ED: Now when Barack Obama puts his hand on a Bible and repeats after the Chief Justice this week, he will be reenacting a rite performed by 43 presidents before him. And it’s easy to understand how, for many people, these presidential inaugurations just seem like another tired piece of political theatre, created and played for maximum effect. But the story we heard a moment ago reminds us that there have been times in American history when inaugurations were anything but tired, times when the incredibly high stakes of a presidential transition were played out in the inauguration itself.
PETER: And so today on the show we’re going to zero in on a few of these high stakes inaugurations. We have got stories that just may change your thinking about this quadrennial event.
BRIAN: We’ll begin in New York City, the nation’s very first capital. The man of the hour, of course, was George Washington. Here’s historian Joanne Freeman again.
JOANNE FREEMAN: You can see that he decided very carefully what he was going to wear to his inauguration. He wore homespun American cloth made in Connecticut. It was apparently beautiful homespun cloth so that you wouldn’t have known from looking at it that that’s what it was.
But symbolically speaking, he was trying to be sort of plain, straightforward guy. I’m not a king, not me. But he had diamond buckles on his shoes. So that was like, you know, a great Washington compromise. It was like, well, yes, I’m dressed in homespun like any other American, except for those diamonds.
He also made a decision, in the afternoons very often he would take these walks around the block, very ostentatiously around 2:00, 3:00 in the afternoon. He would leave and walk around the block and stop and look up at a church clock and then set his watch and then go back to his office. And that was a very explicit political statement that I don’t always ride in a carriage. Look at me, I’m walking in the street.
And not only was that the message, but people got the message. And he got fan mail. Great thing, George, the walks. We love it.
BRIAN: So to go back to the inauguration, take us through the inauguration as though you were commenting on– you were doing the color for a football game. Comment on how he’s doing on toeing this thin line between veering towards monarchy or simply being an unimportant plebeian.
JOANNE FREEMAN: Well, certainly the American people were not treating him like a plebeian on his way up. He came up from Virginia from Mount Vernon up to New York, which was the first capital. And there were Hosannas being sung the entire way up and flowers strewn in his path and women sort of with banners. And there was a whole celebration all the way through his path.
BRIAN: Now, help me out. I’m certain he wasn’t in a limousine. So how was he processing?
JOANNE FREEMAN: No. For the most part he was in a carriage.
BRIAN: Wasn’t that a little dangerous, a little monarchist, perhaps?
JOANNE FREEMAN: Well, yeah. And as a matter of fact, he got some criticism, not inaugural criticism, but generally speaking. He had a very fancy carriage and he had a lot of white horses. And people who were prone to worry about a monarchy, that was one of the things they looked at was, oh, we know he’s president and everything. But that’s an awfully fancy carriage and a lot of fancy horses.
So the inauguration, I think America was in yippee mode. And so I don’t think that they were yet at that moment, sort of coming down on his head for being monarchical. And there were barges in Manhattan harbor and he was sort of conducted on this sort of ceremonial barge that he embarked from and was taken to Federal Hall where he could take the oath of office. But the sort of wonderful part about this is what was going on at Federal Hall, which is where Congress was meeting, before this.
Because Congress, and in particular the Senate, was debating what the heck should happen during an inauguration because nobody knew. First of all, what is a president? And, secondly, how do you inaugurate one?