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