Shot in the Chest, He Spoke for 90 MINUTES

In 1912, Teddy Roosevelt was shot in the chest. Then he gave his speech anyway.

Roosevelt was campaigning for a third term in Milwaukee when a man stepped from the crowd and fired a revolver point-blank into his chest.

The bullet should have been fatal. But first it tore through a steel glasses case and a folded fifty-page speech in his coat pocket. Roosevelt reasoned that since he was not coughing blood, the wound had not reached his lungs.

So he refused the hospital and went to the stage. He held up the bloodied, bullet-torn pages and told the crowd, it takes more than that to kill a Bull Moose. Then he spoke for roughly ninety minutes.

Only afterward did he let doctors examine him. The bullet was lodged against his ribs, and they decided it was safer to leave it. He carried it for the rest of his life.

Follow The History Vault for the stories they didn't teach you.