Elmo Burns, Jr. Roper

Background

Roper Elmo Burns, Jr. , was born on 31 July, 1900, in Hebron, Nebraska, the son of Coco Malowney and Elmo Burns Roper.

Education

After graduating from Hebron High School, he briefly attended the University of Minnesota and the University of Edinburgh.

Career

Roper opened a jewelry store in Creston, Iowa , in 1921. He became a clock salesman in 1928, and later said he had been able to make a good living during the Great Depression by polling his customers on their preferences in clock styles. He gave up selling in 1933 to begin market research in New York City, where he formed a partnership with Paul T. Cherington and Richardson Wood. Roper devoted himself to perfecting sampling techniques that utilized a small number of subjects carefully selected to form a representative cross section of the group surveyed. The firm was engaged by Henry R. Luce in 1935 to conduct surveys of public opinion for Fortune.

Roper parted company with Cherington and Wood in 1937 and established his own firm, which eventually became Roper Research Associates.

Roper had become prominent in 1936 when he predicted a landslide victory for Franklin D. Roosevelt.

Unlike the celebrated Literary Digest straw vote and the polls of his rivals, George Gallup and Archibald Crossley, which all predicted a defeat for Roosevelt, Roper's prediction came within 1 percent of Roosevelt's margin of victory.

In the elections of 1940 and 1944, Roper's were again the most accurate forecasts, coming within one-fifth to one-half of a percentage point of predicting Roosevelt's actual percentages of the popular vote. Along with other pollsters, Roper erred in predicting Thomas E. Dewey as the victor over President Harry S Truman in 1948 and in forecasting that Richard M. Nixon would defeat John F. Kennedy in 1960 by 1 percent of the popular vote. In the main, however, the sampling techniques developed by Roper Research Associates proved accurate in election predictions; they were widely adapted by other political pollsters, and became a mainstay of political campaign organizations and media analyses of voting trends. In addition to directing the Survey of Public Opinion for Fortune--the first nationwide polling of the public's thinking on economic, political, and social matters--for fifteen years, Roper conducted marketing research for other clients including the American Meat Institute, Illinois Power, Metropolitan Life Insurance, Philip Morris, RCA Victor, and the Standard Oil Company of New Jersey. His market surveys were designed to uncover consumers' buying habits and preferences, as well as their reactions to product design and advertising.

In the 1940 election, moreover, Roper, working for the Columbia Broadcasting System, inaugurated the practice of analyzing voting trends over the air; during the 1944 preelection period a large number of newspapers subscribed to Roper's semiweekly column, "What People Are Thinking, " syndicated by the New York Herald Tribune, for the latest surveys of public opinion regarding political candidates and issues.

During World War II, Roper briefly worked for the Office of Production Management and the Office of Facts and Figures before serving as a deputy director of the Office of Strategic Services from 1942 to 1945. In the 1942-1943 academic year, Roper was also an assistant professor of journalism at Columbia University. Throughout the war, he continued his newspaper column and his work as an editor at large of the Saturday Review, and analyzed public opinion in numerous magazine articles and radio programs. Following the war, the lean six-footer, almost always photographed with rimless glasses and a pipe in his mouth, publicly associated himself with some of the liberal and internationalist causes he believed in.

He assumed key positions in the Atlantic Union Committee, the Fund for the Republic, the National Planning Association, the Connecticut State Commission on Civil Rights, the Connecticut State Commission to Study the Problems of the Aging, and Freedom House and the Henry Street Settlement in New York City.

Roper retired from his market research firm in 1966.

Roper died in Norwalk, Connecticut.

Achievements

• The sampling techniques developed by Roper Research Associates proved accurate in election predictions; they were widely adapted by other political pollsters, and became a mainstay of political campaign organizations and media analyses of voting trends.

Works

More photos

• book

  • You And Your Leaders; Their Actions and Your Reactions, 1936-1956.
  • What people want to know about your company;: Why different publics are dissatisfied with corporate financial reports, and what to do about it ... survey made for Controllership Foundation
  • The high cost of discrimination;: The waste in manpower, morale and productivity costs American industry $30 billion a year

Views

Quotations: Once given the necessary facts, Roper thought, the public "is likely to steer just as wise and fair a course as that plotted by any of its leaders. "

To report the opinions of the people on public matters was vital because "the people have a sovereign right to be heard and to be heeded by their representatives. "

Membership

He assumed key positions in the Atlantic Union Committee, the Fund for the Republic, the National Planning Association, the Connecticut State Commission on Civil Rights, the Connecticut State Commission to Study the Problems of the Aging, and Freedom House and the Henry Street Settlement in New York City

Connections

In June 1922, Roper married Dorothy C. Shaw; they had two children.

Father:

Elmo Burns Roper

Mother:

Coco Malowney

Wife:

Dorothy

In June 1922, Roper married Dorothy C. Shaw; they had two children.

Business partner:

Paul T. Cherington

Business partner:

Richardson Wood