November 19, 2020 • 45 mins
On Halloween 1938 young radio star Orson Welles scared the pants off of America with a fictional news bulletin claiming Martians had landed and were destroying the country. People across the nation ran wild with panic in the streets – or did they?
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff you should know, a production of five
Heart Radios How Stuff Works. Hey, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles w Chuck Bryan over there.
It's just the two of us batching it up without Jerry.
(00:22):
Oh man, I think Jerry's inclusion, we're still batching it up.
How do you mean? I mean, does she really ruin
the batch scene for us? Sure? She's very maternal and judge, Yeah,
you were headed down a kind road for a second.
I was with Jerry. That doesn't sound like me. So
(00:48):
for all of you who are just tuning into the
first time, welcome, this is stuff you should know. To
everybody else who's tuning in for the multiple times, Welcome,
this is stuff you should know. Yeah, we never do that.
Some shows do that what they welcome new listeners, Yeah,
and kind of say what they do. And I mean
we've literally never done that. That's fine, that's lame. Hi,
(01:10):
which who does that? Any friends of ours? Yeah? I
mean the guys on the Flop House, they've been podcasting
as long as we have. In every single episode they
say who they are and what they do. No, okay,
well do you want to do that this one time. Well,
I'm Chuck Bryant and this is Josh Clark, and uh,
this is a podcast where we explain things in a
lighthearted and fun and sometimes even funny way. I disagree
(01:33):
with all of that. Oh boy, So what we're gonna
talk about today, because I think we need to talk
about this one in a slightly somber tone. Chuck, it's
a blemish in the history of America really if you
think about it. Well, yeah, and you know what, I've
never actually had listened to it until this week, same here,
(01:55):
and it was It's a lot of fun to actually
listen to. I would recommend it, Yeah, especially in a
dark room, um, where that's all you're concentrating on, not
like a second screen kind of thing, like where you're
really listening to this radio play. Put yourself there a
little bit like what it must have been like and
well not And that's when the book came out. Yeah,
(02:18):
but in ninety eight, I mean what forty years later,
Just in that forty years stretch, I mean, think about
the difference between nine eight and not ridiculously different periods.
It's exactly. Oh it's gone downhill, um, And don't think
they had nothing to do with Reagan's election in nineteen eighty.
(02:39):
But the difference between eight and nineteen thirty eight are
it's just like two different worlds, man um, two different worlds,
common War of the So I guess we should start
with the book written by the great H. G. Wells. Um.
It was the very first an invasion story to hit
(03:02):
the bookshelves, and that's a pretty remarkable thing. It was
a serialized thing at first, and magazines and Pearson's in
the in the UK, and then Cosmo here in the US,
and then they finally slapped all those serialized versions together
into a book and it sold pretty well. Yeah, it's
never been on a print since that first edition in
(03:25):
that's pretty respectable. I expect that as much for our
book as well. Yeah, I'm sure it'll be still being
published in forty years or a hundred years, a hundred
and forty years. Yeah, well let's hope. Um. So in
this book, and like you said, first alien invasion story
ever published, which is you know, just the fact that
(03:46):
this is a completely new premise, new conceit made it,
you know, kind of scary. But in the book, um, H. G.
Wells describes like this, this alien invasion. Um. And part
of the thing that was so scary about it, at
least at the time, from what I can gather, is
that it was about like the breakdown of society. And
we're talking like Victorian era England society, where like rigid
(04:10):
social rules and customs and Morey's and and guidance for
all behavior at all times was like the norm. So
the idea of that breaking down was scary on in
and of itself. I think that made the book kind
of scary to contemporary readers. Would that be right readers
back then? Um? And that was one big theme that
Well has explored. Another one that he explored in that
(04:33):
at least I think whoever wrote the Encyclopedia Britannica article
on it said that the main point of this, the
main subtext was um, learning how humans dominion over animals
can be, you know, cruel and thoughtless, because all of
a sudden, with these alien invaders who were just wiping
(04:53):
us off the map, Um, we were the we were like,
you know, domesticated animals to them. Yeah, so the shoe
was on the other hoof, And uh, sure it caused
or at least it was intended to cause people to
take kind of a hard look at a pre animal
farm to make sort of a social statement about how
(05:14):
we treated animals. And so that was if you flash
forward to Orson Welles in his Mercury Theater version, he uh,
this is you know, like you said, we're right in
the middle or we're in the Great Depression and we're
headed towards war and it's sort of an uneasy feeling
in the United States as a whole. So he thought,
(05:37):
perfect time to go in there, put a fresh coat
of paint on this thing and scare the bijebas out
of the American public by doing really something that they
had never heard before, which was sort of a verite
style production. Yeah, and I mean it's it's easy to
overlook today, but radio is still rather new at the
(05:58):
time in it was like, you know, cutting edge technological
medium and it was not fully defined. So the idea
of um creating this I guess hoax broadcast is the
best you can call it. Um, this fictionalized version that
(06:19):
was what would you call it? Man, I hate that
word so much. It's really taken on a bad tang
here lately. Uh. Yeah, I mean, it's it's verity. It's
it's uh, you know, of a faux documentary style thing
that no one had ever heard, Like, there's no way
(06:39):
when people heard this they would think, oh, this is
you know, I know Christopher Guests, this is sort of
a scary version. I've seen Blair Witch. I know what's
going on here. I recognize Lenny from Laverne and Shirley anywhere.
I know it's not real. So they were they weren't
prepared for this in when orson well, as he was
already a big name in radio as the voice of
(07:02):
the Shadow, which was big hit, and his Mercury Theater
was pretty pretty well respected at the time. It's yeah,
it's like a live stage theater. So they'd only had
this show for a few months by the time October
rolled around. UM. But their whole jam was they were
on CBS, and CBS had them do our long radio
adaptations of classic UM like novels like Treasure Island they
(07:27):
did around the world in eighty days. And so since
it was October, they wanted to do something spooky around
Halloween something, so they decided yeah. So so they were like, well,
what's the most boring scary book there is? And they said,
h G wells wore the world, so they decided to
adapt it. Yeah, so they got together, they're rehearsing. We'll
talk a little bit more about that in a sec.
(07:47):
But there wasn't a strong feeling among the cast and
crew and the production group that I thought it was
gonna be awesome because I think probably because they had
never done anything like this. They had never heard anything
like this, and they thought, is this even gonna be
any good? And a couple of different sources in the
production went to a radio critic ahead of time, it's like,
(08:10):
thanks a lot, and they said, by the way, this
is going to be a real stinker, they said, Apparently
two different people in the in the production said that
this will put everyone to sleep. And I don't I
don't have the impression that it's strictly because they didn't
have any frame of reference to judge it against, because
no one had done this before. From what I can gather,
(08:32):
the originally it was going to be really bad and
really terrible, and the production and the cast and crew
knew this. They knew that they were marching towards embarrassment.
Um with the the early versions of the of the script. Yeah,
so orson he's sort of distracted. He's got a stage
production going on. He's got his partner in his group,
(08:53):
John the Great John Houseman, Uh you all know from
the Paper Chase, kind of a legendary actor. He was
his one of his original partners, and he got together
with Howard Is it catch? I never know if it's
going to be a colt or a coke, doesn't matter,
all right, koc h and he was the writer who
was adapting the novel, and they were like, we gotta
(09:15):
make this thing better. And one thing I think we
can do. This was Houseman talking, I'm not gonna do
a John Houseman, but everyone knows how he sounds. Right.
When I came across John Houseman being involved, was like,
I can't wait. I don't even remember. I mean, he
was just very serious and sort of all I can
think of his Paper Chase. And what was the TV
commercial was it? I want to say it was like
(09:38):
Schwaberry Lynch. I think it might have been Merrill Lynch
maybe I don't know. But one of those finance firms
he did he voiced for, well, yeah. He was very
famous for having a very high pitched, squeaky falsetto voice,
and he talked very very fast, and actually I know
who it was. It was FedEx and Duncan Donuts. He
was well known for it, right, he was the time
to make the donuts guy right with the must so
(10:02):
houseman and uh, Cotch Coke went in there and he said,
one of the things we should do, probably to make
this a little more scary and a little more believable
that it's an actual broadcast is you know, time passes
in the book and we can't do that here, so
let's just get rid of all that stuff so it
gives the appearance that it's going down right now. Yeah,
(10:24):
that was enormously a huge change. Um. And I don't
know if he did that too to help the pacing
move a little faster or what, um, but that was
that would pan out to be a really important difference
in the original script that um Howard Kay turned in
uh and the one that they ended up doing. And
then even beyond that, some of the other changes came
(10:48):
just hours before broadcast, because apparently, if you worked with
Wars and Wells, you should be on the lookout for
him to come in at the last minute and be
like all the stuff we've been practicing for a week
or two, forget all of that. We're we're doing this instead.
And part of that, from what I can tell, is
that he was trying to shake up the act or
shake them out of whatever complacency they'd worked themselves into
(11:09):
with rehearsal and to get this raw, more terrified performance.
And apparently it worked. I mean, I can't imagine I
didn't hear any rehearsals or anything like that. I would
have loved to have compared, you know, the week before too,
you know, the actual broadcast. But everyone delivered these really great, um,
really great performances, and they really nailed by showtime, um
(11:32):
the realism in a lot of ways, not just in
the performances, um, but also in just little details like
they you know, they were they were doing a a
mock radio program, which we'll talk about a little more
in detail in a second, but they were they were
pretending to have news bulletins breaking, so they were they
(11:52):
were doing the things that news bulletins did. And one
of the things that stuck out to me was one
of the eyewitnesses, so it's an actor, but one of
the eyewitnesses is like being interviewed by a news reporter
on the scene and they started to talk, and the
news reporter goes, can you can you speak loud? Speak
more loudly and move into the microphone please, and that
the I think the actor actually says, how's that? And
(12:14):
the guy repeats himself, and then the actress to repeat
himself what he was originally saying. So it has like
that veneer of you know, authenticity, just from little details
like that that, you know, really it stood out to
me when I was listening for him. But if you're
if you're not listening for him, you you just it
makes you buy into the whole thing that much more. Yeah,
And the other big change that Wells brought along was
(12:37):
stretching out the first two halves of the thing such
that it went past it went forty minutes, and radio
at the time, every thirty minutes, like on the half hour,
they would check in with the station I D check
and listeners, even though radio was new, were well honed
(12:58):
to this station break every thirty minute, And so when
ten minutes passed, the half hour go by and there
ain't and there ain't no station break. That really makes
people kind of buy in to what they're listening to
is possibly real. Uh. And then you add to the
fact that there were no sponsors for this show. Yeah,
so they weren't cutting to a Casper or or me,
(13:22):
me and these ads all of a sudden, I can
remember any sponsor. Can you imagine John Houseman saying made
with modal? No, I thought it'd be made with modal. Yeah,
that's right, that's a much better Houseman. I had something
in my threat. Uh. So, yeah, there were no sponsors.
So basically it really came across as something that was
super super realistic sounding. Right, So all that is to
(13:46):
say that they had really by the time this broadcast
aired eight p m. On Sunday, October eight, they they
were not going to be the laughing stock and this
is not going to be embarrassing. It was going to
be pretty awesome. Actually, should we take a break, I
think so, Chuck, and then we'll come back and we
will reveal the broadcast after this. Okay, so we've reached showtime.
(14:40):
Air time a p m. Sunday, October, Mercury Theater on
the Air began broadcasting its adaptation of H. G. Wells
War of the World, and at the very beginning, it's
introduced as much there's an announcer who says that I
think this loss is probably to time somewhat because everyone
probably thinks that they just tried to trick everyone. But no,
(15:00):
they actually introduced it as what they're doing. You know
that this is a radio place at one year in
the future, right right, And yeah, Orson Welles. So it's
introduced by an announcer. Orson Wells comes in does the
introductory essay, and then they did something really smart and interesting,
especially for the time. They went to a musical program
(15:24):
that was supposedly being broadcast from the Murdian Room in
the Hotel Park Plaza. So if you were just tuning
in right then, you would have no idea that this
was Mercury Theater on the air. You would have no
idea that this was a teleplay. You would think that
you were listening to UM something that was pretty regularly broadcast,
which was live music at some like ballroom in a
(15:45):
hotel somewhere in New York. UM that they set up
like a radio transmitter to transmit out over the radio.
That was pretty frequent. But this was part of the
show paused. It is right right exactly so, but that
was a huge which part of the show because that
lilled um listeners into kind of complacency, and listeners who
tuned in late and missed that introduction thought that this
(16:07):
is what they were listening to. And then the first
news bulletin hits, yeah, and that's where things start to
get really interesting. They break in, you know, one of
these interrupt your previously scheduled programs kind of things, and
they come in and with these bulletin's, but they're not
super long at first because they treat it kind of
(16:29):
how it would be in real life. It's just sort
of a breaking story. Something's going together. It was fairly obtuse,
and they didn't like, you know, say, Martians are attacking
us right now everyone from the get go, I sort
of left it up to the listener to kind of
piece it together a little by little. They would go
back to the Meridian room for a bit, and it
wasn't for very long, but because you know, they couldn't
(16:51):
waste too much time, but it was long enough. It
wasn't for like ten seconds. They did it for like
a minute a minute and a half. Right. It made
it seem right then, like that was what you were
listening to, that that was the program and the bulletin
was in fact the bulletin rather than the opposite being true. Yeah.
So eventually you start to piece together what's going on,
and you have, uh, this attack in New Jersey of
(17:13):
all places, and uh, Princeton University they had like a
Princeton astronomer on. They have government officials and they kind
of dole it out a little by little until about
the seventeen minutes seventeen and a half minute mark, and
then that's when it really kind of gets, uh, super
scary and people really see the full picture of what's
(17:34):
going on. So Chuck, um, I feel like we should
read a little bit of the script. There's this one
part starting about the seventeen thirty minute market think you
said where they um as I like to say, they
tore the lid off the sucker. Do you want to
be announcer or Phillips? I'll be the announcer, okay, but
I want you to do Phillips as Sammy Davis jor.
(18:00):
So here's the announcer. Wait, hold on, I'm getting on
my tap shoes. Okay you're ready, Canny man, I'm not
gonna do it that way. Okay, So let me give
you a little bit of background real quick. So these
news bulletins up to this point of basically said there's
some weird thing that landed they thought was a meteorite
at first, that landed in Grover's Mill, New Jersey. Um.
(18:24):
And then later bulletin said that, oh, actually there's some
weird tentacle like weird things emerging from this thing we
thought was a meteor Right. So now we're back at
Grover's Mill. So I'm the announcer. We are bringing you
and I witness account of what's happening on the Wilmouth
Farm Grover's Mill, New Jersey. And that was kind of
(18:44):
like they were breaking in to let you know that.
And then they go back to more piano for some reason.
And then we now return you to Carl Phillips at
Grover's Mill. Lady, ladies and gentlemen. Am I on on,
ladies and gentlemen. Here, I am back up a stone
wall that adjoins Mr. Willmas Garden. From here I get
a sweep of the whole scene. I'll give you every
detail as long as I can talk, as long as
(19:06):
I can see. More State police have arrived. They're drawing
up a cordon in front of the pit, about thirty
of them. No need to push the crowd back now
they're willing to keep their distance. The captain is conferring
with someone we we can't quite see who. Oh, yes,
I believe it's a professor Pearson. Yes it is. Now
they've parted. The professor moves around one side, studying the object. Well.
(19:26):
The captain and two policemen advance with something in their hands.
I can see it now. It's a it's a white
handkerchief tied to a pole, a flag of truce. If
those creatures know what that means, what anything means? Wait,
something's happening. You can cut in any time. Who can
(19:49):
take a rainbow? Wait? Sorry, hump shape is rising out
of the pit. I can make out a small beam
of light against a mirror. What's that? There's jet there's
a jet flame springing from the mirror and at leaps
right at the advancing men. It strikes them head on.
Good lord, they're turning into flame. Oh god, oh my god.
(20:13):
Now the whole field's caught fire, the woods, the barns,
the gas tanks, the automobiles, and spreading everywhere. It's coming
this way, about twenty yards to my right, very nice
and scene that was great, Chuck so Um they they
(20:35):
you mentioned, or I should say Phillips. The reporter on
the scene mentioned Professor Pearson, and he's this he ends
up being the main character and he's uh, he's an
interview he's in a Stromer's interviewed earlier on and he's
on the scene as it happens. Um, and the the
program just keeps going like that, like there's another there's
a main announcer. Um, who I played? I thought rather well, Um,
(20:58):
thank you, and it seemed to you by the future
as a fully artist, if I may say so, thank
you very much. I've been practicing. You want to hear
my machine gun? I've been doing that one since I
was like six. All right, how about walking through the forest?
All right now, how about a good punch to the face.
(21:21):
Oh wow, that was good, Thank you. Probably punched myself
in the thing. I'm dedicated. That's how dedicated to the
art of fully so. Um. The announcer just keeps bringing
in more and more news as this thing goes on
and unfolds of like, now, these things aren't just in
New Jersey there in Chicago. They're like out West they're
(21:42):
they're starting to invade everywhere, and they're killing people left
and right. That you said there was a government official
that reads a statement is actually that they say that
it's the Secretary of the Interior, which I thought was
particularly genius because I mean, probably not that many people
were familiar with the Secretary of the Interior, Harold x Um,
(22:03):
but they had him sound like FDR so that they
would kind of play on everyone's um, I guess unconscious
or I'm sure there were people who are like the
sounds just like FDR, but at the very least, it
would kind of evoke that government authority, the reality of
like a government figure, you know. Yeah. So meanwhile, on
(22:24):
the other stations, there's one that's running opposite, which is
a really really popular radio show at the time, um
probably the most popular, Chasing Sandborn Hour, which had the
very very famous ventriloquist Edgar Bergen in his dummy Charlie McCarthy,
and we talked about that on our ventilla Quism episode.
Remember that they started out on radio, which is hysterical.
(22:49):
I don't even know why they would even bother with
the dummy part. Just do too. You wouldn't even know
that's what he did. You wouldn't even have to wear
pants around and your spaghetti stained under shirt and yeah,
naked from the waist down, maybe some socks, doing a
couple of voices. Here's your contract Edgar Bergin, What do
(23:10):
you think about that? Charlie Dart get me started, Like
that's it. I could be a famous vintiloquist on the radio.
You just you just did it. I think I think
Hollywood's gonna come with Collin. But the real sort of
interesting um factoid here, I think is that people were
channel surfing back then when you cut to commercial, just
like we used to do when we didn't have pause
(23:33):
buttons and fast forward buttons. And what is this pause button?
You keep mentioning? I've never heard of this. You've never
paused television? No, wow, you you need I don't believe
I've ever paused anything in my life. It's funny. We
were Emily and I've been watching that German sci fi
series Dark, which is very challenging to follow, and uh,
(23:57):
there's a lot of rewinding like wait, wait, who was
at what did they just say? And we rewind it
a bit and do that again, and or you know,
of course I got to go the bathroom. Let me
depose it. And I was thinking about how, not too
long ago, you just if you missed something, you missed it.
You just paid the count or you paid yourself on
the couch. Yeah, there was no clear like, let me
go back and clear this up. It's like, what did
(24:19):
he say? I have no idea. I guess we'll never know.
There's no internet. I guess I should probably stop watching
this show altogether. You go walk up to the VCR
in President Jack. But at any rate, back then, let's
say Charlie McCarthy goes to break and no word from
Mark Banser and they flip it over to war the
world's at this point in the broadcast when the s
(24:42):
is hitting the fan and it's going to scare the
pants off of people in well, yeah, even more than
I think that they would have dialed over even before that,
so they might have caught like a news bulletin and
then maybe some of that music from the Meridian Room. Um,
so I really would have caught them. And there were
supposedly a substantial number of people who did dial over,
(25:03):
and we're like, wait, wait, what what is going on here?
And now we come to the reaction the response, because
if you picked up the paper the next day in America, um,
just about anywhere in any major city, you're going to
find huge, blaring headlines like the one that the New
(25:24):
York Daily News printed in tall, bold letters. Fake radio
war stirs terror through the US. Yeah, stories of of
shock and hysteria, stories of people taking their own life,
stories of people dying from heart attacks. The ape sat
a man in Pittsburgh found his wife with poison in
(25:45):
her hand and said, I'm gonna I'd rather die this
way than like that. And you know, talking to Wells
afterward in the aftermath of this, he apologizes publicly says
they didn't intend to do this. Uh, we had we
didn't know what was going to cause a panic. And
then you know, if you look over the years more interviews,
(26:05):
it's sort of seems like Wells is a little more like,
you know, we thought it would be pretty fun to
scare people, and I didn't know if it was going
to cause a panic, but we definitely intended it to
have this effect on people, whereas houseman in Cotch, We're like, no,
we really didn't mean it. Um. So it was sort
of conflicting reports from the production on what they thought
(26:26):
was going to be the result, right, Um. And I've
read an interview with John Landis, the great director who
um worked with Wells on a project that never got
made towards the end of wells life, and he didn't
say that. Wells admitted to him that he meant to,
but he got to know him enough that he was like, yes,
if you watched this, this initial press conference where he's
(26:46):
apologizing because the whole country was ripped apart in chaos
and we're running wild in the streets and like nearly
rioted because of his broadcast, he's not at all. He's
he's just as happy as a lark that this all happened,
even though he's pretending to apologize. And he said that
was just this resource And Wells, did you just say apologize.
(27:11):
It's a it's a new version I'm testing out. I
like it. It's it's good. Kind of yeah, it's it's
at least as good as apologize. So this was just
a couple of days in the news cycle. It wasn't
the biggest deal in the world, even though it was
fairly sensational. Uh. Story writing for for a newspapers. UH.
(27:31):
And it might have just gone that way had it
not been for a Princeton University social psychologist a couple
of years later named Hadley Cantrell, and Cantrell released a
book on the real effects of this thing and basically
said that you know, people were praying, crying, they were
(27:51):
frantically trying to escape death from the Martians. Six million
people listen to this thing, and at least when six
of them were frightened or disturbed, and I have the
evidence right here. Yeah, And the evidence that he had
was based on a series of interviews with a hundred
and thirty five people. Almost all of them were in
(28:12):
New Jersey, which remember that's where the crux of the
invasion and destruction being described took place, because Grover's Mill,
New Jersey is actually a real town in Jersey. Um,
so he went to Jersey because he was in Princeton.
So he went where he was and interviewed a hundred
and thirty five people, and he said, were you scared
(28:32):
by this broadcast? And the participant would say yes, and
he'd say you're in my study. And he'd ask the
next one, were you scared? Were you scared by this broadcast?
And they'd say no, he'd be like, you're not in
the study. And so yeah, he said in the in
the methodology that he selected a hundred out of the
hundred and thirty five because they had been scared by
(28:53):
the broadcast. And so he took this these interviews of
people in New Jersey and he extrapola did it to
the rest of the country, and he said, yep, this
is this is real. This is a really great example
of people, um being fooled into into terror and panic.
And you know the responses when this happens, like we
(29:16):
saw after the World were the World's broadcast, people will
run out into the street, they will flee the city,
they will um call their friends and neighbors, they will
um they may attempt suicide, they may die of a
heart attack. Like the New York Times UM reported, uh
twenty or so people in New York alone needed to
be treated for for shock and hysteria. This is what
(29:38):
happens when somebody toys with the public trust and UM yeah,
it's pretty nuts. The end That was what That was
the end of Hedley's Headley's book, right, Uh, yeah, not
the end of this episode. So this is what this
specific study is. What if you've ever taken um asked
(30:00):
media or communications college class, you've probably studied War of
the World's largely because of this study. Basically, it might
have just come and gone if it weren't for this
um this academic paper that we're put out and all
of a sudden, for decades and decades, it's reported on
as like a cautionary tale almost of responsibility and media,
(30:23):
even fictional media. And you know, as recently as two
thousand thirteen, PBS American Experienced documentary said this was the case.
Our old pals at Radio Lab in two thousand and
eight did an episode about this where that was the case.
But there were a few problems with this paper. Beyond
the supremely bad methodology behind just getting scared New Jersey
(30:47):
people to go in there and and give their report.
Was they found up that we they ended up finding
real ratings for this thing, and not a ton of
people even heard it. It turns out, uh so, so
his six million estimate was way off, way way way off.
And they did a survey during the program that said
(31:07):
two percent of respondents said that they were listening in
some markets, like big cities like Boston even preempted this
thing for local programming. So it wasn't a ton of people,
It wasn't a ton of people being scared and like, uh,
just literally losing their minds with fear and panic and
things swing so far the other way that it the
(31:30):
narrative became, you know what, no one was really scared
at all, And what newspapers really did was they put
out hit pieces on a competing medium like radio and
how you shouldn't trust it anymore. So so what happened
over the last within some time within the century, but
sometime in the two thousand tens, the the myth that
(31:53):
America lost its mind went bonkers and ran wild in
the street because they were panicked by the War of
the World's broadcast was shown to be a myth that
it didn't happen, and that was the new understanding for
a little while, um, just a few years, until another
guy came along and said, you know what, Um, they're
(32:16):
actually both both are right and both are wrong in
a lot of ways. Should we take a break and
talk about the truth always being somewhere in the middle?
Mm hmm, all right, I said, the truth is always
(32:57):
somewhere in between. That's not always the case with everything
in life obviously, but that's that's a saying for a reason. Uh,
And that's definitely seems to be the case. Uh, in
this case with a gentleman named a Brad Schwartz, he's
a probably the leading War of the World scholar. And
he went back and he went and investigated the letters
(33:21):
and the cables that that came in. Uh. They were
at the University of Michigan Archives, and these are the
letters that actually came in two Wells and the Mercury
Theater in the days after the broadcast. And what he contends,
and I agree, is that this is what you need
to be reading, is what people were really thinking at
the time, that weren't just cherry picked in the town
(33:41):
where that got attacked in New Jersey, who were obviously
they were going to be freaked out more than anyone
in the country. Right. So one of the things that
he points out is, you know, everybody been, you know,
since around two thousand ten or maybe a little earlier.
Everyone had been wailing on Hadley can't traill Um for
his terrible, terrible methodology. Um, but they the revisionists were
(34:06):
also kind of doing the same thing. They were making
all sorts of suppositions, like the idea that the newspapers
had basically conspired to target radio its rival to show
how irresponsible it was and how it shouldn't be trusted
with the news, that it's really newspapers that should be
handling the news. And maybe you can listen to a
little or fanny on on the radio, but that's about it.
(34:29):
That that was all supposition. That was as much supposition
as um Hadley can trill extrapolated his findings in New
Jersey to the rest of the country. UM. And a
Brad Schwartz. One of the reasons I think he's doing
a good jobs because he's he's saying no where. If
you actually sit down and read these letters and these
cables that were coming in in the days after, they
(34:50):
really probably paint the most accurate picture anyone's ever found
to this to this point of how it was actually received.
Like you can see almost in real time at the time, Um,
what people were saying about this by in their letters
to orson wells into the Mercury Theater on the air. Yeah,
and and it was a range of feelings. It was
(35:12):
everything from people who said, you know what, we knew
it wasn't real, but it was really scary and super awesome.
I don't know if they said things like super awesome.
He said that a number of people wrote in who
actually um made fun of the people who fell for
it and said that you know, they're they're gullible, their
(35:33):
their rubes, and one writer even said they should be
sterilized and disenfranchised. Yeah, because they'd shown that in an
actual emergency they were undependable. They would just run around
like chickens with their heads cut off in the streets. Yeah.
And Swartz sort of draws a line between what was
going on back then to us today with this whole
fake news hoax garbage that we have to listen to
(35:56):
day in and day out, and uh basically said, this
was the first viral phenomenon in media. Was the World
of the World's broadcast, and it was a mixed bag.
Some people loved it, some people did think it was
real and panicked, but it certainly was not this widespread
panic across the country like you were talking about. Yeah,
(36:16):
he said, less than a chord of the letters described
what he would consider panic, but even most of those
weren't actually angry when they were writing the letter. A
lot of them were thrilled. But he he did right.
But he did say, um that, yes, there are cases
that you see in these letters and cables, Um that
that described people panicking. So that did happen in some cases.
(36:40):
Most of it seems to have been isolated in New Jersey.
So if Hadley ken Trill had not extrapolated his findings
and had you know, interviewed more people who had different
reactions to the broadcast. But if it had just been
like an investigation into the reaction in New Jersey, that
study or that look would have been much more useful.
(37:02):
But the fact is he just screwed the screwed the
methodology up so badly that it's it's basically useless. But
he wasn't. He didn't make up the panic that he described.
Necessarily may have exaggerated it, who knows, but it did.
It does seem to have actually happened in some cases,
but it was sporadic, few and far between, certainly not organized,
(37:24):
and certainly not seen across the rest of the country
like it was reported on by the papers the next day. Yeah,
which sort of leads us to the story of the
poor pulses of Manhattan. This Manhattan couple Um, they did
fall for it. They were very scared. Apparently, as the
story goes, they got their last six dollars together and
(37:45):
got on a train to get the heck out of
New York m assuming not going west into New Jersey,
they went north towards Connecticut. Um, got as far as
they could on what little money they had. Get off
the train, and you know, there's a bunch of other
passengers that they're telling, you know, they're warning everybody of
what's happened. And this one guy there goes over and
(38:08):
gets there. And I just pictured this in the movie.
It's like, no one's listening to this guy. And he
picks up the newspaper basically the TV guide to the
Dunkin Donuts. He says, hey, guys, it says right here
were the world's broadcast is supposed to be on at
that hour. Um, Like, it just says right here in
the newspaper. It's a it's a radio play. Everyone no one, everyone,
(38:31):
no one, nobody, Okay. And then he just goes and
gets on the train and leaves. But they feel bad
for them that the other people that were you know,
that had gathered together, they loaned them or gave them
I guess some money, and she chipped in and got
them back to New York City. And then later Estelle
Pauls wrote a fifteen page letter the next day to
(38:53):
Orson Wells that was very admiring and said how thrilled
she was, but he imagine what else I know? Hell
of a story, I think, is what which she has
kept over and over and over all. Right, So, um
so that was one of the letters that Abrad Schwartz
(39:13):
turned up in that trove, and like it very clearly
describes a couple panicking because they mistook the War of
the World's broadcast. But again, um, this was not like
across the nation like the papers reported, and Schwartz actually
explains to the papers basically, um, as a combination of
a couple of things. One is a bias. I can't
(39:36):
tell if it's selection bias, volunteer bias, or confirmation bias,
but the biases as follows. If you're in a newsroom
and all of a sudden, your phone starts ringing off
the hook, and you're getting a hundred and fifty percent
more calls that night, and all of them are people
asking about this Martian invasion and what's going on? And
is this real or is this a hoax? Or have
(39:57):
you guys heard anything about this? And some of those
calls are even from the local police who are also
getting similar calls, and now they're calling you to find out.
Then it seems like there's a lot of people calling
and freaking out about this Martian thing. But if you
step back, if you zoom out and look at that
number of people that actually called the newsroom, it's just
this minute fraction of the population of whatever town it is. Um,
(40:22):
So it wasn't a bunch of people freaking out, But
to the people answering the phone in the newsroom who
are getting swamped with calls, way more calls than usual,
it did seem like that. So that, combined with anecdotal
reports that no one followed up followed up on from
the wire services that people were attempting suicide or having
heart attacks or whatever, that just being reported and related
(40:44):
as fact, led everybody to believe that this was actually
happening out there in the country, that people were running.
Well maybe not my town, because I stuck my head
outside of the news room and I didn't see anything,
but I hear they're going crazy in Chicago, right now
or I hear they're really going nuts in Milwaukee or whatever. Um.
And that's how it got reported, and that's what everyone
thought happened. People who lived through this thought that this
(41:06):
happened the next day. Orson Welles thought his career was
in jeopardy the next day because he accidentally made America
go berserk. And that's how that myth began, and that's
how it stood. And and A Brad Schworts basically traced
it back to lazy, lazy reporting. So myth busted thanks
to A. Brad Schwartz and US and US for sure,
(41:30):
I'm glad you included us. So there's an interesting footnote
here though, because this actually did kind of play out
that way, um eight years later and night was eight
years later, Yeah, in Ecuador. So this is in Quito, Ecuador.
These broadcasters recreate the Orson Wells radio play, um, and
(41:53):
they did a version that went a lot further than
his did and got other radio stations to join in
and add to their warding, which really pretty brilliant move
there to increase like you turned the station and it's
happening over there too. And this really did scare people.
They really did take to the streets and panic. Uh
there was you know, public panic going on. And then
(42:14):
the crowd finds out that it's fiction and they get
angry and actually turned into an angry mob and burned
down the local newspaper building that had the radio station
inside of it, killing six people. Yeah, six people died,
fifteen people were injured, Like they knew that the staff
was in that building, and they set the building on
fire to try and kill them. A bunch of people
(42:36):
escaped out the back, but a lot of people didn't escape,
and the two people who were responsible for the broadcast,
including UM, Ecuador's most beloved and trusted presenter, UM, were
indicted for it. Like they're more safer basically, yeah, exactly, Um,
and they were. They were indicted for their role in this.
(42:57):
Like people died because of it. And this actually does
seem to have happened in Ecuador. Amazing. Yeah, So there
you go. The idea that America fell into chaos and
panic after the war the world's broadcast is largely myth.
Go forth and spread the gospel everybody, unless you're in Ecuador,
and then you're like, no, it's actually happened here. Uh.
(43:20):
And since I said that, actually happened here, I think,
Chuck is time for the listener mail. So this is
uh from Tom in the UK. Did you see this email?
I don't think so. It's great. It's one long sentence
and I'm gonna try and read it. And how I
think Tom speaks as as Tom from the UK, because
(43:45):
just the way he wrote it, I think Tom probably
talks a little bit like this. This isn't Tom from
the UK who was our tour manager when we did
our UK tour? Is it now? Well? Shout out to
that Tom. This is an engineer and this is what
he all right, Sup, Josh and Chuck, Tom engineer from
the UK, Stoke on Trent, big fan of the show.
(44:08):
Been binging for about two years and got through all
of them, all of you lot, even Jerry have got
me through a lot these last couple of years, and
I put a few people onto your podcast. Wanted to
email you lot for a while and finally managed to
get round to emailing a load of things to people
about stuff that really doesn't matter. Emailed the TV show
(44:30):
about one of their actors, a part of a particle
physicist about using a light year of lead as a
frame of reference. The company super Noodles for the excellent
job they've done with their super noodle part, but I'm
not much for the pas And I just wanted to say,
I know you like the Japanese mayo, but you really
(44:52):
need to try the Polish mayo. Spot on all the
best Tom boil Boy Tom now is great And Chuck,
that was a fantastic stoke on trent accent, the most
accurate I've ever heard and the first Tom that was
a great email. And you're right, Chuck, I love that
email so much. I had so much fun. You were
(45:12):
right to choose that one. UM. So thanks Tom, thanks
for writing in. Thank you for including us in your
list of people you harass via email. Um, and keep listening, okay,
and keep writing in. Maybe we'll make this a regular thing, Chuck,
I would that yep. So Tom right in again. Uh
And if you want to write into we want to
hear from you, you can send us an email to
(45:34):
Stuff podcast at iHeart radio dot com. Stuff you Should
Know is a production of iHeart Radio's How Stuff Works.
For more podcasts for my heart Radio, visit the iHeart
Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your
favorite shows.
Welcome to Stuff you should know, a production of five
Heart Radios How Stuff Works. Hey, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles w Chuck Bryan over there.
It's just the two of us batching it up without Jerry.
(00:22):
Oh man, I think Jerry's inclusion, we're still batching it up.
How do you mean? I mean, does she really ruin
the batch scene for us? Sure? She's very maternal and judge, Yeah,
you were headed down a kind road for a second.
I was with Jerry. That doesn't sound like me. So
(00:48):
for all of you who are just tuning into the
first time, welcome, this is stuff you should know. To
everybody else who's tuning in for the multiple times, Welcome,
this is stuff you should know. Yeah, we never do that.
Some shows do that what they welcome new listeners, Yeah,
and kind of say what they do. And I mean
we've literally never done that. That's fine, that's lame. Hi,
(01:10):
which who does that? Any friends of ours? Yeah? I
mean the guys on the Flop House, they've been podcasting
as long as we have. In every single episode they
say who they are and what they do. No, okay,
well do you want to do that this one time. Well,
I'm Chuck Bryant and this is Josh Clark, and uh,
this is a podcast where we explain things in a
lighthearted and fun and sometimes even funny way. I disagree
(01:33):
with all of that. Oh boy, So what we're gonna
talk about today, because I think we need to talk
about this one in a slightly somber tone. Chuck, it's
a blemish in the history of America really if you
think about it. Well, yeah, and you know what, I've
never actually had listened to it until this week, same here,
(01:55):
and it was It's a lot of fun to actually
listen to. I would recommend it, Yeah, especially in a
dark room, um, where that's all you're concentrating on, not
like a second screen kind of thing, like where you're
really listening to this radio play. Put yourself there a
little bit like what it must have been like and
well not And that's when the book came out. Yeah,
(02:18):
but in ninety eight, I mean what forty years later,
Just in that forty years stretch, I mean, think about
the difference between nine eight and not ridiculously different periods.
It's exactly. Oh it's gone downhill, um, And don't think
they had nothing to do with Reagan's election in nineteen eighty.
(02:39):
But the difference between eight and nineteen thirty eight are
it's just like two different worlds, man um, two different worlds,
common War of the So I guess we should start
with the book written by the great H. G. Wells. Um.
It was the very first an invasion story to hit
(03:02):
the bookshelves, and that's a pretty remarkable thing. It was
a serialized thing at first, and magazines and Pearson's in
the in the UK, and then Cosmo here in the US,
and then they finally slapped all those serialized versions together
into a book and it sold pretty well. Yeah, it's
never been on a print since that first edition in
(03:25):
that's pretty respectable. I expect that as much for our
book as well. Yeah, I'm sure it'll be still being
published in forty years or a hundred years, a hundred
and forty years. Yeah, well let's hope. Um. So in
this book, and like you said, first alien invasion story
ever published, which is you know, just the fact that
(03:46):
this is a completely new premise, new conceit made it,
you know, kind of scary. But in the book, um, H. G.
Wells describes like this, this alien invasion. Um. And part
of the thing that was so scary about it, at
least at the time, from what I can gather, is
that it was about like the breakdown of society. And
we're talking like Victorian era England society, where like rigid
(04:10):
social rules and customs and Morey's and and guidance for
all behavior at all times was like the norm. So
the idea of that breaking down was scary on in
and of itself. I think that made the book kind
of scary to contemporary readers. Would that be right readers
back then? Um? And that was one big theme that
Well has explored. Another one that he explored in that
(04:33):
at least I think whoever wrote the Encyclopedia Britannica article
on it said that the main point of this, the
main subtext was um, learning how humans dominion over animals
can be, you know, cruel and thoughtless, because all of
a sudden, with these alien invaders who were just wiping
(04:53):
us off the map, Um, we were the we were like,
you know, domesticated animals to them. Yeah, so the shoe
was on the other hoof, And uh, sure it caused
or at least it was intended to cause people to
take kind of a hard look at a pre animal
farm to make sort of a social statement about how
(05:14):
we treated animals. And so that was if you flash
forward to Orson Welles in his Mercury Theater version, he uh,
this is you know, like you said, we're right in
the middle or we're in the Great Depression and we're
headed towards war and it's sort of an uneasy feeling
in the United States as a whole. So he thought,
(05:37):
perfect time to go in there, put a fresh coat
of paint on this thing and scare the bijebas out
of the American public by doing really something that they
had never heard before, which was sort of a verite
style production. Yeah, and I mean it's it's easy to
overlook today, but radio is still rather new at the
(05:58):
time in it was like, you know, cutting edge technological
medium and it was not fully defined. So the idea
of um creating this I guess hoax broadcast is the
best you can call it. Um, this fictionalized version that
(06:19):
was what would you call it? Man, I hate that
word so much. It's really taken on a bad tang
here lately. Uh. Yeah, I mean, it's it's verity. It's
it's uh, you know, of a faux documentary style thing
that no one had ever heard, Like, there's no way
(06:39):
when people heard this they would think, oh, this is
you know, I know Christopher Guests, this is sort of
a scary version. I've seen Blair Witch. I know what's
going on here. I recognize Lenny from Laverne and Shirley anywhere.
I know it's not real. So they were they weren't
prepared for this in when orson well, as he was
already a big name in radio as the voice of
(07:02):
the Shadow, which was big hit, and his Mercury Theater
was pretty pretty well respected at the time. It's yeah,
it's like a live stage theater. So they'd only had
this show for a few months by the time October
rolled around. UM. But their whole jam was they were
on CBS, and CBS had them do our long radio
adaptations of classic UM like novels like Treasure Island they
(07:27):
did around the world in eighty days. And so since
it was October, they wanted to do something spooky around
Halloween something, so they decided yeah. So so they were like, well,
what's the most boring scary book there is? And they said,
h G wells wore the world, so they decided to
adapt it. Yeah, so they got together, they're rehearsing. We'll
talk a little bit more about that in a sec.
(07:47):
But there wasn't a strong feeling among the cast and
crew and the production group that I thought it was
gonna be awesome because I think probably because they had
never done anything like this. They had never heard anything
like this, and they thought, is this even gonna be
any good? And a couple of different sources in the
production went to a radio critic ahead of time, it's like,
(08:10):
thanks a lot, and they said, by the way, this
is going to be a real stinker, they said, Apparently
two different people in the in the production said that
this will put everyone to sleep. And I don't I
don't have the impression that it's strictly because they didn't
have any frame of reference to judge it against, because
no one had done this before. From what I can gather,
(08:32):
the originally it was going to be really bad and
really terrible, and the production and the cast and crew
knew this. They knew that they were marching towards embarrassment.
Um with the the early versions of the of the script. Yeah,
so orson he's sort of distracted. He's got a stage
production going on. He's got his partner in his group,
(08:53):
John the Great John Houseman, Uh you all know from
the Paper Chase, kind of a legendary actor. He was
his one of his original partners, and he got together
with Howard Is it catch? I never know if it's
going to be a colt or a coke, doesn't matter,
all right, koc h and he was the writer who
was adapting the novel, and they were like, we gotta
(09:15):
make this thing better. And one thing I think we
can do. This was Houseman talking, I'm not gonna do
a John Houseman, but everyone knows how he sounds. Right.
When I came across John Houseman being involved, was like,
I can't wait. I don't even remember. I mean, he
was just very serious and sort of all I can
think of his Paper Chase. And what was the TV
commercial was it? I want to say it was like
(09:38):
Schwaberry Lynch. I think it might have been Merrill Lynch
maybe I don't know. But one of those finance firms
he did he voiced for, well, yeah. He was very
famous for having a very high pitched, squeaky falsetto voice,
and he talked very very fast, and actually I know
who it was. It was FedEx and Duncan Donuts. He
was well known for it, right, he was the time
to make the donuts guy right with the must so
(10:02):
houseman and uh, Cotch Coke went in there and he said,
one of the things we should do, probably to make
this a little more scary and a little more believable
that it's an actual broadcast is you know, time passes
in the book and we can't do that here, so
let's just get rid of all that stuff so it
gives the appearance that it's going down right now. Yeah,
(10:24):
that was enormously a huge change. Um. And I don't
know if he did that too to help the pacing
move a little faster or what, um, but that was
that would pan out to be a really important difference
in the original script that um Howard Kay turned in
uh and the one that they ended up doing. And
then even beyond that, some of the other changes came
(10:48):
just hours before broadcast, because apparently, if you worked with
Wars and Wells, you should be on the lookout for
him to come in at the last minute and be
like all the stuff we've been practicing for a week
or two, forget all of that. We're we're doing this instead.
And part of that, from what I can tell, is
that he was trying to shake up the act or
shake them out of whatever complacency they'd worked themselves into
(11:09):
with rehearsal and to get this raw, more terrified performance.
And apparently it worked. I mean, I can't imagine I
didn't hear any rehearsals or anything like that. I would
have loved to have compared, you know, the week before too,
you know, the actual broadcast. But everyone delivered these really great, um,
really great performances, and they really nailed by showtime, um
(11:32):
the realism in a lot of ways, not just in
the performances, um, but also in just little details like
they you know, they were they were doing a a
mock radio program, which we'll talk about a little more
in detail in a second, but they were they were
pretending to have news bulletins breaking, so they were they
(11:52):
were doing the things that news bulletins did. And one
of the things that stuck out to me was one
of the eyewitnesses, so it's an actor, but one of
the eyewitnesses is like being interviewed by a news reporter
on the scene and they started to talk, and the
news reporter goes, can you can you speak loud? Speak
more loudly and move into the microphone please, and that
the I think the actor actually says, how's that? And
(12:14):
the guy repeats himself, and then the actress to repeat
himself what he was originally saying. So it has like
that veneer of you know, authenticity, just from little details
like that that, you know, really it stood out to
me when I was listening for him. But if you're
if you're not listening for him, you you just it
makes you buy into the whole thing that much more. Yeah,
And the other big change that Wells brought along was
(12:37):
stretching out the first two halves of the thing such
that it went past it went forty minutes, and radio
at the time, every thirty minutes, like on the half hour,
they would check in with the station I D check
and listeners, even though radio was new, were well honed
(12:58):
to this station break every thirty minute, And so when
ten minutes passed, the half hour go by and there
ain't and there ain't no station break. That really makes
people kind of buy in to what they're listening to
is possibly real. Uh. And then you add to the
fact that there were no sponsors for this show. Yeah,
so they weren't cutting to a Casper or or me,
(13:22):
me and these ads all of a sudden, I can
remember any sponsor. Can you imagine John Houseman saying made
with modal? No, I thought it'd be made with modal. Yeah,
that's right, that's a much better Houseman. I had something
in my threat. Uh. So, yeah, there were no sponsors.
So basically it really came across as something that was
super super realistic sounding. Right, So all that is to
(13:46):
say that they had really by the time this broadcast
aired eight p m. On Sunday, October eight, they they
were not going to be the laughing stock and this
is not going to be embarrassing. It was going to
be pretty awesome. Actually, should we take a break, I
think so, Chuck, and then we'll come back and we
will reveal the broadcast after this. Okay, so we've reached showtime.
(14:40):
Air time a p m. Sunday, October, Mercury Theater on
the Air began broadcasting its adaptation of H. G. Wells
War of the World, and at the very beginning, it's
introduced as much there's an announcer who says that I
think this loss is probably to time somewhat because everyone
probably thinks that they just tried to trick everyone. But no,
(15:00):
they actually introduced it as what they're doing. You know
that this is a radio place at one year in
the future, right right, And yeah, Orson Welles. So it's
introduced by an announcer. Orson Wells comes in does the
introductory essay, and then they did something really smart and interesting,
especially for the time. They went to a musical program
(15:24):
that was supposedly being broadcast from the Murdian Room in
the Hotel Park Plaza. So if you were just tuning
in right then, you would have no idea that this
was Mercury Theater on the air. You would have no
idea that this was a teleplay. You would think that
you were listening to UM something that was pretty regularly broadcast,
which was live music at some like ballroom in a
(15:45):
hotel somewhere in New York. UM that they set up
like a radio transmitter to transmit out over the radio.
That was pretty frequent. But this was part of the
show paused. It is right right exactly so, but that
was a huge which part of the show because that
lilled um listeners into kind of complacency, and listeners who
tuned in late and missed that introduction thought that this
(16:07):
is what they were listening to. And then the first
news bulletin hits, yeah, and that's where things start to
get really interesting. They break in, you know, one of
these interrupt your previously scheduled programs kind of things, and
they come in and with these bulletin's, but they're not
super long at first because they treat it kind of
(16:29):
how it would be in real life. It's just sort
of a breaking story. Something's going together. It was fairly obtuse,
and they didn't like, you know, say, Martians are attacking
us right now everyone from the get go, I sort
of left it up to the listener to kind of
piece it together a little by little. They would go
back to the Meridian room for a bit, and it
wasn't for very long, but because you know, they couldn't
(16:51):
waste too much time, but it was long enough. It
wasn't for like ten seconds. They did it for like
a minute a minute and a half. Right. It made
it seem right then, like that was what you were
listening to, that that was the program and the bulletin
was in fact the bulletin rather than the opposite being true. Yeah.
So eventually you start to piece together what's going on,
and you have, uh, this attack in New Jersey of
(17:13):
all places, and uh, Princeton University they had like a
Princeton astronomer on. They have government officials and they kind
of dole it out a little by little until about
the seventeen minutes seventeen and a half minute mark, and
then that's when it really kind of gets, uh, super
scary and people really see the full picture of what's
(17:34):
going on. So Chuck, um, I feel like we should
read a little bit of the script. There's this one
part starting about the seventeen thirty minute market think you
said where they um as I like to say, they
tore the lid off the sucker. Do you want to
be announcer or Phillips? I'll be the announcer, okay, but
I want you to do Phillips as Sammy Davis jor.
(18:00):
So here's the announcer. Wait, hold on, I'm getting on
my tap shoes. Okay you're ready, Canny man, I'm not
gonna do it that way. Okay, So let me give
you a little bit of background real quick. So these
news bulletins up to this point of basically said there's
some weird thing that landed they thought was a meteorite
at first, that landed in Grover's Mill, New Jersey. Um.
(18:24):
And then later bulletin said that, oh, actually there's some
weird tentacle like weird things emerging from this thing we
thought was a meteor Right. So now we're back at
Grover's Mill. So I'm the announcer. We are bringing you
and I witness account of what's happening on the Wilmouth
Farm Grover's Mill, New Jersey. And that was kind of
(18:44):
like they were breaking in to let you know that.
And then they go back to more piano for some reason.
And then we now return you to Carl Phillips at
Grover's Mill. Lady, ladies and gentlemen. Am I on on,
ladies and gentlemen. Here, I am back up a stone
wall that adjoins Mr. Willmas Garden. From here I get
a sweep of the whole scene. I'll give you every
detail as long as I can talk, as long as
(19:06):
I can see. More State police have arrived. They're drawing
up a cordon in front of the pit, about thirty
of them. No need to push the crowd back now
they're willing to keep their distance. The captain is conferring
with someone we we can't quite see who. Oh, yes,
I believe it's a professor Pearson. Yes it is. Now
they've parted. The professor moves around one side, studying the object. Well.
(19:26):
The captain and two policemen advance with something in their hands.
I can see it now. It's a it's a white
handkerchief tied to a pole, a flag of truce. If
those creatures know what that means, what anything means? Wait,
something's happening. You can cut in any time. Who can
(19:49):
take a rainbow? Wait? Sorry, hump shape is rising out
of the pit. I can make out a small beam
of light against a mirror. What's that? There's jet there's
a jet flame springing from the mirror and at leaps
right at the advancing men. It strikes them head on.
Good lord, they're turning into flame. Oh god, oh my god.
(20:13):
Now the whole field's caught fire, the woods, the barns,
the gas tanks, the automobiles, and spreading everywhere. It's coming
this way, about twenty yards to my right, very nice
and scene that was great, Chuck so Um they they
(20:35):
you mentioned, or I should say Phillips. The reporter on
the scene mentioned Professor Pearson, and he's this he ends
up being the main character and he's uh, he's an
interview he's in a Stromer's interviewed earlier on and he's
on the scene as it happens. Um, and the the
program just keeps going like that, like there's another there's
a main announcer. Um, who I played? I thought rather well, Um,
(20:58):
thank you, and it seemed to you by the future
as a fully artist, if I may say so, thank
you very much. I've been practicing. You want to hear
my machine gun? I've been doing that one since I
was like six. All right, how about walking through the forest?
All right now, how about a good punch to the face.
(21:21):
Oh wow, that was good, Thank you. Probably punched myself
in the thing. I'm dedicated. That's how dedicated to the
art of fully so. Um. The announcer just keeps bringing
in more and more news as this thing goes on
and unfolds of like, now, these things aren't just in
New Jersey there in Chicago. They're like out West they're
(21:42):
they're starting to invade everywhere, and they're killing people left
and right. That you said there was a government official
that reads a statement is actually that they say that
it's the Secretary of the Interior, which I thought was
particularly genius because I mean, probably not that many people
were familiar with the Secretary of the Interior, Harold x Um,
(22:03):
but they had him sound like FDR so that they
would kind of play on everyone's um, I guess unconscious
or I'm sure there were people who are like the
sounds just like FDR, but at the very least, it
would kind of evoke that government authority, the reality of
like a government figure, you know. Yeah. So meanwhile, on
(22:24):
the other stations, there's one that's running opposite, which is
a really really popular radio show at the time, um
probably the most popular, Chasing Sandborn Hour, which had the
very very famous ventriloquist Edgar Bergen in his dummy Charlie McCarthy,
and we talked about that on our ventilla Quism episode.
Remember that they started out on radio, which is hysterical.
(22:49):
I don't even know why they would even bother with
the dummy part. Just do too. You wouldn't even know
that's what he did. You wouldn't even have to wear
pants around and your spaghetti stained under shirt and yeah,
naked from the waist down, maybe some socks, doing a
couple of voices. Here's your contract Edgar Bergin, What do
(23:10):
you think about that? Charlie Dart get me started, Like
that's it. I could be a famous vintiloquist on the radio.
You just you just did it. I think I think
Hollywood's gonna come with Collin. But the real sort of
interesting um factoid here, I think is that people were
channel surfing back then when you cut to commercial, just
like we used to do when we didn't have pause
(23:33):
buttons and fast forward buttons. And what is this pause button?
You keep mentioning? I've never heard of this. You've never
paused television? No, wow, you you need I don't believe
I've ever paused anything in my life. It's funny. We
were Emily and I've been watching that German sci fi
series Dark, which is very challenging to follow, and uh,
(23:57):
there's a lot of rewinding like wait, wait, who was
at what did they just say? And we rewind it
a bit and do that again, and or you know,
of course I got to go the bathroom. Let me
depose it. And I was thinking about how, not too
long ago, you just if you missed something, you missed it.
You just paid the count or you paid yourself on
the couch. Yeah, there was no clear like, let me
go back and clear this up. It's like, what did
(24:19):
he say? I have no idea. I guess we'll never know.
There's no internet. I guess I should probably stop watching
this show altogether. You go walk up to the VCR
in President Jack. But at any rate, back then, let's
say Charlie McCarthy goes to break and no word from
Mark Banser and they flip it over to war the
world's at this point in the broadcast when the s
(24:42):
is hitting the fan and it's going to scare the
pants off of people in well, yeah, even more than
I think that they would have dialed over even before that,
so they might have caught like a news bulletin and
then maybe some of that music from the Meridian Room. Um,
so I really would have caught them. And there were
supposedly a substantial number of people who did dial over,
(25:03):
and we're like, wait, wait, what what is going on here?
And now we come to the reaction the response, because
if you picked up the paper the next day in America, um,
just about anywhere in any major city, you're going to
find huge, blaring headlines like the one that the New
(25:24):
York Daily News printed in tall, bold letters. Fake radio
war stirs terror through the US. Yeah, stories of of
shock and hysteria, stories of people taking their own life,
stories of people dying from heart attacks. The ape sat
a man in Pittsburgh found his wife with poison in
(25:45):
her hand and said, I'm gonna I'd rather die this
way than like that. And you know, talking to Wells
afterward in the aftermath of this, he apologizes publicly says
they didn't intend to do this. Uh, we had we
didn't know what was going to cause a panic. And
then you know, if you look over the years more interviews,
(26:05):
it's sort of seems like Wells is a little more like,
you know, we thought it would be pretty fun to
scare people, and I didn't know if it was going
to cause a panic, but we definitely intended it to
have this effect on people, whereas houseman in Cotch, We're like, no,
we really didn't mean it. Um. So it was sort
of conflicting reports from the production on what they thought
(26:26):
was going to be the result, right, Um. And I've
read an interview with John Landis, the great director who
um worked with Wells on a project that never got
made towards the end of wells life, and he didn't
say that. Wells admitted to him that he meant to,
but he got to know him enough that he was like, yes,
if you watched this, this initial press conference where he's
(26:46):
apologizing because the whole country was ripped apart in chaos
and we're running wild in the streets and like nearly
rioted because of his broadcast, he's not at all. He's
he's just as happy as a lark that this all happened,
even though he's pretending to apologize. And he said that
was just this resource And Wells, did you just say apologize.
(27:11):
It's a it's a new version I'm testing out. I
like it. It's it's good. Kind of yeah, it's it's
at least as good as apologize. So this was just
a couple of days in the news cycle. It wasn't
the biggest deal in the world, even though it was
fairly sensational. Uh. Story writing for for a newspapers. UH.
(27:31):
And it might have just gone that way had it
not been for a Princeton University social psychologist a couple
of years later named Hadley Cantrell, and Cantrell released a
book on the real effects of this thing and basically
said that you know, people were praying, crying, they were
(27:51):
frantically trying to escape death from the Martians. Six million
people listen to this thing, and at least when six
of them were frightened or disturbed, and I have the
evidence right here. Yeah, And the evidence that he had
was based on a series of interviews with a hundred
and thirty five people. Almost all of them were in
(28:12):
New Jersey, which remember that's where the crux of the
invasion and destruction being described took place, because Grover's Mill,
New Jersey is actually a real town in Jersey. Um,
so he went to Jersey because he was in Princeton.
So he went where he was and interviewed a hundred
and thirty five people, and he said, were you scared
(28:32):
by this broadcast? And the participant would say yes, and
he'd say you're in my study. And he'd ask the
next one, were you scared? Were you scared by this broadcast?
And they'd say no, he'd be like, you're not in
the study. And so yeah, he said in the in
the methodology that he selected a hundred out of the
hundred and thirty five because they had been scared by
(28:53):
the broadcast. And so he took this these interviews of
people in New Jersey and he extrapola did it to
the rest of the country, and he said, yep, this
is this is real. This is a really great example
of people, um being fooled into into terror and panic.
And you know the responses when this happens, like we
(29:16):
saw after the World were the World's broadcast, people will
run out into the street, they will flee the city,
they will um call their friends and neighbors, they will
um they may attempt suicide, they may die of a
heart attack. Like the New York Times UM reported, uh
twenty or so people in New York alone needed to
be treated for for shock and hysteria. This is what
(29:38):
happens when somebody toys with the public trust and UM yeah,
it's pretty nuts. The end That was what That was
the end of Hedley's Headley's book, right, Uh, yeah, not
the end of this episode. So this is what this
specific study is. What if you've ever taken um asked
(30:00):
media or communications college class, you've probably studied War of
the World's largely because of this study. Basically, it might
have just come and gone if it weren't for this
um this academic paper that we're put out and all
of a sudden, for decades and decades, it's reported on
as like a cautionary tale almost of responsibility and media,
(30:23):
even fictional media. And you know, as recently as two
thousand thirteen, PBS American Experienced documentary said this was the case.
Our old pals at Radio Lab in two thousand and
eight did an episode about this where that was the case.
But there were a few problems with this paper. Beyond
the supremely bad methodology behind just getting scared New Jersey
(30:47):
people to go in there and and give their report.
Was they found up that we they ended up finding
real ratings for this thing, and not a ton of
people even heard it. It turns out, uh so, so
his six million estimate was way off, way way way off.
And they did a survey during the program that said
(31:07):
two percent of respondents said that they were listening in
some markets, like big cities like Boston even preempted this
thing for local programming. So it wasn't a ton of people,
It wasn't a ton of people being scared and like, uh,
just literally losing their minds with fear and panic and
things swing so far the other way that it the
(31:30):
narrative became, you know what, no one was really scared
at all, And what newspapers really did was they put
out hit pieces on a competing medium like radio and
how you shouldn't trust it anymore. So so what happened
over the last within some time within the century, but
sometime in the two thousand tens, the the myth that
(31:53):
America lost its mind went bonkers and ran wild in
the street because they were panicked by the War of
the World's broadcast was shown to be a myth that
it didn't happen, and that was the new understanding for
a little while, um, just a few years, until another
guy came along and said, you know what, Um, they're
(32:16):
actually both both are right and both are wrong in
a lot of ways. Should we take a break and
talk about the truth always being somewhere in the middle?
Mm hmm, all right, I said, the truth is always
(32:57):
somewhere in between. That's not always the case with everything
in life obviously, but that's that's a saying for a reason. Uh,
And that's definitely seems to be the case. Uh, in
this case with a gentleman named a Brad Schwartz, he's
a probably the leading War of the World scholar. And
he went back and he went and investigated the letters
(33:21):
and the cables that that came in. Uh. They were
at the University of Michigan Archives, and these are the
letters that actually came in two Wells and the Mercury
Theater in the days after the broadcast. And what he contends,
and I agree, is that this is what you need
to be reading, is what people were really thinking at
the time, that weren't just cherry picked in the town
(33:41):
where that got attacked in New Jersey, who were obviously
they were going to be freaked out more than anyone
in the country. Right. So one of the things that
he points out is, you know, everybody been, you know,
since around two thousand ten or maybe a little earlier.
Everyone had been wailing on Hadley can't traill Um for
his terrible, terrible methodology. Um, but they the revisionists were
(34:06):
also kind of doing the same thing. They were making
all sorts of suppositions, like the idea that the newspapers
had basically conspired to target radio its rival to show
how irresponsible it was and how it shouldn't be trusted
with the news, that it's really newspapers that should be
handling the news. And maybe you can listen to a
little or fanny on on the radio, but that's about it.
(34:29):
That that was all supposition. That was as much supposition
as um Hadley can trill extrapolated his findings in New
Jersey to the rest of the country. UM. And a
Brad Schwartz. One of the reasons I think he's doing
a good jobs because he's he's saying no where. If
you actually sit down and read these letters and these
cables that were coming in in the days after, they
(34:50):
really probably paint the most accurate picture anyone's ever found
to this to this point of how it was actually received.
Like you can see almost in real time at the time, Um,
what people were saying about this by in their letters
to orson wells into the Mercury Theater on the air. Yeah,
and and it was a range of feelings. It was
(35:12):
everything from people who said, you know what, we knew
it wasn't real, but it was really scary and super awesome.
I don't know if they said things like super awesome.
He said that a number of people wrote in who
actually um made fun of the people who fell for
it and said that you know, they're they're gullible, their
(35:33):
their rubes, and one writer even said they should be
sterilized and disenfranchised. Yeah, because they'd shown that in an
actual emergency they were undependable. They would just run around
like chickens with their heads cut off in the streets. Yeah.
And Swartz sort of draws a line between what was
going on back then to us today with this whole
fake news hoax garbage that we have to listen to
(35:56):
day in and day out, and uh basically said, this
was the first viral phenomenon in media. Was the World
of the World's broadcast, and it was a mixed bag.
Some people loved it, some people did think it was
real and panicked, but it certainly was not this widespread
panic across the country like you were talking about. Yeah,
(36:16):
he said, less than a chord of the letters described
what he would consider panic, but even most of those
weren't actually angry when they were writing the letter. A
lot of them were thrilled. But he he did right.
But he did say, um that, yes, there are cases
that you see in these letters and cables, Um that
that described people panicking. So that did happen in some cases.
(36:40):
Most of it seems to have been isolated in New Jersey.
So if Hadley ken Trill had not extrapolated his findings
and had you know, interviewed more people who had different
reactions to the broadcast. But if it had just been
like an investigation into the reaction in New Jersey, that
study or that look would have been much more useful.
(37:02):
But the fact is he just screwed the screwed the
methodology up so badly that it's it's basically useless. But
he wasn't. He didn't make up the panic that he described.
Necessarily may have exaggerated it, who knows, but it did.
It does seem to have actually happened in some cases,
but it was sporadic, few and far between, certainly not organized,
(37:24):
and certainly not seen across the rest of the country
like it was reported on by the papers the next day. Yeah,
which sort of leads us to the story of the
poor pulses of Manhattan. This Manhattan couple Um, they did
fall for it. They were very scared. Apparently, as the
story goes, they got their last six dollars together and
(37:45):
got on a train to get the heck out of
New York m assuming not going west into New Jersey,
they went north towards Connecticut. Um, got as far as
they could on what little money they had. Get off
the train, and you know, there's a bunch of other
passengers that they're telling, you know, they're warning everybody of
what's happened. And this one guy there goes over and
(38:08):
gets there. And I just pictured this in the movie.
It's like, no one's listening to this guy. And he
picks up the newspaper basically the TV guide to the
Dunkin Donuts. He says, hey, guys, it says right here
were the world's broadcast is supposed to be on at
that hour. Um, Like, it just says right here in
the newspaper. It's a it's a radio play. Everyone no one, everyone,
(38:31):
no one, nobody, Okay. And then he just goes and
gets on the train and leaves. But they feel bad
for them that the other people that were you know,
that had gathered together, they loaned them or gave them
I guess some money, and she chipped in and got
them back to New York City. And then later Estelle
Pauls wrote a fifteen page letter the next day to
(38:53):
Orson Wells that was very admiring and said how thrilled
she was, but he imagine what else I know? Hell
of a story, I think, is what which she has
kept over and over and over all. Right, So, um
so that was one of the letters that Abrad Schwartz
(39:13):
turned up in that trove, and like it very clearly
describes a couple panicking because they mistook the War of
the World's broadcast. But again, um, this was not like
across the nation like the papers reported, and Schwartz actually
explains to the papers basically, um, as a combination of
a couple of things. One is a bias. I can't
(39:36):
tell if it's selection bias, volunteer bias, or confirmation bias,
but the biases as follows. If you're in a newsroom
and all of a sudden, your phone starts ringing off
the hook, and you're getting a hundred and fifty percent
more calls that night, and all of them are people
asking about this Martian invasion and what's going on? And
is this real or is this a hoax? Or have
(39:57):
you guys heard anything about this? And some of those
calls are even from the local police who are also
getting similar calls, and now they're calling you to find out.
Then it seems like there's a lot of people calling
and freaking out about this Martian thing. But if you
step back, if you zoom out and look at that
number of people that actually called the newsroom, it's just
this minute fraction of the population of whatever town it is. Um,
(40:22):
So it wasn't a bunch of people freaking out, But
to the people answering the phone in the newsroom who
are getting swamped with calls, way more calls than usual,
it did seem like that. So that, combined with anecdotal
reports that no one followed up followed up on from
the wire services that people were attempting suicide or having
heart attacks or whatever, that just being reported and related
(40:44):
as fact, led everybody to believe that this was actually
happening out there in the country, that people were running.
Well maybe not my town, because I stuck my head
outside of the news room and I didn't see anything,
but I hear they're going crazy in Chicago, right now
or I hear they're really going nuts in Milwaukee or whatever. Um.
And that's how it got reported, and that's what everyone
thought happened. People who lived through this thought that this
(41:06):
happened the next day. Orson Welles thought his career was
in jeopardy the next day because he accidentally made America
go berserk. And that's how that myth began, and that's
how it stood. And and A Brad Schworts basically traced
it back to lazy, lazy reporting. So myth busted thanks
to A. Brad Schwartz and US and US for sure,
(41:30):
I'm glad you included us. So there's an interesting footnote
here though, because this actually did kind of play out
that way, um eight years later and night was eight
years later, Yeah, in Ecuador. So this is in Quito, Ecuador.
These broadcasters recreate the Orson Wells radio play, um, and
(41:53):
they did a version that went a lot further than
his did and got other radio stations to join in
and add to their warding, which really pretty brilliant move
there to increase like you turned the station and it's
happening over there too. And this really did scare people.
They really did take to the streets and panic. Uh
there was you know, public panic going on. And then
(42:14):
the crowd finds out that it's fiction and they get
angry and actually turned into an angry mob and burned
down the local newspaper building that had the radio station
inside of it, killing six people. Yeah, six people died,
fifteen people were injured, Like they knew that the staff
was in that building, and they set the building on
fire to try and kill them. A bunch of people
(42:36):
escaped out the back, but a lot of people didn't escape,
and the two people who were responsible for the broadcast,
including UM, Ecuador's most beloved and trusted presenter, UM, were
indicted for it. Like they're more safer basically, yeah, exactly, Um,
and they were. They were indicted for their role in this.
(42:57):
Like people died because of it. And this actually does
seem to have happened in Ecuador. Amazing. Yeah, So there
you go. The idea that America fell into chaos and
panic after the war the world's broadcast is largely myth.
Go forth and spread the gospel everybody, unless you're in Ecuador,
and then you're like, no, it's actually happened here. Uh.
(43:20):
And since I said that, actually happened here, I think,
Chuck is time for the listener mail. So this is
uh from Tom in the UK. Did you see this email?
I don't think so. It's great. It's one long sentence
and I'm gonna try and read it. And how I
think Tom speaks as as Tom from the UK, because
(43:45):
just the way he wrote it, I think Tom probably
talks a little bit like this. This isn't Tom from
the UK who was our tour manager when we did
our UK tour? Is it now? Well? Shout out to
that Tom. This is an engineer and this is what
he all right, Sup, Josh and Chuck, Tom engineer from
the UK, Stoke on Trent, big fan of the show.
(44:08):
Been binging for about two years and got through all
of them, all of you lot, even Jerry have got
me through a lot these last couple of years, and
I put a few people onto your podcast. Wanted to
email you lot for a while and finally managed to
get round to emailing a load of things to people
about stuff that really doesn't matter. Emailed the TV show
(44:30):
about one of their actors, a part of a particle
physicist about using a light year of lead as a
frame of reference. The company super Noodles for the excellent
job they've done with their super noodle part, but I'm
not much for the pas And I just wanted to say,
I know you like the Japanese mayo, but you really
(44:52):
need to try the Polish mayo. Spot on all the
best Tom boil Boy Tom now is great And Chuck,
that was a fantastic stoke on trent accent, the most
accurate I've ever heard and the first Tom that was
a great email. And you're right, Chuck, I love that
email so much. I had so much fun. You were
(45:12):
right to choose that one. UM. So thanks Tom, thanks
for writing in. Thank you for including us in your
list of people you harass via email. Um, and keep listening, okay,
and keep writing in. Maybe we'll make this a regular thing, Chuck,
I would that yep. So Tom right in again. Uh
And if you want to write into we want to
hear from you, you can send us an email to
(45:34):
Stuff podcast at iHeart radio dot com. Stuff you Should
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