William Franklin Knox (January 1, 1874 – April 28, 1944) was an American politician, soldier, newspaper editor, and publisher.

He was the Republican vice presidential candidate in 1936 and Secretary of the Navy under Franklin D. Roosevelt during most of World War II.

The 1936 Republican National Convention nominated a ticket of Alf Landon and Knox, and they were defeated by Roosevelt and John Nance Garner in the 1936 election.

His parents were both Canadian; his mother, Sarah C. (Barnard), was from Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island, and his father, William Edwin Knox, was from New Brunswick.

He later supplemented his studies with additional readings and coursework, and the college's board of trustees awarded him a Bachelor of Arts degree as a member of the class of 1898.

[5] After the war, Knox became a newspaper reporter in Grand Rapids, which was the beginning of a career that included ownership of several papers.

Landon, Knox, and former President Herbert Hoover were the only supporters of Theodore Roosevelt in 1912 who were later named to a Republican ticket.

Knox carried out Roosevelt's plan to expand the US Navy into a force capable of fighting in both the Atlantic and the Pacific oceans.

Upon his return, he issued a public statement that "the most effective Fifth Column work of the entire war was done in Hawaii with the exception of Norway," and he accused Japanese Hawaiians of impeding US defense efforts in a report to the President.

Although the FBI and military intelligence later disproved those claims, Knox continued to push for the internment of Japanese Americans and barred them from service in the Navy during the war.

In 1948, his widow, Annie Reid Knox (1875–1958) endowed the Frank Knox Memorial Fellowships, which allow scholars from Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the Union of South Africa, and the United Kingdom to pursue graduate study at Harvard University, or by recent graduates of Harvard to travel and research in the countries of the British Commonwealth of Nations.

[4] Frank Knox School on the grounds of the Patuxent River Naval Air Station was named for him.