The Last ArchiveEach week on ‘The Returns,’ we pull a different episode from our archive to put our present politics into historical context.
The election of 1952 brought all kinds of new technology into the political sphere. The Eisenhower campaign experimented with the first television ads to feature an American presidential candidate. And on election night, CBS News premiered the first computer to predict an American election — the UNIVAC. Safe to say, that part didn’t go according to plan. But election night 1952 is ground zero for our current, political post-truth moment. If a computer and a targeted advertisement can both use heaps of data to predict every citizen’s every decision, can voters really know things for themselves after all?
This episode first ran in the summer of 2020.
Pushkin. One Saturday in November twenty twenty, I was buying shoes in Brooklyn. Crazy, I know, but this is a true story. They were running shoes. Did I run with them hardly? Ever, But that's not important. What's important is I was at the store trying on some hokahs I later came to regret. And then a crazy thing happened. A good friend of mine pulled up in a car out front. He had just that very day moved back to New York. And then as he got out of the car, people all over the streets suddenly raised their windows, leaned out of them, and began to scream and hag on pots and pans. I was like, whoa, you should try moving away more often. But then I checked my phone, and remember I was in Brooklyn. I realized that the election had just been called for Joe Biden. It was November seventh, twenty twenty. But here's the twist this it was four days after the election happened. You may remember the agonizingly long time between election day twenty twenty and the announcement of the final result. If you're a younger person, this might have felt very novel to you. It felt pretty novel to me. Generally, in my lifetime, elections were decided sometime overnight on election day or into the next morning, when a tired Wolfplitzer would est at a GLITCHI map and say that CNN could finally make a projection. But for a long time, it took a long time to call elections. The country is big, counting votes by hand is slow, and then reporting them is laborious. There wasn't one single election day until eighteen forty five. The eighteen seventy six election wasn't called till eighteen seventy seven. Quick calls like the famous Dewey defeats Truman case of nineteen forty eight were easy to get wrong. But that changed in a meaningful way in nineteen fifty two. Seeing as it's an election year in fact, you might be receiving with some trepidation, we overhear at the last Archive are digging through our own archives to bring you a mini season rehashing our past election coverage. Today, I want to take you back to that election night nineteen fifty two, Eisenhower, Varus Stevenson and the quantum leap, and how we ran and called elections. This was the first election to be predicted by computer, the moment we really leaned into our need for speed. What's interesting about that election and the marriage of computing power, polling, advertising, and electoral politics is that it accelerated a trend towards putting our faith in predictions, as if you almost didn't need to hold an election at all, but that with enough data you could just simulate the outcome data simulation, massive computers. Election Night sounds like a job for the last archive. So let's go back to twenty twenty when we made this episode from our first season, and then even further back to the election of nineteen fifty two and the emergence of a new way to run and to call elections. Oh and one last thing before we get into it. You'll hear in the episode from the historian Ira Chenoi who wrote a dissertation called Battle of the Brains on the Computers of Election Night nineteen fifty two. Well, that dissertation is about to be a book out in May called Predicting the Winner. Okay, from our first season, first published in the summer of twenty twenty, here's Project X.
There's a place in our world where the known things go a quarter of the mind, lined with shelves, stocked with proof, and cluttered with snacks. Here on top of this old television set a pack of em and MS. Oh does the TV still work?
I'd listened to everybody on TV and radio. I've read the papers and magazines. I've tried, But I'm confused. Who's right?
What's right?
What should I believe?
What are the facts?
How can I tell?
Yeesh?
Sounds like something I would say. That's why I come here to this place, This cabinet of curiosities, a police that stores the facts that matter and matters of fact. It's all that stands between a reasonable doubt and the chaos of uncertainty. It lies in a time between now and then. The sign on the door reads the last Archive. Step through that door to a studio at the Columbia Broadcasting System on Election Night nineteen fifty two.
Got anything, everyone, This is Walter grand Guy speaking to you from CBS Television election headquarters. They're in New York City. The big election Night nineteen fifty two, the year when the United States BECs it's thirty fifth president.
Welcome to election Night. But Election Night nineteen fifty two wasn't just any night, because everything you know about how campaigns are run and how results are announced, polls, targeted advertising, breathless television coverage, edge of your seat computer projections. That all started right here in nineteen fifty two, with Walter Cronkite just settling in for the long night ahead and CBS Studio forty one on the third floor of Grand Central Station, New York. As CBS's coverage begins, the camera pans across a crowded, frantic newsroom, teletype machines, adding machines, paper spread everywhere, dozens of telephones, some guys smoking at the back of the room near a giant wall map of the United States, a map that CBS will fill out as the returns come in. They couldn't color the states red and blue because in nineteen fifty two hardly anyone had a color TV. Instead, states that went Democrat would be covered with black. Republicans got stripes. Not so much elephants as zebras.
Bomby weather over most of the United States today, and the record turnout apparently throughout the United States.
Record turnout so many votes to count this election would change how Americans predicted the outcome of the election it would change all sorts of things about elections. But let me first remind you who was running. The Republicans put forward as their candidate General Dwight D. Eisenhower, Ike, the general behind D Day, military man, grandfather, straight shooter. Republicans came up with the slogan, I like Ike, I for president.
I President for president.
I thought President you like, and everybody really did like Ike. This is the election where likability became a thing for the Democrats. The incumbent, Harry S. Truman, was out. The Democrat who wanted to be in was Illinois Governor Adlai E. Stevenson. Stevenson wasn't affable or folksy like Eisenhower. He was learned and experienced, dignified, he might even say aristocratic. Stevenson had been born to a political family. His grandfather had been Grover Cleveland's vice president. Stevenson held himself above the messiness, the tackiness of campaigns. Trustworthy, he was supposed to be trustworthy.
Vote Stephenson vo Stevenson a man you canzy leave in un.
The general versus the governor, likable Ike versus the man you can believe Inson anyway, Like Walter Cronkite said, voting in the nineteen fifty two race looked to be a record turnout, turn out so big that the wire Service thought it might take until the next day to count the votes.
We're going to be giving you all of the figures just as quickly as we can. But we'll know the results sometime the night, early in the.
Morning, results that very night that would be fast, so fast. Historians sometimes call this era after the Second World War the Great Acceleration. There were races, the arms race, the space race, even NASCAR racing started then, but in a bigger way. Everything got sped up, transportation, communication, production, consumption, everything. Knowledge is to take the form of mysteries, things only God could know. Then came facts, then numbers, and then during the Great Acceleration, numbers began to yield to data, including the votes counted on election night. CBS wanted to count them faster than anyone else. Welcome to the Last Archive, the show about how we know what we know, how we used to know things, and what it seems sometimes lately as if we don't know anything at all. I'm Jill Lapour on the edge of my seat, waiting for the returns to come in. Aside from all those television cameras, there was another machine in the CBS studio on Election Night nineteen fifty two, a machine most Americans had never seen before, a console blinking.
The development of modern electronic digital computers began with early man, who used his digits or fingers to keep track of the things around him one weapon, two animals, and three wives.
A few thousand years after that Caveman, the first general purpose digital computers were built by the Allies in the Second World War. They were used to calculate missile trajectories and to break codes. After the war, the first commercial digital computer was built by an office equipment company called Remington Rand. I guess because there were more things to count than one weapon, two animals, and three wives.
Even through the use of present day office equipment, it becomes increasingly difficult to process this accumulation to obtain the information we need.
So many facts, so many numbers, so much data. Humankind needed a new kind of machine to.
Meet this need for high speed data processing. The scientists and technicians of the Eckert Mochley division of Remington Rand have created a miracle of electronic development, UNIVAC, a complete electronic system for sorting, classifying, computing, and decision making.
The UNIVAC, the Universal Automatic Computer. Remington Rand had sold one to the US Census Bureau to count the nineteen fifty census.
Right now, UNIVAC is handling automatically and economically unbelievables of statistical work for the United States Bureau of the Census.
Work that formerly took weeks and months to do is.
Now being done in a matter of hours by UNIVAC.
Okay, so the Census Bureau needed the machine to count the census. But who else could possibly need a crazy expensive UNIVAC, a machine the size of a small truck. Hardly anyone, it seemed. But Remington Ran wanted to sell them, so they had to keep pitching them, and pitching them and pitching them.
UNOVAC is rapidly turning out answers, answers which have profound significance in the lives of all of us.
Maybe UNIVAC could count votes. Maybe on election night, UNIVAC could even know the winner before any human could. Maybe the UNIVAC might actually get it right, because in the last election everyone had gotten it wrong.
Thomas Dewey and his family waited expectantly for concession.
In nineteen forty eight, Truman had run against the publican governor of New York, Thomas Dewey. All the big pollsters were sure Dewey would win. Reporters were just as sure. The Chicago Tribune went to press early, too early, with one hundred and fifty thousand papers bearing the headline Dewey defeats Truman. Dear listener, he did not.
A man of the people, had accomplished a political miracle at his home in Independence, Missouri. President Truman accepted the congratulations of the nation.
TV got it wrong, too, But TV didn't matter in nineteen forty eight, first because hardly anyone owned a television set then, and second, the TV coverage in nineteen forty eight was basically just live film of radio guys snoozing and waiting for the returns. But in nineteen fifty two, everything was supposed to be different. People finally had television sets. Watching would be fun, the announcers would call it right. So back to election night nineteen fifty two, it seems.
To me that television has certainly come into its home this year.
This time, everything seems to be especially designed just forward television.
CBS had put a lot of effort and money into its coverage, every last bell and whistle. They'd also made it into a race. They really wanted to call the election early. Ideally, they wanted to call the election first, except they didn't want to call it so early that they'd get it wrong. But in case that happened, they needed a scapegoat. Enter the computer. Millions of Americans had televisions, but how many had computers. None. At the time, there were by my count, six computers in the whole country. It's possible I have my numbers wrong. Remember I am only human. But here's where what CBS wanted and what Remington Ran wanted lined up perfectly. Remington Ran needed a chance to show how useful computers are a showcase. CBS needed a stunt and also a scapegoat. As a match made in heaven, these things tend to seem inevitable after the fact, but of course history doesn't work that way. Most things happen by accident. A few months before election day, a guy from CBS went out to lunch with a guy from Remington Rand. CBS wanted to put in a big order for you know, typewriters and calculators, the sorts of machines that figured it needed to stock up on for election night. But the Remington Rand guy said, have you considered a UNIVAC. CBS's director of News in Public Affairs guy called Sig Mickelson heard about the lunch. He decided to go to the Remington Ran factory in Philadelphia to take a look. He hopped on the train and went to meet the UNIVAC.
The machine was a monster, a mass of electronic vacuum tubes interconnected by miles of copper wire and cooled by noisy fans.
Mickelson was supposed to meet a colleague of his there in Philadelphia, the dashing cbsqu correspondent Charles Collingwood. As legend has it, Collingwood was running late. When he arrived, The printer hooked up to the UNIVAC spat out a short message, calling Wood, you are a leap Where have you been? This is what's known among historians is a fact too good to check, in a sense that this never happened. But I'm telling you about it because Mickelson said it happened, and I love it. Back to things that did happen, CBS decided to proceed with what it called I'm not making this up project. Here's the deal they worked out. CBS would get the services of Univac for election night, but the machine would stay in Philadelphia. It was just too big to bring to New York. It weighed sixteen thousand pounds and had five thousand vacuum tubes. But the CBS studio in New York needed to look like it had a computer on set, so Charles Collingwood would sit at a UNIVAC looking thingamagic a console. There was actually just a dummy, a fake. The giant computer prophet CBS did, however, light up. It blinked for the benefit of viewers at home, as if it were the real electronic brain.
Thinking it's like a Christmas tree light time, or basically, and if you watch it long enough, you see the pattern of the lights.
Just review.
There's nothing, there's nothing happened.
I first learned about this story and a dissertation, an amazing dissertation called Battle of the Brains by Ira Chenoi. And I don't say dissertations are amazing all that often. Chanoi is a professor at the University of Maryland, but before he got his PhD, he was the director of computer assisted Reporting at the Washington Post. Before that, he'd been an investigative reporter. I wanted to visit him in his office in Maryland so that we could watch this footage together, footage that he'd discovered in the archives.
It looks great there.
It does look really good.
And actually I don't know if you can see it here, but actually saw one of these when I went out to the Computer Instrum Museum, and I think it has an ashtray in it.
Actually, Tony and I watched the footage where Walter Cronkite and Charles Collingwood on election I wait for the first prediction from the machine, and.
Now for perhaps a prediction on how this voting is going. What's the vote that is in so far means let's turn to that miracle of the modern age, the electronic brain UNIVAC and the Charles Collingwood.
Collingwood's on live television looking at a display offscreen, waiting for a prediction that he's supposed to read out loud.
The JUNIVAK is going to try to predict the winner for us just as early as we can possibly get the returns. Then this is not a joke or a trick. It's an experiment. We think it's going to work, We don't know.
We hope it'll work, but.
There's nothing coming in. It's incredibly awkward to watch. They didn't call this stuff cringe TV then, but this is cringe TV.
Can you say something, UNIVAC, have you got anything to say to the television audience?
Currently? The UNIVAC in Philadelphia had made a prediction. It predicted that Eisenhower would win in a landslide, but given that exit polls had the race neck and neck, that prediction seemed bananas, so, supposedly, not wanting to screw up Remington, Ran decided not to send that prediction on to CBS in New York. Remington's second guest its own machine, which left Collingwood hanging and CBS without a prediction to announce.
You're a very impolite in Shane, I must say, it.
Was as if the whole election had suddenly gone off script, when in fact, so much of the campaign had been so entirely scripted. There's more to this story. There are documents, There is evidence. My producer Ben has filed a copy of that campaign script in his desk herein the last archive. So the supercomputer UNIVAC failed its first public audition as the predictor of voter behavior, at least though it was something obvious, a giant machine with these blinking lights right there on television. A lot more subtle stuff changed during that election, too, stuff that's been forgotten because now it's everywhere.
I for president, I.
For president, I for president, I thought president.
Television advertising that was new too, not jingles. There'd been campaign songs since forever, but nineteen fifty two saw the introduction of a particular kind of television advertising, the targeted political ad. Lately, all political ads are targeted. They're targeted by computers is unairring his missiles. But in nineteen fifty two, targeting was done by hand, and political television advertising was invented by a man named Rosser Reeves. Think Don Draper and Madmen, but even slicker the very best Madison Avenue could offer. Rosser Reeves he was the man. He owned one of the world's big I just rubies. He led the uschess team on a trip to the Soviet Union. He invested in island real estate. He captained yachts. He flew planes mainly, though he created modern television advertising.
Reeves decided that there were many advantages to be gained by adopting a new form of political advertising, the short spot commercial.
Signicholson, that executive from CBS who brought in the UNIVAC he knew all about Reeves he later wrote about it.
He had a hunch that the sixty second advertising spot could be used in the way the soap, food and cigarette companies were using them with spectacular success.
In nineteen fifty two, Reeves took his talents to politics. He went to the Republican Convention, the first convention broadcast start to finish on television. Reeves was there, but instead of watching from the convention hall, he watched the keynote speech on TV from a hotel room. The crowds inside the stadium were enthusiastic, but watching the convention on TV, Reeves thought the speeches were dreadful, too many ideas, too many words. So he devised a test to see which people remembered better a televised speech or a televised commercial. Less than ten percent of people remember the speech, ninety one percent remember the commercial. Reeves thought that was because speeches usually have a lot of ideas, too many for television. He believed in something he called the unique selling proposition the USP.
What is a USP. It's a theory of the ideal selling concept. It is a condensation, a verbal shorthand, if you will, of what makes a campaign work. It is the hidden secret of literally thousands of the most successful advertising campaigns ever written.
Reeves often made pitches over meetings at Manhattan's One Club, where everyone was always several martinis deep. He told them that his unique selling proposition had three rules.
Number one, each advertisement must make a proposition to the consumer, not just words, not just product puffery. Each advertisement must say to each reader, buy this product and you will get this specific benefit. Number two, the proposition must be the one that the competition either canoe or does not offer. Number Three, the proposition must be so strong that it could move the mass millions.
That's from Reeves's book Reality and Advertising. My producer Ben and I decided to go get a copy of it. So we went to the basement of Wider Library at Harvard together. And when I say basement, I mean not in the deepest sense. To get to Reeves, you take the elevator four stories down and then you walk through a tunnel. So the fucy tunnel, it's so much better than you used to be.
Be plastic buckets down.
Here because they're just all these see all these pipes.
They would just do it, but they still has that humidity. No, it's a humidity treatment smell. I think it would humiliate Reeves to know this. But after you go through that sweaty tunnel, you have to go down another level, down another elevator to finally get to the stacks and the shelf where his book is housed. His best advertisements all follow those three rules of the USP. So Wonderbread helps build strong bodies in twelve ways, andison gives you fast, fast, fast relief. But my personal favorite was the campaign he wrote for Eminem's.
Which han chocolate can not good hands.
That's ordinary chocolate can.
It's melted.
But this there's no chocolate min because amanams melt. Chocolate melts in your mouth, not in your hand.
Reeves said Republicans should run ad spots, and Eisenhower, like M and M's Ike's campaign, signed him right up. Even though Eisenhower himself had yet to be convinced. Reeves took six weeks off and holed himself up in a hotel to write ad copy. He had all of Eisenhower's speech is sent over, but he didn't read them.
I was too busy with the political mailstroam to sit down personally and read all the Eisenhower's rather dreary speeches.
So we had other people do that. They drew up a list of topics that the general favored. Reeves showed that list to George Gallup, the pollster, who ran some numbers and told Reeves which three topics pulled best with voters.
One corruption in government, two high prices and high taxes. Three war.
Those three topics still pull well. They're evergreens today though computer driven targeted advertising, polling and election predictions are all tangled up on your iPhone as if they're one thing. But they got tangled up in nineteen fifty two when the pollsters and admin we're actually doing much the same thing as the UNIVAC was trying to do, running the numbers, coming up with a prediction. Are we okay with that? I mean we all are, because this is our world. But still, if we here in the last archive are wondering who killed truth, I'm looking at you, Rosser, Reeves. Reeves had hired a friend of his to run the numbers for him, a guy named Michael Levin. Ben brought copies of what he found in the archives when we went looking for Reeves's book fifty thousand Leagues beneath the library.
This one is Michael Levin's plan. It's called how to Ensure an Eisenhower victory in November. And this is what Reeves commissioned his numbers guy Levin, who worked at a different firm, Yeah, Yeah, to write up about basically how to target the ads, where to run them, what counties, how often.
It's a smoking gun of micro targeted advertising. Right here we have ranked here. Levin carved the country in devoting blocks, the southern vote, the black vote, the farm vote, the middle class. He saw it this way. Since Roosevelt, most of the country had voted Democratic, but that could change now that the economy was good. People weren't so keen on paying taxes anymore. They'd rather keep their money and spend it on some of the things they saw in all those television ads, dishwashers and dog food. To make the electoral math work in Republicans favor, Levin said they needed to flip the vote in forty nine counties in twelve states where they narrowly lost the last election. Levin called this block of states the Great Lakes Girdle. This was at a time when, by the way, people call parts of the country girdles, and now we call them belts, which is sad to me. Anyway. Forget kissing babies, shaking hands, and meeting voters, cultivating civic life and political debate. Instead, Levin said, divide the electorate into market segments and then blitz those key counties with the custom made TV ads.
He was there a new way of campaign that can guarantee victory for Eisenhower in November. The answer is yes. Most people don't know the power spot. However, here are the cold facts. The humble radio or TV spot can deliver more listeners for less money than any other form of advertising.
This pitch, you may have noticed, sounds a little bit different from the Lovin plan, but they were filed together in Ross's papers in the archives.
This is kind of like lipstig on a pig, though like at least reass just flipstick, no pig.
Here's the turn where commercial television advertising becomes political television advertising just lipstick, no pig.
Let us repeat that the humble radio or TV spot can deliver more listeners for less money than any other form of advertising. It is a way of having a big town meeting but letting sixty million people hear all the questions and answers. This technique is I really suited to Eisenhower's warm personality as opposed to the cold intellectual approach of Adelais Stevenson. And because they are simple, because they are quick, because they are short and uncomplicated, the public will remember.
Them Lake Kendy, but he dirty hens problem solved, vote Eisenhower.
In other words, they will penetrate, Yes, they will penetrate the brains of sixty million critical voters, where the more complicated and more elaborate political speeches won't be remembered. And it's what the critical voters have in their brains when they go into the poland booths the counts.
But before he could get to voters' brains, the eminem men first had to get General Eisenhower on board. Eisenhower was worried that these spots would be undignified. After all, at the time Eisenhower was president of Columbia University. He wasn't as a palled as ADLEI Stevenson would have been, but he was still worried. So Reeves met the General for lunch, probably over scotch, and wore him down.
Well, General, do you think it's all right for candidate to make a thirty minute speech on television or radio?
Yes?
Or would it be dignified to make a fifteen minute speech?
Yes?
Would it be in order, perhaps to make a five minute speech?
Yes?
I am sure a five minutes speech would.
Be in order if we could cut that speech to one minute. Is there anything wrong with that?
Okay, let's go ahead.
That's Reeves's account. Anyway. They filmed the campaign spots all in one day in Manhattan. The original idea was to run the spots in those targeted markets we now call them swing precincts.
Eisenhower answers America.
In each spot, an everyday person asks the General a question. Reeves had Eisenhower's answers written on huge posters. Eisenhower wouldn't have to wears glasses to read them. The story goes that Eisenhower worked through Reeves's script so fast that Reeves grabbed his typewriter and started to dash off news scripts spots.
On the spot, General, the Democrats are telling me I never had it so good.
Can that be true?
When America is billions in depth, when prices up doubles, when Texas break our backs and we are still fighting in Korea? Is tragic and it's time for the change.
They filmed forty spots that day. A few days later, the crew grabbed some tourists from around Midtown to go on camera. The tourists were then prompted to ask the very questions Eisenhower had already answered. Then Reeves's producer stitched the spots together. They were the first television ads featuring an American presidential candidate.
You know what things cost today?
High prices are just driving me crazy.
Yes, my Nami gets after me about the high cost of living. The reason why I say is time for the change. Time to get back to an honest dollar and an honest dollar's worth.
At the filming, someone overheard Eisenhower say to think that an old soldier should come to this. But Rosser Reeves was delighted. Here was the unique selling proposition president. But wait, the Democrats had a new television strategy too.
A man you candy leave.
In adlei e.
Stevenson would go on TV and read his speeches, speeches that were at the shortest nearly a half an hour long, and when he went over that time, the networks would just cut him off mid sentence. The Stephenson campaign was bringing sticks to a knife fight. The tragedy of it all was that Stevenson had a lot of important things to say about the problems confronting the nation.
Better we lose the election than myth lead the people, and better we lose than misgovern the people. Help me to do the job in this world of conflict and of campaign. Help me to do the job in these years of darkness, of doubt and of prices which stretched beyond the horizon of tonight's happy visions. And we will justify our glorious pass and the loyalty of silent millions who look to us for compassion, for understanding, and for honest purpose.
Honest purpose was one of Stevenson's big themes. Treat people like citizens, don't treat us like idiots, like consumers who can be predicted and persuaded. But Stevenson wasn't any good at getting that message across on television. Democrats desperate did everything they could. They even got a hold of Rosserres's advertising plan, which was supposed to be top secret. It made Stevenson's campaign advisors steaming mad.
They've invented a new kind of campaign, a campaign conceived not by men who want us to face the crucial issues of the day, but by the high powered hocksters of Madison Avenue. They've conceived not an election campaign in the usual sense, but a super colossal, multi million dollar production designed to sell an inadequate ticket to the American people in precisely the way they sell soap, toothpaste, hair tonic, or bubblegum.
Or M and MS.
Stevenson's campaign even asked the FCZ to look into the legality of the Republican campaign ad spots. They figured, stuff's got to be illegal, wasn't in an affront to everything a democracy stood for, faith in the voter to weigh the hard facts and make the call. But the FCC decided there was nothing to be done. In the end, Republicans spent one point five million dollars on television advertising in nineteen fifty two, more than ten times what Democrats spent. Also, Stevenson never appeared in any of the Democrats ads amazingly. By election day, Stevenson was still a strong contender. He and Eisenhower were neck and neck, at least as the polls had it. I've got those predictions on an old, yellowed punch card tacked to a bulletin board here in the Last Archive. Election Day nineteen fifty two began normally enough. It just didn't end that way. At seven fifteen that morning, Dwight Eisenhower's train pulled into Grand Central Station, just a few floors beneath the CBS news studio. Ike and Mami traveled to the Upper West Side to vote, and then they retired to their apartment. That evening, they'd go to the Commodore Hotel to wait for the results. Adlai E. Stevenson, meanwhile, was at the governor's mansion in Illinois. I've talked before here on the Last Archive about the importance of historical imagination, and I'm trying, but I just can't picture Stevenson watching the return ins on tele television. The rest of the country was watching, though, and a whole lot of them were watching CBS. This election had been all about television and advertising, and now the election coverage featured a first of its kind product placement for the computer, the UNIVAC. Like I've said that part was going badly.
Have you got a prediction for us?
YUNIVAC.
I have to say I totally feel for Charles Collingwood. He's on live television. The fate of CBS News probably seemed to turn on how well the network would cover this election. They'd spent gazillions on this insane production and it's a dud.
Univac our fabulous mathematical brain is done in Philadelphia mulling over the returns that we've sent him so far.
He's sitting there in his corner, humming away. A few minutes ago.
I asked him what his prediction was, and they sent me back a very caustic answer for a machine that if we continue to be so late in sending him the results, it's going to take him a few minutes.
To find out just what the prediction is going to be.
So he's not ready yet with his prediction, but we're going to go to him in just.
A little while.
UNIVAC be damned. The Eisenhower campaign was getting its own results by phone over at the Commodore Hotel, a confident. Eisenhower was getting ready to celebrate. CBS though still didn't want to call the race.
And as I was saying that, as a great believer in the machine, we're having a little bit of trouble with UNIVAC. It seems that he's refilling against the human element.
About ten thirty, CBS finally got a prediction from the machine.
Yes, univacs finally come through.
Good give it to us.
Huh, we've got Stephenson twenty stays Eisenhower twenty eight stays. That adds up to an electoral vote for Stephenson of two hundred and seventeen for Eisenhower three hundred and fourteen.
A prediction at last, but an outcome that just about anyone watching closely couldn't have predicted by that time of the night. And then a half an hour before midnight, UNIVAC seemed to go entirely off the rails. It predicted that well Eisenhower would win the electoral vote, Stevenson would win the popular vote. No human was predicting anything like that, not even Walter Cronkite.
Charlie very interesting, indeed, on that UNIVAK prediction, we who are on way human and have to operate with the flesh and blood instead of with electronic gadgets. I still think this thing looks like it's pretty much on the Eisenhower side at the moment.
I know.
It seems as though Univak was a complete disaster on election night in nineteen fifty two, But it turned out that early in the night UNIVAC had predicted an Eisenhower landslide. The computer min at Remington Ran, thinking the election was neck and neck and afraid of the machine making mistake on live television, just hadn't passed that prediction on to CBS. Remington RAN's entire interested in collaborating the CBS had been to demonstrate the usefulness of a general purpose digital computer. What if it failed? Disaster, So the UNIVAC people, after suppressing that early prediction of an Eisenhower landslide, had gotten desperate and had tinkered with the data to see if they could get the machine to make a prediction that didn't seem nuts.
The chances are one hundred to one in favor of General Eisenhower.
I might note that Yunivak is running a few moments behind at morrow.
However, just before midnight, after veterans. CBS reporter Edward R. Morrow called the election for Eisenhower. CBS had finally announced that early UNIVAC prediction. To viewers at home, it looked like the UNIVAK was the slowest of all predictors. Remington Rand had some explaining to do.
Well. We had a lot of trouble tonight. Strangely enough, they were all of humor and not the machine.
Remington Rand guy tried desperately to explain what had gone wrong. The problem, he insisted, had never been with the UNIVAC, so.
We should have had nerve enough to believe the machine and the first flight it was right. We were wrong.
Fifteen minutes later, an aid to Adelie Stevenson told reporters that the candidate was conceding. He'd lost to the guy with the thirty second TV ADS in a vote predicted by a TV gimmick the supercomputer UNIVAC. Stevenson, after delivering the concession speech, headed back to the governor's mansion, where guests had gathered. One of them tried to boost his spirits, told him that he'd educated the country. Stevenson supposedly said glumly that the American people had flunked his course. He'd wanted his campaign to show that truth can win. He wanted to demonstrate that you could run for president and win the White House by talking honestly about actual issues in all their complexity, not by making thirty second ad spots that turned pow Celtics into Eminem's. But truth didn't win, and the American people failed Professor Stevenson's exam, which, when you think about it, was a lousy way to run a campaign. No wonder he lost, but so did the country. Nineteen fifty two set a new course for the United States and for American politics the way every election does, by changing our president. But it also changed how we elect a president, and it even changed how we know things. The day after the election, Edward R. Murrow talked about voters the way Americans like to think of themselves, self determining and unknowable.
To me, the most impressive thing about tonight is again the demonstration that the people of this country are sovereign, that they are unpredictable, and that, somehow, in a fashion that is as mysterious upholsters as it is the reporter, the great normal majority in this country made up fits mine as to the man that wanted to leave it.
Maybe polsters and advertising agencies and computers can predict how voters behave. Maybe they can change how voters behave. But should they? What if the very accuracy of those predictions means that citizens lose faith in the evidence of what they see with their own eyes, lose faith in the political process. What if they really take to heart the idea behind the well targeted ad campaign, in the computerized prediction, and conclude that we behave as predictable consumers, not as individual citizens. Four years later, during the election of nineteen fifty six, adlest Stephenson took on Eisenhower again, and this time he too appeared in commercials.
It's wonderful I was hitting right here in my own library. Thanks to television, I can talk to millions of people that I couldn't reach any other way.
They were TV commercials, but really they were anti TV commercials.
I can talk to you, yes, but I can't listen to you. I can't hear about your problems, about your hopes and your affairs. To do that, I've got to go out and see you in person, and that's what I've been doing. So finally, I hope that the next time we meet it will be person to person and face to face.
Stevenson wanted you to know it was all props, all fake TV ads were just as fake as dummy computers with Christmas lights. But it was no use, and it was too late. Citizens had become consumers shopping for the best deal. Politics had become just another con the hard sell, face to face, fat chance. Campaigns would get glossier and glitzier. Elections would be predicted by faster and faster computers. In nineteen fifty six, President Eisenhower had new ads.
To lower taxes, higher taxes, record employment, unemployment, peace or asked wages.
Lower pay.
Late's right, centralization of government?
Whoa stop?
I've tried.
I've listened to everybody on TV and radio. I've read the papers and magazines. I've tried, but I'm still confused. Who's right, What's right? What should I believe? What are the facts? How can I tell?
Voters became irritated and impatient, looking for the quick fix. Eisenhower answers America the easy answer, what are the facts? When politics becomes big business, the facts of the matter become harder and harder to tell, especially outside of the Last Archive. The Last Archive is produced by Sophie Crane, mckibbon and ben Netta Faffrey. Our editor is Julia Barton, and our executive producer is Mia Lobel. Jason Gambrell and Martine Gonzalez are engineers. Fact checking by Amy Gaines. Original music by Matthias Bossi and John Evans of Stellwagon Symfinette. Many of our sound effects are from Harry Jeannette Junior and the Star Jeanette Foundation. Our fool Proof players are Barlow, Adamson, Daniel Berger, Jones, Jesse Hinson, John Kuntz, Becca A. Lewis and Maurice Emmanuel Parent. The Last Archive is brought to you by Pushkin Industries. Special thanks to Ryan McKittrick in the American Repertory Theater, to Alex Allenson and the Bridge Sound in stage, to Simon Leake, and to the Wisconsin Historical Society. Footage provided by Veritone at Pushkin thanks to Heather Fane, Maya Kaynigg, Carly Migliori, Emily Rostick, Maggie Taylor, and Jacob Weisberg. Our research assistants are Michelle Gou, Olivia Oldham, Henrietta Riley Oliver Ruskin Cuts and Emily Spector. I'm Jill Lapour
