Frank Meyer was the father of fusionism and one of the key builders of the conservative movement in the mid-twentieth century. That’s despite spending his early years as a serious communist agitator. James Patterson and Daniel Flynn discuss the evolution of Meyer’s thought and the impact of his legacy. Flynn’s book synthesizes a large quantity of recently-uncovered material on Meyer, offering a more complete and nuanced picture than has been available heretofore. What lessons does Meyer’s life and career offer for the conservative movement today?
Related Links
The Man Who Invented Conservatism by Daniel J. Flynn
“A Soldier for Synthesis” by Rachel Lu (Law & Liberty book review)
“Fusionism: The Only Game in Town” by Alexander William Salter
“Conservative Fusion,” a Law & Liberty Podcast episode featuring Charles C. W. Cooke, Samuel Goldman, and Stephanie Slade, hosted by James Patterson
Transcript
Hello and welcome to the Law and Liberty Podcast. My name is James Patterson, Contributing Editor to Law & Liberty and Associate Professor of Public Affairs at the Institute of American Civics at the University of Tennessee. Today with me is our guest, Daniel J. Flynn. He’s an author and columnist, Senior Editor at the American Spectator, and he’s written for the Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, Boston Globe, New York Post, City Journal, and National Review. He lives in Massachusetts and is a former US Marine Reservist, and has recently launched a new YouTube channel called Right-Wing Wilderness. So once you have completely listened to this podcast, go subscribe to his YouTube channel and like all of the videos that are up there. So Mr. Flynn, thank you for coming onto the Law & Liberty Podcast.
Appreciate you having me.
Okay, so this is about your book, The Man Who Invented Conservatism, and that man is Frank Meyer. Mr. Flynn, why is it not Edmund Burke?
Well, I don’t think anyone invented conservatism, and the title is sort of a joke. I think a lot of the reviewers sort of miss that “don’t judge a book by its cover” admonition. And I guess I’m to blame for that because I did put that on the cover, so I can’t complain too much. What I explained in the book is that Frank Meyer was coming over from communism, being sort of a heavy hitter in the Communist Party. When he came over to conservatism, he thought, well, it takes a system to beat a system. Why don’t these people on the right have their act together, and why don’t they have a system? And that missed the point, sort of a category mistake. Conservatism is sort of an anti-system. It’s something that developed organically; it didn’t spin out of some theorist’s mind.
And so, when there are reviewers and others saying, “Well, he’s wrong. It wasn’t Meyer who invented conservatism, it was Edmund Burke or Bill Buckley.” I think all those people miss something, and that conservatism is not something that was invented. It’s something that develops. And I think that’s what Meyer figured out over the course of the last 20 or so years of his life in pursuing what he’s known for, which is fusionism. In pursuing fusionism, rooting that in the American tradition, in the American founding, he realized that conservatism wasn’t a system. It was something had to be rooted to something. And in America, the natural place to root conservatism would be the American founding
Yeah, the Law & Liberty audience is probably more familiar with the Frank Meyer of the second half of the book. So before we get to that, let’s talk about the first half of the book. So what was Frank Meyer’s childhood like, and what accounts for this rather dramatic shift once he becomes a young man and becomes interested in Marxism?
Frank Meyer was born in 1909 in Newark, New Jersey to a very wealthy family. The father was an industrialist. The mother was sort of a Jewish do-gooder. So he had these two poles on him, one was the temple and the other was his father’s capitalism. He goes to the Newark Academy, and the earliest writing I have of him was when he’s 14. And it’s a real spirited defense of Judaism and saying, how does anyone say that Judaism is sort of losing its followers? Come into the temple on the holy days. You’ll see for yourself there’s a lot of enthusiasm there. Well, that was when he was 14, and that’s for the temple newspaper. And when he’s 16, he’s writing an article, an award-winning article, for the Newark Academy, defending Bolsheviks and toying with atheism. Something happens to him in his early years, like I think a lot of things happen to people in those years.
When he goes to Princeton, initially, he’s denied entry to Princeton, and I have the letters from the director of admissions there. He says, Frank Meyer doesn’t strike me even as a Hebrew of the better type. Can’t we steer him to some other college? There are plenty of fine, clean-cut Christians that we should have a place for, and Frank Meyer will just take a place from one of those people away. Now Frank didn’t see that, he stayed at it, he wins admission to Princeton in his next year, and when he is at Princeton, he encounters a student body of those fine clean-cut Christian Americans that the director of admissions was talking about, and he’s left out. Psychologically, he’s in a bad spot and he finds an attraction to Milton’s Satan. He starts writing poems about Satan, poems about young women. There was a woman in Newark, Dorothy Canning Miller, who later becomes a huge figure in American art, the curator at the Museum of Modern Art. When Frank is about 20 years old, he loses his virginity to Dorothy Canning Miller, an older woman.
And here goes a pattern. Frank is pursuing these pleasurable aspects of life, particularly women. He starts writing poetry about women. He starts writing poetry about Satan. And it’s not too much of a jump in the alphabet from Satan to Stalin, and I don’t think it’s too much of a jump otherwise. And so Frank starts toying with the idea of communism. By the time he gets to Oxford (he drops out of Princeton and he goes to Oxford), in his later time at Oxford where it’s a much more welcoming environment than Princeton was for him, he found something called the October Club, which is still around, which is a Marxist, explicitly Marxist, organization. And he marches his friends to the Communist Party of Great Britain’s headquarters in London, with a guy named Prince Mirsky (who in a few years dies in the Gulag) and they all join the Communist Party of Great Britain. Frank becomes a board member of the party. He’s the leader of the student bureau. And in fact, if you look at the MI five and MI six files of Frank Meyer, they call him the founder of the Student Communist Movement in Great Britain. So it’s unlikely that you’d have an American be the founder of something like this, but that’s what Frank Meyer found himself in the early 1930s.
It’s an incredible story because on the one hand, it really does speak to the time where the Ivy Leagues are very concerned about preserving a very specific identity for admissions, when they would place caps on admissions to Jews for example. But on the other hand, it’s a familiar story even now, where you have well-to-do Americans sort of almost rejecting the lives that they’d lived before in favor of some kind of imagined superior alternative. It’s almost like a rejection of his Jewish upper-middle-class upbringing, which is repeated endlessly in not just Jewish but other religious backgrounds. But the young vigor that typifies Frank Meyer is not exclusively limited to Dorothy Canon Miller, is it?
No, it’s not. And when he’s in Great Britain, he is getting a lot of attention from MI5 in MI6 when he goes abroad and they’re taking notes on him, they take 160 pages of notes, they talk about what tweed he wears, whether he shaved that day, what bars he drinks at. They do a black bag job on his apartment. They put a mail cover on his correspondence. So they note all sorts of very obscure things about him, which is very helpful to a biographer. They leave out, and for reasons that you could probably imagine why they left it out, but they leave out the one glaring aspect of Frank Meyer’s time in Great Britain, and that is this. All that time, he’s calling for the violent overthrow of the government of Prime Minister Ramsey McDonald. And during that time, he is surreptitiously dating Ramsey McDonald’s youngest daughter.
I have a letter from Sheila McDonald to Frank Meyer saying, come on over to 10 Downing. The coast is clear. My dad’s gone. We’ll have dinner. Seven o’clock sound good for you? So you pick the person in the history of communism, the romantic figure, Che Guevara, Jack Reed, whoever you want to pick—none of them had the guts to pull off a caper like that. And it shows you Frank Meyer’s confidence, his charisma, but it also shows you his recklessness. The idea that he would be out there, such an upfront figure saying we need to overthrow the government of Great Britain, and at the same time he was secretly dating the Prime Minister’s daughter. I mean that to me, that’s just a wild story and one that I think until this book came out was completely overlooked.
So Frank Meyer was a true believer in this stuff, not just a cynical agent, right? Both when he came here, went to Britain, and then came back.
Correct. He’s an ideologue, he’s a Marxist fanatic, he’s a firebrand. And his dating of Sheila McDonald leads rather predictably to deportation hearings against him. And at that point, he becomes a cause celeb. And even though he’s a Marxist, I think he really liked being sort of the first amongst equals, if you will. All the attention that he was getting in Great Britain, you had Bertrand Russell, the philosopher, and E.M. Forster, who wrote A Passage to India and Howard’s End, signing a petition saying, keep Frank Meyer in the country. Clement Attlee, who would later become the Prime Minister of England, defends Meyer on the floor of the House of Commons. Michael Straight, who later was the publisher of the New Republic, got caught up in Meyer’s charisma and joined the Communist Party, became an agent. Meyer was never an agent, but he became a Soviet agent. He remembers at the time marching around London with the whole mobs of students chanting, “Free Frank Meyer, free Frank Meyer.”
So he became really like one of these “free Angela Davis,” “free Mumia” figures in Great Britain. But you know, you can date the Prime Minister’s daughter, or you can call for the Prime Minister’s overthrow. If you do both, you’re not going to last there if you’re not an Englishman. And so he gets deported on June 1st, 1934. And in keeping with the ironies and paradoxes of his life, he immediately goes to work in Paris for a guy named Walter Ulbricht. And Ulbricht was the guy who constructed the Berlin Wall later. At that point, he was sort of an unknown Marxist on the run from Germany because he had killed two policemen. Meyer goes to work for him as a peace activist. They’re engaging in peace activism for Stalin. So here’s a guy like Ulbrich, who is a very stern, rigid figure. I mean, he later becomes the longest-serving dictator of that short-lived country known as East Germany. And there’s Meyer working for him in the summer of 1934, gets kicked back to the United States, and it takes him about 10 years, but he finally regains his spot. He’s at the highest levels of the British Communist Party, and in the American Party, he’s more like a mid-level manager. He’s the director of the Chicago Workers School, but it takes him about 10 years to get back to that level that he was at in Great Britain. And for his final year or so in the party, he’s at that highest level of the party.
And probably not dating a member of the Roosevelt family.
No, he married one of his students at the Chicago Worker School, Elsie Meyer. And when they met, she was married to some other communist, but with the communist morality being what it was, they weren’t going to let that get in the way of the red-hot attraction that they had. And so she dumped him and same week she gets a divorce, she marries Frank Meyer, and they lived happily ever after for the rest of their lives.
You have this true believer. And you know what? With true believers, you go one of two ways. Either they self-destruct within their own ideologies, or something about communism starts to bother them, right? Especially when it’s managed by Soviet influence, which is very calculating, very non-ideological in its approach. And this has something to do with Meyer’s experience with the Second World War.
A lot of it does, definitely. He had a friend in England, his understudy, who was a guy by the name of John Cornford. Meyer later names his son “John Cornford Meyer”; he had that much of an influence on Meyer’s life. Cornford was the great grandson of Charles Darwin, and Meyer ropes him into communism as a teenager, as like a 16, 17-year-old kid. And when Meyer leaves, Cornford takes Meyer’s spot over there. He’s the head of the student bureau. He goes over to Spain and he dies the day after his 21st birthday. And I have to think that Meyer felt great guilt for this. Meyer had also sent men to their deaths as a recruiter for the Spanish Civil War in the United States. So Meyer tries to join up to fight Hitler in World War II. And the Communist Party says, no, I’m sorry, we need you here.
And he thinks, this is odd. They’re exhorting everyone else to go and join the fight against Nazism, but they won’t let me go. This goes on for about eight months. And finally in frustration they say, okay, you want to go? Go. He goes, and it’s revelatory. In the squad bay that he’s in, he finally meets the proletariat that he’s been talking about all these years. And they’re not the same people that Marx had described. These are not people that are itching to overthrow the government. They’re just looking to make their lives better. And he’s stunned by this because he had lived a very socially insulated life. He grew up in a hotel, he went to Oxford and Princeton, his family was wealthy. So this is revelatory. He gets injured in Officer Candidate School in Fort Benning, Georgia and it takes him over a year to recoup. He gets surgeries on both of his feet.
Yeah, he had some sort of problem with his feet, they had very high arches? I was trying to understand what this is. It was pretty bad-sounding.
Yeah, something like that. And he’s 33 when he joins the military, so he’s …
Yeah. You’re breaking down. And so he doesn’t go and fight, but he sort of washes out of the military. But that year of recuperation, he’s thinking, and he’s questioning, and questioning and communism do not go together. And in desperation, him and a guy named Louis Budenz, they’re talking in Chicago. Budenz was the editor of a communist paper out there; Meyer had been the head of the Chicago Worker School. And they think, back in the thirties, the heyday of communism, was when they were touting these slogans, like “Communism is 20th century Americanism.” We need to get back to that. And so he writes this letter to Earl Browder that has a dramatic effect, not just on communism but on conservatism. And Meyer couldn’t have foreseen this when he tells Browder that the Communist Party needs to fuse Marxism with the American tradition, and that they need to do this not just on the 4th of July, but every day of the year.
And he repeatedly uses a variant of this word “fusion.” So that comes much later. But that idea—Meyer comes to realize, well, Marxism doesn’t fit with the American tradition. He’s a fanatic, but he’s not such a fanatic as to lose his sense or his intelligence. And so that eats away at him. But the question remains, what does fuse with the American tradition? And in the long run, after Meyer leaves the party, what he comes to recognize is that the American tradition means the founding. And what does the founding mean? It means freedom. So if you’re an American, that’s what you’re conserving. If you’re a British conservative, maybe you’re conserving the monarchy, the aristocracy. If you’re an Italian conservative, maybe it’s the Catholic church. But the thing that’s significant about us, that’s important about the United States of America, is our founding. And so that is what Meyer set out on the last half of his life to preserve: the ideas of the American founding. And to Frank Meyer, that meant freedom.
A lot of the people around Meyer during the latter days of his American communism are people who are peeling away too. I mean, you mentioned Louis Budenz, whose name I first learned when I was in graduate school during research on Fulton Sheen.
Fulton Sheen converts them to Catholicism.
That’s one of the most amazing stories, and I’m sure you’re probably familiar with it, but Meyer uncharacteristically leaves the Communist Party in a whimper. He just sort of sneaks away.
And people kind of shun him because he had spoken out about things. He had given a positive review of Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom. So he was already sort of cracking up. Budenz went in a more Meyerite way. And so in October of 1945, and I have some letters from Budenz to Meyer covering this in real time, really fascinating stuff. And so, on this particular morning, whatever it was, October 13th or something like that, 1945, Budenz is the managing editor of the Daily Worker. He’s the guy, I think the editor at that point’s Earl Browder. So Earl Browder is not editing the paper, Budenz is the editor of the paper. That morning he’s the editor of the paper; that night he is converted in St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York to Catholicism. He renounces communism. So you have probably the most flamboyant, high-profile charismatic priest in American history, converting the editor of the Daily Worker in the most famous cathedral in the United States, St. Patrick’s Cathedral, and all of the newspapers cover it, and the communists are just sort of dumbstruck at this. How did this happen? Meyer, around the same tim,e kind of worms away, but Meyer and Budenz’s paths continue to intersect, but it’s with Budenz that Meyer comes up with this idea of fusionism.
The intellectual ferment that communism loses as a result of its hard line is actually to the gain of the United States, with people like Budenz. He dies shortly after that, I think?
No, he dies the same year as Meyer. He might’ve died the same month, month as Meyer. He died the same month as Meyer. He was quite older than Meyer. Whereas Meyer went into conservatism, Budenz became more of a Catholic. They both became witnesses, Budenz a bit of a professional witness. So Meyer gets convinced by Budenz to testify against his former comrades. And in 1947, he gets a visit which he dreads from the FBI, and they visit every month or so, and Budenz is encouraging him to testify against his former comrades. And he said, it was at that moment that I first understood what grace was, because there was no good decision I could make. There was no decision I could make without sinning. I would either have to turn on my old friends, my comrades, or I’d have to turn on my country.
There was no good decision. There was no decision I could make without committing a sin. He ultimately decides that he’s going to go the Budenz route and he’s going to testify against his former comrades. And in 1949, he testifies as a mystery witness, as a surprise witness, in the longest, most expensive trial in US history. That’s the Smith Act trial of 1949 and it lasts a couple of years. And Meyer is one of five witnesses along with Budenz who were actually members of the Communist Party. A lot of the other witnesses who were, well, remember the program, “I Was a Communist for the FBI”? There were a lot of people back then who were FBI agents who had infiltrated the Communist Party. They had testified against the party, naturally, but Meyer was one of a few people who were actually earnest members of the party who said, this is what happened. And he sends 11 of his former comrades, including Eugene Dennis and Gus Hall, to jail. They go to jail for five years or so.
Yeah, I am forgetting who it is. I’m frantically trying to look this up, who some of these converts were. He converts Fritz Chrysler and Clare Boothe Lewis, but they are not the ones who I was thinking of. But yeah, there are a lot of high-profile conversions that Sheen makes, and Budenz is certainly one of them. So I’m sorry for misremembering. So how do we go from the sort of heretical communism of Meyer to the National Review? There’s this period of you call Woodstock, and it’s not the fun one. He’s already had all that.
Yes. Meyer in 1944 moves to Woodstock, New York. When he was convalescing, he went up there for awhile, and he has a son, John Cornford Meyer. And during his period there, his income is essentially passive income from money that he had inherited. They own a building in Newark, New Jersey, and he’s really making no income. So he’s married, he has a kid, but he has no really no means of supporting them. He starts speaking with his best friend, who’s Eugene O’Neill Jr. That story is probably too intricate to get into here, but Eugene O’Neill is his other dead friend that he names a son after. After drinking Frank Meyer’s whiskey (and to me this is sort of the seminal point of Meyer’s Life), O’Neill commits suicide, finishing that bottle of whiskey, saying: never let it be said of an O’Neill that he couldn’t finish a bottle.
And that next morning or that afternoon, Elsie Meyer finds his body. He slit his wrists and his ankles—he was a classicist—so in Seneca style. So this period, it’s not a great period for Frank. He’s shunned by a lot of the folks in Woodstock because it’s an artist colony, there’s a lot of left-wingers up there. And he starts writing for The Freeman. He starts writing for American Mercury. So people kind of start to know him within conservative circles. By 1950, his language in these debates he has with Eugene O’Neill are characteristically the language of a right-winger. You would know this sort of language. So after 45, he’s sort of a Truman Democrat. By 1950, he’s a right-winger. Within a few years, he’s too pure for Eisenhower. And at 1955, he’s present at the creation of National Review.
And this is sort of like the biggest little magazine of the twentieth century. Bill Buckley’s the prime mover, he’s the main founder, and there’s another guy who comes up with the idea named Willi Schlamm. So Schlamm is a founder. Schlamm said when he founded it, he wanted to start a veritable conspiracy of friendship where the outs could finally take on the ins. And Schlamm thought of himself as the out, and he knew himself in that way. He was sort of the consummate out. Unfortunately, Schlamm was ill-equipped to be the master of ceremonies of his conspiracy of friendship. He annoys Buckley; he annoys Jim Burnham. He gets sort of kicked out. And immediately, three things happen upon Schlamm’s defenestration to Vermont. The first thing is that Frank Meyer is sort of elevated to the leader of the anti-James Burnham faction with the National Review.
Meyer is sort of the purest. Meyer is the right wing. Burnham is more moderate, more pragmatic, we could say within that continuum of National Review. He’s the more moderate end of things. So Meyer carries on a 17-year battle for the soul of National Review with James Burnham. I think Meyer probably loses that battle on a lot of fronts, but he wins the larger battle for the soul of the conservative movement. We can get into that a little later. The second thing that happens is that Meyer becomes the editor of Books, Arts & Manners. He’s the literary editor of National Review. He takes over from Willi Schlamm, and this is really where he shines in the magazine. Although he’s the purist in his column, Principles and Heresies, he’s sort of this strange ideologue when it comes to being the literary editor because someone’s politics don’t matter to him, what matters is: Can they write a good book review? Which is probably what should matter if you’re running a book review section. People miss that.
And so he’s the editor who runs the first freelance article by Joan Didion in the United States, and Didion credit him with that. He takes Gary Wills under his wing, and Gary Wills is later a Pulitzer Prize winner, writing in history. Wills said that he spent more time with Meyer than he did with anyone outside of his family in the late fifties, early sixties. He has a neighbor in Woodstock, Theodore Sturgeon, who’s a science fiction writer. And Meyer was unlike a lot of people at the time who thought of science fiction as culturally maybe a step above professional wrestling, but a step below cowboy fiction. He said, no, there’s some great stuff going on. And there really was a lot of great stuff going on in the fifties and sixties.
He has this guy Sturgeon review over about a hundred science fiction titles for National Review. And during that time, Sturgeon is writing scripts for Star Trek. He comes up with “Live Long and Prosper,” probably the most famous line in the history of Star Trek. He comes up with the prime directive. He writes that episode in which Spock (Leonard Nimoy) comes up with that Vulcan hand salute. I can’t do it but some people can, where you split the fingers down the middle. So Meyer had a lot of very interesting and eclectic people writing book reviews that made National Review the place to be in the 1960s. If you wanted literary criticism, there was nowhere better in the 1960s, and Frank Meyer is the guy running that show. The third thing that happens, this cascading effect from Schlamm leaving, is that Meyer becomes the master of ceremonies of this veritable conspiracy of friendship.
He does this in part by staying connected through the telephone. He spent more on his phone bills in the mid 1960s; in fact, it was double the amount that he spent on his son’s Yale education. That’s how much he was spending on phone bills. So people were getting calls from Frank Meyer, longer calls than they might want. The other thing he does is he turns his Woodstock farmhouse into this unlikely agora of the postwar right, where people like Didion and Wills would come up and spend the weekend. Or I just wrote a piece in the Boston Globe about David Brudnoy, the great talk show host in Massachusetts, who died about 20 years ago. Brudnoy said, I never spent a more mentally taxing, yet relaxing weekend as I did with you. And what they would do is they would drink, and they would smoke, and they would debate.
And if Gary Wills was there, they might go back and forth proclaiming a Shakespeare play in full. They would debate about Goldwater, they would sit by the fire if it were cold, and they would have dinner, they’d just have a great weekend and they would keep Meyer’s hours. After Meyer leaves the Communist Party he basically goes to sleep at seven in the morning and wakes up in the afternoon. And if you were going up for that weekend to debate and talk with Frank Meyer, you would keep Frank Meyer’s hours or something close to it. And so in the 1960s this became a passage rite. If you said in the sixties you were going to Woodstock, it meant something very different for conservatives than it meant for everyone else. And of course, Woodstock for Meyer, the last few years of his life, he’s living next door to Bob Dylan.
So there’s all of these figures that, almost like in Forrest Gump or Zelig-like Fashion, Meyer ends up with Eugene O’Neill, TS Elliot, in Britain he confronts HG Wells and has this big sort of standoff with him at a public lecture that gets a lot of attention. Gertrude Stein, obviously Joan Didion, J Edgar Hoover, Barry Goldwater, Henry Kissinger, it’s almost like a Who’s Who of the twentieth century that Meyer is weaving in and out, of course, having this next-door neighbor, Bob Dylan. And he meets him, and he says, the guy had reasonably good sense. He was surprised. Dylan had reasonably good sense. And if you read Dylan’s autobiography, you can see that he hated hippies more than Meyer did. As strange as that sounds, he said, I wanted to set fire to these people.
The guy I was trying to remember was Heywood Broun, by the way. And he dies of pneumonia at I think 39. But this is an incredible array of people you’re describing, and one of perhaps the most insane relationships that he has is with a man named L. Brent Bozell. So who was that, and in what way is he kind of like the creative opposition to Meyer? I feel like I’m kind of skipping over Kendall here, but we’ll maybe get into that in a second.
Kendall, Meyer, and Bozell were kind of like the Three Musketeers at National Review, and to one degree or another they generally stood against James Burnham with Meyer being kind of the captain of that ship, and Meyer sort of having more, I don’t know if venom’s the right word, but he certainly disliked Burnham. And Burnham I think had contempt for Meyer as well. It softens over the years. But Bozell, in the United States, he is kind of a Meyerite, he’s a fusionist. Meyer’s idea of fusionism is essentially that for people who love freedom, the libertarians and the traditionalists are not in conflict. They’re in cooperation. For a freedom to prosper, it rests on thousands of years of tradition, of Western heritage, you take away that heritage and freedom’s going to collapse. For the traditionalist people, something like virtue is important to them.
You can’t have virtue without freedom. You can’t have coerced virtue, at least for adults. And so he said, you guys shouldn’t be fighting, you should be together. And initially Bozell is all for that. But Bozell is one of these guys, like a lot of people in the sixties, who had a long strange trip. In the forties, he was a world federalist, he was a McCarthyite in the fifties, and he’s sort of a fusionist at the end of the fifties, early sixties. And then he goes to Spain, and Spain takes away another of Frank Meyer’s friends. In Spain, Bozell becomes, I gues,s kind of what you would call a Theo Con or someone for whom religion is sort of infusing all of their politics. Prior to going to Spain, he didn’t write about religion at all in National Review, or not much at all. And afterwards, almost everything that he was writing, or most of what he was writing, had some connection to Catholicism.
And so he changes overnight, and they have this debate in National Review, which I think is really the height of the magazine. And this is in 1962 where Bozell in the seven page article kind of mocks Meyer’s idea of fusionism and his idea of the Holy Trinity of government. Meyer, he thought the federal government (and you get this more in Defense of Freedom, which Meyer wrote that year, that’s sort of his magnum opus) but Meyer says in that book: there are basically three functions of the federal government. It’s for the common defense, to adjudicate disputes through courts, and to police crime and things like that within the country. Everything else beyond that is mission creep. And Bozell wanted a bigger, more robust government to push his moral ideas. And Meyer thought that politics was not something where you pushed morality. In other words, that his libertarianism, his fusionism, was a philosophy for government.
It wasn’t a philosophy for how you conduct yourself in your life. You need other stuff for that. But what Bozell was saying, Meyer would say that that’s an overreach, putting government into functions which it’s ill-equipped to partake in. And so they had this big debate in National Review, and both of them scored points. I will say that, unlike some of the other people that Meyer debated, Bozell and Meyer remained friends. I mean I have found the correspondence between Bozell and Meyer and they’re laughing about this. They’re saying, “if Bill Buckley doesn’t let us put this in the magazine I’m going to resign” or “let’s do it when he is over in Switzerland, we’ll sneak it in.” And they do that and they’re still friends. But Bozell has gone in a very different direction ideologically and philosophically. And I don’t think people noticed it at the time, but the real tragedy of all this is that over time people come to see that Bozell had developed a mental illness. And so a lot of the people that Meyer surrounded himself with at National Review didn’t ultimately last there. Meyer did. He was sort of the hero or the last of the Mohicans. He was sort of the guy that was keeping up that fight, the good fight against James Burnham. But all of his soldiers in battle, or his lieutenants, they all sort of wash out of the magazine, and Bozell starts washing out of the magazine around that time.
And you end up with a choice between a kind of fusionism of Barry Goldwater, a West State, Jewish Episcopalian and libertarian, or Francisco Franco, right? These are like: Which way, conservative man?
There’s a point at which Bozell, in these letters that I have, there’s a point at which Bozell writes Meyer and says, I no longer want to be president of the United States. I want to be caudillo of Spain. And it’s tough to see whether he’s being serious. You know, Bozell had a bit of a sense of humor. So maybe he’s sort of tongue in cheek, but at the same time he’s urging Meyer to come to visit him or maybe even emigrate to Spain. And he says to Meyer, the United States is no longer the country that’s going to save the West. It’s not suited to save the West. Why keep working on an ungrateful people? Come to Spain! Spain is the country that’s going to save the West. Meyer regards this as kind of a dubious proposition, does not go to Spain. He’s sort of open to visiting, but he doesn’t go over there and he is not caught up in Spain the way Bozell is or their other component of the Three Musketeers, Willmore Kendall is. And so these guys, Bozell and Meyer, remain friends. Kendall and Meyer are friends for about 10 years. And then that tempestuous relationship really kind of goes off the rails.
And that’s what’s so interesting about National Review is that as a reader, reading the article, reading this great stuff, you would have no idea that what you’re reading is the outcome of these incredibly tempestuous personalities fighting each other tooth and nail behind the scenes.
What a credit to Bill Buckley to keep all that together. I mean, you’re telling me the idea that Buckley has to run a magazine with all of these guys and a lot of them at each other’s throats, and they’re all incredibly talented, and he’s got to squeeze product out of them. He’s got to squeeze the talent out of them and not have them strangle each other. They all, including Meyer, Bozell, certainly Kendall, they all had aspects of their personality that made them sort of ill-suited for a group enterprise. When Jim Burnham, who I think could do no wrong in Buckley’s eyes, when he was a Trotskyite, people would say, “Jim Burnham, he was one of us, but he wasn’t of us.” If that makes any sense. His is a guy who went to the opera, one of his fellow Trotskyites said. In other words, they thought of him as a snob.
And at National Review, a lot of the people there thought of him as a snob. There were certainly people who liked him and admired him. And I think for Buckley, because he was in the office, he was an actual editor who was editing things and getting magazines out, Buckley appreciated him. Not just because he was a person who influenced Trotsky and Orwell, he was a massive intellect, but he was also a person who in the practical function of putting on a magazine was more valuable than those other guys were. So Buckley loved the guy, but Burnham had a snobbishness about him, had a condescension that would really upset Meyer and others in that National Review circle. So a lot of these guys didn’t really like each other all that much, but yet Bill Buckley’s talent, as Neal Freeman told me, was as the band leader, getting all these guys to sort of play their instruments, not always in harmony, but getting them all to play their instruments. And Bill Buckley had a lot of talents, but that may be one of his most overlooked talents.
Just thinking about it gives me the hives. I can’t imagine having to keep Burnham, Meyer, Kendall, and Bozell from killing each other. It just sounds like an impossible task. No wonder he smoked so much. So let’s talk a little bit bigger picture now and Meyer’s contribution to conservatism. The book almost claims this in the title, but you’ve explained what’s actually going on there. He kind of gives us what we consider conservatism.
He has kind of the default outlook of the American right in fusionism, let’s say between from the 1960s, and you can pick your date when it sort of started to wane. I mean, I think fusionism is certainly not the default outlook of conservatives now. When that started to die down, whether that was the nineties or sometime later, I don’t know. But people like Barry Goldwater and William F. Buckley and Ronald Reagan, whether they called themselves fusionists or not, they were certainly fusionists. And so Meyer’s idea won the day within the conservative movement, and partly it wins the day because whereas Burnham has Buckley’s ear at National Review, Meyer is doing all sorts of stuff outside of the magazine. He’s a founder of the American Conservative Union along with people like Bob Bauman and Buckley and others. He’s a founder of the Conservative Party of New York. He’s at the founding meeting in Queens, New York of that organization.
He’s a founder of the Philadelphia Society. He’s present at the creation of Young Americans of Freedom. And if you read the Sharon statement, a lot of that is Frank Meyer distilled through the pen of maybe his greatest acolyte, M. Stanton Evans. And so Meyer had his fingerprints all over the conservative movement in part because he had such an interest in mentoring young people, in getting young people involved. And I think a guy like Burnham didn’t have time for that. And I heard some kind of bad stories about Burnham sort of ignoring young people and sort of treating them poorly. I also heard some great stories. David Franke, the late David Franke, said Burnham took him aside at National Review and said, you remind me of me when I was your age. And Frankie thought that was the biggest compliment he had ever received in his life and in his eighties, shortly before his death, he told me that.
And so Burnham could have different effect on different people. Meyer was much more aggressive and evangelistic and I think took some of those ideas that he learned in the Communist Party and applied them within the conservative movement. He of course wrote a book called The Molding of Communists. People don’t read The Molding of Communists now, and I’m not advising them that they should. It’s sort of part training manual, part anthropological study of the Communist Party. It doesn’t have a lot of application for 2026. In Defense of Freedom, I think, certainly does. But in that book, you get a sense of where Meyer got some of his ideas to put his influence not only on the movement, but on future generations of the conservative movement.
And it doesn’t sell. That was the thing when I was reading that section, I was like, it didn’t sell? I was shocked.
Yeah, In Defense of Freedom didn’t sell very well. It sold well later, and the Liberty Fund is a big reason why it sold well later. So in 1972, Frank dies, he had lung cancer, and dies in April of 1972, converts to Catholicism six hours before his death. His wife, Elsie Meyer, is so disgusted with Regnery Publishing that when they send her a measly check of under a dollar of the royalties that he’s getting, she rips it up, sends it back to them, and says, why don’t you just send me a stamp next time? It would’ve saved me the trouble. And so she’s upset at them. It sold a little over 3000 copies, In Defense of Freedom, which is a respectable number, but not what you would say is a success.
I mean, everyone says if you sell 5,000 copies, you’re a success. I think now it’s changed because people don’t really read books anymore. But Frank’s book did poorly and then Regnery came out with kind of a Gateway Edition, and it started to sell, and started to sell pretty well. In the nineties, the Liberty Fund came out with this beautiful blue and yellow edition, that’s the one I have, of In Defense of Freedom. And I think those, I don’t know what the numbers are. I know the numbers up until about Frank’s death, which were about 3,100. After that, I don’t have the numbers, but it’s a safe bet that the book sold many more copies after Frank’s death than he did during his life. And some reviewers took me to task for this, but at least for me coming up in the conservative movement, it was one of a dozen or so books that let’s say you’d have to read eight of them to gain entry to serious conversations with other conservatives, other books being The Road to Serfdom by Hayek or The Conservative Mind by Kirk, or maybe Ideas Have Consequences by Weaver. Pick whatever 12.
Meyer’s was in that camp, and I think people had forgotten him to such a degree that when I made that statement that this was a book that serious conservatives, I think I make the comparison in the book that it was a lot like The Velvet Underground & Nico, where Brian Eno said, well, it may have only sold 30,000 copies, but everyone who listened to that album started a band. And I think everyone who read In Defense of Freedom, they may have launched a magazine, my editor, R. Emmett Tyrrell, he launched The American Spectator. He had Frank Meyer speak in Indiana. He went up to make that obligatory pilgrimage up to Woodstock with Bill Kristol. So a lot of the people that Meyer was influencing, they might’ve started a political club or a magazine, they might’ve run for office. A number of federal judges went to visit him.
Of course, they weren’t federal judges then, but they are now. And so he had an impact that the numbers kind of hide. And Liberty Fund is a reason for that, and the Regnery Gateway Edition. But I do think Meyer, he was forgotten. Two things happened. In the 1940s, when he testified against the Communist Party, the communists are caught on a wiretap saying, we have to erase this guy from our history. We’re rewriting the history, going to rewrite the history of the student movement in Great Britain. So Meyer is completely erased from that history. There’s a different censorship that happens on the right, and maybe the censorship’s too strong a word, but he becomes erased on the right, too. Because if you are going to write a book about Bill Buckley, where do you go? You go to Sterling Library at Yale, look at his papers.
You write a book about James Burnham, you go to the Hoover Institution and look at his papers there. Where would you go for Frank Meyer? There was no place to go. Where were his papers? And so I went on a journey to find where his papers were, and it took me two years, but I finally found the couple that had bought his property in Woodstock and they bought all the contents. They insisted initially that they had donated it to the Hoover Institution. And I said, no, you kept some of it. And they said, no, no, no, we donated. I said, no, you kept some of it. You may not know it, but you have some of it. And finally, they said, well, we have a warehouse. And in the summer of 2022, I go to this warehouse in Altoona, Pennsylvania, and there’s 663 boxes. I go through all of them.
And in those boxes, 15 of them have the life’s work of Frank Meyer, probably a hundred thousand of his letters or something like that. And I couldn’t have written this book without that desperation because at the time, COVID had closed everything. The federal government essentially told me there’d be a 10 year wait for my Freedom of Information Act request. I made that in 2021. Here we are in 2026, still nothing from the federal government, but I was able through persistence to find this warehouse in Altoona, Pennsylvania. And in that warehouse, I don’t know, I probably have a quarter million pieces of paper in my house. I have homemade Christmas cards from Joan Didion, a thousand letters between Meyer and Willmoore Kendall that nobody’s ever seen, hundreds of letters from Buckley that nobody’s ever seen. Probably a thousand letters involving Brent Bozell.
There’s one-off letters from C. S. Lewis, Tolkien, Evelyn Waugh, and all sorts of people. So it’s a quite valuable, in a historical sense, in a scholarly sense, a quite valuable collection. And for readers, there’s a lot of conservative books out there for you to read. The reason I would say “read mine” is because it’s not recycled. It’s not incestuous. It’s not borrowing from some other book. It is a book that—well, one of the reviewers counted and said, 43 percent of the source citations stem from this warehouse in Altoona. So nobody’s ever seen this stuff before. So it gives you a fresh look at some old stuff. And then on top of that, there’s about 54 archives of archival collections both in the UK, Canada, the United States that I got material from, and there’s about 80 people I interviewed.
So it’s a lot of fresh stuff, not just on Meyer, but you get a sense of the conservative movement, the personalities involved. A lot of these books on conservatives, if I were to criticize them, a lot of the times it’s sort of hagiography, it’s a kind of biography of the saints. And I wanted to get into the personality of these guys. A lot of these books are intellectual biographies. I didn’t want to write an intellectual biography. I wanted to write a biography about a guy’s life. And if you want to write about a guy’s life, you got to write about his loves. You got to write about his vices. You got to write about his friends, his rivalries, all the good things he did. And that’s what I try to do. This is a very human story, and it’s also a story that if you want to understand the conservative movement, I would say you have to read this book.
I got to say, I’m an academic. I don’t do quantitative stuff that much. I do a lot of stuff that’s in archives, and I am so grateful that you pushed on this to find this archive because it’s so easy for stuff like that just to vanish, and then people not to know it vanished.
Correct. I mean, this would’ve ended up in a landfill or an incinerator within a few years. The couple was getting on in age. They’re pretty healthy people, I think. But what would’ve happened to that material? I don’t know. I got to think probably no one’s going to go through 663 boxes and say, is there anything valuable here if that couple had passed on or if something had happened to them. So I’m grateful that I found this, and I’m grateful it’s all going to go to the Hoover Institution very shortly. So there’s going to be other scholars that are going to be able to look at it. And I’m already sending some stuff out to some other scholars that’s a little bit too much of a task, but when it gets to Hoover, they can all look at it.
Yeah. Well, thank you so much for that service just to the discipline as it were.
Desperation. Desperation.
That’s one of the other mothers of invention. Just to close, does Frank Meyer really have any bearing today? You mentioned that fusionism is in decline, but the funny thing is that when I was reading the Goldwater section, Bozell kind of has a point, right? Like everyone’s losing, but then you get Reagan in a few years. So this despair that besets the conservative movement after Goldwater. Do you think sort of conservatives unhappy with the state of the right today might just simply need to keep plugging away the way Meyer did?
I think so. Meyer was indefatigable in 1960. He wrote a memo urging National Review, successfully urging them not to endorse Richard Nixon, who he thought it was the prime opportunist of the twentieth century. And he said, we have to support local candidates, congressional candidates, and it may take until 1980 until our movement is able to elect one of our own presidents. Of course, that’s what happened. Meyer was an early adopter of Ronald Reagan. Almost the moment that Goldwater loses, he reorients, and says, this is the guy. This is the guy that we should have nominated or we should nominate in the future. I think right now where there is a personality, and Meyer warned about this too, about a big personality. Both Meyer and Bozell worried about a big personality co-opting the conservative movement and taking it in their own direction.
I think Donald Trump’s done a lot of really great things. I admire a lot of things that he’s done, but there’s no rhyme or reason to a lot of it. And he certainly hasn’t read the same books that we’ve read. He’s coming at it instinctually, and some of his instincts are good. Some of his instincts are bad. I think until he leaves the scene—and I don’t know that he’s going to leave the scene when he leaves the scene, he’ll probably stick around, hover around—but I think until 2028, conservatism for most conservatives is whatever Donald Trump says it is. And so when there is this soul searching, and I think the soul searching is already happening, you can see the sort of fights between Ben Shapiro and Tucker Carlson. These are the people that Matthew Continetti calls the very online right, so I don’t know if a lot of people are looking to them for intellectual guidance, but a lot of people do look for them, look to them.
And these fights that are going on now, even Marjorie Taylor Greene sort of stepping out and saying, I disagree with all this. It’s showing little cracks in the armor. And I think when people start to reevaluate and say, what is conservatism? It’s going to be very difficult to avoid fusionism because we are Americans, and what is it that Americans are conserving? There’s a big obvious answer. And the fact that it’s 2026, the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, gives us that obvious answer. It shouts out to us that the American founding is the big thing that conservatives should conserve. And I think Meyer was right that the founding meant freedom. And so I do think American conservatism will always have something to do with freedom because that’s the significant thing about the American founding. There are all sorts of people that set up governments at all different times in the history of the world. But what was unique about our founding was the freedoms that it unleashed and that it recognized that we had. And so I think that is something that moving forward, when people are not as hypnotized as they are now, inevitably fusionism is going to be part of that conversation.
The book is The Man Who Invented Conservatism, the Unlikely Life of Frank Meyer. The author Daniel J. Flynn. The YouTube channel is …
Oh, RightWingWilderness, all but you have to do it all compressed, like capital, right, capital wing, capital wilderness. And it’s just me talking about conservative stuff and the wilderness, and feeling a little bit like I’m out and alone in the wilderness, because the world has changed so dramatically. We always feel like we’re out in the wilderness as conservatives vis-à-vis the regular society. But I think a lot of people who are on the right now feel like they’re alone. Everything’s changed. It’s sort of a wild world. And that’s kind of why I titled it that way. But I post something up every week and, hey, just because now I’m a YouTuber, I have to say it. Please like and subscribe.
That’s right. The irritants needed one errand in the wilderness. Daniel’s given himself so many, he can follow a YouTube channel. Alright, well, thank you so much for coming on our podcast.
I appreciate it. Thank you so much.
Thanks for listening to this episode of Law & Liberty Podcast. Be sure to subscribe on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. And visit us online at www.lawliberty.org.
