William Volker Fund - Controversy and Collapse

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. Harper continued the basic nature and spirit of his Volker Fund work by creating the Institute for Humane Studies. Luhnow hired Ivan R. Bierly, an ex-Foundation for Economic Education senior staffer. Luhnow reorganized the Volker Fund as the Center for American Studies and ended the fund’s charitable commitments to Kansas City institutions. Bierly recruited William T. Couch, R. J. Rushdoony, and David Leslie Hoggan to run the new center. Rushdoony hired his future son-in-law, Gary North, as a summer intern in 1963.

Immediately, Rushdoony and Hoggan became lightening rods for controversy. Rushdoony, a conservative Presbyterian minister, alienated many of the fund’s secular and non-Protestant supporters and was fired by Bierly. Hoggan was even more controversial for his explicitly pro-Hitler and pro-Nazi sympathies. 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. A decade later, the remainder of the Volker Fund money, amounting to about seven million dollars, went to the Hoover Institution. The Fund's files have disappeared.