Real Dry Oatmeal

THE DAY THEY SHOOK THE PLUM TREE (314 pp.)--Arfhur H. Lewis--Harcourt, Brace & World ($5.75).

Sooner or later, the U.S. forgives most of its millionaires. It elects them Governors and Presidents and honors foundations established in their names.

But to be accepted, a millionaire must have a certain sense of social conscience or a gift for humility or an unmistakable faith in God. Hetty Green, lamentably, lacked all of these.

The Green fortune was one of the largest ever accumulated in America. It yielded an almost tax-free income of $7,000,000 a year at a time (1900) when the average individual income was $490, and at Hetty's death in 1916 it was estimated at anywhere from $100 million to $200 million. Hetty helped protect it by carrying her lunch--dry oatmeal--to the desk provided for her by the Seaboard National Bank. And she saw to it that not a cent or a spoonful of oatmeal went to charity.

Perfectly Good Nails. Arthur Lewis' lively and detailed study of Hetty and the fortune she fostered raises some interesting psychological questions. What meaning, for instance, did money have for a woman who carried her cash--often only a few crumpled dollar bills--in a handbag tied around her waist? Who avoided taking a bath, probably in order to save soap, and who laboriously extracted "perfectly good nails" from a broken sled and saved them for some vague future use? Who spent half the night looking for a 2-c- postage stamp she had mislaid? At a time when Hetty maintained a $30 million cash bank balance, she was living in two furnished rooms in Hoboken.

It was not that money was new to

Hetty; it had been in the family for years. She was a Robinson from New Bedford, and her grandfather had amassed a great whaling fortune. Growing up as an only child, Hetty learned the uses of money the way other youngsters learned their nursery rhymes. Her father used to prop her on his knee and read her the stock quotations. When Hetty Robinson, at 31, married 46-year-old Vermont Millionaire Edward Henry Green, she was already by inheritance one of the richest women in the U.S.; her bridegroom was said to have signed a statement renouncing all future rights to her fortune.

Old Clothes. Hetty and Henry remained together 14 years--or as long as it took them to consume most of his inheritance. After the separation, Hetty moved into a cheap Brooklyn flat with her two children. Sylvia, when she grew old enough, did the cooking; Ned served his mother as a messenger boy, delivering bonds and other securities to Hetty's out-of-town brokers. The richest woman in America bought her children's clothes from an old-clothes dealer. When Ned developed an infection in one leg, Hetty tried to have it treated without charge at a succession of public clinics. The leg finally had to be amputated, and Hetty had it buried in the family plot (where it was joined by the rest of the body 47 years later).

For all her eccentricities, Hetty was unquestionably a financial genius. Operating through two holding companies of which she was the sole stockholder, she bought up property (in Chicago, San Francisco, St. Louis) so shrewdly that by her death at 80 she had increased at least 20 times over the fortune she inherited. But no great American fortune has ever been dispersed quite so rapidly. In the nine years before his death in 1936, Ned spent it at the rate of $5,000,000 a year, much of it going into his collection of jewels and rare stamps and coins. When Sylvia, sole beneficiary under Ned's will, died with no close relatives in 1951, she bequeathed most of her fortune to schools, hospitals and churches--with a $35,000 bequest for the bookkeeper who had served the Greens for 36 years at a top salary of $75 a week.

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