The Richest Woman in America (31 page)

Leigh Mitchell Hodges seemed to have a doggedness not so different from her own. She led him into her sparsely furnished parlor, nodded toward the vase of flowers on the mantel, and flashed her steel-gray eyes. “You think they’re real, don’t you?” she challenged. “Well, they’re only dyed chicken feathers,” she said, adding that they cost no more than fresh roses and outlived the real ones by years.

Directing her guest to the well-worn sofa, she sat down beside him on the haircloth seat and made room for Dewey, the Skye terrier, who jumped in between. His namesake was her husband’s hero: the Vermont-born Commodore who defeated the Spanish and occupied the Philippines was rescuing the place where Edward Green had made his fortune. The dog was Hetty’s playmate, an unconditional friend who lapped up rice pudding and rare steak and romped with her in the park.

After surveying the photographs in the room, of her son and herself in younger days, Hetty relaxed. With a childlike love of repetition, she eagerly told the stories she had told so many times before: her harsh childhood; her gay society years; her troubled marriage; her haranguing lawsuits; and her money—the sixty million she said she was now worth. “Words seem to come to her as easily as dollars,” Hodges wrote.

What advice did she have for a young girl? he asked. “
A girl should be brought up as to be able to make her own living, whether or not she’s going to inherit a fortune,” Hetty replied in a low, feminine voice. “But a woman’s place is in the home, though some young women do better in business than men.” Perhaps with the Duc de la Torre in mind, she continued: “A girl ought to be careful about the man she marries too, especially if she has money. She oughtn’t to marry until she’s old enough to know what she’s doing anyway.” Sylvie was nearing thirty and living in New York: her romance with the duke had come to an end. Despite another season with Annie Leary in Newport, there were no other prospects in sight.

Hetty dismissed the reporter and, eyes twinkling, bade him good night. As she spoke, her husband scuffed about in the flat above. She would take her dinner alone, as always, in her small dining room and then join him upstairs. Sometimes she bought him books from Isaac Mendoza’s shop downtown and read to him, reminiscent of the times when she read the news to her father.

Edward Mott Robinson had trained her in business and given her good skills, but he had also imposed a responsibility she did not want for Sylvie. “My daughter hasn’t been reared to be a business woman,” she had told the reporter. “She knows a good deal about business and she’ll be able to take care of what she may have, but I wouldn’t want her to follow in my footsteps.” With that she gave a hint about another life she might have preferred: a domestic world of husband, hearth, and home. And yet, business pulled her in like a magnet. And business, she claimed, helped her appreciate life.

“I have heard it stated that for a woman to get a business training is to crush all the poetry out of her life,” she said. “This is sheer nonsense. A woman with a knowledge of business appreciates music, painting and other finer things of life just as much as the woman who is ignorant of all business matters. She has the advantage to secure more opportunities of seeing and appreciating these things. She can get more tickets to concerts and art galleries and will have more money to possess beautiful things. I have been a business woman for fifty years and I am just as fond of pictures and music as anyone my age.” Two years earlier
she had attended an auction at the Fifth Avenue Art Gallery. When a copy of a portrait of James Madison by Gilbert Stuart appeared, she raised her hand. “Seven fifty,” she called out. “Twenty-five,” someone else cried, and Hetty was out of the bidding.

      
H
er interest in art hardly matched that of her rival Collis Huntington, who left his collection of paintings to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. But Hetty was not envious of his art; it was his business tactics that ate at her like termites gnawing at wood. In the summer of 1900, while she was in Vermont with Edward, news arrived of her nemesis. Hetty marched into the room where her husband sat with a friend. “The old devil Huntington is dead,” she announced. The
railroad mogul, seventy-nine, had died at his summer lodge in upstate New York. Edward listened and puffed on his cigar; the loss of a good businessman, he said. Hetty proclaimed it Satan’s defeat. “Serves him right,” she declared.

The following year Frank Norris gave a searing account of the railroad promoter’s ruthless acts against the farmers of California. His book,
The Octopus
, was a vindication for Hetty. But no victory flags waved from the windows of the dark green train that brought Edward Green back to Bellows Falls that next autumn. He had been in poor health for years, and now, weak from heart and kidney ailments, he journeyed with his daughter in Ned’s private railroad car, joined soon by his son, his wife, her private secretary, and a cluster of clerks.

Business never stopped for Hetty. She had just received $1.5 million at 5½ percent interest on a loan she made to New York a few months before. She lent the funds during summers when the financial markets were quiet and the city needed money, and she received a good return in the fall when she was paid back. “
Hetty Green is smart,” said an official in the Department of Finance.

The city comptroller, Bird S. Coler, later remarked: “Hetty Green 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.” Not only was she receiving interest, she was constantly investing her capital. In November, she joined the Vanderbilts and Goulds and pledged $4 million for a new iron- and steelworks in California.

For several months Hetty hovered over Edward, waking continually during the night to check on him; a serious inflammation of the kidneys seemed to foreshadow his end. The whole family stayed close to his side and then, under the care of a private nurse, he regained his strength. Convinced he was on his way to recovery, Ned returned to Texas, never to see his father again. Hetty resumed her old routine, commuting from Bellows Falls to New York, traveling in good weather and through the worst of storms.

In early March she stopped in Boston at the Parker House and met with lawyers representing her in a legal suit. Less than two weeks
later, on March 19, 1902, while she was on the train on her way back from New York to Vermont, eighty-two-year-old Edward took a turn for the worse. Hetty arrived at the Bellows Falls station that evening, walked across the bridge and up the steep streets to Tucker House, but by the time she reached the house, Edward was dead.

The funeral in the cemetery of the Immanuel Episcopal Church marked the end of a disappointing life. A bold adventurer in his youth, a well-dressed clubman in his middle years, he had been shot down by the random swerves of the market and the straight arrows of his wife. She had had no patience with his womanizing, or his profligate use of her wealth. In the days when women were known by their husbands’ names, she had long since given up calling herself “Mrs. Edward Green.” Indeed, for years he had been known as “the husband of Hetty Green.” And yet, they kept their marriage together.

Wearing a fine black dress and heavy widow’s veil, Hetty graced him with a broken circle of laurel leaves and Easter lilies and said farewell to the father of her children, her financial adviser, her friend, and the guardian of her life. One month after Edward died, she visited the Leonard Street station and asked the police for a license to carry a gun. New York Pistol Permit #13854 was a rare certificate granted a woman for her own protection. In July she was in Far Rockaway with her daughter, and then in August, joined by Ned, she holidayed with Annie Leary in Newport. But in September Hetty sailed alone to London to settle up Edward’s accounts. And perhaps in a final act of farewell, in December 1902 she sold twenty thousand shares of Louisville and Nashville Railroad stock to the Wall Street gambler John Gates. She doubled her money on the railroad that brought down her man; it was a fitting end to their life together.

T
he atmosphere that greeted America at the start of the twentieth century seemed as solid as the gold standard it now banked on and as bright as the electricity it now burned. New inventions, new technology, and new forms of transportation transformed the country and the customs of its people. While Hetty kept her Bellows Falls lanterns filled with kerosene, Americans lighted their homes with electric bulbs, listened to music on talking machines, rang each other on telephones, and lurched along in automobiles—all a dramatic change from the decade before.

After the panic of 1893 the country’s economy had remained less than robust. For several years American companies had struggled to keep their profits up and their prices down: in the methods still practiced today, they fired workers, slashed paychecks, and cut costs on raw materials and overhead. With jobs scarce and wages low, customers counted out their pennies and snapped their purses shut. Mountains of merchandise rose on shelves; orders for new goods sputtered to a halt; factories were lifeless.

The economy stayed moribund until European industry came back to life. By 1897 business was flourishing in France and England; as their factories flooded with orders they could not fill, they turned to the United States for help. Slowly, American steel and iron mills were roused from their sleep, cotton mills hummed, railroads picked up steam transporting freight from coast to coast, and ships packed with cargo sailed to Europe. U.S. exports crawled out of a deficit of nearly
$20 million at the start of the crisis in 1893 and climbed to a surplus of almost $300 million over imports.

The Spanish-American War did little to derail the boom. From the congressional declaration of war in April 1898 to Commodore Dewey’s swift destruction of the Spanish fleet in Manila Bay toward the end of May that year, the United States established itself as a world power. With its victory over Spain, America gained possession of the Philippines, Guam, and Puerto Rico; it guaranteed the sovereignty of Cuba and ensured the safety of American citizens residing and conducting business on the island ninety miles off the coast of Florida. That same year Congress passed legislation allowing the annexation of Hawaii, an important military base for actions in the Pacific. And by the end of 1898 American exports exceeded imports by $615 million. America had confirmed its superiority in both conflict and commerce.

The end of the war reignited commercial engines and invigorated entrepreneurs, who found new methods for making money. Where once they sought to finance rising industries like railroads and mining, now they saw the chance to consolidate existing firms. When promoters approached the banks for loans, the financial institutions scrambled to help. They saw new prospects for themselves: “Wall Street has furnished the money that has set the wheels of industry in motion over the vast continent,” said the financier Henry Clews.

John Gates, a smooth-talking barbed-wire salesman turned daring entrepreneur, led the merger mania. In 1898, he combined seven factories in Illinois into the Consolidated Steel and Wire Company. Two months later, he sold that business to another new firm, the American Steel and Wire Company, which then bought an additional seven mills. But Gates was not satisfied to gain a hold on the wire business: he wanted to cash in on his assets by selling the stock to the public. With his salesman’s showmanship and the help of banks that underwrote the issue, the new company offered shares at a market price of $24 million. Wall Street gobbled it up like cotton candy.

The following year Gates organized another business, American Steel and Wire of New Jersey, which bought the earlier American Steel and Wire Company for $33 million and then added another eleven wire plants to its name. Again with the help of bankers, Gates
issued $90 million in new shares: eager buyers pushed up the common stock and doubled its price in two months. One of the most triumphant men of his time on Wall Street, Gates topped it all off with the sale of American Steel and Wire to United States Steel.