War of the Worlds

Remembering The War of the Worlds

Image Source: Rense.com

Not many people who are alive today have any memory of what happened the night of October 30, 1938, when a radio dramatization of H.G. Wells’ “The War of the Worlds” caused unprecedented chaos and panic across the country.

The many personal accounts that the writer of the original New York Times article (date/page) portrays show just how much panic and fear ensued in the duration of the broadcast. Many residents were reportedly driven out of their minds with hysteria.

Let’s take a look at one of the experiences in particular recounted in the article:

“A man in Pittsburgh said he returned home in the midst of the broadcast and found his wife in the bathroom, a bottle of poison in her hand, and screaming: ‘I'd rather die this way than like that!’” 

 

I mean, poison is just an awful way to die. Granted, there is no “good” way of dying, but for someone to even consider willingly drinking a bottle of poison just to escape a perceived threat is just stunning to me. I guess it’s impossible for Americans today to empathize with the amount of anxiety that already consumed many residents at the time of this broadcast. So while it’s impossible to truly feel what those people were feeling, these firsthand accounts are still able to give us at least an eerie basic sense of the panic and dread that filled the air.

This article also gives great coverage and insight into just how chaotic the country had become in the aftermath of the broadcast. You had everyone trying to call loved ones, calling the police trying to discover what was happening.

 “The switchboard of The New York Times was overwhelmed by the calls. A total of 875 were received. One man who called from Dayton, Ohio, asked, ‘What time will it be the end of the world?’” 

Even though alerts were sent out through radio stations and the police department saying that everything was alright and that there was nothing to be afraid of, not many people who heard and believed that the broadcast was real were going to hear it while scrambling around thinking the world had come to an end. It’s not like today where we have smart phones and are able to receive news updates and alerts basically as soon as they happen. In 1938, all they really had was the radio!

I don’t honestly believe that this broadcast would cause nearly as much panic as it did back in 1938, for many reasons:

First, many Americans would have no reason to believe anything like this could actually happen, as they did back then. Also, due to the anxiety right after a scare with war in Europe, and in a period where broadcasts were frequently interrupted for updates from overseas, many Americans were on edge to begin with. Second, that nervousness combined with the fact that people obviously either did not hear or did not listen to the opening of the broadcast or had not heard that this dramatization was going to be on, is what led to the mass panic, chaos, confusion and hysteria. Third, there are far more outlets by which we could hear and see this broadcast being promoted than were present back in 1938.

I had never listened to it fully, but it’s pretty easy to see how people in 1938 could become alarmed if they missed the very opening of the broadcast. If you want to have a listen as to why, you can listen to it at RadioLab

 Landan Kuhlmann is a senior majoring in Journalism with a minor in Business Administration