The Red Cross reported 700 people killed and 1,754 injured, and that 63,000 had lost their homes. President Roosevelt sent Hopkins north with 100,000 men from the Army, the Coast Guard, and the WPA. Before long they had the current running again, but much that had been lost in the storm could never be brought back. New England mourned its trees; 16,000 were down in Springfield alone, and someone calculated that the hurricane had toppled enough wood to build 200,000 houses. The season’s apple crop was a total loss. Maimed shore cottages that had lost their beaches were being auctioned off for pittances. And because only 5 percent of the losses had been insured, many factories which had been in trouble since the Crash went out of business.
For a while an imaginative beggar roamed Boston Common wearing a placard which read, “For 25¢ I will listen to your story of the hurricane.” One of the best tales was about the American flag on New York’s Whitehall Building. It had been torn to shreds. Inside, a few feet away, was the regional office of the U.S. Weather Bureau.
***
Long Islanders and New Englanders traveling to other parts of the country that fall were startled by the number of well-informed men and women who knew nothing of the hurricane. In part this reflected the magnitude of the disaster. For the first twenty-four hours the New York Times hadn’t been able to get any reliable news at all. Even the Boston Globe’s editors, who could see overturned freighters in their own harbor, didn’t publish an interview with a survivor until Friday, two days after the big wind. That same morning the Times, piecing together scattered reports, realized that the country had suffered a greater disaster than the Chicago fire, the San Francisco earthquake, or any Mississippi flood. Then the paper ran eight-column headlines about the hurricane. Surprisingly, few readers read them or retained what they read; within a week they had forgotten it, and the story has been one of the forgotten fragments of American history.
The big reason for this mnemonic failure was that the country’s attention was still riveted on Czechoslovakia. The crisis in Europe had become the first of those mass communications phenomena which might be called the shared simultaneous experience. Unlike those which followed—the Army-McCarthy hearings of 1954, for example, or the Kennedy funeral of 1963—Czech developments were not televised. Yet the impact was immense. Listeners became helpless spectators following events which they knew might alter their own lives. After the Munich Pact was signed on September 29, CBS hailed the arrival of radio “not merely as a disseminator of the news, but as a social power.”
This was true, but it was not all good. Over radio, fear had fed on fear; everyone had wanted a happy ending, and when eventually it did end, the best possible construction was put upon the agreement. Chamberlain was the hero of the hour, as much in America as in Britain. It took a while for people to realize that he was a weak old man who had sold out a resolute and embattled ally for a worthless Hitler promise. Churchill knew it, and said, “Britain and France had to choose between war and dishonor. They chose dishonor. They will have war.” Roosevelt knew it; to his ambassador in Portugal he wrote, “The dictator threat from Europe is a good deal closer to the United States.” Murrow and Shirer knew it. Meeting in Paris, they agreed that war was likely after next year’s harvest. And H. V. Kaltenborn knew it; even before Chamberlain’s visit to Berchtesgaden he said, “My own feeling is that it will be little more than a truce. There is grave doubt as to whether or not the visit will bring peace.”
The people were beginning to understand. A Fortune survey showed that only 11.6 percent of the American people thought the Munich agreement commendable, and 76.2 percent believed that the United States would participate in a general European war. The percentage held in every part of the country. “This is news,” the editors commented. “Eighteen months ago only about 22 percent of the population thought that we would be drawn into a foreign war in the next two or three years. Now more than three times that many believed that we actually would have been embroiled in the war that was so narrowly averted…. Thus has been shattered our sense of secure alliance upon the sentiment: ‘Thank God for two wide oceans!’”
In short, the Czech crisis had awakened America from a long slumber, and the country was anxious, biting its nails, drumming its fingers. Bombs, invasions, war—all that had been unthinkable as recently as last summer—were suddenly very real. Radio had transformed the country into one vast theater crowded with skittish spectators, and four weeks after the Munich Pact a brilliant twenty-three-year-old producer shouted, “Fire!”
***
The journalistic hoax has a long, picaresque, and not entirely dishonorable history. Edgar Allan Poe became famous on the strength of his “Unparalleled Adventure of One Hans Pfall”; H. L. Mencken’s spurious account of how the first bathtub was invented became a national joke and found its way into some encyclopedias. The most successful of all, Richard Adams Locke’s Moon Hoax of 1835, told wide-eyed readers of the New York Sun that one “Sir John Herschel,” using “an immense telescope based on an entirely new principle,” had identified bat-man inhabitants of the moon. Poe, Mencken, and Locke were quickly forgiven, for newspapers, being what Marshall McLuhan calls a “cool medium,” are not likely to incite a riot. The mass media are “hot,” and radio has never been hotter than the night before Halloween in 1938.
The recipient of that heat was then the most versatile and successful young man on Broadway. Actor-director, producer, at the age of twenty Orson Welles had been radio’s “Lamont Cranston” (The Shadow). He had dressed Julius Caesar in a business suit, put on a Negro Macbeth with Haiti as the background—and made money with both. When his WPA production of The Cradle Will Rock was ordered canceled on opening night by Washington—on political grounds—Welles defied the government. He and his theatrical company led the customers through the streets to an empty theater. The play became an enormous success, and CBS invited the prodigy of show business to broadcast a one-hour drama from the network’s Studio One each Sunday evening at 8 P.M. There were no sponsors; the program was what was called “sustaining.” CBS wasn’t making much of a gesture. It couldn’t sell the time, because its NBC competitor, the Chase and Sanborn Hour, was the most popular program of the week. Don Ameche was the master of ceremonies there, Dorothy Lamour the singer, and high comedy was provided by ventriloquist Edgar Bergen and his redheaded dummy Charlie McCarthy. Carved by a Chicago bartender for $35, and based on a Bergen sketch of a Chicago newsboy, Charlie had been No. 1 for eighteen months. His witty, insolent personality dominated Sunday prime time.
When it came to a choice between great theater and listening to Bergen talk to himself, most Americans preferred Bergen. Both the Crossley and Hooper radio censuses conducted the week before that Halloween gave the Chase and Sanborn Hour 34.7 percent of the total possible audience and Welles’s Mercury Theater 3.6 percent. (There was a hidden factor here, withheld from advertisers because it would damage their morale; we shall encounter it presently. Still, the figures doubtless held up on an average Sunday.) Of the 32 million families then living in the United States, about 27.5 million owned radios. Thus when CBS played the opening strains of the Tchaikovsky Piano Concerto in B Flat Minor—the Mercury’s opening theme each week—Welles could assume that about a million people were tuned to him. On October 30 that figure would grow.
Roosevelt had sent a personal message to Hitler on September 26 asking him to stop issuing ultimatums and proposing instead a conference of “nations directly interested in the present controversy” as an alternative to the battlefield. He suggested it be held immediately in some “neutral spot in Europe.” It never came off—other conferences were being arranged—but on that same day Orson Welles had an inspiration. Why not dramatize H. G. Wells’s War of the Worlds? His agent thought the idea silly, and Howard Koch, his writer, believed it was impossible. The young producer insisted. Being a strong personality, he won, and Koch went off to translate Wells into Welles. On Tuesday, October 25, five days before the show, he phoned John Houseman, the
Mercury’s editor. He was throwing in the towel, he said; science fantasy couldn’t be turned into radio drama. The Mercury’s secretary agreed. “You can’t do it!” she cried. “Those old Martians are just a lot of nonsense! We’re going to make fools of ourselves! Absolute fools!” Houseman thought of substituting Lorna Doone, but Orson wouldn’t discuss it, so writing the Wells script became a team effort. By Thursday they had a show—a dull show, everyone agreed.
Then someone—later no one remembered who—made a suggestion. Wouldn’t it be a good idea to make the whole thing a simulated news broadcast? As realistic as possible? Even a voice like Roosevelt’s? It was all possible, including the voice; Kenneth Delmar, whom Fred Allen would later make famous as Senator Claghorn, could summon commanding tones. The actor who would play Carl Phillips, the first network “announcer,” dug into the CBS record library and listened, over and over, to the semihysterical radio commentator’s description of the Hindenburg exploding at Lakehurst. Welles himself would appear as a Princeton scientist. They were to open with a weather report, dance music, and then the special bulletins. The cast thought Welles dragged this part much too long. He shook his head; that, he explained, was what gave it authenticity.
It certainly did. The public had become accustomed to sudden interruptions during the Czech crisis; each had provided a significant development later confirmed in the newspapers. Radio, indeed, had become the accepted vehicle for important announcements. And there were other circumstances which would increase authenticity. Since the 1936 election, Fortune had found, people had more faith in commentators than in newspapers. Indeed, for many the line between reality (news) and fantasy (drama) had become hopelessly blurred. In one of the more penetrating postmortems of the performance, Variety doubted that “any explanation would have prevented some people taking the whole thing in deadly earnest,” because “evidence of the seriousness with which many listeners take radio dramas is the concerned letters numerous dialers write in about the characters and happenings in the daily serial shows.”
It was, furthermore, an era in which people still respected authority, and Kenneth Delmar would be identified as “the Secretary of the Interior.” For audiences in New York and New Jersey, real streets were to be named: the Pulaski Skyway, South Street, route 23. Added to all these, a Princeton University study later found, were intellectual and emotional immaturity, Depression insecurity (“Things have happened so thick and fast since my grandfather’s day that we can’t hope to know what might happen now,” one respondent said afterward) and, outweighing everything else, the “recent war scare in Europe.”
Welles seems to have had some apprehension. The script opened and closed with explanations that this was only a play, and four CBS station breaks were to interrupt the actors and say the same thing. All that was fine, given their assumption that listeners would join them at eight o’clock and stay till the end. But the assumption was unsound. Here the rating surveys’ little secret assumed tremendous significance. Their discovery, which would have discouraged sponsors, was that when a commercial or an unpopular entertainer came on, people reached over and twisted their radio dials. Everyone enjoyed Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy, but they were only part of a variety show.
The Mercury’s relatively small but faithful audience heard the Tchaikovsky theme, the introduction, an authentic weather report, and “We now take you to the Meridian Room in the Hotel Park Plaza in downtown New York, where you will be entertained by the music of Ramón Raquello and his orchestra.” Periodic bulletins traced the progress of Carl Phillips and Professor Pierson to the New Jersey town of Grovers Mill. There were sirens and crowd noises in the background. At that moment, 8:12 P.M., Charlie McCarthy finished his first skit and a soothing voice began to recommend the rich flavor of Chase and Sanborn coffee.
Nearly six million people spun dials to CBS. This is what they heard:
ANNOUNCER:…I’ll move the microphone nearer. Here. (Pause) Now we’re not more than twenty-five feet away. Can you hear it now? Oh, Professor Pierson!
PIERSON: Yes, Mr. Phillips?
ANNOUNCER: Can you tell us the meaning of that scraping noise inside the thing?
PIERSON: Possibly the unequal cooling of its surface.
ANNOUNCER: Do you still think it’s a meteor, Professor?
PIERSON: I don’t know what to think, The metal casing is definitely extraterrestrial… not found on this earth. Friction with the earth’s atmosphere usually tears holes in a meteorite. The thing is smooth and, as you can see, of cylindrical shape.
PHILLIPS: Just a minute! Something’s happening! Ladies and gentlemen, this is terrific. The end of the thing is beginning to flake off! The top is beginning to rotate like a screw! The thing must be metal!
Excited crowd voices were heard; then back to the microphone.
ANNOUNCER: Ladies and gentlemen, this is the most terrifying thing I have ever witnessed!… Wait a minute! Someone’s crawling out of the hollow top. Someone or… something. I can see peering out of that black hole two luminous discs… are they eyes? It might be a face. It might be…
(Shout of awe from the crowd)
ANNOUNCER (sobbing and retching): Good heavens, something’s wriggling out of the shadow like a gray snake. Now it’s another one, and another! They look like tentacles to me. There, I can see the thing’s body. It’s large as a bear and it glistens like wet leather. But that face. It… it’s indescribable. I can hardly force myself to keep looking at it. The eyes are black and gleam like a serpent. The mouth is V-shaped with saliva dripping from its rimless lips that seem to quiver and pulsate….
The announcer temporarily loses control. Silence. A few bars of “Clair de Lune.” A second announcer, cool and professional, says, “We are bringing you an eyewitness account of what’s happening on the Wilmuth farm, Grovers Mill, New Jersey.” A few more bars of Debussy, then the cool announcer again: “We now return you to Carl Phillips at Grovers Mill.” Policemen, it develops, are advancing on the thing, but the Martians turn a sheet of flame upon them. Screams are heard, and unearthly shrieks. A barn blows up; then the mike goes dead. In comes the second announcer, saying quietly, “Ladies and gentlemen, due to circumstances beyond our control, we are unable to continue the broadcast from Grovers Mill. Evidently there’s some difficulty with our field transmission. However, we will return you to that point at the earliest opportunity.” Now the action escalates. The state police have been burned to cinders. “Brigadier General Montgomery Smith, commander of the State Militia in Trenton,” makes an official statement, in behalf of the governor of New Jersey, placing the counties of Mercer and Middlesex, as far west as Princeton and east to Jamesburg (all real places), under martial law. New spaceships are landing, and Pierson, who has made a miraculous escape, says the invaders are armed with something which “for want of a better term, I shall refer to… as a heat-ray.” Now the second announcer is upset:
ANNOUNCER: Ladies and gentlemen, I have a grave announcement to make. Incredible as it may seem, both the observations of science and the evidence of our eyes lead to the inescapable conclusion that those strange beings who landed in the Jersey farmlands tonight are the vanguard of an invading army from the planet Mars.
In shocked tones he reveals that Martians have annihilated the New Jersey National Guard. Martial law is declared throughout New Jersey and eastern Pennsylvania. The President has declared a national emergency. The Secretary of the Interior, sounding like FDR and even using his phrases, begs the country to do its duty and pray God for help. The Army Air Corps is wiped out. An operator comes on jerkily:
OPERATOR: This is Newark, New Jersey…. This is Newark, New Jersey!… Warning! Poisonous black smoke pouring in from Jersey marshes. Reaches South Street. Gas masks useless. Urge population to move into open spaces… automobiles use routes 7, 23, 24…. Avoid congested areas. Smoke now spreading over Raymond Boulevard….
In the last sequence before the middle break, Ray Collins, the only surviving announcer, is
standing on a New York rooftop. Bells are ringing in the background warning New Yorkers that it’s time to evacuate the city; the Martians are coming. “Hutchinson River Parkway is still kept open for motor traffic. Avoid bridges to Long Island… hopelessly jammed.” Voices in the background are singing a hymn; you can just hear them as Collins, his voice choking, reads a bulletin announcing that “Martian cylinders are falling all over the country. One outside Buffalo, one in Chicago, St. Louis….”
Toward the end of Collins’s speech (8:32 P.M.) Davidson Taylor, a CBS program supervisor, was asked to leave the Studio One control panel; an urgent phone call awaited him. He left and returned, his face a white knot. Already 60 percent of local stations had broken into the broadcast to reassure listeners that all this was make-believe, and New York policemen were surrounding the CBS Building. None of the performers or technicians would be allowed to leave after the show; some urgent questions needed answering. When Taylor came back to the control booth, Collins was describing the Martians, tall as skyscrapers, astride the Pulaski Skyway, preparing to wade through the Hudson River. It was seconds before the break, so Taylor decided to let Collins end, which he did in a voice ravaged by gas:
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