Miss America

Bryant, who died of cancer last month at the age of 84, first became known as a beauty queen—Miss Oklahoma, and then the second runner-up for Miss America 1959—and a pop singer, crooning the Top 10 hits “Paper Roses” and “In My Little Corner of the World.”

He was also known for hosting the Miss America pageant in the early 1980s, where he met his wife Valerie.

Margot Mifflin is a professor at the City University of New York and the author, most recently, of “Looking for Miss America: A Pageant’s 100-year Quest to Define Womanhood.”

Apart from a voting scandal at the Miss America contest in 2022, recent controversies have tended to be in less developed parts of the world.

Swift discussed speaking out more often about politics in her January 2020 documentary Miss America.