Frank S. Meyer was an extraordinary man, so it’s unsurprising that his life is full of colorful stories. Interesting people always seemed to want to know him; noteworthy things always seemed to be happening in his orbit. It’s hard to choose a favorite Meyer story, but if it came to it, I would highlight the tale of how he emerged from his dissolute, communist youth to become a leading conservative intellectual.
Meyer was the child of privilege, as the only son of an affluent New York businessman. Intelligent and rich, the world was his oyster, so naturally, he proceeded to waste his gifts on the Communist Party. He was in good company here. James Burnham, Max Eastman, and Willmoore Kendall all followed a similar path, as one-time socialists or Marxists who ended up as leading personalities at the fledgling National Review.
For Meyer, the turning point came in World War II, when American communists were struggling to find their way in a culture brimming with patriotic fervor. Writing to Earl Browder, then General Secretary of Communist Party USA, he suggested that communism could only succeed in America if it was more successfully integrated with aspects of the American tradition. Browder was sympathetic and began working on the branding while Meyer tackled the intellectual questions. The project immersed him in the Founders and in serious works of political theory, with unexpected results. He liked the wrong texts, and in the wrong ways. F. A. Hayek’s Road to Serfdom thrilled him; Richard Weaver’s Ideas Have Consequences was transformative. Instead of piloting an authentically American communism, he ended up walking away from communism altogether, to the point where he was soon testifying against former comrades in court. On one level, therefore, Meyer’s first fusionist voyage was an abject failure. But some failed projects open the way to better fruit.
I read this account in Daniel Flynn’s new biography of Meyer, The Man Who Invented Conservatism. It’s a valuable book that meaningfully expands available material on Meyer, owing to a discovery Flynn made in the course of his research: a warehouse in Altoona, Pennsylvania, which contained fifteen boxes of Meyer’s papers, including letters, pictures, and other personal documents. This remarkable find enabled Flynn to flesh out Meyer’s story and character as no previous biography could do. He weaves the new material into his portrait of a man whose life really ought to be better known, particularly among conservatives. Meyer was one of the great architects of the American right, and Flynn helps elucidate the reasons: with a restless intellect and a far-sighted capacity for synthesis, he helped conservatives move past some of their internal squabbles to focus on more enduring truths.
First, he had to leave Karl Marx behind. As a young man, Meyer climbed high into the ranks of the Communist Party, first in Britain and then in America. Flynn recounts these early years of Meyer’s life in great detail, which is especially appreciated since the story was heretofore very little known. The young communist flitted through multiple prestigious universities, shamelessly wasting his time and his parents’ money, squandering the academic opportunities but building a profile for himself as a charismatic titan of collectivism.
When the universities finally got fed up with him (as even his more stalwart patrons eventually did), he became the director of the Chicago Workers’ School, effectively a communist academy. He taught classes in Marxist theory and recruited young Americans to go die on Spanish soil fighting Francisco Franco. World War II loomed, and he found himself decrying the fascists, then defending Josef Stalin’s signing of the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact. Then he stole the wife of a more junior party member. By the time Meyer began veering to the right, he had reached midlife with a patchy resume, a host of disreputable friends, a family to support, and little experience in “adulting.” In his forties, his family was still living mainly (and meanly) on inherited income. But a new chapter was beginning in the life of Frank Meyer.
Meyer saw the valuing of human freedom as another gift of the Judeo-Christian tradition, captured in a specially explicit way within the American political tradition.
From his home in Woodstock, New York, Meyer began freelancing for libertarian magazines, and ended up aboard William F. Buckley’s merry ship of crusading conservatives. The latter part of Flynn’s book shifts our gaze to this landscape, exploring the adventures and controversies of the early years at National Review. Here we find the familiar personalities: Buckley himself, Burnham, Kendall, Harry Jaffa, Bill Rusher, Brent Bozell, and more. We move through debates well-known to lovers of American conservatism, about the excesses of anti-communism, Barry Goldwater (who captured Meyer’s full admiration), Richard Nixon (who didn’t), and Vietnam. Meyer was a founding editor of National Review in 1957, and fully in the thick of these debates, though it’s interesting to reflect that this period really only represented the final chapter of his life story since he died of lung cancer in 1972. He came to conservatism late, and departed this world early, at the age of 62.
Flynn narrates the sturm und drang of movement conservatism in detail, with very little effort to present Meyer as a heroic or even likable figure. For instance, he never seems to have developed a particularly strong work ethic. As the editor of National Review’s Books, Arts, and Manners section, he showed considerable talent for finding good writers and commissioning interesting work, but Flynn reports that his wife, Elsie, did most of the actual editing. Meyer never stopped expecting that the world should largely conform to his style and habits. He loved long telephone conversations, but he was a night person, to the point of being effectively nocturnal. He was (in)famous for calling people in the middle of the night, expecting them to be ready and willing to discuss big ideas on his timetable. What does it say about Meyer that so many people were willing to oblige him? Clearly, there was something magnetic about the man that enabled him to skirt the normal rules with minimal censure.
The early days of National Review are of real interest to me, but at times I wanted to pull back a bit from Flynn’s granular analysis of the internal controversies to think more about the ideas, particularly Meyer’s. There is, of course, endless debate on the right about fusionism, which tends to move beyond textual analysis of Meyer’s own work and into broader discussions of political theory. That’s fair enough, insofar as Meyer clearly saw fusionism as more than just a pragmatic strategy for building a bigger tent. The ideas matter; indeed, once we’ve moved past some basic preliminaries, it can be a bit difficult to articulate what Meyer uniquely brought to the table. The conservative movement at that time had a good mix of limited government people and anti-modern traditionalists. The fact that they were already congregated in one editorial room strongly suggests that multiple people had already realized that freedom and tradition should optimally stand in some positive relationship to each other. Meyer surely doesn’t deserve to be dubbed the “inventor of conservatism” just for telling the two camps to shake hands and be friends.
Meyer’s manifesto, In Defense of Freedom, bridges that gap between freedom and tradition by explaining that freedom is at the core of the American tradition. That’s a neat formula, and even just by articulating what others might have thought or explained less cleanly, Meyer might have done a real service to the movement. I would tentatively suggest that his contributions went somewhat further, especially insofar as he articulated how the tensions that inevitably arise between freedom and tradition can be fruitful, not something to resolve, but rather a thing to embrace. Although Meyer approached this wedding (or welding) of elements mostly from the libertarian side, the point should resonate with anyone who has thought deeply about the Christian tradition. Christian philosophy enshrines fruitful mysteries at its very heart, especially in its teachings about the Incarnation and the Trinity. Meyer saw the valuing of human freedom as another gift of the Judeo-Christian tradition, captured in a specially explicit way within the American political tradition. It didn’t strike him as a problem that that freedom forces us to grapple with further difficult questions, about habituation, culture, the nature of political authority, and so forth. It’s healthy for a political theory to leave room for complexity, as long as the grey spaces in the theory match the ones in the world.
Flynn ends his book by noting Meyer’s foresight in anticipating both the rise of Reagan and the end of the Soviet Union. Those reflections are interesting, but it’s clear that he made a deliberate choice not to flash forward any further by applying morals from Meyer’s story to the conservatism of today. Perhaps that forbearance is admirable, but it inevitably leaves the reader speculating on those sorts of questions. What would Meyer make of our own internal conservative debates? What should we try to draw from him?
Meyer also believed, sincerely, that the West would win. Though he admired the work of many anti-modern thinkers, such as Weaver, Meyer’s view had more triumphalist notes.
I myself am comforted by the reminder that older generations of conservatives were also riddled with fractious controversies, prone to being petty and territorial, and regularly battling against formidable headwinds in the larger culture. Threats to civil liberties are not new. Vain, attention-seeking politicians are not new. It’s interesting, too, to consider just how many conservative intellectuals spent their early adulthood marinating in deeply perverse political ideologies, especially communism. Maybe today’s wokesters, socialists, and proto-fascists are also capable of reform?
I hope so. But even without having lived through the earlier era, it’s hard not to feel that there is a real change since Meyer’s day: right-wing politics seems more performative and less serious today, driven more by memes than ideas. Buckley’s conservatives included a lot of big personalities, and they could be prickly and unforgiving to one another. There was a fair amount of drama in Meyer’s social and professional life, first among his communist comrades, then at National Review. But it does at least feel as though the personal drama largely proceeded from the ideas, instead of using them to mask pettier impulses and desires. Witnessing the endless posturing and jockeying of today’s influencers, so many of them lost in the clouds of their fairy-tale political fantasies, one begins to yearn for the honest intellectual brawl.
This is where the virtues of a Frank Meyer truly shine. He liked to be right, and he could be drawn into turf wars, but he still approached ideas with a real desire to understand, and to see what might be true and worth affirming even in views he regarded with suspicion. His middle-of-the-night phone calls, even if presumptuous, spoke to this same desire to meet minds and understand perspectives. He knew the value of the “yes, and.” His ability to grasp the direction of another person’s thought was what made him so invaluable to National Review; he knew which person to put on a given assignment. But it was his ability to fit these pieces into a larger whole that enabled him to shape conservatism in lasting ways.
Meyer also believed, sincerely, that the West would win. Though he admired the work of many anti-modern thinkers, such as Weaver, Meyer’s view had more triumphalist notes. There are reasons why Western Civilization has reshaped the world so completely. It will endure. This was why he believed firmly that the West would win the Cold War. It may have had something to do with his deathbed conversion to Catholicism. It helps explain why a new President Reagan acknowledged a personal debt to Meyer, years after his death.
The West did win the Cold War. Now, as in Meyer’s youth, the world again seems to be gripped by destructive political ideologies that attract the anxious young. Maybe it’s time for traditionalists and lovers of freedom to shake hands and be friends.