Grandiose Inaugurations we Have Known - 19 January 2001

"On the day of his inauguration, the president was followed from the Capitol to the White House by a motley mob - black and white - who pressed into the mansion to see the new president of the people.

"They clambered upon the satin furniture with their muddy boots for a better view..." oh I think, I think I ought to say at once - in order to prevent a few heart attacks - that this is not my account of the current ceremony but an accurate one that I am quoting about the presidential inauguration of 1829, an indelible date in the history of American democracy, a date that conservatives might have said "will live in infamy".

It was the day that Andrew Jackson was inaugurated and once you've heard something about old Andy you'll appreciate that it was the day when the United States adopted democracy with a vengeance, rather than with a once-every-four-year salute to a noble theory.

To put the story of this second American revolution in its proper setting we have to remind ourselves that when the 55 men from the colonies met to invent a nation by writing a constitution that would guide it, they made clear at the start that of all the forms of government they might adopt democracy was the least likely.

Remember George Washington: "Democracy among civilised nations is the form in most disrepute."

It had always led, these scholars, divines and landowners feared, into what they called "the tyranny of the mob" and as we saw the other week they invented the so-called electoral college to prevent a man's being elected president by a majority of the popular vote alone.

Men of "merit and virtue" who held no political office, men of substance would choose the president. These saints would represent the number of representatives in Congress plus the two senators to which each state, irrespective of population, is entitled.

Even way back then the idea of giving two senators to every state, whether an unpopulated desert or a state with teeming cities, was a thoughtful device for seeing that the cities did not overwhelm the vote of the sparsely populated West and forever elect one party. It's still the forceful argument for not abolishing the electoral college.

Because if it were done just look at the map of the United States today. Most, you could say, of the millions of acres painted in as Bush country - the states of Utah, Montana, Wyoming, Nevada, Colorado, Arizona - would be practically disenfranchised if they didn't each have those two electoral votes that represent their senators.

The first president, George Washington, called himself a federalist. It was assumed everybody else was one.

The new system eliminated political parties because, said Washington: "they lead to factions and general disputation". And his successor, John Adams, was a federalist.

But the mischief started with the third president, Thomas Jefferson, who imagined an American future composed entirely of a benevolent, scholarly and wise, in effect, ruling class like his own supervising and glorying in what he called: "God's finest creature, the American farmer".

But all of them had been created equal and Jefferson tried to square his belief in equality with a republican form of government by calling himself a "Democratic Republican". And the next two presidents - Madison and Monroe - did the same.

But then came the one man backlash against this growing pseudo-democracy. It was delivered by Andrew Jackson.

By his time the frontier, which had gone not much farther inland than the coastal plain of the colonies, was being extended west by new types of men - rougher, tougher, vigorous - mostly unlettered men, cleaving their way through the Appalachians and opening up the roads to the promised land, the true actual huge West.

Jackson was a rousing, belligerent, shrewd, prototype of this new American. A Southern boy from the Carolinas, he fought in the American Revolution at the age of 13, was orphaned at 14.

He was adopted by a well-off uncle. Went to school, became a lawyer, hustled his way into the United States Senate.

He became the hero of the backwoodsmen whose settlements were being laid waste by several Indian tribes.

Jackson turned to commanding the soldiery, beat the Indians, smashed the invading British at the battle of New Orleans, ran for president, lost once, but in 1829 rid himself of these mixed party labels and was the first president to declare himself and run as a Democrat.

As much as any president before or since he meant the term in all the fullness of its present day populism.

The oldsters - the scholars, lawyers, landowners who'd written the Constitution - were all dead.

The prediction of the patrician Alexander Hamilton - the nation's first Secretary of the Treasury - his prediction had, by his lights, come true: "Democracy will be our disease".

He would have recoiled as horridly as any Founding Father at the scenes of Andrew Jackson's inauguration, to which we now return.

So Jackson went into the White House followed by that motley mob - black and white, of all sorts.

They clambered upon the satin furniture with their muddy boats and became such a jam that their hero had to be rescued by a side window.

Only after disgraceful scenes in the parlours and several thousand dollars' worth of damage was the situation relieved by the device of setting tubs of punch on the lawn to lure the new democracy out of the house.

I ought to say for late tuners-in that the raucous scene I've just described is not an overnight account of the inauguration of George W Bush but a recollection from the public prints of the inauguration of the first Democrat president 171 years ago, you'll be glad to hear.

By contrast Governor Bush became President Bush to the tune of $35m, gratefully contributed to set up the ceremonies by corporations of all sorts that hope for favourable legislation from the new administration - oil drilling companies, pharmaceutical companies who have a big stake in the proposal to have prescriptions for the elderly funded by the government, cities and sports companies looking for a new stadium in their city, not to mention airlines, computer manufacturers, anybody else with a claim or a plea for federal help.

Of the many teeth that will be set on edge by the grandeur and expense of the festivities and the identification of their sponsors will be the teeth of Senator John McCain - remember him? - and Senator Finegold, his Democratic co-sponsor of what McCain says will be for him the first item of business in the new Senate.

Namely, the pushing of a bill to outlaw soft money - the limitless contribution of millions of dollars theoretically and legally for a political party but actually transferred under the counter to the promotion of a single candidacy. Both parties did this shamelessly for every office last year.

Nobody listening need have yearned for a ticket - a $400, maybe a £1,000 ticket to the presidential balls.

As an old reporter I can testify that more people, togged out in their ball gowns and Sunday best, go away frustrated, if not embittered, because they find themselves in one of four ballrooms, if you consider the Washington railway station as a ballroom, so jammed to suffocation by other black ties and ball gowns that they can scarcely breathe let alone dance.

And it's been calculated that about 1 in 40 or 50 of the guests ever gets to peek at the President, let alone to touch the hem of his garment.

The actual inauguration ceremony has not progressed in grandeur down the centuries, it has spanned the gamut from Disney magnificence to - during the Second War - something more like a church parade.

For the first inauguration George Washington designed a coach of state and other decorative carriages carrying other magnificoes, including foreign ministers, with a military escort.

By the standards of the day, the late 18th Century, Washington's bearing was quite up to the dignity and elegance of the occasion. He didn't like to be touched and he'd ordered that nobody should sit in his presence.

One senator from Massachusetts whispered to a friend: "I fear we have exchanged George III for George I."

The onlooking Jefferson had very firm ideas about what regal extravagances a republic should shed - no wigs on judges, no public statues, no titles of nobility.

He was shocked at Washington's show-off inaugural. He found it: "Not at all in character with the simplicity of republican government and looking as if wishfully to those of European courts."

And when, 12 years later, it came his turn there was no parade, no escort, no state coach - no coach at all - he rode his horse to the Capitol, went inside and gave his address in a voice so thin and low that most members couldn't hear a word.

Then he left, mounted his horse again, rode home to his boarding house and sat down to dinner below the salt.

Well! Exactly 200 years later here was another presidential inauguration from which you must have gathered that this republic has long overcome Jefferson's fondness for the simplicity of republican government.

Washington did a roaring trade in the renting out of gowns, jewels, furs, stretched limos, stetsons, even dinner jackets in this blue jean age - though even the more pretentious Texans could not fall back, as the House of Lords gratefully did for the coronation of Queen Elizabeth, on the beloved D'Oyly Carte Opera Company - and borrow the splendid robes of the peers in Iolanthe.

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