America first: Great and dreadful inaugural addresses over the centuries

It’s been a week since Donald Trump made what the eminent conservative columnist George Will called “the most dreadful inaugural address in history.” 

It was easily the most awful in my memory, but it prompted me to wonder about the competition. What other presidents have made truly terrible inaugural addresses or, conversely, how many have made great, memorable speeches to launch their presidencies?

I had neither the time nor the enthusiasm to read all 58 inaugural addresses, many of them both dreadful and long, but history tells us we haven’t been overburdened with great ones. What the best and the worst have in common, for good or ill, are one or two truly memorable lines. 

Lincoln’s second inaugural, in the final year of the Civil War, is probably the highest regarded, for its call for “malice toward none, charity for all.” Or Roosevelt’s Depression-year assurance in 1933 that the only thing a fearful nation had to fear is fear itself. The top three would also include John Kennedy’s highly quotable short address with its admonition to “never fear to negotiate, but never negotiate out of fear” and “ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country.” 

Like most inauguration addresses, Lincoln’s, Roosevelt’s and Kennedy’s were spoken before large crowds assembled before or behind the Capitol. It’s been an outdoor ritual most of the time since 1817, when the capitol was being renovated and House members refused to allow senators into their chamber for the inauguration of James Monroe. 

The thousands out in the cold couldn’t hear a thing Monroe said, but the idea caught on anyway, and for the next century or so, newly inaugurated presidents would speak to large audiences that couldn’t hear them and had to read about what they said in next day’s paper.

These earliest speeches were sometimes both terrible and long, and the longest of them all proved fatal for its author. William Henry Harrison wore neither a hat nor coat when he spoke for more than two hours on a very cold March 4, 1841. He caught a cold and died of pneumonia a month later, unable to fulfill any of the plans he outlined in numbing detail in that 8,000-word address. His records for the longest speech and shortest administration still stand.

It took presidents more than a century to learn that shorter was better, and they are still learning that it takes only a few words to convince history that they had made a great speech or maybe not. Sometimes, a few grace notes were all that history would remember in an otherwise pedestrian speech. 

This was true of Jimmy Carter in 1975, who opened his speech by turning to President Gerald Ford and saying, “For myself and for our nation, I want to thank my predecessor for all he has done to heal our nation.” Ford, of course, assumed the presidency after the disgraced Richard Nixon resigned, and his Inaugural address also had a memorable opening: “My fellow Americans, our long national nightmare is over … our Constitution works, our great republic is a government of laws, not men.”

It is altogether fitting and proper that the worst inaugural address was given by the worst president. With slavery driving the Union to the breaking point, James Buchanan looked the other way. 

This fuss over slavery, said the new president, is “happily, a matter of but little practical importance.” It would be better for the country to be “diverted from this question to others of more pressing and practical importance,” he told an anxious nation, and he would devote the next four years to hoping the issue would go away. 

His chief competitor as worst president is the unfortunate Warren G. Harding, whose administration is rightly remembered as the most corrupt in all of our history. The affable Harding created a cabinet of cronies from Ohio, and they did him in. Or, as Harding himself put it to the Kansas editor William Allen White, “I have no trouble with my enemies, White, but my damned friends, my goddamned friends are the ones that keep me walking the floor all night.”

Harding’s inaugural address is also considered a model of banality, not for anything he particularly said, but for what the great political columnist H.L. Mencken wrote about it three days after Harding’s inauguration on March 4, 1921.

Harding’s inaugural speech, wrote Mencken, was written in the worst English he had ever encountered. “It reminds me of a string of wet sponges, … tattered washing on the line … stale bean soup. It is flap and doodle … balder and dash.”

It was so bad, wrote Mencken, “that a sort of grandeur creeps into it.” In all that I have read about the address of the 45th president, I have seen no indication of creeping grandeur. 

Simsbury resident Dick Ahles is a retired journalist. Email him at dahles@hotmail.com.