There was a former First Lady from the 60s or 70s who I remember complaining about all the mice and such in the White House. Maybe even farther back than that. Bess Truman wasn’t a fan of the place.
Tried Googling but good grief. Hundreds of unrelated hits. For one search almost all of the first 100 links were to amazon.com where the “mice” were ads for computer mice.
Google is not my friend. Tried Bing. Even with “Bess Truman” in quotes, got a lot of hits for The Truman Show.
I’m quite sure the WH was pretty filthy-up to about 1900. Face it, food preparation in the 19th and 18th century was pretty iffy.
But I was always amused by Andrew Jackson’s inauguration party-huge amounts of booze was consumed, and guests carved their initials into the wood work-and cuts souvenir pieces of the drapery. And before it had indoor plumbing, the chamber pots were emptied into the back yard-yum!
In Destiny of the Republic, the author describes how shabby the White House had become by 1881. I honestly don’t recall if there were vermin mentioned, but I feel like that was probably an issue at that time.
The White House as it is today is fairly new in most senses and only dates to the Truman administration from the early 1950’s. After the Great Depression and WWII, it had serious structural and deterioration issues and had to be almost completely destroyed internally and rebuilt from the inside out.. Only the outer brick shell is partly original and that only counts if you don’t include other rebuildings such as when it was burned during the War of 1812 or the various additions that were later added and sometimes later removed. Once you know that, it makes some of its ‘historical’ features such as the Lincoln bedroom seem like fraud.
What I am saying is that the White House has had many different forms over the years and was allowed to become quite decrepit at times especially during the 1800’s and from the Great Depression to WWII. I am sure it is mostly spotless today but there is plenty of food around and that is enough to attract vermin anywhere. They aren’t scared of the Secret Service and can get through any opening whatsoever.
The poor things. I was saying that I expect an enormous 19th-century building where the inhabitants used chamber pots and didn’t have indoor baths or sinks probably had its share of vermin.