by The President's House: 1800 to the Present : The Secrets;History of the World's Most Famous Home
During Franklin D. Roosevelt’s administration, the Oval Office was moved from the center of the West Wing, as the Executive Office Building was now being called, to the southeast corner where it looked out on the Rose Garden that had been planted by Woodrow Wilson’s first wife, Ellen, in 1913.
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In 1945, soon after we moved into the Big White Jail, as Dad called it in his wryer moments, he asked the commissioner of public buildings to give the place a thorough going-over. He knew that any building as old as the White House needed to be inspected at regular intervals to make sure it was structurally sound.
A year went by and nothing happened, until the evening of an official reception in the East Room. Mother and Dad made their entrance down the Grand Staircase from the second floor, preceded, as usual, by a color guard of four servicemen carrying the American and the presidential flags. As the color guard came marching across the room, Dad looked up and saw the huge chandelier above his head swaying. He lost no time in reporting it to the commissioner of public buildings, but it was several weeks before anyone got back to him. When they did, they didn’t exactly pick the best time.
Dad was hosting the last official reception of the 1946–47 season and the guests were being treated to a concert by pianist Eugene List. Howell Crim, the chief usher, and Jim Rowley, the Secret Service agent in charge of the White House detail, quietly informed Dad that the inspection team had found that the chain holding up the center chandelier was on the verge of giving way.
Rather than interrupt the concert and ask his guests to leave—after all, the chandelier weighs twelve hundred pounds—Dad decided that if the chain hadn’t broken yet, it would probably hold up for a little while longer. Nevertheless, his first order of business the next day was to have the chandelier taken down. Not long after that, one of the White House butlers came into Dad’s study with his breakfast tray and the floor began to sway. This time, the commissioner of public buildings was ordered to bring in a team of engineers to check things out.
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Meanwhile, Dad had set off a few vibrations of his own. In the summer of 1947, he decided to add a second-floor balcony to the South Portico. I won’t deny that Dad was thinking of the comfort of the first family. An upstairs balcony would provide us with a pleasant outdoor sitting room. But Dad’s interest in the balcony had a strong practical side. In warm weather, the South Portico was protected from the sun by awnings hanging between the columns. The effect was not particularly attractive, especially when the awnings got covered with mildew during the humid Washington summers. The balcony would eliminate the need for these cumbersome, unsightly things.
Dad presented his idea to the Commission of Fine Arts, which had to be consulted about any changes to the White House. The commissioners voted unanimously to reject it. Since the commission did not have the power to block Dad’s plan and Congress had already voted a general appropriation that would cover the cost, Dad went ahead with the balcony. You should have heard the uproar! He was condemned for meddling with a historic monument, accused of being an ignoramus about architecture, and called an assortment of names that are not worth repeating.
As usual, Dad ignored the fuss. The Truman balcony was built and the baggy awnings were replaced by a set of good-looking blinds that rolled up and down like window shades. Before long, the Truman balcony began to look as if it had always been there. Several experts on historical architecture have praised its design, and more than one presidential family has told me how much they enjoyed it.
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The balcony quickly became old news as a new problem loomed on the horizon. The engineers who had been ordered to “check things out” when Dad felt the floor swaying had come back with a gloomy report. The second floor, where we lived, was about to fall and the ceiling in the State Dining Room would come crashing down with it.
Spurred on by the threat of a cave-in, Dad appointed another committee of engineers and architects to inspect the entire White House. Their report was not reassuring. The foundation was sinking into the swampy ground and the ceiling in the Green Room was held up by only a few rusty nails. If any further evidence was needed that the White House was falling apart, it came in the summer of 1948 when the piano in my sitting room broke through the floor. One of its legs wound up jutting into the family dining room below.
That did it. Dad was banished from his bedroom and forbidden to use his bathroom lest it collapse and land in the Red Room. Mother and I spent most of that summer in our home in Independence, Missouri, and in the fall we joined Dad on the whistle-stop tour that led to his upset victory in the 1948 presidential election.
By the time we returned to the White House in November, the engineers and architects had concluded that it would be dangerous for us to live there. The first and second floors were supported (so to speak) by the same wooden beams that James Hoban had installed when the White House was rebuilt after the War of 1812.
Not only were they rotting with age, they were riddled with gashes made by several generations of workmen sawing into the wood to install new plumbing and wiring. After further inspection the experts determined that the entire house would have to be gutted and rebuilt from the ground up. The only thing that could be saved was the outside walls.
The Trumans moved across the street to Blair House, the lovely 1824 mansion that is the president’s official guest house, and construction crews took over 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. By the time they were finished in 1952, a new White House had risen out of the shell of the old one. Dad was always proud of the fact that his administration had overseen the construction of a White House that would last for ages to come. Mother and I agreed with him. But we would have been happier if another first family had gotten stuck with the disruptions.
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Furnishing the rebuilt White House was the responsibility of the building commission, but their decorating couldn’t compare to the later efforts of Jacqueline Kennedy, who set out to make the White House not just a well-furnished mansion but a repository of American history.
To ensure that Jacqueline Kennedy’s valuable acquisitions would not be jettisoned in some future redecorating project, Congress passed a special act making all the items belonging to the White House part of a permanent collection and preserving the museum character of the State Rooms in perpetuity.
Although it is not generally known, President Richard M. Nixon sponsored an even more ambitious acquisition of antiques. His wife, Pat, had the State Rooms redesigned in the style of the period they represented. Together, the Nixons created the beautiful and historically accurate rooms that exist today.
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Every time I visit the White House, I am reminded of all the people at every level who have contributed to its grandeur. If I had to name names, I would single out for their extraordinary contributions George Washington, who had the foresight to realize how important the nation and its president would become; James Hoban, who created such an enduringly elegant design; and Harry S Truman, who made sure the White House will still be standing long after the rest of us are gone.
Questions for Discussion
Do you think George Washington was right in insisting that the nation’s leader should live in an impressive house?
What are the most important changes that have been made to the White House in the course of its history?
Why is it a good idea to have the State Rooms decorated with historically accurate furnishings that are part of a permanent collection?
We have Lady Bird Johnson to thank for the handprints of presidential grandchildrenset in the paths of the Children’s Garden. Credit: White House Historical Association
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The President’s Park
I SELDOM VISIT the White House without pausing to contemplate a venerable tree that graces the south front. Known as the Jackson magnolia after the president who planted it, those gnarled old limbs provided shade on the muggy August day when Harry S Truman had lunch with Franklin D. Roosevelt not l
ong after Dad had been nominated to run with FDR in 1944.
It did not take my father long to realize the rumors about Mr. Roosevelt’s declining health were all too true. The president’s hand shook so violently, he could not spoon sugar into his coffee. FDR asked Dad how he was going to campaign. When Dad said he was thinking of using a plane, the president shook his head. “One of us has to stay alive,” he said. That was the day Harry S Truman realized he might become president of the United States.
That meeting is a good example of why no story of the White House can be complete without an exploration of the acres of grass and gardens and trees that surround it. The history of the grounds is as full of unexpected twists and turns as the history of the mansion itself.
The first president to take a serious interest in the White House’s potential for natural beauty was Thomas Jefferson. He planned a landscaped park with small groves of trees and clumps of rhododendron and other shrubs. He marked off one area as the “garden” where vegetables and flowers would grow, fenced off about eight acres of the land set aside for a “President’s Park,” and made plans to build a high stone wall at the south end of the property.
Although he never got around to doing much about his plan, Jefferson planted scores of seedling trees. Sadly, most of his plantings were trampled by British troops and the army of workmen who arrived to rebuild the mansion after the British burned it.
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The next president to exert an influence on the grounds was John Quincy Adams, who had a lifelong interest in horticulture. Soon after John Quincy took office, he fired Charles Bizet, whom James Monroe had hired as “Gardener to the President of the U. States,” and replaced him with John Ousley, who became almost as permanent a part of the mansion’s landscape as the trees and flowers he planted.
Under President Adams’s guidance, Ousley devised a park that included seedlings gathered from all parts of the country. Soon walnut, persimmon, willow, oak, and other trees were growing on the White House grounds and a two-acre garden had been planted near the south entrance gate.
The president took an intense interest in Ousley’s work and often arose at dawn to do some digging of his own. One morning he wrote of planting “eighteen whole red-cherries.” By the summer of 1827, a delighted Adams was bragging to his diary that the two acres contained over a thousand different trees, shrubs, hedges, flowers, and vegetables.
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John Quincy’s successor, Andrew Jackson, had more ambitious plans for the White House grounds. Jackson called in the public gardener of the city of Washington, Jemmy Maher, to help him overhaul the President’s Park.
At some point in the course of this work, the White House’s most famous tree, the Jackson magnolia, was supposedly planted. There is no written record of its arrival, and some experts have expressed doubts about the tree’s origin. One thing we know for certain is that Jemmy Maher and his workmen planted dozens of trees. Among his best selections were horse chestnuts, which produced beautiful white blossoms that added an exotic dimension to the White House grounds.
Another clever purchase, warmly approved by Jackson, was a miniature fire engine, which could be trundled around the grounds, spraying water on the grass and plants along its way. Between the “watering machine” and a hand-pushed roller, the White House lawn became a perfect shade of green and so smooth it looked sculpted.
In 1835, President Jackson supervised the installation of an orangery—a hothouse where plants could be cultivated year-round so that residents of the White House could enjoy fruit and flowers during the winter months.
Jackson’s orangery went up just in time to save a Malayan palm tree that had been cultivated from seed in the orangery at Mount Vernon by another enthusiastic horticulturist, George Washington. “Old Hickory,” who was an admirer of the first president, took great satisfaction in rescuing the tree after the Mount Vernon orangery burned down. The exotic specimen survived until 1867, when it was destroyed in a second fire, this one in the White House orangery.
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John Ousley retained his job as White House gardener through the next four administrations. Among other things, he developed an ingenious scheme for cutting the grass at no cost. When it got knee-high, he let a local livery stable owner cut it and feed it to his horses as hay. Then he called in a farmer, who pastured a herd of sheep there for a few days and reduced the grass by another few inches. By then the lawn was ready for Ousley and his roller to flatten it into a smooth green carpet.
On the east side of the house, Ousley maintained a colorful flower garden. Among his favorite plants were roses, which he trained to climb along a white wooden arbor. Their fragrance undoubtedly contributed not a little to presidential pleasure, especially if you consider the other less lovely odors that swirled in and around the house from the swamps of the Potomac Flats to the south.
Oddly, the presidents and first ladies of Ousley’s tenure seldom brought cut flowers into the house. The quacks who passed for doctors in that era had convinced the public that fresh flowers would poison the air indoors. It may surprise you to learn (it did me) that until the 1850s most of the flowers in the White House were wax.
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The death of President Zachary Taylor in 1850 brought the White House its next amateur horticulturist of note— handsome silver-haired Millard Fillmore. President Fillmore hired Andrew Jackson Downing, the most famous landscape designer of his day, to relandscape Washington’s public grounds, including the President’s Park, Capitol Hill, and the Mall that stretched between the two.
Downing boarded a Hudson River steamboat at his home town of Newburgh, New York, with drawings of his final plans for the Mall, the Capitol, and the White House. The ship caught fire and Downing died in the flames. His drawings perished with him. In Washington, the president and his aides were too stunned to do anything but lament.
In any case, Millard Fillmore participated in one White House beautification project. He presided at the unveiling of the equestrian statue of Andrew Jackson in Lafayette Square, just across Pennsylvania Avenue from the White House. The square is on land that was originally set aside for the President’s Park and it is still considered part of the grounds.
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By this time, John Ousley’s position as chief gardener was held by John Watt. He persuaded the new president, Franklin Pierce, to let him expand Jackson’s rebuilt orangery into a greenhouse. Four years later, Watt’s greenhouse had to be demolished to make room for a wing of the Treasury building, but not before plans were made for a replacement. It was to occupy the White House’s western terrace and would be connected to the mansion itself to make it easily accessible to presidential families and their guests.
James Buchanan became the first president to use this pleasant patch of indoor greenery when it was completed in 1857. Boasting lemon and orange trees plus dozens of different plants and flowers, the conservatory was furnished with chairs and benches and was gaslit for evening visits.
By this time, fears of being poisoned by having flowers indoors were beginning to wane. The fears all but vanished after Harriet Lane, James Buchanan’s niece and official hostess, discovered that vases full of fresh flowers were all the rage in England. She immediately introduced them at the White House, with the conservatory providing a steady supply.
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Ulysses S. Grant made two notable additions to the Executive Mansion’s grounds. He had a pool installed on the south lawn with a water spray powered by steam, and, in a symbolic gesture signaling a long Republican reign, he had the statue of Thomas Jefferson that President James K. Polk had installed on the north lawn moved to the Statuary Hall at the Capitol. It was replaced by a magnificent circular flower bed with a pool emitting a jet of water at its center.
With the arrival of Rutherford B. Hayes in 1876, the White House had a first couple who were seriously interested in landscaping. One of the president’s main concerns was the land to the south of the mansion. In the early days, this was a va
st meadow. One section of it was fenced off to create the south lawn, but a large swath of land remained.
Andrew Jackson Downing had hoped to plant trees and grass and turn the area into a large circular “parade” where public celebrations and military reviews could be held. Hayes, drawing on Downing’s plan, decided to create a seventeen-acre park called the Ellipse, which became a popular spot for Sunday and holiday outings. Separated from the White House by a curving road, the Ellipse still provides a splendid vista from the South Portico with unobstructed views of the Washington Monument and the Jefferson Memorial.
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The conservatory continued to be popular during the Cleveland and Harrison administrations. It was still a ready source of floral arrangements for every occasion. The orchids that were a favorite during Grover Cleveland’s administration were eclipsed by roses during William McKinley’s presidency. His wife, Ida, adored them. Her husband was equally fond of red carnations and started a national craze for that flower. He considered them his good-luck charm and never went anywhere without one in his buttonhole.
By 1901, when the Roosevelts moved into the White House, the conservatory had spawned so many annexes that the mansion’s west terrace was a veritable village of glass houses, each in a different size, shape, and style. When architect Charles McKim was called in to renovate the White House a year later, the village’s days became numbered.
