| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 90.1

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 90.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

The Wizard of Washington: Emil Hurja, Frank-lin Roosevelt, and the Birth of Public Opinion Polling. By Melvin G. Holli. (New York: Pal-grave, 2002. viii, 153 pp. $49.95, ISBN 0-312-29395-X.)

The Wizard of Washington by Melvin G. Holli is a compact volume that is at once intriguing and frustrating. It presents important information about the unsung exploits of Emil Hurja. Yet, while piquing interest in Hurja and his prescient approach to electoral campaigning, Holli leaves me wanting a somewhat more comprehensive understanding of his life.

Let me recount first some of the many intriguing contributions of this book. Like many (political scientists at least), I have subscribed to the simplistic view that the world of public opinion polling was divided into the naïve, pre-1936 Literary Digest era and the post-1936 Gallup (scientific, small sample) polling era. That simplistic view is unfounded. The biases in the Literary Digest approach were well known to Hurja and others. Moreover, Hurja developed remarkable methods for weighting the Literary Digest and other flawed surveys to produce remarkably accurate predictions of voting behavior.

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