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LIFE AFTER THE WHITE HOUSE, PART IV

© John S. Cooper

With the assassination of President William McKinley, Theodore Roosevelt became President. (See my earlier articles, “Teddy Roosevelt: More Fun Than A Goat, Parts I and II” published on October 18 and 25, 1999.) Roosevelt’s retirement could hardly be called that. After leaving the White House in March 1909, he went big game hunting in Africa. The year-long safari included more than 200 porters, his son Kermit, and taxidermists and naturalists from the Smithsonian Institution. Roosevelt and his party killed 5 elephants, 7 hippos, 9 lions and 13 rhinos, and collected more than 200 specimens of plants and animals for the Smithsonian Institution. After that, he took a tour of Europe where he was greeted royally by the crowned heads of Europe, and then returned home to the United States to a hero’s welcome.

Roosevelt felt that his successor, President William Howard Taft, had become too conservative. Many progressive members of the Republican Party urged Teddy to run for President again. In February 1912, he declared his candidacy for the Republican presidential nomination. He lost the nomination to Taft, whose supporters controlled the convention machinery, and bolted the party to form the Progressive Party. His Progressive, or Bull Moose, ticket split the majority Republican vote and allowed Democratic candidate Woodrow Wilson to win the election. This was the only time in our history in which an incumbent President, a former President, and a future President ran against each other in the same election. (See my earlier article “The Bull Moose Campaign of 1912” published on November 19, 1999.)

It was during this Bull Moose campaign that Roosevelt survived an attempted assassination. On October 14, 1912, a bartender named John Schrank shot TR with a .38 caliber Colt revolver in the chest. The bullet passed through a doubled-over copy of his speech and his metal spectacles case. The bullet, although greatly slowed-down by the speech and case, entered Roosevelt’s chest. He insisted on finishing the speech before going to the hospital for treatment. In a dramatic but foolhardy display of bravado, he spoke for almost an hour. He then went to the hospital, where doctors treated the wound, but decided not to remove the bullet. Roosevelt carried the bullet inside him for the rest of his life.

In 1916, Roosevelt returned to the Republican Party and helped campaign for the candidate Charles Evans Hughes, who was favored to defeat President Wilson. Roosevelt campaigned for the Republican, but often opposed the stated position of his party and its candidate. Roosevelt campaigned more for war than for the Republican Party, and caused many voters to vote for Wilson as the peace candidate. The day after

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