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Philip Spiess
DOUBLE, DOUBLE TOILET TROUBLE: A Two-Seater of Comedy and Tragedy
Part I: The Great Bathtub Hoax
On December 20, 1842, one Adam Thompson, a Cincinnati dealer in cotton and grain, who shipped such items down the Mississippi and thence to England, had a bathtub installed in his house in Cincinnati near the corner of Monastery and Oregon Streets in Mount Adams, a house described as being “a large house with Doric pillars.” Today this would not be of any memorable interest – I’m sure that most of us, at one time or another, have had a bathtub or a shower (or at least an upgrade) installed in our house – but in 1842, this was a novelty: it was the first installed (i.e., plumbed) bathtub in the United States. Oh, sure, there had been portable tin tubs (so-called “bonnet tubs” or "hip baths") used for the occasional bath in the United States before this – you can see them in many an ante-bellum historic house, both in the South and in the North, usually partially tucked under the four-poster bed – but to have actual running water attached to a tub was something new.
And Thompson’s tub was something unusual indeed. It had been made for Thompson by Cincinnati’s leading cabinet-maker, James Guiness, who fashioned the nearly 7-foot long and 4-foot wide tub of Nicaraguan mahogany, lined it with sheet lead soldered at the joints, and finished it with an elaborately polished wood surround. It weighed around 1,750 pounds when completed, and thus the floor of the bathroom had to be reinforced to support it.
But there’s more: The city water supply did not then reach to the top of Mount Adams, and so Thompson had a pump, operated by six of his black servants, installed in a large well in his garden to lift water to a cypress tank in the attic, from which two pipes ran to the tub. One, carrying cold water, was a direct line. The other was coiled like a giant spring inside the great chimney of the kitchen and was designed to provide warm water. Thompson took two baths in his new tub on December 20, a cold one at 8:00 a.m., and a warm one (it’s said the water reached a temperature of 105 degrees) during the afternoon. On Christmas Day, Thompson had in a party of gentlemen for dinner, and four of them tried the tub. Word about the bathtub thereupon got out.
I won’t go through the numerous articles, both pro and con, that appeared in the public press, the medical journals, and even the Christian religious journals, concerning the efficacy of said tub-bathing. Some, particularly plumbers, said it had a certain hygienic and relaxing merit to it; but most commentators, of whatever sort, thought it an “obnoxious toy,” a certain provider of “rheumatic fevers, inflammation of the lungs,” etc., or an “epicurean corrupter” of moral and “democratic simplicity.” Some state and local governments took it upon themselves to tax any bathtubs set up, while Boston made bathing unlawful, “except upon medical advice,” from 1845 to 1862.
It was when Millard Fillmore, convinced of the usefulness of bathtubs (having supposedly inspected Thompson’s in Cincinnati), had one installed in the White House when he became President in 1850, that bathtubs achieved respectability (despite the fact, as was pointed out, that none of our Founding Fathers had had tubs with running water on their plantation estates) and they were finally and fully established in the United States. Installation of the White House bathtub was supervised by General Charles M. Conrad, the Secretary of War, and was constructed of cast iron lined with zinc by Harper & Gillespie, engineers of Philadelphia. The rest is history.
It really is. Yet all of the above is total fabricated nonsense, except for a few idle facts thrown in as “merely corroborative detail, intended to give artistic verisimilitude to an otherwise bald and unconvincing narrative” [William S. Gilbert]. This whole stew of lies was ladled up by Henry Louis Mencken, the irascible and ironic journalist known as the “Sage of Baltimore,” in a piece in the New York Evening Mail on December 28, 1917, entitled “A Neglected Anniversary.” He wrote it as a lark amidst the alarms and horrors of World War I, never dreaming of the consequences, because . . .
Mencken’s hoax has far outlasted Mencken – it goes on and on being accepted as the gospel truth, even though Mencken himself sought to pull the plug on it – twice! In the Chicago Tribune of May 23, 1926, Mencken wrote a column entitled “Melancholy Reflections,” in which he attempted to quash his false history of the bathtub by stating that his 1917 article “was a tissue of absurdities, all of them deliberate and most of them obvious.” As he acknowledges, the 1917 article was “reprinted by various great organs of the enlightenment.” Then, he says, “suddenly, my satisfaction turned to consternation. For these readers, it appeared, all took my idle jocosities with complete seriousness. Some . . . actually offered me corroboration!”
But, as Mencken says, the worst was to come. “Pretty soon I began to encounter my preposterous ‘facts’ in the writings of other men. . . . They got into learned journals. They were alluded to on the floor of congress. . . . Finally, I began to find them in standard works of reference. Today, I believe, they are accepted as gospel everywhere on earth. . . . This is the first time, indeed, that they have ever been questioned, and I confess at once that even I myself, their author, felt a certain hesitancy about doing it. . . . The Cincinnati boomers, who have made much of the boast that the bathtub industry, now running to $200,000,000 a year, was started in their town, will charge me with spreading lies against them.”
Mencken then waxes philosophical on truth versus fiction: “The truth, indeed, is something that mankind, for some mysterious reason, instinctively dislikes. Every man who tries to tell it is unpopular, and even when, by the sheer strength of his case, he prevails, he is put down as a scoundrel.” He concludes: “All I care to do today is to reiterate, in the most solemn and awful terms, that my history of the bathtub . . . was pure buncombe. If there were any facts in it they got there accidentally and against my design. But today the tale is in the encyclopedias. History, said a great American soothsayer [Henry Ford], is bunk.”
But history was not done with Mencken and his bathtub. Frustrated with his own hoax, on July 25, 1926, Mencken wrote another column for the Chicago Tribune, this one entitled “Hymn to the Truth.” He states that he had expected his readers to like the original article. “Alas,” he writes, “they liked it only too well . . . it spread to other papers, and then to the magazines and weeklies of opinion, and then to the scientific press, and finally to the reference books. . . . It accumulated corroborative detail. To this day it is in circulation, . . . and is . . . embalmed for the instruction and edification of posterity. On May 23, writing here, I exposed it at length. I pointed out some of the obvious absurdities in it. I confessed categorically that it was all buncombe. I called upon the historians of the land to take it out of their books. This confession and appeal was printed simultaneously in nearly thirty great American newspapers.” The result? The Boston Herald printed Mencken's confession on page 7 of its editorial section, and then on June 13, on page 1 of the same editorial section, it printed Mencken’s original article – the fake – “soberly and as a piece of news!”
Well, the beat goes on to this day. Mencken died in 1956. In 1959, Dr. Robert J. Rayback, Fillmore’s first real biographer, claimed that Fillmore had, in the White House, “one of Washington’s few bathtubs.” [N.B. At the time, there were at least six marble tubs in the basement of the U. S. Capitol for use by Senators.] In 1973, in his The Americans: The Democratic Experience, the eminent scholar and historian, Dr. Daniel J. Boorstin, former director of the National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution, and, following that, Librarian of Congress, wrote of President Fillmore installing a bathtub and water closet in the White House in 1851 (thereby adding to Mencken’s original hoax). Other books – among them Earl Schenck Miers’ America and Its Presidents (1969); Randle Bond Truett’s The First Ladies in Fashion (1970); Barbara Seuling’s The Last Cow on the White House Lawn (1978); and even at least three editions of Joseph Nathan Kane’s Famous First Facts (1st ed., 1933; 3rd ed., 1964) – have repeated Mencken’s nonsense, particularly the part about President Fillmore, as have radio and television journalists and talk-show hosts. (It was President Andrew Jackson who, in December 1834, installed the first bathtub with hot and cold running water in the White House.)
As I said, the story really is history. The hoax is a real hoax, but the history of it has become a part of history itself. Do the “facts” of the case matter in the long run? I don’t know. You could look it up.
Coming soon: Part II: The Pleasant Ridge Privy Disaster
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Last year's eclipse on my birthday 4/20 in Western Australia.
And here are the crescent images of the sun projected through a collander
Oldenburg is a quaint 19th century country town founded around a Franciscan monastery and nunnery. One of the sisters established a homemade ice cream shop in a former post office turned bank. They also sell antiques, including old CrackerJack treats from the 1920s through 1950s, which now go for $15 and upwards. Don't you wish you'd saved yours? (Oldenburg also has an outstanding fried chicken restaurant, Wagner's Village Inn, which won the 2023 James Beard Foundation America's Classic Award for best local restaurant in the Great Lakes region. Unfortunately, it was closed on the day of the eclipse.)
I stayed in Mt Adams on Sunday night but was disappointed to find that the nighborhood's old artsy-bohemian vibe had faded yupwards. The only open restaurant I could find there was a Mexican cantina, El Barril, with a confused cross-cultural vibe. The waitress looked blank when I asked if they served sangria. She turned out to be from Nepal, one of the many south Asians who have immigrated to Cincinnati in recent years. The burritos were good though.
