The Organizer of Victory: Frank S. Meyer | The American Spectator

The Man Who Invented Conservatism: The Unlikely Life of Frank S. Meyer
By Daniel J. Flynn
Encounter Books, 544 pages, $41.99
General George Marshall was called the organizer of America’s victory in the Second World War. Frank Meyer could be called the organizer of American conservatism’s political victory in the second half of the 20th century. In an intellectually scintillating and crisply written new biography of Meyer titled The Man Who Invented Conservatism: The Unlikely Life of Frank S. Meyer, Daniel J. Flynn, a senior editor of The American Spectator and a Hoover Institution visiting fellow, utilizing a heretofore undiscovered treasure trove of Meyer’s papers kept in a warehouse in Altoona, Pennsylvania, marshals compelling evidence that Frank Meyer — the former communist-turned-conservative — not only foresaw conservatism’s political rise in the United States but labored intellectually and organizationally to help bring it about. Flynn draws a not-so-straight line from Meyer’s conversion from communism to conservatism and his fusionist approach to politics to the election of Ronald Reagan as president — modern American conservatism’s greatest political victory. (RELATED: Finding the Lost Papers of the Conservative Movement)
Flynn draws a not-so-straight line from Meyer’s conversion from communism to conservatism and his fusionist approach to politics…
It is a not-so-straight line because Frank Meyer’s life and politics were anything but a straight line. Born to well-off Jewish parents in Newark in 1909, Meyer attended Newark Academy, Princeton, then Oxford’s Balliol College and the London School of Economics. Meyer was intellectually smart but more interested in women than his studies. And, Flynn notes, he soon abandoned “his mother’s Judaism and his father’s capitalism,” becoming “intensely Marxist” while at Balliol. So much so that British authorities took note and kept watch on the young communist’s activities, which included writing for Marxist journals…