The Price of Altruism (54 page)

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.

35.
For an endearing fictional account of this development, see Michael Chabon,
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay
(New York: Picador, 2000), 74–77.

36.
Alice Avery Price letter to Edison, undated, circa 1936, EPFA.

37.
Numerous letters between Alice Avery Price and Edison Price, 1934–38, EPFA.

38.
“Louise Birch, 97, Dead; Co-Founder of School,”
New York Times
, September 29, 1976; Birch Wathen yearbook (1935), 16. Two of the school’s most celebrated alumni in later years would be Barbara Walters and Brooke Shields.

39.
“The History of Greek Temple Architecture,” by George Price, George Price Papers (GPP).

40.
Alice Avery Price letter to Edison Price, July 5, 1938, EPFA; Alice Avery Price letter to Miss Louise Birch, September 6, 1938, EPFA.

41.
Susan E. Meyer,
Stuyvesant High School: The First 100 Years
(New York: Campaign for Stuyvesant/Alumni and Friends Endowment Inc., 2005), 10.

42.
See Diane Ravitch,
The Great School Wars: New York City 1805–1973
(New York: Basic Books, 1974).

43.
Meyer,
Stuyvesant
, 14, 11, 15.

44.
New York Times
, October 27, 1907.

45.
Interview with Richard A. Bader, Stuyvesant class of June 1940, May 7, 2008;
Stuyvesant High School Yearbook
, June 1940; Meyer,
Stuyvesant
, 24, 16–17.

46.
Interview with Dan Morris, Stuyvesant class of June 1940, May 2, 2008.

47.
Ibid.

48.
Lewis Mumford,
Sketches from Life: The Early Years
(New York: Dial Press, 1982), quoted in Meyer,
Stuyvesant
, 45.

49.
“’Til We Meet Again,”
Indicator
(school yearbook), June 1940, 102; interview with Richard A. Bader, May 7, 2008.

50.
W. H. Bradshaw, “The Citadel,”
Indicator
, June 1940, 7.

51.
Sinclair J. Wilson, “Lost Horizon,”
Indicator
, June 1940, 13; interviews with Dan Morris, May 2, 2008, and with Richard A. Bader, May 7, 2008.

52.
George Price letter to Abe Shlemewitz, August 15, 1940, GPP; George Price letter to Mr. Sternberg, August 17, 1940, GPP; “Harvard College, Principal’s Report on Applicant,” March 15, 1940, Harvard University Archive (HUC).

53.
Greenspan,
The Age of Turbulence,
24, 25.

54.
David Gelernter,
1939: The Lost World of the Fair
(New York: HarperPerennial, 1996); “Stuyvesant High School Permanent Record—George R. Price,” June 30, 1940, Stuyvesant Archives; “Harvard College Freshman Scholarship Application,” March 15, 1940, HUA; “Harvard College Freshman Scholarship Personal Interview Report,” May 24, 1940, HUA.

CHAPTER 3: SELECTIONS

1.
Joan Fisher Box,
Ronald A. Fisher: The Life of a Scientist
(New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1978).

2.
Charles Darwin,
The Autobiography of Charles Darwin,
ed. Nora Barlow (New York: W. W. Norton, 1993), 58.

3.
Box,
Ronald A. Fisher
, 13.

4.
A. W. F. Edwards, “The Genetical Theory of Natural Selection,”
Genetics
154 (2000), 1419–26, quote on 1420.

5.
“Regression to the mean” was Galton’s terminology, not Jenkin’s. Fleeming Jenkin, “Review of Darwin’s Origin of Species,”
North British Review
46 (1867), 277–318. Darwin’s solution was to fall back increasingly on the inheritance of acquired traits, and to posit unseen “pangenes” whose very existence even he described as “provisional.”

6.
Peter Bowler,
The Eclipse of Darwinism: Anti-Darwinian Evolution Theories in the Decades around 1900
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992); Charles Darwin,
The Origin of Species
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 70; William Provine,
The Origins of Theoretical Population Genetics
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971).

7.
Quoted in Marek Kohn,
A Reason for Everything: Natural Selection and the English Imagination
(London: Faber and Faber, 2004), 95. The portraits of Fisher, Haldane, Maynard Smith, and Hamilton in this chapter and chapter 7 borrow generously from Kohn’s wonderful book.

8.
R. A. Fisher, “Some Hopes of a Eugenist,”
Eugenics Review
5 (1914), 309–15. Many contemporary eugenicists focused on “negative eugenics,” meaning steps to be taken to contain the procreation of the weak and unsocial elements in society, such as sterilization. Fisher preferred “positive eugenics,” namely steps to be taken to encourage the procreation of the fitter elements of society, such as family allowances and tax-cut incentives.

9.
Kohn,
A Reason for Everything
, 101.

10.
R. A. Fisher, “The Correlation Between Relatives on the Supposition of Mendelian Inheritance,”
Transactions of the Royal Society of Edinburgh
52 (1918), 399–433.

11.
“Correlation Between Relatives” was not strictly about evolution, but it showed that trait similarity could be explained by recourse to Mendelian genetics, rendering clear the implications for evolution, at least for Fisher if not at first for others.