A tub of thin cast iron, capable of floating the largest man
If there were any facts in it they got there accidentally and against my design
It’s not a great ad – just some silly, harmless fun typical of Kia’s North American image of the era. Opening on a white bust of the 13th President, a man in a bowtie and blazer takes a slight dig at Millard Fillmore. The camera pans to a pair of cars parked indoors, beneath a banner advertising the automaker’s “Unheard of Presidents’ Day Sale” – a reference to the relative obscurity of the last Whig Party member to be elected Chief Executive.
The presenter notes that Fillmore was also the first President to have a running water bathtub. It’s a peculiar claim to fame befitting the punchline: Millard Fillmore Soap on a Rope. He pulls off a cloth off a table to reveal the object. Lifting the red rope, the camera tightens on a scaled down bust of the President, ostensibly carved from soap.
A small contingent of Fillmoreheads were suitably enamored. A man named Richard Bailey reported e-mailed Kia, inquiring how he might go about purchasing one for each of the Millard Fillmore Society of Ohio’s four members. It was a proactive move for a member of group that largely admired the President’s "mediocrity and procrastinating.” Bailey added, “he never did anything.”
A week prior, the site reported that one person in particular was far less amused by the President’s Day spot. Incoming CEO of Kia Motors America, Byung Mo Ahn, was said to be so unamused by the exercise that he fired a pair of top executives. The site issued a correction to the original story, hedging the language to note that while the ad may have played a role in their exit, the new CEO’s hatred of the spot was likely not “the main reason behind the departure.”
Nor, apparently, was the fact that the bathtub story had been concocted out of whole cloth 91 years prior. As intentionally crafted hoaxes are concerned, it was one of the more benign – which may well be part of the reason it’s also among the most enduring. In the president’s home of Moravia, New York, residents still race wheeled bathtubs in celebration of “Fillmore Days” for one long weekend every August.
Three days after Christmas 1917, The New York Evening Mail published, “A Neglected Anniversary” by H. L. Mencken, in which the author bemoans the unremarked upon passing of December 20th. “Not a plumber fired a salute or hung out a flag,” he writes, solemnly. “Not a governor proclaimed a day of prayer. Not a newspaper called attention to the day.” A banquet had been floated in Washington, he adds, but ultimately never came to fruition.
The piece goes on to describe the rise of the bathtub in the United States, including, most notably, its championing by Fillmore, which helped ushered in acceptance among the U.S. populace. Mencken writes,
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.
The story was, by its author’s own admission, a complete fabrication – one that would become forever attached to a President who regularly lists among the nation’s 10 worst. In fact, popularizing the bathtub in United States would almost certainly rank among Fillmore’s greatest accomplishments, were it remotely true. Mencken noted surprise and concern that the hoax had been taken seriously.
Eight years after the story, its author came clean about the story he’d previously written off as “some harmless fun in war days.”
“The moral, if any, I leave to psycho-pathologists, if competent ones can be found,” Mencken writes. “All I care to do today is to reiterate, in the most solemn and awful terms, that my history of the bathtub, printed on Dec. 28, 1917, was pure buncombe. If there were any facts in it they got there accidentally and against my design. But today the tale is in the encyclopedias. History, said a great American soothsayer, is bunk.”
Sources:
Mencken’s History of the Bathtub http://hoaxes.org/archive/permalink/the_history_of_the_bathtub
Did Irreverence Play a Part in Departure of Top Kia Execs? https://adage.com/article/news/irreverence-play-a-part-departure-top-kia-execs/125026