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George Gallup said the creation of public opinion polling grew from his experience in journalism, an encounter with electoral politics, and his training in applied psychology, and the goals of polling were to make audible the voice of the common man and bring science to democracy. This article, however, shows point-by-point connections between his reader-interest research and his first syndicated poll results, which appeared in "America Speaks" on October 20, 1935, in at least thirty newspapers across the country. It reveals the foundation of Gallup's public opinion polling in his market research and suggests that appealing to newspapers' readers and promoting his market research were additional goals. It also establishes an earlier date for the origin of the understanding of public opinion as poll results.
George Gallup's first syndicated public opinion poll, "America Speaks," appeared on October 20,1935, in at least twentyfive daily newspapers across the United States. The full page of poll results debuted fifty-four weeks before Franklin Delano Roosevelt was re-elected-just as Gallup had predicted-to a second term as president of the United States. By November 1936, seventy-eight newspapers carried Gallup's feature.'
This article reveals that Gallup used findings from his readerinterest research completed for newspapers and advertisers earlier in the decade to shape the content and presentation of "America Speaks."2 Furthermore, this study corrects previous assumptions about the origins of the widespread understanding of public opinion as poll results. It suggests that by carrying "America Speaks," newspapers helped to secure the mainstream definition of public opinion as an aggregate of individual opinions expressed privately. Thus, this research adds important details to the histories of newspapers, polling, and public opinion.
Mainstream understanding of the concept of public opinion is securely, if not universally, linked to the notion of one person giving one opinion privately in response to a survey question, with aggregates of multiple individual responses reported in poll results. In the early decades of the twentieth century, however, the understanding of public opinion varied widely.
Although scholars generally agree that the turn toward quantification for the meaning of public opinion occurred in the middle 1930s, the road leading to equating public opinion with polling results remains incompletely mapped.' Harwood Childs, a founding editor of Public Opinion Quarterly (POQ), used broad strokes...