Show notes
Frank Meyer was the father of fusionism and one of the key builders of the conservative movement in the mid-twentieth century. That’s despite spending his early years as a serious communist agitator. James Patterson and Daniel Flynn discuss the evolution of Meyer’s thought and the impact of his legacy. Flynn’s book synthesizes a large quantity of recently-uncovered material on Meyer, offering a more complete and nuanced picture than has been available heretofore. What lessons does Meyer’s life and career offer for the conservative movement today? Related Links The Man Who Invented Conservatism by Daniel J. Flynn“A Soldier for Synthesis” by Rachel Lu (Law & Liberty book review)“Fusionism: The Only Game in Town” by Alexander William Salter“Conservative Fusion,” a Law & Liberty Podcast episode featuring Charles C. W. Cooke, Samuel Goldman, and Stephanie Slade, hosted by James Patterson Transcript James Patterson: Hello and welcome to the Law and Liberty Podcast. My name is James Patterson, Contributing Editor to Law & Liberty and Associate Professor of Public Affairs at the Institute of American Civics at the University of Tennessee. Today with me is our guest, Daniel J. Flynn. He’s an author and columnist, Senior Editor at the American Spectator, and he’s written for the Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, Boston Globe, New York Post, City Journal, and National Review. He lives in Massachusetts and is a former US Marine Reservist, and has recently launched a new YouTube channel called Right-Wing Wilderness. So once you have completely listened to this podcast, go subscribe to his YouTube channel and like all of the videos that are up there. So Mr. Flynn, thank you for coming onto the Law & Liberty Podcast. Daniel J. Flynn: Appreciate you having me. James Patterson: Okay, so this is about your book, The Man Who Invented Conservatism, and that man is Frank Meyer. Mr. Flynn, why is it not Edmund Burke? Daniel J. Flynn: Well, I don’t think anyone invented conservatism, and the title is sort of a joke. I think a lot of the reviewers sort of miss that “don’t judge a book by its cover” admonition. And I guess I’m to blame for that because I did put that on the cover, so I can’t complain too much. What I explained in the book is that Frank Meyer was coming over from communism, being sort of a heavy hitter in the Communist Party. When he came over to conservatism, he thought, well, it takes a system to beat a system. Why don’t these people on the right have their act together, and why don’t they have a system? And that missed the point, sort of a category mistake. Conservatism is sort of an anti-system. It’s something that developed organically; it didn’t spin out of some theorist’s mind. And so, when there are reviewers and others saying, “Well, he’s wrong. It wasn’t Meyer who invented conservatism, it was Edmund Burke or Bill Buckley.” I think all those people miss something, and that conservatism is not something that was invented. It’s something that develops. And I think that’s what Meyer figured out over the course of the last 20 or so years of his life in pursuing what he’s known for, which is fusionism. In pursuing fusionism, rooting that in the American tradition, in the American founding, he realized that conservatism wasn’t a system. It was something had to be rooted to something. And in America, the natural place to root conservatism would be the American founding James Patterson: Yeah, the Law & Liberty audience is probably more familiar with the Frank Meyer of the second half of the book. So before we get to that, let’s talk about the first half of the book. So what was Frank Meyer’s childhood like, and what accounts for this rather dramatic shift once he becomes a young man and becomes interested in Marxism? Daniel J. Flynn: Frank Meyer was born in 1909 in Newark, New Jersey to a very wealthy family. The father was an industrialist. The mother was sort of a Jewish do-gooder. So he had these two poles on him, one was the temple and the other was his father’s capitalism. He goes to the Newark Academy, and the earliest writing I have of him was when he’s 14. And it’s a real spirited defense of Judaism and saying, how does anyone say that Judaism is sort of losing its followers? Come into the temple on the holy days. You’ll see for yourself there’s a lot of enthusiasm there. Well, that was when he was 14, and that’s for the temple newspaper. And when he’s 16, he’s writing an article, an award-winning article, for the Newark Academy, defending Bolsheviks and toying with atheism. Something happens to him in his early years, like I think a lot of things happen to people in those years. When he goes to Princeton, initially, he’s denied entry to Princeton, and I have the letters from the director of admissions there. He says, Frank Meyer doesn’t strike me even as a Hebrew of the better type. Can’t we steer him to some other college? There are plenty of fine, clean-cut Christians that we should have a place for, and Frank Meyer will just take a place from one of those people away. Now Frank didn’t see that, he stayed at it, he wins admission to Princeton in his next year, and when he is at Princeton, he encounters a student body of those fine clean-cut Christian Americans that the director of admissions was talking about, and he’s left out. Psychologically, he’s in a bad spot and he finds an attraction to Milton’s Satan. He starts writing poems about Satan, poems about young women. There was a woman in Newark, Dorothy Canning Miller, who later becomes a huge figure in American art, the curator at the Museum of Modern Art. When Frank is about 20 years old, he loses his virginity to Dorothy Canning Miller, an older woman. And here goes a pattern. Frank is pursuing these pleasurable aspects of life, particularly women. He starts writing poetry about women. He starts writing poetry about Satan. And it’s not too much of a jump in the alphabet from Satan to Stalin, and I don’t think it’s too much of a jump otherwise. And so Frank starts toying with the idea of communism. By the time he gets to Oxford (he drops out of Princeton and he goes to Oxford), in his later time at Oxford where it’s a much more welcoming environment than Princeton was for him, he found something called the October Club, which is still around, which is a Marxist, explicitly Marxist, organization. And he marches his friends to the Communist Party of Great Britain’s headquarters in London, with a guy named Prince Mirsky (who in a few years dies in the Gulag) and they all join the Communist Party of Great Britain. Frank becomes a board member of the party. He’s the leader of the student bureau. And in fact, if you look at the MI five and MI six files of Frank Meyer, they call him the founder of the Student Communist Movement in Great Britain. So it’s unlikely that you’d have an American be the founder of something like this, but that’s what Frank Meyer found himself in the early 1930s. James Patterson: It’s an incredible story because on the one hand, it really does speak to the time where the Ivy Leagues are very concerned about preserving a very specific identity for admissions, when they would place caps on admissions to Jews for example. But on the other hand, it’s a familiar story even now, where you have well-to-do Americans sort of almost rejecting the lives that they’d lived before in favor of some kind of imagined superior alternative. It’s almost like a rejection of his Jewish upper-middle-class upbringing, which is repeated endlessly in not just Jewish but other religious backgrounds. But the young vigor that typifies Frank Meyer is not exclusively limited to Dorothy Canon Miller, is it? Daniel J. Flynn: No, it’s not. And when he’s in Great Britain, he is getting a lot of attention from MI5 in MI6 when he goes abroad and they’re taking notes on him, they take 160 pages of notes, they talk about what tweed he wears, whether he shaved that day, what bars he drinks at. They do a black bag job on his apartment. They put a mail cover on his correspondence. So they note all sorts of very obscure things about him, which is very helpful to a biographer. They leave out, and for reasons that you could probably imagine why they left it out, but they leave out the one glaring aspect of Frank Meyer’s time in Great Britain, and that is this. All that time, he’s calling for the violent overthrow of the government of Prime Minister Ramsey McDonald. And during that time, he is surreptitiously dating Ramsey McDonald’s youngest daughter. I have a letter from Sheila McDonald to Frank Meyer saying, come on over to 10 Downing. The coast is clear. My dad’s gone. We’ll have dinner. Seven o’clock sound good for you? So you pick the person in the history of communism, the romantic figure, Che Guevara, Jack Reed, whoever you want to pick—none of them had the guts to pull off a caper like that. And it shows you Frank Meyer’s confidence, his charisma, but it also shows you his recklessness. The idea that he would be out there, such an upfront figure saying we need to overthrow the government of Great Britain, and at the same time he was secretly dating the Prime Minister’s daughter. I mean that to me, that’s just a wild story and one that I think until this book came out was completely overlooked. James Patterson: So Frank Meyer was a true believer in this stuff, not just a cynical agent, right? Both when he came here, went to Britain, and then came back. Daniel J. Flynn: Correct. He’s an ideologue, he’s a Marxist fanatic, he’s a firebrand. And his dating of Sheila McDonald leads rather predictably to deportation hearings against him. And at that point, he becomes a cause celeb. And even though he’s a Marxist, I think he really liked being sort of the first amongst equals, if you will. All the attention that he was getting in Great Britain, you had Bertrand Russell, the philosopher, and E.M. Forster, who wrote A Passage to India and Howard’s End, signing a petition saying, keep Frank Meyer in the country. Clement Attlee, who would later become the Prime Minister of England, defends Meyer on the floor of the House of Commons. Michael Straight, who later was the publisher of the New Republic, got caught up in Meyer’s charisma and joined the Communist Party, became an agent. Meyer was never an agent, but he became a Soviet agent. He remembers at the time marching around London with the whole mobs of students chanting, “Free Frank Meyer, free Frank Meyer.” So he became really like one of these “free Angela Davis,” “free Mumia” figures in Great Britain. But you know, you can date the Prime Minister’s daughter, or you can call for the Prime Minister’s overthrow. If you do both, you’re not going to last there if you’re not an Englishman. And so he gets deported on June 1st, 1934. And in keeping with the ironies and paradoxes of his life, he immediately goes to work in Paris for a guy named Walter Ulbricht. And Ulbricht was the guy who constructed the Berlin Wall later. At that point, he was sort of an unknown Marxist on the run from Germany because he had killed two policemen. Meyer goes to work for him as a peace activist. They’re engaging in peace activism for Stalin. So here’s a guy like Ulbrich, who is a very stern, rigid figure. I mean, he later becomes the longest-serving dictator of that short-lived country known as East Germany. And there’s Meyer working for him in the summer of 1934, gets kicked back to the United States, and it takes him about 10 years, but he finally regains his spot. He’s at the highest levels of the British Communist Party, and in the American Party, he’s more like a mid-level manager. He’s the director of the Chicago Workers School, but it takes him about 10 years to get back to that level that he was at in Great Britain. And for his final year or so in the party, he’s at that highest level of the party. James Patterson: And probably not dating a member of the Roosevelt family. Daniel J. Flynn: No, he married one of his students at the Chicago Worker School, Elsie Meyer. And when they met, she was married to some other communist, but with the communist morality being what it was, they weren’t going to let that get in the way of the red-hot attraction that they had. And so she dumped him and same week she gets a divorce, she marries Frank Meyer, and they lived happily ever after for the rest of their lives. James Patterson: You have this true believer. And you know what? With true believers, you go one of two ways. Either they self-destruct within their own ideologies, or something about communism starts to bother them, right? Especially when it’s managed by Soviet influence, which is very calculating, very non-ideological in its approach. And this has something to do with Meyer’s experience with the Second World War. Daniel J. Flynn: A lot of it does, definitely. He had a friend in England, his understudy, who was a guy by the name of John Cornford. Meyer later names his son “John Cornford Meyer”; he had that much of an influence on Meyer’s life. Cornford was the great grandson of Charles Darwin, and Meyer ropes him into communism as a teenager, as like a 16, 17-year-old kid. And when Meyer leaves, Cornford takes Meyer’s spot over there. He’s the head of the student bureau. He goes over to Spain and he dies the day after his 21st birthday. And I have to think that Meyer felt great guilt for this. Meyer had also sent men to their deaths as a recruiter for the Spanish Civil War in the United States. So Meyer tries to join up to fight Hitler in World War II. And the Communist Party says, no, I’m sorry, we need you here. And he thinks, this is odd. They’re exhorting everyone else to go and join the fight against Nazism, but they won’t let me go. This goes on for about eight months. And finally in frustration they say, okay, you want to go? Go. He goes, and it’s revelatory. In the squad bay that he’s in, he finally meets the proletariat that he’s been talking about all these years. And they’re not the same people that Marx had described. These are not people that are itching to overthrow the government. They’re just looking to make their lives better. And he’s stunned by this because he had lived a very socially insulated life. He grew up in a hotel, he went to Oxford and Princeton, his family was wealthy. So this is revelatory. He gets injured in Officer Candidate School in Fort Benning, Georgia and it takes him over a year to recoup. He gets surgeries on both of his feet. James Patterson: Yeah, he had some sort of problem with his feet, they had very high arches? I was trying to understand what this is. It was pretty bad-sounding. Daniel J. Flynn: Yeah, something like that. And he’s 33 when he joins the military, so he’s … James Patterson: He’s in trouble. Daniel J. Flynn: Yeah. You’re breaking down. And so he doesn’t go and fight, but he sort of washes out of the military. But that year of recuperation, he’s thinking, and he’s questioning, and questioning and communism do not go together. And in desperation, him and a guy named Louis Budenz, they’re talking in Chicago. Budenz was the editor of a communist paper out there; Meyer had been the head of the Chicago Worker School. And they think, back in the thirties, the heyday of communism, was when they were touting these slogans, like “Communism is 20th century Americanism.” We need to get back to that. And so he writes this letter to Earl Browder that has a dramatic effect, not just on communism but on conservatism. And Meyer couldn’t have foreseen this when he tells Browder that the Communist Party needs to fuse Marxism with the American tradition, and that they need to do this not just on the 4th of July, but every day of the year. And he repeatedly uses a variant of this word “fusion.” So that comes much later. But that idea—Meyer comes to realize, well, Marxism doesn’t fit with the American tradition. He’s a fanatic, but he’s not such a fanatic as to lose hi…
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