The Residence - Inside the Private World of The White House (28 page)

U
SHER
N
ELSON
P
IERCE
knew he had a problem—and it had to be fixed immediately.

When he first got to the Usher’s Office as a young man, in 1961, he was responsible for bringing residence staff personnel files up to date. This meant looking at what every worker was paid. “I was amazed at the salaries,” he said. The African American staff were making significantly less than their white colleagues.

The timing of the revelation was terrible. In his first State of the Union address, President Johnson declared “an unconditional war on poverty,” at a time when the poverty line was accepted to be around $3,000 a year or less (around $23,550 in today’s dollars). “Our joint federal–local effort must pursue poverty, pursue it wherever it exists—in city slums and small towns, in sharecropper shacks or in migrant worker camps, on Indian Reservations, among whites as well as Negroes, among the young as well as the aged, in the boomtowns and in the depressed areas,” the president said in his January 8, 1964, address before a joint session of Congress.

It turns out that poverty existed right under the president’s nose. The higher-paying jobs at the White House—ushers, florists, executive chefs, head housekeepers, carpenters, and plumbers—were viewed as more professional, and were given to white workers. The traditional domestic jobs, like butlers and maids, were filled mostly by African Americans and paid far less. (As a young usher, Pierce was making almost six thousand dollars a year, twice as much as
the underpaid new hires.) Everyone on staff was paid less than they would have been at an equivalent job in the private sector, but overall the white staffers fared far better.

On January 9, Pierce told Chief Usher J. B. West that they needed to talk. The president had hired two new people who fell below the poverty line. “Before the press finds out that we have poverty cases working in the White House,” Pierce said urgently, “you better up the salary of the two new maids we just hired at $2,900 a year.”

West knew the salaries—in fact, he’d hired the maids himself—but it hadn’t occurred to him that the media could seize upon this information to label the president a hypocrite. West raised the two maids’ salaries immediately.

It wasn’t lost on Pierce that it took a public relations scare to force West’s hand. “The residence staff, as dedicated as they were to every president that they worked for, it was amazing to me that they weren’t paid more than what they were paid.”

Curator Betty Monkman wouldn’t have been surprised by the pay discrepancy. Almost as soon as she came on board, in 1967, she recalls, she sensed an undercurrent of racism—“this Southern thing,” she called it—beneath the surface bonhomie of the White House. For example, she could not believe that everyone called Doorman Preston Bruce by his last name. “He was a very distinguished man, he had a great presence about him,” she said. “When I first came there everybody would call him ‘Bruce,’ so I just thought ‘Bruce’ was a first name. Then, after a while, I realized it was his last name. I just was appalled that I had been calling him that.”

S
TOREROOM
M
ANAGER
B
ILL
Hamilton insists that
he
was the one who led the revolt to get equal pay for the underpaid African American staff. That runs contrary to the impression created by
Lee Daniels’ The Butler
, the film loosely based on Butler Eugene Allen’s life,
which shows the title character going into the head Usher’s Office demanding a raise. By most accounts, Allen was too shy and too respectful of the institutional hierarchy to be so brazen.

Hamilton, however, is neither. He was born eight blocks from the White House. His mother stayed at home to raise her ten children. After living on Capitol Hill, she told him, she never wanted to live in a white neighborhood again. Hamilton was just twenty years old when he started as a houseman, during the Eisenhower administration. The Eisenhowers ran the White House like a military operation. He remembers vacuuming after the tours ended for the day, trying to erase any footprints from the rugs before Mamie Eisenhower could see them. When a guest walked through the Ground Floor, the houseman would turn the vacuum off and turn his face toward the wall. (When President Kennedy saw the workers behaving this way, he asked a staffer, “What’s wrong with them?”) Hamilton worked nine to five in the storeroom to support his seven children (at one point four of them were in college at the same time), then drove a cab after work until eleven o’clock at night. “I worked like a dog,” he said. “But I always made sure I was home for the weekends.”

Whenever a new president takes office, Hamilton says, his political advisers tend to treat the residence staff with disdain. “The West Wing staff just think they are better than you. Then they learn their lesson after they get there: it takes all of us to run this show for the president.” But Hamilton resented being mistreated, and he had to find a way to express his frustration.

“I’ll never forget when we went up to see J. B. West,” Hamilton recalled at his home in a quiet, middle-class retirement community in Ashburn, Virginia, about an hour outside Washington, D.C. He made his move in the late 1960s, around the time of Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination and the days of riots that followed. Washington was on fire as angry protestors, enraged by
King’s murder and the inequality they saw around them, tossed Molotov cocktails and looted stores. Some came within just two blocks of the White House.

Inside the gates, Hamilton was furious. Everyone else seemed to be getting a raise, he said, except for the African Americans on staff. Inspired by the civil rights protestors, he gathered a handful of his fellow housemen—the workers in charge of vacuuming and heavy-duty cleaning—and made an announcement.

“They’re having a state dinner tonight and we’re not working.”

There was a long pause as his colleagues mulled it over. They had already agreed to help that evening. (Staffers from the different shops were often asked to help out at events, as they had already been cleared through security.)

“What do you mean we’re not working? We’re going to lose our jobs,” one of them said.

“This is what I’m trying to tell you all. If we all learn to stick together, there’s nothing they can do.”

“They can’t bring somebody in off the street” to work the event, he argued, because they wouldn’t have clearance.

Hamilton finally convinced his coworkers, and together they went to see Chief Usher J. B. West.

West was furious. “Are you the spokesman for the group? ” he asked Hamilton.

“You could say that,” he replied.

West was as “red as a beet,” Hamilton remembered, laughing. For once, he had his boss over a barrel.

“You expect me to put on that little black bow tie, white shirt, and suit? If somebody drops something I’ll go pick it up?” West asked the group.

Hamilton did not waver: “Sir, I don’t give a damn what you do when I leave here.”

Contrary to the portrait in
The Butler
, it wasn’t the butlers who
questioned the salary discrepancies; according to Hamilton, they “didn’t make any waves.” In fact, Hamilton was disappointed that they didn’t join him—it was the butlers who had the real power among the White House staff because they worked in the closest proximity to the first family. If they got up the courage to tell the president and the first lady that they were being underpaid, Hamilton was sure something would be done to correct it. But not only did the butlers refuse to join him in protest, some were angry at him for potentially putting their own jobs at risk.

“We were not active in the civil rights movement. Our role was to serve the president and his family. Period,” said former Butler and Maître d’ George Hannie. In 1963, Hamilton said he was the only residence worker who went to hear Martin Luther King Jr. deliver his famous “I Have a Dream” speech at the Lincoln Memorial during the March on Washington. He describes the experience as “thrilling.” But by following his conscience and demanding action years later he was angering his colleagues. He says, “I had more of
my
people mad with me” for demanding a raise. “But I had kids to take care of. I’m going to make sure my kids are going to be better than what I am. I didn’t care what it takes, it was going to happen. I went home and told my wife one day, ‘I’m tired of these people [white management paying African Americans less]. I might not have a job, but from now on I’m taking no stuff from nobody down there.’”

When Hamilton and his fellow residence workers finally stood up, however, justice prevailed. Two days after they sat out that state dinner, the black staff members got their raise. Hamilton thinks it was because J. B. West could see the writing on the walls beyond the White House. “He knew, with everything going on on the outside, he couldn’t get out of it. I knew I had him when I had him. Wasn’t no doubt in my mind.”

Even though he’s still angry about the blatant racism at the White House, Hamilton talks about his fifty-five years serving
eleven presidents with a sense of awe. “When I walked into the White House for my interview, it felt like the first day of my life,” he said. He had never been to the White House, even for a public tour. “I just couldn’t believe it, and my parents couldn’t believe it. It just doesn’t happen!”

E
UGENE
A
LLEN WAS
certainly more careful about rocking the boat than Bill Hamilton.

When Allen’s only son, Charles, was in Vietnam, he dreaded the prospect of fighting on the ground. “The only time I ever asked my father to do me a White House favor was when I asked him to ask President Johnson to get me out of this,” he recalls.

In his letter he begged his father out of sheer desperation: “Go to the man, get me out of the infantry. I will stay in the war, but just get me out of the infantry. We’re walking ten to twenty miles a day. I’m starving to death.” Charles added: “I’m not a physical coward, Dad, but can you see if Mr. Johnson can get me in an aviation unit?”

When Charles heard back from his father, it was not the response he was hoping for. “He wrote me back and said something to the effect that if the Kennedys were still in power he thought he could do something. If Bobby was still around.” But the Johnson White House was a different story. “I don’t know these people that well,” he said. “So you’re going to have to stick it out.”

W
HITE
H
OUSE BUTLERS,
maids, pot washers, and housemen were considered to have good, solid jobs in Washington’s African American neighborhoods in the 1960s and 1970s. “There was always a sense of elegance, a sense of recognizing that this is a special occupation,” Lonnie Bunch said. He attributed the sense of pride and professionalism in these trades to the fact that many families passed
the work on from generation to generation: “The father teaches the son who teaches the grandson.”

For generations of black Americans, a job at the White House was more than just a job. “They recognized that their service was about more than them. They really felt that they were carrying a double burden. They had to work hard to keep their jobs, [but] they were also carrying [certain] expectations and attitudes toward their race. They wanted to make sure that they were at the top of their game.”