Leonard Read

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Leonard E. Read (September 26, 1898 - May 14, 1983) was the founder of the Foundation for Economic Education, which was the first modern libertarian think tank in the United States.

After a stint in the United States Army Air Service during World War I, Read started a grocery wholesale business in Ann Arbor, Michigan, which was initially successful but eventually went out of business. He moved to California where he started a new career in the tiny Burlingame Chamber of Commerce near San Francisco.

Read gradually moved up hierarchy of the United States Chamber of Commerce, finally becoming general manager of the Los Angeles branch, America's largest, in 1939.

During this period his views became progressively more radically libertarian. Apparently, it was in 1933, during a meeting with W. C. Mullendore, an executive with Southern California Edison, that Read was finally convinced that the New Deal was completely inefficient and morally bankrupt.

Read was also profoundly influenced by religion. His pastor, Reverend James W. Fifield, was minister of the 4,000-member First Congregational Church of Los Angeles, of which Read was also a board member. Fifield ran a "resistance movement" against the "social gospel" of the New Deal, trying to convince ministers across the country to adopt libertarian "spiritual ideals".

During the period when he worked for the Chamber of Commerce, Read was also deeply influenced by Albert Jay Nock.

In 1945, Virgil Jordan, the President of the National Industrial Conference Board (NICB) in New York, invited Read to become its executive vice president. Read very quickly rejected the NICB's principle of presenting two sides to every argument, and shortly afterwards resigned his position.

One donor from his short time at NICB, David M. Goodrich, Chairman of the B.F. Goodrich Company, encouraged Read to start his own organization. With Goodrich's aid, as well as financial aid from the William Volker Fund and from Harold Luhnow, Read founded the Foundation for Economic Education in 1946. He continued to work with FEE until his death in 1983. Read authored 27 books, 18 of which are still in print and sold by FEE. He wrote numerous essays including the well-known "I, Pencil".