How Trump's Inauguration Compares to Inaugurations Past

On January 20, 1953, President Dwight D. Eisenhower caused a raucous when he bucked convention and refused to wear a traditional cutaway coat and top hat at his inauguration. The “social arbiters” were outraged, according to the January 26, 1953 issue of Newsweek. There was a mad dash of senators and cabinet members scouring men’s shops for homburg hats, like Eisenhower's, and even Vice President Richard Nixon was in a tizzy; he moaned, then begrudgingly bought himself a club coat to match the president’s.

But with the men managing to find last-minute attire and the foggy weather clearing, Newsweek reported that it was the most “benign” inauguration since the first Roosevelt inaugural.

Sixty-four years later, the presidential inauguration is shadowed by controversy, and it has nothing to do with the president-elect’s clothing. Thousands of people are expected to descend on the nation’s capital on Friday, in what is shaping up to be the least benign presidential inaugural ceremony in American history. Dozens of groups are planning to protest Donald Trump’s inauguration; the Women's March on Washington, for example, has 177,000 people marked as “going” on its official Facebook page.