John Frush Knox

John Frush Knox (1907–1997) served as secretary and law clerk to United States Supreme Court Justice James Clark McReynolds from 1936 to 1937. After working at various law firms, he took over his family's mail-order business and then worked as an insurance adjuster. He is chiefly known for his memoir of his year spent working for Justice McReynolds.

Life

Early life Knox was born in 1907, in Oak Park, Illinois to James Samuel Knox and Elizabeth Knox (née Frush). In high school, he began writing pen pal letters to celebrities. He began with Civil War veterans and proceeded to other notable figures of the day including Helen Keller, William Howard Taft, and Admiral Byrd. He established an ongoing correspondence with members of the United States Supreme Court, including Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., Benjamin N. Cardozo, and Willis Van Devanter. His most sustained correspondence was with Van Devanter, one of the conservative "Four Horsemen" of the Supreme Court.

Knox did undergraduate work at the University of Chicago (Ph.B. 1930) and then studied law at Northwestern University School of Law (J.D. 1934) and the Harvard Law School (LL.M. 1936). He was an indefatigable diarist, generating more than 750 pages of scrapbook, commentary and written recollection by the time he reached college. At one time, Knox claimed that he intended to surpass Samuel Pepys as a diarist. Knox would later write a long memoir of that experience, A Year in the Life of a Supreme Court Clerk in Franklin D. Roosevelt's Washington, centered mostly on his relations with McReynolds and McReynolds's two black servants, but also containing observations on other members of the Supreme Court at that time, and the historical period in general.

Knox was a member of the Bars of Illinois, New York and of the Supreme Court of the United States. He also belonged to the Society of Mayflower Descendants, the Society of Colonial Wars, the Sons of the American Revolution, the Sons of the Revolution, and the Society of the War of 1812. Knox's club at Harvard was Lincoln's Inn.