Presidential Inaugural Addresses and American Political Culture

Abstract

Taking its cue from Parker and Greenstone, this study uses the inaugural addresses of the presidents of the United States to identify the permanent in American politics. It considers the more prominent, recurrent themes in the tradi tion formed by those addresses as definitive of the more permanent, cultural fea tures of American politics. Moreover, it argues that the function of inaugural addresses is precisely to express those cultural features of American politics, not, as political scientists and others have long noted, such features of American politics as the incoming president's policy agenda.2 This argument can be attacked from three directions. One critique would be to deny that inaugural addresses share any common themes.3 For example, the fact that all inaugural addresses have invoked a providential supreme being might be dismissed by stating the obvious: different presidents have meant different things by invoking such a being. All these invocations do, however, share a common meaning. The incoming president invokes a supreme being to identify with his audience by acknowledging their common humanity. He is confessing that even as he assumes the highest office in the land he shares with the members of his audience all the limitations of human nature. He is also confessing that he can not fulfill the stringent duties of his new office without the assistance of a power beyond his, or any other person's, control. What, then, is transient in inaugural addresses is the incoming president's personal conception of that higher power; what is permanent is his recognition of the limits of his all-too-human powers. Inaugural addresses, though, could share some common themes without those themes being anchored in the broader culture. The second critique, thus, would be to deny that inaugural themes are cultural themes. Inaugural addresses

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