Teddy Roosevelts Prescription for all Ails Still Holds

Teddy Roosevelt was not well as a child or a young adult. He had acute asthma, Crones disease, insomnia. He was weak, thin, prone to depression and doctors didn't believe he would make it to adulthood. But his father famously told him, "Teddy you have the mind but not the body."  Enter Dr. Salter. Salter had a radical belief for the late eighteenth century and it said that the internal organs did not do well with the sedentary life. "Organs were made to work." Salter proclaimed and that meant action or the "vigorous life" as Roosevelt would later dub the life of action.  Teddy's father then added, "Without the body the mind cannot go far."

Roosevelt had his charge.  He began to box. He began gymnastics and weightlifting. This was at a time when few people exercised. Many believed exercise led to illness and certainly the Victorian upper classes of New York did not believe in getting sweaty. A constitutional consisted of walking to ones office or strolling into the parlor for some brandy and cigars. Cigars were what Teddy's parents had been giving him to ward off attacks of asthma that nearly suffocated the boy. That along with black coffee, opium, marijuana, Castor oil. Anything to stop the spasms of acute asthma. Nothing worked and so Teddy Roosevelt began the regimen his father and Salter prescribed and he began to slowly remake himself. Then he went West to the Badlands and for three years lived the wild life of a cowboy that completed Roosevelt's evolution into a man of action.

It is interesting that with all the hype over working out today we still see articles in the New York Times about the benefits of exercise. The latest said that strenuous exercise will slow down aging, ward off Alzheimer's. make us look and feel younger. It as if we are still trying to convince ourselves over a hundred years later that what Teddy Roosevelt found in the 1870s as a remedy to his ailments still holds. Without the body the mind cannot go far. True then and now.

Forging a President How the Wild West Created Teddy Roosevelt

Walk Softly and Carry a Big Stick

What part of Teddy Roosevelt's famous quote does Trump not get? Probably all of it. Then again, there is the Bad Cop Good Cop approach. Tillerson is the good cop being calm and rational while Trump is the bad cop talking about nuclear war. Tillerson says we just want to negotiate. Trump says we want to annihilate. Teddy Roosevelt knew that power backed by words was the answer. But not bragging backed by more bragging. If you have a Big Stick and speak softly then you probably wont have to use it. But if you shout and threaten and then don't use it, then everyone knows you are a bluffer.

Trump undoubtedly knows how to fight. He has done it all his life. From the schoolyard on where he would back down people with threats. When the justice department filed suit over a discrimination case Trump counter sued for millions. Punch and then counter punch. The folks at CNN are not used to this. They looked like they might puke as they contemplated nuclear war. Wolf Blitzer didn't look happy and Erin Burnett looked like she wanted to take her children and run for the hills. Trump has that affect on people.

But lets say Trump does get Teddy Roosevelt's famous edict. He knows he is backed up by a big stick and hes giving the guy with the bad haircut a little of his own. At a point a schoolyard bully is a schoolyard bully and you have to smack him back. It does take one to know one.

Forging A President How the Wild West Created Teddy Roosevelt

Teddy Roosevelt Would Thrash the Cad

It is an old term. Woodrow Wilson told some reporters that if they did not quit reporting on his first wife Ellen Wilson he would thrash them. It makes us think of a man with gloves slapping another man or someone whipping someone else. The technical definition is to beat someone with a stick or a whip. In the old Victorian sense of the word someone was thrashed for a slight on insult or an injury to honor. A thrashing was the warm up for a duel the ultimate settling of a slight. So now we really have a situation where someone needs to be thrashed.

Maybe Jeffry Lord on CNN should be thrashed for saying it is alright to imply that women are menstruating everywhere and bleeding from everywhere. Theodore Roosevelt would thrash Lord for that if not beat him to a pulp. Roosevelt confronted more than a few men who implied he was a coward and demanded retribution and even offered himself available for a duel. He in fact bought dueling pistols when he was a student at Harvard.

Another great word is cad. Definition: a man who misbehaves dishonorably especially toward a woman.  Cads are always thrashed sooner or later. There were certain lines that were not to be crossed. And when they were crossed the cad was thrashed. Lord says equality demands that men and women be treated equally and women should be able to take being insulted by powerful men.

What a cad.

Forging a President

Roosevelt and Churchill in the Heroic Age

I have been reading Hero of the Empire by Candace Millard and it hit me that the similarities between Winston Churchill and Theodore Roosevelt are many. Both men came of age in the Heroic Age of Shackleton and Scott the two polar explorers who set the bar for suffering and death with their exploration of the South Pole. The Heroic Age can be defined as men of a certain patrician class feeling it is their destiny to explore, fight, or rule. The heroic man knows not fear and usually puts himself in grave danger.

Take Winston Churchill in the Boar war where he is attacked on a troop train and by all rights should have died there. This is when he was a war corespondent who really should not have even been fighting but he wanted to find war and test himself and he ended up being captured. Once captured Churchill makes a daring escape and goes on the run. The fact he could be shot and killed at any moment is negated by the heroic mans feeling that he is special and Gods Will shall keep him safe. In Churchill's case this seems to be true.

Much the same for Teddy Roosevelt who goes west after his wife and mother die on the same day in 1883 and ends up in the Badlands ;a place Custer called hell with the fires out and then puts himself through every test a young dude from the East could find with the possibility of death or great injury. Fighting Indians, badmen, blizzards, heat, stampeding cattle, swollen rivers, wild horses, Roosevelt cheats death at every turn...yet he comes out unscathed. He has the sense he will not be harmed and three years later he returns to the East to eventually become President as  Churchill returns to become England's greatest prime minister.

The Heroic Age ended as modernism moved in. Men were no longer heroic, they were mortal. Such a pity.

Forging A President How the Wild West Created Teddy Roosevelt

Did Teddy Roosevelt Hold off 5 Indians in the Badlands ?

Yes. It might have been four but no matter. The Dude newly arrived in the West was out looking for some horses when Indians appeared on the horizon and started galloping toward him. This is 1884 with Geronimo still on the loose and atrocities occurring on both sides. Men carried poison with them in case they were captured as stories of Indians cutting off men's organs while alive was well known. Enter Teddy Roosevelt to the Badlands fresh off the train from Manhattan. He had come out to find his piece of the West after his wife and mother died on the same day.

So the Indians with Winchesters raised charge Teddy. He swings down and puts his rifle across the pommel of his saddle and pins it to the center Indian. They stop and legend has it they professed they were friendly. The man with thick glasses from Manhattan would have none of it and told them to keep their distance. They then cussed at him and Teddy would later write he knew they had a good command of English then.

So how much danger was Teddy in? Possibly a lot. The Indians could have easily killed him and taken his horse and rifle and left his bones to rot in the Badlands. Cowboys were found many times scalped and worse after Indian encounters. So Roosevelt was smart to hold his ground. Apparently they then followed him but eventually gave it up. Teddy Roosevelt's stock went up in the West and the Roosevelt legend climbed just a little higher.

Forging A President How the Wild West Created Teddy Roosevelt

Otto Warmbier Stirs a Sleeping Giant

I saw him when he was first arrested It did not look good. He was heading into hell. Otto Warmbier has died. He had so much brain damage the tissue in his brain had died from lack of blood flow. Heart attack or respiratory arrest the doctors said...after that they had no explanation. Teddy Roosevelt would have had a very simple answer for the North Koreans. Lock and load. He would have screamed from the rooftops to attack and would not have been satisfied until the first American soldiers hit the beach. Things were simpler in 1906.

Otto Warmbier took down a political poster and for that he was sentenced to fifteen years. This we know. It was their revenge. Now what? Remember the Maine. That started the war with with Spain. Teddy saw it as inevitable. The war had to be fought and settled. It was. Now we have the Koreans building an ICBM. Teddy would see this one way. The issue would have to be settled sooner or later. Might as well be sooner.

Something about a human face put on the nebulous war of words. Otto Warmbier is gone for taking a political poster down. But we know he was killed for much more. It was the only way to strike at a giant. Step on his toes, tweak his nose, spit in his eye. What does the giant do? When Teddy Roosevelt died Woodrow Wilson said, death had to take Roosevelt when he was sleeping, otherwise there would have been a fight...

Otto never woke up, but you never know when a sleeping giant might.

Forging A President How the Wild West Created Teddy Roosevelt

How Teddy Roosevelt Cheated Death in the Badlands

I believe in destiny. I didn't before I wrote Forging A President. The fact is Teddy Roosevelt should have been killed many times over in his time out West. Anybody else would have not cheated death in the many ways the dude from the East escaped harm. Take the time the Indians rode up on him when he was alone. There had been atrocities and Geronimo was still loose . Roosevelt gets down off his horse and holds off the Indians until he is able to escape. Why the Indians didn't overwhelm the small man in the buckskin coat with glasses is amazing.

Or when he was confronted by an armed man in a saloon who demanded he buy drinks for the house. Roosevelt is sitting behind a stove and ignores the man but he persists with his six shooters drawn. Roosevelt stands up and knock his out with a right and a left. Again this is unbelievable for a man  who came from a patrician family in the East. The man easily could have shot him and we would not be discussing Teddy Roosevelt. Or the time he was a on roundup and went over a cliff with his horse and fell into the Missouri river. The horse flipped over and missed him by a foot. Roosevelt just got back on and continued riding.

Or when he chased armed men down a frozen river who stole his boat. Anyone else would have let the boat go but Roosevelt chases the men three days, captures them, then takes them on a journey of seven days to reach the nearest sheriff.  Or when a Grizzly confronted him and Roosevelt squeezes off a perfect shot between the eyes. Or the time he falls off the edge of a mountain and crashes through a pine tree then gets up without a scratch.

One time around a campfire a cowboy told him one day he would not be running cattle and he would become President. Roosevelt just laughed, but that cowboy saw something even Teddy didn't understand....destiny.

Forging A President

Teddy Roosevelt's Neurasthenia

A man named Charles Beard came up with a theory in the late nineteenth century to account for the sudden increase in people becoming depressed. To Beard this coincided with the closing of the American West. In 1890 the frontier was declared closed but this had not stopped men like Teddy Roosevelt from going West. Teddy went West to get away from the depression  and heartache of losing his wife and mother on the same day. Charles Beard saw what Roosevelt did in a bigger context.

Beard believe people were getting sick because they were using the mind over the body. He attributed nervousness, impotence, cancer, heart attacks, depression to the fact people were now working in offices in the East. Beard believed we had fundamentally changed from a people who were out working under Gods light in the fresh air to a people huddled away in offices who ran from work to home only to return the next day. We had become a people who rarely exercised and were bound up in knots The real life Beard said was out West. He called this disorder... neurasthenia.

Buffalo Bills Wild West show was built around people who pined for the frontier. William Cody's show basically said the real men were out there on horses saving people from the Indians not working in cramped offices. Teddy Roosevelt and others took this to heart and found themselves in the wide open plains of the West. Today we know Beards neurasthenia is real. And we know that  being outside in  nature is good and sitting in offices is not a a great thing.

Teddy Roosevelt returned after three years in the West a different man. The magic elixir of the West had cured his neurasthenia. Then he set aside millions of acres for future generations who would deal with the same malady under a much shorter name....stress.


Forging A President How the Wild West Created Teddy Roosevelt

Teddy Roosevelt Faces Down a Gun Slinger in the Wild West

He was out looking for horses and it was getting dark. Teddy Roosevelt saw a town in the distance, small yellow lights peeking out in the Badlands. He went into town and looked for a room to bed down for the night. When he walked into a saloon he heard shots and saw a man with two pistols shooting up the bar. Teddy went and sat behind a wood stove to warm himself when the gunman saw him. What did he see? A man in a sombrero in a buckskin coat with thick glasses. A dude from the East. A target

Four eyes is going to buy the man bellowed. Teddy rubbed his hands and kept his head down. The man staggered over looking down at the skinny man behind the stove. I said four eyes is going to buy he shouted waving his guns. Teddy breathed deeply. Well if I have to I have to he said, standing up. Teddy cold cocked the man with a right hook and then a left. The gunman fell to the ground and Roosevelt sprung on him but he was out.

The people from the saloon hustled the man out and put him on a night train out of town. Teddy got his room and enjoyed the thanks of the town people. The dude from the East had just knocked out a badman and his reputation went a little higher that night. The Wild West had begun forging the man who would be President one day.

Forging A President How the Wild West Created Teddy Roosevelt

Doing Radio Interviews for a Book

You have only fifteen minutes maybe less except for the shows that let you roll thirty minutes. Those are the ones where you can stretch your legs and get into the meat of the book but for  many drive time shows you have less than ten minutes to get your point across and if you blow it there is no do  over because it is live. And so you wait for the phone to ring and set yourself up in a quiet room and tell everyone you are on the radio and please don't open that door or call out my name while I'm on the phone.

So you have your coffee and your notes and you have to be careful not to ramble and not speak too fast but you don't want to squander your time either. Getting a book down to sound bytes that will come across while someone is driving down the expressway is tricky. You have to hit the high points and your book may be three hundred pages but you can only get across a few moments that will stay with the listener  and hopefully get him to buy your book.

So it is one minute now. You have two phones ready in case one fails. The producers usually call right on the minute. And there it is. Hi, Is this William? Yes. Ok. Sixty seconds and you are on. So now you can hear the show. It is buzzing in your ear. A commercial. And then you are on. You will either do this or not. The show sounds distant and then it gets loud, there is a long hiss and now you are live. And we have author William Hazelgrove and his new book Forging A President to tell us about Teddy Roosevelt, William, welcome to the show!

You're on.

The Marc Bernier Show interview on Forging

Order Forging A President

The Day Your Book Comes Out: Forging A President

My book is out today. Forging A President How the Wild West Created Teddy Roosevelt is finally for sale. A release day is a funny thing. There has been a lot of anticipation, suspense, heartache, highs and lows, and then, then, the book comes out. And it does have a bit of anticlimax. There should be bells and shouting from the rooftops and of course that is why you do media. But in reality your book coming out is the end of a very long journey that began years before when you had the idea to put pen to paper or fingers to screen.

In the case of Forging A President I was intrigued by a biography of Teddy Roosevelt when I learned his mother and wife died on the same day and he went West for three years to the Dakota Territory or the Badlands. It is an amazing thing to think that this vigorous President had such tragedy at such a young age (26) and then went to the West to essentially become someone else. Add to this that he was a sickly asthmatic who literally had to fight for every breath prompting his father to once observe, "you have the mind but not the body Teddy, and without the body the mind cannot go far."

And from that moment I wanted to find out what happened to Teddy Roosevelt out West and how did it create this barrel chested persona who comes down to us through history. I do believe in destiny, anyone else would have been killed by the falling horses, the arrows from Indians, the six shooters pointed his way by bad men. And so you write the book, push the book, and then finally it comes out.  And like a child that grows up, the best you can do is give your book a good push... and let it go.

Forging A President How the Wild West Created Teddy Roosevelt

The Wild West Is Vanishing From the Classroom

I gave a speech the other day on Forging A President How the Wild West Created Teddy Roosevelt at a school and I asked the students what they knew about the Wild West.  This was a middle school of eighth graders and they stared at me blankly. So I changed it a little. What do you know about the West? Blank stares. Then it occurred to me that my knowledge of the West had come down to me through movies and legend. No one sat me down and told me about the West. So for these eighth graders, the Wild West does not exist. Not even in legend.

It is a part of our history yet it is not taught the same way World War II or World War I is taught. The Wild West really only existed a very short time. From 1865 to 1890. Frederick Remington declared the West closed ten years before the beginning of the Twentieth Century and after the short rein of Billy the Kid and the James Brothers, Geronimo, Custer, it all came to an abrupt end. The car would take care of any remnants of the great plains horse culture.

And the Wild West was given to me and others through movies and television. But Westerns pretty much disappeared from the big screen in the seventies and John Wayne and company hung up their spurs. So kids today will not know about the West. They will not have that cultural marker. So after I asked the fourteen year olds about the West and I realized they did not know anything about it,  I put my book down and pulled up my chair, and said...

Let me tell you about a place called the Wild West.

Forging a President How the Wild West Created Teddy Roosevelt

The Great Adventures of Winston and Teddy

It was a heroic age. Men believed exploration of the South Pole was heroic. They believed freezing to death was heroic. They believed fighting in wars was heroic. The awful carnage of the twentieth century had yet to prove the utter futilty of war. Winston Churchill and Teddy Roosevelt grew up in the heroic age and both men set out to prove themselves at a very young age.

Teddy lost his mother and wife the same day and went West for three years. He deliberately put himself in harms way and was nearly killed by a Grizzly Bear, shot by an armed man in a saloon, scalped by four Indians, and trampled by stampeding cattle. He was out to find the myth of the West and to that end he threw himself into one dangerous situation after another demanding that life give him back adventure and prove himself to himself.

Winston Churchill was not much different. He went off to the Boer War hoping to find adventure and to prove himself as a solider. What happened was he ended up a journalist but this didn't stop him from rescuing a train under attack and then getting captured by the Boers. Churchill believed he would survive when all around him were dying. He believed he was destined for greater things and that would see him through.

Both men demanded adventure from life and carried a sense of their own destiny. When one reads about Teddy out West or Winston in the Boer War in Africa you come away with a belief in destiny. How else can we explain survival against all odds.

Forging A President How the Wild West Created Teddy Roosevelt

Why Publishers Drop Authors

It's simple. The authors book don't sell. It used to be publishers would bring authors along. This ended about thirty years ago if not more. Now if you do not sell then you don't get another book contract. You are simply done with that publisher. The author may kill him or herself for the book only to be unceremoniously dropped. The author then has to find another home but this is easier said than done.

So that leaves marketing. If you dont' market then you will surely be dropped. Hats off to the authors whose books magically sell without doing a thing. But for  the rest of us mortals people need to be informed a book has just been published. It is a reality of the internet age that our attention spans have grown shorter with a plethora of entertainment vying for our nanosecond focus. But that doesn't mean you can throw up your hands.

Once upon a time in a land far away authors like Fitzgerald and Hemingway sipped martinis and absinthe on the West Bank while waiting for their royalty checks. This then is the literary fantasy but then Fitzgerald at the time of his death was barely selling and Hemingway was a master at media manipulation. So if you look at it that way, maybe the more things change, the more they stay the same.

Madam President

We Could Sure Use A Teddy Roosevelt Today

We could sure use Teddy Roosevelt about now. Think of a man who just lost his wife and child and who heads West to remake himself. He is then plunged into the Badlands and ends up facing down a badman in a saloon who calls him four eyes and demands he buy him a drink. Teddy Roosevelt is small and just there from New York and yet he stands up and knocks out the man cold.

Or when he goes to cross a river that is overflowing with ice and moving swiftly. Everyone tells him not to do it but he takes his horse and tries to cross it anyway and ends up being knocked off his horse and managing to cross the river anyway and not freeze to death. Or when he lassos another man and saves him from a swiftly moving river and hauls him to the shore.

Or when he goes after three  men who have stolen from him and follows them all across the Badlands and then captures them and takes them all the way back to the sheriff. Or when he faces down five Indians by himself and manages to hold them off and escape. What is it? Courage. Grit. Destiny. Fortitude. Morality. Take your pick.  But Teddy Roosevelt embodied the man who did what he believed was right regardless of the cost.

We could sure use a Teddy Roosevelt now.

Forging a President How the Wild West Created Teddy Roosevelt

How the Wild West Remade Teddy Roosevelt

In 1890, the superintendent of the U.S. Census Bureau declared the American frontier finally closed. Frederick Jackson Turner affirmed this and claimed that the frontier experience, more than any other, had shaped America’s character; it had given the pioneer “a new field of opportunity, a gate of escape from the bondage of the past.” Teddy Roosevelt went to the Badlands of the Dakotas at the tail end of the Wild West in 1883 to recover from the death of his wife and his mother.  The asthmatic with thick spectacles who stepped off the train in the town of Little Missouri bore little resemblance to the man who would return years later thick of chest and ready to tackle the world. He came back as the Teddy Roosevelt we now recognize.

The West remade Roosevelt, just as it had remade the country. Basically lawless and churchless, the West offered freedom unbounded if you were tough enough to take it. As he later wrote, “For cowboy work there is no need of special traits and special training, and young Easterners should be sure of themselves before trying it: the struggle for existence is very keen in the far West, and it is no place for men who lack the ruder, coarser virtues and physical qualities. . . . ”This held great appeal for young Roosevelt, who would find the essence of America in the frozen and baking terrain of the Badlands. Here the character of America presented itself to Roosevelt, and he essentially became that character. The West delivered this one-hundred-and-twenty-five-pound man, this “dude,” a great adventure: he faced down gunmen, grizzly bears, thieves, rustlers, unscrupulous ranchers, ruthless outlaws, and Indians. He had the breath knocked out of him by overturned horses, cracked a
rib, dislocated a shoulder, and nearly froze to death more than once, getting lost in the hell that is the Badlands—all while fighting chronic asthma and ignoring a physician’s admonition to protect his weak heart and lead the sedentary life of a recluse.

To recover from the twin blows of losing both his mother and his wife on the same day, and in his quest to find his way again, Theodore Roosevelt would push himself to the point where his broken heart would either heal or stop forever. The West was just the place for such a contest.

Forging A President How the Wild West Created Teddy Roosevelt

Teddy Roosevelt Facing Down a Grizzly Bear

Roosevelt and Merrifield spent the long night with fingers on their rifle triggers, but the bear did not come back. The next morning Merrifield picked up the bear’s trail over the pine needles and moss and led them through the woods. The hunters breathed in the cold, clean scent of pine needles as they crept forward. Roosevelt was following Merrifield “when in the middle of the thicket we crossed a breastwork of fallen logs, and Merrifield, who was leading, passed by the upright stem of a great pine,” Roosevelt wrote later.6 “As soon as he was by it, he sank suddenly on one knee, turning half around, his face fairly aflame with excitement; and as I strode past him, with my rifle at the ready, there, not ten steps off, was the great bear, slowly rising from his bed among the young spruces.”

 To Merrifield’s surprise, Roosevelt walked past him briskly. The nine-foot, twelve-hundred-pound grizzly had already heard them and was back on his haunches, baring his needle-sharp teeth. “He had heard us but apparently hardly knew exactly where or what we were,” Roosevelt continued, “for he reared up on his haunches sideways to us, then he saw us and dropped down again on all fours, the shaggy hair on his neck and shoulders seeming to bristle as he turned toward us. As he sank down to his forefeet, I had raised the rifle.”8 Roosevelt’s heart was pounding and his mouth was dry as he faced down the fiercest creature in the West. He lifted his rifle, feeling his heart, telling himself that this was the moment; this was where the man confronted himself.

If he missed, he would be dead. Roosevelt aimed between the fierce gleaming eyes and fired. “Doubtless my face was pretty white,” he later wrote his sister, “but the blue barrel was as steady as a rock as I glanced along it until I could see the top of the bead fairly between his two sinister-looking eyes . . . ”

Forging A President How the Wild West Created Teddy Roosevelt

Teddy Roosevelt's First Time West

Commander Gorringe had decided at the last minute not to go, and this left Teddy Roosevelt to hunt buffalo alone.  When he switched to the St. Paul Express for the twenty-four-hundred mile journey, Roosevelt wired his mother, Mittie, that he felt “like a fighting cock again” as he left the United States for the Dakota Territory for the first time.

The darkness masked the geological malformations of the Badlands passing by his window, with its glowing lignite fires and ancient waters that had carved stone, blasted gullies, and formed rivers. Then Roosevelt was blinking in the darkness of two a.m. after the warmth of the Pullman car—a dapper young man who stepped off the train directly into the wet sagebrush of Little Missouri in the Dakota Territory. The train rolled away, leaving white smoke and the train whistle’s lament. Roosevelt breathed heavily, his asthmatic wheeze not unlike the huffing steam locomotive fading into the night. His new boots were stiff, his hat tight, his collar itchy. The new clothes he had bought in New York felt all wrong, but they were the latest in Western outdoor apparel.

There was no sound save for the yips of coyotes out in the darkness beyond the town. The town wasn’t much. Little Missouri had come of age rapidly when the railroad arrived and would die just as quickly. Such was the boom and bust of railroad towns in the West. Roosevelt stared at a dilapidated sign reading “PYRAMID PARK HOTEL,” behind which slouched a recently painted white structure leaning toward the street. Roosevelt hoisted his Sharps rifle and duffel bag and began to walk in the cool darkness. A coyote howled in the distance again; then he heard the thin musical note of running water. Roosevelt saw moonlight glimmering on the Little Missouri River, whose waters whispered softly in the night. The train had since faded into the darkness, heading for the heart of the Badlands. Teddy Roosevelt was in the middle of nowhere with a recommendation to see a man who might be able to help him.

Forging A President How the Wild West Created Teddy Roosevelt

The Day Teddy Roosevelt's Wife and Mother Died

                                                                             
Theodore Roosevelt clutched the two telegrams, shifting uncomfortably in the train—leaning forward, tapping his foot, trying to hurry on the frustratingly slow steam engine. Roosevelt was a man with a beautiful wife, a new baby, a brilliant political career, and the patronage and wealth of an aristocratic family behind him. Now, all this seemed in danger. The young assemblyman from Albany was making his way 145 miles south to Manhattan, where his wife and his mother both lay dying. On a clear day the train ride from Albany to Manhattan took five hours, but a heavy fog had been hovering over New York for days, seeming to portend what lay ahead for him. Teddy Roosevelt tapped his foot impatiently and stared at the first telegram. You have a baby girl. Congratulations. The second telegram told a much different story. Come at once. Mother and Alice gravely ill. The light went out for Roosevelt that day as he ran for the train. The man who valued action above all else could now do nothing but wait to be delivered to destiny.

Roosevelt stared out the window. The fog reminded him of when he was a boy and he would sleep sitting straight up because his asthma squeezed his small chest. On such nights, his father would take him out in his carriage. They would ride like the wind through the streets of New York. “Open your mouth Teddy! Open your mouth!” his father instructed. “Let the air in!” And, as in a primitive oxygen ventilator, he would open his mouth and feel the cool air go down his throat and inflate his lungs. The image of a man frantically driving a black, rain-slicked carriage through the night streets of New York, and a boy hanging off the side with his mouth open to the heavens—it was all his father could do, after walking up and down the hallway with him all night. The rich man’s son could get no air, and his father could only admonish the boy to open his mouth while he sped the horses savagely along. “Faster! Faster! For my son must breathe!” 

Now the train was pulling into Grand Central Station. The young dandy ran for his home in a fog so thick he could only grope his way toward 57th Street, where the lordly Roosevelt mansion commanded the street. Finally, he ran up the stairs to where his young wife, Alice, lay in bed. She was dying of Bright’s disease, an affliction of the kidneys causing fever, vomiting, terrible back pain, and bloody urine. They had just married the year before, but now the love of his life was dying in his arms. 

Forging A President How the Wild West Created Teddy Roosevelt

Teddy Roosevelt Was Shot in the Chest...and just kept on talking

Teddy Roosevelt had just finished dinner at the Gilpatrick Hotel in Milwaukee and was walking to his car—he was to give a speech in the Milwaukee Auditorium. The election of 1912 had been vitriolic with Roosevelt bolting the Republican Party and forming his own third party, the Bull Moose Party. Roosevelt was sure he could beat the incumbent William Howard Taft and the Democratic candidate, the former Princeton President, Woodrow Wilson. He reveled in giving speeches and attacking Taft as incompetent, and Wilson as an egghead who had the demeanor of a “druggist.” He now planned to deliver another rousing speech and had the fifty-page manuscript stuffed in his coat pocket, folded twice behind his steel glasses case.

John Schrank, a thirty-six-year-old psychotic and former New York saloonkeeper, approached Theodore Roosevelt. Schrank believed that deceased President McKinley had spoken to him in his dreams, proclaiming that no man should run for a third term. Schrank had bought a fourteen-dollar Colt .38 and fifty-five cents worth of bullets, and had
been following Roosevelt through New Orleans, Atlanta, Charleston, and Tennessee, ever since the dead McKinley had risen in his coffin and pointed to him and said, “Avenge my death.” While waiting to shoot Roosevelt in Milwaukee, he had passed the time drinking beer in a local bar and smoking Jack Pot cigars. Now his opportunity came. Roosevelt had just sat down in an open car in front of the hotel. Schrank approached him and Roosevelt rose to shake his hand when the assassin raised the .38 caliber pistol and fired. Roosevelt fell back into the car as the bullet entered his chest after piercing the steel glasses case and the folded manuscript pages of his speech. The bullet entered under his right nipple and lodged in his ribs.

The ex-President immediately took out a handkerchief and dabbed his mouth to see if his lungs had been hit. He then proclaimed he wouldn’t go to the hospital, but would deliver his scheduled speech. Dr. Terrell, his physician, insisted he go to the hospital. Roosevelt would have none of it. “You get me to that speech. It may be the last one I shall deliver, but I am going to deliver this one!” Theodore Roosevelt went to the auditorium and spoke for more than ninety minutes while bleeding under his coat—thundering to the crowd the immortal line, “It takes more than a bullet to stop a bull moose!”1 The crowd loved it.

And when Roosevelt went to the hospital, the doctors opted to leave the bullet lodged in his chest. He sent a telegram to his wife Edith, informing her that he was not nearly as badly hurt as he had been falling from a horse. He boarded a train for a Chicago hospital and changed into a clean shirt and asked for a hot shave. He hummed as he shaved and then climbed into the train compartment bed and fell asleep, sleeping like a child. In the press, people expressed astonishment that a man who had been shot at point-blank range could give a speech for an hour and a half. But they truly expected no less from Teddy Roosevelt. The sickly, asthmatic son of a rich man in Manhattan was born in the East; the Bull Moose who spoke for an hour and a half with a .38 caliber bullet lodged in his chest, he was born in the West.

Forging A President How the Wild West Created Teddy Roosevelt