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CHAPTER TWENTY THREE 

Of Theodore Roosevelt And his Time Volume 2

THE   PBOGRBSSIVE   CONVENTION   AND:   

CAMPAIGN-SHOOTING OF ROOSEVELT: 

immediately following the completion of the roll-call, which resulted in the nomination of Taft, the Roosevelt delegates and alternates left the convention and accompanied by a great throng of people went to another hall in the city, which was filled to overflowing as soon as the doors were opened. A convention was organized and resolutions were adopted nominating Roosevelt as the candidate of the Progressive party for the presidency. A committee of notification, representing the strongest Republican States, twenty-two in number, was appointed to apprise him of the nomination. When he appeared in the hall a scene of the wildest enthusiasm followed. All witnesses of this scene describe it as something quite without precedent in convention history, being more like the beginning of a religious crusade than the founding of a political party. Roosevelt made a brief speech, in which he said:
"I think the time has come when not only men who believe in Progressive principles, but all men who believe in those elementary maxims of public and private morality which must underlie every form of successful free government, should join in our movement. I, therefore, ask you to go to your several homes to find out the sentiment of the people at home and then again come together, I suggest by mass convention, to nominate for the presidency a Progressive on a Progressive platform that will enable us to appeal to Northerner and Southerner, Easterner and Westerner, Republican and Democrat alike, in the name of our common American citizenship. If you wish me to make the fight, I will make it, even if only one State should support me. 
   
"I am in this fight for certain principles, and the first and most important of these goes back to Sinai, and is embodied in the commandment, 'Thou shalt not steal.' Thou shalt not steal a nomination. Thou shalt neither steal in politics nor in business. Thou shalt not steal from the people the birthright of the people to rule themselves."
A call for a National Progressive Convention, to meet at Chicago on August 5, 1912, in the same building as that in which the Republican convention had held its sessions, was issued on July 7. There were sixty-three signers to the call, representing forty States, mostly Northern, and no Territories.
When the convention assembled at Chicago there were delegates from every State except South Carolina. Many States sent three and four times the regular number of delegates, so that there were in attendance fully two thousand in all. There were negro delegates from several States, including West Virginia, Pennsylvania, New York and Rhode Island—whose character and standing in the communities from which they came were equal in every respect to those of the white delegates.
The convention was as extraordinary in character as that which had been assembled so hastily in Chicago in June. Its members, like those of the June gathering, sang hymns and patriotic songs, like "The Battle Hymn of the Republic," the "Star-Spangled Banner," "Onward Christian Soldiers." When Roosevelt made his first appearance on the platform he was cheered continuously for nearly an hour. On the evening of the second day Theodore Roosevelt was nominated for President, and Hiram W. Johnson, of California, for Vice-President. The convention adjourned after singing the "Doxology."
In accepting the nomination, Roosevelt reiterated the principles for which he had been speaking and writing since his return from abroad, and in closing used a phrase which he had employed in the speech which he had made to his followers when they withdrew from the Republican convention in June and which had instantly become a sort of battle cry in the Progressive campaign: "We stand at Armageddon and we battle for the Lord":
"Six weeks ago here in Chicago, I spoke to the honest representatives of a convention which was not dominated by honest men; a convention wherein sat, alas! a majority of men who, with sneering indifference to every principle of right, so acted as to bring to a shameful end a party which had been founded over half a century ago by men in whose souls burned the fire of lofty endeavor. Now to you men who, in your turn, have come together to spend and be spent in the endless crusade against wrong, to you who face the future resolute and confident, to you who strive in a spirit of brotherhood for the betterment of our nation, to you who gird yourselves for this great new fight in the never-ending warfare for the good of mankind, I say jn closing what I said in that speech in closing: We stand at Armageddon and we battle for the Lord."
The campaign which followed the convention was one of the most exciting and remarkable that the country had ever witnessed. Its result was virtually certain from the outset, for with two Republican candidates in the field the success of the Democratic candidate was reasonably well assured. The Republican leaders who had brought about the re-nomination of President Taft admitted frankly among themselves that they had no hope of his election. They had deliberately chosen defeat for their party in preference to success for it with Roosevelt. As his letters show, Roosevelt had no hope of election when he consented to run as the Progressive candidate. He was not making the fight for personal success but in defense of the principles for which he stood. He took the stump and made a vigorous campaign, and almost from the outset it was generally recognized that although he was the nominee of a new party, and was called a third party candidate, the contest was between him and the Democratic candidate, Woodrow Wilson.
When the campaign was at its height in October its progress was arrested and the whole country was shocked by the attempted assassination of Roosevelt while he was on a speaking tour in the West. As he was leaving his hotel in Milwaukee, on the evening of October 14, a half-crazed fanatic shot him as he stood in an automobile bowing to a cheering crowd. His assailant was only a few feet away when he fired the shot which under ordinary conditions would have been fatal. One of Roosevelt's secretaries, Elbert E. Martin, who had been a football player, immediately sprang upon the assailant and forced him to the ground. The crowd, thoroughly incensed, was crying out, "Lynch him, lynch him," but Roosevelt, who had not been thrown down by the shot, calmed the crowd by saying: "Don't hurt him! Bring him here. I want to look at him." When one of his secretaries suggested that Roosevelt be taken at once to a hospital, he said: "You get me to that speech; it may be the last I shall deliver, but I am going to deliver this one."
He rode at once to the hall where he was to speak, and on arriving there one of his companions exclaimed as soon as they came into a lighted room: "Look, Colonel, there's a. hole in your overcoat!" Roosevelt looked down, saw the hole, and putting his hand inside his coat, withdrew it with blood upon it. Not at all dismayed, he said: "It looks as though I had been hit, but I don't think it is anything serious." Three physicians who were found in the audience examined the wound, said the bullet had penetrated his breast, that they could not tell how serious the injury was, but that in their opinion he should be taken at once to a hospital. He refused absolutely to permit this, saying: "I will make this speech, or die; one or the other," and strode to the platform. The great audience, in ignorance of the shooting, broke into prolonged cheering at his appearance, and when quiet was restored the presiding officer said: "I have something to tell you and I hope you will receive the news with calmness. Colonel Roosevelt has been shot. He is wounded.'' A cry of astonishment and horror ran over the audience and great confusion followed. Roosevelt stepped to the front of the platform and produced instant calm by raising his hand and saying: "I am going to ask you to be very quiet and please to excuse me from making you a very long speech. I '11 do the best I can, but you see there is a bullet in my body. But it is nothing. I'm not hurt badly."
He began at once upon his speech. On taking from the breast-pocket of his coat the folded manuscript of his speech he saw that it had a bullet hole completely through it, having first passed through a metal spectacle case which was also in his pocket, but this did not check him for a moment, though he said afterwards it did startle him a little. Showing it to the audience, he said: "It takes more than that to kill a Bull Moose!" Several times during his speech he seemed to be growing weak but when persons on the platform rose to help him, he said: "Let me alone. I'm all right." In the course of his speech he said that certain newspaper utterances were to blame for the attempt to assassinate him—that a weak-minded man had been influenced by them. He finished his speech and later in the evening was taken by special train to Chicago, arriving there at half past three the next morning. Looking from the car window and seeing an ambulance standing by the station, he said: "I'll not go to a hospital lying in that thing. I'll walk to it and I'll walk from it to the hospital. I'm no weakling to be crippled by a flesh wound."
On arriving at the hospital a thorough examination of his wound, with X-rays, was made and it was discovered that the bullet had entered his chest at the right of and below the right nipple and was embedded in a rib; it had touched no vital part. One of the examining surgeons said: "Colonel Roosevelt has a phenomenal development of the chest. It is largely due to the fact that he is a physical marvel that he was not dangerously wounded. He is one of the most powerful men I have ever seen laid on anoperating table. The bullet lodged in the massive muscles of the chest instead of penetrating the lung."
Mrs. Roosevelt, who was in New York at the time, received news of the shooting while at a theater and, accompanied by her two daughters, went at once to Chicago, where she took personal charge of the patient. Dr. Alexander Lambert, Roosevelt's family physician, also hastened to Chicago and after examining him said: "The folded manuscript and heavy steel spectacle case checked and deflected the bullet so that it passed up at such an angle that it went outside the ribs and in the muscles. If this deflection had not occurred and the bullet gone through the arch of the aorta or auricles of the heart, Colonel Roosevelt would not have lived 60 seconds."
In the official bulletin of October 15, the attending surgeons said: "We find him in a magnificent physical condition, due to his regular physical exercise, his habitual abstinence from tobacco and liquor."
Senator Beveridge, of Indiana, visited him in the hospital on the day of his arrival, October 15, and to him Roosevelt dictated the following message to his followers, which the Senator delivered to a large audience at Louisville, Kentucky, on October 17, 1912:
"It matters little about me, but it matters all about the cause we fight for. If one soldier who happens to carry the flag is stricken, another will take it from his hands and carry it on. One after another the standard bearers may be laid low, but the standard itself can never fail.
"You know that personally I did not want ever to be a candidate for office again. And you know that only the call that came to the men of the 60's made me answer it in our day as they did more nobly in their day. And now, as then, it is not important whether one leader lives or dies; it is important only that the cause shall live and win. Tell the people not to worry about me, for if I go down another will take my place. Always the cause is there, and it is the cause for which the people care, for it is the people's cause."
Describing his sensations at the time of the shooting, a few days later, Roosevelt said: "It was nothing, nothing. I felt a little pain, but it was not serious. When I stretched out my arms or reached for my manuscript it made me gasp a bit, but that was all. It was quite amusing when I reached for my manuscript to see that it had a hole in it from the bullet and there was a hole in my spectacle case too."
"Amusing, did you say, Colonel?" some one asked.
"Well, it was quite interesting," he replied. "It was difficult to keep my temper," he added, "when at the close of my speech a half dozen men scrambled upon the platform to shake hands with me. Didn't they know that it is impossible for a man who has just been shot to shake hands with genuine cordiality?"
The shooting had completely arrested the progress of the campaign, both Taft and Wilson sending messages of sympathy and refraining from public utterances while the ultimate effect of the attack was in doubt. Two days after reaching the hospital Roosevelt made a statement for publication in which he urged that the campaign be resumed without regard to his condition. In this he said:
"I cannot too strongly emphasize the fact upon which we Progressives insist, that the welfare of any one man in the fight wholly is immaterial compared to the great and fundamental issues involved in the triumph of the principles for which our cause stands. If I had been killed the fight would have gone on exactly the same. ... So far as my opponents are concerned, whatever could with truth and propriety have been said against me and my cause before I was shot can with equal truth and equal propriety be said against me now, and it should be so said; and the things that cannot be said now are merely the things that ought not to have been said before. This is not a contest about any man; it is a contest concerning principles."
He remained in the hospital till October 21, when he went to his home in Oyster Bay. The man who shot him was a fanatic, named John Schrank, who was shown by papers found on his person to be of unbalanced mind, and to have been following Roosevelt about the country for some time seeking a favorable opportunity to shoot him. In a sort of diary, among these papers, were entries in which Schrank said McKinley had appeared to him and told him that Roosevelt was his murderer. Another entry showed that some of the campaign talk against Roosevelt as a candidate for a third term had affected his crazy brain, for it read: "Any man looking for a third term ought to be shot." When he was arraigned in court in Milwaukee, on November 12, 1912, he showed very clearly that this was the case, for when asked how he would plead he replied: "Why, guilty. I did not mean to kill a citizen, Judge; I shot Theodore Roosevelt because he was a menace to the country. He should not have a third term. I did not want him to have one. I shot him as a warning that men must not try to have more than two terms as President." Could there be furnished stronger evidence than this that violent denunciation of public men, in the press and on the stump, incites assassination by inducing persons of unbalanced minds to attempt it in the crazy belief that they are thereby doing a public service? The assassinations of Lincoln, Garfield and McKinley were directly traceable to this source.
The court appointed a commission of five alienists to examine Schrank and report on his mental condition. They reported on November 22 that he was insane and he was committed to an asylum for the insane for an indefinite period.
Several letters that Roosevelt wrote at the time and subsequently contain exceedingly interesting observations upon the natural conduct of men in like situations:
November 15, 1912.
To the Rt. Hon. Sir Edward Grey, Foreign Office, London: "I am a little amused, my dear fellow, at your saying that the account of the shooting stirred you with a curiosity to know whether, if the experience had been yours, you would  'have had the nerve to make the speech,' and whether your 'body would have proved as healthy.' I can answer both questions with absolute certainty. Your nerve would not have been affected in the least, you would have made the speech as a matter of course, and your body would have proved more healthy. You would have shown the absolute coolness and courage and lack of thought of self that your brother showed when mauled by the lions. Modern civilization is undoubtedly somewhat soft, and the average political orator or party leader, the average broker, or banker, or factory owner, at least when he is past middle age, is apt to be soft—I mean both mentally and physically—and such a man accepts being shot as a frightful and unheard-of calamity, and feels very sorry for himself and thinks only of himself and not of the work on which he is engaged or of his duty to others, or indeed of his real self-respect. But a good soldier or sailor, or for the matter of that even a civilian accustomed to hard and hazardous pursuits, a deep-sea fisherman, or railway-man, or cow-boy, or lumber-jack, or miner, would normally act as I acted without thinking anything about it. I believe half the men in my regiment at the least would have acted just as I acted. Think how many Bulgars during the last month have acted in just the same fashion and never even had their names mentioned in bulletins!
"Recently John Murray sent me 'The Life of Sir Harry Smith,' and I was reading his experiences in the Peninsula War, and his account of the many officers who continued to perform their duties with bullets in them, it being often many hours before a surgeon could attend to them. Why! even in our little San Juan fight there were thirteen men of my regiment who after being shot continued to fight. Now I wish to rank myself with such men as Harry Smith and his comrades in the Peninsula War, and with the men in my regiment, and I expect to be judged by their standards and not by the standards of that particular kind of moneymaker whose soul has grown hard while his body has grown soft; that is, who is morally ruthless to others and physically timid about himself.
"I doubt if any man has had a greater volume of obliquity poured upon him than I have had during the past nine months, and I have been assailed with an injustice so gross as to be fairly humorous. But there is a good deal in Emerson's law of compensation, and to offset this I have been praised in connection with the shooting with quite as extravagant a disregard of my deserts. The bullet passed through the manuscript of my speech and my iron spectacle case, and only went three or four inches into the chest, breaking a rib and lodging against it. I never saw my assailant, as it was dark and he was mixed with the dense crowd beside the automobile, and as I was standing unsteadily I half fell back for a second. As I stood up I coughed and at once put my hands to my lips to see if there was any blood. There was none, so that as the bullet was in the chest I felt the chances were twenty to one that it was not fatal.
"I would not have objected to the man's being killed at the very instant, but I did not deem it wise or proper that he should be killed before my eyes if I was going to recover, so I immediately stopped the men who had begun to worry him, and had him brought to me so that I might see if I recognized him; but I did not. There was then a perfectly obvious duty, which was to go on and make my speech. In the very unlikely event of the wound being mortal I wished to die with my Roots on, so to speak. It has always seemed to me that the best way to die would be in doing something that ought to be done, whether leading a regiment or doing anything else. Moreover, I felt that under such circumstances it would be very difficult for people to disbelieve in my sincerity, and that therefore they would be apt to accept at the face value the speech I wished to make, and which represented my deepest and most earnest convictions. If, on the other hand, as I deemed overwhelmingly probable, the wound should turn out to be slight, it was still likely that I would have little further chance to speak during the campaign, and therefore it behooved me to go on while I had the chance, and make a speech to which under the circumstances it was at least possible that the country would pay some heed. This is all there was to the incident."
December 16, 1912.
To J. St. Loe Strachey, Esq., Editor of the London Spectator: "Just one word about the madman who shot me. He was not really a madman at all; he was a man of the same disordered brain which most criminals, and a great many non-criminals, have. I very gravely question if he has a more unsound brain than Eugene Debs. He simply represents a different stratum of life and of temperament, which if not more violent is yet more accustomed to brutal physical expression. He had quite enough sense to avoid shooting me in any Southern State, where he would have been lynched, and he waited until he got into a State where there was no death penalty. I have not the slightest feeling against him; I have a very strong feeling against the people who, by their ceaseless and intemperate abuse, excited him to the action, and against the mushy people who would excuse him and all other criminals once the crime has been committed.''
December 31, 1912.
To Sir Cecil Arthur Spring-Rice, British Legation, Stockholm: "I am as well as possible. I did not care a rap for being shot. It is a trade risk, which every prominent public man ought to accept as a matter of course. For eleven years I have been prepared any day to be shot; and if any one of the officers of my regiment had abandoned the battle merely because he received a wound that did nothing worse than break a rib, I should never have trusted that officer again. I would have expected him to keep on in the fight as long as he could stand; and what I expect lieutenants to do I expect a fortiori, a leader to do."
February 5, 1913.
To Dr. William Sturgis Bigelow, Boston: "I was getting into the barouche, having just left a lighted hotel, so that I could not see the crowd distinctly. What I said when the man was caught was: 'Don't hurt him. Bring him here. I want to look at him.' After the bullet I had no real pain. The wound felt hot. When I began to speak my heart beat rapidly for some ten minutes, but aside from that about all the real trouble I had was that on account of my broken rib I had to breathe quick and short, so that I could not speak as loudly as usual, nor use long sentences without breathing. When I got to the railway car I shaved and took out the studs and buttons from my bloody shirt and put them in a clean shirt, as I thought I might be stiff next morning. This all tired me a little, and when I lay down in my bunk my heart was again beating fast enough, and my breath was short enough, to make me feel somewhat uncomfortable. But after a while I found I could turn, if I did it very carefully, to my un-wounded side, and then I fell asleep."
February 17, 1913.
"By the way, I remember once or twice your speaking to me about why the bullet was not cut out. I never asked the surgeon, but through Dean Sumner, who had just been attended by Dr. Murphy and who questioned him about me, I found out the reason. Dr. Murphy said that the bullet had splintered the inside of the rib, and one or two of the splinters penetrated the pleura. My speech slightly aggravated the laceration, and they were afraid that if they took out the bullet immediately there might either be a collapse of the pleura, or an infection of the pleura cavity; and inasmuch as there was no infection for the moment they thought it was better to leave well enough alone.''
The bullet was never extracted and he carried it with him to his grave. Writing to his friend, Charles G. Washburn, of Worcester, Mass., on March 5, 1913, he said of it: "I do not mind it any more than if it were in my waistcoat pocket.''
Roosevelt remained quietly at Oyster Bay until he recovered completely from his wound, taking no active part in the campaign till a few days before election. On October 31, 1912, he addressed a great audience of 15,000 persons in Madison Square Garden in New York City, where he was received with unbounded enthusiasm and was seen to be in full health and vigor. In closing he repeated the passage from his Carnegie Hall speech of March 20, which I have quoted in Chapter 22 of this volume, and which he called his political creed, and added:
"Friends, what I said then I say now. Surely there never was a greater opportunity than ours. Surely there never was a fight better worth making than this. I believe we shall win, but win or lose I am glad beyond measure that I am one of the many who in this fight have stood ready to spend and be spent, pledged to fight while life lasts the great fight for righteousness and for brotherhood and for the welfare of mankind.''
The result of the election demonstrated conclusively that Roosevelt had been, as his advocates claimed, the first choice of a majority of the Republican voters, for his popular vote was 4,119,507, while Taft's was 3,484,056. He received the electoral votes of six States, 88 in all, while Taft received those of only two States, Vermont and Utah, or 8 in all. In the six States that Roosevelt carried were such Republican strongholds as Pennsylvania, Michigan and Minnesota. In nearly all other normally Republican States his vote greatly exceeded that of Taft, who, although the regular nominee of his party, ran third in the contest, while Roosevelt, the nominee of a new party, ran second. No new party in the history of the country had ever before developed such remarkable strength; but time was to show very speedily that it was not a party strength at all, but simply Roosevelt strength—that he himself was the party, for without him as its candidate it dissolved almost as quickly as it had been formed. Four millions of people had voted for him because he was Roosevelt and they had absolute faith in him, but in doing so they had not consolidated themselves into a permanent political organization.