The Man Who Invented Conservatism

His life was soaked in sex, secret agents, suicide, and even a dose of Satanism. Then he became the unlikely idea man for the American Right. The Man Who Invented Conservatism tells the greatest story of the 20th Century never told. Frank S. Meyer’s redacted tale weaves, in ways big and small but always consequentially, through Eugene O’Neill, H.G. Wells, James Michener, Rose Wilder Lane, Walter Ulbricht, William F. Buckley, J. Edgar Hoover, Barry Goldwater, Bob Dylan, Henry Kissinger, and others who created the 20th Century. And Meyer leaves his mark on his times, too, first as the Johnny Appleseed of Communism among the youth of Great Britain, then by making the gut-wrenching decision to bear witness against former comrades in the longest trial in U.S. history, and finally as postwar conservatism’s intellectual architect.   Surveilled UK Communists reacted to Meyer testifying against his American comrades by secretly agreeing that they would “now have to re-write their history,” meaning the erasure of the man described by an English Communist as “the founder of the Student C.P. movement.” Prior to his defection from the American Communist Party, where he became party leader Earl Browder’s acolyte, he ironically developed an early version of the theoretical blueprint for postwar conservatism. Present at the creation of National Review, Meyer wrote “In Defense of Freedom”, which slowly became canonical reading on the American Right. Like the Communists caught censoring his role in history, conservatives suppressed Meyer’s biography by neglect due to the strange disappearance of his papers, which remained hidden in an old warehouse until discovered and unearthed for this biography. This book rewrites the history of the conservative movement through these Lost Papers of the American Right that expose the rivalries, jealousies, friendships, and fights among the makers of the movement.