UNIVAC and the 1952 Presidential Election and Chester E. Holifield: Difference between pages

Revision as of 21:20, 6 January 2015

Biography

Former Representative Chester (Chet) Holifield was one of the few members of Congress to protest the internment of Japanese-Americans in World War II and a policy maker on atomic energy.

Mr. Holifield, a Democrat, was first elected to the House in 1942 and went on to serve 15 more terms. He represented a district in Los Angeles County, and his time in office, which came under six Presidents, was longer than that of any other California member of Congress. He retired in 1973.

He was the chairman of the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy several times and served on the House Committee on Government Operations and the House Subcommittee on Legislation and Military Operations.

Mr. Holifield was one of the few to protest plans by Attorney General Earl Warren of California and others to force 110,000 Japanese-Americans on the West Coast into camps during World War II. He voted against the Emergency Detention Act and then voted for its repeal in 1950, Ms. Feldmann said.

He was an outspoken opponent of the House Committee on Un-American Activities, voting in 1945 against giving it permanent status and speaking out on behalf of people in the motion picture industry in Hollywood who were attacked by the committee in 1947.

His civil rights concerns translated later into a bill he wrote that established the Cabinet Committee on Opportunities for Spanish Speaking People within the Office of the President.

Mr. Holifield specialized in atomic energy matters and was influential in legislation enabling development of military and peacetime nuclear programs.

He led a successful effort to stop plans to put the military in sole control of atomic energy, and in 1946, he persuaded Congress to pass legislation creating the civilian Atomic Energy Commission.

He was chairman of the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy, a member of the President's Special Evaluation Commission on Atomic Bomb Tests at Bikini Atoll and a Congressional adviser to the United States delegations to the International Conferences on the Peaceful Uses of Atomic Energy in Geneva from 1955 to 1972.

He also managed the bill creating the Department of Housing and Urban Development and wrote the bill creating the Department of Transportation.

Born Dec. 3, 1903, in Mayfield, Ky., Mr. Holifield came to California and started a dry-cleaning business in Montebello. He later expanded it to a men's clothing store.

Mr. Holifield died of pneumonia in 1995 at the age of 91 on Balboa Island at Newport Beach in California.

His wife, Vernice, died in 1991 after 68 years of marriage. In addition to Mrs. Feldmann, of Potomac, Md., he is survived by another daughter, Lois Mulholland of Redlands; a sister, Maxine Dungey of Medford, Ore.; a brother, Robert, of Soldatna, Alaska; 15 grandchildren, and 16 great-grandchildren.

Larson Collection Interview

{{#widget:YouTube16x9|id=EVzA4J69VPs</youtube>

Tape 1

{{#widget:YouTube16x9|id=BYh48LAro7c</youtube>

Tape 2

@@ Line 1: / Line 1: @@
-== UNIVAC and the 1952 Presidential Election ==
+== Biography ==
-The story has been told and retold for decades: how CBS Television News used a [[UNIVAC]] computer to predict the 1952 U.S. Presidential election returns and — when the computer accurately predicted the Eisenhower landslide at around 8:30 in the election night broadcast — the prediction was doubted, and only hours later did CBS reveal that the prediction had been accurate. It has become a classic cautionary tale of the dangers of allowing human preconception to interfere with logic and evaluation of facts.
+Former Representative Chester (Chet) Holifield was one of the few members of Congress to protest the internment of Japanese-Americans in World War II and a policy maker on atomic energy.
-There is more to the story. The exact timeline of when UNIVAC's initial prediction was made is not certain, but what is important is that UNIVAC's correct prediction of a landslide victory was ostensibly ignored until much later in the broadcast because of journalistic prudence and lack of confidence in the accuracy of the results.
+Mr. Holifield, a Democrat, was first elected to the House in 1942 and went on to serve 15 more terms. He represented a district in Los Angeles County, and his time in office, which came under six Presidents, was longer than that of any other California member of Congress. He retired in 1973.
-Dr. Ira Chinoy, whose doctoral thesis examines the use of computers in broadcast journalism, estimates that the celebrated initial prediction of the Eisenhower landslide was made closer to 9:15.  At 8:30, only slightly more than one million votes had been tallied; it took until at least 9:15 pm for three million votes to be transmitted from CBS to the Remington Rand factory in Philadelphia. CBS was receiving vote tallies from the wire services and teletyping them to Remington Rand’s factory in Philadelphia. Additional time was needed to input the data and to run the programs.
+He was the chairman of the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy several times and served on the House Committee on Government Operations and the House Subcommittee on Legislation and Military Operations.
-The 8:30 CBS segment merely gave the television audience a visual tour and introduction to UNIVAC; the second UNIVAC segment of the evening at 9:30 asked for a prediction, but the machine was not yet ready. By that point in the television coverage, the human commentators were already commenting on the surprising Eisenhower strength in the early returns.  On the basis of pre-election polls, the race between Eisenhower and Stevenson had seemed to be close (Eisenhower held a slight edge), so the use of a state-of-the-art computer to predict what was expected to be a very close election had generated a lot of popular interest.
+Mr. Holifield was one of the few to protest plans by Attorney General Earl Warren of California and others to force 110,000 Japanese-Americans on the West Coast into camps during World War II. He voted against the Emergency Detention Act and then voted for its repeal in 1950, Ms. Feldmann said.
-At some point relatively early in the evening, UNIVAC predicted an Eisenhower landslide victory. However, the UNIVAC programmers decided that the prediction was too risky to release because it contradicted what the pollsters had been saying previous to the election about a tight race.
+He was an outspoken opponent of the House Committee on Un-American Activities, voting in 1945 against giving it permanent status and speaking out on behalf of people in the motion picture industry in Hollywood who were attacked by the committee in 1947.
-At 10:30, which was the third on-air UNIVAC segment, the computer predicted twenty-eight states for Eisenhower and twenty for Stevenson. This was a softer prediction, and was in line with what the CBS commentators had already been telling their television audience. It was the initial correct prediction of an overwhelming Eisenhower win that the UNIVAC programmers decided not to release because it contradicted the poll numbers.
+His civil rights concerns translated later into a bill he wrote that established the Cabinet Committee on Opportunities for Spanish Speaking People within the Office of the President.
-The 11:30 UNIVAC on-air prediction caused more drama. It reversed its earlier prediction, calling 24 states each for Eisenhower and Stevenson, and a slim 270 to 261 Electoral College vote margin for Eisenhower.  But by 11:45, the prediction had been corrected and UNIVAC predicted 100 to 1 odds of an Eisenhower victory.
+Mr. Holifield specialized in atomic energy matters and was influential in legislation enabling development of military and peacetime nuclear programs.
-UNIVAC made its predictions based on the difference between vote tallies and the expected vote in cities and counties, based on a statistical model extrapolated from past elections.  By applying this deviation in places that had already voted to those which had not yet voted, an estimate of the present election could be obtained based on past tallies in those places. One of the ironies of the election of 1952 was that the returns from Massachusetts, one of the crucial early-reporting states, were incorrectly reported to UNIVAC.  That UNIVAC was nonetheless able to make accurate predictions.
+He led a successful effort to stop plans to put the military in sole control of atomic energy, and in 1946, he persuaded Congress to pass legislation creating the civilian Atomic Energy Commission.
-The UNIVAC used by CBS was the fifth UNIVAC machine made. In the autumn of 1952, UNIVAC-5 was still in the Philadelphia factory of Remington Rand waiting for its future installation at the Lawrence Livermore Laboratories. Because UNIVAC itself was too large to be moved conveniently, a dummy control console was set up in the CBS studio in [[Grand Central Terminal]], New York City for visual effect, its lights blinking evocatively thanks to delay switches ordinarily used for making Christmas tree lights flash on and off.
+He was chairman of the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy, a member of the President's Special Evaluation Commission on Atomic Bomb Tests at Bikini Atoll and a Congressional adviser to the United States delegations to the International Conferences on the Peaceful Uses of Atomic Energy in Geneva from 1955 to 1972.
-There was some irony that a machine which debuted in the public spotlight of national TV would go on to do classified weapons work.  UNIVAC contained mercury delay lines, which allowed it to store 1,000 words (45 bits each) as electric pulses in tubes of mercury. Up to one million characters could be stored and accessed on magnetic tape. It was these tapes, replacing punched cards, which made the UNIVAC revolutionary, and which gave it a tremendous speed advantage because it could access its own data instead of needing to wait for cards to be loaded.  It could perform four hundred and sixty-five multiplications per second and had a clock speed of 2.25MHz.
+He also managed the bill creating the Department of Housing and Urban Development and wrote the bill creating the Department of Transportation.
-== Video ==
+Born Dec. 3, 1903, in Mayfield, Ky., Mr. Holifield came to California and started a dry-cleaning business in Montebello. He later expanded it to a men's clothing store.
-A brief video of the CBS prediction can be seen here.
+Mr. Holifield died of pneumonia in 1995 at the age of 91 on Balboa Island at Newport Beach in California.
-{{#widget:YouTube16x9|id=v7K8MW8wQWs</youtube>
+His wife, Vernice, died in 1991 after 68 years of marriage. In addition to Mrs. Feldmann, of Potomac, Md., he is survived by another daughter, Lois Mulholland of Redlands; a sister, Maxine Dungey of Medford, Ore.; a brother, Robert, of Soldatna, Alaska; 15 grandchildren, and 16 great-grandchildren.
-== Further Reading ==
+== Larson Collection Interview ==
-[http://drum.lib.umd.edu/bitstream/1903/10504/1/Chinoy_umd_0117E_11395.pdf Ira Chinoy's doctoral thesis]
+{{#widget:YouTube16x9|id=EVzA4J69VPs</youtube>
-[[Category:Computing and electronics]]
+Tape 1
-[[Category:Computer_science]]
+{{#widget:YouTube16x9|id=BYh48LAro7c</youtube>
+Tape 2
+[[Category:Military applications]] [[Category:News]]
+{{DEFAULTSORT:Holifield}}
+[[Category:News]]