Word: patterson
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...State's 6,960,117 registered voters, asking: "Shall the United States enter the war to help Britain defeat Hitler?" Of the 696,011 voters, last week 174,309 (25%) had responded-51,507, Yes; 122,802, No. Score: Go in, 29.5%; Stay out, 70.5%. Publisher Joseph Medill Patterson editorialized: "If, contrary to his 1940 campaign pledges, the President leads or pushes us into this war any time soon, he will be taking an unwilling people into a hated war." The newspaper anticlimactically observed: "In such event, the President must risk the verdict of history...
Publisher Patterson knew that he too was risking the verdict of history. The multimillionaire publisher of the biggest U.S. proletarian newspaper had asked a loaded question, had drawn a loaded answer. There is a difference between wanting to go to war and being willing to go to war-no sensible citizen in any country wants to go to war at any time-which the question dodged. There is a further difference between being willing to go to war "to help Britain" and to save the U.S. from grave danger. Careless questions certainly could not probe the present complex U.S. state...
...that almost 30% of the answerers were willing to go to war now. Dr. George Gallup's scientifically conducted Institute of Public Opinion, in a special New York State survey (monthly-for-23-months), could find only 21% who wanted to go to war, 8.5% less than Publisher Patterson's poll. Obvious conclusion: instead of chortling at the lack of war fever, Publisher Patterson should be brooding over its high reading on his own thermometer...
...Illinois, Colonel Patterson's cousin, multimillionaire Isolationist Colonel Robert Rutherford McCormick, simultaneously conducted a poll in his Chicago Tribune on the same question. Of 257,484 post cards mailed to every tenth voter, 77,229 (30%) answered: Yes (for war), 14,176, or 18.36%; No (against war), 62,394, or 80.79%. These figures checked almost exactly with Dr. Gallup's month-by-month poll of Illinois sentiment. Obvious conclusion: Colonel McCormick would have saved thousands of dollars by reading Dr. Gallup's polls, which regularly appear in the rival Chicago Daily News...
...spectacles far down on his nose, pug-faced Under Secretary of War Robert Porter Patterson sat before the Senate Defense Investigating Committee. The Under Secretary was reporting what the War Department had done in national defense during the last twelve months-the score of the first period in a deadly serious game...