The Richest Woman in America (23 page)

Even his father was more restrained with his money now. Operating on a far more moderate scale, Edward was seen two or three times a week in the canyons of Wall Street, often in the company of his wife. On one occasion he sat beside her at the back of the Chemical Bank while she clipped away at her coupons, cutting them off the bond certificates, dropping them into her satchel; she would redeem the pieces of paper for the interest due on the scheduled date. When she finished snipping the bonds, she counted the slips and found that one was missing. They searched the floor, the desks, the bag, until they discovered the coupon, stuck to the bottom of Edward’s boot. With a cry of joy, Hetty grabbed the paper and put it in her satchel, but not before casting a look of mistrust at her husband. Assured that he was innocent, she locked her bag and trotted off, her money and man in tow.

F
rom the day their son was born, Hetty had a singular goal: to see Ned become the richest man in America. With railroads propelling the country, she wanted him at the forefront. But she knew he needed an education in how the railroads functioned before he could captain his future along the gilded track.

For years she had owned shares of the Connecticut River Railroad, and from the time Ned was a boy he had traveled the line linking Bellows Falls with New York. The time had come for him to see its operations from the inside. Limping along the tracks with his new cork leg, he toiled as a section hand and foreman on the Connecticut River Railroad, weeding and clearing the tracks, running a locomotive, eating lunch with the workingmen. A quick student, he learned the ways of the railroad and, after several months, gained an understanding of the process. From there he was sent to Cincinnati, where he worked as a superintendent and then as managing director of the Ohio and Mississippi Railroad. Now his mother felt he was ready to take on bigger tasks.

Over six feet tall with a hefty build, Ned Green was an extroverted twenty-two-year-old when Hetty sent him off to the Midwest in 1890. Handing him a satchel filled with valuable papers, she ordered him to deliver them to Frank Chandler, her agent, in Chicago. On the twenty-three-hour train ride out west, Ned fought hard to stay awake all night. He tucked the bag under the mattress in his Pullman berth and did not close his eyes, lest the satchel be lost or stolen.

From the window of his car the next morning, Ned could see the open prairie landscape morph into a maze of stockyards and railroad tracks, could watch the tall poles and telegraph wires give way to smokestacks and factories. When the train pulled into Union Station, the young man grabbed his bag and went directly to the agent’s office. Along State Street, LaSalle, Madison, and Monroe, he saw tall structures rising on “streets long and flat and without end,” as Rudyard Kipling described them at the time; “
interminable vistas flanked with nine, ten, and fifteen storied houses, and crowded with men and women.”

The Great Fire had destroyed acres of land and structures, and out of its ashes arose an array of new buildings designed by leading architects such as Charles McKim and Richard Morris Hunt, who re-created the classic Roman style, and Louis Sullivan, father of the skyscraper. New laws prohibited the use of wood, causing builders to put up huge stone or iron structures, mounds of masonry with plate-glass fronts and brass nameplates, which now stretched across entire blocks. Eager young women and impatient young men, fair-haired and wide-eyed, fresh off the farms of Iowa, Kansas, and Oklahoma, dashed from the speeding, clanging streetcars and darted along the sidewalks: off to work, rushing to make a life for themselves.

Weary from the sleepless journey, relieved to have made the trip unscathed, Ned reached the agent’s office and handed over the package. He watched with pride as the man carefully unwrapped the precious parcel. To Ned’s surprise, the agent let out a loud guffaw. “What do you mean, telling me you have bonds here?” he asked, showing Ned the stack. Hetty’s valuable papers were nothing more than a pile of outdated insurance policies. “My mother always dearly loved a joke,” Ned said later with a laugh, “but I’ll say she had a very practical way of testing me out.”

Teasing and practical jokes were a regular part of the Greens’ family life. On one occasion when Ned went to visit Hetty and Sylvie, he arrived with an enormous box. His mother quickly admonished him for his habit of buying things in large quantities. “You don’t need all those dress shirts,” she scolded. Her son protested and proceeded to open the package: the carton was filled with her favorite doughnuts.

Although Hetty often lived at less than distinguished places,
she instructed Ned to pay six dollars a day at the Auditorium Hotel. Designed by Louis Sullivan, it was attached to the new Auditorium Theatre, where Grand Opera was performed and the Republican Party had recently held its convention. But the fancy four-hundred-room hotel on Michigan Avenue was too much for Ned. After a short while, he moved to a hotel on Madison that cost half the price. Ned may have wanted to enjoy his money his own way, but as soon as his mother heard, she dashed off a quick reprimand: “I notice that you are not staying at the hotel I suggest,” she wrote. “It’s all right, but I have reduced your daily allowance to $3,” she said, cutting his stipend in half. She warned him to watch his pennies. “You are not to have any more spending money than the amount decided on originally.”

Her affable son adjusted quickly to life in Chicago. He dressed nattily and wore his fake leg as gamely as he sported his thin mustache and wire spectacles. He joined the Elks, attended the theater, wooed the actresses, and favored a red-haired girl named Mabel Harlow. He might have run into Sister Carrie at McVicker’s Theatre, or dined with Charles Drouet at the glittering Rector’s, or swilled drinks with their creator, Theodore Dreiser, at Fitzgerald and Moy’s. Self-assured and confident, he chatted easily with actors, businessmen, politicians, and the press. When a reporter from the
Herald
interviewed him, he boasted about his plans to open a bank.

Relaxing in his office at the Owings Building, a neo-Gothic structure owned by Hetty, he repeated his plans to the
New York Times
: “Arrangements are practically completed for the new business,” he said, noting it would be a mortgage bank loaning money on securities. “We will loan at a reasonable rate of interest and borrowers may take up their paper at any time. Ours will be a sort of private bank.” Ned assured the writer that he and his mother would have a controlling interest. “We never invest in anything unless we have control of it,” he said.

Some people viewed such banking operations as high finance, but the young man made short shrift of it: “This loaning business is nothing more nor less than a pawnbroker’s shop on a large scale, except that the borrowers have to hock a good piece of real estate instead of a watch. Some men get mad when you call them pawnbrokers,” he said, “but loaning money as I do is nothing more nor less.” Ned also
spoke of buying a major newspaper, but despite his big talk, neither the newspaper nor the bank came to fruition. As much as Ned boasted, his mother kept her lips sealed tight. Her remarks were never heard. Ned noted that she was usually nice to him in public, but in private she “gave me hell.”

Hetty knew it was a propitious time to be in Chicago.
Not only was the city “the capital of the railroads,” as one French writer observed, it was the bustling center of the West. Innovative and industrial, Chicago introduced steel-framed skyscrapers to the world, established major department stores like Marshall Field’s and Sears Roebuck, and boasted manufacturers like Armour and Company meatpackers, McCormick Reapers, and Pullman Palace sleeping cars. It had twenty-five grain elevators that could hold 25 million bushels of corn. It had Lincoln Park with acres of green and a sand beach lapping Lake Michigan, a lake as large as an ocean. It had grand hotels like the Tremont and the palatial Palmer House, with its barber shop, billiards room, bowling alley, telegraph office, and its own ticker tape. It had banks with weekly clearings of millions of dollars, and the Board of Trade, where men bought and sold commodities—hogs and cattle, wheat and corn—as if they were penny candy. In this dynamic atmosphere, Ned announced he would run his mother’s operations and make Chicago his home. He was right that the city would flourish, but wrong that it would be his home.

      
H
etty sent Ned to Chicago to sniff out new opportunities and to oversee her mortgages. She charged her son with collecting the payments due, and before he left, she proffered some advice. She counseled him to memorize the amount of principal and interest owed on each mortgage. Whatever someone owed, she warned, don’t take a penny less. And not a penny more. It would only mess up his books. When her son wanted to entertain his associates, his mother cautioned: “After your business is over you may take him to dinner and the theater, or allow him to take you, but wait until the transaction has been closed and the money paid.”

His other responsibility was buying and selling new properties and mortgages. Hetty held him accountable for his every decision but
offered her own recommendations before making a deal: “If anyone is fool enough to offer you the full amount, take it. If you are offered less, tell the man you will give him the answer in the morning.” She believed in giving things a second look. “Think the matter over carefully in the evening. If you decide that it will be to our advantage to accept the offer, say so the next day.” Then she repeated one of her favorite maxims: “In business generally, don’t close a bargain until you have reflected on it overnight.”

Not only did Ned purchase mortgages for his mother, he also bought them for his father. E. H. Green became the owner of at least one Chicago mortgage, a $12,000 loan on the First Baptist Church at Thirtieth Street and Indiana Avenue. Whether Hetty had given Ned permission is unknown, but she had a soft spot for Edward, and his name cropped up every so often.

As much as Ned savored his independence, his mother often surprised him and arrived at his side. Hetty commuted between New York and Chicago as though they were two stops on a suburban train. No other woman traveled as much as she did, it was said. Wearing costumes like the brown dress and black cloak trimmed in cheap plush that the
Tribune
dismissed as clothes “a society lady’s maid would not covet,” she appeared in Chicago courts for her lawsuits, attended meetings in her agent’s office, and scouted locations for investment.

In December 1890, when the builder of
the town of Colehour defaulted on his payments and the whole property was to be sold under court order, Hetty and Ned were quick to visit the site. Before daybreak on the morning of the sale, they caught the train for South Chicago and rode out to the suburban town. They inspected the property carefully, walking around the homes of the clerks and mechanics who lived in the town, until they had seen it all. The sale was to take place at 10 a.m. and they had to make a decision.

Before the bidding began, they contacted the banks, arranged for some ready funds, and quickly informed the sellers they had the money. Later that day they met with their lawyer: Hetty plopped down a newspaper bundle on his desk; buried inside was $100,000, enough to finance a mortgage on the entire town. Critics claimed she had snaffled the land. But it was more the action of a shrewd businesswoman. Indeed, a similar event took place in 2006 when it was
rumored that the Lord & Taylor chain would be put up for sale by Federated Department Stores. One man acted aggressively: “Before Federated even asked for bids, Mr. Baker kicked the tires and lined up financing, letting him close the deal before other parties had completed their bids,” said the
New York Times
. Hetty assured the press there was no evil in her maneuver. Indeed, she said with a twinkle in her eye, it was more than a tactic for making money: it was an act of humanity. She had saved the town, she told reporters, and saved the four hundred families who lived there.

When others were failing, Hetty often stepped in and saved them by buying their mortgages. The secret, of course, was available cash. She loved a bargain, and having money on hand to pick up distressed assets gave her a distinct advantage in the marketplace. Then, when the banks allowed foreclosure on her mortgages, Hetty assumed the property.