The Digest - September 25, 1937

Description

This is the September 25, 1937 issue of The Digest (Review of Reviews incorporating Literary Digest). It contains articles (including articles about “Soviet China,” Nazi demonstrations and Albert Einstein), black & white photos, editorial cartoons, jokes, a page about current movies and sports. There are also vintage black & white advertisements (AT&T, Met Life, Westinghouse, etc.).
The magazine’s cover is beautiful, and 83+ years later, the colors are still vibrant. It would look great matted and framed. The magazine measures approximately 8.5 x 11.5 inches and contains 40 pages.
The American Review of Reviews was edited by the American academic, journalist and reformer, Albert Shaw.
Published from New York, The American Review of Reviews ran simultaneously alongside its British counterpart. As such, it represented the views and concerns of participants in the trans-Atlantic culture of progressive reform.
Shaw was part of the first generation of academic reformers, which included Woodrow Wilson (who was his classmate at Johns Hopkins University). Born in Ohio, Shaw studied at Grinnell College and received his doctorate in government at Johns Hopkins in 1884. Declining an appointment at Cornell, Shaw became editor of the Minneapolis Tribune and a widely published author of books on municipal reform.
The American Review of Reviews is one of the best primary sources on American reform between 1890 and 1920, providing not only a panoramic view of the range of reformers' interests, but also the ties between British and American progressives. By volume 3, however, its style had departed significantly from that of its British cousin.
The American Review of Reviews ran until 1937, when it merged into The Literary Digest.
The Literary Digest was an influential American general interest weekly magazine published by Funk & Wagnalls. Founded by Isaac Kaufmann Funk in 1890, it eventually merged with two similar weekly magazines, Public Opinion and Current Opinion.
Beginning with early issues, the emphasis was on opinion articles and an analysis of news events. Established as a weekly newsmagazine, it offered condensations of articles from American, Canadian and European publications. Type-only covers gave way to illustrated covers during the early 1900s. After Isaac Funk's death in 1912, Robert Joseph Cuddihy became the editor. In the 1920s, the covers carried full-color reproductions of famous paintings. By 1927, The Literary Digest climbed to a circulation of over one million. Covers of the final issues displayed various photographic and photo-montage techniques. In 1938, it merged with the Review of Reviews, only to fail soon after. Its subscriber list was bought by Time.
The Literary Digest is best-remembered today for the circumstances surrounding its demise.
As it had done since 1916, it conducted a straw poll regarding the likely outcome of the 1936 presidential election. Before 1936, the poll had always correctly predicted the winner.
The 1936 poll showed that the Republican candidate, Governor Alfred Landon of Kansas, was likely to be the overwhelming winner. This seemed plausible as the Republicans had fared well in Maine, and at this time, the state's congressional and gubernatorial elections were then held in September, as opposed to the rest of the nation where these elections were held in November, along with the presidential election (as they are today). A Landon victory also seemed likely to some in light of the conventional wisdom at that time, "As Maine goes, so goes the nation," a saying coined because Maine was incorrectly regarded as a "bellwether" state that allegedly supported the winning candidate's party. Maine was merely a Republican state. From 1860 to 1932, with only one exception, Maine voted for the Republican candidate for President. Maine did not vote for Grover Cleveland in 1884 or 1892, nor did it vote for Woodrow Wilson in 1916, nor did it vote for Franklin Roosevelt in 1932, when they, as Democrats, won the election, thus refuting any notion that Maine could somehow predict the election result. In 1912, Maine cast its electoral votes for Wilson, the Democrat, but that was the year Republicans split their votes between William Howard Taft, the Republican, and Theodore Roosevelt, the Bull Moose candidate.
In November, Landon only won Vermont and Maine, while President Franklin Delano Roosevelt won the 46 other states. Landon's electoral vote total of eight is a record low for a major-party nominee since the American political paradigm of the Democratic and Republican parties began in the 1850s. The Democrats joked, "As goes Maine, so goes Vermont," and the magazine was so discredited by this failure that it folded within two years.
George Gallup's American Institute of Public Opinion achieved national recognition by correctly predicting the result of the 1936 election, and also correctly predicted the quite different results of the Literary Digest poll to within about 1% using a much smaller sample size. Gallup's last poll before the election predicted Roosevelt would receive 56% of the popular vote; the official tally gave Roosevelt 61%.
This debacle led to a considerable refinement of public opinion polling techniques and later came to be regarded as ushering in the era of modern scientific public opinion research.