The late Phyllis Schlafly isn’t the only conservative badly mistreated by the Hulu series Mrs. America. The other women of Schlafly’s Eagle Forum organization are treated even worse, and the portrayal is sickeningly unfair.
Many others quite rightly have defended Schlafly, so suffice it to say here that she was much more gracious than the series portrays her. More importantly, it is defamatory for the series to insinuate that she, a devout Catholic, would accept even an arm’s-length, wink-and-nod alliance with the viciously anti-Catholic Ku Klux Klan.
Yet not even those or other cheap shots against Schlafly are as consistently abusive as are the unceasing portrayals of her Eagle Forum lieutenants as buffoonish, simple-minded, weak, and in some cases openly racist. Anyone who knows the real longtime leaders of the Eagle Forum understands how risible those portrayals are.
For example, Mrs. America concocts a fictional organization leader in Louisiana identified only as “Mary Frances” (last name unknown), who is a raving racist. The real Eagle Forum leader in the Bayou State was Marilyn Thayer, who won the group’s Eagle Award in 1976, exactly in the time frame the series covers. Thayer was, like Schlafly, a force of nature. She had inexhaustible energy, an astute mind, a strong will, and, not least, a huge heart manifested in countless acts of kindness.
Thayer ran tremendously effective Republican phone banks. As a Resolutions Committee member, she authored the successful effort in 1980 to insert explicitly pro-life language, for the first time ever, into the GOP national convention’s platform. She was a two-term president of the women’s auxiliary of the Volunteers of America and founded a nursery for handicapped babies. From 1996-97 she was president of the National Federation of Republican Women. (Watch her here, from 36:24-43:12.)
And she was the farthest thing from racist imaginable: She was one of a select group of New Orleans-area leaders I interviewed as part of a feature cover story on race relations for Gambit Weekly in New Orleans in the early 90s, and she was an eloquent advocate for racial harmony and black economic advancement.
Perhaps Schlafly’s longest-lasting deputy, now national president of the Eagle Forum, is Eunie Smith of Alabama, where I now live. Smith has been on the organization’s board since its inception in 1975. Smith is lovely, charming, and brilliant. Every journalist in Alabama knows that whether or not they agree with the state Eagle Forum’s positions, they can be assured that the research behind Eagle Forum recommendations is fact-based and well-documented.
Schlafly’s leader in Virginia for a quarter century, meanwhile, was Helen Blackwell, whom I wrote about when she died last year. Just as with Schlafly, Blackwell’s first big political interest wasn’t in “family issues” but rather in defense and foreign policy, on which she wrote eloquently way back when she was in an art history graduate studies program in 1963. My friend and fellow columnist Deroy Murdock, who knew her for nearly 40 years, penned a tribute describing her as a “sunny warrior” who “always was kind, vivacious … and funny as hell.”
These were wonderful, warm, savvy, sagacious women — not the simpleton, sometimes bigoted misfits portrayed in Mrs. America. Despite the impression created by this awful series, decorous but strong women such as Schlafly don’t resent, much less try to box in, other women of talent and verve. Instead, they recruit and encourage such peers in common cause.
That’s why Schlafly and the Eagle Forum won so many battles. They outclassed their opponents every step of the way.
