![]() READ MORE: Teddy Roosevelt Got Sued for Libel. ![]() “It is a very natural thing,” he said, “that weak and vicious minds should be inflamed to acts of violence by the kind of awful mendacity and abuse that have been heaped upon me for the last three months by the papers.” Roosevelt went rogue and ran under the banner of the Progressive Party, nicknamed the “Bull Moose Party.” Blasted by political opponents and elements of the press for being a power-hungry traitor willing to break the tradition of two-term presidencies, Roosevelt told the Milwaukee audience that the campaign’s inflamed political rhetoric contributed to the shooting. The internecine fight, so fierce that barbed wire concealed by patriotic bunting defended the podium at the Republican Convention, tore the Grand Old Party apart. Roosevelt dictated a telegram to his wife that said 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.”Įven before the shooting, the 1912 presidential campaign had been a raucous one, with the former Republican president challenging his party’s standard-bearer (and his handpicked successor), incumbent William Howard Taft. Fortunately, the projectile had been slowed by his dense overcoat, steel-reinforced eyeglass case and hefty speech squeezed into his inner right jacket pocket. X-rays taken after the campaign event showed the bullet lodged against Roosevelt’s fourth right rib on an upward path to his heart. Papers in Roosevelt’s pockets at the time he was shot showed where the bullet struck. 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.” Not seeing any telltale blood, he determined that the bullet hadn’t penetrated his lungs. “He pinked me,” Roosevelt told a party official. 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.”Īlthough there were no outward signs of blood, the former president reached inside his heavy overcoat and felt a dime-sized bullet hole on the right side of his chest. The man who had been propelled to the Oval Office after an assassin felled President William McKinley bellowed out, “Don’t hurt him. The well-wishing crowd morphed into a bloodthirsty pack, raining blows on the shooter and shouting, “Kill him!” According to an eyewitness, one man was “the coolest and least excited of anyone in the frenzied mob”: Roosevelt. The candidate’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. ![]() As he stood up in the open-air automobile and waved his hat with his right hand to the crowd, a flash from a Colt revolver 5 feet away lit up the night. as Roosevelt entered his car outside the Gilpatrick Hotel. The shooting had occurred just after 8 p.m. READ MORE: How Teddy Roosevelt Crafted an Image of American Manlinessīloodstained shirt worn by President Theodore Roosevelt photographed following an assassination attempt in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, 1912. Only with the speech completed did he agree to visit the hospital. Although his voice weakened and his breath shortened, Roosevelt glared at his nervous aides whenever they begged him to stop speaking or positioned themselves around the podium to catch him if he collapsed. “I give you my word, I do not care a rap about being shot not a rap,” he claimed. Only two days before, the editor-in-chief of The Outlook characterized Roosevelt as “an electric battery of inexhaustible energy,” and for the next 90 minutes, the 53-year-old former president proved it. The bullet is in me now, so I cannot make a very long speech, but I will try my best.” “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. Holding up his prepared remarks, which had two big holes blown through each page, Roosevelt continued. He reached into his coat pocket and pulled out a bullet-riddled, 50-page speech. “It takes more than that to kill a bull moose,” the wounded candidate assured them. ![]() The horrified audience in the Milwaukee Auditorium on October 14, 1912, gasped as the former president unbuttoned his vest to reveal his bloodstained shirt. (Credit: Stock Montage/Stock Montage/Getty Images)Ĭlearly, Roosevelt had buried the lede.
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