CHAPTER VI Hetty Green THE MISER

EARLYIN 1833 a young man arrived in the town of New Bedford and went at once to the offices of Isaac Howland, Jr., & Company. His name was Edward Mott Robinson and thereafter he was the “Company” in that important firm of merchant-adventurers. He was a dashing figure, tall, erect, handsome, distinguished in his bearing.

On December 29 of that same year New Bedford learned why this romantic young stranger had been brought into the great house of Howland. On that day Edward Mott Robinson married Abby Slocum Howland, the daughter of Gideon Howland, Jr., who was practically head of the firm.

If ever this nation was money-mad it was in that decade of our history. Men talked about the Money Devil. The whole country was up in arms helping the redoubtable Andy Jackson smite that monster, who was supposed to be roosting then in the wicked United States Bank. But for all that, a French traveler observed that the “money devil may be found sitting in state upon his altars in all the towns of these states with large numbers of the population bowed down in adoration before him.” Speculation ran wild. Men gambled their time, their fortunes, their lives in pursuit of quick riches. And then, as now, one of the most romantic of all the gambles was the oil business. But the oil business of that day was carried on not with the drill but with the harpoon. Men bored for oil not in the rocks but in the blubber of the whale. Whale oil was the light of the world. New Bedford was the Mecca of whale oil. And the Howlands were its prophets.

The house of Isaac Howland, Jr., & Company was formed in 1811. The Howlands had been in and around New Bedford since 1621. From the first they possessed the secret of making money. By 1833 they had not merely acquired great wealth; they compelled an unquestioning recognition as the peak of the very upper crust of New Bedford aristocracy. The Howlands were to New Bedford what the Cabots were to Boston. Theirs was not a codfish aristocracy. Their Brahminism was founded upon a bigger fish. For fifty years they sent out a fleet of more than thirty fine whaling craft. For fifty years they wreaked upon the whale the vengeance of the faithful for its treatment of Jonah, and waxed fat. And in 1833 when young Robinson entered the business and the family, the Howlands were on the way to supplying America with some of its first crop of millionaires.

Robinson himself was a patrician of unmistakable caliber. Like the Howlands, he was a devout Quaker. He hailed from Providence. His grandfather had been a justice of the Supreme Court of Rhode Island. His great-grandfather had been speaker of the Colonial Assembly and deputy royal governor. He himself had a fancy for commerce. And his subsequent career confirmed the wisdom of this fancy. He became quickly a man of the first importance in New Bedford.

A year later, upon a very windy November day, a horseman galloped up to the counting room of Isaac Howland, Jr., & Company with a message for Mr. Robinson. He was to come home at once. His lady had just been delivered of an infant. Boy or girl? A girl, replied the messenger. A brief shade passed over the brow of the new father. The house of Howland and the house of Robinson needed a son. Had this been a boy, Mr. Robinson would have leaped upon his horse and hurried to his home. As it was he arranged the papers on his desk very carefully, adjusted his greatcoat with deliberation, put his high hat on his head at the proper angle, looked it all over in the long wall mirror, and trotted off to behold his daughter. In his wife’s room he looked with interest at the infant who had just entered this money-mad world. A girl! Well, there was no help for it. Better luck next time. Meantime this child must be named. And so they called her Hetty—Hetty Howland Robinson, to be known in later years to all the world as Hetty Green, the richest woman on earth, and the strangest.

In eighteen months the house of Robinson had better luck. A boy was born. And when this happened little Hetty was bundled off to the home of her grandfather, Gideon Howland, Jr., under the care of her maiden aunt, Sylvia Ann Howland. For some unknown reason, that continued to be her home. She went occasionally to her mother’s and sometimes her mother visited her. But always Aunt Sylvia Ann was her mother in fact. Even after the baby brother died in infancy she continued under her aunt’s roof. It is probable that her mother was an invalid and unequal to the task of rearing this strong, vigorous child. Then too there is some reason to believe that this frail Abby Slocum did not get along so well with her imperious spouse.

As Robinson grew older he became more immersed in his business and his investments. He got a kind of local reputation for greed—very genteel greed, of course, not dusty and squalid and ugly like Miss Hetty’s in later life. But enough, all the same, to make someone say in New Bedford that he “squeezed a dollar until the eagle screamed.” It is a local tradition that this was the origin of that famous phrase. Meantime Gideon Howland, Jr., was growing older. His eyesight was failing. He had difficulty reading his New York newspaper and its financial and trade news. And so each day he took his seat by the fireside and his little granddaughter Hetty would read to him all the business and financial news. In a little while she astonished friends by quoting prices on bonds and stocks and furnishing bits of business news in the shop talk that went on in Gideon’s home.

It is an odd fact that financial geniuses display great precocity. John D. Rockefeller made an original discovery of interest on money at ten. He was a man of wealth at twenty-five. Russell Sage was a successful wholesaler at twenty-three. J. P. Morgan, Andrew Carnegie, Edward Harriman, all revealed their talents for profit at an early age.

One day a little girl of eight years walked into one of the banks in New Bedford. This was before the masses had been invited into the banks. The bank was the rendezvous for the dollars of the well to do and the adult. But this little girl was the daughter of Edward Mott Robinson, and so the bank president patted her benignly on the head and asked what she wanted. She wanted to open a bank account. And she did open it there and then. This she had done of her own accord and without consulting anyone at her home.

In the grim, relentless Hetty Green of mature life there was no suggestive remnant of the merry, handsome girl of those New Bedford years. At first she had a governess. Later she was sent to Eliza Wing’s boarding school in Sandwich, where the prosperous Quakers sent their daughters. After that she went to Miss Lowell’s select school in Boston. She loved singing and dancing and while in Boston lived as gaily as any girls in that period. But at home, under the severe eye of her pious Quaker aunt, she wore her plain gray frock and her leaden-colored bonnet.

It was because of the severity of this devout home that Hetty loved to go to New York. There she attended social functions at the homes of the Aspinwalls, the Rhinelanders, the Astors. Her father’s growing wealth and social position made for her an easy entry into the most exclusive circles. Her own bright, vivacious conversation made her a companion much sought after. Moreover, she enjoyed the prospect of great wealth. Later many recalled her as a young woman of stately carriage, high color, and a wealth of glorious hair.

But already she was beginning to display those traits of personal economy—even parsimony—that characterized her later in life. Once, on a protracted visit to New York, her father sent her $1200 to buy clothes. When she returned to New Bedford she still had $1000 of it to put into her bank account.

In February, 1860, her mother died. This event brought Hetty her first money and her first serious family quarrel. Her mother had inherited $40,000 from her grandfather, Isaac Howland. This sum had been put in trust for her. When she died there arose the question of how the estate should be divided. A Boston lawyer wrestled with the problem and held that the personal property should go to the husband, Mr. Robinson, the real estate to the daughter, Hetty Robinson. But when the estate was inventoried it was found the personalty amounted to $120,000 and the realty to only $8000. Hetty and her Aunt Sylvia felt deeply aggrieved at this. It was the beginning of a coolness between Aunt Sylvia and Hetty’s father.

The father decided to move to New York and its larger fields. Hetty remained with her aunt who compensated her for the loss of her inheritance by a present of $20,000 in stock. This was the beginning of her fortune. But in 1863 her father requested her to come to New York. She accordingly said good-by to Aunt Sylvia, her old home, her Quaker friends, and to New Bedford, now at the top of its prosperity as the center of the whaling industry. Henceforth her home was to be in the great city whose financial purlieus she was to haunt for the next half century.

On June 14, 1865, while the nation was still draped in black for the death of Abraham Lincoln, Edward Mott Robinson died in New York City. The next day, and while her father’s body was still lying in its coffin, Miss Hetty Robinson sent the following note to the men in charge of his office:

GENTLEMEN: I have to request that you will answer any questions that Mr. E. H. Green may put to you on all matters about my father’s business affairs. I wish you gentlemen to consult with Mr. Green on all matters of importance where advice is required.

HETTY H. ROBINSON

Behind this cold epistle lay a story that has never been fully explained. Early in June Mr. Robinson became ill. He feared death to be imminent and sent for his daughter, who was away at the time. When she arrived he demanded to see her alone.

“I have been murdered,” he said. His life was ebbing fast and he spoke in quick, feeble gasps. “I have been poisoned by a band of conspirators. You will be next. Watch over yourself.”

He added that she was to receive his entire fortune and that Edward H. Green and Henry Grinnell were to be his executors. He told her also, according to her story, all the details of the conspiracy against his life. Then he closed his eyes and died.

Was there any truth in this? Or was this just the fevered delusion of a dying man? Hetty Robinson believed it. Not only that, but to her dying day this weird revelation continued to exercise a powerful influence over her life.

In a few days Mr. Robinson’s will was opened. Her father’s fortune was indeed left to her. But to her amazement and chagrin only one million dollars was given to her outright. The balance, supposed to be about four million dollars, was put in a trust for her. Instead of Green and Grinnell, two others, employees in her father’s office—clerks, she called them—were named as executors and trustees. Her acceptance of her father’s dying accusations now became complete.

But she was now worth a million dollars. And as she escorted her father’s body to New Bedford for burial beside her mother, her mind was torn between her plans for investing her new fortune and the terrors inspired by the tale of the plot her father had related.

Hardly had Miss Hetty returned to New York when she was shocked by the news of the death of her Aunt Sylvia Ann, just three weeks after her father’s death. Sylvia Ann Howland was one of the richest women in America. Her fortune was not less than two million dollars. She had always declared she would leave her whole estate to her niece Hetty. Now Hetty hurried to New Bedford. She wondered if this could be another chapter in the plot first to concentrate her father’s and her aunt’s wealth in her person and then assassinate her.

At Sylvia Ann’s funeral the relatives swarmed like the Chuzzlewits at the pretended deathbed of old Martin. The place was overrun with doctors and nurses and neighbors. Among them all Hetty Robinson, usually robust and full of color, presented a picture of consuming worry. She was haggard, pale, weary. The alarm that had eaten at her heart since her father’s death was now intensified almost to consternation. One of her aunt’s doctors, strangely deficient in tact, commented to her on her condition, which he attributed to grief.

“If you continue like this, Miss Robinson,” he observed, “you will not live a year.”

Some close relatives with their heads together in a little group talked of the dead woman’s fortune and her will.

“We are to get everything when Hetty dies,” one whispered. “When that happens we are going to add a greenhouse to this place.”

Hetty, standing beside them unseen, heard this. That night she crept up to a storeroom of the old house, locked the door, piled the furniture around so as to conceal a bed on the floor, and slept there until morning. For days she repeated this. She refused to eat a morsel prepared for her by any other hand than her own.

When Sylvia Ann Howland’s will was offered for probate Hetty Robinson’s terror was changed in an instant to rage. Half of the good lady’s fortune was given away to civic and charitable institutions and to numerous relatives. The other half was left to Hetty but, like her father’s fortune, was tied up in a trust.

She immediately protested the probate of the testament. But the evidence of its authenticity was so complete that she withdrew her appearance and the will was admitted by the court. This, however, was but the beginning of this suit, one of the most famous will cases in the annals of the American courts. A month later Miss Robinson appeared with another will which she demanded should be put into effect. This rambling, half-illiterate document bequeathed all her property to her niece “as freely as my father gave it to me,” all “except about $100,000 in presents to my friends and relations.” Then it revoked all wills “made by me before or after this one.” The testator then declared that she gave this document to her niece so that she might show it in the event a will “appears made without notifying her and without returning her will to her as I have promised to do. I implore the judge to decide in favor of this will as nothing would induce me to make a will unfavorable to my niece; but being ill and afraid, if any of my caretakers insisted on my making a will, to refuse, as they might leave me or be angry.”

Along with this document Hetty Robinson offered the following explanation. Her aunt was determined that Hetty’s father, living at the time this will was made, should never receive any more of the Howland fortune. She therefore proposed to Hetty that she, Sylvia, would make a will leaving all to Hetty if Hetty would in turn make her will leaving all to Sylvia. Hetty agreed to this, whereupon the above testament was made. Hetty in turn gave a similar will to her aunt. She now asserted that this amounted to a contract and she called on the court to enforce performance of it.

The case presented some novel points of law that we need not notice. To the people of New Bedford it involved one all-engrossing question—did Hetty Robinson forge this document?

The case became a cause célèbre. It dragged along for two years. The testimony filled a thousand pages. It consumed $150,000 in costs. Among the expert witnesses called were Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes, Professor Louis Agassiz, and Professor Benjamin Peirce, the celebrated mathematician. Handwriting experts were called on both sides. Some pronounced the newly discovered will an obvious forgery. Others declared the alleged signature of Miss Sylvia Ann Howland genuine.

Did Hetty Robinson forge that will? The court never answered the question. The case of Sylvia Ann Howland’s remarkable will was disposed of on a purely technical point. But Hetty lost her suit. She never got over the defeat. It was the beginning of a lifelong hatred for lawyers. It was also the beginning of a long life of endless litigation about an infinite variety of things ranging from a two-dollar tax bill to suits involving millions. It served also to introduce her to the American newspaper-reading public, before whom she was to remain for another half century. She never forgave any of the parties to the suit.

In spite of her defeat, however, she was the possessor of a million dollars in cash from her father and several more millions in trust from her father’s estate and her aunt’s. Compared to the monumental fortune she reared on this foundation this was a modest start. But she was, in fact, already one of America’s richest women.

Now began that remarkable career of investment and moneymaking which has been equalled by no other woman who ever lived and by few men. But also there took form in her heart that enduring and consuming bitterness that pervaded her whole life, that filled it at times with gloom, that led her into all sorts of strange meannesses and ruthless quests after revenge, and that in the end raised up in her mind a kind of mania of persecution. All her life she believed her father was murdered, that her aunt was murdered by the same hands, and that her relatives, bound together in a persistent plot, were resolved to murder her.

On the eve of Saint Valentine’s Day in the year 1865, a gentleman named Edward H. Green, a bachelor of wealth, sat down in his apartment to write some letters. Among other things he put a valentine into an envelope. Then he made a check in payment for a suit of clothes—a very cheap suit of clothes, although this bachelor was a man of large means—and put that in another envelope. Then, getting his envelopes mixed, he addressed the one with the valentine to his tailor. The one containing the check he addressed to the lady of his heart—Miss Hetty Howland Robinson.

Mr. Green was weary of his lonely life. He was now forty-four years old. Only a short while before he had met Miss Robinson and he launched at once a violent attack upon her heart. She had hesitated at first, not from coyness. She was now thirty-one years old and her practical, unsentimental nature held her back from precipitate investment—unconsidered investment of any sort.

However, when the envelope containing the check intended for the tailor arrived, she was completely overcome. Here was a man worth a million dollars who was so careful of his money that he paid the very lowest price for his clothes. What woman’s heart could be proof against such touching economy, thus so artlessly revealed? We do not know what the tailor thought when he got the valentine, but we do know that Miss Hetty there and then made up her mind to accept Mr. Green. When her father was dying he urged her to complete her intention and marry Green, who would be a responsible helpmate in the management of her fortune.

Throughout her life Hetty Green employed a rather crude system of investigation before making any investment. She herself went to persons she knew to be the enemies of the man or corporation seeking the funds. Thus she learned everything that could be said on the other side. Then she bluntly confronted the applicant for funds with all the criticisms and accusations against him and asked for a reply. But apparently she did not do this when Mr. Green proposed that she invest her life and happiness in marriage. Had she inquired she would have learned that the tailor’s bill for the cheap suit was a poor indication to her lover’s real character. She would have been told that he was already known as Spendthrift Green. He loved at times to play the grand seigneur, a role for which he was well equipped. He was a large, portly man, standing head and shoulders above his fellows. He carried himself erect, walked with a brisk, decisive step. He was worth a million dollars and he was already known in Wall Street as a daring and successful speculator.

What Miss Robinson did know, in addition to the delicate intimation conveyed in the misaddressed tailor’s bill, was that her suitor had begun life as a poor boy, though of fine family, and had risen to wealth through his own exertions. He came of an excellent family with its beginnings in early Massachusetts days. His father had been a merchant in New York and Bellows Falls, and in the latter town Mr. Green was born. At eighteen, with no other assets than his pleasant, affable nature, he became a clerk in the firm of Russell, Sturgis & Company of New York. He was sent to the Philippine Islands. He must have been an attentive agent and a good businessman, for in five years he was a member of the firm. He was making money. He put other irons in the fire. He extended his operations to the port of Hong Kong and made more money. When he came back to New York he was a rich man.

When her father died Hetty was already plighted to Green, and he remained by her side throughout the great will case, counseling and encouraging her. Just before the decision against her the pair were married—on July 11, 1867—at the residence of Henry Grinnell in Bond Street, New Bedford.

If Miss Hetty did not investigate her fiancé’s character and habits among his enemies, she did not fail to observe one precaution. She required him to sign a contract under which his wife’s fortune would not be liable for his debts but at the same time stipulated that he would be liable for her support. How this arrangement turned out in the end we shall see.

Miss Robinson’s newly acquired husband had spent most of his early business years in the Orient. With his headquarters at Manila, he had ranged about China, India, and Japan, with his eyes open for profits. Something of the rover lingered in his makeup. And now that he was married, the wanderlust flamed up in him anew. He steered his ship for England and persuaded his wife to agree upon this course.

Mrs. Green at this time was filled with disgust at the stupidity of American courts and the villainy of American lawyers. It is possible that this mood aided her husband in bringing her around to this revolutionary change in her life. At the time, he was a large, impressive, expansive man, with grizzled Jovian whiskers, the sort one sees on the substantial gentlemen in one of Bulwer-Lytton’s novels. It is quite possible that he cast a feeble spell over her mind and that in her own hard, practical way she was fond of him. At all events, as soon as the business of the Sylvia Ann Howland estate was wound up, Mr. and Mrs. Edward H. Green took ship for England.

Here they were to remain for six or seven years. Here some thirteen months after the marriage their first child—a boy—was born at the Langham Hotel in London. He was adorned with all the ancestral tribal names—Edward Howland Robinson Green—every one of them a patron saint who had made his million. Three years later their second and only other child arrived. She was called after her mother and her Aunt Sylvia—two female millionaires.

In spite of these domestic events it was here in London that Mrs. Green definitely turned her attention to business. She had a million and a half in her own name, perhaps more. She had a million in her inheritance from her aunt in a trust fund. She had several million in her father’s estate also in a trust fund. There was something ludicrous in this collection of trustees set up to protect this innocent female in her financial affairs. Even her husband had been urged upon her by her dying father as a kind of protector for her fortune. What all her guardians did with their funds and what she did with those under her own control will appear later. Now, however, she went resolutely about the business of pounds, shillings, and pence. Very naturally, her first investments had been in government bonds. She was reading about bonds to her grandfather at an age when most little girls are reading about the three bears. Before she had left America she had already revealed her feeling for profitable investment.

The end of the Civil War found the country’s credit impaired. The war had eaten up huge quantities of money, more indeed than the government could supply. To make up the deficiency the Treasury had done what governments always do in the same situation—it turned to the printing press and began to print money as fast as it was required. These notes became famous or infamous as “greenbacks.” They were worth fifty cents on the dollar in gold. They dragged the market value of government bonds down with them. Here was an excellent chance for any far-seeing person to pick up government securities at half their value. All it required was a little faith in the nation that had just demonstrated in a most extraordinary way its ability to come through a terrific civil war. Looking back at it now, the recovery of the country ought to have seemed a sure thing to any observer. The war had given an immense impetus to the resources of the continent—coal, iron, oil, copper, gold, and silver were just being discovered and developed. But for all that, the nation’s credit was at low ebb and through 1865, 1866, and 1867 Hetty Robinson bought all the government bonds she could lay hold of. Some she got as low as forty cents on the dollar. She knew how to wait out the market and buy bonds on the declines that occurred every time a gust of bad news swept the country.

When she got settled in England she continued this course, adding, however, an interest in railroad securities, especially Rock Island bonds. She became well known in the financial district of London. Indeed, she associated herself with a group of financiers and organized two banks from which she made large profits. In one year in London she made more than a million and a quarter dollars. In a single day she cleared $200,000. “I have made more money than that on individual deals,” she said in afteryears, “but that was the largest single day’s earnings of my life.”

She was already dropping into those personal idiosyncrasies that marked her among women in later years. The habits of thrift that had expressed themselves in her girlhood were now hardening into a state of mind bordering on parsimony and meanness. She might have been a handsome figure now, in the full tide of her womanhood. Her features were strong but well formed. Her skin was clear and suffused with a rosy glow that persisted late into life. Her deep-sunken eyes were large and luminous, even brilliant. Her beautiful hair, combed in a severe part on top, fell over her neck in a rich roll of abundance. But these charms were all lost through her excessively plain and even homely dress. Fashion passed her by. She had no interest in it. Indeed, it may be doubted if she had any mechanism for the perception of the beautiful. Her mind was now engrossed with her bonds and her banks and with the small boy who trudged at her side wherever she went.

It was while she still lived in London that Mrs. Green found herself at the fork of the roads in her domestic life. One road led off into Threadneedle Street, the other to the London clubs and Rotten Row. The wife took the trail that led to Threadneedle Street, the Exchange, and the banks. The husband took his way along the road that led to London club life. This was the beginning of those two trails that this ill-assorted pair traveled for so many years and that came together in the end under such pathetic circumstances. Mr. Green, of course, took an interest in his fortune. He was by no means a ne’er-do-well. But he was content to instruct his broker from a pleasant lounge in a London club. His wealth was large and he fully lived up to the prenuptial contract under which he was to meet all living expenses. His wife was able to devote herself to business under what must have seemed to her almost ideal conditions—making great profits and spending nothing. She ruled her own finances with an iron hand. But she was acutely aware of the differences in temper, in tastes, in aims, and in modes of life between herself and her husband. She grew to dislike England, and when her son was still under ten she demanded that the family return to the United States.

A few years after their return to America the Greens began living in separate quarters. There was no scandal about it. There was no quarrel. There was no legal separation. They did not become estranged. They merely took up separate abodes.

Thereafter she took an office in the building of the Chemical National Bank and gave herself up wholly to building her great fortune. And as this fortune grew the fear of assassination took deeper hold of her mind. She intimated more than once that it was this fear that led her into all the penurious ways she adopted to conceal, perhaps, her identity and wealth. But on every hand, in every dark corner, she saw the assassin lurking. She declared that in a boardinghouse in Brooklyn she found ground glass in her food. She lived for a while at a house in Hempstead, Long Island. One night burglars broke in. Mrs. Green insisted they were not burglars but murderers come to kill her. As she walked along the street one day a shower of bricks fell from a building on the sidewalk around her. She was untouched. Again the mysterious scoundrels were at work. On another occasion a huge block of wood fell from a house in course of construction. It dropped at Mrs. Green’s feet. Another miraculous escape. Certainly whoever these would-be assassins may have been they were sorry bunglers. But her soul grew darker and she managed to infuse this fear of assassination into the minds of her children.

Some years later her son’s leg had to be amputated. This she attributed to an assault years before upon the boy by her own enemies. Dr. Lewis A. Sayre, of New York, however, told a different story. One day a shabbily dressed woman with a boy whose knee was badly infected entered the doctor’s office. The boy had bruised it some years before, she said, while sliding down a hill. She herself had treated the injury which remained an open and troublesome sore. Finally she applied hot sand to it, causing the flesh to slough off. Dr. Sayre, supposing the woman to be in dire poverty, took the boy to Bellevue as a charity patient. Because the injury had certain interesting professional aspects the boy, with the mother’s consent, was used for a demonstration at which the doctor lectured to the students. After this Dr. Sayre learned his shabby patient was none other than Hetty Green. He thereupon refused to treat the case further until she paid for his services and in advance. This she refused to do and never returned. Some years later this leg was taken off.

Another blow was now in store for her. In the year 1884 Mr. Edward H. Green sat in an easy chair in the Union League Club, his favorite lounging place, discussing the very lively political campaign then in progress between James G. Blaine and Grover Cleveland. Presently a messenger handed him a letter. Mr. Green read it, passed his hand over his darkened brow, and went out of the club hurriedly. That night when the evening papers arrived his cronies learned why he had left so hurriedly in the afternoon. The brokerage house of J. Cisco & Company had failed. Green was deep in the market, and the prospect of a Democratic victory had caused a slump. He was called on to make good his obligations and could not do so. His securities were thrown on the market, and when all the smoke had cleared away, his fortune, amounting then to $800,000, was swept away. The husband of Hetty Green, who had been commissioned to guard her fortune, was bankrupt.

She resolutely refused to aid him. There is reason to believe that she did pay his debts, but she would give him no money to recoup his losses. Thereafter he did not have a penny. He was sixty-three years old and accustomed to indolence. His outlook was hopeless indeed, save as a pensioner of his wife.

She was a warlike spirit, and life now furnished her with plenty of battlefields. She crossed swords with some of the most astute financiers of the day and never sheathed her blade in battle. One day the little Houston & Texas Central Railroad swam into the news as a bankrupt road. Collis P. Huntington, of the Southern Pacific, bought the stock as low as $10 a share. He proceeded to reorganize it. The bondholders were asked to turn in their bonds and co-operate in the plans. All the bondholders did—save one. That one was Hetty Green who held a million dollars’ worth of this paper. Huntington tried argument, coaxing, cajolery, and threats. All failed. She threw the road into the hands of a receiver, forced a public sale, and collected her bonds in full. Thereafter she added Collis P. Huntington to her list of hatreds.

Sometime later, she was found to be in the market, gathering in Louisville and Nashville stock. The market woke one day to find that Mrs. Green had almost driven this issue into a corner. Later still, she did actually succeed in cornering the market on Reading, and the humiliated he-operators of Wall Street had to come with their hats in their hands to the financial ogress in the Chemical National Bank.

One cherished dream of her life Mrs. Green now sees blossoming into perfect fruit. Her son, Edward H. Green, the apple of her eye, is fairly launched upon his business career. Though a Quaker, he has just been graduated from Fordham College, the school of the Jesuits in New York. He has now finished his course as a lawyer, is admitted to the bar, and is ready for business. He does not practice law, however. Doubtless Mrs. Green’s long career as a litigant and her hatred of lawyers has led her to make this boy independent of the breed. He will go into business. He will be his own lawyer. And he will be the richest man in America. She has been preparing him to be what all his ancestors have been for two hundred years—good business managers. From his earliest years she has taught him the meaning and the value of money. She has lectured him about his way of life. When he was graduated she called him to her office one day. She handed him a package. “Ned,” she said, “this package contains $250,000 in bonds. Take it to San Francisco and deliver it to the address on the outside. But be careful it is not lost or stolen.”

The first night on the train Ned sat up watching that package. For the rest of the trip he kept it in his hands night and day. Finally with relief and pride, he handed it safely to the bank official to whom it was addressed. The package contained some canceled insurance policies. Mrs. Green had given her son a lesson in caution.

Reporters asked him what religion he followed. “I was born a Quaker,” he said, “raised a Protestant, educated a Catholic, and by business I am a Jew.”

She kept him near her for a while, took him to Chicago on several large real-estate deals, and initiated him into all the methods she employed in the management of her millions. At first he went into the office of the Connecticut River Railroad. When he was just twenty-one he was elected a director of the Ohio & Mississippi Railroad. When he was twenty-four she sent him to Texas to foreclose on the Texas & Midland road, a mortgage being due her for $750,000. He did so and bought the road in for his mother at the sheriff’s sale. Then she wired him: “The road is yours. See what you can do with it.”

He assumed the presidency of this defunct concern. His mother’s heart glowed with pride when she could say that her Ned was the youngest railroad president in the United States. So far he had done only what she made possible for him. But now the breed of the Howlands and the Robinsons shone out in him. He made his residence in Terrel, Texas, and set about the rehabilitation of the Midland. In a few years he had made it the model road of Texas.

His mother never took her eye off his operations and occasionally she intervened with one of her characteristic gestures. In those days railroad officials were constantly pestered by politicians for passes. Giving free rides on her railroad tortured the soul of Hetty Green. And so she had prepared a little card, and whenever a politician or anyone else asked for a pass he received one of these little cards. It read:

MONDAY: “Thou shalt not pass.” Numbers XX, 18.

TUESDAY: “Suffer not a man to pass.” Judges III, 28.

WEDNESDAY: “The wicked shall pass no more.” Naham I, 15.

THURSDAY: “This generation shall not pass.” Mark XIII, 30.

FRIDAY: “By a perpetual decree it shall not pass.” Jeremiah V, 22.

SATURDAY: “None shall pass.” Isaiah XXIV, 10.

SUNDAY: “So he paid the fare thereof and went.” Jonah I, 2.

What is more, her son had made himself a figure in Texas public life. He possessed a fine commercial mind, like his mother’s. But he had also the genial, kindly suavity of his father. And before long the country was interested to read that the son of the world’s richest woman was running for governor of Texas on the Republican ticket. Of course a Republican nomination was merely a kind of laurel wreath of personal popularity or a key to unlock a rich man’s pocketbook.

One of the powerful emotions that controlled Mrs. Green’s life was her hatred of lawyers. To her dying day she would talk with anyone by the hour about lawyers. Once she took out a permit for a pistol. It was really because of her fear of assassination. Someone asked why she had done this. “To protect myself from the lawyers,” she answered. “I am not afraid of other kinds of burglars.”

Her favorite joke, that she would tell upon the slightest provocation, went this way.

“Why,” she would ask, “is a lawyer like a man who is restless in bed?”

When no answer was forthcoming she would answer her own question.

“Because both lie first on one side and then on the other.”

This hatred of lawyers grew out of the long series of lawsuits that had begun following her aunt’s death and that never ended until her death. She was in incessant legal controversies with all sorts of people about all sorts of things. In spite of her conviction that all lawyers and all judges were scoundrels, no one in America applied for the services of these gentlemen more than Hetty Green. But the greatest of all her lawsuits, next to the famous will case, was the one that grew out of charges against the trustees of her father’s estate.

It will be recalled that during all these years her father’s and aunt’s estates remained intact. Trustees administered them for her benefit. There was something a little ludicrous in this woman, beyond doubt the most astute financial mind that her sex has ever produced, having her funds in the hands of guardians who were supposed to protect her.

At all events, in 1892 the sole surviving trustee of her father’s estate, Henry A. Barling, applied to the New York courts to be discharged from his trust. He rendered an accounting. And this accounting Mrs. Green contested. She made many extravagant allegations. She declared her father left an estate of $9,000,000, that she received only $334,000 income from the trustees, that Barling had been just a clerk in her father’s office, and that undue influence had been used by him to get control of the estate. She went through the accounting with a fine-tooth comb and made innumerable objections to all kinds of items. The whole subject was referred by the court to a referee and thereafter for a long time testimony was taken before him.

Nothing could give a better picture of this remarkable woman, her appearance, her habits, her manners, her aggressive and imperious nature, her swift wit, and her withering sarcasm, than an account of this trial. At the time, the newspapers made it a matter of daily extended reports and got all sorts of vivid and entertaining news from it.

The referee was a little, round, pink-faced lawyer of the mildest type, named Henry H. Anderson. He returned from luncheon each day looking a little rounder and pinker than before. And invariably within half an hour after resuming proceedings his head would droop forward a little and he would sink into a gentle doze.

Mrs. Green herself was always in attendance and very much in evidence. At this time she had perfected that appearance of shabbiness which marked her for the rest of her life. Her dress was of the poorest materials, black but already revealing tints of green such as one sees in an old umbrella. A cape of the cheapest fur covered the rents and patches. On her head she wore a little bonnet held on with a stringy ribbon tied under the chin. This bonnet she had worn for ten years and insisted she would wear it for another ten. Over her whole person, her dress, her cape, her bonnet, and over her face itself there seemed to have settled an ashen dust that completed the utter destitution of her appearance. Behind all this squalor, however, was a spirit of indomitable resolution. Her eyes, steel gray with just a glint of blue, burned with the brilliance of black eyes and looked out with the sharpness of two steel points. The skin itself was quite pink and her mouth thin, but large, firm, and resolute.

Against her and representing the executor was no less a personage than the distinguished Joseph H. Choate, later to achieve world renown as the American Ambassador to Great Britain. Choate was a masterful lawyer. But he was hardly a match for the terrible figure he now opposed. Mrs. Green would address him as “Choate” or “Joe Choate,” very much to the impairment of his dignity. She had known him as a girl. One day in a recess she was fulminating against him.

“That’s little Cupid Choate,” she said with sneering laughter. “Why when I was a girl Joe used to call on me and whisper little love tales to me. He used to call on another girl too, named Kitty Wolf, and tell her the same tales. We used to meet every Friday and compare notes. We called him Cupid Choate. But now I call him Cherub, because he isn’t exactly a cupid any longer. He is a reformer now and his wings have begun to sprout.”

Hardly had the referee begun to doze, when Mrs. Green would say aloud: “Look at that man. I’m paying fifty dollars a day for him to sleep.” Whereupon there would be a laugh and Mr. Anderson would awake with a start.

She changed lawyers so often that the proceedings were very much delayed. One day she dismissed one lawyer, William H. Stayton, in open court. Stayton was her husband’s lawyer also. He got up to address the court. She waved him archly away and said: “I don’t want any traffic with you. Charles W. Ogden is my lawyer now. My son sent him to me from Texas. He’s a good lawyer, too. He can beat Choate. He’s a regular Texas steer, but I don’t know whether he’ll be able to live through this thing.”

The referee complained that Mrs. Green, as soon as a lawyer became familiar with her case, dismissed him.

“When they get hypnotized, don’t I have to change them?” she said. “Choate hypnotizes them. He hypnotized Stayton.”

Another day Referee Anderson attempted to rebuke her.

“Hear that,” she exclaimed. “He’s mad because I said he snored last Saturday. Well, the only difference between us is that Anderson snores and I get nightmares.”

Mr. Anderson rapped sadly for order. What was mortal man to do with such a litigant? Then a question arose over the books of the estate.

“The books,” said the executor’s lawyer, “must be kept at the office. This is not a small estate—”

“But getting smaller every minute,” shot out Mrs. Green.

The referee looked helplessly at her: “There’s no use, Mrs. Green, adding more—”

“Except a little money,” she put in. “I’d like to see a little more money.”

Later her lawyer, cross-examining the executor on the witness stand, said: “Don’t you know that your fellow executor, at the time that letter was signed, was in a lunatic asylum?”

“It was not a lunatic asylum,” retorted Mr. Barling angrily. “I’ve been there myself—”

“Why not?” interrupted Mrs. Green with a loud laugh.

“Visiting,” added the embarrassed witness, turning red.

A moment later Mr. Barling’s lawyer went to the witness chair and to look over some papers the witness was examining. The heads of lawyer and witness were close together.

“Look at that,” snapped the terrible Mrs. Green, “a two-headed witness. That ought to be in a dime museum.”

For months this travesty went on, lawyers, witnesses, referee struggling to push ahead and riddled by the machine-gun fire of Mrs. Green’s withering jibes, while all New York laughed. The utter frustration of her foes came, however, toward the end of the trial when the referee’s report had been made against her and the matter was being argued before the court. Joseph H. Choate was addressing the judge. He was picturing the sufferings of the sorely tried executor who went on with his burdensome duties under the load of Mrs. Green’s incessant criticism and obloquy. He grew eloquent. He was sailing aloft along an altitudinous level of forensic pathos. Suddenly the judge, the spectators, and the lawyers became aware of Mrs. Green drawing a huge yellow pillow slip from under her cape, putting it to her eyes, and bursting into a violent burlesque of weeping at Choate’s heartbreaking eloquence. The scene was so lugubrious that judge, lawyers, all broke into violent laughter that continued in ceaseless titters for the balance of Choate’s address. The great lawyer for once was utterly crushed.

If Mrs. Green hated lawyers before this suit, she regarded them with a deeper and blacker hatred forever after. She had scored brilliantly on the entertainment side, but in the end she lost this case as she did most others. Almost all great financial figures have managed to get themselves into court a great deal. John D. Rockefeller was in endless litigation. But Rockefeller always won his suits. Mrs. Green always lost hers.

There is a little double flat in Hoboken in Bloomfield Street—a two-family house bearing the number 1309. In the parlor of the lower flat are three chairs, a table, a couch, and a rug somewhat the worse for wear. There is an old vase on the mantel holding aloft some artificial flowers. Over the mantel hangs an oil chrome, and there are a few other cheap framed prints on the other walls. This is the living room of Mrs. Hetty Green, the richest woman in the world. If, as the Germans say, “true wealth is to have everything you want,” then Mrs. Green, in addition to her money, is rich indeed. For this is all she wants. She has another home at Bellows Falls, her husband’s native village. She goes there for a few weeks each year. In Wall Street it is said she maintains this as her legal residence in order to escape New York taxation. But her home throughout most of the year is in Hoboken.

One might see her any morning at seven o’clock closing the door of this humble home behind her as she leaves for business in New York City. She says good-by to a little dog named Dewey. She calls the dog Cupid. His name is Cupid Dewey. In the little tin frame on the door under the electric push button is a soiled card on which is written what purports to be the name of the occupant of the flat. It is C. Dewey. This is a grim mixture of Mrs. Green’s sardonic humor and her terror. She foolishly imagines she is hidden away in this remote tenement. Everyone knows where she lives. However, she has other reasons for dwelling amid the secluded fastnesses of Hoboken. “It is the cheapest place to live I know of,” she once said of it.

As she goes to the ferry she is indescribably shabby. Her old clothes hang about her as if they were wet. This is part of her disguise. Yet on the ferry everyone recognizes her. “There is Hetty Green, the richest woman in the world,” is said a score of times every morning.

Once in Manhattan, she goes to her office in the Chemical National Bank building. It is on the second floor of the bank—a large room with heaps of papers piled all around. There is no rug on the floor and an air of bareness and age about the whole place. In her office she changes her clothes. She puts off the raiment of the beggar and dons a less seedy costume. But it, too, is faded, worn, threadbare.

Here at this desk she transacts her business. Here come bankers, brokers, corporation presidents, church pastors, men of all sorts who want money. Over that desk millions flow every week. The most imposing and stately gentlemen in America—men who live in mansions, sail the seas in yachts, preside over vast industrial enterprises, operate vast railroads—all owe money to the squalid old woman who lives in the Bloomfield flat and whose only yacht is the Hoboken ferry.

The meanest forms of economy permeate all departments of this woman’s life. Her business is transacted on the same basis. One day she was in Philadelphia and wanted to get to New York before the close of the Stock Exchange. It was necessary to have a special train. The railroad authorities quoted her a price for a locomotive and one car. The price staggered her. She tried to bargain with them but they informed her the price was standard and could not be lowered.

“All right,” she said, “take the car off the train and five dollars off the price and I’ll ride in the locomotive.” And this she did.

At Bellows Falls one day she wanted to buy a horse. The owner asked $200 for it. He refused to lower his price. She went to a person who had been a lifelong enemy of the horse owner. She got all the particulars of his life, went back to him, and shocked him by revealing what she knew of his past. She offered him $60 and he took it. Afterward she laughed, saying she would have been willing to pay $100.

In New York she ate at cheap restaurants where she was known to waiters as the woman who never gave a tip. But at Bellows Falls she went each day to the town shops and bought in small quantities just what she needed for that day—a quarter pound of butter, a few crackers, a small quantity of sugar. She could never speak with patience of the extravagance of women. Whenever conditions were depressed in the country she blamed it on the extravagance of her own sex.

One day she went to a real-estate office on Fifth Avenue. The office had advertised for several caretakers to live in the basements of tenement houses belonging to the firm. All day long, forlorn old women had been coming in applying for the job. When Mrs. Green entered the young clerk flew at her and cried: “No more caretakers needed! No more caretakers today!” Mrs. Green was not in the least perturbed. She replied in her soft, smooth voice: “I am Hetty Green. I came here just to talk over a loan of half a million dollars your firm wishes to borrow from me.”

She was wholly without that frailty which Saint Francis so abhorred—the sin of human respect. And above all things Mrs. Green hated a snob. On her place at Bellows Falls she had a cow. One day a very haughty English visitor crossed the lot and was promptly pursued by the cow. Much upset by his precipitate and graceless flight he went to Mrs. Green.

“Madam,” he said, “your cow has chased me across the lot.” Mrs. Green surveyed him calmly but made no reply.

“Madam!” he fumed, drawing himself up in all his disheveled dignity. “Do you know who I am? I am the Honorable Vivian Westleigh of London.”

“Go tell that to the cow,” she said quietly.

At a comfortably late hour Mr. Edward H. Green rises in his apartments in the Cumberland Hotel. He is an old gentleman now some seventy-five years of age. He is still a tall, erect, distinguished-looking man, with a portly figure. He has his breakfast in his room and then looks carefully over his morning papers. He does not miss a page, scanning all the small items. Now he frowns darkly. He has come upon some little note about his wife. He is deeply displeased at this. But for all that he reaches for his shears, clips the item out, and puts it carefully in an envelope along with innumerable others.

No one but his most intimate friends are permitted to enter this room. But many try to reach him. Reporters occasionally present themselves at the clerk’s desk of the Cumberland. There is a good deal of mystery about the husband of the world’s richest woman, and reporters are forever trying to get to him for a little chat. The caller’s card is taken away and in a moment the attendant returns to say that Mr. Green begs to be excused. The card has never reached him. The attendants at the hotel are liberally tipped by Mr. Green to protect him from all visitors save two or three who are known.

When he is through with his papers he amuses himself with a book until about one o’clock. Then he dresses and walks leisurely to the Union League Club where he spends the rest of the day. There he meets his familiar cronies who can be depended upon not to mention his wife. He plays a hand at cards, smokes a cigar or two, enjoys the conversation of friends, has his dinner, and remains into the night when he goes back to the Cumberland, save on those rare occasions when he goes to the theater.

He is now a man of leisure living on a pension allowed him by the wife who had forced him to sign a prenuptial contract that her funds would not be liable for his debts and that he would support her. The allowance was not a large one, but it enables him to live at a decent hotel and support by careful management the wants of a clubman. But he never attempts speculation again.

There is, however, one fly in the ointment. His wife exercises over him a surveillance which is most distressing at times. He becomes aware of her unseen presence through inquiries made by her in the most unexpected places. Thus one day Mr. Green went to the Bureau of Elections to register. He learned that his wife had been there before him to find out if he had made a change in his voting residence. These investigations of his wife are the chief reason for his careful arrangements to keep out all visitors. Perhaps this once wealthy man feels a little uneasy to be the guest of the Cumberland and the lounger at the Union League while the bills are paid by the shabby woman in the Hoboken flat.

Meanwhile, Mrs. Green’s fortune is rising. Her business is money—making dollars into more dollars. She was not a builder. She projected no great productive industry. Her business was to stand on the side and take her toll from those who were producers and builders and needed her money. Most of the great millionaires of this country have been primarily creators of wealth, dreamers of great enterprises. Rockefeller organized the oil industry, Hill created a railroad empire and developed a vast region, Carnegie put together that amazing system of industries that became the foundation of the United States Steel Corporation, Ford raised up a great network of wealth-producing plants that employ hundreds of thousands of men. Hetty Green never created a dollar.

Of all American millionaires the one she resembled most was Russell Sage. Her investments were made largely in government bonds and real-estate mortgages. Her speculative profits were made in the call-money market and in buying high-grade securities when the market was low and selling when it was high. This simple process, which everybody pretends to understand but so few follow, she began in early life when she gathered in government securities after the war. In Wall Street they would tell you that Hetty Green made her money through luck. But there was no luck in it. It was in following the obvious principle that Wall Street preaches and then ignores. She always insisted she never speculated. (It is odd how everyone fights shy of that word.) As a matter of fact she seldom bought anything to hold.

“There is a price on everything I have,” she once said. “When that price is offered I sell. I never buy anything just to hold it.”

This was in striking contrast to the investing philosophy of George F. Baker. When asked what he considered the right time to sell stocks he replied: “I don’t know; I never sell anything.”

“About all that can be said of my investments,” said Mrs. Green on another occasion, “is that they have been carefully chosen and have turned out well as a rule. A fortune cannot be built up around a fixed idea or in other words without the exercise of just plain common sense. I buy when things are low and nobody wants them. I keep them until they go up and people are anxious to buy.”

Then she added: “I never speculate. Such stocks as belong to me were purchased simply as an investment, never on margin.”

What she meant was that she never speculated unwisely. After the panic of 1907 she said: “I saw this thing coming. When it came some of the solidest men in Wall Street came to me and tried to unload all sorts of things, from palatial residences to automobiles. When the crash came I had money and I was one of the very few who had. The others had their securities and their values. I had the cash and they had to come to me.”

Her real-estate holdings were vast. She owned or had mortgages on an endless number and variety of places—great business buildings, palatial city homes, theaters, factories, hotels, livery stables, country estates, farms, ranches, undeveloped acreage, churches, and cemeteries. Once she decided to make a personal tour of inspection of all her real-estate investments, and it required two years of constant traveling all over the country to visit them all.

What she was worth it would be difficult to say. She always preserved the greatest secrecy about her wealth. She was equally secret about what she bought. If she was asked what was a good business to invest in she would reply: “The other world.” One estimate of her wealth placed her New York City realty investments at between 30 and 45 million dollars. She owned from 40 to 60 millions in industrial and mining securities. She had from 15 to 25 millions in railroad stocks and bonds, about 10 millions in farm and other tracts in the Southwest, and another 10 millions in Boston, Chicago, and St. Louis real estate. Around 1900 her wealth was not less than 60 million dollars. By the time she died it had certainly doubled.

And now on the door of the small flat in Hoboken the name of C. Dewey is still in the little tin frame. But in the frame just above it is another name. It is that of E. Green. This is none other than the expansive and genial clubman and former millionaire, Edward H. Green. He is now past seventy-eight, ill, feeble, weary. At last he has been brought down to the dingy level of his wife. His old apartments at the Cumberland have been abandoned. He is done with the Union League Club. He is too old and broken to go on alone. Now he occupies the little flat above his wife’s.

It is difficult to say precisely what were the feelings of this self-willed woman toward this fallen man. He was really never quite out of her thoughts. Even while away from her she exercised a ceaseless vigilance over him. She was a hard woman. She was never swayed in her actions by watery human sympathies. This man and this woman, brought together in their maturity, looked out upon life through eyes so different that what they saw constituted two wholly different worlds. She had no patience with the things that attracted him. His loss of a whole million dollars must have tormented her soul. And yet there is some reason to believe that now as she saw this once strong and handsome man brought so low she felt a glow of affection for him. Their daughter Sylvia remained in Hoboken to look after her father, and Mrs. Green proceeded, as was her way, to boss with an iron hand the job of nursing him.

After a while, perhaps early in 1902, the family, doubtless at the insistence of the children, moved him to his old home at Bellows Falls. He was now a man of eighty years and utterly without spirit. His daughter now remained with him altogether. Mrs. Green moved her office to Bellows Falls and tried to stay there too. But it was a most inopportune time for him to choose to die. That was a year of extraordinary prosperity. A new race of daring promoters was in the field—the Harrimans, the Gateses, the Rogerses, and their like. Also a new breed of dangerous and brilliant radicals were on the warpath. It was a time when people of vast wealth had to watch their stations with ceaseless vigilance. William J. Bryan, Eugene V. Debs, Tom Watson, all pointed their fingers frequently at Hetty Green as the symbol of useless and parasitic wealth. Besides, the call-money market was running wild. Rates were going high, and there was big money to be made by sitting close to Wall Street. Hetty Green had raised the towering structure of her fortune so high that she had to be patrolling it always to keep it from rust and loss.

And so while the indomitable wife labored night and day with her far-flung interests, the shadows gathered around the man who thirty-five years before had been chosen to guard her fortune. Now, utterly broken in spirit, Edward H. Green died on March 19, 1902.

The Robinsons and the Howlands and the Greens had all been precocious in the making of money. But they had displayed no precocity in love. The elder Green had not married until he was forty-seven. His son, Edward, remained single until after his mother’s death, until he was forty-seven—the age at which his father married. Mrs. Green was thirty-three before she married, and now her daughter at thirty-eight was still unwed. In 1909, however, Mr. Matthew Astor Wilks, a clubman of prominence and a grandson of John Jacob Astor, approached Mrs. Hetty Green and asked for the hand of her daughter Sylvia. Mr. Wilks had been paying court to the lady for some ten years. But he had been always painfully aware of Mrs. Green’s opposition to his suit. And she was not a figure to be approached upon an unfavorable subject with impunity. However, early in February, 1909, Mr. Wilks presented himself to his future mother-in-law. He was plainly getting on in years. Really his proposal could hardly be deferred longer. When he laid the matter before Mrs. Green her answer was characteristic:

“You are sixty-five years old, Mr. Wilks,” she said, “and you have got the gout, if you’ll excuse my plain language. I think Sylvia ought to marry a younger man. I have no doubt you will treat her well. But, to speak plainly again, I’d like an heir to my estate, which will be Sylvia’s when I am gone.”

Nevertheless she relented when she found the young turtle doves quite determined. The wedding was fixed for February 23—just ten days away. Mrs. Green, with her wonted vigor, proceeded to boss that job, too. As arrangements progressed and she found herself superintending the purchase of the trousseau—spending money quite lavishly—she experienced a strange thrill in this extravagance. Despite much secrecy the news got out and promptly the Bloomfield Street flat was besieged by reporters. The day of the wedding they were camped in numbers outside the house. In some way, however, the family managed to escape unseen, get into a hack, and drive to Morristown, New Jersey. Soon after the reporters discovered they had been tricked, they commandeered cabs, carts, milk wagons, every species of vehicle and attempted pursuit but without success. At the church of St. Peter in Morristown, with but sixteen or eighteen relatives present, Hetty Sylvia Ann Howland Green gave her hand to Mr. Wilks. Perhaps for the first time in thirty years Mrs. Green put aside her shabby old clothes. She appeared, radiant, in a new black-silk dress and with a hat, rather than a bonnet, beaming with red flowers and an ostrich plume. And she gleamed with diamonds. Always she owned diamonds. She bought them as she bought stocks, to hold until someone wanted them at an advanced price. Now they came in handy to adorn her at the wedding.

By the time the Great War broke Mrs. Green’s health had begun to fail. She was then eighty years of age. In spite of her regular habits she had driven herself with work. Besides, her fortune was now reaching gigantic proportions. She had always scorned those modern innovations in office management for the control of details. She trusted few employees. All the threads of her varied and widely scattered interests she held in her own strong hands. The hands were tired. But she held on firmly and refused to rest. Someone asked her if she thought of retiring. “Retire!” she exclaimed. “Why should I give up work? I was never more capable of managing my affairs. Besides business has become a habit after so many years.”

But for all that she began to reach out for help. Her son had already been summoned back to New York gradually to take hold with her of the reins of her interests. He had many interests of his own by this time. He was a bachelor of wealth and culture. Unlike his mother he had a whole collection of hobbies. Chief among them was flowers. His mother still had her little artificial bouquet in the vase on her mantel. At Dallas he had a huge nursery. He was an enthusiastic fisherman and organized the Tarpon Club of Texas. He was a yachtsman and owned a palatial vessel. He took up aviation and formed an aviation club in Texas. A lover of life, he was now called from all this in Texas to associate himself with his grim mother. She had formed the Westminster Company, giving him half the stock to assist in the management of her business. Later she set up the Wyndham Corporation to take over her real-estate mortgages and interests.

But she continued to be the directing genius of her affairs. In 1915, in the excitement of the stock market when the European war began to stimulate business here, she loaned millions on call at twelve per cent. She began to take an interest in stocks new to her. She worked ceaselessly putting her fortune into such shape that it might be least affected by the tax gatherer.

On April 17, 1916, she was felled in her Hoboken flat by a paralytic stroke. She was eighty-two years old. Nevertheless she rallied and, after being removed to her son’s home at 7 West Ninetieth Street, recovered rapidly. Her old hatred of extravagance flamed up in her new surroundings. To provide her with two nurses her son had to introduce them into the household under the guise of seamstresses. Daily she got reports upon her multitudinous affairs.

But she began for the first time to sense that her own end was near. She looked this grim fact in the face without fear.

“I am not worrying,” she said. “I do not know what the next world is like. But I do know that a kindly light is leading me and that I shall be happy after I leave here.”

One day, on returning from a ride in Central Park, toward the end of June, a second stroke laid her low. In spite of this, her unconquerable spirit flared up anew. But she knew that death stood at her elbow. And she was quite unperturbed. The glittering mass of her countless dollars drew dim. Her bonds, her buildings, her stocks, her beloved mortgages, all now seemed thin and unreal. On Monday, as the first flow of dawn came into her room, she showed signs of sinking. The doctor was sent for. The weary countenance and tired, half-closed eyes presaged death. But her pulse was strong. The iron engine inside refused to be stilled. The doctor felt her pulse. “She will live out the day,” he said, and left. In half an hour Hetty Green, rid of her millions, her old, black, faded dress, stripped even to the soul, had gone to some other world.

She was laid in the cemetery at Bellows Falls beside the man whose name she bore and whom she had known so little.

Mrs. Green’s death was the signal for one of the most extraordinary spectacles ever witnessed in a probate court. It will be recalled that Mrs. Green had inherited a portion of her Aunt Sylvia Ann Howland’s estate amounting to a little over a million dollars. This sum, however, was not given to her outright. It was put into a trust fund with instructions that the income was to be paid to Mrs. Green during her life. After her death the whole amount was to be divided “among the lineal descendants of my grandfather, Gideon Howland.” Gideon Howland had been dead for nearly a hundred years. And now Miss Sylvia’s estate was released for distribution among all the descendants of the old whaling merchant, and they had been multiplying with extraordinary rapidity for a century.

The earth seemed to open and cast up heirs. They came pouring as if answering the trump of doom into the Valley of the Last Judgment. They came from the four corners of the globe. The terms of the will had always been known, and this horde of claimants had sat about waiting with growing impatience for the passing of the almost indestructible Hetty Green.

Mr. William M. Emery, an accomplished journalist and genealogist of New Bedford, has written a whole book about these heirs and this famous will. In 1918 he found living 1478 direct descendants of Gideon Howland. The lawyers set up a genealogical bureau to determine who were the rightful inheritors. When the work was concluded Miss Sylvia Ann Howland’s estate was divided among some 438 rightful claimants. This came pretty close to a socialization of wealth. Some got minute fractions, one heir getting one seventh of one half of one thirty-second of one forty-fifth. The curious reader with a flare for mathematics may figure that out for himself.

No woman was ever more generously provided with guardians than Hetty Robinson in her young womanhood. Her father left most of his estate in the hands of trustees. Her aunt left all of Hetty’s inheritance in the hands of trustees. Her husband was selected as a prudent businessman who would aid her in managing that part of her fortune which was put into her hands. It is interesting to contrast the work of the guardians provided for this innocent, unsophisticated woman by the wise men of her race. The aunt’s estate after fifty years was hardly a dollar greater than it was at the start. The father’s trustees had actually achieved a shrinkage in his trust fund. Poor Edward H. Green was allowed to furnish no guardianship to Hetty’s own money and as to his own he became a bankrupt. Mrs. Green herself took her original million dollars and turned it into more than a hundred million—two hundred million, some have said. Her estate was divided between her son, Edward Green, and her daughter, Mrs. Matthew Astor Wilks.

Interlogue Two

MISERS

THERE CAN be little doubt that Hetty Green satisfied most of the elements in the definition of a miser. Whatever other ingredients this definition ought to contain, certainly a French version—literally translated—is not amiss: “The love excessive of the silver for it to accumulate.”

Love of money is a spiritual malady that runs through almost all the persons who are the dubious heroes of these chapters. A common observation about men of wealth in which their eulogists indulge is that they “care nothing for money,” that they are interested rather in the things—with the emphasis on the good things—they can do with money. Rockefeller said he looked upon himself as a trustee of his money—God’s trustee. “God gave me my money,” he exclaimed. His great aim was to use it according to God’s will. Certainly much can be said for the wise use which Rockefeller, among all his multimillionaire contemporaries, made of his money. But one may well indulge in a mild surprise on learning that all the stratagems Mr. Rockefeller employed in gathering his riches had the complete approval of his Divine Partner.

The insistence that these rich men “do not love money” is probably made to counteract the impressions made by those misers of fiction and the stage who rub their hands and drool in obscene glee over the little heaps of gold coins—“my little shining darlings.” The dramatists, from Plautus’ Euclio to Molière’s Harpagon and the trembling wretch in The Chimes of Normandy, have established in the common mind a fixed pattern of what the expression “love of money” means.

As a matter of fact, few persons, save perhaps some who are mentally diseased, suffer from the sheer love of the metal we call money. Money itself is merely one form of property. And what these rich men have in varying degrees of virulence is the urge of acquisitiveness—the relentless and forever gnawing appetite to add more and more to what they already possess. And this urge arises, not out of any special affection for the physical possessions, but from certain special uses to which they hope to put these possessions. They want power. They want security. They want glamour. And mixed up with this they have a special talent for accumulation which, like all persons who have special and strong talents, they love to exercise. They find the same delight in the patient, ceaseless planning and execution to make a profit as others do in winning a game of tennis, achieving a low score at golf, or managing large bodies of men in military formations.

All sorts of men want power or want pleasure or want acclaim. But there are all sorts of ways of achieving power, getting pleasure, and winning acclaim. Acquisitive men want the kind of power, the sort of pleasures, and the brand of acclaim that can be purchased with riches. All of them, incidentally, do not have the same acquisitive abilities and, of course, all do not want the same thing. Many of them do not want much more than security. They start out in life with little, or at least some of them do, and acquire much, not through any great ability as producers, but by dint of incessant, patient, remorseless saving and stinting. The miser, therefore, may be said to be an acquisitive man who shrinks from spending. He is a getter, a saver, but not a spender.

Upon examination one is impressed with the fact that most misers are not to be found in any sort of industrial or commercial enterprise, but rather in some business that has to do with the handling of money. The talent for business is not a simple affair. One man is a good salesman, another a good merchandiser, another an excellent manager of men, another has a talent for finance. The misers are usually found among those who have this talent for finance. In some it is great. In others it is meager and, as a rule, at least so I conclude, the misers will be found among those whose talent in handling money is meager.

When we have the man or woman with the acquisitive urge but no special capacity for making money by producing wealth or managing large enterprise, with a bent for finance but not very much talent in that direction, and all this coupled with a powerful element of fear—fear of destitution—we have the authentic miser. For then he supplements his moderate power to earn by an abnormal passion to save, to deprive himself and his family of the necessities of life even, to say nothing of its decencies, in order to accumulate a fund against the day of want.

Some years ago police entered the home of a carpenter in Brooklyn. The children had gone without food for two days. They had no shoes. Investigating, the police found a thousand dollars in bills in a small tin box in a pocket of the father’s coat. When asked why he did not give some money to his wife, he replied in amazement: “Oh, no! I’m saving that.” Saving it, doubtless, against the day of want—a day of worse want than that which was then in his home. Lady Gregory, the writer on Irish folklore, touches, if whimsically yet closely, the germ of this. She tells of the “Man who went beyond the hope of God.” He was a poor peasant who had forty-four potatoes and who could expect no replenishment of his supplies for forty-five days. He reasoned that since there would be one day without a potato he would do well to fast on the first day and thus be able to look forward to forty-four days of safety. But, alas, he starved the first day. The fear of destitution, which is a normal protective caution in all healthy minds, expands to abnormal proportions in the minds of men and women who are not equipped to combat it by successful accumulation of wealth. It expresses itself in intense and even degrading parsimony. And a person who has cultivated this habit of parsimony for many years finds it continuing to dominate the mind even after wealth has been accumulated either through grinding savings or inheritance.

Daniel Dancer, famous London miser, might well have been supposed to be relieved from the terror of destitution when he inherited an income of several thousand pounds a year. But he and his sister continued to live in squalor, to find their food in refuse, to pick up dead bodies of sheep for meat until she died from poisoning as a result. Even then he found a reason not to incur the expense of a doctor. That would be interfering with God’s will, he explained. What did he want money for? Not power, not glory, not pleasure. Only the unconquerable fear of starvation in the end. He lived in his wretchedness to an old age and willed his whole estate to a wealthy noblewoman who visited him in his illness.

A somewhat different type of miser was Thomas Cooke of Islington, of the early eighteenth century. Cooke was a miser with no wealth until he married the widow of a wealthy brewer. But his niggardliness remained unaffected and the widow is said to have died of starvation not long after the marriage. Cooke took no part in the management of his beer making. He continued to assure his safety, not by earning more but by stinting on all things. But in this case, unlike Dancer, he was fond of the good things of life, particularly of good food. He laboriously cultivated many friends, visited them much, hinted that their children would be remembered in his will, and thus got many invitations to dinners and excellent attention. He would, upon occasion, fall down in a simulated fit in front of a good home, would be carried indoors, given good food, would later call to express his gratitude and his determination someday to reward his rescuers, thus getting more good meals. Obviously he could have provided himself with an endless succession of good meals had he had the talent to apply himself to productive business rather than to those humiliating and cheap schemes for getting what was so cheap in those days. He would, when ill, put on rags and call on some benevolent doctor for aid. This will recall Hetty Green’s delivery of her son into the hands of a free clinic to be the subject of a lecture because of an infected leg, and her refusal to pay a doctor when the clinic physicians discovered who she was, the whole story ending with the loss of her son’s leg. Cooke left a fortune of $650,000 entirely to charity when he died at the age of eighty-six.

Of course, these attributes of the miser assume different shades and degrees of meanness. Russell Sage of New York and John Elwes of Southwark, England, were not wholly unlike, save that Sage was probably softened somewhat by his unusual wife. Sage was a character who combined both avarice and parsimony. He was what Wall Street called a skinflint. Although at his death he left an estate of $66,000,000, he lived with the greatest frugality, haggled and bargained, never took a vacation, quarreled with the poor apple woman in Wall Street about the price of her apple, and angrily bargained like an Oriental peddler with the candy man near Trinity Church for a small reduction in price on a slightly soiled bar of chocolate.

He began as a wholesaler, made money as a youth, was elected an alderman of Troy and later to Congress. He made a lot of money as an alderman unloading a local railway on the city of Troy and later is said to have got for himself a large haul when as a banker he settled with his depositors in depreciated paper, taking the currency for himself. He went into Wall Street, which he haunted as a moneylender, speculator, and most of all as a dealer in puts and calls for many decades, about the same time that Hetty Green moved like a witch through its shadows.

Sage lived in a modest, yet decent home, was a devoted husband, and was undoubtedly rescued from more debasing meannesses through the influence of his wife. It is said that she even induced him on one occasion to make a gift of $100,000 to some school. He was coldly and cruelly avaricious. If he was not as miserly as the wretched Dancer or the shabby Cooke, it was because he did possess what they did not have, an extraordinary capacity for making money.

Elwes, in London, did not descend to the same coarse levels of meanness as Cooke because he, too, had never known poverty, having inherited a fortune from his father at the age of four. He came of a family of miserly folk and was congenitally grasping, mean, and stingy. Like Sage, he went into politics, being elected to Parliament for several terms. Like Sage, he could be guilty of an occasional generosity—he made a number of loans to needy colleagues in the House. But, though having an estate of over two million dollars, he lived in a small country seat, kept but a single servant, never traveled in a coach or entered a hotel, riding instead on horseback, detouring through muddy roads to escape the toll gate, slept by the roadside, and, when in London, occupied, instead of a hotel, whatever house or room he could find among his numerous properties, got up early in the morning to walk out a great distance to buy his meat cheap at the farms. When he died he left an estate of $4,000,000.

Such a man as the Duke of Marlborough had in him some of the ingredients of the miser, but they were restrained by certain other qualities, such as his enormous interest in military science and his ambition for power. He lived in a state befitting his rank, but both he and his wife were guilty of an endless number of petty meannesses that in the end lost for them practically every friend they had.

Hetty Green, unlike most misers, had an extraordinary genius for making money out of money, pursuing relentlessly the cruelest bargains, squeezing the highest interest rates through the devious methods of discounts and fees, watching the market with catlike patience for its high points and its low points—buying, as she said, low and selling high. But she took an almost fiendish delight in the power she acquired over men who called themselves rich and powerful and who strode about the world in grandeur while she lived in a dismal flat in Hoboken. But she was pursued by the haunting fear of murder and of losses all her life.

But none of these persons engaged in industrial enterprises as producers of the wealth they craved. They depended wholly upon the scheming management of money.

II

POVERTY

It is not possible to talk so much about wealth without thinking of the reverse of the shield—poverty. There is a widely held, if hazy, notion that poverty is not merely the reverse of wealth but its deformed child; that it is Dives who has created Lazarus. There is another popular conviction that poverty is the creature of the machine age; that this blessed miracle of skill and power, the machine, turns out not merely our prized gadgets but our disprized paupers.

Certainly poverty is no new phenomenon. It did not come in with the machine. In all ages, under all forms of government, in all economic systems there has been widespread poverty. So far as the machine is concerned, the worst indictment that can be brought against it is not that it created poverty, but that it has failed to abolish it.

After all, poverty is not a simple disease. There is the poverty that arises out of natural causes—droughts, famines, plagues. There is the chronic poverty that afflicts large areas of society even in the most favorable times.

Throughout history poverty has been produced by two causes—the convulsions of nature herself and man’s ignorance of his world.

The story of man’s long and agonizing struggle against nature is the most terrible chapter of human history. Almost all the countries in the Old World and most of those in the modern world have been afflicted so persistently by famine and disease that the effect upon their populations has been persistent, filling up the intervals between disasters with poverty. The University of Nanking has made a table showing that between 108 B. C. and A. D. 1911 there were 1828 famines in China—almost one a year somewhere in that unhappy empire. One can understand why a polite salutation on meeting a friend in parts of China is “Have you eaten?” These afflictions have continued in our time. In 1920-21 the drought slew half a million people and rendered twenty million destitute. In 1876-79 the area devastated was 300,000 square miles and the victims from nine to thirteen million human beings.

These famines were caused by droughts, floods, swarms of locusts. Concentrated wealth was not responsible, though it may have accentuated the suffering. Man did not know how to restrain the vengeful hand of cruel nature. His lack of knowledge of the forces against which he had to contend, the rudeness of the instruments with which he worked, his merciless superstitions, his unintelligent social organizations—in a word, his ignorance—accounted for his sufferings.

Concentrated wealth may indeed have aggravated human suffering. An old Sanskrit chronicle tells us that “the Jelham River [in India] was covered with corpses during the drought and the land became strewn with human bones like a burial ground. Yet the king’s minister and guards became rich selling stores of rice at high prices.”

Agra and Delhi were scourged by a severe famine. The governor was Hemu. Of him Badaoni, a contemporary historian, writes: “The people died with the word bread on the lips and yet Hemu valuing the lives of a hundred thousand men at no more than a barley corn, continued to feed 500 elephants upon rice and sugar and butter.”

Abdul Hamid, a native chronicler, writes of a famine in central India in 1628-29: “Men devoured each other and the flesh of a son was preferred to his love. The powdered bones of the dead were mixed with flour.” The Mogul emperor, Shah Jahan, fabulously wealthy, heard of these degrading agonies with ten million dollars of jewels hung around his neck. The curious insensibility of the wealthy rulers to the hunger pangs of their subjects deprived these societies of the aid of the only leadership that could ameliorate their condition. That condition appalls the mind as we read the dreadful record of human degradation under the pressure of hunger, men eating cats and dogs and their own children, waiting like vultures around the scaffold for the bodies of executed criminals.

Men suffered this poverty because they did not know how to prevent or arrest the floods, how to irrigate their lands, or escape from sun-baked prairies to which they were chained by religion, how to prevent the plagues which wiped out in western Europe a third of the population at a stroke and, in cities like Vienna and Bologna, two thirds. This poverty was the fruit of ignorance.

But there is another type of poverty that is chronic in societies and is more nearly related to wealth concentration, though it would be a great mistake to say that this is its chief cause. It inheres in all economic systems. In simpler economic groupings it arises out of men’s weakness, struggling alone against nature to win subsistence from the soil. The isolated feudal social islets depending on the limited resources of their small demesnes and their inability to exchange goods upon any considerable scale with others made the condition of almost all in the community one bordering closely upon poverty. In Japan we find feudal colonies starving next door to other colonies enjoying for the moment at least relative abundance. Seldom able to produce enough for the current year, they were without any reserves when drought or floods or insects interrupted production.

It is found in the world today as in remote ages. Louis Adamic, describing a community in the Black Mountain, Montenegro, writes:

Tsernagora is the same today as it was . . . a hundred years ago. It is as poor as ever. Rocks, rocks, rocks. Sheep, goats, scrawny cattle snatch up every blade of grass as soon as it sticks its point above the stoney bleakness. On tiny patches, few larger than a city lot, and most considerably smaller . . . growing corn, tobacco, cabbage, and potatoes, subsist from one to ten families. But how can they? The cruel and simple answer is that their wants, restricted by centuries of lack and struggle, are extremely small. Thousands of families do not see the equivalent of five dollars throughout the year. . . . Thousands of persons, especially women, live on a meagre piece of crudely baked cornbread and a little sheep or goat cheese a day. Both men and women, if necessary, can go foodless from two days to a week without thinking they are starving.

In the Dalmatian Highlands, Adamic found what he called a land of perennial economic crisis, sugar and salt undreamed-of luxuries, kindling wood at night their only source of light. Toward the end of winter, when food runs short, adults, particularly men, all but entirely refrain from food, strapping flat, specially shaped rocks close to the abdomen to keep the stomach from growling.

The responsibility for this must rest in a variety of sources—the sterile soil, the strange earth tie that binds them to these unyielding hills, the venality and corruption at the center of government. But most of all, populations are impoverished by systems of land ownership that herd swarms of men upon patches of land while great tracts are reserved for the wealthy.

The exactions of the landlord in countries like Japan—not to speak of the United States—keep the tenant farmer poor when he cannot possibly harvest a crop sufficient to keep himself and his landlord. The poor farmer, after paying his rent, has not enough left for subsistence. His lot is hopeless. But we will do well to remember that this is not the consequence of vast fortunes merely. Most of the landlords are small capitalists and many of them are hardly raised above the level of poverty.

In the larger groupings in the populous cities where the more complicated money economy does its mysterious work upon society, there is an inherent flaw. It reveals itself in a process by which portions of the working population are rejected as unusable. We hear much of our early insurance against this defect. Unemployment was eradicated by draining off large numbers of families into what was called our “frontier.” It was so in Athens. Pericles found a frontier in the islands of the Aegean. Rome did the same, parceling out the lands of Italy until they were all gone and then dividing up the lands of conquered provinces.

But in Rome, in Athens, as in the United States, as fast as the social organization was emptied of its excess working population, the system went promptly to work to produce a new surplus. To express it differently and more simply, that is the way capitalist money economy works. Imagine a population of a million workers. Aside from occasional spasms of boom, that society will discard a hundred thousand as useless. If the hundred thousand are moved utterly out of the society by immigration, the remaining nine hundred thousand will soon suffer another convulsion of rejection. Another hundred thousand or more will be found unusable. When they are removed by voluntary or forced exile, the purged society of eight hundred thousand workers will soon mark another ninety thousand or more for rejection. If the frontier is big enough and other forces do not intervene, it will drain away the whole population, after which it will, perhaps, feed them back to the old lands or to new ones if they can be found. The figures I have used are arbitrary and chosen merely to illustrate the point.

This phenomenon finds its origin in the central flaw of the money economy—that up to now no one has discovered how, by healthy means, a sufficient money income can be distributed to all of the workers to enable them to purchase the product of the producing machine.

The concentration of wealth has something to do with this state of affairs, though it is by no means the only cause. Nor are the great aggregations of capital the only concentrations which nourish this fatal defect. Small fortunes may well be as deleterious to the system as large ones.

Nor are all large fortunes equally unhealthy. A fortune like John D. Rockefeller’s, acquired wholly in wealth-producing processes, is by no means as injurious as a fortune like Morgan’s, acquired almost wholly in parasitic functions. The Rockefellers, the Carnegies, Armours, Fords, du Ponts are associated with the creation of wealth-producing machinery. One may very well argue that they have all drawn from the product more than either their ethical or economic share. But in the case of the finance fortunes, they have been acquired by pouncing upon wealth-creating machines already built and developed, capitalizing them for promotional and speculative purposes, reducing the ownership factor to liquid form, and running that liquid form through stock markets into the hands of investors as a means of withdrawing from those investors large gobs of their money savings. These parasitic promotional fortunes are, as a rule, almost wholly injurious and do, actually, play hob in the jamming of the economic system.

Today, in highly organized modern capitalist money economies, the cyclical disaster takes the place of the hurricane, the earthquake, the drought, and the plague. It produces those acute rashes of poverty that break out in our cities and farms when the economic machine breaks down. But the problem of chronic poverty remains; it hangs on in the midst of great booms. It is beyond a doubt associated with the problem of the distribution, not of wealth, but of income, in which problem the man of wealth is a serious factor.