The staff of the White House proper is not so numerous, eighteen or twenty perhaps, including cooks, kitchen maids, butlers, boys, housemaids and laundresses. There was one coloured cook, Alice, who prepared the meals for the servants’ dining-room and who had been in the White House twenty years.
My head cook, whom I engaged, was Swedish. She was a miracle of a cook, but she displayed a romantic tendency as well. She must have been about forty, apparently quite staid, when she acquired a husband, a policeman on duty at the White House, and, in due course, a baby. She had been married only a little over a year when her husband contracted tuberculosis. We had always been very much interested in her, deploring the homemaking tendency which took her away from us, so when we learned of her misfortune Mr. Taft immediately took steps to have her husband sent to Ft. Bayard, the Military Tuberculosis Sanatorium in New Mexico. The cook, who earned seventy-five dollars a month, put her baby out to nurse and returned to the White House, where we got regular reports as to the progress of the invalid and the infant, each of whom proceeded to do as well as could be expected.
The other servants in the White House are paid the usual wages, from twenty-five to fifty dollars, and are no more and no less efficient than other good houseworkers in other homes. The entire White House staff is paid by the Government, the only private servants in our employ being a Filipino valet who had been with Mr. Taft for a number of years, and my personal maid.
In fact, all White House expenses are paid by the Government except actual table supply bills, and Mr. Taft is fond of insisting upon his conviction that the country treats its President exceedingly well. He was the first President to receive a salary of $75,000.00 a year, and when the subject of his nomination was uppermost in political discussions he did not hesitate to say that he thought this increase from $50,000.00 was an absolute necessity. He did not expect to spend $75,000.00 a year, but he knew by careful calculation and by a knowledge of President Roosevelt’s expenditures that he would have to spend at least $50,000.00 a year and he thought he had a citizen’s right, even as President, to provide a small competence for his family, a thing which in his twenty years of poorly paid official service he had never had an opportunity to do. He was fifty years old with two sons and a daughter in school and college and, as Secretary of War at least, he had long been working for a wage which was insufficient. But the country really is good to its President. It does not make him rich by any means, but it enables him to banish the wolf a fair distance from his door if he is sensible enough to assist its generosity by the exercise of a mild form of prudence.
My first inspection of the White House on the evening of my husband’s Inauguration was casual, but the next day I assumed the management of the establishment in earnest and proceeded upon a thorough investigation which resulted in some rather disquieting revelations.
Mrs. Roosevelt, as the retiring Mistress of the White House, naturally would make no changes or purchases which might not meet with the approval of her successor, so I found the linen supply depleted, the table service inadequate through breakages, and other refurnishing necessary. There is a government appropriation to meet the expense of such replenishments and repairs, and every President’s wife is supposed to avail herself of any part of it she requires to fit the mansion for her own occupancy.
Perhaps nothing in the house is so expressive of the various personalities of its Mistresses as the dinner services which each has contributed. For my part I was entirely satisfied with the quiet taste displayed by Mrs. Roosevelt and contented myself with filling up the different broken sets in her service to the number necessary for one hundred covers.
I always enjoyed, however, using some of the old historic plates and platters at small luncheons and dinners. There are enough plates left of the Lincoln set to serve a course to a party of thirty. Though I speak of the different designs as expressive of personalities they represent, perhaps, various periods of popular taste rather than individual preference. Samples of all the different services, displayed in cabinets in the long eastern corridor, are among the most interesting exhibits in the White House.
From the day my husband became President I never knew for certain until I entered the dining-room just how many persons there would be at luncheon. He always did credit me with a miraculous ability to produce food for any number of persons at a moment’s notice and when he was Governor of the Philippines and Secretary of War I always had to keep an emergency supply cupboard, but I did not feel that I could carry with me into the White House the happy-go-lucky attitude toward the formalities which I had enjoyed in those days, so meeting his sudden demands became a slightly more serious matter. His haphazard hospitality was of more concern to the servants than to me, however, and I think it is only his own gift for inspiring respectful devotion on the part of his household staff that ever enables me to keep a cook more than a week at a time.
During our first spring in the White House Congress was in extra
