Investments in those things weren’t a sideshow to a White House squarely focused on lowering unemployment and modernizing the country’s infrastructure, but an essential part of that project. “We must plan for, and help to bring about, an expanded economy which will result in more security, in more employment, in more recreation,” Roosevelt said at a 1943 press conference, by then 10 years into a commanding Democratic majority in the House and Senate that would hold, almost continuously, for decades. To credit tennis courts and cabins for those margins wouldn’t be exactly right. New Deal liberalism, however, was self-consciously interested in making the case for itself to the public by making tangible improvements in the lives of working people.
The public improvements made during the New Deal could also be crucial to helping the U.S. navigate a climate-changed world. Take swimming pools. Pools are vital infrastructure to have in place as temperatures rise, giving people a free place to cool off during extreme heat waves like the one that blanketed the country in July. The New Deal built around 750 public pools between 1933 and 1938, and remodeled thousands more. They’re an example of the sorts of public institutions that help provide cooler physical spaces as well as foster social bonds that are essential to surviving the climate crisis. Public libraries, similarly expanded by the Works Progress Administration, likewise act as a community resource, offering air conditioning, shelter, and internet access.
Like many public institutions at the time, New Deal leisure infrastructure was often segregated—a poison pill that not only limited public accessibility, but helped usher in mass closures. As The Sum of Us author Heather McGhee and others have detailed, white officials began to close or privatize public pools as activists sought to integrate them during the Civil Rights Movement; rather than open pools to anyone who might want to use them, reactionary governments closed them off to everyone. Swimming became a more rarified commodity: Richer communities erected private pool clubs, and wealthy families built pools in their own backyards. The CDC estimates that there are now roughly 10 million private swimming pools in the U.S.—but just 309,000 public ones.