David Graham Phillips was a famous American novelist and journalist best known for muckraking, now known as investigative journalism. Muckraking is essentially a form of writing that concentrated on political corruption and on opposing big corporate monopolies and political machines. His best-known work was a series of articles in Cosmopolitan in February of 1906 called “The Treason of the Senate.” This collection of articles was an expose of the corruption of the United States Senate that eventually lead to the ratification of the 17th Amendment, which called for direct election of senators by the people of the state. Also, this series is the reason the name “muckraking” came to be. President Teddy Roosevelt responded to Phillips work in the 1906 speech, “The Man with the Muck Rake,” where he rebuked political attacks that could potentially spread false information; he did not want the American people to be lied to while trying to uncover the truth. In his speech he compares these journalist to a character in The Pilgrim’s Progress (a novel by John Bunyan written in 1678), “In Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress you may recall the description of the Man with the Muck-rake, the man who could look no way but downward with the muck-rake in…show more content… It almost seems as if Roosevelt was making a pass towards Phillip himself, and if that is the case he obviously as motive for murder. Even if he wasn’t making a personal pass towards him, he made a general pass towards his craft (muckraking journalism), which also gives him a motive for murdering the president. But ultimately he was ruled out of being the killer because he himself was murdered a year previous to the murder of President
