The Richest Woman in America (27 page)

Frank Baum set his story on the impoverished Kansas prairie, where an almost biblical series of plagues tested the people and challenged their survival: across the Midwest, farmers suffered as freight fees rose and agricultural prices fell while grasshoppers devoured the crops, blizzards withered new plantings, and drought desiccated much of what was left. Despite the sense of despair drawn in the lined faces of the citizens and across the somber landscape, the book’s heroine, the orphaned girl Dorothy, sparkles—a spirited symbol of the country itself.

As the book begins, we are introduced to Dorothy’s family: her grim Uncle Henry, stern and solemn in his long beard and rough boots, and her Aunt Em, thin and gaunt and never smiling, living in a one-room house furnished with only a rusty-looking stove, a cupboard, a table and chairs, and beds. Looking out from the doorway, Dorothy “could see nothing but the great gray prairie on every side. Not a tree nor a house broke the broad sweep of flat country.” The sun had baked the ground and burned the grass and blistered the paint on the house. Everything, including the people, was dull and gray.

When a cyclone hits the farm, Dorothy is swept up in a swirl of conflicting interests, dropped into a world of naïveté; she has arrived in the Land of Oz. The girl is bewildered: the fertile landscape, filled with “stately trees bearing rich and luscious fruits,” beautiful flowers, and colorfully feathered birds, she learns, is bewitched by the evil forces of East and West. The little girl yearns to go back to Kansas. No matter how enchanting other places may be, she says in all-American earnestness, “There is no place like home.”

With no road map to follow, she is told she will learn the way back from the Wizard of Oz. Adorned with silver slippers, alighting on a path of gold, she is at once, unknowingly, treading on the currency conflict as she sets off to the Emerald City. There, she hopes, she will find the answers to her problems from the all-knowing Wizard. Along the way she encounters personalities who embody the characteristics of the Midwest: the unemployed worker, turned by industrialists from human to automaton and personified in the Tin Man, is eager to be a human being back on the job; the undervalued, simple-minded farmer, symbolized by the Scarecrow, isn’t even aware that he has a wellspring of good common sense; the fearful citizen, come to life in the Cowardly Lion, discovers he has the courage to lead. This ragtag band became Dorothy’s own Coxey’s Army marching to Washington for help.

In the Emerald City, the money-obsessed capital where greenbacks are printed and government officials paid off, all who enter wear green-colored glasses and all that they see, from the people’s faces to the food they eat, is tainted by money and tinted green. At the Emerald Palace, the Wizard of Oz reveals himself as little more than a circus trickster who came into power carried aloft in a hot-air balloon. He is the true politician promising all things to all people.

A country-fair promoter, the Wizard sits in his office, avoiding the public, hidden behind a paper screen. Like Mark Hanna, the rich political operative from Ohio who orchestrated McKinley’s campaign, he is the puppeteer pulling the strings, presenting a different image to each person he meets: a man with an enormous head to Dorothy; a lovely lady to the Scarecrow; a monstrous beast to the Tin Man; a ball of fire to the Cowardly Lion. But once the curtain is pulled back, the real president is revealed: a decent man who doles out good advice,
telling the Scarecrow that “experience is the only thing that brings knowledge”; counseling the Cowardly Lion that “true courage is facing danger”; warning the Tin Man that having a heart can be painful.

Scary adventures and strange escapades ensue, but with the help of a golden cap, each character in the book finds his or her rightful place. The wise Scarecrow takes charge of Washington; the brave Lion becomes king of the beasts; the hardworking Tin Man rules the West. And Dorothy, minus her silver slippers, finds her way back to Kansas. On the farm, content to be with her family, she turns to her aunt. “Oh, Aunt Em!” she exclaims, “I’m so glad to be at home again!”

It took years until the real financial crisis was over, the gold standard set, and the country on solid ground. Not until 1900, when
The Wizard of Oz
was published, could America say it was at home again.

H
etty Green never seemed at home anywhere: not in New York, or Chicago, or New Bedford, where she still retained her Howland properties. Despite the hundreds of acres and numerous buildings she owned in Massachusetts, the town had embittered her memories. She visited every few years and never stayed longer than several days.

Peripatetic, she constantly scuttled from east to west inspecting her assets. In 1894 she crisscrossed the country by train from Boston to Dallas to St. Louis to San Francisco, with constant stops in between. “I traveled for two years and stayed at forty hotels,” she said. Her holdings included thousands of acres of valuable land, mortgages on factories, ranches, churches, and “blocks of businesses, houses, theatres, livery stables, hotels, restaurants, farms, and nearly everything you could mention—all good mortgages,” she vowed.

With her properties spread far and wide, her headquarters, she declared, were in Vermont. In the summer of 1895 she was in Bellows Falls. Coming in from her garden, wearing a tidy dress, couching a basket of tomatoes in her arms, she encountered a reporter, who asked why she was there. “I’m here because
folks can’t find me out without coming a long way,” she replied. “I’m here for my husband’s rheumatism, and I’m here because my daughter isn’t strong.” But “more than all,” she added, “I’m here for the reason that I’m a born farmer and I love to work the ground and raise crops.” Indeed, she said, with a
wry air, everything her family had eaten for the past month had been raised on their farm: “We live on chickens, and ducks, and turkeys, and eggs.”

Like her daughter, she claimed she much preferred the slow pace of the countryside to the frantic rush of New York. For all the hostility she felt from some of the local people, she did appreciate the small town and the friends she had there. But the burden of wealth prevented her from remaining in Vermont. “I’ve other interests, but some day I’m going to live here,” she said. “If I hadn’t had a fortune in real estate in town left to me, you may be sure I’d never been driven from Eden to the noisy city—either for comfort or to make money.”

“Time is money,” Hetty told another reporter, “and I never leave my business for long.” Most of the time, her business was at the Chemical Bank on lower Broadway. Wearing a neat black dress and small black hat, gold brooch, small diamond earrings, and a diamond and emerald ring, she was spied by a writer as she was speaking to a clerk. Her “
tall and stately” figure, delicate features, and refined bearing impressed the viewer. Nothing about her, he said with surprise, matched the stories of the terrible Hetty Green.

Although she regularly spent her days downtown, her nights were unpredictable, scattered around Brooklyn, New York, and New Jersey. Lodging at a daily rate at boardinghouses or hotels, leaving behind none of her belongings, she worried about the tax man, fretted over letters begging her for money, and feared being physically attacked. She tried to remain anonymous and listed herself under assorted names: Mrs. Norton, Mrs. Hickey, Mrs. Nash, Mrs. Warrington, Mrs. Dewey. As soon as her identity was revealed she hurried away.

Or so it was thought. In December 1895 she was discovered at the St. George in Brooklyn. The posh new apartment hotel on Pineapple Street boasted the largest dining room in the country and its own electric plant. She and her daughter had registered as Mrs. and Miss Gray, the head clerk said; for several weeks they occupied one of the most expensive suites.

The day the newspaper published the story, Mr. Nible went on, Hetty became an object of curiosity in the hotel. Recognized by other guests and the staff, she was followed by inquisitive eyes in the foyer and bombarded with stares in the dining room. The next morning,
under the watchful gaze of breakfasters, she finished her coffee and rolls, paid her bill, and bustled off. She and Sylvie would eat their Christmas dinner with Edward Green, who was staying at the Union Club, the clerk revealed. They may have all dined in New York. But more than once the clerk was covering up her whereabouts; although he confided she had left, she was still residing at the hotel.

Many believed Hetty refused to establish a permanent residence in New York to avoid paying personal property taxes to the city. Despite her protests, New York was where she made most of her money. Yet for years she scurried from place to place, evading the tax man like the mouse eluding the cat. And like modern New Yorkers who claim residence in other states, she was hardly alone in her efforts to escape the payments.

Even prominent people like Theodore Roosevelt avoided payment by taking an oath and “swearing off” their personal property. In 1895 New York’s acting tax collector announced that Jay Gould had declared his home to be in New Jersey; William Vanderbilt’s payment had not been seen; and two thousand people in Brooklyn were delinquent. Assessed by New York for $1.5 million, Hetty appealed to the city mayor to have the tax commissioners indicted. She swore she was not a resident of New York and showed that she paid her taxes in Vermont. With records to prove her innocence, she won her case.

      
A
s frequent a litigant as she was an investor, lawsuits were her yellow brick road to justice. Although they were often costly, she pursued them with religious zeal. She studied every detail with her attorneys and sought advice from her friends, among them George Williams of the Chemical Bank, Clarence Kelsey of the Title Guarantee and Trust Company, Chauncey Depew of the New York Central and Harlem Railroad, Russell Sage of Wall Street fame, and her husband, Edward Green. She claimed she never took on a lawsuit if she did not think she could win. “If my friends and lawyers tell me there is no chance for me,” she said, “I would rather compromise than take the chance of succeeding by fighting.”

Some legal cases were settled quickly; others stretched out for years. Just before the start of 1895 she handed the New York Superior
Court a complaint that the
Times
called “one of the most remarkable papers ever filed in court.” It covered ten thousand typewritten pages and was estimated to contain three million words. The suit, which had started earlier in Illinois, against the executors of her father’s estate, charged the men with reckless expenditures and bad investments. She demanded an accounting. The case dragged on for years.

The trustee Henry Barling accused of her being crazy. “She certainly talked rationally enough,” countered a reporter covering the case, “convincingly and without the slightest show of vindictiveness. She did a great deal of business yesterday, and was as keen and shrewd in making her business as ever she was in her life.” Added her lawyer, William Slayton: “Mr. Barling is welcome to the opinion that Mrs. Green is crazy.
She is the brightest woman financier in this country today.”

Perceptions of Hetty were as varied as those of the Wizard of Oz. Readers of the
Brooklyn Eagle
chuckled over the paper’s view: Mrs. G: “I’ve been reading of that Hetty Green. I think she must be crazy.” Mr. G: “Why, she’s worth 40 millions.” Mrs. G: “Then she can’t be crazy. She’s only eccentric.” Said Hetty, “Probably I am a bit eccentric, but everybody has some peculiarity.”

Opinions of her appearance were poles apart. In early January 1895 she was portrayed in the
Boston Evening Transcript
: “The Richest Woman in America, Mrs. Hetty Green, went to a public office in New York the other day on business, but she was dressed in such shabby clothes that a policeman was about to direct her to the charity bureau.” “This eccentric woman,” the paper said, “certainly proves that the possession of money and its use for personal adornment are not inseparable in the makeup of womankind.”

Another day, walking briskly to her lawyer’s office during the lawsuit, she wore a dark green dress, a velvet-trimmed cloth cape, and a violet-speckled hat. Two reporters who saw her offered their views: “Stories about her cheapness of clothing are true,” wrote one. “As she walked down Cedar Street she looked for all the world like some old servant going to market, prepared to carry home coffee, sugar and soap in her arms.” The other observed: “She was not fashionably dressed, as things go nowadays, but she was certainly comfortably and appropriately clad.” Both agreed on one thing: she stood straight,
her step was as sprightly as that of a forty-year-old, and she looked more than a decade younger than her sixty years.