Before the fake news of the Onion, before fake TV newscasters such as Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert, there was Orson Welles and his 1938 dramatization of H. G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds. No radio program has ever been examined as thoroughly, in books, film, and television. Coverage leans toward the lurid, describing how Americans were so terrified by “news bulletins” about a Martian invasion that they fled their homes, attempted suicide, or prayed for salvation from extraterrestrial heat rays. But this carefully researched new book reveals that the press, pundits, and academics got the story colossally wrong.
A. Brad Schwartz has evaluated more than a thousand letters written by Martian broadcast listeners to CBS, to the Federal Communications Commission, and to Welles himself. Schwartz is the first scholar to have read some of these letters since they were deposited in the University of Michigan’s Welles archive in 2005. Also drawing on recent work by other researchers, he comes to a startling conclusion: The hysteria was produced not by the audience, but by the press, which scared the public with misleading reports of mass terror, followed by dire warnings that Americans were dangerously susceptible to fascism by demagogues controlling the medium of radio.
If there was any invasion, it was by radio itself, which made its first American broadcast in 1920 and created print enmity toward the new, faster medium, a dislike that intensified as advertising revenues were captured by broadcasters. The number of homes with radios leapt from 60,000 in 1921 to 16.7 million in 1930.
Radio became a fixture of American life in the decade that followed, from coverage of the kidnapping of Charles Lindbergh’s baby son to the fiery crash of the German zeppelin Hindenburg (“Oh, the humanity!”). This shared national experience was new, and, as Schwartz writes:
Enter a man made for the moment: Orson Welles. Proclaimed a genius virtually the moment he was born in Wisconsin in 1915, he was a star of both theater and radio by the time he was barely out of his teens. CBS radio would be the vehicle for his Mercury Theatre on the Air’s Halloween eve adaptation of H. G. Wells’s 1898 science-fiction novel.
Worried that listeners would find the story too silly, Welles instructed writer Howard Koch (of future Casablanca fame) to change its setting from 19th-century England to 20th-century America. The script used names of real places and presented the drama as a series of news bulletins interrupted by seemingly normal programming. Koch dropped his pencil over a map; the point hit a tiny town named Grover’s Mill, New Jersey. That’s where the Martians would land.
On a Sunday night at 8 p.m., six million listeners heard an announcer present “Orson Welles and The Mercury Theatre on the Air in The War of the Worlds by H. G. Wells.” Orson Welles’s resonant baritone then spoke the novel’s opening lines, followed by an announcer who cut to supposed orchestra music out of a Manhattan hotel. This was interrupted by reports of explosions on Mars and an interview with “Professor Pierson of the Princeton Observatory,” played by Welles himself. The station then returned to music.
The pace was measured and convincing. When reporter “Carl Phillips” arrives at Grover’s Mill to report on a presumed meteor that fell there, he encounters a cylinder whose top unscrews as monstrous-looking armed aliens emerge to attack the Earthlings. His commentary is redolent of the Hindenburg crash: “There’s a jet of flame. . . . It leaps right at the advancing men! . . . Lord, they’re turning into flame!” The station then goes silent. Welles held that silence for an unnervingly long time.
As the aliens (now officially Martians) rampage through the tristate area, causing fake death and desolation, various pseudo-officials are brought on to calm the public. One sounds too much like Franklin Roosevelt, violating a radio dictum that the president should not be imitated on the air. Network executives were furious. Midway through the broadcast, Welles noticed policemen entering the control room: He’d ignored the customary “station identification” at the half-hour mark and had waited 40 minutes before reminding people that the program was a dramatization. By then, it was too late: Switchboards at CBS were lighting up brighter than a Martian heat ray.
At a press conference the next morning, Welles was unshaven, contrite, and deeply apologetic for any injury, physical or mental, he might have caused. In fact, he was terrified that he would go to jail—and that his meteoric career had crashed to Earth.
What had happened? Conjecture was that many radio listeners who tuned in to a more popular program with Edgar Bergen and his wooden sidekick Charlie McCarthy didn’t care for guest Dorothy Lamour’s singing and switched to Welles’s program only after it had been identified as a drama. Schwartz’s research finds otherwise, indicating that relatively few made the switch. Nevertheless, Welles’s friend, the writer and radio personality Alexander Woollcott, sent him a telegram for the ages: “The intelligent people were all listening to a dummy, and all the dummies were listening to you.”
The newspapers had a field day. The New York Times wrote that “a wave of mass hysteria” had overtaken America and reported that a Pittsburgh man stopped his wife from taking poison as she screamed, “I’d rather die this way than like that.” But Schwartz’s research indicates that such sensational stories were either invented, exaggerated, or anomalous. Meanwhile, an Iowa senator with the improbable name of Clyde LaVerne Herring (D) told the press that the Federal Communications Commission should prohibit radio scripts containing violent material that could warp children’s minds. Columnist Dorothy Thompson wrote that Welles should receive a congressional medal for demonstrating radio’s potential for demagoguery. Others called Welles a fascist for using the airwaves to terrify the public.
In Germany, the real fascists used Welles’s broadcast for their own propaganda purposes. Adolf Hitler jibed that he would never “start a war scare in the world, a panic, perhaps, about an impending invasion of Martians,” and the Nazi press sneered that Americans were so stupid they would believe anything. Academics piled on, too. Princeton social psychologist Hadley Cantril’s volume The Invasion from Mars: A Study in the Psychology of Panic (1940) was methodologically flawed and tainted by the author’s prejudices. Schwartz notes that its interviewees were drawn largely from the Princeton area, near the program’s fictive epicenter—and, consequently, included a high concentration of frightened listeners. Cantril, says Schwartz, betrayed his own disdain for ordinary Americans by claiming that those more likely to believe the broadcast were less educated, lower-class, and more religious than those less likely to believe, who were educated, not very religious, and possessed “critical ability”—people not unlike Cantril himself.
By contrast, Schwartz argues that those who believed the broadcast were none of the above. Rather, they were part of small communities where misinformation spread quickly—“virally,” as we would say today—regardless of the inhabitants’ background. Additionally, many who missed Welles’s opening thought the bulletins referred either to a natural disaster or a German invasion—a not-implausible notion in the same month that Hitler seized the Sudetenland.
Ultimately, however, most people were either aware that the program was a drama or briefly worried but then reassured after some simple checking. Yet the mass-panic legend persists.
Schwartz is a graceful writer and a diligent historian, but he falters when turning his eye to the present. In his conclusion, he expresses dismay that modern media blur the line between news and entertainment, allowing consumers to find niche programming that caters to their beliefs. He perversely commends the aforementioned Stewart and Colbert for alerting the public to this state of affairs while ignoring the fact that these faux-newscasters offer biased views of their own for their niche audience.
Near the end of his life, Orson Welles noted of his Martian broadcast that people in other countries had tried the same stunt and been arrested: “I didn’t go to jail,” he said, “I went to Hollywood.” That trip resulted in the 1941 masterpiece Citizen Kane, a film famous for, among other things, an early sequence with a pitch-perfect fake newsreel. But Welles never shook off the notoriety caused by The War of the Worlds. Though adamant, in 1938, that he never intended to make anyone think the broadcast was real, he later enjoyed saying that he had planned it all—to make people understand that “they shouldn’t swallow everything that came through the tap, whether it was radio or not.” Such skepticism, of course, should also be applied to statements by that highly gifted story-teller, Orson Welles.
Robert Nason is a writer in New York.
