Robert D. McFadden

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“He Preferred To Be Called A Public-Opinion Analyst Rather Than A Pollster”

December 20, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech | Permalink

Louis Harris, the most famous American pollster of the twentieth century, just died at 95. I worked for the company in its last pre-acquisition days when I was an undergraduate. The offices were located at 630 Fifth Avenue, a building with a giant Atlas statue at its entrance. On a lunch break one day, I sat across the street on the steps of St. Patrick’s Cathedral reading a copy of The Stories of John Cheever. I absorbed “The Country Husband” (still my favorite tale by the writer), which coincidentally mentions the very same Atlas building right before my eyes. Cool. 

What I can recall about the experience:

  • The break room had a shrine to the late professional wrestler Bruiser Brody, who had been murdered in 1988 in a backstage altercation Puerto Rico. There’s even a Mountain Goats song about the stabbing.
  • The Harris Poll was the least buttoned-down workplace I’ve ever come across. The crew was a mix of anarchist squatters from the Lower East Side (who apparently had no regular access to soap), a few college students like myself, a handful of aspiring actresses and theater directors, several little people, and some LGBTQ folks who told me they had trouble getting non-phone work because they couldn’t or wouldn’t masquerade as something that was more acceptable in America at the time. Oh, and there was a very nice and quiet middle-aged woman who was said to be a former Bob Fosse dancer who’d fallen on hard times.
  • The employees were almost universally extremely liberal politically, even radical, though that seemed to have no influence over survey outcomes. Many polls wound up reflecting a strong conservative opinion.
  • I was instructed that when conducting phone surveys I needed to be more assertive with women in the Midwest, since they could be bossed around. It wasn’t exactly in those words, but close. I was told precisely that when Middle American females told me they weren’t interested in doing a survey that I was to ask to speak to the “man of the house.”
  • I once referred to the company as “Lou” Harris and was immediately told to never, ever do that again. The founder had retired by then but was still a sort of spectral presence.

From Robert D. McFadden’s New York Times obituary of the man who called too much:

He preferred to be called a public-opinion analyst rather than a pollster, a word that he believed trivialized what he did, which went beyond gathering data into new realms of interpretation — useful to clients of his consulting firm and more meaningful to millions who watched his analyses on the CBS and ABC television networks or who read his nationally syndicated newspaper and magazine columns.

His results were sometimes wrong. And critics questioned his early practice of using his polls to promote candidates — notably John F. Kennedy in his 1960 presidential race — for whom he worked as a campaign strategist. But he gave up political advocacy after a few years to concentrate on public polling and analyses for the newspaper and television jobs that made him a household name in America.

In the 1960s, he developed television’s ability to project national election winners on the basis of early returns after polls closed in the East. But critics said projections before the polls closed in the West discouraged some voters from casting ballots, and the networks voluntarily ended the practice.

Mr. Harris denied that his work affected the outcome of elections or corrupted voting processes. He rejected charges that he was too commercial, although he made a fortune in market research. And he scoffed at accusations that his polls reflected a liberal Democratic bias; he said he often worked for Republicans and was guided by principles of fairness and accuracy.

Like Elmo Roper and George Gallup, his pioneering predecessors, Mr. Harris plumbed attitudes with face-to-face interviews, using carefully worded questions put by trained interviewers to subjects selected as part of a group that was chosen as demographically representative of the nation. (Telephone interviews, faster and less expensive, came into wide use in the late 1970s, and proved to be just as valid.)•

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“How Lucky I Am To See This Beautiful Animal In His Environment”

February 26, 2015 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Videos | Permalink

Dr. Eugenie Clark, an ichthyologist who specialized in sharks–even sleeping ones–just passed away at 92. She was not a fan of Jaws, the Spielberg blockbuster adapted from Peter Benchley’s novel. From her New York Times obituary by Robert D. McFadden:

For all her scientific achievements, Dr. Clark was also a figure of popular culture who used her books, lectures and expertise to promote the preservation of ecologically fragile shorelines, to oppose commercial exploitation of endangered species and to counteract misconceptions, especially about sharks.

She insisted that Jaws, the 1975 Steven Spielberg film based on a Peter Benchley novel, and its sequels inspired unreasonable fears of sharks as ferocious killers. Car accidents are far more numerous and terrible than shark attacks, she said in a 1982 PBS documentary, The Sharks.

She said at the time that only about 50 shark attacks on humans were reported annually and that only 10 were fatal, and that the great white shark portrayed in Jaws would attack only if provoked, while most of the world’s 350 shark species were not dangerous to people at all.

“When you see a shark underwater,” she said, “you should say, ‘How lucky I am to see this beautiful animal in his environment.’ ”•

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“The big ones are the females.”

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“In The 1960s And ’70s, He Was One Of The World’s Richest Men”

October 22, 2014 in Excerpts, Urban Studies | Permalink

Nelson Bunker Hunt, who sprang from the right-wing nut H.L. Hunt, lived a life as large as Texas. He was born with a silver spoon his mouth and nearly lost everything trying to corner the silver market. Hunt would have been considered just another eccentric oilman if it wasn’t for the anti-Semitism, his boner for the John Birch Society and other unsavory politics. From his lively New York Times obituary by Robert D. McFadden:

“Bunker Hunt was a jovial 275-pound eccentric who looked a bit like the actor Burl Ives. In the 1960s and ’70s, he was one of the world’s richest men, worth up to $16 billion by some estimates. With his five siblings, heirs of the oil billionaire H. L. Hunt, who sired 15 children by three women and died in 1974, he controlled a staggering family fortune whose value was not publicly reported.

In his heyday, Bunker Hunt owned five million acres of grazing land in Australia, 1,000 thoroughbreds on farms from Ireland to New Zealand, eight million acres of oil fields in Libya, offshore wells in the Philippines and Mexico, and an empire of skyscrapers, cattle ranches, mining interests and other holdings. Home was a French provincial mansion in a Dallas suburb and his 2,000-acre Circle T Ranch 30 miles out of town.

Often likened to Jett Rink, the antihero of Edna Ferber’s Giant, or the scheming J. R. Ewing of the long-running CBS television drama Dallas, he was a nonsmoking teetotaler who cultivated a devil-may-care Texas mystique by inhabiting cheap suits, a battered seven-year-old Cadillac, economy-class airline seats, burger and chili joints, and dusty barnyards in the raucous company of ranch hands.

He was an evangelical Christian close to the Rev. Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson and supported right-wing politicians and causes, including the John Birch Society. He loathed the federal government, warned of international communist conspiracies, spouted anti-Semitic sentiments, did business with the Saudi royal family and bankrolled expeditions to salvage the Titanic and to find Noah’s Ark.”

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