Margaret Truman by The President's House: 1800 to the Present : The Secrets, History of the World's Most Famous Home Page B

morning. It took the Harrisons the better part of a year to get up the nerve to use the electric lights in the living quarters. They were equally fearful of pushing the electric call buttons to summon the servants. “There was a family conference every time this had to be done,” Hoover wryly recalled.
    Ike was promoted to usher in 1904 and became chief usher during the Taft administration, a job he held for the next twenty-five years. In all that time, there was only one problem he was unable to solve. When Herbert Hoover became president in 1929, there were two Mr. Hoovers in the White House. To avoid any confusion, Mrs. Hoover insisted that Ike be referred to as “Mr. Usher.”
    III
    I’m sorry to say that slaves were not uncommon in the pre–Civil War White House. Abigail Adams, the first woman to examine the place with the eyes of a practiced hostess, thought at least thirty servants were needed to run it. She was unquestionably right, but the early presidents tried to cope with far fewer than that number because Congress, already convinced the president was overpaid at $25,000 per year, declined to include the White House in their budgets.
    Jefferson tried to economize by importing some of his slaves from Monticello, but he soon decided this was not a good idea. They did not get along with his French steward, who had a poor command of English and an autocratic style. By the end of his first term, Jefferson was telling his daughter back in Monticello that he preferred white servants. “When they misbehave, [they] can be exchanged,” he wrote. He meant fired and replaced, of course.
    Andrew Jackson imported slaves from his Tennessee estate, The Hermitage. President Zachary Taylor, another slave owner, used blacks from his Louisiana plantation. But a change in the American attitude toward slavery was beginning to take hold in many people’s minds. Fearful of political repercussions, Taylor kept his slaves out of sight. They worked only in the second-floor family rooms and slept in the attic. Free blacks, who had previously comprised most of the household staff, were dismissed lest they be mistaken for slaves.
    When the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution brought an end to slavery in 1865, blacks returned to the White House workforce but they were not always integrated. In President Ulysses S. Grant’s administration, the inside servants were white and the outside ones black.
    In later administrations, white and black servants worked side by side and those who were entitled to meals ate together as well. This was the norm until 1909, when Helen Taft hired an arrogant housekeeper named Elizabeth Jaffray, who decreed that henceforth white servants and black servants would eat in separate dining rooms.
    When Calvin Coolidge discovered the whites were getting better food, he gave orders that the same meals be served to both groups, but it was not until Eleanor Roosevelt got to the White House that anyone addressed head-on the issue of segregation.
    Mrs. Roosevelt’s solution was to fire the whites on the household staff, except for the housekeeper, and hire only blacks, which solved the problem—up to a point. Integration finally came to the White House during my father’s administration. The man who banned segregation in the armed forces in 1948 could hardly tolerate it in his own household. The President’s House has been an equal opportunity employer ever since.
    IV
    It took many years and several presidents to finally convince Congress that the government should bear the expense of running the White House. Until federal funds were forthcoming, only the wealthiest chief executives could afford to hire an adequate staff and host a suitable number of social events.
    Congress’s decision to allot funds to remodel the White House in 1902 was followed by a willingness to pay for a decent-sized staff. When Woodrow Wilson took office, Abigail Adams’s ideal number