A Bullet and a Bull Moose

Abstract

The assassin's bullet played an unique role in the presidential career of Theodore Roosevelt. He became president when McKinley was shot by the anarchist Czolgosz, and his efforts to regain the presidency from Taft in the campaign of 1912 ended for all practical purposes in Milwaukee with his own attempted assassination by an unemployed saloonkeeper from New York named John Schrank. Roosevelt had completed a whistle-stop tour of the South, and was just beginning his campaign swing through the Midwest. Late in the afternoon of Oct 14, his train arrived in Milwaukee, where he was to speak in the evening at the civic auditorium. He originally had planned to have dinner in his own railroad car, the<i>Mayflower</i>, but decided instead to go to the Gilpatrick Hotel to have a good bath and eat with some of the local Bull Moose. There—although he did not know it—he also would meet