Volker founded the fund with the purposes of aiding the needy, reforming Kansas City's health care and educational systems, and combating the influence of machine politics in municipal governance.
William Volker was born in Hanover, Germany, in 1859, and his family immigrated to the United States in 1871 and settled in Chicago in October after the Great Fire destroyed portions of the city.
According to his official biography, Volker "saw the operations of a vast spontaneous system of relief supported by charitable persons from every section of the world" (23).
Volker growing up as a German immigrant in Chicago was further motivated towards charity by the pietist Christianity passed on to him by his mother who stressed a passage from the Gospel of Matthew about anonymous giving.
[4] The Evangelical values Volker had been raised with favored hard work and frugality, assisting the needy but rejecting the concept of handouts.
Welfare networks in Volker's native Germany, developing from guild traditions, provided a collective means for alleviating poverty where relief was traded for short work projects or was issued as short-term loans rather than a direct payment of unearned money.
His civic agenda broadened to working towards progressive reform in Kansas City's government by using cooperative public/private social welfare agencies.
[2] Starting in 1908 he joined with those creating a Board of Pardons and Paroles that formed to try and counter the mayor's domination of those legal processes which could be abused for political ends.
They would train social workers, provide free legal services, loan money to the poor, and even inspect business for safety and "moral decency".
[2][6][7][8] Despite years of success when focusing on criminality in Kansas City, when the board expanded its scope to take on corrupt machine politics it soon ran into difficulty – specifically from the Pendergast brothers.
By providing the poor (consisting mostly of immigrants, Catholics, and unskilled laborers) in the West Bottoms area of Kansas City, with coal fuel and other financial assistance the Pendergast brothers were able to rely on their grateful support for political issues.
This arrangement allowed the Pendergasts to enrich themselves by managing the West Bottoms (an industrial and entertainment district infamous for the availability of gambling and other vices).
[1] Volker's health began deteriorating in the mid-1930s and being childless he turned over most of the duties in running his company to Harold W. Luhnow, a nephew born to his sister Emma.
[2] Luhnow and other businessmen joined CRI in a major get-out-the-vote effort in March 1934 that was met by violence by pro-Pendergast supporters bent on voter suppression culminating in "Bloody Tuesday".
[2] Accounts of the Kansas City municipal election of March 27, 1934 recall that "Cars were demolished, women beaten, trucks burned, ballot boxes stuffed"[10][11] where "numerous sluggings and reported kidnappings were recorded before noon as voters went to the polls in unprecedented numbers.
The Citizens-Fusion party was headed by Dr. Ross Hill, former president of the University of Missouri who accused Pendergast's Democratic Mayor Bryce E. Smith of wholesale graft, fraud, and allowing collusion of the police department with gangsters.
Oldham, a 78-year-old hardware store owner, while locking up his shop was struck by a stray bullet in the fire-fight between Flacy and his murderers.
Justin Bowersock, a Kansas City Star reporter had his car struck by another vehicle and then shot at by the thugs inside it – they then chased him back to the newspaper's building before he managed to escape.
[11] With Pendergast's power slipping, Luhnow and CRI were able to achieve some success in backing political reformers for the Kansas City Council in the 1938 elections.
During his three-year tenure at the CRI, Miller introduced Luhnow to other intellectuals deeply committed to opposition of government bureaucracy and economic intervention.
[3][15] Under Luhnow's administration the fund shifted its focus away from charities in the Kansas City area and began pursuing a number of strategies for increasing the acceptance of Old Right and Austrian economics thought in the United States.
[17] As Luhnow's commitment to these ideas grew, he used the Volker Fund to give sizable contributions to libertarian and conservative causes.
[18] It also helped support many other classical liberal scholars who at the time could not obtain positions in American universities, such as Ludwig von Mises and Aaron Director.
Among its most significant contributions to such academic conferences, the fund supported North American participation at the first Mont Pèlerin Society meeting in 1947.
Prominent Christian Right pioneers Rousas John Rushdoony and Gary North also gained early notoriety because of their association with the fund.
The Fund was dissolved after Luhnow's death in 1978, and its assets distributed to local Kansas City charities and to the Hoover Institution of Stanford University.
[16][2] Harper continued the basic nature and spirit of his Volker Fund work by creating the Institute for Humane Studies.
The center proved short lived and closed late in 1964 when Couch and Birely failed to secure the support of Stanford and Hoover.