View the Table of Contents
Read the Introduction

aThe letters collected contain an array of opinions about the war, of both the hawk and dove variety. The scores of letters in this collection both praise and vilify Dr. Spock for his antiwar activism.a
--"The VVA Veteran"

"From thousands of letters written to Dr. Benjamin Spock during the Vietnam War, Foley has carefully culled 218 missives from America's silent majority. . . . Many may find the frustration, fear and grief expressed here newly relevant."
--"Publishers Weekly"

"These letters--with Michael S. Foley's astute and informed commentary--make clear why and how so many Americans trusted Benjamin Spock. The body politic sorely needs a Doctor Spock today."
--James Carroll, author of "Crusade: Chronicles of an Unjust War"

"Foley has discovered a unique source on the American home front during the Vietnam War, a perspective that moves us past the usual images of angry polarization. These powerful letters help us to consider how war-times induce people to look with new eyes at their nation and their government."
--David Farber, author of "The Age of Great Dreams: America in the 1960s"

"Few documentary collections offer such an immediate connection to the years in which the Vietnam War was fought. Reading these letters now, when the U.S. is once again at war, is a profoundly moving experience."
--Marilyn B. Young, author of "The Vietnam Wars, 1945-1990"

At the height of the Vietnam War, thousands of Americans wrote moving letters to Dr. Benjamin Spock, America's pediatrician and a high-profile opponent of the war. Personal and heartfelt, thoughtful and volatile, these missives from Middle Americaprovide an intriguing glimpse into the conflicts that took place over the dinner table as people wrestled with this divisive war and with their consciences.

Providing one of the first clear views of the home front during the war, Dear Dr. Spock collects the best of these letters and offers a window into the minds of ordinary Americans. They wrote to Spock because he was familiar, trustworthy, and controversial. His book "Baby and Child Care" was on the shelves of most homes, second only to the Bible in the number of copies sold. Starting in the 1960s, his activism in the antinuclear and antiwar movements drew mixed reactions from Americans-some puzzled, some supportive, some angry, and some desperate.

Most of the letters come from what Richard Nixon called the "silent majority"--white, middle class, law-abiding citizens who the president thought supported the war to contain Communism. In fact, the letters reveal a complexity of reasoning and feeling that moves far beyond the opinion polls at the time. One mother of young children struggles to imagine how Vietnamese women could endure after their village was napalmed, while another chastises Spock for the "dark shadow" he had cast on the country and pledges to instill love of country in her sons.

What emerges is a portrait of articulate Americans struggling mightily to understand government policies in Vietnam and how those policies did or did not reflect their own sense of themselves and their country.

View the Table of Contents
Read the Introduction

aThe letters collected contain an array of opinions about the war, of both the hawk and dove variety. The scores of letters in this collection both praise and vilify Dr. Spock for his antiwar activism.a
--"The VVA Veteran"

"From thousands of letters written to Dr. Benjamin Spock during the Vietnam War, Foley has carefully culled 218 missives from America's silent majority. . . . Many may find the frustration, fear and grief expressed here newly relevant."
--"Publishers Weekly"

"These letters--with Michael S. Foley's astute and informed commentary--make clear why and how so many Americans trusted Benjamin Spock. The body politic sorely needs a Doctor Spock today."
--James Carroll, author of "Crusade: Chronicles of an Unjust War"

"Foley has discovered a unique source on the American home front during the Vietnam War, a perspective that moves us past the usual images of angry polarization. These powerful letters help us to consider how war-times induce people to look with new eyes at their nation and their government."
--David Farber, author of "The Age of Great Dreams: America in the 1960s"

"Few documentary collections offer such an immediate connection to the years in which the Vietnam War was fought. Reading these letters now, when the U.S. is once again at war, is a profoundly moving experience."
--Marilyn B. Young, author of "The Vietnam Wars, 1945-1990"

At the height of the Vietnam War, thousands of Americans wrote moving letters to Dr. Benjamin Spock, America's pediatrician and a high-profile opponent of the war. Personal and heartfelt, thoughtful and volatile, these missives from Middle Americaprovide an intriguing glimpse into the conflicts that took place over the dinner table as people wrestled with this divisive war and with their consciences.

Providing one of the first clear views of the home front during the war, Dear Dr. Spock collects the best of these letters and offers a window into the minds of ordinary Americans. They wrote to Spock because he was familiar, trustworthy, and controversial. His book "Baby and Child Care" was on the shelves of most homes, second only to the Bible in the number of copies sold. Starting in the 1960s, his activism in the antinuclear and antiwar movements drew mixed reactions from Americans-some puzzled, some supportive, some angry, and some desperate.

Most of the letters come from what Richard Nixon called the "silent majority"--white, middle class, law-abiding citizens who the president thought supported the war to contain Communism. In fact, the letters reveal a complexity of reasoning and feeling that moves far beyond the opinion polls at the time. One mother of young children struggles to imagine how Vietnamese women could endure after their village was napalmed, while another chastises Spock for the "dark shadow" he had cast on the country and pledges to instill love of country in her sons.

What emerges is a portrait of articulate Americans struggling mightily to understand government policies in Vietnam and how those policies did or did not reflect their own sense of themselves and their country.

An illuminating documentary history that reveals the effects of U.S. military ventures overseas on more than a century of American life at home.
"Who are the heroes that fight your war?
Mothers who have no say.
But my duty's done so for God's sake leave one
And don't take my darling boy away."
--antiwar song circa 1916
The United States has been at war for seventy of the past one hundred years. And even as American soldiers have fought overseas, war has profoundly influenced almost every aspect of American society on the home front--as this startling collection of wartime letters, song lyrics, poems, editorial cartoons, newspaper articles, leaflets, and government documents (from the Spanish-American War and World War I to the Vietnam War, the Persian Gulf War, and the war in Iraq) reveals.
"Home Fronts" offers a vivid cross-section of American intellectual, political, and cultural life in wartime over the past century. Here are brief excerpts--set into historical context with concise introductions--from the most important work by intellectual luminaries, political activists, poets, songwriters, and presidents.
Across the rich variety of social commentary, political critique, and artistic expression--which covers the full spectrum from pro-war to peacenik--"Home Fronts" brings into sharp focus the startling continuities and revealing contrasts between past and present wartime experiences. A major historical resource, "Home Fronts" will also be an important intellectual tool for anyone contemplating the impact of war in our own time.
Includes the words of:
- William Jennings Bryan
- Emma Goldman
- Eugene V. Debs
- W.E.B. Du Bois
- CharlesLindbergh
- David Dellinger
- Ring Lardner Jr.
- John Steinbeck
- Dwight Macdonald
- Thomas Merton
- John Hope Franklin
- Muhammad Ali
- Noam Chomsky
- Daniel Berrigan
- Herbert Marcuse
- Marvin Gaye
- J. Anthony Lukas
- Richard Nixon
- Denise Levertov
- The Dead Kennedys
- Sydney Schanberg
- George Packer
- Christopher Hitchens
- Charles Simic
- and many others

Shedding light on an understudied form of opposition to the Vietnam War, Michael Foley tells the story of draft resistance, the cutting edge of the antiwar movement at the height of the war's escalation. Unlike so-called draft dodgers, who evaded the draft by leaving the country or by securing a draft deferment by fraudulent means, draft resisters openly defied draft laws by burning or turning in their draft cards. Like civil rights activists before them, draft resisters invited prosecution and imprisonment.

Focusing on Boston, one of the movement's most prominent centers, Foley reveals the crucial role of draft resisters in shifting antiwar sentiment from the margins of society to the center of American politics. Their actions inspired other draft-age men opposed to the war--especially college students--to reconsider their place of privilege in a draft system that offered them protections and sent disproportionate numbers of working-class and minority men to Vietnam. This recognition sparked the change of tactics from legal protest to mass civil disobedience, drawing the Johnson administration into a confrontation with activists who were largely suburban, liberal, young, and middle class--the core of Johnson's Democratic constituency.

Examining the day-to-day struggle of antiwar organizing carried out by ordinary Americans at the local level, Foley argues for a more complex view of citizenship and patriotism during a time of war.