Jack Kelly writer
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THE WAR OF THE WORLDS
(AmericanHeritage.com)
"Good heavens, something’s wriggling out of the shadow
like a gray snake . . .” On this date in 1938, millions of
Americans listened with total credulity as a radio reporter
described an attack by creatures from Mars. It was the
broadcast by Orson Welles and his Mercury Theatre
Players of H. G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds. Many of
those who tuned in to the Sunday evening program
panicked. They ran into the streets, drove their cars
through stoplights, and fired shotguns at water towers that
they perceived to be the invaders. The hysteria spread
across the country. Men and women wept in front of their
radios. Why?
Wells had published his novel in 1898. Two decades
earlier, an Italian scientist peering through his telescope
had made out thin dark lines on Mars. He called them
canali, channels. The eccentric American astronomer
Percival Lowell, mistranslating the word as “canals,”
envisioned a race of creatures constructing a giant
irrigation system. He produced extensive maps of these
waterways and put forth his ideas in an 1895 book,
touching off a century of speculation about life on the red
planet.
Wells’s novel was part allegory. It mocked the smug
insouciance of the British in their rule of a vast empire.
Citing the extermination of native peoples, Wells asked,
“Are we such apostles of mercy as to complain if the
Martians warred in the same spirit?” He seasoned his anti-
imperialist fable with prophetic images of flying machines,
poison gas, ray guns, and armored vehicles.
In 1938, Orson Welles, 23 years old, assembled a group of
Broadway actors to put on a weekly CBS radio drama, The
Mercury Theatre on the Air. Determined to tap the full
resources of radio, he enhanced his productions with
extensive sound effects and live music. The scripts were
turned out each week by a writer named Howard Koch.
In the years between 1924 and 1940, radio ownership in
the United States grew from 2 million sets to 50 million. At
first mainly a vehicle for entertainment, radio was
becoming a source of news as well by the 1930s. The May
1937 explosion of the zeppelin Hindenberg in Lakehurst,
New Jersey, was the first disaster covered live on radio.
Mercury Theatre cast member Frank Readick studied
recordings of that frantic, emotional broadcast, to get the
right tone for his own performance.
Welles’s Mercury Theatre on the Air normally reached only
a small portion of the radio audience. Much more popular
was The Chase and Sanborn Hour, a variety show. But
Chase and Sanborn listeners would often change
channels after hearing a popular act like the ventriloquist
Edgar Bergen. An estimated 4 million of them switched to
the CBS network to find The War of the Worlds already
playing, thereby missing Welles’s initial announcement that
it was a drama. An estimated 6 million Americans listened
to some portion of the broadcast, and nearly a third of
them took the play as fact.
The nation was on already on edge. Five weeks earlier,
the worst hurricane of the century had killed 600 people
along the eastern seaboard. During September, radio
correspondents had frequently interrupted programs with
bulletins about the Munich crisis in Europe. War was in the
air.
After landing in Grovers Mill, New Jersey, the Martians
started fires, brushed aside militia units, and marched
toward New York City spreading poison gas. As the play
continued, phone lines clogged with listeners calling radio
stations, police headquarters, and relatives. Those who
couldn’t get through saw the congestion as further
evidence of disaster. Many listeners, surrendering to the
power of suggestion, actually saw the flash of bombs and
smelled the gas.
After a station break, a second announcement informed
the audience that they were listening to fiction, but by that
time many frantic listeners had fled into the streets. A lot of
them believed the invaders were earthly enemies. “I felt it
might be the Japanese,” one observer said, “they are so
crafty.” “I knew it was the Germans trying to gas all of us,”
another remembered. “When the announcer kept calling
them people from Mars, I just thought he was ignorant.”
By the end of the hourlong broadcast the Martians had
decimated the population of New York but had themselves
succumbed to bacterial disease. A character speculated
that this might be “only a reprieve.”
Asked at a press conference whether he had anticipated
the terror the broadcast would stir up, Welles said,
“Definitely not.” But years later he admitted, “We weren’t
as innocent as we meant to be when we did the Martian
broadcast.” CBS executives apologized and promised
never again to use “the technique of a simulated news
broadcast.”
The Mercury Theatre on the Air benefited. It picked up a
sponsor, became The Campbell Playhouse, and continued
on the air for two more years. Welles signed a lucrative
contract with RKO and went to Hollywood to direct and star
in the 1941 movie Citizen Kane. In 1944 Howard Koch won
an Oscar for his script for Casablanca.
The 1938 broadcast wasn’t the only time The War of the
Worlds caused a panic. A radio station in Quito, Ecuador,
broadcast a version in 1949, beginning it without warning.
As the Martians advanced on the capital, thousands of
citizens filled the streets in panic. When the announcer
revealed the hoax, angry crowds converged on the radio
station and set the building on fire, killing 20 employees
inside.
Welles’s War of the Worlds broadcast was a lesson about
the power of mass media. The New York Tribune columnist
Dorothy Thompson praised the program for showing up
“the incredible stupidity, lack of nerve, and ignorance of
thousands. . . . If people can be frightened out of their wits
by mythical men from Mars, they can be . . . terrorized into
subservience to leadership because of any imaginable
menace.”
The Martian “canals” that had suggested the whole thing
did turn out to be the product of intelligent minds—those of
the human observers who conjured them from fuzzy
telescope images. When spacecraft viewed the planet
clearly in the 1960s, the waterworks vanished. Later
landings proved Mars to be a lifeless desert.
On another Sunday three years after the Welles
broadcast, excited reporters again interrupted radio
programs to announce an attack from the air, this time on
Hawaii. It was no hoax.
# # #
(AmericanHeritage.com)
"Good heavens, something’s wriggling out of the shadow
like a gray snake . . .” On this date in 1938, millions of
Americans listened with total credulity as a radio reporter
described an attack by creatures from Mars. It was the
broadcast by Orson Welles and his Mercury Theatre
Players of H. G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds. Many of
those who tuned in to the Sunday evening program
panicked. They ran into the streets, drove their cars
through stoplights, and fired shotguns at water towers that
they perceived to be the invaders. The hysteria spread
across the country. Men and women wept in front of their
radios. Why?
Wells had published his novel in 1898. Two decades
earlier, an Italian scientist peering through his telescope
had made out thin dark lines on Mars. He called them
canali, channels. The eccentric American astronomer
Percival Lowell, mistranslating the word as “canals,”
envisioned a race of creatures constructing a giant
irrigation system. He produced extensive maps of these
waterways and put forth his ideas in an 1895 book,
touching off a century of speculation about life on the red
planet.
Wells’s novel was part allegory. It mocked the smug
insouciance of the British in their rule of a vast empire.
Citing the extermination of native peoples, Wells asked,
“Are we such apostles of mercy as to complain if the
Martians warred in the same spirit?” He seasoned his anti-
imperialist fable with prophetic images of flying machines,
poison gas, ray guns, and armored vehicles.
In 1938, Orson Welles, 23 years old, assembled a group of
Broadway actors to put on a weekly CBS radio drama, The
Mercury Theatre on the Air. Determined to tap the full
resources of radio, he enhanced his productions with
extensive sound effects and live music. The scripts were
turned out each week by a writer named Howard Koch.
In the years between 1924 and 1940, radio ownership in
the United States grew from 2 million sets to 50 million. At
first mainly a vehicle for entertainment, radio was
becoming a source of news as well by the 1930s. The May
1937 explosion of the zeppelin Hindenberg in Lakehurst,
New Jersey, was the first disaster covered live on radio.
Mercury Theatre cast member Frank Readick studied
recordings of that frantic, emotional broadcast, to get the
right tone for his own performance.
Welles’s Mercury Theatre on the Air normally reached only
a small portion of the radio audience. Much more popular
was The Chase and Sanborn Hour, a variety show. But
Chase and Sanborn listeners would often change
channels after hearing a popular act like the ventriloquist
Edgar Bergen. An estimated 4 million of them switched to
the CBS network to find The War of the Worlds already
playing, thereby missing Welles’s initial announcement that
it was a drama. An estimated 6 million Americans listened
to some portion of the broadcast, and nearly a third of
them took the play as fact.
The nation was on already on edge. Five weeks earlier,
the worst hurricane of the century had killed 600 people
along the eastern seaboard. During September, radio
correspondents had frequently interrupted programs with
bulletins about the Munich crisis in Europe. War was in the
air.
After landing in Grovers Mill, New Jersey, the Martians
started fires, brushed aside militia units, and marched
toward New York City spreading poison gas. As the play
continued, phone lines clogged with listeners calling radio
stations, police headquarters, and relatives. Those who
couldn’t get through saw the congestion as further
evidence of disaster. Many listeners, surrendering to the
power of suggestion, actually saw the flash of bombs and
smelled the gas.
After a station break, a second announcement informed
the audience that they were listening to fiction, but by that
time many frantic listeners had fled into the streets. A lot of
them believed the invaders were earthly enemies. “I felt it
might be the Japanese,” one observer said, “they are so
crafty.” “I knew it was the Germans trying to gas all of us,”
another remembered. “When the announcer kept calling
them people from Mars, I just thought he was ignorant.”
By the end of the hourlong broadcast the Martians had
decimated the population of New York but had themselves
succumbed to bacterial disease. A character speculated
that this might be “only a reprieve.”
Asked at a press conference whether he had anticipated
the terror the broadcast would stir up, Welles said,
“Definitely not.” But years later he admitted, “We weren’t
as innocent as we meant to be when we did the Martian
broadcast.” CBS executives apologized and promised
never again to use “the technique of a simulated news
broadcast.”
The Mercury Theatre on the Air benefited. It picked up a
sponsor, became The Campbell Playhouse, and continued
on the air for two more years. Welles signed a lucrative
contract with RKO and went to Hollywood to direct and star
in the 1941 movie Citizen Kane. In 1944 Howard Koch won
an Oscar for his script for Casablanca.
The 1938 broadcast wasn’t the only time The War of the
Worlds caused a panic. A radio station in Quito, Ecuador,
broadcast a version in 1949, beginning it without warning.
As the Martians advanced on the capital, thousands of
citizens filled the streets in panic. When the announcer
revealed the hoax, angry crowds converged on the radio
station and set the building on fire, killing 20 employees
inside.
Welles’s War of the Worlds broadcast was a lesson about
the power of mass media. The New York Tribune columnist
Dorothy Thompson praised the program for showing up
“the incredible stupidity, lack of nerve, and ignorance of
thousands. . . . If people can be frightened out of their wits
by mythical men from Mars, they can be . . . terrorized into
subservience to leadership because of any imaginable
menace.”
The Martian “canals” that had suggested the whole thing
did turn out to be the product of intelligent minds—those of
the human observers who conjured them from fuzzy
telescope images. When spacecraft viewed the planet
clearly in the 1960s, the waterworks vanished. Later
landings proved Mars to be a lifeless desert.
On another Sunday three years after the Welles
broadcast, excited reporters again interrupted radio
programs to announce an attack from the air, this time on
Hawaii. It was no hoax.
# # #