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McVicar, M. J. (2011). Aggressive Philanthropy: Progressivism, Conservatism, and the William Volker Charities Fund. Missouri Historical Review. Retrieved from http://purl.flvc.org/fsu/fd/FSU_migr_rel_faculty_publications-0007
This essay explores the history of the William Volker Charities Fund, a significant charitable organization founded in 1932 by William Volker, a Kansas City furniture manufacturer. A self-describe progressive, Volker was a prominent Kansas Citian who earned the nickname Mr. Anonymous because he ssecretly gave away most of his personal fortune to create the city's private/public welfare system in the first half of the twentieth century. After Volker's death, Harold W. Luhnow, Volker's nephew, used the fund's resources to move from progressive concerns related to social welfare to support free market, libertarian, and conservative intellectuals after World War II. Before collapsing in the late 1960s, the fund financed the early careers of five Nobel Prize winners; prominent figures in what would become the Religious Right; controversial revisionist historians; and, numerous conservative writers, publishers, and public figures.
McVicar, M. J. (2011). Aggressive Philanthropy: Progressivism, Conservatism, and the William Volker Charities Fund. Missouri Historical Review. Retrieved from http://purl.flvc.org/fsu/fd/FSU_migr_rel_faculty_publications-0007
