George Gallup, the father of modern opinion polling, ran his first political survey because his mother-in-law asked him to. 

The year was 1932, and Iowa’s Democratic party bosses had just placed Ola Babcock Miller on the ticket as candidate for Secretary of State. It was a token gesture. Miller—a former teacher and amateur painter—had only modest political experience, but her deceased husband Alex had edited the only important Democratic newspaper in the traditionally Republican state, and his friends in the party thought nominating his suffragette widow for statewide office would be a worthy tribute. She was flattered, but overwhelmed; early in the race, Miller described her campaign as “a martyrdom to the cause.” 

She didn’t take the responsibility lightly, though. Instead, Miller enlisted the help of her son-in-law, George. Raised by an Iowa dairy farmer and land speculator, Gallup had spent the past decade at the University of Iowa and Drake University studying the reading patterns of American newspaper and magazine consumers. Using Gallup’s survey method, revolutionary at the time, an interviewer would take readers through the pages of a newspaper’s most recent issue, glean how much or how little of it they read, and then break down the items by category so publishers could learn what types of features drew significant eyeballs. His doctoral dissertation was titled, quite frankly, “A New Technique For Measuring Reader Interest in Newspapers,” and a host of Midwestern rags eventually hired him to evaluate their products. [1] His mother-in-law, looking for any advantage she could secure, wondered whether Gallup’s technique could be used to figure out what issues mattered most to her potential constituents. 

It was an insightful idea. Throughout the fall, George knocked on doors, asking voters what they valued in a candidate. (Highway safety, he found, was a top priority.) He passed those details on to Miller, who worked it into her campaign stump speeches. Riding the coattails of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who took home 2,225 out of 2,435 precincts in the Hawkeye State that November, the widow upset her opponent by less than 3,000 votes, one of the first Democrats since the Civil War to win statewide office in Iowa. She had Gallup to thank for the extra edge. 

Gallup’s own experience on the trail was revelatory. He had come to the conclusion during his academic training that people “arrive at their preferences and opinions in an orderly way” (Journal of Marketing; October, 1962). It followed that one could get a firm understanding of the public’s political desires if he or she asked the right amount of Americans the right questions. And if voters’ collective intentions were pure and preferences widely known, politicians would have no choice but to bend to their will. Democracy would flourish. The trick was figuring out an efficient and accurate technique to ascertain what the public actually wanted. 

Political junkies had taken straw polls for decades [2], but they invariably lacked statistical rigor. (“Of the 16 people on this cable car, 12 are Harding men.”) In the early 20th century, the most comprehensive and influential practitioner was Literary Digest, a weekly general interest magazine. During each presidential election cycle, starting in 1916, its editors mailed out ersatz ballots to its subscribers (and eventually to publicly-listed names of people who owned telephones and cars) and solicited responses. Heaps of data poured back into the magazine’s offices, where hundreds of clerks tallied the results. Saturation was the name of the game; if enough Americans are contacted, the thinking went, the nation’s predilections will inevitably emerge. One or two weeks before Election Day, the magazine would release its final forecast. In the first five races it tracked, Literary Digest’s data spit out the correct winner five times. 

Gallup knew there was a better way. In December of 1933, after moving to New York City to head up the research arm of the advertising agency Young and Rubicam, Gallup and his colleagues began conducting nationwide opinion polls, employing the sampling method, which he likened to government inspectors who test wheat. (“They take a sample here, another there,” he told the Washington Post on December 8, 1935, “and by choosing the samples properly are able to judge the quality of the whole amount from what the sample shows.”) Along with people who owned cars and phones, Gallup hired hundreds of staffers to interview laborers and persons on public aid in all 50 states, folks who intended to vote but whose names could not be traced back to assets they owned or luxury magazines to which they subscribed. (This was the height of the Depression, so that demographic was significant.) The firm deliberately surveyed a cross-section of Americans they felt was representative of the electorate at large: farmers and city dwellers, rich and poor persons, Republicans and Democrats. The approach seems intuitive, but nobody in politics had ever tried it before.  

After gathering data for two years, Gallup created a new organization—the American Institute of Public Opinion (AIPO)—and published its initial findings in a syndicated newspaper column he named “America Speaks.” Within the year, over 60 newspapers had purchased the package, which Gallup updated with new information weekly. Columnist Franklyn Waltman dubbed it “the periodic gauging of the public heartbeat” (Washington Post; July 13, 1936). The concept of a running poll was so novel that some newspapers had to convince readers that the information Gallup presented did not reflect the political views of their editorial board. 

Gallup didn’t hide his modest disdain for Literary Digest’s survey work, either. A few months before that magazine was set to release its enormous report, the Iowa native predicted in one of his columns that his competitor’s data would skew toward Republican challenger Alf Landon, despite what he considered strong evidence that the incumbent, President Roosevelt, held a commanding lead. (As early as November 24, 1935, Gallup had identified 30 states in which the Democrat was garnering at least 53 percent support, a bloc that would have given him enough electoral college votes (269) to win without securing even one “borderline state.”) Wilfred Funk, LD’s editor, clapped back, calling Gallup’s prediction “a gratuitous statement." His staff had “never been able to discover how many ‘rich men, poor men, G-men, racketeers, and candlestick makers’ voted in a given election,” he added sarcastically (New York Times; July 19, 1936). 

They should have tried harder. After sending out 10 million postcards through the mail, and receiving a whopping 2.4 million responses, Literary Digest projected that Landon would upend Roosevelt with 370 electoral votes. Gallup’s last “America Speaks” column of the cycle argued that Roosevelt could take home anywhere from 315 to 477 electoral votes. He carried 48 states and won with 523. 

Funk and company had no explanation for their poor showing. “We were far from correct,” they wrote in their first post-election issue. “Why? We ask that question in all sincerity, because we want to know.” Refusing to admit that they over-sampled wealthier, Republican-leaning voters, Literary Digest ultimately just threw its hands up in the air: “So we were wrong, although we did everything we knew to assure ourselves of being right.” It was the last poll they’d conduct; after promising to try their luck again four years down the road, the magazine merged with a competitor in 1937, Funk fled for Reader’s Digest, and the whole enterprise sank the following year.

The Washington Post, meanwhile, was so thrilled with the accuracy of its partner that the paper printed, on two different days, letters from “political and business leaders” praising Gallup’s work; according to the chairman of the Federal Trade Commission, AIPO “undoubtedly demonstrated its superiority over other devices for prejudging the results of the election” (November 5, 1936). Gallup used the high-profile victory as a launching pad, eventually building with his son an international network of research offices that ask private citizens, to this day, what they are thinking. Political polling, as is painfully obvious this time of year, took on a life of its own, for better and worse. As Jason Zengerle wrote in New York last week, “the polling industry has never been less confident in its ability to reduce a series of interviews to a number that is an accurate reflection of the opinions and future behavior of the populace.” Pollsters, it turns out, are still grasping for that elusive representative sample. 

As for Gallup’s mother-in-law? She was re-elected for two additional full terms, in 1934 and 1936, before she succumbed to pneumonia at the age of 57. Her most meaningful contribution to Iowa public life was the establishment of a state highway patrol unit in 1934, one that boasted 15 inspectors and helped reduce the highway accident rate considerably. More often than not, it helps to know what voters want.

[1] One of Gallup’s early discoveries was that people loved to look at pictures and comic strips. According to the Journal of Marketing (October, 1962), “advertisers, and particularly Ralph Starr Butler of General Foods, seized on these findings, and the first comic-strip advertising resulted.”

[2] Via the Wall Street Journal, they were "named for the way farmers threw a fistful of straw in the air to see which way the wind was blowing."

It was the moment she had worked toward for years. On June 25, 1924, Lena Springs—a decorated 41-year-old academic and political activist from Lancaster, South Carolina—was set to address the Democratic National Convention in New York’s famed Madison Square Garden. Her task was routine but symbolically important: Springs was to submit a report for the committee on credentials [1], of which she was chairman, the first woman to hold that title. In a wide-ranging interview published by the Washington Post six weeks later (August 10, 1924), Springs admitted that she was “not one of those who think a woman needs to submerge her femininity in order to be a politician,” so she dressed up for the occasion, donning a crepe meteor dress and a “very Parisian and very chic” straw leghorn hat (New York Times; June 26, 1924). As she walked purposefully across the stage and approached the lectern on that sweltering summer day, the convention’s band leader cued up a song he felt encapsulated all that Springs had to offer the party of Jackson and Wilson. It was an old ragtime ditty titled “Oh You Beautiful Doll.”

Two days later, a group of delegates formally placed Springs in nomination for the office of Vice President. No woman at a major party convention had ever received that distinction, one that “heralded the time, according to the fair sex, when one of their number will be entered in the lists for the Presidency itself” (Post). She was honored and humbled by the gesture; the leading woman Democrat of the South, as a colleague described her, promised she would not treat the nomination “lightly.” Springs didn’t win, but her 15 minutes in the spotlight—zealously documented by news and style reporters of the time—show how much progress we’ve made in equalizing political opportunities for women, and how much further we still have to go.

Lena Jones was born in 1883 in Pulaski, Tennessee. She took to school instantly, first in the Dallas-area private schools where she studied for the first decade of her life and later at Sullins College, where she graduated with a B.A. in English. Like few other women of her era, Jones continued her scholarship in post-graduate programs at Virginia College in Roanoke and Presbyterian College in South Carolina, eventually earning a prestigious D. Litt. and landing a job as head of the Queens College (North Carolina) English Department, all before her 30th birthday.

Love interrupted her academic ascent. In 1913, Jones married Leroy Springs, a cotton mill owner and one of the most prominent industrialists of the South. She adopted her husband’s name, moved 50 miles south to Lancaster, and redirected her energy into politics, taking on key roles in the South Carolina Equal Suffrage League and the South Carolina Federation of Women’s Clubs. During the Great War, Springs organized the Lancaster Red Cross, establishing two emergency hospitals in her town to treat influenza. Once the 19th amendment was ratified, she eagerly cast her ballot for the Democratic slate, and ultimately secured a position as Democratic National Committeeman [2]. The convention in 1924—the first held since women were extended the franchise—was an event Springs would not miss.

She wanted plenty of women to join her, too. Springs had spent a portion of her spring alongside national Democratic vice chairman Emily Newell Blair lobbying party members to increase the number of delegations-at-large from four to eight, with the explicit intention of reserving half of the new slots for women. (Just one female Democrat served as a delegate at the DNC’s 1908 convocation in Denver, though the number of lady envoys increased slowly over the next 16 years.) The provision passed. When Springs arrived in New York, another 475 female delegates and alternates were in attendance—almost one-fourth of the entire membership, and the largest delegation of women ever to participate officially in a U.S. political convention.

The Democratic women came from all walks of life—elected officials, Tammany Hall leaders, school teachers, business women, housewives—and made clear there was “no one outstanding issue on which [they], as a group, will make a fight” (Chicago Tribune; June 23, 1924). What they wanted was to be treated seriously as political thinkers and organizers. Right away, they launched a campaign to gain control of a major committee chairmanship, canvassing delegations for pledges “in a professional way” (AP; June 22, 1924). It was a display of strength, and Springs was the beneficiary of this exerted clout, taking the reins of the Credentials Committee as the convention got underway. Not surprisingly, she handled the job like a veteran, “winning the plaudits of her colleagues not only for her ability but her courtesy and fairness” (Times; June 28, 1924). Her first appearance on stage was a direct result of her skillful work behind the scenes.

And how did reporters depict the South Carolina suffragette upon her initial foray into national politics? Like the band who played her on stage, the press overwhelmingly treated Springs like little more than a pin-up model, or “an ornament to the convention,” as the Boston Globe so delicately put it (July 6, 1924). Even after watching some members of the media objectify Vice Presidential nominee Sarah Palin four years ago, the reports from 1924 are jarring. Springs was “a highly personable and sumptuously-draped young woman” with “a complexion which Helen of Troy might envy.” She had “coal black hair and eyes, and a dynamic, scintillating vitality.” Her dresses and jewels were “particularly lovely and becoming,” catching the eyes of fashion editors, “who have been shown that the women from the Southland know how to wear clothes as well as the women on Fifth Ave.” Springs, in short, was “distinctly the type that men ‘fall for’ good and hard.”

The coverage got even more ridiculous when 18 of Springs’ fellow South Carolina delegates—as a way to honor her service to their state and national party—nominated her for the presidential ticket. The former English professor understood that her chances were minuscule; 29 other men were nominated, and she’d never held elected office. But even the modest tribute was partially spoiled by rampant sexism. It took two forms: Springs’ nomination was understood as either a novelty to mock or a nightmare to fear. With a creepy wink and nod that practically leaps off the page, Senator Burton Wheeler (D-MT) provided a clear example of the former, noting that Springs “would most certainly improve the situation in the Senate” (Times; June 28, 1924). Her (jackass) husband Leroy joined the latter camp, initially telling reporters that he “did not take kindly to the idea of having his wife’s name ‘coupled’ with that of another man’s” (Globe), and adding two weeks later he would “leave for some other country” on the day a woman won the presidency (Post). What would become of the United States if a woman took a seat in the vice presidential chair? According to the Post, “speculation [on the convention floor] ranged from making every day a Mother’s day to appointing the head of the Thursday Mah Jong club as secretary of war.”

Springs, for her part, said she would keep a low profile and “try to keep the Senate from getting into too great a parliamentary tangle.” (Where is she when we need her?) And while she maintained that no woman would lead a major party until “men get over this old-fashioned jealousy or sex superiority complex,” she was optimistic about the future, despite the treatment she herself received. “The day is not very far off,” she told the Post, “when a woman will be President of the United States.”

Springs took home 2.7 percent of the vote at the 1924 convention, not enough to eclipse eventual nominee Charles Bryan. Afterwards, she stayed modestly active in local affairs before moving to New York following her husband’s death in 1931. Nine years later, at the age of 59, she passed away, the victim of a surprise heart attack. And with no women on either 2012 ticket, her wish to see a female president remains unfulfilled.

[1] The credentials committee confirms the identity of the party’s delegates and their authority to vote.
[2] The Republican Party, she would later say, “stands for special privilege.”

Opponents called it the first step towards socialized medicine. The law was too expensive, they complained, and it violated states’ rights. One woman who testified during a congressional committee hearing even suggested its passage would lead to “bureaucratic control of family life.” If he was alive, John Roberts surely would have found a way to strike it down in court.

You don’t hear about it much anymore, but the Sheppard-Towner Act—or the “Better Babies Bill,” as some reporters referred to it at the time—was a big f’ing deal. No Congress in U.S. history had ever approved a federally funded social welfare program before S-T came up for debate in the early 1920s; aside from the Volstead Act, it was the most controversial law of its era. A Boston Globe writer summed it up this way: “It ranks next in importance, in the opinion of its advocates, to the legislation which finally gave women the right to vote.” And there are some striking parallels between the fight over Sheppard-Towner and the recent debate surrounding President Obama’s embattled health reform law. With the Supreme Court set to rule on the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act next month, it’s worth investigating the legacy of its earliest legislative antecedent.

The story begins in 1912, when President Taft created the U.S. Children's Bureau and hired Julia Lathrop to run it. Housed within the Labor Department, the agency was designed to investigate and report “upon all matters pertaining to the welfare of children and child life among all classes of our people.” Lathrop (pictured above) had been doing essentially the same work for two decades at Chicago’s Hull House, undertaking extensive surveys to document the brutal living conditions in her city’s slums, mental health institutions, orphanages, and poorhouses. She was a natural fit. As one senator’s wife gushed to the Washington Post, choosing Lathrop was “the finest and most just recognition of a woman's ability, and her place in the nation, that has ever been made by any president" (November 6, 1912).

“Young America’s Aunt”* knew instantly what problem her department should tackle first: infant mortality. When she arrived in Washington, Lathrop’s office launched an eight-city examination into American childbirth habits. The results were startling; the nation’s overall infant mortality rate was a whopping 111.2 per 1,000 live births, higher than almost every other industrialized country in the world. Annually, 250,000 American babies died during their first year and another 23,000 mothers were killed during the delivery. (It was the second leading cause of death among women between the ages of 18 and 45, behind tuberculosis.) There was also a correlation between poverty and the mortality rate—for families earning less than $450 annually, one baby in six died before his or her first birthday. Respected Johns Hopkins pediatrician Dr. J. H. Mason Knox made clear at the time that nearly all of those deaths were preventable if families just received proper prenatal care. Only 20 percent of expectant moms did.

With firm data in hand, Lathrop set about drafting a piece of legislation that would use federal funds to provide “public protection of maternity and infancy.”** Like the newly-established Smith-Lever Act, which authorized the Department of Agriculture to distribute matching funds to the states for extension work by county agents, Lathrop envisioned a program in which Washington partnered with local nurses, universities, and social workers to subsidize the instruction of mothers on the care of infants. “The bill,” Lathrop wrote, “is designed to emphasize public responsibility for the protection of life just as already through our public schools we recognize public responsibility in the education of children.”

In 1919, U.S. Rep. Horace Mann Towner (R-Iowa) and U.S. Sen. Morris Sheppard (D-Texas) submitted a bill that contained the basics of Lathrop’s proposal. The Hull House veteran wasted no time stumping for her idea. Over the next three years, Lathrop enlisted support wherever she could, relying heavily on women’s associations that were emboldened by the recent extension of suffrage. The Children’s Bureau sponsored “The Year of the Child,” in which the agency appealed to groups across the nation and published catchy graphics to illustrate the country’s poor international standing. Lathrop convinced popular magazines like Good Housekeeping and the Ladies Home Journal to editorialize in favor of the measure. Ultimately, 13 of the most powerful women's groups in America rallied behind Sheppard-Towner, too; in the final weeks of negotiations, the Women's Joint Congressional Committee—a massive umbrella group—conducted interviews with congressman at the rate of 50 per day. “It is doubtful,” reported the Globe (December 18, 1921), “if any single piece of legislation enacted by Congress in recent years—apart from equal suffrage—has had the organized influence of so great a body of the citizenship of the country back of it.”

The final version of the bill passed both the House (279 to 39) and the Senate (63 to 7) by a wide margin in late 1921, in part because the law was modest in scope. Congress agreed to appropriate just $1.24 million annually (about $15 million today) for the program, with each participating state receiving $5,000 outright and then dollar-for-dollar matching funds as determined by its population. After five years, the funding would need to be reauthorized, as well. (The advocates of the bill were confident that half a decade was “sufficiently long to demonstrate the real value of the measure.”) One year after its passage, a reporter for the Detroit Free-Press described Sheppard-Towner as “mild and rather helpless” (December 1, 1922). He wasn’t wrong.

But the idea behind the bill, at least in the United States, was revolutionary. Social insurance, in any form, just didn’t exist. In her book “Protecting Soldiers and Mothers,” historian Theda Skocpol writes that Lathrop’s brainchild “extended what was once domestic action into a new understanding of governmental action for societal welfare.” Put another way, the new law was “a fragile seed growing in isolation from the then-traditional health programs.”***

That seed quickly bloomed. Within the first year of implementation, 45 out of 48 states passed enabling legislation to receive matching S-T funds. (Illinois, Connecticut, and Massachusetts never participated.) Each used their subsidy in different ways; some organized conferences where physicians ran demonstrations on maternal and infant care and hygiene, while others paid nurses to visit new or expectant mothers. However it was deployed, the money went a long way. Between 1922 and 1929, the Bureau distributed over 22 million pieces of literature, conducted 183,252 health conferences, established 2,978 permanent prenatal centers, and visited over 3 million homes. Lathrop’s successor at the Children’s Bureau, Grace Abbott, estimated that one-half of U.S. babies had benefited from the government's childrearing information.

Not surprisingly, infant mortality dropped precipitously while Sheppard-Towner was on the books. A new working paper published last month by the National Bureau of Economic Research estimates that Sheppard-Towner activities accounted for 12 percent of the drop in infant mortality during the 1920s, with one-on-one interventions creating the most statistically significant results. Combined with rising incomes and better nutrition, preventative health education helped cut down the infant mortality rate to 67.6 deaths per 1,000 live births in 1929. Considering how little money Congress actually spent on the law, the results were thrilling.

Not everyone was so excited by the precedent Sheppard-Towner was setting. During the initial debate in Congress, several opponents delivered unhinged criticism of both the bill and its supporters. U.S. Sen. James Reed (D-Missouri) declared (incorrectly) that Sheppard-Towner would permit officials to “invade” the homes of mothers-to-be. “We would better reverse the proposition,” he charmingly added, “and provide for a committee of mothers to take charge of the old maids (at the Children’s Bureau) and teach them how to acquire a husband and have babies of their own.” Not to be outdone, his colleague in the House, U.S. Rep. Henry Tucker (D-Virginia), characterized the bill as an attempt to “make Uncle Sam the midwife of every expectant woman in the United States.” And Mary G. Kilberth of the National Association Opposed to Woman Suffrage argued that Sheppard-Towner advocates were both “inspired by foreign experiments in Communism” and “connected with the birth-control movement.” A wealthy socialite from Boston went so far as to challenge the law before the U.S. Supreme Court, contending unsuccessfully that it violated the Tenth Amendment.

If ideologues couldn’t rescind the law, doctors had a better shot. The American Medical Association board was initially skeptical of Sheppard-Towner, calling it an “imported socialistic scheme unsuited to our form of government” at its annual meeting in 1922. Four years later, however, the association fully mobilized for the funding reauthorization fight, lobbying Congress and writing letters to the president. It’s clear that many physicians moved to incorporate preventive health education into their private practices only when they saw the benefits of prenatal care play out in new clinics across the country. In a very real sense, the Children’s Bureau had become a primary competitor, and its own worst enemy.

Desperate to keep their projects operating, directors of the state Sheppard-Towner programs and Abbott cut what the historian Skocpol deemed a “deal with the devil,” agreeing to terminate the law altogether in exchange for two more years of full financial support. In 1929, seven years after reformers printed their first informational flyers, Sheppard-Towner came off the books. Over the next four years, progressives introduced 14 different bills that would have funded maternity and infancy health programs using federal dollars. All of them failed. When the Great Depression hit, most states dropped their existing programs altogether.

The lesson, though, had been learned. And while the United States’ current infant mortality rate is still not where it should be, it’s decidedly safer for babies and mothers now than it was a century ago. For that, we can thank Julia Lathrop and her small, ambitious staff.

*Headline in the Post on June 9, 1912
** Children’s Bureau’s Fifth Annual Report of the Chief, 1917
***The Sheppard-Towner Era: A Prototype Case Study in Federal-State Relationships; June, 1967