Hetty_ The Genius and Madness of America's First Female Tycoon - Charles Slack [111]
CHAPTER NINE: GROOMING A PROTÉGÉ
The exact details surrounding the loss of Ned’s leg are vague, and separating the myths from the reality is difficult at best. A search for records of Dr. McBurney’s operation at Roosevelt Hospital unfortunately came up empty. Assessment of the popular myth that Hetty caused her son to lose his leg out of miserliness and spite must therefore fall into the area of educated guesswork. Hetty’s behavior with doctors was certainly unattractive. But, based on her obvious love for her son, and her many unsuccessful efforts to correct his condition over several long and painful years, it is inconceivable to me that she would have allowed her son to lose his leg out of fear of paying a doctor’s bill.
CHAPTER TEN: THOU SHALT NOT PASS
Hetty’s acquisition of the Texas Midland Railroad, and Ned’s subsequent improvements, are recounted in S. C. G. Reed’s authoritative History of the Texas Railroads. The story of Hetty’s pistolpacking confrontation with Collis P. Huntington comes from the Sparkes and Moore book, The Witch of Wall Street. Most of the information regarding the Chemical National Bank and its president, George Gilbert Williams, came from files in the JP Morgan Chase Archives in New York. A 1902 profile of Williams by Edwin Lefevre, author of the Wall Street classic Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, was particularly helpful. The clipping does not identify the journal in which the article appeared.
CHAPTER ELEVEN: A LADY OF YOUR AGE
Hetty’s interminable legal battles with her father’s appointed trustees were given extensive coverage in the newspapers. The New York Times was my primary source in re-creating the fight. Sylvia’s letters to her friend, Mary, survive under a glass case at the Rockingham Free Public Library in Bellows Falls.
CHAPTER TWELVE: ACROSS THE RIVER
For the information about Hetty’s friendship with James and Michael Smith, I must thank Hoboken resident Lisa Conde. Lisa and her husband, Tom, live in Michael Smith’s old house, and happened to come across records detailing Hetty’s loans to him. Lisa showed me around the house and shared information she has collected on the brothers. The incident involving Hetty, Edward, and William Crapo at the New York rooming house is drawn from Henry Howland Crapo’s The Story of William Wallace Crapo. The book contains a delightful chapter on Hetty. The story of Hetty’s reaction to news of Collis P. Huntington’s death first appeared in the Sparkes and Moore book, The Witch of Wall Street. The story of Hetty’s fears of being poisoned in New Bedford, at the end of the chapter, comes from William Emery, the official Howland genealogist, who described her fears in an article for the New Bedford Standard-Times, June 13, 1948.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN: IF MY DAUGHTER IS HAPPY
The causes of the panic of 1907 were legion, and my description is by necessity greatly simplified. Alexander Noyes’s Forty Years of American Finance (1865–1907), published just as the country was emerging from the crisis, offers an excellent view of the crisis as it unfolded. More modern perspective can be found in John Steele Gordons The Great Game, and Charles P. Kindleberger’s Manias, Panics, and Crashes. The solution to the crisis, worked out by J. P. Morgan and others including, apparently, Hetty, was supposed to stabilize the banking system by ensuring a flow of cash to forestall panics. The ensuing establishment of the Federal Reserve system did, in fact, stabilize the banking system, but not so much as Morgan and the others had hoped. A little over two decades later, of course, the markets collapsed again and hundreds of banks failed, leading to the Great Depression.