by Jill Lepore
The 1948 election became a referendum on polling, a referendum with considerable consequences because Congress was still debating whether or not to establish a National Science Foundation, and whether such a foundation would provide funding to social science. The pollsters’ error likely had to do with undercounting black votes. Gallup routinely failed to poll black people, on the theory that Jim Crow, voter violence, intimidation, and poll taxes prevented most from voting. But blacks who could vote overwhelmingly cast their ballots for Truman, and probably won him the election.
That was hardly the only problem with the polling industry. In 1944, Gallup had underestimated Democratic support in two out of every three states; Democrats charged that he had engineered the poll to favor Republicans. Questioned by Congress, he’d weakly offered that, anticipating a low turnout, he had taken two points off the projected vote for FDR, more or less arbitrarily.49 Concerned that the federal government might institute regulatory measures, the polling industry had decided to regulate itself by establishing, in 1947, the American Association for Public Opinion Research. But the criticism had continued, especially from within universities, where scholars pointed out that polling was essentially a commercial activity, cloaked in the garb of social science.
The most stinging critiques came from University of Chicago sociologist Herbert Blumer and Columbia political scientist Lindsay Rogers. Public opinion polling is not a form of empirical inquiry, Blumer argued, since it skips over the crucial first step of any inquiry: identifying what it is that is to be studied. As Blumer pointed out, this is by no means surprising, since polling is a business, and an industry run by businessmen will create not a science but a product. Blumer argued that public opinion does not exist, absent its measurement; pollsters created it: “public opinion consists of what public opinion polls poll.” The very idea that a quantifiable public opinion exists, Blumer argued, rests on a series of false propositions. The opinions held by any given population are not formed as an aggregation of individual opinions, each given equal weight, as pollsters suppose; they are formed, instead, “as a function of a society in operation”; we come to hold and express the opinions that we hold and express in conversation and especially in debate with other people and groups, over time, and different people and groups influence us, and we them, in different degrees.50
Where Herbert Blumer argued that polling rested on a misunderstanding of empirical science, Lindsay Rogers argued that polling rested on a misunderstanding of American democracy. Rogers, a scholar of American political institutions, had started out as a journalist. In 1912, he reported on the Democratic National Convention; three years later, he earned a doctorate in political science from Johns Hopkins. In the 1930s, he’d served as an adviser to FDR. In 1949, in The Pollsters: Public Opinion, Politics, and Democratic Leadership, Rogers argued that he wasn’t sold on polling as an empirical science, but that neither was that his particular concern. “My criticisms of the polls go to questions more fundamental than imperfections in sampling methods or inaccuracy in predicting the results of elections,” he explained. Even if public opinion could be measured by adding up what people say in interviews over the telephone to people they’ve never met, legislators using this information to inform their votes in representative bodies would be inconsistent with the Constitution.
“Dr. Gallup wishes his polls to enable the United States to become a mammoth town meeting in which yeses and noes will suffice,” Rogers wrote. “He assumes that this can happen and that it will be desirable. Fortunately, both assumptions are wrong.” A town meeting has to be small; also, it requires a moderator. Decisions made in town meetings require deliberation and delay. People had said the radio would create a town meeting, too. It had not. “The radio permits the whole population of a country, indeed of the world, to listen to a speaker at the same time. But there is no gathering together. Those who listen are strangers to each other.” Nor—and here was Rogers’s key argument—would a national town meeting be desirable. The United States has a representative government for many reasons, but among them is that it is designed to protect the rights of minorities against the tyranny of majority opinion. But, as Rogers argued, “The pollsters have dismissed as irrelevant the kind of political society in which we live and which we, as citizens should endeavor to strengthen.” That political society requires participation, deliberation, representation, and leadership. And it requires that the government protect the rights of minorities.51
Blumer and Rogers offered these critiques before the DEWEY-BEATS-TRUMAN travesty. But after the election, the Social Science Research Council announced that it would begin an investigation. The council, an umbrella organization, brought together economists, anthropologists, historians, political scientists, psychologists, statisticians, and sociologists. Each of these social sciences had grown dependent on the social science survey, the same method used by commercial pollsters: they used weighted samples of larger wholes to measure attitudes and opinions. Many social scientists subscribed to rational choice theory. Newly aided by the power of computers, they used quantitative methods to search for a general theory that could account for the behavior of individuals. In 1948, political scientists at the University of Michigan founded what became the American National Election Survey, the largest, most ambitious, and most significant survey of American voters. Rogers didn’t object to this work, but he wasn’t persuaded that counting heads is the best way to study politics, and he believed that polling was bad for American democracy. Blumer thought pollsters misunderstood science. But what many other social scientists came to believe, after the disaster of the 1948 election, was that if the pollsters took a fall, social science would fall with them.
The Social Science Research Council warned, “Extended controversy regarding the pre-election polls among lay and professional groups might have extensive and unjustified repercussions upon all types of opinion and attitude studies and perhaps upon social science research generally.” Its report, issued in December 1948, concluded that pollsters, “led by false assumptions into believing their methods were much more accurate than in fact they are,” were not up to the task of predicting a presidential election, but that “the public should draw no inferences from pre-election forecasts that would disparage the accuracy or usefulness of properly conducted sampling surveys in fields in which the response does not involve expression of opinion or intention to act.” That is to say, the polling industry was unsound, but social science was perfectly sound.52
Despite social scientists’ spirited defense of their work, when the National Science Foundation was finally established in 1950, it did not include a social science division. Even before the founding of the NSF, the federal government had committed itself to fortifying the national security state by funding the physical sciences. By 1949, the Department of Defense and the Atomic Energy Commission represented 96 percent of all federal funds for university research in the physical sciences. Many scientists were concerned about the consequences for academic freedom. “It is essential that the trend toward military domination of our universities be reversed as speedily as possible,” two had warned. Cornell physicist Philip Morrison predicted that science under a national security state would become “narrow, national, and secret.”53 The founding of the NSF did not allay these concerns. Although the NSF’s budget, capped at $15 million, was a fraction of the funds provided to scientists engaged in military research (the Office of Naval Research alone had an annual research budget of $85 million), the price for receiving an NSF grant was being subjected to a loyalty test, surveillance, and ideological oversight, and agreeing to conduct closeted research. As the Federation of American Scientists put it, “The Foundation which will thus come into existence after 4 years of bitter struggle is a far cry from the hopes of many scientists.”54
Even without support from the National Science Foundation, of course, social science research proceeded. Political scientists applied survey methods to the study of American politics and
relied on the results to make policy recommendations. In 1950, when the distance between the parties was smaller than it has been either before or since—and voters had a hard time figuring out which party was conservative and which liberal—the American Political Science Association’s Committee on Political Parties issued a report called “Toward a More Responsible Two-Party System.” The problem with American democracy, the committee argued, is that the parties are too alike, and too weak. The report recommended strengthening every element of the party system, from national leadership committees to congressional caucuses, as well as establishing a starker difference between party platforms. “If the two parties do not develop alternative programs that can be executed,” the committee warned, “the voter’s frustration and the mounting ambiguities of national policy might set in motion more extreme tendencies to the political left and the political right.”55
The recommendation of political scientists that American voters ought to become more partisan and more polarized did not sit well with everyone. In 1950, in a series of lectures at Princeton, Thomas Dewey, still reeling from his unexpected loss to Truman, damned scholars who “want to drive all moderates and liberals out of the Republican party and then have the remainder join forces with the conservative groups of the South. Then they would have everything neatly arranged, indeed. The Democratic party would be the liberal-to-radical party. The Republican party would be the conservative-to-reactionary party. The results would be neatly arranged, too. The Republicans would lose every election and the Democrats would win every election.”56
Exactly this kind of sorting did eventually come to pass, not to the favor of one party or the other but, instead, to the detriment of everyone. It may have been the brainchild of quantitative political scientists, but it was implemented by pollsters and political consultants, using computers to segment the electorate. The questions raised by Blumer and Rogers went unanswered. Any pollster might have predicted it: POLLSTERS DEFEAT SCHOLARS.
WHEN TRUMAN BEAT DEWEY, and not the reverse, and Democrats regained control of both houses, and long-eared Lyndon B. Johnson took a seat in the Senate, the American Medical Association panicked and telephoned the San Francisco offices of Campaigns, Inc. In a message to Congress shortly before his inauguration, Truman called for the passage of his national health insurance plan.
The AMA, knowing how stunningly Campaigns, Inc., had defeated Warren’s health care plan in California, decided to do exactly what the California Medical Association had done: retain Clem Whitaker and Leone Baxter. The Washington Post suggested that maybe the AMA, at the hands of Whitaker and Baxter, ought to stop “whipping itself into a neurosis and attempting to terrorize the whole American public every time the Administration proposes a Welfare Department or a health program.” But the doctors’ association, undaunted, hired Whitaker and Baxter for a fee of $100,000 a year, with an annual budget of more than a million dollars. Campaigns, Inc., relocated to a new, national headquarters in Chicago, with a staff of thirty-seven. To defeat Truman’s proposal, they launched a “National Education Campaign.” The AMA raised $3.5 million, by assessing twenty-five dollars a year from its members. Whitaker and Baxter liked to talk about their work as “grass roots campaigning.” Not everyone was convinced. “Dear Sirs,” one doctor wrote them in 1949. “Is it 2½ or 3½ million dollars you have allotted for your ‘grass roots lobby’?”57
They started, as always, by drafting a Plan of Campaign. “This must be a campaign to arouse and alert the American people in every walk of life, until it generates a great public crusade and a fundamental fight for freedom,” it began. “Any other plan of action, in view of the drift towards socialization and despotism all over the world, would invite disaster.” Then, in an especially cunning maneuver, aimed, in part, at silencing the firm’s critics, Whitaker had hundreds of thousands of copies of their plan, “A Simplified Blueprint of the Campaign against Compulsory Health Insurance,” printed on blue paper—to remind Americans that what they ought to do was to buy Blue Cross and Blue Shield—and distributed it to reporters and editors and to every member of Congress.58
The “Simplified Blueprint” wasn’t their actual plan; a different Plan of Campaign circulated inside the office, in typescript, marked “CONFIDENTIAL:—NOT FOR PUBLICATION.” While the immediate objective of the campaign was to defeat Truman’s proposal, its long-term objective was “to put a permanent stop to the agitation for socialized medicine in this country by”:
(a)awakening the people to the danger of a politically-controlled, government-regulated health system;
(b)convincing the people . . . of the superior advantages of private medicine, as practiced in America, over the State-dominated medical systems of other countries;
(c)stimulating the growth of voluntary health insurance systems to take the economic shock out of illness and increase the availability of medical care to the American people.
As Whitaker and Baxter put it, “Basically, the issue is whether we are to remain a free Nation, in which the individual can work out his own destiny, or whether we are to take one of the final steps toward becoming a Socialist or Communist State. We have to paint the picture, in vivid verbiage that no one can misunderstand, of Germany, Russia—and finally, England.”59
They mailed leaflets, postcards, and letters across the country, though they were not always well met. “RECEIVED YOUR SCARE LETTER. AND HOW PITYFUL,” an angry pharmacist wrote from New York. “I DO HOPE PRESIDENT TRUMAN HAS HIS WAY. GOOD LUCK TO HIM.” Truman could have used some luck. Whitaker and Baxter’s campaign to defeat his national health insurance plan ended up costing the AMA nearly $5 million and took more than three years. But it worked.60
Truman was furious. As to what in his plan could possibly be construed as “socialized medicine,” he said, he didn’t know what in the Sam Hill that could be. He had one more thing to say: there was “nothing in this bill that came any closer to socialism than the payments the American Medical Association makes to the advertising firm of Whitaker and Baxter to misrepresent my health program.”61
National health insurance would have to wait for another president, another Congress, and another day. The fight would only get uglier.
III.
MOST POLITICAL CAREERS follow an arithmetic curve. Richard Nixon’s rise was exponential: elected to Congress at thirty-three, he won a Senate seat at thirty-six. Two years later, he would be elected vice president.
He had persisted in investigating Whittaker Chambers’s claim that Alger Hiss had been a communist. In a series of twists and turns worthy of a Hitchcock film—including microfilm hidden in a hollowed-out pumpkin on Chambers’s Maryland farm, the so-called Pumpkin Papers—Nixon charged that Hiss had been not only communist but, like Chambers, a Soviet spy.62
In January 1950, Hiss was convicted of perjury for denying that he had been a communist (the statute of limitations for espionage had expired) and sentenced to five years in prison. Five days after the verdict, on the twenty-sixth, Nixon delivered a four-hour speech on the floor of Congress, a lecture he called “The Hiss Case—A Lesson for the American People.” It read like an Arthur Conan Doyle story, recounting the entire history of the investigation, with Nixon as ace detective. Making a bid for a Senate seat, Nixon had the speech printed and mailed copies to California voters.63
Nixon sought the Senate seat of longtime California Democrat Sheridan Downey, the “Downey” of the “Uppie-and-Downey” EPIC gubernatorial ticket of 1933, who had decided not to run for reelection. Nixon defeated his opponent, Democrat Helen Gahagan Douglas, by Red-baiting and innuendo-dropping. Douglas, he said, was “Pink right down to her underwear.” The Nation’s Carey McWilliams said Nixon had “an astonishing capacity for petty malice.”64 But what won him the seat was the national reputation he’d earned in his prosecution of Alger Hiss, even if that crusade was soon taken over by a former heavyweight boxer who stood six foot tall and weighed two hundred pounds.
On February 9, a junior senator fro
m Wisconsin named Joseph McCarthy stole whole paragraphs from Nixon’s “The Hiss Case—A Lesson for the American People” and used them in an address of his own, in which he claimed to have a list of subversives working for the State Department. In a nod to Nixon, McCarthy liked to say, when he was sniffing out a subversive: “I have found a pumpkin.”65
McCarthy had big hands and bushy eyebrows, and an unnerving stare. During the war, he’d served as a marine in the Pacific. Although he’d seen little combat and sustained an injury only during a hazing episode, he’d defeated the popular incumbent Robert La Follette Jr., in a 1946 Republican primary by running as a war hero, and had won a Senate seat against the Democrat, Howard McMurray, by claiming, falsely, that McMurray’s campaign was funded by communists, as if McMurray wore pink underwear, too.
The first years of McCarthy’s term in the Senate had been marked by failure and duplicity. Like Nixon, he tested the prevailing political winds and decided to make his mark by crusading against communism. In his Hiss speech, Nixon had hinted that not only Hiss but many other people in the State Department, and in other parts of the Truman administration, were part of a vast communist conspiracy. When McCarthy delivered his February 9 speech, before the Ohio County Republican Women’s Club, in Wheeling, West Virginia, he went further than Nixon. “While I cannot take the time to name all of the men in the State Department who have been named as members of the Communist Party,” he said, “I have here in my hand a list of two hundred and five . . . names that were made known to the Secretary of State as members of the Communist Party and who nevertheless are still working and shaping the policy of the State Department.”66 He had no list. He had nothing but imaginary pink underwear.