Writers Almanac January 20 ~ Franklin Delano Roosevelt became the first president to take the oath of office on January 20, back in 1937. Originally, the Presidential Inauguration Day had been March 4th to allow the new president time to get to Washington D.C. Due to the speed of modern transportation and communication, Congress decided there was no need to wait so long between the election and the oath of office, so they established the new date with the passage of the Twentieth Amendment. It was FDR’s second inaugural, and in his address he examined the progress the nation had made in the intervening four years. He said: “Have we reached the goal of our vision of that fourth day of March 1933? Have we found our happy valley? I see a great nation, upon a great continent, blessed with a great wealth of natural resources [...] I see a United States which can demonstrate that, under democratic methods of government, national wealth can be translated into a spreading volume of human comforts hitherto unknown [...] But here is the challenge to our democracy: In this nation I see tens of millions of its citizens [...] who at this very moment are denied the greater part of what the very lowest standards of today call the necessities of life [...] The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little.”
Posted on: Tue, 20 Jan 2015 10:50:36 +0000
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