Sold – Theodore Roosevelt: A Page of the Speech He Was to Give When He Was Shot

On September 5, 1901, President William McKinley delivered a speech at the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, New York. Also in attendance that day was Leon Czolgosz. The following day the President was shot and he died a week later. McKinley’s assassination made Theodore Roosevelt president. Eleven years later, Roosevelt, now running as the Progressive Party candidate for the presidency, was the victim of the same act.

John Schrank was born in Bavaria and emigrated to America at the age of 13. His parents died soon after and Schrank came to work for his uncle, a New York tavern owner and landlord. Later, he drifted around the East Coast, becoming profoundly religious and a Bible preacher whose debating skills were well-known around his neighborhood’s watering holes and public parks. He spent a great deal of time walking around city streets at night.

On October 14, 1912, Roosevelt arrived in Milwaukee at the end of a campaign visit to the area. Schrank stood toward the head of a crowd waving to him as he attempted to enter his car, shooting him at close range. Schrank, claiming to have been motivated to kill by the ghost of assassinated President McKinley, said he wanted to dissuade future third term hopefuls. He wounded Roosevelt, who was saved only by a folded 60-plus page speech that was tucked inside his vest pocket, as well as a metal spectacle case, both of which slowed and deflected the bullet away from sensitive chest areas and the heart.

Roosevelt went on to make a moving and significant campaign speech, though not the one he had prepared and was carrying. Speaking extemporaneously, he quieted the crowd by reminding them that it was hard to speak given that he had just been shot. He started by addressing his being shot: “First of all, I want to say this about myself: I have altogether too important things to think of to feel any concern over my own death…I am telling you the literal truth when I say that my concern is for many other things…I am not thinking of my life or of anything connected with me personally. I am thinking of the movement.” He continued about his cause: “ I am in this cause with my whole heart and soul. I believe that the Progressive movement is making life a little easier for all our people; a movement to try to take the burdens off the men and especially the women and children of this country. I am absorbed in the success of that movement.” He made light of the wound: “It takes more than that to kill a Bull Moose.” He pleaded for honesty in government: “I cannot tell you of what infinitesimal importance I regard this incident as compared with the great issues at stake in this campaign, and I ask it not for my sake, not the least in the world, but for the sake of common country.” He ended with a call for “social and industrial justice.” And all this time, he held the speech that had helped save his life. However, as brave as he was, his campaign was finished and he was hospitalized in Chicago for 8 days.

John M. Dixon served two terms as a congressman from Montana, from 1902 to 1906, followed by a term in the U.S. Senate. He became active with the Progressive Party, made up largely of reform-minded Roosevelt Republicans, and gained national prominence by managing TR’s “Bull Moose” campaign against Republican incumbent President William Taft and Democrat Woodrow Wilson in 1912.

Typed manuscript, page 6 of the speech that Roosevelt carried in his pocket in Milwaukee on October 14, 1912, originally folded once horizontally. The sheet exhibits two bullet holes – one at the top and one at the bottom. The page reads, “…anyone alive today sympathizes with the efforts of the well-meaning but misguided people who in ’64 followed the lead of Fremont and of Wendell Phillips (both men who had rendered fine service in the past) in the effort to beat the Progressives of that day, and thereby threw the victory into the hands of the reactionaries. I am sure that in the future a similar judgement will be extended by history as regards the men of our day who claim to be progressives while yet doing whatever in them lies to secure the triumph of the forces of reaction.” At this point, the text becomes faded but is still visible. The text continues, “There are three tickets but only two real choices. Each man will vote either for the progressives or against them…”

The page is mounted to a thin board. There is an old notation on the verso, “Leaf from the speech of Theodore Roosevelt given at Milwaukee during Bull Moose Campaign of 1912. Thro’ these papers bullet passed when Roosevelt was shot there, and to these papers he owed his life. Gift to Joseph M. Dixon from Mrs. Theodore Roosevelt.”

This portion of Roosevelt’s speech, referencing the value of the progressivism, the need to convert to its cause, and the judgment of history on those who refuse, was a relevant portion for Mrs. Roosevelt to have given Senator Dixon, himself a convert to Roosevelt’s cause. It was a touching gesture from the Roosevelts to a man who had laid aside his own career to manage the campaign of Roosevelt and the presidential hopes of the Progressive Party. In 1912, Dixon lost his Senate bid while fighting for Roosevelt.

We know of just two other instances in which a page from this speech that helped save Roosevelt from assassination have been offered for sale in the past three decades, the most recent being at the Forbes sale this year when two unattributed pages sold for over Forty Thousand Dollars.