The Pools We Filled and the Prosperity We Gave Away

We built the world's largest middle class by accident. We destroyed it on purpose.

For all the Saving Private Ryans and movies about the Second World War, we've yet to turn into heroes those who did the work that really expanded and built our society. It's a much more complicated story, I guess, or at least less visceral. It's a story about building through the Great Depression, building through the New Deal, building and preparing, having the infrastructure and timing necessary to be ready for the Arsenal of Democracy and what that brought.

When the Depression hit, Americans did something radical - they trusted. They gave Roosevelt and the Democrats massive majorities and said "fix this mess." And Roosevelt used that trust to experiment. The CCC put young men to work building things that still stand today. Social Security said maybe old people shouldn't die broke. The government became an employer, a builder, an investor in its own people.

But the war took it to another level. The Arsenal of Democracy wasn't built by generals. It was built by regular people doing impossible things because they had to.

To achieve our goals, we had to suppress many resentments, cultural norms, religious expectations, and both economic and social ideas. Women would undoubtedly need to work, so the government built childcare centers. The Manhattan Project needed the best minds, so suddenly Jewish scientists fleeing Europe and Black mathematicians were essential personnel. Factories needed workers, so racial barriers to service were removed - at least on the factory floor.

The government didn't just regulate. It built. Entire cities. Factories. Ships. Housing. Roads. If companies couldn't meet the new goals, they'd get some coaching, then, if they weren't up to the task at hand, they'd get taken over. Price controls kept the profiteers in check. We basically suspended capitalism because democracy was on the line.

And it worked. Not just at beating the Nazis - it created the world's largest middle class in history. It helped raise millions and millions of Americans out of poverty. Subsequent legislation like the GI Bill, VA healthcare, and VA home loans and many other programs led to a rising tide that, due to efforts like the Marshall Plan, the Interstate Highway System and our domination of global manufacturing and innovation, we saw a continued explosion in the capacity of the working class to purchase a high quality life with fewer years of their lives than any previous generation.

We'd accidentally discovered something incredible. When survival mattered more than status, when we prioritized building over hoarding, everybody could live well.

A coworker named Waleed Shahid once told me this story, and I haven't been able to shake it since. Back in the day, public swimming pools were everywhere in America. Big cities had dozens. Small rural towns might have several. They were the heart of summer - kids splashing, families gathering, teenagers flirting, old folks doing their laps.

Then came integration. And white communities across America made a choice. Rather than share those pools with Black and brown neighbors, they filled them in. Poured concrete. Turned them into parking lots.

The affluent whites moved to the suburbs and built their own pools. The middle class built them for their neighborhoods, behind gates and fences. Protected from the "wrong" people. But poor whites and most Black and brown folks? They got nothing. They got parking lots where community used to be.

This was the wedge that the corporatists, the privatization crowd, and what would become our billionaire class needed to separate the American people from their ability to prosper. The thing that we'd stumbled upon in the thirties, forties and fifties was that together we could build a society that lifted all boats, the rising tide, if you will.

But when our racial resentments and hateful past caught up with us, that resentment, that hatred, that racism was used against us. To divide us. To conquer us. To take what we'd built away from us.

Soon as the war ended, we started tearing it all down. Price controls? Temporary wartime measures. Government childcare? Send the women home. Public investment? That's socialism. All those Black workers in good factory jobs? Time to push them out.

When Black folks and Latinos and women began to demand more socially and economically, a lot was given up to prevent them from getting ahead. That mentality didn't stop at pools. It went to wages, housing, healthcare. Communities were willing to give up a lot that they had gained in order to prevent folks that they didn't think deserved it from getting it.

Luckily, we had built so much that we had decades and decades of prosperity in reserve. We had so much wealth and capacity that you could easily ignore the decline. Even confuse it with a bump in the road of progress. But it was decline. We made progress on race but lost workers' rights. Unions lost their way in no small part to racism that divided their members. Those were the moments we decided to give it all away.

The distance from the poor is what makes you feel wealthy. If everybody is doing well, then you're just average. That's the problem with a lot of mentality that we have when it comes to economics - we look at everything on a scale, on a gradient. Where am I relative to others? If everyone lives the life of a millionaire, then what's the point of being a millionaire? We all want to be special. Not just well-off. Not just well taken care of. Not just happy. But happy relative to someone else's misery.

We literally filled in the pools rather than swim with Black people. And we're still doing it. We'd rather pay more for worse private healthcare than have excellent public healthcare everyone can use. Rather have bridges collapsing than invest in infrastructure. Rather have tent cities than build public housing.

Every time someone says "I don't want my tax dollars going to..." they're standing there with a shovel, ready to fill in another pool.

And they're doing it again. Now in 2025 we are being manipulated with hate and fear. Our hate and fear directed in the tried and true fashion at people of color, immigrants, Muslims, progressives, Democrats. Once again, they're blaming the poor, the impoverished, and the downtrodden. They're blaming the powerless for doing something pretty remarkable. One of the most remarkable thefts in history is being blamed on people that have no political power and no power whatsoever.

No foreign enemy did this. No economic law demanded it. We demolished our own success, brick by brick, because we couldn't stomach the idea of the "wrong" people enjoying it.

Now we're living in the parking lots we paved over paradise to build.

All because we can't share the damn pool.

So maybe this, like many of my pieces, is a diagnostic of the problems. You might be thinking that we're all in agreement, but unfortunately, we are not. There are many people that will tell you that we're headed exactly the right direction.

Next week, all of my emails will be focused on solutions. I'm gonna once again turn to healthcare, housing, and maybe even a little artificial intelligence and manufacturing.

This is supposed to be part of a conversation. Not some sort of essay that's written and just put out in the ether. We need to be thinking about how to not just acknowledge that things are tough all over, but because of that we need deep systemic radical change. The type of radical change that means, like before, breaking from norms.

But first we need to see clearly what we threw away. We built something incredible once. We proved it could work. Then we destroyed it ourselves rather than share it.

That's the choice we're still making.