The Speech That Saved T.R.
Teddy Roosevelt’s assassination had been attempted at 8 PM, as he 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 deranged Bavarian immigrant named John Flammang Schrank, would have been lynched on the spot if Roosevelt had not intervened to save his life: “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 “.
Roosevelt coughed into his hand a few times, saw no blood, and determined that his lung had not been pierced. He then directed that he be driven to the Milwaukee Auditorium, to address the waiting audience. Whether or not the pen is actually mightier than the sword, in this case, words were literally mightier than a bullet. TR owed his escape from death to his hefty speech. Squeezed into his jacket pocket, the speech 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 it, 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.
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Where Did We Find This Stuff? Some Sources and Further Reading
Albuquerque Journal, February 3rd, 2004 – Man Survived 22,000 Foot Fall Out of Bomber
All That is Interesting – The Seven Unbelievable Survival Stories of Frane Selak
BBC, September 26th, 2013 – Stanislav Petrov: The Man Who May Have Saved the World
Biography – Tsutomu Yamaguchi: The Man Who Miraculously Survived Both Atomic Bombings
Historic Wings – The Miracle of Saint Nazaire
History Collection – Some of the Most Adventurous People Who Ever Existed
Independent, The, August 9th, 1995 – City Remembers Day it Escaped the Bomb
La Brujala Verde – The World War II Airmen Who Survived Falls from Thousands of Feet High
Museum of Flight – Digital Collections: Louis E. Curdes Oral Interview
New York Times, August 7th, 1995 – Kokura, Japan, Bypassed by A-Bomb
Royal Air Force Museum – The Indestructible Alkemade
Smithsonian Magazine, July 2005 – The Real Robinson Crusoe
Smithsonian Magazine, November 2012 – The Speech That Saved Teddy Roosevelt’s Life
Vox – 40 Years Today, One Man Saved Us From World-Ending Nuclear War