The Taft Bathtub Myth Everyone Gets WRONG

You have heard that President Taft once got stuck in his bathtub. It probably never happened.

William Howard Taft was the heaviest president in history, weighing well over three hundred pounds during his term that began in 1909.

The stuck-in-the-tub story has been told for a century, but no record from his lifetime mentions it. No newspaper, no aide, no diary. Historians believe it grew from jokes about his size, not from anything that actually happened.

But here is what is real. A custom tub was built for Taft so large that four grown men could sit inside it together. There is even a photograph of them doing exactly that.

So the legend of the trapped president is a myth. The real story is a man so large the navy built him a tub big enough to hold four men.

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