BioSci Fi: "Jerry Was a Man", Robert A. Heinlein, 1947

“Don’t blame the Martians.  Humans would have developed plasto-biology in any case.”

Robert Heinlein’s 1947 short story, Jerry Was a Man, was an early, but tremendously creative, look at some of the possibilities of biotechnology – but also of the law.  I don’t think of Heinlein as a particularly biological science fiction writer.  Before his writing took its final turn towards fantasy, his hard science fiction focused on space ships, space suits, orbital dynamics, slide rules, and, in his last “hard sci fi” novel, computers.  But in 1947, he wrote a very bio short story, one that presaged several recent advances.

Jerry Was a Man is set in an America in the indeterminate future, a future detached from any of Heinlein’s other work.  It features personal jets, mobile phones, and 3D apparently flat screen television – at least for the rich. And our main character, Mrs. Bronson van Vogel, is very, very rich.  Her husband, who married into her money, sets the plot in motion when, after seeing someone at “the club” with a six-legged dachshund, he decides to trump him by flying into the club on a winged horse.  The couple goes to the laboratories of The Phoenix Breeding Ranch, where the husband, after a lesson in biology, has to settle for a non-flying, but rideable, winged horse and his wife buys a 20-inch tall elephant with enhanced intelligence.  During the trip, Mrs. van Vogel also sees Jerry, a cognitively enhanced, talking “neo-chimpanzee” who has been retired from his job picking crops to await euthanasia, followed by conversion into dog food. (Jerry loves to smoke cigarettes, but so does everyone in the story in a way that is startling today – one failure of Heinlein’s biology-related imagination.)

The story depends on three related biotechnologies.  The simpler ones are embryonic plastic surgery and, making the surgery easier, artificial wombs (“extra-uterine capsules”).  The more difficult is actual genetic manipulation, brought to earth by Martians, members of the self-named “Great Race.”  Heinlein incorrectly envisions genetic engineering as chromosomal surgery, but, as the story was published six years before Crick and Watson’s discovery of the structure of DNA, it was not a bad guess – and I suspect owed something to his friend, biochemist turned author Isaac Asimov.  The cultural result of these technologies is widespread use of surgically and genetically engineered animals, not, apparently as food (for humans, at least), but as workers and as pets.

The legal world has also changed in this story, becoming somewhat English, only more so. It has barristers (the one in the story is named Augustus Pomfrey), solicitors (Sidney Weinberg), and licensed “shysters,” (R.J. “The Real” McCoy).  Barristers argue in togas and would be ashamed to be seen with a shyster. Oh, and lobbyists and their corporate employers are refusing to push any legislation currently because of a new “fair practices code” from “the Legislative Guild” that sets “confiscatory” rates for bribes to legislators.

The shyster (whose office is “the pool room of the notorious Three Planets Club”) comes up with a strategy for Mrs. van Vogel to protect the life of Jerry and the other modified anthropoids – to argue, in court, that they are persons, entitled to legal protection.  (Interestingly, no one seems to wonder about the status of the dwarf elephant, which can actually read and write.) The closing courtroom scene has several delicious aspects, ranging from one side’s reluctance to stipulate to the obvious, to the Martian geneticist’s comparison of humans and chimps, to a timely (in light of Citizens United) snipe at the “human” status of corporations.  And it ends with a decision on Jerry’s legal status (which, in light of the story’s title, doesn’t require any other spoilers).

Sixty-five years later, Jerry Was a Man is not real, but it may be getting close.  I have cited the story in writing about human/non-human brain chimeras, but recently I have been paying more attention to the idea of other kinds of genetically engineered animals, from revived woolly mammoths to specially crafted unicorns.  I can certainly see a billionaire wanting to give his daughter a real, live unicorn for her 12th birthday, can’t you?  We can already buy “glo-fish” tropical fish with inserted genes for green fluorescent protein, making them glow under an ultraviolet light.  And, as Heinlein himself noted in the story’s second paragraph:

“Look at the older registered Kennel Club breeds – glandular giants like the St. Bernard and the Great Dane, silly little atrocities like the Chihuahua and the Pekingese. Consider fancy goldfish.”

Though there are many wonderful things in the story’s 9000 or so words, it has, for me, a disconcerting conclusion.  Jerry’s court appearance ends with him, dressed in field worker’s clothes, winning over the court by singing

“Way down upon de Suwanee Ribber

Far, far away,

Dere’s where my heart is turning ebber”

I can’t help seeing an implied similarity between black farm workers and neo-chimpanzees that makes me more than cringe.  But what did Heinlein mean?

I doubt he meant to be racist.  A few years earlier he had been active in the non-communist left, working hard in Upton Sinclair’s California campaigns. Two of his juvenile books, written nearly a decade later, feature black heroes – overtly in the case of Henry Gladstone Kiku, the Kenyan Permanent Undersecretary of the Department of Spatial Affairs of the Federation in The Star Beast, and less obviously in Rod Walker, the teenaged protagonist of Tunnel in the Sky.  Later, after his shift to a more libertarian philosopher and his 1964 publication of Farnham’s Freehold, with its future of black owners of (and eaters of) white slaves, his racial views are less clear.

Jerry’s conclusion perhaps is better seen as a reminder of a bygone era of popular culture, where broad ethnic and racial stereotypes were commonly used in entertainment, comically and otherwise.  After all, Jerry came only eight years after the happy slaves of the enormously popular movie version of Gone with the Wind and just before the transition of the popular radio show, Amos and Andy, to television.  Times change, and with them changes our ability to enjoy some of the culture of the past.  I wonder what things that we take for granted in popular culture will make people cringe in 65 years? (Other than reality tv.)

Hank Greely

Jerry Was a Man, by Robert A. Heinlein, first published in Amazing Wonder Stories, October 1947 (65 years ago this month, but that’s not why I wrote about it), republished in the collection, Assignment in Eternity in 1953.  Versions are available (though I don’t know how legally) at story and pdf

7 Responses to “BioSci Fi: "Jerry Was a Man", Robert A. Heinlein, 1947”

  1. Brilliant. Delightfully written, insightful, and a welcome reminder of one of Heinlein’s stories not read in decades. Appreciated.

    Other than ‘reality’ tv, and germane to the discussion of racism, I hope that in 65 years people will cringe at the disgusting treatment by a surprisingly large segment of American citizens of President Obama. The day after election day in 2008 I found I was not living in the country I thought.

  2. I was thinking about “Jerry Was a Man” over the past few days—coincidentally!—and it struck me was that the song that Heinlein chose for Jerry to sing was intended to make a racial point as unmistakably as possible: by having Jerry sing words stereotypically associated with blacks, McCoy was equating Jerry’s status as property with black slavery. By our standards it’s heavy-handed, but Heinlein wasn’t writing for a subtle audience.

    As to Farnham’s Freehold, I think it may have been intended as an almost mathematical argument against racism: Here, Heinlein shows his readers, is a society where blacks are masters and whites are slaves. You find this repugnant? Without loss of generality (as mathematicians say), it’s equally repugnant when whites are masters and blacks are slaves. A conversation between Hugh Farnham and his second wife at the end of the book makes the moral equivalence of the two explicit, in fact. I discussed this at more length than I can here in a review at http://www.troynovant.com, if you’re curious. The trouble is, if I’m right, that Heinlein laid out his trap for prejudiced white readers so subtly than many people thought he shared the same prejudices.

  3. Thanks to both commenters.

    As to William Stoddard’s first comment, I’m not sure that Heinlein’s audience was less subtle than we are (however subtle that may be), but that their culture led them to accept the one way link between neo-chimps being like black slaves without bridling at (or noticing?) the converse of black slaves being like (neo) chimps.

    I did read your review of Farnham’s Freehold and there is much in it with which I agree. I remember that I also, when I read Farnham’s Freehold back in the mid-60s, made and heard the same moral equivalence argument.

    BUT, for me, at least, he overdid it with a) the fact that the dominant blacks ate meat from the white slaves (and, in fact, raised some for their meat, b) the routine black use of white women as “bed warmers”, and c) the brutality of the black masters’ routine treatment of the slave males – either castrating them or cutting off their thumbs. In all three cases (including, I “think”, even the second), his black on white slavery exceeded US white on black slavery and, more tellingly for me, in each case it did so in a way Europeans “traditionally” associated with African – cannibals with unbounded libidos, especially for white women, and sub-humanly brutal.

    Heinlein was born in Missouri, a border state (and the site of some of the worst atrocities in the Civil War) in 1907. I bet he knew some Civil War veterans growing up. I think the way he implemented his moral equivalence story did reflect the racism of his era, even though (at least before the 1960s), his writing expressly rejected racism.

  4. Greatly enjoyed reading this article and the comments. Found myself running a search for “Jerry Was a Man” after reading new coverage of this case: http://www.wired.com/2014/10/chimpanzee-personhood-hearing/

    You note, “I think the way he implemented his moral equivalence story did reflect the racism of his era, even though (at least before the 1960s), his writing expressly rejected racism.”

    I note that in “The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress,” published in book form in 1966, race doesn’t seem to matter much. While I don’t have the book easily at hand, this paragraph from the Wikipedia entry on the novel is accurate to the best of my recollection:

    “The social structure of the lunar society features complete racial integration, which becomes a vehicle for social commentary when Mannie, visiting the southeastern United States, is arrested for polygamy after he innocently shows a picture of his multiracial family to reporters, and learns that the “range of color in Davis family was what got [the] judge angry enough” to have him arrested. It is later revealed that this arrest was anticipated and provoked by his fellow conspirators to gain emotional support from Loonies when the arrest is announced.”

    I don’t know if this can be considered EXPRESSLY rejecting racism, but as I said above, in Heinlein’s lunar society, race simply doesn’t seem to matter much.

  5. Edit: in the 2nd sentence, that’s NEWS coverage.

  6. 4/21/2015 – “Science has learned that the court order now has been amended. The words “writ of habeas corpus” have been struck out… suggesting that the court has made no decision on whether Hercules and Leo—two research chimpanzees at Stony Brook University in New York—deserve to be treated as legal persons.

    The Nonhuman Rights Project has responded to the amendment, stating, “This case is one of a trio of cases that the Nonhuman Rights Project has brought in an attempt to free chimpanzees imprisoned within the State of New York through an ‘Article 70-Habeas Corpus’ proceeding. These cases are novel and this is the first time that an Order to Show Cause has issued. We are grateful for an opportunity to litigate.”

    -And I am grateful, that I was able to stop by for a ‘cup of culture’ and refresh my memory of this hauntingly-classic story in the genre of Speculative Fiction, by one of its masters, a true out-of-the-box thinker.

    In light of the recent news flurry, I’ve wanted to reference this story to others– but could NOT recall the name or even the author.

    I started to rummage in my old sci-fi anthologies in the attic… and then decided instead to do an intelligent search online. (As long as I merged ‘moving courtroom scene’, SciFi, and chimps into the search-gestalt, I had to “run into the Suez Canal eventually”, as they say.)

    This delightful story recap and article/thread was one of the top matches. I also recommend the on-topic article, Adam J. Kolber, Stanford Law Review, Vol. 54, p. 163, 2001.. entitled “Standing Upright: The Moral and Legal Standing of Humans and Other Apes”.

  7. Anyone who doesn’t think Heinlein was a biological SF writer might also want to check out “Beyond This Horizon.” “Gulf,” and Gulf’s sequel “Friday,” in which he explores a lifelong fascination with genetic engineering and its moral and ethical consequences; and “The Notebooks of Lazarus Long” and “Time Enough for Love,” two explorations of human biological immortality.

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