Anatomy of a Panic

To most of 1,200,000 U. S. radio listeners who ran for the exits, peered down the pike for Martian invaders or otherwise conducted themselves oddly on the night before Halloween 1938, the Orson Welles broadcast based on H. G. Wells's The War of the Worlds remains a booful, baleful memory.* They will perhaps never think of Mercer County, N. J. except as the place where a series of rocket-machines once fictionally landed, loosing battalions of huge extra-terrestrial monsters. For those interested in 1) owning a copy of the celebrated script (with indicated sound effects); 2) enjoying a learned laugh over the things it made people do; 3) studying U. S. behavior when a panic is on, The Invasion from Mars,* provides a lively, sympathetic anatomizing of the Wells-Welles ruckus by Psychologist Hadley Cantril and a special staff of Princeton's Radio Research Project.

The Princeton project (directed by Drs. Paul F. Lazarsfeld, Frank Stanton and Hadley Cantril) had been studying radio on Rockefeller money for about a year when the Halloween panic popped practically in Nassau Hall. With a special grant of $3,000 from the Rockefeller General Education Board, Dr. Cantril and associates went after known survivors of the Sunday nightmare with a questionnaire many times as nosy as a census blank. In addition to straightforward questions about the incident, the project's interviewers asked people about Mars, rocketships, religion, superstitions, job security, education, year and make of car, the Czech crisis, choice of newspapers, magazines, books; a hundred other questions, including "For whom did you vote in 1936?" The Princeton researchers estimated that 6,000,000 people heard the broadcast; 1,700,000 believed it to be news; 1,200,000 were frightened. Although the broadcast dealt mainly with events supposedly happening in central and northern New Jersey, the panic was widespread. In the South, 80% of those who heard were plumb scared; in the East North Central and West North Central States, 72% were alarmed.

To conserve resources, most of the Princeton interviews were conducted in nearby areas, and later compared with nationwide findings of CBS and Gallup polls. Some finds: > A student, driving back to college after a date in Poughkeepsie, N. Y., tuned in just in time to hear a bulletin that something from out of this world had landed at Grovers Mills, near Princeton. He listened long enough to hear "Professor Pierson of Princeton" (Welles), and talk of invasion, gas, fire, and many deaths. Believing that everybody was done in down Princeton way, he headed back to rescue his girl, covered 45 miles in 35 minutes, passed through Newburgh, N. Y. (pop. 31,000) without noticing it. Analyzing this young man's questionnaire, Psychologist Cantril deduced him to be well-to-do, conventional, "particularly susceptible to prestige suggestion." The reputation of Columbia Broadcasting System, the broadcast references to the Princeton professor and the pessimistic Secretary of the Interior greatly impressed him. His reaction to the catastrophe seemed to be partly based upon his greatest fear: "that something will happen to make him financially insecure." During that evening he lost five pounds, and during the next few days was unable to digest his food.

> A Massachusetts man heard all he could stand, ran and planked down his savings ($3.25) for a railway ticket. He traveled 60 miles before he found out he was fleeing a bogeyman.

> One unruffled husband, to prove to his wife that there was no danger, tuned in another radio station with music on. Humphed his wife: "Nero fiddled while Rome burned."

> At another exasperating husband, a stickling wife screamed: "Dan, why don't you get dressed? You don't want to die in your working clothes!"

> Said one come-what-may man later: "The broadcast had us all worried, but I knew it would at least scare ten years' life out of my mother-in-law."

> One Glory-bent citizen, driving 80 miles an hour for a priest to be shriven, turned over twice on a curve, lived to tell it.

> How the Law behaved in Maplewood, N. J.: "We know as much as you do. Keep your radio tuned in and follow the announcer's advice. There is no immediate danger in Maplewood."

One quality that might have tipped everyone off to what was really going on, according to Dr. Cantril, was pure, uninfluenced "critical ability." Some child listeners possessed and used this. They recognized Orson Welles's voice as that of The Shadow of a year prior. Compared to The Shadow's well-remembered activities, the War of the Worlds was tame stuff. On the whole, college-bred listeners who first thought the program was a news broadcast were twice as successful as grade-school graduates in detecting that what they heard was fiction. But generally, Dr. Cantril's researchers found, critical ability was affected by other factors tending to create susceptibility. Most significant of these were universal insecurity, worries, phobias, fatalism, war fear. To sum up, Dr. Cantril quoted the late Heywood Broun: "Jitters have come to roost."

Two persons upon whose critical ability Dr. Cantril does not comment were the two hard-rock Princeton geologists who heard that something had fallen near by, promptly set out, hammers in hand, to have a scientific go at it.

* On April Fool's Eve, two Sundays ago, Jack Benny in his NBC radio half-hour held an imaginary telephone conversation with Orson Welles, jokingly blamed recent sunspot magnetic storms on him, worried about the end of the world. In Philadelphia, Press Agent William A. A. Castellini of the Fels Planetarium telegraphed Benny, care of Station KYW: "Your worst fears that world will end are confirmed by astronomers of the Franklin Institute. Scientists predict that the world will end at 3 p. m. E. S. T. April 1." A KYW announcer read the telegram--an obvious plug for a Planetarium show called "How the World Will End&"--following a news broadcast, with no mention of Jack Benny. Result: a minor panic in the City of Brotherly Love, jammed switchboards, perspiring cops, an editorial rebuke from the Philadelphia Inquirer. * Princeton University Press; $2.50.

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