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Inauguration Plans – Grandiose Simplicity or Simple Grandiosity?

Inauguration Plans – Grandiose Simplicity or Simple Grandiosity? – (PIP #53)

By Louise Peloquin

Two articles about planning Calvin Coolidge’s inauguration report the flip from desired simplicity to imposed grandiosity.

A hundred years later, will the inauguration be grandiosely simple or simply grandiose?

L’Etoile – February 11, 1925

Simplicity of the Presidential Inauguration

     The ceremonies of the installation of the new President will be of elegant simplicity, at the request the President himself – There will not even be an official ball at the White House – Taking the oath and a short procession.

     Washington – Complying to President Coolidge’s wishes, yesterday the March 4th Presidential Inauguration Committee, on the motion of its president William L. Galliher, canceled all appropriations voted for the official celebration of the event.

     The President will pronounce his inaugural address on the west side of the Capital and will be as brief as possible, according to Mr. Coolidge’s spokesperson. (1) In keeping with the new economic savings program, the project to build a magnificent courtyard of honor at Lafayette Square would have cost $28,000. Fireworks have also been canceled for the evening.

     The official inauguration ceremony of President Coolidge and of vice-president Dawes is now simply reduced to taking the formal oath of office at the Capital and to a procession of troops and of several State governors, a parade to last an hour.

     Galliher declared that he felt almost constrained to rescind the vote, taken weeks ago, on the inauguration ceremonies. He said that patriots in Washington have already contributed $140,000 to the guarantee fund even though they had been repeatedly warned that this sum would probably never be spent. The money will be reimbursed to the donors.

     The Committee will nevertheless allow building a stand and is ready to rent space along the procession route on the boulevards.

     State governors, out of respect for the President’s wishes to have the least ostentatious ceremony possible, will not travel in great number to Washington. Of the 22 governors who, thus far, have responded positively to the invitation, 19 have refused to participate in the procession. The others will have a very modest escort. 

     The presidential inauguration ceremonies will not even include an official grand ball, a tradition for this event.

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L’Etoile – Front page, March 2, 1925 

     THE INAUGURATION WILL BE GRANDIOSE

     Mr. Coolidge will bend to the whims of the organization committee – The ceremonies are sure to be impressive – Huge preparations under way – The parade is sure to be long – The President’s suite.

     President Coolidge yielded to Committee wishes and his installation will not be as simple as he had originally desired.

     Stands are set up along Pennsylvania Avenue and another is now being constructed in Lafayette Square directly in front of the White House, with the President’s permission. All of the stand seats were reserved promptly at good prices.

     We calculate that it will take three hours to review the inauguration parade from the stand in front of the White House where the Chief Executive, Mrs. Coolidge, family members and guests will be placed.

     The President has also allowed local high school cadets to participate in the ceremonies. They will serve as ushers at the reviewing stands.

     G.A.R. veterans in the parade

     Another eleventh-hour change in the program allows the Great Army of the Republic to be represented at the parade. Since the ranks of these veterans are becoming scarcer as time passes, everywhere across the nation, these men who helped save the Union are invited to take part in the parade. The White House gave its favorable response yesterday. Veterans will parade in automobiles and will serve as part of the President’s escort.

     All of the Army and Navy divisions will be represented in the inauguration parade. Some detachments have already arrived from Camp Meade.

     The weather forecast announces pleasant cool temperatures for next Wednesday.

The President’s Suite

     When the President takes the oath of office, he will be accompanied by family members and by Mrs. A.I. Goodhue, Mrs. Coolidge’s mother who arrived last Friday. Colonel John C. Coolidge, the President’s father, and John, the President’s son, will be in Washington tomorrow. John will arrive from Amherst College in the company of college president Mr. Olds.

     Dr. George T. Harding, late President Harding’s father, made it known that it was impossible for him to accept the President’s invitation to be a White House guest during the inauguration.

     Although the President will not attend the charity ball, his aide-de-camp Colonel Sherrill announced that it would be one of the grand social events to take place in the capital.

     Air Force General Mitchell acted as ball committee president but left this post, probably because of accusations against him of insubordination. Consequently, Colonel Sherrill replaced him.

     THE ARRIVAL OF GENERAL DAWES

     General Charles G. Dawes, vice-president elect, arrived in Washington late yesterday afternoon with his wife, their two adopted sons and Francis J. Kilkenny, his long-time personal assistant in public and private affairs. 

     The General did not envisage taking on a task or traveling without Kilkenny….He accompanied General Dawes in France during the Great War. He was his right-hand man when the General initiated the national budget system at the request of President Harding. When Dawes was running as candidate for vice-president, Kilkenny was his personal assistant during the campaign. Kilkenny will remain in Washington until General Dawes takes the direction of the Senate and then will return to Chicago to manage General Dawes’s private affairs. 

     Ross Barclay, member of the Associated Press legal staff, will serve as the new vice-president’s secretary….

    When Calvin Coolidge swears on his family Bible to faithfully fulfill his duties and functions in front of Chief Justice Taft, he will have been the first President to take the oath from one of his predecessors.

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THE CROWD WILL BE AS LARGE AS USUAL  AT THE INAUGURATION

     The crowd expected to gather in Washington for President Coolidge’s March 4th inauguration will be as immense as that of other large crowds assembled in the Capital for similar ceremonies.

     Despite the desire for simplicity expressed by President Coolidge, people are hurrying just as much to see the historic event….

     This year, planes will not fly above the city of Washington during the inauguration because the Secretaries of the Army and Navy forbade it given that the noise of the planes had drowned out President Harding’s voice at the Yorktown ceremonies.

     General and Mrs. Dawes will parade in an automobile from the White House to the Capital behind Mrs. Coolidge, escorted by a squadron of cavalry. 

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THEY WILL  ATTEND THE INAUGURATION

     Representative Jewett will head the Lowell delegation.

     Lowell will send a delegation of several of its Boston legislative Representatives to Washington to attend the official installation of President Coolidge on Wednesday March 4th. Representative Victor-F. Jewett, Speaker of the House, an intimate friend of President Coolidge when the latter was Representative, Speaker, Lieutenant-governor and Governor, will lead the delegation. It will be composed of seven members belonging to the Republican and Democrat parties.

     The Republican delegates are: Representative Henri Achin Jr., Senators Charles P. Howard and Walter Pentam. The Democrat delegates are: Charles H. Shower, Daniel F. Moriarty and Patrick F. Nestor.

     All will attend the lunch which will take place at the White House. They will remain in Washington almost all week. (2)

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1) Calvin Coolidge’s inaugural address was the first to be broadcast nationally by radio.

2) Translations by Louise Peloquin.

Historical fiction that expands our minds and feeds our senses by Marjorie Arons Barron

The entry below is being cross posted from Marjorie Arons Barron’s own blog.

This Strange Eventful History by Claire Messud is a fictional drama based on the author’s own multi-generational family, covering seven decades of family history and moving from Salonica in Greece, to French (colonial) Algeria to France, Switzerland, Brazil, Canada, Australia and the United States. Each chapter is told from the perspective of another family member, and their stories move in and out, identified by the year and geographic setting. Gradually the reader comes to understand the grandparents, adult children, grandchildren not only from their own telling of their stories but from others’ perceptions of them.

Grandfather Gaston Cassar considered himself French. Based in Algiers, he fought for the French against the Germans in 1940. Then, for safety, he sent his wife, Lucienne, and children, Denise and Francois, to Algiers, considering it to be their homeland. A naval officer in service to France, he spent years in postings in Greece, France, Lebanon and elsewhere but always gravitated back to Algeria. In 1959-1960, he and his family were force to flee during Algeria’s battle for independence from France. He left behind a 1000-page handwritten family history that became the foundation of Messud’s Booker-listed novel.

Son Francois’s brilliance is rewarded with a scholarship to the United States and post-graduate work at Harvard.  We travel through the decades of his life, the challenges and rewards of his marriage, his inner travails, his philosophical struggles and family ties. So, too, with his Canadian wife, Barbara, and on to their children (author Messud’s generation), who also divide their time between the United States and Europe.  At the end, we have been immersed in their intense family relationships, professional ambitions, devout and anti-religious beliefs, accomplishments and failures. We travel for decades with these characters, as they move, change and, yes, age. We are touched to understand the complexities and contradictions of their lives and develop empathy for disparate elements of the human experience.

We share their debates about colonialism, sacrifices for upward mobility within France’s rigid social structure, adapting to changing generational mores at home and abroad, intellectual sensibilities struggling to breathe within corporate metrics of accomplishment.

The author moves seamlessly between and among locations and characters. Messud’s writing is exquisitely descriptive, painterly without being forced, with fresh imagery on every page, making the reader want to reread pages just for the pleasure of the elegance of the writing. I highly recommend this book and want to return to it myself for a second go-through.

Lowell Politics: January 12, 2025

The Lowell City Council returned to its regular meeting schedule on Tuesday after a three-week gap due to Christmas and New Year’s. However, City Manager Tom Golden and City Councilors Sokhary Chau and Kim Scott were absent, so the agenda was relatively light.

The dominant issue at Tuesday’s meeting was maintenance problems at the new Lowell High athletic building. It seems like there have been many small things, but the final straw that precipitated it coming to the council was the failure of a heating system which caused glycol (a type of antifreeze used in such systems) to leak from the unit’s elevated location into the boy’s locker room below it. Because this happened during Christmas break, a time of intensive usage of the athletic facility, the negative impact was substantial.

This leak, however, was not the only problem discussed. Another was an apparent design flaw in the bleachers in the athletic facility. These were intended to remain folded up during the school day so the full gym can be utilized by physical education classes, but then be extended to allow spectator seating for sporting events. From their installation nearly two years ago, however, if the bleachers are opened, they cause gouges in the very expensive gym floor. The company that provided the bleachers has been resistant to sending anyone to rectify the problem although one of the city’s construction managers told councilors that person was due on site on Wednesday, hopefully with a fix to this issue.

The third problem discussed was a cluster of smaller items that included doors that lock when they are not supposed to which has left people trapped in rooms, closets and other spaces and have sometimes required the fire department to extract them; benches in the locker rooms that collapse the moment someone sits on them (they are screwed into  the wall rather than being supported by legs); and an elevator that routinely traps people inside.

Finally, councilors expressed skepticism over the city’s efforts to adequately staff the facility with people trained to properly utilize and maintain the high-tech systems, especially HVAC systems, that come with the building. As we’ve learned from other “new” schools in Lowell, when their systems are not properly maintained from the start, they cease to be “new” very quickly and require expensive repairs and replacements long before they would if they had been properly maintained from the start.

Although it never expressly arose on Tuesday, the bitter 2017 fight over the location of Lowell High lurks over every aspect of this project. (Recall that battle was whether to build an entirely new structure on the grounds of Cawley Stadium in Belvidere or to renovate the existing downtown building while adding two new structures). Someone Tuesday did point out that these problems have all arisen in the gymnasium, which is a brand-new standalone building constructed on the site of the demolished “dentists offices” along Arcand Drive. Presumably the desired inference to be drawn from that fact was that the downtown location was not a contributing factor to these problems. While that is likely true, the longer construction time of the downtown project as opposed to the suburban all new facility likely means that by the time the final stage of the project is completed, the earliest portion – the gym – will need extensive renovations due to the city’s inability to maintain it to the necessary standards.

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A motion on the status of the Smith Baker Center generated a brief discussion on the status of a structural engineering report that the city has obtained. That report happens to be on the agenda for this coming Tuesday night’s meeting so I’ll write about it next Sunday, but for now, from the tenor of councilor remarks Tuesday and in the past, my guess is that a majority of the council will almost immediately vote to demolish the building notwithstanding the efforts of a group of citizens to preserve the building.

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I have frequently criticized this council for the volume of motions filed. Each motion requires a formal response from the city manager which in turn requires some senior leader to devote a substantial amount of time to drafting the response, time that in my view would be better spent doing their actual job of managing city operations. To quantify this “too many motions” situation, I counted the number of motions made by each councilor over the course of 2024.

Back in July, I posted a count for the first six months of the year which I’ll repeat below before giving the second half and full year numbers. As for how the counting was done, if a motion was jointly made by two or more councilors, I credited each councilor with one motion made. Also, if a motion was clearly marked as the refiling of an unanswered motion, I did not count it. Finally, because Corey Belanger replaced John Leahy on the council in the middle of the year, I treat the two of them as a single councilor.

Here are the number of motions made by councilors in the first half of 2024 ordered by the most to the fewest motions made:

Corey Robinson – 65
Erik Gitschier – 45
Vesna Nuon – 35
Paul Ratha Yem – 22
Kim Scott – 16
John Leahy – 14
Wayne Jenness – 12
John Descoteaux – 9 (tie)
Rita Mercier – 9 (tie)
Sokhary Chau – 7 (tie)
Dan Rourke – 7 (tied)

Here are the numbers for the second half of 2024:

Corey Robinson – 38
Erik Gitschier – 34
Vesna Nuon – 21
Wayne Jenness – 20
Kim Scott – 19
Corey Belanger – 17
John Descoteaux – 10
Paul Ratha Yem – 8
Rita Mercier – 7
Dan Rourke – 4
Sokhary Chau – 3

Before you think, “That’s quite a drop; maybe councilors have learned to cut back on the volume of motions,” it’s important to realize that there were far fewer council meetings in the second half of the year than in the first half. From January through June there were 24 meetings; from July through December there were just 18 (due mostly to the twice-monthly summer meeting schedule but also to Christmas and New Year falling on Wednesdays this year).

A better way to measure any changes in motion volume is to look at the average number of motions filed by each councilor in the first half of the year compared to the second half. Here are those numbers with the councilors listed alphabetically with their first and second half averages following:

Sokhary Chau – 0.3 to 0.2 (motions per meeting)
John Descoteaux – 0.4 to 0.6
Erik Gitschier – 1.9 to 1.9
Wayne Jenness – 0.6 to 1.1
Leahy/Belanger – 0.6 to 0.9
Rita Mercier – 0.4 to 0.4
Vesna Nuon – 1.5 to 1.2
Corey Robinson – 2.7 to 2.1
Dan Rourke – 0.3 to 0.2
Kim Scott – 0.7 to 1.1
Paul Ratha Yem – 0.9 to 0.4

Finally, here are the total number of motions filed by each councilor for all of 2024 sorted by the most to the fewest:

Corey Robinson – 103 motions in 2024
Erik Gitschier – 79 motions
Vesna Nuon – 56 motions
Kim Scott – 35 motions
Wayne Jenness – 32 motions
Leahy/Belanger – 31 motions
Paul Ratha Yem – 30 motions
John Descoteaux – 19 motions
Rita Mercier – 16 motions
Dan Rourke – 11 motions
Sokhary Chau – 10 motions

With 2025 being a city election year, don’t expect these motion totals to go down. There’s a correlation between people who watch city council meetings and people who vote, so there’s a re-election incentive for councilors to draw more attention to themselves by making more motions.

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As if this volume of regularly filed motions were not enough, councilors sometimes bring up things that are not on the agenda by “suspending” the rules. According to a recent Lowell Sun article (“2025 debuts the Year of the Snake,” January 5, 2025, p.3), this practice was responsible for some of the Open Meeting Law violations committed by the council in 2024. Here’s some of what was written in the Sun article: “The council was scolded and schooled by the Attorney General’s Office for the use of ‘suspending the rules’ under the mistaken understanding that it waived proper public notice . . .”

The most common use of “suspending the rules” by the council is to take an item that does appear on the agenda out of order, usually because someone is present to speak on the motion and councilors don’t want to force that person to sit through the entire meeting before they can make their statement. There does not seem to be anything wrong with doing that.

The problematic practice is when something that does not appear on the agenda gets brought up by a councilor. There is an exception in the Open Meeting law – and I’m paraphrasing here – for urgent business that cannot wait until the next meeting, but this council seems way too quick to invoke that exception. However, because violating the Open Meeting Law in this manner does not seem to result in any meaningful sanction, it’s unlikely the council will change its ways.

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In past newsletters, I’ve frequently mentioned the pending Supreme Judicial Court decision on the legality of the state’s MBTA Communities zoning law. The long-awaited holding in that case was announced on Wednesday. Attorney General v. Town of Milton (SJC-13580) was a civil action brought in the Superior Court last year in which Massachusetts Attorney General Andrea Campbell sought to compel the town of Milton to comply with the MBTA Communities Act, a bill passed by the legislature that requires municipalities serviced by the MBTA to allow more affordable housing to be constructed.

The town of Milton has refused to comply with the law. Many other communities have followed Milton’s lead so there was a lot riding on this decision. The SJC reached what might best be called a split decision. The court held that the legislature did have the authority to set housing policies that had to be implemented by municipalities; that the Attorney General had broad authority to seek enforcement of such laws; but that the administrative process used to implement the regulations that govern the detailed working of this law was flawed, so the regulations are unenforceable at this time.

The mainstream media reporting I’ve seen on this emphasizes that the law was upheld and minimizes the administrative flaw, implying that the problem can be rapidly rectified. I’m not so sure it will be that easy or fast. Redoing the adoption process will likely require re-advertising the proposed regulations, holding new public hearings, and then voting to adopt them.

My concern is that opposition to this law has become so entrenched that the process will be fought at every step. At the same time, I suspect that many elected officials interpret the results of last November’s election as a sign that the electorate has become more conservative and less accepting of things like affordable housing. (I think that’s the wrong takeaway from the election but mine is not the prevailing analysis.) Consequently, there is no guarantee that the version of the regulations adopted after this redo will be the same as those first promulgated.

For Lowell, this decision might have a slightly negative consequence. The city was quick to adopt the required zoning changes and only recently announced that the benefits of the quick enactment in the form of substantial housing grants would soon flow to the city. However, if this decision causes the entire program to be placed on hold pending a lengthy administrative redo of the regulation implementation process, it could delay those funds getting to the city.

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This week on richardhowe.com, Rich Grady wrote about his visit to the U.S. Capitol to pay his respects to former President Jimmy Carter; I wrote a review of the movie Conclave; and Louise Peloquin provided coverage of the celebration of the New Year in Lowell one hundred years ago as covered by L’Etoile, Lowell’s French language newspaper.

America’s Rotunda

photo by Rich Grady

America’s Rotunda

by Rich Grady

The roads and sidewalks were still covered in a mush of snow and ice. The snow was not the pure white blanket of a day ago, but a dirty mix of sand, salt and slush. I decided to walk the two or three miles to the US Capitol from where I was staying, drawn by the lure of history and a life well-lived. Jimmy Carter was lying-in-state in the Capitol’s Rotunda.

The footing was slippery, but the premise was solid. The man and I were born on the same day, but in different years. He was younger than my father would have been, but they were of the same generation and both served in the US Navy. One was from Plains, Georgia and the other was from Dorchester, Massachusetts.

My father was a quiet man, and his sense of patriotism was genuinely deep and tempered in the flames of WWII. He didn’t wrap himself in the flag and had our Irish ancestry as a reminder that a red, white, and blue flag had not always stood for freedom for our people – but in the US, it did. As kids, my three brothers and I learned by observation, and we all saw how our humble, quiet old man stood tall as the Stars & Stripes approached in a parade, took his hat off with his right hand, and put it over his heart. He wasn’t an overly religious man, but he was kind and believed in the Golden Rule. He was raised Catholic, and raised us all the same way, but not in a draconian manner. He didn’t go to Church every week, but he prayed every day, and we saw him bless himself whenever we drove by a Church. He believed in a higher spirit. We all wanted to be like him.

When Jimmy Carter died, I thought of my dad. We both voted for the man when he ran in 1976, although we didn’t discuss it; and I doubt that it mattered to my father that Carter was a fan of the Allman Brothers Band, but that resonated with the youthful me. That was a big year in our nation’s history – the Bicentennial of the Declaration of Independence. It’s hard to believe that we have almost reached the Semiquincentennial – halfway to 500. I felt compelled to rally and make it to the US Capitol to see our 39th President lying-in-state.

During the walk over, I was surprisingly alone. I expected to see more people going in the same direction. Perhaps it was because it was a cold wintry night with a windchill in the teens, or perhaps because most were taking public transit or driving; or perhaps because I started relatively far away and my path was not linear nor predictable – just heading in the right general direction.

I came to an intersection where I knew I should go left, and saw a middle-aged couple walking in the direction that I was going. I fell in behind them at a respectful distance. They took turns looking over their shoulder to check me out, and quickened their pace. I kept up with them, maintaining separation. They stopped at an intersection and the gap closed between us.

Sensing their tenseness, I volunteered that I was not following them, just heading to the Capitol. I could almost hear a sigh of relief, and the woman said, “We are, too,” and we began to walk together. Soon, a young man came up to us and asked if we were going to the Capitol, and our formation grew. We started to see people walking ahead of us, and behind as well. I began to feel part of a loosely-formed procession, parading along – not with the tight precision of the caisson that earlier in the day brought former President Jimmy Carter to the Capitol, but with the same resolve and sense of purpose.

As we got closer to the Capitol, other people joined the march from different directions. There was no single rallying point to start from, and no single path to get there, and no one telling us to go. We made up our own minds and we followed our own paths.

As we got closer to the Capitol, law enforcement officers in full regalia, some wearing balaclavas as a buffer to the biting winds, were directing people to go around to the back side of the sprawling building, to where the line began. My cluster of pilgrims arrived shortly before 7 pm, when the doors were scheduled to be open. The line was a long, tight zig-zag along fencing and quite a way from the actual entrance. People were patiently waiting and there was a murmur of numerous conversations. The young man standing next to me grew up in Annapolis and now lives in DC near the National Cathedral. His wife stayed home, but he wasn’t going to miss it. Talking to him helped pass the time and reinforced a feeling that this was an historic and rare event. Whatever led us there, we seemed to be feeling similar sentiments and sharing a common purpose – to pay respects to a man of honor, humility, and humanity.

So many people of all shapes, sizes, and shades, peacefully and respectfully standing in the cold, patiently making their way into the Capitol’s Emancipation Hall entrance where we went through metal detectors before lining up again to await a turn to go up into the Rotunda. Inside the hall, armed law enforcement became less evident, and cheery ushers became prevalent. They were counting us and demarcating groups for making the ascent into the Rotunda.

The Rotunda is very beautiful, with a domed ceiling, historic paintings, and sculptures. Jimmy Carter’s flag-draped casket was in the center, resting on the catafalque that held Abraham Lincoln’s in 1865. The military honor guard stood perfectly still and tall at solemn attention.

Silence reigned over the mourning citizens, who needed no royal assent to be there. I looked at the flag-draped coffin and shed a silent tear as I put my right hand over my heart. The power of quiet was strong, and I blessed myself as if I was in Church – knowing that the man at rest was just a man, but a truly great man. I then signed the condolences book and walked back out into the bitter cold night with a warm glow of faith in the quiet strength of caring Americans.

President Carter visitation line at US Capitol. By Rich Grady

Frederick Douglass statue inside US Capitol. Photo by Rich Grady.