He also got shot in the chest at the beginning of a speech, calmed everybody down and told the crowd to give the assassin to the police and make sure nobody hurt him, and then spoke for 50 minutes before he left to get medical care.
He said later that because he wasn’t coughing blood, he was confident the bullet hadn’t pierced his lung, so he could go for a while before needing it looked at.
Before the invention of TV stupefied everybody, America was fuckin WILD.
I forget which president it was, but I remember that one of them would frequently insist on bathing in the Potomac.
America was so wild that our West was called The Wild West. There were like 12 rules in the United States for a hundred years. Beyond that you could do whatever the fuck you wanted. I'm sure it was fraught with peril, and subject to multiple attacks from all sides, but it probably felt free as fuck. You needed to be strong to survive. There were no safety signs for those without a sense of self-preservation.
Yeah given how warped our understanding of the old west is from movies and TV I'm gonna bet most of what we think we know is bullshit and it was actually a lot more chill since people liked living. A lot like how if you check TV you'll see all sorts of stories on murder because those are prominent events. You'll see the same in history books and wiki articles. Years and years of nothing special being recorded, everyone being chill, but check out this Sheriff who did a backflip off a horse and shot three people in the dick in 1762.
More presidents should host events where citizens can punch them.
Can you imagine any of the current geriatrics taking anything more than a 6th grader’s punch?
Teddy is a real dichotomy to me. When I was much younger, living outside the US, i found him to be the worst that Americans represented: arrogant, bullish, and full of sovereign ignorance. Then going through college and beyond, living states side, I discovered his championship of nature and his passion for reading and education. Now a days, I can recognize him as an imperfect man trying to do the best he thought at the time. Kinda like a grumpy granddad with some ideas way ahead of his time.
