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elimination of racial prejudice. The unlovely victory of black culture in Heinlein's novel is nothing if not a testimony to Twain's enlightened plea for racial and cultural pluralism; yet for all that, a pluralism harmonized with the majority values of the nation's founders.
This patriotic note was another sore point with the critics. They jabbed at the novel's hero, Hugh Farnham, for the single-minded attention he gave to rescuing his family from black enslavement, and then for defending the family freehold upon the return of the Farnhams to the postwar anarchy of the "present" time. As it happens, the whole family had been thrown into the future by the mysterious effects of an atomic bomb blast, while hiding in their fallout shelter during World War III. Somehow getting back to their own time, in the midst of wartorn chaos, they establish their own freehold and fly the American flag over it. The critics found this offensive, for what appeared to them to be no more than pure selfishness united with racism, the whole miserable scene falsely wrapped in bunting.
But Hugh Farnham, in restoring his family to the best security he can manage, does nothing out of keeping with sound Christian doctrine. St. Paul says: "But if any does not take care of his own, and especially of his household, he has denied the faith and is worse than an unbeliever" (Timothy I, 5:8). The faithful are of course obliged to be helpful to others, loving one's neighbor as oneself, etc. But as the Bishop of Hippo (St. Augustine) observed, while the Roman Empire fell into anarchy all about his diocese in Tunisia, the religious person's "first duty is to look out for his own home, for both by natural and human law he has easier and readier access to their requirements" (City of God, chap. 14).
Yet when Heinlein defends the traditional ethics of Christian civilization, it is not seen in him; it is "rugged individualism" all over again, and worse. Moreover, Hugh Farnham frees himself and his family on the same principles that guide black emancipation in The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass: An American Slave (1845). Its famous words, "No slave is ever freed, save he free himself," are those quoted by Heinlein elsewhere, without attribution in "Logic of Empire." He clearly expects the reader to recognize the source, this great classic of Afro-American Literature.
Leon Stover, Robert A. Heinlein (Boston: Twayne, 1987), pp. 6062
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Fred Erisman
A consistent theme throughout Robert A. Heinlein's works is the importance of intellectual breadth. From the outset, his

 
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