by Jill Lepore
After more music, another interruption brought the voice of a reporter named Carl Phillips, interviewing an astronomer at Princeton University. After another break, a much-shaken Phillips returned:
Ladies and gentlemen, this is Carl Phillips again, out at the Wilmuth farm, Grovers Mill, New Jersey. . . . I hardly know where to begin, to paint for you a word picture of the strange scene before my eyes, like something out of a modern Arabian Nights. . . . I guess that’s it . . . doesn’t look very much like a meteor.
Suspense and tension heightening to panic, the radio network abandoned its dance music program for breathless reporting of an invasion from Mars, and of chaos in the streets as Americans tried to reach safety. The U.S. secretary of the interior addressed the “citizens of the nation” in hopes that their resistance might aid “the preservation of human supremacy on this earth.” The ambition of the aliens was planetary. Said another voice: “Their apparent objective is to crush resistance, paralyze communication, and disorganize human society.”
The military took control of the airwaves. American cities, including New York, burned to the ground. “This may be the last broadcast,” a despairing voice announced. “We’ll stay here to the end. . . .” His voice breaks off as listeners hear the sound of his body falling. All that was heard next was what sounds like a shortwave radio operator:
“2X2L calling CQ. . . . New York.
Isn’t there anyone on the air?”
Only then—but, according to the next day’s newspaper reports, not before listeners all over the country panicked, called police, visited their parish priests to deliver their dying confessions, and ran screaming from their houses—did an announcer break in for a program identification, telling listeners that they’d been treated to “an original dramatization of The War of the Worlds.”132
A decade of public relations and the authority of the radio had left Americans uncertain, anymore, about what was true. A contrite CBS announced that it would never again use “the technique of a simulated news broadcast.” The FCC decided against reprisals. But all over the country commentators wondered what radio had wrought. Had the masses grown too passive, too eager to receive ready-made opinions?
Dorothy Thompson was grateful. “The greatest organizers of mass hysterias and mass delusions today are states using the radio to excite terrors, incite hatreds, inflame masses, win mass support for policies, create idolatries, abolish reason and maintain themselves in power.” Having spent years trying to convince American readers of the rising tide of fascism, she concluded, “Welles has made a greater contribution to an understanding of Hitlerism, Mussolinism, Stalinism, anti-Semitism, and all the other terrorism of our times, more than will all the words about them that have been written.”133
In 1938 and 1939, with CBS fighting $12 million in lawsuits over The War of the Worlds, Welles insisted that he never had any idea of the effect the broadcast was having, and certainly never meant to harm anyone.134 But he later admitted that fifteen minutes into the broadcast, listeners had begun to panic, calling the station in terror. A New York policeman had even tried to break into the studio. “What’s going on in there?” he’d called out. A station supervisor had asked Welles to stop the broadcast, or at least interrupt it, to reassure listeners.
“For God’s sake, you’re scaring people to death,” the CBS supervisor said. “Please interrupt and tell them it’s only a show.”
“What do you mean interrupt?” Welles boomed. “They’re scared? Good, they’re supposed to be scared. Now let me finish.”
Welles later insisted that his point, all along, had been to raise Americans’ awareness about the perils of radio in an age of propaganda. “People suspect what they read in the newspaper,” he said, but “when radio came . . . anything that came through that new machine was believed.”135 That didn’t end with The War of the Worlds, which only made it harder for Americans to know what to believe. Except that this much they knew: something evil had been let loose upon the world.
On November 9, less than two weeks after the War of the Worlds broadcast, Nazis across Germany, Austria, and the Sudetenland burned more than seven thousand Jewish shops and more than a thousand synagogues. They murdered shopkeepers, and arrested more than thirty thousand Jews, a night known as Kristallnacht, after the smashed glass that littered the streets. “This is not a Jewish crisis,” wrote Dorothy Thompson. “It is a human crisis.”136 It was as if the sky itself had shattered.
From the White House, Roosevelt said he “could scarcely believe that such things could occur in a twentieth-century civilization.”137 It was indeed difficult to believe. But a war of the worlds had begun.
Twelve
THE BRUTALITY OF MODERNITY
The day after the United States bombed Hiroshima, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch ran, as an editorial, a crayon drawing titled A New Era in Man’s Understanding of Nature’s Forces.
THE 1939 WORLD’S FAIR WAS HELD ON TWELVE HUNDRED acres in Queens, New York, a wasteland that had once been an ash heap. Years of planning and building had gone into the work of turning it into a fairground, a shimmering display of advances in politics, business, science, and technology, right down to the scaled reproduction of the Empire State Building. Its centerpiece was the Perisphere, a globe two hundred feet in diameter and eighteen stories high that housed the Democracity exhibit, a celebration of “the saga of democracy,” which took visitors to a world one hundred years in the future, to 2039, where highways carried people from suburbs like Pleasantville to the downtown of Centerton.1 The fair celebrated the defeat of the past; its theme was the World of Tomorrow. General Motors mounted an exhibit called Futurama. Westinghouse staged a “battle of the centuries” between Mrs. Drudge, who scrubbed, and Mrs. Modern, who used a dishwasher. Elektro the Moto-Man, a seven-foot-tall robot, suavely smoked a cigarette.2
On opening day, on April 30, 1939, in a ceremony held in the fair’s Court of Peace, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, his hair gone gray at the temples, declared the World’s Fair “open to all mankind.” RCA, introducing the brand-new technology of television, sent out the address on NBC, which began broadcasting that day. A chorus line of women dressed in white performed a “Pageant of Peace.” A lot of visitors to the World of Tomorrow were unimpressed. E. B. White had a cold the day he went. “When you can’t breathe through your nose,” he wrote, “Tomorrow seems strangely like the day before yesterday.” Harper’s offered a more mixed view: “It was the paradox of all paradoxes. It was good, it was bad; it was the acme of all crazy vulgarity; it was the pinnacle of all inspiration.”3
It was also obsolete, even before it began. On opening day, the pavilions featuring Austria and Czechoslovakia were already anachronisms: those countries no longer existed. The allure of the future faded fast. After Hitler invaded Poland, in September, the Polish pavilion was draped in black. Belgium, Denmark, France, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands soon followed. By the time the fair closed, eighteen months after it opened, and bankrupt, half of the European countries represented at the World’s Fair had fallen to Germany.4
The Second World War would bring the United States out of depression, end American isolationism, and forge a renewed spirit of civic nationalism. It would also call attention to the nation’s unfinished reckoning with race, reshape liberalism, and form the foundation for a conservative movement animated by opposition to state power. By 1945, the future imagined six years before at the site of an old ash heap in Queens would look antique.
Still, the fair left its mark. Westinghouse had collected hundreds of items for a time capsule, to be opened five thousand years in the future, in the year 6939: everything from an alarm clock to an electric razor, along with seeds of grain provided by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, thousands of photographs, magazines, a dictionary, much of the Encyclopedia Britannica (14th edition, 1937), an RKO newsreel and a motion-picture projector, and one hundred books, in the form of microfilm. (“A microscope is included to enable historians of the future to r
ead the microfilm; also included are instructions for making larger reading machines such as those used with microfilm in modern libraries.”) Not everything was hokum. Among the “special messages from noted men of our time,” Albert Einstein had contributed a letter, written to tomorrow from today.5
“People living in different countries kill each other at irregular time intervals,” Einstein reported of the world in 1939. And “anyone who thinks about the future must live in fear and terror.”6 As Orson Welles had warned, introducing The War of the Worlds the year before, “In the thirty-ninth year of the twentieth century came the great disillusionment. . . .”
I.
ON SEPTEMBER 1, 1939, the day Germany invaded Poland, a ceremony was taking place in Geneva. Officials from the League of Nations dedicated a sculpture, a giant bronze globe, “To the Memory of Woodrow Wilson, President of the United States, Founder of the League of Nations.” Two days later, Britain and France, having fatefully appeased Hitler at Munich the year before, declared war on Germany. Had the United States not failed to join the League of Nations in 1919, some people thought, the world-shatteringly brutal war that followed might have been avoided. “The United States now has her second opportunity to make the world safe for democracy,” said Henry Wallace, Roosevelt’s secretary of agriculture. That fall, internationalists like Wallace who regretted the failure of the League of Nations began meeting, usually in secret, to plan the peace—to imagine a new league. The Council on Foreign Relations began preparing a report for the State Department.7 Meanwhile, Roosevelt was trying to plan for war.
In the 1930s, both Congress and public opinion favored isolationism. In 1935, Congress passed the first of five Neutrality Acts, pledging that the United States would keep clear of war in Europe. In 1936, when civil war broke out in Spain, nearly three thousand private American citizens volunteered, and fought for democracy against a right-wing insurgency aided by Hitler and Mussolini; more than a quarter of them lost their lives. But the United States stayed out. A Gallup poll taken in 1937 reported that most Americans had no opinion about events going on in Spain.8
American indifference emboldened Germany. “America is not dangerous to us,” Hitler said. “Everything about the behavior of American society reveals that it’s half Judaized, and the other half Negrified,” he said. “How can one expect a State like that to hold together—a country where everything is built on the dollar?” Americans’ gullibility about Orson Welles’s radio production of The War of the Worlds revealed Americans to be fools, Hitler thought, and Americans were too selfish to concern themselves with Europe: if he had a grudging respect for stolid Soviets, he saw Americans as fools distracted by baubles. “Transport a German to Kiev, and he remains a perfect German,” Hitler said. “But transport him to Miami, and you make a degenerate out of him.”9
Late in 1938, FDR had proposed a plan by which the United States would manufacture airplanes for Britain and France and build a 10,000-plane American air force. In 1939 he presented this plan, with a budget of $300 million, to Congress. “This program is but the minimum of requirements,” the president said. While the Nazi war machine pummeled Europe, the president wanted Congress to repeal the Neutrality Acts, support American allies, and prepare American forces, a position that became known as his “short-of-war” strategy. Secretly, he had another worry, too. German chemists had discovered nuclear fission in 1938. Leo Szilard, a Hungarian scientist who had fled Germany, had come to New York with the news. Germany took over Czechoslovakia in March 1939. In August, Roosevelt received a letter written by Szilard and signed by Einstein, warning him about “extremely powerful bombs of a new type,” fueled by uranium. “The United States has only very poor ores of uranium in moderate quantity,” the physicist informed the president. But “I understand that Germany has actually stopped the sale of uranium from the Czechoslovakian mines which she has taken over.” Roosevelt gathered together a secret advisory committee to investigate. It soon reported to him that uranium “would provide a possible source of bombs with a destructiveness vastly greater than anything now known.”10
Before Germany invaded Poland, nearly half of Americans had been unwilling or unable even to commit themselves to favoring one side over the other in the conflict in Europe, not least because William Randolph Hearst, who’d opposed U.S. involvement in the war in Europe in 1917 (calling for “America first!”), took the same position in 1938. Over NBC Radio he warned that the nations of Europe were “all ready to go to war, and all eager to get us to go to war,” but that “Americans should maintain the traditional policy of our great and independent nation—great largely because it is independent.”11 A fringe fervently supported Hitler. Father Coughlin, who’d left broadcasting after failing to win the presidency, returned to radio in 1937, when he began to preach anti-Semitism and admiration for Hitler and the Nazi Party. To the extent that Hitler reciprocated, it was to express his admiration not for the United States but for the Confederacy, whose defeat in the Civil War he much regretted: “the beginnings of a great new social order based on the principle of slavery and inequality were destroyed by the war,” he wrote. Nazi propagandists, sowing discord, tried to make common cause with white southerners by urging the repeal of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments.12 Coughlin played into their hands. In 1939, his audience, while diminished, heeded his call to form a new political party, the Christian Front.13 Dorothy Thompson ridiculed him. “I am 44 years old and if I have been menaced by Jews I haven’t noticed it yet.” (Her strategy was always to refuse to take Coughlin seriously. He once referred to her on the radio as “Dotty”; after that, she never failed, in her column, to call him “Chuck.”) Twenty thousand Americans, some dressed in Nazi uniforms, gathered in a Madison Square Garden bedecked with swastikas and American flags, where they denounced the New Deal as the “Jew Deal,” at a “Mass Demonstration for True Americanism.” Thompson snuck into the rally, started laughing, and, even as she was dragged out by men dressed as storm troopers, kept calling out, “Bunk, bunk, bunk!”14
But if radio had first gained Coughlin his audience, it also helped bring him down, especially after an Episcopal priest from New Jersey named Father W. C. Kiernan launched a radio program whose purpose was to refute each of Coughlin’s arguments. A callback to the protests of abolitionists and anti-lynching crusaders from Frederick Douglass to Ida B. Wells, Kiernan called his program Free Speech Forum.15
After Britain and France declared war on Germany in September, Fortune magazine raced to add to its next issue a supplement called “The War of 1939,” which included a map of Europe and a survey of public opinion.16 “In the trouble now going on in Europe, which side would you like to see win?” Fortune’s survey asked. Eighty-three percent of Americans now chose “England, France, Poland and their friends.” Only 1 percent chose “Germany and her friends.”17
The forces of isolation, however, remained strong. Fortune’s map made Europe seem near. But in a speech on October 1, 1939, American aviator Charles Lindbergh, who in 1927 had been the first man to fly nonstop across the Atlantic alone, said, “One need only glance at a map to see where our true frontiers lie. What more could we ask than the Atlantic Ocean on the east and the Pacific on the west?” Europe might be engaged in an air war, and Americans might build an air force but, said Lindbergh, “An ocean is a formidable barrier, even for modern aircraft.”18
Isolationists developed a vision of “Fortress America.” Most isolationists were Republicans, while opposition to isolationism was strongest among southern Democrats, who were committed to global trade for their tobacco and cotton crops. But even committed isolationists understood that the world was shrinking. In February 1940, Michigan’s Arthur Vandenberg wrote in his diary: “It is probably impossible that there should be such a thing as old fashioned isolation in this present foreshortened world when one can cross the Atlantic Ocean in 36 hours. . . . probably the best we can hope for from now on is ‘insulation’ rather than isolation.”19
Opp
onents of Roosevelt’s short-of-war strategy worried that it might backfire. If Americans were to sell tanks and ships to Britain and then, under attack from Germany, Britain were to surrender, American munitions would be seized by Germans. But Roosevelt’s ability to rally Americans to England’s aid was strengthened overnight when, on May 10, 1940, Winston Churchill became prime minister.
Churchill and Roosevelt had first met in London in 1918, when Roosevelt was a thirty-six-year-old assistant secretary of the navy and Churchill a forty-three-year-old former lord of the Admiralty. Twenty years later, after Churchill returned to the Admiralty, Roosevelt opened a channel of communication with him, eager to hear frank reports on events in Europe. Their relationship grew, Churchill the courter, Roosevelt the courted. “No lover ever studied the whims of his mistress as I did those of President Roosevelt,” Churchill later said. The prime minister desperately needed to win over Roosevelt and secure U.S. supplies—and, ultimately, U.S. entry into the war—because Britain could not defeat Germany without the Americans. The course of the war and even the terms of the peace would depend, in no small part, on the course of their friendship. Between 1941 and 1945, they would spend 113 days together, including a holiday at Marrakech. Churchill, a poet and a painter, painted the sunset for the American president.20
If Churchill courted Roosevelt, he also courted American voters. On June 4, 1940, Churchill delivered a rousing speech to the House of Commons, broadcast on radio stations across the United States, pledging that Britain would fight as long as it took:
We shall go on to the end, we shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our island, whatever the cost may be, we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender . . . until in God’s good time, the new world, with all its power and might, steps forth to the rescue and the liberation of the old.21