A woman who puts principles over party

Phyllis Schlafly has long argued that the American conservative movement’s purpose is to influence, not echo, the Republican Party.

Still going strong at age 90, Mrs. Schlafly re-asserts that argument in a highly anticipated update to her landmark book “A Choice, Not an Echo,” which in 1964 became the motto of Barry Goldwater’s grassroots effort to overthrow a Wall Street ruling alliance inside the GOP.

In her characteristically clear, crisp prose, Mrs. Schlafly leaves no doubt as to why the movement is not the party. Nor does she leave any doubt as to why that party’s establishment the “kingmakers” — has been so antagonistic toward her and the movement she has been so much a part of for more than a half century.

Her party picks losers as candidates too often because, she says, of the stranglehold by the political consultant-big business-Wall Street crowd, which she argues makes a bundle from championing moderates over conservatives.

In her updated book’s final chapter, titled “Still Seeking A Choice Not An Echo,” she pointedly warns that the GOP-establishment is trying to hijack the 2016 election from conservatives through the persona of former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush.

She notes “closed-door events have been held for Republican mega-donors to select who will get the big money that went last time to Mitt Romney” and that the mainstream media is already cheering on Mr. Bush.

As evidence, she cites a New York Times article about how “Jeb Bush is so smart, so intellectual, and so well-read. We were told that he is a ’top-drawer intellect’ and a voracious reader who maintains 25 books on his Kindle, books such as George Gilder’s ’Knowledge and Power.’

Mrs. Schlafly urges grassroots conservatives to rise up and resist a coronation of Mr. Bush.

“Do you get the message that the media buildup for Jeb Bush has begun and that the 2016 Republican National Convention may simply nominate for president another Establishment loser candidate?,” she writes. “But it doesn’t have to be. Some of us remember Everett Dirksen’s famous speech at the 1952 Republican Convention when he publicly taunted the kingmakers, ’We followed you before and you led us down the path to defeat.’”

Through countless columns, books, speeches, organizing and behind-the-scenes negotiating to preserve conservatives principles in the GOP Platform every four years, Mrs. Schlafly has remained the ineluctable force of the political right in America.

She is why the anti-abortion plank remains part of the GOP platform, presidential cycle after cycle, despite efforts of consultants and kingmakers to kill it.

At a Council for National Policy event on Saturday honoring Mrs. Schlafly, longtime conservative activist Richard Vigeurie, said that when he became the executive secretary of the newly formed Young Americans for Freedom in 1961, “Phyllis Schlafly was a major conservative leader.”

Whereas now, “in 2015 Phyllis Schlafly is a major conservative leader,” a tribute to her tireless efforts to preserve the self-reliant, freedom-cherishing family as the key to American success and strength.

Media Research Center President Brent Bozell says Mrs. Schlafly’s impact on American culture and politics is irrefutable.

“To measure what Phyllis’ impact has been and is, you reverse the question to: ’What might the world look like without this person?’” Without Phyllis Schlafly, the American family might have collapsed, and with it American society,” he said.

To the extent that she accomplished that preservation, it has been through a steely determination that pervades the atmosphere of any space she occupies.

“From free trade and immigration to military affairs, education and pro-life — you name it — Phyllis shows us ways to understand the issues, frame the arguments, and make progress for the movement,” said Ed Martin, who officially resigned this month as the elected chairman of the Missouri GOP to take over as the Mrs. Schlafly’s hand-picked successor to the presidency of the Eagle Forum, the conservative interest group-lobby that she founded in 1972.

“Winning matters to Phyllis, not just being correct,” Mr. Martin said.

To Matt Staver, dean of the Liberty Universty School of Law, Mrs. Schlafly is the “is” in “What is conservatism?”

“Phyllis and her leadership birthed not only Eagle Forum but a conservative movement,” said Mr. Staver.

But then, as noted in a 2005 profile of her in The Washington Times, few living Americans have done as much to shape the nation’s direction as Mrs. Schlafly, who is arguably the most influential woman in American conservative history.

She is the suburban housewife turned best-selling author who heralded the 1964 Goldwater nomination with her celebrated “A Choice, Not an Echo,” followed up by becoming an authority on nuclear-missile defense and then, in a stunning upset, led the forces that defeated the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA).

When asked back in 2005 about her greatest accomplishments, however, Mrs. Schlafly took care to mention perhaps the most important lesson of her long career — “teaching conservatives that we can win.”

Along the way, she helped arouse the slumbering giant of American politics — millions of socially conservative but previously apolitical churchgoers. She saw their potential and figured out how to turn them into a separate force on the political right.

What Mrs. Schlafly calls the “pro-family movement” helped elect Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush to the White House and establish Republicans’ decadelong dominance in Congress.

She got an early start — in 1942, at the world’s largest munitions plant in St. Louis.

“I went to work on my 18th birthday, on the night shift, firing machine guns and rifles to test .30- and .50-caliber ammunition for accuracy, penetration, hang fire, velocity — and went to college in the day,” she says.

She finished her degree a year early and sees “no reason for anybody to go [to college] any longer than three years.”

At 81 — she looks 51 — she is sitting poised, tailored and elegant in her office at the suburban St. Louis headquarters of her Eagle Forum Education & Legal Defense Fund. She speaks precisely, without a single thought-collecting “um” or “uh.”

Time-wasting is not a Schlafly trait. Hard work is.

One summer back in 2004, she sat through every long, grueling session, every day and evening for a week, of the platform-writing committee at Republican National Convention in New York. She secretly negotiated with presidential adviser Karl Rove and the platform writers to make sure it remained her kind of conservative document on everything from abortion to immigration.

For decades, she delivered, five days a week, a three-minute report on more than 450 radio stations across the country, voicing her amalgam of libertarian concerns about constitutional liberties and religious conservative emphasis on social issues. She aired her views on everything from “battling the gay and feminist agenda” to “protecting freedom against government snooping.”

She broadcasted her hour-long radio call-in show, “Phyllis Schlafly Live,” every Saturday. For a half century, she published a monthly newsletter. Her syndicated column appeared in 100 newspapers.

She has written 26 books that have sold millions of copies, but never once put her children into day care while she pursued her political career.

After graduating from Washington University in St. Louis and then getting a master’s in government from Harvard, she married J. Fred Schlafly and became a full-time mother. She taught her six children to read before they entered school.

When they were on their own, she earned a law degree and admittance to practice before the Supreme Court of the United States.

From the time she entered political activism in the 1950s, she says, the conservative movement was all about economics and national defense. And then came the battle over the Equal Rights Amendment.

In 1971, the proposed constitutional amendment sailed through the House, and the ERA seemed unstoppable — but its feminist backers hadn’t reckoned on Mrs. Schlafly’s opposition.

“The feminists were not about women’s achievement,” she recalled. “They were and are about telling women they are victims; men are the enemy; if you go in the workforce, you will never be paid what you ought to be paid; and if you get married, your husband will probably beat you up.”

At the time the ERA became an issue, the war in Vietnam was winding down, but the U.S.-Soviet struggle was still a Cold War stalemate and Mrs. Schlafly was chiefly concerned with national security issues.

Then, in the February 1972 issue of her influential national newsletter, Mrs. Schlafly wrote about the ERA, declaring it a fraud that would have no effect on equal pay but would force women to register for the military draft, serve in combat and lose financial protections as wives and mothers. She also warned the amendment would, among other things, legalize same-sex “marriage.”

The response from readers was overwhelming.

“Suddenly women started to call me, saying, ’Well, Phyllis I took your report to our legislators, and we beat ERA.’ And that’s when I knew we could do something with it.”

So in September 1972, she got 100 friends, mostly from Republican women’s clubs in 30 states, to meet her in St. Louis, where she persuaded them to lead the fight to stop their state legislatures from approving the ERA.

Establishment conservatives, however, weren’t exactly enthusiastic about the anti-ERA crusade.

“The conservative movement was little help — conservatives in those days were defeatist,” Mrs. Schlafly recalls. “We had nothing to help us. There wasn’t any Internet — any Rush Limbaugh talking about ’femi-Nazis.’ There was noWashington Times or Fox News. Conservative publications were ignoring us. National Review never wrote anything about it until after the battle was over.”

By 1976, the ERA had been endorsed by Republican Presidents Nixon and Ford and almost all state governors, regardless of party. Indiana was on the verge of becoming the 35th state to ratify the ERA.

Then, Mrs. Schlafly says, she realized she needed to seek support from a new source — the churches. She says she got “1,000 mainline Protestants, evangelicals, Catholics, Mormons and orthodox Jews” to attend an anti-ERA rally in Springfield, Ill., on April 27, 1976.

“That is when the pro-family movement was invented,” she says. “It was a coming together of believers of all denominations who would do two things — come into politics for the first time and then work together for a cause they shared.”

The newborn movement quickly grew. In November 1977, when feminists held their International Women’s Year rally in Houston —attracting 3,000 tax-funded delegates — Mrs. Schlafly organized a counterrally.

“We had 20,000 pro-family women from all over the country,” she says. “They rode on buses maybe for 20 hours to our rally, then got back on the buses and rode home.”

By 1983, the ERA was defeated. In the process, Mrs. Schlafly says, a powerful new alliance had been formed between churchgoing Americans and those conservatives chiefly concerned about economic and foreign-policy issues.

Over the years, the religious right has “been educated” on such issues by conservative leaders, she says. “At the same time, the pro-family conservative movement has educated economic conservatives about the social issues.”

Mrs. Schlafly’s credentials as a member of the conservative movement’s Old Guard are unimpeachable.

Her first book, “A Choice, Not an Echo,” sold an astonishing 3 million copies nationally and helped turn the 1964 Republican presidential nomination away from New York Gov. Nelson Rockefeller — leader of the liberal “Eastern establishment” wing of the party — and give it to Mr. Goldwater, hero of the GOP’s conservative rank and file.

The Arizona senator stood for free markets, limited government and a military strong enough to defeat Soviet communism. Although he lost in a landslide to President Lyndon Johnson, Mr. Goldwater’s 1964 candidacy has since been viewed as the turning point in the rise of Republican conservatism.

The social and religious conservatives among whom Mrs. Schlafly remains a powerful leader are not, she says, part of the same movement as economic conservatives.

“It’s really a different movement. It was a coalition of those two movements — the economic-national defense conservatives who were still around after Goldwater and then the social conservatives who woke up in the ’70s — that elected Ronald Reagan.”

And, she says, the family values movement’s message to the economic conservatives has gotten through loud and clear: “You better stick with us or you’re not going to win any elections.”

For all her social conservatism, Mrs. Schlafly remains very much the Goldwater-Reagan conservative when it comes to limited government and the role of the United States in the world.

Her operational definition of conservatism is “lower taxes, limited government, fiscal integrity — and American military superiority, because everybody is safer that way.”

But she says it doesn’t follow that the mightiest nation in the world has an obligation to spread democracy by force.

“No, I do not believe it is the mission of our country to tell other countries how to run their affairs,” she says. “Our public officials have an obligation to obey the Constitution. They don’t have an obligation to reform the world.”

Is that an integral part of the definition of conservatism?

“I think so,” Mrs. Schlafly says. “It would certainly be an integral part of what Bob Taft believed. And what Goldwaterbelieved. And I think what Reagan believed.”