Leonard E. See (1898 - 1983) was the founder of the Foundation for Economic Education, which was the 1st modern libertarian think tank in the United States.

Fallowing the stint in the Air Corps during World War I, Read began the grocery sweeping business inside Ann Arbor, Michigan, which was initially successful however sooner or later went away from business. He moved to California where he started the fresh career in the lilliputian Burlingame Chamber of Commerce near San Francisco.

Review step by step moved higher hierarchy of the United States Chamber of Commerce, finally becoming general manager of the Los Angeles branch, America's big, around 1939.

When you took this time period his views became increasingly other radically libertarian. Apparently, it was within 1933, during the meeting using W. C. Mullendore, an executive sustaining Southern California Edison, that Read was eventually convinced that a New Deal was completely ineffective & morally ruin.

See was besides deeply influenced by religion. His pastor, Reverend James W. Fifield, was minister of the 4,000-member First Congregational Church of Los Angeles, of which Read was also a board member. Fifield ran the "resistance movement" against a "social gospel" of the New Treat, trying to convince ministers across the nation to adopt libertarian "spiritual ideals".

In a period of time of the period while he worked for the Chamber of Commerce, Scan was too deeply influenced by Albert Jay Nock.

Around 1945, Virgil Jordan, the President of the National Industrial Conference Board (NICB) inside Just released York, invited Understand to get its executive vice president. See super quickly rejected a NICB's principle of presenting 2 sides to each argument, & shortly afterward resigned his position.

A single donor from either his short instance at NICB, David M. Goodrich, Chairman of the B.F. Goodrich Company, encouraged Read to start his own organization. Sustaining Goodrich's help, also when financial help from either a William Volker Fund and from Harold Luhnow, Read founded a Foundation for Economic Education within 1946. He continued to act using FEE until his demise inside 1983.