The Truman Gutting: The White House Nobody Has Seen

In the summer of nineteen forty-eight, a leg of Margaret Truman's piano crashed through the floor of her sitting room. A few weeks later, as he was standing at his bathroom sink, he noticed the floor swaying slightly underfoot. The White House had been making alarming sounds for years.

The engineers who inspected the building had a blunt assessment. The structure was on the verge of collapse. The original timber framing from the eighteen seventeen reconstruction after the British burning had been settling and warping for over a century, and a hundred and fifty years of additions, new floors, new wiring, new plumbing, had loaded the building far beyond what its original timbers could bear. The walls were being held up essentially by habit.

Harry Truman moved across the street to Blair House while the work was done. Between nineteen forty-nine and nineteen fifty-two, the entire interior of the White House was demolished. The historic plaster, the original woodwork, the floors, all of it came out. Workers salvaged what they could; Truman distributed pieces of the original material to libraries, historical societies, and supporters. A new steel skeleton was installed inside the original eighteen seventeen sandstone walls.

The White House visitors tour today is a nineteen fifty-two building. The rooms look as they are supposed to look, because the reconstruction was careful and faithful to historical appearance. But the interior structure, the bones of the house, are postwar steel.

The original exterior sandstone walls are genuine. Everything inside them was replaced by the time Eisenhower was inaugurated.