Recollections of full years

by Helen Herron Taft

THE WHITE HOUSE AS IT LOOKED ON THE EVENING OF THE FOURTH OF MARCH, 1909

We made a trip to Panama in February before the Inauguration and did not reach Washington until the end of the month when we went to stay with our friends, Mr. and Mrs. William J. Boardman, and their daughter, Miss Mabel Boardman, at their residence on Dupont Circle. We spent with them a busy week as the recipients of varied and delightful hospitality, which was terminated by a splendid reception in our honour on the evening of the second of March.

Captain Butt, who was to be continued as aide to President Taft, called on me at once upon my arrival in Washington to assure me that my instructions had been carried out and that the new régime, fully organised, would go into effect at the White House on the morning of March fifth.

Some time before the Inauguration, indeed shortly after Mr. Taft’s election, President Roosevelt expressed a desire that we should dine with him and Mrs. Roosevelt on the evening of the third of March and spend that night in the White House as their guests. This was breaking a precedent, but it was Mr. Roosevelt’s plan for bidding us a warm welcome to the post which he was about to vacate, and my husband accepted with grateful appreciation. My impression is that neither Mrs. Roosevelt nor I would have suggested such an arrangement for this particular evening, but, it having been made for us, we naturally acquiesced.

The third of March, a stormy day, was filled with innumerable minor engagements and small incidents, with instructions and counter-instructions and, especially, with weather predictions and counter-predictions, so it was not until shortly before eight o’clock that Mr. Taft and I, having dressed for dinner, arrived at the White House. The other guests at the dinner were Senator and Mrs. Lodge, Senator and Mrs. Root, Admiral and Mrs. Cowles, Mr. and Mrs. Nicholas Longworth and Miss Mabel Boardman.

Now there is always bound to be a sadness about the end of an administration, no matter how voluntarily the retiring President may leave office, no matter how welcome the new President and his family may be. Mrs. Roosevelt seemed depressed, not, I am sure, over the prospect of leaving the White House,—Presidents’ wives are always given plenty of time to prepare themselves for that event,—but for other reasons which one easily could surmise. Her husband and son were about to start for a long and, possibly, dangerous trip into the jungles of Africa, and she was looking forward to a year of anxiety. She was leaving a full and busy life; she had occupied her high position for nearly eight years, during which she had made a host of friends, and a great number of them had called during the afternoon to say farewell and to express their deep regret at her departure. I knew all of these things, realised their depressing effect and sympathised with her deeply. The President and Mr. Taft, seconded by other guests, did their best with stories and conversation, made as general as possible, to lighten the occasion, but their effort was not entirely successful.

As my husband had an engagement to attend a “smoker” which was being given to him at the New Willard Hotel by a large gathering of Yale men, the party broke up very early and, as soon as the last of the guests had gone, I went immediately to my rooms. We had been assigned to the suite in the southeast corner, known in the White House as the Blue Bedroom.

This Blue Bedroom gave me food for interesting reflection. Conspicuous, under the mantel against the side wall, I found, on a bronze plate, the following inscription (which I read as I struggled with my hooks): “In this room Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation of January 1, 1863, whereby four million slaves were given their freedom and slavery forever prohibited in these United States.” It is only a state bedroom now, having been made so by the plans of the McKim restoration which was accomplished during the Roosevelt administration, but it was once Lincoln’s Cabinet room, a room in which he lived through many terrible days during the Civil War. It seemed strange to spend my first night in the White House surrounded by such ghosts.

I went to bed reasonably early, hoping that I might have a good, long sleep and get up refreshed and ready for an eventful day. But the press of circumstances was against me. My mind was never more wide awake. In spite of my determination to rest, I went carefully over the whole Inaugural programme. I wondered if this had been done, if that had been attended to. I worried over many petty details with which I had no reason to be concerned. I suppose I must have been excited, a condition quite rare with me, but then, too, the weather had something to do with it. Never was seen such a night in Washington. It will be remembered that Mr. Moore, the Chief of the Weather Bureau, had prophesied that the storm of the third would pass and that the Fourth of March would dawn as clear and bright as any Inaugural Committee could wish. He made himself very popular with the anxious officials, who were expending their energies in the preparation of a fair weather programme, but his popularity was short lived. He afterward learnedly explained that some wholly unprecedented thing had happened in the wind currents, causing a “flareback”—whatever that may be. It was a memorable “flareback” in any event, not to be forgotten by those who were so seriously inconvenienced by its results.