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"The
White House by
Moonlight" by Paul McGehee. This beautiful view of the Executive
Mansion in 1905 is best described by the pen of Walt Whitman: "I wander
about a good deal, sometimes at night under the moon. To-night took a
long look at the President's house. The white portico...the
palace-like, tall, round columns, spotless as snow...the walls
also...the tender and soft moonlight, flooding the pale marble, and
making peculiar faint languishing shades, not shadows...everywhere a
soft transparent hazy, thin, blue moon-lace, hanging in the air...the
brilliant and extra-plentiful clusters of gas, on and around the
facade, columns, portico, etc. ...everything so white, so marbly pure
and dazzling, yet soft...the White House of future poems, and of dreams
and dramas, there in the soft and copious moon...the gorgeous front, in
the trees, under the lustrous flooding moon, full of reality, full of
illusion...the forms of the trees, leafless, silent, in trunk and
myriad-angles of branches, under the stars and sky...the White House of
the land, and of beauty and night...sentries at the gates, and by the
portico, silent, pacing there in blue overcoats...stopping you not at
all, but eyeing you with sharp eyes, whichever way you move". It was a
time of great excitement in Washington, D.C. In the winter months of
early 1905, the nation's capital was preparing for the second term of
President Theodore Roosevelt, a popular and forceful leader who had
been reelected by an unprecedented majority of votes.
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