Mass panic: people fleeing their homes, traffic jams heading out of town, the night sky ablaze with the fury of otherworldly invaders. Sound familiar? It should. On the night of Oct. 30, 1938, the infamous radio broadcast of “War of the Worlds” took place. But did all that resultant chaos actually happen? Well, not really. That misleading perception was essentially the work of the nation’s newspapers, all too hungry to sensationalize a few minor, sporadic events and spin them into said mass panic.
A. Brad Schwartz’s Broadcast Hysteria: Orson Welles’s War of the Worlds and the Art of Fake News (Hill and Wang) makes an in-depth examination and counter-point to the legends surrounding that faked Martian invasion presented by the Mercury Theatre on the Air. It’s a much-needed corrective to the accepted hyperbole.
Listener anger was bestowed on Welles during the days after the broadcast, but the FCC was essentially powerless to act—no actual laws were broken. Yet, many people also supported him, casting shame on the dupes who fell for the fiction. And Hitler paid close attention for he very well understood the impact that radio could have on the masses. So did the Campbell Soup Company, as they jumped on board to sponsor the show thereafter.
In theory, Americans were primed to readily ingest the fear factor because of a devastating hurricane had ravished the East Coast earlier that year and the growing apprehension of a Nazi takeover in Europe. The populace was on collective edge. And yes, some people did panic, but in scattershot pockets, not in the mass hysteria historically claimed. One guesses that it didn’t help that Welles used real location names in the foreboding narrative.
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Hadley Cantril’s 1940 study, The Invasion from Mars: A Study in the Psychology of Panic, added fuel to the fires of the mythologizing and focused on the few who had freaked out, selectively portraying the most reactive listeners. But Broadcast Hysteria pointedly dispels that book’s weighted angle and brings a far more sober reassessment to the actual response.
Soon, the warm embrace of summer will fall prey to the beckoning darkness of autumn, and as the witching season nears, we will once again tune in for the annual rebroadcast of that red planet scare. Read this book first and then enjoy the hallowed tale when it falls once again from the night airwaves into our radios. Boo!
