It’s gotten to where
there are as many women as men plying the internet and more and
more women are CEOs, managers, entrepreneurs, marketers
and traders. You’d think from all this a name or two
would emerge as financial empire builders. But as far as
I know it hasn’t happened yet. Except maybe Oprah Winfrey,
who is supposed to be worth more than half a billion But
Oprah Winfrey or no, there is one name that shines like a beacon
among women traders.
Hetty Green.
And she flourished a hundred years
ago.
Hetty Green lived in a cold water
flat in Hoboken, wore the same shapeless black dress for days
on end, seldom bathed and when her son hurt his leg severely would
not pay to get a doctor. She was the Epitome of Parsimony,
the Princess of Penury. They called her the Witch of Wall Street.
And when she died in 1916 at 81
she left an estate of more than $100 million.
In the Twenties, when I was a child,
Hetty Green was still a household word. Even small children
knew her name and fame. Hetty Green was a synonym for ‘miser’. There have been books written about her and as late as August
1997 there was a long story about her in Biography Magazine by
Miranda Spencer in, appropriately, the Eccentrics section.
She was born Henrietta Howland
Robinson in New Bedford, Massachusetts in 1834. Her father was
Edward “Black Hawk” Robinson, part owner of a fleet of whaling
ships. As a child she followed her father on his business
around the wharves and every day she read newspaper business news
aloud to him. She learned about stocks and bonds and how
the market worked. When she was ten she was sent to a strict
Quaker school on Cape Cod where, to quote Spencer’s Biography
Magazine article, she was instructed on “the evils of vanity and
luxury and the virtue of thrift.” She was there three years
before returning home to work as bookkeeper for her father, Black
Hawk Robinson, who taught her never to owe anyone anything, “not
even a kindness.”
At 16, after three years among
coarse, profane sailors, she was sent off to a finishing school
to be made a lady of. After three years of that, although
she “came out” and went to New York to mingle in society, it didn’t
work out. She went home less impressed with her foray into
society than she was with having made money in the bond market
investing her $1,200 spending allowance. It was already
obvious she was more interested in making and hanging onto money
than in social position.
After some years as more
an investing dilettante than debutante, she hooked up with
her father in New York. He had left the moribund whaling
business to invest in precious metals and securities. That
was the life for her. At 29, Hetty decided her true home
was Wall Street.
Her father sickened and on
his death bed told her, “I have been poisoned. You will
be next.” She believed him and started sleeping under a
mattress in a storeroom closet and eating hard-boiled eggs (which
couldn’t be poisoned). She slept with a pistol on a string
at the end of her bed.
Her father left her a million dollars,
in those days a vast sum, and a four million dollar trust fund.
An aunt who had helped raise her died two weeks later and instead
of leaving Hetty her two million dollar fortune, as she had promised,
changed her will and left her only $65,000 a year in interest.
Furious, Hetty went to court to get it all, introducing
a new “will,” in Hetty’s handwriting (she claimed her aunt had
dictated it to her and signed it). “The Howland Will Case” took five years to settle and piled up legal fees of $150,00,
a staggering sum, but brought her a settlement of over half a
million, which she invested in bonds.
Her strongest supporter was one
of her father’s business acquaintances, Edward Henry Green, himself
a wealthy investor. So in 1867 she married him. They
moved to London and lived there in a hotel almost seven years.
She had two children, a son, Ned, in 1868 and in 1871 a daughter,
Sylvia, keeping her business skills honed speculating in American
dollars. Through it all, she proved to be a strict but doting
mother.
In 1874 they moved back to the
US, to her husband’s home town of Bellows Falls, Vermont.
There, increasingly rich through her investment, she haggled with
shopkeepers over prices, reused envelopes and layered her clothes
with newspapers in cold weather. She and her husband commuted
regularly to New York to be closer to their investments.
She was better at accumulating money than he was. When he
tried to make a large withdrawal from their bank account and was
refused because he already owed the bank half a million, Hetty
kicked and screamed but finally paid his debt and switched her
account to another bank. And dumped him.
She profoundly distrusted lawyers and
doctors and sometimes tried to work them for free advice.
When billed, she tried to stiff them. In 1882 Ned, then
14, dislocated his knee while sledding. Instead of taking
him to a hospital, she tried home treatment and free clinics.
In the end, his leg had to be amputated. Her husband paid
the doctor bill and Ned never blamed his mother.
By 1900, when the average family
income was $500, Hetty had seven million a year. After she left
Green she grew even thriftier and shrewder. She and her
daughter, who lived with her until she was 38, lived on as little
as $5 a week in a series of near-hovels, often under an assumed
name. She leased a Hoboken apartment in the name of her
dog.
Although she kept Sylvia with her,
she let Ned, who had grown into a large, friendly man, go off
on his own, sort of. She made him promise not to get married
until he was middle-aged and saw to his business well-being.
Sylvia, a shy, six-footer, escaped her mother at 38 in a marriage
to a 57-year-old business man with Hetty’s consent, after he signed
a pre-nuptial agreement giving up all claim to Sylvia’s fortune.
Left alone, aging, she got stingier
and more eccentric. She went to her bankers’ offices every
day, often in the same clothes day after day, sunbathed and smelly
(she munched raw onions for her health), but nevertheless always
welcomed. Employees liked her and she liked them.
She worked at any desk she could find or even on the floor, surrounded
by stacks of her securities. Her usual lunch was oatmeal,
cooked on an office radiator. She lived with her dog in
a Hoboken apartment. Though she did not waste money on food
for herself, she fed him steak.
Near the end of her life she moved into
the New York apartment of one of her few friends, who lived as
elegantly as Hetty lived meanly. They got along but after
a screaming match with her friend’s cook, she had the first ot
three strokes. She died in July, 1916, at 81. She’d
had herself baptized an Episcopalian so she could be buried back
in Bellows Falls in her husband’s family plot. Her flower-bedecked
coffin was transported there in a Pullman car.
Her son, Ned, spent his inheritance
freely on yachts, luxurious homes and female companions.
When he died, he still had 125 million dollars. It went
to his sister, Sylvia. And when she died she left her fortune
to distant relatives, friends and charities.
Hetty Green must have whirled in
her grave.
