Bull Moose Party | Victor Takacs

Republican President Theodore Roosevelt served as vice president under President William McKinley. Approximately 8 months after McKinley was inaugurated to a second term as president, he was shot. He lived for 8 days but eventually succumbed to infection and died. Nearly a full presidential term, Roosevelt served the rest of McKinley’s years. He was reelected in 1904, but after being in the White House for over 7 years, he decided not to seek a second term of his own. Instead he enthusiastically endorsed his friend William Howard Taft for the Republican nomination for President of the United States in 1908. Taft not only got the party’s nomination but was also ultimately elected president. Extremely unsatisfied with Taft’s job performance, Roosevelt decided to run for president again. His attempt to pull Republican support for the incumbent Taft in his direction failed.

Roosevelt would eventually come to grips with the fact that Taft would be the Republican nominee, and that, he knew he could not change. In response, Roosevelt founded the Progressive or Bull Moose Party and declared his candidacy for president under the banner of said party. The campaign was brutal, as Taft and Roosevelt verbally assaulted one another in speeches they delivered across the nation. In the end, Roosevelt and Taft would split the Republican vote, which would allow the democrat, Woodrow Wilson to win the presidency. What was the origin of the name for the new Bull Moose Party you ask? In one of his earliest speeches of the campaign, Roosevelt mentioned that he felt as strong as a bull moose, and the name stuck.

HUNTER SHOOTS BULL MOOSE

On October 14, 1912, former President Theodore Roosevelt arrived in Milwaukee, Wisconsin to deliver a speech as part of his campaign as the nominee of the new Bull Moose Party to be elected for a third term as president of the United States of America. President Roosevelt walked out of the Hotel Gilpatrick in an effort to make his way over to the Milwaukee Auditorium to deliver his speech to his supporters, but his journey was immediately cut short. John Schrank approached the President and fired a shot at him, striking him in the chest. President Roosevelt stopped, coughed in his hand, and after realizing there was no blood in his spit, he continued his walk toward the auditorium. You see, Teddy Roosevelt had his 50 page speech and his eyeglasses case in his front breast pocket. It just so happened that the bullet struck the manuscript and the glasses case, preventing any real bodily harm to the President. He arrived at the Milwaukee auditorium and delivered an 84 minute speech like nothing ever happened, the epitome of the endurance of the Bull Moose Party.

Here’s the opening to Roosevelt’s speech:

“Friends, I shall ask you to be as quiet as possible. I don’t know whether you fully understand that I have just been shot; but it takes more than that to kill a Bull Moose. But fortunately I had my manuscript, so you see I was going to make a long speech, and there is a bullet — there is where the bullet went through — and it probably saved me from it going into my heart. The bullet is in me now, so that I cannot make a very long speech, but I will try my best.”

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Let me get this straight. The bullet fired out of the .38 caliber revolver was slowed down enough to prevent legitimate bodily harm by some paper and a glasses case? Wow, what a joke. What a pipsqueak of a gun. The son of a bitch might as well have used a slingshot. At this point, from that standpoint, I have to say the gun used in this assassination attempt was the shittiest gun ever assembled. I can imagine Schrank talking to his friends now, “I shot the President but my gun was so shitty that the bullet was stopped by some folded up paper.” Damn the luck. I really have to think that a sucker punch would have been much more effective. And how about Ol Teddy taking one to the chest and then proceeding to deliver an 84 minute speech? What an alpha move.

Jordan flu game type shit right there. Wasn’t Jordan a card carrying member of the Bull Moose Party? The press conference after the speech had to have been electric. “Mr. President, John Tucker from the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, how were you able to deliver an 84 minute speech after being shot in the chest?” The President responds, “Shot?! I thought that was a mosquito bite!” LOL. Teddy Roosevelt referring to this guy’s gun as a tiny insect is an all-time burn. This is such a wild story; I knew that it was absolutely necessary that I find footage of this preposterous assassination attempt and the puny gun used. I searched high and low and it took forever but I finally found the footage we all need to see. The question here is whether or not the gun sucked or as the nominee of the big and strong Progressive or Bull Moose Party, could it be that Teddy was immortal?