Hetty Green: Financier and “The Wealthiest Woman in America.”
Hetty Green was good at math but she did not go to college. She didn’t learn about stocks, bonds or investing at a business school. Nor did she ever work in a bank or for a financial firm. But when she died in 1916 at age 82, she had built a financial empire worth more than $100 million – the equivalent of $2.8 billion dollars in today’s money.
During her long career, she made loans to city governments during financial crashes and saved companies from bankruptcy. Her financial prowess rivaled those of the top male industrialist financiers of the day, including Jay Gould, J. P. Morgan, John Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie and Corneilus Vanderbilt.
Hetty Green had a reputation as a shrewd, sharp and formidable businesswoman at a time when the only businesspeople were businessmen. In an age when respectable women never went out unaccompanied by a man or another woman, she would hire cabs and often take public transportation alone to visit bankers and potential borrowers. Her direct never-take-no-for-an-answer style challenged the status quo when women had barely any legal rights, no voting rights and were expected to be submissive.
Unlike most of the rich who lived in luxury during the Gilded Age, her personal style was austere, plain and simple in keeping with her Quaker faith. When she began appearing in public dressed entirely in black, newspaper editors had a field day. She was described either as “the witch of Wall Street,” in articles that described her boisterous arguments with bankers or “the Queen of Wall Street” in stories where her deals rescued railroads and municipalities from going under.
Henrietta Howland Robinson was born into wealth on November 21, 1834, in New Bedford, Massachusetts. Both sides of her family - the Robinsons and the Howlands - were part of the financial elite in a city reputed to be the richest in America. New Bedford was the center of the country’s booming whaling industry which supplied the oil to heat homes and drive manufacturing and industry.
Hetty’s father, Edward, worked for his wife’s father in a firm that had grown and prospered with the boom. The company, called Issac Howland Jr. and Company, loaned money to shipowners for their whaling voyages, negotiated deals with merchants and acted as a powerbroker in many transactions related to whaling industry.
As recounted in The Richest Woman in America, by Janet Wallach, Hetty got her first lessons in business by reading the stock tables, bond reports and news of oil prices in the newspapers to her grandfather, Gideon Howland, whose eyesight was failing. He encouraged Hetty to read financial articles and when he needed to write letters, he dictated them to Hetty. In the process she began learning how the family business was run.
When Gideon died, Hetty’s father, Edward Robinson, took over the company. By then, Hetty was a teenager and the only child. It was evident that the fortune her parents were amassing would someday be hers. With money a constant topic of conversation at home, Hetty eventually became her father’s companion on his daily rounds. For Hetty it was an apprenticeship and a master class in business. In addition to visiting warehouses, inspecting ships, negotiating with merchants and cutting deals, her father also taught her how to trade commodities and learn the difference between stocks and bonds. In Wallach’s book, Robinson is quoted as saying, “There is nothing better than this sort of training. A girl acquires the habit of keeping track of every cent and gets the most value for every dollar she spends.”
Money became Hetty’s North Star and combined with her family’s Quaker upbringing and its emphasis on frugality and simple tastes, it set the stage for her own personal and business style. Unlike most heiresses, she was not a socialite and the thought of spending lavishly on clothes and jewelry was anathema to her.
As she grew older, her lack of interest in finding a husband worried her family. To appease them, when she turned 20, she attended a series of high society balls in New York but came away with no prospects for marriage.
In 1865 on a trip to Boston, she met Edward Green, a businessman who had made his fortune in China. He was 44 and Hetty was 30. When he asked her father for her hand in marriage, Hetty’s father agreed. Despite Hetty’s feisty nature and sharp math skills, Robinson was still not confident that she could make the right decisions for herself. He believed she should marry someone strong and independently wealthy to protect her and the family’s assets. To seal the deal, Green signed a pre-nuptial agreement ensuring that the family money would be safe from any financial calamity that might occur.
Shortly after they were engaged that year, Edward Robinson died, leaving Hetty a vast fortune estimated at between $5 and $7 million. In addition, her Aunt Sylvia had also passed away bequeathing money to her niece. But there were strings attached to the estates. Most of the money was put into trusts, which could not be touched and Hetty was only able to inherit the income from the trust’s investments. Hetty was outraged that she would not be able to have access to her entire fortune and make more money from it. Hetty contested her aunt’s will and an acrimonious and lengthy lawsuit followed.
In 1867, Hetty and Edward Green married and left the United States to live in London for six years. The couple had two children but Hetty found time between raising them to develop her investment skills. She did not believe in speculating on risky stocks or trendy investments. When others were getting burned, she was making a killing by buying railroad stocks and Treasury bonds. During one year, her portfolio turned a profit of more than $1.25 million.
“I believe,” she said “in getting in on the bottom and out on top…When I see a good thing going cheap because no one wants it, I buy a lot of it and tuck it away…I keep them until they go up and people are crazy to get them. That is, I believe the secret of successful business.”
The Greens returned to the States in 1873 and lived between New York City and Edward’s hometown of Bellows Falls, Vermont. In 1885, their marriage was tested when Edward Green owed more than $700,000 to a bank in which he was a partner, jeopardizing its solvency. Hetty had to pay off his debt before the bank would allow her to transfer her own assets of $26 million to another bank. Incensed by his bad decisions, Hetty never forgave her husband and the couple lived apart for the rest of their lives.
After decades of conservative investing in land and financial instruments, Hetty had accumulated huge amounts of cash, which came in handy during the Panic of 1907. She lent more than $1 million to the city of New York and was a lender of last resort to many individuals and firms, according to the New York Times. While many of her contemporary male financiers did the same, Hetty Green was again the only businesswoman with deep enough pockets to come to the country’s rescue.
During her lifetime Green was portrayed as “ruthless” in business and parsimonious to the point of depriving her own son of medical treatment. In an obituary after her death, it was revealed that she had given generously to many charities and supported individuals without publicizing her activity. She was aware of the often-harsh portrayal of her in the newspapers but she was unconcerned about her image.
“I am in earnest. Therefore they picture me as heartless,” she said. “I go my own way. I take no partner, risk nobody else’s fortune.”
Green continued working until she died at age 82 in New York City.
© 2023 Alice Look
Executive Producer, Remarkable Women Project