Orson Welles speaks with reporters the morning after his 'War of the Worlds' radio broadcast was mistaken by some as news of a real Martian invasion.
Eighty-one years ago this Halloween eve, a young Wisconsinite named Orson Welles brought the classic H. G. Wells story The War of the Worlds to the CBS radio airwaves in a faux-newscast style of daring drama. The format and content of the program, so the story goes, was so convincing in its chilling narrative of a hostile Martian invasion that a nation-wide panic ensued, with people fleeing their homes and taking up arms in the mistaken belief that the broadcast was relaying actual events actually occurring on the eastern seaboard.
Recent investigation of the broadcast, however, found that the supposed “panic” was mostly as imagined as were the aliens touching down in New Jersey. This Slate article points out that most of the evidence use to prop up the mass-hysteria story can from vague accounts in newspapers—an industry that suffered financially as the radio boom of the 1930s challenged their eminence as America’s principal source for news and (to a lesser degree) entertainment. If radio was a dangerous medium, or even if it could be suggested that it was, the newspapers would gladly give it front-page coverage.
These newspaper stories covering the panic were mostly from wire service stories, speaking of events that occurred in places far away from local readership, permitting them a sense of regional superiority over more gullible parts of the country. But what about right here in Milwaukee? Certainly, a town of such even-keeled Midwesterners wouldn’t fall for such an obvious play on their fears, right? Well, it depends on who you asked… and what financial stakes they had.
Unpacking the items from the following day’s Milwaukee Journal and Milwaukee Sentinel, it appears that response in Milwaukee fits in pretty neatly with the new thinking about the broadcast, which was carried locally on WISN, then a CBS affiliate. The Journal reported little panic in the city. “Mr. and Mrs. Gottlieb Hassenpfeffer, N. Teutonia Ave.,” the paper wrote, using a stand-in name for the most middle-of-the-road Milwaukeean they could conjure, refused to get excited over the broadcast, listening while “full of sauerbraten washed down with good Milwaukee beer” and fully aware that the story was an act of fiction. While the Journal reported fielding about 100 calls from citizens curious as to the accuracy of what was being heard on the radio (curiously, the police department did not report any calls about the event), they could only find a handful of cases in which people overacted to the program. At least two of them, the paper reported, involved men playing pranks on their wives.
Stay on top of the news of the day
Subscribe to our free, daily e-newsletter to get Milwaukee's latest local news, restaurants, music, arts and entertainment and events delivered right to your inbox every weekday, plus a bonus Week in Review email on Saturdays.
The Sentinel’s view of the aftermath was a bit more severe—it is worth noting here that the Journal Company also operated a radio station, WTMJ, whereas the Sentinel was owned by the Hearst chain of newspapers. The paper also reported a spike in phone traffic, with many calls from people “indignant” that false information would be out on the airwaves. One woman called the paper, asking in a trembling voice if there was any chance of “those monsters getting this far west.” Another caller reported that his 16-year-old daughter was sick with a “heart attack” after hearing the program and yet another had spent the entire evening frantically trying to wire relatives out east. “That’s a terrible thing to do,” the man said. “We were thinking of going out of town, and we went all around and warned our neighbors. We made fools of ourselves. We’re going to sue the broadcasting company.” Informed that the show had put on by Welles, a native of Kenosha, the fellow found a bit of humor in the situation. “Well, it was so darn realistic I might have known someone from Wisconsin was in it.”
The one thing that the papers seemed to agree on was that most radio listeners in the city probably never even heard the show. The Journal reported that Milwaukee was most definitely a “Charlie McCarthy town,” a reference to the wooden dummy star of The Chase and Sanborn Hour, the NBC variety program airing opposite Welles’ War of the Worlds show. WISN’s station manager, Gaston Grignon, told the Sentinel the most interesting aspect of the “panic” as far he was concerned was that enough people were listening to Welles to register any kind of response at all.
Since the broadcast, the story of the “panic” it inspired has taken on a life of its own, fueled in no small part by Orson Welles himself, who was happy to make the chapter part of his personal artistic mythology. The myth survived—and still survives—in part because of its “lessons” about mass hysteria, group-think and the dangers of propaganda. But back in 1938, the story faded from the public consciousness in just a few days, replaced by news of war and brutality that, oddly enough, couldn’t stir up much of a panic at all.
