Presidential Swearing-In Ceremony

Part 5 of 6

Library of Congress

Calvin Coolidge taking the oath of office, August 3, 1923.

Sadly, not all Presidential Inaugurals have been stately formal ceremonies, or happy occasions. Eight Vice Presidents have taken the oath of office upon the death of a President, while another was sworn in following a Presidential resignation. John Tyler was at his home in Williamsburg, Virginia, when he received the news that President William Henry Harrison had died. Tyler immediately took a coach to Washington. The next day, April 6, 1841, Tyler was sworn in as President at the Indian Queen Hotel on Pennsylvania Avenue. Chief Justice William Cranch of the Circuit Court of the District of Columbia administered the oath to Tyler, as he did nine years later to Millard Fillmore, following the death of President Zachary Taylor. On July 10, 1850, Vice President Fillmore took the oath in a public ceremony in the House of Representatives chamber.

President Abraham Lincoln died early on the morning of April 15, 1865, and shortly afterwards Vice President Andrew Johnson was sworn in quietly at Kirkwood House, in Washington, by Chief Justice Salmon P. Chase. At 2:00 a.m. on September 20, 1881, Chester Alan Arthur took the oath at his home on Lexington Avenue, in New York City. Two days later, President Arthur repeated the oath in the Vice President's Room in the Capitol, in the presence of former Presidents Grant and Hayes. When William McKinley died, on September 14, 1901, Theodore Roosevelt took the oath in the home of Ansley Wilcox, in Buffalo, New York. News of President Harding's death reached Vice President Calvin Coolidge at his family's homestead in Plymouth, Vermont in the small hours of the morning on August 3, 1923. By the light of a kerosene lamp, Coolidge took the oath from his father, Colonel John Calvin Coolidge, a farmer, notary public, and justice of the peace. On August 21, Coolidge repeated the ceremony in his suite at the Willard Hotel in Washington.