The Drained Pool

In the middle of the twentieth century the United States built one of the largest networks of public swimming pools in the world: grand, free or nearly free, capable of holding thousands of people. They were monuments to what public money could do.

Then the courts ordered them desegregated. And in town after town, the response was not to share them. It was to drain them, fill them with dirt, and pave them over. In Montgomery, Alabama, the city closed its entire parks and recreation department in 1959 rather than integrate: the pool was filled in, the zoo animals were sold, and the parks stayed shut for years.

Heather McGhee builds a book around that image, and this chapter borrows it, because it is the most economical statement of an argument that otherwise takes a long time to make: America repeatedly chooses nothing over something it would have to share, and the resulting deprivation lands on everyone, including the white majority that voted for it.¹

Montgomery was the pattern at its purest, but not its first performance. In St. Louis the era of sharing lasted one afternoon. When the city opened the vast Fairground Park pool, one of the largest in the world, to Black swimmers in June 1949, a white crowd grew through the day into a mob that hunted Black bathers and passers-by through the surrounding streets with bats and bricks. The city re-segregated the pool the next morning in the name of public order; a federal court reopened it to everyone the following summer; white attendance collapsed, and within a few years the great pool was closed and demolished. Nobody swam.²

And when the manoeuvre finally reached the Supreme Court, it was blessed. Jackson, Mississippi, ordered to desegregate its five public pools, closed four and surrendered the fifth to the YMCA, which ran it for whites. In Palmer v. Thompson (1971), five justices held that a city which drains its pools for everyone denies equal protection to no one: there is no constitutional right to swim, and a deprivation shared is no injury the law can see. The Constitution, so construed, forbade a segregated public good but not the abolition of public goods as such. It protected the water only while there was water.

The pattern, not the anecdote

The pools are not an isolated eccentricity. The same decision recurs across the whole architecture of American public provision.

Schools. Prince Edward County, Virginia, shut its entire public school system from 1959 to 1964 rather than desegregate, while white children attended a private academy supported by state tuition grants. Black children in the county lost up to five years of schooling.

The welfare state was segregated at birth. The Social Security Act of 1935 excluded agricultural and domestic workers, a category that covered roughly two-thirds of Black workers at the time. The exclusion was the price of Southern Democratic votes. The GI Bill, formally colour-blind, was administered locally: Black veterans were steered away from universities and denied the mortgages that built the white middle class, while the Federal Housing Administration's underwriting manuals explicitly favoured racially homogeneous neighbourhoods and redlined the rest. The postwar American middle class was created by government programmes from which Black families were substantially excluded; this is documented in the government's own maps and manuals.³

Cash assistance. Aid to Families with Dependent Children was politically unremarkable for as long as its imagined recipient was a white widow. The political scientist Martin Gilens later demonstrated the mechanism with unusual precision: American hostility to "welfare" (a popular programme under almost any other name) tracks the belief that its beneficiaries are Black, and that belief tracks the pictures rather than the caseload. From the mid-1960s, at the very moment the news magazines' poverty coverage shifted from white faces to Black ones, the poor of the national imagination became undeserving and support fell away.⁴ Reagan supplied the icon on the 1976 campaign trail: the Cadillac-driving "welfare queen" of Chicago, a real and genuinely spectacular fraudster named Linda Taylor, whose singular criminal career was promoted into a portrait of an entire caseload. Twenty years on a Democratic president completed the sequence, signing the 1996 law that "ended welfare as we know it": the entitlement became a block grant, time limits were attached, and the rolls fell by more than half, shedding poor white families along with everyone else. The drain does not check the swimmer's colour.

Healthcare. Harry Truman's national health insurance proposal of 1945–48 died in committees chaired by Southern Democrats, for whom federal hospital funding meant federal desegregation of hospitals. When Medicare arrived in 1965, its implementation did desegregate hospitals almost overnight, which shows both what was at stake and what was possible.⁵ The United States remains the only wealthy country without universal coverage, and support for expanding it has tracked beliefs about who would benefit with depressing regularity.

Nor is that ancient history. When the Supreme Court made the Affordable Care Act's Medicaid expansion optional for the states in NFIB v. Sebelius (2012), the map of refusal reproduced the old Confederacy with only a handful of exceptions. States declined federal money that would have insured millions of their own residents at a marginal cost to their treasuries approaching zero; the resulting coverage gap was disproportionately Black and numerically full of poor white southerners, concentrated in the same rural counties whose hospitals were closing fastest, and which closed fastest of all in the states that refused.⁶ Palmer v. Thompson, scaled up: no one gets the water.

Everything else. Once learned, the reflex generalises past its trigger. A polity that has spent two generations teaching itself that public is a synonym for theirs stops building grand public things altogether: the country that built the pools, the dams and the interstates now awards its own infrastructure grades hovering around D, and in 2014 the city of Flint, Michigan, majority Black and governed at the time by a state-appointed emergency manager, was switched to a corrosive river supply to save money and left drinking lead while officials issued reassurances. Flint is remembered as a racial atrocity, which it was; it should also be remembered as the pool again, because the pipes are shared, and a country that will not maintain what it shares eventually poisons swimmers of every colour.

The general finding is not confined to critics of American politics: mainstream economics has documented that racially and ethnically divided polities spend less on public goods, and used the United States as a leading case.⁷

The war on drugs

Between 1980 and its peak, the American prison and jail population rose from roughly half a million to around 2.3 million, the highest incarceration rate in the world, and a level with no precedent in American history or parallel in any comparable democracy. The proximate cause was drug policy.

The clearest statutory evidence of racial targeting is the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986, which set a 100-to-1 disparity between the quantities of crack and powder cocaine triggering the same mandatory minimum sentence. The two substances are pharmacologically the same drug. Crack was used disproportionately in Black communities and powder disproportionately by white users. Five grams of one and five hundred grams of the other drew five years. Congress reduced the ratio to 18-to-1 in 2010, a reduction, not an abolition, twenty-four years later.

Meanwhile, national survey data consistently show similar rates of drug use across racial groups, while arrest and incarceration rates differ by multiples. Michelle Alexander's argument (that mass incarceration functions as a system of racialised social control that survives the formal end of Jim Crow, complete with lifelong disqualification from voting, housing and employment) is the standard reference, and its empirical core is not seriously contested.⁸

There is also a much-quoted statement from Nixon's domestic policy chief John Ehrlichman, given to a journalist in 1994 and published in 2016, saying that the administration knew it could not make it illegal to be against the war or Black, but that by associating hippies with marijuana and Black people with heroin it could disrupt those communities. The chronicle flags this one honestly: the quotation surfaced twenty-two years after it was given, Ehrlichman's family disputes it, and historians of the period are divided on whether it describes conscious intent or is a bitter retrospective gloss.⁹ The statutes and the arrest data do not require the quotation.

Making college expensive

The University of California charged no tuition for California residents until 1970; the state's 1960 Master Plan had promised, in effect, a free place for every Californian who could use one. Ronald Reagan, as governor, pushed through the first substantial charges (initially labelled a "fee" to preserve the letter of the no-tuition tradition) after a term of open conflict with a student movement he had campaigned against.

The epigraph at the top of this chapter is from his own education adviser, Roger Freeman, speaking during the 1970 campaign. It is worth reading twice. The stated danger is not that education is expensive; it is that too many educated people is politically destabilising. Freeman's remark came at the precise moment when American higher education was, for the first time, opening substantially to Black students, to women and to the working class.

New York ran the same experiment and got the same result. The City College of New York had charged no tuition since its founding as the Free Academy in 1847, and for a century it was the escalator of the immigrant city, the "Harvard of the proletariat" that took the children of the tenements and produced Nobel laureates by the handful. In 1970, under pressure from Black and Puerto Rican student occupations, the City University adopted open admissions, and the student body changed colour within five years. In 1976, amid the fiscal crisis, with the banks holding the city's notes and dictating austerity, New York ended free tuition after 129 years. The timing is the finding: free college for the white city, loans for the darker one.

What followed nationally over fifty years: tuition rising far faster than inflation or wages, the shift from grants to loans, and an outstanding student debt stock now well above a trillion dollars, carried disproportionately by Black borrowers who begin with less family wealth and finish with more debt. A country that had made college nearly free for the generation of the GI Bill made it a debt instrument for the generation that followed desegregation.

The philosophy supplied afterwards

None of this could be defended in the terms that motivated it, so it needed a language. Several were supplied.

"States' rights" and "law and order" did the work in electoral politics, as chapter 17 described through Atwater's own account of the sequence.

Objectivism did the work in the boardroom. Ayn Rand's system (selfishness as a virtue, altruism as a vice, taxation as theft, the productive individual besieged by parasites) offered a way to experience the refusal to share as moral courage rather than as meanness. Its influence was not marginal: Alan Greenspan was a member of Rand's inner circle before running the Federal Reserve for nineteen years. And Rand's own view of the continent's original inhabitants, stated at West Point in 1974 (that they had no right to a country because they had not created a settled society, and that Europeans were right to take it) makes explicit the connection to chapter 9's doctrine of improvement.

"Personal responsibility" completed the circuit, converting the outcome of a hundred years of policy into a description of individual character.

The crusade goes abroad

The same imaginary shaped the foreign policy of the 2000s. Five days after the September 2001 attacks, George W. Bush described the response as a crusade, a word his staff immediately walked back, and which was received in the Muslim world exactly as one would expect.

The theology travelled with an economics. The 2002 National Security Strategy, the document that codified preventive war, opened by announcing that the great struggles of the twentieth century had ended with "a single sustainable model for national success: freedom, democracy, and free enterprise". A single model, prescribed for every nation on earth: the missionary universalism of chapter 16's free trade, now armed. What the model did not include, at home, was any of the things the preceding sections describe as drained.

The chapter's harder claim concerns the run-up to Iraq. Jacques Chirac and his advisers have described a telephone call in which Bush invoked Gog and Magog (figures from the prophetic literature chapter 17 traced through Darby and Scofield) in urging France to join the coalition. Chirac's staff were sufficiently baffled that they consulted a Swiss theologian, Thomas Römer, who later published an account of the enquiry. Bush has not commented; the sourcing is second-hand but from named, senior participants.¹⁰

Whatever the status of that particular call, the constituency described in chapter 17 was among the war's most reliable supporters, and it understood the Middle East through a prophetic frame. And when the photographs came out of Abu Ghraib in 2004, grinning guards posing beside hooded and leashed prisoners, Susan Sontag pointed out where the composition was already familiar from: the lynching photographs in which white Americans had once posed with their victims, printed as postcards and mailed home.¹¹ The colour line had been exported, and it photographed the same. The Iraq war killed several hundred thousand people at minimum, destabilised the region for a generation, and cost the United States trillions of dollars, while at home the same political coalition maintained that universal healthcare was unaffordable.

Forward

A country that will not fix its own drinking water, and that spends its public imagination on crusades abroad, still needs a story about the future. Chapter 19 examines the one on offer: an eschatology with a messiah, a promised land, and a rapture, for those who can afford the ticket.

Footnotes

1. Heather McGhee, The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together (New York: One World, 2021), ch. 2; on the pools specifically, Jeff Wiltse, Contested Waters: A Social History of Swimming Pools in America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007). ↩
2. Wiltse, Contested Waters, on the Fairground Park riot of 21 June 1949 and the abandonment of municipal pools after desegregation; Palmer v. Thompson, 403 U.S. 217 (1971). On privatisation as the successor strategy more broadly, Kevin M. Kruse, White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of Modern Conservatism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005). ↩
3. Ira Katznelson, When Affirmative Action Was White (New York: Norton, 2005); Richard Rothstein, The Color of Law (New York: Liveright, 2017). ↩
4. Martin Gilens, Why Americans Hate Welfare: Race, Media, and the Politics of Antipoverty Policy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999); on Linda Taylor, Josh Levin, The Queen: The Forgotten Life Behind an American Myth (New York: Little, Brown, 2019). ↩
5. Jill Quadagno, One Nation, Uninsured: Why the U.S. Has No National Health Insurance (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005); David Barton Smith, The Power to Heal: Civil Rights, Medicare, and the Struggle to Transform America's Health Care System (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2016). ↩
6. NFIB v. Sebelius, 567 U.S. 519 (2012). ↩
7. Alberto Alesina, Reza Baqir and William Easterly, "Public Goods and Ethnic Divisions," Quarterly Journal of Economics 114:4 (1999), pp. 1243–1284; Alberto Alesina and Edward Glaeser, Fighting Poverty in the US and Europe (Oxford, 2004). ↩
8. Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow (New York: New Press, 2010); on the sentencing disparity, United States Sentencing Commission, Report to Congress: Cocaine and Federal Sentencing Policy (2007). ↩
9. Dan Baum, "Legalize It All," Harper's Magazine, April 2016. For scepticism, see the responses collected by German Lopez, Vox, 29 March 2016, including from historians of the Nixon drug policy. ↩
10. Thomas Römer's account of the 2003 enquiry from the Élysée, published in Allez savoir! (University of Lausanne), no. 43 (2009); Chirac's own memoirs and interviews with Jean-Claude Maurice, Si vous le répétez, je démentirai (Paris: Plon, 2009). ↩
11. Susan Sontag, "Regarding the Torture of Others," New York Times Magazine, 23 May 2004. ↩