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The power of radio: Americans trusted the medium

Lisa Browar
Head librarian, Lilly Library, IUB

Martians laying waste to New Jersey on Halloween eve?

Improbable as this sounds, the radio dramatization of H. G. Wells' 1898 novel, The War of the Worlds, performed by Orson Welles' Mercury Theatre of the Air, was presented as a live newscast of an actual invasion and threw unsuspecting listeners into extreme panic. The CBS switchboard was overloaded by demands for verification of the reports.

In the aftermath, many called it a hoax. Law suits were filed against Welles and CBS. The play's producers insisted that the broadcast had no further significance than the holiday offering it was meant to be. Whether a cynical ploy or a merry prank, the October 30, 1938 radio play remains one of the most famous broadcasts ever made.

Producers Orson Welles and John Houseman, along with Howard Koch who scripted the novel's adaptation, pushed the envelope of conventional radio drama by using the experimental techniques that had been successful in their stage plays. Changing the location from England to New Jersey, Koch was instructed to dramatize the novel's action in the form of news bulletins that would interrupt a musical program broadcast from a New York hotel. This device added urgency and credibility to bulletins heard by an audience which remembered all too well accounts of the 1937 fire aboard the German dirigible Hindenburg as it tried to land in New Jersey, and who had listened to Archibald MacLeish's radio play, Air Raid, broadcast days earlier.

No attempt was made to disguise the play. The action was interrupted to remind listeners that they were listening to the Mercury Theatre of the Air. Nevertheless, the verisimilitude with which the play was performed convinced the audience that the reportage was real.

At that time, radio offered the primary source of information about the world. Listeners trusted familiar voices to speak the truth to them. Welles and his colleagues exploited this brazenly -- and brilliantly.

CBS angrily confiscated the script and recordings of this broadcast, and thus they are missing from the Orson Welles manuscripts acquired by the Lilly Library in 1978 (See story this issue). The Welles manuscripts (1930-1959) consist of the correspondence, papers and memorabilia of the actor, writer, producer and director.

Although he died in 1978, interest in Welles increases with time. Barbara Leaming and Simon Callow have written notable biographies, and numerous volumes of critical appraisal have been published, including The Magic World of Orson Welles by IU professor James Naremore. Recently, Welles' 1956 film, Touch of Evil, was re-edited in an effort to restore his original vision. Currently, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences is restoring the 1947 film, The Lady from Shanghai.