The Man Who Invented Conservatism: The Unlikely Life of Frank S. Meyer
By Daniel J. Flynn.
Encounter Books, 2025.
Hardcover, 440 pages, $41.99 .
Reviewed by Bill Meehan.
One rainy afternoon in June, I finally got around to reading the first section of Confessions of A Conservative by Garry Wills, which he called “National Review Days.” In the fourth of six chapters, titled “Frank and Elsie,” Wills describes his deep friendship with Meyer and his wife, disclosing that, after arriving at NR in 1959, he’d spent more time with him than with anyone else. Until then, what I knew about Meyer is what any reader of books about the journal of opinion and its founder (i.e., Strictly Right and Living it Up at National Review) knew: that he was a former member of the Communist Party who was standing athwart in 1955 at the founding of National Review, where he wrote about principles and heresies and edited the book department; was one member in a contentious group of NR editorial insiders with strong opinions and even stronger personalities; is credited with formulating the idea of fusing the traditional and libertarian wings of the right; and hardly ever left the house, sleeping during the day and working at night on the telephone out of fear; and he reportedly admitted to Priscilla Buckley that an old fellow traveler would sneak up to his home in Woodstock, New York. He was, in other words, a fascinating enigma.
A few days later, when the email from John A. Burtka IV, president and CEO at the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, announced the imminent publication of a new Frank Meyer biography published by Encounter Books’ new imprint ISI Books, my curiosity was aroused. ISI had previously released in 2004 a biography on Meyer, whose personal library at some point had made its way to handsome built-in wall shelving at the organization’s F.M. Kirby Campus on Hoopes Reservoir in Greenville, Delaware.
But it was Burtka’s subordinate clause that was the carrot dangling in front of me: “Drawing on a cache of long-lost correspondence discovered in an old warehouse, the book reveals the rivalries, friendships, and fierce debates that shaped modern conservatism.” The main clause foreshadowed the book’s theme, but, in the genre of biography, the meaning of this discovery was clear to me.
Daniel J. Flynn’s adventure in writing this biography is as improbable as Frank Meyer’s life. After years of searching for an archive of Meyer’s correspondence, Flynn learned in a passing conversation with Meyer’s son John that a couple, Karen Myers and David Zincavage, had purchased his father’s home “and everything in it.” In the umpteenth conversation with the buyers, who had since sold the property, Zincavage nonchalantly mentioned to Flynn that he and Karen had placed hundreds of boxes containing their belongings in a warehouse in Altoona, Pennsylvania. The closest the collection at the Hoover Institution, the apparent first stop for researchers into Meyer, came to anything called a primary source, Flynn knew, consisted of newspaper clippings of articles in scrapbooks, which, he also knew, “ranks at the bottom of the list in terms of value.”
So it was to Altoona, a railroad hub situated in the mountains, Flynn headed and found a treasure trove of original documents—artifacts in library lingo—pertaining to his subject. Fifteen of the 663 boxes containing thousands of never-before-seen primary sources would illuminate a reinterpretation of Meyer, of the American conservative movement, and of the editorial squabbles in the early years of National Review. “The uncovered material necessarily reorients what one thinks one knows about the formation of the conservative movement in America,” states Flynn, adding,
The Frank Meyer papers include expected materials such as his birth certificate, passport, diplomas, dance cards, contracts, pictures of girlfriends, and tax returns. Tens of thousands of letters, starting prior to the First World War and ending during the Richard Nixon presidency, occupy most of the real estate within the collection. These include correspondence, much of it heretofore hidden, between Meyer and William F. Buckley Jr., L Brent Bozell, Barry Goldwater, and others who created the conservative movement. Clashes more than confluence characterize many of these relationships. The most colorful and voluminous material from a single correspondent came from the green pen of the brilliant but combustible Wilmoore Kendall. Here their friendship and estrangement play out in dramatic detail in a thousand letters.
One startling and previously unknown item was Meyer’s phone bills. “Ma Bell provided the weaponry of Frank Meyer’s revolution,” writes Flynn. “He called to influence. He called to glean information. He called out of necessity given the handicap of living on the outskirts of a town of a few thousand. He called for friendship. He called to cultivate future leadership.” In 1965, for example, when he claimed an income of $20,000, Meyer “reported telephone and telegraph expenses of $4,830.” Similarly, in 1966, on an income of $16,040, his phone charges totaled $4,486. To underscore the significance of Flynn’s discovery of artifacts like phone bills, of the 1,515 notes in the biography, 649 cite FSM, the author’s abbreviation for the records in his possession, now called the Frank S. Meyer Papers.
Flynn, a senior editor at The American Spectator and visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution who has authored seven books, enhances his study with abundant special collections research in the UK that informs the narrative of Meyer’s time as a student at Oxford and the London School of Economics. For it was there in the late 1920s and early 1930s, Flynn demonstrates, that Meyer’s “great powers of persuasion, charisma, and organization” not only emerged but also affected his quick ascension as an ardent and devoted comrade in the Communist Party. These same attributes, Flynn argues, are what made Meyer such an impressively large and ubiquitous presence on the right at a time when it needed his intellectual acumen, political prowess, and force of personality.
“Meyer shows up everywhere on the right,” Flynn explains. Along with others, “idea-man Meyer constructed the skeletal structure of the burgeoning conservative movement that eventually elected one of the most consequential presidents of the twentieth century in Ronald Reagan, transformed American Politics, and altered the trajectory of world history by bringing a peaceful triumph to end the Cold War.” Meyer, who graduated from a Newark, New Jersey high school at sixteen and was rejected by an anti-semitic admissions officer at Princeton, used his “personal magnetism” to create one of the greatest book review sections of any periodical in the post-war era and was involved with Young Americans for Freedom, the Conservative Party of New York, the Philadelphia Society, and the American Conservative Union.
What is so remarkable about the story is Meyer’s truly unlikely journey from left to right. After being deported from England for communist activities at the London School of Economics and living on an allowance generated by family wealth on his mother’s side (the middle initial S stands for Straus, of the department store company) he landed briefly at the University of Chicago, where he organized the student communists as director at the Chicago Workers School, and eventually back east to Greenwich Village, where he taught courses in the Jefferson School for Social Science, a Communist-run center where the curriculum focused on indoctrination for new foot soldiers flying the hammer and sickle. The seeds of doubt planted during this time, however, were starting to sprout red, white, and blue, and in the patriotic fervor following Pearl Harbor, Meyer petitioned the CPUSA for a leave of absence so he could enlist in the U.S. Army.
“The forced egalitarianism and brotherhood ironically undermined his ideological commitment to all that,” writes Flynn. John Meyer said his father’s “‘first key experience was finding out that ordinary Americans in the military were not the proletariat they were cut out to be in Communist theory.’” A physical ailment forced his discharge and, after debilitating surgeries, led to a period of respite at home in a wheelchair dependent on Elsie. “Now Meyer,” explains Flynn, “experienced a vacation of sorts from the party. He read. He reflected. Like a cult member separated from the group, he developed independence of mind. He questioned. Questioning and Communism did not, could not, peacefully coexist.”
In his rumination, Meyer resurrected a heterodox proposition he posited in 1941 in The Communist, a theoretical monthly complementing to The Daily Worker, that “‘fusing the ideas of the American leaders with the ideas of Marx, Engels and Lenin” was an idea worth pondering. It was Meyer’s first use of the concept fusion, and it attracted the watchful eyes of apparatchiks. Then, in another irony of sorts, Meyer reviewed Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom and experienced an epiphany, explaining that centralized economic planning eventually results in a “‘completely regimented society in which the individual would have no freedom and no real voice.’”
Meyer was labelled an ex-Communist, a defector who once wholeheartedly believed in the dogma and “moulded” party members by convincing them to, in Flynn’s words, “pour faith into falsehoods.” Meyer’s 1961 book, The Moulding of Communists, disclosed the party’s methods of brainwashing.
Meyer, who had relied on various pseudonyms to disguise his bylines and his courses, was now a familiar advocate for conservatism driven by uncompromising principles and stubborn optimism that informed his next book. In Defense of Freedom was a treatise written “‘to vindicate the freedom of the person as the central and primary end of political society. I am also concerned with demonstrating the integral relationship between freedom as a political end and the beliefs of contemporary American conservatism.’” According to Flynn, the book
advances individual rights, freedom and a government dedicated to the preservation of both. And therein lies the fusion. Americans find freedom in their tradition. Preserve the latter and one preserves the former. Fusionism brought traditionalists and libertarians together . . . . Meyer regarded it as an organic political philosophy growing out of history. And that allowed him to more firmly root fusionism within conservatism because he could show that it came from somewhere and sometime rather than someone. America did not tether its identity to a monarch or a sect or an ethnicity but to its founding credo: freedom.
Flynn brings the wonderful biography to a close with warm discussions of Elsie’s death by suicide and Meyer’s conversion to Catholicism on Holy Saturday mere hours before he died, concluding with a kind tribute by the fortieth president of the United States, whose election Meyer foresaw in his 1960 memorandum to the National Review editors. Speaking at the 1981 CPAC, ten years after Meyer’s passing, Ronald Reagan said, “‘He’d made the awful journey that so many others had: He pulled himself from the clutches of ‘The God That Failed,’ and then in his writing fashioned a vigorous new synthesis of traditional and libertarian thought—a synthesis that is today recognized by many as modern conservatism.’”
The Man Who Invented Conservatism: The Unlikely Life of Frank S. Meyer is an impressively investigated and superbly written biography. The incredible narrative is told chronologically in thirty-six chapters enriched by an incredible warehouse discovery that “unleashed amazing stories” and “rescued a mislaid, vibrant history” about a formidable eccentric at the front of a dynamic twentieth-century movement. As unlikely as Meyer’s life was, it is also unlikely that another biography will top Flynn’s splendid portrayal of the cultural warrior who journeyed with supreme optimism to the side he thought could and would win.
Bill Meehan, a frequent contributor to The University Bookman, lives in Delaware.
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