Harold Luhnow - The William Volker Fund

The William Volker Fund

When William Volker died in 1947, his will added $15 million of his assets to the already sizable William Volker Charities Fund. Luhnow took primary control of the trust. He also took control the William Volker & Co. In 1952, Luhnow moved the headquarters of the fund and the company to Burlingame, California.

Luhnow used Volker Fund assets to support bringing schools associated with the Austrian School of economics to U.S. institutions. He "paid Mises's salary at New York University; he paid F. A. Hayek's salary at the University of Chicago; he funded lectures that Milton and Rose Friedman turned into Capitalism and Freedom and he approved the grant that enabled Murray Rothbard to write Man, Economy and State. As early as 1946, Luhnow earmarked Volker Fund money to support Leonard Read and agreed to fund the establishment the Foundation for Economic Education, which became the first major post-war libertarian think-tank. By the late 1950s, Luhnow had led the Fund to provide critical support for a host of political groups, including the Intercollegiate Studies Institute and the Institute for Humane Studies. In the 1960s Luhnow's leadership of the Fund became more and more erratic until he eventually fired most of its staff and much of the Volker Fund's remaining assets were given to the Hoover Institution at Stanford University.