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Sep 16, 2011 · The (original) tub was 7 feet 1 inch long, 41 inches wide, and weighed one ton. This Berryman cartoon depicts William Howard Taft being enticed towards a run for the Presidency in 1908. Taft blocks the buzz of a potential Supreme Court nomination to better hear the enticing buzz of the Presidential bee.
Nov 26, 2023 · This leaves his presidential legacy to a story about a bathtub: Legend has it that Taft, who weighed over 300 pounds during his presidency, once got so stuck in the White House bathtub that it...
Mar 19, 2024 · Rumors abound that the 27th president of the United States, William Howard Taft, got stuck in a bathtub at the White House due to his portly size. Specifically, most stories say he was only removed once six people helped pry his naked body out.
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Topping the scales at over 350 pounds, William Howard Taft was a true political heavyweight. Although “Big Bill” was the only man to serve as both U.S. president and Supreme Court chief justice, what most remember about Taft is that he supposedly became stuck in the White House bathtub.
The story, however, apparently doesn’t hold water. No documentary evidence backs it up, and according to Brady Carlson, author of the book Dead Presidents: An American Adventure into the Strange Deaths and Surprising Afterlives of Our Nation’s Leaders, the story didn’t arise until two decades after Taft left the presidency. Carlson says the sudsy tale first surfaced along with other presidential dirt in longtime White House usher Ike Hoover’s 1934 memoir, 42 Years in the White House.
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Newspapers reported that similarly spacious tubs were installed in the White House, on Taft’s presidential yacht and inside his brother’s summer home in Texas. After leaving the White House in 1913, Taft moved into a suite in a New Haven, Connecticut, hotel with an immense bathtub that the Philadelphia Inquirer reported was “deep enough to allow an ordinary sized man to float when it is filled.”
Two years later, the ex-president’s bathing habits again made news when at a Cape May, New Jersey, hotel he “failed properly to consider the size of the average seashore hotel bathtub.” The water displaced by his tremendous girth flooded the floor and trickled onto the heads of guests in the downstairs dining room. As a wistful Taft gazed out at the Atlantic Ocean the next morning, he said, “I’ll get a piece of that fenced in some day, and then when I venture in, there won’t be any overflow.”
William Howard Taft, the 27th President of the United States reportedly sat down one day for a nice long bath and got hopelessly stuck, needing six men to free him. Taft weighed about 340...
Jan 1, 2024 · The first, and most well-documented case is that of Taft ordering a special extra-large tub installed aboard the ship he used while overseeing the construction of the Panama Canal. Pictures of this custom tub can be found with four full-grown adults sitting comfortably inside.
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Jan 1, 2018 · The Schadenfreude-laced tale, in which six men had to be called to dislodge William Howard Taft from his bath time predicament, is legendary. Yet the problem with the anecdote isn’t just...
