Contested Waters: A Social History of Swimming Pools in America

by Jeff Wiltse

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.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, American History, Race, Society, Politics, Sociology

288 pages, Hardcover

First published April 23, 2007

Reviews

[Asya · Rating 4 out of 5]

Indispensable guide to understanding the social and cultural context of swimming pools in America, from the Progressive era bathhouses to the privatization of swimming and decline of municipal pools after desegregation in the 1950s. Wiltse traces the cultural valence of pools: from an effort to socialize immigrants and working class urban dwellers (early 20th century), to middle-class resorts of leisure and pleasure (the golden age of public pools in the 20s and 30s), to contested, racially segregated urban spaces (40s and 50s), and on through white flight and the emptying out of municipal pools -- of people, funding, significance, and eventually, of water. As a swimmer in NYC's public pools, I found this history to be an invaluable counterpart to my swimming, a reminder that pools, like subways and parks, are potentially an equalizing, democratic public space. My only complaint is that Wiltse does not consider the distinction, often falling along race and class lines, between swimming as bathing and competitive swimming. He suggests that the public pools were never meant for serious training or competition (that was relegated to private athletic clubs and the Ys), but that was not always the case (for example, the Astoria pool was the site of Olympic Trials in 36 and 64); and more importantly, it would be interesting to explore why these pools, some of them Olympic in size, never attracted wide athletic usage. How does race, urban planning, ideas of leisure and recreation, etc., play into this conspicuous absence? Still, what Wiltse does consider makes for an insightful exploration of American public life in the 20th century, told through the prism of swimming pools.

[Bruce Grossman · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fantastic! For example, shows the relationship between growth of women's liberties and how this exacerbated racial tensions-- but moreover a cultural tour de force, from Victorian American purposeful directed activities, to pleasure as a good in itself-- body culture-- the evolution of women's swimsuits-- the municipal pool as a site for voyeurism-- how swimming pools were originally public baths for the "unwashed" Irish, Slovaks, and other immigrants-- how municipal pools were formerly great melting pots and civic centers where the Fourth of July was celebrated-- privatization and the rise of swimming clubs and pools as suburban status markers-- statistics on 1950's economic exceptionalism . . . Everything we've repressed about America and have forgotten how to ask.

[Simone · Rating 4 out of 5]

I just found this in the library and thought it sounded interesting, it was. The main takeaway point is that in the early days of swimming pools (1880ish) pools were segregated by gender and class and no one cared about race. But when pools started becoming less segregated by gender (mostly in the interwar period) the pools were then segregated by race. When (after much fighting) the pools were integrated, whites normally just stopped showing up to public pools, and retreated to private club pools (also segregated) or home pools. Wiltse does a good job tracing out why this happened and what it means. Of special interest to me is that the rise of private or home pools contributed to Putnam's idea of civic retreat. Of all things, our town is finally building a city pool (I have heard rumors we never had one because of potential race issues, but I haven't confirmed that), and I am happy there will be an outdoor pool in the summer.

[Renee · Rating 5 out of 5]

I savored this book slowly all summer. The author made it clear how he focused his research (northern US) and dug into detailed history on how swimming areas/pools evolved over time. I was fascinated to learn how this was first segregated by class, then gender, then race. The work to open pools to all races took so much effort, sacrifice from Black Americans, and time. It was harder than desegregating schools. Pools are very political and very communal and very personal. I learned that huge pools used to exist (even in cities I've lived in) that I had never heard of. Huge -- much bigger than football fields. I felt the book could have used a bit more editing -- a few things repeated -- but overall it was very well done and a compelling read.

Quotes:

"It was no coincidence that the old suits were called 'bathing suits' and the new variety 'swim suits.' The one-piece suit actually permitted women to swim." Pg 110

"...the only way white residents would swim in a pool after blacks was if the water was drained and the tank scrubbed." pg 148

"The local Warren [OH] newspaper covered the June 15 pool opening and published a front-page picture showing a dozen kids waiting to enter. The last two children in line were clearly black and the caption read, 'Last one in the water is a monkey.'" pg 166

"The privatization of swimming pools during the second half of the twentieth century degraded the quality of community life in America.... As Robert Putnam points out in 'Bowling Alone,' the lack of 'repeated interactions with fellow citizens' has significant social costs. It breeds mistrust, intolerance, and a lack of empathy." pg 181

"Swimming pools and other democratic public spaces limit the cultural power of mass media precisely because they encourage 'direct contact and face-to-face association.'" pg 207

[Karim · Rating 5 out of 5]

An insightful look into the history of swimming in America. Did you know swimming in lakes and rivers was ‘outlawed’ in many U.S. cities? Also a history of how Men have been legislating Women’s bodies for decades— as in what they could wear to pools or couldn’t.

This book gives you a pretty conclusive through line on how Public pools were once divided by class and gender but in the 40s started to become divided by race. Black bodies became a threat, to White women as well as White males who perceived muscular Black men as a threat to the idea of White superiority.

Great for history buffs or those interested In how Civil Rights was fought for in Pools nationwide. 5 stars.

[Carmen von Rohr · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book offers readers a really outstanding piece of social history. Wiltse uses swimming pools, municipal and private, to trace Americans' selective participation in and ultimate retreat from public life, and the racial and gender inequalities that pervade these choices. I've never been prouder to be a member of my own local municipal pool, which is indeed a vibrant bastion of imperiled democracy.

[Nina · Rating 5 out of 5]

I will never swim laps and think about swimming in a pool in the same way again. So much history is illustrated in the existence and use of swimming pools during the time period covered by this book. It reinforced for me the importance of teaching ALL children and adults how to swim, for social development as well as for survival.

[Laura Metro · Rating 5 out of 5]

Black males have the highest risk for drowning. This is something that didn't have to be. This is a great book that uncovers the reality behind why swimming didn't make it into recreational black culture.

[Tibby]

I was certainly familiar with the fight over integrating swimming pools in the middle of last century and while Contested Waters covers a lot of that it presents a lot of very interesting and new information about these public spaces.

The book starts back in the late 1800s during the Gilded Age/Victorian Era when the first public baths and pools were built. These were largely for the use of the poor who lived in slums and didn't have access to bathing facilities in their tenements. The justification for building the pools was to stop the spread of disease by the dirty, poor immigrants. Not a great start with xenophobia and classism. Prior to space being set aside for bathing and splashing around a lot of men and boys simply swam naked in the rivers which was shocking to middle and upper class Victorian Era people for the public nakedness. In theory public baths/pools were supposed to give these men and boys a place to swim that wasn't so public. It certainly worked to a degree, but there just weren't enough of them to stop public bathing all together. At this time these baths/pools were segregated by gender.

Into the Progressive Era in the early 20th century these pools began to be for providing something for poor kids to do. More pools were built, but they were still too few and far between and they were still segregated by gender. In the interwar years pools were built to provide entertainment for middle and lower class people alike and pools began to be more and more elaborate.

Finally after WWII public pools became quite popular and were desegregated by gender. This led to the controversy over race. Prior to this period there were occasional conflicts over race, but by and large pools were divided by class and gender. Now with the possibility of contact across race and gender white people began to take issue with Black people being in public pools. Many Black people weren't wild about white men being in their pools either because of an actual history of violence against Black women by white men (as opposed to the imagined sexual threat of Black men against white women).

As the Civil Rights Era progressed cases of pool integration went to court and there was a lot of violence and vitriol. White people tried to pull funding for pools and when courts ruled in favor of integration they left public pools and either got pools in their backyards or pooled money with neighbors to build private pool clubs where they could exclude whoever they wanted. When middle class white people pulled out of municipal pools attendance dropped (oftentimes the pools were in white neighborhoods and it was difficult for people who lived outside the neighborhood to get there) and pools began closing for lack of attendance. Municipalities also simply allowed the equipment to deteriorate to the point of necessitating closing.

This history is messy and interesting for what it says about broader social trends in the US during the various different eras. In terms of readability, the book was really repetitive and could have used a better editor. It wasn't long, but it could have been shorter if some of the sections had been streamlined, but overall the format of the book and how it was divided up made a lot of sense.

[Yenta Knows · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fascinating, well researched social history. The author, a university professor, is verbose and repetitive. A copy editor could have fixed that, and substituted “ogle” for his awkward term “visually consume.”

But the valuable content compensates for these deficiencies.

It’s the story of the private Wheaton Haven pool that most interested me. Wheaton Haven was supposed to be a neighborhood pool, you had membership if you lived within 3/4ths of a mile of the pool. This was a way for the nice white families of Montgomery County, Md, to ensure that they’d only swim with other whites, because no blacks lived in the neighborhood. I can personally attest to the logic of that assumption, because I lived close to the Wheaton Haven pool from ages 3-7. It was just blocks from Glen Haven Elementary, where I began my school career.

But man plans and God laughs. In 1968, a black doctor, Dr Press, moved into the neighborhood and wanted membership. Another family, the Tillmans, already members, brought a black friend, Martha Rosner, there as a guest. The pool tried to enforce segregation. The case went to the Supreme Court, who, in 1973, ruled in favor of the constitution and civil rights law (https://www.law.cornell.edu/supremeco...).

My parents moved from the Wheaton Haven area in 1959, but just two miles away, to a split level on Leslie Street. So I find it astonishing that all this occurred under my nose and I knew NOTHING until reading the book’s description nearly 50 years after all the action. Granted, this was the nose of a self-involved teenager and very young adult. But shouldn’t I have read about it in the newspapers? Sigh. I am ashamed to admit that more engaging topics (such as the boy next door) evidently consumed my attention.

I suspect the pool is long gone, but will drive through the neighborhood soon. In 1997, a Washington Post reporter wrote: “While former members now attend Kenmont Swim & Tennis Club, less than two miles away, the 40-year-old Wheaton Haven pool sits empty, surrounded by overgrown grass.”

Knowing the neighborhood as I do, I can tell you that those two miles, from Wheaton Haven to Kenmont, are a congested two miles. You couldn’t let your 12 year old bike there. Conclusion: The community lost a lot when it lost the pool.

[Amy · Rating 4 out of 5]

I dig a social history book on a narrow, contained topic such as swimming pools in the US. Wiltse's book was well researched and organized, explaining the uses and rise and decline of (mostly) public swimming pools from the late 1800s/early 1900s into the 2000s. Early pools were built for public health reasons in the slums of cities for the poor to bathe in. The golden age of public pools was from 1920 to 1940, when many cities had resort-style pools with sandy beaches and water slides, which were intended for white swimmers. Wiltse discusses the sex of pool swimmers, mostly young males in the beginning, with certain days designated for female swimmers, and the determination of pool planners to separate boys & men from girls & women to encourage modesty and avoid sexual situations. He also discusses at length the ridiculous notion to separate the "races" in pools, and the court cases across the nation to legally bring about their integration. Wiltse includes an instance of a pool in West Virginia that remained closed for 14 years rather than integrate! Or this foolishness from p 125: "If black men were permitted to frequent the resort pools of the interwar years, some of them would have displayed powerful and muscular physiques and thereby conspicuously challenged white supremacy." Without explicitly stating it, Wiltse deftly illustrates the folly and stupidity of white people where "race" is concerned. And then there are plenty of accounts of black swimmers being attacked by whites for daring to enter a public pool. One such bloody occurrence happened in my town, St. Louis, in 1949 at the Fairgrounds Park Pool. Wiltse closes the book with a discussion of the decline of public pools, primarily because white people moved to the suburbs and joined clubs or neighborhood pools, or just installed their own in their backyards. He laments the decline in bridging gaps among community members that coincided with the decline in public pool use, citing other researchers' observations as well. The last paragraph offers a brief glimpse into the author's own fond memories of spending his summers at his municipal pool in Seattle. The book was a dry read (no doubt it's his dissertation) and it took me some time to finish, but I'm glad I stuck with it.

[Zach Church · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Segregation was strongest and most viable when it was an accepted and uncontested habit of community life."

I usually reserve five stars for books that stand in a class all their own - more themselves than any genre, author, format, or anything else. That's not this book, but I can't find any reason I shouldn't sing its praises at a five star level. Jeff Wiltse is such a skilled history writer, bringing us real people and real events, with solid analysis and conclusions. But he never wanders into territory where you have to question the research or whether he's drawing unearned conclusions.

Weird to say a book that has so much to do with race and class segregation is a 'fun' book, but it really is. I'm glad I read this one as summer was closing. It felt like swimming at public pools this year was being part of a history - a tricky history for sure - but a truly American history. It felt like being part of public life. There's a lot to love about this country, not least of which writers like Wiltse who can examine it so clearly and guide us through a story we didn't really know we should know.

Also, shoutout to Boston mayor Josiah Quincy who was once criticized as such: "It was almost a festis with him that the poor should have as ample facilities for recreation as the rich."

[MargaretDH · Rating 4 out of 5]

I picked this up because I love swimming, and being in a landlocked place with a cold winter and not a lot of lakes, I do a lot of it in public pools.

Public pools are expensive to build and maintain, so Wiltse takes us through the different reasons that American municipalities have invested in them, starting with public baths, which were strictly about cleanliness, rather than recreation. He takes us through the ways that public bathing and swimming spaces have been understood as public goods, and how the class, race and gender of users has shaped those conceptions.

It says right in the title that this is a social history, so this minor complaint is totally undeserved, but I actually wanted to know slightly more about the pools themselves. Wiltse does touch on how these pools were cleaned, filtered and chlorinated, and passingly mentions the updates in water purification technology, but I wanted slightly more. But that's a different book.

This is a pretty readable academic work, and if you're interested in the intersections of swimming pools, recreation, the Progressive Era and Civil Rights Movement, this is worth your time.

[Fraser Sherman · Rating 3 out of 5]

For much of American history, swimming wasn't cool. It was undisciplined, too physical, too disorganized for the rational people we wanted to be; only lower class boys indulged in it. In the late 1800s that began to change as swimming pools became a thing.
At first they were public baths to wash the unkempt lower classes. Then they became recreational facilities for the lower classes. Then they became popular with everyone.
In the 1900s pools got a paradigm shift. First they allowed men and women to swim together. That made it taboo for blacks and whites to swim together and pools became racially segregated. When that ended several decades later, society began giving up on public pools in favor of private facilities.
A good deep dive (see what I did there?) into a topic more complicated than I realized.

[Scott Schneider · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the few history books which shows clearly the intersection of race, class, culture and immigration. As immigration ended from Europe in the 20s, and blacks moved north in the Great Migration, pools became integrated by sex, resulting in the exclusion of blacks to avoid black boys being in the pool with white women. Eventually in the 60s forced integration resulted in private swim clubs and backyard pools. Pools started as bath houses for the working class to improve hygiene in the 1890s, when young boys would swim in the rivers and lakes completely integrated racially, but as municipal pools were built, swimming was democratized until it became segregated in the 30s. Fascinating read and important history to learn.

[Katie Moynihan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fascinating historical lens; for an aspect of American culture that was so massively popular/widespread in our nation's past, municipal swimming pools are almost entirely unknown to most. The writing itself was a little on the redundant side, and I thought that it would have been interesting and not too broadening to bring in or elaborate on certain subjects (polio, details from the perspective of women, pool architecture such as Bintz designs, etc).

Definitely a subject I want to continue to learn about!

[Ariane · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was a great book-very easy to read- about the history of swimming pools in the United States. Wiltse starts in the Progressive Era talking about how swimming pools were envisioned as bath houses for the poor. He then discusses how the way that the public saw pools changed in the 1920s-40s. It was during this time that pools became gender integrated, but racially segregated. Wiltse's book explained things that I have seen like blacks of a certain generation not knowing to swim. I thoroughly enjoyed this book.

[Claire Poindexter · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fantastic read - I feel like I now know SO much about the social history of swimming. Swimming pools were initially a public health endeavor to "clean the poor" and then they became a method of social control to give youth something to do rather than "raise trouble." A really interesting book on how our use and consumption of swimming has changed throughout time and how pools have increasingly become privatized to serve the upper class and individualistic needs. Really well-researched.

[Jeremy Neely · Rating 4 out of 5]

I enjoyed this fascinating, well crafted history of municipal pools in northern U. S. cities. Readers interested in the histories of recreation, Progressive reform, and the rise and fall of racial segregation will likely find much of interest here. This monograph has broad utility in a survey of recent US history.

[Wendy · Rating 5 out of 5]

The role of the public and private swimming pools in America is deep (no pun intended). An eye opening read that encompasses more social factors than the skin color of the swimmers.

Now what to do with this new information I have? Perhaps I will start with checking on the cost of swimming lessons in local communities. No one can do everything but everyone can do something.

[Brenda · Rating 3 out of 5]

I enjoyed learning about the history of swimming pools in America, most specifically in large cities of the Northeast. The author obviously did a lot of research although some information seemed repetitive. It is interesting how American was very focused on social class in the 19th century and how that evolved more into racial lines in the 20th century.

[Sara · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a small but dense book full of historical gems. I recommend it to anyone interested in the social history of the USA, the concept of shared common spaces as essential in a society, the history of recreation, among other topics.

[Sara · Rating 3 out of 5]

The research in this is incredible if you’re into swimming pools (which I am). It was very academic in its writing style though, so it became dry at times. I think there could have been more storytelling throughout, but overall I’m happy I got through this and learned a lot.

[Balloon Bruce · Rating 4 out of 5]

A fascinating look at race relations through the lens of public swimming pools.

[Julie Bosworth · Rating 4 out of 5]

Enjoyed many aspects of this book, especially that it brought to light the racial and gender struggles of the United States through a familiar and understandable topic...the swimming pool.

[Steven Thompson · Rating 5 out of 5]

Everything I didn’t know I needed to know. Required reading for any swimmer, lifeguard, or aquatic professional

[Bethan · Rating 4 out of 5]

king of writing a social history of swimming pools!

[Nick · Rating 4 out of 5]

the perfect NPR book

[Lisa Murray · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book was long winded and boring. Could have beeb condensed into 50 pages.

[Christy Coughlin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Contested Waters tells yet another history lesson about racism’s devastating impact on all of us. Those beautiful pools, if shared by all, would have made us a country of swimmers. Instead whites refused to share and the pools were lost. Pools became a luxury found in backyards and country clubs. Such a shame. How many kids would have been saved from drowning if we had all been able to swim from childhood?! We can only dream about those beautiful pools! NYC is renovating the Lasker Pool. Can’t wait to check out that massive space.