Daniel J. Flynn’s biography of Frank S. Meyer (1909–1972), one of American conservatism’s central theoreticians and organizers, is the product of a remarkable discovery. Nearly half a century after Meyer’s death, Flynn, a senior editor of The American Spectator and a visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution, tracked down hundreds of boxes of Meyer’s notes and correspondence, located in a half-abandoned warehouse owned by the family who had purchased Meyer’s house in Woodstock, New York.
As the conservative movement approached its maturity in the turbulent 1960s, Meyer was treated as a singular authority on what conservatism meant—The Man Who Invented Conservatism, as Flynn’s title has it. Key conservatives in politics, journalism, and academia took phone calls, usually late at night, from a man possessed by his sense of wisdom and conviction. Young conservatives made pilgrimage to Woodstock, eager for the town sage’s counsel. In a speech given to the Conservative Political Action Committee (CPAC) in 1981, the new president Ronald Reagan counted Meyer among the essential thinkers of the American conservative tradition.
Forty-five years after that speech, Meyer has sunk further into obscurity than any of his foes or allies in the early movement. He wrote only two proper books, and—contrary to Flynn’s assertion—his manifesto,
