September 21, 2019 • 29 mins
Today's classic from 2014 features Hetty Green. 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.
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Speaker 1 (00:02):
Happy Saturday, everybody. We have a new show launching on
our network. It's called She Makes Money Moves, and it's
hosted by Glamour Editor in chief Samantha Berry. It is
all about money, like its name suggests, especially how money
relates to women, and to go along with that theme,
Today's classic episode is our August episode on Hetty Green.
(00:24):
She was one of the wealthiest women in the United
States in her day, but her eccentric behavior and her
reputation as a miser led her to being disparagingly called
the Witch of Wall Street. Tune in for a peeka
She Makes Money Moves. At the end of today's episode.
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
(00:44):
of I Heart Radios How Stuff Works. Hello, We'll welcome
to the podcast. I'm from and I'm Tracy Vie Wilson
and um So, there's the stereotype. We talked about it
a little bit in our math episode, in our episode
about algebra about women lacking mathematical proclivity and not having
(01:08):
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 streets,
you know, heaviest hitting financiers, and she really opened the
door to the idea that women could succeed in finance.
(01:30):
But despite her immense success and 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 way or in one area, the areas
outside of her uh life that fell outside of like
(01:52):
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 help but be fascinated by. But there
is a certain sort of like, I don't know if
(02:12):
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 her early childhood and her birth and
her family. Hetty was born Henrietta Howland Robinson on November
(02:35):
twenty one, eighteen thirty four, in New Bedford, Massachusetts. Her
mother was Abby Holland, who could trace her family directly
back to the Mayflower, and her father was Edward Mott Robinson.
And Hetty's mother 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
(02:57):
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 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
(03:18):
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 really into money as a concept.
She opened her first savings account when she was only
(03:38):
eight years old. Uh, 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 and soon she was
really uh back with her male elders, reading the financial
(03:59):
pages at her 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 clothes and instead
invested the money and Hetty's mother passed away when uh
(04:20):
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 bachelor as
a widower. H. And there's some pretty significant speculation that
Hetty's motivation for following her father was to ensure that
(04:43):
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 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
(05:05):
and with a male relative managing things, and all of
that had been arranged for in the wills for both
of the wills in question. Yes, she actually was 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
(05:27):
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 of managing
any sort of wealth. But Henny 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
(05:50):
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 action to
break her 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
(06:14):
of her aunt's estate. Eventually, after much arguing 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
(06:34):
was a really really huge fortune. Yeah, she she had
plenty of money. I mean, it's one of 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 when that
was like uh. And as all of this legal back
and forth over her inheritance was dragging on, particularly the
(06:56):
stuff with her aunt's will, Hetty actually got married. She
Edward Henry Green, and this was in eighteen 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,
(07:18):
Green had to sign a prenup agreeing that he would
keep his hands off Hetty's money, which pre nup 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,
(07:41):
and this was a move that they made to escape
some of the bad press that Hetty 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 he had made for herself. Yeah, and this you know,
(08:03):
caused also some legal heat which 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
(08:25):
by Sylvia as she grew up. The two of them
and their children lived very well while they were in London,
and all of their living expenses came out of Edwards money.
So there had been a financial panic in eighteen seventy three.
And not long after that, just a couple of years later,
the Greens moved back to the US. Uh. You know,
(08:47):
the the concerns had died 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 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
(09:09):
that money right then. 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,
hett he opted for long term investments. She primarily invested
in bonds and real estate. She also invested in the railroads,
(09:31):
and she bought real estate primarily in Chicago, New York,
and St. Louis. As her fortune grew, she also expanded
her holdings well beyond these 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
(09:51):
she put her money behind anything. And it wasn't just
that she was a patient investor. She was also really frugal.
Even though she had at this point had amassed 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
(10:14):
or panics, she really didn't have to worry about it.
She could 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,
(10:34):
Hetty who had never borrowed money as a rule, always
stayed on solid ground. 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? Sure? And so now back
(11:04):
to Hetty. Uh. So she is at this point in
New York. She has really uh entrenched herself in this
lifestyle of trading 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.
(11:28):
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 unwashed, they would
eventually fall 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.
(11:50):
I mean, she would even purchase broken cookies at the
store so she could get a discount for them, and
she would 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
(12:11):
insisted that they only washed the bottoms of the skirts
so just to take away the obvious mud and dirt,
and she 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
(12:34):
from like a Dickens novel. H It said that as
their winter clothes were thin, she would line them with
newspapers rather than 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
(12:55):
really cost her son dearly. So when Ned, as he
was known, hurt his leg 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
(13:18):
the Witch of Wall Street came from the way Hetty
carried herself in public. 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
(13:40):
most of the time, and she wore wore clothes that
were a little bit outdated. Again, 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 all I said
that she did not really have a great personal smell,
(14:03):
which is not really a huge leap of logic given
accounts of her less than stellar hygiene. Because she was
this enigmatic and unusual figure lots of rumors circulated about her.
One of these was that she was so miserly that
she only had one dress. As we've already mentioned, she
definitely did have a penny pinching streak about her. Yeah,
(14:27):
and there's a story in biography 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 thousand
dollars in eighteen sixties money, or this may have been
a little bit later, but uh. And when someone insinuated, like, hey,
(14:48):
that's not really wise to carry that much wealth on
public transportation, she insisted 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
(15:08):
lived with a hernia for years rather than going to
the doctor to have it looked at, and she only
went once the pain 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,
(15:31):
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 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
(15:51):
and not sort of just a commentary on her shrewdness
and her acumen in business. And it just added to
that which mystique that you know, she's 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
(16:12):
of a fortune and stand toe to toe with men
when it came to making deals had to be a sorceress.
Yet 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
(16:34):
a lot of men on Wall Street and elsewhere we're
just really happy to be insulting about Hetty. And some
of these 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
(16:56):
a check for one point one million dollars in the
nineteens of a Knickerbocker crisis as part of the emergency
bank bailout that was headed up by JP Morgan. Yeah,
people would just say horrible things about her and kind
of snicker 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
(17:17):
was having these spectacular successes in finance, her husband unfortunately
was not. Uh. He had been making investments through the
years just as 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
(17:37):
marriage with had slowly dwindled down until it was mostly gone. Unsurprisingly,
a husband who could not manage his own money was
of no interest to Hetty, despite 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
(17:59):
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 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
(18:19):
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
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
(18:40):
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 a cold water flat
with a low weekly rate, she would use aliases that
most of them sometimes even registering under her dog's name. Yeah, yeah,
they're They're debate over what the actual name of her
(19:02):
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,
her dog rented some flats for her. Ned her son,
went to Fordham and he pursued a law degree, and
(19:23):
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
Texas to see after interests there. His life away from
his mother gave Ned a little taste of freedom. He
(19:44):
started to like more extravagant living, and he did have
several dalliances with some ladies. We can say they had
negotiable affections. That's a perfect way to put it. Hetty
was afraid that he would end up married to a
man who was only after the family fortune, so she
begged Ned to promise her he would never get married.
(20:05):
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 eventually moved back
to New York by his mother to see after the business,
(20:26):
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
(20:49):
and Edward's daughter, Sylvia, stayed unmarried and stayed with her
mother until she was thirty nine. At that point, she
married Matthew Astor Wilkes, who was the great grandchild of
John Jacob asked her. 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,
(21:13):
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
(21:33):
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
(21:54):
Sylvia wasn't married. And this sounds sort of a little
ironic given what a fiercely independent him and 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 town house. She had gotten six several
years before with pneumonia, and at that point the papers
(22:16):
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 afterward, 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 she would normally have gotten for herself, and eventually
(22:39):
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 as she was approaching
her eighty second birthday, she had a series of paralytic strokes,
and so she died just a few weeks before her birthday.
(23:00):
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,
and cemeteries. And she held the mortgages for more than
(23:21):
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
some that put her like in the tens of billions.
(23:43):
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,
doing his job as a financier. But he spent plenty
(24:06):
of that money. He married his mistress that he had
promised his mother he would never marry, although it is
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
up for all the lost time that they lived very
poorly as children. And he gave a lot of money
(24:29):
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
lot to various charities, so all that money that Hetty
(24:51):
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
you read about her. That's why, Uh, I'm almost reluctant
(25:13):
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
reminds us that yes, she was a very extreme person
with some very extreme behaviors, but she was still a
(25:36):
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
to know one iota of the real Hetty Green. I
am in earnest. Therefore they picture me as heartless. I
(25:59):
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 Hitty Green. Thank you so much for joining
us on this Saturday. If you have heard an email
(26:20):
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over the course of today's episode, since it is from
the archive that might be out of date now, you
can email us at History Podcast at how stuff Works
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media at missed in History, and you can subscribe to
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(26:47):
Miss Industry Class is a production of I Heart Radio's
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visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you
listen to your favorite shows. I was one serious emergency
away from being completely broke. What would happen is my
(27:10):
money would just sort of sit in my savings and
nothing would be done with it. We wanted to enjoy
certain things in life and not be stressed living paychecks
a paycheck. I do remember having nights where I was
up at night worrying about where my paychecks were coming
from when they were coming in. I'm Samantha Barry, theater
in chief of Glamor and the host of She Makes
(27:31):
Money Moves. I believe there's power, especially for young women,
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Consider this your invitation to join the conversation. You'll hear
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(27:52):
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(28:14):
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(28:37):
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(28:58):
women raise their voices and make money moves Who can't
afford to miss it. Oh, my dad's gonna be so
ashamed of me when this airsh
Happy Saturday, everybody. We have a new show launching on
our network. It's called She Makes Money Moves, and it's
hosted by Glamour Editor in chief Samantha Berry. It is
all about money, like its name suggests, especially how money
relates to women, and to go along with that theme,
Today's classic episode is our August episode on Hetty Green.
(00:24):
She was one of the wealthiest women in the United
States in her day, but her eccentric behavior and her
reputation as a miser led her to being disparagingly called
the Witch of Wall Street. Tune in for a peeka
She Makes Money Moves. At the end of today's episode.
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
(00:44):
of I Heart Radios How Stuff Works. Hello, We'll welcome
to the podcast. I'm from and I'm Tracy Vie Wilson
and um So, there's the stereotype. We talked about it
a little bit in our math episode, in our episode
about algebra about women lacking mathematical proclivity and not having
(01:08):
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 streets,
you know, heaviest hitting financiers, and she really opened the
door to the idea that women could succeed in finance.
(01:30):
But despite her immense success and 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 way or in one area, the areas
outside of her uh life that fell outside of like
(01:52):
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 help but be fascinated by. But there
is a certain sort of like, I don't know if
(02:12):
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 her early childhood and her birth and
her family. Hetty was born Henrietta Howland Robinson on November
(02:35):
twenty one, eighteen thirty four, in New Bedford, Massachusetts. Her
mother was Abby Holland, who could trace her family directly
back to the Mayflower, and her father was Edward Mott Robinson.
And Hetty's mother 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
(02:57):
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 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
(03:18):
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 really into money as a concept.
She opened her first savings account when she was only
(03:38):
eight years old. Uh, 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 and soon she was
really uh back with her male elders, reading the financial
(03:59):
pages at her 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 clothes and instead
invested the money and Hetty's mother passed away when uh
(04:20):
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 bachelor as
a widower. H. And there's some pretty significant speculation that
Hetty's motivation for following her father was to ensure that
(04:43):
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 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
(05:05):
and with a male relative managing things, and all of
that had been arranged for in the wills for both
of the wills in question. Yes, she actually was 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
(05:27):
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 of managing
any sort of wealth. But Henny 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
(05:50):
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 action to
break her 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
(06:14):
of her aunt's estate. Eventually, after much arguing 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
(06:34):
was a really really huge fortune. Yeah, she she had
plenty of money. I mean, it's one of 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 when that
was like uh. And as all of this legal back
and forth over her inheritance was dragging on, particularly the
(06:56):
stuff with her aunt's will, Hetty actually got married. She
Edward Henry Green, and this was in eighteen 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,
(07:18):
Green had to sign a prenup agreeing that he would
keep his hands off Hetty's money, which pre nup 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,
(07:41):
and this was a move that they made to escape
some of the bad press that Hetty 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 he had made for herself. Yeah, and this you know,
(08:03):
caused also some legal heat which 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
(08:25):
by Sylvia as she grew up. The two of them
and their children lived very well while they were in London,
and all of their living expenses came out of Edwards money.
So there had been a financial panic in eighteen seventy three.
And not long after that, just a couple of years later,
the Greens moved back to the US. Uh. You know,
(08:47):
the the concerns had died 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 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
(09:09):
that money right then. 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,
hett he opted for long term investments. She primarily invested
in bonds and real estate. She also invested in the railroads,
(09:31):
and she bought real estate primarily in Chicago, New York,
and St. Louis. As her fortune grew, she also expanded
her holdings well beyond these 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
(09:51):
she put her money behind anything. And it wasn't just
that she was a patient investor. She was also really frugal.
Even though she had at this point had amassed 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
(10:14):
or panics, she really didn't have to worry about it.
She could 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,
(10:34):
Hetty who had never borrowed money as a rule, always
stayed on solid ground. 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? Sure? And so now back
(11:04):
to Hetty. Uh. So she is at this point in
New York. She has really uh entrenched herself in this
lifestyle of trading 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.
(11:28):
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 unwashed, they would
eventually fall 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.
(11:50):
I mean, she would even purchase broken cookies at the
store so she could get a discount for them, and
she would 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
(12:11):
insisted that they only washed the bottoms of the skirts
so just to take away the obvious mud and dirt,
and she 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
(12:34):
from like a Dickens novel. H It said that as
their winter clothes were thin, she would line them with
newspapers rather than 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
(12:55):
really cost her son dearly. So when Ned, as he
was known, hurt his leg 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
(13:18):
the Witch of Wall Street came from the way Hetty
carried herself in public. 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
(13:40):
most of the time, and she wore wore clothes that
were a little bit outdated. Again, 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 all I said
that she did not really have a great personal smell,
(14:03):
which is not really a huge leap of logic given
accounts of her less than stellar hygiene. Because she was
this enigmatic and unusual figure lots of rumors circulated about her.
One of these was that she was so miserly that
she only had one dress. As we've already mentioned, she
definitely did have a penny pinching streak about her. Yeah,
(14:27):
and there's a story in biography 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 thousand
dollars in eighteen sixties money, or this may have been
a little bit later, but uh. And when someone insinuated, like, hey,
(14:48):
that's not really wise to carry that much wealth on
public transportation, she insisted 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
(15:08):
lived with a hernia for years rather than going to
the doctor to have it looked at, and she only
went once the pain 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,
(15:31):
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 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
(15:51):
and not sort of just a commentary on her shrewdness
and her acumen in business. And it just added to
that which mystique that you know, she's 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
(16:12):
of a fortune and stand toe to toe with men
when it came to making deals had to be a sorceress.
Yet 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
(16:34):
a lot of men on Wall Street and elsewhere we're
just really happy to be insulting about Hetty. And some
of these 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
(16:56):
a check for one point one million dollars in the
nineteens of a Knickerbocker crisis as part of the emergency
bank bailout that was headed up by JP Morgan. Yeah,
people would just say horrible things about her and kind
of snicker 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
(17:17):
was having these spectacular successes in finance, her husband unfortunately
was not. Uh. He had been making investments through the
years just as 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
(17:37):
marriage with had slowly dwindled down until it was mostly gone. Unsurprisingly,
a husband who could not manage his own money was
of no interest to Hetty, despite 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
(17:59):
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 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
(18:19):
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
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
(18:40):
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 a cold water flat
with a low weekly rate, she would use aliases that
most of them sometimes even registering under her dog's name. Yeah, yeah,
they're They're debate over what the actual name of her
(19:02):
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,
her dog rented some flats for her. Ned her son,
went to Fordham and he pursued a law degree, and
(19:23):
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
Texas to see after interests there. His life away from
his mother gave Ned a little taste of freedom. He
(19:44):
started to like more extravagant living, and he did have
several dalliances with some ladies. We can say they had
negotiable affections. That's a perfect way to put it. Hetty
was afraid that he would end up married to a
man who was only after the family fortune, so she
begged Ned to promise her he would never get married.
(20:05):
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 eventually moved back
to New York by his mother to see after the business,
(20:26):
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
(20:49):
and Edward's daughter, Sylvia, stayed unmarried and stayed with her
mother until she was thirty nine. At that point, she
married Matthew Astor Wilkes, who was the great grandchild of
John Jacob asked her. 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,
(21:13):
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
(21:33):
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
(21:54):
Sylvia wasn't married. And this sounds sort of a little
ironic given what a fiercely independent him and 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 town house. She had gotten six several
years before with pneumonia, and at that point the papers
(22:16):
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 afterward, 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 she would normally have gotten for herself, and eventually
(22:39):
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 as she was approaching
her eighty second birthday, she had a series of paralytic strokes,
and so she died just a few weeks before her birthday.
(23:00):
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,
and cemeteries. And she held the mortgages for more than
(23:21):
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
some that put her like in the tens of billions.
(23:43):
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,
doing his job as a financier. But he spent plenty
(24:06):
of that money. He married his mistress that he had
promised his mother he would never marry, although it is
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
up for all the lost time that they lived very
poorly as children. And he gave a lot of money
(24:29):
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
lot to various charities, so all that money that Hetty
(24:51):
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
you read about her. That's why, Uh, I'm almost reluctant
(25:13):
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
reminds us that yes, she was a very extreme person
with some very extreme behaviors, but she was still a
(25:36):
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
to know one iota of the real Hetty Green. I
am in earnest. Therefore they picture me as heartless. I
(25:59):
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 Hitty Green. Thank you so much for joining
us on this Saturday. If you have heard an email
(26:20):
address or a Facebook you are l or something similar
over the course of today's episode, since it is from
the archive that might be out of date now, you
can email us at History Podcast at how stuff Works
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media at missed in History, and you can subscribe to
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(26:47):
Miss Industry Class is a production of I Heart Radio's
How Stuff Works. For more podcasts for my Heart Radio,
visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you
listen to your favorite shows. I was one serious emergency
away from being completely broke. What would happen is my
(27:10):
money would just sort of sit in my savings and
nothing would be done with it. We wanted to enjoy
certain things in life and not be stressed living paychecks
a paycheck. I do remember having nights where I was
up at night worrying about where my paychecks were coming
from when they were coming in. I'm Samantha Barry, theater
in chief of Glamor and the host of She Makes
(27:31):
Money Moves. I believe there's power, especially for young women,
in talking about money, how much we make, how much
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Consider this your invitation to join the conversation. You'll hear
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(27:52):
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Clearly we're not going to be able to afford to
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There be highs. I think I saved my first hundred
(28:14):
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(28:37):
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hundred thousand dollars in student loan time. Money is the
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