The William Volker Fund was a charitable foundation established in 1932 by Kansas City, Missouri, businessman and home-furnishings mogul William Volker. Volker founded the fund with the purposes of aiding the needy, reforming Kansas City's health care and educational systems, and combating the influence of machine politics in municipal governance. Following Volker's death in 1947, Volker's nephew Harold W. Luhnow continued the fund's previous mission, but also used the fund to promote and disseminate ideas on free-market economics. During Luhnow's tenure as the fund's primary manager, the William Volker Fund was one of the few libertarian organizations with significant amounts of money at its disposal, making it a key leader in developing the modern libertarian and conservative movements in the United States.

William Volker and the establishment of the fund

William Volker was born in Hanover, Germany, in 1859, and his family immigrated to the United States in 1871 and settled in Chicago in October after the Great Fire destroyed portions of the city. According to his official biography, Volker "saw the operations of a vast spontaneous system of relief supported by charitable persons from every section of the world" (23). According to family tradition, the event convinced Volker of the power of private charity. Volker growing up as a German immigrant in Chicago was further motivated towards charity by the pietist Christianity passed on to him by his mother who stressed a passage from the Gospel of Matthew about anonymous giving. In Kansas City he practiced daily giving – especially towards those whose needs were not met by organized charities.

The Evangelical values Volker had been raised with favored hard work and frugality, assisting the needy but rejecting the concept of handouts. Welfare networks in Volker's native Germany, developing from guild traditions, provided a collective means for alleviating poverty where relief was traded for short work projects or was issued as short-term loans rather than a direct payment of unearned money.

In 1909 Volker and his associates expanded their mandate and became the Board of Public Welfare in an effort to fight squalor and poverty. They would seek to end poverty by researching its causes and educating the populace against them. They would train social workers, provide free legal services, loan money to the poor, and even inspect business for safety and "moral decency".

Despite years of success when focusing on criminality in Kansas City, when the board expanded its scope to take on corrupt machine politics it soon ran into difficulty – specifically from the Pendergast brothers. By providing the poor (consisting mostly of immigrants, Catholics, and unskilled laborers) in the West Bottoms area of Kansas City, with coal fuel and other financial assistance the Pendergast brothers were able to rely on their grateful support for political issues. This arrangement allowed the Pendergasts to enrich themselves by managing the West Bottoms (an industrial and entertainment district infamous for the availability of gambling and other vices). Due to the machinations of the Pendergast machine, West Bottoms largely disregarded Prohibition. Seeing Volker's Board as a threat, "Boss Tom" Pendergast used his political connections to have the city drop its funding. This shifted the groups financial needs onto Volker. Pendergast also used his influence to get his supporters appointed to the Board, until by 1918 it had become little more than an extension of his political machine. The fund's articles of incorporation claimed it would "care for the sick, aged and helpless"; "provide means and facilities for the physical, mental, moral and spiritual betterment of persons"; "improve living and working conditions"; and provide "education and educational facilities" (209–210). where "numerous sluggings and reported kidnappings were recorded before noon as voters went to the polls in unprecedented numbers." The choice was between the Pendergast endorsed Democratic candidates against the reformist Citizens-Fusion candidates (drawn from Republicans and those Democrats that opposed Pendergast). The Citizens-Fusion party was headed by Dr. Ross Hill, former president of the University of Missouri who accused Pendergast's Democratic Mayor Bryce E. Smith of wholesale graft, fraud, and allowing collusion of the police department with gangsters. The machine lost two council seats to the reformers but otherwise dominated, thereby enhancing Pendergast's image state-wide.

Despite the electoral set-back, Luhnow continued to press for political reform using Volker's financing to fight Pendergast's political machine.

Under Luhnow's administration the fund shifted its focus away from charities in the Kansas City area and began pursuing a number of strategies for increasing the acceptance of Old Right and Austrian economics thought in the United States. During this period, Luhnow read books like F.A. Hayek's The Road to Serfdom and became a proponent of classical liberalism. As Luhnow's commitment to these ideas grew, he used the Volker Fund to give sizable contributions to libertarian and conservative causes. The Fund was instrumental in bringing Friedrich Hayek to the University of Chicago. It also helped support many other classical liberal scholars who at the time could not obtain positions in American universities, such as Ludwig von Mises and Aaron Director. Through its subsidiary the National Book Foundation, the Volker Fund gave away books authored by libertarian and conservative academics to college libraries throughout the U.S.

Under the directorship of "master recruiter" F. A. Harper, the fund systematically recruited a number of young libertarian and conservative scholars.

Controversy and collapse

In the early 1960s, Luhnow's management of the fund became increasingly inconsistent, and in early 1963 he suddenly fired most of his staff, including Harper and Rothbard. He was fired shortly after Rushdoony.

The Rushdoony/Hoggan controversy left Bierly and Couch scrambling to find support for the center even as Luhnow grew old and sick and was no longer able to support the organization. They courted Stanford University and the Hoover Institution with several million dollars in remaining Volker money only to be rebuffed. The center proved short lived and closed late in 1964 when Couch and Birely failed to secure the support of Stanford and Hoover. The Fund's files have disappeared.

References

  • A history of the William Volker Fund at LewRockwell.com
  • Kansas City's Great Anonymous Philanthropist, William Volker