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In the 1950s the Special Committee to Investigate Tax-Exempt Foundations and Comparable Organizations, informally referred to as the Reece Committee because Brazilla Carroll Reece was its chairman, delved into the activities of the Ford Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Carnegie Corporation, and other foundations because these organizations were allegedly financing and sponsoring socialist and communist subversion. The Reece Committee pulled no punches when it concluded that,

[T]he subversive projects have been offered with spurious claims to ‘science.’ With this false label they have been awarded a privileged status. They have been offered as ‘scientific’ and, therefore, beyond rebuttal. The impact of these subversive works has been intensified manifold by the sponsorship of foundations.

(See René A. Wormser’s Foundations: Their Power and Influence for reference.)

One particular part of the Reece Committee’s investigation is this essay’s focus, and that is the part pertaining to presidential election polling. The latest presidential election raised all sorts of issues pertaining to the believability of polls with President Trump, for example, lashed out at Ann Selzer because she released a “totally fake poll.” For Trump, this fake Iowa poll was possible election fraud. Selzer’s poll gave Kamala Harris a three-point lead over Donald Trump. As another example, Rasmussen Reports posted on X about the difference between internal polling results and publicly available polling results. The internal polling never had Kamala Harris ahead of Donald Trump, but the publicly available polling usually showed the opposite.

In his testimony to the Reece Committee, Dr. A. H. Hobbs of the University of Pennsylvania made an original comment about the danger of overreliance on presidential election polling results. Hobbs mentioned Mr. Stuart Chase, because Chase was not only a highly influential writer but he also was supported by some major foundations, including the Social Science Research Council and the Carnegie Corporation of New York. Hobbs warned about substituting poll results for actual election results:

The point I am trying to make, sir, is that with the prestige of science behind a thing like polling, you could get to the point where they would be substituted for elections and things like that. Mr. Chase cites examples of that tendency in a highly approving fashion. This was written just prior to the election results of 1948. Just suppose for a minute that we had accepted this so-called science and abandoned the election of 1948 and taken the word of the pollsters.

The 1948 election was a monumental train wreck for the polling industry. According to Dominic Lusinchi, “All three ‘scientific’ pollsters (Crossley, Gallup and Roper) wrongly predicted incumbent President Harry Truman’s defeat in the 1948 presidential election, and thus faced a potentially serious legitimacy crisis.” If the United States had run the 1948 election using the system mentioned by Hobbs in his Reece Committee testimony, the United States would have picked Thomas Dewey as president, not Harry Truman. Similarly, if the state of Iowa had run the 2024 election using the system mentioned by Hobbs, the state of Iowa would have picked Kamala Harris as president, not Donald Trump, because of Ann Selzer’s “totally fake poll.”

Hobbs also engaged in an exchange with Mr. Hays, a member of the Reece Committee from Ohio, about the teaching of empirical methods to political science students at universities. Hays said, “I have a minor in political science from Ohio State.” Hobbs responded to him by saying that, 

[I]f, in your training, your teachers had been trained only in this empirical method, then your training in political science would have been predominantly, perhaps solely, studies of how to make opinion polls and the techniques of statistical computation and examination of the results and things along those empirical lines.

The Reece Committee’s investigation was full of criticisms directed at empirical methods of research in the social sciences. (The Committee “spent little time in investigating the activities of foundations in the natural sciences”). Professor Pitirim A. Sorokin of Harvard ridiculed “the wide use of the poll-taking method of operation, calling it unscientific, vague, indeterminate and, more often than not, ‘hearsay’ in its product.” Professor Carle C. Zimmerman of Harvard told the Committee in a letter that “[t]he tax-exempt foundations in the United States have unfairly and undesirably emphasized empirical research to such an extent that the whole meaning of social science research has come to be ridden with sham and dubious practices.” But the most scandalous criticism of empirical methods in the social sciences came from Hobbs when he said that the goal of empirical research is for society “to hand over government to these social scientists.”

Hobbs based his claim on the listing of purposes found in the 1928–1929 annual report of the Social Science Research Council. One of these purposes was that “a sounder empirical method of research had to be achieved in political science, if it were to assist in the development of a scientific political control.” René Wormser, the general counsel to the Reece Committee, commented on what he called the “guiding spirit in social science research”:

Political control is thus to be left in the hands of the ‘élite,’ the ‘social engineers.’ What the people want is not necessarily good for them; they are not competent to decide. The Führers must decide it for them, so that we can have a scientifically based and intelligent society.

The Reece Committee heard additional testimony pertaining to “social engineers.” In a section labeled “Preparation for World Citizenship,” the Committee heard that people must learn to always defer to the experts:

It will take social science and social engineering to solve the problems of human relations. Our people must learn to respect the need for special knowledge and technical training in this field as they have come to defer to the expert in physics, chemistry, medicine, and other sciences.

Thinking about all of this, I will conclude this essay with a few closing remarks. The experts, whom the Reece Committee investigated, wanted to be a “savior” class. In the 1950s, they wanted to save homosexuals, sexually promiscuous women, and even child molesters from all criticisms. They were supremely confident that they were right. They had all the facts, so they did not feel the need to ask for permission from others. They simply wanted to impose their will on everyone else. Therefore, the Reece Committee exposed the hubris of the “savior” or expert class that still plagues us today.

Public domain.

Image: Public domain.