NOTORIOUS NEW YORKERS
104
AVENUE MAGAZINE | SPRING 2020
A scene on Wall Street during the panic of 1907, when Hetty famously kept her cool while others decidedly did not.
dust-covered mementoes from her life: the sleigh in which she rode with her father around the snowy streets of New Bedford as a child, old jewelry and clothing, furniture from her childhood, family photographs. Tears filled her eyes as the objects recalled memories of her youth. Then she came across a newspaper clipping about her old enemy Huntington. “That old hyena thought I’d die before him, but he’s long in his grave.” As she mulled over the titans she fought over the years, she declared to her young assistant: “I’ll outlive all of them!” In large part, Hetty achieved these goals, and it’s possible that this brought her the kind of happiness that spending her fortune did not. She proved herself more than the equal of Gilded Age Wall Street’s fiercest competitors and she did it on her own terms. She exponentially grew the small portion of her father’s fortune that he deigned appropriate to leave in her control, but he wasn’t around to express pride in that feat. It’s her loss, and ours, that she didn’t gain more gratification in mentoring other brilliant women of her day, or of helping to jump-start the women’s suffrage movement that has just marked its centennial.
But Hetty didn’t live by others’ rules or expectations, and it’s doubtful that she would even have cared that history would go on to relegate her to the sidelines. At least the paper of record recognized the double standard with which she was judged in her own era, the New York Times noting that the world’s endless focus on her personal quirks rather than on her accomplishments was owed to her gender. Had a man showed such monomaniacal zeal for acquiring wealth, stated the article, “nobody would have seen him as very peculiar.” How odd, then, that in today’s current climate of female empowerment, Hetty’s singular accomplishments have yet to spark renewed interest in the trailblazer. It’s hard to celebrate a figure as complicated at Hetty Green, but it seems even harder to ignore her. Charles Slack is the author of several books, including Liberty’s First Crisis on the early architects of American free speech, Noble Obsession on Charles Goodyear, and Hetty Green: The Genius and Madness of the America’s First Female Tycoon.
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ding to a souvenir pistol on display in her office, she said calmly, “Harm one hair on Ned’s head and I’ll put a bullet through your heart.” Hetty was also capable of swanning around in society with the other swells when it suited her, and she was liberally possessed of a lively, sharp wit that would add life to any gathering. She enjoyed a lifelong friendship with prominent socialite and philanthropist Annie Leary, and to further complicate any caricature version of her persona, she displayed quiet kindness when out of the spotlight. While living in modest boardinghouses, Hetty often nursed ill neighbors through the night and was known for handing out piggy banks to children, with money inside, and admonitions to save. Despite her groundbreaking position as a woman in finance, Hetty never professed to be a feminist. She refused when asked to advocate for the right of women to vote, and, until such time as she felt required to enter the workforce by her husband’s missteps, Hetty raised her children along more or less traditional lines. It was Ned whom she trained to take over business operations, while keeping her daughter, Sylvia, as a sort of domestic companion until she finally married. Of Hetty’s two children, it was Ned who made attempts at buying his way to happiness. After his mother’s death, he built palatial homes in South Dartmouth, Massachusetts, and in Florida, while indulging passions for aviation, broadcasting, auto racing, and collecting rare gems and stamps. Sylvia lived quietly in New York and in Greenwich but never had children, nor did her brother. It’s been speculated that Hetty’s fear of interlopers entering the family was the reason both Ned and Sylvia married late in life. When Ned died, he passed the bulk of his estate to Sylvia, and when she died, her estate scattered Hetty’s meticulously built fortune to dozens of distant relatives, universities, private schools, and charities—none of the gifts having been earmarked for reputation management of the iconoclast who built it. In her zealousness to protect and grow her fortune, Hetty lived a life of extraordinary secretiveness—as if by hoarding her treasures away from public eyes she might more meaningfully preserve them. She didn’t appear to gain pleasure by spending or sharing the money she earned, and it’s difficult to determine where she did gain pleasure. An assistant recalled accompanying Hetty, near the end of her life, to the top floor of a nearly empty loft building she owned in lower Manhattan. In the stultifying heat and near-darkness, they climbed floor after floor. At the top landing was a door. She bent down and felt for a thread running from the bottom of the door to the floor. “If anybody ever goes in here, I’ll know it because the thread will be broken,” she said. Satisfied that the room was secure, Hetty unlocked the door to a chamber packed with