Heinlein’s “Stealth” Black Character

Sneaking past fearful publishers

Robert A. Heinlein was America’s most influential science fiction writer.

A committed 1930s liberal and ardent New Dealer, Heinlein purposely populated his works with a diverse set of strong characters:

-- Jews (Morrie Abrams, Rocket Ship Galileo, 1947)

-- Asians (Lieutenant Wong, Space Cadet, 1948)

-- Muslims (Doctor Mahmoud, Stranger in a Strange Land, 1961)

-- women (Podkayne Fries, Podkayne of Mars, 1962), and so on.

But fearful publishers shied away from black characters, worried that it would have an adverse effect on book sales. So Heinlein decided to create a “stealth” black main character, Rod Walker, in his 1955 novel, Tunnel in the Sky.

(Another giant of science fiction, Englishman Arthur C. Clarke, had already created the black character Jan Rodricks in his 1953 novel, Childhood’s End, but the British have always had fewer foam-at-the-mouth racists than the USA, probably because they never permitted slavery within the country (their colonies were a different matter altogether, of course.))

Heinlein’s trick worked. Although he sprinkled clues throughout the novel, hardly anyone twigged to it for decades. I certainly didn’t when I read it around 1959 or so, but I grew up in deeply segregated Florida, and didn’t even have a conversation with a black person until my junior year of college. (I’m not going to tell you what those clues are—you’ll have to read the book yourself.)

That Heinlein created Rod Walker as black was never in doubt; Heinlein scholar Robert James, Ph.D. says ”The evidence is slim but definite. First and foremost, outside of the text, there is a letter in which RAH firmly states that Rod is black… RAH often played games with the skin color of his characters, in what I see as a disarming tactic against racists who may come to identify with the hero, then realize later on that they have identified with somebody they supposedly hate.”

Today, publishers make sure that everyone knows that Rod is black, and the cover art shows it. It makes the publishers look “progressive.”

Women with Wings (Forget any nonsense about “angels”—these women were tough)

By now, everyone has heard of Amelia Earhart, of course. But I doubt that many of you have heard of the Women's Airforce Service Pilots (WASPs) of World War II.

During World War II, women began to enter previously all-male jobs, out of necessity, to free up men for combat. Legendary flyer Jackie Cochran envisioned a corps of women pilots who would ferry new planes to the air bases of England and the Pacific, freeing up more men for combat flight duty.

Cochran petitioned General “Hap” Arnold, the head of the Army Air Force, but Arnold was not convinced that “a slip of a young girl could fight the controls of a B-17."  But women pilots can be as determined as men, and Cochran enlisted the aid of none other than Eleanor Roosevelt.

Finally, Arnold was persuaded, and the WASPs were hatched. When the announcement was made, asking for volunteers, more than TWENTY-FIVE THOUSAND women applied, and eventually about a thousand were accepted. These women pilots served with great distinction in the war, with thirty-eight of them making the ultimate sacrifice.

On December 7, 1944, in a speech to the last graduating class of WASPs, General Arnold said, “You and more than 900 of your sisters have shown you can fly wingtip to wingtip with your brothers. I salute you . . . We of the Army Air Force are proud of you. We will never forget our debt to you.”

Despite these high-sounding words, the WASPS were treated VERY differently from male pilots; they were given no benefits, they had to pay for their own training, they even had to pay for their own way home after the war!

The WASP records were sealed after the war, stamped “classified” or “secret,” and were not available to the public until 1980. So much for “we will never forget!”

In fact, it wasn’t until 2009 that Senators Kay Bailey Hutchison of Texas and Barbara Mikulski of Maryland, along with Congresswomen Susan Davis of California and Ilena Ros-Lehtinen of Florida introduced a bill to award the Congressional Gold Medal to all WWII WASP pilots. (This medal is the highest and most distinguished award Congress can award to a civilian.)

The award ceremony took place on March 11, 2010. These brave women finally got the recognition they deserved.

And it took the government a mere 65 years to do it.

There is still no word on whether the WASP pilots will be reimbursed for their travel expenses.

The R101--Britain’s Hindenburg

In 2000, Marcia and I visited the Aeronauticum Museum in Northern Germany. This was originally the base from which German Zeppelin airships flew on bombing missions over London & other cities in World War I.

Thanks to the pioneering work of Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin, Germany was far ahead of the rest of the world in airship technology in those days, and after the war, they began looking at airships as a means of luxury travel.

The British were not to be outdone, however—they began building airships their own, “reverse-engineered” from a Zeppelin that was shot down over Yorkshire in 1916. (All’s fair in war—the “Red Baron’s” famous Fokker triplane was modelled after the British Sopwith triplane in 1917.) The pride of Britain’s fledgling fleet was the “R101.”

The giant airships were regarded as the future of passenger transportation. From the point of view of the citizens of the 1920s (whose milk was still being delivered in horse-drawn wagons), a luxury liner that could fly serenely above the storm clouds (not to mention the icebergs) at speeds up to 60mph—more than twice the speed of a steamship—must have seemed like a Jules Verne science fiction story come true.

And they were indeed luxury liners—the R101 had 50 luxurious staterooms, a dining room that sat 60, two multi-windowed promenade decks, and, last but not least, an asbestos-lined smoking lounge that could accommodate 24 smokers (considered a necessity because almost everybody smoked in those days—many old-timers can remember being examined by a physician with a lit ciggie dangling from his lips).

The British dream was that these ships would ply the airways of the world, connecting the far-flung outposts of the Empire, with no point on Earth more than a few days’ travel away.  (I have no idea why such a visionary vehicle would be given such a prosaic name as “R101”—you’d think they would have called it HMA Victorious or some such. The Germans, on the other hand, usually a by-the-numbers kind of people, gave their airships names like Graf (Count) Zeppelin and Hindenburg.)

The Brits felt the pressure of competition from the Germans, and after what some considered to be inadequate testing, the R101 was declared ready for its maiden voyage.  And not a short demonstration hop, either, but a continent-spanning voyage all the way to India, with a refueling stop in Egypt.

With various dignitaries on board, including Lord Thomson, Secretary of State for Air, and Sir Sefton Brancker, Director of Civil Aviation, the R101 lifted from Cardington, Bedfordshire on October 4, 1930.

A few hours later, over France, the ship began behaving erratically, and the crew’s efforts to correct it failed. R101 crashed near Beauvais, and immediately caught fire, killing 48 of the 56 passengers, a much higher death toll than the 36 deaths in the Hindenburg crash in Lakehurst, New Jersey 8 years later. But unlike the Hindenburg disaster, the R101 had no newsreel cameras filming all of the gory details, nor a second-by-second account from an emotional radio newscaster.

Still, the British government was discouraged enough to abandon its airship project, leaving the field wide open to the Germans, who continued regular Transatlantic service for years with the Hindenburg, the Graf Zeppelin, and the Graf Zeppelin II.

And, contrary to popular belief, the Hindenburg crash in 1938 did not end airship travel. After the crash, more than 400 tickets were sold for the next available flight. But Nazi Germany scrapped the remaining airships to use the materials for building fighter planes. And after 1941, New Jersey was no longer a destination for Nazi-owned aircraft. Airship travel was killed by World War II, not by safety concerns.

 

A Real-World Experiment

Simon Cowell vs. Michael Moore

In his highly profitable film, Capitalism: A Love Story, multimillionaire Michael Moore makes the claim that “capitalism” is “evil” and must be replaced by “democracy.”

Now, Mikey is not known for his precise definition of terms—especially since he seems completely ignorant of the fact that economic systems and political systems are not opposites, and thus one cannot “replace” the other.

So it’s difficult to figure out just what he meant by “capitalism” and “democracy.” But what the heck--I’ll take a stab at it.

I think Moore would agree with me if I say that democracy is an arrangement where we all get to vote on what’s best for everybody, and the winners, even if they win by just one vote out of 100 million, have the fundamental human right to impose their agenda on the losers, at gunpoint if necessary.

It’s harder to tell what he means by “capitalism,” but he might say that it’s an arrangement where everybody does whatever the heck he or she wants, without supervision by wiser heads. 

So what does this have to do with Simon Cowell?

Just this: entrepreneurial wizards such as Simon Cowell, Nigel Lythgoe, and Simon Fuller have provided us with great examples of how “democracy” and “capitalism” function in the real world, by creating TV programs such as The X Factor, So You Think You Can Dance, and American Idol.

Unless you have been living among the Yanomami for the last 12 years, you probably know that American Idol is a televised singing competition in which the winner gets a $250,000 recording contract, and the losers get virtually nothing. The winner is selected democratically, by a vote of the viewers.

In Michael Moore’s perfect world, this would be the end of it; the winner would go on to fame & fortune, and the losers would go back to waiting tables and cleaning toilets.
 
But this is the real world, where American Idol exists within a larger environment called the “entertainment industry,” an aggressively capitalistic free market in which consumers can “do whatever the heck they want,” and decide for themselves whose songs to buy and whose concerts to attend.
 
Every year in May, Forbes Magazine publishes a list of the top American Idol money makers.  In Moore’s world, this list would consist of only past winners, because all other contestants would have been permanently eliminated. But, in the freedom of a capitalist world, things aren’t decided by a democratic winner-take-all rule.  Here’s the latest list:

Carrie Underwood (winner, season 4)
Chris Daughtry (“loser,” season 5)
Adam Lambert (“loser,” season 8)
Fantasia Barrino (winner, season 3)
Jordin Sparks (winner, season 6)
Kelly Clarkson (winner, season 1)
Jennifer Hudson (“loser,” season 3)
Kellie Pickler (“loser,” season 5)
Clay Aiken (“loser,” season 2)
Katharine McPhee (“loser,” season 5)
David Archuleta (“loser,” season 7)
David Cook (winner, season 7)
Kris Allen (winner, season 8)
Lee DeWyze (winner, season 9)
Crystal Bowersox (“loser,” season 9)
Ruben Studdard (winner, season 2)

Of the sixteen names on this list, only eight are Michael Moore-style “winners.” Out here in the real world, all of them are winners.

And this is just the tip of the free market iceberg; many other “losers” are now successes, too, doing what they love, and making a good living at it.

I think it’s safe to say that capitalist entrepreneurs such as Simon Cowell have launched more careers, created more jobs, and brought happiness into more people’s lives each year than Michael Moore will in his entire lifetime.  (Moore said in his blog that “I made the decision that I would never buy a share of stock…” That would put his job creation rate at about zero.)

Big Mikey, now that he’s made his $50 million in the free market, can afford to hype his anti-freedom agenda. He’s already got his—as far as he’s concerned, the rest of us can just go vote for a living.

If this were Mikey’s “winner-take-all” democratic world, he would probably be the one cleaning toilets.

“Everything I Know About American History, I Learned from Hollywood”

The Mild West

It seems that every time a shooting in America makes headlines, some wag in a European newspaper makes a remark about how “it’s like the Wild West over there.”  He’s right, but not for the reasons he thinks.

Now, “everybody” knows that the American West in the 1800s was a violent place, with daily duels in the streets, and characters such as Wyatt Earp and Wild Bill Hickock blazing away at the likes of Billy the Kid and Jesse James.

And, as usual, “everybody” is wrong.

The great Westward Expansion Period of the 1860s thru the 1890s captured the imagination of the entire world.  And a gaggle of hack writers cashed in on this fascination, churning out dime novels that featured real-life people such as Kit Carson and Calamity Jane in violent, 100% fictional adventures.  (Of course, the vast majority of these hack writers had never ventured further west than Altoona.)

Motion pictures were invented when Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show was at the height of its popularity, and the movie-makers sought to make dime-novel-style action come alive on the silver screen.  One of the most popular of these early movies was The Great Train Robbery (1903), the first Western “shoot ‘em up.”  Considered a cinematic milestone, Robbery was filmed entirely in New Jersey (I kid you not).

As movies became more elaborate, stars such as Tom Mix, Hopalong Cassidy, Roy Rogers, and John Wayne filled the silver screen with clouds of gun smoke, and the “Wild West” legend became part of our popular culture.

But when historians began to research the newspapers and the official town records of the period, an entirely different picture began to emerge.

Larry E. Schweikart, professor of history at the University of Dayton, estimates that there were no more than a dozen bank robberies in the ENTIRE FRONTIER WEST between 1859 and 1900.  (When you’re surrounded by honest bank customers wearing six-guns, only the stupidest crook would risk a robbery.)

How about homicides?  What about all those famous cattle towns, filled with cowboys flush with cash from the cattle drives and “all likkered-up?”  Or those quick-draw shootouts on Main Street?  Well, as much as the young men of the Old West may have been attracted to the romantic notion of settling their differences like European gentlemen (i.e., blasting away at each other at a distance of 20 paces), the hard-won common sense of the working-man seems to have prevailed.  Professor Richard Shenkman of George Mason University found that even notorious Dodge City had suffered only 5 homicides in its WORST year, 1878.  Homicide rates were similarly low in other Western cities & towns.

It seems that author Robert Heinlein was right when he said, “an armed society is a polite society.”

So why did I say that when Europeans remark that the modern USA is “like the Wild West,” they are right, but not for the reasons they think?  Well, with the liberalization of concealed carry permit laws, the USA now has the highest rate of private gun ownership in 20 years.  In that same 20 years, our violent crime rate has been falling steadily.  According to the most recent United Nations International Crime Study, the USA ranks only 12^th in violent crime, out of 15 advanced countries, safer than such countries as England, New Zealand, Denmark and Switzerland.

   

Perhaps the typical American mugger or liquor-store-holdup-man is like those bank robbers in the Old West—only the really stupid ones would think of committing a crime where honest citizens are armed.

At this point, some of you may be thinking, “Aha! But what about all those murders in America?  The homicide rate is much higher than in Europe!”

Unlike other violent crimes, homicide seems to be culturally-driven rather than economically driven.  Some cultures seem to prefer murder as a tool for dealing with social situations!  Take, for instance, “honor killings;” in some cultures, it’s perfectly acceptable to murder your own daughter because she was the victim of rape.  In others it’s customary to murder a widow after her husband dies.

This is not the case with, say, European or Japanese culture, and we find that, in the USA, people of European or Japanese descent commit murder at about the same low rate as their cousins in Europe or Japan.  (Note that the vast majority of inhabitants of the Old West were of European descent.)

We are probably the most culturally diverse nation in existence; the idea of a single homicide rate in the USA is about as meaningless as a single homicide rate for Planet Earth.