The Unusualness of the 2021 Inauguration—and Inaugurations More Unusual Than That
Normal inaugurations? They're strange too.
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There were the masks. There were the ranks and rows of rippling flags, filling in for the usual spectators. That was thanks to COVID. There were massed troops, thanks to the Trumpist assault on the Capitol on January 6.
And thanks to the departure of the worst president in our history, so far, with the possible exception—possible exception—of Andrew Johnson, there was a global sigh of relief.
Despite all that, the inauguration of President Joe Biden on Wednesday was, in its way, pretty classic. The effect was by design. Holding a big inauguration ceremony has become associated not only with normalcy but also with legitimacy, and even with certain qualities supposedly critical to the nature of the republic itself.
And yet the presidents who didn’t get big ceremonies were presidents nonetheless; the system kept bumping right along. Chester A. Arthur springs to mind. No, he doesn’t, but his story is pretty good all the same. Arthur took the oath of office at 2:00 A.M., on September 20, 1881, at his home, 123 Lexington Avenue, New York City. James Garfield, his predecessor, had been shot by an assassin, then lingered for eighty days while the nation waited. In the great American tradition of the peaceful transfer of power, Arthur had reason to fear he would be accused of conspiring in Garfield’s murder, so he went into seclusion in New York, where he’d long been operating as a top Republican-machine hack. From such unedifying beginnings came a somewhat interesting presidency, which we don’t have time to go into right now.
Arthur’s inauguration is an example of the emergency swearing-in. When a president dies, it’s considered critical to keep the time with no president as brief as possible. In 1963, when JFK was assassinated, Lyndon Johnson famously—iconically, as they like to say—took the oath in a plane on the tarmac.
Teddy Roosevelt was another vice president who first came to the presidency unelected. His president was McKinley, shot in Buffalo, New York. As the topical song went:
Doctor come a-running and he tore off his specs./He said, “McKinley, done cashed in your checks,/You’re bound to die, poor boy, /You’re bound to die.”
McKinley hollered, McKinley squalled,/ Doctor said, “McKinley, I can’t found the ball. [I used to think this was “can’t find the hole.”]/You’re bound to die, poor boy, You’re bound to die.”
Despite the doctor’s prediction in song, there was actually some hope for McKinley’s recovery, so Teddy snatched the opportunity to take the family on a glamping trip in the Adirondacks. Called back mid-vacation, he was sworn in at a friend’s house in Buffalo.
And it was in a smelly Washington hotel room, after Lincoln was pronounced dead, that Andrew Johnson gave what was probably the greatest-ever cringe-comedy inauguration address, if we could only go back and hear it. A lot of tales-out-of-school have attached themselves to that series of events, so who knows, but Johnson is said to have gone over to see Lincoln dying and was kicked out when Mrs. Lincoln saw him and started screaming. He retreated to his hotel room and started pounding drinks because everybody hated him. Lincoln died, but by then Johnson was so far into a drunken stupor that for long minutes he couldn’t be aroused. At last he came to and sat up. For some reason, there was dried mud in his hair. They brought in the Chief Justice of the United States, a doctor, and a barber and got Johnson on his feet and swore him in. Unsolicited, he launched into a rambling speech, alternately weepy and hostile, but it was heard only by a few people, so again: who knows.
That behavior couldn’t have come as a shock. Johnson had also been drunk for his inauguration as vice president: blathering at length, slurring, trying to make out with the Bible, embarrassing everybody. When the weather cleared, and it was decided to move that ceremony into the open air, Lincoln told the inauguration marshal, “Do not let Andy speak outside.” It’s Trump’s great achievement to have matched Johnson‘s devolution without the crutch of alcohol.
Assassination hasn’t been the only cause of emergency inauguration. The first vice president to make the sudden switch was John Tyler, and his president, William Henry Harrison, died in 1841, only a month into the term, having fallen ill from what people thought was a chill caused by exposure to bad weather. The infection has more realistically been attributed to septic shock, caused by drinking the White House water (the supply was conveniently downstream from public sewage). Keeping Harrison alive brought out the most advanced efforts of nineteenth-century medical science. Doctors bled him. They applied hot cups to his bare skin. They dosed him with him ipecac and castor oil, and when that failed, they brought in the big gun: a hot toddy of snakeroot and crude oil. Incredibly, the patient died anyway.
Tyler got the bad news on his plantation in Williamsburg, Virginia. He’d been planning to hang there for his whole vice-presidential term and to do as little in Washington as possible. That idyll was rudely interrupted by Secretary of State Daniel Webster’s son Fletcher, arriving to tell Tyler that Harrison was dead and he’d better get back to town.
The weirdest thing about Tyler’s swearing-in is that nobody knew whether to do it or not. A president had never died in office before. You’d think the Constitution would be plain on the matter, but as in many other cases, no such luck. It simply wasn’t clear whether the vice president was now to become the actual president, or just to carry out presidential duties as an acting president until the next election. Tyler’s insistence on being sworn in as the president—in a hotel room, in Washington—is part of how the succession system we know got started.
Four other vice presidents became unelected presidents: Millard Fillmore, Calvin Coolidge, Harry Truman, and Gerald Ford. They too were done out of fancy swearing-in ceremonies.
Most presidents don’t get the job that way, of course, but some inaugurations of duly elected presidents have had strange qualities. Lincoln’s first, in 1861, was fraught with terror. The Democrats were refusing to accept the election outcome. The Southern states were getting ready to secede. As with 2021, armed forces were in the city: anti-Lincoln sentiment ran so high that if the president-elect had been assassinated, it wouldn’t have been surprising.
Rutherford B. Hayes, for his part, was sworn in secretly, in 1877, in the Red Room of the White House, because he’d won the worst election in U.S. history, in the worst way. Hayes did get a normal inauguration ceremony, though, two days later.
The normal ceremony has gotten plenty weird too. While it’s routinely celebrated by both participants and commentators as a festival of democracy, the roots of modern-day American inaugurations are pretty obviously in coronations of monarchs as heads of state, with a lot of divine-right and state-church stuff floating around.
We didn’t always do it this way. We’ve slowly and steadily grafted a coronation mood onto a spartan, workaday procedure that our founders saw as more appropriate to a republic.
The Constitution requires nothing more than the oath, as follows:
I do solemnly swear (or affirm [for those whose religious beliefs prohibit swearing]) that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.
Wait. . . isn’t something missing there? Oh, yes: “so help me God.” God’s help is not required by the Constitution; the presidents have snuck it in. There’s no requirement that the president’s name be stated aloud. Or that a Bible be involved. Or even that a judge be present. (It’s probably implicit in the word “oath” that there be witnesses; otherwise, we’d be getting into Trump territory, self-inauguration, like self-pardon.)
Our eighteenth-century forebears may sometimes seem more publicly religious and elaborately formal than we are, but when it comes to the inauguration, the opposite is true. George Washington took the oath for the first time on the balcony of Federal Hall in New York City—temporarily serving as the new nation’s capital—with throngs gathered in the street below. The oath was administered by the Chancellor of New York, Robert Livingston, who then yelled "Long live George Washington, President of the United States!" followed by a thirteen-gun salute. Then Washington went inside to deliver a very brief address, in the Senate chamber, and that was that.
To be fair, the first president’s progress from Mount Vernon to New York may count as one of the biggest inauguration parades ever. He and his equipage were given a series of triumphal welcomes, at Alexandria, at Georgetown, at Baltimore, at Havre de Grace, at Philadelphia, and at Trenton. Approaching New York by barge, he was greeted by multiple artillery salutes from ships and welcomed ashore at Wall Street by the governor, some newly elected U.S. congressmen, and a crowd of citizens.
Jefferson took the opposite approach, possibly somewhat performatively. On the morning of his first inauguration, he left his hotel at New Jersey Avenue and C Street, wearing normal business clothes (his defeated predecessor, John Adams, had been mocked, when vice president, for wearing a wig and sword at the Senate, drawing nicknames like “The Duke of Braintree”). Instead of riding in a coach, as expected, Jefferson walked to the Capitol, attended by Virginia militia officers, District of Columbia marshals, and some congressmen. After being sworn in, he gave an important speech in the Senate chamber on national healing and unity. Then he walked back to his hotel and ate dinner with the other boarders.
Despite Jefferson’s efforts, the more triumphal approach has not only prevailed: it’s been elaborately developed. Nowadays we cram all the pomp that greeted Washington’s travel from town to town into a single day: speeches, songs, sometimes a declamatory poem, and not only outright prayers but supposedly secular references to sacred temples of democracy, etc. That’s followed by a grand progress on Pennsylvania Avenue from the Capitol to a White House that has become more or less a fortified palace. Such is the classic form—one of our great extraconstitutional norms.
We must like the majesty of it, the investiture of a supposed head of state with powers and abilities far beyond those of mortal men. (There’s something similarly sacramental and extraconstitutional about the process that was interrupted by the Trumpist mob on January 6.) Maybe the fact that this country really has no head of state causes unavoidable collective anxiety. Maybe we’ve been trying to manage that anxiety, over and over again, with ritual ceremonies of headship and statehood.
The Brits have their ceremonies too, of course—they’re our model, somewhat ironically—but they’ve solved the underlying contradiction differently. They do have a real head of state, who is also the head of a church, and who has nothing to do with governing. In that context, a monarch’s coronation by the Archbishop of Canterbury at Westminster Abbey makes perfect sense and no sense at all.
Their system does involve a ritual carried out by the actual government, when the new Prime Minister—mere leader of a majority party, therefore lacking in magical powers—goes to the head of state, in whom the magical powers are invested, and pretends to ask permission to govern. But that ritual is held in private. The British public is expected to look to the monarchy for magic and drama and to the government for government. The American public likes magic and drama so much that, along with making our executive act like a monarch, we’ve given the British royal family a whole TV network, called PBS.
The British model wouldn’t work here, obviously. We’d have to dismantle the solo executive, independent of the legislature, and decide that the peaceful transfer of power—the Republicans came closer to demolishing it, this year, than anyone since the Democrats in 1860 and 1876—really occurs, or should occur, between opposed parties and platforms, not between individuals who supposedly embody, for one brief, shining moment, the soul of a nation. We’d have to stop reviewing the agon of somebody’s whole life before taking office, stop considering the relative capacity for empathy, the weddings and divorces and deaths and children and choices in suit color and so on. The Brits have people for that. They have a whole family, with vast private wealth, publicly ruining its life, generation after generation, at vast public expense.
We don’t have that, so we’ll have to go on doing what we do. And as long as we go on doing what we do, we won’t need a Donald Trump or an Andrew Johnson to make our presidential inaugurations truly oddball.
Further Reading
Skim
On the McKinley assassination: “White House Blues,” in a version from the great Charlie Poole. Because this is a skim, I won’t go into the many interesting antecedents for this tune and some of its verses.
Harry Truman being sworn in, after FDR’s death. This may be the first photo of a vice president acceding to the presidency on the death of a president: I think I read somewhere that there were news photographers at TR’s Buffalo swearing-in, but TR kicked them out for brawling.
Swim
The surprising legacy of Chester A. Arthur.
John Adams to Abigail Adams on his own inauguration.
I just saw this other piece on unusual inaugurations: fortunately, it’s quite different from the piece above, and it has some other quick and entertaining tales.
An interesting piece on Robert Frost as the first inauguration poet, with a critical look at the poem he didn’t even get to read.
Dive
These aren’t especially long, but they are deep: Jefferson’s First Inaugural Address; Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address