The Nation's House

By Randolph Delehanty

It wasn’t always painted white and there was a time when any citizen could knock on the front door and ask to see the president. The White House is the country’s most unique historic home, part office building, part official residence, and, to a large degree, a living museum—with very tight security. It is about to come under new management for the 44th time.

On Oct. 16, 1901, Republican President Theodore Roosevelt invited Booker T. Washington from Tuskegee, Ala., to family supper at the White House. Washington arrived in black tie and entered through the North Portico. The young president, his wife Edith, their children and a guest dined with the famous conservative African American educator, founder of the Tuskegee Institute and influential southern Republican. Almost casually, America’s rigid color bar, the historic divide between white and black, had been breached in the stately white house that all (white) Americans considered their own. Washington’s visit was the first time a black man entered the Executive Mansion through the front door to socialize with a president. When the press was informed of the dinner the next day, a firestorm of controversy broke out. The Memphis Scimitar slashed out, “The most damnable outrage which has ever been perpetrated by any citizen of the United States was committed yesterday by the President, when he invited a nigger to dine with him at the White House.” In those days of intensifying racial segregation, much of America was not ready for such civility and social equality. No similar invitation was extended to an African American for several presidencies.

On Jan. 20, 2009, another African American man will enter the White House through the front door, this time as the 44th president of the United States of America. Barack Obama’s inauguration is a watershed in our history, the fulfillment of our founders’ idealistic assertion that “all men are created equal.” It took 220 years for the U.S. to reach this momentous day and it is a cause for national—indeed global—celebration regardless of one’s political party. Like so many other critical moments in our national story, this transition is focused on the stately house at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.
African Americans have had a role in the history of the White House from the very beginning. Like the building of the nation itself, enslaved African Americans helped dig the mansion’s foundations. Enslaved and free blacks also worked with white laborers to finish the house. Since its occupation by the first presidential family in 1800, black men and women have worked in the big house and its extensive President’s Park caring for them and their privileged occupants. But Jan. 20, is, of course, fundamentally different, a turning point in America’s social and political history.

Most Americans know the White House as two things: the official residence of the president and his family and, literally, the office of the president. The White House is also the nation’s chief ceremonial setting for signing bills into law, greeting dignitaries and hosting state receptions and dinners. In the modern era, the White House has become the setting for press conferences, radio broadcasts, televised addresses to the nation from the Oval Office and Rose Garden ceremonies. Ronald Reagan likened it to living over the store.
Since 1961 and the Kennedy administration the White House is a third thing, a living museum with unique curatorial challenges and complex governance and funding structures. The curatorial challenges are rooted in the fact that the house keeps changing as its occupants change and that the building and its furnishings are in constant use with continual wear and tear and the continual need for replacement. Its governance and funding structures reflect both the recent infusion of historical expertise in the management of the house and the combination of National Park Service (NPS), General Services Administration and congressional appropriations along with new channels for private funding for refurbishment and acquisitions.

National politics has always determined who lives in the White House. Life in the house has included gregarious or reclusive wives and occasionally rambunctious children, all living in the public spotlight. The house responds to changing lifestyles as family patterns change. It also reflects changing tastes in architecture, furnishings, art and philosophies of preservation. It is the most historic “historic house” in the nation and the oldest federal building in Washington. Many of our nation’s triumphs and tragedies have played out within its walls, as well as the private joys and sorrows of the families who have lived here, from weddings and births to assassinations and funerals. Our quadrennial presidential elections guarantee that there will always be change in who lives in it and what they embody as the people’s will. From the earliest Federalist presidents with their formal attitudes toward the presidency and state receptions to later, more democratic and egalitarian presidents, the “mood” of the White House has changed as its residents have changed. This change is continuous.
While the exterior of the White House has not changed since the addition of the North and South Porticoes in the 1820s, its interiors have passed through three distinct phases and made a full circle from chaste neoclassicism to Victorian exuberance and then back to a consciously revived neoclassicism after 1902. The building underwent complete gutting and interior reconstruction from 1948–52 and then a new philosophy toward its furnishings, art and history beginning in the early 1960s.

Shortly after the War for Independence the new nation’s capital was placed on the Potomac River in a federal district carved out of Maryland and Virginia as part of a political compromise between the North and the South. French-trained designer, architect and engineer Pierre Charles L’Enfant located a great “presidential palace” prominently in his grand, baroque city plan of 1791. He paired it with the elevated Capitol at the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue to express the relationship between the nation’s lawmakers and the Chief Magistrate who executes the laws. Ceremonial-minded George Washington envisioned a stately residence and ordered it built not too grand but grand enough to manifest the dignity of the new office of the president. To that end he specified a stone exterior rather than common brick. Irish-born James Hoban won the architectural competition with an Anglo-Palladian design. Inspired by Leinster House in Dublin, it was built of bricks made from clay from the basement excavation and encased in a Virginia sandstone veneer. Stonemasons from Scotland dressed and set the stones. The cornerstone—actually a brass plate secreted in the southwest corner of the foundation—was laid in 1792 in a solemn Masonic ceremony. The house was first painted white in 1798 with a lime-based whitewash to protect the porous sandstone from the elements.

Though Washington took a paternalistic interest in the house and even expanded the original design by 20 percent in length and width, he never lived in it. It was the second president, Federalist John Adams, who moved into the unfinished house in 1800, when the government moved from Philadelphia to the semi-developed federal capital.

When Democrat-Republican Thomas Jefferson took office, he pointedly turned away from aristocratic pomp and brought republican simplicity to the President’s House. Putting his democratic ideals into practice, Jefferson opened the house to the public in the mornings. He did away with seating plans at dinner; guests sat where they pleased. They also served themselves from dumbwaiters so that servants would not overhear their conversations. Ignoring rank and hierarchy shocked the British minister and his very formal wife. Jefferson introduced informal American manners into what had been formal, European court-inspired social functions.
James Madison commissioned Benja-min Henry Latrobe to decorate the Oval Drawing Room (today the Blue Room) and to design Greek Revival furniture for it. His wife, Dolley, had a pleasant word for everyone and was the house’s first celebrated hostess. Her grace and charm made presidential receptions the social events in the frontier city. Like every great hostess, she had a knack for bringing diverse people together in civilized discourse and this smoothed her husband’s political path. Under Madison, the house suffered its greatest calamity when the British captured the city in 1814 and burned the White House and Capitol in retaliation for the Americans’ burning of York, the capital of Upper Canada.

President James Monroe hastily rebuilt the burned-out shell with James Hoban again as architect. The scorched sandstone walls were repainted white. The Monroes brought European formality to the house. Monroe had been minister to France and appreciated fine furniture, china and silver. In 1817, he refurnished the house in elegant French Empire taste, including gilded bronze clocks and candelabra. A Parisian-made settee and seven gilded chairs in the oval Blue Room are the oldest original furnishings in the house today. In 1860, President Buchanan auctioned off the old-fashioned Empire furniture and replaced it with a modern Victorian suite. Since the 1960s, some of the Monroe furniture has come back to the house and replicas have been made of missing pieces. The furnishings in the Blue Room, with its shift from early neoclassical furnishings under Monroe, to changing Victorian fashions in the mid-19th century, and then back again to a revived neoclassicism after 1902 under Theodore Roosevelt epitomize the history of the interior of the mansion.
Democrat Andrew Jackson’s election in 1829 was a victory for the common man. A Tennessee planter and war hero, Jackson was the first westerner (since Tennessee was the frontier at the time) to live in the house. Old Hickory’s supporters thronged his inaugural reception. Afterwards, new china and glassware had to be bought to replace what was broken. Jackson made more Americans feel that the house was theirs, not just the preserve of Virginia and New England elites.

The White House has been a barometer of changing American taste as succeeding presidents and their wives modernized the house’s furnishings and decoration.
Mary Todd Lincoln took more interest in the house than any president’s wife since Dolley Madison. Mrs. Lincoln made much-criticized shopping expeditions to New York during the Civil War and bought the Rococo Revival laminated rosewood furnishings now in the Lincoln Bedroom.
Lincoln’s successor, Civil War hero and Republican Ulysses S. Grant, redecorated the house in 1873 during the Gilded Age in a style then called “Greek” but considered heavy and oppressive by later generations. Republican Rutherford B. Hayes greatly expanded the White House greenhouses in the 1870s. They provided the house with flowers and gave the presidential family and their guests a semi-tropical retreat and sheltered promenade in the chilly Washington winters. The Victorian period saw great advances in science, exploration and publishing. Mid-19th century parlors became showcases for curiosities from around the world and heated greenhouses displayed exotic ferns and plants.
Sophisticated New Yorker Chester A. Arthur disliked the fusty house and its
old-fashioned look. In 1882 he auctioned off 30 barrels of White House china and 24 wagonloads of old furniture. He then engaged Louis Comfort Tiffany and his Associated Artists to redecorate the Blue Room in robin’s egg blue with Aesthetic wallpaper. In the mid-19th century presidents and their wives saw the White House as their own domestic space to do with as they saw fit. They used congressional appropriations to furnish the State Rooms. They moved their own furniture into the family quarters upstairs. They wanted to be up-to-date and fashionable and had little consciousness of preserving the past except in keeping the portraits of previous presidents and some first ladies.

Along with the waves of fashionable décor that swept through the rooms were other changes often hidden within their walls. These technological advances improved the comfort of the presidents, their families and guests and the efficiency of the presidential office. Inventive Thomas Jefferson started the process in 1801 when he replaced Adams’ outside privy with two indoor water closets on the second floor. Next was a bell system to call servants from the basement. Running water was piped in in 1833 through hollowed-out logs. The 1840s saw a hot-air furnace and gas lighting. A hot water furnace in 1853 made a second floor bath with hot and cold running water possible, as well as more efficient laundry in the basement. A telegraph was installed in the president’s study in 1866 and a telephone in 1879. Typewriters were introduced in the president’s office in 1880 and a hydraulic elevator was installed in 1881. Electric light came to the State Rooms in 1891. Portly President Taft’s huge porcelain bathtub made a news splash in 1909. The Oval Office was air-cooled as early as 1909, a boon in Washington’s steamy summers. The 1920s saw vacuum cleaners, refrigerators and an electric washing machine. The 1930s introduced air-conditioning to the second floor, radio broadcasts from the Diplomatic Reception Room and electric ranges in the basement kitchen. The 1940s brought a small movie theater and then a black-and-white television set. Central air conditioning and an electric elevator were installed in 1951 during the Truman reconstruction. Solar energy panels were placed atop the West Wing in 1979 by President Carter (later removed by President Reagan). Computers and e-mail came in 1993 under President Clinton, and a robust IT system has been evolving ever since.
Today the White House is a fusion of modern plumbing, heating and cooling, electric lighting, advanced telecommunications and elaborate security systems in a historic shell. Most of these improvements are invisible, but they are what make the house both livable and quintessentially American. Paradoxically, as mechanical improvements raced forward in the 19th and 20th centuries, the aesthetics of the interior of the house, its “look,” moved backward to the late 18th and early 19th centuries.

Life in the house during Theodore Roosevelt’s presidency was active and crowded with the president and his wife and six children and their pets living on the second floor that also accommodated the offices of the president and his staff. But the busy house was showing its age. When large gatherings were planned for the East Room, timbers had to shore up the floors. Despite his carefully cultivated public image as a “Rough Rider,” Roosevelt was well educated and had sophisticated tastes. He commissioned Augustus Saint-Gaudens to design the most beautiful gold coins in U.S. history and John Singer Sargent to paint his commanding official portrait. He commissioned classically trained Charles McKim of McKim, Mead & White in New York to strip away the heavy accretions of the Victorian period, including the Tiffany glass screen, and make the interior refined and neoclassical again. McKim’s new Beaux arts interiors were not recreations of James Hoban’s eighteenth century rooms but rather drew from stately French and English interiors. The renovated and refurnished house with its lighter, less cluttered look opened to general acclaim on New Year’s Day, 1903. The White House we see today is essentially the house of 1902 reconstructed and refurnished. Roosevelt commissioned the same architects to add a West Wing for executive offices on the site of the Victorian greenhouses in order to remove the presidential offices from the family quarters to free up space for his large family and to provide more space for his activist presidency.

Democrat Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who expanded the role of the federal government in the wake of the Great Depression, enlarged the West Wing, relocated the Oval Office, and added a small movie theater and an air raid shelter. But Harry S. Truman, who became president upon FDR’s death, rebuilt the White House itself. The building hastily thrown up after the arson of 1814 was now structurally unsound, as Truman discovered when his daughter’s piano began to sink into the floor. From 1948 to 1952, President and Mrs. Truman lived across Pennsylvania Avenue in Blair House while the White House was gutted and reduced to its four brick-and-stone walls. Two new basements were excavated and the interior was rebuilt with steel and concrete. Hoban’s plan was replicated with the famous State Rooms in their traditional sequence and McKim, Mead & White’s neoclassical paneling and plasterwork reproduced. Central air conditioning and a new elevator made the 132-room house much more comfortable.

In the 19th century, Congress dominated the government. The presidency was a distinctly “junior partner” often occupied by undistinguished men. Physically, the president’s office was just a couple of rooms upstairs in the President’s House. But the vast expansion of the role of the federal government in almost all aspects of American society and the economy in the 20th century, and several global wars managed by the commander-in-chief, also expanded the role of the president, increased the size of his staff and generated the need for more office space. Today the decisions made in the Oval Office impact not only our country but much of the rest of the world. Charting the expansion of the executive offices in the West Wing and their recent spillover into the late Victorian former State, War & Navy Building next door, reflects the expanding role of the presidency in American government and in the world.
What came with the increase in prominence was the “fortification” of the President’s Park. In 2001 the defensive zone around the White House was expanded when the 1600 block of Pennsylvania Avenue was closed to traffic to preclude truck bombs after the federal building in Oklahoma City was bombed and a propeller plane landed on the White House lawn. Assassinations and the escalation of tensions in the world have affected the physical situation of American presidents. No longer can a citizen show his or her card at the door and expect admission. Presidents and their families are now encapsulated in an armored cocoon that increases their isolation from ordinary Americans. President Clinton quipped that the White House is “the crown jewel in the federal penitentiary system.”

When John Fitzgerald Kennedy took office in 1960, the reconstructed White House was revered but lacked éclat. After its reconstruction, the house had been furnished with department store furniture. Mrs. Kennedy moved into a White House where, in her words, “every room was still mainly B. Altman 1948.” Jacqueline Kennedy awoke the house from its dowdiness, revived its glamour as a showcase for the arts, recognized its historic importance and began to bring back the house’s early furnishings. She pursued a three-pronged effort to restore the public rooms, acquire an appropriate collection of fine and decorative arts and establish the White House Historical Association (WHHA), a private, independent, nonprofit corporation with its own board of directors. In addition to conducting research and publishing, the WHHA raises funds for the maintenance and refurbishment of the public rooms and the acquisition of furniture and art. The Office of the White House Curator was created in 1961.

For the first time in its long life, the landmark house had a permanent collection. No longer can presidents and their wives simply dispose of furnishings and objects in the house; instead they are moved to a secure off-site storage facility.
Since Jacqueline Kennedy’s French-influenced redecoration, there has been continuous change in the house and in its curatorial philosophy. The house has gotten more and more American. The outstanding furniture collection assembled at the White House today is the collective accomplishment of the last generation of first ladies, curators, expert advisors and generous donors. The focus is on furnishings and decorative arts from 1800 to about 1825, the Federal period. It is not the aim to create “pure” period rooms but rather elegant, usable rooms that enhance the sense of American history among those who live and visit here. The emphasis is on the acquisition of objects associated with the White House or its occupants and those that reflect the finest productions of early American furniture making in Baltimore, Philadelphia, New York and New England. It is now one of the most important collections of early American decorative art in the nation.

“The White House is a traditional collection in a nontraditional setting. Here the president’s guests sit on the furniture; they dine on the china. They experience the collection, not just view the collection,” says William G. Allman, curator of the White House. As in any lived-in house, it needs continual repair and refurbishment.
At the urging of Lady Bird Johnson, Lyndon Johnson created the Committee for the Preservation of the White House in 1964. The first lady is the honorary chair of the Committee and the director of the National Park Service is the committee chair. The committee brought a new level of professionalism to the conservation and ongoing embellishment of the house through the involvement of recognized experts in historic furniture and decorative arts. Patricia Nixon sponsored an important “second wave” of sensitive redecoration in the early 1970s. In 1979 Rosalynn Carter headed the creation of the White House Preservation Fund with an endowment of $25 million. AAM first accredited the White House in 1988. In 1990, the Preservation Fund was dissolved and the White House Endowment Fund was chartered as a subsidiary of the White House Historical Association. In 1996 the WHHA created the White House Acquisition Trust as a revolving fund for the acquisition of objects. Today donors can contribute tax-deductible gifts to either the Endowment Trust, where only the income from the endowment may be expended, or to the Acquisition Trust, where the funds go to the acquisition of desired objects. Requests for expenditures from the WHHA and its two trusts originate jointly from the curator and the chief usher of the White House upon prior approval by the first lady and the Committee for the Preservation of the White House. The White House curator has a staff of five and is responsible for the public rooms in the house and its collection of fine and decorative art. The chief usher manages the permanent staff of the White House that numbers about 100.

The White House continues to change, reflecting the politics, interests, tastes and composition of the presidents’ families. But now it enjoys museum-like care, scholarly seriousness and its own mechanism for funding that is more secure than, but not independent from, annual congressional appropriations. America’s iconic house is now a public-private responsibility. Much has changed since Jacqueline Kennedy awoke the sleeping White House in the early 1960s. One current question is how to reflect the continuing vitality and creativity of American culture now that the predominant period of the interiors is set in the early 19th century.
Today the President’s House is a complex and subtle collage of periods, artifacts, personalities and memories. Slowly, carefully and self-consciously, it continues to evolve. President Barack Obama and his First Lady Michelle Obama will add another layer of American life to the ever-changing nation’s house.

Randolph Delehanty is the historian and exhibit curator at the Presidio Trust (www.presidio.gov) and the author of a dozen books. Congress established the Presidio Trust in 1996 to preserve the historic and scenic Presidio of San Francisco for the American people and to make it financially self-sufficient by 2013.