Hi
Was the panic resulting from Orson Welles’s 1938 ‘War of the Worlds’ radio broadcast overblown? I’ve only seen a handful of website articles stating that it was overblown. What is the authoritative view today?
I look forward to your feedback.
And how do you define overblown? Many people did panic and behaved accordingly, disrupting their lives and that of those around them.
FWIW: Stephen King had an “Aunt Betty” who sat in the bathtub with a razor, waiting for the Martians to come over the horizon.
Are you asking if the panic was overblown? (Obviously yes, since it was fiction.)
Or if the stories of panic are overblown, i.e. the panic didn’t really happen to any great extent?
There was a recent news article about this. I will look for a link.
The article makes clear that there was no panic. No significant uptick in calls to the police, no traffic problems, nothing at all. There were people talking about the story, which incidentally identified itself 3 times during the broadcast as fiction, that were exaggerated in the days afterwards as a panic. Nothing of the sort actually happened. Orson Wells talked about the “panic” in news stories in the years afterward and confirmed that nothing like it had happened-but the stories afterward were a tribute to his story-telling powers.
There was a New York news story about the panic but it was almost entirely made up.
You need to read A. Brad Schwartz’s Broadcast Hysteria: Orson Welles’s War of the Worlds and the Art of Fake News.
He argues that the newspaper coverage in the days that followed was entirely overblown. A few incidents did occur but most people did not take to the streets or go into hiding or shoot guns.
Unfortunately, I haven’t had time to read this book, but I did do a fair amount of research into the subject a few years ago, including reading as many contemporary news articles as I could find plus a couple of later books.
Probably the single most important fact to consider is that the Mercury Theatre on the Air was a low-rated highbrow show that wasn’t even carried by all the CBS stations. Boston didn’t air it, making reports of panic there dubious in the extreme. It aired opposite the top ten Edgar Bergen show. You need to believe that large segments of the audience tuned away from Bergen during his first commercial to pick up the Welles show in progress. And then stopped listening before all the subsequent reminders that it was a drama and the huge time shifts at the end that made it obvious it wasn’t covering current news. It’s all unlikely.
People do unlikely things all the time, though. A professor, Hadley Cantril, in New Jersey, the epicenter of panic reports, did a pioneering set of interviews with listeners after the event. The Invasion from Mars: A study in the psychology of panic finds that many of them were spooked and some did leave their houses. That reprint edition is available cheaply and worth looking at, because there’s nothing else quite like it, although the protocols were primitive by current standards.
Newspapers probably hyped any and all anecdotal reports far out of proportion to reality. Nevertheless, Welles got pounded afterward and had to issue a public apology. Congress investigated CBS. Columnists wrote pseudo-profound analyses of what it all meant.
And when the show was redone by others, in other times, and countries, and languages, it was said to have produced similar panic from people who couldn’t have known about the original. One mob supposedly burned the radio station down when it learned of the hoax.
Did they? I can’t prove it. But a station in Buffalo redid the show many decades later and got a huge public uproar that appears to be real.
My guess is that a surprising number of listeners believed that an invasion of some sort was happening. The show triggered a huge response in an uneasy population in an era when live news coverage on radio was so rare that few even considered the possibility of a drama imitating reality. Newspapers then feasted on the few details, possibly because newspapers hated the radio media that was already seen as a threat to their monopoly over coverage and were happy to put radio in a bad light.
Just as a curious aside about how fiction also influences reality, I remember that in the fine documentary The World at War (The Barbarossa episode) when Germany invaded the USSR in 1941; Sir John Russell, that then was at the British Embassy in Moscow, declared that ‘the shock was all the greater when it did come.’ And said that “It was like a work of fiction.”
And later that year many in the USA later claimed to “remember” that the Pearl Harbor attack by Japan interrupted a musical show just like in The War of the Worlds and some also thought that the attack was also a work of fiction. But in reality the musical show just by coincidence had ended and the networks began on the top of the hour with the news flash about the war starting for the USA.
Definitely overblown. The supposed effect has been greatly magnified over the years and in fact the popular press blew it out of all proportion at that time too. Good article on the myth here. The truth is that very few people were listening to the show anyway.
Remember when the whole world was terrified of clowns mysteriously appearing in the woods? But also how no one, at all, ever, actually was scared?
It was like that.
I heard about the “panic” when I was 10 or 11. I asked my grandmother if she remembered the broadcast. She said she did. I asked if she was afraid, and she laughed, “No! It was just a show. Everybody knew that.”
She scoffed at the notion that frightened people were taking to the streets and fleeing.
It did supply a nice bit of backstory for Buckaroo Banzai, though.
My Dad, who heard the original broadcast, said pretty much the same thing. “No need to be afraid. We all knew it was just a radio play.”
According to Wikipedia, about 2/3rds of those that were frightened thought they were listening to reports of a German invasion or a natural disaster. They didn’t just miss the fictional aspect, they missed the aliens, too.
A Contemporary report by the Associated Press about the aftermath of the ill-fated February 1949 Quito, Ecuador broadcast: Six Die When Quito, Ecuador Mob Wrecks Radio Station After ‘Mars Invasion’ Story.
Well, not* all…*
Our neighbor once confessed sheepishly that he and a fellow grade schooler had immediately thrown clothes in a duffle and ran away from home. They took the bus downtown to an Army recruiting office and tried to sign up “to help fight the Martians!”
Of course the newspapers blew it out of proportion-they were in direct competition with radio to bring news and information to the people, and a story the purportedly showed radio to be sensationalistic and/or inaccurate was all to the good in their eyes.
My father once said that his mother believed it was real and was screaming “The Martians are coming…we are going to die.” I never asked him (or her the one week she spent with us a year later) for more details.
ummm…it’s a nice story…but a little hard to believe.
The radio broadcast began at 8 p.m. In order to hear it, grade school kids would have had to be at home with their family sitting in the living room-- where the radio set was a large, expensive piece of furniture which kids were not allowed to play with. Then your neighbor claims that they “ran away from home”…say,by 10 oclock at night.The kids would have had to pack food from the kitchen, clothes from their closet, money for bus fare …without their parents noticing. Then they would have had to sleep outdoors, and wake up the next morning to go find the bus stop, where they would sit next to the regular commuters going to work, and through all this still remain excited about joining the army.Then, your story continues,they actually located the army recruitment office and went inside (where unaccompanied children were probably not welcomed) and “tried to sign up”.
Kids have a lot of imagination…but they also have pretty short attention spans.
I’m guessing that your neighbor found the radio broadcast exciting…and then he might have run outdoors to look up at the sky and see what’s happening. Then he went back home to sleep.
The rest of his story sounds like the same type of exaggerations that have kept this myth popular for 80 years.
How good of a ventriloquist do you have to be on the radio?
Bergen was a terrible ventriloquist, and he knew it, and his dummies Regularly mentioned the obvious fact that his lips were always moving.
But his routines were often hilarious anyway.