These Truths

by Jill Lepore

  Joseph Goebbels, Germany’s minister of propaganda, made especially effective use of radio, here used to address Hitler Youth. Newspapers had been predicting local election results for decades, but predicting the outcome of a national election required a network of newspapers. In 1904, the New York Herald, the Cincinnati Enquirer, the Chicago Record-Herald and the St. Louis Republic joined forces to forecast elections, tallying their straws together. By 1916, the Herald had organized a group of newspapers in thirty-six states. That year, the Literary Digest, a national magazine, began mailing out ballots as a publicity stunt. The Digest used its polls to try to attract new subscribers; its plan was to collect more ballots than anyone else. In 1920, the Digest distributed eleven million ballots and, in 1924, more than sixteen million.89 For reach, its only real rival was the chain of newspapers owned by William Randolph Hearst, which was able to report the results of polls in forty-three states. Although the Literary Digest sometimes miscalculated the popular vote, it always got the Electoral College winner right. In 1924, the Digest’s forecast was right for all but two states and in 1928 for all but four.

  A newspaperman named Emil Hurja figured out that this method was nevertheless bound to fail, since what matters is not the size of a stack of straws but its variety. Hurja tried to convince the Democratic National Committee to conduct its straw polls using ore sampling methods. “In mining you take several samples from the face of the ore, pulverize them, and find out what the average pay per ton will be,” Hurja explained. “In politics you take sections of voters, check new trends against past performances, establish percentage shift among different voting strata, supplement this information from competent observers in the field, and you can accurately predict an election result.” In 1928, the DNC dismissed Hurja as a crank, but by 1932 he was running FDR’s campaign.90 By 1932, the Literary Digest’s mailing list had grown to more than twenty million names. Most of those names were taken from telephone directories and automobile registration files. Hurja was one of the few people who understood that the Digest had consistently underestimated FDR’s support because its sample, while very big, was not very representative: people who supported FDR were much less likely than the rest of the population to own a telephone or a car.91

  Hurja was borrowing from the insights of social science. But the real innovation in public opinion measurement was a method that had been devised by social scientists in the 1920s, which was to use statistics to estimate the opinions of a vast population by surveying a statistically representative sample.

  Political polling is the marriage of journalism and social science, a marriage made by George Gallup. “When I went to college, I wanted to study journalism, and later on go out and be an editor of a newspaper,” Gallup said, remembering his days at the University of Iowa in the 1920s, but “in my day I couldn’t get a degree in journalism, so I got my degree in psychology.” He graduated in 1923, entered a graduate program in a new field, Applied Psychology, where everyone was talking about Walter Lippmann’s 1922 book, Public Opinion, and Gallup got interested in the problem of measuring it. His first idea was to use the sample survey to understand how people read the news. In 1928, in a dissertation called “An Objective Method for Determining Reader Interest in the Content of a Newspaper,” he argued that “at one time the press was depended upon as the chief agency for instructing and informing the mass of people,” but that the growth of public schools meant that newspapers no longer filled that role and instead ought to meet “a greater need for entertainment.” He had therefore devised a method to measure “reader interest,” a way to know what parts of the paper readers found entertaining. He called it the “Iowa method”: “It consists chiefly of going through a newspaper, column by column, with a reader of the paper.” The interviewer would then mark up the newspaper to show what parts the reader had enjoyed. “The Iowa method offers the newspaper editor a scientific means for fitting his paper to his community,” Gallup wrote: he could hire an expert in measurement to conduct a study to find out what features and writers his readers like best, and then stop printing the boring stuff.92

  In 1932, when Gallup was a professor of journalism at Northwestern, his mother-in-law, Ola Babcock Miller, ran for lieutenant governor of Iowa. Her husband had died in office; her nomination was largely honorary and she was not expected to win. Gallup decided to apply his ideas about measuring reader interest to understanding her chances. After that, he moved to New York and began working for an advertising agency, where, while also teaching at Columbia, he perfected a method for measuring the size of a radio audience. He conducted some experiments in 1933 and 1934, trying to figure out how to better predict elections for newspapers and magazines, and started a company he named the Editors’ Research Bureau. Gallup liked to call public opinion measurement “a new field of journalism.” But he decided his work needed a scholarly pedigree. In 1935, he renamed the Editors’ Research Bureau the American Institute of Public Opinion and established it in Princeton, New Jersey, which also made it sound more academic.93

  Gallup’s method was to survey public opinion by asking questions of a sample of the population carefully chosen to represent the whole of it. He said he was taking the “pulse of democracy.” (Wrote a skeptical E. B. White: “Although you can take a nation’s pulse, you can’t be sure that the nation hasn’t just run up a flight of stairs.”) In 1935, to announce the publication of a new weekly column by Gallup, the Washington Post launched a blimp over the nation’s capital trailing a streamer that read “America Speaks!”94

  Gallup intended the measurement of public opinion to be a tool for democratic government, a tool intended to do the very opposite of the work of political consulting. Political consulting is the business of managing the opinions of the masses. Public opinion surveying is the business of finding out the opinions of the masses. Political consultants tell voters what to think; pollsters ask them what they think. But neither of these businesses gives a great deal of credit to the idea that voters ought to make independent judgments, or that they can.

  New industries, new technologies, and the conduct of the war itself heightened longstanding concerns about the power of propaganda. Joseph Goebbels, who had completed his PhD in 1921, had been greatly influenced by Edward Bernays, and used the methods of American public relations in broadcasting messages by print, radio, film, and parades. Goebbels had a device installed in his office that allowed him to preempt national programming, and he deployed “radio wardens” to make sure Germans were listening to official broadcasts. The purpose of fascist propaganda is to control the opinions of the masses and deploy them in service of the power of the state. Germans had attempted to employ Bernays himself; he refused, but other American public relations firms had accepted commissions to produce pro-Nazi propaganda in the United States. Goebbels hoped to sow division in the United States, partly through a shortwave radio system, the Weltrundfunksender, or World Broadcasting Station, the Propaganda Ministry’s “long-range propaganda artillery.” By 1934 it was broadcasting pro-Germany Englishand foreign-language propaganda to Africa, Latin America, the Far East, Southeast Asia, Indonesia, and Australia, though its broadcasts to North America far outstripped the scale of all of its other programs. To the United States, where it broadcast in “American English,” the Weltrundfunksender sent false “news,” chiefly having to do with claims about a “Communist Jewish conspiracy.”95

  Newspapers took to calling this sort of thing “fake news.”96 But some Americans worried that not much separated fake news from the work of Whitaker and Baxter’s Lie Factory, or even from the forms of political persuasion deployed by the White House. Roosevelt’s critics accused him of adapting the radio for purposes of propaganda. The Democratic National Committee’s executive secretary talked about voters in much the same way as Whitaker and Baxter did: “The average American’s mind works simply and it is not hard to keep him behind the President if we can properly inform him as to what is going on in Washington, what the Presiden
t is trying to do, and the specific objectives he is seeking.” This was best done, the DNC secretary pointed out, “from a source of confidence like the radio.” But, in contrast to Europe, the government in the United States neither owned nor, in the end, controlled the radio.97 And nothing in FDR’s arsenal of persuasion came close to the deception practiced on voters by the nation’s first political consultants.

  Still, even Roosevelt’s closest allies worried. Felix Frankfurter, an adviser to the president and a longtime friend of Walter Lippmann’s—they’d lived together in the House of Truth—warned Roosevelt to keep clear of public relations professionals, calling men like Bernays “professional poisoners of the public mind, exploiters of foolishness, fanaticism, and self-interest.”98 FDR, though, was drawn not to Bernays but to Gallup. He trimmed his sails by the daily voter mail—and, more and more, by the weekly polls. Roosevelt was willing to use broad executive powers to accomplish his agenda, but not without popular support. With FDR, polling entered the White House and the American political process. And there it remained.

  IV.

  ON JUNE 27, 1936, Roosevelt accepted his party’s nomination at the University of Pennsylvania’s Franklin Field before a crowd of 100,000. “This generation of Americans has a rendezvous with destiny,” he said. The United States was now fighting to save democracy both “for ourselves and for the world.”99 Saving democracy at home required dismantling Jim Crow. This Roosevelt did not do.

  Jim Crow defined New Deal politics. Between violence, poll taxes, literacy tests, and other forms of disenfranchisement, less than 4 percent of African Americans were registered to vote. Nevertheless, “the revenge of the slave is to place his masters in such subjection that they can make no decision, political, social, economic, or ethical, without reference to him,” Anne O’Hare McCormick wrote in 1930. “Voteless, he dominates politics.”100

  FDR’s reliance on public opinion surveys made this problem worse. Gallup’s early method is known as “quota sampling.” He analyzed the electorate to determine what proportion of the people who vote are men, women, black, white, young, and old. The people who conducted his surveys had to fill a quota so that the survey respondents would constitute an exactly proportionate mini-electorate. But what Gallup presented to the American public as “public opinion” was the opinion of Americans who were disproportionately wealthy, white, and male. Nationwide, in the 1930s and 1940s, blacks constituted about 10 percent of the population but made up less than 2 percent of Gallup’s survey group. Because blacks in the South generally could not vote, Gallup assigned no “Negro quota” in those states.101 Instead of representing public opinion, polling essentially silenced the voices of African Americans.

  Roosevelt’s electoral coalition drew African Americans from the Republican Party; he consulted an informal group of advisers who came to be called his “black cabinet”; and he appointed the first African American federal judge. But New Deal programs were generally segregated, and Roosevelt failed to act to oppose lynching. After twenty-three lynchings in 1933, anti-lynching legislation was introduced into Congress. The next year, a man named Claude Neal, accused of rape and murder, was taken from a jail in Alabama and brought to Florida, where he was tortured, mutilated, and executed before four thousand spectators. In the Senate, southern Democrats waged a filibuster against the anti-lynching bill.102 “If I come out for the anti-lynching bill now, they will block every bill I ask Congress to pass to keep America from collapsing,” Roosevelt told the NAACP’s Walter White. “Southerners, by reason of the seniority rule in Congress, are chairmen or occupy strategic places on most of the Senate and House committees.” The anti-lynching bill died.103

  Gallup’s influence, meanwhile, grew. In 1936, in the pages of the New York Herald-Tribune, he predicted that Literary Digest would forecast that Alf Landon would defeat FDR in a landslide and that the Digest would be wrong. He was right on both counts.104 This, though, was only the beginning of what Gallup intended to do. “I had the idea of polling on every major issue,” he explained. As the world reeled and the end of liberal democracy appeared near to hand, Gallup argued that the measurement of public opinion was critical to the fight against fascism and the solution to the problem of mass democracy. In the fast-moving modern world, “We need to know the will of the people at all times.” Elections came only every two years but, by measuring the public’s views on issues almost instantly, elected officials could better represent their constituents—more efficiently, and more democratically. Gallup believed that his method had rescued American politics from the political machine and restored it to the American pastoral: “Today, the New England town meeting idea has, in a sense, been restored.” He was not alone. Elmer Roper, another early pollster, called the public opinion survey “the greatest contribution to democracy since the introduction of the secret ballot.”105

  Time coined the word “pollsters” in 1939, and, in the public mind, the word “polls” came to mean two different things: surveys of public opinion and forecasts of elections. When Gallup started, he conducted forecasts only in order to prove the accuracy of his surveys, there being no other way to demonstrate it.106 That aside, the forecasts themselves were pointless.

  Congress called for an investigation. “These polls are a racket, and their methods should be exposed to the public,” Walter Pierce, a Democratic member of the House, wrote in 1939. (Pierce, like many critics of polling, which tended to show that Americans favored entering the war, was an isolationist.) Part of the concern was that polls were fraudulent. Another concern was that they were interfering with the proper function of elections and of government. Polls don’t represent the people, one congressman wrote; Congress does: “Polls are in contradiction to representative government.”107

  A genuine antidote to fascism—a way to bolster representative government—was to promote open, fair-minded public debate. America’s Town Meeting of the Air debuted on NBC Radio in 1935, ringing in each episode with the cry, “Oyez! Oyez! Come to the old town hall and talk it over!” America’s Town Meeting of the Air aimed to break radio listeners out of their political bubbles. “If we persist in the practice of Republicans reading only Republican newspapers, listening only to Republican speeches on the radio, attending only Republican political rallies, and mixing socially only with those of congenial views,” its moderator warned, “and if Democrats . . . follow suit, we are sowing the seeds of the destruction of our democracy.” Each episode took the form of a formal debate about a policy question—for instance, “Does America need compulsory health insurance?” It went a long way toward achieving its object: the program spawned more than a thousand debating clubs, in which citizens listened together and, after the broadcast, staged their own face-to-face debates.108

  Revealingly, FDR himself refused to debate on air. Candidates for local, statewide, and even national office had been debating on the radio since the early 1920s, but Roosevelt turned away all challengers, insisting, unconvincingly, that no president should debate on air because he might let slip a state secret. Republicans, frustrated, spliced bits of his speeches and other speeches into a rebuttal given by Republican senator Arthur Vandenberg and gave it to radio stations to broadcast as a “debate.” Sixty-six stations were supposed to air the program; twenty-one, on learning that the debate was a fake, refused.109

  Observers noted the dangers of radio—it appeared the perfect instrument for the propagandist—but just as many expressed much the same enthusiasm for radio as Frederick Douglass had expressed for photography, or as boosters of the Internet would express in years to come. Between 1930 and 1935, the number of radios in the United States doubled. “Distinctions between rural and urban communities, men and women, age and youth, social classes, creeds, states, and nations are abolished,” wrote the psychologists Hadley Cantril and Gordon W. Allport in 1935. “As if by magic the barriers of social stratification disappear and in their place comes a consciousness of equality and of a community of interest.”110 Some of that
, no doubt, did come to pass. But radio also created and strengthened both new and old forms of affiliation—and division.

  Radio made fundamentalism into a national movement. In 1925, Paul Rader, the director of the Chicago Gospel Tabernacle, began broadcasting The National Radio Chapel. During the hardest years of the Depression, revivalist ministers railed against modernity and the suffering it had wrought, calling on listeners to return to God. Radio Bible Class, broadcast from Grand Rapids, Michigan, brought the tradition of Sunday and summer Bible study to communities that stretched as far as its radio signal could reach. New York’s Calvary Baptist Church and the Bible Institute of Los Angeles were among those churches that owned their own radio stations. Fundamentalists founded new colleges in those years, too, and recruited students on air: Bob Jones College was founded in Florida in 1926 and moved to Cleveland, Tennessee, in 1933; William Jennings Bryan University was founded in Dayton, Tennessee, in 1930. Illinois’s Wheaton College—the “Harvard of the Bible Belt”—had four hundred students in 1926 and eleven hundred in 1941; its students include Billy Graham. By 1939, the Old Fashioned Revival Hour, broadcast from Los Angeles over the Mutual network, reached an audience as large as twenty million.111