WELLESNET MESSAGE BOARD

I think it's in an Autobio (?) that Steve Allen tells the story of hearing it, I believe with his mother, and having indeed been shocked -

- that anyone had ever thought it was anything other than what it actually was!

(I think his main argument was that you just had to take one sec to spin the dial, to realize that The End Of The World would obviously not be covered by just one station!!!)

-Craig

For what it's worth, I do remember when I was a kid my late grandfather telling me that he remembered the broadcast but that he was not fooled. However, he also told me that several of his neighbors had questioned the veracity of the fictitious reports. He lived in Worcester, Massachusetts, so if he was telling me the truth, at least some of the people in that area were confused. Of course, my grandfather was a great storyteller, so I can't say with all honesty that what he was telling me was true -- though I'm very much a traditionalist, and I would like to believe it!

Another precinct heard from:

http://www.ocregister.com/2017/10/31/how-the-great-war-of-the-worlds-radio-panic-is-the-halloween-hoax-that-wont-die/

Aha!

(The clumsiness of Mr. Gore's Interweb strikes again!)

All best,
-Craig

Craig,
That comment was not aimed at you. It was about [i]Adam Ruins Everything[/i], which I thought was extreme in its view.
Ray

Ray, for my part I'm not trying for one NY minute to do that!

In fact, my goal is just the opposite of rejecting anything out of hand without weighing it. And that includes first-hand memories later put on the record by folks like Houseman, Herz, Anderson, et al.

News is rightly called just, "the [i]rough draft[/i] of History."

So what I [i]do [/i]believe in trying to do, is sifting the truth out of [i]both[/i] current clippings, and later interviews and research. History - and it's often an imperfect thing, at best - is pieced together from both related-but-different sources.

Best,
-Craig

P.S. - And I'm loving all of the great new threads discussing Welles' audio work, which often gets unfair short shrift.

I don’t object to being skeptical about some of the outlandish reports, but I have a problem with rejecting statements given 80 years ago in order to make it fit into a revised history.

"When the Legend becomes Fact
- Print the Legend!"

Oh, then I agree 100%. Growing up in the 70s and 80s it was always 'the night that panicked America.' I'm glad that's being walked back these days (though I bristle at walking it back too far.) :D

>I always assumed there certainly was some bad excitement caused by Welles soaping the nation's windows<

Hadji, as I've said all along, "some" is a given. (But "THE NIGHT THAT PANICKED AMERICA"? No.)

>he does contradict your "newspapers pissing on radio theory":<

Chief, that's not [i]my[/i] explanation - it's Houseman's! (You can even hear him say it in a recorded interview.)

>To paraphrase Carl Phillips, "something happened."<

And to paraphrase Superman to Lois, in the first Donner film. "But [i]that[/i] was in a [i]story[/i]..."

Best,
-Craig

[quote]H.G. Wells posited to Orson that the 'panic' could have been Americans pretending to be afraid since it was Halloween.[/quote]
Yes, that seems to be the Wells/Welles position: that the so-called "panic" was in fact a fake panic that consisted mainly of practical jokes. That's a possibility that's never really been explored, if it even could be.

Thanks for linking that fine article by Brad Schwartz, Craig; and his book is a very fine piece of research. But he does contradict your "newspapers pissing on radio theory":
[quote][size=120]The brief, isolated outbreaks of fear and confusion captured in the letters hardly add up to the “wave of mass hysteria” that The New York Times and other papers conveyed. But [b]there is no hard evidence that the press deliberately played up the panic in order to cast aspersions on news broadcasting.[/b] In fact, papers and radio were getting along better than ever in the fall of 1938, having finally realized that the public saw them as complimentary news sources, not competitors. [b]Instead, it seems more likely that many dailies used War of the Worlds simply as an opportunity to increase circulation with eye-catching headlines.[/b] As Paul W. White, the managing director of CBS News, observed in his 1947 book News on the Air, “Not in every case, but in too many cases, news stories are written to justify headlines which will make people want to buy newspapers.” And nothing sells papers like massive headlines about Martians and panic.[/size][/quote]

So, three years before Kane, Welles was well aquainted with the idea of "Yellow Journalism" ("If the headline is big enough, it makes the news big enough"). But as Hadji says, SOMETHING had to have happened first.

[img]http://www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/radio/2015-08/12Aug/warworldssummary_3286680a.jpg?imwidth=480[/img]

The only empirical evidence from the time of the event is the letter(s) complaining about emergency phone lines being jammed by calls from people upset about an invasion. I've never verified this evidence, though I always assumed there certainly was [i]some[/i] bad excitement caused by Welles soaping the nation's windows. The scale and intensity of the 'panic' is something we'll never know. As for the press reaction, I always liked Welles' explanation that the newspapers were attacking radio for stealing their advertising revenue. Apparently fake news has been around for a long time.

H.G. Wells posited to Orson that the 'panic' could have been Americans pretending to be afraid since it was Halloween. I think it's incorrect to discount that [i]anything[/i] happened, as some online authors have done in recent years, and incorrect also to completely throw out Hadley Cantril's conclusions since someone didn't like the sampling method he used 80 years ago.

To paraphrase Carl Phillips, "[i]something[/i] happened."

I don't mean to be a wet blanket. And I am an amateur student of history, whose goal is the real truth.

But, NYT or not, that kind of immediate stuff always needs to be kept in context. It's Raw Reporting, not nailed down facts. Even up to today, details of disaster stories very often get downgraded as time passes. As the links I gave above, and other research, shows, very, very little of this morning after-type stuff was actually able to be documented later.

And again, I'd point to the lack of legal followup to anything. If no tangible charges could be proven, even of the "incitement/public nuisance" type, then that speaks a lot to the depth of the "panic."

Again: [i]I'm not saying that [b]nothing[/b] happened[/i]. But, more balance here:

https://www.vanityfair.com/culture/2015/04/broadcast-hysteria-orson-welles-war-of-the-worlds

"The story of John and Estelle Paultz, and [b]a handful of other people[/b] who fled their homes or thought of doing so, prove that the War of the Worlds panic had a definite basis in fact, [b]though such scenes were very, very rare[/b]. Even among people frightened by the program, most stayed close to their radios, listening intently for up to half an hour [b]before they figured out it was science fiction[/b]"

-Craig

[quote]Beyond Grover's Mill, mainly some phone calls. [/quote]
According to the letter, at least two thousand in one city in the space of two hours, including people from all over the country, worried about their loved ones in the region. I guess it depends on how you want to define "panic". I've never heard anything about suicides or mass panic on the roads, but it did go beyond phone calls, according to the

[b][size=150]New York Times:[/size][/b]

[img]http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-DaQbVDraL-g/UUHUBTbpy1I/AAAAAAAAMKI/NNiQLrBHiE4/s1600/war+of+the+worlds+radio.jpg[/img]

Guys, I [i]never[/i] said "none"!

But much, much less than the legend we grew up with would have had us think; and that which [i]did[/i] happen, of much smaller scope than the screaming reports would have had us believe.

Mass panic on the roads and streets? Suicides? Nope.

Beyond Grover's Mill, mainly some phone calls.

Best,
-Craig

P.S. - Let's keep in mind a logical point: if there [i]had [/i]been real damage, there [i]would[/i] have been the legal repercussions that CBS and Welles feared for a short while...