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.