Robert A. Heinlein: In Dialogue With His Century

by Robert A. Heinlein

  In 1852 Lawrence married Elizabeth Johnson (1830–1909), and a prominent strain of Irish blood entered the family. Elizabeth was born October 14, 1830, in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania (1831 in some sources), a member of the Ulster-Irish Johnson family (originally “Johnston,” though the family dropped the “t” somewhere in the eighteenth century, or at any rate did not use it consistently). Heinlein’s great-great-grandfather (through his grandmother Elizabeth), Thomas V. Johnson (1786?–1850), had immigrated to the United States in 1822.

  At the time of the Civil War, Asa Heinlein was still living, though at the age of sixty-six it is unlikely that he enlisted. Lawrence Heinlein would have been thirty-three years old when war broke out, and he is, therefore, the Civil War Heinlein.7 Lawrence’s oldest son, Samuel Edward (Heinlein’s paternal grandfather), would have been about seven years old in 1860.

  After the Civil War, Lawrence moved his family by covered wagon to Bates County, Missouri, settling in the town of Butler in 1883, where he farmed until his retirement in 1896.

  The genealogy of the Heinleins in Missouri is somewhat confused. There are several Heinleins in Missouri before the Civil War, but the data from the 1850 federal census and the 1864 Missouri State census show only one (rather large) family—that of John M. Heneline (later spelled as Heinlein), of Gasconade County, in central Missouri. John Heneline was born in Germany, circa 1805. Although this is a common variant spelling of the Heinlein name, this was an independent immigration, probably by a completely unrelated family. This John Heneline had come to Missouri during the early days of settlement with his German-born wife (1815)—coincidentally also by way of Ohio. But the Henelines had immigrated to northwestern Ohio, while the Matthias Heinlein line was in eastern Ohio, near the Pennsylvania border. There are no Heinleins (of any variant spelling) in Ohio in the 1830 census, only two in 1840, and eleven by the 1850 Ohio census. The bulk of the 1850 names are in Crawford County, also in northwestern Ohio. By 1880, there are plenty of Heinleins, Heneleines, Heinlens, and Henlines in the northwest of the state.

  To make matters even more confusing, after the Civil War there was also a series of migrations of unrelated Heinleins from Germany directly to St. Louis, 260 miles across the state from the Kansas City area. The coincidental involvement of Ohio in both sets of family trees continues to create confusion in Heinlein family genealogy.

  Lawrence’s family is recorded in various census records:

  Samuel Edward Heinlein (6/12/1853–3/1/1919), born in Illinois.

  Mary Alice Heinlein (2/07/1860–3/22/1861), died in infancy.

  Francis Marion Heinlein (5/1/1857–1/20/1927).

  “Frank” apparently stayed in Illinois to farm instead of moving with the family to Missouri. He lived in Blue Mound, Illinois, and died in Decatur, Illinois, keeping the family Bible on which much information in the Heinlein family’s genealogy is based. F. M. Heinlein apparently had three marriages, though the full name is known only of his first wife: Althea May Brodes. The others were Rhetta and Mary.

  Alma Ann Heinlein (4/23/1862–3/30/1925) married J. A. Wear and lived in Butler, Missouri.

  Oscar Allen Heinlein (12/16/1864–10/31/1931), born in Christian County, Illinois, near Springfield and died in Butler, Missouri.

  “Uncle Oscar” married Kate Canterbury (03/11/1881–5/24/1926), a native of Butler.

  Leonard Smith Heinlein (12/14/1869–1/18/1872)—another childhood death; nothing further is known; and

  Harvey Wallace Heinlein (9/9/1873–4/2/1931). He also had two marriages—to Ruth Dare and to Aura Neptune. It is recorded that he died in Long Beach, California.

  Lawrence’s oldest son, Samuel Edward, was Robert Anson Heinlein’s paternal grandfather. He had married Elizabeth Kitchin (or “Kitchen,” 1853–1881) on February 24, 1876, in Christian County, Illinois. Their firstborn, Rex Ivar Heinlein (08/08/1878–11/13/1959), born in Christian County, was Robert Anson’s father. Samuel Edward and Elizabeth had one other child, a girl: Jessie Clare (01/17/1881–1961?). Elizabeth died just two weeks after Jessie was born. Jessie married William Ira Ayers (b. 2/23/ 1856).

  After Elizabeth’s death, Samuel Edward remarried, to Maria Woods Baldwin (1857–1932). For reasons unknown, Maria is not mentioned at all in contemporaneous family correspondence, though their children, Lawrence Ray Heinlein (b. 11/11/1886), Mina Ladine Heinlein-Hurst (b. 12/24/1888), and Alice Irene Heinlein-Pemberton (b. 3/7/1895), were lively correspondents of Rex’s family, and Aunt Alice made a particular impression on young Robert. An oral history dictated by Maria Woods Heinlein to Alice Pemberton is an important resource of Heinlein family history.

  Robert’s maternal grandparent, Alva Lyle, M.D., first came to Missouri before the Heinleins, but he moved around a great deal and was much longer in settling down.

  The Lyle name is Irish in origin, a variant of “L’Isle,” meaning “from the (or an) island.” The surname appears in Irish records as early as 1170, which suggests an aristocratic or quasi-aristocratic origin for the family, as this is centuries before surnames came into popular use among commoners. In combination with Heinlein’s Irish paternal grandparents (Johnson), the Lyle Irish half of his heritage caused Irish to predominate over German, despite the German name. And there was “some Cherokee Indian in the family, too, and a trace of African.”8

  Oral tradition in the Lyle family (who do not seem to have had the same lively interest in family genealogy as did the Heinleins) indicates the family had been in America about the same length of time as the Heinleins—that is, predating the great wave of emigration out of Ireland following the Great Irish Potato Famine of 1848—and early-nineteenth-century census information seems to support this tradition. One Robert Lyle is known to have been born in 1808 in Muskingum County, Ohio. In 1829, he married Anna Evans, born also in Muskingum County, in 1811, and their son, Alva Evans Lyle, was born in March 1843 in Perry County, Ohio. The family moved, again westward, to Minnesota in 1856, where Alva grew up, receiving a primary education of which he later spoke approvingly. He, too, though very young, appears to have served for a brief time in the Civil War (after a fashion): there was a family story passed down to Robert that young Alva, at the age of twelve, ran off to join the Union Army as a drummer boy. His father went after him and took him back to Minnesota.9

  The Lyles seem to have been unusually restless, even in a time of migrations, westward movement, and Manifest Destiny. Alva Lyle came to Bates County, Missouri, in 1868, as part of the first wave of resettlement following the Civil War. He arrived in a region that was completely devastated, burned fields and rubble. These new settlers had to rebuild new towns and farms practically from the ground up. In one letter, Robert Heinlein mentioned that his grandmother lived in a log cabin. Perhaps it is his grandmother Lyle he is referring to, since both Heinlein grandmothers married into wellestablished families.

  The northwestern part of Missouri had been devastated by the Civil War and the border war between Kansas and Missouri, which had been going on since the 1850s. Missouri was remembered as a “dark and bloody ground” by veterans and their descendants. But the devastation of the area surrounding Kansas City was special even so.

  The western border area of Missouri had essentially been at war since the early 1850s, with Missouri pro-slavery gangs crossing over into Kansas to raid the Abolitionist strongholds, and Kansas gangs (“Jayhawkers” and “Liberators”) crossing over the Missouri line to exact revenge. The Missouri Compromise of 1820 had set up this situation, admitting Missouri as a slave state at the same time Maine had been admitted as a nonslave state—“Free Soil.” Thereafter, one state would be admitted Free Soil for every state admitted as a slave state. The proportions of representation in Congress could thus be kept stable for a time.

  The U.S. Congress in 1854 passed the Kansas-Nebraska Act, permitting (requiring) the voting residents of the territories to determine how they would be admitted to the Union under the Missouri Compromise. Therefore, the question of whether Kansas would
be admitted as Free Soil was overwhelmingly important.

  There were fifty thousand slaves—half the slave population of Missouri—ranged along the western border with the Kansas Territory, an immense concentration of wealth, constantly increasing in value as the slave trade was shut down. Thousands of pro-slavery Missourians immediately rushed into Kansas, hoping to capture the legislature. In response, Abolitionists, particularly from New York State, immigrated to Kansas for exactly the same reason. Missouri “Bushwhackers” tried to close Missouri River traffic by terrorist attacks on riverboats. Free Soilers countered by coming in through Iowa State (which had been admitted Free in 1846).

  The levels of violence escalated into what has been called the Kansas Border War, but which were really the opening movements of the Civil War: two days after a Missouri gang shot up the Abolitionist town of Lawrence, Kansas, in 1856, John Brown, a new Kansas settler, took a sword and hacked up five pro-slavery men and boys in Kansas on the banks of the Pottawatomie River—apparently random targets of opportunity, as none had anything to do with the raid. The Abolitionists won control of the Kansas legislature after that, and Kansas Liberators began to raid in Missouri.

  The Kansas Border War was incorporated into the Civil War, the raiders from each side (Quantrill’s Raiders, the Cole Younger gang, etc.) co-opted into the national armies but loosely: they had their own agendas, which they pursued in their own way.

  When the Union Army moved into the area, it found the border counties of western Missouri an impossible problem. Two-thirds of the population surrounding the Marais des Cygnes (pronounced “Mardezines” by the locals) marshlands, it was estimated, were either relatives of the pro-slavery guerrillas or actively supporting them by provisioning and sheltering them. After a particularly destructive raid by Quantrill and his Raiders on the town of Lawrence, Kansas, Brigadier General Thomas Ewing, the Union commander at Kansas City, decided on a drastic solution: depopulate the entire area.

  General Order No. 11, issued August 25, 1863, ordered every human being out of Jackson, Bates, and Cass counties within fifteen days—except those who had satisfactorily proved their loyalty to the Union cause. Twenty thousand people were driven from their homes, their farms put to the torch (after being looted by the Union cavalry), a heart-wrenching flood of refugees in misery. The phrasing of the order, “Leave not a stone standing on a stone, and raze the ground,” was remembered by survivors for decades and repeated to their children and their children’s children.

  Those who could pass interrogation and took a Union loyalty oath were dispersed to refugee camps in Kansas. After the deadline, the grain and hay found in the district was to be burned, to keep it out of the hands of the guerrillas. Almost all antebellum records were destroyed by fire. The painter George Caleb Bingham witnessed the atrocity at first hand and later memorialized it after the war in his picture Order No. 11. He portrays General Ewing personally driving a family from their home. 10

  After the Civil War the area was repopulated, but not by the original displaced families, many of whom stayed in Kansas, where they had been resettled. Others moved farther westward, perhaps to Nevada or Arizona, or even California. Still others went to Arkansas. The new population for the three counties devastated by General Order No. 11 came mostly from Ohio, and they brought with them an upper midwestern cultural tradition. Even today, Kansas City is a midwestern city, distinct from the Southern and Ozark subcultures in the rest of Missouri. Both the Heinleins and the Lyles were thus the distilled product of an evolutionary filter, in the same sense as Darwin was to talk about the migration to the New World as an evolutionary filter in The Descent of Man (1871).

  The Lyles and then the Heinleins came to an area that was rebuilding from the ground up. The first railroad bridge over the Missouri River—the Hannibal Bridge at Kansas City—was completed in 1869, the same year the transcontinental railroad opened. Kansas City was thus set up to become a major entrepôt for the nation’s westward expansion. Generations later, all of the Heinleins’ homes in Kansas City, by coincidence, were on the old Santa Fe Trail—and before World War I many of the local landmark buildings of the neighborhoods were oriented to the Trail, rather than to the streets they sat on. As a boy, Robert was fascinated by Westport Landing,11 the place where pioneers gathered to leap off on their journey across the plains and over the Rockies to the West Coast. Three years after the opening of the transcontinental railroad, there were seven rail lines going into and through Kansas City. The frontier had moved west, and Missouri was now the middle of the country.

  By the time the Heinleins arrived in 1883, the surrounding area was booming. Some of the family settled southeast of Kansas City, in the town of Butler (county seat of Bates County), but Samuel Edward Heinlein removed to Kansas City, working for the Emerson-Brantingham Co. and Midland Manufacturing Company, a producer of agricultural implements.

  Alva Lyle stayed in Bates County. In 1871, he found himself in Papinville, the first settlement in Bates County (named for a Canadian trader), and decided to become a medical doctor. At that time, the accustomed way to become a doctor was to learn from an established practitioner, so Alva apprenticed himself to August Rhoads, M.D. (b. 1838?), and attended a series of medical lectures at Washington University in St. Louis. Missouri history books emphasize that medical teaching in St. Louis was unusually advanced at that time. But most of his training was practicum, spent “walking with” Dr. Rhoads.

  In March 1873 he was “graduated,” but it is not clear whether this consisted of a certificate of proficiency issued by Dr. Rhoads (the more usual custom) or by the new medical school in St. Louis. Dr. Lyle set up a practice in the town of Metz, in Vernon County, Missouri, and the following year (1874) married Miss Rose Althea Adelia Wood (born 1850 in Morrow County, Ohio), daughter of Anson S. Wood and K. (Sophia) Monroe. It is thought that Adelia Wood’s mother’s family was a collateral branch of President James Monroe’s family, which would give Robert Heinlein an “Old American” descent through all four of his grandparents. 12

  Though Dr. Lyle’s parents had both immigrated to Bates County by this time (as cemetery records show them both buried in the same cemetery in Bates County), the Lyles must have spent some additional years moving from place to place as the young doctor sought a stable and lucrative practice and his family continued to grow. Daughter Anna was born in 1876 or 1877 and followed by another daughter, Bam, on July 14, 1879. Her birthplace is given as Grinnell, Iowa. Her name is not short for “Alabama,” as has been conjectured; she was named for an Aunt Bam—“an old heller who … was forever traveling,” visiting relatives.13 When Aunt Bam (Heinlein’s great-aunt) was ninety-nine years old—this would be in the 1940s—she broke her hip and could no longer travel, so she “turned her face to the wall” and died. 14 (Heinlein later combined qualities of his aunt Bam and his mother’s sister, Anna, as the basis for Hazel Stone in The Rolling Stones.) Apparently, Bam was not given a middle name.

  In 1881 Dr. Lyle moved his practice back to Missouri, to the village of Sprague, in Bates County. His mother, Anna Evans Lyle, died December 1, 1888, and was buried in Green Lawn Cemetery in Bates County.

  Some years after Bam’s birth, while the family was still living in Sprague, Missouri, there was another addition to Dr. Lyle’s family, under curious circumstances. Dr. Lyle had an extramarital affair with a schoolteacher, which resulted in an illegitimate boy, Park Lyle, born in 1893. Remarkably, Dr. Lyle told his wife about it, and she took Park into the family, raising him as her own child. The actual circumstances surrounding Park’s birth and informal adoption have never been documented. Apparently, Park Lyle never learned about his illegitimacy.

  Rose Adelia Lyle can only have been a remarkable woman—the first of many in Robert Heinlein’s life.

  Dr. Lyle shortly had an opportunity that he may have used to assist the cover-up by relocating his practice again, away from the gossipy Mrs. Grundys of Sprague.

  In 1893 Dr. Lyle, then fifty years old, took th
e unusual step of moving his family with him to Chicago for a year while he took a continuing-education course in the medical school at Northwestern University, to learn about Pasteur’s new germ theory.

  Although Bam Lyle was never inclined to talk much about herself (Robert said of his mother that she didn’t let her fingers know what she was doing ),15 the experience was deeply formative for her. Bam was not a particularly intellectual person, though she had a rather intellectual father who may have been something of a natural teacher: she recalled stopping with him in about 1889 or 1890 in Kansas City to figure out an underground foundation. In 1893 she was fourteen years old, and her world was repeatedly expanding and re-forming itself around her.

  For one thing, she saw her first black man on the train going to Chicago, a dining car attendant going about his business, serving diners—a traditional “George” of railroad travel before the turn of the century. She was startled and not a little frightened. 16

  During the year the Lyles were in Chicago, Bam did not go to school but instead spent her time at the Columbian Exposition, the World’s Fair of 1893—which was probably as educational as school might have been for her. Certainly she was impressed by the wonders and new experiences that came to her. A “glahz vahz” she saw at the Exposition (“glass vaze” being the usual pronunciation in the Midwest when she was growing up) became something of a family joke. What she mainly took away from Chicago was the memory of talks with her father about germ theory: nothing was ever quite clean enough for her after Chicago. She spent the rest of her long life scrubbing everything.

  But she was at a pivotal place in a pivotal moment in American history. The 1890s were a period of particular turmoil for the United States. Following the Chicago Haymarket Riots of 1886, the public was terrified of strikes, terrified of the Labor movement (these dangerous anarchists were striking for an eight-hour day), and terrified by the Panic and Depression of 1893—the worst in the country’s history. Businesses collapsed by the thousands. Banks closed in record numbers.