Radio, Propaganda, and The War of the Worlds

Host Aaron Henne: Welcome to The Dybbukast. I'm Aaron Henne, artistic director of theatre dybbuk. We are excited to continue to share with you recordings of our illuminated lectures – live presentations which were inspired by The Dybbukast format, as they are available. In that spirit, this episode was recorded as a live presentation on September 1st, 2024 at the Skirball Cultural Center in Los Angeles and was edited for the podcast by Julie Lockhart and Gregory Scharpen.

Titled "Radio, Propaganda, and The War of The Worlds" the illuminated lecture you will hear features Professor Paul Lerner as he discusses the famous 1938 radio broadcast by Orson Welles of The War of the Worlds vis-à-vis analysis from Austrian Jewish media researcher (and later advertising exec) Herta Herzog, who studied audience reactions to the broadcast and argued that the tensions of the time – the rise of fascist movements, the growing likelihood of war – agitated listeners and predisposed them to believe the fabricated threat from the skies, despite Welles’ assurances that the broadcast was a hoax.

Throughout the lecture, actors Joe Jordan, Adam Lebowitz-Lockard, Edgar Landa, Julie Lockhart, and Inger Tudor perform excerpts from radio broadcasts and other sources, accompanied by musician Andrew Anderson.

And now, “Radio, Propaganda, and The War of The Worlds.”

•••

(We hear audience applause.)

Actor 1 (Announcer): The Columbia Broadcasting System and its affiliated stations present Orson Welles and the Mercury Theatre on the Air in The War of the Worlds by H. G. Wells.

(We hear music.)

Actor 1 (Announcer): Ladies and gentlemen: the director of the Mercury Theatre and star of these  broadcasts, Orson Welles . . .

Actor 2 (Orson Welles): We know now that in the early years of the twentieth century this world was being watched closely by intelligences greater than man’s and yet as mortal as his own. We know now that as human beings busied themselves about their various concerns they were scrutinized and studied, perhaps almost as narrowly as a man with a microscope might scrutinize the transient creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water. With infinite complacence people went to and fro over the earth about their little affairs, serene in the assurance of their dominion over this small spinning fragment of solar driftwood which by chance or design man has inherited out of the dark mystery of Time and Space. Yet across an immense ethereal gulf, minds that are to our minds as ours are to the beasts in the jungle, intellects vast, cool and unsympathetic, regarded this earth with envious eyes and slowly and surely drew their plans against us. In the thirty-ninth year of the twentieth century came the great disillusionment. It was near the end of October. Business was better. The war scare was over. More men were back at work. Sales were picking up. On this particular evening, October 30, the Crosley service estimated that thirty-two million people were listening in on radios.

Dr. Paul Lerner: It was the night before Halloween. October 30, 1938.

Actor 1 (Announcer): . . .for the next twenty-four hours not much change in temperature. A slight atmospheric disturbance of undetermined origin is reported over Nova Scotia, causing a low pressure area to move down rather rapidly over the northeastern states, bringing a forecast of rain, accompanied by winds of light gale force. Maximum temperature 66; minimum 48. This weather report comes to you from the Government Weather Bureau. . . . We take you now to the Meridian Room in the Hotel Park Plaza in downtown New York, where you will be entertained by the music of Ramón Raquello and his orchestra.

(We hear music.)

Paul: On that Halloween eve, Orson Welles shocks the country with his War of the Worlds broadcast, an adaptation of H. G. Wells’ 1898 novel, which was, as you heard, featured on the “Mercury Theater on the Air” series on CBS radio. The hour-long broadcast mimicked a series of actual news bulletins aired in interruption of regularly scheduled musical programming.

(We hear music.)

Actor 3 (Announcer Two): Ladies and gentlemen, we interrupt our program of dance music to bring you a special bulletin from the Intercontinental Radio News. At twenty minutes before eight, central time, Professor Farrell of the Mount Jennings Observatory, Chicago, Illinois, reports observing several explosions of incandescent gas, occurring at regular intervals on the planet Mars. The spectroscope indicates the gas to be hydrogen and moving towards the earth with enormous velocity. Professor Pierson of the Observatory at Princeton confirms Farrell’s observation, and describes the phenomenon as (quote) like a jet of blue flame shot from a gun (unquote). We now return you to the music of Ramón Raquello, playing for you in the Meridian Room of the Park Plaza Hotel, situated in downtown New York.

(We hear music.)

Paul: The faux reportage begins in earnest with an interview meant to both assure the listener and to set up that which is to come.

(We hear music.)

Actor 3 (Announcer Two): We are now ready to take you to the Princeton Observatory at Princeton where Carl Phillips, our commentator, will interview Professor Richard Pierson, famous astronomer. We take you now to Princeton, New Jersey.

Actor 4 (Phillips): Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. This is Carl Phillips, speaking to you from the observatory at Princeton. I am standing in a large semi-circular room, pitch black except for an oblong split in the ceiling. Through this opening I can see a sprinkling of stars that cast a kind of frosty glow over the intricate mechanism of the huge telescope. The ticking sound you hear is the vibration of the clockwork. Professor Pierson stands directly above me on a small platform, peering through a giant lens. I ask you to be patient, ladies and gentlemen, during any delay that may arise during our interview. Besides his ceaseless watch of the heavens, Professor Pierson may be interrupted by telephone or other communications. During this period he is in constant touch with the astronomical centers of the world . . . Professor, may I begin our questions?

Actor 2 (Pierson): At any time, Mr. Phillips.

Paul: I should mention that Pierson was actually played by Orson Welles.

Actor 4 (Phillips): Professor, would you please tell our radio audience exactly what you see as you observe the planet Mars through your telescope?

Actor 2 (Pierson): Nothing unusual at the moment, Mr. Phillips. A red disk swimming in a blue sea. Transverse stripes across the disk. Quite distinct now because Mars happens to be the point nearest the earth . . . in opposition, as we call it.

Actor 4 (Phillips): In your opinion, what do these transverse stripes signify, Professor Pierson?

Actor 2 (Pierson): Not canals, I can assure you, Mr. Phillips, although that’s the popular conjecture of those who imagine Mars to be inhabited. From a scientific viewpoint the stripes are merely the result of atmospheric conditions peculiar to the planet.

Actor 4 (Phillips): Then you’re quite convinced as a scientist that living intelligence as we know it does not exist on Mars?

Actor 2 (Pierson): I’d say the chances against it are a thousand to one.

Paul: Once we’ve met Phillips, the commentator, and Pierson, who will become our narrator later on, the faux reportage continues with news of a mysterious object landing on a farm in Grovers Mill, a rural New Jersey community.

(We hear music.)

Actor 3 (Announcer Two): We take you now to Grovers Mill, New Jersey.

Actor 4 (Phillips): Ladies and gentlemen, this is Carl Phillips again, out at the Wilmuth farm, Grovers Mill, New Jersey. Professor Pierson and myself made the eleven miles from Princeton in ten minutes. Well, I . . . I hardly know where to begin, to paint for you a word picture of the strange scene before my eyes, like something out of a modern “Arabian Nights.” Well, I just got here. I haven’t had a chance to look around yet. I guess that’s it. Yes, I guess that’s the . . . thing, directly in front of me, half buried in a vast pit. Must have struck with terrific force. The ground is covered with splinters of a tree it must have knocked down on its way down. What I can see of the . . .  object doesn’t itself look very much like a meteor, at least not the meteors I’ve seen. It looks more like a huge cylinder. It has a diameter of . . . what would you say, Professor Pierson?

Actor 2 (Pierson): What’s that?

Actor 4 (Phillips): What would you say . . . what is diameter?

Actor 2 (Pierson): About thirty yards.

Actor 4 (Phillips): About thirty yards . . . The metal on the sheath is . . . well, I’ve never seen anything like it. The color is sort of yellowish-white. Curious spectators now are pressing close to the object in spite of the efforts of the police to keep them back.

(We hear the other actors whispering.)

Paul: Phillips, the correspondent, allegedly on the scene, then reports, along with Pierson’s commentary, that beings are emerging from a spacecraft

Actor 4 (Phillips): Can you tell us the meaning of that scraping noise inside the thing?

Actor 2 (Pierson): Possibly the unequal cooling of its surface.

Actor 4 (Phillips): I see, do you still think it’s a meteor, Professor?

Actor 2 (Pierson): I don’t know what to think. That metal casing is definitely extraterrestrial . . . not found on this earth. Friction with the earth’s atmosphere usually tears holes in a meteorite. This thing is smooth and, as you can see, of cylindrical shape.

Actor 4 (Phillips): Just a minute! Something’s happening! Ladies and gentlemen, this is terrific! This end of the thing is beginning to flake off! The top is beginning to rotate like a screw! The thing must be hollow!

Actors 1, 3, and 5: She’s movin’! Look, the darn thing’s unscrewing! Keep back, there! Keep back, I tell you! Maybe there’s men in it trying to escape! It’s red hot, they’ll burn to a cinder! Keep back there. Keep those idiots back!

(We hear a thump.)

Actors 1, 3, and 5: She’s off! The top’s loose! Look out there! Stand back!

Actor 4 (Phillips): Ladies and gentlemen, this is the most terrifying thing I have ever witnessed . . . Wait a minute! Someone’s crawling out of the hollow top. Someone or . . . something. I can see peering out of that black hole two luminous disks . . are they eyes? It might be a face. It might be . . .

(We hear the other actors gasping.)

Actor 4 (Phillips): Good heavens, something’s wriggling out of the shadow like a gray snake. Now it’s another one, and another one, and another one. They look like tentacles to me. There, I can see the thing’s body. It’s large, large as a bear and it glistens like wet leather. But that face, it . . . Ladies and gentlemen, it’s indescribable. I can hardly force myself to keep looking at it. It’s so awful. The eyes are black and gleam like a serpent. The mouth is a sort of V-shaped with saliva dripping from its rimless lips that seem to quiver and pulsate. The monster or whatever it is can hardly move. It seems weighed down by .  . . possibly gravity or something. The thing’s rising up now. The crowd falls back. They’ve seen plenty. This is the most extraordinary experience, ladies and gentlemen. I can’t find words . . . I’ll pull this microphone with me as I talk. I’ll have to stop the description until I can take a new position. Hold on, if you’ll please, I’ll be right back in a minute.

Paul: And then we hear that these beings were vaporizing local residents with some sort of heat ray.

Actor 1 (Announcer): We now return you to Carl Phillips at Grovers Mill.

Actor 4 (Phillips): Ladies and gentlemen (Am I on?). Ladies and gentlemen, ladies and gentlemen here I am, back at the stone wall that adjoins Mr. Wilmuth’s garden. From here I get a sweep of the whole scene. I’ll give you every detail as long as I can talk. As long as I can see. More state police have arrived. They’re drawing up a cordon in front of the pit, about thirty of them. No need to push the crowd back now. They’re willing to keep their distance. The captain is conferring with someone.

We can’t see who. Oh yes, I believe it’s Professor Pierson. Yes, it is. Now they’ve parted. And the Professor moves around one side, studying the object, while the captain and two policemen advance with something in their hands. I can see it now. It’s a white handkerchief tied to a pole . . . a flag of truce. If those creatures know what that means . . . what anything means!. Wait a minute, Something’s happening!

A humped shape is rising out of the pit. I can make out a small beam of light against a mirror. What’s that? 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!

(We hear the other actors screaming and shrieking.)

Actor 4 (Phillips): Now the whole field’s caught on fire. The woods . . . the barns . . . the gas tanks of automobiles . . . it’s spreading everywhere. It’s coming this way. About twenty  yards to my right . . .

(We hear radio static.)

Actor 1 (Announcer): Ladies and gentlemen, due to circumstances beyond our control, we are unable to continue the broadcast from Grovers Mill.

Paul: An update then details the army’s plan for martial law and evacuation.

Actor 3 (Announcer Two): Ladies and gentlemen, I have just been handed a message that came in from Grovers Mill by telephone. Just one moment please. At least forty people, including six state troopers lie dead in a field east of the village of Grovers Mill, their bodies burned and distorted beyond all possible recognition. The next voice you hear will be that of Brigadier General Montgomery Smith, commander of the state militia at Trenton, New Jersey.

Actor 5 (Smith): I have been requested by the governor of New Jersey to place the counties of Mercer and Middlesex as far west as Princeton, and east to Jamesburg, under martial law. No one will be permitted to enter this area except by special pass issued by state or military authorities. Four companies of state militia are proceeding from Trenton to Grovers Mill, and will aid in the evacuation of homes within the range of military operations. Thank you.

Paul: Then more updates outline the army’s ineffectual attempts to hold off the invading Martians.

Actor 1 (Announcer): We’ve run special wires to the artillery line in adjacent villages to give you direct reports in the zone of the advancing enemy. First we take you to the battery of the 22nd Field Artillery, located in the Watchung Mountains.

Actor 2 (Officer): Range, thirty-two meters.

Actor 4 (Gunner): Thirty-two meters.

Actor 2 (Officer): Projection, thirty-nine degrees.

Actor 4 (Gunner): Thirty-nine degrees.

Actor 2 (Officer): Fire!

(We hear a low boom.)

Actor 4 (Gunner): A hundred and forty yards to the right, sir.

Actor 2 (Officer): Shift range . . . thirty-one meters.

Actor 4 (Gunner): Thirty-one meters

Actor 2 (Officer): Projection . . . thirty-seven degrees.

Actor 4 (Gunner): Thirty-seven degrees.

Actor 2 (Officer): Fire!

(We hear a low boom.)

Actor 3 (Observer): A hit, sir! We got the tripod of one of them. They’ve stopped. The others are trying to repair it.

Actor 2 (Officer): Quick, get the range! Shift thirty meters.

Actor 4 (Gunner): Thirty meters.

Actor 2 (Officer): Projection . . . twenty-seven degrees.

Actor 4 (Gunner): Twenty-seven degrees.

Actor 2 (Officer): Fire!

(We hear a low boom.)

Actor 3 (Observer): Can’t see the shell land, sir. They’re letting off a smoke.

Actor 2 (Officer): What is it?

Actor 3 (Observer): A black smoke, sir. Moving this way. Lying close to the ground. It’s moving fast.

Actor 2 (Officer): Put on gas masks. Get ready to fire. Shift twenty-four meters.

Actor 4 (Gunner): Twenty-four meters.

Actor 2 (Officer): Projection, twenty-four degrees.

Actor 4 (Gunner): Twenty-four degrees.

Actor 2 (Officer): Fire!

(We hear a low boom.)

Actor 3 (Observer): Still can’t see, sir. The smoke’s coming nearer.

Actor 2 (Officer): Get the range. (coughs)

Actor 3 (Observer): Twenty-three meters. (coughs)

Actor 2 (Officer): Twenty-three meters. (coughs)

Actor 4 (Gunner): Twenty-three meters. (coughs)

Actor 3 (Observer): Projection, twenty-two degrees. (coughing)

Actor 2 (Officer): Twenty-two degrees. (coughing)

(We hear the sound of an airplane motor.)

Actor 5 (Commander): Army bombing plane, V-8-43, off Bayonne, New Jersey, Lieutenant Voght, commanding eight bombers. Reporting to Commander Fairfax, Langham Field . . . This is Voght, reporting to Commander Fairfax, Langham Field . . . Enemy tripod machines now in sight. Reinforced by three machines from the Morristown cylinder . . . Six altogether. One machine partially crippled.

(We hear a sharp whistling sound.)

Actor 5 (Commander): Green flash! They’re spraying us with flame! Two thousand feet. Engines are giving out. No chance to release bombs. Only one thing left . . . drop on them, plane and all. We’re diving on the first one. Now the engine’s gone! Eight . . .

(There is a long beat of silence.)

Actor 3 (Operator One): This is Bayonne, New Jersey, calling Langham Field . . . This is Bayonne, New Jersey, calling Langham Field . . . Come in, please . . .

Actor 4 (Operator Two): This is Langham Field . . . Go ahead . . .

Actor 3 (Operator One): Eight army bombers in engagement with enemy tripod machines over Jersey flats. Engines incapacitated by heat ray. All crashed. One enemy machine destroyed. Enemy now discharging heavy black smoke in direction of —-

(There is a long beat of silence.)

Actor 1 (Operator Three): This is Newark, New Jersey . . . This is Newark, New Jersey . . . 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–

(There is a long beat of silence.)

Actor 5 (Operator Four): 2X2L . . . calling CQ . . . 2X2L . . . calling CQ . . . 2X2L . . . calling 8X3R . . . Come in, please . . .

Actor 2 (Operator Five): This is 8X3R . . . coming back at 2X2L.

Actor 5 (Operator Four): How’s reception? How’s reception? K, please. Where are you, 8X3R? What’s the matter? Where are you–

(There is a long beat of silence. Then we hear the sound of bells.)

Actor 1 (Announcer): I’m speaking from the roof of Broadcasting Building…I’m speaking from the roof of Broadcasting Building, New York City. The bells you hear are ringing to warn the people to evacuate the city as the Martians approach. Estimated in last two hours, three million people have moved out along the roads to the north, Hutchinson River Parkway still kept open for motor traffic. Avoid bridges to Long Island . . . hopelessly jammed. All communication with Jersey shore closed ten minutes ago. No more defenses. Our army’s wiped out . . . artillery, air force, everything wiped out. This may be the last broadcast.

Paul: The program, moving forward in time, shifts to Pierson, who we learn has survived the invasion.

Actor 2 (Pierson): As I set down these notes on paper, I’m obsessed by the thought that I may be the last living man on earth. I have been hiding in this empty house near Grovers Mill — a small island of daylight cut off by the black smoke from the rest of the world. All that happened before the arrival of these monstrous creatures in the world now seems part of another life.

Paul: He comes upon a stranger, a fellow survivor.

Actor 2 (Pierson): Have you seen any . . . Martians?

Actor 5 (Stranger): Naah. They’ve gone over to New York. At night the sky is alive with their lights. Just as if people were still livin’ in it. By daylight you can’t see them. Five days ago a couple of ‘em carried somethin’ big across the flats from the airport. I think they’re learning how to fly.

Actor 2 (Pierson): Fly!

Actor 5 (Stranger): Yeah, fly.

Actor 2 (Pierson): Then it’s all over for humanity. Stranger, there’s still you and I. Two of us left.

Actor 5 (Stranger): They got themselves in solid; they wrecked the greatest country in the world.

Paul: The Stranger goes on to share that he was in the service and to tell Pierson a little about the Martians’ military occupation.

Actor 5 (Stranger): I was in the militia — national guard. . . That’s good! There wasn’t any war any more than there’s war between men and ants.

Actor 2 (Pierson): Yes, but we’re eat-able ants. I found that out. . .

Actor 5 (Stranger): I’ve thought it all out. Right now we’re caught as we’re wanted. The Martian only has to go a few miles to get a crowd on the run. But they won’t keep on doing that. They’ll begin catching us systematic-like — keeping the best and storing us in cages and things. They haven’t begun on us yet!

Paul: Pierson continues on alone and, time once again passing, then talks about the Martians’ ultimate defeat due to one thing they had not counted on: bacteria and disease.

Actor 2 (Pierson):

I rushed recklessly across Columbus Circle and into the Park. I climbed a small hill above the pond at Sixtieth Street. And from there I could see, standing in a silent row along the mall, nineteen of those great metal Titans, their cowls empty, their steel arms hanging listlessly by their sides. I looked in vain for the monsters that inhabit those machines.

Suddenly, my eyes were attracted to the immense flock of black birds that hovered directly below me. They circled to the ground, and there before my eyes, stark and silent, lay the Martians, with the hungry birds pecking and tearing brown shreds of flesh from their dead bodies. Later when the bodies were examined in the laboratories, it was found that they were killed by the putrefactive and disease bacteria against which their systems were unprepared. . .  slain, after all man’s defenses had failed, by the humblest thing that God in His wisdoms put upon this earth.

Paul: The broadcast sent shockwaves through the country, inciting a state of mass fear among American listeners, already on edge amid the increasingly tense international situation in the runup to World War II.

Actor 1: “Germany Deports Jews To Poland; Seizes Thousands” – Front Page of the New York Times, October 29, 1938

Paul: At least 6 million listeners tuned in to the broadcast on October 30th and contemporary estimates suggested that about a million of them believed what they heard. There were even reports of stampedes, of suicides and of threats to Welles’ life, once the facts had been safely established. Welles is reported to have said:

Actor 2 (Orson Welles): “If I’d planned to wreck my career, I couldn’t have gone about it better.”

Paul: But what really happened that night? Did people truly believe Welles’ tale, and did it really hold the country in a state of nervous tension as described?

Media studies scholars and historians continue to debate the actual reach of the broadcast and the extent to which it truly did trigger terror among American audiences. To be sure, radio listeners were informed four times throughout the program that what they were hearing was a fabrication, and Welles himself made this clear at the end.

Actor 2 (Orson Welles): This is Orson Welles, ladies and gentlemen, out of character to assure you that The War of The Worlds has no further significance than as the holiday offering it was intended to be. The Mercury Theatre’s own radio version of dressing up in a sheet and jumping out of a bush and saying Boo! Starting now, we couldn’t soap all your windows and steal all your garden gates by tomorrow night. . . so we did the best next thing.

We annihilated the world before your very ears, and utterly destroyed the C. B. S. You will be relieved, I hope, to learn that we didn’t mean it, and that both institutions are still open for business. So goodbye everybody, and remember, please for the next day or so, the terrible lesson you learned tonight. That grinning, glowing, globular invader of your living room is an inhabitant of the pumpkin patch, and if your doorbell rings and nobody’s there, that was no Martian. . . it’s Halloween.

(We hear music.)

Paul: But the verisimilitude of the program and Welles’ own trickery worked to undermine those assurances and contemporary accounts suggest that the panic was in fact quite widespread. Indeed, The New York Times received hundreds of phone calls that evening, and the morning papers reported on the wave of mass hysteria with bracing headlines.

Actor 1: “Radio Listeners in Panic, Taking War Drama as Fact” – The New York Times, October 31, 1938

Actor 5: “Radio Play Terrifies Nation” – Boston Globe, October 31, 1938

Actor 3: “F.C.C. Launches Investigation of ‘War’ Broadcast; Thousand Thrown Into Panic; Mass Hysteria Aroused.” – Watertown Daily News, October 31, 1938

Paul: The city manager of Trenton, NJ reported that two thousand phone calls (including long distance calls from people concerned about relatives in the area) came into the police station that evening and complained to the FCC that Trenton was chosen as the subject of this hoax, noting that the panic caused by the broadcast paralyzed the city’s police force and fire fighters for three hours.

Actor 4: The panic came in the night. Here, there and everywhere elderly spinsters suddenly dropped to their knees and began to moan and babble. Competent housewives wept, tore their hair, and fell in swoons. Grown men wept too and dashed about the streets. College boys trembled and prayed. Telephone lines were clogged with calls. In a few hours more the Red Cross, the National Guard, and the YMCA would have had to be mobilized." – Ralph Thompson in the New York Times, April 19, 1940

Paul: What’s clear is that the Welles program was a landmark mass media event, such as the Hindenburg disaster of the preceding year, also occurring in New Jersey (but the Hindenburg actually did happen).

Actor 2: “Hindenburg, World’s Largest Zeppelin, Destroyed” – San Francisco Chronicle, May 7, 1937

Paul: And like the Hindenburg, The War of the Worlds has remained an object of fascination for decades, helping create both the modern media itself and the branch of knowledge devoted to studying it. Today, when we’re once again gripped by tense speculation about traces of extraplanetary life, we marvel at the naivete of listeners who could be so credulous, so gullible as to believe in the veracity of a Martian invasion. Or perhaps the panic around the broadcast could be seen as a testament to the remarkable power of Welles’s craft. Of course, those questions were posed at the time too. In fact, as Frank Stanton, CBS’s director of research at the time and eventually its president, caught wind of the broadcast and the ensuing hysteria, he and his wife hopped into their car and tuned in to CBS on the radio in time for the climax:

Actor 1 (Announcer): We take you now to Washington for a special broadcast on the National Emergency . . . the Secretary of the Interior . . .

Actor 4 (Secretary): Citizens of the nation: I shall not try to conceal the gravity of the situation that confronts the country, nor the concern of your government in protecting the lives and property of its people. However, I wish to impress upon you — private citizens and public officials, all of you  — the urgent need of calm and resourceful action. Fortunately, this formidable enemy is still confined to a comparatively small area, and we may place our faith in the military forces to keep  them there. In the meantime placing our faith in God we must continue the performance of our duties each and every one of us, so that we may confront this destructive adversary with a nation united, courageous, and consecrated to the preservation of human supremacy on this earth.

Paul: As they listened, Stanton and his wife sped to his office in the CBS headquarters on 52nd Street. Sensing the rich research opportunity the event brought, Stanton, who had a PhD in psychology and an academic research background, hastily got sociologist Paul Lazarsfeld on the phone, and Lazarsfeld prepared a research team to head to Orange, New Jersey as quickly as possible. Lazarsfeld enlisted his erstwhile wife, Herta Herzog to direct the project.

The resulting study,

Actor 3 (Herzog):

“The Impact of Terror on the Radio Listener”

Paul: was the product of Herzog and her team’s canvassing of homemakers in Orange. We will return to that study soon but first let’s ask: Who was Herta Herzog? Who was Paul Lazarsfeld? And why was radio – and audience responses to it – such a hot research topic in fall 1938? My larger aim here is to suggest a lineage of thinking about media, terror, and violence among German-speaking, and notably Austrian Jewish émigrés and refugees in the United States, a cohort that witnessed firsthand the terrifying use of radio for Nazi propaganda and which remained particularly attentive to the incitement of terror through mass media.

This cohort had witnessed the Nazis’ effective use of propaganda through media, first radio, for rallying supporters in the 1920s and early 1930s, and then film, primarily through the work of Leni Riefenstahl whose 1935 movie Triumph of the Will riveted audiences with choreographed images of the power and unity of the Nazi Volksgemeinschaft, or people’s community.

(We hear a video clip from Triumph of the Will.)

Paul: Returning to the emigres and refugees - Having witnessed such propaganda, they clearly saw the potential dangers, but also the benefits of radio, the technology which first brought, and would continue to bring, mass media directly into the home. Their lineage encompasses stops along the way, which include Bertolt Brecht's musings on radio in the 1920s, early Frankfurt School researchers, through Lazarsfeld’s work for Austrian radio and Herzog’s “Mars Invasion” research and on through psychiatrist Fredric Wertham’s now notorious if somewhat risible crusade against violence in comic books – beginning with his 1954 book Seduction of the Innocent:

Actor 2 (Wertham): “What in a few words is the essential ethical teaching of crime comics for children? I find it well and accurately summarized in this brief quotation:

Actor 5: ‘It is not a question of right, but of winning. Close your heart against compassion. Brutality does it. The stronger is in the right. Greatest hardness. Follow your opponent till he is crushed.’

Actor 2 (Wertham): These words were the instructions given on August 22, 1939, by a superman in his home in Berchtesgaden to his generals, to serve as guiding lines for the treatment of the population in the impending war on Poland.”

(We hear music.)

Paul: – and the lineage continues through psychoanalyst Fred Hacker’s studies on media, psyche, and terror in the 1960s and 1970s. As he notes in his 1971 work, Aggression:

Actor 4: "Magazines, comics, and TV help kill time and they do that all the more effectively...by showing arson, robberies, murder, and homicide."

Actor 1: "The world comes into the house, into living rooms, into bedrooms, and above all, into kids' rooms. Reality and its advertisements are guests at your command and on demand."

Actor 2: “In the US these days, television has the same effect on kids as if one experienced a daily three to five hour dose of police interrogations, abuse, and brainwashing."

Actor 3: “In American TV programs extreme acts of violence occur on average every 16.3 minutes, not counting the animated animal cartoons which celebrate truly orgiastic violence. The sweet animals hit and shoot each other every few seconds, tread upon each other and blow each other up into thin air.”

Actor 5: "Kids skip school from time to time, but they never skip television."

Paul: But, of course, before television, there was radio, the medium we've been focusing on. Radio burst onto the scene in the years around World War I and tensions between its value as a source of information and entertainment, and its potential dangers as a vehicle for disinformation and propaganda surfaced almost immediately. The technological breakthroughs that enabled radio broadcasting date back to the 1880s when German physicist Heinrich Hertz established the existence of electromagnetic waves,

Actor 2 (Hertz): “I do not think that the radio waves I have discovered will have any practical application.”

Paul: But it was only at the end of the century when Guglielmo Marconi developed his method of wireless telegraphy, translating Hertz’s breakthrough into a viable system for transmitting sound across distance.

Actor 4 (Marconi): “The coming of the wireless era will make war impossible, because it will make war ridiculous.”

Paul: Advances in vacuum tubes around 1906 then made it possible to broadcast speech and music. The first practical applications of this new technology in Germany involved the military, and radio came into use as a means of circulating clandestine information across the vast distance of Germany’s African and Asian empire. World War I saw major developments in radio’s diffusion and military uses, and in the war, radio also emerged as a source of entertainment and news for soldiers, many of whom brought their skills and equipment home with them and became hobbyists in the interwar years. Notably, the soldiers’ and sailors’ councils, targeted imperial Germany’s nascent radio broadcasting system, seeing control of information as a crucial step in the establishment of a revolutionary government. Yet, it was not until October 1923 that, for the first time, voices, as historian Inga Marssolek put it,

Actor 1 (Marssolek): “came from the ether into a living room.”

(We hear an audio recording of a voice and violin.)

Paul: Violinist and composer Fritz Kreisler was featured in that recording. He, like Lazarsfeld and Herzog, was an Austrian of Jewish descent who fled the Nazis and came to the US.

By the middle of the 1930s, with astounding speed, radio had profoundly changed politics, commerce, and culture on both sides of the Atlantic. Unlike its rival media form, the cinema, radio brought mass culture right into the home, invading the private sphere with the frissant of the disembodied voice, the thrum of concerts, plays, news, and spectacle, linking individual households to international networks of listeners, creating the modern media event, yet also producing, as contemporary media theorists saw it, a modern style of distracted spectatorship – as opposed to concert going or reading, one could listen to the radio while eating a meal, ironing clothes, or, ultimately, running errands by car.

Bertolt Brecht, for example, in his 1932 speech,

Actor 5 (Brecht): The Radio as an Apparatus of Communication:

Paul: addressed the way in which radio was a kind of one way street that turned the listener into a passive recipient rather than an active communicator.

Actor 5 (Brecht): “But quite apart from the dubiousness of its functions, radio is one-sided when it should be two. It is purely an apparatus for distribution, for mere sharing out.”

Paul: Radio’s diffusion was explosive, especially in North America. Already by 1935, some 78 million Americans (out of a population of around 128 million) identified themselves as regular radio listeners, and over 21 million had receiver sets in their homes. (Denmark was the only country with higher rates of radio ownership at the time.) A single broadcast could draw as many 20 million Americans, and around these practices grew an industry which employed some 100,000 people. The radio, as a piece of furniture and a link to the outside world, had become the anchor of the living room, and Americans, according to one 1935 estimate, spent a billion hours a week gathered around it, far eclipsing the 150 million hours they spent gazing at movie theater screens. A slightly earlier survey found that women listened more than men: by about 22 to 17.9 average weekly hours – not an enormous difference to be sure, but enough to facilitate the gendering of radio audiences, especially for daytime programming, as female. Radio also flourished in Austria and Germany, but there it developed more gradually and under stricter regulation.

Unlike the laissez faire commercialism of US broadcasting, and in light of the legacies of the November 1918 revolution, the German state retained control of the new medium, albeit indirectly and in a quasi-labyrinthine bureaucratic manner through both the Ministry of the Interior and the Postal Ministry on the federal level which co-existed with a complicated system of regional administration. As a matter of fact, the state only permitted radio for military uses until 1923 and after that, programming was monitored with the goal of avoiding potentially divisive political content and ensuring that the new medium served the public interest.

Erich Scholz of the German Ministry of the Interior articulated the German distinctiveness by drawing a contrast to American conditions:

Actor 4 (Scholz): “The developments in the United States cannot be a model for Germany because there everyone is permitted to operate transmitters and receivers, to send or receive news.”

Paul: Scholz noted the existence of

Actor 4 (Scholz): “many hundreds of private stations,”

Paul: which were

Actor 4 (Scholz): “founded by factories, department stores, newspapers, and religious sects, which broadcast all sorts of programs, especially ones touting their own interests.”

Paul: Indeed, for Scholz, the US government had failed to keep control over the spread of radio and had balked at the task of creating a system that served the interests of the larger community. Radio in the interwar period in Central Europe, then, remained in the hands of state agents who saw it as a bastion against “Americanization” and as providing unique access to “the masses,” in particular, women.

Unlike the American approach, which depended on corporate sponsorships and  advertisements for profitability, in Germany listeners were required to pay the state for the right to listen, a practice which continues to this day for both radio and television. Radio advertisements did begin in Germany in 1924, but advertisements were limited to particular (and particularly unpopular) times, and specific product endorsements outside of those times were strictly prohibited. Notably, after the First World War the German term–

All actors: “Funk”

Paul: – derived from the word for spark – was introduced to replace the American-sounding

All actors: “radio,”

Paul: a symbolic rejection of the US model in the Weimar Republic, a political culture pushed and pulled between Soviet and American approaches to modernity, consumerism, and culture. In contrast to the other branches of Weimar Germany’s modern media culture – the film industry, phonograph recordings, and paperback book publishing – radio remained firmly in the hands of conservative elites through the 1920s and early 1930s and, at least in principle, served their vision of mass media as a tool of enlightenment that should remain above party politics. The reality was quite a bit messier, as demonstrated by Hitler’s mastery of the medium and radio’s well documented role in the rise of the Nazis and its centrality to the Nazi project of creating a unified national racial community – as acknowledged by Goebbels–

Actor 1 (Goebbels): “Our way of taking power would have been inconceivable without the radio and the airplane.”

Paul: Radio listenership grew quickly in the Weimar years, but ownership of living room sets lagged far behind the United States. By 1932, when the German population approximated 65 million, Germans owned only about 4.2 million licensed radio sets. Radio was also a major employer in this period, like in the US, providing work for nearly 1500 employees and some 40,000 freelancers, clearly outpacing the other branches of Weimar’s growing culture industries. Yet, even the Nazis, for whom the radio was the quintessential

All actors: Volksprodukt

Paul: and who wielded a keen understanding of the political value of the medium, did not even come close to realizing their goal of putting

All actors: “a radio in every household.”

Paul: Despite efforts to produce receivers affordable for the working classes and gradual payment schemes, radio listening remained a largely communal activity for much of the 1930s and 40s in Germany, even after 1939 when the Wehrmacht confiscated radios in occupied countries and redistributed them to citizens of the Reich.

How did the enormous profusion of radios and radio broadcasts influence listeners’ perceptions, experiences, and lives? Almost simultaneous with the growth of radio as a mass medium was the emergence of a field of research devoted to the study of radio listenership.

In the United States, this research, originally organized and funded by the Rockefeller Foundation, reflected a concern with democracy’s vulnerability to mass media, as a conveyor of propaganda and a tool of commercial interests.

Officers at the Rockefeller Foundation imagined that social scientists, as sources of expert, objective knowledge could serve public enlightenment and mitigate the effects of the

All actors: “incomplete knowledge”

Paul: provided by the commercially driven media, potentially bridging the gap between the American and German approaches.

Commentators at the time, struck by radio’s rapid expansion and the resulting cultural changes, celebrated the “shrinking of the world” and the acceleration of time in terms that today’s observers use for the internet, social media, and other more recent developments in the technology of communication. As writer and psychologist, Rudolf Arnheim, wrote in 1936:

Actor 1 (Arnheim): “Busy and Idle, rich and poor, young and old, healthy and sick – they all hear the same thing. That is what is great, moving, dangerous and dreadful about our time.”

Paul: I should mention that his book

Actor 1 (Arnheim): “Film As Art”

Paul: was banned by the Nazis in 1933 and he left Germany shortly after they came to power.

Commentators also celebrated the medium’s democratic potentials in ways that will resonate with those old enough to have witnessed the explosion of the internet in the 1990s and early 2000s, and they feared, as psychologists Hadley Cantril and Gordon Allport remarked in 1935, the extent that

Actor 5 (Cantril): “they were placing public opinion

Actor 4 (Allport): and private taste

Actors 4 and 5: at the mercy of entrepreneurs.”

Paul: Cantril and Alport also confronted the apparent paradox that radio, while an inherently democratizing medium which promised to introduce increasing, nearly limitless variety into its listeners’ lives, in reality promoted greater standardization.

As such, their concerns anticipated the approach to mass culture that German émigrés T. W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer adopted during the war which emphasized the sinister consequences of turning culture into a commodity and its manipulative effect on the viewer or listener, as they discuss in

Actor 2 (Adorno): "The Culture Industry:

Actor 1 (Horkheimer): Enlightenment as Mass Deception"

Paul: an essay in their book,

Actors 1 and 2: The Dialectic of Enlightenment

Paul: written here in Los Angeles in 1944, published in 1947:

Actor 1 (Horkheimer): "The result is the circle of manipulation and retroactive need in which the unity of the system grows even stronger.

Actor 2 (Adorno): No mention is made of the fact that the basis on which technology acquires power over society is the power of those whose economic hold over society is greatest."

Paul: As the Austrian Jewish émigré Paul Lazarsfeld and American social psychologist Marjorie Fiske observed in a 1945 report,

Actors 3 and 4: “the radio industry has waxed to the status of a giant,”

Paul: with a reach beyond that of books, movies, or theater. But who was listening to the radio and how was radio shaping impressions and experiences in American households? These were questions of great urgency to social scientists, psychologists, and social theorists on both sides of the Atlantic with the rapid spread of radio as a means of mass communication and entertainment and indeed as a tool for aspiring authoritarians. Such questions were also of growing interest to the corporate world which was still searching for ways of measuring listenership and assessing the potential impact of radio sponsorships and advertising campaigns. These overlapping concerns created spaces and opportunities for dozens of Central European social scientists and psychologists on the seams of American commercial interests and academic research.

We now turn to this cohort of educated but desperate refugees, struggling to escape Hitler’s grasp and reach American shores where many, after arriving penniless, came to have previously unthinkable success and influence on the American way of life. Arriving in the US in the 1930s, they joined in the heady discussions and debates about the radio and its impact on the listener, the consumer, and the soundscape of the American household.

The sociologist Paul Lazarsfeld stood at the center of these debates and bridged the worlds of communications studies in the US and Central European social theory and psychology.

Compared to many of the figures I trace through the pages of my larger study, Lazarsfeld enjoyed a relatively soft landing in the US. He left Austria voluntarily – and, he thought, temporarily – in 1933 thanks to a traveling fellowship from the Rockefeller Foundation which supported a year of research in New York. He had scarcely left his native Vienna when the First Republic collapsed at the hands of reactionary forces, and the democratic system was replaced by a dictatorship, a regime most historians would describe as “Austro-fascist” or corporatist, an Austrian nationalist variation of Italian fascism.

Actor 1: “Austrian Socialists Yield: Leaders Flee the Country” - New York Times, February 16, 1934

Paul: The new regime revoked Lazarsfeld’s teaching position at the University of Vienna and many of his family members were imprisoned, making a return home unthinkable for the Jewish Social Democrat. Still in his early 30s, Lazarsfeld had already achieved a degree of fame in social science circles in the US, above all for the acclaimed quasi ethnographic (or “sociographic”) study of a community devastated by the unemployment crisis, the Austrian town of Marienthal, which he had conducted together with his former wife, social researcher Marie Jahoda and the  sociologist Hans Zeisel. With the assistance of psychologists Karl and Charlotte Bühler, Lazarsfeld had established the Wirtschafts-Psychologisches Institut–

Actors 1 and 4: Economic-Psychological Institute

Paul: –in Vienna, a semi-autonomous research center which had grown out of the university’s psychology department and where scholars conducted market research and pathbreaking studies on consumer choice.

As Lazarsfeld proclaimed at the founding of the center:

Actor 4 (Lazarsfeld): “This institute’s investigations will turn, for example, to the economic psychological questions of industrial studies: when are goods purchased, who likes a book, what is attractive in a film, what is effective in an advertisement, when and where are purchases made, how does the buyer know about the goods, etc."

Paul: In the summer of 1937, while vacationing in the Austrian Alps, Lazarsfeld received a telegram from the Princeton psychologist Hadley Cantril offering him the full-time directorship of a Rockefeller Foundation funded radio research project created by Cantril and Frank Stanton. In making the offer for a renewable two-year term – at an annual salary of

Actor 4 (Lazarsfeld): $7000!

Paul: with another

Actor 4 (Lazarsfeld): $1000…

Paul: for his partner and eventual spouse Herta Herzog, Cantril assumed that Lazarsfeld would relocate to Princeton where the project was based, instead, Lazarsfeld chose an abandoned brewery in Newark. Although, as it turned out, his  administrative and organizational skills were not universally appreciated, the Marienthal book and the work of Lazarsfeld’s Vienna institute had established him as a pioneering thinker working at the intersection of psychology, economics, and social research. He was able to draw on the community of recently exiled German-speaking critical theorists, including Theodor Adorno whom he appointed to head the project’s music division. Although Adorno’s work with the project was not universally appreciated, especially by those who found his theoretical work difficult to penetrate and his arrogance insufferable. As Lazarsfeld wrote to Adorno:

Actor 4 (Lazarsfeld): "You and I agree upon the superiority of some parts of your intellectual work, but you think because you are basically right somewhere, you are right everywhere."

Paul: Lazarsfeld and Stanton enlisted a lab tech at Ohio State to help them in their research project and to design the “Program Analyzer,” a machine that recorded listener reactions to radio programs in real time.

Listeners held two buttons, a green and a red one: they were instructed to press and hold the green button when hearing programming they liked and the red for content they disliked. These buttons were connected to pens which recorded the listeners’ impressions forming a continuous record of responses throughout a broadcast.

The technique, however, failed to yield the kind of reliable scientific data its designers had sought. Before long, Lazarsfeld moved to a 

combination of quantitative and qualitative approaches and

Actor 4 (Lazarsfeld): “Little Annie”

Paul: as the machine was dubbed, was put back on the shelf.

Although the research agenda had originally been conceived of and designed by Stanton and Cantril, Lazarsfeld reconceptualized the program from the start, becoming its director, with the two Americans, both burdened with teaching and administrative responsibilities at Princeton, soon taking on more ancillary roles. In addition to Adorno and the marketing guru Ernest Dichter the project supported Siegfried Kracauer, who left Germany in 1933, Rudolf Arnheim of whom we heard earlier, and other leading lights of sociology, psychology, and critical theory. It also gave Herta Herzog her American start.

Herzog has yet to be the subject of a biography, and the details about her early life remain fairly scant. Born in 1910 into a middle-class Jewish family in Vienna, Herzog’s childhood was stamped by the deprivations of World War I and the premature death of her mother from tuberculosis. She excelled at the violin and in her studies and she supported herself by tutoring. She entered the University of Vienna in 1928 planning to study classical languages and archeology until she met the psychologist pair Charlotte and Karl Bühler who inspired her to switch to psychology and thus set her on the path toward both a career and a marriage. It was at the Institute of Psychology where Herzog and Lazarsfeld first crossed paths.

Having studied psychology as well as sociology in Vienna, she landed in the nascent field of radio research, and went on to have a great deal of success in the advertising industry, leaving the ivory tower for McCann Ericksen, one of the giants of twentieth- and twenty-first century US advertising. You may be familiar with one of the agencies most famous campaigns:

All Actors (singing): “I’d like to buy the world a coke and keep it company”

Paul: And Herzog herself helped develop the L’Oreal hair care product ads in which famous women said:

Actors 1 and 3: “Because I’m worth it.”

Paul: That line went on to be spoken by Jane Fonda, Viola Davis, Eva Longoria, and others. Herzog also worked on the alka seltzer ads so many of us might remember:

All Actors (singing): Plop Plop Fizz Fizz Oh What a Relief It Is

Paul: It was even her idea to show a hand dropping two tablets into the glass of water.

(We hear the plop, plop, and fizz.)

Paul: Yet, Herzog remains a fairly obscure figure today, except in the small world of communications research, where a trickle of publications commemorates her place in the field’s history. Herzog recently experienced a moment of shrouded fame as the likely basis, at least in part, of Dr. Faye Miller who distributed questionnaires to the Sterling Cooper staff and famously (but unsuccessfully) urged adman Don Draper to talk about his feelings in season 4 of Mad Men.

The series took liberties with time and place – and added a degree of titillation that was likely the creators’ own invention – but it did dramatize the meeting of social scientific and psychological opinion research with Madison Avenue advertising that created employment opportunities and zones of expertise for many of the figures which journalist Vance Packard documented in his 1957 expose on The Hidden Persuaders.

Packard, for example, said this of Ernest Dichter, and his work:

Actor 2 (Packard): “As early as 1941 Dr. Dichter was exhorting ad agencies to recognize themselves for what they actually were -- 'one of the most advanced laboratories in psychology.' He said the successful ad agency 'manipulates human motivations and desires and develops a need for goods with which the public has at one time been unfamiliar - perhaps even undesirous of purchasing.' The following year Advertising Age carried an ad man's statement that psychology not only holds promise for understanding people but 'ultimately for controlling their behavior."

Paul: Now, Herzog’s dissertation on “Stimme und Persönlichkeit”–

Actor 3 (Herzog): Voice and Personality

Paul: – was sponsored by the RAVAG (Radio Verkehrs Aktiensgesellschaft),

Actor 3 (Herzog): Austria’s first radio company

Paul: and studied and interrogated the way radio listeners make inferences about personality and the reliability about the speaker they are listening to. The new media forms of the period had led to the separation of visual and acoustic perception. As Herzog wrote:

Actor 3 (Herzog): “For psychology itself, the problem of expression is becoming acute.”

Paul: For her research Herzog distributed questionnaires at tobacco shops in Vienna and was able to draw from 2,700 respondents who reacted to the same text –

Actor 3 (Herzog): “the announcement about the lost dog Lux” –

Actor 5: “the announcement about the lost dog Lux” –

Actor 1: “the announcement about the lost dog Lux” –

Actor 2: “the announcement about the lost dog Lux” –

Paul: as read by nine different voices.

She used these survey results to posit a relationship between tone of voice and the  characteristics listeners ascribed to speakers, with gender playing an important role in questions of trustworthiness and authoritativeness. Herzog showed that respondents generally made accurate assessments of the physical properties and characteristics of the people whose voices they heard; women did slightly better than men, and people matched the radio voices with acquaintances who sounded similar and extrapolated the physical characteristics from there.

After earning her PhD, Herzog accepted a position at the University of Vienna’s psychology department, where she took over Lazarsfeld’s teaching obligations during his fellowship time in New York. In 1935, a year into the Austro-fascist regime, she followed Lazarsfeld to the US and began assisting him in his studies of the effects of the depression on American communities. In 1937 she officially began her appointment with the radio research project, where she carried out pioneering studies on the audiences for quiz shows, children’s radio listening, and women and daytime serials.

Actor 3 (Herzog): “The problem of children's programs presents a three-cornered battle. It goes on between the children and the parents, with the broadcasters willing to act as arbitrators."

Paul: She thus developed a kind of research niche for herself around women and listenership, where she was actually the lowest paid staff member at the Radio Research Project. She was paid

Actor 3 (Herzog): $1.39

Paul: per published page while others got up to

Actors 2, 4, and 5: $120

Paul: per page! It should be noted though that she was far from the only woman in the radio research community – in fact some 50 women worked in various capacities for the several incarnations of Lazarsfeld’s radio research project.

Actor 1: Hazel Gaudet, Jeanette Sayre, Dorothea Seelye, Eunice Cooper, Helen Lehman, Helen Schneider, Hannah Linden, Joan Doris, Rina Ross, Alberta Curtis, Marjorie Fiske, Martha Bayne.

Paul: Herzog’s soap opera analyses remain her most noted contribution to early communications research and media studies and anticipated the larger interest in women – the figure of the homemaker in particular – and patterns of spectatorship by some three decades. As she wrote in her wartime study of soap opera listeners:

Actor 3 (Herzog): “Today is the day of mass audiences. And commanding one of the largest of these is the radio daytime serial. At least twenty million women in this country keep a regular rendezvous with these serials. Small wonder, then, that this type of program has been the occasion for heated, though not always illuminating discussion.”

Paul: In her study, she sent questionnaires to hundreds of women around the country to assess how these serials affected listeners and proposed to assess the content of the broadcasts, the demographic profile of the audience, and listeners’ emotional responses to particular shows. What marked Herzog’s work and set it apart from other approaches was that she took her subjects seriously, understanding their agency and their emotional and intellectual responses to radio programming – in contrast to the emphasis purely on audience manipulation of many of her colleagues – and she underlined the potential importance of radio for the war effort and the civic engagement of women listeners:

Actor 3 (Herzog): “The audience to daytime serials comprises a cross-section of almost half of all American women. Thus the radio industry and the Office of War Information would seem quite justified in their effort to use these programs as a vehicle for war messages….We shall have to combat prejudice and wishful thinking by information and the analysis of complex social situations.”

Paul: But it was her 1938 War of the Worlds study that put Herzog on the map. Her Mars study was based on detailed interviews with thirty women in Orange, New Jersey. Her interview subjects were generally middle-class women who’d been identified as having been acutely affected by the broadcast. First Herzog, in her analysis, explains that most of the respondents felt predisposed to believe

Actor 3 (Herzog): “unusual and gruesome events”

Paul: because of the tense mood of the times:

Actor 3 (Herzog): “The people’s nerves are pitched up;” “These times are not normal.”

Paul: More specifically respondents cited the talk of war – there are references to the Czechoslovakia crisis –, recent floods, and strange scientific developments (X-rays, reports from Mt. Wilson Observatory, science fiction), and a fear that the current situation made a German or Japanese invasion, and by extension an alien one, quite plausible.

Actor 4: "At the beginning of the broadcast, my older son said, 'It sounds like a Buck Rogers story,' but as time went on he became more and more convinced that it was real. He tried to explain to me while the excitement was on that that's the way the world balances itself – either by floods or wars – and that this was some other form of God-sent elimination of people."

Paul: Herzog also notes the role of individual beliefs and circumstances, as in the case of two Republican respondents who were convinced that Franklin Roosevelt had so bungled foreign affairs that some sort of invasion was perhaps inevitable. She poignantly highlights the comments of a Jewish respondent who recounted:

Actor 5: “The first thing that came to my mind while my sister-in-law was talking was that there was an uprising against the Jews.”

Paul: This is the sole mention of antisemitism in the study and it was not until late in her long life, in 1994, in a work on

Actor 3 (Herzog): “The Jews as Others”

Paul: that Herzog picked up on the theme again in a research project on antisemitic attitudes in contemporary Austria.

But as she argued in her pathbreaking study of responses to the Mars invasion broadcast, the listeners who were most affected, tended to be already in a state of agitation by current events, political and environmental, and anxieties about new technologies. They also replied that they trusted radio as a source of information and Welles’ own expressed incredulity at the events –

Actor 2 (Orson Welles): “It is incredible but true” –

Paul: only served to reinforce their credulity. Herzog goes on to write that a normal response to a situation like this is to check other sources for verification. About a third of her subjects did this but many were unsuccessful because their anxious states of mind led them to misinterpret innocuous signs and see them as confirmation, as for example the woman who mistook the neon lights in Newark as signs of fire or the person who called the police and alarmed them, only furthering her own sense of anxiety.

Actor 3 (Herzog): “One woman looked out of the window and saw a 'greenish eerie light' which later on proved to be the lights on the car of the maid who had just come home.”

Paul: Bringing in just a hint of psychoanalysis, Herzog adds

Actor 3 (Herzog): "Finally, one cannot but feel that in a few cases an element of the sadistic enjoyment of a catastrophe is involved.”

Actor 5: I realized right away that it was something that was affecting everybody, not only the Jews, and I felt relieved. As long as everybody was going to go, it was better."

Paul: and she noted that others enjoyed a respite from their quotidian concerns into a larger, collective experience.

Actor 3 (Herzog): "Some people felt important for participating in such a momentous event irrespective of the danger involved."

Actor 1: "'I urged my husband to listen and said it was a historical moment possibly and he would be sorry afterwards to have missed it.'"

Paul: To conclude: Herzog and her fellow radio researchers brought the techniques of Austrian social science and consumer research and the distance of the outsider to bear on understanding the power of American media industries and their impact on their listeners and consumers and potentially on American democracy at a time of crisis and challenge. This story and the radio research project itself started with the Rockefeller Foundation’s concern about democracy’s vulnerability in an era of mass media: that project is what brought Lazarsfeld, Herzog, and the other members of their circle to this country in the first place. The Mars Invasion and Herzog’s research on it thus represented a powerful, explosive convergence of a group of Central European refugee media scholars with the ultimate American media spectacle. Having witnessed firsthand the rise of fascist movements and having fled Germany and Austria in the 1930s, Lazarsfeld, Herzog, Arnheim, Wertham, and Hacker all had a keen sensitivity to the power of mass media and a sincere desire to protect society’s most vulnerable members, above all, children, from its effects. Those concerns are still with us today, as each generation since the onset of radio grapples with the effects of new technologies on children’s experiences and on our ability to share a coherent notion of reality and “the truth.” Such concerns are often cynically exploited in campaigns against new styles, musical genres, and video game and social media trends. But at the core of these concerns, as I’ve tried to suggest, lay a deep sensitivity to the power of the medium and an appreciation of the fragility of thoughtful, rational discourse.

And finally, I’d like us to consider the idea that the Central European émigrés themselves were the unwelcome aliens, whose invasive arrival was further putting American audiences on edge.

Reading Herzog on the Mars invasion today (in our own environment of xenophobia and disinformation), one can’t escape the sense that the American public’s concerns about extraplanetary invaders operated, at least in part, as a metaphor for fears of “invaders” from other countries, who like Herzog herself, had to scratch and claw their way into the United States.

(We hear music.)

Actor 2 (Pierson): It may be that the destruction of the Martians is only a reprieve. To them, and not to us, is the future ordained perhaps.

Strange it now seems to sit in my peaceful study at Princeton writing down this last chapter of the record begun at a deserted farm in Grovers Mill. Strange to watch children playing in the streets. Strange to see young people strolling on the green, where the new grass heals the last black scars of a bruised earth.

Strange to watch the sightseers enter the museum where the dissembled parts of a Martian machine are kept on public view. Strange when I recall a time when I first saw it, bright and clean-cut, hard, and silent, under the dawn of that last great day.

(We hear bells.)

(We hear audience applause.)