Post Mortem: The Willard Hotel
IT WAS AT THE TOBACCO COUNTER of the Willard Hotel at 14th Street and Pennsylvania Avenue, the story goes, that Thomas Marshall, who served for eight years as Woodrow Wilson’s vice president, uttered the words that were to become one of America’s classic aphorisms: “What this country needs is a good five-cent cigar.”
As with so many other good stories, however, this one just isn’t so.
Marshall liked to chew cigars — and sometimes smoke them — in the Willard’s main lobby, and he was reportedly given to fits of outrage over the hotel’s steep cigar prices. But if he ever really said those words, it’s clear that he lifted them from Frank McKinney “Kin” Hubbard, the gifted Hoosier humorist who actually coined the saying.
Will Rogers, in fact, once said that he considered Hubbard to be the funniest man in America. Maybe Rogers was right. It was Hubbard who wrote, “When a fellow says, ‘It ain’t the money but the principle of the thing,’ it’s the money.”
This article originally appeared in the January 1988 issue of Regardie’s.
Bill Hogan