After a dinner that evening in his honor, T.R. stepped out of the Hotel Gilpatrick and crossed the sidewalk toward the open car that was waiting to take him to the hall where he would speak. At his side was Colonel Cecil A. Lyon, a former hunting companion, Texas state chairman of the Progressive party, and the candidate's unofficial bodyguard, who was carrying a loaded automatic in his pocket. The lobby, of course, had been brightly lighted, but the street was dark and Roosevelt barely perceived a crowd, held back by the police, waiting to cheer him. Lyon escorted the Colonel to the automobile and heard the chauffeur start the engine; he then turned to get into his own car, second in the line of official vehicles that was to form a motorcade. As Roosevelt stood up in the car to acknowledge the cheers, a man in the second rank of the crowd raised an old fashioned pistol and, aiming between two people standing in front of him, fired a shot directly into Roosevelt's chest, at a distance of less than thirty feet.

As the Colonel rocked back from the bullet's impact, the man prepared to fire a second time. Elbert Martin, one of T.R.'s stenographers and a former football player, had seen the glint of the pistol even before the first shot was fired and at this instant leaped across the automobile and flung himself at the assassin. The flying tackle brought them both to the pavement, where Martin got the man under his knee, dug his fingers into his throat, and wrested control of the weapon from him. "I wasn't trying to take him prisoner," Martin later confessed. "I was trying to kill him." It was all the police could do to hold back the surging crowd, but the captain of the detail rushed over and demanded that Martin give him the gun. "I'll be damned if I do," Martin shouted over his shoulder and went back to strangling the assassin. Colonel Lyon--whom one eyewitness remembered as "dancing around like a madman with a drawn revolver"--kept back both the police and the crowd. But Roosevelt, still standing in the open car, called out to Martin: "Don't hurt him. Bring him here. I want to look at him." The stenographer released his grip reluctantly and complied with the Colonel's request.

Roosevelt peered intently at the man who just shot him--John F. Schrank, a part-time bartender from New York who had decided to kill the ex-President because he did not believe that any President had the right to serve three terms. The obviously demented man later related dreams in which William McKinley, who had been assassinated eleven years earlier, had accused Roosevelt, his Vice President, of assassinating him.  The deceased President had then asked Schrank to revenge him. Now T.R. asked him why he had done it and then, without waiting for a reply, told the police to take theman away.

Later the Colonel confessed that he really would not have objected to the man's being killed then and there but had not deemed it "wise or proper" to allow it. Schrank, he charged in a private letter, was no more madman than Senator La Follette or Eugene Debs. He had shrewdly avoided shooting T.R. in a Southern state, where he probably would been lynched on the spot, and he had waited until Roosevelt was in a state with no death penalty. He harbored no feeling one way or the for the man, only ill will "against the people, who, by their ceaseless and intemperate abuse, excited him to the action. . . ." Schrank was ultimately judged insane and locked up in a Wisconsin state hospital--living through the election of 1940 that saw the anti-third-term tradition at last shattered, by the husband of  T.R.'s niece Eleanor.

With the would-be assassin disposed of, Roosevelt could think of his wound. The force of the shot, he subsequently told his son Archie, had no more than the kick of a mule; Archie--having been kicked a mule--was enormously impressed. The bullet had been slowed passing through both the manuscript of the speech TR. was about to deliver and an iron spectacle case in his pocket and had thus only penetrated three or four inches into the Colonel's chest, breaking his fourth rib and lodging just short of his right lung. The candidate reached inside coat and dispassionately noted the blood on the hand he withdrew, then coughed and put his hand to his lips; blood in his mouth would indicate that his lung had been pierced. But there was no blood and he concluded that "the chances were twenty to one" that the bullet was not fatal one.

A member of the party now stepped forward to suggest that the Colonel's car proceed to a hospital. "You get me to that speech," Roosevelt snapped; "it may be the last I shall deliver, but I am going to deliver this one." Later he told an English friend that his decision was no rnore heroic than those of the thirteen men in his Rough Rider regiment--who had fought on at San Juan Hill after having been wounded. "In the very unlikely event of the wound being mortal I wished to die with my boots on. . . ." Even if the wound proved light,"as I deemed overwhelmingly probable," it would no doubt curtail his remaining campaign activities--and he wanted to make one more speech "to which under the circumstances it was at least possible that the country would pay some heed."
 

The caravan drove on to the Milwaukee Auditorium but before Roosevelt was escorted to the platform three doctors were summoned from the audience to examine the wound. None could say how serious the injury was, but all three agreed that Roosevelt should be taken to a hospital immediately. Again, the Colonel refused: "I will make this speech, or die; one way or the other." As he strode onto the stage, the audience--still ignorant of the shooting--broke into the prolonged, almost hysterical cheering that greeted all his appearances. At last the chairman quieted the crowd and said: "I have something to tell you and I hope you will receive the news with calmness. Colonel Roosevelt has been shot. He is wounded." Cries of horror and disbelief rose from the throng as T.R. stepped forward. But a mere lifting of his hand brought calm again.

"Friends, I shall ask you to be as quiet as possible," he said. "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 took the manuscript from his pocket and showed his shocked listeners where the sheets had been pierced by the bullet--it was to have been a lengthy address, he joked, and had thus probably saved his life. "The bullet is in me now, so that I cannot make a very long speech, but I will try my best." But he did not ask for pity. He was concerned about too many other things to fear in the least for his own life. "I want you to understand that I am ahead of the game anyway. No man has had a happier life than I have led; a happier life in every way."

He then started to talk about the Progressive movement, a cause he was in "with my whole heart and soul." But before going on, he reverted to the assassination attempt. "He shot to kill," the Colonel said. "He shot--the shot, the bullet went in here--I will show you."

The opposition newspapers, he now charged, were responsible; "they cannot, month in and month out and year in and year out, make the kind of untruthful or bitter assault that they have made and not expect that brutal, violent natures . . . will be unaffected by it." Someone on the stage behind him tried to get him to sit down. "I am not sick at all," he said testily. "I am all right." His audience, he again joked, could not escape listening to the speech. When a second attempt to get him off the stage was made, he said: "My friends are a little more nervous than I am. Don't you waste any sympathy on me. I have had an A-1 time in life and I am having it now!"

Once in the speech he conceded that he was a little sore in the chest but that he was not yet ready to let the doctors get hold of him. And so he spoke for an hour, though it is doubtful that his audience was able to concentrate on the points he was making. Afterward he confessed to a sensation of heat as he had begun speaking and said that his heart beat was unusually fast for the first ten minutes. Thereafter he was forced to take quick, short breaths and found it impossible to get through long sentences without pausing.

His speech at last ended, Roosevelt turned to leave the stage and nd his way blocked by scores of well-wishers who--to his amazed and intense disgust--insisted on pumping his hand vigorously and refused to let him go. A member of his entourage said it was as if each greeter wished to be able to say he had been the last person to hake the Colonel's hand before he expired.

It was now decided to take Roosevelt inunediately back to Chicago, where he could be treated at Mercy Hospital by the noted specialist Dr. John Benjamin Murphy. (Among the more outrageous campaign slanders was the story later circulated that T.R.--at the moment he was and sinking into the arms of an aide--had said: "Take me to Murphy at the Mercy. I need the Catholic vote." ) Back in his private ailroad car, Roosevelt undressed, shaved, and removed his studs and buttons from the bloody shirt to put them into a fresh one--"as I thought I might be stiff the next morning." When he lay down in his berth, he discovered that his heart was again beating rapidly and his breath was coming in short puffs. Soon he found that he was less uncomfortable lying on his left, unwounded side and in that position he went to sleep. The special train was highballed through on the main line and arrived in Chicago at 3:30 a.m. on October 15. Alongside the tracks an ambulance was waiting. "I'll not go to a hospital lying in that thing," the Colonel insisted when he spied attendants with a stretcher. "I'll walk to it and I'll walk from it to the hospital. I'm no weakling to be crippled by a flesh wound."

An X-ray disclosed that the bullet, which had entered Roosevelt's chest to the right of and just below the right nipple, was embedded in the fourth rib. An examining doctor announced that the Colonel, who had a phenomenal chest development, was "one of the most powerful men I have ever seen laid on an operating table." It was largely due to the fact that he was "a physical marvel" that T.R. was not dangerously wounded, the doctor concluded.

Roosevelt did not become a third term president (and it is questionable whether it would really have counted as a third term, as his first term began, not by election, but when McKinley's death elevated Teddy, who was on the ticket solely as a political maneuver to capture the New York republican vote, to the highest office in the land). However, the Bull Moose Party in 1912 split the Republican vote, causing the Democratic Progressive candidate, Woodrow Wilson, to win the presicency. Roosevelt lived the rest of his life with Schrank's bullet inside him.
 
 

Source: Theodore Roosevelt: An Intimate Biography by William Roscoe Thayer (1920)

Roosevelt's 36 year old assailant was mild mannered, the Bavarian born nephew and ward of a New York City tavern and tenement owner who bestowed this profitable property on him upon their death. Having suffered the loss of his parents at a young age, and his only girlfriend in a ferryboat accident, Schrank was deeply grieved by their deaths, within a year of each other. He sold the business and lived from that time until his arrest on the income from it.

Having had only five years' schooling in Bavaria, Schrank enrolled in night classes after arriving in New York. He became proficient in English and became an avid reader of history, politics, and the Bible. At a young age he became interested in poetry. After the deaths of his aunt and uncle he spent increasing amounts of time in solitary persuits, such as walking through the city's parks and writing poetry. One poem is below:
 

ELECTRIC LIFE

The laws that rule electricity
Control the human life:
The magnitude you possess
Will draw to you a wife.
For positive and negative
Are poles that never meet.
So be sure that she is negative
If you intend to lead.

All matrimonial troubles
Rise from the same defect
Because positive and positive
Are poles that don't connect.
Your station and your influence,
The number of friends you control,
Depends upon the power
Of your positive pole.

Your powerhouse is in heaven,
The current is your soul
Your spirit is the wire,
And God your positive Pull;
A sudden death--the failure of heart
Is in other words--a circuit short
But when you die at 90, about
We simply say your fuse burnt out.


On September 15, 1901, Shranck wrote the following letter
 

In a dream I saw President McKinley sit up in his coffin, pointing at a man in a monk's attire in whiom I recognized as Theo. Roosevelt. The dead President said, "This is my murderer, avenge my death."

He later stated that he did not intend to kill "the citizen Roosevelt" but rather "Theodroe Roosevelt, the third termer." He reiterated, "I did not want to kill the candidate of the Progressove Party. I shot Roosevelt as a warning to other third termers."

Schrank was examined by a panel of five "alienists," as doctors of the mind were called in those days, and declared to be "suffering from insane delusions, grandiose in character." He lived out his days in a mental hospital. When TR died, he claimed to be "sorry to hear" of his death; when Franklin Delano Roosevelt, TR's newphew by marriage, announced his intention of seeking a third term, Schrank decared himself again willing to again save the nation from "a Roosevelt dictatorship."
 

Source: McKinley, James. Assassination in America. NY: Harper and Row, 1977; Clarke, James W. American Assassins: The Darker Side of Politics. Princeton, NJ: Princeteon UP, 1982; <