Hetty_ The Genius and Madness of America's First Female Tycoon - Charles Slack [97]
Most articles were respectful in their assessment. The New York Times quoted Ned at some length. He described her as a woman who had been largely misunderstood, hardly the miser that people made her out to be:
Mother held herself aloof because there was nothing else she could do in her position. When it becomes known that a person has money to lend you have no idea of the requests that come for it—bona fide offers to borrow, begging letters, and letters from unbalanced people. In recent years she had moved her office many times and had finally taken up quarters in the Ninetieth Street house to avoid these money seekers.
For the same reason, mother never told of her charities, though they were many. The sums of $500, $1,000 and $10,000
she gave away were many and there was a list of about thirty families who received regular incomes. These were mostly members or descendants of families who had been associated with our family for many years.
Writing in the Boston Sunday Globe on July 9, six days after Hetty’s death, A. J. Philpott stated: “In point of fact, it is a question if Hetty Green—in a financial sense—wasn’t the greatest woman that ever lived.” Among the newspapers seeing Hetty’s life as a cautionary tale against greed and miserliness was the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, which offered the opinion that Hetty’s behavior was only natural for a woman. Under the headline “Hetty Green, Feminine Croesus,” the article stated: “The familiar type of masculine multimillionaire who has piled up great accumulations through unsocial methods turns naturally to ameliorative philanthropy when his years lengthen. He becomes as intemperate in the making of gifts as he once was in the making of money. He even tries to regain the esteem of his fellow man by inventing and endowing new forms of benevolence.
“Womanlike, however, Mrs. Green, disillusioned as to all other things, pursued her one remaining phantom to the end without faltering and without betraying qualms of conscience,” this odd editorial stated. “Almost every town, even small towns, have women like her. The only difference is that she devoted the same sort of mean sacrifices in a narrowed life to conserving and increasing tens of millions that they may devote to conserving and increasing only thousands.”
A more balanced and thoughtful assessment came two days after her death in an editorial in the New York Times, which noted that Hetty hardly would have come in for the criticism she did had she been a man. “If a man had lived as did Mrs. Hetty Green, devoting the greater part of his time and mind to the increasing of an inherited fortune that even at the start was far larger than is needed for the satisfaction of all such human needs as money can satisfy, nobody would have seen him as very peculiar—as notably out of the common. He would have done what is expected of the average man so circumscribed, and there would have been no difficulty in understanding the joys he obtained from participation in the grim conflicts of the higher finance,” the editorial stated. “It was the fact that Mrs. Green was a woman that made her career the subject of endless curiosity, comment, and astonishment.” The most perceptive assessment may have been this: “Probably her life was happy. At any rate, she had enough of courage to live as she chose and to be as thrifty as she pleased, and she observed such of the world’s conventions as seemed to her right and useful, coldly and calmly ignoring all the others.”
The New York Sun struck a similar theme, praising Hetty for her independence and courage: “If Mrs. Hetty Green was not the richest woman in the world, as popular fancy delighted to regard her, she was one of the most sensible. What common report said of her she disdained to notice. If her frugality was painted as miserliness, well and good; if she was depicted