100 YEARS AGO IN THE SARATOGIAN
Wednesday, July 17, 1918. State attorney general and gubernatorial candidate Merton E. Lewis is injured in a car crash as he arrives in Saratoga Springs for the Republican state convention this morning, The Saratogian reports.
Lewis hopes to unseat his fellow Republican, two-term incumbent Charles S. Whitman, in a September primary. This week’s convention will endorse one of the primary candidates: Whitman, Lewis or former state senator William M. Bennett.
Lewis approaches the Spa City “a few miles out South Broadway,” in a car owned by his deputy and intended successor, Harold J. Hinman. The men are accompanied by campaign manager Clarence Shuster and Hinman’s friend Edward Van Colt. Ahead of his car is a vehicle belonging to Phillip Coffey and Jesse Ralph of Troy.
The Troy car comes to a sudden stop just as a farm wagon approaches on the other side of the road. “The Hinman chauffeur was confronted with the alternative of bumping into [the Troy car], running into the farm wagon or going into the ditch at the roadside.
“He chose the last. The road was slippery from the recent rains and the car skidded and overturned. One of the occupants were thrown out but Mr. Van Colt and Mr. Shuster, who were in the rear seat with the attorney general, were thrown against him with great force.”
The Troy men take Lewis to his campaign headquarters at the United States Hotel, where doctors determine that despite a “badly wrenched back,” his injuries are not serious. Lewis will most likely spend the entire convention, which begins tomorrow, in bed.
Lewis’s accident casts a further pall over the convention after delegates learned earlier today that the youngest son of former president Theodore Roosevelt is missing and presumed dead in France.
Lt. Quentin Roosevelt’s plane went down “behind the German lines, in full view of the American positions,” during a dogfight earlier this week. The former president issues a statement this afternoon, saying, “Quentin’s mother and I are very glad that he got to the front and had the chance to render some service to his country and to show the stuff that was in him before his fate befell him.”
The elder Roosevelt is scheduled to deliver the keynote address at the Saratoga Springs convention tomorrow. He sends word this afternoon via his nephew, Theodore Douglas Robinson, that he will speak as scheduled. Representatives of the Whitman and Lewis campaigns join in sending the former president a message of condolence. Roosevelt, who split from the GOP to wage an independent presidential campaign in 1912, has declared his neutrality in the gubernatorial race.