Mickey McElya
speaker
374 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Aug 2026
last heard 3 Aug
Mickey McElya’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 1.
Appearances
It's enormous.
And it actually gets really big over those first few years until the end of the 1920s.
when it seems to have – it has both been protested by different groups in the country but has lost its luster for the large hotel interests that have been supporting it.
But as you move through the 1930s, the 1940s, during the Great Depression, it is largely reduced.
It doesn't happen for a couple of years.
But it really becomes the Miss America pageant that we understand today in the 1940s, in the post-World War II moment.
And Atlantic City itself is crucial both to mobilizing for war and then for the demobilization that occurs later because those large hotels and enormous convention center provide the institutional structures for processing enormous numbers of men.
In the aftermath, they provide hotel rooms for injured men.
And for men dealing with really significant injuries from their war service to sort of transition into their lives back home.
And so really it sounds like it was almost an act of patriotism and to bring the spirits up of Americans and war heroes as they came back.
Oh, absolutely.
And a space that had been so identified with that.
There's a story in a nationally circulated magazine around the time that says, now it's not just Miss America that's on the boardwalk, but Mr. America is there too, commenting on the fact that the city is now overrun with new inductees into the service.
But
In that moment, the sort of military patriotism, those associations that will then be so cemented and so powerful by the 1960s are really coalescing in ways that the pageant had been popular.
It had been the subject of films.
It had been the subject of scandals.
People have seen the pageant all over the country because in the 20s it's being shown in newsreels before feature films or they're listening to it live on the radio.
But
By the 1940s, it really gets this association of this is representative of the United States.
Showing 61–80 of 374 · page 4 of 19
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