Professor dives into history of swimming pools

The idea came to him in a dream. UM assistant history professor Jeff Wiltse dreamed of writing about his childhood swimming pool when he was in graduate school. The dream became a reality. That reality spawned another dream — an academic book that has gained broad national attention.

Shortly after the dream, Wiltse ran the idea of a history of swimming pools in America by his adviser at Brandeis University and she agreed the idea had merit for a dissertation. Soon Wiltse was on the road, researching swimming pools in northern cities across America. The task was formidable. He would go to a city’s public library and research, using archives of public records and newspapers. One idea or finding would lead to the next and he would drive to another town or city.

Along the way, Wiltse won the Allan Nevins Prize, awarded annually by the Society of American Historians for the best-written doctoral dissertation on an American subject. The prize guaranteed a publishing contract for his dissertation, which became “Contested Waters: A Social History of Swimming Pools in America.”

The book charts the social and cultural history of swimming pools — and the role pools have played in the tensions and transformations that have given rise to modern America.

Published early this year by the University of North Carolina Press, “Contested Waters” has become an almost instant and somewhat surprising success. It quickly garnered the attention of the national press, with reviews in Publishers Weekly, The Wilson Quarterly, The Washington Post Book World, People magazine, The Economist and Journal of Blacks in Higher Education.

Dick Cavett, a former television talk-show host, reviewed the book in the June 3 Summer Reading issue of the New York Times Book Review. Cavett wrote that he thought, when given the assignment to review the book, “what a silly idea.” “I am one who came to scoff but remained to pray,” he then opined, adding “It quickly becomes clear that Jeff Wiltse’s ‘Contested Waters’ … is the colorful story of America’s municipal swimming pools in the 19th and 20th centuries. Against that backdrop it becomes a story of America.”

Wiltse has been interviewed for National Public Radio’s “Tell Me More” as well as “Weekend Edition.” UNCP publicist Gina Mahalek reports the book already has gone into a second printing and is experiencing “extraordinary publicity.” In the book Wiltse discusses the implications of pools as sites of race riots, shrinking swimsuits and conspicuous leisure. It is, at once, a story of class and race conflicts, burgeoning cities and suburbs, competing visions of social reform, eroticized public culture, democratized leisure, and Americans’ recent retreat from public life.

Wiltse relates how the first public pools were provided as “bathtubs” for the urban poor and were separated by gender. Racism became an issue when the pools allowed men and women to swim together. For a time — from the 1920s to the 1950s — municipal pools were hugely popular and often fought over. Some were larger than football fields; 50,000 people visited the Fairgrounds Park Pool in St. Louis on one day when it opened — about half to watch and the other half to swim.

Beginning in the 1970s, the flight to the suburbs and racial tensions resulted in a decline in municipal pool use. The middle class built backyard pools or swam in pools built in their neighborhoods, and municipal pools began a slow decay.

Wiltse laments the loss of the open public space the swimming pool provided. From the 1920s into the 1970s, “municipal pools were a central part of community life and individuals’ summer experience,” he said. “Today they’ve become marginal in America.”

He noted that there was a “pool building spree” during the Great Depression. “We were in the worst depression and yet there was the concerted effort to provide public swimming pools,” he said. “Today we’re in a period of historic prosperity and yet we can’t seem to find the money to build public swimming pools.”

Wiltse has taught at UM for five years and soon will take over retiring Professor Harry Fritz’s Montana History class. His next research topic is the history of music in public spaces. Wiltse’s goal is to publish three important history books in his lifetime. “Contested Waters” clearly has given him a good start on it.