Sunday Special-An undaunted 'Moose Bull'

 Sunday Special-An undaunted 'Moose Bull'

 

Theodore Roosevelt was climbing into his car outside the Gilpatrick Hotel, headed to give a campaign speech, when a man pushed through the crowd and fired a .38 caliber revolver directly at his chest.

https://www.history.com/videos/teddy-roosevelt-shot

The shot rang out. Roosevelt staggered but didn't fall.His aides tackled the gunman a  man named John Schrank who believed the ghost of President McKinley had told him to kill Roosevelt. The crowd surged forward, ready to lynch the assassin on the spot.Roosevelt, bleeding, shouted at them to stop."Don't hurt him. Bring him here. I want to see him."
They brought Schrank forward. Roosevelt looked at the man who had just shot him and

said calmly, "What did you do that for?" Then he ordered his men to take Schrank to the police, unharmed.

Roosevelt's aides insisted he go immediately to the hospital. He refused.Instead, he did something that seemed impossible: he checked himself for injury. He coughed forcefully 

into his hand, checking for blood. If the bullet had punctured his lung, he would cough up blood and know he was in mortal danger. His hand came back clean.
"I don't think it went deep," he said. "I'm going to make this speech."
His aides protested. He had just been shot. He was bleeding. He needed a doctor 

immediately.Roosevelt looked at them with the same iron will that had carried him 

through asthma-racked childhood, through grief when his wife and mother died on the 

same day, through the Spanish-American War, through the Presidency, and now through 

a third-party campaign that everyone said was impossible.
"You get me to that speech," he commanded.
They drove him to the Milwaukee Auditorium. Three thousand people were waiting, completely unaware that anything had happened. When Roosevelt walked onto that 

stage, he looked like he always did powerful, determined, ready for a fight.Then he 

opened his coat.A collective gasp swept through the auditorium. The front of his shirt 

was soaked with blood. The stain was spreading.
Roosevelt raised his hand for silence. His voice was strong, clear, absolutely steady.
"Friends, I shall ask you to be as quiet as possible. I don't know whether you fully understand that I have just been shot."
The audience erupted in shock and disbelief. Roosevelt waited for them to quiet, then continued."It takes more than that to kill a Bull Moose."
The crowd roared. Some laughed, unsure if this was somehow part of the show. Others 

sat in stunned silence, unable to process what they were witnessing.
Roosevelt reached into his coat and pulled out his speech manuscript. It had a bullet hole through it. He held it up for the audience to see.
"The bullet is in me now, so that I cannot make a very long speech. But I will try my best."
Then Theodore Roosevelt, with a .38 caliber bullet lodged in his chest, spoke for ninety minutes.
He spoke about his Progressive Party platform, about the need to break up monopolies, 

about protecting workers, about conservation, about the America he believed was possible. His voice occasionally faltered. He paused to catch his breath. Aides stood nearby, terrified, ready to catch him if he collapsed. He never did.
"I have altogether too important things to think of to feel any concern over my own death," 

he told the crowd. His message mattered more than his body. The speech mattered more 

than the bullet.When he finally finished and left the stage, doctors rushed him to the hospital. They examined the wound and discovered something remarkable: the bullet had been slowed by two objects in Roosevelt's breast pocket. His metal eyeglass case had deflected it slightly, and then the bullet had punched through his fifty-page speech manuscript, folded thick. By 

the time it reached his chest, it had lost enough velocity that it lodged in his chest muscle instead of piercing his heart or lung.
His speech had literally saved his life.The bullet was too deep and too dangerous to remove. Doctors decided to leave it in place. Theodore Roosevelt would carry that bullet in his chest 

for the remaining seven years of his life.He joked about it later with characteristic humor. 

"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."But who was this man who treated a bullet wound as a minor inconvenience?
Theodore Roosevelt was born in 1883 into privilege, but his childhood was dominated by crippling asthma. He was weak, sickly, unable to breathe without struggle. Doctors told his father he might not survive to adulthood.
His father gave him a challenge: "You have the mind but not the body. You must make your body."

Hero of Spanish American War

Theodore dedicated himself to physical transformation with ferocious discipline. He boxed. 

He lifted weights. He rode horses. He hiked mountains. He forced his weak body into 

strength through sheer willpower, building himself into one of the most physically robust 

men in American politics.
He became a rancher in the Dakota Badlands, a war hero charging up San Juan Hill, the youngest President in American history at age 42, and a champion of progressive reform 

who broke up corporate monopolies and created the national park system that preserved America's wilderness.He lived with the same intensity he brought to that Milwaukee stage

all or nothing, no retreat, no surrender.
After that night in 1912, Roosevelt didn't win the election. He split the Republican vote 

and handed the presidency to Woodrow Wilson. But he proved something more important than winning: that courage isn't the absence of pain, but the refusal to let pain stop you.
Theodore Roosevelt died on January 6, 1919, at age sixty. When the news reached Washington, Vice President Thomas Marshall said simply, "Death had to take Roosevelt sleeping, for if he had been awake, there would have been a fight."His son Archibald cabled 

his siblings with six words: "The old lion is dead."
Not defeated. Not diminished. Just finally at rest after a lifetime of charging forward.
On that October night in Milwaukee, bleeding from an assassin's bullet with ninety minutes of speech still ahead of him, Theodore Roosevelt taught a lesson that outlived him:
Leadership isn't about comfort or safety. It's not about avoiding danger or waiting for perfect conditions.Leadership is standing up when you're wounded. It's speaking when your body screams to stop. It's finishing what you started even when the bullet burns.
Anyone can lead when things are easy. A Bull Moose keeps going even after being shot.

-Searched and Illustrated by Tejinder Kamboj

  
                    (1940 -20??)