When a rich white man was murdered in front of the Princeton Club, gun control came to New York
Permits for handguns go back more than 100 years there
David Graham Phillips rose later than usual on January 23, 1911, following a late night of editing the corrective proofs of his new short story for the Saturday Evening Post. “Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise” was, like most of his stories, a scandalous one — this time about an unrepentant prostitute.
Phillips, who had just been heralded as “the leading American novelist” by H.L. Mencken, was carrying the final proofs that he intended to mail to the magazine as he left his building, the National Arts Club on Manhattan’s Gramercy Park.
And just steps away from his daily stop at the Princeton Club on the north side of the park at Lexington Avenue, Fitzhugh Coyle Goldsborough, a former violinist with the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra, confronted him and yelled, “Here you go!” and rapidly shot him six times. Moments later, Goldsborough wailed, “Here I go!” before fatally shooting himself in the head.
Phillips, known for his striking white suits and chrysanthemum boutonnieres, had made enemies with nearly all of his writing, whether it was journalism or fiction — or the former masquerading as the latter. Whether it was a front page story or a novel, Phillips wrote to expose the worlds of business, finance and politics and complained that American novels at the turn of the century were “largely imitative of ideals and methods that are narrow and that are totally inadequate as a description of life as it is in America today.”
As a journalist in 1906, Phillips wrote a series of articles in William Randolph Hearst’s Cosmopolitan magazine that alleged several U.S. senators were corrupted by the wealthiest families of the day: Carnegie, Rockefeller and Vanderbilt. For this, President Theodore Roosevelt attacked Phillips in a speech, “The Man With the Muck Rake,” at the Gridiron Club, coining the term “muckraker” that investigative journalists now wear as a badge of honor. Roosevelt, however, meant it as no compliment; in a letter, he called Phillips a “foul-mouthed coarse blackguard.” In the Senate, however, it led to embarrassing defeats and the passage of the 17th Amendment, which replaced state legislatures selecting senators with selection by popular vote.
But it was the 1909 Phillips novel The Fashionable Adventures of Joshua Craig that had Goldsborough in a state of rage. Goldsborough was born into a family from the gilded aristocracy that Phillips viewed as destructive to America. His lineage led to the founding of the nation with one ancestor in the Continental Congress and nearly a signer to the Declaration of Independence. Another was a commander in the War of 1812 and later a prominent senator from Maryland. Fitzhugh’s father, a doctor and Civil War veteran, relocated the family to Washington, D.C., where Fitzhugh was raised in a home near the White House.
The Fashionable Adventures of Joshua Craig relentlessly mocked that, and Goldsborough was certain the novel was about his family— in particular, that the detestable main character was a thinly-veiled version of his beloved sister.
Goldsborough, who became obsessed with George Sylvester Viereck’s 1907 novel, The House of the Vampire, also believed that Phillips had the ability to read his mind. Like Viereck’s principal character, “an intellectual vampire who absorbed the genius of all those with whom he came in contact,” Goldsborough became obsessed with the idea that Phillips was a literary vampire who had sucked ideas and characters from the Goldsborough family — something he called in his diary the “lucrative method of literary vampirism.”
Goldsborough became increasingly unstable and abruptly moved to New York to stalk Phillips. He rented a room with a window facing Phillips’s Gramercy Park apartment and observed his mannerisms and routines, preparing his attack. “He is an enemy to society,” Goldsborough reportedly said. “He is my enemy.”
On that fateful January afternoon, as Phillips was rushed to Bellevue Hospital, he knew he was dying. “I could’ve won against two bullets,” he said. “But not against six.” He died the next day.
In the papers and on the streets, New York teemed with outrage over the gun violence. Essentially, no laws were on the books to curb it. Within days, Timothy Sullivan, a state senator from the Bowery area in Manhattan introduced a bill requiring a permit for anyone to buy a handgun or carry a concealed weapon. And sellers would be required to maintain records of firearms transactions.
Sullivan, who had links to Tammany Hall and was associated with gambling and prostitution, picked up on the public outrage. But his proposal was also about politics and his worries over the growth of gang violence that lived mostly in his district.
Still, he made a convincing appeal: “This bill is intended to cut down on the murder and suicide statistics in New York City by at least 50.”
Some were outraged that it required the deaths of two wealthy, prominent men in front of the Princeton Club to take action, but either way New York had run out of patience for such killing. As a result, the bill found widespread support in city and throughout the state, including from Manhattan County District Attorney Charles Whitman, who said, “Carrying a weapon is an invitation to crime….Reduce the weapons carried and you will reduce crimes of violence.”
Second Amendment supporters, including state Senator T. Harvey Ferris, whose district in Oneida County was home to a gun factory, was one of the legislators who opposed the bill. “Your bill won’t stop murders,” he told Sullivan. “You can’t force a burglar to get a license to use a gun.”
Sullivan shot back that maybe the bill wouldn’t suit profit-seeking gunmakers, but the broad, commonsense public demand, police and “all the judges of New York City” were enough to pass the legislation. New York was finished tolerating “pistol toters,” he said.
But he also made a social appeal for would-be criminals. “I want to make it so the young thugs in my district will get three years for carrying dangerous weapons instead of getting a sentence in the electric chair a year from now,” he argued.
With support from the Merchants’ Association of New York, prominent civic leaders, and even oil baron John D. Rockefeller, the bill passed overwhelmingly in both houses and was quickly approved by Gov. John Dix. Although the Sullivan Act has been challenged in court and debated for more than a century, its basic provisions are still in force and credited with the relative low numbers of gun violence for a city its size.
But was Goldborough in any way justified in seeking justice for his distinguished, yet maligned, family? Publishers relished the story of the lone gunman, a “crazed violinist,” who confronted the man who tarnished his pedigree.
Phillips, however, had a different response to the question of whether he knew the assassin who had just taken his own life: “No, I don’t know the man.”
