In the drawing rooms and dining rooms of New York’s aspiring aristocracy, social acolytes whispered her name in awe, sought her approval with trepidation. Some, like Collis Huntington, paid thousands of dollars to be in her company. Mentored by Ward McAllister, who organized the Patriarchs, for twenty years she decided New York’s Four Hundred and deemed who was worthy of inclusion. But as magnificent as her houses were, as gorgeous as her dresses were, as dazzling as her jewels were, Mrs. Astor could not electrify her own husband. William stayed with her long enough to father five children and then escaped from her overwhelming ambitions, fleeing to Ferncliff, his mansion on the Hudson, or to the Ambassadress, his yacht.
If Mr. Astor did not appear at his wife’s glittering balls, neither did many of his colleagues. While their wives and daughters, wearing Parisian gowns (and paying a 50 percent import tax for the privilege), descended from their brownstones and townhouses in the dark of night and, under the gaze of the gossip columnists, partied with idle males till 2 a.m., the men who made the money supped early and went to sleep. Jay Gould, James Lenox, and William Vanderbilt, recoiling at the word “cotillion,” retreated to their private clubs. Henry James understood: “The highest luxury of all, the supremely expensive thing, is constituted privacy,” he declared.
Hetty agreed with the men. She shunned the trivial entertainment, the exorbitantly expensive clothes, the aura of excess, and favored a simple life. Her Quaker God shone his smile on her fortune; she dared not risk his wrath on frivolity. She weighed her wealth and balanced the brilliant gold on one side with a leaden social life on the other.
But if her evenings were unexciting, her mind was certainly not dull. Henry Clews, the famed investment banker, wrote that Wall Street “is not the place for a lady to find either fortune or character.” Women, he claimed, were “impulsive and impressionable, and not able to reason in the way that is indispensable to a successful speculator.” With one exception, however: Hetty Green. “Her unaided sagacity has placed her among the most successful of our millionaire speculators. She is, however, made up of a powerful masculine brain in an otherwise female constitution. She is one among a million of her sex.” In other words, suggested Clews, she thinks like a man.
Like many men, she had no interest in keeping house. Instead, Hetty boarded. She lived in houses with snug rooms, comfortable parlors, and home-cooked food, owned by women who could have been her. Like William Dean Howells’s Mrs. Leighton, who faced the loss of her fortune, thousands of ladies in financial ruin opened their private homes and quietly offered rooms for respectable people. For gentlemen, single women and widows, newlyweds, and families not ready to live in one of the new apartment flats, the boardinghouse allowed them to reside with others of similar mind. Many doctors, lawyers, and wealthy businessmen took their warm breakfasts and hot suppers at their boardinghouse table, including Henry Hyde, founder of Equitable Life Assurance Society, the largest insurer in the world; James Alexander, president of the company; Frank Leslie, publisher of Popular Monthly, and his wife, Minnie Leslie, editor of the Illustrated Ladies Gazette; and Adolph Ochs, publisher of the New York Times, and his family.
While some fashionable places, furnished by people who had lived in wealth, welcomed their genteel guests, or “family,” as they preferred to call them, with plush sofas and polished silver, others were upholstered in the tears and tatters of their impoverished owners; faded and threadbare, the quarters were small, the meals measly, and the food badly cooked, and the boarders were working class. These dingy places gave boardinghouses a bad name. Responding to a nasty piece in the New York Times, a young woman defended her residence: “That ‘cheerless’ boarding house is often a much happier home and the business girl more contented than very many of those who have decided to become ‘queens of homes.’ I don’t object for one minute to any girl’s choosing to be a ‘queen’ if she wishes to, but I do solemnly object to her saying that the boarding house girl misses all the fun of life and is cheerless and discontented.” It was far less lonely, she wrote, to be in the company of others than to wait at home alone while one’s “companion” was out at his private club. “There are some girls who prefer to be in boardinghouses and some who prefer to be queens,” she said. “I prefer the calm comfort of the boardinghouse to the tie that binds uncomfortably.”
Hetty had little desire to be a queen or to be tied down. Nor did she wish to concern herself with the daily problems of domesticity. But the press, deprived of a monarch and bewildered by her ways, made fun of her meager quarters and scorned her for her boardinghouse tastes. That other millionaires, like James Lenox or Edward Schermerhorn, hid in seclusion or lived amid clutter, did not matter. Reporters rarely mentioned them; Hetty, a woman, was fair game.
Ignoring her wish for privacy, often not even sure where she lived, they hunted down her address, hounded her doorway, and, whenever possible, revealed her residence. Disclosure drew hundreds of letters begging for money, or suggesting ransom, or threatening murder. Suspicious to begin with, afraid to settle in, she constantly felt forced to flee. She was Ishmael; she was the Wandering Jew. She was used to shuttling between places; she moved like a nomad from boardinghouses to flats to hotels, from Brooklyn to the Bowery, Hempstead to Hoboken, changing her name, evading the press, the public, and also the tax man. Like thousands of New Yorkers then and now, she escaped state and city taxes by refusing to establish a residence. Where she lived mattered little to her. Days were a whirlwind of transactions; at night all she wanted was refuge. More important issues occupied her thoughts.
Railroads were constantly on her mind: they were costly, conspiratorial, competitive, cutthroat, and corrupt. Those who ran them were like thirsty men near a bar, elbowing their way to the front, imbibing all they could, gobbling up fare along the way. No better example existed than the Louisville and Nashville. As many of the smaller railroads were swallowed up in the early 1880s, the L&N consumed or controlled or leased, among others (and sometimes in secret): the Great Southern Railroad; the Mobile and Montgomery Railroad; the New Orleans and Mobile Railroad; the Nashville, Chattanooga, and St. Louis Railroad; the Western and Atlantic Railroad; and the Georgia Central Railroad. Through these transactions, the L&N gained a monopoly on the produce, the provisions, and the passengers traveling through South Carolina and Georgia and on to the West.
Railroad men like Colonel E. W. Cole, former president of the Nashville, Chattanooga, and St. Louis, could almost taste the profits. Organizing a group of friends, he put together the financing to form the East Tennessee Railroad, and took on the L&N. Despite strong opposition, he obtained a charter from the state of Georgia for the new line, and with millions of dollars and in minimum time, blasted through the mountains and laid tracks to the sea.
But expenses overwhelmed the income, and shortly afterward the East Tennessee found itself in receivership. That, however, spurred it to slash its fees, just to spite the L&N. The East Tennessee behaved like a monster toward the Louisville and Nashville and menaced the harmony that prevailed among the Southern roads, said the New York Times. “Freight rates have been frozzled out time and again.” By September 1885 both lines were offering free delivery of cargo in Atlanta and both cut their passenger rates more than once. The rancor had reached the point of siege; even the L&N’s allies were set to fight the East Tennessee. “It will be war to the knife and knife to the hilt,” said the Times. “This is the way the rails are laid and the wires are working in the South.”
The way that railroad stocks were trading seemed hardly better. In 1886 when word leaked that the Richmond Terminal Railroad wanted to expand its lines and consolidate its position in the South, its stock bounded out of control. When the opening bell rang at the Stock Exchange on the morning of November 20, no one could figure out how much the shares cost: a dozen different opening prices were quoted at the same time. The same brokers were selling the same stock at anywhere from 68 to 76. The hurly-burly was driving the investing public to distraction.
Hetty Green owned a considerable number of Georgia Central shares. When the Richmond Terminal Railroad made its move to take control, Hetty’s stock was in demand. Two officers of the Richmond Terminal paid her a visit at the Chemical Bank, where her office was a few desks at the back of the room. She may have been one of the largest shareholders of the bank, but hers was a simple bureau. In the area where the cashiers, tellers, and clerks sat behind their gilded barriers, she sat in the open, in a corner, at her rolltop desk. Bonds, stocks, cash, letters, and notes were stuffed in the desk’s side drawers, overflowed its pigeonholes, and sat chock-a-block in a black tin box on the top. Here, where light streamed in from a skylight in the roof, she dictated letters to her stenographer or clipped coupons from her bonds. On a typical day, Hetty, dressed in a black silk shirtwaist trimmed with rusty velvet and a black sateen skirt dotted in white, met with businessmen who called on her by the hour.
The two men from the Richmond Terminal made her an offer that seemed too good to refuse. She had bought the stock at $70; now it was selling at $100. The officers of the railroad offered to buy her 6,400 shares at $115, fifteen dollars over the market; to seal the deal they showed her a certified check. Hetty wrinkled her nose at the cash and declared she would be willing to sell, but only if they paid her more: she would accept the deal at $125 a share. They declined and left, but soon appeared again. This time they said that if she would agree to support their candidate for president of the railroad, they would sign a contract secured by collateral to buy her shares at $125. Oh no, she sniffed, dismissing their bid, she could not do that: their offer was not in cash. If they wanted her vote, they would have to pay her $130. Further negotiations led to triumph: in true Hetty style, she sold her stock for $127.50.
It was hard to know which Hetty enjoyed more: making money or outsmarting men. Around this time she achieved another coup. Once again, as the stock market retreated and the Louisville and Nashville headed downward, Hetty went against the trend. The bears were selling, and she was buying. One of the best-known bears was Addison Cammack, a former stockbroker who earned the nickname “Ursa Major” for his negative positions in the market. Cammack had heard that the Louisville and Nashville would report a loss and sold the stock short, that is, he borrowed shares he did not own, sold them at what he thought was the high, and then waited for the stock to fall so he could buy it at a lower price. Gleefully he watched the shares plummet. But Hetty was cornering the market, aggressively buying up stock; with fewer shares available, the market started to turn.
Cammack tried to buy shares to cover his short sale, but the more he tried to buy, the more the price went up. The words of the infamous Wall Street bear Daniel Drew hissed in his ear: “He who sells what isn’t his’n, must buy it back or go to prison.” Worried that the stock would go even higher and he would be squeezed even more, he approached Hetty: he wanted to buy forty thousand shares. She was willing to sell, she said, if he would pay her a difference of ten dollars per share. Cammack considered it a reasonable offer; he had expected her to demand a higher price. Surprised that she didn’t ask for more of a profit, he gladly wrote her a check for $400,000. Cammack had treated her with respect and Hetty returned the favor. But those who acted condescendingly to her were treated with disdain.
Lewis May was one who had behaved badly. In January 1887, Hetty filed a lawsuit against May, the assignee for the Cisco bank. In the course of the suit, which lasted more than a year, Hetty often ignored her own attorney and interrogated May at the hearings. She charged him with taking illegal commissions and implied that he had committed fraud. When she had no success with May, she attacked John A. Cisco, who had proved to be far more of a gambler than his cautious father.
The heat of New York City in July 1888 hardly compared with the sizzling atmosphere of the hearings. Wearing a black dress and a battered hat, Hetty faced the younger man: Did he know his father was writing to her? she demanded. Did he know his father had said that none of her money would be used in anything, and yet Mr. Green was using it all the time? Why did he send someone to follow her in Bellows Falls? she wanted to know. Her nostrils flaring, her eyes burning, she hurled out her suspicions: “Did you think I had a tendency to heart disease, and you would put me out of the way and get all the money?” she asked. “She went for him like a tigress and nothing could hold her back,” one observer said.
Although she lost the case and was forced to pay all costs, Hetty took pleasure facing her enemies in court. When Cisco denied any knowledge of her claims, she defended herself: “I come of good old Quaker blood. All I care for is to do right. Then I am sure to go to heaven,” she said. The judge’s decision may have gone against her, but the court was her meetinghouse, and she had been heard by the High and Mighty.
A few weeks after she initiated the lawsuit, the Reading Railroad, which had suffered severe losses, announced a reorganization plan. Satisfied that the idea would succeed, Hetty agreed to support it. In February 1887 she marched into the offices of Brown Brothers and handed over a satchel filled with a million dollars’ worth of stock certificates; in line with the plan, she would exchange her old shares for the new. Would there be any costs for the transfer? she asked. Yes, she was told, the transfer charges from New York to Philadelphia would be $100. “A hundred dollars!” she screeched. “Why, I can go to Philadelphia and return for four dollars.” The bankers neither denied her claim nor offered to lower the cost. Dismayed, Hetty picked up her securities, stuffed them back in her bag, rushed to the Grand Central Station, and bought a ticket for the next train to Philadelphia.
When word of her dealings reached the Stock Exchange, the Wall Street men were taken aback. What surprised them was not that Hetty took the train to save the money; rather, it was that she had secretly acquired far more shares of Reading than anyone knew. She was a rare woman who could hold her tongue, they said, and they sheepishly had to admit she managed her business far better than most men.
Hetty accepted reorganization of the Reading Railroad, but she refused to go along with such a scheme for the Houston and Texas Central Railroad. When Collis Huntington, still in control, offered to exchange existing bonds of the defaulting railroad for new bonds yielding 2 percent less, some bondholders resigned themselves to the plan. But Huntington had hurt Hetty once in 1885 when he stopped paying dividends on the railroad’s bonds, causing the price to plunge; two years later she would not let him get away with it again. With her large holding of first mortgage bonds, she could take control of the railroad if it went into total bankruptcy.
The “Queen of Wall Street,” as Hetty was called by the Times and other papers, opposed the Central Railroad reorganization. When Huntington said that he did not care whether or not she went along and that he would proceed as planned, the paper scoffed at him. “Other big men have talked in just this way about Mrs. Green in times past, but somehow she usually contrives to come out ahead whenever the fighting notion strikes her.” Indeed, after almost a year of hard negotiation, Huntington caved in to Hetty’s demands and she agreed to the reorganization. But Huntington stuck like a thorn in her side. Several years later, she would outbid him to take control of part of the railroad.
Hetty’s life extended well beyond her New York City office. Besides visits to Vermont and Massachusetts, in the summer of 1887 she and her son resided in Hempstead, New York, and later, in the autumn, the Chicago Daily Tribune reported that they were living in Chicago. She was working out of her agent’s office on Dearborn Street and sometimes arrived as early as 7 a.m. to oversee her properties, such as the Howland block. Known as the Honore and erected after the Great Fire, the block was a massive stone building that housed the Real Estate Exchange. Hetty had loaned its well-known owner, H. H. Honore, $250,000 some years before, but when he became overextended and was unable to make his payments, she took the property back. A local broker told the Tribune he’d like to own it now and could sell it for three times the price.
Hetty also held a $
250,000 mortgage on the Major Block, a large office building that housed the National Weather Service. Her properties included, along with an aggregate of mortgages worth around $3 million, the Gower Block, the Reed Block, and other block-long buildings downtown that became a significant part of the Loop. Whenever interest on a loan could not be met, Hetty claimed the property.
In early 1888, when the managers of her father’s trust insisted on selling 650 acres in nearby Cicero, Hetty was furious. She believed the land was worth far more and saw no reason to sell it. She filed suit and the matter was brought to court. When the case was heard, Hetty sent Ned to represent her in Chicago. But Judge Collins, who was in charge of hearing the case, refused to stop the transaction, and the acreage was sold to the Grant Locomotive Works. Hetty vowed revenge.
Few knew exactly how much money Hetty really had or what exactly she invested in. “No broker or operator who is not very new at the business ever attempts to get the better of Mrs. Green,” said one observer. “Her methods are so quiet and straightforward that she mystifies the very elect among railroad men.” So secretive was she that for a while they did not even know where she lived. In January 1888 the Brooklyn Eagle discovered the peripatetic woman was residing in its own backyard, and had been living there for several months. Her companions were her daughter and her Newfoundland dog, which had recently produced a litter of pups. Her son Ned was still in Chicago, her husband still in New York; on Sundays, Edward visited his wife and daughter in Brooklyn.
Hetty’s choice of Brooklyn was not as surprising as it sounded. The third-largest city in the nation, Brooklyn offered a gentle alternative to Manhattan’s hullabaloo. It was “as quiet as New York is bewildering and noisy,” wrote Fredrika Bremer years before. “On Broadway,” she said, one finds “endless tumult and stir, crowds and bustle … and the most detestable fumes poison the air.” New York, she wrote, is “the last place on earth I would live. But thank Heaven! I know Brooklyn!”
The Richest Woman in America Page 15