Hetty (15 page)

Keiley, who had been appointed by the court to approve May’s handling of the Cisco failure, had already found his work exemplary. But Hetty claimed his commissions of $139,500 to be exorbitant. She claimed that the law firms handling the case had earned too much—$27,000—and that May had erred hiring Frederick Foote, one of the Cisco partners, for $10,000 per year, to assist him in handling the case. As with the earlier Aunt Sylvia trial, the action against May had the practical effect of holding up payments to a large number of potential recipients, in this case depositors who now had to wait another year to get their money. Her goal, no doubt, was to embarrass May. 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.”

Hetty was still steaming when she assumed the duties of questioning John A. Cisco on the witness stand. According to the
Times
account, “she went for him like a tigress and nothing could hold her.”

“May I ask you a few questions?” she began, brushing past her attorney, Nelson Smith. 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.”

Hetty offered this blanket explanation of her own conduct, repeated several times during the proceedings: “I come of good
old Quaker blood. All I care for is to do right. Then I am sure to go to heaven.”

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.

If the financial community had settled on Hetty as scapegoat for the Cisco failure, Hetty herself blamed Collis P. Huntington. His actions had caused the collapse of the firm, putting her deposits, and perhaps even her $25 million, in jeopardy. Hetty’s seething, burning, spitfire hatred of Huntington was inevitable. She set about slowly to take her revenge on the well-known bully, who frightened her not in the least. In time, Huntington’s dislike for Hetty would grow to match hers for him.

But the Cisco failure caused another turning point in Hetty’s life, a more personal one; it marked the effective end of her marriage to Green. Actually, that is not quite so. 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. He had violated a trust through his mismanagement of money. He had not simply squandered his own fortune; he had sliced into hers. Even at his most confident and robust, Edward was hardly a match for Hetty’s steel-minded determination. When she packed up her two children and walked out, Edward was left, for all intents and purposes, a broken man, without money of his own, reduced to a sort of genteel subsistence. Following the Cisco failure, Hetty was a free agent, in her personal and financial life.

EIGHT
THE VIEW FROM BROOKLYN

F
or an ambitious capitalist in the United States, the period between the end of the Civil War and the beginning of the twentieth century was the most golden of golden ages. The Civil War had settled once and for all the nettlesome question that had haunted the country for generations: would the Union survive? It would. In Europe, the end of every war dumped another horde of unemployed soldiers into crowded and already mature cities. But the American landscape was ample and open enough to absorb hundreds of thousands of ex-soldiers looking for work and opportunity, in addition to hundreds of thousands of immigrants who came each year to work in factories or to till fields that stretched beyond the horizon. Alexander Noyes, in his classic volume Forty
Years of American Finance
, wrote: “Almost at the moment when a million citizens were turned from organized destruction to pursuit of peaceful industry, the avenues of American employment and production were widened in a degree unprecedented in the history of trade.”

The pace of growth and production was staggering. Every
industry, from manufacturing to agriculture, boomed. American farmers, who in 1867 planted just over 64 million acres of wheat, corn, oats, rye, and barley planted 100 million by 1878. The combined yield increased to 2.3 billion bushels. Moving those vast supplies of grain, as well as a restless people, required a new and extensive transportation network. The transcontinental railroad was rightly hailed as a monumental construction feat when the two sides were linked in Utah in the spring of 1869. But those 1,800 miles were a drop in the bucket of overall railroad development. In the eight years after the end of the Civil War, crews laid some 30,000 miles of track across the United States. Russia, also aggressively building its rail infrastructure, put down just 11,000 miles during the same period.

And every new mile of railroad required steel for rails, timber for ties, and capitalists for cash. If the potential rewards of investing in railroads were great, so were the risks. For every strong, healthy railroad with sound management there were many more that failed for mismanagement, natural obstructions, or outright fraud. Corrupt politics, frequent panics, and a shaky money supply unsettled on the issue of whether gold, silver, or paper ought to be the standard, left a financial landscape strewn with the corpses of would-be tycoons. One of them was Edward Green.

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. A roster of financiers and industrialists of Hetty’s generation, whose fortunes flowered along with hers during this remarkable period, reads like a who’s who of American capitalism. Jim Fisk, whose notorious financial schemes made him the embodiment for the term “robber baron,” was born in 1834, seven months before Hetty. Fisk’s partner, Jay Gould, was born in 1836. Steel magnate Andrew
Carnegie was born in Scotland in 1835. J. P. Morgan, the financier and banker who would buy Carnegie’s company (over a golf game) to form the colossus U.S. Steel, was born in 1837. John D. Rockefeller, the muscle and brains behind Standard Oil, was born in 1839. Henry M. Flagler, Rockefeller’s onetime partner who later became a real estate developer who invented Palm Beach, had been born in 1830. For the shrewd and lucky, this Darwinian environment, before regulation, labor unions, and income tax, presented opportunities almost without limit.

Most of these men and their wives and families lived on a scale unprecedented in the history of the world. New York’s Fifth Avenue, laid out in 1811 and completed in 1824, drew Wall Street swells away from their downtown mansions in the postwar years and became the wealthiest and most fashionable address in the United States, if not the world. The stretch of Fifth Avenue in the vicinity of Central Park became known as Millionaire’s Row. Testimonies to wealth and privilege rose in block after block of French manor houses and royal palaces and opulent châteaux, each built by and for some industrial captain whose family a generation or two earlier had been trapping furs, butchering meat, tilling soil, or keeping shop. There were Rockefellers on Fifth Avenue, and Flaglers and Guggenheims, and Russell Sage, a grocer-turned-financier, and Hetty’s archenemy, Collis P. Huntington, who got his start peddling hardware to miners during the California gold rush. The Vanderbilts erected a section of fabulous homes on a ten-block section of Fifth Avenue below Central Park that became known as Vanderbilt Row. In 1879, Henry Vanderbilt commissioned not one but two houses. A few months later, William Kissam Vanderbilt settled on plans for a grand home on Fifth Avenue at Fifty-second Street, to be designed by noted architect to the rich Richard Morris Hunt. Fawning critics pronounced the home a triumphant combination of the Palais de Justice, the Hôtel du Bourgtheroulde at Rouen, the Hôtel Cluny at Paris, and the Château de Blois. When it was completed, Alva Vanderbilt,
William’s wife, christened the house with a costume ball at which each guest dressed as a member of European royalty.

This great fat feast was the New York that Hetty found when she arrived after the Cisco failure. But when she left Bellows Falls with her two children in tow, she did not erect a mansion next to the Vanderbilts, although she could have afforded a home as fine as the finest on Millionaire’s Row. She chose instead the teeming, dense borough of Brooklyn, populated by immigrants and, laborers, where nobody dressed up as royalty, European or otherwise. With the exception of short stretches in low-rent quarters in lower Manhattan, Hetty would call Brooklyn home for the next decade. 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. During the course of her life she would be a resident of Bellows Falls, New Bedford, New York, and New Jersey, all of them and none of them at the same time.

Hetty, Sylvia, and Ned moved first into a modest apartment house on Pierrepont Street in Brooklyn Heights. No childhood with Hetty Green as the mother could ever be called normal, but with their move to Brooklyn Ned and Sylvia entered a new, surreal phase of their lives. While they were among America’s richest children, Ned and Sylvia’s lifestyle was more akin to those constantly struggling for the next meal. Hetty never failed to tell them how rich they would be one day, and she meant it, for her goal was to leave them as the richest people in America.

Ned, despite the severe limp that made walking awkward, and despite the rigors of life with his mother, was developing into a tall, gregarious young man with an easy laugh. At seventeen,
he was already six feet tall, built like his father. Sylvia, on the other hand, seemed to retreat inside of herself. Tall and not pretty, she was a painfully, shy, self-conscious girl. People who spent time with her were often unable to detect any trace of a personality. To acquaintances, she seemed to go through the motions of life without ever taking a part. She was Hetty’s constant companion, and did chores around the apartment.

This odd little family naturally aroused the curiosity of fellow Brooklynites. As Hetty’s financial prowess became more celebrated, her reputation as an oddball preceded her. A reporter for the
Brooklyn Eagle
noted: “Nobody ever saw her with a dress which was not severely plain, and seldom has she been noticed when she did not carry an old style and well worn black satchel. Her appearance would never cause the uninitiated to think that she was anything more extraordinary than an old fashioned woman of moderate means and simple tastes, who was on her way to the corner grocery or the bakery on the block below. Yet, if money is power, this same staid looking person is one of the most powerful human beings in the country.”