Hetty: The Genius and Madness of America's First Female Tycoon
Charles Slack
Language: English
Pages: 288
ISBN: 0060542578
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
When J. P. Morgan called a meeting of New York's financial leaders after the stock market crash of 1907, Hetty Green was the only woman in the room. The Guinness Book of World Records memorialized her as the World's Greatest Miser, and, indeed, this unlikely robber baron -- who parlayed a comfortable inheritance into a fortune that was worth about 1.6 billion in today's dollars -- was frugal to a fault. But in an age when women weren't even allowed to vote, never mind concern themselves with interest rates, she lived by her own rules. In Hetty, Charles Slack reexamines her life and legacy, giving us, at long last, a splendidly "nuanced portrait" (Newsweek) of one of the greatest -- and most eccentric -- financiers in American history.
This P.S. edition features an extra 16 pages of insights into the book, including author interviews, recommended reading, and more.
have it, to appear against another will found after my death. I wish her to shew this will, made when I am in good health for me, and my old torn will made on the fourth of March, in the year of our Lord one thousand eight hundred and fifty, to show also as proof that it has been my lifetime wish for her to have my property. I therefore give my property to my niece as freely as my father gave it to me. I have promised him once, and my sister a number of times, to give it all to her, all excepting
“a friend of the assignee,” the Tribune reported: “Mr. May could wind up the affairs of the depositors in four weeks, but he prefers, for the sake of all, to nurse matters, and is willing to devote a year to bringing things out straight. Not a man of the depositors has asked for his money; on the contrary, most of them are willing that the assignee should take his time about payment.” The line about “not a man” may or may not have been a sly reference to Hetty’s gender, but the article closed
Avenue in the vicinity of Central Park became known as Millionaire’s Row. Testimonies to wealth and privilege rose in block after block of French manor houses and royal palaces and opulent châteaux, each built by and for some industrial captain whose family a generation or two earlier had been trapping furs, butchering meat, tilling soil, or keeping shop. There were Rockefellers on Fifth Avenue, and Flaglers and Guggenheims, and Russell Sage, a grocer-turned-financier, and Hetty’s archenemy,
IF MY DAUGHTER IS HAPPY Economics is complex enough to fill a thousand fat textbooks and as simple as the law of supply and demand. Through the ages, whether the commodity was tulips in Holland, gold in California, or cash on Wall Street, speculation has made millionaires and paupers, created and destroyed fortunes in the blink of an eye. But the most secure fortunes have always belonged to those with the discipline and foresight to stay out of the fray, those who supply speculators with
and could not resist spreading information, especially if reporters were offering cash for tips. The building’s dumbwaiter was a natural conduit; the women of the building would exchange gossip with those on other floors. Hetty, aware of this, began holding informal daily briefings near the dumbwaiter, to be sure that her messages were spread around. “Mind you, although I say I’d like to kill all reporters, I wouldn’t murder them. But, oh! I would like to pull their hair a little bit now and