Episode 94 -- Phyllis Schlafly, Part 1

Hello, I'm Adrian Dahl.

And I'm Larry Donnegan.

Whether we like it or not, we're in bid with the right.

So, Adrian, today we're talking about one of the biggest forces in 20th century American conservatism.

A person whose influence on the Republican Party laid the groundwork for the presidencies of Ronald Reagan and Donald Trump, who brought once fringe conspiratorial reactionary thought into the mainstream, who laid the blueprint for the Christian right, defeated a constitutional amendment for women's equality, and built the institutional mechanisms that continue to harness misogyny as one of the most potent forces in American political life.

And so I ask you, my friend, what do you know about Phyllis Schlafly?

Yeah, so first off, I know that she was played by none other than Kate Blanchette, and so that's always who I'll be picturing.

I also should mention that in preparation for this episode, you did most of the research or did all the research.

I did delve into the archives and wanted to get a sense of this person as well.

And I basically came away with questions that I think I'll be posing to you today.

I know she was a right-wing operative.

She sort of comes out of the far-right, really Bircher wing of the Republican Party, and I think it's instrumental in engineering the takeover from

the more Rockefeller wing of the party in the 60s, it seems to me.

She's a big Goldwater person and helps mainstream far-right Republicanism.

And then, of course, she becomes most important or most well-known and most Cape Blanchette played through her work defeating the Equal Rights Amendment in the 1970s, which had been basically all but certain to be ratified when she began her campaign against it in, I want to say, 1971, is that right?

Yes, 1971.

And which was formally defeated in the 1980s.

Basically, after Schlafly...

I mean, the way the show, Miss America, kind of makes it sound like single-handedly radicalized the country against it.

Yeah, she is all but single-handedly responsible for why we do not have the ERA.

And just so our listeners know, Adrian, do you want to give us a spiel on what the ERA was?

Right, especially for our non-American listeners.

The ERA, the Equal Rights Amendment, was proposed in 1923 by Alice Paul, essentially as a follow-up and an enforcement mechanism for the 19th Amendment, right, which granted white women the right to vote.

So it's a little bit like the relationship between the 14th and 15th Amendments, right?

You're supposed to put meat on the bones of abstract rights.

Do I have that right?

Yeah, you know, this was brought about really, it was the brainchild of the first wave of feminism, right?

Yeah.

This idea, like, okay, now finally we've gotten suffrage for women.

And what we really want to do now is transform the law so that all these ways that women are patronized, treated like children, treated like property are taken out of the law so that they can have the legal status of full adults the way that men do, right?

So the ERA says in its entirety or the entirety of its first clause: equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or any state on account of sex.

Period.

That's it.

Period.

And so this gets revived in the second wave.

The first wave first conceives of this, and then the second wave really embraces it, notably by Betty Friedan, right?

Yeah, Betty Friedan gets now the National Organization for Women, which at the time was like a pretty powerful political force under which like a lot of different sort of like liberal feminist projects were being pushed, a really big organization.

And she gets them to embrace the ERA, sort of not without controversy, right?

Like a lot of women's auxiliaries to labor unions wind up like leaving now because labor unions were traditionally opposed to the ERA.

It was something that she had to really fight for, but she really believed that would be the key to unlocking all these like subsequent legal victories.

And at the time, basically people agreed with her.

Everyone was like, yeah, that sounds basically reasonable.

It was a non-controversial addition to the Constitution.

People thought, yes, this is an obvious statement of principle.

We believe that everybody is equal, and that should be true in the law for women as well.

So when this got reintroduced again under like now's auspices, it passed both houses of Congress like basically immediately, right?

Yeah.

This thing was going to be in the Constitution easy by 1975, 1976, maybe even sooner, right?

It's because Schlafly shows up.

She makes this non-controversial fait accompli

into a political issue.

And she uses that political issue.

She uses anti-feminism, which she has aggravated and politicized and organized as something from which she rebuilds the right wing of the Republican Party following some pretty big defeats.

Even though we mostly associate her with the ERA's defeat, and that's really her kind of lasting legacy, what I kind of requested when we first started conceptualizing this episode and started researching it was that I was pretty,

I don't want to say unaware, but I had not heard as much about her prehistory and how she came to the ERA fight and that she really started much more of as a foreign policy hawk.

And so we should maybe flag for listeners right at the outset that this is going to be the first part of a two-parter.

So we're going to give you all the ERA stuff at the beginning to kind of understand why we're talking about this person at all.

But please don't be surprised if there's actually not that much ERA talk at the end of it, because there's a second part.

Yes, we are going to do basically everything up to when she joins the ERA fight today, right?

Because I think what's really important to understand about Schlafly

is that she is not just this big successful political misogynist.

She is really this kind of like animating spirit of the far right for decades through the mid-20th century.

So she understood the ERA fight as a continuation of what she had been doing on the Republican right for years by that point.

She had been working tirelessly to push her party to the political right and to advance this like really maximalist paranoid style of anti-communism that was heavy on nuclear armament and light on diplomacy, right?

She was very much in the like just nukem camp of the Cold War.

And her work against the ERA, you know, it centered around the rhetoric of preserving femininity, but her work on foreign policy was very differently gendered.

It was incredibly macho, right?

It was looking about strengthening the United States and disciplining its posture on the world stage away from like diplomatic conciliation and towards really just like a violence, just maximal capacity for violence.

Yeah.

So like, this is somebody who thought that Henry Kissinger was not pro-war enough.

And she really made that opinion felt.

She had a lot of influence.

She was hard-nosed.

She was incredibly self-disciplined and strategic, the way I think of like a Dick Cheney as being, but she also had this, she had this kind of cerebral quality to her evil.

She was smart, but she was also just conspiratorial and deluded and out there.

She understood the world as a really terrifying place and really believed that she was one of very few people who were tough enough to handle it, right?

And most conspicuous about her, I think, is that Schlafly, throughout her whole career, the periods we're going to cover today, and then also the periods we're going to cover next week, she had this like great ability to decipher what people were really angry about, where their senses of inadequacy were, what their resentments were, and to deploy those like morally small parts of themselves against her enemies and towards her end.

And just really quickly, I'm going to read this quote about Phyllis Schlafly from Andrea Dorkin's Right Wing Women, which I think gives like a pretty decent sketch of just who this person was as a character.

Phyllis Schlafly, the rights not born-again philosopher of the absurd, is not having a hard time.

She seems possessed by Machiavelli, not Jesus.

It appears that she wants to be the prince.

She might be viewed as that rare woman of any ideological persuasion who really does see herself as one of the boys, even as she claims to be one of the girls.

Unlike most other right-wing women, Schlafly, in her written and spoken work, does not acknowledge experiencing any of the difficulties that tear women apart.

In the opinion of many, her ruthlessness as an organizer is best demonstrated by her demagogic propaganda against the Equal Rights Amendment, though she also waxes eloquent against reproductive freedom, the women's movement, big government, and the Panama Canal Treaty.

Her roots, and perhaps her heart, such as it is, are in the old right, but she remained unknown to any significant public until she mounted her crusade against the Equal Rights Amendment.

At any rate, she seems to be able to manipulate the fears of women without experiencing them.

So this is like a really cold-blooded political strategist, right?

Somebody who's just incredibly calculating and at the same time,

kind of fucking wacky, right?

She's very, very realistic about how to get what she wants out of people who she assumes to be weaker than her, but she's not really realistic about a lot of her perceptions of the world.

So I think that's like a tension that I hope we get to sort of dive into.

In digging into her writings and thinking into just also the way they circulated, right?

The ERA defeat really was about carrying far-right ideas into liberal media, into polite media, into the upper echelons of Republican politics.

And this from someone who, I mean, just to give you an idea, I found this mailer that apparently she sent out with a picture of her children, her six children dressed in red and white for Christmas, with the big lettering next to it, will your future Christmases be as happy as this picture of Phyllis Slaffley's children?

And it's an ad for

a book called Strike from Space.

Oh, yeah.

She wrote a bunch of these like...

strange like communist propaganda like paperbacks with a crank former admiral who was like very paranoid about the communists.

Subtitled A Mega Death Mystery.

Oh, yeah.

This is the person that defeated a constitutional amendment.

It is exactly this kind of wingnut to

halls of power path that has become so characteristic of our era.

But she really did it well before anyone else in that cohort did it.

I should say that if you do want your future for Christmas to be as happy as Flo Schlafly's children, there is a little card you can fill out to buy copies of Strike from Space by Schlafley and Ward.

You can buy a single copy for 75 cents, 10 books for $5, or 500 books for $125.

A steal at any price.

But to those of you who study the American right a little bit, like this is classic far-right fringy shit.

Like this is like, would you please subscribe to my newsletter shit?

And it's really kind of an interesting question of how this person ends up defeating an amendment that had been passed by vast majorities in both houses and senate.

You know, it is a recurring theme of our era that I was comforted to find replicated in this part of the past, that part of being on the left is the humiliation of losing to these fucking people who are such clowns.

So let's dig into it.

Let's talk Phyllis.

I did want to like briefly give a shout out to some of the sources I used because we've had a couple of listeners ask for that, which I think is like a good practice to have.

So I relied a lot on Jane Mansbridge's 1986 Why We Lost the ERA, which is an account of the ERA battle from a feminist perspective.

There's also a really good book that I absolutely love and love recommending to people by Marjorie Spruill called Divided We Stand, which is an account of the ERA fight just in the year 1977.

It's crazy.

Of course, Right Wing Women by Andrea Dworkin, which I already read from.

And I also read For My Sins a couple of Schlafly's own books.

I did not read all of them.

She was incredibly prolific.

But I relied a lot on A Choice Not an Echo, which is her 1964 book, Advancing the Presidential Campaign of Barry Goldwater, and The Power of the Positive Woman, which is the first of her many anti-feminist books, kind of like a trad wife-style self-help book before the term.

And I relied heavily on what is the only major Schlafly biography on the market, Phyllis Schlafly and Grassroots Conservatism by David Critchlow.

It's a kind of hagiographic account.

Critchlow is clearly a conservative.

He believes that Schlafly was, you know, fighting this righteous fight in bringing the party further to the right, but it is quite thorough.

It was published while she was still alive, I believe in like 2006.

She died in...

2016, so it doesn't get into things like the very end of her life and her support for Donald Trump's presidential campaign in the 2016 cycle.

But oddly, there has been been no big biographical book on Schlafly from the left.

And that kind of surprised me.

And I think that maybe it's because generally nobody buys books anymore.

Books on gender history especially don't sell.

But I also think it's because maybe nobody wants to spend so much time thinking about her.

Yeah.

Like, I gotta say, I kept waiting to be sort of like begrudgingly charmed.

or to admire her.

Yeah.

Like the way I kind of did a little bit with Roy Cohn, who is so fucking evil.

But when we did those episodes and I was researching all the stuff about Roy Cohn, I was like, man,

this was a guy who was kind of funny.

And she is, she's got no sense of humor.

She can troll, but she's just a joyless, relentless, evil bitch.

So let's get into it.

As a guy who's still on page 350 of Sam Tannenhaus' Buckley biography, like

I don't know how far I'd make it into a 1,000-page Schlafly biography.

Well, Schlafly was not born Phyllis Schlafly.

She was born Phyllis Stewart in St.

Louis, Missouri on August 15th, 1924.

And she was the first of just two children, both daughters, born to Bruce and O'Deal Stewart.

Her mother, O'Deal, went by daddy or daddy,

and they were devout Catholics.

Her mother, by all accounts, was like a really formidable broad.

Her dad was this like

old guy who wasn't good for much.

So St.

Louis, when Phyllis was born, was a much, much bigger city than it is now.

It was like 800,000 people.

It's now like 300,000 people.

And pretty soon after she was born, it got hit really hard by the Great Depression.

There was massive unemployment, poverty, and depopulation from which St.

Louis never really recovered.

And among those who lost work in the great economic cataclysm of 1930 was Phyllis's father who lost his job as a machinist.

She was supported by her mother.

Phyllis, along with her mother and sister, spend some time in LA actually because her mom has like a rich uncle there who they're crashing with.

But while they're in California, her father stays in St.

Louis and looks for work and fails to find it.

Wow.

The situation doesn't really resolve until Phyllis's mother, Dottie, goes to work and she works as a teacher and as a librarian, and she's working these nine and ten-hour days.

Mom is eventually, she actually also starts volunteering at her children's Catholic school on the weekends, like doing the library cataloging at this Catholic school in exchange for her kids' tuition so that they can send them to a Catholic school instead of to a public school.

And this is a long period of unemployment in which Phyllis's Phyllis's father, Bruce, refuses to accept any unemployment benefits.

And he says that he will not participate in what he called, quote, Roosevelt's assault on free enterprise.

Wow.

So instead he relied on his wife.

Yeah, exactly.

And I'm interested in this statement from her father because I think it clues in to some of the trends in like the conservatism of the old right that were starting to form Phyllis's young mind.

What do you know about the old right?

So this is basically the Lindbergh right, right?

Like the kind of stuff that they all had to disavow after World War II because it all tended to kind of cozy up to the Nazis, right?

So this would be Father Coughlin in Chicago, right?

The radio preacher, America First,

Mothers Against the War, right?

You know, a conservatism that was comfortable with traditions even when they included fascism and very frank

revisionism on the Civil War, right?

Which is both things that the conservative movement under Buckley would sort of put some distance between it and that, right?

You're describing the nativist tradition.

Phyllis Schlafly is only born 60 years after the Civil War ends, right?

So those values, those arguments, those milieus are still hanging on.

But there's a lot of maybe even more recent like anti-immigrant sentiment.

There's a ton of anti-integration anti-integration and pro-Jim Crow sentiment, right?

There's a like sense of suspicion about newcomers, right?

And there is a sympathy for these far-right regimes emerging in Europe that are seeming to reflect some of the same concerns, right?

And then

you also get this different right-wing politics because the old right really hates Roosevelt.

FCR.

Yeah.

And they hate what he does with the New Deal.

And suddenly they have this non-racial ideological complaint, or you know, nominally non-racial ideological complaint.

You scratch a New Deal skeptic and a racist bleeds, but this is something that they are able to start pitching to different kinds of voters.

The people who maybe wouldn't have been super agitated by white supremacist sentiments before can get pretty agitated by anti-New Deal sentiments, especially as we're going to see when that gets sort of merged with a broader post-war anti-communism.

And this is something that finds a little bit of new purchase.

There's lots of opposition to Roosevelt running for a third term that was not yet unconstitutional, but it was non-traditional and people found it really arrogant and kind of scary.

And then, you know, post-World War II, the right has to downplay a lot of its own like historical anti-Semitism, which they were pretty avowed about before.

That's now newly taboo and delegitimized after the Holocaust.

But it finds a new enemy in the threat of communist Russia and in the rise of this like nascent early post-war civil rights movement.

Yeah.

The other thing that the old right was during the Roosevelt years was just totally out in the desert.

These were people who were just like not within shouting distance of power or the mainstream, right?

And especially during World War II, when people would exactly remember what what they'd said about Hitler, right?

They were very much out of favor.

And one of the things that I think is interesting is that Schlafly, sort of midway through her career before the ERA, often sort of will take credit for her book that we'll get to, A Choice Not an Echo, for establishing Barry Goldwater as the presidential nominee in 1964.

Now, fun fact, Goldwater is he got fucking crushed, right?

But she runs around with these bona fides that are based on something that a lot of other Republicans and even other conservatives tended to regard as an absolute disaster.

But part of that is that someone who is kind of an old South romantic plus an anti-Roosevelt, anti-New Deal person in the 40s and early 50s is really a lost cause kind of person, right?

Like they see themselves as consummate outsiders and always shut out from power.

You're giving us spoilers because we've got Phyllis's opposition to the Civil Rights Act coming up later in the episode.

Oh, yeah.

But let's stay in the 1940s.

Funnily enough, let's stay in in the 1940s a little bit longer is something that both Maura Donegan says and John Roberts.

That's it.

That's a joke.

One thing I wanted to emphasize before we go any further, or at least provide a little bit of context to her later anti-feminism, is what the weird gender messages were like for girls of Phyllis's generation growing up in the late 1930s and early 1940s, right?

It's genuinely kind of a fascinating gender politics moment with some interesting resonances for our own, right?

Because like Schlafly's mother's generation had been the generation that came of age during the suffrage fight, right?

Yeah.

And those women, a lot of them, had made like pretty big strides towards social equality.

This tends to get written out of popular like historicizations of like the 1920s and early 30s, but it was a big deal.

In the years following the passage of the 19th Amendment, a lot of women were getting college educations, big ones, good ones.

They were living alone in cities.

They were having sex before marriage.

And they were working more and more in respected and remunerative fields, right?

This was...

as like any historian worth her salt will tell you, like a fairly limited trend.

It was pronounced among the white middle classes and less pronounced among everybody else, but it was noticeable and it was really remarked upon.

Like, look at all the shit that women are doing now.

And that was a new model of women's lives that flowed from the 19th Amendment's new model of women's citizenship.

And this

really accelerated during World War II.

So men were drafted in huge numbers and women flooded into the workforce, especially in this like wartime, like munitions production boom.

Like we've all seen Rosie the Riveter, right?

That was real.

Wartime industry was powered by female labor, And those were jobs that women had not traditionally been able to have access to, right?

They were like high skill.

They were well paid.

Those are jobs that can pay you a real living wage from which you can support yourself.

So when Phyllis graduates high school, she actually gets a full ride to a small Catholic college in St.

Louis.

Wow.

Yeah.

Full scholarship.

Insane deal that I know a lot of teenagers now who would like to have.

Yeah.

Also, I mean, like the depression itself, right?

This is the Mildred Pierce generation where a lot of male-dominated fields were particularly hard hit and then women ended up having to pick up the slack, right?

Which seems to have been what happens to the Shafley family.

Exactly what happens to her parents, yeah.

Yeah.

And so Phyllis graduates high school into this environment and she gets a full ride to this like small Catholic college in St.

Louis.

But she doesn't think this school is good enough for her.

She wants to be more challenged, right?

So she gives up her scholarship and instead goes to the more rigorous and more prestigious Washington University in St.

Louis, where she has to pay tuition.

And to pay her tuition, she takes on one of these like wartime Rosie the Riveter jobs.

And Adrian, you are not going to believe what she did.

Did she rivet?

Okay, she gets a job at a munitions factory, right?

And her job is as a munitions tester.

So literally, Phyllis Schlafly

spends all day shooting guns.

Yes.

Oh my God.

I mean, is that not insane?

It's perfect.

I took one look at her and you're like, this lady needs to be trusted with a handgun.

So this is like this era when this new American woman, like Phyllis, they're all flooding into the factories.

But the shift in gender relations that that was causing was beginning to generate a lot of like cultural unease, right?

So even before the end of the war, you start to see this growing sentimentalization of like private family life with strictly defined gender roles that discourage women's paid work outside the home and work in non-caregiving fields.

Right, there's this big emerging sort of zeitgeist that emphasizes that the state of affairs with women working and supporting themselves and doing like non-feminine work has to be a state of exception, right?

It's legitimate only for the remainder.

And after her college graduation, summa cum laude, fiveota kappa, obviously, Phyllis moves to Cambridge for a graduate program in politics.

And she's already betraying a conservative bent in her graduate work, but she's not crazy yet, right?

She is a conservative.

She is not yet a member of the far right.

I see.

In grad school, for instance, she actually writes pretty enthusiastically about the formation of the United Nations, which is something she'll later like rail against as this like hideous breach on American sovereignty, right?

At the time, she's like, oh, this is pretty cool.

Like, look, this is a new experiment in like mutual international governments, right?

Her professors note that she would have been a good candidate for law school, but sad, she can't go to Harvard Law because it does not admit women at the time.

Right.

So in 2013, just a couple of years before she died, she gives a speech to a group of conservative activists where she recounts this period of her life and she says, listen, I got a degree from Harvard.

I competed with the boys in graduate school.

There was no discrimination.

Nobody stopped me.

I was able to do it because I was tough enough.

I was strong enough.

The feminists had nothing to do with this, right?

I wasn't kept down.

I was just strong enough to make it.

And this is a

inaccuracy because in fact, Phyllis Schlafly did not get a degree from Harvard.

She got a degree from Radcliffe because Harvard did not award degrees to women.

Right.

So Phyllis has this like new master's degree.

She's all bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, and she really wants to work in the federal government.

So she's hopping down to DC.

She's got these incredible recommendation letters from her professors.

Everybody's very impressed with her as a student, but she can't get a job.

She tries to get a job at the Bureau of the Budget.

She gets turned down.

She tries to get a job at the Tennessee Valley Authority.

She gets turned down because all of these agencies where she thinks she can be of use are saying, no, we really only want to hire men.

And particularly, we really only want to hire returning veterans, right?

Right.

This is the moment where sort of the feminine mystique picks up, right?

That there is a deliberate push to get women back out of the workforce in the immediate post-war era.

Same as with the GI Bill.

It was basically like to stave off the possibility of male mass unemployment.

And so basically they just decimated the female workforce in order to make room.

Is that right?

Yeah, more or less.

You know, the economy is contracting because the government is no longer spending as much as it was on these like wartime industries, right?

And so there's fewer jobs to go around, and those jobs are being reserved for men, which at the time is legal because, again, this is before the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which makes it illegal at the federal level to discriminate in employment on the basis of sex.

It's totally legal for all of these guys to say, as they did to Phyllis Schlafly, like, listen, we really kind of wanted a man for this job, and we're really, really looking for a veteran.

So sorry, you've got to go elsewhere.

Should have had an amendment.

What she does manage to find is this kind of lowly job as a researcher at a new conservative think tank, which has just a handful of employees, which was then called the American Enterprise Association and now goes by a name you might have heard, the American Enterprise Institute.

What do you know about the AEI?

I think that, in a way, Phyllis Schlafly got her wish of working for the federal government in the sense that the American Enterprise Institute at the time may not have been the federal government, but it is sure as shit this federal government now, basically.

Yeah, the AEI, or I guess AEA at the time, right?

Yeah.

Today, it's sort of a standard issue right-wing think tank and one of a bajillion of them, but one of the longest running.

It was sort of the first in the field.

It was the first institution that sort of sought to unify the fractured right and was trying to galvanize and connect the various strands of conservative thought that were sort of sloshing about, the irritable gestures seeking to resemble ideas, as Lionel Trolling described them, right?

So, America First People, sort of business conservatives.

This is something that Kevin Cruz has talked a lot about.

Religious conservatives, religious traditionalists, and anti-communist and anti-New Deal kind of initiatives.

They're trying to create like an umbrella organization for the whole spectrum of the political right.

And this is where Phyllis Schlafly will like credit a lot of her political education, right?

Like this is where people sort of start to identify her as having a germ of real right-wing radicalism, as opposed to like mere conservative commitments, because she's in this sort of like heady space of the AEA.

But look, it's a dead-end job, right?

She's like basically just writing reports on other people's research.

There's no opportunity for advancement.

And she's really ambitious.

She wants bigger things.

So what she does is she actually leaves DC and moves back home to her parents' house in St.

Louis.

So there's different accounts of this, right?

Because something Schlafly always does throughout her career and up until the time she dies is refer to her work in politics as her hobby, right?

She's very dishonest, sometimes sort of like winking in performatively and sometimes in a way that seems like she wants you to believe it about the role of her political career in her life, right?

She's always like, oh, I'm just a housewife.

I do this as a hobby.

And that's not true.

She was in fact one of the most powerful political operatives in the Republican Party for a period of like some decades.

So when she describes this period of her life, we should probably not take her totally seriously when she says, I had this adventure and I was going to give up and just go to work as a librarian.

That's what she says when she talks about this time.

What she in fact did when she got back to St.

Louis was write a letter to a conservative lawyer, a guy named Claude Bakewell, who was running for Congress.

And she offered to manage his congressional campaign for him.

It was 1946.

She was 22 years old and she got the job.

And the campaign was successful.

She got this guy elected to Congress as a 22-year-old.

Wow.

And it was kind of an upset victory.

He was campaigning against a popular Democratic incumbent, and she managed to push him over the finish line.

And like most campaign managers, that job is an audition for the job of chief of staff, right?

Bakewell did not take Phyllis with him to Washington.

He talks about how impressed he was with her.

He talks about how smart she was.

He talked about how hard-boiled she was.

He's like, I would hear her and she sounded like this cigar chopping ward rep.

And then you look at her and it's like a pretty girl.

But he doesn't take her.

He's like, sorry, Toots.

And he leaves her in Missouri.

Wow.

And this is a period of three years where Phyllis's story goes a little sideways.

Like when you research the lives of powerful men, they don't really have these fallow periods, right?

They're like,

I went to Dalton and then I went to Yale and then I went to Harvard Law and then I went to McKinsey and it's just like bam, bam, bam, bam, bam, bam.

Straight shot.

That doesn't really happen with Phyllis, partly because unlike a lot of politicos, she sincerely did not grow up with rich parents,

but also because she's a, she's a woman, right?

Like she's getting turned down and looked over.

And she's sort of like in St.

Louis.

She gets a job working for a conservative banker.

And that guy likes her a lot.

He has her do two things.

He has her start doing financial education classes for local women's groups.

And he has her start writing his own anti-communist newsletter,

which is going to be a little bit of foreshadowing for her newsletter empire when she's running the stop ERA campaign.

And the Bercher stuff.

A lot of that is also.

It's all newsletters.

Yeah.

She was Barbie Weiss before there was a Barry Weiss.

So what she would say is the most important thing that happened during this period is that she starts exchanging letters with this ambitious and conservative lawyer, lawyer, 15 years her senior, a guy named Fred Schlafly,

who lives across the river in Illinois.

It's hard to learn much about Fred Schlafly.

We know that he liked that Phyllis was smart.

They remained married from their wedding in 1949 until his death in 1993.

They had six children.

He's described as like a big shot lawyer in the area.

And then I looked up who he was actually representing and it was like his uncle's bank.

So he had money.

He came from a rich family.

And the thing that people say about his actual character is that when he started dating Phyllis Schlafly, people were surprised because they thought he was a quote-unquote confirmed bachelor.

A husband on a low light, perhaps.

Yes.

She describes their partnership as an intellectual partnership.

She's like, I get more done because I can bounce ideas off of Frank all the time.

She's like, I'm having a conversation with an intellectual interlocutor all day, every day, which isn't really true because she was actually, in fact, quite rarely home through much of their marriage.

But, you know, in 1949, she marries this old guy.

She quits her job at the bank and she moves to Alton, Illinois to start her life as a housewife.

Sorry, the penny is dropping.

Like all her weird paperbacks and fucking newsletters always go back to Alton, Illinois.

I'm like, what's her connection?

It's literally just across the Mississippi River River.

It's literally just across the Mississippi River.

Yeah.

It's like looking at it now.

And there's Pear Marquette State Park, which is what her publishing empire is named after, Pear Marquette Press.

She's just a suburban housewife, Adrian.

She's bored out of her fucking mind.

So her thoughts inevitably turn to ICBMs.

Well, she tries to make a good go of it, right?

She's like, how can I be a conservative activist and also be a 1950s housewife?

And she joins two groups.

She joins the Illinois Federation of Republican Women, which she quickly becomes a president of and will remain the president of basically for the rest of her career.

And she also joins the good old Daughters of the American Revolution.

Are you familiar with this?

I am.

I knew about them only from Gilmore Girls.

What are they?

The DAR are sort of country club Republicans, right?

Like it's women, it tends to be kind of conservative, but like non-crazy.

It's very blue-blooded, right?

Yeah.

Which is a little bit different from the sort of anti-establishment, anti-elitist conservative that she's going to pitch herself as or sort of champion within the Republican Party.

But when she's doing her anti-ERA work, she does become,

you know, she has a very patrician affect.

She sort of drops the hard-boiledness and, you know, starts talking like she's wearing little white gloves all the time, which sometimes she literally is.

So this is an interesting mix of like class signifiers, right?

Schlafly is very much married up.

She's very much been like upwardly mobile from her pretty poor childhood to this Radcliffe degree, this rich husband.

Now she's in the DAR.

Like she has ascended to a level of elitism.

But when she's talking about intro-Republican Party politics, she's very much like the rich people are out to get us salt to the earth, real Americans, right?

So the DAR, I always assumed that the daughter's part is, at least to some extent, literal.

You have to prove some kind of bloodline descent from an ancestor in the American Revolution.

Is that right?

You know, I have actually never looked up the qualifications for membership.

This has not been on my radar as like something to do after work.

I think that's a plot point on Gilmore girls.

I'm not going to credit their accuracy too much.

Emily, you're not getting in, honey.

That is not true.

You were never going to get in.

This was a courtesy meeting because Renford is a very big deal in our circle and he's got more money than God, despite the fact that he's already paying off three other wives.

Emily, please, you don't know what you're saying.

Oh, come on.

It's always the same.

Well, I'm going to go on DAR.org to find out how to join.

You're finding it out here, listeners, how to join the DAR in case you're interested.

God, this is slow to load.

Ladies,

your web service is stuck in the revolutionary period and you need to upgrade your server.

Find a local chapter.

Cool.

You can use a chapter locator.

Connect with DAR, membership interest form.

Gather what you know.

What do you know about your family history and lineage?

Okay.

Wow.

Yeah, yeah.

So I think you're right.

She's kind of a parvenue.

But on the other hand, like DAR, I think it's not just like you're like a spiritual daughter.

It is really, there's a nativist element to it.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It's about descent.

There's a racial connotation there.

So she starts pumping out a lot of kids.

Her mother, Dottie, only had two daughters.

Phyllis has six children altogether.

I saw pictures and red sweaters.

Four sons, two daughters, and a little bit of foreshadowing.

One of these babies, her first first son, John, born in 1951, is gay, gay, gay, gay, gay.

He's a gay man.

He comes out in the early 90s after he is outed during like the height of the AIDS crisis.

And he has to sort of be like, yes, I'm a homosexual.

But he says that he is an opponent of gay rights and winds up running his mother's conservative activist organization.

So, you know, can't win them all.

Yeah, it's both the least gay and most gay thing I've ever seen a gay man do is like, I decided to embrace homophobia because mommy told me.

We got to edit this out.

No, come on.

This is hilarious.

This is the most homophobic thing I've ever said on this podcast.

I think we should get to do like a little bit of gentle homophobia.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Like once, once a month or something.

Country club homophobia.

I'm a daughter of the Stonewall Revolution.

She also becomes a big author and sort of like influential cult writer in a field called grassroots anti-communism.

Have you heard about this?

Well, yeah, now.

Yeah, so this is something that I sort of found a lot of, like just like her really voluminous output of anti-communist writings, some of which I read, some of which I just skimmed.

If you've read one, you've kind of read them all.

Like this is the thing about Schlafly is her output is enormous and it's wildly repetitive.

Yeah, and all of it is batshit insane.

I feel like this doesn't exist quite as much anymore because it's all moved onto the internet.

It's a kind of anti-communism that sort of eschews the established media and kind of dissemination ecosystems that were available in the 1950s and 60s in in favor of,

yeah, like leafleting.

Like it's all very leaflety.

All of it is always trying to sell you something.

They're always trying to subscribe to something.

No one's just going to hand you a pamphlet.

It's a pamphlet that asks something of you.

This is, I think, very common among the birchers because it is supposed to activate the mothers of America in some way, right?

It is supposed to get people to run for school board or at least ask.

really bizarre questions at school boards.

It's meant to get people shouting at their congressmen or something like that.

In the materials that I looked at, the books are real books, but they're not huge.

They're about 200 pages, will fit into just any purse and or blazer pocket.

They almost look like travel guides.

A lot of it sort of refers to each other.

Slaffley has a pamphlet called The Communist Conspiracy, which is just basically a roundup of books that people should read, all of which sound absolutely fucking unhinged.

And I tried to find some of these in the Stanford Library and it's always like, this one's lost.

Or like,

no, like, you have to get this like delivered from Livermore or something like that.

It's a whole ecosystem.

It's a little bit like the way we talk today about online radicalization, where like you fall through a YouTube rabbit hole or something like that.

This looks to me like a rabbit hole.

Like you don't read one of these, you read one and then you buy another and you buy another and you buy another.

Does that seem right?

Yeah, I think that is right.

You know, we talk about how Schlafly went from being a fairly like not crazy conservative at Radcliffe to being a

whack job, like anti-communist anti-communist bircher.

And I think part of it is that she may have just found this stuff and kept reading.

Yeah.

Sharing is a bunch of bull too and helping others.

And what's all this crap I've been hearing about tolerance?

Hmm, your ideas are intriguing to me, and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter.

But I think we have to go into retreat anyway.

And there was a lot of it.

These were like newsletters, they were pamphlets, they were circulating, yeah, like kind of informally, as you said, a lot through the mail.

And they're all about conveying communism as this like dangerous threat to america but i wanted to talk about the concept of communism

in this grassroots anti-communist literature that's like emerging in the like the late 40s and 1950s yeah because communism the way they talk about it becomes a stand-in just for the federal government and for especially sort of the legacy of the new deal right like it becomes about the government reaching into your lives this is about fluoridization it's also kind of understood as a feminizing cultural or political force, right?

Yeah, it's about awakening the, you know, American independence.

And it's about, you know, parasitically mooching off of the American taxpayer.

Later, when she'll talk about the ERA, like she will keep going like, well, women wouldn't have to work if they didn't have to pay so much in taxes,

which is just like not how math works.

But, you know, it's a sense of communism as a stand-in for everything that is threatening about the world, anything that might implicate an individual in a sense of like social responsibility to others, specifically like any government attempt to like intervene and better the lives of its citizens, right?

And so communism becomes

almost like a spiritual force, right?

They talk about like the strength and independence and like tenacity of real Americans and they oppose it to like the feminizing force of this like communist cosmopolitanism, right?

This is where I think like they start to remind me a little of Carl Schmidt.

I don't think these people are reading Carl Schmidt because I don't think they're reading much

besides other, you know, Xerox anti-communist brochures, but there is a conceptual slip that seems to be talking about anti-communism as almost a spiritual crusade.

And this becomes really core to Schlafly's thought because she starts proselytizing anti-communism specifically to Catholics, right?

Right.

She will say like, no, no, no,

you may think that as a Catholic, you have a higher loyalty than the loyalty to the politics of your country, right?

This is something that people

were still kind of thinking about Catholicism at the time, particularly because, you know, not all the Catholic white ethnics were like fully integrated into like the American white mainstream yet.

And Schlefley has no patience for that.

She's like, no, as a Catholic, as a Catholic, you have a obligation to fight communism.

So, you know, she

is making these and she's working with some people operating in this, you know,

grassroots anti-communist sort of world.

And some of this, we should say, is sincerely grassroots, right?

Some of it is cranks writing these brochures on their typewriters in their basements after their kids have gone to bed.

Some of it is also funded by these burgeoning corporate anti-communist interests that are trying to make it sort of socially taboo and politically less and less feasible for their workers to unionize, right?

Yeah.

So there's also a little bit of this like corporate money sploshing around.

So I know this part of the story a little bit because, of course, eventually these people will train their attention also to university campuses.

And some of it is just

both, right?

Porque no los dos.

There's a lot of rich weirdos who have an instinctive antipathy to the federal government and to racial integration, et cetera, et cetera.

And basically, they are that dude with the typewriter, except that their typewriter is the American Enterprise Institute.

That's dark, man.

In lieu of confiscatory taxation, I wonder if maybe we could have some sort of like babysitting enterprise where over a certain wealth threshold, like you're not allowed to pick your own media diet anymore.

Like, you're assigned like a sociology PhD who gives it all to you.

That's great.

Congratulations on your first billion dollars, man.

Here's a free subscription to Jacobin.

It's the only thing you're going to read from now on.

Here's Sid with a Septum ring.

They go by they them pronouns and they will be dictating everything you're allowed to watch and listen to.

They will freak your shit.

So, you know, Schlafly really comes to see the influence of communism everywhere.

And some of this she thinks of as like outright communist infiltration, right?

She very much believes that there is a communist conspiracy that is infiltrating the government.

But she also will talk sometimes about like the malign, nefarious, and insidious influence of like communist ideology, right?

Yeah.

So the people she comes eventually to assume and accuse of having like communist sympathies or be working for communist interests comes to extend to to Harry Truman,

Dwight Eisenhower,

Robert McNamara,

Richard Nixon,

and Henry Kissinger.

Huh.

She writes a whole book psychoanalyzing Henry Kissinger at one point.

It's called Kissinger on the Couch.

It is so anti-Semitic.

It's crazy.

I mean, shocking.

I'm shocked.

This is my shocked phase.

It's like a we didn't start the fire of lunacy.

So the sense of a vast communist conspiracy that's like infiltrating the government, it might make you think of Joe McCarthy, who she never had anything bad to say about.

But it might also make you think of the John Birch Society.

Adrian, what do you know about the John Birch Society?

The John Birch Society was founded in 1958 by Robert Welch, one of those rich people who used foundations and other people's printing presses as his freako typewriter.

Welch, I believe, was a candy heir.

He wasn't even like candy heir in the traditional sense of a Nepo baby, like your daddy ran the candy factory.

He worked for his brother, who had a successful candy company.

He was the dipshit brother of a rich guy, basically.

Being anti-communist in the 1950s, you can't swing a dead cat.

without hitting an anti-communist.

What makes the Birchers stand out is that basically they think that like the entire establishment has been subverted by communists and homosexuals or whatever, right?

They're famously bizarre.

The Birchers matter, I think, for a couple of reasons, like conspiratorial style and American right-wing politics really comes to the fore with them.

At the same time, it's also really important that the Birchers sort of become a projection screen for the other parts of the, frankly, only slightly less loony right to distance themselves from, right?

Bill Buckley's effect is often sort of described, well, he banished the Birchers.

Did he?

Not really.

What he did was he created a kind of cordon san dété around their thought and around their style of conspiracism and then tolerated anything that was outside of that specific Code d'Ance sanitail.

But it made the Birches really important because it made them the unacceptable kind of right-wing agitation that you could distinguish mainstream conservatism from.

Yeah, you know, these were the crazies, and they were something that you could define yourself against if you want, say, the racial politics of the old right, but you don't want to seem de-classe.

You don't want to seem beyond the pale, right?

Yeah.

William F.

Buckley really objected to them because they seemed crass.

Yeah.

And he was trying to cultivate this like patrician genteel kind of conservatism that was like really heavy on respectability.

The Berchers did not give a shit about respectability.

They were self-consciously unrespectable.

Yeah.

So like, how crazy were they?

I wanted to like maybe read or have you read, Adrian, for our listeners, a little bit of a Bircher internal document that I dug up from the internet.

And this is part of a long passage that starts with, this is our dear leader explaining the role of what is called the Bavarian Illuminati.

Oh, I love him already.

Feels like home.

It was in the truth in time that the founder of the John Birch Society first adopted the term insiders.

It's in all caps, which if you're not familiar with right-wing crazy is usually how you spell Jews

in your crazy pamphlets.

That's normally what is capitalized, I would say, a little bit like the three parentheses today, to refer to those who hold places in, quote, an inner core of conspiratorial power.

It was these individuals, claimed Robert Welsh, who, just as the Illuminatists in their day had used other groups and individuals, were using the communists, the anarchists, the socialists of various hues and kinds, and dozens of other groups to promote their purposes.

Interesting.

So they didn't even think it was a communist conspiracy.

They thought the communists were carrying out an Illuminati conspiracy.

Is that right?

They thought there was a vast communist conspiracy that was in turn being controlled by a vast insider conspiracy that was run

out of the families of major European bankers.

Stop me if you've heard this one before.

Yeah, we'll do the duck meme.

Which bankers, motherfucker?

This is an anti-Semitic conspiracy theory.

It's playing all the hits, and it alludes to the sense, okay, the ultra-elite are controlling things behind the scenes in pervasive but invisible ways that is hurting you.

This is just straight QAnon of all the lettre, right?

What's really interesting to me is also that I was thinking this a lot when I read Kevin Cruz's book about the sort of origins of the Christian right, that a lot of this is like the pretty wealthy or very wealthy rebelling against the ultra wealthy, right?

Like it has this very strange populism where it's like, oh, the rich are controlling everything, but this guy's rich.

This guy is a fucking candier.

Yeah.

It's like when Elon Musk talks about the elites, don't want you to know this.

And it's like, bitch, you are the elites.

They're the most elite anybody can be.

Yeah.

It's just so

wacky, right?

It reminds me of like, I have like just enough followers on the internet that sometimes I'll get like emails or voicemails from people who are like truly like having a mental health crisis.

Yeah.

And will like describe their psychosis into my inbox.

I try not to laugh at these because these are people who are suffering, but this one guy.

He left me this voicemail.

He's like, Moira,

he's like, the Illuminati are getting messages into my phone, even though I took the battery out.

And I was also like, what are you calling me on?

So because they thought the world was being run by a nefarious conspiracy of somebody, the Birchers tended to be pretty secretive and conspiratorial themselves, right?

So their membership roles were always kept a secret.

And that's a tactic that has the added bonus of allowing them to like overstate or understate their political support based on their own needs, right?

So the biggest estimates of the birchers' formal membership in the 1950s at their peak in the like late 50s, early 60s, was around like 100,000 people.

Like there's 100,000 birchers, but those estimates tended to come from liberals who wanted to paint the Republican Party as like full of these crazed conspiracist nut jobs.

And then the lower estimates estimates come in around like 24,000, 25,000 people.

But those estimates tend to come from mainline Republicans who want to paint the Birchers as this like irrelevant fringe that doesn't really count.

Right.

But they have this like central premise, right?

American values and virility are under threat from a secret network of conspiring elites.

And therefore, we need to be a secret network of, you know, the conspiring righteous.

So Schlafly, until she died, always denied being a member of the John Birch Society.

I was going to ask.

She also always refused to condemn them.

She's like, of course, I'm not a member, but I'll work with anybody who wants to work with me.

And this is also how she dealt with like women who had ties to the actual KKK, right?

Robert Welch, the founder of the Birchers, said she is one of our most loyal members.

In 2020, a bunch of Schlafly's personal files were unsealed, you know, a few years after her death.

And there were letters in there where Schlafly alludes to having been a member of the Birchers.

She says she signed up in 1959, so the year after they were formed.

And we know she was a member at least until 1964.

Oh, wow.

Probably later.

So, Schlafly is a boardhouse wife.

She's writing these insane anti-communist tracks.

She's going like more and more like pamphlet pills in Illinois.

And in 1952,

a representative from the Illinois Republican Party comes to their house and talks to Fred, Schlafly's husband.

And they're like, listen, we want you to run in the primary for your congressional district.

Fred is an empty suit.

He's got no personality whatsoever.

He says, I don't want to do it.

And Schlafly, Phyllis, says, I will.

He's like, everyone's calling me a confirmed bachelor.

Read between the lines.

I'm gay.

I mean, he did create six children.

So, you know, he's putting it, he's putting in the work.

She's running for Congress the first time at age 28.

And this is her first real taste of public attention, right?

She's been writing a lot of these pamphlets.

She hasn't gotten a lot of attention on her.

And she actually wins her primary.

She knocks out a more moderate Republican representative of like sort of the East Coast traditional moderates, and she gets the nomination.

She gets creamed in the general, right?

Right.

But this experience of media attention and of of the way she runs this first campaign is, I think,

really interesting.

It's like uncommon, but not crazy for women to run for Congress in the early 1950s.

So across the country in the 1952 midterm cycle, 29 women run for House seats and most of them lose.

And most of them don't get a lot of attention in the media.

Phyllis's race gets an unusual bit of an attention, right?

They're like Anton Housewife runs for Congress.

One headline said powder puff in, which I wouldn't even be able to discern, but apparently that made sense to the readers of the 1950s.

Since women have always been the guardians of morality in the home, she said in one interview, our country would benefit if women exercise their voting rights to restore morality to the federal government, right?

She's talking very specifically about conservatism as a moral crusade.

This is years before Jerry Falwell moral majority.

There is not really an organized Christian conservative movement at this time.

That is a later invention that Schlafly herself builds brick by brick out of the ERA campaign.

But she is already talking about conservatism as a morally superior calling.

And this is, you know, something that she will be talking about.

for years.

It's one of her main contributions to the Republican right.

And it's a very specific kind of morality, right?

It's specifically a morality in Christian conservative terms of respect for hierarchy, independence, and individual responsibility.

So she actually is asked during the course of this campaign, it's like, well, what about these welfare state programs that you oppose?

Aren't those morally motivated?

Is that not a kind of morality?

And her response is that is immoral morality.

Okay, convenient.

And, you know, she really does sort of lean in to the cute young housewife thing.

You know, she's, oh, I'm out in my district stumping, but I'm always home for dinner.

And she makes sure that she gets photographed in her kitchen with a literal tray of cookies.

And she's doing it in a way that is troubling to the distinction between irony and sincerity.

Right.

This is something I think we discovered a lot in like the alt-right when they started, you know, sort of memeifying their political commitments.

Like what's a joke and what's serious is actually not a coherent distinction.

A lot of things are a joke and serious at the same time.

And Schlafly's play on the supposed contrast between her political aspirations and her status as a housewife is both a joke and serious at the same time.

So I'm going to blow your mind a little bit right now.

Okay.

Please.

So have you ever heard the phrase, sometimes you'll see it on like a boomer woman's t-shirt at the farmer's market.

It's like a woman's place is in the house, dot, dot, dot, of representatives.

Yes, I have.

guess who said that a

oh my god

uh in fairness to her she actually said that it was her husband's joke and that she's merely repeating it oh my god it obviously isn't

it obviously isn't

so she gets her ass kicked in the general uh but eight years later she runs again in the same district and it's more or less the same story right she runs an insurgent campaign in the primary she says that her opponent both the you know republican she beats in the primary and then the Democrat she faces in the general, she calls them like both soft on communist infiltration, which is a pretty big Burchard dog whistle, right?

Right.

She casts herself as a insurgent grassroots conservative taking on the establishment and as a defender of morality.

And again, she loses, right?

But by this point in 1960, Schlafly is a figure of national importance to Republican politicos.

She has been noticed.

Like are coming in from outside of her district to stump for her, important people, including then vice president Richard Nixon.

He comes and he gives a speech in her district and is like, vote for Phyllis.

We need to bring some beauty to Washington.

We could use it.

And so people in the Republican establishment know who she is.

And she's becoming a little bit of a symbol of the far right, right?

She's got these two far right wing campaigns.

They both failed in a district that probably should have been winnable for Republicans, right?

And they have illustrated to some in the party's center that this extreme right-wing politics is like a political loser, but she has also attracted loyalty and admiration from members of the far right.

And this brings us, I think, pretty nicely to the 1960 Republican convention in Chicago.

Do you know what was happening at that Republican convention?

Yeah, so this is Nixon's coronation, first coronation.

He basically wants to take the party more to the center than it had been, right?

Put in a party platform that will endorse civil rights and desegregation.

The right wing is horrified, mad at Nixon, who had, of course, been Eisenhower's beep, so right, like mad at them for...

supporting school desegregation and something like, you know, sending the National Guard to Arkansas to ensure that African-American children could attend school with white children.

Basically, it's the first four shocks of the Goldwater Revolution, right?

It's the place where they, for the first time, flex their muscle.

The far right.

Yeah.

The far right of the party absolutely hates Eisenhower, right?

And Nixon is Eisenhower's legacy.

It's his VP standing up to become the next presidential nominee.

And this is Nixon before the Southern strategy.

That's not for another decade.

This is Nixon before he embraces racism for like cynical political concerns.

And he wants to put in like an anti-segregation plank in the platform.

It is Phyllis Schlafly at this convention in Chicago who organizes a group she calls Moral Conservatives, whose entire purpose is to get this pro-integration provision out of the platform.

And she wins.

They have to strip it out because she has organized so much opposition to this pro-integration plank.

And ultimately, the platform doesn't have it.

And she must have felt like such hot shit, right?

Like this girl is managing to make the Republican Party more racist, basically through the force of her own will and influence, right?

She has achieved a level of power that she hasn't really gotten before, even though she lost twice.

Now she's emerging kind of as a kingmaker in the Republican Party.

Wow.

Yeah.

And within 12 years, Nixon will be on tape being like, and that's why the Jews are inaudible.

Yeah, it's weird that you have to be like, the good guy in this story is one Richard Nixon.

Milhouse Nixon.

And that brings us to 1964

and the presidential campaign of Barry Goldwater.

What do you know about Senator Barry Goldwater?

A-U-H-2O.

Yeah, a far-right senator from Arizona, opposed to the Civil Rights Act, opposed to integration, and challenges basically the coastal elites, above all, I think Governor Nelson Rockefeller.

He'd written this book in 1960, 61, actually, I believe ghost written by,

was it Brent Bozell, or is it actually William F.

Buckley?

One of those ghost wrote it, The Conscience of a Conservative.

So this is sort of the coming out moment of the far right within American conservatism, coming out more than one way than one, because the Goldwater campaign was kind of like a Bernie Sanders style like rethink of what role grassroots could play in a presidential campaign, a lot of which was routed through young women.

Wasn't Hillary Clinton, in fact, a Goldwater Republican?

That's what she says.

Yeah, you are referring to Barry Goldwater's troop of weirdly sexualized supporters, the Goldwater girls.

Can you, I have put these two images in the talk.

Do you want to describe them?

Yeah, it's like rodeo fluffer.

I don't know.

They're in like

very 1964 idea of like Western clothes.

So Goldwater was from Arizona, like all bad things.

And he was challenging the East Coast establishment, right?

He like had a tan.

And a big part of his mystique was that he was this rugged Westerner.

And the Goldwater girls are wearing they've got these two images.

They've got signs that say Goldwater for president.

They are wearing these clinched little waists with these big A-line, ugly, like athletic team yellow skirts and these little matching white western blouses and little cheeky little kerchiefs.

White gloves.

White gloves and big stupid cowboy hats that are tied under their chins with straps.

And the girls were a big ambassador for Goldwater's campaign, right?

It was a sort of endorsement of his masculinity, which was self-consciously rugged.

And also, big thing you have to remember about Barry Goldwater is that not only was he a grassroots hit with the Republican base, he was this like runaway candidate whose campaign the Republican establishment couldn't like check, even though they wanted to.

It reminded a lot of people of Barry Goldwater when Donald Trump first came on the scene in 2015, 2016 in that primary.

But he was also a huge fucking racist who opposed and voted against the Civil Rights Act, right?

So the election of Goldwater was an explicit rebuke to the Eisenhower part of the party, to the

Rockefeller part of the party.

And at that convention, right here in San Francisco at the Cow Palace, actually.

Cow Palace, yeah.

Nelson Rockefeller, in his concession speech after he loses the primary, warns against Goldwater's quote-unquote extremism, which is in Rockefeller's parlance, kind of a euphemism or a code word for his racism.

And Goldwater replies, extremism in defense of liberty is no vice.

Vice.

He's talking literally about segregation.

I mean, Rockefeller really ate his words because, of course, the 1964 election is famously close.

A real, real nail biter there for non-American listeners.

I believe Goldwater carried Arizona, Mississippi, Georgia, Alabama, and one other.

So, yeah, this is about as much of a drubbing as someone can receive in presidential politics in the United States.

He basically only got the Klan vote in the general.

Like, basically, if only Klan members had voted, Goldwater could have won.

But, you know, this was a really ugly primary, right?

Yeah.

And Phyllis Schlafly puts herself directly into the middle of this primary, throws her full weight behind Goldwater.

And this is the publication of her first book, A Choice, Not an Echo.

Choice, Not an Echo.

And, you know, she alleges in this book, it's a pro-Goldwater book.

It's specifically for Goldwater's campaign.

It's specifically for his primary campaign.

And she says in this book that there is a conspiracy of Republican elites who are suppressing the choices of the real Republicans, the Volk, the people who have their spirit embodied in Barry Goldwater, because they don't want the real Americans to be able to make a choice.

They just want to echo what the Democrats are doing.

And Schlafly claims that this book is self-published and that it goes on to sell 3 million copies, which is an absurd bestseller for a nonfiction book.

That would be ridiculous now.

Like, I think the average nonfiction book sells like 5,000 copies or probably somewhat less at this point.

She says hers sold 3 million.

Wow.

Really, this book is not self-published.

It is published by a shill company set up by the John Birch Society.

Right.

The Birchers, in classic right-wing think-tank fashion, they buy hundreds of thousands of copies of this book basically from themselves to artificially make the book a bestseller.

But where the book actually has an impact is in the California primary, which is where it comes down to the wire between Rockefeller and Goldwater.

And this book is everywhere in California in the months and weeks before that primary election.

And Goldwater wins it.

He wins it.

And Schlafly takes credit for delivering him the nomination.

And then he gets his ass absolutely handed to him in the fucking general.

Now there's some anti-Schlafly sentiment within the Republican Party.

There's a lot of these sort of establishment, less racist East Coast elites who are like, this lady's a crank and she's making us look bad and she's leading us to bad decisions that are making us lose elections, right?

In 1970, Schlafly runs for a third time.

And she thinks that this redistricting and her increased public profile will finally propel her to victory and deliver her to Congress.

She really wants to be in Congress and she loses again.

And this is kind of a dark night of the soul for Phyllis.

The Civil Rights Act passed.

The right wing of the Republican Party got humiliated in the 64 election.

After 1964, Lyndon Johnson has a huge mandate.

And in the late 60s and early 70s, the civil rights movement has sparked a broader new left.

It looks like the left is really on the up and up.

And even the Birchers aren't really feeling like home to her anymore because as the Cold War has dragged on,

She has gotten more and more convinced that what we need to do to fight communism is build a lot of nuclear missiles and develop the quote-unquote capacity to strike first, right?

She's gunning for like preemptive nuclear war against the Soviets.

Yeah.

Against the Vietnamese, in fact.

That was Barry Goldwater who said we have to nuke the Vietnamese.

He wanted to nuke Chinese supply lines in Vietnam.

He didn't win, thank God, or we would never be here.

But she is looking at the birchers who are like, no, no, no, there's still massive communist infiltration.

It's like, there's not really even an American Communist Party anymore.

You know, like she thinks that nobody has the right priorities and she feels really kind of like isolated and adrift and alone and like she's suffered this big setback from the high of 1960 to the low of 1970.

It's a steep fall for her.

And so this is where during a dark night of the soul, she pulls over on the side of a highway and she sees a billboard and that billboard says, vote for the ERA.

And she says, thank God I found my calling.

I don't know that it happened like that.

Phyllis Schlafly has her own account of the discovery of the issue that I do not think we can trust.

No, mine is better.

But that is

brilliant foreshadowing for what we're going to talk about next week.

Awesome.

Well, thank you so much for walking me through this first chapter of Phil Schlafi's life, which I really didn't know nearly as much about.

And as I was sort of going through the archive, I was like, holy shit, I did not realize just her level and depth of engagement with these people.

Perfect.

So I think we're well teed up for a memorable second episode.

And for now, just a big thanks to you for delving into this woman's life.

And thank you to all of our listeners.

As always, we are In Bed with the Right.

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