Contested Waters: A Social History of Swimming Pools in America

3. "A Good Investment in Health, Character, and Citizenship": Municipal Swimming Pools in the Progressive Era

CHAPTER 3 “A GOOD INVESTMENT IN HEALTH, CHARACTER, AND CITIZENSHIP” MUNICIPAL SWIMMING POOLS IN THE PROGRESSIVE ERA On any Saturday afternoon, a few years ago, the streets of the West Side of Chicago were a battle ground for rough and tumble fights between Italian and Slav boys. National Characteristics and international misunderstandings were fertile causes for combat. In any case a fight was the cheapest and most convenient excitement the locality afforded. . . . Now on any Saturday afternoon long lines of Italians and Slavs, as well as Hungarians, Scandinavians, Irish and Germans, may be seen at the door of the swimming pool, awaiting their turn—with the peace restored. . . . Here play has become a deep, wholesome Americanizing force.”—Playground Association of Philadelphia (1908) In January 1912 the Philadelphia Bureau of City Property assigned one of its inspectors to assess the condition of the city’s twenty swimming pools. The unnamed inspector visited the establishments 585 times over the next ten months. He found the pools in a dilapidated state. All the tanks “need[ed] to be strengthened by asphalt, cement or calcium silicates.” The plumbing at all the pools needed repair, and most of the bathhouse roofs were “worthless.” All but one needed extensive carpentry work “to put in condition the doors, windows, transoms, lockers and benches.” Finally, they all needed to be repainted. The city had clearly done little over the years to maintain its municipal pools.¹ While the inspector’s assessment of their physical condition was bleak, he was sanguine about the social utility of the pools. He encouraged his superiors at the Bureau of City Property and at city hall to make the needed repairs on existing pools and build new ones “in the congested districts.” The inspector did not justify the repairs and new pools by pointing to their 48 Municipal Pools in the Progressive Era virtues as baths or fitness facilities. Rather, the pools were “a public necessity ,” he claimed, because they would socialize immigrant and working-class children into healthy, happy, and patriotic Americans. “Public bath house swimming pools are undoubtedly a good investment in health, character, and citizenship,” the inspector concluded, “as they stand for body, and character building, and produce better boys and girls, homes, morals, as well as greater love for their home city.”² This unnamed city employee encapsulated the Progressive redefinition of municipal swimming pools. After the turn of the century, public officials and reformers in several large northern cities reconceived municipal pools as centers for working-class recreation and intended them to serve a variety of purposes. On the one hand, these social Progressives believed that swimming pools would improve the lives of poor and working-class youths by providing them a safe and pleasurable refuge away from the sweltering streets, cramped tenements, and industrial landscapes that surrounded them. Proponents also emphasized the broader social function of municipal pools, claiming they would curb juvenile delinquency, alleviate urban social tensions, and “Americanize” immigrants. They championed pools as wholesome alternatives to saloons, gambling dens, and the ominous “streetcorner ,” where, many commentators asserted, a generation of working-class youths was being schooled in vice and subversion. In short, Progressive social reformers viewed municipal swimming pools as antidotes to many of the problems they believed plagued American cities at the time. Progressive Era pools did not, however, diminish the social divisions that existed in northern cities. Rather, they reinforced the physical distance separating the classes and the social distance separating the sexes by perpetuating class and gender segregation. As the Philadelphia building inspector advised, cities once again built pools within residential slums, where they attracted only immigrant and working-class residents. Cities also continued to gendersegregate municipal pools. Males and females either swam in separate pools or used the same pools on different days. Municipal pools were not, however, segregated along racial or ethnic lines. Blacks and working-class whites of various ethnicities swam together throughout the Progressive Era. Conflicts sometimes arose, but the disputes did not lead to racial segregation or exclusion . The class segregation that characterized the use of municipal pools during this period was not simply a coincidental result of locating pools within working-class neighborhoods. Rather, it was an intentional public policy meant to protect the social and cultural geography of northern cities. Propos- Municipal Pools in the Progressive Era 49 als to build outdoor pools in central locations—where working-class youths and their swimming culture would...