William Howard Taft as President

Part 2 of 2

No story more indelibly imprints the persona of President William Howard Taft as a fat man and compulsive eater than the claim he became stuck in the bathtub of the lavatory in the presidential bedroom suite, located in the southwest corner of the White House second floor.

The Taft Tub Tale is now so embedded in American Pop Culture, it seems futile to question it; at the least, evidence it is untrue might be resented by teachers trying to find any hook that might interest students in history.

Some facts lend credence to the story in congregate and may be the genesis for what technically remains an unproven myth, mixed in the public’s never-ending search for humiliating stories of the great and mighty. One fact is absolute truth: Taft was an honest and open-hearted human being who worked hard to accomplish all that he did. His values were upset by deception. He never saw himself as above the law. In an era when bigotry was part of establishment thinking, Taft was a radical in his rigorous affirmation that Filipinos be treated as social equals and that their native culture and customs be respected when he ran the American-controlled government of the islands as its first civil governor-general.

Catholic Cardinal Gibbons and Jewish Rabbi Wise, close associates of William Howard Taft

He formed close, personal friendships with many of the Jewish leaders in his native Cincinnati, defending especially the controversial rabbi Isaac Mayer Wise, considered the father of American Jewish  Reform movement. He was equally close with the Catholic Cardinal James Gibbons and further deepened his understanding of the Roman Church when his sister-in-law converted to that faith. As a Unitarian, Taft had been viciously attacked in the traditional Protestant press for denying the divinity of Christ – but never felt the need to apologize or justify his personal beliefs or the faith he followed. He made some unpopular blunders regarding tariff rates, irritating consumers and big business alike, but all in his striving for fairness.

Taft in his open car touring through Savannah, Georgia.

He was also in touch with the pop culture of his era, listening to Caruso records, caught up in the Haley’s Comet craze and, as historian Michael Bromley (http://taft.stretching-it.com/) proved in his recent book William Howard Taft and the First Motoring Presidency, popularized the automobile by becoming the first White House resident to use a car.

Although Theodore Roosevelt is popularly depicted as the “Trust-Buster” it was Taft whose Justice Department prosecuted some eighty anti-trust suits against monopolies, while Teddy’s only pursued eight. Unfortunately for Taft, one of those cases which made frequent headlines and was associated with his name involved fifty manufacturers of bathroom hardware – otherwise known as “The Bathtub Trust,” dominated by the Standard Sanitary Manufacturing Company.

1909 ad for the Standard Sanitary Manufacturing Company’s bathroom hardware, the dominant company of the “Bathtub Trust,” which became associated with Taft’s prosecution of them for anti-competitive practices.

It is established that a larger White House bathtub measuring seven feet long and three and a half feet wide was made for Taft by the venerable J. L. Mott Iron Works and installed by four of its workers who irreverently posed in the tub. Nowadays, it is routinely and incorrectly reported that the picture shows White House employees and was taken in the mansion, despite the fact that workers there have always been notoriously discreet and respectful of the Chief Executive. The picture has also led to the false claim that it took four men to pull a stuck Taft out of a bathtub. That incorrect fact is often now embellished one degree further by the claim that butter was used to slip him out of the tub, perhaps a flourish suggestive his favorite “Loblolly Butter,” a butter with lobster liver bits, used on his other food love, “Bouncing Babies,” a kind of popover roll.

Tafts special-sized White House bathtub from the Mott company – and four employees in it.

The claim he got stuck in the original tub is purely extrapolation, based on an assumption that he would’ve had to have tried it out to discover it too small. Yet it may also be true that he simply looked at and sized up the tub, realizing he might become stuck, or that he never fully submerged himself into the water. Neither of those possibilities, of course, makes a good story.

There is other proof, however, of Taft’s trouble with other presidential bathtubs. On the presidential yacht Mayflower, there was a tub carved from a single block of Italian black marble that was immediately recognized as being too small for him. Rather than rip it out of the vessel, a large and portable one was quietly transported on board for his use.  Word began to circulate publicly, however, that there was a big tub installed for the fat President – and it was easy to see how, as it was retold, the yacht tub could be confused with the one in the mansion. Usually scrupulously honest, Taft was actually sensitive to the fat jokes still being told about him, so he resorted to an old trick still used by politicians today – he lied.

Will and Nellie Taft riding down Commercial Street in Provincetown on the way to his dedicating the Pilgrim Monument, August 5, 1910

On August 5, 1910, Will and Nellie sailed on the Mayflower up to Provincetown at the tip of Cape Cod so he could dedicate the Pilgrim Monument, which marked the first stop of the Pilgrims in 1620, on their boat, also called the Mayflower. It was in P’town where Taft told his tub fib: “When you become President of the United States, or even if you only try to, you find out many things about yourself you did not know before, and I am bound to say that most of them you prefer not to find out….but there are certain stories I should like to deny. We have no special bath tubs made for any executive of any particular size….It is particularly fitting that the vessel which brought the Chief Magistrate of the nation to the laying of the corner stone… should be named the Mayflower. It did not happen from any particular arrangement, only that the vessel was the most suitable, leaving out the question of bath tubs.”

The evidence that Taft hadn’t told the tub truth emerged in a news story two years later which reported on arrangements for his voyage to the Panama Canal on the battleship Arkansas. A “tub of unusual size and depth was to be installed in order that the President might not be put to any inconvenience or embarrassment” on his trip was the “mysterious object” that was being transferred from the Mayflower to the Arkansas.

Tafts bathtub from the Mayflower now on display at the Taft national Historic Site in Cincinnati, Ohio

All the tub stuff might be amusing diversion to the business of governing were it not for how deeply lodged into the public imagination the President Obesity persona became – and how well that fact was used against Taft by the time he was pursuing the Republican presidential re-nomination in 1912. As he made the run for a second term, Taft was directly challenged by his former friend and mentor, ex-President Theodore Roosevelt. Teddy was brilliant in employing various publicity stunts that played to the public. In the spring primaries, he unleashed some nasty words that suggested Taft’s compulsive eating had resulted in an inability to function as President, calling him a “fathead” and “flubdub” with “the brains of a pig…”

Taft was depicted as lazy because of his weight.

Magazines and newspapers that supported the Democratic candidate Woodrow Wilson or Roosevelt (who broke with the Republicans to run as a third-party candidate) were unmerciful in their caricature of Taft. No longer was he the jolly fat man. One cartoon showed him as a lazy, inert mass impeding progress, especially in the way of that very picture of velocity – Teddy. Another teased that while Teddy was intent on reforms to radically improve everyday life and Wilson on tedious, legal tariff changes, all Taft wanted was another piece of his Aunt Delia’s pie. Teddy’s daughter Alice, once somewhat emotionally close to Taft, compared his smile to a “pan of sweet milk.”

A 1912 election cartoon focuses on Taft’s love of his aunt’s homemade pies. He liked mince best.

If President Taft’s weight proved to be a factor in his defeat for a second term, it did not end the public interest in bathtub stories about him.

In fact, barely one month after he lost the 1912 election, came the news under the headline of “Special Tub for Taft,” that there had been a special tub installed on the Mayflower for the President – the same matter he had so specifically denied in August 1910.

Within seven months of leaving the Presidency, Taft got serious about weight loss, and dropped 70 pounds. He shared his diet secret with a citizen who wrote for advice: “I can truthfully say that I never felt any younger in all my life. Too much flesh is bad for any man. I have dropped potatoes entirely from my bill of fare, and also bread in all forms. Pork is also tabooed, as well as other meats in which there is a large percentage of fat. All vegetable except potatoes are permitted, and of meats, that of all fowls is permitted. In the fish line, I abstain from salmon and bluefish, which are the fat members of the fish family. I am also careful not to drink more than two glasses of water at each meal. I abstain from wines and liquors of all kinds, as well as tobacco in every form.”

Unfortunately for his reputation, however, a story more humiliating than being stuck in a bathtub was yet to come. In June of 1915, the facts were laid out in black and white for the entire world to read under the headline, “Taft Causes Hotel Deluge: Tidal Wave from his Bathtub Floods Bankers in Dining Room.” While staying at a Cape May hotel, the former President bathed in a tub too small for him, causing a massive amount of the water to overflow onto the tiles and trickle down through the ceiling of the floor below, where it dripped onto the heads of the Pennsylvania Bankers’ Association members. When the plumber ran up to find out what was wrong in Taft’s room, the ex-Prez was snoring, asleep.

Former President developed a deteriorating heart while serving as Chief Justice of the Supreme Court and died in 1931

William Howard Taft’s compulsive eating may have worked against his presidential re-election campaign, but more sadly it might have also strained his heart, a factor in his untimely 1931 death when he was serving as Chief Justice, the only public job he had ever really wanted. Ironically, however, it may also be his saving grace presidential pop culture aficionados who never cease to seem interested in the idea of a stuck, naked and wet President. The tall “Taft Tub” tale and irreverent references to his love of food have even recently made him the subject of a catchy song by the contemporary Two Man Gentleman Band, currently touring the Eastern Seaboard (check out their website at http://www.thetwogentlemen.com/ - they also tear it up over President Franklin Pierce on a subsequent album).

A poster for the film Shaft.

Inevitably, Taft also captures the imagination of kids learning their presidents. In one animated cartoon series on presidents, Taft’s episode is set to the changed lyrics but the same theme of 70s blaxploitation film Shaft, sung by a performer who sounds like Shaft‘s original singer, Barry White.

Taft Christmas ornament by Christopher Radko.

Furthermore, “Big Bill” Taft has made inroads to all those QVC housewives and holiday season obsessives, finding immortality on the Christmas Tree.

Woodrow Wilson’s long frowning face leaves him resembling a forbidding icicle, and Teddy Roosevelt’s bared teeth are a bit too menacing to convey goodwill towards all men.

Thanks to designer Christopher Radko, however, the sweetly smiling William Howard Taft has been radiating since the mid-90s on trees and wreathes all across the land each yuletide – as a glass ornament.

Categories: Americana, Cleveland, Harrison, McKinley, Roosevelt, Taft, Wilson, Harding, Individual Presidents, Presidential Campaigns and Elections, Presidential Foods, Presidential Mythology, Presidents, Regional Food, Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, William McKinley

Tags: History, Panama Canal, President, Theodore Roosevelt, United States, White House, William Howard Taft, William McKinley