Rub-a-dub-dub

Journalism has produced few more plausible hoaxes than H. L. Mencken's famed essay on the history of the U.S. bathtub. Mencken's yarn explains how a Cincinnati grain merchant named Adam Thompson caused the first tub to be constructed of sheet lead and Nicaragua mahogany back in 1842, how he built a pump with which a team of six Negroes lifted water into a tank in his house, how he ran a heating pipe through his chimney, and finally took the first modern bath.

Gaining speed with every paragraph, it further relates how President Millard Fillmore was captivated by the contraption after sloshing around in it on a stumping tour, and, despite adverse public opinion, had a similar tub installed in the White House in 1851. Although there is not a word of truth in the whole account, and Mencken has confessed his amiable duplicity repeatedly, connoisseurs of historical anecdote have been snapping it up for 30 years. It is doubtful, however, that any of them ever seized on it as tenaciously as President Harry Truman.

Back in 1948, the President answered critics of his White House balcony by saying that Mrs. Fillmore "almost got lynched" after her husband put in the first bathtub. Eighteen months ago, while escorting Novelist John (The Wall) Hersey through the presidential mansion, Truman retold the tale. White House Secretary Bill Hassett, who was standing at his elbow, gently told the President the awful truth.

"But," said the President, "what about that account I've read of Fillmore's stopping off in Cincinnati . . . ?" Said Hassett regretfully, "That's all in Mencken." "But I've seen a paper the American Medical Association drew up . . ." said the President. Hassett gave Mencken credit again. The President shook his head. "I'd swear those A.M.A. fellows didn't think it was a hoax."

Last month, in a Satevepost article, Washington Correspondent Beverly Smith tried to straighten out Truman--and history--once and for all. Smith proved that there was a bathtub in the White House long before Fillmore's administration, probably as far back as Andrew Jackson's day.

Truman was undiscouraged. Last week, in a speech to federal hospital executives at Philadelphia, the President not only retold the Fillmore bathtub tale, but improved it: Mrs. Fillmore (rather than the President), he said, had installed the first bathtub in the White House, and for her pains had been censored by Cincinnati doctors as an indecent person.

There had, he went on, been some progress since that date, and added that the White House now has as many bathtubs (it has 16) as Philadelphia's Benjamin Franklin Hotel (which has 1,200).

President Truman has said that after he retires he plans to do some writing and lecturing on U.S. history. He might fill out the Fillmore bathtub lecture with a few paragraphs on the 1,800-lb. tub (see cut) especially constructed for oversized President William Howard Taft.

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