RECOLLECTIONS OF FULL YEARS
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 maried only a little over a year when her husband contracted tuberculosis. We had always been very much interested in her, deploring the home-making 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 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 bing 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
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