William F. Buckley called him “Mission Control.” National Review publisher Bill Rusher referred to him as “the Master.”
From Australia, Professor Hiram Caton described him as “the central nervous system of the body conservative, the only man who was in constant touch with what all of us in the remote regions were thinking.”
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When Frank S. Meyer died more than a half-century ago, America’s right-wing remembered him as an organizer extraordinaire involved in the founding of such groups as the American Conservative Union and the Philadelphia Society, a mentor to such talents as Joan Didion, Garry Wills, and Guy Davenport as National Review’s literary editor, and the originator of fusionism, which wedded tradition with liberty and served as the de facto philosophy of American conservatives from Barry Goldwater well through Ronald Reagan.
Few knew that before his exploits propelled the postwar conservative movement, Meyer had similarly Johnny Appleseeded Communism in Great Britain, where he is referred to in declassified MI5 files as “the founder of the Student C.P. movement” in that country.
Those files contain notes on a 1949 telephone conversation between two British Communists. Wiretapped by MI5 during the longest, most expensive trial in United States history to that point, in which Meyer’s testimony helped send former comrades to prison, they speak clearly about redacting Meyer from the history of British Communism.
That palimpsest of that erased past turned up in an Altoona, Pennsylvania, warehouse during research for The Man Who Invented Conservatism: The Unlikely Life of Frank S. Meyer. The tens of thousands of documents therein reveal one of the conservative movement’s best-kept secrets and one of the great untold stories of the 20th century.
In 1931, Meyer co-founded the October Club at Oxford, where the student body quickly went from a complete absence of Communists to 300 members of Meyer’s Communist group. His antics led other leftists to forcibly eject him from a speech by Labour Party leader George Lansbury, and he arranged for H.G. Wells to lecture at Oxford for the sole purpose of humiliating him.
As a graduate student at the London School of Economics, Meyer plotted with V.K. Krishna Menon, later the most powerful man in India next to Jawaharlal Nehru, to rig a vote to elect him president of the student government.
British intelligence followed the brash American, intercepted his mail, and conducted a black-bag job on the apartment where he had lived. Despite his position on the board of the Communist Party of Great Britain and as the leader of its student bureau, Meyer interacted with scientist Albert Einstein, poet T.S. Eliot, playwright George Bernard Shaw, anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski, and economist Harold Laski.
Government spies pretended not to notice the Communist leader’s most conspicuous social contact. At the very time that Frank Meyer called for the violent overthrow of Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald’s government, he carried on a surreptitious relationship with his youngest daughter.
Did John Reed, Che Guevara, or any other romanticized revolutionary ever pursue so dangerous a bachelorette?
Coincidentally, or not, Ramsay MacDonald’s government deported Frank Meyer, but not before he became a cause célèbre that sparked a speech in parliament from future Prime Minister Clement Attlee and marchers in London chanting, “Free Frank Meyer!”
Whittaker Chambers, James Burnham, and many other figures of import among American conservatives traveled the same left-to-right journey as Meyer, albeit without becoming a sort of Marxist teen idol. What further distinguishes Meyer within this fraternity is his importance as an organizer and theorist at both ends of the political spectrum.
He changed his mind about Communism in 1945. His skills and personality remained.
Present at the creation of National Review and the Conservative Party of New York, Meyer left his fingerprints all over Young Americans for Freedom’s Sharon Statement. When his acolyte M. Stanton Evans wrote in the document that government exists for “the preservation of internal order,” “provision of national defense,” “administration of justice,” and nothing more, and that “the just interests of the United States” should guide American foreign policy, he passed on Meyer’s views to a younger generation.
Similarly, Meyer’s classic text In Defense of Freedom infused an American flavor into conservatism by imparting: “Freedom means freedom; not necessity, but choice between responsibility and irresponsibility; not duty but the choice between accepting and rejecting duty; not virtue, but the choice between virtue and vice.”
ANOTHER BOOK ABOUT MY GRANDFATHER WHITTAKER CHAMBERS PUTS POLITICS BEFORE HISTORICAL ACCURACY
Perhaps the onset of the Great Depression explains how Meyer created a vibrant Communist youth movement in the United Kingdom, and the outbreak of the Cold War explains why the American party largely collapsed swiftly after he left it.
That the conservatives routed by Franklin Roosevelt started their great ascent once Frank Meyer joined the movement seems one too many coincidences to chalk up to happenstance.
Daniel J. Flynn, a Hoover Institution visiting fellow and American Spectator senior editor, wrote The Man Who Invented Conservatism: The Unlikely Life of Frank S. Meyer (Encounter/ISI Books, 2025).