Eric Rabkin is professor
emeritus of English language
and literature at the
University of Michigan.
His books include Mars:
A Tour of the Human
Imagination.PANIC ON THE STREETS OF NEW YORK
Police distribute food to needy
New Yorkers. Orson Welles’s
Panic Broadcast preyed on
the fears of a fragile nationJust after 8.30pm on 30 October 1938,
the thousands of Americans tuned to
the radio show Mercury Theater on the Air
suddenly heard an alarming news flash:
huge Martian fighting-machines were emerging
from meteor-like spacecraft that had landed near
Grover’s Mill, New Jersey. What they were listening
to was an adaptation of HG Wells’s The War of
the Worlds. Many, however, mistook it for
an invasion on American soil.
“Something’s wriggling out of the shadow like
a gray snake,” a desperate voice shouted down
the airwaves. “Now it’s another one, and another.
They look like tentacles to me... There’s a jet of
flame springing from the mirror, and it leaps right at
the advancing men. It strikes them head on! Good
Lord, they’re turning into flame!... Enemy now
turns east... Evident objective is New York City...”
The so-called Panic Broadcast, directed and
narrated by 23-year-old radio actor and future
filmmaker Orson Welles, caught America at
a vulnerable moment. Still besieged by the Great
Depression, which had seen half of its banks closeA fabricated Martian invasion hit a raw nerve in a country facing the prospect of warand unemployment soar to 25 per cent, the nation
was struggling, and many people felt themselves
just a short mischance from disaster.
Adding to the sense of dread was the rise
of German imperialism across the Atlantic.
Hitler was now the dark colossus of Europe,
annexing Austria just a few months before Welles’s
broadcast. Following the Nuremberg Laws of 1935
(which enshrined anti-Semitic Nazi doctrine
in law), New York, a city with some 1.7 million
Jews, seemed an obvious target for German
aggression. An invasion, Martian or otherwise,
was no longer unthinkable.
Papers such as The New York Times seized
on Welles’s broadcast (which you can listen to
at youtube.com/watch?v=Xs0K4ApWl4g), sparking
a popular outcry against fake news. Congress even
considered limiting freedom of speech, while
the Federal Communications Commission
launched an investigation to see if any laws had
been broken. Ultimately, the real-life fears of 1938
overshadowed the fictional, and Welles escaped
with an on-air apology.5