President Clinton's Inaugural Address last month was the 53rd in the series that began in 1789. All are worth a read--not just the highlights, such as Washington, Lincoln, and FDR. They will give you a feeling of being there, not as an omniscient historian of 1997 looking back at 1837 or 1897 but as an ordinary citizen who shares--and is limited by--the information, the concerns, and the values of those times. (Thanks to Columbia University, all the addresses can be found on the World Wide Web.)

Among all the past presidents and their speech writers there was only one literary genius: Lincoln. After 132 years, his second inaugural still brings tears to your eyes and chills your blood. None of the other inaugural addresses is in that league. But by and large they are dignified and intelligent speeches given by articulate men, each in touch with his times and aware that his inauguration was the most solemn occasion of his life.

Three Phases

The stance and style of the inaugurals seem to have gone through three phases. The first, lasting until Lincoln, was that of the modest, classic public servant. The second, lasting through William Howard Taft, was of the prosaic government executive. The third, in which we are still, is the phase of the assertive, theatrical, leader-preacher. This classification is not waterproof. Theodore Roosevelt may belong in the third phase and Warren G. Harding-Calvin Coolidge-Herbert Hoover in the second. But the trend is clear.

On picking up Washington's first inaugural, one is immediately struck by the modesty. He had just been elected unanimously by the Electoral College. He was more respected than any subsequent president has been at the time of his inauguration. And what does he say?

[T]he magnitude and difficulty of the trust to which the voice of my country called me, being sufficient to awaken in the wisest and most experienced of her citizens a distrustful scrutiny into his qualifications, could not but overwhelm with despondence one who (inheriting inferior endowments from nature and unpracticed in the duties of civil administration) ought to be peculiarly conscious of his own deficiencies.

None of his successors has made the point as forcefully as that. But echoes are to be found in almost every president for the next 68 years. (John Adams was an exception. He was apparently so envious of Washington that he spent a large part of his address spelling out his own excellent qualifications for the job.) That era ended with Lincoln. Subsequent inaugurals routinely contain protestations of humility, but they are perfunctory and do not sound sincere.

The antebellum modesty, while in part a reflection of the conventional etiquette of the time, may also have served a political objective: to alleviate the concerns of those who--in the early days of the republic--feared it might be transformed into a monarchy, and the president into a king. A little later, perhaps after 1820, a new worry arose. Would the power of the federal government be used to interfere with the "peculiar domestic institution" of the Southern states? The presidents' assurance of the limitation of their powers may have been intended to give comfort to those states.

Lincoln faced a different situation. With the South already seceding, he could only "preserve, protect and defend the Constitution" by asserting the power of the federal government and his own power as chief executive. It was no time for modesty. Lincoln's successors inherited a federal government with much more authority--and more need to use it--than before the war, and they had less motivation to belittle themselves and their powers.

In the third phase, the Inaugural Address metamorphosed from describing the government's policy to inspiring the public's behavior. Presidents recognized--or, at least, believed--that the country had problems they ought to deal with but could not manage by using the instruments of government alone. Thus, in his first inaugural, Woodrow Wilson said: "At last a vision has been vouchsafed us of our life as a whole. We see the bad with the good, the debased and decadent with the sound and the vital. With this vision we approach new affairs."

If the country is debased and decadent, the cure has to come from uplifting the people, not from acts of government. Similar diagnoses and prescriptions appear in later inaugurals.

Presidents derived their license to serve as leader-preacher from Theodore Roosevelt's remark that the presidency was "a bully pulpit," a remark that did not appear in his Inaugural Address. The metaphor of the pulpit suggests not reading but oral and visual contact between the preacher and his flock. Radio and--even more--television, made this possible on a national scale. A telltale sign of the leader-preacher inaugural is the use of the phrase, "Let us . . ."--meaning, "You do as I say." This expression appears occasionally throughout the history of inaugurals, but it has hit its stride in recent years. John F. Kennedy repeated it 16 times in his Inaugural Address, and Richard Nixon has it 22 times in his second one.

The change in literary style from classical to colloquial can be demonstrated by one statistic. In all the inaugurals from Washington through James Buchanan, the average number of words per sentence was 44. From Lincoln to Wilson it was 34, and since Wilson it has been 25. I do not consider this a deterioration (this article has an average of 17 words per sentence), but it does reflect the change in the size and character of the audience and in the means of communication. William Henry Harrison could talk about the governments of Athens, Rome, and the Helvetic Confederacy and expect his audience to know what he was talking about. That wouldn't be true today. But Harrison's audience would not have known what the Internet was.

Presidents and their speech writers have mined their predecessors for memorable words and repeated them without attribution. Kennedy's trumpet call, "Ask not what your country can do for you: Ask what you can do for your country," has an ironic history. In his inaugural, Harding, surely no model for Kennedy, had said, "Our most dangerous tendency is to expect too little of government, and at the same time do for it too little." And even before he became president, in a speech in 1916, Harding had said, "In the great fulfillment we must have a citizenship less concerned about what the government can do for it and more anxious about what it can do for the nation."

Issues

Many an issue frets its hour on the inaugural stage and then is heard no more. That includes the Indians, the coastal fortifications, territorial expansion, the Isthmus Canal, civil service reform, polygamy, and Prohibition. Some subjects that you expect to appear, don't. Hoover's inaugural, March 4, 1929, gives no hint of economic vulnerability. Roosevelt's second inaugural, January 20, 1937, contains no reference to Hitler or to Germany. But what is most amazing, at least to a reader in 1997, is the silence of the inaugurals on the subject of women. The word "women" does not appear at all until Wilson's first inaugural, and, with one exception, it always appears as part of the phrase "men and women," never as referring to any special concerns of women. The exception was Harding's recognition that "womanhood," as he called it, had voted in a national election for the first time in 1920.

One subject that does get ample treatment is taxes. "Taxes" or some equivalent word appears in 43 of the 52 inaugural addresses to date. Coolidge said in 1925: "The time is arriving when we can have further tax reduction. . . . I am opposed to extremely high rates, because they produce little or no revenue, because they are bad for the country, and, finally, because they are wrong." Federal taxes were then about 3 percent of the gross domestic product. Ronald Reagan said essentially the same thing in 1981, when they were 20 percent.

The most disturbing aspect of the whole series of inaugurals is what is said and unsaid on the subject of race relations, which Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., calls "the supreme American problem." The words "black," "blacks," "Negro," and "race" (as applied to blacks) do not appear at all until Rutherford Hayes, 1877. James Monroe asked in 1817, "On whom has oppression fallen in any quarter of our Union? Who has been deprived of any right of person or property?" These were rhetorical questions, intended to get the answer "No one!"--as if there were not millions of slaves in America.

Before the Civil War the word "slavery" appears only in the Inaugural Address of Martin Van Buren, 1837, and Buchanan, 1857, and then only as something that, pursuant to the Constitution and in order to preserve the Union, should not be interfered with. But although generally unmentionable, the subject was boiling, and would boil over in 1861. After the Civil War, it is in the inaugurals of Hayes, James Garfield (1881), and Benjamin Harrison (1889) that we find the most explicit and positive discussion of the need to convert into reality the rights and freedom granted to the "freedmen" on paper by the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments. Garfield's was the strongest among these. (He had been a student at Williams College in the 1850s, 80 years before me, when the college had been a station on the underground railway.) But the subject then began to fade. William McKinley said in his first Inaugural Address, March 4, 1897, "Lynchings must not be tolerated in a great and civilized country like the United States," but he said it without horror. Taft raised the subject of race relations in 1909 only to express satisfaction at the progress that had been made. And then the subject disappeared. FDR never mentioned it in any of his four inaugurals.

After World War II the subject came back to inaugural addresses, but in a weak and abstract form. That is true even of the presidents we think of as being most concerned with race relations in America--like Harry Truman, Lyndon Johnson, and Bill Clinton. Perhaps each thought he had made a sufficient statement by having a black woman--Marian Anderson, Leontyne Price, or Maya Angelou--perform at his ceremony. In Clinton's first inaugural the only allusion to the race problem is in this sentence: "From our revolution, the Civil War, to the Great Depression, to the civil rights movement, our people have always mustered the determination to construct from these crises the pillars of our history." I recall this not to suggest that their concern was not deep and sincere but only to indicate what is acceptable to say in a speech intended to appeal to the values shared by Americans.

There is much more to ponder in these speeches than I have suggested here. There is much to be proud of, in what we have endured and achieved, in the peaceful transference of power, and in the reasonableness and moderation of the presidents we have elected. But there is also much humility to be learned. We look back with amazement at the ignorance and moral obtuseness revealed by what our past leaders have said and our past citizens believed. We should recognize that 50 or 100 years from now, readers will shake their heads at what we are saying and believing today.

POSTSCRIPT: CLINTON II

To see and hear the inaugural address live in the context of the prayers, the music, the poem, the vistas, the history experienced and learned--is quite different from reading 52 past inaugurals on the computer screen. An American would have to be hardhearted indeed not to be moved by the Inaugural Address--any Inaugural Address--in that ceremonial context.

But to read it the morning after in cold print is another thing entirely. In that light, Clinton II is an average--very average--Inaugural Address. As I said above, an average Inaugural Address is a good speech by most standards--by the standards of speeches given at political conventions, college commencements, and bar mitzvahs. Clinton II is dignified and literate. It will give future readers a good idea of what was on the minds of Americans in 1997. But, by the standards of what the occasion invites and what a president probably hopes for, it is a disappointment. There is dignity but not grandeur. And although the speech is a fair representation of what America is thinking, it offers no special insight into our problems or prospects.

Clinton II is blessedly and--for him--surprisingly short. It has about 25 percent fewer words than the average of the past 52 inaugurals, of which only 19 were shorter. The speech is easily understandable, at least superficially. It averages 19 words per sentence; only Bush's, with 18, had fewer. There are no arcane allusions to puzzle the modern listener. Although the speech is definitely in the leader-preacher mode, the phrase "Let us . . ." appears only 9 times, compared with 16 for Kennedy and 22 for Nixon II. I do not feel in the speech the frantic striving of speech writers for the "zinger," the pithy phrase that will make it into Bartlett's Familiar Quotations. Perhaps the juxtaposition of "lands" in "Guided by the ancient vision of a promised land, let us set our sights upon a land of New Promise" is the candidate. "Land of new promise" occurs three other times in the speech, but the phrase does not zing.

Of course, the speech does have its stylistic banalities. All recent presidents have loved using the word "new" to describe their condition, their vision, and themselves, but I think that Clinton II sets a record for the use of that word--28 uses compared with 15 in the runner-up, Nixon II. And then there is that blasted "bridge." Even so, all-in-all, Clinton II is up to the average in style.

Assessing the content is more complicated. The theme of race gets a lot of attention in the first 40 percent of the speech, weaving in and out. There is more focus on this subject than in any previous inaugural since the Reconstruction days after the Civil War. I think that is appropriate. (I also note with pleasure the first recognition since Harding of the revolution that has occurred in the status of women.) The sentence, "The divide of race has been America's constant curse," is the most striking in the whole speech. If Clinton had stopped there, or proceeded to develop the implications of that statement, the speech would have been a much better one. But he diverted attention and diluted the effect by dribbling off to brag about his accomplishments, repeat his campaign mantras, and paint a fairy-tale picture of what it will be like after we cross that bridge. And as he approaches his high-level windup, there is a plea for an end to petty political bickering, which is too readily--and, I suppose, properly--interpreted as an offer to go easy on Speaker Gingrich's scandals if the Republicans will go easy on his. That is surely a matter of great importance to Clinton and to Gingrich, but it is not a matter of enough gravity in American history to go into the Inaugural Address.

The whole thing suffers from a lack of perspective. Here is a relatively young man who, five years ago, was a person of no great distinction. Now he is one of 14 men in all American history who have been twice elected to the highest position in the land. He is joining select company. It includes all three presidents rated "great" by historians (Washington, Lincoln, and Franklin Roosevelt) and three of the six rated "near great" (Jefferson, Jackson, and Wilson). He should have expressed his enormous gratitude to the American people for the honor they have given him. He should have acknowledged his limitations. If he had done those things, he would have enhanced his credibility with the public--or, at least, with me. If he had done them, and felt them, he would be able to focus his attention on his obligations to the public, and not only to himself and his party.

Nothing to Say about the Constitution

He has just taken an oath to "preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States." That is all he swears to do, aside from filling the office to which he has been elected. What does it mean to "preserve, protect and defend the Constitution"? What powers does it give the president? What limits does it place upon him? What obligations does it impose upon him? Early presidents, starting with Washington, discussed that in their inaugurals. It is the main subject of Lincoln's first. But the Constitution has fallen out of recent addresses, and Clinton II doesn't mention it.

It would have been appropriate to mention the Constitution because Clinton wants to discuss the role of government, and the Constitution is about that. He says that "we have resolved for our time a great debate over the role of government. Today we can declare: Government is not the problem and government is not the solution." If there was a great debate--and I may have missed it--the "resolution" of it seems silly. Government is the solution of some problems and the cause of others. The question is, which is which? Clinton says "we need a new government," but he does not describe the new government except to say that it will be, as advertisers say of automobiles and refrigerators, "bigger on the inside and smaller on the outside."

An interesting and fundamental aspect of Clinton's speech is his view of history. He has a sunny and pain-free view. He likes to divide history in centuries. At the beginning of the 19th century, we made a choice for territorial expansion, and that was good--never mind that the century included a tragic Civil War that was partly about the spread of slavery into the new territory. At the beginning of 20th century, we made a choice to "harness the industrial revolution to our values of free enterprise, conservation, and human decency," and that was good. And he says of this century, with elation, "What a century it has been." Well, it has been many things, including the most bloody and bestial in history. True, the president does refer at one point to the "awful bloodshed that stained its legacy" when talking about the 20th century. But that does not seem to have changed his outlook basically, as the word "stained" suggests. It does not affect his cheerful disposition.

One does not get from President Clinton any sense of the unpredictable and tragic side of history, or any warning of that for the future. Maybe that is why there is no grandeur in the speech.

Herbert Stein is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.