Editors' Afterthoughts

The Roosevelt avalanche last week left many a U. S. news publisher wondering if writing and printing an editorial page was worth the trouble. All through the land, voters thumpingly disregarded the editorial politics of an estimated 80% of the nation's daily Press (TIME, Nov. 2). In Chicago an election night mob took direct action against the rabidly anti-Roosevelt Tribune by burning a truckload of its "bulldog" edition, egging its building, smashing plate glass at its Dearborn Street branch. In Manhattan even a pro-New Deal publisher, Captain Joseph Medill Patterson of the News, his pockets lined with $25,000 won on his paper's polls & predictions, was moved to editorialize:

"This election demonstrated that the power of the press to sway public opinion in this country is dying if not dead . . . that people read newspapers these days to get facts--baseball and football and stockmarket scores, weather reports, facts from the fighting fronts and the war medicine distilleries, shopping tips--but that they either don't read or don't rely on editorials."

Publisher William Randolph Hearst, ever prompt and practical, pulled in his fierce anti-New Deal horns in a statement made the more remarkable by addressing it to his striking employes in Seattle (see p. 23).

Publisher Hearst had staked his personal reputation as a prophet on Governor Landon. Far greater was the stake risked and lost by the publishers of the respected old Literary Digest, whose famed straw vote had polled by mail 1,293,669 votes for Alfred Landon, 972,897 for Franklin Roosevelt. In the face of actual returns, the publishing trade buzzed with rumors about what the Digest had done or would do: that it had been bought with Republican or Hearstian gold, that its editors had bet and lost a fortune on the vote, that it would never again attempt a pre-election poll, that it would go out of business altogether.

A wag sent the Digest a telegram which consisted of the word HA! repeated 50 times. The radical New Masses showed a cartoon cop barking into a microphone: "Pick up a nut at the Literary Digest office. He keeps trying to buy the joint for two bits ." Even the august New York Times hurled a smug thunderbolt: "Among the rewards or consolations of this Presidential election, most citizens will have already made up a 'little list' of political nuisances of which they have now got rid. One of these is the Literary Digest poll. It will scarcely venture to show its face again in the Congressional elections of 1938 or the Presidential campaign four years from now. That it was so thoroughly discredited this year is not because it was dishonest or unfair in its motives or methods. It certainly will never be again the bogy or oracle as which it had so long figured in our elections. The result on Tuesday has made it and most other polls of the kind only straws which the wind driveth away. American voters can well get along without its guidance or misguidance in the future. . . .

"Should it never appear again it will not be missed."

Under this storm of castigation and second-guessing, the Digest's editors sat down to decide what to say for themselves. Their poll had accurately foretold the major electoral results of, 1920, 1924, 1928, 1932. This time something had gone horribly wrong. Pleased and proud were its readers when out of its travail came the Digest with a cheerful, sporting handling of its own and other poll scores. Good-humored Editor Wilfred J. Funk, who himself had wagered no money on the election, featured on his magazine's first page a small facsimile Digest cover encircling the legend, "IS OUR FACE RED!" Beneath this he printed a cartoon by Edmund Duffy of the Baltimore Sun in which a battered GOPolitician clutches a horsewhip and growls into a telephone: "Literary Digest? Lemme talk to the editor!" Surrounding text went on to say:

". . . All this conjecture about our 'not reaching certain strata' simply will not hold water. . . . The basis of the 1936 mailing-list was the 1932 mailing-list, and since the overwhelming majority of those who responded to our Poll in 1932 voted for Mr. Roosevelt, it seems altogether reasonable to assume that the majority of our ballots this year went to people who had voted for Roosevelt in 1932. . . . So what? So we were wrong, although we did everything we knew to assure ourselves of being right."

Fact was that to the Digest's aging Publisher Robert Joseph Cuddihy, mail-order methods have always spelled success. This year, Editor Funk recommended that more money be spent to check and supplement the 1932 lists, was overruled. Only ten million ballots were mailed this year, half as many as in 1932. And anyone would guess that more Landon than Roosevelt voters were to be found at their 1932 addresses in 1936.

As to the future, the Digest asked its readers: "Should the Democratic Party have quit in 1924 . . . instead of going on to the greatest triumph in its history? Should the University of Minnesota . . . give up [football] because it finally lost one game?" On the question of a change in polling methods, the Digest hedged: "We'll cross that bridge when we come to it."

Lest Franklin Roosevelt feel that the magazine had attempted to slug him with a "weighted" poll, the Digest heartily added that it hailed "a magnificent President against whom it never uttered one word of partisan criticism. . . . The Digest does not editorialize."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.