These Truths

by Jill Lepore

  The technology that made it possible to sort citizens by “sex, marital status, education, residence, age group, birthplace, employment, income and a dozen other classifications” would make it possible to sort consumers, too. Businesses found that they could both reduce prices and increase profits by sorting markets into segments and pitching the right ad and product to exactly the right consumer. In much the same way that advertisers segmented markets, political consultants would sort voters into different piles, too, and send them different messages.88

  When Mauchly and Eckert staged their unveiling in 1951, all of this was in the future, and the press was not excited. In a one-paragraph story on the bottom of page twenty-five, the New York Times only dutifully took notice of the “eight-foot-tall mathematical genius,” as if it were nothing more than a stunt, like Elektro the Moto-Man.89

  UNIVAC made its debut at a moment when Americans were increasingly exasperated by automation, the very year that readers waded through White Collar, the sociologist C. Wright Mills’s indictment of the fate of the people who worked, surrounded by telephones and Dictaphones, intercoms and Mimeographs, in fluorescent-lit, air-conditioned offices in steel-and-glass skyscrapers or in suburban office parks. Mills argued that machine-driven office work had created a class of desperately alienated workers and that the new office, for all its gadgets, was no less horrible than the old factories of brick and steam. “Seeing the big stretch of office space, with rows of identical desks,” Mills wrote, “one is reminded of Herman Melville’s description of a nineteenth-century factory: ‘At rows of blank-looking counters sat rows of blank-looking girls, with blank, white folders in their blank hands, all blankly folding blank paper.’” Melville had been describing a New England paper mill in 1855; Mills described a modern office a century later: “The new office is rationalized: machines are used, employees become machine attendants; the work, as in the factory, is collective, not individualized,” he wrote. “It is specialized to the point of automatization.”90 The minutes of white-collar workers’ lives were tapped out by typewriters and adding machines. They had the cheerfulness of robots, having lost the capacity to feel anything except boredom.91

  “Robotic” having become a term of opprobrium, the people interested in explaining the truly revolutionary capabilities of the UNIVAC had to do something more than write numbers on Ping-Pong balls. Mauchly, disappointed at the bland coverage of UNIVAC’s unveiling, wrote a paper called “Are Computers Newsworthy?” Given that the novelty of computers as front-page news had worn off, the best approach would be to find ways to showcase their application to real-world problems, he suggested. He hired a public relations firm. “We must aim our publicity at the public in general because our object is to expand the market until computers become as ordinary as telephone switchboards and bookkeeping machines,” he explained. Mauchly’s PR team then came up with the very clever plan of bringing to CBS a proposal to predict the outcome of the upcoming election on live television, on Election Night.92

  In 1948, less than 3 percent of American homes had a television; by 1952, the number was up to 45 percent. By the end of the decade, 90 percent of American homes had a television. The year 1952 marked the first coverage of a presidential election by television, and, if Mauchly had his way, it would be the first whose result would be predicted on television.

  It looked to be an especially fascinating election. General Dwight D. Eisenhower, a lifelong military man, a five-star general who during the Second World War had served as Supreme Allied Commander Europe, had refused to run in 1948, on the grounds that professional soldiers ought to abstain from political officeholding. In 1952, at the age of fifty-seven, he was finally persuaded to run against Truman in an election expected to amount to a referendum on U.S. involvement in Korea. In June 1950, North Korean communist forces crossed the thirty-eighth parallel to attack South Korea. Truman sent in troops, led by General Douglas MacArthur, who drove the North Koreans nearly back to the border with China. China responded by providing resources to North Korea, and the American forces lost all of the ground they’d gained. The war was protracted, costly, and unpopular. Eisenhower, a hero from a better war, appeared a perfect candidate for the times.

  Clem Whitaker and Leone Baxter managed his campaign. Having worked behind the scenes since its founding in 1933, Campaigns, Inc., had attracted not altogether wanted attention as a consequence of its phenomenal defeat of Truman’s national health insurance plan. A three-part exposé, written by Carey McWilliams, had appeared in The Nation in 1951. McWilliams admired Whitaker and Baxter, and he also liked them. But he believed that they had too much power, and that they were dangerous, and that what they had created was nothing less than “government by Whitaker and Baxter.” After McWilliams’s story ran, a number of notable doctors resigned from the AMA, including the head of Massachusetts General Hospital, who explained, in his letter of resignation, that he was no longer willing to pay dues used to support “an activity, which I consider contrary to public welfare and unworthy of a learned profession.” That fall, the AMA fired Whitaker and Baxter. That’s when Whitaker and Baxter went to work for Eisenhower.93

  They decided to put Ike on TV. Republicans spent $1.5 million on television advertising in 1952; Democrats spent $77,000. Polls drove the ads; ads drove the polls. George Gallup chose the themes of Eisenhower’s TV spots, which took the form of fake documentaries. In “Eisenhower Answers America,” a young black man (plucked off the street from Times Square and reading a cue card) says, “General, the Democrats are telling me I never had it so good.” Eisenhower replies, “Can that be true, when America is billions in debt, when prices have doubled, when taxes break our backs, and we are still fighting in Korea?” Then, he looks, sternly, straight into the camera. “It’s tragic, and it’s time for a change.”94

  Eisenhower’s politics were moderate, as was his style. He described himself as a “dynamic conservative”: “conservative when it comes to money and liberal when it comes to human beings.” His Democratic opponent, Illinois governor Adlai Stevenson, found that account of Eisenhower’s political commitments wanting: “I assume what it means is that you will strongly recommend the building of a great many schools to accommodate the needs of our children, but not provide the money.” Critics called the bald and effete Stevenson an egghead and “fruity”; rumors spread that he was gay. “Eggheads of the world unite!” Stevenson would joke, “You have nothing to lose but your yolks!,” not quite appreciating the malice of the campaign against him.95

  Television became to the 1950s what radio had been to the 1930s. The style of news reporting that had been developed on the radio adapted poorly to the screen, but the audience was so huge that news organizations had every incentive to adapt. In 1949, the Federal Communications Commission established the Fairness Doctrine, a standard for television news that required a “reasonable balance” of views on any issue put before the public. CBS sent Walter Cronkite, a thirty-five-year-old newsman from its Washington affiliate, WTOP-TV, to cover both nominating conventions.

  Richard Nixon went to the Republican National Convention in Chicago on board a chartered train from California called the Earl Warren Special, allegedly supporting Warren’s bid for the presidential nomination. Whitaker and Baxter had never forgiven Warren for firing them in 1942, and even scuttling his statewide health insurance plan in 1945 had not slaked their thirst for vengeance. During the train ride to Chicago, Nixon secretly swayed California delegates to throw their support behind Eisenhower—a scheme forever after known as the “great train robbery”—and the general had rewarded him with a spot on the ticket. Warren would later call Nixon a “crook and a thief.” Eisenhower would find a place for Warren in his administration, as solicitor general.96

  Nixon had managed to secure the GOP vice presidential nomination, but, weeks later, he’d go on television to try to hold onto it. After the convention, the press revealed that Nixon had an $18,000 slush fund. Eisenhower’s advisers urged him to dump Nix
on, and asked Nixon to step down. Nixon, facing the end of his political career, decided to make his case to the public. He labored over it, writing the speech of his life. On September 23, 1952, sitting at a pine desk, with his wife looking on from a chintz chair, in what appeared to be his own den but was a stage built at an NBC studio in Los Angeles, he gave a remarkable performance, pained and self-pitying. It reached the largest television audience television ever recorded. Nixon said he intended to do something unprecedented in American politics. He would provide a full financial disclosure, an accounting of “everything I’ve earned, everything I’ve spent, and everything I owe.” Nearly down to the penny, he then listed his modest income, his loans, and his wealth (“this will surprise you, because it is so little”). He had no stocks, no bonds, a two-year-old Oldsmobile, mortgages, debts to banks, and even a debt to his parents that he was paying back, every month, with interest. Yes, he’d accepted gifts to a campaign fund. But no contributors had gotten special favors for their donations, and “not one cent of the eighteen thousand dollars” had gone to him for his private use. He’d spent it on campaign expenses. He covered his face for a moment, as if offering up a final, humiliating confession. There was one gift he must acknowledge: a man in Texas has sent his daughters a black-and-white spotted cocker spaniel puppy, and his six-year-old daughter, Tricia, had named the dog Checkers. “Regardless of what they say about it,” he said, feigning injury, “we’re gonna keep it.”97

  Liberals were disgusted, partly because it was something of a sham, but mostly because it was maudlin. Eisenhower was, at the time, president of Columbia University; twenty-three full professors at Columbia, including Allan Nevins, Lionel Trilling, and Richard Hofstadter, issued a statement in which they denounced the Checkers speech, which Nevins described as “so essentially dishonest and emotional an appeal that he confused a great many people as to the issues involved.”98 Walter Lippmann said that watching it was “one of the most demeaning experiences my country has ever had to bear.” But the overwhelming majority of people who watched it loved it. Nixon spoke to their experiences and their quiet lives, and to their grievances, too. Plainly, Nixon had saved his career, and more. “In 30 minutes,” Time reported, “he had changed from a liability to his party to a shining asset.”99

  Nixon had accomplished something else, of greater and more lasting importance. Since the days of Harding and Hoover, the Republican Party had been the party of businessmen, of country club members and stockholders. The Democratic Party had been the party of the little guy, from Andrew Jackson’s self-made man to William Jennings Bryan’s farmer to FDR’s “forgotten man.” Nixon, with that speech, reversed this calculus. That was what so galled liberals: they were no longer the party of the people. Populism had shifted to the right.100

  The Checkers speech was a landmark in the history of television, and it became a watchword in the history of American politics. Lost in the fog of memory was another epic turn during that election. Nixon decided, after the Checkers speech, that he loved television. As his friend the Hollywood producer Ted Rogers said, “He was the electronic man.”101 But the real electronic man of that year’s political season was the UNIVAC.

  After the conventions, all three network television broadcasters were looking for a way to do a better job covering election night than they’d done in 1948, which had been widely seen as a dismal failure. There hadn’t been much to look at. As one critic put it, “Counting ballots is hardly a function which lends itself to much visual excitement.” Added to the clumsiness of the television coverage was the lingering embarrassment of the error of everyone’s prediction of the outcome. Broadcasters had made the same error as the DEWEY-BEATS-TRUMAN Chicago Tribune; by the time Truman pulled ahead, CBS had already closed down for the night.102

  CBS agreed to commission UNIVAC as its special guest on Election Night. On November 4, the actual UNIVAC—there was only one—was in Philadelphia, while CBS’s Charles Collingwood sat at a blinking console at the network’s flagship studio in New York, giving viewers the illusion that he was controlling a computer. “A UNIVAC is a fabulous electronic machine, which we have borrowed to help us predict this election from the basis of early returns as they come in,” Collingwood told his audience as the evening’s coverage began. “This is not a joke or a trick,” he went on, “It’s an experiment. We think it’s going to work. We don’t know. We hope it will work.”

  Thirty-six-year-old Walter Cronkite read the early, East Coast returns; Edward R. Murrow provided the commentary. Cronkite, born in Missouri, spoke with a gentlemanly midwestern twang. Not long after the East Coast polls closed, CBS announced that Eisenhower was ahead in the popular vote, Stevenson in the electoral vote. Cronkite then said, “And now to find out perhaps what this all means, at least in the electronic age, let’s turn to that electronic miracle, the electronic brain, UNIVAC, with a report from Charles Collingwood.”

  CBS News, whose team included Walter Cronkite (right), commissioned the first commercial computer, UNIVAC, to predict the outcome of the election of 1952. UNIVAC had been attempting to calculate the likely outcome of the election by comparing early returns to results from the elections of 1944 and 1948. When the camera turned to Collingwood, though, he could get no answer from UNIVAC. Murrow ventured that perhaps UNIVAC was cautious. After all, it was still early in the night. “It may be possible for men or machines to draw some sweeping conclusions from the returns so far,” Murrow said, “but I am not able to do it.” But then, eyeing the returns from Connecticut, where a great many Democrats had surprisingly voted for the Republican, Murrow, while not offering a sweeping conclusion, suggested that the momentum appeared to be very much in Ike’s favor.

  At 10:30, Cronkite turned again to Collingwood. UNIVAC was having “a little bit of trouble,” Collingwood said with evident embarrassment. At one point UNIVAC predicted that Eisenhower would win by a sizable margin, at another that Stevenson might eke out a win. After Murrow called the election for Eisenhower, UNIVAC changed its mind again and said that the race was close. Cronkite turned to Murrow, who said, “I think it is now reasonably certain that this election is over.” Fifteen minutes later, Cronkite offered this update:

  And now, UNIVAC—UNIVAC, our electronic brain—which a moment ago, still thought there was a 7 to 8 for Governor Stevenson, says that the chances are 100 to 1 in favor of General Eisenhower. I might note that UNIVAC is running a few moments behind Ed Murrow, however.

  Ike won in a landslide. UNIVAC called it right, in the end, and so did George Gallup, who had gotten the vote wrong by 5 percent in 1948, and got it wrong by 4 percent again in 1952, but this time, Eisenhower’s margin of victory was so big that Gallup’s margin of error hadn’t led him to predict the wrong winner.103

  The next day, Murrow, speaking on CBS Radio, delivered a sermon about the civic importance of voting, as against the political mischief of polling, political consultants, and electronic brains. “Yesterday the people surprised the pollsters, the prophets, and many politicians,” Murrow said. “They demonstrated, as they did in 1948, that they are mysterious and their motives are not to be measured by mechanical means.” The election, he thought, had returned to the American voter his sovereignty, stolen by “those who believe that we are predictable.” Murrow said, “we are in a measure released from the petty tyranny of those who assert that they can tell us what we think, what we believe, what we will do, what we hope and what we fear, without consulting us—all of us.”104

  Murrow’s faith in the American creed, in the triumph of reason over fear, in progress over prophecy, was a hallmark of mid-twentieth-century liberalism. But it was also a shaken faith. Between the unreasoning McCarthy and the coldly calculating computer, where was the independent-minded American voter, weighing facts and searching for truth? The questions about the malleability of public opinion raised by radio were revisited during the rise of television. “Brainwashing” became a household word in the 1950s, when it was used to refer not only to the p
sychological torture during the Korean War but also to the persuasive powers of television.

  When Americans talk about “public opinion,” C. Wright Mills argued, they meant the eighteenth-century idea of informed people engaging in free, rational discussion to arrive at truth—the right understanding of an issue—before urging their representatives to take action. But in the middle of the twentieth century, Mills said, this idea had become nothing more than a “fairy tale,” as fanciful as Disneyland, because “the public of public opinion is recognized by all those who have considered it carefully as something less than it once was.” Like many social scientists of his generation, Mills argued that the United States was far along the road to becoming a fully mass society rather than a community of publics. The way to tell the difference between a mass society and a community of publics is the technology of communication: a community of publics is a population of people who talk to one another; a mass society receives information from the mass media. In a mass society, elites, not the people, make most decisions, long before the people even know there is a decision to be made. The formation of what Mills called “power elites” was directly related to technological shifts, especially the rise of computing. “As the means of information and of power are centralized,” Mills wrote, “some men come to occupy positions in American society from which they can look down upon . . . and by their decisions mightily affect the everyday lives of ordinary men and women.”105

  Yet for all the concern about “mass media”—a term coined in derision—there remained sources of optimism, especially in the undeniable observation that investigative television reporting and broadcast television news were usefully informing the electorate, introducing them to candidates and issues, and helping Americans keep abreast of national and world affairs. And McCarthy’s own end, after all, came on television.