What Event Was Created in the 1920s to Attract Tourists to Atlantic City After Labor Day?
Miss America | Article
Dazzler Pageant Origins and Culture
Origins of the Beauty Pageant
Contests to decide "who is the fairest of them all" have been around at least since ancient Greece and the Judgment of Paris. According to fable, a poor mortal goatherd, Alexandros (Paris), was chosen upon to settle a dispute among the goddesses. Who was the almost beautiful: Hera (Juno), Aprhodite (Venus), or Athena (Minerva)? All iii goddesses offered bribes: according to the writer Apollodorus, "Hera said that if she were preferred to all women, she would give him the kingdom over all men; and Athena promised victory in war, and Aphrodite the hand of Helen." When Paris selected Aphrodite in commutation for getting Helen of Troy, the almost cute mortal of the time, he inadvertently started the Trojan War.
While ancient Greeks memorialized in myth the complicated relationship between dazzler and competition, there is no historical evidence that they actually held contests for women. A "contest of physique" called theeuandria was held yearly at an Athenian festival — but the contest was for men. European festivals dating to the medieval era provide the nigh directly lineage for beauty pageants. For case, English May Day celebrations always involved the selection of queens.
In the Us, the May Day tradition of selecting women to serve equally symbols of bounty and customs ethics continued, every bit young cute women participated in public celebrations. When George Washington rode from Mountain Vernon to New York Metropolis in 1789 to presume the presidency, groups of young women dressed in white lined his route, placing palm branches before his carriage. Full general Lafayette's triumphant bout of the United States in 1826 as well was greeted by like delegations of young women.
The start truly mod dazzler competition, involving the display of women's faces and figures before judges, tin can be traced to one of America's greatest showmen, Phineas T. Barnum (of circus fame). In the 1850s, the always-resourceful Barnum owned a "dime museum" in New York City that catered to the growing audience for commercial entertainment. Some of Barnum'due south most pop attractions were "national contests" where dogs, chickens, flowers, and even children were displayed and judged for paying audiences. While 61,000 people swarmed to his infant show in 1855, a similar event the year before to select and exhibit "the handsomest ladies" in America proved a disappointment. The prize — a dowry (if the winner was unmarried) or a diamond tiara (if the winner was married) — was not plenty to lure respectable girls and women of the Victorian era to publicly display themselves.
Barnum developed a vivid alternate programme for a beauty contest that would accept entries in the form of photographic likenesses. These photographs would exist displayed in his museum and the public would vote for them. The final ten entrants would receive specially deputed oil portraits of themselves. These portraits would be reproduced in a "fine arts" book to be published in France, entitled theWorld's Book of Female Beauty. Barnum sold off his museum earlier the photographs arrived, but in employing modern applied science and in combining lowbrow entertainment with the appeal of highbrow civilisation, Barnum pioneered a new model of commercial entertainment.
In the decades to come, the moving-picture show photograph contest was widely imitated and became a respectable way for girls and women to take their beauty judged. Borough leaders across the country, seeking to heave citizen morale, incorporate newcomers, and attract new settlers and businesses to their communities, held paper contests to cull women that represented the "spirit" of their locales. 1 of the nigh popular of these contests occurred in 1905, when promoters of the St. Louis Exposition contacted urban center newspapers beyond the country to select a representative young woman from their city to compete for a dazzler title at the Exposition. There was intense competition and, according to i report, xl thousand photo entries.
By the early decades of the twentieth century, attitudes had begun to change most beauty pageants. Prohibitions against the display of women in public began to fade, though not to disappear birthday. Ane of the earliest known resort beauty pageants had been held in 1880, at Rehoboth Beach, Delaware. Notwithstanding, it was not until the twentieth century that beach resorts began to hold regular beauty pageants as entertainments for the growing center class. In 1921, in an effort to lure tourists to stay past Labor Day, Atlantic Metropolis organizers staged the showtime Miss America Pageant in September. Stressing that the contestants were both youthful and wholesome, the Miss America Pageant brought together bug of commonwealth and grade, art and commerce, gender and sex activity — and started a tradition that would grow throughout the century to come.
Atlantic City
Absecon Island, where Atlantic Urban center was congenital, was known to the Lenni Lenape Indians as Absegami, or "Little Sea Water." In 1852 a grouping of New Jersey businessmen, anxious to develop the shoreline, received a railroad lease from Camden to Atlantic City. Engineer Richard Osborne named and designed Atlantic City. Since it was the shortest distance between Philadelphia and the sea, Atlantic Metropolis grew quickly as a resort boondocks.
By the 1870s, a boardwalk had been added, providing more than people with access to the sea. The city boasted a prototype rollercoaster by the tardily 1880s. In the decades around the plough of the twentieth century, eye and working class Philadephians, and presently others from up and downwards the E Coast, would come up to play past the seaside. Vendors hawked their wares. James' Saltwater Taffy became "Famous the World Over." Mechanical marvels took tourists on daring rides that made their stomachs plow. Children rode carousels, and families dined in seaside cafes. Concerts were held on the sand every evening and the many hotels up and downwards the shore held gala dances.
Atlantic Urban center seemed to take adult two personalities. On the one hand, the resort was promoted as a restful and wholesome vacation spot, offer lord's day and surf. On the other hand, tourists reveled in the boisterous atmosphere spawned by a festival of midways, numerous amusement piers (such as the one H.J. Heinz purchased to popularize his 57 varieties of pickles), and a selection of rollicking rides. Atlantic City and its older sibling to the north, Coney Isle, became extravagant playgrounds. InNew Cosmopolis (1915), James Huneker wrote, "Atlantic City is non a care for for the introspective. It is all surface; it is hard, glittering, unspeakably cacophonous, and it never sleeps at all. Iii days and you lot require the comparative solitude of Broadway and 34th Street; a calendar week and you may dice of insomnia."
By the 1920s, Atlantic Urban center also had become a pre-Broadway show tryout town, a do that continued until 1935. With the entrance of show business, the resort increasingly attracted celebrities who added a special chemical element of glamour. Even as the urban center declined as a Broadway showcase, the celebrities continued to grace the city in the decades to come. Over the years people similar Sophie Tucker, Jimmy Durante, Fanny Brice, Harry Houdini, Milton Berle, Martha Raye, Guy Lombardo, Irving Berlin, Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Jerry Lewis, Marilyn Monroe, and many more would be spotted around town.
Its tourism and low-cal-hearted revelry fabricated Atlantic Metropolis the perfect spot to concord the first Miss America Pageant on September eighth, 1921. King Neptune himself greeted the beauties competing along the shore. At the time, Atlantic City was known equally one of the premier spots to market to a national audience. For years, the Underwood Company attracted large crowds to its "World's Largest Typewriter" at the Garden Pier. In 1932 Goodyear had a truck haul a 12-pes tall rubber tire around the city equally "the World's Largest Tire." At night, along the boardwalk and around the city, thousands of light bulbs lit upwards signs advertising everything from cigarettes to razor blades. What better place to present and parcel the nation's reigning ideal of femininity — Miss America?
Though the economic system hit difficult times in the 1930s, people continued to flock to Atlantic Urban center. It became even more well known when it became the metropolis featured in the Depression-era hit game,Monopoly, where players handled big sums of coin and strategized to buy the best property along the boardwalk. Today,Monopoly is still the most pop board game in the globe.
With the advent of air travel to vacation spots like Florida and the Caribbean, the urban center hitting a decline in the 1950s. The city was beset with economical problems for the next two decades. In 1976, the city legalized gambling and supported the structure of casinos. At the time gambling was brought in, proponents heralded it as a "unique tool of urban development." Casinos have brought tourism back to the city and created new jobs. At the same fourth dimension, over the final three decades, the city has been faced with a decaying inner metropolis and a high poverty rate, challenging citizens and casino owners to manage the urban center'south mean solar day-to-twenty-four hour period needs as well every bit it serves its tourist visitors.
Since 1921, the Miss America Pageant has called to stay in Atlantic City. Every September the pageant brings in celebrity hosts like Donny and Marie Osmond and Tony Danza. Next door to the Convention Center, ane of the biggest merchandise shows for the beauty pageant industry sets up shop in a casino. Pageant hopefuls are seen everywhere on the boardwalk and in the hotels, adding to the excitement of being in Atlantic City.
The First Miss America Dazzler Pageant, 1921
Business interests and leisure activities came together on a New Jersey beach, and the Miss America pageant was born. Atlantic Urban center emerged as a beach resort for Philadelphians by 1860. In the 1870s, a boardwalk was added. Over the next l years, hotels, saltwater taffy, hot dog stands and arcades all added to the vacation temper for summer vacationers. In 1920 the Businessmen'south League of Atlantic City came upward with a plan to keep fun and profits continuing by Labor Day. For September 25th, they organized aFall Frolic. Three hundred and 50 gaily decorated rolling wicker chairs were pushed along the parade road. Three hundred and fifty men pushed the chairs. However, the main attractions were the young "maidens" who sat in the rolling chairs, headed by a Miss Ernestine Cremona, who was dressed in a flowing white robe and represented "Peace."
The glittering spectacle was proclaimed a success. The Businessmen'south League went to piece of work shortly later on to program for the next yr'due south event. They appointed a committee to organize a "bather's revue." Taking a cue from the popularity of newspaper-sponsored dazzler pageants based on photograph submissions, newspapers every bit far westward as Pittsburgh and equally far s as Washington, D.C., were asked to sponsor local beauty contests. The winners would participate in the Atlantic Metropolis contest. If the local paper would pay for the winner'southward wardrobe, the Atlantic City Businessmen's League would pay for the contestant's travel to compete in the Inter Urban center Beauty Contest.
Equally plans proceeded and contestants were selected, a local Atlantic City newspaperman, Herb Exam, enthusiastically proclaimed, "And we'll phone call her Miss America."
For the 1921Fall Frolic 5 days of festivities were planned, including tennis tournaments, parades, concerts, a fancy clothes ball as well as seven different bathing divisions featuring children, men, and comic costumes. It seemed that everyone in town was dressing in bathing suits, including firemen and the police. There was even a category for "professional women," actresses of phase and screen.
For weeks before the competition, advertisements up and down the East Coast promised a beachfront bathing accommodate parade of "thousands of the nearly cute girls in the state." In the end, there were just a scattering of beauty queens. They were from Washington, D.C., Pittsburgh, Harrisburg, Ocean City, Camden, Newark, New York, and Philadelphia. A auspicious crowd of 100,000 gathered on the boardwalk on the forenoon of September eighth, 1921, hoping to grab a glimpse of the bathing beauties.
The first Miss America contest was kicked off by the arrival of King Neptune on a clomp that landed at the Atlantic City Yacht Society. Neptune was surrounded by a costume ball entourage called the "Frolic of Neptune" which included twenty beauties and xx male black "slaves." The winner of the Golden Mermaid trophy and $100 was chosen past an equal combination of the crowd'south applause and the points given to her by a console of artists who served as judges. The winner was xvi-twelvemonth-sometime Margaret Gorman of Washington, D.C.
Gorman's bust, waist and hip measurements were xxx-25-32. She was 5 feet one inch tall, and weighed 108 pounds. She bore a striking resemblance to the pop screen actress of the era, Mary Pickford. Gorman's openhearted grinning and youthful exuberance had won over the crowd and judges. They crowned her and wrapped her in an American flag every bit they paraded her effectually as Miss America. Samuel Gompers, the president of the American Federation of Labor, would be quoted in theNew York Times remarking, "She represents the type of womanhood America needs — strong, crimson blooded, able to shoulder the responsibilities of homemaking and motherhood. It is in her type that the hope of the state rests."
Over the next half dozen years, the parade and festivities were expanded. The dazzler competition was increasingly pop and the number of contestants rose to 83, from 36 states. To avoid the charges of immorality from bourgeois protesters appalled by the thought of young women parading themselves in public, organizers presented the contestants equally natural and unsophisticated, stressing their youth and wholesomeness. Publicity stressed that they did non wearable make-upwardly nor bob their hair — both symbols of 1920s worldliness and modernity. From the very starting time, the pageant was confronted with a disharmonize between the effort to present an image of innocence and virtue while, at the same time, promoting a spectacle where women paraded in public in bathing suits.
America's Beauty Civilization
The use of cosmetics in the nineteenth century posed a moral dilemma. Dazzler was supposed to be a manifestation of goodness, non artifice. Still, women were familiar with a wide diversity of home recipes for paints and cosmetics.
Early cosmetics were unremarkably made from home-concocted recipes. Some used lead, mercury and arsenic, which could cause illness -- or sometimes death. Americans distinguished between "paint" and "cosmetics," though products classified with these 2 terms frequently accomplished the same goal: to enhance a adult female's appearance. Cosmetics implied "peel-improving" substances, while paint denoted "pare-masking." As the heart class grew over the nineteenth century, and every bit urban life expanded, paints, particularly patent compounds, were associated with social climbers and women who would play a joke on men into marriage. The American middle and upper classes too associated the utilize of paint with the working classes. Using paint was understood as part of a disreputable effort to use artifice to hide i's social status.
During the early twentieth century, paints remained attached to stories of prostitutes or shop-girls trying to pass themselves off as "ladies." Simply slowly, women from all classes were experimenting with cosmetics and paints. Race also played a role in reactions to cosmetics. Pale pare remained the ideal throughout the nineteenth century, as role of an ethos of white supremacy and the predominant racism of the era. Withal, more natural-looking skin tints started making their appearance in the early part of the twentieth century. In black communities, brand-upwardly became a political issue. Some women chose to use peel whiteners, causing debates over whether the products indicated black self-loathing or private expression. Darker colors of face powder were introduced to the market when the black pride movements of the 1920s, such equally the one led by Marcus Garvey, began making a positive impact on African Americans' self images.
In its early years, the cosmetics manufacture was built largely past women. Despite the fact that women had picayune business organisation educational activity or the admission to credit that men had, the turn of the century saw the rise of several highly successful women entrepreneurs in the beauty business organization. 4 of the 5 near successful women dazzler entrepreneurs, the Canadian Florence Graham (later on Elizabeth Arden), the eastern European Jew Helena Rubinstein, and two African-American women, Annie Turnbo and Sarah Breedlove (later Madame Walker), came from impoverished backgrounds. Much of their success resulted from new selling techniques adopted when mainstream avenues were closed to them. They created a more personalized sales approach, similar community door-to-door selling and abode-based mail order operations. These women, who made it in the male-dominated concern globe, succeeded in an area some thought was particularly "suited" to women — businesses that catered to female body prototype. Like the Miss America Pageant, the cosmetics industry provided a identify for women to succeed — but merely within the narrow parameters deemed advisable for women.
Between 1890 and 1924 women registered 450 trademarks for cosmetics. Past the 1920s, the more than localized and service-oriented cosmetic industry, which was dominated by women, began to transform into a national organisation that put production, advertising, and distribution into the mass market. The new national cosmetic industry was run primarily by men after 1920, but information technology required women, who entered the world of cosmetics business as advertisers, and peradventure more importantly, beauty experts and the trusted tastemakers for ladies magazines such asLadies' Home Journal,McCalls andGood Housekeeping. At the end of the 1920s a fundamental change had taken place. Makeup was now perceived to exist part of a woman's expression of individuality. Far from being deceitful, the use of makeup now expressed femininity. In 1936 the first makeover appeared inMademoiselle. The discipline was a nurse, Barbara Phillips.
The national cosmetics industry and beauty pageants emerged around the same fourth dimension, equally function of a growing dazzler civilization. Past the 1920s and 1930s, taking a cue from the Miss America Contest, beauty contests were everywhere. Beauty contests were even held in high schools, equally one Fresno superintendent explained, to make students more interested in personal care; concrete education teachers rated girls' skin, pilus, muscle tone, and general appearance, amongst other criteria. At an Iowa country fair, judges measured immature women against a yardstick of health and rural virtue. The winner in 1926, reported the Des Moines Register, used no powder or rouge, cared nothing for boys and dates, did not dance, and rarely went to the movies. Very dissimilar standards applied elsewhere. In a massive study on movies and bear led by sociologist Herbert Blumer in the late 1920s and early on 1930s, 3-fourths of the 'delinquent girls' said they heightened their sex appeal past imitating picture show stars' clothes, hair, and cosmetics.
During the 1940s makeup became part of a nationalist soapbox as cosmetic advertisers made the well made-up adult female the very thing men were fighting for. Women were told it was their "right" to be feminine — even, or specially, equally they engaged in their wartime jobs. The existent explosion in the diversity of color, goods and styles came after the state of war and had a profound effect. Now there was "mood" makeup, makeup marketed for teenagers, and even renewed interest in attracting men to cosmetics. Fifty-fifty more than ever, makeup became embedded in psychological issues of self: dazzler care was a sign of mental health and accepting one'south femininity. In an era when opportunities for women declined, existence beautiful was a chore in itself. The increasing sophistication of advertising at mid-century played to people's personal vulnerabilities and sold them on self-improvement. Advert focused on how products would make buyers "ameliorate" people. For women, the focus was on how a product would brand them more "feminine."
Perhaps one of the more freeing changes in the 1950s was the acceptance of female person sexuality as something for a woman herself to enjoy. Lipsticks called "hussy" and "burn and ice" were sold to the "loftier course tramp." While there was little controversy over cosmetics in the 1950s and early 1960s, criticism exploded in the belatedly 1960s. African American women inaugurated the "natural" mode. The way and cosmetics industries, however, showed remarkable malleability, easily incorporating the new mental attitude, selling information technology every bit a expect that could only be attained by purchasing more than make-upwardly. Cosmetics that didn't look bogus were marketed as higher quality products. "Maybe she'due south born with information technology, maybe information technology's Maybelline," trumpeted one advertizement. When more than women went dorsum to cosmetics in the 1980s it was with the distinct idea that they would wear make-upwards according to their own needs and desires. The cosmetics manufacture itself became more "multicultural" than e'er before.
Women accept many reasons for using cosmetics to change their advent, in search of allure, youth, maturity, multifariousness — and the cosmetics manufacture has responded by diversifying its offerings. In 1999, the industry'south annual profits grew to $25 billion. While some critics argue the new diversity just profits white-owned businesses wanting to cash in on "a liberal image," there seems to exist a gimmicky emphasis on choice. In the end, as historian Kathy Peiss has pointed out, cosmetics mean different things to different people. "The culture of beauty has never been only a regimen of cocky-appraisement and surveillance," she writes. "Women have used makeup to declare themselves — to announce their adult condition, sexual allure, youthful spirit, political beliefs — and even to proclaim their right to self-definition."
Beauty Queens on a Earth Stage
Beauty pageants are not just an American miracle. Pageants around the globe draw on local and international audiences and span every believable group and interest. The origins of dazzler contests extend dorsum for centuries; the modern pageant can be traced to the United States and the 1921 Miss America Pageant. Hollywood films and newsreels helped spread the idea to dissimilar countries in the 1930s and 1940s. Past the 1950s, many beauty contests were held effectually the world as part of decolonization and rise nationalism.
In 1951 the Miss America Corporation, a non-profit foundation unrelated to the Miss America Pageant, unified regional contests and divide national contests and invented the Miss Earth Pageant. Later, when Miss America Yolande Betbeze refused to wear a bathing suit in public, Catalina Swimwear pulled out every bit a sponsor of the Miss America Pageant, and founded the rival Miss United states of america and Miss Universe pageants.
While beauty pageants around the world are primarily most putting arcadian versions of femininity on a competitive stage and awarding a "royal" title and crown to the winner, they are also about using femininity to represent other bug. As various equally beauty contests are around the earth, write historians Colleen Ballerino Cohen and Richard Wilk, they are remarkably similar. "Whether the title is for Miss Universe or the Kleptomaniacal Tree Cashew Queen, these contests showcase values, concepts, and behavior that exist at the center of a group's sense of itself and exhibit values of morality, gender, and identify."
Several recent pageants underscore the importance of beauty queens equally symbols. The 1996 Miss Italy Pageant generated a national dialogue on race. Denny Mendez, a black Carribean immigrant, was crowned Miss Italy. Mendez'due south victory ignited a controversy and Italians debated the issue of national identity and what it ways to exist Italian. Commentors all over the country used the Mendez victory to discuss the outcome of racial tolerance in Italia.
That same yr, the Miss World Contest, held in Bangalore, India, made international news when feminist and nationalist protesters picketed the pageant and threatened mass suicide. Their message was non simply that women were degraded, simply also that the Miss World Pageant threatened Indian culture with its importation of western values. Objections to international pageants center on the employ of these events every bit global showcases for Western products and Western standards of beauty. This critique, which equates the selling of women to the selling of Western products and values, has some ground. Miss Universe, for example, is circulate to more fourscore countries and has an audience of six hundred 1000000 people.
International pageants also play a role in national aspirations. Equally cultural scholar Sarah Banet-Weiser has suggested, many countries that transport contestants to these pageants are making a claim. In the context of the world's cultural economy, having a contestant at an international pageant can exist about challenge inclusion in the "family unit of nations" that comprises the international customs. In 1994 women from India won both the Miss World and the Miss Universe pageants. Many people in India and in other countries historic the event. Because of its newly acquired monopoly on beauty titles, Republic of india could claim its women were amid the world's most cute. In successfully meeting the pageants' standards of beauty, the new Miss World and Miss Universe staked a merits for India in the international commercial civilization these pageants stand for.
On the international stage of a pageant like Miss Universe, and on Miss America'south national stage, participants, organizers, and audience look for shared values and ways to feel national pride. Though beauty pageants sometimes have been critiqued as piffling or irrelevant, what makes them important to many people worldwide is the somewhat mysterious process past which an individual adult female tin can get a symbol of national identity, group values and pride.
Source: https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/missamerica-beauty-pageant-origins-and-culture/#:~:text=In%201921%2C%20in%20an%20effort,Miss%20America%20Pageant%20in%20September.
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