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THE WITCH OF WALL STREET
Bob Hoye June 12th, 2003
Hetty (Howland Robinson) Green
Financier (1835-1916)
Excerpted from Zanies:
The World's Greatest Eccentrics by Jay
Robert Nash, 1982
She was the world's richest woman and the shrewdest female who ever
invested a dollar. She was also the strangest person, male or female, of
her wealth caste, a woman who was known as "The Witch of Wall Street."
Born Henrietta Howland Robinson in New Bedford, Massachusetts, of a rich
whaling and real estate family, Hetty learned early the value (or
obsession) of thrift. Her Quaker relatives dressed her in second-hand
clothes, and she was castigated severely if she ever spent one penny of
her monthly nickel allowance. With her father's death in 1865, Hetty
inherited approximately $5 million.
From that moment on she dedicated herself to becoming the richest woman in
America, or, she hoped, the world.
Only days after the end of the Civil War, Hetty began to buy up great
quantities of government bonds, which most financiers of the day thought
to be useless. Their value soared during the Reconstruction era, and Hetty
added several more millions to her coffers. In 1867,she married Edward H.
Green, executor of her father's estate, who was also a millionaire. Shrewd
Hetty made sure that her spouse signed a contract that their fortunes
would remain separate before walking to the altar. When Hetty discovered
that her husband was spending money carelessly, she separated from him,
actually driving him out of all the family business in 1885 and predicting
that he would die a pauper.
She was right; Green died in 1902 with only a gold watch and $7 to his
name, albeit his miserly wife did pay for his modest lodgings at the end
of his life. Hetty nevertheless complained about having to support her
dying spouse: "My husband is of no use to me at all. I wish I did not have
him. He is a burden to me."
Hetty's investments centered in stocks and bonds; she also bought up
railroads. By the end of her life, her real estate holdings were enormous:
she owned two square miles of choice property in Chicago, along with
several skyscrapers, especially in the Southwest. But most of Mrs. Green's
financial coups involved lending huge amounts of money to cities and
states- and to established financiers wanting short loans and willing to
pay 6 percent interest or more.
Hetty could be ruthless in her business dealings. She would get her way
with any banker or borrower through charm or tantrum. On one occasion,
demanding that a bank return to her all of her liquid assets that minute,
a sum exceeding $1 million, she pulled at her clothes, cried, screamed,
and stamped the floor, finally squatting on the floor and threatening to
remain in that position until she was given her money, "right now, right
away and in cash!" The banker complied and his bank failed the following
day.
Mrs. Green had a sixth sense concerning money and seemed to be able to
smell financial disaster days in advance. One of her female friends asked
her if her accounts were safe at the Knickerbocker Trust Company, then
rated the second-largest trust company in New York. Hetty, who was as
niggardly in giving advice as she was in buying a newspaper, eyed the
woman for a few seconds then confided: "If you have any money in that
place get it out the first thing tomorrow."
"Why?" inquired the startled friend.
"The men in that bank are too good-looking," Hetty said in her usual
cryptic fashion. "You mark my words."
The friend withdrew her savings the following morning. A day later, on
October 21, 1907, the National Bank of Commerce announced that it would no
longer accept checks from the Knickerbocker Trust Company. Some days later
the trust company closed its doors, its officers declaring the institution
insolvent.
Hetty's business acumen was needle sharp, as scores of the toughest
financiers in the country learned. Bird S. Coler- for years a financial
officer for the city of New York, who arranged for Mrs. Green to lend the
city millions of dollars over the years- claimed that Hetty "had the best
banking brain of anyone I ever knew. She carried all her knowledge in her
head and never depended upon memoranda. She watched the money currents so
closely that when I went to ask her for a loan she often knew how much I
was going to require before I opened my mouth."
Financial panics were Hetty's specialty. She could predict months in
advance when and where a panic would ensue.
Wrote Boyden Sparkes in The Witch of Wall Street: "It was then that she
foreclosed her death grip on coveted real estate; it was then that her
brokers found her a willing customer for the depreciated stocks and bonds
of men who were being engulfed… At such times Mrs. Green would stalk
through Wall Street buying bargains. She knew what the bargains were; she
knew what stocks were being sold for less than their value… This is what
she meant when she said she bought cheaply and sold dearly."
The ire in Mrs. Green never abated for competitors she felt had wronged
her. Of one she threatened: "The next time I see him in front of a church
I'll paste him in the face with the heel of a satin-lined slipper!" One of
the executors of her many trusts, Henry Barling, mistreated her, Hetty
felt, and she publicly asked God to chastise him. The results were
edifying to Hetty:
"I prayed that the wickedness of that executor [Barling] might be made
manifest to New York, and after that prayer that executor was found stone
dead in his bed!" Commented one of Hetty's critics: "Prayed Barling into
his grave, nonsense! That woman literally worried him to death."
The lives of Hetty's two children, Edward (born in 1868) and Sylvia (born
in 1871), were lived almost on the poverty level. Hetty refused to waste
money buying them new clothes.
Edward was given hand-me-down clothes, and Sylvia wore her mother's
ancient garments cut down to size. The daughter was later sent to a
convent, where a nun's habit suited Hetty's cost conscious mind. Sylvia
would become her mother's financial adviser in Hetty's dotage, exercising
the same miserly principles as her mother.
Anything modern annoyed the pernicious Mrs. Green. Cars were wild
extravagances, according to Hetty, who once barked to a New York Herald
reporter: "Jesus did not ride in automobiles- an ass was good enough for
Him!" Next to modern conveniences, Hetty despised lawyers and doctors.
"I
had rather that my daughter should be burned at the stake," Hetty once
said, "than to have to suffer what I have gone through with lawyers!"
Doctors were nothing but money-grubbing quacks to Mrs. Green, men who
invented illness for profit. When her son Edward injured his leg while
sledding, Hetty applied her own remedies. The leg grew continuously worse,
and Hetty, hating it, took Ed to Bellevue Hospital.
She and her son were dressed in rags at the time; and a doctor who
examined the boy thought he was a welfare case- at a time when Hetty was
worth more than $50 million. When the physician asked for his small fee,
Mrs. Green laughed at him and took her son out of his care before proper
medical treatment was administered. She applied sand to the festering leg,
but that did not stop gangrene from setting in. The boy's leg was
amputated in 1887.
Attire meant nothing to Hetty Green. She wore the same black dress for
twenty years- beneath which was a petticoat fitted with special pockets
containing stocks, bonds, and cash amounting to millions. Hetty washed the
dress every few nights but later turned that chore over to a scrubwoman,
informing her only to scrub the bottom of the dress and her petticoat
because these were the dirtiest parts, having trailed through the dust of
Wall Street. Since the scrubwoman only washed a portion of the garment,
Hetty paid her a fraction of what she would have received had she washed
the whole garment.
Beneath her dress, Hetty wore men's underwear in the winter and provided
added insulation by stuffing newspapers under her dress. She wore rubbers
borrowed from a clerk in the Chemical National Bank, where she kept most
of her cash and stocks and bonds. Her black gloves were torn and her
fingers poked through. Her muff, also worn for twenty years, literally
rotted away. Hetty would haggle with store clerks over shoes priced at $3
a pair when her stock market investments were earning $500 an hour. The
most economical bargain in footwear, Hetty discovered, was fisherman's
boots, which she wore into the most distinguished banking house in
America.
Edward Hatch Jr. of Lord and Taylor met Hetty Green during one of her rare
appearances at a social function. He was appalled at her attire, telling
her, "Mrs. Green- just consider that veil through which you are looking at
me. It is torn. It is faded. It looks like hell. You come down to the
store some morning and I'll give you one of the best veils we have in
stock."
"You will? How sweet of you."
Hetty was at Hatch's store the first moment the clerks opened the doors
the next morning. She tried on the most expensive veil Lord and Taylor had
to offer, and Hatch had it charged to his own account. Delighted, Mrs.
Green turned to Hatch and said: "I wonder if you have any skirts that you
could let me buy at reduced rates."
Hatch nodded and led Hetty to the skirt department. There was only one
skirt, returned by a customer, that was marked down to $8. "How much is
this skirt?" Hetty asked in a wary voice.
Hatch quickly tore off the price tag before Hetty could see it. "Fifty
cents," he lied.
Hetty Green turned her back and dug into one of the many pockets of her
dress, producing a small coin purse into which she reached trembling
fingers. She paid in dimes. "She never, after that day," wrote one of her
many biographers, "ceased to admire Edward Hatch, Jr."
On one occasion, Hetty raced into a stable and ordered the owner, a man
named Hayes, to hitch up a team of horses "and then drive her back to a
place where she believed she had lost a postage stamp." The financier
searched frantically through street gutters for hours while the perplexed
stable owner sat by patiently watching her. Hetty's son Ed once lost a
coin, and Mrs. Green and her son spent the night searching an entire block
for the money, Hetty holding a lantern in her hand as she ran nervous
hands over the cobblestones.
Hetty's eating habits were as bizarre as her penchant for ragged apparel.
She ate in the cheapest restaurants she could find and ordered the
cheapest items on the menu. Her favorite eatery in Boston was a run-down
lunchroom in Pie Alley where she could buy a plate of beans for 3 cents
and a slice of pie for 2 cents. One wag calculated that since her income
at the time was 8 cents a second she would have had to eat four pieces of
pie every second in order to keep up with her earnings.
A rare whim once urged Mrs. Green to give a party for her society friends.
A group of people in full evening wear showed up at the cheap boarding
house where she was staying. Hetty led them to another boarding house
where they were served a seven-course dinner at 25 cents a plate. The
party cost Mrs. Green all of $2.25.
The woman looked for economy everywhere. She would purchase a newspaper
for 2 cents, then after reading it have it sold again. She once provided
her own empty bottle for some medicine to save 5 cents. Though Hetty owned
two railroads, she never travelled in the comfort of a Pullman car but sat
up all night in the day coach. One boiling day in 1893, Hetty climbed into
an attic where she had stored some old clothes inherited from her father.
"The July sun boiled down upon the iron roof and made the attic just a
trifle less hot than the outskirts of Hades," reported on chronicler. "Yet Hetty Green worked in that devastating heat for hours. Doing what? Sorting
white rags from colored ones because the junk man paid a cent a pound more
for white rags!"
Charles Krell, a Hoboken, New Jersey, streetcar conductor, studied an
elderly woman dressed in all black when she climbed aboard his car on the
morning of January 18, 1906. The woman gave him a half-dollar for her 5
cent fare. Krell studied the coin then returned it, saying: "This looks
like a counterfeit to me."
"I guess you can trust me for a ride," Hetty Green told the conductor. She
pointed to a mailman seated in the car. "That postman opposite can tell
you my credit is good."
The mailman nodded. Clucking his tongue in disgust, Krell put a nickel
from his own pocket into the coin receiver.
Two days later, Mrs. Green marched into the office of the Hoboken
streetcar corporation, explaining the loan made to her by the conductor.
She placed a nickel on the desk of an official, but not until she received
the receipt she demanded did she lift her forefinger from the coin on the
desk. A few hours earlier, Hetty Green had lent the City of New York $4.5
million in cold, hard cash.
Beyond losing money, Mrs. Green feared the tax collector most. She saw tax
collectors around every corner and inside every doorway. On one occasion,
while chatting with a friend in the lobby of the Waldorf Astoria, Hetty
suddenly spotted a man sitting in a chair. "That man is a tax assessor,"
whispered Hetty to her friend. "I can tell by the way he's glancing at
me."
As she talked, Hetty kept glancing alternately from the clock on the wall
to a streetcar transfer in her hand. She examined the time punched on the
transfer then raced off to use it before it expired.
Tax collectors were on Hetty's trail to be sure, but they rarely found
her. When they did she would invariably pay $30,000 on her vast holdings.
Such payments were few and far between since Hetty was the most mobile
millionaire in history. She moved constantly, from one cheap boarding
house- never paying more than $5 a week for the dingiest room- to another,
from Manhattan to Brooklyn to Hoboken, New Jersey, always using assumed
names. She preferred Hoboken, where she mostly lived from 1895 to 1916,
the year of her death. It was the New York tax collectors she feared since
her fortunes were essentially made and banked in that state.
With her son and daughter boarded out most of the time, Hetty lived alone
in rooming houses, fearing not only tax collectors but kidnappers and
anarchists. However, she was ready for all intruders. She always rigged up
a revolver, with strings attached to the footboard of her bed and to the
doorknob in such a way than any unwelcome visitor forcing her door would
receive a bullet in the general area of the torso. "I always sleep so,"
she curtly explained to one startled landlady who was almost shot coming
into Hetty's room to clean up.
The only permanent address Hetty Green ever maintained was the Chemical
National Bank in Manhattan. She had all her trunks and furniture stored in
the enormous bank vault, along with her securities and many millions in
cash. (Her ancient carriage was stored on the second floor of the bank
building.)
Hetty received her mail at the bank and spent several hours a day there,
clipping coupons and seeing financiers who wanted loans. She would receive
them as she sat on the vault floor of the bank, a dried out ham sandwich
(her lunch) tucked into a pocket of her dress.
When one visitor arrived at the vault to obtain a loan on some valuable
gems, Hetty blurted, "I know nothing of jewels- stocks, bonds, cash
investments, yes, not baubles." She then proceeded to drag forth from her
vault cabinet a bushel basket brimming with diamonds, rubies, emeralds,
and other precious stones, explaining, "These are family gifts. I
purchased not one stone. To me they are useless."
Mrs. Green came under attack in 1894 by none other than Bible-spouting
William Jennings Bryan, then a congressman from Nebraska, who delivered a
speech in favor of income tax and cited Hetty as a chief abuser of the
system. "She owns property estimated at $60 million," thundered Bryan,
"and enjoys an income which can scarcely be less than $3 million [a year],
yet she lives at a cheap boarding house and only spends a few hundred
dollars a year. The woman, under [the] indirect system of taxation does
not pay as much toward the support of the federal government as a laboring
man whose income of $500 [a year] is spent on his family."
Hetty's response was to tell the world that though she had more money than
most she was sympathetic to the laboring man. "I have always been a friend
of the laboring man," said Mrs. Green, "and never a day passes but what I
do something for them. Why, in a railroad accident a butcher boy was hurt
and I was the first one to help him. I have got nerve. People who are
honest nowadays are accused of being mad!"
Then again, Hetty did things that most thought abnormal, if not mad.
Though her son Edward slaved for her interest most of his life, he
received only $45 a month in salary. Her sage advice to Edward after he
received his college diploma was "Never speculate in Wall Street. Never
maintain an office. Eat slowly. Don't stay up all night. Don't drink ice
water, and keep out of draughts."
Before officially hiring Edward to work in her shadowy financial empire,
the scheming Hetty devised a test for her son. She ordered him to appear
at the vault of the Chemical National Bank. When he arrived she handed him
a bundle, telling him to deliver it personally to her agents in Chicago.
"This package contains $250,000 in bonds," Hetty informed her son.
Edward Green, who was later to take over the direction of one of his
mother's Texas railroads, never forgot the assignment. "I was a young
man," Green later recalled, "and stayed awake every foot of the way
putting the package under the mattress in my berth and watching for
robbers all night. It was with a great feeling of relief and pride that I
handed the package over to those appointed to receive it in Chicago. It
was opened in my presence while I waited for a receipt. The bank official
burst into loud laughter. "What do you mean telling me you have bonds
here? he asked, and then he gave me my first view of the contents of the
package. Instead of bonds I saw a number of fire insurance policies, long
since expired. You know, my mother… had a very practical way of testing me
out."
When later working in Texas, Edward received a telegram ordering him to
perform certain duties. The wire was unsigned. An office employee
questioned the identity of the sender.
"It's from my mother," Edward informed the employee.
"How do you know that, sir?"
"I know it's from Ma because it came collect."
Edward Green began to take over more and more of the responsibility for
Hetty's empire as Mrs. Green began to slip into senility. She lent $1.5
million to Colonel Payne, a notorious Wall Street plunger, thinking him to
be Senator Oliver Payne of Ohio. She began to rave about imaginary
culprits trying to steal her fortune, to murder her in her sleep. "I've
had a peck of trouble," she moaned to a friend, "and I'll tell you some of
it.
My son and daughter are dying by inches of nervous prostration [both were
well] … Why, ever since I began to wear long dresses schemers have been
trying… I've lots of enemies… I tell you the devil would fear me, as many
of his satellites do here."
She claimed that the directors of the Chemical National Bank, her bank,
were attempting to poison her. She had lunch with the directors after
demanding they give her some of the cash she had on hand, $3,900,000.
"Well, there were about a dozen others at the table, set in the director's
room, and the funniest thing was that there was no one else but me taken
sick. I thought I was going to die. They called a physician and he said I
had no fever but a terrible inflammation, and he said I probably had
ptomaine poisoning. But I collected the money all right, and since then I
have not made my office at the Chemical National Bank."
On her seventy-eighth birthday in November 1912, Hetty was interviewed by
a reporter for the New York Herald. She greeted him while chewing on a
large onion. "Pardon this onion I'm chewing," sputtered Hetty, "but it's
the finest thing in the world for health. Perhaps that's why I live so
long. I had a big tenderloin steak for breakfast, with fried potatoes, a
pot of tea, and the top of a bottle of milk. I don't buy cream because it
is twelve hours older than the milk. I just take off the top of the bottle
of milk, set the rest in a cool place and use it for cooking."
"How do you account for the color in your cheeks?" inquired the reporter.
"That's not rouge and don't you think so for a minute," snapped Hetty.
"That's because I always chew a baked onion. Most people don't like the
smell of onions but I find that by chewing an onion- a well baked onion-
after breakfast it kills any germs that might be in the steak or the milk
and keeps my digestion fine. That piece of onion I'm chewing now will last
me all day."
Hetty Green kept on chewing onions for four more years, until the day of
her death, July 3, 1916. Nurses who had attended the eighty-one year old
during her illness were ordered by Edward Green to wear street dresses. If
Hetty had seen white uniforms she would have perished in agony, knowing
that expensive trained nurses were caring for her. Of the estimated $100
million left by the richest woman in the world, Edward and Sylvia Green
received about $10 million each. The rest, including seven to eight
thousand parcels of land, was divided among 1,478 relatives.
Hetty's last train ride was unlike any she had taken in life. Her son
chartered a Pullman car, which carried her body from New York to Bellows
Falls, Massachusetts, and the family plot. Defying a Quaker rule, Edward
Green had the car filled with white carnations. The spirit of Hetty Green
undoubtedly ranted and raved the whole trip long at such extravagance.
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