UNA HOWLAND
Brown Brothers/From 'Hetty'Hetty Green and her dog, Dewey, probably about 1900.HETTY The Genius and Madness of America's First Female Tycoon.By Charles Slack.Illustrated. 258 pp. Ecco/HarperCollins Publishers. $25.95.
'Hetty': Scrooge in Hoboken
By CONSTANCE ROSENBLUM Published: December 19, 2004
F you can picture Donald Trump as a stout, 19th-century matron wearing an unfashionable bonnet and an ankle-length black coat trimmed with ermine, then you get an idea of the figure that Hetty Green -- invariably described as ''the richest woman in America'' -- cut in the financial circles of her day. But the Donald was a pussycat compared with Hetty, whose achievements included trying to swindle an ailing old aunt out of her fortune, possibly ignoring an injury to her young son's leg for so long that the limb had to be amputated and dumping her genial husband when his financial problems interfered with her fortune building. And did I mention that she used cheap cotton doilies instead of real lace, wore old stockings in place of overshoes and showed up for dinner with dirty hands? (At least that's what the maid said.)
Hetty Green was that rarity, a woman who largely through her own efforts amassed a ton of money during the Gilded Age, a time when virtually everyone else getting rich -- Rockefeller, Morgan, Carnegie -- was a man. By nearly all accounts she was also a thoroughly unpleasant individual, greedy, petty and often downright nasty.
In ''Hetty: The Genius and Madness of America's First Female Tycoon,'' Charles Slack, a journalist and historian, makes every effort to present an even-handed portrait. He even manages to tease out Hetty's softer side, not an easy task with regard to a woman the Guinness Book of World Records anointed the world's ''greatest miser.''
Born in 1834 into the richest whaling family in New Bedford, Mass., Hetty Howland Robinson developed an interest in finance practically in the cradle. As a child she read the financial news to her father, and at the age of 8 started her own savings account. Apparently being raised as a Quaker did nothing to dampen her mercenary interests, though her training in self-denial may have contributed to her lifelong penchant for claiming poverty, and also to her seeming inability to enjoy her great wealth.
The death of a younger brother in infancy had the advantage of making Hetty the family's sole heir. After a brief spell of living like other rich young women of her day -- wearing lace-trimmed gowns and dancing with the Prince of Wales -- she headed for New York to devote her life to the making and hoarding of money. As Slack charts in meticulous detail, she turned out to have a golden touch, buying and selling real estate, railroads and mines, and acquiring mortgage after mortgage. At the time of her death in 1916, she had amassed a fortune estimated at $100 million, the equivalent of $1.6 billion in current dollars. Through it all she lived in small apartments in Brooklyn Heights and even -- horror of horrors! -- Hoboken. And according to one account, she was known to arrive at the bank where she worked ''with a metal pail containing dry oatmeal, to be mixed with water and heated on a radiator for lunch, so as to avoid a restaurant tab.''
Slack seems to enjoy writing about 19th-century business, especially its less publicized corners; his previous books include ''Noble Obsession: Charles Goodyear, Thomas Hancock and the Race to Unlock the Greatest Industrial Secret of the Nineteenth Century.'' His accounts of the tortuous and complex transactions by which Hetty made her fortune, notably her knock-down, drag-out battles over her aunt's will (''rich spinster aunt'' versus ''ambitious, covetous niece'') sometimes go on too long, but they powerfully suggest just what his heroine would do to get what she felt was rightfully hers. Although Slack lucidly explains how Hetty made her fortune, he is less clear on exactly why she developed as she did, especially given the era in which she came of age. In fact, some of his most vividly drawn characters are those who circled in Hetty's orbit, notably her long-suffering merchant husband, Edward Henry Green, her genial son, Ned, and her shy daughter, Sylvia.
Despite Hetty's often horrid behavior, a reader may well conclude that Slack nurses a secret admiration for this scrappy, hardheaded woman. ''She was full of life, her personality if anything outsized,'' he says of her. ''She was a pioneer, a trailblazer, a woman not just of wealth but of substance.'' The Guinness Book of World Records said Hetty ''died of apoplexy in an argument over the virtues of skimmed milk.'' In fact, Slack tells us, she died a few months after a series of strokes.
During her lifetime, journalists were quick to describe her as the ''least happy woman in New York,'' but Slack appears to get it right. ''In the end,'' he says, ''her principal crime seems to have been that the rules she chose to live by were her own rather than society's.'' The New York Times concurred. ''It was the fact that Mrs. Green was a woman that made her career the subject of endless curiosity, comment and astonishment,'' the paper wrote in an editorial at the time of her death. ''Probably her life was happy. At any rate, she had enough of courage to live as she chose.'' Which practically makes you want to say, ''You go, girl!''
Constance Rosenblum is the editor of the City Section of The New York Times and the author of ''Gold Digger: The Outrageous Life and Times of Peggy Hopkins Joyce.''
F you can picture Donald Trump as a stout, 19th-century matron wearing an unfashionable bonnet and an ankle-length black coat trimmed with ermine, then you get an idea of the figure that Hetty Green -- invariably described as ''the richest woman in America'' -- cut in the financial circles of her day. But the Donald was a pussycat compared with Hetty, whose achievements included trying to swindle an ailing old aunt out of her fortune, possibly ignoring an injury to her young son's leg for so long that the limb had to be amputated and dumping her genial husband when his financial problems interfered with her fortune building. And did I mention that she used cheap cotton doilies instead of real lace, wore old stockings in place of overshoes and showed up for dinner with dirty hands? (At least that's what the maid said.)
Hetty Green was that rarity, a woman who largely through her own efforts amassed a ton of money during the Gilded Age, a time when virtually everyone else getting rich -- Rockefeller, Morgan, Carnegie -- was a man. By nearly all accounts she was also a thoroughly unpleasant individual, greedy, petty and often downright nasty.
In ''Hetty: The Genius and Madness of America's First Female Tycoon,'' Charles Slack, a journalist and historian, makes every effort to present an even-handed portrait. He even manages to tease out Hetty's softer side, not an easy task with regard to a woman the Guinness Book of World Records anointed the world's ''greatest miser.''
Born in 1834 into the richest whaling family in New Bedford, Mass., Hetty Howland Robinson developed an interest in finance practically in the cradle. As a child she read the financial news to her father, and at the age of 8 started her own savings account. Apparently being raised as a Quaker did nothing to dampen her mercenary interests, though her training in self-denial may have contributed to her lifelong penchant for claiming poverty, and also to her seeming inability to enjoy her great wealth.
The death of a younger brother in infancy had the advantage of making Hetty the family's sole heir. After a brief spell of living like other rich young women of her day -- wearing lace-trimmed gowns and dancing with the Prince of Wales -- she headed for New York to devote her life to the making and hoarding of money. As Slack charts in meticulous detail, she turned out to have a golden touch, buying and selling real estate, railroads and mines, and acquiring mortgage after mortgage. At the time of her death in 1916, she had amassed a fortune estimated at $100 million, the equivalent of $1.6 billion in current dollars. Through it all she lived in small apartments in Brooklyn Heights and even -- horror of horrors! -- Hoboken. And according to one account, she was known to arrive at the bank where she worked ''with a metal pail containing dry oatmeal, to be mixed with water and heated on a radiator for lunch, so as to avoid a restaurant tab.''
Slack seems to enjoy writing about 19th-century business, especially its less publicized corners; his previous books include ''Noble Obsession: Charles Goodyear, Thomas Hancock and the Race to Unlock the Greatest Industrial Secret of the Nineteenth Century.'' His accounts of the tortuous and complex transactions by which Hetty made her fortune, notably her knock-down, drag-out battles over her aunt's will (''rich spinster aunt'' versus ''ambitious, covetous niece'') sometimes go on too long, but they powerfully suggest just what his heroine would do to get what she felt was rightfully hers. Although Slack lucidly explains how Hetty made her fortune, he is less clear on exactly why she developed as she did, especially given the era in which she came of age. In fact, some of his most vividly drawn characters are those who circled in Hetty's orbit, notably her long-suffering merchant husband, Edward Henry Green, her genial son, Ned, and her shy daughter, Sylvia.
Despite Hetty's often horrid behavior, a reader may well conclude that Slack nurses a secret admiration for this scrappy, hardheaded woman. ''She was full of life, her personality if anything outsized,'' he says of her. ''She was a pioneer, a trailblazer, a woman not just of wealth but of substance.'' The Guinness Book of World Records said Hetty ''died of apoplexy in an argument over the virtues of skimmed milk.'' In fact, Slack tells us, she died a few months after a series of strokes.
During her lifetime, journalists were quick to describe her as the ''least happy woman in New York,'' but Slack appears to get it right. ''In the end,'' he says, ''her principal crime seems to have been that the rules she chose to live by were her own rather than society's.'' The New York Times concurred. ''It was the fact that Mrs. Green was a woman that made her career the subject of endless curiosity, comment and astonishment,'' the paper wrote in an editorial at the time of her death. ''Probably her life was happy. At any rate, she had enough of courage to live as she chose.'' Which practically makes you want to say, ''You go, girl!''
Constance Rosenblum is the editor of the City Section of The New York Times and the author of ''Gold Digger: The Outrageous Life and Times of Peggy Hopkins Joyce.''
posted by EDITOR at 12:01 p. m.
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