On my way to re-reading President Eisenhower’s farewell address, I got sidetracked by Teddy Roosevelt.
It was not a presidential speech that snared my attention, but one that he delivered in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, on Oct. 14, 1912.
Roosevelt had already served as president as a Republican and was now running as the nominee of the Progressive (Bull Moose) Party that he had created.
He delivered the speech with an assassin’s bullet still in his chest.
We think of ourselves as a peaceful people, but presidents have not fared so well. Abraham Lincoln and John F. Kennedy are perhaps the most famous victims of assassination, but there were also James A. Garfield and William McKinley. And attempts were made on the lives of Andrew Jackson, Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, Gerald Ford and Ronald Reagan. That’s 20 percent of American presidents who have been the targets of violence.
And then there is Roosevelt, who ascended to the presidency upon the death of McKinley.
The campaign of 1912 was a bitter one, with William Howard Taft as the Republican nominee, Woodrow Wilson as the Democratic nominee and Roosevelt as the major figures. The Socialist Eugene V. Debs was a minor figure.
Roosevelt’s life was spared in Milwaukee because a folded copy of the speech he planned to deliver and a steel spectacles case in his breast pocket were enough to slow the .38 caliber bullet.
Roosevelt didn’t deliver all of his prepared speech in Milwaukee, but here are some of the things he did say:
“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. But fortunately I had my manuscript, so you see I was going to make a long speech, and there is a bullet - there is where the bullet went through - and it probably saved me from it going into my heart. The bullet is in me now, so that I cannot make a very long speech, but I will try my best.
“... I want to say something very serious to our people and especially to the newspapers....
“Now, I do not know who he was or what he represented. He was a coward. He stood in the darkness in the crowd around the automobile and when they cheered me, and I got up to bow, he stepped forward and shot me in the darkness.
“Now, friends, of course, I do not know, as I say, anything about him; but it is a very natural thing that weak and vicious minds should be inflamed to acts of violence by the kind of awful mendacity and abuse that have been heaped upon me for the last three months by the papers in the interest of not only Mr. Debs but of Mr. Wilson and Mr. Taft.
“Friends, I will disown and repudiate any man of my party who attacks with such foul slander and abuse any opponent of any other party; and now I wish to say seriously to all the daily newspapers, to the Republicans, the Democrat, and Socialist parties, that they cannot, month in month out and year in and year out, make the kind of untruthful, of bitter assault that they have made and not expect that brutal, violent natures, or brutal and violent characters, especially when the brutality is accompanied by a not very strong mind; they cannot expect that such natures will be unaffected by it.
...”What I care for is my country. I wish I were able to impress upon my people – our people – the duty to feel strongly but to speak the truth of their opponents. I say now, I have never said one word on the stump against any opponent that I cannot defend. I have said nothing that I could not substantiate and nothing that I ought not to have said – nothing that I – nothing that, looking back at, I would not say again.
“And now, friends, this incident that has just occurred – this effort to assassinate me – emphasizes to a peculiar degree the need of the Progressive movement. Friends, every good citizen ought to do everything in his or her power to prevent the coming of the day when we shall see in this country two recognized creeds fighting one another, when we shall see the creed of the "Havenots" arraigned against the creed of the "Haves." When that day comes then such incidents as this to-night will be commonplace in our history. When you make poor men – when you permit the conditions to grow such that the poor man as such will be swayed by his sense of injury against the men who try to hold what they improperly have won, when that day comes, the most awful passions will be let loose and it will be an ill day for our country.”
Roosevelt’s words, spoken nearly a century ago, sound uncannily contemporary.
Contact the writer at billatthelake@gmail.com
