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A.B. Guthrie, the former president and the flush toilet – Daily Montanan

['More From Author', 'February', 'Marc C. Johnson']

Date: 2022-02-16 00:00:00

Axios, a widely read digital news site, reported last week: “While President Trump was in office, staff in the White House residence periodically discovered wads of printed paper clogging a toilet — and believed the president had flushed pieces of paper, Maggie Haberman scoops in her forthcoming book, “Confidence Man.”

Maggie Haberman is a White House reporter for the New York Times who reportedly convinced the former president to sit for hours of interview as she prepared her new book. To say the least, Haberman’s “scoop” – can you say that about a toilet story? – generated a lot of comment, and more than a few lame jokes particularly considered that Donald Trump often had something to say about, well, toilets.

In 2019, for example, as CNN reported, Trump “claimed Americans are flushing their toilets ‘10 times, 15 times, as opposed to once’ and argued that they are having difficulty with washing their hands in what appeared to be a tangent about low-flow sinks and toilets.”

“We have a situation,” Trump told a group of small business owners during a White House meeting, “where we’re looking very strongly at sinks and showers and other elements of bathrooms where you turn the faucet on – and in areas where there’s tremendous amounts of water, where the water rushes out to sea because you could never handle it, and you don’t get any water.”

Using his best Trump voice, late night TV host Stephen Colbert intoned, “Toilet’s clogged again. Call the E.P.A. Have them declare my commode a Superfund site. And you’d better get FEMA in here, too, because this bathroom is a disaster.”

Stay with me, but all this potty talk inevitably leads right back to Montana, and to the pen of a legendary Big Sky country writer – A.B. Guthrie. That’s right, Bud Guthrie, in a manner of speaking – or flushing – anticipated the White House toilet controversy nearly 50 years ago.

Allow me to explain.

But first a brief digression to praise Alfred Bertram “Bud” Guthrie, author of many books – many good books – including “The Way West,” which won the Pulitzer for fiction in 1950. Guthrie wrote the screenplay for the motion picture “Shane” and received an Academy Award nomination. He was a “conservationist” before the term was popular. Guthrie wrote about the West that he came to love but refused to mythologize his adopted region.

Originally from Kentucky, Guthrie once said he had “a sense of morality about it,” – meaning the West.

“I want to talk about real people in real times,” Guthrie said, “For every Wyatt Earp or Billy the Kid, there were thousands of people trying to get along.”

He settled in Choteau because it felt to him like a good place to view the universe

Guthrie, who died in 1991, taught college-level writing courses for a while, before making a living with his fiction, his screenplays and essays. “Nouns and verbs are the guts of the language,” he would tell students. “Here’s where the beginner goes astray. Having fallen short in the use of nouns and verbs, he tries to enforce his prose with adjectives and adverbs and, though he doesn’t know it, thereby makes it weaker.”

Guthrie also had a puckish sense of humor, as demonstrated by at once a both serious and tongue-in-cheek seven-paragraph piece in Harper’s in 1973 entitled “Reflections on a Flush Toilet.” It was a lamentation on the growing complexity of the modest commode and how that indispensable device might be reformed.

“The present flush toilet is the fruit of a conspiracy between manufacturer and union,” Guthrie wrote. “It has been designed to thwart the do-it-yourselfers.”

Guthrie sounds like a guy, like so many guys, who can’t figure out how to stop the toilet from running.

The basic household toilet – the “binger” as my favorite uncle labeled it – “has been so engineered,” Guthrie wrote, “that when it gets out of whack, only a plumber can fix it – at what is reported to be the going wage of in my part of the country for $17.50 an hour.”

That 1973 rate was surely a bargain by today’s standards. Inflation, also in the news, apparently explains virtually everything.

Like all self-respecting rugged western male individualists, the Montana novelist could not help himself. He was determined to solve the mysteries of the flush toilet, and he offered one bit of salient advice to the non-journeyman plumber.

“Before tinkering with the guts of the tank, make sure you close the cut-off valve outside it. Once, forgetting to do so, I removed the intake valve and flushed the whole bathroom – at a saving, though, of $17.50 an hour.”

On the big issue of our time, however – the intensity of the flush – Bud Guthrie clearly parts company with the former president, who by all accounts wanted to mandate a bigger, more powerful rush of toilet water. All the better, one assumes, for ridding the White House of confidential memos, transcripts of uncomfortable phone calls and summons demanding the production of tax records.

Guthrie, always the conservationist, advocated a toilet that was not “a great waster of water, of which we are increasingly in short supply.” (You wonder what the great writer would make of climate change and persistent, years-long drought across his beloved Montana.)

Guthrie’s ideal commode, anticipating what is now widely available, was “a two-phase flush toilet with levers or buttons designed A and B or One and Two or, come down to it, P and C. Thus would reduce to half a gallon or less the minimum four and one-half gallons of water presently used to flush away the bladder’s approximate maximum content of one pint (ratio 36 to 1).”

Guthrie was, his biographer Jackson Benson wrote, “a hell of a writer, but he could be an ornery cuss.” So, while it is impossible to know what Bud might have thought of 21st Century political toilet troubles and the man in the center arena of flush controversy, we can make an educated guess.

His daughter recalled that Guthrie was often passionate about issues and disdainful of “rotten sons of bitches” who were on the wrong side of issues he cared about. He lamented that “people have a habit of electing a lot of the wrong guys.” So, make of that what you will. I’m going with the low flush theory.

Guthrie did make room in his little Harper’s toilet essay for a classic shoutout to Thomas Crapper of London, allegedly the inventor of the indoor toilet.

“Flushed by this felicitous and surely accidental association of surname with our common names for product, function, matter, and bathroom,” Guthrie penned a limerick to honor the inventor.

“Tom Crapper was the name of a chap

Whom fame has neglected to tap

When seated take thought

Of the blessing he wrought

And always spell Crap with a cap.”

To that we might say: May all your flushes be adequate.

And, after all, who knows if the previous occupant of the White House was a serial flusher. He says the charge is “categorically untrue.” And presidents, at least prior to the passage of the Presidential Records Act in 1978, often routinely destroyed documents. Martin Van Buren and Chester Arthur, for example, intentionally destroyed their presidential papers, which may explain why the world continues to wait for the collected works of both.

Yet, in the final flush this is not some minor deal, or some crappy little partisan controversy, these records matter. (In a related story, the National Archives recently recovered 15 boxes of White House records improperly transported to Mar-a-Lago by the former president in apparent violation of federal statute.)

The law requires preservation, simple as that. Historians, both critics and apologists, depend on the papers to understand our times. As Bud Guthrie might have said: People have a habit of electing the wrong people.

Erasing history – flushing it in fact – causes us to forget the mistakes.

And always spell Crap with a cap.

Marc Johnson is working on his latest project, a biography of former Senate Majority Mike Mansfield of Montana.

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