A(nother) Former President Survives an Assassination Attempt

By Theodore Roosevelt

A former president, out of office for a term, seeks to regain the White House. On the campaign trail, a gunman takes aim. The bullet hits its target, but the former president escapes largely unscathed. Observers take note of the toughness of the former president’s response to the attack.

Sound familiar?

It’s a scenario that played out not only during the recent assassination attempt on Donald Trump. A similar scene unfolded on October 14, 1912, when a would-be assassin fired on former president Theodore Roosevelt.

Roosevelt was campaigning in Milwaukee—where, coincidentally, Trump’s Republicans gather for their convention this week—when a man named John Schrank fired at him. The bullet hit Roosevelt in the chest. Fortunately, the steel-reinforced eyeglass case and thick speech manuscript in TR’s coat pocket slowed the bullet just enough to keep it from reaching his lungs.

Roosevelt was no stranger to assassinations. He had become president after an anarchist shot and killed William McKinley.

Still, TR was undaunted. With the bullet still lodged in his chest, he gave his scheduled campaign speech. “I don’t know whether you fully understand that I have just been shot,” he told the audience, showing them his bloody shirt. Then he declared, “It takes more than that to kill a bull moose.”

Here is how Roosevelt discussed the assassination attempt, and political violence more broadly, in his autobiography, published the following year.

When, in 1900, I was nominated for Vice-President, I was sent by the [Republican] National Committee on a trip into the States of the high plains and the Rocky Mountains…. It was an interesting trip, and the monotony usually attendant upon such a campaign of political speaking was diversified in vivid fashion by occasional hostile audiences. One or two of the meetings ended in riots. One meeting was finally broken up by a mob; everybody fought so that the speaking had to stop.

Soon after this we reached another town where we were told there might be trouble. Here the local committee included an old and valued friend, a “two-gun” man of repute, who was not in the least quarrelsome, but who always kept his word. We marched round to the local opera-house, which was packed with a mass of men, many of them rather rough-looking. My friend the two-gun man sat immediately behind me, a gun on each hip, his arms folded, looking at the audience; fixing his gaze with instant intentness on any section of the house from which there came so much as a whisper. The audience listened to me with rapt attention.

At the end, with a pride in my rhetorical powers which proceeded from a misunderstanding of the situation, I remarked to the chairman: “I held that audience well; there wasn’t an interruption.” To which the chairman replied: “Interruption? Well, I guess not! Seth had sent round word that if any son of a gun peeped he’d kill him!”…

“The Right Thing for a Man to Do”

On another tour, when I was running for Vice-President, a member of the [Rough Riders] regiment who was along on the train got into a discussion with a Populist editor who had expressed an unfavorable estimate of my character, and in the course of the discussion shot the editor—not fatally. We had to leave him to be tried, and as he had no money I left him $150 to hire counsel—having borrowed the money from Senator [Edward] Wolcott, of Colorado, who was also with me.

After election I received from my friend a letter running: “Dear Colonel: I find I will not have to use that $150 you lent me, as we have elected our candidate for District Attorney. So I have used it to settle a horse transaction in which I unfortunately became involved.”

A few weeks later, however, I received a heartbroken letter setting forth the fact that the District Attorney—whom he evidently felt to be a cold-blooded formalist—had put him in jail. Then the affair dropped out of sight until two or three years later, when as President I visited a town in another State, and the leaders of the delegation which received me included both my correspondent and the editor, now fast friends, and both of them ardent supporters of mine.

At one of the regimental reunions a man, who had been an excellent soldier, in greeting me mentioned how glad he was that the judge had let him out in time to get to the reunion. I asked what was the matter, and he replied with some surprise: “Why, Colonel, don’t you know I had a difficulty with a gentleman, and…er…well, I killed the gentleman. But you can see that the judge thought it was all right or he wouldn’t have let me go.”

Waiving the latter point, I said: “How did it happen? How did you do it?”

Misinterpreting my question as showing an interest only in the technique of the performance, the ex-puncher replied: “With a .38 on a .45 frame, Colonel.”

I chuckled over the answer, and it became proverbial with my family and some of my friends, including Seth Bullock.

When I was shot at Milwaukee, Seth Bullock wired an inquiry to which I responded that it was all right, that the weapon was merely “a .38 on a .45 frame.” The telegram in some way became public, and puzzled outsiders.

By the way, both the men of my regiment and the friends I had made in the old days in the West were themselves a little puzzled at the interest shown in my making my speech after being shot. This was what they expected, what they accepted as the right thing for a man to do under the circumstances, a thing the non-performance of which would have been discreditable rather than the performance being creditable. They would not have expected a man to leave a battle, for instance, because of being wounded in such fashion; and they saw no reason why he should abandon a less important and less risky duty.