There were two iconic Spocks in the 20th century: Dr. Benjamin Spock (1903-1998) and the Spock created by Gene Roddenberry (1921-1991) and Leonard Nimoy (1931-2015).
When he died, Dr. Benjamin Spock had been a household name for more than 50 years. His book Baby and Child Care, first published in 1946, coincided with the first swell of the baby boom. It kept selling long after the boom was gone. As of last year, the book had sold more than 40 million copies and was available in 39 languages.
. . . . Benjamin Spock made a revolution in American child-rearing practices. Before Spock’s book, the popular assumption was that the treatment of children should be subject to the convenience of parents and other adults. Children should be seen and not heard, the saying went. Spock’s revolution was to treat children as real human beings. Parents should talk to their children, he said, and, even more important, really listen to them. Above all, children should be respected as individual people.
Dr. Spock also played a major role in the anti-Vietnam war movement of the 1960s and early 1970s:
Spock was the first pediatrician to study psychoanalysis to try to understand children's needs and family dynamics. His ideas about childcare influenced several generations of parents to be more flexible and affectionate with their children, and to treat them as individuals. However, they were also widely criticized by colleagues for relying too heavily on anecdotal evidence rather than serious academic research. In addition to his pediatric work, Spock was an activist in the New Left and anti Vietnam War movements during the 1960s and early 1970s. At the time his books were criticized by Vietnam War supporters for allegedly propagating permissiveness and an expectation of instant gratifications that led young people to join these movements, a charge Spock denied.
More, below the fold on the revolutionary happenings of the 1960s and 70s.
The New Left:
The New Left was a political movement in the 1960s and 1970s consisting of educators, agitators and others who sought to implement a broad range of reforms on issues such as gay rights, abortion, gender roles, and drugs, in contrast to earlier leftist or Marxist movements that had taken a more vanguardist approach to social justice and focused mostly on labor unionization and questions of social class. Sections of the New Left rejected involvement with the labor movement and Marxism's historical theory of class struggle, although others gravitated to variants of Marxism like Maoism. In the United States, the movement was associated with the Hippie movement and anti-war college-campus protest movements including the Free Speech Movement. While formed in opposition to the "Old Left" Democratic Party, groups composing the New Left gradually became central players in the Democratic coalition.
Major movers in the movement were German-Jewish critical theorist
Herbert Marcuse, referred to as the "Father of the New Left";
Students for a Democratic Society (SDS);
Free Speech Movement (FSM).
Into the midst of this exciting revolutionary milieu occurred Star Trek, a relatively short-run TV series (1966-1969) with the other iconic Spock of Vulcan heritage, whom I like to think was named tongue-in-cheek for the doctor.