The first words of presidents: Inaugural addresses

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Appropriate for an election year, ‘Fellow Citizens: The Penguin Book of U.S. Presidential Inaugural Addresses’ has hit shelves. It includes every inauguration speech, from George Washington’s in 1789 to George W. Bush’s in 2005. For each speech, it also provides a few pages of context, describing elections and the men who won them.

President William Henry Harrison served the shortest time as president -- because he declined to wear a coat or hat despite the unseasonably cold weather on his inauguration day, March 4, 1841, and died a month later of a fatal chill. His speech was the longest a president ever gave, and it takes up 18 pages of this volume.

Organizers learned their lesson; in later years, inclement weather drove the ceremony inside, so longwindedness would not prove fatal.

The most succinct speech was the one that George Washington gave on March 4, 1793, before his second term began. He took just two paragraphs to say what he needed to, which can be summed up as, ‘Again, thanks.’

President James A. Garfield, who also suffered an untimely death (due to incompetent doctoring following an assassination attempt), read every inaugural address in preparation for his own on March 4, 1881, making him something of the Milton of presidents. I’d wager that others followed in that tradition -- William Jefferson Clinton, anyone? -- although with this book on hand, the task would have been a lot easier.

There is something monumental about reading all these inaugural addresses from beginning to end. They show the great aspirations of our nation and its leaders, but also force us see where we have failed to achieve greatness. We see where rights were neglected, where fat cats were overfed, where isolationism stood in the way of being a nation of the world. But most painfully, we read of the great hopes of men who died in office -- unlucky Garfield, loquacious Harrison, John F. Kennedy -- and then the words of the men who follow them, striving, again.

-- Carolyn Kellogg

After the jump: John F. Kennedy’s inauguration speech, in color video, in two parts.

Photo credit: ‘Washington, D.C., 1861.’ [Lincoln Inauguration.] Copyprint deposit, 1861. American Treasures of the Library of Congress exhibition.

Above, Part 1 -- part 2, below.