Presidents Have Long Caught Holy Hell for Messing With The White House

by MARK POWELL

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Garments are rent, and a persistent wail shrieks across the land. The East Wing of the White House is no more!

And… it’s nothing new. 

Because when it comes to that lovely old residence in downtown Washington, D.C., two ironclad rules have been established over the years.

1. Change is unavoidable.
2. The public hates change.

It’s been that way since the very beginning, as one of our most revered founding fathers discovered the hard way. Thomas Jefferson, the third president, was the second chief executive to live at 1600 Pennsylvania. During his eight-year tenure, he got tired of cows and pigs meandering through the premises, so he put his presidential foot down.

Jefferson erected a fence to keep out hungry livestock. He built two fences, in fact. The first was a simple wooden design. A more permanent stone fence followed a few years later.

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Americans were outraged.

“He’s betraying revolutionary principles, keeping the people out of the People’s House!” they howled. 

But the fence stayed… as did the pattern of public recrimination anytime a president messed with the residence.

From then on, there was an endless stream of expansion, reconstruction, additions and alterations. When the Brits burned the house down in 1814, it was rebuilt (on the cheap, as it turned out, with later reconstruction revealing the original charred support beams still in the attic). The walls were coated with white paint to cover the smoke stains; giving the home the nickname that followed became permanent when Teddy Roosevelt officially decreed it “The White House” in 1901.

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Andrew Jackson added the North Portico in 1829-30 (the familiar Pennsylvania Avenue entrance we know today was originally intended to be the back door, with architect James Hoban envisioning the grander South Portico as the official entryway).

Glass greenhouses were built to supply a steady stream of floral decorations year-round, only to be torn down decades later to make room for a new West Wing in 1902. When it burned in 1929, it was rebuilt and expanded, only to be significantly enlarged yet again, less than five years later.

A third floor was added to the White House in 1927, but it almost proved to be its undoing. The structure built in the 1790s simply wasn’t designed to sustain all that weight. The whole thing came within a whisker of collapsing in 1948. When inspectors went through it from attic to cellar that fall, they then went straight to the Oval Office and told President Harry Truman, “Get out. Right now. We can’t guarantee the walls will remain standing for another minute.”

The White House staff dropped everything that instant and emptied it of all belongings.

There was considerable debate over what to do next. The White House sat eerily empty for months, like something out of a ghost town. Some wanted to tear it down and build another presidential residence on the site. Others wanted to erect a new house for the chief executive and his family in nearby Virginia or Maryland. A third group wanted to build a new home and keep the old one for a museum.

Truman finally put an end to the debate. The White House would be completely rebuilt and remain the president’s home. Period, end of discussion. So, it was gutted, given a proper foundation, shored up with steel support beams, and provided another 200-year lease on life.

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Less controversial but equally significant was First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy’s interior makeover in 1961. More than a décor do-over, she oversaw a meticulous historical restoration featuring dozens of authentic pieces that had been absent from the White House for many decades and were returned to their original positions.

“I approve of what you’re doing to the White House as strongly as I disapprove of your husband’s politics,” one woman wrote to Mrs. Kennedy.

But nothing, nothing in 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue’s 225-year history, compared to the raw, savage fury that erupted when Harry Truman put in a back porch.

No, really.

One evening in February 1946, Truman summoned the White House’s chief usher to the second-floor Oval Study. He pointed out the window through the South Portico to the Washington Monument and Potomac River beyond.

“That’s a magnificent sight,” he said. Then he dropped his bombshell.

“I’m going to put a balcony there.”

It was the historical equivalent of the Great San Francisco Earthquake. Truman was no fool. He knew his proposal would ignite a firestorm. So, he had his rationale ready to share with Congress, the news media, and the public. But he also had a deeply personal reason for doing it that he kept totally to himself.

First, the experts were on his side. They said adding a balcony would make the mansion’s south front more architecturally pleasing. In layman’s terms, long vertical lines (such as the original six stone columns which survived the Brits burning the place) look better when broken up by a horizontal line across the middle. Such as a balcony. (Wink, wink.)

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Then there were the savings. In the pre-air conditioning era, the mansion’s first floor sweltered during Washington’s tropical summers. Each year, ugly canvas awnings were installed over the ground-level windows to provide a bit of relief. Not only were they eyesores, but they were also dust magnets. Hauled down in the fall, they were so filthy they couldn’t be used again. Meaning a new batch had to be purchased every summer. By 1946, that was costing the government $20,000 a decade—nearly $360,000 today. Adding a balcony would save Uncle Sam money in the long run.

Democrat Truman didn’t bother asking the Republican Congress for the $16,000 to fund the project, since “no” was a foregone conclusion. He came up with the cash by cutting the president’s household account.

Then, in typical Truman fashion, he went ahead and built his balcony.

His opponents (and there were many, for Truman was very unpopular at the time) thundered, “He’s ruining the White House!”

The Commission on Fine Arts was adamantly opposed. Congressional leaders claimed he was desecrating a national landmark. “Truman wants to turn the White House into a country club,” roared Frank Keefe, a Republican congressman from Wisconsin. Newspaper editorial after editorial railed against it. One compared it to “sticking a porch onto Mount Vernon.” The White House was flooded with furious letters of complaint from outraged citizens. 

When construction was completed and the fuss finally died down, even critics grudgingly admitted it was an improvement. Architectural experts admitted it actually improved the South Portico’s appearance.  

The balcony became so respected that Republicans, in fact, jokingly “thanked” Truman for improving the house for the man they were sure would replace him, Thomas Dewey. They even circulated a button saying, “Truman was screwy, to build a porch for Dewey!” 

But as we all know, things didn’t turn out that way.

The man from Missouri squeaked out a narrow win in one of history’s greatest election upsets.

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RELATED | TRUMP’S ‘BIG BEAUTIFUL BALLROOM’

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Thirteen presidents have lived in the White House since Truman left, and many have called the balcony their favorite spot. Besides providing one of the capital’s most impressive views, its breezy informality is a welcome break from the official stuffiness inside. The Truman Balcony is, quite literally, the White House’s back porch.

Which brings us to Harry Truman’s real, secret reason for building it in the first place.

Truman’s passion for his wife, Bess, is one of the presidency’s greatest love stories. He fell in love with her the first time he saw her in 1890 and didn’t stop loving her until the day he died in 1972.

While Bess loved Harry in return, she hated the spotlight that accompanied the presidency. Though she admirably performed her duties as First Lady, she jumped at any chance to return to their home in Independence, Mo., where she spent the entire summer of 1945, leaving a lonely Harry pining for her in the White House.

Their daughter Margaret wrote, “one of the chief pleasures of 219 North Delaware Street [the Independence house] was its porches, particularly the back porch…” where the family whiled away summer evenings “secure from prying eyes.” The Trumans sat there for hours, reading, listening to baseball on the radio (Bess was a huge fan), and playing cards while Bess savored the privacy.

Since Harry’s job didn’t allow him to share the back porch with his wife back home, he decided to bring the back porch to Washington.

Harry Truman added the Truman Balcony in the hope it would lure his wife into staying with him during the summer months.

But it didn’t work.

Much as Bess appreciated the gesture and genuinely liked the new balcony, it wasn’t the same as the one at home. And nothing, nothing at all, could overcome her burning desire to flee Washington, with or without her husband. The summer of 1948 found her back on North Delaware Street.

As Donald Trump embarks on the most significant renovation of the White House complex ever – the addition of a 90,000-square foot, $250 million ballroom on the site of the old east wing – naysayers are once again out in force.

Will Trump’s addition silence them? With an ambitious construction schedule in place which hopes to have the new structure by completed by January 2029… we eagerly await its unveiling.

And the judgement of history.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR…

J. Mark Powell is an award-winning former TV journalist, government communications veteran, and a political consultant. He is also an author and an avid Civil War enthusiast. Got a tip or a story idea for Mark? Email him at mark@fitsnews.com.

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