August 27, 2014 • 29 mins
She was the wealthiest woman in the U.S., skilled when it came to amassing a fortune. But her eccentric behavior and miserly ways led to bad press and a less-than-flaterring nickname. Read the show notes here.
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class from house
stuff Works dot com. Hello, we're welcome to the podcast.
I'm from and I'm Tracy Wilson. And Um, So there's
that stereotype. We talked about it a little bit in
(00:21):
our math episode, in our episode about algebra, about women
lacking mathematical proclivity and not having much business sense. But
those stereotypes were completely obliterated by today's topic. And in
the mid eighteen hundreds, before many people were talking about
obliterating those stereotypes, she was seen as a peer and
an equal to many of Wall Street's you know, heaviest
(00:43):
hitting financiers, and she really opened the door to the
idea that women could succeed in finance. But despite her
immense success in these really admirable accomplishments, it's kind of
difficult to like heavy green um who is who we're
talking about today, And as is often the case with
people who are extremely driven or really gifted in one
(01:04):
way or in one area, the areas outside of her
uh life that fell outside of like finance and building
her fortune really often suffered. And that included her family,
which is part of why it's kind of hard to
like her, and we'll we'll get to a specific incident
as we go on, But she's sort of fascinating in
that regard. She's one of those people that you can't
(01:26):
help but be fascinated by. But there is a certain
sort of like, I don't know if revulsion is the
right word, but there's a you can't help but wins
a little bit at some of the things that happened
in her life because of her obsession with building the
family fortune. Uh. So we will kick it off and
start just at the beginning, as we usually do, with
(01:48):
her early childhood and her birth and her family. Hetty
was born Henrietta Holland Robinson on November twenty one, eighteen
thirty four, in New Bedford, Massachusetts. Her mother was Abby Holland,
who can trace her family directly back to the Mayflower,
and her father was Edward Mott Robinson. And Hetty's mother
(02:09):
is uh said to have been quite dismayed that she
did not have a son to be an heir to
the family fortune. Uh. And so she also sent Hetty
to live with her grandfather when she was still a
very small child, import in part because Abby was in
very poor health. So Hetty was not terribly close to
her mother. As a result, Hetty spent most of her
(02:29):
childhood with the men in the family, and she learned
about business and money management from her father and her grandfather.
The two of them were partners in a whaling company,
which did quite well. Her father was an excellent and
astute businessman who said to have increased the family's fiscal
fortunes twentyfold, and right out of the gate, Hetty was
(02:52):
really into money as a concept. She opened her first
savings account when she was only eight years old, and
two years after that she was sent to boarding school,
although she wasn't terribly interested in it. She talks in
interviews about how she um kind of like went ahead
and like trudged through, but she didn't really like it uh,
(03:13):
And soon she was really uh back with her male elders,
reading the financial pages at home and feeling like she
was getting a much better education in that regard. One
of the stories about her is that her father set
her up with a whole new, expensive wardrobe for her
formal society presentation, but she sold all of her new
(03:34):
clothes and instead invested the money. And Hetty's mother passed
away when Uh. When the heiress, Hetty was only twenty
five and her newly single father decided to move to
New York for from Connecticut, and Hetty followed because you know,
at this point in his life, even though he was
a little bit older, he was still considered an eligible
(03:54):
bachelor as a widower. Uh. And there's some pretty significant
speculation that Ye's motivation for following her father was to
ensure that she was not forgotten and left out of
the family fortune in the event that he remarried and
started a new family. When her father and her aunt
both died in the same year, Hetty, who was thirty
(04:15):
one at the time, was poised to inherit the family fortune.
The general opinion of her male relatives was that she
would have been better off with her money in a
trust and with the male relative managing things, and all
of that had been arranged for in the wills for
both of the wills in question. Yeah, she actually was
(04:36):
not given as much in her aunt's will as she
had hoped. Uh. And that comes up a little bit
more in just a bit. But as a woman, you know,
in the mid eighteen hundreds, even though she had grown
up with these two men who were really quite established
financiers and quite good at handling money, and they had
talked with her a great deal about it. She was
still perceived as just being unable to handle the demands
(04:57):
of managing any sort of wealth. But Hetty was very headstrong.
She was very confident in her abilities to handle her
own fortune. You know, she'd been keeping accounts for her father,
and she had been reading stock quotes to her grandfather
every night from the paper since she was a very
young child. And so she mounted a lawsuit against the
trustees of her father's will, and she actually took legal
(05:18):
action to break her aunt's will, uh, which was a
newer version than the one she said she had last seen.
She did manage to wrangle a million dollars of her
father's fortune in eighteen sixty five, and later on she
procured part of her aunt's estate. Eventually, after much arguing
(05:38):
and litigation, she reached an income arrangement from a trust
and she ended up with somewhere between six million dollars
and seven million dollars between the two estates. That's not
adjusted to today's value, though, that is eighteen sixties dollars,
So it was a really, really huge fortune. Yeah, she
she had plenty of money. I mean, it's one of
(06:00):
those things where even you know today obviously if someone
had six million dollars to be in pretty good shapes,
so you can imagine a hundred and fifty years ago,
and that was like uh. And as all of this
legal back and forth over her inheritance was dragging on,
particularly the stuff with her aunt's will, Hetty actually got married.
She married Edward Henry Green, and this was in eighteen
(06:22):
sixty seven and Hetty was thirty three at the time.
Green was a silk trader and he served on the
board of a bank, but his business and Hetty's did
not mingle. The pair never combined their finances, which, as
you can imagine, was pretty unheard of at the time,
and in fact, Green had to sign a prenup agreeing
that he would keep his hands off Hetty's money, which
(06:43):
prenup arrangements of some sort or another have actually been
around for hundreds and hundreds of years, but in my
mind this sticks out as one of the earliest sort
of modern uh pre nup arrangements. For a while, the
two of them moved to England and they stayed there
for seven years. And this was a move that they
made to escape some of the bad press that Hetty
(07:05):
had gotten while she was contesting her aunt's will. She
had a previous version of the will that had named
her as the sole inheritor, and there was the scandal
over the fact that people sort of believed it was
a forged document that Hetty had made for herself. Yeah,
and this, you know, caused also some legal heat which
(07:26):
helped move them right along to UH, England. And they
actually had their first child while they were living in London.
His name was Edward Howland Robinson Green and that was
in eighteen sixty eight, so just a year after their marriage. Uh.
And then three years later, still in London, they had
a daughter named Hetty Sylvia and Howland Robinson Green, and
she went by Sylvia as she grew up. The two
(07:48):
of them and their children lived very well while they
were in London, and all of their living expenses came
out of Edward's money. So there had been a financial
panic in eight seventy three, and not long after that,
just a couple years later, the Greens moved back to
the US. UH. You know, the the concerns had died
(08:08):
down over the legal document and whether there had been
any foul play involved. And so they settled in Vermont,
where Edward was originally from, and it was not long
before Hetty marched right to Wall Street. She made a
pilgrimage to New York and she went into John Jay,
Cisco and Sons to deposit cash and stock certificates. And
she was ready to start investing with that money right then,
(08:31):
and with her separate and independent fortune, Hetty invested very
very wisely. Instead of focusing on fast cash investments that
would build up her fortune really quickly, had he opted
for long term investments. She primarily invested in bonds and
real estate. She also invested in the railroads, and she
bought real estate primarily in Chicago, New York, and St. Louis.
(08:55):
As her fortune grew, she also expanded her holdings well
beyond the cities, and all of her money handling every
move she made was really well informed. She did copious
amounts of research on her own before she put her
money behind anything. And it wasn't just that she was
(09:16):
a patient investor. She was also really frugal. Even though
she had at this point had a massed a massive fortune,
she lived really simply she didn't have a lavish lifestyle
at all, and as a consequence, she always had money
and when there were dips in the market or panics,
she really didn't have to worry about it. She could
(09:36):
just expand her fortune further instead of worrying about getting
by day to day. Until the crisis passed. She loaned
money and purchased real estate on the cheap from desperate sellers.
And when the financial panics caused many investment firms to
declare bankruptcy because of their huge debt, Hetty, who had
never borrowed money as a rule, always stayed on solid
(09:59):
grass owned. And before we get to kind of her
obsession with investing in money and expanding her wealth, uh
kind of ramping up? Do you want to take a
word from our sponsor? And so now back to Hetty. Uh,
So she is at this point in New York, she
has really uh entrenched herself in this lifestyle of trading
(10:25):
and buying. And it seems as the uh as her
money management continued to take off and it took up
more and more of her time, she grew less and
less interested in taking care of herself. Uh. She seemed
to have just become so obsessed with her work in
finance that everything else kind of fell away from her focus.
Her clothes would go un washed, they would eventually fall
(10:47):
into ragged disrepair, and she would continue to wear them.
She often looked very grubby, so much so that merchants
are said to have winced when she entered their stores.
They dreaded her dirty hands touching their merchandise. I mean,
she would even purchase broken cookies at the store so
she could get a discount for them, and she would
(11:07):
return barry boxes to the market so she could get
a refund on them. So she was living very frugally,
very very cheaply, but she really wasn't taking great care
of herself. When she finally did relent and take her
clothes to the cleaners, she said to have insisted that
they only washed the bottoms of the skirts, so just
to take away the obvious mud and dirt, and she
(11:29):
would negotiate a reduced price for the partial cleaning. And
her children this is the part that really breaks my heart. Uh.
You know, her children had the wealthiest woman in America
for a mother, but they wore hand me downs. They
looked like, you know, ragamuffins and poppers. From like a
Dickens novel. Uh It said that as their winter clothes
were thin, she would line them with newspapers rather than
(11:51):
spend money on new coats and shoes would get the
same treatment. So if the kids had holes in their souls,
she would patch them cheaply or just line them with
paper uh to so that the hole wasn't completely open.
Her tight fistedness with her money really cost her son dearly,
So when Ned, as he was known, hurt his leg
(12:12):
while he was sledding, Hetty put off getting a medical
treatment for him because she didn't want to get a
bill from the doctor, and consequently, his leg never healed
correctly and it finally had to be amputated because he
developed gang green. So the nickname the Witch of Wall
Street came from the way Hetty carried herself in public.
(12:33):
As a woman, she was often confronted with people who
thought that they could take advantage of her, and one
of the ways that she dealt with that was by
being really shrewd and abrupt in her behavior. She was
very direct and very cautious in all of her dealings,
and additionally, she wore solid black most of the time,
and she wore were clothes that were a little bit outdated. Again,
(12:56):
she didn't like to buy new clothes, so she would
kind of be out of season in these older, you know,
dusty looking things. So you could see where people would
start calling her a witch based on, you know, sort
of the depictions of witches at the time. And it's
also said that she did not really have a great
personal smell, which is not really a huge leap of
logic given accounts of her less than stellar hygiene. Because
(13:20):
she was this enigmatic and unusual figure, lots of rumors
circulated about her. One of these was that she was
so mis early that she only had one dress. As
we've already mentioned, she definitely did have a penny pinching
streak about her. Yeah, and there's a story in biography
(13:41):
that was written about her, and the way the story
goes is that she was carrying two hundred thousand dollars
in bonds on public transportation. And again that is not adjusted.
That is two hundred thousand dollars in eighteen sixties money,
or this may have been a little bit later, but uh,
and when someone insinuated like, hey, that's not really wise
to carry that much wealth on public transportation. She insisted
(14:04):
that she could not afford to hire a private carriage
as they were suggesting, and that if they can, that's
great for them, but she couldn't. Just kind of funny,
you know, it's like the person sitting there with a
pile of money in their laps saying they can't afford
a taxi. In another story, she lived with a hernia
for years rather than going to the doctor to have
it looked at, and she only went once the pain
(14:25):
became really unbearable, and then she was infuriated that the
surgery was going to cost a hundred and fifty dollars.
She only agreed to it because she was in so
much pain, and allegedly she then tried to get away
without paying the bill to the doctor. Yeah, there's another
rumor that went around that she had a man's brain
in a woman's body, And in all likelihood that was
(14:48):
not intended to be taken literally by you know, a
person who initially said it. It was one of those
you know, uh, just kind of off handed comments. This
tidbit kind of slid into the rumor mill, and people
believed it as though it were a real thing and
not sort of just a commentary on her shrewdness and
her acumen in business, and it just added to that
(15:08):
which mystique that you know, she's a sort of almost
Frankenstein character that has, you know, male thinking in a
woman's body. But there's also a tinge of sexism in
the nickname. Clearly, a woman who could amass so much
of a fortune and stand toe to toe with men
when it came to making deals had to be a sorceress. Yeah,
(15:31):
her odd and unsettling demeanor really didn't help. The press
picked up the name and they started using the Witch
of Wall Street anytime they reported any financial news involving her.
And she was really worth reporting about. So a lot
of men on Wall Street and elsewhere we're just really
happy to be insulting about Hetty. And some of these
(15:51):
same men were the ones appealing to her for loans
and fiscal assistance when they ran into a crisis. This
was the case throughout her life. She's said to have
saved the city of New York on several occasions when
the city's coffers ran dry, and she even wrote a
check for one point one million dollars in the seven
Knickerbocker crisis as part of the emergency bank bailout that
(16:14):
was headed up by JP Morgan. Yeah, people would just
say horrible things about her and kind of sneaker behind
her back, but boy, they were really happy to take
her money when they needed it. Uh, as is often
the case. Uh. And so while Hetty was having these
spectacular successes in finance, her husband unfortunately was not. Uh.
He had been making investments through the years, just as
(16:36):
his wife had, but he just did not have her
skill at picking winners and really like, you know, assembling
a cohesive portfolio that was all smart moves. And the
two million dollars that he had entered their marriage with
had slowly dwindled down until it was mostly gone. Unsurprisingly,
a husband who could not manage his own money was
(16:57):
of no interest to Hetty. This if the fact that
he was from a good family and by all accounts
was a kind and affable man. She had already bailed
him out several times, and once she had to pull
all of our money out of the bank to avoid
it being seized to cover his debts. And at that
point enough was enough. And so in one after fourteen
(17:18):
years of marriage, she took the children and she moved
to New York. She kept the desk in an office
on Wall Street, incidentally in the bank where she moved
her money after the incident with Edwards debt collectors caused
her to leave her previous bank. She brought her lunch
of oatmeal or a plain ham sandwich with her every day,
and because she wasn't exactly enthusiastic about paying taxes on
(17:41):
the property she owned, she and the children never had
a consistent home. The three of them moved around a
lot to dodge debt collectors, and they stayed in cheap
flats over the years all over the city. They spent
time in Hoboken, the Bowery, Harlem, and Brooklyn. Anywhere that
Hetty could find a deal on cold water flat with
a low weekly rate. She would use aliases that most
(18:04):
of them, sometimes even registering under her dog's name. Yeah. Yeah,
there there's a debate over what the actual name of
her dog was, and it could just be that there
were multiple dogs. Some will list him as Dewey, Some
even list him as Money being his name, which to
me sounds a little urban legend. E uh, and I
think there's another name in the mix. But in any case,
(18:26):
her dog rented some flats for her. Ned her son
went to Fordham and he pursued a law degree. And
Hetty had always had in mind that he was going
to be the one that managed the family fortune after her,
and so after he graduated, she gave him a job
managing some of her properties in Chicago, and he did
quite well there, and so she eventually moved him to
(18:47):
Texas to see after interests there. His life away from
his mother gave Ned a little taste of freedom. He
started to like more extravagant living, and he did have
several dalliance is with some ladies. We can say they
had negotiable affections, that's a way to put it. Patty
(19:08):
was afraid that he would end up married to a
woman who was only after the family fortune, so she
begged Ned to promise her he would never get married.
He acquiesced, although his mistress, who was a former prostitute,
stayed with him and the pair lived as though they
were married to each other. Ned was euventually moved back
to New York by his mother to see after the business,
(19:29):
and unlike his mother, who still insisted on living in
cheap rental flats, he lived for a little while at
the Waldorf Astoria, and then he and his mistress moved
to adjoining townhouses near Central Park. And while ned did
not share his mother's taste in lodging or lifestyle, he
really did inherit her business acumen, and he proved himself
to be extremely adept at managing the family fortune. Neddie
(19:52):
and Edward's daughter, Sylvia, stayed unmarried and stayed with her
mother until she was thirty nine. At that point she
arad Matthew asked Wilkes, who was the great grandchild of
John Jacob Aster. The first Wilkes was in his sixties,
so he was much older than Sylvia. But Hett he
approved of the marriage because he had family money of
his own and promised that he would never touch Sylvia's. Yeah.
(20:16):
It said that Hetty didn't really like uh, Matthew, but
she liked that he was willing to stay out of
her family's money. Uh. And Sylvia's wedding is often pointed
to you as one of the few times that Hetty
kind of loosened her purse strings. She paid for the wedding,
and it said uh. And it said that she was
much more fiscally indulgent in the whole affair than just
(20:37):
about any other time she was in her life, and
prior to Sylvia meeting Matthew, Hetty had also paid to
host several dinners uh like places at the plaza so
that her daughter could invite eligible men and they could
have these sort of social events uh. And all of
this was really because Hetty had been quite concerned that
(20:57):
Sylvia wasn't married, And this sounds sort of a little ironic,
given what a fiercely independent woman Hetty herself was, but
even so, she had been married, and she seemed to
think that it was important for a woman to marry
at some point. Hetty died on July third, nineteen sixteen,
at her son's townhouse. She had gotten six several years
(21:17):
before with pneumonia, and at that point the papers had
reported that the Witch of Wall Street was really at
death's door, but she defied them and recovered. The illness
left her pretty frail, though, and she wasn't able to
work anymore afterwards, so she moved in with her son
and insisted that she pay him rent, but no more
than she would have paid at the more modest lodgings
(21:38):
she would normally have gotten for herself, and eventually after
falling into gradually poorer and poorer health. Uh, she had
had that that initial pneumonia that caused the death scare
when she was in her late seventies. I believe she
was seventy seven, and then she was approaching her eighty
second birthday, she had a series of paralytic strokes, and
(21:59):
so she died just a few weeks before her birthday.
When she died, she left behind a fortune of more
than a hundred million dollars, which she acquired over the
fifty one years that she had worked. She owned about
six thousand pieces of property across forty eight states, and
she held the deeds to theaters, railroads, hotels, office buildings,
(22:21):
and cemeteries. And she held the mortgages for more than
five hundred churches. Yeah, and again that is not an
adjusted amount. That was a hundred million in the nineteen
teens when she died. So I have seen various adjustment
estimates that are wildly different. Some that put her in
the low billions, uh, if that were today's money, and
(22:43):
some that put her like in the tens of billions.
So it's a pretty wide range. But basically she would
have been a billionaire. If if this was in today's
UH fiscal measuring. And so then Ned inherited a big
chunk of the money, and unlike his mother, he took
that money and he lived big. He was still, you know,
(23:06):
doing his job as a financier, but he spent plenty
of that money. He married his mistress that he had
promised his mother he would never marry, although it's it's
said that he also had dalliances with other women. Uh.
And he spent a huge chunk of money building mammoth
mansions in multiple places, and he staffed all of them
with a full complement of servants. He kind of made
(23:27):
up for all the lost time that they live very
poorly as children. And he gave a lot of money
to charity, and he also funded several scientific research projects.
He did some work with m I. T. And let
them even use some of his property to to do
some of their experiments. Ned died in nineteen thirty seven,
and at that point the estate went to Sylvia, who
was already a widow. She in turn left the entire
(23:51):
lot to various charities. So all that money that Hetty
had spent her life hoarding eventually was given away. Yeah,
it's one of those moments where you're you feel reasonably
confident that if she could, she was probably rolling in
her grave. Uh. But it's interesting to note. I mean,
she gets these this almost caricature grade description in anything
(24:13):
you read about her. That's why, Uh, I'm almost reluctant
to ever say anything with certainty about her, because it
seems like every report of her is colored by sort
of the press and this weird image that she had.
But I want to wrap up with a quote from
Hetty herself that I think is really telling, and it
it kind of uh pulls the whole thing together and
(24:33):
reminds us that yes, she was a very extreme person
with some very extreme behaviors, but she was still a
person and she uh she said this in response to
criticisms and bad press about her. Uh. And you know,
this is a woman who was listed in the Guinness
Book of Records as the world's greatest miser. But this
quote goes, My life is written down for me in
Wall Street by people who I assume do not care
(24:56):
to know one iota of the real heavy green I
am in earnest. Therefore they picture me as heartless. I
go my own way, I take no partner risk nobody
else's fortune. Therefore I am madam Ishmael set against every man.
So that's Eddy Green. And we had several requests for
her over the last year and a half, and I
(25:17):
presumed prior host did as well. But this is one
where when I got your outline, the name was so
familiar because of so many people who have requested it
that I was like, didn't we do this all right? Tracy?
And I kept like going back through all of our
archives and being like, did was this? It wasn't done.
If it was, we couldn't find it. Uh, So I'm
(25:40):
gonna go with it wasn't uh Heeddy, She's so fascinating.
I may want to dress as her for Halloween one year. Also,
it gives me an excuse to where, you know, kind
of an outdated Victorian gown, which I always love. Uh.
And now I have a bit of listener mail of
much different um tone, so I have to One is
(26:01):
a postcard from our listener Ann Marie, and she says,
dear Tracy and Holly, I love your show and a
ment to send cards from many trips instead, here's one
from my city, Alexandria, Virginia. We have an awesome apothecary museum.
It was active from seventeen ninety six to nineteen thirty three.
When its owners went bankrupt in the Great Depression, they
(26:22):
left everything behind. It's an amazing local highlight that too
few people have seen. They have original pepto abysmal. And
then there's a thing about armin Hammer that is obscured
by postal marks, uh and arsenic and mercury. But yeah,
it's a lovely picture of some of the labels on
some of these items in this apothecary museum, which is
(26:42):
super cool and is now on my list of places
I want to go. And then we also got a
really lovely parcel from our listener, Ian who is in Australia,
and he says, hi, ladies and clothes should be two
small bars of Kendall mint cake and a copy of
ten sixty six and all that. These go back to
a couple of episodes did a while ago, but it
took me a while to get stuff together. In the
(27:04):
episode on Mount Everest, Hillary intensing ate some mint cake
when they got to the top of Mount Everest. Kendall
mint cake is a type of candy from Kendall, England,
one manufacturer, Romney's, used to give it away to expeditions
such as the Mount Everest expedition for the publicity. Unfortunately,
I wasn't able to find the right brand here in Adelaide, Australia.
By the time it gets to you, it will probably
(27:25):
be pulverized. But that's how most explorers probably would have
eaten it in the field. Anyway, I wanted to say
I tried the mint cake. It was intense. Yeah, it's
a it's not cakey at all. That's for people that
think of cake like a spongey cake the way we
would bake a cake. That is not what it is
at all. It's really like a compressed bar of like
(27:48):
glucose and peppermint, and it is very intense. It's like
the York peppermint patty feeling, but it's all the way through.
There's no chocolate to temper it. So it was quite
an intense peppermint flavor. It was lovely. Uh and Ian
also asked about another postcard he sent us in relation
to um the Red Ghost of Arizona, and we did
get that, by the way, But anyway, thank you for
(28:09):
the treats. It was fun to try something it may
have scared my stomach a little bit with its intense
peppermint nous. I'm imagining it was like a slightly softer altoid. Well,
it's hard, so it's not as hard as an altoid,
But like I said, it's like compressed. It's almost candy like,
(28:30):
but it's in bar form and I can see where
it would give you some energy to huck it up
a mountain. Um, So that's a scoop. If you would
like to write to us, you can do so at
History Podcast at how stuff Works dot com. You can
also visit us at Facebook dot com, slash missed in History,
on Twitter at missed in History, at missed in History
dot tumbler dot com, and at pinterest dot com slash
(28:51):
missed in History. If you would like to visit our
spreadshirt store and purchase missed in History a koutrament for
your person, you can do that at missed in History
dot spreadshirt dot com. If you would like to research
a little bit about what we talked about today, you
can go to our parents site, House of Works. Type
in the word millionaire in the search bar, and you
will find an article called how to Make a million dollars.
(29:13):
I don't promise you will go away through that article
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Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class from house
stuff Works dot com. Hello, we're welcome to the podcast.
I'm from and I'm Tracy Wilson. And Um, So there's
that stereotype. We talked about it a little bit in
(00:21):
our math episode, in our episode about algebra, about women
lacking mathematical proclivity and not having much business sense. But
those stereotypes were completely obliterated by today's topic. And in
the mid eighteen hundreds, before many people were talking about
obliterating those stereotypes, she was seen as a peer and
an equal to many of Wall Street's you know, heaviest
(00:43):
hitting financiers, and she really opened the door to the
idea that women could succeed in finance. But despite her
immense success in these really admirable accomplishments, it's kind of
difficult to like heavy green um who is who we're
talking about today, And as is often the case with
people who are extremely driven or really gifted in one
(01:04):
way or in one area, the areas outside of her
uh life that fell outside of like finance and building
her fortune really often suffered. And that included her family,
which is part of why it's kind of hard to
like her, and we'll we'll get to a specific incident
as we go on, But she's sort of fascinating in
that regard. She's one of those people that you can't
(01:26):
help but be fascinated by. But there is a certain
sort of like, I don't know if revulsion is the
right word, but there's a you can't help but wins
a little bit at some of the things that happened
in her life because of her obsession with building the
family fortune. Uh. So we will kick it off and
start just at the beginning, as we usually do, with
(01:48):
her early childhood and her birth and her family. Hetty
was born Henrietta Holland Robinson on November twenty one, eighteen
thirty four, in New Bedford, Massachusetts. Her mother was Abby Holland,
who can trace her family directly back to the Mayflower,
and her father was Edward Mott Robinson. And Hetty's mother
(02:09):
is uh said to have been quite dismayed that she
did not have a son to be an heir to
the family fortune. Uh. And so she also sent Hetty
to live with her grandfather when she was still a
very small child, import in part because Abby was in
very poor health. So Hetty was not terribly close to
her mother. As a result, Hetty spent most of her
(02:29):
childhood with the men in the family, and she learned
about business and money management from her father and her grandfather.
The two of them were partners in a whaling company,
which did quite well. Her father was an excellent and
astute businessman who said to have increased the family's fiscal
fortunes twentyfold, and right out of the gate, Hetty was
(02:52):
really into money as a concept. She opened her first
savings account when she was only eight years old, and
two years after that she was sent to boarding school,
although she wasn't terribly interested in it. She talks in
interviews about how she um kind of like went ahead
and like trudged through, but she didn't really like it uh,
(03:13):
And soon she was really uh back with her male elders,
reading the financial pages at home and feeling like she
was getting a much better education in that regard. One
of the stories about her is that her father set
her up with a whole new, expensive wardrobe for her
formal society presentation, but she sold all of her new
(03:34):
clothes and instead invested the money. And Hetty's mother passed
away when Uh. When the heiress, Hetty was only twenty
five and her newly single father decided to move to
New York for from Connecticut, and Hetty followed because you know,
at this point in his life, even though he was
a little bit older, he was still considered an eligible
(03:54):
bachelor as a widower. Uh. And there's some pretty significant
speculation that Ye's motivation for following her father was to
ensure that she was not forgotten and left out of
the family fortune in the event that he remarried and
started a new family. When her father and her aunt
both died in the same year, Hetty, who was thirty
(04:15):
one at the time, was poised to inherit the family fortune.
The general opinion of her male relatives was that she
would have been better off with her money in a
trust and with the male relative managing things, and all
of that had been arranged for in the wills for
both of the wills in question. Yeah, she actually was
(04:36):
not given as much in her aunt's will as she
had hoped. Uh. And that comes up a little bit
more in just a bit. But as a woman, you know,
in the mid eighteen hundreds, even though she had grown
up with these two men who were really quite established
financiers and quite good at handling money, and they had
talked with her a great deal about it. She was
still perceived as just being unable to handle the demands
(04:57):
of managing any sort of wealth. But Hetty was very headstrong.
She was very confident in her abilities to handle her
own fortune. You know, she'd been keeping accounts for her father,
and she had been reading stock quotes to her grandfather
every night from the paper since she was a very
young child. And so she mounted a lawsuit against the
trustees of her father's will, and she actually took legal
(05:18):
action to break her aunt's will, uh, which was a
newer version than the one she said she had last seen.
She did manage to wrangle a million dollars of her
father's fortune in eighteen sixty five, and later on she
procured part of her aunt's estate. Eventually, after much arguing
(05:38):
and litigation, she reached an income arrangement from a trust
and she ended up with somewhere between six million dollars
and seven million dollars between the two estates. That's not
adjusted to today's value, though, that is eighteen sixties dollars,
So it was a really, really huge fortune. Yeah, she
she had plenty of money. I mean, it's one of
(06:00):
those things where even you know today obviously if someone
had six million dollars to be in pretty good shapes,
so you can imagine a hundred and fifty years ago,
and that was like uh. And as all of this
legal back and forth over her inheritance was dragging on,
particularly the stuff with her aunt's will, Hetty actually got married.
She married Edward Henry Green, and this was in eighteen
(06:22):
sixty seven and Hetty was thirty three at the time.
Green was a silk trader and he served on the
board of a bank, but his business and Hetty's did
not mingle. The pair never combined their finances, which, as
you can imagine, was pretty unheard of at the time,
and in fact, Green had to sign a prenup agreeing
that he would keep his hands off Hetty's money, which
(06:43):
prenup arrangements of some sort or another have actually been
around for hundreds and hundreds of years, but in my
mind this sticks out as one of the earliest sort
of modern uh pre nup arrangements. For a while, the
two of them moved to England and they stayed there
for seven years. And this was a move that they
made to escape some of the bad press that Hetty
(07:05):
had gotten while she was contesting her aunt's will. She
had a previous version of the will that had named
her as the sole inheritor, and there was the scandal
over the fact that people sort of believed it was
a forged document that Hetty had made for herself. Yeah,
and this, you know, caused also some legal heat which
(07:26):
helped move them right along to UH, England. And they
actually had their first child while they were living in London.
His name was Edward Howland Robinson Green and that was
in eighteen sixty eight, so just a year after their marriage. Uh.
And then three years later, still in London, they had
a daughter named Hetty Sylvia and Howland Robinson Green, and
she went by Sylvia as she grew up. The two
(07:48):
of them and their children lived very well while they
were in London, and all of their living expenses came
out of Edward's money. So there had been a financial
panic in eight seventy three, and not long after that,
just a couple years later, the Greens moved back to
the US. UH. You know, the the concerns had died
(08:08):
down over the legal document and whether there had been
any foul play involved. And so they settled in Vermont,
where Edward was originally from, and it was not long
before Hetty marched right to Wall Street. She made a
pilgrimage to New York and she went into John Jay,
Cisco and Sons to deposit cash and stock certificates. And
she was ready to start investing with that money right then,
(08:31):
and with her separate and independent fortune, Hetty invested very
very wisely. Instead of focusing on fast cash investments that
would build up her fortune really quickly, had he opted
for long term investments. She primarily invested in bonds and
real estate. She also invested in the railroads, and she
bought real estate primarily in Chicago, New York, and St. Louis.
(08:55):
As her fortune grew, she also expanded her holdings well
beyond the cities, and all of her money handling every
move she made was really well informed. She did copious
amounts of research on her own before she put her
money behind anything. And it wasn't just that she was
(09:16):
a patient investor. She was also really frugal. Even though
she had at this point had a massed a massive fortune,
she lived really simply she didn't have a lavish lifestyle
at all, and as a consequence, she always had money
and when there were dips in the market or panics,
she really didn't have to worry about it. She could
(09:36):
just expand her fortune further instead of worrying about getting
by day to day. Until the crisis passed. She loaned
money and purchased real estate on the cheap from desperate sellers.
And when the financial panics caused many investment firms to
declare bankruptcy because of their huge debt, Hetty, who had
never borrowed money as a rule, always stayed on solid
(09:59):
grass owned. And before we get to kind of her
obsession with investing in money and expanding her wealth, uh
kind of ramping up? Do you want to take a
word from our sponsor? And so now back to Hetty. Uh,
So she is at this point in New York, she
has really uh entrenched herself in this lifestyle of trading
(10:25):
and buying. And it seems as the uh as her
money management continued to take off and it took up
more and more of her time, she grew less and
less interested in taking care of herself. Uh. She seemed
to have just become so obsessed with her work in
finance that everything else kind of fell away from her focus.
Her clothes would go un washed, they would eventually fall
(10:47):
into ragged disrepair, and she would continue to wear them.
She often looked very grubby, so much so that merchants
are said to have winced when she entered their stores.
They dreaded her dirty hands touching their merchandise. I mean,
she would even purchase broken cookies at the store so
she could get a discount for them, and she would
(11:07):
return barry boxes to the market so she could get
a refund on them. So she was living very frugally,
very very cheaply, but she really wasn't taking great care
of herself. When she finally did relent and take her
clothes to the cleaners, she said to have insisted that
they only washed the bottoms of the skirts, so just
to take away the obvious mud and dirt, and she
(11:29):
would negotiate a reduced price for the partial cleaning. And
her children this is the part that really breaks my heart. Uh.
You know, her children had the wealthiest woman in America
for a mother, but they wore hand me downs. They
looked like, you know, ragamuffins and poppers. From like a
Dickens novel. Uh It said that as their winter clothes
were thin, she would line them with newspapers rather than
(11:51):
spend money on new coats and shoes would get the
same treatment. So if the kids had holes in their souls,
she would patch them cheaply or just line them with
paper uh to so that the hole wasn't completely open.
Her tight fistedness with her money really cost her son dearly,
So when Ned, as he was known, hurt his leg
(12:12):
while he was sledding, Hetty put off getting a medical
treatment for him because she didn't want to get a
bill from the doctor, and consequently, his leg never healed
correctly and it finally had to be amputated because he
developed gang green. So the nickname the Witch of Wall
Street came from the way Hetty carried herself in public.
(12:33):
As a woman, she was often confronted with people who
thought that they could take advantage of her, and one
of the ways that she dealt with that was by
being really shrewd and abrupt in her behavior. She was
very direct and very cautious in all of her dealings,
and additionally, she wore solid black most of the time,
and she wore were clothes that were a little bit outdated. Again,
(12:56):
she didn't like to buy new clothes, so she would
kind of be out of season in these older, you know,
dusty looking things. So you could see where people would
start calling her a witch based on, you know, sort
of the depictions of witches at the time. And it's
also said that she did not really have a great
personal smell, which is not really a huge leap of
logic given accounts of her less than stellar hygiene. Because
(13:20):
she was this enigmatic and unusual figure, lots of rumors
circulated about her. One of these was that she was
so mis early that she only had one dress. As
we've already mentioned, she definitely did have a penny pinching
streak about her. Yeah, and there's a story in biography
(13:41):
that was written about her, and the way the story
goes is that she was carrying two hundred thousand dollars
in bonds on public transportation. And again that is not adjusted.
That is two hundred thousand dollars in eighteen sixties money,
or this may have been a little bit later, but uh,
and when someone insinuated like, hey, that's not really wise
to carry that much wealth on public transportation. She insisted
(14:04):
that she could not afford to hire a private carriage
as they were suggesting, and that if they can, that's
great for them, but she couldn't. Just kind of funny,
you know, it's like the person sitting there with a
pile of money in their laps saying they can't afford
a taxi. In another story, she lived with a hernia
for years rather than going to the doctor to have
it looked at, and she only went once the pain
(14:25):
became really unbearable, and then she was infuriated that the
surgery was going to cost a hundred and fifty dollars.
She only agreed to it because she was in so
much pain, and allegedly she then tried to get away
without paying the bill to the doctor. Yeah, there's another
rumor that went around that she had a man's brain
in a woman's body, And in all likelihood that was
(14:48):
not intended to be taken literally by you know, a
person who initially said it. It was one of those
you know, uh, just kind of off handed comments. This
tidbit kind of slid into the rumor mill, and people
believed it as though it were a real thing and
not sort of just a commentary on her shrewdness and
her acumen in business, and it just added to that
(15:08):
which mystique that you know, she's a sort of almost
Frankenstein character that has, you know, male thinking in a
woman's body. But there's also a tinge of sexism in
the nickname. Clearly, a woman who could amass so much
of a fortune and stand toe to toe with men
when it came to making deals had to be a sorceress. Yeah,
(15:31):
her odd and unsettling demeanor really didn't help. The press
picked up the name and they started using the Witch
of Wall Street anytime they reported any financial news involving her.
And she was really worth reporting about. So a lot
of men on Wall Street and elsewhere we're just really
happy to be insulting about Hetty. And some of these
(15:51):
same men were the ones appealing to her for loans
and fiscal assistance when they ran into a crisis. This
was the case throughout her life. She's said to have
saved the city of New York on several occasions when
the city's coffers ran dry, and she even wrote a
check for one point one million dollars in the seven
Knickerbocker crisis as part of the emergency bank bailout that
(16:14):
was headed up by JP Morgan. Yeah, people would just
say horrible things about her and kind of sneaker behind
her back, but boy, they were really happy to take
her money when they needed it. Uh, as is often
the case. Uh. And so while Hetty was having these
spectacular successes in finance, her husband unfortunately was not. Uh.
He had been making investments through the years, just as
(16:36):
his wife had, but he just did not have her
skill at picking winners and really like, you know, assembling
a cohesive portfolio that was all smart moves. And the
two million dollars that he had entered their marriage with
had slowly dwindled down until it was mostly gone. Unsurprisingly,
a husband who could not manage his own money was
(16:57):
of no interest to Hetty. This if the fact that
he was from a good family and by all accounts
was a kind and affable man. She had already bailed
him out several times, and once she had to pull
all of our money out of the bank to avoid
it being seized to cover his debts. And at that
point enough was enough. And so in one after fourteen
(17:18):
years of marriage, she took the children and she moved
to New York. She kept the desk in an office
on Wall Street, incidentally in the bank where she moved
her money after the incident with Edwards debt collectors caused
her to leave her previous bank. She brought her lunch
of oatmeal or a plain ham sandwich with her every day,
and because she wasn't exactly enthusiastic about paying taxes on
(17:41):
the property she owned, she and the children never had
a consistent home. The three of them moved around a
lot to dodge debt collectors, and they stayed in cheap
flats over the years all over the city. They spent
time in Hoboken, the Bowery, Harlem, and Brooklyn. Anywhere that
Hetty could find a deal on cold water flat with
a low weekly rate. She would use aliases that most
(18:04):
of them, sometimes even registering under her dog's name. Yeah. Yeah,
there there's a debate over what the actual name of
her dog was, and it could just be that there
were multiple dogs. Some will list him as Dewey, Some
even list him as Money being his name, which to
me sounds a little urban legend. E uh, and I
think there's another name in the mix. But in any case,
(18:26):
her dog rented some flats for her. Ned her son
went to Fordham and he pursued a law degree. And
Hetty had always had in mind that he was going
to be the one that managed the family fortune after her,
and so after he graduated, she gave him a job
managing some of her properties in Chicago, and he did
quite well there, and so she eventually moved him to
(18:47):
Texas to see after interests there. His life away from
his mother gave Ned a little taste of freedom. He
started to like more extravagant living, and he did have
several dalliance is with some ladies. We can say they
had negotiable affections, that's a way to put it. Patty
(19:08):
was afraid that he would end up married to a
woman who was only after the family fortune, so she
begged Ned to promise her he would never get married.
He acquiesced, although his mistress, who was a former prostitute,
stayed with him and the pair lived as though they
were married to each other. Ned was euventually moved back
to New York by his mother to see after the business,
(19:29):
and unlike his mother, who still insisted on living in
cheap rental flats, he lived for a little while at
the Waldorf Astoria, and then he and his mistress moved
to adjoining townhouses near Central Park. And while ned did
not share his mother's taste in lodging or lifestyle, he
really did inherit her business acumen, and he proved himself
to be extremely adept at managing the family fortune. Neddie
(19:52):
and Edward's daughter, Sylvia, stayed unmarried and stayed with her
mother until she was thirty nine. At that point she
arad Matthew asked Wilkes, who was the great grandchild of
John Jacob Aster. The first Wilkes was in his sixties,
so he was much older than Sylvia. But Hett he
approved of the marriage because he had family money of
his own and promised that he would never touch Sylvia's. Yeah.
(20:16):
It said that Hetty didn't really like uh, Matthew, but
she liked that he was willing to stay out of
her family's money. Uh. And Sylvia's wedding is often pointed
to you as one of the few times that Hetty
kind of loosened her purse strings. She paid for the wedding,
and it said uh. And it said that she was
much more fiscally indulgent in the whole affair than just
(20:37):
about any other time she was in her life, and
prior to Sylvia meeting Matthew, Hetty had also paid to
host several dinners uh like places at the plaza so
that her daughter could invite eligible men and they could
have these sort of social events uh. And all of
this was really because Hetty had been quite concerned that
(20:57):
Sylvia wasn't married, And this sounds sort of a little ironic,
given what a fiercely independent woman Hetty herself was, but
even so, she had been married, and she seemed to
think that it was important for a woman to marry
at some point. Hetty died on July third, nineteen sixteen,
at her son's townhouse. She had gotten six several years
(21:17):
before with pneumonia, and at that point the papers had
reported that the Witch of Wall Street was really at
death's door, but she defied them and recovered. The illness
left her pretty frail, though, and she wasn't able to
work anymore afterwards, so she moved in with her son
and insisted that she pay him rent, but no more
than she would have paid at the more modest lodgings
(21:38):
she would normally have gotten for herself, and eventually after
falling into gradually poorer and poorer health. Uh, she had
had that that initial pneumonia that caused the death scare
when she was in her late seventies. I believe she
was seventy seven, and then she was approaching her eighty
second birthday, she had a series of paralytic strokes, and
(21:59):
so she died just a few weeks before her birthday.
When she died, she left behind a fortune of more
than a hundred million dollars, which she acquired over the
fifty one years that she had worked. She owned about
six thousand pieces of property across forty eight states, and
she held the deeds to theaters, railroads, hotels, office buildings,
(22:21):
and cemeteries. And she held the mortgages for more than
five hundred churches. Yeah, and again that is not an
adjusted amount. That was a hundred million in the nineteen
teens when she died. So I have seen various adjustment
estimates that are wildly different. Some that put her in
the low billions, uh, if that were today's money, and
(22:43):
some that put her like in the tens of billions.
So it's a pretty wide range. But basically she would
have been a billionaire. If if this was in today's
UH fiscal measuring. And so then Ned inherited a big
chunk of the money, and unlike his mother, he took
that money and he lived big. He was still, you know,
(23:06):
doing his job as a financier, but he spent plenty
of that money. He married his mistress that he had
promised his mother he would never marry, although it's it's
said that he also had dalliances with other women. Uh.
And he spent a huge chunk of money building mammoth
mansions in multiple places, and he staffed all of them
with a full complement of servants. He kind of made
(23:27):
up for all the lost time that they live very
poorly as children. And he gave a lot of money
to charity, and he also funded several scientific research projects.
He did some work with m I. T. And let
them even use some of his property to to do
some of their experiments. Ned died in nineteen thirty seven,
and at that point the estate went to Sylvia, who
was already a widow. She in turn left the entire
(23:51):
lot to various charities. So all that money that Hetty
had spent her life hoarding eventually was given away. Yeah,
it's one of those moments where you're you feel reasonably
confident that if she could, she was probably rolling in
her grave. Uh. But it's interesting to note. I mean,
she gets these this almost caricature grade description in anything
(24:13):
you read about her. That's why, Uh, I'm almost reluctant
to ever say anything with certainty about her, because it
seems like every report of her is colored by sort
of the press and this weird image that she had.
But I want to wrap up with a quote from
Hetty herself that I think is really telling, and it
it kind of uh pulls the whole thing together and
(24:33):
reminds us that yes, she was a very extreme person
with some very extreme behaviors, but she was still a
person and she uh she said this in response to
criticisms and bad press about her. Uh. And you know,
this is a woman who was listed in the Guinness
Book of Records as the world's greatest miser. But this
quote goes, My life is written down for me in
Wall Street by people who I assume do not care
(24:56):
to know one iota of the real heavy green I
am in earnest. Therefore they picture me as heartless. I
go my own way, I take no partner risk nobody
else's fortune. Therefore I am madam Ishmael set against every man.
So that's Eddy Green. And we had several requests for
her over the last year and a half, and I
(25:17):
presumed prior host did as well. But this is one
where when I got your outline, the name was so
familiar because of so many people who have requested it
that I was like, didn't we do this all right? Tracy?
And I kept like going back through all of our
archives and being like, did was this? It wasn't done.
If it was, we couldn't find it. Uh, So I'm
(25:40):
gonna go with it wasn't uh Heeddy, She's so fascinating.
I may want to dress as her for Halloween one year. Also,
it gives me an excuse to where, you know, kind
of an outdated Victorian gown, which I always love. Uh.
And now I have a bit of listener mail of
much different um tone, so I have to One is
(26:01):
a postcard from our listener Ann Marie, and she says,
dear Tracy and Holly, I love your show and a
ment to send cards from many trips instead, here's one
from my city, Alexandria, Virginia. We have an awesome apothecary museum.
It was active from seventeen ninety six to nineteen thirty three.
When its owners went bankrupt in the Great Depression, they
(26:22):
left everything behind. It's an amazing local highlight that too
few people have seen. They have original pepto abysmal. And
then there's a thing about armin Hammer that is obscured
by postal marks, uh and arsenic and mercury. But yeah,
it's a lovely picture of some of the labels on
some of these items in this apothecary museum, which is
(26:42):
super cool and is now on my list of places
I want to go. And then we also got a
really lovely parcel from our listener, Ian who is in Australia,
and he says, hi, ladies and clothes should be two
small bars of Kendall mint cake and a copy of
ten sixty six and all that. These go back to
a couple of episodes did a while ago, but it
took me a while to get stuff together. In the
(27:04):
episode on Mount Everest, Hillary intensing ate some mint cake
when they got to the top of Mount Everest. Kendall
mint cake is a type of candy from Kendall, England,
one manufacturer, Romney's, used to give it away to expeditions
such as the Mount Everest expedition for the publicity. Unfortunately,
I wasn't able to find the right brand here in Adelaide, Australia.
By the time it gets to you, it will probably
(27:25):
be pulverized. But that's how most explorers probably would have
eaten it in the field. Anyway, I wanted to say
I tried the mint cake. It was intense. Yeah, it's
a it's not cakey at all. That's for people that
think of cake like a spongey cake the way we
would bake a cake. That is not what it is
at all. It's really like a compressed bar of like
(27:48):
glucose and peppermint, and it is very intense. It's like
the York peppermint patty feeling, but it's all the way through.
There's no chocolate to temper it. So it was quite
an intense peppermint flavor. It was lovely. Uh and Ian
also asked about another postcard he sent us in relation
to um the Red Ghost of Arizona, and we did
get that, by the way, But anyway, thank you for
(28:09):
the treats. It was fun to try something it may
have scared my stomach a little bit with its intense
peppermint nous. I'm imagining it was like a slightly softer altoid. Well,
it's hard, so it's not as hard as an altoid,
But like I said, it's like compressed. It's almost candy like,
(28:30):
but it's in bar form and I can see where
it would give you some energy to huck it up
a mountain. Um, So that's a scoop. If you would
like to write to us, you can do so at
History Podcast at how stuff Works dot com. You can
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(28:51):
missed in History. If you would like to visit our
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your person, you can do that at missed in History
dot spreadshirt dot com. If you would like to research
a little bit about what we talked about today, you
can go to our parents site, House of Works. Type
in the word millionaire in the search bar, and you
will find an article called how to Make a million dollars.
(29:13):
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