Hetty_ The Genius and Madness of America's First Female Tycoon - Charles Slack [65]
In 1844, the bank was reorganized as independent from the manufacturing company, but retained the “Chemical” in its title. It prospered from the start. The shareholders list represented the cream of New York finance and society—Cornelius Vanderbilt, Anthony Drexel, Russell Sage, and a long list of Roosevelts were among the shareholders and depositors. Annie Leary, Hetty’s closest friend, did her banking there. Like Hetty, the bank established a reputation for maintaining large cash reserves in good times and bad, and for keeping its head when everyone else lost theirs. When the financial panic of 1857 prompted banks to stop payments in gold, the Chemical earned national respect for being the only major bank that publicly vowed to continue using gold until its reserves ran out. After an initial run, the bank’s reserves actually increased as depositors, impressed by the show of confidence, switched their assets to Chemical.
The cashier during the 1857 crisis, thirty-one-year-old George Gilbert Williams, was a rising young star who had started as an office boy. By the time Hetty made her first deposit in 1885, Williams had been an employee for more than forty years, and president for eight. By then, his personal reputation for hard work, thrift, and financial sobriety were so intertwined with the bank’s reputation that many people looked on him as the physical embodiment of everything the Chemical National Bank was and wanted to be.
It required a special individual to deal with Hetty in any business or legal relationship, let alone to serve as her banker, and Williams was more than up to the task. Furthermore, Williams and Hetty seemed genuinely to like and respect one another. Williams exhibited a rare mixture of deference and toughness that Hetty found appealing. He was a dapper, fastidious man with a high starched collar, thinning gray hair, kindly eyes, and a Victorian beard-and-mustache combination that cascaded over the lips, reducing his mouth to a mere hint of a line. He was a man of firm and unchanging habit. Each day, regardless of the weather, he eschewed carriages and walked the several miles from his home on West Fifty-eighth Street to the Chemical Bank. Each summer he rented the same room at the same hotel in Manhattan Beach, Brooklyn (The Oriental), from which he emerged at precisely six o’clock in the morning for a swim in the ocean, before catching the ferry to lower Manhattan.
Like Hetty with her Robinson ancestors, Williams had descended from an old Rhode Island family, including Roger Williams, founder of the state, and William Williams, who signed the Declaration of Independence. But to Hetty, his greatest attribute was his unwavering, almost obsessive politeness. In his professional dealings, Williams exhibited a level of courtesy that even then was considered old-fashioned. To Williams, politeness was more than just kindness; it was sound business. “Politeness pays,” he would tell his employees. “A grain of politeness saves a ton of correction. No institution is too important to ignore the laws of courtesy.” Williams no doubt had his largest depositor in mind when he said, “I have observed that many a tattered garment hides a package of bonds and that gorgeous clothing does not always cover a millionaire.”
Hetty was a shrewd enough judge of character to know the difference between those behaving out of conviction and those simply being obsequious in the presence