Hetty (32 page)

The
Bellows Falls Times
noted somberly: “Despite Mrs. Wilks’
bitterness over the kind of life her mother led and imposed upon her children, she evidently was unable to escape living a life that was much like her mother’s in its dedication to money. Even though she may have hated her mother’s influence, she could not escape it.”

While Ned’s burial had drawn fifteen hundred people to the New Bedford train station, just to observe the procession, Sylvia’s arrangements were as quiet, restrained, and understated as her life. After a small service at a funeral home on Madison Avenue, her body was transported to Bellows Falls to join those of her mother, father, and brother. A small group of New Yorkers joined about fifty local residents standing graveside on a bitter cold day. The New Yorkers included two executives from Chase National Bank, where Sylvia kept more than $31 million in a single cash account; her lawyer; and her chauffeur.

The four Greens—Edward, Hetty, Ned, and Sylvia—lie in the same few square feet of soil next to the church. The children’s names appear on the same obelisk that bears Edward’s and Hetty’s. Ned’s wife and Sylvia’s husband are buried elsewhere.

Sylvia’s will, directing the distribution of around $100 million, was found stashed with four bars of soap in a cabinet in her New York apartment. It named sixty-three individuals and institutions as beneficiaries. There seemed to be little overall plan to the bequests; they were scattered willy-nilly, sometimes to people who pleased her from afar. Sylvia left $10,000 to Robert Moses, New York City parks commissioner, “in appreciation of his work creating public parkways.” Moses had been the mastermind behind the Hutchinson River Parkway, the leafy thoroughfare connecting New York City with her home in Connecticut. The Boston Public Library received a half-million dollars, because one of her father’s cousins had been a trustee there.

She divided $1 million of her estate evenly among ten distant relatives—all, like herself, descendants of Gideon Howland. Most barely knew Sylvia, if at all, and were shocked to learn of their inheritances. Henry A. Loomis, an eighty-five-year-old retiree living
in Rochester, New York, was perplexed. “I won’t be able to use much of it. I’m too old,” he told reporters. “I’m going to continue to live simply—and wear old clothes—as I have been doing for the last forty years.”

The lion’s share of Sylvia’s estate was divided into 140 shares, worth more than $600,000 each. These she doled out to some of the nation’s most elite and least needy universities and private schools—Yale, Harvard, Columbia, Groton, and Vassar—despite having little personal connection to any of them. Some of her bequests were personal. She left money to some friends, such as the now-elderly Mary Nims Bolles. She left money for the construction of a new hospital in Bellows Falls, and for the library in New Bedford. It was the same library to which her namesake, Aunt Sylvia, had given money in her own will.

The great fortune that Hetty had spent her lifetime acquiring, saving, and guarding against interlopers real and imagined slipped quietly out of the family’s grasp. Time and death did what no Wall Street shark, meddling trustee, or tax collector could—it dispersed the great fortune among people and institutions who were strangers to Hetty. Hetty, who had set out to win at a man’s game, and played it ferociously, courageously, brilliantly. Perhaps, she had played it a bit too well.

SOURCE NOTES

There have been two previous mainstream nonfiction books dealing with Hetty: Hetty Green: The Witch
of Wall Street
, by Boyden Sparkes and Samuel Taylor Moore, published in 1935, and The
Day They Shook the Plum Tree
, by Arthur H. Lewis, published in 1963. The Sparkes and Moore book, first published in 1930 as Hetty Green: A
Woman Who Loved
Money, and reprinted in 2000 by Buccaneer Books, was well researched, and the authors were able to interview some acquaintances of Hetty’s who by now are of course no longer living. In a few cases I have used anecdotes that could only have come from their interviews, and I have cited these instances in my chapter notes. The Lewis book dealt mainly with the fortune as it was handed down to Hetty’s children. The author’s research papers, on file at the Temple University archives in Philadelphia, yielded many magazine articles, newspaper articles, and other leads.

John Steele Gordon’s concise and highly readable history of Wall Street, The Great
Game
, was a great help to me here and elsewhere in terms of understanding the evolution of finance in America and placing Hetty in the context of her times. Other
useful books included Charles R. Geisst’s Wall
Street: A History
, and Charles P. Kindleberger’s Manias,
Panics, and Crashes.

For presenting the history of New Bedford and of the Howland family, I drew on many resources, ranging from whaling books and old city directories to a physician’s handwritten diary from the cholera outbreak in 1834, the year of Hetty’s birth. But two volumes deserve particular mention. The first is William M. Emery’s
The Howland Heirs
, a monumental genealogical work written in 1919 by the historian who after Hetty’s death was assigned to untangle the enormous list of Howland descendants in line for a portion of Aunt Sylvia’s trust fund. More than just a genealogical table,
The Howland Heirs
is loaded with family history and colorful anecdotes, and was a constant reference guide for me during the writing process. The second is Leonard Bolles Ellis’s History
of New Bedford and Its
Vicinity, an enormous, kitchen-sink history that always seemed to yield just the fact or detail I needed.

Outside of trial lawyers, historical researchers are among the few people who think litigation is great. Old court records, when you can find them, yield wonderful details. Records of the 1867 lawsuit filed by Hetty against Aunt Sylvia’s estate are especially revealing. Lengthy testimony by Aunt Sylvia’s domestic staff helped me to re-create in Chapters Two and Three the atmosphere of her lonely life in New Bedford and at Round Hill, and the tumultuous impact that Hetty had when she visited. Given the animosity between Hetty and the servants, it is not surprising that much of their testimony casts Hetty in a negative light. Hetty’s own testimony mainly concerns the making of the wills
rather than domestic details. The servants also had a financial interest in seeing Hetty lose the case, because the will Hetty was contesting included bequests to them. Still, the servants’ testimony comes off by and large as plain, straightforward, consistent, and believable. Many of the scenes of Sylvias domestic life are re-created from their testimony.

The account of Hetty dancing with the Prince of Wales on page 19 is adapted from the unpublished memoirs of Walter Marshall (see notes for Chapter Fifteen).

Information on the capitalists who became known collectively as the robber barons came from various biographies of the men, and from Webster’s
American Biographies.
Another good source was Gustavus Myers’s polemical classic,
History of the Great American Fortunes
, first published in 1907. Myers’s book is an unabashed, 700-page slam against big money in all forms, and must be read as such. He can find barely a redeeming quality in any of the people he writes about. Still, his research was enormous, and the book sheds fascinating light on the origins of the wealth of some of America’s richest families.

The two letters from Edward Green I cite are in the collection of the New-York Historical Society. The description of the trial came almost entirely from the voluminous court records. The expert testimony of Agassiz, Holmes, and others represents one of the most exhaustive scientific examinations of the issue of forgery. Although the judge ironically never considered forgery in rendering his decision, the case was studied closely by attorneys in subsequent forgery cases because of its clinical treatment of this emerging science.

When I was looking for a description of the London neighborhood where Hetty and Edward lived, the Internet paid off. I found a copy of
The National Gazetteer of Great Britain and Ireland
for 1868, offering detailed descriptions of St. Marylebone. Thanks to British genealogist Colin Hinson, who painstakingly transcribed the
Gazetteer
onto his Web site, and who gave me permission to quote from it.

Bellows Falls, Vermont, is a village within the town of Rockingham. Among several local histories I consulted, Lyman Simpson Hayes’s 1907
History of the Town of Rockingham, Vermont
was especially helpful in providing information on the village as well as on the Green family. Even better was an unpublished paper by Hayes, called “Hetty Green at Home: Reminiscences of Her Neighbors at Bellows Falls, Vermont,” on file in the Rockingham Free Public Library. Hayes interviewed many town residents and recorded their impressions of her as well as some of the more delightful and colorful stories from her times there. The Arthur Lewis papers at Temple University contained a typescript of memoirs by Mary Nims Bolles, the lifelong friend of Hetty’s daughter, Sylvia. These memoirs contained many interesting details about Hetty, Edward, and the children.

The Cisco bank failure was widely covered by the New York newspapers, and Hetty figures largely in the stories. The
New
York World and the
New York Daily Tribune
were especially exhaustive in their coverage, and for much of the information for this chapter I owe thanks to those un-bylined reporters of yesterday.

The New-York Historical Society was an excellent resource for information on the extraordinary wealth accumulating in New York during the Gilded Age—the lives the wealthy led and the homes they built. Robert Stern’s
New York 1900
offered detailed description of the fabulous pleasure palaces these lightly taxed captains of industry erected for themselves along Fifth Avenue. Stewart Holbrook’s
The Age of the
Moguls, with its section on “What They Did With It,” was also useful. Alexander Noyes’s Forty
Years of American Finance (1865–1907)
was extremely helpful in describing, on a year-by-year basis, the prevailing economic conditions of America during the years when Hetty was most active.

The exact details surrounding the loss of Ned’s leg are vague, and separating the myths from the reality is difficult at best. A search for records of Dr. McBurney’s operation at Roosevelt Hospital unfortunately came up empty. Assessment of the popular myth that Hetty caused her son to lose his leg out of miserliness and spite must therefore fall into the area of educated guesswork. Hetty’s behavior with doctors was certainly unattractive. But, based on her obvious love for her son, and her many unsuccessful efforts to correct his condition over several long and painful years, it is inconceivable to me that she would have allowed her son to lose his leg out of fear of paying a doctor’s bill.

Hetty’s acquisition of the Texas Midland Railroad, and Ned’s subsequent improvements, are recounted in S. C. G. Reed’s authoritative
History of the Texas Railroads.
The story of Hetty’s pistolpacking
confrontation with Collis P. Huntington comes from the Sparkes and Moore book, The Witch
of Wall Street.
Most of the information regarding the Chemical National Bank and its president, George Gilbert Williams, came from files in the JP Morgan Chase Archives in New York. A 1902 profile of Williams by Edwin Lefevre, author of the Wall Street classic Reminiscences
of a Stock
Operator, was particularly helpful. The clipping does not identify the journal in which the article appeared.

Hetty’s interminable legal battles with her father’s appointed trustees were given extensive coverage in the newspapers. The
New York
Times was my primary source in re-creating the fight. Sylvia’s letters to her friend, Mary, survive under a glass case at the Rockingham Free Public Library in Bellows Falls.

For the information about Hetty’s friendship with James and Michael Smith, I must thank Hoboken resident Lisa Conde. Lisa and her husband, Tom, live in Michael Smith’s old house, and happened to come across records detailing Hetty’s loans to him. Lisa showed me around the house and shared information she has collected on the brothers. The incident involving Hetty, Edward, and William Crapo at the New York rooming house is drawn from Henry Howland Crapo’s
The Story of
William
Wallace Crapo.
The book contains a delightful chapter on Hetty. The story of Hetty’s reaction to news of Collis P. Huntington’s death first appeared in the Sparkes and Moore book, The Witch
of Wall Street.
The story of Hetty’s fears of being poisoned in New Bedford, at the end of the chapter, comes from William Emery, the official Howland genealogist, who described her fears in an article for the New Bedford Standard-Times, June 13, 1948.