… I myself think it’s a good sign when a mother confesses that boys are more mysterious to her than girls, in some respects; it means that she’s very much a woman herself and has a respect for the male sex as somewhat different.… When a mother can admit she’s only a woman it should foster the chivalrousness of her son, whether he’s four or sixteen.76
But it was not enough for the single mother to be ultrafeminine to compensate for her unnatural situation. She also had the dramatic responsibility of creating a mythical father to preside over the family. No matter what the real father had been like, this ghostly father figure had to be a strong and positive image of manhood for his sons. Spock felt so strongly about this that he even advocated lying to the children, which was rare for him. For the woman who had a hard time making up a good story about the departed daddy, or perhaps the father who had never lingered long enough for the birth of the baby (this was well before the legalization of abortion), Spock suggested the following complete speech:
Your daddy and I loved each other very much and we got married. We wanted to have a little boy to take care of and to love. Then you were born and I loved you very much and your daddy loved you very much. But after a while your daddy and I didn’t get along so well. We began to have arguments and fights just the way you and Tommy have arguments and fights.… Finally your daddy got so upset that he thought it would be better if he went away. He thought he would feel better and I would feel better if there were no more arguments around here. But he felt bad to leave you because he loved you very much. He loved to hold you and play with you. I’m sure he still thinks about you a lot and wishes he could live with you. But I think he is afraid if he came back to see us the arguing and fighting would start all over again.77
Spock admitted that “A mother who has been indignant about the father’s lack of affection for the child may think that some of these statements about how he loved the child are a bit thick.” But when she considered that the little boy’s manhood was at stake, a good mother would be willing to stick to the script.
Communism and the Crisis of Overpermissiveness
The mid-century family drama, as directed by the child-raising expert, was a performance put on solely for the benefit of the child. It was for the child’s sake that the mother strove to regress into a formless “expressiveness”—or pulled back so that her love would not turn into a seductive quicksand capable of swallowing the sons. It was for the child’s sake too that the father made himself available as a backyard example of masculinity—always careful to present it, in the spirit of permissiveness, as a new source of fun. And it was for the child’s sake that the parents worked at their respective jobs, relaxed on weekends, and even made love after the kids were in bed. But the reign of the child was to be short-lived. Even beginning in the early fifties the experts were beginning to view the American child with a cold and critical eye. By the end of the sixties the alliance of the expert and the child would end in a climax every bit as violent as the original Oedipal drama: the experts would turn, in a patriarchal fury, against the very children they had nurtured and protected.
To understand what happened we have to draw back from the closed world of the suburban “wreck-room” with its festering entanglements between expert, mother, and child. While Americans had spent the post–World War II years in a great national celebration of private life, the political geography of the world was being reorganized on a vast scale. Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Rumania, and China all “fell” to communism in a few short years after 1945. To American children growing up in the fifties, this development was experienced as a spreading red stain on the Weekly Reader maps of the world. What went on there behind the “Iron Curtain” seemed too horrible to contemplate (there were stories of purges, liquidations, forced labor camps, etc.) but with the exception of a few inexplicable home-grown “spies” and “traitors,” it was all safely removed from us in the heartland of the Free World.
But as the fifties progressed the threat of communism began to loom larger and larger in the middle-class American psyche. On the one hand, communism as portrayed in the U.S. press represented everything that Americans were against: religion had been abolished; two-dimensional “socialist realism” dominated art; all life centered around production. Worst of all, the sanctity of the family had been violated. Muscular women swept the streets while their children were raised by the state.
In short, communism looked like nothing so much as the rationalist nightmare which had always been latent in industrial capitalism—a world without love, without poetry, without illusion. In describing the “communist mentality” in his 1958 scare book Masters of Deceit, J. Edgar Hoover used the very language which could have described the mentality of a hard-headed capitalist—“systematic, purposive and conscious.…” Hoover’s book describes communism not so much as a threat to the state or the capitalist economy, but to “the happiness of the community, the safety of every individual, and the continuance of every home and fireside.”78
The horror of communism as the rationalist anti-utopia found expression in the developing genre of science-fiction movies. During the McCarthy era, men from Outer Space repeatedly invaded the American screen, and they were remarkably similar to the popular conception of men from beyond the Iron Curtain—cold, purposeful, emotionless humanoids. In movies like Invaders from Mars [1953], The Creeping Unknown [1955], Invasion of the Body Snatchers [1956], and The Invisible Invaders [1959], aliens bent on world conquest infiltrated cozy neighborhoods and homey rural towns. (The subtheme was the budding romantic love between the female lead and the brave young scientist. With the aliens licked, the two would be free to set up housekeeping and settle into all-American family life.)
But at the same time, the experts had to acknowledge, communism provided an external standard that could be used to measure American children, parents, and, ultimately, America’s most sacred values. While middle-class Americans had been relaxing in the new consumption-centered economy, the Soviets had been “catching up” with American industry, and there was no telling what the Chinese were doing. Waking up to the imperatives of the Cold War, Americans began to see child raising as another “race” like the Arms Race and the Space Race.
Figuratively speaking, the American child first encountered communism face-to-face in Korea. Experts later agreed that the Korean confrontation provided a critical test for the whole American way of life—and we failed dismally. Close to seven thousand American soldiers were captured by the North Korean and Chinese armies. By all accounts, they responded with a high level of demoralization. No one obeyed the American officers; the strong stole from the weak and sick; many simply curled up and died from what psychiatrists later termed “give-up-itis.”79 Most alarming of all to American analysts, a whopping one-seventh of the prisoners seem to have succumbed to “brainwashing”; i.e., they came to agree with their captors’ seemingly bizarre claim (this was before Vietnam) that the war was a result of U.S. imperialism and aggressiveness. With this, the first suspicions were raised that something might be amiss in the nursery. American youth was too soft to bear the rigors of war and too confused to tell the difference between communism and “freedom.”
To make matters worse, American youth was fast becoming a pressing social problem at home. Throughout the fifties there were repeated explosions of violence from male youth gangs. Most delinquency was concentrated among the urban poor, a group usually ignored by child-raising experts, but it appeared to be a “symptom” which could easily infect even “wholesome normal environments.” Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Harrison Salisbury suggested a link between juvenile delinquency at home and communism abroad:
The teenage problem and the Russian problem—there was, I suspected, a somewhat closer connection between the great issues of our times than many imagined. They might, even, be regarded as two faces of one coin.…80
Concern over Korean War POWs and domestic JDs sent the child-raising experts scurrying back to
the drawing boards. Even Dr. Spock asked himself: Are American youth underdisciplined, overcoddled? Spock began to rethink permissiveness and decided that American mothers had been carried away by his original advice—they were guilty of “overpermissiveness”:
Overpermissiveness seems to be much commoner in America than in any other country … I have talked with dozens of professional people from other countries, visiting the United States for the first time, who have had trouble concealing their surprise and irritation at the behavior of certain children they have seen here.81
In contrast, American child-raising professionals were coming back from their first visits to Soviet schools and nurseries with glowing reports about the kids; Dr. Spock quotes the report of Dr. Milton Senn, a professor of pediatrics and child psychiatry at Yale, who “though a scientist not given to easy enthusiasm” was moved to report:
They are good-humored, easygoing, carefree and friendly … They play together in notable harmony, even when there is a remarkable disparity in their ages. They never seem to whine; they cry only when they hurt themselves, and then only briefly. They are warm, spontaneous, polite and generous.…82
The Communists’ obvious lead in the child-raising race inspired Dr. Spock and a group of other well-known educators and psychologists to organize a special Cold War parent education project—Parenthood in a Free Nation, which, according to its literature, was funded “by a grant from a foundation that recognized the strategic importance of parents in the preservation of a free world.”83 In its hundreds of study groups, Parenthood in a Free Nation educators emphasized “the importance of setting limits appropriate to the child’s stage of development and to the realities of the environmental situation.” “Limits” became the new catchword of expert child-raising argot: A child could not do just anything; it would have to give up a little power, a little freedom, for the sake of the larger interests of the Free World. Just as there would be “containment” abroad, there would be “limits” at home.
But even “limits” were not enough, the experts realized. Just as Cold War propagandists understood the need for not only missiles and tanks but for “a crusading faith to counter communism”84 child-raising experts recognized the need for some positive “values” to guide child raising. After all, the Communists had firm values, as J. Edgar Hoover stressed emotionally in Masters of Deceit:
Let us not blind ourselves to the fact that communists do have a “faith.” True, it is falsely placed, but still it inspires them to sacrifice, devotion and a perverted idealism.
The late Mother Bloor, the [Communist] Party’s woman “hero,” often praised Walt Whitman’s “The Mystic Trumpeter” as the poem she loved best. It seemed, she said, to prophesy the coming of a “new world”:
War, sorrow, suffering gone—the rank
earth purged—nothing but joy left!
The ocean fill’d with joy—the atmosphere
all joy!
Joy! Joy! in freedom, worship, love!
joy in the ecstasy of life!
Enough merely to be! enough to breathe!
Joy! Joy! all over joy!
Hoover was apparently as taken with this poem as Mother Bloor was. He comments with pique:
She is trying to identify communism with the dream of a world of joy. She is exploiting Walt Whitman. Yet her feeling shows the lure of communist “faith.” If communists can be so inspired from error, falsehood, and hate, just think what we could do with truth, justice, and love! I thrill to think of the even greater wonders America could fashion from its rich, glorious, and deep tradition. All we need is faith, real faith.85
Spock and other child-raising experts had to agree that the Russians were inspired by their values and that this no doubt gave them their advantage in child raising:
… the great majority of the Russian people have a very strong sense of common purpose. They are convinced that they are creating a nobler political and economic system than has ever existed before.… They are proud to be playing their individual roles in such a mighty effort.86
But what values did we have? There had been nothing in the self-absorbed, libidinal approach to child raising to suggest that children had to grow up at all, much less face a world inhabited by hordes of Communist “fanatics.”
In fact there was a widespread suspicion that Americans had no values at all. Intellectuals were suffering through a mass case of “alienation.” Housewives were showing the first signs of the boredom which would later be considered their characteristic occupational disease. Teenagers were beginning to assume their now-familiar mien of sullen anomie. The heroes of the time, such heroes as there were, were distinguished by their very lack of values: James Dean of Rebel Without a Cause and Marlon Brando of The Wild One—aimless, inarticulate loners.
Throughout the fifties, child-raising experts joined forces with educators and government officials to unearth some truly American values for mothers to inculcate and children to absorb. The results, though, were disappointing. In 1951 the National Education Association and the American Association of School Administrators concluded a study with the finding that “the basic moral and spiritual value in American life” was “the supreme importance of the individual personality.”87 Similarly, a 1960 Presidential Commission on Goals for Americans announced that “the paramount goal of the United States … is to guard the rights of the individual, and to enlarge his opportunity.”88
Now, “individualism” can be a reason for fighting courageously, but it can also be the rationale for defecting to the enemy, betraying a friend, or terrorizing old people on the streets. Besides, individualism is hardly a unifying value. Dr. Spock observed sadly that the American emphasis on individual success “does not bind us together, but puts us in competition with one another.” It wasn’t that American ideals were “unworthy,” he wrote, “it is only that they do not serve to unite and inspire us.” In the age of POW turncoats and juvenile delinquents, the child-raising experts uneasily faced the fact that America did not have any transcendent, unifying “values”: nor could it, because the imposition of any other overarching value would undercut the first value, “individualism,” and thus would be a step toward totalitarianism.
On October 4, 1957, something happened to take the experts’ minds off the American dilemma about “values” and to give them a concrete challenge to think about. The Soviets launched Sputnik, the world’s first orbital satellite, and it hit like a spitball in the eyes of American child-raising experts, educators, and Cold War propagandists. American psychologists who had visited the Soviet Union had been willing to concede that Communist children were cooperative and good-tempered to a degree that was almost eerie compared to the Dennis-the-Menace personality deemed acceptable in American kids. But the very niceness of the Soviet children was presumed by the experts to be achieved by some process of indoctrination. They must be basically robots—utterly lacking in “individuality.” Or so it seemed until Sputnik raised the possibility that at least some of them were more creatively daring and imaginative than their American counterparts.
Sputnik created an “almost instantaneous national mood of panic and alarm.”89 Conservative public opinion—and at a time when any opinions that were not conservative were not public—turned against American kids with vicious impatience. A public service advertisement printed in Newsweek and Reader’s Digest a few months after Sputnik’s launching warned (with a grammatical recklessness that only seems to reinforce the point):
Johnny had better learn to read. It no longer matters whether he wants to or would like to or may learn to read—and read well—or we may wind up in a world where no English is written any more … We Americans don’t want to move the world. But we don’t want anyone else to, either. So Johnny had better learn to read. Because you can bet Ivan is spending a lot of time on his books.90
A best-seller of 1955, Why Johnny Can’t Read was soon followed ominously by Why Ivan Can Read. “Ivan,” who a few years ago had been only an insignifica
nt speck on the red part of the map, seemed to have moved right into the classroom, where he sat apple-cheeked and alert, as conversant with logs and vectors as “Johnny” was with batting averages and TV Guide. With Ivan around, American children ceased to be regarded as a national hobby and became a national military resource—a status memorialized in the National Defense Education Act of 1958.
Faced with the Soviet military threat, experts discovered that the toddler—who had been indulged in every way in the last decades of libidinal luxury—was in fact, a malingerer. Leading educator Dr. George Shuster snapped:
That learning to read at 3 can be for some children as exciting as stringing beads or jumping was news to a certain school of pedagogy until experiment began to prove it was truth. We have, in short, been wasting a lot of the nation’s time.91
Experts discovered overnight that not only toddlers but babies of ten months could learn to read. The Sputnik scare, combined with rising competition for entry to colleges, set off a kind of hysteria among upwardly mobile parents. The permissiveness that still hung over the physical side of child raising stood in sharp contrast to the new intellectual pushiness of the fifties and early sixties: the psychologically ideal three-year-old of 1960 might soil its diapers, drink from a bottle, and cling to a tiny rag-fetish, but it could recite the alphabet and was showing the first signs of aptitude for the new math.
The new standards for juvenile achievement gave the image of “Mom” a much-needed boost in status. Experts now stressed that the infant I.Q. needed constant stimulation to nurture its growth—without stimulation even infants could slip into boredom, apathy, and, ultimately, retardation. Obviously the American mother would have to be resurrected from the primeval muck of instinct laid down by past generations of psychoanalysts. In a merciful lapse of memory, the experts forgot the iron laws governing sex-role socialization, and decreed that Mother could now play an instrumental role in child raising: it was her job to keep the child’s sensory apparatus employed full-time. Gone were the days when all a mother had to do was provide a womblike environment, a sort of constant-temperature bath gently rocking the baby in ambient love. Mothers who responded to the Cold War alert were supposed to keep the environment challenging, noisy, colorful, and ever-changing. Mobiles should be strung above the baby’s crib; even patterned sheets could help tickle an infant nerve cell into life. For the toddler, the home should be stocked with toys such as that advertised as
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