Harold Luhnow

Harold Luhnow (born 1895 in Chicago) was largely responsible for the libertarian direction taken by the influential William Volker Fund during the period between 1944 and 1964.

Luhnow moved to Kansas City, Missouri in 1928 and worked for his uncle, William Volker, as president of Volker's Kansas City-based wholesale firm. He became an active opponent of Kansas City's Pendergast political machine[1], and was exposed to libertarian thought through fellow reformer Loren Miller. After reading F.A. Hayek's and influential book The Road to Serfdom, Luhnow became a thoroughgoing classical liberal. In 1932, William Volker established the William Volker Fund to subsidize libertarian causes, and in 1944 Luhnow succeeded him as the Fund's president.

In addition to directing the Volker Fund, Luhnow personally supported academics of the Austrian school. He "paid [Ludwig von] 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."[2]

In 1946, Luhnow was approached by Leonard Read and agreed to lend him funds to establish the Foundation for Economic Education, which became the first major post-war libertarian think-tank.[3]