Inaugural Speeches a Quadrennial Rite of Presidential Passage, Vision

WASHINGTON — From the days of powdered wigs to the era of top hats and beyond, presidents have opened their terms of office by assaying the challenges of their times and offering their prescriptions for the nation’s well-being.

“By the words they use, presidents help to set the standards by which the public will judge them,” says John J. Pitney, professor of government at Claremont McKenna College in Claremont, Calif.

Most of the 52 inaugural addresses are exemplars of hope. Many were quickly overwhelmed by the rush of events and the footsteps of reality. Most lie dormant in books like carefully pressed and faded flowers from an inaugural ball of long ago.

A few--very few--are immortal, their words carved for the ages in granite or marble:

Abraham Lincoln in 1861, appealing for union in the face of rebellion, his chief rival, Sen. Stephen A. Douglas, holding the president’s stovepipe hat:

“The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.”

Lincoln again, in 1865, the Civil War all but won, the words later to be engraved on a wall of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington:

“With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation’s wounds . . . to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.”

Franklin Delano Roosevelt, staring down the Great Depression in 1933, a resentful Herbert Hoover behind him:

“So, first of all, let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself--nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance.”

George Washington, first in all things, was first in this, too, taking his oath of office on the balcony of Federal Hall in New York City, then moving inside to the Senate chamber to proclaim that not even in war had he been caused greater anxiety than by his elevation to the presidency.

Never a requirement of law or Constitution, the inaugural address became a custom, a speech delivered by all presidents to follow except those taking office in extraordinary circumstances.

By the time he delivered his second inaugural address in 1793, Washington offered up just 135 words.

His message: If he violated his oath to “preserve, protect and defend” the Constitution, he deserved not only the punishment that document provides but “the upbraidings of all who are now witnesses of the present solemn ceremony.”

While Washington’s audience was limited to those who stood before him, or who read his words days or weeks later, the reach of the contemporary inaugural address is instant and global, the audience not limited to the scores of thousands who sit and stand near the flag-draped West Front of the Capitol.

Washington still holds the record for brevity. Despite his reputation for loquacity, President Clinton claims that his address four years ago was the third-shortest in history, just after Abraham Lincoln.

But he’s wrong. Clinton’s first inaugural was nearly 1,600 words. Far shorter efforts were offered by James Madison, Andrew Jackson, Zachary Taylor, Ulysses S. Grant, Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt and Clinton’s hero, John F. Kennedy.

FDR’s fourth effort in wartime 1944, delivered from the south portico of the White House, was just 559 words long, shorter than the 698 words of poetry and vision that Lincoln offered in 1865.

As the inaugural record wound into the 20th century, incoming presidents mined the speeches of their predecessors.

Gary Wills, in his 1970 book “Nixon Agonistes,” reported that Richard Nixon had “locked himself away and studied past inaugural addresses,” coming up in Wills’ view with a speech that was “hand-me-down” John Kennedy.

Kennedy in 1963: “Let the word go forth to friend and foe alike.”

Nixon in 1969: “Let this message be heard by strong and weak alike.”

And so on.

Scholar John Pitney, in an article prepared for Presidential Studies quarterly, shows similar mining on Clinton’s part four years ago, with borrowings from Woodrow Wilson, FDR, Nixon and even Ronald Reagan.

Coming to office on a bare plurality in 1913, after Theodore Roosevelt’s third-party candidacy divided the Republican vote, Wilson spoke of an impulse for change.

“No one can mistake the purpose for which the nation now seeks to use the Democratic Party,” Wilson said. “It seeks to use it to interpret a change in its own plans and points of view.”

Clinton, coming to office after third-party candidate Ross Perot siphoned off many Republican votes, likewise saw a Wilsonian mandate for change: “The American people have summoned the change we celebrate today. You have raised your voice in an unmistakable chorus.”

Wilson saw his mandate as reformer: “The great government we loved has too often been made use of for private and selfish purposes, and those who used it had forgotten the people.”

Clinton: “Powerful people maneuver for position and worry endlessly about who is in and who is out, forgetting those people whose toil and sweat sends us here and pays our way.”

Thomas Jefferson, coming to power after the first truly bruising partisan campaign--a campaign in which the most alarming fears were raised about his character--sought to reassure his countrymen.

Standing in the Senate chamber in the newly opened Capitol, Jefferson said:

“All will bear in mind the sacred principle, that though the will of the majority is in all cases to prevail, that will to be rightful must be reasonable; that the minority possesses their equal rights, which equal laws must protect, and to violate would be oppression. . . . We are all Republicans, we are all Federalists.”

William Henry Harrison takes the prize for long-windedness, and the award for unintended consequences as well. On March 4 he rode a white charger to the Capitol. His inaugural parade featured marching bands, troops and ardent supporters. The crowd was said to be the largest for any inauguration since Washington.

The speech: 8,500 words. Delivery time: Nearly two hours.

The speaker, hatless and coatless, spoke into a snowstorm. He invoked ancient Rome and ancient Greece and ancient Egypt and inveighed against the inordinate love of power.

Thirty-one days later, Harrison achieved a presidential first.

He became the first president to die in office. The cause: pneumonia.