The first Ms. America and Charles Edison’s BFF, the ‘Most Versatile Man in the World’

The first Ms. America didn’t really want her title. Later in her life, when interviewed about the experience, Margaret Gorman said “I never cared. It wasn’t my idea. I am so bored by it all. I really want to forget the whole thing.” Gorman was born on August 18, 1905. She lived with her parents and brother in Washington, DC where her father was a bureaucrat who worked in the Department of Agriculture. When our story begins, Gorman was 15 and petite, standing her full adult height of five-foot-two, weighing about 108 pounds.

In the summer of 1921, the Washington Herald newspaper held a popularity contest and invited young women to submit their photographs for a chance to win. When interviewed by Frank Deford, for his 1971 book There She Is; The Life and Times of Miss America, Margaret Gorman, the first Ms. America, said that she couldn’t remember sending in her photo, if someone else had sent it, or how exactly she learned that she had won a place in the inaugural contest. What she did remember was that 1921 was the summer that she fell “madly in love” for the first time.

Contemporaneous reporting, and other pieces written about the history of the Miss America Pageant, suggest that Gorman had entered her photograph to the contest on a whim. That summer, Gorman was on the school break between her sophomore and junior years at Western High School in Washington, DC, the town where she lived all her life. Earlier that season, Gorman had entered, and won, a similar beauty contest which had been sponsored by the Washington Post, the Herald’s rival paper. Some sources report that Gorman entered several regional beauty contests that same summer.

This type of newspaper-sponsored contest had existed for at least 20 years, and the tournament style bracket seems to have existed for most of that history. Young women would compete in local competitions sponsored by local papers who would poll the area in which they circulated their publication, the winners would move up to regional contests. In some cases, national competitions were held. One such example, the Most Beautiful Girl In America contest, held in Los Angeles in 1915, awarded its champion, Ruth Maria Purcell, with a movie studio contract.

The Herald, along with seven or eight other papers in the area, had partnered with the Businessmen’s League of Atlantic City to create the contest. The winner from each paper was to be given a free trip to Atlantic City, New Jersey where all would compete to determine the final winner. The Atlantic City contest was to be held immediately after Labor Day.

In the mid 19th century, Atlantic City had become a popular beach resort town, especially with people from the area in and around Philadelphia. A boardwalk was added in the 1870s, and soon arcades, hotels, hot dog stands and saltwater taffy shops were everywhere, and a distinctive and iconic American summer experience was established. The Labor Day holiday weekend unofficially closed the city’s summer events season, and in 1920, the Businessmen’s League organized an event they called the Fall Frolic to extend the season and the profits that came with all the vacationers who came to stay.

The main event at the Fall Frolic was centered around three-hundred-and-fifty rolling wicker chairs which had been decorated for a parade, with three-hundred-and-fifty men who had agreed to push ‘Maidens’ in the chairs down a designated route. Miss Ernestine Cremona headed up the procession, wearing a diaphanous white robe to represent “Peace.” The whole event was a success, and it was clear that the Maidens were the biggest attraction, which the Businessmen’s League remembered when they soon began planning for the next year.

A committee was organized to create a “Bather’s Review” for 1921. Newspaper Pageants, where the contestants were selected from photo submissions, were already popular across the east coast, and out as far west as Pittsburgh. Newspapers across that area were asked to sponsor their own local contests, and if the papers would pay for their winner’s wardrobe, the Businessmen’s League agreed to cover the cost for the local winners to travel to Atlantic City so that they could participate in what was tentatively being called an Inner City Beauty Contest. A local, Atlantic City newspaperman named Herb Test suggested that they call the winner of the contest Miss America.

Oddly, Test’s suggestion was not the immediate choice. There was actually quite the argument about the name of the title the so-called “Civic Beauties” would be competing for, though the pageant was proceeding with its preliminary award name, the “Inner City Beauty Contest Winner.” It did not exactly roll off the tongue, but was the most popular choice among its organizers.

The Fall Frolic in 1921 was to be five full days of events, which included concerts, parades, a tennis tournament, and Bathing Suit Competitions for seven different categories of participants. The whole community was to attend dressed in their swimsuits, even the policemen and firemen who went. There was to be a separate division for “professional women,” which meant actresses from both stage and screen.

Back in DC, there were about 1000 young ladies who entered the Washington Herald’s local contest. On August 28, ten days after Gorman turned 16, the judges of the contest, which PBS says were “mostly the heads of affluent Washington societal organizations,” selected six finalists. Gorman was one, and she and the rest of the girls began touring the area, with escorts, to drum up support and publicity. The six finalists were then invited to the Arts Club of Washington’s Italian Garden where the same judges interviewed each finalist and watched each parade down a garden path for inspection. The next day, Washington Herald reporter John Boucher appeared at Gormans home on Cambridge Place, in the Oak Hill Cemetery and Montrose Park area, to tell Margaret that she was the winner. Apparently it was a “viciously hot day,” and she was not at home, Boucher was sent by her parents to find their daughter at a park nearby. The reporter wrote that when he found her “the woman who, next month, would be declared ‘the most beautiful Bathing Girl in America’ – she was shooting marbles in the dirt.”

Immediately, Gorman, who later said she was “just a little schoolgirl” at the time, became a local celebrity. The pageant, which was scheduled for September 7-9, 1921, was about a week away, and what a week it was for the teenager. Gorman was given free clothing from local businesses, went to the White House to meet President Warren G. Harding and his wife, First Lady Florence Mable Harding, and received dozens of invitations to dinners and parties being thrown by various governmental officials. When she got to Union Station on Tuesday the sixth of September, with her mother and a chaperone, to catch her train to Atlantic City, hundreds of people were waiting to watch Miss Washington, DC leave, and wish her luck.

In anticipation of the contest, the east coast had been covered in advertising posters that promised “bathing beauties,” a press release said that “Thousands of the most beautiful girls in the land, including stage stars and movie queens, will march in bathing review before judges in the Atlantic City Fall Pageant.” This was a blatant lie, as the contest was only one of many, and there were not thousands of contestants for all of the events combined. At the actual event, there were only a few women who were actually award winning beauty queens.

In addition to the women’s contests there were competitions for local, Atlantic City organizations, as well as contests for men and for children The beauty contest contestants were divided up into subcategories. Gorman was competing in the newspaper class, which was for amateurs, and the rules stated that “no actresses, motion picture players, or professional swimmers” would be allowed to compete against them; those ladies were to be judged in their own separate contests.

The competition began when King Neptune arrived on a barge which docked at the Atlantic City Yacht Club. King Neptune was not just anyone in costume, nor was he from Atlantic City. Neptune was Hudson Maxim, a noted inventor and chemist who Thomas Edison called “the most versatile man in America,” and who invented smokeless gunpowder and a variety of other stable explosives which he eventually sold to the multinational chemical company DuPont de Nemours, Inc., more commonly known as ‘DuPont.’ A fascinating individual, Maxim lost his left hand in 1894, during an experiment with mercury fulminate that ended in an explosion. Also interested in use of language, he wrote a book in 1910 called The Science Of Poetry and the Philosophy of Language, in which he posited that as in science, there were natural laws which governed use of language, and that excellent writing, like the works of William Shakespeare, was the result of the author understanding those natural laws and utilizing them in their creative work. When Maxim emerged from the barge dressed as Neptune he was surrounded by twenty young women in similarly themed costumes in a promenade which was called “The Frolic of Neptune.” Horribly, and inexcusably, part of the entourage was a group of twenty Black men who were referred to as ‘Slaves.’

The winner of the pageant would be awarded a literal Golden Mermaid trophy and $100, and it was explained to the crowd that she would be selected by points given by a panel of artists who were the competition’s judges, equally combined with the applause from the audience which was received by each contestant. Gorman was the smallest of all the contestants she was competing with, six other young women who were referred to collectively as the ‘Civic Beauties.’ The contestants were: Margaret Bates, Miss Newark; Kathryn M. Gearon, Miss Camden; Hazel Harris, Miss Ocean City; Virginia Lee, New York City; Thelma Matthews, Miss Pittsburgh; Nellie Orr, Miss Philadelphia; Emma Pharo, Miss Harrisburg; and, of course, Margaret Gorman, Miss Washington, DC. On the morning of their contest, September 8, 1921, a crowd made up of 100,000 cheering spectators was waiting for the Bathing Beauties on the boardwalk. The contest was held in a roped off area of beach, and the ladies had to parade across loose, hot sand. The winner would be announced the next day, as judging for all of the contests at the Fall Frolic were scheduled to commence Wednesday.

On the Garden Pier in Atlantic City, inside the Keith Theatre, a panel of artists serving as judges, which included the matinee idol John Drew and the well-known illustrator Howard Chandler Christy, compared their scores. Selecting the winner of the Bathing Beauties wound up being a complicated affair; there were two frontrunners who were vying for the title. One was Margaret Gorman, who wore her hair in a long, loose, Victorian-influenced style and wore a demure swimsuit made of tiered layers of chiffon with a sash around her waist. More than a few writers have remarked upon her resemblance to the movie star of the same era, Mary Pickford. The Washington Herald, writing about the contest, said that “a photograph unfortunately gives no idea of her fine coloring, or rare charm.”

The other contender was Virginia Lee, Miss New York. A pretty blond, twenty-years-old, Lee was a frequent model for artists in Manhattan, a factor that played into the judges decision. Amy Argetsinger, author of There She Was: The Secret History of Miss America, wrote in her book that “very late in the hours after Wednesday’s competition and ahead of Thursday night’s crowning, Virginia was disqualified.” The determination was that Lee was a professional, and that such a classification was in violation of the contest’s rules. A married woman, though it does not seem that marriage was against the rules, Miss New York did have a burgeoning film career, with as many as twelve credits already accumulated. It is also possible that the judges saw a potential conflict of interest; Howard Chandler Christy was the chief judge of the contest, who Lee had an existing working relationship with, and were also known to be friends. The artist had been quoted earlier in 1921 as saying that Lee was “my most marvelous model, the ideal Christy girl.” Lee was moved into the ‘professionals’ contest, where she easily won that competition’s Endicott Trophy, and the title “Most Charming Professional” over the group of lesser-known models and actresses which were her competition.

Margaret was declared the winner and was awarded the “Beauty Urn,” Miss Camden, Kathryn M. Gearon, was the first runner-up. The complicated contest rules then paired the winners of the amateur contest against the professional. Margaret Gorman, with her girl-next-door look, was the judges choice over Virginia Lee’s more mature, professional appearance. Gorman was declared the winner of the Golden Mermaid trophy. By some accounts, the trophy meant that Lee was Gorman’s runner-up, others reported that the ladies’ wins were equal. Either way, Lee was not happy about the decision, and she was still mad 72 years later.

The New York Times, in its coverage of the events, quoted the president of the American Federation of Labor, Samuel Gompers, who said that Gorman “represents the type of womanhood America needs — strong, red blooded, able to shoulder the responsibilities of homemaking and motherhood. It is in her type that the hope of the country rests.”

To the ceremony where Gorman was declared the winner, she wore a sea green, sequined chiffon dress to the event, a costume which was intended to emulate Lady Liberty. A pearl-studded crown was placed on her head and King Neptune draped an American flag over her shoulders, and officially presented the winner to the audience which included many reporters who would be telling the story across the nation. But Gorman was still not given the title ‘Miss America.’ The Golden Mermaid statue she won was 10 inches high, 36 inches long, and was said to be valued at $5,000. In reality, it was worth closer to $50.

Back in Washington, Gorman’s victory made all the major papers. One of her high school friends sent Gorman a telegram in Atlantic City. It read: “Congratulations. Don’t get stuck up,” and was sent cash on delivery (COD), and the delivery person had to ask Gorman to pay the 35 cents which was the cost of delivery.

Arriving home, Gorman remembered, “There were a bunch of people in the station to meet me, and all that foolishness.” Her fame faded quickly, and she was soon as anonymous as any other student at Western High School.

The next summer, Gorman was expected to return to Atlantic City and defend her title, but no one could decide what to call her. The Herald had already picked another Miss Washington, DC. Someone seriously suggested she be called “The Most Beautiful Bathing Girl in America.” Pageant officials eventually decided she would be called Miss America, the title Herb Test had originally suggested. Gorman is the only winner in the history of the Miss America pageant to receive her title at the end of the year she reigned. In 1922, when she returned to defend her title, Gorman perhaps set a precedent for the pageant when she cried happily when another contestant won.

Gorman would compete for a few years, but never again won first prize. She worked for pageant events, a bit of a celebrity, made a burlesque film, a comedy which caricatures more serious works, in 1922 about the burning of Rome. The film was made by the Washington Producing Company, and she played opposite Stephen Fegan, also of Washington, DC.

In 1925, Gorman married her high school sweetheart, Vincent Cahill, possibly that first love she’d mentioned. He was a real estate broker, and Mrs. Cahill became something of a socialite, though she made a concerted effort to stay out of the spotlight for the rest of her life. Of her time as a star pageant winner, Margaret said late in her life, “Would I do it again? Oh, never in my life, I don’t like publicity, good, bad or indifferent. My husband hated it, I did, too.”

The couple never had any children, though their marriage was very happy. Mr. Cahill died in 1957. For the rest of her life, according to many sources, Mrs. Cahill kept her green chiffon dress in the back of her closet. Margaret also kept her ‘Beauty Urn.’ She gave the Golden Mermaid trophy to her brother, William L. Gorman, who for many years kept the Golden Mermaid by the swimming pool at his home near the Hialeah Racetrack in Miami Springs, Florida.

For many years, Margaret made appearances for the Miss America Pageant, supporting the organization until 1960. That year, the pageant had promised to reimburse her travel expenses if she would attend a reunion. When the $1,500 was not paid back to her, Margaret publicly called the organization cheap, and refused to ever again participate in its functions. The Miss America pageant retaliated by publicly labeling her inactive on all their public facing materials.

As a widow she lived in a condo in Washington, DC, which was not very far from the house she grew up in back on Cambridge Place. In 1995, while ill with pneumonia, Margaret Gorman Cahill suffered a heart attack and died at 90 years old. She was survived by her brother, who had since relocated to Ft. Meyers, Florida.