“…you don’t play
murder with soft words.” — Orson Welles, 31 October 1938
Tomorrow will be the 76th anniversary of the
infamous The Mercury Theatre's dramatization of H.G. Wells’s story War of the Worlds. Social scientists and historians are
still studying and postulating on what exactly happened in its aftermath and
its meaning when it comes to mass hysteria.
A bit of background: the
world was on tenterhooks on 30 October 1938.
Nazi saber rattling had reached fever pitch. People over the world were focused on a
crisis in Munich. Everybody was worried.
Radio broadcasts had only recently begun interrupting normal
programming to report what we would call “breaking news.” Having just endured the privation and pain of
the Great Depression, listeners across the United States were just getting used
to sudden, staccato reports of dire happenings in Europe.
The American radio audience was primed for bad news
Then came CBS's broadcast of War of the Worlds.
And there is no doubt that the writer Howard E. Koch, the
producer John Houseman, and the director Orson Welles sought to capitalize on
prevailing conditions to ramp up the impact of their little Halloween
hoax. They used the names of actual
people and told a story that sounded (sort of) like a report of actual, ongoing
events.
On the other hand, they did announce—at the beginning, twice
during the course of the broadcast, and at its end—that they were acting out a
play based on H.G. Wells’s fiction.
Also, given the supposed “real-time” nature of the broadcast, the
willing suspension of disbelief would have to have been at higher than fever
pitch for people to believe, even in those simpler times, that all the events
reported could have taken place in 62 minutes.
Certain habits of radio listeners played into their
gullibility. The Mercury Theatre ordinarily
garnered only about two percent of the radio audience. The
Chase and Sanborn Hour, starring Edgar Bergen got the big bulk of the
eardrums. But about twelve minutes into
that hyper-popular variety show—that featured a ventriloquist on the radio, by
the way—they announced a musical performance by a rather dull ensemble. Quite a few people got up from their easy chairs
and twisted their dials to CBS just in time to catch the scary part of the
Mercury broadcast, having missed the disclaimer at the beginning. The dimmer brains among those latecomers were
the ones who were duped into thinking they
were listening to an actual report. Some
of them raised a ruckus.
Pretty much immediately after the show signed off the air,
the cops invaded the studio, network employees collected all the scripts and
records, and the print press corps took over the story. The next day, which was Halloween, newspapers
across the country blared headlines about how the Mercury show had caused
widespread panic. And, on that October
31st, Orson Welles was forced to meet reporters and apologize to the
nation for its overreaction to his joke.
For a long while people believed the reports of widespread
panic in the wake of the show. Recent
analysis, however, has come to a different conclusion. American University media historian W. Joseph Campbell and many sociologists have
reinvestigated actual events and found no evidence of panicked crowds in the
streets. Slate Magazine ran an article last year on the 75th
anniversary that concluded, “Almost no one was fooled.”
So what were all those news headlines about? Well, you see, in the 1930’s a real war raged
between newspapers and radio for dominance in news reporting and in garnering
the bulk of advertising dollars. In an
attempt to discredit radio, newspapers greatly exaggerated the dimensions of
public’s panic. It seems now that all those banner headlines were really meant
to characterize radio news as an unreliable upstart medium.
Orson Welles took the blame.
For your listening pleasure, here is a link to the actual
broadcast:
And here is the adorable young Orson apologizing on the
following day:
Happy Halloween from---
Annamaria Alfieri
