On the evening of October 30, 1938, the night before Halloween, CBS radio aired an adaptation of H. G. Wells's novel The War of the Worlds. The Mercury Theatre on the Air performed it, under a 23-year-old Orson Welles. The script, written mostly by Howard Koch, told the story of a Martian invasion through a series of breaking news bulletins that kept interrupting a music program, with the first landing in Grover's Mill, New Jersey.
By the next morning, newspapers around the country were reporting that the broadcast had set off mass hysteria. That version of events became part of American folklore, and many people still believe millions fled their homes.
Historians who have examined the evidence closely think the panic was far smaller than the legend. Something did happen that night. The larger story, though, is how the newspapers turned it into a national event.
What the broadcast actually did
The program ran for an hour. It began with an announcement that it was a dramatization of Wells's novel. Further announcements during the broadcast, including at the station break and at the end, made clear that it was a play.
The realism was deliberate. The first half borrowed the style of radio news: an orchestra playing, then flash reports of explosions on Mars, then a reporter at the scene in Grover's Mill describing a strange cylinder and the creatures coming out of it. Radio was the fastest news medium of its day, and the program traded on that authority.
How many people were listening?
Here is the first problem with the panic story. The Mercury Theatre was hardly a top show. It aired opposite The Chase and Sanborn Hour, featuring the ventriloquist Edgar Bergen, one of the most popular programs on radio.
A ratings survey taken that night by the C. E. Hooper service reportedly found that only a very small share of people were tuned to CBS at all. Estimates of the real audience are uncertain, but they fall well short of the "millions panicking" of later legend.
Where the panic story came from
The day after the broadcast, newspapers ran dramatic front pages. The New York Times headline read "Radio Listeners in Panic, Taking War Drama as Fact." The stories told of people fleeing, police switchboards jammed, and people covering their faces with wet towels to protect against gas.
Some of those reports were true. People did call newspapers, police and radio stations. Some were frightened, and some left their homes. But many of the stories were anecdotes, gathered in a hurry by phone and repeated across the country by the wire services.
Writing in 2013, the media historians Jefferson Pooley and Michael Socolow argued that newspapers had a motive to exaggerate. Radio had been drawing advertising money and audiences away from print, so a story showing radio to be irresponsible and dangerous suited newspaper publishers well. Their review turned up few confirmed cases of genuine hysteria and no documented deaths linked to the broadcast.
The Princeton study
In 1940, the psychologist Hadley Cantril and colleagues at Princeton published The Invasion from Mars: A Study in the Psychology of Panic. It estimated that around six million people heard the broadcast and that more than a million of them were frightened.
For decades, that study lent the panic story scientific authority. Later scholars, however, have pointed out its problems. Its estimates rested partly on a survey conducted weeks afterward, by which time the newspaper coverage had already shaped how people remembered the night. Being "frightened" is also a long way from fleeing in panic. Some of those who said they were scared may simply have been startled, or unsure for a moment, before checking another station.
What really happened in Grover's Mill
Local stories say that some residents of Grover's Mill went out with guns and fired at a water tower they took for a Martian machine. The tale has been widely repeated and is part of local lore, but it is hard to confirm from documents of the time. The town embraced its role regardless, and a monument there now commemorates the broadcast.
The consequences
There were calls for regulation. The Federal Communications Commission looked into the broadcast but did not penalize CBS. The network did agree not to use fake news bulletins in drama in the same way again.
Welles became famous. Within a few years he would make Citizen Kane. He later joked about the broadcast and what it had caused, and his reputation for showmanship grew partly out of the panic story.
The same script caused far more serious trouble elsewhere. In February 1949, a Spanish-language adaptation broadcast in Quito, Ecuador, led to genuine panic. When listeners found out it was fiction, a crowd attacked the radio station building and set it on fire. Several people were reported killed. That later episode is much better documented as a real crisis than the American one.
Why the myth lasted
The panic story is deeply satisfying. It suggests that new media are powerful and that ordinary people are easily fooled. Those ideas resurface every time a new technology comes along, whether television, the internet or social media.
The record from 1938 points to something more modest. Some people were confused, and some were frightened. Many more people learned about the panic from their newspapers the next day than ever heard the broadcast itself.
How to read this kind of story
- Look at the sources' motives. Newspapers reporting on a competitor's mistake are not neutral witnesses.
- Separate anecdotes from counts. A dozen vivid stories do not add up to millions of people.
- Check how the numbers were made. Surveys taken after heavy news coverage measure memory as much as they measure the event.
- Notice when the legend outgrows the facts. That is often the point at which the story has started serving a purpose.
Sources
- Jefferson Pooley and Michael J. Socolow, "The Myth of the War of the Worlds Panic," Slate, October 28, 2013.
- A. Brad Schwartz, Broadcast Hysteria: Orson Welles's War of the Worlds and the Art of Fake News (Hill and Wang, 2015).
- Hadley Cantril, The Invasion from Mars: A Study in the Psychology of Panic (Princeton University Press, 1940).
- The New York Times, October 31, 1938, front page.
- Library of Congress, "The War of the Worlds" broadcast materials.