As the king of Toronto babies 1919, John Robinson smiled his two-toothed grin, oblivious to the pain he’d caused the other parents.

It was early September, the end of the Ex. Nearly 200 of “the most beautiful specimens of Toronto babyhood” had been weighed on a glistening scale and measured by doctors and nurses judging the annual Baby Contest. Their heads and chest circumference were measured, and their overall looks taken into account. Many parents hoped the results would confirm that their child was the most beautiful in the city, but the verdicts were harsh and unrelenting.

One baby was ruled out because his upper lip was a little “out of shape” from a recent feeding. Infants were deemed too long or too short, too heavy, too slim. Babies with blemishes, mosquito bites or “crooked limbs” didn’t make it past the preliminary tent into the final judging at the dairy building.

One mother muttered that her baby was just as good as the others, another blamed her child’s poor showing on a nurse. One woman with a lilting Irish accent told a newspaper reporter that her husband didn’t think their child should be entered because of her great beauty: “Some jealous woman’ll be knifing you,” he advised. (That baby didn’t place but that was probably for the best, as the mother said she was already too “foolish” and vain about her daughter.)

“There is a very bitter side to every baby show,” the Globe wrote in 1919, and that was true even into the 1960s, as the CNE’s baby contest was sputtering toward its demise, and a father dismissed one judge as nothing more than a “horse doctor,” and a mother demanded an explanation for her son’s ousting, even though the program clearly stated that decisions were final, discussions with judges forbidden. (A doctor quietly whispered an explanation to ease her misery: her baby had been felled by a rash.)

“People are self-selecting because they think their baby is the best bred and the most beautiful, and then to be told, or worse yet, to find out that there is something wrong with your child could be so emotionally devastating,” says Jane Nicholas, a history professor at the University of Waterloo and the author of Canadian Carnival Freaks and the Extraordinary Body, 1900-1970s. She doesn’t judge the parents — then or now — but as a cultural historian, she is more interested in what is happening in Canada at the time.

Amid high rates of infant mortality in early 20th-century Canada, the baby contest was a powerful and popular way to “promote scientific ideals,” Nicholas writes in her book. The measurements were “codified aesthetic judgements,” that were “developed using white, middle-class children, introducing racial and class biases that would be perpetuated for decades,” she notes. Once called “beautiful baby” contests, they became “better baby” contests in an age of eugenics and concern over public health.

According to their records, the CNE held its first baby contest in 1910, with “three hundred chubby mites” in the competition, and several “prominent medical men” in the judge’s chairs, who declared they had never seen such beauty. The babies were marked on appearance, health, dress, “physical defects,” proportions, muscular development and “the probability as to becoming healthy adults,” as the Star noted in their coverage.

In 1919, Toronto was becoming more diverse, but there was little evidence of the changing demographics in the winner’s circle of the baby contest the year John Robinson won.

“The triangulation of whiteness, cuteness, and healthiness is important if unsurprising,” writes Nicholas. “Negatively racialized children were often excluded from the category of cute and deemed to be of lesser value than white babies, who were seen as a symbol of racial and national preservation and success.”

It was “total garbage” with no basis in science, she says. “But this is a deeply held and really widely held belief in Canada at the time.”

People were drawn in by the hundreds, seeking affirmation, prize money, or a novel way to spend the day. Little boys wore collared shirts and caps, and the girls were dressed in lace outfits with Peter Pan collars and bonnets. The mothers were often gussied up like it was Easter Sunday, with high-heeled shoes and pearl necklaces. The contest was an institution. In 1928, one woman who was very ill insisted that her child be entered in that summer’s challenge no matter if she was alive to see it. She died before the Ex, but the baby’s grandmother, dressed in black, foisted the infant into the arms of the reporters and judges, proud of the child’s weight.

During the First World War, Canada was in the midst of a health crisis. Young men showing up to enlist weren’t meeting basic requirements for height and overall health, and the Canadian government realized it needed to play a bigger role in keeping its citizens healthy, she explains. The baby show gained steam with the idea “that as long as they’re well bred and healthy when they’re young, we can help to assure we have a healthy population,” she says.

A judge said at the close of one contest during the war: “There’s no doubt about the future of Canada when you see a crowd like this.”

Infant mortality rates were also very high at the turn of the century. In 1911, the Globe noted that one in every four babies was dying before it reached a year, and 70 per cent of the deaths were preventable. “The baby show does its share in caring for the baby and promoting interest in him,” the paper noted: “Educate the mother and save the child.”

For the doctors and nurses, it was a good way to get their messages of “scientific mothering” to the public, and gather data for their advice literature, Nicholas says. In 1910 the CNE judges were “anxious to make it known” that the top nine babies had all been breastfed. In 1911, the public health department was also at the baby show with signs urging parents not to sleep in the same bed as their infant, not to let their baby sleep in a room with a closed window, and not to feed their child while it was lying down.

Breastfeeding, they said, was “God’s plan.” On a series of placards, they also advised: “There’s death in the dirty bottle” and “Don’t use pacifiers” and “Don’t feed a baby every time it cries.” By the time John Robinson took the crown, breastfeeding was still favoured by the Ontario health department, Nicholas says, but a lot of medical attention was also paid to “artificial feeding, including infant formula introduced at Sick Kids.”

By the early 1970s, the baby contest was losing its lustre. Attendance was low. It was becoming hard to find doctors to judge the contest because of “fear of reprisals,” and some had requested that their names not be released publicly. The medical profession had evolved, infant mortality rates had declined, and doctors didn’t need the contest for their “own professional reasons anymore,” Nicholas says.

The CNE baby contest was cancelled in the spring of 1973, before that summer’s fair.

The baby show had become slightly more diverse, but it wasn’t keeping pace with the city. “Every year it was usually a girl or a boy with blue eyes and blond hair,” says David Garrick, who was then general manager of the Ex.

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Garrick heard concerns from his staff and saw them in the exit surveys too. The world was changing, and the public was also becoming uncomfortable with the “freak show,” too. (He cancelled that as well, but in his mind, the best freak show was always the man-eating chicken, which was just a man in a room eating KFC. “It was sort of the best con you could do for a quarter,” he says from his home in Kingston.)

There was talk of reviving the CNE’s baby contest in the 1980s. According to internal memos at the Exhibition Place archives, the “Great Canadian Baby Contest” would be a 14-day bonanza, where babies would compete in daily contests designed to avoid the “hard feelings” of the past with new categories like “most solemn baby,” “baby with the most teeth,” and “the baby with the most dimples.”

A guide on how to judge babies tucked into the manila folder reads likes an application for toddler Mensa. Speak to a child for a few minutes to decide who is the friendliest. See how the babies respond to light, animals, colour — do they move right away or do they “need to be coaxed?” Which baby has the largest vocabulary? Staff wondered about a crawling race, or a contest where babies hammered down pegs.

Each winner of the daily category would receive $1,000, and among those winners, a grand champion would be crowned the Great Canadian Baby of 1983, awarded a $5,000 scholarship. “It is suggested that the judges have a varied ethnic background to avoid any criticism of discrimination,” one memo read.

Jane Nicholas says “it’s almost like early reality television,” noting that in the 1980s, there was a boost in pageants in general.

The CNE couldn’t get enough sponsors, and no infant was ever crowned the Great Canadian Baby.

These days, “baby programs” still exist at a handful of fairs, primarily in traditional farming communities west of Toronto, says Vince Brennan, the manager of the Ontario Association of Agricultural Societies.

“I don’t even like to use ‘contest,’ ” he says. “You don’t do that with people, you do that with livestock.”

There used to be a “beautiful baby” category at the Brigden Fall Fair, but it only caused trouble, says Jackie South, who used to run the baby show in the small town near Sarnia. “People would say my baby should have won, you know how it goes,” she says. In the late 1980s, when nobody wanted to helm the show because of the drama, she took it over as the volunteer chairperson. “I’m one of these stupid people that says, ‘It can’t be that hard.’ ”

The contest was already changing, but South created categories like “chubbiest cheeks” and “longest fingers,” because “that way you didn’t have to say your baby’s cuter than my baby,” she says.

“There are a few ugly babies out there but you can’t say that to a family.”

For a time, South and her team also gave out a best-dressed award, but it was “unbelievable” how people brought their babies in six layers of crinoline — so she changed it to “best dressed for the fair,” hoping to encourage more comfortable clothes.

South moved on from the baby show a few years ago to help with the parade. She’s currently in charge of the fruit and vegetable building, but “there’s not many people growing gardens,” she says.

She is not sure how long the baby show will endure, but it still draws about 100 entrants — and their family members, which is good news for admissions. She has always been a bit surprised by its popularity.

“I don’t know why you’d put your child through that,” she says with a laugh. “Drag it to the fair, have it sitting there trying to be nice.”

She was too busy on the farm to enter her children but she does understand some of the motivation: “It’s the same thing we all think of when we got a new baby: It’s beautiful, there’s nothing wrong with it, and I want everybody to see it,” she says. And people want the ribbon, she says.

Her granddaughter won a prize for being the loudest baby a few years ago. South was proud. “She screamed the whole time she was out there,” she says, laughing.

The contest has evolved, but there is one rule that hasn’t changed, and you’ll find it in the rules for the Brigden Fair baby show.

The judge’s decision is final.