Hetty_ The Genius and Madness of America's First Female Tycoon - Charles Slack [82]
J. P. Morgan, whose purchase of Carnegie Steel had helped touch off the wave of mergers, eventually played the lead role in bringing the panic of 1907 to a close. Shortly after the Knickerbocker closing, two of the city’s largest trusts—the Trust Company of America and the Lincoln Trust Company—appeared on the verge of collapse. Morgan stepped in, organizing one of the most extraordinary meetings in the history of Wall Street. With his private library on East Thirty-sixth Street as headquarters, a furious, daylong series of negotiations ensued, drawing around thirty of the nation’s leading bankers and industrialists. Calling themselves the Committee of Trust Companies, they hashed out a plan to rescue the two companies. Negotiations with the directors of the two trusts stretched on into the night. At midnight, a wagon from the Waldorf Hotel pulled up in front of Morgan’s library, and six hotel workers carried in a catered supper and urns of coffee. George B. Cortelyou, President Theodore Roosevelt’s treasury secretary waited in a hotel nearby. Although Cortelyou did not participate directly in the meetings, the Treasury, at Morgan’s request, had deposited some $35 million in national banks for the specific purpose of bailing the distressed trusts out.
Finally, at 3 A.M. on November 6, the Committee of Trust Companies announced a plan to save the trusts by assuming control of their stock. The bankers also decided to make millions of dollars available from the New York Clearing House (set up to clear checks drawn on the city’s largest banks) specifically to bolster banks during the threat of a run. The meeting marked the first step toward what would become, six years later, the Federal Reserve banking system, providing a measure of stability for the banking industry. The gathering included a lone woman. The Times reported that a woman wearing a black veil entered Morgan’s library at 6:30 P.M. and stayed for several hours. Although the woman was never positively identified, reporters were convinced that the woman was Hetty Green. Hetty was known to wear a black veil on the streets at times to give herself a measure of privacy. Perhaps Morgan and the other bankers invited Hetty to gauge her interest in the 6 percent bonds they planned to issue to establish the Clearing House fund. She would have been a logical buyer. At any rate, it is difficult to imagine any other woman of the time being called in by J. P. Morgan and his associates to discuss a national financial crisis.
As her financial power reached its zenith, so did the popular impression that Hetty was, despite her money, a desperately unhappy person. Her customary black dress, accented at times by the veil, gave her a witchlike appearance as she walked the streets of lower Manhattan. Some took to calling her the Witch of Wall Street. This notion of her unhappiness owed itself in part to the tenor of the times. How could a woman be happy whose thoughts were so dominated by business and finance? Her preoccupation with money must be covering for some huge gap in her domestic life. Certainly, nothing Hetty said supported the notion that she was unhappy. Virtually every public comment she made regarding her own life reinforced the idea of a woman living her life contentedly, according to a few simple rules. “I really have nothing to say,” she told a New York Times reporter in November 1905, “further than to be thankful for my continued health and interest in general affairs. I know of but very few people who are busier than myself or who are better trained to combine business with pleasure.” Asked if she planned to retire, Hetty responded, “Why should I give up work? I was never more capable of handling my affairs.”
In the end, her principal crime seems to have been that the rules she chose to live by were her own rather than society’s. One of the more cutting portraits came in January of 1908, when Broadway magazine published a particularly long and unflattering article describing Hetty as the “least happy woman in New York.”
The article, by a writer named