Robert A. Heinlein: In Dialogue With His Century

by Robert A. Heinlein

  This had been an exhausting—and humiliating—campaign. But life goes on. Politics goes on. And you rarely lose political capital with your party by running in a district locked up by the other party. In the meantime, there was an election to win.

  The next item of business was housecleaning for the State Democratic Committee. The EPIC wing of the party was sinking partly because its dead weight of communist infiltrators was becoming a problem in the party organization: “A group of three can often stampede a crowd into some action disastrous to the objectives of the crowd but suited in some devious fashion to Communist purposes.”31 For just this reason, mainstream Democrats had become wary of trying to work with EPIC clubs.

  The Sinclair tactic of keeping the EPIC clubs as a shadow organization of the local Democratic clubs was starting to backfire. The problem had only gotten worse since 1935. Now, there wasn’t anybody in the California Democratic Party with Sinclair’s prestige to stand up against the communists. It had become another of those factors that made working with the mainstream Democrats an uphill battle. It was getting less and less realistic to stay EPIC and Democrat at the same time.

  Heinlein realized that the experience of working with EPIC had changed his political orientation somewhat. He used to think of himself as a “pragmatic socialist,” unconcerned with “labels, terminology or fine points of ideology.” 32 The Democratic Party had all the stuff it really needed, except the driving will—and that, the EPICs could provide.

  If the EPICs could clean up their act, they could improve their chances at the next election and the next—and that’s what the state committee people were supposed to be working toward, after all. He arranged a meeting with Susie (Florence G. McChesney) Clifton, wife of Robert Clifton.33

  Susie Clifton was an EPIC Democrat, also on the State Central Committee. Heinlein had worked with the Cliftons in Ordean Rockey’s 1936 campaign. He suggested that the communist problem was becoming a public embarrassment to both EPIC and the Democratic Party. A housecleaning was in order, he argued. They needed to conduct a purge and clean up the EPIC image in order to be more effective. The general election was shaping up well for California, but not encouraging for Democrats across the country. There is a rule of thumb, he argued to Clifton, that communists in America flourish where there are real problems that need to be dealt with; EPIC is trying to address certain real problems, and it’s going to attract communists, and that’s all there is to it. “Unfortunately, we are more prone to ignore the sick spots thus disclosed and content ourselves with calling out more cops.”34 He had direct testimony on this point, and he was not prepared to budge: a “very dear friend (now dead)” had actually been present—and voted!—at

  the notorious meeting in the ’20s in which the Central Committee of the CPUSA ordered a policy under which clandestine members were to infiltrate the clergy, the teachers, and the newspaper men—and besides that I had had my nose rubbed in the fact that clandestine CP members had (1938) infiltrated the organization of the Calif. Demo. Party, top to bottom, and controlled many key positions.35

  Clifton was not encouraging: it was nearly impossible under the current laws to purge communists from the party rolls. As far as the Registrar of Voters was concerned, a registered Democrat is a Democrat. End of discussion. In order to do anything at all in the way of housecleaning, Mrs. Clifton pointed out, they would have to raise a major stink—with another campaign about to start. And there was no guarantee they would be successful. It might be more divisive than the results could possibly justify. They just couldn’t afford to take the hit.

  17

  THE NEXT THING

  There is always a great deal of cleanup work to do after a political campaign—more, probably, after a failed campaign than after a successful one: by the end of August, the campaign staff, such as it was, were all dispersing to work for the candidates who still had a chance in the November elections. Like a shark, politics never stops.

  Heinlein, too, had some political commitments to perform in the important governor’s race, and for local Democratic candidates. But after the intense work over the summer, it was almost like being at loose ends.

  He must have spent some time working through the unpleasant implications of his talk with Susie Clifton. If her estimate of the party’s strategic situation was right, the handwriting was on the wall for EPIC. EPICs had been saying for years that Americans wouldn’t tolerate communists; in his own campaign literature he had been saying that communists were just “Red Fascists,” morally no better than Hitler’s and Mussolini’s “Black Fascists”1—and he believed at least part of his problem in this campaign was the endorsement and “help” the local Communist Party wanted to give him—whether sincerely or in an effort to blacken his name with the voters. “I would have retired Charlie Lyon from office … if the goddam commies had not insisted on playing footie with me, snuggling up to me, and sitting in my lap.”2

  If it could not get communists out of the EPIC movement without committing public relations suicide, the Democratic Party would have to cut EPIC loose—amputate the infestation. The process was already well advanced.

  Mene, mene, tekel, upharsin: “You have been weighed in the balance and found wanting.”

  That pretty much ended Robert Heinlein’s interest in working at a high level in the Democratic Party.

  He got into party politics in the first place to make a radical break with business-as-usual—political as well as economic. Power had never really interested him for its own sake; nor did party politics as a game played for its own sake.

  He would clean up and get out—finish out the year and then just not take on new jobs in politics.3

  Getting out of political management meant he would have to get a real job, with no prospects that were not distasteful to him:

  I didn’t really want to teach high school physics and regarded the “education” courses required for a permanent certificate as a fate-worse-thandeath, etc., ad nauseam with respect to several other possibilities, such as excessively difficult commuting if I took a job with Douglas Aircraft.4

  The break did give him a chance to catch up on his reading: the magazines had been stacking up unread during the months of the campaign.

  Three or four years earlier, Hugo Gernsback’s Wonder Stories magazine had launched a nationwide consortium of local science-fiction clubs, called the Science-Fiction League. Every month there were a few pages consisting mostly of reports of local chapter activities. Later, Heinlein remembered finding, in the October 1938 issue of Thrilling Wonder Stories, a story contest announcement:

  The beginning of 1939 found me flat broke following a disastrous political campaign … I “owned” a heavily-mortgaged house. About then Thrilling Wonder Stories ran a house ad reading (more or less):

  GIANT PRIZE CONTEST—Amateur Writers !!!!! First Prize $50 Fifty Dollars $505

  But his memory embroidered the details. It wasn’t a contest at all: the magazine was just trying to drum up new writers. The Science-Fiction League pages in the October 1938 issue began quietly and reasonably with what could be regarded as a “house ad,” an open call for new writers. After a bit of musing on how science-fiction stories should be constructed, it went on:

  CAN YOU WRITE A STORY?

  Thrilling Wonder Stories is looking for new writers from among its thousands of readers. We want stories from readers who have never written a word for professional publication. And we will pay the same rates for these stories as we do for all our professional writers! It doesn’t matter who you are—your story will get the same reception that is accorded to our most famous writers.6

  All the science-fiction magazines needed new writers all the time. Pulp magazines ate up material at a fierce rate, and science fiction had become a specialized genre since 1930. A pulp writer couldn’t just dress up an adventure story anymore … well, you could, but the readers complained. Back in the July issue, just before Heinlein had gotten totally immersed in precinct walking, As
tounding Science-Fiction had run a similar editorial (trying to drum up new writers) that debunked the whole idea of pulp-magazine writing contests. According to Astounding, those “contests” were just a gimmick: the contest winners just became ordinary professional writers and the “prize” was the penny a word (more or less) that the bottom rung of pulp writers was paid.

  So Astounding can announce a contest—a contest for new, good authors, a contest that has neither entry not closing date, nor is it limited to one prize apiece nor one entry per contestant. We’ve all gained by those past winners; we’ll gain, I know, on new winners. Better stories—new ideas. The contest is on—and goes on.7

  The artful public story Heinlein later concocted to explain how he got his start in writing had no room for the details of the mental processes involved—but some of the elements of his thinking can easily be reconstructed. He was faced with unpalatable choices for a job and a need for ready cash, and undoubtedly he, like many devoted readers of science fiction over the decades, held his nose and declared to himself that he could write better stories than the hackwork, formula crap the pulps were publishing. He could, too—almost certainly: he had accumulated a certain amount of journalistic experience over the years.

  Leslyn was supportive of the idea, but Heinlein also had two people in his immediate circle of friends who may have contributed to the idea as it percolated from possiblity to intention: Cleve Cartmill was a professional journalist writing for United Progressive News, and Elma Wentz had for years been talking about writing pulp.

  The Wentzes and Cleve Cartmill typically came over after dinner Saturday evenings for a sherry party and conversation. They were all very supportive and talked it out with him and Leslyn. At some point, the subject of regular fiction—not science fiction—for a regular book may well have come up. If so, Heinlein must have been intrigued: the last three or four years had piled up a lot of stuff he needed to get off his chest.

  Those conversations, though never described in any detail in the surviving correspondence, must have given Heinlein a lot to think about, and he gradually evolved a plan: he would give it a serious try, work at it like a professional—work up some story ideas and follow Sinclair Lewis’s advice to apply the seat of the pants to the seat of the chair, working consistently every day. Either that would pay off the mortgage or he would know he had to get a real job before the money ran out.

  And as for books, Heinlein dove into his research. He avoided the how-to books, but it may well have been his new preoccupation with wordsmithing that led him to Stuart Chase’s Tyranny of Words, even before the elections were over.8 The book itself was a creaking propaganda piece, but Heinlein could conceivably justify carrying the book around with him because he could always pull it out and quote from an appropriate passage of stock propaganda comparing President Roosevelt to a modern physicist who creates new experiments to meet new conditions—and is smothered in an avalanche of bitter protest by the people who don’t understand what he is doing—“experiments in democracy,” Chase called them.

  Whenever he got an idea for a story, Heinlein jotted a note on any scrap of paper that was handy and stuffed it into a file folder he kept in his desk drawer. Mostly what he was getting was not so much ideas as fragments of ideas, disconnected from each other. He didn’t yet know how to take those fragments and develop them into stories—just the thing a starting writer needs to know, and of course the one thing that books on writing never have anything useful to say about.

  Tyranny of Words led him to Ogden and Richards’s The Meaning of Meaning (1922). If Chase was propaganda fluff, Ogden and Richards’s survey of the development of modern semantics was tough going. Fortunately, they started with epistemology and Heinlein’s teenage reading of Fiske gave him a little background in the subject. Ogden and Richards had begun to move epistemology out of philosophy and into science—and where there is science, can technology be far behind? A technology of language represented a rare opportunity for understanding the core realities of human nature.9

  As November came on, and the general elections, the political chores gradually eased up, and Heinlein had a little more free time. The Democrats had not fared well in the national elections—people were getting tired of the New Deal as Roosevelt’s various attempts to patch things up weren’t working—but the party was thriving in California. That year, they managed to elect an EPIC—or former EPIC—governor, Culbert Olson. And there were finally enough progressives on the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors to have a real voice in things. With Jerry Voorhis in Congress, too, there was finally a real voice for economic reform in the U.S. government. California Democrats had done well, and the party was in good shape. Heinlein could afford to let other people take over some of the load.

  Political chores done for the moment, Leslyn went into the hospital for an appendectomy, leaving Robert with some time on his hands. One day in the middle of November,10 he sat down at the typewriter to make some sense of the ideas he had been collecting. Slowly, the jumble of fragments and bits had started to shape up into a story of a far future, once the country had gotten out of its current mess. The choices he made can be reconstructed from the story he did finally put down on paper: the country would have to put its economic bookkeeping on a rational footing someday—like the Social Credit line. A book like that might make a lot of people very angry—maybe even angry enough to get off their duffs and do something. It might, in fact, not be commercial at all: “The book was written by a man who was not then a writer, and written primarily as a means of ordering his thoughts on many matters. The book was completed before I considered trying to publish it.”11

  H. G. Wells’s film Things to Come had made the rounds that year, a very impressive achievement.12Things to Come had demonstrated one very effective way to dramatize political tracts.

  Wells had done utopias—A Modern Utopia and When the Sleeper Wakes—in reaction to Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward. Bellamy’s book was the most famous utopia in the English language.

  All the various subjects EPIC News had been reporting on for years were available for use as currently interesting material.13 The country was being strangled by private monopolies—like the utility companies, which had been in the papers (including EPIC News) since municipal utility ownership had come up for vote in 1935 and 1936. And it was a commonplace of liberal thought in the 1930s that the banking and power monopolies were the main problem—if those could be addressed, the road would be cleared to clean up all the big problems.

  EPIC News had run a front-page article about using the sun’s power for power applications that January. A cheap source of power might provide the necessary shake-up to get from here to there … .

  Heinlein must have stirred all these elements together until a plan of approach emerged for his book: a man from the present gets into the far future, when the economic troubles are over. Heinlein came up with a new gimmick to get his modern man into the glorious socialist future. Those odd past-life memories he had had as a kid—fading now into just memories of memories—probably contributed to the device he chose, as did J. W. Dunne’s serial-time theories: he could get his hero into a jam in the twentieth century that shocked him out of his personal time track and caused him to wake up in the twenty-second century.

  Heinlein was dissatisfied with much of the writing about utopias: they were all too goody-goody. They got dull. Perhaps he learned something specific from the experience of writing this book:

  I hope the future is going to be Utopian and believe that we have the potentialities to make it so—but for story purposes, sorry, no can do. Why? Because the basis of drama is tragedy and Utopia aint tragic. In this field you can do short stories about minor incidents in an otherwise-Utopian culture, but I defy you to do a story 50,000 words or longer about the future and have that future be a Utopia—and sell it!14

  Looking Backward was an idealized presentation of the workings of a Fourierist phalanstery15 on a national scale—the brand of
socialism that had been a virtual craze in the United States, in the middle of the nineteenth century. (Fourier had also written a utopia that Heinlein had apparently read: in his Harmony, people lived twice as long as we do and were sexually active into extreme old age.)

  But nobody believed in Fourier’s crazed accounting system anymore, though the basic principles of utopian socialism were largely accepted in this country.16 The problems of bookkeeping in the modern world were a lot more complex.

  Of all the economic and political schemes that EPIC News had summarized and argued about, the one that apparently fascinated Heinlein most was the Canadian Douglas Plan—known by the title of Douglas’s 1924 book as “Social Credit.” The 1933 revised edition of Social Credit was debated in the United States.17EPIC News had run a long, multipart, mostly disparaging piece on Social Credit in 1935.

  He had gotten interested in Social Credit as early as the 1934 gubernatorial campaign, when he made the acquaintance of Pierre Gordon, who would remain part of his social circle for many years.18 Perhaps what attracted Heinlein to Social Credit was that Douglas had suggested a way out of the scrip problem built into the EPIC plan—one that Sinclair and the EPICs had not picked up on: the EPIC colonies would use scrip and the rest of the state would use U.S. currency; at the interface of the two economies, scrip would somehow have to be exchanged for currency, and none of the suggested mechanisms looked very satisfactory.

  The problem disappeared if you looked at the money supply from a fiscal—Social Credit—perspective. The Douglas Plan took a very fresh and provocative look at the whole problem of money.