ABSTRACT
The inauguration of a president now resembles the coronation of a king. Perhaps it is no surprise that the first Catholic president heightened the nation's sense of liturgy. At the inauguration of Washington in 1789, all the American adults had been subjects of George III. Even after Bunker Hill, the prayers of the army chaplains fervently asked blessings "on the king". In executive power, the president is all too like a king of old, especially and perhaps fatally in foreign affairs. Andrew Jackson was the first president elected by the newly enfranchised ancestors of the millions of lower-class voters of the South and West who 143 years later, in 1972, cheered George Wallace—rough, vulgar, unlettered, resentful, exuberant. The people, however, found in Jackson reason to begin to love the presidency as an image of themselves. Ironically, but predictably, the more egalitarian the base of participation, the more deeply felt was the tug of royalty.
