← Back to the front page

Tough Teddy and Old Hickory: America’s Most Badass Presidents

Khalid Elhassan December 4, 2024 14 min

Tough - An 1828 woodcut of the Andrew Jackson vs Charles Dickinson duel — An 1828 woodcut of the Andrew Jackson vs Charles Dickinson duel. Wikimedia

5. When Teddy Roosevelt Got Shot

Teddy Roosevelt campaigning in 1912. Historic Ipswich

Many of us get queasy or even faint at the sight of blood if we nick ourselves shaving, or suffer a paper cut in the office. Not so Teddy Roosevelt, who once gave a speech while bleeding from the chest, where he’d just gotten shot. It began in 1912, when TR came to regret his decision to walk away from the presidency in 1908. So he returned to the campaign trail, and ran for president as candidate of the Bull Moose Party. That October 14^th, he made his way to a podium at the Milwaukee Auditorium, and opened with the unremarkable statement “Friends, I shall ask you to be as quiet as possible“. Next, however, he delivered one of the most remarkable lines ever uttered on the stump: “I don’t know whether you fully understand that I have been shot“.

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.