JFK’s very cold inauguration, Robert Frost’s regrettable poem

In 2024, more than 77 million Americans elected an old man to be their president again, so it should not shock anyone to hear that the 78-year-old Trump will take his oath — Trump and oath, quite the joke! — indoors because of the weather forecast. As we get older, the cold seems colder. So into the Capitol — the building his supporters violently stormed four years ago — Trump will go.

In 1961, a much younger president, John F. Kennedy, took his oath outdoors in the same temperature (22 degrees F) forecast for Trump’s inauguration. 

Kennedy was 43 at the time he took office, bringing vigor to what he called the New Frontier, a time when a torch would be passed to activist citizens to move the country forward. The speech and the moment was bright and optimistic. “And so, my fellow Americans,” Kennedy said, puffs of exhaust coming from his mouth in the cold, “ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country.”

It’s my first memory of a big event on television.

During the ceremonies, Robert Frost recited a poem, “The Gift Outright,” that he had written a couple of decades earlier. I read the poem years ago and did not find it particularly inspiring for a poet with such an excellent body of work. I read it again recently and, while appreciating the poem’s patriotic spirit, I found Frost’s description of the nation’s history myopic, based in the mythical American thinking that was common among white men of his generation (and is still common among the MAGA). 

It’s not Frost at his best, by any means.

The poem is frothy with Manifest Destiny — that is, the fervent belief that this land was made for European whites to conquer, from East to West, using slaves and removing Native Americans in the process. Frost seems to think that nothing of any value occurred in North America — unstoried, artless, unenhanced — before “we” arrived, never acknowledging the people who lived here long before the colonists started cutting through the forests. 

A lot of us would find such a poem insultingly narrow today, and that’s a good thing. The MAGA right likes to denigrate “woke” thinking as political correctness gone mad when all it represents is enlightenment, mature thinking about ourselves and others, and honesty — honesty about our past and our present. The MAGA right finds “wokeness” offensive because it challenges the same racial/ethnic superiority, framed as patriotism, that Frost betrayed in that poem at Kennedy’s inauguration.

The Gift Outright

The land was ours before we were the land’s 

She was our land more than a hundred years 

Before we were her people. She was ours 

In Massachusetts, in Virginia, 

But we were England’s, still colonials, 

Possessing what we still were unpossessed by, 

Possessed by what we now no more possessed. 

Something we were withholding made us weak 

Until we found out that it was ourselves 

We were withholding from our land of living, 

And forthwith found salvation in surrender. 

Such as we were we gave ourselves outright 

(The deed of gift was many deeds of war) 

To the land vaguely realizing westward, 

But still unstoried, artless, unenhanced, 

Such as she was, such as she will become.