I think there are two (related) historical contexts that have been missed in these discussions about "Slaves of Silver" that are especially relevant to Wolfe, as a Republican, responding to the recent Civil Rights Movement. First, for any Republican in 1971 wanting to associate with the right side of history, there were still champions of civil rights in the party, most famously Nelson Rockefeller, George Romney, and (before '68) Jackie Robinson. As long as the Democrats relied on a large bloc of southern segregationists (as they would into the mid-90s), there was still the possibility that the GOP wouldn't travel further down the road of the southern strategy. If Wolfe in 1971 hoped the GOP wouldn't permanently abandon what was (until the 1960s) actually a pretty decent history of championing civil rights, he may have been drawn to explore the ideological origins of his party's opposition to slavery. Whether directly or indirectly, Wolfe may have been aware of Eric Foner's landmark book on this topic that was published in 1970 entitled "Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party before the Civil War." This was the motto of the 1850s Republicans, and it bears a very close resemblance to the motto "Free markets and free robots" on which Wolfe's society is founded. The GOP motto led to the passage of the three civil rights amendments during Reconstruction--just as "Free markets and free robots" led to the passage of the Civil Rights law in Wolfe's story. Note that these parallels make sense chronologically too: Wolfe's story is set in a neo-Victorian era with a neo-civil rights movement in its recent past, just as the real Victorian era (or Gilded Age in the U.S.) came on the heels of the Civil War and Reconstruction. What does this do for our thematic interpretation of the story? From OPERATION ARES, we know Wolfe was concerned with the dignity of work. Well, so were antebellum Republicans--in fact, that's the thesis of Foner's book! Foner shows that, unfortunately, vanishingly few Americans were *moral* abolitionists. Most anti-slavery voters supported the Republicans precisely because they believed slavery undermined the dignity of their work: "[Foner] also shows how northern ideas of human rights--in particular a man's right to work where and how he wanted, and to accumulate property in his own name--and the goals of American society were implicit in [Republican] ideology. This was the ideology that permeated the North in the period directly before the Civil War, led to the election of Abraham Lincoln, and led, almost immediately, to the Civil War itself." In Wolfe's world, robot slavery had squeezed out free labor (just like Lincoln's Republicans feared it would) and thus the dignity of work had been taken away from (almost) all humans. However, the robot Civil Rights Act allowed robots like Westinghouse to achieve dignity (exceeding that of most humans, even) through their work. I've only read the story once, and I'd need to spend some more time on it to fully work out these parallels. The most notable difference between the antebellum era and Wolfe's story is that one exists in an era of scarcity, and one exists in a world of abundance. What are we to make of free labor ideology in a post-scarcity world of universal basic incomes? Important differences aside, I'm pretty convinced that Wolfe had the Lincoln-era Republican Party on his mind while he was writing this. (And now for some wild speculation: when the robot in the TRI-D utters "DREAD," which is such a particular word, this could be an allusion to one of the most famous enslaved man of the antebellum era, Dredd Scott.)