Paul Tuns, Review:
The Man who Invented Conservatism: The Unlikely Life of Frank S. Meyer by Daniel Flynn (Encounter, $54.99, 544 pages)
Frank Meyer is the most important conservative whose name you never heard. Perhaps more than anyone not named William F. Buckley, he shaped American conservatism to adopt the seemingly contradictory stances of promoting a socially dynamic economic freedom with respect for tradition. His incredible story is told by The American Spectator’s Daniel J. Flynn in a captivating biography, The Man who Invented Conservatism: The Unlikely Life of Frank S. Meyer.
Meyer has already been the subject of an excellent biography, Principles and Heresies: Frank S. Meyer and the Shaping of American Conservative Movement by Kevin J. Smant. Flynn’s new biography is based on a rich store of archival material he discovered that included dozens of boxes of Meyer’s papers in a forgotten warehouse. The result is a thorough biographical account of Meyer’s origins from the son of a Jewish couple in New Jersey and his spotty record at elite universities in the U.S. and U.K. to his Stalinist activism on both sides of the Atlantic, through to his settling in Woodstock, New York, and becoming a founding editor at National Review, the preeminent magazine of conservative opinion in the second half of the 20th century. It was quite a journey indeed.
Flynn reports that Meyer’s parents had some wealth from business and he was exceptionally gifted in school, but as a Jew he was discouraged from attending Princeton. His obstinance led him to persist in applying and he was eventually accepted before dropping out the next year. He traveled to England to study for tests to apply to Oxford and was eventually admitted. He completed his studies in politics and economics, and then attended graduate school at the socialist London School of Economics. It was there that he delved into communist politics and became active as an organizer and agitator. He bedded numerous women including the Prime Minister’s daughter, dabbled with Satanism, was spied upon by the British secret service, and made friends and enemies of the highest caliber. He would eventually drop out of LSE and move back to the U.S. to seek a Ph.D. in anthropology at the University of Chicago where he continued organizing for communists, working directly with the Communist Party of the United States (CPUSA), and writing for its publications. His political activism was the priority over studies and eventually he was forced out of school. Flynn reports, “In the 13 years since his high school graduation, (Meyer) had attended six different institutions and attained just one degree.”
Flynn began teaching at the Chicago Worker’s School (CWS) at the order of CPUSA and Flynn remarks on the irony of the university failure teaching Marxist political thought to labourers. What Flynn makes clear is that party work and commitment to international Stalinism was all-consuming. Furthermore, as a party man, Flynn illustrates how Meyer would change his tune to match his marching orders. At one time an organizer of world conferences against war and fascism, he then pivoted to silence when the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany began World War II as allies. When that alliance dissolved and the U.S.S.R. joined the allies, Meyer and the CPUSA fell in line, supporting the Allied war effort. Franklin Delano Roosevelt, a villain whose New Deal gave cover to the supposed corruptions of capitalism, now became a hero. Meyer signed up to become a soldier, but the party opposed the move despite encouraging members to sign their draft cards for service. It was the beginning of Meyer moving away from Stalinism.
After the War, Meyer was again forced to change directions, with the U.S. and U.S.S.R. becoming opponents in the Cold War. Before leaving his comrades behind completely, he attempted to reform American-style communism by fusing it with the American political tradition of Thomas Jefferson. It didn’t work. He would end up marrying (a move opposed by the party) and moving to upstate New York, where he and his wife had two children, whom they homeschooled long before homeschooling became popular.
Meyer would eventually talk to the F.B.I. and testify to the House Unamerican Activities Committee about the communists he worked with. Politically he moved toward a libertarianism and eventually he caught the eye of William Buckley and others who were assembling talent for a new conservative magazine, National Review. Meyer joined as a senior editor and soon became responsible for the back of the magazine where books were reviewed and culture commented upon. He brought non-conservatives into NR’s pages but failed to attract writers such as C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien, although he did convince Evelyn Waugh to contribute a single article.
Meyer would help found the Young Americans for Freedom, the Conservative Party of New York, and other vehicles to advance conservative thought and action. Flynn compares Meyer’s activism and writing career as a communist to his commitment and insistence on putting conservative thought into action. And Meyer’s commitment to political theory was his obsession in his regular column “Principles and Heresies” that some on staff thought too academic for a popular magazine.
There is extensive discussion of the quarrels and feuds amongst the NR editors, some of which was based on principles, others on personalities. There were sides, with James Burnham on one and most others, including Willmoore Kendal (Buckley’s former Yale professor), L. Brent Bozell (Buckley’s brother-in-law), and Meyer usually aligned together. Some of the conflict is gossipy (and fun) and Flynn does not hide the pettiness of some of the combatants, but there were also legitimate disagreements about how to run the magazine and the meaning of conservatism. Flynn observes “such disputations made the magazine.” And the magazine made American conservatism.
This is Meyer’s most important contribution to modern American conservatism. The magazine was founded in 1955 and it wasn’t until 1962 that it moved itself and U.S. conservatism with it to what is now called fusionism. Meyers wrote a column, “The Twisted Tree of Liberty,” which details the “growing family” of conservatism, with its distinct libertarian, anti-communist, and traditionalist wings. To Buckley’s credit, he let the pages of his magazine air the debate among various thinkers. Bozell had in an essay (“Freedom or Virtue”) responding to the debate, (in Flynn’s paraphrase) “pegged man’s goal as virtue and politics as a means to aid in this pursuit” and “that freedom for freedom’s sake … represented a rebellion against God and nature.” Meyer’s attempt at “consolidating the right” and “unite its disparate strands” faced fierce opposition both inside and outside the magazine.
Meyer denied trying to police or define who was a conservative, calling his project an attempt to “articulate in theoretical and practical terms the instinctive consensus of the contemporary conservative movement.” Flynn says, “Meyer stressed that fusionism derived from the tradition of Western civilization and the American Constitution.” That tradition, Meyer argued, is “virtue in freedom,” with Flynn saying, “the former required the latter to express itself; the latter required the former to imbue meaning.” Opposition to either side of the equation, Meyer insisted, ran contrary to conservatism. Fusionism brought traditionalists (conservatives) and libertarians together as a movement.
Meyer would spend the rest of his NR days promoting the fusionism he did not so much create as identify, and for the better part of a half-century, that model of conservatism was so dominant that the word fusionism largely disappeared; the three pillars of libertarianism, traditionalism, and anti-communism (until the end of the Soviet Union) were synonymous with conservativism, effectively taken for granted until Donald Trump became the leader of the Republican Party and conservative movement. Flynn says that Meyer as a conservative political writer appears “less like a pundit than a prophet,” foretelling the political realignment that elected Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan president twice each. But Meyer was no mere soothsayer, but an active participant in bringing about those conditions; as Flynn concludes, “the conservative movement, America, and the world change because of him.”
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.