Same as it ever was
In a San Francisco hotel suite on Aug. 2, 1923, the first lady was reading a favorable magazine article aloud to President Warren G. Harding when he convulsed and died on the bed. Harding’s health had been poor; still, this was unexpected.
Among the many questions raised by his sudden demise: Who could get word to the new president?
That new president was Calvin Coolidge, former governor of Massachusetts, who put the flint in flinty New Englander. Coolidge had taken refuge from the suffocating heat of the Washington summer at his family’s ancestral farm in tiny Plymouth Notch, Vt., far from any telephone.
A telegram to the nearest Western Union office startled the clerk about midnight. When the messenger reached the farmhouse, Coolidge’s elderly father answered the knock, then called up the stairs to his sleeping son.
There was a copy of the Constitution nearby. After some study of Article II, Section I, by the light of a kerosene lamp, the Coolidges determined that it would be entirely legal for the father, a notary public and justice of the peace, to administer the oath of office to his son. Thus, at about 2:30 a.m. Aug. 3, America had its 30th president.
Almost a century later, Joseph R. Biden Jr. took the same oath under his own strange circumstances.
But the lesson of the lamp-lit parlor in Vermont is that none of the trappings really matter. There is no right way or wrong way to inaugurate a president. The oath of office has been sworn under all sorts of circumstances. George Washington’s first took place on a porch overlooking Wall Street in downtown New York. He wasn’t sworn in by the chief justice of the United States because there was no chief justice yet.
Everything about the “traditional” ceremony is someone’s innovation. Thomas Jefferson in 1801 was the first to be inaugurated at the Capitol—indoors, inside the old Senate chamber— and the first to call for bitterly divided Americans to come together as one.
For generations, ceremonies were held on the east front of the Capitol in March. The 20th Amendment moved the date to Jan. 20, and Mother Nature replied with a lashing rainstorm when the new date debuted in 1937. Even colder was the ceremony in 1961. Soldiers with flamethrowers cleared streets and walkways for the inauguration of John F. Kennedy, yet the glare from snow-covered marble half-blinded Robert Frost, the first poet to participate in an inauguration ceremony.
Less than three years later, on Nov. 22, 1963, Lyndon B. Johnson loomed inside a Boeing 707 and repeated the oath administered by U.S. District Judge Sarah Hughes, the first and only woman to perform that task. The window shades were lowered for fear that snipers might target Air Force One as it sat on a runway in Dallas. The corpse of a slain president lay in a casket by the rear door.
On Jan. 20, 1981, Ronald Reagan took the oath from Chief Justice Warren Burger, then faced the vista we have come to think of as permanent. To his defeated predecessor Jimmy Carter, seated nearby, Reagan said: “By your gracious cooperation in the transition process, you have shown a watching world that we are a united people… . I thank you and your people for all your help in maintaining the continuity which is the bulwark of our republic. The business of our nation goes forward.”
The business of our nation goes forward. Nothing else matters.