Colonel Roosevelt

by Edmund Morris

  Roosevelt stepped forward and gestured for silence. “It’s true,” he said. “But it takes more than that to kill a bull moose.” There was some nervous laughter, so he unbuttoned his vest and exposed his shirtfront. The spreading bloodstain, larger than a man’s hand, caused screams of horror. Voices called, “Turn this way—turn this way!”

  He obliged, then said, “I’m going to ask you to be very quiet. I’ll do the best I can.”

  Waiting for the noise to subside, he reached into his jacket pocket for his speech. The fifty-page typescript was folded in half. He did not notice that it had been shot through until he began to read. For some reason, the sight of the double starburst perforation seemed to shock him more than the blood he had seen on his fingertips. He hesitated, temporarily wordless, then tried to make the crowd laugh again with his humorous falsetto: “You see, I was going to make quite a long speech.”

  His heart was racing, and the wound felt hot. He proceeded to half-read, half-improvise a rambling rationale of his trust-control and labor policies in a voice no longer husky but weak. A knifelike pain in his ribs forced him to breathe in short gasps. Two or three times, he appeared to totter. Afraid that he was dying, Philip approached the podium and begged him to stop. But Roosevelt swung his head toward him with such a steel-gray stare that the young man retreated, helpless.

  After about forty-five minutes Roosevelt asked how long he had been talking. Upon being told, he said, “I’ll speak for a quarter of an hour more.” In fact, he continued for well over half an hour, throwing down page after page as was his habit (the drilled sheets snapped up as souvenirs) and improvising an appeal to followers of Senator La Follette to lend their support to the Progressive Party. Although his voice remained forceful, he was clearly losing strength as well as blood. Aides stationed themselves below the footlights to catch him in case he fell forward, while others sitting onstage prepared to do the same behind. Toward the eighty-minute mark, Roosevelt’s face was white, but he spoke on till there was no more paper in his hands. Then, turning from the tumultuous applause, he said to Dr. Terrell, “Now I am ready to go with you and do what you want.”

  “HE DID NOT NOTICE THAT IT HAD BEEN SHOT THROUGH UNTIL HE BEGAN TO READ.”

  Roosevelt’s perforated speech manuscript and spectacle case. (photo credit i12.1)

  Incredibly, members of the audience crowded around and tried to slap his back. Charles Thompson got the distinct impression that each man was intent on being the last to shake hands with Theodore Roosevelt. They were pushed away, and the Colonel, walking very slowly, was led back to his car. By ten o’clock he was in the care of doctors at Milwaukee’s Emergency Hospital. Before being stripped and laid on the examination table he dictated a telegram to Edith, saying that he was in “excellent shape,” and that the wound was “trivial.”

  He also asked that somebody contact Seth Bullock, of Deadwood, South Dakota, and be sure to mention that he had been shot with “a thirty-eight on a forty-four frame.”

  MEANWHILE, AT THE CITY police station, John F. Schrank was being exhaustively grilled. He was calm but badly bruised from being kicked and torn at by his attackers. If Roosevelt had not intervened to save him, he might well have been lynched. He handed over a written account of his visions of President McKinley calling for Roosevelt’s death. A search of his pockets turned up another note, stating it was the duty of the United States to preserve the two-term tradition.

  Never let a third-term party emblem appear on an official ballot.

  I willing to die for my country, god has called me, to be his instrument.

  So help me god.

  Innocent Guilty

  Eine Fester Burg ist unser Gott.

  A mighty fortress is our God. This is my body, this is my blood. The mock-religious aura that had glowed around Roosevelt since he first stood at Armageddon had reached its grotesque climax. News of the drama on the Auditorium stage flashed outward along telephone and telegraph wires, jolting every night editor in the country and penetrating even into the Casino Theatre in New York, where Edith Roosevelt sat watching Johann Strauss’s The Merry Countess. She emerged from a side entrance weeping. “Take me to where I can talk to him or hear from him at once.” A police escort whisked her to the Progressive National Headquarters in the Manhattan Hotel, which had an open line to Milwaukee. There, just before midnight, she heard that her husband’s wound had been X-rayed and dressed. He was being transferred to Chicago’s Mercy Hospital, where a team of thoracic specialists would consider whether the bullet in his chest could be safely removed.

  It lay embedded against the fourth right rib, four inches from the sternum. In its upward and inward trajectory, straight toward the heart, it had had to pass through Roosevelt’s dense overcoat into his suit jacket pocket, then through a hundred glazed pages of his bifolded speech into his vest pocket, which contained a steel-reinforced spectacle case three layers thick, and on through two webs of suspender belt, shirt fabric, and undershirt flannel, before eventually finding skin and bone. Even so, its final force had been enough to crack the rib.

  “THE DULL-EYED, UNMISTAKABLE EXPRESSIONLESSNESS OF INSANITY.”

  John Schrank under arrest after attempting to kill Roosevelt, 14 October 1912. (photo credit i12.2)

  Marveling at the freak coordination of all these impediments, a witness to the shooting noted that had Schrank’s slug penetrated the pleura, the Colonel would have bled to death internally in a matter of minutes. “There was no other place on his body so thoroughly armored as the spot where the bullet struck.”

  ROOSEVELT WAS BACK on board the Mayflower before midnight. His breathing hurt and his right arm was stiff, but he undressed without assistance, putting studs into a clean shirt for the morning, and shaving himself before he went to bed.

  He was asleep before the train pulled out. It steamed extremely slowly, to rock him as little as possible, and glided into Chicago’s Northwestern yard at 3:32 A.M. without whistling. A locomotive on an adjoining track was blowing off, but fell silent as the Mayflower approached and came to rest.

  Even at that early hour, some four hundred persons were waiting on the platform. Among them was Dr. John B. Murphy, the nation’s premier chest surgeon. He had an ambulance standing by to take the Colonel straight to Mercy Hospital, but was persuaded to let his patient sleep until it was light. At a quarter past six the ambulance drew up and Roosevelt appeared, leaning on Cecil Lyon’s arm. He looked grave and pale, but when a press camera flashed and popped, he dryly remarked, “Ah, shot again.”

  With that he was hurried off by Murphy for more X-rays and tests.

  At 10:30 the hospital issued its first bulletin, describing the extent of Roosevelt’s injury, and stating a pulse rate of ninety and a temperature of 99.2°F. “No operation to remove bullet is indicated at the present time. Condition hopeful, but wound so important as to demand absolute rest for a number of days.” The chief risk, since the pleura was intact, was of infection, if not poisoning, since nobody could be sure if Schrank’s bullet (a floating cockroach of black ink in X-ray reproductions) had not been laced.

  By 1 P.M., Room 308 of Mercy Hospital was so mobbed with personal and political visitors, oblivious of the pain it cost Roosevelt to talk, that Murphy issued another bulletin emphasizing that the wound was “serious,” and that his patient needed complete quiet to recover. The surgeon was closemouthed about his decision not to probe for the bullet, but three consulting doctors concurred in a later statement that sent encouraging signals around the country:

  The records show that Colonel Roosevelt’s pulse is 86; his temperature 99.2 and respiration 18; that he has less pain in breathing than he did in the forenoon; that he has practically no cough; that there has been no bloody expectoration.

  We find him in magnificent physical condition due to his regular physical exercise and his habitual abstinence from tobacco and liquor. As a precautionary measure he has been given tonight a prophylactic dose of antitetanic serum to guard again
st the development or occurrence of lockjaw. Leukocyte count 8800, lymphocytes 11.5.

  Perhaps the best news for the patient was that his wife, undeterred by his repeated assurances that he had suffered worse accidents while riding, was on her way to see him and stand guard over his bed.

  DR. MURPHY’S POINTED reference to Roosevelt’s abstemiousness spoke to one of the thousands of telegrams pouring into the LaSalle Hotel headquarters of the Progressive Party. It was from the supporter in Detroit whom O. K. Davis had authorized to start a libel suit against George Newett, of the Ishpeming Iron Ore. He assumed that the Colonel still wished to proceed with the case. “I have retained Judge James H. Pound, one of the best men in Michigan, for such purposes, to represent him.”

  Among the other telegrams was one from William Howard Taft: “I am greatly shocked to hear of the outrageous and deplorable assault made upon you.” Woodrow Wilson also wired a message of sympathy. He announced that he would suspend his campaign, bar a few unavoidable engagements, until Roosevelt was well again. “My thought is constantly of that gallant gentleman lying in the hospital at Chicago.” Similar messages came in from Robert La Follette and William Jennings Bryan. A number of European crowned heads—some of whom had their own reasons to fear assassination attempts—sent get-well cablegrams. Vincent Curtis Baldwin of Chicago wrote enclosing a campaign donation of ten dollars that he said he had made selling flowers. “For I want you to be our President. If I was a man I’d help you, and work hard for you, and tell people how good you are, but I am only 10 years old.”

  AMONG THE MILLIONS of people wondering what effect the attack on Roosevelt would have on the election was Milwaukee’s district attorney, charged with the prosecution of John F. Schrank. He informed the judge presiding at the arraignment that his prisoner would plead guilty, and asked for a postponement of trial proceedings until mid-November, so that politics would not interfere with justice. His request was approved. Senator Dixon and his committee gave public thanks for the Colonel’s deliverance, but had to recognize, if only in some furtive recess of the heart, that Schrank had done the Progressive Party an enormous favor. All the hate that various political factions held for Roosevelt was subsumed in a surge of protective admiration. Mercy Hospital’s bulletins indicated a slow but steady recovery, with no sepsis and no aftereffect of shock. The bullet in his ribs was apparently sterile, and he was resigned to carrying it for the rest of his days.

  After a week in the hospital he was well enough to return to Sagamore Hill for his fifty-fourth birthday on 27 October. His wound was still open and his chest swollen with edema, but he decided that he needed to make another speech as soon as possible. To remain silent through the election would signal that he had been felled politically as well as physically. Voters needed to be assured that he was recovering, and reminded that Theodore Roosevelt was, surprisingly enough, the youngest of the four candidates now running. Debs was about to turn fifty-seven; Wilson would soon be fifty-six; Taft had just turned fifty-five.

  He announced that he would address a mass meeting at Madison Square Garden on the thirtieth. “I am in fine shape now,” he wrote his sister Bamie, while admitting to William Flinn that he might need pharmaceutical help.

  HIRAM JOHNSON was warming up the crowd of sixteen thousand at the Garden when a sound of distant cheering betokened Roosevelt’s approach. It grew louder, and eventually drowned out Johnson’s words. A sudden influx of newcomers filled the main entrance. For a moment or two the man they were escorting was invisible, but when he appeared on the prow of the platform, looking out over the sea of heads like a figurehead breasting foam, the uproar surged to hysterical levels. Dowagers climbed onto their chairs and screamed. Groups of men competed with one another to improvise noises even more raucous than the moose calls heard in the Chicago Coliseum in August. Heels drummed on the auditorium floor. Time and again, “Onward, Christian Soldiers” rose above the din.

  As far as reporters could tell, there was nothing orchestrated about the demonstration. Roosevelt had to wait for more than forty minutes, looking at first amused, then tired, then impatient, as if his First Amendment rights were being abused. He got order at last by banging on the flag-draped speaker’s table. Alert eyes noticed that he did so with his left hand. His face was ruddy, and when he began to speak, his voice easily filled the vast room. But there were no smacks of fist into palm. Occasionally he tried to raise his right arm, then winced and dropped it.

  “Friends, perhaps once in a generation, perhaps not so often—” The crowd began roaring again. Roosevelt lost his temper and yelled, “Quiet, down there!” A hush ensued.

  “—Perhaps not so often, there comes a chance for the people of a country to play their part wisely and fearlessly in some great battle of the age-long warfare for human rights.”

  This was approximately his 150th formal address of the campaign, and he had nothing new to say about Progressivism, much less about himself. As he spoke on, reporters were struck by the absence of the rancor he had often shown against Taft and Wilson on the stump. He mentioned neither by name, and seemed content to talk vaguely, yet feelingly, about the humanitarianism of his Party. “The doctrines we preach reach back to the Golden Rule and the Sermon on the Mount. They reach back to the commandments delivered at Sinai. All that we are doing is to apply those doctrines in the shape necessary to make them available for meeting the living issues of our own day.”

  ON TUESDAY, 5 November, a pall of privacy descended on Sagamore Hill for the first time in many months. Roosevelt was driven down to Oyster Bay at noon, and voted in the firehouse. After lunch, he and Edith went for a long walk in the woods. George Perkins arrived on the 4:05 train from New York, visited briefly, and hurried back to the station without saying anything to reporters.

  At seven the Colonel dressed for dinner as usual, and dined with his wife and a cousin, Laura Roosevelt. Most of the younger family members were at the Progressive headquarters in the city, watching returns come in over the wires. Alice was in Cincinnati, miserably pessimistic, her marriage as tenuous as Nick Longworth’s chances of another term in Congress.

  The phone call Roosevelt was bracing for came at about eleven o’clock. Two hundred miles away, the bells of Princeton, New Jersey, began to peal, while those of Oyster Bay remained silent. Presently a servant came out of Sagamore Hill and hurried off with a telegram to Woodrow Wilson:

  THE AMERICAN PEOPLE, BY A GREAT PLURALITY, HAVE CONFERRED UPON YOU THE HIGHEST HONOR IN THEIR GIFT.

  I CONGRATULATE YOU THEREON.

  THEODORE ROOSEVELT

  Just before midnight the Colonel received reporters in his study. He was still in black tie. A log fire burned softly behind him.

  “Like all other good citizens,” he said, “I accept the result with good humor and contentment.”

  * “Great Excitement! Local Committee!”

  CHAPTER 13

  A Possible Autobiography

  And if he still remembers here

  Poor fights he may have won or lost,—

  If he be ridden with the fear

  Of what some other fight may cost …

  He may by contemplation learn

  A little more than what he knew,

  And even see great oaks return

  To acorns out of which they grew.

  BEFORE ROOSEVELT WENT to bed after hearing the election result, he dictated a letter to Kermit. It belied his sanguine words to the press. “Well, we have gone down in a smashing defeat; whether it is a Waterloo or a Bull Run, only time will tell.”

  He did not have to wait for a full count of the vote to see that Wilson had scored the greatest electoral victory yet accorded a presidential candidate. Forty states had gone to the governor, and only six to himself. Taft had to be content with Utah and Vermont. Debs secured none. The electoral college tally was just as disproportionate, with 435 votes for Wilson, 88 for Roosevelt, and 8 for Taft. In Congressional races, the Democratic Party was triumphant, winning control of the S
enate and substantially increasing its majority in the House of Representatives.

  In his still-fragile state, Roosevelt yielded to rage against Root, La Follette, and all the others who had hampered his campaign from the start. Their efforts, he told Kermit, had been backed by “95% of the press” and “the great mass of ordinary commonplace men of dull imagination who simply vote under the party symbol and whom it is almost as difficult to stir by any appeal to the higher emotions and intelligence as it would be to stir so many cattle.” He railed at the “astounding virulence and hatred” of those who accused him of everything from habitual drunkenness to mendacity. Even after he had been struck down in Milwaukee, “the opposition to me was literally a mania.… I now wish to take as little part as possible in political affairs and efface myself as much as possible.”

  Like a female ranger living near Old Faithful, Edith Roosevelt understood her husband’s regular need to erupt. “You know him well enough,” she warned Kermit in a covering note, “to realize that he will paint the situation in his letter to you in the blackest colors.”

  Gradually, Roosevelt realized that his loss was not as devastating as it at first seemed. He had scored 4,126,020 popular votes over Taft’s 3,483,922. Wilson’s winning total was only 6,286,124: William Jennings Bryan had done better than him in losing four years before. Debs, by contrast, had doubled the Socialist vote of 1908 to nearly a million. This last was a remarkable achievement, but Roosevelt’s was historic. He had recruited a new party, schooled it in his Confession of Faith, and brought it to second place in a well-fought election. In just over ninety days, he had humbled a sitting president and decisively beaten a party that had dominated national politics for forty years. When the Progressive vote share, at just under 27.5 percent, was added to the GOP’s 23.2 percent, the Democratic total of 41.9 percent looked a lot less impressive. Technically, Wilson was a minority president.