The legend is one of the most repeated in the history of mass media. On the night of Sunday, October 30, 1938, millions of Americans took a radio drama for fact, believed Martians were wading ashore in New Jersey, and bolted — clogging highways, jamming switchboards, fleeing into the night with wet towels pressed against the poison gas. Journalism schools teach it as the moment radio proved it could seize a nation by the throat.
Against that stands the record, which says almost none of the legend happened as told. No mass stampede has ever been substantiated. No deaths from the broadcast were ever confirmed. The towels, the choked highways, the suicides belong to a story assembled afterward, somewhere other than the streets. A real, smaller fright did reach a portion of the audience — but the question worth trying is not whether America panicked exactly as remembered, but who decided it had panicked on that scale, and what they got out of saying so.
The Broadcast on Trial
At eight o’clock that Sunday, CBS handed an hour of national airtime to a twenty-three-year-old named Orson Welles and his Mercury Theatre on the Air. The episode was an adaptation of H.G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds, rewritten by Howard Koch, who had moved the Martian landing from Victorian England to a real crossroads in New Jersey: Grover’s Mill, a hamlet in West Windsor that almost no one outside the township had heard of.
What made the broadcast unusual was its shape. Instead of narrating the invasion, Welles staged it as a normal evening of radio coming apart in real time. A program of dance music keeps getting interrupted by news flashes — a strange explosion on Mars, then a falling object near Grover’s Mill, then a reporter on the scene describing a metal cylinder unscrewing itself in a farmer’s field. The bulletins arrive in exactly the cadence of real ones, voiced like the men who read genuine emergencies over the air. For about forty minutes there is no host, no story, only the apparatus of news reporting an apocalypse.
That is the case for the prosecution: a fiction built to be mistaken for fact, broadcast to a nation. The trouble is the audience.
The Audience That Wasn’t There
The simplest problem with the panic is the size of the audience. On the night of the broadcast, the C.E. Hooper rating service was doing what it always did — telephoning households at random and asking what they were listening to. It reached about five thousand homes. Only two percent named the Welles program, or a “play,” or anything pointing to CBS.
The other ninety-eight percent were elsewhere. Most of them, in all likelihood, were on NBC, where Edgar Bergen and his wooden dummy Charlie McCarthy ran the Chase and Sanborn Hour, one of the most popular shows in the country. A program that practically no one was hearing cannot have emptied the streets of a continent.
Of the few who did tune in, fewer still were fooled, and fewer than that did anything about it. Some had switched over late, missed the opening that named it as fiction, and felt a jolt of fright. A share of those assumed not Martians but Germans — in the autumn of 1938, with Europe sliding toward war, an attack from the sky was a plausible fear, and it pointed at Berlin, not Mars. People did call their local police and newspapers to ask what was going on — enough of them, in New York, to flood police headquarters with more than two thousand calls inside one fifteen-minute stretch of the broadcast. That is most of the documented record: phone calls, asking, in numbers that overwhelmed a few switchboards for an evening. Not a continent in flight.
The Motive
If the panic was that small on the night, the story of a panic had to be assembled somewhere. It was assembled in newsrooms, and the newsrooms had a motive.
Through the Depression, radio had been pulling advertising away from newspapers at a frightening clip — a younger medium, free to the listener, eating into the revenue that kept print alive. Worse, radio had spent the preceding weeks scooping the papers on the news itself, carrying the Munich crisis live into living rooms while the morning editions trailed a day behind. To the newspaper trade, radio was both a thief and an upstart. And here, dropped in their laps, was a chance to show that the upstart could not be trusted with the public mind.
The morning after the broadcast, Welles was on front pages from coast to coast. The Associated Press moved a wire story that gathered scattered, anecdotal reports from its bureaus into a single picture of nationwide terror, and hundreds of papers ran it. Editorials followed. The New York Times ran one titled “Terror by Radio,” scolding broadcasters for letting “blood-curdling fiction” be “offered in exactly the manner that real news would have been given.” The trade journal Editor and Publisher warned that the country faced “the danger of incomplete, misunderstood news over a medium which has yet to prove ... that it is competent to perform the news job.” The medium that had yet to prove itself was, conveniently, the competition.
The argument was aimed past the reader, at the people who held radio’s leash — advertisers and regulators. The lesson the papers pressed was that radio was reckless, that an audience could not tell its fictions from its facts, and that something ought to be done. Frank McNinch, the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, extracted an informal promise from the networks not to dress fiction up as news flashes again. No rule was written. No one was punished. Welles, who had spent the next day at an apologetic press conference insisting he never meant to deceive anyone, kept his job and his contract.
The Verdict, and Why It Stuck
A scare that real would have left a long trail. This one barely outlived the week. Within a day or two the story slid off the front pages and most papers let it die — the behavior of a sensation, not a catastrophe.
What kept it alive was a book. In 1940 the Princeton psychologist Hadley Cantril published The Invasion from Mars, a study of the supposed panic that estimated more than a million Americans had been frightened by the broadcast. Cantril’s figures leaned heavily on the same inflated survey numbers the press had generated, and the book treated the newspaper coverage as evidence of the very panic the coverage had manufactured. Some twelve thousand five hundred newspaper articles ran about the broadcast in the three weeks after it aired, and Cantril read that blizzard of print as a record of mass hysteria. It was at least as much a record of an industry’s grievance.
Cantril’s study became the standard citation, the broadcast became the textbook case, and the textbook case became common knowledge. Welles himself, who had been mortified in 1938, came to relish the legend and burnished it for the rest of his life. Generations learned that radio had once frightened America out of its wits.
Later historians went back to the record and found the wits largely intact. The reassessment runs through the work of researchers like W. Joseph Campbell and A. Brad Schwartz, and through a 2013 analysis by the communication scholars Jefferson Pooley and Michael Socolow, who concluded that the panic, on the night it supposedly happened, was so small as to be nearly unmeasurable.
Two broadcasts went out that Sunday, in a sense. One was an hour of theater pretending to be news, and it ended at nine o’clock. The other was a piece of news pretending to be fact, printed by an industry with a reason to want it believed — and that one ran for the better part of a century.