Looking for Miss America. Margot Mifflin
judges again wrestled with their decision. (The New Yorker cracked, “It’s becoming hard now to find a beauty queen, which may or may not be a comment on the types of pulchritude at hand.”) The vote went to Norma Smallwood, Miss Tulsa, an eighteen-year-old who was part Cherokee, an oversight of yet another unspoken pageant rule that would later be formalized: contestants had to be white. In fact, the previous year, in response to Miss America’s blatant segregation, a black beauty pageant had materialized. Sponsored by the African American press and modeled on Miss America (sans swimsuits), the National Golden Brown Beauty Contest was also held in Atlantic City, where thirty-two state nominees received diamond rings and the winner, Josephine Leggett of Louisiana, was awarded a new car. The founder, Madame Mamie Hightower of the Golden Brown Chemical Company, purveyor of cosmetics for black women, appeared to be a pioneer in the spirit of Madam C. J. Walker and claimed to be promoting racial pride through her pageant. But there was something rotten at its core: Golden Brown sold skin bleach, the winners were mostly light-skinned, and Hightower turned out to be a fictional character created by the white owner of the company.
Smallwood’s Cherokee heritage wasn’t mentioned, but in a spasm of recognition that Native Americans might bear some relevance to American beauty (and with a nod, perhaps, to the 1924 Indian Citizenship Act), the pageant committee installed Okanogan beauty queen Jessie Jim in Neptune’s coronation court as a “guest of honor.” Wearing family heirloom buckskin and beads, she functioned as an ethnic analogue to the royalty on display—or merely added a note of novelty. Earlier that month, nineteen-year-old Jim had been crowned Princess America II at the second annual National Indian Congress in Spokane, Washington. Her father, Long Jim, a chief forced to leave his ancestral land on Lake Chelan in Washington for a reservation, was still fighting for his family’s return.
Back then, contestants cried with disappointment, not joy. After losing 7–8 in a face-off with Smallwood, Miss Washington D.C. wept backstage while fans cheered the winner in the ballroom. “Tears trembled on her lashes,” reported the United Press, and “her mouth jerked with the effort to smile and take the blow standing.” Smallwood, who had graduated from high school at a precocious sixteen, was a student at Oklahoma State College for Women, where she studied art. She rode horses, played hockey, swam, loved painting and music, and wanted to be an artist. She was chosen for “her beauty, intelligence and personality,” but newspaper reporters didn’t concern themselves with much beyond her marriageability and her measurements, which one syndicated article described in demented detail, from “her well molded throat, which is 12 inches in circumference,” to her “normal 33-inch bust.”
“What kind of man would suit her?” she was asked. She ventured a description, then added, poignantly, “But it’s silly to talk about. I’m a day dreamer—most girls are. But dreams hardly even come true. I guess in our hearts we know they won’t.”
While she lounged in her presidential suite at the Traymore Hotel after the crowning, Smallwood received three fraternity pins, stage and film contracts, an offer of a cook stove, and a marriage proposal from a college professor who had seen her photo in the paper. She accepted the cook stove on the logic that “cook stoves are sometimes essential.” A husband, by contrast, was “not absolutely essential just now.” She had other ideas, and they didn’t involve domesticity.
Smallwood was the first college student to win and the first to go out on a full sponsorship year as a spokesperson. Her crowning may have been a victory for traditional womanhood (she wore her hair neatly braided in buns at her ears, and the United Press called her “a type entirely apart from the bobbed haired, boyish flapper”), but she was set on getting paid in money, not marriage, and shrewdly parlayed her banquet appearances and product endorsements into a reported $60,000, which, if true, meant she earned more than Babe Ruth that year. And that wasn’t all. The next year, when she returned to crown her successor, she demanded $1,200 for her services. When her fee was rejected, she grabbed her mother and left town in a huff.
That year, the pageant committee had invited another Princess America from Spokane, Alice Garry, who substituted for Smallwood during the formalities. Raised on the Coeur D’Alene reservation, Garry had won her title in 1925. She was the great-granddaughter of Chief Spokane Garry, and sister of Joseph R. Garry, who became the first Native American state senator in Idaho. Garry carried a beaded bag, one reporter noted, “that would be the envy of any flapper,” and laughed when she was told some of the beauties didn’t swim. “What for, then,” she asked, “are they bathing beauties?” She arrived on the Beauty Train with the others and led the parade in place of Smallwood, saying she was “thrilled to the eyebrows” to serve as the guest of honor. But her role was purely ceremonial, subservient, and likely subsidiary. After the pageant, she went to Washington for more important business: meeting President Coolidge, commerce secretary Herbert Hoover, and the Commissioner of Indian Affairs.
By now, the judges were wary of setting off another firecracker like Smallwood. So in 1927, after eliminating the women wearing bobs, makeup, gold teeth, and plucked eyebrows (and measuring the contestants themselves), they settled on Lois Delander, Miss Illinois, a demure sixteen-year-old blue-eyed blonde who had won a medal for reciting Bible verses. Delander assured reporters she didn’t smoke, drink tea or coffee, or, for that matter, eat pickles. Like Smallwood, she was set on becoming an artist. She said she had no interest in performing and would not accept professional contracts because “I want to become a great artist. I want to draw, to make a name for myself, to be somebody in this world.” (The statement is remarkable in light of the few women artists who actually were “somebody in this world.” Around this time, the pioneering abstract expressionist Lee Krasner had resorted to sneaking into a classroom at the National Academy of Design reserved for men.)
A few weeks later, the United Press ran a photo spread called “Miss America is ‘a Great Help About the House,’” showing her back home in Joliet, Illinois, with her mother, “handling household weapons” like a dust rag and a vacuum cleaner. That fall, Delander hit the vaudeville circuit and performed with the young Bob Hope, but she didn’t like it, so she returned to high school, became a salesgirl, married, then vanished from public life. Hers was a classic case of pageant whiplash: she was pushed by her ballet teacher to compete, dumbfounded that she won, and confused when, at sixteen, she was expected to enter vaudeville merely because she was pretty.
Even before Delander took the crown, the Atlantic City Hotel Men’s Association was debating ending or suspending the lavishly produced pageant. Careerism was one concern: “There has been an epidemic recently,” one member explained, “of women who seek personal aggrandizement and publicity by participating in various stunts throughout the world, and the hotelmen feel that in recent years that type of women [sic] has been attracted to the pageant in ever-increasing numbers.” Another grumbled, “Many of the girls who come here turn out bad later and though it may happen in other cities, it reflects on Atlantic City.”
More significantly, the pageant attracted a low-class “Coney Island crowd” and exploited women. The latter charge was echoed by an unexpected critic: the legendary actress Mae West, whose first published play, Sex, had landed her in prison in 1927 for “corrupting the morals of youth.” That fall, her drama The Wicked Age opened in Manhattan with a live jazz band. It was, she wrote, “an exposé of the bathing beauty contests of the 1920s—the Miss Americas, crooked contests, and fixed winners.”
West starred as a flapper named Babe who pulls strings to get the pageant rigged for her. When she wins, she develops a huge ego and a devastating coke habit. The play not only blasts the corrupt national pageant industry and the businessmen who ran it but also mocks the women who submitted to it—presumably without West’s sexual self-awareness or business smarts. Lobbying for launching a seaside New Jersey beauty contest, one character declares, “The basis of any industry that needs immediate attention of the public for success today is based on the exploitation of the female form . . . everything is an excuse for a horde of almost naked women to parade up and down the stage.”
And so Miss America got shelved before anyone had ever really defined what she signified. What was American beauty in a nation of immigrants, and how did it benefit the women who won? Throughout the pageant’s history, people—specifically men—made vacuous pronouncements