Swearing in the Rain

All inaugurations are sentimental occasions. Last week for 200,000 visitors to Washington--not counting several thousand who arrived in the Union Station and never got any farther because of the downpour--the second inauguration of Franklin Roosevelt as President of the U. S. was a sentimental historical ducking in five acts Act I took place in mid-morning at St. John's Episcopal Church across Lafayette Square from the White House. There the Rev. Dr. Endicott Peabody, headmaster of Groton School, held services just as he did four years ago for his onetime student Franklin, for Franklin's mother, wife, sons, daughters-in-law, grandchildren, and miscellaneous kin* and friends. Act II lasted for 40 minutes, from the time Franklin Roosevelt entered the robing room in the Senate wing of the Capitol to the time he went out to take the oath. Outside, under a sea of ineffective umbrellas, several thousand soggy people who had for hours been progressively impregnated with cold rain stamped their feet in impatience. On the open pine-board stands continuously flushed by the downpour some Congressmen and distinguished guests took an icy showerbath in full regalia. In the inaugural pavilion covered by a roof beneath which the gusty torrent swept, attendants dumped the puddles from chairs as the Cabinet and seven Justices of the Supreme Court (including all its aged conservative members) marched down the official red carpet, which oozed water like a sponge, to take their seats. Mrs. Roosevelt rushed about oblivious to the deluge finding blankets for relatives and friends. Within Rear Admiral Grayson, head of the inaugural committee, wrestled with an obdurate President, trying to induce him to hold the inauguration in the dry chamber of the House. Noon came, and Franklin Roosevelt's term of office expired but not his tenacity. He had the last word as the curtain fell: "If they can take it, I can take it." Act III was the taking of the oaths. More than 20 minutes late the ex-President and ex-Vice President came out to the dripping inaugural stand. John Nance Garner was the first to make history. Senator Joseph T. Robinson administered the Vice Presidential oath. He answered with a vigorous, "I do!" Although twelve other men had stood up to be sworn in for a second term as President, only five had been reinaugurated as Vice President.-More unusual, Jack Garner became the first Vice President to take his oath of office on the same platform as the President instead of separately in the Senate chamber. Unique, he was chief officer of the nation for the minute or two that passed before the main drama of the occasion was enacted by Franklin Roosevelt and Chief Justice Hughes. This act was a dramatization of the Constitutional issue which troubled the campaign of 1936 and still burns. Standing up and removing his skull cap from his damp hair, the Chief Justice boomed: "Do you, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, solemnly swear that you will faithfully execute the office of President of the United States, and will, to the best of your ability"--with every word his voice grew more emphatic--"preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States, SO HELP YOU GOD?" With his palm on the old Dutch bible of Claes Martenzen van Rosenvelt (protected from the rain by a heavy sheet of waterproof cellophane) Mr. Roosevelt threw back the challenge word by word in tones which fairly cried aloud.

"My way, not yours, will save the Constitution!" "I, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, do solemnly swear.

..." The ring in his voice mounted as he shouted the words, each a separate challenge. "Preserve" "Protect" and "Defend." "SO HELP ME GOD!" he added with sacerdotal solemnity. Act IV was Franklin Roosevelt's second inaugural address, an address which presented no program, no plans but the activating sentiment of the New Deal. The rain beat a tattoo in the microphones and twice the President wiped the water from his face as he unfolded his burden: "In this nation I see tens of millions of its citizens--a substantial part of its whole population--who at this very moment are denied the greater part of what the very lowest standards of today call the necessities of life. "I see millions of families trying to live on incomes so meagre that the pall of family disaster hangs over them day by day. I see millions. ... I see millions. ... I see millions. . . .

"I see one-third of a nation ill-housed, ill-clad, ill-nourished. "It is not in despair that I paint you that picture. I paint it for you in hope. . . . We are determined to make every American citizen the subject of his country's interest and concern. . . . 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." Act V was not Franklin Roosevelt's drive home in an open car with a half inch of water on the floor and Mrs. Roosevelt sitting beside him in the downpour, her new inauguration bonnet resembling a last year's bathing cap. It was not the buffet luncheon in the White House with 500 recently soaked notables. It was not the hour and a half spent in the reviewing stand--an $11,000 model of Andrew Jackson's home The Hermitage erected before the White House, where the President stood exposed in a sort of showcase whose bullet-proof glass windows he had removed, the better to be seen and rained on, while he reviewed a parade of 32 Governors in closed cars,* of the Army, Navy, Marine Corps, Coast Guard, Cadets, Middies, CCC andT NYA sloshing through the deluge. Nor was it the mad tea afterwards when 3,000 visitors crammed the White House. The last act belonged to the author of the 20th Amendment which set forward this inauguration and those that will follow from March 4 to Jan. 20. Said Senator George William Norris of Nebraska: "They are all trying to blame this on me. You can't charge this up to me until after March 4 when you see what kind of a day that is."

*0nly notable absentees were Daughter Anna in Seattle with her husband John Boettiger: Son Franklin Jr.

recuperating from sinus trouble in Florida with his fiancee Ethel du Pont; three of the lesser grandchildren. -John Adams in 1793, George Clinton in 1809 Daniel D.

Tompkins in 1821, John C. Calhoun in 1829 and Thomas Riley Marshall in 1917. *Only exception was Governor George Earle of Pennsylvania who, as became his Presidential ambitions for 1940. followed the great New Dealer's example by taking his drenching in an open car so that throngs, wet to the skin, could see him.

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