Leonard E. Read

Leonard E. Read was born on 26 September 1898 on a farm near Hubbardston, Michigan. His father died when he was ten, so he took on an adult’s burdens early. He served in the armed forces during the First World War and, on his return, founded a wholesale grocery business in Ann Arbor which, after a few years of success, closed.

He then moved to California and began a new career in chambers of commerce: from the small chamber of Burlingame, near San Francisco, he moved to Palo Alto and to the Western Division of the United States Chamber of Commerce, and in 1939 he became general manager of the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce, the largest in the country. The turning point came in 1933, when he met W. C. Mullendore of Southern California Edison, who criticized the Chamber’s stance toward the New Deal; the conversation changed his views radically and led to his first book, The Romance of Reality (1937).

In 1946, with Henry Hazlitt and other associates, he founded the Foundation for Economic Education (FEE) in Irvington, New York, one of the first free-market think tanks in the United States. FEE hosted thinkers such as Ludwig von Mises and from 1956 published the magazine The Freeman; according to FEE itself, its early work inspired the founding of the Mont Pèlerin Society in 1947. In The Freeman of December 1958 he published “I, Pencil”, in which an ordinary pencil recounts its “family tree” to show that “not a single person on the face of this earth knows how to make me”: the product arises from the free cooperation of countless people, without central planning.

He wrote 29 books in all and many essays, and led FEE until his death on 14 May 1983 in Irvington-on-Hudson. According to the Mises Institute, the revival of the liberal tradition in post-war America owes a great deal to him; in 2025 the Institute published an anthology of his writings edited by Gary Galles.

Sources: Foundation for Economic Education — Leonard E. Read · FEE — History · FEE — Leonard E. Read: A Portrait · FEE — Leonard Read, the Founder and Builder (Mary Sennholz) · FEE — Celebrating Leonard Read (Gary Galles) · Mises Institute — Leonard E. Read · Mises Institute — Freedom in One Lesson (introduction) · The New York Times — obituary (1983) · Wikipedia — Leonard Read

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