Presidential Inauguration - 17 January 1997

On a bright morning, 30 April 1789, a tall, uniformed, very military figure stood on a balcony overlooking Wall Street. The New Republic had not yet found a permanent capital city and, facing a character called the Chancellor of New York, he raised his right hand and repeated, “I, George Washington, do solemnly swear 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, so help me God.”

It is exactly the same oath that has been taken by every president since the first, including William Jefferson Clinton. It has been muttered, droned, shouted, slurred, spoken boldly, and chanted with an incomparable personal stress four times by the only four-time president.

No one who was there in Washington on 4 March 1933, which was then the regular date of the president’s inaugural, nobody will forget that light, tenor voice rising out of a dense crowd of pretty sombre citizens in the pit of the Great Depression. “I, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, do solemnly swear 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. So help me God.”

Several million prayers must have sifted over that huge crowd like a small wind, for, in spite of his local reputation as Governor of New York, Franklin Roosevelt was very much an unknown quantity. The wisest, certainly the most distinguished political journalist of the day had written that "Mr Roosevelt is an amiable man who would like very much to be president with no discernable qualifications for the job."

Once the inauguration was over, the first news of Roosevelt as president was a bombshell. He had overnight closed every bank in the country. The money had stopped and it wouldn’t flow again until he, this amiable country squire from the Hudson Valley, had gone through the whole roster and decided which banks to dump and which to allow to survive. This was only the first volley of a thunderous attack on the Depression that rocked the country for the next six years. There’s been nothing like it since.

When Washington took the oath, that one simple sentence was all there was of what you might call an inaugural tradition. The only dictate other than the oath was that the inauguration should take place on the first Tuesday in March.

But the boggy state of the roads in February and early March, country dirt roads along which many notables would have to ride two, three, four, six hundred miles made it impossible to keep the date, which is why the first inaugural in New York City was held on 30 April. Mrs Washington, who had hoped to get there in time for an evening ball, made New York by the end of May.

So any ceremony that was to precede or follow the oath taking was left inevitably to the new president, and Washington had no doubts about the style of it. He was a gentleman surveyor and farmer, but he was also a lifelong soldier, and though when he was begged to become the first president and after two hours of swearing he would never give in, gave in, he very soon got over the feeling that it was all too grand for him.

Indeed he and his closest colleagues decided to make this first government pageant as impressive to the masses as possible because they had a deep fear that maybe the new government wouldn’t work. It was, to be truthful, a very feeble skeleton of a government only two years after its Constitution had been written and ratified by some states, rejected by others.

It’s grim but fascinating to look at just what was the government over which Washington had been called to preside. It had for a civil service a dozen clerks, their pay in arrears. It had a crushing amount of debts from the war, and since there was no machinery for collecting taxes, there were no taxes coming in. Anyway, since the row with the British, the new Americans were against taxes.

There were no federal courts, so enforcing the law in big and little matters was left to the colonial (now state) courts or local busybodies along the north to south straggle of 2,000 miles.

There was no national currency; states printed or coined their own. Some states lived by a system of barter with others.

Because of the colonists’ detestation of George III and the regiments he’d posted in the colonies, the Constitution had rejected a standing army. The states were expected to organise militias and have them on call in time of trouble. The American navy did not exist.

Two or three states had no intention of ratifying the Constitution. Rhode Island declared itself to be “independent”. And off in London, a local hero from Vermont was dickering to have his state either stay in the empire or be recognised as a state independent of George Washington’s confederation.

Three or four of the states that bordered the Appalachian Mountains, what were then known as western territories, had started an alarming movement to secede from the union.

Some "United States". No wonder Washington, just before he left his Virginia estate for the 350 miles of muddy, jogging coach ride to New York, wrote to a friend of feelings not unlike those of a culprit who is going to the place of his execution. "So unwilling am I in the evening of life" – he was then at the advanced age (in those times) of 57 – "so unwilling to quit a peaceful abode for an ocean of difficulties". So he did what Shakespeare, I think, somewhere recommends: let the outward show mask the slender substance.

The route of his ride from Virginia north was well advertised. Local cannon were dragged out to fire salutes, bridges were decorated with flowers, banquets were planned and enjoyed along the way. And it had been arranged that by the time the general (as he still liked to be called) came to cross the Hudson and ferry over to Manhattan, a very fancy state coach was in readiness.

There were other carriages bearing new officials, local gentry, and foreign ministers, with a hip-hup military escort, Washington and all former soldiers wearing full military dress, high-stepping outriders, the lot.

This pageant, you might think, would have set the pattern, a tradition of presidential inaugurals, but it did not impress several distinguished onlookers. Watching this almost regal exhibition of Washington’s parade and inaugural, a bystanding Senator whispered to a man from Massachusetts, “I fear we may have exchanged George III for George I.”

Even less impressed, indeed positively offended, was a fellow Virginian who was to become the third president. Thomas Jefferson wrote that this first inauguration was "not at all in character with the simplicity of Republican government, looking (as if wishfully) to those of European courts".

It would be eleven years before Jefferson himself would take the oath and have the privilege of dictating the inaugural ceremony, but he never forgot the pomp of Washington’s inauguration; and on the day, in 1801, he approved the sketchiest scenario for an occasion that would feature no state coaches, no decorations, no uniforms, no silks and satins, no parades.

He could not restrain or forbid a little salvo of artillery at high noon, the hour when the oath is taken. Otherwise, it was a damp day in Washington now, which had been purchased as the site of the new capital, another choice Jefferson disliked; it was below sea level, humid, hardly yet a built-up city. He called it that “Indian swamp in the wilderness.”

But Jefferson on the great morning got up, dressed in his usual informal black, rode on his horse up to the capital, went in, delivered his inaugural address in a faint, reedy voice that nobody could understand. Then he went outside, unhitched his horse and rode to the boarding house he called home, and sat to dinner in his usual place below the older guests or residents.

Later inaugurations have been everything from a brawl: Andrew Jackson’s guests were a mob of drunks who broke furniture and glassware and roared around the house so militantly that President Jackson himself escaped through a back door and went to stay at a hotel.

From there we’ve gone through splendid all-military parades to (more recently) creditable imitations of Macy’s New York Thanksgiving Parade with legions of drum majorettes, soldiers, sailors, professional Yankees and Westerners, floats, balloons.

The high point of what you might call non-Republican simplicity was President Nixon’s invention of a bodyguard of trumpeters in body-clinging, gleaming white satin tights, reminding old movie-goers of the blinding scene in Rupert of Hentzau when about a hundred similarly blazing white trumpeters tooted in celebration of the wedding of Ronald Coleman to Madeline Carroll.

Mr Clinton, we are told, wants a low-key ceremony. Which sounds unlike him, until you think ahead to the onrush of investigations of him, of Whitewater, of the White House travel office, of the FBI files that are coming up.

We’re also told that Monday’s inaugural lunch is intended as a tribute to Thomas Jefferson. All the foods, the veggies, will be ones that he grew at Monticello; and the wines, either the ones he imported from France or ones grown locally.

Of one thing you can be sure: the inauguration may be restrained by modern standards, but it will not be conspicuous for that Republican simplicity that Jefferson thought right and proper for this new nation.

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