| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 105.4

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 105.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Daniel J. Robinson. The Measure of Democracy: Polling, Market Research, and Public Life, 1930–1945. Buffalo: University of Toronto Press. 1999. Pp. ix, 252. Cloth $55.00, paper $21.95.

Where does legitimate politics end and manipulation of an electorate begin? How is it possible for politicians to influence how we think? Is it immoral to smudge the line between consumerism and government policy making? Daniel J. Robinson comes to grips with these questions and others in his book. It is a finely written, extensively documented, and compelling account of how the politics of polling came to Canada, and how it ultimately came to serve the private, as opposed to the public, good. 1

Robinson charts new territory with this book, given that there are no histories of Canadian polling. He ably lays out the origins of consumer polling in Canada, soon seen to be a necessity as the Canadian economy grew after 1900 and business sought any advantage. These early polls were, however, rather crude and were eventually discarded in favor of George Gallup and his methods. From the 1935 establishment of Gallup's American Institute of Public Opinion to that of its northern sister, the Canadian Institute of Public Opinion (CIPO), in 1941, polling became a much more important part of Canada's political landscape. It promised to be, Gallup revealed in The Pulse of Democracy (1940), a book he co-wrote with Canadian Saul Forbes Rae, "a democratizing agent, a tool for social change that would restore a much-needed semblance of power to the politically inarticulate" (p. 7). His was a moral charge, as much as a financially remunerative one. . . .

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