Celebration
The inaugural celebration, organized by Melvin D. Hildreth, lasted the full week from January 16–23. The New York Times described it as "the most splendiferous since Franklin D. Roosevelt tried to lift the pall of gloom of 1933 with brave words proclaiming the New Deal". Some confusion was generated when thousands of people received souvenir "invitations" that were in fact not valid tickets to inaugural events.
1.3 million people reportedly stood on Constitution and Pennsylvania Avenues in Washington, D.C., to watch the inaugural parade. Six hundred warplanes flew overhead, and army soldiers marched with new weaponry on display. Some of the marching units were racially mixed. During the parade, Truman was saluted by retired General and future President Dwight D. Eisenhower, then President of Columbia University. Truman drew media attention for 'snubbing' southern Governors Strom Thurmond and Herman Talmadge during the parade.
Lena Horne, Dorothy Maynor and Lionel Hampton performed at the inaugural gala—the first African Americans to appear at this type of performance.
Read more about this topic: Second Inauguration Of Harry S. Truman
Famous quotes containing the word celebration:
“What, to the American slave, is your Fourth of July? I answer: A day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him your celebration is a sham.”
—Frederick Douglass (c.1817–1895)
“No annual training or muster of soldiery, no celebration with its scarfs and banners, could import into the town a hundredth part of the annual splendor of our October. We have only to set the trees, or let them stand, and Nature will find the colored drapery,—flags of all her nations, some of whose private signals hardly the botanist can read,—while we walk under the triumphal arches of the elms.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Sweet weight,
in celebration of the woman I am
and of the soul of the woman I am
and of the central creature and its delight
I sing for you. I dare to live.”
—Anne Sexton (1928–1974)