First Inaugural Address

Summary

Ronald Reagan took the oath on 20 January 1981, the first President sworn in on the Capitol's West Front, facing down the Mall toward the Washington Monument, the Jefferson and Lincoln memorials, and, across the Potomac, Arlington National Cemetery. He opened by thanking Jimmy Carter for a gracious transition and by calling the routine handover of authority, seen through foreign eyes, "nothing less than a miracle." The body of the address is a bill of economic complaints. Inflation that "penalizes thrift," idle factories, a tax code that punishes achievement, and decades of piled-up deficits are traced to one cause: "In this present crisis, government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem." Reagan presses the point with a question about self-rule (if no one can govern himself, who can govern another?) and with the reminder that the States created the Federal Government, not the reverse. He insists he means to make government work "with us, not over us," not to abolish it. Abroad he promises loyalty to allies and firmness toward adversaries: Americans will negotiate and sacrifice for peace but will not surrender for it. Then the speech turns to the view from the platform. The monuments become lessons in greatness, and the white markers at Arlington lead to Martin Treptow, a small-town barber killed in France in 1917, whose diary pledge ends "as if the issue of the whole struggle depended on me alone." Reagan asks for no such sacrifice, only for best effort and belief that, with God's help, Americans can meet their troubles. Along the way he names the farmers, clerks, cabbies, and shopkeepers in the crowd as the heroes of whom he speaks, and proposes that every future Inauguration Day be a day of prayer. His most quoted sentence begins with a limit, "in this present crisis," that later quotation often drops.

Top Lessons

• The qualifier in the famous sentence

  Reagan's best-known line begins "In this present crisis," and a few paragraphs later he says he does not intend to do away with government but to make it "work with us, not over us." Quoting the sentence and its clarification together is the first discipline this speech teaches.

• Who can govern someone else?

  Against the claim that society has grown too complex for self-rule, Reagan asks: if no one is capable of governing himself, who has the capacity to govern another? The argument assumes rulers share the nature of the ruled, the same reasoning Madison used in Federalist No. 51.

• Martin Treptow's pledge

  The closing uses one soldier's diary to make sacrifice concrete, then lowers the demand: the present crisis requires effort and belief, not death. Students should ask whether the move honors the war dead or draws on their authority for an economic program, and whether both can be true.

Verified Quotes

Medical Lens

Presidential inaugurals concern constitutional politics and national crisis; they have no medical content for this library's lens.