Frederick Nymeyer

At about the same time Read was setting up FEE in Irvington, New York, Mises made another acquaintance who would eventually turn into a long-term ally. In May 1946, Chicago businessman Frederick Nymeyer had finished reading Mises's Theory of Money and Credit, which prompted him to write to the author and inquire about any further writings of his on the subject.²⁹ During the following months, Nymeyer read Omnipotent Government and other available English-language writings of the Austrian professor. He was the ideal reader for Mises. He had received his economics education in the early 1920s, then worked for a while as a field representative of the Harvard Business Cycle Index. He was well acquainted with the monetary thought that prevailed in the United States. The Theory of Money and Credit, he found, “was a radically different approach than the mechanical Quantity theory” and he therefore “had some difficulty to adjust all my thinking to your exposition.” Part of the difficulty seemed to be the different use of terms, and Nymeyer then went on to raise questions about one of the crucial concepts of the theory: the demand for money.³⁰ Mises agreed that the way he had put it—the demand for money being the demand for purchasing power—was ambiguous, and that a better way of putting it was to say that the market participants had a demand for cash holdings. He promised to revise his writings accordingly and to consider this point in his forthcoming treatise on economics.

This exchange was the beginning of a long-lasting alliance (though never really more than a personal friendship). Nymeyer soon commenced to read other Austrian works available in English, in particular Böhm-Bawerk's Capital and Interest. Slowly, he became a dedicated admirer of the Austrian School. He was also a dedicated Calvinist and claimed, “Böhm-Bawerk has gone as far beyond Adam Smith as Calvin did beyond Luther.”³¹

Mises's agnosticism did not diminish Nymeyer's admiration for the Austrian economist. And it did not prevent Mises himself from cooperating openly and productively with Christian libertarians in America. In Austria, such cooperation was almost out of the question, because the Christian Socialists had pushed the Catholic Church into an intellectual dead end. Only outstanding personalities such as Monsignor Seipel could overcome the socialist resentments against the liberal Mises. But in the States, things were different. A great number of the Protestant clergymen in America loved individual liberty and the free market and considered this love to result quite naturally from their Christian religion. Many of these men felt that Mises's theories were complementary to their faith.

In correspondence with a high clergyman of the Church of England in Canada, who had read Human Action, Mises wrote:

I fully agree with your statement that the Gospels do not advocate anticapitalistic policies. I dealt with this problem years ago in my book Socialism.... I furthermore fully agree with your proposition that one does not find in Human Action “one word which is in opposition to the Christian faith.”³²

Mises enthusiastically welcomed the publication of the monthly periodical Faith and Freedom by Spiritual Mobilization, a Los Angeles based organization in December 1949. Of course he knew very well that the majority of Protestant leaders championed some form of socialism or interventionism, and that while the Catholic Church “valiantly fights communism,” it did not oppose socialism. But these problems were outside of his field: “I think that only theologians are called to deal with the issue.”

This was also the opinion of Frederick Nymeyer. One of the mainsprings of his motivation for spreading Mises's writings was precisely the complementary relation he perceived between laissez-faire capitalism and Christianity.

Mises and Nymeyer probably met for the first time in late January 1948. Nymeyer then started thinking about why the Austrian School of economics was not prevalent in the United States and he came to the conclusion that Austrian works were not sufficiently well known. In the fall of that year, he was ready to take action, relying in particular on his voluminous address book (“I know several of the outstanding entrepreneurs in the country. I sit on some important Boards of Directors.”³³). And at the end of January 1949, after several more encounters with Mises, Nymeyer came up with a plan: The idea was to set up a “Liberal Institute” under Mises's leadership at the University of Chicago—Nymeyer was a friend of the dean of the business school—or at some other suitable university in the Chicago area.³⁴ Nymeyer had already won over his associate Robert W Baird and his friend John T Brown, vice-president of the J.I. Case Company. By May 1949 they had talked to several other businessmen in the area.

At the end of April, the university had told Nymeyer that they would favor “unrestricted gifts” to be used with “academic freedom”—which meant that the university would select the staff of the proposed Liberal Institute. Mises commented:

Based on this slogan [“academic freedom”] the universities are boycotting all those economists who dare to raise objections against interventionism from another point of view than that of socialism. The question of academic freedom is today not: should communist teachers be tolerated? It is rather: should only communists, socialists or interventionists be appointed?³⁵

But the resistance did not come only from within the universities. A few years later (and that much the wiser), Mises acknowledged the existence of another factor:

One of the worst features of the present state of affairs is the misplaced loyalty of the alumni. As soon as somebody dares to criticize something concerning a university, all alumni come to the rescue of their alma mater. Then we have the spectacle of big business defending the boycott launched by the faculties against all those who do not sympathize with interventionism, planning and socialism.³⁶

In any case, the plan for a Chicago-based “Liberal Institute” under Mises's leadership did not materialize. But Nymeyer and his friends probably had some influence in bringing Hayek to Chicago, and in the early 1950s he played a significant role in raising funds for Mont Pèlerin Society meetings.³⁷