Hetty_ The Genius and Madness of America's First Female Tycoon - Charles Slack [67]
Municipalities around the country were coming to see Hetty as a reliable source of funding for civic improvements. In 1900, for example, the rapidly growing city of Tucson, Arizona, desperately needed to modernize and expand a water system that as recently as the end of the Civil War had relied on wagons carting water from nearby springs at five cents a bucket. The city turned to Hetty, who purchased the $110,000 bond issue—making possible a modern water and sewer system.
More than once she bailed New York City out of a pinch. It is staggering to think of a major city coming to a single person, hat in hand, but such was the scope of Hetty’s fortune. Despite her reputation as a miser and a hard-nosed dealer, Hetty usually offered rates that were more than fair. Although she could be ruthless when dealing with an enemy, she rarely if ever took the opportunity to kick a borrower when he was down. That was bad business, she always said. In 1898, she lent the cash-strapped city $1 million at a rate of 2 percent, well below the prevailing rate of 3 to 3.5 percent. In 1901, she advanced the city another $1.5 million. “Hetty Green is smart,” an anonymous New York finance official told a reporter from the Times in July 1901. “During the summer months there is not much demand for money in Wall Street. She loans New York City a million and a half, and just when the money market gets active in the fall the money comes back with good interest.”
Hetty traveled frequently to survey her properties in cities around the country. Sometimes she traveled with Ned or Sylvia, but often she traveled alone, invariably by day coach rather than in a more expensive sleeper car. In an age when women rarely traveled unaccompanied, Hetty fearlessly traversed the country. She carried with her a black reticule that became the stuff of legend wherever she went. Reporters frequently speculated that the bag was ever stuffed with millions of dollars’ worth of bonds, a claim Hetty denied. One item she did carry in the bag was a ring of keys, fifty or so of them—keys to many of her properties. They jangled in her reticule the way that charms might have jangled in the bags of other fifty-something women of the era.
ELEVEN
A LADY OF YOUR AGE
No matter what anybody else called her, Hetty Green always saw herself as simply a woman looking out for her rights. When it came to struggles on Wall Street, she rarely lost a battle. In court, however, her record was spottier, as the case of Aunt Sylvia’s will presaged decades earlier. Regardless, she could never resist a good legal fight. Her hatred of lawyers was surpassed only by her need of them. She went through batteries of lawyers during the 1890s, as complainant or respondent in dozens of lawsuits. She eagerly attended every hearing. Frequently one court case would spin off from another and yet another, like a fast-growing and pernicious vine of litigation. Sometimes she had to hire new lawyers to handle the case of an old lawyer suing to collect his fee from a previous case. And yet she obviously loved the process. Hetty would have been a formidable soldier. But women did not fight in wars. The courtroom was her battlefield.
Of all the legal cases she was involved with during the 1890s, whether as a plaintiff or a defendant, none occupied more time than her fight against Henry A. Barling, the