‘War of the Worlds:’ 75 years later, people still remember famous broadcast
Associated Press
Orson Welles broadcasts his radio show of H.G. Wells’ science fiction novel “The War of the Worlds” in a New York studio at 8 p.m. Sunday, Oct. 30, 1938. The realistic account of an invasion from Mars caused thousands of listeners to panic.
Ed Cope
Herb Springer, 80, of Perryopolis, remembers listening as a child to the frightening “War of the Worlds” broadcast on the family’s Atwater Kent radio on Oct. 30, 1938. He is holding a copy of the broadcast on a record album while being interviewed at the Perryopolis Senior Center.
Ed Cope
Norma Allison of Perryopolis talks about the “War of the Worlds” radio broadcast in 1938 she remembers from her childhood.
Ed Cope
Record album of “War of the Worlds” 1938 radio broadcast
Seventy-five years ago tonight, a national panic ensued as radio listeners came to believe that Martians had invaded the United States.
They were listening to Orson Welles’ 1938 adaptation of “The War of the Worlds,” which became one of the most famous broadcasts in radio history.
“I remember a neighbor lady came running over to my mother and dad because she was scared,” said Norma Allison, 86, of Perryopolis, who was 11 years old at the time. She said her parents calmed the woman.
“I thought it was real to begin with because whatever came out of the radio was gospel. But my father straightened me out,” said Herb Springer, 80, also of Perryopolis, who was then a 5-year-old child living in Leetsdale, Beaver County. “He explained to me those things could not have happened even before the program ended.”
While Allison and Springer didn’t join in the panic, Uniontown historian Victoria Dutko Leonelli said many people believed a Martian invasion was actually taking place. She included this story in her 2009 book, “The Unexplained: Stories, Folklore and Legends of Fayette County, Pennsylvania.”
“People were frightened half to death. It was a scary thing at the time,” said Leonelli.
The broadcast was performed as a Halloween episode of the Columbia Broadcasting System’s “The Mercury Theatre on the Air.” Welles directed and narrated the show, which was an adaptation of H.G. Wells’ 1898 science fiction novel. The CBS production took the story out of England and changed the setting to Grover’s Mill, N.J.
The drama simulated a live newscast of a Martian invasion, coming as a series of fictionalized breaking news bulletins and firsthand reports from the scene. While the show incorporated notices that the broadcast was a drama, many listeners missed them.
“It was the first one, to the best of my knowledge, to sound like it was taking place in real time,” said Doug Wilson, operations manager and morning show host for WANB radio in Waynesburg and an instructor at Waynesburg University who has held a lifelong interest in classic radio broadcasts.
“Orson Welles and his team took a unique approach to making it sound like a contemporary broadcast,” Wilson said. “He set it in 1939 — a year later — but if you came in 10 to 15 minutes late into the program, you might think you were listening to an actual broadcast.”
Not only was there fear in New Jersey, where the Martians supposedly landed, but it spread across the country. Local news accounts from the Morning Herald and Daily News Standard, forerunners to the Herald-Standard, reveal Fayette County was not immune.
“The city and county last night were as excited as the rest of the nation over the CBS broadcast, which, today, had precipitated a wave of bitter public reaction. The News Standard office was swamped with telephone calls by radio listeners, many of whom were hard to convince that the radio broadcast was mere fiction,” was a report from the Oct. 31, 1938, Daily News Standard that carried the headlines “Broadcast gives nation jitters.”
The Oct. 31 edition of the Morning Herald noted it received many reports including, “A man at Uniontown called the Herald to report that a group playing cards at his home ‘fell down on their knees and prayed,’ then hurried home.”
Uniontown’s annual Halloween parade went on as planned on Oct. 31, but a story block on the Standard’s front page suggested “Bar Martians from the parade” and appeared to try to comfort its readers: “The ghosts and witches and goblins that’ll be hovering over the town tonight will be just make believe, honestly, absolutely and no kidding. And they’ll be no Martians and black smoke breezing around — you can take that as complete truth.”
Both papers also printed wire service stories that reported episodes of panic across the country, including people running into churches, leaving restaurants and fleeing their homes.
“But in the East, in the country being subjected to the ‘invasion,’ hysteria ran riot. Several persons came forward to swear they saw the rocket land and ‘strange creatures’ climb out of it,” according to a United Press International story.
Allison and Springer were children listening to the broadcast with their families.
“Nobody had television,” said Springer, a retired machinist die maker and veteran. “My mother and father listened to the radio and me, as the oldest sibling, I’d listen to it while lying on the floor. We had a large console radio, and I was allowed to turn the dial.”
Allison, a retired nurse, said, “I had parents that if something was going on, we listened to it on the radio.”
The two, who were interviewed at the Perryopolis Senior Center, don’t remember details of the broadcast but remembered they didn’t join in the panic. Both credit their parents.
“We weren’t raised to be afraid of things,” said Allison.
So why did so many panic?
Wilson looks at the times when World War I was just a couple of decades removed and there was tension from the Nazis in Europe, where World War II would begin the next year. Immediate mass communication was by radio. Television and computers for home use were still in the future. Even most telephone use was limited as many people had a party line, having to wait for the line to be free and then calling an operator to put a call through.
Wilson said, “It was, in some respects, to borrow a phrase, a perfect storm.”
But were Welles and his team innocent?
“I think too many things had to be very good coincidences for this to have worked out so well,” said Brandon Szuminsky, an instructor of communications at Waynesburg University, who has performed research on media hoaxes, including “War of the Worlds”, as a doctoral candidate at Indiana University of Pennsylvania. He also co-authored a chapter in the 2013 book, “War of the Worlds to Social Media.”
“Did Welles mean to cause a panic?” asked Szuminsky. “Probably not, but he did mean to fool people. ‘The War of the Worlds’ was designed to sound like radio bulletins and no one had done that before. It was groundbreaking style, and I think he had a lot of people falling for it.”
Szuminsky added there also is a belief that newspapers may have exaggerated the panic in an effort to make radio look bad.
Still, the broadcast made everyone take a look at the influence of radio and what eventually would be called the “media effect,” noted Szuminsky and Wilson.
“We take for granted that media impacts us,” said Szuminsky, “but it was a turning point in the way we looked at media.”
“The public, I think, learned you’ve got to take what you hear and compare it against other sources,” said Wilson. “Radio learned a lesson — we have to be morally aware. And that later applied to television as well. Even the government realized that by 1938, radio was starting to be a household item and that the government would have to pay attention.”
Today, Springer looks back fondly on the broadcast and even has a record album of the original show.
He said, “I feel that is something that will never happen again.”
Is that true?
Wilson believes that hoaxes today are more likely to come through social media, such as Facebook or Twitter, where someone might tweet “I saw an alien spacecraft” and 100 people will re-tweet it and so on.
Szuminsky also believes that today’s hoaxes are more likely to occur on social media, such as the death of a celebrity or someone saying he has a winning lottery ticket and if you post a photo, you might be picked to share in the winnings.
“You don’t just take everything at face value,” Wilson said. “Do some research. Don’t jump to conclusions. There’s so many ways to double-check information today.”