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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...
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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.”
Jan 1, 2018 · Taft did, however, have a verified bathtub incident that had nothing to do with getting stuck: In 1915, while attending a bankers’ conference after he left office, he went to take a bath in the...
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 pounds,...
Feb 6, 2013 · But today, Taft is best remembered at the president who was so large that he got stuck in the White House bathtub. Constitution Daily started researching President Taft when news broke that the...
Sep 15, 2017 · In “President Taft is Stuck in the Bath,” Taft isn’t just overweight, but morbidly obese, red-faced and stark naked, with ample rolls of flesh protruding from every imaginable location on his...
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Oct 7, 2021 · Not only was a photograph of four men who installed the White House tub sitting inside it comfortably circulated widely, but in 1915, the Times published a story reporting that "the portly ex-President" had made a tub overflow after stepping into it during a stay in New Jersey.
