The Richest Woman in America (16 page)

Across the panorama of history, the same potent forces that have driven men to war and devastation have also driven them to financial destruction. The markets may change, the methods may be revamped, but as long as human beings are propelled by greed and ego, they are doomed to repeat the mistakes of the past.

It had been a good seven years in London for the Greens. But stock prices were falling across the board, banks were failing, and the lucrative market for money in London had dried up. Many speculators were losing fortunes and Edward was no exception. The future in Europe looked grim. It was time for Mr. and Mrs. Green to go home.

H
etty and Edward Green, their children in tow, sailed on the
Russia
in early October 1873. The same Cunard ship that swept them off to London on their honeymoon was now steaming them back to New York. The city had burgeoned in the boom years. Ten-story buildings stood tall on the horizon, and Central Park stretched north as far as Eightieth Street. Expensive brownstone houses replaced the shanties that had sheltered impoverished German and Irish immigrants along Fifth Avenue up to the park, and apartment houses, much bigger than the omnipresent boardinghouses where many people lived, appeared for the first time. Real estate prices were still climbing, and when the directors of Trinity Church considered moving uptown, the lots they looked at near Central Park cost almost $400,000.

Scribner’s had opened the largest bookstore in the world, the spires of St. Patrick’s majestically touched the sky, and Temple Emanuel, its walls inlaid with mosaics in the Egyptian style, offered services for German Reform Jews. The Metropolitan Museum of Art opened on Fourteenth Street with an array of treasures, including a show of ancient Cypriot pots and an exhibition of Dutch and Flemish paintings scooped up in Europe by its millionaire trustees. The new Museum of Natural History beckoned visitors with its fossils, flora, and fauna.

The exuberant spending that had once more infected New Yorkers was no different from the unfettered expansion fed by industrial entrepreneurs, railroad promoters, and real estate speculators in the
Midwest and the West. But by the autumn of 1873, when Hetty and Edward arrived, the financial panic had pricked the bubble of hope and flattened the country into despair.

New York jittered as stocks bounced up and down and gold prices continued to drop. More firms in the city declared bankruptcy, and businesses and farms around the country continued to go into default. A&W Sprague of Rhode Island, one of the most important textile manufacturers in the country, declared bankruptcy, Utica Mills announced it was running on two-thirds time, and Wamsutta Mills in New Bedford decreed a four-day workweek. Companies across the land were chopping their costs by laying off workers, cutting back on their hours, or reducing their wages.

On Wall Street men in frock coats, floppy ties, and silk hats, stunned by their losses, moved in a daze. Only a few months before, they had walked briskly, the bands of their stovepipes bulging with commercial paper; now they held on to their tall hats and worried over their jobs. Even lawyers suddenly found themselves unemployed. Shortly after Hetty arrived, she donned her dark dress and cloak, crammed her bag with stocks and bonds, and rode downtown to see her banker. Her appearance might have astonished J. P. Morgan, who refused to allow women into his offices, but she was not the first woman to arrive on the street. Fur-cloaked wives of famous businessmen, frumpy spinster teachers, and décolleté madams of bordellos were sometimes seen climbing down from their carriages or stepping off the horse-drawn omnibus, eager to throw the dice in the Wall Street game of roulette. But none had the keen eye, the shrewd head, or the courage of Mrs. Edward Green.

Head down, eyes peeled on her reticule, Hetty made her way along the route of America’s riches: past the Custom House, past the respected Brown Brothers’ offices, past the granite building of August Belmont, who represented the Rothschilds in the United States, past the shuttered doors of Jay Cooke and the darkened entrance of Fisk and Hatch. At 59 Wall Street she entered the offices of John J. Cisco, the conservative banker and friend of her father’s who served on the board of Trinity Church alongside George Templeton Strong. She had known Cisco for twenty years, first as her father’s banker, and then, after Edward Robinson’s death, as banker for both her husband and herself.

Cisco led her past the glass divider that separated the public from his private office and welcomed her as she handed him her pile of certificates to stash in the vaults and her wad of cash to deposit. But Hetty had more on her mind. Cisco made his services available for her business on Wall Street, and at this time when stocks were being abandoned, Hetty wanted to trade. “I believe in getting in at the bottom and out at the top,” she often said. “I like to buy railroad stock or mortgage bonds. When I see a good thing going cheap because nobody wants it, I buy a lot of it and tuck it away.” For Hetty, the decline in the market offered an opportunity for the future.

“
It takes a clear, cool head, a large amount of brains, and unfaltering nerve to thread one’s way through the intricacies of the business of finance,” said a journalist at the time. Hetty was a fearless pit bull charging into a sloth of frantic bears. True, she had a pile of cash when others were scouring for pennies, but she also had a deft mind and the colossal courage to push against the crowd.

It was far easier to lose money than it was to make it. Even Commodore Vanderbilt had been badly hurt on September 18, 1873, the day of the crash. Most of his railroad stocks had plummeted and some of the firms he did business with were forced to close. Vanderbilt bought his stocks for cash and was able to wait out the market. But his followers, who risked their money on 10 percent margin, were racing to cover their losses. When a friend complained, he replied, “
If you had bought a hundred shares instead of a thousand, you could have held on. Never be in too great a hurry to get rich.” Like Hetty, he bought his railroads for the long haul.

It was said that word of Hetty’s arrival sent brokers scurrying to watch. She may have been out of the country for seven years, but the extent of her wealth was well known. When news seeped out that Cisco’s traders on the floor of the Stock Exchange were waving their hands to buy, it sent a rush of hope through Wall Street. The positive mood continued, and by December spirits were higher even though incomes stayed low. George T. Strong wailed about his bills but still partook in the Christmas rush, joining the shoppers jammed into Tiffany’s and complaining about the fleet of carriages in front of A. T. Stewart’s, tying up traffic on Broadway. Others bought at Lord & Taylor’s, where the
Times
reported the store had taken advantage of low
costs during the crisis and was able to offer its customers a tempting array of goods at reasonable prices. Ladies’ sealskin jackets, gentlemen’s furnishings, and a sprawling display of children’s toys, including “automatic” Negro plantation dancers, music boxes, and monkeys playing the harp, made for compelling shopping.

As prices declined and imports decreased, new opportunities opened up for innovative entrepreneurs. With lower wages to pay and lower prices for raw materials, American industry prospered. Yet, in a paradox that presaged future recessions, unemployment increased and businesses continued to decline. More than five thousand companies closed their doors in 1873 and more than six thousand in 1874; within one year, three million people lost their jobs, and the recession continued for ten more years.

While government officials and Congress argued over whether to allow deflation or encourage inflation, farmers and even small businessmen resorted to methods of barter. In 1874, a conservative Congress passed a bill to devalue the dollar by printing more money. The following year, after the economy failed to improve, Congress legislated to strengthen the system by backing U.S. dollars with gold. Those like Hetty, who had held on to their discounted greenbacks bought after the Civil War, were now flush with wealth.

Dogged in their pursuit of fortune and determined to flaunt their wealth in goods, the rich kept buying. But as much as they bought, it did not satisfy their craving for more. Although they had achieved social status at home, their grand tours and travels to Europe gave them a taste for titles, and they longed for aristocratic approval abroad. But money had its limits: the upper crust of New York was no match for the nobility of the Continent. To set themselves apart from the masses of newly rich Americans, a small group of New York men, led by an ambitious Southerner, Ward McAllister, organized themselves into an exclusive club called the Patriarchs. An invitation to one of their evenings, which included such patricians as John Jacob Astor III, William Astor, William C. Schermerhorn, and Arthur Leary, tapped the recipient into the circle of New York knights; marrying off one’s daughter to a titled European earned him a crown.

The Wall Street speculator and racetrack owner Leonard Jerome
won new standing when his daughter married the cash-poor Duke of Marlborough. The wedding of Randolph Churchill and Jennie Jerome was the perfect melding of money and title. The noble and landed Churchill was too poor to maintain his family homes, while Jerome had the funds to help him out. When less than nine months after they married, Jennie bore him a son, Winston, nasty gossipers shrank back; they dared not deface the name of the aristocratic Churchill’s new wife.
Rich New Yorkers were soon seeking titled men for their daughters to wed, and the writer Henry James had fertile soil in which to plant his stories.

While Jennie Jerome basked in the spotlight, most of the nation slogged through the recession and tens of thousands of men sought work out west. Hetty adjusted to life back in America, but in 1874 she suffered the loss of her cousin Henry Grinnell. In the scorching heat of the summer, his brothers Moses and Joseph and their families, business associates, a group of Friends, and officials of the American Geographical Society gathered for the quiet funeral that revealed his Quaker roots. The ceremony at Episcopal Trinity Church in New York displayed no flowers and offered no music, but attendees praised its dignified style.

The temperature rose as Edward and Hetty made their way with their children to the Grand Central Station on Forty-second Street. “Grand Central Depot of New York eclipses anything of the kind that the world has ever seen,” declared the
New York Herald
. The intricate truss work that spanned the infinite roof, the acres of glass set between the iron sashes, the barbershops, hairdressing salons, toilets for ladies and gentlemen, restaurants for ladies, dining rooms that rivaled the best restaurants in the quality of the food and service, the waiting rooms and plush drawing rooms all made it a cathedral to railroads.

Setting off on the seven-hour train ride to New England, young Ned and Sylvie could see the ferries that crisscrossed the bustling East River between Brooklyn and New York, busy with steamers carrying cargo and people south and north. As the train chugged along, the gray thoroughfares of the city gave way to rolling green hills reminiscent of the English countryside. Low stone walls hugged the soft fields, cows and sheep munched in the meadows, white clapboard houses and Congregational churches stood crisply as the railroad made its way
past New Haven and Hartford and up the fertile Connecticut River Valley to Vermont. No wonder they called it New England!

Edward Henry Green had left Vermont at the age of twenty to make his way in the world. With his broad build and strapping height he stepped through the narrow frame of Bellows Falls and went to Boston in search of daring adventure; from there he sailed off to find the exotic riches of the Far East. But as big and bold as his life became, a piece of his heart remained in Bellows Falls.

The town thrived on its pulp and paper mills, which drove rafts of logs down the river, providing newsprint for the
Boston Herald
and
Baltimore American
; it prospered from factories that produced machinery for sheep and dairy farms. As one of the main connecting points for trains steaming to Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and New York, Bellows Falls hosted a multitude of travelers at good hotels like the Island House, where rich Southerners vacationed before the Civil War, and the Towns Hotel, which served them hefty drinks and hearty meals in its basement tavern.