Miss America and the Business of Beauty
Near Atlantic City, New Jersey
In September of nineteen twenty-one, Atlantic City's businessmen had a problem. Every summer, the resort ran at full capacity through Labor Day weekend. Then the crowds left and the season was over.
They needed a reason to keep visitors coming into September. What they invented, fairly casually, was one of the most durable institutions in American popular culture. The Inter-City Beauty Contest was modest by later standards.
Newspapers in East Coast cities had asked readers to mail in photographs of young women from their communities. Winners were invited to Atlantic City for a Fall Frolic on September seventh and eighth. Sixteen-year-old Margaret Gorman of Washington, D.
C., arrived representing her city and won. A journalist named Herb Test coined the title for the winner: Miss America.
The pageant grew. By nineteen forty, it was held in Atlantic City's Convention Hall, which could seat well over ten thousand people. It became a television fixture, a national ritual, a subject of satire and serious scholarship alike.
It was also a mirror for the country's contradictions. In nineteen forty-five, Bess Myerson of New York City won the title, the first Jewish Miss America and, to this day, the only one. Pageant directors had pressured her to compete under a different last name, one that sounded less Jewish.
She refused. After she won, three of the pageant's five corporate sponsors withdrew rather than be associated with her. She responded by embarking on a speaking tour titled You Can't Be Beautiful and Hate, delivering lectures on behalf of the Anti-Defamation League for years.
She used the pageant's spotlight to argue against the very bigotry she had encountered on her way to winning it.
