How Presidents Change the White House Reveals a Lot About Them

President Coolidge keeps an eye on the 1927 White House renovation

By Jacob McNeill

The press chastises President Trump’s White House renovation as though he were offending John Adams and James Hoban themselves. But in fact, many presidents have edited Hoban’s structure—with mixed results.

And thereby hangs an engineering tale.

Start with President Theodore Roosevelt. In 1902, Roosevelt worked with the architect Charles McKim, of the most admired firm of the era, McKim, Mead & White. McKim undertook a massive renovation. In July, he reported that the White House was “torn to pieces,” adding that “bedlam let loose does not compare with it.” The workplace became a chaos, with the public and even workers walking off with “souvenirs” and selling them.

But in typical Roosevelt fashion, the president hurried his contractor. He set off for his summer home in Oyster Bay, Long Island, saying he wanted the work completed by the time he returned three months later.

Perhaps as a result, McKim often improvised, including when it came to a serious structural problem: the weight of the roof and upper floors. As Patrick Phillips-Schrock reports in The White House: An Illustrated Architectural History, McKim’s workmen tore out a load-bearing wall of the State Dining Room and inserted an inadequate steel truss to carry the weight.

Nonetheless, McKim’s renovation—or restoration, as the architect called it—clearly established the White House as the symbol we know today.

Seven years later, Roosevelt’s successor, William Howard Taft, made his own mark on the executive mansion. He added what we call the Oval Office.

Enter the Coolidges. Grace Coolidge’s interest in history coincided with the rise of the historic preservation movement. Upon moving into the White House in 1923, Grace was disappointed in the lack of original furnishings. The first lady lobbied for and obtained a joint resolution from Congress allowing the White House to receive gifts of treasured objects in line with the historic nature of the building’s interior. Mrs. Coolidge desired to restore the White House in the Federal style, and she brought in more traditional furniture.

In 1925, an advisory committee of experts was assembled to review gift offers and make recommendations on interior decor. Mrs. Coolidge did not receive as many suitable gifts as she had hoped, but her efforts established the tradition of antique, Federal-style furnishings up to the present day. In this way, she can be seen as a precursor to another first lady curator, Jacqueline Kennedy.

In 1927, Mrs. Coolidge worked with her committee to refurbish the Green Room, maintaining her commitment to Federal-period design and giving the White House a museum-esque ambiance. Committed to her cause of fine interior decor for the house, she crocheted and donated a coverlet for the Lincoln Bed, which she used in her personal bedroom. She hoped to establish a tradition among first ladies of leaving mementos for the home.

But larger concerns pressed on the Coolidges—and the White House. A 1923 report found the building’s roof trusses to be weakened and no longer safe. The third floor of the White House then served as an attic used for storage and living space for staff. As time went on, the storage function led the attic to be overloaded with paper records, heavy machinery, and water tanks. All contributed to the weakening of the trusses.

In 1925, President Ulysses S. Grant’s grandson, Lt. Col. Ulysses S. Grant III, was appointed the director of the Office of Public Buildings and Public Parks. He would oversee the coming changes to the White House. Congress appropriated $375,000 for the project. Contractor bids were requested, and in true Coolidgean fashion, the lowest of the nine bids was the winner.

The plan was to renovate the attic and roof areas of the White House to add a full third floor to the building.

The work began on March 14, 1927. The Coolidges decamped to the Patterson Mansion on Dupont Circle, which is where the president greeted aviator Charles Lindbergh that June.

Workers removed the wooden trusses, which had been in place since 1815, when the building was restored after the War of 1812. Although the beams had been carrying too much weight, they were determined to be in generally good condition at the end of their 112-year service, which spanned twenty-six presidencies. The National Lumber Manufacturers’ Association purchased a large portion of the wood and refashioned it into various souvenirs, such as gavels and candlesticks, distributing them to prominent people at the time.

The wooden trusses were replaced with modern, durable steel beams. This work was completed in record time, by the beginning of July that year. The third floor had been transformed: it now featured guest bedrooms, offices, and a solarium, or “sky parlor,” as Mrs. Coolidge called it. Interior design was in the Federal style. When the Coolidges returned from their 1927 summer White House in South Dakota, all was complete.

Coolidge’s renovations were so significant that they led to speculation he would run for office again in 1928.

There were problems, though: the renovation hadn’t alleviated the weight problems, and in some places had worsened them. “Coolidge put a concrete 3rd floor on top of Teddy’s botched rebuilding,” President Harry Truman later recorded in his diary. The addition added “180 tons to the old brick pillars’ carrying capacity.” Truman’s rebuilding took not months but years.

Still, one can isolate a quality to Coolidge’s renovation. It was not a makeover but a plan designed to make the White House more itself. The Coolidge renovations reflected the president and first lady’s beliefs and temperaments. The changes respected history, restoring the interior design of the White House to its early nineteenth-century origins. The winning contractor for renovation work was the firm with the lowest bid. And, unlike the 1902 Roosevelt renovations, the Coolidge construction did not see an epidemic of workers grabbing souvenirs to pawn off.

Indeed, the Coolidge-era renovations reflected much of what is so admirable about Calvin and Grace: a reverence for tradition and history, thrift, and honesty.

Jacob McNeill is program manager of the Coolidge Senators program at the Coolidge Foundation.