Being Miss America: Behind the Rhinestone Curtain (Discovering America) Read Online Free PDF

was a rare moment for her, one that found her back on her heels instead of proactively taking charge of the situation. By all accounts, she just didn’t get Bess Myerson’s back.
    Although there may not have been any outward indicators that Lenora Slaughter was fumbling with how to handle the situation, the message apparently came through loud and clear to the pageant’s sponsors. Myerson reportedly received far fewer invitations than her predecessors for public appearances from sponsors like Ford and Catalina. “Those companies didn’t want a Jew representing them,” she has said. Even during her appearances at veterans’ hospitals, where a large portion of her audience had fought against the extermination of the Jewish race, she remembers encountering anti-Semitism.
    With the benefit of history and information that Lenora Slaughter did not have, it’s easy to look back and call her behavior in the Bess Myerson episode cowardly at best, bigoted at worst. But consider this: nearly seven decades later, there are still Fifth Avenue apartment buildings that New York real estate agents are quietly advised not to show to their Jewish buyers, because their purchase will never be approved by the building’s board of directors. The story of Jewish culture in America in any era is a complex one, and certainly beyond the scope of this particular project. But this episode was an early and obvious example of two of the pageant’s most consistent and self-destructive patterns: first, defaulting to a reactive position (rather than crafting a clear and firm identity and sticking with it), and second, sacrificing the young women it claims to celebrate in the name of the pageant’s survival.
    Fortunately, Myerson herself had the fortitude that the pageant lacked, and demonstrated the type of big-picture vision that allows significant human beings to hurdle over insignificant ones. After all, women had fought for the vote, flown airplanes, run the country while “the boys” were fighting for Europe’s freedom. Women had already internalized that they had options besides dutifully staying home with the kids. The boldest among them, like Alice Paul, like Amelia Earhart, like Bess Myerson, followed through by leveraging their power into action.
    Instead of sitting alone and frustrated in her hotel room, wishing she could have her picture taken with hope chests and helpful household appliances, Bess Myerson joined forces with the thirty-year-old Anti-Defamation League. Instead of spending time in department stores, as many of her predecessors had done, this Miss America launched a speaking tour. She determined that she would “make her reign one that would matter.” When the ADL suggested she use her position to speak to students and community groups, she jumped at the chance. She toured 15 cities. Pageant officials were not pleased, Myerson recalled. ‘They accused me of making communist speeches sponsored by Jewish manufacturers.’”
    Bess Myerson used her unique celebrity to push the pageant—uphill and pretty much against its will—toward a type of meaning it hadn’t yet experienced and probably didn’t deserve. Like Jean Bartel before her, she left a legacy when she handed over her crown. By the end of 1945, Miss America could both go to college and say something important to the world, from the perspective of a young woman whose voice would not otherwise be heard. Although Slaughter had tested the idea of framing Miss America as a serious, intelligent, independent young woman, it had been understood that things were done on her terms. Rather than let Slaughter’s lack of faith in her potential dictate her narrative, Myerson was the first to take control of her own destiny. Ironically, it was this exact defiance of the pageant leadership that allowed her to make manifest the qualities that Miss America endeavored to embody.
    Even today, Myerson continues to be considered an anomaly—significantly lauded, somewhat