In “The Sum of Us” Heather McGhee says, “The American landscape was once graced with resplendent public swimming pools, some big enough to hold thousands of swimmers at a time. In the 1920s, towns and cities tried to outdo one another by building the most elaborate pools; in the 1930s, the Works Progress Administration put people to work building hundreds more… Officials envisioned the distinctly American phenomenon of the grand public resort pools as ‘social melting pots.’ Like free public grade schools, public pools were part of an ’Americanizing’ project intended to overcome ethnic divisions and cohere a common identity — and it worked.” It worked, she conceded, until integration arrived.
In an interview, McGhee commented “[I]n Montgomery, Alabama. I find myself walking the grounds of this big, beautiful park… just this huge flat expanse of grass in the middle… there are about a handful of people at this otherwise beautiful park that you would think might have a few more visitors. And it turns out that 10 feet underneath the ground that I’m walking on is the carcass of what used to be a thousand-plus-person public Works Progress Administration, New Deal-era swimming pool. And there used to be about 2,000 of those pools in the country… built in a building boom in the 1930s and ’40s of public goods, right? Roads, bridges, schools, libraries, parks, and pools.”
It’s not the first time I’ve heard about WPA projects or the racism directly related to swimming pools. Isabel Wilkerson addressed it in “Caste: The Origins of Our Discontent.” The theme of giving up a common good to their detriment was addressed in “Dying of Whiteness: How the Politics of Racial Resentment is Killing America’s Heartland” by Jonathan Metzl in which he said, “White backlash politics gave certain white populations the sensation of winning… yet the victories came at a steep cost. When white backlash policies became laws, as in cutting away health care programs and infrastructure spending, blocking expansion of health care delivery systems, defunding opiate-addiction centers, spewing toxins into the air, or enabling guns in public spaces, the result was — and I say this with the support of statistics detailed in the chapters that follow — increasing rates of death.”
This got me thinking about what we’ve lost that was built through the WPA and previous generations. What still remains? In searching for information, I learned the program provided paid work for approximately 8.5 million people from 1935-1943. I also discovered a nonprofit group, Living New Deal, that has documented 17,000 WPA projects and their current status. Filtering for city and state shows 17 projects listed for Columbia including six buildings on the “White Campus” at The University of Missouri and a couple on the “Red Campus.” As for swimming pools, six of the 13 WPA pools listed in Missouri are still in existence including the Swope Park Pool in Kansas City as well as the Fayette City Pool and the Chaffee Public Pool — two of the last above-ground pools in the United States.
Under Federal Project Number One, the WPA employed musicians, artists, writers, actors and directors. It was a collective name for five sub-projects: the Federal Writers’ Project (FWP), the Historical Records Survey (HRS), the Federal Theatre Project (FTP), the Federal Music Project (FMP), and the Federal Art Project (FAP). The Federal Writers’ Project alone employed more than six thousand writers. One of those projects was the American Guide Series. “Not mere booster products or even just tourist guides, the series sought to analyze as well as describe, to offer a composite portrait of our country with all its nuances and diversities, with its states’ individual traditions and characteristics.” This quote is from the forward in the 1998 reissue of “Missouri: The WPA Guide to the ‘Show Me’ State.” You can still find this guide in our library and those of other states also as ebooks through Hoopla.
The Writers’ Project began the careers of many writers that were asked to interview ordinary people — more than 10,000 interviews producing about 800 books. One of those writers was Zora Neale Hurston and the book, “Go Gator and Muddy the Water,” includes some of those interviews. You can also read some other more local interviews in “Missouri Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in Missouri from Interviews with Former Slaves.” “Republic of Detours: How the New Deal Paid Broke Writers to Rediscover America” by Scott Borchert tells an even deeper story of some of the writers and the Federal Writers’ Project.
If you would like to explore more of these themes, you can check out this list. I hope that we can remember, as Heather McGhee puts it, “We are greater than, and greater for, the sum of us.”
