Shot in the chest and bleeding, but Roosevelt still delivered a 90-minute speech

January 5, 2019 marked the centenary of the death of Theodore Roosevelt – the 26th president of the United States.

Theodore Roosevelt was a descendant of Claus van Roosevelt, a Dutchman who settled in ‘New Amsterdam’ in the mid-17th century and the site of whose farm has disappeared beneath the Empire State Building.

TR (as he liked to be known) also had significant Scottish, Ulster-Scots and English ancestry.

Ancestors of Martha Bulloch, Roosevelt’s mother, had emigrated from Larne in 1729. He referred to his Ulster-Scots ancestors as ‘a stern, virile, bold and hardy people who formed the kernel of that American stock who were the pioneers of our people in the march westwards’.

Born in New York in 1858, TR was a sickly and asthmatic child who by taking up various demanding sports, adopting a strenuous lifestyle and sheer determination managed to turn himself into a man of action. During the course of his life he climbed the Matterhorn, hunted big game in Africa and explored Brazil.

After his first wife and mother died on the same day, he spent two tough years as a ‘gentleman cowboy’ and rancher in the Badlands of Dakota (where he was initially underestimated and mocked by locals as ‘Four Eyes’), during which time he also managed to write a four-volume history of the American frontier.

A Harvard graduate, he was both an accomplished historian and popular author.

He served as president McKinley’s assistant secretary to the Navy between 1897 and 1898. He resigned when the United States went to war with Spain to lead a volunteer cavalry unit known as ‘the Rough Riders’ in Cuba.

On July 1 1898 he famously led a cavalry charge up San Juan Heights, mounted on his horse Little Texas and waving his hat. He relished war as a sport, regarded July 1 1898 as ‘the greatest day of his life’ and achieved celebrity.

Between 1898 and 1900 he served as governor of New York and antagonised some Republican bosses by his vigorous opposition to corruption. They concluded that TR would cause less bother as vice-president and so he became president McKinley’s running mate in June 1900. The chairman of the Republican National Committee was appalled at the prospect of ‘only one life’ between ‘that madman’ and the White House.

When an anarchist shot McKinley in September 1901, TR became the youngest ever president at the age of 42.

TR loved being president and especially the conduct of foreign policy. He loved being at the centre of everything. As Alice Roosevelt famously observed: ‘My father wanted to be the corpse at every funeral, the bride at every wedding and the baby at every christening.’

He believed passionately that the US Constitution gave the federal government the authority to act vigorously in the interests of the general welfare of the nation.

Throughout his presidency he favoured tighter regulation of big business, especially railroads, and strong executive action against monopolistic ‘trusts’.

He believed that the United States as ‘a great nation’ had a mission to extend ‘its superior and peaceful civilisation’ (primarily defined as democracy and free trade) to the rest of the world.

Sea power was a vital component of this mission. During both his vice-presidency and presidency he expanded the Navy. In 1901 the US Navy had 11 battleships. By 1913 it had 36 and had become the third largest in the world after the UK and Germany.

In 1903 he secured the right to construct the Panama Canal by sending US warships to ensure Panama’s secession from Columbia.

In 1906 he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his mediation in the Russo-Japanese War.

TR was an ardent conservationist. In 1906 he signed an Antiquities Act, allowing presidents to declare as national monuments ‘historic landmarks, historic and prehistoric structures, and other objects of historic or scientific interest’.

Originally intended to protect prehistoric Indian remains, TR interpreted the legislation broadly to save many sites of natural beauty such as Grand Canyon and to create millions of acres of new national forests.

TR supported William Howard Taft, his secretary of state, as the Republican candidate for the presidency in 1908 and withdrew from politics for a two-year world tour.

On his return he tried to re-enter politics but failing to deprive Taft of the Republican nomination for the presidency in 1912, he stood as a Progressive candidate against both Taft and Woodrow Wilson, the Democratic candidate.

The central plank of his platform was the creation of a national government which would exercise broad powers to govern the country in the interest of the people as a whole.

While campaigning in Milwaukee in October 1912, JF Schrank, a New York bar owner who had been stalking Roosevelt for weeks, shot him in the chest.

Roosevelt’s life was saved by the presence of his 50-page campaign speech, folded over twice, and his glasses case in his breast pocket which slowed down the bullet. Although wounded, with blood seeping into his shirt, he delivered his scheduled speech and spoke for 90 minutes, before accepting medical attention. He told his audience: ‘Ladies and gentlemen, I don’t know whether you fully understand that I have just been shot, but it takes more than that to kill a Bull Moose.’ The Bull Moose was the official logo of the Progressive Party.

Although Roosevelt polled more votes than Taft, by splitting the Republican vote TR’s intervention enabled Wilson to win.

Roosevelt viewed the Great War as a titanic struggle between the forces of good (represented by the UK and France) and evil (represented by Germany), deplored US neutrality and despised Woodrow Wilson for it.

When the United States finally entered the war, all four of TR’s sons served in the US forces. With the death in action of Quentin, his youngest son, in July 1918, TR’s zest for life vanished. His health declined rapidly. He died in his sleep on January 5 1919. 

Thomas R Marshall, Wilson’s vice-president, observed: ‘Death had to take Roosevelt sleeping, for if he had been awake, there would have been a fight.’