Back Then, It Was a Bridge Too Far

There was no obsessing over the future at the final inaugural of the 19th century.

In 4,000 listless words delivered from the Capitol’s east steps in 1897, William McKinley made no mention of a bridge to the 20th century. No organizers strained over themes like “American Journey” or tried to stage “empowerment dialogues” with leading Americans of the day.

McKinley, an Ohio Republican, swept in to replace Grover Cleveland, the Democrat, and short order was made of festivities. The president-elect and his wife, Ida, arrived on a Tuesday, prepared Wednesday for the celebrating and did it all--swearing-in, parade and inaugural ball--Thursday. Petered out by the evening, both were in bed in the White House while the fireworks display was still flaring.

Everyone seemed under the weather that ’97. McKinley was fighting off the flu. Cleveland was hobbling around leaning on an umbrella, one foot swollen from an attack of the gout. And Ida, an epileptic and all-around fragile woman, lasted about half a turn across the ballroom floor at the cavernous and electrically lighted Pension Building (today the National Building Museum) before being whisked away, too faint to go on.

Where presidential medallions displaying a puffy-looking Bill Clinton are hawked on shopping channels today, going for from $36 to $695 each, models of McKinley’s head in a Napoleonic hat were selling curbside back then for 25 cents. Where a Web site and computer-stuffed Mall pavilion are billed as the first cyberspace promotion of a swearing-in in 1997, McKinley’s inaugural was the first recorded for sight (grainy kinetoscope) and sound (gramophone.)

If Clinton was the first of the Vietnam generation (antiwar organizer, London, ‘69) to serve as president, McKinley was the last of the Civil War veterans (Ohio volunteer, Antietam, ‘62)

And if the media today gush in anticipation of Hillary Clinton’s Oscar de la Renta for the inaugural ball, back then they clamored to break the story of Ida McKinley’s gray-blue satin ensemble from Marshall Field & Co. in Chicago, and the tuft of egret tail feathers in her hair.