Why is it that every Halloween I return to the idea that Orson Wells’s War of The Worlds broadcast offers one of the greatest untapped sources of material for a US History lesson?
Every October I flip through my bookmarks and notes and am again convinced it has too many great ingredients to ignore. There are so many bits and pieces of essays, articles, and pictures that can be woven into a lesson guaranteed to meet two goals every teacher has – capture their students’ interest and expose them to a vital understanding of the past and present. This is just a partial list of all the goodies this event and all its implications offer:
A Monument to a Martian Invasion
A monument in Van Nest Park in Grover’s Mill New Jersey offers a great angle to start the lesson. Just putting these pictures up on the classroom screen and asking students to generate a list of questions is enough to get it going. Did Martians really visit the Earth? Were a million people fooled into believing that really happened? How? Do new communications technologies have a special power to trick people into believing something that simply isn’t true? Is that happening today? What more do you want to know about this?
The payoff to this element of the lesson is the way the lesson’s arc will eventually end by questioning the “million people” comment on the historic marker.
The Prank
Don’t teenagers love to hear about pranks? Whether the people who actually believed the broadcast and panicked numbered in the millions, the thousands, or only the hundreds, the fact that a 23-year-old pranked so many people will grab teenagers’ attention. All you need is a couple of stories of traffic jams, families rushing to church, and men shooting at water towers, and students will be yours for the rest of the ride. Sure, CBS started the Mercury Theater on the Air program that night with a disclaimer that the news broadcast was a dramatization, but some people were listening to “The Chase and Sanborn Hour” on NBC and missed the disclaimer and turned their radio dials away from NBC during commercial and landing right in the middle of the news reports that Martians were landing on Earth. But again, this works for the lesson itself – the number of people who actually believed the broadcast was real is at the heart of the lesson, how do we fact-check what we hear about the past?
Teenagers are also used to adults reacting to pranks, using the first minute of the American Experience film interview with Judge A.G. Kennedy of South Carolina might sound familiar in tone to them, though the vocabulary may not.
“Welles’ performance on the radio Sunday evening was a clear demonstration of his inhuman instincts and his fiendish joy in causing distress and suffering all over the country. He is a carbuncle on the rump of degenerate theatrical performers and he should make amends for his consummate act of asininity.”
Jill Lepore claims in These Truths: A History of the United States that $12 million worth of lawsuits were filed against CBS. Are performers responsible for the reactions of their audience? Does our answer to that question when we switch to radio and prank for Twitter and an attack on the Capitol?
Orson Wells
Orson Wells was 23 years old when he shot to fame testing the limits of new technology using his Mercury Theatre on the Air to adapt H.G. Well’s War of the Worlds to radio, broadcasting the story of a Martian invasion in real time like a news broadcast. He’s only a few years older than the high school students, so starting with this picture and talking about how young people seem to have a knack for using new media in ways its inventors never intended. That’s another way to start this lesson.
Mass Media
Radio was the new media on the block in 1938, at least when it came to “news” and instead of Twitter, Facebook, and Google, fighting for audience attention, this was Bill Paley’s leadership of the upstart CBS taking on David Sarnoff’s NBC, the 800 lb gorilla of radio broadcasting at the time. In Attention Merchants, Tim Wu explains how it was Paley who told advertisers that “people do what they are told to do”, highlighting the way CBS told advertisers that the audio content of radio was more influential than print. Maybe that belief was also held by executives at newspapers who saw radio news as a threat, making it easier for them to attack CBS, and Wells for using “Fake news” to scare people and make money.
Historical Context
William Manchester’s Glory and Dream describes how Americans were on edge following the Munich Conference the previous month. Germany occupied the Sudetenland three weeks before the broadcast, and radio updates about Kristallnacht would follow it just ten days later. It could be easy that many of them to panic because they were primed for war.
Historiography and Epistemology
At the heart of this lesson would be a bait-and-switch prank that rivals Orson Wells. He used a dramatization of a news broadcast to capture an audience. This lesson would use the story of that broadcast and the public reaction that followed it to teach a lesson about how we can be led to a perfectly reasonable and likely true understanding of the past, only to find out that we could be dead wrong.
Teachers can prime students to get interested in a dozen different ways. Primary source newspaper clips and a couple of minutes of a PBS documentary will lead them to the inevitable conclusion that millions of people across the country panicked.
The pièce de résistance of the lesson is this closing essay by Jefferson Pooley and Michael Socolow, which explains how the number of people who believed the broadcast and panicked as a result of that belief is itself highly inflated. After teaching students about how the country panicked after hearing something wasn’t true, the teacher gets to teach students, that that panic itself, wasn’t really true.
This list demonstrates all of the roads that lead in and out of the past. That alone is essential to understanding how history is practiced as a discipline, rather than how it is taught in the classroom.
But I still don’t have that lesson, just these great ingredients.