President Taft's Bathtub Woes

Gregory takes on the hot button political issues of the day.

You know who I’ve been thinking about lately?

President Taft.

I feel bad for President Taft.

Now before you get all insecure about your deficit of knowledge regarding our nation’s 27th leader, let me assure you that I don’t know anything about him either. Actually, thats not true. I know one thing.

He was the one who got stuck in the bathtub.

I suspect some of you are now nodding in recognition. “Oh, that guy.” And herein lies the problem. Taft may have been an outstanding president, but most of us will never bother to find out. He ascended to our nation’s highest office, and his entire legacy has been relegated to a giggle-inducing mental image of a naked man tragically underestimating his own girth. Poor guy.

There could almost be two layers of sympathy for Taft. Aside from the permanent stain on his reputation, one might also be tempted to feel compassion for the shame he must have felt upon realizing he would need assistance in being extricated from one of life’s most vulnerable situations. Feeling sorry for him in this regard is unnecessary, however, because it turns out that the story is not true. Never happened. Historians have studied it (which is incredible in and of itself) and it turns out, it was simply a baseless rumor started by an attention-seeking White House usher. Yet, the legend persists.

I recall being taught this “fact” in first grade. It seems to have been an unfortunate byproduct of the well-intentioned yet always ill-fated attempts to make education “fun.” And apparently children are still being misinformed because in my research for this article, I discovered a 2016 picture book titled, “President Taft is Stuck in the Bath.” (Note that this is not an Amazon link. If you’re in the market for children’s books about apocryphal presidential bathroom incidents, please always support your local independent bookstore.)

Honestly, I can’t say I’m surprised that Americans have latched on to this myth at the expense of any useful knowledge of Taft’s administration. We’re a lot more interested in scandal than we are in government. If Abraham Lincoln had had an humiliating incident during the Gettysburg Address, we probably wouldn’t even know about the Civil War.

“Oh yeah, Lincoln, wasn’t he the guy who was giving that Gettytown Address thing and then his pants split open? That’s funny…What was that speech about anyway? What did he need to address? Was something going on?”

Politics is polarizing, but immaturity will always be bipartisan.