# Philander Knox **Philander Chase Knox** (1853–1921) was the Pittsburgh corporate lawyer who became Attorney General (1901–04), Secretary of State (1909–13) and a senator from Pennsylvania (1904–09, 1917–21) — the Gilded Age's clearest case of the revolving door between the defense of private power and the exercise of public power, and the vault's type-specimen of [[Elite Impunity]]. ## The two careers As a name partner of Knox & Reed he was counsel to [[Andrew Carnegie]] and [[Henry Clay Frick]], a member of the [[South Fork Fishing and Hunting Club]] whose neglected dam killed 2,209 people in the [[Johnstown Flood of 1889]], and the architect of the club's legal defense: the flood was an act of God, the club a private association without assets, and no plaintiff ever recovered a dollar. In 1901 he handled the legal side of the Carnegie sale to [[J.P. Morgan]] that created [[U.S. Steel]] — then, within months, became [[William McKinley]]'s Attorney General and, under [[Theodore Roosevelt]], the prosecutor of Morgan's Northern Securities railroad trust, the case that made "trust-buster" a title. He did not prosecute U.S. Steel. As [[William Howard Taft]]'s Secretary of State he named the policy — "Dollar Diplomacy" — of using American banks and Marines together in Central America and the Caribbean, the foreign extension of the Pittsburgh capital he had represented; as a senator he led the fight against the League of Nations. ## Why he matters here Knox is the answer to a question the vault keeps asking about the present: what happens when the people who engineer private impunity go on to run public enforcement. The answer in his case was selective vigor — a trust prosecuted, a trust he had built left alone, a dam's victims uncompensated — carried out by a man of unquestioned competence and no discernible sense of contradiction. The [[Johnstown Flood of 1889]] and [[South Fork Fishing and Hunting Club]] pages carry the case; compare [[Andrew Mellon]] for the next Pittsburgh lawyer-financier to run a department of the government he had done business with. ## See Also - [[South Fork Fishing and Hunting Club]] · [[Johnstown Flood of 1889]] · [[Elite Impunity]] - [[Andrew Carnegie]] · [[Henry Clay Frick]] · [[J.P. Morgan]] · [[U.S. Steel]] · [[Andrew Mellon]] - [[William McKinley]] · [[Theodore Roosevelt]] · [[William Howard Taft]]