The Roads Must Roll - Themes

Themes

The story is interesting, in a broader political sense, and in the context of the rest of Heinlein's writing, because it provides an example of a libertarian author arguing against labor unions – here justified because the union in question is in a vital government-run public service industry on which the broader society as a whole is dependent. It also shows a typical Heinlein solution of this period: control by an elite military organization whose officers are trained to selflessly serve the greater good.

The story uses the technique of the false protagonist. At first the reader is introduced to the firebrand who stirs up the workers to their radical action, and at this stage the reader can quite easily identify with him and the grievances he addresses. When Larry Gaines first appears, it seems to be just a glimpse at what the Bad Guys are doing. However, the "glimpse" goes on and on while the strikers blacken themselves in reader's eyes by callously causing the death and wounding of innocent passengers - and Gaines correspondingly wins the reader's sympathy and identification. The demagogue who seemed the hero at first is only met again at the very end, when he is already clearly identified as the arch-villain who gets his just punishment.

Damon Knight, in his introduction to the paper-back edition from the New English Library edition of The Past Through Tomorrow, Vol 1., compares the story to then-current power of Jimmy Hoffa and the Teamsters Union. He also notes that Heinlein successfully predicted urban sprawl driven by cheap and efficient transport, as well as the development of 'pseudopods' of urban development between communities. This idea was taken to its logical extreme by William Gibson in the Sprawl trilogy, the Sprawl being the Boston-Atlanta Metropolitan Axis (defined by the primary super-expressway), or BAMA.