Taft made only halfhearted attempts in carrying out Roosevelt’s policies, and progressive Republicans became disenchanted with the president. Roosevelt, always outspoken, broke with the Taft administration and decided he would run for office again. At the Republican convention of 1912, however, conservative Republicans nominated as their candidate the incumbent president, while progressive Republicans formed the Progressive, or Bull Moose, Party, with Roosevelt as their candidate.
In the early evening of October 14 Theodore Roosevelt had arrived in Milwaukee from Racine, Wisconsin. He had wanted to eat dinner in his car and proceed directly to the auditorium where he was to deliver his speech but was urged by local party leaders to greet the people of the city by riding through the streets and then to dine at the Gilpatrick Hotel. Those who traveled with him, including a physician, were concerned about the large crowds that always attended Roosevelt’s appearances in public and about finding time for him to rest. But committeemen said the police would provide security and that this extra appearance would be beneficial. Along the route to the Gilpatrick, people were lined up and welcomed Roosevelt enthusiastically. At the hotel, Roosevelt rested briefly in a room and then had dinner. With a few others in his entourage, he emerged from the hotel into the darkness. A crowd of people around Roosevelt’s car had gathered to cheer him. After he made it to his car, he stood up to bow and tip his hat in acknowledgment of the cheers. At the front of the crowd was a man holding a .38-caliber Colt, mounted on a .44-caliber frame, a weapon offering the user superior aim.
Teddy Roosevelt, just after John Schrank's assassination attempt.
Unbeknownst to Roosevelt, a saloonkeeper from New York City named John Schrank had stalked him through eight states in an effort to seize the right moment to assassinate him. As Schrank would later claim in court proceedings (original transcripts at the Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.), the slain U.S. president William McKinley had appeared to him twice in dreams. The first was in September 1901 when McKinley rose from his coffin, pointed to Roosevelt, and claimed the vice president had murdered him. In September 1912 McKinley, in another dream, approached Schrank from behind, tapped his shoulder, and ordered him to avenge his murder.
At about 8:10 P.M., standing just six feet away from Roosevelt, Schrank raised his arm and fired his gun (now in private possession). The bullet was well aimed but encountered some unexpected obstacles. Let’s trace its trajectory.
The bullet first penetrated the heavy overcoat Roosevelt was wearing. It ripped through the coat on the right side of his chest and plowed into his suit jacket at the breast-pocket level. Inside the pocket were two items that absorbed the impact of the bullet and undoubtedly saved Theodore Roosevelt’s life. The first was a fifty-page speech folded in half into a wad one hundred pages thick. Behind this wad was a metal eyeglass case in which were Roosevelt’s spectacles. Its force diminished but still lethal, the bullet traveled through Roosevelt’s vest, then his outer shirt (Theodore Roosevelt Birthplace, New York, New York), his undershirt (Theodore Roosevelt National Park, Medora, North Dakota, on loan from the Theodore Roosevelt Association, Oyster Bay, New York), and finally punctured his skin, right below the nipple, and lodged in his chest just before reaching his lung.
After he was hit Roosevelt reeled a bit, then fell into the seat beneath him. Elbert Martin, Roosevelt’s stenographer and a former football player, immediately jumped out of the car and ran to Schrank, who had his gun raised and appeared ready to fire again. Martin grabbed him from behind and wrestled him to the ground. Others rushed over as Martin, with his knee planted on the small of Schrank’s back, yanked his head back. Roosevelt called for Martin not to hurt the gunman and to bring him near. Schrank tried to conceal the pistol under his left arm, but Martin grabbed it. When they made it to Roosevelt, Martin put his hand over Schrank’s face and turned it toward the wounded man. There was much commotion by this time; the police came to maintain order in the crowd and take Schrank into custody.
Roosevelt was advised by his doctor and others to go immediately to a hospital, but he said he felt all right and emphatically insisted on making his speech. Roosevelt undoubtedly realized this was a supreme opportunity for a political candidate to make a great impact, and he wanted to grab it. He was wounded with a bullet in him; he could die. He figured the bullet hadn’t hit his lung because he wasn’t hemorrhaging. But if the wound required surgery, he would be incapacitated, and especially after being so vilified by the press in his campaign, he didn’t want to pass up this chance.
People were lined up along the streets to Milwaukee Auditorium, where Roosevelt was to speak, and they applauded as he slowly drove by. Roosevelt’s physician, Dr. Scurry L. Terrell, continued to try to talk the candidate into going to a hospital, but Roosevelt responded, “This is my big chance and I am going to make that speech if I die doing it.”
At the auditorium before Roosevelt went on stage, he permitted Dr. Terrell to examine his wound. His advisers invited some local physicians to look at the wound so that it wouldn’t appear as if the candidate was trying to hide anything. Roosevelt submitted to an examination and an interview. The doctors applied a handkerchief as a bandage and consented to Roosevelt making his speech.
It was an occasion to appeal to the audience’s emotions, and Roosevelt rose gloriously to it. “I don’t know whether you fully understand that I’ve just been shot,” he began, “but it takes more than that to kill a Bull Moose.” He showed his bullet-torn speech manuscript and declared it probably prevented the bullet from piercing his heart, and continued, “The bullet is in me now so that I cannot make a very long speech, but I will try my best.”
Roosevelt in fact did make a rather long speech, speaking extemporaneously rather than reading from his manuscript. He made numerous references to the attempted assassination: “I have altogether too important things to think of to feel any concern over my own death”; “I cannot tell you of what infinitesimal importance I regard this incident as compared with the great issues at stake in this campaign”; “I am a little sore. Anybody has a right to be sore with a bullet in him. You would find that if I was in battle I would be leading my men just the same. Just the same way I am going to make this speech”; “I know these doctors, when they get hold of me, will never let me go back and there are just a few more things that I want to say to you”; “Don’t you pity me. I am all right. I am all right and you cannot escape listening to my speech either.” Roosevelt was interrupted a few times by his associates, who wanted him to conclude his remarks.
Shortly after the assassination attempt, Oscar King Davis, the press secretary of the Progressive Party, wrote, “I watched the Colonel very closely and it seemed to me that he had lost color and was laboring very hard to go on, so I stepped up to him and put my hand on his arm. He stopped and glared at me ferociously and said, ‘What do you want?’ I said, ‘Colonel, I want to stop you.’ He said, ‘No sir, I will not stop, you can’t stop me nor anybody else.’ Then he turned and went on with his speech.” Ninety minutes after he began, Roosevelt concluded his speech.
When Roosevelt read a speech, he would typically hold it close to his face, for he was very nearsighted. When he finished with a sheet, he would frequently drop it, so that by the time he had completed delivering a speech the stage was littered with pages. People in the audience would rush to the stage and grab the sheets as souvenirs.
Lifesavers: the metal eyeglass case and speech that stopped a bullet from killing Theodore Roosevelt on the evening of October 14, 1912.
After his extemporaneous remarks at Milwaukee Auditorium, Roosevelt gave out some of his folded speech with the bullet holes to reporters seated in the first rows, as souvenirs. (One reporter later sold his page to the Smithsonian Institution.) Other pages were sent to Roosevelt’s relatives and supporters as souvenirs.
Roosevelt was then driven to the Johnston Emergency Hospital, where physicians dressed his wound and took X-rays, and Roosevelt telegraphed his wife, Edith. At 12
:30 A.M. he was taken on a special train to Mercy Hospital in Chicago, where better care could be administered.
The doctors did not probe for the bullet. After President James A. Garfield was shot in 1881, doctors had probed for the bullet, and Garfield later died.
The physicians kept what was sometimes called a “death watch.” If they observed a problem, they would take out the bullet and clean the wound. But since there were no antibiotics at the time and sterilization procedures were not always workable, there was a terrible risk of infection. Physicians finally decided not to remove the bullet. A week after being shot, Roosevelt was released from Mercy Hospital. He returned to his New York home in Oyster Bay, Long Island, for further recuperation, and was back campaigning on October 30.
Roosevelt lost the election of 1912—both he and Taft were defeated by Woodrow Wilson—but went on to lead a productive life. He explored and mapped a Brazilian river, wrote prolifically, and continued to speak out on and bring his influence to political matters. On January 6, 1919, Teddy Roosevelt died at his home in Oyster Bay at the age of sixty, with Schrank’s bullet still in him. The next day, James Earle Fraser, the sculptor who designed the buffalo nickel, made a death mask (Theodore Roosevelt Home, Sagamore Hill National Historic Site, Oyster Bay, New York).
In the meantime, Roosevelt’s almost-assassin, John Schrank, had been diagnosed as being a schizophrenic, clinically a dementia praecox paranoid. He was committed to an institution for the criminally insane, where he lived out his days. (He vowed to shoot President Franklin Delano Roosevelt if he were ever released.) Schrank died in 1943 at the age of sixty-seven.
Some interesting points may be made about the garments Roosevelt was wearing. The heavy overcoat, suit jacket, and vest seem no longer to be in existence; they were probably discarded.
The two shirts were used as evidence in the trial of John Schrank and were kept for a long time by the presiding judge of the trial. They were washed and bleached, but faint traces of bloodstains may be observed.
The eyeglass case and several pages of the speech survive, branded with bullet holes from the day when they resisted a lethal bullet marked for the twenty-sixth president of the United States, Theodore Roosevelt.
LOCATIONS: Metal eyeglass case: Theodore Roosevelt Birthplace National Historic Site, New York, New York.
Pages of the speech: eleven pages (now bound in a hardcover volume), Theodore Roosevelt Birthplace, New York, New York; one page, National Museum of American History, Washington, D.C.; other pages, privately owned.
PILTDOWN MAN
DATE: 1912.
WHAT IT IS: Skull fragments and part of a jaw once thought to be from a newly discovered, ancient ancestor of humankind.
WHAT IT LOOKS LIKE: The parts of Piltdown Man are in separate pieces, all mahogany brown.
Mr. Dawson seemed surprised by the shard of “cocoa-nut” handed to him by a worker at the gravel pit.
He knew immediately it wasn’t what the workers at Barkham Manor, a sprawling estate in the village of Piltdown in Sussex, thought it was. No, this wasn’t a piece of edible fruit but a very old fragment of bone, possibly that of a human cranium.
Charles Dawson, a forty-four-year-old solicitor and amateur fossil collector, enthusiastically thanked the laborers who had brought this fragment to his attention. He frequently visited Barkham Manor, one of a few estates of which he was the steward, and told the men digging at the gravel pit there to keep a lookout for anything unusual; the pit just might yield something to feed his blazing passion for paleontology. The gravel bed—as well as all of Barkham Manor—was part of the Weald, a piece of countryside in southeast England girdled in the north and south by chalk hills known as the Downs. The region contained many sites associated with the study of human antiquity.
Over the next few years, Dawson reportedly returned to the pit, where he subsequently recovered further fragments of the very same broken piece—what he realized was part of a human skull of possibly great antiquity—found initially about 1910. In February 1912 he informed Arthur Smith Woodward, the keeper of geology at the British Museum (Natural History) in London (later called the Natural History Museum), of these discoveries.
The gravel deposit at Barkham Manor was investigated further early in June 1912, when Dawson, accompanied by Arthur Smith Woodward and the French priest-paleontologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, searched the gravel bed for more finds. Based on the discoveries made that day, Woodward assisted Dawson in a more thorough search of the gravel deposit, which yielded further fragments of the cranium plus a section of a jawbone.
Woodward concluded that the bones were all from the same creature because of their color and their proximity to each other in the pit. The geology of the pit and other fossil remains (including the jaw) found in it indicated the site dated from the early Pleistocene epoch or earlier. This, of course, would mean the skull fragments were of great age, belonging to a truly primitive being, one that appeared to be human. The parietal bones were indeed human, and although the mandible was apelike, its canine tooth and molar teeth exhibited wear not characteristic of anthropoid apes but of humans.
Paleontologists of the day commonly believed that humans had descended directly from the apes (unlike the more modern theory that humans and apes have a common ancestor). Some transitional creature, they assumed, bridged the gap between “pure” ape and “pure” human. The bones found at Piltdown could very well be from such a creature. Even the jaw’s apelike characteristics fit this theory. A transitional ape-to-man creature would develop a more advanced brain before its jaw became humanlike. Piltdown Man (dubbed Eoanthropus dawsoni), it was conjectured, was the “missing link”!
Piltdown Man was one of the greatest scientific hoaxes of all time. Pictured in this painting by John Cooke is an examination of the Piltdown skull by the "Piltdown Gang," with, from left to right in the front: Underwood, Keith, Pycraft, and Lankester; in the rear: Smith, Dawson, and Woodward.
A skull was constructed from the cranial and mandibular fragments for presentation at a meeting of the Geological Society of London on December 18, 1912, by Dawson and Woodward. Those privy to Piltdown Man vowed secrecy, but almost a month before the meeting the Manchester Guardian somehow learned of the finds and reported the discovery of the supposedly prehistoric remains, trumpeting the possibility that they belonged to a progenitor of human beings.
News of the skull spread quickly around the world, and great excitement attended the meeting. The speakers included Woodward, Dawson, anatomy professor Grafton Elliot Smith, Royal College of Surgeons conservator Arthur Keith, and amateur geologist Alfred Kennard—each of whom subscribed to his own individual interpretation of the fragments and their age, but all of whom supported the belief that the fragments came from the same individual and that this individual belonged to a race that had descended from apes and was a predecessor to humankind.
From the time of Piltdown Man’s public introduction, there were dissenters. Primarily, they contested the association of the apelike jaw with a human braincase. Although all these bones had been found in close proximity, a fact that supported the argument for their association, the dissenters argued against this on anatomical grounds. However, none of the skeptics questioned the authenticity of the remains.
Unable to prove or disprove the validity of the reconstruction, scientists continued to support the skull as belonging to an ancient form of humanity, though with mounting difficulty. Piltdown Man continued to withstand challenges to its authenticity, and because its origins were never proved conclusively, it became an anomaly, and as such hindered the progress of paleontology. Ultimately, however, the fluorine dating technique supplied the solution to this ongoing dilemma.
LEFT: Apelike in jaw and of small brain capacity: the skull of the Piltdown Man as reconstructed by Dr. A. Smith Woodward.
RIGHT: Manlike both in jaw and in brain capacity: the skull of the Piltdown Man as reconstructed by Professor Arthur Keith.
The techniqu
e of dating bones by determining their fluorine content was developed in the 1940s by British anthropologist Kenneth Oakley. When the Piltdown remains were dated with this technique in 1950, the results, while not resolving the issue of association, did indicate that the bones might be younger than expected, which only complicated the matter. Then, in 1953, Joseph Weiner, an anatomist at Oxford, put forward the hypothesis that the jaw belonged to an ape and had been artificially modified and stained. Convinced of the validity of Weiner’s argument, Oakley requested a full investigation, which was sanctioned by the British Museum (Natural History) and which led to a complete resolution of the Piltdown controversy.
This investigation involved, among other things, a variety of physical and chemical tests, which determined the cranial bones were human whereas the jaw was undoubtedly a remnant of an ape. (Much later, it was confirmed that the jaw belonged to an orangutan.) Some portions of the Piltdown remains had been chemically stained and altered in other ways to make them appear to be ancient human fossils—and they were all less than one thousand years old.
What a revelation! For forty years, paleoanthropology had been misled, deliberately led astray. During this time other remains—discovered in South Africa and elsewhere—suggested an evolutionary scenario completely different from that indicated by the Piltdown Man remains. Those who had claimed that the Piltdown remains were incongruous were right, but little did they imagine the “finds” were a hoax. Someone—or more than one person—had methodically committed a fraud.
That Dawson was involved in the deception is virtually certain. But he was probably too scientifically uneducated to have pulled off the ruse alone. Someone else with a greater knowledge of anatomy was almost certainly behind it. But who?
Lucy's Bones, Sacred Stones, & Einstein's Brain Page 31