Quote of the Day (Daniel Webster, on Editing an Inaugural Address)

“I have killed seventeen Roman proconsuls as dead as smelts.”—Daniel Webster, discussing how he edited an allusion-heavy draft of William Henry Harrison’s inaugural address, quoted in Jill Lapore, “Annals of the Presidency: The Speech—Have Inaugural Addresses Been Getting Worse?”, The New Yorker, January 12, 2009

(The link above is only an abstract—you’ll have to register to read the whole thing, with the alternatives being buying the issue or hunting it down in a library. Whatever you decide, reading Lapore’s almost unendlessly intriguing article on the fine—or, as it happens more often than not, not-so-fine—art of writing inaugural addresses will be worth your trouble.

After he finished deleting all the classical allusions in Harrison’s address, Webster—no economist of words himself—might have taken an ax to much of the rest of the content, since the President-elect in that 1841 speech went on, despite insanely cold winter weather, to deliver the longest inaugural address in American history. Harrison’s madness precipitated a cold that worsened into pneumonia, leading to his death one month later—the shortest term in office of any President.

If a highlight film of great inaugurals could be compiled, it wouldn’t last long, once you get past Kennedy’s, FDR’s, Lincoln’s, and Jefferson’s first. But Lapore brings to the forefront another address that, while not reaching that level of greatness, achieved a flickering power of its own: James A. Garfield’s, in 1881.

Garfield—my God, who knew?

Much of Lapore’s article uses Garfield’s prolonged, weeks-long agony in writing his own speech as a hilarious running thread through the piece.

But America might have been spared three-quarters of a century of lost opportunities and turmoil if it had listened to this Civil War veteran warning about the retreat from Reconstruction already taking place: “To violate the freedom and sanctities of the suffrage is more than an evil. It is a crime which, if persisted in, will destroy the government itself.”

The Garfield link above is worth reading in its entirety. Finally, his dream of a race, long handcuffed by human-rights abuses, finally coming into its own, will be fulfilled less than two weeks from now, on the same spot where he spoke, by Barack Obama.)