TR Vs. Weakness

Published Oct 20, 2019, 4:00 PM

In 1912, after Theodore Roosevelt was shot in the chest, he proceeded to deliver a 90-minute campaign speech before allowing someone to take him to the hospital. Was it for patriotism’s sake, or a bull-headed refusal to show weakness? Given his history, perhaps the latter. Mental Floss editor-in-chief Erin McCarthy traces Roosevelt’s battle against weakness back to his childhood as an asthmatic, wildly energetic boy determined to overcome his poor health with a commitment to “the strenuous life,” which essentially became his life philosophy.

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History Versus is a production of I Heart Radio and Mental Flaws. It's October fourteenth and Theodore Roosevelt is standing before a crowd of ten thousand in Wisconsin's Milwaukee Auditorium. Fifty three year old former president is once again campaigning for the highest office in the land, and he was scheduled to deliver what was supposed to be a typical campaign address. But the speech he's about to give is anything but typical. 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. At first, the crowd can't, doesn't quite believe it. Someone yells fake, but there are gasps and screams as Roosevelt pulls aside his vest, revealing a white shirt marred by a growing bloodstain. Just moments before, Roosevelt had been standing in an open car outside his hotel, waving to the assembled crowd, and it would be assassin had shot him with a revolver from just seven feet away. Roosevelt had dropped momentarily, but it wasn't long before he was back on his feet. Aids wanted to rush him to the hospital, and most people would have gone. But that is not Theodore Roosevelt style. Instead, he said, get me to that speech. And now on stage he assures the shocked crowd, it takes more than that to kill a bull. Moose, I give you my word, I do not care a rap about being shot. Not a rap. And then, although the slug is still inside him, he proceeds to give a nearly ninety minute long speech. If this sounds like an extraordinary occurrence, it was, or it would have been for anyone but Theodore Roosevelt, a man whose life was full of extraordinary occurrences. This was the guy who charged up Kettle Hill on horseback, bullets whizzing past him with a rough ride, ears who when he assumed office, became the youngest president in history and is still the youngest president we've ever had. Who helped broker peace between Russia and Japan and won the Nobel Prize for his efforts. Who paved the way for the Panama Canal, who went off the grid to navigate a previously uncharted river in the Amazon, who is immortalized on Mount Rushmore, and who is often ranked as one of the greatest presidents of all time. But Roosevelt wasn't always strong enough to stop a bullet. In fact, as a child, he was afflicted by asthma so terrible that his parents feared he might not live to see his fourth birthday. How did Roosevelt go from puny, sickly kid to person capable of giving that incredible, unimaginable ninety minutes speech We're about to find out. For Mental Flaws and I Heart Radio, this is History Versus, a podcast about how your favorite historical figures faced off against their greatest foes. For this first season of the show, we're focusing on Theodore Roosevelt's incredible life, using a convention that he, as a boxer, would have appreciated. In each episode, we'll analyze how Roosevelt took on a particular challenge, from conflict within his family and conquering the hours of the day to his tussles with other presidents and preserving the world for the next generation. This episode is tr versus Weakness. But before we get started, I want to tell you a little bit about how I became interested in Theodore Roosevelt. Yes, I'm the editor in chief of Mental Flaws, so history is kind of my thing. But I didn't fully appreciate all things TR until I plucked Edmund Morris's excellent book Colonel Roosevelt out of the stacks at the Strand bookstore. I didn't realize at the time that it was the third book in a trilogy, so then I had to go back and read the others. But anyway, I came out of it with a huge admiration for TR and, if I'm being honest, a little bit of an obsession, Okay, a big obsession. My desk at work has more TR stuff on it than it does photos of my cat's husband and best friends combined. I even have a Theodore Roosevelt action figure at home. I have an overflowing shelf voted to books about Roosevelt. When I got married, I tried to convince my husband to go on a tr forre of the Dakotas for our honeymoon, which he did not go for and you know fair enough. Also, as a wedding gift, the Mental Flow staff got me some first edition books of TRS collected speeches, which is way better than a kitchen aid mixer, no offense to kitchen aid. And last year I dressed up as Roosevelt for a Halloween costume contest and one. So suffice to say, once you get me started talking about theotre Roosevelt's incredible accomplishments, I can't stop talking about them. Hence this podcast, which finally allowed me to take that tr tour of the Dakotas. But more on that later. The wonderful people at Sagamore Hill called tr enthusiasts like me ted heads, and I'm going to borrow that nickname for this podcast. So just a note to all the ted heads out there, This is not an exhaustive a to Z look at tars life. If we tried to do that, well, there would be a million episodes in this podcast because Roosevelt did a staggering amount of stuff in his sixty years. We're going to be dipping in and out of his life and we're going to miss some things, but we're going to be visiting some important Roosevelt sites and talking to some really mart Roosevelt experts, so hopefully you'll still learn some things along the way. Okay, ready to get started, Bully Today. East between Park Avenue South and Broadway on the Island of Manhattan is a mix of stores, businesses, and restaurants and it's busy with taxis and trucks and cars. But when Theodore Roosevelt was born in eighteen fifty eight, it was a much more residential neighborhood that featured the clip clop of horses hooves in the rattle of carriage wheels. Behind the Brownstones was a garden, and around the corner the Goley family built a mansion in the middle of three lots, which they populated with cows and peacocks and exotic birds. Theodore Roosevelt Jr. Came into the world on the evening of October in a bedroom on the second floor of the brownstone at East Twentie Street. He was the second child of Martha Bullock Roosevelt or Middy, and Theodore Roosevelt Senior, or the Their first child, Anna or Baby, had been born three years earlier. Later would come brother Elliott and sister Karin. Today, the elder Roosevelt's room is covered with cream colored wallpaper, adorned with flowers, and filled with original cherry stained walnut furniture. A portrait of Middy hangs over the fireplace, but we don't know for sure if that's what the room looked like when the Roosevelt kids were born there. The family owned the home until eighteen nine and then sold it, and soon after it was either completely torn down or had the top two stories torn down. Sources are a bit unclear on that point. In nineteen nineteen, after TR's death, the Women's Roosevelt Memorial Association repurchased that building and the one next to it, which had belonged to Tiar's uncle, and reconstructed the home as Baby and Karin remembered it. It's now Theodore Roosevelt Birthplace National Historic Site. Shortly after he was born, Middi described tr as a hideous baby who looked like a terrapin. But TD, as he was called as a boy, quickly became the center of his family's world. As a child, he had a ton of energy, but from the age of three he was, in his own words, a sickly, delicate boy who suffered much from asthma. He also had with a family called cholera morbus, a type of nervous diarrhea. As a result of his illness, he was largely homeschooled by his aunt Annie. When out and about in the city, his younger brother Elliott had to defend him against police tr spenting a lot of time indoors and pass the time by reading voraciously. According to historian Kathleen Dalton, author of Theodore Roosevelt, a strenuous life when he was sick, and he often was the adults put the needs of the other children's second, because Theodore's life was at stake. If you watch some of the documentaries, they describe him lying in the family crib, which you still see today in the nursery, barely being able to blow out his candle from suffering that bad from asthma. That's Alyssa Parker Geisman, the lead ranger at Theodore Roosevelt Birthplace National Historic Site. She says that the family tried almost everything to treat trs asthma. Roosevelt wrote in his autobiography that one of his memories was of my father walking up and down the room with me in his arms at night when I was a very small person, and of sitting up in bed gasping, with my father and mother trying to help me. Sometimes in an attempt to force air into his son's lungs. The would take young TD and the family buggy and race up and down Broadway, but they also tried many remedies that, although standard at the time, would raise eyebrows today. David McCullough, in his book Morning on Horseback describes laudanum being used, which is opium mixed with the wine UH. He also describes what is called Indian hemp we call it marijuana today. Vinegar of squills was used, which was a plant I believe used for rat poison. Whiskey and gin were used. Kids were given enemas tears. Parents weren't exactly feeding him rat poison, though supposedly the vinegar and processing would mitigate some of the plant's side effects. Later, Tier would recall having to smoke cigars and drink black coffee to keep his asthma at bay. And I think that it boggles the mind when you think about it. In today's standards, hindsight is always but I'm sure that was kind of cutting edge technology of the day and additional treatment of the day. Perhaps if you see a child suffering, you're going to try to alleviate that in any way possible, which they could afford to do. The Roosevelts were an affluent family, and that fact is key. Theodore Roosevelt's story may have been very different and if he hadn't been born into a life of privilege and not only ensured he could get the care he needed when he was ill, but it also meant that his parents could show him the world. The Roosevelt spent summers outside of the city, and they took family trips to Europe, where Middy and Ted would visit health resorts. Right, you go to these health resorts for treatment, You're sitting hot baths, you soak in the hot waters. You might be prescribed literally a walk in the woods as part of the treatment. So this is all kind of that time period and the health treatment back in the day. This is probably a good place for a break. We'll be right back. Following their first European tour, which occurred when Tier was around twelve, a doctor recommended he get plenty of fresh air and exercise with the goal of expanding his chest to give his lungs room and to ease the strain on his heart. After or words, the issued his son a challenge. You have the mind, but not the body, he told his son. And without the help of the body, the mind cannot go as far as it should. You must make your body through gritted teeth. Tier responded that he would do just that. It was not a promise that he took lightly. Tire worshiped his father, whom he called the best man I ever knew. These children called him great heart, and he was a huge influence on Roosevelt, who would later in life tell a journalist the thought of him now and always has been a sense of comfort. I could breathe, I could sleep when he had me in his arms. My father, he got me breath, he got me lungs, strength, life. According to Dalton, when his father was away during the Civil War, Tierra's health would creator. It's important to note that he was not away fighting. He paid a substitute to fight for him, at least in part because Middi, a Southerner, couldn't stand the thought of her husband fighting her brother's instead. He was on a mission to get troops at the front to sign up for what author Deborah Davis describes as a payroll savings program that would allow soldiers to put aside money for their families while they were off fighting the war. It was just one more expression of these lifelong commitment to philanthropy. He would take his son with him on trips to visit missions like the Newsboys Lodging House, giving tr in Dalton's words, a loving example of how one man can use his privilege to make society better. A proponent of what was known as muscular Christianity, which has been defined as a Christian life of brave and cheerful physical activity, he told his son sickness is always a shame and often a sin. His father was an example to his son, always trying to instill in his son good moral character, strength, virility. I think he was seeing around the city that there's a lot of vice happening in CD characters, CD places to visit in the city, and he doesn't want his son does come to that. He has the strong sense of morality, so he's going to instill that and his son of this idea of muscular Christianity. So he challenges his son right, and this belief of like overcoming your weakness, overcoming your fragility, and really building up your body and making sure that you're maintaining strong morals as well, and so TD began to build his body. Karin would later write of often seeing him working out on the piazza overlooking the back garden between horizontal bars, widening his chest by regular monotonous motion. He would work out there, keeping a journal of how big his biceps are getting, how big his chest size is getting. But two years into his efforts he learned that he wasn't progressing as quickly as he would have liked. In eighteen seventy two, when TD was almost fourteen, he had a bad asthma attack, and his father sent him away by himself for the first time two Maine's moose Head Lake. It was a life changing experience. In his autobiography, Roosevelt wrote that on the stage coach ried to the lake, he met two boys his own age, and rather than making friends, they found him to be an easy victim, and quickly his life miserable. The worst feature was that when I finally tried to fight them, I discovered that either one singly could not only handle me with easy contempt, but handled me so as not to hurt me much, and yet to prevent my doing any damage whatever. In return, I made up my mind that I must try to learn so that I would not again be put in such a helpless position. And so, with his father's encouragement, TD began to learn how to box with ex prize fighter John long Is his coach. Much to their surprise, td was tough. He could take hit after hit and keep fighting. Later that year, the Roosevelts took off on another grand tour. There, Mitti and c deposited t d, Elliott, and Karn with a family in Dresden, Germany, and though Tire was much healthier than he had been, he still never quite conquered his illnesses. During one attack of the months, he wrote to his mother that he resembled an antiquated woodchuck with his cheeks filled with nuts, and that your unhappy son had his third attack of asthma, accompanied by a violent headache. To his father, he said that an asthma attack rendered him unable to speak without blowing up, like an abridged edition of a Hippopotamus. According to Edmund Marris, Roosevelt's tutors openly admired his ability to concentrate on his books and his specimens to the exclusion of physical suffering. One of those tutors was the first to predict that he'd be president by the way. The Roosevelt's returned to the States in eighteen seventy three, and the next summer they headed out to a place that would come to hold a huge significance for Roosevelt, Oyster Bay, New York, where his grandfather and other Roosevelt families vacations. TR the President is fifteen years old when he starts coming out to Oyster Bay. That's Tyler CALIBERTA education technician at Sagamore Hill National Historic Site on Long Island. Wealthy New Yorkers are spending their summers out. Here's a place to escape New York City for the family that's coming out here. This is a country. We don't think about Long Island as the country any longer, but it was for this family. It was an escape from the heat of New York City, disease in New York City, and it was a place to come out and enjoy themselves. There might have been another benefit as well. The air may have been cleaner than the air in the city, which would have been better for t R's asthma. TR Senior would have brought him out of the city as frequently as he could have, especially when he was undergoing those really terrible asthma attacks. I think that's probably part of it for the family to come and spend time outside of New York, So the family spent a lot of times swimming. Roosevelt loved to row. He would row all over Long Island Sound and the various coves and necks around on the north shore Long Island. Who would explore them? And Roosevelt is as a young boy interested in taxidermy and learning about natural history and the way that you do that in their days by shooting birds. So Roosevelt is going all over and trying to find different specimens and collecting them for his Roosevelt Museum of Natural History that he kept in his parents house in New York. Horseback riding, hiking, and just enjoying the outdoors. Roosevelt loved Oyster Base so much that he would eventually by land to build a house on the house that would come to be named Sagamore Hill. There's a story behind that name, by the way. Sagamore Mohanness was essentially a chief or a satrum um. Satum is the Algonquin word for chief, and then Sagamore is a lesser statum or lieutenant statium. And this is apparently a place where they had meetings. And Mohannas apparently is the native that signed the land away, and Roosevelt decides to name it Sagamore Hill. This is the highest point on co from X, so this is the where they would have met. But we're getting ahead of ourselves. Before any of that could happen, Roosevelt had to go to college. He answered Harvard in eighteen seventy six, where he chose to study the natural sciences. So the first couple of years at Harvard, he was the biggest nerd. Like he was just this, you know, person who you'd see in you'd only be in his room. He'd be doing essentially taxidermy. He'd have like animals and drawers and things like that, and you can image is and making very popular with people. But then all of a sudden he broke out of it. Eventually starts joining all these clubs. He becomes friendly with people all over campus. When he wasn't in class or studying or in his clubs, Tier kept up with his boxing and rowing, and he took up wrestling too. Every spare moment was filled with some kind of activity. That was doubly true when Roosevelt was experiencing some kind of trauma in his sophomore year, he passed away, and when Roosevelt went back to school, he threw himself into his work, a frenzy of activity, as if to dull his pain. According to historian Douglas Brinkley, Tier wasn't scared of catching pneumonia and seemed to relish spending hours in the cold. Instead of taking a street car, Tier would walk three or four miles, and he'd still be ice skating in frigid temperatures long after everyone else went home. A friend from Harvard, Richard Welling, believed that Tier was overcompensating for his weakness. Roosevelt had neither health nor muscle, he would later write, but he had a superabundance of a third quality, vitality, and he seemed to realize that this nervous vitality had been given in order to help him get the other two things. In between years at Harvard, Roosevelt would spend as much time as possible outdoors, often in Oyster Bay and in Maine. There he lived with backwoodsman Bill Sewell, who would become a lifelong friend, but his initial opinion of Roosevelt wasn't glowing. He called him a thin, pale youngster with bad eyes and a weak heart, and said he was mighty pindlin, but Roosevelt quickly changed Bill's mind. One day that summer, they watched twenty five miles, and Bill would later recall that I do not think that I ever remember him being out of sorts. He did not feel well sometimes, but he would never admit it. On later trips to Maine, Roosevelt would pursue cariboo in the snow without tents or blankets for thirty six hours with Sewell and his nephew Wilmot Doo. He'd summit the five thousand, two hundred and sixty eight foot tall Mount cadad In, the tallest peak in the state, making the trip partially in moccasin's after he lost one shoe in a stream, after which tr wrote news journal I can endure fatigue and hardship nearly as well as these lumbermen. That wasn't the end of the excursions. He Sewell, and Dow also took a six day trip up a river in a dugout canoe through a number of rapids, and then marched a hundred miles and pouring rain for three days. Back at Harvard for his senior year, Roosevelt became engaged his first wife, Alice Hathaway Lee, and eventually decided on a career in politics. That year, he also had an appointment with a doctor at the university, and the news was not good. The doctor informed him that his heart was dangerously strained. The only way to live a long life, the doctor said, was to live a quiet, sedentary life. Roosevelt's response was unequivocal, doctor, I'm going to do all the things you tell me not to do. If I've got to live the sort of life you've described, I don't care how short it is. For decades, he kept quiet about the doctor's advice and continued to live as if he'd never heard it. The only reason we know about it is that the doctor wrote about the encounter, wishes confirmed by Harvard's records. Later year, he married Alice on his birthday, and on their honeymoon he claimed Pilattice, the Riggie, Grindelwald, and the young Frau. In the span of ten days after that, tr and Amateur summitted the matter Horn, a mountain so deadly that many skilled mountaineers have died in the attempt. Why did he do it? He told Sewel that it was to prove to some snobby English climbers he'd met in the lobby of his hotel that a Yankee could climb just as well as they could. Roosevelt never fully conquered his asthma. In fact, his sister karn One, said that he suffered from it all his life, though in later years only at long separated intervals. But his active lifestyle, what he would come to call the strenuous life, built his stamina and helped him manage his illness, and he never quit being active. When he was governor of New York, he had a wrestling matt installed in the governor's mansion. Roosevelt wrote in his autobiography that the controller put up a fuss about the purchase. He refused to audit a bill i put in for a wrestling match, explaining that I could have a billiard d boop billiards being recognized as a proper gubernatorial amusement is that a wrestling matt symbolized something unusual and unheard of and could not be permitted. When he got word that President William McKinley was dying, Roosevelt, then vice President, had just summited Mount Marcy, the highest peak in New York state in the White House. He continued to box, at least until a hard hit took the vision in his left eye. After that he picked up jiu jitsu, and then he had a tennis court installed. Though his playing style was unconventional, his method of playing pass was interesting. He would take the handle of Hello into the ball. According to Michael cullinane, author of Theodore Roosevelt's Ghost, The History and Memory of an American Icon, Tire wasn't actually all that good at tennis or sports in general. He was terrible a sports. I mean, there's a really funny story about this kid who was playing tennis with he was kr with then President was playing tennis at Sagamore Hill, I think, or maybe it was the White House. I can't recall, but this kid used like a teenagers, like this guy is terrible at tennis and he's the President and I admire him so much, but he's like the worst tennis player in the world. When he lacked in skill, he made up for an energy. He'd also engaged in other physical pursuits, which his daughter Alice called endurance tests. At Sagamore Hill, there's a place to go on these long point to point walks where Roosevelt would ask the children to walk in a perfectly straight direction towards a certain place that was their goal, and in that path, no matter what was in your way, you had to go either over through it or around itself. It was a thornbush, you had to go through it. If it was a body of water like a pond, you'd have to wade through it. If it was a wall, you had to climb over it. This was his living the strenuous life. Their idea of recreation wasn't what most other people would think that I was sitting and drinking lemonade on the porch and being taken care of by your servants. For Roosevelt, it was going out and really exhausting yourself. Most people who didn't know him, Willy, I think they didn't. They didn't understand what they were getting into when they were coming here to Sagamore. Hell, let's take a quick break and we'll be right back. For Roosevelt, working at a sweat wasn't just a way to stay healthy. It was also a key part of his life philosophy of bodily vigor as a method of getting that vigor of soul without which vigor of the body counts for nothing. As he described it in his autobiography, he credited his hard work for his successes, writing that I never won anything without hard labor and the exercise of my best judgment and careful planning, and working long in advance. Having been a rather sickly and awkward boy, I was a young man at first, both nervous and distrustful of my own prowess. I had to train myself painfully and laboriously, not merely as regards my body, but as regards my soul and spirit. Roosevelt didn't just advocate the strenuous life for himself but for others. At the end of his second term, he ordered that military officers be able to walk fifty miles or ride around a hundred miles on horseback in three days, later declaring it a test which many a healthy middle aged woman would be able to meet. When the officers and the press ball to the requirement, he demonstrated how easy it was by doing it himself, and in his autobiography he advised that a man whose business is sedentary should get some kind of exercise if he wishes to keep himself in as good physical Trim as his brethren who do manual labor. When I worked on a ranch, I needed no form of exercise except my work. But when I worked in an office the case was different. He also expected his children to live the strenuous life, especially his children. I would rather one of them should die than have them grow up weaklings. He was especially tough on his oldest son, Ted, who like his father, had asthma and later would suffer from headaches and depression. Eventually he had what tr called kind of a nervous breakdown. The doctors say, Theodore, you know he was overstressed or he had a breakdown, and maybe it's because you're pushing too hard. Tr was Contrite, telling the doctor, I'll never push Ted again. He said he had been so hard on the boy because Ted could have been all the things I would like to have been and wasn't, and it has been a great temptation to push him. But Dalton writes that he never could quite let up as he promised. Later, Edith would write to Ted, as I look back, you fared worst because father tried to toughen you, but happily was too busy to exert the same pressure on the others. According to Dalton, the weakling tr had been as a child made him uncomfortable and ashamed because he detested the invalid he had been. Dalton writes he looked back on his childhood with a sense of detachment. Roosevelt hated weakness. It's not hard to trace a line from this back to his father, whom Roosevelt adored and who put so much emphasis on being wrong and manly. Roosevelt would always feel inferior to Great Heart, and he never wanted his children to be the kind of weakling he had been. Both Roosevelt and his father had worried about American society becoming weaker due to over civilization. The idea was that men were so used to modern comforts that they lost touch with some of the things that made them manly. In speech delivered at the Hamilton Club when he was governor of New York, Roosevelt laid out his plan for making his country and its people as strong as it could be. He used the speech, which he would later call The Strenuous Life, to argue for US militarism and imperial expansion, which will cover in another episode, and to argue against a life of ignoble ease. I wish to preach not the doctrine of ignoble ease, but the doctrine of the strenuous life, the life of toil and effort, of labor and strife. He urged the wealthy fathers of the event to encourage their sons to devote time to non remunerative work, as his father had done with him, and noted that in this life we get nothing saved by effort. Freedom from effort in the present merely means that there has been stored up effort in the past. Men should use that freedom to explore different kinds of work, whether it be in politics or exploration. But if a man used that freedom just for enjoyment, he shows that he is simply a cumberer of the earth's surface. A mere life of ease is not, in the end, a very satisfactory life, And above all, it is a life which ultimately unfits those who follow it for serious work in the world. As it is with the individual, so it is with the nation. He finished by saying that living a life of ease and seeking peace when war was called for would doom America to be left behind. The twentieth century looms before us big with the fate of many nations. If we stand iddly by, then the bolder and stronger people's will pass us I and will win for themselves the domination of the world. Let us therefore boldly face the life of strife, resolute to do our duty well and manfully. Resolute to uphold righteousness by deed and by word. Resolute to be both honest and brave, to serve high ideals. Get to use practical methods. Above all, let us shrink from no strife, moral or physical, within or without the nation, provided we are certain that the strife is justified. For it is only through strife, through hard and dangerous endeavor, that we shall ultimately win the goal of true national greatness. According to one of Roosevelt's friends, he had a policy of forcing the spirit to ignore the weakness of the flesh. And I think there's no better example of that than when he was shot in John Shrank was the man who fired the bullet. Shrink would later say that he was against a third term president, but that wasn't his only reason for pulling the trigger. As tr stood outside the Gilpatrick Hotel, he was advised by the ghost of William McKinley to avenge McKinley's death while pointing to a picture of Theodore Roosevelt. So Shrink followed Roosevelt on the campaign trail from New Orleans to Milwaukee. When Shrink fired at Roosevelt, he was tackled to the ground. Roosevelt didn't bring Shrink up, but the gentleman around him did. He actually asked Shrink, like, why did you do it? And obviously, realizing like there's not going to be an answer to that, he's like, okay, fine, cops take him away. Later, Shrink would be examined and deemed insane. He spent the rest of his life in a mental hospital and died there in nineteen forty three. After Shrink was hauled away, Roosevelt went on to do his speech. As a hunter, he knew to check yourself, and if you're coughing up blood, that probably means the longest function you're in trouble. But he checked, and he's like, you know, okay, it doesn't hurt to breathe this way, so I'm going to go on. According to Maris, the whole right side of Roosevelt's body had turned black, but the wound was bleeding slowly, so tr slapped a handkerchief over the bullet hole and went out on stage. He didn't realize until after he pulled out his speech, unfolded it, and began to read that the bullet had gone through it, at which point he joked, you see, I was going to make quite a long speech, and make a long speech he did. Who gets shot point blank and can then go on to carry out about an approximately ninety minutes speech. Wow. But it wasn't as though Roosevelt was unaffected. He spoke in a voice Marris writes was no longer husky but weak. A knife like pain in his ribs forced him to breathe in short gasps. Two or three times he appeared to totter. Party aids stood below the footlights in case he fell, but Roosevelt didn't fall still. By the time he was finished speaking, he had lost a lot of blood and was taken to Milwaukee's emergency Hospital. Doctors there did an X ray and found that the bullet had hit his fourth rib on the right side. It had been headed straight for the heart, but had been slowed by Roosevelt's speech and his eyeglasses case before it hit and cracked his rib. Today you can see the speech, eyeglasses, case, and shirt tr war on the day he was shot on display at the Theodore Roosevelt Birthplace National Historic Site. I mean they did the X ray. They saw that the bullet was lodged since his rib, and they decided not to take it out. So he carried that bullet with him for the rest of his life yep, to his death. Even more incredibly, Roosevelt gave his next speech at Madison Square Garden a mere sixteen days later. Ultimately, weakness was no match for try. History Versus is hosted by me Aaron McCarthy. This episode was written by me, with additional research by Michael Salgarolo and fact checking by Austin Thompson. Field recording by John Mayer. Joe Wigan played Theodore Roosevelt in this episode. The executive producers are Aaron McCarthy, Julie Douglas, and Tyler Klang. The supervising producer is Dylan Fagan. The show is edited by Dylan Fagan and Loeberlante. Special thanks to a listen Parker Geisman, Tyler Caliberta, and Michael Collinane. To learn more about this episode, check out our website at mental flass dot com slash History Versus. That's mental flass dot com. Slash h I S t O R y vs. History Versus is a production of iHeart Radio and Mental Floss. For more podcasts from my heart Radio, visit the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you listen to your favor rit shows.

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