ABSTRACT
In the summer of 1941, Harry H. Field (1897-1946) established the National Opinion Research Center (NORC) at the University of Denver. Field was an experienced founder. He had been Gallup's envoy abroad to help establish the first affiliate, the British Institute of Public Opinion, as well as the French Gallup Poll. After six years in the Gallup enterprises, Field set off in 1939 to establish and direct his own polling organization, the People's Research Corporation (PRC).l
Detailed information about PRC is hard to come by, but a few features are clear from NORC records. It had a national interviewing staff; it was active during the 1940 presidential campaign; and from a final preelection national sample of 2,500 respondents, it forecast a Roosevelt victory within 2.3 percent of the returns." It did not make this forecast public, however, because Field had agreed not to compete with his former employer, who was, after all, selling election forecasts in his syndicated column to newspapers." From these experiences, Field went on to the design of NORC.
