The Man Who Invented Conservatism: The Unlikely Life of Frank S. Meyer, Daniel J. Flynn, Encounter Books, 2025, pp. 544, $34.00 hardcover.
If there ever was a book that required brawn as well as brains, Daniel J. Flynn’s The Man Who Invented Conservatism: The Unlikely Life of Frank S. Meyer is it.
Flynn’s own account of going through 663 boxes in an Altoona, Pennsylvania, warehouse in 2022 to find the fifteen containing Frank Meyer’s correspondence, manuscripts, memoranda, and memorabilia features a photo of him looking more like a coal miner than a writer. Flynn had been seeking these documents for two years and, after finding them, he managed to put together the remarkable story of one of the key postwar conservatives based at National Review in 431 pages (not counting endnotes, which are quite extensive).
This book has been (and likely will continue to be) devoured by conservative readers, and Flynn has made all the usual stops on a conservative-book speaking tour—plus many I did not know existed. To those familiar with the “movement” centered on William F. Buckley, Jr., will come some surprising perspectives about such well-known figures as James Burnham and Brent Bozell, along with the disputes and friendships in what turns out to be a small but influential group of ex-communists, academics, businessmen, and religionists—even a “clique.” As Flynn puts it, Meyer was “the last difficult man standing within NR of the Meyer-[Willmore]-Kendall-[Willi] Schlamm-Bozell clique.” The reader sees the sausage-making behind the production of a magazine—the arguments over theory, political endorsements, editing, and even suicide (with some acting on the philosophical idea of self-determination, including Meyer’s friend Eugene O’Neill, Jr, son of the famous playwright).
Yet, in spite of the book’s scope and abundance of new information, the title oversells the product. A more accurate title would have been “The Man Who Rediscovered Conservatism.” Meyer’s “fusionism” between the traditionalist and libertarian schools of conservatism is really a rediscovery of the principles of the Founding.
American conservatism or constitutionalism had been there all along, informing the opposition’s battles against President Franklin Roosevelt. These conservatives’ efforts were quashed by FDR’s IRS, FBI, FCC, and Roosevelt’s own mellifluous demonization of critics as Fifth Columnists and Nazis. Indeed, the “fusion” of moral order and liberty has been the animating principle even in Buckley’s ally-turned-enemy, the John Birch Society. (The major difference was that the JBS viewed the assaults on liberty and civic virtue as emanating from a deliberate and coordinated conspiracy).
Meyer’s discovery occurred on his path from Communism to Conservatism. The “fusionism” articulated in Meyer’s 1962 essay “Why Freedom” had been percolating in Meyer’s mind since the Popular Front days, except that then it had been communism that was touted as “Americanism.” Meyer, along the way, realized that Americanism is the opposite of collectivism. The idea was fully articulated in his 1962 magnum opus, In Defense of Freedom: A Conservative Credo.
It took government connections (National Review principals William F. Buckley, Jr., Willmore Kendall, and James Burnham had worked for the CIA) and a new thrust toward internationalism to propel the movement to the influential political position National Review enjoyed. As Flynn reveals, the propulsion did not emerge solely through the strength of ideas.
The larger social and political context, however, can be covered only sparingly in a single volume. A page-limit constraint would preclude expansive investigation—the kind that is granted to multivolume histories by leftist historians dealing with leftist subjects, such as Robert Caro with Lyndon B. Johnson, and David Levering Lewis with W.E.B. Du Bois. A chapter on Meyer’s relationship with Murray Rothbard (one of Buckley’s excommunicates) and the intellectual clashes and confluences would have provided depth and broadness. It is good that such places as the Mises Institute have published Flynn’s articles dealing with Meyer’s correspondence with Rothbard, but a chapter in a hardcover book would have given such exchanges a more permanent place of prominence. Future students would get a fuller understanding of the conflicts between conservative camps (the old anti-interventionist camp represented by Rothbard and the internationalist one represented by Buckley). Those new to the study of conservatism instead might get the impression that the Old Right was not worthy of serious study.
Furthermore, the prose moves along at a rapid clip—sometimes so rapidly that the reader needs to stop and reread. Flynn tends to pack so much into a sentence that its joke or pun is not appreciated until a second or third reading—by which time the appreciation dims: e.g.,
Fears, stoked by O’Neill’s earlier admission during the long night’s journey into day, dissipated upon the guest’s rethinking the idea of acting on his depression.
Nevertheless, Flynn captures the essence, uniqueness, and importance of his subject—the only child born in 1909 to older Jewish parents, a successful businessman father and a civically involved mother.
Frank was obviously pampered and indulged and by the time he applied to Princeton faced some antisemitism. He was not tall or athletic, but his intensity and dark good looks drew young people, especially women. In the radical/communist circles at Oxford, Meyer was the big man on campus and a big target of British intelligence.
Meyer’s radical poetry-writing playboy lifestyle soon came to an end when he was unceremoniously deported from England, still lacking a graduate degree because his time had been devoted to communist activism as class president at the London School of Economics (after Oxford), and womanizing. By the first months of 1934, writes Flynn,
His brashness attracted the wrong kind of attention from spies, bureaucrats, and dons. He defied the counsel of a celebrity academic [anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski], pursued Britain’s most dangerous bachelorette [Prime Minister Ramsey MacDonald’s daughter Sheila], and inspired the soon-to-be superstar of the U.K. left [Clement Attlee].
Fighting Meyer’s impending deportation were “Future Nobel Prize-winners and a prime minister, members of Parliament and leading philosophers, and novelists, clerics, and student hordes.” These included Attlee, Bertrand Russell, and E.M. Forster.
After a stint in Paris, Meyer returned to New York—Greenwich Village specifically—on July 4, 1934. From there it was on to Chicago on assignment by the Communist Party to attend the University of Chicago with a letter from Malinowski in hand. Meyer again failed to get the graduate degree but succeeded in his mission to recruit for the Party. After being expelled (it was the sixth institution Meyer attended since graduating from high school thirteen years previously), Meyer in 1938 was promoted to director of the Chicago Workers School. He recruited soldiers to Spain, remained loyal to the Communist Party alongside Earl Browder after the Stalin-Hitler Pact, and stole the wife of a comrade, Elsie Philbrick, with whom he would share his life and two sons.
As he continued to work as an organizer for the Party, Meyer began to rethink his position. Flynn traces Meyer’s intellectual progression from “vehemently denouncing Nazi Germany to opposing any war effort against it as imperialism to urging the taking up of arms against the Third Reich,” which he acted upon until foot problems requiring surgery forced him to leave. But his first personal contacts with the “proletariat” in the Army led him to reevaluate communism. Then, as he taught at the Jefferson School, Meyer began having doubts. An assignment to review Friedrich Hayek’s Road to Serfdom for the New Masses in 1945 spurred further thought—and an end to any more bylines in that Marxist publication.
After his defection came multiple testimonies during the 1950s, including before the Subversive Activities Control Board, the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee, and the House Committee on Un-American Activities. Also came the habit of sleeping during the day in his and Elsie’s home in bucolic, but left-wing, Woodstock, New York, and the habit of carrying a pistol on infrequent journeys out, such as to a Philadelphia Society meeting—precautions necessary for apostates who named names. But Meyer went further, with his The Moulding of Communists published in 1961, followed with a publicity tour that included television.
Meyer also wrote for The American Mercury, where he became book review editor. He was mentored by mail by libertarian Rose Wilder Lane, received Volker Fund writing grants, and did a stint at The Freeman alongside Henry Hazlitt and Frank Chodorov.
Meyer knew about National Review during the planning stages, which according to Flynn would be free of The American Mercury’s “crackpots” and The Freeman’s “schismatics and meddling moneymen.”
After the launch of National Review in 1955, Meyer began writing his Principles & Heresies column and became books editor. The changes in editorship are recounted, as are the conflicts between Meyer and Kendall, Bozell and Burnham, and Meyer and Burnham (the former Trotskyite who jockeyed for power and held sway over Buckley).
A schism erupted between the traditionalists aligned with Europe, such as Kendall and Bozell who literally moved to Franco’s Spain, and the free market libertarians. Flynn recounts National Review’s role in selling Barry Goldwater (complementing Phyllis Schlafly’s incredible work) as an uncompromised conservative presidential candidate.
Flynn also recounts the purges from National Review (decreed by Buckley) of Revilo Oliver in 1960 for antisemitism, but also any contributors to The American Mercury or John Birch Society publications.
Along the way, we learn about the nurturing of future anti-conservatives Joan Didion and Garry Wills, the solicitation of advice by Henry Kissinger, and the leave-taking of Medford Evans and then son Stan Evans (with the immediate prompt being George Will’s arrival at NR).
Meyer, in the midst of this all, had transformed from a radical playboy to a devoted family man who, with his wife, homeschooled their two sons long before it became a popular thing to do. His appearing in the afternoon with a several-day-old beard in a bathrobe and an ever-present cigarette, as a friend of his son recalled, puts a different slant on the image often presented of the National Review conservative movement—symbolized by the bon vivant William F. Buckley in the back of his limousine on the phone (in 1974!) or in a television studio. Much of the intellectual labor was done by late-night phone calls, as Flynn recalls in cataloguing the household expenses of which 30 percent of taxable income often went to telephone bills.
Meyer, working from his remote location, was the man who got things done. Meyer put to use the skills he had learned as a Communist cadre-builder in launching and/or aiding such conservative organizations as Young Americans for Freedom, the Conservative Party, the American Conservative Union, and the Philadelphia Society.
Meyer’s background also led him to diverge from the positions taken by both non-interventionists and internationalists. Though skeptical of foreign alliances and interference, he recognized the dangers of communist incursions, such as in Vietnam. At the same time, he was opposed to the draft. With other paleoconservatives, he opposed Harry Jaffa’s adulation of Abraham Lincoln as well as government incursions into the right of freedom of association through forced integration. While Buckley capitulated to the demands of the left (often reversing himself), Meyer stood firm in the Constitutionalism he had come to value. He was not as harsh on the John Birch Society as Buckley and his perspective captured the long view.
Meyer comes across as more authentic and principled than many of the others at National Review. He remained a firebrand—but now for a good cause. Even before he found the warehouse treasure, Flynn recorded the memories of such recently departed conservative luminaries as James Buckley, Lee Edwards, and Ed Fuelner. His interviews of those who knew Meyer reveal a man who at a Philadelphia Society meeting would “’pop up to the microphone and just lace into’” someone who uttered “’a heresy’” (interview with “Yaffer” Ken Grubbs in 2023), combatively yell back and forth “’across the room’” with Harry Jaffa (interview with Don Devine in 2020), and challenge Irving Kristol on his claim to be a conservative (interview with David Keene in 2020). When Kristol “’decided to describe himself, finally, as a conservative,’” Keene recounted, “’Frank, who usually wore a red flannel shirt and suspenders—he was a little skinny guy’” jumped on his chair in the back and pointing at Kristol said, “’You sir, are not a conservative. You are nothing but a goddamned Tory socialist.’” Then Meyer “’got up and slammed the door to a then-silenced crowd.’”
In the months before he died of lung cancer in March 1972, Meyer gave a fiery speech at the Philadelphia Society and wrote his last column “Isolationism?” for the December 3, 1971, issue. After having long discussed converting to Catholicism, Meyer did so six hours before his last breath. His work has been carried on by his sons and through the republication of Defense of Freedom. President Reagan quoted him at length in 1981.
Flynn’s book, for its impressive detective work, its research, including in the archives of the Hoover Institution and British and American intelligence, is an addition to the oeuvre of conservative history for which we should all be grateful. Flynn deserves the plaudits he is getting (and more) for undertaking this herculean task chronicling the story of a man who was confronted with the truth about communism and did not look away. The Hoover Institution and Encounter Books deserve kudos for helping to bring this important book forth.
Mary Grabar is the author of Debunking Howard Zinn: Exposing the Fake History That Turned a Generation against America; Debunking The 1619 Project: Exposing the Plan to Divide America”; and Debunking FDR: The Man and the Myths. Grabar earned her Ph.D. from the University of Georgia in 2002 and taught college English for 20 years. She is a resident fellow at The Alexander Hamilton Institute for the Study of Western Civilization and executive director of Dissident Prof (dissidentprof.com).
Photo by family photograph, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=4345327