Hetty_ The Genius and Madness of America's First Female Tycoon - Charles Slack [123]
—John Steele Gordon, author of The Great Game: The Emergence of Wall Street as a World Power, 1653–2000
“Want to be a tycoon? Hetty, Charles Slack’s riveting history of America’s pioneering billionairess, tells you how. As a cautionary tale of Hetty Green’s iconoclastic, emotionally pinched life, and an inspiring one of an early twentieth-century woman tougher than any man, Hetty is a must read for all aspiring moguls.”
—Regina E. Herzlinger, Nancy R. Mc-Pherson Professor of Business Administration, Harvard Business School
ALSO BY CHARLES SLACK
Noble Obsession:
Charles Goodyear, Thomas Hancock, and the Race to Unlock the Greatest Industrial Secret of the Nineteenth Century
Blue Fairways:
Three Months, Sixty Courses, No Mulligans
Copyright
Due to copyright restrictions, this eBook may not contain all of the images available in the print edition.
A hardcover edition of this book was published in 2004 by Ecco, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.
HETTY. Copyright © 2004 by Charles Slack.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
EPub Edition © JULY 2010 ISBN: 978-0-062-03811-1
FIRST HARPER PERENNIAL EDITION PUBLISHED 2005.
The Library of Congress has catalogued the hardcover edition as follows: Slack, Charles.
Hetty: the genius and madness of America’s first female tycoon/Charles Slack.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-06-054256-X
1. Green, Hetty Howland Robinson, 1835–1916. 2. Women capitalists and financiers—United States—Biography. 3. Millionaires—United States-Biography. I. Title: America’s first female tycoon. II. Title.
HG2463.G74S57 2004
332’.O922—dc22
[B] 2004042055
ISBN-10: 0-06-054257-8 (pbk.)
ISBN-13: 978-0-06-054257-3 (pbk.)
05 06 07 08 09 /RRD 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
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Notes
*Hetty has sometimes been called “Henrietta,” under the assumption that Hetty is akin to Bob for Robert. After Hetty’s death, family genealogist William Emery asked her son, Ned, for clarification and was told her name “absolutely and positively was Hetty and nothing else” (New Bedford Mercury, February 22, 1938).
* One of the most delightful Hetty stories, perhaps apocryphal, concerns an Englishman passing through Bellows Falls who was supposedly chased by a cow on her property. The man knocked on Hetty’s door to complain and, not getting the apologetic reaction he wanted, reeled off his impressive-sounding title. Hetty said, “Tell it to the cow.”
* This vignette is preserved in an old newspaper clipping on file at the Kendall Institute, New Bedford, Massachusetts. The clipping does not identify the newspaper or the date.
* The term “watered