It is no time for ostentatious display of military power or of ill-gotten wealth. It is no time to be acting the ape of a German Kaiser or an English King. It is no time to allow free rein to a rotten Nobility of Money-bags, which seeks to turn the simple swearing-in of the Chief Servant of a free people—freely chosen by ballot—into a quasi-royal coronation of an hereditary beneficiary of the monstrous dogma of Divine Right.
One of Mr. Roosevelt’s predecessors had long been familiar with courts and princes and kings, and they had filled him with so deep a contempt for idle, vain and pompous display that when he came to be inaugurated President of the United States he simply gathered around him a few of those who were at his hotel, walked with them up Capitol Hill, took the oath of office before his assembled fellow-citizens and delivered to them his inaugural address—which still ranks as a classic in the political literature of the world.
This President was he who broke the power of the Barbary Pirates to whom Washington had paid tribute. He it was who by the daring seizure of opportunity gained Louisiana and raised this Republic from its place as a power of the third class into the dignity of a nation of the first class, by a sweep of his pen, lifting our Western boundary from the Mississippi and setting it on the coast line of the Pacific.
His inauguration was simplicity itself, but his administration was full of the grandeur of great deeds accomplished.
This was Thomas Jefferson.
Another of Mr. Roosevelt’s predecessors had been a hero in three wars. In the Revolutionary War he had fought bravely, though only a boy. In the Indian wars he had led armies from the upper Chattahoochee to the Gulf of Mexico, adding an empire to our domain. In the War of 1812 he had taken the volunteers of the South, and at New Orleans had whipped the veterans of Wellington as English soldiers had never been whipped before and have never been whipped since.
Entering civil life, this great soldier dashed himself against the power of Clay, Webster and Calhoun, triumphing over them all.
Yet when he came to be inaugurated President of the Republic whose glory and power he had so greatly increased, it contented him to go quietly from the old Metropolitan Hotel, accompanied by the Marshal of the District and a volunteer escort, to take the oath of office in the Senate Chamber, without the slightest attempt at pompous ceremonial.
The great soldier was honored by a salute fired by the local military, and, with that salute, the function ended.
This was Andrew Jackson.