TLS as president, two pages, 7 x 9, White House letterhead, January 20, 1948. Letter to George Rothwell Brown. In full: “I can't tell you how very much I appreciated your good letter of January seventeenth. I knew about the difficulty Andrew Jackson had with the Pennsylvania Avenue front of The White House and they had almost exactly the same trouble when they put the new columns on the south porch. The old columns were very narrow and did not in anyway go with The White House as a whole.
For the last few years they have had awnings on the south porch which covered up the windows and put the beautiful columns out of proportion. The awnings were also exceedingly dirty and were impossible to keep clean. Every year we had to buy a new set of awnings at Seven Hundred and Eighty Dollars and all together it took about Two Thousand Dollars a year to keep them up.
In my walks in the morning when I'd approach The White House from the south the dirty awnings obstructed the view of those beautiful columns on the south porch and I tried to think out a remedy for the situation. I called in the Fine Arts Commission and they informed me that if an outstanding architect made a suggestion for the remedy they would approve it. I talked to Mr. Delano, who had been a member of the Fine Arts Commission, and he immediately fell in with the suggestion which I made for a portico, as all these old southern mansions have in cases of this sort, so arranged that the awnings would be out of sight when not in use. When the job is finished everybody will like it. The Chairman of the Fine Arts Commission told me that the Commission would be glad to go along with the architect’s decision. When Mr. Delano approved my suggestion, the Chairman of the Commission then wrote me that the Commission had never thought he would!
When I was on the Public Building and Grounds Committee in the Senate we worked out a plan for the completion of the Capitol at the time when building programs were in order for employment. As you know, the north wing and the south wing of the Capitol are Vermont marble and were added sometime between 1835 and 1850. It was decided to put a new dome on the old Capitol, which is built of red sandstone, move the east portico out in conformity with the north and south wings and veneer the sandstone and the dome with marble, We succeeded in getting a project of that sort through the Senate but two or three Congressmen went out and made a campaign, such as the one they are making on this portico, and defeated the project. As you know, the Capitol dome is one of the three great domes in the world-the other two are on St. Peter's in Rome and St. Paul’s in London, Michelangelo being one architect and Sir Christopher Wren the other. The present Capitol dome sits seven feet over the east portico, therefore, it hangs in the air. Sometimes you don’t understand what causes people to tick. I hope you will come and take a look at the new arrangement when it is finished. I wonder if we ought to put the green shutters back on The White House and take out all the bath tubs!” Letter is affixed to a slightly larger board. In fine condition, with scattered spotting and toning and a few corner tip dings.
By 1948, Truman’s plans for architectural renovations had already been thwarted by Congress twice. As senator, he helped create a plan to alter the Capitol building, whose dome grossly overshadowed the columns that supported it; unfortunately, “Congressmen went out and made a campaign, such as the one they are making on this portico, and defeated the project,” and it wasn’t until 1958 that the new Capitol came to fruition. After his second proposal (to build an addition to the West Wing) was rejected, Truman decided to use money allotted for White House maintenance to add a balcony to the South Portico. Ironically, this project (the cheapest of his proposed renovations and the only one approved to completion) led to the discovery that the building was structurally unsound, resulting in a multimillion dollar, two-year overhaul of the entire interior. In this lively letter to George Rothwell Brown, writer and member of the Washington staff of The Boston Herald, the president discusses his current renovations as well as his rejected attempts—a wonderful piece in the architectural history of the White House, along with the president’s penchant for renovation. Pre-certified John Reznikoff/PSA/DNA and RR Auction COA.
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