In 1912 a speech may have saved Teddy Roosevelt’s life

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Strange things can happen while getting ready to give a speech. On the evening of October 14, 1912 former president Theodore Roosevelt had stepped out of a hotel in Milwaukee and into an open car that would take him to the Milwaukee Auditorium where he was scheduled to speak. Then an unemployed saloonkeeper, Jacob Schrank, who stood just five feet away. fired one shot from a .38 revolver at Roosevelt’s chest.  

 

The combination of his heavy army overcoat, glasses case, and the folded fifty-page text of his speech slowed down the bullet, and it did not penetrate the lung. He decided to go on and deliver his speech. Roosevelt opened by stating:

 

“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.”

 

The incident is described both in an article by Patricia O’Toole in Smithsonian Magazine for November 2012 titled The speech that saved Teddy Roosevelt’s life and more recently by Christopher Klein on July 21, 2019 at History.com in another article titled When Teddy Roosevelt was shot in 1912, a speech may have saved his life.

 

Roosevelt followed his own advice from an address in Paris at the Sorbonne on April 23, 1910 in which he famously had said:

 

“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, and comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat.”

 

An image of a revolver came from Wikimedia Commons.