Hetty Green

• Born: November 21, 1834
• Birthplace: New Bedford, Massachusetts
• Died: July 3, 1916
• Place of death: New York, New York

American financier and investor

A successful businesswoman in an era when few women ventured into the male world of Wall Street, Green made millions of dollars through savvy investing, judicious lending, and careful guarding of the family fortune, but she was better known for her extreme parsimony. The Guinness Book of World Records named her among the world’s greatest misers.

Sources of wealth: Inheritance; investments; real estate

Bequeathal of wealth: Children

Early Life

Henrietta Howland Robinson Green was born into the bustling, commercial world of New Bedford, the city described in Herman Melville’s novel Moby Dick: Or, The Whale (1851). A small city in Massachusetts, New Bedford was the center of the worldwide whaling industry, and Green’s grandfather, Isaac Howland, Jr., founded one of the city’s most important whaling firms. Green’s father, Edward Mott Robinson, married Isaac’s daughter Abby, inherited the whaling company, and continued its success. Robinson wished for a son to carry on the family business, but the only son born to Abby and Edward died in infancy. Their daughter, Hetty, born in 1834, received the scanty education deemed sufficient for a young society woman: a few years at a Quaker boarding school and a few more at a finishing school, where she learned to dance and play piano. Green, however, was not content to spend her life dancing and playing piano. From an early age, she showed a keen interest in her father’s business, and she accompanied him on his rounds of the wharves, warehouses, and commissaries of New Bedford. In later life, Green claimed that she learned to read sitting on her father’s knee as he read business news and stock market reports, listening and absorbing everything.

First Ventures

When Abby Robinson died in 1860, Edward Robinson, foreseeing the decline of whaling, joined a New York shipping firm. Green remained in New Bedford with her invalid aunt, Sylvia Ann Howland, whose $2 million fortune Green hoped to inherit outright. Instead, Howland’s 1865 will divided her estate among servants and charities, with only $1 million in trust for Green. Despite having just inherited $6 million from her father’s estate, Green was furious. She spent years in a legal battle to challenge the will. She claimed that her aunt’s earlier 1862 will, which left the bulk of her fortune to Green, was valid, and Green produced a document, known as the “second page,” that revoked all wills made before and after the 1862 will. Opposing lawyers claimed Howland’s signature on this document was forged. The case was finally settled in 1868; Green lost, but by then she had moved on.

In 1867, thirty-three-year-old Hetty Robinson married forty-six-year-old Edward Henry Green, a successful businessman. Perhaps fearing she could be charged with forgery, Hetty sailed to London with her husband and lived abroad for several years. In England, she continued the investment strategy she had begun with United States bonds and also started to invest in railroads. As America grew following the Civil War, so did her fortune. At a time when a fortunate worker earned an average weekly wage of $5, Green boasted of making $200,000 in a single day. Yet her appearance belied her wealth. Some accounts describe Green in shabby dress, bargaining with shopkeepers for free bones for her dog.

Mature Wealth

The Panic of 1873 caused havoc in the stock market. Edward and Hetty Green were not affected, but they decided to return to America in order to keep a close eye on their investments. With their two children, Ned (born 1868) and Sylvia (born 1871), they moved to Edward’s hometown of Bellows Falls, Vermont. For a few years, Hetty lived a relatively conventional life, raising her family while Edward traveled to New York to tend to business. Another financial crisis ended this domestic phase of her life and thrust her into the spotlight as America’s richest woman. When Cisco and Son, a Wall Street firm, collapsed in 1885, Hetty was its largest creditor; its largest debtor was her husband, Edward Green. Hetty withdrew her holdings and refused to cover her husband’s debts. It was, in effect, the end of the marriage, though the couple never officially divorced.

From this point on, Green was determined to control her own destiny, financial and otherwise. She threw herself into the intensely competitive world of finance. Green proved to be the equal of the great Gilded Age capitalists in all but her style of living. While some millionaires built Fifth Avenue mansions, Green and her children shuttled through a series of working-class flats in Brooklyn and Hoboken, New Jersey. By having no fixed residence, Green hoped to avoid paying taxes. She even was said to have left Hoboken after she was served a summons for refusing to pay a $2 license fee for her dog. While Green’s penny-pinching ways seemed like amusing eccentricities to some, her frugality had a darker side. Her son Ned had injured his leg in a childhood accident and continued to suffer from pain and lameness. Green, dressed in her oldest clothes, would beg doctors to treat Ned as a charity case. When one specialist learned the truth, he demanded Green pay in advance. She refused. Eventually, in part due to delays in treatment, Ned’s leg had to be amputated. Although Ned never publicly blamed his mother for the loss of his leg, he went on to live a life that belied Green’s frugality.

Green took up unofficial headquarters at the Chemical National Bank in New York, where she was said to heat oatmeal on an office radiator to avoid paying restaurant prices. There, she managed her ever-growing empire, which included real estate in New York, Boston, and Chicago, as well as railroads, government bonds, and municipal lending. Acting as a one-woman bank, Green loaned money to cities ranging from Tucson, Arizona, to New York, allowing them to finance civic improvements. During financial panics, when banks refused to lend and many businesses were in danger of failing, Green continued to give loans to businesses she considered sound, trusting that her investment would be returned when the crisis passed. Despite her reputation as a miser, she charged a fair rate of interest. She also showed compassion to her estranged husband, nursing him during his final illness in 1902.

Interviews with Green show a no-nonsense, unpretentious woman with a sense of humor and a surprisingly forward-thinking outlook. She expressed sympathy for striking workers and criticized child-rearing conventions that encouraged boys to be active, while girls were encouraged to focus on pretty clothes. However, this human side of Green was seldom seen in the press, as the image of a female Ebenezer Scrooge came to dominate her public persona. Articles described her as a dour, wizened skinflint. Perhaps in response to these stories, Green made a few ventures into society, at least long enough for her daughter Sylvia to meet and marry an appropriate man. In a photograph taken on Sylvia’s wedding day, Green appears as a respectable dowager in a feathered hat and lace-trimmed dress. Since she had been assured that her son-in-law would lay no claim to Sylvia’s inheritance, Green approved the marriage. She was less approving of her son Ned’s long-term relationship with Mabel Harlow, a former showgirl and reputed prostitute; wisely, Ned waited until after his mother’s death to wed Mabel. Still, he proved himself his mother’s son: He had Mabel sign a prenuptial agreement before the wedding.

Green remained active in business into her eighties, but shortly after her eighty-first birthday, she suffered a stroke. Legend claims that Green died following an argument with her friend’s cook over the virtues of skimmed milk, but this may be an exaggeration. It is known that Green suffered a series of strokes over several months. She died on July 3, 1916, and was buried with her husband, Edward, in Bellows Falls. Estimates valued her estate at between $100 and $200 million.

Legacy

Hetty Green’s name is seldom mentioned among the great capitalists of the Gilded Age—men like John D. Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie, and J. P. Morgan—yet she was their peer and equal. Refusing to accept the domestic role her society assigned to women, Green built her whaling inheritance into a Wall Street fortune through her own daring and persistence. Her motto “Buy cheap and sell dear” served her well, allowing her to weather financial panics without losses.

While Green inherited $7.5 million, she left her children a fortune of $100 to $200 million. Yet as much as Green enjoyed creating wealth, she seemed to lack the ability to enjoy the benefits of her labor. Green did not merely eschew luxuries; she often denied herself and her children such basic necessities as adequate clothing, comfortable housing, and even medical care. Wearing the same faded black dress year after year, washing only the dusty hem to save on laundering, she earned herself the miserly “Witch of Wall Street” label that has overshadowed her undeniable accomplishments.

Bibliography

Klepper, Michael, et al. “The American Heritage Forty: A Ranking of the Forty Wealthiest Americans of All Time.” American Heritage 49, no. 6 (October, 1998): 56. Green, at number 6, is the only woman on the list.

Lewis, Arthur H. The Day They Shook the Plum Tree. New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1963. A look at Green’s life and legacy and how her fortune, passed to her children, eventually was dispersed among relatives and charities.

Menand, Louis. “She Had to Have It.” The New Yorker 77, no. 9 (April 23, 2001): 62. Focuses on Green’s court battle to overturn her aunt’s will and her success as a financier.

Saunders, Laura. “Blubber Capitalism.” Forbes, 174, no. 7 (Oct 11, 2004): 96. Describes New Bedford’s lucrative nineteenth century whaling industry, source of Green’s inheritance.

Slack, Charles. Hetty: The Genius and Madness of America’s First Female Tycoon. New York: HarperCollins, 2004. Balanced biography covers Green’s life, wealth building, and legacy, while disputing some popular legends of her miserly ways.

Sparkes, Boyden, and Samuel Taylor Moore. The Witch of Wall Street: Hetty Green. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, Doran, 1935. First full-length biography of Green.