BEYOND THE RHETORIC: A NEW LOOK AT PRESIDENTIAL INAUGURAL ADDRESSES
On January 20, 1977 James Earl "Jim my" Carter, Jr. was sworn in as the cur rent President of the United States. As has been the custom with every newly in augurated chief executive since George Washington, President Carter opened his tenure of office by delivering a speech. And as has been the usual reaction of most observers of these inaugural ad dresses since 1789, Fort Worth Star Telegram writer Ron Hutcheson down graded the new chief executive's remarks in a column published two days later en titled: "Carter's inaugural talk has mediocre company." The two exceptions which Hutcheson cited to this negative assessment were the 1933 address of Franklin D. Roosevelt and the 1961 one of John F. Kennedy. Hutcheson's thesis is hardly unique; a search of the newspaper and magazine morgues of America would bring to light hundreds of similar essays. Nevertheless, his negative assessment needs to be tested by the historical record, and this essay has been written for that purpose. The widespread sentiment that Presi dential inaugural talks are mostly vapid rhetoric has been accompanied over the years by the view that political platforms usually consist of meaningless promises, which will be inevitably broken. These documents have been heaped with con tempt and neglect by the general public as well as by journalists, and even by politi cians themselves. In contrast, this author has attempted to demonstrate at length in his book A GUIDE TO POLITICAL PLATFORMS1 that a systematic analysis of the ideological content of political plat forms throws considerable light on the evolution of the political process in the United States. He likewise is of the opin ion that something valuable is to be gained from a similar examination of Presidential inaugural addresses. Al though other writers in the past may have penned essays which focus on the latter, no scholar has ever analyzed Presidential inaugural talks in the context of political platforms. In recent years two books have ap peared in print which contain every Presidential inaugural address delivered to date. One of these volumes does in clude annotations, but no systematic analysis;2 the other is prefaced by an in troduction, but Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. disposes of his topic in a mere four pages.3 Schlesinger, who regards only five to nine inaugural speeches as truly memo rable, nevertheless discerns a common theme in all of them, first announced in George Washington's first inaugural: " the preservation of the sacred fire of liber ty and the destiny of the republican model of government are justly considered, per haps, as deeply, as finally staked on the experiment intrusted to the hands of the American people."4 Viewed against this backdrop, Schlesinger finds a growing preoccupation with global affairs in these inaugural talks, along with an increasing pessimism due to the problems resulting from the rise of industrialism, the absorp tion of minorities, and various other domestic concerns.