William Volker Fund Closes After Financing Chicago School and Mont Pelerin Society

The William Volker Fund closes after serving as the primary libertarian organization with significant funding throughout the 1940s-1950s, having played a key role in developing the modern libertarian movement by financing the Chicago School of economics, the Mont Pelerin Society, and free-market academic programs. The fund donates its remaining $7 million in assets to the Hoover Institution, transferring wealth accumulated from Missouri businessman William Volker’s home-furnishings empire to Stanford’s conservative think tank. Under Harold Luhnow’s direction since William Volker’s 1947 death, the fund provided crucial financing for Friedrich Hayek’s fellowship at University of Chicago, Ludwig von Mises at New York University, Aaron Director’s Free Market Study (1946-1952) and Antitrust Project (1953-1957), the 1947 Mont Pelerin Society founding conference, and retainers for scholars including Murray Rothbard. The fund paid Director’s University of Chicago salary for seven years and encouraged the university to grant him tenure, demonstrating direct corporate influence over academic appointments. Volker financing supported development of works including Friedman’s Capitalism and Freedom, Hayek’s Constitution of Liberty, and Leoni’s Freedom and the Law, fundamentally shaping free-market economic theory. The fund’s closure scatters its activities, with F.A. Harper continuing systematic recruitment of libertarian scholars at the Institute for Humane Studies, and most activities briefly transferred to the Center for American Studies before that closes. This 1962 closure precedes the Powell Memo by 9 years but marks the end of the most important early corporate-funded organization that built free-market intellectual infrastructure, demonstrating that systematic corporate financing of academic economics and legal scholarship flourished throughout the 1940s-1950s before Powell called for such efforts in 1971.