The article begins as follows:
“On December 20 there flitted past us, absolutely without public notice, one of the most important profane anniversaries in American history, to wit, the seventy-fifth anniversary of the introduction of the bathtub into These States. Not a plumber fired a salute or hung out a flag. Not a governor proclaimed a day of prayer. Not a newspaper called attention to the day.”
He was celebrating the first bathtub in America, the first use of which took place on Dec. 20, 1842, in the home of James Cullness, the leading Cincinnati cabinetmaker, who had made the first bathtub, a copy and an improvement on the English version. It was made of mahogany from Nicaragua.
“It was nearly seven feet long and fully four feet wide. To make it water-tight, the interior was lined with sheet lead, carefully soldered at the joints. The whole contraption weighed about 1,750 pounds, and the floor of the room in which it was placed had to be reinforced to support it. The exterior was elaborately polished.”
What followed was a masterpiece of research and writing, exactly as we might expect of its author H.L. Mencken, perhaps the greatest stylist in the history of American journalism. The article moves breezily with perfect detail through all the controversies, culminating in the great moment when President Millard Fillmore installed one in the White House.
After some public discussion that noted that no tub existed at Mt. Vernon or Monticello, the public finally came around and eventually the bathtub became popular in the United States.
The article by Mencken came to be one of his most cited and celebrated. It was included in collections on American history, scholarly works and encyclopedias, and medical journals, and even entered into popular culture.
Nine years later, in 1926, an exasperated Mencken came clean and admitted that the entire article was a complete fake. Not one word of it is true. As he put it, it is “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.”
Anyone could have easily discovered this by looking up a single name or place. It was a well-crafted hoax, complete with enough clues that anyone with the slightest knowledge of history could have known (bathtubs have been around since 1750 BC, for example).
Mencken’s point, in part, was to illustrate the gullibility of the American public, how we seek out predictable narratives to confirm our biases, and are easily tricked by precision on storytelling.
Yes, it was a pretty dark trick that he pulled but he left enough clues in it. Just one I looked up just now is rather obvious. The home of the original bathtub he said was on the corner of Monastery and Orleans but maps show those streets are miles away from each other. There is no such intersection. Another giveaway: Monticello does indeed have bathtubs!
As for Millard Filmore, he was indeed president in 1850 but bathtubs were already there. They were installed by James Madison in 1814. It was Andrew Jackson who brought running water to the White House. It was Fillmore’s successor Franklin Pierce who installed running cold and hot water, and doing so resolved no public controversy at all.
Again, the whole thing was entirely made up. And there is a deeper history concerning why he did this. Think of the year of 1917. In April, the United States entered the Great War that caused so much wreckage to U.S. freedoms. Censorship was already in play, and rationing was coming. For several years, war propaganda was heating up in the Unites States, complete with a full demonization of the Kaiser and Germany in particular.
There was a frenzy in the land, with every civic club and community meeting seized with a war lust to make the world safe for democracy. Opponents of the war were being investigated and arrested. As a journalist, Mencken grew ever more frustrated. He embarked on a long and brilliant history of the American language, if only to pass the time, and wrote many other essays that never saw the light of day.
He made sport out of getting around the censors but it is a tiresome job. Also tiresome were the daily media tropes that wove pro-war fantasies that tapped into certain habits of mind in the civic religion. Mencken saw through it all, but found himself frustrated at both the media’s complicity in the lying and also the credulity of the American public which displayed a diminished capacity for critical thinking.
His history of the bathtub, then, was both a send-up and celebration of American civic culture with all its warts. Then the little experiment got out of hand. He had done too good a job! Finally he confessed 10 years later.
I reread the original piece over the Christmas holiday and its utter brilliance struck me. It serves as a meta-critique of certain habits of mind in the American spirit.
For example, we have always been inclined to believe that our technological know-how is superior to any country on earth, so he made up a phony story about how a fussy English lord could not figure out how not to use maids to fill up the tub. The American invention of piped-in water illustrates creativity and also our democratic longings not to have servants.
Americans love to debate things, so he further made up a non-existent controversy about whether the bathtub was too pretentious and precious for rugged American sensibilities.
Here is my favorite passage from this fake history.
“On the one hand it was denounced as an epicurean and obnoxious toy from England, designed to corrupt the democratic simplicity of the Republic, and on the other hand it was attacked by the medical faculty as dangerous to health and a certain inviter of ‘phthisic, rheumatic fevers, inflammation of the lungs and the whole category of zymotic diseases.’ (I quote from the Western Medical Repository of April 23, 1843.)”
There was such a journal as the Western Medical Repository. No, it never carried an article denouncing the bathtub. Hilariously, however, medical journals after 1917 cited this non-existent article with reference to Mencken’s supposedly definitive history!
Also featured in the article is the American tendency to over meddle in people’s lives by force of law, including punitive taxes and outright bans. Another passage:
“Late in 1843, for example, the Philadelphia Common Council considered an ordinance prohibiting bathing between November 1 and March 15, and it failed of passage by but two votes. During the same year the legislature of Virginia laid a tax of $30 a year on all bathtubs that might be set up, and in Hartford, Providence, Charleston and Wilmington (Del.) special and very heavy water rates were levied upon those who had them. Boston, very early in 1845, made bathing unlawful except upon medical advice, but the ordinance was never enforced and in 1862 it was repealed.”
Again, none of this happened. But could it have happened? Certainly.
Finally, the article offers a funny send-up of the cultural power of the American presidency. The notion that Millard Filmore popularized the bathtub is absurd except that it is not entirely crazy to believe that this could have happened.
What was Mencken’s fame here? He constructed the perfect illustration of fake news, as a means of exposing the gullibility of the public and the complicity of the press in popularizing fiction masquerading as fact. He was too successful!
“It is out of just such frauds, I believe, that most of the so-called knowledge of humanity flows. What begins as a guess—or, perhaps, not infrequently, as a downright and deliberate lie—ends as a fact and is embalmed in the history books. One recalls the gaudy days of 1914-1918. How much that was then devoured by the newspaper readers of the world was actually true? Probably not 1 per cent. Ever since the war ended learned and laborious men have been at work examining and exposing its fictions. But every one of these fictions retains full faith and credit today. To question even the most palpably absurd of them, in most parts of the United States, is to invite denunciation as a bolshevik.”
Yes, it was a wicked trick but with real lessons. On reflection, the article is as ridiculous as it is brilliant. It pushed all the right buttons and thereby became true merely because it was believed. Indeed, the original article continued to be cited long after Mencken had confessed.
To this day, the great bathtub hoax of 1917 should serve as a warning to all: check before you believe!
