How Roosevelt’s Long Speech Saved Him From Assassination
Bettmann/Getty ImagesTeddy Roosevelt speaking to a crowd during his presidential campaign in 1912.
Though he had promised in 1904 not to run for a third term, Theodore Roosevelt later changed his mind. In 1912, he ran for president as a candidate of the Progressive Party, also called the “Bull Moose Party.”
But while campaigning in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, on Oct. 14, 1912, Roosevelt met death head-on — in the form of a 36-year-old mentally disturbed man named John Schrank. Schrank, tormented by dreams that Roosevelt had murdered William McKinley, shot at the former president as he greeted a mass of people waiting outside the Gilpatrick Hotel.
His bullet hit Roosevelt in the chest. But after Schrank was hauled away, Roosevelt refused to be taken to the hospital. Instead, he insisted on giving his speech. “You get me to that speech,” Roosevelt told his driver.
Theodore Roosevelt Collection Several items in Theodore Roosevelt’s breast pocket, including his 50-page speech, helped save his life.
There, Roosevelt told the stunned crowd that he’d been shot, and he shocked them even further by displaying his bloodstained shirt. But he assured them that he was fine, noting: “It takes more than that to kill a bull moose.”
Lifting his 50-page speech, marked with bullet holes, the former president added: “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.”
As his anxious aides watched, Roosevelt gave his speech as planned. He spoke for 84 minutes and refused to go to the hospital until he’d said every word. Doctors later found that the bullet — slowed by Roosevelt’s coat, glasses, and speech — had lodged itself into one of his ribs.
But Theodore Roosevelt seemed unruffled by his brush with death. In a telegram to his wife, he called the wound “trivial” and assured her that he was in “excellent shape.”
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