Margaret Truman Read online

Look at the line waiting to get into President William Howard Taft’s 1911 New Year’s reception. I’m glad I didn’t have to shake hands with them all. Credit: Library of Congress

  15

  The People’s White House

  ONE EVENING PRESIDENT Franklin Pierce was strolling the White House grounds, enjoying music from the Marine Band and nodding cordially to hundreds of tourists and local Washingtonians. A man nervously approached him and said: “Mr. President, can’t I go through your fine house? I’ve heard so much about it that I’d give a great deal to see it.”

  Pierce replied: “Why, my dear sir, that is not my house. It is the people’s house! You shall certainly go through it if you wish.” Summoning a doorman, he ordered the visitor to be given a thorough tour of the first-floor rooms.

  That touching tale sums up one side of the story of tourists in the White House, a very important side. But the whole story is a lot more complicated. The first uninvited visitors appeared in the President’s House in 1800, even before the place was finished. These unwanted callers became so numerous and so nosy, the commissioners in charge of the new capital’s public buildings ordered them barred unless they had a written pass justifying their presence. This rule did not discourage numerous local ladies, who conned written passes out of friendly bureaucrats and were soon sashaying all over the house.

  A tradition had been launched that future residents of the White House would sometimes cheer and sometimes lament. Whose house was it, anyway? The American people apparently thought it belonged to them. But presidential families would occasionally exclaim: “What about us? Don’t we have a vote on that question?” Most of the time, the answer was no.

  II

  President Thomas Jefferson ordered the White House doors kept open every day, so visitors could inspect the State Rooms on the first floor. They were more interested in Jefferson’s basement kitchen, which had a fireplace equipped with an iron range—very rare at the time. Jefferson also added what we would call tourist attractions. Lewis and Clark shipped skins of hitherto unknown beasts and birds from the west. Zebulon Pike and General James Wilkinson, commander of the U.S. Army, also sent their share of dinosaur bones and Indian artifacts from Texas and other unmapped portions of the southwest.

  Pike’s biggest contribution to the displays were two grizzly bear cubs. Jefferson put them in a ten-foot-square cage in the middle of the circular driveway on the north side of the White House. People came from miles around to get a look at these creatures. Eventually he had to ship them to Baltimore where presidential portrait painter Charles Willson Peale maintained a natural history museum, a forerunner of the modern zoo.

  Some of Jefferson’s tourists were even more exotic than the cubs. They arrived wearing feathered headdresses, deerskin moccasins, cloth leggings, and streaks of paint on their faces. The president had told Lewis and Clark to extend invitations to visit the “Great Chief” of the white men in Washington to any and all tribes they met along their route west. Jefferson probably did not realize that Indians were prodigious travelers, who loved an excuse for a journey. Soon chiefs from several western tribes were camping on the White House lawn, along with their squaws and their uncles and their cousins and their aunts.

  III

  The first president to curtail access to the White House was James Monroe. The few people who succeeded in getting in did not have much of a tour. The State Rooms were off limits and although the East Room may have impressed visitors by its size, it had little else going for it. There was no furniture and the chandeliers were drab metal.

  Monroe’s successor, John Quincy Adams, tried to overcome his lack of appeal to the voters by keeping the White House wide open all day, every day. Anyone could come in and wander around. If he wanted to shake the president’s hand, all he had to do was join the line of callers waiting on the stairs.

  On one occasion, Adams was the beneficiary of his open house policy. The president was conferring in his oval study with Secretary of State Henry Clay when one Eleazar Parraly strolled into the room. Parraly was mainly interested in shaking the president’s hand, but in the course of introducing himself, he mentioned that he was a dentist. The president instantly dismissed the secretary of state and invited Parraly to remove a tooth that was aching ominously. There was no resident dentist in the national capital. Parraly not only did the job, he refused to take money for it.

  IV

  When President Andrew Jackson had the good fortune to receive a $50,000 appropriation from Congress to refurbish the White House, he spent a large chunk of it on finishing the magnificent cavern called the East Room. On the floor went a Brussels carpet, new draperies framed the windows, and three cut-glass chandeliers were suspended from the ceiling. New furniture was purchased and twenty spittoons were placed at strategic points around the room.

  The rest of the house was not accessible to uninvited visitors. The White House grounds, however, were open from eight A.M. to sundown to anyone in the mood for a stroll. Enjoying the President’s Park became popular and first families often grew more than a little discomfited when they glanced out the window and found twenty or thirty people staring up at them.

  V

  The Civil War made the White House even more fascinating to the American people. A good many of the tourists of those years were transported to Washington at government expense. They were wearing army blue, and the White House was only a way stop on their journey to fight and possibly die in Virginia. Lincoln gave orders to admit soldiers freely to the first floor, where they gaped at the East Room and occasionally stretched out on one of the sofas for a nap.

  The rest of the first-floor rooms were closed to visitors. Concern for Lincoln’s safety was one reason for not encouraging wanderers. Another reason was the visitors’ tendency to carve souvenirs out of the rugs, draperies, and upholstery.

  After Lincoln’s assassination, the White House collapsed into near chaos. Mary Lincoln spent the next few weeks weeping and brooding in her upstairs bedroom, forcing the new president, Andrew Johnson, to set up his office in the Treasury Building next door. This left the President’s House with no one in charge. It remained open to visitors and the public came pouring in. For most of each day, they swarmed through the State Rooms, collecting mementoes of the martyred president and wreaking havoc in the process.

  Vases, lamps, and small statues vanished and still the pillagers were not satisfied. They proceeded to cut chunks out of the draperies and carpets. After they discovered the chest where the silver and china were stored, these items, too, disappeared at a dismaying rate.

  VI

  That orgy of misbehavior made everyone connected to the White House a lot more wary of tourists. It was generally recognized that some sort of supervision was needed. The Civil War had made Americans history-minded. The number of Washington sightseers kept growing each year. The President’s House was a place where they could glimpse the early days of the republic.

  The mansion was redecorated after Andrew Johnson moved in and all evidence of vandalism was erased. Sightseers were again welcome to visit the East Room, but there were detectives on hand to make sure nothing was removed.

  If the doorkeepers were not busy, one of them would double as a tour guide and spice up the visit with tidbits of White House history. Sightseers heard about Abigail Adams’s wash hanging in the East Room, Andrew Jackson’s chaotic inaugural reception, and the rebuilding of the White House after the British burned it down during the War of 1812.

  The White House had achieved reverential status but that did not eliminate the souvenir hunters. On the contrary, it may even have stimulated them. The East Room was open to the public three days a week, and despite the presence of plainclothes detectives, there were always a few things missing when visiting hours ended. Even the select group of tourists who had special passes to visit the state parlors regularly indulged in petty thievery. According to Rutherford B. Hayes’s son, Birch, “After every public reception a man had to go the round
s with a basket of crystal pendants to replace those taken from the chandeliers. They cut pieces off the bottoms of curtains and carried off everything in sight.”

  VII

  When Theodore Roosevelt launched his vast White House redecoration and building program, public interest was intense. Pictures of the East Room, resplendent with ivory and gilt, filled the magazines and thousands came to see it with their own eyes. That was about all they saw. Roosevelt was not enthusiastic about tourists. His successor, William Howard Taft, was very much the opposite. During his administration, visitors were actually admitted to the Oval Office, and when the president was out of town they could bounce in Big Bill’s chair.

  Woodrow Wilson shared Theodore Roosevelt’s attitude toward tourists but his daughters Margaret, Jessie, and Nellie found them a good source of laughs. Every once in a while they would join the crowd waiting to get into the White House and walk through the downstairs rooms, making catty remarks about themselves. “I wonder where that stuck-up creature Margaret Wilson is hiding today,” Jessie would say.

  “Yes,” Nellie would reply. “I’d like to see her, just to give her hair a good yank. I hear she wears a wig.”

  The tourists around them would be horrified. Any minute they expected the White House police to arrest the entire crowd.

  VIII

  The flow of tourists ceased when Woodrow Wilson declared war in 1917, and did not resume until Warren Harding became president in 1921. Harding, having nothing better to do all day—his administration was run mainly by his cabinet and staff—began coming downstairs around lunchtime to greet the tourists. People liked it and soon crowds gathered to exchange a few words with the supposedly great man.

  Calvin Coolidge felt no need to greet the tourists or anyone else, if he could help it. He shortened the visiting hours and let the ushers deal with the crowds. Herbert Hoover might have done the same thing if the stock market had not collapsed early in his presidency. With the country sinking into the Great Depression, Hoover decided visiting the White House might boost public morale. He ordered the mansion opened to visitors from ten A.M. to four P.M. every day except Sunday.

  The president’s sense that the people’s house could serve as a beacon of hope during the dark days of the Depression was on target. People were eager to visit the mansion and the number of tourists doubled to 900,000 a year.

  The flood of visitors continued when Franklin D. Roosevelt became president, and the White House grounds remained popular with tourists and Washingtonians out for a stroll. This free and easy access to the President’s Park ended with the declaration of war against Japan on December 8, 1941, and it has never resumed. The White House, and the country, had lost its innocence.

  IX

  A lovely leftover from those bygone days is the annual lighting of the White House Christmas tree. In December 2001, after much internal debate, the Secret Service reversed its decision to bar everyone without a ticket to the ceremony because of their fear of a terrorist attack. It was heartening to know that the Secret Service had decided President George W. Bush could undertake this ceremony, which goes back to 1923. That year, Calvin Coolidge had gotten a letter from a Washington, D.C., public school janitor, suggesting it would be a nice idea to start the holiday season by lighting a tree on the South Lawn. Coolidge imported a balsam fir from his native Vermont and presidents have been performing this pleasant chore ever since. The ceremony was moved to the Ellipse in 1954.

  At five P.M. on December 6, 2001, President Bush pushed a switch and ignited red, white, and blue lights on a forty-foot Colorado blue spruce. Soprano Audra McDonald and country singer Travis Tritt performed, starting a month-long pageant in which Washington-area dance groups and choirs appeared nightly. The symbolic blend of patriotism and the ancient feast of Christmas was hailed by everyone as a stirring reminder of what our soldiers were defending in the war against terrorism.

  Another festive event that adds a unique dimension to the people’s house is the annual Easter Monday egg rolling festival, which features folksingers, jugglers, and clowns in traditional regalia and in bunny costumes. The first lady is the official hostess of the event. The president blows a whistle and the kids, armed with spoons, start trying to persuade their hard-boiled eggs to roll across the sloping grass. In the end, the first lady declares everyone a winner and the children each get a wooden egg to take home as a souvenir. Not surprisingly, the Easter egg roll has become the largest public event of the White House year.

  X

  Visitors to the contemporary White House are unlikely to get a glimpse of the president, much less shake his hand and give him their thoughts about the economy. Yet that does not stop them from getting in touch with him in other ways. Faxes and E-mail have become increasingly popular, but letters remain the medium of choice for Mr. and Mrs. John Q. Citizen.

  The American people have been sending letters to the White House since 1800. Some of our early presidents tried to read and answer these missives personally, but as the numbers increased, the chore was passed to a secretary. By the end of the nineteenth century, when even two secretaries were not enough to keep up with the flow, the mail room was created.

  Its staff grew from one man—handling about a hundred letters a day in 1897—to twenty-two in the Truman era. Another fifty or so people were on a standby list for emergency days when, for various reasons, the letters and parcels leaped from an average of 8,000 a day to an avalanche of 150,000.

  The current White House mail room, now called the Correspondence Office, has a staff of almost ninety people plus a couple of dozen interns and a pool of over seven hundred volunteers. Most correspondents receive some kind of reply, usually a printed card rather than a regular letter.

  Letters that might be of special interest to the president are extracted from the pile and brought to his attention. President George H. W. Bush’s staff secretary once sent a memo to the Correspondence Office stressing the importance of being on the lookout for such letters. Attached was a letter addressed to President Franklin D. Roosevelt telling him about a theory the writer had that could create an unbelievably powerful bomb. The letter was badly typed and full of misspellings and crossed-out words but an alert mail handler had rescued it from the “nut file” and sent it on to the president. It was signed: Albert Einstein.

  XI

  Another avenue to the president is the telephone. Many of the callers have questions, such as how to apply for veterans’ benefits or what their Medicare coverage includes. The operators cannot answer such queries but they provide the callers with the phone numbers of the government agencies that can give them the information they need.

  The line also attracts a fair number of mentally ill callers. Although their comments often make very little sense, these callers are treated with the same courtesy as everyone else. For threatening calls, there is a buzzer that connects the call to the Secret Service and they take it from there.

  Comment line volunteers will not stay on the line forever, even though many people, both sane and insane, would like them to. They are instructed to limit the conversations to two minutes so other callers can get through.

  XII

  The Gift Office has been set up to deal with the approximately fifteen thousand gifts that arrive at the White House each year. A staff of about a half dozen highly experienced employees registers the gifts, sees that they are acknowledged, and decides what should be done with them. Many are gifts from foreign governments and are quite valuable. They are considered gifts to the nation rather than to the president and they are usually sent to the Smithsonian Institution or the Library of Congress or kept for use in a presidential library. The president is allowed to keep only those that have minimal value, which is currently defined as less than $260.

  A high percentage of the gifts that arrive at the White House are sent by private citizens. If a president or a first lady has a special hobby or a fondness for a particular type of clothing, he or she is likely to get buried in the st
uff. When Dad was seen pitching horseshoes on the White House lawn, horseshoes by the hundreds descended on us. A similar glut occurred when a reporter wrote a story about Caroline Kennedy’s love of chocolate. The White House Gift Office logged in everything from Hershey bars to a 6-foot, 190-pound chocolate rabbit from Switzerland.

  Jerry Ford once received—and kept—a hand-knitted ski hat that had been sent to him by a retired nun. After she spied him wearing it on a television news clip, she decided it looked too tight. She immediately sent him a letter with instructions on how to care for it: Wet it and let it sit on your head until it dries.

  XIII

  The White House is the only residence of a head of state in the entire world that can be visited by the public free of charge. Before the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, it was open Tuesday through Saturday from ten A.M. to 12 noon. This wonderful privilege was one of the many casualties of that dire day. Since then, the Secret Service has decreed that only limited public tours are permissible, and even these may be suspended in the event of a serious security threat.

  A tour of the White House begins in the East Wing. Visitors pass through the ground floor corridor before ascending the staircase to view the historic rooms on the main floor. The corridor was a grubby work area until Charles McKim got his hands on it in 1902. He restored the vaulted ceiling and covered the walls and floors with marble. It is now a red-carpeted entrance worthy of welcoming the most exalted VIPs.

  I have a special fondness for the rooms that open off the ground-floor corridor because their wood paneling was made from the timber that was removed from the White House during the Truman renovations. The Vermeil Room, which is used as a ladies’ sitting room at formal events, features an exhibit of some rare pieces of vermeil—gilded silver. Next to it is the China Room, where items from the White House china collection are displayed and Howard Chandler Christy’s portrait of Grace Coolidge dominates one wall. On the north side of the corridor is the library, which serves as a male counterpart to the ladies’ sitting room across the hall. It’s always a shock for me to realize that prior to the 1902 renovation, this beautiful space was a laundry room.