Harman Oren Solomon. The Price of Altruism: George Price and the Search for the Origins of Kindness
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he should have gone. Erich was blessed with a contagious lust for life, and a
lovably mischievous twinkle. I always smile when I think of him.
Sue Llewellyn performed a masterful job copyediting, and I am extremely
grateful for her hawk eyes and erudition, as well as for Don Rifkin’s expert hand.
In England, Kay Peddle at Random House was a fantastically perceptive editor
and a friendly voice of encouragement. Thanks to Oren Dai, consummate
professional photographer, ptitim-maker, and friend. My editor, Jack Repcheck, a
wonderful writer in his own right, has been a constant source of wisdom and good
cheer, and has also become a friend. Thank you, Jack—I couldn’t have done it
without you, and I look forward to many more years of work together at Norton.
Back home, the Organism continues to be a lifeline. Jeno ax yakar, my partner in
crime: you are my source of sanity and insanity, shetavo alexa habraxa! My
second family: the one and only Trulner Hakalil—shaderrrr; Nitzan Hakoks who
did the unthinkable; Il Xamdelilah my animated chummus partner; Kata
Ha’anak—friend, poet, intellectual; Fecht, the arak lover; Horror, Ace,
Flotsenkranz, Salta and Shamna, and Ben Jaino (“aval lama bana’al?”)—I love
you all like brothers. To my smiling Taltal, thank you for your sweetness, for
Purim, and for everything else. Abba and Imma: Thank you so much in
everything, for everything, above everything—my most adorable, telephone
enthusiast, deeply loving parents. Finally, to my sister, Danz, and brother, Mish,
to whom this book is dedicated: You are the two most special, giving, and in a
deep sense selfless people I know, and I love you very very much.
Notes
PROLOGUE
1. When Bill Hamilton wrote about the event twenty years after it happened, his
memory played tricks on him. See Narrow Roads of Gene Land (Oxford: W. H.
Freeman/Spektrum: 1996), 325; Saint Pancras Cemetery Registrar files, January
22, 1975; “Weather Report,” Daily Telegraph, January 22, 1975.
2. I thank Ursula Mittwoch for her memories of the funeral, and Martin Collier of
the Camden Register Office for invaluable information.
3. The story about Saint Paul was recounted by John Maynard Smith to Ullica
Segerstr le, Defenders of the Truth: The Sociobiology Debate (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2000), 68.
4. Genesis 3:5; 4:9.
5. Charles Darwin, Notebook M, 1838.
6. Jack Repcheck, The Man Who Found Time: James Hutton and the Discovery of
the Earth’s Antiquity (Perseus, 2003), 6; Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species,
1st and 2nd eds. (London: John Murray, 1859).
7. For a description of the few partial accounts of George Price’s life and science,
see the acknowledgments.
CHAPTER 1: WAR OR PEACE?
1. Peter Kropotkin, Memoirs of a Revolutionist (London: Folio Society, 1978),
232.
2. Ibid., 232, 234.
3. Adrian Desmond, Huxley: From Devil’s Disciple to Evolution’s High Priest
(Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1997), 9, 11; Leonard Huxley, ed., Life and Letters of
Thomas Henry Huxley, 2 vols. (London: Macmillan, 1900); Julian Huxley, ed., T.
H. Huxley’s Diary of the Voyage of H.M.S. Rattlesnake (London: Chatto and
Windus, 1935).
4. Kellow Chesney, The Victorian Underworld (London: Temple Smith, 1970);
Thomas Henry Huxley, “The Struggle for Existence in Human Society: A
Programme,” Nineteenth Century 23 (February 1888), 161–80, reprinted in T. H.
Huxley, Collected Essays (London: Macmillan, 1883–84), 195–236, quote on
217; Desmond, Huxley, 11, 84.
5. Desmond, Huxley, 443–44.
6. Ibid., 361.
7. Kropotkin, Memoirs, 10, 238, 239.
8. Ibid., 237–40.
9. Quoted in Desmond, Huxley, xv. On the reception of Darwinism in England see
Peter Bowler, Evolution: The History of an Idea (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1989), 187–245.
10. The “X Club” was a dining club convened by Huxley and eight other
like-minded supporters of Darwin’s theory of evolution and academic liberalism.
It met regularly once a month between 1864 and 1893, and wielded a powerful
influence over British science. See Roy M. MacLeod, “The X-Club: a Social
Network of Science in Late-Victorian England,” Notes and Records of the Royal
Society of London 24, no. 2 (April 1970): 305–22.
11. Ibid. 424–25; V. Kovalevskii, “On the Osteology of the Hyopotamidae,”
Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society 163 (1873), 19–94. See also
Desmond Adrian, The Politics of Evolution: Morphology, Medicine and Reform
in Radical London (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989).
12. Besides Kropotkin’s own Memoirs see George Woodcock and Ivan
Avakumovich, The Anarchist Prince: A Biographical Study of Peter Kropotkin
(London: T.V. Boardman and Co., 1950), and the more scholarly Martin A.
Miller, Kropotkin (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976).
13. Colin Ward, Introduction to Memoirs of a Revolutionist, by Peter Kropotkin
(London: Folio Society, 1978), 8.
14. Kropotkin, Memoirs, 56; Ivan Sergeyevich Turgenev, Mumu (Moscow:
Detgiz, 1959).
15. This was the title of an influential treatise by Chernyshevsky, and later of
others by Tolstoy and Lenin.
16. Kropotkin, Memoirs, 35.
17. Ibid., 111, 80, 126.
18. Charles Darwin, The Voyage of the Beagle (Hertfordshire: Wordsworth,
1997).
19. E. Paley, ed., The Works of William Paley, 6 vols. (London: Rivington, 1830).
20. Charles Darwin, Zoological Notes, 1835. Much of Darwin’s written corpus
now exists on the Web at http://.darwin-online.org.uk, thanks to the labors of John
van Whye and collaborators at Cambridge University.
21. Some historians have questioned Darwin’s own claims about Malthus’s
influence on him. See in particular Silvan S. Schweber, “The Origin of the Origin
Revisited,” Journal of the History of Biology 10 (1977), 229–316. On England’s
leading evolutionists’ appreciation of Malthus see Robert M. Young, “Malthus
and the Evolutionists: The Common Context of Biological and Social Theory,” in
Robert M. Young, Darwin’s Metaphor: Nature’s Place in Victorian Culture
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 23–55.
22. Charles Darwin, The Autobiography of Charles Darwin (New York: W. W.
Norton, 1993), 120; Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species, 2nd ed. (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1996), 6.
23. Darwin, Voyage of the Beagle, 228–29; 471.
24. Darwin, The Origin of Species, 396; letter to J. D. Hooker (January 11, 1844),
The Correspondence of Charles Darwin, vol. 3 (1844–46), ed. Frederick
Burkhardt (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 2.
25. Kropotkin, Memoirs, 94
26. Ibid.
27. Ibid., 157.
28. Ibid., 201, 202. The best book on Russian anarchism is Paul Avrich, The
Russian Anarchists (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1967).
29. Helena Cronin, The Ant and the Peacock (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1991).
30. The Origin of Species, 197.
31. A pre-Origin phrase coined by Alfred, Lord Tennyson, In Memoriam A. H. H.
(1850).
32. Thomas Dickson has recently argued that “altruism,” a term coined by the
French positivist sociologist Auguste Comte in the early 1850s, filtered through
Victorian culture in interesting ways. Contra most previous interpretations he
claims that Darwin saw sympathy and love, not only selfishness and competition,
throughout the natural world. See Thomas Dickson, The Invention of Altruism:
Making Moral Meanings in Victorian Britain (Oxford: British Academy
Postdoctoral Fellowship Monographs, 2008).
33. Darwin also spoke of the “family” as a beneficiary, but “community” is the
term he used more often.
34. The Origin of Species, 196, 392, 164.
35. Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex, 1st ed.
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1871), 103.
36. Kropotkin, Memoirs, 254.
37. Ibid., 258.
38. Huxley letter to Frederick Dyster, November 25, 1887, quoted in Desmond,
Huxley, 557; Ronald W. Clark, The Huxleys (London: Heinemann, 1968), 109.
Huxley’s first child, Noel, had died, aged four, in 1860.
39. He had won the Royal, the Wollaston, and the Clarke; the Copley, the
Linnaean, and the Darwin still awaited him.
40. Desmond, Huxley, 572–73.
41. Huxley used this term in a lecture invited by the Prince of Wales at Mansion
House, January 12, 1887; The Times, March 18, 1888; Nature 37 (1888), 337–38.
42. On social Darwinism see Richard Hofstadter, Social Darwinism in American
Thought (Boston: Beacon Press, 1955); Mike Hawkins, Social Darwinism in
European and American Thought, 1860–1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1997); Peter Dickens, Social Darwinism: Linking Evolutionary
Thought to Social Theory (Philadelphia: Open University Press, 2000); Paul
Crook, Darwin’s Coat-Tails: Essays on Social Darwinism (Peter Lang, 2007).
43. Herbert Spencer, “Progress: Its Law and Causes,” Westminster Review 67
(April 1857).
44. Desmond, Huxley, 184. On Spencer see James G. Kennedy, Herbert Spencer
(Boston: G. K. Hall & Co., 1978); Jonathan H. Turner, Herbert Spencer: A
Renewed Appreciation (Sage Publications, Inc., 1985); Michael W. Taylor, Men
versus the State: Herbert Spencer and Late Victorian Individualism (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1992); James Elwick, “Herbert Spencer and the
Disunity of the Social Organism,” History of Science 41 (2003), 35–72; and Mark
Francis, Herbert Spencer and the Invention of Modern Life (Newcastle: Acumen
Publishing, 2007).
45. Coined in Spencer’s Principles of Biology (London: Williams and Norgate,
1864).
46. Henry George, Progress and Poverty: An Inquiry into the Cause of Industrial
Depressions, and of Increase of Want with Increase of Wealth—The Remedy
(London: Kegan Paul, 1885).
47. Wallace even wrote a textbook titled Darwinism: An Exposition of the Theory
of Natural Selection with Some of Its Applications, 2nd ed. (1889; reprint, New
York: AMS Press, 1975).
48. Alfred Russel Wallace, “Human Selection,” Fortnightly Review 48 (1890),
325–37. On Wallace see Martin Fichman, An Elusive Victorian: The Evolution of
Alfred Russel Wallace (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004); Ross A.
Slotten, The Heretic in Darwin’s Court: The Life of Alfred Russel Wallace (New
York: Columbia University Press, 2004); In Darwin’s Shadow: The Life and
Science of Alfred Russel Wallace (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002).
49. For Darwin, humans had reversed the usual “female choice” in nature, making
females the “chosen” and males the ones choosing.
50. Desmond, Huxley, 576.
51. Darwin used this image already in his essay from 1844, but it was made public
in C. R. Darwin and A. R. Wallace, “On the Tendency of Species to Form
Varieties; and on the Perpetuation of Varieties and Species by Natural Means of
Selection,” Journal of the Proceedings of the Linnaean Society of London.
Zoology 3 (1858): 46–50.
52. Huxley notes for Manchester address, quoted in Desmond, Huxley, 558.
53. Huxley to Foster, January 8, 1888, in Leonard Huxley, The Life and Letters of
Thomas Henry Huxley (London: Macmillan, 1900), 198. Quoted in Lee Dugatkin,
The Altruism Equation: Seven Scientists Search for the Origins of Goodness
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006), 19.
54. “The Struggle,” in Huxley, Collected Essays, 197, 198, 199, 200.
55. Ibid., 198, 199, 200.
56. Ibid., 204, 205. For a clear reading of Huxley on the evolution of sociality in
man see Raphael Falk’s review of Michael Ruse, ed., Thomas Henry Huxley:
Evolution and Ethics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009), in
Philosophia 38, no. 2 (June 2010).
57. Ibid., 212, 235.
58. Daniel P. Todes, “Darwin’s Malthusian Metaphor and Russian Evolutionary
Thought, 1859–1917,” Isis 87 (1987), 537–51, quotes on 539–40. See his broader
treatment in Darwin Without Malthus: The Struggle for Existence in Russian
Evolutionary Thought (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989). Also Stephen Jay
Gould, “Kropotkin Was No Crackpot,” in Bully for Brontosaurus
(Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1991), 325–39.
59. Quoted in Todes, “Darwin’s Malthusian Metaphor,” 542.
60. On Malthus see Patricia James, Population Malthus: His Life and Times
(London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1979); Samuel Hollander, The Economics
of Thomas Robert Malthus (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997); William
Peterson, Malthus, Founder of Modern Demography, 2nd ed. (New Brunswick,
NJ: Transaction, 1999); J. Dup quier, “Malthus, Thomas Robert
(1766–1834),” International Encyclopedia of the Social and Behavioral Sciences,
2001, 9151–56.
61. Todes, “Darwin’s Malthusian Metaphor,” 542, 540, 541–42. See also Thomas
F. Glick, ed., The Comparative Reception of Darwinism (Chicago: the University
of Chicago Press, 1988), 227–68. Also Engels letters to Lavrov, November
12–17, 1875, available at the Marx/Engels Internet Archive, http://marxists.org.
62. Darwin, Origin of Species, 53 [italics added].
63. Peter Kropotkin, “Aux Jeunes Gens,” Le Révolté, June 25, July 10, August 7,
21.
64. Kropotkin, Memoirs, 261–338.
65. Peter Kropotkin, “Charles Darwin,” Le Révolté, April 29, 1882.
66. “Without entering,” he added, “the slippery route of mere analogies so often
resorted to by Herbert Spencer.” Peter Kropotkin, “The Scientific Basis of
Anarchy,” Nineteenth Century 22, no. 126 (1887), 149–64, quotes on 238.
67. Ibid., 239.
68. Desmond, Huxley, 599. The oft-quoted phrase is: “the ethical progress of
society depends, not on imitating the cosmic process [evolution], still less in
running away from it, but in combating it,” T. H. Huxley, “Evolution and Ethics,”
in Evolution and Ethics and Other Essays (New York: D. Appleton and
Company, 1898), 83; Desmond, Huxley, 598.
69. T. H. Huxley, “Evolution and Ethics: Prolegomena,” in Evolution and Ethics
and Other Essays, 25, 27, 30. Smith had spoken of the “man within” in his Theory
of the Moral Sentiments (London: A. Miller, 1759; 1790), part 3, ch. 3; Oxford
Magazine 11 (May 24, 1893), 380–81, quoted in Desmond, Huxley, 598.
70. Peter Kropotkin, Mutual Aid: A Factor in Evolution (1902; reprint, Boston:
Extending Horizons Books, 1955), 4. Kropotkin thought Darwin, especially in his
Descent of Man, had emphasized the role of cooperation, whereas his followers
took to the narrower definition of the struggle for existence. “Those
communities,” Darwin wrote in the Descent, “which included the greatest number
of the most sympathetic members would flourish best, and rear the greatest
number of offspring” (2nd ed., 163). “The term,” Kropotkin added, “thus lost its
narrowness in the mind of one who knew Nature.”
71. This was George Bernard Shaw’s description of Kropotkin; Mutual Aid, xiv;
Desmond, Huxley, 564.
72. Kropotkin, Mutual Aid, 14, ix. Professor Karl Fedorovich Kessler, rector of
St. Petersburg University and chair of its Department of Zoology, had made this
claim already in December 1879, at a talk before the St. Petersburg Society of
Naturalists. Actually Kessler was to Kropotkin what Malthus had been to Darwin:
his “law of mutual aid”—which Kropotkin read in exile in 1883—having struck
him as “throwing new light on the subject” Kropotkin, Mutual Aid, x. Other
“mutual aid” supporters in Russia included M. N. Bogdanov, A. N. Beketov, A. F.
Brandt, V. M. Bekhterev, V. V. Dokuchaev, and I. S. Poliakov; see Todes,
“Darwin’s Malthusian Metaphor,” 545–46.
73. Kropotkin, Mutual Aid, 51, 40, 60–61; Kropotkin freely admitted that there
was much competition in nature, and that this was important. But intraspecies
conflict had been exaggerated by the likes of Huxley; it also often left all
combatants bruised and reeling. True progressive evolution was due to the law of
mutual aid.
74. Ludwig B chner, Liebe und Liebes-Leven in der Thierwelt (Berlin: U.
Hofmann, 1879); Henry Drummond, The Ascent of Man (New York: J. Pott and
Company, 1894); Alexander Sutherland, The Origin and Growth of the Moral
Instinct (London: Longmans Green and Company, 1898). Kessler, too, thought
that mutual aid was predicated on “parental feeling,” a position from which
Kropotkin was careful to detach himself. See Mutual Aid, x.
75. Kropotkin marshaled evidence from varied sources, especially liberally
interpreted archaeological evidence, to argue that man’s “natural” state was in
small, self-sustaining, communal groups.
76. Kropotkin, Mutual Aid, xiii.
77. Kropotkin, Mutual Aid, 75.
78. Daily Telegraph, July 5, 1895, quoted in Desmond, Huxley, 612.
79. Kerensky was there, and offered him a ministry in the new government, which
Kropotkin declined. Still, he did become active in party politics from the outside.
See Miller, Kropotkin, 232–37.
80. P. A. Kropotkin, Selected Writings on Anarchism and Revolution, ed. Martin
A. Miller (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1970), 324–33, quote on 327. The
meeting was recorded by Vladimir Bonch-Bruevich, an acquaintance of
Kropotkin and close associate of Lenin.
81. An attempt to lay the foundations of a morality free of religion and based on
nature, Ethics was published posthumously in 1922.
82. Kropotkin, Selected Writings, 336.
CHAPTER 2: NEW YORK
1. Intimations of this meeting exist in a letter from William Edison Price to Alie
Avery, June 12, 1914, Edison Price Lighting Company Family Archive (EPFA).
2. A Catalogue of Theatrical Lighting Equipment and Effects (New York: Display
Stage Lighting Co., Inc., 1923), quotes on 3, 50.
3. On Belasco see Craig Timberlake, The Bishop of Broadway: The Life and Work
of David Belasco (New York: Library Publishers, 1954). Madame Butterfly was
written by John Luther Long. A second Belasco play, his own The Girl of the
Golden West (1905), was also adapted for opera by Puccini.
4. “An Old Friend Back at Belasco; Where Warfield in ‘The Auctioneer’ Charms
with Blend of Comedy and Pathos,” New York Times, October 1, 1913.
5. “Mrs. Emma Addale Gage Avery: Once An Esteemed Teacher in Big Rapids,”
Bellevue Gazette, March 26, 1925.
6. Oberlin College, the first to admit women, was founded by the progressive
Reverend John J. Shipherd some years before he and a group of Congregational
missionaries came north to create a college in the midst of the wilderness of
southern Michigan. Recalling that the Mount of Olives had been a place of
learning and contemplation, they named the college and the town they built
around it “Olivet” and strove for a “harmonious Christian community.” See
Michael K. McLendon, “Olivet College: Reinventing a Liberal Arts Institution”
(research paper, Center for the Study of Higher and Postsecondary Education at
the University of Michigan, 2000).
7. Letter of recommendation for French teacher Clara Avery from W. N. Ferris To
Whom It May Concern, July 18, 1904, EPFA; Letter of recommendation for
Principal Clara Avery from G. A. Vail, May 17, 1905, EPFA.
8. The Preis family name is not a certainty, but both Annamarie Price and
Kathleen Price, as well as their cousin, Edison’s daughter, Emma Price, believe
that this might have been the case.
9. The censuses of all major American cities can be found at ancestry.com. W. E.
Price’s information is in the Chicago 1900 and 1910 census, Wards 8 and 12,
respectively, and in the New York 1920 census, ward 13. I am grateful to
Annamarie Price for this information.
10. Wedding invitation, Clara to Mr. William Edison Price, EPFA.
11. Morning Telegraph, June 4, 1914.
12. The names of the businesses with which Display had contracts are detailed in
the report of Saul Levy, Certified Public Accountant, February 29, 1928, EPFA.
13. Belle Hecht letter to Alice and William Edison Price, October 20, 1922,
EPFA.
14. “List of Patents Granted to W.E. Price & D.S.L.Co,” EPFA.
15. John Frederick Cone, Oscar Hammerstein’s Manhattan Opera House
(Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1966).
16. “Ordo Ab Chao: Suprema Council” (certification of William Edison Price
joining the Masons as “Prince of the Royal Secret 32nd”), March 24, 1925, EPFA.
17. Emma Avery letter to Clara Avery (her family continued to call Alice by her
given name), undated, EPFA.
18. “William E. Price Dies: South Broadway Resident Had Revolutionized
Theatrical Lighting With His Inventions,” February 22, 1927, unidentified
newspaper clipping, EPFA.
19. “Brokers Believe Worst Is Over and Recommend Buying of Real Bargains,”
New York Herald Tribune, October 27, 1929; “Very Prosperous Year Is
Forecast,” World, December 15, 1929.
20. Keynes was quoted in the New York Evening Post, October 25, 1929; Philip
Snowden was quoted in the Wall Street Journal, October 4, 1929. On the crash
see Harold Bierman, Jr., The Causes of the 1929 Stock Market Crash (Westport,
CT: Greenwood Press, 1998), John Kenneth Galbraith, The Great Crash, 1929
(Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1961) and Irving Fisher, The Stock Market Crash and
After (New York: Macmillan, 1930) for different, time-lapsed perspectives.
21. See Suzanne R. Wasserman, “The Good Old Days of Poverty: The Battle
Over the Fate of New York City’s Lower East Side During the Depression”
(Ph.D. dissertation, New York University, 1990); also Thomas Kessner, Fiorello
H. La Guardia and the Making of Modern New York (New York: McGraw-Hill,
1989).
22. Alice Avery Price letter to Mr. Zagat, Sunlight Realty Co., August 16, 1933,
EPFA; Clara Price letter to Remco Real Estate, April 28, 1933, EPFA; Alice
Avery letter to Mr. Zagat, February 14, 1933, EPFA; Rosendale and Cohen
Counselors at Law letter to Mrs. Price, April 13, 1932, EPFA; Alice Price letter to
Dr. Ralph Singer, June 18, 1934, EPFA; “Final Notice Before Suit,” New York
Times letter to Mrs. Alice Avery, November 13, 1934, EPFA.
23. Alice Avery Price letter to Remco Real Estate, Dec. 26, 1934, EPFA.
24. Alice Avery Price letter to Mr. Kelly, Transfer Tax Commission, Jan 30,
1935, EPFA.
25. Edison Price letter to Mr. Elias Aaronson, December 9, 1936, EPFA; Alice
Avery Price letter to Edison, undated, EPFA.
26. Wasserman, “The Good Old Days of Poverty.”
27. Alice Avery Price letter to Chief Inspector George G. Henry, September 14,
1934, EPFA; Alice letter to Transfer Tax Commission.
28. Gage H. Avery letter to Clara Avery, January 27, 1932, EPFA.
29. Alice Avery Price letter to Mr. Barzo, Nov. 16, 1932, EPFA.
30. See Robert C. Allen, Horrible Prettiness: Burlesque and American Culture
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991); Michelle Baldwin,
Burlesque and the New Bump-and-Grind (Golden, CO: Speck Press, 2004),
especially 1–16.
31. “Moss Weighs Ban on 14 Burlesques,” New York Times, April 30, 1937; “La
Guardia Backs Ban,” New York Times, May 3, 1937.
32. Alice Avery Price letter to Edison, July 9, 1936, EPFA.
33. See Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New
York (New York: Knopf, 1974), and Kenneth T. Jackson and Hillary Ballon, eds.,
Robert Moses and the Modern City: The Transformation of New York (New York:
W. W. Norton, 2007).
34. A good description of New York City in the 1930s can be found in Alan
Greenspan, The Age of Turbulence (New York: Penguin Press, 2007), 19–37.