Hetty_ The Genius and Madness of America's First Female Tycoon - Charles Slack [80]
With that, Hetty opened her fabled black bag.
“You may see for yourself that it contains nothing but letters, the accumulation of correspondence that I get in my business affairs during the day. I always attend to my own correspondence. As a matter of fact, I never carry more than a dollar or two about with me.”
Now, these fears seemed more real to her than ever. Hetty began to suggest openly that her father had been murdered, and her aunt Sylvia as well, all by greedy manipulators after a piece of the family fortune. Her fears peaked when she visited New Bedford, home, as it was, to a high concentration of heirs-in-waiting. When Hetty visited on business she usually stayed at the home of Benjamin Irish, one of the few people she trusted. Irish had been a clerk at the old Isaac Howland Jr. and Company whaling firm. Sylvia had left Irish $15,000 in her will. After the deaths of her aunt and father, and the dissolution of the whaling company, Hetty kept Irish on as her business agent in town, looking after her real estate there. She trusted his honesty and integrity and, significantly, his home was one of the few places in town where she felt no fear in eating a meal. On one occasion in New Bedford, Hetty visited with a friend and distant relation, who subsequently asked her to stay for dinner. Hetty demurred, saying the Irishes were expecting her. She then described for her friend some of the fears and suspicions she had about eating at various homes of relatives around town.
“I’m one of those heirs,” the friend said. “Hetty, you don’t mean to insinuate I would poison you, do you?”
When Hetty tried to smooth her friend’s ruffled feathers, the friend replied, “Humph. I’m going to get only a few hundred dollars out of that old will. If I was going to get thousands, I would consider a proposition to poison you.”
THIRTEEN
IF MY DAUGHTER IS HAPPY
Economics is complex enough to fill a thousand fat textbooks and as simple as the law of supply and demand. Through the ages, whether the commodity was tulips in Holland, gold in California, or cash on Wall Street, speculation has made millionaires and paupers, created and destroyed fortunes in the blink of an eye. But the most secure fortunes have always belonged to those with the discipline and foresight to stay out of the fray, those who supply speculators with the tools of their glory or ruin.
Stock values soared during the first years of the twentieth century, as the United States transformed itself from an economy based on agriculture and thousands of small, mostly local manufacturers to one driven by a new creature—the Large Corporation. In 1901, J. P. Morgan paid Andrew Carnegie nearly $500 million for Carnegie Steel—the highest price ever paid for a company—laying the cornerstone for U.S. Steel. The purchase set off a wave of mergers and acquisitions as would-be Morgans bought up strings of mills and factories to form one national colossus after another, with names such as United States Spinning, International Weaving, and American Steel and Wire. Some of these corporations were based on sound financing. But in many cases the deal-makers simply financed their acquisitions by issuing huge amounts of watered stock—stock whose value on paper vastly exceeded the actual assets of the company*
In their optimism, investors eagerly snapped up even the most heavily watered shares of major corporations, believing, as would Internet investors nine decades later, that values were destined to continue rising forever. With the exception of a brief downturn in 1903, the mania continued unabated until early 1907, when reality set in. It wasn’t just individual investors who were caught unprepared when the bubble burst. Many banks and trust companies had been speculators themselves, and had made reckless loans secured only by still more shares of inflated stock. Stocks began to slide in March, but the real catalyst for