38. How the Speech Foiled the Assassination Attempt
The assassination had been attempted at 8 PM, as Roosevelt got into an open-air car outside his hotel, and waved his hat at the crowd. Just then, the darkness was lit up by a flash from a .38 Colt revolver – TR had been shot. An aide grappled with the would-be assassin and prevented him from firing another shot, before the crowd joined in. The culprit, a nutjob Bavarian immigrant named John Flammang Schrank, would have been lynched on the spot if Roosevelt had not intervened: “Don’t hurt him. Bring him here. I want to see him. Roosevelt then asked Schrank “What did you do it for?” When Schrank stayed mum, TR told the crowd to turn him over to the police.
Roosevelt reached inside his shirt and felt around, until he encountered a dime-sized hole, and told an aide “He pinked me “. The former president then coughed into his hand a few times, and seeing no blood, determined that his lung had not been pierced. He then directed that he be driven to the Milwaukee Auditorium, to address the waiting audience. The hefty speech, squeezed into his jacket pocket, had combined with a glass case and a dense overcoat to slow the bullet. It was later recovered lodged against his fourth rib, on a trajectory to his heart. As to the shooter, Schrank acted because of a dream, in which the assassinated president William McKinley had urged him to avenge him by killing his vice president and successor, Roosevelt. Schrank was found legally insane, and institutionalized until his death in 1943.