Colonel Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [147]
He also asked that somebody contact Seth Bullock, of Deadwood, South Dakota, and be sure to mention that he had been shot with “a thirty-eight on a forty-four frame.”
MEANWHILE, AT THE CITY police station, John F. Schrank was being exhaustively grilled. He was calm but badly bruised from being kicked and torn at by his attackers. If Roosevelt had not intervened to save him, he might well have been lynched. He handed over a written account of his visions of President McKinley calling for Roosevelt’s death. A search of his pockets turned up another note, stating it was the duty of the United States to preserve the two-term tradition.
Never let a third-term party emblem appear on an official ballot.
I willing to die for my country, god has called me, to be his instrument.
So help me god.
Innocent Guilty
Eine Fester Burg ist unser Gott.
A mighty fortress is our God. This is my body, this is my blood. The mock-religious aura that had glowed around Roosevelt since he first stood at Armageddon had reached its grotesque climax. News of the drama on the Auditorium stage flashed outward along telephone and telegraph wires, jolting every night editor in the country and penetrating even into the Casino Theatre in New York, where Edith Roosevelt sat watching Johann Strauss’s The Merry Countess. She emerged from a side entrance weeping. “Take me to where I can talk to him or hear from him at once.” A police escort whisked her to the Progressive National Headquarters in the Manhattan Hotel, which had an open line to Milwaukee. There, just before midnight, she heard that her husband’s wound had been X-rayed and dressed. He was being transferred to Chicago’s Mercy Hospital, where a team of thoracic specialists would consider whether the bullet in his chest could be safely removed.
It lay embedded against the fourth right rib, four inches from the sternum. In its upward and inward trajectory, straight toward the heart, it had had to pass through Roosevelt’s dense overcoat into his suit jacket pocket, then through a hundred glazed pages of his bifolded speech into his vest pocket, which contained a steel-reinforced spectacle case three layers thick, and on through two webs of suspender belt, shirt fabric, and undershirt flannel, before eventually finding skin and bone. Even so, its final force had been enough to crack the rib.
“THE DULL-EYED, UNMISTAKABLE EXPRESSIONLESSNESS OF INSANITY.”
John Schrank under arrest after attempting to kill Roosevelt, 14 October 1912. (photo credit i12.2)
Marveling at the freak coordination of all these impediments, a witness to the shooting noted that had Schrank’s slug penetrated the pleura, the Colonel would have bled to death internally in a matter of minutes. “There was no other place on his body so thoroughly armored as the spot where the bullet struck.”
ROOSEVELT WAS BACK on board the Mayflower before midnight. His breathing hurt and his right arm was stiff, but he undressed without assistance, putting studs into a clean shirt for the morning, and shaving himself before he went to bed.
He was asleep before the train pulled out. It steamed extremely slowly, to rock him as little as possible, and glided into Chicago’s Northwestern yard at 3:32 A.M. without whistling. A locomotive on an adjoining track was blowing off, but fell silent as the Mayflower approached and came to rest.
Even at that early hour, some four hundred persons were waiting on the platform. Among them was Dr. John B. Murphy, the nation’s premier chest surgeon. He had an ambulance standing by to take the Colonel straight to Mercy Hospital, but was persuaded to let his patient sleep until it was light. At a quarter past six the ambulance drew up and Roosevelt appeared, leaning on Cecil Lyon’s arm. He looked grave and pale, but when a press camera flashed and popped, he dryly remarked, “Ah, shot again.”
With that he was hurried off by Murphy for more X-rays and tests.
At 10:30 the hospital issued its first bulletin, describing the extent of Roosevelt’s injury, and stating a pulse rate of ninety