Hesperian Trivia #9
Deserving of greater fame
Question: What disciple of Jeremy Bentham wrote a critique of the political philosophy of John Stuart Mill that Richard Posner described as “an audacious and radical challenge to classical liberalism” and “a (neglected) classic of conservative thought”?
Hint #1: Benjamin Disraeli said that his position as a judge was unfortunate, for he otherwise could have become the leader of the Conservative Party of the future. In his sole bid for elective office, however, he stood for Parliament as a Liberal and finished last in the poll.
Hint #2: His father was such an influential figure in the relations between Britain and its colonies that he was often referred to as the “Over-Secretary of the Colonial Office”.
Hint #3: His friends included Macaulay, Carlyle, James Anthony Froude and Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
Hint #4: He made his reputation in India, holding a position that his father had turned down in favor of Macaulay.
Hint #5: Besides the work referred to in the question, he authored a three volume history of English criminal law.
Hint #6: He had a Bloomsbury niece.
Last week’s answer and question:
FRANK STRAUS MEYER
Question: What English-educated former Communist strove to implant nuclear energy in American conservatism?
Frank S. Meyer (hereinafter “Frank”, as I knew him personally and am now old enough to call him by his praenomen) is a conservative thinker who particularly deserves to reenter the dialogue on the Right at the present moment. Now, as then, conservatism has sharp divisions. They aren’t the same divisions. In place of libertarians vs. traditionalists vs. “new conservatives”,1 we have “freedom conservatives” vs. “national conservatives” vs. populists, and conservatism as a whole is much stronger politically and intellectually than it was in the immediate aftermath of World War II. There is, nevertheless, the same sense of a fragmented Right that has a clearer idea of means than of ends.
Frank’s political philosophy received the moniker “fusionism”, because it had room for both freedom and tradition, viewing each as crippled without the other. The label was misleading, though, because Frank did not simply take incompatible concepts and ram them together. Rather, he developed a distinctive point of view during his own evolution from a Communist functionary to a senior editor of National Review. This isn’t the place to try to summarize his thought in a couple of paragraphs. His Wikipedia article is, by Wiki standards, a pretty good introduction. His In Defense of Freedom and Related Essays (with an introduction by a mutual friend, William C. Dennis) is still in print, and The Conservative Mainstream, a collection of over 100 of his “Principles and Heresies” columns in National Review, isn’t hard to find on AbeBooks.
Though born in Newark, Frank received his higher education (after a year at Princeton) from Oxford University and the London School of Economics. He arrived in England in the summer of 1930 and soon became active in the Communist Party. He organized a Party cell at Oxford, then a much larger one at the LSE, where he was elected president of the student union. He also led delegations of young Communists to left-wing conferences in other countries and was made a member of the Party’s central committee. In the words of his biographer, “he was clearly a party member first; everything else was secondary.”2
Eventually, his agitation became intolerable to the LSE’s director, Sir William Beveridge,3 who described him as “a very red politician from America” and expelled him from the School. The Party decided that he should return to his homeland, which he did in late 1934 with a letter of introduction from British CP general secretary Harry Pollitt.4
Hint #1: While he was a student, he and his comrades succeeded in persuading a university organization to rerun an election after the discovery of a single invalid ballot – which had been cast for their own Communist candidate.
This anecdote Frank related to me himself. I don’t recall whether it took place at Oxford or the LSE – probably the latter.
In a close and contentious student union election, the Communist candidate narrowly lost. Frank and his comrades then learned that one of their side’s voters had been ineligible to cast a ballot. They protested to the elections committee that the procedures for verifying eligibility had been inadequate. There might be other invalid votes. Therefore, the election should be rerun. The committee was persuaded. A new vote was held, and this time the Communist came in first.
One might say that Frank was a forerunner of Marc Elias.
Hint #2: He began to walk away from Communism when he suffered trouble with his feet.
Repatriated to America, Frank was sent to Chicago, where he worked on the Party’s educational programs, including heading the Chicago Workers’ School. That was a difficult period for anyone who wanted to remain loyal to the Party line. The U.S. Communist Party, after years of denouncing their country, had been ordered by Moscow to proclaim that Communism was the true Americanism. Then came the Stalin-Hitler Pact and anti-war agitation, followed abruptly by embrace of the war effort when Hitler invaded the Soviet Union. Through all the changes, Frank held on to the faith. He later wrote a book, The Moulding of Communists (see Hint #5), that described the mindset of the Party loyalist and the techniques by which it was fostered and maintained. Fealty to Great Stalin was, however, a strain. A friend who saw him soon after the Nazi-Soviet invasion of Poland said later that “Meyer was reaching the end of the Communist tether”.
When America entered World War II, Frank sought, and after months of delay received, the Party’s permission to enlist in the Army. His military career was very short. He suffered a foot deformity that made it impossible to meet the military’s physical requirements. Basic training aggravated the condition to the point that surgery was required. During a long convalescence, Frank read extensively, particularly American history, and began to see works like the Federalist Papers as more than simple defenses of class interests.
In late 1943 he went so far as to write a long letter to Earl Browder, the general secretary of the CPUSA, expressing doubts about the Party’s doctrine and practice. Browder was at that time undertaking a kind of glasnost avant la lettre, so Frank’s heresies had no repercussions within the Party until 1945. Early that year, Browder was purged. Frank, now identified as unsound, was relegated to unimportant tasks. In the fall, he resigned from teaching at the Party’s Jefferson School and ceased to think of himself as a Party member.
Hint #3: After his break with Communism, he and his wife settled in a town that later became synonymous with the counterculture.
While teaching at the Chicago Workers’ School, Frank met Elsie Bown, who had joined the Party while a Radcliffe undergraduate. They married in 1940. Her doubts about Communism grew alongside his. After he broke with the Party, she resisted pressure to get a divorce.
The couple faced the immediate problem of restarting their lives outside the structure created by the Party. One difficulty was their location. In 1944, while they were still in good standing, they had purchased a home in Woodstock, New York. The town’s population included a large contingent of Party members and fellow travelers, who turned hostile toward ex-Communist neighbors.
There was also a non-negligible risk of worse fates than ostracism when Frank appeared before Congressional committees to testify about the American Communist Party. It was at this time that he and Elsie developed the habit of sleeping during the day and keeping watch vigilantly at night. Frank’s nocturnal schedule continued for the rest of his life.
Despite being shunned by former associates, the Meyers stayed put and lived in Woodstock for the rest of their lives. Their house was remarkable for the books stacked from floor to ceiling along every wall. Frank used to say that they were an economical form of insulation.
Hint #4: He named one of his two sons after a left-wing icon. He and his wife home schooled the boys. They both became chess masters and graduated from their parents’ second choice of an Ivy League university. The younger son has served for many years as president of a major conservative organization.
Among Frank’s Communist comrades in Britain was John Cornford (1915-36), who became a close friend. Frank and Elsie named their first child, John Cornford Meyer, after him.
Digression on John Cornford:
Frank met Cornford, six years his junior, while both were working for the Party in London. They came from strikingly different milieus. Frank’s father was a Jewish businessman from New Jersey, Cornford’s a Cambridge classics don whose translation of Plato’s Republic was the textbook of one of my undergraduate courses. Cornford’s mother was Charles Darwin’s granddaughter and a poet of some contemporary renown. Cornford himself was precocious. He began writing verse (and criticizing his mother’s, which he thought old-fashioned) in his early teens, enrolled at Trinity College Cambridge at age 16 and graduated with a First in History at age 18. He then became a full-time Communist activist. Harry Pollitt thought highly of him.
At the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in July 1936, he rushed to Spain, legendarily armed with his father’s old service revolver, to join the fight for the Spanish Republic. The local Communists turned him away; he had neglected to bring documentation of his membership in the Party. He instead signed up with the militia of the dissident Marxist POUM (Partido Obrero de Unificación Marxista) and is believed to have been the first English volunteer to see action at the front.
After about a month with POUM, he returned briefly to England, recruited a score of comrades, obtained endorsements of his ideological soundness (no doubt after apologizing profusely for the error of association with the POUM deviationists) and, on arriving again in Spain, enlisted in the International Brigades. On December 27, 1936, his 21st birthday, his brigade was ordered to assault a Nationalist-held town. The attackers were half-trained, outnumbered and had no artillery support. They fought for three days before falling back with nearly a third of their number killed or wounded. Among the dead was John Cornford. The exact circumstances of his death are unknown, and his body was not recovered.
He quickly became an exemplar of “anti-fascist” manhood. Reviewing a memorial volume published in 1938, Stephen Spender wrote that the soldier/poet’s life “burns the imagination” and “was an important lesson to the leaders of democracies”. A less impressed reviewer of the definitive collection of Cornford’s writings struck a different note:
They [foreign volunteers in Spain] knew little about Spain, some did not even speak the language, and they were not fighting for love of Spain, patriotism, or admiration of its culture. They were fighting in Spain because the communist parties of their home countries urged them to do so. John Cornford is a chilling example.
After John’s kindergarten year, Frank and Elsie decided that they could do better educating him and his younger brother, Gene, at home. When John reached the age for college applications, they intended for him to matriculate at Princeton. The admissions office showed no interest in an applicant whose formal education had ended before first grade, so they fell back on Yale, which was less exclusive. Both John and Gene followed their father’s example by becoming active in collegiate politics, though on very much the other side of the spectrum. After Yale, Gene became the first, and as of this writing only, president of the Federalist Society. He recently announced his retirement.
Frank was an avid chess player and served a director of the United States Chess Federation. His sons surpassed him at the game. Both attained Master rank, while Frank never progressed beyond Expert.
Hint #5: His first book analyzed the Communist mindset. His last was an anthology of patriotic poems and ballads whose title was borrowed from Sir Walter Scott’s “Lay of the Last Minstrel”.
The Moulding of Communists: The Training of the Communist Cadre was published by the liberal Fund for the Republic in 1961. As noted previously (see Hint #2), the book is based on Frank’s own experience as both mouldee and moulder. His last book, Breathes There the Man: Heroic Ballads and Poems of the English-Speaking Peoples, published posthumously in 1973, grew out of his love of patriotic and heroic verse. He knew many poems in the anthology by heart and recited them lustily. The verses that inspired the book’s title can be read here.
Hint #6: A Wikipedia editor’s comment on his entry complains that it isn’t dull enough to meet the site’s standards.
Huffs the nameless editor: “This article is written like a personal reflection, personal essay, or argumentative essay that states a Wikipedia editor’s personal feelings or presents an original argument about a topic. Please help improve it by rewriting it in an encyclopedic style.” The article is, as a matter of fact, balanced, informative and better written than the average multi-handed Wiki mishmash (not admittedly a high standard to surpass). The Wikipedia editor seems to think that an encyclopedia has a duty to be lifeless where it is not confused.
Happy Thanksgiving to all, and to all a good feast.
The “new conservatives” of the early 1950’s, against whom Frank cut his first rhetorical teeth, were figures like Clinton Rossiter and Peter Viereck, who plucked conservative ideas and adapted them to collectivist ends, foreshadowing “common good conservatism” and publications like Compact.
The biography is Kevin J. Smant, Principles and Heresies: Frank S. Meyer and the Making of the American Conservative Movement (ISI Books, 2002).
The 1942 “Beveridge Report” was the blueprint for the welfare state, making its author one of the most destructive thinkers of the 20th Century.
Pollitt was immortalized in “The Ballad of Harry Pollitt”, attributed by Google to the “labor troubadour” Joe Glazer (older brother of sociologist Nathan Glazer) but probably the work of an anonymous Trotskyite. I was present on the first occasion that Frank heard it sung. At the opening lines, “Harry Pollitt was a worker, one of Lenin’s lads./ He was foully murdered by some counterrevolutionary cads”, he shouted indignantly that it was a lie. Harry Pollitt did in reality live to almost an undeserved three score and ten. He died in 1960 of a heart attack on a liner returning to Britain from Australia, whither he had traveled on Party business. Frank felt less indignant after hearing the song to the end. You can listen to it yourself (after some stuttering) here.