INAUGURATION DAY, 20 JANUARY 2021
- Peter Radan
- Jan 15, 2021
- 6 min read
Peter Radan (15 January 2021)
At noon on Wednesday, 20 June 2021, 78 days after the presidential election that was held on 3 November 2020, Joe Biden will assume office as the 46th president of the United States. For this to occur, the only constitutionally mandated act is for him to take the following Oath of Office: "I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States".[1]
Whether Biden will be sworn in as Joe Biden or Joseph Biden remains to be seen. To date, Jimmy Carter, in 1977, is the only president sworn in by a nickname.
As anyone with but the slightest interest in American politics will be aware the reason for the significant span of time between election day and inauguration day is to give time for the Electoral College processes to take place. However, what may not be known is the origins of the dates for the election and inauguration of the president.
Election Day
For the first few decades of the history of the United States, presidential elections were not held on a single day. The election of George Washington, America's first president, was held over a period from 15 December 1788 to 10 January 1789, several months before the Constitution came into operation on 4 March 1789.
In 1792 Congress passed a law that stipulated that states could hold their elections for president at any time within a 34-day period before the first Wednesday in December of the election year.[2] This was seen as a convenient period because harvest would have usually been completed, but the severe winter weather would not yet have arrived.
Following the invention of electric telegraph by Samuel Morse in 1843, the scope for virtually instant communication nationwide led to elections being held on a single day so that results in any given state would not influence outcomes in others. In order to prevent this happening Congress passed a law in 1845 that mandated that states were to hold their elections for the president on the first Tuesday after the first Monday in November of the relevant election year.[3] Tuesday was chosen because it would allow voters to attend church on Sunday, and have time, on Monday, to travel to polling location, to vote on Tuesday.
All presidential elections after 1845 have been held on a date between 2 November and 8 November (both dates inclusive). The first was that which elected Zachary Taylor as president on Tuesday, 7 November 1848. The most recent, which all but Donald Trump, its loser, and his acolytes know resulted in the election of Joe Biden, was held on Tuesday, 3 November 2020.
Inauguration Day
The Constitution of the United States came into operation on 4 March 1789. George Washington, the first president, was inaugurated 57 days later on 30 April 1789. However, 4 March - some four months after election day - became the date for the inauguration thereafter until, in 1933, it was changed to 20 January by an amendment to the Constitution.[4] The first president to be sworn in on this date was Franklin Roosevelt for his second term on Wednesday, 20 January 1937.
Although the Constitution stipulates that a president can "affirm" rather than "swear" that he or she will faithfully undertakes his or her duties, only Franklin Pierce, in 1853, has done so. All other have "sworn" to do so, usually taking the Oath of Office on a Bible. An exception was John Quincy Adams, who, in 1825, was sworn in on a "Volume of Law", stating that, as president, he chose to uphold the Constitution — not the Bible.
If 20 January falls on a Sunday, it has been, since Woodrow Wilson's second inauguration in 1917, the tradition that the Oath of Office is administered in a private ceremony on that day with the Oath taken again on the following day in the public inauguration ceremony. The most recent instance of this occurring was Barack Obama's inauguration for his second term in 2013.
Inaugurations have, since 1801, taken place at the Capitol Building in Washington DC. For a time, one of the odd traditions associated with inauguration day ceremonies was that the president elect wore a stovetop hat on the day. Started with James Garfield in 1881, this tradition came to end in 1961 when John F Kennedy became the last president to wear such a hat to his inauguration.
Outgoing presidents usually attend the inauguration of their successor. In the wake of the incursion into the Capitol Building on 6 January 2021, for which he was, seven days later impeached on charge of "incitement of insurrection", Donald Trump will become the sixth outgoing president not to attend the inauguration of his successor.
John Adams, in 1801, was the first outgoing president not to attend the inauguration of his successor, in this case, Thomas Jefferson. Adams and Jefferson were rivals in the 1796 presidential election which resulted in Jefferson becoming Adams' vice-president. They were bitter rivals again in the 1800 presidential election, which ended up being resolved, for reasons too complicated to recount here, in the House of Representatives where Jefferson prevailed on the 36th ballot against, not Adams, but Jefferson's vice-presidential running-mate Aaron Burr.[5] Jefferson and Adams subsequently made up and became friends. Both died on 4 July 1826, the fiftieth Anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, a document which both contributed to and signed.
In 1829, Adams' son, John Quincy Adams, chose, like his father, not to attend the inauguration of his successor, Andrew Jackson. Adams gained the presidency in 1824 in circumstances where none of four presidential candidates gained a majority in the Electoral College. This meant the presidency was decided by the House of Representatives which it to Adams. Jackson, who had gained the highest number of votes in the Electoral College, claimed that he had been denied the presidency as the result of "a corrupt bargain" engineered between Adams and Henry Clay, who finished third in the Electoral College vote, and who became Adam's Secretary of State. Jackson, Donald Trump's favourite former president, claimed he had been cheated out of an election victory and sought revenge which he got in the presidential election of 1828, with a 178 to 83 Electoral College victory over Adams.[6]
In 1869, Andrew Johnson became the third president who did not show up to his successor's inauguration. Johnson, a regular contender for the title of the worst-ever American president, had been impeached exactly a year before Ulysses S Grant's inauguration in March 1869. Johnson, who escaped removal from office by a single vote at his trial before the Senate in March 1868, was effectively uninvited from attending the inauguration by Grant himself who refused to have Johnson sit with him in the carriage ride from the White House to the Capitol Building for the inauguration ceremony.[7]
The other two non-attendees were Martin van Buren, who, for unknown reasons, did not attend William Henry Harrison's inauguration in 1841, and Woodrow Wilson, who was too sick to attend Warren G Harding's inauguration in 1921.
The Inaugural Address
Starting with George Washington, all elected presidents have delivered an inaugural address at their inaugurations.[8] Prior to William McKinley's inauguration in 1897, the address was delivered before taking the Oath of Office. However, starting with, and since, 1897, it has been delivered after taking the Oath of Office.
The shortest inaugural address was Washington's second in 1793 at 135 words. At 8,445 words, William Henry Harrison's was the longest. It is widely agreed that it was also deadly.
Harrison's inauguration ceremony was conducted in a snowstorm that hit Washington on 4 March 1841. Harrison, an army general, wanted to show his resilience and toughness, braved the elements and refused to wear an overcoat, scarf, or hat while delivering his speech which took nearly two hours to deliver. He died exactly a month later on 4 April, 1841. His treating doctor stated that the cause of death was pneumonia, contracted while delivering his inaugural address. Whether pneumonia brought about the shortest presidential term in history has recently been put into question. It has been suggested that Harrison died as a result of enteric fever (a gastrointestinal infection) contracted from bacteria in Washington's unsanitary sewerage system.[9]
Footnotes
[1] US Constitution, Article II, Section 1, Clause 8. [2] An act relative to the election of a president and vice-president of the United States, and declaring the officer who shall act as president in case of vacancies in the offices of both president and vice-president, Section 1, 1 March 1792. [3] An Act to establish a uniform time for holding elections for electors of President and Vice President in all the States of the Union, 23 January 1845. [4] US Constitution, 20the Amendment, Section 1. [5] Dan Sisson, The American Revolution of 1800, Berrett-Koehler Publishers Inc, 2014. [6] Jill Lepore, These Truths: A History of the United States, W W Norton, 2018, 180-187. [7] Brenda Wineapple, The Impeachers: The Trial of Andrew Johnson and the Dream of a Just Nation, Random House, 2019, 409-410. [8] The following eight presidents have died in office: William Henry Harrison (1841), Zachary Taylor (1850), Abraham Lincoln (1865), James A Garfield (1881), William McKinley (1901), Franklin D Roosevelt (1945), and John F Kennedy (1963). None of their successors delivered an inaugural address. Following Richard Nixon resignation in 1974, Gerald Ford did address the nation, but did not characterise the speech as an inaugural address. [9] Jane McHugh & Philip A Mackowiak, 'Death in the White House: President William Henry Harrison's Atypical Pneumonia' (2014) 59(7) Clinical Infectious Diseases 990-995.
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