The First Miss America Pageant, 100 Years Ago, Was as Much a Mess as Today's

This story was adapted from “There She Was: The Secret History of Miss America” by Amy Argetsinger, published by One Signal Publishers/Atria Books, an imprint of Simon & Schuster Inc.

The legend of Margaret Gorman, the first Miss America, started to be written the day she learned she was bound for Atlantic City.

As the story goes, a Washington Herald reporter went to the Gorman family’s Georgetown home in August 1921 to announce that Margaret had been selected as D.C.’s emissary to the first-ever “Inter-City Beauty Contest.” But he couldn’t find her at home: Margaret — this “practically perfect” 16-year-old with a “wreath of natural golden hair” and eyes “of a rare deep blue” — was out in the yard, shooting marbles in the dirt with the neighborhood kids.

“Above all,” the Herald rhapsodized, “she is modest and unassuming.”

“Modest” was a funny way to describe a teenager confident enough of her charms to enter several beauty contests that summer. (Weeks earlier, she had been judged the most beautiful girl in town by the rival Washington Post in a separate citywide photo contest.) But it captured something about Margaret’s appeal — and in turn, so much about the impossible ideals upheld by this fledgling pageant not yet known as Miss America, where for the next century young women would try to prove themselves the loveliest, the sweetest, the most talented … yet also the most natural, the most down-to-earth, the most themselves. Where it would become imperative not to seem to try so hard — even though, obviously, they were.

Miss America is celebrating its 100th anniversary as a shadow of its former self, plagued by infighting, litigation, a damaging email scandal and slow-burning financial challenges.

A praised but polarizing decision to jettison its famed swimsuit competition in 2018 triggered an identity contest for the pageant, while doing nothing to stem a long exodus of sponsors and viewers. The number of women who enter the pipeline of state and local pageants in hopes of winning the national crown has plummeted over a generation.