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.