Who is Frank Meyer? with Daniel J. Flynn

[00:00:00] Speaker A: Hey everyone, and welcome to the 276th episode of objectively speaking. I'm Jag. I'm the CEO of the Atlas Society. Very excited to have the author Daniel J. Flynn on to talk about his book, the man who Invented the Unlikely Life of Frank S. Meyer. As you can see, quite a few bookmarks here, so it's going to be one of those. I'm looking forward to talking to Frank and also asking some of your questions. Sorry, that would be pretty amazing. But we don't believe in being able to speak to people beyond the veil. So. Guest Daniel, we're stuck with you, but thank you for joining us. [00:00:40] Speaker B: Thank you for having me. [00:00:42] Speaker A: So your biography of Frank Meyer chronicles his unlikely evolution, but you've also had an interesting trajectory of your own, from former Marine to author of so seven books and senior editor at the American Spectator. So tell us a little bit about your early life and any intellectual influences. [00:01:07] Speaker B: Well, strangely enough, I became conservative by delivering the Boston Globe every day. And I did that for five years as a youngster. Later, I was a vendor at Fenway Park. And at Fenway park, you didn't get minimum wage or any hourly wage. You got a commission. So if you worked very hard and you sold a lot of Cokes or ice cream or hot dogs, you made a lot of money. And I think that had a big influence on my evolution, at least my outlook on the world. And, you know, later I got involved in conservative movement stuff. I've probably felt a little bit alienated from the conservative movement since, I don't know, the late 1990s. But you know, I nevertheless, I sort of fall on the political right. And I think with this particular book, what you see is not necessarily a political book, but it's just a great story. I mean, Frank Meyer has one of those amazing pops up the page stories of the 20th century that strangely has been kept from readers until now. [00:02:09] Speaker A: Well, yes. So tell us a little bit about the surprising discovery of Frank Meyer's previously unexamined correspondence in, in an old soda warehouse. How did that discovery come to pass? [00:02:26] Speaker B: Well, I had made a FOIA request, Freedom of Information act request to the federal government. And you know, typical of the government, they said, well, you know, we're just, this was in 2021. They got back to me in 2022. They said, we're just processing requests from 2014, but since COVID has happened, yours is going to take a little bit longer. In other words, check back with us in the2030s. And that wasn't going to work for me at the same time, all of the archives, and that's kind of my bread and butter, is going into archives. They all closed because of COVID And it was out of desperation that I essentially wished his papers into existence. I looked at his papers, the index of his papers at the Hoover Institution. Full disclosure, I'm a visiting fellow there. And I thought, there's something wrong here. The rhythm's off. Because usually in a collection, you would, you know, think of this. You know, what would someone keep during their lifetime? Would they keep their, you know, their birth certificate that keep their tax returns that probably keep their letters that keep old photographs? None of that was in the papers at Frank. At the Hoover Institution. So I said, where, you know, where are his papers? And after about two years, I found this couple that had purchased the Meyer house in Woodstock, and all of the contents, they're in. They insisted that they had donated to the Hoover Institution. I insisted that they had some of it. They insisted that they donated it, went back and forth and. And finally they said, well, we do have this warehouse. And I said, take me to your warehouse. And in the warehouse, there were 650, 663 boxes. And I went through them all. And of those boxes, 15 were the life's papers of Frank Meyer. These included things like letters between Meyer and Tolkien and C.S. lewis, homemade Christmas cards from Joan Didion. There's a thousand letters from some of the major players in the early Christmas sort of movement, like Wilmore Kendall and El Brent Pizzell. There's hundreds of letters from Barry Goldwater and William F. Buckley, Leo Strauss, Murray Rothbard, Henry Kissinger. You can just go on and on. It is a treasure trove of information that I. I think, would have landed in a. Where, you know, a landfill or an incinerator if I hadn't got to it in that time, at least within a few years. And so I think what this does is it gives a unique flavor to my book. It's a book that's not reliant on other books, but for the most part, it's reliant on papers, letters that people have never seen before. [00:04:46] Speaker A: Yeah, I think in this day and age where we think that everything is available online or, you know, better yet, by asking ChatGPT or what have you, to realize that there are really still some unexamined treasures and undiscovered treasures out there that, you know, the fact that they were kept in physical form, we have access to. Otherwise, you know, if they were all coming over email, they might never come to Light. So tell us about Frank's early childhood and to what extent if any, do you think his later embrace of communism during that, the red period of his oeuvre have to do with a kind of rejection of his privileged upbringing? [00:05:34] Speaker B: I think it had a lot to do with it. Frank's mother was heavily into Jewish causes in the temple. Frank's father was a capitalist. And ultimately he rebels against both his ancestral faith in the money that is giving him and you know, a very privileged existence. He's living in a fancy hotel in, in Newark, New Jersey. He goes to the Newark Academy, which is a kind of a tony prep school. Ultimately he finds his way into Princeton, but he's rejected at first. And I found these, you know, if you go to, if you go to big time school like you said, I think you said you went to Harvard, you went to Harvard, they have a file on you whether you know it or not. And they, they kept the file on Frank. And in the file his booster at the Newark Academy writes and says, well you know, although Frank has unmistakable Jewish features, I think he would be a fine addition to the student body. And the, the fellow from Princeton writes back and says, well I don't think this Frank Meyer is even a Hebrew of the better type. You know, there are plenty of fine clean cut Christian Americans who are applying to Princeton this year and I think they would fit in with the student body better than this Frank Meyer. Can't you steer him to another school? Sounds like a parody or you know, caricature, but that's what he said. And so Frank was kept out, but he was persistent and he was let in. However, at Princeton that same kind of anti Semitism that he faced in admissions he's going to face in the student body. Cuz that student body is hand selected by this, this guy who was racist and anti Semitic and he had, you know, mental health struggles. He had all sorts of problems at Princeton. And at the same time in these letters that I found, you know, there's all these poems that he writes about sex and Satan and all sorts of just things that you wouldn't expect from someone who's sort of an early movement conservative. My sense is that he wrote those poems as sort of a rebellion against the anti Semitism that he was facing. These were the fine, clean cut Christian Americans. Well what do they hate? Well they hated Satan and he started writing odes to Satan. I don't think it's that far in the Alphabet from Satan to Stalin. And very quickly Frank's fixations moved from Milton Satan to this real Stalin in the Soviet Union. And when he goes to England, he gets into Oxford, goes to Balliol College, very quickly he found something called the October Club. When he gets there, there's zero communists on the student body. By the time Frank Meyer leaves, there's over 300 members of his club, the October Club. And it's in England where he finally has this expression of communism. But as you point out, it's this childhood that he has and this, you know, this traumatic experience at Princeton that I think pushed him in that direction. It was very much a rebellion against his parents and it was very much a rebellion against these fine clean cut Christian Americans that kept him out of Princeton. [00:08:20] Speaker A: Yes, I mean I thought it was kind of ironic that I think at some point you mentioned that he had had a poster of Woodrow Wilson, early admiration of him. And one thinks about Wilson's role in shaping Princeton to be a place where people of color or Jews were excluded. And just to see these contexts and the interplay of history and also unfortunately how history in some way can go full circle where these former bastions of antisemitism find themselves in a quandary where they can't even figure out calls for globalizing the Intifada and you know, outright calls of anti Semitism are somehow against the codes of conduct, against bullying. So you talked about the October Club. What were some of the other highlights of his eight years in UK and as a sometimes student, but mostly communist rabble rouser. [00:09:25] Speaker B: He certainly was. I mean he, he had the time of his life when he was in England and he, the October Club starts getting noticed because they, you know, it's very similar to like Antifa or some of these groups that we see now. They disrupted an Armistice Day event in England, you know, only, you know, a decade or so after the end of the First World War, he invited HG Wells to speak for the sole purpose of disrupting the speech. When George Lansbury, who was the grandfather of Angela Lansbury and the head of the Labour Party, was invited to speak at Oxford, Meyer gets kicked out of the event because he's shouting Lansbury down. He has to be forcibly removed from the event. So people start to take notice if you behave like that. And some of the people that took notice were journalists, members of Parliament, but also MI5. And when Frank went abroad, MI6 meaning the British intelligence, took notice. And there's about 160 pages of files on Frank Meyer. And these files include things like, you know, what tweed he's wearing on a certain day, what friends he meets with, what girls he hangs around with, what bars he goes to, where he does his banking. They do a black bag job on his apartment. They put a mail cover on his incoming correspondence for a month. So they know a whole lot about Frank Meyer. But there was curiously, one thing that they omitted from these files, and that is that Frank Meyer, for almost the entire time that he was in Great Britain, was calling for the violent overthrow of Prime Minister Ramsay McDonald's government. And for most of that time, he was surreptitiously dating Prime Minister Ramsay McDonald's youngest daughter, Sheila McDonald. And so, you know, you take any romantic figure that you can think of in the history of communism. Che Guevara, Jack Reed, it doesn't matter, none of them were brash enough to pull off a stunt the way Frank Meyer pulled off that stunt. And of course, if you're going to be calling for this guy's overthrow and at the same time you're dating his daughter, you, you're not going to be long for Great Britain. And so in the spring of 1934, there is a movement afoot to deport Meyer. Meyer had by that point moved on to London School of Economics where conspiring with a guy named Christian Menon, he was elected the president of the student body at the Lenin School of Economics. And they had rigged the election. Menon later went on to be like the number two guy in India under Nehru, but they had, they had rigged the election. And so in payback to these Indian students, Meyer put in his publication that there were faculty members at the London School of Economics and he named one of them spying on Indian students. And Harold Lasky, famous Marxist, who got Meier into the London School of Economics, effectively got him kicked out because he said, listen what Meyer's saying about you. Quickly they take away Meyer's presidency, they kick him out of school. He had been an assistant to Bronislaw Malinowski, the anthropologist. They take that away from him. He had a Rockefeller funded grant at the British Museum. They take that from him and they say, listen, there's no reason for this guy to be in the country. Let's deport him. That very quickly, Meyer becomes a cause celeb. There's a petition that's put out, people like Bertrand Russell and the Passage to India, author E.M. forster, who also wrote Howard's End, Dean of Canterbury, all sorts of people signed this petition saying, keep Frank Meyer in the country. Michael Strait, who gets involved in communism because of Meyer, he gets wrapped up in Meier's movement. He Says that he remembers marching around Straight later was the publisher of the New Republic. And later, further than that, people figured out he was a communist buyer. At least he admitted it. Straight remembers marching around London chanting, free Frank Meyer. Free Frank Meyer. So he becomes like one of these Angela Davis Mumia Abu Jamal characters where they're saying free. This guy becomes a cause celeb. And Clement Attlee, who's the future Prime Minister, he gives a speech on the floor of Parliament saying, why can't we keep this guy in the country? But the long and the short of it is if you're going to be messing around, I mean, I have a letter from Sheila MacDonald to Frank Meyer saying, listen, my father's not around, the coast is clear, come over to 10 Downing street tonight, we'll have dinner. If you're getting those kind of letters from the Prime Minister's daughter. And at some points the intelligence is intercepting these letters, well, you're not going to stay in that country very long. And so on June 1, 1934, is kicked out of Great Britain, immediately goes to work for a guy named Walter Ulbricht. And Ulbricht, you may remember, was the longest serving dictator of East Germany. He's the guy who put up the Berlin Wall. Meyer goes to work for him, of all things, on peace activism in Paris. So, you know, some irony there. Obviously go to work for peace activism for a guy like Walter Ulbricht, who was by that point had already murdered people. [00:14:08] Speaker A: Yes. So very Orwell esque. And I think also the fact that Meyer was kind of rebelling against his privileged upbringing. Sheila McDonald, the girlfriend, having a little bit of rebelliousness as well. Flirting with the, and carrying on with the young man who's calling for the overthrow of her father and all of her privileges. So let's turn now to this kind of transitional period between when Frank was enlisted by the party to persuade Americans to go and fight on behalf of Francisco Franco's forces in Spain, seeing the results of some of that knowing personally people that ended up losing their lives, Americans who lost their lives to his later prevailing upon the party to, to enlist in the military, the US Military itself. And whether or not that experience kind of planted the seeds of his later alienation from the Communist Party. [00:15:12] Speaker B: Well, it certainly did. I mean, Frank, the guy who brought him to join the Communist Party in Great Britain is a guy named Prince Mirsky, who ends up dying in the Gulag a few years later. Frank's understudy in England was a guy named John Cornford, who was the Great grandson of Charles Darwin Cornford, dies the day after his 21st birthday, fighting in Franco and fighting Franco in Spain. And Meyer had been a recruiter in the United States. He certainly sent men to their deaths fighting for the communists in Spain. And so when it comes time for him to join to fight against Hitler, he tells the party, listen, I want to sign up for the army. And they said, no, you stay here. And he's shocked by this because they're exhorting everyone else to go fight Hitler. And he says, why can't I fight Hitler? And I have to imagine he carried a great deal of guilt. Ultimately, six or so months later, when they relent and allow him to join the army, he meets for the first time the proletariat that Marx had talked about, these assembly line workers and electricians and plumbers, people that he had never met in his sheltered existence. And he realizes, these guys don't want to overthrow the government. They are nothing like what Marx had described. And so there becomes more cracks in his armor. He gets injured in the army, he has, you know, has to recuperate and has surgery for a couple of years. And he starts to question. Questioning and Communism don't go together. And so he writes a letter to Earl Browder, kind of a desperation letter, the head of the Communist Party. And he said, listen, if we want to attract bowlers, if we want to attract normal people, we need to Marxism with the American tradition, not just on the 4th of July, but every day of the year. And so that letter was very consequential in the history of Communism. Later. It was very consequential in the history of American conservatism immediately. What it did is, you know, Browder, whether he was going down that path or not changes the Communist Party. It ceases to be the Communist Party. It goes from being. Browder goes from being the general secretary of the Communist Party to being the president of something called the Communist Political Association. Meyer, who had been director of the Chicago Workers School, now he was a faculty member of the Jefferson School. They used to start their meetings with the stars, with the International. Now they're starting with the Star Spangled Banner. So for a few years, when we're allies with the Soviet Union in World War II, there's this Americanized party that Meier fits comfortably in. But then at the end of the war, there's this letter from France called the Duke Lose Letter, which basically warns American Communists, listen, this alliance that you have with Truman and before Roosevelt, this class collaboration instead of class conflict, this is all ending. Basically. It warned that there's a cold war coming. Meyer didn't like that because it upended his conception of an Americanized party. And so that happens. And the other thing that happens, which is rather remarkable, In May of 1935, he writes a review of a book for the New Masses, which is a communist controlled publication. And the book is the Road to Serfdom by Friedrich Hayek. This is probably the first time in the history of that publication that a free market publication, free market book, gets kind of a fair hearing. It's not exactly a positive review, but you can, you can see that Meier is having trouble contending with, with Hayek's points. And he's almost having an epiphany. You're not really reading a book review. You're reading a man having an epiphany. His commitments of 14 years crumbling. So that Communist Party that is becoming more Sovietized. And the fact that he reads Hayek, these things, they all combine. And by the end of 1945, he kind of slinks away from the party rather uncharacteristically. [00:18:50] Speaker A: Yeah. So. And we're going to get to some audience questions in a moment, but let's talk about the break with communism and the Communist Party. What were the circumstances other than the ones that you just described? Was he expelled? Did he leave away? Was it a bit of a mutual breakup? [00:19:09] Speaker B: Kind of a mutual breakup. They allowed him to come back and teach for the fall of 1945, but he really didn't. He sort of came in the office and didn't talk to anyone. He came to the Jefferson School headquarters and he didn't talk to anyone. He just kind of slinked away in Woodstock. He. He buys, he purchases a gun. He starts to sleep in the daytime and stay up all night. And obviously the Communist Party, it's not like they killed a lot of people in the United States, but they did kill some people. And Frank was worried that his leaving the party and later him testifying against the party. And the longest, most expensive trial in US history to date. That would be the Smith act trial of 1949. Frank was called a surprise witness, a mystery witness, and he testified and helped sent to prison 11 of his former comrades, including Gus hall and Eugene Dennis, a lot of the bigwigs in the party. And so his life began to change in, you know, strange ways, like staying up all night and having a gun by the bedside. And he was a little worried that they would take repercussions against him. [00:20:12] Speaker A: So we've Been talking up to now about some of the early Frank Meyer and what makes him such an interesting story study for a book and why his story is unlikely given the later outsized influence he had on the Communist Party. So I think it's a good time on the conservative movement. So I think it's a good time to break and take a few questions. Candace Morena saying I've never heard of Frank Meyer before today. What inspired you, Daniel, to write about this person? [00:20:45] Speaker B: Well, you know, if you go into a bookstore, you see a lot of books about Hitler and Stalin and maybe Jesus Christ and all sorts of figures that I think we know almost everything there is to know about them. We're not. There's no stone that's going to go unturned. I would rather write about someone that we don't know a whole lot about but should. And I think Frank Meyer fit that description. To me, he led one of the most exciting lives of the 20th century. That you know, a life story that hasn't been told. A lot of these guys in a lot of ideologues, to me, they live kind of black and white lives, they live gray lives. There's a few of them, people like Whitaker Chambers or Wilmar Kendall, they live in Technicolor. Frank meyer lived in 3D. This is a story that has a lot of sex, that has Satanism, that has Stalinism and secret agents, and has suicide. And I think all you got two of those five S's, I think you get a pretty good story. Frank has all five. So it's a story that I really wanted to tell. [00:21:43] Speaker A: So I recently read Witness by Whitaker Chambers. And so perhaps you could contrast and compare their two testimonies before panels, their two roles within the Communist Party, and then maybe later get to their kind of contentious relationship at National Review. [00:22:05] Speaker B: Sure. Chambers was a spy. You know, for a time he was an editor of the New Masses. So for a time he was kind of like Meyer. He was an intellectual in the party. He was an organizer. But his main role was that he was a spy. Meyer was not a spy. Meyer was in the above ground party. Later they both, you know, Chambers goes to sort of loose publications, Time magazine, that sort of thing, and Meyer does writing as well, but on sort of a lower level at National Review, Chambers stayed away. And I think people, people don't realize, I mean, initially Whitaker Chambers didn't really care for Bill Buckley. Ultimately, you know, I have a letter from Buckley's sister that when Chambers died, Buckley cried harder at Chambers death than he did at his own father's death. So he was quite moved when. When Chambers did die. Chambers finally came to National Review in 57, a few years after it was. Was founded, because he didn't. There was a guy named Billy Schlam that he worked with at. At time. Schlam was extremely anti communist. He was a guy that had met Lenin. Shlam was the guy that came up with the idea for National Review. Bill Buckley did the heavy lifting, but Schlam said, I wanted to create a veritable conspiracy of friendship. That was his whole point of National Review, of the outs taking on the ends. And so Slam didn't sit well with Chambers because I think the misconception about Chambers is because he testified against Hiss and all the left hated him. That must mean he's this right winger. Chambers was kind of moderate. And so people like Meyer and Schlam were off putting to him in National Review. Meyer was friends with Chambers. He went to visit him on his farm. He got him a membership at the Boston Athenaeum. He recommended magazines, sent him publications. They were friends. But I think both of them looked at the other a little bit suspiciously because, put it like this, that when Chambers, who had gone to jail for perjury, when he wanted to get a passport, Meyer and other people at National Review thought, why are we giving this guy a passport so he can slink back behind the Iron Curtain? And Chambers said, give him his passport, I don't care. So they had. When Khrushchev came to America in the late 1950s, Meyer put up a big stack, had a big committee protesting Khrushchev's visit, and Chambers said, let him visit. What's all this about? So they had ideological disagreements that probably the left. It's hard for them to comprehend because they vilified Chambers to such a degree because of his placement vis a vis. But the truth is that in the political continuum of National Review, Whitaker Chambers was certainly on the left of that continuum, at least within that magazine. [00:24:47] Speaker A: So of course, Whitaker Chambers is going to be most infamous to this audience for his vicious. I would characterize vicious Review of Atlas Shrugged in the pages of National Review, essentially saying that there was this totalitarian, almost Nazi spirit pervading every page to the gas chambers go of a woman who was a Jewish refugee from Communist Soviet Union. And in our brief chat before we went live, you said that, at least in terms of what you gathered from Frank's son, that he had a more nuanced view and probably on the balance, felt that Rand had a positive impact in terms of making the moral case for liberty. Perhaps you can share what that experience was like and whether that put some pressures on Frank and, you know, his many alliances with the libertarian side of the movement. [00:26:02] Speaker B: I think so. I mean, there's. Frank became the literary editor of National Review a few months before that Chambers Review ran. From what I can tell, he didn't commission the Review. I don't know that he, I don't, I don't think he would have tried to stop it, but I don't think he had the power to stop it because Chambers was really the prized get for National Review that they got. This guy was, you know, a big deal in American culture at that point. He had a best selling book, he was well known, unlike say, Frank Meyer. And so they were going to run whatever he wrote. Chambers had a habit of writing things that were kind of beautiful, but when you thought about them, you know, they were beautifully written. Then when you thought about them and took them literally, you said, well, you know, this doesn't make sense. He did that with Meyer several times. His descriptions of Meyer to Bill Buckley fit that description. And certainly, you know, when he wrote that line to the gas chambers go, you know, that is over the top. I think people that are even critics of Rand will say, well, that's over the top. Even Buckley admitted it on an interview with Charlie Rose. He said, well, I wouldn't have put it that way. And Buckley was obviously a critic of Rand, so. But I don't know that there was any stopping that review. Incidentally, when I interviewed Meyer's son, his oldest son, he was a subscriber to the Objectivist in the early 1960s. I forget if it was called the Objectives at that point, but the newsletter of Ayn Rand, he subscribed to it, his son did. And it wasn't like Frank Meyer objected to that or anything like that. What Meyer said to his son was, I think on the whole, I think she's more good than bad. Meyer was more of a libertarianish conservative. Obviously his, his fusionist outlook, you know, the emphasis there was, was on freedom. And so I think he, he viewed libertarians in a more positive light than maybe some of the other folks at National Review. What's strange is that of the hundred and thousand or so letters that I have, he doesn't really have a whole lot to say about Ayn Rand. There's a couple of mentions of her in the letters, but of all the major figures that are around at the time, there's no correspondence between him and Rand. And there's not a whole lot of mention. So she's not really. Strangely enough, she's not really on his radar that much, even though he had this sort of minor role in the. In that particular review. Where he did have a role with Rand is he. You know, and this is an article I wrote for the journal Libertarian Studies. He was sort of a sounding board for Murray Rothbard. And initially Murray Rothbard was effusive in his praise for Rand, and then he soured on her. And all of these letters, sort of in real time, his praise for Rand, his complaints about Rand, they're all in these six letters that he wrote to Meyer. Meyer used the telephone, so we don't really have what he said back to Rothbard, but she was, you know, he knew who she was, but he didn't have a whole lot to say about her drama. [00:28:58] Speaker A: So one libertarian, I guess you could say libertarian founding mother, who was more than on Frank's radar, was of course, Rose Wilder Lane, one of the three founding mothers of libertarianism, the other two being Isabel Patterson. And of course, I'm Ran. What was their relationship like? [00:29:18] Speaker B: Well, they had a very tight relationship. And it's strange because Meyer really didn't have a mentor when he was on the left as a Communist, he sort of came in, and almost immediately he was put on the board of the Communist Party of Great Britain. Almost immediately. He's the head of the student bureau of the Communist Party of Great Britain on the right. It was a little different. He did have a mentor. And I think this, you know, this is one of the blessings of this collection that I found in the warehouse. There are these 60 letters between him and Rose Wilder Lane, and they are absolutely amazing. I wrote an article about it in Reason. I think it's in November issue. I'm not sure. But the bottom line is she was a mentor to him. And in some ways he accepted her beliefs. And in some ways, you can see she challenges him, and he sort of hardens on some of his conservative beliefs. So, for instance, one of the disagreements that they had was Lane thought that the United States owed its freedom to being, you know, having an ocean between it and Europe, having the settler mentality here. And of course, that's not surprising given that her mother wrote the Little House in the Pregnancy series. So Meyer thought, no, we are the inheritors of thousands of years of Western civilization. Even if these guys over in Europe have gone socialist, we inherited that tradition. And Lane said, no, that's a bunch of junk. And so they clashed over that. And that's, in a sense, that's why Meyer is more of a conservative, in a sense, he's conserving the liberty that's been handed down. Whereas Lane said to be a libertarian is to be a revolutionary. That, that you, you know, that you couldn't say that We. This all came from Europe because all these people in Europe, they've just spent thousands of years trying to control people with kings and other things like that. So they had, they had a lively discussion. And the amazing thing about Lane is, you know, I said, I, you know, I don't know what. I have maybe a hundred thousand letters in this collection, something like that. I. There's letters from, like I said, Tolkien and C.S. lewis and Evelyn Waugh and W.H. auden, Bill Buckley. All sorts of great writers in this collection. The best letter writer in the whole collection is Rolls Wild. Elaine. They are in. This is incredible, these letters that she wrote. And you know, Meyer couldn't match him word her word for word in these letters. I don't think anyone could. She's writing like two. Two page PSS Postscripts. And you don't want them to end. I mean, usually you see a two page postscript, you say, well, you know, okay, give it a rest with her. You wanted to keep going because she was just such an amazing writer. [00:31:44] Speaker A: Yes. And I would say that Rand would also fall into that camp of being not just. Not a conservative critical of conservatism and sensing that we needed to have more people being radicals for capitalism and particularly in defending the morality of capitalism. Great question here from Iliacin. How would you characterize Meyer's relationship with William F. Buckley? [00:32:13] Speaker B: I think they had a good relationship mainly because Meyer really wasn't in the office. There were these three guys at National Review that I would, you know, people call them the three Musketeers, the three amigos, Wilmore Kendall, Brent Bazell and Frank Meyer. And to some degree, all of them. Neil Freeman said about them. He said that they were all unclubbable men. In other words, they were. They could be a pain in the neck to have around. Meyer lasted at Nash Review. Those two guys didn't. And I think the reason he lasted is because he, he was sort of an early telecommuter. He worked from home, and so he wasn't there to annoy anyone around the water cooler. He wasn't there to start an argument. He was very excitable. Meyer had a very contentious relationship with James Burnham. Burnham being the guy who wrote the Managerial Revolution, was, you know, cited by Orwell as kind of an inspiration for 1984. Burnham was a Trotskyist, Meyer was a Stalinist. They both were at Princeton at the same time. They both were at Baylor College, or at least there was some overlap at both those times. By the time they get to National Review, there's sort of a battle for the soul of National Review, which I think Meyer loses, but Meyer wins the soul for the. The conservative movement outside of National Review. I think the reason Meyer loses to Burnham is because he really, Burnham had Bill Buckley's ear in a way that Meyer didn't. That doesn't mean, I think philosophically, Buckley was more of a Meyerite than a Burnhamite, but as far as persuasion on him, he really listened to Jim Burnham. Buckley did, yes. [00:33:46] Speaker A: Well, as one of my mentors, James P. Pinkerton, says, nothing pro pinks like propinquity. And I think that's something for some of our younger viewers who are doing the remote thing and not wanting to have that in, you know, person facetime with the decision makers and the stakeholders. It's something to think about because being in the room is often where these relationships get formed and the final decisions either get influenced or made. My modern Gault asks, did you find any contradictions between Meyer's public philosophy and his private behavior or views? And then also, why do you think Meyer remained more of a behind the scenes intellectual than a public figure? He certainly was a public figure in his early UK Communist phase. [00:34:39] Speaker B: Yeah, I think that, you know, when he was interviewed by Mike Wallace in 1961, Wallace said, I would venture to guess that maybe one in a thousand of my viewers knows who you are. My sense is that all these years later, it's maybe 1 in 10,000. So he's not like a household name. But, you know, when Wallace went on to say, but I'm told that Bill Buckley hangs on your editorial advice and that Barry Goldwater solicits you for political counsel, that all was true. But that speaks of a guy who is behind the scenes, who's more of kind of a guy holding the strings than the guy in front of the crowd. And that was, to a great degree, Frank Meyer. I mean, even his big book, In Defense of Freedom in the Course of his lifetime, that sold 3,000 copies, which isn't exactly a success now once he dies, and regularly comes out with a new edition later, the Liberty Fund comes out with new editions. That's where it sells the bulk of its copies. But I would liken it to, and I liken it in the book to, you know, there was a famous statement by Brian Eno, the producer and the musician, and they said, well, you know, the Velvet Underground and Eco that only sold 30,000 copies, the famous 1960s album. He said, yeah, but all 30,000 of those people that read that book, that listened to that album, they all started a band. And my sense is that about all 3,000 people that read In Defense of Freedom in the 1960s, you know, they started a political club or a magazine or they ran for office. It was a tremendously influential book, but not something that broke through into the mainstream. Say, like something like Atlas Shrugged or, you know, Bill Buckley's God and Man at Yale or even Capitalism and Freedom or Chambers as Witnesses. Witness any of these books on the right. Those books all sold a lot of copies. Meier stuff didn't sell as well. But I would argue that it was quite influential because that. That the default philosophy of the American right, you know, from Goldwater through Ronald Reagan, it's that fusionism that Meyer articulated. And it's not, say, like the theocan outlook of Brent Bazelle or the more populist outlook of Wilmore Kendall. It was Meyer's brand of conservatism, at least politically, that was triumphant in those years. [00:36:51] Speaker A: Question via Instagram, Eduardo lamantics quote, it seems like a fascinating book. I just ordered it. What would be the best article by Meyer to understand what made him move away from Marxism? [00:37:05] Speaker B: Oh, that's interesting. I mean, the book review that you can get this online. There's the book review of in the New Masses. In June or May of 1945, he does a book review of Hayek's Road to Serfdom, the most important article that he ever wrote in his life. You can also get this online is summer of 1955, he wrote an article in the Freeman called Collectivism Rebaptized, in which he criticized Russell Kirk as just sort of a collectivist in conservative clothing. And Meyer, again, he's more on the freedom side of things, and Kirk is more on the traditionalist side of things. And so they battle. Meyer has these fights with all sorts of figures on the right, to include Brent Bazell, to include Harry Jaffa. With Bazell and Jaffa, they remain friends with Kirk. He takes it very personally. And when Buckley asks him to join the masthead of National Review, Kirk says, how can I stand cheek by jowl with those two guys? Meaning Frank Meyer, who wrote that article in the Freeman, and Frank Chodoroff, the editor who had published the article. And so there was some bitterness from Kirk lasting bitterness from that critique. Because if you remember, in 1955, Kirk was a big deal in the conservative movement. He had written this book that was so well received, the the Concert of Mind. And it is really a beautiful book. But when Meyer looked at that, he thought that this was, you know, too deferential toward tradition, not deferential enough towards reason. And the word freedom was, you know, few and far between mentions of that word in the book. So he critiqued it in the Freeman and it let. And that's, that's a very important article in the development of Frank Meyer because it leads directly to, to the publication of Independence of Freedom. That book was initially based on that article and the Volcker Fund gave him all sorts of money to write that book based on the article. Now the book that came out was very different from that initial article, but I would say that's the most influential article Meier ever wrote, the most important article he wrote and the article where you can see something influencing him. That's that article in the New Masses on Hayek, the review of the Road to Serfdom. [00:39:13] Speaker A: So you observe that in the early 1960s, Meyer, quote, increasingly scattered his. His fingerprints all over the rapidly expanding conservative movement. How were Young Americans for Freedom and the New York Conservative Party examples of that? [00:39:32] Speaker B: Well, he was at the pre. He was at the meeting in Queens that where the Conservative Party of New York was founded. He was an officer until his death in the Conservative Party of New York. He wrote their platform, so to speak, and he wrote a lot of things for him for them. He was, you know, he was the go between between them and getting Bill Buckley to run for mayor of New York, which is a crucial thing with regard to young Americans freedom. He is at, you know, not sure if you had a board meeting at Sharon the same time that they had the younger Americans Founding freedom. Founding meeting. So he was there in a sense, but his real influence there is not his presence. It's. It's. If you read the Sharon statement, which I think to this day is sort of the most succinct and coherent expression of conservatism. 368 words. You read that. It has Frank Meyer dripping all over it because his acolyte, M. Stanton Evans, fusionist, wrote it. And what I mean by that is that it says, you know, our foreign policy should only be concerned with the just interests of the United States. Anything else is not our business. It says that, you know, there are three functions, three legitimate functions of the federal government and they are to adjudicate Disputes through courts. They are to, you know, police power to fight, you know, the bad guys. And they are a national defense and everything else is extraneous to legitimate functions of government. So it's all stuff that's straight from Frank Meyer and those organizations. Obviously Frank was tremendously influential. He didn't exactly found the Conservative Party in New York. Daniel Mahoney and his brother in law did. But Meyer was there at the founding meeting and he was one of the people that was, you know, could rightly be called a founder of that organization. [00:41:11] Speaker A: Well, in terms of those three essential legitimate functions of government, defense, police and adjudication of differences, that would hue pretty closely to Rand's objectivist view of politics and the role of government in protecting individual rights. So Meijer helped to define post war conservatism through the National Review. If you were alive today, what do you think he would think of the current conservative movement, the rise of populism, nationalism, identity politics on the right, and specifically, any lessons from how Meijer, A National Review dealt with the threats presented by the rise of the Bercher movement that may be appropriate or applicable today? [00:42:04] Speaker B: Well, I mean, obviously we have a 7 trillion dollar government and there's a 2 trillion dollar deficit or something like that, a 7,030, $38,000,000,000 debt and there's Republicans that are, you know, that control all three branches of government. So I think he would have been disgusted. Meyer is someone who was probably better suited to be on the outside looking in because, you know, once, once, you know, conservatives or Republicans or whoever get power, a lot of them tend to act like Democrats. I don't think Meyer, because Meyer was very, very pure guy, whether he was a Stalinist or whether he was a right winger, he was sort of a purist. And I don't think he would have gone for that one area that I think he, you know, Trump's foreign policy I don't think he would have had much of a problem with. He wrote a famous letter to Henry Kissinger. Kissinger said, listen, I'm going to be the national security adviser under Nixon. What should our foreign policy be? And Myers said, well, listen, there's this disorienting influence, this messianic crusader state, the Soviet Union, and our job is to roll them back. But if they did not exist, the whole idea of foreign aid, the idea of these alliances, the idea of the United nations, even the Vietnam War, which he supported, all of these things would be a farce. Minus the existence of the Soviet Union, what the social systems of other countries are is of no business to us. And, you know, Trump's foreign policy has been a little bit different as of late than, you know, it hasn't exactly been isolationist or Washingtonian. But I don't think he would have as much disagreement with Trump on foreign policy as he would have had, say, with George W. Bush or someone like that. But on so much else, he would have had a problem. He wasn't a populist. I think he would have been disgusted by, you know, the rise of sort of this kind of racist, anti Semitic movement on the right, which is, I think, a little bit confusing to a lot of people, as you point out. National Review kind of had this sort of excommunication of Robert Welch, and then later it was sort of extended to the John Birch Society. Now, I think that was necessary. I mean, you know, Robert Welch saying that Dwight Eisenhower was a communist who took orders from his brother who was higher up in the party. I mean, that was just silly, silly stuff. And I think people like Meyer, you know, a guy who graduates from Balliol College, Oxford, or Buckley who graduates from Yale, they don't want to be, you know, intertwined with these yahoos saying these ridiculous things. Meyer was not a conspiracy theorist. He was not a populist by any means. He was pro McCarthy. He was, he told Jim Buckley, Buckley's brother, who later won the U.S. senate seat as a Conservative Party nominee in New York, he told him to go for the union vote, to go for the Democrats. In other words, strategically, he understood the benefits of populism, but he was not a populist himself. [00:44:59] Speaker A: So you credit Meier with inventing conservatism through fusionism, the blend of libertarian freedom and traditional virtue. Can you explain, perhaps at greater length, how he reconciled in some ways these irreconcilable or opposing ideas? And why was this fusion so revolutionary for the movement? [00:45:26] Speaker B: Well, I think my. My view of the title is not to be taken literally. I don't think anyone invented conservatism. You can make a case for Meyer inventing it, but my. My view of it is that Meyer had a misunderstanding coming over from. From the left. The left believes in systems. And I think initially Meier thought, well, conservatism is something to be invented. I think what he discovered is that conservatism sort of develops organically. And his view was basically this, that if you're a conservative in Great Britain, you know, maybe you're conserving the monarchy or the aristocracy. If you're conservative in Italy, might be conserving the Catholic Church and the United States, it's different. What is our big tradition? Well, our big tradition here is the founding. What does the founding mean? The founding means freedom. So he said to be a conservative in the United States meant something very different. It meant you are a conservator of our tradition of freedom. And so that view. How did he. And so in that sense, he says that freedom and traditionalists, the libertarians, traditionalists, you're not at war, you're not in conflict, you're in cooperation. These things go together for the freedom people, for the libertarians, your. The freedoms that you enjoy, they rest on thousands of years of Western civilization. If you take away that heritage, if you take away that tradition, that freedom is going to collapse with it. And for the traditionalists, his point was the things that you. You value things like virtue, you can't have virtue without choice. You can't have. You can't have rote virtue or coerced virtue. So you need the freedom people just as they need you, the traditionalists. And so some people saw this as a forced marriage. Some people saw it as a little too utilitarian. But I think when you explain it in the terms that Meyer explained it, you realize it's sort of, you know, you understand why people thought it was sort of the natural kind of, you know, way for an American to view conservatism, that you would conserve freedom, because that is what we are about here in the United States. I think his view lasted partly because it was so simple, partly because, at least at that distilled level, that the American tradition means freedom, that it was true. And I think the third reason it lasted is because it had this political utility in a way that some of the other books in. In the history of the American right didn't have. Like, something like ideas have consequences. There's really no political component to that in the same way that there is for ideas have consequences. So because it had this political utility to it, I think a lot it helps explain why it did. It had such influence that a lot of the people that were influenced by it had never heard of Frank Meyer. They never heard of fusionism. Nevertheless, they essentially were advocating fusionism. [00:48:01] Speaker A: Is there a modern heir to Meier's intellectual balancing act? Somewhat attempting to unite moral seriousness, tradition with a more libertarian defense of liberty and individual rights? [00:48:15] Speaker B: I think there are a lot of people that adhere to that outlook, but in the age of Trump, that's going to get squelched. Most of the conservatives out there think conservatism means Trumpism. And think Trumpism means conservatism. And if Trump says something like we need to have a 50 year home mortgage or we need to lower the interest rates to some unnatural level like zero or sub zero, they'll say, oh yeah, that's conservatism. Or so it doesn't matter what Trump does. They'll say that's what conservatism is. And I think his popularity on the right is such that almost trauma bonded. I mean, they tried to kill this guy, they try to send him, put him to jail for 700 years or something like that. And you understand why these people on the right view him as a hero for standing up to that onslaught. But at the same time his views are, some of them are instinctually conservative, but for the most part they're not intellectually thought out and they're more populist, I would say, than conservative. [00:49:23] Speaker A: So part of the story of this book is the story of the discovery of this treasure trove of unexamined correspondence. Will those papers and those letters now go to the archive and where. [00:49:40] Speaker B: Yeah, they're going to go to the Hoover Institution, hopefully within the next month or two. And I just was out at Hoover a week or so ago. There are some other, there's so many documents here and people said, hey, can you get me this document? Document? It's kind of hard because I don't have a scanner, I don't have a copy machine or anything like that. But in, in certain instances I am going to scan things as favors. But for the most part it's all going to get donated to Hoover. Hopefully they process it pretty quickly and it'll be available to anyone who makes an appointment there to look at it. And, and you know, like I said, there's so much material. There's, you know, Milton Friedman and, and Murray Rothbard and, and Frank Chodoroff. This early stuff from the Freeman, just, you know, the Freeman magazine where you have this, this triumvirate of editors, Suzanne LaFollette, Forest Davis and John Chamberlain and they basically refuse to endorse Dwight Eisenhower and Meyer's egging them on. Don't endorse Eisenhower. He stole the nomination from Taft. This guy wants to have a truce with the New Deal. How can you endorse a guy like that? And so you get the correspondence and you find out that Henry Haslip behind the scenes and other people are trying to force them out because they're, they're so angry at 1952 that they refuse to endorse Eisenhower. So they all get Kicked out in early 1953. The backstory to that fight is all here in this letters. So there's so many aspects of the history of the post war, right where you get the backstory with National Review, you know, so much of it is so personal. They, they really, you know, guys like Kendall and Meyer and Brent Pizzell, to a great degree, they let a Mad Men existence. So just to give you one example, there's a letter from Kendall de Meyer where he says, this is Buckley's mentor, his professor at Yale. And he says, I'm sorry to Meyer, I can't get the Book Review in time. And I'm afraid this time I don't have a good excuse. Remember that 19 year old CO ed I told you about? Well, I'm afraid she showed up at my door and this time I didn't turn her away. In other words, this is a 50 something year old man messing about with like a 19 year old college student as he's a professor. Sir, these are guys that are drinking. You know, Kendall at one point says to Meyer, you know, I've cut down on cigarettes at my usual intake of 70 cigarettes a day. Now I'm smoking 20. There was some dysfunction there. There was some dysfunction with Meyer, there was some dysfunction with Kendall, there was some dysfunction with Brent Bazelle. And so we've known all along what these guys believed. We just didn't really know a lot about their personal lives. And I think what you get with this book is, is a glimpse into the personal lives of these men that made the conservative movement and their lives. In some sense they're human like us, and in another sense they're a little too human. There's a lot of flaws there and I think that's what makes the book more exciting because a lot of these books on political figures, they tend to be like hagiographic kind of books that make them into saints. And this book doesn't do that. It just pulls the curtain back and says this is what these guys were really like. To me that makes them a heck of a lot more interesting that people will want to read about them more. Because I, you know, I don't know that people have been reading about them a whole lot in the last few years. But I think given the excitement surrounding this book and giving the, the sort of, the, the new stuff that's involved, I do think people want to read about them because they're quite interesting, whether they, whether you agree with them or not, sort of irrelevant. They just led very interesting lives. [00:53:05] Speaker A: Well, you are deeply immersed in the intellectual history of the conservative movement. And so I assume that you had read some of these books and that you were far more familiar with Frank Meyer and many of the luminaries surrounding the early ferment at the National Review. So I've got to ask you, after reading all these letters, after learning all of this new stuff, did your estimation of Meyer go up or down in terms of his impact? I'm assuming it went up. But in terms of whether he was a good person or not, what's the verdict? [00:53:47] Speaker B: I like people who are interesting. I like characters. I don't really care about what. I mean, I hate to be. I hate to sound like this, but I don't really care that much about whether someone was a good person or not. I should. I know I should. But as a writer, I care more about whether they're interesting. And Meyer was profoundly interesting. He had, he. I think there's about five or six women that he messed around with that he had romances with that have Wikipedia pages. I don't know, you know, you know, there's not a lot of women in the 1920s and 1930s that have Wikipedia pages. In other words, he. If you look at the guy, you don't think he's going to be able to get all these, you know, famous women or all these quite interesting and accomplished women. Somehow he does. I think that tells you something about Meyer. He had some charisma. The same type of attribute that would make women want to hang around with you or make guys want to be your friend is the same attribute that you would have where people would want to join your social movement. That where you would go from 0 to 300 members of your club, your October club at Oxford, or you would corral people into your post war conservative movement. That people don't want to join a movement if you have marbles in your mouth. People don't want to join a movement if you're looking down at your shoes, they want to join a movement of someone who's interesting and has some energy and is charismatic, and that was Frank Meyer. Those same qualities, I think, also make for a good biography that you're reading about someone who's, who's, you know, whose life kind of pops off the page. That's Frank Byron. So it's that quality, you know, whether you're a character, whether you're interesting. That's sort of what I'm looking for. And your question is whether, you know, I think he was a good guy or a bad guy or whatever. I don't even care about that. [00:55:24] Speaker A: All right, well, that's refreshingly honest. And I think, you know, in having this interview, I'm finding that there are more points of commonality, and I think it's always good to look for that between that it needed to be conserved, I think with that, but also that it needed a stronger moral case. Also that to be charismatic, you don't need to have the most money or be the best looking person in the room. Of course, both Frank Meyer and Ayn Rand had that kind of intellectual and kind of hypnotizing charisma that made people want to be around them and made people want to join the movement. [00:56:09] Speaker B: You are, when you see Rand with Mike Wallace or you see with Phil Donahue, those old clips, she does have that hypnotizing quality. You can't turn away. You want to watch what this woman has to say. I don't know that Meyer had it to the degree that she had it, but certainly I think that's part of the reason people were attracted to her. She had the surety about her. She had a, I think a quiet charisma and a certainty with what she said. Meyer had some of those qualities as well. And I think, you know, that's an overlooked aspect of what, you know, we always point to the ideas. Well, the ideas were good. It's not enough to have good ideas. You need something more than that. I think, I think Meyer had more than that. I think Rand in that department sort of exuded that as well. [00:56:50] Speaker A: So you've chosen so many interesting topics for your book. Varied and, but all with a kind of a through line. What. How do you choose the topics of your books, the subjects of your books, and what are some of the topics you are considering tackling next? Or given your prolific output, perhaps you're already writing your next. [00:57:16] Speaker B: Well, it's, it's. I, I write a book. Do I want to read this book? Do I want to write this book? Do other people want to read this book? I mean, those are all questions that you'd have to consider. I think where we are now, there's fewer and fewer people reading fewer and few people reading books. I don't know, maybe I'll put on a TikTok out in a few years instead of a book. That seems to be where people are at. They're on the Internet, they're doing podcasts, they're doing things like what you're doing. And some people just have kind of dumb podcasts and silly ones. I mean, obviously you're dealing with intellectual matters here. But there are different ways to get the message out other than books and to tell stories other than books. I just hope by the time that I write my next book that people will still be reading books or else I'll kind of be out of a job. [00:58:04] Speaker A: Well, get them on Audible because a lot of our viewers consume books. I know I certainly do. Although again, given the plethora of bookmarks here, I enjoyed reading this one as well. So thank you, Daniel and thanks to all of you for joining us today. Please be sure to join us next week when I will be out of mumdani hell here in Manhattan and back in our podcast studio in Malibu to interview Darcy Olson, founder of the center for the Rights of Abused Children. She'll be joining us to talk about the center's mission to give children a voice, an advocate and the opportunity to thrive. So we'll see you then.