February 27, 2007
Decorators-in-Chief III Posted by Alexander Burns at 09:00 AM EST John Steele Gordon addresses the question of presidential decor and points out that we owe a debt to Jacqueline Kennedy for making the White House the majestic building it is today. He also mentions the White House’s long history of shoddy treatment at the hands of earlier Presidents and points out that Mary Todd Lincoln ended up outspending the Clintons in her efforts to restore the seat of American executive power. I’d like to continue discussing this last point, regarding the Lincolns’ redecoration. Mr. Gordon is surely right that “the nation had other calls on its treasury” when Mary Lincoln decided to refurbish the White House. In fairness to Mrs. Lincoln, her redecorating was rather less selfish than the Clintons’ (or the Reagans’). Rather than just redecorating the presidential residence, Mrs. Lincoln refurbished the entirety of the White House. Furthermore, in 1861 the White House was a much more public place than it is today. One of the reasons that Lincoln had to spend so much money to improve the building was that it hosted many more uninvited guests than one might imagine. Doris Kearns Goodwin describes this in her recent work, Team of Rivals: “The White House family quarters were confined to the west end of the second floor. . . . The rest of the mansion was largely open to the public. . . . [Secretary of State William] Seward reported to his wife, ‘the grounds, halls, stairways, closets’ were overrun with hundreds of people, standing in long winding lines and waving their letters of introduction in desperate hope of securing a job.” One can hardly imagine a similar scene in any recent White House. Like Mr. Gordon, Goodwin acknowledges that the wartime footing of the nation left Mrs. Lincoln’s renovations open to criticism as frivolous expenses. The outcome of the renovations was widely applauded, though, and the public response to mansion’s new appearance was one of pride. In a time when the White House was both a symbol of national dignity and a landmark that the public could enjoy, cosmetic expenditures might have seemed rather more forgivable. I imagine (though I don’t know) that the secretary of war would have felt differently.
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