Tarlton Law Library
Jamail Center for Legal Research

     In the Salman Rushdie affair, a "death sentence" has been imposed to punish an author for a book that gave offense that he did not intend or foresee. This is a remarkable chapter in the history of revenge, but not without precedent. When the twentieth century was little more than a decade old, the American novelist David Graham Phillips was assassinated by one of his readers; the killer was a madman who imagined that his sister had been defamed by the writer's fictional portrait of a frivolous daughter of Washington's high society.
     Phillips, forty-three years old, was a man of regular habits: so regular that they could be easily monitored by a secret enemy. It was the novelist's unbroken custom to work at his desk until the early morning hours, producing manuscripts at the rate of six thousand words a day; he had once boasted, "If I were to die tomorrow, I would be six years ahead of the game." Phillips, in fact, praised work and sleep as life's greatest joys, since only they, he said, brought full unconsciousness. This is, of course, a benefit that is also bestowed by death.
     On Monday, January 23, 1911, the ruggedly handsome Graham Phillips rose as late as usual and dressed his tall figure in the dandified style which he had affected. In the afternoon, he put on his black, rather crumpled, alpine hat and left his apartment (shared with his adored sister, Mrs. Carolyn Frevert, after her separation from her husband) in the National Arts Club on the south side of Gramercy Park, a fashionable gated square in Manhattan. Skirting Gramercy Park, Phillips headed for the Princeton Club, on the northern side of the square, to collect his mail; the club was the former residence of the famed architect Stanford White. As he walked eastward on Twenty-First Street towards the club, the novelist may have given little more than fleeting attention to a man leaning against the iron railing of a house a few doors before the club entrance.
     Suddenly the man blocked his path, and in rapid succession fired six shots from a .32 caliber automatic pistol. As Phillips staggered back towards the railing, a florist, John Jacoby, was near enough to prevent him from falling. Two club members, Newton James and Frank Davis, who had witnessed the scene in disbelief, heard the assailant cry something like: "There you are! I guess that does for you." The man then pointed the gun to his own head, adding, "I'll finish the job now." Walking to the curb, he fired again and fell dead.
     James and Davis helped Jacoby carry Phillips into the clubhouse and laid him on a settee in the foyer not far from where Stanford White's coffin had stood five years earlier. Summoned by telephone, his private 

physician, Eugene Fuller, soon arrived at the club to superintend his removal by ambulance to Bellevue Hospital. There the surgeons confirmed that the first bullet fired had caused the most dangerous wound; it had entered the upper part of Phillips's chest between the first and second rib, passed through the right lung and come out at the back under the left shoulder blade. Another bullet had passed through the right side of the abdominal wall without penetrating the intestines. The remaining shots had wounded Phillips in the left forearm, both thighs, and the right hip. The doctors removed from the muscles of his hip the only bullet that remained lodged in his body, and issued an optimistic bulletin, identifying as their main concern the risk of septic pneumonia in the injured lung.
     The stricken novelist was visited in the hospital by Mrs. Frevert and his brother, Harrison C. Phillips, a Denver newspaper man, who by chance had come to New York unannounced almost at the very hour of the shooting. When questioned by James at the club, Graham Phillips had said he did not know his attacker, but at Bellevue he told his sister that during the past few months he had been receiving anonymous threatening letters and telephone calls. Shortly before the shooting, he had received a message signed in his own name; it menaced, "This is your last day." A detective from police headquarters told reporters that Phillips had complained about the threats; in the policeman's view, "that crank has got him."
     On Tuesday evening, January 24, Phillips's condition took a turn for the worse. He was unable to retain any food, even a little beef broth served at about nine. Soon afterwards, internal hemorrhages began from both his stomach and the punctured lung. As he steadily became weaker with the loss of blood, Phillips himself saw that the efforts of the doctors were futile. Shortly before he lapsed into unconsciousness, the surgeons bending over him heard him murmur: "I could have won against two bullets, but not against six."
     The news of Phillips's death, coming so soon after the first hopeful reports, shocked the journalistic and literary world and the public at large. Phillips was born in Madison, Indiana, and was educated at DePauw University in his home state and at Princeton. After his graduation from Princeton, he began his career as a journalist at Cincinnati and in 1890 moved to New York, where he joined the staff of the Sun. In 1893, the tyrannical Joseph Pulitzer hired him as London correspondent for the New York World, and four years later he became an editorial writer for the newspaper. An uncompromising enemy of economic and political privilege, Phillips climaxed his journalistic career in 1906 by attacking the servility of the United States Senate to big business in his series, "The Treason of the Senate," in William Randolph Hearst's 

Cosmopolitan (long before the days of Helen Gurley Brown). These articles inspired President Theodore Roosevelt to brand Phillips and other reform-minded journalists, including Lincoln Steffens, as "muckrakers."
     Beginning in 1901, Phillips also began to turn his acid-dipped pen to fiction. The development of characters was not his strong point or major interest as a novelist, for in his stories he trained his guns against the same targets he had incessantly attacked in his columns: the "extravagance of the wealthy classes, the abuse of political power, and the oppression of the poor." As time went on, he took a special interest in exposing the superficiality of America's leisured classes and particularly of their women. One of his later caricatures was Margaret Severence, the female protagonist of The Fashionable Adventures of Joshua Craig (1909), described by Phillips as one of the "fashionable noddle-heads" in Washington society. "Like the others of her class," Phillips wrote, "she left the care of her mind to chance. . . . Her person was her real care. To her luxurious, sensuous nature every kind of pleasurable physical sensation made keen appeal, and she strove in every way to make it keener." To Margaret Severence, "health meant beauty," and to make sure she had not neglected any muscle, she even engaged in daily yawning exercises. Phillips was frequently criticized for basing his characters on people he had met, but readers generally did not identify Margaret Severence with a real person. One reader, however, thought otherwise. That was Fitzhugh Coyle Goldsborough, Phillips's assassin.
     The murderer's identity and address were discovered from an envelope in his pocket. A detective and reporters immediately proceeded to his lodgings, a top-floor rear-hall room rented for $3 a week at the Rand School of Social Science on East Nineteenth Street. The Rand School propagated an idiosyncratic brew of Christian socialism, a circumstance that led the New York Times to editorialize prematurely about the irony of a muckraking novelist being struck down by a socialist. The facts as they emerged from the police inquiries were infinitely stranger. Goldsborough, known by fellow lodgers to be an impecunious and unsociable music teacher, had never been to the Rand School lectures; had shown not the slightest interest in socialism. He had taken a room at the school for quite a different reason: its location afforded him an excellent vantage point for spying on the movements of Graham Phillips.
     The police learned that Goldsborough was a member of a prominent family of the Eastern Shore of Maryland, which included a famous Civil War admiral. Fitzhugh, thirty-one years old, had been born in Washington, where his father Edmund was a well-known physician. He had early shown a musical talent, and was active in musical circles at 

Harvard, which he attended for three years. After studying and performing as a violinist in Vienna and Berlin, young Goldsborough joined the Pittsburgh Orchestra as a first violinist. However, about 1910 he left Pittsburgh in mid-season, leaving behind the message: "The Pittsburgh smoke has driven me crazy. You will never see me again." Although Goldsborough had established his musical credentials, his real passions lay elsewhere. He prided himself on his poetic gifts, and according to William T. Mossman, manager of the Pittsburgh Orchestra, "insisted on inflicting his home-made poetry and epigrams on all who would listen." Goldsborough would rush into the manager's office "waving a new bit of poetry of his own making and insist on reading it to the whole office, and then would want to know what we all thought of it." Goldsborough's captive audience judged his looks to be "those of a man we didn't care to tell the truth to about his compositions, and we would always praise his works." The caution displayed by Mossman and his colleagues seems to have been well-advised. Otto Kegel, trumpeter in the orchestra, was also compelled by Goldsborough to listen to some of the poet's verses. When the trumpeter candidly remarked that it was the worst poetry he had ever heard, Goldsborough broke a $400 violin over his head, fled screaming from his house and was not seen for three days and nights.
     Apart from his devotion to poetry, Goldsborough nourished a second passion of comparable intensity: like Phillips, he was strongly attached to a sister. The violinist's frustrated literary aspirations and wounded family feelings were powerful emotional forces that, working in combination, were to prove fatal to Phillips.
     Phillips's family was convinced that the murderer was the author of the anonymous messages he had been receiving. Harrison Phillips concluded that it was the novel The Fashionable Adventures of Joshua Craig that had "inflamed" Goldsborough's mind; the murderer thought that he saw himself in the portrayal of Craig, an ambitious politician, and that his adored sister had been lampooned as Margaret Severence. Mayor William J. Gaynor's office was able to provide some support for this theory, and also revealed Goldsborough's belief that "he was being shadowed by detectives or some persons seeking to do him an injury." In the early summer of 1910, the distraught violinist had paid a visit to the mayor's office to render a complaint, but had been shunted aside to Gaynor's secretary Robert Adamson. After stating that he was being followed by two private detectives without cause, Goldsborough asked the patient functionary: "Do you know David Graham Phillips"? When Adamson replied that he did, his odd visitor continued: "Well, he has written up me and my family in one of his books, The Fashionable Adventures of Joshua Craig."

     Adamson got the impression that the reference to Phillips and his book reflected appreciation rather than resentment. However, the depth of the murderer's antipathy to Phillips was revealed by examination of a notebook and diary, which had dropped from his pocket as he fell in Gramercy Park, and from numerous writings discovered in his room.
     Goldsborough appeared to be strongly affected by George Sylvester Viereck's 1907 novel, The House of the Vampire, a dramatic version of which had recently run at a New York theater. The principal character in Viereck's fantasy was "an intellectual vampire who absorbed the genius of all those with whom he came in contact." Goldsborough formed the obsession that Phillips was a literary vampire who had sucked his ideas from Goldsborough's brain and had stolen his characters from the violinist's family. His diary entries contained many references to vampires, including the following note:

To create characters with real blood in their veins, beyond the powers of many writers. Much easier to take them from real life -- to utilize their actual flesh and blood by the easy, distinguished, legalized, and lucrative method of literary vampirism.

appeared behind her, half in sight near the window. Goldsborough thought this was Phillips, but was by no means sure. Ultimately he concluded that the woman was not attempting a flirtation but must be a friend of Phillips, plotting with the novelist to spread the story that Goldsborough was making advances.
     Later Goldsborough found stronger evidence of the conspiracy when he was himself "shadowed by a man who, by fixed staring at [him] in an impertinent manner on the street and rattling the spoon in his coffee cup when he came in a ten-cent restaurant, evidently wished to arouse [him] into belligerency." On one occasion the man on his trail seemed to bear a "good family likeness" to Mr. Adamson, Mayor Gaynor's secretary - but "his clothing was worn and second-hand looking." In another entry, Goldsborough mentioned passing a man in Central Park who looked very much like Phillips, walking with a girl. He noted yearningly his wish that he could have been introduced to him some time before.
     The diary recorded Goldsborough's efforts to communicate with Phillips as early as the previous June. He wrote that he "called last night again on Phillips" but was told he had gone to Pittsfield, Massachusetts. Reluctantly Goldsborough concluded that the information must be true since it was separately confirmed by two bellboys. In any event, he was furious that Phillips had ignored his letters (a pardonable offense if they were indeed anonymous, as Phillips had told Carolyn Frevert). Nevertheless, to Goldsborough's mind the failure to respond was an acknowledgment of the vampire's guilt:

At any rate P.'s ignoring my last letter and twice excusing himself after it, is in itself a confession of guilt of a sort. A man who has done no wrong will listen to one who claims he has; moreover the tone of that letter showed my intentions to be as amicable as he would let them be.

New York Times for his "vivid interest in the trend of American life, both in its public and private aspects."
     The service for Goldsborough was conducted in private and in as much obscurity as his prominent relatives could manage. Shortly before, they were embarrassed by the disclosure that a younger brother of the murderer had been in a sanitarium near Washington for the past couple of months, under treatment for mental troubles.
     Despite the ample documentary evidence of Goldsborough's insanity, the crime and the subsequent suicide remained bewildering. In an editorial on January 26, the Times searched for a logical explanation for Goldsborough's having taken his own life. The insane, the newspaper argued, "differ from the sane by being more, not less, logical in passing from premise to conclusion, and they are weak, not in reasoning power, but in the power to select and judge the data from which they reaason." The special mark of a man like Goldsborough, with an "exaggerated ego," was the lack of a sense of proportion; this defect, according to the Times, tended to make men murderous but did not drive men to suicide. On the contrary, most murderers with an oversized ego and a delusion of persecution (like Harry Thaw and Charles Guiteau, the murderer of President Garfield) were "confident that everybody would admit the rightness of [their acts]." Ergo, said the Times, the accomplishment of Goldsborough's long-meditated crime "was followed by a lucid interval in which he appreciated its enormity and punished it." If the Times was right, the lucid interval must have followed with blinding speed on the shooting of David Graham Phillips.
     The family of the late Fitzhugh Coyle Goldsborough had a far simpler explanation. They accounted for both the murder and the suicide with the fact that Goldsborough had been suffering from a bad attack of flu.

* This article was previously published in Jonathan Goodman( ed.) The Art of Murder 219-227 (London: Piatkus, 1990)