Robert A. Heinlein: In Dialogue With His Century

by Robert A. Heinlein

  EPIC’s position going into the vote was shaky: Father Coughlin not only withheld an endorsement, he explicitly criticized Sinclair in his weekly radio address.17 United for California filed a second lawsuit, targeting 35,000 more “fraudulent” voter registrations—all Democrat. So far, 50,000 of the 330,000 new Democrats the EPIC forces had registered were under challenge. Two Assistant Court Commissioners resigned in protest, calling the fraudulent registration suit a “political sham.” When the California Supreme Court issued its ruling—on Halloween, appropriately enough, and just seven days before the election—prohibiting the wholesale purging of voters in Los Angeles, the justices confirmed EPIC’s position: “It is perfectly clear now that this action is a sham proceeding and a perversion of court process, absolutely void … It outrages every principle of justice and fair play.”18

  But it would not be enough. What United for California could not achieve wholesale, it might yet accomplish on a retail level: on election day the Republicans would personally challenge 150,000 voters.

  On November 2, airplanes dropped leaflets over downtown Los Angeles. A nonexistent relief committee funded by one of the Merriam groups passed out pamphlets pleading for funding to take care of the 1.5 million bums expected to flood into Southern California when Sinclair was elected. A “Thunder over California” leaflet showed a Russian waving a red flag with hundreds of bums trailing behind. EPIC forces retaliated by pasting Merriam’s face over the Russians and had the Governor trampling babies beneath his revolutionary feet on their own leaflet. Raymond Haight, once the leading candidate, now running a distant third, predicted “blood will flow” no matter who wins on Tuesday.19 Six thousand churchgoers gathered in Shrine Auditorium for an eleventh-hour anti-Sinclair meeting, in which evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson mounted an anticommunist pageant. Nine thousand EPICs rallied at the Pasadena Civic Auditorium. Six thousand more could not get into the auditorium, but a thousand stayed crowded around the steps. Sinclair came out to speak to them, telling them, “For twenty-five years I have been [his friend H. L.] Mencken’s prize boob because I believed in you. Now we shall find out which of us is right.”20

  The next evening (November 3, 1934), Sinclair made the last personal appearance of the campaign. The EPIC war chest was empty, but his friend Aline Barnsdall (an oil heiress who had mounted an EPIC billboard facing Hollywood Boulevard on her home, Frank Lloyd Wright’s Hollyhock House) contributed $10,000 to rent halls and buy radio time for a statewide, coordinated hookup, linking all the major grassroots rallies up and down the state.

  The Los Angeles rally started in Grand Olympic Auditorium, which had recently been set up as a boxing arena. This was the last and biggest event of the campaign, and Robert and Leslyn Heinlein must have been there, representing the West Hollywood Democratic Club.

  A huge American flag dominated the stage over the boxing ring where Upton Sinclair would emcee the show.21 As the broadcast began at 8:30 P.M., the audience sang “The Star-Spangled Banner”—to show EPIC’s patriotism—and Sinclair read the Twenty-third Psalm—to show his friendliness to religion. Sinclair then tossed the show to Bakersfield for its grassroots rally, then to Fresno, to Sacramento, and, finally, to San Francisco, where Sinclair’s running mate, Sheridan Downey, hosted a rally in the Dreamland Auditorium. Downey handed the show back to Sinclair in Los Angeles for a fifteen-minute talk, only the latest of hundreds in this campaign. “We still have a chance to settle our problems with ballots instead of bullets,” Sinclair told them. “It may be the last chance. The issue of this campaign is: can they fool you with their lies, and get you to vote in their interest instead of in your own?”

  He ended his speech as he had ended so many others during the campaign: “It’s up to you!” Bookmakers were giving Merriam odds of five to one, and the professional politicians were privately calling Merriam the winner.

  Without the endorsements that would keep the Democratic Party united, EPIC didn’t really have a chance. The EPICs in Olympic Auditorium didn’t know that. They were confident Sinclair was going to win. Their own estimates showed a three-to-one margin in favor of Sinclair over Merriam.

  On Monday, November 5, 1934, the day before the election, the Registrar of Voters asked the police to be ready to guard the polls in Los Angeles to minimize the bloodshed. EPICs gathered that evening in front of Aimee Semple McPherson’s Angelus Temple near downtown Los Angeles and paraded several miles into Hollywood—the biggest parade ever held in Los Angeles.

  The polls opened at 6 A.M. on Tuesday, November 6. Thousands were already lined up to vote. United for California concentrated on getting out the vote. The Chamber of Commerce had virtually ordered all member businesses to close that day, and the California Real Estate Association’s “Merriam or Moscow” force put all their Realtors’ automobiles at the disposal of the United for California group. True to their word, the Republicans challenged about 10 percent of the Democrats registered to vote—but the overwhelming majority qualified and voted. EPIC had “flying wedges” of lawyers to rush to assist wherever Democrats were being harassed by Republicans.

  Heinlein was an EPIC poll watcher that day. His experience with the comparatively gentle political machine in Kansas City didn’t prepare him for what he found: six thugs who didn’t like his count-watching threatened to beat him up. He retreated into the polling place until the lawyers came to rescue him.

  It … surprised and shocked me. The polling place was in a prosperous, super-respectable residential neighborhood; it had never occurred to me that there could be any danger—that sort of thing happened only down near the river. And not to me in any case! I was a respectable citizen!22

  But EPIC mutual self-help wasn’t always enough: he heard that another poll watcher in the same situation had been beaten and left bleeding on the sidewalk.23

  The polls closed at 7 P.M. Thousands of people—EPICs and Merriamites alike—gathered in downtown Los Angeles to hear the returns announced over loudspeakers or see them posted on signboards. The tallies began to even up as the night went on, but it was a clear loss for Sinclair and EPIC. By 10:30 P.M., Sinclair’s campaign manager, Richard Otto, was beginning to confront the possibility of defeat.

  But no matter what the outcome, Sinclair told his EPIC supporters, this election had been a great victory for EPIC against the united opposition of all reactionary forces in the state and piles and piles of money. The final count was 1,100,000 for Merriam; 900,000 for Sinclair; 300,000 for Haight.

  But the loss of the governorship race did not mean the campaign was a waste of time: even with dissension in the ranks, Sinclair had gotten twice as many Democratic votes for governor as had ever been cast in California. Of the thirty-eight Democratic State Assemblymen (compared to the Republicans’ forty-two), twenty-four were now EPICs, including Augustus Hawkins, who would later go on to become California’s first black congressman. In Los Angeles County, EPIC-supported John Anson Ford won a seat on the Board of Supervisors. EPIC was still strong in Los Angeles. Rising liberal politician from the San Dimas area Jerry Voorhis lost his election but predicted EPIC would be “one of those great forces which appear from time to time in human history and actually change the minds and hearts of people until the world is made new.”24

  Culbert Olson, an “earnest and idealistic lawyer,”25 won a seat to the state senate. He compared the EPIC situation to the founding of the Republican Party in 1856. They didn’t make a good showing that year, but in 1860 they elected a president—Abraham Lincoln.26

  The next morning, Governor Merriam claimed victory in a radio speech and acknowledged his bipartisan support, thanking the Democrats for supporting him. That was a signal that California’s opposition to the New Deal was over. Sinclair, too, made a radio speech—not as soft and accommodating as his campaign speeches. “I concede that the election has been stolen.” To his campaign workers he expressed his “eternal gratitude” and assured them, “We are the Democratic Party of California.” The Democrats who had bro
ken with the party were no longer Democrats.

  Sinclair announced that he was going to take a month off to do what he did best: write a companion pamphlet to the EPIC campaign books—an exposé of the campaign, I, Candidate for Governor, and How I Got Licked. He would publish it on Merriam’s inauguration day, January 7, 1935, offering bargain rates for the serial rights: any magazine or newspaper that wanted it could have it for $1 per thousand copies in circulation.

  Sinclair was retiring from active management of the EPIC movement. While he was writing, he told EPICs, follow the leadership of his trusted campaign manager, Richard Otto. They would find new directions for EPIC once he had recovered.

  In one of forty letters he wrote on November 7, 1934, Sinclair showed that his ego, at least, was not defeated: “We are far from being licked. The crucifixion of Jesus was looked upon as the greatest failure the world had ever known and now we know it resulted in the greatest victory.”27

  True to his word, Sinclair closeted himself in his Beverly Hills home and began dictating I, Candidate three days after the election. Dozens of newspapers and magazines across the country took him up on his serial offer—including, ironically enough, the Los Angeles Times.

  If politics makes strange bedfellows, the prospect of money makes even stranger: movie censor Will Hays suggested to Louis B. Mayer at MGM that a film on the rise of EPIC might be in order, and Mayer went directly to Sinclair for a proposal. Joe Schenck, who had threatened to move the film industry to Florida, had his studio, Twentieth Century Pictures, ramp up a production of Sinclair’s Depression Island.

  Sinclair had gone down in political defeat and went back to his profession as a working socialist/businessman/writer—and now Robert Heinlein’s political work began in earnest.

  15

  PARTY AND SHADOW PARTY

  The day after Thanksgiving 1934, things started to come apart for EPIC: EPIC-elected Senator Olson made a public statement calling for the End Poverty League to dismantle the EPIC movement and merge its local clubs into the statewide Democratic Party apparatus. Richard Otto, now de facto head of the End Poverty League, replied succinctly that EPIC was not a party, it was a movement and would stay as it was. The movement then fractured into two groups with very different aims. The Production-for-Use EPICs wanted to take the movement national—renamed “End Poverty in Civilization”—under Sinclair’s continuing leadership. Their aim was to strengthen EPIC’s ties to other progressive movements, stressing their independence from party affiliations as a grassroots movement in the American populist tradition. The Democrat-oriented EPICs wanted to rebuild the Democratic Party with EPIC dominating its radical wing and continuing to set the party’s agenda. Rube Borough, the managing editor of EPIC News, resigned and walked out in the middle of production of the next issue, taking most of the staff with him, to found a regular newspaper, United Progressive News.

  Although Heinlein stayed with the EPIC Democrats, his subsequent activities suggest he sympathized with both factions and couldn’t see why there should even be factions. With hundreds of thousands of supporters in California and more coming when EPIC went national, the organization should be pursuing both sets of goals—and figuring out some more, too. He was out of the fray for the moment, though: his bad cold turned into influenza and a persistent sinus infection. True to form, his prostatitis recurred. He went to see a private doctor on December 7, 1934, and the treatment this time lasted until July.

  But the politics could not wait. Sinclair’s retirement left a power vacuum, and the EPIC movement split in January 1935. The head office had managed to get EPIC News out for the month of December, but had to find new staff.

  The End Poverty League business manager scrambled through the card file on campaign workers with publications experience, and Robert Heinlein’s name popped up: he had, after all, edited, written, and published the USS Lexington’s paper, The Observer. Heinlein was called to the League’s offices downtown for an emergency get-out-the-paper effort, and he was given the task of organizing the whole project, almost from the ground up. Upton Sinclair himself and his wife, Mary Craig Sinclair, were there to lend a hand.

  This emergency not only thinned out the ranks of upper management—always a good thing for promotions—but it threw Robert and Leslyn into direct contact with Sinclair. Sinclair must have taken a liking to this obviously bright and obviously dedicated young couple. Robert was then just twenty-seven years old, and Leslyn thirty-one.

  A little of the luster dimmed for Heinlein, though, when he discovered Sinclair could not do simple arithmetic in his head1—even though Sinclair had expected to run an economics-driven bureaucracy.

  Sinclair must also have found Heinlein’s opinions sound and evolved a use for this newfound tool: Sinclair was going to be turning the California EPIC movement over to the local grassroots management, and that would mean a charter and a revised constitution for the End Poverty League in California. He asked Heinlein to join Saul Klein and Luther Bailey and help write the EPIC constitution .2 Sinclair had just put him in the position of Thomas Jefferson on the Committee of Five formed by the Second Continental Congress to draft the Declaration of Independence—and not a John Adams or Benjamin Franklin in sight.

  Within a few weeks, a regular staff was found for EPIC News. Heinlein stayed on as managing editor for the upcoming Los Angeles municipal elections, though his name did not appear on the masthead (only Sinclair and the overall managing editor were credited in EPIC News). This emergency was over for the moment—leaving only a few dozen other fires to put out. He had made a couple of friends working with EPIC News—particularly Sinclair’s secretary, Elma Wentz, and her husband, Roby Wentz, as well as a newspaperman, Cleve Cartmill, who wrote for the paper and for United Progressive News. The five of them formed a tight social group.

  In mid-February 1935, Robert and Leslyn discovered that they had had a close call that could have ruined any further political ambitions they might develop: on February 19, 1935, the Colorado Sunshine Club they had helped found with the Garrisons was arrested en masse and prosecuted for violation of Denver’s decency laws. The case was front-page news in The Denver Post for months. They had left Colorado just in time.

  Early in 1935, the EPIC group received an appeal from James M. Carter in Congressional District 3 (Imperial County) for help with his campaign for city council. Sinclair assigned Heinlein to this task—probably because it would give him some hands-on, one-on-one experience with political campaigns, which would be useful to EPIC in coming years. Leslyn was deputized to keep the home fires burning, and Heinlein loaded up his car and headed south and inland from San Diego. What he saw appalled and outraged him: reactionary vigilantes were carrying on a brutal warfare against agricultural workers, migrant and immigrant.

  Out-of-work people were coming to California from all directions, but in early 1935 the outflow from the Oklahoma Dust Bowl had already started. After years of drought, dirt storms, and unexpected, killing deep freeze destroyed Oklahoma’s wheat crop in 1933. The record-breaking heat of 1934 finished off the state’s economy. “Okies,” memorialized a few years later (1939) by John Steinbeck in The Grapes of Wrath, flooded toward California along U.S. Route 66, into the San Joaquin and Imperial valleys. The season started near Brawley and El Centro, then they could follow the crops to Santa Barbara, working sixteen-hour days from dawn to dusk, stoop labor that paid them not quite enough to keep body and soul together. Immigration restrictions starting in 1929 had cut off the supply of braceros from Mexico. Texans and Oklahomans could pick crops and provide manual labor in place of the ’cans who were no longer available. Max Knepper, a columnist for EPIC News, had called the area “semi-feudal” by early 1935 and under the “Fascistic rule” of about a thousand oligarchs, growers and shippers.3

  Not even California’s agriculture could absorb the flood of immigrants that came in 1934 and 1935, however: three hundred thousand migrants were not lucky enough to get jobs. They had no prospects at all—not
even state relief until they had been in California for a year. They gathered into squatter camps called “little Oklahomas”—eight thousand of them—beside the roadways. Those down in the Imperial Valley were rated by Fortune magazine as “the absolute low for the entire state.”4 Heinlein found the reports were not exaggerated: there was gut-wrenching squalor, tear-raising misery—ten people in one family living in a 1921 Ford, the mother sick with tuberculosis and pellagra, their cooking water coming from the same irrigation ditch that functioned as their toilet.5

  The growers put pressure on local sheriffs to break up these camps and move them along—though the migrants had nowhere to go. Groups of vigilantes beat up migrants, accusing them of being communists, and burned their shacks to the ground. Heinlein was sickened: this was more class warfare; the reactionary establishment was making brutal war on its own citizens, and at a horrifying social cost. The subject came up years later and was still fresh in both Robert’s mind and Leslyn’s:

  Leslyn just pointed out that the important point is not that such things are immoral, but that they are stupid—by any standards which look toward more than an immediate profit. [Creating an illiterate, inefficient, untrained peasant class in this state] will cost the business men who let it happen more than they made on their “smart deals.”6

  Heinlein could verify the reports that were coming in from every source, national and local. He went back to Los Angeles in early March and prepared to give his findings as a lecture before his local (West Hollywood) Democratic club. He had more or less overcome his self-consciousness about stammering in public; his first public speech, just a few dozen words at a luncheon, had left him white and shaking, “so nervous that I went away without my spectacles,”7 but by now he was a (nearly) fully blooded reform politician.