“Raging fires”, in the inaugural address

Today in his second inaugural address, President Barack Obama got my attention when he mentioned “raging fires”.

…We, the people, still believe that our obligations as Americans are not just to ourselves, but to all posterity. We will respond to the threat of climate change, knowing that the failure to do so would betray our children and future generations. Some may still deny the overwhelming judgment of science, but none can avoid the devastating impact of raging fires, and crippling drought, and more powerful storms. The path towards sustainable energy sources will be long and sometimes difficult. But America cannot resist this transition; we must lead it. We cannot cede to other nations the technology that will power new jobs and new industries — we must claim its promise. That is how we will maintain our economic vitality and our national treasure — our forests and waterways; our croplands and snowcapped peaks. That is how we will preserve our planet, commanded to our care by God. That’s what will lend meaning to the creed our fathers once declared.

This got me to wondering — has any other president mentioned forest fires in an inaugural address? Some research turned up eight other Presidents that used the word “fire”, but none of them were actually talking about wildland fires.

During President George W. Bush’s second inaugural address in 2005, he was referring to the 9/11 attacks three and a half years earlier:

At this second gathering, our duties are defined not by the words I use, but by the history we have seen together. For a half century, America defended our own freedom by standing watch on distant borders. After the shipwreck of communism came years of relative quiet, years of repose, years of sabbatical — and then there came a day of fire. We have seen our vulnerability — and we have seen its deepest source.

In President Ronald Reagan’s first inaugural address in 1981 he was talking about the Arlington National Cemetery across the Potomac River:

Under one such marker lies a young man–Martin Treptow–who left his job in a small town barber shop in 1917 to go to France with the famed Rainbow Division. There, on the western front, he was killed trying to carry a message between battalions under heavy artillery fire.

John F. Kennedy, in 1961 talked about fires “lighting the world”:

In the long history of the world, only a few generations have been granted the role of defending freedom in its hour of maximum danger. I do not shrink from this responsibility–I welcome it. I do not believe that any of us would exchange places with any other people or any other generation. The energy, the faith, the devotion which we bring to this endeavor will light our country and all who serve it–and the glow from that fire can truly light the world.

President Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1953 used the word fire as a verb:

In the light of this equality, we know that the virtues most cherished by free people — love of truth, pride of work, devotion to country — all are treasures equally precious in the lives of the most humble and of the most exalted. The men who mine coal and fire furnaces and balance ledgers and turn lathes and pick cotton and heal the sick and plant corn — all serve as proudly, and as profitably, for America as the statesmen who draft treaties and the legislators who enact laws.

During the First World War in 1917, Woodrow Wilson used the word as a metaphor during his second inaugural address:

We are being forged into a new unity amidst the fires that now blaze throughout the world.

William Howard Taft, in 1909, advocated for the building of the Panama Canal:

We must not now, therefore, keep up a fire in the rear of the agents whom we have authorized to do our work on the Isthmus.

James K. Polk in 1845 talked about the “blessings secured to our happy land by our Federal Union” in a speech that was a little hard to follow:

No treason to mankind since the organization of society would be equal in atrocity to that of him who would lift his hand to destroy it. He would overthrow the noblest structure of human wisdom, which protects himself and his fellow-man. He would stop the progress of free government and involve his country either in anarchy or despotism. He would extinguish the fire of liberty, which warms and animates the hearts of happy millions and invites all the nations of the earth to imitate our example.

In 1789 George Washington pledged preservation of “the sacred fire of liberty”.

And since the preservation of the sacred fire of liberty, and the destiny of the Republican model of Government, are justly considered as deeply, perhaps as finally staked, on the experiment entrusted to the hands of the American people.

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