Two dozen musical bands and other organizations â€" including the Kamehameha Schools Warrior Marching Band from President Obama's native Hawaii, the Lesbian and Gay Band Association from St. Louis, and the Boston Crusades Drum and Bugle Corps â€" have agreed so far to march in the nation's 57th inaugural parade on Jan. 21, Mr. Obama and his inaugural planners said Tuesday.
The groups chosen “reflect the spirit, values and diversity of our great nation,'' Mr. Obama said in a news release announcing the selections, adding that he and Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. “are honored to have them join us in the parade.â€
Invitations to march in the parade - a tradition that dates to George Washington - are being offered and accepted as part of a rolling process, the parade planners said. More than 2,800 online applications were submitted to the task force that is organizing the parade - more than double the nearly 1,400 organizations that applied to take part in Mr. Obama's first inauguration.
The participants are responsible for paying their own lodging and travel expenses to Washington for the inaugural, the planners said. A list of the participants can be found here on the presidential inauguration Web site.
George Washington's inauguration in 1789 was the first such parade. On his way from his home in Mount Vernon, Va., to New York City for the nation's first inaugural event, Washington, a retired general, was accompanied by local militias on the way to Federal Hall, where his swearing-in ceremony was held.
When the ceremony moved to the newly established capital in Washington, Thomas Jefferson charted the modern-day parade route when he rode on horseback down Pennsylvania Avenue from the Capitol to the White House after being sworn in for his second term.
Since Jefferson, inaugural planners say, nearly every inauguration has featured a parade, although in 1985 President Ronald Reagan canceled the parade â€" and moved his swearing-in ceremony indoors â€" because of freezing temperatures that the authorities deemed dangerous to the public.
When Abraham Lincoln was sworn in for a second term in 1865, African-Americans participated in the parade for the first time. In 1873, as parade crowds grew larger, President Ulysses S. Grant ordered the construction of a reviewing stand at the White House, where he watched the processional. In 1917, as part of President Woodrow Wilson's second inaugural, women participated in the parade for the first time.
Most inaugural parades last about two hours, Mr. Obama's planners said. (The record for the longest parade is held by President Dwight Eisenhower; his parade lasted four and one half hours and included 73 bands and 59 floats.) President Warren Harding was the first president to drive down Pennsylvania Avenue in a car, and President Jimmy Ca rter was the first to walk from the Capitol to the White House â€" a tradition Mr. Obama and his wife, Michelle, followed in part in 2009.
The Obamas spent part of the parade, which lasted until after sundown, riding in the president's armored limousine, down a heavily fortified Pennsylvania Avenue. But, overruling advisers who wanted him to stay in the car the whole time, he and Mrs. Obama stepped out twice to walk in the frigid cold along with 10,000 marchers from all 50 states.
