Digital Extra: The Journal's 175th Anniversary

07.21.2004

1938. Switchboard deluged after Welles' 'sketch'

Arriving in a flaming meteor, a make-believe army from Mars struck New Jersey without mercy on Oct. 30, 1938, vaporizing a fictitious town and spreading panic across Rhode Island and America.

Orson Welles' radio production "War of the Worlds," a realistic drama describing an attack by Martians, was broadcast in Providence by WPRO.

"Literally hundreds of protests were received by the Providence Journal," the paper reported the next day in a front-page story cataloguing the local and nationwide panic caused by Welles' production.

Despite announcements during the broadcast that the drama was fiction, thousands of radio listeners took the show to be real.

"Hysteria was genuine," the paper reported. "Many of the callers wanted to know about 'the disaster down in New Jersey.' Others wanted to know if war had actually broken out.

"Scores of persons called the Narragansett Electric Company and advised officials to order lights turned off so the darkened city might hide from the invaders," the paper reported.

One woman called The Journal's Woonsocket office in sobs, saying that her aunt from New Jersey must be dead. "She couldn't possibly survive that horrible disaster," the woman cried. A driver on North Main Street fainted at the wheel during the broadcast and had a minor collision. Another driver took his wife and three children to the Attleboro police station and told the police the world was coming to an end.

The paper reported: "The Journal's switchboard operator was as busy as though the disaster were a real one, and she acted accordingly. Through the deluge of calls her voice could be heard reassuring hysterical callers, telling them, 'it's just a sketch that is being broadcast on the radio.' "

"Mr. Welles's previous efforts at realism have had no such sweeping results," The Journal reported. "A year ago he brought a company to Providence to play Shakespeare's 'Julius Caesar' in modern dress and Nazi-like uniforms."

The Journal's editorial page urged the Federal Communications Commission to investigate.

"The lesson is that the radio has an unsuspectedly tremendous capacity to influence people," the paper said. "When a broadcast intended as dramatic entertainment can inspire tens of thousands with such fear that they seek escape or protection from an invasion by the imagined men of Mars, it is time to consider what effects of a milder but likewise unwholesome sort may be produced day by day by the garrulous gadget that springs into life at the touch of a switch."