Wrapped in the Flag by Claire Conner Read Free Book Online Page B

later partnered with Schlafly on other projects, including fighting the Equal Rights Amendment and lobbying Catholic bishops to oppose the growing social justice movement centered in Latin America. I have photos of Mother and Phyllis together on their 1965 trip to Rome as part of a delegation to discuss the implications of the encyclical
Pacem in Terris
(Peace on Earth), written by Pope John XXIII two years earlier.
    Mother and Schlafly never became close personal friends, and my mother was critical of Phyllis, calling her a “self-promoter.” I attributed the animosity to jealousy—Phyllis became a nationally known conservative in the 1960s while Mother remained behind the scenes. I later discovered, however, that Mother’s beef with Phyllis was about loyalty, not jealousy.
    According to my mother, Phyllis and her husband, Fred, insisted they’d never been members of the John Birch Society, but Mother knew they’d actually joined ten months after my parents did. Robert Welch must have known Phyllis was a Bircher in 1960 when he called her “one of our most loyal members.” 12
    Mother also knew that in 1962 Fred Schlafly had been invited to join the Birch National Council because my father, already a council member, told her. Mother’s information (this wasn’t a contention; it was a fact) proved correct. In his 2005 book about Schlafly, Donald Critchlow quotes Fred’s letter declining Welch’s invitation. “I know of no other more patriotic or dedicated group than your council,” Fred wrote. 13
    The more that Phyllis insisted she was not a Bircher, the less Mother liked her. “Phyllis sold out to the Republican establishment,” she said.

    Forty-plus years after Mother dove into the textbook wars, I sat on a five-gallon bucket in my parents’ basement, sorting a mountain of old papers. “They saved everything,” I complained to the silverfish scurrying along the damp floor. “I’ll be here for a month of Sundays.”
    Black-metal file cabinets lined three of the walls. Books, magazines, andpamphlets littered rows of shelves. In the corner, a tall stack of hard-cover books leaned against the wall. The jumble spilled over into piles on the floor. All around me was the debris of my parents’ long fight against all things liberal. My brother Jay R. had already made arrangements for our parents’ extensive library of conservative books, personal correspondence, and writings to be donated to a Catholic library in Virginia. I was left with the stuff no one wanted.
    All afternoon I filled boxes. I found index cards, covered with Mother’s nearly illegible scrawl, stuck out of the pages of old textbooks—remnants of her crusade.
    I took a moment to remember my mother as she marched down the hall to confront the authorities about the errors in the books. How I wished she’d just go home and bake cookies like other mothers did. Of course, my mother never did. She moved from project to project and issue to issue for almost fifty years. Right to the end, she was a formidable crusader for everything right-wing.
    I dragged boxes to the corner and stuffed books inside. The next day was trash pickup; all of this stuff was headed to the dump.
    While those books went to the trash compactor, Mother’s ideas were being rescued from the dustbin of history. In 2010, the Texas Board of Education adopted curriculum standards that were as far to the right as anything ever imagined for public schools. My mother, Phyllis Schlafly, and Mel and Norma Gabler—along with two generations of John Birchers and religious fundamentalists—were reemerging on the winning side of the textbook battles.
    Some of the curriculum changes to Texas’s books defy fact; others delete important historical figures and erase events from the timeline of American history. Still others diminish the importance of the civil rights movement while praising states’ rights ad infinitum. 14 Today’s students in public schools across the country are in