Roper, Elmo (1900–71)

ELMO ROPER WAS a pioneer and leader in the field of modern survey research. In the 1930s, he was one of three major pollsters who helped usher in a new era of scientific survey research. Roper was born in Hebron, Nebraska. As a young man, he operated [Page 725]a jewelry store with his brother in Creston, Iowa (1922–28) and worked for manufacturing companies (1928–33). He got his first taste of customer research while employed by the Traub Company. Shortly thereafter, he joined with Paul T. Cherington and Richard Wood to found one of the first market research firms, Cherington, Roper, and Wood (1933–38).

In 1935, publisher Henry Luce asked Roper to serve as director of the Fortune survey. Roper and two other young pollsters, George H. Gallup and Archibald Crossley, predicted accurately (but not with statistical precision) President Franklin Roosevelt's victory over Republican challenger Alfred (Alf) Landon in the 1936 presidential election. This election proved to be a turning point. Literary Digest magazine ran the major survey at the time. Until that election, Literary Digest had accurately predicted election outcomes, but in 1936 a series of methodological mishaps resulted in failure. Roper headed one of three organizations that employed “scientific methods” to poll a fraction of the Literary Digest's two million respondents and accurately project the outcome of the race.

In the late 1930s, Roper left Cherington to establish and head his own firm, Roper Research Associates. He also successfully predicted Roosevelt's two subsequent electoral victories. The viability of scientific polling was cemented in 1940 when President Roosevelt asked Roper and Gallup to measure public support for the Lend-Lease Deal. Roper continued to poll extensively during World War II.

Among other things, he served as deputy director of the Office of Strategic Services and helped convince the military establishment to use public opinion polling. If 1936 established the viability of scientific survey research, 1948 showed that it was not infallible. During that election, all three of the nation's top pollsters, Roper, Crossley, and Gallup, inaccurately projected Thomas E. Dewey would defeat Harry Truman by five to 15 percent.

Truman not only won by 4.5 percent, but the image of him holding a copy of the Chicago Tribune bearing the headline “Dewey Defeats Truman” has become one of the most famous photos of the mid-20th century. Roper responded to the debacle by saying that his face was “just as red as President Truman said it would be.” He and the other major pollsters not only took responsibility for the errors, but also took steps to correct them. Among other things, they explored new sampling techniques. In 1948, most pollsters used quota sampling, in subsequent elections this was abandoned in favor of probability sampling, a technique that is still used today.

In addition to polling, Roper was an editor for the Saturday Review, a newspaper columnist, radio commentator, television analyst, and a popular speaker on the lecture circuit. He also served on the boards of several well-known organizations and businesses, was a member of the Urban League, the Connecticut Civil Rights Commission, and the U.S. Citizen's Commission on the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). While Roper never completed his undergraduate studies, he was the recipient of honorary degrees from the University of Minnesota, Williams College, and the University of Louisville.

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