This novel is based (as the movies say) on a true story. On September 3, 1902, after Theodore Roosevelt had been president for almost a year, he was finishing a thirteen-day tour of New England in advance of the midterm elections. As he rode from Pittsfield, at the western edge of Massachusetts, to neighboring Lenox, an electric streetcar hurtled down Howard’s Hill and broadsided his open-air, horse-drawn carriage. His bodyguard was killed instantly. Roosevelt, thrown thirty or forty feet, was hurt more seriously than was clear at the time. His leg injuries may have contributed to his death seventeen years later, at age sixty, from a pulmonary blood clot.
Everything in the prologue, including the dialogue, is taken from contemporaneous accounts. The outlines of the ensuing events are also accurate. Berkshire County held an inquest into the bodyguard’s death. The motorman pleaded guilty to a charge of manslaughter (charges against the conductor were dropped) and was sentenced to sixty days in jail; he was allowed to spend nights at home. His lawyer, William Turtle, a state legislator, was also the streetcar company’s lawyer.
I have changed a single, central fact. The collision was assumed to be an accident. In my story, it was an attempted assassination.
Some of the coolest details in my tale are true. Emma Goldman was arrested in Omaha as an alleged threat to President Roosevelt eleven days before my story starts. John Hay once interviewed President McKinley’s assassin, Charles Guiteau, for a job. While secretary of state, Hay dispatched a letter urging European governments to help the Romanian (then Roumanian) Jews. At four o’clock on weekday afternoons, he took a stroll with Henry Adams, followed by tea. Adams once described Roosevelt as “a stupid, blundering, bolting bull calf”—though to Lizzie Cameron, not to Hay. Both men, at one time or another, harbored romantic feelings, apparently unconsummated, for Mrs. Cameron. Her beloved sister was married to the army’s commanding general, Nelson Miles, the target of Roosevelt’s tongue-lashing. David Pratt, the carriage driver, worried aloud (to New York policemen, not to his son) that the Pittsfield collision had been his fault. His unlikely story of two men on the trolley aiming shotguns was recounted by a grandson seventy-one years later. Frank Forney, whose parents came from Quebec, was Pratt’s live-in servant. Massachusetts governor Crane was president of the Agricultural National Bank of Pittsfield. All true.
I’ve tried to bring the time and places of my story to life. In 1902, the world was roiling with technological advances, struggling between capital and labor, and adjusting to a confident, even cocksure, America. The surge of U.S. imperialism revived interest, lingering since the 1870s, in annexing Canada. Trusts and tariffs were the issues of the day. In Washington, the doctors defeated the lawyers, eight to two, in a Labor Day baseball game. B street, which is now Constitution Avenue, was no longer a smelly canal. Mason’s Island, as locals called Analostan Island until it was renamed for Theodore Roosevelt in 1933, had indeed been home to a mansion, outbuildings, orchards, and athletic fields.
I’ve left anachronisms of style in place—the lower case for street and avenue, a hyphen in to-day and to-morrow. The floor plan of the Willard Hotel is as it used to be, featuring, beyond the reception desk, a staircase that no longer exists.
Except for the livery drivers, hotel clerks, elevator operators, and the trolley yard worker in Pittsfield, all of the characters in this novel are real. I have generally kept to what is known about the historically prominent ones, although John Hay has seen a few changes. The facts of his life are accurate, but I have no evidence that he was a boxer or a detective, and he was in poorer health than I have him here. (He would die of a heart attack in 1905, while still secretary of state.) When the collision occurred in Pittsfield, Hay was at his summer home in New Hampshire, not in Washington.
I have taken a few other liberties to serve my story. President Roosevelt was in Oyster Bay or touring the South and the Midwest during most of the time my story has him in Washington. (He underwent emergency surgery on his injured leg, in Indianapolis, on September 23, and was confined for three weeks to a wheelchair.) General Miles, meantime, was in the Philippines. I have no reason to think that Nellie Bly visited Washington in the fall of 1902 (nor any reason to think that she didn’t). William Turtle and David Pratt weren’t murdered; they lived another twenty and fifteen years, respectively. I can’t vouch for my description of Berkshire County’s political machine. I made up Hay’s memories of his late son, Del, but used his own letters in describing his grief and lifelong luck.
Minor changes, too. Alvey Adee’s crack about “Grand Duke Bore-us” came in an August 26 letter to Hay, not in a September 4 telegram, and the luncheon for the tsar’s cousin was held in the front hall at Sagamore Hill, not in the dining room. The scandal of the Austrian prince’s arrest in London occurred in July, not in September. Saint John’s Church was closed for repairs, and between pastors, in September 1902; the sermon that angered Roosevelt was actually delivered in front of him that day by his minister in Oyster Bay. I doubt that the door knocker at Mark Hanna’s home was shaped like a lion’s rump.
I’ve also imagined most of the scenes and almost all of the dialogue. But I’ve tried to portray the world of TR’s presidency with factual and emotional accuracy, as it was changing into the world we can still recognize—or at least remember—today.