The Hidden White House: Harry Truman and the Reconstruction of America's Most Famous Residence by Klara Robert

Author:Klara, Robert [Klara, Robert]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
Published: 2013-10-22T00:00:00+00:00

NINETEEN

SOMETHING TO REMEMBER YOU BY

Looking for a souvenir from the White House? Maybe an old nail, or a sliver of wood, or a partly charred timber, or some antique hardware? You’ll have to take it up with the commission.

—Washington Post, March 31, 1949

When Truman had finished his laugh over General Edgerton’s photograph of Hoban’s ghost, another thought occurred to him. “Say, General,” he began, “do you have some of the things they took out of the White House down here? I’d like to see some of that again.” Edgerton said, “Sure enough,” and pushed open a door that led to a chamber behind the wall. Hersey likened what he saw to “a cross between a museum and a junk shop.”1 Here, tucked away among the South Lawn’s construction shacks, was the general’s cabinet of curiosities—objects removed from (or found hidden inside) the house that would not be put back but were too interesting to be tossed out. There were old work boots that had been entombed behind a wall, a saber discovered below the North Portico, and the brick imprinted with the dog’s paw that Lorenzo Winslow had fished from the rubble underfoot.

Then something on the room’s far wall caught Hersey’s attention. It was an array of unusual objects hanging from hooks screwed into a board. There were pieces of old wood, whole bricks, and paperweights fashioned from ornamental trim. There was even a walking stick whose color and grain were a perfect match to the yellow poplar and white oak of the White House’s old floor beams. Hersey had become the first member of the public to get a peek at one of the most unusual government projects ever: the White House renovation’s official souvenir program.

* * *

From the commission’s earliest meetings, the most aggravating item on the agenda had been deciding what to do with all of the demolition debris. The material in question did not include the finely crafted decorative interior pieces that Winslow had removed and set aside. It was the guts of the house that needed to be dealt with: floor joists and wall studs, chips of fractured plaster and hammer-broken stone. As Edgerton admitted to a reporter, “We’ve got a quarter of a million bricks, about 30,000 hand-hewn laths and more handmade nails than we like to think about.”2 Where was all of it supposed to go?

Had the debris come from any other building in the country, that answer would’ve been obvious: It would top off the nearest landfill and that would be that. But these were pieces from the president’s house; a kinder, gentler version of the scrap heap would have to be found. It wasn’t sentimentalism that drove the commission to think this way so much as the fear of complications: If the White House’s insides were carelessly tossed out, someone would find them and sell them. After all, it had happened before.

Winslow was old enough to remember how, during the installation of Coolidge’s new roof, workmen went home each night with bulging pocketsful of old White House nails.

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