What was the legacy of the 1936 election success for Gallup and scientific polling?
ALEC GALLUP: Well, what it did was it made it not only acceptable but made it credible. I mean, when he got that one right, the poll just took off and the papers, it was a syndicated newspaper service, as you know, and he signed the papers up, and they paid pretty good money back then. One of the reasons that we actually weren’t as active in market research in the early years as we might have been, was there wasn’t enough money in it. The papers were paying big money. I once asked my father why was it so successful – why did it take off like it did? He said – it’s something I wasn’t even aware of – he said the decade of the 1930s for a very short period of time, from let’s say 1932 until the war – was sort of the era of the Sunday newspaper, and they needed filler back then for that Sunday paper. And so he cranked out these full pages – you know, surveys and things – and it was great filler. And this was, for a very short period, was the era of the Sunday newspaper. QUESTION: What were
