Always worried about Ned, his parents indulged him in whatever ways they could. In the winter of 1877, when Hetty decided to switch her Midwestern lawyers from her father’s representatives to Edward’s agents, the family traveled together to Chicago. Hetty held mortgages and real estate, including the entire town of Cicero, which eventually became the headquarters of the gangster Al Capone, and land downtown that would become the Loop. The Greens rode by private train across the flat Midwest and were met at the end by the fiery glow of steel mills and iron foundries, the pounding clank of new factories, and the bloody smell of the stockyards, all of which enriched the city.
The family checked into Matteson House, a leading hotel even before the Chicago fire, with gas lighting, steam heat, elevators, and French chefs serving guests three meals a day on the American Plan. Its newly redone elegance offered Hetty and Edward a reminder of the years they had stayed at the Langham in London. For Ned and Sylvie, the fancy hotel was a perfect place to play in the corridors or hide their unusual pet, a hen. Their understanding parents did not object. But the management felt otherwise. Tired of the eggs the hen laid under the bed, disgusted with the dirt it dropped on the carpets, they went to extreme measures. When the Greens came back to the room one day, they discovered the chicken was dead: someone had wrung its neck.
The following morning the family checked out. They left for St. Louis, the newspapers said, another terminus for the transcontinental rail, another town where Hetty owned land. On future trips to Chicago, the Greens stayed at Palmer House, owned by Hetty’s friends, which was the city’s finest hotel. One night, Ned and some friends engaged in a furious pillow fight; feathers flew and two sets of pillows were destroyed. When the chambermaid complained, Hetty gave her the money to buy new pillows and told her to send them to the boys. “As long as they’re making noise in the room, I’m satisfied,” she said. “If they had been still, I would have been suspicious.”
The Greens’ travels left little time for the children’s proper schooling. Like bathers dipping their toes into the sea, they took tentative steps into public school classrooms in New York; other times they studied with private tutors. In Bellows Falls, the children enrolled in the school of the Immanuel Episcopal Church. Seated at one of the double desks in the boys’ front room, Ned studied history and mathematics, while Sylvie sat in the back parlor with her best friend, Mamie Nims, and a handful of other girls, learning to do their needlework by stitching red thread onto muslin.
Ned loved playing baseball with his friends, but when his leg prevented him from running, his mother allowed him to stand in the outfield on the chance a stray ball might come his way. When other boys came to the house, he could throw a ball in the backyard, but he wasn’t permitted to run. Whatever he did, from playing catch to organizing games around town, his mother kept a vigilant eye on him. “Be careful, Ned!” or “Don’t throw the ball so hard to Ned,” she would call out whenever he played with his friends. His parents gave him permission to drive his friends around in their old horse and cart, and once in a while, he was driven around by his sister in a toy wagon. Hetty and Edward gave Ned a larger allowance than most of the boys received, but Hetty’s generosity had its limits. She dressed her children in hand-me-down clothes and was adamant that they watch their pennies. She was pleased when her son and his friends earned money by cleaning bottles for a local distillery; but when Ned lost his coins in a pile of leaves, she insisted he help her search through the heap to find them.
As surely as balls bounce up and down, Edward’s finances sprang high and low. In 1879, when his stocks were moving in the right direction, he purchased Tucker House, the Greek Revival mansion that rose on a hill on Church Street. Once owned by his grandfather, the imposing yellow brick house, with its grand staircase and large central hall, stood like a dowager welcoming the Greens and their friends.
To the right, in the parlor, candles in the crystal chandelier lit up a portrait of Hetty done in her youth. Guests moving about the rooms could see paintings of Edward’s forefathers by John Singleton Copley and Gilbert Stuart hanging over the mantels, and tapestries sewn by Aunt Sylvia hanging on the walls. Around the house mahogany tables and lowboys held silver candlesticks and signed silver pieces from Boston; fainting couches offered a respite for women whose corsets were pulled too tight; and in the dining room, Queen Anne chairs lined the table where family and friends took their places. Upstairs, a seven-foot bed accommodated the large frame of its owner, Edward Green.
The substantial house boasted a square widow’s walk on the roof and a wide porch in the front, where the outgoing Ned and his shy sister Sylvie sat with his friends on rocking chairs, looking out on the canal and across to the steep face of Mount Kilburn in New Hampshire. In the garden the children grew fruits and vegetables and all around the property they let their pets—cats, dogs, birds, and other animals—run free. But there was no free run for the children: wherever they were, in Bellows Falls, Chicago, or New York, or traveling by railroad in between, Ned and Sylvie lived under the protective gaze of their forceful mother.
Chapter 11
Changing Times
Our country’s prosperity depends on its having an efficient and well-maintained rail system,” said the investment genius Warren Buffett in 2010 when he invested $34 billion in the Burlington Northern Santa Fe Corporation. “They are the only mode of freight transportation that can handle growth.” Over a century earlier, railroads changed the course of American life. They inspired innovation and energized the economy. They brought farm goods to urban markets, raw materials to factories, finished goods to towns. They ventured into far-flung corners of the country and made them accessible, created cities and linked them together, compressed the vast space between the oceans and laced the populace into a single nation. Then they synchronized the clocks from end to end.
As towns cropped up across the landscape, each decided on its own time. Aldermen in the East and sheriffs in the West—and the jewelers of any town—looked up to the sky, shielded their eyes with their hands, and gazed at the sun: when it appeared to be at its highest point, they declared the hour to be high noon and set their watches. Residents checked the hands on their church steeple or peered in the window of the jewelry store to find the correct time.
But even when towns were in touching distance, time was unreliable and varied from place to place. The situation created havoc for the railroads. With three hundred different time zones across the country, trains that met at various terminals could not coordinate their schedules, nor could they even keep to a schedule because it was so confusing.
Travelers in Pittsburgh would find six different clocks at the station. In Buffalo, New York, four clocks showed four different times. A man from Portland, Maine, who was catching a train might well ask an innocent question: “What time is it?” Checking his watch, he would see that it was 12:15. But looking up at the New York Central Railroad clock he would see that it was noon, while the Lake Shore and Michigan Railroad clock announced it was 11:25 and the Buffalo city clock stated it was 11:40.
Travelers from the East might have to reset their watches two hundred times before reaching California. Trains might wait at one stop for farmers to arrive with their freight and then, at the next, find farmers who had been waiting with freight for a long time. Cities a mile apart geographically could be several minutes apart chronometrically. Twelve o’clock in New York was four and a half minutes past twelve in Newark; five past the hour in Boston was seven past the hour in Lewiston, Maine. Confused passengers could not calculate what time they would arrive or what time they would depart.
The problem had become so horrific that doctors declared it was driving people crazy: they blamed the time confusion (as well as everything from dyspepsia to insomnia to tooth decay, and the stress from other modern technology, such as steam engines and telegraph wires) for a new illness called “neurasthenia.” The American neurologist George Miller Beard declared it “the disease of the age.”
Though beneficial to some, “railway travel is injurious” to others, he said. “We are under constant strain,” he went on, “to get somewhere or do something at some definite moment.”
Yet the definite moment differed from place to place. The situation was so chaotic that the editor of a railroad guide appealed to a convention of railroad officials to standardize their clocks. After much argumentation, they agreed to four time zones across the country that would be based on Greenwich Mean Time.
At noon on November 18, 1883, at Union Station in Chicago, the assembled crowd watched and waited as the timekeeper stopped the clock. Hours seemed to go by until, exactly nine minutes and thirty-two seconds later, a telegraph signal from the U.S. Naval Observatory announced the new noon. Americans across the continent reset their pocket watches and reconfigured the hands on their tall case clocks. Although some fearful souls declared it would bring on the wrath of God, and some dissident cities refused to go along, the country now functioned on the same system. Workers at offices and factories toiled by the same clock, businessmen arranged their meetings with synchronized watches, and salesmen planned their travels around similar schedules. The new zones set a new pace for the country; the railroad revolution raced ahead and America sped ahead with it.
Hetty Green put her money in the race. The railroads’ dynamic potential, their promised return on capital, their unregulated operation, and their untaxed profits provided infinite possibilities for financiers. Since the end of the Civil War, Hetty had been investing in, among others, the Reading, Rock Island, Connecticut River Valley, and Louisville and Nashville railroads. The latter, based in the Union state of Kentucky, owned routes that ran straight through the South: occasionally during the Civil War it transported the Confederate army and was paid in Confederate notes; most of the time, however, it carried men and matériel from the North and received payment in greenbacks. By the end of the war its southern competition had been destroyed, but the L&N not only survived, it emerged financially strong. The profitable line was in a unique position to extend its reach.
Hetty’s investments were not always known: she purchased property under fictitious names, bought stocks under other identities, and was praised by shrewd observers for how closely she held her positions. By 1879 Edward Green owned thirty thousand shares—one-third of the stock—of the Louisville and Nashville Railroad: he was the company’s single largest shareholder. It is not known whether he bought it with his own money or Hetty really owned the shares, or if she owned a large block of bonds. But with his huge chunk of stock, in December 1879 Edward was elected to the board of directors and appointed second vice president. But Edward was doing more than buying stock in the L&N; he was secretly sweeping up shares of the competition. With his clever maneuvering and his talent for raising money, he was put in charge of the New York office, the financial end of the railroad’s operations.
The L&N expanded dramatically, laying new track and gobbling up smaller lines. In a series of secret moves, Edward and a group of major financiers, including John Jacob Astor, managed to gain control of track that gave the L&N a direct line from Chicago to Mobile, Montgomery, and New Orleans, and an unbroken line from Chicago to Pensacola Bay in the Florida Panhandle. They were paving the way, said the New York Times, for the railroad to become “the largest aggregate under one management in the world.” At a time when no regulations existed, when oversight was unheard of, when the industry had the feel of the Wild West, this was “one of the most gigantic railroad operations of the age.” The newspaper called it “a brilliant coup.”
Within a short period, the Louisville and Nashville quadrupled its track to 3,500 miles extending from St. Louis, Missouri, to Savannah, Georgia, and from the freshwater lakes in the north to the Gulf of Mexico in the south, making it the only line to have an inlet to New Orleans. The lucrative monopoly was not only carrying profitable freight north to south, it was buying land, building towns, and developing coal and iron mines, making its operations more cost-effective and more self-sufficient. The routes were so extensive that the New York Central Railroad was eager to lease them. With the success of the line, Edward was elected president and given an annual salary of $5,000.
Edward’s reign was short-lived. After a few months as president, he was demoted to vice president, and then, a few months later, with his financial ties still needed, he was asked to take on the chief post once again. By the end of 1881, however, the stock was down, he had mortgaged his house, and his official duties were over. Nonetheless, he remained an important member of the board of directors: “E. H. Green,” said a historian of the railroad, was “an erratic financier whose influence upon the L&N extended far beyond his brief Presidency.”
As an officer of the L&N, Edward was expected to make inspection tours of the roads, and Hetty and the children sometimes traveled with him. For Hetty, an investor who kept a careful eye on her assets, it was an opportune way to see the railroad in full operation from its roadbeds to its rolling stock. Standing on the open platform at the rear of the company’s private car or sitting on the plush seats in its private, windowed lounge, she could look out, examine the track, and survey the bridges as the train rolled by. The trips also allowed her a chance to visit her properties in the Midwest, which increased with the expansion of the railroads from Chicago to St. Louis to Cincinnati.
Young Ned and Sylvie loved steaming around the country with their parents in the opulent train. In the dining room, they sat at tables set with starched white cloths, sparkling crystal, and gleaming silver, while crisply uniformed Negro waiters served them tasty food; at night, they slept curled up in the new Pullman beds carefully arranged by the Negro porters as the rhythmic roll of the train rocked them to sleep. They weren’t the only ones who enjoyed the sumptuous private car: the sociable Edward often entertained other guests along the route.
Agnes Elmendorf and other members of his sister’s family were invited to join them if their travel plans coincided, and friends of Edward’s and Hetty’s were sometimes asked to come along. As always, Edward made an amiable and charming host. In fact, he was sometimes too charming, especially with other women. Hetty had known of his reputation as a bachelor in the Philippines, but she thought he had finished his womanizing by the time he returned from the East. Along with his “loose habits” of drinking and playing cards, however, she discovered that not only was he very courteous to ladies when his wife was with him, he was touring with other women when she was not.
“I had heard stories about his life in Manila before I married him, about his sowing his wild oats out there, but those stories never bothered me. That was all before my time,” she told a friend. “But when I was traveling with him, I noticed he was always exceedingly polite to women. After I got back to New York, rumors about his doings came to me. When I thought it over, I thought that he had been a little too polite.” Deeply hurt by Edward’s deception, Hetty hired a detective from Chicago to follow him around. “I got a report on him,” she said. “It told me everything I needed to know.”
Hetty needed time away from Edward. In the summer of 1882, and again the following year, while he scampered around the country or lodged near the Union Club in New York, Hetty took the children on a six-week trip to New Bedford. Stepping off the train and into a carriage in the town where she grew up, she ordered the driver to take them to Pleasant Street. It would cost her more money, the man protested, but she brushed him off and told him to do as she said. Riding along the familiar streets, she reminisced with Ned and Sylvie, pointing out the different sites: “Here is the house where I was born.” She motioned as they passed the big house on Seventh and Walnut streets. “And here is where your grandpa and I used to walk,” she recalled.
Hetty told the driver to turn onto a narrow road leading to Round Hills. Halfway there, she ordered him to stop and led the children a few feet from the side of the road to a thicket of bushes. Beyond the trees were rocks leaning along the banks of a brook. “Here is where Mama—that
’s your grandma—used to take us picnicking when she felt well enough,” Hetty said. It was one of the few times she mentioned her mother; it was one of the few good memories she had of her. Hetty took off her shoes and stockings and told the children to do the same. The threesome dipped their feet into the sparkling water. A few minutes later they scrambled back into the cab.
She had inherited 140 acres and the house at Round Hills after Aunt Sylvia’s death. This was the place she always enjoyed as a child, where she learned to drive a horse and cart at the age of six, where she learned to ride sidesaddle, where she ran free in the fields. Her daughter Sylvie liked to ride too, but fourteen-year-old Ned was no longer able to ride or run; he and his sister enjoyed the salty air and the ocean breeze. Some of the time Hetty took him around to local doctors to see what they could do about his leg, but their response was always the same: they shook their heads and recommended amputation. Out at Round Hills, where Sylvie rode her horse, Ned sat on the big rocks, dangling his fishing rod in the waters of Buzzards Bay.
While Hetty was with her children, Edward still struggled with the L&N. Like so many other speculators, he and his friends at the Union Club had bought their shares on margin, and like so many other railroads, the Louisville and Nashville had overexpanded and built unprofitable lines. The company fell into debt, and the stock fell with it. In the autumn of 1883, Jay Gould tried to bring down the price of the stock even further, hoping to buy up shares, take control, and enhance his own Union Pacific and Missouri Pacific lines. Over the next twelve months Edward and the other members of the L&N’s finance committee fought hard against Gould, trying to support the price of the stock, but the debt kept growing and the earnings continued to shrink.
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