Now Read On... - 14 July 2000

When somebody - I believe it was Alfred, later Lord Northcliffe, the inventor of the first penny newspaper - when he had the bright idea, which was thought brilliant at the time, of printing book-length stories in instalments, every instalment ended: "To be continued in our next..."

And the next week on the same day would appear the following instalment with a little preface summarising the tale to date and then printing the command, which became a popular idiom: "Now read on."

I must begin today by borrowing that brilliant idea since some of you may not remember the promise I made at the end of last week's talk and what it was about.

Well then, we'd been talking about the American passion for statistical surveys and the often shocking results of them - shocking because they so often ran against the general assumption of what the truth was.

The truth, that is, about what the public thinks on a political or social issue.

For centuries we've all really guessed at public opinion and couldn't be sure of it short of its expression in a riot.

I'm doing this talk, incidentally, on 14 July - a rather violent reminder that in days when public opinion didn't even matter to the rulers of a nation, very few top people in France had any idea that a revolution was brewing until it exploded with the mob storming the Bastille.

A few wise men have forever lamented that we really don't know what public opinion is. James Bryce, probably the most famous foreign historian of the American system of government, wrote over a hundred years ago: "The obvious weakness of government by popular opinion is the difficulty of ascertaining it."

Well that's where we left off and I ended with this little passage: In 1932 a young man from the Midwest farming state of Iowa marked his 30th birthday by saying to himself: "If government is supposed to be based on the will of the people somebody ought to find out what that will is."

And he did it. The first man in the world.

And by so doing changed forever the views of all of us - about government, what the majority opinion of the public was - and in the process punctured a great many of our social preconceptions by discovering a scientific method of studying public opinion. Now listen on.

And what, pray, is scientific method? In the investigation of anything, scientific method is no more and no less than the attempt to discover a generalisation that covers all the known facts.

The young man's name was George Gallup - G A L L U P. I apologise to older listeners who suppose that everybody was present when in the late 1930s the Gallup Poll came in.

I apologise because I learn every day that people beyond 60, say, tend to assume that young people have absorbed their older culture and then tacked on their own. Not so.

A 24 year old I know, a brilliant young scientist who is no recluse - he has his own favourite writers, movie stars, athletes, so on - I asked him: "What does the name Charlie Chaplin mean to you?"

He said: "Ah, it comes up in crossword puzzles."

So to repeat one, I'll bet, none of you know by heart - and I knew little of till I read his biographer Richard Reeves - George Galp - a sturdy, rugged boy - was born in 1901, son of a country school teacher, went off, at 18, to the Iowa State University and was intending, himself, to become a teacher.

At the end of his junior year - that's the third or next-to-the-last year - he did what every college boy did, he took a summer job. Quite by chance it was the nature of that summer job that changed his life.

A famous Midwestern newspaper wanted 50 students to go to St Louis and knock on the doors of the 55,000 homes in the city and find out what people liked and didn't like about the paper - The St Louis Post Dispatch.

Well the 21 year old did his stint but well short of his allotted 1,000 he decided there was something wrong when so many people gave the same answers, almost in rhythm.

Back in college for his fourth he had a thought, maybe a series of thoughts, ending in a thesis that changed his life and ours. He came on the theory of probabilities of the Swiss mathematician Jakob Bernoulli.

Young Gallup chose for his PhD thesis the resounding and to most people I should say baffling title, A New Technique for Objective Methods for Measuring ... what do you think? ... People's Interest in Newspapers.

He was obsessed still with what he considered the clumsy and dubious door-to-door technique of measuring public opinion.

The new method claimed that a scientifically chosen sample of the population could mathematically stay true to the opinions, the bias, whatever, of the whole population if - this was Gallup's innovation - the sample covered in due proportion the diversity of the population - white, black, men, women, old, young, married, single, ethnic minorities, rich, poor, et cetera, et cetera.

This elaborate idea was not of the sort to seize national attention. But an advertising agency in New York spotted it and thought it might work to discover truly the effectiveness of various sorts of advertising. So they invited Gallup to head up such a study.

He came to New York, he tested and he conquered. He pretty much invented marketing research as we know it today.

At the age of 34 Dr Gallup was so sure of himself that he decided he would challenge the great god of prophets, the famous magazine The Literary Digest, which had uncannily predicted Franklin Roosevelt's 19352 landslide over Herbert Hoover.

We are now in 1936 and Gallup had the gall to predict, not yet the result of the forthcoming election - Roosevelt again, against the Republican Governor Landon of Kansas - but he predicted what The Literary Digest would predict: Landon 56%, Roosevelt 44%.

And that is what the writhing pollsters of the Digest did predict. Gallup added, incidentally, that Roosevelt would "bury" Governor Landon. And so he did, by 63 top 37%. And in the electoral vote Roosevelt took 46 states and Landon took Maine and Vermont.

But why did The Literary Digest hit the bull's eye in 1932 and hit the dust so shamefully in 1936?

Dr Gallup put down the '32 guess as sheer luck. What he exposed in 1936 was the weakness - scientifically, the absurdity - of the Digest's method.

They sent out literally millions of postcards to people whose names were picked up from telephone directories and from city records of motor car registrations.

Gallup pointed out that all that their method did was to predict, more or less correctly, the way people would vote who owned telephones and automobiles. In the pit of the Depression there were many millions more who didn't own either.

And Gallup's sampling method, of scanning a smaller number of people who together formed a microcosm of the voting population, proved astonishingly accurate.

From then on Gallup and his institute spent all their time refining the principle. So did two or three others who'd been trained in modern statistical method.

But Gallup got there first and everybody hired or consulted him who weren't quite sure if their product would sell, whether the product was a politician, a breakfast cereal, a motion picture...

I don't suppose many people will remember a story that appeared in the old Saturday Evening Post 50-odd years ago. It was called Glory for Me.

A film studio decided to make a movie of it, wasn't sure that the original was a selling title. Gallup polled the people, offering 32 alternative titles.

The representative sample leaned heavily to one title, and it was used. The movie was called The Best Years of Our Lives and it was the Oscar for Best Picture.

Gallup's biographer, Richard Reeves, has best summed up Gallup's achievement.

"He made clear the mortality of instinct, first in commerce then in government and politics". In a word, he "killed the hunch."

Those of you who remember the early years of Gallup's invasion of our hunches and guesses will remember he was not received with cheers and the blare of trumpets. He was most resented by politicians, who, until Gallup, had been able to claim a monopoly on what the public thought and wanted.

But then, we all at first inclined to belittle Gallup and were eager to find and quote examples of the rare occasions he was off the truth.

The main effect it seems to me has been to abolish the politician who talks and acts wholly on principle. He first has to find out if his asserted principle is acceptable to most people.

So what we have seen is the disappearance of the statesman. Today in most democratic countries the leader is led by what a majority of the public thinks it wants.

The leader is led by our prejudices - not what Dr Gallup had in mind.

Yet still today the old Adam asserts itself. Most people deeply resent the results of scientific method because it tends too often to prove their own opinions dead wrong. So they say; "Polls can be famously unreliable" or "Well, that was not the experience of my brother-in-law".

After the statistical revolution most of us I'm afraid still cling to what Mr Justice Holmes called "Every man's view of truth. His belief, in the teeth of the facts, in what he can't help thinking must be true."

THIS TRANSCRIPT WAS TYPED FROM A RECORDING AND NOT COPIED FROM AN ORIGINAL SCRIPT. BECAUSE OF THE RISK OF MISHEARING, THE BBC CANNOT VOUCH FOR ITS COMPLETE ACCURACY.

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