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—— ON THIS DAY ——
OCTOBER 30, 1938
New York City, USA
88 years ago
The War of the Worlds, the radio dramatization of the H.G. Wells novel directed and narrated by Orson Welles, broadcast on the CBS network on the evening of October 30, 1938.
At eight o'clock on Sunday evening, October 30, 1938, the CBS radio network began its weekly hour of drama, The Mercury Theatre on the Air. An announcer clearly introduced that night's offering as an adaptation of The War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells. Then the program turned into something else. Listeners heard a weather report, then dance music from a hotel ballroom, then a news flash about strange explosions observed on Mars, then more music, then further bulletins, each more alarming than the last.
A meteorite was reported to have fallen on a farm at Grover's Mill, New Jersey. A reporter on the scene described a metal cylinder unscrewing, a creature with tentacles emerging, and a heat ray incinerating the crowd, before his microphone went dead. Within half an hour of airtime, Martian war machines had destroyed the army, crossed the Hudson, and released poison gas over Manhattan. The director and star was Orson Welles, who was twenty-three. The script was by Howard Koch, who a few years later would co-write Casablanca.
—— MARQUEE EVENT ——
Orson Welles, the actor and director whose War of the Worlds broadcast made him nationally notorious at twenty-three and led directly to the Hollywood contract that produced Citizen Kane.
The format was the innovation. Radio audiences in 1938 had grown used to programs being interrupted by urgent bulletins, most recently during the Munich crisis a month earlier, when Europe had seemed on the edge of war. Welles borrowed the sound of those bulletins exactly. Some listeners tuned in late, having switched over from the much more popular Edgar Bergen comedy show on NBC during a musical number, and missed the introduction. Some of them were genuinely frightened. People telephoned newspapers, police stations, and the network. A number packed their cars, and in the area around Grover's Mill, a few went out with guns to look for Martians.
The next morning's headlines described a nation in chaos: mass flight, traffic jams, heart attacks, attempted suicides. Almost none of it holds up. A ratings survey conducted that night found that only about two percent of those polled were listening to the program at all, and most who heard it understood it as a play. Hospitals reported no surge of patients, and no deaths were ever linked to the broadcast. Historians who have gone back to the evidence conclude that the panic was scattered and brief. The newspapers had a motive to exaggerate: radio had been taking their advertising revenue throughout the Depression, and here was a chance to portray the new medium as reckless and untrustworthy.
Welles appeared before the newsreel cameras the next day, unshaven and looking contrite, insisting he had no idea anyone would be fooled. How sincere he was is debatable. The Federal Communications Commission investigated and took no action beyond securing an informal promise from broadcasters not to use fake news bulletins in drama. The show acquired a sponsor, Welles acquired a contract with RKO Pictures giving him unprecedented creative control, and he used it to make Citizen Kane. The broadcast's darker echo came in 1949, when a Spanish-language version in Quito, Ecuador, provoked real fury. When listeners learned it was fiction, a mob set fire to the radio station, and several people died.
—— WHY THIS MATTERS ——
The broadcast is a founding text in the study of mass media. It prompted some of the first academic research into how audiences respond to broadcasting, and it has been cited for decades in debates about the power of media to mislead.
The myth of the panic is itself a lesson in misinformation. The enduring story of nationwide hysteria was largely created by newspapers with a commercial interest in discrediting a rival. A tale about gullible audiences turns out to be a tale the audience has been too ready to believe.
It showed that the form of a message shapes whether it is believed. Welles frightened people by imitating the conventions of trusted news. The same insight applies to every later medium in which fabricated content can be dressed in the style of authentic reporting.
—— THE TAKEAWAY ——
On October 30, 1938, a twenty-three-year-old director staged an alien invasion using the sound of breaking news. A small number of listeners were truly scared, and the newspapers turned them into a stampede. Welles got a Hollywood contract out of it. The legend of the great panic has now lasted far longer than anyone's fear of Martians.
—— QUOTE OF THE DAY ——
“This is Orson Welles, ladies and gentlemen, out of character to assure you that The War of the Worlds has no further significance than as the holiday offering it was intended to be.”
— Orson Welles, closing remarks of the broadcast, October 30, 1938
—— OUR QUIZ OF THE DAY ——
How much do you know about Orson Welles's War of the Worlds broadcast, the fake news bulletins from Grover's Mill, the truth about the supposed mass panic, and what it did for Welles's career?
