The Price of Altruism Read online

  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.”77

  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.”78 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.79 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!”80

  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.81 “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.”82

  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.1

  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.2

  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.3

  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 vaudevil
le 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.”4 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.5 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.6 She became a beloved mainstay of her community—a third- and fifth-grade teacher—and when her daughter Clara graduated from Big Rapids High School, so did she.

  In 1905, after Olivet, Clara became the principal of Hersey High School, but she already knew inside that the theater was her calling.7 New York City’s Broadway lights shone brighter than anything in Hersey. Armed with a stage name and inborn dramatic panache, she would seek new fortunes there.

  William Edison Price, to be perfectly honest, was not his real name either. Like his wife-to-be, he had been born in 1883. While she was a daughter of the Christian foundational classes of the Midwest, he was the son of Henry and Etta, Yiddish-speaking Russian Jews, perhaps of the name Preis, who had arrived on boat to America’s shores, and from there to Chicago.8 Brother to Anna, Lena, Robert, Sadie, and Rosie, all born in America, his own given name was Isak. By 1910 the Chicago census listed him as an “electrician” with a positively new appellation. Isak must have figured that the blend of Americanism and professional pedigree in his new name might be a harbinger of future success, and, more or less severing all ties with his family, he got on a train for New York City to invent himself anew.9

  And so, in a theater named Belasco after a man whose real name was Velasco, William Edison, whose real name was Isak, and Alice, whose real name was Clara, fell in love. The wedding took place on June 6, 1917, in Stamford, Connecticut, a town whose real name had been Rippowam before it was bought from the Indians in 1640.10 This was America, where dreamers could dream.

  Dreams didn’t come easy, though, at least not for Alice. “Dear managers—” she had written, in a poem printed in the Morning Telegraph,

  I’d like to ask a favor please of you:

  Give me your definition of a Broadway ingénue.

  We are too slim or else too fat, or have no shape at all;

  Too short—we have our heels built up and then we are too tall.

  Our hair’s too light or else too dark, or has a tinge of red

  That really wouldn’t go too well with the leading lady’s head.

  Our accent’s flat or else too broad; we never could “get by.”

  Our eyes are just a bit too small; our brows a bit too high.”11

  As her prospects grew dimmer in the theater, Alice increasingly helped with the lighting at Display. Soon a first child was born to the unlikely couple, Edison, in the summer of 1918. Life was lived from order to order. The theaters, the moving pictures, schools, clubs, universities, hotels, dance halls, and restaurants—every one, it seemed, needed a lighting fixture. And then there were the suppliers: the Cutler-Hammer Co., Wilmington Fibre Co., Corning Glass Works, Asco Supply, Rome Wire Co., and scores more—each with their trucks and shipments and schedules and “unbeatable” deals.12 It was into this world of gelatins, clamps, screws, and electric fibers; wholesales and showtimes; vaudeville actresses, quick-tongued salesmen and fix-it men; glitzy clubs, Broadway theaters and their melodramatic impresarios that on October 16, 1922, weighing eight pounds twelve ounces, George Robert Price was born in Scarsdale, New York. “Don’t you care,” a family friend wrote upon his arrival, half in consolation. “This world needs boys for lonesome girls.”13

  It was an age of invention, and William Edison Price embodied it. Connection Plug patent 1,454,858, Lamp Fixture patent 1,351,681, Clamping Device patent 1,562,052——all these and more were his creations.14 The theaters loved him, and one in particular would leave its mark.

  The Manhattan Opera House had been built by Oscar Hammerstein in 1906, just west of Madison Square Garden on Thirty-fourth Street. Hammerstein had the bold intention of taking on the Metropolitan Opera by offering New Yorkers cheap seats to opera productions; culture, he thought, belonged to everyone. Sensing that it would be out of business in no time, the Met offered $1.2 million to the upstart establishment to stop producing opera for a decade, a deal even “champion-of-the-masses” Hammerstein could not judiciously refuse. Hammerstein eventually sold to the Shubert brothers, who turned the place into a “combination” house featuring vaudeville on weekdays and cheap opera concerts on Sundays, once again undercutting the Metropolitan. In 1926, when George was not yet two years old, Warner Brothers chose the venue to premiere Don Juan, the first commercially released film featuring a recorded musical soundtrack.15

  By the time Display Stage Lighting Incorporated began contracting at the Manhattan Opera House, the building was owned by the Ancient Accepted Scottish Rite of Free Masonry, which built a grand ballroom on the seventh floor. It may well have been this connection that led William to join the order, all the more so to disguise from his boys their immigrant father’s true origins.16

  Business was booming, and there was no time to look back. On the occasions when the past could not be escaped, it was changed: In the 1920 New York census, the place of origin of William’s parents had miraculously migrated from Russia to England. Alice’s devoutly Christian side of the family didn’t mind William Edison’s bouts of religious forgetfulness and invention. “How is the old outfit that broke away from your business,” Emma Gage Avery wrote to her daughter regarding some Display internal affairs, adding, rather tellingly, “The Jews.”17

  And so, when in February 1927 William Edison Price died suddenly of pneumonia, the man whose “name was known wherever there was a theatre” was accompanied to his grave by priests of the Masonic Temple. It is unclear how many of the 150 people attending the funeral knew about his true beginnings. Thanks to Alice’s acquiescence, his two little sons, Edison and George, positively did not. Isak Preis, forty-five, took his secret to the grave.18

  “Stock Prices Crash in Frantic Selling,” the Washington Post reported on October 3, 1929, just as the Price family was beginning to grasp the loss of its husband and father. Following a decade of unprecedented growth, the market predicted recovery. “Brokers Believe Worst Is Over,” a sanguine New York Herald Tribune headlined toward the end of the month, adding that investors should look for “real bargains.” Even after “Black Thursday” and “Black Tuesday” optimism abounded: “Very Prosperous Year Is Forecast,” predicted the World, in December 1929.19

  Whether the crash had been the result of “extraordinary speculation” as the economist of the welfare state, John Maynard Keynes, thought (England’s Chancellor of the Exchequer, Philip Snowden, called it more bluntly “a perfect orgy of speculation”), no longer seemed to matter much.20 A market that had begun at a high above 380 points in September had by Thanksgiving fallen below 200. As surely as William Edison Price would not rise from his grave, there was not going to be a “recovery.” By 1932 stocks would lose nearly 90 percent of their value.

  An immigrant haven, New York was one of the cities in America hit hardest by the crash. By the spring of 1930 there were more than fifty bread lines on the Lower East S
ide providing fifty thousand meals a day to the hungry. Before he embarked on a second campaign for the presidency of the United States, Governor Franklin Delano Roosevelt was made to face a cold reality: Half of the city’s manufacturing plants were closed, one in three citizens was unemployed, and roughly 1.6 million were on some form of relief.21 Having incorporated before the crash at one hundred dollars a share, Alice Avery Price and her company were buried deep in the Great Depression, holding on for dear life, and the two little boys along with them.

  They had moved from Hartsdale to the city, to a tenement on West Ninety-fourth Street. Rain came through the ceilings in the front hall, the bathroom, and the kitchen. The living room light fixture was falling down. The toilet did not flush properly, nor did the refrigerator work or sit evenly on the crooked linoleum. Alice wasn’t sure which was worse: the plaster coming apart in the bathroom, the three-pane windows ready to fall out in the bedrooms, or the water taps that ran as if with a mind entirely of their own. The more she wrote to her landlord to complain, the more he wrote back threatening legal action for her lack of payment, as did the Laundromat owner Isidore Stern; the boys’ friendly eye doctor, Ralph Singer; and the New York Times for overdue payment for an advertisement.22

  Money had to come from somewhere, anywhere, quick. Alice decided to send her older boy, Edison, to a farm upstate owned by a family called the van Akins. With any luck his room in the city would fetch seven dollars a week. It made sense; after all, she must have offered to her aching conscience: Little George could be lugged along to the office, but Edison was often at home until late hours by himself, and Alice was afraid of “prowlers.”23