In March 1935, the face of an obscure son of Finnish immigrants from a small iron ore mining town on Michigan’s Upper Peninsula—Emil Edward Hurja—appeared on the front cover of Time Magazine above a caption reading “Democracy’s Emil Hurja / He counts his elections before they are hatched.” Writing in a local UP newspaper a year earlier, referencing Hurja’s hometown in response to his contrarian forecasts of Democratic victories in the upcoming 1934 mid-term elections, a reporter proclaimed him “the crystal gazer from Crystal Falls.” Writing in the Saturday Evening Post in 1936, another reporter—Thomas Sugrue—labeled Hurja “The Wizard of Washington.” Unable (or, equally likely, unwilling) to correctly pronounce Hurja’s last name, Louis Howe, FDR’s gnomish, irascible, curmudgeonly confidant dubbed him “Ouija” for his magical powers to predict future votes.
Despite Hurja’s frequent appearances in news media in the latter years of the first New Deal, his name has been largely absent from the pages of history in the years since. While Elmo Roper and George Gallup have been lionized—and with good reason—for their ground-breaking contributions to the development of modern, scientific public opinion polling, Hurja with his innovative polling techniques began influencing presidential campaigning, decision-making, and governing in 1932, a full presidential election cycle before these two titans of the art first had an impact on the national scene.
With a few scattered exceptions, most historians of the New Deal era have left out any recognition of Hurja and his contributions from their accounts. Witness a recent posting from historian Heather Cox Richardson on her blog, Letters from an American. On August 9, 2024, Richardson wrote,
The 1960 presidential election ushered in a new era in politics. While Eisenhower had turned to advertising executives to help him appeal to voters, it was 1960 Democratic nominee Massachusetts senator John F. Kennedy who was the first presidential candidate to turn to a public opinion pollster, Louis Harris, to help him adjust his message and his policies to polls.
HCR’s declaration errs by fully 28 years. The aforementioned Emil Edward Hurja has sole rightful claim to that distinction. Beginning with the run-up to the 1932 election and continuing on through the election of 1936, Franklin Delano Roosevelt sought Hurja’s advice time and time again and incorporated it into his thinking, strategizing, and policymaking. Hurja’s innovative polling methodology subsequently became foundational to the development of modern, scientific, statistics-based public opinion polling such as we know it today.
The late Melvin Holli of the University of Illinois-Chicago first argued Hurja’s case in The Wizard of Washington: mil Hurja, Franklin Roosevelt, and the Birth of Public Opinion Polling (Palgrave, 2002). In recent years, Rutger’s David Greenberg and Penn State’s Mary Stuckey have reinforced and expanded Holli’s arguments—Greenberg in his essay, “FDR’s Nate Silver”(Politico Magazine, January 2016) and Stuckey one year later in her monograph, Deliberative Voting (Penn State University Press, 2017).
As Holli makes clear, FDR first employed Hurja’s seemingly magical powers of prognostication in the run-up to the 1932 presidential election. Two years later, Hurja astonished Roosevelt when the Democrats confounded pollsters, pundits, politicians, and public alike by increasing their majorities in the House and Senate in that year’s mid-term elections just as Hurja had insisted to FDR they would and just like the rest of the world had insisted they would not. Amazed by his advisor’s polling perspicacity, Roosevelt called Hurja’s predictions and the election’s results “the most remarkable thing” he had ever seen in his political career.
As the year 1935 progressed, FDR’s chances of winning a second term in 1936 grew increasingly uncertain, so low had his approval ratings fallen. Concerned about his diminished prospects, Roosevelt directed Hurja to conduct a poll on the nation’s current state of mind vis-à-vis FDR and his policies and brief him on the results.
On June 28, 1935, during a late-night dinner at the White House with the President, Hurja—joined by Postmaster General and Chairman of the Democratic National Committee James A. Farley, friend and advisor to FDR and future Supreme Court justice Felix Frankfurter, then-head of the Securities and Exchange Commission Joseph Kennedy, and Secretary of Commerce Harry Hopkins—delivered his report, bluntly critiquing Roosevelt’s recent performance and breaking down the public’s reaction to it. Contrary to what the President thought, he carefully explained, citing his freshly compiled polling numbers as evidence, the American people overwhelmingly disapproved of Roosevelt’s efforts to resuscitate the National Industrial Recovery Act which had been declared unconstitutional earlier that year to FDR’s great displeasure by the Supreme Court.
Passed in June 1933 during the frenetic first 100 days of the New Deal, the NIRA authorized the President to regulate industry and created two new federal agencies to facilitate that task: the Public Works Administration (PWA) and the National Recovery Administration (NRA)—the latter famous for its ubiquitous Blue Eagle symbol. The NIRA immediately went to work to stimulate economic recovery by creating new jobs, increasing wages, regulating industry, building infrastructure, improving working conditions, and outlawing child labor.
Roosevelt and his circle of Brain Trusters—led by Rex Tugwell—calculated that, if wages increased, workers would be able to earn and spend more. One might call their approach pre-Laffer Curve, “bubbling up,” consumption-side economics as opposed to the “trickle down” supply-side economics dominant in the Reagan- and post-Reagan eras. It eerily resonates with an assertion made by William Jennings Bryan decades earlier in his famous Cross of Gold speech when he thundered, “The Democratic idea has been that if you legislate to make the masses prosperous their prosperity will find its way up and through every class and rest upon them.”
In the aftermath of the Supreme Court’s ruling, FDR persisted in believing that he had the people’s support for his NIRA-based approach to addressing the country’s economic needs, lashing out at anyone—on the right or on the left or anywhere in between—who opposed him on the issue. To the contrary, Hurja argued, the American public cared little about the fate of any of Roosevelt’s individual pet projects. In their place, Hurja asserted, they wanted results they could see and feel and taste, not bureaucratic panaceas or empty platitudes of no practical value to them. In 1932, the Democrats had chosen as their theme song, “Happy Days Are Here Again.” As the Great Depression continued to deepen over the ensuing two years, a growing number of people demanded to know, “Whatever happened to those happy days you promised us? We want prosperity, and we want it now!”
Roosevelt incorrectly believed that the American public supported his pet “alphabet agencies.” Hurja’s polling told a different story, which he made known that evening. His numbers showed, to the contrary, that a significant majority of Americans opposed programs like the WPA and NRA and wanted something different. FDR’s refusal to let go of them alienated voters whose support he would need if he wished to serve a second term—something the President and his allies most decidedly did not want. Hurja concluded his presentation by recommending that FDR redirect his energy by focusing on matters people truly cared about and to do so positively, sooner rather than later.
Influenced by Hurja’s advice, in setting aside his personal ’druthers and bowing to public opinion, Roosevelt made a calculated decision to alter his administration’s direction (in the eyes of the voting public) to recapture the support of the people This was a prescient move that arguably led directly to his reelection. Some might call such moves “governing by polls.” Later notable practitioners of the art have included John Fitzgerald Kennedy, Lyndon Baines Johnson, and William Jefferson Clinton. What Emil and Franklin started, Jack, Lyndon, and Bill expanded and perfected with the help of pollsters such as JKF’s numbers man, Lou Harris.
One hopeful finding of Hurja’s polling he reported that night stood out: the public liked FDR but disliked his coterie of “egghead” advisors known as the “Brain Trust.” By aligning himself too closely with Rex Tugwell et. al. and fighting too strongly for what the general public thought of as their crackpot ideas, not FDR’s, Roosevelt alienated opponents and supporters alike. By turning down his rhetoric—at least for the moment—and re-focusing on the issues that mattered most to voters, FDR reversed the downward trend of his popularity, thereby setting the stage for his landslide victory in 1936. How much Hurja’s presentation affected the President’s path forward to victory can be debated. The wisdom and forethought of Hurja’s recommendations cannot.
The tensions generated by these conflicting views continued to build beneath the surface until Roosevelt’s landslide victory in 1936 unleashed them in the battle over his much-debated court-packing scheme. Unraveling the complexities of that imbroglio far exceeds the scope and purpose of this piece. If this discussion of Emil Hurja, his polling prowess, and his interactions with FDR contribute to our understanding of the origins of public opinion polling, it will have achieved its primary goal.
A journalist noted Hurja’s relationship with Tugwell and the brain trusters:
[Hurja] is an actuarial antidote to the nonpolitically minded and impractical brain trusters and reformers. Even the professors are beginning to appreciate him. Knowing that they cannot accomplish all their aims in four years, some sense that perhaps Hurja’s work behind the scenes may enable them to linger on and to dream bigger and better dreams. Time and again they have had to call on Messrs. Farley and Hurja to rescue important measures from defeat at the hands of legislators whom they have antagonized.
Nobody realizes more perfectly than the President that the best of preachments is wasted if they are delivered to empty and unsympathetic pews. And if, as some fondly believe, the Democrats are destined to remain in power for many, many years, it may be due to Hurja’s political planning and demoralizing predictions as much as to the dreams of the reformers.
The late Robert Remini—a one-time colleague of Melvin Holli in the history department at the University of Illinois-Chicago, former Historian of the United States House of Representatives, and author of the magisterial three-volume biography, The Life of Andrew Jackson—remarked that Emil Hurja’s work “profoundly changed how political elections are conducted.”
As the father of modern, scientific public opinion polling and, in the words of Holli, “the first presidential pollster to apply the newly developing science of polling to election campaigns and governing,” Hurja played a vital role in FDR’s first two elections and in setting the New Deal on its original course. “Thus Hurja,” Holli wrote, “during the 1932 presidential campaign, performed as the brain machine and back-room intelligence directing Roosevelt’s try for the presidency.”
“The fact that President Roosevelt,” Holli went on to write,
had been quietly using a pollster to guide his campaign and to secretly test the popularity of his New Deal programs was not then generally known. Most polling studies credit John F. Kennedy and Louis Harris as the first presidential poll team in history. … Although this was the natal period in scientific polling as applied to politics, Hurja from his engineering and mineral analysis background understood scientific sampling, probability theory, and how to use quotas to get representative samples. Perhaps equally important, he knew how to reweight and correct mega-straw polls such as those of the Literary Digest and make political sense of them.
In the case of FDR and the first New Deal, if you probe far enough beneath the surface of political events, you will find the figure of an unheralded son of Finnish immigrant parents, Emil Hurja, looming large, providing critical input to President Roosevelt regarding the public’s attitudes toward his policies and programs.
August, 2024
James H. Ojala, Ph.D.
SUNY-Binghamton, 1974
Nephew & godson of Emil Hurja
Collaborator with the late Melvin Holli on The Wizard of Washington