Katy Burns: Miss America? Is that still around?

Contestants in the first Miss America pageant line up for the judges in Atlantic City, N.J., in September 1921. Second from left is Margaret Gorman, who won the competition. Miss America started as a bathing suit contest on the uncomplicated theory it might help fill Atlantic City hotel rooms for an extra week past Labor Day at the end of the summer season. AP

By KATY BURNS
Monitor columnist
Sunday, August 26, 2018

Headline: The Miss America Pageant dumps swimsuit competition!

Reaction: No! That’s an outrage! That’s downright un-American! It’s . . .

Uh, wait. You mean there’s still a Miss America Pageant? Didn’t it go out about the same time that women ditched pointy bras and bouffant and beehive hairdos?

Apparently not. I just did a little research. Turns out the pageant has been with us all this time, hanging out in Atlantic City along with the rest of the relics of the 1950s. Although apparently Bert Parks is no longer with it – or for that matter with us at all, having departed some years for some bright runway in the Great Beyond, still crooning, “there she is, Miss America . . .”

Presiding over the Atlantic City pageant these days is Stanford graduate and virtuoso violinist Gretchen Carlson, once the reigning blond female on the Fox and Friends morning couch and once (until recently a little-known fact) a Miss America herself.

Margaret Gorman of Washington, D.C., poses after winning the first Miss America pageant in Atlantic City, N.J., in 1921. AP

As soon as she took over direction of the pageant, though, she made a few waves. Specifically, Carlson – who no doubt looked quite fetching in a swimsuit herself in her heyday – decided that appearing in a swimsuit was too undignified for 2018 Miss America hopefuls and banished the bathing attire part of the competition. For good measure she threw the evening gown contest in the trash bin, too. Contestants would be judged on their abilities and accomplishments, not on their physical attributes.

Well! From the uproar, you’d have thought that poor Gretchen had driven a stake through the heart of an adorable fuzzy puppy. On national television, in prime time.

Okay, that is perhaps a slight exaggeration. But clearly, to a great number of patriotic citizens, she was messing with a pillar of American culture, even civilization. No doubt adding to the outrage was knowing that Carlson herself had not been too good to wear a swimsuit in her day.

And after all, history is on the side of the bathing apparel, since the pageant itself was begun in 1921 by members of the Atlantic City Businessmen’s League who thought the prospect of attractive young women parading the boardwalk in swimming attire – a “bathing beauty revue” – would be sure to draw spectators.

It did! And it turned out that large numbers of American television viewers (well, once the pageant made it to television) got used to the idea of seeing, in their very own living rooms, scantily clad young women – not that early swim garb was all that scanty – parading on a runway. Who knew? Except, maybe, everyone in the country.

Miss America beauty contestants walk on Atlantic City’s seafront in 1921 for the Miss America Beauty Pageant. The pageant was won by 16-year-old marbles champion Margaret Gorman of Washington, D.C.

And so the Miss America Pageant has been in our nation’s living rooms ever since, even if its contestants’ requirements did expand over the years to include talent performances and interviews probing their interests and their views on national and global affairs. (Mostly, they wisely have none.)

But in recent decades interest in and even awareness of the contest has slipped significantly, thanks to a lot more riveting entertainment available on our own television set’s 560 or so channels these days. And now – to raise the tone of the evening, perhaps? – the pageant is doing away with runway promenades of barely clothed entrants, not to mention any consideration at all of “physical appearance.”

Uh, doesn’t sound like a winning strategy to me. Or, I suspect, to the dwindling number of sedentary television watchers who have stuck with the pageant of young “bathing beauties” for all these years and who now rightly figure they can find fully dressed articulate, capable and interesting young women all over dial any day of the year who aren’t necessarily clad for “bathing.”

I suppose all the organizations that profit from the Miss America organization – and a lot do – could become more creative in monetizing the annual display of young pulchritude to draw in more viewers – more competition, perhaps? Group mud bath wrestling? Creative crocheting competitions? Pie making or calf raising, which are real winners on the county fair circuit?

But I doubt that more spirited vocal renditions of a Puccini aria or more zealous demonstrations of belly dancing or piano concerto performances, even tugs of war pitting the contestants against one another, will expand the audience. Especially not when there are monster truck competitions on the Spectacular Crashes channel or demonstrations of Mongolian yak butter-making on the Food Channel, not to mention all over the internet.

And expanding the variety of contestants – hence the audience draw – by, for example, including men simply wouldn’t work, given the show’s nearly 100-year-old name. Plus, I think there’s a Mister America competition somewhere on some obscure channel, and it’s obviously even less popular than Miss America.

So here’s a novel, nearly unheard-of idea. The Miss America machine could simply shut down. Young women today have almost unlimited opportunities ahead of them crying out for their talents and energies, their intelligence, their enterprise and their devotion. Its sponsors could today find other causes, perhaps some more worthy of their money and their attention.

And it would set a good example for other organizations whose purpose has passed but which still won’t go away, essentially raising and spending money to maintain an entity which is no longer needed or even wanted.

(“Monitor” columnist Katy Burns lives in Bow.)

https://www.concordmonitor.com/Katy-Burns-Miss-America-19693400