Teddy Roosevelt survived shooting, assassination attempt in Milwaukee

A former Republican president making a bid to return to the White House is shot while campaigning — and survives.

But that assassination attempt happened in Milwaukee in 1912.

And, if it hadn’t been for a copy of a long-winded speech and a spectacle case, it might be more than a footnote to history.

On Oct. 14, 1912, Teddy Roosevelt was making a run for the White House as the candidate for the Progressive Party, after failing to get the Republican Party’s nomination. He came to Milwaukee to speak to a packed Milwaukee Auditorium (now Miller High Life Theatre).

On his way out of the Gilpatrick Hotel (now the site of the Hyatt Regency Milwaukee), Roosevelt was shot by a disgruntled New Yorker named John Schrank, who had been stalking the former president to stop him from getting a third term.

The bullet hit Roosevelt in the chest, but it was slowed by the contents of his pocket: a metal spectacles case and a copy of his very-long speech. (The Hyatt has a display marking the event in its entrance off King Drive.)

Roosevelt managed to make his speech and, in a bit of bravado, used his bloodied shirt and tattered speech as a symbol of his resilience.

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As Gerard Helferich recounts in his history of the incident, “Theodore Roosevelt and the Assassin” (Lyons Press), the shooting happened in Milwaukee, but only because Schrank had bungled several previous attempts as he followed Roosevelt around the country.

Schrank was ruled insane after he pleaded guilty to the shooting. (He had told anyone who would listen that his chief inspiration was a dream in which President William McKinley, assassinated in 1901 and succeeded by Roosevelt, told him that Roosevelt was behind his murder.)

But while Schrank shared the concern of a number of Americans about a president serving a third term — breaking the precedent set down by George Washington — investigators failed to tie the shooter to any larger conspiracy.

Schrank spent the rest of his life — 31 years — in Wisconsin mental prisons. According to Helferich, he didn’t have a single visitor in all that time, and died in obscurity.