Hetty_ The Genius and Madness of America's First Female Tycoon - Charles Slack [0]
———
The Genius and Madness
of America’s First Female Tycoon
———
CHARLES SLACK
For my sisters, Jennifer Slack-Gans and Alison Slack, strong women, gentle souls
CONTENTS
PREFACE
ONE NEW BEDFORD
TWO AUNT SYLVIA
THREE A TEST OF WILLS
FOUR ALONE IN A CROWD
FIVE SELF-IMPOSED EXILE
SIX PRIDE AND PAIN
SEVEN HETTY STORMS WALL STREET
EIGHT THE VIEW FROM BROOKLYN
NINE GROOMING A PROTÉGÉ
TEN THOU SHALT NOT PASS
ELEVEN A LADY OF YOUR AGE
TWELVE ACROSS THE RIVER
THIRTEEN IF MY DAUGHTER IS HAPPY
FOURTEEN THE HAT WAS “HETTY” GREEN
FIFTEEN I’LL OUTLIVE ALL OF THEM!
SIXTEEN HIGH TIMES AT ROUND HILL
SEVENTEEN SCATTERED TO THE WIND
SOURCE NOTES
BIBLIOGRAPHY
INDEX
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
PRAISE FOR HETTY
ALSO BY CHARLES SLACK
Copyright
About the Publisher
Notes
PREFACE
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. More remarkable than the sheer bulk of her fortune was the fact that she amassed the great majority of it herself, in the overwhelmingly male environs of Wall Street, at a time when women were not permitted by law to vote in an election.
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 bought and sold real estate, railroads, and entire city blocks. She owned mines, and held mortgages on churches, factories, and office buildings. Major cities, including New York on more than one occasion, came to her, hat in hand, when they ran into financial trouble. 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.
Wall Street took its name from a wall erected in the 1650s by Dutch settlers at what was then the northern edge of colonial settlement on the island of Manhattan. The wall was intended to keep the British out. It failed. But as Wall Street grew into the world’s most important financial center, the wall might better have stood for the all but impenetrable barrier excluding women. In 1870, Victoria Woodhull opened the first female-owned brokerage house on Wall Street. But the brokerage, financed as a lark by Woodhull’s friend Cornelius Vanderbilt, was more of a publicity stunt than a serious enterprise. Woodhull had tried her hand at newspaper publishing, running for president, and promoting the nineteenth-century religious fad of spiritualism, based on the idea that one could commune with dead relatives and friends. Wall Street was the latest venue in which Woodhull attempted to shock staid Victorian sensibilities, and the concern quickly failed. Wall Street was, in the words of historian John Steele Gordon, “universally thought to be as unsuitable to women as a battlefield.”
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.”
As the subtitle to this book indicates, there was a certain undeniable madness to Hetty. At a time when the rich were so extravagant that their spending gave the Gilded Age its name, Hetty Green had a hard time spending a quarter. People who had millions less than she did built