CULTURAL CONSERVATISM AND THE RELIGIOUS RIGHT

Phyllis Schlafly

In 1775, the people who were meeting and talking about their gripes against the British crown were all trying to make the king shape up and be a good fellow and recognize their rights. All of their entreaties were addressed to the king; the idea of not having a king really hadn’t occurred to them. When they had their convention in July of 1775, they submitted the Olive Branch Petition. They were continuing to make entreaties to the king to give them their Englishman’s rights.

In January of 1776, a little book was published; you could call it a pamphlet. It was called Common Sense by Thomas Paine. It was only forty-six pages. It wasn’t written in the scholarly method of the other writers who wrote at that time. It was written for the guys who went to the coffee shop, the guys who went to the pub. It was in plain language for plain people, and it basically said, “We’ve got to get rid of the king.” It was published January 10. By July 4, we had the Declaration of Independence. Common Sense is one of the most amazing literary accomplishments in history, and considering the population we had at that time, it probably is the best-selling book in history.

The pamphlet gripped people. It created the movement for independence. It was a different technology. It was something like moving from the horse and buggy to the automobile, or from the typewriter to the Internet. That’s what the pamphleteer did. He made the pamphlet the new technology, the language of ordinary people. He didn’t have his piece decorated with Latin phrases; it was just direct political language that anybody could understand.

Now let’s fast-forward to the 1930s, the time of the Great Depression. High unemployment, even worse than today. But even then, Americans were not looking to government to solve their problems. Franklin Roosevelt, who was expected to be elected president in 1932, supposedly to end the Depression, ran on the Democratic platform. Let me tell you what that 1932 Democratic platform said: “We advocate an immediate and drastic reduction of government expenditures, by abolishing useless commissions and offices, consolidating departments and bureaus, and eliminating extravagance to accomplish a saving of not less than 25 percent in the cost of the federal government. We favor a federal budget annually balanced.”

Well, that sounds like the Tea Party, doesn’t it? It certainly doesn’t sound like the New Deal. FDR knew that was what the American people wanted to hear. However, once he was elected, he embarked on a big spending program, expanded the bureaucracy, and used the Commerce Clause to do all kinds of things that we still think are unconstitutional—the same arguments that were used in the ObamaCare case that was argued before the Supreme Court.

By the time FDR ran for his third term, prominent Democrats had left him. The American people really hated FDR, very much like the significant number of people who really hate Obama today. Nevertheless, they elected him four times. That does not mean that people approved of his spending programs and what he was doing; he certainly did not solve the unemployment problem. But he spent the money in states where it would get him votes to be reelected and continued to use spending to be reelected.

Then something happened, which brought another little book to the fore. It was written by an Austrian named Friedrich Hayek, who had become a British citizen. It’s a short book in which he directly attacked collectivism, the planned economy, and the whole idea that central planning was the way to run an economy. He took the position that in order to preserve liberty, we had to make a choice: Do we want the government to plan everything? Or do we want the rule of law?

The initial printing was only two thousand books. And then something happened to bring it to the grass roots: the Reader’s Digest reprinted it. It’s hard to imagine or believe today, but the Reader’s Digest then had five million subscribers, and everybody read the Reader’s Digest in those years. So this reached the plain people, the grass roots. They believed it, and it had a tremendous impact on our country in explaining what was wrong with the New Deal, and how we did not want central planning of our economy.

I happened to be at the Harvard Graduate School that year—don’t let anybody tell you that opportunities for education for women started only when the feminists came along, because I was getting my degree at the Harvard Graduate School in 1945, before all these feminists were born. Hayek came there to speak on his cross-country tour. I remember how the professors gathered us to explain to us how we were not supposed to believe what Hayek was saying. They were preparing us for his coming, and how to refute him and to answer him. They were all New Dealers, my professors at Harvard. I remember one whose favorite saying was, “We shouldn’t talk about balancing the budget. We should talk about budgeting the balance.” We had another professor who devoted one whole lecture in his constitutional law class to telling us that Henry Wallace was the greatest political thinker of the twentieth century. Now, if you study your history, you know he was the closest thing we ever had to a communist anywhere near the White House. He was too far left even for Franklin D. Roosevelt, who dumped Wallace as vice president when he ran for his fourth term in 1944 and replaced him with Harry Truman.

In any event, the conventional wisdom in America then was that the planned economy was the wave of the future. There was a lot of opposition to Roosevelt that was building. There were a number of organizations organized by the grass roots to oppose him. There are only two that I know have survived to this day. One is the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons, founded in the mid-1940s, which represents conservative doctors. They filed three briefs against ObamaCare. The other is America’s Future, which still publishes a newsletter. Most of the others died out.

So where was the political opposition to Roosevelt? The Republican Party in those years was pretty well run by what we call the kingmakers, headquartered in New York, and particularly in the Chase Manhattan Bank. They thought they were divinely appointed to select the Republican nominee, who would not very much challenge what Roosevelt was doing. In 1940, they forced on the Republicans a man named Wendell Willkie, who wasn’t even a Republican; he was a Democrat. He was sort of a ninety-day wonder. The kingmakers lined up all the media, did a lot of crooked things, and put Willkie over as the nominee. He ran for president on the Republican ticket and lost to Roosevelt.

Then in 1944, the kingmakers tried New York governor Tom Dewey, the one whom Teddy Roosevelt’s daughter described as “looking like the little man on the wedding cake.” Dewey didn’t do very well in ’44. And then came 1948, and they had the gall to nominate Tom Dewey again, and we, the grass roots, were very much opposed to that nomination.

There were all kinds of wonderful issues that Dewey could have talked about: the Truman scandals, the Korean War, the communist infiltration of our government, the Alger Hiss case. But Tom Dewey waged a “me-too” campaign, and he lost again.

Then came 1946, the off-year election. By this time, the grass roots were really getting angry, and they went out and carried on a campaign under the slogan “Had enough.” They elected the biggest Republican majority in Congress in the twentieth century.

As we approached the Republican National Convention of 1952, everybody expected a Republican year. The contestants were Senator Bob Taft, who had the support of the grass roots and was, I think, the first authentic conservative. However, I can tell you: in those days, people never called themselves “conservatives.” It was not a word that we used. Taft was just a run-of-the-mill, garden-variety Republican. The kingmakers put up Dwight Eisenhower, a military hero, whom they had installed as a university president to keep him safe until the time of the convention so he wouldn’t have to take any stands on controversial issues. The grass roots wanted Bob Taft, because he spoke up for typical American values, foreign and domestic. His book, A Foreign Policy for Americans, was another short book that we liked and we distributed. And he was the guy we hoped to nominate in 1952.

In 1952 there was another crooked convention. The kingmakers succeeded in nominating Eisenhower, after they went to the governor of California, who was then Earl Warren, and promised him the next vacancy on the Supreme Court if he would deliver the big California delegation for the vote on the Credentials Committee and the vote on the Rules Committee, both of which were crucial to whether Taft or Eisenhower would be nominated by the convention. And Warren delivered the California votes. Eisenhower was not part of the deal, but he was persuaded to fulfill that part of the commitment that his handlers had made, and it was a terrible, terrible mistake, because the Eisenhower court became the infamous Warren Court. Later on, Eisenhower was asked one day, “Did you make any mistakes while you were president?” He said, “Yes, two, and they’re both sitting on the Supreme Court.”

Eisenhower was nominated and we all supported him and he won. But after that, we began to realize the enormity of the communist threat, both the Soviet missile threat and the infiltration of our government by communist spies and people who were sending our secret information to the Soviet Union. There was also infiltration in the universities and in Hollywood. We had investigations of communism by the various congressional committees and reports that were widely read by the American people. In those days, everybody could read. They read the congressional reports, and the grass roots understood what communism was and why we wanted to get rid of the infiltration in our government. The grass roots took up the study of communism from the congressional reports.

In 1956, a man named Dr. Fred Schwarz suddenly rose to prominence. He had an enormous impact in building the start of the conservative movement. He brought thousands of people into what we referred to as the anti-communist movement, so that we had a grass roots that was well informed. I assisted him in putting on his first educational event in 1956 at the Tower Grove Baptist Church in St. Louis, where he realized what he could do by training people with a five-day class. So he then had these classes all over the country, and to this day, I meet people who came into the conservative movement attending one of the Schwarz schools. It was such a big thing that when he got to California, he filled the Los Angeles sports arena with 16,000 people for one of his schools.

He ultimately wrote a book called You Can Trust the Communists (to Be Communists). Unlike some of our enemies today, the communists told us exactly what they were going to do. “We are going to bury you!” they said, and they told us exactly how they were going to do it. Schwarz called his organization the Christian Anti-Communism Crusade, so it had a certain evangelical aspect to it. At the end of this first school, I said, “Well, we’ve got to bring the Catholics in, too, and have them join.” And he said, “No, you can’t put the Catholics and the Protestants in the same room. It just isn’t going to work—the Catholics will have to have their own organization.” So we got the Catholics to start their own organization called the Cardinal Mindszenty Foundation. We promoted study groups all over the country, and at one time, we had five thousand of these study groups.

People were learning: learning about government, learning about our enemies, learning about communism. This had a major impact. I looked up some of the resolutions passed by the Illinois Federation of Republican Women from the 1950s and ’60s; these were just ordinary women, Republican volunteers who liked to be supportive and support their candidates in politics. And they had resolutions against the centralization of power in Washington, against UN treaties and UNESCO, against the drive for disarmament. They had resolutions that demanded victory over communism, full support of the House Committee on Un-American Activities. They had a resolution to stop all federal aid to education, to wipe it out. They had resolutions that condemned the Supreme Court decisions that were siding with the communists. They had resolutions that condemned the accumulated power in the executive branch and the president, the sprawling bureaucracy, the weakening of constitutional restraints that permitted advocates of socialism and communism to make inroads in national security, and resolutions against the further centralization of power in the federal government. Again, nobody used the word conservative; they were just garden-variety Republicans. That’s just the way people thought, especially in the Midwest. Nobody called them extremists. Our files have a whole file of letters from congressmen saying, “Thank you for sending us this resolution; we agree one hundred percent with it.” That was the thinking of people in those days.

It was a different time. Even the American Bar Association was on our side in the fight against Supreme Court decisions siding with the communists. The American Bar Association had a committee that put out a report on communist tactics, strategy, and objectives, which set forth ten of the worst pro-communist decisions of the Supreme Court. This was put in the congressional record first by Senator Bridges and then later, by Senator Dirksen, and I’ll bet millions of copies went out. It became a major vehicle to educate the grass roots about how the court was favoring communism.

In those years, one of the most popular speakers was Dean Clarence Manion of the Notre Dame Law School. He wrote a book, less than a hundred pages, called The Key to Peace and talked about the religious foundation of our country, a lot of the conservative ideas that we hear today. Again, we’re not using the term conservative, but conservative was just the way people believed and thought in those days.

Then we looked around for a president. Who were we going to run for president? Somebody suggested a senator from Arizona. Well, nobody from Arizona had ever been elected president before. Arizona? At that time, we didn’t have any baseball team that was farther west or south than St. Louis. Nobody went to Arizona in those days. You had to come from Ohio, Pennsylvania, or New York to be president. But we all picked Barry Goldwater as the guy we wanted, so he had to have a book, too. His book The Conscience of a Conservative soon came out in paperback too. Actually, the book was written by Brent Bozell, who’s the father of the guy who runs the Media Research Center. But Dean Clarence Manion gave it the title. And that was the first time people began to call themselves “conservative,” because after The Conscience of a Conservative came out, it was proof that conservatives were not heartless people. They really had a conscience. And we began, proudly, to call ourselves “conservatives.”

We made a try for Goldwater in Chicago in 1960, but we didn’t have enough votes. That’s when Goldwater came out on the stage and said, “Conservatives, this isn’t our year. Go home and I’ll see you in four years.” So that’s what we did, and we distributed his book and did some more studying. One of the major factors in building the ranks of the conservatives was a paperback called None Dare Call It Treason by John Stormer. It was a little longer than some of these other paperbacks, but it really set forth what had happened to our country and the dangers of communism, central planning, an overgrown bureaucracy, and high taxation. He published it himself and he sold seven million copies, and it was a major educational tool of the grass roots, who were now beginning to come alive.

We approached the 1964 convention of the Republican Party, which was in San Francisco. I had been to all of them beginning in 1952. Most of the people who go to Republican conventions as delegates are first-timers. The majority of them have never been before, and they don’t know what to expect and don’t know how it really operates. I figured they ought to know what went before, so I wrote my little book called A Choice Not an Echo, and I plunged in with a printing of 25,000. I thought that would be it. I ended up selling three million out of my garage, and they went to all the people who were delegates who were interested in the next nomination. Every week, I still meet some public official who says, “I came into the conservative movement reading A Choice Not an Echo in 1964.” Most political literature just simply revs up your juices for your prejudices, but my book persuaded people.

Goldwater’s opponent was Nelson Rockefeller, a former New York governor. My book persuaded Rockefeller people to switch and support Goldwater, and persuaded Lyndon Johnson people to switch and support Goldwater. So we had the 1964 convention and we nominated Goldwater; the conservatives took over the Republican Party. And then, as you know, Goldwater went down to a smashing defeat.

But twenty-seven million people voted for Goldwater, and they never regretted it, and that was really the start of the coming together of the conservative movement. Because of his defeat, however, we thought, “Well, I guess we can’t really elect a real conservative president,” and that’s why we went for Richard Nixon on the next round. We thought he was the best we could do, which turned out to be a mistake.

In any event, the conservative movement was there, and the anti-communist movement was there, but that wasn’t enough.

THE EQUAL RIGHTS AMENDMENT

Then something else happened. Congress voted for a new constitutional amendment, supported by the feminists, called the Equal Rights Amendment. Everybody was for it. There were only a couple of dozen people in the House who voted against it. There were only eight in the Senate who voted against it. President Nixon, President Ford, and President Carter were all enthusiastic supporters of it. All the governors. The media were 99 percent in favor of it. Everybody was for it; everybody who was anybody in politics, from left to right, from Ted Kennedy to George Wallace, endorsed it.

I was asked to speak about it and made a speech about it, which then turned up in my Phyllis Schlafly Report, which I’d started a few years before. I wrote one called “What’s Wrong with ‘Equal Rights’ for Women?” and sent it out to my friends. I sold the report by subscription for five dollars a year, mostly to women I had worked with in the Republican Party. And one day the next month, an Oklahoma friend called up and said, “Phyllis, we took your report to the legislature, and they voted down the Equal Rights Amendment.”

So I invited one hundred women from thirty states to meet me in St. Louis. I put them on a bus and took them down to the riverfront, and we boarded one of the showboats and I climbed up on the stage, where they do all these melodramas, and I told them, “We’re going to go out and beat the Equal Rights Amendment.” At that point, nobody thought it was possible. They thought we were crazy, because in the first year, the ERA-ers got thirty states; they only needed thirty-eight, three-fourths of the country.

We had big fights in state after state. Illinois was the front line. Illinois voted on it every year for ten years, and we kept beating them and they kept coming back. Five states that had previously voted for it rescinded. We kept beating ERA.

We won because the ERA was bad law. You’ve read the Constitution: you know men are not in the Constitution. It’s a completely sex-neutral document. It only talks about “citizens, persons, electors, presidents, and we the people.” ERA did not offer any benefit to women. I testified in forty-one state legislative hearings, and in only one state did one of its people come in and say, “Our state has a law that discriminates that ERA will remedy.” What was the law? It said that wives could not make homemade wine without their husbands’ consent. For this we needed a constitutional amendment? You’ve got to be kidding.

When the feminists went on TV, however, they made women think ERA was going to give them a raise. But ERA would have nothing to do with employment, because the employment laws were already sex-neutral. What ERA would do would be to make every law sex-neutral, and the classic discriminatory law was the draft law. We were then in the Vietnam War; we had a draft. My daughters—I had daughters and sons that age—they thought it was the craziest thing anybody said. You’re going to give women a constitutional amendment, and the first thing they’ll do is sign up for the draft like their brothers? It was unsalable.

But the battle continued.

When ERA came out of Congress, the advocates were given a time limit of seven years. They realized they might not win before the deadline. Bella Abzug was then in Congress (you remember, she’s the woman with the funny hats) and she got Congress to give her $5 million to have a special convention in Houston, which was supposed to be used to ratify the Equal Rights Amendment. They had their meeting, and it was an enormous media event. Three thousand media people went to Houston to cover this. The feminists passed their resolution saying they wanted the Equal Rights Amendment, but that didn’t satisfy them. They began to tell the rest of their agenda. They said they wanted abortion funded by the taxpayers. They said they wanted a whole list of gay rights. They wanted universal, government-supported day care. For all these resolutions, they were letting off balloons and they were prancing around. We’re talking about 1977; this was not agreeable to the American people, but all this was on television.

The feminists believe that women are victims of the patriarchy, and it’s up to new laws and the Constitution to remedy the second-class citizenship of women. Absolutely false. American women are the most fortunate class of people who ever lived on the face of the earth. We can do anything we want to do. But at any rate, that’s the line they’re putting out, and their prime example of the “oppression” of women by the patriarchy is that society expects mothers to look after their babies, and that burden has got to be lifted from them by the taxpayers.

Every important and well-known feminist was in Houston. Betty Friedan was making an impassioned plea to invite the lesbians to come and join them. They passed all the radical resolutions.

While the ERA forces had their big shindig, financed by the taxpayers, we took another hall across town, in Houston, and invited people to come at their own expense and to attend our pro-family rally. We packed 20,000 people into a hall that was supposed to hold only 18,000, and they all came at their own expense. I think that’s the day “pro-family movement” went into the political vocabulary, because that’s what we called ourselves.

I remember, after that was over, somebody asked the Missouri governor, “Governor, are you for the Equal Rights Amendment?” “Well,” he said, “do you mean the old ERA or the new ERA? I was for equal pay for equal work, but after they went down to Houston and got tangled up with all those abortionists and lesbians, I can tell you, ERA will never pass in Missouri.” Of course, he was absolutely right. After that convention, ERA never won another vote. ERA’s probably been voted on twenty-five times in various committees or legislatures or even referenda, but it’s never won anywhere else. Their own $5 million conference, which they were so proud of, simply destroyed them.

But the fight went on, because then ERA advocates ran to Jimmy Carter and got him to give them a three-year extension. The cartoonists had a field day with this; this was like giving a baseball game three more innings when the game was not tied up. But they did not get any more states. A court finally held that the extension was illegal. We had a victory party in 1979, which was the end of the original seven years, and we proclaimed victory. Then we had another victory party in 1982, the end of the crooked extension.

The press was so angry with me; they could hardly stand it. But it was important for all of the conservatives left over from the Goldwater campaign to realize that it is possible for conservatives to win.

THE BIRTH OF THE PRO-FAMILY MOVEMENT

When I started out, I was holding my finger in the dike with a handful of my Republican women friends. We’d go to the state legislature and we would be successful. Then I realized, about 1976, that we were going to need more help. That’s when I went to the churches, and asked, “Please come and join us.” I prayed that we could bring a thousand people to Springfield, Illinois, for a demonstration. That was the day, on April 26, 1976, that a thousand people did come to Springfield, Illinois. Our legislature had never seen anything like this before. Our people came and showed legislators that we were opposed to ERA. So that is the day we invented the pro-family movement.

In building my organization—first of all “Stop ERA” and then morphing into Eagle Forum—I was very ecumenical. I didn’t let them talk about religion. I combined the Catholics, the Protestants, all the denominations, the evangelicals, the Jews, the Mormons. I had them all. The message was, “I don’t care what your church is. We’re all going to work together to beat the Equal Rights Amendment.” And I made them all get along. This was the first time a lot of Catholics and Baptists were in the same room together, and they just had to get along. That was my policy.

But I didn’t have help from the establishment. In ten years, National Review never had a single article about the Equal Rights Amendment. They were no help at all. I think Human Events had one article. There were only two newspapers that had one friendly editorial—one was in St. Louis and one was in Tampa, Florida. What I did was not an outgrowth of the conservative movement or of the Republican Party. The Republican presidents had all signed on to ERA. As for the rest of the people, they didn’t believe I could win. Nobody believed I could win. You know, “This is just Phyllis’s plaything. She can’t possibly win.”

The cultural conservative movement I founded is the base of the GOP today.

We really swelled our ranks when the Baptists joined us; that’s when Jerry Falwell started his Moral Majority. We actually had ten thousand people at another demonstration at the Springfield capitol. We were realizing that people of faith and people who had similar values could work together for a goal they shared.

Initially, Roe v. Wade and abortion did not actually galvanize that movement. When Roe v. Wade was handed down by the court in 1973, the Catholic bishops jumped in to fight it. Well, the Protestants were not going to join up with something the Catholic bishops were running, so they hung back. But eventually, we all got on the same page. It was about 1976 that we realized that one of the reasons the feminists wanted ERA was they felt it was the key to locking abortion funding into the Constitution. The Supreme Court had handed down a decision, Harris v. McRae, which said you did not have a constitutional right to have your abortion paid for. The feminists, however, wanted it paid for, and they thought they could get funding through ERA because they could charge that it was sex discriminatory to deny this money.

That was the start of what we now call the pro-family movement that has played such a big part. After we proclaimed victory over ERA in 1979, the next big thing coming up was the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980. A lot of us were not sure we could win. You know, we didn’t have a vision of victory in the conservative movement in those days. There were not enough people left over from the Goldwater voters to elect a president. But Reagan successfully and skillfully combined the fiscal conservatives left over from the Goldwater campaign, the people who had been brought into the anti-communist movement who cared about national defense, and the people who’d been brought in to the pro-family movement through Stop ERA and the fight for life. And he won a great victory in 1980 and ’84.

You need those three legs in order to win. You really can’t win with only one of them. Reagan proved that that is the key to success.

When candidates now say, “We’re going to put the social issues or the moral issues in the deep freeze or the back burner,” they’re making a terrible mistake, because they’re kicking away large blocks of voters who are important to any Republican victory. The pro-family movement has played a tremendous role; there are so many people who came into the Republican Party through these social and moral issues. The people who care about the moral issues are extremely important to the conservative constituency, and they have to be kept part of it. Human motivation is very complex, and the decline in marriage rates is the chief reason for the enormous amount of welfare and enormous numbers of people who are being supported at taxpayer expense.

We don’t want to build a nation of dependent people. We want a nation of people who can make their own way. I grew up during the Great Depression; we didn’t look to government; government wasn’t any help at all. And now we’ve got more than forty programs that funnel cash or benefits to people who are not married. They say it’s for the children, but it’s encouraging women to have children without getting married. It’s a terrible mistake; they’re going to be poor. They ought to tell them, “You’re going to be poor all your life if you do that.”

The welfare part of our budget is the fastest growing and the biggest segment of federal spending. It’s far more money than we’re spending on national defense. Obama knows that. That’s why they’re trying to increase the number of single moms; most of them vote for Obama because that’s where they’re getting their support. Look at the figures on how marriage has declined and the numbers of people who think it’s okay to do without marriage. That’s extremely unfortunate; a happy marriage is the best thing you can hope for a happy life. To tell young people that it really doesn’t matter whether you get married or not is a terrible thing. Just look at the figures: we had a 41 percent illegitimacy rate in this country last year. Of course, the feminists have promoted the idea that kids don’t need fathers, and the family courts have almost adopted that, too. Fathers are necessary, and I do worry about the deterioration of morals in the whole culture. I don’t think it’s making people happier or making a better country.

Social issues and fiscal issues are intertwined. Social issues and foreign policy are intertwined. You cannot remove the beating heart and soul of conservatism and hope to save the philosophy or the movement.