Page of Theodore Roosevelt speech hit by bullet in 1912 assassination attempt uncovered

The first page of a thick manuscript that helped slow a bullet and save the life of Theodore Roosevelt during a 1912 assassination attempt has been uncovered by a presidential historian in Pennsylvania.Signed by the 26th president, who at the time was seeking another term in the White House after leaving office almost four years earlier, the document from Roosevelt was found in the possession of a private collector and has not been seen in more than a century.It formed part of a lengthy, typewritten speech that Roosevelt folded in two and tucked in his breast pocket at a campaign event in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, on 14 October that year. It bears two holes from where a bullet tore through before striking his metal spectacles case.Wounded, but not mortally so, a bleeding Roosevelt told the crowd he had been shot, then proceeded to deliver his speech. He slumped down once finished and announced: “OK, I’m ready for the doctor,” historian Nathan Raab, of the Raab Collection, said.“Can you imagine that happening today?” Raab remarked. “No. The president would be whisked away, and rightfully so. But, in this case, I’m not sure they thought: ‘Oh, maybe there’s a second person’, or they figured: ‘OK, well, we got the guy.’”Raab said he was aware of the existence of only two other pages from Roosevelt’s speech from that day still in existence – but he believes this one, which he values at $150,000, is more significant for two reasons.It is the introductory page of the manuscript and is the only one known to have Roosevelt’s handwriting on it. The handwriting is in the form of the inscription: “This is one of the manuscript sheets through which the bullet went at Milwaukee. TR.”The manuscript appears in a 1912 photograph, housed by the Library of Congress, held by Elbert Martin, Roosevelt’s stenographer and acting bodyguard who tackled the gunman and prevented him firing a second shot.In that historic black and white image, and in a closeup photograph of the document released by the Raab Collection, the bullet holes are prominent.Raab believes Roosevelt wrote on the page shortly after the assassination attempt and gave it to a friend, who years later handed it on to a family in New York “in whose collection it has remained for the better part of 75 or so years”.Raab said the document was clearly “quite personal and important to Roosevelt himself, the kind of important material that one doesn’t see routinely pop up on the market”.He added: “Any time you see something that no one else has ever seen before, something that’s super important, it’s pretty exciting. It’s a reminder that important stuff is still out there to discover.”Roosevelt, a Republican who assumed the presidency in 1901 upon the assassination of William McKinley, won the 1904 election but did not run for re-election four years later.He ran as a third-party candidate in 1912. But both he and Republican incumbent William Taft were trounced by Democrat Woodrow Wilson, less than a month after Roosevelt was shot in Milwaukee.Roosevelt died in January 1919 aged 60, with the bullet fired by John Schrank, a German-American tavern owner with a history of mental illness, still in his chest.Raab has previously uncovered multiple presidential artifacts thought lost or destroyed, including rare letters from George Washington and Thomas Jefferson. He said Roosevelt’s speech from the day of an attempted assassination is particularly poignant.“The final speech differs from the prepared one because he had just been shot,” he said.“He goes at length into the motivations of the person that shot him, talks about political violence, of relevance to today, of course, in a world where political violence is very much in the news and decried by both sides of the aisle.“It’s a reminder that our country has faced difficult times where there was political violence in previous iterations, and this one fortunately turned out well.”