The Ludwig von Mises Institute presents The Libertarian Tradition, an audio series with Jeff Rigenbach.
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.
Heinlein, who was born in 1907 in Butler, Missouri, a small town about 65 miles south
of Kansas City, had been in poor health for most of his adult life. His family had connections
with the powerful Pendergast political machine, the outfit that later put Harry Truman in
the U.S. Senate. But Heinlein still had to spend his freshman year in a two-year Kansas
of the City Junior College, what today we would call a community college, before the
Pendergast machine was finally able to wangle him an appointment to Annapolis.
After graduating from the Naval Academy in 1929 with a degree in mechanical engineering,
Heinlein went to sea as an officer, but in his fourth year of active duty he contracted
tuberculosis and was honorably discharged, retired really with a small pension after
for a Lengthy Hospitalization at Navy Expense.
It was now 1934, the depths of the Great Depression.
Robert A. Heinlein was 27 years old and living in Los Angeles, where the Navy had sent him
upon his graduation from Annapolis five years before.
He applied for admission to graduate school in physics and mathematics at UCLA, was accepted
and enrolled in classes there, but he dropped out after only a few weeks, partly for reasons
because of his still precarious health, partly because he had become interested in politics
and wanted to devote his time to working for Upton Sinclair's gubernatorial campaign instead
of studying math and physics. Sinclair was an outspoken and self-identified socialist
whose campaign as the Democratic nominee for governor of California in 1934 was an outgrowth
Epik was an acronym for end poverty in California.
In Sinclair's words, the epic movement proposed that our unemployed shall be put at productive
labor, producing everything which they themselves consume and exchanging those goods among themselves
by a method of barter, using warehouse receipts or labor certificates or whatever name you
You May Choose to Give to the Paper Employed.
It asserts that the state must advance sufficient capital to give the unemployed access to good
land and machinery, so that they may work and support themselves, and thus take themselves
off the backs of the taxpayers.
The Epic Movement asserts that this will not hurt private industry because the unemployed
are no longer of any use to industry.
Robert A. Heinlein worked for Sinclair's campaign in 1934. It won a little more than a third
of all the votes cast in the election, then stayed with the Epic movement for a few more
years. He became a staff writer for, then editor of, the Epic News, the movement's flagship
publication, with a paid circulation of two million.
Having discovered what seemed to be a natural bent for writing, he tried his hand at a novel.
A utopian socialist polemic entitled For Us the Living that never saw publication until
after his death.
In 1938 he ran unsuccessfully for a seat in the California State Legislature on an epic
platform.
Then, in 1939, at the age of 32, he began writing short stories for the commercial science
fiction magazines.
He enjoyed immediate success.
In months of publishing his first short story in the pages of the leading science fiction
magazine of the day, Astounding Science Fiction, he was widely regarded as the leading writer
in the field.
Within eight years, by 1947, the year he turned 40, he had become the first science fiction
writer to break the pulp barrier, that is, the first science fiction writer to publish
published not just one story, but an entire series of stories, not in the cheaply produced
pulp magazines like Amazing Stories, Astounding Science Fiction or Thrilling Wonder Stories,
but rather in the more expensively produced, more prestigious, larger circulation, better
paying, slick magazines like Town and Country and the Saturday Evening Post.
The Saturday Evening Post alone published nearly half the stories, including the title story,
that made up Heinlein's celebrated 1951 collection, The Green Hills of Earth.
It was also in the late 40s that Heinlein began publishing science fiction stories in
Boy's Life, the monthly magazine of the Boy Scouts of America.
It was in the late 40s that he began writing, at the rate of one novel per year, what Brian
John Doherty calls a series of science fiction novels for boys published by Scribner's that
seem to make it into every high school and elementary school library. A series of coming-of-age
adventure tales that made Heinlein a top favorite author of baby boomers long before those boomers
were old enough to vote or order a drink in a bar. Meanwhile, he wrote science fiction
and for adults as well. During the 50s and 60s Heinlein won four Hugo Awards for Best
Science Fiction Novel of the Year. In 1969 he joined Walter Cronkite on national television
to offer commentary on the first manned moon landing in history. In 1975 he was named the
first recipient of the Grand Master Award for lifetime achievement in the field by the
The Science Fiction Writers of America.
By the time of his death in 1988, his nearly four dozen books, novels and collections
of short stories had sold more than 40 million copies, and they haven't stopped selling
in the more than two decades that have gone by since then.
Why is all this important from the point of view of the libertarian tradition?
Because among the many hundreds of thousands of readers who made Robert A. Heinlein's career
in Science Fiction, such a brilliant success, were quite a few who later came to think of
themselves as libertarians, and to associate themselves in one way or another with the
organized libertarian movement.
Not a few of these would be happy to tell you that it was by reading Heinlein stories
and novels that they discovered libertarian ideas, and became persuaded of their power
and truth.
In the early 1970s, according to a survey undertaken at the time by SIL, the Society
for Individual Liberty, one libertarian activist in six had been led to libertarianism by reading
the novels and short stories of Robert A. Heinlein. Among the prominent libertarians
of the late 20th century who have named Heinlein as an important influence on the development
of their Own Political Thinking, were Dave Nolan, the founder of the Libertarian Party,
and the late Samuel Edward Conkin III.
But was Heinlein a libertarian?
There certainly are libertarian ideas in some of his books.
The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, for example.
The winner of the Hugo Award as the best science fiction novel of 1966 is the story
The Theory of a Libertarian Revolution on the Moon, a revolution designed to free Luna
from the control of politicians and bureaucrats on terra, that is, the earth.
One of the leaders of the revolution is a distinguished man with wavy white hair, dimples
in cheeks and a voice that smiled, Professor Bernardo de la Paz, who speaks of the most
basic human right, the right to bargain in a free marketplace.
De La Paz calls himself a rational anarchist, and argues that the question we need to put
to ourselves when thinking about political questions is this one.
Under what circumstances is it moral for a group to do that which is not moral for a
member of the group to do alone?
According to Professor De La Paz, this is the key question, a radical question that
strikes to the root of the whole dilemma of government.
As the professor puts it, a rational anarchist believes that concepts such as state and society
and government have no existence save as physically exemplified in the acts of self-responsible
individuals.
He believes that it is impossible to shift blame, share blame, distribute blame, as blame,
built responsibility are matters taking place inside human beings singly and nowhere else.
Both in his physical appearance, the wavy white hair, the dimples, the smiling voice,
and in his ideas, Professor Bernardo de la Paz bears a striking resemblance to a real-life
libertarian who flourished and enjoyed considerable influence within the libertarian movement
during the 1950s, 60s and 70s, Robert LaFave.
Now it so happens that Robert A. Heinlein and his third wife, Virginia Heinlein, lived
in Colorado Springs throughout the 1950s and through the first half of the 1960s, the very
period during which Robert LaFave, a neighbor of theirs, as it turns out, was serving as
editorial page editor of the Colorado Springs Gazette Telegraph.
Einstein was writing The Moon is a Harsh Mistress during the years when Lefebvre was operating
his famous Freedom School up the road a few miles in Larkspur, and working to transform
it into a degree-granting four-year institution he wanted to call Rampart College.
During the years when, in effect, Lefebvre was transforming himself from an editorialist,
controversialist and rabble-rouser to a professor.
It has generally been assumed, though it was never confirmed by either Heinlein or his
widow while they were alive, that the fictional Bernardo de la Paz was based on the real Robert
Lefebvre. The Moon is a Harsh Mistress is unquestionably a libertarian novel. It is unquestionably
one of the three or four most influential libertarian novels of the last century. But
But whether its author, Robert A. Heinlein, can plausibly be described as a libertarian
in his personal political views remains a troubled question.
We have seen that Heinlein's first period of political activism in the mid to late 1930s
was devoted to the advocacy of policies like a guaranteed annual income, universal tax-funded
schooling and government seizure of unused private factories and farms so that they could
be transformed at taxpayer expense into workers' co-ops. Whatever this is, it is not libertarianism.
Heinlein's next period of political activism came in the late 1950s, during the very years
when he was first getting acquainted with Robert Lefebvre. On April 5, 1958, the Colorado
Radio Springs Gazette Telegraph published a full-page ad, sponsored by...
But let Robert A. Heinlein tell the story.
The following quotations are taken from the full-page ad he wrote in reply and paid to
have published a week later, on Saturday, April 12, 1958.
Last Saturday in this city appeared a full-page ad intended to scare us into demanding that
The President Stopped Our Testing of Nuclear Weapons
The instigators were 70-odd local people and 60-odd national names styling themselves the
National Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy.
This manifesto is the rankest sort of communist propaganda, concealed in idealistic-sounding
nonsense.
We the undersigned read that insane manifesto of the so-called Committee for a Sane Nuclear
If it comes to atomic war, the best we can hope for is tens of millions of American dead,
perhaps more than half our population wiped out in the first few minutes.
The risks cannot be avoided other than by surrender.
They can be reduced only by making the free world so strong that the evil pragmatists
of Communism cannot afford to murder us.
The price to us will be year after weary year of higher taxes, harder work, grim devotion
and, perhaps, despite all this, death.
But we shall die free.
We the undersigned are not a committee, but simply two free citizens of these United States.
We love life and we want peace, but not peace at any price, not the price of liberty.
Poultrons and pacifists will think otherwise.
Heinlein urged his readers to join a new organization he was starting up called the Patrick Henry
League to promote his ideas.
Again, whatever this may be, it is not libertarianism.
As Murray Rothbard explained in his classic essay War, Peace and the State, published
in 1963, five years after the publication of Heinlein's fatuous polemic, suppose Jones
finds that he or his property is being invaded, aggressed against by Smith.
It is legitimate for Jones to repel this invasion by defensive violence of his own.
But now we come to a more naughty question.
Is it within the right of Jones to commit violence against innocent third parties as
a corollary to his legitimate defense against Smith?
To the libertarian, the answer must be clearly no.
Remember that the rule prohibiting violence against the persons or property of innocent
Men is absolute. It holds regardless of the subjective motives for the aggression. It
is wrong and criminal to violate the property or person of another, even if one is a Robinhood,
or starving, or is doing it to save one's relatives, or is defending oneself against
a third man's attack.
Now with regard to nuclear weapons, here is what Rothbard had to say. While the bow
The bow and arrow and even the rifle can be pinpointed if the will be there against actual
criminals.
Modern nuclear weapons cannot.
These weapons are ipso facto engines of indiscriminate mass destruction.
The only exception would be the extremely rare case where a mass of people who were
all criminals inhabited a vast geographical area.
We must therefore conclude that the use of nuclear or similar weapons, or the threat
thereof, is a sin and a crime against humanity, for which there can be no justification.
Since it is precisely the characteristic of modern weapons that they cannot be used selectively,
cannot be used in a libertarian manner, Rothbard argued, therefore their very existence must
must be condemned, and nuclear disarmament becomes a good to be pursued for its own sake.
And if we will indeed use our strategic intelligence, we will see that such disarmament is not only
a good, but the highest political good that we can pursue in the modern world.
Ten years later, in his invaluable introduction to the libertarian idea, For a New Liberty,
The Libertarian Manifesto, Rothbard summed up his view of the point Robert A. Heinlein
had made in that 1958 ad in the Colorado Springs Gazette Telegraph.
Anyone who wishes is entitled to make the personal decision of better dead than red,
or give me liberty, or give me death.
What he is not entitled to do is make these decisions for others, as the pro-war policy
of Conservatism would do.
What conservatives are really saying is, better them dead than red, and give me liberty or
give them death, which are the battle cries not of noble heroes, but of mass murderers.
It is noteworthy, is it not, that while Heinlein boasted that he and his wife had paid for
the publication of their ad by spending only our own money, he simultaneously made it clear
Is it clear that he expected all Americans to cheerfully pay higher taxes to implement the policy of mass murder he espoused?
Similarly, the man who wrote stories depicting a successful space program funded by private enterprise
also made it clear that he expected Americans to pay taxes, that is, to tolerate government theft of their money, to support NASA.
Gassimov, who knew Heinlein from the mid-thirties on, was convinced that his personal political
views were largely a function of the woman he was married to at the time.
In the thirties, when he was married to wife number two, Leslyn MacDonald, whom Gassimov
describes as a flaming liberal, Heinlein was working with Upton Sinclair and his epic movement.
Many years later, married to wife number three, Virginia Gerstenfeld, he re-emerged as a cold
warrior fixated on the supposed nobility of the military, and newly devoted to a free
market for which he had had little use during the years of the Great Depression.
If so it was, I say, so be it.
Many men have tailored their beliefs to match those of their wives.
They have found that it helps to preserve and promote domestic harmony, and they believe
that domestic harmony is a valuable thing, a thing worth preserving.
Robert A. Heinlein was hardly the only man, or even the first man, to venture down this
path.
What we need to stay focused on here, I think, is that in his books, Heinlein was his own
man.
He found social and political ideas, ideas about the different ways human beings might
figure out to live together peaceably in large groups, endlessly fascinating.
He liked to fool around with such ideas, speculate about how they might work out in practice.
Libertarian ideas weren't the only ones he fooled around with and speculated about in
his fiction.
But because of his interaction with Robert Lefebvre in Colorado in the 50s and 60s, libertarian
and ideas were among those he toyed with and dramatized in certain of his stories.
Whether he was personally a libertarian or not, all those of us who are libertarians
owe him a profound debt for writing The Moon is a Harsh Mistress.
For that book alone, Robert A. Heinlein has earned a place in the libertarian tradition.
This is Jeff Rigenback.