Roosevelt Dies: Progressive Giant Passes at Sixty

Theodore Roosevelt died in his sleep on January 6, 1919. His son Archie cabled the other brothers with three words: "The old lion is dead." Roosevelt was 60 and had never fully recovered from an expedition to the Amazon in 1913-14 that nearly killed him. The River of Doubt expedition, as it was called, involved mapping an unmapped tributary of the Amazon. Roosevelt contracted malaria, suffered a severe leg infection, and lost 55 pounds. At one point he told his companions to leave him behind. They refused. He survived but his health never returned to what it had been. The bullet from the 1912 assassination attempt was still in his chest when he died. He had been shot by John Schrank while campaigning for a third-party presidential run in Milwaukee. The bullet passed through his steel eyeglass case and a folded 50-page speech before lodging near his rib. Roosevelt delivered the 84-minute speech anyway, telling the audience "it takes more than that to kill a Bull Moose." Surgeons decided removing the bullet was more dangerous than leaving it, so it stayed for the remaining seven years of his life. He had been the youngest president in American history, taking office at 42 after McKinley's assassination in 1901. He built the Panama Canal, broke up monopolies, established the national park system, and won the Nobel Peace Prize for mediating the end of the Russo-Japanese War. His final years were marked by grief over the death of his son Quentin, a pilot killed in France in July 1918. Roosevelt never recovered from the loss. He died less than six months later.