Winter 2005

So Help Me God

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Four years later, we have a more focused photograph of Lincoln’s first inaugural, and four years after that, with the Capitol dome finally completed, we have a remarkable shot of Lincoln in the act of delivering his second. Historians argue about whether John Wilkes Booth is perceptible in the shot—nearly everyone looks like him—but the most fascinating figure is Lincoln himself, blurry and indistinct (did he move his head when he saw the photographer?), already growing spectral, as if he were inhabiting one of his legendary dreams about his imminent demise. This year marks the 140th anniversary of that oration, arguably the greatest in American history, and yet the basic appearance of the inaugural that will take place in 2005 would not surprise Lincoln’s audience. It’s all more or less the same, except that we now watch from the west front rather than the east, after Ronald Reagan shifted our viewing angle in 1981 (an actor’s privilege).

If, then, the inaugural address is an unusually American, unusually durable form of oratory, bringing the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries into our televisions, why do we know so little about it? Tens of millions will listen to George W. Bush on January 20, just as they did four years ago. But is there a single person, including the president, who can quote even a sentence from his 2001 inaugural address? Can anyone quote a sentence uttered since “Ask not what your country can do for you”?

III. Recitation

As a former presidential speechwriter, I used to spend more time than most looking into these matters. I once took it upon myself to read all of the inaugural addresses. It is not a task for the fainthearted. No one can enter those endless paragraphs about tariffs and civil-service reform and emerge undamaged. But if you’re going to do it, the library of the Old Executive Office Building in the White House complex is the right place—an extraordinary ironclad nineteenth-century space for books and bookworms, in what was once the State Department Library, where America’s treaties and founding documents were long kept under lock and key. There, those old speeches have new life breathed into them, and without too much difficulty, a reader can imagine the exhilaration with which America heard the earliest presidential thoughts of a Zachary Taylor, a Grover Cleveland, a Herbert Hoover. Taken all together, in sequence, the fifty-four inaugural addresses comprise an essential course in American history, a Book of the Republic, roughly 500 pages long, depending on your font size. Every four years, we can join those distant audiences and listen to the past’s plans for the future. It’s like stumbling across an old box full of nineteenth-century stereoscope slides at a yard sale, and wondering what those same images meant to the family that was transported by them to parts unknown.

Why would anyone in his right mind go through all of the inaugurals? I’m not sure what I was looking for, but finding those distant speeches and speechwriters was comforting at a lonely time for me, having been uprooted more quickly than I wanted to be from Boston and bewildered by late-1990s Washington, a world of policy wonks, cutthroats from both parties, and women still wearing shoulder-pad dresses from the Age of Reagan. To read through old catalogues of speeches offered a salve to my antiquarian soul, and I fell for the long-forgotten fables they held inside their crumbling bindings. Suddenly, I had forty-two new friends. The old presidents generously shared their fears, their hopes, and their most personal aspirations for the country of which I, too, was a citizen. More than mere politicians, they were storytellers, each writing a narrative that improved upon his predecessor’s.

It’s a surprisingly common urge to go back to the beginning. Instead of saying simply, “I have been elected president and these are my plans for the next four years,” most said something like, “Because I’ve been elected, I’m going to tell you the story of democracy, and why America is the greatest country.” That can be instructive—when John Adams reflects upon the Revolution and the Constitution, it’s worth listening. It can also be pedestrian in a lesser figure (say, James Monroe). There is a thin line between a cliché and a genuinely moving statement about a personal belief or experience. Nevertheless, I developed a fondness for both, and grew to enjoy the curious awkwardness that bedeviled past presidents at the precise moment of their elevation, as if the dizzying height to which they had climbed also deprived them of much-needed oxygen.

There are so many to choose from. Why did John Adams, sailing along smoothly, suddenly embark on an interminable single sentence that took up approximately a quarter of his address and required 732 words to complete? (Yes, I counted.) Why did Martin Van Buren include an exclamation point—the only one in inaugural-address history—after a sentence that was neither funny nor shocking? What inner child in George H. W. Bush forced him to say “freedom is like a beautiful kite that can go higher and higher with the breeze”? Was Warren Harding reading skin-care ads when he urged Americans to free themselves “from the great blotches of distressed poverty”? Why did John F. Kennedy, usually so smart, wonder if “a beachhead of cooperation may push back the jungle of suspicion”? What was Nixon thinking when he ripped off Kennedy by saying, “Let each of us ask—not just what will government do for me, but what can I do for myself?” Was Reagan daydreaming of Mitch Miller with his odd paean to “the American Sound”?

Even without obvious clunkers, many of the addresses are stunningly dull. The three worst are Taft’s (as fat as its author), McKinley’s (a typical topic sentence: “The question of international bimetallism will have early and earnest attention”), and William Henry Harrison’s interminable excursus into ancient Roman history. Harrison took an hour and forty minutes to read his speech, in a snowstorm, and that was after Daniel Webster had streamlined the original version (“I have killed seventeen Roman pro-consuls as dead as smelts,” he wrote a friend). Some felt that it was divine retribution when Harrison died a month later from an illness he contracted during its delivery. Calvin Coolidge also deserves an honorable mention—he was hardly “Silent Cal” while droning on about patriotism during a very long address (“We have been, and propose to be, more and more American”).

Of course, we err in applying modern standards of literary quality to what was neither modern nor literary. A speech is not a poem or even an essay; it is a highly ritualistic kind of theater that combines words, gestures, and backdrops to create a stylized effect. As with Japanese kabuki, the audience derives much of its pleasure from its knowledge of the ritual. In our modern world of rapid sensations, we frown upon hearing any thought we have heard before; but such repetition was reassuring to earlier American audiences. It’s clear that verbosity, far from being a sin, was a positive virtue for the people who assembled every four years to hear these elaborate performances. John Quincy Adams’s first sentence, while unreadable today, must have thrilled a certain kind of listener: “In compliance with an usage coeval with the existence of our Federal Constitution, and sanctioned by the example of my predecessors in the career upon which I am about to enter, I appear, my fellow-citizens, in your presence and in that of Heaven to bind myself by the solemnities of religious obligation to the faithful performance of the duties allotted to me in the station to which I have been called.” What writing class could ever teach that? Of course, they also liked laudanum and enemas in the nineteenth century.

And there is a problem worse than swollen writing. The urge to write at great length is often tied to the need to conceal something, and there were unmentionable parts of the American story that never made it close to the inaugural stage. In their haste to please, nearly every early American president went to great lengths to avoid the word slavery, preferring tortured euphemisms like “domestic institutions” or no mention at all. One cringes a bit when James Monroe asks, gloatingly, “On whom has oppression fallen in any quarter of our Union? Who has been deprived of any right of person or property?” In 1857, on the eve of the Civil War, James Buchanan wanted to end the argument over slavery so that he could move on to “more pressing” matters, like the spread of “liberty throughout the world”! It’s no wonder that their contemporary Herman Melville wrote, “Woe to him who seeks to please rather than to appall.”

The kabuki of the typical inaugural can be broken down into specific set pieces; the thoughts arranged in a comforting sequence that would have been instantly familiar one hundred, even two hundred, years ago.

1. I am not worthy of this great honor.
2. But I congratulate the people that they elected me.
3. Now we must all come together, even those of us who really hate each other.
4. I love the Constitution, the Union, and George Washington.
5. I will work against bad threats.
6. I will work for good things.
7. We must avoid entangling alliances.
8. America’s strength = democracy.
9. Democracy’s strength = America.
10. Thanks, God.

Not every speech follows that scheme. But quite a lot do. Still, a few inaugural addresses jump out from behind the damask curtain of nineteenth-century sensibilities. Who knew that James Garfield was a passionate champion of the rights of ex-slaves? Or that Rutherford B. Hayes daringly called for the creation of a single six-year term for the president? Or that Benjamin Harrison, another Republican beard, was a sensitive writer?

And there is something about the generals that compels admiration. Military exigencies pruned their writing styles long before they entered politics. Washington’s second inaugural is all of 135 words—about what it would take Taft to clear his throat. Jackson says more in fewer words than any of his contemporaries. Grant weeds out needless adjectives like so many Confederate sharpshooters: After discussing Reconstruction and problems with black suffrage, he clenches his jaw and says, “This is wrong, and should be corrected.” What else is there to say? Grant’s no-nonsense style is even more appealing when one learns that halfway through his speech, his young daughter, lonely, came up to the podium to hold his hand while he was speaking. Doubtless he was lonely too.

These human moments are not written into the Messages and Papers of the Presidents, a ten-volume collection of presidential utterances between 1789 and 1897 that was the standard source for generations. But they too are an inexorable part of the story. Should we not know that James Garfield suffered from crippling writer’s block and simply could not finish his speech until 2:30 on the morning of the inaugural? As the day approached, he had an anxiety dream in which he fell off a canal boat and was suddenly standing naked in the wilderness during a wild storm. After finding a few pieces of cloth to cover himself and embarking on “a long and tangled journey,” he found his way to a house where “an old negro woman took me into her arms and nursed me as though I were a sick child.” Comforted, he awoke to face his presidency.

If there is a single theme that unites all of the inaugurals, from George W. to George W., it is the need to explore the central mystery of God’s relationship to the American experiment. This is hardly a simple topic, and some handle it better than others. John Quincy Adams preferred to place his hand on the Constitution rather than the Bible. Dwight D. Eisenhower, on the other hand, allowed a vehicle called “God’s Float” to enter his parade. A religion writer compared it to “an oversized model of a deformed molar left over from some dental exhibit.”

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Ted Widmer directs the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University. He is a contributing editor of the THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR.

This article is copyrighted by the author. It may not be reproduced without permission of the publisher. For reproduction or distribution rights, please contact scholar@pbk.org.

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