Professor of Law/Vice President, Equitable Life Assurance Society
Centurion, 1921–1959
Born 27 November 1881 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
Died 17 June 1959 in Babylon, New York
Buried Holy Sepulchre Cemetery
, Coram, New York
Proposed by Henry R. Seager and Harlan F. Stone
Elected 3 December 1921 at age forty
Century Memorial
What is the right “type” for an insurance man? In his younger days Thomas Parkinson was advised that he was “not the type” for the insurance business. Perhaps that is why he became president and later chairman of the board of the Equitable Life Assurance Company of America. Perhaps that is also why during the twenty-seven years in which he held these offices the company’s assets were multiplied by six. And possibly if he had been the “right type” instead of being an extremely forceful and intelligent individual, he would never have become a Centurion.
Parkinson, however, was not an insurance man, pure and simple. During a long and strenuous career, his talents were directed into many channels. Before insurance came teaching. He was professor of legislation in the Law and Political Science faculties of Columbia University; then dean of the Columbia Law School. He was director of Columbia’s Legislative Drafting Research Fund and chairman of the fund’s administrative board. For a time he was legislative counsel to the Senate and for two terms he was president of the Chamber of Commerce of the State of New York. In the First World War he was an army major.
Thomas Parkinson was born in Philadelphia seventy-seven years ago. In 1902 he graduated cum laude from the University of Pennsylvania School of Law. For five years he practiced law in Pennsylvania; then he came to New York to work with a charter commission which prepared a new administrative code for the city.
From his law school days he had been especially interested in insurance. During part of the First World War, he worked with the War Department in drafting the act that created the Bureau of War Risk Insurance. It was partly this that interested Equitable in him and, in 1920, he was invited to join it as second vice-president. He became president in 1927. During his long career there he interested himself particularly in foreign affairs, and he was primarily responsible for liquidating a German debt which had gone back to 1871.
He was a member of the Century for thirty-eight years.
Roger Burlingame
1960 Century Association Yearbook
