David Graham Phillips
1867–1911 · United States
he named the senators who had been bought
Phillips went from DePauw to Princeton, reported in Cincinnati, and spent the 1890s at the New York Sun and the World, where he became a star of the new mass-circulation press. Then he turned the tools on the government. In 1906 Cosmopolitan ran his series The Treason of the Senate across six monthly instalments, naming senators — Nelson Aldrich of Rhode Island above all — as the paid agents of the corporations. It was furious, it was largely accurate, and it helped carry the argument that ended with the direct election of senators.
He dressed like nothing else in the trade: white flannel suits, a high stiff collar, a fresh flower in the buttonhole. Theodore Roosevelt disliked the series enough to coin the word muckraker as an insult, and it stuck as a badge.
On 23 January 1911, outside the Princeton Club at Gramercy Park, a violinist and music teacher named Fitzhugh Coyle Goldsborough shot him six times, convinced that one of his novels had slandered his family, and then killed himself. Phillips died the next day, at forty-three. Susan Lenox, the novel he thought was his best, was published six years later.