Author: A. Silver

A Report From Group 17 is a novel by Robert C. O’Brien. The audio files on this page are part of my personal narration of the title. A Report From Group 17 is out of copyright and this recording is meant for entertainment purposes only.

From the book jacket:
“RUSSIANS MAY BUY VIRGINIA ESTATE
The Russian Government has asked the U.S. State Dept. to approve the purchase of Wellington, a 27.5 acre estate at Ferry Point…about five miles upriver from Mount Vernon. A Russian suburban estate would correspond to the dacha maintained by the American Embassy sixteen miles from Moscow.”

The Washington Post
10/21/71

There were several things about the tight little community of Russians installed at Villa Petrograd that were disturbing: the sophisticated microbiological equipment, the private zoo that seemed to be unusually well supplied with primate specimens, the secrecy. But everyone knows the Russians are great animal watchers. Downstream from the Villa the city of Washington taps the Potomac for drinking water. Still, probably nothing to it.

Robert C. O’Brien’s exciting new novel, A Report from Group 17, takes the reader on a fantastical trip worthy of Ray Bradbury and Michael Crichton – into the intricacies of the world of DNA manipulation, gene mechanics, and the larger implications of biological warfare, espionage and counterespionage.

The hero is Fergus O’Neil, a brilliant virologist; his opposite, Helmuth Schutz, is a former Nazi scientist whose talents have no been commandeered by the Russians. The scene is Washington; the tension is extraordinary. A fast-paced tale of intrigue, science, and suspense.”

This book was published in 1971 by Athenium books, New York, NY. It is out of copyright (the only Robert C. O’Brien book to go out of print). It can be found through used booksellers. The Library of Congress catalog number is 76-175291.

I’ve finally decided to extract just the Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH chapter of my thesis for your viewing pleasure. After all, since science has recently revealed that they’ve trained rats to drive cars to get food ( https://www.newscientist.com/article/2220721-scientists-have-trained-rats-to-drive-tiny-cars-to-collect-food/?utm_medium=SOC&utm_source=Twitter ), I felt like it was important to mention that it was O’Brien’s rats who did it first – once they found the Toy Tinker’s truck in the woods.

You know what’s interesting about the study? Well, maybe about what they discovered? That rats find learning new tasks relieve stress. I will tell you, honestly, my love affair with rats was the only time I’ve believed in love at first site. When I met one, their clear intelligence and curiosity was just one of the many things that won me over. I always enjoy when rat research shows positive things about rats – who are often vilified – but at the same time, I feel disheartened because I know that rats (as well as mice and birds) are not offered the same protections other animals are offered under the Animal Welfare Act. I respect those who have put guidelines in place to prevent animal suffering and I am heartened by moves to alternate models, but progress takes time.

All of that aside, I still find it’s incredibly cute to watch a rat get into a little car and go after their treats (which of course, they would be inclined to share with friends( https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn21256-rats-free-each-other-from-traps-then-share-chocolate/ ). I also felt like it was a good time to extract just my Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH chapter from my thesis in case anyone felt like taking a look. (IMPORTANT: This excerpt, as it appears in my thesis is FULL of citations and references that can be seen in my thesis. I have omitted them for readability.)

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Chapter Two: Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH

The story was part of a book of essays, and the reason I had read it so eagerly was that it was called “The Rat Race” – which, I learned, means a race where no matter how fast you run, you don’t get anywhere. But there was nothing in the book about rats, and I felt bad about the title because, I thought, it wasn’t a rat race at all, it was a People Race, and no sensible rats would ever do anything so foolish.

Called “[i]ngenious, credible, and sometimes moving” in Children’s Books of International Interest, Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH has been, ever since its release, praised highly by scholars and reviewers of children’s literature. In 1985, Alethea K Helbig called Mrs. Frisby “a combination of science fiction and animal fantasy” that described “fantastic situations with scientific accuracy. Scholar Paula T. Connolly noted the book for Conly’s “gradations of moral understanding and culpability” while dealing with “such problematic issues as the roles of science and technology, identity, idealism, family life, forms of community and means of survival.” The positive reviews for Conly’s pivotal work seem endless, as do the number of issues the ambitious Conly set out to address in the novel.

Of Conly’s four books, Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH is not only the most well- known, but it is also the book which addresses the broadest range of social issues. It also almost didn’t come to pass. Conly began writing his most famous book in November 1967, while working on The Silver Crown, and had almost abandoned the book in March 1968 – after only two chapters. Then, in 1969, Conly’s work with National Geographic took him to the laboratories of John B. Calhoun, a behaviorist researcher who worked for the National Institutes for Mental Health. Calhoun, who was then doing research on the improvement of intellectual capacities in rats, had been well-known in the 1960s for his work on overcrowding and his development of the concept of societal breakdown which he called the “Behavioral Sink.” The visit would “set him thinking.” That fateful meeting may have been the spark that would lead to the creation of a tale that would address American concerns about genetic engineering and technological materialism.

The Biological Time Bomb, written by Gordon Rattray Taylor and released in 1968, is notable for its intent to bring the ethical concerns of biological engineering to the public at large. Geneticist and philosopher C.H. Waddington, author of books such as The Ethical Animal (1960) and Biology, Purpose and Ethics (1971) included the following passage in the review of Taylor’s book in The New York Review of Books:

His book is in fact the first major exposition, addressed to the general public, of questions which are going to be very much with us in the next few decades. The main question his book raises is simple to state, and very difficult to deal with. It is that the pursuit of knowledge eventually brings the power to control the subjects the knowledge is about; and power can be used for many purposes, including undesirable or evil ones as well as good. Taylor’s aim is to show that biological knowledge is on the point of presenting us with powers that might be as double-edged as the control of atomic energy proved to be.

In The Biological Time Bomb, Taylor warns that the privileged reputation of the scientist as a “miracle worker” could eventually become one of a “mad engineer, applying his arcane knowledge regardless of the human consequences, causing disasters, manufacturing monsters, prepared even to move the earth from its course or extinguish the sun to test his theories.” Books such as Taylor’s often used the words of scientists to support their assertions. For example, Taylor quoted famed geneticist Francis Crick, who suggested that “the development of biology is going to destroy to some extent our traditional grounds for ethical beliefs.” James T. Patterson, in his non-fiction book about the 1960s The Eve of Destruction, quoted the words of scientist Rollin Hotchkiss who ominously predicted that research into the manipulation of DNA could not be stopped. “It will surely be done or attempted,” Hotchkiss said, adding that “[t]he pathway will be built from a combination of altruism, private profit, and ignorance.”

It is important to note here that Dr. Schultz and his graduate students in Conly’s book are not the mad, sadistic scientists portrayed by the 1982 Bluth film, The Secret of NIMH. Conflation of the two movies often gives Conly an unfair reputation for being virulently anti-scientist and anti-science. This point is reiterated by reviewers of the text who deride the movie for muddling the subtle commentary that Conly provided in Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH. Part of the effectiveness of the book lies in its portrayal of real-life issues in shades of grey, not in black and white. Paula R. Connolly supported this view when she said that “[d]espite O’Brien’s obvious criticisms of the overambitious goals of science and the dangers of experimentation, he is careful not to provide facile characterizations of scientists.” Nevertheless, the book was not well- received in scientific circles. Catherine L. Elick cites a Science magazine article in which authors Deborah Runkle and Ellen Granger attacked “juvenile magazine articles and novels like Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH” for “propagandizing” children and accused “teachers of subjects other than science” of “promoting the animal rights agenda during a discussion of civil rights.” The Smithsonian Institution, which included the book in a teaching list about animal research issues, also gained the ire of the American Association for the Advancement of Science whose members felt the book was an unbalanced attack on scientific research.

Conly’s book, indeed, does not condone Dr. Schultz and experimentation he conducts on the rats. It is his subtlety, which, in fact, makes the message more effective: Alethea K. Helbig describes Dr. Schultz as having a “cold, dispassionate manner [which] increases the horror of what may happen. Conly’s daughter, in her essay “Intelligence and Utopia in Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH ,” notes the willingness of the scientists to “attack with cyanide gas a group of rats they believe to be as intelligent as themselves.” Catherine L. Elick, in Talking Animals in Children’s Fiction, said that Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH presented “not only a harsher view of humanity but also a stronger call to see animals as intelligent, rights-bearing individuals.” She also alludes to Shelley’s Frankenstein, proposing that “Dr. Frankenstein’s inexorable hunt for his creature through frozen wastes” parallels the attempt to exterminate the rats of NIMH.” The literate rats of NIMH are well-aware of their differences to regular rats, noticing the changes in their size and intelligence, as well as the ways in which their former brethren seem to be intimidated by them. This is clear in a discussion between Nicodemus and Jenner in which Nicodemus says:

The real point is this: We don’t know where to go because we don’t know what we are…. But the fact is, we aren’t rats any more. We’re something Dr. Schultz has made…Where does a group of civilized rats fit in?

There is another possible reason, however, that Conly’s scientist chooses to be willing to attempt to exterminate the possibly re-discovered rats of NIMH rather than capture the rats under the Fitzgibbon rosebush at the conclusion of the book. Many animal experiments, including those in the fields of genetic engineering, end in the purposeful deaths of the animals in order that the scientists can then dissect the corpses in order to learn the effects of the experiments upon the physiology of the animal. This practice, which still occurs today, is done not only in the name of scientific analysis, but simply because any additional upkeep of laboratory animals post- experiment is viewed as too costly.

Materialism – and the thing about “things” – is another of Mrs. Frisby’s major foci. Alexis de Tocqueville, in now famous observations of mid-nineteenth American culture, declared that materialism was a “dangerous disease of the human mind,” a phrase which closely resembles Nicodemus’s own talk of “a feeling of discontent [which] settled upon us like some creeping disease.” Nicodemus was here describing the feeling of the rats after they had given themselves every gadget and luxury in their home beneath the Fitzgibbon rosebush.

America, too, was feeling some of this malaise, as evident in the anti-materialist sentiment that rose to the forefront in 1960s counterculture. By the 1960s, the proliferation of technology led to a whole new facet to such materialism. Elaine Taylor, in The Commodity Gap: Consumerism and the Modern Home, stated that Richard Nixon linked “consumer aspirations to scientific expertise” in 1959. An exchange between President Nixon and Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev, now immortalized as the “Kitchen Debate,” featured a Nixon who trumpeted the capabilities of American technology against a Khrushchev who jokingly asked the President if the United States had “a machine that puts food in the mouth and pushes it down?” Ruth Schwartz Cohen’s More Work for Mother noted that American affluence wasn’t just indicated by the typical signs of wealth such as home size and automobile make, but also by “toilets, refrigerators, and washing machines.” Popular culture, too, expressed a sense of malaise with materialism, such as in the Monkees’ 1967 hit, “Another Pleasant Valley Sunday,” in which the singer laments that “[c]reature comfort goals, they only numb my soul” and “make it hard for me to see.” Anti-materialism was a prominent theme in 1960s counterculture, with many members eschewing such consumerism and advocating a return to a simpler life, including those which advocated a return to the land.

Anthropologist Loren Eiseley’s The Immense Journey (1962) opens with a chapter in which the author describes himself observing a community: “[L]istening to the talk ringing out from neighbor to neighbor” and “seeing the inhabitants drowsing in their doorways.” It is not a human city, Eiseley reveals, but “prairie dog town.” Eiseley then relates a tale of human evolution in which the roles of rodents and the early primates play pivotal roles. Eiseley describes the rodent predecessor as a “shabby little Paleocene rat, eternal tramp and world wanderer” and the “father of all mankind.” Using detailed scientific language, Eiseley suggests that without these rodents, the early primates would have remained tree-dwelling mammals.

Compare Eiseley’s theories in The Immense Journey to the following passage from Mrs. Frisby:

But there was one book, written by a famous scientist, that had a chapter about rats. Millions of years ago, he said, rats seemed to be ahead of all the other animals, seemed to be making a civilization of their own. They were well-organized and built quite complicated villages in the fields. The descendants today are the rats known as prairie dogs. But somehow it didn’t work out. The scientist thought maybe it was because the rats’ lives were too easy; while the other animals (especially the monkeys) were living in the woods and getting tougher and smarter, the prairie dogs grew soft and lazy and made no more progress. Eventually the monkeys came out of the woods, walking on their hind legs, and took over the prairies and almost everything else. It was then that the rats were driven to become scavengers and thieves, living on the fringes of a world run by men.

Rats taken out of the wild and kept in captivity had also been observed to undergo profound changes. In Mankind Evolving (1962), Theodosius Dobzhansky concluded that the laboratory rats of the mid-twentieth century had undergone significant evolutionary changes since being sequestered from their wild cousins in the mid nineteenth-century. Because the lab rats’ “struggle for survival no longer exist[ed]” they exhibited “smaller adrenal glands and less resistance to stress, fatigue, and disease than wild rats.” Such observations could have influenced Conly’s work. This can be seen in Dr. Schultz’s dialogue with the men who have trapped Nicodemus and the other city rats. When one of the men reports to Dr. Schultz that the wild rats seemed “almost tame,” Schultz replies, “I hope not. I already have enough tame ones.”

There had been other twentieth-century books that had included rats and mice in discussions of science and technology and its effect on human civilization, including Doctor Dolittle’s Zoo (1925) and Flowers for Algernon (1966). It seems likely that the character of Nicodemus may have been inspired in part by a rat in Doctor Doolittle’s Zoo. In a story called “The Volcano Rat,” the leader of the rat and mice complain of how he fears “rat and mouse civilization” may regress due to its proximity to humans and their technology. He calls the rats and mice who want to continue to live in this way “parasites,” a description that resembles Nicodemus’s assertion that to stay on the Fitzgibbon farm would make the rats like fleas on a

drowning dog.59 The story also includes a white mouse – a possible inspiration for Mr. Ages, the white mouse who, along with Mr. Frisby, escapes from the lab with the rats of NIMH. However, Conly’s book takes the story much farther, making a far more comprehensive commentary on the rodents’ situation, and, rather than leaving the story in dystopia, creates a path toward utopia in Thorn Valley.

Technological materialism was not only dangerous to a species’ evolutionary progress, according to Nicodemus, but it also had dangerous implications for the environment.

Nicodemus’s allegory of “Keeping up with the Joneses” reveals that the damage caused by materialism is far greater than that of the dent in the pocketbook, but environmental degradation:

I was reminded of a story I had read at the Boniface Estate when I was looking for things written about rats. It was about a woman in a small town who bought a vacuum cleaner. Her name was Mrs. Jones, and up until then she, like all of her neighbors, had kept her house spotlessly clean by using a broom and a mop. But the vacuum cleaner did it faster and better, and soon Mrs. Jones was the envy of all the other housewives in town – so they all bought vacuum cleaners, too. The vacuum cleaner business was so brisk, in fact, that the company that made them opened a branch factory in town. The factory used a lot of electricity, of course, and so did the women with their vacuum cleaners, so the local electric power company had to put up a big new plant to keep them all running. In its furnaces the power plant burned coal, and out of its chimneys black smoke poured day and night, blanketing the town with soot and making all the floors dirtier than ever. Still, by working twice as hard and twice as long, the women of the town were able to keep their floors almost as clean as they had been before Mrs. Jones ever bought a vacuum cleaner in the first place.

Compare this to a passage from French technology-critic Jacques Ellul’s description of the problems of household technology from his book, The Technological Society:

For example, to make housework easier, garbage-disposal units have been put into use which allow the garbage to run off through the kitchen sinks. The result is enormous pollution of the rivers. It is then necessary to find some new means of purifying the rivers so that water can be used for drinking. A great quantity of oxygen is required for the bacteria to destroy these organic materials. And how shall we oxygenate the rivers? This is an example of the way technology engenders itself.

Americans, including American President John F. Kennedy, were also thinking about the effects of science and technology on the environment – in no small part because of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring. The work which was first serialized in The New Yorker and eventually published in 1962, immediately gained wide readership and bestseller status. Her whistleblowing on the pesticide industry may have gained her friends, but it also gave her dire enemies. The book is considered the spark for the environmental movement which would fully emerge with vigor in the 1970s.

Overall, Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH, served to provide children with a fully- fleshed out story, replete with messages of friendships and the importance of community, with a sub-story of far deeper implications. As in his other books, Conly’s sense of concern for humanity’s future in the face of rapidly expanding science and technology rings clear, giving both children, and, in some cases, their parents, much to think about and discuss.

“Inhumane Humanitarianism:” The Work of Caroline Earle White and H.G. Wells

“Many good people who abhor ordinary cruelty stultify their judgment concerning the extraordinary and feel rebuked when “the good of humanity” is hurdled at them as a telling argument; and when it is hinted that they are hysterical and indulge sickly sentimentality, they are silenced.”
American Anti-Vivisection Society
Journal of Zoophily , Volume IV, No. 4, 1895, Pg. 46

“To be kind to the race – to save it from self-destructive over-individuation.… This kind-to-be-cruel policy they formulate as that of “inhumane humanitarianism”…In a word, they are pitilessly benevolent (1933b:346). As ethical revolutionaries, they “see things unfeelingly” (1937c:72), with “cold inhuman clearness” (1933c:46). Given scientific self-discipline, they possess the “rational insensitiveness to get facts as facts and not as dreads and horrors” *1937c:72)” (49)
Leon Stover on the Works and Philosophies of H.G. Wells pg. 49

A number of theories have been brought forward by historians of the anti-vivisection and animal rights movements to explain its apparent disappearance from the annals of American and English culture, in the early-twentieth century. Some attempted to explain this disappearance as a result of the Great War, while others would argue that it was the advent of anesthesia that had taken the ‘sting’ out of the opposition to the practice. In comparing the works, both fictional and non-fictional, of Caroline Earle White, the founder of the Pennsylvania Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, the Women’s Branch of the Pennsylvania Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals and the American Anti-Vivisection Society, alongside the fictional and non-fictional works of the well-known H.G. Wells, another factor presents itself for consideration, and one that would have implications far beyond the perception of the ‘worth’ of animals, but would have terrible implications for human relations as well – eugenics-based beliefs that would take root in the United States and ultimately manifest itself horrifically in the Holocaust. In both fictional and nonfictional works, are reflected their differing beliefs on what it mean to be “humanitarian” to all life. 

In the consideration of both pain and the ‘humane motive’ in the nineteenth-century England and the United States, the  morality of slavery became a point of fiery contention, featuring two sides that each claimed “God” and “humanity” were on their side. Historian Margaret Abruzzo aptly observes in her book, Polemical Pain, that “[T]he messy history of humanitarianism within the slavery debate reveals the limitations of a humanitarian ethic and the difficulty of resting moral judgments solely on objections to pain.” However, even after ethics of the slavery question had resolved, the Gilded Age would bring more sharply racial, economic, ethnic and gender divides than ever before, and, combined with Darwin’s recent theory of natural selection, emerging eugenicists continued where the pro-slavers left off. Opacity became the new rule, and those who would continue to vivisect both animals and people depended on the ability to cloak their behaviors; something never available to the slaveholder.  H.G. Wells, although a ‘staple’ of science-fiction reading lists, considered himself a ‘new Puritan,’ and believed firmly in “inhumane humanitarianism.” His Island of Doctor Moreau was not a cautionary tale, as had been Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, but, rather, a novelization of some of his most deeply held beliefs in what he felt would create the ‘perfect society.’ An ardent vivisectionist, he was the antithesis of Caroline Earle White and her allies, whose work to world cultural values. 

Prendick, the leading character of The Island of Doctor Moreau, and Hargrave, of Love in the Tropics bear similar may feelings toward their fates at first glance, but even then their inner resolve shows some hint of things to come. Whereas Hargrave weeps, but “[A]fter a time, however, different feelings awoke in my breast. I was young and strong, and the love of life stirred within me, impelling me to preserve my existence,” Prendick bears less resilience and more bitterness. “I was empty and very faint, or I should have had more heart. But as it was I suddenly began to sob and weep, as I had never done since I was a little child. The tears ran down my face. In a passion of despair I struck with my fists at the water in the bottom of the boat, and kicked savagely at the gunwale. I prayed aloud for God to let me die…..,” read the words of Prendick. Each speaks of heart, but within Hargrave, there is, indeed, ‘love of life.’ At the surface, it may seem that these two passages may bear little reflection on the stories to come, however, their significance in regard to the way in which both writers saw ‘life’ would become far more clear. 

In dealing first with the issue of cruelty to animals, the views of these two Gilded Age thinkers, there is certainly transparency. Wells had gone as far as to debate George Bernard Shaw on the issue of animal experimentation. Wells and his beliefs would remain a target of criticism of thinkers such as George Orwell. In response to Wellsian theory that “The modern state must apply the “good, scientifically caused pain” (1901a:325) of “social surgery” for the “maximum elimination of its feeble and spiritless folk” (1905c:141f),”  Orwell replied that in Wellsian literature: “”one finds the same idea constantly recurring: the supposed antithesis between the man of science who is working towards a planned World State and the reactionary who is trying to restore a disorderly past…. History as he sees it is a series of victories won by the scientific man over the romantic man. [Orwell 1941: 169] (26)”” In an interesting twist, Wells once considered himself the defender of vivisection in a debate against George Bernard Shaw, who he termed a sentimentalist. However, in this debate, Wells would consider Pavlov the better many because of his animal experimentation. In truth, Pavlov was a great advocate for overhauling the vivisection system, opposing it not only for ethical reasons, but because pain would contaminate the results. Moreau showed no such concern with his House of Pain. White may have consistently reminded opponents that she was opposed only to ‘painful’ vivisection on animals, Wells gave absolutely no ground. 

In regard to the issue of pain, it is not only a question of whether pain is allowed to be inflicted, but rather, what the very nature of pain was. White’s view, incorporating her feelings regarding the practice as follows:

“No one would maintain that we were justified in either robbing or murdering a large number of poor people in order to confer a great benefit upon a large portion of the human race; then why are we justified in inflicting such indescribable tortures upon poor, helpless animals that happen to be in our power? It is just as much of one of God’s laws that we should be merciful as that we should not steal or murder; and is it merciful to cut up sentient creatures alive and torment them in every possible way that the imagination of the vivisector can devise? (9)” 

Prendick, who does, to the reader, offer a modicum of resistance to Moreau, at first, does ask Moreau the application of such infliction of pain. Moreau replies in a way that both agrees and yet denies the presence of pain as it exists in Moreau’s work:

“So long as visible or audible pain turns you sick; so long as your own pains drive you; so long as pain underlies your propositions about sin,—so long, I tell you, you are an animal, thinking a little less obscurely what an animal feels. This pain… Oh, but it is such a little thing! A mind truly opened to what science has to teach must see that it is a little thing. It may be that save in this little planet, this speck of cosmic dust, invisible long before the nearest star could be attained—it may be, I say, that nowhere else does this thing called pain occur.”

A compatriot of Wells in the fight against the anti-vivisection movement, and an equally enthusiastic proponent of eugenics was Dr. Alexis Carrel. Carrel received the Nobel Prize despite protests from members of the  anti-vivisection movement. Carrel’s own former medical brethren constantly challenged his results, however, he found a home with the Rockefeller Institute, and, later, in Vichy France where it is believed he continued his open avocation of eugenics. The Rockefeller Farm, a bugbear of White’s, became one of the sources of her most bitter defeat. Her protests against the ‘lab animal farm’ were banned from discussion by political intrigue between Dr. W.W. Keen, a fierce White opponent, President Taft and the complicit cooperation of the President of the American Humane Association. 

Slavery may have ended, but imperialism certainly hadn’t, and as imperialism was a mainstay of both England and the United States, it isn’t terribly surprising that the idea of valuing one human life over another wouldn’t be extinguished along with formal practices of slavery. Despite the common accusations that the anti-vivisectionists did not care about humanity, and placed animals above them, consistent research of the movement reveals otherwise. Caroline Earle White was constantly refuting this idea, and a poignant example of her compassion toward people can be found in the introduction to her (FIRST) novel, Love in the Tropics:

“As I know… that a book stands of falls upon its merits alone, I will merely say that, whatever be its fate, it will not have entirely failed if it bring home to the minds of my readers what I believe to be certain truth, that as warm a heart, as noble a nature, and as bright an intellect may be found under a yellow, or brown, or a black skin as under a white one. (iii-iv)” 

As in The Island of Doctor Moreau, Love in the Tropics begins with a shipwreck near islands generally inhabited by Polynesians. White portrays them as a kind and beautiful people. Wells may remain neutral (at best) when it comes to the  Kanakas of Moreau’s Isle, derogatory terms, but his real world feelings toward the people of Polynesia are not so subtle, saying that “That large, naked, virtuous, pink, Natural Man, drinking pure spring water, eating the fruits of the earth, and living to ninety in the open air is a fantasy; he never was nor will be. The real savage is a nest of parasites within and without, he smells, he rots, he starves… As for his moral integrity, let the curious inquirer seek an account of the Tasmanian, or the Australian, or the Polynesian before “sophistication” came. (16)””

Even as the indigenous peoples in both of these books would have been perceived as significantly different in the eyes of White and Wells, the idea of ‘womanhood’ would also bear marked differences. Moreau’s Prendick even sees gendered differences among the beast people, ascribing to them descriptions such as “these weird creatures—the females, I mean—had in the earlier days of my stay an instinctive sense of their own repulsive clumsiness, and displayed in consequence a more than human regard for the decency and decorum of extensive costume.” White’s ‘leading lady’ of Love in the tropics, on the other hand, is treated positively. The native woman “wore a sulu of the finest native cloth, which reached from her waist below her knees, and was ornamented with the feathers of various birds. Around her wrists and ankles she had circlets of shells. (29)” Polygamy too is addressed, and though neither White nor Wells condone it, there is a distinctly different flavor to the choices of wording made to approve or disapprove of the choices. White, who was certainly the more religiously affiliated of the two, is kinder regarding the practice in Paloa, stating that “polygamy was practiced among the men of distinction in Paloa, but that Owahi, with the good sense and moderation which distinguished all his proceedings, chose to confine himself to two wives. (25)” Wells, however, not only leaves the males out of the system of polygamy, but unsubtly implicates the females as the instigators. “Some of them—the pioneers in this, I noticed with some surprise, were all females—began to disregard the injunction of decency, deliberately for the most part. Others even attempted public outrages upon the institution of monogamy. The tradition of the Law was clearly losing its force. I cannot pursue this disagreeable subject.”

As one investigates more deeply into both stories, and the passions that drove each of these ‘humanitarians,’ the religious focus of Wells versus the minimal reference of religion to the otherwise more religious White starts to lose much of its mystery.  In The Island of Doctor Moreau, the idea that even humanity should be subject to shaping and vivisection is but alluded to. However, Wells himself put no such subtleties into his words when expressing his own beliefs. Whereas he stated that  “the new Puritans are necessarily cruel to individuals. This kind-to-be-cruel policy they formulate as that of “inhumane humanitarianism” which , in their “obliteration of out-of-date moral values,” White, for her part was confronting a Christian clergyman (and doctor) who preached that vivisection with a worthy purpose was not cruel, White replied by asking: 

“But who, I will ask, is to be the judge of the purpose and the motive?  Are a few powerful men united in the pursuit of any object, who claim that their motive sanctifies their action, to be allowed to inflict atrocities upon helpless creatures, either human beings or the lower animals? Do we think at the present time that Philip II of Spain was justified in burning alive heretics and schematics, as it is said he did? Yet he had a far greater motive than the vivisectors of today, for they say they are only trying to save our bodies, while he hoped to save souls. Were Cotton Mather and his colleagues justified in burning or in defending the burning of witches at the stake, and were our Puritan ancestors who fled from religious persecution in England justified, after they had obtained power in this country, in flogging and even putting to death the innocent, gentle Quakers?“

However, Wells was far from alone as an advocate for scientific betterment of mankind at any cost. White reported, in her Journal of Zoophily, that the “cruelty of the dog and ear grafting in which Dr. Carrel cut off dogs’ legs and ears and put legs and ears from other animals in their stead was described by sworn witnesses who were at the Rockefeller, who mentioned it was “awful.” Indeed, one or two of the attendants left the institute because they could not endure the sight of so much suffering.” This was not a false flag, and that can be seen clearly through Moreau. When questioned by Prendick regarding the scope of his work and his goals, the vivisectors replies: 

“All in good time,” said he, waving his hand at me; “I am only beginning. Those are trivial cases of alteration. Surgery can do better things than that. There is building up as well as breaking down and changing…This is a kind of grafting in a new position of part of an animal upon itself. …,—monsters manufactured.”

In examining the works and beliefs of both sides of the vivisection debate, one sees some of the same arguments which led to two sides of a story claiming moral victory, and arguing pain in disturbingly flexible terms. However, once slavery disappeared, the movement to alleviate the pain and suffering of both animals and the marginalized members of society continued. The key to implementing ‘inhumane humanitarianism’ was not openly asking people to believe that pain was good, rather, it was to be achieved either by convincing people to look the other way either out of selfishness and fear or to never give them the choice at all.  In a world of ag-gag laws and distant sweatshops, we can see what appears to be a primarily successful outcome of silencing, discrediting or keeping evidence of what could be considered ‘unethical’ behavior out of the hands of those whom would share it. Fortunately for society, that level of opacity is becoming more and more difficult to maintain. 

First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Socialist.
Then they came for the Trade Unionists, and I did not speak out— 
Because I was not a Trade Unionist.
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out— 
Because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.
Martin Niemöller