Mencken's Bathtub Hoax

He's been dead for nearly 50 years, but H.L. Mencken's bathtub hoax lives on.  It seems to breed wherever information congregates, even mutating to the Internet.   

It's a story that's surely familiar to some.  Mencken is the Baltimore journalist who is the subject of many biographies, most recently Terry Teachout's The Skeptic: A Life of H.L. Mencken.  (Terry Teachout, the Wall Street Journal's drama critic, also co-authors the entertaining blog About Last Night.)

The hoax began on December 28, 1917, when Mencken published an article titled “A Neglected Anniversary,” ostensibly about the history of the bathtub on its 75th anniversary.  According to Mencken, early instances of bathtub use were attacked by doctors as "dangerous to health" and certain causes of "rheumatic fevers, inflammation of the lungs and the whole category of zymotic diseases."  The controversy didn't end, according to Mencken, until President Millard Fillmore installed the first modern bathtub in the White House in 1851. 

Mencken's article contained many other interesting bathtub facts--not one of them true.  Mencken’s point was to prove his belief that Americans were hopelessly gullible and would believe anything they read in a newspaper.  (In the process, he also proved the gullibility of news editors, not to mention the uselessness of fact-checkers.)  Mencken didn’t come clean for nine years, when he confessed in an article for the Chicago Tribune.  During those nine years, his false history of the bathtub was reprinted throughout the land and was beginning to be cited as a primary source. 

The hoax continues to this day.  On the Internet, lightly-edited publications such as EasyFunSchool.com and the Washington Post credit President Fillmore with installing the first bathtub in the White House.

What should we make of Mencken's bathtub hoax?  It surely can't be good for President Fillmore that he doesn't have a better legacy. (In modern times, a more suitable legacy might feature a stranger in a bathtub).  One web author is so enamored by Mencken's bathtub hoax that he continues to document examples of its proliferation.  (I borrowed some of his facts for use here.)  If you demand a moral, it's probably this: don't believe everything you read.  In fact, don't believe anything.

Comments

[Ed Darrell]

C'mon over and find more hoaxes to worry about: Millard Fillmore's Bathtub, at www.timpanogos.wordpress.com