Hetty

Wealth and Legend

At the time of her death in 1916, Hetty Green was widely regarded as the wealthiest woman in America. She left a fortune estimated conservatively at $100 million, or about $1.6 billion today.

She was the lone woman among a gallery of nineteenth-century rogue heroes—Andrew Carnegie, Jay Gould, J. P. Morgan, John D. Rockefeller, and the Vanderbilts.

She adhered all of her life to the simplest yet hardest-to-follow financial wisdom of all: She bought low, sold high, and never panicked during a panic.

The prevailing sentiment was captured nicely in a December 1909 New York Times article about women investors. “Women, it is Wall Street’s conviction, are good winners but bad losers, and that’s why so many brokers dislike to have women speculators among their customers,” the Times stated. “It is difficult to reason about money and business with an angry or weeping woman. Her view of Wall Street and all its works suddenly becomes entirely emotional, and only a broker with infinite patience can calm her.” The article singled Hetty out as an exception to the rule, praising her “masculine instinct for finance.” “She has a broader grasp of finance than many men of prominence in the Street, and her views of the values of railroads and real estate are always worth having. She makes her investments in the logical way that a man does, and she usually makes wise ones.”

By casting off the trappings and social expectations of her time, she freed herself to do as she pleased, to live life on terms that she and she alone determined.

“I always try to deal justly with everyone,” she once said. “But if anyone wants to fight me I’ll give him all the fight he wants.”

Formative Years

…from a young age Hetty read the financial news to her father, and to her maternal grandfather, Gideon Howland, a partner in the firm. She read shipping statistics, tariff news, currency debates, the latest on securities and investments, and trade news from New York. She absorbed everything. By the time she was fifteen, by her own reckoning, she knew more about finance than many financial men.

“My father taught me never to owe anyone anything. Not even a kindness.”

Society and Beauty

For a figure who would one day garner the title “Witch of Wall Street,” Hetty was a particularly lovely young woman. She was tall and full-figured, with large blue eyes, a long, straight nose, prominent chin, and generous brown hair.

Despite Aunt Sylvias misgivings, Hetty had picked up a thing or two at Mrs. Lowell’s school and could behave like a lady when she wanted. She attended balls, luncheons, parties, and concerts, and she turned the heads of young men, not just because of the money she stood to inherit, but because of her beauty. By all appearances she enjoyed herself enormously.

The reason for the ball was a visit by the Prince of Wales, the future King Edward VII of England, who was in the midst of an extended tour of North America. At the ball, Hetty had herself introduced to the prince as “the Princess of Whales.” The prince appreciated the joke. He laughed and told her, “I’ve heard that all of Neptune’s daughters are beautiful. You are proof of that.” They danced twice.

With her social connections, her looks, and her family wealth, Hetty, had she chosen to do so, could have shed the straitlaced provincialism of New Bedford and entered seamlessly into a life of ease in New York society, of summers at Newport and winters on Fifth Avenue.

Family Control

But something in Hetty Robinson drew her home, back to her dour family and the seat of her family’s money. Her father sent her $1,200 with instructions to properly outfit herself with dresses and gowns for the social season. Hetty spent only $200 of the money. She put the rest into the bank upon her return to New Bedford.

With Sylvia unmarried and childless, Hetty was the sole blood heir to the Howland whaling fortune. As such, she saw Sylvia not just as an aunt, but as the caretaker for a fortune that would one day pass on to her. She began to fear the influence that the coterie of nurses and servants might have on Sylvia. Sylvia was weak and often indecisive. How could Hetty be sure that some servant wouldn’t swindle her out of a chunk of the estate?

Whaling Decline

As always, his business timing was impeccable. He had entered the whaling business in the 1830s, just as it was approaching its zenith, and now he quietly but quickly sold off the ships and other assets when he recognized unmistakable signs that the industry was headed for a decline from which it would not recover. The recent discovery of oil in Pennsylvania, combined with new techniques for refining it, promised a new and seemingly inexhaustible supply of oil that didn’t require costly, dangerous voyages on the far seas. But another factor greatly hastened the downfall of whaling—the Civil War.

Confederates destroyed no fewer than twenty-five New Bedford ships, seizing or destroying a half-million dollars’ worth of oil. But the coup de grace to the whaling fleet came not from the Confederate side, but from the Union. In the fall of 1861, the United States Navy commandeered thirty whalers, most of them from New Bedford, filled them with stone, and sank them in the shipping channels of Charleston and Savannah to blockade Southern shipping.

Hetty had acquired a home of her own, the house on Second Street where Edward and Abby had lived, after her mother’s death. Her father let her have it as a sort of consolation prize, after assuming control of all of Abby’s money. But Hetty preferred to stay with Sylvia. Whether this preference was born of a fondness for her aunt and a desire to be the dutiful niece, or a self-centered desire to keep tabs on the cash cow, depends on who was telling the story.

However unattractive and at times irrational Hetty’s behavior toward Sylvia was, personal greed did not seem to be among her motivations, at least, not greed in the conventional sense. She did not lust after Sylvia’s money in order to one day shower herself with luxury. Indeed, the miserly habits for which she would become famous later in life point to the opposite extreme, an abject unwillingness to enjoy the indulgences that other wealthy people (or even members of the middle class) took for granted. Her concern with Sylvia’s money grew instead out of her own obsession to protect the family fortune at all costs, and from her belief that the money would not be safe until it was in her hands.

Gilded Era

Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller, J. P. Morgan, Jim Fisk, Jay Gould, Henry M. Flagler, Philip Armour, the list went on-all of them had been born during the 1830s, the same decade as the lone woman who belongs among their ranks in terms of the financial power she wielded—Hetty Green.

It is hardly an exaggeration to say that this particular generation created the modern world, or, at least, laid down its blueprints.

Rail tycoons even gave us the concept of standardized time, unheard of until railroad schedules made it necessary for two towns located hundreds of miles apart to keep the same clocks.

Morgan’s underpaid workforce included boys of eleven or twelve, too young to go into the mines, who earned the colorful nickname “red tips” because they sorted jagged pieces of coal with their bare hands until their fingers bled.

Carnegie had written glowing letters to relatives in his native Scotland, extolling the freedom, equality, and opportunity in his adopted country. Yet when war threatened that nation’s very existence, the twenty-six-year-old Carnegie paid a substitute to do his fighting for him.

Rockefeller’s younger brother, Frank, served with distinction and was twice wounded during the war. Twenty-two-year-old John, citing the needs of his growing mercantile business, bought his way out of the fighting.

Philip Armour, born in 1834, sent a substitute off to war, then concentrated on building an empire in meatpacking and grain.

A young J. P. Morgan, born into privilege as heir to a financial dynasty established by his grandfather and father, would seem to have had an especially large stake in fighting to ensure the survival of the United States. Yet he, too, paid someone else to dodge bullets for him.

When the swindle became public, Morgan not only failed to show remorse or shame for his actions, he sued the government for the balance of the payment, and won. A contract, after all, was a contract.

While it is true that Hetty would never turn her millions into libraries or universities, it is also true that she never bilked the government out of tens of millions of dollars, or called out the Pinkerton boys to rough up underpaid immigrant laborers.

Inheritance Fights

In the nineteenth century, when women were presumed to have no head for money or numbers, trust funds were created for them almost as a matter of course. But a young woman weaned on the financial papers, who started her own bank account at eight, and who stashed away money given to her to buy dresses, was no ditzy heiress. Hetty wanted control of what was coming to her.

Hetty coolly informed Electa that she, Hetty, would prevail. She said, “I never set out for anything that I don’t conquer.”

With this goal accomplished, Hetty started to worry in earnest. When she was away in New York, what would prevent Sylvia from drawing up an entirely new will?

Her fears, as it turned out, were well placed. About the time Hetty returned to New York, a new rival for influence over Sylvia entered the scene in the form of a remarkably attentive physician named William A. Gordon.

Among Dr. Gordon’s nonmedical acts on behalf of Sylvia was to write a letter to Hetty in New York advising her that she was not to visit Aunt Sylvia. No copy of the letter remains—it survives only in the memory and testimony of Electa Montague. However justified the mandate may have seemed to Electa, Fally Brownell, and others, Hetty could interpret such a letter only one way—as the act of an interloper and gold digger seeking to put distance between Aunt Sylvia and her one rightful heir.

Sylvia owned real estate with a combined value of $75,000, bringing her total worth to a little over $2 million, at a time when her night nurse was happy to take home a dollar each morning.

The remaining million dollars—about half of what Hetty had expected to receive—would go into a trust, of which Hetty (after taxes, commissions, trustee’s fees, and other payments) would receive the income. It was enough money to make her a wealthy woman, with around $65,000 a year in income. But if she had any inkling of what was being done in that farmhouse bedroom on that September night, it would have confirmed all of her worst fears. Hetty herself would have no control over the bulk of the money. It’s direction would be in the hands of others—and one of the guiding hands, reaping rewards for himself all the while, would be the detested interloper, Dr. Gordon. Even if the arrangements were entirely Sylvia’s idea, the doctor emerges as a dubious character, if not an outright cad. He was, after all, prescribing mind-altering medication to a dying woman whose last-minute financial decisions stood to make him rich.

The breadth of Sylvias new will, promising to scatter manna into so many hands, did more than just increase the number of beneficiaries of her goodwill. It also severely isolated Hetty and even, in a way, put a price on her head. Dozens of people stood to inherit money when Hetty died.

Hetty had spent so much time worrying about her aunt’s will, in part because she assumed it would be years until she saw much from her father. An inventory made after his death showed an estate of nearly $5.7 million.

Robinson left virtually his entire estate to his only heir, his daughter. Five months shy of her thirty-first birthday, Hetty Robinson found herself a rich woman. But there was a catch. Robinson had arranged to leave Hetty a little over $900,000 outright, along with some property in California that he owned. The rest, almost $5 million, would be bound up in a trust, with Hetty as beneficiary, but with two associates of her father’s, Henry A. Barling and Abner Davis, as managers.

But she was a woman, and Robinson followed the conventions of the day and kept some 80 percent of his fortune in trust for her, so that she would not fritter it away. Hetty could interpret the will as nothing other than a deep and burning insult. She would carry anger over her father’s will throughout her life, transferring her rage from her father to the men he had selected to administer the trust.

At the reading of the will following the funeral, Hetty sat stewing in a silent rage as she listened to each provision. The news that she would receive lifetime income on a $1 million trust did not move her. All she could hear was a litany of insults large and small. She was to receive no cash. In essence, she was to be less trusted to handle money than the assortment of widows who received direct cash payments of $10,000 or $20,000. The huge cash payments to Dr. Gordon and his family outlined in the will and the codicil stung Hetty, but the greatest outrage was that the hated Dr. Gordon would serve as one of the trustees for her inheritance. He would be the one making financial decisions for her and reaping thousands of dollars each year in commissions.

Marriage and Trusts

With the exception of their mutual affection for money, Edward and Hetty had little in common. They were an odd pairing, and their differences would intensify in the years to come and make them both frequently miserable. For one thing, Edward was not a Quaker, but an Episcopalian. This did not pose much of a theological barrier—neither was particularly devout. But the Quaker traditions that drove Hetty to save, scrimp, and deny herself luxuries were utterly lost on Edward Green. He…

The fact that Hetty and Edward thought they could find happiness together represents a considerable gap in judgment by both.

Edward undoubtedly admired Hetty’s knowledge of business—rare in a woman. She was pretty, and possessed a sharp wit—another quality Edward admired. And, of…

Hetty knew that Edward liked to spend. But his self-made fortune attested to his business abilities, and her father, whose business judgment she valued above all others, liked Green. If he spent his money, what of it, so long as he didn’t try to spend hers.

“I can get somebody to serve as trustee who won’t charge any commissions. You can have the commissions for yourself.” The judge stared at her for a long moment. “Do I understand correctly what you just said?” Hetty repeated the offer. Bennett looked at her coldly. “Young lady, I must decide the case upon the law and the evidence. I do not want to hear any more from you.” Fortunate that the even-tempered judge hadn’t tossed her in jail for attempted bribery, Hetty left the office to catch the noonday train back to New Bedford.

Nobody questioned the authenticity of Sylvia’s signature on the 1862 will—which, after all, had been made in the presence of three witnesses. But Hetty was the only witness as Sylvia supposedly signed two copies of the second page, one for each of them to keep. The signatures on all three items looked almost exactly alike, indicating that someone had copied or traced the two “second page” signatures from the signature on the will. Was Hetty Robinson a forger? Rarely had such a collection of scientific celebrities been assembled for one case. In their zeal to top one another, both sides sought the greatest names they could find for their professional opinions—among them Louis Agassiz, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Benjamin Peirce, and John Quincy Adams, grandson and namesake of the sixth president of the United States. Their depositions were taken separately over several months, mostly in the Boston office of Special Examiner Francis W. Palfrey. But the collective star power, combined with the lure of the wealth involved, made the case one of the most watched civil cases of the century.

It was also a world-class case of churning on the part of attorneys who, by the time they were finished, had racked up more than $150,000 in fees.

While he was eager to help Hetty, Edward had put his own reputation on the line by making himself a party to her schemes; and, to the extent that he corroborated portions of Hetty’s fabulous tale of the “second page,” Edward Green quite probably lied under oath.

Hetty and Edward were married on July 11, 1867, more than two years after becoming engaged. The scene of their wedding was, significantly, not New Bedford. The ceremony took place in New York, at the Bond Street home of Henry Grinnell, the relative who had hosted her on her earlier visits to the city. Edward was forty-six; Hetty was thirty-three, well into her spinster years according to the customs of the times, but still a lovely young woman with a fair, clear complexion, blue eyes, and attractive figure.

This was a civil, not a criminal, trial, and Hetty had been the plaintiff, not the defendant. And yet the tables had turned during the course of the trial; as everyone knew, if the now-infamous “second page” was not genuine, then Hetty was by definition guilty of forgery. If Hetty was a forger, could criminal charges be far behind? Some of Hetty’s opponents had made rumblings about that possibility.

The news couldn’t have surprised Hetty. The trustees had a much stronger case all along. But the decisiveness with which Clifford, on November 14, 1868, rebuked Hetty’s claims left little room for comfort.

Clifford did not care whether the documents were genuine or forged, he said, or who passed them to whom and under what conditions, because, “viewed in any light, and assuming all the papers to be genuine, the evidence fails altogether, in the opinion of the court.”

munificence

Money Management

The extent to which Hetty and Edward worked together on financial matters is unclear, and Edward may well have advised her on investments in the early stages. But she was already establishing the patterns of investment that would define her career, sticking with conservative instruments such as United States bonds, and having the cool head to stay on her course when others panicked. From the time she inherited her first lump from her father in 1865, Hetty had been buying up United States “greenback” notes. The government had printed large quantities of these notes immediately after the Civil War, to cover its huge expenditures. The Union had won military victory, but people were still quite apprehensive about the prospects, particularly the economic prospects, of the ragged and still-fragile reunified country. Unease caused a rush to gold, and the greenbacks dropped to as low as forty or fifty cents on the dollar of gold. While others lost their nerve and sold greenbacks, Hetty bought.

Her father’s estate of some $5 million, even under management she openly detested, was yielding her several thousand dollars per week in interest and dividends. She was able to put all of this money to work in U.S. bonds, and she began branching out in railroad bonds issued to finance the rapidly expanding rail network. With Edward handling the living expenses, Hetty had nothing to do with all of her money but to keep investing and reinvesting principal and income. Within a few years her fortune doubled, tripled, quadrupled.

“Two hundred thousand dollars is the largest sum I ever made in a single day,” she told Leigh Mitchell Hodges of her days in London, “though I’ve cleared more than that on single deals.”

As her cash piled up and she sought new investments, she became a de facto bank. Her holdings, indeed, were growing larger than those of many banks of the day, in England or America. Banks in need of cash would sell Hetty loans they had made to parties using property as collateral. When inevitably some of the borrowers defaulted on their loans, Hetty began to accrue property. This was the beginning of what would become a real estate empire.

Home Life

And now, to top off his legend, Edward was returning home with two children, ages six and three, and a fabulous millionaire wife. Anticipation over Edward’s arrival was overshadowed by the gossip, excitement, and expectations surrounding his wife. Edward was rich, but his wife had money on a scale that people in Bellows Falls could not comprehend. What would this woman be like? Would she be dour or sweet? Would she put on airs or mix with the common folk?

At forty-one Hetty still had a pretty face and a fine complexion, but her dress was downright homely. Her hair looked as though she hadn’t given it a thought. She spoke not in the low, regal manner they might have expected, but in harsher, earthier tones, and, when angered, she could cuss like a dockworker. Within a few weeks of her arrival, if any of the townsfolk even remembered their predictions of aristocracy in their midst, it was only with an ironic laugh.

Hetty insisted on doing most of the shopping herself, and would return to the house bearing the cheapest flour she could find, and bags of broken cookies that grocers sold cheap. Grocer Patrick J. Keane said she always redeemed her berry boxes for a nickel refund, and asked for—and received—free bones for the family dog.

When the Greens first arrived in town, they took pleasure rides in Edward’s barouche, a fancy, four-wheeled carriage with a collapsible top, double seats facing each other inside the carriage, and an outside front seat for the driver, along with a pair of fine horses. Hetty decided the rig was too fancy. She sold the carriage and horses, and paid $10 for an old horse and a modest jump seat wagon, barely large enough to fit the family. In the subtle way that reputations shift, Edward was no longer the conquering hero to the admiring throngs of Bellows Falls, but a man making the best of a difficult situation.

Neighbors on Henry Street were shocked one day to see Hetty on the roof, seated, wearing hoop skirts, hammering away. Why pay workmen for a simple repair job?

Anna’s funeral led to one of the few times that Mary (or anyone else) saw Edward react violently to Hetty. As the family gathered for a postfuneral dinner, Edward raised a drinking glass to his lips and noticed it was old and cracked. This was not his mother’s prized crystal, but cheap kitchen ware. “Where is the crystal?” he asked evenly. Hetty told him she’d packed it away.

One day, as he headed to the station to catch a train for New York, Hetty discovered that he had forgotten to take along an extra pair of pants. She followed him to the train and handed him the pants, which he took without comment. When the train rolled out of the station, Edward discreetly tossed them into the canal below.

Once the town folk got used to the fact that Hetty Green would not reign as the queen of Bellows Falls, they began to see her, with a mixture of consternation and affection, as a celebrated oddball. Hetty stories developed into a local currency; everyone had at least two or three, and they were handed down by word of mouth, some even to this day, until it is not always clear which are apocryphal and which based on fact. She was, as one local historian put it, “at once the pride and pain of the town.”

One shopkeeper remembered that Hetty had come into his shop and, as was her custom, began handling the merchandise. The storekeeper watched in dismay—her hands were black. She explained that she had been pulling some reusable nails out of some boards that had been damaged in a fire in her barn.

When she brought her skirt to Wheeler’s Laundry, she is said to have asked that only the bottom portions be washed—the parts that swished through the alternately muddy and dusty street.

Ned and Sylvia spent their early years living an odd double life as rich kids whose mother behaved as if they were poor. They wore ill-fitting clothes and got used to being pointed to and whispered about, not out of jealousy, but out of pity.

Investing Rules

When Edward traded, he did so with his own money. Hetty had laid down the law in no uncertain terms that he was not to use her principal in his transactions.

The rest of her fortune, now totaling more than $26 million in mortgages, bonds, and other securities, and growing all the time, was stashed safely in Cisco vaults, away from the hands of Edward, Cisco partners, or anyone else.

Cisco Fallout

He loved to tell of the day he was looking out the window of the company’s building at 59 Wall Street and saw Hetty stepping off of a public coach on Broadway, carrying a bulky parcel. He went to the front door to greet her, and learned that the parcel contained $200,000 in negotiable bonds. “Don’t you think it was risky for you to have brought these bonds downtown in a public stage? You should have taken a carriage,” Cisco said. Hetty arched her eyebrow. “Perhaps you can afford to ride in a carriage. I cannot.”

Hetty had every right to expect Cisco and Foote to do as she had asked. But there was a complication, which the partners cited in refusing to honor her demand. It seemed that while Hetty was the largest depositor at John J. Cisco and Son, Edward Green was its largest debtor. The pride of Bellows Falls, Far East trader extraordinaire, owner of thirty-one suits, generous tipper, and man-about-town, owed the bank no less than $702,000.

Edward never explicitly offered Hetty’s fortune as collateral—at least, the bank presented no evidence of this. Nevertheless, creditors did not hesitate lending money to a man whose wife sat on a pile of $25 million. Now, Cisco and Foote asked Hetty to make good on the debt.

Hetty would never forget the many indignities done to her through the Cisco fiasco. She held a grudge against Lewis May and, in particular, against Collis P. Huntington, the railroad magnate. She patiently planned her revenge on May, waiting almost two years to the day from the time of the Cisco failure, when May had at last sorted out the finances and was preparing to pay off the long-waiting creditors.

Hetty hired a New York lawyer named Nelson Smith to handle the proceedings, but she took practical control herself, attending every hearing and often personally questioning witnesses. Her conduct exasperated the judge and left even her own lawyer groping for words. May added fuel to Hetty’s anger by boasting on the witness stand that he may not, in retrospect, have been able legally to force Hetty to cover her husband’s debts. His acknowledgment that Hetty might have been able to walk away with all of her cash, in addition to her securities, was a double slap, both in the loss of money and in the gleeful implication that Hetty had been bested in a deal. May called his and his lawyer’s handling of Hetty, “One of the greatest things ever accomplished in the city of New York, and I was daily complimented for it.”

She launched an attack accusing the witness and his late father of deliberately hiding the fact that Edward had used Hetty’s money to staunch the flow of his own losses. “When your father was writing to me did he ever say to you that he was writing me? Here are these letters where he says none of my money will be used in anything. Yet Mr. Green was using it all the time.” She even suggested that the Ciscos had “sent a man” to Bellows Falls to intimidate her. “Then did you think when you had a sham failure and a sham assignment and sham lawsuits—” “Mrs. Green!” The objection came not from May’s attorney nor the judge, but from Hetty’s own counsel, trying to prevent her from self-destructing. May’s lawyer, delighted by Hetty’s outburst, objected to her lawyer’s interruption and urged her to continue. She did so, now accusing both Cisco and Foote of participating directly in the attempts to intimidate her, or worse. “Did you think I had a tendency to heart disease, and you would put me out of the way and get all the money?” At the audible gasps from various corners of the room, Hetty explained, “I am only asking him if this was a nice little game, because the people in the country said my life wasn’t worth it. I only want to give him an idea of that.” Finally, a bewildered Cisco was able to respond: “All I can say is that I have no knowledge of any of the circumstances Mrs. Green speaks of.”

Judge Keiley, unmoved by the protestations of righteousness, sided with May, finding his conduct in handling the Cisco failure exemplary. Hetty was required to pay the court costs—estimated at $10,000–$15,000. For all her frugality, she always seemed to consider such expenses money well spent, if she was able to turn the screws a bit on her enemies.

Hetty and Edward never officially were divorced. In fact, over the years they effected a sort of reconciliation; things would be cordial between them, and for stretches, at least, they would stay under one roof. But it was the effective end of anything resembling a conventional marriage. Hetty had had enough of convention; she had had enough of the masquerade of herself as the dutiful wife and Edward as the financial brains behind the family.

Wall Street Rare

Hetty Green holds the considerable distinction of being the only woman to make her mark in the financial markets during the Gilded Age. But if repressive and constricting attitudes toward women presented serious obstacles for Hetty, the Gilded Age in almost every other regard was tailor-made for a financial genius looking to get rich.

For the shrewd and lucky, this Darwinian environment, before regulation, labor unions, and income tax, presented opportunities almost without limit.

She rented apartments in hotels and rooming houses, usually paying by the month. A large house, beyond the price to buy or build it, would mean an endless stream of payments for upkeep, not to mention a staff of servants to keep the place running. And there was another reason. In order to collect personal property taxes, collectors first had to establish proof of residency. By paying monthly rent and moving frequently, Hetty preserved the ability to deny that she lived in any given city or state whose tax collectors became too persistent.

Hetty rarely lost sleep worrying what others thought of her, and yet there was a certain irony in the public’s reaction to her. For all of her faults, she was no snob. She sneered at all forms of pretense, and was unimpressed with titles* She didn’t just mix with the common folk; she lived among them, ate at their restaurants, rode their streetcars and ferries. Clerks and storekeepers, delivery boys and washerwomen who would not be allowed through the front door of Alva Vanderbilt’s Fifth Avenue mansion lived side by side with Hetty and her children. And yet it was her very reluctance to live like a queen that evoked derision and ridicule.

Nor did her lifestyle inure her to criticism from populists that she was just another self-important member of an overmonied class.

It was a strong reaction to what had been, especially for Hetty, a fairly innocuous comment. And the irony, of course, was that, unlike Pulitzer and his editorial writers, Hetty Green actually did live in a tenement.

Views on Women

Hetty disproved the prevailing idea that women were incapable of handling finances. Her skill, tenacity, and fearlessness made her a feminist long before that term became a rallying cry for generations. Her money gave her power over men and companies and financial markets, and yet she never proclaimed herself an example, or even an advocate, of women’s rights. And when it came to deciding which of her children would succeed her in handling the family fortune, her choice couldn’t have been more conventional; from the start, it was going to be Ned.

“Mentally, I do not believe woman to be inferior to man, save as she has become so by a mistaken course of training,” Hetty wrote. “A certain amount of business training would be an excellent thing for women, but it should be begun in their infancy.” She frequently cited her own training from reading the financial papers to her father and grandfather. “A mother will say to her boy, ‘Go out and play,’ while to the daughter of the house she observes, ‘Do this piece of sewing and I will give you a pretty ribbon,’ thus incidentally sewing the seeds of vanity, and imparting a restricted and wrong view of the value of things in relation to life and labor. The boy becomes broadened mentally and physically by his robust out-door life, while the girl’s natural inclinations are cramped to a narrow groove, which, after a time, becomes second nature to her.”

Not even Hetty’s most ardent detractors produced evidence that Ned blamed his mother for the lost leg, and when Morrow asked him to name the most important lesson he had learned from his mother, he replied, without hesitation, “Self-reliance.”

Hard Bargains

“Get the exact sum due on each mortgage, interest and principal, fixed in your mind,” she told him. “If anyone is fool enough to offer you the full amount, take it. If you are offered less, tell the man you will give him the answer in the morning. Think the matter over carefully in the evening. If you decide that it will be to our advantage to accept the offer, say so the next day. In business generally, don’t close a bargain until you have reflected upon it overnight.”

Many men, strong and tough in their own right, hated Collis Huntington almost as much as they feared him. He was a physically imposing man, two hundred pounds, with a large head and piercing eyes. He knew he was intimidating and he used this quality to his advantage whenever it suited him. He was known as a vindictive man who never forgot a slight. Hetty Green was not impressed. To Hetty, Huntington was no empire builder. He was the man responsible for the principal humiliation of her life, a time when she had come the closest to losing control of that which gave her life purpose and meaning.

If people thought Huntington could hold a grudge, they hadn’t seen Hetty.

Whether Hetty gave her outright promise or merely intimated that she would go along, the committee members believed they had a unified front. They hashed out a compromise with Huntington, essentially going along with his demands.

But no sooner had the bondholders announced the resolution, in May 1887, than Hetty made an announcement of her own. She had changed her mind. Was that not, she said sweetly, a woman’s prerogative?

As word spread of Hetty’s refusal—presaging more months of haggling and delays—the stock sagged like a leaky balloon, back down toward $10. Huntington, who had broken more than a few tough men on his climb to success, watched in cold fury as the value of his securities sank and his broad plans for Texas stalled, all because of this … woman.

What did Hetty care? If being noble and honorable meant getting swindled by Collis Huntington, the other bondholders could keep their nobility and honor.

Banker Reputation

To Williams, politeness was more than just kindness; it was sound business. “Politeness pays,” he would tell his employees. “A grain of politeness saves a ton of correction. No institution is too important to ignore the laws of courtesy.” Williams no doubt had his largest depositor in mind when he said, “I have observed that many a tattered garment hides a package of bonds and that gorgeous clothing does not always cover a millionaire.”

The employees at Chemical went out of their way to accommodate Hetty, and to avoid raising eyebrows at her unorthodox habits. They made no issue about her old clothes, or about her ways of economizing, which at times included arriving at the bank with a metal pail containing dry oatmeal, to be mixed with water and heated on a radiator for lunch, so as to avoid a restaurant tab.

At times she used an office, but she declined offers for permanent office space for fear that the tax collectors would try to pin her to New York for tax purposes. Often she sat at a desk in the back and the tellers created a sort of shield for her from the prying eyes of the public and from reporters who more and more frequently came around in hopes of finding a story.

More than once she bailed New York City out of a pinch. It is staggering to think of a major city coming to a single person, hat in hand, but such was the scope of Hetty’s fortune. Despite her reputation as a miser and a hard-nosed dealer, Hetty usually offered rates that were more than fair. Although she could be ruthless when dealing with an enemy, she rarely if ever took the opportunity to kick a borrower when he was down. That was bad business, she always said. In 1898, she lent the cash-strapped city $1 million at a rate of 2 percent, well below the prevailing rate of 3 to 3.5 percent. In 1901, she advanced the city another $1.5 million.

Legal Battles

…she could never resist a good legal fight. Her hatred of lawyers was surpassed only by her need of them. She went through batteries of lawyers during the 1890s, as complainant or respondent in dozens of lawsuits. She eagerly attended every hearing. Frequently one court case would spin off from another and yet another, like a fast-growing and pernicious vine of litigation. Sometimes she had to hire new lawyers to handle the case of an old lawyer suing to collect his fee from a previous case. And yet she obviously loved the process.

She believed Barling had mismanaged the trust, allowing investments to languish and wallow while creating for himself a life of luxury. She had a point. The principal in the trust had barely increased in nearly thirty years. The $350,000 Hetty received each year was roughly the same amount that she had received the year after her father died. Hetty’s lawyers charged that Barling squandered thousands of dollars each year in salaries for clerks, one of whom was Barling’s son.

Hetty’s philosophy on real estate was simple, its wisdom borne out over and over in her experience. Hold on to property.

Hetty’s attorney began questioning Barling about Abner Davis and why he would continue to receive commissions while living in a sanitarium following a mental breakdown. Barling tried to put a positive spin on the situation, calling the hospital “a retreat for those who want a rest of mind.” “A place for howling lunatics,” came a cheerful voice from the audience. “Mrs. Green!” said Judge Anderson.

Barling’s attorney, J. Evarts Tracy, said Barling’s books had always been open for Hetty and her lawyers to examine. “No use lying,” came the voice. “Mrs. Green!” said Judge Anderson. “I do not like to speak to a lady of your age in this way.” “Oh, you needn’t mind me,” she responded. “I know I am in my second childhood, but you can’t muzzle—” “Mrs. Green!” Anderson snapped. “You must not talk. I will keep order, and you have your lawyers to talk for you.”

Public Stances

Hetty, too, came out on the side of the strikers. This may seem an odd position for a famous capitalist to take, but Hetty never sympathized with management. While the public didn’t quite perceive her this way, Hetty considered herself a populist.

“The law must be upheld, must it? Then why don’t they begin at the right end? Who begins to break the law? The great railroad magnates. There is Huntington. He and his railroads and the men about him have been grinding wealth out of the poor for years and years and defying the authorities. But the militia are never sent against him…. Let the poor man break the law and see how soon he gets into jail.”

Now Sylvia, I’ve kept my eyes open all these years, and I want to say right here and now, that you shall never marry a society man with my consent. I want to see you happily married and in a home of your own, but I want you to marry a poor young man of good principles, who is making an honest, hard fight for success. I don’t care whether he’s got $100 or not, provided he is made of the right stuff. You will have more money than you’ll ever spend, and it isn’t necessary to look for a young man with money.

To ward off the inquisitive, Hetty identified herself as “C. Dewey” on the name tag next to the electric buzzer at the entrance to Yellow Flats. This was her private joke. Dewey was the name of her pet Skye terrier; the “C” stood for “Cutie,” one of the dog’s nicknames.

The room’s mantle was decorated with a large bouquet of imitation American Beauty roses, made from dyed chicken feathers. Hetty proudly told visitors she had bought them in Chicago for a dollar. “I’d have to pay twenty times that for real ones, and they wouldn’t last a week,” she said. “These are good for ten years yet.”

“Waiter, I want the best steak you can give me for thirty cents.” “We have no thirty-cent steaks, madam.” “No thirty-cent steaks! Haven’t you something you can warm up for me?” “No, madam.” “Well, how much is your tea?” “Ten cents.” “Ten cents! Well, it isn’t worth it. How much are your stews?” “Fifteen cents.” “Can’t you let me have a stew for less than that? “No, madam.” “Well, you can bring me some tea, some toast without butter, and a stew.” When the woman had finished eating, she paid thirty cents for her meal (no tip) and walked off muttering that her dinner was worth at most twenty-five. The waiter walked in the other direction, grumbling, and the businessman felt compelled to ask the identity of the diner. “Hetty Green.”

Edward’s Death

Ned, still on business in Texas, did not attend his father’s funeral. Hetty was escorted by Frank Green of Boston, one of Edward’s cousins. There were many bouquets from well-wishers, but none was more striking than Hetty’s; she had splurged on a large circle of laurel and Easter lilies. Among the other tributes was a pillow from Sylvia and Ned bearing the word “Father.”

In the final tally, Edward Green, who had once boasted a fortune of $750,000, was worth $24,509.75. The New York Times obituary ran under the headline: HETTY GREEN’s HUSBAND DEAD…

Panic and Rescue

Hetty had avoided any temptation to join in the speculative fever. During the height of the boom, in November 1905, she told a New York Times reporter, “I buy when things are low and no one wants them. I keep them, just as I keep a considerable number of diamonds on hand, until they go up and people are anxious to buy. That is the general secret of business success.” She added, “I never speculate. Such stocks as belong to me were purchased simply as an investment, never on a margin.” Her words must have seemed hopelessly stodgy and archaic to speculators riding the crest of the wave. But by 1907 the wisdom of her investment methods was painfully clear.

As she had done several times before, Hetty came to the rescue, writing a check for $1.1 million, drawn on her Chemical Bank account, in exchange for short-term revenue bonds, paying 5.5 percent. Her money helped keep the government running.

Banks, which until recently had been passing out loans like party favors, now indulged their own deepest fears, often refusing loans even to sound, well-run companies needing cash for expansion. When they did lend, they accepted stock as collateral only at rates far below the stock’s actual market prices. After all, the banks reasoned, in these uncertain times the stock could collapse, leaving them holding scads of worthless paper. Faced with a Hobson’s choice of doing without needed loans or mortgaging themselves to the hilt to get them, many companies simply folded. Hetty remained one of the few sources consistently willing to lend money at or near the market value of the stock.

On October 19, 1909, two years after the crisis ended, the New York Times singled Hetty out for levelheadedness that had helped save the railroad. “So great was her confidence in the intrinsic worth of the stock that she was willing to take the chance of wide fluctuations occurring during the panic. That she was right about the stock has been shown since the panic, for Lackawanna since October, 1907, has advanced several hundred points.”

The meeting marked the first step toward what would become, six years later, the Federal Reserve banking system, providing a measure of stability for the banking industry. The gathering included a lone woman. The Times reported that a woman wearing a black veil entered Morgan’s library at 6:30 P.M. and stayed for several hours. Although the woman was never positively identified, reporters were convinced that the woman was Hetty Green. Hetty was known to wear a black veil on the streets at times to give herself a measure of privacy.

Late Years

Her customary black dress, accented at times by the veil, gave her a witchlike appearance as she walked the streets of lower Manhattan. Some took to calling her the Witch of Wall Street. This notion of her unhappiness owed itself in part to the tenor of the times. How could a woman be happy whose thoughts were so dominated by business and finance? Her preoccupation with money must be covering for some huge gap in her domestic life. Certainly, nothing Hetty said supported the notion that she was unhappy.

Asked if she planned to retire, Hetty responded, “Why should I give up work? I was never more capable of handling my affairs.”

In the end, her principal crime seems to have been that the rules she chose to live by were her own rather than society’s.

Society Titles

…any young American heiress in search of a title might pick up the earl at a bargain rate.

An unrepentant Telegraph responded that “it was generally understood in the United States of America that Earls and other English noblemen without means had been fortunate by reason of their titles in marrying rich American heiresses, and that by reason of the conduct of said Earl, it was the general belief that he was in search of an heiress.”

The earl later married an heiress in Pittsburgh, bestowing on her a royal title in exchange for a life of leisure, thanks to an industrial fortune.

…in 1909 the prince married American Josephine Schmid, the widow of a beer magnate, whose husband had left her some $10 million. At the time of the wedding, Josephine was fifty, the prince, twenty-seven.

When asked on her daughter’s wedding day whether the marriage made her happy, Hetty replied: “I am happy if my daughter is happy.” Only on Hetty’s death seven years later would a final piece of the puzzle regarding this marriage be put in place. The revelation came through her will, which bestowed $5,000 on Wilks for having agreed to sign a prenuptial agreement disavowing any claim on the fortune.

Ned and Sylvia

In 1899, Ned had made what is widely considered to be the first car trip in Texas—a rugged trip across dusty horse trails from Dallas to Terrell.

Ned’s crowning honor came when Governor B. B. Colquitt bestowed on him the honorary title of colonel. Ned wore the title proudly for the rest of his life.

Her millions in cash and her willingness to lend made her a sort of one-woman Federal Reserve, whose decisions on interest rates were followed the way investors today await word from Fed chairman Alan Greenspan. “Hetty Green Cuts Rates,” the Times reported on January 7, 1911, when she made a loan of $325,000 at 4.5 percent to the Roman Catholic Church of St. Ignatius Loyola on Park Avenue, between East Eighty-third and Eighty-fourth Streets. “This is the lowest rate of interest at which a real estate mortgage has been made in this city for many months,” the article stated.

Several years earlier, in 1903, the Fifth Presbyterian Church of Chicago defaulted on a $12,000 loan. The pastor made the mistake of trying to shame Hetty into forgiving the loan. He arranged for pastors at other Chicago churches to denounce Hetty from their pulpits as a ruthless financier, and wrote to Hetty threatening that she would not get into Heaven if she foreclosed. Hetty wrote back: “As long as you’re in a threatening mood, you had better climb up on your cornerstone and pray for my soul because I am going to foreclose.” A number of pastors leapt to Hetty’s defense. The Reverend M. P Boynton, of Lexington Avenue Baptist Church in Chicago, told reporters, “To expect the holder of a church mortgage to cancel it upon the grounds of Christianity, after the money has been lent in good faith, is nothing less than a hold-up.”

The occasion had been kept a strict secret, to keep the ever-curious reporters away. Here, in the rectory, with only her son as witness, Hetty was baptized in the Episcopal church. She had not, however, undergone a conversion of faith or become suddenly devout. Her reasons were more practical, and perhaps more touching. The little burial ground in Bellows Falls where her husband lay interred only Episcopalians—and that is where she preferred to be buried, next to Edward, when the time came.

A young girl approached her and asked, somewhat impertinently, how to become rich. Hetty looked at the girl’s fancy dress and replied, “The first thing, don’t spend so much money on your clothes.”

Croesus,”

Final Rest

The body was moved outside to the shady spot where Edward was buried. She was laid alongside him; they were together for eternity as they had not always been through years of turbulent marriage. They share a tombstone—a modest-sized obelisk. In death, on the memorial stone, she accepted a subordinate position to Edward that she rejected during her life. There is no mention of her financial prowess or fame. Only this, beneath Edward’s name: “Hetty H. R. Green. His Wife.”

New York, stirred by the prospect of perhaps the biggest inheritance tax windfall in state history, fought on. After three years of legal wrangling, the case made its way to the United States Supreme Court. In 1919, the court sided with Hetty’s estate in declaring her a resident of Vermont, the state which, ironically, had shown the least interest in claiming her. The reason for the indifference became clear when the estate in February of 1920 doled out Vermont’s cut of just under $58,000, per the state’s lenient tax code.

Because of this connection with Wellesley, Ned in 1923 talked his sister into joining him in a $500,000 donation to the college. They agreed to give $50,000 each per year for five years, toward the construction of an administration building. The building, with a tower rising 185 feet high from Norumbega Hill, was constructed of brick and Indiana limestone; it was and remains the most prominent building on campus. It also bears the distinction of being the only edifice or monument to Hetty Green. It is called Hetty H. R. Green Hall.

It is impossible to miss the pathos between the lines, of the aging brother and sister, both childless, exchanging gifts and notes for their dogs instead of their children, writing in the voices of their pets, the closest either of them ever came to producing heirs.

But Ned was not to be buried at his beloved Round Hill. Shortly after the funeral, Ned, the lover of trains, took his final ride up into the hills of Vermont. Although he had little personal connection with Bellows Falls, he was taken up to join his mother and father in the cemetery of the Episcopal church.

Mabel tried to invalidate the prenuptial agreement she had signed forswearing any claim on the fortune. She tried to prove that the Colonel had been predominantly a resident of Texas, which had one of the nation’s strongest community property laws. She wanted half of Ned’s estate. But Ned had signed his will in 1908, when his mother was still alive. He left everything to Hetty and, should Hetty be dead, to his sister. The fact that he had not felt compelled to update it during the remaining twenty-eight years of his life speaks to the closed circle that the family fortune had become. The fortune must stay in the immediate family. He would not violate that trust.

The second court case developed as a battle among four states—New York, Texas, Florida, and Massachusetts—over estate taxes. Each of the four states sought to have Ned declared a legal resident. In the end, although he had never voted in Massachusetts and had avoided paying state income taxes by claiming to be a resident of Texas, the courts found him to be a resident of Massachusetts. For its efforts, the state received some $5 million in taxes, the largest single estate payoff it had ever received.

Sylvia died in a New York hospital on the evening of February 4, 1951, at the age of eighty. Obituaries noted that Sylvia died without heirs, and that her passing had put an end to the strange and fabulous saga of Hetty Green.

The four Greens—Edward, Hetty, Ned, and Sylvia—lie in the same few square feet of soil next to the church. The children’s names appear on the same obelisk that bears Edward’s and Hetty’s. Ned’s wife and Sylvia’s husband are buried elsewhere.

The great fortune that Hetty had spent her lifetime acquiring, saving, and guarding against interlopers real and imagined slipped quietly out of the family’s grasp. Time and death did what no Wall Street shark, meddling trustee, or tax collector could—it dispersed the great fortune among people and institutions who were strangers to Hetty. Hetty, who had set out to win at a man’s game, and played it ferociously, courageously, brilliantly. Perhaps, she had played it a bit too well.”