Henry Baldwin Hyde

Who was Henry Baldwin Hyde?

Henry Baldwin Hyde, 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.

He led the company to construct the Equitable Life Assurance Building for its headquarters, completed on May 1, 1870. He pushed to have the first passenger elevators installed in what was then the tallest office building in the United States. He was a founding member of the Jekyll Island Club aka The Millionaires Club.

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 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 Waddel 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.