The Richest Woman in America (25 page)

The purpose of all this spectacle was to enhance the social status of the hostess and increase her daughter’s chances of marrying well. At her own dinner parties on fashionable Bellevue Avenue, Annie Leary was known to tie red ribbons on everything from the chandeliers to the clocks to her white dress and red wig. As surrogate mother, she wished for Sylvie Green to meet the most eligible young men. At her Thursday afternoons, at lunches, and at teas she made certain that her charge was introduced to Newport’s best.

The last week of August, she invited friends to the largest fete
she had ever held and decorated her house to celebrate the event: she covered her walls with red silk, swagged lace curtains over fake windows, trailed artificial ivy over the roof, and hung a gold revolving electric fan from the ceiling to cool her guests. She lined her dinner table, which ran the length of several rooms, with as many friends and bachelors as she could, and then opened her house to one hundred guests for an after-dinner dance, hoping that Sylvie would find a suitable mate. To Annie’s relief, one young man made himself available and courted Miss Green. As soon as Hetty heard about it, she checked him out; a disappointed Sylvie was soon headed back to New York.

“I found that your young man is very nice and proper,” Hetty told her daughter in words later made public, “but if it wasn’t for his father, the world wouldn’t know a thing about him. He has never earned a dollar and doesn’t have the value of money.”

Hetty had only disdain for self-indulgent socialites and said to Sylvie: “
I want to say right here and now that you should never marry a society man with my consent. I want to see you happily married and in a home of your own, but I want you to marry a poor young man of good principles who is making an honest hard fight for success. I don’t care whether he’s got $100 or not, provided he is made of the right stuff. You will have more money than you’ll ever need and it isn’t necessary to look for a young man with money. Now you know my wish and I hope I won’t hear anything more about your young man in Newport who knows just about enough to part his hair in the middle and spend his father’s money.”

With that, Hetty went back to business. Others might fritter away their time and money on the conspicuous consumption of the Gilded Age, but she had scores to settle, buildings to buy, and railroads to run.

A
man could travel the state of Texas for hours and count no more human beings than fingers on his hand. As sparse with people as it was thick with cattle, it was as cold and dry as a desert in some parts; in others, as hot and damp as a swamp. Texas stretched 773 miles from east to west and 800 miles from north to south; at its farthest points, from Beaumont, on the border of Louisiana, to El Paso, on the border of New Mexico, the distance was greater than that from Chicago to New York.

Mexican cowboys, whose roots went back to Spain, rustled the longhorn cattle and drove them north toward the stockyards. Germans and Czechs settled the hill country, where the soil was rich, and farmed the earth. Southerners brought their slaves with them to the Confederate state, planted their favorite crops, and watched them flourish. Cotton sprouted like daisies in the rich soil. Cattle fed happily on the green grass. Coal mined underground fueled the trains bringing the cotton to market and the cattle to slaughter.

Six thousand miles of railroads crisscrossed the state. Some belonged to major lines, others to small independents that charged high fees to link the larger ones. Some ran at a profit; others went bust. Hetty Green spent four years negotiating to buy a bankrupt branch of the Texas Central Railway. Her insolvent part came with fifty-four miles of track and almost half a million acres of land. Now she wanted Ned to take charge of the line.

In addition, she was eager to own a branch of the Waco and Northwestern
Texas Railroad, a defunct piece that was of particular interest to Collis Huntington, her old enemy, who owned major amounts of track around the state. It would enable him to link his lines across Texas, connect them with grain states like Kansas and mining states like Colorado, and garner the lucrative fees for freight. Huntington was keen to own the branch. And so was Hetty. She wanted the fees,
wanted badly to outwit Huntington, and ordered her son to buy the bankrupt line.

Shortly before the opening of the World’s Fair, Hetty dispatched Ned to the Lone Star State. The young man carried out his mother’s orders with the ease of an experienced entrepreneur. Looking older than his age and more dignified than his boldness might suggest, he appeared in the railroad town of Waco a few days before the sale. Streetcars, some pulled by mules, others fueled by electric power, rumbled through the town; cotton farmers drove their wagons to the depot to ship their crops; settlers stopped to buy goods on their way out west; and everyone gathered at the Old Corner Drugstore, where the pharmacist Charles Alderton, born in Brooklyn, created his drink Dr Pepper. Ned took a hotel room and scouted around. In his amiable way, he chatted with the locals and sought out the railroad buffs.

On the morning of the auction, he lumbered up the steps of the brick courthouse where the sale was being held. His competitors were three other men, but it soon became clear that his chief rival was Julius Kruttschnitt, Collis Huntington’s representative. As soon as the bidding started, the auction took off at a fevered pitch. Kruttschnitt made the $800,000 opening bid and Ned immediately upped the offer. Kruttschnitt raised his hand at $1,250,000, certain he had won, but Ned increased his bid to $1,375,000. Only then did the auction screech to a halt: Huntington’s man lacked the authority to go higher. With the bang of the hammer, twenty-four-year-old Ned Green won the railroad. His success meant more than just the track and the quarter million acres around it: the win was a triumph for his mother over her nemesis. But the victory was short-lived.

Collis Huntington had as much antipathy toward Hetty as she had toward him. He quickly announced that the Greens could not own the line until they paid almost $100,000 in liens against the property that
he claimed were due him. Just as quickly, the state announced that the liens belonged to Texas. Ned responded that as far as he knew, there were no liens, but if they did exist, he had no interest in owning the railroad. Huntington tried to force the sale on Hetty and Ned with or without the liens.

The case continued for three years and made news around the country. In California, where the crafty Huntington had made his fortune at the expense of many farmers, the feelings against him were so strong that a group wrote to Hetty: if she came to California, they said, they would welcome her as a hero. In the meantime, to reward her for her victory they sent her a gift: a forty-four-caliber revolver, a holster, and plenty of cartridges. They hoped she would use it on Huntington. She almost did.

In the course of the dispute over the liens, Ned refused to make payments on the property. Angry and eager to prosecute, Huntington, who had built a mansion on Fifth Avenue, made his way down to Wall Street to visit Hetty. As the bushy-bearded man reached her desk, she offered him a hard-backed seat and some friendly conversation. But when he made threats against Ned, Hetty flashed her steely eyes and said: “Up to now, Huntington, you have dealt with Hetty Green, the business woman. Now you are fighting Hetty Green, the mother. Harm one hair of Ned’s hair and I’ll put a bullet through your heart.” With that, she reached for the gun she kept on her desk. The bald-headed Huntington ran out the door, leaving his top hat behind him.

Not much later, Ned returned the deeds. Huntington bought the branch, paying more than the original price. But by then Ned was busy with the other Texas railroad Hetty had recently purchased.

One month after the auction, Ned traveled north from Waco on a hundred-mile trip past endless fields of white fluff. At Terrell, a transit point for local cotton, cattle, and timber, the broad streets were filled with carts carrying bales of cotton, waiting for the buyers who made the town rich. With three thousand people, two banks, three weekly newspapers, nine churches, and three cotton gins, Terrell would become the headquarters for the northeast portion of the Houston and Texas Central Railway.

Ned arrived at the start of 1893, carrying a check from his mother
for a half million dollars. He deposited the funds like a New Year’s gift to the bank. Despite its grand name, the American National Bank had few assets. Stunned by the size of the check, and aware that their deposits had just tripled, its officers quickly made the young man a vice president.

The money was to be used to improve Hetty’s insolvent portion of the Houston and Texas Central. The new board of directors, which included her husband, Edward H. Green, and the Chemical Bank president, George G. Williams, renamed the line the Texas Midland Railroad and appointed Ned as president. Although older men joked that the road was little more than a pile of iron, the youngest railroad president in the country boldly announced he would turn it into “one of the best railroads in the Southwest.”

The Texas Midland consisted of fifty-two miles of north–south track running east of Dallas between the tiny communities of Roberts and Garrett. But Ned had bigger plans in mind. Years of his mother’s training had taught him to study every aspect of the subject, from the condition of the roadbeds to the state of the rolling stock to the rates to charge for freight. But he was sometimes too nervous to make a decision and telegraphed Hetty for advice. “You are on the ground,” she answered. “Mind your own business.”

Once when he was visiting his mother, she told him about the New Bedford whaling captain whose two sons served as officers on his ship. They carried the titles and wore the uniforms but stood aside while their father did the work. When their father died, the two young men tried to steer the ship, but, without experience, they lost control; the boat ran aground and all was destroyed. The story may have been apocryphal but the message was clear: Ned had to learn how to take command. “I sent you to Texas to learn the railway business,” Hetty said. “I can’t teach you by telegraph from New York.”

She wanted him to learn from his own mistakes and urged him to use the railroad money as he wished. When he returned to Texas, she treated him like an experienced sailor, allowing him to find his strength, giving him slack to make his own way. But Hetty also knew how a young sailor could go astray; when conditions seemed questionable, she tightened her control. In a note to his mother in August 1893 Ned made a poignant plea for her to loosen her grip:

The highlight of Ned’s trip to the fair was his visit to the United States government pavilion; he was mesmerized by the exhibit of valuable postage stamps, some worth as much as $1,000 each. Excited by the display, he purchased a full set of Columbus commemorative issues, the start of a stamp and coin collection that in his lifetime became one of the most rare and treasured in the world.

Within a year of Ned’s arrival in Terrell, he bought the old Opera House, turned it into offices, and created a handsomely furnished apartment. He lined the walls with books, hung a portrait of the actress Lillian Russell over his bed, and for his kitchen, furbished with everything up-to-date, he hired the best chef in the state to prepare his meals. But his special residence was his private train car, the “Lone Star”: “a palace on wheels,” said the
Dallas Morning News
.

To expand the railroad, he purchased additional track to the north and south, connecting the small Midland road with major lines that ran perpendicular to it, east to west across the state. Before he built the rail from Garrett to Waco, he rode the eighty miles on horseback to assess the valuable land along the right-of-way. Hiring experts, listening to the needs of his clients, he heavied up the run-down rails and replaced the worn-out ties, strengthened the sagging wooden bridges with steel, introduced electric headlights, improved the passenger cars, added café lounges and observation cars, built new stations, and provided customers with scheduled, on-time service.