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What Lincoln’s Pockets Held When he Died and Other Presidential Oddities

Khalid Elhassan July 15, 2021 36 min

Secret Service agents bust counterfeiters in 1879. United States Secret Service

John Flammang Schrank, who tried to assassinate former president Theodore Roosevelt — John Flammang Schrank in police custody. Fine Art America

15. The Former President Who Saved the Life of His Would-Be Assassin

Teddy Roosevelt assured his Milwaukee Auditorium audience: “I give you my word, I do not care a rap about being shot; not a rap“. He then delivered a fiery speech that lasted for ninety minutes. A ninety-minute fiery speech, even as he had a bullet hole in his chest. The assassination had been attempted at 8 PM, as the former president got into an open-air car outside his hotel, and waved his hat at the crowd. Just then, the darkness was lit up by a flash from a .38 Colt revolver.

An aide grappled with the would-be assassin and prevented him from firing another shot, before the crowd joined in. The culprit was a nutjob Bavarian immigrant named John Flammang Schrank. He would have been lynched on the spot if Roosevelt had not intervened, and ordered: “Don’t hurt him. Bring him here. I want to see him. Roosevelt then asked Schrank “What did you do it for?” When Schrank said nothing, Teddy Roosevelt told the crowd to turn him over to the police.

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.