Back-Porch Harry

All Harry Truman wanted was a back porch--a cool place where he could sit of an evening, as he used to back in Independence, listening to the whir of the sprinkler on the lawn and the sound of neighbors' voices coming clear through the summer air. He consulted an architect; together, they found just the place for it. It would be inconspicuously tucked away behind the pillars of the White House's south portico, at the second-floor level. The plans were drawn, the money ($15,000) set aside from White House maintenance funds. Then the storm broke.

The Commission of Fine Arts loudly disapproved the scheme, declaring that it would "permanently change the appearance of the south fac,ade."* Pennsylvania's Congressman-Architect Frederick Muhlenberg rose to declare that the White House "was a heritage of the American people, not lightly or casually to be altered at the whim of any tenant." Indignant letters poured in to the Washington papers; cartoonists lampooned the plan. Crumped the New York Herald Tribune: " 'Back-porch Harry' is scarcely an appellation that a man would like to carry into a presidential campaign, even if he were impervious to the odium of violating good taste, propriety and historical feeling."

But Harry Truman is a stubborn man. At his press conference, the Herald Tribune's Bert Andrews asked if the President were going ahead with the balcony. He was, the President declared--the Herald Tribune to the contrary notwithstanding. The same opposition had been made, he added, when bathtubs, gaslights and cooking stoves were put in the White House.

May Craig, brash correspondent for a group of Maine newspapers, objected: "But they did not change the structural appearance of the house, Mr. President." Yes, Mr. Truman declared, they did. The entire interior was changed when Mrs. Fillmore put in the first bathtubs, and she was almost lynched for doing it.

Mrs. Craig persisted: "The Republican comment is that you are only a temporary tenant and therefore. ..." The President suddenly turned serious, as he does when he wants to end an interchange. No President has ever been anything else, he said, and he hoped that that would continue as long as the Republic lasts.

As correspondents left the White House, they took a look at the south portico. Work had already begun.

* The south portico itself was not added to the White House until 1824, the colonnaded north portico five years later. Other Presidents have made other alterations with & without outcry. Jefferson added wing terraces and long rows of one-story "offices," which also served as "meat house, wine cellar, coal and wood sheds and privies." Buchanan tacked on a glass conservatory, Coolidge raised the roof (unnoticeably from the outside) to find room for eight bedrooms.

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