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The "Bull Moose"candidate Theodore Roosevelt
shortly before being shot on October 14, 1912 in Milwaukee, WI.
(Library of Congress) |
What incumbent president came in third in his re-election race?” I recently got the correct answer to this presidential trivia question with the following logic: if the sitting president came in third, a third-party candidate must have beaten him...and that third-party challenger had to have been Teddy Roosevelt. Theodore Roosevelt became the 26th President of the United States when his predecessor William McKinley was assassinated in 1901. Roosevelt served two terms from 1901 to 1909 during which he is best known for his trust-busting and the establishment of National Parks. His hand-picked successor William Howard Taft was supposed to carry on Roosevelt’s “progressive” legacy. However, in 1912, Roosevelt was so disappointed with Taft that he formed the National Progressive Party, aka the Bull Moose party, and ran for a third term against Taft and Woodrow Wilson. Wilson won, Roosevelt came in second, and the incumbent Taft (the correct answer to the trivia question) was third. How much of this unusual election result was due to the dramatic event that occurred just weeks before the election?
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Roosevelt's manuscript (now bound) and glasses case
in Theodore Roosevelt Birthplace National Historical Site. |
Roosevelt had been campaigning tirelessly throughout the fall of 1912. On October 14, 1912, he finished his day in Milwaukee, Wisconsin where he was scheduled to give a speech that evening. Around 8:00 pm, Roosevelt exited the Gilpatrick Hotel and got into an open car. In the breast pocket of his overcoat were his 50-page speech folded in half and his eyeglasses case. As he stood up to acknowledge the cheers of the crowd, a nobody named John Schrank stepped forward and fired a Colt .38 revolver at Roosevelt’s chest from about five feet away. Schrank was quickly subdued and carried away. Although unsure of his condition, Roosevelt insisted that he continue on to the auditorium. Since he wasn’t bleeding from the mouth, he assumed that his lung was not been punctured but he did have a hole in his chest and a spreading blood stain on his shirt. Why wasn’t he dead? Miraculously, the bullet had passed through both the folded manuscript and the metal eyeglasses case, losing much of its force before entering the president’s chest.
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| Teddy Roosevelt's X-Ray shows bullet lodged in rib |
Upon arrival at the auditorium, the crowd of 9,000 was informed that Roosevelt had been shot. When crowd jeered in disbelief, Roosevelt took the stage, showed them his shirt and the holes in his speech, and said “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.” For the next hour and a half, Roosevelt delivered his speech with an ashen face and shaky voice as his blood oozed from the wound in his chest. Perhaps it was his years as a Rough Rider or his time as a trust-busting president that trained him never to back down, even to an assassin’s bullet. After the speech, Roosevelt was taken to the hospital where an X-ray revealed the bullet had lodged itself in a rib where it would stay for the rest of his life. A week later, after a short convalescence, Roosevelt was back on the campaign trail. Front page news about the shooting was published around the nation but it wasn’t enough of an October surprise to defeat Woodrow Wilson on Nov. 5th.
After his arrest, some letters were found on John Schrank which explained his assassination attempt. On Sept. 14, 1912 he wrote “While writing a poem, someone tapped me on the shoulder and said let not a murderer take the presidential chair, avenge my death. I could clearly see Mr. McKinley’s features.” The next day he wrote “In a dream I saw President McKinley sit up in his coffin, pointing at a man…in whom I recognized Theo. Roosevelt. The dead president said this is my murderer, avenge my death.” Court-appointed psychiatrists found Shrank to be mentally insane. He spent the remainder of his life in a Wisconsin insane asylum.
The life-saving manuscript with its bullet holes, the pierced eyeglasses case, and the shirt are on display at the Theodore Roosevelt Birthplace National Historical Site in New York City. His undershirt with its bullet hole is on display in Theodore Roosevelt National Park in North Dakota. And, of course, Roosevelt’s visage is carved into Mount Rushmore in South Dakota.
O'Toole, Patricia, Assassination Foiled. Smithsonian Magazine, November 2012, pp. 64-65
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