# Eagle Forum The **Eagle Forum** is a conservative social-issues advocacy organization founded in **1972 by [[Phyllis Schlafly]]** as the institutional vehicle for the **STOP ERA campaign** — the successful effort to block ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. Eagle Forum became one of the most influential grassroots organizing structures of the late-20th-century social-conservative movement, and the personal organizational base from which Schlafly built her decades-long career as "the first lady of conservatism." After Schlafly's death in 2016, Eagle Forum split into two competing successor organizations (the "Phyllis Schlafly Eagles" faction, led by her daughter Anne Schlafly Cori and her son Andy Schlafly, vs. the legacy "Eagle Forum" board) — a succession fight that exposed long-running tensions inside the org but did not end its operational presence. ## Founding and the STOP ERA Campaign Eagle Forum was founded as a project of Schlafly's pre-existing newsletter operation, the *Phyllis Schlafly Report* (1967–present). The org's first and defining campaign was **STOP ERA** — the multi-year effort, beginning in 1972, to prevent the Equal Rights Amendment from being ratified by the necessary 38 state legislatures. Schlafly's campaign reframed the ERA from a women's-rights amendment into a threatened destruction of traditional sex roles (women drafted into the military, women's restrooms abolished, alimony rights eliminated), and successfully prevented ratification before the original 1979 deadline (later extended to 1982). The STOP ERA campaign is the **canonical case study of grassroots social-conservative organizing**. Schlafly built a decentralized network of state chairs and local organizers — predominantly suburban, married, churchgoing women — who lobbied state legislators in person. The campaign also fused, for the first time at scale, Catholic and Protestant evangelical women into a single organizing structure. The infrastructure built for STOP ERA became the template for subsequent social-conservative campaigns (anti-abortion, anti-gay-rights, anti-LGBT, anti-school-curriculum) for the next four decades. ## Programmatic Evolution After ERA was defeated, Eagle Forum expanded into a broad social-conservative agenda: - **Anti-abortion** activism - **Education policy** — opposition to federal [[Department of Education]], opposition to Common Core (Schlafly was a major early Common Core opponent), home-schooling advocacy - **Anti-gay-rights** advocacy (1980s–2010s) - **Sovereignty / anti-globalization** — opposition to NAFTA, GATT/WTO, UN treaties; Schlafly was an early "[[America First]]" voice predating MAGA by decades - **[[Immigration restriction]]** — Eagle Forum was an early restrictionist voice on the right, well before the issue moved to the movement center - **Anti-amnesty** during the 2007 immigration debate (a defining organizational fight) - **Pro-Trump positioning** — Schlafly endorsed Trump in March 2016, one of the first major social-conservative figures to do so, and her endorsement helped legitimize Trump with the Christian right Schlafly's last book, *The Conservative Case for Trump*, was published the day after her death in September 2016. ## Place in the Right's Organizational Ecosystem Eagle Forum is one of the **founder organizations** of what later became known as [[the New Right]] / movement conservatism / [[The Unholy Alliance]]. Schlafly was a founding member of the [[Council for National Policy]] (1981), the elite-coordinating body of the religious and movement right, and Eagle Forum was effectively the grassroots-organizing arm of that broader coordination layer. Inside the [[Christian Nationalism Ecosystem]] hub, Eagle Forum sits in the **older social-conservative organizing layer** alongside: - [[Family Research Council]] — D.C. policy/broadcast arm - [[Concerned Women for America]] — women's organizing layer (originally a Schlafly competitor, founded by Beverly LaHaye in 1979) - [[Moral Majority]] — Falwell's earlier (1979–1989) coordinating body Eagle Forum's distinctive contribution was the **state-legislature lobbying competence** developed during STOP ERA, which the other organizations did not have at the same depth. ## The 2016 Succession Fight Schlafly's death in September 2016 (one month before Trump's election) opened a fight over her institutional legacy. Anne Schlafly Cori and Andy Schlafly, with five of Schlafly's six children, sought to take over Eagle Forum and continue Schlafly's specific 2016-era political program. [[Ed Martin]], the chair of the Eagle Forum board (who Schlafly herself had elevated), held control of the legacy entity. Litigation followed. The result was an effective split: the legacy Eagle Forum continued under Martin (later involved in Trump-era politics); the "Phyllis Schlafly Eagles" became the family-led successor. Both organizations continue to operate as of 2026. ## KB Significance Eagle Forum matters to the KB for four reasons: 1. **The grassroots-organizing template.** STOP ERA produced the organizational playbook (suburban-women state-level lobbying networks fused across Catholic and Protestant lines) that the social-conservative movement has reused for fifty years. 2. **The early-warning system on populism.** Schlafly and Eagle Forum were America-First, anti-globalization, immigration-restrictionist, anti-trade-deal, and anti-establishment-Republican for decades before MAGA. The 2016 Schlafly endorsement of Trump was not a surprise; it was an old current in conservatism finally finding its presidential candidate. 3. **The CNP coordination layer.** Schlafly's CNP membership makes Eagle Forum a node in the elite-coordination structure that links the religious right, the donor right, and the operative right. 4. **The succession-fight pattern.** The post-2016 Eagle Forum split is an instructive case of what happens to founder-dominated movement organizations when the founder dies — a pattern relevant for understanding what may happen to other personality-driven movement entities (Liberty University post-Falwell-Sr, parts of the Charismatic broadcast empires, etc.). ## See Also - [[Phyllis Schlafly]] — founder - [[Council for National Policy]] — coordination body Schlafly co-founded - [[Concerned Women for America]] — peer/competitor women's social-con org - [[Family Research Council]] — peer D.C. social-con org - [[Moral Majority]] — predecessor coordinating body - [[Christian Nationalism Ecosystem]] — broader ecosystem hub - [[The Unholy Alliance]] — coalition framework - [[Think Tank Ecosystem]] — broader policy-org ecosystem