Susan Herbst’s A Troubled Birth is an engaging and original analysis of American public opinion in the 1930s. This is not a book about the content of public opinion. Rather, it examines how a particular vision of the American public came into being during this turbulent and pivotal decade. According to Herbst, many enduring ideas and practices central to scholarly and lay understandings of public opinion emerged in the 1930s and even helped create the public they purportedly described. Because these ideas and practices persist to this day, her analysis yields numerous insights about not only the past but also our own troubled time.

Herbst’s main argument is that during the 1930s there emerged a view of the American public as “fundamentally anti-intellectual, consumption-oriented, and politically passive” (p. 205). Moreover, the “frozen conflicts” encapsulated in this view created “an iron cage of assumptions, biases, and expectations that make us [i.e., Americans] passive, vulnerable to authoritarian behavior of leaders, anti-intellectual, and generally resistant to what should be our citizenly duties” (p. 2). These are important claims with clear relevance to contemporary American politics. As I discuss at the end of this review, Herbst does not present all the evidence needed to support them fully. However, the evidence she does present is creative and thought provoking, and as such valuable on its own terms, even if its implications are less coherent and sweeping than Herbst’s general thesis would suggest.

Herbst’s empirical approach is far more eclectic than the typical work of Americanist political science. Indeed, as she acknowledges, it has more in common with social and intellectual history. Herbst’s primary focus is how various actors—from presidents to pollsters to fair-planners—viewed and sought to shape the American public. To explore this topic, she draws (both directly and using secondary sources) on an extremely wide range of mainly textual evidence: speeches, letters, newspaper columns, fair guides, radio programs, self-help books, and more. She cites opinion surveys mainly for what they reveal about how pollsters viewed and treated the public rather than as measures of public opinion. In fact, one of Herbst’s stated goals is to broaden the range of evidence used to measure public opinion: “[A]ll public activity,” she argues, “is evidence of how people think and feel” (p. 23).

Though united by a common theme and historical period, the chapters of A Troubled Birth are fairly loosely connected and (except for the first and last) could probably be read in any order. Each considers a different set of actors and evidence base. Together, they highlight a similar but not entirely consistent set of themes.

Chapter 2 examines President Franklin Roosevelt, focusing on his “lay theory” of public opinion. Despite being the first president to use polls, Roosevelt did not regard them as uniquely or even particularly reliable indicators of public opinion. Rather, he put at least as much weight on letters from constituents, conversations sought out during trips to the countryside, and especially daily newspaper coverage. The core of Roosevelt’s theory of public opinion was that the American public would make wise decisions, as long as it was “properly argued to.” Roosevelt therefore made unprecedented efforts—cajoling reporters, leaking scoops, addressing the public by radio—to manipulate public opinion.

Radio, which drew Americans together on a scale and intimacy hitherto unknown, is one of several technological advances that figure prominently in Herbst’s account. Another, covered in chapter 3, is the “scientific” opinion survey. Originating in the mid-1930s with the work of pioneers like George Gallup and Elmo Roper, polling created an enduring paradigm for understanding public opinion that Herbst gives the compelling label “twisted populism.” On the one hand, by taking survey responses seriously, polling’s advocates (Gallup preeminent among them) dismissed critics such as journalist Walter Lippmann who were skeptical of the political knowledge and capacity of ordinary Americans. In this sense, early pollsters embraced the rhetorical valorization of the “common man” characteristic of the 1930s. On the other hand, polling turned populism on its head by treating people not as active political agents but as passive objects expected to respond obediently to the questions posed to them. Overall, Herbst argues, polling both presumed and helped construct an American public that, if not completely unified, was cohesive and that viewed the world through a common perspective (p. 217).

Chapter 4 turns in a very different direction with an examination of the decade’s world’s fairs, in particular New York’s in 1939–40. In Herbst’s view, the 1939 World’s Fair epitomized the sort of “infotainment” still prevalent today in settings ranging from Twitter to Trump rallies. Through her analysis of world’s fairs, Herbst detects a significant uptick in infotainment over the 1930s. For example, whereas the 1933 Chicago World’s Fair emphasized the wonders of “basic” science, the 1939 New York one gave much more attention to applications of science to consumer goods such as automobiles and television. In another section, Herbst interprets the 1939 fair’s “Democracity” exhibit as portraying a vision of a hardworking and interconnected American public living in centrally planned but oddly depoliticized communities—a perfect fit, she argues, for “the forthcoming, informed public that pollsters needed” (p. 141).

In chapter 5, Herbst analyzes the late-1930s radio program “Americans All—Immigrants All,” a pathbreaking collaboration between activists, New Deal officials, and the media company CBS promoting “interracial education.” As Herbst acknowledges, the multiculturalist message of “Americans All” was in many respects daringly advanced. By the 1930s, scholars such as Franz Boas had begun to undermine the intellectual respectability of scientific racism, but scientific or not, racist attitudes and practices remained extremely widespread. A government-sponsored program promoting ethnic and racial toleration thus represented an important challenge to the dominant culture—so challenging, in fact, that Congress quickly defunded it. Herbst, however, stresses the limitations and biases of “Americans All.” She notes that it glossed over the existence of prejudice (in one episode, an immigrant asserts that “there is no social, economic, or racial intolerance in the United States”) and welcomed immigrants’ economic contributions “but not their opinions or political participation” (pp. 172; 189–90). Herbst thus interprets this program, too, as portraying the American public as interdependent but depoliticized.

Chapter 6 is a brief “interlude” on 1930s self-help gurus such as Dale Carnegie. In it, Herbst again finds evidence of an individualistic, consumption-oriented, conflict-avoiding ethos consistent with her other chapters. The book then concludes with a chapter offering lessons for our own time, when issues such as demagoguery, authoritarianism, media manipulation, misinformation, and American identity have again come to the fore. Targeting educators, journalists, and corporate leaders, Herbst offers a hodgepodge of advice that, while reasonable, struck me as only loosely related to the rest of the book. This includes a renewed emphasis on civic education and digital literacy, more reliance on rigorous ethnographic techniques in political reporting, and greater pressure for (and less cynicism toward) corporate social responsibility.

Overall, I learned a great deal from A Troubled Birth and found it an enjoyable read. Herbst provides enough detail to make her argument concrete and engaging without getting bogged down in the particulars. Her observations are astute and her methodological admonitions well taken, even if they make someone like myself, whose research relies heavily on early public opinion polls, squirm a bit. I was less convinced by Herbst’s larger claim that the 1930s was a breakpoint in conceptions of the American public. Given the decade’s technological breakthroughs, such as polling and radio, this claim is certainly plausible, but demonstrating it more convincingly would require a research design with a longer time span. Nor is it clear how exactly these ideational changes had the real-world effects on the American public that Herbst claims they did. Even if Herbst does not fully connect these dots, however, A Troubled Birth still brims with insights, and I would recommend it to anyone interested in the deeper historical and intellectual context behind the study of public opinion.