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So Help Me God
What all fifty-four inaugural addresses, taken as one long book, tell us about American history
I. Exordium
By tradition, January 20 is the feast day of Saint Fabian, a third-century pope who was appointed in a most unusual way. Before 236, he was a simple layperson, leading an utterly obscure life, even by third-century standards. That year, Fabian came to Rome and found himself unexpectedly in the middle of a crowd choosing the successor to Pope Anteros, recently deceased. At a dramatic point in the proceedings, according to the chronicler Eusebius, a dove flew down from the ceiling and landed on Fabian’s head, in “clear imitation of the descent of the Holy Spirit in the form of a dove upon the Savior.” The rest of the story can be divined without too much difficulty: within moments, Fabian found himself nominated, elected, and handed the keys to the papacy. Surprisingly, he made quite a good pope.
Was the same invisible hand guiding Congress when in 1933 it switched the date of the presidential inauguration to Saint Fabian’s Day? It makes a certain cosmic sense, though one could argue that it made just as much sense to stick with the date on which our presidents were previously inaugurated—March 4. Not only was it enshrined in the Constitution (there are only twenty-five amendments to the Constitution, and two of them, the twelfth and twentieth, treat the date of the inaugural); it was also, by a stroke of founding genius, the perfect date for a rousing speech about the future (march forth!). But since 1937, when the new plan went into effect, we have been held to a tighter schedule, with the result that our quadrennial calendar begins in the short days of late January—hardly the best time to sing a song of renewal.
That does not appear to have dimmed our interest in the ceremony, however. Inaugurals happen rarely enough to be genuinely arresting spectacles. Once every four years, between the Olympics and the World Cup, we embrace the rituals that launch a new presidentiad—Whitman’s word. The parades, the seating charts, the jets streaking overhead, the swearing-in ceremony—and then, of course, the inaugural address, when the most powerful man in the world elucidates his vision for the next four years of history. What’s not to love?
II. Exposition
But it’s an odd moment, really. Very few states, with the possible exception of the Vatican, place such a high premium on the rituals attending the transfer of power. These elaborate ceremonies tease out a tension that is as present in the twenty-first century as it was in the eighteenth, when the United States was still an iffy proposition. Simply put, it is difficult to conduct a democracy without resorting to monarchical role models. The inauguration is of course a coronation, drawing heavily on medieval antecedents. There are traveling delegations from across the realm, elaborate hierarchies and protocols, balls, minstrels, horses, equerries—a veritable Renaissance Faire!
Yet it cannot be a coronation, so it is different. The new leader wears no crown (hats have been optional since 1960, when John F. Kennedy held a silk top hat but did not wear it). His tenure begins not with a religious ceremony symbolizing the church’s approval, but with the swearing of a legal oath, thirty-five words written very specifically into the Constitution—along with the four words ad-libbed by George Washington in 1789, “so help me God.” The ceremony that “makes a president” lasts only about six minutes, as the journalist Richard Harding Davis noted in 1897, while “six hours are required to fasten the crown upon the Czar of Russia and to place the sceptre in his hand.”
That tension continues throughout the day, when the new president is expected to walk some of the distance to the White House, waving jubilantly, but unable to walk free in any normal sense, surrounded by phalanxes of security men, bulletproof glass, and other interpositions between the theory and reality of democracy. And the tension continues throughout the presidency itself. An Irish carpenter I knew in Boston told me that the only image the Irish had of Ronald Reagan was that of a disembodied hand, sticking out of the back window of a Lincoln Continental limousine, waving good-bye as he sped away from the crowds that had come to see him. We have traveled a long way from the famous inaugural of 1829, when anyone could attend a White House reception, and did. Andrew Jackson was nearly crushed to death by the exuberant mob that showed up to congratulate him; he escaped by jumping out the nearest window.
The inaugural speech, the central spectacle of the day, remains sacrosanct, undiminished by the passage of centuries. It is unclear why, in fact, Washington felt compelled to speak at all on the day he launched the American presidency in 1789 (April 30, the only spring inaugural in our history). The very idea of an inaugural address was revolutionary—kings don’t persuade, they command. Monarchs have never been known for their eloquence, and certainly do not speak at coronations. To the extent that they ever give famous speeches, they give them on the eve of battle or at their own executions (Louis XVI’s moving address to the mob on the day he was guillotined took place four years after Washington became president). Indeed, Washington wrote a friend as he prepared to assume the presidency that he felt like “a culprit who is going to the place of execution.” But he was always saying things like that. In fact, he put immense effort into his inaugural address, turning to two friends (James Madison and David Humphreys) for help with the drafting. And the very act of speaking said something important about the new job he was filling: he needed the American people to hear him as he surveyed a new path into the wilderness. That speech set the precedent we still follow, fifty-four inaugurals later. It is the mold into which we pour our loftiest political language.
Why is the inaugural address so important? Surely part of the answer lies in the enormous expectations we freight the office with. We have very complicated, contradictory notions of who we expect our presidents to be. The leader of a political party…the symbol of the nation…the military commander-in-chief…the oracle, therapist, and self-empowerment guru for nearly 300 million people. With so many questions floating in the air about this father figure, we need the roots that a long speech, even a bad speech, can sink into the nation’s topsoil. The need isn’t uniquely American. Last October, the people of Indonesia were thrilled when their newly elected president, Susilo Bambamg Yudhoyono, gave a modest speech outlining his goals—something his predecessor never would have done. At their best, these secular sermons tell us where we have been, where we are going, and who we will be when we get there. It is curious that we expect the most important speech to come at the beginning of a presidency rather than at its crescendo or end. But undeniably, Lincoln’s two inaugurals, Roosevelt’s first, Jefferson’s first, and Kennedy’s rank among the most significant speeches in our history.
What was Washington thinking as he gave the inaugural inaugural? It is possible to put some of the pieces back together. We know that he felt keenly the tension between monarchy and democracy. His personal gravitas would not allow for the relaxed, telegenic public behavior that we now expect from our presidents; nor was he comfortable with the deification that was already under way in his lifetime. Before settling on “Mr. President,” the Senate debated a number of loftier honorifics, including “His Mightiness,” “His Serene Highness,” “His Elective Highness,” and “His Highness, the President of the United States, and Protector of the Rights of the Same.”
With his usual instinct for the correct solution, Washington groped toward a satisfying compromise. He validated democracy by going to Congress for the ceremony (in this case, Federal Hall in New York, a building at Broad and Wall Streets), and then, immediately afterward, by walking seven blocks to a church service, through a large crowd in lower Manhattan. He validated monarchy with his natural aloofness and his tolerance of regal adoration: the giant transparencies of the new King George, and the thousands of new objects designed with his image—tankards, watch fobs, buttons, and other cheap souvenirs, presidential customs that continue to this day, as a quick visit to eBay will confirm.
Of course, the inaugural tradition has grown, picking up piecemeal new rituals the way a shaggy dog accumulates burrs. The parade dates from 1829 when Andrew Jackson, trying to flee the huge crowds smothering him with affection, raced down Pennsylvania Avenue from the Capitol toward the White House and found that the crowd, to his horror, was following him. (This January, when you see the thousands of baton twirlers and tuba players following the presidential motorcade, think of them as slightly menacing, chasing after the chief executive in slow but high-stepping pursuit.) The White House reviewing stand dates from 1861, when a simple wooden platform with a canvas canopy was built for Abraham Lincoln to review the troops coming to defend Washington from the threat of invasion from the South.
The first inaugural address given in Washington was Jefferson’s, in 1801, famous both for its sound bite (“We are all Republicans, we are all Federalists”) and for its successful transfer of power from one party to another. When Jefferson spoke, so quietly that most of the room could not hear him, he was standing in the newly built Senate wing of the Capitol. In fact, that’s all there was to the Capitol; it was little more than a hallway in search of an idea. Looking at prints of the successive inaugurals in the early nineteenth century is almost a cinematic experience—only the building is the action figure. In each image, an indistinct president is in the foreground, giving an oration, while the Capitol gets a little bigger every time. It’s like flipping through children’s books with photographs arranged at the margins of the page in a time sequence, to create the illusion of film, or time, or both. Real photographs begin in 1857, with the inauguration of James Buchanan. The daguerreotype shows the washy effects of what was still a very sketchy chemical process—one person’s hat is far more distinct than the rest of his body, and focus is far better at the center of the image than at its margins, aptly symbolizing the aimlessness of the presidency as the United States drifted toward Civil War.
Copyright ©2005 The American Scholar. All rights reserved.