Everyone knows that our enslaved African ancestors built the Executive Mansion, that is called “The White House.” They were also the workers who maintained and kept it clean. But when one person decided to destroy the East Wing and one of the two terraces on the site of the colonnades that Thomas Jefferson ordered our people to build, we had no say. This new White House ballroom will be 90,000 square feet, almost double the size of the 55,000-square-foot structure we built. We had no input, and no one else did either.
Over-scaled and ill-considered, this new ballroom is a bad idea. Whether citizen, resident, or visitor, due to the current administration’s policies, so much has happened in a way that’s never happened before, helping to normalize the abnormal and harmful. The current leadership has diminished and degraded our quality of life. Tariffs, cuts to health insurance and food assistance, inflation, and unaffordability already overburden too many of us with fear and anxiety. Add to this the arbitrary, brutal, and illegal deployment of police, ICE, and the military against, not criminals, but us, we who are law-abiding. It’s crazy! In Trump’s America, where grants to research ending childhood cancer are slashed, but billionaires get massive tax breaks, how could any kind of ballroom, achieved by any party, through any means, not be seen as other than a perverse extravagance?
In addition, this pay-to-play fundraising hall is redundant. For the past forty years, the State Department has had an array of beautifully appointed diplomatic reception rooms at the disposal of every president.
Architecturally, is the ballroom underway without any approval whatsoever, as bad as the President’s alterations to the Oval Office? There seems to be no plan to use plastic, stick-on, gold-painted Home Depot embellishments. But in other terms, this undertaking is just as much of an affront to good taste. Adhering to neoclassical convention alone is not enough to ensure its harmony. The lack of any context with the existing structure and detailed with uninspired, banal ornament makes Trump’s ballroom a mere parody of Benjamin Henry Latrobe’s graceful South-facing facade, famous for its semi-elliptical portico. A balcony added to its colonnade was done with such care, it’s hardly noticed. This new ballroom’s ungainly mass lacks both the dignity and deferential subordination of McKim, Mead & White’s East wing. All of these deficiencies and more, seeks to overcome, with an intimidatingly gargantuan size. It would appear to be designed not to enhance the People’s House, but to render all that previously contributed to its pleasing ensemble, overwhelmed, into insignificance. This is not like adding the current president to Mount Rushmore. It is like doing so, but making his head twice the size of his predecessors. If ever there was one, this is the tail that wags the dog.
And, in part, this is not solely the fault of the president. Steadily, since at least the Eisenhower years, there has been an inflation of the number of guests deemed necessary to call a state dinner a success.
In England, for some time too, this has been the case. As comparatively few enjoy traditional dancing today, apart from wedding celebrations, royal balls in the UK are now a rarity. But, throughout her reign, Queen Victoria entertained much as most of her richest subjects did. Thousands might be invited for gala balls, but with the anticipation that hosting pre-ball dinners, various guests would divide up those invited, amongst themselves, a Royal dinner seldom exceeded 60. In the ballroom of Buckingham Palace, where State Banquets are always held now, as many as 170 could be hosted for dinner. But in a time when dancing was fashionable, precluding a ball, this happened infrequently.
Before our time, the White House East Room was also seldom used for dinners. At round tables, it can accommodate about 170. Yet because a single dining table, either rectangular, arc, or U-shaped, was preferred in the past, administrations seldom deviated from having State Dining Room dinners. To adequately entertain guests, either dancing or a concert to follow dinner was then the norm.
Because the original White House State Dining Room seats only 40, there were exceptions. In 1902, 85 attended an East Room men-only dinner for Prince Henry of Prussia. To detract from the old-fashioned decor dating from the Grant era, in addition to shaded candelabra and numerous large arrangements of hothouse flowers, the columns were entwined with twinkling ropes of tiny electric lights. Mixed with greenery, they were also festooned from chandeliers, curtains, and the ceiling.
Just after this, by removing the President’s office from the Executive Mansion proper, into the new West Wing, McKim, Mead & White were able to enlarge and redecorate the State Dining Room. In 1910, President Taft held a more typical State dinner in the State Dining Room for forty. It was followed by an East Room musical. The party was described as “perhaps the most exclusive on the calendar of such events at the capital.” Guests included some among the President’s most consistent supporters; Cabinet Offices, Supreme Court Justices, the Diplomatic Corps, and their wives.
Still, in 1939, 156 guests were invited to dine in the East Room with their majesties Queen Elizabeth and King George VI of England. After dinner, Marion Anderson, just a month after her triumphant Lincoln Memorial appearance, and Kate “God Bless America” Smith contributed to a concert of all-American music.
An innovation of First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy, was the introduction of several round tables in place of one, which maximized the number of seats available. It brought the number of attendees possible in the State Dining Room to 140, close to 170 who attended Queen Elizabeth’s 2019 Buckingham Palace State Banquet honoring the Trumps, or the 160 at dinner for the President and First Lady this year, hosted by King Charles at Windsor Castle.
In 2011, at round tables and enlisting a combination of adjoining rooms, the State Dining Room, the Blue and Red Rooms, the Obamas had 225 at their dinner for Chinese President Hu Jintao. President Biden’s 2023 state dinner, held in a tent on the South Lawn, honored Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese with 400 attending. A year earlier, 330 came to a dinner held in the East Room, honoring French President Emmanuel Macron.
Today, to Trump, none of this will do. Entertaining on behalf of the nation, meant to reciprocate, cultivate, or commemorate mutually beneficial alliances and diplomatic cooperation, will no longer be satisfied with such small numbers. For King Trump, only a contingent 999-strong will do.
My trite metaphors aside, the true function of this ‘ballroom’ is not to impart conviviality and mutual enjoyment. Rather, it is instead a place for making transactions to improve partisan ties and to illegally extort and enrich, all involved in subverting democracy!
Since its completion, other attempts were indeed made before to aggrandize the People’s House, into someplace akin to European Palaces. The rationale was to show that America’s hospitality could be as lavish and fancy as any monarchy’s. What saved us then was the refusal of the Congress to pay for such ostentatious trumpery. The idea then, too, was that it would be obscene to permit private donors, for who knows what motive, to pay instead. That’s something that’s still true today.