George Gallup, a public opinion polling expert, was born in Jefferson, Iowa. In high school he founded the school newspaper with money he earned managing a small dairy farm. At the State University of Iowa, he was editor of the college newspaper and founder of Quill and Scroll, the national high school journalism honor society. After completing his B.A. in 1923, he became an instructor in the university's newly formed school of journalism, where he earned a master's degree in 1925 and a Ph.D. in 1928, in applied psychology.

Gallup headed the journalism department at Drake University from 1929 to 1931 and taught journalism and advertising at Northwestern University from 1931 to1932. In 1932, he applied his journalistic and research skills to the successful campaign of his mother-in-law, Ola Babcock Miller, for lieutenant governor of Iowa. Although Gallup did advise President Franklin D. Roosevelt on public reactions to policy proposals, this was the last political campaign in which he took a side. Also in 1932, he joined the first advertising agency research department to test product appeal and radio impact, established by Young & Rubicam in New York City. He was made vice president since 1937 and remained with Y & R at least part-time until 1947 while building up his polling business on the side<19>.

Gallup's dissertation titled "An Objective Method for Determining Reader-Interest in the Content of a Newspaper" was based on his experimentation with systematic methods of gathering data for client newspapers<19>. He outlined the methods he was developing in a 1930 Journalism Quarterly article, the first quantitative audience analysis published in that journalism.

In 1932, Gallup began to interviewer for D'Arcy Advertising, St. Louis, and later proposed research approaches in his University of Iowa Ph.D. thesis. At Northwestern University in 1932, his male-female copy appeal ratings (economy, efficiency, sex, vanity, quality) caught Ray Rubicam's attention and Gallup then joined Y&R<7>. The copy research department he created and ran for 16 years also trained research leaders. Gallup believed consumer attitude research had to precede creative work<36>.

One of the surveys he conducted for the Des Moines Register and Tribune showed that readers were interested in photography. In response, the publishers decided to put out a photo-heavy magazine called Look. In 1936, Gallup spent $250,000 on a new polling technique that he was sure would be an improvement upon the then reigning pollster, Literary Digest. Instead of polling a large number of people, Gallup polled only small representative samplings and forecast the results from that sampling. The big test of Gallup's system came during the 1936 presidential campaign. The Literary Digest polls had shown that Alf Landon would be the next president. Gallup's results showed that Franklin Roosevelt would win. Gallup's prediction proved to be correct, which is why the name Gallup, and not Literary Digest, is now synonymous with polling<37>.

In New York, Gallup set up a par-time polling business with a marketing specialist, Harlod Anderson. With a clientele of forty newspapers, the fledging firm, popularly known as the Gallup Poll, produced a regular column based on survey results. In his first attempt at nationwide sampling, Gallup earned recognition by correctly predicting that the Democrats would gain congressional seats in the 1934 elections. Although Gallup was not literally the inventor of opinion surveys, his career quickly became the best known, along with Elmo Roper's Fortune Quarterly Poll (1935).

Gallup established his survey research headquarters, the American Institute of Public Opinion (AIPO), in Princeton, New Jersey; the marketing office remained in New York City. The poll's reputation was firmly established in 1936 when Gallup correctly predicted the re-election of President Roosevelt, in contrast to the famous Literary Digest poll, which predicted a Republican victory<19>.

Gallup polls in newspapers were the most visible component of an interlocking set of applied social science enterprises. At Y&R, he continued to test-market advertisements and product names and to measure mass media audiences. He developed the "coincidental" method of measuring the radio audience by contacting people at home to ask what they were listening to at the moment. In 1939, Gallup founded the Audience Research Institute (ARI) for radio and motion picture clients. Throughout the 1940s, ARI studies affected film titles, promotion strategies, casting, and plotlines, leading writers and actors to complain about Gallup's predictable advice. To "do an ARI" became Hollywood slang for any sort of marketing testing<19>.

In 1948, he experienced the great crisis of his career: the presidential election in which Harry S. Truman defeated Thomas E.Dewey. Gallup and others had predicted that Dewey would win, and the popular question became, "Why were the polls wrong?" He attributed the error primarily to ending his polling three weeks before Election Day. The Gallup staff overhauled its sampling and survey questions and in future elections continued interviews through the final weekend of the campaign. Despite increased accuracy of the poll, however, Gallup's business suffered severely after the 1948 debacle<19>. Film studio contracts were not renewed. AIPO became dependent on earnings from other market research enterprises, which from 1958 on were run by The Gallup Organization, Inc.

Gallup's greatest professional strengths lay in his ability to formulate questions, his journalistic sense, and his capacity to speak broadly on behalf of the polling field. He advocated full reporting of survey methods and outlined his own sampling and interviewing techniques as part of each Gallup Poll release; there were no "secret formulas." In 1947, Gallup helped organize the American Association for Public Opinion Research (AAPOR), and served as its president in 1954-55. Through AAPOR and kindred professional organizations, he pressed for self-policing and reporting standards in the polling field<19>.
Contemporaries characterized him as "an ardent Jeffersonian" who was "deeply rooted in agrarian America" and had "boundless faith" in the "good sense" of the majority. He argued for electoral reforms that would counteract the influence of special interests against the majority opinion. He wrote after the Vietnam War that "the collective judgment of the people is amazingly sound, even in the complex area of foreign policy," echoing a view he had expressed on the eve of World War 2.

Gallup never fully retired from professional activity. He held the titles of chairman of the board and chief executive officer of the Gallup Organization when he died. At his death, Gallup Polls were being published in some fifty countries. In 1988, the year the Gallup Organization was sold to Selection Research, Inc., of Lincoln, Nebraska, the first annual Gallup Memorial Survey was conducted. It was an international study of people's knowledge, perceptions, and behaviors relating to acquired immune deficiency syndrome (AIDS)<19>.

George Gallup's gravestone Location