Essays - Winter 2005

So Help Me God

What all fifty-four inaugural addresses, taken as one long book, tell us about American history

By Ted Widmer

The tradition, as I noted earlier, goes back to Washington’s spontaneous decision to blurt out “So help me God” in 1789. From that moment on, God was in the details, or more specifically the concluding paragraph. There, time and time again, He appears to bless the proceedings. The mere mention of His name signals the imminent end of the speech, as if the manager of a vaudeville house had appeared onstage to thank the audience and urge its members to gather their belongings before leaving. God appears in forty-two of fifty-four perorations, and only one speech dares to leave Him out completely—Washington’s second inaugural. The conformity ends, however, when it comes to naming Him. The founders avoided invoking God by name and instead resorted to a dizzying array of divine identifiers: “the benign Parent of the Human Race” (Washington), “that Being who is supreme over all” (Adams), “that Infinite Power which rules the destinies of the universe” (Jefferson), “that Power whose providence mercifully protected our national infancy” (Jackson), and “Him Who has not yet forsaken this favored land” (Lincoln). It is worth noting that Jesus has never been mentioned in an inaugural address.

Lincoln remains aloof from the rest, fascinating, slightly subversive. From fourth grade on, we are trained to think him great, without really knowing why, except that he freed the slaves and won the Civil War. But to read Lincoln in the context of his surrounding inaugurals is to see a gifted genius so ahead of his time that we are still in some ways catching up to him. For him, religion, like patriotism, was not a boast to be brayed in public, but an aspiration to be quietly, relentlessly sought in the dark chambers of the human heart.

Each of Lincoln’s inaugural addresses struck the perfect tone for its moment. An eyewitness to the first (1861), Benjamin Brown French, wrote, “words could not have been selected & framed into sentences that could better express the ideas of those who have elected Abraham Lincoln to the Presidency.” With a lawyer’s precision and a friend’s patience, Lincoln pleaded the cause of the Union with the South and reminded them, delicately but firmly, how much was at stake (he artfully delayed the words “civil war” until the penultimate paragraph).

The final paragraph is a miniature masterpiece and still teaches editors and aspiring speechwriters what a few line changes can do to strengthen an argument. William Seward, the incoming secretary of State, proposed these lines:

I close. We are not we must not be aliens or enemies but fellow countrymen and brethren. Although passion has strained our bonds of affection too hardly they must not, I am sure they will not be broken. The mystic chords which proceeding from so many battle fields and so many patriot graves pass through all the hearts and all the hearths in this broad continent of ours will yet again harmonize in the ancient music when breathed upon by the guardian angel of the nation.

Lincoln’s translation:

I am loath to close. We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battle-field and patriot grave, to every living heart and hearth-stone, all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.

Lincoln’s second inaugural (1865) is more majestic still. Though one of the shortest inaugurals, it remains the best. Everything about it is different—its lack of interest in the minutiae of politics, its stately retelling, in short, lapidary building blocks, of the war’s story. The remarkable four-word sentence, “And the war came,” surely preceded by a pause when he spoke it, seems almost to have sprung from the Old Testament. The brilliant disquisition on God’s indecipherability (“The Almighty has his own purposes”) flies in the face of all presidential oratory before and since. This least hermeneutic of all inaugurals is also in many ways the most religious, offering searing passages from the Bible along with Lincoln’s mystical reflections on human responsibility to a God that is not always responsive, even to Americans. Finally, it is a literary gem, containing small surprises around every corner, including this prose poem near the end:

Fondly do we hope,
Fervently do we pray,
That this mighty scourge of war
May speedily pass away.

There are countless inaugural highlights in the more crowded twentieth century. Wilson’s musings are cerebral and eloquent, befitting a parson. FDR is interesting four times in a row—no mean feat—and breaks down the distance between speaker and listener with colloquialisms (“thank God”), sound bites (“fear itself”), and contagious optimism. Eisenhower’s second, while unknown to most, bears a close rereading today for its shrewd assessment of imperial overreach. JFK was our most exciting inaugural speaker, and no one should discount the importance of the way the words are performed—in his case, barked out on a day so cold that you could see wisps of air escaping from his mouth, like smoke from a dragon ready to slay the hoary Washington establishment seated behind him. Kennedy could have read any president’s inaugural and made it mean something. But his words were of course well chosen. Ted Sorensen, his speechwriter, studied Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, and noticed something that had eluded almost all presidents in between: Lincoln communicated big ideas with very small words. Accordingly, he began lopping off adjectives and syllables to stunning effect (speechwriting can be a science as well as an art). The use of the second person (“ask not what your country can do for you…”), rare in presidential oratory, was another bright innovation. Eisenhower used Thou in 1953, but he was speaking to God at the time.

Still, none of the great speeches of the last century has quite the
audacity of Lincoln’s second, which becomes more revolutionary as modern politicians increasingly claim that God approves their actions. Despite Washington’s impetuous decision to kiss a borrowed Masonic Bible in 1789, I suspect that the founders—all creatures of the Enlightenment—would find the current evangelical climate dispiriting.

IV. Peroration

In the greatest essay on speechwriting ever written, “Politics and the English Language” (1946), George Orwell warns against the subtle and serial ways in which stately language can be placed in the service of violence. Obviously, Orwell deplored Nazism and Stalinism, but he was equally discouraged by ways in which Western politicians resorted to euphemism, stale imagery, and over-reliance on safe words like democracy to obscure policies he disliked (including British rule in India and the dropping of the atomic bomb on Japan). “Political language,” he wrote, “is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable.” Orwell would particularly hate the word Orwellian, which has become untethered from its moorings, like a runaway dirigible, and now means anything dark and threatening.

How would this shrewd judge of language evaluate our modern rhetoric? I doubt it would be pretty. Orwell would approve President Bush’s reliance on short, sturdy Anglo-Saxon words. But he would deplore his helpless dependence on extremist words, both negative (evil, terror) and positive (freedom, liberty, democracy), that conjure emotions rather than facts, and round up people and nations into good and bad corrals like so many cattle. Even at the height of World War II, fighting a far more lethal enemy, FDR paused frequently to define the kind of democracy America was fighting for. But today, our words seem to lose precision as our weapons acquire it. It was a telling moment when veterans of the Afghanistan and Iraq conflicts rejected the Global War on Terror medals they had received from the Pentagon, in favor of separate medals for the two very different campaigns they had fought in. The American people are surely capable of understanding the complex nuances of these difficult struggles—political, diplomatic and military. We deserve to be spoken to as equals.

No one knows what the fifty-fifth inaugural address—January 20, 2005—will offer Americans and the people of the world (they, too, care deeply about the words spoken by American presidents). President Bush has a gift for connecting with his audiences, or he would not be ascending the podium for a second time. We can all hope that he uses this opportunity to say clearly, without artifice, what Americans need to hear about our next four years. It goes without saying that we like soothing phrases about the remarkable nation we all inhabit. But we also need concrete, grounded ideas about America’s place in the world. More than anything, we need to reconnect to each other as fellow Americans, to borrow a favorite presidential phrase. A century and a half ago, that is precisely how Lincoln reached the summit of the inaugural tradition.

Given how venerable the inaugural tradition is, it is becoming more difficult to claim, as so many presidents have, that we are a very young country. We are more like an aging movie star who needs a couple extra minutes to apply her makeup. “Getting old ain’t for sissies,” as Bette Davis said. But age has its compensations, not the least of which is that our history just keeps getting better. The inaugural ceremony is already crowded enough, but for me there will be forty-two other presidents on the platform, adding their voices to the sounds of the ceremony and straining to “harmonize in the ancient music,” to use Seward’s discarded phrase. Surely it does no harm to pause for a moment and listen to what they have to say, still speaking to us faintly over the din of the republic.

Ted Widmer directs the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University. He is a contributing editor of The American Scholar.