impressed
Roosevelt was at the Gilpatrick Hotel in Milwaukee at a dinner provided by the hotel's owner, a supporter. He was scheduled to deliver a speech at the Milwaukee Auditorium. News had circulated that Roosevelt was at the hotel, and Schrank (who had been following Roosevelt from New Orleans to Milwaukee) went to the hotel. The ex-President had finished his meal, and was leaving the hotel to enter his car when Schrank shot him.
The bullet lodged in his chest, but lucky for TR, it first went through his steel eyeglass case and then through a 50 page single-folded copy of the speech he was carrying inside his jacket pocket. Roosevelt, was an experienced hunter and anatomist, and he correctly concluded that since he was not coughing blood, the bullet had not completely penetrated the chest wall to his lung, and so declined suggestions he go to the hospital immediately. Instead, he delivered his scheduled speech with blood seeping into his shirt. He spoke for 90 minutes. His opening comments to the gathered crowd were:
Friends, I shall ask you to be as quiet as possible. I don't know whether you fully understand that I have just been shot; but it takes more than that to kill a Bull Moose. But fortunately I had my manuscript, so you see I was going to make a long speech, and there is a bullet - there is where the bullet went through - and it probably saved me from it going into my heart. The bullet is in me now, so that I cannot make a very long speech, but I will try my best.
Later, probes and x-ray showed that the bullet had traveled through three inches of tissue and lodged in Roosevelt's chest muscle but did not penetrate the pleura (the wall of the lung). His doctors decided that it would be more dangerous to attempt to remove the bullet than to leave it in place. Roosevelt carried it with him for the rest of his life. The bullet lodged in his chest caused his chronic rheumatoid arthritis – which he had suffered from for years. It got worse and soon prevented him from doing his daily stint of exercises
Because of the bullet wound, Roosevelt was taken off the campaign trail in the final weeks of the race (which ended election day, November 5). The other two campaigners (Woodrow Wilson and William Howard Taft) stopped their own campaigns in the week Roosevelt was in the hospital, but each resumed it once he was released from hospital.
In the election Roosevelt, was able to attract 4.1 million votes (27%), compared to Taft's 3.5 million (23%). However, Wilson's 6.3 million votes (42%) were enough to garner 435 electoral votes. Roosevelt had 88 electoral votes to Taft's 8 electoral votes. This meant that Taft became the only incumbent president to place third in a re-election bid. Pennsylvania was the only eastern state that Roosevelt won, but did much better in the Midwest, winning Michigan, Minnesota and South Dakota. In the West, he won in California and Washington. He did not win any southern states.
As for Schrank, he maintained that he had nothing against Roosevelt personally, and he did not intend to kill 'the citizen Roosevelt', but rather 'Roosevelt, the third-termer.' He claimed to have shot Roosevelt as a warning to other third-termers, and said that it was the ghost of William McKinley that told him to perform the act. Doctors soon examined him and reported that he was suffering from 'insane delusions, grandiose in character' and they declared Schrank to be insane. Schrank was sentenced to the Central State Mental Hospital in Waupun, Wisconsin, in 1914. He remained there for 29 more years, until his death on September 15, 1943 of bronchial pneumonia.