George Gallup, Jr., was born in
Jefferson, Iowa, the son of Nettie Quella (Davenport) and George Henry Gallup, a dairy farmer. As a teen, "Ted" would deliver milk and used his earnings to start a newspaper at his high school. He attended the
University of Iowa, earning his B.A. in 1923, his M.A. in 1925 and his Ph.D. in 1928. While there he was a member of the Iowa Beta chapter of the
Sigma Alpha Epsilon fraternity, and editor of
The Daily Iowan, the campus newspaper. He then moved first to
Des Moines, Iowa, where he served until 1931 as head of the Department of Journalism at
Drake University, then to
Evanston, Illinois, as a professor of journalism and advertising at
Northwestern University. He moved to
New York City in 1932 to join the advertising agency of
Young and Rubicam as director of research, serving as vice president there from 1937 to 1947. He was also a professor of journalism at
Columbia University, but relinquished the position shortly after he formed his own polling company, the American Institute of Public Opinion, in 1935. Gallup had first become involved in polling in 1932, when he did some for his mother-in-law,
Ola Babcock Miller, a longshot candidate for
Iowa Secretary of State. She was swept in with the Democratic landslide of that year, furthering Gallup's interest in politics. In 1936, his new organization achieved national recognition by correctly predicting that
Franklin Roosevelt would defeat
Alf Landon in the U.S. Presidential election, besting a poll based on over two million returned questionnaires conducted by the widely-respected
Literary Digest magazine. Gallup's poll was based on a more representative sample of the American electorate reflected in just 50,000 more selectively chosen respondents. Twelve years later, his organization suffered its moment of greatest ignominy by predicting that
Thomas Dewey would defeat
Harry S. Truman in the
1948 election by between 5% and 15%. Truman won the election by 4.5%, with Gallup attributing the error in his results to ending polling three weeks before Election Day, which failed to account for an unexpected Truman's comeback. In 1947, he launched the
Gallup International Association, an international association of polling organizations. With friends-cum-rivals
Elmo Roper and
Archibald Crossley, he was instrumental in the establishment of the Market Research Council, the National Council on Public Polls, and the
American Association for Public Opinion Research. In 1948, with
Claude E. Robinson, he founded
Gallup & Robinson, an
advertising research company. In 1958, Gallup grouped all of his polling operations under what became
The Gallup Organization. Gallup died in 1984 of a
heart attack at his summer home in
Tschingel ob Gunten, a village in the
Bernese Oberland of
Switzerland. He was buried in
Princeton Cemetery. His wife, the former Ophelia S. Miller, died in 1988, and their son, writer and pollster
George Gallup Jr., died in 2011. ==See also==