The Myth of the War of the Worlds Panic

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By Jefferson Pooley and Michael Socolow
www.slate.com
10-28-13

Orson Welles’ infamous 1938 radio program did not touch off nationwide hysteria. Why does the legend persist?

     Wednesday marks the 75th anniversary of Orson Welles’ electrifying War of the Worlds broadcast, in which the Mercury Theatre on the Air enacted a Martian invasion of Earth. “Upwards of a million people, [were] convinced, if only briefly, that the United States was being laid waste by alien invaders,” narrator Oliver Platt informs us in the new PBS documentary commemorating the program. The panic inspired by Welles made War of the Worlds perhaps the most notorious event in American broadcast history.

That’s the story you already know—it’s the narrative widely reprinted in academic textbooks and popular histories. With actors dramatizing the reaction of frightened audience members (based on contemporaneous letters), the new documentary, part of PBS’s American Experience series, reinforces the notion that naïve Americans were terrorized by their radios back in 1938. So did this weekend’s episode of NPR’s Radiolab, which opened with the assertion that on Oct. 30, 1938, “The United States experienced a kind of mass hysteria that we’ve never seen before.”

There’s only one problem: The supposed panic was so tiny as to be practically immeasurable on the night of the broadcast. Despite repeated assertions to the contrary in the PBS and NPR programs, almost nobody was fooled by Welles’ broadcast. . . .

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See Also:

70 Years Ago Today: Orson Welles Presented H.G. Wells, "War of The Worlds"

Radio Terror Brings Panic in All Areas
10-31-1938

Nation is Swept By Hysteria Over 'Martian Invasion'
10-31-1938

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