Gale-Force Phyllis

She’s been called a national nag, been splattered in the face by a pie hit man and caused such fits among feminists that one declared, “I’d like to burn you at the stake.”

Now in her 50th year of public life--a career spent fighting communism, feminism, abortion and other left-wing evils--Phyllis Schlafly is hooked on phonics.

Yes, phonics. Foniks. The 71-year-old conservative says she’d rather be remembered for deep-sixing illiteracy than torpedoing the Equal Rights Amendment.

Not that she’s abandoned her other causes, of course.

Although Schlafly might not be as visible as she was in the 1970s, she still flexes considerable political muscle. She’s already maneuvering to shape the Republican Party platform at this summer’s convention in San Diego--where she’ll be a delegate for the seventh time since 1956 (this year for Pat Buchanan).

And she’s still cranking out a tornado of newsletters, daily radio broadcasts and newspaper columns from her eagle-adorned headquarters in suburban St. Louis.

Schlafly’s husband died three years ago--prompting her to move to Missouri from an Illinois mansion perched on the bluffs of the Mississippi River--but she didn’t skip a beat.

“I just keep going and going--like the battery,” she says. “It solves a lot of problems if you’re busy.”

By that yardstick, Schlafly’s life should be virtually carefree.

Even at Washington University, where she crammed four years of college into three, she still found time for a 48-hour workweek testing machine guns at a World War II munitions plant (a precursor, perhaps, to the verbal fusillades she would fire as a political activist).

And in August, she figures to have her hands full trying to stage a minor coup d’etat at the Bob Dole fest in San Diego.

“I won’t be on the platform committee,” Schlafly says, “but I expect to be influential anyway. I have friends on it.”

Her No. 1 concern: abortion. Unlike the Christian Coalition’s Ralph Reed and several other evangelical leaders, Schlafly--a staunch Catholic--has fiercely resisted Dole’s attempts to craft a compromise that would welcome Republicans who support legalized abortion.

And that could spell trouble for the party, says political strategist William Kristol, who edits the conservative Weekly Standard magazine: “If she were to really turn against Dole or defect from the party, it would be a signal of real problems on the right.”

Although Schlafly’s name is primarily associated with the ERA fight, her influence with conservatives runs much deeper than that.

She oversaw her first congressional campaign in 1946, ran herself in 1952 (but lost) and, in 1964, wrote and self-published a curious little book about the history of Republican national conventions.

Titled “A Choice Not an Echo” (Pere Marquette Press), the book is credited by some with tilting the presidential nomination to Barry Goldwater. “It told how the Eastern internationalists--the Rockefeller wing of the Republican Party--had forced their candidates on the conventions year after year,” Schlafly says. “And it urged a grass-roots conservative effort . . . to nominate Goldwater.”

The book sold some 3 million copies--mostly to Goldwater workers who bought it in bulk--and put Schlafly on the map.

With her newfound fame, an Underwood typewriter and lots of carbon paper, she then launched the monthly Phyllis Schlafly Report, a newsletter devoted to pet causes. (The most famous was her February 1972 manifesto on the Equal Rights Amendment. One subscriber reportedly called shortly after publication and said: “We beat ERA in Oklahoma today and all we had was your report. I just went to the Capitol and passed it around and we beat it.”)

Schlafly also was raising six children, attending assorted political soirees (the 1968 family vacation was to the Republican convention in Miami), writing more books (on the Soviet military threat) and again running for office (a losing congressional bid in 1970).

It was partly because of such activity that feminists were so outraged when Schlafly took up the anti-ERA banner in 1972. How could she urge other women to stay home with their children when she was so busy traveling, speaking and campaigning herself? they asked. (Schlafly also has a master’s degree in political science from Harvard-Radcliffe and a 1978 law degree from St. Louis’ Washington University.)

“If I had a daughter,” quipped former National Organization for Women President Karen DeCrow at the time, “I’d want her to be a ‘housewife’ just like Phyllis Schlafly.”

Schlafly, however, dismisses such criticism as a distortion of what she said and did.

“My whole organization is to train women to do what I’ve done . . . to be active in politics, to run for office, to work on lobbying and campaigns. . . . I think women can do whatever they want to, [but] I think they can do it sequentially.”

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In her own case, she insists, politics was merely “a hobby,” one that grew as her children got older.

Today, the hobby is called the Eagle Forum, an 80,000-member network of followers and spin-off organizations, including about 50 recently formed college chapters (which aim to “de-fund left-wing groups,” combat political correctness and publish conservative campus newspapers).

(The Eagle Forum and its tax-exempt cousin, the Eagle Forum Educational and Legal Defense Fund, operate on a combined budget of about $1 million. Schlafly takes no salary from the groups.)

Instead of the ERA, Schlafly and Co. now battle such bugaboos as bilingual education, abortion, taxes, “women and open homosexuals” in military combat, the NAFTA and GATT trade agreements, gay rights, national health insurance and efforts to turn public schools “into social welfare agencies” instead of focusing on reading, writing and math.

Schlafly also opposes U.S. intervention in Bosnia. “A government that can’t protect our safety in America’s cities has no business trying to police the world,” she says, echoing comments made in 1964 about Vietnam.

At that time, she said it was absurd to send “American boys 9,000 miles away to fight and die against the Communists in Vietnam . . . [when] the Johnson administration won’t do anything at all about the Communists only 90 miles away in Cuba.”

Once troops were in Southeast Asia, however, Schlafly said they should fight to win, according to journalist Carol Felsenthal’s biography, “The Sweetheart of the Silent Majority” (Doubleday, 1981).

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Schlafly backs up such rhetoric by dispatching volunteers and cash to like-minded political candidates. In 1994, the Eagle Forum’s political action committee raised $250,000 for Senate and House of Representatives hopefuls, she says.

Not surprisingly, Schlafly has collected a fair share of detractors over the decades.

Chicago columnist Mike Royko once dubbed her “a national nag.” Betty Friedan was quoted as wanting to torch her like a witch. And feminist Midge Costanza asserted that Schlafly and Anita Bryant would make “a fine set of bookends” for Hitler’s “Mein Kampf.”

The St. Louis native has also been burned in effigy, apple-pied in the face at New York’s ritzy Waldorf Astoria and interrupted during speeches by bomb threats.

She seems unfazed by it all. In one incident, during an interview with journalist Felsenthal in 1977, several ERA supporters shoved middle fingers in Schlafly’s face and spat at her, but she “didn’t pause, she didn’t even blink,” Felsenthal reported.

Of such attacks, Schlafly says now, “I think it shows what slobs they are.” As for Royko, “I can’t say anything bad about him. He’s my favorite columnist. And you have to keep your sense of humor.”

Of course, Schlafly has hurled a few satiric barbs herself. “Hillary lite” is her nickname for Bob Dole’s abortion-rights-supporting chief of staff, Sheila Burke. And “the dirty-art czar” was her title for John Frohnmayer, the controversial head of the National Endowment for the Arts under President Bush.

Maybe part of the reason for Schlafly’s longevity in the public eye is her instinct for memorable turns of phrase. “Don’t call me Ms., to me it means misery,” she quipped at the height of the ERA fracas. “Most women would rather cuddle a baby than a typewriter,” she said in defending stay-at-home moms.

Schlafly is effective “in that she states [her arguments] passionately and with emotional impact,” says Sarah Weddington, a Texas lawyer who now debates her regularly on the college lecture circuit (Weddington is the attorney who won 1973’s Roe vs. Wade case, legalizing abortion).

But don’t get the idea that the two women are on friendly terms, despite seven years of joint appearances. Says Weddington: “We ask the schools to pick us up in separate cars and we eat in separate restaurants.”

Once, they were forced to ride in the same vehicle and “we tried to be courteous and create conversation,” Weddington adds, but the only topic they could safely agree on was that “airplane coffee is bad.”

Schlafly’s relations with other feminists are also icy. She refers to them as “shrill and radioactive.” And they resent her for holding back feminism.

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Elizabeth Toledo, president of NOW’s California chapter, says: “This year is NOW’s 30th anniversary, and we’re still arguing some of the same points we argued then, [such as the idea] that ERA would give women and men the right to use the same restroom. . . . Phyllis Schlafly is a reminder that we still haven’t won some of the basic rights so that we can move on to other issues.”

Nevertheless, Toledo and some others suggest that Schlafly isn’t as formidable as she once was. Groups such as the Christian Coalition and Focus on the Family have eclipsed her, they say.

“She’s probably in sixth or seventh place” in the conservative scheme of things, says Clyde Wilcox, associate professor of government at Georgetown University.

What happened? F. LaGard Smith, a law professor at Pepperdine University, says Schlafly “still maintains great respect among the Christian right as someone who’s thoughtful and articulate, but on issues that aren’t specifically related to women, people in the religious right tend to think in terms of male spiritual leadership. When you get away from [something like] ERA, it’s difficult for a woman to be considered a leader.”

Does that mean defeat of the ERA--which some observers say Schlafly engineered almost single-handedly--will be her sole legacy?

The Christian Coalition’s Reed doesn’t think so. In a 1994 interview with Knight-Ridder Tribune’s news service, he said, “She is the spiritual godmother of [the] grass-roots movement to promote common sense and virtue. . . . The rest of us have learned at her feet.”

For critics, it is difficult to define Schlafly apart from her hard-line conservative--some would say intolerant--political views.

“My mother is not a monster,” her son John told the Washington Post in 1992, after confirming reports that he was gay. “My life points to the fact that family-values people are not hostile to gays and lesbians. . . . They’re well-meaning people who are trying to create a better world.”

Biographer Felsenthal, who described herself as a liberal Jewish feminist and says she approached her subject with suspicion, ultimately came to regard Schlafly as “a complex human being with some good qualities and some bad, whom, on balance, I came to admire.”

Schlafly contends she has been maligned and misrepresented by the media and critics, but she hopes that will change.

Instead of ERA, she says, “I’d like [to be remembered] for converting this nation to where it’s as normal for parents to teach their kids to read before they get to school [as it is] to teach them to ride bikes.”

Toward that end, she’s promoting her latest book, “First Reader” (Pere Marquette Press, 1994), a $79.95 phonics instruction guide (with tapes, pencils and workbook) based on the methods she used with her own children.

But that doesn’t mean she’s mellowed on the political front. No way.

“She’s as active and feisty as ever,” says conservative guru Paul Weyrich of the Free Congress Foundation. “And she’s still a force because in every state she has a group of people who are willing to jump as high as she commands. It’s hard to suggest anyone in the conservative movement who’s comparable.”

Schlafly wouldn’t dispute that: “If anyone wants to underestimate us, that’s their problem.”