by Oren Harman
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, Mal
thus, Founder of Modern Demography, 2nd ed. (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 1999); J. Dupquier, “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 Bchner, 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.