The Literary Digest was an influential general interest weekly
magazineMagazines, periodicals, glossies or serials are publications, generally published on a regular schedule, containing a variety of articles, generally financed by advertising, by a purchase price, by pre-paid magazine subscriptions, or all three...
published by
Funk and WagnallsFunk & Wagnalls is a publisher based in New York City known for its reference works, including an encyclopedia, content from which became a part of Microsoft's Encarta digital encyclopedia.-History:...
. Founded by Isaac Kauffman Funk in 1890, it eventually merged with two similar weekly magazines,
Public Opinion and
Current Opinion.
Beginning with early issues, the emphasis was on opinion articles and an analysis of news events. Established as a weekly newsmagazine, it offered condensations of articles from American, Canadian and European publications.
The Literary Digest was an influential general interest weekly
magazineMagazines, periodicals, glossies or serials are publications, generally published on a regular schedule, containing a variety of articles, generally financed by advertising, by a purchase price, by pre-paid magazine subscriptions, or all three...
published by
Funk and WagnallsFunk & Wagnalls is a publisher based in New York City known for its reference works, including an encyclopedia, content from which became a part of Microsoft's Encarta digital encyclopedia.-History:...
. Founded by Isaac Kauffman Funk in 1890, it eventually merged with two similar weekly magazines,
Public Opinion and
Current Opinion.
Beginning with early issues, the emphasis was on opinion articles and an analysis of news events. Established as a weekly newsmagazine, it offered condensations of articles from American, Canadian and European publications. Type-only covers gave way to illustrated covers during the early 1900s. In the 1920s, the covers carried full-color reproductions of famous paintings. By 1927,
The Literary Digest climbed to a circulation of over one million. Covers of the final issues displayed various photographic and photo-montage techniques. In 1938, it merged with the
Review of ReviewsThe Review of Reviews was a noted family of monthly journals founded in 1890-93 by British reform journalist William Thomas Stead...
, only to fail soon after.
Presidential poll
The Literary Digest is almost certainly best-remembered today for the circumstances surrounding its demise. It conducted a "straw poll" regarding the likely outcome of the 1936 presidential election. The poll showed that the
RepublicanThe Republican Party is one of the two major contemporary political parties in the United States, along with the Democratic Party. Founded by anti-slavery expansion activists in 1854, it is often called the Grand Old Party or the GOP, despite being the younger of the two major parties. In the U.S...
governor of KansasThe Governor of the State of Kansas is the head of state for the State of Kansas, United States. Under the Kansas Constitution, the Governor is also the head of government, serving as the chief executive of the Kansas executive branch, of the government of Kansas. The Governor is the...
,
Alf LandonAlfred "Alf" Mossman Landon was an American Republican politician, who served as Governor of Kansas from 1933–1937. He was best known for being the Republican Party's nominee for President of the United States, defeated in a landslide by Franklin D...
, would likely be the overwhelming winner. This seemed possible to some, as the Republicans had fared well in
MaineThe State of Maine is a state in the New England region of the northeastern United States, bordering the Atlantic Ocean to the southeast, New Hampshire to the southwest, and the Canadian provinces of Quebec to the northwest and New Brunswick to the northeast. Maine is the northernmost portion of...
, where the congressional and gubernatorial elections were then held in September - as opposed to the rest of the nation, where these elections were held in November along with the presidential election, like today. This seemed especially likely in light of the conventional wisdom, "
As Maine goes, so goes the nation"As Maine goes, so goes the nation" is a phrase that at one time was in wide currency in United States politics. The phrase described Maine's reputation as a bellwether state for presidential elections...
", a truism coined because Maine was regarded as a "
bellwetherA bellwether is any entity in a given arena that serves to create or influence trends or to presage future happenings.The term is derived from the Middle English bellewether and refers to the practice of placing a bell around the neck of a castrated ram leading its flock of sheep.The movements of...
" state which usually supported the winning candidate's party.
In November, Landon carried only
VermontThe State of Vermont is a state in the New England region of the northeastern United States of America. The state ranks 43rd by land area, , and 45th by total area. It has a population of 621,270, making it the second least-populated state...
and
MaineThe State of Maine is a state in the New England region of the northeastern United States, bordering the Atlantic Ocean to the southeast, New Hampshire to the southwest, and the Canadian provinces of Quebec to the northwest and New Brunswick to the northeast. Maine is the northernmost portion of...
;
U.S. PresidentThe President of the United States is the head of state and head of government of the United States and is the highest political official in the United States by influence and recognition...
Franklin Delano Roosevelt carried the then-46 other states; Landon's electoral vote total of eight is a tie for the record low for a major-party nominee since the current U.S.
two-party systemA two-party system is a form of party system where two major political parties dominate voting in nearly all elections, at every level. As a result, all, or nearly all, elected offices end up being held by candidates endorsed by one of the two major parties...
began in the 1850s. The Democrats joked, "As goes Maine, so goes Vermont," and the magazine was completely discredited because of the poll and was soon discontinued.
In retrospect, the polling techniques employed by the magazine were to blame. Although it had polled 10 million individuals (only about 2.4 million of these individuals responded, an astronomical sum for
any survey), it had surveyed firstly its own readers, a group with disposable incomes well above the national average of the time (shown in part by their ability still to afford a magazine subscription during the depths of the
Great DepressionThe Great Depression was a severe worldwide economic depression in the decade preceding World War II. The timing of the Great Depression varied across nations, but in most countries it started in about 1929 and lasted until the late 1930s or early 1940s...
). The magazine also used two other readily available lists: that of registered
automobileAn automobile, motor car or car is a wheeled motor vehicle used for transporting passengers, which also carries its own engine or motor...
owners and that of
telephoneThe telephone is a telecommunications device that transmits and receives sound, most commonly the human voice. It is one of the most common household appliances in the developed world, and has long been considered indispensable to business, industry and government...
users. While such lists might come close to providing a statistically-accurate cross-section of Americans today, this assumption was manifestly untrue in the 1930s. Both groups had incomes well above the national average of the day, which resulted in lists of voters far more likely to support
RepublicansThe Republican Party is one of the two major contemporary political parties in the United States, along with the Democratic Party. Founded by anti-slavery expansion activists in 1854, it is often called the Grand Old Party or the GOP, despite being the younger of the two major parties. In the U.S...
than a truly typical voter of the time.
George GallupGeorge Horace Gallup was an American pioneer of survey sampling techniques and inventor of the Gallup poll, a successful statistical method of survey sampling for measuring public opinion....
's American Institute of Public Opinion achieved national recognition by correctly predicting the result of the election, and for correctly predicting the results of the
Literary Digest poll to within about 1%, using a smaller sample size of 50,000.
This debacle led to a considerable refinement of public opinion polling techniques and was largely regarded as spurring the beginning of the era of modern scientific public opinion research.
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