← Dan Snow's History Hit
Dan Snow's History Hit
War of the Worlds: Orson Welles' Alien Invasion Hoax
00:40:55
Orson Welles' infamous radio broadcast and its impact on American society.
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- [00:01]
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Ryan Seacrest
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- [01:01]
Strawberry Me Career Coach
It's time to come clean with yourself. Let's be completely honest. Are you happy with your job? Like really happy? The unfortunate fact is that a huge number of people can't say yes to that. Far too many of us are stuck in a job we've outgrown or one we never wanted in the first place. But still we stick it out and we give reasons like what if the next move is even worse? I've already put years into this place. I can't afford to take a wrong step. And maybe the most common one. Isn't everyone kind of miserable? But there's a difference between reasons for staying and excuses for not leaving. It's time to get unstuck. It's time for Strawberry Me. They match you with a certified career coach who helps you go from where you are to where you actually want to be. Your coach helps you get clear on your goals, create a plan, build your confidence and keeps you accountable along the way. So don't leave your career to chance. Take action and own your future with a professional coach in your corner. Go to Strawberry Me Career to claim a special offer. That's Strawberry.
- [02:10]
Dan Snow
Hi everybody. Welcome to Dan Snow's History hit at the very end of October. In the beginning of November 1938, a young 23 year old director of radio drama called Orson Welles was about to receive an avalanche of letters. He had just produced a shocking, innovative Sunday night broadcast which was an adaptation of H.G. wells. No relation. War of the Worlds. It had, let's just say, divided opinion. Here's one letter now in the University of Michigan library, which actually has an archive of all these letters and you can search them digitally. It's brilliant. Dear Mr. Wells, if you had any idea what terribly realistic portrayal of H.G. wells play could do for college girls away from guiding parents, you might be able to understand why some 100 girls in our hall believed that some horrible catastrophe had occurred in the East. Many of the girls tried frantically to call parents and pack suitcases. Some thought their friends caught in the area, and even some of the girls lived near New York. The hall was a madhouse, and one councillor was vainly trying to reassure the girls. In future, please, when you give that type of drama on the air, ask the announcer to cut in at frequent intervals to mention the station and the program. Though I believed I recognized your voice a few times, I thought you were giving over your program to announce the catastrophe. I certainly think you're one of the best actors and I've thoroughly enjoyed every one of your programs till this one. Please, next time have something not quite so realistic. One of the victims, Betsy Kruger. Another woman, Ethel DA Potty from Flint, Michigan. So I think it's an insult to the public for you to perpetuate such a practical joke on them through their radios. I don't think it was a bit funny, frightening people out of their wits. She finishes by saying, and if I'm so fortunate as to never to tune into another one of Mr. Orson Welles smart ideas, I will be much too soon. But in that archive there are letters of praise as well. Mrs. S. Shirley says, of all the crybabies I ever heard of, this sure beats all shame to admit to other countries that American people so civilized, so advanced, can put on a panic of such sort merely over a radio program. Won't Hitler get a laugh? Where are the true Americans? These Molly coddled jitterbugs show what they're made of. Just a bunch of crybabies. More power to Orson Welles for such realistic performances. He tops a one in the radio realm and five votes from my household. The broadcast of War of the Worlds on The radio on 30 October 1938 has become a thing of legend, become a thing of myth. And that's what we're talking about on the podcast today. I'm gonna ask Brad Schwartz. He's a writer and historian. He's just written the book broadcast Orson Welles, War of the Worlds and the Art of F I ask him, what happened that fateful night? Did people up and down America get their weapons out, start shooting at the sky, believing they were under alien invasion? Is all that true? And what does it tell us about a world of innovative media platforms, propaganda, fake news, believing things, believing everything you hear? It's a story decades old, but, my goodness, a lot in here that feels very contemporary. Enjoy.
- [05:17]
Brad Schwartz
T minus 10 atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima. God save the King. No black white unity till there is first some black unity. Never to go to war with one another again. And liftoff. And the shuttle has cleared the tower.
- [05:35]
Dan Snow
Brad, thanks so much for coming on the podcast, buddy.
- [05:38]
Brad Schwartz
My pleasure. It's great to be here.
- [05:39]
Dan Snow
Tell me everyone's heard of this book, but just give me the history of it, the background. H.G. wells wrote it. When was it published?
- [05:46]
Brad Schwartz
Like a lot of novels back in those days, it was serialized for the first time before it was published between hardcovers. So it appeared in magazines, I think, beginning in 1897. Comes out as a hardcover in 1898. It's the latter installment of this sort of remarkable run that H.G. wells has when he's really debuting as a novelist. He's still very young. He would be in his early 30s, like 31, 32, when War of the Worlds is coming out. But he does right in a row, he does the Time Machine, he does the island of Dr. Moreau, he does the Invisible man, and then he does War of the Worlds. And so you can imagine the effect that that's had on science fiction writing, on our popular culture. I mean, he's inventing the modern time travel story, the modern alien invasion story. Of course, how many things have been based on the concept of an invisible man or a mad scientist. He's drawing from the cutting edge science of his day and packaging it in a way that makes it much more thrilling. So he bursts onto the scene with, I think, one of the great debut runs of literary history. And in many ways, War of the Worlds itself is the culmination of.
- [06:52]
Dan Snow
Yeah, see, we are now so used to aliens invading and deploying new kinds of weapons systems. But this is not something you read about in the middle of the 19th century, right? This is not something that earlier novelists thought about. Like, what is going on there? Is it just the product of an astonishing imagination, or is it this era of science, of looking deeper into the solar system around us? What's happening?
- [07:14]
Brad Schwartz
I think it's both. I mean, it's a singular imagination that can get all of the stuff that's in the air and combine it into a story. You know, this is the first really alien invasion story. So you don't get Independence Day, you don't get the Dalek, if you don't have the War of the worlds. H.G. wells is the one who comes up with that template. But it's really a combination of, on the one hand, this growing scientific consensus that existed in the late 19th century that Mars could be inhabited, if not likely was inhabited. So you had astronomers. There was an Italian astronomer by the name of Giovanni Schiaparelli, who was one of the first people who aimed a high powered telescope at Mars and saw what he in Italian wrote down as canali, which sort of translates to English as channels. And that can be a geographic feature, it can be natural. That gets mistraded into English as canals, which a canal is something that intelligent beings built. And so you had other people like Percival Lowell, you had, coming out in this scientific and particularly popular literature, the idea that Martians are up there building canals, and if there are canals, there are canal builders. So this idea that we had neighbors very close was a broadly, at least plausible scientific theory. But you also had, equally as important, if not more so, is the political context, because this is barely 20 years out from World War I. It's the era of invasion literature being very popular, particularly in Britain and Europe, but fantasies of what the next war might look like because the tensions are rising, People know generally that this is on the horizon. And so even though it's alien invaders, the mechanized war machines, populations of major European capitals becoming refugees, the use of things like poison gas, all of this is anticipating what's about to happen very relatively soon after the book comes out. So it plays into very directly, on the one hand, this scientific plausibility of alien invasion, and on the other hand, this fear of a terrestrial war. And that's one of the reasons that this story, this concept, but this story specifically has had such a long life, because it always comes back whenever, you know, in the 1930s, when World War II is on the horizon, the Cold War, in the post 911 era, the Martians always get reconfigured to match up to the threat that we're most afraid of on this planet.
- [09:44]
Dan Snow
There are so many themes in it that we recognize today, because I'm very struck by that. It happens in Surrey, you know, which for listeners elsewhere in the world, Surrey in the 1890s was like the safest, richest place on earth. It's HQ of Britishness, Britain's the largest empire on Earth. Got the Largest fleet. And that reminds me that when you watch Alien movies set in the 20th century or the early 21st, it's places in the US that seem so insulated from the rest of the world, like happy towns in the Midwest. And it's inconceivable that in this American hyperpower that anything could strike you there, but that's where it happens. You know, I love that, that parallel. And then I like the things that the author, the protagonist, notices how people respond. Is it the Artilleryman, who's the sort of soldier who emerges and he dreams of radical solutions to humankind? You know, how war breaks everything and rebuilds it in ways that is unimaginable. Like we're going to rebuild human civilization underground, or we're going to upend the social order. You know, these are things that are recurring.
- [10:45]
Brad Schwartz
Yeah. And I think to some degree, the Artilleryman is speaking for Wells or an extreme version of Welles, because he was a socialist, he was a radical thinker in a lot of ways. His politics sort of suffuse his work, and we forget that when we read it. Just as an early example of science fiction today, you know, he goes out one of his more famous later books, I think it was 33, 1933, when he writes the Shape of Things to Come, where he predicts, almost like to the month when World War II is going to break out and how. But then the results of that, the idea that this is going to radically change human society, his predictive abilities are not quite as good there. But the setting of the book, which you're right to point out, I mean, that's where Welles was living when he wrote it. He was living in Woking, which, when I visited England a few years ago, I was finally able to go and walk around. And his home has a blue plaque on it. You can actually see it from the train when you're going to London. And he was writing letters to his family or friends, I think, at that time, talking about how much fun he's having killing his neighbors in the most horrific ways in this book. But it was, you know, being in that space and going for a walk one day in the woods in Surrey with his brother Frank, talking about British colonialism in Tasmania specifically, and sort of the annihilation of the indigenous population. And his brother says in this, you know, Ed, you're describing it quite well, this very peaceful, very secure, beautiful, wooded English environment. And his brother Frank says, well, what if beings from another world came down here and started doing to us what we did to people who we believe to be inferior. And that was the genesis of the idea, the idea that you're going to have this reversal. The most powerful nation city that is the seat of the British Empire, upon which the sun never sets. Still, I think in the 1890s, what if a race of superior beings come down and decide they want to take it over? And that, you know, politically but imaginatively, that appealed to HG and again, you know, in the context of sort of the pinnacle of the empire. And again, people don't know World War I is exactly when it's going to start, but they feel it's coming. So when you're at the top, there is also that anxiety about what comes after. And I think this book and that reversal of the people who feel the most secure losing their security in a horrific way, really is one of the reasons this book strikes a chord with audiences in the 1890s.
- [13:13]
Dan Snow
And what I love about it. We'll come onto the broadcast in a second. What I love about it is he invents science fiction. He invents alien invasion. He talks about poison gas. He does all these things. He's warning and playing with the British. Their fear of being overthrown, of crushed as surely as they did the Tasmanians. And then in the end, the invaders, they die off because they can defeat humans, but they can't defeat bacteria, the little smallest and. And little tiny microscopic beings of planet Earth. And so I like that because this is a period in the 1890s when humans just were convinced that there was a pyramid and they were absolutely at the top of it, right? The Earth and everything on it was for them to shape and dominate and HDR saying, no, don't forget. And that feels very modern as well. Like, we talk about how we are now dependent on the sea and the microscopic life in the world's ocean, or whether it's pollinating insects and the collapse that we face as they go down in number. Again, that feels in the 1890s like an extraordinarily modern way of looking at the world.
- [14:07]
Brad Schwartz
And he was. H.G. wells was a science teacher. I mean, his training was in science and education, so he understood these things at a degree that most people didn't. I agree that it's remarkably forward thinking that he's able to come up with this again. He's pulling in these ideas into all of this first run of books about evolution, which is still a pretty new idea. I mean, that underlies the time machine, that underlies even more of the worlds. There was this concept which turns out not to be how it works, but this theory that the planets get older as they move away from the sun. You see that reflected in the novel. The idea that Mars is used up as a planet and the Martians need to leave, need to colonize our planet because their resources are dying out. So the notion that planets age and die doesn't quite work out that way. But the notion that you could so deplete the resources of your homeworld that you need someplace else to live, and then you go there and you transform it, you terraform it, you bring your red weed and your ecology to try and change the place to support your own form of life. I mean, these are concepts that we're just now catching up with. Right. So he was remarkably ahead of his time as a storyteller, but it's because he was plugged into what was going on in the scientific community and paying.
- [15:18]
Dan Snow
Attention, as you say, it all shows if you're paying attention, if you care to look and read and listen and learn. It's all there. Folks, let's come forward to the 1930s now in the US which in some ways is similar, in some ways, different people in the 1930s, were they familiar with it in the U.S. why did it find in its new iteration such a sort of fertile audience?
- [15:36]
Brad Schwartz
Well, it's interesting because everything that makes the book cutting edge in 1898, 40 years later, is making it seem kind of dated. I mean, science fiction to begin with. It doesn't have the cultural footprint in the late 1930s that it does now. This was the age of pulp magazines and comic strips, and it was sort of becoming a new thing. But Flash Gordon and the Attack from Mars was a serial that was in the theaters at the time War of the Worlds happens. It's really for children. People had read this book, they were aware of the book, but it was seen as kind of outdated, actually. It had been reprinted in some pulp magazines, but people didn't so much believe that Martians could actually exist anymore. That aspect of it was fading. And it may have had its day if it didn't come back in a remarkable way, thanks to Orson Welles. But it's a time similar to Britain in the late 1890s of great anxiety. Although the reasons for that anxiety are different. It's sort of a rising empire, not empire about to cross the peak. This is a period where we're moving toward another world war. And people in the United States and around the world are very much feeling that. So you have this new technology of the radio that is in people's homes, that is bringing them not just the news and what's going on with a greater speed than has ever been possible before, but you have the actual voices and the sounds, because that was one of the things that radio, particularly in the US, was selling to the public. The idea of this direct connection to things that are happening really for commercial reasons. Unlike in Britain, unlike in most other countries where, you know, the BBC regularly would record speeches or events and then play them back, the American radio networks didn't want to do that. Everything that aired in the United States had to air live. That was sort of how they said that, that's more authentic. And so if a news event doesn't happen in time to be recorded, they would reenact it with actors. And this was somehow seen as more authentic because it was live, even though it was fake. So on the one hand, it's already. You can't trust everything you're hearing on the radio. On the other hand, audiences are being trained to equate what's coming over the radio with something that's happening right now. And so you're hearing Adolf Hitler's voice, you're hearing FDR's voice, you're hearing these things that suddenly make you feel more connected to events, Whether you're living in the middle of the country and it's in Washington or it's in London, it's in Berlin, it's wherever. So the series of diplomatic crises and events, The Anschluss in 1938, Munich crisis, happens in September, right before War of the Worlds. American radio coverage, particularly of the Czechoslovakian diplomatic crisis, is much more intense, in some ways much more detailed than what you're getting in European countries, because there's censorship there that is not present in the United States. So people are feeling really connected. And it's really raising this level of tension. The Great Depression is not over, and in fact, it has a resurgence in 1937, 1938. So there is economic anxiety, and then there's a major devastating hurricane on the east coast also in September 1938, right before war of the Worlds. So you have a series of events, many of them brought to you by the radio, that are giving you reasons to be afraid and to realize that distant events can affect your life and also training you to listen for that when we interrupt this broadcast, because that's going to bring you the latest writing bit of news.
- [19:06]
Dan Snow
Okay? So the nation sits around their wireless sets, their radios. 1938, people don't have TVs in their homes. They are as you say, they're used to doing that. If there's an earthquake, they'll interrupt the broadcast, tell you about the earthquake. So tell me about this broadcast on 30 October 1938, one of the most storied and mythologized broadcast in history. So, Brad, I need you to give it to me. What exactly happened here?
- [19:30]
Brad Schwartz
That's a big story. So it's October 30th, it's the night before Halloween. That's very important because this is kind of a Halloween prank. Orson Welles is 23 years old. He's not yet the actor and the film director that we know today. He's a theater director primarily, so he's known in the New York world. He's frequently a voice on the radio, but he's not yet an international celebrity. CBS Radio Network has given him this opportunity to air a weekly series of adaptations of classic works of literature. So they do Shakespeare, they do Robert Louis Stevenson, they start off with Dracula, they land on H.G. welles. The war of the Worlds, really, because Orson Welles, again, like H.G. welles being somebody who really has his antenna up and is an artist who is aware of what's going on in the world, has been paying attention to all of these radio events and crises and how the public is glued to their radio sets. And he wants to capture that in a dramatic broadcast. I don't believe, even though he claimed this later on, I don't think Orson Welles was trying to trick people, but he was trying to capture some of that intensity and excitement to make an old book seem new again by making it sound like a news report. So he has this idea, he wants to do a news type show. His collaborators suggest this book is the perfect material to do that. They give it to one of their writers who hates the book, really can't stand it, thinks it's outdated, thinks it's not going to work, but they say, no, this is our book. And so all of the collaborators that Wells is working with in the Mercury Theater, from the writer to the actors to the sound effects people, pour all of their creative energies into this project because they think it's not going to work. So they have to do everything that they can to make this 40 year old fantasy story sound realistic. And so 8pm on the East Coast, October 30th. The broadcast begins with this monologue taken from the H.G. wells novel. We know now that in the early years of the 20th century, this world was being watched by intelligences greater than ours, and yet as mortal as Our own. And then after these initial announcements that this is a record theater dramatization of the War of the Worlds for about 40 minutes, you're not going to have a station break. You're not going to have any interruption telling you what this is. The next half hour plus is all news announcements and broadcasts from military units and shortwave radio operators and things like that. It's all constructed. If the novel invents the alien invasion science fiction genre in some ways, this broadcast, I think, invents found footage, things like the Blair Witch Project. And this is the first time anybody's doing something like that. So the broadcast begins and you have these musical interludes that are exactly as boring and inoffensive as people want to listen to on a Sunday night when they're trying to relax. Getting interrupted by these news bulletins about gas explosions on Mars. And then something landing near Princeton, New Jersey, which is very comparable in location and topography compared to New York City that woking is to London. It's actually kind of scary. I spent a lot of time in Princeton and then to actually go to see where the Martians originally landed. They're very similar. So you have these news bulletins, you have these interruptions and an interview with a Princeton professor who's an astronomer played by Orson Welles, although you're not supposed to know that. And they go to the site where what they think is a meteor has landed. And it's this amazing sequence where the spacecraft opens up and you realize that you're not dealing with a meteor, you're dealing with an alien invasion. And from then on, for the members of the audience, for people who have tuned in late who didn't know what they were in for, they are having a very different experience from anything that anybody intended at this point.
- [23:18]
Dan Snow
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- [24:33]
Ryan Seacrest
Hey, it's Ryan Seacrest for Albertsons and safeway now through August 12th. Get great savings on your favorite self care items and earn four times points when you shop in store or online. Shop for items like Neutrogena Cleansing and Makeup removing towelettes, Dove Men 2 in 1 shampoo and conditioner, Dove Shampoo, Tresemme Shampoo Method Body Wash and Suave Body wash and earn 4 times points. Use these points for discounts on groceries or gas. Offer ends August 12th. Restrictions apply. Offers may vary. Visit albertsons or safeway.com for more details.
- [25:04]
Strawberry Me Career Coach
It's time to come clean with yourself. Let's be completely honest. Are you happy with your job? Like really happy? The unfortunate fact is that a huge number of people can't say yes to that. Far too many of us are stuck in a job we've outgrown or one we never wanted in the first place. But still, we stick it out and we give reasons like what if the next move is even worse? I've already put years into this place. I can't afford to take a wrong step, and maybe the most common one. Isn't everyone kind of miserable at work? But there's a difference between reasons for staying and excuses for not leaving. It's time to get unstuck. It's time for Strawberry Me. They match you with a certified career coach who helps you go from where you are to where you actually want to be. Your coach helps you get clear on your goals, create a plan, build your confidence and keeps you accountable along the way. So don't leave your career to chance. Take action and own your future with a professional coach in your corner. Go to Strawberry Me Career to claim a special offer. That's Strawberry Me Career.
- [26:06]
Dan Snow
Hi folks. I want to tell you about my latest series on Dan Snow's history. Now, I expect, like me, you have grown up reading or watching movies about pirates, swashbuckling rogues having adventures on the high seas. Disregard guarding authority, not taking it from the man, not taking any nonsense. What would you say if I told you that basically everything you think about Pirates isn't true. Treasure maps, pirates, buried treasure. So what is true? Well, my latest series that is running all through this July, with new episodes every Monday, answers that question. We'll be telling the real stories for pirates, you know, Blackbeard, Captain Kid and Anne Bonny. And I'll also be telling you astonishing tales of the pirates that you don't know, like Jung Yi, the Queen of the South China Seas, Definitely the most formidable pirate in history. So make sure you check out and follow Dan Snow's history hit to get new episodes on Pirates every Monday. This. So Orson Welles is directing. It's like he's a conductor, and he's kind of bringing this bit. Now bring in that bit. Wait, now a bit of silence. I mean, it's a very, very live project.
- [27:24]
Brad Schwartz
It is. I mean, it's studio in The CBS building, 45 Madison Avenue, right in downtown Manhattan. And you can just picture it. I mean, Welles is standing in the center, as you say, like a conductor at a music stand. He's got his actors around a microphone before him. He's got a live orchestra conducted by Bernard Herman, who would go on to be one of the great film composers of all time. Off to Welles's left, I think the control room is to his right. So he's got that window where he can see everybody there working the dials and switches and everything like that. But Welles is in command. He's in the center. And, you know, he had been. Even though this is his production, he's the star, he's the director, he had been remarkably distanced from the actual development of the show because he was doing a stage play that was not going well, and he was trying to save that while his collaborators were putting this all together. And he gets to the studio about six hours before airtime on Sunday and decides to change everything. Decides to put his stamp on it and rewrite the script and bring in new fake news bulletins and change the musical cues. And so he's the person controlling it now as they're going onto the air. And so there's that great moment that I think is the most effective of the show. And we know from various accounts, from people who listened and who believe this to be real, that it was the thing that was most convincing to them, which is when you have this scene set in Grover's Mill, New Jersey, near Princeton, where the Martians have landed and the alien spacecraft opens up and the Martians come out, and then they have their heat ray. And this is right from the H.G. wells novel, where the heat ray comes out and is incinerating everybody. You have this remarkable soundscape of police sirens and people, the actors in the studio chattering. And you get the sense that you're in a much larger space than you're actually in. And then the sound of the heat ray, which is, of course, constructed by the sound effects team. And then you have one of the unsung heroes of this project, really, who's the actor by the name of Frank Reddick, who was one of the great radio actors of the era, a lost craft in a lot of ways, particularly in the United States. And he had listened to the famous recording of the Hindenburg disaster the year before, which had also happened in New Jersey, when there was a radio announcer who happened to be on the scene describing what he thought was going to be a routine landing. And then the airship catches fire, the hydrogen explodes, and it's that everyone knows, oh, the humanity and all the passengers, all that. And so Frank Reddick replicates that announcer's voice, what he's saying. In the Hindenburg broadcast, they say it's bursting into flames. In War of the Worlds, he says they're turning into flames when they get hit by the heat ray. So there's that emotion. You're seeing this event through this reporter's eyes. And his performance sells it better than any, certainly digital special effect you could have in this era. And the heat rays sweeping across to Frank Reddick, and he's about 20 yards to my rep, and then they cut it. And that's the moment when the last thing you want in radio is dead air, because that's when people change the channel, turn the dial right. But Wells in that studio, 45 Madison Avenue, was standing there like a conductor with his arms outstretched, holding the pause for, I believe, six full seconds. And everybody in the room is getting more and more anxious, like, come on, let's get this going. But he holds it and holds it and holds it. And then he gives the cue for the announcer to say, we interrupt the broadcast because we have technical difficulties. We'll return you to Grover's Mill at the earliest opportunity. And that's the moment from letters that people wrote who listened to the broadcast and wrote about it or talked about it later, hearing what they thought was the reporter die on air. That silence signifying death was so affecting that if you were tuning in under the right circumstances, it was very difficult to process what you were hearing rationally. And that was the moment that pushed a lot of people over the edge.
- [31:23]
Dan Snow
Okay, well, Brad, how many people were Pushed over there, because this is what we. Hey, we're all brought up with this idea that the whole of the US Went completely bonkers and started running around the streets worrying about a Martian invasion. What do you think really was the reality? Did that many people think this was real?
- [31:36]
Brad Schwartz
The short answer is no. Quite a few did, but not the entirety of the United States. I mean, it's very difficult to give you a number for the reason that things like ratings opinion polling are in their infancy. So figuring out how many people were listening just to begin with was extraordinarily difficult. The best estimate that we have is that it was about an audience of maybe 6 million people, of which 1 million for some period of time believed that this was real. But that's. That's guesswork in the extreme. So I don't know how much faith to put into those numbers. What I can tell you is that the majority of the radio audience were not listening to Orson Welles because this was not very popular. It was seen as very sort of what we would call highbrow, more for a refined taste. Again, people who would listen to Shakespeare on a Sunday night. The vastly more popular show on a competing network was the Chase and Sanborn Hour, starring Edgar Bergen, who was a ventriloquist with his dummy, Charlie McCarthy. And I've been talking about this subject for many, many years. I still haven't figured out how you could do a ventriloquist act on the radio. Nevertheless, it was extraordinarily popular. And so that had maybe five or six times the audience, and most people were listening to that. And so of the subset that heard this, an even smaller subset believed it to be true. But it is certainly the case that I think under the right conditions, given the environment, given how well this show was put together, how accurately it replicates what a news broadcast of that era sounded like, and given the fact that nothing like this had been done on American airwave, to the extent that this pushed the idea of a fake news broadcast, I mean, there had been, famously, there had been one over the BBC back in the 20s that had a similar response. This was a new thing in America. And so when I was going through, I had the opportunity to be one of the first, really the first researcher to go through and analyze all of the letters that listeners sent to Orson Welles in response to this broadcast. The people who were frightened tended to write that night. They tended to write immediately after. They were so angry. And there's one from a woman who sort of fills both sides of the page. Orson Welles you horrible, terrible person. You scared me after death. Da da da. And at the very bottom of the last page, she just sort of squeezes it upon thinking about it. I must say it was marvelous and accept my congratulations. So you can see how there was emotional response that then, you know, she thought about a little bit and cooled off and still sent the letter, which is amazing. But people would write these letters and would really be trying to document their experiences in many cases to justify why they reacted in the way that they did. And I started noticing that you referred to the mythology around this about people fleeing their homes and, you know, taking up arms and all the other sort of stuff, which did happen in rare instances. But I started noticing that in first in college dormitories, but in apartment buildings and in tight neighborhoods. And I eventually began to realize that it was virality of it, that it was the spreading of it. That in an environment where a lot of people are living close together, if one person tunes in late and then tells five people and they haven't heard the first part of the show, they don't have context. Their context is somebody they trust telling them that this was a real matter for concern. And so that then created these pockets of hysteria scattered around the country. So it wasn't this tidal wave of terror, as one of the newspapers called it, but there were pockets where in many cases it was somebody in another part of the country calling a relative who lived in New Jersey where this event is happening happened, and saying, you got to go. And then some of the people who fled or the professors who went looking for the meteor that somebody told them had landed near Princeton, they never actually heard the show. So a lot of what got into the newspapers as people fleeing in response to a radio show were not people who actually heard the broadcast. They had been told from someone they trusted to get out of town, and they went.
- [35:46]
Dan Snow
And just to remind people it was not taped and then played out later. So if you missed the broadcast, you missed the broadcast.
- [35:52]
Brad Schwartz
Exactly. No one hears this until it's released on vinyl record in the 1960s. So 30 years after now transcripts were published in the newspapers the next day and later in book form. So that was the format in which it existed in the public mind. But reading it, you know, the soundscape, everything I was talking about earlier about the silence and the sound effects, none of that comes through on paper. That cuts both ways, because on the one hand, and there's this mythology that grows up around it when people can't listen to it, they can't evaluate it for themselves. But if you're just reading it in cold print the next day, as most people were, because again, this is not a show that many people heard to begin with, but it's on the front pages of newspapers across the country and then around the world. So everybody's reading about it the next day and they're reading this transcript. And what I noticed from going through the letters is the, that what drives a lot of the written response from people is not listening to the initial show. That's a subset of it. It's people who are outraged and terrified by the thought that so many of their fellow Americans could fall for what they're reading in the newspapers. Because, you know, you're reading it from the very beginning. You're not coming into it in the middle of it. You're not surrounded by people who are believing this is real. You're reading this alien invasion story beginning with the announcement. And so a lot of people in the United States, as is the case throughout our history, were quick to believe the worst of the rest of the country. And in this period where people know World War II is coming, people are aware of what's happened in countries like Nazi Germany, how the Nazis use radio and mass media for propaganda purposes. Americans like to believe we are exceptional, we are somehow immune from these sorts of things. Well, here's a piece of evidence that we are just as persuadable as any other country that has been, you know, subjected to radio propaganda. And that is what really, even more than the broadcast itself, that's what terrifies the country in the aftermath of this.
- [37:58]
Dan Snow
Don't go away. More War of the Worlds after this.
- [38:03]
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- [39:51]
Dan Snow
Why did the newspapers make such a big deal over the next day? Is it partly because the newspapers are lost love to discredit the radio and they want to show that it's dangerous and transgressive and perhaps destabilizing?
- [40:01]
Brad Schwartz
I don't know how much that influenced the initial reporting. Certainly that comes out in the editorial comment after the fact. Orson Welles and his collaborators would talk about this later on that they believed, because after the broadcast happens and they leave the CBS building, there are these accounts of reporters who have descended on the building shouting all these questions at Wells and his producer. Did you know about all the suicide? Did you know about all the car accidents? None of which was true. But they were on the receiving end of terrifying questions that made them think that they killed all these people and they detected a certain amount of malice in those questions. You have to begin with the fact that this is an event that nobody expected, that's happening on a Sunday night. By the time most newspapers are aware of it, it's basically already over because people are calling into police stations, they're calling into radio stations and newspaper offices trying to verify what they're hearing over the radio, because that's the only way you could do it. And so newspapers suddenly start getting these calls about, well, there's a meteor that's landed in New Jersey. Well, there's some sort of natural disaster. There's an invasion, aliens. Like, there are all these sorts of different versions of it that are coming into them and they're trying to make sense of it in very few hours before they have to put out the morning newspapers. So trying to. To make sense of such a complex event in such a narrow frame of time is basically Impossible, given the tools that they had. And they also then have these teletype machines that are bringing in the wire service reports from all over the country. And all the newspapers throughout the cities and towns scattered across the United States are sending out their most extreme, unusual examples of fright. So somebody runs into a church service screaming about the end of the world. Somebody goes, tries to commit suicide. I mean, so they're getting all of this evidence that suggests that this is a much bigger event than is actually the case. And the mistake that the newspapers made, understandably, was to sort of connect the dots that should not have been connected and to present this as a tidal wave of terror when it was all these discrete sort of pockets. So, yes, in the days to come, there was a lot of. A lot of newspaper columns and editorials talking about how you shouldn't believe everything you hear on the radio, comparing this to the situation in Germany. But a lot of that is written from a position of ignorance. Again, because people hadn't heard the show, there was no serious reporting, trying to figure out exactly what had happened. So they just sort of went with the initial version of it. And that then enters our popular culture. But it gives you a seriously distorted picture, I think, of what happened that night.
- [42:50]
Dan Snow
Yeah. As we're trying to incorporate new forms of media and people engagement and fake news and propaganda and virality, what's your thinking about the legacy and the lessons of this broadcast?
- [43:02]
Brad Schwartz
It really is the first time that Americans certainly, and maybe around the world are dealing with what has become the problem of the 21st century, which is how do you operate as a society, much less as a democracy, when you have technologies that exist that can spread lies much more convincingly than truth, and in some cases make them sound more convincing than truth. The people who fell for this broadcast in a lot of ways did so because it tapped into these fears and anxieties that they had. So most of the people who were frightened, and we know this from some of the survey research that was done after the fact, did not understand that the show was about aliens. They thought it was the Germans coming to invade or some sort of natural disaster, whatever they were most afraid of. Radio is the theater of the mind. Right. So if you're not seeing it, if the announcers are only talking about war machines and invaders and they're not using the words Martians or aliens as they are, after a certain point in the show, you can imagine any threat that is most terrifying to you. So that population selects itself and is most affected by what happens now, of Course, we have not just the distribution of news and has changed where we all have social media platforms and we are all distributors as well as producers to a certain extent. But we have generative AI technologies that can create any sort of image, any sort of text you want, whether or not it's tied to the truth. And that is supercharging. Sort of the same human psychological dynamics that are on display in this event. The human psychology hasn't changed. The technology is what's bringing out this side of us more and more. So one of the reasons I love to talk about this subject and have been talking about it since I finished my undergrad, was that the one thing that we know could help people interpret this correctly, even if they were in those sort of more terrifying circumstances when they tuned in late, was education. There's a certain amount of mental training. Even if you knew H.G. wells novel and you knew sort of the tropes of science fiction, you were listening to this and you could sort of plug it into what you knew, a certain degree of scientific knowledge, you know, that like, you know, you shoot a spacecraft off of Mars and conquer the entire eastern seaboard in 40 minutes. It just doesn't make physical sense. There were those sorts of things that trained people to interpret what they were hearing more and more in the right way. And in the aftermath of War of the Worlds, even though relatively few people heard the show, the story, and the way it became a part of American popular culture for a long time, it's this thing in the back of people's minds. So three years later, when Pearl harbor is attacked, there is a lot of anecdotal evidence that people did not believe the initial news reports because they thought it was another War of the Worlds. I've seen accounts even as late as 1963, the Kennedy assassination, there were people who had been alive in the late 1930s who heard the initial news reports about the President being shot in Dallas and didn't believe it or were skeptical about it because they had been trained to wait for additional information to verify the alarming news report. And so I think I like to keep the story alive. I think the story will always remain alive in this era because the story of how people fell for the broadcast itself, and then also how the story got distorted and exaggerated and how people saw their own fears in it, whether they were frightened by the broadcast or not, that hasn't gone away. And the only defense against that is to get people training themselves to be more skeptical, to be more discriminating about the information. That comes to them to not believe you know, something that particularly ties into what you're most emotionally responsive to, what most frightens you, what most angers you, triggers you in any way. That's what made War of the Worlds such a phenomenon in 1938. And that's what has become our great challenge in the 21st century.
- [46:59]
Dan Snow
Well, that's right. And we will be our best version of ourselves right here. Because if you don't believe what Brad has said, you can go to the University of Michigan library, which has a digitized collection of all these letters, letters written to Orson Wells that Brad mentioned earlier. And the link is in the show notes. People can go read them for themselves. They are one of the best archive letters I have ever read in my life. You've got to go over there. It's brilliant. I mentioned some in the introduction there. And Brad, people can also go and read Broadcast Hysteria, Orson Welles's War of the Worlds and the Art of Fake News. Thanks so much for coming on the podcast, buddy.
- [47:30]
Brad Schwartz
It was my pleasure. Thank you.
- [47:34]
Dan Snow
Thanks very much for listening, everyone. Before you go, I'll tell you that ever at the cutting edge, the bleeding edge of what's new and exciting, after 10 years of the podcast, you can finally watch on YouTube. We are moving fast and breaking things here, folks. Our Friday episodes each week will be available to watch on YouTube and you can see me. You can see what we're talking about. I'd love it if you could subscribe to that channel over there. Just click the link in the show notes below and you can watch it on your phone, your tablet or even a tv. Or even a giant cinema movie screen if you have one in your underground lair. See you next time folks.
- [48:21]
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- [48:55]
Brad Schwartz
Fair.
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