The Miser Hurts No One But Herself
The latest chapter of John T. Flynn's Men of Wealth that has my head spinning concerns someone I probably should have known about, except that late 19th-century Wall Street lore is in short supply these days. But thanks to Flynn, I now know all about Hetty Green (1834-1916), whose weird and creepy life now haunts me to no end.
She was the richest woman of the Gilded Age, and sometimes the richest person, having died with a solid $200 million. But she was a miser. In fact, if the term describes her, it should describe no one else, or else we need some other modifier like x-treme miser or hyper-miser. This is a woman who refused to pay the doctor to treat her son's leg wound, so it later had to be amputated. She was once offered a horse for $200 and she was outraged at the price so she found out everything terrible she could on the seller and intimidated him down to $60. She rode the ferry with the cars rather than pay the passenger fee. She lived in dumpy house in Hoboken. She had two changes of clothes, both black and tattered. She would travel hundreds of miles to collect debt payments. She never tipped.
She was wicked smart. Emphasis on wicked: she was called "the witch of Wall Street." On the smart part: her key to success was rather simple, so simple, says Flynn, that everyone preaches but hardly anyone practices it. She bought things that no one wanted and sold them when everyone wanted them. Nothing was permanent in her mind. So she bought bonds when they were crashing and dumped them when they were in high demand. She did the same with real estate, and railroads. She seemed to have money to lend when no one else did, so a long line of borrowers was always at her door. She offered tough terms and charged a high price. FULL ARTICLE
Comments (15)
Eric
I remember reading the story about her. It was in "Devil Take the Hindmost" by Edward Chancellor. He devotes over a page to Hetty Green. Later in the book, during the panic of 1873, he reports that she "bargain-hunted among distressed stocks". Like Mr. Tucker writes, she bought when nobody else was buying.
It was a good book which shows history eerily repeating itself time after time. It seems the only common thread that's needed for these market booms and subsequent busts is a preponderance of debt - which should scare the dickens out of anybody at this juncture.
Published: August 21, 2007 2:59 PM
Brad
Another way to look at it is what happens when a person of such temper works outside the voluntary system of the market and has their personality unfold through the brute use of Force. I think History has a more than a few such examples. Observance of a free market should be thanked instead of ridiculed when presented with the likes of Hetty Green.
Published: August 21, 2007 3:17 PM
jeffrey
Thank you Brad. That's the point that I probably should have made.
Published: August 21, 2007 3:33 PM
Nasikabatrachus
Indeed, Brad. The main reason one could censure her is for her mistreatment of her son, and the parent-child relationship is not really a chosen relationship: the child simply appears into it at the behest of the parent. We should be glad the avarice of such people is channeled into productive activities like speculation.
Published: August 21, 2007 5:37 PM
Susanna K. Hutcheson
What a delightful post. Thank you, Jeffrey. I must admit I didn't know about this woman and find it quite fascinating. Might we perhaps suspect that the fact she was a woman in a time when women were not thought to have brains, caused her to be meaner than she would have been in another time? Just a random thought.
Today, it seems that those of wealth of those on the way to it, are giving a good deal of their wealth to good causes. And they're doing this from the beginning.
I think perhaps people have discovered that giving makes us rich --- in many ways.
Published: August 22, 2007 6:26 AM
eric lansing
I think she was mentioned in James Grant's book "Money of The Mind - Borrowing & Lending in America from the Civil War to Michael Milken"
If I'm remembering right, she ended up living in the First National Bank of New York (Baker's bank).
either way, I very much recommend Grant's book.
Published: August 22, 2007 8:36 AM
Billy Beck
A reading:
"In her personal economy Hetty [Green] was as hot on the trail of a bargain shirtwaist as she was for a short-line railroad. Living in shabby rooming houses, she did her own cooking off a gas ring and lived for months on end off graham crackers which she purchased in barrel lots to save the grocer's profit. A single black dress, threadbare from age and now turning a poisonous green, was her only wardrobe and her frayed umbrella, when she put it up, admitted the elements through rusty ribs from which fluttered the remnants of silk covering.
She presented so scarecrow an appearance that once on encountering her sorting through the contents of a trash barrel on Fifth Avenue, Edward Hatch, one of the executive staff at Lord & Taylor, told her that if she'd come by he'd give her a fine black veil from stock.
'Would you?' she said, happy as a kid with firecrackers. 'That would be real nice.'
Soon afterward there was a disturbance among the merchandise counters devoted to female furnishings at Lord & Taylor and Hatch was informed by a courier that Hetty Green was raising unmitigated hell with the sales staff and claiming that she'd been promised a veil for free. The man of garments saw to it that his promise to Mrs. Green was kept, whereupon she asked if by any chance there was any damaged merchandise in the skirt line that she might have at abated prices? Hatch gave her several in last year's mode for fifty cents each and always afterward Hetty told anybody who would listen that Lord & Taylor was a fine place to shop and her favorite outfitter.
Since Hetty's appearance was that of one of the three witches in the first scene of 'Macbeth' this was an endorsement to ponder over.
In 1916, Hetty suffered a stroke after a knockdown argument with the housekeeper in the home of a friend over her extravagance. The cook, Hetty claimed, was bankrupting her employer by using whole milk where the skimmed would do, and in the ensuing exchange of insults, Hetty burst a blood vessel. Her last hours were spent attended by nurses hired by Ned Green to ease his mother's passing, but only in street clothes. Trained nurses got as high as a dollar an hour in wartime and knowledge of such expense would, Colonel Green knew, have killed her out of hand.
As it was, she left an estate of $100,000,000 which, as Stewart Holbrook points out, is more than the net liquid assets of J. P. Morgan and a resounding monument to what a diet of whole-wheat crackers can accomplish."
Lucius Beebe, "The Big Spenders", 1966, ch. 13, "Misfortune's Darling", pp. 313-314)
Published: August 22, 2007 9:21 AM
jeffrey
Billy Beck, I'm dying of laughter here from the parts of that book that you quoted!
Apparently that story about the skim milk is not true, but it still makes a great story!
Published: August 22, 2007 9:34 AM
Billy Beck
I wouldn't know about the skim milk story, not having seriously studied Green's life, and can only wonder what the state of the data was in '66 when Beebe wrote that.
It's a great book, however. It's a great look at a culture that has been savagely beaten to death in The Age of Envy, and written with terrific style and wit.
Very heartily recommended. Beat around your used book stores.
Published: August 22, 2007 10:43 AM
RP
This woman's miserliness reminds me of Paul Getty's.
"Paul Getty moved to Rome as head of Getty Oil Italiana. In 1973 his son, Paul III, was kidnapped in Rome and held in the Calabrian Mountains, chained to a stake in a cave. Getty did not have enough money to pay the US$17 million ransom demand, and his father refused to help, saying "I have 14 other grandchildren, and if I pay one penny now, then I will have 14 kidnapped grandchildren."
When one of his son's ears was delivered by mail to a newspaper in Rome (delivery had been delayed by three weeks because of a postal strike), his father agreed to help out with the ransom payment. Paul III later took a mixture of prescription drugs which left him comatose for six weeks and left him paralysed and blind.
In 1976, Paul Getty's father died, but had essentially written his son out of his will, leaving him $500,000. Getty's money came from a family trust and his grandmother. After his father's death, he was able to stop using drugs. Getty's daughter Aileen was married to Elizabeth Taylor's son, Christopher Wilding. Elizabeth Taylor attributes her AIDS activism to Aileen's contraction of AIDS. Aileen recently married Bartolomeo Ruspoli, son of the late European playboy Dado Ruspoli." [wikipedia]
Published: August 22, 2007 10:58 AM
Billy Beck
At some risk of wearing the point, but in the interest of urging more widespread reading of a personal favorite, please allow me a fairly extended quote from the Foreword to Beebe's book, as well as one more anecdote:
"'Anybody,' said Jay Gould, 'can make a fortune. It takes a genius to hold onto one.'
'A man with a million dollars can be as happy nowadays as though he were rich,' deposed Ward McAllister.
'Money has a tendency to buy happiness,' wrote Damon Runyon.
'Money is something to be thrown off the back platform of moving trains,' was the stated philosophy of Gene Fowler.
Each of the foregoing expressed at least a facet of the basic thinking of all but the most benighted men and women. There are proverbs and admonitions to the contrary, to be sure. 'A fool and his money are soon parted' is learned by that mythical entity, every schoolboy, as early as he can read and write. Prudence and saving were advocated in ample abundance by Benjamin Franklin. The impending rainy day is part of every American's subconscious awareness as is attested by the hundreds of millions of dollars in savings banks; but, by and large, the American people are a spending people just as, by and large, the French people are a saving people, unless, of course, they happen to have in hand someone else's money.
On the basis of the existing record it is safe to assert that, in the great American credo, a rich man is the noblest handiwork of God, and the corollary of the aphorism is that how he spends his money is the measure of the rich man.
It is the purpose of this book to explore some of the ways in which Americans and, in a few cases, foreigners financed with American money have expressed the genius required for the rewarding expenditure of substantial sums of money.
When in the early 1920's an Armenian named Michael Arlen who was then living in England and later became an American citizen found himself on the way to almost overnight riches on the strength of a novel called 'The Green Hat', he was faced with the problem of how to spend the not inconsiderable sum represented by his first royalty check. His first impulse, which he happily was able to resist, was to pay his indebtedness to his tailor, who happened to be Henry Poole & Company Limited just off Burlington Gardens. He might also have paid his back rent which was mounting or even repaid some of the loans from kind friends on which he had been subsisting while waiting for fame to crown his slightly oriental brows.
With great strength of character he was able to restrain himself from indulging such urgings of middle-class probity and went out and spent the entire sum in hand on the biggest, flashiest Rolls-Royce touring car with a body by Ward Park, in blinding canary yellow.
'It gave me a new dimension', he said.
'All I want of the world is very little,' he later explained as his basic philosophy of life. 'I only want the best of everything and there is so little of that.'
[...]
Compared to such stimulating recollections of the belle epoque of big spending, the degenerate present, despite material abundance on a scale to dwarf the dreams of a Roman proconsul, offers a sorry comparison. Never have material prosperity and emergent good fortune in such radiant dimension crowned a nation's destinies, never have diffidence and timidity suggested their enjoyment on a scale of more debased mediocrity.
The details of what can only be regarded, by persons of taste and imagination, as an American tragedy came over the wires from Houston not long ago when a Texas oil tycoon named James M. West at last encountered the old fellow with the scythe. It wasn't the fact of Mr. West's demise, a matter we must all face sooner or later, that constituted tragedy: it was the details of his life as furnished by the Associated Press.
Mr. West left an estate of $100,000,000, take or leave a few dollars, $290,000 of it squirreled away in silver dollars in a secret cellar in his home. He also left a fleet of forty-one Cadillacs and his favorite relaxation, which was riding night patrol in squad cars with Houston policemen.
There you have the archtypical American millionaire in the years of the nation's greatest economic affluence: more high-priced motorcars than he could possibly use, a taste for Skid-road adventure vicariously achieved, and such a terror of the times that he couldn't feel secure without a hoard of hard cash in the cellar. His concern for minted coinage may have been prophetic but its suggestion of insecurity is none the less explicit.
If this were an isolated example of men of great wealth it would still be a matter for tears, but when you realize that, with only slight variations, it may be taken as typical of an entire generation of American millionaires it becomes a national catastrophe.
It may be argued that Texas millionaires are a specially inhibited and unimaginative breed, predisposed from birth to the inanities of football, drum majorettes, and private flying machines, and that elsewhere in the land rich men rise above this level of tastelessness and conformity, but the argument, alas, is not valid. Fords, Rockefellers, Morgans, Mellons, and Vanderbilts to a man are given to public good works and private lives of the most revolting probity. Among the inheritors of great names and great fortunes in America it is difficult if not impossible to find a living man who has given a dinner party at which nude chorus girls leaped from the innards of a lamb potpie.
The great hallmarks of wealth and character that once set rich men apart from their inferiors -- affairs with stage favorites, love nests aboard oceangoing yachts, private railroad cars, racing stables, vast retinues of domestics, collections of bogus old masters, membership at Colonel Edward Bradley's Beach Club at Palm Beach, titled sons-in-law, custom-made motorcars, cottages at Newport and mansions on Fifth Avenue, a nice taste in Madeira, and fêtes champêtres around swimming pools into which guests in evening dress precipitated themselves at frequent intervals -- all are gone with the wind. And don't talk about poverty and income taxes and the hard lot of the well-to-do. There are men in Texas who could buy and sell J. P. Morgan, Jim Hill, and Jay Gould all rolled into one, but they are poltroons to a man, scared beyond measure of having fun. Instead of fancy-dress balls of revolting dimensions at the Waldorf-Astoria they are a pushover for family foundations. Instead of scandalous associations with French actresses, busted silk hats, and champaign bottles on the lawn, they prefer to be known as 'plain as an old shoe.'
[...]
There is no moral to this recital of a few of the more lighthearted gestures of a departed generation of the millionaires except to point out that they will live in fragrant memory. There are ten times more millionaires today than there were when Morgans, Mellons, Hills, Astors, and first-generation Fords trod the earth but only the merest handful are known to the public, and there isn't an authentic magnifico in a carload.
[...]
Walter Lord, an accredited commentator on the rich and their tribal rituals, inclines to the belief that the years of the ortolans came to an end with the loss of the Titanic where so many of the well-to-do of the world departed under auspices of significant decorum and gallantry. Their curtain call from the sloping sun deck, he maintains, was the final salute of a generation that knew how to spend money splendidly both in this world and on the threshold of the next.
In this context it would seem little short of churlish in a British politician of the time to announce that 'paying twenty-two hundred dollars for a single suite for a five days' voyage is without any qualification utterly indefensible and morally wrong.' It may be the merest casuistry to point out that, for the occupant of the suite, the trip was of longer duration than had been planned. In any event the passenger in question could have done better for himself had he wished, as did Emile Brandeis, an Omaha department store owner, who paid another $4350 for a private promenade deck.
Nowhere, it has been remarked, is moderation so debilitating and destructive of character as in the expenditure of money. The decision to spend excessively on the caprices of their choice is what lent the stature of greatness to most of the people who will be encountered in this book. It was they who validated the lost art of being rich.
Lucius Beebe
1966
Virginia City
(excerpts: "Foreword" -- "The Big Spenders", Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1966)
"In his lifetime, jovial and flamboyant Amon G. Carter of nearby Fort Worth gave Mr. Stanley a run for his money as the best-known Texan of his time, but their personalities were somewhat different. Carter's notion of showing good will, and one that was widely approved by its beneficiaries, was to arrive in New York's Waldorf-Astoria for the annual newspaper publishers' convention, take over an entire floor, and throw all the keys out the window into Park Avenue. He then kept open house like a maharaja for the duration."
(ibid, p. 303)
Published: August 22, 2007 11:08 AM
IMHO
Susannah said:
Might we perhaps suspect that the fact she was a woman in a time when women were not thought to have brains, caused her to be meaner than she would have been in another time?
An excerpt:
She was once offered a horse for $200 and she was outraged at the price so she found out everything terrible she could on the seller and intimidated him down to $60...
...to my way of thinking, her behavior towards the seller went well beyond meanness. It was blackmail. The seller had the right to place whatever value he/she wished upon the horse. It was her right to either accept or reject the price. Resorting to blackmail in order to reduce the price was, IMHO, an act of aggression.
Blaming her behavior upon men is a copout. Trying to rationalize a wrong committed based upon gender is one of the reasons why many men don't want to do business with women.
Published: August 22, 2007 11:28 AM
eric lansing
IMHO, that was an unreasonable response to Susanna's perfectly reasonable comment.
Just IMHO.
Published: August 22, 2007 12:45 PM
IMHO
Eric:
I simply presented another woman's point of view.
I do not feel that it is unreasonable to perceive blackmail as an act of aggression, nor do I feel that we should excuse inappropriate behavior based upon a person's sex.
If what I said was politically incorrect, then so be it.
Published: August 22, 2007 1:23 PM
David Johnson
It's funny that if I didn't know any better I thought I was reading about my mother-in-law. While a good woman at heart, she is shrewd with her money and causes herself much heart ache.
She tries to help others but always expects to make some sort of capital gain from it. I wont go into details because I do love the woman but she can be tough to get along with at times and I owe her a ton of gratitude.
She has to be the unhappiest person worth Millions that I have ever known. She lives like she has nothing because she is scared of losing even a dime.
Published: November 29, 2008 4:31 PM