Dead Air: The Night That Orson Welles Terrified America
“A convincing portrait of the artist as a young man—defiant, reckless, ruthless, and teeming with talent and ambition—Dead Air packs delights worthy of its subject.”
In the internet’s infancy, an enterprising early adopter created a sequential series of linked web pages that told a serialized faux-true crime story. It began with Soviet spy Alexander Feklisov approaching an adolescent Ann-Margret at a movie theater concession stand in the late 1940s to recruit her as a spy. From there it unspooled a fairly preposterous (though plausibly rendered) tale of intrigue and espionage that concluded, many ingenious plot twists and a dozen or so pages later, with Elvis Presley stepping out the grassy knoll at Dealey Plaza in 1963 and assassinating President Kennedy.
These webpages were reproduced and shared in various forms over the next several years, usually without the reference to a final page where the author admitted the hoax and explained that he’d made it all up to test the utility of the nascent internet as a vehicle for widely disseminating misinformation. In a subsequent article, he maintained that for years thereafter, he continued to encounter people who insisted that Elvis had killed JFK, presented the story with additional embellishments, and asserted that they had the evidence to prove it. An “Elvis shot Kennedy” Google search still pulls up various odd permutations of the story 25 years later.
Even the most adamant and thoroughly hoodwinked victims of the “Elvis shot Kennedy” early internet hoax just tend to look a little foolish. But a far more famous hoax designed to test the trust the populace placed in another rising communications and entertainment medium in 1938 had considerably more dramatic consequences, depending on which sources you believe.
In Dead Air: The Night That Orson Welles Terrified America, William Elliott Hazelgrove argues that when it comes to the reported public hysteria spawned by Orson Welles’s infamous October 30, 1938, fake news-style radio play of H.G. Wells’ Martian invasion novel, The War of the Worlds, everything you’ve heard (and more) is true. Welles’ Mercury Theatre program delivered The War of the Worlds as if a real Martian attack were wiping out the human race in real time in New Jersey and New York City, and gullible listeners bought it hook, line, and sinker.
In recent years, revisionists have gone to great lengths to poke holes in the findings of Princeton professor Hadley Cantril in his 1940 book The Invasion from Mars: A Study in the Psychology of Panic, which gathered evidence of widespread hysteria through surveys, interviews, and analysis of more than 12,500 newspaper articles. Cantril’s book asserted that as many as 12 million listeners had tuned in by the end of the broadcast. Convinced that they were hearing a real news report of giant Martian machines attacking humans with poisonous gas and heat rays, millions of listeners lost their minds.
As Hazelgrove describes Cantril’s findings, terrified Americans across the country “ran out into the night; grabbed shotguns; drove off in speeding cars; ran screaming down the streets; had heart attacks; contemplated suicide; committed suicide; fell down stairs; ran for the hills; hid in basements and attics; went to churches to beg for mercy; ran for the rooftops; spilled into the streets; jumped on trains, subways, and taxis.”
Naysayers claim that Cantril oversampled those who went into hysterics and downplayed the vast majority who simply recognized it as a first-rate radio play. What’s more, he exaggerated the sheer numbers of Mercury Theatre listeners, while the largest share of the 34 million-strong radio audience was tuning into the wildly popular Edgar Bergen as he performed a lowbrow ventriloquism act with his dummy Charlie McCarthy. The revisionists also insist that “newspapers revved up the story to sell papers and take revenge on the new medium of radio that had been sucking away advertising dollars; most people did not believe Martians had invaded and were murdering humans.”
Hazelgrove, like A. Brad Schwartz in Broadcast Hysteria: Orson Welles’s War of the Worlds and the Art of Fake News (2015), draws not only on Cantril’s findings but also on other resources that have only recently become available, such as a vast archive of letters to Welles housed at the University of Michigan that demonstrate how broad and deep the panic went.
Dead Air draws its name from the pivotal moment in the War of the Worlds live broadcast when director Orson Welles committed a cardinal sin of radio, holding up his hands for six agonizing seconds of radio silence in the middle of what seems to be a live news report of a Martian invasion in progress.
“Dead air ends careers, destroys reputations, and gets shows canceled. It is the monster in the closet of every broadcaster,” Hazelgrove writes. “The mistake, the glitch, the unforeseen event that leaves dead air buzzing out on the airwaves feels like death . . . On the other end, the human waits for this awful dead moment to end because it suggests the world can be a dark and horrible place devoid of humanity.”
And the suggestion may never have been more powerful than in the moment it conveyed that a reporter in the field was being vaporized on air in real time.
Hazelgrove portrays The War of the Worlds as a dazzling, unprecedented, and unequaled highwire act pulled off by a single man, Orson Welles, who lived to push the envelope and push audiences to new and unsettling places through daring and transgressive art. A convincing portrait of the artist as a young man—defiant, reckless, ruthless, and teeming with talent and ambition—Dead Air packs delights worthy of its subject.
Like most chroniclers of Orson Welles’ uneven life and long descent into dissipation, Hazelgrove finds Welles peaking early, but he regards War of the Worlds as the peak rather than film-of-the-century Citizen Kane (1941), if only because War of the Worlds connected more fully with its audience in its time. Mock-heretically, Hazelgrove terms Citizen Kane “a famous flop.”
But he does make enchanting use of Citizen Kane and the on-screen youth of Charles Foster Kane as essentially a thinly veiled adaptation of Welles’ own traumatic childhood. Hazelgrove unabashedly treated Kane as a Welles alter ego, with Rosebud-invoking statements like “Charles (Orson) reluctantly abandons his sled and goes inside, where his life changes forever.”
The device works well as Hazelgrove unspools the story of Welles’ orphanhood, his travels to Ireland, and the cocky, shameless ways he lies and blusters his way into an acting career, always making the most of the precocious, booming, sonorous voice that would make him a radio star.
Hazelgrove writes in the wonderful, old-timey purplish prose familiar to readers of earlier works like his two bookending partial biographies of young and old Theodore Roosevelt. In addition to carefully chronicling Welles’ early years, Dead Air also offers a rumination on the state of radio in 1938, the panic-ready populace with Hitler and Mussolini on the move in Europe, and the credulity of the listening audience at a time technological eons before our current age of AI deepfakes when radio hoaxes were largely unheard of.
Orson Welles proves himself nearly as capable a hoax-master in the day after the broadcast, when he professes total innocence and shock at how the program was received in an on-air apologia that Hazelgrove convincingly identifies as a staged and fully fabricated press conference.
Hazelgrove also finds early signs of future culture wars in the commentary of the great anti-Nazi journalist Dorothy Thompson, who exonerated Welles by placing all of the blame for the War of the Worlds-induced panic on a gullible and ignorant listening audience. In a column titled “Mr. Welles and Mass Delusion,” she concluded that Welles had done the world a great service by exposing how easy it was to use radio to “convince masses of people of a totally unreasonable, completely fantastic proposition as to create a nationwide panic.”
Noting that listeners who missed the program identification at the beginning of the radio play and were fooled by the magnificently realistic production came from all walks of life—colleges in particular—Hazelgrove comments, “Dorothy Thompson, as part of the cultural elite of her time, had made the judgment that the mass of people in America were just plain ignorant.”
On the one hand it seems absurd that Orson Welles could have driven millions of Americans into screaming hysterics with a 30-minute radio broadcast of a ginned-up alien attack in 1938 that left listeners trusting the voices in their ears above the logic of their minds and the evidence before their eyes. But is it really any stranger than another master media manipulator riding a preposterous, dog-and-cat-eating alien invasion hoax all the way to the United States presidency in 2024?
Of course, the real 21st century parallel to the War of the Worlds broadcast was not a presidential campaign fueled by a phony immigrant invasion scare but the reckless invention of a cartoonish mogul strongman in a reality TV program by producers who failed to comprehend the tragic degree to which an impressionable viewing audience didn’t get the joke.
Perhaps the cleverest assessment of The War of the Worlds and what it may have revealed about its audience was captured in a telegram from drama critic Alexander Woolcott that Hazelgrove says “Welles kept for the rest of his life”: “This only goes to prove, my beamish boy, that the intelligent people were all listening to a dummy and all the dummies were listening to you.”