The Literary Digest was an influential American general interest weekly magazine published by Funk & Wagnalls. Founded by Isaac Kaufmann Funk in 1890, it eventually merged with two similar weekly magazines, Public Opinion and Current Opinion.
History
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. After Isaac Funk's death in 1912, Robert Joseph Cuddihy became the editor. 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 Reviews, only to fail soon after. Its subscriber list was bought by Time. A column in The Digest, known as "The Lexicographer's Easy Chair", was produced by Frank Horace Vizetelly. Ewing Galloway as assistant editor at the publication.
Presidential poll
The Literary Digest is best-remembered today for the circumstances surrounding its demise. As it had done since 1916, it conducted a straw poll regarding the likely outcome of the 1936 presidential election, and prior to 1936, the poll had always correctly predicted the winner. The 1936 poll showed that the Republican candidate, GovernorAlfred Landon of Kansas, was likely to be the overwhelming winner. Despite the popularity of the incumbent Franklin D. Roosevelt, a Landon victory seemed plausible as at the time, Maine's congressional and gubernatorial elections were held in September - with the Republicans winning the Governorship, both houses in the state legislature, and all of the state's congressional delegation - as opposed to the rest of the nation that held elections in November along with the presidential election. A Landon victory also seemed likely to some in light of the conventional wisdom at that time, "As Maine goes, so goes the nation", reflecting the fact that Maine's September election of a governor correctly predicted the party outcome of the November presidential election in 22 out of the 29 presidential election years from 1820 to 1932 : 1820–1844, 1852, 1860–1880, 1888, 1896–1908 and 1920–1932. Maine was a Republican state, and from 1860 to 1932, with the exception of 1912, Maine voted for the Republican candidate for president. Thus, Maine did not vote for Grover Cleveland in 1884 or 1892, Woodrow Wilson in 1916, or for Franklin Roosevelt in 1932, when they, as Democrats, won those elections. In 1912, Maine cast its electoral votes for Wilson, but that year, Republicans split their votes between William Howard Taft, the Republican, and Theodore Roosevelt, the Bull Moose candidate. In November, Landon only won Maine and Vermont, as President Franklin Delano Roosevelt won the other 46 states. Landon's electoral vote total of eight is an equal-record low for any major-party nominee since the American political paradigm of the Democratic and Republican parties began in 1854. The Democrats joked, "As goes Maine, so goes Vermont," while the magnitude of the error destroyed the magazine's credibility, and it folded within 18 months of the election. In retrospect, the polling techniques employed by the magazine were to blame. Although it had polled ten million individuals, it had surveyed its own readers first, a group with disposable incomes well above the national average of the time, and two other readily available lists, those of registered automobile owners and that of telephone users, both of which were also wealthier than the average American at the time. Research published in 1972 and 1988 concluded that as expected this sampling bias was a factor, but non-response bias was the primary source of the error, that is, people who disliked Roosevelt had strong feelings and were more willing to go to the trouble of mailing back a response. George Gallup's American Institute of Public Opinion achieved national recognition by correctly predicting the result of the 1936 election. Gallup also correctly predicted the results of the Literary Digest poll to within 1.1%, using a much smaller sample size of just 50,000. Gallup's last poll before the election predicted Roosevelt would receive 56% of the popular vote; the official tally gave Roosevelt 60.8%. This debacle led to a considerable refinement of public opinion polling techniques and later came to be regarded as ushering in the era of modern scientific public opinion research.
