Phyllis Schlafly and Grassroots Conservatism

In 1924, the year Phyllis Schlafly's birth, St. Louis went Republican,. This did not prove to have been a great idea in 1929 when the Great Depression hit and the city sunk into an apocalyptic collapse that it is still not recovered from. Her father loses his job as a sales engineer to Westinghouse; this left him broken pensionless at the age of 51 with a wife and two children. She wrote in her diary about the excitement of taking a three day train ride from St. Louis to Los Angeles in an unair conditioned car.