Presidential Inaugurations from Washington to Obama
On January 20, 2009, the newly inaugurated president, Barack Obama, and his wife Michelle abandoned their presidential limousine and walked down Pennsylvania Avenue, a gesture that elicited widespread approval from the assembled crowd. On January 20, 1977, Jimmy Carter and his wife Rosalyn strolled down Pennsylvania Avenue to signal the beginnings of a more accountable and less imperious presidency than had existed in recent years. While Obama borrowed from Carter, both men owe a debt to Thomas Jefferson, who signaled a philosophical break from his “monarchical” Federalist predecessors when he walked from his Washington, D.C. boarding house to the U.S. Capitol to be inaugurated on March 4, 1801, eschewing the customary horse, carriage and an official escort.
As we commemorate the one-year anniversary of Barack Obama’s inauguration and reflect on these iconic images from earlier inaugurations, we should remember the substantive importance and even controversy that surround presidential inaugurations, particularly those occurring during the nation’s early decades, as presidents used these events to present their understanding of the U.S. Constitution.
The election of George Washington as the nation’s first president proved to be a foregone conclusion. What remained a mystery was how the republican presidency would work in practice. Washington shrewdly recognized that the actions he took as president, whether ceremonially, domestically or diplomatically, would become enduring precedents that would determine the success or failure of republican government. For the new republic to succeed, he would need to respect the two principles that formed the basis of the Constitution: popular sovereignty and the rule of law. Unlike a monarchy, this government derived its authority from the people and was based in a written Constitution with clearly defined responsibilities. Republican government would not succeed if he (and others) could not find ways to put these abstract principles into practice. But Washington could not make any decisions as president until he had been officially sworn in. His inauguration occurred on April 30, 1789 in New York City, in an event planned and executed by the nation’s first Congress, with visible and vocal support from the nation’s citizens.
Immediately after his inauguration, President Washington turned his attention to defining the rules and parameters of presidential conduct to ensure the successful launch of republican government. Working in consultation with key officials such as John Adams, John Jay, James Madison, and Alexander Hamilton, Washington developed a ceremonial program designed to balance republican accessibility with presidential dignity. The overall goal of Washington’s ceremonial program was to bring newly minted sovereign citizens into contact with their new national government. With this goal in mind, Washington employed monarchical rituals such as levees (or receptions) and tours to reach out to the nation’s citizens, but always making sure that republican government, not Washington, remained the star attraction of these events. These monarchical rituals were not only familiar to many Americans, but they dovetailed nicely with Washington’s vision of republican government based in broad federal power and a strong executive. Washington’s ceremonial program initially met with little resistance, until it faced enormous criticism from Thomas Jefferson and his emerging Democratic-Republican coalition.
While George Washington believed his carefully crafted ceremonial program was critical to the successful launching of the new Constitution, Thomas Jefferson reached the opposite conclusion. Jefferson believed ceremonial rituals were an anathema to republican government, particularly those practices that came from monarchy, because they injected luxury and excess into a form of government that needed simplicity to survive. In Jefferson’s mind, Washington and his fellow Federalists were thinly disguised monarchists whose ideas and practices would destroy republican government. Jefferson, Madison and their supporters spent the 1790s developing a philosophical alternative to the Federalists, an approach that culminated in Jefferson’s election to the presidency in 1800. Jefferson dedicated his two terms to dismantling the Federalists’ program, including its ceremonial rituals, beginning with a short but highly significant walk to the U.S. Capitol on his inauguration day. His commitment to informality achieved comic dimensions at times, particularly when he greeted the new British ambassador to the United States dressed in a soiled shirt and bedroom slippers. Jefferson’s philosophical approach was clear: republican government would thrive, not through the use of monarchical rituals, but through a celebration of its core value of simplicity.
Washington and Jefferson’s approaches to presidential ceremony were by no means the final word on how to interpret the Constitution and how to ensure the successful launching of republican government. Instead, their competing understandings represented two of the numerous philosophies of governance that presidents would present to sovereign citizens for their approval or disapproval at inaugurations and other ceremonial events and non-events. For example, Jackson’s “people’s inauguration” of 1829, occurring several decades after Jefferson’s, popularized presidential ceremony in ways that Jefferson himself might have had difficulty grasping. Two hundred and twenty years into our republican experiment, we may have become complacent when we witness the familiar rituals associated with presidential inaugurations and other executive rites. As sovereign citizens reflecting on Obama’s inauguration, we should remember to look for the ideologies fueling the festivities.