Fire and Knowledge

During the campaign of Harry Truman and John Dewey, political experts everywhere predicted a landslide victory for Dewey.  All of the polls showed Dewey in the lead.  Newspapers would decry Truman and wish he would stop doing anything more to mess up the country before Dewey got in to fix things up.  But they were all wrong.  Truman won by over 2 million popular votes and carried 303 electoral votes (compared to Dewey’s 189).

He had won against the greatest odds in the annals of presidential politics.  Not one polling organization had been correct in its forecast.  Not a single radio commentator or newspaper columnist, or any of the hundreds of reporters who covered the campaign, had called it right.  Every expert had been proven wrong, and as was said, “a great roar of laughter arose from the land.”  The people had made fools of those supposedly in the know.  Of all amazing things, Harry Truman had turned out to be the only one who knew what he was talking about….

George Gallup, Elmo Roper, and other opinion specialists were openly dumbfounded.  He didn’t know what happened, Gallup said.  “I couldn’t have been more wrong.  Why I don’t know,” Roper admitted.

So what did all these experts do?  Think about what the experts would say today if this happened. They would probably not admit they were wrong, but rather make charges of voter fraud or avoid the issue.  They have no sense of honor.  But listen to how the experts back then handled things.  The managing editor of Life, Joseph J. Thorndike, Jr., wrote:

But I do think that we ourselves were misled by our bias.  Because of that bias we did not exert ourselves enough to report the side we didn’t believe in.  We were to ready to accept the [negative] evidence…. We were too eager to report the Truman “bobbles” and to pass over the things that were wrong about the Republican campaign: empty Dewey speeches, the bad Republican candidates, the dangers of Republican commitments to big business.  I myself had many misgivings about these things but thought that what the hell, the election was already decided, we could get after the Republicans later….

So the editor of Life admitted their bias and moved on.  That would be a major accomplishment for most of our political experts who get things wrong and distort the truth so often.   It should be a warning for those who accept the television news as absolute truth, and do not realize what kind of biases of content and medium are being presented.  It should be a warning against accepting pollster’s opinion as fact, when so much depends on whom they sample and how they form their questions.  However, the experts did not end with simply admitting their bias. Harry Truman returned to Washington on Friday, November 5th.

Passing the stone-fronted offices of the Washington Post, Truman looked up to see a big sign strung across the second floor: WELCOME HOME FROM CROW-EATERS.

The day after the election, the staff of the Post had sent a telegram asking him to attend a “Crow Banquet,” to which all newspaper editorial writers, political reporters, pollsters, radio commentators, and columnists would be invited.  The main course was to be old crow en glace.  Truman alone would be served turkey.  Dress for the guest of honor would be white tie, for the others, sackcloth.  In response Truman had written that he had “no desire to crow over anybody or see anybody eat crow figuratively or otherwise.  We should all get together now and make a country in which everybody can eat turkey whenever he pleases.”

[Blockquotes taken from David McCullough's Truman.]