William Hill Hunt: American Scoundrel

William Hill Hunt, 1900

Just at that moment, timing couldn’t be better – the turn of the switch of the twentieth century –

Successful American, an illustrated monthly magazine featuring “sketches and portraits of representative men and women,” made its debut.  

Women were largely confined to society notes at the back of each issue. Politicians and educators appeared here and there. The real focus was railway magnates, bankers, industrialists; the men who used to be called capitalists. Their stories dominated the pages of Successful American, with each picture accompanied by a caption that said it all:

One of Our Most Experienced Engineers, and Identified with the Gigantic Developments of the Period.

Introducer of the Automatic Weighing Machine, and Connected with a Host of Industries.

A Hustler in the Best Sense of the Term – A Modern American Full of Vim and Energy.

Known as One of the Leading Lights in the Financial and Railroad World.

And in December 1902, here came William Hill Hunt:

The Pioneer of American International Banking, A Progressive and Successful American.

Hunt was born in Alabama in 1864. His father, an overseer (that would be slaves), died the same year. The son started his career as a grocery store clerk. By the age of 21, he had established two banks in Selma and made valuable connections. Somehow he met Mattie Mitchell, daughter of a Minneapolis physician who had amassed wealth as a director of two Midwestern railways.

In 1894 Mattie and William married and moved to San Antonio where he worked as a banker. Almost certainly the proximity to Mexico led to his interest in making money there. While agriculture still dominated the Mexican economy, manufacturing, mining, and other businesses were taking off as the government encouraged foreign investment.

William was on the move.

A son, Lester, arrived in 1894 and a daughter, Siloma, in 1897. A few years later, William moved his family to New York City. They lived at The Alimar, a fancy new apartment house on the Upper West Side.

The Alimar, 925 West End Avenue, Manhattan
(The Architectural Review, June 1903)

In June 1901, William Hill Hunt established the Mexican Trust Company, the first U.S. financial institution to operate a branch banking system in a foreign nation. Mr. Hunt studied the problem for eight years before figuring out how to break the European monopoly on international banking, according to Successful American.            

In 1902, Hunt changed the company’s name to the International Bank and Trust Company of America.

A year after that, the bank went into receivership with a $1 million loss.

A year after that, Hunt reorganized the bank as the Pan-American Banking Company.

And in 1905, the state of Illinois indicted him for larceny. Accused of accepting deposits as an officer of his company when he knew it was insolvent, Hunt also falsely used the name of General Nelson A. Miles, a veteran of the Civil War and Spanish-American War, to lure investors. The judge set bail at $5,000.

The loyal Mattie set to work lobbying the Illinois governor for a pardon, and finally succeeded. After William got out of jail, she asked her father to help her husband restart his career. William established the United States Industrial Company and hoped to make another fortune through trade with Argentina. When one plan failed, Hunt moved onto another.

Announcement of Hill's 1916 business endeavor: "William Hill Hunt,
of New York, devised the scheme of organization and made a trip to
Argentina to discuss the plan with merchants and importers. . ."

Meanwhile Mattie left in 1912, taking the children. Her cousin had arranged to have William tailed and it turned out he had been unfaithful. Next, a mining engineer came out of the woodwork to testify that Hunt had “misbehaved” in Cuba in 1896 and described his “notorious” conduct with women. After two years of working with a court-appointed referee, Mattie received a divorce decree.

The man from Alabama continued to scheme until he had to stop. When he died in 1928 the New York Times reported politely that his banking operations “brought him a good deal of notoriety.”  

An inglorious end for a “successful American.” And, in the end, a truly American story. A young, ambitious banker who overvalued social status, William Hill Hunt became cagey and deceitful, lying recklessly to his own investors. He thought himself invincible.

Yet Hunt certainly was a man of his times. Mustachioed and packed into an Edwardian waistcoat, like so many others he launched himself greedily into the new century.

Mattie's story will follow. 

See also April 20 post about William Hunt's sister, Mamie Hunt Sims, and her book Negro Mystic Lore.

https://www.throughthehourglass.com/2016/07/william-h-hunt-american-scoundrel.html

The Story of Negro Mystic Lore

Advertisements for the book appeared exclusively in To-morrow Magazine, an early 20^th century journal whose writers enthused about Socialism, atheism, and woman’s suffrage.

The “talented authoress,” an Alabama native named Mamie Hunt Sims, wrote with “a Pathos and a Sociological Insight” and “knew every touch of Negro Philosophy,” according to the promotion.

In passing, I assumed that Negro Mystic Lore, published in 1907, was written by a black woman.  Perhaps it explored stories told by former slaves and analyzed their African antecedents.

But now, book in hand, I realize that my assumption was absurd.  Negro Mystic Lore comprises 18 stories written in what linguists today define as African American Vernacular English.  In her foreword, Sims wrote that she hoped “to show the real kindly feeling that existed between the people of the South and the better class of the negroes.”

A character named Uncle Jake, based on a real person according to Sims, is the main voice in a series of interactions between “de collured pussuns” and “white folkies.”  He is a grotesque caricature:

You chillun is too interruptin enny how and ef you all don’t hush I gwine to hush my mouf and I ain’t gwine to tell you nuthin. I did low ter tell you some two or three nannydotes dis mawnin in case hits too naturally hot ter work dat garden an I mout as well be erestentin you chillun as gwin ter sleep under dat fig tree.

According to the sole notice the book received, Mrs. Sims originally created the stories as entertainment for her friends. “Her work is at once a memory of the ‘Old South’ in its pride and beauty, and a suggestion of the new and greater South flushed with the dawning of more glorious days,” wrote the reviewer.

The title page bears the quotation: “Dem dat has must give to dem dat hain’t.”

How did Negro Mystic Lore come to be published? The likely answer is that it was a favor granted by Parker Sercombe, editor of To-morrow Magazine who also ran a press.

The self-aggrandizing Sercombe (see earlier post), stood accused of many things but not bigotry. He had railed against South Carolina Senator “Pitchfork” Ben Tillman, a white supremacist who led a KKK-style terrorist group called the Red Shirts. He expressed solidarity with J. Max Barber, editor of the newspaper Voice of the Negro, who fled a white mob in Atlanta in 1907.

But it turns out that one of Sercombe’s friends, William Hill Hunt, had a sister named Mamie Hunt Sims who wanted to publish her stories. Sercombe obliged.

William Hill Hunt, born in Alabama in 1864, grew up in a family with some wealth in its past. He became successful in business at a young age. In 1902, he founded the Mexican Trust Company with a group of American investors. Around this time, Parker Sercombe also was active in banking in Mexico.

Like Sercombe, Hunt proved slippery. In 1905, the state of Illinois accused the latter of violating its banking laws when he accepted deposits from a bank that he knew was insolvent. Sentenced to Joliet Penitentiary, eventually he received a pardon from the governor.

Mamie Sims dedicated Negro Mystic Lore to her brother, thanking him for his support and encouragement.

The book is a nasty relic of racism written 44 years after the end of the Civil War. But it is typical of its time. During the Progressive Era, America’s white upper class perpetrated outrageous indignities against black people in books, music, and theater. The insults reflected the deep-seated, rationalized prejudices of educated whites.

During the Theodore Roosevelt administration, performers at the White House included Mary L. Leech, a soprano who performed a selection of “coon songs.” The German diplomat Baron Speck von Sternburg and TR’s Secretary of State, John Hay (once President Lincoln’s private secretary) were among the guests who applauded “You’se Just a Little Nigger, Still Youse Mine All Mine” and “Is Dat You?”

Whose dare? Whose dare?

Oh who’s dat knockin’ at my door?

Is dat you, Sambo?

Is dat you, Sambo?

Now you better stop dat knockin’ at de door!

Although Negro Mystic Lore was published by an obscure press and scarcely advertised, my bet is that it was read widely.

Mamie Hunt Sims, frontispiece of Negro Mystic Lore

https://www.throughthehourglass.com/2016/04/the-story-of-negro-mystic-lore.html