Bravo and thanks to penn for a thoughtful and thought-provoking personal reminiscence that supports my recent post about the claim that the famous panic over Orson Welles’ famous 1938 “War of the Worlds” radio drama never happened. Here is his fascinating Comment of the Day on Print the Legend Ethics: The “War of the Worlds” Panic:

This story came up every Hallowe’en in my family as I was growing up. We had family living in Toms River and in Lakewood, NJ (about 35 miles from Grover’s Mill) at the time Orson did his thing. The different reactions to the broadcast by the people living in the two places resulted in a minor family schism which continues to this day in the attitudes of their descendants.

It was a city mouse/country mouse situation. The Lakewood adults were elementary school teachers — the sophisticates. They listened to that program as a matter of course and as they later reported, they declared this one silly from the very beginning. But then, all science fiction was silly to them (really! space ships and aleeums? pshaw!) — my father (it was his side of the family) always contended they had no imagination. My mother recalled, however, many years later (and after taking several psychology courses at the New School), that commercials or not, she was convinced they had been very disturbed, if not downright scared. Scared enough to sit through the whole “silly” program in the first place, and for the rest of their lives to focus an uncharacteristic rage on the writers … for using the name of a real location in the program. [I think this naming of Grover’s Mill may account for some of the anxiety, if not the panic — people were sooo trusting of the media in those days .. . .]

The Tom’s River contingent had started out as sophisticates, too. New Yorkers, in fact. But circumstances had uprooted them from their urban skepticism and landed them on a chicken farm in South Jersey. They never quite adjusted and were always uncomfortable and patently uneasy in their rural milieu. I’m not sure when they tuned in to the program, but they certainly missed the opening. They heard about it by accident — picking up the telephone to make a call and getting an earful on the party line. One distant neighbor was excitedly telling another to listen to the radio and described some of what was going on. Whoever had picked up the phone would have downed it quickly: that’s what you did on a party line. The excitement (said my mom) could easily have been for the drama, rather than fear of a true tragedy unfolding, a form of gossip, as it were. But to the neo-country mice, who then tuned in probably near the end, possibly never hearing (or exclaiming over) any station breaks, gathered up some survival essentials, and retreated to the storm cellar, not coming out until the next morning when, presumably, the clucking recalled them to their duty, even in the face of danger..

To their everlasting shame, they called the Lakewood relatives to ask what was happening with the invasion.

In a way, I think a lot of people today are even more vulnerably naive than 75 years ago. The snake oil salesmen and pitchwomen have more media to work with; the media across the board, if not less reliable, have so many more options for promoting Big Lies with which to fool the superstitious and the credulous; and a disintegration in basic education (logical thinking) along with unending waves of new un-understood technology, has created a society that mistakes reality for fiction and vice versa; and which distrusts and fears (you don’t need a psychology course to recognize fear responses) just about everything.

I think the “Tom’s River” reaction went on and goes on a lot more than we know.

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Graphic: War of the WorldsUK