To understand the 1938 broadcast from the perspective of our new fake-news moment, we have to understand the play’s true meaning. The journey of those murderous Martians in the US began well before that Halloween eve, with the popular pseudoscientific understanding of radio itself. Reproduced sounds have always had an uncanny presence in US life. The reaction of Scientific American to the invention of the phonograph was to exclaim that it would allow the living to hear the voices of the dead. Sure enough, some people began to record their voices before they died so that they could speak at their own funerals, and a Washington Post column wondered if radio itself could pick up vibrations from the dead, according to the sound historian Jonathan Sterne’s book The Audible Past (2003). One of the earliest understandings of radio, writes the cultural historian Jeffrey Sconce in Haunted Media (2000), was that aliens might already be using it to attempt contact with humans.
The moment that print ceded position to radio might be 1936, when US incumbent President Franklin Delano Roosevelt secured reelection despite a fierce shellacking in print: 80 per cent of the press rejected the president only to watch him win in an almost vindictive landslide. ‘Election day 1936 was judgment day for America’s daily press,’ wrote The Christian Century after his victory in a letter to newspaper publishers. ‘When people voted, they voted against you.’
Radio seemed like a miracle, but it was powerful, too. The medium promised a more participatory democracy – one where common people could listen in on the momentous events of their day. That meant a better-educated society, all the more equipped to fight the rising tide of fascism. ‘If the future of our democracy depends upon the intelligence and cooperation of its citizens,’ wrote James Harbord, president of the Radio Corporation of America, in 1929, ‘radio may contribute to its success more than any other single influence.’ As early as 1924, the US commissioner of education, John Tigert, prophesied that, after ‘the school, the library, and the newspaper’, radio was the fourth most important education agency in the nation. Many claimed that radio might usher in a new enlightenment.
In Germany, it would come to look more like a dark age. Under the auspices of Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s unprecedented propaganda machine used that education agency towards totalitarian ends. ‘The German radio under National Socialist auspices must become the clearest and most direct instrument for educating and restructuring the German nation,’ wrote Goebbels in 1933. Social scientists in the US studied radio in order to ensure that it would be used for good and not ill. The social scientists Hadley Cantril (who would later write the War of the Worlds study that cemented its legend) and Gordon Allport wrote The Psychology of Radio (1935), which analysed the effects of radio on listeners. ‘Radio is an altogether novel medium of communication, preeminent as a means of social control and epochal in its influence upon the mental horizons of men,’ they wrote. Their book was simultaneously a scientifically certified account of radio’s power and evidence of social scientists’ growing interest in using radio to study the American mass mind.