Trump’s inauguration could be one of the warmest. New photos show Taft’s was one of the wintriest.
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Version 0 of 1. A week before what forecasters say could be the warmest inauguration on record, D.C. officials unveiled new glimpses of one the wintriest: William Howard Taft’s 1909 snow-out that forced the swearing-in ceremony to take place inside the Capitol instead of on its East Front. Nine images, recently acquired by the D.C. Council, went on display Friday in the atrium of the John A. Wilson Building. They portray thin crowds lining a slushy Pennsylvania Avenue as platoons of mounted honor guards and one out-of-focus presidential carriage pass under a towering billboard for Gillette Safety Razors. Flag vendors can be seen hawking American flags to bundled bystanders. In one, a helmeted District policeman keeps bystanders on the soggy pavement that city employees had worked overnight to clear in whiteout conditions. Less than 10 inches fell, but conditions were dire in the hours leading up to the ceremony. Drifts were piled deep along the parade route, and more than 58,000 tons of snow was hauled away by 6,000 men and 500 wagons, according to news reports of the time. “It was 1909. Why all the horse-drawn stuff?” asked Council Chairman Phil Mendelson (D) as he stooped to view each image. “I think it was ceremonial,” said Josh Gibson, the council’s public information chief and the unofficial historian who procured the 31 medium-format negatives that the images came from. “Should we go back to carriages?” Mendelson mused just seven days before the next presidential cavalcade would roll along the same route, this one featuring a Trump in an armored car instead of a Taft in a buggy. “That would be classy, wouldn’t it?” [Donald Trump first swept into the nation’s capital 40 years ago. It didn’t go well.] This year’s procession will move along a Pennsylvania Avenue far different from the 1909 edition, and not just because the Old Post Office building so prominent on one of the shots is now a hotel emblazoned with the name of the president-elect. Many of the blocks near the White House were lined with early-20th-century storefronts, including a piano store and an engraving plant. They amount to a black-and-white portrayal of Washington as a small working city even in the heart of the part devoted to national power. “These photos show the context of the District as a place where people lived and worked,” Gibson said of the grainy inns and restaurants that have long given way to the low-rise canyon of office blocks that line much of the route today. Beverly Brannan, curator of 20th-century photography at the Library of Congress, said she was excited to see the new images, which were unknown to her curators. While the sharpness of the pictures is on the hazy side, she hailed “the immediacy” that the unknown photographer managed to capture on what must have been a challenging day. “It’s almost as if you are there,” Brannan said. “If you’ve been to one of these snowy inaugurations, you can imagine standing there with wet feet and wondering if you want to stay because you know something exciting is just about to happen.” The library has a collection of about 80 Taft inauguration photos, Brannan said. “These complement very much the ones we have. I’m thrilled to see them.” The collection caught Gibson’s eye mainly for the unusual shots of the Wilson Building, the six-story Beaux-Arts facade known then as the District Building. The city’s first city hall — a historic symbol of the District’s slow march to a degree of self-rule — had been completed only eight months earlier and was making its debut as a feature on the inauguration route. Decades before Pennsylvania Avenue was reconfigured in the 1970s, the building was set well back from the street and was invisible in most of the parade shots taken over the years. “It’s actually pretty rare for the Wilson Building to show up in photos like these,” Gibson said. “It’s a real find for us.” The negatives popped up earlier this year on eBay, where Gibson — who calls himself the Indiana Jones of D.C. Council history — maintains a standing search alert for the term “Wilson Building.” They arrived with little information except that they once belonged to one Ambrose Swasey, an Ohio engineer who developed astronomical instruments. Whether Swasey was the photographer is unknown, but the pictures probably were taken by someone comfortable with fine lenses and delicate machinery, according to Brannan. Surprisingly for the era, they were shot not on glass plates but on newer fangled medium-format strip negatives. “It sounds as though he were tech-oriented,” she said. Twenty-five years after Mr. and Mrs. Taft’s ride to the Capitol and President and Mrs. Taft’s ride back down Pennsylvania Avenue, Inauguration Day was switched from March to January by the 20th Amendment. But given the Mid-Atlantic’s mushy winter conditions, that shift didn’t mean much in the way of weather disruptions, with many of the March inaugurations as cold as those since. For now at least, there looks like little chance Donald Trump will take his oath in the Senate Chamber as Taft had on a day dubbed a weather “calamity” by Henry Cabot Lodge, the Republican senator from Massachusetts. Forecasts call for temperatures next Friday in the 50s or even 60s, which would break the record for the warmest inauguration on record, the balmy 55-degree start to Ronald Reagan’s first term in 1981. 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