Reading the Inaugurals
President Clinton's
Inaugural Address this month is the 53 rd in the series that began in
1789. All are worth a read--not just the highlights, such as George Washington,
Abraham Lincoln, and FDR. They will give you a feeling of being there, not as
an omniscient historian of 1997 looking back at 1837 or 1897 but as an ordinary
citizen who shares--and is limited by--the information, the concerns, and the
values of those times. (Thanks to Columbia University, all the addresses can be
found on the Web.)
Among all
the past presidents and their speech writers there was only one literary
genius: Lincoln. After 132 years, his second inaugural still brings tears to
your eyes and chills your blood. None of the other inaugural addresses are in
that league. But by and large they are dignified and intelligent speeches given
by articulate men, each in touch with his times and aware that his inauguration
was the most solemn occasion of his life.
The stance and style of the inaugurals seem to have gone
through three phases. The first, lasting until Lincoln, was that of the modest,
classic public servant. The second, lasting through William Howard Taft, was of
the prosaic government executive. The third, in which we are still, is the
phase of the assertive, theatrical leader-preacher. This classification is not
waterproof. Theodore Roosevelt may belong in the third phase and Warren G.
Harding-Calvin Coolidge-Herbert Hoover in the second. But the trend is
clear.
On picking up Washington's
first inaugural, one is immediately struck by the modesty. He had just been
elected unanimously by the Electoral College. He was more respected than any
subsequent president has been at the time of his inauguration. And what does he
say?
[T]he magnitude and
difficulty of the trust to which the voice of my country called me, being
sufficient to awaken in the wisest and most experienced of her citizens a
distrustful scrutiny into his qualifications, could not but overwhelm with
despondence one who (inheriting inferior endowments from nature and unpracticed
in the duties of civil administration) ought to be peculiarly conscious of his
own deficiencies.
None of his successors has made the point as
forcefully as that. But echoes are to be found in almost every president for
the next 68 years. (John Adams was an exception. He was apparently so envious
of Washington that he spent a large part of his address spelling out his own
excellent qualifications for the job.) That era ended with Lincoln. Subsequent
inaugurals routinely contain protestations of humility, but they are
perfunctory and do not sound sincere.
The
antebellum modesty, while in part a reflection of the conventional etiquette of
the time, may also have served a political objective: to alleviate the concerns
of those who--in the early days of the republic--feared it might be transformed
into a monarchy, and the president into a king. A little later, perhaps after
1820, a new worry arose. Would the power of the federal government be used to
interfere with the "peculiar domestic institution" of the Southern states? The
presidents' assurance of the limitation of their powers may have been intended
to give comfort to those states.
Lincoln faced a different situation. With the South already
seceding, he could only "preserve, protect and defend the Constitution" by
asserting the power of the federal government and his own power as chief
executive. It was no time for modesty. Lincoln's successors inherited a federal
government with much more authority--and more need to use it--than before the
war, and they had less motivation to belittle themselves and their powers.
In the third phase, the
Inaugural Address metamorphosed from describing the government's policy to
inspiring the public's behavior. Presidents recognized--or, at least,
believed--that the country had problems they ought to deal with but could not
manage by using the instruments of government alone. Thus, in his first
inaugural, Woodrow Wilson said: "At last a vision has been vouchsafed us of our
life as a whole. We see the bad with the good, the debased and decadent with
the sound and the vital. With this vision we approach new affairs."
If the
country is debased and decadent, the cure has to come from uplifting the
people, not from acts of government. Similar diagnoses and prescriptions appear
in later inaugurals.
Presidents derived their license to serve as
leader-preacher from Theodore Roosevelt's remark that the presidency was "a
bully pulpit," a remark that did not appear in his Inaugural Address. The
metaphor of the pulpit suggests not reading but oral and visual contact between
the preacher and his flock. Radio and--even more--television made this possible
on a national scale. A telltale sign of the leader-preacher inaugural is the
use of the phrase, "Let us ... "--meaning, "You do as I say." This expression
appears occasionally throughout the history of inaugurals, but it has hit its
stride in recent years. John F. Kennedy repeated it 16 times in his Inaugural
Address, and Richard Nixon has it 22 times in his second one.
The
change in literary style from classical to colloquial can be demonstrated by
one statistic. In all the inaugurals from Washington through James Buchanan,
the average number of words per sentence was 44. From Lincoln to Wilson it was
34, and since Wilson it has been 25. I do not consider this a deterioration
(this article has an average of 17 words per sentence), but it does reflect the
change in the size and character of the audience and in the means of
communication. William Henry Harrison could talk about the governments of
Athens, Rome, and the Helvetic Confederacy and expect his audience to know what
he was talking about. That wouldn't be true today. But Harrison's audience
would not have known what the Internet was.
Presidents and their speech writers have mined their
predecessors for memorable words and repeated them without attribution.
Kennedy's trumpet call, "Ask not what your country can do for you: Ask what you
can do for your country," has an ironic history. In his inaugural, Harding,
surely no model for Kennedy, had said, "Our most dangerous tendency is to
expect too little of government, and at the same time do for it too little."
And even before he became president, in a speech in 1916, Harding had said, "In
the great fulfillment we must have a citizenship less concerned about what the
government can do for it and more anxious about what it can do for the
nation."
Many an
issue frets its hour on the inaugural stage and then is heard no more. That
includes the Indians, the coastal fortifications, territorial expansion, the
Isthmus Canal, civil-service reform, polygamy, and Prohibition. Some subjects
that you expect to appear, don't. Hoover's inaugural, March 4, 1929, gives no
hint of economic vulnerability. Roosevelt's second inaugural, Jan. 20, 1937,
contains no reference to Hitler or to Germany. But what is most amazing, at
least to a reader in 1997, is the silence of the inaugurals on the subject of
women. The word "women" does not appear at all until Wilson's first inaugural,
and it always appears as part of the phrase "men and women," never as referring
to any special concerns of women. Even Harding, the first president to be
chosen in an election in which women voted nationally, does not remark on the
uniqueness of the fact in his inaugural.
One subject that does get ample treatment is
taxes. "Taxes," or some equivalent word, appears in 43 of the 52 inaugural
addresses to date. Coolidge said in 1925: "The time is arriving when we can
have further tax reduction. ... I am opposed to extremely high rates, because
they produce little or no revenue, because they are bad for the country, and,
finally, because they are wrong." Federal taxes were then about 3 percent of
the gross domestic product. Ronald Reagan said essentially the same thing in
1981, when they were 20 percent.
The most
disturbing aspect of the whole series of inaugurals is what is said and unsaid
on the subject of race relations, which Arthur Schlesinger Jr. calls "the
supreme American problem." The words "black," "blacks," "Negro," or "race" (as
applied to blacks) do not appear at all until Rutherford Hayes, 1877. James
Monroe asked in 1817, "On whom has oppression fallen in any quarter of our
Union? Who has been deprived of any right of person or property?" These were
rhetorical questions, intended to get the answer "No one!"--as if there were
not millions of slaves in America.
Before the Civil War the word "slavery" appears only in the
Inaugural Address of Martin Van Buren, 1837, and Buchanan, 1857, and then only
as something that, pursuant to the Constitution and in order to preserve the
Union, should not be interfered with. But although generally unmentionable, the
subject was boiling, and would boil over in 1861. After the Civil War, it is in
the inaugurals of Hayes, James Garfield (1881), and Benjamin Harrison (1889)
that we find the most explicit and positive discussion of the need to convert
into reality the rights and freedom granted to the "freedmen" on paper by the
13 th , 14 th , and 15 th amendments. Garfield's
was the strongest among these. (He had been a student at Williams College in
the 1850s, 80 years before me, when the college had been a station on the
underground railway.) But the subject then began to fade. William McKinley said
in his first Inaugural Address, March 4, 1897, "Lynchings must not be tolerated
in a great and civilized country like the United States," but he said it
without horror. Taft raised the subject of race relations in 1909 only to
express satisfaction at the progress that had been made. And then the subject
disappeared. FDR never mentioned it in any of his four inaugurals.
After World War II the
subject came back to inaugural addresses, but in a weak and abstract form. That
is true even of the presidents we think of as being most concerned with race
relations in America--like Harry Truman, Lyndon Johnson, and Bill Clinton.
Perhaps each thought he had made a sufficient statement by having a black
woman--Marian Anderson, Leontyne Price, or Maya Angelou--perform at his
ceremony. In Clinton's first inaugural, the only allusion to the race problem
is in this sentence: "From our revolution, the Civil War, to the Great
Depression to the civil rights movement, our people have always mustered the
determination to construct from these crises the pillars of our history." I
recall this not to suggest that their concern was not deep and sincere, but
only to indicate what is acceptable to say in a speech intended to appeal to
the values shared by Americans.
There is
much more to ponder in these speeches than I have suggested here. There is much
to be proud of, in what we have endured and achieved, in the peaceful
transference of power, and in the reasonableness and moderation of the
presidents we have elected. But there is also much humility to be learned. We
look back with amazement at the ignorance and moral obtuseness revealed by what
our past leaders have said and our past citizens believed. We should recognize
that 50 or 100 years from now, readers will shake their heads at what we are
saying and believing today.
POSTSCRIPT: To read Herbert Stein's analysis of President Clinton's second
Inaugural Address, click .
