May 23, 1926: Mencken confessed the Millard Fillmore bathtub hoax, “any facts . . . got there accidentally”

Reasons for my annual observance of a moment of silence, here on May 23, for the failed confession of Mr. Mencken should be obvious to even a sleepy reader.  Alas, annually the need grows to call attention to the dangers of hoaxing, as hoaxes particularly in the political life of the U.S. grow in number, in viciousness, and in the numbers of gullibles suckered.  Here, again, is our annual reading of the confession with a few photographs and new links thrown in for easy learning:

May 23, 1926, H. L. Mencken‘s newspaper column confessed his hoax of nine years earlier — he had made up whole cloth the story of Millard Fillmore‘s only accomplishment being the installation of a plumbed bathtub in the White House (in the 1850s known as the Executive Mansion).

Alas, the hoax cat was out of the bag, and the hoax information still pollutes the pool of history today.

Text of the confession, from the Museum of Hoaxes:

Melancholy Reflections

On Dec. 28, 1917, I printed in the New York Evening Mail, a paper now extinct, an article purporting to give the history of the bathtub. This article, I may say at once, was a tissue of absurdities, all of them deliberate and most of them obvious…

This article, as I say, was planned as a piece of spoofing to relieve the strain of war days, and I confess that I regarded it, when it came out, with considerable satisfaction. It was reprinted by various great organs of the enlightenment, and after a while the usual letters began to reach me from readers. Then, suddenly, my satisfaction turned to consternation. For these readers, it appeared, all took my idle jocosities with complete seriousness. Some of them, of antiquarian tastes, asked for further light on this or that phase of the subject. Others actually offered me corroboration!

But the worst was to come. Pretty soon I began to encounter my preposterous “facts” in the writings of other men. They began to be used by chiropractors and other such quacks as evidence of the stupidity of medical men. They began to be cited by medical men as proof of the progress of public hygiene. They got into learned journals. They were alluded to on the floor of congress. They crossed the ocean, and were discussed solemnly in England and on the continent. Finally, I began to find them in standard works of reference. Today, I believe, they are accepted as gospel everywhere on earth. To question them becomes as hazardous as to question the Norman invasion.

* * *

And as rare. This is the first time, indeed, that they have ever been questioned, and I confess at once that even I myself, their author, feel a certain hesitancy about doing it. Once more, I suppose, I’ll be accused of taking the wrong side for the mere pleasure of standing in opposition. The Cincinnati boomers, who have made much of the boast that the bathtub industry, now running to $200,000,000 a year, was started in their town, will charge me with spreading lies against them. The chiropractors will damn me for blowing up their ammunition. The medical gents, having swallowed my quackery, will now denounce me as a quack for exposing them. And in the end, no doubt, the thing will simmer down to a general feeling that I have once more committed some vague and sinister crime against the United States, and there will be a renewal of the demand that I be deported to Russia.

I recite this history, not because it is singular, but because it is typical. It is out of just such frauds, I believe, that most of the so-called knowledge of humanity flows. What begins as a guess — or, perhaps, not infrequently, as a downright and deliberate lie — ends as a fact and is embalmed in the history books. One recalls the gaudy days of 1914-1918. How much that was then devoured by the newspaper readers of the world was actually true? Probably not 1 per cent. Ever since the war ended learned and laborious men have been at work examining and exposing its fictions. But every one of these fictions retains full faith and credit today. To question even the most palpably absurd of them, in most parts of the United States, is to invite denunciation as a bolshevik.

So with all other wars. For example, the revolution. For years past American historians have been investigating the orthodox legends. Almost all of them turn out to be blowsy nonsense. Yet they remain in the school history books and every effort to get them out causes a dreadful row, and those who make it are accused of all sorts of treasons and spoils. The truth, indeed, is something that mankind, for some mysterious reason, instinctively dislikes. Every man who tries to tell it is unpopular, and even when, by the sheer strength of his case, he prevails, he is put down as a scoundrel.

* * *

As a practicing journalist for many years, I have often had close contact with history in the making. I can recall no time or place when what actually occurred was afterward generally known and believed. Sometimes a part of the truth got out, but never all. And what actually got out was seldom clearly understood. Consider, for example, the legends that follow every national convention. A thousand newspaper correspondents are on the scene, all of them theoretically competent to see accurately and report honestly, but it is seldom that two of them agree perfectly, and after a month after the convention adjourns the accepted version of what occurred usually differs from the accounts of all of them.

Political boss Harry M. Daugherty (later Attorney General of the United States), left, with Senator Warren G. Harding (later President of the United States) at Harding’s home in Marion, Ohio during the 1920 presidential campaign. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I point to the Republican convention of 1920, which nominated the eminent and lamented Harding. A week after the delegates adjourned the whole country believed that Harding had been put through by Col. George Harvey: Harvey himself admitted it. Then other claimants to the honor arose, and after a year or two it was generally held that the trick had been turned by the distinguished Harry M. Daugherty, by that time a salient light of the Harding cabinet. The story began to acquire corroborative detail. Delegates and correspondents began to remember things that they had not noticed on the spot. What the orthodox tale is today with Daugherty in eclipse, I don’t know, but you may be sure that it is full of mysterious intrigue and bold adventure.

Ambassador Myron T. Herrick was part of the U.S. delegation to the International Chamber of Commerce which sailed on Kroonland in 1920. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

What are the facts? The facts are that Harvey had little more to do with the nomination of Harding than I did, and that Daugherty was immensely surprised when good Warren won. The nomination was really due to the intense heat, and to that alone. The delegates, torn by the savage three cornered fight between Lowden, Johnson, and Wood, came to Saturday morning in despair. The temperature in the convention hall was at least 120 degrees. They were eager to get home. When it became apparent that the leaders could not break the deadlock they ran amuck and nominated Harding, as the one aspirant who had no enemies. If any individual managed the business it was not Harvey or Daugherty, but Myron T. Herrick. But so far as I know Herrick’s hand in it has never been mentioned.

* * *

Jack Dempsey and Georges Carpentier in arena before fight at Boyle’s Thirty Acres. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I turn to a more pleasant field — that of sport in the grand manner. On July 2, 1921, in the great bowl at Jersey City, the Hon. Jack Dempsey met M. Carpentier, the gallant frog. The sympathy of the crowd was overwhelmingly with M. Carpentier and every time he struck a blow he got a round of applause, even if it didn’t land. I had an excellent seat, very near the ring, and saw every move of the two men. From the first moment Dr. Dempsey had it all his own way. He could have knocked out M. Carpentier in the first half of the first round. After that first half he simply waited his chance to do it politely and humanely.

Yet certain great newspapers reported the next morning that M. Carpentier had delivered an appalling wallop in the second round and that Dr. Dempsey had narrowly escaped going out. Others told the truth, but what chance had the truth against that romantic lie? It is believed in to this day by at least 99.99 per cent of all the boxing fans in Christendom. Carpentier himself, when he recovered from his beating, admitted categorically that it was nonsense, but even Carpentier could make no headway against the almost universal human tendency to cherish what is not true. A thousand years hence schoolboys will be taught that the frog had Dempsey going. It may become in time a religious dogma, like the doctrine that Jonah swallowed the whale. Scoffers who doubt it will be damned to hell.

The moral, if any, I leave to psycho-pathologists, if competent ones can be found. 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.

Mencken’s confession gets much less attention than it deserves.  In a just world, this essay would be part of every AP U.S. history text, and would be available for printing for students to read individually in class and to discuss, debate and ponder.  Quite to the contrary, state legislatures today debate whether to require teaching of the hoax that disastrous climate change is not occurring, only 45% of Americans claim to know better for certain; more legislatures work hard to devise ways to insert hoaxes against biology (evolution and human reproduction, notably), astronomy and physics (Big Bang), history and even education (Islam is a root of socialist thought, President Obama is not Christian, weapons of mass destruction were found in Iraq after the U.S. invasion, teachers are socialists).

In 2013, the governing body of the Boy Scouts of America votes today on whether to allow homosexual boys to be Scouts — as if an 8-year-old kid joining Cub Scouts knows enough about sex and love, and sex predation, to threaten the Constitution of the U.S. if we allow him to learn how to put alphabet macaroni onto a board spelling out “Mom,” or to learn how to carve an automobile out of a block of wood and race it on a closed-course track.  The so-called Family Research Council (FRC) has conducted a campaign of vicious hoaxes against the measure, even going so far as to purloin official logos of the Boy Scouts to suggest they speak for BSA.  The hoax has millions of victims, they claim.

Meanwhile, in Washington, D.C., GOP Members of Congress call for investigations into wrongdoing evidenced in e-mails between the White House and State Department and CIA, over the attack on the U.S. diplomatic mission in Benghazi, Libya, and the death of Ambassador Chris Stevens.  To hear the GOP describe it, you’d never know that the GOP opposed President Obama’s actions to save the city of Benghazi from destruction by dictator Muammar Gadhafy a few months before, that the GOP slashed the security budget for all U.S. diplomatic missions, leaving Ambassador Stevens underprotected, that the GOP was opposed to much of the work of Ambassador Stevens, or that the incriminating e-mails were hoaxed up by GOP Congressional staff.

If you see pale faces among the GOP Congressional staff or the FRC this morning, it may be because the ghost of H. L. Mencken appeared to them last night to give them hell.  We could hope.

More:

• Portraits: Millard Fillmore (mowryjournal.com)
• Rachel Carson/DDT hoaxing from the Ayn Rand Institute (timpanogos.wordpress.com)
• Mallard Fillmore comic strip is misleading (thegazette.com)
• Recognizing bogus history, part I, and part II

Once again, the Earth Day/Lenin hoax trotted out: Earth Day honors Earth, our majestic home — not Lenin (2013 version)

This is mostly an encore post, repeated each year on April 22 — sad that it needs repeating.

You could write it off to pareidolia, once. Like faces in clouds, some people claimed to see a link. The first Earth Day, on April 22, 1970, coincided with Lenin’s birthday. There was no link — Earth Day was scheduled for a spring Wednesday. Now, years later, with almost-annual repeats of the claim from the braying right wing, it’s just a cruel hoax.

No, there’s no link between Earth Day and the birthday of V. I. Lenin:

One surefire way to tell an Earth Day post is done by an Earth Day denialist: They’ll note that the first Earth Day, on April 22, 1970, was an anniversary of the birth of Lenin.

Coincidentally, yes, Lenin was born on April 22 (new style calendar; it was April 10 on the calendar when he was born — but that’s a digression for another day).

It’s a hoax. There is no meaning to the first Earth Day’s falling on Lenin’s birthday — Lenin was not prescient enough to plan his birthday to fall in the middle of Earth Week, a hundred years before Earth Week was even planned.

About.com explains why the idea of a link between Earth Day and Lenin is silly:

Does Earth Day Promote Communism?
Earth Day 1970 was initially conceived as a teach-in, modeled on the teach-ins used successfully by Vietnam War protesters to spread their message and generate support on U.S. college campuses. It is generally believed that April 22 was chosen for Earth Day because it was a Wednesday that fell between spring break and final exams—a day when a majority of college students would be able to participate.

U.S. Sen. Gaylord Nelson, the guy who dreamed up the nationwide teach-in that became Earth Day, once tried to put the whole “Earth Day as communist plot” idea into perspective.

“On any given day, a lot of both good and bad people were born,” Nelson said. “A person many consider the world’s first environmentalist, Saint Francis of Assisi, was born on April 22. So was Queen Isabella. More importantly, so was my Aunt Tillie.”

April 22 is also the birthday of J. Sterling Morton, the Nebraska newspaper editor who founded Arbor Day (a national holiday devoted to planting trees) on April 22, 1872, when Lenin was still in diapers. Maybe April 22 was chosen to honor Morton and nobody knew. Maybe environmentalists were trying to send a subliminal message to the national subconscious that would transform people into tree-planting zombies. One birthday “plot” seems just about as likely as the other. What’s the chance that one person in a thousand could tell you when either of these guys were born.

My guess is that only a few really wacko conservatives know that April 22 is Lenin’s birthday (was it ever celebrated in the Soviet Union?). No one else bothers to think about it, or say anything about it, nor especially, to celebrate it.

Inventor of Earth Day teach-ins, former Wisconsin Governor and U.S. Senator Gaylord Nelson

Wisconsin’s U.S. Sen. Gaylord Nelson, usually recognized as the founder and father of Earth Day, told how and why the organizers came to pick April 22:

Senator Nelson chose the date in order to maximize participation on college campuses for what he conceived as an “environmental teach-in.” He determined the week of April 19–25 was the best bet; it did not fall during exams or spring breaks, did not conflict with religious holidays such as Easter or Passover, and was late enough in spring to have decent weather. More students were likely to be in class, and there would be less competition with other mid-week events—so he chose Wednesday, April 22.

In his own words, Nelson spoke of what he was trying to do:

After President Kennedy’s [conservation] tour, I still hoped for some idea that would thrust the environment into the political mainstream. Six years would pass before the idea that became Earth Day occurred to me while on a conservation speaking tour out West in the summer of 1969. At the time, anti-Vietnam War demonstrations, called “teach-ins,” had spread to college campuses all across the nation. Suddenly, the idea occurred to me – why not organize a huge grassroots protest over what was happening to our environment?

I was satisfied that if we could tap into the environmental concerns of the general public and infuse the student anti-war energy into the environmental cause, we could generate a demonstration that would force this issue onto the political agenda. It was a big gamble, but worth a try.

At a conference in Seattle in September 1969, I announced that in the spring of 1970 there would be a nationwide grassroots demonstration on behalf of the environment and invited everyone to participate. The wire services carried the story from coast to coast. The response was electric. It took off like gangbusters. Telegrams, letters, and telephone inquiries poured in from all across the country. The American people finally had a forum to express its concern about what was happening to the land, rivers, lakes, and air – and they did so with spectacular exuberance. For the next four months, two members of my Senate staff, Linda Billings and John Heritage, managed Earth Day affairs out of my Senate office.

Five months before Earth Day, on Sunday, November 30, 1969, The New York Times carried a lengthy article by Gladwin Hill reporting on the astonishing proliferation of environmental events:

“Rising concern about the environmental crisis is sweeping the nation’s campuses with an intensity that may be on its way to eclipsing student discontent over the war in Vietnam…a national day of observance of environmental problems…is being planned for next spring…when a nationwide environmental ‘teach-in’…coordinated from the office of Senator Gaylord Nelson is planned….”

Nelson, a veteran of the U.S. armed services (Okinawa campaign), flag-waving ex-governor of Wisconsin (Sen. Joe McCarthy’s home state, but also the home of Aldo Leopold and birthplace of John Muir), was working to raise America’s consciousness and conscience about environmental issues.

Lenin on the environment? Think of the Aral Sea disaster, the horrible pollution from Soviet mines and mills, and the dreadful record of the Soviet Union on protecting any resource. Lenin believed in exploiting resources, not conservation.

So, why are all these conservative denialists claiming, against history and politics, that Lenin’s birthday has anything to do with Earth Day?

Can you say “propaganda?”  Can you say “political smear?”

2013 Resources and Good News:

• This date in science: Why celebrate Earth Day on April 22? (earthsky.org)
• Google doodle celebrates Earth Day 2013 (independent.co.uk)
• Top News: Earth Day: When It Is, How It Began, What to Do (news.nationalgeographic.com)
• 8 Earth Day Tips – How Are You Celebrating? (myoldtowneorange.com)
• Clinton Foundation Earth Day quiz
• “What Earth Day has to do with Vladimir Lenin,” at NBC

Good information for 2012:

• Earth Day Network
• “President Obama issues Green Schools Proclamation”
• US EPA Earth Day page
• Nature Conservancy site on Earth Day
• Today is Earth Day! Let’s all celebrate it! (yabbedoo.wordpress.com)
• Earth Day (goodolewoody.wordpress.com)
• Earth Day! (holyfamilysisters.org)
• 10 Apps to Help You Go Green for Earth Day and Beyond (mashable.com)
• Earth Day Facts: When It Is, How It Began, What to Do (news.nationalgeographic.com)
• About.com, “Is Earth Day a communist plot?”; “U.S. Sen. Gaylord Nelson, the guy who dreamed up the nationwide teach-in that became Earth Day, once tried to put the whole “Earth Day as communist plot” idea into perspective.”On any given day, a lot of both good and bad people were born,” Nelson said. “A person many consider the world’s first environmentalist, Saint Francis of Assisi, was born on April 22. So was Queen Isabella. More importantly, so was my Aunt Tillie.”

Good information from 2011:

• Interview with Kathleen Rogers of Earthday Networks, Washingtonian’s Capital Blog
• “The Best Earth Day Investments,” from Reuters Blogs
• Natural Resources Defense Council says it’s time to act
• Time Magazine blog: Earth Day Network’s launch of the Billion Acts of Green campaign
• Brookings Institution calls for green schools in the U.S.

Good information from 2010:

• National Geographic Society, “Earth Day at 40 – How It Began, Where It’s Going“
• Calgary Herald
• ABC News (North America, not Australia)
• Bill McKibben in the Washington Post, notes that the environment, and Earth’s people, are losing the environmental fight
• Earth Day reading from The Baltimore Sun
• USA Today worries that Earth Day has run too far in the opposite direction from Lenin, too corporate
• Washington Post on Earth Day activities in 2010
• EPA on Earth Day

2013 Wall of Shame:

• Earth Day: A Pagan Holiday (canadafreepress.com)
• Happy Vladimir Lenin’s Birthday (aka Earth Day) (thedaleygator.wordpress.com)
• American Spectator’s brayings from the barnyard (ask them)
• BeforeIt’sNews
• Though he knows better, Alan Caruba keeps spreading the hoax — and Sodahead let him!

Wall of Lenin’s Birthday Propaganda Shame from 2012:

• Happy Earth / Communism Day
• Do You Know Why Earth Day is April 22? (johnmalcolm.me)
• Do you know why Earth Day is April 22? (gds44.wordpress.com) [This blog appears not to accept any dissenting views . . . funny, Leninist tactics from a guy who claims not to like Lenin.]
• “Earth Day’s Dark Side,” at Peak Oil
• LibertyNews.com
• The Freepers got suckered, too
• Rich Kozlovich at Paradigms and Demographic; Kozlovich repeats these fantastic lies, without even bothering to hint at any backup:  “There is one factor that is known. This whole green stuff was imposed in Nazi Germany and in Soviet Russia and their views are virtually identical to the views of modern greenies and it is a reasonable assumption to think they were inspirational to the green movement of today; who have morphed into the step child of socialism. I think it is fair to question any denials on their part, in that their denials can be being likened to cow flatulence. Back to today.” [Editor's note:  Complete and utter balderdash.]
  
• Alan Caruba went all Bolshevik at SodaHead
• They are still out of Prozac at World Net Daily

Wall of Lenin’s Birthday Propaganda Shame from 2011:

• The formerly respectable Human Events pushes the hoax, still
• RightSide News hoaxes its readers
• The New American pushes the hoax, and slams children singin. Go figure.
• Steven Hayward went haywire at Powerline; keep your fingers out of the sockets, guys!
• Canada Free Press engages wholly in fiction
• The Orange County (California) Register, of course — Agnew-land

Wall of Lenin’s Birthday Propaganda Shame from 2010:

• David Zeimer, writing in The Wisconsin Law Journal (This guy is particularly nutty. He notes the successes of cleaning up the air and water in and around Milwaukee, and then claims that clean air and water are false goals. Nuts.)
• Orange County Register comments (of course)
• Inaptly named (propaganda doublespeak?) American Thinker (Sussman runs with an odd crowd; and why does his friend always shout “Lenin’s birthday!” at Sussman’s speeches? Who needs a friend like that?)
• One of the ways you know Earth Day is innocently timed is that the FBI investigated it; in 1970, the FBI investigated hippies, but not organized crime. Go figure.
• Capitalism Magazine announces they have fired all of their fact checkers
• Front Page pushes the Lenin hoax
• Careful Thought blog abandons its name
• Tarpon’s Swamp just scrambles history and current issues inexplicably
• Don Surber may be as nutty as Zeimer, above – he notes words of concern from 1970, then dismisses the progress that resulted because people worked to change things; clean air is bad, to him, I guess
• Free Republic, never concerned with clashing facts, or facts at all, gets things exactly wrong
• Lubos Motl, a man not known for getting any facts straight, joins in the hoax at the Reference Frame (and don’t pretend Motl doesn’t know it’s a hoax)
• Making the case that economics should be left to professionals, the Amateur Economist pulls out a laundry list of hoaxes

Spread the word.  Have you found someone spreading the hoax, claiming Earth Day honors Lenin instead?  Give us the link in comments.

Rachel Carson/DDT hoaxing from the Ayn Rand Institute

Welcome, refugees and truth-seekers from WUWT:  If this site seems a little unusual to you, you should know that at Millard Fillmore’s Bathtub we try to stick to science, and we don’t censor opposing opinions.  Genuinely interested in the DDT/Malaria issue?  See this collection.

______________

A couple of physicists get together in a podcast from the Ayn Rand Institute, Poke in Your Eye to Eye, and demonstrate that they don’t know biology well, they know less about history, but they don’t hesitate to tell whoppers about Rachel Carson and the value of DDT:  “Silent Spring 50 Years Later [a special Earth Day podcast].“

A better indication of the legacy of Rachel Carson: Schools across America named after the woman, to inspire children to explore science, and to read and write. Here, the main entrance of Rachel Carson Middle School in Herndon, Virginia. (Photo: Wikipedia)

Earth Day must be coming up.  The usual suspects trot out their usual disinformation and hoax campaigns — and it will continue through Earth Day on April 22, International Malaria Day on April 25, through Rachel Carson’s birthday, and probably all summer.

Mencken warned us that hoaxes, once out of the bottle, can’t be put back.  Twain (and others) remind us that whopping falsehoods travel around the world “while truth is getting its boots on.”  Amanda Maxham, who is listed as an astrophysicist at the Rand site, interviewed physicist Keith Lockitch — and they repeat almost all the hoary old false fables invented by Gordon Edwards and Steven Milloy about malaria, DDT, and Rachel Carson.

A few of the errors committed by the polemicists at the Ayn Rand Institute:

• ‘DDT doesn’t breed mosquitoes more resistant to the stuff, but instead weakens the population through reducing diversity.’  Absolutely wrong.  Turns out the new alleles mosquitoes pick up that makes them resistant and immune to DDT, are ALSO the alleles that make mosquitoes resistant to the whole class of chemicals, and thereby foul up efforts to develop new pesticides.
  

  Cleaning up DDT in Africa: 40 tons of 50 year old DDT were found in Menzel Bourguiba Hospital, Tanzania – FAO photo

• ‘Rachel Carson didn’t account for the value of DDT in eradicating malaria.’  They start out claiming DDT ended malaria in the U.S. (it didn’t; CDC had won the fight will just mop up operations left, by 1939; DDT wasn’t even available for another seven years), and run through the false claim that DDT alone had almost eradicated malaria from Sri Lanka, but listening to Rachel Carson, the nation stopped spraying and malaria roared back (the nation stopped ALL of its malaria fighting efforts due to costs and civil war; when the fight was taken up again, DDT was not useful; largely without DDT, Sri Lanka has once again nearly wiped out malaria).
• ‘Because of a lack of DDT use, malaria continues to ravage the world killing a million people a year.’  Actually, malaria is at the lowest level in human history, killing less than a million a year, with great progress being made against the disease using the methods Rachel Carson urged in 1962.  Had we listened to Carson earlier, we could have saved a few million more lives, and perhaps have eradicated malaria already.  Also, it’s important to remember that DDT was never banned in Africa nor Asia; the ban on use of DDT on cotton crops in the U.S. did not cause any increase in malaria anywhere; since the ban on DDT use in the U.S. malaria has constantly declined in incidence and deaths.
• ‘DDT is very effective because it’s ALSO repellent to mosquitoes, after it ceases to kill them.’  So in the end, they urge the use of a poisonous-to-wildlife, mildly carcinogenic substance, because it repels mosquitoes?  Bednets are more effective, cheaper, not-poisonous to wildlife, and they aren’t even suspected of causing cancer.

Rachel Carson’s life is a model for budding scientists, aspiring journalists, and teachers of ethics.  That so many people spend so much time making up false claims against her, in favor of a deadly toxin, and against science, tells us much more about the subrosa intentions of the claim fakers than about Rachel Carson.

Want the facts about Rachel Carson?  Try William Souder’s marvelous biography from last year, On a Farther Shore.  Want facts on DDT?  Try EPA’s official DDT history online (or look at some of the posts here at Millard Fillmore’s Bathtub). Want the facts about malaria?  Check with the world’s longest running, most ambitious malaria fighting campaign operated by the good people at the World Health Organization, Roll Back Malaria,  or see Sonia Shah’s underappreciated history, The Fever:  How malaria has ruled mankind for 500,000 years.

More:

• Ode to (Silent) Spring (theamericanscholar.org)
• Prenatal exposure to pesticide DDT linked to adult high blood pressure (sciencedaily.com)
• First day of the conference celebrating Rachel Carson’s and Ruth Harrison’s books – 50 years on (cabiblog.typepad.com)
• The Silent History of Rachel Carson (misbehavedwoman.wordpress.com)
• Pertpetuating Crichton’s version of the DDT hoax (timpanogos.wordpress.com)
• Global Environment Facility:  “Countries move toward more sustainable ways to roll back malaria”

Roll Back Malaria, World Malaria Day logo for 2013

Wall of Shame (hoax spreaders to watch out for this week):

• Michael Mann now a DDT expert; Defends indefensible Rachel Carson – Rachel lied, millions died (and are still dying) (junkscience.com)
• Green Luddites (possil.wordpress.com)
• 20 Years Ago: 4-18-93 – Feds designate Rachel Carson home as national landmark (junkscience.com)

Pertpetuating Crichton’s version of the DDT hoax

If you needed turf grass, would you buy it from someone who doesn’t know beans about pesticides and ecosystems?  Shouldn’t a turf grass provider know a bit more about ecology?

“Fairy ring” in turf grass — created by the pattern of spores dropping out of the mushrooms, not by fairies. Don’t tell the Saskatchewan Turfgrass Association. They appear to believe in fairies. (No, DDT won’t cure ‘em.) Photo from UTK.edu (turf diseases)

Found this in the on-line newsletter of the Saskatchewan Turfgrass Association:

“State of Fear” written around 2006 by author Michael Crichton had interesting things to say about the once popular insecticide DDT. He wrote that arguably the greatest tragedy of the 20th Century was the removal of DDT for control of mosquitoes. DDT was the best insecticide on the market. Despite reviews to the contrary, no other products were as efficient, or as safe. Since the removal of DDT, it has been estimated that 30 to 50 million people have died unnecessarily. Before the removal of DDT, malaria had become almost a minor illness with only 50,000 deaths per year throughout the world. Remember the figures above are from 2006.

Nope.  Crichton’s still wrong; he hasn’t corrected his errors since he died.

Malaria deaths are at historic lows, probably the lowest they’ve been in human history – thanks to Rachel Carson‘s integrated vector management methods and hard work by African malaria fighters working without DDT, mostly.

So, after the lie gets around the world before the truth gets its boots on, does the lie ever stop?  Probably not.

We’re coming up on World Malaria Day on April 25.  Corporately-funded hoaxsters will be spreading a lot of disinformation about malaria, about DDT, and about Rachel Carson, over the next month or so.  And, probably for years beyond that.

More:

• DDT Linked to High Blood Pressure in Women (scientificamerican.com)
• Steven Milloy, campaigning to be the greatest DDT/malaria hoaxster in history, even bleeds his hoax over into his anti-warming hoax:  “Michael Mann now a DDT expert; Defends indefensible Rachel Carson – Rachel lied, millions died (and are still dying)” (junkscience.com) (Not a single claim in Milloy’s piece has any passing acquaintance with truth.)

Especially on his birthday, don’t call Darwin racist — he wasn’t

Creationists, Intelligent Design proponents, and several other anti-science and historical revisionist groups come unglued every February about this time — February 12 is Charles Darwin’s birthday.  He was born in 1809, on the exact same day as Abraham Lincoln.

Part of creationists’ coming unglued revolves around that fact that the science behind evolution grows stronger year by year, and at this point no argument exists that creationists can make against evolution that has not been soundly, roundly and thoroughly.  This makes creationists nervous in a discussion, because even they recognize when they lose arguments.   Creationists don’t like to lose arguments about how well Darwin’s theories work, because they erroneously believe that if Darwin is right, God and Jesus are wrong.

God and Jesus cannot be wrong, in their view, but intellectually they see they are losing the argument, and they grow desperate.  In their desperation they grasp for claims that shock uneducated or unfamiliar viewers.  Since about 1970, among the more shocking arguments one can make is to claim one’s opponent is racist.

Claiming Darwin, and hence evolution, boost racism, slaps history with irony.  Creationism’s roots were in denying that Europeans and Africans are evolutionarily equal, a claim necessary to allow slave holders to enslave Africans and go to church on Sundays.  The Civil War is 150 years away, the Emancipation Proclamation 148 years old, and even die-hard creationists generally have forgotten their own history.

Creationists accuse Darwin of being a racist, they claim evolution theory is racist, and they claim, therefore, it cannot be scientifically accurate.  There are a lot of holes in that chain of logic.

This is Darwin’s birthday.  Let me deal with major wrong premise, and give creationists room to correct their views with accurate history, so we don’t have a shouting match.

Way back in 2008, nominally-liberal evangelical preacher Tony Campolo got suckered in by a conservative evangelicals claim to him that evolution and Darwin are racist.  Below is my answer to him then — I think Campolo learned his lesson — but this builds on the claims Campolo made which are really copied from creationists.

In short, Darwin is not racist, and here are some explanations why, with a few updated links and minor edits for Darwin’s birthday, and Lincoln’s birthday, in 2013:

Tony Campolo is an evangelical Christian, a sociology professor and preacher who for the past 15 years or so has been a thorn in the side of political conservatives and other evangelicals, for taking generally more liberal stands, against poverty, for tolerance in culture and politics, and so on. His trademark sermon is an upbeat call to action and one of the more plagiarized works in Christendom, “It’s Friday, but Sunday’s Coming” (listen to it here).

Tony Campolo, in a publicity still from his website. He should be more gray by now (this photo is no later than 2008, and probably earlier).

Since he’s so close to the mainstream of American political thought, Campolo is marginalized by many of the more conservative evangelists in the U.S. Campolo is not a frequent guest on the Trinity Broadcast Network, on Pat Robertson’s “700 Club,” nor on the white, nominally-Christian, low-budget knock-off of “Sabado Gigante!,” “Praise the Lord” (with purple hair and everything).

Campolo came closest to real national fame when he counseled President Bill Clinton on moral and spiritual issues during the Lewinsky scandal.

His opposite-editorial piece in the Philadelphia Inquirer back in 2008, “The real danger in Darwin is not evolution, but racism,” is out of character for Campolo as a non-conservative evangelistic thinker — far from what most Christians expect from Campolo either from the pulpit or in the college classroom. The piece looks as though it was lifted wholesale from Jerry Falwell or D. James Kennedy, showing little familiarity with the science or history of evolution, and repeating canards that careful Christians shouldn’t repeat.

Campolo’s piece is inaccurate in several places, and grossly misleading where it’s not just wrong. He pulls out several old creationist hoaxes, cites junk science as if it were golden, and generally gets the issue exactly wrong.

Evolution science is a block to racism. It has always stood against racism, in the science that undergirds the theory and in its applications by those scientists and policy makers who were not racists prior to their discovery of evolution theory. Darwin himself was anti-racist. One of the chief reasons the theory has been so despised throughout the American south is its scientific basis for saying whites and blacks are so closely related. This history should not be ignored, or distorted.

Shame on you, Tony Campolo.

GOP “no-budget” hoax

If you repeat some hoary old falsehood often enough, people will begin to assume it’s got some accuracy to it, right?

Paul Ryan and Eric Cantor are at it again, complaining that the Senate hasn’t passed a budget.

But that’s false.  In fact, no only did the Senate pass a budget, but so did the House — and then (perhaps stupidly), they made it a law instead of the budget resolution the Congressional Budgeting process calls for.

Then-Senate Budget Committee Chairman Kent Conrad, D-North Dakota, explained last April how this worked:

We’ve got a budget, by law — and it’s a disaster.

We don’t need a budget resolution nearly so badly as we need some Congressional leadership who understand supply and demand, and who are committed to good government and not the destruction of America (even if unintentional).

Cartoon by Pulitzer Prize winner Pat Oliphant, syndicated by Go Comics

More:

• “No Budget No Pay” Is 3rd GOP Budget Misstep In A Row (ourfuture.org)
• More on the House GOP’s new debt limit ransom demand, and by ransom demand I mean complete surrender (dailykos.com)
• Why Senate Democrats haven’t passed a budget (washingtonpost.com)
• Murray to House GOP: End your ‘hostage-taking’ (politico.com)
• Senator wants your budget ideas (blogs.marketwatch.com)
• Las Vegas laying off teachers, though classrooms crowded (Las Vegas Sun)
• Social Studies for Kids:  Supply and Demand
• “You need to watch this:  Paul Krugman, ‘Jobs now is the key to our recovery,’” (at Millard Fillmore’s Bathtub)
• One more time, again: Why “supply side” economics doesn’t work without demand (at Millard Fillmore’s Bathtub)
• Thomas B. Edsall makes the case that Paul Ryan’s budget, or any version of it (like the Romney plan), would be an economic disaster for the nation, in at article titled “The Ryan Sinkhole.”

Text of Sen. Conrad’s remarks, below the fold.

“Penetration however slight”: Remembering a good and noble hoax – the U.S.S. Pueblo

January 23 is the anniversary of the North Koreans‘ capture of the spy boat, U.S.S. Pueblo, in 1968 — a beginning of a momentous year for bad events.  The saga of the Pueblo and its crew, including especially Cmdr. Lloyd Bucher, is of special interest to me because it features a series of some of the grandest, best and most humorously American hoaxes ever perpetrated by imprisoned people against their captors and wardens.  This is one of the great Kilroy stories of American history.  It should not be forgotten.  Especially with the role North Korea plays in contemporary angst, the Pueblo episode should not be forgotten. This is an encore post, with new links added.

1968 brought one chunk of bad news after another to Americans. The year seemed to be one long, increasingly bad disaster. In several ways it was the mark of the times between the feel-good, post-war Eisenhower administration and the feel-good-despite-the-Cold-War Reagan administration. 1968 was depressing.

USN Cmdr. Lloyd M. Bucher (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

What was so bad? Vietnam manifested itself as a quagmire. Just when Washington politicians predicted an end in sight, Vietcong militia launched a nationwide attack in South Vietnam on the Vietnamese New Year holiday, Tet, at the end of January. Civil rights gains stalled, and civil rights leaders came out in opposition to the Vietnam war. President Johnson fared poorly in the New Hampshire primary election, and eventually dropped out of the race for the presidency (claiming he needed to devote time to making peace in Vietnam). Labor troubles roiled throughout the U.S., including a nasty strike by garbage collectors in Memphis. It didn’t help to settle the strike that the sanitation workers were almost 100% African American, the leadership of Memphis was almost 100% white, and race relations in the city were not so good as they might have been – the strike attracted the efforts of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and Martin Luther King, Jr. – who was assassinated there in early April. In response, riots broke out in 150 American cities.

More below the fold, including the key confession to “penetration.”

World Malaria Report 2012: Malaria still declining, but more resources needed fast

Significant gains against malaria could be lost because funding for insecticide-treated bednets has dropped, and malaria parasites appear to be developing resistance to the pharmaceuticals used to clear the disease from humans, while insects that transmit the parasites develop resistance to insecticides used to hold their populations down.

African bedroom equipped with LLINs (insecticidal bednets) Photo: YoHandy/Flickr

UN’s World Health Organization (WHO) published its annual report on the fight against malaria last month, December 2012.  Accompanying the many page World Malaria Report 2012  were a press release and a FAQ; the fact-sheet appears unedited below.

Insecticidal bednets have proven to be a major, effective tool in reducing malaria infections.  Careful studies of several different projects produced a consensus that distributing the nets for free works best; people in malaria-infected areas simply cannot afford to pay even for life-saving devices, but they use the devices wisely when they get them.  Nets often get abbreviated in official documents to “LLINs,” an acronym for “long-lasting insecticidal nets.”

Generally, the report is good news.

Dramatic facts emerge from the report:  The “million-a-year” death toll from malaria has been whacked to fewer than 700,000, the lowest level in recorded human history.  More people may die, and soon, if aid does not come to replace worn bednets, distribute new ones, and if the drugs that cure the disease in humans, lose effectiveness.  Many nations where the disease is endemic cannot afford to wage the fight on their own.

Links in the Fact Sheet were added here, and do not come from the original report — except for the link to the WHO site itself.

17 December 2012

World Malaria Report 2012

FACT SHEET

Malaria is a preventable and treatable mosquito-borne disease, whose main victims are children under five years of age in Africa.

The World Malaria Report 2012 summarizes data received from 104 malaria-endemic countries and territories for 2011. Ninety-nine of these countries had on-going malaria transmission.

According to the latest WHO estimates, there were about 219 million cases of malaria in 2010 and an estimated 660,000 deaths. Africa is the most affected continent: about 90% of all malaria deaths occur there.

Between 2000 and 2010, malaria mortality rates fell by 26% around the world. In the WHO African Region the decrease was 33%. During this period, an estimated 1.1 million malaria deaths were averted globally, primarily as a result of a scale-up of interventions.

Funding situation

International disbursements for malaria control rose steeply during the past eight years and were estimated to be US$ 1.66 billion in 2011 and US$ 1.84 billion in 2012. National government funding for malaria programmes has also been increasing in recent years, and stood at an estimated US$ 625 million in 2011.

However, the currently available funding for malaria prevention and control is far below the resources required to reach global malaria targets. An estimated US$ 5.1 billion is needed every year between 2011 and 2020 to achieve universal access to malaria interventions. In 2011, only US$ 2.3 billion was available, less than half of what is needed.

Disease burden

Malaria remains inextricably linked with poverty. The highest malaria mortality rates are being seen in countries that have the highest rates of extreme poverty (proportion of population living on less than US$1.25 per day).

International targets for reducing malaria cases and deaths will not be attained unless considerable progress can be made in the 17 most affected countries, which account for an estimated 80% of malaria cases.

• The six highest burden countries in the WHO African region (in order of estimated number of cases) are: Nigeria, Democratic Republic of the Congo, United Republic of Tanzania, Uganda, Mozambique and Cote d’Ivoire. These six countries account for an estimated 103 million (or 47%) of malaria cases.

• In South East Asia, the second most affected region in the world, India has the highest malaria burden (with an estimated 24 million cases per year), followed by Indonesia and Myanmar.  50 countries are on track to reduce their malaria case incidence rates by 75%, in line with World Health Assembly and Roll Back Malaria targets for 2015. These 50 countries only account for 3% (7 million) of the total estimated malaria cases.

At present, malaria surveillance systems detect only around 10% of the estimated global number of cases.  In 41 countries around the world, it is not possible to make a reliable assessment of malaria trends due to incompleteness or inconsistency of reporting over time.

This year, the World Malaria Report 2012 publishes country-based malaria case and mortality estimates (see Annex 6A). The next update on global and regional burden estimates will be issued in December 2013.

Malaria interventions

To achieve universal access to long-lasting insecticidal nets (LLINs), 780 million people at risk would need to have access to LLINs in sub-Saharan Africa, and approximately 150 million bed nets would need to be delivered each year.

The number of LLINs delivered to endemic countries in sub-Saharan Africa dropped from a peak of 145 million in 2010 to an estimated 66 million in 2012. This will not be enough to fully replace the LLINs delivered 3 years earlier, indicating that total bed net coverage will decrease unless there is a massive scale-up in 2013. A decrease in LLIN coverage is likely to lead to major resurgences in the disease.

In 2011, 153 million people were protected by indoor residual spraying (IRS) around the world, or 5% of the total global population at risk. In the WHO African Region, 77 million people, or 11% of the population at risk were protected through IRS in 2011.

The number of rapid diagnostic tests delivered to endemic countries increased dramatically from 88 million in 2010 to 155 million in 2011. This was complemented by a significant improvement in the quality of tests over time.

In 2011, 278 million courses of artemisinin-based combination therapies (ACTs) were procured by the public and private sectors in endemic countries – up from 182 million in 2010, and just 11 million in 2005. ACTs are recommended as the first-line treatment for malaria caused by Plasmodium falciparum, the most deadly Plasmodium species that infects humans. This increase was largely driven by the scale-up of subsidized ACTs in the private sector through the AMFm initiative, managed by the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria.

Drug and insecticide resistance

Antimalarial drug resistance is a major concern for the global effort to control malaria. P. falciparum resistance to artemisinins has been detected in four countries in South East Asia: in Cambodia, Myanmar, Thailand and Viet Nam. There is an urgent need to expand containment efforts in affected countries. For now, ACTs remain highly effective in almost all settings, so long as the partner drug in the combination is locally effective.

Mosquito resistance to at least one insecticide used for malaria control has been identified in 64 countries around the world. In May 2012, WHO and the Roll Back Malaria Partnership released the Global Plan for Insecticide Resistance Management in malaria vectors, a five-pillar strategy for managing the threat of insecticide resistance.

www.who.int/malaria

You were perceptive.  You noted there is no call from malaria fighters for more DDT, nor for any change in DDT policy.  This is a report from medical personnel, from public health experts, the real malaria fighters.  It’s not a political screed.

More, and related articles:

• Malaria gains at risk, warns World Health Organisation (guardian.co.uk)
• New report signals slowdown in the fight against malaria (yubanet.com)
• Health Ministry poised to expand malaria fight in face of ‘gold rush’ (kaieteurnewsonline.com)
• Drug-Resistant Malaria Flares As Funding For Research Tapers (thinkprogress.org)
• In The Americas, Malaria Cases Have Declined Nearly 60% Since 2000 (medicalnewstoday.com)
• Malaria battle ‘hit by funding’ (bbc.co.uk)
• Drug-resistant malaria in Thailand threatens deadly global ‘nightmare’ (aworldchaos.wordpress.com)
• India to see decrease in malaria cases: WHO (thehindu.com) – India remains the world’s largest manufacturer and user of DDT; were DDT the panacea cynical critics and hoaxsters claim it is, India would not have 24 million malaria infections each year; India has the highest rate and highest total of malaria cases in Asia
• Drug-resistant malaria in Thailand threatens deadly global ‘nightmare’ (worldnews.nbcnews.com)
• Drug-resistant malaria threatens global ‘nightmare’ (worldnews.nbcnews.com)
• “WHO warns of malaria resurgence,” VOA News; audio VOA report
• At National Review Online, Corey Dean Hall plays fast and loose with the facts, and advocates the poisoning-Thailand-with-DDT hoax, instead of fighting malaria

A neglected 95th anniversary of Mencken and Millard Fillmore’s Bathtub – National Bathtub and Presidential Obscurity Day

A Millard Fillmore’s Bathtub December 28 tradition; mostly encore post, but worthy of note on National Bathtub and Presidential Obscurity Day

95 years ago today, on December 28, 1917, this column by H. L. Mencken was published in The New York Evening Mail:

1927 Portrait of H. L. Mencken by Nikol Schattenstein; Enoch Pratt Free Library, Baltimore

A Neglected Anniversary

On December 20 there flitted past us, absolutely without public notice, one of the most important profane anniversaries in American history, to wit, the seventy-fifth anniversary of the introduction of the bathtub into These States. Not a plumber fired a salute or hung out a flag. Not a governor proclaimed a day of prayer. Not a newspaper called attention to the day.

True enough, it was not entirely forgotten. Eight or nine months ago one of the younger surgeons connected with the Public Health Service in Washington happened upon the facts while looking into the early history of public hygiene, and at his suggestion a committee was formed to celebrate the anniversary with a banquet. But before the plan was perfected Washington went dry (This was war-time Prohibition, preliminary to the main catastrophe. — HLM), and so the banquet had to be abandoned. As it was, the day passed wholly unmarked, even in the capital of the nation.

Bathtubs are so common today that it is almost impossible to imagine a world without them. They are familiar to nearly everyone in all incorporated towns; in most of the large cities it is unlawful to build a dwelling house without putting them in; even on the farm they have begun to come into use. And yet the first American bathtub was installed and dedicated so recently as December 20, 1842, and, for all I know to the contrary, it may still be in existence and in use.

Curiously enough, the scene of its setting up was Cincinnati, then a squalid frontier town, and even today surely no leader in culture. But Cincinnati, in those days as in these, contained many enterprising merchants, and one of them was a man named Adam Thompson, a dealer in cotton and grain. Thompson shipped his grain by steamboat down the Ohio and Mississippi to New Orleans, and from there sent it to England in sailing vessels. This trade frequently took him to England, and in that country, during the ’30s, he acquired the habit of bathing.

The bathtub was then still a novelty in England. It had been introduced in 1828 by Lord John Russell and its use was yet confined to a small class of enthusiasts. Moreover, the English bathtub, then as now, was a puny and inconvenient contrivance — little more, in fact, than a glorified dishpan — and filling and emptying it required the attendance of a servant. Taking a bath, indeed, was a rather heavy ceremony, and Lord John in 1835 was said to be the only man in England who had yet come to doing it every day.

Thompson, who was of inventive fancy — he later devised the machine that is still used for bagging hams and bacon — conceived the notion that the English bathtub would be much improved if it were made large enough to admit the whole body of an adult man, and if its supply of water, instead of being hauled to the scene by a maid, were admitted by pipes from a central reservoir and run off by the same means. Accordingly, early in 1842 he set about building the first modern bathroom in his Cincinnati home — a large house with Doric pillars, standing near what is now the corner of Monastery and Orleans streets.

There was then, of course, no city water supply, at least in that part of the city, but Thompson had a large well in his garden, and he installed a pump to lift its water to the house. This pump, which was operated by six Negroes, much like an old-time fire engine, was connected by a pipe with a cypress tank in the garret of the house, and here the water was stored until needed. From the tank two other pipes ran to the bathroom. One, carrying cold water, was a direct line. The other, designed to provide warm water, ran down the great chimney of the kitchen, and was coiled inside it like a giant spring.

The tub itself was of new design, and became the grandfather of all the bathtubs of today. Thompson had it made by James Cullness, the leading Cincinnati cabinetmaker of those days, and its material was Nicaragua mahogany. It was nearly seven feet long and fully four feet wide. To make it water-tight, the interior was lined with sheet lead, carefully soldered at the joints. The whole contraption weighed about 1,750 pounds, and the floor of the room in which it was placed had to be reinforced to support it. The exterior was elaborately polished.

In this luxurious tub Thompson took two baths on December 20, 1842 — a cold one at 8 a.m. and a warm one some time during the afternoon. The warm water, heated by the kitchen fire, reached a temperature of 105 degrees. On Christmas day, having a party of gentlemen to dinner, he exhibited the new marvel to them and gave an exhibition of its use, and four of them, including a French visitor, Col. Duchanel, risked plunges into it. The next day all Cincinnati — then a town of about 100,000 people — had heard of it, and the local newspapers described it at length and opened their columns to violent discussions of it.

The thing, in fact, became a public matter, and before long there was bitter and double- headed opposition to the new invention, which had been promptly imitated by several other wealthy Cincinnatians. On the one hand it was denounced as an epicurean and obnoxious toy from England, designed to corrupt the democratic simplicity of the Republic, and on the other hand it was attacked by the medical faculty as dangerous to health and a certain inviter of “phthisic, rheumatic fevers, inflammation of the lungs and the whole category of zymotic diseases.” (I quote from the Western Medical Repository of April 23, 1843.)

The noise of the controversy soon reached other cities, and in more than one place medical opposition reached such strength that it was reflected in legislation. Late in 1843, for example, the Philadelphia Common Council considered an ordinance prohibiting bathing between November 1 and March 15, and it failed of passage by but two votes. During the same year the legislature of Virginia laid a tax of $30 a year on all bathtubs that might be set up, and in Hartford, Providence, Charleston and Wilmington (Del.) special and very heavy water rates were levied upon those who had them. Boston, very early in 1845, made bathing unlawful except upon medical advice, but the ordinance was never enforced and in 1862 it was repealed.

This legislation, I suspect, had some class feeling in it, for the Thompson bathtub was plainly too expensive to be owned by any save the wealthy; indeed, the common price for installing one in New York in 1845 was $500. Thus the low caste politicians of the time made capital by fulminating against it, and there is even some suspicion of political bias in many of the early medical denunciations. But the invention of the common pine bathtub, lined with zinc, in 1847, cut off this line of attack, and thereafter the bathtub made steady progress.

The zinc tub was devised by John F. Simpson, a Brooklyn plumber, and his efforts to protect it by a patent occupied the courts until 1855. But the decisions were steadily against him, and after 1848 all the plumbers of New York were equipped for putting in bathtubs. According to a writer in the Christian Register for July 17, 1857, the first one in New York was opened for traffic on September 12, 1847, and by the beginning of 1850 there were already nearly 1,000 in use in the big town.

After this medical opposition began to collapse, and among other eminent physicians Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes declared for the bathtub, and vigorously opposed the lingering movement against it in Boston. The American Medical Association held its annual meeting in Boston in 1849, and a poll of the members in attendance showed that nearly 55 per cent of them now regarded bathing as harmless, and that more than 20 per cent advocated it as beneficial. At its meeting in 1850 a resolution was formally passed giving the imprimatur of the faculty to the bathtub. The homeopaths followed with a like resolution in 1853.

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.

So much for the history of the bathtub in America. One is astonished, on looking into it, to find that so little of it has been recorded. The literature, in fact, is almost nil. But perhaps this brief sketch will encourage other inquirers and so lay the foundation for an adequate celebration of the centennial in 1942.

(Text courtesy of Poor Mojo’s Almanac(k))

The entire history was a hoax composed by Mencken.

Even conservative wackoes appreciate the column.

Content with his private joke, Mencken remained silent about the hoax until a follow-up article, “Melancholy Reflections,” appeared in the Chicago Tribune on May 23, 1926, some eight years later. This was Mencken’s confession. It was also an appeal for reason to the American public.

His hoax was a joke gone bad. “A Neglected Anniversary” had been printed and reprinted hundreds of times in the intervening years. Mencken had been receiving letters of corroboration from some readers and requests for more details from others. His history of the bathtub had been cited repeatedly by other writers and was starting to find its way into reference works. As Mencken noted in “Melancholy Reflections,” his “facts” “began to be used by chiropractors and other such quacks as evidence of the stupidity of medical men. They began to be cited by medical men as proof of the progress of public hygiene.” And, because Fillmore’s presidency had been so uneventful, on the date of his birthday calendars often included the only interesting tidbit of information they could find: Fillmore had introduced the bathtub into the White House. (Even the later scholarly disclosure that Andrew Jackson had a bathtub installed there in 1834—years before Mencken claimed it was even invented—did not diminish America’s conviction that Fillmore was responsible.)

(No, dear reader, probably not correct; surely John Adams brought a bathtub with him when he moved into the White House, then called the President’s Mansion.  Plumbing, hot water, and finally hot water to a bathtub in the president’s residence, were installed between 1830 and 1853, as best I can determine.)

Mencken wrote an introduction to the piece in a later book,  A Mencken Chrestomathy (Alfred A. Knopf, 1949):

The success of this idle hoax, done in time of war, when more serious writing was impossible, vastly astonished me. It was taken gravely by a great many other newspapers, and presently made its way into medical literature and into standard reference books. It had, of course, no truth in it whatsoever, and I more than once confessed publicly that it was only a jocosity… Scarcely a month goes by that I do not find the substance of it reprinted, not as foolishness but as fact, and not only in newspapers but in official documents and other works of the highest pretensions.

There’s a moral to the story:  Strive for accuracy!

So, Dear Reader, check for accuracy, and question authority.

Fact checks — what else might need to be corrected in this story?

• Cincinnati’s population in 1840 was about 44,000, far short of the 100,000 Mencken claimed (were you even aware of the riots in 1841?)
• Lord John Russell, twice Prime Minister of England, had nothing whatever to do with bathtubs; Bertrand Russell was his grandson
• Bathing and bathtubs have been a part of civilization for 5,000 years at least; almost every home in Mohenjo-Daro had a bathing area in it, with plumbing to take waste water away from the home.  Mohenjo-daro emerged as a major city about 2600 BCE, more than 4,600 years ago
• The Governor’s Palace at Williamsburg, Virginia, had a bathhouse as early as 1721 (See photo)
  

  This nineteenth-century tub was one a fixture in the basement of Williamsburg’s St. George Tucker House, the first home in town known to have a bath with running water. –Colonial Williamsburg (tub was installed by 1796, contrasting sharply with dates Mencken offered)

• Roman baths were famous, from at least the first century CE
• During the American Revolution, George Washington and others worked to develop hot springs for bathing in Bath, Virginia — now the town of Berkeley Springs, West Virginia
• Bathtubs a novelty in the 18th century?  Consider the famous painting of the death of Marat Sade, during the French Revolution
• Charles M. Conrad was, indeed, Fillmore’s Secretary of War – but why would a president task the Secretary of War with plumbing renovations at the Executive Mansion?

Resources:

• Neatorama, “Six More Hoaxes that Fooled the World”
• Today in Literature, “Mencken’s Tub and Hot Water”
• Description of the H. L. Mencken Collection at Baltimore’s Enoch Pratt Free Library
• Was the New York Evening Mail a propaganda tool of the German government, operating in America during the war?
• What about “fake news?”  Is Jon Stewart the modern-day incarnation of H. L. Mencken?
• Millard Fillmore: Victim of yet another hoax (timpanogos.wordpress.com)
• Today in History, Friday, December 28 (amarillo.com)
• An Interview with Professor Donald Elder: The Presidents of the United States of America (educationviews.org)
• “Mencken’s Typewriter,” at Millard Fillmore’s Bathtub
• Mencken and the 1948 conventions, at Millard Fillmore’s Bathtub; “Mencken suffered a stroke later in 1948 that left him unable to speak, or read, or write for a time. He spent much of the rest of his life working to organize his papers, and died in 1956. His epitaph, on his tombstone and on a plaque in the lobby of the Baltimore Sun, reads: ‘If, after I depart this vale, you ever remember me and have thought to please my ghost, forgive some sinner, and wink your eye at some homely girl.’”
• Mencken’s creed, Mencken’s birthday

Finally, Dear Readers — have you noticed someone falling victim to the hoax of Millard Fillmore’s Bathtub recently?  Give us details in comments, please.

Best editorial quote ever: “Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus” (2012 remembrance)

“Papa says, ‘If you see it in the Sun, it’s so.’”

Do we, you and I in 2012, stand as witnesses to the end of newspapers in America?  In recent months we’ve seen body blows to the New Orleans Times-Picayune, the San Diego Union, and The Cleveland Plain Dealer, and others.

It’s been a grand history. Newspapering gave us great leaders like Benjamin Franklin. Newspapering gave us wars, like the Spanish-American War. Newspapering gave us Charlie Brown, Ann Landers, the Yellow Kid, Jim Murray, Red Smith, Thomas Nast (and Santa Claus), the Federalist Papers, Watergate, Herblock, news of Vietnam and Pearl Harbor, Neil Armstrong on the Moon, the Pentagon Papers, and coupons to save money on laundry soap.

It’s been a curious history, too. An 1897 editorial vouching for Santa Claus rates as the most popular editorial of all time, according to the Newseum in Washington, D.C.  That’s 115 years ago, and that’s quite some staying power.

The man who saved Christmas, at least for Virginia O’Hanlon: Francis Pharcellus Church – Newseum image

In autumn, 1897, 8-year-old Virginia O’Hanlon of 115 West 59th Street in New York, wrote to the New York Sun with this simple question:

“Please tell me the truth; is there a Santa Claus?”

In the age of Yellow Journalism, the fiercely competitive Sun‘s editors turned the letter to Francis Pharcellus. He responded to little Virginia on September 21, 1897:

“Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus.”

Church’s brother, William Conant Church, owned and published the newspaper. Both had followed their father into the news business. They co-founded The Army-Navy Journal in 1863, and went on to a series of journalistic collaborations. Francis was 58 years old when he answered Virginia’s letter. (He died at age 67, in 1906.)

The New York Sun held down the conservative corner in New York journalism at the time, versus the New York Times and the New York Herald-Tribune. But it also had an interesting history, to a blogger intrigued by hoaxes. In 1835 the paper published a series of six newspaper stories falsely attributed to Sir John Herschel, a well-known astronomer, claiming to describe a civilization on the Moon — the Great Moon Hoax. The discovery was credited to a new, very powerful telescope.

In 1844 the paper published a hoax written by Edgar Allen Poe, the Balloon Hoax. Under a pseudonym, Poe wrote that a gas balloon had crossed the Atlantic in three days.

The Sun also featured outstanding reporting. A 1947 and 1948 series about crime on the docks of New York City won a Pulitzer Prize for writer Malcolm Johnson. That series inspired Elia Kazan’s 1954 movie On the Waterfront starring Marlon Brando, Rod Steiger, Eva Marie Saint, Karl Malden and Lee J. Cobb.

The New York Sun ceased publication in 1950.

For all of its history, the Sun and the Churches are most remembered for that defense of belief in Santa Claus.
Virginia O’Hanlon grew up, graduated from Hunter College, got a masters at Columbia, and earned a Ph.D. from Fordham. She taught in the New York City Public School system, from which she retired in 1959. She died in 1971.

Birth of tradition

Columbia University was Church’s alma mater, as well as O’Hanlon’s. Her letter and his response get a reading each year at the Yule Log Ceremony at Columbia College, along with the poem “A Visit from St. Nicholas.” Animated, live-acting, and other television productions have been mounted in 1974, 1991, and 2009.

Is there a Santa Claus? Did Church write a credible defense? The text of the letter and answer, below the fold.

More:  

• Yes, this is a Christmas tradition here at Millard Fillmore’s Bathtub.  Some years I even edit and add something to the piece.
• As if the 112th Congress were not refutation enough, here’s the rebuttal to Church’s editorial, from Greta Christina (tip of the old scrub brush, yet again, to P. Z. Myers and Pharyngula, but at the new site)

Montreal’s baby-stealing eagle? “Hoax.”

It was a class project, a class project in CGI.

The baby-stealing eagle in Montreal?  Computer generated.  No real eagles were harmed in the process (no word about osprey or falcons, though . . .)

Luisa posted this in comments to the previous post:

Je suis désolée: http://blogue.centrenad.com/2012/12/19/centre-nad-reassures-montrealers-no-danger-of-being-snatched-by-a-royal-eagle?lang=en

The blog at CentreNAD said:

19 December 2012

POSTED BY Chantal (3D Studies, Communication)

The “Golden Eagle Snatches Kid” video, uploaded to YouTube on the evening of December 18, was made by Normand Archambault, Loïc Mireault and Félix Marquis-Poulin, students at Centre NAD, in the production simulation workshop class of the Bachelors degree in 3D Animation and Digital Design.

The video shows a royal eagle snatching a young kid while he plays under the watch of his dad. The eagle then drops the kid a few feet away. Both the eagle and the kid were created in 3D animation and integrated in to the film afterwards.

The video has already received more than 1,200,000 views on YouTube and has been mentioned by dozens of media in Canada and abroad.

The production simulation workshop class, offered in fifth semester, aims to produce creative projects according to industry production and quality standards while developing team work skills. Hoaxes produced in this class have already garnered attention, amongst others a video of a penguin having escaped the Montreal Biodôme.

Was that enough YouTube views to guarantee an A in the course?

I’ll wager the students who made the film are not “désolée” at all.

Grateful tip of the old scrub brush to Luisa, at Crows and Ravens.

More:

• Gawker wasn’t fooled — listed four good reasons why they thought it fake, a sort of primer on how to tell hoax videos (note the non-video reasons especially, Birthers)
• Poynter.com blog, “Montreal students take credit for fake viral video of baby-snatching eagle”

.Gif showing shadow inconsistencies used to debunk video: Caption at Poynter.org: “Earlier, social media verification experts at Storyful point to evidence of fakery, including Twitter user @thornae’s animated GIF showing inconsistencies with the eagle’s shadow.”

Montreal baby experiences terror of being ‘lifted up by eagle’s wings’ (hoax?)

East Coast son Kenny sent this video, noting his reaction was the same as the guy in the film; an encounter with a golden eagle in a Montreal park:

You can take the eagle out of the wild, but you can’t take the wild out of the eagle.

Looks mostly like a golden eagle to me — anyone want to make the case it’s a different bird?

What’s going on in Montreal, I wonder, that would make a golden eagle think a human baby might make a good meal?  (No, I don’t think the bird was trying to give the kid a thrill.)

Other reports of similar incidents around Montreal?

Update:  WHAT?  IT’S FAKED? Thoughtful reader Luisa in comments refers us to Chris Clarke’s Original Blog™ Coyote Crossing, which updates from expert birder Kenn Kauffman who says, as I wondered, it’s not a golden eagle, and other things look hoaxed. (While you’re looking around, check out Luisa’s Crow and Raven; bird photos that will make you jealous.)  You’d think an incident like that would have made it to the newspapers and television stations in Montreal, but I’ve found nothing — have you?)

Update, December 19, 2012:  Now the CBC covers the tale,  noting that it is most likely a hoax.  The film’s maker or YouTube poster has not defended it that I can find.  Watch carefully — the “baby” doesn’t move during the time it’s on the ground, through the bird’s plucking it up and dropping it.  There’s plenty of time to swap a dummy out with a real kid in the stroller while the camera is pointed away.  CBC found a Montreal ornithologist who claims it looks more like an osprey than an eagle.  I’ll buy that.

More:

• At The Atlantic blogs, Adam Clark Estes provides a smattering of history of similar events, but avoids saying it means it’s the End of Days only barely.=

Millard Fillmore: Victim of yet another hoax

The Washington Post’s usually great blog on politics, The Fix, features a list of the best presidential biographies.  This comes just in time for the holidays, of course.  It could be a guide to getting the book for that wonk you know, the one who says Franklin Pierce is underrated, or the woman you know who is fixated on what might have been had Warren G. Harding not died in San Francisco.

The list links to good versions of obscure and arcane history, as well as some major stuff — any good biography of Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, or Teddy Roosevelt, has to have some major chops going for it, in those crowded niches of good biographies of important people.

1938 U.S. postage stamp of Millard Fillmore, a 13-cent stamp for our 13th president – Wikipedia image

Then there is poor old, hapless Millard Fillmore.

We can excuse Natalie Jennings and Sean Sullivan, perhaps.  After all, there are not many books on Millard Fillmore.  Pickings are slim.

Ever since America’s favorite curmudgeon, H. L. Mencken, created a World War I hoax on the gullibility of the public, with a completely invented history that claimed the only thing of note ever done by Millard Fillmore was putting a bathtub in the White House, against the advice of the American Medical Association, poor Fillmore has been the butt of jokes, but more often the cruel butt of unintended slights when people cite the fictions of his life rather than his accomplishments.  We approach the anniversary of the Mencken “Fillmore’s Bathtub” Hoax, on December 28.

I said the pickings on Fillmore books were slim.  The list at The Fix  includes a parody history of some five years back by George Pendle, The Remarkable Millard Fillmore: The Unbelievable Life of a Forgotten President.

At Amazon, we learn of Pendle’s book:

Millard Fillmore has been mocked, maligned, or, most cruelly of all, ignored by generations of historians–but no more! This unbelievable new biography finally rescues the unlucky thirteenth U.S. president from the dustbin of history and shows why a man known as a blundering, arrogant, shallow, miserable failure was really our greatest leader.

In the first fully researched portrait of Fillmore ever written, the reader can finally come face-to-face with a misunderstood genius. By meticulously extrapolating outrageous conclusions from the most banal and inconclusive of facts, The Remarkable Millard Fillmore reveals the adventures of an unjustly forgotten president. He fought at the Battle of the Alamo! He shepherded slaves to freedom on the Underground Railroad! He discovered gold in California! He wrestled with the emperor of Japan! It is a list of achievements that puts those of Washington and Lincoln completely in the shade.

Refusing to be held back by established history or recorded fact, here George Pendle paints an extraordinary portrait of an ordinary man and restores the sparkle to an unfairly tarnished reputation.

Of course it’s parody!  There’s no indication Fillmore, never a member of the military, fought at the Alamo.  Fillmore never made it to California, nor was he the Mormon who discovered gold at Sutter’s Mill.  In one of his greatest acts, Fillmore dispatched Commodore Perry to Japan to coerce that nation to open its doors to American sailing ships, and trade with the rest of the world.  Fillmore himself did not journey to Japan, and never met the Japanese emperor, let alone wrestled the man. (After his presidency, Fillmore visited Europe; Queen Victoria is attributed with having said he was one of the handsomest men she’d ever met; he refused an honorary degree because, he said, he couldn’t read the Latin it was written in — you can’t make up the real stuff.)

Despite its clearly being a parody, however, there it is on the list of The Fix, as the best biography of Millard Fillmore.

Screen clip showing parody Fillmore biography on The Fix’s list of best presidential biographies

H. L. Mencken at approximately 12:30 a.m., April 7, 1933, at the Rennert Hotel, corner of Saratoga and Liberty Streets, 17 years later, not neglecting a sudsy anniversary – Baltimore Sun photo

The Ghost of H. L. Mencken notes that this item appeared on December 5, 2012, the anniversary of the end of Prohibition — and knocks back a brew.  Every other president gets a serious biography mentioned; for Millard Fillmore, The Fix lists a hoax book as his “best presidential biography.”

More:

• An accurate biography of Millard Fillmore, online, at Big Mo
• A serious work on Fillmore’s presidency:  Millard Fillmore: The American Presidents Series: The 13th President, 1850-1853 (American Presidents (Times)), by Paul Finkelman, with series editing by Sean Wilentz and Arthur M. Schlesinger
  • 5 U.S. Presidents Who Taught School (history.com)
  • The Presidential Trail… in Buffalo NY (buffalorising.com)
  • Sources on Millard Fillmore’s life, listed here at Millard Fillmore’s Bathtub

A note on fairness to Mr. Pendle:  Pendle has argued here before that his book does contain real history, and it’s there despite the embellishments which he says at least get the book sold.  Earlier, in comments he said:

Dear Sir,

I am the author of the recently published ‘The Remarkable Millard Fillmore’, which I have just discovered has been mentioned by your website on a couple of occasions. Judging by your website’s wonderful name, and your obvious interest in making people more aware of American history, I was slightly troubled to see that you thought I treated Millard Fillmore unfairly in my book.

I don’t know if you have had a chance to read ‘TRMF’ yet, but I can assure you that while it is a faux-biography, and does indeed poke fun at Millard Fillmore’s perceived image (or lack of it), its larger target is that of presidential biographies that are unthinkingly reverential of the office of the president. The cynical revision of history, in which one man is placed at the center of the world’s events is a historical fallacy, as you are probably well aware. Yet it is one which – unlike my book – many historians perpetrate with a straight face.

In ‘TRMF’ I attempted to mock this school of biography by extrapolating the most ridiculous situations from the most basic and inconclusive of historical facts. For instance, I have Millard Fillmore stowing away to Japan, and Sumo-wrestling with the Mikado’s champion, because in real life Fillmore opened up Japan to western trade (albeit from a safe distance in Washington D.C.).

Lest you think I am playing too fast and loose with the truth (some readers have complained that they did not realize my book was a spoof, despite the picture of Millard Fillmore riding a unicorn on its cover!) my book also includes a large appendix of strange but true historical notes to show that many of the ridiculous situations I place Fillmore in were actually based on fact. By reading them I hope one can discover that even the most staid of human lives can be touched by the fantastic.

In short I come not to bury Fillmore, but to praise him, and all those forgottens who have not been granted a role as a ‘Great Man of History’ by the Academy. I very much hope that although ‘The Remarkable Millard Fillmore’ is primarily a spoof and designed to make people giggle, readers will, possibly without being aware of it, come away from the book with a better knowledge of American History than when they started it.

Yours sincerely,
George Pendle

So we are left with a little mystery.  Did the WaPo reporters know that Pendle’s book is a parody, and are they saying it works wonderfully as a tool of history telling?  Or, did they not know?

_____________

Update:  Comes word this morning that The Fix changed its listing for Fillmore, to the Rayback book (Thanks, Lea).  The column says only that it’s been “updated,” but doesn’t explain where or why.   Mr. Pendle might argue his book should be there:  How many books are there on Fillmore after all?

One more time: “Do we really know who Donald Trump is, or where he came from?”

Donald Trump is at it again.  His $5 million offer to get Obama’s grades mystifies me, and irritates me (why doesn’t he just call Harvard, and see what GPA was required to graduate with the honors on Obama’s diploma?).  It’s clear Trump has not bothered to see whether information is available on Obama, but is instead attempting a political smear.

Should we be concerned at all?  David Letterman savaged Trump on his show October 24, but then invited Trump to appear on October 25, and let Trump get away without challenging most of his big whoppers.  Letterman seemed to sense he was not witnessing a political exposé, but instead was witness to the dying throes of a man whose talent and time seem to be restricted to hair design, these days.

Heh.  Why should we believe Donald Trump?  In addition to the manifold reasons you may have already accumulated to dismiss the guy as a crank and a crackpot, consider that we don’t have a clue about his bona fides.

Who is Donald Trump, really?  I posted this originally in February 2011 — and since then, Trump has failed to release any whiff of evidence to clear up his murky background.  He’s not released his birth certificate (except a forgery), he’s not been able to establish that he ever attended a college in America.   In short, he’s vulnerable exactly to the type of unfair and churlish attack he’s making on President Obama.

Here’s how it unfolds:

Donald Trump demonstrated his ability to spread hoax information at the CPAC Conference recently — a group who love to hear hoaxes and spread them, as much as fourth-grade boys love to hear and spread jokes about flatulence.

But can he take it?  [Note the hoax insinuations below are underlined.]  Could Donald Trump withstand the kind of attack* he made on President Obama?

I mean, he claims President Obama may not have attended Columbia because Trump hasn’t personally interviewed anyone who knew him there — despite years of stories in alumni magazines, major media interviews with the people who knew Obama there, etc., etc.

Gratuitous picture that makes trump look funny or evil, with gratuitously misleading caption: “Donald Trump wants people to stop asking why no one, in America, can remember his high school and college days.” Alternative caption: “Donald Trump, two of his closest friends and an unnamed woman discuss politics and government policy.”

Does Trump have room to talk?  His Wikipedia bio claims he attended Fordham University for a brief period (got kicked out, maybe?), but didn’t graduate.  It claims he got an undergraduate degree from the Wharton School in Pennsylvania.

A search found no one from Wharton who remembers Donald Trump as a student there.  Jon Huntsman, the founder of Huntsman Container and Huntsman Chemical, the guy who invented the “clamshell box” for McDonalds, is one of the most famous and wealthy Wharton grads (and also the father of Jon Huntsman, Jr., the recently resigned Obama Ambassador to China).  He never saw Trump on campus at Wharton.  James DePriest, the outstanding conductor now with the Oregon Symphony (and fun to watch, trust me) — he never ran into Trump on campus when he attended Wharton.  There’s no record of Trump having had a roommate there. Alan Rachins, the famous actor who graduated from Wharton — not only never took a class with Trump, but said he never heard of Trump attending classes at the time.

Who is Donald Trump?  Where did he come from?  How come no one remembers him?

But the fog gets inkier.

Trump was not only a football standout in high school, he was a social standout, winning awards for his community involvement (although, no one at the high school in his hometown remembers his attending classes there).

But during the time he claims to have attended Fordham, no one remembers him.  No social standout.  No football hero.  Was he ever really at Fordham?

And what about his odd religious beliefs?  There are jokes about his worship of money — but what sort of religion would lead a man to claim that the 2008 economic collapse was “an Act of God?”  Yes, he really believes that.  His “god” appears to have a grudge against the United States and its economy.  Even in his greatest economic ventures, he pays homage to Hindu religious landmarks.  What is his secret agenda on religion?

Where did Donald Trump come from?  Why does no one in his hometown high school remember him?  Why did he drop out of sight at the time he claims to have attended Fordham University?  Did he buy his way into a listing as an alumnus of Wharton, after so many Wharton grads don’t remember seeing him there?   Who can trust a guy who worships (if he does worship at all) a “god” who strikes down the U.S. economy?

Who is Donald Trump?  Why did no one at CPAC check his questionable credentials before giving Trump a national platform?  Why is CPAC mum about this entire affair?  Why did Fox News conspire to obscure the message and candidacy of Ron Paul, with their new darling, Donald Trump?

Worse for Trump, most of the things in this screed are factually accurate.  Those who live by the inaccurate spin can die by it, too.

Scarier:  Which conservative sites will have the guts to question** Trump’s secret credentials?

Read more here, at Oh, For Goodness Sake (and here at “Donald Trump Pants On Fire”), and here, at PolitiFact.

_____________________________

*   That is, “completely hoaxed up.”

**  Oh, yeah — that should have read, “gullibility to fall for.”  When will the blog owner correct that glaring error?***

*** Not until Trump apologizes to President Obama.

More:

• Hawaii’s confirmation that Barack Obama was born there (but they won’t vouch for Trump) (Millard Fillmore’s Bathtub)
• “Are Trump and the birthers hypocrites?  Racists?” (Millard Fillmore’s Bathtub)
• Stephen Colbert Invites Donald Trump to Gargle His Balls For Charity (jezebel.com)
• Donald Trump’s “Big News” (now100fm.cbslocal.com)
• Obama Is Asked What Donald Trump Has Against Him: “This all dates back to when we were growing up together in Kenya.” (thedailydolt.com)
• Donald Trump’s Dr. Evil “blockbuster” – a $5 million hostage offer? (VIDEO) (timesunion.com)

Happy birthday, H. L. Mencken (a day late)

 

Born in Baltimore, Maryland, September 12, 1880:  Henry Louis Mencken.

H. L. Mencken at his piano, 1942. Photo from the Library of Congress, via Gibbons

Mencken is the guy who invented the Millard Fillmore bathtub hoax.  So here at Millard Fillmore’s Bathtub, we owe a birthday greeting to the guy, no?

As a quintessential curmudgeon, Mencken took a cynical pose on many issues.  Why?  His creed explains:

Mencken’s Creed

I believe that religion, generally speaking, has been a curse to mankind – that its modest and greatly overestimated services on the ethical side have been more than overcome by the damage it has done to clear and honest thinking.
I believe that no discovery of fact, however trivial, can be wholly useless to the race, and that no trumpeting of falsehood, however virtuous in intent, can be anything but vicious.
I believe that all government is evil, in that all government must necessarily make war upon liberty. . .
I believe that the evidence for immortality is no better than the evidence of witches, and deserves no more respect.
I believe in the complete freedom of thought and speech. . .
I believe in the capacity of man to conquer his world, and to find out what it is made of, and how it is run.
I believe in the reality of progress.
I — but the whole thing, after all, may be put very simply. I believe that it is better to tell the truth than to lie. I believe that it is better to be free than to be a slave. And I believe that it is better to know than be ignorant.

The Mencken Society plans an event commemorating his birthday.  David Donovan will speak on “H.L. Mencken and the Saturday Night Club” on Saturday, September 29, 2012 at 1:00 p.m. at the the Pratt Library’s Southeast Anchor Library, 3601 Eastern Avenue (S Conkling St), Baltimore, MD 21224.  Donovan is a librarian and musicologist from the Pratt Library; the Saturday Night Club was a group of musicians with whom Mencken played piano.

It would be a great day to be in Baltimore.

I wonder what Mencken would have made of Kennedy’s speech in 1962 about going to the Moon.

More:

• Encore typewriter of the moment: Mencken and the 1948 conventions (timpanogos.wordpress.com)
• Mencken on Mayor Mike (cafehayek.com)
• What Would Mencken Do? (cafehayek.com)
• The Crying Game (nybooks.com)
• Cleaned by Capitalism IX (cafehayek.com)
• H.L. Mencken and the Anarchist, 1933 (longstreet.typepad.com)
• H. L. Mencken and W. A. Dwiggins, a Book Cover (twicemodern.wordpress.com)
• H. L. Mencken Room at the Enoch Pratt Library, Baltimore
• The Mencken Collection at the Enoch Pratt Libary
• H. L. Mencken, the Musician (featuring Mencken’s interview on music)