EPIC was one of the many plans put forward by various American political figures to solve the problems of the Great Depression, including Franklin Delano Roosevelt and his New Deal; Huey P. Long's Share the Wealth (tax the rich 100 percent after their first million dollars of income, then redistribute the wealth to everyone else); Dr. Francis Townsend's Old Age Revolving Pension Plan (give senior citizens $200 a month); and the Technocracy movement (put engineers and scientists in charge of society). FDR curtailed many of these movements by co-opting their best ideas. He raised the income tax on the rich to disarm Share the Wealth's appeal and instituted Social Security in 1935 to supplant Dr. Townsend.
Sinclair's idea for EPIC can be boiled down to a single phrase:
"production for use"—a phrase which is ridiculed in the 1940 Cary Grant/Rosalind Russell classic, His Girl Friday. He suggested that California had two untapped resources: factories and farms that had been closed down, and the unemployed. Why not combine them, so that all the unused land and facilities could be used by the unemployed to produce the goods and services they needed for themselves? They would use scrip to run their economies, and anything left over as surplus could be sold to the general population. On paper, it looked like a simple equation.
In reality, it provoked two responses: one, a wild joy on the part of Sinclair's followers that the problems of the Depression could be solved, and two, a great fear on the part of California's wealthy that the Socialist Revolution had come for their heads—and wallets. The memories of the Russian Revolution were sharp for these wealthy capitalists, who viewed EPIC as a communist plot. The movie industry in particular went to war, producing phony "newsreels" that were far from representative of Sinclair's plans, making it seem as though the communists and the nation's unemployed would turn life in California into a nightmare. The Hearst newspapers and the Los Angeles Times went to work as well, destroying Sinclair's hopes for election at every opportunity. FDR hammered the final nail into the coffin when he refused to endorse Sinclair as the Democratic candidate, seeing little reason to spend political capital on a potential rival.
So Upton Sinclair lost the election.
But Robert Heinlein did not give up the fight.
He was a neophyte political volunteer in the 1934 election, although he was quickly given six precincts to run. But after Sinclair's loss, Heinlein began to move up in the Democratic Party, to carry on the EPIC fight over the next four years. Eventually, he helped write and edit the EPIC newsletter (with a circulation of two million in 1934), became a major player in the Democratic Party in Los Angeles, helped write the platform for the state EPIC movement, and served at the state level of the Democratic Party on the California State Central Committee. In 1938, Robert Heinlein moved from behind the scenes and took up the race for political office, running for California State Assembly.
His opponent was the Republican incumbent, corporate attorney Charles Lyons. Their district included Beverly Hills and part of Hollywood, which at that time were not only wealthy, but also conservative and Republican. Heinlein had only a small group of supporters in his campaign, because the Democratic Party believed there was no way to win that seat. He fought the good fight, but because his opponent had cross-filed as a Democrat for the primaries (which eventually became illegal in California), if Heinlein lost the primary, Lyons would automatically win the election—as the only candidate. Heinlein lost, by fewer than five hundred votes.
In many ways, the 1938 election was a triumph for the Democrats—they gained the governor's seat for former EPIC member Culbert Olson and a number of state assembly seats. Although Heinlein's loss stung, it did not end his political involvement. He continued in Democratic politics at least until 1940, when he attended the Democratic National Convention in Chicago as an observer with press credentials.
Still, with his formal education stalled and his political career stymied, where would he turn to pay off the mortgage on his house? His naval disability pension would be enough to keep the Heinleins fed and clothed, but not enough to cope with the mortgage, and in 1938, owing money to a bank was still somewhat shameful.
And how would he continue his efforts to help his country?
EPIC showed every sign of falling apart: the EPIC newsletter ceased publication even before the 1938 primaries were over, and most of the EPIC politicians stopped identifying themselves as such, in order to win elections. Sinclair himself had returned full time to writing.
Sinclair's writings had always harbored social commentary, not to mention social crusades. Heinlein knew Sinclair personally and had worked with him on the EPIC movement. Thus one writer's life and work provided the model for another's incipient career.
Heinlein turned to writing For Us, The Living.
Of course, Upton Sinclair was not the first writer to suggest solutions to social problems in the form of fiction—Utopias (perfect worlds) and dystopias (nightmare worlds) were well-known literary forms by 1938. Heinlein would have known of the genre's two most famous practitioners: Edward Bellamy and H. G. Wells, both major influences on Upton Sinclair's Utopian socialism. Bellamy's 1887 Looking Backward remains the most famous Utopian novel ever written by an American and may well be the book Heinlein had in mind when writing this first novel. In both novels, the main character awakens in the future to find an ideal society he does not understand. Through a series of Socratic dialogues, the protagonists (and the audience) learn how such a wonderful world can truly exist. Wells, whose "scientific romances" established the paradigms of science fiction for much of the twentieth century, also wrote many novels that portrayed future Utopias and dystopias. When the Sleeper Wakes was a particular favorite of Heinlein's (the 1910 revision The Sleeper Awakes was the book H. G. Wells autographed for Heinlein when they met). The 1936 film Things to Come, adapted by Wells from his earlier novel, The Shape of Things to Come, ends with a launch into outer space, as does For Us, The Living.
Heinlein was primed by these writers, as well as by the science fiction pulp magazines he read regularly, to trumpet the future as a wonderful opportunity for progress. When he sat down to write For Us, The Living he was trying to do what he had done throughout his four years of political activity and would continue to do for much of his writing career—generate change for the better. The title comes from Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address:
It is for us, the living, rather, to be dedicated to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us—that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion—that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain, that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom....
If Robert Heinlein could not achieve social change through his political efforts, perhaps he might achieve it through the pen, to gain that "new birth" that is so central to his fiction.
Anybody who has read Robert Heinlein will recognize that he offered provocative commentary on our society and advocated for radical social change. Indeed, his politics have often confused people. How could a man who supported the Socialist Upton Sinclair and the Democrat FDR become a supporter of arch-conservative Republicans Barry Goldwater and Jeanne Kirkpatrick? As Heinlein once explained to Alfred Bester in 1959, "I've simply changed from a soft-headed radical to a hard-headed radical, a pragmatic libertarian...." Heinlein's apparent change in politics makes sense if viewed this way: he saw problems that were not being solved and went to the political forces he believed had the greatest chance of solving them. In 1938, the most dangerous problem he perceived was the Great Depression, and he looked to FDR and Upton Sinclair for results; in 1959, it was nuclear war and communism (a hatred for which Heinlein developed before World War II, not with the Cold War). He supported Barry Goldwater in 1964 because he believed Goldwater would be far more effective against the Soviets than Lyndon Johnson.