Robert A. Heinlein: In Dialogue With His Century

by Robert A. Heinlein

  The lecture was scheduled for March 16, 1935, but he did not get peace to work on his presentation: a student antiwar strike had been called, worldwide, for Friday, March 12, 1935, to show that young people were alarmed over warlike posturing, particularly in Germany. Fascist governments, it was already clear, meant aggressive, territorial wars, and that was inescapable. The whole world seemed to be on an irreversible drift toward war. In the United States, the increase in military appropriations, taken together with antiradical stunts across the country, caused the editors of EPIC News to wonder in print if the military appropriations were not intended to put down an uprising of U.S. citizens against their civil masters.8

  The demonstrations were relatively quiet on most college campuses, with 125,000 students walking out of classes across the country. The Los Angeles Junior College campus was the site of an actual riot. Director Roscoe Ingalls of the campus administration ordered the small crowd of students gathered near the steps of the library to disperse, threatening them with suspension, and then blew a whistle to summon an “anti-Red” squad of plainclothes and uniform policemen provided by L.A. Chief of Police James Davis. According to published reports, one of the “red squad” detectives suddenly and without specific provocation began swinging his nightstick, flailing out at random. One of the uniformed sergeants pulled the girl who was speaking at the time off the library steps and began to beat her with his fists when she resisted. Another coed, Flora Turchinsky, had her nose bloodied by a nightstick. 9 An Evening News-Standard photographer caught this moment in a front-page splash, and this was how Heinlein learned of the incident.10

  On the morning of Heinlein’s report to the West Hollywood Democratic Club about the Imperial Valley, the Hollywood Citizen-News reported the follow-up to the strike. The Los Angeles Times barely noticed the fuss. It wasn’t news that “fit” in Harry Chandler’s newspaper.11 “I got mad as a boiled owl,” Heinlein reported, “and sat down and wrote a most sarcastic letter to the public forum department of the Hollywood Citizen-News,” their local progressive paper: 12

  The Plot is Broken. Town Meeting:

  Courage, citizens, fear no longer. The great revolutionary plot of 1935 is broken. Once again we are safe from those nasty Rooshians (or was it Japs?) In any case the peril is over. Our doughty Chief of Police and our ever-watchful school board have dealt heroically with the invaders and we are safe. Visions of our heroic traditions pass before our eyes. Finally a crowning touch, 18 year old Flora [Turchinsky] knocked unconscious by our brave guardians.

  And Comradski Margaret, she got hers. Director Ingalls blew valiantly on his whistle and the deed was practically done. A few manly right arms, raised in defense of liberty and our American honor, and she was through for the day. The shades of Ethan Allen, Nathan Hale and Paul Revere smiled down from the beautiful California sky.

  The school board, acting in its wisdom, wouldn’t let Bernice come to the party. She was a menace and must be kept from contaminating our youth. What if she is very young and pretty and dimples when she smiles; just that much more insidious.13

  But it’s all over now and we may sleep in peace. Put away the gas masks. The Chief of Police and the School Board have landed and have the situation well in hand. America is safe again.

  —R. A. Heinlein

  Lieut., U.S. Navy14

  That very last line—which may have been added by Leslyn (though Robert took full and sole responsibility for it officially15)—was to have repercussions.

  It made the letter appear to be the statement of a serving officer—and therefore presumably in the line of duty.

  The letter would appear in the Hollywood Citizen-News the day after his report to his local Democratic club on conditions in the Imperial Valley.

  The meeting came too late to get into the week’s EPIC News, which came out on Tuesday each week—but that Tuesday the Hollywood Citizen-News carried the report of Heinlein’s presentation to the West Hollywood Democratic Club, quoting his “hook”: “Constitutional rights of workers in Imperial Valley have been abrogated by some of the citizens and elected officials in amazing display of vigilante activities.” The article continued:

  In a report on a recent investigation trip into Imperial county, Robert A. Heinlein described conditions of the workers and the lawlessness permitted there as reported to the Imperial County Board of Supervisors by Gen. Pelham D. Glassford, investigator for Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins.

  Vivid scenes among California’s unemployed were shown in the first EPIC newsreel which will be part of the club’s bi-monthly programs in the future.16

  Sinclair and Otto continued to heap work on Heinlein. By the time of the municipal elections in the first week of April 1935, he was a county committeeman, a state committeeman, and a district chairman. Heinlein was also one of fifty Assembly District secretaries who helped make the arrangements for the EPIC organizing convention on May 16–18. His constitution committee had grown to six and was producing two different drafts, a minority constitution as well as a majority constitution. Sinclair appointed a conference committee to meld the two drafts into a single proposed constitution in time to be mimeographed and distributed for the convention.

  The EPIC convention started at 10:00 A.M. on May 16, 1935, with four hundred delegates gathered in the Labor Temple in downtown Los Angeles. There was a slight hitch over credentials: the delegates were elected by the chapters of the End Poverty League all up and down the state, and the fractioning of the EPL meant that some chapters had elected two slates of delegates. That had to be sorted our first.

  It was hardly possible to recognize what was actually going on at the convention from the newspaper reports. The convention was relatively businesslike, but the Los Angeles Times reported riots and underhanded doubledealings. They started the Saturday morning session with the crowd singing American folk and patriotic songs. During the singing of “Marching Through Georgia,” agitators for the Communist United Front dropped leaflets, and that brought the United Front issue up for discussion.

  The Communist International had recently proposed that all progressive organizations in the world join with them in a united front against fascism and reaction—which sounded like a good idea, except that it meant in practice that the organizations would have to adopt communist tactics wherever the United Front took them.17 Heinlein had been elected as a delegate representing the West Hollywood EPIC Club (though he had since resigned from the club when they instructed the delegates to vote for the United Front). He was attending now as a delegate-without-portfolio, freelance, as he later said.18

  Sinclair opposed having EPIC join the United Front—but he responded by scheduling a formal debate on the question for the Sunday session, after the constitution had been adopted. The communists who were not delegates were then ejected, because Sinclair wouldn’t allow their demonstration to block the convention. The Times report was of some other EPIC convention, with several dramatic events that never actually happened: they had Sinclair leaping to a chair and declaring, “There are Communists among us.”19

  During the reseating that would allow all the actual delegates to vouch for each other, Jerry Voorhis stood in the center aisle and pled with the delegates not to team up with the communists—the first time Heinlein had seen Voorhis20; it made an impression on him, and they thereafter became friendly.

  In the Saturday afternoon session, the convention took up the draft constitution, section by section, getting through about a third before adjourning for a banquet and dance at Leighton’s Cafeteria. They blanket-approved the rest, except for a single section.

  The convention took up the last remaining section of the constitution on Sunday and an ad hoc discussion of the United Front, with debate limited to twenty minutes for and twenty against. The convention caucused and agreed to join any united front with all democratic organizations, which let the communists out. The EPIC lamb decided not to lie down with the communist lion and chance not getting up again. Things would on
ly grow more difficult over the next several years as they buckled down to making the Democratic EPIC work.

  A letter from the Secretary of the Navy dated May 29, 1935, was forwarded to Heinlein from the Naval District 11 Commandant’s office in San Diego. It quoted the sarcastic “Town Meeting” editorial letter he and Leslyn had written, which had been published in the Hollywood Citizen-News on April 17, and asked him to explain himself. On June 8, Heinlein wrote back: “[S]everal explanatory phrases were removed by the editor, but the letter is essentially mine.” He explained: “I was not sympathetic to the student strike and urged several of my student acquaintances to refrain from participating in it.” He included several newspaper clippings about the incident, including the shocking and grotesque front-page photograph of a policeman clubbing Flora Turchinsky.

  I felt that an injustice had been done. When I read the report of the young girls being clubbed senseless by police officers I became highly indignant. As an officer and a gentleman I felt that I could not let the matter pass without a protest. I used my rank in conjunction with my signature because I thought that the citizens had a right to know that officers of the federal military forces do not consider violence to young girls necessary in order to insure an adequate national defense.

  The Navy was not impressed. Heinlein received a private, written admonition from Admiral Leahy, Secretary of the Navy:

  The letter, signed with your Naval title, which you sent to the Hollywood Citizen, and which was published on 17 April 1935, is, in the opinion of the Department, neither in good taste nor is it composed in a seemly and proper manner [and is therefore in violation of Paragraph four of General Order Number 46 of 20 May 1921].

  For this indiscretion you are hereby admonished .21

  The admonition was a minor, if painful, irritant—then. Heinlein conceded it was correct in essence,22 but it also could be used to tar him with the same brush as the communists and their sympathizers, even though he most decidedly was not.

  In the meantime, life went on. Since they landed in Los Angeles in August 1934, they had been living in an apartment in what is now West Hollywood, on La Jolla a block south of Santa Monica Boulevard,23 but as early as December 1934, when Heinlein wrote his profile for the upcoming sixth reunion of his Annapolis class,24 he and Leslyn had found and made a firm offer on a house in the Laurel Canyon area, almost halfway up the mountains that separate Los Angeles from the San Fernando Valley. By June 1935, they completed the purchase of the house at 8777 Lookout Mountain, with a mortgage for $3,000, and moved in permanently.25 At that time, mortgage payments would have been about $25 to $30 a month—the better part of Heinlein’s monthly retired pay.

  To be an EPIC Democrat in the mid-1930s was to be in the middle of every progressive movement in the United States, all of them concentrated in Southern California. In July 1935, the Seventh World Congress of the Comintern announced the Popular Front against fascism throughout the world, bizarrely holding up the Nazi government of Germany as “the highest form of capitalism.” The success of this peculiar “big lie” would cripple the ability of traditional liberals to resist the growth of totalitarian ideology. They would have to be antifascist and anticommunist and anticapitalist all at the same time. Liberals didn’t realize it yet, but traditional—“classical”—liberalism began to collapse as an intellectual movement in the United States from that moment. The entire country was watching the ferment in California. As the largest of the progressive movements, EPIC tried to maintain coalition relationships with the cooperative movement, technocracy, and even the Communist Party in the middle of an internal and very uncivil war precipitated by the United Front.

  Probably as a direct result of the investigation and report Heinlein had made of vigilantism in the Imperial Valley in 1936, the newly elected Supervisor for Los Angeles County, John Anson Ford, asked Heinlein to investigate relief activities and the WPA in Los Angeles County. Ford had never actually been a part of the EPIC organization, but he was a reformer very much to Sinclair’s liking, and EPIC approved Heinlein’s cooperation.

  Ford had been elected by a grassroots organization in Los Angeles. He had not taken any stand on the state gubernatorial campaign; he was narrowly focused on Los Angeles County issues and, unlike Sinclair, he was not “too far to the left” for the electorate. Heinlein knew both the Fords well from organizing the EPIC News coverage of the municipal elections in 1935.

  Ford’s issue was waste, profiteering, and graft eating away at the county budget. The county’s entrenched bureaucracy stonewalled any inquiry through channels, so Ford began asking knowledgeable outsiders to make informal investigations, a tactic so successful that investigators sometimes found their cars bombed.26 Heinlein is not mentioned in John Anson Ford’s professional autobiography, Thirty Explosive Years in Los Angeles County27; only Clifford Clinton’s work is mentioned in any detail. Perhaps this was because Heinlein’s investigation duplicated and confirmed the work of others—but it was grist for Heinlein’s political mill and is listed in a campaign biography he wrote in 1938.

  The 1936 elections were the next big push for the Democrats, and, as Democratic Party secretary for the 59th Assembly District (Hollywood, West Hollywood, and Laurel Canyon), Heinlein actively campaigned for the still mostly EPIC Democratic slate. He must have stayed with real estate for a while, as a temporary real estate salesman card is preserved in his files licensing him to sell land from February 27 to August 26, 1936, for Vandervort & Teague (possibly his old Naval Academy friend Woody Teague). But it was bare subsistence. Politics was where Heinlein concentrated his energies.

  Histories of the EPIC movement—including the comments in Upton Sinclair’s autobiography and, of course, Mitchell’s Campaign of the Century—are largely stories of the 1934 campaign. They give the impression that the movement ceased to exist after Sinclair lost the governorship. But EPIC remained a strong force in California (the national EPIC effort never really got off the ground) until after 1940. The 1936 elections were particularly busy for the Heinleins.

  Jerry Voorhis had resigned from the EPIC board of directors in order to keep out of the dissension, and now he was running for the 12th District seat in the U.S. House of Representatives. Robert’s State Assemblyman, Charles W. Lyon, was not up for reelection that year, but the congressional district, District 16, was contested, and the Heinleins both campaigned hard for the EPIC candidate in the party’s primary election, Ordean Rockey. Rockey was a political science professor at UCLA—and a Rhodes Scholar (1917). His one fault, Heinlein thought, was that he liked too much to be liked:

  Ordean could always be persuaded by any pressure group to back anything, just as long as they made it sound as if it would be “noble” of him to do it. Far from being blunt or forthright, Ordean could occupy any platform for any length of time, win ringing applause—and never say anything which would show up as a positive statement under semantic analysis.28

  Still, those were assets in a campaigner, and Rockey would need every asset he could come up with to win the Democratic primary from the incumbent, John Dockweiler. The Civic Research League, a citizens group that tried to weed out the most corrupt candidates, recommended Rockey for the 16th District in the Democratic primary, and Leslyn organized a Rockey-for-Congress Ball .29

  Leslyn and Robert worked together in the campaigns for Rockey and Harlan Palmer (editor of the Hollywood Citizen-News). Palmer had been drafted to run as the Democratic candidate for District Attorney, against incumbent Burton Fitts, whom “no true liberal or progressive can support.”30 They concentrated on precinct work—utterly essential direct contact with the voter that is often neglected because it is hard work, demanding and uncongenial except to that rare person who finds talking amiably with strangers energizing rather than enervating. Neither Robert nor Leslyn fit into that profile: talking one-on-one with strangers did not come easily or naturally to Heinlein. He would often get home from these meetings drained and shaking with nervous exhaustion, even when th
ey went smoothly and relations were cordial. Conflict would leave him shaking, his stomach tied in knots.31

  Heinlein learned in his life in politics to conceal the drain on his energies from the people he was meeting and glad-handing. He prepared intensely, reading and studying all the issues and movements in which his constituents might have an interest, keeping a set of “issue” scrapbooks starting in 1935 that held newspaper and magazine article clippings. He developed a smooth and polished surface manner that struck most people as refined and even aristocratic. And when prepared, he found he could genuinely enjoy meeting people: nothing could be more fascinating than the endless variation in the personal quirks of individuals. Politics, he concluded, was truly the only game for adults.32

  For the most part, Heinlein kept his own opinions to himself, nodding agreeably and letting the person he was speaking with assume they were together, shoulder to shoulder. Arguing with someone, he found, was no way to win a vote—and usually produced no good results of any kind. In private, with Leslyn, he would voice his opinions—or in tactical conferences, where his evaluation of the situation was critical to the campaign.33 Heinlein had the social engineer’s attitude: facts—not wishful thinking—were the building blocks of what you could do with what resources you had. “This arrogant independence will get my tires slashed someday. Or worse. But I am no sheep and that just might be a Judas Goat leading the procession. I’ll decide for myself—and the mistakes will be mine.”34

  The biggest problem they had was the giant split down the middle of the Democratic Party, with EPICs on one side and the traditional Democrats on the other. Scattered around the fringes were all the one-issue and other radical reformers. Sinclair had taken Democratic registration to parity with the Republicans in 1934; by 1936, the California Democratic Party had a three-to-two voter registration advantage—but if the Democrats were going to keep their edge, they were going to have to pull together. “‘Blessed is the peacemaker’—for he shall see his party triumph in November!”35