COLLINS:…Now they’re lifting their metal hands. This is the end now. Smoke comes out… black smoke, drifting over the city. People in the streets see it now. They’re running toward the East River… thousands of them, dropping like rats. Now the smoke’s spreading faster. It’s reached Times Square. People are trying to run away from it, but it’s no use. They’re falling like flies. Now the smoke’s crossing Sixth Avenue… Fifth Avenue… 100 yards away… it’s 50 feet…
OPERATOR FOUR: 2×2L calling CQ… 2×2L calling CQ… 2×2L calling CQ… New York. Isn’t there anyone on the air? Isn’t there anyone… 2×2L…
Now came the break; now a regular CBS announcer told them that they were listening to a CBS presentation of Orson Welles and his Mercury Theater. The second half of the program followed. It was sensitively written, with no hysterics, but that didn’t matter any more. Before the break hundreds of thousands of screaming Americans had taken to the streets, governors were begging their constituents to believe that martial law had not been declared, and the churches were jammed with weeping families asking for absolution of their sins before the Martians came to their town. Altogether, the Princeton study discovered, approximately 1,700,000 believed the program to be a news broadcast, and about 1,200,000 were sufficiently distressed to do something about it. “For a few horrible hours,” the study concluded, “people from Maine to California thought that hideous monsters armed with death rays were destroying all armed resistance sent against them; that there was simply no escape from disaster; that the end of the world was near.”
In every state, telephone operators were overwhelmed. Local stations reported a 500 percent increase in incoming calls. In New York CBS and police switchboards were jammed. Riverside Drive became impassable; it was packed with mobs of sobbing people. Conditions were worst in northern New Jersey, where the first Things had been “discovered.” Weeping families clung to one another, terrified men ran blindly across fields, and drivers raced about in all directions, all hoping to escape asphyxiation and flaming death. Train terminals and bus stations were filled with wild-eyed people demanding tickets to anywhere; one New York woman phoning the Dixie Bus Terminal for information gasped, “Hurry, please, the world is coming to an end and I have a lot to do.”
When Dorothy Thompson wrote, “Nothing about the broadcast was in the least credible,” there was a tendency among those who had not heard the program to dismiss the stricken mobs as ignorant. It was untrue. Miss Thompson to the contrary, War of the Worlds was a magnificent technical achievement; even today a transcription of it is chilling. And while there was some correlation between fear, education, and economic status—the most vulnerable were listeners who had not completed grammar school and had been on relief for more than three years—the well-to-do could not be let off so easily. Princeton found that 28 percent of the college graduates who were tuned to the program, and 35 percent of those with high incomes, believed they were hearing straight news. On a southern university campus, sorority girls wept in each other’s arms and took turns telephoning their parents for a last goodbye, and an Ivy League senior, driving back from a Vassar check-in, was convinced when he flipped on the car radio that “Princeton was wiped out and gas was spreading over New Jersey and fire.”
In Studio One, Welles signed off jovially: “Goodbye everybody, and remember, please, for the next day or two the terrible lesson you learned tonight… and if your doorbell rings and nobody’s there, that was no Martian! It’s Halloween.” The red light went out; the Mercury Theater was off the air. But it was Studio One’s doorbell that was ringing, and somebody was out there—not Martians but New York’s finest, determined to teach Orson Welles a lesson he would never forget. Before opening the door, Welles and Houseman answered a shrill telephone in the control room. As Houseman later remembered it, the call came from “the mayor of some Midwestern city, one of the big ones. He is screaming for Welles. Choking with fury, he reports mobs in the streets of his city, women and children huddled in the churches, violence and looting. If, as he now learns, the whole thing is nothing but a crummy joke—then he, personally, is coming up to New York to punch the author of it on the nose!”
They hung up, the door burst open, the studio was suddenly crowded with dark blue uniforms, and what Houseman called “the nightmare” began—interrogations hinting darkly at countless suicides, traffic deaths, and a “fatal stampede in a Jersey hall.” At the moment the police could think of no law that had been broken, so the two men were released to a more terrible fate: the press. It seemed to Houseman that the press was being vindictive because radio had eclipsed newspaper coverage of the Czech crisis. Reporters countered that the broadcast was a big story, which it certainly was. Next morning scare headlines read:
RADIO WAR TERRORIZES U.S.
PANIC GRIPS NATION
AS RADIO ANNOUNCES
“MARS ATTACKS WORLD”
TIDAL WAVE OF TERRORISM SWEEPS NATION
PHONE CALLS SWAMP POLICE
AT BROADCAST OF FANTASY
“The show came off,” Houseman said wryly. There was no doubt about that. For two days it drove Hitler off front pages, while CBS put to rest the fears of those still distressed by following its hourly time signal (“9 P.M. B-u-l-o-v-a, Bulova Watch Time”) with an explanation that “the entire story and all of its incidents were fictitious.” The Federal Communications Commission issued a statement describing the program as “regrettable” and proposing a new radio code. For a while there was talk of criminal action, but it died away. By then Orson Welles had rocketed to national fame, and his Mercury Theater, no longer CBS’s poor relation, had acquired a lavish sponsor in Campbell Soups. Eventually Welles was invited to a White House function. The President took him off to one side and said, “You know, Orson, you and I are the two best actors in America.” He seemed serious, but Welles wasn’t sure how to take it, so he merely bowed.
***
The War of the Worlds broadcast revealed, as clearly as any mass convulsion can, that American nerves were being stretched ever tauter. In a popular phrase of the time, the country was “all balled up.” Fortune noted a mood of fatalism among people. It did not, however, report despair. Though men might feel that they had little control over their individual futures, there was a kind of momentum to the decade, a feeling that America had touched bottom at the start of it and was moving inexorably toward some grand historic climax. Radio was part of it; the European tempo mounted month by month, and ignoring its crises was impossible. There was also the immense vitality of the time; looking back on it Frank Brookhouser wrote, “It was, granted, a grim and heartbreaking period in many ways. But the people triumphed over the loss and the disappointment and the suffering and the heartache. And never was the nation’s heartbeat so loud and clear.” Finally, Roosevelt discouraged any sense of mindlessness. He believed in generational destiny, and as long as he was the conductor, beaming and flourishing his baton, it was almost impossible to doubt that eventually it would all make sense.
Sometimes, when the fire is low and the bourbon just right, the images and lost notes may drift down from the past, evoking memories for those who were then alive of what 1939 was like for a quite ordinary American in that year. If his morning newspaper was the Chicago Tribune, he was relieved to learn that Colonel Robert R. McCormick had just abandoned his crusade for simplified spelling (“agast,” “staf,” “lether,” “jaz,” “fantom”). The Tribune was elated by the new congressional coalition against a Roosevelt spending bill (“Mutiny on the bounty!”) but wrathful about a Court of Appeals ruling that schoolchildren needn’t salute the flag. Tribune editors expressed dismay that New York children thought habeas corpus was a kind of disease, approval of Senator Taft’s maiden speech on governmental economy, sadness over Lou Gehrig’s farewell to baseball, awe over the twenty-three-stitch gash Joe Louis inflicted on Two-Ton Tony Galento, resentment of those enemies of tradition who had changed the Boston Braves to the Boston Bees, and pleasure that the new Pope, Pius XII, had appoin
ted conservative Francis Joseph Spellman an archbishop. Colonel McCormick would have given a great deal to know that an apostate Communist named Whittaker Chambers was visiting Adolf Berle at Berle’s Washington home on Woodley Road and telling him of subversion in the government—which Berle then disregarded. It remained a secret—then. But the colonel’s time would come.
J. Edgar Hoover was wrapped in combat with, of all people, District Attorney Thomas E. Dewey. Dewey thought the FBI wiretappings were invasions of privacy, and one high police official in Manhattan accused Hoover of being a “publicity hound,” a “David Belasco in the squad car.” Fighting back, the FBI director issued a blast: “Communists at a meeting yesterday in New York have instructed two of their best writers to portray me as a Broadway glamour-boy.” At the American Legion’s national convention he said, “Intellectual license and debauchery is un-American. In righteous indignation it is time to drive the debauchers of America out in the open.” Dewey announced for the Presidency, which may not have been what Hoover had in mind.
The fastest-selling record was Hildegarde’s “Deep Purple.” Frankie Sinatra was still plugging along at $25 a week, but one night in a hotel Harry James’s wife turned up the volume on her radio and said, “Honey, listen to this boy sing.” Harry drove to Englewood, New Jersey, found Sinatra in a roadhouse called the Rustic Cabin, and signed him up. Their first record, “All or Nothing at All,” sold only eight thousand copies, but the Sinatras were eating regularly now. The Lone Ranger was being heard three times a week by twenty million people over 140 stations… Bette Davis, Spencer Tracy, and Frank Capra won Oscars… Alfred Hitchcock was making a lady vanish… Bobby Breen had to retire at the age of twelve because his voice was changing.
Otherwise—or moneywise, as they were already saying in the motion picture industry—Hollywood was at the crest of its supercolossal glory. Shirley Temple was only ten. At box offices the top three were Mickey Rooney, Tyrone Power, and Spencer Tracy. Every movie was marvelous, amazing, spellbinding, sensational, and the reigning genies were entitled to leave their imprints in the wet cement slabs of Grauman’s Chinese Theatre on Hollywood Boulevard. On the prewar silver screen, stars demonstrated incredible, magnificent deeds. Judy Garland persuaded a humbug Frank Morgan to confer courage upon cowardly Bert Lahr. Laurence Olivier, David Niven, and Merle Oberon recklessly pursued one another across the foggy moors (“Heathcliff! Heathcliff!”) of Wuthering Heights. Gene Autry sang of the West. Watching Robert Donat as Mr. Chips, you knew the Empire would last forever. Clark Gable was something of a cutup. He took his shirt off right in front of Claudette Colbert,2 and to the consternation of cotton mill owners he turned out to be topless; textile stocks dropped 8 1/4 in one week. Gable got that raffish “damn” into GWTW, though when the world premiere was held in Atlanta, the president of the United Daughters of the Confederacy was reported to have succumbed to the vapors. Even worse, Gable led a mutiny against Charles Laughton, who had kept calling him “Mr. Christian.”
George Arliss was a man of such dignity, such sang froid, that he became typecast as a historical figure, and a school superintendent expressed anxiety that a whole generation of schoolchildren might grow up believing that all great men of the past looked like George Arliss. He outmaneuvered Gladstone, outwitted D’Artagnan and the Three Musketeers, and outspent the rest of the Rothschild brothers. Arliss left audiences feeling euphoric; the French Revolution always left them sobbing. In Marie Antoinette Norma Shearer rode bravely to the guillotine in a tumbril. Ronald Colman rolled right behind her in A Tale of Two Cities, and as he laid his handsome neck under the blade you knew then, before his head even dropped into the basket, that it was a far, far better thing that he did than he had ever done; it was a far, far better rest that he went to than he had ever known.
***
Both Europe and America had suffered through one of the coldest winters on record. There were a million dead in Spain. Heinrich Himmler banned Time from Germany, to the delight of Henry Luce, and Hitler posed before the $396 Volkswagen he had helped to design. (Later the price would go up, but the little auto would look the same.) There were two world’s fairs in America in 1939, and if you could swing it, an excursion train would take you to both at a cut rate. Not many took advantage of the bargain. For most fairgoers one was enough, and that one was usually New York’s. San Francisco’s Golden Gate Exposition was designed with taste; its aeronautic display took your breath away, and its color floodlighting revealed a genuine flair. But the Golden Gate Exposition had no gimmicks, no camp, no corn, no sideshows—and, most important, no Grover Whalen.
At fifty-three Grover Aloysius Whalen, who had never been seen in public without a gardenia in his lapel, was New York’s official “greeter.” Visiting dignitaries who were not met by Whalen and presented with a key to the city felt insulted, and rightly so; it was like breaking diplomatic relations. The New York fair—he called it “The World of Tomorrow”—was conceived as his masterpiece. He intended to greet all guests by offering them anything they could possibly want, from great art to skin shows from a robot called Elektro that could talk and smoke a cigarette to the Lord’s Prayer in three hundred languages. “It was the paradox of all paradoxes,” Sidney M. Shalett wrote of the fair in Harpers the year it closed. “It was good, it was bad; it was the acme of all crazy vulgarity, it was the pinnacle of all inspiration.” Meyer Berger of the New York Times called it “Mad Meadow.” But there was a method in its madness, and in retrospect that motive seems more significant than its lapses of taste, even more important than the snub from Nazi Germany, the only major power that stayed away. In a word, the fair was a triumph of technology, the force that would do so much to shape postwar American society.
The hit of the fair was GM’s Futurama, which drew 28,000 paying customers a day, each of whom sat on a conveyor belt armchair for fifteen minutes, listening to a recorded explanation while he observed Norman Bel Geddes’s notion of what the American landscape would be like in 1960. Bel Geddes’s prescience was less than twenty-twenty. He predicted tall, tanned, vigorous people spending most of their time having fun. (There was no mention of black people; blacks, apparently, would have ceased to exist.) Possessions would bore Americans in his 1960, so there weren’t many in the Futurama. The countryside was crisscrossed by fat highways. Cars were air-conditioned and cost $200. Most of the land was forested. The luckiest Americans dwelt in one-factory villages producing a single industrial item and growing their own food.
Inventors and engineers would use a little atomic energy, but their chief source of power would be liquid air. Tremendous telescopes permitted men to see the moon a hundred times more clearly. Cancer would be cured; the average life span was seventy-five years. Houses were light and disposable; when you tired of one you just threw it away. (Where you threw it was unmentioned.) Most people had high school educations. Every village had an airport, with elevators taking aircraft to and from underground hangars. Office buildings and apartment condominiums were 1,500 feet high and were bordered by fourteen-lane turnpikes.
John Brooks has pointed out Bel Geddes’s most conspicuous Futurama flaw. He had no grasp whatever of the urban problems which would produce the crisis of America’s next generation. Cities were to be divided by the superhighways, and neighborhoods were to be zoned residential, commercial, or industrial. The dreamland was built to bring more automobiles into cities faster, yet there was no provision for parking. That was Bel Geddes’s most accurate forecast. It is precisely what has happened—to our despair. As Brooks observes of the Futurama, “many of its prophecies of Heaven have become facts; the only trouble is that now that they are here they look more like the lineaments of Hell.”
***
Among the foreign visitors to arrive at Mad Meadow’s gate in mid-June of 1939 was an Englishman with an awkward stutter and the name George the Sixth, by the Grace of God, of Great Britain and Northern Ireland and of his other Realms and Territories, King; Emperor of India; Head of the Commonwe
alth; Defender of the Faith. He was accompanied by his queen, the former Elizabeth Angela Marguerite Bowes-Lyon, and a host of protocol officers, secretaries, and aides. It was probably the biggest moment in the greeter’s life. His smile benevolent above a flowing white stock, he gave them his blue-ribbon personal tour and then saw them off to Hyde Park.
FDR was very much the squire that day. He drove his royal guests around the county in his custom-built Ford with manual brakes and served them hot dogs and—at the request of the Defender of the Faith—Ruppert’s beer. In Washington, 600,000 people lined the parade route, John Nance Garner cackled “Here come the British!” and Kate Smith, again by royal request, sang “When the Moon Comes Over the Mountain.” It was all very low-key, but its political significance was prodigious. Three months earlier Hitler had seized the rump Czech state. War was now imminent, and the President was letting the world know that he could do more than send pious messages to the Wilhelmstrasse. America had been a slumbering giant, he said, but now she was awakening; the aggressors had better watch out. The Führer displayed his customary charm by describing the President as a “pettifogging Jew” and adding that “the completely negroid appearance of his wife” showed that she was “half-caste.”
Hitler had an adoring Reichstag; Roosevelt faced a coalition Congress, and for the White House the difference was painful. The President asked the Führer for assurance that weak nations would not be attacked; William L. Shirer noted how “the paunchy deputies rocked with raucous laughter” when their leader solemnly promised not to invade the United States. Senator Nye, speaking for the isolationist bloc, said Roosevelt had “asked for it.” The strong wind FDR had sowed in the off-year primaries reaped a whirlwind in the Senate Foreign Relations Committee; after the shock of Munich the committee had been expected to recommend repeal of the neutrality laws, but the vote was 12–11 against it, and the majority included Walter George and Guy Gillette, two of the senators Roosevelt had tried to retire.
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