Leo Strauss, a University of Chicago scholar of political theory, and Frank Meyer, the mastermind of the fusion of liberty and tradition that guided so many on the American right from Barry Goldwater through Ronald Reagan, certainly read the mail sent between them.
Until now, nobody else did. Their letters sat untouched until I came upon them in an Altoona, Pennsylvania, warehouse during research for The Man Who Invented Conservatism: The Unlikely Life of Frank S. Meyer. They pertain as much to 1941 as to 1961, so their saran-wrapped quality strikes as appropriate—and keeps the missives fresh for our times.
“We had lunch with Leo Strauss, who turns out to be an enormously charming man,” Meyer wrote Willmoore Kendall in June 1961. “Somehow I had had this impression that he would be dourly Germanic, but I find him most sympathique. And a great mind.”
Strauss came up in conversation between these and other National Review editors periodically in 1961. Strauss and Meyer, who would meet in the Bay Area that spring and in Chicago during the fall, exchanged the bulk of their correspondence that year. Of the 17 letters between the University of Chicago professor and the National Review literary editor in the latter’s papers, 11 date to 1961.
“I can think of no living political philosopher whose judgment I value more than yours,” Meyer wrote Strauss on March 12, describing himself as “greatly indebted to your work.” Strauss, in turn, read Meyer’s articles in National Review, a magazine to which he subscribed, and his books.
They shared several common denominators. German-Jews—Strauss, a refugee from the upheaval of the 1930s, and Meyer, the descendant of refugees from the upheaval of the 1840s—they each drifted from their ancestral faith. They received Rockefeller Foundation research grants in England during the early 1930s. Marxist professor Harold Laski, a patron of both, played a crucial role in their moves from the United Kingdom to the United States. For Strauss, he introduced him to American academics and helped him gain employment. For Meyer, whom he had helped obtain entry to the London School of Economics, he set off a chaotic chain of events that ultimately resulted in his deportation by informing an LSE colleague of the student’s libel against him. Meyer, as a Stalinist activist going through the motions as a University of Chicago graduate student for four years following his 1934 return to the United States, terrorized the school’s president, Robert Maynard Hutchins. The following decade, Strauss joined the school’s faculty and became the Robert Maynard Hutchins Distinguished Service Professor. Crucially, Meyer and Strauss fell on the right of the ideological spectrum of intellectuals during a time when conservatism marked one as outside the mainstream of elite opinion.
Just as Meyer’s life as a committed Stalinist on two continents shaped his view, Strauss’s exit from Germany, the homeland where he lived the first 32 years of his life, shortly before the Nazis seized power, naturally shaped his.
This heretofore hidden correspondence centered on another common denominator: hatred of totalitarianism.
In a January 1961 letter, Strauss called attention to the Russian government’s quasi-official critique, which curiously dispensed with customary Marxist jargon, of Boris Pasternak’s 1957 novel Dr. Zhivago. Meyer concurred in regarding it as extraordinary. Dr. Zhivago did not read as forcefully anti-Communist as, say, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. This truth explains Meyer’s discomfort with the novel and possibly makes it a rare example of Strauss’s Persecution and the Art of Writing in action.
Strauss, in an in-person conversation, touted the virtues of Senator Henry “Scoop” Jackson of Washington. Meyer responded by mail that “your judgment of Senator Jackson gets a bit of objective confirmation” in the Democrats’ opposition to aid to Yugoslavia, the ostensibly non-aligned but still very Communist country.
Meyer sent Strauss a copy of his 1958 article that favorably assessed the brief but intense senatorial career of Joseph McCarthy. “Better by far the rough-hewn truth,” the article judged, “than a sophisticated … apology for error.” Repeatedly therein, Meyer described the ideology that McCarthy stood against as “evil,” a word exiled from the lexicon of many intellectuals but not by the two correspondents. This shared disdain for relativism served as a magnet that brought them together.
Strauss described himself as “grateful” for the McCarthy piece, “with which I am in entire agreement.” Meyer responded, “I am very happy that you did not find anything to quarrel with in my interpretation of the McCarthy phenomenon.”
Even this small talk, such as it was, focused on Communism. The letters were exchanged, after all, during one of the frostier parts of the Cold War. The meat of their correspondence, though certainly encompassing Communism, goes beyond this one tributary of totalitarianism. It does so not in a way that fixates on current events; instead, it examines the philosophical underpinnings and ramifications of modern tyranny. The conversation flows in directions to include Nazism and variants within Communism. A what-came-first-the-chicken-or-the-egg quality colors the discussions that ultimately focus on Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin.
Strauss and Meyer engaged in an ongoing epistolary and in-person conversation in 1961. Despite these letters only now reappearing after more than six decades lying dormant in file cabinets and moving boxes, the dialogue remains quite alive. The consistent subject? Big Evil.
By the end of January 1961, Leo Strauss expressed his appreciation for one of Meyer’s books, published at the beginning of that month, that he had devoured upon receipt.
The Moulding of Communists struck almost as an anthropological exposition of the folkways of the Communist cadre, that contradiction in terms that described the elite who ran a party that preached equality. Meyer, lording above most of his comrades in his 14 years as a Communist, strangely removed himself, names, and dates from The Moulding of Communists. He identified dozens of party members in his testimony before courts and committees, yet kept names out of his book.
A hypothetical memoir that might have included tales of his cause célèbre deportation from Great Britain when he drew such backers as future prime minister Clement Attlee and philosopher Bertrand Russell, his “peace” work under future East German dictator Walter Ulbricht, and down-with-the-ship loyalty to deposed American Communist leader Earl Browder might have been a bestseller. Meyer instead depersonalized The Moulding of Communists. Nevertheless, a curiosity with the mysterious world of Communists, even in a post-McCarthy America, generated positive reviews and strong sales. This intrigued audience included Leo Strauss. He appreciated Meyer for writing about Communists without disparaging them. He delivered a jaw-dropping confession to the former Stalinist that partly explains his eagerness to engage with Meyer: he had never personally known any Communists.
“Having always loathed communism and never having known directly any communist,” he wrote Meyer, “I was particularly impressed by what you say about the Communist conception of ‘subjectivity,’ of their understanding of the soul in general and of the inadequacy of the current psychologies in understanding the communists.”
“Subjectivity,” in the party context, refers to one’s individualistic impulses that overwhelm the good of the collective. In criticism sessions designed to bring about the ideal Communist, chastisement inevitably came via that Marxist swear word: subjectivity.
While Communists did not believe in souls, Meyer points to a process of a soul-sucking “psychosurgery” that stunts the person so that he or she might more effectively serve the greater power.
Strauss’s reference to psychologies, too, remains vague enough to possibly refer to numerous parts of the book. For instance, Communists regarded personal difficulties as the result of social, rather than individual, contradictions, which fostered a hostility toward mainstream psychotherapy, as well as difficulties for mainstream psychotherapy to understand one moulded by the party.
The Moulding of Communists, in contrast to the correspondence, molded. Even upon its 1961 release, it seemed dated. Unlike Meyer’s evergreen follow-up, In Defense of Freedom, The Moulding of Communists today perhaps fits most comfortably on a curio-shop shelf.
What specifically grabbed Strauss’s attention in 1961, however, feels very 2025. After singling out parts of the book for praise, Strauss then reached his big point that subsequently drove much of their conversation. He wondered whether Stalin, more than Lenin, influenced the development of the Communist cadre that Meyer described in his book, writing that he gleaned that impression
from Trotsky’s confrontation of Lenin’s empathy with the masses and Stalin’s much more bureaucratic mold. Is anything known about any difference between Lenin and Stalin regarding the schooling of communists? Some time ago it occurred to me that Khrushchev differs from Stalin and Lenin by the fact that there is no longer a coincidence between ‘philosophy’ and political power in the sense that Khrushchev apparently does not or cannot claim to be the communist theorist. Is this opinion correct?
No, Meyer gently informed on this last point. Conceding he could be wrong, Meyer believed that Khrushchev, however much the buffoon he appeared to Westerners, traveled well on his way to consolidating the dual roles of political power and theoretical supremacy. Furthermore, the bifurcation of political and philosophical leadership meant bad news for Communism, a system that included the tautological meta-belief that it amounted to a proven science no different from biology or physics (which necessarily proved the smaller beliefs that stemmed from the big idea).
Whether Khrushchev truly was the leading philosopher of Communism struck as an almost tertiary concern to one who had imparted doctrine as a longtime faculty member at Communist schools and occasional writer on theory for The Communist and New Masses. Khrushchev, “despite his flamboyant personal style,” needed to become that leading voice on doctrinal matters for the good of international Marxism. And what was good for the party was true, and what was bad for it was false.
The fact that small-c communists favored Mao Zedong, Fidel Castro, or Ho Chi Minh over Soviet leaders as the decade progressed—and thereafter some branched off to regard economics as not among the most important applications of Marx—suggested prescience at the heart of Strauss’s question.
Meyer agreed with Strauss’s point regarding Stalin’s role in molding Communists. Meyer, a molder as a member of the Communist Party of Great Britain’s board and later the director of the Chicago Workers School, drew on his experience. He meted out correction in that life. He presented a closeted member with an ultimatum: cease active homosexuality within 48 hours or face expulsion (he chose the former). In 1938, after a drunk Nelson Algren engaged in public combat with Trotskyists, Meyer disciplined the author, told him he reflected poorly on fellow radicals, and later nudged him out of the party as unserious and, presumably, un-mouldable. The corrector eventually faced correction. In 1945, Meyer wavered. The party presented an ultimatum to his salvageable wife: divorce Frank to stay in the party. She divorced the party, instead.
Meyer wrote Strauss:
You are right, I think, more emphatically even than you put it in your letter, on the Stalinist character of the moulding process about which I have written. While the concept of the “party of a new type” was Lenin’s, he had to deal even in the Russian Bolshevik Party with men of the long-established socialist type—and his hands were full in establishing his concept of the Party and directing its practical revolutionary activities. It is questionable, I imagine, whether Lenin ever understood the sort of moulding that would be necessary to create men of the type demanded by a Party of the kind he conceived. He too, of course, like Marx before him, could not existentially grasp the human implications of his ideological concepts.
On March 23, Strauss continued the conversation by asking, “Is not full-fledged Stalinism a ‘synthesis’ of Leninism and Hitlerism?”
Strauss believed that the Soviet dictator learned two things from the Nazi dictator:
1) The Marxist-Leninist conclusion from the Jacobin experience that the revolution must not eat its own children is not unqualifiedly correct as Hitler proved beautifully by the Roehm purge; surely the big purges by Stalin took place after the experience of the Roehm purge had plenty of time to sink in. 2) It was a principle of pre-First World War socialism ([August] Bebel) that anti-Semitism is the socialism of the fools; again Hitler proved beautifully that this fact does not deprive anti-Jewish policies of an enormous political effectiveness and Stalin, as well as Khrushchev, learned his lesson.
Here, Strauss sees Stalin as not merely one who entered into a utilitarian no-honor-among-thieves alliance with Hitler, but as a student who essentially took notes on the master’s modus operandi. Stalin’s persecution of Jews served as but one example that illustrated the truth of his belief.
The monsters that shaped Strauss and Meyer’s perspectives differed. But their discussion indicated that maybe the monsters more closely resembled one another in real life than they did in their long afterlife in the popular imagination.
Meyer necessarily approached the question from a different starting point and different life experiences. He effectively sent men to their deaths as a recruiter for the Republican side during the Spanish Civil War. He later engaged in embarrassing feats of mental gymnastics to justify the Hitler-Stalin Pact. His penance of sorts came in volunteering at 33, over repeated objections by the Communist Party, for the US Army. He wanted to fight Nazis. In the Army, he met, finally, the proletariat after the social insulation of a private preparatory school, a high-hat hotel serving as home, and higher education at Oxford. The workingmen with whom he shared a squad bay did not resemble the proletariat Karl Marx had described. Training injuries curtailed his time in the military. Recuperation led to a prolonged reassessment and thoughts about Big Evil on the European continent.
Injuries prevented Meyer from fighting the Nazis in Europe. They catalyzed him to fight Communists in America.
“I would agree that on both points Stalin learned from Hitler,” he wrote Strauss on April 4, regarding anti-Semitism and the revolution devouring its own. “But is it not a sort of multiple-stomach digestive process? I mean, the general characteristics of Nazism seem to me to derive from Bolshevism, and then an amalgam of these general characteristics with the special characteristics that Nazism produces is created. From this amalgamated special type of totalitarianism, the two phenomena you mention (and probably others) were re-digested by Stalin.”
Meyer questioned himself. Had he unfairly dismissed Hitler as one possessing very little originality? The prejudice stemmed from his view distilled to its essence that “all the characteristics of contemporary totalitarianism were potential in Marx.” He immediately thereafter mentioned Marx’s anti-Semitism. He possibly included this as a characteristic of totalitarianism or, more specifically, of one of its more well-known twentieth-century manifestations.
Just as Meyer’s life as a committed Stalinist on two continents shaped his view, Strauss’s exit from Germany, the homeland where he lived the first 32 years of his life, shortly before the Nazis seized power, naturally shaped his.
“It is hard to separate Strauss’s reading of texts from a moral-cultural critique that came out of his early life, particularly from his status as a Jew in Germany in the first third of the twentieth century,” Paul Gottfried wrote in Leo Strauss and the Conservative Movement in America: A Critical Appraisal. “His hermeneutic points back to critical points in his life, including his reactions to the rise and triumph of Nazism, his subsequent flight to England, and his long-time residence in the United States.”
Strauss and Meyer shared much in common. The monsters that shaped their perspectives differed. But their discussion indicated that maybe the monsters more closely resembled one another in real life than they did in their long afterlife in the popular imagination.
The two men stayed in touch. But their communication never matched the depth of their 1961 letters. Strauss looked forward the next year to reading Meyer’s In Defense of Freedom and later to seeing Meyer in 1965 when he spoke at the University of Chicago during the Public Affairs Conference on Liberalism and Conservatism, an event attended by Rep. Donald Rumsfeld, future US Senators Charles Percy and Adlai Stevenson III, political reporter Robert Novak, and scholars Joseph Cropsey, Harry Jaffa, Walter Berns, and Edward Banfield. The following year, Meyer relayed that he had read his friend’s “fascinating” Socrates and Aristophanes.
After that burst of initial letters, they wrote to each other sporadically. Nineteen-sixty-one’s mailbox conversation mainly continued telephonically and face-to-face, both of which afforded more time and space to explore the big questions surrounding Big Evil. Sadly, no stenographer transcribed.