Sunday, October 27, 2024

The Radio Drama that Spooked a Nation--Part 2

By Kit Hawthorne

Last month I wrote about the background and planning of the War of the Worlds radio drama, a newscast-style production that was convincing enough to set off a nation-wide panic in 1938. Click here to read Part 1. To find out what happened next, keep reading!

Cover by Penguin Random House

The show began at 8 p.m. with the playing of the Mercury theme music, followed by an announcement that a dramatization of the H.G. Wells novel, The War of the Worlds, was about to be performed. Next came an introduction read by Orson Welles—a retrospective on the beginning of the Martian invasion from what sounds like an omniscient narrator. (In fact, Welles was playing the part of a character in the drama, a Professor Pierson, who later gives a conclusion describing the aftermath of the Martians' attack and how they eventually succumbed, not to Earth’s weaponry, but to its pathogens, to which they had no immunity.) He sets the stage for the evening of 30 October 1938, the day of the broadcast—an ordinary enough day, with the war scare ended, and the economy picking up, and thirty-two million people listening to their radios.

This intro makes a seamless segue into a mundane news bulletin with a weather report. Then the CBS house orchestra began playing dance music.

At this point, hardly anyone was listening. Most American dials were tuned to the popular Charlie McCarthy Show on a different station. (The idea of people eagerly listening to a ventriloquist act on the radio, without a video component, seems almost incomprehensible today. Clearly it was a different time.)

At 8:12, Charlie McCarthy (and his handler, ventriloquist Edgar Bergen) left the air, replaced by a new, not very popular singer. Bored listeners began dial-surfing, and came across the Mercury broadcast already in progress, having missed the introduction. By now, the story had progressed to the finding of a mysterious meteorite in New Jersey.

Frank Readick, the actor who played the part of the reporter who witnesses the emergence of the tentacled Martians from the meteor, modeled his performance on Herbert Morrison’s famous eyewitness report of the Hindenburg disaster. It is a convincing performance, ending with the reporter tumbling over his microphone as he falls dead, killed by the Martian Ray. After a moment’s silence, the network’s emergency fill-in—“Clair de Lune” played on a studio piano—is heard. Next comes the voice of a New Jersey State Militia general, establishing martial law, followed by an eyewitness account of a deadly battle at Watchung Hills. Then “Clair de Lune” again, sweet and sinister.

Even allowing for the fact that many listeners had missed the play’s introduction, which stated plainly that it was a dramatization of Wells’s novel, there were plenty of clues that what they were hearing could not possibly be taking place. Events that would have taken weeks in real time were drastically telescoped, with the mobilization of troops across long distances, the holding of cabinet meetings, and the fighting of land and air battles covering less than forty minutes.

But this was 1938. Across the Atlantic, Hitler was running roughshod over European heads of state, many of whom were still too scarred by the last war to deal decisively with this new threat. The touch-and-go Munich crisis had occurred barely a month earlier, and Americans had grown accustomed to listening fearfully to their radios, which had supplanted the press as the primary source of news. The radio troupe’s masterful production preyed on the strained nerves of listeners overwrought by weeks and months of mounting dread.

Around the nation—but primarily in place closest to the aliens’ purported depredations, like New Jersey—Americans began to pray, cry, or flee. People called to say goodbye to far-off loved ones. They warned their neighbors. They overwhelmed police switchboards with panicked requests for instructions. And they kept listening to their radios.

The first act of the show ended with the call of an amateur shortwave operator trying to reach survivors. “2X2L Calling CQ. 2X2L Calling CQ. 2X2L Calling CQ. Isn’t there anyone on the air? Isn’t there anyone?”

Five seconds of silence. Then, smooth and calm, the voice of the Announcer: “You are listening to the CBS presentation of Orson Welles and the Mercury Theater on the Air in an original dramatization of The War of the Worlds, by H.G. Wells. The performance will continue after a brief intermission.

The War of the Worlds radio broadcast by Orson Welles on electrical transcription disc

Not many listeners tuned in for the second half of the show. By the time the final theme played, the phone was ringing in the control room. The mayor of a Midwestern city was calling for Welles, raving about mob violence in his terror-stricken city, and pledging to come personally to New York City to punch Welles on the nose.

It was all downhill from there. Uniformed men showed up at the studio and hustled the crew into a back office, where they remained the rest of the night while network employees did damage control. The press assailed them with accusatory questions and implications of deaths from traffic accidents and stampedes.

In the end, it transpired that the casualties had been manufactured by the press, which had seized the opportunity to sensationalize the story, thereby taking vengeance on radio and casting aspersions on its reliability. One young woman did fall and break her arm while running downstairs, and a man in Massachusetts spent three dollars in travel expenses to escape the aliens, which meant he could no longer afford the shoes he had been saving for. (The Mercury Theater on the Air compensated him for the shoes.)

Within a couple of weeks, the furor had subsided, but the public did not let go of its resentment. People felt that they had been played for fools. The men and women of the Mercury Theater on the Air were just amazed that anyone had taken their little drama seriously.


Kit Hawthorne makes her home in south central Texas on her husband’s ancestral farm, which has been in the family for seven generations. When not writing, she can be found reading, drawing, sewing, quilting, reupholstering furniture, playing Irish pennywhistle, refinishing old wood, cooking huge amounts of food for the pressure canner, or wrangling various dogs, cats, horses, and people. Visit her at https://kithawthorne.com/.

1 comment:

  1. Thank you for posting today. I have never listened to the broadcast, so I appreciated your information.

    ReplyDelete