Dropping The Ball

Gallery

A History of Inaugural Balls

It's not just the ball gowns that have evolved since the first presidential inaugural gala in 1809.

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1. A party change.

2. Television.

3. The twist.

When Dwight D. Eisenhower entered office in 1953, Democrats had been in the White House for two full decades, and Republicans were rarin' for a good bash.

And how. An official ball was planned and the Inaugural Committee sent out thousands of invitations to supporters -- way more than the D.C. Armory, the planned venue, could accommodate. By the time Inauguration Day rolled around, more than 90 percent of those invited had responded affirmatively, so the committee had decided to split the ball between two jampacked locations: the Armory and a Georgetown gymnasium. On the morning of the event, some 2,000 come-latelies rushed the ticket booth to learn which venue they had been assigned to, and in the process missed something important: the soon-to-be-sworn-in Eisenhower, passing by the booth on his way to the Capitol.

Oops.

That night, both official balls were so crowded that something else kind of important didn't happen: dancing.

"Friends always talked about how much the Eisenhowers loved to dance," says Marilyn Holt, author of "Mamie Doud Eisenhower: The General's First Lady." "He had been reprimanded at West Point for twirling his partner too fast and causing her ankle to show." But at the 1953 inaugural balls, "it was such a crush that they barely had room or time to get in and out of there."

There was no dancing in Camelot either. John F. Kennedy's balls (all five of them; once Eisenhower opened the multiple balls door, there was no going back) were once again too swamped for the couple to dance at all.

Of course, by that point, partnered dancing was going out of fashion anyway. Blame the twist, introduced in 1959, which ushered in an era of "dancing at your partner, rather than with them," says Powers.

A ball without dancing is less "ball," more "cattle herd."

Technology added another layer of frenzy to the Kennedy festivities: Those inaugural balls were televised, meaning that people around the country saw the first family in all its glamour and began, in later years, to angle for tickets like never before.