Welcome to Spock Talk! The podcast that explores:

• What’s the deal with Dr. Benjamin Spock?
• How did Baby and Child Care become the preeminent parenting guide of the 20th century?
• Who gets to tell parents how to parent?

I’m Deborah

And I’m Katie

We’re talking Spock because we want to understand what it is about Dr. Spock’s work that endures. Why is the Spock brand around, twenty-five years after Dr. Spock died?

We have another listener request. Listeners! Are you a Boomer? Do you know a Boomer? If you have a childhood memory of Spock’s Baby and Child Care, let us know! You can leave it in a review on Apple Podcasts and we’ll read it in a future episode.

Last episode we covered Spock’s personal relationships with women.

In this episode, we’re covering politics, starting with Spock’s personal political opinions and beliefs. And then on to how parenting advice relates to political ideology.

Personal politics

As a young man, Benjamin Spock grew up in a Republican household and when he was in college, Yale was mostly conservative and apolitical. 

When Spock transferred to the medical school at Columbia, that’s when he encountered political opinions that were different than what he encountered growing up. In his memoir, Spock writes that “[At Columbia] “some students were avowed Democrats, a few even Socialists”.

He formed his own political ideas by being an annoying social component. He described how he would take Republican positions when he was around Democratic medical school student friends, and he would take liberal positions when he was around his conservative undergraduate friends. (Spock on Spock, p. 96-97). 

I have a good friend who prides himself on taking this very tack. I feel like once you’re in the inner circle, and you know about that conversational strategy, you should earn one of those Wile E. Coyote style signs that you can hold up at any moment during conversation that just says “I get it. You can stop.”

Eventually Spock realized that being a conversational contrarian was not a way to win friends and influence people.

Eventually, he settled on being a “‘New Deal’ liberal,” especially because of what he observed during the Depression. He admired Franklin Roosevelt “and agreed with his methods of employing people through government projects, all the way from sweeping up parks to painting murals in post offices” (Spock on Spock, p. 94-97)

Jane, however, was a bit more politically radical in her youth. In the late 1930s, she was a socialist and involved with the American Labor Party (p. 110-111). When Spock finished medical school, Jane quit her job and was a big volunteer and activist “in the drive to repeal Prohibition,” protesting and raising donations outside the New York Public Library. “Her anti-Prohibition group put her on a truck with a microphone so she could travel to more sites around the city” (p. 81).

This is Jane, of the alcohol- and Milltown-induced schizophrenia. A lesser person would make a joke here about how maybe keeping prohibition on the books would’ve helped Jane out, but instead I’m reaching for a statistic about whether prohibition actually reduced drinking amongst the populace. According to the National Bureau of Economic Research “alcohol consumption fell sharply at the beginning of Prohibition, to approximately 30 percent of its pre-Prohibition level. During the next several years, however, alcohol consumption increased sharply, to about 60-70 percent of its pre-Prohibition level.”

I’m also curious as to what the anti-prohibition case was among activists. Was it an anti-government, keep your laws out of our personal beeswax argument? Or was it let’s fund the government with alcohol taxes? We’re spending too much to prosecute these crimes? Any ideas? Probably some combo and more I can’t think of.

 Later, to give himself credibility in a “I wasn’t always a radical” type of way, Spock would talk, in political speeches, about how he was born and raised a Republican, how he used to vote Republican because his father did (Spock on Spock, p. 180).

When he was a public figure later on, because of the bestselling Baby and Child Care, he used his clout to endorse national political figures. In 1956 Spock stumped for Adlai Stevenson.

Here’s an aside. Sometimes, okay a lot of the time, I’m fuzzy on American History details. So, just for anyone else who didn’t always bother to memorize names and dates beyond the test, Adlai Stevenson THE SECOND was the Democratic party nominee for President of the United States in 1952 and 1956, losing both elections to Dwight Eisenhower. 

And Adlai Stevenson THE SECOND was the son of Adlai Stevenson THE FIRST, who was 23rd vice president of the United States from 1893 to 1897, during Grover Cleveland’s presidency.

Is it common knowledge that Adlai Stevenson was a nepo baby?

No! I assumed that name was so distinctive, you could only use it once!

One of Spock’s endorsements, famously, was John F. Kennedy in 1960. Spock and Jane, were invited to the White House during the Kennedy and the Johnson administrations and the Spock on Spock memoir name drops the hell out of these events. Prince William (I wrote Prince William but I must have meant Charles?), President Kennedy, Jackie Kennedy, Mrs. John Steinbeck, British PM Harold Wilson.

Let’s listen to some scripted banter between Dr. Benjamin Spock and Jacqueline Kennedy for a promotional campaign video, which is in the public domain, from the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum.

[Clip of Jackie Kennedy and Spock!!] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UbUdlB0_rTc 

Thanks to the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum for that clip!

Spock even supported Lyndon B. Johnson until Johnson turned Vietnam into a full scale war (Spock on Spock, p. 175), at which point Spock  felt very betrayed by LBJ. And disillusioned with the Democratic Party (Spock on Spock, p. 162). Spock called his own anti-war activism a kind of “delayed adolescent rebellion” (Maier, p. 250). He self-analyzed this in an Oedipal way, saying that LBJ was like a father figure and Spock was able to defy him, by protesting the war, and able to embrace his true self (Hubert, p. 263).

 Again with the freud! Is vocally opposing the president’s positions all it takes for an Oedipal complex? If so, the term has lost all meaning and applies to all Americans at this point.

To situate ourselves in time here, this was during the Cold War nuclear arms race between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. In the early 1960s Spock became an Anti-nuclear activist and in 1962 he joined the national board of an organization called National Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy, which was referred to as SANE (S-A-N-E, all-caps). This was motivated because he advocated for nuclear disarmament and to end nuclear testing. 

Which, nuclear threats are something I don’t even think about because we have so many other things to worry about, like climate change and school shootings. Katie, how does nuclear winter rank on your worry list?

Nuclear worries? I feel like nuclear power is often touted by conservatives as an alternative to the tree hugger’s wind and solar. There’s quite a bit of - “this was never dangerous; anything that told you otherwise was propaganda.” So among conservative circles that recognize that climate is changing (even if they deny man’s role in changing it), nuclear is kind of a hot topic as an alternative to fossil fuels that is more effective than wind or solar and supposedly way safer than we’ve been led to believe. I’m skeptical, but maybe because I’ve just been effectively propagandized to fear nuclear winter?

I listened to a delightful 1989 interview with Spock and second wife Mary Morgan on a podcast called “And Now I’ve Heard Everything”, in which Spock discusses how he got really concerned about nuclear testing and its effect on children, increasing their risk for developing cancers because of radiation exposure.

As for the anti-nuclear activism, although he was used to giving talks and writing about child development, he didn’t feel he was an expert on radiation and disarmament. He was elected co-chair of the national committee, which he felt unqualified for BUT STILL ACCEPTED THE POSITION.

What must it be like to never experience imposter syndrome? The people elected me, so even if I feel unqualified, they must see something in me that I was heretofore unaware of. I must actually be qualified. Sheesh. I was elected to my kids’ PTA, the main qualification for which is to be a parent of a kid at the school, and I still somehow feel unqualified.

In a New York Times Magazine retrospective about Spock after he died, Margaret Talbot, wrote, “[Spock’s] modesty of tone only reinforced his authority”

But I can’t help but wonder: is this a rhetorical trick, on Spock’s part? Or is he genuinely sincere about his modesty and insecurity? I sort of don’t think the modesty is false? But it’s hard to be sure).

 Can anyone with that level of fame be truly modest? I’m too cynical to think it’s not calculated. He was clearly aware that his folksy tone is part of what set him apart from the rigidity of prior expert guides, no?

Spock was also an advocate for civil rights. He palled around a bit with Martin Luther King, Jr. They met on an airplane in 1965 when Spock approached King and tried to convince King to align himself with the anti-war movement. Spock and King marched together in 1967 and gave speeches together. Spock, in 1967 (I think), wrote a New York Times editorial that was supportive of civil rights and linked it to the anti-war movement, as having the same goals, broadly (Maier, p. 280).

I read about this, with great weariness. King was very purposefully focused on civil rights, he couldn’t afford to alienate President Johnson, who was supportive of civil rights legislation. And here is Spock, asking King to lend his name and his activism to the anti-war movement. Of course, in our 2023 eyes, ending the Vietnam War was a very noble cause, but Spock was asking King to do it at the expense of King’s civil rights work. Pretty much the antithesis of how to be a good ally, am I right? (Maier, p. 271).

 Good causes can still be at odds. Like you, my American history knowledge is embarrassingly sparse, but my consumption of prestige TV dramas has taught me that this was a sacrifice asked often of people of color during the civil rights movement. Not just to fight for anti-war causes, but to fight for feminist causes, for example. 

In Spock’s public speaking gigs, he linked race, class, the Vietnam war, and poverty. At King’s funeral, Spock spoke and urged “white Americans to work to end discrimination” [because they had been oppressors] (Maier, p. 307).

Nothing ever gets solved, Katie!

No, depressingly, it does not. I was listening to a podcast recently, and I apologize for not remembering which one, but the host said that rather than the arc of history bending toward justice, it can just become a depressing cycle that turns back in on itself.

In 1967 Spock wanted SANE to join other groups for the peace march in New York, but this was controversial because SANE was relatively conservative. Spock: “I said that the peace movement was a popular movement, not a country club in which you felt entitled to blackball other people” (Spock on Spock, p. 171)

Spock and SANE broke up because Spock thought the SANE people were too timid and the SANE people thought Spock was too radical.

As an anti-war activist, he was on the road every other month, “at his own expense” (Massie, 81) giving talks at universities, press conferences, television interviews. He’d talk about the history of the occupation of Vietnam, how Johnson had betrayed the American public, how Hoover was wrong. When Johnson declined to run for a second term Spock considered that a success (Spock on Spock, p. 180-2).

 I’m going to choose to cast this in a hopeful light and say that I really love how this shows that you don’t have to fit into a box to work for a good cause. Maybe because we live in such strongly partisan times, it’s hard to see how Spock could speak out against the war and be so conservative in other ways (his views on women, for example). But maybe that’s really something we need more of, so people don’t feel they have to be fully on board with a slew of issues they might be ambivalent about in order to act on one they feel strongly about.

Spock was old compared to a lot of anti-war activists. He described himself as a dilettante in civil-disobedience demonstrations (Spock on Spock, p. 194). And how he would wear his suits to “[help] remind people that this isn’t a rowdy act but a carefully considered demonstration that I deem worthy of great respect” (Spock on Spock, p. 194)

Lots of people didn’t care for his anti-war stance. In 1967 he had ordered a new sailboat “to live on in retirement” but the longshoremen of New York refused to “load the yacht of a rich traitor”. Spock couldn’t get it on a freight boat either. So he hired three men to sail it to the Virgin Islands instead. (Spock on Spock, p. 208). 

I hope that this new, more enlightened Spock took this in stride, because I’m really choking back a “poor you, you can’t transport your yacht” comment right about now.

In 1967 Spock and Jane attended a PEACE VIGIL outside of the White House where someone hit him in the head with a raw egg. 

Then, he was arrested for the first time at a political protest. It’s kind of a cute story about how he couldn’t figure out how to get past the police barricades at a War Resisters League protest, and he whined to the Chief Inspector about it, and the Chief Inspector Garelik told him where there was a gap in the barriers, which Spock managed to find and get through, and was promptly arrested (Spock on Spock, p 189). (Maier, p. 297-299).

Jail time and protest namedrops include: Allen Ginsburg, Noam Chomsky, and Abbie Hoffman.

He was rumored to possibly be considering a run for Ohio Senate in 1968 (Massie, 86). Also in 1968 he was indicted for aiding Vietnam War draft dodgers, along with four other older men, and they were called “The Boston Five” (Hubert, p. 257). The charge was “conspiracy to counsel draft resisters” by giving them moral and financial support. He was found guilty in a “dull trial”, but then the decision was reversed for “lack of evidence of guilt” in 1969. (Spock on Spock, p. 262). (Maier, p. 325).

The indictment was a turning point. When the public considered him a radical.

He actually ran for President of the United States as a People’s Party candidate with a pretty great platform in 1972 (wikipedia) The People’s Party was feminist, democratic, socialist, against the draft, and for disarmament. 

Ah! I was just going to say someone like Spock would make for a pretty great political candidate today! But he’d have to take over one of the two major parties instead of running as a third party, which is okay because celebrities can do that no problem!

He was arrested so many times it’s not even interesting to read about, after a point. Like, more than 20 times from the late 1960s to 1980s (Maier, p. 398).

Spock, along with his second wife Mary Morgan, were activists after the Vietnam War ended. In 1980s, they were arrested while protesting Reagan’s cuts to social safety net programs,  “for kneeling in front of the White House in protest against cuts in medical funding for children and old people”, they joined demonstrations to advocate for the homeless, too. (Spock on Spock, p. 193-4)

So, I obtained a few of his speeches from the Syracuse University archives, home of the Dr. Benjamin Spock and Mary Morgan papers. And his anti-war writing isn’t so different from his parenting advice. He advocated for dignifying individuals, even Commie dictator bullies, and for building mutual trust. He wanted the United States’ foreign policy approach to be more humane, less violent. Instead of imposing sanctions on Communist countries like Cuba and China, the U.S. should send food aid, which he argued that generosity would do a lot more to convince the citizens of those countries that democracy was better than Communism. He thought America should have given awards to Soviet astronauts, scientists, artists, to establish goodwill. Basically he wanted the U.S. to solve hunger, poverty, disease, illiteracy.

I really love his political writing. And, as an idealistic leftie myself, I agree with Spock. But, from my bemused and jaded perspective as a person in the future, I think he saw a great deal of potential in America as benevolent world power, that was really unfounded.

Spocklash

for someone who so desperately wanted to be liked, and thrived on public adoration, this seems curious that he would pursue causes that made him so unpopular. He seems to have won out in the end though. I’ve never once heard a boomer lament Spock’s political causes, but I’ve heard plenty extol his parenting advice. Even though, in our opinions, he was on the right side of history. 

So he was this very iconic expert, but the anti-war and anti-nuclear stuff was just too much of a departure for his core fan base. In the late 1960s there were many popular magazine articles discussing the “Spocklash,” as the establishment blamed Spock for the rabble-rousing youths. Here’s a glorious quotation from a conservative columnist named Stewart Alsop who wrote that young people had been “Spocked when they should have been spanked” (Hubert, p. 258).

There was blowback against what some termed the “Spock Generation.” The terms “permissive” and “discipline” became code words, politically. This is a very Joan Didion-esque “The Center Will Not Hold” moment. Discipline was a stand-in for the conventional. The social structure of the United States changed very quickly, because of the civil rights movements, the women’s movement, the anti-war movement, the environmental movement. And folks who didn’t care for the changes blamed the Baby Boomers, and, by extension, Spock! Because he was the post-war authority on childrearing. (Apple, p. 107).

He wasn’t actually all that permissive. But that was the public impression.

Maybe the folks who criticized his permissiveness didn’t really read his books? I mean, leaving your infant outside in the cold for 2-3 hours a day doesn’t exactly sound like the height of coddling.

They absolutely did not read his books! It was just perception. It wasn’t in the actual text, anywhere in Baby and Child Care. Maybe because he was not willing to take a stance on corporal punishment, one way or the other, contributed to this impression of permissiveness. (MPR interview)

In the 1980s Spock, in turn, criticized the Baby Boomers, for moving on after the war ended, and for embracing materialism over idealism. (Maier, p. 399).

Political ideology / impact of childcare

This is a good time to zoom out and discuss the political and ideological nature of childcare advice.

There are a couple of fun theories about Spock’s influence on American culture: 1, that the nature of post-war parenting was small-d democratic ideology disguised as parenting advice. And 2. Post-war parenting advice worked to create a complacent workforce that helped America be an economic superpower.

1. So, we already talked about how Baby and Child Care is absolutely infused with Freudian analytic theory. This happened not just in the U.S.. In Great Britain, there were influential pediatricians and educators, Donald Winnicott and Susan Isaacs also melded psychoanalytic psychology with parenting advice. And, a little later on in France, Francoise Dolto, also a pediatrician and psychoanalyst, does the same thing for French children. 

There is an academic named Richard Bates, from the UK, who wrote about how these parenting  experts “believed that the widespread application of psychoanalytic theory would help produce democratic citizens and ward off the dangers of authoritarian personalities” (abstract, Bates).

I was all prepared to comment on how we were just shoving anti-communism into every nook and cranny of children’s lives back then. And how cartoonish and overblown it feels now. I went to Google to find some anecdotes and found that the governor of my very own state just last year signed a bill that will require public school students to observe “Victims of Communism Day” on Nov. 7 each year. Which, what? Just when I think the place I live couldn’t get any weirder.

Bates wrote that educating parents to raise psychologically healthy children was for the good of the republic:

“Using psychoanalysis to encourage the development of democratic practices in the family was likewise a central strand of Spock’s approach…Spock thought that those who followed dictators were driven by repressed anxieties and resentments” (Bates, p. 205). Spock thinks that a child raised in a reasonable manner, who is given some autonomy, is going to make good choices. “A properly led child will want to go to bed on time and eat nutritious food without needing to be forced” (Bates, p. 206). 

And, what some folks mistake for permissiveness is more of an emphasis on democratic principles. A child cannot be a very good participant in a democracy if they are raised by a parent or taught by a teacher who acts like a dictator.

And the stakes are really high. In the first half of the twentieth century, the main threat is Nazis and fascists. And in the second half, Communism is seen as another great threat. 

This argument makes some sense on its face. Of course the dominant culture is going to impact what is viewed as appropriate or desirable when it comes to childrearing. Isn’t that the lesson we learn from every popular parenting guide that attempts to tell us why other cultures actually do it better (like Bringing Up Bebe or Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother or even that adorable show on Netflix Old Enough from Japan)? Does the fact that I can’t think of an example of a popular parenting book about how Russians do it better mean that Spock was ultimately successful in bringing down communism?

As for the 2nd theory, it has more to do with capitalism. There was a corporate mentality to mid-century America that really valued group harmony, and that is partly what Baby and Child Care tried to achieve, a way for parents and their kids to get along in a harmonious way. Baby and Child Care was first published around the same time as Peter Drucker’s book about General Motors, which “popularized the notion that workers would be more productive if they were not [treated in an overly paternalistic way]” (Hubert p. 250). This harmonious group vibe is all in service to the national interest, which is basically dominating the new world order through economic might.

I think we have to be careful here in how much of this we ascribe to Spock and how much might just be Spock reflecting these ambient values back to the public. So I think we can definitely say Spock’s work overtly impacted American culture in the childrearing and family space. But the farthest we can go when it comes to anti-communism and pro-capitalist messaging is to say he was a part of this larger cultural trend toward emphasizing these ideas without being a conscious thought leader there. Does that wash with you?

And, we’re here to answer the question - why does Spock’s influence endure, why is his very old childcare manual still in bookstores, in its 10th incarnation? And, while Spock’s political activism later in life against nuclear proliferation, against the Vietnam War, didn’t help him sell books, his activism was newsworthy and kept his name, his profile, in the public sphere.

And the anti-war stuff made him ostracized by people his own age, his contemporaries. But it introduced him to a whole new generation of folks who thought he was right on, super principled, a hip anti-war activist in a dapper suit. Liked or not liked, the political activity kept his name in the public’s consciousness.

New Spock / Old Spock

Before we wrap up, let’s go to a segment we call “New Spock, Old Spock. In this segment we’ll take a look at early Spock advice and see what has changed since the mid-1900s.

In the 1957 edition of Baby and Child Care, Spock wrote:

“Now is the time to get an automatic washer and drier if you can possibly afford them. They save hours of work each week, and precious energy.” (P. 25, 1957 edition)

Katie, what does the 10th edition say about buying a washer and drier, or procuring any other time saving household appliances?

Katie, from 10th edition From my position in the midst of today’s parenting industrial complex, it was refreshing to see the emphasis in the 10th edition be on listing the bare essentials and discouraging unnecessary add ons. There is no mention of whether or not to have a washer and dryer, but the 10th edition is very pro-laundry service for parents that choose to use cloth diapers. The book stops short of saying it’s just plain gross to wash diapers yourself, but it does go into some detail as to what a pain washing them is and recommends one add-on I didn’t even know existed - a high pressure sprayer that attaches to the toilet. “First scrape the contents of the diapers into the toilet (a high-pressure sprayer that attaches to the toilet makes rinsing faster and easier). Next, put the diapers into a covered pail partially filled with water, with one-half cup of borax or bleach per gallon. Clean the diaper pail each time you do a diaper wash. Wash the diapers with mild soap or detergent and rinse two or three times.” (p.70)

Outro / Tease next episode

Thanks for listening to this episode of Spock Talk! Please subscribe so you are sure to get our next episode, in which we’ll explore [example: how Dr. Benjamin Spock’s privileged background made him an authority on childrearing!]

See this episode’s show notes for our references.

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Special thanks to the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, Boston.

We’ll see you soon, the next time we Talk Spock!