STATE OF THE UNION AT A GLANCE
What is it?
It is a speech that allows the U.S. president to lay out his agenda for the following year. The American constitution requires the president to “from time to time give to Congress information of the state of the union and recommend to their consideration such measures as he shall judge necessary and expedient.”
When was the first one?
The first such report to Congress was delivered by president George Washington in New York City in 1790. It was only 1,089 words. By contrast, president Bill Clinton’s speeches always clocked in over an hour long.
Was it always a big deal?
No. The early speeches did not include the pageantry and formal responses of today’s televised speech. From 1800 to 1912, the speech was a written text delivered to Congress by the White House. Woodrow Wilson reinstated the tradition of the speech.
Was it always delivered at night?
No. President Lyndon Johnson moved the speech to prime time to capture a larger television audience and speak more to Americans than to Congress.
What else?
The speech has been broadcast on radio since 1923, on television since 1947 and today has its own Twitter hashtag, #SOTU.
According to the White House website, the first lady has the prerogative to invite special guests to listen to the speech from her private viewing box. Often these people are visual symbols of a policy or event the president highlights in his speech. Guests for this year’s speech included survivors of the Boston Marathon bombing, the first openly gay professional basketball player, a 16-year-old inventor, a woman struggling with crushing student debt and the fire chief of Oklahoma town devastated by a tornado earlier this year.
In 2009, Republican congressman Joe Wilson from South Carolina shouted “you lie” to Obama in the middle of his inaugural state of the union speech.
For the 2011 speech, Democrats and Republicans sat together mixed up in the chamber instead of seating by party lines. This was a response to the shooting of Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords a few weeks earlier and an attempt to show the American public the two parties could work together.
The state of the union speech brings together every important person in government in one room: the president, vice-president, all of Congress, the heads of the military, the justices of the Supreme Court, ambassadors, cabinet members and foreign dignitaries. One cabinet member stays away, chosen by the president to be the “designated survivor” in the unlikely event something catastrophic occurs. In 2013, Energy Secretary Steven Chu was the designated survivor.