The Presidency Before Celebrity: A Selection from George F. Will’s The Conservative Sensibility (2019)

“President John Quincy Adams regularly swam naked in the Potomac, accompanied only by a servant in a canoe. All day long citizens wandered into his White House to pester him for loans, jobs, or other favors. A British visitor shrank from the ‘brutal familiarity’ with which President-elect Andrew Jackson was treated when traveling from Tennessee to Washington. It was not as brutal as the treatment White House furniture got from the crush at Jackson’s inaugural blast, which was an open house. President John Tyler founded Washington’s metropolitan police essentially to guard the White House, but President Franklin Pierce in 1853 became the first president to have a personal guard (an old army buddy). Enemy cannon were across the river and spies infested the city, but almost anyone at any time could wander into Lincoln’s White House. Through the late nineteenth century presidents regularly received the public each day in the East Room. President Ulysses Grant had a staff of three. President Grover Cleveland answered the White House doorbell himself. Until FDR, there was a New Year’s Day receiving line for anyone who joined the queue out on the street. Security became serious during World War I, but then until Dec. 7, 1941, the White House lawn was again a public park. Portions of the mansion’s first floor were open to everyone. You could even park on the narrow street between the White House and what is now the Executive Office Building. Harry Truman was the last president to live approximately as his countrymen did and do: He strolled across Pennsylvania Avenue to do his banking. His normality had something to do with the fact that he was the last president before television turned America into a wired nation.”—George F. Will, The Conservative Sensibility (2019)