Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: THURSDAY, April 7, 1994 TAG: 9404070334
SECTION: NATL/INT PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: By SEAN HOLTON ORLANDO SENTINEL
DATELINE: FORT MYER LENGTH: Long
The echoes rise from an unmarked grave on a small Army post, beneath an open field now used as a baseball diamond.
This is where they buried the White House.
There! Can you hear? The old second floor, still creaking under the weight of William Howard Taft. And listen: the private curses of Abraham Lincoln, witnessed only by the plaster walls of a long-lost hallway.
And that? Whispered prayers rising to the ceiling of the East Room, where Franklin Delano Roosevelt lay in a flag-draped casket.
In 1950 and 1951, the dump trucks came across the Potomac River to Fort Myer, laden with rubble from the demolition of the White House interior. The wrecking job, which spared only the sandstone facade of the White House, was the first stage of President Truman's reconstruction of the building.
More than four decades later, memories of the Truman demolition have faded. For many, it has taken its place in a long succession of much less significant ``redecorations'' and other cosmetic changes.
Relatively few Americans are aware that the reconstruction left the most famous building in Washington - the ultimate symbol of power in America - but a gutted shell of the house begun by George Washington in 1792. That shell aside, the real structure is a mere 42 years old.
Fewer still are aware - or have even considered - what became of the bulk of the old building Truman tore down.
And almost no one, including the post historian at Fort Myer, realizes that the forgotten dump under the ball field at the Army post is the likeliest final resting place of most of the old White House.
``Every now and then, somebody comes by looking for where they buried the White House,'' said John Parker, 69, facilities and maintenance chief at Fort Myer, who came to the post in 1955 and is the senior employee. ``I'm afraid the only people who could tell you about this now are in the cemetery.''
That's exactly the way the government wanted it. The commissioners who oversaw the White House renovation reused a small fraction of the old interior materials, gave some articles to museums and sold some bricks and fragments as souvenirs.
But the great majority of the White House - tons of surplus material and rubble - was disposed of quietly. It was parceled out for use by other government agencies, burned or buried in the Fort Myer dump.
On one level, the story of what happened to the White House is just a story about trash. Nobody keeps track of trash, and nobody cares about it much once it is thrown out, especially if it was thrown out four decades ago.
Thanks to Truman, the White House of today is an 800-ton structural steel skeleton fleshed out by nearly 8,000 cubic yards of concrete, 110 tons of reinforcing steel and 257,500 square feet of wire mesh. At least one-third of the building's 1.5 million cubic feet lie below ground, in sub-basements and subterranean mechanical areas that extend out beneath its lawns.
The halls that Lincoln walked, supported by huge timbers anchored in load-bearing masonry walls, no longer exist. The interiors that President Clinton surveys today are a facsimile.
Truman had to do what he did because the old building was falling down. Walls were cracking. Floor beams were splitting. Ceilings were pulling away from their moorings.
Truman, in keeping the original sandstone walls intact, had preserved what he thought was the soul of the White House.
The building that emerged from Truman's renovation - the White House of today - is architectural taxidermy, U.S. history stuffed and mounted.
The historic skin, the sandstone exterior walls, once supported the entire building. Now they are responsible only for holding up their own weight and masking the mid-20th-century structure inside.
The new, steel-spined White House would prove an apt metaphor for a renewed, post-World War II nation with a powerful, new executive branch.
But Harry Truman left much more than a sparkling new building to the ages. He left something else in a dump across the river. That something, the newer building's silent, older counterpart, is a monument to a buried past.
Is the carved, marble mantelpiece that John Quincy Adams leaned against in 1828 a more historic object than, say, the galvanized metal pipe through which Calvin Coolidge drew a glass of water in 1928?
Once you start investing any physical object - let alone an entire structure like the White House - with an abstract notion like ``historic value,'' you're headed down a slippery slope. If the fireplace must be saved, why not the plumbing? If the wooden door frame, why not the wooden lath? If the woven rug, why not the rubber floor runner?
``Where do you put your values?'' asked William Seale, the White House historian. ``We usually put [them] on ornamental things.''
That was the stance the White House renovation commission took when deciding which materials to use in the rebuilt structure and which to discard.
Some ornamental objects, such as mantels and the paneling in the State Dining Room, were reinstalled. Other material was reused in a different form, such as old floor timbers that were remilled as basement paneling.
The rest, the overwhelming bulk of the old White House, was deemed ``surplus material'' and was either reused elsewhere, sold as souvenirs or buried at Fort Myer.
Rex Scouten, a Secret Service agent for Truman and now the White House curator, said that now and then, an ornament from the building turns up in the hands of a collector.
The commission did not record precisely where on the Fort Myer grounds the landfill was located. Today, Army officials at the post are stumped, claiming they have no record of it.
by CNB