Potus Geeks Photo: Even a Bullet Can't Stop TR
This is a photo of Theodore Roosevelt taken just over a century ago on October 14, 1912, and just minutes before an unemployed saloonkeeper named John Schrank shot Roosevelt in the chest. The incident took place in Milwaukee in the midst of the 1912 election campaign. A messy divorce in the Republican Party caused Roosevelt first to challenge incumbent President William Howard Taft for the party nomination for president in the 1912 campaign, and when that didn't work, to run against Taft as a Third Party Candidate for the Progressive Party, or as it was better known, the "Bull Moose Party".
The shooting had occurred just after 8 p.m. as Roosevelt entered his car outside the Gilpatrick Hotel. He stood up in the open-air automobile and waved his hat with his right hand to the crowd. From five feet away a Colt revolver fired a shot. Roosevelt's stenographer quickly put the would-be assassin in a half nelson and grabbed the assailant’s right wrist to prevent him from firing a second shot.
The crowd of Roosevelt supporters morphed into an angry mob, raining blows on the shooter and shouting, “Kill him!” According to an eyewitness, the man who was “the coolest and least excited of anyone in the frenzied mob” was Roosevelt himself, who told the mob: “Don’t hurt him. Bring him here. I want to see him.” Roosevelt asked the shooter, “What did you do it for?” With no answer forthcoming, he said, “Oh, what’s the use? Turn him over to the police.”
Inside of his jacket was a dime-sized bullet hole on the right side of his chest. “He pinked me,” Roosevelt told a party official. He coughed into his hand three times. Not seeing any blood, he concluded that the bullet hadn’t penetrated his lungs. An accompanying doctor naturally told the driver to head directly to the hospital, but Colonel Roosevelt gave different marching orders: “You get me to that speech.”
Fortunately for Roosevelt, the bullet passe through a metal glasses case in the inside pocket of his suit jacket. Rather than being rushed to the hospital, Roosevelt insisted on delivering his scheduled 90-minute speech. He began his speech by telling the crowd: “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.”
The audience in the Milwaukee Auditorium gasped as the former president unbuttoned his vest to reveal his bloodstained shirt. “It takes more than that to kill a bull moose,” he told the crowd before reaching into his coat pocket and pulling out a 50-page speech with some of it missing. Holding up his prepared remarks, which had two big holes blown through each page, Roosevelt continued. “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.”
For the next 90 minutes the 53-year-old former president gave his speech, telling the crowd “I give you my word, I do not care a rap about being shot; not a rap.” Although his voice weakened and his breath shortened, and he grimaced in pain, Roosevelt glowered at his aides whenever they begged him to stop speaking or positioned themselves around the podium to catch him if he collapsed. Only with the speech completed did he agree to go to the hospital.
X-rays taken after the campaign event showed the bullet lodged against Roosevelt’s fourth right rib on an upward path to his heart. The projectile had been slowed by his dense overcoat, steel-reinforced eyeglass case and hefty speech squeezed into his inner right jacket pocket. Roosevelt sent a telegram to his wife, telling her that he was “in excellent shape” and that the “trivial” wound wasn’t “a particle more serious than one of the injuries any of the boys used continually to be having.”
The attempted assassination was 36-year-old John Schrank, an unemployed New York City saloonkeeper who had stalked Roosevelt around the country for weeks. A handwritten note found in his pockets reflected a troubled mind. It read: “To the people of the United States, in a dream I saw President McKinley sit up in his coffin pointing at a man in a monk’s attire in whom I recognized Theodore Roosevelt. The dead president said—This is my murderer—avenge my death.” Schrank said that he acted to defend the two-term tradition of American presidents. “I did not intend to kill the citizen Roosevelt,” the shooter said at his trial. “I intended to kill Theodore Roosevelt, the third termer.” Schrank pled guilty, was determined to be insane and was confined for life in a Wisconsin state asylum.
Doctors determined it was safer to leave the bullet embedded deep in Roosevelt’s chest than to operate, although the shooting worsened his chronic rheumatoid arthritis for the rest of his life. The attempted assassination unleashed a wave of sympathy for Roosevelt, and on election day Roosevelt came in second with 27 percent of the vote, the highest percentage of any third-party candidate in American history.