Critchlow, Donald T. Phyllis Schlafly and Grassroots Conservatism: A Woman's Crusade

International Social Science Review, Spring-Summer, 2006 by Barry D. Friedman

Critchlow, Donald T. Phyllis Schlafly and Grassroots Conservatism: A Woman's Crusade. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005. xiv 422 pages. Cloth, $29.95.

Donald T. Critchlow offers a history of the Republican party from the 1950s to the present using the noteworthy career of Phyllis Schlafly as the source of milestone events that bring the story to life. The groundwork for Schlafly's career as a conservative Republican activist was set by a series of jobs that she occupied after earning her master's degree in political science at Harvard and Radcliffe's graduate school in 1945. In 1946, she worked as a researcher for a right-wing think tank, the American Enterprise Association (today's American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research), and as campaign manager for the successful congressional campaign of St. Louis lawyer Claude Bakewell. From late 1946 to 1949, she worked as a librarian and writer for the newsletter of the St. Louis Union Trust Company. The newsletter's purpose was to promote the free-enterprise system and to denounce socialism and big government. Under the tutelage of Towner Phelan, the bank's vice president for advertising, Schlafly "learned how to write, produce a newsletter, and convey conservative ideas to a larger public" (p. 30). Layered on top of these skills was Schlafly's uncanny instinct for producing publications about timely topics that could galvanize audiences of conservative, anti-communist Americans. Her 1957 pamphlet, "A Reading List for Americans," was a bibliography of anti-communist books; tens of thousands of copies were sold. Her break-out work that assured her a place in Republican-party history was a 128-page book entitled A Choice Not an Echo. The title came from a phrase that U.S. Senator Barry Goldwater (R-AZ) used in announcing his candidacy for president, and the book offered advice to conservative Republicans about how to overcome the liberal wing of the party to win the 1964 nomination for Goldwater. Sales of Schlafly's book reached the millions. Its utility in energizing Goldwater volunteers in California arguably delivered the state to Goldwater in his tight primary contest against New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller. When, as an elected delegate pledged to Goldwater, she arrived in San Francisco for the Republican National Convention, Schlafly was received as a celebrity and hailed as a heroine.

Schlafly continued to be a prominent figure in the bruising battles between the Republican party's moderate-to-liberal "Eastern Establishment" and its right-wing. In 1964, Schlafly was unanimously elected vice president of the National Federation of Republican Women (NFRW), in line to become president of that organization two years later. But when Goldwater lost the 1964 presidential election in a landslide to Democrat Lyndon B. Johnson, Republican-party regulars initiated efforts to purge Goldwater supporters from party leadership positions. The NFRW's Executive Board postponed the next convention from 1966 to 1967, and then used its control of the chartering of new chapters and the issuance of delegate credentials to defeat Schlafly at the convention by a vote of 1,910 to 1,494. The rivalry between the party's left-wing and right-wing continued through the rest of the 1960s and the 1970s, and Schlafly continued her work on behalf of the party's conservative faction. When Schlafly attended the 2004 Republican National Convention, it was, remarkably, the .fourteenth national convention in which she was an active participant.

Schlafly's involvement in Republican-party politics has not been her only claim to fame. She has also established a place in history through her shrewd selection of social and military issues and her activation of a grassroots movement that has influenced national, state, and local policymakers. Schlafly and her husband Fred--an Alton, IL, lawyer--established the Cardinal Mindszenty Foundation in 1958. The foundation's purpose was to bring anti-communist ideas to Roman Catholics. Schlafly wrote the monthly Mindszenty Reports from 1958 to 1964 as a resource for local "Cardinal Mindszenty Study Groups." The emphasis on local meetings and study groups established a pattern for Schlafly's subsequent leadership of grassroots activists. In the wake of her NFRW defeat, she began to write and distribute the monthly Phyllis Schlafly Report. Many of the Republican women and their local Republican women's clubs who felt alienated from the GOP after the NFRW fiasco transformed themselves into Schlafly-oriented activists and "Schlafly Clubs." This operation and this network were thus available when, in 1971, she was invited to participate in a debate in Connecticut about the proposed Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) to the U.S. Constitution. Schlafly had not been tuned in to the ERA issue, but, once it was brought to her attention, she studied it and decided that she opposed the ERA. In the February 1972 Phyllis Schlafly Report, she wrote an article entitled, "What's Wrong with 'Equal Rights' for Women?" In September 1972, she organized the "STOP (Stop Taking Our Privileges) ERA" movement. The ERA proposal emerged from Congress in March 1972, and by mid1973 thirty state legislatures had already ratified it. Once Schlafly weighed in, progress toward the required thirty-eight state ratifications all but stopped. Her supporters traveled in buses to state capitols to lobby against ratification, and they flooded legislators' mailboxes with circulars and letters. When the ratification period expired on June 30, 1982, Schlafly hosted a dinner in Washington, D.C., to celebrate the death of the proposed ERA. Undoubtedly, her involvement is the only useful explanation for the failure of ERA advocates to achieve their goal of a constitutional amendment.