Recollections of full years

by Helen Herron Taft

At each of the four corners of the house there is a suite; all arranged on the same plan, exactly alike, except as to decoration. Each consists of an exceedingly large bedroom with a spacious bath, and a smaller room adjoining which may be used as a bedroom or dressing-room. I went first into the large bedroom which my husband and I expected to occupy. The windows of this room look out on the White House gardens where the large fountain plays, and, beyond, on the Washington Monument, the Potomac River and the distant Virginia hills. This, I think, is the most glorious vista in Washington, which is a city of splendid vistas, and seeing it that March night by the long line of lights which stretch across the Potomac bridge and meet the lights of Arlington, it was, indeed, inspiring.

The room was the room where Lincoln slept, indeed, where every President since Jackson has slept. A tablet under the mantel states this fact. It is the room which must necessarily have more intimate and personal association with the men who have occupied the White House than any other. Other parts of the house have been the scenes of great historic events and of magnificent hospitality, but here, one after another, the Presidents of the United States have really lived and been at home.

Its furnishings have, undoubtedly, been changed many times and yet I found it to contain many old and interesting pieces. The most striking object in the room was an enormous four-poster bed with a great curved canopy of wood, decorated with carved and gilded eagles and upholding heavy draperies of blue and white brocade. In this bed, we had been told, the Prince of Wales slept when he visited this country in 1860, but on the first night I discovered that, whatever its historic interest, I did not like it as a bed to sleep in. I soon replaced it with two smaller mahogany beds and I dispensed altogether with the draperies. There were canopies of the same gilded eagles over the windows, and the curtains suspended from them, as well as the upholstery of the sofa and chairs, were of the same blue and white brocade. Some of the furniture was colonial, some Victorian. The colonial furniture in the White House is very good and there is quite a lot of it in all the bedrooms, but many of the bureaus and wardrobes are of the scarcely-to-be-called beautiful style of the Victorian era. I secured for our room, later on, the beds, a dressing-table and some chairs, all colonial. These were about the only pieces of furniture I bought for the White House. I also substituted heavy chintz for the brocade draperies and upholstery, and did away with the canopies entirely, as they seemed to me to be too heavy for a sleeping room. The small room in the corner of our suite Mr. Taft used for a dressing-room.

The corresponding suite across the hall I gave to Helen, my daughter. It had been occupied by both of the Misses Roosevelt and before them, I believe, by Mrs. McKinley. It had been fitted up in pretty flowered chintz for Miss Ethel Roosevelt, after Miss Alice had married, and we left it unchanged.

I strolled down the hall, which contains only a large table and a few portraits of Presidents for which there is no wall space down stairs, and looked into the Library which is exactly in the center of the house on the south side. It is oval like the Blue Drawing Room beneath it and it is a little dark in the daytime, being shaded by the roof of the south portico. This was Mrs. Roosevelt’s favourite room and it had been fitted most charmingly with many of her own belongings, but as they were now gone and my own had not yet been moved in, it looked rather bare. The furniture had not been upholstered for many years and it was a little shabby. Later on I had it all recovered and the walls of the room retinted, and when I had put in some of the Oriental tapestries and handsome pieces of furniture which I had brought with me from the Far East it made a very beautiful and livable room. We used it a great deal, especially when there were guests, but for the family the sitting-room at the end of the hall was always the favourite gathering place.

Opposite the Library a short corridor extends to the window under the roof of the front portico and on each side of this doors open into smaller bedrooms; smaller, that is, in comparison with the four large ones. Even these would be considered large in an ordinary house. One of them I assigned to the housekeeper and the other to my two sons. The boys’ room was rather dark, with its windows directly under the roof of the portico; and it was furnished, moreover, in dark red, a colour which does not add light to gloominess, but the boys got it because they were the members of the family who would care the least and who would be the most away.

The great staircase descends from the central hall just beyond these rooms and facing the staircase is the President’s Study. The eastern end of the building was all used as offices until the new offices were built and the house restored in accordance with the original plan. The Presidents with large families must, indeed, have been in an uncomfortable situation when they had to confine themselves to the rooms in the west end, the only rooms then available for living purposes. The facts are that such families found the house to be less commodious than a “five-room flat,” as the wife of one President expressed it. I believe the Roosevelts, until the house was remodelled, were unable to accommodate one guest.

© Harris & Ewing.
TWO WHITE HOUSE BEDROOMS SHOWING FINE OLD COLONIAL BEDS

There is a story that when Prince Henry of Prussia was in Washington, President Roosevelt invited him to ride. The Prince accepted and just before the appointed hour appeared at the White House in his street clothes, accompanied by a valet bearing his riding clothes. He had very naturally expected to change at the White House, but it happened that on that day there was not one room that could even be prepared for a Royal dressing-room, so the President was compelled to request His Highness to return to the German Embassy to change. I believe this incident had the effect of hastening the deliberations of the members of the Appropriations Committee of the House who were then leisurely figuring on the amount necessary for the restoration.