Speaker 1: Pushkin. One Saturday in November twenty twenty, I was buying
Speaker 1: shoes in Brooklyn. Crazy, I know, but this is a
Speaker 1: true story. They were running shoes. Did I run with
Speaker 1: them hardly? Ever, But that's not important. What's important is
Speaker 1: I was at the store trying on some hokahs I
Speaker 1: later came to regret. And then a crazy thing happened.
Speaker 1: A good friend of mine pulled up in a car
Speaker 1: out front. He had just that very day moved back
Speaker 1: to New York. And then as he got out of
Speaker 1: the car, people all over the streets suddenly raised their windows,
Speaker 1: leaned out of them, and began to scream and hag
Speaker 1: on pots and pans. I was like, whoa, you should
Speaker 1: try moving away more often. But then I checked my phone,
Speaker 1: and remember I was in Brooklyn. I realized that the
Speaker 1: election had just been called for Joe Biden. It was
Speaker 1: November seventh, twenty twenty. But here's the twist this it
Speaker 1: was four days after the election happened. You may remember
Speaker 1: the agonizingly long time between election day twenty twenty and
Speaker 1: the announcement of the final result. If you're a younger person,
Speaker 1: this might have felt very novel to you. It felt
Speaker 1: pretty novel to me. Generally, in my lifetime, elections were
Speaker 1: decided sometime overnight on election day or into the next morning,
Speaker 1: when a tired Wolfplitzer would est at a GLITCHI map
Speaker 1: and say that CNN could finally make a projection. But
Speaker 1: for a long time, it took a long time to
Speaker 1: call elections. The country is big, counting votes by hand
Speaker 1: is slow, and then reporting them is laborious. There wasn't
Speaker 1: one single election day until eighteen forty five. The eighteen
Speaker 1: seventy six election wasn't called till eighteen seventy seven. Quick
Speaker 1: calls like the famous Dewey defeats Truman case of nineteen
Speaker 1: forty eight were easy to get wrong. But that changed
Speaker 1: in a meaningful way in nineteen fifty two. Seeing as
Speaker 1: it's an election year in fact, you might be receiving
Speaker 1: with some trepidation, we overhear at the last Archive are
Speaker 1: digging through our own archives to bring you a mini
Speaker 1: season rehashing our past election coverage. Today, I want to
Speaker 1: take you back to that election night nineteen fifty two, Eisenhower,
Speaker 1: Varus Stevenson and the quantum leap, and how we ran
Speaker 1: and called elections. This was the first election to be
Speaker 1: predicted by computer, the moment we really leaned into our
Speaker 1: need for speed. What's interesting about that election and the
Speaker 1: marriage of computing power, polling, advertising, and electoral politics is
Speaker 1: that it accelerated a trend towards putting our faith in predictions,
Speaker 1: as if you almost didn't need to hold an election
Speaker 1: at all, but that with enough data you could just
Speaker 1: simulate the outcome data simulation, massive computers. Election Night sounds
Speaker 1: like a job for the last archive. So let's go
Speaker 1: back to twenty twenty when we made this episode from
Speaker 1: our first season, and then even further back to the
Speaker 1: election of nineteen fifty two and the emergence of a
Speaker 1: new way to run and to call elections. Oh and
Speaker 1: one last thing before we get into it. You'll hear
Speaker 1: in the episode from the historian Ira Chenoi who wrote
Speaker 1: a dissertation called Battle of the Brains on the Computers
Speaker 1: of Election Night nineteen fifty two. Well, that dissertation is
Speaker 1: about to be a book out in May called Predicting
Speaker 1: the Winner. Okay, from our first season, first published in
Speaker 1: the summer of twenty twenty, here's Project X.
Speaker 2: There's a place in our world where the known things
Speaker 2: go a quarter of the mind, lined with shelves, stocked
Speaker 2: with proof, and cluttered with snacks. Here on top of
Speaker 2: this old television set a pack of em and MS.
Speaker 2: Oh does the TV still work?
Speaker 3: I'd listened to everybody on TV and radio. I've read
Speaker 3: the papers and magazines. I've tried, But I'm confused. Who's right?
Speaker 4: What's right?
Speaker 5: What should I believe?
Speaker 4: What are the facts?
Speaker 5: How can I tell?
Speaker 4: Yeesh?
Speaker 2: Sounds like something I would say. That's why I come
Speaker 2: here to this place, This cabinet of curiosities, a police
Speaker 2: that stores the facts that matter and matters of fact.
Speaker 2: It's all that stands between a reasonable doubt and the
Speaker 2: chaos of uncertainty. It lies in a time between now
Speaker 2: and then. The sign on the door reads the last Archive.
Speaker 2: Step through that door to a studio at the Columbia
Speaker 2: Broadcasting System on Election Night nineteen fifty two.
Speaker 6: Got anything, everyone, This is Walter grand Guy speaking to
Speaker 6: you from CBS Television election headquarters. They're in New York City.
Speaker 6: The big election Night nineteen fifty two, the year when
Speaker 6: the United States BECs it's thirty fifth president.
Speaker 2: Welcome to election Night. But Election Night nineteen fifty two
Speaker 2: wasn't just any night, because everything you know about how
Speaker 2: campaigns are run and how results are announced, polls, targeted advertising,
Speaker 2: breathless television coverage, edge of your seat computer projections. That
Speaker 2: all started right here in nineteen fifty two, with Walter
Speaker 2: Cronkite just settling in for the long night ahead and
Speaker 2: CBS Studio forty one on the third floor of Grand
Speaker 2: Central Station, New York. As CBS's coverage begins, the camera
Speaker 2: pans across a crowded, frantic newsroom, teletype machines, adding machines,
Speaker 2: paper spread everywhere, dozens of telephones, some guys smoking at
Speaker 2: the back of the room near a giant wall map
Speaker 2: of the United States, a map that CBS will fill
Speaker 2: out as the returns come in. They couldn't color the
Speaker 2: states red and blue because in nineteen fifty two hardly
Speaker 2: anyone had a color TV. Instead, states that went Democrat
Speaker 2: would be covered with black. Republicans got stripes. Not so
Speaker 2: much elephants as zebras.
Speaker 6: Bomby weather over most of the United States today, and
Speaker 6: the record turnout apparently throughout the United States.
Speaker 2: Record turnout so many votes to count this election would
Speaker 2: change how Americans predicted the outcome of the election it
Speaker 2: would change all sorts of things about elections. But let
Speaker 2: me first remind you who was running. The Republicans put
Speaker 2: forward as their candidate General Dwight D. Eisenhower, Ike, the
Speaker 2: general behind D Day, military man, grandfather, straight shooter. Republicans
Speaker 2: came up with the slogan, I like Ike, I for president.
Speaker 4: I President for president.
Speaker 2: I thought President you like, and everybody really did like Ike.
Speaker 2: This is the election where likability became a thing for
Speaker 2: the Democrats. The incumbent, Harry S. Truman, was out. The
Speaker 2: Democrat who wanted to be in was Illinois Governor Adlai E. Stevenson.
Speaker 2: Stevenson wasn't affable or folksy like Eisenhower. He was learned
Speaker 2: and experienced, dignified, he might even say aristocratic. Stevenson had
Speaker 2: been born to a political family. His grandfather had been
Speaker 2: Grover Cleveland's vice president. Stevenson held himself above the messiness,
Speaker 2: the tackiness of campaigns. Trustworthy, he was supposed to be trustworthy.
Speaker 5: Vote Stephenson vo Stevenson a man you canzy leave in un.
Speaker 2: The general versus the governor, likable Ike versus the man
Speaker 2: you can believe Inson anyway, Like Walter Cronkite said, voting
Speaker 2: in the nineteen fifty two race looked to be a
Speaker 2: record turnout, turn out so big that the wire Service
Speaker 2: thought it might take until the next day to count
Speaker 2: the votes.
Speaker 6: We're going to be giving you all of the figures
Speaker 6: just as quickly as we can. But we'll know the
Speaker 6: results sometime the night, early in the.
Speaker 2: Morning, results that very night that would be fast, so fast.
Speaker 2: Historians sometimes call this era after the Second World War
Speaker 2: the Great Acceleration. There were races, the arms race, the
Speaker 2: space race, even NASCAR racing started then, but in a
Speaker 2: bigger way. Everything got sped up, transportation, communication, production, consumption, everything.
Speaker 2: Knowledge is to take the form of mysteries, things only
Speaker 2: God could know. Then came facts, then numbers, and then
Speaker 2: during the Great Acceleration, numbers began to yield to data,
Speaker 2: including the votes counted on election night. CBS wanted to
Speaker 2: count them faster than anyone else. Welcome to the Last Archive,
Speaker 2: the show about how we know what we know, how
Speaker 2: we used to know things, and what it seems sometimes
Speaker 2: lately as if we don't know anything at all. I'm
Speaker 2: Jill Lapour on the edge of my seat, waiting for
Speaker 2: the returns to come in. Aside from all those television cameras,
Speaker 2: there was another machine in the CBS studio on Election
Speaker 2: Night nineteen fifty two, a machine most Americans had never
Speaker 2: seen before, a console blinking.
Speaker 4: The development of modern electronic digital computers began with early man,
Speaker 4: who used his digits or fingers to keep track of
Speaker 4: the things around him one weapon, two animals, and three wives.
Speaker 2: A few thousand years after that Caveman, the first general
Speaker 2: purpose digital computers were built by the Allies in the
Speaker 2: Second World War. They were used to calculate missile trajectories
Speaker 2: and to break codes. After the war, the first commercial
Speaker 2: digital computer was built by an office equipment company called
Speaker 2: Remington Rand. I guess because there were more things to
Speaker 2: count than one weapon, two animals, and three wives.
Speaker 7: Even through the use of present day office equipment, it
Speaker 7: becomes increasingly difficult to process this accumulation to obtain the
Speaker 7: information we need.
Speaker 2: So many facts, so many numbers, so much data. Humankind
Speaker 2: needed a new kind of machine to.
Speaker 7: Meet this need for high speed data processing. The scientists
Speaker 7: and technicians of the Eckert Mochley division of Remington Rand
Speaker 7: have created a miracle of electronic development, UNIVAC, a complete
Speaker 7: electronic system for sorting, classifying, computing, and decision making.
Speaker 2: The UNIVAC, the Universal Automatic Computer. Remington Rand had sold
Speaker 2: one to the US Census Bureau to count the nineteen
Speaker 2: fifty census.
Speaker 7: Right now, UNIVAC is handling automatically and economically unbelievables of
Speaker 7: statistical work for the United States Bureau of the Census.
Speaker 4: Work that formerly took weeks and months to do is.
Speaker 7: Now being done in a matter of hours by UNIVAC.
Speaker 2: Okay, so the Census Bureau needed the machine to count
Speaker 2: the census. But who else could possibly need a crazy
Speaker 2: expensive UNIVAC, a machine the size of a small truck.
Speaker 2: Hardly anyone, it seemed. But Remington Ran wanted to sell them,
Speaker 2: so they had to keep pitching them, and pitching them
Speaker 2: and pitching them.
Speaker 7: UNOVAC is rapidly turning out answers, answers which have profound
Speaker 7: significance in the lives of all of us.
Speaker 2: Maybe UNIVAC could count votes. Maybe on election night, UNIVAC
Speaker 2: could even know the winner before any human could. Maybe
Speaker 2: the UNIVAC might actually get it right, because in the
Speaker 2: last election everyone had gotten it wrong.
Speaker 5: Thomas Dewey and his family waited expectantly for concession.
Speaker 2: In nineteen forty eight, Truman had run against the publican
Speaker 2: governor of New York, Thomas Dewey. All the big pollsters
Speaker 2: were sure Dewey would win. Reporters were just as sure.
Speaker 2: The Chicago Tribune went to press early, too early, with
Speaker 2: one hundred and fifty thousand papers bearing the headline Dewey
Speaker 2: defeats Truman. Dear listener, he did not.
Speaker 5: A man of the people, had accomplished a political miracle
Speaker 5: at his home in Independence, Missouri. President Truman accepted the
Speaker 5: congratulations of the nation.
Speaker 2: TV got it wrong, too, But TV didn't matter in
Speaker 2: nineteen forty eight, first because hardly anyone owned a television
Speaker 2: set then, and second, the TV coverage in nineteen forty
Speaker 2: eight was basically just live film of radio guys snoozing
Speaker 2: and waiting for the returns. But in nineteen fifty two,
Speaker 2: everything was supposed to be different. People finally had television sets.
Speaker 2: Watching would be fun, the announcers would call it right.
Speaker 2: So back to election night nineteen fifty two, it seems.
Speaker 8: To me that television has certainly come into its home
Speaker 8: this year.
Speaker 9: This time, everything seems to be especially designed just forward television.
Speaker 2: CBS had put a lot of effort and money into
Speaker 2: its coverage, every last bell and whistle. They'd also made
Speaker 2: it into a race. They really wanted to call the
Speaker 2: election early. Ideally, they wanted to call the election first,
Speaker 2: except they didn't want to call it so early that
Speaker 2: they'd get it wrong. But in case that happened, they
Speaker 2: needed a scapegoat. Enter the computer. Millions of Americans had televisions,
Speaker 2: but how many had computers. None. At the time, there
Speaker 2: were by my count, six computers in the whole country.
Speaker 2: It's possible I have my numbers wrong. Remember I am
Speaker 2: only human. But here's where what CBS wanted and what
Speaker 2: Remington Ran wanted lined up perfectly. Remington Ran needed a
Speaker 2: chance to show how useful computers are a showcase. CBS
Speaker 2: needed a stunt and also a scapegoat. As a match
Speaker 2: made in heaven, these things tend to seem inevitable after
Speaker 2: the fact, but of course history doesn't work that way.
Speaker 2: Most things happen by accident. A few months before election day,
Speaker 2: a guy from CBS went out to lunch with a
Speaker 2: guy from Remington Rand. CBS wanted to put in a
Speaker 2: big order for you know, typewriters and calculators, the sorts
Speaker 2: of machines that figured it needed to stock up on
Speaker 2: for election night. But the Remington Rand guy said, have
Speaker 2: you considered a UNIVAC. CBS's director of News in Public
Speaker 2: Affairs guy called Sig Mickelson heard about the lunch. He
Speaker 2: decided to go to the Remington Ran factory in Philadelphia
Speaker 2: to take a look. He hopped on the train and
Speaker 2: went to meet the UNIVAC.
Speaker 10: The machine was a monster, a mass of electronic vacuum
Speaker 10: tubes interconnected by miles of copper wire and cooled by
Speaker 10: noisy fans.
Speaker 2: Mickelson was supposed to meet a colleague of his there
Speaker 2: in Philadelphia, the dashing cbsqu correspondent Charles Collingwood. As legend
Speaker 2: has it, Collingwood was running late. When he arrived, The
Speaker 2: printer hooked up to the UNIVAC spat out a short message,
Speaker 2: calling Wood, you are a leap Where have you been?
Speaker 2: This is what's known among historians is a fact too
Speaker 2: good to check, in a sense that this never happened.
Speaker 2: But I'm telling you about it because Mickelson said it happened,
Speaker 2: and I love it. Back to things that did happen,
Speaker 2: CBS decided to proceed with what it called I'm not
Speaker 2: making this up project. Here's the deal they worked out.
Speaker 2: CBS would get the services of Univac for election night,
Speaker 2: but the machine would stay in Philadelphia. It was just
Speaker 2: too big to bring to New York. It weighed sixteen
Speaker 2: thousand pounds and had five thousand vacuum tubes. But the
Speaker 2: CBS studio in New York needed to look like it
Speaker 2: had a computer on set, so Charles Collingwood would sit
Speaker 2: at a UNIVAC looking thingamagic a console. There was actually
Speaker 2: just a dummy, a fake. The giant computer prophet CBS did, however,
Speaker 2: light up. It blinked for the benefit of viewers at home,
Speaker 2: as if it were the real electronic brain.
Speaker 11: Thinking it's like a Christmas tree light time, or basically,
Speaker 11: and if you watch it long enough, you see the
Speaker 11: pattern of the lights.
Speaker 6: Just review.
Speaker 4: There's nothing, there's nothing happened.
Speaker 2: I first learned about this story and a dissertation, an
Speaker 2: amazing dissertation called Battle of the Brains by Ira Chenoi.
Speaker 2: And I don't say dissertations are amazing all that often.
Speaker 2: Chanoi is a professor at the University of Maryland, but
Speaker 2: before he got his PhD, he was the director of
Speaker 2: computer assisted Reporting at the Washington Post. Before that, he'd
Speaker 2: been an investigative reporter. I wanted to visit him in
Speaker 2: his office in Maryland so that we could watch this
Speaker 2: footage together, footage that he'd discovered in the archives.
Speaker 1: It looks great there.
Speaker 4: It does look really good.
Speaker 6: And actually I don't know if you can see it here,
Speaker 6: but actually saw one of these when I went out
Speaker 6: to the Computer Instrum Museum, and I think it has
Speaker 6: an ashtray in it.
Speaker 2: Actually, Tony and I watched the footage where Walter Cronkite
Speaker 2: and Charles Collingwood on election I wait for the first
Speaker 2: prediction from the machine, and.
Speaker 6: Now for perhaps a prediction on how this voting is going.
Speaker 6: What's the vote that is in so far means let's
Speaker 6: turn to that miracle of the modern age, the electronic
Speaker 6: brain UNIVAC and the Charles Collingwood.
Speaker 2: Collingwood's on live television looking at a display offscreen, waiting
Speaker 2: for a prediction that he's supposed to read out loud.
Speaker 11: The JUNIVAK is going to try to predict the winner
Speaker 11: for us just as early as we can possibly get
Speaker 11: the returns. Then this is not a joke or a trick.
Speaker 11: It's an experiment. We think it's going to work, We
Speaker 11: don't know.
Speaker 1: We hope it'll work, but.
Speaker 2: There's nothing coming in. It's incredibly awkward to watch. They
Speaker 2: didn't call this stuff cringe TV then, but this is
Speaker 2: cringe TV.
Speaker 11: Can you say something, UNIVAC, have you got anything to
Speaker 11: say to the television audience?
Speaker 2: Currently? The UNIVAC in Philadelphia had made a prediction. It
Speaker 2: predicted that Eisenhower would win in a landslide, but given
Speaker 2: that exit polls had the race neck and neck, that
Speaker 2: prediction seemed bananas, so, supposedly, not wanting to screw up Remington,
Speaker 2: Ran decided not to send that prediction on to CBS
Speaker 2: in New York. Remington's second guest its own machine, which
Speaker 2: left Collingwood hanging and CBS without a prediction to announce.
Speaker 11: You're a very impolite in Shane, I must say, it.
Speaker 2: Was as if the whole election had suddenly gone off script,
Speaker 2: when in fact, so much of the campaign had been
Speaker 2: so entirely scripted. There's more to this story. There are documents,
Speaker 2: There is evidence. My producer Ben has filed a copy
Speaker 2: of that campaign script in his desk herein the last archive.
Speaker 2: So the supercomputer UNIVAC failed its first public audition as
Speaker 2: the predictor of voter behavior, at least though it was
Speaker 2: something obvious, a giant machine with these blinking lights right
Speaker 2: there on television. A lot more subtle stuff changed during
Speaker 2: that election, too, stuff that's been forgotten because now it's everywhere.
Speaker 1: I for president, I.
Speaker 4: For president, I for president, I thought president.
Speaker 2: Television advertising that was new too, not jingles. There'd been
Speaker 2: campaign songs since forever, but nineteen fifty two saw the
Speaker 2: introduction of a particular kind of television advertising, the targeted
Speaker 2: political ad. Lately, all political ads are targeted. They're targeted
Speaker 2: by computers is unairring his missiles. But in nineteen fifty two,
Speaker 2: targeting was done by hand, and political television advertising was
Speaker 2: invented by a man named Rosser Reeves. Think Don Draper
Speaker 2: and Madmen, but even slicker the very best Madison Avenue
Speaker 2: could offer. Rosser Reeves he was the man. He owned
Speaker 2: one of the world's big I just rubies. He led
Speaker 2: the uschess team on a trip to the Soviet Union.
Speaker 2: He invested in island real estate. He captained yachts. He
Speaker 2: flew planes mainly, though he created modern television advertising.
Speaker 10: Reeves decided that there were many advantages to be gained
Speaker 10: by adopting a new form of political advertising, the short
Speaker 10: spot commercial.
Speaker 2: Signicholson, that executive from CBS who brought in the UNIVAC
Speaker 2: he knew all about Reeves he later wrote about it.
Speaker 10: He had a hunch that the sixty second advertising spot
Speaker 10: could be used in the way the soap, food and
Speaker 10: cigarette companies were using them with spectacular success.
Speaker 2: In nineteen fifty two, Reeves took his talents to politics.
Speaker 2: He went to the Republican Convention, the first convention broadcast
Speaker 2: start to finish on television. Reeves was there, but instead
Speaker 2: of watching from the convention hall, he watched the keynote
Speaker 2: speech on TV from a hotel room. The crowds inside
Speaker 2: the stadium were enthusiastic, but watching the convention on TV,
Speaker 2: Reeves thought the speeches were dreadful, too many ideas, too
Speaker 2: many words. So he devised a test to see which
Speaker 2: people remembered better a televised speech or a televised commercial.
Speaker 2: Less than ten percent of people remember the speech, ninety
Speaker 2: one percent remember the commercial. Reeves thought that was because
Speaker 2: speeches usually have a lot of ideas, too many for television.
Speaker 2: He believed in something he called the unique selling proposition
Speaker 2: the USP.
Speaker 12: What is a USP. It's a theory of the ideal
Speaker 12: selling concept. It is a condensation, a verbal shorthand, if
Speaker 12: you will, of what makes a campaign work. It is
Speaker 12: the hidden secret of literally thousands of the most successful
Speaker 12: advertising campaigns ever written.
Speaker 2: Reeves often made pitches over meetings at Manhattan's One Club,
Speaker 2: where everyone was always several martinis deep. He told them
Speaker 2: that his unique selling proposition had three rules.
Speaker 12: Number one, each advertisement must make a proposition to the consumer,
Speaker 12: not just words, not just product puffery. Each advertisement must
Speaker 12: say to each reader, buy this product and you will
Speaker 12: get this specific benefit. Number two, the proposition must be
Speaker 12: the one that the competition either canoe or does not offer.
Speaker 12: Number Three, the proposition must be so strong that it
Speaker 12: could move the mass millions.
Speaker 2: That's from Reeves's book Reality and Advertising. My producer Ben
Speaker 2: and I decided to go get a copy of it.
Speaker 2: So we went to the basement of Wider Library at
Speaker 2: Harvard together. And when I say basement, I mean not
Speaker 2: in the deepest sense. To get to Reeves, you take
Speaker 2: the elevator four stories down and then you walk through
Speaker 2: a tunnel. So the fucy tunnel, it's so much better
Speaker 2: than you used to be.
Speaker 10: Be plastic buckets down.
Speaker 13: Here because they're just all these see all these pipes.
Speaker 2: They would just do it, but they still has that humidity. No,
Speaker 2: it's a humidity treatment smell. I think it would humiliate
Speaker 2: Reeves to know this. But after you go through that
Speaker 2: sweaty tunnel, you have to go down another level, down
Speaker 2: another elevator to finally get to the stacks and the
Speaker 2: shelf where his book is housed. His best advertisements all
Speaker 2: follow those three rules of the USP. So Wonderbread helps
Speaker 2: build strong bodies in twelve ways, andison gives you fast, fast,
Speaker 2: fast relief. But my personal favorite was the campaign he
Speaker 2: wrote for Eminem's.
Speaker 6: Which han chocolate can not good hands.
Speaker 2: That's ordinary chocolate can.
Speaker 4: It's melted.
Speaker 14: But this there's no chocolate min because amanams melt. Chocolate
Speaker 14: melts in your mouth, not in your hand.
Speaker 2: Reeves said Republicans should run ad spots, and Eisenhower, like
Speaker 2: M and M's Ike's campaign, signed him right up. Even
Speaker 2: though Eisenhower himself had yet to be convinced. Reeves took
Speaker 2: six weeks off and holed himself up in a hotel
Speaker 2: to write ad copy. He had all of Eisenhower's speech
Speaker 2: is sent over, but he didn't read them.
Speaker 12: I was too busy with the political mailstroam to sit
Speaker 12: down personally and read all the Eisenhower's rather dreary speeches.
Speaker 2: So we had other people do that. They drew up
Speaker 2: a list of topics that the general favored. Reeves showed
Speaker 2: that list to George Gallup, the pollster, who ran some
Speaker 2: numbers and told Reeves which three topics pulled best with voters.
Speaker 12: One corruption in government, two high prices and high taxes.
Speaker 12: Three war.
Speaker 2: Those three topics still pull well. They're evergreens today though
Speaker 2: computer driven targeted advertising, polling and election predictions are all
Speaker 2: tangled up on your iPhone as if they're one thing.
Speaker 2: But they got tangled up in nineteen fifty two when
Speaker 2: the pollsters and admin we're actually doing much the same
Speaker 2: thing as the UNIVAC was trying to do, running the numbers,
Speaker 2: coming up with a prediction. Are we okay with that?
Speaker 2: I mean we all are, because this is our world.
Speaker 2: But still, if we here in the last archive are
Speaker 2: wondering who killed truth, I'm looking at you, Rosser, Reeves.
Speaker 2: Reeves had hired a friend of his to run the
Speaker 2: numbers for him, a guy named Michael Levin. Ben brought
Speaker 2: copies of what he found in the archives when we
Speaker 2: went looking for Reeves's book fifty thousand Leagues beneath the library.
Speaker 1: This one is Michael Levin's plan. It's called how to
Speaker 1: Ensure an Eisenhower victory in November. And this is what
Speaker 1: Reeves commissioned his numbers guy Levin, who worked at a
Speaker 1: different firm, Yeah, Yeah, to write up about basically how
Speaker 1: to target the ads, where to run them, what counties,
Speaker 1: how often.
Speaker 2: It's a smoking gun of micro targeted advertising. Right here
Speaker 2: we have ranked here. Levin carved the country in devoting blocks,
Speaker 2: the southern vote, the black vote, the farm vote, the
Speaker 2: middle class. He saw it this way. Since Roosevelt, most
Speaker 2: of the country had voted Democratic, but that could change
Speaker 2: now that the economy was good. People weren't so keen
Speaker 2: on paying taxes anymore. They'd rather keep their money and
Speaker 2: spend it on some of the things they saw in
Speaker 2: all those television ads, dishwashers and dog food. To make
Speaker 2: the electoral math work in Republicans favor, Levin said they
Speaker 2: needed to flip the vote in forty nine counties in
Speaker 2: twelve states where they narrowly lost the last election. Levin
Speaker 2: called this block of states the Great Lakes Girdle. This
Speaker 2: was at a time when, by the way, people call
Speaker 2: parts of the country girdles, and now we call them belts,
Speaker 2: which is sad to me. Anyway. Forget kissing babies, shaking hands,
Speaker 2: and meeting voters, cultivating civic life and political debate. Instead,
Speaker 2: Levin said, divide the electorate into market segments and then
Speaker 2: blitz those key counties with the custom made TV ads.
Speaker 12: He was there a new way of campaign that can
Speaker 12: guarantee victory for Eisenhower in November. The answer is yes.
Speaker 12: Most people don't know the power spot. However, here are
Speaker 12: the cold facts. The humble radio or TV spot can
Speaker 12: deliver more listeners for less money than any other form
Speaker 12: of advertising.
Speaker 2: This pitch, you may have noticed, sounds a little bit
Speaker 2: different from the Lovin plan, but they were filed together
Speaker 2: in Ross's papers in the archives.
Speaker 1: This is kind of like lipstig on a pig, though
Speaker 1: like at least reass just flipstick, no pig.
Speaker 2: Here's the turn where commercial television advertising becomes political television
Speaker 2: advertising just lipstick, no pig.
Speaker 12: Let us repeat that the humble radio or TV spot
Speaker 12: can deliver more listeners for less money than any other
Speaker 12: form of advertising. It is a way of having a
Speaker 12: big town meeting but letting sixty million people hear all
Speaker 12: the questions and answers. This technique is I really suited
Speaker 12: to Eisenhower's warm personality as opposed to the cold intellectual
Speaker 12: approach of Adelais Stevenson. And because they are simple, because
Speaker 12: they are quick, because they are short and uncomplicated, the
Speaker 12: public will remember.
Speaker 2: Them Lake Kendy, but he dirty hens problem solved, vote Eisenhower.
Speaker 12: In other words, they will penetrate, Yes, they will penetrate
Speaker 12: the brains of sixty million critical voters, where the more
Speaker 12: complicated and more elaborate political speeches won't be remembered. And
Speaker 12: it's what the critical voters have in their brains when
Speaker 12: they go into the poland booths the counts.
Speaker 2: But before he could get to voters' brains, the eminem
Speaker 2: men first had to get General Eisenhower on board. Eisenhower
Speaker 2: was worried that these spots would be undignified. After all,
Speaker 2: at the time Eisenhower was president of Columbia University. He
Speaker 2: wasn't as a palled as ADLEI Stevenson would have been,
Speaker 2: but he was still worried. So Reeves met the General
Speaker 2: for lunch, probably over scotch, and wore him down.
Speaker 12: Well, General, do you think it's all right for candidate
Speaker 12: to make a thirty minute speech on television or radio?
Speaker 10: Yes?
Speaker 12: Or would it be dignified to make a fifteen minute speech?
Speaker 14: Yes?
Speaker 12: Would it be in order, perhaps to make a five
Speaker 12: minute speech?
Speaker 9: Yes?
Speaker 10: I am sure a five minutes speech would.
Speaker 12: Be in order if we could cut that speech to
Speaker 12: one minute. Is there anything wrong with that?
Speaker 10: Okay, let's go ahead.
Speaker 2: That's Reeves's account. Anyway. They filmed the campaign spots all
Speaker 2: in one day in Manhattan. The original idea was to
Speaker 2: run the spots in those targeted markets we now call
Speaker 2: them swing precincts.
Speaker 4: Eisenhower answers America.
Speaker 2: In each spot, an everyday person asks the General a question.
Speaker 2: Reeves had Eisenhower's answers written on huge posters. Eisenhower wouldn't
Speaker 2: have to wears glasses to read them. The story goes
Speaker 2: that Eisenhower worked through Reeves's script so fast that Reeves
Speaker 2: grabbed his typewriter and started to dash off news scripts spots.
Speaker 9: On the spot, General, the Democrats are telling me I
Speaker 9: never had it so good.
Speaker 4: Can that be true?
Speaker 9: When America is billions in depth, when prices up doubles,
Speaker 9: when Texas break our backs and we are still fighting
Speaker 9: in Korea? Is tragic and it's time for the change.
Speaker 2: They filmed forty spots that day. A few days later,
Speaker 2: the crew grabbed some tourists from around Midtown to go
Speaker 2: on camera. The tourists were then prompted to ask the
Speaker 2: very questions Eisenhower had already answered. Then Reeves's producer stitched
Speaker 2: the spots together. They were the first television ads featuring
Speaker 2: an American presidential candidate.
Speaker 9: You know what things cost today?
Speaker 2: High prices are just driving me crazy.
Speaker 9: Yes, my Nami gets after me about the high cost
Speaker 9: of living. The reason why I say is time for
Speaker 9: the change. Time to get back to an honest dollar
Speaker 9: and an honest dollar's worth.
Speaker 2: At the filming, someone overheard Eisenhower say to think that
Speaker 2: an old soldier should come to this. But Rosser Reeves
Speaker 2: was delighted. Here was the unique selling proposition president. But wait,
Speaker 2: the Democrats had a new television strategy too.
Speaker 4: A man you candy leave.
Speaker 10: In adlei e.
Speaker 2: Stevenson would go on TV and read his speeches, speeches
Speaker 2: that were at the shortest nearly a half an hour long,
Speaker 2: and when he went over that time, the networks would
Speaker 2: just cut him off mid sentence. The Stephenson campaign was
Speaker 2: bringing sticks to a knife fight. The tragedy of it
Speaker 2: all was that Stevenson had a lot of important things
Speaker 2: to say about the problems confronting the nation.
Speaker 15: Better we lose the election than myth lead the people,
Speaker 15: and better we lose than misgovern the people. Help me
Speaker 15: to do the job in this world of conflict and
Speaker 15: of campaign. Help me to do the job in these
Speaker 15: years of darkness, of doubt and of prices which stretched
Speaker 15: beyond the horizon of tonight's happy visions. And we will
Speaker 15: justify our glorious pass and the loyalty of silent millions
Speaker 15: who look to us for compassion, for understanding, and for
Speaker 15: honest purpose.
Speaker 2: Honest purpose was one of Stevenson's big themes. Treat people
Speaker 2: like citizens, don't treat us like idiots, like consumers who
Speaker 2: can be predicted and persuaded. But Stevenson wasn't any good
Speaker 2: at getting that message across on television. Democrats desperate did
Speaker 2: everything they could. They even got a hold of Rosserres's
Speaker 2: advertising plan, which was supposed to be top secret. It
Speaker 2: made Stevenson's campaign advisors steaming mad.
Speaker 16: They've invented a new kind of campaign, a campaign conceived
Speaker 16: not by men who want us to face the crucial
Speaker 16: issues of the day, but by the high powered hocksters
Speaker 16: of Madison Avenue. They've conceived not an election campaign in
Speaker 16: the usual sense, but a super colossal, multi million dollar
Speaker 16: production designed to sell an inadequate ticket to the American
Speaker 16: people in precisely the way they sell soap, toothpaste, hair tonic,
Speaker 16: or bubblegum.
Speaker 12: Or M and MS.
Speaker 2: Stevenson's campaign even asked the FCZ to look into the
Speaker 2: legality of the Republican campaign ad spots. They figured, stuff's
Speaker 2: got to be illegal, wasn't in an affront to everything
Speaker 2: a democracy stood for, faith in the voter to weigh
Speaker 2: the hard facts and make the call. But the FCC
Speaker 2: decided there was nothing to be done. In the end,
Speaker 2: Republicans spent one point five million dollars on television advertising
Speaker 2: in nineteen fifty two, more than ten times what Democrats spent. Also,
Speaker 2: Stevenson never appeared in any of the Democrats ads amazingly.
Speaker 2: By election day, Stevenson was still a strong contender. He
Speaker 2: and Eisenhower were neck and neck, at least as the
Speaker 2: polls had it. I've got those predictions on an old,
Speaker 2: yellowed punch card tacked to a bulletin board here in
Speaker 2: the Last Archive. Election Day nineteen fifty two began normally enough.
Speaker 2: It just didn't end that way. At seven fifteen that morning,
Speaker 2: Dwight Eisenhower's train pulled into Grand Central Station, just a
Speaker 2: few floors beneath the CBS news studio. Ike and Mami
Speaker 2: traveled to the Upper West Side to vote, and then
Speaker 2: they retired to their apartment. That evening, they'd go to
Speaker 2: the Commodore Hotel to wait for the results. Adlai E. Stevenson, meanwhile,
Speaker 2: was at the governor's mansion in Illinois. I've talked before
Speaker 2: here on the Last Archive about the importance of historical imagination,
Speaker 2: and I'm trying, but I just can't picture Stevenson watching
Speaker 2: the return ins on tele television. The rest of the
Speaker 2: country was watching, though, and a whole lot of them
Speaker 2: were watching CBS. This election had been all about television
Speaker 2: and advertising, and now the election coverage featured a first
Speaker 2: of its kind product placement for the computer, the UNIVAC.
Speaker 2: Like I've said that part was going badly.
Speaker 4: Have you got a prediction for us?
Speaker 11: YUNIVAC.
Speaker 2: I have to say I totally feel for Charles Collingwood.
Speaker 2: He's on live television. The fate of CBS News probably
Speaker 2: seemed to turn on how well the network would cover
Speaker 2: this election. They'd spent gazillions on this insane production and
Speaker 2: it's a dud.
Speaker 11: Univac our fabulous mathematical brain is done in Philadelphia mulling
Speaker 11: over the returns that we've sent him so far.
Speaker 4: He's sitting there in his corner, humming away. A few
Speaker 4: minutes ago.
Speaker 11: I asked him what his prediction was, and they sent
Speaker 11: me back a very caustic answer for a machine that
Speaker 11: if we continue to be so late in sending him
Speaker 11: the results, it's going to take him a few minutes.
Speaker 12: To find out just what the prediction is going to be.
Speaker 11: So he's not ready yet with his prediction, but we're
Speaker 11: going to go to him in just.
Speaker 12: A little while.
Speaker 2: UNIVAC be damned. The Eisenhower campaign was getting its own
Speaker 2: results by phone over at the Commodore Hotel, a confident.
Speaker 2: Eisenhower was getting ready to celebrate. CBS though still didn't
Speaker 2: want to call the race.
Speaker 11: And as I was saying that, as a great believer
Speaker 11: in the machine, we're having a little bit of trouble
Speaker 11: with UNIVAC. It seems that he's refilling against the human element.
Speaker 2: About ten thirty, CBS finally got a prediction from the machine.
Speaker 13: Yes, univacs finally come through.
Speaker 4: Good give it to us.
Speaker 13: Huh, we've got Stephenson twenty stays Eisenhower twenty eight stays.
Speaker 13: That adds up to an electoral vote for Stephenson of
Speaker 13: two hundred and seventeen for Eisenhower three hundred and fourteen.
Speaker 2: A prediction at last, but an outcome that just about
Speaker 2: anyone watching closely couldn't have predicted by that time of
Speaker 2: the night. And then a half an hour before midnight,
Speaker 2: UNIVAC seemed to go entirely off the rails. It predicted
Speaker 2: that well Eisenhower would win the electoral vote, Stevenson would
Speaker 2: win the popular vote. No human was predicting anything like that,
Speaker 2: not even Walter Cronkite.
Speaker 17: Charlie very interesting, indeed, on that UNIVAK prediction, we who
Speaker 17: are on way human and have to operate with the
Speaker 17: flesh and blood instead of with electronic gadgets. I still
Speaker 17: think this thing looks like it's pretty much on the
Speaker 17: Eisenhower side at the moment.
Speaker 14: I know.
Speaker 2: It seems as though Univak was a complete disaster on
Speaker 2: election night in nineteen fifty two, But it turned out
Speaker 2: that early in the night UNIVAC had predicted an Eisenhower landslide.
Speaker 2: The computer min at Remington Ran, thinking the election was
Speaker 2: neck and neck and afraid of the machine making mistake
Speaker 2: on live television, just hadn't passed that prediction on to CBS.
Speaker 2: Remington RAN's entire interested in collaborating the CBS had been
Speaker 2: to demonstrate the usefulness of a general purpose digital computer.
Speaker 2: What if it failed? Disaster, So the UNIVAC people, after
Speaker 2: suppressing that early prediction of an Eisenhower landslide, had gotten
Speaker 2: desperate and had tinkered with the data to see if
Speaker 2: they could get the machine to make a prediction that
Speaker 2: didn't seem nuts.
Speaker 17: The chances are one hundred to one in favor of
Speaker 17: General Eisenhower.
Speaker 6: I might note that Yunivak is running a few moments
Speaker 6: behind at morrow.
Speaker 2: However, just before midnight, after veterans. CBS reporter Edward R.
Speaker 2: Morrow called the election for Eisenhower. CBS had finally announced
Speaker 2: that early UNIVAC prediction. To viewers at home, it looked
Speaker 2: like the UNIVAK was the slowest of all predictors. Remington
Speaker 2: Rand had some explaining to do.
Speaker 13: Well. We had a lot of trouble tonight. Strangely enough,
Speaker 13: they were all of humor and not the machine.
Speaker 2: Remington Rand guy tried desperately to explain what had gone wrong.
Speaker 2: The problem, he insisted, had never been with the UNIVAC, so.
Speaker 13: We should have had nerve enough to believe the machine
Speaker 13: and the first flight it was right. We were wrong.
Speaker 2: Fifteen minutes later, an aid to Adelie Stevenson told reporters
Speaker 2: that the candidate was conceding. He'd lost to the guy
Speaker 2: with the thirty second TV ADS in a vote predicted
Speaker 2: by a TV gimmick the supercomputer UNIVAC. Stevenson, after delivering
Speaker 2: the concession speech, headed back to the governor's mansion, where
Speaker 2: guests had gathered. One of them tried to boost his spirits,
Speaker 2: told him that he'd educated the country. Stevenson supposedly said
Speaker 2: glumly that the American people had flunked his course. He'd
Speaker 2: wanted his campaign to show that truth can win. He
Speaker 2: wanted to demonstrate that you could run for president and
Speaker 2: win the White House by talking honestly about actual issues
Speaker 2: in all their complexity, not by making thirty second ad
Speaker 2: spots that turned pow Celtics into Eminem's. But truth didn't win,
Speaker 2: and the American people failed Professor Stevenson's exam, which, when
Speaker 2: you think about it, was a lousy way to run
Speaker 2: a campaign. No wonder he lost, but so did the country.
Speaker 2: Nineteen fifty two set a new course for the United
Speaker 2: States and for American politics the way every election does,
Speaker 2: by changing our president. But it also changed how we
Speaker 2: elect a president, and it even changed how we know things.
Speaker 2: The day after the election, Edward R. Murrow talked about
Speaker 2: voters the way Americans like to think of themselves, self
Speaker 2: determining and unknowable.
Speaker 8: To me, the most impressive thing about tonight is again
Speaker 8: the demonstration that the people of this country are sovereign,
Speaker 8: that they are unpredictable, and that, somehow, in a fashion
Speaker 8: that is as mysterious upholsters as it is the reporter,
Speaker 8: the great normal majority in this country made up fits
Speaker 8: mine as to the man that wanted to leave it.
Speaker 2: Maybe polsters and advertising agencies and computers can predict how
Speaker 2: voters behave. Maybe they can change how voters behave. But
Speaker 2: should they? What if the very accuracy of those predictions
Speaker 2: means that citizens lose faith in the evidence of what
Speaker 2: they see with their own eyes, lose faith in the
Speaker 2: political process. What if they really take to heart the
Speaker 2: idea behind the well targeted ad campaign, in the computerized prediction,
Speaker 2: and conclude that we behave as predictable consumers, not as
Speaker 2: individual citizens. Four years later, during the election of nineteen
Speaker 2: fifty six, adlest Stephenson took on Eisenhower again, and this
Speaker 2: time he too appeared in commercials.
Speaker 14: It's wonderful I was hitting right here in my own library.
Speaker 14: Thanks to television, I can talk to millions of people
Speaker 14: that I couldn't reach any other way.
Speaker 2: They were TV commercials, but really they were anti TV commercials.
Speaker 14: I can talk to you, yes, but I can't listen
Speaker 14: to you. I can't hear about your problems, about your
Speaker 14: hopes and your affairs. To do that, I've got to
Speaker 14: go out and see you in person, and that's what
Speaker 14: I've been doing. So finally, I hope that the next
Speaker 14: time we meet it will be person to person and
Speaker 14: face to face.
Speaker 2: Stevenson wanted you to know it was all props, all
Speaker 2: fake TV ads were just as fake as dummy computers
Speaker 2: with Christmas lights. But it was no use, and it
Speaker 2: was too late. Citizens had become consumers shopping for the
Speaker 2: best deal. Politics had become just another con the hard sell,
Speaker 2: face to face, fat chance. Campaigns would get glossier and glitzier.
Speaker 2: Elections would be predicted by faster and faster computers. In
Speaker 2: nineteen fifty six, President Eisenhower had new ads.
Speaker 7: To lower taxes, higher taxes, record employment, unemployment, peace or
Speaker 7: asked wages.
Speaker 6: Lower pay.
Speaker 5: Late's right, centralization of government?
Speaker 4: Whoa stop?
Speaker 5: I've tried.
Speaker 3: I've listened to everybody on TV and radio. I've read
Speaker 3: the papers and magazines. I've tried, but I'm still confused.
Speaker 3: Who's right, What's right? What should I believe? What are
Speaker 3: the facts? How can I tell?
Speaker 2: Voters became irritated and impatient, looking for the quick fix.
Speaker 2: Eisenhower answers America the easy answer, what are the facts?
Speaker 2: When politics becomes big business, the facts of the matter
Speaker 2: become harder and harder to tell, especially outside of the
Speaker 2: Last Archive. The Last Archive is produced by Sophie Crane,
Speaker 2: mckibbon and ben Netta Faffrey. Our editor is Julia Barton,
Speaker 2: and our executive producer is Mia Lobel. Jason Gambrell and
Speaker 2: Martine Gonzalez are engineers. Fact checking by Amy Gaines. Original
Speaker 2: music by Matthias Bossi and John Evans of Stellwagon Symfinette.
Speaker 2: Many of our sound effects are from Harry Jeannette Junior
Speaker 2: and the Star Jeanette Foundation. Our fool Proof players are Barlow, Adamson,
Speaker 2: Daniel Berger, Jones, Jesse Hinson, John Kuntz, Becca A. Lewis
Speaker 2: and Maurice Emmanuel Parent. The Last Archive is brought to
Speaker 2: you by Pushkin Industries. Special thanks to Ryan McKittrick in
Speaker 2: the American Repertory Theater, to Alex Allenson and the Bridge
Speaker 2: Sound in stage, to Simon Leake, and to the Wisconsin
Speaker 2: Historical Society. Footage provided by Veritone at Pushkin thanks to
Speaker 2: Heather Fane, Maya Kaynigg, Carly Migliori, Emily Rostick, Maggie Taylor,
Speaker 2: and Jacob Weisberg. Our research assistants are Michelle Gou, Olivia Oldham,
Speaker 2: Henrietta Riley Oliver Ruskin Cuts and Emily Spector. I'm Jill
Speaker 2: Lapour