Popular Lore Claims That William Howard Taft Got Stuck in a Bathtub. New Research Sheds Light on the Legend’s Forgotten Origins

In 1909, a photograph of four men sitting fully clothed inside a gigantic bathtub built for President William Howard Taft circulated widely across the country.

Seventy years later, the image resurfaced on television. In the NBC mini-series “Backstairs at the White House,” an actor portraying Taft holds up an article featuring the photograph.

“How in thunderation do the newspapers do it?” he asks a maid’s young daughter. “And how did they find out I got stuck in my bathtub and had to have a special one made?”

The photograph was real, but the scene itself was fiction.

Although the mini-series was based on a White House staffer’s memoir, this exchange was wholly the invention of its screenwriters. No record exists of Taft ever saying anything like it, and contemporary newspapers made no mention of the 340-pound president ever getting lodged in a bathtub.

Nearly 20 million households watched the 1979 television series, which helped cement in the public imagination a legend that continues to plague Taft’s legacy. Now, instead of being remembered for his accomplishments—including becoming the only president to serve on the Supreme Court—many Americans remember him as the commander in chief who got stuck in a bathtub.

The story is a staple in trivia books and popular histories like Bill O’Reilly and Martin Dugard’s Confronting the Presidents. It has even inspired a children’s book, Mac Barnett’s President Taft Is Stuck in the Bath. Depending on the telling, Taft needed the help of up to six men and a gallon of butter to free him. By some ahistorical accounts, he even died in the tub.

Historians have roundly debunked this tale, tracing it back to vague mentions in White House staff memoirs, particularly 42 Years in the White House by Irwin Hood Hoover (no relation to President Herbert Hoover), published in 1934.

Hoover, who was commonly known as Ike, began working at the White House in 1891 as an electrician and rose to become chief usher, serving under ten presidents. His account of the bathtub incident contains just two sentences on the subject—barely enough to qualify as an anecdote: “When Taft came to the White House, a large tub had to be placed in his bathroom, since the one already there was not big enough. The president would stick in it when bathing and had to be helped out each time.”

Of the many tell-all books published by White House staff, Sarah Fling, a historian at the White House Historical Association, says she considers Hoover’s memoir “perhaps the most interesting of all, because it has dubious authorship and it has been called into question since it was published.” Released after Hoover’s death in 1933, the book drew immediate skepticism. Former first ladies Grace Coolidge and Lou Henry Hoover suspected that a ghostwriter had padded Hoover’s notes with Washington gossip, presenting rumor as the usher’s firsthand recollections.

For decades, historians have treated Hoover’s controversial memoir as the earliest printed source of the bathtub story. But an earlier, far more detailed—and previously overlooked—account by writer and explorer Lewis R. Freeman appeared in 1929. I found it while researching the myth’s appearance in newspapers and later corroborated it with diary entries from Freeman’s papers at the Huntington Library, Art Museum and Botanical Gardens in California. The article suggests that the legend may have been circulating before Hoover ever put it to paper—and places it not in the executive mansion but on a Mississippi River steamship.

In September 1909, at the height of his popularity, Taft embarked on a massive cross-country tour that culminated in a voyage down the Mississippi from St. Louis to New Orleans. The president’s flotilla spanned miles—more than 20 ships carrying an estimated 2,800 people, including congressmen, governors and foreign dignitaries.

For four days and five nights, Taft’s “floating White House” was the steamship Oleander, a United States Lighthouse Service vessel built to maintain lights and buoys along the winding river. Taft occupied what newspapers called the ship’s “bathroom suite,” a set of rooms that had been “improved to the ultimate limit” for the president. Just off the 12-by-14-foot bedchamber, with windows overlooking the paddle wheel, was a private bathroom said to be “twice the size of the conventional bathroom in a St. Louis flat.”

The press covered every detail of the trip, including a report that Taft’s “extra strong” bed was too small and had to be replaced in Memphis. But journalists failed to note any embarrassing bathtub mishaps. If such a moment occurred, it left no trace in contemporary newspapers—only a story that quietly circulated among the crew of the Oleander. Nearly two decades later, a passing traveler would hear that story firsthand.

In the fall of 1926, Freeman set out on a solo journey down the Missouri and Mississippi Rivers on a 15-foot skiff. It was exactly the kind of improbable adventure he was known for. A directory of New York’s elite Explorers Club described him as a man who “has been almost everywhere on the civilized globe, by land and by sea, in war and in peace.”

One foggy morning on the river, Freeman nearly collided with the Oleander. Captain Thomas Good welcomed the writer aboard and set him up in the ship’s guest cabin—the same room Taft had occupied years earlier. In an essay published in 1929, Freeman called it the largest stateroom he had ever seen on a river steamer, complete with “a gargantuan steel bed and chairs.” In the adjoining bathroom, the explorer noticed something odd: what he described as “something less than [a] boy’s size bathtub.” It was so small, Freeman wrote, that he had to bathe “in sections.”

When Freeman joined the crew late for breakfast, chief engineer Tommy Smith joked that they were worried he’d gotten “jammed in the bathtub,” just as the room’s first tenant “so nearly did.” The sailors then told Freeman the tale of Taft’s visit. They had scrambled to make everything big enough for the famously large president, knocking down partitions to expand the stateroom and procuring “the bed and chairs of the fat lady of a defunct sideshow.” The only thing they couldn’t replace on short notice was the bathtub. No oversize tubs were available, leaving only the “Lilliputian fount” that Freeman had just used himself.

According to Freeman, the crew shared multiple versions of what exactly happened next, but they all agreed on one thing: Taft had “made the serious mistake of trying to bathe the whole of his considerable bulk at once.” Though the president managed to get into the tub, Freeman wrote, “it took Archy Butt, a Secret Service man, and two or three state governors to overcome the suck of the vacuum beneath and drag him out.”

Freeman eventually published his account in the April 1929 issue of the American magazine, in a profile of Good titled “Fifty Years on the Ol’ Mississip’.” The article reached the magazine’s roughly two million readers, and excerpts were reprinted in newspapers nationwide. More importantly, the account appeared five years before Hoover’s White House memoir, the source historians have long pointed to as the origin of the bathtub story. It also describes a specific incident, even naming one of the men who supposedly helped the president: Taft’s military aide and right-hand man, Archibald Butt, who is identified by Freeman as “Archy.”

Upon reviewing Freeman’s account, Fling said that she believes it could be the source of the misinformation in Hoover’s memoir. “We often see that White House myths are made out of amalgamations or exaggerations of stories,” the historian explains. “It’s possible that all of these nuggets are combined in a memoir like Hoover’s to create this myth.” Fling is careful to point out that Freeman’s 1929 account, published 20 years after the supposed incident, is “an imperfect source,” and she likens the retellings to “playing historical telephone.”

This game of telephone played out geographically as well. Newspaper accounts spanning decades suggest that in addition to the White House and the Oleander, Taft lodged himself in at least six other bathtubs across the U.S. Bellhops supposedly had to dislodge the president from tubs in the Alvarado Hotel in Albuquerque; the Portland Hotel in Portland, Oregon; and the Windsor Hotel in Denver. Reports also point to Taft getting stuck in private residences in Erie, Pennsylvania; Wichita, Kansas; and Nashville. As a Wichita newspaper joked in 1985, if the stories were true, Taft must have traveled around “getting stuck in tubs and generally making a nuisance of himself.”

Fling posits that the local variants stem from sites that “want to attach themselves to an important moment in history.” She says the legends persist because “people decide to continue to share that story and spread that myth rather than digging into the primary source material.”

But for those inclined to believe the legend, a lack of contemporary sources might make sense. The people closest to Taft might have kept quiet out of respect—or out of fear of the president’s “explosive temper” and “inclination to fire people when he thought that they were disloyal,” says Taft biographer Jeffrey Rosen. If an embarrassing incident like this occurred, it might only become public through the gossip of staff members outside of Taft’s inner circle.

Primary sources provide a confluence of real bathtub stories that might have inspired the legend. Perhaps the most influential was the 1909 story of the custom-built “Taft-size bathtub,” which was installed aboard the USS North Carolina ahead of the president’s tour of the still-in-progress Panama Canal. The tub was capable of holding four grown men; measuring just over 7 feet long and nearly 3.5 feet wide, it weighed one ton.

Another bathtub tale made headlines in 1915, showcasing Taft’s self-deprecatory humor. Staying at the seaside Hotel Cape May in New Jersey, the former president settled in for a bath. When he lowered himself into the tub, it overflowed, and water soaked through the floor and dripped onto guests in the dining room below. The next morning, Taft reportedly looked at the ocean and quipped, “I’ll get a piece of that fenced in someday, and then when I venture in, there won’t be any overflow.”

None of these stories mention Taft getting stuck in a bathtub, but at least one account discusses a notable incident of entrapment and rescue. In 1908, an electrician claimed that the then-presidential candidate had gotten “stuck hard and fast” inside a telephone booth at a hotel in Hot Springs, Virginia. Carpenters armed with saws and hammers were reportedly dispatched to cut him loose.

Once the idea of Taft getting trapped in a bathtub took form, several factors helped entrench it as one of the most persistent pieces of presidential folklore. The narrative appeals to a desire to see powerful figures humanized—or humiliated—and offers the kind of kid-friendly bathroom humor that thrives as trivia. Fling attributes much of the story’s appeal to “the lighthearted aspects that some take away from it,” but she doesn’t see the tale as funny. Instead, she says it “may have had its origins really in cruelty toward the president’s weight” and is “rooted in a lot of what we know today as fatphobia.”

Rosen, who is also the emeritus CEO of the National Constitution Center, says that fascination with Taft’s size was rampant during his lifetime. “The images of the large president captivated people so much,” Rosen explains, that a group once whisked Taft to hot spring in Colorado and implored him to take a public dip, even presenting him with a custom-made bathing suit “because they wanted to see his body.” The president declined the offer, saying that “bathing is not, if I may say so, my strong suit.”

Throughout his career, Taft endured jokes about his size and often made them himself. He even turned his struggles with weight into a political metaphor.

After leaving the White House in 1913, Taft lost around 70 pounds. His sleep apnea disappeared, and his temperament improved, helped by a low-carb diet, frequent walking and the attainment of his dream job as chief justice of the Supreme Court.

Although the bathtub tale didn’t gain traction during Taft’s lifetime (he died in 1930 at age 72), Rosen doesn’t think the commander in chief would be surprised by the hold it has taken over his public memory. But for a man who approached the presidency more like a judge than a politician—and who saw figures like Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson as “populist demagogues,” in Rosen’s words, expanding the office beyond its constitutional limits—Taft would have wanted to be remembered for something more important than his battle with weight. Instead, the historian argues, he’d point to “his struggles to restrain popular majorities and to keep the republic.”

Restraining the popularity of a legend is a different matter. Fling believes the best defense is media literacy—looking at the evidence “before we bite into those myths.” Historians, she says, “do our best to try to debunk history that is untrue … or talk about the factual aspects or what is being misrepresented in a story.”

“But at the end of the day,” Fling adds, “if somebody prefers the fictional version to the facts, there’s not much we can do.”

Not even six bellhops, a military aide and a gallon of butter can unstick a story from the popular imagination.