George Washington, the first president, was trembling as he gave his inaugural address, and his immediate successors John Adams and Thomas Jefferson were respectively terrified of having a mid-speech panic attack and criticised as “near-inaudible”. Two hundred years later, in the alternative political reality of The West Wing, President Bartlet fretted up to the last moment about what to put in and leave out of his second address, despite (with third terms ruled out) having no further need to seek public approval. Such are the strains derived from a paradoxical American tradition: a display of the ancient art of oratory is the first task required of new or re-elected heads of a nation that, from Washington onwards – his first inauguration in April 1789 preceded by only 75 days the start of the French Revolution that took its lead from America’s - has prided itself on spearheading the world into the future. Donald Trump will become the latest exponent of this esoteric literary form when he delivers the 58th inaugural address next Friday.
What may have frightened the Founding Fathers was the prospect of failing to meet the standards of Cicero and other classical orators, and their own more silver-tongued contemporaries; whereas for recent presidents including Barack Obama the bar has been set by the addresses generally agreed to be the finest. These are Abraham Lincoln’s (in 1861 and 1865, just before and in the final months of the civil war), two of FD Roosevelt’s (mid-Depression in 1933 and rededicating himself to take his still-stricken people to a “happy valley” in 1937), and John F Kennedy’s sole address in 1961, weeks away from the centenary of Lincoln’s first.
As well as in book collections, these and all the other addresses can now be quickly found on the websites bartleby.com and avalon.law.yale.edu/subject_menus/inaug.asp, an easy accessibility that can be a curse as well as a boon: last week Ghana’s new president Nana Akufo-Addo (whose inauguration speech echoed those by Bush and Bill Clinton) joined the roll call of politicians accused of plagiarising them.
Inaugural oratory has distinctive features – not least the cruel custom that it has to be delivered in the open air in January, making chattering teeth a danger but providing a suitable context for gritty commitments to battling foes and evils. (Obama, channelling Richard III, drew on this in speaking of the “winter of our hardship” on inheriting several messes from George Bush in 2009; the death of William Harrison after a month in office in 1841 is often blamed on his having given an interminable speech widely regarded as the worst ever in cold weather). It has to be lofty in tone, offer a panorama of domestic and foreign aspirations, and (unlike campaign speeches) be free of partisan negativity. Above all, if the president accepts the challenge of living up to the tradition, it must be eloquent, informed by the language of Lincoln and the Bible plus personal influences – Bunyan for Roosevelt, Churchill for Kennedy, Martin Luther King for Obama. It is no accident that the top-rated addresses produced phrases that live on today, such as Lincoln’s “the better angels of our nature”, Roosevelt’s “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself” and Kennedy’s “ask not what your country can do for you – ask what you can do for your country”. (Overall, Obama’s two speeches matched their stirring prose, but were marked down by commentators for lacking similar “signature phrases”.)
In contrast, the nearest British equivalent – prime ministers’ speeches on arrival in Downing Street – tend to be brisk, unshowy and practical, firmly eschewing tricksy oratorical devices and nods to God, such as Kennedy’s call to heed “the command of Isaiah” to “let the oppressed go free”.
As for Trump, he may look up the addresses given by his hero Ronald Reagan but it will be a surprise if he seeks to match his illustrious predecessors for verbal verve or memorability: his speechwriter Stephen Miller was responsible for the address at the Republican convention which was little more than a series of bullet points, used “I” 68 times and offered slogans – “I am your voice” and “we will make America great again” – instead of prose poetry.
There is a point to this anti-oratory approach, which isn’t simply an avoiding of a challenge: lawyer-like verbal finickiness, polished arguments and the skilful marshalling of words are tied to what Trump views as the malaise of the Obama era. His convention speech referred to the Democrats’ “corporate spin, carefully crafted lies and media myths” and an America “led by a group of censors, critics and cynics”. Blunt refusal to be rhetorical, though, is itself a time-honoured rhetorical ploy.
