Hetty_ The Genius and Madness of America's First Female Tycoon - Charles Slack [1]
But it is also undeniable that Hetty’s madness, such as it was, served a vital purpose. 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.
Unlike Carnegie, Morgan, and Vanderbilt, who transformed their spotty reputations through philanthropy, Hetty Green left no monuments to herself. She therefore left it up to others to determine her legacy—and this process has not been kind to her. In her own time, she was regarded with a roughly equal mix of admiration for her financial skills and disdain for her parsimony. In the century after her death, as the immediacy of her financial prowess receded, she slipped into obscurity, remembered (when remembered at all) as a mean old woman with too much money and too little heart.
Probably the most succinct and widely disseminated version of this portrait may be found in the Guinness Book of World Records, where Hetty is listed, along with the largest lobster, the smallest antelope, and the champion hot dog eater, as the “greatest miser.” “She was so mean that her son had to have his leg amputated because of the delays in finding a free medical clinic,” the item states. “She herself lived off cold oatmeal because she was too mean to heat it, and died of apoplexy in an argument over the virtues of skimmed milk” (emphasis in original).
Like most legends, this description contains kernels of truth wrapped in myth, exaggeration, and caricature. She was, indeed, extraordinarily tight with her money. Some of the things she did were shocking. She never apologized for the way she lived, and it won’t do to apologize for her now. But her life eludes simple classification, and “miser” is a particularly unsatisfying term, for it implies a soul that is withered, dull, and desiccated—almost devoid of life.
Hetty Green was none of these things. She was full of life, her personality if anything outsized. She was a pioneer, a trail-blazer, a woman not just of wealth but of substance. She was witty and, in her younger years, beautiful. And she never backed down from an adversary, no matter how powerful. “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.”
NOTE: Where does Hetty Green’s fortune rank among the great American fortunes? As much art as science goes into answering such questions, given imprecise estimates of wealth, the changing value of money over time, and any number of other variables. In their 1996 book, The Wealthy 100, Michael Klepper and Robert Gunther ranked the net worth of one hundred fabulously wealthy Americans by the percentage of the Gross National Product their personal fortunes represented. According to the authors, Hetty’s $100 million represented 1/498th of the GNP at the time of her death in 1916. Hetty, the only woman on the list, came in thirty-sixth, five places behind Microsoft founder Bill Gates, and three places ahead of current billionaire-investor Warren Buffett. John D. Rockefeller, whose $1.4 billion in 1937 represented 1/65th of the GNP, was ranked as the wealthiest American of all time.
ONE
NEW BEDFORD
Asleigh cut through the snowy streets of New Bedford, Massachusetts, during the early 1840s. People could not help but turn their heads as it passed. They all recognized the sleigh, the powerful black horse, and the man at the reins. Edward Mott Robinson was not a New Bedford native, but he had married into the richest whaling family in town. He had a dark, stern face with hawklike features. Black Hawk Robinson, they called him. He was known as a tough businessman, shrewd, unsentimental, thrifty, and cold. He spared little in the way of greetings to his fellow townspeople as the sleigh hurried along.
Sitting next to him, all but obscured