'THE TENSION BETWEEN TRADITION AND INDIVIDUALISM'

THE RICH DEBATES OF CONSERVATIVE FOUNDING FATHER FRANK MEYER AND LIBERTARIAN FOUNDING MOTHER ROSE WILDER LANE

- DANIEL J. FLYNN

ROSE WILDER LANE, one of the founding mothers of modern libertarianism, and Frank Meyer, one of the founding fathers of modern conservatism, spent a decade engaged in friendly debate. They both did some work for the Volker Fund, a major source of funding for libertarian scholarship in the 1950s; Volker officer Richard Cornuelle brought Lane to the Meyer home once while passing through Woodstock, New York. The relationship grew from there, with Lane and Meyer trading detailed letters and occasional phone calls from 1953 to 1962.

Their 60 or so letters resurfaced when a trove of tens of thousands of documents saved by Meyer turned up in an Altoona, Pennsylvania, warehouse in 2022. Those papers were a large part of the source material for my book The Man Who Invented Conservatism: The Unlikely Life of Frank S. Meyer.

Lane's papers, housed at the University of Iowa, in great measure duplicate her live-ink letters found in Meyer's papers, whose cache of long-lost letters includes correspondence with Joan Didion, James Michener, William F. Buckley Jr., and J.R.R. Tolkien.

In a collection overflowing with great writers, Lane shone as the best letter-writer. The Meyer collection's most intellectually captivating and philosophical letters, which include multipage postscripts that strangely leave the reader wanting more rather than less, emanated from her typewriter in Danbury, Connecticut.