Contested Waters: A Social History of Swimming Pools in America

CONTESTED WATERS

Contested Waters

A SOCIAL HISTORY OF SWIMMING POOLS IN AMERICA

JEFF WILTSE

THE UNIVERSITY OF NORTH CAROLINA PRESS

CHAPEL HILL

© 2007 The University of North Carolina Press

All rights reserved

Set in Scala and Eagle types by Tseng Information Systems, Inc.

Manufactured in the United States of America

This book was published with the assistance of the

THORNTON H. BROOKS FUND of the University of

North Carolina Press.

The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Wiltse, Jeff.

Contested waters : a social history of swimming pools

in America / Jeff Wiltse.

   p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN-13: 978-0-8078-3100-7 (cloth : alk. paper)

1. Swimming Pools—Social aspects—United States.

2. Swimming pools—United States—History. I. Title.

GV838.53.S85W55 2007

306.4’81—dc22    2006031021

11 10 09 08 07   5 4 3 2 1

To Ann,

My love

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Just Don’t Touch the Water

1 A Peculiar Kind of Bath:

The Origin of Municipal Pools in America

2 A Means of Physical Culture:

The Redefinition of Municipal Pools during the 1890s

3 A Good Investment in Health, Character, and Citizenship:

Municipal Swimming Pools in the Progressive Era

Interlude:

The Traumatic Early History of Fairgrounds Park Pool

4 The Swimming Pool Age:

1920 to 1940

5 One for the White Race and the Other for the Colored Race:

The Onset of Racial Discrimination, 1920 to 1940

6 More Sensitive Than Schools:

The Struggle to Desegregate Municipal Swimming Pools

7 Alone in the Backyard:

Swimming Pools in Recent America

Conclusion:

The Promise and Reality of Swimming Pools as Public Spaces

Notes

Bibliography

Index

ILLUSTRATIONS

Harvard Bridge Bath, Boston, circa late 1800s 21

Greenbush Natatorium, Milwaukee, Wisconsin, circa 1895 28

Drawing of Douglas Park Pool and Gymnasium, Chicago, circa 1895 33

Plan of Brookline Public Bath, Brookline, Massachusetts, circa 1897 39

Brookline Pool, Brookline, Massachusetts, circa late 1890s 45

Plan of Armour Square Recreation Center, Chicago, 1903 57

Stanford Park Swimming Pool, Chicago, 1916 59

Typical Swimming Day at Armour Square Swimming Pool, Chicago, 1909 63

Typical Swimming Day at Davis Square Swimming Pool, Chicago, 1909 64

Fairgrounds Park Pool, St. Louis, 1933 81

Astoria Pool with Hell Gate Bridge in the Background, Queens, New York, 1936 95

Cameron Pool, Cameron, West Virginia, circa late 1930s 98

Fleishhacker Pool, San Francisco, 1925 100

Swimming Pool and Beach at Glen Echo Amusement Park, Montgomery County, Maryland, circa late 1930s 101

Beauty Contest Winners, Glen Oak Pool, Peoria, Illinois, circa early 1930s 114

Beauty Contest, Salisbury, Maryland, 1940 115

Sunbathers at Municipal Pool, Caldwell, Idaho, 1941 116

WPA Learn to Swim Poster, New York Department of Parks, 1940 122

Highland Park Pool, Pittsburgh, circa 1940s 136

Colonial Park Pool, Harlem, New York, 1937 141

Thomas Jefferson Pool, Harlem, New York, 1936 142

Outside Looking In—Mamie Livingston, Baltimore, 1953 155

Black Swimmers at Fairgrounds Park Pool, St. Louis, June 21, 1949 170

Rioters outside Fairgrounds Park, St. Louis, June 21, 1949 172

Victim of Fairgrounds Park Riot, St. Louis, June 21, 1949 173

Morris Park Pool, Harlem, New York, 1967 189

McCabe Pool, Detroit, 1989 190

Residential Pool, South Barrington, Illinois, 2000 204

Sterling Playground Pool, Brooklyn, New York, 1967 211

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I never would have begun this book had it not been for Jacqueline Jones, my adviser at Brandeis University. I still remember sitting in her office, timidly describing an idea to research the history of swimming pools that I had literally dreamed up over a Thanksgiving weekend in Hershey, Pennsylvania. If she had responded the way almost everyone else did—with incredulous laughter—I would have abandoned the idea. Instead, she confidently replied, That’s it. Thereafter, Jackie was generous with her time, thoughtful in her criticism, and unfailingly supportive. Michael Willrich befriended and mentored me during graduate school. He offered enlightening criticism of an early version of the manuscript and taught me how to be a professional historian. Howard Chudacoff was a model of professional generosity and kindness. I am deeply indebted to Brandeis University for supporting my work on this project with the Rose Crown Fellowship, the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences’ Dissertation Year Fellowship, and the Louis, Frances, and Jeffrey Sachar Research Grant.

The research for this book took me all over the northern United States, where I encountered many memorable and generous people. Librarians at the Free Library of Philadelphia, Martin Luther King, Jr. Library in Washington, D.C., Harvard University’s Lamont Library, and the St. Louis Public Library were especially helpful. A special thanks to recreation department officials in Elizabeth, New Jersey, who let me climb up into the attic at city hall to search through dusty old boxes. Emily Varner, archivist at the Trumbull County Archives in Warren, Ohio, also deserves special thanks. She spent hours searching the courthouse basement for the pleadings of an important legal case. She finally found them minutes after I had left and came running down the street after me, shouting and waving her arms. Thank you, Joseph Plechavy and Duane Shipman, for chatting with me about your experiences at municipal pools during the 1930s. Christina Cruse, Jan Lovell, Deborah Cribbs, Sony Onishi, Christopher Farris, Carrie Meade, and Mary Milinkovich went out of their way to find photos that appear in the book.

Many friends and colleagues read all or parts of the manuscript at various stages and improved it through their comments and suggestions. Clark Hantzmon, Brian McCarthy, Mike Fein, Dana Comi, and Julie Frank helped me get started on the project in our Brandeis writing group. Ben Irvin, Molly McCarthy, Eben Miller, Hillary Moss, and Paul Ringel offered valuable feedback on chapter 5 at a critical point. Kay, Garry, and Paul Crane read everything I sent them with three pairs of passionately critical eyes. They have also supported my intellectual development in countless other ways. The anonymous reader for the University of North Carolina Press provided a thoughtful and incisive assessment of the manuscript. It was filled with spot-on recommendations that helped guide me through the final revision.

My colleagues in the history department at the University of Montana have been exceptionally supportive. Thanks in particular to Richard Drake, John Eglin, Dan Flores, Linda Frey, Harry Fritz, Anya Jabour, Paul Lauren, Ken Lockridge, Michael Mayer, Kevin Ostoyich, and Pamela Voekel. Jody Pavilack deserves special thanks. Her close reading of the manuscript and perceptive questions helped me solve several perplexing structural problems. Diane Rapp responded to my many demands on her time with good cheer and impeccable competence. Thanks also to Tom and Anne Boone for their support of faculty research. The College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Montana provided generous support that enabled the timely completion of the book and allowed me to acquire the rights to reproduce several additional photos.

Sincere thanks to everyone at the University of North Carolina Press, especially my editors Sian Hunter and Ron Maner. Sian was a dedicated advocate for the book, offered valuable suggestions during the final revision, and always put my mind at ease with her friendly emails and phone calls. Ron responded to my many queries with sound judgment and good humor. I could not have hoped for a better publishing experience.

I am fortunate to have a loving and supportive family. My parents, Johannah and John Wiltse, opened every possible door, encouraged me to pursue my own interests, and always trusted that I knew what I was doing. They also taught me to be honest, hardworking, and appreciative, which has served me well in life and in the writing of this book. Brenda and Walter Hiester lovingly accepted me into their family and have encouraged and supported me in many thoughtful ways. Ann Hiester Wiltse has shared her life with me through the entire journey of writing this book. Scholarship can be a lonely enterprise, but thanks to her I never felt alone. Every time I discovered a critical piece of evidence, had an analytical epiphany, or phrased something just right, I most wanted to tell her. I guess that’s love. Ann also read every chapter multiple times and spent countless hours helping me clarify my writing and thinking. Her mark is on every page. Daniel and Rose bring me indescribable joy every day. Daddy, daddy, daddy is the second most wonderful thing that has ever been said to me.

CONTESTED WATERS

INTRODUCTION: JUST DON’T TOUCH THE WATER

In 1898 Boston’s mayor Josiah Quincy sent Daniel Kearns, secretary of the city’s bath commission, to study Philadelphia’s bathing pools. Philadelphia was the most prolific early builder of municipal pools, operating nine at the time. All but three were located in residential slums and, according to Kearns, attracted only the lower classes or street gamins. City officials had built the austere pools during the 1880s and early 1890s—before the germ theory of disease transmission was popularly accepted—and intended them to provide baths for working-class men and women, who used them on alternating days. The facilities lacked showers, because the pools themselves were the instruments of cleaning. Armed with the relatively new knowledge of the microbe, Kearns was disturbed to see unclean boys plunging into the water: I must say that some of the street gamins, both white and colored, that I saw, were quite as dirty as it is possible for one to conceive. While the unclean boys shocked Kearns, blacks and whites swimming together elicited no surprise. He commented extensively on the shared class status of the street gamins and their dirtiness but mentioned their racial diversity only in passing. Nor did racial difference seem to matter much to the swimmers, at least not in this social context. The pools were wildly popular. Each one recorded an average of 144,000 swims per summer, or about 1,500 swimmers per day.¹

Fifty-three years later, the scene at a municipal pool in Youngstown, Ohio, was quite different. A Little League baseball team had won the 1951 city championship and decided to celebrate at the local pool. The large facility was situated within the sylvan beauty of the city’s Southside Park, not in a residential slum. The pool itself was surrounded by a broad deck and grassy lawn, both of which provided swimmers ample space to play games or lie in the sun. The pool was clearly intended to promote leisure, not cleanliness. To celebrate their baseball victory, coaches, players, parents, and siblings showed up at the pool, but not all were admitted. One player, Al Bright, was denied entrance because he was black. The lifeguards forced him to sit on the lawn outside the fence as everyone else played in the pool. The unwritten rule was clear, one guard told the coach, Negroes are not permitted in the pool area. After an hour had passed, several parents pleaded with the guards to let Al into the pool for at least a couple of minutes. Finally, the supervisor relented; Al could enter the pool as long as everyone else got out and he sat inside a rubber raft. As his teammates and other bystanders looked on, a lifeguard pushed him once around the pool. Just don’t touch the water, the guard constantly reminded him, whatever you do, don’t touch the water.²

How is it that so much had changed in those fifty years?

At its heart, this book answers that question. It explains how and why municipal swimming pools in the northern United States were transformed from austere public baths—where blacks, immigrants, and native-born white laborers swam together, but men and women, rich and poor, and young and old did not—to leisure resorts, where practically everyone in the community except black Americans swam together.³ As the opening vignettes suggest, this social, cultural, and institutional transformation occurred during the first half of the twentieth century and involved the central developments of the period: urbanization, the erosion of Victorian culture, Progressive reform, the emergence of popular recreation, the gender integration and racial segregation of public space, and the sexualization of public culture. In short, the history of swimming pools dramatizes America’s contested transition from an industrial to a modern society.

But the story does not end there. A second social transformation occurred at municipal swimming pools after midcentury. Black Americans challenged segregation by repeatedly seeking admission to whites-only pools and by filing lawsuits against their cities. Eventually, these social and legal protests desegregated municipal pools throughout the North, but desegregation rarely led to meaningful interracial swimming. When black Americans gained equal access to municipal pools, white swimmers generally abandoned them for private pools. Desegregation was a primary cause of the proliferation of private swimming pools that occurred after the mid-1950s. By the 1970s and 1980s, tens of millions of mostly white middle-class Americans swam in their backyards or at suburban club pools, while mostly African and Latino Americans swam at inner-city municipal pools. America’s history of socially segregated swimming pools thus became its legacy.

Throughout their history, municipal pools served as stages for social conflict. Latent social tensions often erupted into violence at swimming pools because they were community meeting places, where Americans came into intimate and prolonged contact with one another. People who might otherwise come in no closer contact than passing on the street, now waited in line together, undressed next to one another, and shared the same water. The visual and physical intimacy that accompanied swimming made municipal pools intensely contested civic spaces. Americans fought over where pools should be built, who should be allowed to use them, and how they should be used.

This is a very different view of urban space than presented by historians John Kasson, Kathy Peiss, and David Nasaw. They characterize commercial amusements at the turn of the twentieth century—such as Coney Island, dance halls, and movie houses—as social melting pots that rather painlessly dissolved earlier class and gender divisions but reinforced racial distinctions. According to Nasaw, ‘going out’ meant laughing, dancing, cheering, and weeping with strangers with whom one might—or might not—have anything in common… . Only persons of color were excluded or segregated from the audience. Kasson makes essentially the same point when he concludes that commercial amusements help[ed] to knit a heterogeneous audience into a cohesive whole.⁴

Just the opposite was true at swimming pools early in the twentieth century. Northerners’ use of municipal pools throughout the Progressive Era reinforced class and gender divisions but not racial distinctions. Cities strictly segregated pools along gender lines, and people from different social classes almost never swam together. In many cases, middle-class northerners fought vigorously to ensure that working-class swimmers did not intrude upon their recreation spaces. By contrast, blacks and working-class whites commonly swam together, often without conflict.

All this changed during the 1920s, when northerners redrew the lines of social division at municipal pools. Different social classes of whites and both sexes plunged into the same pools and simultaneously excluded black Americans. This social reconstruction had many causes. The Great Black Migration contributed to the onset of racial segregation at pools by intensifying residential segregation in northern cities and heightening perceptions of black-white racial difference. Conversely, economic prosperity and the decline in European immigration mitigated perceptions of class and ethnic difference. Middle-class northerners generally became willing to swim in the same pools with working-class whites because they did not seem as poor, foreign, or unhealthy as before. Also, municipal pools became more appealing to the middle class during the 1920s because cities redesigned them as leisure resorts and typically located them in open and accessible parks rather than residential slums. At the same time, municipal officials began permitting males and females to swim together because they intended the new resort pools to promote family and community sociability. The concerns about intimacy and sexuality that had necessitated gender segregation previously did not disappear during the 1920s; rather, they were redirected at black Americans in particular. Whites in many cases quite literally beat blacks out of the water at gender-integrated pools because they would not permit black men to interact with white women at such intimate public spaces. Thus, municipal pools in the North continued to be intensely contested after 1920, but the lines of social division shifted from class and gender to race.

Historians have largely ignored this racial contest over public space in northern cities after 1920, focusing instead on housing, work discrimination, and schools. John McGreevy, for example, recently concluded that racial violence in the North centered on housing and not, for the most part, on access to public space.⁵ This book tells a different story. The imposition of racial segregation at municipal pools was a violent and contested process in the North. Blacks and whites battled one another with their fists as well as with bats, rocks, and knives. Racial segregation succeeded not because black Americans acquiesced, but because white swimmers steadfastly attacked black swimmers who entered pools earmarked for whites and because public institutions—namely the police and courts—enforced the prejudice of the majority rather than the rights of minority.

The social reconstruction of municipal pools between 1920 and 1940 marked a fundamental shift in northern social values and patterns of social interaction. During the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, the difference between people with black skin and those with white skin was a less significant social distinction than class. Furthermore, what we now think of as race was a less significant public social division than gender, class, and even generation. That changed during the 1920s, when race emerged as the most salient and divisive social distinction. Northern cities became fundamentally more integrated along class, gender, and generational lines, yet more segregated along racial lines. This racial division persisted throughout the rest of the twentieth century, despite court-ordered desegregation and the civil rights movement.⁶

Northerners also contested public culture at municipal pools. During the late nineteenth century, working-class boys battled with Victorian public officials to determine the use and function of these new institutions. Public officials intended municipal pools to be used seriously as baths and fitness facilities. They were supposed to instill the working classes with middle-class values and habits of life. In defiance of these expectations, working-class boys transplanted their boisterous and pleasure-centered swimming culture from natural waters and defined municipal pools as public amusements. In doing so, they undermined Victorian public culture and helped popularize the pleasure-centered ethos that came to define modern American culture.⁷ During the 1920s and 1930s, swimmers refashioned attitudes about the body and cultural standards of public decency by what they wore and how they presented themselves at municipal pools. City officials attempted to dampen the sexual charge sparked by mixed-gender use and to limit exhibitionism and voyeurism by mandating conservative swimsuits. They could not, however, control popular demand. The acceptable size of swimsuits shrank during the interwar years and pools became eroticized public spaces. As a result, public objectification of the body became implicitly acceptable, and public decency came to mean exhibiting an attractive appearance rather than protecting one’s modesty. The female nakedness and overt sexuality that pervade contemporary American culture originated, in part, at swimming pools. In these ways, ordinary Americans reshaped public culture by what they did and what they wore at municipal pools.

Municipal swimming pools were extraordinarily popular during the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s. Cities throughout the country built thousands of pools—many of them larger than football fields—and adorned them with sand beaches, concrete decks, and grassy lawns. Tens of millions of Americans flocked to these public resorts to swim, sunbathe, and socialize. In 1933 an extensive survey of Americans’ leisure-time activities conducted by the National Recreation Association found that as many people swam frequently as went to the movies frequently. In other words, swimming was as much a part of Americans’ lives as was going to the movies.⁸ Furthermore, Americans attached considerable cultural significance to swimming pools during this period. Pools became emblems of a new, distinctly modern version of the good life that valued leisure, pleasure, and beauty. They were, in short, an integral part of the kind of life Americans wanted to live.

This story of tens of millions of Americans flocking to municipal pools, reshaping cultural standards, and redefining the meaning of the good life presents a very different view of modern American culture than offered by most historians. William Leach, Gary Cross, and Richard Fox and T. J. Jackson Lears are unanimous in arguing that consumption and commercialism became the dominant cultural ethos in twentieth-century America, effectively wiping out all competing public cultures. In their introduction to The Culture of Consumption, Fox and Lears claim that consumption became a cultural ideal, a hegemonic ‘way of seeing’ in twentieth-century America. Additionally, many cultural historians characterize Americans as passive receivers of this consumer culture supposedly created and popularized by marketers, movie producers, merchants, and entrepreneurs. As William Leach argues in Land of Desire, the culture of consumer capitalism may have been among the most non-consensual public cultures ever created … it was not produced by ‘the people’ but by commercial groups in association with other elites.⁹ This was not the case at municipal swimming pools, where ordinary Americans helped create a vibrant public culture not primarily focused on spending money and consuming goods.

Finally, the history of swimming pools reveals changes in the quality of community life and the extent of civic engagement in modern America. From the 1920s to the 1950s, municipal pools served as centers of community life and arenas for public discourse. Hundreds and sometimes thousands of people gathered at these public spaces where the contact was sustained and interactive. Neighbors played, chatted, and flirted with one another, but they also fought with one another over who should and should not be allowed to swim and what sorts of activities and clothing were appropriate for this intimate public space. In short, community life was fostered, monitored, and disputed at municipal pools. The proliferation of private swimming pools after the mid-1950s, however, represented a retreat from public life. Millions of Americans abandoned public pools precisely because they preferred to pursue their recreational activities within smaller and more socially selective communities. Instead of swimming, socializing, and fighting with a diverse group of people at municipal pools, private-pool owners fenced themselves into their own backyards. The consequences have been, to a certain extent, atomized recreation and diminished public discourse.

This study focuses on the history of municipal swimming pools in the northern United States. I chose to focus on municipal pools because they enabled me to study the public lives of Americans from many different—and often overlapping—social groups: working-class whites, women, African Americans, immigrants, children, and the middle class. At one time or another, Americans from all these social groups frequented municipal pools and contested their use. This book also examines and interprets the history of private swimming pools, but mostly when that history is necessary for understanding what occurred at municipal pools. I chose to focus on the northern United States in order to make the research more manageable, and because I wanted to tell a coherent story rather than interpret regional variation. I have, however, defined the northern United States broadly, including cities such as Baltimore, Washington, D.C., and St. Louis. These cities certainly have a southern heritage, but the history of their municipal pools followed a very similar pattern to that of cities further north. Likewise, the pattern occurred not only in large cities but in smaller municipalities as well. It turns out that what happened at municipal pools, whether in St. Louis and Chicago or in Newton, Kansas, and Elizabeth, New Jersey, was all quite similar.

CHAPTER 1

A PECULIAR KIND OF BATH

THE ORIGIN OF MUNICIPAL POOLS IN AMERICA

The growing popularity of the public [swimming] baths quite justifies the experiment. They should be established in all parts of the city. An expenditure of public money for the promotion of personal cleanliness among the poorer classes is a most profitable sanitary investment. —Editorial, Philadelphia Evening Bulletin (1888)

Philadelphia opened one of the earliest municipal pools in America on June 21, 1884, at the intersection of Twelfth and Wharton Streets. The swimming bath, as it was commonly called, was so popular with the boys and young men of this immigrant, working-class neighborhood that they regularly waited an hour in line to enter. During the first few days, the crowd outside the pool often became unruly. The youths argued, fought, and tried to sneak ahead of one another in line. On the night of June 24, the usual ruckus escalated into a small riot. It started when the superintendent informed the expectant swimmers that they would not be admitted that evening because the pool was already filled to capacity. As the crowd grew incensed, the superintendent retreated inside the building and bolted the door. According to a local newspaper, the fifty or so young men who had been turned away concluded to override his authority by the superiority of their numbers. They tore the door from its hinges and knocked down the fence that surrounded the pool. The city had stationed a police detail at the pool in anticipation of disorderly behavior, but the four officers were no match for the angry crowd. They were tossed about like little bits of driftwood in rough water. Police reinforcements eventually restored order with a liberal application of their clubs, but not before the pool and the reputation of the bathers had been severely damaged. The Philadelphia Evening Bulletin editorialized that the good [the pool] has accomplished amongst the unwashed down-town youths has been more than counterbalanced by the harm a certain gang of roughs has seen fit in their ignorant and brutal natures to inflict. Commissioner of City Property William Dixey, whose department administered the pool, promised that if such conduct is kept up, he would close the house and keep it closed.¹

The small riot that accompanied the opening of the Twelfth and Wharton Bath captures in microcosm the contested early history of municipal pools in the United States. Municipal pools originated during the last third of the nineteenth century as public baths. They were quintessential Victorian reforms. Large northern cities located them within residential slums and intended them to promote cleanliness, refinement, and modesty among the urban poor. Public baths were necessary because the urban poor lacked bathing facilities in their homes, and middle-class northerners had come to see dirtiness as a sign of disease, immorality, and disorder. A physically unclean person, they believed, was an agent of pestilence and a likely criminal, loafer, and drunk. By promoting the bathing habit among the urban poor and instilling them with middle-class values, reformers and public officials assumed that municipal pools would help counteract the rising rates of disease, crime, and pauperism that accompanied urban growth during the mid-to late nineteenth century.²

The unwashed down-town youths who plunged into the Twelfth and Wharton Bath, however, viewed municipal pools differently. They flocked to the pool and waited in long lines to enter not because they were eager to bathe or adopt middle-class values, but because they were excited to roughhouse in the water. Swimming had been a popular activity among working-class boys and young men throughout the nineteenth century. They swam in the lakes, rivers, and bays that surrounded most American cities and created a plebeian and masculine swimming culture that violated Victorian norms. They swam in the nude, they swore, they fought, and they evaded authority. Municipal pools brought working-class swimmers face-to-face with the cultural expectations of middle-class Americans and the social policies of civic leaders. Cities attempted to control what the bathers did in the pools through elaborate rules and poolside police officers. But, as the riot reveals, the boys and young men who controlled the natural waters around American cities were determined to control the artificial waters as well. They attempted to transplant their rowdy swimming culture to these new public spaces and transform municipal pools into public amusements. In the end, they did just that.

When working-class boys and young men plunged into the nation’s first municipal pools, they brought with them a distinct swimming culture developed by earlier generations. Beginning in the late eighteenth century, plebeian boys commandeered urban lakes and rivers as their play domain. They stripped naked, splashed and shouted, and roughhoused in the water. Their behavior was sufficiently offensive to provoke a public response in several cities. In 1786 Boston passed an ordinance that prohibited swimming on the Sabbath. The law noted that it was boys in particular who were prophan[ing] [sic] the Lord’s Day.³ New York City passed an ordinance in 1808 forbidding daytime swimming in the East River. As the wording of the law explained, swimmers were extremely offensive to spectators.⁴ In 1820 J. G. Coffin sent a letter to Boston public officials complaining that the practices of local swimmers were opposed to the decorum and purity of the social state.⁵ The raucous behavior of these youngsters, and especially their naked bodies, offended other citizens and led most Americans at the time to associate swimming with rebelliousness and indecency.⁶

Even as urban America was transformed during the nineteenth century by industrialization, large-scale immigration, and technological advances, this swimming culture passed—in remarkably similar form—from one generation of plebeian boys to the next. Natural-water swimmers later in the century were just as immodest, defiant, and boisterous as their predecessors. One boy in Milwaukee received much notoriety in 1878 because he was in the habit of stripping upon the bank of the river and assuming the pose of Michael Angelo’s Slave just as the little river steamer hove in sight with her load of women and children.⁷ Most swimmers and bathers did not flaunt their naked bodies like this fellow, but few went out of their way to hide themselves from the public gaze. Newspaper reports from the period also emphasized the insulting language that was common among the swimmers, noting in particular the verbal attacks they directed at those who happened to pass by.⁸

The New York Times offered an elaborate description of working-class boys’ nineteenth-century swimming culture in a 1900 feature article. On an early summer Saturday along the East River, a dozen or more boys were diving and splashing around, having water fights and making no small commotion, when suddenly a tall police officer hove in sight. New York still prohibited daytime swimming within its city limits, but, as the Times commented, the boys care about as much for the law as the seagull that ventures up from the bay to see what is going on. When the blue-clad officer ordered the naked boys out of the water, a fourteen-year-old redhead replied, come an’ git us, will yer, Mister Cop? The swimmers then quickly disappeared underneath the pier. As the officer leaned over the edge to see where the boys had gone, a mass of spray flew up and struck the guardian of the law squarely amidships, causing him to jump back so quickly that his helmet flew off into the water. Predictably, one of the boys plucked the helmet from the surface and disappeared back beneath the pier. Smarting from defeat, the officer turned and skulked off the pier. The Times recognized that the whole episode—the naked swimmers, the fighting and splashing, and then the confrontation with the officer—exemplified a transmitted culture among urban, working-class boys. It all occurred, the paper noted, according to a prescribed custom that has been handed down from the time when there was not any ferry at all at Fulton Street.⁹

A prolonged public debate that occurred in Milwaukee during the late 1850s clearly reveals the social and cultural tensions public swimming generated during the nineteenth century. As New York and Boston had done previously, Milwaukee passed an ordinance in 1856 that restricted public swimming and