DAVID
GRAHAM PHILLIPS, CLASS OF 1886
October 31, 1867 - January 23, 1911
David Graham Phillips was born in Madison, Indiana, on October 31,
1867. After studying at Asbury University Phillips
found work as a reporter with the Cincinnati Times-Star. Later he
worked for the New York
Sun and the New York World. While with these newspapers
Phillips developed a reputation as a fine investigative journalist.
His first novel, The Great God Success (1901), sold well and so
Phillips left the New York World and concentrated on writing
fiction. Most of Phillips's novels employ journalistic techniques and
explored a variety of social problems. The Plum Tree (1905) and Light
Fingered Gentry (1907) both dealt with political corruption, whereas
The Second Generation (1907) looked critical at the issue of
inherited wealth.
Phillips was occasionally commissioned to write articles for magazines
on political subjects. The Treason of the Senate, a series of
articles published in Cosmopolitan in 1906 caused a tremendous
stir. Phillips revealed that politicians were receiving huge payments
from large corporation to argue their case in the Senate. This included
a bitter attack on Nelson W. Aldrich of Rhode Island
and Arthur P. Gorman of Maryland.
Phillips accused both main parties, the Democrats and Republicans, of
joining together to "advance the industrial and financial interests
of the wealthy classes of the country". Accused of being a
muckraker, Phillips returned to fiction and other success included Old
Wives for New (1908), a novel that considered the social and
economic position of women. In other novels such as The Conflict
(1911) Phillips returned to the subject of political corruption.
On January 23, 1911, David Graham Phillips was murdered by a man who
believed that the novel, The Fashionable Adventures of Joshua Craig,
had libelously portrayed his family. Phillips's best known novel, Susan
Lenox, a story about the rise to success of an illegitimate country
girl, was published posthumously in 1917.
1906
• The Treason of
the Senate by David Graham Phillips - led to the passage of the
Seventeenth Amendment to the Constitution, providing for popular
senatorial elections.
David Graham Phillips was born on Oct. 31, 1867, in Madison, Ind.
During his happy and comfortable childhood he developed especially close
ties to his older sister Carolyn. After high school Phillips entered
Asbury (DePauw) University, where he roomed with the future U.S. senator
Albert J. Beveridge, a man whom Phillips considered a symbol of the
success that can come from hard work. When Beveridge graduated, Phillips
went to Princeton, where he received a degree in 1887.
New entrepreneurs such as S. S. McClure hit upon what Theodore
Roosevelt dubbed as "muckraking." The term was taken as a
compliment by the men and women who exposed corruption in politics and
greed in business. Some of the most celebrated muckraking series were an
exposé of patent medicines by Samuel H. Adams, a study of the Senate by
David Graham Phillips, a report on urban government by Lincoln Steffens,
and a history of the Standard Oil Company by Ida Tarbell. Several
muckraking magazines had more than half a million subscribers, and
overall, some 20 million American homes followed these investigations.
In 1910 Senator Albert J. Beveridge called muckraking a "people's
literature" amounting to "almost a mental and moral
revolution." No permanent revolution of this type changed the
American press, however. Cheap cover prices meant a heavier dependence
on advertisers, who objected strongly to such journalism. Moreover, the
exploitation of reform themes by so many magazines eventually made the
formula stale in a culture attuned to novelty. Finally, as Roosevelt had
feared, muckraking made political participation itself seem unappealing.
http://list.msu.edu/cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind0411c&L=aejmc&F=&S=&P=26977
links DGP, ECP, and AJB
The life of David Graham Phillips essentially corresponds to this
pattern. He was born on October 31, 1867, in Madison, Indiana, a town of
ten thousand population lying fifty miles above Louisville on the Ohio
river. Madison was founded in 1806, and its days of commercial glory
were the two decades prior to the Civil War, when for a time it was the
largest and wealthiest city in Indiana, a port for steamboat traffic. By
the 1870's, however, the railroad had replaced the river as a carrier of
commerce; Madison's prosperity had begun to wane, its shipyards to
decline, its meatpacking industry to lose business to Chicago and St.
Louis. Stately homes, a fixed society, and patterns of living
established in the time of Jackson were the heritage of the town's
pre-war business vitality. Phillips's father, an Indiana farm boy, lived
in Madison from the time he was sixteen years of age, attended Indiana
Asbury University, served as sheriff and clerk of court, and for
thirty-one years was cashier of the National Branch Bank of Madison.
Phillips grew up in an atmosphere compounded of banking, Republican
politics, Bible-reading, Methodist morality, and love of learning. His
father owned one of the best private libraries in southern Indiana, and
Phillips was encouraged to read widely, particularly in American
history. In later years be attributed his omnivorous reading and
tenacious writing habits to that encouragement. Graham, as he was called
at home, gained his early education in the Madison public schools,
which, according to Arena editor B. 0. Flower, were staffed in the
seventies by enthusiastic New England teachers who created a thoroughly
democratic environment and were famous for efficiency and a high
standard of ethical conduct. Phillips told Flower, "I went to the
public-scbools ... and I do not know of anything I am more thankful for.
If I bad my way, there should not be any other kind of schools, high or
low." Although his principal interests were history, politics, and
government, Phillips was an avid reader of novels and verse; his
biographer, Issac F. Marcosson, reported that Graham had read all of
Dickens, Hugo, and Scott before he was twelve and knew thousands of
lines of poetry, including the whole of Gray's "Elegy." In
1882, at the age of fifteen, he enrolled at Asbury, his father's
college, a Methodist institution in the rural atmosphere of Greencastle,
Indiana (Which changed its name to DePauw University about the time
Phillips departed). Among his college interests were languages, French
realistic literature, debate, football, and the Delta Kappa Epsilon
fraternity, where he met the man who would become his closest and
life-long friend, Albert Beveridge. Beveridge, a self-made man,
impressed Phillips with his integrity, magnetism, and commanding voice.
He was Phillips's roommate, and the writer in later years used him as
model for his politician-hero, Hampden Scarborough, in a series of
novels. Phillips admired Beveridge's determination to be a success, and
the experience may have altered his own ambitions. By 1885, when
Phillips left Indiana for Princeton University, he bad decided not to
follow his father's banking profession. At Princeton for two years, be
won reputation as a brilliant conversationalist and a fastidious
dresser, and there he resolved to become a writer. Phillips graduated
from Princeton in 1887 and began his journalistic career in Cincinnati,
Ohio, ninety miles upriver from Madison.
