amused
potus_geeks because the story is often associated with President Millard Fillmore.
On December 28, 1917, Mencken's article entitled “A Neglected Anniversary” was published in the New York Evening Mail. It claimed that the bathtub had been introduced into the United States in 1842, the first ones having been made of mahogany lined with lead. The article went on to describe how the introduction of the bathtub initially was greatly discussed and opposed until President Millard Fillmore had a bathtub installed in the White House in 1850, making the invention more broadly acceptable. The article was entirely false but was still being widely quoted as fact for years, including as recently as January 2008 when a TV ad for the Kia automobile referenced the story.
The complete text of the article can be found here. Following is the section of it which refers to Fillmore:
But it was the example of President Millard Fillmore that, even more than the grudging medical approval, gave the bathtub recognition and respectability in the United States. While he was still Vice-President, in March, 1850, he visited Cincinnati on a stumping tour, and inspected the original Thompson tub. Thompson himself was now dead, but his bathroom was preserved by the gentlemen who had bought his house from the estate. Fillmore was entertained in this house and, according to Chamberlain, his biographer, took a bath in the tub. Experiencing no ill effects, he became an ardent advocate of the new invention, and on succeeding to the Presidency at Taylor's death, July 9, 1850, he instructed his secretary of war, Gen. Charles M. Conrad, to invite tenders for the construction of a bathtub in the White House.
This action, for a moment, revived the old controversy, and its opponents made much of the fact that there was no bathtub at Mount Vernon, or at Monticello, and that all the Presidents and other magnificoes of the past had got along without any such monarchical luxuries. The elder Bennett, in the New York Herald, charged that Fillmore really aspired to buy and install in the White House a porphyry and alabaster bath that had been used by Louis Philippe at Versailles. But Conrad, disregarding all this clamor, duly called for bids, and the contract was presently awarded to Harper & Gillespie, a firm of Philadelphia engineers, who proposed to furnish a tub of thin cast iron, capable of floating the largest man.
This was installed early in 1851, and remained in service in the White House until the first Cleveland administration, when the present enameled tub was substituted. The example of the President soon broke down all that remained of the old opposition, and by 1860, according to the newspaper advertisements of the time, every hotel in New York had a bathtub, and some had two and even three. In 1862 bathing was introduced into the Army by Gen. McClellan, and in 1870 the first prison bathtub was set up at Moyamensing Prison, in Philadelphia.
Mencken referred to the article as “a tissue of somewhat heavy absurdities, all of them deliberate and most of them obvious,” which had no other purpose than “to have some harmless fun in war days.” Author Wendy McElroy wrote: “Through his hoax, Mencken demonstrated to himself and to selected friends that the American public would believe any absurdity, as long as it appealed to their imagination or emotions.”