“Frank’s death was a real personal blow to me,” Murray Rothbard confessed in 1973. Frank Meyer and Rothbard debated at the Harvard University Institute of Politics in 1971. Less than a year later, Meyer was dead at 62. 

Starting in the 1950s, both men worked as the two paid reviewers of scholarship for the Volker Fund. Ex-Communist Meyer ran Rothbard’s book reviews as literary editor of National Review during the late 1950s and early 1960s. In 1972, the year of Meyer’s death, Rothbard modeled much of his “Sociology of the Ayn Rand Cult” on Meyer’s Moulding of Communists. They occasionally met, periodically spoke on the phone, and corresponded dozens of times from 1954 to 1972.

This correspondence, discovered in an Altoona, Pennsylvania, warehouse in 2022 as part of research for The Man Who Invented Conservatism: The Unlikely Life of Frank S. Meyer, amounts to about three dozen letters and numerous other items. Meyer, a telephonic creature to such a degree that he began spending about a quarter of his income on long-distance bills, often responded to letters with calls. The quotations and paraphrased material in this article—and four succeeding ones that explore their discussions of American history, populism, conservative politics, and the counterculture—appear in print for the first time here. A lengthier scholarly article on Rothbard and Meyer’s correspondence about Ayn Rand and the Objectivists appears in The Journal of Libertarian Studies. 

The Meyer-Rothbard relationship started in November 1954. “I had such an enjoyable time meeting and talking to you,” Rothbard wrote, “that I thought I’d continue the conversation by typewriter.” 

During the first weekend of May 1955, Frank Meyer and his wife, Elsie, ventured from Woodstock downstate to Manhattan for camaraderie with the Circle Bastiat. Rothbard’s libertarian friends, to include Leonard Liggio, Ralph Raico, and Bruce Goldberg, gathered in these years for late-night bull sessions. They allowed the outsiders to join them. Meyer told his fellow partisans of liberty that the common denominator for so many of the great political upheavals in American history remained Julia Ward Howe’s “Battle Hymn of the Republic.” These remarks, according to Rothbard, inspired Ralph Raico to stay up Saturday night rewriting that song into the “Battle Hymn of Freedom.” The reworked lyrics, boasting a refrain of “the Circle marches on,” included: 

All of Freedom’s blessed martyrs are here marching by our side

Ours the spirit and the cause for which they smiling bled and died

With us now they cut those fetters which men’s mind and body tied

Man will at last be free.

Meyer seemed amused. 

“We thoroughly enjoyed our evening with the Cercle Bastiat,” he wrote Murray and Jo Rothbard the way the Frenchman Bastiat would spell the modifier to his name. “I would love to have the entire Cercle spend a rousing weekend up here some time this summer—who knows how many songs might be composed?” 

Rothbard’s travel phobias prevented that upstate summer meeting. 

The correspondence includes a letter of recommendation from William F. Buckley, Jr., for the “brilliant,” “congenial,” and “imaginative” Rothbard for the aim of securing him employment with the Econometric Institute’s Manhattan office after he lost a position with the Princeton Panel. This followed, and perhaps sprang from, Rothbard’s confessions to Meyer about his precarious economic situation. The National Review chieftain’s 1957 laudatory sentiment yielded to a very different one by 1959, when Rothbard suggested to Buckley that his magazine’s objections to Nikita Khruschev’s visit to the United States must be some sort of parody given its embrace of Winston Churchill, Francisco Franco, and other state leaders also responsible for death and destruction and such. Rothbard found the magazine’s complaint especially “humorous” that Khrushchev “might be sleeping in the sainted Lincoln’s bed; but this surely would be more apt, considering that Mr. K’s deeds in Hungary were precisely equivalent to Mr. Lincoln’s Butchery of the South.”

Buckley responded, “National Review may be ambitious, but it is not so ambitious as to take on the job of educating you on how to make elementary moral distinctions.” 

This exchange strikes as one that reoriented the relationship between the two men. Meyer, who launched one of the anti-Khrushchev groups that Rothbard lambasted, did not let the disagreement destroy the friendship. 

Other differences existed between Meyer and Rothbard. The letters show the men at loggerheads, for instance, over semantics in a manner similar to Meyer’s ongoing epistolary debates with Rose Wilder Lane. Rothbard wondered whether conservatives wished to conserve the status quo, adhere to the outlook of European rightists of the previous century, or perhaps merely favor gradual to sudden change. 

“Perhaps you are a ‘conservative’ because you wish to conserve the ‘western heritage,’” he wrote. “But the Western heritage contains quantitatively more bad than good from our point of view—more murder than laissez-faire. So what you really want to promote is not the heritage en bloc but parts of it—which parts to be picked out by reason. So where can conservatism come in?” 

On October 26, 1956, Rothbard’s letter exudes an ebullience regarding the as-yet uncrushed Hungarian Revolution. “The Circle Bastiat,” he noted, “is thrilled to the core.” He enclosed a “monstrous” article by Walter Lippmann on the uprising that prompted a vow to forgo reading him. As Meyer had inspired Raico to rewrite the “Battle Hymn of the Republic” the previous year, events in Hungary catalyzed Rothbard to rewrite The Communist Manifesto in abridged form. He included within a letter to Meyer his “Individualist Manifesto”: 

A spectre is haunting Europe---the spectre of Individualism. All the powers of old Europe have entered into a holy alliance to exorcise the spectre: ……… The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of caste struggles. Freeman and slave, patrician and plebian, lord and serf, guild-master and journeyman, in a world, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another…a fight that each time ended, either in a revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending castes….The modern Statist society that has sprouted from the ruins of laissez-faire capitalism, has established new castes, new conditions of oppression, new forms of struggle… Our epoch, the epoch of the bureaucrat, possesses, however, this distinctive feature; it has simplified the caste antagonisms. Society as a whole is more and more splitting into two great hostile camps, into great castes directly facing each other: State and People …… Political power, properly so called, is merely the organized power of one caste for oppressing another….In place of the old Statist society, with its castes and caste antagonisms, we shall have an association in which the free development of all ……. Let the ruling castes tremble at an Individualistic revolution. The people have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win. People of all countries, unite!!

The ruling castes, alas, did not tremble. Meyer, an actual revolutionary, understood why. 

Prince Mirsky, who accompanied him into the Communist Party headquarters in London where he joined the party in 1932, had died a few years later in a Soviet gulag; Walter Ulbricht, whom he worked directly for on peace activism in 1934, had already ordered murders and would later erect the Berlin Wall as the longest serving dictator of East Germany; and John Cornford, Charles Darwin’s great-grandson and Meyer’s protégé in England, died fighting for the Communists in the Spanish Civil War the day after he turned 21 in 1936. 

In other words, Meyer knew that Communists not just died but killed for the ideas in The Communist Manifesto. 

The reasons why the ruling castes did not tremble ultimately became obvious to Rothbard as well. Although he continued to romanticize and fetishize the rebellions against authority that the more conservative Meyer forcefully rejected, Rothbard, in the year after Meyer’s death, articulated the nonaggression principle that “no man or group of men may aggress against the person or property of anyone else.”

Murray’s revolution, then, necessarily differed from Marx’s revolution not merely in ends but means. 

[Daniel J. Flynn, a visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution and American Spectator senior editor, wrote The Man Who Invented Conservatism: The Unlikely Life of Frank S. Meyer (Encounter/ISI Books, 2025).]