Clearly, Frank Meyer was a major player in the modern conservative movement in its early days. But the heart of Daniel J. Flynn’s new book doesn’t really explain just how it was that its subject somehow “invented” conservatism.
The Man Who Invented Conservatism: The Unlikely Life of Frank S. Meyer, by Daniel J. Flynn. (562 pages, Encounter Books, 2025)
Did Frank Meyer invent conservatism? That’s, at best, unlikely. Did Meyer have an unlikely life? To be sure. Despite the excessive claim of the title, is his biography worth reading? Most definitely, both because of the unlikeliness of his life and because of his differences and battles with his fellow conservatives.
“The Convert to Conservatism Who Sought to Mold and Massage the Message of Conservatism: The Inevitable Battles of an Often Embattled Frank Meyer” would have been a more accurate, if more than slightly unwieldy, title and subtitle.
Most of those intellectual differences–and, yes, battles–revolved around what was a Meyer invention, namely his concoction of and commitment to the fusion of libertarian-minded and tradition-inclined conservatives. If such a fusion made good sense to Frank Meyer, it didn’t always make any sense to either libertarian conservatives or to their sometime friends and sometime enemies among traditional conservatives–or vice versa, for that matter.
Of course, holding things together through the entirety of Meyer’s life as a conservative was the Cold War. That fact alone, coupled with the efforts of an ex-communist by the name of Frank Meyer to convince his fellow conservatives–and his fellow Americans–to contest and win that war, surely helped solidify his fusionist ideas on the domestic front.
Unfortunately for Frank Meyer, he did not live to see the successful end of the Cold War. Born in 1909, Meyer succumbed to cancer in 1972 at which point Nixonian detente was the order of the day and a Cold War victory, especially a peaceful Cold War victory, was itself thought to be, at best, quite unlikely and perhaps even very much in doubt.
What had also become very much in doubt in recent years was the need for or possibility of a new biography of Meyer to compete with Principles and Heresies by Kevin Smant and M. Stanton Evans, which had been published in 2002. And that seemed to be that until the highly unlikely, nearly accidental, discovery of a major cache of Meyer’s records and correspondence suddenly removed that doubt.
In brief, the story is this. Would-be Meyer biographer Dan Flynn, having surveyed the Meyer collection at the Hoover Institution of Stanford University, had become convinced of three things: 1) If this collection was all there was, why bother with a new biography; 2) Since this collection contained no correspondence of any consequence, it couldn’t possibly represent the sum of his papers; and 3) Somewhere there must be some sort of an additional collection or at least stash of Meyer papers.
“So began,” Flynn states, “a multi-year search to locate the papers of Frank Meyer.” Of course Flynn was well aware of Frank Meyer, late-night, regular customer of Ma Bell. Still, there had to be a paper trial of some sort. And there was.
In October of 2021, Flynn learned from a Meyer son, via a quite casual comment, that the couple who had purchased his parents’ Woodstock, New York, home had also acquired all its contents. Upon contacting the couple he then learned, with equal casualness, of the existence of a warehouse in, of all places, Altoona, Pennsylvania, that contained boxes of papers that had been removed from the Meyer’s home. No doubt they were duplicates of whatever the Hoover Library had. At least that was what he was told.
Could he take a look? Of course, they replied. And there in the back of a “dimly lit” facility were “663 boxes on dozens of pallets in two long rows spanning nearly half the width of the cavernous building.” Rather than consign those boxes to the incinerator or otherwise junk them, the couple had “saved history.” And Dan Flynn, would-be biographer of Frank Meyer, proceeded to become Meyer’s most recent biographer.
The book is roughly divided into unequal thirds, with somewhat less than a third devoted to his upbringing and his attachment to communism, with less than that given over to his time of doubt, and with a good deal more than a third dwelling on his National Review years.
Whether as a communist or as a conservative, Frank Meyer was first and foremost and always a teacher. And as a teacher he was often a taskmaster and always on the lookout to be a disciple maker. As such, he always seemed to be setting himself up for a life of great intensity, whether that meant intense conservation and/or debate, intense comradeship, or intense disappointment.
Was Meyer the teacher also Meyer the learner? Not so much. But Meyer the doubter was Meyer the learner. He didn’t so much flee from communism or escape from communism as think and experience his way out of communism. Frank Meyer, the family man, and Frank Meyer, the American, and Frank Meyer, the American soldier, all became Frank Meyer, the ex-communist.
If Flynn is correct, Meyer’s experiences in the army were absolutely crucial to his abandonment of communism. Having been born into a measure of wealth and comfort, having given himself over to a life of ideas and abstractions, a still young early thirtysomething Frank Meyer had never had much experience with the actual American working class. That changed during his time in the military. And that experience changed Frank Meyer.
With no opportunity to be a teacher, Meyer to his great credit became a learner. Instead of looking for ways to convert his fellow soldiers to his view of the world he came to accept the legitimacy of their outlook on life. Of course, it also helped that Frank Meyer, young man of the left, also saw himself as Frank Meyer, American. An American patriot? Perhaps not yet. But an American nonetheless.
Even then Frank Meyer was a fusionist. As he began to think his way away from communism, Meyer began to think that there must be a way to fuse communism and Americanism. To be sure, he was not alone among his contemporaries on the left with such thoughts. But he was among the very few who traveled as intensely and as openly and as far to the right as he did. And his coming to terms with the impossibility of any sensible fusion of communism and Americanism clearly played a significant role in his intellectual and political travel plans.
It was during these years of doubt that Meyer the learner came to the fore. And here the learning that could be obtained from the likes of Friedrich Hayek and Ludwig von Mises helped restore Frank Meyer to his true role as teacher, albeit a teacher who was now teaching some very different lessons.
The heart of this biography deals with Meyer’s tenure at National Review, which began with its founding in 1955 and continued until his death in 1972. It was during these years that Meyer also played a major role in the establishment and development of more than a few conservative institutions, including Young Americans for Freedom, the Conservative Party of New York, the Philadelphia Society, and the American Conservative Union.
Clearly, Frank Meyer was a major player in the conservative movement during these years. As such, he certainly deserves a fresh biographical look based on the persistence–and good luck–of Dan Flynn. And Flynn has just as clearly done Meyer justice in these pages. But the heart of the book doesn’t really explain just how it was that its subject somehow “invented” conservatism.
What Flynn does do is lay bare the twists and turns of Meyer’s efforts to fuse at least two legs of the conservative stool. That effort in turn leads to stories of the twists and turns within the inner circle of National Review conservatives, many of whom were, like Meyer, former communists or at least former leftists. James Burnham, Willie Schlamm, Wilmoore Kendall, and Whittaker Chambers all have more than minor roles in the Meyer’s story.
If there is a featured ongoing conflict in this story it was between Frank Meyer, former Stalinist, and James Burnham, former Trotskyite. And if there was a theme to their post-left years, it was a conflict between Meyer’s support for the insurgent conservative movement of Goldwater and Reagan versus Burnham’s endorsement of more establishment Republican views and personalities. Think Nelson Rockefeller, whom Meyer could barely stomach.
There were also differences between the two over Richard Nixon, differences that, not surprisingly, led Meyer to support John Ashbrook’s challenge to Nixon in 1972. While both Meyer and Burnham are now long gone, the battle between insurgent and establishment Republicanism may still be a feature of the inner politics of the National Review.
A fellow by the name of Donald Trump is mentioned only once in these pages. Here is the context. Frank Meyer’s son Gene was a founding father and president of the Federalist Society, which played a key role in providing names to President Trump for filling three vacancies on the Supreme Court during his first term. Flynn rightly praises both the Federalist Society’s role and Trump’s selections–and recent court decisions, including the overturning of Roe v Wade, while quoting a Meyer family friend to the effect that Gene had carried on his father’s work “beyond what Frank could have done.”
So, is the story of the “man who invented conservatism” actually, if indirectly, the story of the man who helped invent today’s version of insurgent and populist conservatism? Flynn doesn’t say so, but he has given as a sympathetic biography of an individual who, while not exactly inventing conservatism, did more than his share to begin to move the Republican party toward the positions, policies, and power that it holds today. And that all of this has happened under the leadership of a New Yorker not named Rockefeller would in all likelihood be doubly pleasing to a fellow by the name of Frank Meyer.
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The featured image is a family photograph of Frank Strauss Meyer and is in the public domain, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.