The finalists for the title of Miss America 1948 were bustling around backstage in the suspenseful closing moments of the annual pageant when a motherly volunteer issued the command: “Girls, get into your swimsuits.” Yet as they raced off to change, she stopped BeBe Shopp from following the others.
“I thought I’d done something wrong,” recalls Shopp, who was an 18-year-old farmgirl and vibraphone player when she arrived in Atlantic City, New Jersey, as Miss Minnesota.
Suddenly, the pageant’s formidable executive director Lenora Slaughter appeared at Shopp’s side. From her handbag, she unspooled the coveted lettered sash: “Miss America 1948.” And that’s how Shopp learned she had won.
Shopp’s four runners-up—including Miss Kansas Vera Miles, the future star of the classic 1960 horror film Psycho—would take the stage that September night to claim their prizes in the swimsuits they had worn into the competition: black-and-white striped Catalina maillots. The crowning of the Miss America court traditionally played out this way, the top five in the skimpy beachwear that had defined the pageant from its beginnings. But Slaughter had a new vision for 1948: Miss America herself would be crowned, not in her swim togs, but in a full-length evening gown.
“She wanted an image,” explains Shopp. Slaughter was always searching in those days for ways to dignify the title and elevate the women who won it.
Last month, the 91-year-old Shopp donated her original Catalina swimsuit to the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History—one of the first big acquisitions in a new initiative to collect items connected to the Miss America pageant on the occasion of its 100th anniversary.
Ryan Lintelman, the museum’s curator of entertainment, says the pageant’s ever-shifting attempts to define some notion of ideal womanhood make it a fascinating lens to examine a century of American social and cultural change. Some items may find a home in the long-term “Entertainment Nation” exhibition scheduled to open in 2022.
Other acquisitions include a hearing-aid-compatible microphone used by Heather Whitestone, the first deaf Miss America of 1995; the insulin pump worn during the 1999 competition worn by Miss America Nicole Johnson, who advocated for diabetes awareness during her reign; and the mandarin collar pantsuit that Miss America 2001 Angela Perez Baraquio, the first Asian-American winner, appeared in for her on-stage interview as a tribute to her Chinese lineage.
These objects chart Miss America’s fitful evolution into the modern era—from a giddy seaside beauty contest to the multi-layered competition a generation grew up watching on TV, through decades when organizers strived to celebrate merit, professional ambition and cultural diversity. In 2018, to diminish the emphasis on physical appearance, pageant organizers scrapped the swimsuit competition.