The presidential inauguration: a brief history
This tradition is older than the U.S. capital itself. The first presidential inauguration in 1789 took place on a balcony in New York City.
George Washington delivered the first such speech there, a decade before the capital moved to the city that now bears his name.
Washington spoke of duty, honesty and love of country. In one memorable line, he said: “The preservation of the sacred fire of liberty and the destiny of the republican model of government are … staked on [this] experiment.”
A decade later, Thomas Jefferson took the oath at the new U.S. Capitol in an important democratic milestone.
It was the first peaceful transfer between the then-developing political parties. Jefferson celebrated that unity as a speech theme: “We are all republicans. We are all federalists,” he said.
For more than a century and a half, the inauguration would happen either indoors or, more often, on the opposite side of the Capitol from the present location: at the street-facing eastern entrance, where JFK delivered that famous line, “Ask not what your country can do for you.”
It was Ronald Reagan, in 1981, who started the tradition of speaking on the western balcony to huge crowds on the National Mall, delivering that conservative clarion call: “Government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.”
He had other problems — with the weather. Four years later, in 1985, the ceremony moved back indoors, for the final time, until today.