Word: digester
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...TIME'S mention of attempt of Berkshire Eagle to ascertain vote of New Ashford 18 hours before opening of polls by means of straw ballot distributed to all 48 registered voters of the village (TIME, Oct. 9), should like to ask Literary Digest's Funk what he does for red face...
Under this storm of castigation and second-guessing, the Digest's editors sat down to decide what to say for themselves. Their poll had accurately foretold the major electoral results of, 1920, 1924, 1928, 1932. This time something had gone horribly wrong. Pleased and proud were its readers when out of its travail came the Digest with a cheerful, sporting handling of its own and other poll scores. Good-humored Editor Wilfred J. Funk, who himself had wagered no money on the election, featured on his magazine's first page a small facsimile Digest cover encircling the legend...
Publisher Hearst had staked his personal reputation as a prophet on Governor Landon. Far greater was the stake risked and lost by the publishers of the respected old Literary Digest, whose famed straw vote had polled by mail 1,293,669 votes for Alfred Landon, 972,897 for Franklin Roosevelt. In the face of actual returns, the publishing trade buzzed with rumors about what the Digest had done or would do: that it had been bought with Republican or Hearstian gold, that its editors had bet and lost a fortune on the vote, that it would never again attempt...
...sent the Digest a telegram which consisted of the word HA! repeated 50 times. The radical New Masses showed a cartoon cop barking into a microphone: "Pick up a nut at the Literary Digest office. He keeps trying to buy the joint for two bits ." Even the august New York Times hurled a smug thunderbolt: "Among the rewards or consolations of this Presidential election, most citizens will have already made up a 'little list' of political nuisances of which they have now got rid. One of these is the Literary Digest poll. It will scarcely venture to show...
Fact was that to the Digest's aging Publisher Robert Joseph Cuddihy, mail-order methods have always spelled success. This year, Editor Funk recommended that more money be spent to check and supplement the 1932 lists, was overruled. Only ten million ballots were mailed this year, half as many as in 1932. And anyone would guess that more Landon than Roosevelt voters were to be found at their 1932 addresses...