H-NET BOOK REVIEW
Published by H-Pol@h-net.msu.edu (February 2006)

Donald T. Critchlow. _Phyllis Schlafly and Grassroots Conservatism: A
Woman's Crusade_. Politics and Society in Twentieth-Century America
Series. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005. xi + 422 pp.
Bibliography and index. $29.95 (cloth), ISBN 0-6910-7002-4.

Reviewed for H-Pol by Jonathan J. Bean, Department of History, Southern
Illinois University Carbondale

Mrs. Republican

In this superbly researched work, Donald Critchlow explores the
controversial career of Republican activist and anti-Equal Rights
Amendment stalwart Phyllis Schlafly. Critchlow successfully connects
Schlafly to the larger political landscape that this
housewife-lawyer-writer blazed through from the 1950s to the present.
The full story of Schlafly's life is well worth reading because she was
emblematic of "grassroots conservatism"--a social movement of moral
populists that "has transformed American politics" by making the
Republican Party dominant in all three branches of government (p. ix).
To understand the rise of the modern GOP, one needs to study the key
role played by Schlafly and others in galvanizing a movement based on
religious and cultural traditionalism. Furthermore, Schlafly's
polarizing influence helped spark the "culture wars" that still rage
over issues such as abortion, women's rights, education, and religion in
the public square.

Critchlow's work reflects the recent turn to social histories of
American conservatism, a departure from the early focus on conservatism
as an intellectual movement. The classic work here, of course, is George
Nash's _The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America_ (1976).
Critchlow makes a strong case that the grassroots nature of conservative
activism, as opposed to elite conservative thought, drove the Republican
Party's turn to the Right in the 1950s and 1960s. Grassroots
conservatives, particularly those in the Midwest, gravitated toward
visceral "gut" issues such as opposition to
communism and feminism. Laced with comments by Schlafly's followers,
Critchlow's book reveals the passions of ordinary conservatives. He
concludes that the social, rather than fiscal, strand of conservatism
triumphed, partly because liberalism imploded, and partly because many
women felt liberal policies threatened their families, churches, and
schools. These women, Critchlow argues, were acting in the "moral
republican" tradition, and in so doing became morally minded Republicans
as well.

Critchlow begins with the conservative icon's early life and covers her
career chronologically. Born to a devoutly Catholic family in St. Louis,
Phyllis's parents raised their daughters to be ambitious. Reared by a
strong, college-educated mother who worked during the Great Depression
to keep the family intact, young Phyllis Stewart learned the value of
family, motherhood, hard work, sacrifice, and education. As a young
college student, Phyllis also worked full-time
in a wartime factory. She was apolitical until she secured a job as a
policy analyst with the American Enterprise Association, then the only
conservative "think tank" in Washington. Steeped in conservative
thought, she held the position for one year and never turned back after
this. She returned to St. Louis, married attorney Fred Schlafly, moved
to Alton, Illinois, and started a family. Fred furthered her political
education by sharing his thoughts on the need for moral
virtue as a bulwark against collectivism. This moral republicanism
became the principle guiding Phyllis through fifty years of political
action.

During the 1950s and 1960s, Schlafly was tirelessly active in Republican
Party politics. She twice ran unsuccessfully for Congress, arguing each
time that women had a duty to be politically active: "I think," she
campaigned in 1952, "that women should get into politics and do
something about" the issues of the day. Two themes defined Schlafly and
other Midwestern conservatives of this era: populist opposition to the
Eastern establishment and staunch anti-communism. They were also
fiercely loyal to the Republican Party, despite its constant betrayal of
conservative candidates and principles. High
taxes were a pocketbook issue for conservative Republicans, especially
women, but the key issue was Communism. In popular brochures and books,
Schlafly advocated a strong "America First" defense and criticized Korea
and Vietnam as entangling wars designed by the Communists to weaken
America's defense. Shut out from the mainstream media, Schlafly and
other grassroot anti-communists took to radio. Interestingly, while
favoring a strong military, Schlafly "called for an end of the draft and
the creation of a volunteer army" long before the antiwar movement of
the 1960s made this a political necessity (p. 55). Consistent with her
view of womanhood, Schlafly argued that the draft invaded the home by
involuntarily taking men away from their families.

Contradicting other scholars who interpret grassroots conservatism as
white racist "backlash," Critchlow demonstrates that racial issues were
not important to Midwestern conservatives. Keeping in line with the
Republican Party platform, Schlafly was for civil rights legislation yet
rarely discussed it. Communism and religion played much larger roles in
Schlafly's world. The slogan of grassroots conservatives might have
been, "It's Communism, Stupid!" In his early chapters, Critchlow
illuminates the insular world of grassroots anti-communists, with their
loose network of small and obscure organizations. Religious life became
more ecumenical as Catholics and evangelical Protestants united to
spread the anti-communist gospel.
This early ecumenism echoed loudly in the ERA battle to come in the
1970s. One of the most remarkable achievements of grassroots
conservatism, noted by Critchlow, is that Protestants and Catholics
overcame age-old animosities to battle common enemies: Communists and
liberals.

Schlafly and her fellow grassroots conservatives burst on the national
scene in 1964, with the publication of her best-selling _A Choice Not an
Echo_ and the nomination of Barry Goldwater as the Republican candidate
for president. _A Choice Not an Echo_ blamed GOP "kingmakers" for
selecting moderate-to-liberal candidates who pleased the Eastern elite
but did not appeal to conservative Republicans. Although the book did
not carry Goldwater to the White House, it helped to popularize
conservative thought among "average Republicans" and "little old ladies
in tennis shoes," leading many to become active locally (p. 128). After
the election, Schlafly formed her Eagle Forum network to provide an
alternative to the Establishment wing of the Republican Party.

Schlafly's work at the grassroots level paid off when Congress passed
the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) in 1972 and sent it to the states for
ratification. After thirty states ratified the amendment, Schlafly
rallied opposition with her STOP-ERA organization. Defending women's
privileges and attacking the "radical" agenda of the pro-ERA forces,
which included issues such as gay rights and abortion, Schlafly led a
"woman's crusade" that lit a fire under state legislators across the
country. A harbinger of the Christian Right, the successful STOP-ERA
movement gathered religious women and men together in common cause
against feminism. In his chapter on the ERA, Critchlow spends
considerable time analyzing the social dynamics
behind the STOP-ERA movement, an analysis that is largely missing from
the straight political history of earlier chapters.
Here he hits his stride with a riveting social history of the Right's
revival. Without STOP-ERA, the amendment would have passed, but
Critchlow notes that the condescending and hysterical antics of pro-ERA
forces were equally devastating to their own cause.

The last chapter of Phyllis Schlafly sums up her political career since
1980. With the fall of Communism, Schlafly focused more on threats to
family and religious values. In the role of elder stateswoman of the
GOP, she remained active in turning the party into a perpetual campaign
vehicle for traditional values. Win or lose, for better and worse,
Republican
presidential candidates have found that rhetoric that embraces social
conservatism is easier to sell to the "grassroots" than cuts in Big
Government that never happen.

There are limits to any case study. Critchlow concedes that "not all
members of the Republican Right were religious and cultural
traditionalists" (p. 10). The Midwestern conservatives that populated
Schlafly's world were different from the grassroots conservatives Lisa
McGirr found a bastion of economic conservatism in Orange County,
California.[1] Her crusading women also differed from the increasingly
libertarian Young Americans for Freedom.[2] Business conservatives,
managing large firms or small, also need further study. Schlafly also
had a blind spot concerning civil rights; obsessed with foreign policy,
she missed the boat on an issue that resulted in the near-total loss of
black Republican votes, which were still important during the 1950s and
early 1960s.

While carefully, and fairly, depicting the views of Schlafly's
opponents, Critchlow's narrative often reads from her point of view
because he lets the voice of this grassroots conservative speak for
itself. Nonetheless, he avoids the biographer's sin of associating too
closely with his subject. Schlafly's opponents--feminists, in
particular--are likely to squirm at his depiction of pro-ERA activists
as inept tragicomic radicals who "just didn't get" the political system;
yet there is truth to this characterization and he cites postmortems by
thoughtful feminists echoing this theme.

There are occasional minor omissions. For example, in 1957, Schlafly
invited former presidential candidate T. Coleman Andrews to speak at a
local conservative club although he was "worried about receiving
unfavorable publicity" (p. 69). Critchlow fails to give the reason for
the controversy: Andrews ran on the States Rights ticket in 1956,
sandwiched between Strom Thurmond (1948) and Orval Faubus (1960).
Critchlow's oversights are few and far between and do not detract from
the importance of the work.

Critchlow shows, but does not emphasize, the extent to which the
Republican Party betrayed Schlafly and grassroots conservatives again
and again. From Eisenhower's nomination over Taft in 1952 to the
election of George Bush in 2004, the social conservative base has
received little more than lip service--a fact evident throughout but
without much comment until the final paragraph of the book. A richer
analysis could explore how the social conservatives triumphed on
single-interest causes such as the ERA or the Defense of Marriage Act,
but were largely subsumed by party politics in other areas. "Stand by
your Party" was Schlafly's hallmark, yet the Grand Old Party rarely
stood with social conservatives. Indeed, the only authentic conservative
president, Ronald Reagan, was much more interested in economic issues
than the social agenda of Schlafly, et al. In short, the book could have
been improved with a general analysis of the state of conservatism in
the late twentieth century. Is it "dead" as argued by David Frum because
social conservatives paved the way for the ultimate "triumph of
politics," pork barrel spending and "Big Government conservatism?"[3]

Moreover, were Schlafly's victories mere detours in an elite-driven
liberalization of social policy? After all, the ERA may be dead but its
predicted consequences--feminization of the military, gay marriage, for
example, have come to pass by other means. How did Schlafly feel about
expending so much energy on a party that took her supporters for
granted? Bitterness burst out in _A Choice Not an Echo_ but did she
doubt the GOP at other critical junctures? Or was she ever
the steely party operative? If Schlafly had doubts they are either
missing from her rich archive of personal papers, or she did not commit
them to paper. However, there are hints throughout Critchlow's
manuscript that Schlafly realized the need to keep one foot outside the
Republican Party while remaining loyal to the GOP during elections. This
tension between her own agenda and that of the Republican establishment
might have come forth in oral interviews with Schlafly, which Critchlow
decided not to conduct in order to maintain distance from his subject.

_Phyllis Schlafly and Grassroots Conservatism_ is a tour de force. By
situating an important political figure in a broader social movement,
Critchlow contributes greatly to our understanding of American politics
in the last half of the twentieth century. As literature on the
conservative movement continues to flourish, inspired by works like this
one, we should have a much better grasp of the Right-handed side of
politics in the years to come.

Notes

[1]. Lisa McGirr, _Suburban Warriors: The Origins of the New American
Right_
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002).

[2]. Gregory Schneider, _Cadres for Conservatism: Young Americans for
Freedom and the Rise of the Contemporary Right_ (New York: New York
University Press, 1999).

[3]. David Frum, _Dead Right_ (New York: HarperCollins, 1995).



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