Background
Hyde, Henry Baldwin was born on February 15, 1834 in Catskill, New York, United States. Son of Henry Hazen and Lucy Baldwin (Beach) Hyde.
Hyde, Henry Baldwin was born on February 15, 1834 in Catskill, New York, United States. Son of Henry Hazen and Lucy Baldwin (Beach) Hyde.
He led the company to construct the Equitable Life Assurance Building for its headquarters, completed on May 1, 1870.
lieutenant became, by the year of Hyde"s death, the largest life insurance company in the world. He pushed to have the first passenger elevators installed in what was then the tallest office building in the United States. 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 East. H. Harriman, Henry Clay Frick, Justice of the Peace 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 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 accept 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 World War World War II Ironically, while in France, Hyde married Leishman"s eldest daughter, Marthe.
The Equitable Life Assurance Society was renamed AXA Investment Managers Equitable Life Insurance Company in September 2004, after it was purchased by the French financial giant AXA Investment Managers. AXA Investment Managers Equitable is still one of the nation"s premier providers of life insurance, annuities and other financial instruments.
He was a founding member of the Jekyll Island Club aka The Millionaires Club.
Married Annie Fitch, 1864, 1 child.