Parental discipline was being replaced by self-discipline. Scouting and the Horatio Alger books, with their emphasis on instilling self-discipline, made a deep impression on him, for much the same reason.
Junior high school also brought Robert’s first opportunity to follow in the Heinlein family tradition of military service. His high school yearbook7 shows him a member of the Rifle Club and of the junior ROTC (Reserve Officers’ Training Corps) company. It was expected that all the (male) family members would take up arms, if not as a profession, then at least as their patriotic duty. His older brother Rex (now called Ivar, or sometimes Ike, to distinguish him from his father) was already a member.
High school was very demanding. For the first time, Robert was not within walking distance of the school. He had an hour-long trolley ride each way, and that was when he studied; between household chores and money-earning work, there was no other time available. His academic coursework was fairly heavy: Latin and French, geometry, algebra, and a series of history courses advancing from ancient to medieval to modern European to American history. In addition to the course work, he took in a wide range of extracurricular activities. His life-drawing class was taught by one of Maxfield Parrish’s teachers, and Robert did some paid modeling for the class, as well. He kept up modeling throughout his youth, even, in 1928, professionally, for Coca-Cola ads.8
He also acted in a number of school plays, and he was a member of two science clubs. The school’s Kelvin Club was oriented toward physics, but some of the boys, including Ivar, had organized their own Newton Club, where they could pool their resources and do more interesting activities, out from under the thumb of Central’s administration. They sold toy soldiers to raise extra money. The Newton Club was much more to Robert’s liking, even though he was the youngest of its members. He built the club’s telescope in his basement shop—and since he had the keeping of the scope, he was able to observe from the roof of his home or from the tops of billboards in the neighborhoods. When the weather was promising, he would sacrifice a few hours’ sleep and carry the scope the ten blocks or so to the local park, where the seeing was closer to the horizon.9
As a matter of policy, Robert took every public-speaking course offered at Central, hoping to cure, or at least mitigate, his stammering.10 He was invited to join the Shakespeare Club—the school’s most prestigious literary society—for its public-speaking competition (and eventually became its president). He also worked into the Forensics (debate) squad and eventually became captain of the squad and of the Negative Debate Team.
All these activities kept him very busy, but his real education was taking place outside the school. In 1920 he left Bible Belt fundamentalism behind when he read Darwin’s On the Origin of Species and The Descent of Man. By 1921, his apostasy was complete. At about this time, Heinlein recalled, his best friend in junior high school (and a Russian Jew), Isidore Horoshem, “laughed at me and asked me if I really believed in all that crap about Jesus.”11 Still a believer, he was shocked—but not enough to bust up the friendship. What set the final seal on his apostasy, though, was his discovery of T. H. Huxley’s essays. Reading Huxley, he began to appreciate how far an unfettered mind could go in self-analysis. Huxley’s kind of critical thinking gave him a model for what he should be doing for himself.
He was developing other unorthodox ideas, as well. Although Heinlein was later to portray the figure drawn from his Grandfather Lyle (Ira Johnson, M.D.) as a freethinker, there is no definite evidence that anyone in Robert Heinlein’s family held any views outside what might loosely be called the mainstream. It is more likely that Heinlein came by his progressive inclinations the hard way. At one point, he said he probably became a socialist (of the utopian, rather than the Marxist, type) in reaction to his poverty-stricken upbringing. How could it be, he wondered, that an intelligent, hardworking person such as his father could struggle so hard and yet just barely manage to scrape along?12 He searched for clues in Jack London, Upton Sinclair, Karl Marx, and Edward Bellamy, writers who thought there was something basically wrong with the whole economic setup. There were bits and pieces that seemed to add up to an answer: Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward seemed to have a chunk of it; Henry George’s Progress and Poverty (1879) had a bit of it, too—Robert was fascinated by the Single Tax idea—though there seemed to be something a little wrong with it, too. For the most part, the adults he knew wouldn’t talk about the subject at all.13
In 1919, Robert “heard William Jennings Bryan before he got too old and … heard Woodrow Wilson when he was killing himself trying to sell the League of Nations.”14 At thirteen, Robert vigorously supported the League of Nations, an idea H. G. Wells portrayed as the first magnificent step toward utopia. America would thus, Wells assured us, lead the world into the twentieth century.15
And so it seemed to be: on August 18, 1920, the Tennessee legislature ratified the Nineteenth Amendment, guaranteeing women the vote. President Wilson’s principled progressive and individualist “New Freedoms” inspired Robert at the age of eleven—enough to overlook Wilson’s enormously destructive racism. He described himself as a “world-stater from way back.”16 He learned to read and speak Esperanto because it was going to be the language of the unified, American-led world.
He did not think of his military interests as being in conflict with his socialist ideals. To American socialists steeped in the tradition of Noyes and Fourier and Owens—and now Wells—socialism and patriotism might go arm in arm, and did in Robert Heinlein: socialism was how he did his patriotism.
Nor was socialism the only shaping force he was taking from his reading, which had long since gone beyond the bounds of “boys’ books.” His astronomical reading was expanding his universe. The size and distance of some of those fuzzy nebulae barely visible through a telescope had recently (1917) been determined, and the scale of creation was suddenly staggering. The universe of his Victorian-trained teachers, of the generation that still dominated science in the new world of radiation and relativity, had been a stately pavane; the new picture of the universe was a whirling, dynamic immensity, shocking to his teachers’ ordered sensibilities.
And he found material to shock his own sensibilities: in 1920 he ran across an old book, From Nebula to Nebula (G. H. Lepper, 1912), which described an old and deep conspiracy, known only to the professional ballisticians who calculated orbits: they had known for centuries that Newton’s mechanics were wrong, and they had quietly agreed to use a fudge factor to make the calculations come out even with the observations. Robert found that shocking. The adults were keeping secrets from him!17 That’s where Huxley’s critical thinking came in: you had to examine every assumption, all the time, and see the world—and even yourself—with a kind of doubled vision, alert to the reality as well as the assumptions. Hypocrisy was not just a religious thing, after all.
Robert’s personal universe was expanding in other ways, as well: Electric Park, on the edge of the city, was the temple and exhibition of the wonders of science and technology—“heaven on earth for kids at that time.”18 He went frequently, drawn by another sort of electric marvel: Billie Beck, one of the girls he knew at Central High, had gone to work as a dancer at Electric Park Follies, a judicious lie increasing her age from fifteen to eighteen. This was long before she changed her name and became famous as nude (or fauxnude) dancer Sally Rand. Robert had hit puberty the year before (1918),19 and his hormones were raging.
It is hard for us, nearly a hundred years later, to imagine how frustrating it was to be a teenager then. There was nothing like sex education for a high schooler: for Robert, such information as there was came from his grandfather’s antique medical textbooks. The scandalous sexology books of Havelock Ellis were just beginning to be published in England—very hard to come by in any case. Experience was the best teacher, of course, but even harder to come by: male and female high school students were not even permitted to touch. Nevertheless,
my high school had quite a lot of friendly
and/or frantic fornication in it. I never managed to get in on it but it was not from lack of trying … . But youth, inexperience, lack of money and an automobile—and just being too damned busy—kept me out of the game, in high school.20
That was not an exaggeration: between household chores and work to support himself and all the extracurricular activities, he was fully committed.
Robert did make some time for homemade entertainments—plays and reviews, which could also be moneymaking ventures. One of the more luxe productions had a typed program, which Robert pasted into one of his scrapbooks:21
PROGRAM
Shadowgraphs
Amusing and Interesting Scenes in the Land of Shadow
Magic
Act I
Slips and Sleights with Silks and Cottons
Act II
Capricious Cards
Act III
1. Oriental Liquids
2. Never Say “Die”
3. A Boarding School Favorite
4. Finale
Magicians: A. W. Felt
R. I. Heinlein
Shadowgrapher: Robert Heinlein
Other productions were on a smaller scale—eye still on the cash register. One of the Heinlein family’s neighbors, Don Johnstone, recalled attending one of these extravaganzas in 1920:
A few days after we moved in, a cardboard sign with crayon lettering appeared on the porch railing of a house across the street. Shakespearean drama, it read: Today at 2. Admission 2 cents. Mother and I went, she figuring it would be an easy way to begin getting acquainted. The play was something called King of the Cannibal Isles, and the relation to Shakespeare never became clear. The acts were short—about two minutes each—and the props were simple, a fly-swatter serving as a broadsword. The actors were three: Clare, 8 years old; Louise, more or less my twin; and Bob, two or three years older. I think Bob was author and producer as well as director and actor.22
It was necessary to make even the entertainments pay for themselves. The country was in another depression, with farm prices falling in 1920 by as much as 40 percent. Robert worked, briefly, shelling pecans for a wholesaler, then moved to a job lighting gas streetlamps. In between, he made his personal amusements pay their way by giving paid lectures for adult audiences on astronomical subjects.
Through 1920 and 1921, Robert worked at a succession of pickup jobs, doing whatever came to hand. His oldest brother, Larry, occasionally loaned his car and some money, and taught Robert how to use a Thompson submachine gun—the Tommy gun, the favorite weapon of J. Edgar Hoover’s agents at the Bureau of Investigation, as the FBI was called at the time. (Larry was later loaned by the Army to the Bureau, to teach them how to shoot Tommy guns. “He’s the best Tommychopper in the USA,” Robert boasted.23)
After Christmas 1922, Robert took a steady job, working part-time and evenings as a page in the Reference Room of the Kansas City Public Library, where he earned the munificent sum of $9.50 for his twenty-nine hours a week and considered himself “quite prosperous.”24 When he was not helping the librarian answer reference calls—usually fetching books—he could hole up in the stacks, surrounded by the Kansas City Public Library’s astonishing half a million books, and read to his heart’s content.25
[T]hat gave me time to plow through Fiske,26 Schopenhauer, Darwin, Plato, and other books we did not have at home, and to dabble in Einstein and Freud, both just becoming much talked about, and to read some very interesting books in the locked shelves … 27
By 1923, Heinlein was taking in all this material and trying to integrate it. In 1922 he had acquired his own personal copy of H. G. Wells’s Outline of History, and he was soon to hear—he says “study under”28—socialist intellectual Will Durant.
A notorious freethinker, Durant had scandalized New York by marrying his thirteen-year-old student, Ariel, and then consorting with anarchists at the Ferrer Schools as he toured the nation, lecturing. Kansas City was on his lecture circuit every year. In February and March 1923 he was back in Kansas City, delivering his usual mix of art and history and economics and philosophy and political subjects—infotainment in the last days of the Chautauqua circuit.29 Durant was very explicit about his socialist ideas, and he put them in the context of a total view of science and economics and philosophy and art. This was just exactly what Robert needed to bring cohesion to the material he was reading in the library, and it excited him.30
He also wanted to travel and unsuccessfully entered a National Geographic contest for a prize trip to India, to see the Taj Mahal.
He did manage to take one trip to Colorado, to spend the entire month of July 1923 hiking with his friend Stanley Moise—the first time, at age sixteen, he had been away from home for any substantial length of time.
The boys took the Colorado Flyer from Kansas City, arriving in Colorado Springs on the first of July. That day Robert saw the Garden of the Gods. On July 2, he went to Manitou Springs and visited the Cave of the Winds, Ute Canyon Pass (which he spelled in his itinerary “Yute Canon”), and Green Mountain Falls. Coming from flat country, he was awed by the Rockies. Pikes Peak and Longs Peaks “were the greatest emotional experience in my life up to that time.”31
He had a lot to think about that summer. Larry had gotten married in April and set up housekeeping elsewhere with his new bride. His father had pulled in all the political favors owed him and obtained an appointment for Ivar to the United States Naval Academy at Annapolis. Ivar had left early in June, accompanied by articles in the local newspaper about the Kansas City boy off to Annapolis. The matter of Robert’s own future had suddenly become an immediate concern.
While in Denver on the way home, he saw the August 1923 “All Scientific Fiction” issue of the science-and-technology pulp Science and Invention on a newsstand. For years, Heinlein had been searching out all the science fiction and fantasy he could find. He used half of his remaining fifty cents to buy it. He spent the rest on a dozen doughnuts and made them last until he got home. But he thought both good investments: “food for the body, food for the soul.”32
He was about to start his senior year at Central High—time to start planning for college. College would be an uphill struggle without some kind of financial help, which would not be forthcoming from the family. If he could obtain an appointment for himself to one of the U.S. military academies, it would effectively be a scholarship. He could use them as stepping-stones into professional astronomy: both the Army and the Navy used astronomers—in fact, the United States Naval Observatory was one of the most prestigious astronomical facilities in the world at that time. But it would take a lot of work, particularly since Ivar was already at Annapolis. It was not common (though not completely unknown) to have two people from the same generation of the same family at Annapolis at the same time.
His father advised against it: he and Bam wanted Robert to become a doctor, though Robert knew he was not temperamentally suited to medicine.33 Perhaps, too, his father did not relish the thought of going back to his political contacts for a second favor so soon after the first. In any case, he did not volunteer to make the effort.
It is apparent that, by this time, Robert had accepted the hard truth that Ivar was his parents’ favorite. But he must also have known that what Ivar could do with his parents’ help he could often do on his own. His father might have expended his political capital on Ivar—but to Robert, that only meant an appointment was something possible to achieve. The appointments to the military academies—he would take either one, West Point or Annapolis—were patronage held by congressmen; local politics was a machine, and the example of others seems to have taught him that he could work the levers for his own benefit. Bright, promising high school students had their own entrées.
He resigned his job with the Kansas City Public Library’s Reference Room on July 30, 1923, to take a night job. On August 1, 1923, he wrote to the Navy Department’s Bureau of Navigation (BuNav) and the War Department’s Adjutant General’s Office asking about vacancies at Anna
polis and West Point. The initial results were discouraging: there were no local appointments to Annapolis opening up until 1927, after Ivar graduated. West Point, too, was filled. But there were other congressmen and other appointments open. Over the next two years he wrote dozens of letters, submitting applications, exploring loopholes in the law, and seeking recommendations to both Annapolis and West Point from the local businessmen he had been brought into contact with as an astronomy lecturer. He even inquired about gaining admission as an enlisted man, instead of by appointment, but was informed his chances were no better that way.34 He did, however, have one avenue of preferment open to him: Robert went off to the Civilian Military Training Camp at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, at the end of August 1923, and worked the system.
The CMTC concept—gathering college-age men together for the purpose of “military and citizenship training”—had been proposed during Theodore Roosevelt’s first term, and the first camps were held in 1913. CMTC grew into a movement. After World War I, Congress formally incorporated the CMTC into the National Defense Act of 1920, and the program continued to grow. The participants paid their own way, and it was a significant commitment of Robert’s savings (even though travel expenses were reimbursed by the CMTC). He did well and made sure that his supervisors noticed his superlative performance. Then and in 1924, he tapped them for letters of recommendation.
The first appointment that came up happened to be in his backyard: his own senator James A. Reed had a vacant appointment to the U.S. Naval Academy.
Robert A. Heinlein: In Dialogue With His Century Page 4
