Chapter VIII: History of the Bathtub in America

Those versed in fabricated history had moments of sheer delight the forenoon of May 27, 1936, while listening to Dr. Shirley W. Wynne, formerly Commissioner of Health for New York City, as he spoke over station WEAF of the National Broadcasting Company on the subject “What Is Public Health”:

“Even ordinary bathing, one of the simple factors in our personal hygiene, had a hard time getting inaugurated in our grandfather’s day. The city fathers in the good town of Boston ruled that it was unlawful to take a bath except on a doctor’s advice; and that law remained in effect from 1854 until 1862--think of it. In Philadelphia they were a little more open-minded. The law in Philadelphia was that you couldn’t take a bath between November and March. The cities of Hartford and Providence discouraged bathing by raising the charges for water supply about 400 per cent for people who owned bathtubs. In 1847, in Newport, Rhode Island, a doctor tried to convert the people to the habit of washing, though at the same time he conscientiously warned them that the first bath or two might affect their hearts. The American Medical Association immediately opposed him and said that bathing was NOT compulsory to health, and the people needn’t wash unless they just wanted to do so for some whimsical reason of their own. So you see our great-grandfathers and even our grandfathers all belonged in that category referred to inelegantly as the Great Unwashed.”

The source of joy to the connoisseurs in hoaxes was that the learned ex-Commissioner of Health was reciting over the NBC what sounded a whole lot like an abridgment of a certain contribution to the history of the bathtub which was published in the New York _Evening Mail_ of December 28, 1917. We have secured permission and herewith offer what, in spite of much quoting and discussion, is probably the first complete reprinting of this (the author is beginning to feel) overtenaciously successful hoax:

“A NEGLECTED ANNIVERSARY[22]

_By_

H. L. MENCKEN

“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.

“True enough, it was not entirely forgotten. Eight or nine months ago one of the younger surgeons connected with the Public Health Service in Washington happened upon the facts while looking into the early history of public hygiene, and at his suggestion a committee was formed to celebrate the anniversary with a banquet. But before the plan was perfected Washington went dry, and so the banquet had to be abandoned. As it was, the day passed wholly unmarked, even in the capital of the nation.

“Bathtubs are so common today that it is almost impossible to imagine a world without them. They are familiar to nearly every one in all incorporated towns; in most of the large cities it is unlawful to build a dwelling house without putting them in; even on the farm they have begun to come into use. And yet the first American bathtub was installed and dedicated so recently as December 20, 1842, and, for all I know to the contrary, it may be still in existence and in use.

“Curiously enough, the scene of its setting up was Cincinnati, then a squalid frontier town, and even today surely no leader in culture. But Cincinnati, in those days as in these, contained many enterprising merchants, and one of them was a man named Adam Thompson, a dealer in cotton and grain. Thompson shipped his merchandise by steamboat down the Ohio and Mississippi to New Orleans, and from there sent it to England in sailing vessels. This trade frequently took him to England, and in that country, during the ’30’s, he acquired the habit of bathing.

“The bathtub was then still a novelty in England. It had been introduced in 1828 by Lord John Russell and its use was yet confined to a small class of enthusiasts. Moreover, the English bathtub, then as now, was a puny and inconvenient contrivance--little more, in fact, than a glorified dishpan--and filling and emptying it required the attendance of a servant. Taking a bath, indeed, was a rather heavy ceremony, and Lord John in 1835 was said to be the only man in England who had yet come to doing it every day.

“Thompson, who was of inventive fancy--he later devised the machine that is still used for bagging hams and bacon--conceived the notion that the English bathtub would be much improved if it were made large enough to admit the whole body of an adult man, and if its supply of water, instead of being hauled to the scene by a maid, were admitted by pipes from a central reservoir and run off by the same means. Accordingly, early in 1842 he set about building the first modern bathroom in his Cincinnati home--a large house with Doric pillars, standing near what is now the corner of Monastery and Oregon streets.

“There was then, of course, no city water supply, at least in that part of the city, but Thompson had a large well in his garden, and he installed a pump to lift its water to his house. This pump, which was operated by six negroes, much like an old-time fire engine, was connected by a pipe with a cypress tank in the garret of the house, and here the water was stored until needed. From the tank two other pipes ran to the bathroom. One, carrying cold water, was a direct line. The other, designed to provide warm water, ran down the great chimney of the kitchen, and was coiled inside it like a giant spring.

“The tub itself was of new design, and became the grandfather of all the bathtubs of to-day. Thompson had it made by James Guinness, the leading Cincinnati cabinetmaker of those days, and its material was Nicaragua mahogany. It was nearly seven feet long and fully four feet wide. To make it watertight, 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.

“In this luxurious tub Thompson took two baths on December 20, 1842--a cold one at 8 a.m. and a warm one some time during the afternoon. The warm water, heated by the kitchen fire, reached a temperature of 105 degrees. On Christmas day, having a party of gentlemen to dinner, he exhibited the new marvel to them and gave an exhibition of its use, and four of them, including a French visitor, Col. Duchanel, risked plunges into it. The next day all Cincinnati--then a town of about 100,000 people--had heard of it, and the local newspapers described it at length and opened their columns to violent discussions of it.

“The thing, in fact, became a public matter, and before long there was a bitter and double-headed opposition to the new invention, which had been promptly imitated by several other wealthy Cincinnatians. 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.)

“The noise of the controversy soon reached other cities, and in more than one place medical opposition reached such strength that it was reflected in legislation. 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 early in 1845 made bathing unlawful except upon medical advice, but the ordinance was never enforced and in 1862 it was repealed.

“This legislation, I suspect, had some class feeling in it, for the Thompson bathtub was plainly too expensive to be owned by any save the wealthy. Indeed, the common price for installing one in New York in 1845 was $500. Thus the low caste politicians of the time made capital by fulminating against it, and there is even some suspicion of political bias in many of the early medical denunciations. But the invention of the common pine bathtub, lined with zinc, in 1847, cut off this line of attack, and thereafter the bathtub made steady progress.

“The zinc tub was devised by John F. Simpson, a Brooklyn plumber, and his efforts to protect it by a patent occupied the courts until 1855. But the decisions were steadily against him, and after 1848 all the plumbers of New York were equipped for putting in bathtubs. According to a writer in the _Christian Register_ for July 17, 1857, the first one in New York was opened for traffic on September 12, 1847, and by the beginning of 1850 there were already nearly 1,000 in use in the big town.

“After this medical opposition began to collapse, and among other eminent physicians Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes declared for the bathtub, and vigorously opposed the lingering movement against it in Boston. The American Medical Association held its annual meeting in Boston in 1849, and a poll of the members in attendance showed that nearly 55 per cent of them now regarded bathing as harmless, and that more than 20 per cent advocated it as beneficial. At its meeting in 1850 a resolution was formally passed giving the imprimatur of the faculty to the bathtub. The homeopaths followed with a like resolution in 1853.

“But it was the example of President Millard Fillmore that, even more than the grudging medical approval, gave the bathtub recognition and respectability in the United States. While he was still Vice-President, in March, 1850, he visited Cincinnati on a stumping tour, and inspected the original Thompson tub. Thompson himself was now dead, but his bathroom was preserved by the gentleman who had bought his house from his estate. Fillmore was entertained in this house and, according to Chamberlain, his biographer, took a bath in the tub. Experiencing no ill effects, he became an ardent advocate of the new invention, and on succeeding to the presidency at Taylor’s death, July 9, 1850, he instructed his secretary of war, Gen. Charles M. Conrad, to invite tenders for the construction of a bathtub in the White House.

“This action, for a moment, revived the old controversy, and its opponents made much of the fact that there was no bathtub at Mount Vernon or at Monticello, and that all the Presidents and other magnificoes of the past had got along without any such monarchical luxuries. The elder Bennett, in the New York _Herald_, charged that Fillmore really aspired to buy and install in the White House a porphyry and alabaster bath that had been used by Louis Philippe at Versailles. But Conrad, disregarding all this clamor, duly called for bids, and the contract was presently awarded to Harper and Gillespie, a firm of Philadelphia engineers, who proposed to furnish a tub of thin cast iron, capable of floating the largest man.

“This was installed early in 1851, and remained in service in the White House until the first Cleveland administration, when the present enameled tub was substituted. The example of the President soon broke down all that remained of the old opposition, and by 1860, according to the newspaper advertisements of the time, every hotel in New York had a bathtub, and some had two and even three. In 1862 bathing was introduced into the army by Gen. McClellan, and in 1870 the first prison bathtub was set up at Moyamensing Prison, in Philadelphia.

“So much for the history of the bathtub in America. One is astonished, on looking into it, to find that so little of it has been recorded. The literature, in fact, is almost nil. But perhaps this brief sketch will encourage other inquirers and so lay the foundation for an adequate celebration of the centennial in 1942.”

Varying motives in the fabrication of history lead to varying methods. When the purposes are moral or political, as they seem to have been with Parson Weems in his handling of Washington, there is no deliberate straining at probabilities, there are no planted clues. But when the purpose is outright spoofing, as Mencken says it was with the bathtub, there is frequently a mendacious plant. Samples of these in Mencken are that he tells you the bathtub’s first American home was at the intersection of Monastery and Oregon Streets, in Cincinnati, in the year 1842, and that a certain reference to bathing comes from Chamberlain’s biography of President Fillmore. Now you can discover in any big library, or by writing the friendly librarians of Cincinnati, that while one of the two named streets, Oregon, may have existed there in 1842, the second, Monastery, is not listed until decades later. They will add that streets of these names have never intersected in that town. At your local public library they will report on the telephone that they cannot find any biography of Fillmore by Chamberlain.

Having in part given the victim fair warning, the Mencken type of spoofer proceeds to be reasonable enough to trap the unwary. Much of his tale of bathtub vicissitudes is, for instance, so reasonable superficially, so much in accord with what has actually been the history of the institution at other times and in other places, that not only are health commissioners liable to get caught but they have, on being caught, a pretty fair excuse. For, after all, you could, from so-called real facts, obtain approximately the same pictures and pretty roughly the same morals as you get from the fiction.

Indeed, one of the strongest arguments against troubling to fabricate history or science is that, with judicious manipulation and suitable reasoning, you can frequently extract from ordinary facts tales as pleasing and conclusions as ethical as are commonly based on those facts-by-definition which some call fictions.

Mencken probably felt that the numerous planted clews to his spoofing intent would keep “A Neglected Anniversary” from remaining long undetected. If so, he discovered presently that even he had overrated the public’s discrimination. Then the initial delight with which Mencken had watched the poor fish biting, started to fade. By 1926 it seemed to him the yarn was getting altogether too firmly historical so he began trying to call it off. On May 23 of that year he owned up that he had invented the tale, pointing out its absurdities. This confession was printed simultaneously in thirty American newspapers. One of them, the Boston _Herald_, used the article on a leading page, under a four-column head; three weeks later the same paper reprinted, as a piece of news, the substance of the story as it had originally appeared in 1917.

We give below a classified list, which does not attempt to be complete, of some of the individuals, institutions and publications that took one or the other side of the ensuing controversy over the bathtub hoax.

ACCEPTING THE HOAX

Support from Journalists:

_Scribner’s_, October, 1920.

A booklet entitled _The Story of the Bath_, published by the Domestic Engineering Company of Chicago, 1922.

_New York Herald_, Paris edition, September, 1925, mainly quoting an article in the _New York Sun_ by Ruth Wakeham.

_Chicago Evening American_, December 7, 1926, under heading “For and About Your Home.”

March 21, 1927, Colonel W. G. Archer, representing National Trade Extension Bureau of the plumbing and heating industry, in an address before the Clearfield, Pa., Commercial Club at the Jordan Hotel, Clearfield.

_Chiropractor_, 1927, an article called Splash, by A. J. Pufahl.

_Cleveland Press_, November 15, 1927, letter from E. Hershey, D.C., P.C.

A pamphlet entitled _Saga of the Bathtub_, by Walt Dennison, published by the LeRoy Carman Printing Company of Los Angeles, California, 1929.

_American Baptist_ (Lexington, Kentucky), February 13, 1929, in an article headed Selected--probably indicating quotation from some other source.

_Baltimore News_, March 16, 1929, in a column headed “Baltimore Day by Day,” by Carrol Dulaney (real name Richard D. Steuart).

_House Beautiful_, May, 1930, p. 535.

W. Orton Tewson, October 11, 1930, in a syndicated column, “The Attic Salt Shaker,” quoting a Dr. Moody (possibly Dr. W. R. Moody, who had recently printed a life of his father, Dwight L. Moody).

_Golden Book_, early in 1931, article by Lenora R. Baxter.

_New York Sun_, February 17, 1931, review of _Puritan’s Progress_, by Arthur Train, indicating the book accepted the hoax as fact.

_Baltimore Evening Sun_, May 22, 1931, letter signed S. A. Fact.

_Tucson Daily Star_, December 1, 1931, interview with C. R. King, manager of the Tucson branch of the Standard Sanitary Manufacturing Company.

_New York Sun_, December 22, 1931--quoting the _Military Engineer_.

_New York Sun_, October 12, 1933, advertisement of “Blue Coal,” part of which advertisement was an illustration showing a policeman, ca. 1842, threatening to arrest a man in a bathtub.

United Feature Syndicate, April 27, 1933, illustration by Russ Murphy and Ray Nenuskay under the caption “How It Began”--illustration showing Adam Thompson in his first bathtub in Cincinnati.

_New York Herald Tribune_, March 4, 1934, reprinted portions of above article by Lenora R. Baxter, under heading “Baths in Disfavor for Long Periods, History Recalls.”

_New York Sun_, January 6, 1935, news story.

_New York Times_, August 4, 1935, news story, “The Bathtub Wins Wider Patronage.”

United Press Red Letter for September 26, 1935, “Bathtub Once Viewed as Curse.”

J. Vijaya-Tunga, _New Statesman_ (London), October 5, 1935.

Central Press Association, November 15, 1935, _Scott’s Scrapbook_, cartoon.

_Digest and Review_, December, 1935.

_Australia Age_ (Melbourne), December 31, 1935.

_Liberty_, March 21, 1936.

James N. Kane, _Famous First Facts_, published by H. W. Wilson & Co. of New York (no date).

Support from Leaders of Thought:

Dr. John H. Finley (former president of the American Geographical Society and of the College of the City of New York; now an editor of the New York _Times_), in an article in the _Survey_, July 15, 1927.

Alexander Woollcott, radio broadcast for February 24, 1935.

Dr. Hans Zinsser (professor in the Medical School of Harvard University), in _Rats, Lice and History_, Boston, 1935.

Dr. Shirley W. Wynne (former Commissioner of Health for the City of New York)--cited _ante_.

Support from Governmental Agencies:

Federal Housing Administration clip sheet. Vol. 2, No. 9, February, 1935, sent out to newspapers throughout the U.S.

_Bulletin_ of the Department of Health of Kentucky, October, 1935.

EXPOSING THE HOAX

Exposure by Journalists:

Western Newspaper Union, November 28, 1930, syndicated article by Elmo Scott Watson, under the title “James, Draw My Bawth”--apparently printed in a great many small papers throughout the United States.

_Martha’s Vineyard Gazette_, April and May, 1931.

_Macon Telegraph_, August 31, 1932.

_Philadelphia Evening Public Ledger_, January 15, 1935.

_Editor and Publisher_, February 2, 1935, Marlen Pew, commenting on the circulation of the bathtub hoax by the Federal Housing Commission.

_Baltimore Evening Sun_, April 16, 1935.

_Wilmington Evening Journal_, June 24, 1935.

_Passaic Herald News_, July 26, 1935.

_New Statesman_ (London), November 2, 1935, a letter signed J.M.G., exposing the story as printed in the October 5 issue of the same magazine.

_Mobile Times_, December 28, 1935.

_Chicago Times_, January 23, 1936, editorial headed “A New True Story,” first quoting a speaker who addressed the members of the American Institute of Banking in Chicago. The speaker had related the bathtub story; the editorial then went on to expose the hoax.

Exposure by Leaders of Thought:

Rev. Nolan R. Best, executive secretary of the Baltimore Federation of Churches, letter to the editor of _Survey_, exposing the article by Dr. John H. Finley. Paul Kellogg, the editor, wrote to Finley, who replied July 31, 1927: “The bathtub information was furnished me by a representative of the Cleanliness Institute.”

Curtis D. MacDougal, editor of Evanston, Illinois, _News Index_, made an investigation of newspaper hoaxes, exposing, among others, the bathtub hoax. A summary of his report was printed in the _Editor and Publisher_, January 12, 1935. Later he embodied his material in an article for the _Journalism Quarterly_. A summary of that article was printed in the Worcester, Mass., _Gazette_ for August 10, 1935. Dr. MacDougal printed a second article on the subject in the _Evanston News Index_, August 9, 1935; in it he discussed especially the apparent impossibility of putting such hoaxes down.

Exposure by Governmental Agencies:

Bureau of Municipal Research, Philadelphia. The Bureau’s exposure of the hoax was printed in the _Philadelphia Evening Bulletin_, July 10, 1933, under the heading Bathtub Myth Exploded.[23]

History, whether real or fabricated, may lose or gain, may remain unchanged or may change with time. These things are handily illustrated by coupling statements from Mencken of 1917 and Wynne of 1936:

_Mencken_: “Boston early in 1845 made bathing unlawful except upon medical advice, but the ordinance was never enforced and in 1862 it was repealed.”

_Wynne_: “The city fathers in the good town of Boston ruled that it was unlawful to take a bath except on a doctor’s advice; and that law remained in effect from 1854[24] until 1862--think of it.”

_Mencken_: “... the Philadelphia Common Council considered an ordinance prohibiting bathing between November 1 and March 15, and it failed of passage by but two votes.”

_Wynne_: “The law in Philadelphia was that you couldn’t take a bath between November and March.”

_Mencken_: “... in Hartford, Providence, Charleston and Wilmington (Del.) special and very heavy water rates were levied upon those who had them (bathtubs).”

_Wynne_: “The cities of Hartford and Providence discouraged bathing by raising the charges for water supply about 400 per cent for people who owned bathtubs.”

_Mencken_: “After this medical opposition began to collapse, and among other eminent physicians Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes declared for the bathtub.... The American Medical Association held its annual meeting in Boston in 1849, and a poll of the members in attendance showed that nearly 55 per cent of them now regarded bathing as harmless, and that more than 20 per cent advocated it as beneficial. At its meeting in 1850 a resolution was formally passed giving the imprimatur of the faculty to the bathtub.”

_Wynne_: “In 1847, in Newport, Rhode Island, a doctor tried to convert the people to the habit of washing, though at the same time he conscientiously warned them that the first bath or two might affect their hearts. The American Medical Association immediately opposed him and said that bathing was NOT compulsory to health, and the people needn’t wash unless they just wanted to do so for some whimsical reason of their own.”

That there is pleasant edification for believers in Menckenized history we infer from its popularity; that the employment of the many learned and famous commentators, disseminators and denouncers has been remunerative, we hope; that there is occasionally a spot cash return even to the man in the street we can show by an example:

A well-named periodical, _Liberty_, which encourages among other freedoms the one to believe, has a feature, “Twenty Questions.” For those who, in view of the following, may desire to try making an honest dollar, we quote that “Liberty will pay $1 for any question accepted and published. If the same question is suggested by more than one person, the first suggestion received will be the one considered. Address Twenty Questions, P. O. Box 380, Grand Central Station, New York, N. Y.” Some time before March 21, 1936 (for we quote from that issue) they had, then, paid one dollar for what appeared on that date, p. 39, as question No. 17:

“In which city of the United States was it against the law to take a bath in 1845?”

As directed, we turn to p. 48 and find under 17 the answer:

“In Boston, Massachusetts. It was then deemed unlawful to take a bath except when prescribed by a physician.”

When, belated, I discovered this in _Liberty_, I wondered how the Bostonians were taking what must be a steady barrage, and wrote the Commissioner of Public Health, Dr. Henry D. Chadwick, who replied from the State House, Boston, July 16, 1936:

“The story which you quote from the magazine, _Liberty_, is periodically cropping out in various parts of the country.

“I obtained from W. J. Doyle, City Clerk of Boston, what I consider a true statement of Boston’s attitude toward bathing in the early days, and I enclose a copy.”

The Doyle statement said in part:

“In several forms during the past ten years an item has appeared in various publications stating ... that the City of Boston at some time by ordinance forbade the use of bathtubs, or bathing except on the advice of a physician.

“The story has not the slightest foundation in fact. No such ordinance was ever adopted either by the Town or City of Boston from its settlement in 1630 up to the present time....

“... In 1843 an ordinance was enacted requiring that all prisoners in the Jail or House of Correction should be given a weekly bath. So much as regards bathing except on advice of a physician. The statement that bathtubs were prohibited is so silly as to hardly merit denial, but it is usually made referring to a mythical ordinance supposedly adopted in 1848 and not repealed until 1870. No such ordinance was ever adopted and no such ordinance was ever submitted to the City Council.

W. J. Doyle,

City Clerk.”

I was evidently a long way from being the first to query Boston officials on Menckenized history, for the Clerk’s original statement, of which I received the above copy, was dated May 24, 1929. Incidentally, that dating explains his reference to “the last ten years.” For Mencken’s “Neglected Anniversary” had been published less than twelve years before.

How the Mencken fabricated knowledge is being used towards the end of its second decade has cultural significance. We take a few samples.

Hans Zinsser, A.B., A.M., M.D., D.Sc. (hon.), is professor in the Harvard Medical School. During 1935 his _Rats, Lice and History_, a piece of trenchant writing, was a best seller, one of the much read books that was also much discussed, filled with novel and startling facts. One of these (perhaps no longer exactly novel) is on p. 285:

“The first bathtub didn’t reach America, we believe, until about 1840.”

During February 1935, the Federal Housing Administration issued, in Clip Sheet, Vol. 2, No. 9, a statement on bathtub history:

“In 1842 Adam Thompson startled neighbors in Cincinnati by installing a box-shaped affair lined with lead in his home. Shortly after, in 1845, historians on the subject say the city of Boston passed an ordinance making it illegal to bathe unless a doctor had so ordered. Not until the early days of the Civil War was the act removed from that city’s statute books....

“Further indication of the manner in which early lawmakers viewed the matter of personal cleanliness is seen in a resolution introduced about 1843 in Philadelphia under which bathing would have been prohibited by the city fathers from November to March! As it turned out, the suggestion was tabled.

“When Millard Fillmore became President, the tide turned, due principally to his installing a tub in the White House....”

But on July 25, 1936, Robert B. Smith, Assistant to the Administrator, Federal Housing Administration, wrote:

“After this story was published, we found that the statements made in it could not be substantiated so far as ordinances and laws against bathing were concerned. The Health Commissioners of Boston and Philadelphia both wrote us that they could find no trace of any anti-bathing ordinances in their records....

“After this bathtub experience, we took care to have the statements made in the Clip Sheet double-checked....”

August 4, 1935, the New York _Times_ was celebrating progress in America’s metropolis. East Side tenants had made “demands for the installation of that former luxury,” the bathtub. This reminded the _Times_ that:

“It was with fear and travail that bathtubs were introduced in these United States. One of the first bathrooms appeared in Cincinnati, Ohio, about 1850, and certain clergymen hearing of it preached that such luxury meant nothing less than degeneracy. The fading of the glory that was Greece and the collapse of the grandeur that was Rome were freely mentioned. The baths of wicked Caracalla also were cited.”

The _Bulletin_ of the Department of Health of Kentucky, October 1935, said on p. 75:

“The first bathtub in the United States was installed in a Cincinnati home in 1842. It was made of mahogany and lined with sheet lead. Newspapers denounced it as undemocratic vanity. Boston, in 1845, made bathing unlawful except when prescribed by a physician. Virginia soaked the rich by taxing bathtubs $30 per year.”

A letter from J. Vijaya-Tunga was printed in the _New Statesman_, London, for October, 1935. We quote an extract as reprinted in the _Australia Age_ (Melbourne) for December 31, 1935:

“The first American bathtub was built in 1830. It was made of mahogany and was 7 feet long and 4 feet wide. It was lined with sheet lead and weighed more than 2,000 pounds. The invention was not popular. Boston authorities made bathing unlawful, and Virginia put a tax of $300 on each bathtub. Fifteen years later Boston declared bathtubs illegal, except on medical advice.”

The _Age_ did not fall for the hoax but the _New Statesman_ apparently did.

The Chicago _Times_ of January 23, 1936, quotes a speaker addressing a Chicago meeting of the American Institute of Banking:

“‘The hardest job on earth for the average man,’ he said, ‘is to sit and think. He’ll sit all right, but he won’t think, and that is why the public always detests a new idea. Why, do you know that when the first bathtubs were introduced in America intellectual Boston passed an ordinance making it unlawful to bathe in a bathtub except on medical advice?’”

The _Times_ treated this speaker editorially as the victim of a hoax which, perhaps naturally, did not influence Vice Presidential candidate Frank Knox’s Chicago _Daily News_, which said July 11, 1936, under the heading “Bathtub Suffered Same Fate in U. S. as Most Pioneers,” that

“America’s first bathtub, according to a recent issue of _Architecture_, was built in Cincinnati in 1842 and was made of mahogany and lined with sheet lead.

“While still accepting the oft-quoted relationship of cleanliness and godliness, the people of the day were not receptive to such fantastic innovations, and the tub, suffering the fate of most pioneering ventures, was denounced as a luxurious and undemocratic vanity. Doctors, according to the magazine, termed it a menace to health.

“In 1843 Philadelphia prohibited by ordinance bathing between Nov. 1 and March 15, and Boston made bathing unlawful except when prescribed by a physician. Also, bathtubs were taxed $30 yearly.”

A paper of which Knox is publisher stops in the heat of the Landon-Knox campaign to support Mencken as a historian; Mencken swerves from other forms of history-making the while to campaign for Knox as Vice President. With these things happening at and just after the Republican convention, we feel that God’s in His Heaven and that all should be well at any rate with the making of history.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] This was written when Gertrude Ederle was being showered with ticker tape. Neither she nor the ticker stood quite so well three years later.

[2] This was written in 1927. The press version of the “Blond” Eskimo story, as opposed to my book version, is still going strong in 1936.

[3] It can be argued that the first European discovery of the Northwest Passage was by Thomas Simpson (with whom Peter Warren Dease was associated) in 1839. If this be not admitted, then the claim falls to John Rae who worked both before and after the Third Franklin Expedition, on which the Passage was also discovered. Thus the McClure discovery in 1853 was either the third or fourth.

[4] Appendix X, Natural History, (p. clxxxix), _Journal of a Voyage for the Discovery of a North-West Passage, 1819-20_, by William Edward Parry, London, 1821.

[5] _Three Years of Arctic Service_, by Adolphus W. Greely, New York, 1886, p. 221.

[6] Op. cit., p. 105.

[7] Charles Mair and Roderick MacFarlane: _Through the Mackenzie Basin_, Toronto, 1908, p. 175.

[8] Vilhjalmur Stefansson: _The Friendly Arctic_, New York, 1921, p. 584.

[9] Fridtjof Nansen: _In Northern Mists_, London, 1911, Vol. I, p. 131.

[10] Nansen: Vol. I, p. 133.

[11] Tyson’s winter latitude, to which he here refers, was 81⅔° N. For our quotation see Tyson’s _Arctic Experiences_, New York, 1874, p. 195.

[12] Dr. Nelson died some five years after this paper was printed.

[13] Most authorities consider 105 to 110 pounds as very large for northern male wolves.

[14] The United States has long had this type of service. As mentioned, _ante_, it is administered from Washington by the Biological Survey.

[15] J. Stokley Ligon, American student of wild life, says: “I am inclined to agree with Dr. Nelson regarding young of a previous year not banding with parent animals and their young of a current year.” (Letter March 17, 1928.) He writes in the same letter: “I have never observed the big packs of wolves one hears and reads about.”

[16] Since this was written it has been ascertained that Oimekon, about 300 miles southeast and 200 miles south of the Arctic Circle, is colder than Verkhoyansk, and is therefore now the coldest known spot on earth. Like Verkhoyansk, the Oimekon vicinity is forested.

[17] Most things in this chapter are documented, but this letter is paraphrased from a vivid memory. Some details may be wrong, but the general trend is right.

[18] In 1904-06 I was fellow and assistant instructor in anthropology at Harvard. I had to read the examination papers but my seniors made up the questions. It was a standard joke with them to slip in somewhere: “In what country do the Eskimos live?” A good percentage of Harvard men, ranging from sophomore to senior, could be depended upon to answer: “The Eskimos live in Iceland.” That, my colleagues thought, was a pretty good joke on me.

[19] We have prints of the photographs described above and two additional ones--another of the apartment house and one that may be of Olof by herself, though it is most too good looking and may be of Miss Finch at the age of about 10.

[20] We note here some of the ways in which this ties in with, and fails to tie in with, what Schoolcraft learned. Olof told him that it was a Mr. Slayton who managed her lecture career, that after his death she lived with Mrs. Slayton for a number of years. See his account for why she left them. Then Olof met some people named Stone (I. K. Stone, Maple Street, Battle Creek, Michigan) who took her to Battle Creek where she had then (1922) been living for two or three years.

[21] Youthfulness at the time Olof left Greenland, as hereinafter stated, is said to have been useful in circus sideshow and on the lyceum platform--if challenged Miss Krarer used to say, modestly, that since she had for sources only vague childhood memories she might very well go wrong on particulars. But in general, she maintained, she was conveying an undeceptive first-hand impression of Eskimos and of Eskimoland.

[22] The article was printed with an editorial note: “Here’s a series of inspiring bath hour thoughts suggested by H. L. Mencken’s discovery, through official channels, that America’s first bathtub was built in Cincinnati and put in operation on December 20, 1842. Adam Thompson, its founder, got the idea on his visit to England, where Lord John Russell had started the custom of bathing fourteen years before. So, if any of the next best authors spring a freshly tubbed Englishman on you in a story of the revolution, you’ll know he’s phony.”

[23] Mencken’s own summary of the first decade of struggle over the bathtub hoax is given in his _Prejudices, Sixth Series_, New York, 1927, pp. 194-201.

[24] The discrepancy between this 1854 and Mencken’s 1845 may well be due to a mere transposition of figures.

Transcriber's Notes:

Italics are shown thus: _sloping_.

Variations in spelling and hyphenation are retained.

Perceived typographical errors have been changed.