October 14, 2025 • 33 mins
Roger welcomes Daniel J. Flynn, senior editor at the American Spectator and visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution, for a conversation about his new biography, “The Man Who Invented Conservatism: The Unlikely Life of Frank S. Meyer.” Flynn explores the fascinating journey of Meyer, a former communist who became one of the most influential conservative thinkers of the 20th century and whose ideas still shape conservative thought today.
They discuss Meyer’s early years as a communist organizer at Oxford, his dramatic break with the party, and his later role as literary editor of National Review. Flynn highlights Meyer’s enduring contribution to American conservatism through his philosophy of “fusionism,” the idea that freedom and virtue must coexist for a society to thrive. Additional topics include Meyer’s clashes and friendships with figures such as William F. Buckley Jr., Brent Bozell and Rose Wilder Lane; his mentorship of emerging writers; and the extraordinary archival discoveries that made this biography possible.
Daniel J. Flynn is the author of seven books, including his most recent title, “The Man Who Invented Conservatism: The Unlikely Life of Frank S. Meyer.” His work has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune and City Journal. He also served as a reservist in the U.S. Marine Corps from 1994 to 2002 and was honorably discharged with the rank of sergeant.
The Liberty + Leadership Podcast is hosted by TFAS president Roger Ream and produced by Podville Media. If you have a comment or question for the show, please email us at podcast@TFAS.org. To support TFAS and its mission, please visit TFAS.org/support.
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SPEAKER_01 (00:01):
Welcome to the Liberty and Leadership Podcast,
a conversation with TFAS alumni,faculty, and friends who are
making an impact today.
I'm your host, Roger Reed.
It's a pleasure to welcomeDaniel J.
Flynn to the Liberty andLeadership Podcast today.
Daniel is a senior editor at theAmerican Spectator and a
(00:23):
visiting fellow at the HooverInstitution.
He's the author of seven books.
His most recent, The Man WhoInvented Conservatism: The
Unlikely Life of Frank S.
Meyer.
If you don't know who FrankMeyer is, you'll want to listen
to this podcast because this isa fascinating biography of
someone who's had a tremendousinfluence on the conservative
(00:44):
movement.
Dan's writings have appeared inthe Chicago Tribune, the LA
Times, the Wall Street Journal,City Journal, and elsewhere.
Thank you for joining me today,Dan.
Thank you for having me, Roger.
Well, as I said, I think this isa fascinating book about someone
not many people know about,Frank Meyer.
And uh you've written abiography of this man uh that's
(01:06):
detailed, that is obviously thework of a lot of research you've
done over a number of years, andyou've uncovered a lot of
interesting things about hislife, not only his childhood,
but his time as a communist andhis time as a leader of the
conservative movement.
So we have a lot to talk abouttoday.
But my first question for you iswhat motivated you to write this
(01:28):
book?
SPEAKER_00 (01:28):
Well, I think there's two motivations.
I think there's a lot of writersthat want to write about
subjects that have uh, you know,kind of well-worn.
Like there's a lot of books onHitler and Churchill and
Lincoln.
I wouldn't want to write a booklike that because it's very
difficult to turn up newmaterial.
And so why not write aboutsomeone whose story should be
told, but isn't?
I think Frank has one of thelast great untold stories of the
(01:49):
20th century, and it was just apleasure telling it.
The other reason, you know, whenI first started out as an
author, I wrote a number ofbooks on the American left.
What jumped out at me is howmany books there are on rather
obscure events and figures inthe left.
They really document theirhistory.
And I think conservatives reallyfail to do that.
You see what happens when weallow left-wingers to write our
(02:11):
own history.
I think it's great if liberalswant to write about
conservatives, but I think it'sreally bad if conservatives
neglect their own history.
And I hope that there's more ofthat.
I mean, there's been guys likeLee Edwards and George Nash that
certainly don't fall into thatcategory.
But we, I think, have had adifficult time documenting the
importance of some of theevents, you know, the post-war
(02:32):
conservative movement, and evenbefore that.
SPEAKER_01 (02:34):
Yes, and uh Lee Edwards and George Nash, who I
consider two of the greathistorians of the conservative
movement, and now you've added abook on Frank Meyer to this.
Could you, in a nutshell, kindof give us a summary of why
Frank Meyer is important?
SPEAKER_00 (02:48):
One of the reasons I wrote the book is that people
ceased to think of Frank Meyeras a person, and they started to
think of him as apersonification of an idea that
Frank Meyer meant fusionism.
And so, in a nutshell, pre-thisbook, I think people thought of
Frank as the father offusionism.
In other words, the marriage oftraditionalism and freedom, that
Frank didn't think these wereideas that were in conflict.
(03:10):
He thought they were incooperation.
Stan Evans, an acolyte of Frank,he wrote a book called The Theme
is Freedom.
And in that book, it's called asort of applied fusionism, where
he said, listen, there'sthousands of years of Western
civilization that freedom restsupon.
You take away that heritage,freedom's gonna fall pretty
quickly.
And on the other side of it,that if you take away freedom
(03:31):
from things like virtue andother things that are valued by
traditionalists, then, you know,what do you have?
Virtue without freedom isn'tvirtue.
It's just compulsory virtue.
I mean, that's phony.
And so they both rely on oneanother.
And Frank was the guy in theconservative movement that
really pushed that idea.
I think people accepted itbecause, A, it was very simple.
That's sort of its distilledversion that I gave.
(03:53):
It's simple.
It's true that if you're aconservative, if you're an
American conservative, what areyou going to conserve?
Well, if you're Britishconservative, maybe you conserve
the monarchy, you conserve thearistocracy.
If you're an Americanconservative, the tradition
that's important for us is thefounding.
And what does the founding mean?
The founding means freedom.
And so an American conservative,the tradition that you're
conserving is freedom.
(04:13):
And that's why you have thosethings go together.
It's simple, it's true.
And I think it also haspolitical utility.
And some of its critics willpoint to that as a reason to
criticize.
I don't think that's a reason tocriticize.
I don't think that's the reasonFrank pushed it, but happy
accident, it does have politicalutility in a way that, say,
(04:34):
Richard Weaver's ideas haveconsequences, maybe does not, or
Russell Kirk's The ConservativeMind, which is a beautiful book,
but it doesn't have a lot ofpolitical application.
I think Frank's book did indefense of freedom, Frank's
theory, Frank's ideas did aswell.
That's sort of the pre-man whoinvented conservatism, Frank
Meyer.
And I think the post-one is moreof the person, is more of the
(04:55):
interesting guy, that this is afascinating figure, a guy who
pops off the page.
Frank Meyer, you know, if youthink about post-war
conservatives and the foundingfathers of our movement, a lot
of them led kind of black andwhite lives.
A guy like James Burnham, youknow, Managerial Revolution is
like prophecy.
It's a fascinating book, but Idon't know that he was a
fascinating man.
(05:15):
I think he was living a kind ofa boring black and white
existence.
There are other guys likeWhitaker Chambers or Wilmore
Kendall that lived intechnicolor.
They did lead exciting lives.
Frank, he is someone whooperated in 3D.
And I think the book, I hope thebook shows that.
SPEAKER_01 (05:31):
Well, we'll get into that because a lot of people
listening may not know aboutthat dimension yet, at least.
But you referenced Stan Evans,M.
Stanton Evans, a journalist whowrote the theme is freedom.
I appreciate you mentioning thatbecause it was at a luncheon at
TFAS where David Jones, one ofour founders and a friend of
Frank's, said to Stan, Stan, weneed a book for young
(05:52):
conservatives to read to come tounderstand what conservatism's
all about.
He said, The conscience of aconservative by Barry
Goldwater's dated.
So we'll put our pool moneytogether, Stan, so you'll write
the book.
And he wrote the theme isfreedom, which I thought was an
excellent book.
But it builds, as you said, onFrank Meyer, because Stan talks
about biblical truths that ledto the founding of this country
(06:12):
and our American ideas.
But before we get into that, alittle deeper into fusionism,
Daniel, could you talk moreabout Frank's early life, not
growing up as much, but when hegot to Princeton and Oxford and
his time as a communist?
SPEAKER_00 (06:28):
When Frank applied to Princeton, he was rejected
and unbeknownst to him.
His booster at the NewarkAcademy said, Well, listen, his
Hebrew features are undeniable,but he would make a good
addition to the student body.
And the director of admissionswrote back and said, you know,
we have a limited number ofspots for fine, clean-cut
Christian Americans.
I mean, he actually wrote that.
(06:48):
It sounds like a parody.
And this Frank Meyer, he doesn'tstrike me even as a Jew of the
better type.
Can you please steer himsomewhere else?
His grades are good enough, andhis scores, of course, are good,
but I don't think he's going tofit in with the college.
Frank didn't take the no for ananswer.
He did a second postgrad year atNewark, and then he they finally
let him in the next year.
But he found the studentpopulation populated by those
(07:12):
fine, clean-cut ChristianAmericans, and he had a rough go
of it at Princeton.
He started writing poems aboutSatan and real kind of racy
poems about women.
And there was this philosophythat said, all that stuff is
good.
That's good.
Indulge all that kind of thing.
And it was Marxism.
He goes to Oxford.
After not being admitted toCambridge.
(07:32):
Yeah.
He basically washes out ofPrinceton.
He did a very Frank Meyer thing,which is, you know, people said,
Well, why don't you go to theUniversity of Wisconsin or why
don't you go to the school?
He said, No, I want to go toeither Oxford or Cambridge.
A better school than Princeton.
And so he goes, he gets intoBailey College at Oxford.
These are probably the bestyears of Frank's life.
I mean, he is engaged in allsorts of extracurricular
(07:54):
activities.
He's called the life and soul ofthe college.
He has a million friends.
And in late 1931, he startssomething called the October
Club.
When Frank got to Oxford, therewere zero communists on the
student body.
By the time he graduated, therewere over 300.
And that was because of FrankMeyer, his charisma, his
abilities as an organizer.
(08:15):
It was also because the GreatDepression was starting.
So he came along at the righttime.
The amazing thing about all thisis that Frank, during this time,
was being watched.
There's about 160 pages of MI5and MI6 documents on Frank.
They did a black bag job on hisapartment.
They put a mail cover on hiscorrespondence.
They knew what bars he drank at,they knew what tweed coats he
(08:38):
wore.
They knew what girls he hungaround with.
They knew where his mother didher banking.
The one thing that they don'tmention in all these 160 pages
is when Frank, who's calling forthe violent overthrow of the
government of Ramsey McDonald,the prime minister of Great
Britain, that he is dating theprime minister's youngest
daughter, Sheila McDonald.
In fact, I have a letter that Ifound from Sheila McDonald to
(08:59):
Frank Meyer.
It says, listen, the coast isclear.
My dad's not around.
Come over to 10 Downing.
We'll have dinner.
Take whatever romantic figureyou can think of in the history
of the Communist Party, like CheGuevara or John Reed.
They never had the skull to, youknow, on the one hand, call for
the overthrow of the governmentand then secretly, on the other,
(09:21):
date the youngest daughter ofthe leader of the government.
So it shouldn't be surprising toanyone that Frank was not long
for the United Kingdom.
There were reasons that theygave for his deportation, and
maybe those reasons were thereal reasons.
But it jumps out at me that ifyou mess around with, you know,
the prime minister's daughter,bad things are going to happen.
Frank becomes a cause celeb inEngland.
(09:42):
And that's part of the book, youknow, part of his history that I
think I rescued because in theseMI6, MI5 files, they tapped the
phones of British communists.
And in 1949, when Franktestified in the United States
against his comrades, this wasthe longest, most expensive
trial in U.S.
history.
Frank was called a star witness,a mystery witness.
And he got a lot of attention.
(10:04):
And so this got back across thepond and they said, Did you hear
about Frank?
Well, yeah, I always wassuspicious of him and, you know,
irrationalizing things.
They said, Well, what are wegoing to do about the history?
And the fellow who was theCommunist Party historian says,
It's okay, I'm already rewritingit.
Do you mean the student'shistory?
Yes, I'm already writing it.
If you look at those MI6, MI5files, they repeatedly refer to
(10:25):
Frank Meyer as the founder ofthe student communist party
movement in England, that he wasthe founder.
This American was the founder ofthat movement over there.
He was the Johnny Appleseed ofcommunism in England, at least
for the young people.
So it's amazing to me that thatsame guy who pulled off this
organizational miracle as acommunist did much of the same
as a conservative years later.
SPEAKER_01 (10:45):
Well, I love how you opened the book with that
conversation among thosecommunists about Frank and what
to do with him and to rewritethe history.
And I got to ask you, you know,what's so impressive with this
book is the research you did andwhat came out of it.
You made a Herculean effort totrack down his papers, right?
And all of his materials, someof which had been donated to an
(11:06):
archives, but a lot of which hadbeen disappeared.
Talk about that a little bit.
SPEAKER_00 (11:11):
I mean, if you want to research Bill Buckley, you go
to Yale, Sterling Library.
If you want to research BillRusher, you go to Library of
Congress.
Where do you go if you want toresearch Frank Meyer?
Well, the Hoover Institution,which they had a Frank Meyer
collection, but the rhythm wasoff.
You know, I've been doingarchival work for like 25 years.
There's usually certain thingsthat are in an archive, like
letters or tax returns, thingsthat you would keep.
(11:32):
None of that was there.
And I said, Well, where's FrankMeyer's papers?
And I started searching, andunfortunately, all of the
archives closed down in 2020because of COVID.
And so right at the moment, Iwas to go to these archives,
they all closed.
The other thing that happened isthey did a four-year request,
Freedom of Information Act, andthe federal government, the
efficiency of the federalgovernment, they get back to me
a year later in 2022, and theysaid, Well, listen, we're now
(11:55):
processing requests from 2014,but yours is going to take a
little longer because of COVID.
Check back with basicallycheckback with us in the 2030s,
is what they're saying.
And so I was in a desperatespot.
Like, how can I write a qualitybook with all these things
against me?
So I started wishing intoexistence Frank's papers, and I
started calling around, and Igot scraps of things that were
somewhat valuable.
(12:16):
I got some letters from WilmoreKendall.
I got some property material forthe Woodstock House of Frank
Meyer, some other thingsinvolving in defense of freedom.
But they weren't, you know, itwasn't the mother load.
And so about a year and a half,two years into this, John Meyer
said, Well, we did sell thehouse.
SPEAKER_01 (12:32):
His son.
SPEAKER_00 (12:33):
Yes, John Meyer, his son, his oldest son.
We did sell the house and all ofits contents to this couple that
we went to Yale with.
I said, John, why don't you tellme about that?
And so I get in touch with thiscouple.
They insist, or at least themale partner insists, that they
had donated it to Hoover.
And I said, You didn't.
And they said, No, we did.
And I said, Well, you think youdid, but you kept some of it.
You just don't know it.
(12:54):
And they said, No, we and wentback and forth like that.
Finally, the fellow says, Well,we do have a warehouse in
Altoona.
And I said, Well, take me toyour warehouse.
He said, Well, it's not there.
And even if it were there,there's a thousand boxes.
You can go through it.
And I said, No, I can do it.
So in August of 2022, I wentthrough 663 boxes in that
(13:14):
warehouse.
It took three days, and I found15 that were the life's papers
of Frank Meyer.
This included letters fromTolkien, C.S.
Lewis, Joan Diddian, BarryGoldwater.
There's a thousand letters thatnobody's seen between Wilmore
Kendall and Frank Meyer.
There's a thousand letters thatnobody's seen between El Brent
Bazell and Frank Meyer.
There is an amazing amount ofmaterial in this archive,
(13:36):
probably 100,000 letters orsomething.
I don't know, something close tothat.
I didn't count them.
I counted the Kendall letters,but there's a lot of letters, is
the point.
That enabled me to write thebook.
Some reviewer did a count andsaid, well, 43% of his source
citations rely on this archivein the um tuna.
Yeah.
So the rest of it, I went overto England, found some good
(13:56):
stuff.
There were a lot of archives inthe United States.
I found an essay that Frankwrote when he was 14 from a
Jewish archive in in New York.
So it's very thorough biography.
But if you want to know aboutFrank's life, it's very
detailed.
SPEAKER_01 (14:08):
And well footnoted, too.
A little too well.
No, no, no.
For people who weren't familiarwith Frank Meyer, all right,
we've touched on the fact thathe was a leading communist
recruiter and communistbeliever.
And later he went to work, assome people may not know, for
Nash Review as the book editorand as a close associate of
(14:29):
William F.
Buckley's.
Tell me now, what led to thattransformation from communist to
conservative?
SPEAKER_00 (14:36):
Frank tried to join the fight against Hitler in the
Second World War.
The communists were exhortingAmericans, go fight against
Hitler.
But when it came to leadingcommunists, when they tried to
join, the party said, no, no,no, you stay here.
And Frank thought this was alittle bit odd.
They're saying one thing butdoing another.
About eight months in, sixmonths in, they say, okay, you
want to go in?
Go in.
(14:56):
You can join.
Frank meets for the first timein these squad bays the
carpenters, the electricians,all these people that Marx was
talking about, except they werenot the proletariat that Marx
had described.
I mean, Frank led a sociallyinsulated life.
He grew up in a real fancy hotelin Newark, New Jersey.
He went to an expensive prepschool in the Newark Academy,
(15:17):
went to Balliol College, hisfamily was wealthy.
He made this is a revelation forhim.
Oh, they don't, they're not sortof like budding revolutionists?
What is this all about?
He gets injured, and in thatyear and a half away from the
party, he starts to question.
Questioning and communism, theydon't go together.
He writes Earl Browder, who'sthe head of the Communist Party,
(15:38):
a letter and says, listen, ifyou want to attract bowlers
instead of just these hardcoreMarxists, we need to do
something.
We need to fuse the Marxisttradition, Marxism with the
American tradition, with theAmerican founding.
And we need to do this not juston the 4th of July, we need to
do this every day of the year.
Browder takes his advice, andmaybe he's going in that
(15:58):
direction anyway.
But because of this, Frankbecomes close with Browder.
And prior to that, for his first10 years in the American Party,
he was more of a mid-levelmanager.
He was a rock star in England.
He was a high-level communist inEngland.
He was on the board of theCommunist Party.
He was a big deal.
In the United States, he was abig deal maybe the last year and
a half as a communist.
And so he gets under Browder'swing and they start going in
(16:20):
that direction.
There is a time of freedomwithin the party where the
Soviets ostensibly dissolved thecommon turn.
They said, well, you know, theparties can do their own
nationalistic thing.
Frank, during this time, writesa book review of Friedrich
Hayek's The Road to Serfdom.
And he does this in publicationcalled The New Masses, which was
communist-controlled.
And probably for the first timein the history of that
(16:42):
publication, a free marketthinker gets a fair hearing.
It's not exactly a positivereview.
And in a way, it's a review ofHayek ostensibly, but really
what you're reading is a manhaving an epiphany over the
course of several pages.
A man dropping 14 years of hispolitical commitments and his
ideas, and Hayek sort ofstripping bare all of his
(17:04):
assumptions, and Frank Meyersaying, gee, what if I were
wrong this whole time?
And around that time, somethingcame to the United States from
France called the Duclos Letter.
It was basically a letter thatsaid, listen, Americans, you
need to stop cooperating withthe capitalist communists.
You need to stop veneratingRoosevelt.
You need to fight these people.
(17:24):
And so Frank thought, well, thisis just coming from some
goofball over in France.
Why do I have to pay attentionto this?
In reality, this is coming fromthe Kremlin.
Frank and Earl Browder say no,and they essentially get
shuffled out of the party.
Frank kind of slinks his wayout.
Browder gets unceremoniouslydumped.
But before Frank leaves, theparty goes to his wife, Elsie,
(17:45):
and they have a very closerelationship.
They say, listen, your husbandis no good.
He's unsalvageable.
But we still think you're apretty good communist.
We need you to divorce him, andyou can stay in the party that
way.
And so that facilitated theirexit.
And they were like, no, we don'twant to have any part of this.
Frank goes on sort of a retreatup in Woodstock for, you know,
five years or so and rethinksall of his assumptions.
(18:08):
By 1950, he is a right-winger.
You read stuff by him in 1950,unmistakably, he has the
language of a conservative, of aright winger, whatever you want
to call it.
SPEAKER_01 (18:17):
It's fascinating.
I'm so glad you wrote this bookbecause Frank Meyer died in
what, 1974?
72.
72.
I never, certainly never methim.
One of our founders at the Fundfor American Studies, David
Jones, was close to Frank, andthey would talk on the phone a
lot.
And of course, William F.
Buckley helped found TFAS aswell, and he was close to Frank.
And we have a portrait in ourbuilding of David Jones, our
(18:39):
founder, and he's holding a copyof Frank's book in Defense of
Freedom.
Very influential book.
He was a very influentialwriter.
So he goes on, and how does heconnect with William F.
Buckley in Nashville Review?
SPEAKER_00 (18:50):
He's present at the creation of Nash Review, but
he's a contributor.
He's not an editor initially.
The guy who started NationalReview, Willy Schlam, he wears
thin on Buckley.
He wears thin on James Burnham.
And very soon he's kind ofexiled up to Vermont.
And Schlam was the literaryeditor at that point.
More importantly, he was thesort of the anti-James Burnham
(19:13):
at National Review.
He was the leader of theright-wing faction within the
magazine.
When he goes up to Vermont,Meyer takes his place not only
as the literary editor ofNational Review, but as the
leader of the anti-James Burnhamfaction.
When Schlam, whose idea NationalReview was, he came up with the
whole idea.
He said, When I dreamed thismagazine, I dreamed of a
veritable conspiracy offriendship.
(19:35):
In other words, he thought ofthem as the outs.
These are the people that hadthe sand kicked in their face.
And now they were going to allband together in a veritable
conspiracy of friendship andtake on the ends to crash their
party.
Frank was better at that rolethan Schlam could ever be.
Frank was sort of the leader ofthe veritable conspiracy of
friendship, and he was the sortof the focus around all of these
(19:57):
strange and interestingpersonalities, people like
Wilmore Kendall, L.
Brent Bazell.
A lot of these people would comeup to Woodstock where he lived,
and they would make kind of apilgrimage, they'd spend the
weekend or they'd spend aholiday, and they would smoke,
they would drink, they wouldeat, they would uh quote
Shakespeare, and mostimportantly, they would talk
about politics, culture, currentevents, that kind of thing.
David Brudnoy, the great radiohost, he said, I've never had as
(20:21):
taxing or as fulfilling weekendas I spent in Woodstock with you
guys.
And so it was, it started to beyounger people started going up
to Woodstock.
It meant something different fora conservative to say, I went up
to Woodstock in the 1960s thanit did for liberals.
And of course, at the end of thedecade, irony of upon irony is
Frank, who's sort of anArchiebunker figure and has less
(20:44):
to do with the 60s than anyoneelse, at least as we know the
decade, next door to him movesBob Dylan, the personification
of the decade, and they have aconversation.
And Frank said, Well, he hadreasonable enough sense.
And of course, if you readDylan's autobiography, he says
about the hippies, I wanted toset fire to these people,
harsher than anything FrankMeyer ever said because they
(21:04):
were harassing him.
And if you wanted to get awayfrom hippies and people
bothering you, where are yougoing to move?
You're going to move next toFrank Meyer.
SPEAKER_01 (21:12):
Yeah.
Yeah.
He lands at Nash Review as theliterary editor.
He then develops this politicalphilosophy, which come to be
known as fusionism.
And he ends up in heated debateswith some of these people there
over that idea, which wasrejected, I know, by L.
Brent Bozell and some of theseMurray Rothbard got into
arguments with Frank and otherprominent libertarians and
(21:36):
conservatives who took issuewith it.
But again, kind of give me yourexplanation of this philosophy
that Frank developed, this ideathat you need to bring both
freedom and virtue and traditiontogether.
You can't solely favor freedomwithout the other, and you can't
solely favor tradition andvirtue without freedom.
SPEAKER_00 (21:55):
I think that the notion that they go together
sucker punched a lot of people.
And they thought, well, thesethings don't go together, of
course.
But where did our freedom comefrom?
I mean, his best debate aboutthese questions happened in the
early 1950s with Rose WilderLane.
And her point was that we arenot the inheritors of Western
civilization.
Those people on the other sideof the ocean, they're a bunch of
socialists.
(22:16):
We should be glad that we havethis ocean between us because
their ideas can infect us.
And the settler mentality,that's what created this
individualist strain in Americansociety.
And Frank thought, no, ourfreedoms rest upon Athens and
Jerusalem and the church and somuch else that comes from there.
And I agree with you that, youknow, they're all doing stupid
(22:38):
stuff now, but this is where weget this.
And they go back and forth overthe course of many years
debating this subject.
Now, he would have the samedebate with Brent Bizzell.
The interesting thing aboutBazell is that his views were
essentially Meyerite prior togoing to Spain.
And he goes to Spain in 1960,and his letters to Frank reflect
a very different man.
(22:58):
And these are some of the bestletters in the collection are
from Brent Bizzell.
He says to Frank, listen, theUnited States is no longer the
country fit to save the West.
Come to Spain.
Move to Spain.
This is the only country thatcan save the West.
And Frank thought, you know,listen, uh I don't see things
the way you see them.
How am I going to make a living?
Have you thought about money?
(23:19):
How are we going to runNashville Review?
We're going to have like anauxiliary office in Kent,
Connecticut, where uh JimBurnham's going to be our
American correspondent.
Nothing that you're saying ismaking a whole lot of sense to
me, but maybe I'll visit at somepoint.
He doesn't visit.
But they have a debate withinNash Review, Bazell and Meyer,
which is really, I think,probably the high water mark of
Nash Review, this debate thatthey have in 1962 about
(23:41):
libertarianism or fusionism.
Traditional conservatism.
Yeah, or more theocratic view ofthings from Bazell.
What's interesting about theletters and how it shines a new
light on this whole conversationis that they're laughing about
this.
They're the best of friends.
Bazell said, if Buckley doesn'tprint this, I'm going to resign
from the magazine.
Or let's wait till he goes toSwitzerland and we'll sneak it
(24:04):
in at that point.
And I'm going to excommunicateyou from the conservative
movement and I'm going to makethe biggest stink this movement
has ever seen or smelt.
And they're laughing about this.
And they're saying, well, youknow, when can you come over?
When can we have one of thoseweekend-long debates?
And so you might get the sensefrom reading National Review
that these guys were at eachother's throats.
They were not.
There were other people thatMeyer was at their throats and
(24:25):
did, and some of the debates didlead to acrimony, but not Brent
Bazell.
SPEAKER_01 (24:29):
As literary editor, he had quite an impact as well,
as I understand from your book.
Who are some of the people thathe kind of introduced to the
world of literature through hiswork at Nashville Review?
SPEAKER_00 (24:40):
Well, he discovered, in a sense, Joan Didion.
And Joan Didion was being pushedby her booster boyfriend, a guy
named Noel Parmentel.
I used to call him my oldestfriend.
I met him when he was 96.
And Noel saw talent in her, waspushing him on all the editors,
on her, on all the editors inNew York, and they were just
balking.
And Frank said, Well, this ladyhas talent.
So Frank publishes the firstfreelance work of Joan Didion in
(25:04):
1959.
They have a science fictioneditor at Nash Review, and Frank
says, now this guy's not goingto do.
My neighbor is a good sciencefiction writer.
And so he has this guy, TheodoreSturgeon, review science fiction
books for Nash Review.
You may recall, do you know thissymbol in Star Trek?
I can't do it.
You can do it.
He wrote the episode in StarTrek where Nimoy invents that.
He wrote Live Long and Prosper.
(25:25):
He came up with the primedirective from Star Trek.
And all the time he was writingfor Star Trek, he was writing
for National Review.
Edited by Frank.
Edited by Frank, recruited byFrank.
Gary Wills, who later won aPulitzer Prize, really came
under Frank's wing.
And, you know, he said in hisautobiography, I spent more time
with Frank and Elsie Meyer inthe late 1950s and early 1960s
(25:48):
than anybody outside of myimmediate family.
There were all sorts of peoplethat Frank brought into the
magazine or mentored to reallycreate the best literary section
of any magazine in the countryat that time.
SPEAKER_01 (26:00):
People that went on to great careers.
SPEAKER_00 (26:01):
Those are heavy hitters.
I mean, when they were writingfor National Review, they were
nobodies.
But the second they startwriting for like The New Yorker
or, oh, there we go, they'regreat talents.
You know, that's kind of howthat works.
They recognize their talentsonce they sort of leave the
conservative milieu.
SPEAKER_01 (26:14):
Can you speculate at all?
Are you willing to speculatewhat Frank Meyer would make of
the conservative movement today?
SPEAKER_00 (26:20):
That kind of a question, although it's the most
asked, is a little bit sciencefiction because you do have to
speculate.
Frank was not a populist.
That sort of populist term, Ithink, in some ways would
alienate him.
One of the most interestingletters that Frank wrote in
1968, Henry Kissinger, who hehad known for many years, said,
Listen, I'm going to be thenational security advisor under
(26:41):
Richard Nixon when the incomingadministration, what should we
do with foreign policy?
And Frank said, Well, there'sthis messianic crusader state,
and that's the big problem, andwe need to roll them back
wherever they go.
But absent this country, theidea of getting involved in
permanent alliances, the UnitedNations, foreign aid, even the
idea of the Vietnam War would bea complete farce because what
(27:04):
some other country's socialsystem is is of no business to
us.
I have a hunch that Frank wouldbe very comfortable with the
foreign policy of Donald Trump.
And I have a sense that onthings like government spending,
the way that the movement hasgone, he would be very
uncomfortable.
I mean, would we have a$7trillion deficit or something
like that?
Not seven trillion.
(27:24):
Well, we have a I'm sorry,$7trillion budget.
Budget.
Yeah, and we have a$37 trilliondebt.
Yeah.
And I don't know what the maybethe deficit's two trillion, but
it's too big.
Whatever it is, it's too big.
SPEAKER_01 (27:34):
You got it.
SPEAKER_00 (27:35):
I have trouble thinking that the guy in defense
of freedom who wrote thatgovernment has three legitimate
functions, which is to preservethe defense, to adjudicate
disputes through courts, andmaybe for a police force to sort
of get the bad guys, he thoughtanything else was illegitimate.
How much of our government todaywould he think was legitimate?
It would probably be a verysmall percentage.
SPEAKER_01 (27:55):
In addition to this book, you write columns, you
write for the spectator andother outlets.
In your career, has that writingchanged given the rise of social
media and sound bites?
And how do you navigate that asa writer who, you know, in the
the way young people's habitsare today, they don't even read
books much less, probably longcolumns?
SPEAKER_00 (28:15):
Aaron Ross Powell Depending upon where I'm
writing, there's usually someart in what I'm writing.
If I'm reporting something,maybe not.
But if I'm writing a column, youwant to have a little bit of
snap in what you're writing, nottoo much, but to make it
distracting, but you want tohave a little bit.
People now, particularly youngerpeople, they've almost imitated
search engines in the sense thatthey are looking to mine
information and not reallyreading the column for a piece
(28:38):
of work that it is.
And so I think you see thepublications that are having
success are the ones that arepresenting information.
Even if it's not informationthat they've dug up, even if
they're just aggregating storiesfrom somewhere else, people tend
to gravitate towards that now.
And I think they've becomeimitative of the search engines
and of the computers and allthat kind of thing.
(28:58):
And that's bad news, I think,for people that like the art of
writing.
I think as far as research, ithas benefited me because most
people nowadays think researchmeans doing a Google search.
Yeah.
And as you see with this book, Imean, I dug up, you know,
probably a few hundred thousanddocuments from a warehouse that
would have been in a landfill oran incinerator, very short
(29:21):
period of time.
I went to England to finddocuments you couldn't find
here.
I think there were 50 differentarchival collections.
There were about a hundreddifferent interviews that I did.
To me, that's real research.
You're going to get informationyou can't find anywhere else.
And if you do a Google search,you're getting information that
anyone can find at any time.
SPEAKER_01 (29:40):
Now, the boxes you found in El Toona, are they now
at Hoover?
SPEAKER_00 (29:43):
No, they're in my house.
They're going to go to Hoover.
Oh.
Unfortunately, I brought thoseboxes back.
They're almost in every room ofmy house, and all the bugs and
critters that were living therecame into my house with them.
SPEAKER_01 (29:53):
And so it's worth the sacrifice to save those
boxes.
SPEAKER_00 (29:56):
I think so.
My kids uh may think otherwise,but yeah, I'd messed up my House
pretty bad.
SPEAKER_01 (30:00):
And what about your uh FOIA request with the
government you filed in 2022?
Has that been responded to yet?
SPEAKER_00 (30:07):
No.
And I think it's going to costme$1,000 or something like that.
And in fact, I weaned it downbecause there are three
different files on Frank withthe federal government.
And I said, okay, just give methe two.
SPEAKER_01 (30:16):
Yeah.
SPEAKER_00 (30:17):
Um now I want the third one too.
But are these FBI?
They're yeah, they're mostly FBIfiles that the National Archives
has.
Yeah.
SPEAKER_01 (30:24):
You may get them and be able to write a sequel or or
at least a new edition of thisbook and contain some
interesting new information.
SPEAKER_00 (30:31):
That could happen.
I suspect some of the documentsthat I have are probably
documents I'm going to get.
From MI5 or MI6?
Yeah, and also there's someother ones that Frank retained
that I think they probably haveas well.
Who knows?
There may be some informationthat I don't know that are in
those files.
SPEAKER_01 (30:46):
How long did it take from start to finish to write
this one?
It's I didn't even look at theit's like 500 pages, right?
Something like that.
Yeah.
SPEAKER_00 (30:54):
Yeah.
It's it took six years.
And it was an intense six years.
There was a book years ago Iwrote called Cult City.
SPEAKER_01 (31:00):
Yeah, Jim Jones.
SPEAKER_00 (31:01):
Jim Jones, Harvey Milk, and the Ten Days That
Shook San Francisco.
That book, I messed around withit for 10 years, but it was a
hobby.
It was something after I did mynormal work, I would go up back
then.
I smoked cigars, I'd I'd dabblewith it.
This book was an intense sixyears where it was an obsession.
It was ahab-like.
And so certainly I spent moretime on this than any book that
I've I've written, but it didn'ttake as long as some of the
(31:23):
other books.
SPEAKER_01 (31:23):
Well, you got your whale.
SPEAKER_00 (31:25):
I got my whale, yeah.
SPEAKER_01 (31:27):
You also wrote a book on the NFL.
SPEAKER_00 (31:29):
I did.
Well, it was really a book aboutfootball.
The war on football.
The point of that was that, youknow, the war on football
doesn't hurt the NFL.
It's hurting all these smallerleagues, particularly the
Pee-Wee leagues.
And you have so much it'sdisappearing, really, youth
football, or it was disappearingfor a while.
I think based on a myth, whichis that football is on the whole
(31:50):
bad for you.
And in fact, when they looked atthe NFL players, the federal
government did a health study onthem.
And in 17 of 19 categories, theydid better than average Joe's.
And so a lot of what was beingsaid about football players was
false.
They live longer than the guysin the stands, their peers.
SPEAKER_01 (32:07):
Well, this has been terrific.
I'm glad we had time to talkabout this book.
I highly recommend it.
It's a riveting biography, TheMan Who Invented Conservatism,
The Unlikely Life of FrankMeyer, communist, turned
conservative intellectual, andsomeone whose influence
continues to this day, and notonly because of the work he did
when he was alive, but your bookwill continue.
(32:27):
It's been reviewed in the WallStreet Journal, the Free Press,
the Spectator World, a number ofother places.
So congratulations, Dan.
Thank you for writing this.
And uh thank you for appearingon the Liberty and Leadership
Podcast today.
Had a blast.
Thank you so much.
Thank you for listening to theLiberty and Leadership Podcast.
If you have a comment orquestion, please drop us an
(32:49):
email at podcast at TFAS.org.
And be sure to subscribe to theshow on your favorite podcast
app and leave a five starreview.
Liberty and Leadership isproduced at Podville Media.
I'm your host, Roger Reim, anduntil next time, show courage in
things large and small.
Welcome to the Liberty and Leadership Podcast,
a conversation with TFAS alumni,faculty, and friends who are
making an impact today.
I'm your host, Roger Reed.
It's a pleasure to welcomeDaniel J.
Flynn to the Liberty andLeadership Podcast today.
Daniel is a senior editor at theAmerican Spectator and a
(00:23):
visiting fellow at the HooverInstitution.
He's the author of seven books.
His most recent, The Man WhoInvented Conservatism: The
Unlikely Life of Frank S.
Meyer.
If you don't know who FrankMeyer is, you'll want to listen
to this podcast because this isa fascinating biography of
someone who's had a tremendousinfluence on the conservative
(00:44):
movement.
Dan's writings have appeared inthe Chicago Tribune, the LA
Times, the Wall Street Journal,City Journal, and elsewhere.
Thank you for joining me today,Dan.
Thank you for having me, Roger.
Well, as I said, I think this isa fascinating book about someone
not many people know about,Frank Meyer.
And uh you've written abiography of this man uh that's
(01:06):
detailed, that is obviously thework of a lot of research you've
done over a number of years, andyou've uncovered a lot of
interesting things about hislife, not only his childhood,
but his time as a communist andhis time as a leader of the
conservative movement.
So we have a lot to talk abouttoday.
But my first question for you iswhat motivated you to write this
(01:28):
book?
SPEAKER_00 (01:28):
Well, I think there's two motivations.
I think there's a lot of writersthat want to write about
subjects that have uh, you know,kind of well-worn.
Like there's a lot of books onHitler and Churchill and
Lincoln.
I wouldn't want to write a booklike that because it's very
difficult to turn up newmaterial.
And so why not write aboutsomeone whose story should be
told, but isn't?
I think Frank has one of thelast great untold stories of the
(01:49):
20th century, and it was just apleasure telling it.
The other reason, you know, whenI first started out as an
author, I wrote a number ofbooks on the American left.
What jumped out at me is howmany books there are on rather
obscure events and figures inthe left.
They really document theirhistory.
And I think conservatives reallyfail to do that.
You see what happens when weallow left-wingers to write our
(02:11):
own history.
I think it's great if liberalswant to write about
conservatives, but I think it'sreally bad if conservatives
neglect their own history.
And I hope that there's more ofthat.
I mean, there's been guys likeLee Edwards and George Nash that
certainly don't fall into thatcategory.
But we, I think, have had adifficult time documenting the
importance of some of theevents, you know, the post-war
(02:32):
conservative movement, and evenbefore that.
SPEAKER_01 (02:34):
Yes, and uh Lee Edwards and George Nash, who I
consider two of the greathistorians of the conservative
movement, and now you've added abook on Frank Meyer to this.
Could you, in a nutshell, kindof give us a summary of why
Frank Meyer is important?
SPEAKER_00 (02:48):
One of the reasons I wrote the book is that people
ceased to think of Frank Meyeras a person, and they started to
think of him as apersonification of an idea that
Frank Meyer meant fusionism.
And so, in a nutshell, pre-thisbook, I think people thought of
Frank as the father offusionism.
In other words, the marriage oftraditionalism and freedom, that
Frank didn't think these wereideas that were in conflict.
(03:10):
He thought they were incooperation.
Stan Evans, an acolyte of Frank,he wrote a book called The Theme
is Freedom.
And in that book, it's called asort of applied fusionism, where
he said, listen, there'sthousands of years of Western
civilization that freedom restsupon.
You take away that heritage,freedom's gonna fall pretty
quickly.
And on the other side of it,that if you take away freedom
(03:31):
from things like virtue andother things that are valued by
traditionalists, then, you know,what do you have?
Virtue without freedom isn'tvirtue.
It's just compulsory virtue.
I mean, that's phony.
And so they both rely on oneanother.
And Frank was the guy in theconservative movement that
really pushed that idea.
I think people accepted itbecause, A, it was very simple.
That's sort of its distilledversion that I gave.
(03:53):
It's simple.
It's true that if you're aconservative, if you're an
American conservative, what areyou going to conserve?
Well, if you're Britishconservative, maybe you conserve
the monarchy, you conserve thearistocracy.
If you're an Americanconservative, the tradition
that's important for us is thefounding.
And what does the founding mean?
The founding means freedom.
And so an American conservative,the tradition that you're
conserving is freedom.
(04:13):
And that's why you have thosethings go together.
It's simple, it's true.
And I think it also haspolitical utility.
And some of its critics willpoint to that as a reason to
criticize.
I don't think that's a reason tocriticize.
I don't think that's the reasonFrank pushed it, but happy
accident, it does have politicalutility in a way that, say,
(04:34):
Richard Weaver's ideas haveconsequences, maybe does not, or
Russell Kirk's The ConservativeMind, which is a beautiful book,
but it doesn't have a lot ofpolitical application.
I think Frank's book did indefense of freedom, Frank's
theory, Frank's ideas did aswell.
That's sort of the pre-man whoinvented conservatism, Frank
Meyer.
And I think the post-one is moreof the person, is more of the
(04:55):
interesting guy, that this is afascinating figure, a guy who
pops off the page.
Frank Meyer, you know, if youthink about post-war
conservatives and the foundingfathers of our movement, a lot
of them led kind of black andwhite lives.
A guy like James Burnham, youknow, Managerial Revolution is
like prophecy.
It's a fascinating book, but Idon't know that he was a
fascinating man.
(05:15):
I think he was living a kind ofa boring black and white
existence.
There are other guys likeWhitaker Chambers or Wilmore
Kendall that lived intechnicolor.
They did lead exciting lives.
Frank, he is someone whooperated in 3D.
And I think the book, I hope thebook shows that.
SPEAKER_01 (05:31):
Well, we'll get into that because a lot of people
listening may not know aboutthat dimension yet, at least.
But you referenced Stan Evans,M.
Stanton Evans, a journalist whowrote the theme is freedom.
I appreciate you mentioning thatbecause it was at a luncheon at
TFAS where David Jones, one ofour founders and a friend of
Frank's, said to Stan, Stan, weneed a book for young
(05:52):
conservatives to read to come tounderstand what conservatism's
all about.
He said, The conscience of aconservative by Barry
Goldwater's dated.
So we'll put our pool moneytogether, Stan, so you'll write
the book.
And he wrote the theme isfreedom, which I thought was an
excellent book.
But it builds, as you said, onFrank Meyer, because Stan talks
about biblical truths that ledto the founding of this country
(06:12):
and our American ideas.
But before we get into that, alittle deeper into fusionism,
Daniel, could you talk moreabout Frank's early life, not
growing up as much, but when hegot to Princeton and Oxford and
his time as a communist?
SPEAKER_00 (06:28):
When Frank applied to Princeton, he was rejected
and unbeknownst to him.
His booster at the NewarkAcademy said, Well, listen, his
Hebrew features are undeniable,but he would make a good
addition to the student body.
And the director of admissionswrote back and said, you know,
we have a limited number ofspots for fine, clean-cut
Christian Americans.
I mean, he actually wrote that.
(06:48):
It sounds like a parody.
And this Frank Meyer, he doesn'tstrike me even as a Jew of the
better type.
Can you please steer himsomewhere else?
His grades are good enough, andhis scores, of course, are good,
but I don't think he's going tofit in with the college.
Frank didn't take the no for ananswer.
He did a second postgrad year atNewark, and then he they finally
let him in the next year.
But he found the studentpopulation populated by those
(07:12):
fine, clean-cut ChristianAmericans, and he had a rough go
of it at Princeton.
He started writing poems aboutSatan and real kind of racy
poems about women.
And there was this philosophythat said, all that stuff is
good.
That's good.
Indulge all that kind of thing.
And it was Marxism.
He goes to Oxford.
After not being admitted toCambridge.
(07:32):
Yeah.
He basically washes out ofPrinceton.
He did a very Frank Meyer thing,which is, you know, people said,
Well, why don't you go to theUniversity of Wisconsin or why
don't you go to the school?
He said, No, I want to go toeither Oxford or Cambridge.
A better school than Princeton.
And so he goes, he gets intoBailey College at Oxford.
These are probably the bestyears of Frank's life.
I mean, he is engaged in allsorts of extracurricular
(07:54):
activities.
He's called the life and soul ofthe college.
He has a million friends.
And in late 1931, he startssomething called the October
Club.
When Frank got to Oxford, therewere zero communists on the
student body.
By the time he graduated, therewere over 300.
And that was because of FrankMeyer, his charisma, his
abilities as an organizer.
(08:15):
It was also because the GreatDepression was starting.
So he came along at the righttime.
The amazing thing about all thisis that Frank, during this time,
was being watched.
There's about 160 pages of MI5and MI6 documents on Frank.
They did a black bag job on hisapartment.
They put a mail cover on hiscorrespondence.
They knew what bars he drank at,they knew what tweed coats he
(08:38):
wore.
They knew what girls he hungaround with.
They knew where his mother didher banking.
The one thing that they don'tmention in all these 160 pages
is when Frank, who's calling forthe violent overthrow of the
government of Ramsey McDonald,the prime minister of Great
Britain, that he is dating theprime minister's youngest
daughter, Sheila McDonald.
In fact, I have a letter that Ifound from Sheila McDonald to
(08:59):
Frank Meyer.
It says, listen, the coast isclear.
My dad's not around.
Come over to 10 Downing.
We'll have dinner.
Take whatever romantic figureyou can think of in the history
of the Communist Party, like CheGuevara or John Reed.
They never had the skull to, youknow, on the one hand, call for
the overthrow of the governmentand then secretly, on the other,
(09:21):
date the youngest daughter ofthe leader of the government.
So it shouldn't be surprising toanyone that Frank was not long
for the United Kingdom.
There were reasons that theygave for his deportation, and
maybe those reasons were thereal reasons.
But it jumps out at me that ifyou mess around with, you know,
the prime minister's daughter,bad things are going to happen.
Frank becomes a cause celeb inEngland.
(09:42):
And that's part of the book, youknow, part of his history that I
think I rescued because in theseMI6, MI5 files, they tapped the
phones of British communists.
And in 1949, when Franktestified in the United States
against his comrades, this wasthe longest, most expensive
trial in U.S.
history.
Frank was called a star witness,a mystery witness.
And he got a lot of attention.
(10:04):
And so this got back across thepond and they said, Did you hear
about Frank?
Well, yeah, I always wassuspicious of him and, you know,
irrationalizing things.
They said, Well, what are wegoing to do about the history?
And the fellow who was theCommunist Party historian says,
It's okay, I'm already rewritingit.
Do you mean the student'shistory?
Yes, I'm already writing it.
If you look at those MI6, MI5files, they repeatedly refer to
(10:25):
Frank Meyer as the founder ofthe student communist party
movement in England, that he wasthe founder.
This American was the founder ofthat movement over there.
He was the Johnny Appleseed ofcommunism in England, at least
for the young people.
So it's amazing to me that thatsame guy who pulled off this
organizational miracle as acommunist did much of the same
as a conservative years later.
SPEAKER_01 (10:45):
Well, I love how you opened the book with that
conversation among thosecommunists about Frank and what
to do with him and to rewritethe history.
And I got to ask you, you know,what's so impressive with this
book is the research you did andwhat came out of it.
You made a Herculean effort totrack down his papers, right?
And all of his materials, someof which had been donated to an
(11:06):
archives, but a lot of which hadbeen disappeared.
Talk about that a little bit.
SPEAKER_00 (11:11):
I mean, if you want to research Bill Buckley, you go
to Yale, Sterling Library.
If you want to research BillRusher, you go to Library of
Congress.
Where do you go if you want toresearch Frank Meyer?
Well, the Hoover Institution,which they had a Frank Meyer
collection, but the rhythm wasoff.
You know, I've been doingarchival work for like 25 years.
There's usually certain thingsthat are in an archive, like
letters or tax returns, thingsthat you would keep.
(11:32):
None of that was there.
And I said, Well, where's FrankMeyer's papers?
And I started searching, andunfortunately, all of the
archives closed down in 2020because of COVID.
And so right at the moment, Iwas to go to these archives,
they all closed.
The other thing that happened isthey did a four-year request,
Freedom of Information Act, andthe federal government, the
efficiency of the federalgovernment, they get back to me
a year later in 2022, and theysaid, Well, listen, we're now
(11:55):
processing requests from 2014,but yours is going to take a
little longer because of COVID.
Check back with basicallycheckback with us in the 2030s,
is what they're saying.
And so I was in a desperatespot.
Like, how can I write a qualitybook with all these things
against me?
So I started wishing intoexistence Frank's papers, and I
started calling around, and Igot scraps of things that were
somewhat valuable.
(12:16):
I got some letters from WilmoreKendall.
I got some property material forthe Woodstock House of Frank
Meyer, some other thingsinvolving in defense of freedom.
But they weren't, you know, itwasn't the mother load.
And so about a year and a half,two years into this, John Meyer
said, Well, we did sell thehouse.
SPEAKER_01 (12:32):
His son.
SPEAKER_00 (12:33):
Yes, John Meyer, his son, his oldest son.
We did sell the house and all ofits contents to this couple that
we went to Yale with.
I said, John, why don't you tellme about that?
And so I get in touch with thiscouple.
They insist, or at least themale partner insists, that they
had donated it to Hoover.
And I said, You didn't.
And they said, No, we did.
And I said, Well, you think youdid, but you kept some of it.
You just don't know it.
(12:54):
And they said, No, we and wentback and forth like that.
Finally, the fellow says, Well,we do have a warehouse in
Altoona.
And I said, Well, take me toyour warehouse.
He said, Well, it's not there.
And even if it were there,there's a thousand boxes.
You can go through it.
And I said, No, I can do it.
So in August of 2022, I wentthrough 663 boxes in that
(13:14):
warehouse.
It took three days, and I found15 that were the life's papers
of Frank Meyer.
This included letters fromTolkien, C.S.
Lewis, Joan Diddian, BarryGoldwater.
There's a thousand letters thatnobody's seen between Wilmore
Kendall and Frank Meyer.
There's a thousand letters thatnobody's seen between El Brent
Bazell and Frank Meyer.
There is an amazing amount ofmaterial in this archive,
(13:36):
probably 100,000 letters orsomething.
I don't know, something close tothat.
I didn't count them.
I counted the Kendall letters,but there's a lot of letters, is
the point.
That enabled me to write thebook.
Some reviewer did a count andsaid, well, 43% of his source
citations rely on this archivein the um tuna.
Yeah.
So the rest of it, I went overto England, found some good
(13:56):
stuff.
There were a lot of archives inthe United States.
I found an essay that Frankwrote when he was 14 from a
Jewish archive in in New York.
So it's very thorough biography.
But if you want to know aboutFrank's life, it's very
detailed.
SPEAKER_01 (14:08):
And well footnoted, too.
A little too well.
No, no, no.
For people who weren't familiarwith Frank Meyer, all right,
we've touched on the fact thathe was a leading communist
recruiter and communistbeliever.
And later he went to work, assome people may not know, for
Nash Review as the book editorand as a close associate of
(14:29):
William F.
Buckley's.
Tell me now, what led to thattransformation from communist to
conservative?
SPEAKER_00 (14:36):
Frank tried to join the fight against Hitler in the
Second World War.
The communists were exhortingAmericans, go fight against
Hitler.
But when it came to leadingcommunists, when they tried to
join, the party said, no, no,no, you stay here.
And Frank thought this was alittle bit odd.
They're saying one thing butdoing another.
About eight months in, sixmonths in, they say, okay, you
want to go in?
Go in.
(14:56):
You can join.
Frank meets for the first timein these squad bays the
carpenters, the electricians,all these people that Marx was
talking about, except they werenot the proletariat that Marx
had described.
I mean, Frank led a sociallyinsulated life.
He grew up in a real fancy hotelin Newark, New Jersey.
He went to an expensive prepschool in the Newark Academy,
(15:17):
went to Balliol College, hisfamily was wealthy.
He made this is a revelation forhim.
Oh, they don't, they're not sortof like budding revolutionists?
What is this all about?
He gets injured, and in thatyear and a half away from the
party, he starts to question.
Questioning and communism, theydon't go together.
He writes Earl Browder, who'sthe head of the Communist Party,
(15:38):
a letter and says, listen, ifyou want to attract bowlers
instead of just these hardcoreMarxists, we need to do
something.
We need to fuse the Marxisttradition, Marxism with the
American tradition, with theAmerican founding.
And we need to do this not juston the 4th of July, we need to
do this every day of the year.
Browder takes his advice, andmaybe he's going in that
(15:58):
direction anyway.
But because of this, Frankbecomes close with Browder.
And prior to that, for his first10 years in the American Party,
he was more of a mid-levelmanager.
He was a rock star in England.
He was a high-level communist inEngland.
He was on the board of theCommunist Party.
He was a big deal.
In the United States, he was abig deal maybe the last year and
a half as a communist.
And so he gets under Browder'swing and they start going in
(16:20):
that direction.
There is a time of freedomwithin the party where the
Soviets ostensibly dissolved thecommon turn.
They said, well, you know, theparties can do their own
nationalistic thing.
Frank, during this time, writesa book review of Friedrich
Hayek's The Road to Serfdom.
And he does this in publicationcalled The New Masses, which was
communist-controlled.
And probably for the first timein the history of that
(16:42):
publication, a free marketthinker gets a fair hearing.
It's not exactly a positivereview.
And in a way, it's a review ofHayek ostensibly, but really
what you're reading is a manhaving an epiphany over the
course of several pages.
A man dropping 14 years of hispolitical commitments and his
ideas, and Hayek sort ofstripping bare all of his
(17:04):
assumptions, and Frank Meyersaying, gee, what if I were
wrong this whole time?
And around that time, somethingcame to the United States from
France called the Duclos Letter.
It was basically a letter thatsaid, listen, Americans, you
need to stop cooperating withthe capitalist communists.
You need to stop veneratingRoosevelt.
You need to fight these people.
(17:24):
And so Frank thought, well, thisis just coming from some
goofball over in France.
Why do I have to pay attentionto this?
In reality, this is coming fromthe Kremlin.
Frank and Earl Browder say no,and they essentially get
shuffled out of the party.
Frank kind of slinks his wayout.
Browder gets unceremoniouslydumped.
But before Frank leaves, theparty goes to his wife, Elsie,
(17:45):
and they have a very closerelationship.
They say, listen, your husbandis no good.
He's unsalvageable.
But we still think you're apretty good communist.
We need you to divorce him, andyou can stay in the party that
way.
And so that facilitated theirexit.
And they were like, no, we don'twant to have any part of this.
Frank goes on sort of a retreatup in Woodstock for, you know,
five years or so and rethinksall of his assumptions.
(18:08):
By 1950, he is a right-winger.
You read stuff by him in 1950,unmistakably, he has the
language of a conservative, of aright winger, whatever you want
to call it.
SPEAKER_01 (18:17):
It's fascinating.
I'm so glad you wrote this bookbecause Frank Meyer died in
what, 1974?
72.
72.
I never, certainly never methim.
One of our founders at the Fundfor American Studies, David
Jones, was close to Frank, andthey would talk on the phone a
lot.
And of course, William F.
Buckley helped found TFAS aswell, and he was close to Frank.
And we have a portrait in ourbuilding of David Jones, our
(18:39):
founder, and he's holding a copyof Frank's book in Defense of
Freedom.
Very influential book.
He was a very influentialwriter.
So he goes on, and how does heconnect with William F.
Buckley in Nashville Review?
SPEAKER_00 (18:50):
He's present at the creation of Nash Review, but
he's a contributor.
He's not an editor initially.
The guy who started NationalReview, Willy Schlam, he wears
thin on Buckley.
He wears thin on James Burnham.
And very soon he's kind ofexiled up to Vermont.
And Schlam was the literaryeditor at that point.
More importantly, he was thesort of the anti-James Burnham
(19:13):
at National Review.
He was the leader of theright-wing faction within the
magazine.
When he goes up to Vermont,Meyer takes his place not only
as the literary editor ofNational Review, but as the
leader of the anti-James Burnhamfaction.
When Schlam, whose idea NationalReview was, he came up with the
whole idea.
He said, When I dreamed thismagazine, I dreamed of a
veritable conspiracy offriendship.
(19:35):
In other words, he thought ofthem as the outs.
These are the people that hadthe sand kicked in their face.
And now they were going to allband together in a veritable
conspiracy of friendship andtake on the ends to crash their
party.
Frank was better at that rolethan Schlam could ever be.
Frank was sort of the leader ofthe veritable conspiracy of
friendship, and he was the sortof the focus around all of these
(19:57):
strange and interestingpersonalities, people like
Wilmore Kendall, L.
Brent Bazell.
A lot of these people would comeup to Woodstock where he lived,
and they would make kind of apilgrimage, they'd spend the
weekend or they'd spend aholiday, and they would smoke,
they would drink, they wouldeat, they would uh quote
Shakespeare, and mostimportantly, they would talk
about politics, culture, currentevents, that kind of thing.
David Brudnoy, the great radiohost, he said, I've never had as
(20:21):
taxing or as fulfilling weekendas I spent in Woodstock with you
guys.
And so it was, it started to beyounger people started going up
to Woodstock.
It meant something different fora conservative to say, I went up
to Woodstock in the 1960s thanit did for liberals.
And of course, at the end of thedecade, irony of upon irony is
Frank, who's sort of anArchiebunker figure and has less
(20:44):
to do with the 60s than anyoneelse, at least as we know the
decade, next door to him movesBob Dylan, the personification
of the decade, and they have aconversation.
And Frank said, Well, he hadreasonable enough sense.
And of course, if you readDylan's autobiography, he says
about the hippies, I wanted toset fire to these people,
harsher than anything FrankMeyer ever said because they
(21:04):
were harassing him.
And if you wanted to get awayfrom hippies and people
bothering you, where are yougoing to move?
You're going to move next toFrank Meyer.
SPEAKER_01 (21:12):
Yeah.
Yeah.
He lands at Nash Review as theliterary editor.
He then develops this politicalphilosophy, which come to be
known as fusionism.
And he ends up in heated debateswith some of these people there
over that idea, which wasrejected, I know, by L.
Brent Bozell and some of theseMurray Rothbard got into
arguments with Frank and otherprominent libertarians and
(21:36):
conservatives who took issuewith it.
But again, kind of give me yourexplanation of this philosophy
that Frank developed, this ideathat you need to bring both
freedom and virtue and traditiontogether.
You can't solely favor freedomwithout the other, and you can't
solely favor tradition andvirtue without freedom.
SPEAKER_00 (21:55):
I think that the notion that they go together
sucker punched a lot of people.
And they thought, well, thesethings don't go together, of
course.
But where did our freedom comefrom?
I mean, his best debate aboutthese questions happened in the
early 1950s with Rose WilderLane.
And her point was that we arenot the inheritors of Western
civilization.
Those people on the other sideof the ocean, they're a bunch of
socialists.
(22:16):
We should be glad that we havethis ocean between us because
their ideas can infect us.
And the settler mentality,that's what created this
individualist strain in Americansociety.
And Frank thought, no, ourfreedoms rest upon Athens and
Jerusalem and the church and somuch else that comes from there.
And I agree with you that, youknow, they're all doing stupid
(22:38):
stuff now, but this is where weget this.
And they go back and forth overthe course of many years
debating this subject.
Now, he would have the samedebate with Brent Bizzell.
The interesting thing aboutBazell is that his views were
essentially Meyerite prior togoing to Spain.
And he goes to Spain in 1960,and his letters to Frank reflect
a very different man.
(22:58):
And these are some of the bestletters in the collection are
from Brent Bizzell.
He says to Frank, listen, theUnited States is no longer the
country fit to save the West.
Come to Spain.
Move to Spain.
This is the only country thatcan save the West.
And Frank thought, you know,listen, uh I don't see things
the way you see them.
How am I going to make a living?
Have you thought about money?
(23:19):
How are we going to runNashville Review?
We're going to have like anauxiliary office in Kent,
Connecticut, where uh JimBurnham's going to be our
American correspondent.
Nothing that you're saying ismaking a whole lot of sense to
me, but maybe I'll visit at somepoint.
He doesn't visit.
But they have a debate withinNash Review, Bazell and Meyer,
which is really, I think,probably the high water mark of
Nash Review, this debate thatthey have in 1962 about
(23:41):
libertarianism or fusionism.
Traditional conservatism.
Yeah, or more theocratic view ofthings from Bazell.
What's interesting about theletters and how it shines a new
light on this whole conversationis that they're laughing about
this.
They're the best of friends.
Bazell said, if Buckley doesn'tprint this, I'm going to resign
from the magazine.
Or let's wait till he goes toSwitzerland and we'll sneak it
(24:04):
in at that point.
And I'm going to excommunicateyou from the conservative
movement and I'm going to makethe biggest stink this movement
has ever seen or smelt.
And they're laughing about this.
And they're saying, well, youknow, when can you come over?
When can we have one of thoseweekend-long debates?
And so you might get the sensefrom reading National Review
that these guys were at eachother's throats.
They were not.
There were other people thatMeyer was at their throats and
(24:25):
did, and some of the debates didlead to acrimony, but not Brent
Bazell.
SPEAKER_01 (24:29):
As literary editor, he had quite an impact as well,
as I understand from your book.
Who are some of the people thathe kind of introduced to the
world of literature through hiswork at Nashville Review?
SPEAKER_00 (24:40):
Well, he discovered, in a sense, Joan Didion.
And Joan Didion was being pushedby her booster boyfriend, a guy
named Noel Parmentel.
I used to call him my oldestfriend.
I met him when he was 96.
And Noel saw talent in her, waspushing him on all the editors,
on her, on all the editors inNew York, and they were just
balking.
And Frank said, Well, this ladyhas talent.
So Frank publishes the firstfreelance work of Joan Didion in
(25:04):
1959.
They have a science fictioneditor at Nash Review, and Frank
says, now this guy's not goingto do.
My neighbor is a good sciencefiction writer.
And so he has this guy, TheodoreSturgeon, review science fiction
books for Nash Review.
You may recall, do you know thissymbol in Star Trek?
I can't do it.
You can do it.
He wrote the episode in StarTrek where Nimoy invents that.
He wrote Live Long and Prosper.
(25:25):
He came up with the primedirective from Star Trek.
And all the time he was writingfor Star Trek, he was writing
for National Review.
Edited by Frank.
Edited by Frank, recruited byFrank.
Gary Wills, who later won aPulitzer Prize, really came
under Frank's wing.
And, you know, he said in hisautobiography, I spent more time
with Frank and Elsie Meyer inthe late 1950s and early 1960s
(25:48):
than anybody outside of myimmediate family.
There were all sorts of peoplethat Frank brought into the
magazine or mentored to reallycreate the best literary section
of any magazine in the countryat that time.
SPEAKER_01 (26:00):
People that went on to great careers.
SPEAKER_00 (26:01):
Those are heavy hitters.
I mean, when they were writingfor National Review, they were
nobodies.
But the second they startwriting for like The New Yorker
or, oh, there we go, they'regreat talents.
You know, that's kind of howthat works.
They recognize their talentsonce they sort of leave the
conservative milieu.
SPEAKER_01 (26:14):
Can you speculate at all?
Are you willing to speculatewhat Frank Meyer would make of
the conservative movement today?
SPEAKER_00 (26:20):
That kind of a question, although it's the most
asked, is a little bit sciencefiction because you do have to
speculate.
Frank was not a populist.
That sort of populist term, Ithink, in some ways would
alienate him.
One of the most interestingletters that Frank wrote in
1968, Henry Kissinger, who hehad known for many years, said,
Listen, I'm going to be thenational security advisor under
(26:41):
Richard Nixon when the incomingadministration, what should we
do with foreign policy?
And Frank said, Well, there'sthis messianic crusader state,
and that's the big problem, andwe need to roll them back
wherever they go.
But absent this country, theidea of getting involved in
permanent alliances, the UnitedNations, foreign aid, even the
idea of the Vietnam War would bea complete farce because what
(27:04):
some other country's socialsystem is is of no business to
us.
I have a hunch that Frank wouldbe very comfortable with the
foreign policy of Donald Trump.
And I have a sense that onthings like government spending,
the way that the movement hasgone, he would be very
uncomfortable.
I mean, would we have a$7trillion deficit or something
like that?
Not seven trillion.
(27:24):
Well, we have a I'm sorry,$7trillion budget.
Budget.
Yeah, and we have a$37 trilliondebt.
Yeah.
And I don't know what the maybethe deficit's two trillion, but
it's too big.
Whatever it is, it's too big.
SPEAKER_01 (27:34):
You got it.
SPEAKER_00 (27:35):
I have trouble thinking that the guy in defense
of freedom who wrote thatgovernment has three legitimate
functions, which is to preservethe defense, to adjudicate
disputes through courts, andmaybe for a police force to sort
of get the bad guys, he thoughtanything else was illegitimate.
How much of our government todaywould he think was legitimate?
It would probably be a verysmall percentage.
SPEAKER_01 (27:55):
In addition to this book, you write columns, you
write for the spectator andother outlets.
In your career, has that writingchanged given the rise of social
media and sound bites?
And how do you navigate that asa writer who, you know, in the
the way young people's habitsare today, they don't even read
books much less, probably longcolumns?
SPEAKER_00 (28:15):
Aaron Ross Powell Depending upon where I'm
writing, there's usually someart in what I'm writing.
If I'm reporting something,maybe not.
But if I'm writing a column, youwant to have a little bit of
snap in what you're writing, nottoo much, but to make it
distracting, but you want tohave a little bit.
People now, particularly youngerpeople, they've almost imitated
search engines in the sense thatthey are looking to mine
information and not reallyreading the column for a piece
(28:38):
of work that it is.
And so I think you see thepublications that are having
success are the ones that arepresenting information.
Even if it's not informationthat they've dug up, even if
they're just aggregating storiesfrom somewhere else, people tend
to gravitate towards that now.
And I think they've becomeimitative of the search engines
and of the computers and allthat kind of thing.
(28:58):
And that's bad news, I think,for people that like the art of
writing.
I think as far as research, ithas benefited me because most
people nowadays think researchmeans doing a Google search.
Yeah.
And as you see with this book, Imean, I dug up, you know,
probably a few hundred thousanddocuments from a warehouse that
would have been in a landfill oran incinerator, very short
(29:21):
period of time.
I went to England to finddocuments you couldn't find
here.
I think there were 50 differentarchival collections.
There were about a hundreddifferent interviews that I did.
To me, that's real research.
You're going to get informationyou can't find anywhere else.
And if you do a Google search,you're getting information that
anyone can find at any time.
SPEAKER_01 (29:40):
Now, the boxes you found in El Toona, are they now
at Hoover?
SPEAKER_00 (29:43):
No, they're in my house.
They're going to go to Hoover.
Oh.
Unfortunately, I brought thoseboxes back.
They're almost in every room ofmy house, and all the bugs and
critters that were living therecame into my house with them.
SPEAKER_01 (29:53):
And so it's worth the sacrifice to save those
boxes.
SPEAKER_00 (29:56):
I think so.
My kids uh may think otherwise,but yeah, I'd messed up my House
pretty bad.
SPEAKER_01 (30:00):
And what about your uh FOIA request with the
government you filed in 2022?
Has that been responded to yet?
SPEAKER_00 (30:07):
No.
And I think it's going to costme$1,000 or something like that.
And in fact, I weaned it downbecause there are three
different files on Frank withthe federal government.
And I said, okay, just give methe two.
SPEAKER_01 (30:16):
Yeah.
SPEAKER_00 (30:17):
Um now I want the third one too.
But are these FBI?
They're yeah, they're mostly FBIfiles that the National Archives
has.
Yeah.
SPEAKER_01 (30:24):
You may get them and be able to write a sequel or or
at least a new edition of thisbook and contain some
interesting new information.
SPEAKER_00 (30:31):
That could happen.
I suspect some of the documentsthat I have are probably
documents I'm going to get.
From MI5 or MI6?
Yeah, and also there's someother ones that Frank retained
that I think they probably haveas well.
Who knows?
There may be some informationthat I don't know that are in
those files.
SPEAKER_01 (30:46):
How long did it take from start to finish to write
this one?
It's I didn't even look at theit's like 500 pages, right?
Something like that.
Yeah.
SPEAKER_00 (30:54):
Yeah.
It's it took six years.
And it was an intense six years.
There was a book years ago Iwrote called Cult City.
SPEAKER_01 (31:00):
Yeah, Jim Jones.
SPEAKER_00 (31:01):
Jim Jones, Harvey Milk, and the Ten Days That
Shook San Francisco.
That book, I messed around withit for 10 years, but it was a
hobby.
It was something after I did mynormal work, I would go up back
then.
I smoked cigars, I'd I'd dabblewith it.
This book was an intense sixyears where it was an obsession.
It was ahab-like.
And so certainly I spent moretime on this than any book that
I've I've written, but it didn'ttake as long as some of the
(31:23):
other books.
SPEAKER_01 (31:23):
Well, you got your whale.
SPEAKER_00 (31:25):
I got my whale, yeah.
SPEAKER_01 (31:27):
You also wrote a book on the NFL.
SPEAKER_00 (31:29):
I did.
Well, it was really a book aboutfootball.
The war on football.
The point of that was that, youknow, the war on football
doesn't hurt the NFL.
It's hurting all these smallerleagues, particularly the
Pee-Wee leagues.
And you have so much it'sdisappearing, really, youth
football, or it was disappearingfor a while.
I think based on a myth, whichis that football is on the whole
(31:50):
bad for you.
And in fact, when they looked atthe NFL players, the federal
government did a health study onthem.
And in 17 of 19 categories, theydid better than average Joe's.
And so a lot of what was beingsaid about football players was
false.
They live longer than the guysin the stands, their peers.
SPEAKER_01 (32:07):
Well, this has been terrific.
I'm glad we had time to talkabout this book.
I highly recommend it.
It's a riveting biography, TheMan Who Invented Conservatism,
The Unlikely Life of FrankMeyer, communist, turned
conservative intellectual, andsomeone whose influence
continues to this day, and notonly because of the work he did
when he was alive, but your bookwill continue.
(32:27):
It's been reviewed in the WallStreet Journal, the Free Press,
the Spectator World, a number ofother places.
So congratulations, Dan.
Thank you for writing this.
And uh thank you for appearingon the Liberty and Leadership
Podcast today.
Had a blast.
Thank you so much.
Thank you for listening to theLiberty and Leadership Podcast.
If you have a comment orquestion, please drop us an
(32:49):
email at podcast at TFAS.org.
And be sure to subscribe to theshow on your favorite podcast
app and leave a five starreview.
Liberty and Leadership isproduced at Podville Media.
I'm your host, Roger Reim, anduntil next time, show courage in
things large and small.
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