Never in the nation’s history had there been an Inauguration Day like the one on March 4, 1909. Throughout inaugural eve and early morning, high winds and heavy snow took out all telegram and telephone lines, severing communications between Washington, D.C., and the outside world and delaying the arrival of more than 30 trainloads of celebrants by as much as 12 hours.
Outgoing President Theodore Roosevelt and President-elect William Howard Taft rode together through blowing snow in a closed carriage from the White House to the Capitol. Small crowds cheered the passing carriage drawn by four bay horses and escorted by the Black Horse Troop of Cleveland.
The storm and the frailty of Chief Justice Melville Fuller forced Taft to depart from the traditional open-air ceremony on the east plaza of the Capitol. Aside from Ulysses S. Grant, Taft was the only president to take the oath of office inside crowded Senate chambers, where citizens packed the galleries.
“Never in the history of the United States has such a pageant as that held in Washington today been carried through without the outside world being in direct communication with the scene of the exercises. For the first time, the nation knows nothing about the movements of its President and its President-elect on inauguration day,” wrote a reporter for the final evening edition of the Washington Times on March 4.
From the Chronicling America archives, the Safford (Ariz.) Rattler, “devoted exclusively to removing the county seat to Safford.” While they didn’t succeed in 1896, Saffordians were able to wrest the Graham County seat away from loathed rival Solomonville by 1915.
Now preserved in digital format and made accessible on the Chronicling America website (http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn84026749/1909-03-04/ed-1/seq-1/), this historical issue of the Washington Times records for posterity the events of that inauguration. The stories of that fierce blizzard and its effect on Taft’s inauguration come to life on the front page. Using new photographic-reproduction technology—a halftone print consisting of black ink dots clustered on white paper—the paper displayed a large picture of the carriage, horses and crowds in stark contrast to the snow-covered streets draped with bunting. Also on page one were the beginning text of Taft’s inaugural address and accounts of the inaugural ceremony, the chaos in Union Station, the crowds that grew to 100,000 along Pennsylvania Avenue as the snow dissipated mid-day, the president’s review of 40,000 troops and the Roosevelts’ departure.
This front page of the Washington Times was one of 11 historical journals selected as a ceremonial “one-millionth” page to be posted on the Chronicling America website—a free, national, searchable database of historic American newspaper pages published between 1880 and 1922.
This one-million-page milestone was celebrated at the Newseum in Washington, D.C., on June 16 by the Library of Congress and the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), which are partners in a National Digital Newspaper Program (NDNP) effort that began in March 2007 to digitize historic U.S. newspapers and make them widely available to the public on the Internet.
Deanna Marcum, associate librarian for Library Services, made the celebratory announcement, and Carole M. Watson, acting NEH chairwoman, announced grant awards for seven new NDNP state projects. Historically important newspapers will be selected for digitization in Illinois, Kansas, Louisiana, Montana, Oklahoma, Oregon and South Carolina and posted on the Chronicling America website.
Treasures from the Library’s newspaper archives are available on chroniclingamerica.loc.gov as well as the Flickr photo sharing site, with content such as world exploration (1909).
“As a resource for local history [or national history, as illustrated by the March 4, 1909, story by the Washington Times], no form of publication captures the day-to-day life of a community and its citizens better than the local newspaper,” Marcum said. “Alongside the headlines proclaiming great and small events are editorials, human interest stories, obituaries, sporting news, and business reports that, as a whole, provide the record of the communities in which those events take place.
“For historians, genealogists, and other scholars, newspapers provide a first-hand, and sometimes the only, account of local news,” Marcum continued. “Even in the most extreme instances, when the editorial content of the newspaper reflects journalism at its most outrageous, the ordinary details of life can still be found and appreciated. As a primary source for local history information, all newspapers—metropolitan dailies, suburban papers, rural weeklies, and the rich ethnic press—are worthy of retention and preservation by libraries and archives.”
Treasures from the Library’s newspaper archives are available on chroniclingamerica.loc.gov as well as the Flickr photo sharing site, with content such as fund-raising premiums (1899).
Watson said, “Newspapers not only chronicle the daily life of our citizens in thousands of towns and cities, but also document the civic, legal, historical and cultural events in every state and region. These stories, taken together, help to illuminate the history of our nation.
“Chronicling America is a free, national, digital resource that builds on more than 20 years of collaboration between the NEH and the Library of Congress to preserve and make accessible the content of millions of pages of historically important American newspapers, first by microfilming and now by digitization.”
The institutions that will administer the NEH awards for the newspaper-digitization projects are the University of Illinois, Urbana; Kansas State Historical Society, Topeka; Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge; Montana Historical Society, Helena; Oklahoma Historical Society, Oklahoma City; University of Oregon, Eugene; and University of South Carolina, Columbia. They join the existing 15 state partners in Arizona, California, Florida, Hawaii, Kentucky, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Texas, Utah, Virginia and Washington.
