American towns used to drain their own pools rather than share them
Not close them for repairs. Fill them with dirt. On purpose. And the reason explains a lot more than swimming.
In the mid-20th century, American cities built roughly two thousand grand, resort-style public pools — some the size of small lakes, with diving platforms and sand beaches, funded by New Deal-era public investment and treated as a shared civic luxury. Then, in the 1950s and '60s, courts ordered many of them integrated. A striking number of towns responded not by opening the pools to everyone, but by draining them, filling them with dirt, and shutting down the surrounding parks department entirely, sometimes for a decade.
Heather McGhee opens The Sum of Us with this history because it's a clean, physical version of an argument she makes about the whole economy: a pattern of "zero-sum" thinking, in which a shared public good gets destroyed rather than extended to people it was never meant to include. Everyone loses the pool. That's not a side effect — it's the actual mechanism.
McGhee's larger case is that the same instinct, replayed across housing, healthcare, and public schools for decades, has cost far more than it protected, for far more people than it was ever meant to protect.
The pool wasn't drained to keep the water clean. It was drained so that nobody could have it.