00:00:00.000So, Adrian, today we're talking about one of the biggest forces in 20th century American conservatism,
00:00:21.600a person whose influence on the Republican Party laid the groundwork for the presidencies of Ronald Reagan and Donald Trump,
00:00:28.260who brought once-fringed conspiratorial reactionary thought into the mainstream,
00:00:33.840who laid the blueprint for the Christian right,
00:00:36.680defeated a constitutional amendment for women's equality,
00:00:39.340and built the institutional mechanisms that continue to harness misogyny
00:00:43.740as one of the most potent forces in American political life.0.77
00:00:47.120And so I ask you, my friend, what do you know about Phyllis Schlafly?
00:00:53.020Yeah, so first off, I know that she was played by none other than Cate Blanchett,
00:00:57.600And so that's always who I'll be picturing.
00:01:00.020I also should mention that in preparation for this episode, you did most of the research or did all the research.
00:01:05.800I did delve into the archives and wanted to get a sense of this person as well.
00:01:09.900And I basically came away with questions that I think I'll be posing to you today.0.90
00:01:15.140I know she was a right-wing operative.
00:01:17.380She sort of comes out of the far-right, really bircher wing of the Republican Party, and I think is instrumental in engineering the takeover from the more Rockefeller wing of the party in the 60s, it seems to me.0.53
00:01:35.140She's a big Goldwater person and helps mainstream far-right Republicanism.
00:01:40.460And then, of course, she becomes most important or most well-known and most Cate Blanchett 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?
00:02:00.520And 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.0.70
00:02:14.940Yeah, 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 like give us a spiel on what the ERA was?
00:02:25.880Right, 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.
00:02:42.880So it's a little bit like the relationship between the 14th and 15th Amendments, right? It's supposed to put meat on the bones of abstract rights. Do I have that right?
00:02:53.340Yeah. You know, this was brought about, really, it was a brainchild of the first wave of feminism, right? 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?0.99
00:03:21.200So 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.
00:03:36.340Period. And so this gets revived in the second wave.
00:03:39.280The first wave first conceives of this and then the second wave really embraces it notably by Betty Friedan, right?
00:03:44.940Yeah, 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.
00:03:57.980And she gets them to embrace the ERA, sort of not without controversy, right?
00:04:04.260Like a lot of women's auxiliaries to labor unions wind up like leaving now because labor unions were traditionally opposed to the ERA.
00:04:11.740It was something that she had to really fight for, but she really believed it would be the key to unlocking all these, like, subsequent legal victories.
00:04:19.840And at the time, basically, people agreed with her.
00:04:23.440Everyone was like, yeah, that sounds basically reasonable.
00:04:25.940It was a non-controversial addition to the Constitution.
00:04:31.280People thought, yes, this is an obvious statement of principle.
00:04:35.220We believe that everybody is equal, and that should be true in the law for women as well.
00:04:41.560So 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.
00:04:57.760It'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.1.00
00:05:21.640Even 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.
00:05:43.020and that she really started much more of as a foreign policy hawk.
00:05:47.680And so we should maybe flag for listeners right at the outset
00:05:51.420that this is going to be the first part of a two-parter.
00:05:53.780So we're going to give you all the ERA stuff at the beginning
00:05:57.000to kind of understand why we're talking about this person at all.
00:06:00.900But please don't be surprised if there's actually not that much ERA talk at the end of it
00:06:07.660Yes, we're going to do basically everything up to when she joins the ERA fight today, right?
00:06:13.020Because I think what's really important to understand about Schlafly is that she is not just this big successful political misogynist.
00:06:21.920She is really this kind of like animating spirit of the far right for decades through the mid 20th century.
00:06:31.300So she understood the ERA fight as a continuation of what she had been doing on the Republican right for years by that point.
00:06:41.320She 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?
00:06:54.640She was very much in the, like, just nukem camp of the Cold War.0.53
00:06:58.840And her work against the ERA, you know, it centered around the rhetoric of preserving femininity.0.98
00:07:06.300But her work on foreign policy was very differently gendered.0.99
00:07:11.480It 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, violence, just maximal capacity for violence.
00:07:33.900She was incredibly self-disciplined and strategic, the way I think of, like, a Dick Cheney as being.1.00
00:07:39.180but she also had this she had this kind of cerebral quality to her evil she was smart
00:07:43.120but she was also just conspiratorial and deluded and out there she understood the world as a really
00:07:51.160terrifying place and really believed that she was one of very few people who were tough enough to
00:07:55.600handle it right and most conspicuous about her i think is that schlafly throughout her whole career
00:08:01.640the periods we're going to cover today and then also the periods we're going to cover next week
00:08:06.220Like, 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.
00:08:25.820And just really quickly, I'm going to read this quote about Phyllis Schlafly from Andrea Dworkin's Right Wing Women, which I think gives, like, a pretty decent sketch of just who this person was as a character.
00:08:37.700Phyllis Schlafly, the right's not-born-again philosopher of the absurd, is not having a hard time.
00:08:44.040She seems possessed by Machiavelli, not Jesus.
00:08:47.600It appears that she wants to be the prince.
00:08:50.260She might be viewed as that rare woman of any ideological persuasion, who really does
00:08:54.980see herself as one of the boys, even as she claims to be one of the girls.
00:09:00.000Unlike most other right-wing women, Schlafly, in her written and spoken work, does not acknowledge
00:09:05.340experiencing any of the difficulties that tear women apart.0.77
00:09:09.520In the opinion of many, her ruthlessness as an organizer is best demonstrated by her
00:09:14.780demagogic propaganda against the Equal Rights Amendment, though she also waxes eloquent
00:09:19.820against reproductive freedom, the women's movement, big government, and the Panama Canal
00:09:25.020Treaty. Her roots, and perhaps her heart such as it is, are in the old right, but she remained
00:09:31.020unknown to any significant public until she mounted her crusade against the Equal Rights
00:09:34.660Amendment. At any rate, she seems to be able to manipulate the fears of women without experiencing
00:09:39.800them. So this is like a really cold-blooded political strategist, right? Somebody who's
00:09:45.800just incredibly calculating and at the same time kind of fucking wacky, right? She's very, very0.98
00:09:52.980realistic about how to get what she wants out of people who she assumes to be weaker than her,
00:09:59.000but she's not really realistic about a lot of her perceptions of the world. So I think that's
00:10:04.500like attention that I hope we get to sort of dive into.
00:10:06.620In digging into her writings and digging into just also the way they circulated, right?
00:10:13.320The ERA defeat really was about carrying far-right ideas into liberal media, into polite media,
00:10:20.420into the upper echelons of Republican politics.
00:10:23.480And this from someone who, I mean, just to give you an idea, I found this mailer that
00:10:28.200apparently she sent out with a picture of her children.
00:10:33.180There are six children dressed in red and white for Christmas with the big lettering next to it.
00:10:38.380Will your future Christmases be as happy as this picture of Phyllis Schlafly's children?
00:10:43.980And it's an ad for a book called Strike from Space.
00:10:49.620She 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.
00:11:42.800But to those of you who study the American right a little bit,1.00
00:11:45.540this is classic far-right fringy shit.1.00
00:11:50.660This is like, would you please subscribe to my newsletter shit?0.99
00:11:53.200And 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.0.83
00:12:03.500You know, it is a recurring theme of our era that I was comforted to find replicated in this part of the past.1.00
00:12:12.140That part of being on the left is the humiliation of losing to these fucking people who are such clowns.1.00
00:12:21.840I 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.
00:12:30.160So 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.
00:12:39.620There'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.
00:13:20.760And I relied heavily on what is the only major Schlafly biography on the market, Phyllis Schlafly and Grassroots Conservatism by David Critchlow.
00:14:25.520Like, the way I kind of did a little bit with Roy Cohn, who is so fucking evil.
00:14:29.120But 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.0.78
00:15:40.240And pretty soon after she was born, it got hit really hard by the Great Depression.
00:15:45.720There 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.
00:16:04.500Phyllis, along with her mother and sister, spend some time in L.A., actually, because her mom has, like, a rich uncle there who they're crashing with.
00:16:15.020But while they're in California, her father stays in St. Louis and looks for work and fails to find it.
00:16:23.280The 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.
00:16:38.020Eventually, 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.
00:16:54.360And this is a long period of unemployment in which Phyllis's father, Bruce, refuses to accept any unemployment benefits.
00:17:05.800And he says that he will not participate in what he called, quote, Roosevelt's assault on free enterprise.
00:17:12.860Wow. So instead he relied on his wife.
00:17:15.660And 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.
00:17:32.980So this is basically the Lindbergh right, right?0.84
00:17:36.340Like 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?
00:17:43.320So this would be Father Coughlin in Chicago, right, the radio preacher, America First, Mothers Against the War, right?
00:17:52.020You know, a conservatism that was comfortable with traditions even when they included fascism and very frank revisionism on the Civil War, right?
00:18:03.220Which is both things that the conservative movement under Buckley would sort of put some distance between it and that, right?
00:18:11.500You'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 and pro-Jim Crow sentiment, right?
00:18:32.680There'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?
00:18:48.780And then you also get this different right-wing politics because the old right really hates Roosevelt.
00:18:59.420And 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.
00:19:11.940But this is something that they are able to start pitching to different kinds of voters, people who maybe would 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.
00:19:34.400And 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 nontraditional and people found it really arrogant and kind of scary.
00:19:49.960And 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.
00:20:00.220That's now newly taboo and delegitimized after the Holocaust.
00:20:03.660But 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.
00:20:12.960Yeah. 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 they'd said about Hitler, right? They were very much out of favor.
00:20:32.780And 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 1964.0.96
00:20:48.640Now, fun fact about Goldwater is he got fucking crushed, right?
00:20:52.300But 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.0.96
00:21:01.320But 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?
00:21:14.700They see themselves as consummate outsiders and always shut out from power.
00:21:20.280You're giving us spoilers because we've got Phyllis's opposition to the Civil Rights Act coming up later in the episode.
00:22:38.520And they were working more and more in respected and remunerative fields, right?
00:22:44.540This 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 was really remarked upon, like, look at all the shit that women are doing now.
00:23:01.380And that was a new model of women's lives that flowed from the 19th Amendment's new model of women's citizenship.0.98
00:23:09.660And this really accelerated during World War II.
00:23:14.120So men were drafted in huge numbers and women flooded into the workforce, especially in this, like, wartime, like, munitions production boom.
00:23:23.640Like, we've all seen Rosie the Riveter, right?0.59
00:23:51.600Full scholarship. Insane deal that I know a lot of teenagers now who would like to have.
00:23:56.820Yeah. 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.
00:24:05.700And then women ended up having to pick up the slack, right? Which seems to have been what happens to the Schlafly family.0.62
00:24:11.020Exactly what happens to her parents. Yeah.
00:24:12.680Yeah. 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?
00:24:27.640So 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.
00:24:37.600And to pay her tuition, she takes on one of these like wartime Rosie the Riveter jobs.
00:24:43.820And Adrienne, you are not going to believe what she did.
00:25:05.240It took one look at her and you're like, this lady needs to be trusted with a handgun.1.00
00:25:08.480So this is like this era when this new American woman like Phyllis, they're all flooding into the factories.1.00
00:25:15.220But the shift in gender relations that that was causing was beginning to generate a lot of like cultural unease, right?
00:25:23.760So 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?
00:25:38.900There'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?0.66
00:25:52.960It's legitimate only for the remainder.1.00
00:25:56.060And after her college graduation, summa cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa, obviously, Phyllis moves to Cambridge for a graduate program in politics.
00:26:07.660And she's already betraying a conservative bent in her graduate work, but she's not crazy yet, right?
00:26:21.180In 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?
00:26:32.360At the time, she's like, oh, this is pretty cool.
00:26:34.240Like, look, this is a new experiment in, like, mutual international governments, right?
00:26:39.780Her 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.
00:26:50.600So 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.
00:27:02.000And she says, listen, I got a degree from Harvard.
00:27:06.120I competed with the boys in graduate school.
00:27:55.180She tries to get a job at the Tennessee Valley Authority.
00:27:57.600She 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.
00:28:06.660And particularly, we really only want to hire returning veterans, right?
00:28:09.320Right. This is the moment where 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 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?0.96
00:28:33.020Yeah, 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.
00:28:55.020It'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.
00:29:04.360So, sorry, you've got to go elsewhere.
00:29:07.960What 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.
00:29:31.900I 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.
00:29:44.940Yeah, the AEI, or I guess AEA at the time, right?
00:29:49.080Today, it's sort of a standard issue right-wing think tank and one of a bajillion of them, but one of the longest running.
00:29:55.820It was sort of the first in the field. It was the first institution that sort of sought to unify the fractured right. And it 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?
00:30:15.920So 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.
00:30:30.560They're trying to create like an umbrella organization for the whole spectrum of the political right.
00:30:36.560And this is where Phyllis Schlafly will like credit a lot of her political education, right?
00:30:42.720Like this is where like 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.
00:31:10.620So what she does is she actually leaves D.C. and moves back home to her parents' house in St. Louis.
00:31:18.540So there's different accounts of this, right?
00:31:21.080Because 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?
00:31:31.460She'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?
00:31:43.660She's always like, oh, I'm just a housewife.
00:31:48.200She was, in fact, one of the most powerful political operatives in the Republican Party for a period of like some decades.
00:31:53.540So 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.
00:32:05.520That's what she says when she talks about this time.
00:32:08.260What 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.
00:33:31.920That 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 woman, right?
00:33:42.020Like she's getting turned down and looked over.
00:33:44.980And she's sort of like in St. Louis, she gets a job working for a conservative banker, and that guy likes her a lot.
00:33:54.340He has her do two things. He has her start doing financial education classes for local women's groups.
00:34:02.740And 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.
00:34:15.740And the Bircher stuff. A lot of that is also...
00:34:19.100She was Bari Wise before there was a Bari Wise.
00:34:20.960So 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, 15 years her senior, a guy named Fred Schlafly, who lives across the river in Illinois.
00:34:37.260It's hard to learn much about Fred Schlafly.
00:34:40.700We know that he liked that Phyllis was smart.
00:34:43.220They remained married from their wedding in 1949 until his death in 1993.
00:35:00.260And 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.
00:35:14.500She describes their partnership as an intellectual partnership.
00:35:18.580She's like, I get more done because I can bounce ideas off of Frank all the time.
00:35:23.800She'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.
00:35:33.400But, you know, in 1949, she marries this old guy.
00:35:36.760She quits her job at the bank and she moves to Alton, Illinois to start her life as a housewife.
00:36:05.420She's bored out of her fucking mind.1.00
00:36:08.660So her thoughts inevitably turn to ICBMs.1.00
00:36:13.240Well, 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?0.54
00:36:54.700Which is a little bit different from the sort of anti-establishment, anti-elitist conservative0.73
00:37:00.780that she's going to pitch herself as or sort of champion within the Republican Party.
00:37:06.360But when she's doing her anti-ERA work, she does become, you know, she has a very patrician affect.
00:37:13.660She 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.
00:37:22.120So this is an interesting mix of, like, class signifiers, right?
00:37:28.160She's very much been, like, upwardly mobile from her pretty poor childhood to this Radcliffe degree, this rich husband.
00:37:34.860And now she's in the DAR, like she has ascended to a level of elitism.
00:37:40.060But when she's talking about intra-Republican party politics, she's very much like the rich people are out to get us salt of the earth, real Americans, right?
00:37:48.240So the DAR, I always assumed that the daughter's part is at least to some extent literal.
00:37:55.220You have to prove some kind of bloodline descent from an ancestor in the American Revolution.
00:39:53.580Yeah, 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.0.69
00:40:52.740Yeah, 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.
00:41:06.560If you've read one, you've kind of read them all.
00:41:08.680Like the thing about Schlafly is her output is enormous and it's wildly repetitive.
00:41:13.100Yeah, and all of it is batshit insane.
00:41:15.080I feel like this doesn't exist quite as much anymore because it's all moved on to the Internet.
00:41:18.320It'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 favor of, yeah, like leafleting.
00:42:33.160It's a little bit like the way we talked today about online radicalization,
00:42:36.740where you fall through a YouTube rabbit hole or something like that.
00:42:39.640This 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?
00:42:48.220Yeah, 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 bircher. I think part of it is that she may have just found this stuff and kept reading.
00:43:20.560These were, like, newsletters, they were pamphlets, they were circulating.
00:43:24.900Yeah, like, kind of informally, as you said, a lot through the mail.
00:43:27.500And they're all about conveying communism as this, like, dangerous threat to America.
00:43:33.580But I wanted to talk about the concept of communism in this grassroots anti-communist literature that's, like, emerging in the, like, late 40s and 1950s.
00:43:58.620It's also kind of understood as a feminizing cultural or political force, right?
00:44:02.840Yeah, it's about weakening 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.0.72
00:44:24.820But, 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?
00:44:45.660And 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?
00:45:06.460This is where I think, like, they start to remind me a little of Carl Schmitt.
00:45:11.560I don't think these people are reading Carl Schmitt because I don't think they're reading much besides other, you know, Xerox anti-communist brochures.
00:45:20.600But there is a conceptual slip that seems to be talking about anti-communism as almost a spiritual crusade.
00:45:27.660And this becomes really core to Schlafly's thought because she starts proselytizing anti-communism specifically to Catholics.
00:45:36.460Right. 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.
00:46:02.140And Schlafly has no patience for that.
00:46:04.360She's like, no, as a Catholic, as a Catholic, you have a obligation to fight communism.
00:46:10.400So, you know, she is making these and she's working with some people operating in this, you know, grassroots anti-communist sort of world.
00:46:23.920And some of this, we should say, is sincerely grassroots, right?
00:46:27.940Some of it is cranks writing these brochures on their typewriters in their basements after their kids have gone to bed.
00:46:35.160Some 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?
00:46:47.760So there's also a little bit of this like corporate money splashing around.
00:46:52.120So I know this part of the story a little bit because, of course, eventually these people will train their attention also to university campuses.
00:47:17.020In 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.
00:48:20.440So, the people she comes eventually to assume and accuse of having, like, communist sympathies or be working for communist interests comes to extend to Harry Truman.
00:49:30.760He wasn't even like candy heir in the traditional sense of a Nepo baby, like your daddy ran the candy factory.0.73
00:49:36.240He worked for his brother who had a successful candy company.0.99
00:49:39.680He was the dipshit brother of a rich guy, basically.0.98
00:49:42.940Being anti-communist in the 1950s, you can't swing a dead cat without hitting an anti-communist.0.99
00:49:48.520What 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?0.94
00:49:57.980The Birchers matter, I think, for a couple of reasons.0.99
00:50:00.000The conspiratorial style and American right-wing politics really comes to the fore with them.0.77
00:50:04.160At 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?0.51
00:50:15.600Bill Buckley's effect is often sort of described, well, he banished the Birchers.0.81
00:50:22.080What he did was he created a kind of cordon sanitaire around their thought and around their style of conspiracism and then tolerated anything that was outside of that specific cordon sanitaire.
00:50:32.140Yeah, but it made the Birchers really important because it made them the unacceptable kind of right-wing agitation that you could distinguish mainstream conservatism from.
00:50:42.940Yeah, 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.0.80
00:50:53.340You don't want to seem beyond the pale, right?
00:51:16.120I 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.
00:51:24.700And 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.
00:51:36.240Oh, I love him already. Feels like home.
00:51:39.280It was in The Truth in Time that the founder of the John Birch Society first adopted the term INSIDERS.0.97
00:51:45.300It's in all caps, which if you're not familiar with right-wing crazy, is usually how you spell Jews in your crazy pamphlets.
00:51:54.320That's normally what is capitalized, I would say, a little bit like the three parentheses0.59
00:51:58.540today, to refer to those who hold places in, quote, an inner core of conspiratorial power.
00:52:04.700It was these individuals, claimed Robert Welsh, who, just as the Illuminatists in their day
00:52:09.160had used other groups and individuals, were using the communists, the anarchists, the
00:52:13.840socialists of various hues and kinds, and dozens of other groups to promote their purposes.
00:52:26.580They 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.
00:52:51.680It'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.
00:53:03.700This is just straight QAnon avant la lettre, right?
00:53:06.860What's really interesting to me is also that I was thinking of 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?
00:53:20.000Like, it has this very strange populism where it's like, oh, the rich are controlling everything.
00:53:41.460It 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.
00:53:49.660and will, like, describe their psychosis into my inbox.
00:53:53.660I try not to laugh at these because these are people who are suffering,
00:53:56.260but this one guy, he left me this voicemail.
00:54:49.120But those estimates tended to come from liberals who wanted to paint the Republican Party as, like, full of these crazed conspiracist nutjobs.0.53
00:54:58.160And then the lower estimates come in and around, like, 24,000, 25,000 people.0.54
00:55:03.440But those estimates tend to come from mainline Republicans who want to paint the Birchers as this, like, irrelevant fringe that doesn't really count.
00:55:12.180But 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.
00:56:52.140I mean, he did create six children. So, you know, 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.
00:57:13.540And 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.0.98
00:57:26.520Right. But this experience of media attention and 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.
00:57:41.220Yeah. 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 Powderpuff Inn, which I wouldn't even be able to discern. But apparently that made sense to the readers of the 1950s.0.99
00:58:07.020Since 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?
00:58:20.260She's talking very specifically about conservatism as a moral crusade.
00:58:25.140This is years before Jerry Falwell, moral majority.
00:58:28.380There is not really an organized Christian conservative movement at this time.
00:58:33.480That is a later invention that Schlafly herself builds brick by brick out of the ERA campaign.
00:58:40.340But she is already talking about conservatism as a morally superior calling.
00:58:47.320And this is, you know, something that she will be talking about for years.
00:58:53.100It's one of her main contributions to the Republican right.
00:58:56.400And it's a very specific kind of morality, right?
00:58:58.800It's specifically a morality in Christian conservative terms of respect for hierarchy, independence, and individual responsibility.
00:59:08.340So she actually is asked during the course of this campaign, it's like, well, what about these welfare state programs that you oppose?
00:59:47.560This is something I think we discovered a lot in, like, the alt-right when they started, you know, sort of meme-ifying their political commitments.
00:59:56.120Like, what's a joke and what's serious is actually not a coherent distinction.
01:00:00.420A lot of things are a joke and serious at the same time.
01:00:03.100And 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.
01:00:12.800So I'm going to blow your mind a little bit right now, okay?
01:00:45.760in the general. But eight years later, she runs again in the same district. And it's more or less1.00
01:00:50.820the same story, right? She runs an insurgent campaign in the primary. She says that her0.99
01:00:56.580opponent, both the, you know, Republican she beats in the primary and then the Democrat she
01:01:01.820faces in the general, she calls them like both soft on communist infiltration, which is a pretty
01:01:07.600big Bircher dog whistle, right? Right. She casts herself as a, you know, insurgent grassroots0.98
01:01:13.100conservative, taking on the establishment, and as a defender of morality. And again, she loses,
01:01:19.940right? But by this point in 1960, Schlafly is a figure of national importance to Republican
01:01:26.720politicos. She has been noticed. Like people are coming in from outside of her district to stump
01:01:33.180for her important people, including then Vice President Richard Nixon. He comes and he gives
01:01:37.860a speech in her district and is like, vote for Phyllis. We need to bring some beauty to Washington.0.99
01:01:42.320We 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.0.88
01:02:00.980And they have illustrated to some in the party's center that this extreme right-wing politics is like a political loser.
01:02:10.240But she has also attracted loyalty and admiration from members of the far right.
01:02:16.540And this brings us, I think, pretty nicely to the 1960 Republican convention in Chicago.
01:02:24.940Do you know what was happening at that Republican convention?
01:02:27.400Yeah, 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 veep.
01:02:46.500So, 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.
01:03:00.680Basically, it's the first four shocks of the Goldwater Revolution, right?0.55
01:03:04.960It's the place where they, for the first time, flex their muscle, the far right.
01:03:09.000Yeah, the far right of the party absolutely hates Eisenhower, right?
01:03:25.260This is Nixon before he embraces racism for like cynical political concerns.
01:03:30.700And he wants to put in like an anti-segregation plank in the platform.
01:03:33.920It 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.
01:03:49.780They have to strip it out because she has organized so much opposition to this pro-integration plank.
01:03:55.440And ultimately, the platform doesn't have it.0.99
01:03:58.600And she must have felt like such hot shit, right?1.00
01:04:03.060Like, this girl is managing to make the Republican Party more racist, basically through the force of her own will and influence, right?1.00
01:04:12.720She has achieved a level of power that she hasn't really gotten before, even though she lost twice.0.98
01:04:19.680Now, she's emerging kind of as a kingmaker in the Republican Party.0.67
01:04:23.200Wow. Yeah, and within 12 years, Nixon will be on tape being like, and that's why the Jews are inaudible.1.00
01:04:28.780Yeah, it's weird that you have to be like, the good guy in this story is one Richard Nixon.0.89
01:04:50.820Yeah, 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.
01:05:06.920He'd written this book in 1960, 61, actually, I believe, ghost written by, was it Brent Bozell or is it actually William F. Buckley?
01:05:15.340One of those ghosts wrote it, The Conscience of a Conservative.
01:05:18.380So this is sort of the coming out moment of the far right within American conservatism, coming out more 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.0.71
01:05:35.300A lot of which was routed through young women.
01:05:37.640Wasn't Hillary Clinton, in fact, a Goldwater Republican?1.00
01:07:07.480Is it 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.
01:07:20.360It reminded a lot of people of Barry Goldwater when Donald Trump first came on the scene in 2015, 2016 in that primary.0.97
01:07:28.020But he was also a huge fucking racist who opposed and voted against the Civil Rights Act, right?0.94
01:07:35.500So the election of Goldwater was an explicit rebuke to the Eisenhower part of the party, to the Rockefeller part of the party.0.98
01:07:46.820And at that convention, right here in San Francisco at the Cow Palace, actually, Nelson Rockefeller, in his concession speech after he loses the primary, warns against Goldwater's quote unquote extremism,
01:08:02.040which is, in Rockefeller's parlance, kind of a euphemism or a code word for his racism.
01:08:07.900And Goldwater replies, extremism in defense of liberty is no vice.
01:08:15.260He's talking literally about segregation.
01:08:17.480I mean, Rockefeller really ate his words because, of course, the 1964 election is famously close.
01:08:23.500A real nail-biter there for non-American listeners.
01:08:27.640I believe Goldwater carried Arizona, Mississippi, Georgia, Alabama, and one other.
01:08:36.580So, yeah, this is about as much of a drubbing as someone can receive in presidential politics in the United States.0.69
01:08:43.160He basically only got the Klan vote in the general.0.73
01:08:46.360Like, basically, if only Klan members had voted, Goldwater could have won.
01:08:50.380But, you know, this was a really ugly primary, right?
01:08:54.060And Phyllis Schlafly puts herself directly into the middle of this primary, throws her full weight behind Goldwater.
01:09:01.420And this is the publication of her first book, A Choice, Not an Echo.
01:09:08.120And, 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.
01:09:16.360And 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.
01:09:34.980They just want to echo what the Democrats are doing.
01:09:37.960And 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.
01:10:05.320The 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.
01:10:25.020And this book is everywhere in California in the months and weeks before that primary election.
01:11:22.520The 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.
01:11:39.560It looks like the left is really on the up and up.
01:11:43.180And 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?
01:12:01.520She's gunning for, like, preemptive nuclear war against the Soviets.
01:12:39.040And 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.
01:12:47.840And she says, thank God I found my calling.
01:12:51.960I don't know that it happened like that.
01:12:54.380Phyllis Schlafly has her own account of the discovery of the issue that I do not think we can trust.
01:13:06.540Well, thank you so much for walking me through this first chapter of Phil Schlaffy's life, which I really didn't know nearly as much about.
01:13:13.980And as I was sort of going through the archive, I was like, holy shit, I did not realize her level and depth of engagement with these people.