From the “Why-Didn’t-I-Think-of-This-Before?” Department

If anybody needs proof of just how easily some of the smartest people can be fooled into believing absurdities, and refuse to recant even long after the absurdity has been exposed irrefutably, here is a short version of H. L. Mencken’s famous “Tale of a Tub,” from the year 1917. This is from the last chapter in Bergen Evans’s classic, The Natural History of Nonsense (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1946, 275 pp. plus index). Copyright has expired, so feel free to share. Mencken’s own memoir of this episode is in A Mencken Chrestomathy (Vintage Books). By the time you finish, you will have seen the exact parallels with the current “climate change” hysteria being promoted by Al Gore and his co-conspirators, and why it will be so difficult, or even impossible, to un-brainwash them:

In the New York Evening Mail for December 28, 1917, Mr. H. L. Mencken diverted himself by greeting what he called “A Neglected Anniversary.” On that day seventy-five years before, he averred, one Adam Thompson, an adventurous cotton broker in Cincinnati, had created quite a splash by lowering his naked form into the first bathtub installed in America. His act had precipitated a storm of protest. Bathing was universally condemned as an affectation and a menace to health and morals. Medical societies expressed their disapprobation, state legislatures imposed prohibitive taxes to prevent the custom from spreading, and the city of Boston–then as now zealous to protect its citizens from harmful contacts–passed a special ordinance forbidding it. There was strong public resentment when President Fillmore had a tub installed in the White House, but ultimately his example carried the day and bathing came to be tolerated if not practiced by our grandfathers.

This story, in its author’s words, “of spoofing all compact,” was “a tissue of heavy absurdities, all of them deliberate and most of them obvious,” but it was seized upon with avidity by all sorts of people and related as one of the most sacred facts of our history. Quacks used it as evidence of the stupidity of doctors. Doctors used it as proof of medical progress. Bathtub manufacturers used it as proof of their foresight, and assorted reformers used it as proof of the public’s lack of it. Editors used it as proof of their own knowledge. It appeared as a contribution to public welfare in thick government bulletins. The standard reference works incorporated it. It was solemnly repeated by master thinkers, including the president of the American Geographical Society and the Commissioner of Health for the City of New York. Dr. Hans Zinsser communicated it to his readers as one of the esoteric facts of medical annals, and Alexander Woolcott shared it with the radio public as one of those quaint bits of lore with which his whimsical mind was so richly stored. (Footnote here: “H.L. Mencken, “Hymn to the Truth,” Prejudices. Sixth Series [New York: Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., 1927], pp. 194-201. See also Vilhjalmar Steffanson: Adventures In Error [New York: Robert H. McBride & Co.; 1936], Chapter 8; and Curtis D. MacDougall: Hoaxes [New York: The Macmillan Company; 1941], pp. 302-09).

By 1926 Mencken, “having undergone a spiritual rebirth and put off sin,” felt that the joke had gone far enough. He confessed publicly that his story had been a hoax and pointed out what he felt should have warned the critical reader against accepting it as a fact. His confession was printed in thirty newspapers “with a combined circulation, according to their sworn claim, or more than 250,000,000,” and the gullibility of the public (which had consisted largely in believing those same papers) received many an editorial rebuke.

But the original yarn would not die. Within a month of its exposure it was being reprinted in the very papers that had carried the confession! Mencken printed a second confession, but that too was swept aside. His bathtub had become a juggernaut that was not to be stopped by so slight an impediment as the truth. Congressmen had vouched for it, preachers had woven it into their homilies, and professors had rewritten their textbooks to include it. What chance had the mere disavowal of one whom they regarded as a notorious buffoon against the affirmations of such ponderous respectability?

And so the tale of his tub goes on. Not a week passes but it is repeated in the press or from the pulpit. Mencken has tried once or twice again to undo the damage, but he has been called a meddler and a liar for his pains and his withdrawn from the unequal struggle. The story has taken its place in our national mythology beside Washington’s cherry tree and Lincoln’s conversion. Five minutes in any library would be enough to refute it, but it has ceased to be a question of fact and has become an article of faith.

Certain reasons for this are fairly obvious. It is one of those stories–like the theory that Bacon wrote Shakespeare–that make their narrators seem very learned without putting them to the trouble of having to acquire knowledge. It has earned many an easy dollar for sage and commentator and has added enough “fresh material” to textbooks to justify forcing a new edition onto the students.

But such temporary individual advantages would not fully account for its vitality. Better canards have been shorter lived. The bathtub story plainly touches something very deep in our national psyche, and if we could know why it has spread so vigorously we might know a great deal more about vulgar errors. [Or about the “global warming” hysteria!–DL].

The rest of the chapter is worth reading, too, but I think that is enough to make the point. I will not insult anyone’s intelligence by pointing out here the parallels that are obvious, except one: note that if Mencken could precipitate such a delusion with a story that was patently false, how much more powerful will be the Algore hoax that has a thin patina of apparently real science that requires more sophistication to expose. If the masses were not sophisticated enough in their reasoning to see through the bathtub hoax, can we expect the victims of today’s public schools to be any more advanced and able to see through the fallacies drawn from the media’s pictures of the melting glaciers?

 

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