Margaret Truman Read Free Page B

replacing the whitewash on the outside walls with white lead paint (which made the White House an even more popular name), but the north and south porticos were still under construction and the inside was a mess.
    Nevertheless, the Monroes moved in and Elizabeth Monroe set about decorating the house with furniture they had ordered from France. If the workmen’s materials were removed, the President’s House would at least be fit to entertain in. James Monroe gave the order, the materials were stashed away, and on New Year’s Day, 1818, the president and first lady invited the public to a gala reception. When it was over, the materials were replaced and work on the house resumed.
    The Monroes continued this practice whenever they entertained, but the work stopped when the country was hit by the Panic of 1819 and did not resume until the economy improved. The building was finally completed in 1830, not long after Andrew Jackson moved in, and thirty-eight years after it was started.
    VI
    For almost a hundred years, the president’s office competed for space on the second floor with the chief executive’s family. This meant that visitors to the mansion were constantly trekking up and down stairs, allowing first families little privacy. As the responsibilities of the president increased, particularly during the Civil War, more work space was needed, impinging still further on the first families’ living arrangements.
    With President Benjamin Harrison’s arrival, however, additional space became crucial. The Harrison household included their daughter, her husband, and their two-year-old son and baby daughter; Mrs. Harrison’s ninety-year-old father; and a widowed niece. With so many people in residence, there was little room and even less privacy. Caroline Harrison tried to free up space by using the state rooms as family sitting rooms, but it soon became apparent that the only solution was expanding the building itself.
    Mrs. Harrison consulted an architect, who drew up a plan that would add wings at either end of the mansion. The one on the west would provide office space for the president, leaving the entire second floor available for his family.
    The plan got a warm welcome in the Senate but it came to a dead stop in the House. The Speaker, brooding about the fact that President Harrison had failed to appoint one of his friends to a federal job, refused to bring it to the floor.
    VII
    In 1900, as part of the program celebrating the centennial of Washington, D.C., a symposium was held to discuss the need for improving the city’s appearance. In the years since Pierre L’Enfant laid out his plan for the Federal City, public buildings had been put up in a variety of architectural styles. Vacant land was overgrown with ratty-looking patches of grass and fouled by grazing livestock. Railroads ran up and down the streets and crisscrossed the Mall, and there were a half-dozen different terminals scattered around the city.
    Prompted by the symposium, Senator James McMillan, a member of the Committee on the District of Columbia, appointed a commission to develop and improve the city’s parks. Its members, who were among the leading tastemakers of the day, quickly recognized that a lack of parks was only the beginning of the city’s problems.
    The commission drew up the McMillan Plan, based on Pierre L’Enfant’s original design for Washington, which called for a city of stately buildings, beautiful vistas, and manicured lawns and parks. L’Enfant, who had been booted out in disgrace a little more than a hundred years earlier, would have been delighted to learn that he had suddenly become a hero and that his vision of the nation’s capital would finally be realized.
    Essentially, the McMillan Plan created the Washington of today, with federal buildings clustered around the Capitol, and Union Station replacing the street-level railroad tracks and individual terminals. The