WEBVTT NOTE Robert Anson Heinlein (1907–1988) 1 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:12.000 The Ludwig von Mises Institute presents The Libertarian Tradition, an audio series with Jeff Rigenbach. 2 00:00:12.000 --> 00:00:24.000 When Robert Anson Heinlein died 22 years ago this month in Carmel, California at the age of 80, the wonder of it all was that he had managed to live as long as he did. 3 00:00:24.000 --> 00:00:31.440 Heinlein, who was born in 1907 in Butler, Missouri, a small town about 65 miles south 4 00:00:31.440 --> 00:00:38.120 of Kansas City, had been in poor health for most of his adult life. His family had connections 5 00:00:38.120 --> 00:00:43.720 with the powerful Pendergast political machine, the outfit that later put Harry Truman in 6 00:00:43.720 --> 00:00:49.200 the U.S. Senate. But Heinlein still had to spend his freshman year in a two-year Kansas 7 00:00:49.200 --> 00:00:54.600 of the City Junior College, what today we would call a community college, before the 8 00:00:54.600 --> 00:01:00.160 Pendergast machine was finally able to wangle him an appointment to Annapolis. 9 00:01:00.160 --> 00:01:06.920 After graduating from the Naval Academy in 1929 with a degree in mechanical engineering, 10 00:01:06.920 --> 00:01:12.240 Heinlein went to sea as an officer, but in his fourth year of active duty he contracted 11 00:01:12.240 --> 00:01:18.640 tuberculosis and was honorably discharged, retired really with a small pension after 12 00:01:18.640 --> 00:01:22.440 for a Lengthy Hospitalization at Navy Expense. 13 00:01:22.440 --> 00:01:26.760 It was now 1934, the depths of the Great Depression. 14 00:01:26.760 --> 00:01:32.440 Robert A. Heinlein was 27 years old and living in Los Angeles, where the Navy had sent him 15 00:01:32.440 --> 00:01:36.480 upon his graduation from Annapolis five years before. 16 00:01:36.480 --> 00:01:42.380 He applied for admission to graduate school in physics and mathematics at UCLA, was accepted 17 00:01:42.380 --> 00:01:48.320 and enrolled in classes there, but he dropped out after only a few weeks, partly for reasons 18 00:01:48.320 --> 00:01:54.080 because of his still precarious health, partly because he had become interested in politics 19 00:01:54.080 --> 00:02:00.540 and wanted to devote his time to working for Upton Sinclair's gubernatorial campaign instead 20 00:02:00.540 --> 00:02:07.240 of studying math and physics. Sinclair was an outspoken and self-identified socialist 21 00:02:07.240 --> 00:02:14.000 whose campaign as the Democratic nominee for governor of California in 1934 was an outgrowth 22 00:02:14.000 --> 00:02:22.920 Epik was an acronym for end poverty in California. 23 00:02:22.920 --> 00:02:29.040 In Sinclair's words, the epic movement proposed that our unemployed shall be put at productive 24 00:02:29.040 --> 00:02:36.320 labor, producing everything which they themselves consume and exchanging those goods among themselves 25 00:02:36.320 --> 00:02:42.600 by a method of barter, using warehouse receipts or labor certificates or whatever name you 26 00:02:42.600 --> 00:02:45.920 You May Choose to Give to the Paper Employed. 27 00:02:45.920 --> 00:02:51.920 It asserts that the state must advance sufficient capital to give the unemployed access to good 28 00:02:51.920 --> 00:02:57.840 land and machinery, so that they may work and support themselves, and thus take themselves 29 00:02:57.840 --> 00:03:00.460 off the backs of the taxpayers. 30 00:03:00.460 --> 00:03:05.900 The Epic Movement asserts that this will not hurt private industry because the unemployed 31 00:03:05.900 --> 00:03:09.440 are no longer of any use to industry. 32 00:03:09.440 --> 00:03:16.100 Robert A. Heinlein worked for Sinclair's campaign in 1934. It won a little more than a third 33 00:03:16.100 --> 00:03:21.480 of all the votes cast in the election, then stayed with the Epic movement for a few more 34 00:03:21.480 --> 00:03:28.280 years. He became a staff writer for, then editor of, the Epic News, the movement's flagship 35 00:03:28.280 --> 00:03:32.400 publication, with a paid circulation of two million. 36 00:03:32.400 --> 00:03:37.920 Having discovered what seemed to be a natural bent for writing, he tried his hand at a novel. 37 00:03:37.920 --> 00:03:44.240 A utopian socialist polemic entitled For Us the Living that never saw publication until 38 00:03:44.240 --> 00:03:46.040 after his death. 39 00:03:46.040 --> 00:03:52.160 In 1938 he ran unsuccessfully for a seat in the California State Legislature on an epic 40 00:03:52.160 --> 00:03:53.160 platform. 41 00:03:53.160 --> 00:04:00.520 Then, in 1939, at the age of 32, he began writing short stories for the commercial science 42 00:04:00.520 --> 00:04:03.120 fiction magazines. 43 00:04:03.120 --> 00:04:05.960 He enjoyed immediate success. 44 00:04:05.960 --> 00:04:10.760 In months of publishing his first short story in the pages of the leading science fiction 45 00:04:10.760 --> 00:04:16.480 magazine of the day, Astounding Science Fiction, he was widely regarded as the leading writer 46 00:04:16.480 --> 00:04:18.000 in the field. 47 00:04:18.000 --> 00:04:24.320 Within eight years, by 1947, the year he turned 40, he had become the first science fiction 48 00:04:24.320 --> 00:04:30.240 writer to break the pulp barrier, that is, the first science fiction writer to publish 49 00:04:30.240 --> 00:04:36.520 published not just one story, but an entire series of stories, not in the cheaply produced 50 00:04:36.520 --> 00:04:43.440 pulp magazines like Amazing Stories, Astounding Science Fiction or Thrilling Wonder Stories, 51 00:04:43.440 --> 00:04:49.120 but rather in the more expensively produced, more prestigious, larger circulation, better 52 00:04:49.120 --> 00:04:55.360 paying, slick magazines like Town and Country and the Saturday Evening Post. 53 00:04:55.360 --> 00:05:01.660 The Saturday Evening Post alone published nearly half the stories, including the title story, 54 00:05:01.660 --> 00:05:07.960 that made up Heinlein's celebrated 1951 collection, The Green Hills of Earth. 55 00:05:07.960 --> 00:05:12.880 It was also in the late 40s that Heinlein began publishing science fiction stories in 56 00:05:12.880 --> 00:05:17.740 Boy's Life, the monthly magazine of the Boy Scouts of America. 57 00:05:17.740 --> 00:05:23.360 It was in the late 40s that he began writing, at the rate of one novel per year, what Brian 58 00:05:23.360 --> 00:05:29.500 John Doherty calls a series of science fiction novels for boys published by Scribner's that 59 00:05:29.500 --> 00:05:36.120 seem to make it into every high school and elementary school library. A series of coming-of-age 60 00:05:36.120 --> 00:05:43.040 adventure tales that made Heinlein a top favorite author of baby boomers long before those boomers 61 00:05:43.040 --> 00:05:48.300 were old enough to vote or order a drink in a bar. Meanwhile, he wrote science fiction 62 00:05:48.300 --> 00:05:54.820 and for adults as well. During the 50s and 60s Heinlein won four Hugo Awards for Best 63 00:05:54.820 --> 00:06:02.140 Science Fiction Novel of the Year. In 1969 he joined Walter Cronkite on national television 64 00:06:02.140 --> 00:06:09.180 to offer commentary on the first manned moon landing in history. In 1975 he was named the 65 00:06:09.180 --> 00:06:14.820 first recipient of the Grand Master Award for lifetime achievement in the field by the 66 00:06:14.820 --> 00:06:17.580 The Science Fiction Writers of America. 67 00:06:17.580 --> 00:06:24.000 By the time of his death in 1988, his nearly four dozen books, novels and collections 68 00:06:24.000 --> 00:06:29.980 of short stories had sold more than 40 million copies, and they haven't stopped selling 69 00:06:29.980 --> 00:06:34.120 in the more than two decades that have gone by since then. 70 00:06:34.120 --> 00:06:39.140 Why is all this important from the point of view of the libertarian tradition? 71 00:06:39.140 --> 00:06:44.260 Because among the many hundreds of thousands of readers who made Robert A. Heinlein's career 72 00:06:44.260 --> 00:06:49.560 in Science Fiction, such a brilliant success, were quite a few who later came to think of 73 00:06:49.560 --> 00:06:55.300 themselves as libertarians, and to associate themselves in one way or another with the 74 00:06:55.300 --> 00:06:58.020 organized libertarian movement. 75 00:06:58.020 --> 00:07:03.160 Not a few of these would be happy to tell you that it was by reading Heinlein stories 76 00:07:03.160 --> 00:07:09.080 and novels that they discovered libertarian ideas, and became persuaded of their power 77 00:07:09.080 --> 00:07:10.560 and truth. 78 00:07:10.560 --> 00:07:16.840 In the early 1970s, according to a survey undertaken at the time by SIL, the Society 79 00:07:16.840 --> 00:07:23.980 for Individual Liberty, one libertarian activist in six had been led to libertarianism by reading 80 00:07:23.980 --> 00:07:30.040 the novels and short stories of Robert A. Heinlein. Among the prominent libertarians 81 00:07:30.040 --> 00:07:35.580 of the late 20th century who have named Heinlein as an important influence on the development 82 00:07:35.580 --> 00:07:41.540 of their Own Political Thinking, were Dave Nolan, the founder of the Libertarian Party, 83 00:07:41.540 --> 00:07:45.060 and the late Samuel Edward Conkin III. 84 00:07:45.060 --> 00:07:48.580 But was Heinlein a libertarian? 85 00:07:48.580 --> 00:07:52.940 There certainly are libertarian ideas in some of his books. 86 00:07:52.940 --> 00:07:55.620 The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, for example. 87 00:07:55.620 --> 00:08:01.660 The winner of the Hugo Award as the best science fiction novel of 1966 is the story 88 00:08:01.660 --> 00:08:07.340 The Theory of a Libertarian Revolution on the Moon, a revolution designed to free Luna 89 00:08:07.340 --> 00:08:13.540 from the control of politicians and bureaucrats on terra, that is, the earth. 90 00:08:13.540 --> 00:08:18.980 One of the leaders of the revolution is a distinguished man with wavy white hair, dimples 91 00:08:18.980 --> 00:08:25.680 in cheeks and a voice that smiled, Professor Bernardo de la Paz, who speaks of the most 92 00:08:25.680 --> 00:08:30.860 basic human right, the right to bargain in a free marketplace. 93 00:08:30.860 --> 00:08:36.780 De La Paz calls himself a rational anarchist, and argues that the question we need to put 94 00:08:36.780 --> 00:08:41.740 to ourselves when thinking about political questions is this one. 95 00:08:41.740 --> 00:08:47.780 Under what circumstances is it moral for a group to do that which is not moral for a 96 00:08:47.780 --> 00:08:51.340 member of the group to do alone? 97 00:08:51.340 --> 00:08:56.900 According to Professor De La Paz, this is the key question, a radical question that 98 00:08:56.900 --> 00:09:01.300 strikes to the root of the whole dilemma of government. 99 00:09:01.300 --> 00:09:08.100 As the professor puts it, a rational anarchist believes that concepts such as state and society 100 00:09:08.100 --> 00:09:15.680 and government have no existence save as physically exemplified in the acts of self-responsible 101 00:09:15.680 --> 00:09:17.180 individuals. 102 00:09:17.180 --> 00:09:25.020 He believes that it is impossible to shift blame, share blame, distribute blame, as blame, 103 00:09:25.020 --> 00:09:34.500 built responsibility are matters taking place inside human beings singly and nowhere else. 104 00:09:34.500 --> 00:09:40.120 Both in his physical appearance, the wavy white hair, the dimples, the smiling voice, 105 00:09:40.120 --> 00:09:46.400 and in his ideas, Professor Bernardo de la Paz bears a striking resemblance to a real-life 106 00:09:46.400 --> 00:09:52.580 libertarian who flourished and enjoyed considerable influence within the libertarian movement 107 00:09:52.580 --> 00:09:57.900 during the 1950s, 60s and 70s, Robert LaFave. 108 00:09:57.900 --> 00:10:03.680 Now it so happens that Robert A. Heinlein and his third wife, Virginia Heinlein, lived 109 00:10:03.680 --> 00:10:10.540 in Colorado Springs throughout the 1950s and through the first half of the 1960s, the very 110 00:10:10.540 --> 00:10:16.340 period during which Robert LaFave, a neighbor of theirs, as it turns out, was serving as 111 00:10:16.340 --> 00:10:21.780 editorial page editor of the Colorado Springs Gazette Telegraph. 112 00:10:21.780 --> 00:10:26.580 Einstein was writing The Moon is a Harsh Mistress during the years when Lefebvre was operating 113 00:10:26.580 --> 00:10:32.760 his famous Freedom School up the road a few miles in Larkspur, and working to transform 114 00:10:32.760 --> 00:10:39.900 it into a degree-granting four-year institution he wanted to call Rampart College. 115 00:10:39.900 --> 00:10:46.220 During the years when, in effect, Lefebvre was transforming himself from an editorialist, 116 00:10:46.220 --> 00:10:50.220 controversialist and rabble-rouser to a professor. 117 00:10:50.220 --> 00:10:55.280 It has generally been assumed, though it was never confirmed by either Heinlein or his 118 00:10:55.280 --> 00:11:02.040 widow while they were alive, that the fictional Bernardo de la Paz was based on the real Robert 119 00:11:02.040 --> 00:11:09.260 Lefebvre. The Moon is a Harsh Mistress is unquestionably a libertarian novel. It is unquestionably 120 00:11:09.260 --> 00:11:14.940 one of the three or four most influential libertarian novels of the last century. But 121 00:11:14.940 --> 00:11:20.960 But whether its author, Robert A. Heinlein, can plausibly be described as a libertarian 122 00:11:20.960 --> 00:11:26.360 in his personal political views remains a troubled question. 123 00:11:26.360 --> 00:11:32.600 We have seen that Heinlein's first period of political activism in the mid to late 1930s 124 00:11:32.600 --> 00:11:39.240 was devoted to the advocacy of policies like a guaranteed annual income, universal tax-funded 125 00:11:39.240 --> 00:11:45.240 schooling and government seizure of unused private factories and farms so that they could 126 00:11:45.240 --> 00:11:54.240 be transformed at taxpayer expense into workers' co-ops. Whatever this is, it is not libertarianism. 127 00:11:54.240 --> 00:12:00.680 Heinlein's next period of political activism came in the late 1950s, during the very years 128 00:12:00.680 --> 00:12:07.000 when he was first getting acquainted with Robert Lefebvre. On April 5, 1958, the Colorado 129 00:12:07.000 --> 00:12:12.820 Radio Springs Gazette Telegraph published a full-page ad, sponsored by... 130 00:12:12.820 --> 00:12:15.780 But let Robert A. Heinlein tell the story. 131 00:12:15.780 --> 00:12:21.700 The following quotations are taken from the full-page ad he wrote in reply and paid to 132 00:12:21.700 --> 00:12:28.400 have published a week later, on Saturday, April 12, 1958. 133 00:12:28.400 --> 00:12:34.520 Last Saturday in this city appeared a full-page ad intended to scare us into demanding that 134 00:12:34.520 --> 00:12:38.240 The President Stopped Our Testing of Nuclear Weapons 135 00:12:38.240 --> 00:12:45.440 The instigators were 70-odd local people and 60-odd national names styling themselves the 136 00:12:45.440 --> 00:12:49.520 National Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy. 137 00:12:49.520 --> 00:12:56.160 This manifesto is the rankest sort of communist propaganda, concealed in idealistic-sounding 138 00:12:56.160 --> 00:12:57.600 nonsense. 139 00:12:57.600 --> 00:13:04.040 We the undersigned read that insane manifesto of the so-called Committee for a Sane Nuclear 140 00:13:04.040 --> 00:13:20.920 If it comes to atomic war, the best we can hope for is tens of millions of American dead, 141 00:13:20.920 --> 00:13:25.840 perhaps more than half our population wiped out in the first few minutes. 142 00:13:25.840 --> 00:13:29.840 The risks cannot be avoided other than by surrender. 143 00:13:29.840 --> 00:13:35.920 They can be reduced only by making the free world so strong that the evil pragmatists 144 00:13:35.920 --> 00:13:39.560 of Communism cannot afford to murder us. 145 00:13:39.560 --> 00:13:47.080 The price to us will be year after weary year of higher taxes, harder work, grim devotion 146 00:13:47.080 --> 00:13:51.520 and, perhaps, despite all this, death. 147 00:13:51.520 --> 00:13:54.240 But we shall die free. 148 00:13:54.240 --> 00:14:00.700 We the undersigned are not a committee, but simply two free citizens of these United States. 149 00:14:00.700 --> 00:14:07.840 We love life and we want peace, but not peace at any price, not the price of liberty. 150 00:14:07.840 --> 00:14:12.840 Poultrons and pacifists will think otherwise. 151 00:14:12.840 --> 00:14:18.520 Heinlein urged his readers to join a new organization he was starting up called the Patrick Henry 152 00:14:18.520 --> 00:14:21.440 League to promote his ideas. 153 00:14:21.440 --> 00:14:26.880 Again, whatever this may be, it is not libertarianism. 154 00:14:26.880 --> 00:14:32.420 As Murray Rothbard explained in his classic essay War, Peace and the State, published 155 00:14:32.420 --> 00:14:40.000 in 1963, five years after the publication of Heinlein's fatuous polemic, suppose Jones 156 00:14:40.000 --> 00:14:46.320 finds that he or his property is being invaded, aggressed against by Smith. 157 00:14:46.320 --> 00:14:52.120 It is legitimate for Jones to repel this invasion by defensive violence of his own. 158 00:14:52.120 --> 00:14:55.240 But now we come to a more naughty question. 159 00:14:55.240 --> 00:15:00.840 Is it within the right of Jones to commit violence against innocent third parties as 160 00:15:00.840 --> 00:15:05.380 a corollary to his legitimate defense against Smith? 161 00:15:05.380 --> 00:15:09.880 To the libertarian, the answer must be clearly no. 162 00:15:09.880 --> 00:15:14.840 Remember that the rule prohibiting violence against the persons or property of innocent 163 00:15:14.840 --> 00:15:21.720 Men is absolute. It holds regardless of the subjective motives for the aggression. It 164 00:15:21.720 --> 00:15:29.020 is wrong and criminal to violate the property or person of another, even if one is a Robinhood, 165 00:15:29.020 --> 00:15:35.080 or starving, or is doing it to save one's relatives, or is defending oneself against 166 00:15:35.080 --> 00:15:37.320 a third man's attack. 167 00:15:37.320 --> 00:15:43.340 Now with regard to nuclear weapons, here is what Rothbard had to say. While the bow 168 00:15:43.340 --> 00:15:49.580 The bow and arrow and even the rifle can be pinpointed if the will be there against actual 169 00:15:49.580 --> 00:15:51.140 criminals. 170 00:15:51.140 --> 00:15:54.140 Modern nuclear weapons cannot. 171 00:15:54.140 --> 00:15:59.860 These weapons are ipso facto engines of indiscriminate mass destruction. 172 00:15:59.860 --> 00:16:05.000 The only exception would be the extremely rare case where a mass of people who were 173 00:16:05.000 --> 00:16:10.160 all criminals inhabited a vast geographical area. 174 00:16:10.160 --> 00:16:15.640 We must therefore conclude that the use of nuclear or similar weapons, or the threat 175 00:16:15.640 --> 00:16:24.080 thereof, is a sin and a crime against humanity, for which there can be no justification. 176 00:16:24.080 --> 00:16:30.800 Since it is precisely the characteristic of modern weapons that they cannot be used selectively, 177 00:16:30.800 --> 00:16:37.400 cannot be used in a libertarian manner, Rothbard argued, therefore their very existence must 178 00:16:37.400 --> 00:16:44.360 must be condemned, and nuclear disarmament becomes a good to be pursued for its own sake. 179 00:16:44.360 --> 00:16:50.680 And if we will indeed use our strategic intelligence, we will see that such disarmament is not only 180 00:16:50.680 --> 00:16:57.600 a good, but the highest political good that we can pursue in the modern world. 181 00:16:57.600 --> 00:17:03.960 Ten years later, in his invaluable introduction to the libertarian idea, For a New Liberty, 182 00:17:03.960 --> 00:17:09.880 The Libertarian Manifesto, Rothbard summed up his view of the point Robert A. Heinlein 183 00:17:09.880 --> 00:17:16.160 had made in that 1958 ad in the Colorado Springs Gazette Telegraph. 184 00:17:16.160 --> 00:17:22.080 Anyone who wishes is entitled to make the personal decision of better dead than red, 185 00:17:22.080 --> 00:17:24.960 or give me liberty, or give me death. 186 00:17:24.960 --> 00:17:32.220 What he is not entitled to do is make these decisions for others, as the pro-war policy 187 00:17:32.220 --> 00:17:34.720 of Conservatism would do. 188 00:17:34.720 --> 00:17:40.960 What conservatives are really saying is, better them dead than red, and give me liberty or 189 00:17:40.960 --> 00:17:48.340 give them death, which are the battle cries not of noble heroes, but of mass murderers. 190 00:17:48.340 --> 00:17:53.980 It is noteworthy, is it not, that while Heinlein boasted that he and his wife had paid for 191 00:17:53.980 --> 00:18:00.820 the publication of their ad by spending only our own money, he simultaneously made it clear 192 00:18:00.820 --> 00:18:09.820 Is it clear that he expected all Americans to cheerfully pay higher taxes to implement the policy of mass murder he espoused? 193 00:18:09.820 --> 00:18:16.820 Similarly, the man who wrote stories depicting a successful space program funded by private enterprise 194 00:18:16.820 --> 00:18:26.820 also made it clear that he expected Americans to pay taxes, that is, to tolerate government theft of their money, to support NASA. 195 00:18:26.820 --> 00:18:32.600 Gassimov, who knew Heinlein from the mid-thirties on, was convinced that his personal political 196 00:18:32.600 --> 00:18:38.240 views were largely a function of the woman he was married to at the time. 197 00:18:38.240 --> 00:18:43.680 In the thirties, when he was married to wife number two, Leslyn MacDonald, whom Gassimov 198 00:18:43.680 --> 00:18:51.000 describes as a flaming liberal, Heinlein was working with Upton Sinclair and his epic movement. 199 00:18:51.000 --> 00:18:57.160 Many years later, married to wife number three, Virginia Gerstenfeld, he re-emerged as a cold 200 00:18:57.160 --> 00:19:03.260 warrior fixated on the supposed nobility of the military, and newly devoted to a free 201 00:19:03.260 --> 00:19:09.200 market for which he had had little use during the years of the Great Depression. 202 00:19:09.200 --> 00:19:12.520 If so it was, I say, so be it. 203 00:19:12.520 --> 00:19:16.640 Many men have tailored their beliefs to match those of their wives. 204 00:19:16.640 --> 00:19:21.440 They have found that it helps to preserve and promote domestic harmony, and they believe 205 00:19:21.440 --> 00:19:26.080 that domestic harmony is a valuable thing, a thing worth preserving. 206 00:19:26.080 --> 00:19:30.920 Robert A. Heinlein was hardly the only man, or even the first man, to venture down this 207 00:19:30.920 --> 00:19:32.560 path. 208 00:19:32.560 --> 00:19:38.600 What we need to stay focused on here, I think, is that in his books, Heinlein was his own 209 00:19:38.600 --> 00:19:39.600 man. 210 00:19:39.600 --> 00:19:45.760 He found social and political ideas, ideas about the different ways human beings might 211 00:19:45.760 --> 00:19:51.620 figure out to live together peaceably in large groups, endlessly fascinating. 212 00:19:51.620 --> 00:19:59.240 He liked to fool around with such ideas, speculate about how they might work out in practice. 213 00:19:59.240 --> 00:20:03.640 Libertarian ideas weren't the only ones he fooled around with and speculated about in 214 00:20:03.640 --> 00:20:04.880 his fiction. 215 00:20:04.880 --> 00:20:10.980 But because of his interaction with Robert Lefebvre in Colorado in the 50s and 60s, libertarian 216 00:20:10.980 --> 00:20:17.460 and ideas were among those he toyed with and dramatized in certain of his stories. 217 00:20:17.460 --> 00:20:23.020 Whether he was personally a libertarian or not, all those of us who are libertarians 218 00:20:23.020 --> 00:20:27.620 owe him a profound debt for writing The Moon is a Harsh Mistress. 219 00:20:27.620 --> 00:20:34.340 For that book alone, Robert A. Heinlein has earned a place in the libertarian tradition. 220 00:20:34.340 --> 00:20:49.340 This is Jeff Rigenback.