william volker fdn
4 23 no talk
William Volker Fund was a charitable foundation established in 1932 by Kansas City, Missouri, businessman and home-furnishings mogul William Volker. 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. Following Volker's death in 1947, Volker's nephew Harold W. Luhnow continued the fund's previous mission, but also used the fund to promote and disseminate ideas on free-market economics.
During Luhnow's tenure as the fund's primary manager, the William Volker Fund was one of the few libertarian organizations with significant amounts of money at its disposal, making it a key leader in developing the modern libertarian and conservative movements in the United States.
William Volker and the establishment of the fund
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).[1] According to family tradition, the event convinced Volker of the power of private charity. 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.[2]
As a young man, Volker moved to Kansas City, Missouri, where he started a home furnishings business, the William Volker & Co., which sold picture frames, blinds, and other home furnishings.[3] In Kansas City he practiced daily giving – especially towards those whose needs were not met by organized charities.[2] As his fortune increased in the early 1900s, he continued to increase the amount he gave to charity usually without taking any credit for the donations. Because of his secret charity, locals nicknamed Volker "Mr. Anonymous" and he became an important figure in Kansas City public life.[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.[2] As a member of St. Peter's German Evangelical Church, Volker influenced by his religious upbringing lobbied city government for municipally operated relief agencies similar to ones operating in Germany.[2]
Volker soon applied his organizational knowledge to his cause and created an efficient charitable operation. His civic agenda broadened to working towards progressive reform in Kansas City's government by using cooperative public/private social welfare agencies. At the time he described himself as a "Progressive and Christian Socialist".[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. By successfully lobbying the city's government Volker's group gained official standing and funding by ordinance.[2] The Board held that it was less likely that criminals would re-offend if they were employed, so made having a job a requirement of receiving parole – with the Board devoting many resources to finding jobs for prisoners.[5]
In 1909 Volker and his associates expanded their mandate and became the Board of Public Welfare in an effort to fight squalor and poverty. They would seek to end poverty by researching its causes and educating the populace against them. They would train social workers, provide free legal services, loan money to the poor, and even inspect business for safety and "moral decency".[5] If the city's funding of the board fell short, Volker would quietly cover the cost of the Board's programs.[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). Due to the machinations of the Pendergast machine, West Bottoms largely disregarded Prohibition. Seeing Volker's Board as a threat, "Boss Tom" Pendergast used his political connections to have the city drop its funding. This shifted the groups financial needs onto Volker. Pendergast also used his influence to get his supporters appointed to the Board, until by 1918 it had become little more than an extension of his political machine.[2][5] In 1925 Volker would support reforms to the city charter, but Pendergast was again able to turn this to his advantage and take full control over the city government.[5] Volker became disgusted with the turn of events and his biographer claimed he recalled the period bitterly "I've learned something about government...Government must be restricted to those activities which can be entrusted to the worst citizens, not the best."[2] Rather than take on the Pendergast machine, Volker withdrew back to private charity.
In 1932, Volker set aside half of his fortune into the William Volker Charities Fund.[9] The fund's articles of incorporation claimed it would "care for the sick, aged and helpless"; "provide means and facilities for the physical, mental, moral and spiritual betterment of persons"; "improve living and working conditions"; and provide "education and educational facilities" (209–210).[1]
Harold Luhnow and post-Volker management
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. Luhnow, born in Chicago, was a second-generation German-American with a vastly different temperament and political ambition from his uncle. He neither possessed his uncle's intimate association with the German immigrant community nor shared its community values. Before coming to Kansas City to work with his uncle in 1919, Luhnow had served in the U.S. Army and graduated from Kansas State University with degrees in agriculture and animal husbandry. He would say "he learned about people from cattle." He abandoned his uncle's St. Peter's Church to join First Baptist Church favored by the city's elites.[2]
Luhnow was open and unwavering in his opposition to the Pendergast machine. With his uncle's blessing Luhnow spent large amounts of Volker's funds to call for the city to adapt the policies advocated by the Civic Research Institute (CRI) which Volker had long been a backer of. The CRI called for replacing patronage and corrupt boss rule with an administration of "college-educated, career-professional manager".[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."[12] The choice was between the Pendergast endorsed Democratic candidates against the reformist Citizens-Fusion candidates (drawn from Republicans and those Democrats that opposed Pendergast). 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.[12] Also backing the idea of reform was the National Youth Movement (a Kansas City founded group whose national goal was to bring pressure against Pendergast).[10] By the end of the day four people were slain and eleven wounded.[11]
Pendergast's men regularly worked elections by "Smoking up the Precincts" where gangs would ride in high-powered black cars through the wards and precincts looking to beat supporters of opposing factions with brass knuckles, baseball bats, gun butts, and clenched fists.[10] Already by early that morning these roving gangs had demolished and burned several cars being used by the Citizens-Fusion campaigns. They had also beat a man into critical condition with a wrench.[10] As the day went on things continued to escalate. At one polling place a carload of hoodlums burst in and grabbed the black Democratic election judge and began beating him while the Republican judge fled out the backdoor. William Findley, a black Democratic precinct captain rushed to intervene. When met with pistols he drew his own — in the exchange of gunfire he was slain.[10][12] At another site hoodlums kidnapped an election judge early in the day then returned in the afternoon and beat several election workers and a police officer.[10]
A.S. Williams, a candidate for the Citizens-Fusion ticket was kidnapped, threatened, and then returned to the polls. When reporting the event to the police his assailants leisurely drove by which he pointed out. The police got into their car and drove after them at about 10 miles an hour.[10] Other than in the Black ward and the Southwest and Southeast areas the reformers were not viewed as a serious threat to Pendergast.[10] Still, there was a split in the Shannon wing of his Democratic machine. Deputy Sheriff Lee Flacy supported the L.C. "Doc" Johnson faction of the Shannon wing and was electioneering at a polling place when he went to a nearby café for coffee. Three cars pulled up to the polling place containing twelve men who asked for Flacy. They were pointed to the café. Entering the café, John Gadwood (a supporter of the Pete Kelly faction of the Shannon wing) was told Flacy was in the backroom, which he entered. A pistol shot rang out as Gadwood fired into Flacy's stomach. The twelve then fled the café before being pursued by a wounded Flacy with his own gun drawn. A fire-fight occurred with Flacy shooting ex-boxer Larry Cappo in the head. Flacy was then slain by a blast from a shotgun one of the men had under his coat. P.W. 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.[10][11] One of the assailants the three cars flipped over while racing to escape the murder scene. The occupants when pulled from the car would tell police they had no idea how Cappo got into their backseat. Nine hours later Oldham and Cappo would die in side-by-side hospital beds.
Gadwood was later convicted of murdering Flacy and served three years in prison. Findley and Oldham's killers were never charged.[10] One fusion candidate, Arthur H. Wells was beaten by thugs. 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. The chauffeur for the editor of the Star was also beaten by hoodlums.[12] The Associated Press reported the outcome of the vote saying "Big Tom Pendergast's Democratic machine rode to overwhelming victory today after a blood-stained election marked by four killings, scores of sluggings and machine gun terrorism."[13] The machine lost two council seats to the reformers but otherwise dominated, thereby enhancing Pendergast's image state-wide.[10] [14]
Despite the electoral set-back, Luhnow continued to press for political reform using Volker's financing to fight Pendergast's political machine.[2] Luhnow would not have to wait very long. In June 1936 Pendergast suffered a coronary thrombosis, or blood clot, while attending the National Democratic convention in Philadelphia. By August he was suffering from an intestinal blockage that required a colostomy when he returned in September to Kansas City. In an effort to prove themselves during the uncertainty caused by the bosses illness, machine ward and precinct leaders delivered electoral majorities to machine endorsed candidates at ridiculously high levels – triggering Federal suspicions. For example, one Pendergast's candidate outpolled his primary opponent for a state office by 19,201 votes to 13. Pendergast's son would later recall that the machine workers "got carried away and voted the sick, the dying and the dead."[11] Within weeks a Federal Grand jury was convened to examine the 1936 election, headed by U.S. Distrtrict Court Judge Albert Reeves who had previously been denied a political career due to the machinations of the machine. The FBI brought forward 95 examples of ballot tampering. Indictments followed and throughout 1937 into 1938 juries found 259 of 278 individuals guilty. Election officials struck 60,000 bogus names from the Kansas City voter registration files.[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.[2] By May 1939, Pendergast reported to Leavenworth Federal Penitentiary to begin serving a 15-month sentence for income tax evasion. (He was released on probation a year later with three months off for good behavior and would die in 1945).[11]
Luhnow's partnership with the CRI in the cause against the Pendergast machine introduced him to a nationwide network of similar civic organizations opposing machine politics and also calling for government efficiency and transparency. Many of these groups also opposed the welfare programs and federal intervention in local politics that resulted from the New Deal. During this period Luhnow met Loren "Red" Miller from Detroit's Bureau of Government Research foundation. The philosophy advocated by Miller is the source of much of modern American libertarianism. Miller's ideology arose from witnessing abuses of local government power, leading him to conclude that good government equated to minimal government – where charities and business replaced state social welfare. In 1941 Luhnow hired Miller to run the CRI. During his three-year tenure at the CRI, Miller introduced Luhnow to other intellectuals deeply committed to opposition of government bureaucracy and economic intervention.[2]
When William Volker died in 1947, Luhnow took control of William Volker & Co. and also became the head of the William Volker Charities Fund's board of directors.[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.[16][2] During this period, Luhnow read books like F.A. Hayek's The Road to Serfdom and became a proponent of classical liberalism.[16]
Luhnow was interested in theories of political economy that are generally called "libertarian" or "classical liberal," but at various times have been called "Conservative," "neoliberal," "right-wing radical," "eighteenth- and nineteenth-century liberal," or Straussian.[17] As Luhnow's commitment to these ideas grew, he used the Volker Fund to give sizable contributions to libertarian and conservative causes. The Fund was instrumental in bringing Friedrich Hayek to the University of Chicago.[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.[19] Through its subsidiary the National Book Foundation, the Volker Fund gave away books authored by libertarian and conservative academics to college libraries throughout the U.S.[2] The National Book Foundation distributed books by wide range of influential authors, including Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk, Gordon H. Clark, Hayek, Mises, Roscoe Pound, Leo Strauss, Eric Voegelin, and many others.
Under Luhnow's management, the fund helped the then small minority of Old Right scholars to meet, discuss, and exchange ideas. Milton Friedman's Capitalism and Freedom, Bruno Leoni's Freedom and the Law, and Hayek's Constitution of Liberty were all influenced by the ideas discussed at such meetings. Among its most significant contributions to such academic conferences, the fund supported North American participation at the first Mont Pèlerin Society meeting in 1947.[20]
Under the directorship of "master recruiter" F. A. Harper, the fund systematically recruited a number of young libertarian and conservative scholars.[16] These researchers and staffers eventually became important figures in American right-wing. Notable staffers included a young Murray Rothbard who began working for the Volker Fund in 1951 and wrote book reviews for the Fund until 1962. Rose Wilder Lane also contributed book reviews. Prominent Christian Right pioneers Rousas John Rushdoony and Gary North also gained early notoriety because of their association with the fund.
In addition to its own activities, the Volker Fund also helped support the formation of various complementary institutions, including the Intercollegiate Society of Individualists (ISI), which was later renamed Intercollegiate Studies Institute, and the Foundation for Economic Education (FEE). It also worked closely with similar charitable endeavors, such as the Earhart Foundation and the Relm Foundation.[2]
In the 1960s the Volker company and the Fund moved to Burlingame, California. 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.[21]
Controversy and collapse
In the early 1960s, Luhnow's management of the fund became increasingly inconsistent, and in early 1963 he suddenly fired most of his staff, including Harper and Rothbard.[16][2] Harper continued the basic nature and spirit of his Volker Fund work by creating the Institute for Humane Studies. Luhnow hired Ivan R. Bierly, an ex-Foundation for Economic Education senior staffer. Luhnow reorganized the Volker Fund as theCenter for American Studiesand ended the fund's charitable commitments to Kansas City institutions.[2] Bierly recruited William T. Couch,R. J. Rushdoony, and David Leslie Hoggan to run the new center. Rushdoony hired his future son-in-law, Gary North, as a summer intern in 1963.
Immediately, Rushdoony and Hoggan became lightning rods for controversy. Rushdoony, a conservative Presbyterian minister, alienated many of the fund's secular and non-Protestant supporters and was fired by Bierly.[2] Hoggan was even more controversial for his explicitly pro-Hitler and pro-Nazi sympathies.[22] He was fired shortly after Rushdoony.
The Rushdoony/Hoggan controversy left Bierly and Couch scrambling to find support for the center even as Luhnow grew old and sick and was no longer able to support the organization. They courted Stanford University and the Hoover Institution with several million dollars in remaining Volker money only to be rebuffed. The center proved short lived and closed late in 1964 when Couch and Birely failed to secure the support of Stanford and Hoover.[2] A decade later, the remainder of the Volker Fund money, amounting to about seven million dollars, went to the Hoover Institution.[23][24] The Fund's files have disappeared.
References...
ref
david Leslie Hoggan (March 23, 1923 – August 7, 1988) was an American author of The Forced War: When Peaceful Revision Failed and other works in the German and English languages. He was antisemitic, maintained a close association with various neo-Nazi groups, chose a publishing house run by an unregenerate Nazi, and engaged in Holocaust denial.
Early life
Hoggan was born in Portland, Oregon, and received his education at Reed College and Harvard University. At Harvard, Hoggan was awarded a PhD in 1948 for a dissertation on relations between Germany and Poland in the years 1938–1939. His adviser described his dissertation as "no more than a solid, conscientious piece of work, critical of Polish and British policies, but not beyond what the evidence would tolerate".[1] The American historian Peter Baldwin noted that Hoggan's dissertation, The Breakdown of German-Polish Relations in 1939: The Conflict Between the German New Order and the Polish Idea of Central Eastern Europe, was easily the most reasonable and sane of all Hoggan's writings.[2]
During his time at Harvard, Hoggan befriended Harry Elmer Barnes, whose thinking would have much influence on Hoggan. Subsequently, Hoggan had a series of teaching positions at the University of Munich, San Francisco State College, the University of California at Berkeley, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Carthage College. When teaching at Munich between 1949 and 1952, Hoggan became fluent in German and married a German woman. Reflecting his pro-German tendencies, in a 1960 review of a book by an Austrian writer Hans Uebersberger, Hoggan claimed that the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand was a result of a conspiracy involving the governments of Serbia and Russia, and that as such, Austria-Hungary and its ally Germany were the victims of a Russo-Serbian provocation designed to cause a world war.[3]
Der erzwungene Krieg
In 1955, Barnes encouraged Hoggan to turn his dissertation into a book and it was published in West Germany as Der erzwungene Krieg (The Forced War).[4] It blamed the outbreak of World War II on an alleged Anglo-Polish conspiracy to wage aggression against Germany.[5] Hoggan charged the alleged conspiracy was headed by the British Foreign Secretary Lord Halifax, who, Hoggan contended, had seized control of British foreign policy in October 1938 from Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain who was allegedly assisted by Polish Foreign Minister Colonel Józef Beck in what Hoggan called a monstrous anti-German plot.[6] In Hoggan’s opinion, after the Munich Agreement, an obsessively anti-German Lord Halifax decided to wage a war of annihilation against the German people.[7] Hoggan argued that Hitler's foreign policy was entirely peaceful and moderate, and that it was Nazi Germany that was in Hoggan's opinion an innocent victim of Anglo-Polish aggression in 1939:
[Hitler] had made more moderate demands on Poland than many leading American and British publicists had recommended in the years after Versailles. Moreover, Hitler had offered in return an amazing concession to Poland that the Weimar Republic would never even remotely countenance.[4]
The crux of Hoggan's thesis was presented when he wrote:
In London, Halifax succeeded in forcing on the British Government a deliberate policy of war despite the fact that most of the prominent British experts on Germany argued for a policy of German-English friendship. In Warsaw, Beck was prepared to collaborate fully with Halifax's war plans despite the warnings from numerous Poles who were horrified by the prospect of seeing their land destroyed.
German, Italian, French, and other European leaders did all they could to avert the great catastrophe, but in vain, while Halifax's war policy, accompanied by the secret blessings of Roosevelt and Stalin, carried the day...
The Second World War arose from the attempt to destroy Germany.[8]
Hoggan claimed that Britain was guilty of aggression against the German people. Moreover, Hoggan accused the Polish government of engaging in what he called hideous persecution of its German minority, and claimed that the Polish government's policies towards the ethnic German minority were far worse than the Nazi regime's policies towards the Jewish minority.[1] Moreover, Hoggan charged that all of the German anti-Semitic laws were forced on the Germans by anti-Semitism in Poland as in Hoggan's opinion German anti-Semitic laws were the only thing that stopped the entire Jewish population of Poland from immigrating to the Reich.[4] Hoggan justified the huge one billion Reich-mark fine imposed on the entire Jewish community in Germany after the 1938 Kristallnacht pogrom as a reasonable measure to prevent what he called "Jewish profiteering" at the expense of German insurance companies and alleged that no Jews were killed in the Kristallnacht (in fact, 91 German Jews died).[4] A particular area of controversy centered around Hoggan’s claim that the situation of German Jewry before World War II was extremely favorable to the Jewish community in Germany, and that none of the various antisemitic laws and measures of the Nazis had any deleterious effects on German Jews.[4]
Hoggan argued that because German-Jewish doctors and dentists as late as 1938 could still participate in the German national insurance program that proved that Nazi anti-Semitism was not that harsh.[9] Critics of Hoggan such as Deborah Lipstadt contend that Hoggan ignored the efforts on the part of the Nazi regime to stop "Aryan" Germans from seeing Jewish physicians and dentists throughout the 1930s, and that in July 1938 a law was passed withdrawing the licenses from Jewish doctors.[10] Likewise, Hoggan argued that because in an American State Department cable of September 1938 from the American Embassy in Berlin mentioned that 10% of all German lawyers were Jews, that this proved the mildness of Nazi anti-Semitism.[10] Lipstadt argued that Hoggan was guilty of selective quotation since the entire message concerns the discriminatory laws against German Jewish lawyers such as banning Jewish lawyers from serving as notaries.[10] Moreover, Lipstadt noted that Hoggan ignored the reason for the message, namely that on September 27, 1938 German Jews were forbidden to practice law in Germany.[10] Another area of criticism concerned Hoggan's treatment of the decision to end Judaism as an officially recognized religion in Germany.[11] In Germany, the government had traditionally imposed a religion tax in which the proceeds were turned over to one's faith organization.[12] In the Nazi era, Jews continued to pay the tax, but synagogues no longer received the proceeds.[11] Hoggan claimed that this meant that synagogues could not "profit" at the expense of non-Jewish Germans, and falsely presented this move as mere secularization measure (Christian churches continued to receive the proceeds of the religion tax in Nazi Germany).[12]
In the early 1960s, Hoggan's book attracted much attention, and was the subject of a cover story in Der Spiegel magazine in its May 13, 1964 edition. Hoggan's thesis of Germany as victim of aggression was widely attacked as simply wrong-headed.[1] In regards to his sympathies, it was argued that Hoggan was an ardent Germanophile and a compulsive Anglophobe, Polophobe, and an anti-Semite.
Further fanning the flames of the criticism was the revelation that Hoggan had received his research funds from and that he himself was a member of several neo-Nazi groups in the United States and West Germany, and the charge that Hoggan had wilfully misinterpreted and falsified historical evidence to fit his argument.[1] Another source of controversy with Hoggan's choice of publisher, the firm of Grabert Verlag which was run by former Nazi named Herbert Grabert, who had led a neo-pagan cult before World War II, had served as an official in Alfred Rosenberg's Ministry of the East during the war, and after the war made little secret of his beliefs about what he regarded as the rightness of Germany's cause during the war. When Der erzwungene Krieg was translated into English in 1989, it was published by the Institute for Historical Review.
In a critical review of Hoggan's book, the British historian Frank Spencer took issue with Hoggan's claim that all of the incidents that occurred in Danzig (modern Gdańsk, Poland) in 1939 were Polish provocations of Germany egged on by Britain.[13] Spencer noted that all of the incidents were cases of German provocations of Poland rather than vice versa, and that the Poles would have defended their rights in Danzig regardless of what British policy was.[13] Likewise, Spencer took issue with Hoggan's claim that the *Reich* Protectorate of Bohemia-Moravia was a generous German move to offer autonomy to the Czechs, and thought that Hoggan's complaint that it was most unjust that German minorities in Eastern Europe did not enjoy the same "autonomy" that Hitler offered to the Czechs in March 1939 to be simply laughable.[13] Spencer noted that Hoggan's claim that Hitler's order on April 3, 1939 to begin planning for Fall Weiss was not a sign of moderation on the part of Hitler as Hoggan claimed, and noted Hoggan simply ignored the German Foreign Office's instructions to ensure that all German-Polish talks over Danzig issue failed by making unreasonable demands on the Poles.[14] In particular, Spencer argued against Hoggan's claim that the German-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact was not designed to partition Poland, but was instead a thoughtful attempt on the part of Joachim von Ribbentrop to persuade Joseph Stalin to abandon the idea of world revolution.[15]
The American historian Donald Detwiler wrote that for Hoggan, Hitler was a basically reasonable statesman who tried to undo an unjust Treaty of Versailles.[8] Detwiler went on to write that Hoggan's book was "false" and "vicious" in its conclusion that Britain was the aggressor and Germany the victim in 1939.[8]
Andreas Hillgruber, one of Germany's leading military-diplomatic historians, noted that there was a certain "kernel of truth" to Hoggan's thesis, in that Hitler and Ribbentrop believed that attacking Poland in 1939 would not result in a British declaration of war against the Reich, but went on to argue that the major point of Hoggan's argument that Britain was seeking a war to destroy Germany was simply a "preposterous" misreading of history.[16]
One of Hoggan's leading detractors was the historian Hans Rothfels, the director of the Institute for Contemporary History, who used the journal of the Institute, the Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte [de] to attack Hoggan and his work, which Rothfels saw as sub-standard pseudo-history attempting to masquerade as serious scholarship. In a lengthy letter to the editor of the American Historical Review in 1964, Rothfels exposed the Nazi background of Hoggan's patrons.[17] Another leading critic was the U.S. historian Gerhard Weinberg, who wrote a harsh book review in the October 1962 edition of the American Historical Review. Weinberg noted that Hoggan's method involved taking of all Hitler's "peace speeches" at face value, and ignored evidence in favor of German intentions for aggression, such as the Hossbach Memorandum.[18] Moreover, Weinberg noted that Hoggan often rearranged events in a chronology to support his thesis, such as placing the Polish rejection of the German demand for the return of the Free City of Danzig (modern Gdańsk, Poland) to the Reich in October 1938 in 1939, thereby giving a false impression that the Polish refusal to consider changing the status of Danzig was due to British pressure.[18] Finally, Weinberg noted that Hoggan had appeared to engage in forgery by manufacturing documents and attributing statements that were not found in documents in the archives.[18] As an example, Weinberg noted during a meeting between Neville Chamberlain and Adam von Trott zu Solz in June 1939, Hoggan had Chamberlain saying that the British guarantee of Polish independence given in March 1939: "did not please him personally at all. He thereby gave the impression that Halifax was solely responsible for British policy".[18] As Weinberg noted, what Chamberlain actually said in response to criticism from Trott zu Solz of the Polish guarantee was: "Do you [Trott zu Solz] believe that I undertook these commitments gladly? Hitler forced me into them!"[18] In response, Barnes and Hoggan wrote a series of letters attempting to rebut Weinberg's arguments, who in his turn wrote letters replying to and rebutting the arguments of Hoggan and Barnes.[1] The exchanges between Hoggan and Barnes on one side and Weinberg on the other became increasingly rancorous and vitriolic to such an extent that in October 1963 the editors of the American Historical Review announced that they would cease publishing letters relating to Hoggan's book in the interest of decorum.
In a 1963 article, the German historian Helmut Krausnick, who was one of the leading scholars associated with the Institute for Contemporary History, accused Hoggan of manufacturing much of his "evidence".[1] Krausnick commented: "rarely have so many inane and unwarrented theses, allegations, and 'conclusions' ... been crammed into a volume written under the guise of history".[12] Hoggan's former professors at Harvard described his book as bearing no resemblance to the PhD dissertation that he had submitted in 1948.[1] Another point of criticism was the decision of two German historical societies to award Hoggan the Leopold von Ranke and Ulrich von Hutten Prizes for outstanding scholarship; many, such as the historian Gordon A. Craig felt that by honouring Hoggan, these societies had destroyed the value of the awards.[6] The Berliner Tagesspiegel newspaper criticized "these spectacular honors for a historical distortion".[6] The German Trade Union Council and the Association of German Writers both passed resolutions condemning the awards, while the Minister of the Interior in the Bundestag called the awards a "crude impertinence".[6] In a letter, Rothfels commented that most of the people associated with the two historical societies had a "clear-cut Nazi past".[19]
Support for Hoggan came from the historian Kurt Glaser, after examining The Forced War and its critics' arguments in Der Zweite Weltkrieg und die Kriegsschuldfrage (The Second World War and the Question of War Guilt), found, that while some criticisms had merit, "It is hardly necessary to repeat here that Hoggan was not attacked because he had erred here and there—albeit some of his errors are material—but because he had committed heresy against the creed of historical Orthodoxy."[20] The German historian and philosopher Ernst Nolte has often defended Hoggan as one of the great historians of World War II.[21] The Italian historian Rosaria Quartararo praised Der erzwungene Krieg as "perhaps still ... the best general account from the German side" of the period immediately before World War II.[22] Hoggan's mentor, Barnes, besides helping Hoggan turn his dissertation into the book Der erzwungene Krieg wrote a glowing blurb for the book's jacket.[4]
In 1976, the book March 1939: the British Guarantee to Poland by the British historian Simon K. Newman was published. Newman's thesis was somewhat similar to Hoggan's in that he argued that Britain was willing to risk a war with Germany in 1939, though Newman's book differed sharply from Hoggan's in that besides being based upon British archives that were closed in the 1950s, it was Neville Chamberlain rather than Lord Halifax who was seen as driving British foreign policy. Newman denied there was ever a policy of appeasement as popularly understood.[23] Newman maintained that British foreign policy under Chamberlain aimed at denying Germany a "free hand" anywhere in Europe, and to the extent that concessions were offered they were due to military weaknesses, compounded by the economic problems of rearmament.[24] Most controversially, Newman contended that the British guarantee to Poland in March 1939 was motivated by the desire to have Poland as a potential anti-German ally, thereby blocking the chance for a German-Polish settlement of the Danzig (modern Gdańsk, Poland) question by encouraging what Newman claimed was Polish obstinacy over the Danzig issue, and thus causing World War II.[25] Newman argued that German-Polish talks on the question of returning Danzig had been going well until Chamberlain's guarantee, and that it was Chamberlain's intention to sabotage the talks as a way of causing an Anglo-German war. In Newman's opinion, the guarantee of Poland was meant by Chamberlain as a "deliberate challenge" to Germany in 1939.[26] Newman wrote that World War II was not "Hitler's unique responsibility..." and rather contended that "Instead of a German war of aggrandizement, the war become one of Anglo-German rivalry for power and influence, the culmination of the struggle for the right to determine the future configuration of Europe".[27] Newman's conclusions were controversial in their own right, and historians such as Anna Cienciala and Anita Prazmowska have published refutations of his conclusions.[28]
Based upon extensive interviews with the former French foreign minister Georges Bonnet, Hoggan followed up Der erzwungene Krieg with Frankreichs Widerstand gegen den Zweiten Weltkrieg (France's Resistance to the Second World War) in 1963. In that book, Hoggan argued that the Third Republic had no quarrel with the Third Reich and had been forced by British pressure to declare war on Germany in 1939.
The Myth of the 'New History'
In his 1965 book, The Myth of the 'New History': The Techniques and Tactics of the New Mythologists of American History, Hoggan attacked all of the so-called "mythologist" historians who justified dragging America into unnecessary wars with Germany twice in the 20th century.[29] According to Hoggan, the "mythologists" were Anglophiles, Liberals, internationalists, and "anti-Christians" (by which Hoggan apparently meant Jews).[30] Repeating his argument from Der erzwungene Krieg, Hoggan argued that Hitler was a man of peace who was "the victim of English Tory conspiracy in September 1939... Halifax conducted a single-minded campaign to plunge Germany into war and in such a way as to make Germany appear the guilty party".[29] Hoggan again argued that, incited by Britain, Poland was planning to attack Germany in 1939, and went on to argue that Operation Barbarossa was a "preventive war" forced on Germany in 1941.[29] Hoggan blamed the German defeat in World War II to Hitler's reluctance to rearm on the proper scale due to his alleged love of peace, and argued that Germany was defeated only because of overwhelming material odds, but praised the "grit and courage" of the Germans in resisting the Allied onslaught against them.[29] In Hoggan's opinion, too many American historians were "slow to grasp the central British role in bringing about either the Second World War and the Cold War".[29] In a review of The Myth of the 'New History', the American historian Harvey Wish commented that the book appeared to be little but an isolationist, pro-German Anglophobic rant about the fact that the United States in alliance with Britain had fought Germany in the two world wars.[31]
Holocaust denial
In following years, author Lucy Dawidowicz wrote that Hoggan maintained a close association with various neo-Nazi and Holocaust denial groups.[32] In 1969 a short book was published called The Myth of the Six Million, denying the Holocaust. The book listed no author, but the work was by Hoggan, though published without his permission.[33] This should not be confused with his earlier book of 1965 called The Myth of the 'New History', on America's wars. The Myth of the Six Million was published by the Noontide Press, a small Los Angeles-based publisher specializing in explicitly antisemitic literature owned and operated by Willis Carto. Hoggan sued Carto in 1969 for publishing the book (written in 1960) without his permission; the case was settled out of court in 1973.[33]
The Myth of the Six Million was one of the first books, if not the first book, in the English language to promote Holocaust denial.[32] In The Myth of the Six Million, Hoggan argued that all of the evidence for the Holocaust was manufactured after the war as a way of trying to justify what Hoggan called a war of aggression against Germany.[34] The Myth of the Six Million was published with a foreword by "E.L. Anderson", which was apparently a pseudonym for Carto.[35] As part of The Myth of the Six Million, there was an appendix comprising five articles first published in The American Mercury.[35] The five articles were "Zionist Fraud" by Harry Elmer Barnes, "The Elusive Six Million" by Austin App, "Was Anne Frank's Diary a Hoax" by Teressa Hendry, "Paul Rassinier: Historical Revisionist" by Herbert C. Roseman, "The Jews that Aren't" by Leo Heiman, and a favorable review of Paul Rassinier's work by Barnes.[35][36]
Hoggan was accused in The Myth of the Six Million of re-arranging words from documents to support his contentions.[34] One of Hoggan's critics, Lucy Dawidowicz, used the example of the memoirs of an Austrian Social Democrat named Benedikt Kautsky [de], imprisoned at Buchenwald concentration camp and later at the Auschwitz death camp, who wrote: "I should now like briefly to refer to the gas chambers. Though I did not see them myself, they have been described to me by so many trustworthy people that I have no hesitation in reproducing their testimony". Dawidowicz accused Hoggan of re-arranging the sentence to make it sound like Kautsky declared they were no gas chambers at Auschwitz rather than declaring that he had not seen them but only heard of them by hearsay.[34]
In the 1970s, Hoggan turned to writing about American history in German. Hoggan's books about American history, his Der unnötige Krieg (The Unnecessary War) and the Das blinde Jahrhundert (The Blind Century) series, have been described as "a massive and bizarre critique of the course of American history from a racialist and wildly anti-Semitic perspective".[37]
In the 1980s, Hoggan was a leading member of the Institute for Historical Review (IHR) and a featured speaker at the IHR's Sixth Conference in 1985. His work has remained popular with antisemitic groups.
Final years
During his final years David Hoggan lived with his wife in Menlo Park, California. He died there of a heart attack on 7 August 1988. Hoggan's last book, published posthumously in 1990, was Meine Anmerkungen zu Deutschland: Der Anglo-amerikanische Kreuzzugsgedanke im 20. Jahrhundert (My comments on Germany: The Anglo-American crusade idea in the 20th century) which detailed what he claimed were Germany's innocence in and incredible suffering in both world wars due to an anti-German Anglo-American "crusader mentality" due to an "envy" of German economic success.
Work
Books
- Der erzwungene Krieg. Tübingen: Grabert Verlag (1961).
- Translated into English as The Forced War : When Peaceful Revision Failed. Costa Mesa, Calif.: Institute for Historical Review (1989). ISBN 0939484285.
- Frankreichs Widerstand gegen den Zweiten Weltkrieg. Tübingen: Verlag der Deutschen Hochschullehrer-Zeitung (1963).
- The Myth of the Six Million. Los Angeles, Calif.: Noontide Press (1969). ISBN 0906879892.
- Der unnötige Krieg. Tübingen: Grabert Verlag (1976).
- Das blinde Jahrhundert: Amerika—das messianische Unheil. Tübingen: Grabert Verlag (1979).
- Das blinde Jahrhundert: Europa—Die verlorene Weltmitte. Tübingen: Grabert Verlag (1984).
- The Myth of New History Techniques and Tactics of Mythologists. Costa Mesa, Calif.: Institute for Historical Review (1985). ISBN 0317385119.
- Meine Anmerkungen zu Deutschland: Der Anglo-amerikanische Kreuzzugsgedanke im 20. Jahrhundert. Tübingen: Grabert Verlag (1990).
Articles
- "President Roosevelt and the Origins of the 1939 War." Journal of Historical Review, vol. 4, no. 2, Special Issue: Roosevelt and War in Europe, 1938-1940 (Summer 1983), pp. 205–255.
Reviews
- Review of Oesterreich Zwischen Russland und Serbien: Zur Suedslawischen Frage und der Entstehung des Ersten Weltkrieges by Hans Uebersberger. Journal of Modern History, vol. 32, no. 1 (Mar. 1960), p. 87.
References...
:{How Milton Friedman Aided and Abetted Segregationists in His Quest to ...:(style="margin:0px;padding:0px;border:0px;font-style:inherit;font-variant:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-stretch:inherit;font-optical-sizing:inherit;font-kerning:inherit;font-feature-settings:inherit;font-variation-settings:inherit;vertical-align:top;display:inline-block;max-width:100%;overflow:hidden;text-overflow:ellipsis;white-space:nowrap"):}:
Sep 27, 2021This history reveals how Milton Friedman and his allies provided aid and comfort to those who presided over a racial dictatorship in the Jim Crow South, an apartheid-like regime that stayed in power through state-sponsored repression, employer retaliation, and private violence.
:{William Volker Fund - Philanthropy Roundtable:(style="margin:0px;padding:0px;border:0px;font-style:inherit;font-variant:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-stretch:inherit;font-optical-sizing:inherit;font-kerning:inherit;font-feature-settings:inherit;font-variation-settings:inherit;vertical-align:top;display:inline-block;max-width:100%;overflow:hidden;text-overflow:ellipsis;white-space:nowrap"):}:
Volker's foundation came to the rescue with a check that allowed 17 Americans to fly across the ocean for the 1947 gathering. The American attendees included Milton Friedman, Henry Hazlitt, Leonard Read, George Stigler, and Ludwig von Mises (who was not an American but was teaching in New York).
:{Inflation and Deflation: A Biography of Milton Friedman:(style="margin:0px;padding:0px;border:0px;font-style:inherit;font-variant:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-stretch:inherit;font-optical-sizing:inherit;font-kerning:inherit;font-feature-settings:inherit;font-variation-settings:inherit;vertical-align:top;display:inline-block;max-width:100%;overflow:hidden;text-overflow:ellipsis;white-space:nowrap"):}:
In 1956, the William Volker Charities Fund arranged for Friedman to deliver a series of lectures about general principles and major public policy issues such as unemployment, monopolies, racial discrimination, Social Security and international trade.
:{Why Mislead Readers about Milton Friedman and Segregation?:(style="margin:0px;padding:0px;border:0px;font-style:inherit;font-variant:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-stretch:inherit;font-optical-sizing:inherit;font-kerning:inherit;font-feature-settings:inherit;font-variation-settings:inherit;vertical-align:top;display:inline-block;max-width:100%;overflow:hidden;text-overflow:ellipsis;white-space:nowrap"):}:
Nov 15, 2021Finally, my INET piece demonstrated that other leading libertarians—including what was then a leading libertarian foundation, the William Volker Fund - joined Friedman in embracing the segregationist voucher program, as did many members of the Mont Pelerin Society and two Virginia-based board members of the Foundation for Economic Education.
:{Kansas City Philanthropist's Money Was The Foundation Of U.S ...:(style="margin:0px;padding:0px;border:0px;font-style:inherit;font-variant:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-stretch:inherit;font-optical-sizing:inherit;font-kerning:inherit;font-feature-settings:inherit;font-variation-settings:inherit;vertical-align:top;display:inline-block;max-width:100%;overflow:hidden;text-overflow:ellipsis;white-space:nowrap"):}:
Apr 19, 2021Started in 1932 the William Volker Charities Fund focused on progressive social programs for the less fortunate in Kansas City but after his death was used to aggressively support a "procapitalist ...
:{William Volker Fund - Wikipedia:(style="margin:0px;padding:0px;border:0px;font-style:inherit;font-variant:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-stretch:inherit;font-optical-sizing:inherit;font-kerning:inherit;font-feature-settings:inherit;font-variation-settings:inherit;vertical-align:top;display:inline-block;max-width:100%;overflow:hidden;text-overflow:ellipsis;white-space:nowrap"):}:
The William Volker Fund was a charitable foundation established in 1932 by Kansas City, Missouri, businessman and home-furnishings mogul William Volker. 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's Legacy | Pandemic Retirement Plans : NPR:(style="margin:0px;padding:0px;border:0px;font-style:inherit;font-variant:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-stretch:inherit;font-optical-sizing:inherit;font-kerning:inherit;font-feature-settings:inherit;font-variation-settings:inherit;vertical-align:top;display:inline-block;max-width:100%;overflow:hidden;text-overflow:ellipsis;white-space:nowrap"):}:
Apr 19, 2021How William Volker's money laid the foundation for American conservatism and a look at the pandemic's impacts on retirement plans.
:{William Volker - Wikipedia:(style="margin:0px;padding:0px;border:0px;font-style:inherit;font-variant:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-stretch:inherit;font-optical-sizing:inherit;font-kerning:inherit;font-feature-settings:inherit;font-variation-settings:inherit;vertical-align:top;display:inline-block;max-width:100%;overflow:hidden;text-overflow:ellipsis;white-space:nowrap"):}:
William Volker ( / ˈvoʊlkər /; German: [ˈfɔlkɐ]; April 1, 1859 - November 4, 1947) was an entrepreneur who turned a picture frame business into a multimillion-dollar empire and who then gave away his fortune to shape much of Kansas City, Missouri, both through the William Volker Fund and anonymously, earning him the nickname of "Mr. Anonymous." [1]
:{Milton Friedman and the Volker Foundation | SUNY Buffalo Neoliberalism ...:(style="margin:0px;padding:0px;border:0px;font-style:inherit;font-variant:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-stretch:inherit;font-optical-sizing:inherit;font-kerning:inherit;font-feature-settings:inherit;font-variation-settings:inherit;vertical-align:top;display:inline-block;max-width:100%;overflow:hidden;text-overflow:ellipsis;white-space:nowrap"):}:
Milton Friedman and the Volker Foundation February 18, 2009 by mgarite In his preface to Capitalism and Freedom, Milton Friedman notes that his book was the product of a series of lectures from the late 1950s sponsored by a group called the Volker Foundation.
:{How Milton Friedman Aided and Abetted ... - naked capitalism:(style="margin:0px;padding:0px;border:0px;font-style:inherit;font-variant:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-stretch:inherit;font-optical-sizing:inherit;font-kerning:inherit;font-feature-settings:inherit;font-variation-settings:inherit;vertical-align:top;display:inline-block;max-width:100%;overflow:hidden;text-overflow:ellipsis;white-space:nowrap"):}:
Sep 29, 2021This history reveals how Milton Friedman and his allies provided aid and comfort to those who presided over a racial dictatorship in the Jim Crow South, an apartheid-like regime that stayed in power through state-sponsored repression, employer retaliation, and private violence.