The Greatest Generation and Public Swimming Pools

I've been meaning to post this article forever. It's from the May 25th 2007 issue of the Chronicle of Higher Education, author Evan R. Goldstein, and here it is in full (it's short, don't worry!, and if it's too long, look at the bolded three sentences a little ways down, please):

Municipal pools arrived on the urban American scene in the last third of the 19th century. Initially intended to function as public baths - to cleanse what one newspaper editorialist deemed the "unwashed downtown youths" - these early municipal pools were primarily constructed in immigrant and working-class slums. But swimming soon caught on as a popular recreation, and cities responded by building enormous pools with sprawling sun decks and artificial sand beaches. "These mega-pools drew people from throughout the city, serving a very ethnically and economically diverse group of white Americans," says Jeff Wiltse, author of Contested Waters: A Social History of Swimming Pools in America (University of North Carolina Press, 2007).

But court-mandated racial desegregation in the 1950s radically altered the social landscape of municipal swimming pools, leading to the resegregation of American swimming along class lines. Today, Wiltse said in an interview, the shift away from the face-to-face interaction needed to maintain the social fabric continues in the age of MySpace and Facebook.

Jeff Wiltse, assistant professor of history at the University of Montana:

"Swimming pools are a unique public space. The interaction that occurs at pools is sustained. People typically go to a swimming pool for hours and hours; it is not like just passing someone on your way to the post office. In addition, one of the most intriguing qualities about pools is their eroticism: You're mostly undressed, other people are mostly undressed. This intimacy causes people to be very conscious about how they're interacting with others.

"Until as late as 1950, there were only 2,500 residential pools in the entire country. And they were strictly the province of the very rich. It is not until the mid-1950s that we begin to see the proliferation of backyard pools. Several factors contributed to the explosion - the prosperity of the postwar period, mass suburbanization, and a new construction method that made the building of backyard pools less expensive. But what made these private pools particularly attractive to white Americans was that they were socially exclusive. By joining a private-club pool or building a pool of their own, they could be assured that they would not have to swim with a black American, and they would not have to swim with someone who was of a lower social class.

"In the era of racial desegregation, suburban communities consciously made the choice not to build public pools but rather to let residents organize private-club pools. The reason, it is clear to me, was to exclude black people. There are pool-usage statistics that show how almost overnight, attendance at public pools after desegregation dropped by as much as 90 percent in some cities. Millions of white Americans consciously made the choice that if this pool is going to be open to black Americans I am not going to swim at it. Retreating to private pools also meant that the frequent and sustained interactions that had occurred between middle-class and working-class Americans at municipal pools dwindled.

"Robert Putnam's famous account of the collapse of community life in America in Bowling Alone (2000) is in large part a celebration of the civic engagement of Tom Brokaw's so-called "Greatest Generation." But it was precisely this "Greatest Generation" that chose not to swim with black Americans. It was this same "Greatest Generation" that began the trend of building private-club and backyard pools, which seems to me a most profound act of civic disengagement. After all, this was not only an abandonment of public space but also a turn away from public life. In this way, I disagree with Putnam's claim that racial prejudice and racial desegregation were not causes of Americans' growing civic disengagement.

"If the history of pools shows us anything, it's that face-to-face contact is critical for establishing social bonds. Face to face means that there are certain personal and social controls operating that cause people to be very conscious about how they are presenting themselves and how other people are presenting themselves to them. It really enhances the interaction. Now we have these social-networking sites online that foster non-face-to-face interaction, and you don't have that social context. I don't think online interaction fosters the same sense of empathy and understanding and commitment that occurs when you are interacting with someone physically in a public space. An important distinction between contact through the Internet and contact in person at a pool is that, in person, people have to take social convention into account, which reinforces basic standards of civility."

It's too bad content like this isn't available directly from the website. What important research.