This is the third essay in a symposium that reconsiders neglected conservative thinkers. The essays were originally presented at the 2026 meeting of the Academy of Philosophy and Letters. The next entry, on Willmoore Kendall, will be published tomorrow, August 27. You can read about Robert Nisbet here and Wilhelm Roepke here.

　　Mike Wallace told Frank Meyer on television in 1961 that maybe one in a thousand of his viewers knew of his interview subject. Sixty-five years later, that fraction probably diminishes to one in ten thousand.

　　To the extent people know Frank Meyer at all in 2026, they know him for the philosophy he bequeathed the conservative movement. Sometime after his death, Meyer morphed from a person to the personification of an idea. Meyer meant fusionism.

　　For the uninitiated, fusionism in its distilled form essentially tells traditionalists and libertarians that, although a tension exists between the two philosophies, they rightfully do not stand in conflict but in cooperation. Take away the Western tradition that undergirds liberty, and see freedom collapse. Take freedom out of the equation, and what traditionalists value similarly disintegrates. Virtue, for instance, requires freedom of choice as a precondition. Rote virtue, or compulsory virtue, does not amount to virtue. Although as esteemed a figure as Edmund Burke had said much the same thing in Reflections on the Revolution in France (“liberty, without which virtue cannot exist” and “what is liberty without wisdom, and without virtue?”), Meyer’s ideas struck some traditionalists as alien to conservatism.

　　When a perplexed youngster visiting his Woodstock home asked what, precisely, he did for a living, Meyer answered not writer or activist but political theorist. This suggests that Meyer probably would not lament too much the synonymity of his name with an idea. For those interested in the history of the twentieth century, the removal of Meyer’s biography from the overall story represents a great tragedy—a tragedy I sought to rectify in The Man Who Invented Conservatism: The Unlikely Life of Frank S. Meyer.

　　How did one of the most dynamic and interesting figures of the last century just disappear?

　　The answer stems from the two movements—communism and conservatism—he served from the ground floor upward. The latter buried his story in a warehouse through benign neglect; the former redacted his name from their history through malign suppression.

　　In April 1949, Meyer, dubbed a “mystery witness” in the press, helped send 11 of his former comrades to prison in the longest, most expensive trial in US history to that point. A wiretap captured British Communists, once word of Meyer’s involvement in the Smith Act Trial reached them, conspiring to rewrite the history of their movement to erase Meyer’s role in it.

　　On the left, an active campaign of suppression explains his missing story. On the right, it owed more to neglect. If one wants to write about William F. Buckley Jr., one looks at his papers in Yale’s Sterling Library. For National Review publisher Bill Rusher, one goes to the Library of Congress. The Hoover Institution held a much more incomplete Frank Meyer collection. It lacked letters, photographs, tax returns, and other material one normally kept over a lifetime. Where were Meyer’s papers?

　　The search led, after about two years, to a warehouse in Altoona, Pennsylvania. Amid 663 boxes, 15 contained tens of thousands of letters to include such correspondents as Joan Didion, Henry Kissinger, Whittaker Chambers, and Harold Laski, decades of tax returns that illustrated his mania for the telephone through bills that exceeded a quarter of his income, and observations on scrap paper about his 1926 close encounters with his best friend’s father, Eugene O’Neill.

　　Frank Meyer’s afterlife at its kindest transformed his name into the synonym for an idea, fusionism, and at its cruelest squelched his name entirely.

　　What else did the witting and unwitting censors remove from the story?

　　British intelligence files contain references to Meyer as the “founder” of the British Communist student movement. Upon his arrival at Oxford in the late 1920s, the party had zero presence on the student body. Meyer co-founded the October Club, which led to the party counting affiliations from more than 300 students. He very quickly, after joining the party, became the director of its student bureau and a member of the small board overseeing the Communist Party of Great Britain.

　　British intelligence began to notice Meyer because he behaved as an activist-exhibitionist. Meyer strangely engineered a lecture by H. G. Wells at Oxford for the purpose of publicly berating his guest. As a graduate student under Bronislaw Malinowski, Meyer became the president of the London School of Economics student government after Krishna Menon, later Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru’s chief aide, fixed the vote. The target on his back mostly came from the brashness of not merely calling for the violent overthrow of Ramsay MacDonald, but for doing so as the Communist leader surreptitiously dated the prime minister’s youngest daughter. They shared walks, tea dates, and, most of all, ideas.

　　“Come here at 7.0—or if you don’t like the idea of Downing Street—even though I am the sole occupant at the moment—fix any other place you like,” Sheila MacDonald wrote Meyer.

　　Predictably, the British government moved to deport Meyer. Just as predictably, he became a cause célèbre. Philosopher Bertrand Russell, novelist E. M. Forster, and other dignitaries signed a petition demanding that the British government allow Meyer to stay. Future prime minister Clement Attlee spoke in Meyer’s defense in the House of Commons. Michael Straight, future publisher of The New Republic, recalled marching around London chanting “Free Frank Meyer!” with a mob of students.

　　One can call for the prime minister’s overthrow. One can date the prime minister’s daughter. One cannot long do both.

　　The British government deported Meyer on June 1, 1934. He quickly went to work in France on peace activism for future East German prime minister Walter Ulbricht, a man already implicated in a murder plot back home and who later constructed the Berlin Wall. Back in the United States, Meyer operated for almost a decade as something like a mid-level manager within the party. He directed the Chicago Workers School and wrote for the party press. But not until he wrote a letter to American party leader Earl Browder did he regain a spot at the highest levels of the party that he had enjoyed from an extremely young age in Great Britain. The letter influenced or foreshadowed dramatic changes in the Communist Party. Strangely, and more consequentially, it shaped the unborn conservative movement.

　　Meyer knew that the party enjoyed more public support when it touted “Communism Is 20th Century Americanism” as a 1930s slogan. He implored Browder for “a conscious effort pervading all our work to make our Party constitution real when it speaks of our theory as the fusing of the ideas of the American leaders with the ideas of Marx, Engels and Lenin.”

　　Again, he uses a variant of “fusion” in his letter to Browder:

　　A people’s America and a socialist America must be presented all the time—not simply in an occasional article or on the 4th of July—as a natural, integral outgrowth of our whole past history, and presented in terms of our tradition. And this will only come about when our leaders from top to bottom are as familiar with the struggles of Jefferson and Jackson and Lincoln, and what we have inherited from those struggles, as they are with 1848, 1902, 1917, and fuse these understandings into one tool.

　　Browder followed Meyer’s counsel. Then, in 1945, the Soviet Union, through a letter sent under the signature of French Communist leader Jacques Duclos, essentially kicked him out of his post. Moscow signaled a coming Cold War, a return to class conflict rather than class collaboration, and an American party again tightly controlled from a foreign country. Browder (like Meyer) preferred a party that fused Marx with the American tradition and held a degree of what he imagined as independence from the Kremlin. Meyer shortly thereafter left Communism behind. He took fusionism with him.

　　If Marxism did not fit into the American tradition, what did? This question dominated Meyer’s last quarter century. He ultimately concluded that the American tradition amounted to freedom. If English traditionalists conserved the monarchy and Italian traditionalists the Catholic Church, then American traditionalists should conserve America’s big tradition: the American Founding. It became clear to Meyer that the American Founding meant freedom. American conservatives, therefore, are called to conserve freedom, which stands as the American tradition.

　　As conservatism became less about the ideas inside our heads than the hats worn atop them, thinkers such as Meyer, Kendall, Wilhelm Röpke, and Robert Nisbet drifted further down the memory hole.

　　Meyer, who begged off a commissar assignment to lord over Greenwich Village’s Jefferson School during his Communist days, became a sort of commissar on the right. The mere title of his “Principles and Heresies” National Review column articulated this. At the magazine, he led a clique that carried on a cold war of their own with James Burnham over the direction of National Review. Though he nudged his fellow editors to withhold a Richard Nixon endorsement in 1960 and to back Barry Goldwater in 1964, he increasingly lost the battle for the soul of the magazine to his more pragmatic, less ideological nemesis. But he won the battle for the soul of the broader burgeoning conservative movement. His slim “big book,” 1962’s In Defense of Freedom (now published by Liberty Fund), further articulated his big idea, fusionism.

　　“Society and the state were made for individual men,” he wrote therein, “not men for them.”

　　Perhaps more as an activist than theorist, Meyer imposed a fusionist stamp on the postwar right. The Johnny Appleseed of Communism among British students revived this activist-extraordinaire persona. Present at the creation of National Review and Young Americans for Freedom, he attended the founding meeting and wrote the platform of the Conservative Party of New York. Along with several others, he founded the American Conservative Union and the Philadelphia Society. One finds Meyer’s fingerprints all over the skeletal structure of the postwar conservative movement.

　　These fingerprints remained long after Meyer’s death. Aside from fusionism, a lit cigarette, a nocturnal existence, and a telephone, Meyer became known for transforming his Woodstock, New York, home into a salon of sorts for the postwar right. Weekend guests included such peers at the magazine asWillmoore Kendall, Brent Bozell, and future New Yorker dance critic Arlene Croce. Meyer also attracted a younger crowd that ensured that his ideas lived on after he did. When young conservatives talked of going to Woodstock in the 1960s, it meant something very different than the famous concert bearing that town’s name. In the Meyer home, pilgrims ate, drank, declaimed Shakespeare, and debated into the morning part of the night. Visitors from the rising generation included such future luminaries as Heritage Foundation founder Ed Feulner, Pulitzer Prize-winner Garry Wills, American Spectator editor R. Emmett Tyrrell, essayist Joan Didion, Ronald Reagan National Security Advisor Richard Allen, and Fifth Circuit Judge Jerry Smith. “I have never experienced as relaxed,” future radio host David Brudnoy reflected after his first visit, “and at the same time as mentally taxing a weekend.”

　　Frank Meyer died a few hours before Easter, and a few hours after he converted to Catholicism, in 1972. With Richard Nixon back from China, an anemic primary of the moderate president by John Ashbrook exposing the weakness of the conservative movement, and anticommunism in retreat in Vietnam, Meyer’s ideas looked at aphelion. But with the election of a conservative president in 1980—a moment he had predicted in 1960—the seeds Meyer had so long ago planted finally came to harvest.

　　Frank Meyer’s afterlife at its kindest transformed his name into the synonym for an idea, fusionism, and at its cruelest squelched his name entirely. When observers wrote about him at all, they called him “underappreciated” and “forgotten by contemporary conservatives.” As conservatism became less about the ideas inside our heads than the hats worn atop them, thinkers such as Meyer, Kendall, Wilhelm Röpke, and Robert Nisbet drifted further down the memory hole.

　　The right’s entombment of Meyer’s papers in an old soda warehouse in Coal Country, Pennsylvania, and the left’s deliberate campaign of censorship combined to posthumously muzzle Frank Meyer. But once upon an early time in the conservative movement, William F. Buckley referred to Frank Meyer as “Mission Control,” David Brudnoy labeled him “the Sage of Woodstock” and the “cohesive force of contemporary American conservatism,” National Review publisher Bill Rusher called him the “the Master,” and Australian academic Hiram Caton likened him to “the central nervous system of the body conservative, the only man who was in constant touch with what all of us in the remote regions were thinking.”