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3 - Press and Public Opinion Diverge
- W.E. Upjohn Institute
- Chapter
- Additional Information
39 3 Press and Public Opinion Diverge In 1943, while President Roosevelt was meeting with Joseph Stalin and Winston Churchill in Tehran, pollster George Gallup asked a sample of the American people what they thought would be the greatest problem facing the country from 1945 to 1949. The second most common answer was “peace,” offered by 13 percent of the respondents. Outdistancing all the other possible answers was “jobs and economic readjustment .” In the midst of a fierce world war, 58 percent of Americans stated that employment would be the greatest problem in the immediate future (Gallup 1972, Survey No. 301, p. 410). Obviously, no one wanted a resumption of the high levels of unemployment experienced during the Great Depression, and many expressed the belief that the government should act to alleviate unemployment . It was apparent that people in the Roosevelt administration were seriously considering a full employment policy. The electoral success of the Democratic Party with its New Deal platform implied that a majority favored a strengthened federal role in the economy. At issue, however, was whether there was popular support to redefine that role to encompass economic planning, compensatory spending, guaranteed employment for everyone who sought it, and the federal structure to accomplish these responsibilities. In addition to drawing on coverage by the national print media,1 this chapter uses public opinion polls to explore how the government’s role in job creation was perceived and to what extent full employment was supported. Public opinion research was maturing as a social science by the 1940s. The methodologies had become much more rigorous than the mass mailing techniques that had led to the demise of the Literary Digest in 1936.2 The public opinion researchers of the 1940s placed strict demographic controls on their samples to achieve what they hoped were representative microcosms of the nation.3 There were two noteworthy commercial polling firms, one headed by Elmo Roper and the other by George Gallup. Additionally, there were two major university-based survey research centers by the early 1940s: the Office In order to view this proof accurately, the Overprint Preview Option must be checked in Acrobat Professional or Adobe Reader. Please contact your Customer Service Representative if you have questions about finding the option. Job Name: -- /347091t 40 Wasem of Public Opinion Research (OPOR) at Princeton University, and the National Opinion Research Center (NORC) at the University of Chicago (Converse 1987). Fortune magazine published many of Roper’s poll results, presenting the findings as human interest rather than breaking news. Gallup issued press releases on a regular basis, but the poll results were not typically front page news. The research findings of OPOR and NORC were disseminated in the academic community as scholarly articles that were not time-sensitive.4 POSTWAR EMPLOYMENT WORRIES The popular press rarely featured stories on public attitudes toward employment problems in the early 1940s. The news of the day centered on war coverage and the response of the home front. War production was the main theme of articles on the domestic economy. Stories on rationing were the only features that touched on personal economic concerns. Given the economic worries that Gallup found, this lack of news coverage on employment issues is perplexing. Perhaps those within the media who set editorial policy might have thought that stories on employment fears were no longer newsworthy, given the high employment levels of wartime, or that accounts of economic pessimism would have undercut the war effort. Regardless of its reasons, the popular press had decided at this point not to be a forum for discussion on the prospects of employment following the war. When the war began, most people thought there would be high unemployment after the war, as Figure 3.1 makes clear. According to an opinion survey conducted by Elmo Roper for Fortune magazine in December 1941, just over 60 percent responded that there would be “lots of unemployment” after the war. Indeed, only a few (11.3 percent) predicted there would be jobs for everyone after the war ended (Cantril 1951, p. 898). As discussed in the previous chapter, in 1938 the number of unemployed workers surpassed 10 million, which was 18.9 percent of the labor force. Given that American industries had not fully geared up for war production at the time of the survey, this grim assessment seemed credible. In order to view this proof accurately, the Overprint Preview Option must be checked in Acrobat Professional or Adobe Reader. Please contact your...