The Volker Fund

The William Volker Charities Fund was a philanthropic organization established by the William Volker Company of Kansas City, Missouri, a western furniture distributor. Loren "Red" Miller, a municipal reformer who had fought the Pendergast political machine, becoming in the process a dedicated friend of laissez faire liberalism, became acquainted with William Volker and converted Volker and his nephew, Harold W. Luhnow, to the cause. By the late 1940s, Luhnow, as head of the Volker Fund, undertook to subsidize libertarian scholarship in those dark days of triumphant New Deal corporatism and overseas adventurism.

Luhnow provided funding for Ludwig von Mises at NYU and for Friedrich von Hayek at the University of Chicago. With dedicated staffers such as Herbert C. Cornuelle, Richard Cornuelle, Ivan Bierly, and others, the VF provided much needed support for the small number of rising libertarian scholars. Alongside a handful of other free-market organizations, the VF played an indispensable role in the post-war free-market revival.

Rothbard began his consulting work for the Volker Fund in 1951. This relationship lasted until 1962, when the VF was dissolved. A major part of Rothbard's work for the VF consisted of reading and evaluating books, journal articles, and other materials. On the basis of written reports by Rothbard and another reader – Rose Wilder Lane – the VF's directors would decide whether to undertake massive distribution of particular works to public libraries.

The VF also asked Rothbard to submit reports on particular questions, such as how to rank sundry economists in terms of friendliness to the free market, surveys of the literature on monopoly, Soviet wage structures, etc., etc. Rothbard's memos number several hundred, covering works in economics, history, philosophy, and political science. The memos, which range in length from one page to seventy pages, provide a window into the scholarship of the period – and Rothbard's views on that scholarship. They thereby shed much light on Rothbard's emerging worldview and his systematic defense of liberty.

~ Joseph Stromberg