Silent Sunday

Inauguration Day 2009

Some random information for you:

Where to watch the Inauguration:

• Joint Congressional Committee
  
• Presidential Inaugural Committee
  
• Joost Presents
  
• CNN & Facebook
  
• LiveStation - European Coverage
  

General inauguration information from, where else, Wikipedia.

Miscellaneous stuff:

• Thomas Jefferson was the only president to walk to and from the inaugural, and the first to be inaugurated at the Capitol. (1801)
• The first inaugural ball was held for James Madison. (1809)
• Abraham Lincoln was the first to include African-Americans in his parade. (1865)
• Women were included for the first time in Woodrow Wilson's second inaugural parade. (1917)
• The first president to ride in a car at his inauguration was Warren Harding. (1921)
• Calvin Coolidge's inauguration was the first broadcast on radio. (1925)
  
• The first poet to participate in an official inauguration ceremony was Robert Frost. (Kennedy's, 1961)
• Lyndon Johnson remains the only president to be sworn in by a woman, U.S. District Judge Sarah Hughes. (1963)
• Barack Obama will be our 44th president and his inauguration will be the 56th formal one. Fifteen presidents were elected to a second term, and Roosevelt was elected to a fourth term. (2009)
  

Most Memorable Inaugural Addresses and Quotations:

• George Washington’s first Inaugural Address, April 30, 1789, put the new nation in world historical context: “the preservation of the sacred fire of liberty and the destiny of the republican model of government are justly considered, perhaps, as deeply, as finally, staked on the experiment entrusted to the hands of the American people.”
• Thomas Jefferson’s first Inaugural Address, March 4, 1801. After a bitter election that resulted in the first transfer of power from one party to another, he tried to unify the young nation, exclaiming, “We are all Federalists; we are all Republicans.”
• Abraham Lincoln’s second Inaugural Address, March 4, 1865, during the closing days of the Civil War, called for “malice toward none,” and “charity for all.”
• Franklin Roosevelt’s first Inaugural Address, March 4, 1933, during the depths of the Great Depression, proclaimed, “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself.”
• John F. Kennedy’s Inaugural Address, January 20, 1961, challenged fellow citizens: “Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country.”
• Ronald Reagan’s first Inaugural Address, January 20, 1981, pressed a new idea to reverse the growth of big government: “In the present crisis, government is not the solution to our problem.”

from Britannica Blog

Inaugural Poet

President-elect Obama has chosen the poet Elizabeth Alexander to compose a poem to be read at his inauguration. Obama is only the third president to have done this. (The other two were Clinton & Kennedy.) Alexander is the author of four books of poetry and a professor of African-American studies at Yale. She was a Pulitzer Prize finalist in 2005 for her book, American Sublime. Here is one of her poems:

Ars Poetica #100: I Believe

Poetry, I tell my students,
is idiosyncratic. Poetry

is where we are ourselves,
(though Sterling Brown said

“Every ‘I’ is a dramatic ‘I’”)
digging in the clam flats

for the shell that snaps,
emptying the proverbial pocketbook.

Poetry is what you find
in the dirt in the corner,

overhear on the bus, God
in the details, the only way

to get from here to there.
Poetry (and now my voice is rising)

is not all love, love, love,
and I’m sorry the dog died.

Poetry (here I hear myself loudest)
is the human voice,

and are we not of interest to each other?