AYESHA RASCOE, HOST:
The East Wing of the White House is no more. What started on Monday, with images of excavators and talk of renovation to accommodate President Trump's promised ballroom, finished with the razing of an entire wing of the White House despite the president's promise as recently as July that the event space, quote, "won't interfere with the current building."
Leslie Jones knows the White House. She's now the chief curator of the Preservation Society of Newport but previously served as curator and director of historical resources and programming for the White House Historical Association. Leslie Jones, welcome to the program.
LESLIE JONES: Thank you for having me, Ayesha.
RASCOE: I don't want us to talk past people who haven't been in the White House as much as both of us have. That rounded portico that we all know from pictures - that's not where the Oval Office is. That's in the West Wing, which dates to Teddy Roosevelt's first term. The East Wing was substantially enlarged during World War II. Tell us what the East Wing was and wasn't from a preservationist's perspective.
JONES: Well, I'm glad that you brought that up first because I think there is a misconception that needs to be cleared up. The East Colonnade - as it's more formally referred to, which was fully destroyed - is actually separate from the East Wing. The East Wing was its own block of a building connected to the colonnade, and the East Colonnade actually dates back to 1801. Thomas Jefferson had that built on the addition on both the east and west sides of the White House after he moved in, you know, with James Hoban's original central block design. So those sort of appendages coming off the east and west side of the house have precedent going back to 1801.
And in 1942, when Franklin Roosevelt adds on the actual East Wing building, it is to accommodate the more staff that was necessary as a part of wartime during World War II, but again, built off of that colonnade as a means of continuing that symmetry and balance that the White House had been subscribed in its earliest days, which is so symbolic for what the hopes of our founders were in our country.
RASCOE: So people were thinking about things like that. People were thinking about democracy when they were designing these additions.
JONES: Well, the house itself was designed to look like a domestic residence, not like the palace of a king or the compound of an autocrat or a dictator. It was meant to look like domestic architecture, even so far as to go - James Hoban tried to proportion the windows with the rest of the house to make it look smaller than it actually is. So that sort of approachability and commonality of the house and its design was important from the get-go.
And with the additions of the East and West Colonnade by Jefferson, that was more of a function of utility but also building off these ideas of symmetry, balance. And that symmetry and balance also echo what we talk about with our whole government system, with our three branches, that there are checks and balances.
RASCOE: There are all of these examples which people have been talking about recently about changes to the White House over the years. Obviously, it was burnt by British forces in 1814, Jackie Kennedy's interior restoration and the exterior addition of the Rose Garden. And, of course, the biggest of all, Harry Truman's 1948 renovation. Can you describe how far-reaching Truman's renovation was?
JONES: Well, I wanted to say, too, that Truman's renovation wasn't a vanity project. Truman's renovation was the structural stability and the long-term securing of the White House as a building - the historic building. They did have to add things like more modern technology and electricity and plumbing, which had been just sort of stuck into that very historic building prior. It couldn't really hold all of those additions. Its engineering wasn't designed to accept an elevator. So this was an important, although controversial, change to the White House, but it was a restoration and not a renovation.
RASCOE: You talked about how there was an idea of trying to make the White House not look like a palace. I think to most people in this day and age, they would look at it and go, this looks really grand. This looks like a mansion.
JONES: Well, I think it was certainly developed to hold a capacity of people because the White House used to be open to the public. Former presidents used to have people come in freely off the street and sit in the foyer and wait to have meetings with the president. So it was designed as a people's house for the general public, but times change.
And if people think that the White House looks grand now, they should've seen what Benjamin Harrison tried to do to it in 1892. He proposed to essentially triple the size of the house and really give it sort of a Beaux-Arts style, which is very high-end for the 19th century and would be considered that today as well. But those plans did not get passed. The funding wasn't provided, and we thankfully were able to preserve the house that we have today.
RASCOE: That's Leslie Jones, formerly of the White House Historical Association. Thank you so much for speaking with us.
JONES: Thank you, Ayesha.
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