Populist Partying : Unlike Some of Their Stuffy or Unruly Predecessors, Bill Clinton and Company Want a Fun but Symbolic Inauguration Day

Bob Myman, a Hollywood producer whois not known for his lack of energy, was running breathless.

“I just got off the phone with a woman who wrote some poems she wants Bill Clinton to see,” he said Tuesday.

The rhymes were no threat to Shakespeare, but Myman dutifully assured their author that they would receive a fair hearing. The poetry thus joined a tidal wave of videotapes, audiotapes, photographs and other creative efforts from thousands of Clinton inaugural entertainment -wanna-bes.

“Listen, it’s crazy here,” said Myman, who is overseeing the selection of talent for next week’s inauguration. “My little department alone is responsible for 300 performers in five days.”

On the eve of the weeklong paean to Bill Clinton’s personal brand of populist politics, more than 3,000 volunteers are fueled by a kind of exhilaration that makes the capital feel as though it’s swallowed euphoria pills. Much of the energy comes the collective jubilation of Democrats, who thought in dark moments that they might never live to see their party occupy the White House again. Many baby boomers are equally rapturous, celebrating the election of two of their own--a 46-year-old President-elect and a vice president-to-be who is 44.

In return, the Clinton-Gore Administration is promising participation a-go-go. Organizers hope the inaugural festivities hark back to Thomas Jefferson--who pioneered the inaugural parade and from whom the President-elect draws much of his political inspiration. A two-day “Reunion on the Mall” is open to all of America. Inaugural balls, 10 of them, are meant to be fun--not aristocratic in the fashion of Ronald Reagan, or stiff, a la George Bush.

To make it all happen inaugural planners are getting down to business in their grungy office at the Naval Shipyard. Philip C. Brooks, a National Archives historian who is on loan to the inaugural committee, said the 8:30 a.m. daily meetings are so serious that no one even pauses for coffee or doughnuts.

Brooks, who also worked on the inaugurations of Richard Nixon in 1969 and George Bush in 1989, said the Clinton inaugural staff is obsessed with “little details,” as well as “a real emphasis on the historic and the symbolic.”

He says the symbolic significance of the festivities begins with Sunday’s bus trip from Monticello, Jefferson’s home in Virginia, to the Lincoln Memorial. The Clintons will follow the same route used by this country’s third chief executive when he traveled to Washington to be sworn in. The roads meander through Virginia countryside that is rich in Civil War history, finally crossing what was once known as Reunion Bridge--connecting the Lincoln Memorial to the Lee Mansion.

Now called Memorial Bridge, that span was carefully positioned to represent unity after the divisiveness of the Civil War, Brooks said.

“And I think that’s what you’re seeing now--a celebration that really is designed to bring everybody together.”

As an example, Bob Myman pointed to the selection of Irma Collins, a 51-year-old domestic worker from Los Angeles, whose public appearances until now have been limited to her church choir. Collins will earn the same billing as Linda Ronstadt, Betty Carter, Los Lobos or the Four Tops.

Susan Fowler of the Smithsonian Institution’s Museum of American History said the participatory formula seems to be working. “I’ve been here for several inaugurals, and this one seems to be a little more intense,” Fowler said.

Fowler said she attributes the heightened excitement to “the shift--to a new party, and also to a new generation.”

Of course, Clinton and Gore are taking office in an era in which personal safety is an ever-present consideration. Their initiation could never be as nonchalant, for example, as that of Jefferson, who strolled back to his downtown boarding house after the swearing-in ceremony at the Capitol, with garrulous supporters beside him.

(At his rooming house that evening, Jefferson politely declined the entreaties of fellow diners that he move to the head of the table. “I’m the same person I was this morning,” he is said to have remarked as he took his customary place. Jefferson later made up for such modest behavior, however, by running up a White House wine bill of more than $10,000.)

Unlike Jimmy Carter and Walter Mondale, their most recent Democratic predecessors, Clinton and Gore will not march down Pennsylvania Avenue to the White House after the oaths of office are administered at the Capitol. Instead they will ride in limousines.

In addition to Carter’s thumbing his nose at presidential security, his mile-plus walk to the White House was memorable for a distinct botanical/geographical presence, said Washington author Barbara Seulling. Of all the inaugural trivia she included in her book “The Last Cow on the White House Lawn,” Seulling said, the giant, air-filled peanut that floated over the Georgia delegation was a standout.

The Georgians who traveled from Plains to Washington to see their former governor sworn in arrived on a train dubbed the “Peanut Special,” Seulling said, and consumed a staggering 275 pounds of peanuts on the trip.

With no advice intended for a President-elect who is sometimes long-winded, Seulling said her other favorite inaugural legend centers on William Henry Harrison. On a bitter cold day in 1841, Harrison’s inaugural address lasted for an interminable hour and a half. By the time he had finished, Harrison--along with much of his audience--was coughing and sneezing. The ninth president succumbed to pneumonia 31 days later, without having made a single important decision in office.

In the unpredictable climate zone of a capital that was once a swamp, weather is always a source of Angst for inaugural planners. In 1984, when Ronald Reagan entered his second term, a brutal snowstorm caused festivities to be hastily moved indoors. Members of a youth band from Utah, who had staged a year of bake sales and car washes to earn money for the trip, complained that their entire horn section had frozen shut.

But it is Ulysses S. Grant who claims the dubious distinction for coldest Inauguration Day. In 1873, as Grant took office for the second time, thermometers dropped to 4 degrees Fahrenheit. The champagne froze solid in outdoor pavilions, and guests danced stiffly in heavy overcoats.

More lamentable still was the fate of the hundreds of imported canaries that had been brought in to chirp for the chief. Too cold to utter a peep, the tiny creatures froze to death in their cages.

Almost as uncontrollable as the weather were the crowds at Andrew Jackson’s inauguration in 1829. Philip Brooks said Clinton’s inaugural staffers have been particularly interested in whether subsequent presidents attempted the kind of free-for-all open house that Jackson staged at the White House--”and if so, did any of them turn out well?”

The answer is a firm no, said Brooks, presumably because no other president wanted to ask friends to form a flying wedge to enable him to flee the White House through a little-used side door.

After inviting just about everyone in the known world to celebrate his inauguration, “Jackson got the hell out,” Brooks said.

The swarm of guests took the term open house literally, trashing everything in sight. In “The Life of Andrew Jackson,” Robert V. Remni described the reception as a “near-riotous scene . . . pails of liquor splashed to the floor, glasses fell and were smashed.”

Guests were lured out of the executive mansion only when tubs of refreshments--i.e, booze--were moved out to the lawn. The place was such a wreck that a full six days were required to make the White House suitable for Jackson’s occupancy.

Philip Brooks said he is confident that this kind of fracas will not repeat itself when the Clintons move into the White House on Wednesday. The capital may be giddy, but it is also eager to get to work.

“I think (that) we’re seeing a sense of it being necessary to have this kind of change,” Brooks said. “That’s really the wonderfully rejuvenating thing about our system, isn’t it?”