The Worst Presidential Inaugurations, Ranked

With malice toward none. The only thing we have to fear. Ask what you can do for your country.

Presidential inaugurations will, at their best, inspire their audiences—not just in their respective moments, but for decades and centuries to come. But presidential inaugurations are also run by people, which means that, sometimes, they will go extremely wrong. Sometimes, it will be protests that will mar the best-planned ceremonies. Sometimes, it will be human pettiness (as when President Hoover, riding with Franklin Roosevelt in the motorcade to the Capitol in 1932, seems to have ignored Roosevelt’s attempts at conversation, instead staring stone-faced into the distance). Sometimes, however, inaugural exercises will encounter disasters of a more epic strain: storms, illness, death, extremely pungent cheese.

With that in mind, here are some of the worst inaugurations in history, ranked in order from the mildly to the egregiously disastrous.

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7. John Adams, 1797

Adams is the least disastrous on this list because nothing overtly awful befell his installation as the second U.S. president. In fact,—that Adams’s inauguration was one of the most pivotal moments in American history: Washington having left office after his second term was up, the installation of Adams was a demonstration of the new country’s commitment to a peaceful transition of power. It was in that sense a model of American democracy that would be emulated, with varying degrees of success, by other countries, and that should also place Adams’s inauguration on any best-inaugurations list you might want to make.