Archives West Finding Aid

Clark S. Knowlton was born in Salt Lake City, Utah on December 31, 1919. A member of the L.D.S. Church, he served as a missionary in Argentina prior to the outbreak of World War II. During the war, Knowlton was a machine gunner in the U. S. Armed Forces and was wounded in action while fighting in the Allied invasion of France. Subsequent to the end of the war, Clark pursued his undergraduate and graduate studies at Brigham Young University receiving a B.A. degree in 1947 and a M.A. degree in 1948. He continued his academic pursuits in the field of sociology and graduated from Vanderbilt University with a Ph.D. in 1955. While enrolled in Vanderbilt's doctoral program, Knowlton was granted a Cordell Hull fellowship to study the Syrian and Lebanese minorities residing in Brazil. His teaching career commenced in 1952 when Georgia Southern College hired him. New Mexico Highlands University recruited Clark in 1959 and it was at this juncture that he began his long-term study of the origins and development of Spanish American social, economic, and cultural problems and issues. Knowlton was appointed president of the Las Vegas, New Mexico branch of the L.D.S. Church in 1959 and held that position for three years, vacating it when he moved to El Paso, Texas to become chairman of and professor in the Department of Sociology at Texas Western University. Near the end of his tenure at TWU, Clark was involved in a controversy related to his contacts with a militant Spanish American organization headquartered in New Mexico. Soon after he was exonerated of any inappropriate action, Knowlton accepted an offer from the University of Utah to join the Department of Sociology and to become Director of the Center for the Study of Social Problems. In 1972 Clark was selected as the American West Center's Director of Social Research and Development. Knowlton retired from the University of Utah as a full professor in 1990.

Professor Knowlton published numerous articles in scholarly journals, viz., Sociology and Social Research, Rocky Mountain Social Science Journal, California Law Review, and the Social Science Journal. The primary focus of his research was Spanish American life in New Mexico. One of his particular concerns was an investigation of Spanish and Mexican land grants in New Mexico. The Russell Sage Foundation of New York awarded Clark a research grant to study this problem in 1971. The title of Knowlton's project was the "Socio-Economic History of Spanish and Mexican Land Grants in Northern New Mexico." A member of several professional organizations, Clark was quite active in the Rural Sociological Society, the Rocky Mountain/Western Social Science Association and the Committee on Desert and Arid Zone research. In 1967-1968 he was the president of the Rocky Mountain Social Science Association.

Service to the local community was a very important part of Professor Knowlton's life. He was a member of the El Paso Community Action Board, the Board of Trustees of the Catholic Community Services in Salt Lake City, and the Salt Lake Central City Multi-Purpose Center Advisory Board. One example of Clark's interest in community problems was his composition of a plan for the establishment of a training facility for migrant farm workers in Weber County, Utah.

Clark S. Knowlton died on January 20,1991 at the age of 71.

(Roger V. Paxton composed the biographical sketch.)