The Price of Altruism (53 page)

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).