RECOLLECTIONS OF FULL YEARS
$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 a 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 oppotunity 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 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 Mistress 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.
351
