Looking for Miss America. Margot Mifflin
the public when they get old and wrinkled like me.” But she also wrote an unpublished article attesting to the power of the Miss America image during the war: “It wasn’t Venus Ramey that excited those boys, it was Miss America: a symbol of home . . . a reminder of decency, goodness, mercy, freedom, sanity from the world where they were, gone mad.”
Slaughter reflected on the pageant’s achievements in her 1944 Board Report, saying that “if the war had not interfered, I am confident that we would have one of the smoothest running civic events in America.” Two major challenges remained. The first was finding better regional hosts and sponsors. Despite having contacted every Chamber of Commerce in the country (Slaughter was that thorough), the committee had been forced to approach skating rinks and hotel ballrooms. She spelled out nine reasons her pitches to better venues had been rejected. Most related to the war: a manpower shortage, low interest because of wartime activities, and a dearth of “girls” because they had enlisted, were doing defense work, or had become war brides—wedded hastily before a serviceman’s deployment or during his furlough. Changing mass media also weakened PR interest; movie theaters were so packed they didn’t need outside promotions, and newspaper advertising was shifting to radio, thereby reducing available airtime for pageant ads.
Then there was reason number six: “Do not approve of beauty pageants.” Slaughter had a solution for that. The Jaycees (Junior Chamber of Commerce) were a socially and politically conservative national young men’s leadership training organization. They could convince local families that the pageant was an upstanding civic exercise and sponsor it locally. “What better,” Slaughter told Deford, “than to have the ideal men of America run a pageant for the ideal women?” She’d already worked with a few of them to attract Miss North Carolina and Miss Texas, with positive results. The women had arrived “properly wardrobed,” had “good talent,” and sent thank-you notes afterward. Their mothers were agreeable and supported the contest. The Jaycees were based in rural and suburban areas that would become—as postwar migration pulled middle-class families out of major cities—pageant country.
The second challenge, Slaughter explained in her report, was “Better Disposition of Miss America.” By that she meant rewarding the winners well enough to make the title both desirable and respectable. It was too late to stop Ramey, who would call the pageant an “entrée into oblivion” and work a number called “So What” into her post-reign nightclub junkets (being Miss America had made her life “très gai,” she sang. “Now if I could only find a way to eat three times a day”). But she could offer others more.
Slaughter had taken the pulse of the nation while touring with Bartel, polling people informally about their views of Miss America, and she had thoughts. “There is no need to elaborate on the favorable reactions,” she wrote. Her focus was the holdouts she wanted to convert, whose response (which she quoted in language that prefigured Ramey’s novelty song by a year) amounted to “Miss America—So What?” They wanted to know what happened after Miss America won, whether she contributed anything worthwhile to society, and if she enjoyed sustained success.
Likewise, reluctant contestants asked, “Why should I want to be Miss America?” “Is the title one I can proudly claim throughout my life?” “Can the title Miss America help me attain my ambitions?” “What kind of girl seeks the title Miss America?”
Slaughter was confident that most of her recent queens would vouch for the pageant as “the most educational experience of their lives” and had letters to prove it. But (she felt so strongly about this she broke into all caps) “WE HAVE GOT TO PROVE OUR INTENTIONS TO THE DOUBTING PUBLIC WITH FACTS.” A $5,000 scholarship for the winners, she wrote, was the way to do it.
“In five years, think what a reputation a Miss America pageant could build in the schools in this country? Girls would no longer look upon the pageant as a beauty contest, but would respect the title for its genuine value to them and its rating in the nation.” She even allowed, presciently, that the educational mandate might eclipse the beauty piece of the pageant altogether. With a scholarship, she predicted, “The Miss America title will offer a constructive inducement to all types of girls.” (Well, all except black girls.)
The question of who brainstormed the idea of scholarships has never been resolved—whether Slaughter, Bartel, or a student they met on tour at the University of Minnesota who told them that “no college girl would enter a contest that afforded as few opportunities as the Atlantic City Pageant.” Regardless of its provenance, the idea resonated deeply with Slaughter. “I wanted to go to college more than anything in the world, but I didn’t have the money,” she said. “Now I wanted my girls to have a scholarship, something constructive. I knew the shine of a girl’s hair wasn’t going to make her a success in life, and I knew good and well that the prizes Miss America had been getting were a joke . . . a fur coat that couldn’t have been worth more than two hundred dollars, the Hollywood contract that they got for fifty dollars a week—why, they couldn’t even live on that in California.”
She also knew that not all winners wanted a Hollywood career in the first place; scholarships would open other options. She believed the pageant could produce doctors and lawyers, which seemed laughable at the time, but which, in time, it did.
Her proposal was well timed. During the life of the pageant thus far, women’s college enrollment had declined steadily since a then-historic peak in 1920, when they represented 47 percent of students. In the 1930s, a cultural backlash against the feminist gains of the progressive era and the sexual freedom of the Jazz Age nudged women back toward marriage and motherhood and away from college. Hastened by the Depression, enrollment numbers fell to 40 percent in the 1940s, then continued downward, first as women dropped out to take defense jobs, and postwar, when many swapped their studies for domesticity once their veteran husbands rejoined the workforce.
Government-sponsored newsreels promoted domesticity as their duty. A 1942 Ladies’ Home Journal article titled “What is Your Dream Girl Like?” included a “blueprint” based on a survey of military men that said, “A college education isn’t necessary, and most young men would prefer not to have their wives work after marriage.” The 1944 federal GI Bill also bit into their numbers: its scholarships overwhelmingly served white men at the expense of women (who represented less than 3 percent of veterans) and black men (who were largely denied their benefits). Slaughter may have set her sights on an opportunity she personally wished she’d had, but it was also one of national importance.
Because many of Slaughter’s board members preferred to cultivate movie stars, the scholarship was only grudgingly approved, and to her astonishment, she alone was expected to raise the $5,000 to fund it. She merely flinched, then sat down and hand-wrote letters to 230 companies who sold products a beauty queen might endorse, landing $1,000 contracts with Bancroft & Sons, a textile manufacturer; Fitch Shampoo Company; Harvel Watches; and Catalina Swim Suits, which had been designing swimwear since 1912, inspired initially by Annette Kellerman. With giants Jantzen and Cole, Catalina had been dictating affordable beach fashion for decades. Now its suits would become Miss America’s crowning uniform.
Weeks before the 1945 pageant, however, a fifth sponsor had yet to materialize. Desperate, Slaughter put up her own money. Then, a week before the pageant, she got a call from Sandy Valley Grocery Company, a wholesaler in the South whose owner had a knack for publicity, a taste for philanthropy—and, until that year, AWOL Miss America Bette Cooper on its payroll as marketing director. They wanted in.
With funding secured, Slaughter recruited the executive director of the Association of American Colleges and Universities to head the scholarship program and spread the word to colleges. And so, in 1945, the pageant began its evolution from leg show to Honors Club. The inaugural scholarship was awarded to the first—and, to this day, the only—Jewish Miss America. Bess Myerson was one of the most gorgeous, talented, ambitious, uncompromising, and socially significant winners ever. She was also, in the end, the most bewilderingly disappointing.