Sinclair's idea for EPIC can be boiled down to a single phrase:
"production for use"—a phrase which is ridiculed in the 1940 Cary Grant/Rosalind Russell classic, His Girl Friday. He suggested that California had two untapped resources: factories and farms that had been closed down, and the unemployed. Why not combine them, so that all the unused land and facilities could be used by the unemployed to produce the goods and services they needed for themselves? They would use scrip to run their economies, and anything left over as surplus could be sold to the general population. On paper, it looked like a simple equation.
In reality, it provoked two responses: one, a wild joy on the part of Sinclair's followers that the problems of the Depression could be solved, and two, a great fear on the part of California's wealthy that the Socialist Revolution had come for their heads—and wallets. The memories of the Russian Revolution were sharp for these wealthy capitalists, who viewed EPIC as a communist plot. The movie industry in particular went to war, producing phony "newsreels" that were far from representative of Sinclair's plans, making it seem as though the communists and the nation's unemployed would turn life in California into a nightmare. The Hearst newspapers and the Los Angeles Times went to work as well, destroying Sinclair's hopes for election at every opportunity. FDR hammered the final nail into the coffin when he refused to endorse Sinclair as the Democratic candidate, seeing little reason to spend political capital on a potential rival.
So Upton Sinclair lost the election.
But Robert Heinlein did not give up the fight.
He was a neophyte political volunteer in the 1934 election, although he was quickly given six precincts to run. But after Sinclair's loss, Heinlein began to move up in the Democratic Party, to carry on the EPIC fight over the next four years. Eventually, he helped write and edit the EPIC newsletter (with a circulation of two million in 1934), became a major player in the Democratic Party in Los Angeles, helped write the platform for the state EPIC movement, and served at the state level of the Democratic Party on the California State Central Committee. In 1938, Robert Heinlein moved from behind the scenes and took up the race for political office, running for California State Assembly.
His opponent was the Republican incumbent, corporate attorney Charles Lyons. Their district included Beverly Hills and part of Hollywood, which at that time were not only wealthy, but also conservative and Republican. Heinlein had only a small group of supporters in his campaign, because the Democratic Party believed there was no way to win that seat. He fought the good fight, but because his opponent had cross-filed as a Democrat for the primaries (which eventually became illegal in California), if Heinlein lost the primary, Lyons would automatically win the election—as the only candidate. Heinlein lost, by fewer than five hundred votes.
In many ways, the 1938 election was a triumph for the Democrats—they gained the governor's seat for former EPIC member Culbert Olson and a number of state assembly seats. Although Heinlein's loss stung, it did not end his political involvement. He continued in Democratic politics at least until 1940, when he attended the Democratic National Convention in Chicago as an observer with press credentials.
Still, with his formal education stalled and his political career stymied, where would he turn to pay off the mortgage on his house? His naval disability pension would be enough to keep the Heinleins fed and clothed, but not enough to cope with the mortgage, and in 1938, owing money to a bank was still somewhat shameful.
And how would he continue his efforts to help his country?
EPIC showed every sign of falling apart: the EPIC newsletter ceased publication even before the 1938 primaries were over, and most of the EPIC politicians stopped identifying themselves as such, in order to win elections. Sinclair himself had returned full time to writing.
Sinclair's writings had always harbored social commentary, not to mention social crusades. Heinlein knew Sinclair personally and had worked with him on the EPIC movement. Thus one writer's life and work provided the model for another's incipient career.
Heinlein turned to writing For Us, The Living.
Of course, Upton Sinclair was not the first writer to suggest solutions to social problems in the form of fiction—Utopias (perfect worlds) and dystopias (nightmare worlds) were well-known literary forms by 1938. Heinlein would have known of the genre's two most famous practitioners: Edward Bellamy and H. G. Wells, both major influences on Upton Sinclair's Utopian socialism. Bellamy's 1887 Looking Backward remains the most famous Utopian novel ever written by an American and may well be the book Heinlein had in mind when writing this first novel. In both novels, the main character awakens in the future to find an ideal society he does not understand. Through a series of Socratic dialogues, the protagonists (and the audience) learn how such a wonderful world can truly exist. Wells, whose "scientific romances" established the paradigms of science fiction for much of the twentieth century, also wrote many novels that portrayed future Utopias and dystopias. When the Sleeper Wakes was a particular favorite of Heinlein's (the 1910 revision The Sleeper Awakes was the book H. G. Wells autographed for Heinlein when they met). The 1936 film Things to Come, adapted by Wells from his earlier novel, The Shape of Things to Come, ends with a launch into outer space, as does For Us, The Living.
Heinlein was primed by these writers, as well as by the science fiction pulp magazines he read regularly, to trumpet the future as a wonderful opportunity for progress. When he sat down to write For Us, The Living he was trying to do what he had done throughout his four years of political activity and would continue to do for much of his writing career—generate change for the better. The title comes from Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address:
It is for us, the living, rather, to be dedicated to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us—that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion—that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain, that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom....
If Robert Heinlein could not achieve social change through his political efforts, perhaps he might achieve it through the pen, to gain that "new birth" that is so central to his fiction.
Anybody who has read Robert Heinlein will recognize that he offered provocative commentary on our society and advocated for radical social change. Indeed, his politics have often confused people. How could a man who supported the Socialist Upton Sinclair and the Democrat FDR become a supporter of arch-conservative Republicans Barry Goldwater and Jeanne Kirkpatrick? As Heinlein once explained to Alfred Bester in 1959, "I've simply changed from a soft-headed radical to a hard-headed radical, a pragmatic libertarian...." Heinlein's apparent change in politics makes sense if viewed this way: he saw problems that were not being solved and went to the political forces he believed had the greatest chance of solving them. In 1938, the most dangerous problem he perceived was the Great Depression, and he looked to FDR and Upton Sinclair for results; in 1959, it was nuclear war and communism (a hatred for which Heinlein developed before World War II, not with the Cold War). He supported Barry Goldwater in 1964 because he believed Goldwater would be far more effective against the Soviets than Lyndon Johnson.
Throughout his career, he would suggest solutions to the problems he perceived in society, always implicitly, if not explicitly. Oliver Wendell Holmes said, "Man's mind, once stretched by a new idea, never regains its original dimensions." Heinlein's writing does just that, stretching our minds, teaching us to think and learn, even while entertaining us. If we want to solve persistent problems, we have to think about them in new ways. In criticism of his later works, particularly from the time of Starship Troopers on, the most frequent objection is that Heinlein is "lecturing" the reader. If only all of our teachers could hold such wonderful seminars! As is evident in For Us, The Living, from the very beginning he wanted to present
controversial ideas in his work. In writing for Astounding, he learned to produce commercial fiction, focusing on plot and characters and sheer story. Once he built an audience who would read whatever he wrote, he moved the challenging themes back to the forefront, as in this first novel. If readers were outraged by his ideas or by their presentation, so much the better.
Late in life, Robert Heinlein told bookseller Alice Massoglia that he was going to have to change his name and write under a new one. Shocked, she asked, "Why?" His answer: "Because I think I've insulted everybody I can as Robert Heinlein!" Heinlein wanted to provoke response in order to wake up his readers and lead them to really think about the issues at hand.
As Heinlein told Campbell, For Us, The Living was "entirely concerned with the origin of certain dominant human thought patterns and how they might change if changes in the economic and social matrix shifted the survival values of these dominant mores. It attempted to show that most ethical standards were relative—that the terms vice and virtue depended on the psychological matrices." In this way, For Us, The Living reads more like one of his late novels, rather than one of his earlier works. The more didactic Heinlein of the later novels was always there, subdued in the Heinlein who wrote for Astounding and collected those paychecks. With the publication of For Us, The Living, the pattern of Heinlein's career takes a completely different shape—the later novels are not an aberration but the completion of a full circle.
So what unusual ideas does Heinlein present in this novel?
Ever hear of the metric system? Clearly, Heinlein felt it was a better standard of measurement, as his future society uses it exclusively.
Heinlein also believed that English spelling needed to be streamlined and made more logical; hence, the use of phonetic spellings such as "Astronomikal Almanak and Efmerides" and "corectiv masaj."
Interesting as well that Heinlein predicts a united Europe, although one different in governing structure and outcome than the one we see today. He also predicted a common European currency, which now exists as the euro.
In 1938, few people considered space travel anything but an insane fantasy. Here, as he so often did, Heinlein advocates rockets and space exploration. He was an avid follower of rocketry, even joining the American Interplanetary Society in 1931 (which became the American Rocket Society, later merged into the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics). After his death, his third wife and widow, Virginia Heinlein, endowed the Robert Anson Heinlein Chair in Aerospace Engineering at the Annapolis Naval Academy.
For today's readers (and for many in 1938), the most unfamiliar idea is that of his proposed economy. The economic program Heinlein advocates is not original to him, and is known by the name of Social Credit. He used the same economic system in Beyond This Horizon, where it is referred to as the "Social Dividend" paid to each member of that society.
Heinlein's interpretation of Social Credit Theory was that financial panics and the entire boom and bust cycle are caused by the relationship between production and consumption. Economists recognize that when consumption falls behind production, nothing good can follow. The Great Depression was caused in large part by overproduction in the twenties, followed by layoffs and the resulting decrease in consumption. Farming constantly overproduced, as did other "sick industries" such as textiles and coal mining. FDR's solution was to pay farmers not to produce—which we have continued to do, although the recipients are mostly agricultural corporations these days and not individual farmers. As Heinlein looked around him in the thirties, what he saw were failed attempts to restore consumption. He pointed out, in For Us, The Living, that FDR had attempted to hand out direct relief and to provide public works, but as we now know, only the massive expenditures of World War II ended the Great Depression—by putting everybody back to work, thus allowing them to consume the goods being offered. Direct relief and public works were simply not enough.
For Heinlein, Social Credit seemed a much better solution.
The economist C. H. Douglas had first proposed the idea of Social Credit in the twenties, and with the onslaught of the Depression, his ideas caught fire in Alberta, Canada. The Alberta Social Credit Party took control of Alberta's government in 1935, and Douglas became their economic adviser. Eventually, Alberta's attempts to implement Social Credit were shut down by the courts. But when Heinlein wrote this novel, there were Social Credit factions in the United States as well, including Los Angeles.
Heinlein's version of Social Credit argues that banks constantly used the power of the fractional reserve to profit by manufacturing money out of thin air, by "fiat." Banks were (and are) required by federal law to keep only a fraction of their total loans on reserve at any time; they could thus manipulate the money supply with impunity. By loaning out money that literally does not exist, and gaining in return actual cash, banks gather enormous profits. Abraham Lincoln once said, "If the American people knew tonight exactly how the monetary and banking system worked, there would be a revolution before tomorrow morning." If you took away that power from the banks by ending the fractional reserve system, and instead let the government do the exact same thing for the good of the people, you could permanently resolve the disparities between production and consumption. By simply giving people the amount of money necessary to spring over the gap between available production and power to consume, you could end the boom and bust business cycle permanently, and free people to pursue their own interests.
Until a society fully implements Social Credit, who can speak to the truth of this argument?
But Heinlein believed in it, as late as 1942 in Beyond This Horizon. And Lazarus Long uses the power of the fractional reserve when he works as a banker in Time Enough for Love, so Heinlein clearly hadn't changed his mind about the way banks functioned by the early seventies.
Similarly, he never changed his mind as to the importance of an individual's right to freedom and privacy. Throughout his entire canon, he argues extensively for the need of the government to remain out of the private affairs of individuals; it is most explicit in For Us, The Living when he suggests that the cornerstone of his future government is the constitutional recognition of the right to privacy. In this novel, a citizen should be allowed to do whatever he wishes, unless he harms another citizen. What he does in the "private sphere" is simply nobody else's business.
Heinlein's own life was predicated upon this distinction. His marriage to his second wife, Leslyn, was forced to take a dual character. In public, they were the polite couple, genteel, dedicated to public service, "moral" to a fault. In private, they had an open marriage, as Perry and Diana do in this novel, once Perry's jealousy is cured. They also pursued nude photography and actively attended nudist camps, as did several other science fiction writers, including Theodore Sturgeon. Catherine de Camp posed nude for Heinlein, and her picture was shown at a party with the de Camps and Isaac Asimov in attendance. After Heinlein's divorce from Leslyn in 1948, he repeatedly went out of his way to erase their marriage from any public mention. Heinlein's furious insistence on his own privacy, and the shrouding of his past from public inquiry, rests at least in part from a need to protect his public reputation as a political figure and as a writer—and throughout much of the 1950s, his major reputation outside the science fiction community (and most significant income) was that of a writer of children's books.
Yet when he wrote For Us, The Living, he crusaded for this revolution in privacy, sexuality, and economic consistency.
When he couldn't get it published, he took up the fight in the science fiction pulps.
These magazines would never have allowed him to write openly about sexual issues. In fact, Astounding edited out all sexual references, leading some of its contributors to look for ways to evade the puritanical restrictions, as when one writer inserted a reference to a "ball-bearing mouse trap" (a tomcat) and another used alien names that when pronounced correctly were sexual terms in other languages. But while sex was forbidden, Heinlein would still be able to
crusade on issues of privacy, politics, religion—and do so while being paid for it.
Now we return to the matter of rejections. Heinlein's first two submissions to John W. Campbell in April and May of 1939 were accepted. Six of his next stories—"Let There Be Light," "Elsewhen," "Pied Piper," "My Object All Sublime," "Beyond Doubt," and "Lost Legacy"—were rejected. How frustrating for a writer who had already made two sales right out of the starting gate! And his novel, his social revolution, was dead in the publishing waters—by itself, the sexual freedom the novel embraces would have sunk it for mainstream publishers in 1939.
Heinlein, perhaps frustrated, but clearly determined, decided to reshape the material in For Us, The Living. The concept of a future history is often cited as Heinlein's greatest contribution to science fiction and remains the core concept of this novel. By lifting, revising, and expanding the most compelling ideas from For Us, The Living and turning them into stories, Heinlein found a way to break the dry spell with Campbell. Once he became dominant in the pulps, he was able to stretch the boundaries farther and farther with each tale.
Heinlein always found a way to open up science fiction to wider possibilities. After the war, he was the first science fiction pulp writer to break into the "slicks" of the mainstream. He was the first science fiction writer since H. G. Wells to write a screenplay for a Hollywood movie, the first American film to realistically depict a moon shot: Destination Moon. He was the first science fiction writer to begin a series of juveniles that would educate entire generations of readers to love science fiction and outer space. His later novels continually challenged the very definition of science fiction, provoking anger and debate—and, as always, a legion of imitators.
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