Shot in the chest, Theodore Roosevelt gave his speech anyway

On October 14, 1912, Theodore Roosevelt ate dinner at a hotel in Milwaukee and came out to a waiting open car. He was due to give a speech at the city's auditorium. A crowd had gathered outside, and when it cheered, he stood up in the car and raised his hat. A man pushed through the crowd and shot him in the chest from close range.

Roosevelt had already been president, from 1901 to 1909. He had picked William Howard Taft to succeed him, grown frustrated with him, and lost the 1912 Republican nomination to him. So he was running against Taft anyway, for the new Progressive Party. People called it the Bull Moose Party, after Roosevelt said he felt as strong as a bull moose.

In his coat pocket were a steel glasses case and his speech, 50 pages folded in half. The bullet went through both and lodged in his chest.

His stenographer, Elbert Martin, a former football player, tackled the gunman and took the revolver. The crowd shouted for the man to be lynched. Roosevelt called out, "Don't hurt him. Bring him here. I want to see him." He asked the man why he had done it, got no answer, and had him handed over to the police.

Roosevelt was an experienced hunter and had studied anatomy. He was not coughing up blood, so he concluded that the bullet had not reached his lung. He refused to go to the hospital and went to the auditorium.

"I don't know whether you fully understand that I have just been shot," he told the audience, "but it takes more than that to kill a bull moose." He opened his vest to show them the bloodstain on his shirt. He spoke for at least 50 minutes before he let doctors look at him.

An X-ray found the bullet in the muscle of his chest. It had stopped short of the lining around his lung. The doctors decided that taking it out would be more dangerous than leaving it where it was.

Taft and the Democratic candidate, Woodrow Wilson, stopped campaigning until Roosevelt recovered. He rested for two weeks and went back on the road. Asked whether the shooting would hurt his campaign, he told a reporter, "I'm fit as a bull moose." In November he won more votes than Taft, but Wilson won the election.

The gunman was John Schrank, a former saloonkeeper from New York who had followed Roosevelt from New Orleans. He said the ghost of President William McKinley had come to him in a dream and told him to avenge his murder. McKinley's assassination in 1901 was what had made Roosevelt president. A court found Schrank insane, and he spent the rest of his life in state hospitals in Wisconsin. He died in 1943.

Roosevelt wrote to a friend that he did not mind the bullet "any more than if it were in my waistcoat pocket." He died in 1919 with the bullet still in his chest.