CBS News Election Coverage: November 4, 1952
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- Опубликовано: 16 дек 2015
- A portion of the network coverage of the 1952 elections, anchored by Walter Cronkite, and featuring CBS News pioneers like Edward R. Murrow, Charles Collingwood, and Eric Sevareid.
Posted for educational and historical purposes only. All material is under the copyright of their original holders. No copyright infringement is intended. 
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The choice was between two serious and thoughtful men, either of whom would be a fine president. We don't see that much anymore, probably because we have a less serious and thoughtful electorate.
Devin Devon I’m not entirely convinced it was the public tbh I think had both parties wanted to they could just as easily have used race fear then as now. I think U.S. leaders were more concerned with stability in those days due to the horrible years prior. Even then there were toxic elements in both parties but aswell the media landscape was far more deferential and less focused on polemics and superficial personality driven politics and didn’t provide these wings of each party with ammunition.
Nowadays both parties despise eachother
I couldn’t agree more two men who cared deeply about this county now we have a clown.
Ya back then it wasn’t lesser of two evil instead more lesser to two goods
Adlai would have continued a bloated corrupt regime, other Republicans would have gutted important programs rather than fixing them. America was blessed to have Eisenhower as president.
RUclips is the closest we have to a Time Traveling machine
My father, who fought in WWII, explained the 1952 election this way. This election occurred only eight years after D-Day. A whole generation of American men who had fought in the war were still young and now raising families. So many of them had entrusted their lives to the leadership of General Eisenhower. Simply voting for him for President of the United States was easy. The logical thing to do.
Interesting...that makes a ton of sense actually. When it comes to chosing somebody trusted, tested, tried and true who you know could lead the country through any major ordeal...it was Eisenhower
He'd already done it. The results were there. Why take a chance (and nothing against Stevenson) on some unknown...you know that you could pute the fate of the country in Ike's hands and sleep soundly at night.
Your comment makes complete sense, but don't forget that the Korean War was launched in 1950 and lasted till 1953.
President Truman’s firing of General Douglas MacArthur, and his refusal to fire his attorney general after a corruption scandal surfaced, cost President Truman’s chance of being re-elected.
And considering that the Dems had had the White House for twenty years up to that point, the people simply wanted to give the other side a chance because they felt the Democrats had become complacent. Same thing happened forty years later when Clinton got in, in my view.
@@JohnHillRSNStudios definitely helped him as well
An entire life time ago. And pretty much the beginning of television.
Was this the first election covered on TV? If it wasn't than 1948 had to be.
it was 1948. Excerpts from NBC coverage are available in RUclips.
@@bobblopes1 Actually, the first TV coverage of a Presidential Election Night was in 1940, when NBC broadcast coverage on what was then W2XBS in New York. NBC again televised Election Night in 1944 (the 1940 and 1944 Election Nights may have been also fed to Schenectady and Philadelphia, since those three cities were connected for network TV broadcasting that far back).
The 1948 election was the first Presidential contest to be seen on a "widespread" television network. Actually, there were two sets of network lines carrying coverage, one up and down the East Coast from Boston to Richmond; the other one from Buffalo to Chicago, branching from Chicago to Milwaukee and St. Louis. It wasn't until January of 1949 that the two "networks" were joined together. By the Fall of 1951, the network lines reached to California, making 1952 was the first Presidential Election Night broadcast on a truly national basis.
Not _quite_ the beginning of television, but it was certainly around the time television officially took off.
LOL The guy at 2:25 was trying to assure people that this "computer" was not some kind of joke. Amazing!
That was Charles Collingswood
And now we have Ai... Would have blown his mind
As a young child, I recall hearing the election news on the radio. They kept talking about votes, but I thought they said "boats". I pictured the two men in canoes rowing down the river. LOL.
I was -9 years old when this happened. I barely remember it.
I was -39
-48
-50...
-50
The election was held the day before I became -54.
At 8:06, they discuss the Connecticut Senate race, in which the progenitor of the Bush dynasty-and George H.W. Bush's father-Prescott Bush, whose picture can be seen here, won his first term in the Senate.
This is a very historic piece of video here. :D It's amazing how far we've come in the quality of election coverage in 60 years. Also a nice window of the times as well.
UNIVAC I used 5,200 vacuum tubes,[11] weighed 29,000 pounds (13 metric tons), consumed 125 kW, and could perform about 1,905 operations per second running on a 2.25 MHz clock. The Central Complex alone (i.e. the processor and memory unit) was 4.3 m by 2.4 m by 2.6 m high. The complete system occupied more than 35.5 m² (382 ft²) of floor space.
And The dang thing worked! CBS didn't believe it and "fudged" the numbers, But the UNIVAC pretty accurately predicted the out come!
@@WAQWBrentwood CBS was surely taken off guard by UNIVAC's accuracy, given was the earliest years of computing. There would also be the manner of the viewers tuning out if they though the contest was all over early on.
UNIVAC's prediction was 438-93; compare this to the actual result of 442-89.
A great General, a great President-Ike! 🇺🇸
Lowell Thomas noted at the 4:30 point of this clip that TV election coverage was coming into its own.
Good reason: It was the first time that network election coverage (including remotes from the two major party candidate headquarters) had been seen coast-to-coast.
In 1948, there were two sets of network landlines: One up-and-down the East Coast from Boston to Richmond, the other from Buffalo to Chicago, branching off to Detroit (from Toledo), St. Louis, and Minneapolis/St. Paul (both branching off from Chicago).
In 1948, the networks each originated two separate election-night broadcasts: One from New York for the East Coast; the other from Chicago (ABC and CBS) or Cleveland (NBC) for the Midwest.
East Coast viewers in 1948 saw Dewey's concession speech; Midwest viewers could only hear it; and viewers in neither region could see President Truman's acceptance speech since Independence, Missouri (near Kansas City) wasn't yet connected to TV network lines. TV viewers could only hear Mr. Truman's 1948 acceptance speech.
altfactor Do you know or can see if Cincinnati or Indianapolis were hooked to lines then? Did we see this live or hear it ?
Indianapolis didn't get TV until 1949, so viewers there didn't get to see TV coverage of the 1948 elections. Cincinnati wasn't connected to TV network lines in 1948, so whatever stations were there at the time had to do their own coverage.
Not long after (in-time for the 1950 midterms), both cities were connected to the rapidly-growing web of TV network lines.
Viewers in both cities thus got to see live network coverage of the 1952 election night.
Cronkite actually misspoke at the opening, when he said, it was the election for the 35th President of the United States.
We were actually electing the 34th....JFK was our 35th President.
Did Mitch McConnell Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi run in any race this year ??? It seems they have been in Congress forever .....
McConnell was 10 years old, Schumer was 1 year old (almost 2), and Pelosi was 12 years old.
Nancy Pelosi was first elected as congresswoman from California in 1987
Mitch McConnell was elected in 1984 as senator from Kentucky
Chuck Schumer was in 1981 as a congressman from New York.
At that time, Pelosi's father was the mayor of Baltimore. A year and a half after this broadcast, Mayor Thomas D'Alesandro would bring the St. Louis Browns baseball team to Baltimore, where they renamed the franchise the Baltimore Orioles.
Some joked that Orrin Hatch (until he retired) and Patrick Leahey were probably in the Senate when Washington took his oath office. It's absurd how long some of those people have been there.
@@ascending8220 You all missed the joke here
Apparently to some people it’s “sad” that I don’t watch ANY current day news and have zero idea of what’s going on out there. I was born in 1984 but I always had a connection to the 1950’s whereas strangely enough, my mom relates best to the 80’s. I love these old broadcasts, they are truly a gem!
OMG bro me too!!! I can stay up all night watching these vintages broadcasts! My favorite are the commercials lol
This is a great find!! I have been wanting to find some 1950s election night footage.
Interesting to watch this. I saw the 1980 CBS Election Night coverage earlier, and Cronkite specifically mentions this night, as the first in which they used a computer to predict the results. It's interesting how much changed between 1952 and 1980 alone, though both years were Republican landslides.
My grandma was 7 years old during this wow
I like how they call “The Univax” an electronic brain, instead of a Computer lol
The majority of the electoral votes at this time was 266, 4 short of the magic 270 today, since Alaska, Hawaii, and DC did not yet have electoral votes. The bit about the UNIVAC as an "electronic brain" is interesting, explaining what a computer was to a general public who had never heard the word before.
Nice to see theses excerpts of the returns as I was a 5 year old as a USAF dependent in the UK and totally ignorant of the event back then. I watched the 1956 (CBS) returns on TV (in the SF Bay Area) - which were over rather quickly vs 1952.
I grew up in the 1950s and remember how peaceful everything was. I was too young to understand what a president was and don't remember this election. In 1956 I do remember Eisenhower defeating Adlai Stephenson again to be reelected president. I did watch it on television.
Though the Korean war wasn't so peaceful.
This is a great find. I've watch this atleast 50 times. A huge blast from the past.
8:01 George H.W Bush’s father and George Bush Junior’s grandfather.
I noticed.
I've been looking for this coverage a very long time, finally someone has it! Thank You!
I wish this clip included those Betty Furness commercials for Westinghouse, whose refrigerators were the "Winning Ticket, whether you support Eisenhower or Stevenson".
A portion of the CBS 1956 coverage exists at the Paley Center. It is from late in the broadcast, after they had called Ike's reelection. An interesting segment though, because the election had to compete with news from Hungary and the Suez Crisis
at the time i was 6...we had no tv..my brother glued me to the floor...ah..the good ole daze
Eisenhower vs Stevenson - candidates don't get much better than this!
Ike has been high as fifth greatest President in at least one rating The greatest is sometimes FDR, but more likely Lincoln and Washington.
I am here after presidential debate 2020
This was an election of a great president of the U.S.A.
Back when computers were know as “electronic brain” 🤖
Awesome video! Thanks for sharing!
Have this on in the background as I work - a classic post
Governor Stevenson was a good man.
I was 9 years old at that time, have some memory of events (our first TV was a VERY big deal!). Have two very distinct memory of the election: First, my father saying America never elected the most qualified man. Second, our parents tried to explain Electoral Collège to us, saying it would be changed "soon",
Walter made an error--election was for the 34th President, not the 35th. 35th was Kennedy.
Great! Wish you had more 1952 Cronkite Coverage.
I don't know if the full CBS News 1952 election night telecast still exists. These excerpts may be all that's left.
Amazing.
22:04 the campaign manager for Adaili Stevenson was McClain Stevenson
Hello Larry!
So, what was Stevenson's platform?
What would the 50s have been like if he'd won?
heh - its amusing how they refer to the Univac computer like it was a person....
+hellomcflyy I wonder how much ROM there was on that Univac?
+Joe Postove I wonder how much RAM was in Univac? What was the CPU speed? :p
-.00001 gigs
it took up a whole room
The machine had a RAM of 1000 Words at 12 Characters length (at that time data was still stored as characters, not as bits).
But you had already at that time tape drives, stamp cards etc. so the internal RAM was only needed for the calculation program itself. They feeded the machine with the prerecorded data and started the program.
Lowell Thomas’ reporting was portrayed in “Lawrence of Arabia” by Arthur Kennedy.
19:00 woah that's a funny lookin' map.
Fascinating and funny to see people crossing right in front of Cronkite while he's talking to the camera. How many anchors or news directors would tolerate that today?
Eric Sevaried and Charles Collingwood are "Murrow's boys" I see Douglas Edwards too.
I Like Ike!
Walter is just 36 yrs old here but he looks 55.
doubanjiang For some odd reason he always looked older than he really was. Must have been the stress of being a network anchorman.
Amazes me how different the technology was back then. Anyone know what those things that they were using are?
Is that the flux capacitor at 3:30?
No wonder so many people of that era seemed to wear glasses, squinting at this picture can't be good for your eyes.
IM on an iUNIVAC i love this electic brain
love how they refused to believe the computer actually worked
I like Ike.
I was surprised to see Lowell Thomas in this Presidential Election coverage footage. Perhaps CBS was giving him a test performance, to see how television audiences would react to him? Remember, Douglas Edwards was basically learning on the job working as a news anchor for the CBS evening news broadcasts, and Walter Cronkite was just hired a year earlier, to do work on the network’s morning news broadcasts. Edward R. Murrow was the best news journalist at CBS News, but did not have enough political clout within the company to get the news anchor job for himself. CBS was the “Number Two” network to NBC’s news broadcast in the early-1950s, and perhaps was considering replacing Douglas Edwards with someone else. Either the network owner, William Paley, did not like Thomas’ performance on this night, or Thomas wanted more money than Paley was willing to pay him to take the news anchor job at CBS.
CBS decided to stay with Douglas Edwards as their news anchor. It eventually paid off, as CBS’ newscast overtook NBC in the TV ratings. Edwards remained as news anchor until 1962, when NBC’s newscast overtook CBS in the TV ratings, and was replaced by Walter Cronkite.
Unfortunately, no footage exists of NBC's 1956 election night coverage according to their e-book; as for CBS's? I think some portions are kept, but not the entire broadcast.
ABC’s 1964 election is the earliest in their archives; World News Now showed a clip of it in 1995 as part of Jules Bergman Week (ten years after his death).
Univac for President!
"Electronic machine"? Wow!
Walter Cronkite at his Finest.
Senator Prescott Bush from CT was the patriarch of the Bush family.
And Don Hollenbeck committed suicide two years alter, under fire from pro-McCarthy journalists.
R I P president Eisenhower.
We liked IKE!
When there were 48 states.
I want a Univac!!Daddy, can we get one, please!!!
Can you imagine the amount of electricity that thing would require?
1952 was not a good year politically for the Taft Family. Robert Taft lost the Republican nomination to General Eisenhower and Charles Taft lost the Ohio Governorship to Frank Lausche.
and they had a big map (which NBC would perfect in the 70s)
ah the good old days, if only we could go back...
+Bossman: yeah Jim Crow and segregation. Those sure were the good ol days.
yes, they were. less crime. less friction....people kept their doors unlocked at night.....people didnt have alarm systems at home....or panic buttons on their key chains....or alarms on their cars....
@@doubanjiang When people say that, they don't want to bring back Jim Crow and segregation. They want to bring back the things graciemaemarie11jones mentioned, not to mention people didn't get offended over things like cultural appropriation and think there were somehow more than 2 genders.
70 Years Ago.
The smartphone of 2023 is thousands of times more powerful than that Univac of 1952, and taking up 1/10,000 of the space. As a historical perspective, the computers that put a man on the moon in 1969 were the functional equivalent of the 80386 processors running MS-DOS in 1985.
Why are there only 36 senatorial races (or maybe less) on the board?
One-third of the Senate is at stake in any election year (as opposed to every House seat). With 48 states, there should have been 32 Senate races.
Cronkite always looked old .
Who was the woman sitting next to Walter Cronkite? Anyone know. She seemed like the only one in the studio that night
0:16 35th President?
Walter never looked young would only have been about 35 here. Superb journalist though
was this recorded on kinescope?
Right at the beginning, did Cronkite say they were picking the 35th President? I am quite sure Kennedy was 35th, in which case would this not have been the 34th?
Gary Taylor They weren't sure how to count Grover Cleveland
William Stone Brilliant observation.
I caught that too, Eisenhower was 34 and Kennedy 35
20:48: "Next year we'll believe it." What happened in 1953?
They were picking the 34 president, not the 35th.
Thank you for this, I had no clue this even existed in this form. I read a extremly long college based report about election nights with a focus on this one once. Good read for us nerds.
Anyways, CBS and NBC were competing with the computer elements that year. In 1948 almost everyone epically failed with Truman's upset. Both went with computers in '52 for scientific accuracy and to top the other. CBS had the UNIVAC, while NBC had a primitive RCA based computer which was a joke in hindsight but advanced for it's time. Both predicted Eisenhower landslides despite polls saying a rout for Stevenson. CBS actually tried to influence the machine but Eisenhower still did well like originally forecasted, 100 to 1, and CBS had to admit it was right. CBS won the ratings that night and NBC was embarrassed.
In 1956 NBC won thanks to a better computer and the innovation of local breaks where the local stations reported returns and it started the competition that still continues.
+efan2011 I thought that as far back as 1q948, the networks gave local stations a few minutes each hour to update viewers on local races.
As for 1956, NBC's win wasn't as much due to local updates or a better computer, but to two anchormen named Chet Huntley and David Brinkley.
+altfactor Nope. There's a really long masters/doctorate level thesis wrriten by a professor at one of the US University's I read years ago (it was over 300 pages long,) and it was about the changes of election nights from 1924-56 especially 52. 1948 went continuous until it was done but they had side anchors to take over for breaks for the main anchors. 52 they did that again but computers became a thing that year.
In 1956 Huntley and Brinkley came around but they were rather young then. They hadn't put their foothold down yet but they started innovating the process that year.
According to that thesis It was there idea for the local breaks because they felt everyone deserved a break. This was smart because it allowed the local stations to do something and it made viewers happy because they had a chance to see what was going on in their local places without having to huddle in a Newspaper office or somewhere else. Like 20 years later when NBC innovated the national map, CBS was slow to figuring it out and lost. In 1960 they did it and the results were even.
11:40 oof
CNN and NBC should have used a Univac in 2016. It would have been a lot more accurate than Rachel Madcow et al.
Not so sure. The electoral vote and the popular vote were in sync on this broadcast, unlike 2016.
Also, I do remember that most conservative hosts also predicted a Trump defeat as did the Fox network's own polling data. Let's not view the election predictions made in 2016 through partisan, selective memory. To only mention CNN and NBC was just that.
They might have been in sync, but it IS the Electoral vote that counts. If it was about the popular vote Trump would have run a different campaign.
And we shall not forget, when your models don't fit anymore, because the people vote other than expected, even a univac could only say, that he will not be able to account.
Exactly, They were foolishly basing their predictions on the fact that more people voted for Clinton than Trump.
Yeah, but what sort of campaign would Putin have run?
Just like HAL in 2001: A Space Odyssey! @11:43
Univac at 12:20 was so off lol
Read somewhere that Eisenhower was initially reluctant to Run for POTUS. Prescott Bush, was he running for the Senate? , Anyway, think both Eisenhower and Stevenson were good decent and intelligent men. Unlike some of the fools we have in politics today. Eisenhower apparently had several heart attacks over the years. Think when he died in 1969, it was his seventh heart attack, considering the types of situations he must have faced in Battle. He was one tough Hombre!
16:14 Eisenhower wins
13:04
This is a fun site to watch the television ads for candidates over the years: www.livingroomcandidate.org/commercials/1952
The Stevenson song is hilarious.
They were pretty off on their electoral vote counts. Eisenhower won the election with 442 electoral votes to 89 for Stevenson. 39 States for Eisenhower to 9 States for Stevenson.
266 electoral votes needed to win. Before Alaska and Hawaii are added to the union. Also, Cronkite, Murrow and some of the other newsman sure do have a lot of "product" in their hair.
Most likely Brylcreem.
1950s Kornacki
I like ike and so do you
Obviously the Democrats don't feel the same way that Stevenson did in 1952.
Then you should check out election night 1948. That was really primitive.
8:08 Prescott Bush was George HW Bush’s father
In 1952 they only needed 266 electoral votes to be elected. My how times have changed.
All the way from 266 to… 270. (Or 269 depending on how the House looks.)
Gee, I sure wonder who'll win, Anyways, what do you guys think about John Kennedy? He's running for senate, but I could definitely see him running for president,
Notice they can't bring themselves to say "computer".
Walter slightly goofed, only if Stevenson had won would he have been the 35th President.
Steve Thomas Stevenson would have been the 35th president if he had defeated Ike in 1956. In 1952, both men were seeking the presidency. Truman was the incumbent, and was the 33rd U.S. President.
The year I was born and became a Republican!
0:17 34th potus
Donald Trump & Marjorie Taylor Greene would like to sue the univac.