In the midst of an article about Roddy Doyle we discover an interesting chunk of history.
While the phone book may have helped Roddy Doyle, it did Thomas E Dewey no favours at all.
The twice-failed US presidential candidate was bedevilled by the telephone book, according to writer
Ammon Shea. And Mr Shea knows more than most about this subject as he is author of The Phone Book – the Curious History of the Book that Everyone Uses but No One Reads. (He has a slight obsession with books that everyone uses but no one reads, having previously written a book on reading the Oxford English Dictionary. All 21,730 pages of it.)
In The Phone Book, Shea recalls that when Thomas Dewey first ran for election in 1944, Life magazine interviewed him. The Republican governor of New York state needed all the help he could get as he was running against incumbent
Franklin D Roosevelt who was seeking his fourth term.
The Life feature was a favourable piece, accompanied by a photo spread in the governor’s mansion in Albany. However, the last photograph may have been his undoing. It showed him seated at a giant desk, with a caption explaining that he had to sit on two telephone books because the desk and chair were so large.
When it was published, The New Yorker speculated that the photo of “little
Tom Dewey on two telephone books” probably put an end to his chances for the presidency. And indeed, he did not win the race.
Shea writes that Dewey was again betrayed by the telephone book, four years later. He was up against
Harry Truman this time and throughout the campaign the polls and political analysts had consistently put him ahead of Truman. On election night, the
Chicago Daily Tribune editorial team took a huge chance when they put the early edition to bed with the caption “
Dewey Defeats Truman”. But he didn’t, and Truman secured 303 electoral college votes to Dewey’s 189.
According to Shea, while there were many reasons why everyone got the results wrong, one of them was due to an over-reliance on the phone book.
Pollsters called random numbers plucked from telephone books across the country, in what they thought was a representative sample.
But this was 1948 and telephones were mostly the preserve of the wealthy, so the results were skewed. Dewey was lulled into a false sense of security from early in the campaign and once again, the treacherous telephone book had an invisible hand in his undoing.
https://www.irishtimes.com/opinion/i-m-in-the-book-alison-healy-on-the-phone-book-1.4508934