Finding the Lost Papers of the Conservative Movement | The American Spectator

Three years ago Tuesday, I left an Altoona, Pennsylvania, warehouse with the Lost Papers of the Conservative Movement.

My book largely based on that discovery, The Man Who Invented Conservatism: The Unlikely Life of Frank S. Meyer, coincidentally comes out, coincidentally, on the anniversary of that find in an old soda warehouse.

The trove included such curios as Joan Didion’s homemade Christmas cards featuring black-and-whites of daughter Quintana Roo, a Garry Wills wedding invitation, and Frank Meyer’s London School of Economics dance cards indicating the songs he cut the rug to and what women joined him in doing so.

A thousand colorful letters — and not just because so many sport his trademark green ink — to and from Willmoore Kendall, William F. Buckley Jr.’s teacher and mentor, make for the most gossipy (and tragic) reading as they detail sex, booze, and betrayal.

“Your picture of me as quarreling all the time with all my ‘friends’ is quite false,” Kendall writes in one. “Far as I know, the onliest quarrel I have going with anybody I’ve deemed a friend in recent years is a quarrel with Frank Meyer. WFB doesn’t count here — nobody has heard me refer to him as a friend for many years, and it isn’t a quarrel I have going with him — really the routine conduct of hostilities with an enemy.”

Willi Schlamm, a co-founder of National Review, visits a decade after his exile from the magazine to the disappointment of what it had become. He confessed to Meyer that the idea for National Review was to start “a veritable conspiracy of friendship.” He lamented that “the great adventure grew into another instrument of careerism, of one self-centered s.o.b. fighting against the other, of disloyalty and animosity and juvenile ambition.”

If not for a great deal of luck, a couple who opted to keep instead of discard ancient ephemera, and some persistence, then the massive collection seemed imminently doomed to a landfill or incinerator.

In 2020, I started wishing Frank Meyer’s papers into existence. This tactic, which I began employing immediately prior to every Christmas starting around the age of four, had never once succeeded. I nevertheless again resorted to it.

COVID instilled such desperation. Major archives from which I aimed to retrieve important documents had all closed in response to the pandemic. When I submitted a Freedom of Information Act request in 2021, it seemed an end-around on the COVID impediment. I received a response from the federal government in 2022 that noted that it had only then processed requests from 2014 but because of COVID, my request for Frank Meyer’s FBI files may take several years longer than normal.

I still needed to write a book.

The Hoover Institution touted Frank Meyer’s papers. But the index indicated something amiss. It lacked, for example, letters and tax returns, two categories of material a mid-20th-century figure would normally retain over the course of a lifetime, but overflowed with articles clipped from the newspaper, items one often comes across in archives that nevertheless amount to the least helpful material in terms of writing a biography. The rhythm of the collection sounded all wrong.

Where were Frank Meyer’s papers?

I started making inquiries with people who knew him. In this way, I obtained property records for his farmhouse, letters concerning his book In Defense of Freedom, and correspondence about him. This was progress, but not enough to write a book.

Again, where were Frank Meyer’s papers?

After several conversations with the Meyer children, I heard of a couple, Karen Myers and David Zincavage, who bought their home and everything in it. The couple had long since sold the farmhouse, which they had curiously used not as a residence but largely as a storage facility for their books. That struck as a clue: this pair revered the written word to such a degree that they bought a house to store their accumulated books.

When I called the couple, David earnestly insisted that they had donated Frank’s papers to the Hoover Institution. I insisted that he had inadvertently kept some. We went back and forth, and months later, he nonchalantly noted the existence of a warehouse. Take me to your warehouse, I immediately thought. He initially doubted it contained Frank’s papers, but eventually warmed to the possibility. Still, he noted that he kept a thousand large moving boxes there, and nobody could go through them all. I insisted that I could.

I finally, two years after I started my search for Frank Meyer’s lost papers, entered a decrepit warehouse below the Allegheny Mountains.

Over three days, I removed 663 boxes from rows of pallets. I opened them with box cutters, inspected the contents, retaped them, and restacked them. This laborious process yielded 15 boxes containing Frank Meyer’s papers. The collection included letters from J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Leo Strauss, J. Edgar Hoover, Evelyn Waugh, Henry Kissinger, Rose Wilder Lane, Harold Laski, Murray Rothbard, Barry Goldwater, and hundreds of others.

David Zincavage and Karen Myers had, in a literal sense, saved history.

For 19 months, I read and took notes on every document — something north of 100,000 — retrieved from the warehouse. A reviewer pointed out that 43 percent of the source citations refer to material from the warehouse. That means that on most days, I found information that ended up in the book. But on some days, I found nothing useful. Like finding the papers, processing them became a glacial endeavor that relied on delayed gratification.

But the mining yielded nuggets: Here, evidence of Meyer’s affair with the prime minister of Great Britain’s youngest daughter, as he called for overthrowing her father’s government; there, a heretofore suppressed internal National Review memo from William Rickenbacker depicting James Burnham as a villainous, passive-aggressive coward over 14 brutal pages.

This was paydirt.

I merely needed to patiently place together thousands of informational pieces to reveal the puzzle’s picture. Some fit there, some fit somewhere else, and most did not fit at all.

For people who believe in history for history’s sake, finding new information about old events matters. A cover-band quality colors books that rely heavily on other books for sources. For avid readers, such books begin to feel like reruns. This warehouse find necessarily reorients our understanding of Frank Meyer, National Review, and the history of the conservative movement. To borrow a phrase from collecting, it amounts to “new old stock.” Even for experts on the history of the American Right, The Man Who Invented Conservatism overflows with information unknown and surprising to them.

Frank Meyer starred in perhaps the last amazing, untold story of the 20th Century. That I finally get to tell it in bound form beginning today owes to the rare understanding of the longtime keepers of this collection that not all ephemera is ephemeral.

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