These Truths: A History of the United States

by Jill Lepore

Jim Crow defined New Deal politics. Between violence, poll taxes, literacy tests, and other forms of disenfranchisement, less than 4 percent of African Americans were registered to vote. Nevertheless, “the revenge of the slave is to place his masters in such subjection that they can make no decision, political, social, economic, or ethical, without reference to him,” Anne O’Hare McCormick wrote in 1930. “Voteless, he dominates politics.”100 FDR’s reliance on public opinion surveys made this problem worse. Gallup’s early method is known as “quota sampling.” He analyzed the electorate to determine what proportion of the people who vote are men, women, black, white, young, and old. The people who conducted his surveys had to fill a quota so that the survey respondents would constitute an exactly proportionate mini-electorate. But what Gallup presented to the American public as “public opinion” was the opinion of Americans who were disproportionately wealthy, white, and male. Nationwide, in the 1930s and 1940s, blacks constituted about 10 percent of the population but made up less than 2 percent of Gallup’s survey group. Because blacks in the South generally could not vote, Gallup assigned no “Negro quota” in those states.101 Instead of representing public opinion, polling essentially silenced the voices of African Americans. Roosevelt’s electoral coalition drew African Americans from the Republican Party; he consulted an informal group of advisers who came to be called his “b...