Contested Waters: A Social History of Swimming Pools in America. By Jeff Wiltse. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007. xii, 276 pp. $29.95, ISBN 978-0-8078-3100-7.)

Abstract

Jeff Wiltse begins Contested Waters with a story about a young black boy who, in 1951, could “swim” in a Youngstown pool only after everyone else left the water, he boarded a rubber raft, and promised not to touch the water. It is a good starting point, for it introduces the topic of swimming pools in American history with its most standard social association—extreme racist paranoia. What Wiltse shows in this well-written account, however, is that racism is only half the story. Wiltse traces the history of municipal pools in two distinct periods: from their inception as cleansing baths to the 1920s and from then to, roughly, the present. He interestingly argues that an analysis of swimming pools in the first era turns the traditional historical view of commercial amusements on its head. While other amusements of the Progressive Era, such as Coney Island and dance halls, provided places where social classes mixed but where strict racial segregation was maintained, swimming pools did the opposite, allowing racial mixing but keeping a strict division of gender and social classes. That situation changed in the 1920s when municipal pools joined other amusements in permitting white-only social classes to mix. The change was most dramatic during the New Deal, when posters for a New York City “learn to swim” program showed whites and blacks separated. Wiltse concludes that the Great Migration was important in the shift from social to racial segregation, but that “gender integration and the eroticization of swimming pools” played an increasingly greater role (p. 124). Where racial mixture continued, violence ensued. Highland Park, the site of a pool in Pittsburgh, endured several years of white-on-black violence until city officials herded blacks into a smaller, dilapidated pool already abandoned by whites. Wiltse posits that fear of black-white gender integration—looming miscegenation—led to the blanket segregation that became the norm. It is an interesting and well-supported conclusion. Wiltse finds another interesting way that swimming pools deviated from other “places of amusement”: municipal pools defined themselves from the “ground-up.” In short, municipal pools serve as an aberration in the hegemonic creation of consumer culture by creating their own public culture not driven by spending money.