President Trump speaking in front of painting of Theodore Roosevelt

Yesterday, a non-incumbent ex-president nominee from New York was non-fatally shot by a member of the Republican Party during a campaign event.

Strangely enough, this is not the first time it’s happened.

Running for a non-consecutive term in 1912, Theodore Roosevelt had failed to push his successor, William Howard Taft, off the Republican ticket. He cried foul, claiming the nomination was stolen from him before the convention even began. In order to secure the agenda he hoped Taft would have followed through with, or possibly as a form of revenge, Roosevelt launched his own party – the Progressive Party. It was Roosevelt’s hope that this new party, nicknamed the Bull Moose Party, would absorb the Republican Party and do away with the old guard.

The three-way (or if you include Socialist Party candidate Eugene Debs, four-way) race was closer than one would expect in the polls leading up to the election, despite Republicans’ claim that any third-party run would merely succeed in splitting the ticket. More official means of polling were not available yet, but the informal and scattered straw polls published by newspapers often put Theodore Roosevelt as the candidate to win, beating even Democratic candidate Woodrow Wilson.

It was during this campaign that on October 14, three weeks before the election, Roosevelt was in Milwaukee, Wisconsin for a campaign event. Shortly after his dinner at the Gilpatrick Hotel, Roosevelt went downstairs to get in his car and ride the four blocks to the auditorium where he was scheduled to give a speech. When he arrived, there was a crowd of spectators eager to lay their eyes on the former president, and Roosevelt was happy to oblige as he waved his hat to the cheering audience.

Suddenly, a shot rang out. Roosevelt did not move or react in any way, though one of his secretaries tackled the would-be assassin and restrained him. The crowd went briefly into a panic before entering a rage.

“Lynch him! Kill him!”

“Maniac Shoots Col. Roosevelt”

Some eleven years earlier, Vice-President Roosevelt’s position had unexpectedly been bolstered by the assassination of President William McKinley, who was shot at point blank range while extending his arm to the assassin for a handshake. When the crowd around McKinley swarmed upon the killer, the mortally wounded president was reported to have told them ,“Go easy on him, boys!” Perhaps these words echoed in Roosevelt’s head when he similarly implored the swarming crowd to spare his shooter.

Believing the gunman’s bullet whizzed wildly and innocently into nothingness, Roosevelt took his seat in the back of the car and began the short ride toward the auditorium. It was his secretary, a different secretary than the one who had restrained the shooter, who first noticed Roosevelt had a hole in his coat. “Look colonel,” he said, referring to Roosevelt, “there is a hole in your overcoat.” After Roosevelt reached under his garments and felt the spot on his chest for himself, his hand emerged covered in blood.

“It looks as though I had been hit, but I don’t think it is anything serious.”

Upon further investigation, the bullet had hit Roosevelt right in his coat pocket, where he was holding his folded 50-page speech manuscript, as well as his steel glasses case. All the same, the bullet was large and had lodged itself into his body. Despite advice from his doctor, Roosevelt still went on stage to give the speech.

Roosevelt opened his speech by announcing that he had been shot, holding up the hole-ridden manuscript and showing off his bloodied shirt to the astonished crowd.

“It takes more than that to kill a bull moose!”

Roosevelt proceeded to speak for an hour, his boisterous enthusiasm for public speaking understandably more muted than what he was normally capable of. After the speech, he finally allowed himself to be taken to the infirmary for a more thorough examination before retreating to his home in Oyster Bay, New York for a couple of weeks bedrest.

Although it shook his family quite a bit, Roosevelt seemed unperturbed by the whole ordeal, writing in his autobiography, “Both the men of my regiment and the friends I had made in the old days in the West were themselves a little puzzled in 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 nonperformance of which would have been discreditable rather than the performance being creditable.” Writing to his friend Seth Bullock of Deadwood fame, Roosevelt said he was unharmed and joked that the weapon was merely “a .38 on a .45 frame,” an inside joke harkening back to their time serving as Rough Riders during the Spanish American War.

Roosevelt had made the most of his moment as a near martyr and then seemed to move past it just as quickly as it happened. His allies and opponents, however, were forced to react.

Taft and Wilson were both unequivocally against such acts. Taft, a sitting president who rightly pointed out that three out of the nine last presidents had been assassinated, acknowledged that even though a lack of gun control and mental health were factors in the attack, stopping the “spread of vicious doctrines” would be “more effective.” A former close friend of Roosevelt’s, he then wrote to both Mr. and Mrs. Roosevelt to express his shock and well wishes. Wilson similarly denounced the violence during campaign speeches in Delaware, using it as an opportunity to tie himself and his agenda to Roosevelt’s character and accomplishments.

Roosevelt’s allies were much quicker to point the finger at the major parties. Even though the shooter’s motives seemed to come from the delusion that he was avenging McKinley’s death while stopping the formation of a monarchy, various politicians associated with Roosevelt and the Progressive Party went on the attack against their political opponents, decrying the “falsehoods of character-assassins and liars” and those who had joined in on the “abuse heaped upon” Roosevelt.

In the end, despite the positive press and series of endorsements the attack had garnered him, Roosevelt lost the 1912 election in a landslide. Wilson won by 2.2 million votes, though Roosevelt had defeated Taft by more than 600,000 votes. Despite this strong showing, Roosevelt’s dream of overthrowing the Republican Party and old guard would never come true, and he died seven years later with the bullet still lodged in his chest.

President Roosevelt and President Trump, despite sharing some biographical similarities, diverge in many important ways. When Roosevelt was shot, he still spoke for an hour despite the hole in his chest; when Trump was grazed, he immediately left the stage. Roosevelt’s words and actions carried through the press for readers to judge for themselves; the photo of Trump raising his fist in front of the flag while bleeding from the head will be ingrained into the minds of even the most passive American voter. Roosevelt was competing against two parties while building a Progressive Party infrastructure from the ground up; Trump has the full weight of the Republican Party behind him and only needs to defeat Biden.

It’s still too early to say how the election may shake out in light of this recent event, but perhaps Roosevelt’s story can be studied as a playbook which modern politicians may follow, purposefully or inadvertently.

The eyeglass case and the speech that took the initial blow from the bullet

The x-ray of Theodore Roosevelt’s chest with identifying the location of the bullet

Bibliography

“A Man.” The East Hampton Star. November 1, 1912. NYS Historic Newspapers.

“Blow That Ended T.R. and Taft Bond.” The Sun. November 3, 1912. NYS Historic Newspapers.

“Causes Leading Up to the Republican Break.” The Sun. November 3, 1912. NYS Historic Newspapers.

“Col. Roosevelt Shot in Milwaukee.” The Journal and Republican and Lowville Times. October 17, 1912. NYS Historic Newspapers.

“Gov. Deneen Retorts to Col. Roosevelt.” The Journal and Republican and Lowville Times. October 17, 1912. NYS Historic Newspapers.

“Gov. Wilson is Our Next President.” Westfield Republican. November 6, 1912. NYS Historic Newspapers.

“McCormick’s Defi!” The Lowville Herald and Lewis County Democrat. October 24, 1912. NYS Historic Newspapers.

Millard, Candice. The River of Doubt: Theodore Roosevelt’s Darkest Journey. First Edition. New York: Anchor, 2006.

“Out for Roosevelt.” The Lowville Herald and Lewis County Democrat. October 24, 1912. NYS Historic Newspapers.

PBS News. “Would McKinley Have Survived an Assassin’s Bullet If He Had a Different Doctor?,” September 14, 2019. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/health/would-mckinley-have-survived-an-assassins-bullet-if-he-had-a-different-doctor.

“Progressive Sentiment.” The Lowville Herald and Lewis County Democrat. October 24, 1912. NYS Historic Newspapers.

Roosevelt, Theodore. The Autobiography of Theodore Roosevelt. 5.5.2009 edition. CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2009.

“Some Straw Votes.” The Lowville Herald and Lewis County Democrat. October 24, 1912. NYS Historic Newspapers.

“The Truth Will Out.” The East Hampton Star. October 25, 1912. NYS Historic Newspapers.

“TR Center – Seth Bullock.” Accessed July 14, 2024. https://www.theodorerooseveltcenter.org/Blog/Item/Seth%20Bullock.