Hetty_ The Genius and Madness of America's First Female Tycoon - Charles Slack [92]
Hetty still appeared at the offices early in the morning and stayed until evening. Her millions in cash and her willingness to lend made her a sort of one-woman Federal Reserve, whose decisions on interest rates were followed the way investors today await word from Fed chairman Alan Greenspan. “Hetty Green Cuts Rates,” the Times reported on January 7, 1911, when she made a loan of $325,000 at 4.5 percent to the Roman Catholic Church of St. Ignatius Loyola on Park Avenue, between East Eighty-third and Eighty-fourth Streets. “This is the lowest rate of interest at which a real estate mortgage has been made in this city for many months,” the article stated.
In fact, Hetty often lent money to more than thirty churches at rates well below the going market. These churches benefited from the low rates, but Hetty would not give them a free ride. Several years earlier, in 1903, the Fifth Presbyterian Church of Chicago defaulted on a $12,000 loan. The pastor made the mistake of trying to shame Hetty into forgiving the loan. He arranged for pastors at other Chicago churches to denounce Hetty from their pulpits as a ruthless financier, and wrote to Hetty threatening that she would not get into Heaven if she foreclosed. Hetty wrote back: “As long as you’re in a threatening mood, you had better climb up on your cornerstone and pray for my soul because I am going to foreclose.” A number of pastors leapt to Hetty’s defense. The Reverend M. P Boynton, of Lexington Avenue Baptist Church in Chicago, told reporters, “To expect the holder of a church mortgage to cancel it upon the grounds of Christianity, after the money has been lent in good faith, is nothing less than a hold-up.” The New York Times agreed on its editorial page of February 29, 1903: “If churches … see fit to borrow money in the regular way from persons who make a business of lending it, there is no imaginable reason why they should not pay their debts.” Within a year the site of the Fifth Presbyterian was being occupied by the Trinity Methodist Episcopal Church.
Lending money to churches at a low rate of interest is not the same thing as an outright gift, of course. If she did give portions of her vast wealth away, she did so anonymously. “One way is to give money and make a big show. That is not my way of doing,” she told her friend, C. W. deLyon Nicholls, in a Business America magazine profile in May 1913. “I am of the Quaker belief, and although the Quakers are about all dead, I still follow their example. An ordinary gift to be bragged about is not a gift in the eyes of the Lord.”
There was another reason, of course, for keeping any acts of generosity a secret—if word got out, she would be besieged by requests for more. She was not alone in this fear. A New York Times article on anonymous philanthropy in November 1913 stated: “Often the donors are controlled not by modesty but by a desire for self-protection against the thousands of letters that follow widely heralded public giving. The same article identified Hetty as the likely anonymous donor of $5,000 for relief efforts for victims of major floods in Dayton, Ohio, the previous spring. “In this connection the question has been raised if Mrs. Hetty Green is not accustomed to give generously in secret.”
Breaking her own rule of talking about one’s gifts, Hetty told Nicholls: “I have done one deed of which I am proud. I have helped a school for boys to the extent of between three or four hundred thousand dollars.” Hetty told Nicholls the unnamed school was in New York State, and that she had bought the land during the panic of 1907, at a steep discount. “The buildings were put up at a time when