Editor’s note: The hacking of our website in late April cost us several articles. Among the losses was a look at the book “When Mars Attacked,” which examines the legacy of Orson Welles’ “The War of the Worlds” radio broadcast. Author David Acord was kind enough to help us recreate the interview as it appeared.
Acord is the director of communications and executive editor at a national trade association near Washington, D.C. His previous books include “What Would Lincoln Do? Lincoln’s Most Inspired Solutions to Challenging Problems and Difficult Situations” and “Success Secrets of Sherlock Holmes: Life Lessons from the Master Detective.”
“When Mars Attacked” is available on Amazon Kindle
David, “The War of the Worlds” broadcast marks its 75th anniversary this year. What is its legacy and what did we learn from it?
When you think about it, the enduring popularity of the broadcast is somewhat baffling. After all, we’re talking about a single one-hour radio program that aired more than seven decades ago. What is it about this particular show that refuses to go away? Why does it continue to resonate with the grandchildren and great-grandchildren of the people who first heard it? Those are some of the main reasons I decided to write the book – to explore those questions.
On one level, it’s a very American story. Americans love rebels and the abstract concept of rebellion – after all, it was how our country was founded. Orson Welles was a great rebel. A relatively unknown young man managed to do something no one had done before in the history of radio – something edgy, dangerous and morally dubious, but also exciting and new. He found a way to rattle the masses and send them out of their homes screaming into the night by breaking the unwritten rules of broadcasting.
There’s also a David vs. Goliath aspect to the story. Welles wasn’t just a rebel. He was a “little guy” armed only with his wits, talent and a bare-bones radio program that hardly anyone listened to, and yet he still managed to turn the entire country upside down in the space of just a few minutes. He used the same tools as everyone else, but employed them in new and unexpected ways. In this sense,The War of the Worlds broadcast was a perfectly executed guerilla maneuver.
At the same time, all of us today are convinced that we would never have fallen for it. Like every other generation that has ever lived, we view ourselves as infinitely wiser and more sophisticated than our old-fashioned forebears. But that’s simply not true.
I think the main legacy of the broadcast – and the biggest lesson we can learn from it – is cautionary. It can be summed up this way: we’re not as smart as we think we are. And by “we,” I mean the American public, past, present and future. Perhaps subconsciously, we see ourselves in that long-lost radio audience. They, too, thought they were too mature and sophisticated to ever be taken in by a fake news broadcast.
The incident reminds us of our basic vulnerability as human animals. We aren’t as solid and secure as we would like to think. Despite America’s status as the greatest superpower on earth, there are still gaps in our armor. At any moment, our comfortable world can come falling down around us. The really worrisome part is that it doesn’t take a national tragedy like 9/11 or Hurricane Katrina to send us spiraling into fear and paranoia. You, too, can have your life turned inside out by something as simple as a radio show – or, to put it in today’s vernacular, a series of tweets. In the book, I detail some of the most recent Twitter and other media “panics” that have evoked comparisons to Welles’ radio play.
“The War of the Worlds” is the ultimate reality check. It reminds us that at the end of the day, we have been, and always will be, merely human – flawed, imperfect, and light-years away from the indestructible, larger-than-life personas we adopt in public and private. No matter how hard we try, we can never fully shield ourselves from the fact that the universe doesn’t revolve around us, and that forces a thousand times stronger – be they human or extraterrestrial – may crush us at any second.
What drew you to the subject?
I have been fascinated by “The War of the Worlds” broadcast since I was a very young child. I have always been an old time radio fan, and I can remember hearing my grandparents talk about the broadcast, and how frightened they were. For my 10th or 11th birthday, I think, my parents bought me an audio cassette of the show, so I was finally able to listen to it. I wore that tape out. I must have played it a hundred times. I was just enthralled. I can still remember the first time I heard those screams coming from Grover’s Mill – I knew it was fake, and I was still scared!
So it’s always been an interest of mine. Years later, I realized there was enough material for a book. In particular, I wanted to write a book to set the record straight and dispel some of the myths that have grown up around the show – for instance, that it was a deliberate hoax, and that Welles set out to send innocent American listeners “over the edge.” That’s simply not true.
How long and how did you research the broadcast?
It took a little over two years from beginning to end. I have a “day job,” so it was mostly written late at night, on weekends and during holiday vacations – all in all, an exhausting process, but a rewarding one, as well!
I’ve been an editor/reporter for more than 15 years, so I was able to use the research skills I’d developed covering federal agencies. My goal was to dig as deep and as wide as possible. All told, I read hundreds of individual newspaper articles, scholarly treatises, journal articles, books, letters, telegrams, etc.
I live in the Washington, D.C. area, so I was able to visit the National Archives, and there I found a treasure trove of primary sources, many of which are presented in my book for the first time. A lot of this stuff has just sat there for years, overlooked by most researchers. For instance, the Archives has original copies of every single letter sent to the FCC after the broadcast – hundreds in total. The Archives staff was extremely helpful; they dug up an internal report compiled by the FCC a few weeks after the broadcast in late 1938 that summarizes the responses they received and breaks down the data on a state-by-state basis. It’s fascinating, and something I don’t believe anyone else has ever published. It was one of those documents that could only be found if you knew where to look – and luckily, the staff knew where to look! I included the entire report in the book as an appendix.
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