Pairs of siblings becoming professors of economics are infrequent but hardly rare. A trio of siblings becoming professors of economics becomes easier to imagine when one considers families with nine children as was the case for Frank H. Knight and his brothers Melvin Moses Knight and Bruce Winton Knight. This post provides images and official university obituaries for Melvin and Bruce.
Seeing “salty individualist” in the first line of an obituary tells us something about Melvin, perhaps that he was not an easy-going, cheery colleague?
The previous post unearthed a ballad (The Ballad of Right Price) from the early 1920’s written by Bruce Knight who was a graduate-student quizmaster for University of Michigan professor Fred M. Taylor at the time.
The only photo I could find of the eldest of the three, Melvin, is cropped from the image of his passport application of June 1917. At the online archive of the Dartmouth Alumni Magazine one can find a few different pictures of the youngest, Bruce.
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Melvin Moses Knight, Economics: Berkeley
1887-1981
Professor Emeritus
The University of California has numbered many salty individualists among its faculty. M.M. (Melvin Moses) Knight must figure high among them. Born April 29, 1887 on a farm near Bloomington, Illinois, he was one of nine children. Three were to be distinguished economists, M.M. at Berkeley, Frank at the University of Chicago, and Bruce at Dartmouth. Life on the farm was not always easy. At age 13, M.M. found himself responsible for running the farm. A self-taught man, he never attended high school. For a time he worked as a locksmith and bicycle mechanic. He later showed skills as plumber and musician. At age 23 he managed to qualify for entrance into Milligan College, Tennessee. After two years, he transferred to the University of Tennessee, where he studied physics and economics. He took an A.B. at Texas Christian University in English in 1913, followed the next year by an M.A. in history. He studied for a while at the University of Chicago and finally earned a Ph.D. in sociology at Clark University in sociology, with a thesis, Taboo and Genetics. His studies continued at other institutions, including the New School for Social Research and the University of Paris in such fields as geology, geography, genetics, mathematics, and theology. Later his wide interdisciplinary interests showed up in his teaching and writing.
He was no stranger to war. During World War I he served as a volunteer ambulance driver with the French army and later with the intelligence section of the Air Service of the American Expeditionary Force. In 1919 he served as a volunteer with the Romanian Field Hospital, Regina Maria, in Transylvania and Hungary. He was discharged as a captain and decorated with the Romanian Cross of Merit. During World War II, by then too old for active duty, he served as Assistant Chief, Division of Economic Studies, Department of State.
M.M.’s academic career began in 1920 at Hunter College, followed by brief periods at the Universities of Utah and California. From 1923 to 1926 he was in the Department of History at Columbia University. In 1926 an Amherst Memorial Fellowship took him to Europe and North Africa to examine the French colonial system. In 1928 he joined the Department of Economics of the University of California, Berkeley, where he remained until his retirement in 1954.
In teaching, writing, and dealings with colleagues, M.M. displayed the keenly interdisciplinary character of his studies and a probing curiosity. His first publication was a Dictionnaire Pratique d’Aeronautique, prepared for the U.S. Air Service in 1918. After that came a number of articles on the contemporary economy and the political problems of eastern Europe, economic history, and colonial questions. His “Water and the Course of Empire in French North Africa” (Quarterly Journal of Economics, 1925) is a masterly exposition of the millennial relation between physical changes in man’s environment and the structure of economic organization. By the mid-1920s he entered upon a spate of publication: Economic History of Europe to the End of the Middle Ages (1926), later translated into French; co-authorship of Economic History of Europe to Modern Times(1928); The Americans in Santo Domingo(1928), a condensation of a much larger manuscript, published as well in a number of Spanish editions; an English translation of Sée’s Economic Interpretation of History (1929); Introduction to Modern Economic History (1940); and numerous articles in the Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences.
M.M. Knight’s concerns in economics are best summarized in the tribute to him written by Giulio Pontecorvo and Charles F. Stewart in 1979 (Exploration in Economic History, 16:243-245):
The theoretical apparatus of contemporary economics is focused on general equilibrium analysis and the solution of welfare problems within that static framework. In the simplest sense, Knight departs from today’s emphasis and this line of inquiry by his deep fundamental concern with the problem of the nature of economic scarcity and society’s response to scarcity through time rather than with the determinants of real income and the social implications of alternative income distributions.
He transcends Veblen and especially Galbraith and Rostow by his concern with the evolution and the full extent of economic structures. While Veblen was concerned with the industrial economy and its linkages to other elements, e.g., finance, etc., Knight’s view is both more holistic and more focused on the evolutionary and disequilibrium properties of economic systems.
Unlike the American institutional position, as it is typically presented, Knight adds a strong sense of geography, of place, and the ecology of place. In this particular way, he reveals his links both with his rural origins and with the traditions of French economic history…
Each society is constrained by its own geographic and resource endowments. Each therefore responds to the problem of scarcity in its own way and creates its own institutions or transforms those it borrows. Regardless of the form of the response, the process of expansion works over time to use up the opportunity… Once an opportunity is used up, it requires both technological development and a reordering of social institutions to create a new set of human opportunities and this is a formidable social task of the true long run… unlike the essentially optimistic cast of Marxian inevitability, Knight has a strong sense that systems run down and because they are located in space as well as in time, systems that have exhausted themselves do not necessarily get transformed and revived but tend to be replaced, as were Egypt and Rome and North Africa.
While in Paris, Knight married Eleanor Gehmann in what proved to be a long, happy companionship in his years of active service and after his retirement in 1954. She died in February, he on June 12, 1981.
W.W. Borah M.M. Davisson C.A. Mosk
Source: Melvin Moses Knight, 1887-1981. Economics: Berkeley. University of California (System) Academic Senate. 1988, University of California: In Memoriam, pp. 76-78.
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Obituary, Bruce Winton Knight
Bruce Winton Knight, for 36 years a member of the Dartmouth economics faculty, died on May 28 at Mary Hitchcock Memorial Hospital in Hanover after a long illness. He would have been 88 on June 27.
Knight, who retired in 1960, was a vigorous opponent of what he called “pseudo-liberalism” and “state paternalism” in government. He was introduced to the conservative concepts he taught in courses on economic principles and the economics of international peace by his elder brother, the late Frank Knight, widely honored as the founder of the “Chicago school of economics.”
A native of Colfax County, Ill., Knight attended Texas Christian University and earned a B.A. from the University of Utah in 1920 and an M.A. from the University of Michigan in 1923.
He taught economics at the University of Michigan and the University of Wisconsin, where he met his wife, the former Myrtle Eickelberg. He joined the Dartmouth faculty as an instructor in economics in 1924 and became a professor in 1934. He was also a member of Sigma Chi fraternity and had served for a number of years on the Dartmouth College Athletic Council.
Knight wrote three books on economics and a book on peace, entitled How to Run a War, published by Alfred Knopf in 1936. Despite his authorship of these four books and a solid record of writing for scholarly journals, he opposed the academic doctrine of “publish or perish.” He felt that faculty members should only write when they wished, not simply to gain recognition and status. He was cited by the Freedom Foundation of Valley Forge, Pa., for an article he wrote in the Dartmouth Alumni Magazinein December 1949 entitled “Our Greatest Issue,” which he identified as “pseudo-liberalism.”
During World War I, he served with the U.S. Army infantry for two-and-a-half years, including more than a year in the Philippines.
Knight had also been an avid baseball fan ever since his days as a pitcher in college, and he rarely missed a Dartmouth varsity baseball game.
He is survived by his wife, a son, a daughter, three brothers,aand two sisters.
Source: Dartmouth Alumni Magazine June 1980, p. 93.
Image Sources:
Die Drei von der Tankstelle, classic German film from 1930.
Melvin Moses Knight from National Archives and Records Administration (NARA); Washington D.C.; Roll #: 366; Volume #: Roll 0366 – Certificates: 54301-54700, 31 May 1917-06 Jun 1917.
Bruce Winton Knight from Dartmouth Alumni Magazine, February 1954, p. 18.