Henry Baldwin Hyde
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Henry Baldwin Hyde, (1834-1899), founded The Equitable Life Assurance Society of the United States in 1859. It became, by the year of Hyde's death, the largest life insurance company in the world.
Hyde sought to guarantee that his son James Hazen Hyde would continue the family’s control of the company after his death. James Hazen Hyde was twenty-three when he inherited the majority shares in the billion-dollar Equitable Life Assurance Society in 1899. Five years later, at the pinnacle of social and financial success, he made one fatal miscalculation, and set in motion the first great Wall Street scandal of the twentieth century.
On the last night of January 1905, James Hazen Hyde (vice president of Equitable from 1899 to 1905) gave one of the most fabulous costume balls of the Gilded Age. Falsely accused through a media smear campaign initiated by board directors E. H. Harriman, Henry Clay Frick, J.P. Morgan and company President James Waddell Alexander of charging the $200,000 party to his company. Hyde soon found himself drawn into a maelstrom of allegations of his corporate malfeasance. The shocking revelations almost caused a Wall Street panic, and resulted in an investigation of the entire insurance industry by the State of New York.
Frick attempted to wheedle James Hazen Hyde's removal from the United States to France by seeking an appointment for him to become United States Ambassador to France. Frick had engaged a similar stratagem when orchestrating the ouster of John George Alexander Leishman from the presidency of Carnegie Steel a decade beforehand. In that instance, Leishman had chosen to accepte the post as ambassador to Switzerland. Hyde, however, rebuffed Frick's plan. Hyde did, nonetheless, remove to France where he served as an ambulance driver during World War I and lived until the outbreak of World War II. Ironically, while in France, Hyde married Leishman's eldest daughter, Marthe.
The Equitable Life Assurance Society was renamed AXA Equitable Life Insurance Company in September 2004, after it was purchased by the French financial giant AXA.
AXA Equitable is still one of the nation's premier providers of life insurance, annuities and other financial instruments.
[edit] References
After the Ball: Gilded Age Secrets, Boardroom Betrayals, and the Party That Ignited the Great Wall Street Scandal of 1905
Patricia Beard, Harper Collins 2004
ISBN 0-06-095892-8
