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Theodore Roosevelt Survived an Assassination Attempt Because a Speech Tucked Inside His Pocket Slowed the Bullet. He Insisted on Delivering His Remarks Anyway
“I am very much uninterested in whether I am shot or not,” he told an audience in Milwaukee. Newly discovered documents shed light on how the 26th president wanted the incident to shape his legacy
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When Theodore Roosevelt took the stage on October 14, 1912, he was carrying an eyeglasses case and a typed manuscript in his vest pocket. The steel case was dented, and each folded page was punctured with two round holes. The cause of the damage was a bullet, which was now lodged inside the 26th president’s chest.
“Friends, I shall ask you to be as quiet as possible,” Roosevelt told the crowd. “I don’t know whether you fully understand that I have just been shot.”
The former president reached inside his vest and removed the 50-page manuscript, holding it up before his audience. The papers, he explained, had slowed the bullet, which broke one of his ribs. But it hadn’t hit any vital organs, instead stopping near his right lung. “The bullet is in me now, so that I cannot make a very long speech,” he said, “but I will try my best.”
The assassination attempt took place just weeks before the presidential election. Roosevelt, who was running as a third-party candidate, was about to deliver a campaign speech in Milwaukee when the would-be assassin attacked him. Ignoring the entreaties of his anxious aides, Roosevelt refused to cancel the event, insisting that he was “very much uninterested in whether I am shot or not.” He spoke for about an hour before going to the hospital.
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Doctors eventually decided against removing the bullet, which would remain in the former president’s body for the rest of his life. But other artifacts from the incident are now central pieces of Roosevelt’s tough-guy mythos. His bloodstained shirt (which has since been washed) is on display at the Theodore Roosevelt Birthplace Museum in New York City; the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History acquired a page from the speech that saved his life in 1974.
Several other sheets from the speech have circulated over the years. But a previously unknown page recently surfaced in a private collection, along with an annotated copy of the speech Roosevelt ended up giving that day, which his stenographer typed up soon after the incident.
The Raab Collection, a Philadelphia-based dealer of historic documents, announced the discovery in May. The firm recently sold both the page pierced by a bullet (valued at $150,000) and the annotated speech (valued at $115,000). Together, the papers provide “a window into really a great American event,” says Nathan Raab, the firm’s president.
“Imagine if things had turned out differently. Imagine if he had been killed,” Raab tells Smithsonian magazine. “I think it’s safe to say it would have changed American history—and changed Roosevelt’s legacy.”
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How the shooting played out
When Roosevelt arrived in Milwaukee, the odds were against him. His second term as president had ended three years earlier. He was now running for a third, and he’d already lost the Republican nomination to William Howard Taft. He hoped to convince the American people to vote for him on the third-party Bull Moose ticket.
Just after 8 p.m., Roosevelt exited the Hotel Gilpatrick and stepped into an open-air car. A throng of supporters gathered to greet him, so he stood up to wave. At the front of the crowd, a man named John Schrank pulled out a Colt revolver and shot Roosevelt in the chest.
Several onlookers tackled the would-be assassin, yanking the gun from his hands. Roosevelt remained calm, directing the men to leave the attacker unharmed and turn him over to the police. (A panel of psychiatrists later declared that Schrank was “suffering from insane delusions.”) As a former Rough Rider in the Spanish-American War, Roosevelt knew to check whether he was bleeding from the mouth, which would indicate that the bullet had punctured a lung. Finding no blood, he told his driver to head to the auditorium.
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Backstage, doctors examined the wound, and Roosevelt asked for a handkerchief to staunch the bleeding. When local party leader Henry F. Cochems introduced the former president, he explained the situation to the audience. “The colonel speaks as a soldier with a bullet in his breast,” he said. “Where—we don’t know.”
As Roosevelt spoke, his breathing grew labored, but he warned the crowd that they couldn’t “escape listening to the speech.” Although he blamed his opponents’ “foul mendacity and abuse” for inciting “weak and vicious minds” to violence, he insisted that he didn’t “care a rap” about being shot.
“I cannot tell you of what infinitesimal importance I regard this incident, as compared with the great issues at stake in this campaign,” Roosevelt said. A few minutes later, he unbuttoned his coat and revealed his white shirt, stained with blood, for the audience of 9,000 people to see.
How two historic documents emerged
After the shooting, Roosevelt’s opponents temporarily suspended their campaigns. But when Americans cast their ballots in November 1912, the Democratic candidate, Woodrow Wilson, emerged victorious.
Roosevelt was a prolific writer with a tendency toward introspection. As he came to terms with the lost election, his thoughts kept returning to the assassination attempt, which he reflected on in his letters. If he was no longer the kind of man who was running for president, what kind of man was he?
Quick facts: Theodore Roosevelt’s writing
- The 26th president wrote more than 35 books and roughly 150,000 letters.
- “Theodore’s habit, in moments of joy or sorrow, had always been to reach for a pen, as others might reach for a rosary or a bottle,” biographer Edmund Morris wrote in The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt in 1979.
In a November 15 letter, Roosevelt reasoned that the “average broker or banker or factory owner” would have considered getting shot a “frightful and unheard-of calamity.” But a man accustomed to hard labor—perhaps a soldier, he ventured, or a railway man—would have acted “as I acted, without thinking anything about it.” He liked to think of himself as one of these men, rather than a “money-maker whose soul has grown hard while his body has grown soft.”
In the moments after the attack, Roosevelt estimated his odds of survival at 20-to-1. Making the speech was therefore a “perfectly obvious duty,” he wrote. “In the very unlikely event of the wound being mortal, I wished to die with my boots on, so to speak. It has always seemed to me that the best way to die would be in doing something that ought to be done.”
Later, Roosevelt would give away pages from the speech that had slowed the bullet to friends, family members and supporters. As gifts, they were “meant to be meaningful,” Raab says.
But historians hadn’t known about the page sold by the Raab Collection. The sheet was originally owned by a family who lived near Roosevelt’s home in New York. They gave it to a family friend, who held onto it for some 75 years. The firm hasn’t disclosed the identities of the sellers, but Raab tells WGN-TV that they live in the mid-Atlantic region.
“We’re kind of on the front line of discovery,” Raab tells Smithsonian. “If someone finds something in their attic or their basement, or they were left something by a relative, we’re often their first call.”
To authenticate the page, experts with the Raab Collection compared it to known sheets from Roosevelt’s speech. Was it the same size? Was the typeface correct? Were the holes in the right spots? “If it fails any one of those tests,” Raab says, “it fails all the tests.”
This page is marked with a “1” at the top, but it wasn’t necessarily the first page of the speech, as the Smithsonian’s copy also includes a “1.” But this sheet has one feature that the others don’t. Before parting with the page, Roosevelt scribbled a note across it, which experts authenticated through a handwriting analysis: “This is one of the manuscript sheets through which the bullet went at Milwaukee.”
How Roosevelt wanted to be remembered
Eleven years before the Milwaukee shooting, President William McKinley was shaking hands with supporters in Buffalo when a gunman fired a bullet into his chest. He died from his injuries the following week, and Roosevelt, his vice president, was sworn in on September 14, 1901.
Ever since that day, “I have been prepared to be shot,” Roosevelt later wrote in a letter to his son. He tended to “think possible contingencies out in advance,” and his imagined scenarios were quite specific. “I had always determined that if I was shot when I was about to make a speech or anything of the kind, I should go on with the speech,” he wrote.
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Roosevelt was ready when the fateful day arrived. He had considered how to act and how his actions would shape public opinion. By campaigning in such a compromised state, he also hoped the audience would see how seriously he took the issues at stake. “I felt that under such circumstances,” he later wrote, “it would be very difficult for people to disbelieve in my sincerity.”
As he recovered from his injury, Roosevelt found himself preoccupied with how he wanted the episode to be remembered. The other document sold by the Raab Collection—the copy of the speech typed up by Roosevelt’s stenographer, Elbert Martin—sheds new light on his attempts to craft that story.
Martin was one of the men who’d wrestled Schrank to the ground. When Roosevelt decided to continue on with his day, Martin went back to work, too. The stenographer likely took down shorthand notes as Roosevelt spoke. Then, he typed up a transcript for the former president to review.
Roosevelt’s handwritten edits appear throughout the recently discovered document. “In some cases, he made corrections,” Raab says. “A word is different here; a word is different there.” Roosevelt was a careful line editor, adding commas and removing paragraph breaks. He crossed out the first two sentences (“Friends, I shall have to ask you to be as quiet as possible. I do not know whether you fully understand that I have just been shot”) and made them punchier: “Friends, I shall ask you to be as quiet as possible, for I have just been shot, and the bullet is in me.”
The former president also cut the stenographer’s descriptions of the scene (“Roosevelt then unbuttoned coat and vest and showed his white shirt, badly stained with blood”) and comments from the audience (“Please sit down, Colonel Roosevelt. You should rest.”).
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Martin then typed up a final version, which is now stored with the stenographer’s papers. But Raab isn’t sure whether the edited copy ever circulated. Although transcripts of the speech appeared in the press, they don’t feature the former president’s changes.
What was Roosevelt hoping to accomplish with his edits? “There’s no one alive who can give you that answer,” Raab says. “All we’re left with is speculation.”
He may have been making a good faith attempt to correct the record. Or perhaps he was tinkering with it, adjusting his address to reflect the words he wished he’d said and the man he hoped he’d been.
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