WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 3, 1902
Big Bill Craig, the president’s bodyguard, saw it first. Or heard it. The clanging was insistent, like a boxing gong. The Secret Service man spun in his seat and gazed up Howard’s Hill in horror. A trolley car was hurtling down toward them.
On the thirteenth and final morning of Theodore Roosevelt’s campaign tour of New England, his horse-drawn carriage was leaving Pittsfield, at the western edge of Massachusetts. The city’s church bells had tolled; the factory whistles had rung; the schools and mills had shut down. The president had addressed two thousand admirers from a bunting-bedecked bandstand in Park Square, and his open-air landau was a mile and a half along South street, rolling toward Lenox.
It was ten fifteen.
“Oh, my God!” Craig cried. He reached an arm over President Roosevelt’s head. “Look out! Hold fast!”
The sepulchral Governor Crane turned and leapt to his feet and waved his arms. The electric streetcar kept rushing downhill, along the center of South street. At the bottom of the hill the road narrowed and the tracks slanted to the right; this was where carriages ordinarily crossed. To-day the vantage point was crowded with Kodak enthusiasts.
The landau’s two lead horses cleared the tracks. The two wheel horses did not. The trolley’s metal fender slammed into the nearer wheel horse and the left front wheel of the rig. The carriage toppled over, splintering its sides. Its occupants went flying. Wheels spun unfettered. Horses kicked at nothing. Their shrieks filled the air.
Suddenly, silence.
Governor Crane landed on his shoulder in the roadside twenty feet away, uninjured but white with shock. George Bruce Cortelyou, the president’s secretary, suffered cuts to his nose and the back of his head. The carriage driver lay still under the fallen horse. President Roosevelt was thrown thirty or forty feet, into a bank of soft earth, crumpling his silk hat, shattering his spectacles, ripping his frock coat at the elbows, crushing the red rose in his lapel, and covering his patent leather shoes with dust. His right cheek was swollen and blood flowed from a cut on his lip. His bronzed face was splattered with mud.
His personal physician, Dr. Lung, in the nearest carriage, rushed to his side and probed the barrel chest for broken ribs.
“I’m all right.” The growl came out as a squeak; the president pushed his doctor away. “Some of the others are badly hurt. Look after them.”
Roosevelt jumped up in a rage. The trolley had rolled twenty feet down the track, and by the time he reached it his temper had calmed and his fists had loosened, if slightly. “Where is the motorman of this car?” he demanded.
“Here, sir.”
The respondent was a meek-looking man of indeterminate age, short and balding, with rounded features but a defiant crouch.
“Did you lose control of the car?” Roosevelt’s high-pitched voice had grown husky.
The motorman looked too frightened to answer.
“If you did, that was one thing,” the president bore on. “If you didn’t, it was a goddamned outrage.”
The passengers gasped.
“You don’t suppose I tried to do it, do you?” the motorman managed at last.
Roosevelt bit his puffy lip.
“Well, I had the right-of-way, anyway,” Euclid Madden, for that was his name, continued. “You had a right to look out for yourselves.”
Roosevelt looked like he wanted to punch the man. With a visible effort, he turned away.
That was when he saw what remained of William Craig. The Secret Service man lay under the sharp metal wheels of the trolley. He had been dragged along the track, his mighty torso crushed, his skull split open.
The president sank to his knees. “Oh, poor Craig, poor Craig, poor Craig,” he moaned. “Here, some of you, get a blanket and throw it over that body.”
He bounced to his feet and stalked off. No one dared follow.