A brief mention by Edith Wharton in her autobiography "A Backward Glance" introduced me to the novelist and muckraker "David Graham Phillips. Mrs Wharton had mentioned "Susan Lenox, Her Fall and Rise" as a very fine work and I followed her opinion.
How right she was. I read it immediately ( along with all his other titles) It's a piece of work that's always stayed with me and pokes up in my psyche every now and then in the most interesting of situations.
David Graham Philips is perhaps best known for producing one of the most important investigations exposing details of the corruption by big businesses of the Senate, in particular, by the Standard Oil Company. His article in Cosmopolitan in March 1906, called "The Treason of the Senate", exposed campaign contributors being rewarded by certain members of the U. S. Senate. The story launched a scathing attack on Rhode Island senator Nelson W. Aldrich, and brought Phillips a great deal of national exposure. This and other similar articles helped lead to the passage of the Seventeenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, initiating popular instead of state-legislature election of U. S. senators.
His own true story was no less interesting than his writing. Considered a progressive, a muckraker, a dandy and a ladies man, Phillips' reputation cost him his life in January 1911, when he was shot outside the Princeton Club at Gramercy Park in New York City. The killer was a Harvard-educated musician named Fitzhugh Coyle Goldsborough, who came from a prominent Philadelphia family. Goldsborough believed that Phillips' novel The Fashionable Adventures of Joshua Craig had cast literary aspersions on his family. (It has also been purported that Phillips was having an affair with Mrs Goldsborough, thus causing the shooting from jealous rage)
When confronting Phillips, Goldsborough yelled, "Here you go!" After Phillips collapsed, he yelled, "And here I go!", shooting himself in the head. Admitted to Bellevue Hospital, Phillips died there a day later.
Following Phillips' death, his sister Carolyn organized his final manuscript for posthumous publication as "Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise". In 1931, that book would be made into an MGM motion picture of the same name and starring Greta Garbo and Clark Gable.
