Speaker 1: Hi there, everyone, It's me Josh. For this week's select
Speaker 1: I've chosen our episode on the War of the World's
Speaker 1: myth from November twenty twenty. One of the great myths
Speaker 1: of the twentieth century is that Orson Wells nineteen thirty
Speaker 1: eight War of the World's broadcast set off a mass
Speaker 1: panic in the United States, as roobs from all corners
Speaker 1: of the country grabbed their shotguns and ran senselessly through
Speaker 1: the streets and prayed death would be swift. Well, it
Speaker 1: turns out America is less gullible than that. Instead, we're
Speaker 1: gullible about the idea that we're gullible. Think about that
Speaker 1: one as you enjoy this episode.
Speaker 2: Welcome to Stuff you should know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 1: Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's
Speaker 1: Charles w Chuck Bryan over there. It's just the two
Speaker 1: of us batching it up without you.
Speaker 3: Oh man, I.
Speaker 4: Think Jerry's inclusion. We're still batching it up. How do
Speaker 4: you mean, I mean, does she really ruin the batch
Speaker 4: scene for us?
Speaker 3: Sure? She's very maternal and Judge's true.
Speaker 4: Oh yeah, you were headed down a kind road for
Speaker 4: a second.
Speaker 1: I was with Jerry. Yeah, that doesn't sound like me.
Speaker 1: So for all of you who are just tuning into
Speaker 1: the first time Welcome, this is stuff you should know.
Speaker 1: To everybody else who's tuning in for the multiple times Welcome,
Speaker 1: this is stuff you should know.
Speaker 4: Yeah, we never do that.
Speaker 3: Some shows do that what they welcome new listeners.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and kind of say what they do. And I
Speaker 4: mean we've literally never done that.
Speaker 1: That's fine, that's lame. Hi wis who does that? Any
Speaker 1: friends of ours?
Speaker 4: Yeah? I mean the guys on the Flop House. They've
Speaker 4: been podcasting as long as we have. In every single episode,
Speaker 4: they say who they are and what they do.
Speaker 3: No, okay, well do you want to do that this
Speaker 3: one time?
Speaker 4: Well, I'm Chuck Bryant and this is Josh Clark, and
Speaker 4: this is a podcast where we explain things in a
Speaker 4: lighthearted and fun and sometimes even funny way.
Speaker 3: I disagree with all of it.
Speaker 1: Oh boy, So what we're going to talk about today
Speaker 1: because I think we need to talk about this one
Speaker 1: in a slightly somber tone. Chuck, it's a blemish in
Speaker 1: the history of America really, if you think about it.
Speaker 4: Well, yeah, and you know what, I've never actually had
Speaker 4: listened to it until this week, same here, and it was.
Speaker 4: It's a lot of fun to actually listen to. I
Speaker 4: would recommend it.
Speaker 1: Yeah, especially in a dark room where that's all you're
Speaker 1: concentrating on, not like a second screen kind of thing,
Speaker 1: like where you're really listening to this radio play.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and try to put yourself there a little bit
Speaker 4: like what it must have been like in well, not
Speaker 4: eighteen ninety eight, that's when the book came out.
Speaker 3: Yeah, but in nineteen thirty eight.
Speaker 1: I mean what forty years later, Just in that forty
Speaker 1: year stretch, I mean, think about the difference between nineteen
Speaker 1: eighty and twenty twenty. Not ridiculously different periods, it's just
Speaker 1: gotten eighteen ninety eight exactly. Oh yeah, it's gone downhill.
Speaker 1: And don't think that had nothing to do with Reagan's
Speaker 1: election in nineteen eighty. But the difference between eighteen ninety
Speaker 1: eight and nineteen thirty eight, yeah, are It's just like
Speaker 1: two different worlds, man, two different worlds. Comma War of the.
Speaker 4: So, I guess we should start with the book written
Speaker 4: by the great HG. Wells. It was the very first
Speaker 4: alien invasion story to hit the bookshelves, and that's a
Speaker 4: pretty remarkable thing. It was a serialized thing at first
Speaker 4: in magazines and Pearson's and the UK, and then Cosmo
Speaker 4: here in the US, and then they finally slapped all
Speaker 4: those serialized versions together into a book and it sold
Speaker 4: pretty well.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's never been out to print since that first
Speaker 1: edition in eighteen ninety eight. That's pretty respectable. I expect
Speaker 1: that as much for our book as well.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I'm sure it'll be still being published in forty
Speaker 4: years or one hundred years. Yeah, one hundred and forty years.
Speaker 3: Yeah, well, let's hope.
Speaker 1: So in this book, and like you said, first alien
Speaker 1: invasion story ever published, which is you know, just the
Speaker 1: fact that this is a completely new premise, new conceit
Speaker 1: made it, you know, kind of scary.
Speaker 3: But in the book, HG.
Speaker 1: Wells describes like this, this alien invasion, and part of
Speaker 1: the thing that was so scary about it, at least
Speaker 1: at the time, from what I can gather, is that
Speaker 1: it was about like the breakdown of society. And we're
Speaker 1: talking like Victorian era England society, where like rigid social
Speaker 1: rules and customs and mores and guidance for all behavior
Speaker 1: at all times was like the norm. So the idea
Speaker 1: of that breaking down was scary on in and of itself.
Speaker 1: I think that made the book kind of scary to
Speaker 1: contemporary readers. Would that be right readers back then? And
Speaker 1: that was one big theme that Wells explored. Another one
Speaker 1: that he explored in that at least I think whoever
Speaker 1: wrote the Encyclopedia Britannica article on it said that the
Speaker 1: main point of this, the main subtext, was learning how
Speaker 1: humans dominion over animals can be, you know, cruel and thoughtless,
Speaker 1: because all of a sudden, with these alien invaders who
Speaker 1: were just wiping us off the map, we were like,
Speaker 1: you know, domesticated animals to them.
Speaker 4: Yeah, so the shoe was on the other hoof, and
Speaker 4: sure it caused or at least it was intended to
Speaker 4: cause people to take kind of a hard look at
Speaker 4: pre animal farm to make sort of a social statement
Speaker 4: about how we treated animals. Yeah, And so that was
Speaker 4: in eighteen ninety eight. If you flash forward to Orson
Speaker 4: Wells and his Mercury Theater version, he this is, you know,
Speaker 4: like you said, we're right in the middle or we're
Speaker 4: in the Great Depression and we're headed towards war, and
Speaker 4: it's sort of an uneasy feeling in the United States
Speaker 4: as a whole. So he thought, perfect time to go
Speaker 4: in there, put a fresh coat of pain on this
Speaker 4: thing and scare the bejeebis out of the American public
Speaker 4: by doing really something that they had never heard before,
Speaker 4: which was sort of a Verita style production.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and I mean it's easy to overlook today, but
Speaker 1: radio was still rather new at the time in nineteen
Speaker 1: thirty eight. It was like a you know, cutting edge
Speaker 1: technological medium, and it was not fully defined. So the
Speaker 1: idea of creating this, I guess hoax broadcast is the
Speaker 1: best you can call it. This fictionalized version that was
Speaker 1: what would you call it? Man, I hate that word
Speaker 1: so much.
Speaker 4: I know it's really taken on a bad tang here lately. Yeah,
Speaker 4: I mean it's verite. It's, you know, of a faux
Speaker 4: documentary style, right, thing that no one had ever heard. Like,
Speaker 4: there's no way when people heard this they would think, oh,
Speaker 4: this is you know, I know, Christopher, guess this is
Speaker 4: sort of a scary version. I've seen Blair Witch. I
Speaker 4: know what's going on here.
Speaker 3: I recognize Lenny from Laverne and Shirley anywhere. I know
Speaker 3: that's not real.
Speaker 4: Yeah, So they weren't prepared for this in nineteen thirty
Speaker 4: eight when orson Wells, he was already a big name
Speaker 4: in radio as the voice of the Shadow, which was
Speaker 4: big hit, and his Mercury Theater was pretty pretty well
Speaker 4: respected at the time.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's like a live stage theater. So they'd only
Speaker 1: had this show for a few months by the time
Speaker 1: October nineteen thirty eight rolled around. But their whole jam
Speaker 1: was they were on CBS, and CBS had them do
Speaker 1: our long radio adaptations of class like novels like Treasure Island.
Speaker 1: They did around the world in eighty days, and so
Speaker 1: since it was October, they wanted to do something spooky
Speaker 1: around Halloween something, so they decided Yeah, so they were like, well,
Speaker 1: what's the most boring scary book there is? And they said, HG.
Speaker 1: Wells War the Worlds. So they decided to adapt it.
Speaker 4: Yeah, so they got together, they're rehearsing. We'll talk a
Speaker 4: little bit more about that in a sec. But there
Speaker 4: wasn't a strong feeling among the cast and crew and
Speaker 4: the production group that thought it was going to be
Speaker 4: awesome because I think probably because they had never done
Speaker 4: anything like this, they had never heard anything like this.
Speaker 4: They thought, is this even going to be any good.
Speaker 4: And a couple of different sources in the production went
Speaker 4: to a radio critic ahead of time, it's like thanks
Speaker 4: a lot, and they said, by the way, this is
Speaker 4: going to be a real stinker.
Speaker 1: They said, Apparently two different people in the production said
Speaker 1: that this will put everyone to sleep. And I don't
Speaker 1: have the impression that it's strictly because they didn't have
Speaker 1: any frame of reference to judge it against, because no
Speaker 1: one had done this before. From what I can gather,
Speaker 1: the originally it was going to be really bad and
Speaker 1: really terrible, and the production and the cast and crew
Speaker 1: knew this. They knew that they were marching toward embarrassment
Speaker 1: with the early versions of the of the script.
Speaker 4: Yeah, so orson, he's sort of distracted. He's got a
Speaker 4: stage production going on. He's got his partner in his group,
Speaker 4: the great John Houseman you all know from the paper Chase,
Speaker 4: kind of a legendary actor. He was one of his
Speaker 4: original partners, and he got together with Howard is it Kotch.
Speaker 4: I never know if it's going to be a Cotra
Speaker 4: Coke doesn't matter, all right, koc h. And he was
Speaker 4: the writer who was adapting the novel and they were like,
Speaker 4: we got to make this thing better. And one thing
Speaker 4: I think we can do this was Houseman talking, I'm
Speaker 4: not going to do with John Houseman, but everyone knows
Speaker 4: how he's out right.
Speaker 1: When I came across Shawn house and being involved, he
Speaker 1: was like, I can't wait.
Speaker 4: I don't even remember. I mean, he was just very
Speaker 4: serious and sort of all I can think of his
Speaker 4: paper chase and what was the TV commercial was it?
Speaker 3: I want to say it was like Schwab or no,
Speaker 3: Merily Lynch.
Speaker 4: I think it might have been Merrill Lynch Maybe I
Speaker 4: don't know. But one of those finance firms he did
Speaker 4: he voiced for, well.
Speaker 1: Yeah, he was very famous for having a very high pitch,
Speaker 1: squeaky falsetto voice, and he talked very very fast.
Speaker 3: And actually I know who it was. It was FedEx
Speaker 3: and Dunkin Donuts. He was well known for.
Speaker 4: It, right, he was the time to make the donuts
Speaker 4: guy right with the mustag. So Houseman and Cotch Coke
Speaker 4: went in there and he said, one of the things
Speaker 4: we should do, probably to make this a little more
Speaker 4: scary and a little more believable that it's an actual broadcast,
Speaker 4: is you know time passes in the book, and we
Speaker 4: can't do that here, so let's just get rid of
Speaker 4: all that stuff so it gives the appearance that it's
Speaker 4: going down right now.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that was enormously a huge change. And I don't
Speaker 1: know if he did that to help the pacing move
Speaker 1: a little faster or what, but that would pan out
Speaker 1: to be a really important difference in the original script
Speaker 1: that Howard Kay turned in and the one that they
Speaker 1: ended up doing. And then even beyond that, some of
Speaker 1: the other changes came just hours before broadcast, because apparently,
Speaker 1: if you worked with Orson Wells, you should be on
Speaker 1: the lookout for him to come in at the last
Speaker 1: minute and be like, all the stuff we've been practicing
Speaker 1: for a week or two, forget all of that, we're
Speaker 1: doing this instead. And part of that, from what I
Speaker 1: can tell, is that he was trying to shake up
Speaker 1: the actor, shake them out of whatever complacency they'd work
Speaker 1: themselves into with rehearsal, and to get this raw, more
Speaker 1: terrified performance. And apparently it worked. I mean, I can't
Speaker 1: imagine I didn't hear any rehearsals or anything like that.
Speaker 1: I would have loved to have compared, you know, the
Speaker 1: week before to you know, the actual podcast, but that
Speaker 1: everyone delivered these really great, really great performances, and they
Speaker 1: really nailed by showtime the realism in a lot of ways,
Speaker 1: not just in the performances, but also in just little
Speaker 1: details like they you know, they were they were doing
Speaker 1: a mock radio program, which we'll talk about a little
Speaker 1: more in detail in a second, but they were they
Speaker 1: were pretending to have news bulletins break and so they
Speaker 1: were they were doing the things that news bulletins did.
Speaker 1: One of the things that stuck out to me was
Speaker 1: one of the eyewitnesses. So it's an actor, but one
Speaker 1: of the eyewitnesses is like being interviewed by a news
Speaker 1: reporter on the scene and they started to talk, and
Speaker 1: the news reporter goes, can you can you speak loud?
Speaker 1: Speak more loudly and move into the microphone please, and
Speaker 1: that the I think the actor actually says, how's that,
Speaker 1: and the guy repeats himself, and then the actor has
Speaker 1: to repeat himself what he was originally saying. So it
Speaker 1: has like that veneer of you know, authenticity, just from
Speaker 1: little details like that that, you know, really it stood
Speaker 1: out to me when I was listening for him. But
Speaker 1: if you're if you're not listening for him, you you
Speaker 1: just it makes you buy into the whole thing that
Speaker 1: much more.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and the other big change that Wells brought along
Speaker 4: was stretching out the first two halves of the thing
Speaker 4: such that it went past it went forty minutes, and
Speaker 4: radio at the time, every thirty minutes, like on the
Speaker 4: half hour, they would check in with a station id check,
Speaker 4: and listeners, even though radio was new, were well honed
Speaker 4: to this station break every thirty minutes. And so when
Speaker 4: ten minutes passed, the half hour go by and there
Speaker 4: ain't and there ain't no station break, that really makes
Speaker 4: people kind of buy in to what they're listening to
Speaker 4: is possibly real. And then you add to the fact
Speaker 4: that there were no sponsors for this show. Yeah, so
Speaker 4: they weren't cutting to a Casper or or me Undy's
Speaker 4: as right, all of a sudden, they can't remember any sponsor.
Speaker 3: Can you imagine John Housman saying made with Modall.
Speaker 4: No, I thought it'd be made with Modell.
Speaker 1: That's right, that's a much better Housman. I had something
Speaker 1: in my threat.
Speaker 4: So yeah, there were no sponsors. So basically it really
Speaker 4: came across as something that was super, super realistic sounding.
Speaker 1: Right, So all that is to say that they had
Speaker 1: really by the time this broadcast aired at eight pm
Speaker 1: on Sunday, October thirtieth, nineteen thirty eight, they were not
Speaker 1: going to be the laughing stock and this is not
Speaker 1: going to be embarrassing. It was going to be pretty awesome.
Speaker 4: Actually, should we take a break?
Speaker 1: I think so, Chuck, and then we'll come back and
Speaker 1: we will reveal the broadcast after this. Okay, so we've
Speaker 1: reached showtime. Airtime, eight pm, Sunday, October thirtieth, nineteen thirty eight,
Speaker 1: Mercury Theater on the Air began broadcasting its adaptation of HG.
Speaker 1: Wells War of the World, and at the very beginning
Speaker 1: it's introduced as much. There's an announcer who says that.
Speaker 4: I think that's loss is probably to time somewhat, because
Speaker 4: everyone probably thinks that they just tried to trick everyone.
Speaker 4: But no, they actually introduced it as what they're doing.
Speaker 4: And you know that this is a radio place at
Speaker 4: one year in the future.
Speaker 1: Right, right, And yeah, Orson Wells. So it's introduced by
Speaker 1: an announcer. Orson Wells comes in, does the introductory essay,
Speaker 1: and then they did something really smart and interesting, especially
Speaker 1: for the time they went to a musical program that
Speaker 1: was supposedly being broadcast from the Meridian Room in the
Speaker 1: hotel Park Plaza. So if you were just tuning in
Speaker 1: right then, you would have no idea that this was
Speaker 1: Mercury Theater on the air. You'd have no idea that
Speaker 1: this was a teleplay. You would think that you were
Speaker 1: listening to something that was pretty regularly broadcast, which was
Speaker 1: live music at some like ballroom in a hotel somewhere
Speaker 1: in New York that they set up like a radio
Speaker 1: transmitter to transmit out over the radio.
Speaker 3: That was pretty frequent. But this was part of the show.
Speaker 4: Like if you hadn't paused it, that is right right.
Speaker 1: Exactly so, but that was a huge part of the
Speaker 1: show because that lulled listeners into kind of complacency, and
Speaker 1: listeners who tuned in late and missed that introduction thought
Speaker 1: that this is what they were listening to. And then
Speaker 1: the first news bulletin.
Speaker 4: Hits yeah, and that's where things start to get really interesting.
Speaker 4: They break in, you know, one of these interrupt your
Speaker 4: previously scheduled programs kind of things, right, right, and they
Speaker 4: come in and with these bulletins but they're not super
Speaker 4: long at first because they treat it kind of how
Speaker 4: it would be in real life. It's just sort of
Speaker 4: a breaking story. Something's going together. It was fairly obtuse,
Speaker 4: and they didn't like, you know, say, Martians are attacking
Speaker 4: us right now everyone from the get go. I sort
Speaker 4: of left it up to the listener to kind of
Speaker 4: piece it together. Little by little. They would go back
Speaker 4: to the Meridian room for a bit, and it wasn't
Speaker 4: for very long, but because you know, they couldn't waste
Speaker 4: too much time, but it was long enough. It wasn't
Speaker 4: for like ten seconds. They did it for like a minute,
Speaker 4: minute and a half, right.
Speaker 1: It made it seem right then, like that was what
Speaker 1: you were listening to, that that was the program, and
Speaker 1: the bulletin was in fact the bulletin rather than the
Speaker 1: opposite being true.
Speaker 4: Yeah, So eventually you start to piece together what's going on,
Speaker 4: and you have this attack in New Jersey of all places,
Speaker 4: and Princeton University they had like a Princeton astronomer on.
Speaker 4: They have government officials, and they kind of dole it
Speaker 4: out a little by little until about the seventeen minutes
Speaker 4: seventeen and a half minute mark, and then that's when
Speaker 4: it really kind of gets super scary and people really
Speaker 4: see the full picture of what's going on.
Speaker 3: So, Chuck, I feel like we should read a little
Speaker 3: bit of the script.
Speaker 1: There's this one part starting about the seventeen thirty minute
Speaker 1: market think you said, where they as I like to say,
Speaker 1: they tore the lid off the sucker.
Speaker 4: Do you want to be announcer or Phillips?
Speaker 1: I'll be the announcer, all right, okay, but I want
Speaker 1: you to do Phillips as Sammy Davis Junior.
Speaker 3: So here's the announcer.
Speaker 4: Wait, hold on, I'm getting all my tap shoes.
Speaker 3: Okay, Okay, you ready, canty ma'am uh.
Speaker 4: Huh sure, bab, I'm not gonna do it that way.
Speaker 3: Okay, all right, So.
Speaker 1: Let me give you a little bit of background real quick.
Speaker 1: So these news bulletin's up to this point have basically
Speaker 1: said there's some weird thing that landed. They thought it
Speaker 1: was a meteorite at first, that landed in Grover's Mill,
Speaker 1: New Jersey, and then later bulletins said that, oh, actually
Speaker 1: there's some weird technical like weird things emerging from this
Speaker 1: thing we thought was a meteorite. So now we're back
Speaker 1: at Grover's Mil. So I'm the announcer. We are bringing
Speaker 1: you an eyewitness account of what's happening on the Willmuth Farm,
Speaker 1: Grover's Mill, New Jersey. And that was kind of like
Speaker 1: they were breaking in to let you know that. And
Speaker 1: then they go back to more piano for some reason.
Speaker 1: And then we now return you to Carl Phillips at
Speaker 1: Grover's mil.
Speaker 4: Ladies and gentlemen, am I am I on, ladies and gentlemen.
Speaker 4: Here I am back up a stone wall that adjoins
Speaker 4: mister Wilmo's garden. From here I get a sweep of
Speaker 4: the whole scene. I give you every detail as long
Speaker 4: as I can talk, as long as I can see.
Speaker 4: More State police have arrived. They're drawing up a cordon
Speaker 4: in front of the pit, about thirty of them. No
Speaker 4: need to push the crowd back now, they're willing to
Speaker 4: keep their distance. The captain is conferring with someone we
Speaker 4: can't quite see who. Oh, yes, I believe it's a
Speaker 4: professor Pearson. Yes it is. Now they've parted. The professor
Speaker 4: moves around one side, studying the object, while the captain
Speaker 4: and two policemen advance with something in their hands. I
Speaker 4: can see it now. It's a white handkerchief tied to
Speaker 4: a pole, a flag of truce. If those creatures know
Speaker 4: what that means, what anything means? Wait, something's happening.
Speaker 5: Sh you can cut in anytime. Who can take a rainbow?
Speaker 4: Oh wait, sorry, a hump shape is rising out of
Speaker 4: the pit. I can make out a small beam of
Speaker 4: light against a mirror.
Speaker 2: What's that?
Speaker 4: There's a jet there's a jet flame springing from the mirror,
Speaker 4: and it leaps right at the advancing men. It strikes
Speaker 4: them head on. Good lord, they're turning into flame.
Speaker 2: Go go.
Speaker 4: Now. The whole field's caught fire, the woods, the barns,
Speaker 4: the gas tanks of automobiles, spreading everywhere. It's coming this
Speaker 4: way about twenty.
Speaker 2: Yards to my right.
Speaker 3: Very nice and scene.
Speaker 1: Okay, that was great, Chuck. So they they you mentioned,
Speaker 1: or I should say Phillips. The reporter on the scene
Speaker 1: mentioned Professor Pearson, and he's this he ends up being
Speaker 1: the main character, and he's, uh, he's an interview he's
Speaker 1: in an astronomer I's interviewed earlier on and then he's
Speaker 1: on this scene as it happens, and the program just
Speaker 1: keeps going like that like, there's another there's a main
Speaker 1: announcer who I played. I thought rather well, thank you
Speaker 1: and same to you.
Speaker 4: But the future as a folly artist, if I may say.
Speaker 1: So, thank you very much. I've been practicing. You want
Speaker 1: to hear my machine gun? I've been doing that one
Speaker 1: since I was like six.
Speaker 4: All right, how about walking through the forest? All right? Now,
Speaker 4: how about a good punch to the face. Oh wow,
Speaker 4: that was good.
Speaker 3: Thank you. I punched myself in the thing. I'm dedicated.
Speaker 3: That's how dedicated to the art of folly.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 1: So the announcer just keeps bringing in more and more
Speaker 1: news as this thing goes on and unfolds of like,
Speaker 1: now these things aren't just in New Jersey, They're in Chicago.
Speaker 3: They're like out west.
Speaker 1: They're starting to invade everywhere, and they're killing people left
Speaker 1: and right. That you said there was a government official
Speaker 1: that reads a statement is actually that they say that
Speaker 1: it's the Secretary of the Interior, which I thought was
Speaker 1: particularly genius because I mean, probably not that many people
Speaker 1: were familiar with the Secretary of the Interior.
Speaker 3: It's on Harold.
Speaker 1: Ix, but they had him sound like FDR so that
Speaker 1: it would kind of play on everyone's I guess unconscious
Speaker 1: or I'm sure there were people who are like the
Speaker 1: sounds just like FDR. But at the very least, it
Speaker 1: would kind of evoke that government authority, the reality of
Speaker 1: like a government figure.
Speaker 3: You know.
Speaker 4: Yeah. So meanwhile, on the other stations, there's one that's
Speaker 4: running opposite, which is a really really popular radio show
Speaker 4: at the time, probably the most popular, Chase in Sanborn Hour,
Speaker 4: which had the very very famous ventriloquist Edgar Bergan and
Speaker 4: his dummy Charlie McCarthy.
Speaker 1: And we talked about that on our Ventilaquism episode. Remember
Speaker 1: that they started out on radio.
Speaker 4: Yeah, which is hysterical. I don't even know why they
Speaker 4: would even bother with the dummy part, just due.
Speaker 3: To you wouldn't even know that's what he did.
Speaker 1: You wouldn't even have to wear pants, No, sit around
Speaker 1: in your spaghetti stained undershirt and yeah, naked from the
Speaker 1: waist down, maybe some socks. Doing a couple of voices
Speaker 1: is your contract?
Speaker 4: Edgar Bergen, what do you think about that? Charlie, don't
Speaker 4: get me started, like that's it. I could be a
Speaker 4: famous vinchiloquist on the radio.
Speaker 3: You just you just did it. I think I think
Speaker 3: Hollywood's going to come with calling.
Speaker 4: But the real sort of interesting factoid here, I think,
Speaker 4: is that people were channel surfing back then when you
Speaker 4: cut to commercial, just like we used to do when
Speaker 4: we didn't have pause buttons and fast forward buttons.
Speaker 3: And what is this pause button? You keep mentioning, I've
Speaker 3: never heard of this.
Speaker 4: You've never paused television? No, wow, you need to.
Speaker 3: I don't believe I've ever paused anything in my life.
Speaker 4: It's funny. We were Emily and I have been watching
Speaker 4: that German sci fi series Dark, which is very challenging
Speaker 4: to follow. And uh, there's a lot of rewinding like wait, wait,
Speaker 4: who is that? What did they just say? And we
Speaker 4: rewinded a bit and do that again, and or you know,
Speaker 4: of course I got to go to the bathroom. Let
Speaker 4: me just pause it. And I was thinking about how,
Speaker 4: not too long ago, you just if you missed something,
Speaker 4: you missed it.
Speaker 3: You just peed the count, or you ped yourself on
Speaker 3: the couch.
Speaker 4: Yeah, there was no clear like, let me go back
Speaker 4: and clear this up. It's like, what did he say?
Speaker 4: I have no idea. I guess we'll never know. There's
Speaker 4: no internet ended up.
Speaker 1: I guess I should probably stop watching this show altogether
Speaker 1: and you go walk up to the VCR and presson Jack.
Speaker 4: But at any rate, back then, let's say Charlie McCarthy
Speaker 4: goes to break and now I'll word from Mark Doncher
Speaker 4: and they flip it over to War the Worlds. At
Speaker 4: this point in the broadcast, when the s is hitting
Speaker 4: the fan and it's going to scare the pants off
Speaker 4: of people in nineteen thirty eight.
Speaker 1: Well, yeah, even more than I think that they would
Speaker 1: have dialed over even before that, so they might have
Speaker 1: caught like a news bulletin and then maybe some of
Speaker 1: that music from the Meridian Room, so it really would
Speaker 1: have caught them. And there were supposedly a substantial number
Speaker 1: of people who did dial over and were like, wait, wait,
Speaker 1: what is going on here? And now we come to
Speaker 1: the reaction, the response, because if you picked up the
Speaker 1: paper the next day in America, just about anywhere in
Speaker 1: any major city, you're going to find huge, blaring headlines
Speaker 1: like the one that the New York Daily News printed
Speaker 1: in tall bold letters. Fake radio war stirs terror through
Speaker 1: the US.
Speaker 4: Yeah, stories of shock in hysteria, stories of people taking
Speaker 4: their own life, stories of people dying from heart attacks.
Speaker 4: The API said a man in Pittsburgh found his wife
Speaker 4: with poison in her hand and said, I'm gonna I'd
Speaker 4: rather die this way than like that. And you know,
Speaker 4: talking to Wells afterward, in the aftermath of this, he
Speaker 4: apologizes publicly says they didn't intend to do this, we
Speaker 4: didn't know it was going to cause a panic. And then,
Speaker 4: you know, if you look over the years more interviews,
Speaker 4: it sort of seems like Wells is a little more like,
Speaker 4: you know, we thought it would be pretty fun to
Speaker 4: scare people, and I didn't know if it was going
Speaker 4: to cause a panic, but we definitely intended it to
Speaker 4: have this effect on people, whereas Houseman and Kotch were like, no,
Speaker 4: we really didn't mean it. So it of conflicting reports
Speaker 4: from the production on what they thought was going to
Speaker 4: be the result.
Speaker 1: Right, And I read an interview with John Landis, the
Speaker 1: great director who worked with Wells on a project that
Speaker 1: never got made towards the end of Well's life, and
Speaker 1: he didn't say that Wells admitted to him that he
Speaker 1: meant to, but he got to know him enough that
Speaker 1: he was like, yes, if you watch this initial press
Speaker 1: conference where he's apologizing, because the whole country was ripped
Speaker 1: apart in chaos, and we're running wild in the streets
Speaker 1: and like nearly rioted because of his broadcast.
Speaker 3: He is not at all.
Speaker 1: He's just as happy as a lark that this all happened,
Speaker 1: even though he's pretending to apologize, and he said that
Speaker 1: was just that's his source of wells.
Speaker 4: Did you just say apologize.
Speaker 3: It's a new version I'm testing out. I like it.
Speaker 1: It's kind of yeah, it's at least as good as apologize.
Speaker 4: So this was just a couple of days in the news.
Speaker 4: It wasn't the biggest deal in the world, even though
Speaker 4: it was fairly sensational story writing for newspapers. And it
Speaker 4: might have just gone that way had it not been
Speaker 4: for a Princeton University social psychologist a couple of years
Speaker 4: later named Hadley Cantrell. And Cantrell released a book on
Speaker 4: the real effects of this thing and basically said that
Speaker 4: you know, people were praying, crying, they were frantically trying
Speaker 4: to escape death from the Martians. Six million people listen
Speaker 4: to this thing, and at least one six of them
Speaker 4: were frightened or disturbed. And I have the evidence right here.
Speaker 1: Yeah, the evidence that he had was based on a
Speaker 1: series of interviews with one hundred and thirty five people.
Speaker 1: Almost all of them were in New Jersey, which remember
Speaker 1: that's where the crux of the invasion and destruction being
Speaker 1: described took place. Because Grover's Mille, New Jersey, is actually
Speaker 1: a real town in Jersey. So he went to Jersey
Speaker 1: because he was in Princeton. So he went where he
Speaker 1: was and interviewed one hundred and thirty five people, and
Speaker 1: he said, were you scared by this broadcast? And the
Speaker 1: participant would say yes, and he'd say, you're in my study.
Speaker 1: And he'd ask the next one, were you scared? Were
Speaker 1: you scared by this broadcast? And they would say no.
Speaker 1: He'd be like, you're not in the study.
Speaker 3: That's crazy.
Speaker 1: And so yeah, he said in the in the methodology
Speaker 1: that he selected one hundred out of the one hundred
Speaker 1: and thirty five because they had been scared by the broadcast.
Speaker 1: And so he took this, these interviews of people in
Speaker 1: New Jersey and he extrapolated it to the rest of
Speaker 1: the country and he said, yep, this is this is real.
Speaker 1: This is a really great example of people being fooled
Speaker 1: into terror and panic. And you know the response is
Speaker 1: when this happens, like we saw after the World that
Speaker 1: we're the world's broadcast. People will run out into the street,
Speaker 1: they will flee the city, They will call their friends
Speaker 1: and neighbors. They may attempt suicide, they may die of
Speaker 1: a heart attack, like the New York Times reported twenty
Speaker 1: or so people in New York alone needed to be treated.
Speaker 3: For shock in hysteria.
Speaker 1: This is what happens when somebody toys with the public trust.
Speaker 3: And yeah, it's pretty nuts. The end. Yeah, that was
Speaker 3: the end of Hadley's Headley's book.
Speaker 4: Right, Yeah, not the end of this episode. So this
Speaker 4: is what this specific study is. What if you've ever
Speaker 4: taken a mass media or a communications college class, you've
Speaker 4: probably studied War of the Worlds largely because of this study. Basically,
Speaker 4: it might have just come and gone if it weren't
Speaker 4: for this academic paper that were put out and all
Speaker 4: of a sudden. For decades and decades, it's reported on
Speaker 4: as like a cautionary tale almost of responsibility and meet
Speaker 4: even fictional media. And you know, as recently as twenty
Speaker 4: thirteen PBS American Experience documentary said this was the case.
Speaker 4: Our old pals at Radio Lab in two thousand and
Speaker 4: eight did an episode about this where that was the case.
Speaker 4: But there were a few problems with this paper. Beyond
Speaker 4: the supremely bad methodology behind just getting scared New Jersey
Speaker 4: people to go in there and give their report. Was
Speaker 4: they found up that they ended up finding real ratings
Speaker 4: for this thing, and not a ton of people even
Speaker 4: heard it.
Speaker 3: It turns out, so his six million estimate was way.
Speaker 4: Off, way way way off. And they did a survey
Speaker 4: during the program that said two percent of respondents said
Speaker 4: that they were listening. And some markets, like big cities
Speaker 4: like Boston even preempted this thing for local programming. So
Speaker 4: it wasn't a ton of people. It wasn't a ton
Speaker 4: of people being scared and like literally losing their minds
Speaker 4: with fear and panic and things swing so far the
Speaker 4: other way that the narrative became. You know what, no
Speaker 4: one was really scared at all, And what newspapers really
Speaker 4: did was they put out hit pieces on a competing
Speaker 4: medium like radio and how you shouldn't trust it anymore.
Speaker 1: So what happened over the last within sometime within the
Speaker 1: twenty first century, but sometime in the twenty tens, the
Speaker 1: myth that America lost its mind went bonkers and ran
Speaker 1: wild in the street because they were panicked by the
Speaker 1: War of the World's broadcast was shown to be a
Speaker 1: myth that it didn't happen, And that was the new
Speaker 1: understanding for a little while, just a few years, until
Speaker 1: another guy came along and said, you know what, they
Speaker 1: actually both both are right and both are wrong in
Speaker 1: a lot of ways.
Speaker 4: Should we take a break and talk about the truth
Speaker 4: always being somewhere in the middle? Mm hmm.
Speaker 2: To still all.
Speaker 4: Right, I said, the truth is always somewhere in between.
Speaker 4: That's not always the case with everything in life, obviously,
Speaker 4: but that's that's a saying for a reason.
Speaker 2: Uh.
Speaker 4: And that's definitely seems to be the case, uh, in
Speaker 4: this case with a gentleman named a Brad Schwartz, he's
Speaker 4: a probably the leading War of the World scholar. And
Speaker 4: he went back and he went and investigated the letters
Speaker 4: and the cables that came in. They were at the
Speaker 4: University of Michigan archives and these are the letters that
Speaker 4: actually came in to Wells and the Mercury Theater in
Speaker 4: the days after the broadcast. And what he contends, and
Speaker 4: I agree, is that this is what you need to
Speaker 4: be reading, is what people were really thinking at the time,
Speaker 4: that weren't just cherry picked in the town that got
Speaker 4: attacked in New Jersey who were obviously they were going
Speaker 4: to be freaked out more than anyone in the country.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 1: So one of the things that he points out is,
Speaker 1: you know, everybody been, you know, since around twenty ten
Speaker 1: or maybe a little earlier. Everyone had been wailing on
Speaker 1: Hadley Cantrell for his terrible, terrible methodology, but they, the revisionists,
Speaker 1: were also kind of doing the same thing. They were
Speaker 1: making all sorts of suppositions, like the idea that the
Speaker 1: newspapers had basically conspired to target radio its rival to
Speaker 1: show how irresponsible it was and how it shouldn't be
Speaker 1: trusted with the news. There's really newspaper that should be
Speaker 1: handling the news, and maybe you can listen to little
Speaker 1: Orphan Annie on the radio. But that's about it. That
Speaker 1: that was all supposition. That was as much supposition as
Speaker 1: Hadley Cantrill extrapolated his findings in New Jersey to the
Speaker 1: rest of the country. And a Brad Schwartz one of
Speaker 1: the reasons I think he's doing in good jobs because
Speaker 1: he's saying, no, if you actually sit down and read
Speaker 1: these letters and these cables that were coming in in
Speaker 1: the days after. They really probably paint the most accurate
Speaker 1: picture anyone's ever found to this point of how it
Speaker 1: was actually received. Like you can see almost in real
Speaker 1: time at the time, what people were saying about this
Speaker 1: by in their letters to orson wells, into the Mercury Theater,
Speaker 1: on the air.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and it was a range of feelings. It was
Speaker 4: everything from people who said, you know what, we knew
Speaker 4: it wasn't real, but it was really scary and super awesome.
Speaker 4: I don't know if they said things like super awesome.
Speaker 4: He said that number people wrote in who actually made
Speaker 4: fun of the people who fell for it and said that,
Speaker 4: you know, they're gullible, they're rubes. And one writer even
Speaker 4: said they should be sterilized and disenfranchised.
Speaker 1: Yeah, because they'd shown that in an actual emergency they
Speaker 1: were undependable. They would just run around like chickens with
Speaker 1: their heads cut off in the streets.
Speaker 4: Yeah. And Swartz sort of draws a line between what
Speaker 4: was going on back then to us today with this
Speaker 4: whole fake news hoax garbage that we have to listen
Speaker 4: to day in and day out, and basically said this
Speaker 4: was the first viral phenomenon in media was the War
Speaker 4: of the World's broadcast, and it was a mixed bag.
Speaker 4: Some people loved it, some people did think it was
Speaker 4: real and panicked, but it certainly was not this widespread
Speaker 4: panic across the country like you were talking about.
Speaker 1: Yeah, he said, less than a quarter of the letters
Speaker 1: described what he would consider panic. But even most of
Speaker 1: those weren't actually angry when they were writing the letter.
Speaker 3: A lot of them are thrilled he did, right.
Speaker 1: But he did say that, yes, there are cases that
Speaker 1: you see in these letters and cables that describe people panicking.
Speaker 1: So that did happen in some cases. Most of it
Speaker 1: seems to have been isolated in New Jersey. So if
Speaker 1: Hadley Cantrill had not extrapolated his findings and had you know,
Speaker 1: interviewed more people who had different reactions to the broadcast.
Speaker 1: But if it had just been like an investigation into
Speaker 1: the reaction in New Jersey, that study or that book
Speaker 1: would have been much more useful. But the fact is,
Speaker 1: he just screw the methodology up so badly that it's
Speaker 1: it's basically useless. But he wasn't. He didn't make up
Speaker 1: the panic that he described necessarily he may have exaggerated it, who.
Speaker 3: Knows, but it did.
Speaker 1: It does seem to have actually happened in some cases,
Speaker 1: but it was sporadic, fume far between, certainly not organized,
Speaker 1: and certainly not seen across the rest of the country
Speaker 1: like it was reported on by the papers the next day.
Speaker 4: Yeah, which sort of leads us to the story of
Speaker 4: the poor pulses of Manhattan. This Manhattan couple, they did
Speaker 4: fall for it. They were very scared. Apparently, as the
Speaker 4: story goes, they got their last six dollars together and
Speaker 4: got on a train to get the heck out of
Speaker 4: New York. Assuming not going west into New Jersey, they
Speaker 4: went north toward Connecticut, got as far as they could
Speaker 4: on what little money they had, get off the train,
Speaker 4: and you know, there's a bunch of other passengers that
Speaker 4: they're telling, you know, they're warning everybody of what's happened, right,
Speaker 4: And this one guy there goes over and gets there,
Speaker 4: and a just picture of this in the movie is like,
Speaker 4: no one's listening to this guy. And he picks up
Speaker 4: the newspaper basically the TV guide.
Speaker 3: It's the dunkin Donuts guy.
Speaker 4: He says, hey, guys, it says right here, war the
Speaker 4: world's broadcast is supposed to be on at that hour,
Speaker 4: Like it just says right here in the newspaper, it's
Speaker 4: a it's a radio play. Everyone no one, everyone, no one, nobody, okay.
Speaker 4: And then he just goes and gets on a train
Speaker 4: and leaves. But they feel bad for them that the
Speaker 4: other people that were you know, that had gathered together,
Speaker 4: they loaned them or gave them I guess some money,
Speaker 4: and she chipped in and got them back to New
Speaker 4: York City. And then later Estelle Paltz wrote a fifteen
Speaker 4: page letter the next day to Orson Wells that was
Speaker 4: very admiring and said how thrilled she was. But I
Speaker 4: can't imagine what else is in that fifteen page letter.
Speaker 4: It's a lot of page.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I know.
Speaker 1: Hell of a story, I think, is what whis kept
Speaker 1: just over and over and over all. Right, So so
Speaker 1: that was one of the letters that Abrad Schwartz turned
Speaker 1: up in that trove, and like it very clearly describes
Speaker 1: a couple panicking because they mistook the War of the
Speaker 1: World broadcast. But again, the this was not like across
Speaker 1: the nation like the papers reported, and Schwartz actually explains
Speaker 1: to the papers basically as a combination of a couple
Speaker 1: of things. One is a bias. I can't tell if
Speaker 1: it's selection bias, volunteer bias, or confirmation bias, but the
Speaker 1: bias is as follows. If you're in a newsroom and
Speaker 1: all of a sudden, your phone starts ringing off the hook,
Speaker 1: and you're getting one hundred and fifty percent more calls
Speaker 1: that night, and all of them are people asking about
Speaker 1: this Martian invasion and what's going on and is this
Speaker 1: real or is this a hoax? Or have you guys
Speaker 1: heard anything about this? And some of those calls are
Speaker 1: even from the local police who are also getting similar calls,
Speaker 1: and now they're calling you to find out. Then it
Speaker 1: seems like there's a lot of people calling and freaking
Speaker 1: out about this Martian thing. But if you step back,
Speaker 1: if you zoom out and look at that number of
Speaker 1: people that actually called the newsroom, it's just this minute
Speaker 1: fraction of the population of whatever town it is, So
Speaker 1: it wasn't a bunch of people freaking out. But to
Speaker 1: the people answering the phone in the newsroom, who are
Speaker 1: getting swamped with calls, way more calls than usual, it
Speaker 1: did seem like that. So that combined with anecdotal reports
Speaker 1: that no one followed up followed up on from the
Speaker 1: wire services that people were attempting suicide or having heart
Speaker 1: attacks or whatever.
Speaker 3: That just being.
Speaker 1: Reported and relaid as fact led everybody to believe that
Speaker 1: this was actually happening out there in the country, that
Speaker 1: people were running. Well, maybe not my town, because I
Speaker 1: stuck my head outside of the newsroom and I didn't
Speaker 1: see anything. But I hear they're going crazy in Chicago
Speaker 1: right now, or I hear they're really going nuts in
Speaker 1: Milwaukee or whatever. And that's how it got reported, and
Speaker 1: that's what everyone thought happened. People who lived through this
Speaker 1: thought that this happened the next day. Orson Wells thought
Speaker 1: his career was in jeopardy the next day because he
Speaker 1: accidentally made America go berserk. And that's how that myth began,
Speaker 1: and that's how it stood. And A Brad Schorts basically
Speaker 1: traced it back to lazy, lazy reporting.
Speaker 4: So myth busted thanks to A. Brad Schwartz and US.
Speaker 3: And US for sure, I'm glad you included us.
Speaker 4: So there's an interesting footnote here, though, because this actually
Speaker 4: did kind of play out that way. Eight years later
Speaker 4: and night. Was it eight years later? Yeah, nineteen forty
Speaker 4: eight in Ecuador, So this is in Quito, Ecuador. These
Speaker 4: broadcasters recreate the orson Wells radio play, and they did
Speaker 4: a version that went a lot further than his did
Speaker 4: and got other radio stations to join in and add
Speaker 4: to the reporting, which really pretty brilliant move there to
Speaker 4: increase like you turn the station and it's happening over
Speaker 4: there too. And this really did scare people. They really
Speaker 4: did take to the streets and panic. There was, you know,
Speaker 4: public panic going on. And then the crowd finds out
Speaker 4: that it's fiction and they get angry and actually turned
Speaker 4: into an angry mob and burned down the local newspaper
Speaker 4: building that had the radio station inside of it, killing
Speaker 4: six people.
Speaker 1: Yeah, six people died, fifteen people were injured. Like they
Speaker 1: knew that the staff was in that building, and they
Speaker 1: set the building on fire to try and kill them.
Speaker 1: A bunch of people escaped out the back, but a
Speaker 1: lot of people didn't escape, and the two people who
Speaker 1: were responsible for the broadcast, including Ecuador's most beloved and
Speaker 1: trusted presenter, were indicted for it. Like they're more safer basically, yeah, exactly,
Speaker 1: and they were. They were indicted for their role in this,
Speaker 1: like people died because of it. And this actually does
Speaker 1: seem to have happened in Ecuador.
Speaker 4: Amazing.
Speaker 3: Yeah, so there you go.
Speaker 1: The idea that America fell into chaos and panic after
Speaker 1: the war the world's broadcast in nineteen thirty eight is
Speaker 1: largely myth. Go forth and spread the gospel everybody, unless
Speaker 1: you're an Ecuador and then you're like, no, it's actually
Speaker 1: happened here. And since I said that actually happened here,
Speaker 1: I think Chuck is for this to mo mat.
Speaker 4: So this is from Tom in the UK.
Speaker 3: Did you see this email? I don't think so.
Speaker 4: It's great. It's one long sentence and I'm going to
Speaker 4: try and read it in how I think Tom speaks
Speaker 4: as as Tom from the UK, because just the way
Speaker 4: he wrote it, I think Tom probably talks a little
Speaker 4: bit like this.
Speaker 1: This isn't Tom from the UK, who was our tour
Speaker 1: manager when we did our UK tour, is it now?
Speaker 3: Well, shout out to that Tom.
Speaker 2: Yeah in the UK.
Speaker 4: This is an engineer and this is what you have
Speaker 4: to say, all right, Suck, Josh and Chuck Tom engineer
Speaker 4: from the UK. Stoke on Trent, big fan of the show.
Speaker 4: Been binging for about two years and got through all
Speaker 4: of them. All of you lot, even Jerry, have got
Speaker 4: me through a lot these last couple of years, and
Speaker 4: I put a few people onto your podcast. Wanted to
Speaker 4: email you lot for a while, and finally managed to
Speaker 4: get right to emailing a load of things to people
Speaker 4: about stuff that really doesn't matter. Emailed a TV show
Speaker 4: about one of their actors, a particle physicist, about using
Speaker 4: a light year of lead as a frame of reference.
Speaker 4: The company Supernoodles for the excellent job they've done with
Speaker 4: their supernoodle pot, but I'm not much for the peas.
Speaker 4: And I just wanted to say, I know you like
Speaker 4: the Japanese mayo, but you really need to try the
Speaker 4: Polish mayo. Spot on all the best.
Speaker 1: Tom boil Boy, Tom, that was great, And Chuck, that
Speaker 1: was a fantastic stoke on trent accent, the most accurate
Speaker 1: I've ever heard.
Speaker 3: And the first Tom that was a great email. You're right, Chuck,
Speaker 3: I love that email so much.
Speaker 4: I had so much fun.
Speaker 1: You were right to choose that one, So thanks Tom,
Speaker 1: Thanks for writing in. Thank you for including us in
Speaker 1: your list of people you harass via email, and keep listening.
Speaker 3: Okay, keep writing in. Maybe we'll make this a regular thing, Chuck.
Speaker 4: I would love that.
Speaker 1: Yeah, So Tom, write in again. And if you want
Speaker 1: to write in too, we want to hear from you.
Speaker 1: You can send us an email to Stuff Podcasts at
Speaker 1: iHeartRadio dot com.
Speaker 2: Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 4: For more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
Speaker 4: Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.