Personal Life
Meyer was born to a prominent business family in Newark, New Jersey. He attended Princeton University for one year and then transferred to Balliol College at Oxford University where he earned his B.A in 1932 and his M.A in 1934. He later studied at the London School of Economics and became the student union's president before being expelled and deported in 1933 for his communist activism.
Like a number of the founding senior editors of National Review magazine, Meyer was first a Communist Party USA apparatchik before his conversion to political conservatism. The experiences as a communist are reported in his book, The Moulding of Communists: The Training of the Communist Cadre, 1961. Meyer began an “agonizing reappraisal of his communist beliefs" after reading F.A. Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom while serving in the U.S. Army during World War II, and made a complete break in 1945 after fourteen years in active leadership service to the communist party and its cause. Following the war, he contributed articles to the early free market periodical, The Freeman, and later joined the original staff of National Review in 1955.
After completing his turn to the right, Meyer became a close adviser to and confidant of William F. Buckley, Jr., the founder and editor of National Review, who in the introduction to his book Did You Ever See a Dream Walking: American Conservative Thought in the 20th Century, 1970, gave Meyer the credit for properly synthesizing the traditionalist and libertarian strains within conservatism starting at the magazine itself. Meyer wrote a column “Principles and Heresies” that appeared in each issue of the magazine, was its book review editor, and acted as a major spokesman for its principles.
Meyer married the former Elsie Bown. They had two sons, John and Eugene, who became a president of the Federalist Society.
Meyer converted to Catholicism just before he died of lung cancer in 1972.
Meyer was known in conservative and libertarian circles for his nocturnal lifestyle – Buckley among others has recalled (in Miles Gone By: A Literary Autobiography) that Meyer would sleep by day and be on the phone by night on behalf of his journalism and activism. His bright intellect and passionate presentation won him a broad following among conservative intellectuals in the 1960s and 1970s, who promoted it individually and through the organization he co-founded, the American Conservative Union, and through other modern conservative institutions and think tanks influenced by him including The Heritage Foundation, The Fund for American Studies, the Intercollegiate Studies Institute and Young America’s Foundation.
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