Harman Oren Solomon. The Price of Altruism: George Price and the Search for the Origins of Kindness

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Malthus was already dead when Russian Nights became a best seller in the 1840s.

The novel’s author, Prince Vladimir Odoesky, had created an economist antihero,

driven to suicide by his gloomy prophecies of reproduction run amok. The suicide

was cheered on by the Russian reading masses: After all, in a land as vast and

underpopulated as theirs, Malthusianism was a joke. England was a cramped

furnace on the verge of explosion; Russia, an expanse of bounty almost entirely

unfilled. But it was more than that. “The country that wallowed in the moral

bookkeeping of the past century,” Odoesky explained, “was destined to create a

man who focused in himself the crimes, all the fallacies of his epoch, and

squeezed strict and mathematical formulated laws of society out of them.”

Malthus was no hero in Russia.

And so when the Origin of Species was translated in 1864, Russian evolutionists

found themselves in something of a quandary. Darwin was the champion of

science, the father of a great theory, but also an adherent to Malthus, that

“malicious mediocrity,” according to Tolstoy.

How to divorce the kind and

portly naturalist Whig from Downe from the cleft-palated, fire-breathing,

reactionary reverend from Surrey?

Both ends of the political spectrum had good

grounds for annulment. Radicals like Herzen reviled Malthus for his morals:

Unlike bourgeois political economy, the cherished peasant commune allowed

“everyone without exception to take his place at the table.” Monarchists and

conservatives, on the other hand, like the Slavophile biologist Nikolai

Danilevsky, contrasted czarist Russia’s nobility to Britain’s “nation of

shopkeepers,” pettily counting their coins. Danilevsky saw Darwin’s dependence

on Malthus as proof of the inseparability of science from cultural values. “The

English national type,” he wrote, “accepts [struggle] with all its consequences,

demands it as his right, tolerates no limits upon it…. He boxes one on one, not in

a group as we Russians like to spar.” Darwinism for Danilevsky was “a purely

English doctrine,” its pedigree still unfolding: “On usefulness and utilitarianism is

founded Benthamite ethics, and essentially Spencer’s also; on the war of all

against all, now termed the struggle for existence—Hobbes’s theory of politics;

on competition—the economic theory of Adam Smith…. Malthus applied the

very same principle to the problem of population…. Darwin extended both

Malthus’s partial theory and the general theory of the political economists to the

organic world.” Russian values were of a different timber.

But so was Russian nature. Darwin and Wallace had eavesdropped on life in the

shrieking hullabaloo of the tropics. But the winds of the arctic tundra whistled an

altogether different melody. And so, wanting to stay loyal to Darwin, Russian

evolutionists now turned to their sage, training a torch on those expressions

Huxley and the Malthusians had swept aside. “I use this term in a large and

metaphorical sense,” Darwin wrote of the struggle for existence in Origin. “Two

canine animals, in a time of dearth, may be truly said to struggle with each other

which shall get food and live. But a plant on the edge of a desert is said to struggle

for life against the drought, though more properly it should be said to be

dependent on the moisture.”

Here was the merciful getaway from bellum

omnium contra omnes, even if Darwin had not underscored it. For if the struggle

could mean both competition with other members of the same species and a battle

against the elements, it was a matter of evidence which of the two was more

important in nature. And if harsh surroundings were the enemy rather than rivals

from one’s own species, animals might seek other ways than conflict to manage

such struggle. Here, in Russia, the fight against the elements could actually lead to

cooperation.

London did not keep Kropotkin for long. The Jura Federation that had turned him

anarchist during the blizzard in Sonvilliers beckoned once again, and within a few

months he was in Switzerland knee deep in revolutionary activity. On March 18,

1877, he organized a demonstration in Bern to commemorate the Paris Commune.

Other leaders of the Jura feared police reaction, but Kropotkin was certain that in

this instance violence would serve the cause. He was right. Police brutality

galvanized the workers, and membership in the federation doubled after the

demonstration. The peacefulness of the Sonvilliers watchmakers notwithstanding,

Peter was developing a political program: collectivism, negation of state, and

“propaganda of the deed”—violence—as the means to the former through the

latter.

It was the young people who would bring about change. “All of you who possess

knowledge, talent, capacity, industry,” Kropotkin wrote in 1880 in his paper Le

Révolté, “if you have a spark of sympathy in your nature, come, you and your

companions, come and place your services at the disposal of those who most need

them. And remember, if you do come, that you come not as masters, but as

comrades in the struggle; that you come not to govern but to gain strength for

yourselves in a new life which sweeps upward to the conquest of the future; that

you come less to teach than to grasp the aspirations of the many; to divine them, to

give them shape, and then to work, without rest and without haste, with all the fire

of youth and all the judgment of age, to realize them in actual life.”

On March 1 (old style), 1881, Alexander II was assassinated in Russia. Once his

trusted liege, Kropotkin welcomed the news of his death as a harbinger of the

coming revolution. But he would have to watch his back now. The successor,

Alexander III, had formed the Holy Brotherhood, a secret counteroffensive that

soon issued a death warrant against Kropotkin. Luckily Peter had been expelled

from Switzerland for his support for the assassination, and now, back in London,

he was given warning of Alexander’s plot. Undeterred, he exposed it in the

London Times and Manchester Chronicle, and a deeply embarrassed czar was

made to recall his agents. Still, if Kropotkin had escaped with his life, he was less

lucky with his freedom. Despairing of the workers’ movement in England, he

traveled to France, where his reputation as an anarchist preceded him. Within a

few months he was apprehended and sentenced, and spent the next three years in

prison. It was soon after his release following international pressure that the news

arrived: his brother Alexander, exiled for political offences, had committed

suicide in Siberia.

It was a terrible blow. Alexander had been his lifelong friend, perhaps his only

true one. But his suicide also made Peter all the more determined to find

confidence in his revolutionary activities. Increasingly he turned to science: the

science of anarchy and the science of nature. They had evolved apart from each

other, but the two sciences were now converging, even becoming uncannily

interchangeable. When Darwin died in the spring of 1882, Kropotkin penned an

obituary in Le Révolté. Celebrating, in true Russian fashion, the sage of evolution

entirely divorced from Malthus, the prince judged Darwin’s ideas “an excellent

argument that animal societies are best organized in the community-anarchist

manner.”

In “The Scientific basis of Anarchy,” some years later, he made clear

that the river ran in both directions. “The anarchist thinker,” Kropotkin wrote,

“does not resort to metaphysical conceptions (like the ‘natural rights,’ the ‘duties

of the state’ and so on) for establishing what are, in his opinion, the best

conditions for realising the greatest happiness for humanity. He follows, on the

contrary, the course traced by the modern philosophy of evolution.”

Finding the

answers to society’s woes “was no longer a matter of faith; it [is] a matter for

scientific discussion.”

Meanwhile, navigating anxiously between Spencer’s ultraselfish ethics and

George and Wallace’s socialist Nature, Huxley had found an uneasy path to allay

his heart’s torments. If instincts were bloody, morality would be bought by

casting away their yoke. This was the task of civilization—its very raison d’etre:

to combat, with full force, man’s evolutionary heritage. It might seem “an

audacious proposal” to create thus “an artificial world within the cosmos,” but of

course this was man’s “nature within nature,” sanctioned by his evolution, a

“strange microcosm spinning counter-clockwise.” Huxley was hopeful, but this

was optimism born of necessity: For a believing Darwinist any other course

would mean utter bleakness and despair.

Like Darwin, Huxley saw ants and bees partake in social behavior and altruism.

But this was simply “the perfection of an automatic mechanism, hammered out by

the blows of the struggle for existence.” Here was no principle to help explain the

natural origins of mankind’s morals; after all, a drone was born a drone, and could

never “aspire” to be a queen or even a worker. Man, on the other hand, had an

“innate desire” to enjoy the pleasures and escape the pains of life—his aviditas

vitae—an essential condition of success in the war of nature outside, “and yet the

sure agent of the destruction of society if allowed free play within.” Far from

trying to emulate nature, man would need to combat it. If he was to show any

kindness at all outside the family (to Huxley the only stable haven of “goodness”),

it would be through an “artificial personality,” a conscience, what Adam Smith

called “the man within,” the precarious exception to Nature-Ishtar. Were it not for

his regard for the opinion of others, his shame before disapproval and

condemnation, man would be as ruthless as the animals. No, there could be no

“sanction for morality in the ways of the cosmos” for Huxley. Nature’s injustice

had “burned itself deeply” into his soul.

Years in the Afar, in prisons, and in revolutionary politics had coalesced

Kropotkin’s thoughts, too, into a single, unwavering philosophy. Quite the

opposite of Huxley’s tortured plea to wrest civilized man away from his savage

beginnings, it was rather the return to animal origins that promised to save

morality for mankind. And so, when in a dank library in Harrow, perusing the

latest issue of the Nineteenth Century, Kropotkin’s eyes fell on Huxley’s “The

Struggle for Existence,” anger swelled within him. He would need to rescue

Darwin from the “infidels,” men like Huxley who had “raised the ‘pitiless’

struggle for personal advantage to the height of a biological principle.”

Moved

to action, the “shepherd from the Delectable Mountains” wrote to James

Knowles, the Nineteenth’s editor, asking that he extend his hospitality for “an

elaborate reply.” Knowles complied willingly, writing to Huxley that the result

was “one of the most refreshing & reviving aspects of Nature that ever I came

across.”

“Mutual Aid Among Animals” was the first of a series of five articles, written

between 1890 and 1896, that would become famously known in 1902 as the book

Mutual Aid. Here Kropotkin finally sank his talons into “nature, red in tooth and

claw.” For if the bees and ants and termites had “renounced the Hobbesian war”

and were “the better for it” so had shoaling fish, burying beetles, herding deer,

lizards, birds, and squirrels. Remembering his years in the great expanses of the

Afar, Kropotkin now wrote: “wherever I saw animal life in abundance, I saw

Mutual Aid and Mutual Support.”

This was a general principle, not a Siberian exception, as countless examples

made clear. There was the common crab, as Darwin’s own grandfather Erasmus

had noticed, stationing sentinels when its friends are molting. There were the

pelicans forming a wide half circle and paddling toward the shore to entrap fish.

There was the house sparrow who “shares any food” and the white-tailed eagles

spreading apart high in the sky to get a full view before crying to one another

when a meal is spotted. There were the little titis, whose childish faces had so

struck Alexander von Humboldt, embracing and protecting one another when it

rains, “rolling their tails over the necks of their shivering comrades.” And, of

course, there were the great hordes of mammals: deer, antelope, elephants, wild

donkeys, camels, sheep, jackals, wolves, wild boar—for all of whom “mutual aid

[is] the rule.” Despite the prevalent picture of “lions and hyenas plunging their

bleeding teeth into the flesh of their victims,” the hordes were of astonishingly

greater numbers than the carnivores. If the altruism of the hymenoptera (ants,

bees, and wasps) was imposed by their physiological structure, in these “higher”

animals it was cultivated for the benefits of mutual aid. There was no greater

weapon in the struggle of existence. Life was a struggle, and in that struggle the

fittest did survive. But the answer to the questions, “By which arms is this

struggle chiefly carried on?” and “Who are the fittest in the struggle?” made

abundantly clear that “natural selection continually seeks out the ways precisely

for avoiding competition.” Putting limits on physical struggle, sociability left

room “for the development of better moral feelings.” Intelligence, compassion

and “higher moral sentiments” were where progressive evolution was heading,

not bloody competition between the fiercest and the strong.

But where, then, had mutual aid come from? Some thought from “love” that had

grown within the family, but Kropotkin was at once more hardened and more

expansive.

To reduce animal sociability to familial love and sympathy meant to

reduce its generality and importance. Communities in the wild were not

predicated on family ties, nor was mutualism a result of mere “friendship.”

Despite Huxley’s belief in the family as the only refuge from nature’s battles, for

Kropotkin the savage tribe, the barbarian village, the primitive community, the

guilds, the medieval city—all taught the very same lesson: For mankind, too,

mutualism beyond the family had been the natural state of existence.

“It is not

love to my neighbor—whom I often do not know at all,” Kropotkin wrote, “which

induces me to seize a pail of water and to rush towards his house when I see it on

fire; it is a far wider, even though more vague feeling or instinct of human

solidarity and sociability which moves me. So it is also with animals.”

The message was clear: “Don’t compete! Competition is always injurious to the

species, and you have plenty of resources to avoid it.” Kropotkin had a powerful

ally on his side. “That is the watchword,” he wrote, “which comes to us from the

bush, the forest, the river, the ocean.” Nature herself would be man’s guide.

“Therefore combine—practice mutual aid! That is the surest means of giving to

each other and to all the greatest safety, the best guarantee of existence and

progress, bodily, intellectual, and moral.”

If capitalism had allowed the industrial “war” to corrupt man’s natural

beginnings; if overpopulation and starvation were the necessary evils of

progress—Kropotkin was having none of it. Darwin’s Malthusian “bulldog” had

gotten it precisely the wrong way around. Far from having to combat his natural

instincts in order to gain a modicum of morality, all man needed to find goodness

was to train his gaze within.

War or Peace, Nature or Culture: Where had true “goodness” come from? Should

mankind seek solace in the ethics of evolution or perhaps in the evolution of

ethics? Should he turn to the individual, the family, the community, the tribe? The

terms of the debate had been set by its two great gladiators, and theirs would be

the everlasting questions.

Huxley died at 3:30 p.m. on April 29, 1895. He was buried, as was his wish, in the

quiet family plot in Finchley rather than beside Darwin in the nave of

Westminster Abbey. No government representative came to the funeral; there was

no “pageantry” or eulogy either. But there were many friends—the greatest of

England’s scientists, doctors, and engineers; museum directors, presidents and

councils of the learned societies; and the countless “faceless” men from the

institutes who had taken the train down from the Midlands and the North—all

bowing their heads in silence. His had been a life of pain and duty: from Ealing to

the Royal Society, from rugged individualism to corporatism, Unitarianism to

agnosticism, and finally back again to the merciful extraction of human morality

from the pyre of Nature-Ishtar. He was placed in the ground in a grave that, the

Telegraph noted, had been “deeply excavated.”

In line with his view of the

exclusive role of family in nature, it was above his firstborn son, Noel, who had

died aged four in 1860, that Huxley would come to rest.

When the revolution in Russia finally broke out in February 1917, Kropotkin was

already old and famous. On May 30, thousands flocked to the Petrograd train

station to welcome him home after forty-one years in exile.

Czarless and reborn,

Russia had revived his optimism in the future. But then came October and the

Bolsheviks, and like years before in the Afar, the spirit of promise soon wasted

into disappointment. “We oppose bureaucrats everywhere all the time,” Vladimir

Ilyich Lenin said to Kropotkin when he received him in the Kremlin soon after.

“We oppose bureaucrats and bureaucracy, and we must tear out those remnants by

the roots if they are still nestled in our own new system.” Then he smiled. “But

after all, Peter Alekseevich, you understand perfectly well that it is very difficult

to make people over, that, as Marx said, the most terrible and most impregnable

fortress is the human skull!”

Kropotkin moved from Moscow to the small village of Dimitrov, where a

cooperative was being constructed. Increasingly frail, and working against the

clock on his magnum opus, Ethics, he still found time to help the workers.

“I

consider it a duty to testify,” he wrote to Lenin on March 4, 1920, “that the

situation of these employees is truly desperate. The majority are literally

starving…. At present, it is the party committees, not the soviets, who rule in

Russia…. If the present situation continues, the very word ‘socialism’ will turn

into a curse.”

Lenin never replied. But he did give his personal consent when Peter Kropotkin

died on February 8, 1921, that the anarchists arrange his funeral. It would be the

last mass gathering of anarchists in Russia.

George Price at age thirteen weeks and his older brother, Edison, 1923

Teenagers George and Edison with their mother, Alice

New York

William ran up the backstairs into the Belasco Theatre. Showtime was at 8:00

p.m. sharp, and none of the fixtures were in place. The director was going to kill

him. He was sweating, out of breath. As he ran past the stage, spinning excuses in

his mind, he glimpsed, just for a split second, a pair of sparkling eyes behind a

curtain in the dark. His heart stopped: He’d never seen anything more beautiful.

William Edison Price was a man on a mission. “A light for every purpose” was

the slogan; to be “Pioneers of Progress”—the intent. Baby Hercules Flood Lights,

Cyclorama Reflector Strips, Display Reflector Borders—all were in great

demand. There were fashion shows, pageants, expositions, exhibits. There were

traveling attractions, which usually used Portable Switchboard Dimmer Boxes.

And, since a mere pile of merchandise was no longer sufficient to attract

passersby, there were show windows, of course, calling for instant adjustment of

color and the direction of light where desired. But most of all there was the stage.

“The theatre itself is old as the dimmest page of history,” the company’s catalog

explained, “but scientific lighting of the theatre is in its infancy.” Together with

his business partners John Higham and Michael Kelly, William Edison Price was

the Display Stage Lighting Company, Incorporated, at 334 West Forty-fourth

Street, New York City, and business, thank goodness, was booming.

It was “the Bishop of Broadway” who really cranked up the contracts. David

Belasco was born in San Francisco in 1853 to Portuguese Jewish parents whose

real name was Velasco; his father had been a mime in London before seeking

greater fortunes in America. Escaping from a monastery to a circus at the age of

twelve, David soon landed his first real job: callboy at the Metropolitan Theatre.

By twenty-nine he left for New York City, having acted in 170 plays and written

or adapted at least a hundred. A stage manager at Madison Square Garden and

then for Daniel Frohman at the Lyceum, he was moving in New York’s flashy

show-business circles. But it was the Civil War romance The Heart of Maryland

in 1895 that really made Belasco’s name as playwright, producer, and director.

Then came the French adaptation Zaza, the farce Naughty Anthony, and, at the

turn of the century, Madame Butterfly, the Japanese-set tearjerker destined for

operatic fame in the hands of the great Giacomo Puccini.

Dressed in the clerical collar that gained him his moniker, Belasco was known for

his tantrums. One favorite trick was to stamp on his watch, smashing it to

smithereens. (Only very close associates knew that he kept a stock of cheap,

secondhand watches for just such occasions.) But if Belasco was a mix of

calculated melodrama, so were his plays—and audiences flocked to the theaters to

enjoy them. Maudlin and sensationalist, they were a far cry from Ibsen, Chekhov,

or Strindberg. Still, if the Europeans had brought emotional realism to their

characters, Belasco would bring technical realism to his stage. His settings were

famous for accuracy down to the most minute detail: a functioning laundromat, a

reproduction of a Childs Restaurant with actors brewing coffee and cooking

pancakes onstage. Once he even purchased a room in a flophouse, removed it

from the building, brought it to his theater, cut out one wall, and presented it as the

set for a production.

Lighting was his passion. From under his hands colored silks and gelatin slides

were ushering in a revolution. He was the master of mood and of tension, his

“real” sunsets a spectacle to behold. When he bought the Stuyvesant Theatre in

1907 he was particular about the fly space and hydraulic systems, about the

Tiffany lighting and ceiling panels, rich woodwork and murals. By 1910 it was

renamed the Belasco, and the great actors of the age—David Warfield, Lenore

Ulric, Frances Starr, Blanche Bates—were all on board and working. The address

was West Forty-fourth Street between Sixth and Seventh avenues, just a few

blocks from the “Pioneers of Progress” at Display.

Thank goodness, the fixtures were finally in place. Shaking Belsaco’s hand and

taking a moment to catch his breath, William Edison remembered the curtain. The

Auctioneer, a comedy in three acts, was being restaged after its successful run in

1901. “An Old Friend Back at Belasco,” the Times exclaimed, touting the former

vaudeville actor David Warfield’s Simon Levy, a bittersweetly comical Lower

East Side peddler down on his luck. It was a great hit, Simon’s cry, “Monkey on a

stick, 5 cents!” having lost “none of its plaintive melancholy.”

Broad faced,

rather short, and with the sparkling eyes that had captivated him, Alice Avery was

cast in a small part, playing a Misses Compton alongside Warfield’s woeful

salesman. Summoning up his courage, William walked over to introduce himself.

In fact Alice was not her real name. She had been born Clara Ermine Avery in

Bellevue, Michigan, in 1883, the daughter of Emma Addale Gage and her

husband, Frank Avery, a well known Bellevue jeweler. Emma’s father was Dr.

Gage, a prominent physician who rode horseback through that part of the country,

with old-fashioned saddlebags.

A devout Christian and faithful church worker, at

the age of twenty-two Emma had joined the Methodist church just opposite the

old Gage family homestead. When her husband, Frank, died young in 1890, she

was left to bring up her four children on her own; they were Clara, Mary, Gage,

and George. But Emma had the good fortune of a progressive education,

graduating from the private Christian coeducational Olivet College thirty miles

south of Lansing, one of the first in America to admit women.

She became a

beloved mainstay of her community—a third- and fifth-grade teacher—and when