Frank Meyer, RIP
Campaigne, Jameson G. Jr.
so the Commission was kept busy. The railroads also found that all was still not profitable. The private automobile and the public airplane were taking their passengers, and the...
...You're working on your fourth or fifth drink...
...as we slip bemusedly into acquiescence in collectivism and the tyranny of bureaucracy at home and into acquiescence in appeasement and dishonor in the face of our implacable enemy abroad -- the hope of the future is being born before our eyes...
...Eliseo Vivas writes in a forthcoming obituary in Modern Age -- a poignant, brilliant picture of Frank Meyer...
...I do not underestimate the hard, steel strength of power...
...We can take example from many a battle against high odds in our long heritage...
...The private automobile and the public airplane were taking their passengers, and the private truck, as well as the public regulated truck, were taking much of their freight...
...Eliminating regulation would also cause problems for railroads: they would have to start actively competing for business, they might find that lower rates for some commodities would require innovative investments...
...Thomas G. Moore is a professor in the Department of Economics at Michigan State University...
...Notwithstanding the evidence that larger railroads are not more profitable than smaller, the Commission encouraged the formation of mighty railroads companies...
...You're feeling comfortably fuzzy, and you're finally able to rationalize away your failure to produce a decent piece of writing for the past several weeks...
...And whenever one of his colleagues showed signs of straying from the path of individualistic, humane conservatism that Frank followed, down from Wood stock, New York, where he made his home, would speed like an ideological arrow one of those short, barbed col unms that regularly appeared in Na tignal ReView under the heading Principles and Heresies...
...Our situation is no more desperate, our enemies no more powerful, than the situations our spiritual ancestors faced, than the enemies they conquered...
...For more than twenty years he had been preparing us -- who now carry on as "conservatives" -- exhorting us for that Last Battle in our time...
...the issue rests in our stamina and courage...
...Eliseo Vivas remarked several weeks after Frank's death, "You young fellows won't have Frank around to give you orders any more...
...But he was also much more than that...
...But such lower rates brought on the wrath of their erst-while friends at the Commission who were now concerned about their new friends, the owners of trucks and barges...
...A broken collar hone...
...One of the few remaining hookmen who understood the very real relationship between literature and life, Frank Meyer was a great editor...
...For men of courage it is never totally black...
...In the course of the research for this scholarly article, the author discovered there are two alternative solutions to the problem created by the government...
...The gnawing question keeps intruding: what of the rest of us...
...He was a leading American Communist until his mid-thirties, a cadre Communist responsible for shaping and forever testing Communist elite...
...The old warrior is gone," someone said at the gravesite, gone before the earthly struggle between Communism and the West was resolved...
...Put the government farther into transporation or put the government out of transportation...
...Flu...
...For labor it would mean at last demanding and receiving almost adequate wages -- probably Congress would set a limit at no more than a congressman makes...
...as within our walls principle seems lost in our political life...
...When a man of 62 dies and his friends gather to mark his passing, there is always a sense of loss to be sure...
...Moreover, such views were heresy, for the dogma according to the ICC denied the validity of the laws of supply and demand...
...No matter how black the progress of events may seem, as the barbarian hammers on the gate from Laos to Cuba, from Berlin to the t~wer of infamy on the East River...
...Frank Meyer here...
...Thus in recent years the gospel according to the ICC has promoted mergers of large railroads, prevented or delayed innovative price reductions by railroads, encouraged the Congress to nationalize railroad passenger transportation, and put the northeast part of the United States in danger of losing all rail transportation unless the taxpayers aid the system...
...Calm, firm, with ultimate courage, they stood against the Persian host -- and won though they lost...
...The book, and the subsequent debate it provoked, had the effect of fusing the disparate, warring strands of conservatism at a critical time in the conservative revival...
...Frank Meyer was no ideologue...
...Freed from regulation, trucking firms would be able to fill many now empty backhauls while driving fewer miles by going the most direct route...
...The legacy of Frank Meyer, "'God willing, will have the victory...
...Further, he demonstrates with a relentless logic, that against the Communist enterprise "there is no recourse in compromise, reasonableness, peaceful coexistence...
...The hundreds of thousands who served in Young Americans for Freedom, the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, the Conservative Party of New York, the American Conservative Union, the Philadelphia Society and those readers of National Review, Modern Age and The Exchange who also felt his direct influence, will eventually have to be the makers of that victory...
...Such ideas, such beliefs are on the ascendant...
...Frank Meyer, RIP I T WAS THE saddist funeral I have ever attended, and I didn't know why...
...Because, however, he was self-consciously a battlefield commander in a war of ideas, he simplified, clarified, reduced, often with a stark result-- if also the desired pragmatic effect...
...He was indeed sensitive to the infinite nuances of Being...
...For Congress it would mean a new agency to staff with friends and relations and new congressional committees which could hold hearings on the inevitable deterioration in service and the inevitable inflation in rates...
...The Last Battle...
...And the next morning, full of remorse, you'd write in one hour a good review of that book you hadn't been able to make sense of for a month...
...Labor, DOT and Congress would all gain, while the only people hurt by such a step would be shippers, taxpayers and consumers...
...thus the Commission wrote in the third chapter, fourth verse, that higher rates for all would bring succor to the poor...
...The Spartans who defended the pass at Thermopylae against the countless myraids "of Xerxes died at their post -- and saved the 14 The Alternative June--September 1972 West...
...The Voice We'll Always Hear In in Our Minds John R. Coyne, Jr...
...Today, it could serve as a centripetal agent in a conservative movement grown large and often lacking a center...
...It reasoned that if two big railroads with duplicate trackage, such as the Pennsylvania and the New York Central, were combined, it should be obvious that the resulting firm would be more profitable, more innovative and more viable than its constituent parts...
...The West and freedom have been at bay before...
...Finally, you pick up the phone, and as expected it's that voice, slightly hoarse, the phrases clipped and quick...
...Jameson G. Campaigne, Jr...
...The future lies in our determination, in our firmness of principle, in the courage with which we gird our will to rise to our destiny...
...The hooks he wrote stand as giants of contemporary conservative thou~.ht...
...While rates would fall considerably - - some studies indicate as much as twenty per cent - - much of the staff of the Interstate Commerce Commission would have to find new employment, which would not be easy since many have never done useful work in their lives...
...Nor was he a deadly serious scold, a Cato or Cassandra...
...The book section of National Review, which Frank edited, is considered in the literary world to be consistently one of the nation's finest...
...But the possibility of temporal victory is taking shape...
...And this I submit as the truth of the human condition -- in the teeth of the prevailing mythology of our century, in the teeth of the behavioral scientists, the psychoanalytic delvers, the Machiavellian calculators of pure power, who stifle the thought of an era with their epicene research and masochistic obeisance to whatever ideas or whatever men possess for the moment transitory influence and authority...
...The responsibility for this victory is an acutely felt obligation for many of them, what "the conservative movement" is all about...
...A nervous breakdown...
...The weapons with which to fight are in our hands...
...No matter to which obscure corner of the continent you fled, Frank's phone calls sought you out relentlessly...
...The other alternative, nationalizing the railroads, is of course very attractive...
...For final certainty we can only know that we fight for the right...
...The idea was "lower prices...
...You owe me a review...
...Then it happens...
...Were not the intellectual establishment in our country monolithically liberal, Frank would have been recog nized as one of the foremost men of American letters and would long ago have been rewarded with a chair at an important university...
...The turn has come...
...It is not for temporal success that we are promised that the Gates of Hell shall not prevail against us...
...Time passes, young men must grow up...
...Jameson G. Campaigne, Jr., a journalist and businessman residing in Chicago, is an associate of The Alternative...
...On balance, therefore, nationalization seems the wave of the future...
...The phone rings, cutting sharply through that fuzzy, complacent cocoon...
...For the railroads, though, the ICC recommended stiff medicine: let the weak railroads merge with the strong...
...It is ideas and beliefs that truly reflect the nature of man and his destiny that will in the end decide our future...
...Only a greater determination can avail, for Communist man poses two stark alternatives for us: victory or defeat...
...The day this hook or its equivalent is programmed into the CIA Cold War Computer will mark the day, however desperate the objective situation, when the tide turns against the Communist attack on our civilization...
...Many conservative writers have experienced that awful moment of truth...
...Frank was a teacher, especially effective at calming and guiding the younger, often hot-headed members of the American right...
...For the Department of Transportation it would mean conversion into the largest corporation in the world, unconstrained by the need to cover costs...
...Removing the government from regulating transportation would obviously lead to many problems...
...This is no guarantee of victory...
...It is that important...
...The great tradition of the West is rising again in idea and belief and image...
...HIS The Moulding of Communists shows how the Communist everywhere is made and in so doing illuminates "his essence from within, so that he may be conceived in his true being, with an understanding that neither underestimates his strength nor ignores his total enmity, his challenge a outrance to our civilization...
...Who first proposed it is unknown to history and even today it is not accepted by much of the industry, yet those that have managed to experiment with it have found it added to profits...
...Having experimented with higher rates and found that the laws of demand were still valid, the railroads had an original idea...
...But it was worth it...
...While service would improve rates would decline, shippers would suffer from having to deal with a fluid competitive situation for transportation as well as for raw materials...
...How like the day the man we mourned was: sombre as he told of the barbarian and its advance against the weak defenses of the West -- yet always radiant with hope that the men of the West would raise themselves, victorious when called for the Last Battle...
...If there is to be that clear-cut victory about which Frank Meyer spoke with such passion at National Review's fifth anniversary, it will be said of him -- and those other men of the West who passed the torch to a younger generation in the last third of the twentieth century -- that be "'won though he lost...
...But the knowledge of a life lived with purpose for six decades, with wonderful moments and friends packed into those many days, usually mitigates that sense of loss...
...Surely it was not the cold, the sombre steel-grey sky...
...The Mouldin9 of Communists was followed a year later, in 1962, by In Defense of Freedom, written to foster our understanding of the tradition of Western civilization and the American Republic, our devotion to freedom and to truth, the strength of our will and of our determination to live as free and virtuous men...
...Sick children...
...He demanded much of his charges, America's next generation of conservative leadership, but did so with the kindness and subtlety of a Socrates...
...Power is wielded by men, controlled by men, limited by men, as they are guided and inspired by the ideas and beliefs they hold...
...Thermopylae and Salamis, Poitiers and Lepanto, tell the tale...
...No, the sky was frequently pierced by bright shafts of golden sunlight...
...His raucous good humor and occasional tippling made him a member in highest standing of the Moon Mullins Study Group and the Indiana Iron Guard (he pestered the keepers of that un-organization for years for initiation, even though he had never resided in Indiana as a conservative -- only as a Communist...
...The uncertain outcome of that struggle and the knowledge that Frank was no longer himself a part of it -- teaching, hectoring, directing -- was surely why sadness bore down on those who were there to say farewell...
...Reflecting several weeks later upon that strange sadness, it seems a special, quiet tribute to a great man...
...There will be a hiatus, while we adjust to his loss...
...It's around 9 p.m., EST...
...Has Frank Meyer transmitted his toughness of character along with his wisdom to the many who travelled to sit in front of the fireplace at Woodstock...
...He was not a respectable man...
...And, God willing, we will have the victory...
...For the sake of everything he stood for, let us pray that it will be brief...
...Frank Meyer, friend, teacher, comrade in arms, died April 1, 1972 not knowing the outcome of the earthly struggle between Evil and those whose heritage has conscripted them to the standard of the Good, the True and the Beautiful...
...the weapons are being forged...
...If ever there was a book that deserved a rebirth, it is this one: in a mere 172 pages, he winnows the essence of the conservative position from the minutiae of our long history, of the West and of America, stating it with a precision and power of dramatic effect...
...thus some truck drivers would be displaced and would consequently be forced to give up the maternal protection of the teamsters...
...It is ideas and beliefs that decide how men will act...
...My own favorite, In Defense of Freedom, probably bad more to do with converting members of my generation to conservatism than any other single work...
...You know who it is, and your mind races wildly through a catalogue of respectable excuses...
...combine the roads into larger firms...
...Persian and Carthaginian, Arab and Turk, as they have felt final victory in their grasp, have been flung back and destroyed, when the West, reinvigorated, in its inborn love of freedom, has struck out and conquered...
...Whether for good or evil, it is power which has the next to the last word in the affairs of men -- but not the last word...
...You are going to have to start giving them yourselves...
...He was too dedicated to God and country for that...
...Why was it not possible to lift a smile from the heart and dwell upon a very good life lived to the fullest...
...His phone bill was rumored to be just a bit smaller than the national debt...
...Guy Davenport, reviewing for the New York Times a collection of Frank's columns published m 1969 under the The Alternative June--September 1972 15...
Vol. 5 • June 1972 • No. 9
