After the U.S. Supreme Court legalized abortion in 1973 in the landmark cases of Roe v. Wade and Doe v. Bolton, opposition mounted immediately. Opponents in Congress focused on two strategies to weaken or overturn the decisions. Some introduced bills to end the federal financing of abortions. Others proposed a series of Human Life Amendments to grant constitutional rights to unborn fetuses from the moment of conception. Much has been written about the related lobbying efforts of the National Conference of Catholic Bishops and, in particular, the National Right to Life Committee, which was formed just months after the Supreme Court decisions. These groups focused on electing sympathetic political candidates and lobbying them to pass anti-abortion policies. But change was not immediately forthcoming, which prompted some activists to try to expedite matters by entering politics themselves.Footnote ¹

This article describes how the most unlikely assortment of politicians—a group of housewives from Long Island—attempted to pass a Human Life Amendment by running a candidate for president of the United States. In 1976, one of the housewives, Ellen McCormack, ran in the Democratic presidential primary. She and the other housewives had formed a small Long Island–based Right to Life Party in 1970. Their limited local political experience, however, paled in comparison to running for president in a major party’s primary. McCormack’s campaign was managed from kitchen tables across Long Island with guidance from a sympathetic Catholic priest and a local attorney well versed in election law. This help, along with the support of a small but dedicated group of volunteers across the country, enabled McCormack to appear on the ballot in twenty-one states and garner 267,590 popular votes. Remarkably, she was the first woman to qualify for federal matching funds and Secret Service protection. Yet McCormack and her Democratic presidential primary campaign have received little scholarly or popular attention.Footnote ²

McCormack and her team of mostly white, middle-class, Catholic housewives were motivated to act by two principal factors: a conviction that abortion was akin to murdering somebody out-of-utero and an abiding concern that legal abortion, even feminism, undermined family life. “I am running for president,” McCormack wrote, because “women who support traditional values must express themselves in order to neutralize what the feminists are doing in our name.”Footnote ³ McCormack and her supporters opposed abortion based on their belief that fetuses were no different than full-term babies living outside their mothers’ wombs—an idea that the Catholic Church advocated as well. But McCormack’s comment about neutralizing feminists indicates that her campaign for a Human Life Amendment (HLA) was also a proxy for discomfort with changing social norms and values in the 1960s and 1970s.Footnote ⁴

McCormack’s disagreement with feminists stemmed from fundamentally different views of gender. Feminists argued that gender was a socially-constructed concept. As a result, they promoted a political program designed to help men and women share familial and societal responsibilities more equitably. They encouraged women’s access to greater job opportunities and education, government-funded day care, and the right to have a legal abortion. McCormack and her supporters, by contrast, saw gender as a fixed, divinely-ordered, biologically-based distinction. They felt that humanity was divided into two different sexes, each with distinct roles. Whenever possible, they thought that men should support their families in the paid workforce, while women tended to children and the home.Footnote ⁵

By the mid-1970s, however, the American social order and economy had been so transformed over the past decade that McCormack’s vision of the family seemed increasingly untenable. New sexual freedoms and, above all, legal abortion allowed women to opt out of motherhood. More educational and job opportunities for women, and an economic downturn that disproportionately affected men, posed additional challenges to the traditional division of gendered labor. Ellen McCormack, like a lot of her female supporters and a majority of women opposed to legal abortion at that time, was a first-generation suburbanite. Many of these women had grown up under financial strain in ethnic working-class neighborhoods across New York City, some with mothers who were forced to work outside of the home. As new entrants into the middle class, they hoped to retain the privilege of being homemakers.Footnote ⁶ McCormack’s little-known presidential campaign was part of what historian Jane DeHart has described as a “rational respons[e] of people who lived in a deeply gendered and profoundly precarious world.”Footnote ⁷ Enacting an HLA was of paramount importance to McCormack and her supporters. Yet their campaign was more broadly conceived of as a way to protest everything from economic uncertainty in the 1970s to a range of new social changes and feminist-backed goals.

Ushering McCormack and her concerns back onto the historical stage helps to illuminate the cross section between politics and policy. Romain Huret argued in this journal for the need to join the conventions of social history that “seem to focus entirely on race, class, and gender with the study of . . . the political system of elections, legislation,” and such—the stuff of “ordinary politics” that largely has been ignored by political historians in recent decades.Footnote ⁸ This article addresses Huret’s challenge. The worldview of McCormack and her associates shaped their opinions on topics such as abortion, gender, and the family. But this article is not only guided by the conventions of social history, for the worldview of McCormack and her associates also shaped tactical political strategy. McCormack took advantage of the new regulatory environment created by the Federal Election Campaign Act Amendments of 1974. This legislation made it easier for presidential contenders, including single-issue candidates like her, to earn federal matching funds. McCormack entered the Democratic presidential primary with the goal of winning federal dollars to finance a nationwide campaign for an HLA.Footnote ⁹

Her team strategically chose to run in the Democratic primary in 1976 rather than on an independent line using their local Right to Life Party. This was done partially because of the logistical difficulties of obtaining ballot access on a third-party line. In large part, though, the women were upset that the party of their roots, the party of the New Deal, had been moving in recent years to embrace the modern women’s movement and its support for legal abortion. McCormack’s team assumed that their campaign would expose that other traditional Democrats like them opposed the party’s increasing support for legal abortion. They hoped that doing so would move Democratic politicians to support an HLA. McCormack’s campaign ultimately did not win enough votes to produce that outcome. Instead, in 1976, the first presidential election year after Roe, the Democratic Party responded to its growing feminist caucus by including in its platform for the first time support for legal abortion. McCormack’s unsuccessful campaign did, however, give a voice to the allegedly voiceless “silent majority” of Americans—many of them Democrats who turned to Republicans such as Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan after rejecting the perceived liberal excesses of the 1960s.Footnote ¹⁰

Far from being silent and simply voting for conservative Republicans, McCormack and her supporters aired their concerns across the nation and tried to reform the Democratic Party from within. Much of what McCormack said as a Democratic contender echoed what the most famous anti-feminist from that era, Phyllis Schlafly, said as she and other conservative Republicans seized power from the more liberal Rockefeller wing of the GOP—a faction that had dominated the Republican Party and supported women’s rights such as legal abortion. McCormack’s campaign builds on and revises several important histories of the rise of modern political conservatism. Her candidacy reveals that similar anti-feminist activism emerged on the Democratic side as secular liberals took control of the party’s infrastructure and marginalized lower- and middle-class northern Catholics. McCormack and these traditional Democrats supported the social welfare measures of the New Deal and Great Society but rejected the party’s embrace of abortion rights for women and other tenets of the new feminism.Footnote ¹¹

THE RIGHT STRATEGY

The movement that coalesced into Ellen’s McCormack’s 1976 presidential campaign began in the late 1960s, when Father Paul Driscoll decided to form a “dialogue group” on Long Island at the Curé of Ars Roman Catholic Church in Merrick. Driscoll soon had a regular contingent of housewives, including McCormack, who met with him weekly at the church to discuss current events and a variety of topics. Most members of the group were friends and neighbors, and although none was especially political, they were civic-minded women involved in groups like the school PTA.Footnote ¹²

The dialogue group soon began following the struggle to legalize abortion in New York State. Since the nineteenth century, abortion had been illegal across the United States, except when it was necessary to save the life of the expectant woman. In the 1960s, movements at the state level began pressuring legislatures to update the law. By 1969, ten states had passed reforms. The cause was taken up in New York by a coalition of women’s rights advocates, Democrats outside heavily Catholic districts, and Governor Nelson Rockefeller and his more liberal Republican faction, which controlled the state legislature. Opponents of legal abortion in New York were comparatively disorganized, including the Long Island housewives who had expanded beyond the church to form a lobbying group called Women for the Unborn. When the state legislature passed the nation’s most expansive reform law in April 1970, permitting abortions performed by doctors through the twenty-fourth week of pregnancy, opponents were caught off guard. Without state residency requirements, New York soon became a haven for women across the country seeking medically-supervised, legal abortions.Footnote ¹³

To counter this trend, the Long Island women entered politics. “I was a very contented housewife, happy with my family,” McCormack recalled, but she and others “were increasingly distressed . . . [that] the feminist movement had become the darling of the media and . . . were pressuring the legislatures around the country to legalize abortions.” The women decided that if “right-to-life [were] to have any voice in the political system,” they would “have to become politicians [them]selves.” They began studying state election laws and formed the New York State Right to Life Party (RTLP) in the summer of 1970.Footnote ¹⁴

The Catholic women became politically active out of sheer disbelief: they wondered how a majority of their leaders in Albany did not see aborting an unborn fetus as akin to murdering somebody out-of-utero. Rather than search the Bible for passages that could be perceived as anti-abortion, McCormack and her supporters often laced their arguments with facts about fetal development. Jane Gilroy, a RTLP founder from the original dialogue group, recalled routinely informing state legislators that fetuses’ “hearts began beating at three weeks gestation.” The RTLP hoped to demonstrate that fetuses in the womb were, as they often called them, “preborn babies,” and that abortion therefore was homicide.Footnote ¹⁵

From the onset, the women did not view their political activism as a religious undertaking—even though the Catholic Church also campaigned for an HLA and a local parish priest had introduced them to the issue. Like other contemporary Catholic activists that journalist Cynthia Gorney has written about, the RTLP founders were motivated to act “by the plainest possible intersection of medical science and common moral sense.”Footnote ¹⁶ As they saw it, if fetuses were nearly indistinguishable from full-term human beings, then the political system had been deeply corrupted to the point where murder was being sanctioned and novices had to get off the sidelines to rectify the situation. Or, as McCormack later said as a candidate in 1976, “If things have gotten so bad that a housewife from Merrick [Long Island] says she is running for president, then it’s time for a change.”Footnote ¹⁷

The RTLP leaders and their supporters were demographically similar to other organized opponents of legal abortion at the time. Sociologist Kristen Luker has written that a typical anti-abortion activist in that era was a forty-four-year-old woman who had grown up in a large metropolitan area, gotten married after high school, and likely did not attend college. She had three or more children and was a devout Catholic who attended religious services at least once a week. Her family was lower-middle or middle-class, and she tended to be a full-time homemaker, while her husband worked in a low-level, white-collar job. The RTLP founders overwhelmingly fit this composite profile. Ellen McCormack, for example, was in her forties when she ran for president. She had been married for twenty-six years to Jack McCormack, a deputy inspector with the New York City Police Department, and they lived in a modest three-bedroom house. They had four children, ranging in age from nine to twenty-five, and two young grandchildren. McCormack had grown up in New York City and attended a Catholic high school, but not college. A survey of more than nine hundred RTLP supporters that was conducted by political scientist Robert J. Spitzer in 1983 revealed that the party primarily attracted votes from people in New York State who shared these characteristics.Footnote ¹⁸

Not only did the party’s founders and supporters fit this composite profile, but their reasons for forming the RTLP in 1970 approximated the motivations guiding other third-party political organizations. The women formed the RTLP after a coalition of Democrats outside of heavily-Catholic districts and Republicans aligned with Rockefeller passed New York’s abortion reform law. Much like the founders of other third parties, the women felt that politicians in both major parties were not heeding their concerns. Their focus on one controversial topic, legal abortion, and their emphasis on finding a constitutional remedy to address it—with a Human Life Amendment to the U.S. Constitution—made their activism similar to previous single-issue parties in America that sought constitutional remedies, such as the Prohibition Party. Moreover, the RTLP’s inclusion of very religious people who viewed a politicized issue through a moral lens, and their inability to compromise on a solution, made them similar to reformers in the nineteenth century who saw slavery as a moral issue and formed third parties to try and end it.Footnote ¹⁹

As a result of their moral certitude, the RTLP’s activism was infused with an educational purpose: its goal was never to win political office but to inform the public of its views and push leaders to outlaw abortion. From 1970 onward, the RTLP gathered nominating signatures and entered its founding members and other supporters in local political contests. Anybody’s name would do because the cause mattered more than the candidate. The party typically earned less than 5 percent of the popular vote in each race. The most one of their candidates earned was 16 percent in the U.S. Senate contest in 1974. In this instance, the higher tally resulted from their candidate’s name also being listed on the Conservative Party line—owing to New York State’s rather unique practice of allowing cross-endorsements from several political parties. After operating in this manner for several years in New York, the RTLP saw little progress for its cause and decided to expand its horizons with a national campaign.Footnote ²⁰

When the RTLP began exploring a presidential bid in late 1974, abortion had been legal at the federal level for nearly two years and opponents had concluded that congressional action was the best form of recourse. Beginning with conservative Republican U.S. Senator James Buckley—a staunch opponent of legal abortion who represented New York State and whose campaign RTLP members had volunteered on—a series of unsuccessful bills were introduced that would have curbed Medicaid funding for abortion. In early 1975, a breakthrough on this front materialized when a bill sponsored by Representatives Lawrence J. Hogan (R-Md.) and Harold Froehlich (R-Wis.) passed to prohibit the use of federal funds for abortion-related litigation. Congress achieved far less progress in passing an HLA, with few proposals making it out of committee for a vote. Within the House alone, twenty-eight HLA bills appeared in 1973 and 1974. Twenty-one of these bills (an overwhelming 75 percent) originated from Catholic legislators, among them eighteen Republicans and ten Democrats, even though Catholics made up less than 25 percent of the House.Footnote ²¹

McCormack’s presidential campaign therefore focused on passing an HLA. As in the past, their goal was not to win the race but to form a powerful swing vote that could pressure politicians into voting for the amendment. In one of its first races on Long Island, the RTLP had run a local supporter, Vincent Carey, for U.S. Congress in 1970. He only won 2.5 percent of the popular vote, but because Carey ran in a closely-contested district, his total was enough to convince the politician who won, a man who previously had supported legal abortion, to begin voting for anti-abortion measures. The RTLP’s Jane Gilroy recalled that the goal in the 1976 presidential primary was to “achieve a similar result in state after state . . . to mobilize pro-life voters across the nation on behalf of a constitutional amendment.”Footnote ²²

The RTLP hoped to use television commercials to spread its message across the country. At the time, Dr. John Willke of Ohio, who later became president of the National Right to Life Committee, was considering running his own nationwide commercials, albeit ones independent of a political campaign. Willke hoped the ads would stir up enough anti-abortion sentiment in the electorate to pressure legislators into passing an HLA. The Long Island women shared this goal, but they would tie their commercials to a political candidacy. They had produced anti-abortion commercials for Barbara Keating in 1974, the candidate for U.S. Senate who had won 16 percent of the popular vote—in a race in which both of her major party opponents had supported legal abortion. Without concrete evidence, the RTLP founders credited the commercials with stopping hundreds of abortions in the state. They assumed that a national campaign would push legislators to vote for an HLA and stop perhaps thousands of abortions across the country.Footnote ²³

But to broadcast their commercials across America, the Long Island women would have to run for a national political office: the presidency. They had learned from Keating’s senate bid that anti-abortion commercials could only be aired if they were part of a political campaign. The major television networks—ABC, CBS, and NBC, which collectively reached about 90 percent of viewers—avoided granting airtime to controversial issues. If they wanted to discuss abortion, the networks would produce their own programming, not run commercials created by activists. If, however, the commercials were for a political candidate, in accordance with the Federal Communications Commission’s (FCC) so-called equal-time law, a network had to broadcast the spots, regardless of their content, if at least one other candidate in the race was airing advertisements of any sort.Footnote ²⁴

Dependent on the FCC’s equal-time law, the women decided to run a candidate in the 1976 Democratic presidential primary. The Democratic Party’s open primary race that year offered a vast stage for political advertising—an incredible opportunity to air anti-abortion ads under the equal-time provision. Party founder Jane Gilroy also felt that by the mid-1970s, Democrats “appear[ed] to be wavering towards promoting abortion, which seemed . . . far remove[d] from the Democrats we had grown up knowing who supported the ‘little guy.’”Footnote ²⁵ Many RTLP supporters like Gilroy and McCormack were a generation removed from the working-class ethnic Democratic enclaves of New York City. They wondered how the party that had been aligned primarily with union politics and social welfare measures had become the party of feminism and legal abortion, which they equated with murder. As McCormack later mused by quoting the writer Gilbert Chesterton, “Instead of distributing hats,” Democrats are now more apt to support “cutting off heads.”Footnote ²⁶ These feelings were particularly poignant in their home state, from which some of the party’s leading feminist advocates hailed, notably Democratic U.S. Representatives from New York City, Shirley Chisholm and Bella Abzug.Footnote ²⁷

This palpable sense of alienation was not unfounded: the Commission on Party Structure and Delegate Selection that met from 1969 to 1972 had helped transform the Democratic Party from a working-class, Catholic, machine-driven organization into a more liberal, secular one led by college-educated professionals, including feminists. This so-called McGovern Commission—named after its chairman, Democratic U.S. Senator George McGovern of South Dakota—was the brainchild of young staffers from Eugene McCarthy’s anti-war presidential campaign in 1968. These staffers hoped to minimize the power of northern Catholic bosses who controlled the party’s presidential nominating process by appointing likeminded delegates. That year, the nation focused on what was happening outside of the Democratic National Convention in 1968 as Chicago police attacked and arrested anti-war protesters. Few noticed when McCarthy’s staffers passed a minority plank that would prevent traditional bosses from monopolizing the party’s presidential nomination process in future elections. The plank instituted new quotas mandating more delegate representation from racial minorities, women, and younger people. These groups took over the party’s infrastructure and helped the anti-war, left-wing McGovern become the Democratic presidential nominee in 1972.Footnote ²⁸

This delegate rule change helped align the feminist movement with the Democratic Party. Republicans did not have similar quotas. The GOP also was moving rightward on issues related to women throughout the 1970s as feminist-backed Rockefeller Republicans were marginalized by conservatives in the party who did not support goals such as legal abortion. Conversely, the McGovern Commission enacted rules to ensure that women’s voices and concerns would be heard within the Democratic Party. Since feminists were more politically-mobilized on the national level in the early 1970s than their anti-feminist, anti-abortion counterparts, this rule change meant that those women’s voices would primarily come from feminists. As their comments above indicate, the RTLP founders sensed these shifting priorities in the Democratic Party—even if they were not yet as fully aware of the party’s inner workings as they would become during their primary campaign in 1976.Footnote ²⁹

With their minds set on the presidency, the RTLP women once again turned to Gene McMahon, an attorney and election law expert from Long Island, who had helped them in the past. With McMahon’s help, they had formed the Pro-life Action Committee (PLAC) during Keating’s senate campaign in 1974, and at his suggestion this became the political action committee through which they ran their 1976 presidential campaign. PLAC’s four officers—the founders of the RTLP, including Ellen McCormack—would set campaign strategy, while McMahon tackled complex fundraising and convention delegate laws.Footnote ³⁰

But deciding to run for president is one thing: formulating and executing a strategy to do so, literally from kitchen tables across Long Island, is quite another. As in the past, the women did not work within the political establishment. None held outside employment, and they combined political work with household responsibilities. The campaign was run out of their homes, mostly over the telephone, and relied on networks of volunteers. Campaign leader Jane Gilroy acknowledged that their lack of political experience, especially in the presidential arena, put them at a great organizing disadvantage. But not being part of the political establishment also freed them to focus exclusively on anti-abortion activism.Footnote ³¹

Skipping the usual outreach to senior Democratic politicians, PLAC, in late 1974, wrote to the contacts they had amassed through the years. They hoped to identify leaders in each state to coordinate efforts on the local level. Jane Gilroy remembered beginning this process by asking local supporters to provide a list of friends and family that they had across the country.Footnote ³² PLAC’s pro-bono attorney, Gene McMahon, encouraged people to change their voter registration, if necessary, to the Democratic Party. Gilroy recalled that many “would have blithely become Socialists if [they] had thought it would have helped [PLAC’s] cause.”Footnote ³³ Later, this exact point frustrated party insiders and feminists: PLAC had used the Democratic presidential primary contest as a vehicle to campaign across the country for an HLA, with little regard for the party’s leaders and concerns.

PLAC also began searching for a presidential candidate in late 1974; still without one in August 1975, their vice-chairman, Ellen McCormack, reluctantly agreed to run so that the endeavor would not have to be abandoned. McCormack, as a founder of New York’s RTLP, had more political experience than the average homemaker. In addition to her local political experience, McCormack had written a weekly editorial column since 1972 called “Who Speaks for the Unborn Child?” The column was syndicated in forty newspapers, mostly Catholic ones, making her familiar in certain anti-abortion circles. The column had enabled her to work through her ideas about abortion—to develop linkages, witty retorts, and compelling language that later served as campaign talking points. Thus, in a manner with few parallels to the usual path to the presidency, PLAC had found a candidate whose main goal was not to become the Democratic nominee but to use her campaign to push the party and lawmakers into passing an HLA.Footnote ³⁴

THE CAMPAIGN

Throughout the campaign, PLAC focused on obtaining ballot access and the federal matching funds made available by a new campaign finance law—all in an attempt to unearth widespread Democratic opposition to legal abortion and other feminist goals. Enacting an HLA was their primary goal, but PLAC often equated legal abortion with other feminist-backed proposals, such as government-subsidized child care. They considered these measures to be an unprecedented threat to the traditional nuclear family, and to their roles as wives and mothers within it. Although McCormack ultimately failed to achieve her goals by averaging less than 5 percent of the popular vote in each state, her campaign did not go unnoticed. Her eventual use of nearly a quarter of a million dollars in federal funds for an anti-abortion campaign alarmed feminists and legislators in both parties who supported legal abortion. They pushed the U.S. Congress, while McCormack was still an active candidate, to outlaw the use of federal funds for single-issue campaigns. Moreover, Democrats ended the 1976 presidential cycle even more firmly entrenched in their support for legal abortion and other feminist goals.Footnote ³⁵

But the campaign began on a very different note in November 1975, when PLAC held a press conference in Boston to announce that McCormack would join a crowded race of ten Democrats in the 1976 presidential primary.Footnote ³⁶ The press conference was well covered. The Associated Press and United Press wire services attended, along with Newsweek magazine and a large Boston television station affiliate. The coverage helped PLAC develop a rationale for placing McCormack on Democratic primary ballots across the country: one way to add a name to the ballot was to prove that a candidate was recognized by the national news media. PLAC encouraged supporters to mail in articles about the campaign, and it eventually subscribed to a national press clipping service to bolster its case.Footnote ³⁷

Nevertheless, except for the Catholic press, the media mostly ignored or trivialized McCormack’s campaign, and her gender often exacerbated matters. The widely read Philadelphia Bulletin, for example, entitled one article about her campaign, “A Bonnet in the Ring.” Far worse, in October 1975, perhaps the most popular and well-respected news program in the country, Walter Cronkite’s CBS Evening News, claimed that no women were running for president in 1976. After two months of protest, the newscast issued an apology. Correspondent Morton Dean noted that at least two women were running: “Ellen McCormack, Democratic candidate supported by anti-abortion groups” and “Democrat Mary Britt, a custodian from Philadelphia.” This roster led Dean to deduce, “All you need is ambition, a point of view that you champion or gall or all these things” to run for president. In this trivializing manner, the esteemed newscast recognized McCormack‘s anti-abortion campaign by labeling her candidacy as “interesting” and comparing her to a female custodian whose name ultimately never appeared on a single statewide primary ballot.Footnote ³⁸

Despite this noteworthy mention, three days later, on December 11, 1975, the Secretary of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, citing a lack of demonstrated press coverage, refused to certify McCormack’s name for the state’s upcoming Democratic primary. Her pro-bono attorney, Gene McMahon, responded by citing Cronkite’s CBS Evening News and eighteen publications that had mentioned McCormack’s campaign. His pleas were ignored, forcing PLAC to seek ballot access by gathering the signatures of at least twenty-five hundred registered Democrats in Massachusetts. Roughly two hundred local volunteers collected thirty-five hundred signatures, one thousand more than were necessary. One woman from the working-class suburb of Lynn, Massachusetts, resented collecting signatures over the Christmas holiday. Recognizing the recent shift in Democratic Party allegiance, she asked a local reporter, “Why is [McCormack] being ignored in this day of women’s rights? We would expect the press and the politician alike to provide our lady candidate with fair treatment and coverage.”Footnote ³⁹ PLAC’s canvassing tactic worked and Secretary Guzzi soon certified McCormack’s name for the state’s Democratic primary ballot.Footnote ⁴⁰

The struggle in Massachusetts presaged similar battles across the country. In the end, McMahon’s grasp of arcane election rules, reinforced by the help of volunteers, successfully placed McCormack’s name on nineteen statewide primary ballots and in a scattering of congressional districts across New York and Ohio. With thirty-one states holding Democratic primaries, as opposed to state conventions or party caucuses, this amounted to access in nearly 70 percent of the contests that year.Footnote ⁴¹

In addition to ballot access, PLAC sought to use the new regulatory environment to it advantage by trying to qualify for federal matching funds—money that it intended to use to produce commercials promoting an HLA. The Federal Election Campaign Act Amendments of 1974 had granted presidential candidates the option of earning public financing in the general election and federal matching funds in the primaries. To qualify in a primary, a candidate had to acquire $100,000 in the following manner: $5,000 had to be raised in twenty different states, and the money had to come from individuals, not political action committees, with no person giving more than $250. If a candidate did this, the federal government would give him or her $100,000 in matching funds; it also would match every dollar raised beyond that amount. Almost every mention of McCormack’s candidacy described this complicated process in detail to focus supporters on helping her qualify for federal matching funds in the primary.Footnote ⁴²

Once McCormack agreed to run in August 1975, PLAC sent its growing list of contacts across the country a detailed fund-raising memo. PLAC encouraged out-of-state supporters to raise money by relying on tactics that had worked for them in New York: canvassing door-to-door, setting up booths in shopping centers, speaking at the meetings of sympathetic groups, and sending donation letters to personal contacts and encouraging recipients to do the same. In addition, PLAC targeted Catholic publications. Catholics, especially those who read church newspapers and were engaged in parish life, were more likely than the general public to oppose legal abortion. They also were more likely to donate money. McCormack’s editorial column had run in many of these Catholic publications since 1972, making her a recognizable and trusted name.Footnote ⁴³

PLAC’s decision to run for president in order to seek federal funding to promote an HLA was embraced by other opponents of legal abortion across the country. Many of McCormack’s campaign stops outside of New York were arranged by like-minded groups. Her one trip to Indiana, for instance, revolved around giving a speech at the state’s Right to Life Convention. McCormack spoke at similar gatherings elsewhere, including Nellie Gray’s annual March for Life in Washington, D.C., in January 1976, which attracted an estimated sixty-five thousand people.Footnote ⁴⁴Lifeletter, an anti-abortion newsletter widely read on Capitol Hill, defended McCormack’s entry into the Democratic primary by writing about what they too saw as the party’s increasingly wayward direction. “History repeats itself (as closely as it ever does),” the July 1976 edition of Lifeletter noted, “and the Party of Slavery is born again as the Party of Abortion.”Footnote ⁴⁵ The powerful National Right to Life Committee (NRLC) also frequently used its newsletter to encourage readers to help McCormack. When, for example, Walter Cronkite’s broadcast at first overlooked her candidacy in December 1975, the NRLC urged its readers to complain to CBS about the slight and send McCormack a check to aid her quest for federal funding.Footnote ⁴⁶

Support from groups like the NRLC—combined with PLAC’s effective grassroots fund-raising tactics—enabled McCormack to qualify for federal matching funds in February 1976. As PLAC’s treasurer, Mary Jane Tobin, put it, the money came from “very God-fearing people . . . upset about what is happening,” but resolved to “do something to combat [it].”Footnote ⁴⁷ Once the Federal Election Commission (FEC) approved McCormack’s request for funding, she received an initial grant of $100,000 from the federal treasury to match the $5,000 she had raised in twenty different states. She also automatically qualified for ballot access in fifteen states and became entitled to round-the-clock Secret Service protection. Not surprisingly, the agents generated a lot of attention in suburban Long Island. Human-interest stories ran in the local newspapers, all underscoring the same theme: despite receiving Secret Service protection, McCormack was an outsider in the competitive [male] world of presidential politics.Footnote ⁴⁸

Qualifying for federal matching funds generated far more debate and press coverage—and not just in the local media, but across the country. Public financing had been created in 1974 to cut corruption and democratize politics in the wake of the Watergate scandal. As word spread about McCormack’s funding, people on both sides of the abortion issue argued that her grassroots campaign had fulfilled that promise. Conversely, Republican congressman Charles Wiggins of California, who had voted against the new public financing reforms, called her candidacy “a perversion that could open the Treasury floodgates to candidates seeking to promote controversial causes, not win office.”Footnote ⁴⁹ One columnist in New Jersey who opposed legal abortion agreed with Wiggins in an editorial piece entitled “The Cause, Yes; Tactics, No.” She claimed that McCormack had “cheapened her crusade by mounting a false [presidential] campaign” to obtain federal dollars. In essence, that McCormack had played politics with what this writer felt was a moral issue: abortion.Footnote ⁵⁰

Organized feminists were the most upset about McCormack’s use of federal funding. Most feminist groups had embraced legal abortion as a fundamental woman’s right since the late 1960s. They felt that McCormack had manipulated the new regulatory environment by using federal dollars to try and squash what the U.S. Supreme Court had ruled to be a constitutionally-protected right. The National Organization for Women (NOW) and the National Abortion Rights Action League (NARAL) even pursued legal action against McCormack. They alleged that she was funded by the Catholic Church, and that her ads falsely presented PLAC as an anti-abortion group, not a presidential political action committee. McCormack fought the charges, and although the FEC disqualified two of her advertisements created by supporters in San Diego, nothing more came of the charges.Footnote ⁵¹

NOW and NARAL did, however, highlight an allegation that continually followed McCormack: the idea that her campaign was a pawn of the Catholic Church. The church was deeply involved in the political fight to end legal abortion and had created an extensive plan to lobby congress for an HLA. Many church leaders, notably New York’s Terence Cardinal Cooke, encouraged Catholics to vote for anti-abortion politicians; they stopped short of recommending specific candidates, but McCormack still benefited. For instance, McCormack’s strong showing in northern Kentucky—where she won 30 percent of the popular vote, as opposed to roughly 6 percent statewide—was attributed to local Bishop Richard Ackerman’s indirect endorsement of her candidacy two days before the primary. Catholic newspapers provided favorable free press for McCormack, and church organizations were rich with volunteers and donors.Footnote ⁵²

Critics painted these links as improprieties, prompting PLAC to defend the relationship. PLAC’s Jane Gilroy noted that records certified by the FEC showed that the church had not given money to the campaign; she defended priests’ right to speak out against abortion (she felt that, if anything, their response was somewhat underwhelming). PLAC denied that its campaign, and the anti-abortion movement more broadly, was comprised only of Catholics. McCormack even accused the media of anti-Catholic prejudice to rally supporters. In other words, the Catholic Church played a very supportive, though not direct, role in the McCormack campaign. Still, PLAC denied even this supportive role because it saw its opposition to abortion as having little to do with the Catholic Church or religious doctrine. It insisted that a combination of medical science, moral decency, and basic common sense dictated that a legal abortion was akin to murdering a person out-of-utero.Footnote ⁵³

McCormack conveyed that belief on the stump and in a series of provocative commercials designed to promote an HLA. Federal funding made it easier to buy expensive airtime during prime-time programs such as Name That Tune—shows that attracted their target audience of family-oriented, traditional women. By April 1976, the commercials had reached an estimated forty million people. They were filled with information obtained from doctors sympathetic to their cause, which opponents later rebuked.Footnote ⁵⁴ PLAC, for example, asked Dr. Willke, the RTLC activist in Ohio, for feedback on the rough cut of its first commercial. He noted that the commercial states that “a d & c literally pulls apart the body of the baby. Might I suggest the wording, ‘with this loop shaped steel knife, the body of the tiny baby is cut in pieces.’ On the salt poisoning things . . . [it would be better to say] this healthy, living unborn baby ‘swallows and breathes in this poisonous salt, and is slowly killed by it.’ The word ‘salt-poisoning’ is in fact completely accurate as per a recently published scientific paper. There can be no comeback on that phraseology.”Footnote ⁵⁵

Abortion rights activists complained that such language (“living unborn baby,” as opposed to “fetus”) and imagery were being used in a presidential campaign. They urged their supporters to contact media outlets in protest. Proponents of legal abortion were chiefly concerned with who should control access to abortion: the government or women themselves. Graphic commercials claiming what abortion entailed and how the fetus supposedly felt did little to sway those concerned with this question of access. PLAC focused, however, on fetuses to humanize them; it used graphic images and language to insinuate that aborting a fetus was akin to murdering a child in his or her mother’s womb. PLAC assumed that if they could sway enough voters to think the same, then more legislators, especially Democrats—whom they felt were beholden to feminist and pro-choice groups—would support an HLA.Footnote ⁵⁶

Proponents of legal abortion sought recourse by pushing Congress to deprive McCormack of the federal funds that made such advertising possible. In the spring of 1976, as the Democratic primaries were still under way, Congress passed a bill amending the 1974 campaign finance law. The bill stipulated that if a candidate competed in only one state or failed to earn at least 10 percent of the popular vote in two consecutive primaries, he or she would be cut off from federal matching funds. Only Senator Henry “Scoop” Jackson (D-Wash.), by then an unpopular hawkish Democrat, and McCormack were affected by the change. Throughout the primaries, McCormack had won an average of 3 percent to 5 percent of the popular vote in each state. PLAC argued that her results were significant: the 1960 and 1968 presidential general elections had been decided by less than that amount. But their pleas were ignored. Congress instead effectively excluded single-issue candidates from federal financing. McCormack’s funds were cut off in May 1976, but not before the federal government had doled out approximately $244,000 to her campaign.Footnote ⁵⁷

McCormack positioned these developments as another injustice affecting her and the alleged silent majority of everyday Americans who opposed legal abortion. She and her backers felt that the federal funding—and the primetime commercials that it paid for—were necessary to allow their perspective to be heard. As PLAC’s volunteer coordinators in Colorado remarked, McCormack needed her commercials “to get only a small fraction of the exposure . . . other candidates get [for] free under the guise of news coverage.”Footnote ⁵⁸ Leading polls from organizations such as the National Opinion Research Center showed that in most circumstances, a majority of Americans in 1976 favored legal abortion: ranging from a low of 46 percent of people in cases where a married woman aborted because she did not want any more children to a high of 91 percent in cases where a pregnancy endangered a woman’s health. Yet, despite these polling numbers, PLAC was certain that most Americans agreed with them—and McCormack, like Richard Nixon and George Wallace before her, appealed to this purported silent majority throughout the campaign.Footnote ⁵⁹

Despite some outreach to others (including only token outreach to African American and Latino communities), McCormack focused on others like her to deliver an overwhelmingly suburban, white, middle-class, religious, and maternal message. As one flyer declared, “Behind the front page [headlines] of the libbers and the liberals . . . [m]illions like you . . . make the country go, day in and day out. We know you’re there and we know you believe in the traditional values, as Ellen does.”Footnote ⁶⁰ Espousing gendered populism, McCormack supported economic reforms for women that aligned with the Democratic Party’s historic embrace of labor, but she rejected any proposals that she perceived to be a threat to traditional family life. As she once argued, “I believe in child care for the poor, but [not] . . . for the middle class. I think we are teaching mothers it is more prestigious to work than [to] be home with their children.”Footnote ⁶¹

Such remarks revealed McCormack’s complicated relationship with the modern feminist movement—as she positioned herself as a traditional woman while, ironically, seeking greater political power. This kind of “maternalist politics” had been used by women throughout the twentieth century to promote a range of causes across the political spectrum. In exchange for the vote, for example, some suffragists had promised to use their household skills and supposedly higher female moral authority to clean up politics. By the 1970s, a more conservative maternalism was being forged. Longtime conservative Republican activist Phyllis Schlafly epitomized this new conservative politics. While claiming to be a housewife, Schlafly ran a successful sprawling national campaign against the feminist-backed Equal Rights Amendment, which she said was a death knell to traditional family values. McCormack similarly presented herself as a traditional woman and housewife, even as she competed in the highest level of politics—a path of increased civic and political engagement that the feminists she criticized had paved for her. She also appealed to the new conservative maternalism by promising that just as mothers watch over their children, she would protect unborn fetuses by coming in from the outside and challenging what she viewed as entrenched support for legal abortion in Washington.Footnote ⁶²

This tension with feminists ran both ways. Feminists wanted women to compete more equally with men in politics. But since McCormack campaigned against legal abortion, a core goal of the modern women’s movement, feminists did not promote the fact that she was the first woman ever to qualify for federal matching funds and Secret Service protection. James Killilea, one of PLAC’s delegates who spoke at the Democratic National Convention (DNC), concluded that feminists were “a fraud [for] not coming out for Ellen McCormack.” This lack of support perhaps contributed to McCormack attracting relatively few voters.Footnote ⁶³

Despite her low totals, McCormack had an impact on the presidential race by forcing politicians in both parties to take a stand on abortion. On the Republican side, California governor Ronald Reagan’s challenge to the sitting President Ford was fueled, in part, by Reagan’s support for an HLA. In response, Ford dropped Vice President Nelson Rockefeller from the 1976 GOP ticket—a man who as governor of New York had fought for the state’s abortion reform law and came to represent the party’s fading support for legal abortion. Ford argued in 1976 that abortion laws should be state matters, and he also supported the Republican-backed Hyde Amendment that passed that year ending federal Medicaid financing for abortions. Democrats, in contrast, sought to minimize the abortion issue in 1976, walking the difficult line between their traditional Catholic constituency and the party’s growing feminist caucus.Footnote ⁶⁴Lifeletter, the anti-abortion newsletter, likewise celebrated McCormack’s campaign even as it likely overstated her national impact: “Jimmy Carter, George Wallace, Walter Cronkite, Birch Bayh, . . . toss in dozens more politicians and every major publication and TV (even radio) station in the country—what do they all have in common? Just a few weeks ago, the answer would have been ‘nothing!’ Now, everybody in America knows the answer: the abortion issue. . . . Democrats . . . are stumbling all over the issue. . . . That is why Ellen McCormack is a real threat to all the other Democratic hopefuls.”Footnote ⁶⁵

McCormack took pride in forcing Democrats to talk about abortion and pressed her case at the DNC that July. PLAC hoped to insert support for an HLA into the party’s platform at the convention, but that goal that was impossible by 1976. Democratic feminist leaders—still incensed that their abortion rights plank had been defeated in a contentious floor fight at the DNC in 1972—were furious when the 1976 Democratic Platform Committee again left out the plank. These increasingly more important leaders in the Democratic Party began lobbying Carter’s representatives; they underscored that organized feminists were prepared to wage another convention floor fight, and that this time they had a whip system for votes. Within hours, an abortion rights plank was inserted into the 1976 DNC platform. Opponents of legal abortion—including representatives from PLAC and the Catholic Church—protested, but lacking political savvy and insider ties, they failed to block the plank. Reagan’s delegates, by contrast, helped insert an HLA plank into the Republican platform for the first time. This initiated a political split that still exists today: the Democratic Party officially supports abortion rights and several core feminist issues, while the GOP does not.Footnote ⁶⁶

As these partisan lines hardened, millions of Democrats threatened to bleed across them. As Fran Watson, McCormack’s campaign manager, warned, “Mr. Carter may think he needs the feminist vote . . . but he’s closing the door on millions . . . who are being told to vote Republican” because of the abortion rights plank. Carter is telling opponents of legal abortion that “they don’t belong in the Democratic Party.”Footnote ⁶⁷ PLAC used the abortion rights plank to paint Carter as completely beholden to feminists and dismissive of the party’s historically strong Catholic base. McCormack’s team complained that Carter, a born-again Southern Baptist, had insulted Catholic leaders by calling their views on abortion out of touch; he also failed to invite them to give an invocation at the DNC, as they had in the past. In truth, Carter made feminists nervous because of his somewhat equivocal stance on abortion: he personally opposed legal abortion but vowed not to change the law. Still, McCormack had sounded the alarm. Could Democrats both support abortion rights and hold onto the northern Catholics who had been a core strength of the party since 1936?Footnote ⁶⁸