Real Lace by Stephen; Birmingham Page A

in New York as elsewhere are crushed under the burden of their churches and schools, but there is in this town one Catholic who has never said ‘No’ to anybody.… I mean Mr. Robert Cuddihy. His Literary Digest has an extraordinary influence in the United States.”
    And so indeed it did. After the Digest’s correct forecast of the outcome of the 1932 Presidential election, the editors of the Kansas City Journal-Post trumpeted, “Not even Franklin D. Roosevelt can feel more triumphant than the editors of the Literary Digest.” And the Digest editors themselves, in a rare moment of pride and self-congratulation, added a paean of their own to their magazine, saying, “When better polls are built, the Digest will build them!”
    In the early spring of 1936, the Robert J. Cuddihys celebrated their fiftieth wedding anniversary with a special Nuptial Mass in the Lady Chapel of St. Patrick’s Cathedral, which was then at 460 Madison Avenue. There was a big family party afterward, with relatives gathered from all corners of America. R. J. Cuddihy was seventy-three years old, and the Great Depression had affected his great fortune, and his great magazine, very little. The three Cuddihy sons, Paul, Lester, and Arthur, were now all connected with the Digest , and had made brilliant marriages to prominent (and rich) Irish Catholic women—Lester Cuddihy to Grandpa Thomas Murray’s daughter Julia. (At the time of the courtship, when Grandpa Murray was told that the Cuddihys were big in publishing, the great inventor said, puzzled, “Publishing? What is publishing exactly?”) The Cuddihys’ four daughters had also made good Catholic marriages—Mabel to T. Burt McGuire, Helen to William J. Ryan, Alice to Thomas Guerin, and Emma to Kenrick Gillespie. Grandpa Cuddihy’s money had built the elegant apartment house at 1088 Park Avenue, and his son Lester had had the idea of adding the large and fountain-filled central garden-courtyard, which makes 1088 Park one of the singularly pleasant addresses in New York today. (At first, it looked as though the building would be a financial failure, and so it became inhabited largely by other Cuddihys, McGuires, and Gillespies.) There were summers in Water Mill and cruises on Grandpa Cuddihy’s yacht, the Polly , and trips back to boarding school on the boat for the grandsons, when Father Diman himself, head of PortsmouthPriory, would come out and stand on the bluff to greet and bless the boys as the Cuddihy yacht sailed into Portsmouth Harbor. Meanwhile, the Literary Digest’s pollsters were busily at work on the upcoming November election, a contest between Alfred Landon and Roosevelt for a second term. And presently the results of the poll were out: It would be a landslide victory for Landon, with Landon carrying all the big states—New York, California, Ohio, Illinois, New Jersey, and so on. The result of twenty million Digest ballots showed that Landon would win four votes out of every seven.
    What went wrong? Was it the sin of pride again? Because when the results were in, Landon had carried exactly two states, Maine and Vermont. It was an overwhelming victory for Roosevelt. Time magazine printed a picture of Grandpa Cuddihy with the caption, “Is Our Face Red!” And in its wisecracking style, Time noted that “The Digest mispredicted a Landonslide.” A solemn American political maxim used to be “As Maine goes, so goes the nation.” The joke became “As Maine goes, so goes Vermont.”
    Prior to 1936 the Digest had sent out the ballots for its polls to telephone subscribers, automobile registration owners, and to its own subscription list. In the 1936 poll, however, the telephone lists were largely abandoned, since it was felt that telephone books went quickly out of date. Perhaps that was the reason for the gigantic error. But some Digest people felt that there were other, more subtle,