Frank Knox

Frank Knox

William Franklin "Frank" Knox (* 1. January 1874 in Boston , Massachusetts , † 28 April 1944 in Washington, DC ) was an American politician of the Republican and newspaper publisher ; he was Secretary of the Navy of the United States for much of World War II from 1940 until his death . Knox ran unsuccessfully in the 1936 election as Republican for the office of vice president . He and the presidential candidate Alf Landon were defeated by the Democratic incumbent Franklin D. Roosevelt , under whom Knox later served as Minister of the Navy.

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Secretary of the Navy Knox at his desk in 1943

Frank Knox was born in Boston on New Years Day, 1874; his family moved to Grand Rapids , Michigan seven years later . He left high school before graduation to work as a clerk. But when he lost his job as a result of the economic crisis known as the Panic of 1893 , he went to Alma College . He financed the visit by helping out as a caretaker at the school. When the Spanish-American War broke out in 1898 , he volunteered and fought with Theodore Roosevelt's " Rough Riders " in Cuba . Like many rough riders, he supported Roosevelt's third candidacy for the US presidency in 1912 as the third candidate, as the so-called Bull Moose Republican against the majority will of the Republicans . After serving as a soldier until the United States entered the First World War , he published various newspapers, first in Michigan, and then from 1912 in Massachusetts. With the beginning of the war in Europe, Knox campaigned for the United States to join the war on the side of the Entente . Knox then served as an artillery officer with the US Expeditionary Forces in France and was discharged as a colonel .

After 1918 he worked for the newspaper empire William Randolph Hearsts , and in 1927 he was the general agent for all 27 daily newspapers of the group. In 1930 he left the Hearst group and acquired shares in The Chicago Daily News , whose editor and publisher he was and remained until his death. Even as editor of this newspaper, he was an opponent of the prevailing isolationism , but instead demanded that the United States prepare for an impending war.

For the US presidential election in 1936 , Knox ran as a Republican presidential candidate. When it became clear at the nomination party conference that Alf Landon would almost certainly win, Knox withdrew - probably also to prevent a split in the party. The victorious competitor offered him the post of running mate the next day , and therefore the candidacy for vice-president. The election campaign was fought extremely sharply against Roosevelt's " New Deal " policy, but Landon / Knox lost the election like a landslide with 35:60 percent of the vote. When Hitler's expansion course began to emerge with the Anschluss in the late 1930s , he fully supported the Roosevelt government's armaments program and Roosevelt's foreign policy. Roosevelt offered Knox several cabinet positions, but Knox turned down two offers before taking over the Navy Department in 1940, despite the fact that he was sharply criticized by many Republicans for this. He justified this by saying that he was first an American and only then a Republican. ("I am an American first and a Republican after that.") He did not make the armament and support of the Allies part of his policy before the war in his homeland, which led to open calls for resignation by isolationists.

During his tenure, the entire operational planning ran to Knox by the military chief of staff Ernest J. King , while the fleet armament was administered by Knox 'deputy and later successor James V. Forrestal . As an old army officer he was considered a bad naval strategist; he was said to have a lack of deeper understanding of the issues of naval warfare. However, through visits to all theaters of sea war, including a few days after the attack on Pearl Harbor in Hawaii, as well as to allies in the old world, particularly Britain, and potential allies in the Americas, he was present. Knox died of a heart attack in late April 1944 while still in office in Washington and was buried in Arlington National Cemetery.

Knox is often given as the father of Elyse Knox , but she was born under a different name and has no connection to Frank.

Honors

The USS Frank Knox (DD-742, later DDR-742, and DD-742, after 1971 as Themistoklis to Greece), a destroyer of the gearing class , was named after Knox in the spring of 1944 . Moreover, that was The Frank Knox Memorial Fellowship -Stipendienprogramm Harvard University for students from the United Kingdom , New Zealand , Australia and Canada named after him.

Web links

Commons : Frank Knox  - collection of images, videos and audio files

• Short biography with numerous pictures from the time as Minister of the Navy on the website of the Naval Historical Center of the US Navy ( English )
• Harvard University's The Frank Knox Memorial Fellowship Scholarship Program homepage . (English)
• Frank Knox in the Miller Center of Public Affairs of the University of Virginia (English)
• Newspaper article about Frank Knox in the press kit of the 20th century of the ZBW - Leibniz Information Center for Economics .

Individual evidence

1. ↑ ^{a b c} Biography Knox 'on the website of the The Frank Knox Memorial Fellowship Program at Harvard University ( archive link ( Memento of the original dated December 18, 2007 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and not yet Checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this note. , English ). 
2. ↑ ^{a b c} "End of a Strenuous Life", obituary to Knox, TIME of May 8, 1944 ( [1] , English ).
3. ↑ Entry on Knox on the website of The University of Virginia's Miller Center of Public Affairs ( [2]  ( page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove it this note. , English ).  
4. ^ ^{A b} "Illinois Hall of Fame: Frank Knox" by Mark Rhoads from October 20, 2006 ( [3] , English).