Spooked! How a Radio Broadcast and The War of the Worlds Sparked the 1938 Invasion of America
by Gail Jarrow
In 1938, in the United States, radio was a primary source for both entertainment and news. Just as we today watch TV shows in the evening, so families of that era gathered around their radios to listen to after dinner programming. Radio dramas in particular were popular entertainment.
A rising star in the genre was a young writer, director, and actor named Orson Welles, who in 1938 secured a weekly spot for his theater company, Mercury, to perform a one hour radio drama based on a favorite novel. Their Halloween choice, performed on 30 October, would become legendary, but not for reasons that Welles might have preferred. On Welles’s urging, his writers struggled to adapt a short novel, The War of the Worlds, by the British author H.G. Wells, for their American audience. To make it more relevant to their audience, the writers substituted American place names and agencies in for the British counterparts in the novel. The writers and Welles all felt that the show would be a terrible failure, that it was too silly to be in the least bit credible, let alone entertaining, for their audience.
They couldn’t have been more wrong. While the uproar has been greatly exaggerated in the annals of history, there was still a significant number of people who believed they were hearing live news coverage of a Martian attack on the United States. It was a big enough issue to bring the FCC chairman before the senate to testify as to what measures would be taken to ensure it didn’t happen again.
Author Gail Jarrow keeps up a brisk pace at the beginning of the book, giving back story on Welles and his group and portraying what went into producing a weekly radio drama broadcast. Her summarization of the actual broadcast of War of the Worlds, alternating with what was going on outside the studio as the public confusion began, was riveting. I did feel that her telling of the aftermath, both the public outcry and the official response, could have been edited to delete some repetition of themes that slowed the pace of the narrative. She adds some excellent material in the last portion of the book, including what happened to the major players later on, other media hoaxes, and online links and print titles for related materials.
I found her author’s note at the end of the book particularly relevant for students today. She points out that while we may scoff at the gullibility of those who believed the Martians were invading, the way the news spread, by people running door-to-door in their neighborhoods without first checking other sources to verify the veracity of the supposed invasion, isn’t really so different from how fake news is spread via social media today. She also draws a parallel to how modern “sponsored” paid content often looks like real news and how many fail to differentiate between content meant to be satirical and genuine material.
Aside from the lessons about media that can be learned and the great story that the subject matter lends itself to, this book is rich in tons of photos, documents, and illustrations from the era. I highly recommend this book for Dialectic and Rhetoric students who are reading The War of the Worlds and any who have an interest in early radio broadcasting.
Nonfiction (History)
139 pages
Published: 2018
by Calkins Creek/An Imprint of Highlights
Subject: Orson Welles and the 1938 Radio Broadcast of The War of the Worlds
Time Period: 1938-1939
Recommended for: Dialectic or Rhetoric students