Max McElwain

“…A FAIR CHANCE TO BE HEARD…”

Книга Profiles in Communication содержит 43 очерка о тех, кто удостоен высокой чести быть членом Зала Славы  (the Hall of Fame) в School of Journalism and Mass Communication университета Айовы. В очерке о Джордже Гэллапе использованы материалы интервью с Гэллапом, состоявшемся за два года до смерти ученого.

В ответ на нашу просьбу Профессор Кеннет Старк сообщил, что Max McEwain - автор книги – подготовил ее в качестве исследования, выполняемого студентами для получения степени MA.

Безусловно, этот проект значительно превосходил обычные требования, предъявляемые к подобным исследованиям, и возникла ситуация, при которой «проект во многом руководил автором, а не автор управлял работой» (it almost began controlling him rather than him controlling it).

Но все завершилось успешно, и автор получил искомую степень.

If the American Institute of Public Opinion had been in existence in 1917 and had surveyed the 1,500 voters – the standard number of people interviewed in any Gallup poll – of Jefferson, Iowa, about the likelihood of success for an enterprising hometown son of theirs, chances are they would have said that the future looked rosy for 16-year-old George Gallup.

In that first year of America’s involvement in World War 1, the athletic coach at Jefferson High School was drafted into service, leaving school officials with no choice but to drop sports. Gallup, captain of the football and basketball teams, was raking in considerable pocket change from the six cows he milked on his father’s 10-acre place in Jefferson. He decided to make an offer the administrators couldn’t refuse.

“I told them I would not only outfit the teams in uniforms, but I would serve as coach, too,” remembered Gallup. “The only stipulation was that I got to keep the gate receipts at the games. They agreed.”

“Ted Gallup was always very enterprising,” mused Kenneth Mac-Donald, who was three years behind Gallup in school at Jefferson, and who, like Gallup, wound up in the UI journalism Hall of Fame.

George Gallup’s enterprising nature soon led him to monitor activities of greater international importance than high school athletics. Having revolutionalized the surveying of public opinion, George Gallup, without picking up a gun, may have done more to advance the practice of democracy than anyone in the 20th century.

He saw Gallup Poll affiliates go to work in 35 nations, evidence enough of Gallup’s revolutionary contention that what people think is as much news as what they do. In the Scandinavian countries, a “gallup” is the generic word for poll or survey. In Russia, Gallup said, the idea of a cross-section “is like the old Literary Digest’s: that magazine polled car and telephone owners. The Russians talk to young people getting off the trains in Moscow.”

In his 1964 book, The Miracle Ahead, Gallup contended his aim was “to move civilization to a higher level.” Twenty years earlier, in A Guide to Public Opinion Polls, Gallup saw the poll as “giving the rank and file a fair chance to be heard,” and its greatest contribution as “the redemption of the common man.”

George Gallup’s startlingly simple view of polling – that a small but accurate polling sample can improve the quality of government – sprang from the vision of life he said he learned in Iowa.

It’s a rainy Friday afternoon in Iowa City, and George and Ophelia Gallup sip tea in the River Room at the Iowa Memorial Union, whisked in from the Iowa City airport where they’ve arrived from Rochester, Minnesota. Gallup, born 82 years ago, has just visited the Mayo Clinic for his annual checkup.

“One of the most interesting polls we ever did was about aging,” he recalls. “People who aged most gracefully were those who took life as it comes.”

He is certainly relaxed. Wearing a black suit, black topcoat and black hat straight out of the’30s, George Gallup has the demeanor of a retired Iowa farmer strolling through a stubble field. Hunched over the table, he jabs the air with his knife and fork in emphasis as farmers do at the Sunday dinner table.

Belying George Gallup’s relaxed manner are his eyes. At 82, Gallup’s eyes are as steely hard and black as beans – like those beans he started using 50 years ago to explain his method of cross-section polling.

“Suppose there are 7,000 white beans and 3,000 black beans well churned in a barrel,” he says. “If you scoop out 100 of them, you’ll get approximately 70 white beans and 30 black, and the range of possible error can be computed mathematically. As long as the barrel contains many more beans than your handful, the proportion will remain within a small margin of error 997 times out of 1,000.

“My early background had everything to do with my life later on,” he continues. “I went to a very good school – the school system in Jefferson was excellent. Our children went to private schools in the East, and they didn’t get a better education than I. With the money I made from milking cows, I started a high school newspaper. The high school building was condemned as unsafe, and a temporary structure was put up, without a basketball court. I wrote a long diatribe against the school board. After he read it, my father said, ‘You ought to be a journalist.’

“One problem with education goes back to the permissive era,” says Gallup, whose father, brother and wife were teachers. “Nothing in education failed so badly. But it’s changing now for the good. As far as journalism education goes, I have two ideas about journalism schools: they should give attention to liberal arts training, offering a broad education with less emphasis on technical training. At the same time, they should play the same role as medical schools, serving as a source of new journalistic ideas. If schools were churning out ideas, editors would sit at the feet of the professors.

“Dealing with problems of education has been the most interesting work I’ve done. Democracies are effective only when the people are well-informed; almost every country in South America has taken the U.S. Constitution word for word, but many have failed because their people are not informed.”

So George Gallup, who says he is “surprised occasionally” by his poll results, set out to raise democracy to a higher level. While “what people think” is now news (although not always on the front page), more work remains to be done.

“Right now, there is no effective way of covering ideas,” he observes. “The news media cover catastrophes effectively – but not ideas. All countries have about 65 to 100 identifiable problems in common. Some of these countries are doing exciting things about them, but the press doesn’t cover them adequately.

“By nature, I’ve always believed in change,” he says with a wry smile. “I guess I’ve always had a messianic delusion.”

Gallup’s action-oriented intellect flourished on the University of Iowa campus. Though he earned three degrees and an honorary doctor of law degree from the University of Iowa and also taught at the university, his university years cannot be separated neatly into student and teacher. The two roles blended naturally.

Gallup’s most “pleasurable” pursuit, the field of education, was an obsession. He founded Quill and Scroll Society, the international honorary society for high school journalists, whose base is at the UI.

The idea of establishing an honorary society for high school journalists was proposed in the fall of 1925 by Gallup, when he was a young journalism instructor at the University of Iowa.

“For many years I had been aware of the excellent training which high school journalism offered me, both as an editor of a high school paper and later as editor of The Daily Iowan,” Gallup remarked. “It also seemed grossly unfair that high school athletes should march off with all the honors, and those who were equally outstanding in journalism should go unrewarded.”

It was on April 10, 1926, that 23 enthusiastic high school journalism advisers met with Gallup in Iowa City, Iowa, and wrote the Quill and Scroll constitution. Since 1926, the numbers of new charters and individual memberships have increased at phenomenal rates.

By 1990 more than 13,225 charters had been granted to high schools in every state of the Union and in 41 foreign countries. The Society has an estimated one million “alumni” in all walks of life, many of them distinguished journalists.

Quill and Scroll Society, through its Foundation, established the first chaired professorship at the University of Iowa. Today it is known as the George H. Gallup Professorship in Journalism.

George Gallup’s notions of journalism, education and democracy came together in the sampling technique he developed in the late 1920s while a journalism instructor and doctoral candidate at the UI. His doctoral thesis developed a method of measuring readership interest in news, features and advertisements in a newspaper by interviewing readers with different backgrounds. He used his method for the Des Moines Register in 1928, the same year he received his Ph.D. Four years later, Gallup put his theory to work again with voters, as he helped his mother-in-law, Ola Miller (he had married Ophelia Miller, a UI French major, in 1925) become Iowa’s secretary of state.

In 1935, the first Gallup Poll, sponsored by 40 newspapers, was released. And, of course, a year later he predicted correctly that Franklin Roosevelt would defeat Alf Landon in the 1936 presidential election, although he underrated FDR’s popular vote by about 7 percent. The Gallup prediction was particularly noteworthy in light of an incorrect prediction made by an influential magazine of the day, the Literary Digest.

In the years since the emergence of the poll (there has been at least one public release weekly since October 20, 1935), sweeping changes have been made in election polling and product marketing as a direct result of the Gallup-method. Two staples persisted in George Gallup’s thinking: the stubborn belief that democracy works best when the will of “the common man” is known, and that society continually changes.

George Gallup died on July 27,1984, at his summer home in Tschingel, a village near the Lake of Thun in central Switzerland, at the age of 82. The Gallup organization was sold in September 1988 to Selection Research Inc., in Lincoln, Nebraska.

Max McElwain Profiles in Communication, Iowa Center for Communication Study, Iowa City, 1991, p. 1-5.

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