To the long-standing annoyance of people involved with the Miss America contest, which bills itself as “first, and foremost, a scholarship program,” the general public often confuses it with Miss U.S.A., which freely admits to being a beauty pageant. As annual tournaments of unmarried, childless women in their late teens and twenties, the two events have much in common. In fact, one emerged out of the other. In 1950, Yolande Betbeze, a convent-educated coloratura soprano from Mobile, Alabama, entered the Miss America contest and performed an aria from “Rigoletto” as her talent. She returned to her dressing room to find the words “Hairy sits here,” a reference to her thick eyebrows, scrawled in lipstick on the makeup mirror. But she won, and, newly crowned, refused to sign a contract that would have required her to tour the country in swimsuits made by Catalina, one of the pageant’s sponsors. “I’m an opera singer, not a pinup,” Betbeze said.
Catalina went and started its own contest, Miss U.S.A., scrapping the talent competition and offering cash prizes instead of scholarships. Despite the schism, Miss America endured, with a reputation as the more demure of the two franchises. Miss America finally did away with its swimsuit competition in 2018, in the wake of a scandal that began with male executives at the organization referring to one former winner as a “blimp” and to other contestants as “c*nts.” Apart from their formats, the big difference between the two pageants is that, until 2015, Miss U.S.A. and its international offshoot, Miss Universe, were owned, in part, by Donald Trump.
Of all the things Trump could have invested in, why a beauty pageant? The proprietary access to young, beautiful women was surely an attraction. As Jeffrey Toobin reported in this magazine in 2018, Trump also used Miss Universe to drum up foreign business. There are plenty of places to host clients, though. Pageants, commingling ideology and entertainment, offered something extra—the French-braided forces of patriarchy, capitalism, and racism. As Margot Mifflin demonstrates in “Looking for Miss America: A Pageant’s 100-Year Quest to Define Womanhood” (Counterpoint), they have been woven into pageant culture from the start.
Participation has been declining for decades, but Miss America still commands attention, rivalling perhaps only major-league baseball in outsized nostalgia-based influence. The pageant isn’t a state-sponsored ritual, but its winners are invited to meet with Presidents and to address legislative committees. In 1995, Hillary Rodham Clinton, at that time the First Lady, called in to a pre-competition press conference to chat with the reigning queen. Since girlhood, Clinton claimed, she had never gone a year without watching the pageant. “This is the only way I would ever, ever appear on a Miss America contest,” she said, deprecating herself instead of the contest’s premise. “It’s one of those dreams deferred, but it’s finally coming true.”
At its peak, in the nineteen-sixties and seventies, Miss America attracted more than two-thirds of the country’s television viewers. The annual telecast, culminating with Bert Parks, the m.c., crooning “There She Is,” amounted to a minor late-summer holiday, a reunion of the intact but dysfunctional American family. Boys learned how to watch girls, and girls learned how to watch boys watching girls. Philip Roth once tried to identify the primordial source of the pageant’s allure, “the quirk that made me watch this thing year after year.” All he could come up with was that his boyhood barber, a Jewish immigrant from Turkey, kept a framed picture of the current winner on his scissor tray. I remember tuning in to the pageant during the eighties with my father, who wielded the remote with ceremonious male authority. More than the seahorsey fonts and the sherbet gowns, it was his attachment to the ritual that fostered mine.
The first Miss America pageant was held in September of 1921, in Atlantic City. Inspired by Asbury Park’s popular baby parade, city boosters invited eight “Inter-City Beauties”—from New York, Pennsylvania, Washington, D.C., and New Jersey—to participate in a two-day festival. King Neptune, whom Mifflin describes as “a bronzed, bearded patriarch wearing purple robes and a jeweled crown,” ferried the ingénues around on a barge, depositing them on the shore near Million Dollar Pier for a meet and greet with the mayor. King Neptune was played by Hudson Maxim, the inventor of smokeless gunpowder: “He brandished his trident in his right hand, having lost the other in a lab accident.”
Mifflin is as alive to the pageant’s historical grotesqueries as she is to the weirdo details of its founding. Built near a bay that the Lenni Lenape people called Absegami, Atlantic City was a segregated town that relied on Black labor: African-Americans accounted for twenty-two per cent of the population, but, according to the historian Nelson Johnson, they made up ninety-five per cent of the workforce in the area’s white hotels, which enabled its main industry, tourism. After the opening ceremony at Million Dollar Pier, the contestants were escorted to a float by Black residents in slave costumes—as Mifflin notes, “the only African Americans to participate in Miss America festivities for the next half century.”
The pageant’s “Bathers’ Revue” caused a sensation. Despite an ordinance that forbade women to bare their knees on the beach, the contestants were required to wear bathing suits, establishing a confusing precedent of control and empowerment. At the end of the festival, five male judges pronounced Margaret Gorman the most beautiful girl in America. At sixteen years old and just over five feet tall, Gorman was the smallest Miss America ever. We know this because contestants’ measurements were recorded in maniacal detail. (Newspapers congratulated the winner of the 1926 pageant, Norma Smallwood, on the twelve-inch circumference of her “well-molded throat.”) Gorman, Mifflin writes, “was not quite a woman, and she was decidedly not a ‘New Woman,’ by then a popular term for the enfranchised, independent, post-Victorian woman of the modern age.”
The inaugural pageant took place almost exactly one year after the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment, giving women the right to vote. (Mostly, white women got to exercise it.) Dramatic pageantry, Mifflin notes, had been instrumental in the suffragist movement, in the form of silk sashes and theatrical tableaux. “I can only state my firm belief that a pageant has more power to convince people of the truth of our cause than any other means,” Hazel MacKaye, a suffragist who served as the director of drama and pageantry for the Y.W.C.A., once wrote. Is it any surprise that, just as women won the vote, a repurposed form of pageantry emerged, out of the deep blue, to insure that they were voted upon?
Throughout the twenties, the pageant was a hustle. As its renown grew, the organizers angled for respectability, but the contest kept being thwarted by entrants who bent the rules with a madcap, Miss Hannigan-like period energy. In 1923, Miss Alaska, whom Mifflin describes as “a vivacious favorite in white—swimsuit, stockings, and jazzy tam,” was disqualified on the ground that she was a New York resident and a married woman. A recent immigrant from Sweden, she had “spent all of three days in Juneau.”
In the thirties, the pageant hired Lenora Slaughter, of the St. Petersburg, Florida, chamber of commerce, to spiff up the program. As the pageant’s director, Slaughter hoped to attract a “better class of girl,” and thus a better class of sponsor, transforming a popular entertainment into a tidy model of middle-class advancement. She added the talent competition, instituted scholarships, created the coronation ceremony, and started pageant-momming the pageant with a genteel dauntlessness that left many of her “girls” in her thrall well into adulthood.
Using a “whack-a-mole approach to controlling the obstreperous beauties,” as Mifflin writes, Slaughter established a pattern of reactivity that plagues the Miss America Organization even now. Winner absconds with her chauffeur on the night of her coronation? Assign a society matron to escort each contestant twenty-four hours a day. Palomino nearly falls into the orchestra pit? No more animals in the talent competition. Slaughter is remembered as the pageant’s great reformer, but there were brittle limits to her progressivism, which placed education alongside, but never above, marriage as a pathway to fulfillment.
Miss America positions itself as a meritocratic institution—a congress of self-improving strivers pulling themselves up by their spaghetti straps. Its quasi-legislative structure, with each state and the District of Columbia sending a delegate, implies that Miss America not only reigns over the nation but also represents it. Demographically, she clearly doesn’t. In the course of a century, the pageant has had one Native American winner, in 1926, and one Latina winner, who was born in Paraguay to Mormon missionaries; it has never had a Muslim, trans, or openly gay winner.
The shame of Slaughter’s thirty-two-year regime was Rule Seven, which appeared sometime in the forties and stipulated that contestants must be “in good health and of the white race.” To Slaughter, “of the white race” seems to have meant pretty much anything but Black. For newly arrived Europeans, the contest served as a portal to whiteness, turning immigrants into Americans. In 1945, pageant officials pressured Miss New York, Bess Myerson, of the Sholem Aleichem Houses, in the Bronx, to Anglicize her name. (“‘Betty,’ or whatever, ‘Merrick’ or something,” Slaughter advised.) Myerson refused and won the contest, becoming the first and only Jewish Miss America.
Even in the sixties, as consciousnesses levitated across the country, the pageant remained a bastion of conservatism. In 1968, the feminist collective New York Radical Women organized “a day-long boardwalk-theater event,” in Atlantic City, to coincide with the pageant. As part of the protest, they filled a “Freedom Trash Can” with cosmetics, steno pads, floor wax, hair curlers, undergarments, and other such “woman-garbage.” Writing about the demonstration in the Washington Post, the humorist Art Buchwald concluded, “There is no better excuse for hitting a woman than the fact that she looks just like a man.” Reading Buchwald now, one realizes that Trump’s tone of cruel appraisal is at least partly pageant-watcher-speak, the snap judgment of the Nielsen patriarch accustomed to rating bodies the way he rates shows.
As feminists protested on the boardwalk, the first Miss Black America was being crowned at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel, four blocks away. The contest, sponsored by the regional N.A.A.C.P. and the National Association of Colored Women’s Clubs, was, Mifflin writes, “a pivot from pressuring Miss America to integrate,” which had already been attempted, with “pitiful results.” Miss America’s famous theme song dealt in superlatives (“she is fairest of the fair”), but the Miss Black America serenade, by Curtis Mayfield, offered a collective vision of victory (“You’re such wonderful people/And so beautifully equal”). As the sociologist Maxine Leeds Craig has written, “while Women’s Liberation protested the racism of the contest as one of the specific ways it oppressed women, the N.A.A.C.P. sought to fight that racism by having a black woman win the crown in the name of all black women.” An immediate success, Miss Black America exerted transformative pressure on traditional pageants and on the definition of beauty that they presupposed. At the end of last year, Black women held the crowns of five major beauty pageants: Miss America, Miss U.S.A., Miss Teen U.S.A., Miss Universe, and Miss World.
