Americans Know Political Violence All Too Well

If Trump wins in November, he would be only the second former president to have mounted a successful bid for a new term—after Grover Cleveland, a Democrat who served as the 22nd and 24th commander in chief. But another former president attempted a comeback. That was Roosevelt, who had become president after the assassination of President McKinley in 1901 and who left office in 1909.

Roosevelt had served for almost eight years as a progressive Republican. When he ran again in 1912, however, he was rejected by that year’s Republican National Convention, in favor of the more conservative incumbent, President William Howard Taft. Roosevelt then mounted a bid as the candidate of the newly created Progressive Party, which was nicknamed the “Bull Moose” Party.

Roosevelt positioned himself to the left of the Republicans and Democrats, proposing a “New Nationalism” that sought “to dissolve the unholy alliance between corrupt business and corrupt politics.” His was a progressive populist campaign that relied on mass rallies in cities across the country.

On October 14, 1912, the campaign took him to Milwaukee, where he was prepared to deliver a historic call for economic and social justice, titled “Progressive Cause Greater Than Any Individual,” to a mass rally at the Milwaukee Auditorium.

Like many of Roosevelt’s stem-winders, it was going to be a long speech, and its length quite possibly saved his life. A copy of the address was folded over twice to fit into the breast pocket of his coat when he was approached by John Flammang Schrank outside the Gilpatrick Hotel, the predecessor to the Hyatt Regency. A madman who claimed to be guided by the voice of the late President McKinley to prevent Roosevelt from serving a third term, Schrank had tracked the former president’s movements across the country. In Milwaukee, he saw his opportunity and took his shot at Roosevelt. The bullet passed though the former president’s coat, and through the folded speech and a steel eyeglass case, before lodging in TR’s chest muscle.

Roosevelt immediately ordered bystanders and the police to assure that Schrank was arrested unharmed. Even as a bloodstain was spreading on his shirt, he refused immediate care and proceeded across the street to deliver the speech he had come to make. “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—but it takes more than that to kill a bull moose,” he announced to gasps from the crowd.

Roosevelt spoke for an hour and a half before finally accepting medical care. For almost two weeks, his campaign was put on hold. But he renewed that bid with a fierce final bout of campaigning. It proved insufficient.

Roosevelt finished ahead of Taft, in what turned out to be one of the most potent third-party presidential bids in American history. But Democrat Woodrow Wilson came in first. The Bull Moose retired from politics. The memory of his 1912 campaign remained, however. So did the memory of his near-death experience, in the form of the plaque in a hotel just blocks from where Donald Trump will be nominated, and in the text of the speech Roosevelt delivered in Milwaukee that evening. “I do not care a rap about being shot; not a rap,” he told the crowd. “I cannot tell you of what infinitesimal importance I regard this incident as compared with the great issues at stake in this campaign,” he said, before outlining his proposals for “social and industrial justice.”

Decrying class division, religious intolerance, and xenophobia, Roosevelt said—in an address that seems all the more visionary today—that the way to counter the hatred that can lead to political violence was to build “a movement in which we ask all just men of generous hearts to join with the men who feel in their souls that lift upward which bids them refuse to be satisfied themselves while their countrymen and countrywomen suffer from avoidable misery.”