5 Greatest Inauguration Speeches of All Time
A great piece in the Wall Street Journal today highlighting five of the greatest inauguration speeches throughout United States history. With President Barack Obama’s own inauguration speech coming later today many expect Obama to deliver a very memorable address after he is sworn in as the 44th President.
The WSJ’s list with highlighted excerpts:
5. JFK, 1961
Kennedy speechwriter Ted Sorensen has a stock reply when questioned about the authorship of the 1961 inaugural. “Ask not,” he tweaks his interrogator. The celebrated inversion of words, or chiasmus, to which Sorensen’s quip alludes — “ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country” — stands as the most remembered snippet from what’s commonly thought of as a summons to sacrifice.
4. Jefferson, 1801
Jefferson’s ultimate selection marked the first transition from one party to another, and Jefferson used his speech to acknowledge the importance of the peaceful transfer of power — a theme presidents still sound. “We are all Republicans, we are all Federalists,” he said in the speech’s most memorable sentence. He went on to praise the American experiment in democracy, still relatively untested. “Let us, then, with courage and confidence pursue our own Federal and Republican principles, our attachment to union and representative government.”
3. FDR, 1937
The capstone was Roosevelt’s moving portrait of the worst off, rendered with the classical device of anaphora, the repetition of a phrase to start successive clauses. “I see millions of families trying to live on incomes so meager that the pall of family disaster hangs over them,” FDR said. The passage, and the speech, was a small foray into political philosophy, presenting a moral rationale for government’s enlarged involvement in economic life.
2. Lincoln, 1865
Regarded by most historians as the greatest inaugural, Lincoln’s lightning-brief sermon on the need for “malice toward none … charity for all” at the Civil War’s end was not without flaws — notably an overreliance on the trope of God’s inscrutability. (”The Almighty has his own purposes.”) A gem nonetheless, delivered as the Union forces marched toward victory, the speech endures for spurning triumphalism in favor of humility at a time when the North’s chief war aim — national unity — remained elusive.
1. FDR, 1933
In his opening, FDR spoke the line that everyone today knows: his assertion of his “firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” Much like Kennedy’s “ask not” dictum a generation later, the aphorism was not original; Roosevelt’s was inserted by his aide Louis Howe, who is believed to have seen it in a department-store advertisement.
When the address ended, reporters noted tears streaming down listeners’ faces, and editorialists cheered. “Well,” said Raymond Moley, a close FDR aide, “he’s taken the ship of state and he’s turned it right around.”
Source:
When Inaugural Speeches Work
David Greenberg
Wall Street Journal, January 20th, 2009
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123239680505295195.html
