In 1801, Thomas Jefferson strolled on foot from his Washington, DC, boarding house to the Capitol, where he was sworn in as president and offered a rousing address to his “friends and fellow-citizens” before returning home in time for dinner. As inaugurations go, it was simplicity itself – and the sort of ceremony of which future presidents could only dream.
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All that’s required by the Constitution for the president-elect to lose the “-elect” is the swearing of a 35-word oath of loyalty. Over the centuries, however, the ceremony has become encrusted with tradition and precedent. “Today’s inaugurations are about 50 times as elaborate as they used to be,” says Paul F. Boller Jr., emeritus professor of history at Texas Christian University and author of the book “Presidential Inaugurations.” “The Founding Fathers wanted very much for it to be a dignified occasion and to avoid any smack of royalty or coronation, but it’s gradually become more lavish. People think whatever goes on now goes way back, but there’s nothing permanent about it.”
Washington himself began the elaborations, offering an inaugural address and supposedly adding “so help me God” to the end of the oath, traditions every subsequent president has followed (with one exception – Theodore Roosevelt omitted the almighty). But Washington was still averse to the grander trappings. Before assuming office, he undertook a two-week triumphal procession from his home in Mount Vernon, Va., to New York City, the nation’s capital at the time. Garlanded with laurels and hosannas along the way, he still compared his feelings to those of “a criminal going to the place of execution.” Lincoln reportedly had a similar experience but for very different reasons. When he was first inaugurated in 1861, the storm clouds of civil war were gathering; concerns for his safety were such that he arrived in Washington, DC, in disguise in the middle of the night.
There was always a celebratory ball – Washington danced the minuet at his – but they didn’t become official until 1809, when the menu at James Madison’s banquet included terrapin and meringue, and they reached their zenith in 1997, when Bill Clinton had 14 official balls. The inaugural parade marched in with Ulysses S. Grant in 1873, perhaps as a way of paying tribute to those lost in the Civil War. The convention of the outgoing president accompanying the newcomer to his inauguration started in 1837, but has not always gone smoothly. In 1933, Franklin Roosevelt was reportedly stymied by Herbert Hoover’s frosty demeanor, attempting to rouse him with such conversational gambits as: “My dear Mr. President, aren’t those the nicest steel girders you ever saw?”
Other additions were more impromptu, as when Lyndon Johnson grabbed his wife, Lady Bird, for a dance in 1965. “After that, every president has danced, with varying degrees of success,” notes Boller. In another innovation that caught on, Mrs. Johnson was the first incoming First Lady to hold the Bible on which her husband swore his oath. And only since Bill Clinton’s 1993 inauguration have a president’s children had a place on the stage.
Other budding conventions have proved less enduring. Legend has it that Jefferson’s second inauguration started an informal tradition of open-house celebrations that continued sporadically until 1829, when salt-of-the-earth Andrew Jackson succeeded the patrician John Quincy Adams. “The fancy-pants were out and the common man was in,” says Evan Cornog, author of the presidential campaign histories “Hats in the Ring” and “The Power and the Story.” “And some common men, and women too, turned up for the party at the White House. They enjoyed themselves, and the drinks, so much that the staff had to move the punch out onto the lawn to get the rabble out and save the furnishings.”
There have been other times when festive spirits misfired. Some bright spark thought it would be fun to festoon Theodore Roosevelt’s celebrations with the teddy bears (which were named after him), not realizing how much he disliked them. At Lincoln’s 1865 inauguration, his vice president, Andrew Johnson, was so drunk that his speech was nearly incomprehensible. (It was a strictly medicinal intoxication – he was recovering from typhoid and had been advised to drink alcohol.) Four years later, at Grant’s first inaugural ball, there was mass pilfering from the cloakrooms. And at his second, four years after that, the weather was so cold, and the venue so poorly heated, that guests danced in hats and coats, musical instruments seized up, food frosted over on the tables and a hundred canaries brought in to provide birdsong froze to death.
Weather often has wrecked havoc, never more than in 1841, when 68-year-old William Henry Harrison – at that time the oldest man ever elected to the presidency – was so keen to prove his virility that he spoke in icy winds for more than two hours, without a hat, then went on to dance at all three inaugural balls. He died of pneumonia a month later. In 1961, Robert Frost had a different problem: too much sun. The poet was squinting so much he couldn’t read the text of his new tribute to John F. Kennedy, so he recited a different verse by heart instead – and flubbed the new president’s name.
Perhaps the most surreal inauguration was a surreptitious one. Arguments over who won the 1876 election between Samuel J. Tilden and Rutherford B. Hayes were resolved in Hayes’s favor only two days before the inauguration. As March 4, the inauguration date at the time, was a Sunday, the ceremony was scheduled for the Monday, but there were rumors that Tilden would have himself sworn in on the Sabbath. Fearful of schism, incumbent president Ulysses S. Grant had Hayes called to the White House and secretly sworn in on the Saturday night.
Tilden didn’t dispute the results, however, so Hayes was sworn in as planned on the Monday – ending the only period in history, less than two days long, when America had two presidents.
There have been other embarrassments that Tuesday’s participants will hope to avoid. There seems little likelihood of the mass demonstrations that accompanied both of Nixon’s inaugurations, or the nude protests that marked George W. Bush’s in 2001. And Obama will certainly not want to repeat the experiences of James Buchanan, who, thanks to “the hotel disease,” saw his entire inauguration day in 1857 punctuated by bouts of diarrhea. If all goes according to plan – with the weather, the oath, the parade, and the ball – it will be a great occasion. If not, the appeal of the early days will become clear. As Paul F. Boller Jr., puts it, “a little more Jeffersonian simplicity might be a good thing.”