White House History Quarterly 53 - Turning Points

WHITE HOUSE HISTORY Quarterly

Turning Points at the White House:

Great Expectations

The Journal of T H E W H I T E H O U S E H I S T O R I C A L A S S O C I A T I O N Number 5 3

Please note that the following is a digitized version of a selected article from White House History Quarterly, Issue 53, originally released in print form in 2019. Single print copies of the full issue can be purchased online at Shop.WhiteHouseHistory.org No part of this book may be reproduced or distributed in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

All photographs contained in this journal unless otherwise noted are copyrighted by the White House Historical Association and may not be reproduced without permission. Requests for reprint permissions should be directed to rights@whha.org. Contact books@whha.org for more information. © 2019 White House Historical Association.

All rights reserved under international copyright conventions.

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Turning Points at the White House:

Great Expectations

The Journal of THE WHITE HOUSE HISTORICAL ASSOCIATION Number 53, Spring 2019

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CONTRIBUTORS

the white house historical association Board of Directors

chairman

william g. allman served more than forty years in the Office of the Curator, The White House, before retiring as curator in 2017. His books include Official White House China.

Frederick J. Ryan Jr.

vice chairman and treasurer John F. W. Rogers

secretary James I. McDaniel

president Stewart D. McLaurin John T. Behrendt, Michael Beschloss, Teresa Carlson, Jean Case, Cathy Gorn, Janet A. Howard, Knight Kiplinger, Martha Joynt Kumar, Anita McBride, Mike McCurry, Robert M. McGee, Ann Stock, Ben C. Sutton Jr., Tina Tchen

kat h ry n l . b e a s l e y is a doctoral candidate in U.S. history at Florida State University.

ex officio

c h r i s t o p h e r bu c k l e y is a novelist, essayist, humorist, critic, magazine editor, memoirist and former White House speechwriter.

Kaywin Feldman, David S. Ferriero, Kaywin Feldman, David S. Ferriero, Carla Hayden, Tom Mayes, David J. Skorton Carla Hayden, Tom Mayes, David J. Skorton

directors emeriti directors emeriti

John H. Dalton, Nancy M. Folger, Elise K. Kirk, John H. Dalton, Nancy M. Folger, Elise K. Kirk, Harry G. Robinson III, Gail Berry West Harry G. Robinson III, Gail Berry West

white house history quarterly white house history quarterly editor editor William Seale William Seale

vice president of publishing vice president editor of publishing and executive and executive editor Marcia Mallet Anderson Marcia Mallet Anderson

editorial and editorial and production director production director Lauren McGwin Lauren McGwin

senior editorial and senior editorial and production manager production manager Kristen A. Hunter Kristen A. Hunter

editorial and production manager editorial and production manager Elyse Werling

teresa carandang and erwin r. tiongson are the co-founders of the Philippines on the Potomac Project, which documents landmarks of Philippine history and culture in Washington, D.C. Carandang is a freelance writer. Tiongson is a professor at Georgetown University.

Elyse Werling

editorial assistant editorial assistant Rebecca Durgin

ch ar l e s d e n y e r is a senior managing partner at NDBGovSec, which specializes in national security. His publications include Number One Observatory Circle: The Home of the Vice President of the United States and a forthcoming biography of Dick Cheney. laur e n m c gw i n is editorial and production director at the White House Historical Association and a regular contributor to White House History Quarterly. m eli ss a nau l i n is an assistant curator in the Office of the Curator, The White House, and a regular contributor to White House History Quarterly. Her books include Something of Splendor: Decorative Arts from the White House. peter waddell is known for his paintings of Washington, D.C., history and architecture. He is artist in residence at Tudor Place in Georgetown.

Rebecca Durgin

consulting editor consulting editor Ann Hofstra Grogg Ann Hofstra Grogg

consulting design consulting design Pentagram, New York City Pentagram, New York City

editorial advisory editorial advisory Mac Keith Griswold Mac Keith Griswold Scott Harris Scott Harris Anthony Pitch Anthony Pitch Lydia Barker Tederick Lydia Barker Tederick

the editor wishes to thank the editor wishes to thank

The Office of the Curator, The White House The Office of the Curator, The White House

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CONTENTS

President Dwight D. Eisenhower grills just outside the Third Floor Solarium, a private space enjoyed by first families since the Calvin Coolidge administration.

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FOREWORD Great Expectations william seale

MARINE ONE PAST & FUTURE A Turning Point in Presidential Transportation charles denyer

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THE FIRST LADIES AS SCENE BUILDERS An Artist’s Gallery of Changes at the White House

lauren m c gwin illustratio ns b y pet er waddell

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EISENHOWER PRESIDENTIAL LIBRARY AND MUSEUM

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CREATING A ROOM OF ITS OWN The Evolution of the White House China Room melissa naulin

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AN ARTIST’S DRAWINGS FOR A NEW WHITE HOUSE PIANO Dunbar Beck and the Art of the Nation’s Second Steinway william g. allman

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FLORENCE HARDING WELCOMES PHILIPPINE WOMEN TO THE WHITE HOUSE Suffragist Leaders Identified in White House Photograph teresa carandang and erwin r . tiongson

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A PRESIDENTIAL SITE BECOMES HOME TO THE SUFFRAGE MOVEMENT The National Woman’s Party on Lafayette Square william seale

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REMEMBERING PRESIDENT GEORGE H. W. BUSH, 1924–2018: “The Vishnu”

christopher buckley

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PAT NIXON AND HER INFLUENCE ON THE WHITE HOUSE COLLECTION

kat h ry n l . b e as ley

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REFLECTIONS: HARMONY BETWEEN OLD & NEW

stewart d. m c laurin white house history quarterly

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FOREWORD

Great GreatExpectations Expections

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William Allman tells us the story of the decoration of the magnificent concert grand piano in the East Room that shows Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt’s love for American folklore in artwork, depicting “American dance forms.”

Modern innovations we visit with Charles Denyer in a historical account of Marine One, the presidential helicopter, a service brought to the White House by President Dwight D. Eisenhower that is also the subject of the 2019 White House Christmas Ornament, already in circulation. First Lady Patricia Nixon’s devotion to the protection of the White House furnishings collections and to their enhancement both through objects and accurate architectural alterations is a story almost unknown, told here

by Kathryn L. Beasley.

Finally, we have the honor of publishing Christopher Buckley’s speech recalling President George H. W. Bush, written by an author who knew him well.

william seale editor, WHITE HOUSE HISTORY QUARTERLY

M M II K KE E N NE EL LS SO ON N /A /A F F P/ P/ G GE ET TT TY Y II M MA AG GE ES S

White House History Quarterly looks at change in this issue. One hundred years ago, on June 4, 1919, Congress passed the women’s suffrage amendment and sent it to the states for ratification. This achievement was a turning point in women’s history as well as the history of the nation, and this issue commemorates the suffragists who stood outside the White House iron fence in protest and then in victory. The right of women to vote did not automatically extend to U.S. territories, however, and Teresa Carandang and Erwin R. Tiongson follow the Philippine women who fought for suffrage and called on First Lady Florence Harding, who was an advocate of women’s rights and the first first lady to have voted in a presidential election, in 1920, for her husband.

A turning point in the objectives of first ladies to style the White House as a background for the current tone of the presidency is covered in an article by Lauren McGwin, illustrated by Peter Waddell. They begin with the work of Edith Roosevelt, whose judgments for the Theodore Roosevelt White House redefined the mansion for the twentieth century and in large measure still pertain today. Waddell’s illustrations bring the story of turning points to the era of First Lady Michelle Obama.

Melissa Naulin chronicles the creation of the White House china collection and its display in the China Room, a century-old tradition, and

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President George H. W. Bush is seen parachuting from 3,500 feet over the U. S. Army Yuma Proving Grounds with the U.S. Army Golden Knights to celebrate his 75th birthday. The president had parachuted once before when his fighter plane was shot down in World War II by the Japanese over the Pacific. He continued to parachute in the coming years on his 80th, 85th, and 90th birthdays. white house history quarterly

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The First Ladies as SCENE BUILDERS An Artist’s Gallery of Changes at the White House LAUREN McGWIN

WHITE HOUSE HISTORICAL ASS OCIATION

I L LU S T R AT I O N S B Y P E T E R WA D D E L L

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WHITE HOUSE PHOTOGRAPH

In moments captured during chapters of change, First Lady Michelle Obama poses in the renovated Family Dining Room in 2015 (above), and First Lady Laura Bush pauses in the refurbished Lincoln Bedroom in 2007 (opposite), while First Lady Nancy Reagan visits with her Soviet counterpart Raisa Gorbachev in the West Sitting Hall in a scene envisioned by artist Peter Waddell (previous spread).

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taste brought to light a need for rethinking the spaces of the Executive Mansion. In recent memory, Laura Bush oversaw a major refurbishment of the Lincoln Bedroom and Nancy Reagan undertook renovations of the private family quarters.

Inspired by their stories, artist Peter Waddell, known for his ability to bring the unseen past to life on his canvases, created the following collection of original paintings, imagining brief moments within bigger chapters of change.

Through his art we watch as seven first ladies bring their unique perspective to the White House, setting the stage for the presidency.

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Interview with Michelle Obama, First Ladies: Influence and Image, “Role of First Lady,” C-SPAN, October 28, 2013, available online at http:// firstladies.c-span.org.

B I L L O ’ L E A R Y / WA S H I N G T O N P O S T V I A G E T T Y I M A G E S

six years after moving into the white house in 2009, First Lady Michelle Obama led a major redecoration project in the Family Dining Room on the State Floor.

She sought to incorporate her own perspective in the refurbished Family Dining Room without disturbing the historic nature of the room: “I tried to make it me,” she said.

“I tried to bring a little bit of Michelle Obama into this, but at the same time respecting and valuing the tradition that is America’s.”1 The result was a unique combination of modern art and design, carefully selected by the president and first lady and the Committee for the Preservation of the White House, with historic fine and decorative arts spanning nearly three centuries.

In her renovation of the Family Dining Room, Mrs. Obama followed in the footsteps of the first ladies who preceded her—the women who responded with creativity, political savy, and a sympathy for history as demands of official use and family life and ever-evolving American

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Edith Roosevelt

The State Dining Room: Recalling the Colonial Era

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B R U C E W H I T E F O R T H E W H I T E H O U S E H I S T O R I C A L A S S O C I AT I O N

when president theodore roosevelt and his family moved into the White House in 1901, First Lady Edith Roosevelt quickly realized the decor could reflect her husband’s political platform, and she became the first first lady to actively shape the public’s perception of a presidential administration through her hands-on involvement in redecorating interior spaces. During their years in the White House, the Roosevelts enjoyed entertaining and gave many State Dinners (paid for by the State Department) and informal teas, dances, and garden parties (paid for by the president personally).2 The Roosevelts’ predecessors, President and Mrs. William McKinley had refurbished the Blue Room in the first appearance of the revival “Colonial” style, but they had not much altered the State Rooms, where busy wallpaper patterns and decorative objects represented the taste of the Aesthetic Movement.3 After a few months of living with this outdated style and deteriorating furnishings, the Roosevelts initiated an extensive renovation that would also provide more space for their large and active family.

Presented with possibilities in the fashionable Beaux-Arts style, Edith Roosevelt consulted with Charles Follen McKim of the New York architectural firm McKim, Mead & White to redesign the private rooms into livable spaces and the State Rooms to reflect the latest style in the world of diplomacy.4 At the turn of the century, as interest in creating a national American identity became widespread, interiors became simpler and furnished with Colonial-inspired furniture designed with neoclassical motifs.5 The challenge was to redesign the State Rooms without altering the historic layout of the house. Only the State Dining Room was to be expanded in scale.

The first lady managed every aspect of the construction to be sure it was completed by December 1902, in time for the holidays—a deadline that was met under her stern leadership.6 In depicting this early twentieth-century story with his paints, Peter Waddell captures Edith Roosevelt poring over plans for the State Dining Room as everything comes together while Jack, the Roosevelts’ Manchester Terrier, investigates the grand style used to portray

a presidential agenda to the public for the first time.

The diplomatic tone of the new decor matched the new international status of the United States.

The walls, outfitted with mellow, stained, oak paneling, hearken to Colonial-era eighteenthcentury Georgian architecture. The cabinetmakers responsible for this architectural and decorative work were the Herter Brothers, a New York firm founded in 1865 by Gustave and Christian Herter, two German brothers. Known for their sophisticated furniture and cohesive interiors, the Herter Brothers had received earlier White House commissions for President Ulysses S. Grant’s bedroom furniture in 1872 as well as a refurbishing of the Red Room in 1875 for which they made thirteen pieces of furniture. Two remain in the White House today—a lady’s gilded armchair and a rosewood center table with intricate marquetry inlays of satinwood, holly, and boxwood.7 The furnishings made for the Roosevelts’ State Dining Room were of excellent quality. Three mahogany console tables with eagle pedestals and marble tops were designed by Stanford White and made by A. H. Davenport, a leading manufacturer of Colonial Revival style. The light shining in through the window in Waddell’s painting falls on the doublepedestaled console table and a recently hung seventeenthcentury antique Flemish tapestry. The first lady watches the hanging of an animal trophy, one of many lining the walls to create the aura of a great hall. Although the president himself shot some of the mounted animals, Mrs. Roosevelt purchased most of the specimens from Hart & Company in New York, a company that specialized in stylish game decorations.8 2. William Seale, The President’s House: A History, 2nd ed. (Washington, D.C.: White House Historical Association, 2008), 2:623.

3. Betty Monkman, The White House: Its Historic Furnishings and First Families, 2nd ed. (Washington, D.C.: White House Historical Association, 2014), 177.

4. Seale, President’s House, 2:30.

5. Monkman, White House, 186.

6. Seale, President’s House, 2:645, 655.

7. Alice Frelinghuysen, “Patronage and the Artistic Interior,” in Herter Brothers: Furniture and Interiors for a Gilded Age (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1994), 84; Monkman, White House, 150–51.

8. The White House: An Historic Guide, 23rd ed. (Washington, D.C.: White House Historical Association, 2011), 98.

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Grace Coolidge

The Sky Parlor: An Attic Sanctum

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COLLECTION OF THE ARTIST

while the roosevelt renovation of 1902 transformed the White House interior during the heyday of the BeauxArts fashion, it was an aesthetic illusion that masked and even exacerbated underlying structural problems in the White House. Perhaps the most dangerous was the suspending of the newly enlarged State Dining Room ceiling from iron tierods. President Calvin Coolidge was not in office long before he was informed that the roof and attic of the White House were unsafe. The original joined wood framing, built by James Hoban’s carpenters during the 1818 reconstruction of the White House, was compromised by heavy structural additions, and sinking beams displayed serious cracks. The installation of water tanks in the attic during the Woodrow Wilson administration, and a skylight cut through the attic floor, added more stress on the beams.9 By the time of the Coolidge administration it was urgent that the attic above the original stone walls be replaced. And so, after careful planning, construction began on March 14, 1927. Furniture from the Second Floor and attic was carefully removed and covered with canvas, the walls of the State Rooms were draped in muslin dust covers, and the first family temporarily relocated to 15 Dupont Circle. With a clean slate, the remodelers decided to build not a replica of the old attic but a larger, more useful Third Floor.

In capturing this story, Peter Waddell takes us mid-construction onto the roof of the White House, where Washington landmarks as the Old Post Office, U.S. Capitol building, and the Willard Hotel can be seen past the exposed beams and temporary blinds. The construction debris has been removed by large derricks and specially made covered chutes. Large steel beams and pine framing are in place. When the project was completed, there would be fourteen white house history quarterly

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major rooms on the new Third Floor for guests, servants’ quarters, and household storage.10 The only access point—for contractors, supervisors, and even the first lady—to the construction site was by a temporary wooden staircase built outside the east end of the house. The 70-foot climb did not daunt the tenacious Grace Coolidge. She admitted, “I mounted it several times in order to watch the progress of the work.”11 The artist imagines her in a stylish 1920s dress on the morning of one of these visits, consulting on plans for her “Sky Parlor” with the director of the project, Ulysses S. Grant III (in uniform on the left), and the foreman from the Chicago-based contractors.

“Sky Parlor,” an old-fashioned name, referred to an attic room or sanctum usually painted blue and lighted by big windows. Located on the roof of the South Portico, the small, square White House Sky Parlor was Grace Coolidge’s idea, a fashionable addition as well as a private retreat. She described it as a “delightful sunroom, with glass on three sides equipped with Venetian shades. . . . It was understood that when I was there I was not to be disturbed unless for some urgent reason. A cot bed, a writing table, some porch furniture, a Victrola, and a portable radio provided comfort and entertainment.”12 Through her involvement with the renovation of the Third Floor, the Sky Parlor, now called the Solarium, with its magnificent view of the Washington Monument and the Mall, has been enjoyed by subsequent presidential families as a private living space.

9. Seale, President’s House, 2:127–28.

10. Grace Coolidge, Grace Coolidge: An Autobiography, ed. Lawrence E. Wikander and Robert H. Ferrell (Woodstock, Vt.: Countryman Press, 1993), 78, 80.

11. Ibid., 79.

12. Ibid., 80.

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Jacqueline Kennedy Inspired by France

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B R U C E W H I T E F O R T H E W H I T E H O U S E H I S T O R I C A L A S S O C I AT I O N

it was during the john f. kennedy administration that the White House became the nexus of the nation’s culture.

Jacqueline Kennedy’s plans for redefining the White House interior expanded upon her predecessor First Lady Mamie Eisenhower’s concept of incorporating historically and aesthetically significant objects. But Mrs. Kennedy’s program was far more expansive and immediate, and it established a vision for the future.

Jacqueline Kennedy felt a house embedded with so much American history should showcase it. Rather than reflecting a specific style or period, she envisioned the White House as a living museum that, through its furnishing, symbolized all its occupants. The first lady established a special committee of friends, historians, curators, collectors, and directors—the Fine Arts Committee—to help authenticate early White House furnishings and advise on the purchase of period pieces for the collection. Henry Francis du Pont, a collector of the highest quality eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Americana, was appointed chairman. He believed that the furniture should be American and reflect only the nation’s early history. Jacqueline Kennedy’s idea, however, was a dramatic contrast. She wanted the interiors to represent all presidential generations in whatever their tastes might have been. Her personal interest was in presidents who brought French influence to the new republic.

President and Mrs. Kennedy’s visit to France in June 1961 strongly influenced the first lady’s inspiration for the White House. Peter Waddell’s painting transports us to the moment when the first lady entered Empress Josephine’s silk-draped bedchamber at Château de Malmaison, her suburban estate. Charles Percier and Pierre Fontaine designed the original interior of Malmaison in the “ancient Roman”

style they created for Napoleon’s court.

The rich Pompeian red, based on ancient wall frescoes, dominates the sixteen-sided textile-draped room, which mimics the interior of a military tent. Reflected in the mirror between the windows, the empress’s elaborate mahogany and gilt bronze lit en bateau or sleigh bed, inspired by an ancient kline (reclining couch), can be seen nestled against the wall beneath a high carved eagle tester with fabric draped on either side.

In front of the mirror stands a dressing table and, in the center of the room, a washstand and water jug based on an ancient tripod perfume burner. Jacqueline Kennedy, wearing a suit by Chez Ninon, a Halston beret, and diamond and ruby Tiffany brooch, emanates in her personal appearance the aura of sophistication she wished replicated at the White House.

The visit to Malmaison left quite an impression. Jacqueline Kennedy admired the Empress Josephine’s bedchamber as the epitome of the French Empire style.

Returning to Washington, D.C., she commissioned the celebrated Paris decorator Stéphane Boudin, who had designed the restoration of Malmaison, to bring some of that same flair to the White House. Boudin’s formal work appealed to Mrs. Kennedy for the State Rooms. She described the completed Blue Room as his “masterpiece”— complete with blue silk valances around the ceiling, two-toned cream-colored striped silk stretched on the walls, and President James Monroe’s 1818 pier table and chairs, made in Paris by the French cabinetmaker PierreAntoine Bellangé. Other select pieces were chosen by the Fine Arts Committee.13 The result for this and other State Rooms was a White House transformed into a historical taste that not only narrated American history but also reflected the first lady’s love of beautiful—especially French—objects.

13. Monkman, White House, 234–35.

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Pat Nixon

Enriching the Kennedy-Era Blue Room

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during the Truman renovation was not appropriate to the period. Pat Nixon took an active role in researching possible plaster ceiling designs. She traveled with Jones to local eighteenth- and nineteenth-century houses to collect ideas and ultimately controlled the outcome.

Another new element of the room, the marble mantelpiece, is also reminiscent of the Monroe era and remains in the Blue Room today. Selected by Mrs. Nixon, it is carved from Italian Carrara marble in a style she found compatible with the mantels in the Green Room and Red Room, which came to the house in 1817. Ultimately, Pat Nixon was able to accomplish a longtime wish of previous first ladies—to furnish the State Rooms with fine examples worthy of the presidency.

She furthered the concept introduced during the Kennedy administration, and former First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy took delight in the increased richness Mrs. Nixon achieved.

Here, Peter Waddell depicts Mrs. Nixon overseeing contractors as they work on the plaster ceiling decorations, molding and shaping the elaborate neoclassical acanthus leaves, pearls, flowers, and other designs first used during the period of James Monroe.16

14. Monkman, White House, 242–45.

15. Ibid., 250.

16. Ibid., 252.

COLLECTION OF THE ARTIST

d e s p i t e t h e e x t e n s i v e e f f o r t s of First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy to refurbish the State Rooms, by the time of the Nixon administration, in 1969, they were worn from use by the thousands of daily visitors. First Lady Pat Nixon, correcting the problem, sought to enhance the museum character of the public rooms by furnishing the State Rooms with examples of the highest level of craftsmanship from the nations’ two centuries. In May 1970, she enlisted Clement E. Conger, the assistant chief of protocol at the State Department, who was actively creating period rooms there with American antiques, to help with her plans.

One of his first acts was to hire the Georgiabased architect Edward Vason Jones. Notable for re-creating period rooms in the American Wing at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Jones brought an American neoclassical style of decorating to the White House.14 Conger took specific exception to Boudin’s Kennedy-era decoration of the Blue Room.

In February 1972, renovation began with the replacement of the aging silk wall covering with a turquoise-colored wallpaper and a decor that was more like the nineteenth-century American interior style Jones was known for creating.

The Blue Room, however, maintained an essence of the French influence of the James Monroe period: the wallpaper was reproduced from historical Jacquemart & Bénard designs and the window hangings were designed from those pictured in early French pattern books.15 Jones was particularly interested in restoring the architectural elements of the Blue Room ceiling. He believed the molding designed in the 1950s by Lorenzo Winslow

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Nancy Reagan

COLLECTION OF THE ARTIST

Making the White House a Home

the white house is not only a symbol of the nation and a public stage but also the private home of the president and first family. By the time the Reagans arrived in 1981, the family quarters on the Second and Third Floor left much to be desired. Previous administrations in the twentieth century focused on conserving, restoring, and transforming the public State Rooms. In fact, the family quarters had never been considered in a comprehensive sense. While basic maintenance was ongoing—fresh paint, new draperies and upholstery, professional hand cleaning and conservation to more than 150 objects—First Lady Nancy Reagan became the first to furnish and decorate the Second and Third Floors of the White House cohesively. Along with White House Curator Rex Scouten and Ted Graber, the celebrated interior designer from Hollywood, Nancy Reagan developed a new plan for the private quarters that included updated plumbing, modern electric heating and cooling, and new furnishings. She achieved the uncluttered, expansive feeling of space that President Ronald Reagan favored.17 In his painting, Peter Waddell takes us through the magnificent Georgian-style arched passage at the west end of the Second Floor, into the West Sitting Hall, which is central to the first family’s living quarters. Seated on the floral sofa, Nancy white house history quarterly

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Reagan discusses the redecoration plans with Raisa Gorbachev, wife of the Soviet leader, while Rex, the Reagans’ Cavalier King Charles Spaniel, lounges in the Center Hall. One of President Reagan’s favorite views was from this West Sitting Hall window.

Like all transformations in the White House, the recurring issue of cost was a concern that Nancy Reagan solved by raising donations. Completed in a record ten-month time period, the finished family quarters became a place of comfort and dignity. Mrs. Reagan created a home in the White House that balanced historical and contemporary style together. She searched the White House warehouses, reviving furnishings discarded in the past, and brought the warm hues of the West to the spaces she redecorated. 18

17. Seale, President’s House, 2:407–10.

18. Ibid., 2:480–82.

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Laura Bush

The Lincoln Bedroom Revisited

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COLLECTION OF THE ARTIST

as first lady, laura bush sought to enjoy the White House while focusing on subtle and necessary changes. The first family brought no furniture with them in 2001 except for a sentimental chest of drawers that belonged to President George W. Bush’s grandmother. Laura Bush chose furniture in White House storage to build upon what First Lady Nancy Reagan had used in the private family quarters. But she did not leave all rooms untouched. Like other first ladies before her, Laura Bush expressed her own vision by introducing plans for redecorating certain rooms, beginning with bedrooms for her daughters.

Maintaining a balance between the new and personal and the historical was also important to her, and the Lincoln Bedroom became one of her larger projects.19 Despite its name, the Lincoln Bedroom was not where President Abraham Lincoln slept. It was his office and remained part of the office suite until the Theodore Roosevelt renovation moved the offices to the new West Wing.

The old Lincoln office then became a bedroom. President Herbert Hoover, who collected Lincoln memorabilia, styled this room the “Lincoln Study,” bringing recognition to it as the place where President Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation. During World War II it was converted back into a bedroom, a room in which the English Prime Minister Winston Churchill slept.

It remained the “Lincoln Bedroom” after President Harry S. Truman’s renovation was completed in 1952. All furniture and art associated with President and Mrs. Lincoln, including the costly carved bed, one of Mary Todd Lincoln’s white house history quarterly

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controversial purchases, were moved into the room, and it remained essentially unchanged for more than fifty years. In 2002 Laura Bush expressed an interest in refurbishing the room to be more historically interesting. With the help of The Committee for the Preservation of the White House, a team of experts, curators, and historians, and the support of the White House Historical Association, she transformed the Lincoln Bedroom into a space more evocative of Lincoln’s style in the 1860s.20 Redecoration of the Lincoln Bedroom began as a research project with a survey of period photographs, illustrations, and documents. A wallpaper sample similar in design to one known in Lincoln’s office was used as a guide to create the yellow pattern with a gilt grid and medallions seen here.

The green and gold diamond-pattern reproduction carpet, purchased from a specialty firm, Woodward & Grosvenor, was based on the description of a “G&O Wilton” carpet provided for the president’s office and fitted using traditional hand-sewn methods.21 Peter Waddell shows us a final moment of the restoration, as Mrs. Bush surveys the arranged funishings. Today the room remains a colorful time capsule evoking the spirit of the Civil War era.

19. Interview with Laura Bush, First Ladies: Influence and Image, C-SPAN, October 28, 2013, available online at http://firstladies.c-span.org.

20. The White House: An Historic Guide, 158.

21. William Allman, “The Lincoln Bedroom: Refurbishing a Famous White House Room,” White House History, no. 25 (Spring 2009): 59, 62.

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Michelle Obama A Modern Family Dining Room

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edith roosevelt, the first of the twentieth-century first ladies to become involved in setting the presidential stage through the White House interiors, surveys a twenty-firstcentury scene from her soon to be relocated portrait in this final painting in the series by Peter Waddell. Here, Waddell captures the final moments in Michelle Obama’s 2015 refurbishment of the Family Dining Room.

Adjacent to the State Dining Room, this smaller dining space was used for family meals from 1825, during the John Quincy Adams administration, until 1962, when First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy moved family meals to the new President’s Dining Room that had been created from a converted bedroom on the Second Floor. The “old” Family Dining Room has since been used for small official meals and often for staging State Dinners and large functions.22 The Los Angeles–based designer Michael Smith helped Mrs. Obama with the redecoration. After careful research so as not to lose the feel of history in the room, Smith and Obama changed yellow walls and curtains to a softer palette of gray and burgundy.

Gilded wall sconces were hung along with modern paintings White House collection, but remnants of past decor remain. Antiques collected during the Kennedy era are still integral to the interior. The juxtaposition of the Federal period furniture and abstract art emphasizes how even when styles change over time, the ultimate goal of high-quality craftsmanship remains a common thread. The 2008 rug was taken to storage and replaced with one white house history quarterly

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by Anni Albers, a textile artist known for weaving synthetic and natural fibers into reduced color palette pictorial wall hangings. Her Black, White, and Gray, 1950, was adapted for this new rug for the Family Dining Room.23 Hanging above the Federal-period sideboard is a work titled Early Bloomer [Anagram (A Pun)], 1998, by the American painter Robert Rauschenberg, who was known for using nontraditional materials. This painting is a part of a series called Anagram. It entered the White House collection in 2012.

Just out of view in Waddell’s painting (but seen in the photograph on page 8) is Resurrection, 1966, by Alma Thomas, an active member of the Washington Color School. A gift of the George B. Hartzog Jr. White House Acquisitions Trust, Resurrection is notably the first work by an African-American woman to hang in the public spaces of the White House. after touring the richly historic spaces of the President’s House, a White House visitor could easily be left with the impression that the public and State Rooms have been preserved as they stand from the earliest years of the house. The story of White House furnishings and decor is, however, a story of change. Since Mrs. Roosevelt’s time, the interiors have continued to exhibit a unique blending of the histories of the first ladies, reflecting their times and tastes as well as their changing roles.

22. The White House: An Historic Guide, 102, 105.

23. William Allman, “The Old Family Dining Room, Made New Again,” February 10, 2015, White House website, available online at whitehouse.gov.

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Creating a Room of ITS OWN The Evolution of the White House China Room MELISSA NAULIN

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Henry, the White House butler, told me that the origin of the fruit bowl was unknown. When

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Mrs. Benjamin Harrison was mistress of the mansion she took great interest in the old pieces of furniture, and the bric-a-brac. He said that one day when she was searching in the garret she found the bowl, by itself and apparently broken from the pedestal. Looking a little longer she found the pedestal, and then after a prolonged search the connecting part was found, the figure of the Graces. Originally there had been a cover to the bowl, but that was irretrievably lost. Upon examination it was discovered that the three pieces could be put together with screws. Mrs. Harrison sent it to an expert mender and it was soon restored to the dining room sideboard where it was greatly admired.2 As there is no physical evidence that the centerpiece was ever significantly damaged and repaired, it appears that Caroline Harrison’s primary contribution to its preservation was in recognizing that the three disassociated parts were originally part of a whole. It is likely that the original internal screwrod holding the parts together had been lost or discarded, requiring the “mender” to supply a new rod to allow the piece to be used once again. For decades, the centerpiece was thought to have been acquired for the President’s House during the James Madison or Andrew Jackson administrations, until the Smithsonian curator and White House china scholar Margaret Brown Klapthor convincingly identified it as part of the 1850s’ Franklin Pierce service in her seminal 1975 publication Official White House China: 1789 to the Present.3 Since its rediscovery by Caroline Harrison, the centerpiece has served as a highlight of the White House china collection, with its height often requiring special accommodations to display it.

Caroline Harrison also expressed a desire to have special cabinets built in the State Dining Room to display examples of the White House’s historic china, but she was never able to bring her plan to fruition.4 Her health began to fail, and she died of tuberculosis in October 1892. Neither of Caroline Harrison’s two immediate successors, Frances Cleveland and Ida McKinley, was especially interested in the preservation of historic White House furnishings, but another powerful figure was: Colonel Theodore Bingham.5 Between 1897 and 1903, the sophisticated, autocratic Bingham served as the superintendent of Public Buildings and

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Examples of china from the Washington, Adams, Madison, and Monroe administrations are displayed in the cabinets on the east side of the White House China Room today.

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f irst l ady ed ith wilso n created the China Room in 1917: this is the standard summary of the history of the room on the Ground Floor of the White House that displays ceramics, glass, and silver used in the White House or owned by first families. While it is true that the physical space was transformed during Edith Wilson’s tenure as first lady into a gallery to display what was then known as the White House Collection of Presidential Ware, the common shorthand explanation of its creation obscures the important contributions of others whose advocacy led to this moment, especially Abby Gunn Baker, Caroline Harrison, Edith Roosevelt, Ellen Wilson, Theodore Bingham, and Thomas Symons.

The idea that tableware left by past presidential families was worth preserving and displaying evolved over time at the White House. First Lady Caroline Harrison is typically credited with being the first to take a serious interest in the presidential chinaware that had accumulated in White House storage over the years. When she first moved into the White House in 1889, Mrs. Harrison oversaw a thorough top-to-bottom cleaning of the building, inspecting spaces in the attic and the basement that few of her predecessors probably ever saw. She personally evaluated old furnishings stored around the house for their historical importance and, as an accomplished china painter, took a special interest in the remaining pieces of past presidential china services. Painting ceramic blanks had become a fashionable leisure activity for American women during the 1880s, and Caroline Harrison was an avid practitioner. She continued her passion while in the White House, hosting classes and painting a large number of ceramic forms for family, friends, fans, and charity auctions. Her artistic interest in china painting, coupled with her proclivity for the study of history, led her to try to identify the china services by administration.1 Abby Gunn Baker, a journalist educated at Kansas State University who moved to Washington with her husband in 1896, took an interest in the White House china services and became a kind of de facto curator of the White House collection. She recorded the story of Caroline Harrison’s discovery of what is now known to be the centerpiece from the Franklin Pierce State Service:

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with emphasis, “there won’t be any left to preserve.”

“Well!” I exclaimed, in delighted astonishment at the suggestion, “I should be only too glad to write such an article if I knew enough about the subject to write it, but I do not. To write an article which would assure the preservation of the china would require an intimate knowledge.”6

Abby Gunn Baker’s article “The China of the Presidents,” featured in the December 1903 issue of Munsey’s Magazine, served to inspire interest in the preservation of surviving examples of presidemtial china.

Grounds for Washington, D.C., a position that oversaw the White House and its furnishings. Baker apparently met Bingham while conducting research in his office on the history of the White House sometime in the late 1890s. She attributed the creation of the White House Collection of Presidential Ware to a chance meeting with Bingham outside the White House in the spring of 1901: That morning Colonel Bingham suddenly broke off the conversation in which we were engaged and exclaimed, “Mrs. Baker, why don’t you write an article on the historic china and plate of the executive mansion to arouse an interest that will lead to its preservation? If somebody doesn’t do it pretty soon,” he added

Bingham promised to ask First Lady Ida McKinley if she would allow Mrs. Baker to visit and begin studying the surviving china and any records related to them. Shortly thereafter, President and Mrs. McKinley left for a national tour and Bingham brought Baker in to start exploring the storage areas where tableware was kept.7 Working with inventories of the china prepared by Colonel Bingham and “with the assistance of the colored butler of the White House, who had held his position through three administrations,” Baker worked to identify the different china and glass services.8 President McKinley’s assassination in September 1901 brought Baker’s project to “an abrupt close.”9 Larger preservation issues than china took center stage soon after Theodore Roosevelt’s ascension to the presidency when the question of renovating the house was raised.

Colonel Bingham, Baker’s chief supporter, ended up on the wrong side of the new president when he began to advocate an elaborate expansion that would have radically altered the White House.

Roosevelt supported a renovation but ultimately endorsed the proposal by the New York City architectural firm McKim, Mead & White that promised to “restore the White House to what it was originally planned and designed to be in the days of Washington and Jefferson.”10 Baker joined Colonel Bingham in opposing the McKim plan, instead favoring an entirely new residence for the first family in order to avoid major changes to the original structure.11 Bingham was eventually reassigned, but the publication in December 1903 of Baker’s earlier research on the White House china collection in the popular and widely circulated Munsey’s Magazine12 caught the attention of the new superintendent of Public Buildings and Grounds, Colonel Thomas W. Symons. Symons in turn shared the article with First Lady Edith Roosevelt, whom Symons said was

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in early February 1904. Although not noted as such on the invoice, the one cabinet of this pair that survives in the White House collection bears the mark of United Crafts, Gustav Stickley’s Eastwood, New York, furniture company. Stickley was the leading American proponent of the British-based Arts and Crafts style. It is not known why this style was selected for the White House cabinets, or why Stickley’s firm in particular received the commission. The then modern style of the cabinets would have distinguished them from the rest of the mansion’s furnishings, which were almost all historical revival styles selected by McKim, Mead & White.

Perhaps the focus on function and lack of ornamentation that characterized Arts and Crafts–style pieces were considered to allow for the successful display of disparate, and often elaborate, china services. The cabinets’ invoice does reveal that they were specially commissioned; W. B. Moses & Sons charged the White House $55 each for the cabinets along with an additional $14 (total) for “adding 3

Edith Roosevelt ordered the two Stickley cabinets seen in the 1904 photograph of the Ground Floor Corridor (below) to display presidential china.

One Stickley cabinet survives (opposite, bottom left). The Stickley cabinets were quickly replaced with new cabinets in a similar style, seen in the 1904–17 photograph (opposite, top). One example of the later cabinets survives (opposite, bottom right).

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“most intelligently interested in the historic association of the executive mansion.”13 Mrs. Roosevelt responded by deciding to have a pair of cabinets made to display pieces of historic White House china and requested that Baker return to select and arrange the china. Baker curated selections from nine different administrations, dating from the Lincoln administration through the newly arrived Theodore Roosevelt State Service. The pieces were grouped by administration, most of which received their own shelf. The cabinets were installed opposite one another at the east end of the central hallway on the Ground Floor, which McKim, Mead & White had recently converted into a public passage to reach the State Rooms located one floor above.

Baker reported that Edith Roosevelt specifically chose this location “in order that all visitors at the White House might see the historic ware.”14 The pair of oak cabinets used for the china display were ordered through the Washington, D.C., furnishings firm of W. B. Moses & Sons and arrived

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to legs of 2 Cabinets & furnishing 8 New feet, with ball bearing castors.”15 The request for additional height probably derived from a concern for easy viewing of the china, but why castors, or wheels, were originally requested for the White House cabinets is unclear.

It is hard to imagine why anyone would want to risk rolling a cabinet full of irreplaceable china, most of it propped up along the back or sides of the case.

Adding the block feet to the cabinets significantly changed their look: most Stickley-made cabinets or bookshelves feature legs that extend straight down from the corner posts, but to accommodate castors, block feet wider than the legs had to be added to the White House pair, throwing off their proportions.

Baker credited Colonel Symons for growing the collection of presidential china by orchestrating President Theodore Roosevelt’s interest and support. As she wrote in her unpublished manuscript about the collection: Mrs. Roosevelt seemed very much pleased with the cabinets when the china had been placed in them, but neither of us had much idea that a further effort could be made then toward securing or preserving more of the Presidential china. But Colonel Symons was more hopeful.

He was so enthusiastically interested in all things historical pertaining to the White House that he had determined to see that more care was given to them in the future. Knowing the President’s ability to see and act when anything ought to be done, he determined to bring the new cabinets and their contents to his attention.16 As Colonel Symons wrote to Baker, “On the 22nd day of February [1904], after planting the trees in the White House Grounds . . . the President returned to the House through the East Terrace and for the first time saw the cabinets and the china.

He was very much delighted at the idea and himself proposed that we should try to get some representative china of each administration.”17 Symons no doubt knew exactly what he was doing by escorting the president past the new cabinets. Securing the president’s blessing to expand the collection gave him and Baker the authority to pursue acquisitions to supplement what had survived in the house, and Symons already had some leads on who might be able to donate pieces from earlier administrations.

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additional cabinets to display an enlarged collection, and he solicited Baker’s help. “I am rather of the opinion that we will have to stick to the present style of the cabinets,” Symons wrote, but began suggesting modifications to the Stickley cabinets. He concluded, “I think it would be well for us to decide, as soon as possible, whether to order any more of the cabinets, for it takes quite a bit of time to get them.”18 Three months later, four new cabinets arrived, this time purchased through a different local decorating company, A. E. Kennedy, rather than W. B. Moses. While Symons had expressed a concern about the time it took to get the Stickley cabinets, cost was probably also a factor in switching manufacturers, as A. E. Kennedy charged $86 for “furnishing & making 4 Oak China Closets as per contract,”19 thus providing four cabinets for less than what two of the Stickley cabinets cost.

The annual inventories conducted at the White House reveal that the new A. E. Kennedy cabinets replaced the Stickley cabinets in the Ground Floor Corridor and the latter were moved upstairs to the private quarters. The four Kennedy cabinets were in use for approximately three years before they became inadequate to house the collection that was ever expanding due to Baker’s efforts. In 1907, two additional cabinets, presumably matching the Kennedy ones, were ordered from the Washington Wood-Working Co., bringing the total number of cabinets in the corridor to six. Only one of these six cabinets survives in the White House collection, as five were sold in January 1917, just after the first built-in cabinets were introduced in the China Room. Because the surviving cabinet is unmarked, it is not known if it is one of the four 1904 Kennedy cabinets or one of the two 1907 Washington WoodWorking Co. cabinets.

The replacement Kennedy cabinets were very similar aesthetically to the Stickley cabinets and thus their substitution would have probably caused little notice. The Washington Wood-Working Co. cabinets, however, did feature a number of changes from the originals that made them better suited for their function. First, while made to be almost identical to the originals in width and depth, the new cabinets were almost a full foot taller, with the extra height carried in the legs. This raised the bottommost shelf of china so it would be more readily visible without stooping. Most important for visibility, the new cabinets did not have wooden mullions dividing the glass door as the Stickley cabinets did.

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Removing the mullions not only made it easier to appreciate the china but also allowed the new cabinets to have adjustable shelves that improved flexibility for the china display. For example, shelves could be raised to accommodate the large platters and tall compotes that some State Services included.

One interesting design choice for the new cabinets was the request for block feet like the originals had, even though the new cabinets were not to have castors.20 As Symons was consulting with Baker at the time, she undoubtedly played a role in suggesting the design improvements.

Despite the fact that they were only used for a few short months in the Ground Floor Corridor, the Stickley china cabinets have been much more prominent in the historical record rather than their later replacements that were in use for about thirteen years, largely because the earlier cabinets are seen in a widely distributed photograph. It is quite possible that Baker had the photographs taken to be able to use the images in future publicity campaigns for the growing china collection. A cropped version of the most common view appears at the top of Baker’s article on the china collection for the New-York Tribune Sunday Magazine of June 5, 1904,21 and continued to be used in her articles years later. The only currently known images showing the later cabinets in use are a stereoview from the Abby Gunn Baker Papers collection at the White House and an image in the 1904 annual report from the superintendent of Public Buildings and Grounds to Congress.22 As interest in the Arts and Crafts movement increased in the late twentieth century, Gustav Stickley’s name recognition also increased, making the Stickley-stamped cabinet in the White House collection of much greater interest to decorative arts scholars than its anonymous replacement.

After receiving the Roosevelts’ blessing to enlarge the presidential china collection, Baker began researching in earnest. She focused on trying to identify descendants of the earliest presidents who might still own tableware belonging to their famous ancestors. This task was not easy, and Baker wrote that she “finally decided that the surest way to find the heirs and heirlooms would be through the public press.”23 She therefore published articles about the collection in popular media such the New-York Tribune and Century Magazine.24 She also strategically targeted groups such as the Daughters of the American Revolution by

publishing in the organization’s periodicals. She was soon receiving tips and, starting in 1905, donations. A requirement for the White House Collection of Presidential Ware set by Edith Roosevelt restrained the acquisitions, however. As Baker explained: From the first Mrs. Roosevelt held that the assemblage of Presidential heirlooms must be purely patriotic, that there should be no appeal from the government to purchase objects for it, but that the Collection should belong to the government and should be a sacredly guarded White House trust. . . . This decision of Mrs. Roosevelt’s was a wise one, and has added infinitely to the ethical value of the Collection, but it added infinitely also to the difficulty to secure the heirlooms.25 The earliest donations to the collection were examples believed to have come from personal china services belonging to George Washington, James Madison, James Monroe, and John Quincy Adams, all of which may or may not have been used at the White House. Soon, however, she was also receiving examples from White House State Services ordered during the James K. Polk, Franklin Pierce, and Abraham Lincoln administrations. As previously mentioned, the collection grew quickly enough to warrant ordering two additional cabinets for the Ground Floor Corridor in 1907.

According to Baker, the idea of dedicating a room in the White House to the display of the china collection first arose during the Taft administration.

Baker claimed that it was the presidential descendant donors who “felt that the small cases in the White House did not give the Collection the permanent environment which it demanded.” She continued, “Although the subject of setting aside a room in the mansion for the Collection was earnestly advocated, it was not seriously considered until after President and Mrs. Wilson came into the mansion in 1913.”26 Having been obviously frustrated with First Lady Helen Taft’s lack of interest in the china collection, Baker must have been thrilled to find Ellen Wilson more receptive. As she explained: It was my great honor to be invited to give an illustrated talk on the historic furnishings of the White House at the Welcome Breakfast given by the ladies of Washington to Mrs.

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As Colonel Symons had done years earlier with President Roosevelt when he wanted to expand the scope of the White House historic china collection, Baker guided Ellen Wilson to suggest the very action she desired: designating a room to house and display the china.

It is not clear exactly what plans to create a display of the growing collection were in progress in 1914 when Ellen Wilson became ill with kidney disease and died in early August. An architectural drawing of a proposed “Exhibition Cabinet for The Presidents’ China,” dated June 7, 1915, survives in the National Archives, indicating that work toward creating a display room continued in the period between Ellen Wilson’s death and Woodrow Wilson’s marriage to Edith Bolling Galt in December 1915.28 The plan shows a five-bay cabinet built into the west wall of the room then known as the Gentlemen’s Cloak Room. This room located just to the east of the Diplomatic Reception Room (then, as now, the oval-shaped room on the south side of the Ground Floor) and directly across from the staircase to the State Floor. As stated on the plan, the cabinets were “Designed in the Office of Public Buildings and Grounds under the direction

An architectural drawing (above) of the first built-in cabinet for a new China Room was prepared in June 1915, after Ellen Wilson’s death. The completed cabinet is seen in the photograph taken between 1916 and 1918 (opposite), which shows the overcrowded conditions that soon inspired plans for additional cabinets.

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Wilson, and the ladies of the Cabinet, early in President Wilson’s first administration. After seeing the pictures and hearing the story of the historic belongings of the mansion Mrs. Wilson became greatly interested in the Presidential Collection. Later she gave many practical proofs of this interest. At that time six small cabinets containing the Presidential heirlooms were in the corridor of the ground floor, and all of them had become too crowded to receive additional gifts. Soon after our acquaintance began Mrs. Wilson became familiar with the plans for the Collection; she saw the need and suggested that one of the rooms on the ground floor be set aside for the Collection, with permanent cabinets built in the walls for the heirlooms. Upon this happy suggestion the room was selected and Colonel W. W. Harts, at that time superintendent of public buildings and grounds, had plans drawn for the alteration of the room and for the building of the cabinets. The work was to have been done the following summer, but Mrs. Wilson’s illness and subsequent death brought all of these plans to a stand still for more than two years.27

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of Colonel Wm. W. Harts, In Charge . . . By George Burnap, Landscape Architect.” Burnap was the accomplished New York landscape designer whom Ellen Wilson had invited to design a formal rose garden in the space between the Executive Mansion and the West Wing.

Baker’s efforts to grow the collection also continued after Ellen Wilson’s death, and in February 1915 she orchestrated the donation of one of the most important pieces in the collection, a dinner plate from George Washington’s famous Society of the Cincinnati Service, which he had used for entertaining while president. Woodrow and Ellen Wilson’s oldest daughter Margaret accepted the plate for the White House from Mary Custis Lee, Martha Washington’s great-great-granddaughter.29 Just as collecting for the Presidential Collection continued without an official first lady, it also appears that planning for a dedicated room to display the collection moved forward.

Not long after Edith Galt Wilson became first lady, Baker and/or Colonel Harts shared their plans with her to convert the Gentlemen’s Cloak Room into a china display room. As Baker recounted:

The drawings of the proposed room which had been lying in the office of the superintendent of public buildings and grounds, were shown to her. She approved them most graciously, and gave the order for the alterations to be made and the cabinets built. Subsequently, she took great interest in the transfer of the heirlooms and also in adding more of the historic dishes which were in the china closets of the White House to the shelves of the new cabinets.30 Edith Wilson therefore did not personally select which room would become the China Room, although later scholars have attributed the choice to her.31 Nevertheless, her support was crucial; had she not favored the idea, it would not have happened during her tenure, and possibly never at all.

By September 1916, the first cabinet as designed by George Burnap had been executed in the west wall of the designated room by the William H. Dyer Company of Washington, D.C.32 A sign of composition letters on a wooden board was installed over the center of the cases that read: “CHINA USED BY

THE PRESIDENTS.”

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double the space of the original west wall cabinet.

The cabinets on the east wall would receive a sign with the same wording used on the west wall. The White House did not return to the Dyer Company to complete the new cabinets but instead contracted again with the Washington Wood-Working Co.35 The east wall cabinets were completed in the fall of 1917, and on December 12, 1917, Edith Wilson’s secretary, Edith Benham, wrote to Baker approving the installation plan proposed by Baker and the most recent head of the Office of Public Buildings and Grounds, Colonel Clarence Ridley: Mrs. Wilson . . . thinks the arrangement of the cabinet which you and Colonel Ridley have planned is an excellent one and she can suggest no other changes. She will be very glad indeed to have you begin to arrange the china on Thursday morning at ten o’clock.36 Furniture for the room, consisting of “1 Mhg. [mahogany] Sofa & 3 chairs to match, covered with damask” arrived from the local interior design firm R. W. Henderson on January 18, 1918.37 An image

Architectural plans for additional cabinets in the east wall of the China Room were made in July 1917 (above).

The cabinets were completed later that same year. The room’s southeast cabinet (opposite) was designed with a special niche to accommodate the Franklin Pierce centerpiece, the most impressive piece in the White House china collection.

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Photographs of the cabinet after its installation reveal that it was insufficient from the start. The objects were densely installed, with many ceramic pieces hanging from the back walls of the cabinets rather than sitting on the shelves. Despite the cabinet’s label, the display was not confined to ceramics but also included a silhouette of Abigail Adams, glass and metal tableware, and lighting equipment such as candlesticks. The small areas underneath each bank of shelves, possibly designed to be used as storage areas since the wood paneling of the cabinet doors concealed them when closed, were also installed as display spaces even though they would not typically be seen. The overcrowded conditions may explain why one of the six oak cabinets from the Ground Floor Corridor was retained and moved into the new China Room, though the others were sold in January 1917.33 With the west wall cabinets proving inadequate to display the ever-growing collection, new architectural plans were soon prepared for additional cabinets in the east wall.34 The new cabinets—two groups of three banks each—would more than

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This image of the west wall of the China Room was taken in 1918 or later, when the collection had been expanded into additional cabinets on the east wall.

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the completed China Room made its debut sometime in 1918. Because of the war, there were no public tours of the house during that time, so the completion of the China Room may have been less newsworthy than it might have otherwise been.

The completion of the China Room in 1918 did not conclude the effort to celebrate the material history of the White House but rather served as a starting point. Despite being heavily involved in the relief work of the YMCA during the war, Baker continued her work as the unofficial curator of the White House collection, researching, soliciting, cataloging, and publishing until her death in 1923.38 The expectation that the White House would retain, document, and display materials belonging to its past occupants was firmly established, and it would be championed by future first ladies, especially

The White House China Room, 2019.

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of the China Room with this furniture in place shows the west wall cabinet still in its earliest arrangement, suggesting that the east wall cabinets were not yet in use. There is also a January 1918 change order noted on the July 1917 plans for the east wall cabinets: a rounded niche was to be added to the center bank of the southern group of cabinets to accommodate the large centerpiece that Caroline Harrison had discovered in the attic all those years ago. Creating the niche required sinking the back of the cabinet into the wall. Photographs of the installed southeast cabinet show the centerpiece in place, so they could not have been taken before January. Photographs of the east wall cabinets also show items still visible in the west wall cabinet in the image with the January 1918 furniture additions. It therefore appears that the initial version of

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Grace Coolidge, Lou Hoover, Jacqueline Kennedy, and Pat Nixon. The preservationist philosophy behind the creation of the White House Collection of Presidential Ware and the China Room would eventually lead to the passage in 1961 of Public Law 87-286, which legally established the “museum character” of the public rooms of the White House, and to Executive Order 11145, issued by President Lyndon B. Johnson in 1964, which established both the Office of the Curator, The White House, and an official advisory group, the Committee for the Preservation of the White House. Continuity of care for the White House’s “heirlooms” was by these actions now ensured.

notes 1.

2

William Seale, The President’s House: A History, 2nd ed.

(Washington, D.C.: White House Historical Association, 2008), 1:556–58; Lauren A. Zook, “Caroline Harrison’s China Painting: The First Lady as Artist,” White House History, no. 41 (Spring 2016): 42–65.

Abby Gunn Baker, “The Dolly [sic] Madison Fruit Bowl,” in “Heirs and Heirlooms of the White House, Including a Story of the White House Collection of Presidential Heirlooms,” c. 1920, section 7, 215. Unpublished manuscript in the Abby Gunn Baker Papers, Office of the Curator, The White House (hereafter OCWH), box 1, folder 9.

3. Margaret Brown Klapthor, Official White House China: 1789 to the Present (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1975), 77.

4. Abby Gunn Baker, “The China of the Presidents,” Munsey’s Magazine 30, no. 3 (December 1903): 329; Abby Gunn Baker, “White House Collection of Presidential Ware,” American Monthly Magazine 29, no. 2 (August 1906): 253.

5. For example, in 1898, Theodore Bingham directed Doorkeeper Thomas F. Pendel, the longest-serving White House staff member, to relate what he knew about the history of the furnishings throughout the State Floor. Pendel’s recollections are recorded in his memoir, Thirty-Six Years in the White House (Washington, D.C.: Neale Publishing Company, 1902), 169–75.

6. Baker, “How the Idea of the Collection Originated,” in “Heirs and Heirlooms,” section 3, 105.

7. The same story is also recounted in Abby G. Baker, “The White House Collection of Presidential Ware,” Century Magazine 76 (October 1908): 828.

8. Baker, “The Presidential China in the White House in 1901,” in “Heirs and Heirlooms,” section 3, 55. I have tried to identify the butler to whom Baker was referring but have been unsuccessful thus far.

9. Baker, “Cessation of the White House Study,” in “Heirs and Heirlooms,” section 3, 66.

10. Theodore Roosevelt to Lawrence Fraser Abbott, March 14, 1904, quoted in Seale, President’s House, 1:689. For a full discussion of the competing plans of Bingham and McKim, Mead & White, see William Seale, The White House: The History of an American Idea (Washington, D.C.: American Institute of Architects Press, 1992), 159–201.

11. Seale, President’s House, 1:689.

12. Baker, “China of the Presidents.”

13. Quoted in Baker, “Colonel Symons Takes Up the Project to Establish the White House Collection,” in “Heirs and Heirlooms,” section 3, 67.

15. Account 34380, voucher 63, February 1904, Miscellaneous Treasury Accounts of the General Accounting Office, National Archives, Washington, D.C. 16. Baker, “President Roosevelt’s Plan for the Collection,” in “Heirs and Heirlooms,” section 3, 70.

17. Colonel Thomas W. Symons to Abby Gunn Baker, February 25, 1904, Baker Papers, OCWH. 18. Ibid.

19. Account 34600, voucher 27, May 1904, Miscellaneous Treasury Accounts of the General Accounting Office, National Archives, Washington, D.C. 20. The inside of the blocks on the surviving later cabinet are carved out as if to accommodate castors, but there is no physical evidence that castors were ever used in the feet.

21. Abby Gunn Baker, “Presidential China in Mrs. Roosevelt’s Collection,” New-York Tribune Sunday Magazine, June 5, 1904.

22. Annual Report upon the Improvement and Care of Public Buildings and Grounds (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1904), 3904.

23. Baker, “How to Find the Presidential Ware,” in “Heirs and Heirlooms,” section 3, 71.

24. Baker, “Presidential China in Mrs. Roosevelt’s Collection,”; Baker, “White House Collection of Presidential Ware,” Century Magazine.

25. Baker, “The Collection a Patriotic One,” in “Heirs and Heirlooms,” section 3, 72.

26. Baker, “Permanent Cabinets for the White House Collection,” in ibid., section 3, 102.

27. Ibid., section 3, 102–3.

28. “Exhibition Cabinet for the Presidents China, The White House,” June 7, 1915, drawing 14.1-28, Office of the Public Buildings and Grounds, Records of the National Park Service, Record Group 79, National Archives, College Park, Md. 29. Baker to Colonel W. W. Harts, February 16, 1915, Office of the Public Buildings and Grounds, National Archives, transcription in object file 1915.2747.1, OCWH. 30. Baker, “Permanent Cabinets for the White House Collection,” in “Heirs and Heirlooms,” section 3, 103.

31. For example, see James Archer Abbott, The Presidential Dish: Mrs. Woodrow Wilson and the White House China Room (Washington, D.C.: Woodrow Wilson House, 2007), 11-12; Margaret Brown Klapthor, Official White House China, 2nd ed.

(New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1999), 12.

32. Account 40702, voucher 6, October 7, 1916, Miscellaneous Treasury Accounts of the General Accounting Office, National Archives, Washington, D.C. 33. This cabinet that was moved into the China Room is the A.E. Kennedy or Washington Wood-Working Company cabinet that survives in the White House collection as 1904.690.1. Once the additional cabinets were built into the east wall of the China Room in 1917, the freestanding cabinet was moved out of the room, but not sold.

34. Detail of “Exhibition Cabinet for the Presidents China, The White House;” July 16, 1917, drawing 14.1-29, Office of the Public Buildings and Grounds, Records of the National Park Service, Record Group 79, National Archives, College Park, Md. 35. Account 46383, voucher 48, November 17, 1917, Miscellaneous Treasury Accounts of the General Accounting Office, National Archives, Washington, D.C. 36. Edith Benham to Baker, December 12, 1917, Baker Papers, OCWH. 37. Account 47351, voucher 12, March 9, 1918, Miscellaneous Treasury Accounts of the General Accounting Office, National Archives, Washington, D.C. 38. “Rites for Mrs. Baker at Calvary Baptist Today,” January 27, 1923, Washington Post, 2.

14. Baker, “The Cabinets Selected and the Collection Started,” in ibid., section 3, 69.

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An Artist’s Drawings for a new WHITE HOUSE PIANO Dunbar Beck and the Art of the Nation’s Second Steinway

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the grand piano on the State Floor of the White House was presented eighty years ago by Steinway & Sons to President Franklin D. Roosevelt as a gift for the White House. It was the company’s serial number 300,000 piano, replacing number 100,000, which the firm had donated in 1903 and is now in the collection of the Smithsonian American Art Museum. At a ceremony on December 10, 1938, Theodore Steinway, president of the firm, presented the piano in “thanksgiving by a family who arrived on these friendly shores from abroad and here were permitted to seek and make their homes and their lives, and to pursue their work with happiness and contentment.” President Roosevelt replied: “I hope that future Presidents will see that it is used for the advancement of music.”1 The piano is a rare example of twentieth-century design in the White House collection. The curved side of the custom-designed mahogany case, supported by carved and gilded eagle legs, is decorated with five gilt scenes of American music and dance by the artist and muralist Dunbar Dyson Beck (1902–1986). In 2018, the White House collection acquired by donation pencil drawings by Beck of two of these scenes—one of a lone cowboy and one of African Americans field hands. A third drawing, also donated, is a study for the field hands image.2 For this piano, Theodore Steinway and his staff collaborated not only with Beck but with the architect Eric Gugler and the sculptor Albert Stewart.

This team provided the “Decorative Scheme.”

Models and designs were shared with President Roosevelt and the Commission of Fine Arts for comment and approval. Gugler reminisced in 1970 that “the president was informed to some degree about what was going on—especially the subject matter for the paintings. . . . I had the feeling that he didn’t wish to interfere with the prerogative of the Art Commission to pass on the design of the piano.”3 To create a unique and distinguished “State Piano,” Gugler—a New York architect, friend of the Roosevelts, and White House consultant in the 1930s—devised a square form with simpler lines than the routine double-curve form. He wrote: “From the very first the idea of a ‘clean’ horizontal case, exceedingly simple, resting on three carved wooden eagles, came to my mind. The console tables in the State Dining Room influenced this suggestion.” Theodore Steinway’s recommendation for the use of fine Honduran mahogany for the case delighted the design team.4

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Stewart created the gilded eagle-form legs. In a commemorative booklet prepared by Steinway, the legs were described as “massive eagles, symbolic of freedom.” In presentation remarks, President Roosevelt called attention to the legs, saying, “Art has improved since 1903 [referring to the prior Steinway piano]. Art has at least caught up with ornithology. These eagles are eagles, and the others weren’t.”5

Steinway piano number 300,000 photographed in the White House East Room, 1938 (previous spread) and in the Entrance Hall, 2016 (above).

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BRUCE WHITE FOR THE WHITE HOUSE HISTORICA L ASS OCIATION

Calling him “a masterful craftsman,” Gugler suggested that his friend, Dunbar Beck, fulfill Theodore Steinway’s suggestion to decorate the case with “designs depicting American dance forms,” what would later be called “music indigenous to our Country.” He wrote, “While many of us were in doubt at first as to how it would appear and whether we could do it handsomely, or not, Mr. Beck finally evolved a series of five charming

compositions with which we all fell in love.”6 The compositions were listed in the company’s Steinway News. At the center, occupying one-third of the decorative span across the curve of the otherwise rectilinear case, was “Virginia Reel of the glorious Colonial Days,” a scene of six women and six men. President Roosevelt remarked that this scene brought happiness to “two people who specialize in the Virginia reel—my wife and myself.” At the far

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A L L I M A G E S T H I S S P R E A D : B R U C E W H I T E F O R T H E W H I T E H O U S E H I S T O R I C A L A S S O C I AT I O N / W H I T E H O U S E C O L L E C T I O N

Three pencil drawings made

by Dunbar Beck were donated to the White House in 2018. The lone cowboy (opposite) and one of two of African American field hands singing and dancing (above left) were executed on the Steinway piano made for the White House in 1938.

left is the “New England Barn Dance” composed of two couples and a fiddler. At the far right is the “Ceremonial Chant of the American Indian” composed of five dancing men.

The smallest scenes in between those three are the ones depicted in the newly acquired drawings.

Left of center is what was called the “Cowboy lifting his voice to the stars above the vast Prairies of the West.” This scene, signed and dated “DUNBAR BECK / ’38,” shows a solitary male figure dressed in cowboy hat, bandana, chaps, and boots, singing upward as he plays his guitar. He is standing in front of cacti, a setting that might be less the prairie than the desert Southwest.

Right of center is what was called the “Negro worker in the cotton fields of the South singing after the day’s work.” This scene appears in one drawing, also signed and dated “DUNBAR BECK / ’38,” showing a seated African American man facing forward, singing and clapping, while his companion, shown in profile, raises some dust with his dance.

With a vest over a partially open shirt, the dancer holds onto his hat with his right hand while his left arm curls at waist height. An ax buried in a log suggests that chopping wood rather than picking cotton was their recent labor. A second drawing is an unsigned sketch of the dancing man alone, wearing no hat, both arms rotating around his waist.7

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Beck, who first attended Ohio Wesleyan University in his hometown of Delaware, Ohio, received a bachelor of fine arts degree from Yale University in 1926. After three years as a fellow of the prestigious American Academy in Rome, he was awarded that program’s diploma in visual arts in 1930. Settling in New York City, Beck taught for three years at the Cooper Union. His work outside of the classroom may have been familiar to Steinway employees as, in 1932, he painted the Stations of the Cross for the newly built Art Deco Romanesque–style Church of the Most Precious Blood in Astoria, New York, located about 1 mile south of the Steinway factory.8 In 1935 Beck won first prize in a competition to decorate the New York offices of the Ever Ready Label Company. The competition, which took place during the Great Depression, was described this way: “muralists, employed or unemployed [during the Great Depression], were invited to submit designs” in a contest to show “the importance of art in commerce, and its profound influence as a sales-builder.” Beck created a series of figures shown over the course of history pursuing labeling as craftsmen, merchants, and printers.9 For the 1939 New York World’s Fair, Beck was one of many artists commissioned to create Art Deco–style murals and relief sculpture on the pavilions and buildings. For the Business Systems & Insurance Building, he created an alcove mural called The Genius of Progress or Genius of Business

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Administration showing a large six-armed classical male figure surrounded by factories. The walls flanking a curve in the garden facade of that building were decorated with what were called Recreation (a water polo scene of male swimmers) and Sleep (the goddess Diana holding a crescent moon above a sleeping couple). All the murals were lost when the temporary building was demolished at the close of the fair after its second season in 1940.10 Also in 1939, Beck was employed by the U.S. Treasury Department’s Section of Fine Arts, one of the federal agencies that helped provide work for unemployed artists to create Return of Timothy Pickering to Reside in Danvers, a mural in the post office in Danvers, Massachusetts, that is still in place.

Pickering had served in the cabinets of Presidents George Washington and John Adams as the postmaster general and secretary of state.11 In 1942 Beck moved to Sacramento, California, where he became a consultant for the McClatchy Newspapers. There he painted another set of Stations of the Cross and created stage sets for the Civic Theater. During World War II, from 1943 to 1945, he was a civilian camouflaging expert for the Army Air Corps at McClellan Field near Sacramento.12 From California, Beck stayed on top of the status of the Steinway piano at the White House. In January 1947, Theodore Steinway replied to an inquiry from Beck. He explained that the piano had been taken to the factory for slight repairs but assured Beck that “some day some one may make

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Artist Dunbar Beck poses in front of his painting, Adoration, which won the Rome Prize of the American Academy in Rome for 1930.

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ABOVE: WHITE HOUSE HISTORICAL ASSOCIAITON RIGHT: RICHARD TRASK

Dunbar Beck’s murals for the 1939 World’s Fair in New York included The Genius of Progress or Genius of Business Administration (above), which shows a six-armed classical male figure surrounded by factories. His mural for the Danvers, Massachusetts post office (right), the Return of Timothy Pickering to Reside in Danvers, remains in place today.

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Recently I have been advised that the White House Steinway is no longer in the East Room.

I presume that decorations on the rim have been damaged, as Theodore [Steinway] had anticipated, making the instrument less than

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presentable. . . . The original drawings are in my possession and I am still very much alive.

John H. Steinway, chairman of the board, replied that the piano was in the East Room, after having been removed to the factory in 1979 “for rebuilding of the interior works since it had forty years of good hard use.” He reported: During the rebuilding we did go over the case as best we could removing scratches, etc., [except for ] a few little scratches which we didn’t dare touch because we didn’t want to interfere with your beautiful art work.

Steinway copied his letter to White House Chief Usher Rex Scouten, who wrote to ask Beck if he might make “the original drawings a part of our historical record.”15 Again, the request from the White House went no further.

Beck died in Sacramento in 1986, and at his request, his ashes were scattered from the Golden Gate Bridge.16 In July 2014, Beck artwork located in Sacramento with an “estate of the artist” provenance were sold in seventeen lots on an internet auction site. One lot of White House piano materials, including drawings for the barn dance and Native American scenes, was among those sold,

Steinway piano number 300,000 is seen in the background of the East Room where President Franklin Roosevelt gathered with his family during the holidays in December 1938, shortly after the piano was presented to the White House.

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an injury to your lovely work, in which case, as far as I am concerned, no one will touch it but you!”13 When First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy undertook her much-publicized project to make the White House a museum showcase, Beck wrote to her in 1962, sending her information on the piano and citing “the myth . . . that President Roosevelt had designed it.” He added: “The original sketches for the dancing figures that decorate the rim are still in my possession. If you feel they would be interesting enough to add to the White House collection, I would be happy to give them to you.” In the reply from the Curator’s Office, William V. Elder thanked Beck for “a great aid in our research,” writing “it certainly disproves any ideas that the piano was designed by President Roosevelt, which has been the belief of many persons.” Elder expressed interest in having the sketches at the White House,14 but the donation never came to fruition.

In 1981, Beck wrote to Steinway, offering his services if the piano were in some disrepair:

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PA U L J. R I C H A R D S /A F P/ G E T T Y I M A G E S

A Marine Band pianist performs Christmas music on Steinway piano number 300,000 in the White House Entrance Hall, 2004.

but not the three drawings recently donated to the White House. Those three—along with two lots of works painted while Beck was traveling in Europe in 1927–28—were sold at another auction in 2017.

The Steinway piano with Dunbar Beck’s gold leaf decoration was routinely located in the East Room from 1938 to 1989. The frequent need to move it to the Entrance Hall during large events, however, led to its relocation there in 1989, where it is often played by members of the Marine Band during social functions. A 1966 article reported on the piano, then still in the East Room: “Tourists tend to gasp when they see it, but these are gasps of recognition and proper awe, rather than of surprise, for ‘that Gold Piano in the White House’ is pretty famous throughout the land.”17

notes 1.

“The New White House Piano,” Steinway News, c. December 1938; “Roosevelt Accepts New Piano for White House,” Washington Sunday Star, December 11, 1938.

2. 2018.1907.1-3, Gift of William G. Allman. Field Hands outline 105/8 x 7 13/16 inches, overall 117/8 x 85/8 inches; Study for Field Hands overall 117/8 x 81/4 inches; Cowboy outline 105/8 x 7 13/16 inches, overall 125/8 x 83/4 inches.

4. Gugler, “White House Piano.”

5.

Both quoted in The White House Steinway: The Nation’s Second Steinway commemorative booklet produced by Steinway & Sons, c. December 1938.

6. “New White House Piano”; Gugler, “White House Piano.”

7. “New White House Piano”; White House Steinway includes line drawings of three of the five Dunbar Beck scenes—the Virginia reel, barn dance, and cowboy.

8. Steve Gibson, “Painter-Designer Dunbar Beck Dead at 83” (obituary), Sacramento Bee, February 25, 1986, sent by John H. Steinway to Rex Scouten, White House chief usher, copy in OCWH. 9. “Murals in the Office,” Literary Digest, January 5, 1935.

10. Jeffrey Barrick, “Dunbar Beck,” posted March 3, 2010, Line and Flow blog, lineandflow.blogspot.com; “Art–Murals–Recreation (Dunbar Beck), New York Public Library Digital Collections website, https://digitalcollectionsnypl.org.

11. Evan Kalish, “Post Office Mural–Danvers MA,” posted April 7, 2018, The Living New Deal website, livingnewdeal.org.

12. Gibson, “Painter-Designer Dunbar Beck Dead at 83.”

13. Dunbar Beck to Theodore Steinway to January 7, 1947; Theodore Steinway to Beck, January 25, 1947, copies in OCWH. 14. Beck to Mrs. John F. Kennedy, July 17, 1962; William V. Elder, Registrar, to Beck, July 30, 1962, copies in OCWH. 15. John H. Steinway to Beck, June 16, 1981; Rex W. Scouten, Chief Usher, The White House, to Beck, June 24, 1981, copies in OCWH. 16. Gibson, “Painter-Designer Dunbar Beck Dead at 83.”

17. Charles Cooke, “All About ‘That Gold Piano in the White House,’” Washington Sunday Star, August 21, 1966.

3. “New White House Piano”; Eric Gugler, “The White House Piano,” Eric Gugler Papers, Office of the Curator, The White House (hereafter OCWH).

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PAT NIXON and Her Influence on the White House Collection

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1953–61, she accompanied him on goodwill tours around the world and was recognized for her ability to open lines of communication and establish rapport, even with Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev and his wife Nina.

Always a supporter of her husband, she was chosen as the Outstanding Homemaker of the Year, Mother of the Year, and Homemaker’s Forum’s “nation’s ideal wife” in 1953, 1955, and 1957, respectively.3 A 1960 Time magazine profile described her as having “formidable reserves of poise and aplomb, and a notably retentive mind. . . . Her drive and control have made her into one of the U.S.’s most remarkable women —not just a show piece Second Lady, not merely a part of the best-known team in contemporary politics, but a public figure in her own right.”4 Yet Pat Nixon “never sought the limelight,” says one of

previous spread

Pat Nixon views a portrait of President John Adams by John Trumbull. The portrait, on loan from Harvard University, was hung in the Blue Room during her renovations on the State Floor. below

A young Pat Ryan is seen working as a laboratory assistant at Seton Hospital Pharmacy, c. 1932, in one of many jobs she took on to make her way through college and support her younger brothers after losing her parents as a teenager.

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thelma catherine ryan nixon, called “Pat” by her family because she was born on the eve of Saint Patrick’s Day, is easily remembered for her loyalty to her husband, President Richard M. Nixon. With a fixed smile, she stood in the background when he defended himself in what came to be called his “Checkers Speech” in 1952. In 1974, when he spoke to the public following his resignation from the presidency, she held her head high. While her life and contributions as first lady are often overwhelmed by the tumult of her husband’s political career, she was also a determined woman who created her own legacy. As first lady from 1969 to 1974, she guided an important redecoration of the State Rooms of the White House and expanded the White House collection of fine arts. A half century later, the interiors of the White House still reflect her influence.

Pat Ryan’s childhood prepared her for her role as first lady only through hardship. Her father was a sailor, then a miner, and then a farmer who tried to eke a living from a 10 acre plot in southern California. Pat worked on the farm and, after both her parents died while she was still a teenager, took various jobs to support her brothers and keep the family together. “She had grit,” one of her brothers remembered.”1 She continued doing odd jobs to put herself through college, working at a pharmacy and a bank, as a telephone operator and as a laboratory assistant.

After graduation she took a teaching position at Whittier High school, worked as a paid extra in movies, and acted in local theater productions,2 where she met a young lawyer named Richard Nixon. They married in 1940.

While Nixon served in the navy during World War II, Pat Nixon continued to work, and when he returned to Whittier and decided to enter politics, she helped manage his campaigns, correspondence, and speeches.

During Nixon’s term as vice president,

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her biographers.5 She was an intensely private person who found media attention stressful. After Nixon lost the presidential race of 1960 to John F. Kennedy, she hoped he would retire from public life. But when he ran for president again in 1968, she supported her husband and maintained a unified front with him throughout his years in office.

Asked what kind of first lady she intended to be, Pat Nixon stated, “My first concern will be to make the White

ABOVE: ALAMY STOCK PHOTO RIGHT: GETTY IMAGES

Pat Nixon, seen above with her family on the North Portico on Inauguration Day 1969, intended to make the White House “a home, not a house.” Describing “people” as her focus during her time as first lady, Mrs. Nixon observed that “the personal touch” was needed to solve problems and worked to ensure that all visitors, including the disabled and those who did not speak English, felt welcome at the White House. She is seen below with a group of visitors on the South Lawn.

House a home, not a house. I would want it to be a gracious place where we can enjoy our family life as well as carry out our public responsibilities.”6 Betty C. Monkman, curator emeritus for the White House, explains that “Mrs. Nixon wanted the White House to be an elegant place for visitors to be received.”7 She worked to make it an inclusionary space, accessible to everyone. She arranged for tours for the deaf and blind and had wheelchair ramps installed as well as other accessibility accommodations.8 Most significantly as first lady, Pat Nixon directed a renovation and decorative refurbishment of the White House. According to Monkman, “The house had a great deal of use and wear in the mid- and late 1960s, and fabrics, carpets . . . needed replacement.”9 With the help of Monkman, Curator Clement Conger, the architect Edward Vason Jones, and the Committee for the Preservation of the White House, Mrs. Nixon undertook an interior redesign and an acquisitions program that aimed to secure furnishings and fine art of the highest quality. She was involved in all aspects of decision making and in welcoming donors and participating

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T OP: NATI ONA L A R C H IV E S AN D R E C OR D S A D M IN I ST R ATIO N / B O T T OM , B OT H IM AG E S: WH IT E H OUSE H IST ORI CAL ASSOCI ATIO N / W H ITE H O USE CO L L EC TIO N OPPOSITE: RICHARD NIXON PRESIDENTIAL LIBRARY AND MUSEUM

Pat Nixon with curator Clement Conger in the Red Room. The painting on the easel is a portrait of First Lady Louisa Catherine Johnson Adams by Gilbert Stuart, which was acquired for the White House in 1971.

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Pat Nixon examines a work table (seen open and closed, opposite) acquired for the White House collection in 1971 as her daughter Tricia and White House curator Clement Conger look on in the Green Room. The extraordinary and intricate table was made in c. 1810 and is attributed to New York furniture maker Duncan Phyfe.

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RICHARD NIXON PRESIDENTIAL LIBRARY AND MUSEUM

Pat Nixon poses in the renovated Red Room, November 1971. She stands beneath a French Empire thirty-six-light chandelier of gilt wood hung during the Kennedy administration. Seen here among the objects added to the Red Room during the Nixon renovation are the American Empire secretary desk (beside the window); a bust of Martin Van Buren by Hiram Powers (above the secretary desk); an English carpet in cream, red, and beige, c.

1850; a portrait of Angelica Van Buren

by Henry Inman (above the mantel); a pair of brass American andirons; and two French gilt vases (on the mantel).

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RICHARD NIXON PRESIDENTIAL LIBRARY AND MUSEUM

Mrs. Nixon presents the renovated Green Room to the press, December 1971. Among the many items seen in this photograph that were added to the Green Room during the Nixon renovation are a group of furnishings attributed to Duncan Phyfe including an easy chair (upholstered in pink); one of two mahogany drop-leaf card tables (to the right of the easy chair); a mahogany sofa table (on the right); two of three mahogany latticeback armchairs (center); and two mahogany window benches (beneath the windows). Also new to the Green Room are a Sheffield silverplate coffee urn owned by John and Abigail Adams (on the sofa table); one of two silver candlesticks

by Roch Louis Dany (on the sofa table); the Turkish Hereke carpet; a small unglazed porcelain bust of Benjamin Franklin; two painted and gilt window cornices (above the windows); a portrait of James Monroe by Samuel Morse (above the door on the right); and Still Life with Fruit by Rubens Peale (between the windows).

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RICHARD NIXON PRESIDENTIAL LIBRARY AND MUSEUM

Mrs. Nixon poses in the renovated Blue Room, May 1972. Among the many items seen in this photograph that were added to the Blue Room during the Nixon renovation are the reproduction Directoire wallpaper; a French mantel clock depicting Hannibal (on the mantel); a gilt wood framed mirror with églomisé panel (above the mantel); a portrait of James Monroe

by Gilbert Stuart; and two mahogany and gilt mount Louis XIV occasional tables.

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earthquake-ravaged Peru. In Vietnam, she visited a hospital and an orphanage as well as with soldiers.15 As Monkman summarizes, “She was tireless in her foreign trips and efforts to stress volunteer work throughout the country.”16 At the Republican National Convention in 1972, Pat Nixon received a standing ovation. “This is the most wonderful welcome I’ve ever had,”17 she said. Two years later she left the White House and never went back. Following her death in 1993, she was buried at the Richard Nixon Library. Her epitaph reads, “Even when people can’t speak your language, they can tell if you have love in your heart.”18 A few years later a life-size bronze statue of this quiet, determined first lady was erected in Cerritos, California, near the site of her childhood home.19 Across the continent, Pat Nixon’s contributions to the White House collection continue as a lasting tribute.20

First Lady Pat Nixon excelled as a goodwill ambassador on diplomatic trips. She is seen here on a visit to a classroom while accompanying her husband on a historic visit to China, February 1972.

JOHN DOMINIS/THE LIFE PICTURE COLLECTION/GETTY IMAGES

in press briefings. 10 According to Monkman, the first lady was particularly interested in the New York furniture by Duncan Phyfe acquired for the Green Room and in pieces belonging to President James Monroe.11 Modern first ladies are expected to have a platform, and for Pat Nixon it was volunteerism. She described her focus as “people.”12 “Government is impersonal,” she said, and to really get our problems solved, we have to have people too. We need the personal touch.”13 She coupled her efforts in promoting volunteerism with her love of diplomacy and diplomatic trips, picking up where she had left off a decade earlier as second lady. As one commentator noted, “She’s a political pro who is better than her husband at personal contact.”14 She was received with excitement on her trips to Africa and China.

For Latin America, she was a goodwill ambassador, taking food, supplies, and aid on a humanitarian trip to an

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This life-size bronze statue of Pat Nixon by Ivan Schwartz was dedicated in 1997 in Cerritos, California, near the site of her childhood home, which was destroyed by fire in 1978.

notes For more information on the legacy of First Lady Pat Nixon listen to the 16oo Sessions Podcast with Stewart McLaurin at https://www.whitehousehistory.org/1600-sessions/ the-legacy-of-first-lady-patricia-nixon 1.

Quoted in Julie Nixon Eisenhower, Pat Nixon: The Untold Story (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1986), 33.

2. Ibid., 46; “Pat Nixon: Steel and Sorrow,” Time, August 19, 1974.

3. Judith Viorst, “Pat Nixon Is the Ultimate Good Sport,” New York Times, September 13, 1970.

4. Burt Meyer, “The Silent Partner,” Time, February 29, 1960.

5. Linda B. Hobgood, “Pat Nixon: Wisdom to Know the Difference,” in Inventing a Voice: The Rhetoric of American First Ladies of the Twentieth Century, ed.

Molly Meijer Wertheimer (Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 2004), 317.

6. Attributed to Pat Nixon in Vera Glaser, “The Pat Nixon White House: Entertaining to Emphasize Elegance,” Abilene Reporter-News, January 17, 1969.

7. Betty C. Monkman, e-mail to author, November 21, 2018.

8. Jim Byron, “Pat Nixon and the Golden Age of the White House,” posted October 5, 2009, Richard Nixon Foundation, Library, and Museum website, www. nixonfoundation.org.

M A R C U S TAT E

9. Monkman, e-mail.

10. Betty C. Monkman, The White House: Its Historic Furnishings and First Families, 2nd ed. (Washington, D.C.: White House Historical Association; New York: Abbeville Press, 2014), 250; Monkman, e-mail.

11. Monkman, White House, 250, 252.

12. Mary C. Brennan and Timothy Naftali, “Patricia Ryan Nixon,” in First Ladies: Presidential Historians on the

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Lives of 45 Iconic American Women, ed. Susan Swain and C-SPAN, (Philadelphia: Perseus Book Group, 2015), 360; “Pat Nixon’s First Lady Project to Be Volunteerism,” Linton (Ind.) Daily Citizen, June 2, 1969.

13. Quoted in “The First Lady: Pat’s Bandwagon,” Time, March 16, 1970.

14. Betty Beale, “The Real Pat Nixon Finally Emerges,” Mansfield (Ohio) News-Journal, August 20, 1972.

15. “Pat Nixon Is Given Enthusiastic Welcome in Liberia,” Albuquerque Journal, January 3, 1972; “Pat Nixon Is Winning Friends, Influencing Many People in China,” Danville (Va.) Register, February 27, 1972; “Pat Nixon Launches Humanitarian Effort in Peru,” June 9, 2014, Nixon Foundation website; Betty C. Monkman, The Living White House, 13th ed. (Washington, D.C.: White House Historical Association, 2013), 95; Frances Lewine, “Trouble Doesn’t Diminish Pat Nixon’s Loyalty,” (Appleton, Wisc.) PostCrescent, August 9, 1974.

16. Monkman, e-mail.

17. Quoted in Helen Thomas, “Pat Nixon Is ‘Nominated’ for Re-Election as First Lady,” Lubbock (Tex.) Avalanche Journal, August 22, 1972.

18. Nixon Foundation Instagram post, June 22, 2018.

19. “Park to Get a Statue of a Young Pat Nixon,” Los Angeles Times, July 16, 1996; “Statue of Pat Nixon to Be Unveiled Today,” Los Angeles Times, March 1, 1997; “Pat Nixon Statue at the Cerritos Senior Center,” posted December 23, 2009, City of Cerritos website, www.ceritos.us.

20. Monkman, White House, 252.

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Marine One Past & FUTURE A Turning Point in Presidential Transportation CHARLES DENYER

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u.s. presidents have relied on helicopter transport for more than half a century. Helicopters, for presidents, have gone from being experimental in President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s day, to being essential in the twenty-first century. The hefty, highly sophisticated helicopters are commonly referred to as “White Tops” because, above the unique dark green body, a prominent white stripe covers the top and spreads partway down the sides. The White Tops in the skies over the nation’s capital are routine, but their thunderous noise still commands onlookers’ attention.

Marine One is the call sign of whatever U.S. Marine Corps aircraft is transporting the president, traditionally one of a suite of helicopters operated exclusively by Marine Helicopter Squadron One, known as the HMX-1 Nighthawks.

The men and women in this squadron are a select group of highly trained Marine pilots, considered the very best.

For decades they have managed takeoffs and landings on the South Lawn with precision.

The helicopters of choice for the past six decades have been the Sikorsky Sea King models, along with the VH-60N, a smaller, newer executive transport helicopter. But these aging Marine One helicopters will soon be replaced by the allnew Sikorsky VH-92s, slated to enter service in 2020. The VH-92 represents a quantum leap in presidential helicopter travel in terms of safety, security, technology, and overall amenities. Plush carpeting, seating for twelve passengers, ballistic armor, secure communications lines, and a whisper-quiet interior will be standard features on all VH-92 helicopters dubbed Marine One.1 According to the VH-92 Sikorsky program director Spencer Elani, “It’s also very quiet, so much so that you can have a conversation,” with the VH-92 providing “a smooth and comfortable ride.”2 For security reasons, Marine One always flies in a group of identical helicopters, up to as many as five. While one is transporting the president, the others serve as decoys. After takeoff, the decoys begin to shift in formation to obscure

the location of the real Marine One carrying the president. The current lineup of Marine One helicopters are equipped with a battery of security technologies, including flares to counter heat-seeking missiles, infrared countermeasures, and more. While Air Force One is often referred to as the president’s flying Oval Office, Marine One also keeps the president in constant communication with highly secure data transmission protocols that allow the commander in chief to conduct business as usual.

Whenever the president travels domestically or overseas via Air Force One, Marine One always goes along, together with the president’s limousine (known as “the beast”) because the U.S. Secret Service’s security protocol strictly prohibits the president from being transported on any other helicopter, airplane, or automobile.

Just as presidential motorcades are supported by numerous other vehicles, flying the president on Marine One requires supporting staff and materials, and that job is given to the MV22 Ospreys, tilt-rotor military aircraft capable of vertical takeoff and landing, commonly known as “Green Tops.” The White Tops and Green Tops together form what is known as the Executive Flight Detachment.3

Marine One carries President Donald Trump to Andrews Air Force Base, where the he will board Air Force One, 2019.

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WHITE HOUSE PHOTO

left

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previous spread, above, and right

Views of the all-new Sikorsky VH-92s, slated to begin service as Marine One in 2020. The new models will feature enhanced security, comfort, and technology.

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left

President Dwight D. Eisenhower stands beside the first presidential helicopter, a Bell H-13J Sioux, on the South Lawn of the White House, July 12, 1957. opposite

THE BEGINNING The first president to use a helicopter while in office was Dwight D. Eisenhower. When he opted for a brief flight to Camp David on July 12, 1957, the nature of presidential travel was immediately diversified. He flew on a Bell H-13J, a crude form of transportation compared with the modern-day fleet of Marine One helicopters. It had a top speed of 105 miles per hour and a range of approximately 200 miles. A heavily tinted Plexiglas nose bubble reduced glare, and inside, on seats with simple arm- and footrests, there was just enough room for the president, the pilot, and a single Secret Service agent. But the president was not alone in the skies.

An identical Bell H-13J would usually be close behind, carrying the president’s

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physician and another Secret Service agent.4 For years, the Secret Service—the agency responsible for the protection of the president—had held firm against helicopter use due to both safety and security concerns, but with growing nuclear threats from the Soviet Union, a much more efficient means of evacuating the nation’s commander in chief was necessary, and helicopter transport was the answer. In 1958, both the U.S. Army and U.S. Marine Corps took command of presidential helicopter responsibilities, while the U.S. Air Force retained sole responsibility for transporting the president in fixed wing aircraft. Since 1976, the Marine Corps has been given complete responsibility for all presidential helicopter missions.5

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President Eisenhower and his guest, Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev, board a U.S. Marine Corps Sikorsky HUS-1 helicopter on the White House lawn for a sightseeing tour over the nation’s capital, September 15, 1959.

As the first president to regularly use a helicopter, Eisenhower had two Executive Flight Detachments for his transport. These were provided by flight crews of the U.S. Army and the U.S. Marine Corps. To demonstrate his impartiality, the president alternated between these helicopters and their respective military personnel.

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“The helicopter was very smooth, very impressive,” according to former President Barack Obama after his first ride in the Sikorsky helicopter in 2009.

“You go right over the Washington Monument and then you know—kind of curve in by the Capitol. It was spectacular.”6 With presidential motorcades causing massive traffic jams almost anywhere the commander in chief travels, the White Tops have become a great alternative for fast, efficient, and secure transport. “On multiple occasions, he [President Obama] and his staff would use Marine One in order to eliminate motorcade-induced traffic jams around the country and the world,” according to Joe Mahshie, a White House Trip coordinator.7 Former President George W. Bush explained, “I don’t view it [Marine One] as a perk. . . . I really view it as a part of the presidency because it enables me to get from point A to point B without inconveniencing a lot of my fellow Americans.”8 Bush’s predecessor, President Bill Clinton, concurred. “I don’t know how I would function without Marine One when I was president,” he stated. He jokingly remembered how “I had trouble getting Buddy [Clinton’s Chocolate Labrador Retriever] on board. But in the end, he got to where he loved it. He would practically run off the leash to get on Marine One.”9 The cabin of the Sikorsky Sea Kings is so quiet that the president and others inside can speak in a normal tone of voice. Once, aboard Marine One, President George H. W. Bush and Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbachev engaged in a brief discussion of the fundamentals of American capitalism. David Valdez, President Bush’s White House photographer, vividly remembered that, following takeoff, as Marine One flew over the affluent Maryland suburbs of Bethesda and Chevy Chase, Gorbachev asked what one of those large homes would

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ASS OCIATED PRESS

MEMORIES

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opposite

Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbachev and President George H. W. Bush exit Marine One, at Camp David, Maryland, June 2, 1990.

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President Bill Clinton shares Marine One with his family. His dog, Buddy, seated next to Chelsea, was once a reluctant flier but grew to love the helicopter.

cost. Bush replied that a person might pay $1 million or $2 million for a home in that area. Gorbachev then asked how long it would take for someone to save up that much money to buy such an expensive property. Bush explained that people did not pay in full but got a mortgage to buy the home, prompting Gorbachev to ask, “What’s a mortgage?”

Valdez recalled, “We all looked at each other sitting there in the close quarters of Marine One and realized he had never heard of it before.”10 Lieutenant Colonel (ret.) Rob Bridgers, who flew Marine One during President Reagan’s last three years, remembered traveling the world with the president. “Any time there was any kind of a world meeting . . . Air Force One would fly him to the site and we [Marine One] would pick him up and deliver him a little closer to the actual white house history quarterly

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site.” According to Bridgers, President Reagan was lighthearted, always smiling, and full of jokes: “We’re [Marine One] pointing directly at the White House. So, he comes out with Mrs. Reagan, and we’re ready to take off and somebody taps me on the shoulder.

And I look behind me and it’s President Reagan and he says, ‘Rob, don’t hit my house when you take off.’” 11

MARINE ONE AND NATIONAL TURNING POINTS

“Therefore, I shall resign the Presidency effective at noon tomorrow. Vice President Ford will be sworn in as President at that hour in this office.”12 These twenty-five words forever changed the history of the American presidency. Fifteen hours after the speech, on August 9, 1974, Richard

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Nixon became the first president ever to resign from office. His final good-bye is still a famous image. Turning to flash his signature “V” victory sign, he boarded a presidential helicopter, a 6-ton dark green Sikorsky Sea King. Soon the thunderous blades lifted the mighty helicopter into the air, transporting Nixon to Andrews Air Force base for his final departure back to California.

The White Tops are also used for transporting the vice president of the United States, using the call sign Marine Two, to indicate that the nation’s second in command is on board.

During national emergencies, Marine Two has sometimes been at the center of the tension.

On March 30, 1981, President

Ronald Reagan was shot and wounded while leaving a speaking engagement at the Washington Hilton Hotel. Vice President George H. W. Bush, in Texas for a series of political events, promptly changed plans to return immediately to the nation’s capital. The arrival plans, approved by the Secret Service, were to have Bush land at Andrews Air Force Base, board Marine Two, and land on the South Lawn. Vice President Bush overruled his security detail, telling his military aide, “Only the president lands on the South Lawn.” Bush, clearly remembering these dark hours of presidential peril, remarked that “Something about landing on the South Lawn didn’t sit well with me. . . . It might well have made for great TV, but I thought it would have sent the wrong message to the country and to the world.”13 Almost two decades later, on the evening of September 11, 2001, Marine Two embarked on its first-ever liftoff from the South Lawn with the sitting vice president on board. The United States had been attacked that day, and Vice President Dick Cheney, after spending most of the day in the Presidential Emergency Operations Center, remembered that he “walked out of the diplomatic entrance of the White House onto the South Lawn, where a whitetop helicopter was waiting to take us to an undisclosed location. . . . As Marine Two gained altitude, we could see the Pentagon. The building was lit up for the rescue teams still at work, and smoke was rising from it.” 14 Just three days later, President George W. Bush visited the southern tip of Manhattan to see with his own eyes the still smoldering steel and rubble carnage from the World Trade Center’s Twin Towers. While memories of Marine One flights are often told by the president, family members, and senior staff, on this day the HMX-1 pilots spoke. Colonel Steve Taylor, who piloted Marine One on the flight to

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President Richard Nixon gestures his famous “V” for victory sign to bid farewell as he boards a presidential helicopter for his final departure from the White House following his resignation, August 9, 1974.

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R I G H T : GEORGE W. BUSH PRESIDENTIAL LIBRARY AND MUSEUM L E F T : T I M S L O A N /A F P/ G E T T Y I M A G E S

President George W. Bush steps off Marine One on the South Lawn of the White House, September 11, 2001, following the terrorist attacks in New York City and at the Pentagon (above, left).

Three days later, he viewed the World Trade Center disaster site from Marine One with New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, left, and New York Governor George Pataki, September 14, 2001 (above, right).

Ground Zero, remembered leaving Manhattan after the president’s visit: “On that day I think we all felt like we were a part of our nation’s history. We empathized with our fellow citizens; we supported the president on what was a difficult day for all Americans; we were angry at what had happened to our country. . . . Most satisfying to me was that throughout the response to 9/11, the men and women of HMX-1 responded with the calm professionalism they have been known for throughout the history of the squadron.” 15

notes 1.

Amanda Macias, “Marine One Upgrade: The Next Presidential Helicopter Fleet Is Getting Closer to Its Debut,” posted April 10, 2018, CNBC website, www.cnbc.com.

2. Quoted in ibid.

3. David Cenciotti, “Marine One and HMX-1 MV 22 Osprey Tilt-Rotor Aircraft Land on USS Gerald Ford Aircraft Carrier for President Trump’s Visit,” posted March 5, 2017, Aviationist: David Cenciotti’s Weblog, https://theaviationist.com.

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4.

“Bell H-13J,” Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum website, https://airandspace. si.edu.

5.

“Bell UH-13J Sioux,” National Museum of the U.S. Air Force website, www.nationalmuseum. af.mil.

6. Quoted in Amanda Macias, “There Is No Other Helicopter in the World Like Marine One,” posted December 19, 2016, Business Insider website, www.businessinsider.com.

7. Joe Mahshie, “An Insider’s Guide to Marine One: The President’s Helicopter,” posted June 25, 2017, The Points Guy blog, https://thepointsguy.com.

8. Quoted in Mary-Jayne McKay, “Marine One Flying High,” posted December 12, 2002, CBS News website, www.cbsneews.com.

9. Quoted in ibid.

10. David Valdez, interview with author, January 27, 2019.

11. Quoted in Jaime Dailey, “Former Marine One Pilot Remembers Reagan,” posted June 11, 2004, WTOC website, www.wtoc.com.

12. Quoted in John Herbers, “Nixon Resigns,” New York Times, August 8, 1974, 1.

13. Quoted in Alan Peppard, “Command and Control: Tested Under Fire,” Dallas Morning News, May 13, 2015.

14. Dick Cheney, with Liz Cheney, In My Time: A Personal and Political Memoir (New York: Threshold Editions, 2011), 10.

15. Quoted in Sara Bock, “The Flight to Ground Zero,” Marine Corps Association and Foundation website, https://mca-marines.org.

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Florence Harding WELCOMES Philippine Women to the White House Suffragist Leaders Identified in White House Photograph teresa ca randang and erw i n r . t i o ng so n

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on june 19, 1922, First Lady Florence Harding received a group of Philippine women at the White House. They were the wives and daughters of the delegates of the Philippine Independence Mission who were in the United States to seek complete Philippine independence. The Philippines was then a colony of the United States, acquired from Spain almost a quarter of a century prior, following the Spanish-American War in 1898. This visit took place six years after the 1916 passage of the Jones Act promised eventual independence to the Philippines, and nearly a quarter century before July 4, 1946, when the Philippines finally became independent.

The women’s group was “greeted cordially by Mrs. Harding,” reported the Washington Times, “who escorted them about the state apartments and showed them over the White House gardens.”

The women wore native Philippine dresses, “gaily

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First Lady Florence Harding is seen in a detail from one of a group of photographs (previous spread) that documents her greeting a group of Philippine women on the steps of the South Portico, 1922.

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Florence Harding

colored native costumes of gossamer silk,” according to the Washington Post. The Washington Evening Star report was effusive: “The costumes of the guests were charming, being in many instances, of the more exquisite native materials and fashion, and when Mrs. Harding accompanied them to the south front lawn, where she posed in a group picture with them, the scene was exceedingly effective.” “The call will linger in the memory of the First Lady as one of the picturesque events of her regime,” proclaimed the Washington Times.1 The visit is documented by several photographs of Mrs. Harding and her Philippine guests now in collection of the Library of Congress. The catalog entries are spare. One says, “Philippine women received by first lady,” identifying only Florence Harding and Sofia de Veyra, the leader of the group. A few years ago, the Philippine historian Bernardita Churchill identified the woman to the right of Florence Harding as Aurora Aragon Quezon, the future first lady of the Philippine Commonwealth, as the partly self-governing era from 1935 to 1945 was known. Further research in newspaper archives, biographies, and documentary materials, including ship passenger arrival records and passport applications, helped identify several more of the guests at the White House that day, all, it turns out, among the most extraordinary Philippine women of their time.2 In the next decade, several would help rewrite the suffrage law that would secure for Philippine women the right to vote.

Although women who were U.S. citizens had been guaranteed this right by the Nineteenth Amendment, ratified in 1920, women in the Philippines were not citizens and were thus excluded, although Philippine men had been granted suffrage in 1907.

Florence Harding might have been pleased to know of her guests’ later achievements in extending suffrage to women, for she was an advocate of women’s rights and in 1920 became the first future first lady to vote in a presidential election for her husband.3 She was also a member of the League of Women Voters and the National Woman’s Party.4 Her guests on that day in June 1922 were pioneers in efforts to improve the lives of women, and their work paved the way for new generations of Philippine women to play important roles in history, politics, and government.

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Photographers gather below the South Portico to document Florence Harding greeting her Philippine guests in 1922. Among the women who visited that day were several leaders of the Philippine sufferage movement.

American women had achieved sufferage in 1920, in time for Mrs. Harding to become the first future first lady to vote for her husband in a presidential election.

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On July 12, 1912, the American suffragist Carrie Chapman Catt and Dr. Aletta Jacobs, a Dutch physician and suffrage activist, traveled to the Philippines to promote women’s rights. Despite Catt’s observation in her diary that “the American women are afraid of the question lest it hurt them with the men and the Filipinas are afraid of the ridicule of the men,”5 the Society for the Advancement of Women was established and later became the Women’s Club of Manila.

Among the women who met with Carrie Chapman Catt was Sofia de Veyra, a founding officer of the Asociacion Feminista Filipina, established in 1905, and its offshoot, Gota de Leche, which provided milk for malnourished babies, educated their mothers in nutrition, and is now one of the oldest nongovernmental organizations in the Philippines.6 She also helped establish the first nursing school in the Philippines.7 While her husband served as Philippine resident commissioner from 1917 to 1923, de Veyra lived with her family in Washington, D.C., where she joined the Red Cross and subsequently received a Red Cross Medal and certificate signed by President Woodrow Wilson.

According to the Ladies’ Home Journal, she helped knit clothes for soldiers and contributed nearly a thousand hours of volunteer work, in addition to being mother to four children and serving as her husband’s part-time private secretary.8 A gifted speaker, de Veyra was fluent in English, Spanish, and Filipino.9 She often served as her country’s unofficial cultural ambassador,

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traveling around the United States to represent the Philippines and deliver “illustrated lectures” using stereoscopes, fabrics, jewelry, and paintings.10 In 1917, she and her husband served as members of the Honorary Council for National American Woman Suffrage Association Convention in Washington.11 In 1919, she and Mrs. Pacita Lao, also from the Philippines, were the first women from the foreign commissions to lay a wreath on the tomb of President George Washington at Mount Vernon.12 She was the Philippine representative to several women’s conventions including the Pan American Conference of Women in Baltimore in 192213 and the Pan Pacific Convention of Women in Honolulu.14 The Congressional Women’s Club exempted her from its strict membership rules and made her a nonresident member.15 De Veyra was widely quoted, her striking views and sensibilities seemingly ahead of her time. For example, at the American Red Cross Headquarters, she asserted that the women of the Philippines “can do most everything a man can do.”16 In Baltimore, she stated, “No man transacts business in the Philippines without first consulting his wife.”17 The Boston Globe wrote, “Those who have doubts about the ability of the Filipinos to govern themselves should have heard the illustrated lecture by Mme. J. C. de Veyra.”18 In 1930, after she and her family moved back to the Philippines, she was one of only two women who addressed the First Independence Congress held in Manila. “In life, woman is man’s partner, sharing with him the joys and sorrows, helping him to solve life’s problems,” she told her audience. “Why can she not also take part in shaping the destiny of the nation?”19

Among the Philippine women photographed with Mrs. Harding and now identified in photographs held by the Library of Congress are Sofia de Veyra (left) and Aurora Aragon Quezon (opposite).

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“In life, woman is man’s partner. . . . Why can she not also take part in shaping the destiny of the nation?”

—Sofia de Veyra

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“Why shouldn’t women be allowed to vote when they are subject to the same laws as men?”

— Aurora Aragon Quezon

Her temporary home during some of the most important and difficult moments in her life, Washington was of special significance to Aurora Aragon Quezon. She was a newlywed when she first came to the city in April 1919,20 having recently married Manuel Quezon, the Philippine Senate president who would one day become president of the Philippine Commonwealth. She visited Washington regularly over the next two decades, including in 1922, to accompany her husband as he took on increasingly important roles in Philippine government.

During World War II, Washington was home to Aurora Quezon and her family while the Philippine Commonwealth government was in exile. On May 13, 1942, President Franklin D. Roosevelt welcomed the Quezon family at Union Station and escorted them to the White House where a luncheon with American and Philippine guests was held the following day. Amid bouquets of roses, carnations, and maidenhead ferns, U.S. and Philippine presidents, their families, and officials of their respective governments sat down to a plentiful lunch.21 The party of fifty-two included Vice President Henry Wallace, Secretary of State Cordell Hull, Justice Frank Murphy, General George C. Marshall, and Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes. After lunch, the Quezon family moved to the Shoreham Hotel.

That summer the family stayed briefly in Ashburn, Virginia, at the Hurley Mansion (known as the Belmont Country Club) and later, more permanently, at the Shoreham Hotel, where the family quarters and government-in-exile offices occupied an entire wing. President Manuel Quezon died in August 1944 after a long battle with tuberculosis.

Aurora Quezon and her family left Washington soon after for the West Coast, where she remained until after the liberation of the Philippines in 1945.

Throughout her life, Aurora Quezon stayed away from politics, except for the issue of women’s suffrage. She campaigned for women’s suffrage and once asked her daughter Nini, “Why shouldn’t women be allowed to vote when they are subject to the same laws as men?”22

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Other Philippine women identified in Library of Congress photographs with Mrs. Harding are Pura Villanueva Kalaw ( far left), Inés Villa-González, (left) and Mercedes Tiongson Sandico (opposite).

Pura Villanueva Kalaw Pura Villanueva Kalaw played many roles in her lifetime—journalist, beauty queen, suffragist, writer, real estate entrepreneur, social worker, mother to four children, and wife to Teodoro M. Kalaw, a scholar and a government official. Before she married she was the founder and president of the Asociacion Feminista Ilonga and the editor of the Women’s Page of El Tiempo newspaper. Queen of the first Manila Carnival in 1908,23 she later managed family real estate investments to augment her husband’s public servant salary. An active, pioneering member of the Philippine women’s suffrage movement, she was encouraged by Catt to work with de Veyra to organize the Society for the Advancement of Women in 1912.24 When she accompanied her husband on the 1922 Philippine Independence Mission to Washington, newspapers noted her presence, mentioning her plans to visit the National Women’s Party headquarters.25 For many years after that visit, she continued to campaign for women’s suffrage.

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Inés S. Villa-González was a graduate student in philosophy at the Catholic University of America when she joined the group of Philippine women who visited White House in June 1922.26 She later obtained a doctorate in sociology from the University of Madrid. Her thesis, “Filipinas en el Camino de la Cultura” (“Philippine Women on the Road of Culture”), was awarded the Premio Zobel Award for outstanding writing in Spanish.27 While in the United States, Villa-González toured the country and gave lectures about the Philippines and the suffrage movement. Back in the Philippines, she organized and led the campaign for women’s suffrage in Cebu, her hometown. On forming a woman’s party, she said, “We believe such a party is the logical step to make women’s voice heard.”28 She wrote movingly about the rights of women in her book, The Philippine Epic of Democracy. “For decades, Filipino women had been acquiring a good education and training in various professions and trades, dedicating themselves to worthwhile social, industrial, economic, cultural, scientific advancement for the nation,” she wrote.

“Yet they were deprived of suffrage, although they were part and parcel of home, community and the nation.”29

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Inés Villa-González

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SUFFRAGE ACHIEVED

Mercedes Tiongson Sandico Although not considered a suffragist, Mercedes Tiongson Sandico was considered revolutionary. In 1889 she and twenty others—known as the Women of Malolos after their hometown north of Manila— wrote to Valeriano Weyler, the Spanish governor-general of the Philippines, requesting that the government open a Spanish-language school for women: “We humbly request Your Excellency that we be granted a night school . . . where we shall attend classes accompanied by our mothers to receive lessons in Spanish grammar under a Latin professor who will be paid by us.”30 It was a radical request because few Filipinos, especially women, were educated at the time, and Spanish friars of Malolos worked actively to prevent the teaching of Spanish. Surprisingly, Governor Weyler granted their request. Although the school lasted only three months, the Women of Malolos were celebrated for their accomplishment. The Philippine national hero José Rizal wrote, “No longer does the Filipina stand with her head bowed nor does she spend her time on her knees, because now she is quickened by hope in the future.”31 Sandico was in Washington in 1922 to accompany her husband, Senator Teodoro Sandico.

Many of the Women of Malolos remained actively engaged in politics over the next decades.

Sandico was a member of the Malolos chapter of the Asociacion Feminista Filipina, the organization that Sofia de Veyra helped to found, thus linking the Women of Malolos directly to the leaders of the suffrage movement.

It would be years before the women who visited First Lady Florence Harding in 1922 obtained the right to vote. Many in the Philippines opposed women’s suffrage, and Manuel Quezon himself was initially skeptical. As resident commissioner in 1916, he said he “would not withhold the franchise from women if they wanted to exercise it” but proclaimed that “the women of my country—practically all of them as I know their will—do not want to vote.”32 In contrast, many years later he said, “The Filipino woman is the equal of the best in the world and there is no reason why she should not enjoy all the rights and privileges of women in more progressive countries.”33 The 1935 Constitution of the Philippine Commonwealth included a provision granting women the right to vote conditional on a national plebiscite gathering 300,000 women’s votes in favor of suffrage.34 When the National Assembly passed the women’s suffrage national plebiscite bill in 1936, Pura Villanueva Kalaw, Sofia de Veyra, and Aurora Quezon, by then the first lady of the Philippine Commonwealth, campaigned tirelessly for women to cast their affirmative vote in this national referendum.

Their U.S. allies were as supportive as ever.

Carrie Chapman Catt asked First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt “to write a little appeal to the women of the Philippine islands, expressing the hope that they will turn out in large numbers and enfranchise themselves.”35 At Catt’s suggestion, Mrs. Roosevelt also agreed to meet with Sofia de Veyra, who was with Aurora Quezon at the Shoreham Hotel, visiting Washington at that time.

“On April 30, 1937, nearly 450,000 women out of 500,000 voted in favor of suffrage, far exceeding the required threshold. The 1937 Amended Election Law thus finally granted Philippine women the right to vote. Sofia de Veyra, Aurora Quezon, and Pura Kalaw were all present at the signing of the amended law that allowed women to run for political office, and many did.36 A number of these women had also been Washington visitors and residents. Senator

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P H O T O B Y D I A N A WA L K E R / T I M E & L I F E P I C T U R E S / G E T T Y I M A G E S

President Ronald Reagan greets Philippine President Corazon Aquino beneath the South Portico of the White House, September 17, 1986.

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Helena Benitez, for example, was a 1939 graduate of George Washington University. Senator Leticia Ramos Shahani, a champion of women’s rights who had lived with her family in the Chevy Chase neighborhood in the late 1940s, was the head of the U.N. Commission on the Status of Women and served as the Philippine delegate to several U.N. Conferences on Women. Gloria Macapagal Arroyo, president of the Philippines from 2001 to 2010, had been a student at Georgetown University in the 1960s, where she was a classmate of another future president, William Jefferson Clinton.

A photograph taken at the White House on September 17, 1986, is a striking sequel to the gathering photographed there in 1922. President Corazon Aquino and President Ronald Reagan stood on the South Portico as the heads of two sovereign democratic nations.

“It is only right that the Presidents of two such close allies meet,” Aquino said. That morning the two talked about supporting reforms “in a new environment of freedom, human rights, and democracy,” just a few steps away from where the group of Philippine women and First Lady Florence Harding once stood. “Today was a good beginning,” Aquino said.37

notes

1.

Jean Eliot, “Washington Society,” Washington Times, June 20, 1922, 10; “Society: Mrs. Harding’s Reception Held at the White House Yesterday for Filipino Ladies an Effective Affair,” Washington Evening Star, June 20, 1922, 8; “Philippine Women Guests,” Washington Post, June 20, 1922, 7.

2. This research was presented in The Washington Home of the Philippine Suffrage Movement, an exhibition at the Embassy of the Philippines in Washington, D.C., June 16–23, 2016.

Passport photographs proved helpful in identifying the women in the photograph, and personal networks traced a descendant who helped confirm her grandmother’s identity. A previously uncataloged film clip of the visit to the White House was also uncovered at the University of South Carolina, Moving Image Research Collection, Columbia, S.C. 3. Carl Sferrazza Anthony, “Florence Mabel Kling Harding,” in American First Ladies: Their Lives and Their Legacy, ed. Lewis L. Gould (New York: Routledge, 2001), 252.

4. “Florence Harding,” Miller Center of Public Affairs website, www. millercenter.org.

5. Carrie Chapman Catt, diary, July 19, 1912, Diaries and Photographs, 1911–1912, Carrie Chapman Catt, Wisconsin Historical Society Archives, Madison, box 1, folder 7; See also Maria Kalaw Katigbak, Legacy: Pura Villanueva Kalaw; Her Times, Life, and Works (Philippines: Filipinas Foundation, 1983), 223.

11. Alice Stone Blackwell, “Honorary Council for NAWSA Convention,” Woman Citizen, November 10, 1917, 453.

12. “Lay Wreath at Mt. Vernon: Philippine Women First of Their Sex So Commissioned,” Washington Post, April 9, 1919, 5.

13. Pan American Conference of Women (Baltimore: National League of Women Voters, 1922), 83.

14. “List of Delegates to the Pan-Pacific Women’s Conference,” PanPacific Union Bulletin, December 1928, 15.

15. De Veyra, “Faith, Work and Success” 23.

16. Quoted in “Filipino Men Docile,” Washington Post, May 27, 1920, 14.

17. Quoted in “Women Surprised by Mrs. Pankhurst,” New York Times, April 22, 1922, 9.

18. “Mme de Veyra Shows Filipino Progress, “Boston Globe, January 10, 1921, 4.

19. Sofia de Veyra, “Address of Mrs. Sofia R. de Veyra, President, Federation of Women’s Clubs,” Proceedings of the First Independence Congress, Held in the City of Manila, Philippine Islands, Feb. 22–26, 1930 (Manila: Sugar News Press, 1930), 285–87.

20. E. C. Drum-Hunt, “Society,” Washington Herald, April 20 1919, 2; “Happenings in Society,” Washington Times, May 8, 1919, 15.

21. “Luncheon at the White House,” press release, and “Luncheon for the President of the Philippines and Mrs. Quezon,” menu, both in Victoria Henrietta Kugler Nesbitt Papers, 1933–1949, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.; “Philippine President Feted at White House Luncheon,” Washington Post, May 15, 1942, 25.

22. Quoted in Edgardo J. Angara and Sonia Pinto Ner, Aurora Aragon Quezon (Quezon City: READ Foundation, 2012), 67.

23. Katigbak, Legacy, 192.

24. Pura Villanueva Kalaw, How the Filipina Got the Vote (Manila, 1952), 10, 21.

25. Washington Post, June 6, 1922, 12.

26. “Degrees Conferred at the Thirty-Fifth Annual Commencement, Master of Arts,” Catholic University Bulletin 30, no. 6 (June 1924): 77.

27. Inés S. Villa Suico, “Filipinas en el Camino de la Cultura” (PhD diss., University of Madrid, 1932).

28. Quoted in “Girls for Own Party,” Warren [Pa.] Times Mirror, May 15, 1935, 1.

29. “Ines S. Villa-Gonzalez,” Legal Alternatives for Women Center, Inc. website, www.womenslawcentercebu.org; Villa-González’s book is The Philippine Epic of Democracy (Cebu City: J&J Printers, 1968).

30. Quoted in Nicanor G. Tiongson, The Women of Malolos (Quezon City: Ateneo de Manila Press, 2004), 172.

31. José Rizal, “To My Countrywomen, the Girls of Malolos,” Philippine Review, January 1917, 26–27.

32. The Jones Philippine Bill: Speeches of Hon. Manuel L. Quezon, Resident Commissioner from The Philippines, in the House of Representatives, September 26–October 14, 1914, (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1914), 64.

33. Manuel Quezon, “Speech of President Quezon on Woman Suffrage and the Philippine Independence,” radiocast from Washington, D.C., to Philippines, April 4, 1937, in Messages of the President, bk. 3, Manuel L. Quezon, 1935–1944, vol., 3, Historical Papers and Documents (Manilla: Office of the President of the Republic of the Philippines), 126.

6. UNESCO Office Phnom Penh, The Preservation of Urban Heritage in Cambodia: Report and Conclusions of the National Seminar Held in Phnom Penh, 16 + 17 January 2006 (Phnom Penh: UNESCO, 2007), 32; Maribel Ongpin, “School Feeding Program,” Manila Times, October 31, 1914.

34. Katigbak, Legacy, 231.

7. Rosario Avila de Veyra, “Faith, Work and Success: An Appraisal of the Life of Mrs. Sofia Reyes de Veyra” (master’s thesis, University of San Carlos, 1959), 14–18.

37. Corazon Aquino, “Remarks of President Corazon Aquino to a Speech Preceded by Ronald Reagan on Democracy September 17, 1986,” Official Gazette of the Philippines, available online at www. officialgazette.gov.ph.

8. Frank L. Pyle, “An Ancient People and Their Problems,” Ladies’ Home Journal 37 (February 1920): 28–29.

35. Carrie Chapman Catt to Eleanor Roosevelt, April 13, 1937, file titled “Carrie Chapman Catt 1933–1943,” 69–70, Franklin D. Roosevelt Library, Hyde Park, N.Y. 36. Angara and Pinto Ner, Aurora Aragon Quezon, 78.

9. De Veyra, “Faith, Work and Success,” 14–18.

10. “Society,” Washington Post, October 20, 1921, 7.

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PRESIDENTIAL SITES Quarterly Feature

A Presidential Site Becomes Home to the Suffrage Movement The National Woman’s Party on Lafayette Square WILLIAM SEALE

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LEFT AND OPPOSITE

Ogle Tayloe (left) built his house on Lafayette Square in 1828, and from there witnessed more than fifty years of life and politics on the Square. Presidents Van Buren, Polk, Taylor, Fillmore, and Buchanan were his frequent visitors. The house still stands on Madison Place today (opposite) as part of the National Courts Complex. previous spread

The Camerons entertained just about everyone, including Presidents Cleveland, Harrison, McKinley—who was often there—and the first Roosevelt. The house was often rented when the senator lived at a hotel and his wife was resident in London or Paris. Both were very annoyed that an opera house was built next door, denouncing it as noisy and honky-tonk.

One of the tenants was almost as famous as the presidents and that was the National Woman’s Party. While students in England, Alice Paul, the party’s founder, and her colleague Lucy Burns had become involved with the work of Emmeline Pankhurst in demonstrating to achieve the ballot for women. Pankhurst’s strategy was to get noticed by the public in favor of her cause, and her efforts greatly annoyed the authorities as disturbing the peace. She was often jailed. Paul and Burns, too, had their time in British jails and workhouses.

To honor the war cause and avoid negative press Pankhurst ceased her protests in 1914 when Britain entered the war against Germany. This sent the two American women home to America, where they found a suffrage movement under way but one that was very mild and addressed mostly the state legislatures. They joined in, leading the Congressional Union for Woman Suffrage, first as part of the National Woman Sufferage Association, but soon split, eventually forming the more militant National Woman’s Party.

Suffragists gather near the entrance of headquarters for the Congressional Union for Woman Suffrage on Madison Place, 1915. Their landlord was Senator Don Cameron, who added the bow front after purchasing the house from Ogle Tayloe’s heirs in 1887.

The Camerons often entertained Presidents Cleveland, Harrison, McKinley, and the first Roosevelt here. bottom left

Suffragists call for Congress to pass “the federal suffrage amendment” as a crowd gathers around the statue of Lafayette in Lafayette Park, 1918. The Belasco Theater, adjacent to the headquarters of the National Woman’s Party on Madison Place, can be seen on the right of the photograph.

TOP AND OPPOSITE: WHITE HOUSE HIS TORICAL ASSOC IATION LEF T AND PREVIOUS SPREAD: LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

a m o n g t h e p r e s i d e n t i a l s i t e s close to the White House is the Ogle Tayloe house, which stands on the east side of Lafayette Square and is in use today as part of the National Courts Complex.

Built in 1828, or thereabout, as a private residence, it was a centerpiece of Washington society, beginning with its builder Ogle Tayloe, son of John Tayloe, the principal donor of the nearby St. John’s Church, and concluding with Senator Don Cameron in the early twentieth century.

Tayloe welcomed Presidents Van Buren, Polk, Taylor, Fillmore, and his close friend Buchanan. Of Pierce we are not certain, but the rest enjoyed the good company of a solicitous host, in an elegant setting that included some three-hundred statues, mementos such as Napoleon’s walking stick, and abundant hospitality. Time passed and Senator Don Cameron purchased the property in 1887. He and his famously beautiful wife Lizzie reflected their large Pennsylvania fortune in a total modernization of the house. The “bow” projection you see today was built by them on an alley left by Tayloe when he built the house, and it provided the Camerons with a fine new entrance hall and sweeping new staircase.

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Party moved across Lafayette Square to a town house on Jackson Place. In January 1918 Wilson signaled his support for suffrage, and what was called the Susan B. Anthony Amendment passed the House of Representatives. On September 30, 1918, Wilson went to Capitol Hill to speak in favor of the amendment, warning the Democrats that unless the Senate acted they might lose their congressional majority in the upcoming election. That is what happened, and the incoming Republican majority passed the women’s suffrage amendment on June 4, 1919, sending it to the states for ratification. Three-quarters of the states had to ratify, and when Tennessee did so on August 18, 1920, women’s suffrage was ensured.

In celebration, women massed in Lafayette Square. Alice Paul unfurled a banner from the Jackson Place headquarters of the National Woman’s Party and gave her victory address. Across the Square, members of the all-male Cosmos Club might have been watching from the windows of the Cameron house. They continued to preserve this “nonpresidential site” until it was condemned for government use in 1952.

As women cheer, suffragist Alice Paul speaks from a balcony on Jackson Place and unfurls a banner—with one star for each ratifying state—in celebration of the state of Tennessee’s ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment (opposite), which guaranteed women the right to vote, August 18, 1920.

S T O C K M O N TA G E / G E T T Y I M A G E S

Senator Cameron either rented or loaned his house, fully furnished, to Paul’s organization as its first official headquarters and for about a year the party carried on parades and demonstrations from there, mainly in front of the White House.

President Woodrow Wilson was genuinely angered by suffragist demonstrations, which included a vast parade the day before he took office.

He considered them both insolent pests and, by 1917, unpatriotic. Moreover, he believed that the issue of women and the vote was a matter for the state legislatures.

In the demonstrators’ contempt for Wilson, Ogle Tayloe’s house became a “non-Presidential site.” The president never entered its doors. From the White House he saw it constantly swarming with women, who came in large numbers to play their part in the battle for woman suffrage. By 1917 the protests became hostile, with protesters arrested and taken to the D.C. Women’s Workhouse in Occoquan, Virginia. Some women were force-fed to thwart attempted hunger strikes.

At the end of 1917, the Cosmos Club purchased the Cameron house and the National Woman’s

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NATIONAL ARCHIIV ES

The Nineteenth Amendment, passed by Congress on June 4, 1919, and ratified August 18, 1920, states: “The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex.”

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BRUCE WHITE FOR THE WHITE HOUSE PHOTOGRAPH

President George H. W. Bush, official portrait by Herbert Abrams, 1994. The forty-first president of the United States, Bush died on November 30, 2018, at the age of 94.

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Remembering President George H. W. Bush 1924–2018 “The Vishnu” CHRISTOPHER BUCKLEY

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The following tribute to President George H. W. Bush was first delivered

by Christopher Buckley at the Bohemian Grove in San Francisco on March 14, 2013, and is presented here

by White House History Quarterly in remembrance of the forty-first president of the United States.

those of us who worked for Mr. Bush when he was vice president had a nickname for him: “The Vishnu.” It was his own coinage. The vice president of Indonesia had recently presented to him a statue of the four-armed Vedic deity Vishnu, its plaque describing Vishnu’s many godly qualities, among them omniscience, omnipotence, and the title “Preserver of the Universe.”

Mr. Bush immediately recognized a kindred godhead and began referring to himself in staff memos and on Air Force Two’s public address system as “The Vishnu.” (In more intimate settings, he was “The Vish.”) There I’d be on the plane, a lowly speechwriter banging away at some arrival statement, when over the speakers would come in grave tones, “This is . . . the Vishnu speaking.” After the visit, had it gone well, upon takeoff we would hear, “This . . . is the Vishnu. The Vishnu is well pleased.”

It had a certain Oz-ness, which of course was the intended effect.

When the Vishnu became president in 1989, we stopped calling him that. It was only a few years ago that I was able to relax back into calling him by his old nickname. I get the sense that he’d missed being called by it.

Mr. Bush was, to be sure, a Yankee blueblood establishmentarian, but he was always winking at you, even in the midst of some very formal ceremony. He took a boyish delight in kicking his own pedestal out from underneath him. After he left the White House and started using e-mail, I asked his secretary what on earth the “flfw” part of it portended. The answer was: “former leader of the free world.” Well, why not?

On the first foreign trip I made with him, in 1981, I watched him charm the staff of a U.S. embassy with a story about a visit he had made to President Ronald Reagan after he was shot in an assassination attempt. Mr. Bush was shown into the president’s hospital room only to find it—empty. At a loss, he finally crouched down to look under the bed

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to see if perchance the current leader of the free world might (for some reason) be curled up there.

At which point he heard a voice from the bathroom: “George, I’m in here. Come on in.” With some reticence, Mr. Bush peered in. There was the president, on his hands and knees, wiping the floor with paper towels.

“Mr. President. What are you . . . doing?”

“Well, you see,” Reagan said, “I spilled some water and I don’t want the nurses to have to wipe it up.”

Mr. Bush loved that story for the volumes it spoke about the profound decency and humility of Ronald Reagan. He told it again and again until we, his staff, were heartily tired of hearing about the profound decency and humility of the president.

But the moral was not lost, even on cocky, self-important young politicos such as ourselves. On reflection, it could just as well have been a story about George Bush. I have no difficulty imagining him down on all fours in a hospital room, mopping up a water spill to spare the nurses. Moreover, had Mr. Bush been hospitalized after being shot by a deranged young man, I can quite easily imagine him getting back into bed after mopping the floor and handwriting his assailant’s parents a note of sympathy, expressing his concern for what they must be going through. For a multi-armed, omniscient, and omnipotent deity, the Vish was one of the most considerate men I have ever known.

Which could be maddening in a politician. My boss, his press secretary Pete Teeley, would shake his head and roll his eyes and mutter frustrated imprecations over the Vishnu’s steadfast refusal in those days (the early 1980s) to talk about his World War II record. One reporter, having serially failed to entice Mr. Bush into providing a dramatic account of being shot down over Chichi Jima by the Japanese, remonstrated afterward with Teeley, “For God’s sake, your guy’s a war hero. Why won’t he talk about it? It’s like drawing water from a rock.” Teeley could only shrug.

Then came the 1988 campaign and the era of Lee Atwater and the other high-velocity spinners.

From then on Mr. Bush pretty much had to talk about it. But you could see him wincing. He recoiled from chest thumping (the “Introspection Thing,” as he called it). This was, after all, a man who had been brought up short by his own mother at the Thanksgiving dinner table in 1980. He had been regaling the family with his adventures on the presidential campaign trail. Dorothy Bush said to

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him sharply, “George, stop it. You’re talking about yourself too much.” And he did.

As a boy, one of his nicknames was “Have-Half,” after his habit of always sharing half his sandwich with whoever was there. George H. W. Bush had a valence to him: he seemed to attract nicknames.

His namesake son famously has the converse habit of bestowing nicknames. But “Have-Half ” fit him, even later on in life. When he was vice president, Mr. Bush would stay over in Washington for Christmas rather than go home to Houston, so that his Secret Service detail could spend the day with their families.

There are dozens, scores, hundreds such stories about George Herbert Walker Bush. He had noblesse oblige—or as he once called it—“noblesse noblige.” Who but George Bush would have had the grace—and wit—to invite his impudent Saturday Night Live doppelgänger Dana Carvey to spend a night at White House. This was after Mr. Bush was defeated for re-election. Carvey didn’t quite believe it when the invitation arrived; but it was genuine, and he went, and was utterly charmed by his host.

For a speechwriter, putting words in Mr. Bush’s mouth could at times be a challenge. Mr. Bush was a natural storyteller, and a natural listener—a quality not generally in surplus among politicians. He was usually better off without a written text. And without props, as I learned the hard way.

The Soviets had invaded Afghanistan and as occupiers were engaged in atrocities. Among these was the usage of a device they were dropping from helicopters: “butterfly bombs,” as they were labeled

by NATO. Plastic, packed with high explosives, they looked like harmless toys. They fluttered gently to earth—hence the name—and when picked up by curious children, exploded. The intent was to maim, not kill.

I proposed that we anathematize this gruesome weapon by having Mr. Bush hold one up during the speech he would deliver on Sunday at the Kennedy Center on the occasion of “Afghanistan Day.” It would certainly make for a dramatic photograph.

After staff discussion, Mr. Bush said he agreed.

A man from CIA arrived in my office on Friday morning. He informed me that great pains had been gone to provide us with the (deactivated, naturally) butterfly bomb. He would return to my office on Monday to collect it. Its custody, he emphasized, was my responsibility. You can see where this is going.

Mr. Bush and I rehearsed his speech. I told him it was critical that he hold the thing aloft in his hand during the reference in the speech to the device, and that he hold it there long enough for the photographers to get their shot. I suggested that he take it home with him over the weekend and practice.

The speech was at noon. Sunday morning my phone rang at seven. The Vishnu. “Say,” he said, “do you have it? You know, the . . . thing.” “Sir,” I said nervously, “by ‘thing,’ do you mean the butterfly bomb?” That is to say, sir, the centerpiece of the speech you’ll be giving in a few hours. At the Kennedy Center. In front of thousands of dignitaries. Please tell me, no.

“Yes. Well,” he said blithely, “it doesn’t seem to be here anywhere.” But then why should he worry? It wasn’t his fingernails the CIA would remove on Monday morning.

I immediately phoned Ed Pollard, head of his Secret Service detail. You will not be surprised to hear that Secret Service agents, especially those at the supervisory level, do not brim with glee when told that you have given their principal a device associated with the word “explosives,” and without bothering to mention the fact to them. A rime of frost instantly formed over the phone line. Ed hung up without further pleasantries and ordered his men to fan out to find the bomb that I had given the vice president.

Several anxious hours later Mr. Bush and I were reunited backstage at the Kennedy Center prior to the speech. He grinned sheepishly and produced from his trench coat the cherished item. I sighed with relief—and then stared.

It was punctured through and through by what appeared to be canine dentition. The vice presidential cocker spaniel, Fred C. Bush, had purloined it on the limo ride from the White House to the residence. Eventually tiring of it, Fred had deposited it in Mrs. Bush’s dahlia bed. Thus a device made in Soviet Russia for the purpose of maiming Afghan children ended up as a chewy toy for the dog of the vice president of the United States. Monday morning, the little gray man from Langley listened impassively to my variation on the theme of “the dog ate the homework.”

Normally it was all but impossible to get the media to cover a vice presidential speech in Washington. The press that reliably attended was the guy from C-SPAN, who would set up his camera

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on a tripod at the back of the room—in case someone shot Mr. Bush, so they’d have B-roll—and then go smoke in the lobby.

Then, one day in December 1981, the Polish government declared martial law. The Cold War got very warm, very fast. Russian tank divisions were moving in. The Pentagon was issuing alerts, closing bases, canceling leaves; sabers on both sides were unsheathing. The tension was palpable.

Mr. Bush had a speech already scheduled for the next day. The president’s staff, perhaps by way of rewarding the vice president for good work, announced that he would give the official U.S. response to this outrageous provocation by the Warsaw Pact. My little heart leapt. All the world would be listening—finally!

Being a highly intellectual-type person, I reached for Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations and found a quote by Thucydides that seemed apt to the occasion. Always good to have a bit of classical parsley on the rhetorical plate. The next day, Mr. Bush took the podium, with all the world listening. He did beautifully. I was sitting at the staff table up front, purring with narcissistic satisfaction. Then Mr. Bush arrived at the Thucydides quote and . . . something happened.

I emphasize: Mr. Bush was a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Yale University. Thucydides was no stranger to him; indeed, he had probably written a term paper about him back in Andover.

Nevertheless . . .

“As the Greek historian Thoo . . . ooo . . . oooo . . . oooo.” From the vice presidential maw unscrolled an unending Mobius strip of vowels. I was seated next to retired four-star Admiral Daniel J. Murphy, currently Mr. Bush’s chief of staff. I had been with Benedictine monks for four years at boarding school, and knew something of authority figures.

Now I found myself working for a four-star Navy admiral. And boy, are they strict.

Admiral Murphy glowered at me. I mimed helplessly, “I didn’t make up the word.” Out, finally, slipped the slippery “cy-di-des.” The rest of the speech went without incident. Afterwards, Admiral Murphy jabbed me in the chest with steely finger and said, “Next time, say Plato.” And so began the Platonic era of Bush rhetoric.

During my time at the White House, I found myself, once or twice, the only other person in the room with Mr. Bush and President Reagan. Mr. Bush was unfailingly courteous in any situation,

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with anyone, from kings to cleaning ladies. Courtly and respectful—what we used to call “gentlemanly.”

With Reagan, even in a casual atmosphere, he was especially deferential; not obsequious, but extra attentive, as one might be with, say, a grandfather. This attitude struck me as filial, and entirely without affect.

I thought then, and think still, that in a way George H. W. Bush was the real Ronald Reagan. I mean this with no disrespect for Mr. Reagan, whom I admired and loved. But George Bush had gone to war; Mr. Reagan had played war heroes in movies.

George Bush was a devoted father; Reagan was perhaps devoted to his children, but in a very different way. This perception of mine jarred as I observed the two of them together up close, for it was Reagan who gave the impression of being the tougher guy.

No one would fault his physical courage. After all, he’d insisted on walking into the Emergency Room with Hinckley’s bullet in his lung, and had cracked jokes on the operating table, saying he hoped they were all Republicans. His heroic aura was genuine.

Bush’s was submerged beneath the genial preppy exterior: the Cowboy and Dink Stover.

Mr. Bush’s critics were constantly yapping at him for being preppy. Then, memorably, when the ’88 campaign got under way, the decorated war hero who had been shot down while flying his torpedo bomber into a maelstrom of Japanese flak, found himself on the cover of Newsweek, ridiculed for “the wimp factor.” But, if you’ve been to war as a young man, seen death face-to-face; cradled your dying six-year old daughter in your arms; drilled for oil in Texas; raised a family; been elected to the Congress; headed the Republican Party—during Watergate!; opened the first U.S. liaison office in China; run the CIA; and got yourself elected vice president of the United States . . . For someone who seemed gangly or physically awkward, he was utterly comfortable in his own skin, as the French would say. A later speechwriter of his who put into his mouth many golden words hit exactly the right note in his 1988 convention speech when she had him say, “I may be awkward at times, but there is nothing awkward about my love of country.”

Being comfortable in his manhood may in fact have been one of his greatest assets as president.

When the Soviet Union collapsed—on his watch — Mr. Bush took pains not to bang the drum and thump the national chest, lest it provoke a rump

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element of the Red Army. He was criticized for that, but history has since vindicated the wisdom of that reticence.

He was criticized, too, after the Tiananmen Square massacre, for not publicly excoriating the Chinese Politburo and demanding heads on pikes.

But he understood the Chinese mind, and that grandstanding would only be counterproductive.

He undertook quieter measures, and history has since vindicated those, as well.

Mr. Bush conducted what may have been America’s most efficient war, against a desert despot, assembling a historic coalition of twenty-six countries including Syria. And when that war was swiftly consummated, he withdrew—mission accomplished, to deploy a phrase that would haunt another Bush in later years. The senior Bush was criticized by a great many armchair warriors in 1991—notably by the neo-cons—for not “going all the way.” But he understood the terrible prospects involved in door-to-door warfare in Baghdad.

To be sure, he and his advisers made a tragic miscalculation when he encouraged Iraqis to rise up against Saddam. Those who did rise up were mercilessly cut down by Saddam, whose helicopters had been inexplicably been given permission to continue flying. This mistake gnawed at Mr. Bush.

But his wisdom in not “going all the way” has been ratified. In time, George Bush 41 may be well regarded by historians, as Eisenhower now increasingly is, as much for what he did not do, as for what he did.

Then there was the Pro-Am tournament at Pebble Beach after he retired from the presidency.

Mr. Bush sliced his drive off the tee at a murderous velocity, into the skull of an unfortunate lady spectator. He rushed over to apologize and comfort her as the medics applied pressure bandages. Hours later, lining up his put on the final hole, he saw a woman spectator in a wheelchair with her head bandaged. Re-mortified, he rushed over to renew his apologies, only to be informed that it was a different woman, who had been hit by Clint Eastwood’s ball.

I would never have traded my own father for any other, but I’ve always thought that George Bush is the father we all wish we’d had. His love was unconditional and total. He embodied Shakespeare’s admonition that “Love is not love which alters when it alteration finds.” His soul was always visible on his sleeve. And in his pocket there

was always a handkerchief, usually damp.

I was present in 2004 at the National Cathedral in Washington when Mr. Bush, struggling through his eulogy to Reagan, came close to breaking down.

I’d seen him do that so many times. He’d get all choked up during a playing of the National Anthem.

As for the Navy Hymn—forget it. Cataracts. For a flinty New England blueblood Yankee, Mr. Bush had the tear ducts of a Sicilian grandmother.

In November 1992 I phoned him at Camp David, a few days after his mother Dorothy passed away. A few weeks before, he had lost the presidency to a governor of Arkansas. Into the bargain, a hurricane was on its way to ravage his beloved house on the coast of Maine. Talk about a Melvillean “damp, drizzly November of the soul.”

Mrs. Bush’s funeral was the next day. I asked if he was going to give a eulogy.

“God no,” he said. “I couldn’t do it. I would choke up. I would be permanently ensconced as a member of the Bawl Brigade.”

The Bawl Brigade is the Bush family term for members who cry easily; by my count, it constitutes a majority of Bushes.

He explained: “I’ve had trouble paying my respects to the fallen sailors on the Iowa, or the dead out of Desert Storm, without getting emotional. I’d love to, but I know my limitations. I even choked up here at Camp David last night. We had our choir singing. We had a little vespers program with Amy Grant. It was so beautiful, and I found myself choking up. We had a bunch of friends up here and ‘Oh God,’ I said, ‘please hold back the floods.’”

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REFLECTIONS

Harmony Between Old & New A Home for the White House Historical Association

in 1818 commodore stephen decatur and his wife Susan began to build the most prominent private residence in the President’s Neighborhood, having engaged the services of renowned English architect Benjamin Henry Latrobe. Using money he received for his heroism during the War of 1812, Commodore Decatur was able to acquire a large section of land just north of the White House on which to build his magnificent home. This residence was the closest freestanding home to the White House, positioned on the corner of what is now Jackson Place and H Street Northwest, in Washington.

When Stephen Decatur and his wife, Susan, moved into their new home two hundred years ago, it was believed they would be long-standing residents of the neighborhood, and perhaps someday even occupy the only residence more prominent than their own—the White House—as president and first lady.

Unfortunately, the Decaturs’ time on Lafayette Square was cut short when Stephen Decatur was mortally wounded in a duel in 1820. In the next years, Decatur House continued as a private residence for many distinguished individuals, including Henry Clay and Martin Van Buren while they were secretaries of state. In addition to housing such prominent political figures, Decatur

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House was continuously occupied by numerous free and enslaved servants who are also a part of the Decatur House story. One was Charlotte Dupuy, who in 1829, while living in Decatur House, sued Henry Clay for her freedom and the freedom of her two children, based on a promise made to her by a previous owner. Her petition was denied, but her courage is testimony to the way enslaved persons used whatever resources were available to free themselves.

In 1956 Decatur House was acquired by the National Trust for Historic Preservation, and in 2010 the White House Historical Association entered into a partnership with the National Trust to become the steward of Decatur House. Although the Association’s primary mission is to

maintain the museum quality of the State Rooms in the White House and to educate the public about the history of the White House, we are also committed to telling the important story of Decatur House and to providing new resources for research on the role this house has played in the history of Washington.

In addition to providing free tours of the house and the enslaved persons’ quarters, our campus hosts an annual symposium, a quarterly lecture series, the Association’s teacher institute, and a myriad of other programs and activities all focusing on White House history. The campus also houses our main office space, where we produce our award-winning publications—both books and this quarterly journal—educational materials for classrooms across the country, resources for our digital library, and other wonderful content on the story of the President’s Neighborhood.

On March 31, 2019, the White House Historical Association was honored to be recognized by the Institute of Classical Architecture and Art, Washington MidAtlantic Chapter, for the work of our good friends Franck and Lohsen Architects on the restoration of historic Decatur House.

Receiving the John Russell Pope Award for Historic Preservation highlights our commitment to maintaining this great American treasure of a building.

WHITE HOUSE HISTORICAL ASS OCIATION

STEWART D. M C LAURIN PRESIDENT, WHITE HOUSE HISTORICAL ASSOCIATION

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B R U C E W H I T E F O R T H E W H I T E H O U S E H I S T O R I C A L A S S O C I AT I O N

Views of the renovated first floor of the historic Stephen Decatur House on Lafayette Square. As co-steward of this National Trust for Historic Preservation property, the White House Historical Association completed a renovation in 2018 in order to create spaces with a harmony between new and old that could be used for special receptions and meetings. Rather than creating a museum, the Association chose antique furnishings as well as original artifacts from the Decatur House collection to highlight the history of the house and to allow the home to be once again the center of important activities in the President’s Neighborhood. Clockwise from top left: the entrance hall looking east toward Lafayette Park; a view of the grand stair from the entrance hall; and the formal parlors, once used by Commodore Stephen Decatur as his office.

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WHITE HOUSE HISTORY Quarterly

WHITE HOUSE HISTORY QUARTERLY FEATURES articles on the historic White House, espe-

cially relating to the building itself and life as lived there through the years. The views presented by the authors are theirs and do not necessarily reflect the position or policy of the White House Historical Association.

THE WHITE HOUSE HISTORICAL ASSOCIATION FRONT COVER : Photograph of the new Sikorsky VH-92, was chartered November 3, 1961, to 2020. enhance slated to begin on service as Marine One in The new understanding, appreciation, and enjoyment thetechmodels will feature enhanced security, comfort,ofand historic[u.s.

White House.

Income frombythe sale of White nology. marine corps photo sgt. hunter helis] House History Quarterly and all the Association’s books and guides returned to likely the publications and BACK COVER: is Sewing table, made by theprogram New York is used as well to acquire historical and cabinet-maker Duncan Phyfe c. 1810,furnishings seen open in the memorabilia the[erik White House. /white house Green Room, for 1991. kvalsvik collection] ADDRESS INQUIRIES TO : THE HOUSE HISTORICAL WhiteWHITE House Historical Association, ASSOCIATION

was P.O. chartered Box 27624on November 3, 1961, to enhance understanding, and enjoyment of the Washington, D.C.appreciation, 20038 historic White House. Income from the sale of White books@whha.org House History Quarterly and all the Association’s books and guides is returned to the publications program and © Copyright 2019 by the White House Historical is used as well to acquire historical furnishings and Association. All rights reserved. No part of this publication memorabilia for the White House. may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, ADDRESS TO :recording, or otherwise, without mechanical,INQUIRIES photocopying, White House Historical prior written permissionAssociation, of the White House Historical P.O. Box 27624 Association.

Washington, D.C. 20038 books@whha.org ISSN:

2639-9822

© Copyright 2019 by the White House Historical Association. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without prior written permission of the White House Historical Association.

ISSN:

2639-9822

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In this issue of White House History Quarterly we highlight pivotal moments in chapters of change at the President’s House. Our front cover features a turning point in presidential transportation with a photograph of the all-new Sikorsky VH-92, slated to begin service as Marine One in 2020. An innovation as unusual as today’s helicopter, or its contemporary the steamboat, was the 1810 domestic work or sewing table (seen above in the Green Room). It was likely a creation of the New York cabinetmaker Duncan Phyfe, who flourished in the Era of Good Feelings. It was one of many fine objects added to the White House collection during the refurbishments led by Pat Nixon nearly a half century ago.