My Fellow Citizens: The Inaugural Addresses of the Presidents of the United States, 1789-2009 (Facts On File Library of American History)

443 Pages·2010·1.28 MB·English

by  Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. (editor and Introduction)

My Fellow Citizens
The Inaugural Addresses of
the Presidents of the United States
1789–2009

My Fellow Citizens
The Inaugural Addresses of
the Presidents of the United States
1789–2009
with an introduction by
Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.
and commentary by
Fred L. Israel
My Fellow Citizens:
The Inaugural Addresses of the Presidents of the United States
1789–2009
Originally published by Crown Publishers, Inc. © 1965
Copyright © 2010, 2007 Infobase Publishing
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
My fellow citizens : the inaugural addresses of the presidents of the United States,
1789–2009 / with an introduction by Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. and commentary by
Fred L. Israel.
p. cm.
ISBN 978-0-8160-8253-7
1. Presidents—United States—Inaugural addresses
J81.4.M94 2010
352.23’860973—dc22 2009032184
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Date printed: January 2010
Printed in the United States of America
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Table of Contents
Introduction by Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. vii
George Washington
First Inaugural Address 1
Second Inaugural Address 5
John Adams 7
Thomas Jefferson
First Inaugural Address 14
Second Inaugural Address 19
James Madison
First Inaugural Address 26
Second Inaugural Address 30
James Monroe
First Inaugural Address 35
Second Inaugural Address 43
John Quincy Adams 55
Andrew Jackson
First Inaugural Address 64
Second Inaugural Address 68
Martin Van Buren 73
William Henry Harrison 83
James K. Polk 102
Zachary Taylor 115
Franklin Pierce 119
James Buchanan 129
Abraham Lincoln
First Inaugural Address 138
Second Inaugural Address 148
Ulysses S. Grant
First Inaugural Address 151
Second Inaugural Address 156
Rutherford B. Hayes 161
James A. Garfield 169
Grover Cleveland (First Inaugural) 177
vi contents
Benjamin Harrison 183
Grover Cleveland (Second Inaugural) 195
William McKinley
First Inaugural Address 202
Second Inaugural Address 213
Theodore Roosevelt 220
William Howard Taft 224
Woodrow Wilson
First Inaugural Address 238
Second Inaugural Address 244
Warren G. Harding 249
Calvin Coolidge 259
Herbert Hoover 270
Franklin Delano Roosevelt
First Inaugural Address 281
Second Inaugural Address 287
Third Inaugural Address 293
Fourth Inaugural Address 297
Harry S. Truman 300
Dwight D. Eisenhower
First Inaugural Address 309
Second Inaugural Address 317
John F. Kennedy 324
Lyndon Baines Johnson 330
Richard Milhous Nixon
First Inaugural Address 337
Second Inaugural Address 345
Jimmy Carter 354
Ronald Reagan
First Inaugural Address 361
Second Inaugural Address 370
George H. W. Bush 380
William Jefferson Clinton
First Inaugural Address 388
Second Inaugural Address 395
George W. Bush
First Inaugural Address 405
Second Inaugural Address 410
Barack Obama 419
Introduction
by Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.
I do solemnly swear (or affirm) 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
—Oath as prescribed in the cOnstitutiOn,
article ii, sectiOn 1
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AmericA hAs no more solemn rite than the inauguration of a president.
Every four years since 1789 the austere ceremony has suspended the pas-
sions of politics to permit an interlude of national reunion. “We have called
by different names brethren of the same principle,” said Jefferson after one
of the angriest elections of our history. “We are all Republicans, we are all
Federalists.” Putting doubts and disagreements aside, the nation listens for
a moment as one people to the words of the man they have chosen for the
highest office in the land. And every president, as he takes the oath, has his
opportunity to confide to his countrymen his philosophy of government,
his conception of the presidency, and his vision of the future “to recall what
our place in history has been,” as Franklin Roosevelt said at his third inau-
guration (1941), “and to rediscover what we are and what we may be.” Some
have done this more arrestingly than others; but together the inaugural ad-
dresses offer an unusual panorama of American history.
George Washington delivered the first inaugural address from a balcony
at Federal Hall on New York City’s Wall Street; he gave the second indoors at
Congress Hall in Philadelphia. The first inauguration to be held in Washing-
ton was Thomas Jefferson’s in the Senate Chamber of the Capitol in 1801. Not
until James Monroe’s inauguration in 1817 did the ceremony in Washington
take place outdoors. Thereafter, inaugurations were open to the public. Until
recently, most presidents were inaugurated at the Capitol’s East Portico; since
Ronald Reagan in 1981, the ceremony has moved over to the West Portico.
James Madison, urged on by his vivacious wife, Dolley, held the first
official inaugural ball in 1809. John Quincy Adams in 1825 was the first
vii
viii introduction
president to reject traditional breeches at his inauguration and wear
long trousers. Martin Van Buren in 1837 was the first president actually
born in the United States. James K. Polk’s inauguration (1845) was the
first to be reported by telegraph; James Buchanan’s (1857), the first to be
photographed; William McKinley’s (1897), the first to be filmed; Calvin
Coolidge’s (1925), the first to be carried live on radio; Harry Truman’s
(1949), the first to be televised; Bill Clinton’s (1997), the first to be put on
the Internet. The long parade of inaugural addresses records the growth
of the United States from the predominantly rural nation of 1789, made
up of 4 million people in 13 states straggling along the Atlantic seaboard,
into the mighty computerized society of today, with more than 300 million
in 50 states stretching from sea to sea and thrusting into the Pacific and
toward the Arctic Circle. The addresses record too the parallel transfor-
mation of a weak nation isolated on the periphery of world politics into
the most powerful nation known to history, with interests and obligations
everywhere on earth.
At the same time, these addresses reflect the tragic problems that
growth and change have brought to the American community. The idyllic
days when John Adams talked of our “national innocence,” when Monroe
spoke of “the happy Government under which we live,” when Polk asked,
“Who shall assign limits to the achievements of free minds and free hands
under the protection of this glorious Union?” have given way to the somber
apprehensions that have shadowed the inaugural pronouncements of the
last generation. “Dark pictures and gloomy forebodings are worse than use-
less,” said McKinley as late as 1901; but his successor, Theodore Roosevelt,
could not escape the troubling proposition: “Never before have men tried
so vast and formidable an experiment as that of administering the affairs
of a continent under the form of a democratic republic.” Power gave new
perplexity to both domestic and foreign affairs. So the rise of industrialism
throughout the nineteenth century brought grave problems in its wake. As
early as 1889, Benjamin Harrison began to worry about “our great corpo-
rations,” and four years later Cleveland described them as too often “con-
spiracies against the interest of the people.” At the same time, Cleveland,
warning against the “evils of paternalism,” added, “While the people should
patriotically and cheerfully support their Government, its functions do not
include support of the people.” But the new social questions could not be
ignored. “Modern life,” said Theodore Roosevelt, “is both complex and in-
tense, and the tremendous changes wrought by the extraordinary industrial
introduction ix
development of the last half century are felt in every fiber of our social and
political being.” By 1913, Wilson asked the nation to count the human cost
of industrial growth, “the cost of lives snuffed out, of energies overtaxed
and broken, the fearful physical and spiritual cost to the men and women
and children upon whom the dead weight and burden of it all has fallen
pitilessly the years through.” Answering his question, Wilson demanded
that government “be put at the service of humanity” in order to shield ordi-
nary people “from the consequences of great industrial and social processes
which they cannot alter, control, or singly cope with.”
Our domestic policy has also confronted with rising intensity the prob-
lem of the absorption of ethnic minorities. The early presidents frequently
recommended, in the ornate language of Madison, that the nation “carry
on the benevolent plans which have so meritoriously applied to the conver-
sion of our aboriginal neighbors from the degradation and wretchedness
of savage life to a participation in the improvements of which the human
mind and manners are susceptible in a civilized state”—a recommendation
which, alas, had small effect on his countrymen’s treatment of the Indians.
After the Civil War, presidents betrayed concern about the mounting flow
of immigrants. “There are men of all races,” said Benjamin Harrison, “even
the best, whose coming is necessarily a burden upon our public revenues
or a threat to social order. These should be identified and excluded.” Taft
displayed special anxiety over “the admission of Asiatic immigrants who
cannot be amalgamated with our population.” But the idea of exclusion
on ethnic grounds came into increasing conflict with the American con-
science. Nor can modern America accept Taft’s complacent message to Ne-
gro Americans that “it is not the disposition or within the province of the
Federal Government to interfere with regulation by Southern States of their
domestic affairs.” Better the blunt language of Grant: The ex-slave “is not
possessed of the civil rights which citizenship should carry with it. This is
wrong, and should be corrected. To this correction I stand committed, so
far as Executive influence can avail.”
In foreign affairs our presidents can no longer, with Jefferson, reject “en-
tangling alliances” or, with Monroe, congratulate the nation on the “peculiar
felicity” that preserves us from the upheavals of the world outside. As the
United States has grown, the planet has shrunk. “We have become a great
nation,” said Theodore Roosevelt, “forced by the fact of its greatness into
relations with the other nations of the earth.” “We are provincials no longer,”
said Wilson in 1917. “There can be no turning back.” Even Calvin Coolidge,