no mail? wtf?
- Thread starter I. Cold
- Start date
The pomp that surrounds these ceremonies seems borrowed from monarchic dynasties, entirely alien to a genuine democracy. Indeed, the founders of the American republic would look with horror on such regal exercises.
George Washington, who died on December 14, 1799, was buried the next day in the family tomb at Mount Vernon, Virginia. While he had requested a simple funeral, Congress insisted on sending some troops and a band to participate.
John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, who both died on July 4, 1826—the 50th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence—were buried with simple graveside services, one in Quincy, Massachusetts and the other at his family’s cemetery at Monticello, Virginia.
Similarly, James Madison died in 1836 and was buried the next day in graveside services in Montpelier, Virginia.
State funerals were exceptions carried out for those who died—or were assassinated—in office, including the funerals of William Henry Harrison in 1841, Abraham Lincoln in 1865, James Garfield in 1881, William McKinley in 1901 and Kennedy in 1963. William Howard Taft, who died just weeks after stepping down as chief justice of the Supreme Court in 1930—the only ex-president to ever hold that position—was accorded similar honors.
The staging of elaborate ceremonies for ex-presidents, replete with military trappings and lying in state, is a relatively modern phenomenon that arose only in the 1960s, beginning with Herbert Hoover and including the funerals of Dwight Eisenhower, Lyndon Johnson and Ronald Reagan. It is a practice that is unquestionably bound up with the assumption of ever greater powers within the office of the presidency itself and the increasingly open exercise of US imperial power.
source
And my phone bill AHHHHH!