Hyde was born in Catskill, New York on February 15, 1834, the descendant of William Hyde who emigrated from England probably in 1633 and three years afterward moved to Hartford with Thomas Hooker. He was the son of Lucy Baldwin (Beach) and Henry Hazen Hyde, a local merchant who later became a successful life insurance solicitor, executive, and broker with an extensive business in Boston, Massachussets
He had only the meager school training afforded by the village school in Catskill.
Young Hyde, at the age of sixteen, sought the larger business opportunities in New York City, where, in 1852, he obtained a minor clerkship with the Mutual Life Insurance Company, advanced to the position of cashier, and absorbed the insurance methods and standards common in the fifties. In 1859, on disclosing his plan to form a rival organization, he was summarily dismissed from the older company and succeeded in launching the Equitable Life Assurance Society.
With youthful audacity and keen business sense he rented a room, on the second floor, above the offices of the Mutual Life Insurance Company, borrowed office furniture, erected a sign so large as to obscure that of the Mutual Life beneath it, raised the one hundred thousand dollars necessary capital, and began to write life insurance. Owing to his own youth he arranged that he should be called vice-president and manager while the title of president was given to William C. Alexander, a brother of James W. Alexander, pastor of the Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church, with which Hyde had already connected himself.
For forty years he devoted all his exceptional energy and business ability to the Equitable Society. Before his death the company reported assets of over two hundred and fifty million dollars, a surplus of over sixty millions, and outstanding insurance of over a billion dollars. He not only determined all questions of policy but devoted himself to the supervision and encouragement of the active field force, to details of advertising, and to the careful management of the growing branches in the United States and abroad.
In 1865 the company paid the first dividend to its policy holders but three years later announced the Tontine plan, by which it could avoid the financial drain of paying annual dividends out of a surplus small on account of the company's youth and high expense rate. When this form of insurance proved very popular the business of the company increased rapidly, and the surplus grew from seven million in 1868 to ten million the next year, thirteen million the year after, and twenty-six million by 1874. The personal profit to the founder of the company increased correspondingly because, besides his salary, he enjoyed, until 1875, an additional annual compensation of two and a half percent of the surplus. Since, under the Tontine, and, later, under the deferred dividend policies, no accounting was required of the funds accumulated to pay the deferred dividend, the large surplus provided money for a wasteful enlargement of the company and for such other abuses as were common in the early stages of corporation development in the United States.
Under competitive conditions other companies adopted the system with some modifications. In 1877 the state of New York undertook an investigation looking to the control of such practices, but it was not until the eighties that the public began to realize the discrepancy between estimated returns on maturing Tontine policies and the sums actually paid, and also the increasing dissatisfaction on the part of lapsing policy holders.
Gradually Hyde had acquired a majority of the shares of the Equitable and controlled absolutely the company, of which he had become president in 1874 for a salary of $37, 500 with certain additional sums not clearly specified. In 1886 it was agreed that after his death the company should pay an annuity of $25, 000 to his wife, Annie (Fitch) Hyde. Four years before his death he sought to provide for the continued family control of his majority interest by creating a trust of 502 shares in favor of his son, who, however, lost control in the course of the struggle that brought about the New York investigation of 1905 by the Armstrong committee.
He was a founding member of the Jekyll Island Club aka The Millionaires Club.
He married Annie (Fitch) Hyde in 1864.
