Contested Waters: A Social History of Swimming Pools in America - Softcover

Wiltse, Jeff

Softcover

ISBN 10: 080783100X ISBN 13: 9780807831007

Publisher: University of North Carolina Press, 2007

Synopsis

From nineteenth-century public baths to today’s private backyard havens, swimming pools have long been a provocative symbol of American life. In this social and cultural history of swimming pools in the United States, Jeff Wiltse relates how, over the years, pools have served as asylums for the urban poor, leisure resorts for the masses, and private clubs for middle-class suburbanites. As sites of race riots, shrinking swimsuits, and conspicuous leisure, swimming pools reflect many of the tensions and transformations that have given rise to modern America.

About this title

About the Author

Jeff Wiltse is associate professor of history at the University of Montana.

From the Inside Flap

From 19th-century public baths to today's private backyard havens, swimming pools have been a provocative symbol of American life. In this social and cultural history of swimming pools in the U.S., Wiltse relates how, over the years, pools have served as asylums for the urban poor, leisure resorts for the masses, and private clubs for middle-class suburbanites. As sites of race riots, shrinking swimsuits, and conspicuous leisure, swimming pools reflect the tensions and transformations that have given rise to modern America.

Reviews

Reviewed by John L. Jackson Jr.

Most of us use swimming pools to get away from the toils and tensions of life. Purposeful breast strokes in a local YMCA clear our heads and strengthen our bodies. During the summer, people don skimpy bathing suits and bask in the sun's rays, floating and splashing around in these chlorine-filled symbols of leisure and carefree recreation. But there's also a politics to sitting poolside. In Contested Waters, historian Jeff Wiltse argues that the nation's contentious history of racism, class conflict and gender inequality can be captured by chronicling the rise and fall of municipal pools in northern American cities. And he makes a compelling case.

Contested Waters begins in the 19th century, when poor immigrants (many living in homes without running water) bathed naked in local rivers and lakes. The first public pools were a calculated response to this exhibitionism. Policymakers -- believing, as most people did, that dirt caused diseases such as cholera and tuberculosis -- aimed to promote cleanliness and good health in America's teeming cities while catering to the sensibilities of middle-class urbanites not interested in glimpsing nude bodies in public.

Wiltse emphasizes that the earliest public pools were racially mixed places. Blacks and whites swam together with few clashes and little popular disapproval. Instead, other social lines were stringently policed, specifically the ones drawn around gender and class. Men and women swam on separate days of the week, and a tiered fee structure meant that the wealthiest swimmers didn't have to share their pool time with the raucous, uncontrollable masses.

But pools couldn't stave off diseases the way previous public planners had imagined, so later pools were designed less to promote public health than to discipline rowdy public bathers, teaching them Victorian values of self-control and moral uplift by forbidding the rambunctious activities (screaming, running, fighting) that had previously characterized public swimming. When it became increasingly clear that the rowdy male swimmers weren't internalizing the lessons (and wouldn't abide by the newly posted rules), public pools mutated yet again into a form of recreation that more civilized families could enjoy together. This new mandate encouraged public funding of massive indoor and outdoor facilities replete with shipped-in sand and vast swaths of land for people-watching and picnicking. According to Wiltse, it also spelled the beginning of the end for multiracial swimming in public pools.

Once men and women (as parents and children) started swimming together, African American swimmers (now saddled with the accusations of bio-pathology and disease-carrying earlier attributed to all poor urbanites) were perceived as a threat. A predilection of black men for raping white women was assumed by some of the most enlightened and celebrated urban thinkers, including Nobel Peace Prize-winning settlement house activist Jane Addams. Most opponents of miscegenation considered pools even more dangerous than schools, Wiltse argues, because they provided a kind of close and intimate contact that classrooms hardly allowed.

Wiltse claims that it was America's mid-20th century defeat of legalized segregation that rang the death knell for public pools in major American cities. Though whites had once swum alongside African Americans without comment or concern, they were no longer willing to do so. Several cities even tried to avoid race riots by reverting to gender-segregated pools, but it didn't work. Whites continued their retreat to private clubs and residential pools safely tucked away behind picket fences. Once they stopped frequenting urban public pools, it became much harder to justify spending tax dollars on maintenance. In such a context, Wiltse argues, everyone ended up losing: the suburban middle-class that had cordoned itself off from supposedly unsavory aspects of urban life and the urban poor that had been relegated to barb-wired and dilapidated mini-pools -- when there's enough money for any pool at all.

As this extremely readable narrative makes clear, empty and discarded public swimming pools exemplify the decay and decimation of post-Civil Rights urban America and the squandering of communal possibilities. In the end, Wiltse persuasively shows that there are some very serious consequences to how Americans play together -- and to when and why they decide that they won't.

Copyright 2007, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

Historian Wiltse offers a detailed study of the history of municipal swimming pools from the late 19th century through the present, tracing their development from bare-bones baths for the working classes to elegant, "sylvan" recreational spaces for the middle and upper classes. Wiltse makes a strong case that the history of these swimming pools embodies the painful challenges that class, gender and race presented America in the 20th century. The most compelling portions of the book deal with segregation and the fight to integrate municipal pools. Wiltse describes the eroticizing of the municipal pool as white women began to appear in increasingly revealing swimming suits; this, says the author, was one of the primary motivations behind the white push for municipal pool segregation. Wiltse also details the "white flight" from the pools that followed desegregation. This is well done, clearly written, thoroughly researched history, and it effectively makes important points about the tensions that confounded America during the Civil Rights movement. The writing is occasionally dry and statistic-laden, but Wiltse uses the municipal swimming pool as a fascinating window onto social changes and urban tensions across the 20th century. B&w photos. (Apr. 23)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

The first public swimming pools in the United States were "large community bath tubs"—indoors, relatively small, and intended to encourage good hygiene among the poor. By the nineteen-twenties, pools had become elaborate "public amusements," accommodating thousands. Wiltse’s history argues that, at every turn, these sites of "intimate and prolonged contact" between swimmers of different races, genders, and social classes stirred intense conflict. The book is most incisive in its discussion of swimming pools as what one editorialist called "one of the touchiest problems in race relations." Between the wars, swimming pools began to mix the genders, but African-Americans were gradually excluded from the "sexually charged" spaces. In the fifties and sixties, as civil-rights activists persevered in the courts, many cities chose to close municipal pools rather than integrate them.
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Edition details

• Publisher: University of North Carolina Press
• Publication date: 2007
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 080783100X
• ISBN 13: 9780807831007
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 288