The boardwalk was the focus, the beach merely the backdrop. Enormous hotels embraced the surging tide of tourists in a seaside architectural mashup: there was the Spanish-Moorish Blenheim (the first to install private baths in every room), the Regency-style Dennis, the English Renaissance Chalfonte-Haddon Hall, and the radically modern Traymore, a $4 million art deco leviathan that housed over 3,000 guests and spanned an entire city block; its deck contained a glass-bottom fish pond that served as a ceiling to a supper club called the Submarine Grill, where strategic lighting sent the silhouettes of marine life drifting lazily around the dance floor.
“Atlantic City is not a treat for the introspective,” the critic James Huneker wrote in 1915. “It is hard, glittering, unspeakably cacophonous, and it never sleeps at all . . . From the howling of some hideous talking-machine to the loud, confident blaring of the orchestra of the wooden horses and wooden rabbits in the carousel you can’t escape noise.” As a resort that offered both family and adult urban entertainment, one of its perennial challenges was squaring pleasure with propriety. The Miss America pageant would be one of its more difficult balancing acts.
From the minute the contestants stepped off the train to meet the hostess committee on September 7, 1921, teeming crowds trailed them nonstop throughout the entire two-day festival, shouting questions, cheering, and demanding that they pose for the cameras. They were escorted to luxurious suites at the oceanfront Alamac Hotel and feted at a banquet where they met the new mayor, Edward L. Bader, freshly hand-picked in an election rigged by Nucky Johnson.
They made their formal debut the next morning, arriving by sea, perched on a barge helmed by King Neptune, a bronzed, bearded patriarch wearing purple robes and a jeweled crown. He was sixty-eight-year-old Hudson Maxim, the cheerless engineer who had invented smokeless gunpowder, contracting, as a result, a pathological sensitivity to smell. (“While I am exceedingly strong and rugged,” he told reporters, “if I were placed next to someone smelling to high heaven with perfume, I’d collapse and fall in a heap.”) He brandished his trident in his right hand, having lost the other in a lab accident. Deck guns, sirens, train whistles, and church bells heralded the arrival of the sea god and his mermaid court of dancing girls.
Mayor Bader greeted them at the Million Dollar Pier, a complex of theaters, exhibition halls, and a massive ballroom, handing Neptune a silver key to the city before the king and his court boarded a rolling float, escorted, The Atlantic City Daily Press observed, by “black slaves garbed in skins”—the only African Americans to participate in Miss America festivities for the next half century. After stepping off at the stately Keith’s Theater on the uptown Garden Pier, they chatted informally with the judging panel, chaired by one of the nation’s most famous illustrators, Howard Chandler Christy.
An emboldened successor to the statuesque turn-of-the-century “Gibson Girl,” the “Christy Girl” was plucky, sporty, a little saucy—and perhaps best remembered from Christy’s army recruitment poster: GEE!! I WISH I WERE A MAN. I’D JOIN THE NAVY. She was a fashionable socialite who appeared, in his illustrations between 1898 and 1920, at leisure with boyfriends or classmates, but never at home or at work, because Christy’s ideal woman was transitional. She was liberated but limited—no longer the domestic goddess of yesteryear, but not exactly a feminist either. “Charm and a knack for inspiring manly acts are the extent of [her] personal power,” writes Martha Banta in Imaging American Women: Idea and Ideals in Cultural History. Christy, who chaired the judging committee for the pageant’s first five years, strongly supported educating women—to make them better wives and mothers.
The other judges included, incongruously, the manager of the Ritz-Carlton hotel, the aging actor John Drew (of Barrymore dynasty fame), and two local artists who, with Christy, oversaw a range of sub-competitions, with the most significant division separating amateurs from professionals who’d worked as dancers, actresses, and models. Gorman and Virginia Lee, a stunning silent film actress from New York, were rumored favorites.
That evening, reunited with Neptune, the Inter-City Beauties mounted a waterfront platform to watch a show by a children’s vaudeville troupe called Dawson’s Dancing Dolls. Seated where the audience could gaze at them as well as at the performers, the women were publicly introduced afterward, and cheers for Gorman could be heard, The Atlantic City Daily Press marveled, “from one end of the beach to the other.”
The Atlantic City Pageant’s central event kicked off the next day with the rolling chair parade, as hundreds of flower-bedecked floats and chairs rumbled, this time, down the boardwalk, the thrumming main artery of the city. The floats advertised businesses, amusements, and civic organizations from the Rotary Club to the Press-Union Company, represented by a nine-foot-long copy of The Atlantic City Daily Press bearing a headline announcing the pageant. The neighboring town of Ventnor’s procession stretched for an entire block, with the mayor leading, flanked by the police and fire departments. The beauties rolled too, flaunting their assets in the hope of winning one of the many prizes to be awarded at the crowning ceremony that evening. Wearing a gold-spangled dress and bronze-tinted shoes, Gorman bowed and smiled at hooting fans as children threw flowers in her path.
She was already a star, having made a splash that morning in the beachfront Bathers’ Revue, where she and the others marched unsteadily along a 1,300-foot swath of sand roped off and marked with flags. Gorman wore a modest taffeta swimsuit with a tiered skirt and dark knee-high stockings, drawing cheers for her “natty beach rig” and earning points as well, since public enthusiasm counted toward contestants’ final scores. The others sported one-and two-piece suits, a few with skirts hanging to the knee, and one—Miss Pittsburgh—with pants that ended, shockingly, above mid-thigh.
They wore headbands to secure their hair in the wind, belts or scarves tied at the waist, and laced boots, flats, or low heels, posing for photos with feet splayed or even planted six inches apart, in contrast to the “pretty feet” stance (with one foot slightly forward) prescribed in later years. Likewise, the compulsive smiling that later became a pageant hallmark wasn’t yet reflexive. Photos capture the hopefuls looking variously amused, relaxed, bored, impatient, distracted, or downright stern—charmingly human, and more like the children most of them were than the women they were presumed to be.
And yet, something scandalous was happening. The New York Times reported that during the Bathers’ Revue, “the censor ban on bare knees and skin-tight bathing suits was suspended and thousands of spectators gasped as they applauded the girls, who were judged on their shapeliness and carriage, as well as beauty of face.”
The exposure of bare knees wasn’t just unusual; it was illegal. The city’s 1907 Mackintosh Law prohibited swimwear that ended more than four inches above the knee without stockings rolled up over the thigh to bridge the difference. It was enforced by “beach cops” who trudged around commanding offenders to “Roll ’em up, sister.” (Men, too, were required to cover their chests with tank tops.) A few days before the Atlantic City Pageant, a thirty-nine-year-old writer named Louise Rosine was stopped for wearing her stockings rolled down to her ankles on a blazingly hot day, then jailed for delivering a “lusty blow” to the officer who insisted she cover them.
“I most certainly will not ‘roll ’em up,’” Rosine declared. “The city has no right to tell me how I shall wear my stockings. It is none of their darn business.” She wore her swimsuit in jail—knees exposed—to protest her arrest, and announced, through a formal complaint, that “bare feminine knees” were protected by the Constitution.
Rosine hailed from Los Angeles, where regulations were looser. The question of acceptable beachwear for women was the subject of lively national discussion, and the rules varied regionally. A year earlier, on New York’s Rockaway Beach, twenty “sheriffettes” had been sworn in to enforce modesty regulations. In 1921, Hawaii enacted a law stipulating that no one over fourteen could wear a bathing suit without an “outer garment” extending to the knees. The summer before the pageant, one-piece women’s suits were banned on Long Island, along with voyeuristic “beach lizards”—“bald-headed men who come to the beach to stare.”
Bathing