Colonel Roosevelt (57 page)

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 and a temperature of 99.2°F. “No operation to remove bullet is indicated at the present time. Condition hopeful, but wound so important as to demand absolute rest for a number of days.” The chief risk, since the pleura was intact, was of infection, if not poisoning, since nobody could be sure if Schrank’s bullet (a floating cockroach of black ink in
X-ray reproductions) had not been laced.

By 1
P
.
M
., Room 308 of Mercy Hospital was so mobbed with personal and political visitors, oblivious of the pain it cost Roosevelt to talk, that Murphy issued another bulletin emphasizing that the wound was “serious,” and that his patient needed complete quiet to recover.
The surgeon was closemouthed about his decision not to probe for the bullet, but three consulting doctors concurred in a later statement that sent encouraging signals around the country:

Perhaps the best news for the patient was that his wife, undeterred by his repeated assurances that he had suffered worse accidents while riding, was on her way to see him and stand guard over his bed.

DR. MURPHY’S POINTED
reference to Roosevelt’s abstemiousness spoke to one of the thousands of telegrams pouring into the LaSalle Hotel headquarters of the Progressive Party.
It was from the supporter in Detroit whom O. K.
Davis had authorized to start a libel suit against George Newett, of the Ishpeming
Iron Ore
. He assumed that the Colonel still wished to proceed with the case. “I have retained Judge James H. Pound, one of the best men in Michigan, for such purposes, to represent him.”

Among the other telegrams was one from William Howard Taft: “I am greatly shocked to hear of the outrageous and deplorable assault made upon you.” Woodrow Wilson also wired a message of sympathy. He announced that he would suspend his campaign, bar a few unavoidable engagements, until Roosevelt was well again. “My thought is constantly of that gallant gentleman lying in the hospital at Chicago.”
Similar messages came in from Robert La Follette and William Jennings Bryan. A number of European crowned heads—some of whom had their own reasons to fear assassination attempts—sent get-well cablegrams. Vincent Curtis Baldwin of Chicago wrote enclosing a campaign donation of ten dollars that he said he had made selling flowers. “For I want you to be our President. If I was a man I’d help you, and work hard for you, and tell people how good you are, but I am only 10 years old.”

AMONG THE MILLIONS
of people wondering what effect the attack on Roosevelt would have on the election was Milwaukee’s district attorney, charged with the prosecution of John F. Schrank.
He informed the judge presiding at the arraignment that his prisoner would plead guilty, and asked for a postponement of trial proceedings until mid-November, so that politics would not interfere with justice. His request was approved. Senator Dixon and his committee gave public thanks for the Colonel’s deliverance, but had to recognize, if only in some furtive recess of the heart, that Schrank had done the Progressive Party an enormous favor. All the hate that various political factions held for Roosevelt was subsumed in a surge of protective admiration. Mercy Hospital’s bulletins indicated a slow but steady recovery, with no sepsis and no aftereffect of shock. The bullet in his ribs was apparently sterile, and he was resigned to carrying it for the rest of his days.

After a week in the hospital he was well enough to return to Sagamore Hill for his fifty-fourth birthday on 27 October. His wound was still open and his chest swollen with edema, but he decided that he needed to make another speech as soon as possible. To remain silent through the election would signal that he had been felled politically as well as physically. Voters needed to be assured that he was recovering, and reminded that Theodore Roosevelt was, surprisingly enough, the youngest of the four candidates now running. Debs was about to turn fifty-seven; Wilson would soon be fifty-six; Taft had just turned fifty-five.

He announced that he would address a mass meeting at Madison Square
Garden on the thirtieth. “
I am in fine shape now,” he wrote his sister Bamie, while admitting to William Flinn that he might need pharmaceutical help.

HIRAM JOHNSON
was warming up the crowd of sixteen thousand at the Garden when a sound of distant cheering betokened Roosevelt’s approach. It grew louder, and eventually drowned out Johnson’s words. A sudden influx of newcomers filled the main entrance. For a moment or two the man they were escorting was invisible, but when he appeared on the prow of the platform, looking out over the sea of heads like a figurehead breasting foam, the uproar surged to hysterical levels. Dowagers climbed onto their chairs and screamed. Groups of men competed with one another to improvise noises even more raucous than the moose calls heard in the Chicago Coliseum in August. Heels drummed on the auditorium floor. Time and again, “Onward, Christian Soldiers” rose above the din.

As far as reporters could tell, there was nothing orchestrated about the demonstration. Roosevelt had to wait for more than forty minutes, looking at first amused, then tired, then impatient, as if his First Amendment rights were being abused. He got order at last by banging on the flag-draped speaker’s table. Alert eyes noticed that he did so with his left hand. His face was ruddy, and when he began to speak, his voice easily filled the vast room. But there were no smacks of fist into palm. Occasionally he tried to raise his right arm, then winced and dropped it.

“Friends, perhaps once in a generation, perhaps not so often—” The crowd began roaring again. Roosevelt lost his temper and yelled, “
Quiet, down there!” A hush ensued.

“
—Perhaps not so often, there comes a chance for the people of a country to play their part wisely and fearlessly in some great battle of the age-long warfare for human rights.”

This was approximately his 150th formal address of the campaign, and he had nothing new to say about Progressivism, much less about himself. As he spoke on, reporters were struck by the absence of the rancor he had often shown against Taft and Wilson on the stump. He mentioned neither by name, and seemed content to talk vaguely, yet feelingly, about the humanitarianism of his Party. “The doctrines we preach reach back to the Golden Rule and the Sermon on the Mount. They reach back to the commandments delivered at Sinai. All that we are doing is to apply those doctrines in the shape necessary to make them available for meeting the living issues of our own day.”

ON TUESDAY
, 5 November, a pall of privacy descended on Sagamore Hill for the first time in many months. Roosevelt was driven down to Oyster Bay at
noon, and voted in the firehouse. After lunch, he and Edith went for a long walk in the woods. George Perkins arrived on the 4:05 train from New York, visited briefly, and hurried back to the station without saying anything to reporters.

At seven the Colonel dressed for dinner as usual, and dined with his wife and a cousin, Laura Roosevelt. Most of the younger family members were at the Progressive headquarters in the city, watching returns come in over the wires. Alice was in Cincinnati, miserably pessimistic, her marriage as tenuous as Nick Longworth’s chances of another term in Congress.

The phone call Roosevelt was bracing for came at about eleven o’clock. Two hundred miles away, the bells of Princeton, New Jersey, began to peal, while those of Oyster Bay remained silent. Presently a servant came out of Sagamore Hill and hurried off with a telegram to Woodrow Wilson:

Just before midnight the Colonel received reporters in his study. He was still in black tie. A log fire burned softly behind him.

“
Like all other good citizens,” he said, “I accept the result with good humor and contentment.”