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People found her modest living conditions in Brooklyn and, later, in Hoboken, New Jersey, endlessly fascinating and amusing. Hetty rarely lost sleep worrying what others thought of her, and yet there was a certain irony in the public’s reaction to her. For all of her faults, she was no snob. She sneered at all forms of pretense, and was unimpressed with titles* She didn’t just mix with the common folk; she lived among them, ate at their restaurants, rode their streetcars and ferries. Clerks and storekeepers, delivery boys and washerwomen who would not be allowed through the front door of Alva Vanderbilt’s Fifth Avenue mansion lived side by side with Hetty and her children. And yet it was her very reluctance to live like a queen that evoked derision and ridicule.

The public never seemed to begrudge Andrew Carnegie his sixty-four-room house on Fifth Avenue, a structure so large it required a special railroad track in the basement to move the two tons of coal needed for a single day’s heating in the winter. Carnegie himself justified personal extravagance in his 1889 essay, “Wealth”: “It is well, nay essential, for the progress of the race that the houses of some should be homes for all that is highest and best in literature and the arts, and for all the refinements of civilization, rather than that none should be so.” Untold thousands living in the same city but struggling to maintain their tenement flats seemed to agree with him, according to Carnegie’s biographer, Joseph Frazier Wall. Wall astutely assessed this public sentiment on wealth, using Hetty Green by way of example. The public, he wrote, “expected its millionaires to live in style in big houses; it looked with contempt upon Hetty Green, living penuriously in a small apartment in Hoboken.”

Nor did her lifestyle inure her to criticism from populists that she was just another self-important member of an overmonied class. A reporter once asked her why she lived the way she did. “I am a Quaker; my early training disciplined me towards pomp and show,” she replied. “My family has been wealthy for five generations. We need make no display to insure recognition of our position.” An editorial in the New York World went after her with a vengeance: “The insolence of this utterance would be astonishing if we had not been accustomed to it by the words and ways of our Plutocracy for years past.”

In 1883, after buying the World from robber baron Jay Gould, Joseph Pulitzer had made a point of beating the populist drums against all wealthy financiers, Gould included. The editorial continued:

The assumption needs only to be examined in order to make its absurdity appear. What ‘position do five generations of wealth give which the public must perforce ‘recognize’? Does Mistress Green mean to say that people who are wealthy are better or more honorable or entitled to greater consideration than people who are not wealthy? Or is her claim merely that people who have been wealthy for five generations are superior to people who have not been wealthy for so long a period?

The public recognizes the fact that Mrs. Hetty Green is rich, if that is any comfort to her; but it declines to recognize any sort of virtue or superiority on her because she happens to own more money and property than other people do. It has no greater respect for her than her personal character may entitle her to claim, and not one whit more than it gives to an equally worthy woman who lives in a tenement and takes in plain sewing for a living.

It was a strong reaction to what had been, especially for Hetty, a fairly innocuous comment. And the irony, of course, was that, unlike Pulitzer and his editorial writers, Hetty Green actually did live in a tenement.

For all of her aversion or indifference to matters of society, Hetty’s one connection to the world of wealth and privilege was her lifelong friendship with Annie Leary, who lived in a large limestone house at 1032 Fifth Avenue. Leary, who had been a member of Hetty’s wedding