Words for the Ages

We have obviously come a long way. A vast crowd of spectators witnessed the first African-American in our history take the oath of office as president of the United States. Barack Obama's reputation for oratorical brilliance, plus the multilayered crisis facing the government he has been chosen to lead, combined to generate a dramatic sense of history-in-the-making that required no special pleading from network pundits or crazed bloggers. (Article continued below...)

It was quite different at the beginning. On April 30, 1789, George Washington, who owned about 300 slaves, took the oath of office before a modest crowd of 200 guests gathered in the Senate chamber of Federal Hall in New York City. He had ordered a suit of superfine broadcloth from a Hartford tailor in order to make an austere sartorial statement—this was an inauguration, not a coronation—but he discarded the broadcloth for a suit of black velvet at the last moment.

Eyewitnesses accounts disagree, but several commentators thought that Washington seemed quite nervous, which surprised them given his reputation for stoic serenity when facing musket fire and artillery rounds during the War of Independence. Another witness thought that he did not really want to be there, an opinion supported by the first lines of Washington's Inaugural Address, which emphasized his reluctance about leaving retirement for a job that he did not want but could not decline.

History was most assuredly being made—the American experiment with republican government was being launched—but the inaugural ceremony itself was a disappointingly dull affair. Washington's speech was delivered in such a low voice that few in the audience could make out his words, and the printed version, while stately, comes across as flat and platitudinous.

This has proved an ominous precedent. For while Washington is justifiably praised for shaping the office of the American presidency, he also set the mold for most subsequent Inaugural Addresses, which have been ceremonial occasions bereft of eloquence or substance, the rough equivalent of rock concerts without music.

Ranking the worst Inaugural Addresses is a much more difficult task than selecting the best, because there are many more candidates, and the very act of reading through them tends to liquefy one's brain cells and thereby cloud one's judgment. That said, the Inaugural Addresses delivered in the 1850s by Millard Fillmore, Franklin Pierce and James Buchanan strike me as clear winners in the race for the bottom tier. All three are models of obfuscation, in which the core issue threatening the nation, slavery, is studiously avoided.

My candidate for the very worst is William Henry Harrison (1841). The Harrison address is bad enough in its own right, the longest Inaugural Address in American history as I count the words, studded with obscure classical allusions that Harrison inserted to offset his reputation as "the hero of Tippecanoe," whose chief talent was killing Indians. But Harrison merits the award for the worst for an additional reason. Because his Inaugural Address lasted so long, and because he refused to wear a coat despite the cold weather, Harrison developed a fatal case of pneumonia and died a month later, making him the shortest-lived president in American history, assassinated by his own long-windedness.