In September 1957, when I was nine years old, my parents and I watched a one-hour TV show entitled “The Night America Trembled.” The night in question was October 30, 1938, which my father and mother remembered well although of course I didn’t. That was when a brilliantly conceived radio adaptation of H.G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds convinced multitudes that this country had been invaded by creatures from the planet Mars, and that humanity was doomed.
Many were sent fleeing in their terror. That was 80 years ago tonight.
“The Night America Trembled” is available on DVD, and I’ve watched it a couple of times as a grownup. I can’t recommend it highly enough. It’s an extraordinary drama in its own right which makes clear, the way no scholarly account could, how something like a million people were persuaded for a few dreadful hours that the Martian invasion was really happening.
In 1898, when Wells published The War of the Worlds, Queen Victoria was on the throne and the real War of the World was 16 years away. The action is set in England; the narrator is a British man of letters–“philosophical writer,” he calls himself–who at the time of the Martians’ arrival was “much occupied in learning to ride the bicycle, and busy upon a series of papers discussing the probable developments of moral ideas as civilisation progressed.” It’s made clear almost from the beginning of the book that somehow or other the Martians will be turned back, that civilization will continue, although at a somewhat reduced level of affluence. We know in advance how things will turn out, yet in spite of this the book is powerfully suspenseful. As a fiction writer, I continue to marvel at how Wells pulled this off.
The 1938 radio adaptation by Orson Welles and the Mercury Theatre on the Air–which you can listen to on YouTube, or read a transcript of in Hadley Cantril’s 1940 The Invasion from Mars–breaks entirely from this scenario. It’s set in the present, in an America slowly recovering from the Depression and jittery over impending war in Europe. For two-thirds of the program there’s no narrator at all. It’s presented as a series of radio news bulletins and announcements, interrupting with increasing frequency and urgency a program of light music, allegedly from the Meridian Room in New York’s Hotel Park Plaza.
A huge meteorite, the news announcers report, has landed on a farm near Grovers Mill, New Jersey, not far from Trenton (where I was born). Only it’s not a meteorite. It’s a metal cylinder; and … “the darn thing’s unscrewing! … Ladies and gentlemen, this is the most terrifying thing I have ever witnessed. … Wait a minute! Someone’s crawling out of the hollow top. Some one or … something.”
It’s a “something.” And the invasion has begun.
By the intermission, New Jersey has been trashed, New York City gassed to death. (Foreshadowing what would happen a few years later in Nazi-occupied Europe?) Cylinders are falling everywhere. This is the end.
“The Night America Trembled” cuts back and forth between the Mercury Theater studio, where actors in shirt sleeves and loosened ties deliver their lines and create the sound effects–sometimes taking their roles only half seriously–and scenes of the radio audience. College students in a dorm room (Warren Beatty among them) use the “Meridian Room” orchestra for background music to their card game. They hardly even hear the bulletins that interrupt the music until they’ve become too horrific to be ignored. Of course they believe the news is for real. Why shouldn’t they? If they’d been paying attention, they’d have known it couldn’t be true: events were happening too quickly. But they’re only half listening, until it’s too late and panic has made reason impossible.
A naive teenage baby-sitter turns on the radio for music to keep her company while she does her homework. Twenty minutes later she’s hysterical with fear. Tough guys in a Trenton barroom hear the “news reports” in the midst of an argument about whether Hitler would dare to attack the US. They’re sure it can’t really be Martians who are invading–must be the Nazis! They head straight to the headquarters of the New Jersey State Police (where my mother worked in 1938 as a secretary) to volunteer to fight. They’re told: beat it, it’s just a radio play.
“Warning! Poisonous black smoke pouring in from Jersey marshes. Reaches South Street. Gas masks useless. Urge population to move into open spaces … automobiles use routes 7, 23, 24. … Avoid congested areas. Smoke now spreading over Raymond Boulevard” … and a car runs off the road and overturns, the driver desperately trying to escape from the Martians.
61 years have passed since “The Night America Trembled” was aired. That’s three times the distance separating the TV show from the radio broadcast whose story it tells, though on the other hand no world war has come in between. (Why does The War of the Worlds seem to presage world wars?) The program’s host Edward R. Murrow, sagely smoking a cigarette as he philosophizes about the fatal effects of panic on “men’s” minds, feels like an artifact from another era.
So do the young couple who are supposed to be at a movie–that’s what they’ve told the girl’s parents–but are in fact in the boy’s car passionately making out while music from the Meridian Room in Hotel Park Plaza plays on the car radio. They also light up as they take a break from kissing. Didn’t everybody, in those days?
Let’s get married! the boy proposes–and we know the scene comes from an era where teen marriage is the only accepted way to satisfy teen hormonal needs. I know a Justice of the Peace who can do it! And off they go, knowing Mom and Dad wouldn’t approve; but as the “news” coming from their radio gets scarier and scarier, the girl begs: Oh, please, turn around. In the contest between hormones and horror, fear wins out. Soon they’re back at the girl’s home, where Mom and Dad have been tranquilly listening to Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy, on the radio at the same time as The War of the Worlds.
And so the Martians have done one good deed. They’ve rescued two good kids from what might have been a disastrous marriage.
* * * * *
By the end of the broadcast, at least according to “The Night America Trembled,” Orson Welles and his actors realized the effect their all-too-real drama was having on upward of a million people. Welles felt obliged to make a special appearance, reassuring everyone that this was just a “holiday offering” in honor of Halloween, “the Mercury Theatre’s own radio version of dressing up in a sheet and jumping out of a bush and saying Boo!” The TV show never said what I, as a nine-year-old, most wanted to know.
What happened with the Martian invasion? Did the world come to an end?
Eventually I found out that an older cousin had a copy of the excellent 1955 “Classics Illustrated” version of The War of the Worlds, and that he was willing to lend it to me. So I did learn the outcome of the story, which I suppose most of my readers already know and I don’t intend to repeat here. If you don’t know it, by all means get hold of the Wells classic–not the “Welles classic,” though at age nine I had trouble keeping Orson and H.G. distinct–and read it.
It’s an amazing book. I’ve already mentioned one of the amazing things about it, how it maintains gripping suspense even while telegraphing over and over how it’s going to turn out. Another is this:
The Martians, though terrifying in their grotesque repulsiveness, are not exactly suited for life on this Earth. The gravity here is so much stronger than what they’re used to on Mars, they can barely move. They make up for this through use of elaborate “fighting machines,” towering tripods that stalk over England, all but invincible. “Such mechanical intelligence as the Martian possessed,” Wells wrote, “was quite able to dispense with muscular exertion at a pinch.”
Good enough; but what did those enormous machines use for fuel?
I must have read the book six or seven times over before that obvious question occurred to me: what did the Martians use for fuel? Although Wells devotes an entire chapter to a semi-“scientific” account of the Martians and their machinery, he glosses over the question so effectively that you don’t even notice it’s there, unanswered.
A sobering thought: if the Martians of 1898 were to invade Earth of 2018, they wouldn’t last a week. Let them try using their heat-rays on us, and we’d smart-bomb them out of existence. So much mightier and deadlier have our armaments gotten in those 120 years, and since (as we now know) there are no Martians to use them on, we use them on each other.
* * * * *
And a sad postscript:
A few weeks, or possibly it was months, after the broadcast of “The Night America Trembled,” the most extraordinary thing appeared in our Pennsylvania skies. It was the aurora borealis, and I remember it as luminous red and green smudges across the black of the night sky. It was beautiful. I couldn’t enjoy watching it, however, because although I suppose my parents must have told me what it was, I didn’t entirely trust them. What if they were wrong? What if it was really the Martians, as we’d seen on TV?
I kept my suspicion to myself. I imagined, not unrealistically, that they’d laugh at me or bawl me out if I told them my fears. So I kept quiet, and worried. The next day the Philadelphia newspaper had a front-page story on it, so I knew it was true, it really was the aurora borealis. But by then it was gone. I kept hoping it would appear again some night. It never did. At our latitudes it was a rare phenomenon, front-page news if it happened.
I’ve never seen the aurora borealis again, and since I’m 70 years old and I live in North Carolina, I don’t think I’m likely to. It was a once-in-a-lifetime event, literally. I wasted it fretting about Martians.
by David Halperin
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