President Theodore Roosevelt’s friendships with architects and support for their view of the fine arts predated his occupancy of the White House by more than a decade. In 1884 he retained the New York City firm of Lamb and Rich to design his home, Sagamore Hill, at Oyster Bay, New York. Principals in this important American firm, Charles Lamb and Hugh Rich were well known for their country estates and for the development of suburbs, such as Short Hills, New Jersey. At Sagamore Hill, the firm designed a picturesque Queen Anne-shingle style structure that suited the Roosevelt lifestyle. Roosevelt later wrote, "I did not know enough to be sure what I wished in outside matters. But I had perfectly definite views what I wished in inside matters, what I desired to live in and with; I arranged all this, so as to get what I desired . . . ; and then Rich put on the outside cover with little help from me." Roosevelt’s ideas about the client’s and the architect’s separate responsibilities remained constant through the next three decades. He continued to trust the aesthetic sense of architect, even as he continued to require and promote livable spaces for his family and for his countrymen.

The first Mrs. Roosevelt-Alice Hathaway Lee-had died while Sagamore Hill was being built. Two years later Roosevelt married Edith Kermit Carow, whom he had known since childhood. From the time of their marriage in London on December 2, 1886, through the presidency, both were actively involved in aesthetic and architectural matters. Indeed, in reviewing documents concerning the 1902 restoration of the White House, it is sometimes difficult to determine which Roosevelt was the client. What is clear is that both were deeply interested in, talked with, and listened to the architects.

Roosevelt became vice president on a ticket with William McKinley as president, in March 1901. When McKinley was assassinated six months later, Roosevelt inherited not just the presidency but fine arts and architectural problems and programs that had surfaced during McKinley’s first term. These included a proposed enlargement of the White House and plans for the improvement of the city of Washington. It was under Roosevelt that both programs, which shape the Washington of today, were refined.

Roosevelt’s relationships with architects were crucial in these efforts. As Sagamore Hill was being built, he joined the Century Club of New York, an "association composed of authors, artists, and amateurs of letters and the fine arts." All three partners in the firm of McKim, Mead & White-Charles F. McKim, W. Rutherford Mead, and Stanford White-were Century members, as were architects Cass Gilbert, George B. Post, and Daniel H. Burnham (all also members of the American Institute of Architects), sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens, and landscape architect Frederick L. Olmsted Jr. Individually and collectively these men were important in defining the fine arts during the Roosevelt administration and in shaping his ideas about the White House, the L’Enfant plan, and Washington, D.C.

In Washington, the Cosmos Club had aims similar to those of the Century Club: "the advancement of its members in science, literature, and art." Roosevelt had been given an associate membership for six months in 1899 when he was governor of New York, and he was familiar with the club. Both Charles Moore, aide to Senator James McMillan of Michigan, chair of the Senate District Committee, and Glenn Brown, architect and secretary of the American Institute of Architects (AIA), were active Cosmos Club members. Moore-like Olmsted and Saint-Gaudens-was also a corresponding member of the AIA. This recognition was not only the highest honor the AIA could then pay a nonarchitect; it also guaranteed receipt of all AIA mailings and the opportunity for involvement in AIA lobbying efforts.

Moore and Brown often used the Cosmos Club as a meeting and rallying place for advancing the fine arts in Washington. Cass Gilbert remembered that it was Moore and Brown "who, talking to a group of architects one evening at the Cosmos Club, urged that the architects should throw their fullest efforts in favor of the return to the L’Enfant plan, and by their earnest persistence prevailed upon those present to interest themselves in the subject."

The Cosmos Club rooms were on Lafayette Square, just across Pennsylvania Avenue from the White House. During the 1902 White House restoration, the Roosevelts resided for a time in the Townsend House on the square, even closer to the club where Roosevelt had guest privileges.

Brown’s offices were in the AIA headquarters at the Octagon House, located two blocks west of the White House. The Octagon, which had served as temporary White House for James and Dolley Madison after the White House was burned during the War of 1812, was leased by the AIA in 1898. The AIA opened offices in the Octagon, moving from New York, on January 1, 1899, and, in 1902, it purchased the house.

At the 1898 AIA convention, delegates were introduced to the Octagon and to the White House, where members and guests were received in the East Room by President McKinley. AIA Secretary Brown performed the introductions, not unusual since Brown had regular access to the White House. As AIA secretary, "one of my duties, " he wrote, was to give tours of the house to visiting AIA members and to art and architecture dignitaries who were guests of the AIA. He described the tours as beginning in "the basement, then through the principal floor . . . ending up by taking them out on the south portico and calling their attention to the beauty of the grounds and to the charming view of the Potomac."

During research for his celebrated two-volume History of the United States Capitol (1900 and 1903), Brown had discovered information on and become enamored with Pierre Charles L’Enfant’s 1791 plan for Washington. Soon after the formation of the AIA Washington Chapter in 1887, Brown and other members, alarmed at the disregard then evident in Washington for the plan, began lobbying local agencies and the federal government for its reimposition on Washington development. "We found, " Brown wrote, "appeals to Congress by our small local body accomplished nothing. The way to the legislators’ brain was through marked interest from their home voters."

In 1895, Brown, with the support of the AIA Washington Chapter and interested Cosmos Club members, organized the Public Art League, a lobbying body with a national membership. McKim, Saint-Gaudens, Olmsted, and Burnham were among its officers and directors, while Brown was corresponding secretary. With Richard Watson Gilder, editor of Century Magazine, as president, the league quickly became a national force in lobbying for the fine arts.

When the AIA moved its headquarters into the Octagon in 1899, the Public Art League and the AIA Washington Chapter both rented Octagon offices. In the next decade the AIA provided address and office space in the Octagon to other organizations that joined it in lobbying for restitution of the L’Enfant plan. The Washington Architectural Club and the Washington Society of Fine Arts, which represented a large number of area organizations interested in the development of Washington, were among them. During the Roosevelt administration the Archaeological Society of America, the American Academy in Rome, the National Society of Fine Arts, and the American Federation of Arts joined organizations with offices already in the Octagon. Inasmuch as Glenn Brown and other members of the AIA Washington Chapter were active in all of these groups, having them under one roof gave the AIA enormous influence over fine arts lobbying. That lobbying and the effective use the AIA made of it were important in the evolution of Roosevelt’s views.

The concentration of fine arts organizations in a four-block area around the White House was extraordinary and unequaled. The Cosmos Club was visible from the Lafayette Square facade of the White House. The Octagon, with its nine local and national organizational tenants, was visible from the White House Potomac River facade. Immediately to the west of the White House, in the State, War and Navy Building (now the Eisenhower Executive Office Building), was the Office of Public Buildings and Grounds for the District of Columbia, which largely controlled park development in Washington and the maintenance of the White House. Immediately to its east, in the Treasury Building, was the Office of the Supervising Architect, responsible for most government design and construction, not just in Washington but around the nation.

This concentration of private organizations and governmental agencies, which gave the AIA an extraordinary opportunity to influence fine arts policy, was an ongoing and important factor in the AIA’s decision to schedule its conventions in Washington in 1898, 1900, 1902, 1904, 1905, 1908, 1909, 1911, and 1912. These conventions focused and refocused attention on Washington’s development, often involving the presence or assistance of the president. The conventions and the president’s involvement were promoted through a new publication, the AIA Quarterly Bulletin, authorized by the convention of 1899.

Publication of the bulletin began in 1900, with distribution to a mailing list that included all AIA members as well as 43 foreign societies, 40 American societies, and 59 periodicals concerned with architecture, city planning, and the fine arts. A long list of interested editors, writers, and politicians nationwide also were sent copies, ensuring its importance as a resource through which fine arts information could be disseminated and lobbying instigated. The subscription base increased steadily, and, during the Roosevelt White House years, it became a seminal reference source for fine arts news and for its extensive annotated bibliography of recent articles on city planning, government architecture, and the development of Washington, D.C.

The bulletin extensively promoted the 1900 AIA convention, held in Washington that December, and planned around the theme "Improvement of the City of Washington." Speakers included nationally known and respected architects, landscape architects, and sculptors. The convention opened December 12, a day celebrated as the centennial of the removal of the capital city from Philadelphia to Washington. There were parades and exhibits, and President McKinley asked a select 100 to lunch with him at the White House, where Colonel Theodore Bingham, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, spoke about and unveiled a grand model of his proposed enlargement of the White House. He had previously written about his project in the November Ladies’ Home Journal, an article AIA convention speakers were urged to read.

The AIA had already begun, even before the luncheon, a campaign to discredit both Bingham and his plan, and the next day, December 13, the first full day of the convention, that plan was discussed in open convention session.14 On that evening, before a national audience of politicians, journalists, and others already in Washington to celebrate the centennial, the papers on the "Improvement of the City of Washington" were read. The session had gone through almost a year

of planning, with presentations carefully prepared and profusely illustrated, and was a resounding success. Senator McMillan offered to publish the papers as a government document, and within days they were delivered to the Government Printing Office with accompanying maps, plans, and photographs. Moore wrote in the publication introduction, "The Report of the Centennial Celebration, now in press, will show the ideas of the laity; this publication contains the tentative plans of the experts." The eventual outcome of the Bingham-AIA controversy was obviously tilting toward the AIA.

Decisions on who would oversee the White House work and how it would be accomplished had not been made when, on September 6, 1901, President McKinley was shot by an assassin as he attended the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, New York. When he died, eight days later, Theodore Roosevelt became president.

White House enlargement was then a pressing matter on which AIA lobbying had focused national attention: "Letters opposing Bingham’s plan began to pour in. Glenn Brown vented his wrath against the plan not only in professional publications but also in Century magazine, which Roosevelt read avidly and for which he had written."16 Meanwhile, lobbying for the revitalization of the L’Enfant plan, the AIA’s other main case at the time, continued unabated.

One result of the 1900 AIA meeting had been the appointment, by Senator McMillan’s Senate District Committee, of a commission to study the development of Washington. Known as the McMillan Commission, it was officially the Commission on the Improvement of the Park System of the District of Columbia. With Burnham, McKim, Olmsted, and Saint-Gaudens as members, Moore as its secretary, and Brown available to provide help as needed, the commission issued a report that could not have pleased the architects more.17 Its major recommendations echoed suggestions made by speakers at the 1900 AIA convention. In the McMillan plan these suggestions were refined and supported by magnificent plans, drawings, and models produced by the commission and its delineators.

Brown and McKim supervised the installation of Park Commission drawings, models, and photographs in the Corcoran Gallery of Art, located between the White House and the Octagon, in early 1902. The exhibition, recalled Brown:

first opened to the President, Cabinet and Congressional committees for a private view. . . . Roosevelt . . . as was his custom, seized upon the principal features of the design and showed his keen appreciation of the value of the scheme in the development of the Capital City. From this time until he left the White House he gave zealous and effective support through trials and tribulations, preventing legislation or departmental action that would either mar or destroy the beauty of the plan and in initiating measures that would further its execution.

McKim, who had just been elected AIA president, was invited down from New York to look at the White House in April 1902 and subsequently given the commission for its restoration. He chose Brown, the AIA secretary, as the architect who would serve as his superintendent in Washington. In its publications and convention programs the AIA continued to focus attention on the Park Commission plan. In 1902, for example, convention proceedings carried a lavishly illustrated 49-page section on the plan.

A major test of the plan came quickly. A new building for the Department of Agriculture, being built on the Mall, was placed too far forward to preserve Mall sight lines proposed by the Park Commission. McKim and others lobbied hard to move the building back, but by early 1904 foundations were being dug. At that point only President Roosevelt had the authority to stop construction and ensure acceptance of Park Commission building lines. At almost the last minute, McKim went directly to Roosevelt, and the building was ordered moved back. In a statement reminiscent of his writing on Lamb and Rich at Sagamore Hill, Roosevelt said, "I think him [McKim] more capable of judging what these effects will be than we are. I believe it will be better to trust his judgement."

For a 1905 AIA convention dinner in the Arlington Hotel, two blocks from the White House, McKim and Frank Millet, popular artist and friend of the Roosevelts, designed a special setting. Sixty-five invited guests, including

Roosevelt, sat at a long u-shaped table. At the table were leaders from all facets of American life, a group so distinguished that Brown later wrote, "After this event we found it easy to secure attention to our demands." A section of the banquet hall was also set aside for Mrs. Roosevelt and her guests. Moore recalled:

The president, in his speech made the first public utterance pledging the Executive Department of the Government to the execution of the plans of the Senate Park Commission. . . .The chief result . . . was to give definite official approval to the idea that the day of unrelated buildings had passed, and that the National Capital should be enlarged, extended and made beautiful in an orderly and systematic manner.

There were other significant meetings and events between the president and the institute. After Saint-Gaudens death in 1907, the AIA determined to memorialize the sculptor in an exhibition at Washington’s Corcoran Gallery of Art, curated by Brown. Saint-Gaudens had spent part of each year in Washington and was a friend of the Roosevelts, so both the president and first lady were interested in the exhibition. They visited Brown in the galleries at the Corcoran as the show was being installed. On one occasion Brown was having difficulty securing a Saint-Gaudens bust of General William Tecumseh Sherman for the exhibition. It was at West Point, and Brown mentioned to the president this problem of getting the bust. From the Corcoran, Roosevelt dictated a telegram that ordered the bust to be "at the Corcoran Gallery within twenty-four hours."26 It arrived promptly.

Roosevelt’s participation in the Saint-Gaudens exhibition did not end with assistance in acquiring and hanging objects. He also spoke at the Memorial Meeting, a grand event that opened the exhibition. Brown subsequently wrote the president to express appreciation "for your interest and participation in the Memorial Meeting . . . December 15, 1908, and for your admirable address on this occasion all of which helped materially to make this tribute an international affair which was the object of our Association [the AIA]."

Few organizations have ever had the access to the White House that the AIA then had. Earlier, on December 11, 1908, AIA President Cass Gilbert had gone to the White House to thank Roosevelt for his "intention to attend the Saint-Gaudens memorial meeting. . . . Just before the meeting closed, the President said to me ‘I want to leave to you a legacy.’" Someone interrupted, but Roosevelt repeated the idea two more times, never finishing the thought.

On the following Friday, Gilbert again went to the White House, and he and Roosevelt discussed the "legacy": "a moral obligation of always using its [the AIA’s] influence against changes of the White House which might be proposed in future. . . . I at once assured him that the Institute would feel much honored in accepting this obligation and asked him if he would not write me a letter embodying his ideas." A few days later, from the AIA, Gilbert dictated a memorandum regarding his conversations with the president.

A letter from Roosevelt, dated December 19, 1908, arrived at the Octagon on December 21. Roosevelt evidently pored over the letter for some time, making changes and sending it with the changes in his hand rather than having it retyped. It read:

Now that I am about to leave office there is something I should like to say thru you to the American Institute of Architects. During my incumbency of the Presidency the White House, under Mr. McKim’s direction, was restored to the beauty, dignity and simplicity of its original plan. It is now, without and within, literally the ideal house for the head of a great democratic republic. It should be a matter of pride and honorable obligation to the whole Nation to prevent its being in any way marred. If I had it in my power as I leave office, I should like to leave as a legacy to you, and to the American Institute of Architects, the duty of preserving a perpetual "eye of guardianship" over the White House to see that it is kept unchanged and unmarred from this time on.

Gilbert wrote to Brown on December 23, 1908, transmitting a letter to President Roosevelt "relative to the preservation of the White House." Gilbert asked that Brown present the letter to Roosevelt in person. In the margin of his letter to Brown, Gilbert sketched how the Roosevelt letter might be mounted, with the letter, a photograph of President Roosevelt, and a photograph of the White House in one frame. He wished a copy of his reply hung below the president’s letter "in an appropriate place in the Octagon where they can always be carefully guarded and preserved." In closing, Gilbert wrote to Brown:

I am sure you will appreciate the great historic importance of the President’s letter and I congratulate you upon being the one who really behind it all has brought about the preservation of The White House and has in the past saved it from the calamitous changes which were proposed at various times prior to Mr. Roosevelt’s administration.

Gilbert responded to the president:

I have no hesitation in assuring you, Mr. President, that the American Institute of Architects will accept all the honorable obligation which your letter implies and will lend its influence always to the preservation of the White House as it now stands unchanged and unmarred for future generations of the American people.

Your letter will be a treasured document among the archives of the Institute and will, as need arises, be looked upon as our charter and as our authority for such defense of this structure, growing stronger with the years, until the traditions shall have been firmly established that the building must remain inviolate from this time on.

Early in 1909 an AIA committee that included Brown and Gilbert suggested to the president that he appoint a Council of Fine Arts to oversee federal building and fine arts. Roosevelt agreed immediately. An executive order was prepared, and Roosevelt invited Brown to the White House to read the wording of the order and make suggestions. Brown did so, and on January 19, 1909, Roosevelt issued an executive order creating a Council of Fine Arts:

Hereafter, before any plans are formulated for any building or grounds, or for the location or erection of any statue, the matter must be submitted to the Council I have named and their advice followed unless for good and sufficient reasons the President directs that it be not followed.

Roosevelt’s executive order was printed and circulated. Included was a copy of a January 9, 1909, multipage letter from the AIA to the president suggesting the establishment of the council. The letter outlined the value of having a council to advise on government design and construction. A response from Roosevelt to the AIA, of the same day, asked the AIA to recommend persons to serve on the council. On January 16 the AIA submitted a list of 30 names, by letter, and, on January 18, Roosevelt appointed a 21-member council that included Burnham, McKim, Gilbert, Brown, Millet, and Olmsted, all from the AIA list.

With the signing of the executive order, and the establishment of the council, Roosevelt extended the AIA’s "eye of guardianship" from the White House to other federal buildings, landscape, and art. At the time he was at the end of his term, with William Howard Taft already elected as his successor. Taft would later revoke Roosevelt’s executive order, but it set a precedent for the establishment, by Congress in 1910, of the United States Commission of Fine Arts.

In later years the AIA tried to exercise its "eye of guardianship," but there would never again be such a time, or such a relationship, between the architects and a president.