The Man Who Invented Conservatism: The Unlikely Life of Frank S. Meyer
By Daniel J. Flynn
Encounter Books, 544 pages, $41.99

General George Marshall was called the organizer of America’s victory in the Second World War. Frank Meyer could be called the organizer of American conservatism’s political victory in the second half of the 20th century. In an intellectually scintillating and crisply written new biography of Meyer titled The Man Who Invented Conservatism: The Unlikely Life of Frank S. Meyer, Daniel J. Flynn, a senior editor of The American Spectator and a Hoover Institution visiting fellow, utilizing a heretofore undiscovered treasure trove of Meyer’s papers kept in a warehouse in Altoona, Pennsylvania, marshals compelling evidence that Frank Meyer — the former communist-turned-conservative — not only foresaw conservatism’s political rise in the United States but labored intellectually and organizationally to help bring it about. Flynn draws a not-so-straight line from Meyer’s conversion from communism to conservatism and his fusionist approach to politics to the election of Ronald Reagan as president — modern American conservatism’s greatest political victory. (RELATED: Finding the Lost Papers of the Conservative Movement)

It is a not-so-straight line because Frank Meyer’s life and politics were anything but a straight line. Born to well-off Jewish parents in Newark in 1909, Meyer attended Newark Academy, Princeton, then Oxford’s Balliol College and the London School of Economics. Meyer was intellectually smart but more interested in women than his studies. And, Flynn notes, he soon abandoned “his mother’s Judaism and his father’s capitalism,” becoming “intensely Marxist” while at Balliol. So much so that British authorities took note and kept watch on the young communist’s activities, which included writing for Marxist journals, joining organizations that promoted communist ideology, and dating the prime minister’s daughter. Eventually, Britain deported him.

Meyer thrived on conflict. He “needed conflict,” Flynn writes, “the way others need air.” He became a strong supporter of Stalin’s Soviet Union, even after the Nazi–Soviet Pact, which had caused many in the movement, including James Burnham — a future colleague and rival of Meyer’s — to abandon Marxism.

Meyer’s support for Stalin continued even after the Soviet Union invaded Poland. “[H]e defended the indefensible,” writes Flynn, and promoted communism at the Chicago Workers School, where he educated and organized young students on behalf of the Party. One of those students was Elise Philbrick, who, captivated by Meyer’s charm and charisma, divorced her husband and married her teacher.

Flynn notes that after Japan’s attack on the United States at Pearl Harbor, Meyer sought to enlist in the army, but the Party balked at this request. He had Party obligations, he was told, but Meyer thought he could best help the cause by fighting with other Americans on the side of America’s new ally, the Soviet Union. Meyer became disenchanted with what he viewed as the Party’s hypocrisy of exhorting the war effort but preventing him from joining that effort. He eventually was allowed to join, but physical ailments caused him to fail officer candidate school. More importantly, he was moving away from the Party ideologically, though he made one last effort to, as he wrote, fuse the ideas of America’s Founders with communism. It didn’t work.

Meyer moved to New York to teach at the Jefferson School of Social Science, which was run by communists. Flynn notes that “[h]is teaching appeared increasingly heretical,” and so, too, did his writings, evidenced by a favorable review of Friedrich Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom. When Meyer finally broke with the Party, like Whittaker Chambers, he moved to a rural locale — Chambers moved to a farm in Westminster, Maryland; Meyer moved to Woodstock, New York — because he knew he and his family would be safer there. Stalin ordered defectors killed. Flynn notes that the break with the Party also caused Meyer to lose “friends, social life, work, intellectual outlets, and purpose.”

Like Chambers, Meyer became a witness, naming names of communists to the FBI, testifying before congressional committees, and testifying in a trial against former Party colleagues for violating the Alien Registration Act (also known as the Smith Act). Meyer’s testimony in the trial, Flynn notes, confirmed the American Communist Party’s “fealty to Moscow” and its belief in the “violent overthrow” of the United States government. All 11 defendants were convicted and sentenced to prison. Meyer was moving to the political right and bringing to that emerging and growing movement the intellectual and organizational skills he honed working for the Communist Party.

With that as background, Flynn turns to Meyer’s underappreciated role in shaping the modern American conservative movement. The former communist revolutionary became a conservative counterrevolutionary — a leading voice in conservative journalism and politics in the effort to undo New Deal programs and the New Deal coalition that dominated American politics since 1932.

Like his future colleagues at National Review, William F. Buckley Jr. and James Burnham, Meyer began writing for The Freeman and The American Mercury, two publications of the American right. Flynn notes that Meyer was greatly influenced in his ideological transformation by Richard Weaver’s Ideas Have Consequences and by Rose Wilder Lane, who Flynn calls a “founding mother” of libertarianism. And just as he had attempted in his communist years to fuse American traditions with Marxism, Meyer now sought to fuse American traditionalism with libertarianism to forge a new conservatism that would be ideologically consistent and capable of winning broad political support.

Another element of Meyer’s fusionist program was anti-communism. Meyer, like Burnham and Buckley, understood that the international communist conspiracy headquartered in Moscow posed an existential threat to the United States and the West. The New Dealers not only had carelessly (and sometimes deliberately) allowed communists to infiltrate the government and thereby influence U.S. foreign policy, but they had also pursued a war policy that conceded much of Eastern and Central Europe and China in the Far East to communist control.

Burnham, in the late 1940s and early 1950s, was America’s and the West’s leading theoretician of anti-communism. He combined firsthand knowledge of communist doctrine (having been a leading Trotskyist in the 1930s), a keen grasp of classical geopolitics, and a Machiavellian appreciation of power politics to forge what historian George Nash called “the theoretical formulation for victory in the Cold War.”

Frank Meyer shared Burnham’s anti-communist outlook, but when they both joined Buckley’s fledgling conservative journal National Review in 1955, these two intellectual giants clashed over issues, personalities, and the magazine’s approach to politics and politicians, and each sought allies among NR’s editors and contributors, with the fighting and combative Meyer gaining the allegiance of Willmore Kendall and L. Brent Bozell, while the urbane and strategic Burnham successfully courted the favor of the boss, William F. Buckley Jr., and his sister Priscilla Buckley, who later became NR’s managing editor. It was a contest Meyer could not win, but for a substantial number of years, Meyer’s “Books, Arts, and Manners” section of the magazine held up rather well even as Burnham exercised, in Buckley’s words, the dominant intellectual influence on National Review.

Meyer found a group of “talented but unheralded reviewers” that made the back-of-the-magazine a must-read. Among those reviewers were Garry Wills, Joan Didion, Hugh Kenner, and Guy Davenport. Meyer also wrote reviews and contributed a regular column titled “Principles and Heresies,” where he waxed philosophical and promoted his fusionist agenda. Flynn writes that Meyer oversaw “the best review section in America.”

Meyer, while at National Review, also wrote his most important book, In Defense of Freedom, which appeared in 1962. Flynn writes that Meyer’s book “advances individual rights, freedom, and a government dedicated to the preservation of both.” It was a fusionist ethos that “brought traditionalists and libertarians together.” It damned collectivism and “sought to desacralize the state.” Meyer criticized Andrew Jackson for “the introduction of mass democratism,” Abraham Lincoln for undermining federalism, and Franklin Roosevelt for governing with “collectivist principles and methods.” Flynn notes that the book flopped commercially but became part of the conservative “great books” canon, “which right-wing intellectuals read most to grasp the ideas that animated their movement and the nuanced strains therein.” Though unmentioned by Flynn, that canon also includes Burnham’s Suicide of the West.

Flynn describes the Meyer-Burnham relationship within National Review as a “prolonged cold war.” They personally disliked each other, even though they had followed similar ideological paths to the National Review. Meyer substituted a conservative ideology for his abandoned Marxism. Burnham, however, after abandoning Marxism, renounced all ideology, once writing that it is “only by renouncing all ideology can we begin to see the world and man.” As one colleague noted, “Frank was volatile, passionate. Burnham was the exact opposite. He was very cool and collected.” Flynn believes that while differences over politics and principles played a role in the Meyer-Burnham cold war, personality played a greater role in their disputes.

The Meyer-Burnham cold war manifested itself in disputes over whether NR should withhold support from Eisenhower’s reelection effort in 1956; whether Barry Goldwater or Nelson Rockefeller was more likely to defeat Lyndon Johnson in 1964; or whether NR should support Nixon’s reelection in 1972. Meyer invariably took the ideological position, while Burnham favored the candidate whom he believed had the best chance of defeating the Democrats. Flynn believes that Meyer was playing a long game, focusing not just on the immediate election but on the future of conservatism within the Republican Party.

Flynn notes that Meyer was among the first NR writers to view Ronald Reagan as the political vehicle through which true conservatism — not the pragmatic version of Eisenhower and Nixon — would enter the White House. As early as 1964, Meyer viewed Reagan as “the Republican future.” Four years later, he supported Reagan’s last-ditch effort to defeat Nixon for the GOP nomination. Burnham supported Nixon.

Meyer’s lasting influence on the conservative movement occurred outside National Review. He was deeply involved in organizing and promoting Young Americans for Freedom. He served on the board of the American Conservative Union. He was a “fixture” at the meetings of the Philadelphia Society. He and his ideas groomed and molded younger conservatives like R. Emmett Tyrrell Jr., David Keene, and Bill Kristol. From his rural perch in Woodstock, Flynn writes, Meyer in his last years used his powers of persuasion and organization to “construct” the conservative future.

Frank Meyer died of cancer in 1972 at the age of 62. Just before his death, like his nemesis James Burnham did 15 years later, Meyer converted to Catholicism. A decade after Meyer’s death, President Ronald Reagan remembered Meyer as a “great thinker” who synthesized “traditional and libertarian thought” and paved the way for the political triumph of modern conservatism. You cannot fully understand the modern conservative movement without learning about Frank Meyer and reading Daniel Flynn’s splendid book.

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