In the current (July 2010) issue of The New York Review of Science Fiction, Joe Sanders, who is the SFRA's coordinator of publications, gives what may well be the definitive "old guard" statement of position on Farnham's Freehold, to the effect that the treatment of racism is unsatisfactory. Editor Kevin Marony in a very short letter of comment in the same issue, writes a clear statement of the most defensible argument that there is a disproportion of effect between the treatment of racism in Hugh Farnham's world and in Ponse's world, and that Heinlein's choice of cannibalism as a story figure is therefore badly miscalculated.

While it should be noted that these ideas are a considerable advance on the rabid and sometimes even nonsensical denunciations of the book as simple racism that began appearing in the 1970's (it is a notable fact that none of the book's contemporary reviews saw much out of the way in this aspect), Sanders' piece acknowledges that the analysis cannot be carried forward in these terms and the reading is therefore somewhat inconclusive.

Editor Maroney has indicated he will publish my responsive remarks, but it appears nobody from this forum will see them, so I'm preserving my letter of comment here:

Letter to Kevin J. Maroney editor NYRSF

I was interested to see the two related sets of comments about Heinlein’s Farnham’s Freehold (1964) in the July 2010 issue of New York Review of Science Fiction (Joe Sanders’ “Bullying Arrogant Bastards” and the editor’s “Screed” letter of comment).
I do think Sanders has correctly identified an important symmetry in the book between Hugh and Ponse. Sanders might have noted that there are several story figures that support and nuance this symmetry -- e.g., Ponse acquires all of Hugh’s surviving personal familial relationships from before the Grand Slam -- wife, son, and houseboy, in analogs of their same positions in Hugh’s household.
This suggests to me, however, that there is somewhat more at work in the story structure than the mirror complementarity Sanders identifies -- that by a kind of through-the-looking-glass metaphorical transformation, Ponse is Hugh, Hugh is Ponse. However, I believe Sanders’ somewhat inconclusive discussion of this figure is probably as ample as can be achieved -- if for some reason one is restricted to considering only part of the books’ thematic material.
Farnham’s Freehold, like Stranger before it, is a double satire (though perhaps Frye’s term “anatomy” might be more appropriate here), and both satirical subjects enform the story structure and figures in a way left out of Sanders’ account (and Maroney’s). The second subject (mentioned in Sanders, but treated as simple motivation, as Shklovsky uses the term) was perhaps more immediate to the book’s first readership than it is to us now, but in any case the meaning of nuclear warfare was historically entangled with the Kennedy administration’s war on bigotry: one of JFK’s important orders desegregating federal housing, for instance, was issued on the same day that the Cuban Missile Crisis ended -- November 18, 1962, when the missiles were confirmed removed. Writing began on Farnham’s Freehold two and a half months later -- after Heinlein participated in some of Herman Kahn’s Hudson Institute seminars. (Kahn was the leading theorist of the nuclear faceoff of the Cold War, author of On Thermonuclear War [1960] and Thinking the Unthinkable [1962]. His seminars given at the Hudson Institute after 1961 were some of the most important early policy think-tank events).
The satirical inversions of various types and modalities of bigotry in Farnham’s Freehold are fairly easy to trace (the speech Sanders notes by Joseph about being on a “bus trip through Alabama” is probably an oblique reference to the first Freedom Ride in 1961, firebombed in Anniston, Alabama and twice attacked by Kluxers in Birmingham); the attack on the meaning of nuclear warfare is more difficult -- partly because it was still, in 1963, “unthinkable” and there were not yet any widely-acknowledged categories and modalities of thinking about nuclear war. Heinlein is using the then cutting-edge observation that there could be no “winners” of a nuclear exchange, and no matter what, Western liberal values are the first casualty of nuclear exchange. What follows is a world reconstructed without those liberal values and reflecting the way most of human history was until the liberal revolutions of the Enlightenment Era.
As Dr. Robert James has suggested, the metaphorical transformation that results in Ponse’s world can probably be traced to that most famous of all pre-Civil War pro-Slavery polemicals, Cannibals All, or Slaves Without Masters by George Fitzhugh (1857). Ponse’s world is Hugh Farnham’s self-satisfied and prosperous world remade without those liberal values that included the Civil Rights Movement.
Maroney’s objection cited in Sanders, that there is a critical lack of proportion between the Hugh-world bigotry and the Ponse-world cannibalism, fails to take the second satirical subject into account and the satirically-conventional transformation that converts metaphor into concrete for purposes of world-building. Maroney is still reading it as if bigotry were the only theme to be considered: “look what Blacks really are like”; whereas Heinlein has swung a much wider net, saying “look what everybody is like without the governor of Enlightenment-Era liberalism.” Ponse is portrayed when first seen as dark-skinned but not entirely Negroidal of features, with the clear implication he is of mixed-racial heritage -- not a clear analog for the United States’ racial underclass.
The portrayal of Ponse’s sophisticated cannibal-culture is a necessary and proportionate transformation of Hugh Farnham’s country-club-liberal/bigoted world, made strange in exactly the way cognitive estrangement is supposed to work. Maroney’s “disproportion” is an artifact of a misprision; it is not racism per se that is being attacked in that comparison (NB Hugh’s world has many kinds of racism ridiculed and inverted, while Ponse’s has essentially only one, which suggests that it is the absurdity of the color line that is being exposed for ridicule), but a cautionary acknowledgment of what the advent of western liberal democratic values has meant in human history, and what human futurity might look like if we fail in our duty to perpetuate them. Racism and Nuclear Holocaust must be considered together in Farnham’s Freehold -- in exactly the way that sex and religion must be considered together in Stranger In a Strange Land. No story figure can be explicated without reference to both lines of satirical attack in Farnham’s Freehold.

Never thought of the double satirical attack. Must keep this in mind next time I re-read Farnham.

Good stuff, and worth connecting to my PCA paper on FF when we get around to writing this chapter for our book.