Hetty (19 page)

In January of 1893, Ned arrived in Terrell, Texas, thirty miles east of Dallas, to assume his position as president of the newly christened Texas Midland Railroad Company. At twenty-four, Ned Green was terribly young and inexperienced for the grandiose title of president of a railroad. But then, the Texas Midland wasn’t much of a railroad. It wasn’t just the small length of track that made the railroad seem insignificant; it was clearly outdated and poorly maintained. The wooden bridges were sagging badly and
required frequent jacking; the cars were old and worn. Passenger and freight service on the line were unreliable.

Terrell today is part of the Dallas metro sprawl, but in 1893 it was a small, out-of-the-way town. Ned’s arrival, thanks to his mother’s notoriety and wealth, created immediate excitement. He made a grand entrance at the American National Bank carrying a certified check for $500,000, to be used to whip the railroad into shape. The deposit amounted to twice the existing assets of the bank. When the bank officers got over their shock, and confirmed the identity of this tall, cheerful, young man, they immediately made him a vice president of the bank.

Though the money was Hetty’s, when it came to decisions on what to do with a sagging railroad, she made it clear that her son was in charge. At first, for all of his confident bluster, Ned was terrified. When faced with a business decision, he told journalist James Morrow years later, he would immediately telegraph his mother in New York for advice. Her terse response: “You are on the ground. Mind your own business.” He would have to make his own decisions. He became so frustrated at her obtuseness that he traveled to New York to see her.

She asked him, “Suppose I were not here?” She drew from her New Bedford past an old whaling parable about a captain with two sons. “His sons were his mates,” Hetty said. “They wore uniforms and looked very spruce. But they didn’t take their turn at the wheel or stand watch. Finally the captain died, and no one on board being competent to navigate the ship, it went on the rocks. I sent you to Texas to learn the railway business. I can’t teach you by telegraph from New York. Go back and do the best you can.”

Once he got over his nerves, Ned made the most of his opportunity. He made himself a student of railroading, studying schedules and timetables and statistics. He hired a staff of seasoned, capable railroad professionals and gave them sufficient license to revamp and rebuild. And he took a personal interest as well. He expanded the line to establish and improve connections
to larger roads. He added three miles to the southern terminus of the railroad to improve its connections with other railroads. Then he pushed the northern end out by 14 miles, from the small hamlet of Roberts to the larger town of Greenville, and, finally, up to Paris, Texas, allowing for connections with large east-west railroads. Within four years, the Texas Midland’s trackage had increased to 125 miles.

With his staff of experts advising him, Ned replaced the old wooden bridges with more durable steel, added heavier-duty track, replaced rotting ties. “No expense was spared in making the road the leading model of the Southwest,” wrote S. G. Reed in his seminal volume,
A History of Texas Railroads.
“He was the first to use ‘burnt gumbo,’ a red brick-like substance baked from black waxy soil, as road ballast, because of its low cost and advantage of absorbing water without disintegration. His locomotives were of high speed type. The passenger equipment was the most luxurious in Texas. It included the first café lounge cars and observation sleepers to be operated in the Southwest, the equipment forming part of a through train between St. Louis and Galveston over the Frisco and [Houston and Texas Central]. Green also introduced the first locomotive electric headlights to be used in Texas, in 1894, and the first steel box car in 1900 and later, when the automobile had appeared, he was the first to adopt high speed gas-electric rail cars to meet that competition.”

Ned was popular with his upper-level staff, because he was eager to learn, without being pushy, and because he readily agreed to most of their suggestions for improvements. He was popular with the rank and file as well, from the engineers to the immigrant laborers driving spikes, because he was affable, personable, and never seemed above sharing a jovial greeting or conversation, regardless of a man’s rank or position. Nothing delighted him more than to board one of his own locomotives and ride the line in the cab beside the engineer.

Ned also showed a budding interest in science, one that would lead him into an incredible array of pursuits later in life.
The infestation of the cotton boll weevil from Mexico in the late 1890s threatened not only the cotton farmers, but the Texas railroads that depended heavily on cotton for freight revenues. As federal and state agriculture officials searched for a solution, Ned stepped in with an offer to build and outfit a demonstration farm to test possible remedies. The 400-acre farm, bought and outfitted for about $50,000, helped lead to new varieties of cotton more resistant to the weevil.

Hetty would never have spent this money herself, but she left him pretty well alone in Terrell. Still, Ned’s reputation for being an affable soft touch concerned her, and when she learned that requests were pouring in from Texas politicians and others for free passes on Texas Midland trains, Hetty responded with characteristic wit. She printed up biblically inspired cards for Ned to pass out in response to the incoming requests:

Ned’s prominence naturally earned him invitations to the best Terrell homes and mothers plotted to fix their daughters up with him. But Ned preferred a more unrestrained life. He settled first in a hotel in Terrell, and then moved to the second floor of a two-story building. The large suite became known informally as Green Flats. Ned lived there with several other bachelors, and proceeded to build for himself a sort of backwater Xanadu. He threw frequent parties with women and drinking, and it was the sort of place that might well not have been tolerated in conservative Terrell if not for his prominent position and bankroll. During his early days in Texas, Hetty had kept Ned living on wages
as slender as those he had drawn in Chicago. With his improvements the railroad prospered, and Ned was in a position to indulge and invest in his pleasures. At about the same time, a flame from the past—Mabel Harlow, the prostitute who had taught Ned the ways of life in Chicago—appeared, evidently by chance, in Texas. It was to lead to a long and colorful relationship.

About a year after moving to Terrell, Ned moved to Dallas. Dallas was close enough for him to keep tabs on the Texas Midland, but far enough away and in a large enough city that his arrangement with Mabel Harlow wouldn’t raise too many eyebrows. He took rooms on the second and third floors of a brick building known as the Cullem and Boren Store, at the corner of Elm and Griffin Streets, in a business section of town. He outfitted the rooms as living quarters and installed Mabel Harlow as his “housekeeper” at $200 per month. While her skills with a duster and mop remain undocumented, Ned seemed satisfied with the arrangement, which they kept for years. It’s not clear when Hetty became aware of Mabel Harlow. She disapproved of the relationship, but as it became obvious that Mabel was not going to be just some passing fancy, Hetty grew to tolerate her—coldly—referring to her as “Mabel Harlot.” At least, Hetty reasoned, this extended fling would keep Ned away from the altar. Hetty may not have liked the idea of her son living with a prostitute, but it was better than having him married off to some respectable girl from Chicago or Dallas and giving her a legal claim on the fortune.

In the 1890s, the Texas Midland Railroad counted among its directors one somewhat surprising name—Edward Henry Green, Hetty’s husband. Though Hetty had separated from Edward, the couple never divorced. From time to time, Sylvia and Ned visited him in New York and Bellows Falls and Hetty and Edward shared some holiday meals together. The Texas Midland directorship was a small bone for a man whose financial activities had once been so robust, and it probably served to help keep him paid up at the Union Club. Certainly, Edward
had no money of his own left to invest with. He was broke, living out his once-grand life reading books in quiet studies and enduring one small humiliation after the next.

In September of 1893, at the time that Hetty and Ned were brawling with Huntington, Edward might have picked up a copy of the
Brooklyn Daily Eagle
and learned of his own demise. “Mrs. Green has been a widow for many years and her daughter is about 20 years old,” the article stated. “Since the death of her husband Hetty Green has become a financier of unusual shrewdness. She has indicated by her actions that she has small faith in brokers and that if she wants anything done the best way is to do it for herself.”

Even those who knew she wasn’t a widow knew that Edward was out of the picture financially. In March 1889, the World noted that Edward “lost all his fortune in the crash of 1884, and since then he has received no assistance from his wife to rehabilitate himself. He is still 6 feet and 6 inches in height, but his financial figure has dwindled almost to nothing. He comes down on the Street two or three times a week, but his flyers are of the most modest description.” Five years later, little had changed, except perhaps for girth, age, and lack of mobility. “Her husband sometimes assists her in a purely advisory capacity,” the Times reported on Christmas Day in 1894. “He is seventy years old, weighs more than 250 pounds, and it is exceedingly difficult for him to get about. He spends most of his time at the Union Club.”

While Edward sank ever deeper into obscurity, Hetty continued her surge into national prominence, aligning her fortunes with one of the nation’s most powerful and visible banks. From its squat, columned, Greco-Roman facade to its roster of second-and third-generation blue-blood directors, the Chemical National Bank, located at 270 Broadway, bespoke solidity, security, and sober, conservative prosperity. These were all qualities that Hetty craved after the Cisco failure, and demanded of the institution she would entrust with the guardianship of her millions. Founded in 1824, the bank was an offshoot of the New York
Chemical Manufacturing Company, which a year earlier had begun manufacturing nitric acid, blue vitriol, refined camphor, and other industrial chemicals, as well as paints, dyes, and drugs.

In 1844, the bank was reorganized as independent from the manufacturing company, but retained the “Chemical” in its title. It prospered from the start. The shareholders list represented the cream of New York finance and society—Cornelius Vanderbilt, Anthony Drexel, Russell Sage, and a long list of Roosevelts were among the shareholders and depositors. Annie Leary, Hetty’s closest friend, did her banking there. Like Hetty, the bank established a reputation for maintaining large cash reserves in good times and bad, and for keeping its head when everyone else lost theirs. When the financial panic of 1857 prompted banks to stop payments in gold, the Chemical earned national respect for being the only major bank that publicly vowed to continue using gold until its reserves ran out. After an initial run, the bank’s reserves actually increased as depositors, impressed by the show of confidence, switched their assets to Chemical.

The cashier during the 1857 crisis, thirty-one-year-old George Gilbert Williams, was a rising young star who had started as an office boy. By the time Hetty made her first deposit in 1885, Williams had been an employee for more than forty years, and president for eight. By then, his personal reputation for hard work, thrift, and financial sobriety were so intertwined with the bank’s reputation that many people looked on him as the physical embodiment of everything the Chemical National Bank was and wanted to be.

It required a special individual to deal with Hetty in any business or legal relationship, let alone to serve as her banker, and Williams was more than up to the task. Furthermore, Williams and Hetty seemed genuinely to like and respect one another. Williams exhibited a rare mixture of deference and toughness that Hetty found appealing. He was a dapper, fastidious man with a high starched collar, thinning gray hair, kindly eyes, and a Victorian beard-and-mustache combination that cascaded over
the lips, reducing his mouth to a mere hint of a line. He was a man of firm and unchanging habit. Each day, regardless of the weather, he eschewed carriages and walked the several miles from his home on West Fifty-eighth Street to the Chemical Bank. Each summer he rented the same room at the same hotel in Manhattan Beach, Brooklyn (The Oriental), from which he emerged at precisely six o’clock in the morning for a swim in the ocean, before catching the ferry to lower Manhattan.

Like Hetty with her Robinson ancestors, Williams had descended from an old Rhode Island family, including Roger Williams, founder of the state, and William Williams, who signed the Declaration of Independence. But to Hetty, his greatest attribute was his unwavering, almost obsessive politeness. In his professional dealings, Williams exhibited a level of courtesy that even then was considered old-fashioned. To Williams, politeness was more than just kindness; it was sound business. “Politeness pays,” he would tell his employees. “A grain of politeness saves a ton of correction. No institution is too important to ignore the laws of courtesy.” Williams no doubt had his largest depositor in mind when he said, “I have observed that many a tattered garment hides a package of bonds and that gorgeous clothing does not always cover a millionaire.”

Hetty was a shrewd enough judge of character to know the difference between those behaving out of conviction and those simply being obsequious in the presence of wealth. And because Williams, in essence,
was
Chemical National Bank, his insistence on comportment infiltrated every layer of the bank. “It is the invariable rule of the Chemical National Bank that every employee, from the humblest clerk to the highest official, shall be courteous to everyone,” he said. This philosophy created a welcoming atmosphere for Hetty that went above and beyond merely stroking a major depositor. The employees at Chemical went out of their way to accommodate Hetty, and to avoid raising eyebrows at her unorthodox habits. They made no issue about her old clothes, or about her ways of economizing, which
at times included arriving at the bank with a metal pail containing dry oatmeal, to be mixed with water and heated on a radiator for lunch, so as to avoid a restaurant tab.