Orson Welles’ The War of the Worlds and the History of Radio Broadcasting
You’ve probably heard this story before:
On October 30, 1938, a 23-year-old theatrical boy-wonder named Orson Welles caused panic among radio listeners with the Halloween episode of his Mercury Theatre on the Air (1): an adaptation of H.G. Well’s The War of the Worlds.(2) Actors played the roles of correspondents who broke into an on-going [fake] radio program, seeming to report live as Martians invaded and destroyed the real life town of Grovers’ Mill, New Jersey. As the fictional invaders began to move toward Newark and then New York City, these “correspondents” told their audience that they were reporting from military command posts and from the roof of a broadcasting building in Manhattan.
Some listeners believed the show was a live broadcast and panicked, even though the opening of the show made it clear that the one-hour program was a drama.(3) A Princeton study published in 1940 claimed that six million people heard the program, and 1.7 million believed it was a real news broadcast. (Subsequent scholars question both numbers.)
As for me, I’ve always wondered why anyone would believe the broadcast was real, but as I learn more about radio in the 1930s it makes more sense. Radio was relatively new—the first national broadcast networks in the United States were incorporated in 1926 (NBC) and 1928 (CBS). News broadcasts were even newer, and infrequent. Stopping a program for “breaking” news was almost unheard of.
The growth of Nazi Germany changed the nature of broadcast news The first “news roundup” from multiple locations occurred in March, 1938, in response to the German invasion of Austria. Working on short notice, with serious technical difficulties, Edward Murrow and William Shirer of CBS cobbled together a half-hour of American newspaper correspondents commenting on the invasion from London, Vienna, Berlin, Paris and Rome. Listeners were enthralled.
When the Munich Crisis broke out that September, both NBC and CBS upped their coverage, broadcasting live from Europe 147 and 151 times respectively over the course of three weeks. Back in the United States, CBS’s primary news reader, H.V. Kaltenborn (4), held the story together for his listeners in 102 broadcasts that ranged from one-minute bulletins to two-hour marathons in which he simultaneously translated speeches from French and German. America stayed glued to the radio throughout the crisis.
The crisis ended, but the role of radio news was changed. Local radio stations increased the time they devoted to broadcasting the news and networks scrambled to expand their overseas coverage.
As a result, when Welles broadcast The War of the Worlds a month after the crisis in Munich, he reached an audience that was newly attuned (literally and metaphorically) to radio news, but was not yet sophisticated enough about the medium to tell fact from fiction.
(1) In another year I might have run this on October 30—the actual anniversary of the broadcast. But next week is all about the vote. Boo!
(2) Am I the only one to just now notice the juxtaposition of Orson Welles and H.G. Wells in this event? Meaningless and yet curious.
(3) One scholar suggests that some people missed the beginning because they were channel surfing. Let this be a warning to you.
(4) I hadn’t heard of him either until I started this project.
Royal Witches
Long before women’s history became a thing, two types of women held a place in the public imagination: queens (or more accurately, princesses) and witches. In Royal Witches: Witchcraft and the Nobility in Fifteenth Century England, historian Gemma Hollman considers a point at which two subjects of women’s history intersect—the political roles played by royal women in medieval and early modern Europe and witch trials. The result is a fascinating story of the power and vulnerability of those royal women.
Hollman explores the lives of four women who married into England’s royal family in the turbulent period between Henry IV’s usurpation of the British throne through the Wars of the Roses:* Joan of Navarre, Eleanor Cobham, Jacquetta of Luxembourg (later Jacquetta Woodville), and Elizabeth Woodville. She tells the story of each woman’s marriage. (Unusual among European nobility at the time, all four marriages were love matches.) She establishes the political context of those marriages. And then she demonstrates how accusations of witchcraft were used to attack each woman, and in two cases her husband’s political position as well.
Hollman does an excellent job of demonstrating how accusations of witchcraft lead to the falls of Joan, Eleanor, and Jacquetta and how those accusations, and each woman’s defense, relate to each other. The final section of the book, which deals with the better-known history of Elizabeth Woodville’s life as Edward IV’s wife and the tragic dissolution of her family after his death, is well told, but less clearly linked to Hollman’s central argument. Despite this unevenness, Royal Witches is an intriguing addition to the growing genre of books dealing with royal women in medieval Europe.
*If you want to look at women of this period from a slightly different perspective, I also recommend Sarah Gristwood’s Blood Sisters. Both books are part of a growing genre of books that look at royal and noble women of medieval and early modern Europe within the context of power politics and family networks. If you want to read my general thoughts on this genre (and the broader question of why we write group biographies of women), you can find them in this recent issue of my newsletter. **
If you simply want to read more books about queens, etc, here are links to some I’ve reviewed over the last few years:
Nancy Goldstone. The Rival Queens: Catherine de’Medici, Her Daughter Marguerite de Valois, and the Betrayal That Ignited a Kingdom
Sarah Gristwood. Game of Queens.
Sharan Newman. Defending The City of God: A Medieval Queen, The First Crusade And The Quest for Peace In Jerusalem
Giles Tremlett. Isabella of Castille: Europe’s First Great Queen
Not to mention Antonia Fraser’s The Warrior Queens: The Legends and the Lives of the Women Who Have Led Their Nations in War, which appeared much earlier and holds a special place in my heart for obvious reasons.
I am sorry to report that I have not reviewed any books about witches. Hmmm..
**If you like what you read, take a moment to subscribe.
The guts of this review previously appeared in Shelf Awareness for Readers.
“Degenerate Art” in Nazi Germany
In the early decades of the twentieth century, radical new art forms flourished in Germany. Expressionism, futurism, surrealism, cubism, fauvism, and the Dada movement, while different in their forms, shared a common mood of revolt against the established norms of both art and society and the authorities that supported those norms. Despite the inherently revolutionary nature of such work, state-owned German art museums collected and exhibited work by artists such as Otto Dix, Max Beckmann, Paul Klee, Käthe Kollwitz, and Emile Nolde.* In short, art was hot.
The catalog cover for the Degenerate Art exhibition. Notice that Kunst (Art) is in quotation marks. (Image from the Deutsches Historisches Museum
The Nazis were less open-minded on the subject. In the summer of 1937, the Nazi government in Germany staged two important art exhibits in Munich that were designed to teach the German people the difference between great art and what they termed “degenerate art”—anything that was modern, abstract, elitist** or created by a Jewish, socialist, communist, or otherwise class-conscious artist.
One exhibit was titled “Degenerate Art”, comprised of 740 works of modern art by 120 artists—part of more than 20,000 such works the Nazi removed from the state collections between 1937 and 1939. According to the exhibition catalog, the purpose of the show was to “reveal the philosophical, political, racial and moral goals and intentions behind this movement, and the driving forces of corruption which followed them. The works were displayed in a manner designed not only to mock them as “bad art” but to suggest that they were part of an international plot against the German people. ***
Nazi Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels visiting the Degenerate Art exhibition, which was his brainchild. Image from the German Federal Archive
The other, designated the “Great German Art Exhibition, was a “model art exhibition” of works hand-picked by Hitler for the edification of the public. It was made up of works that were traditional in style, featuring beautiful landscapes, statuesque blond nudes, and idealized Germanic soldiers. By and large, the works were perfectly competent, but they weren’t particularly exciting.
People voted with their feet. In the first two weeks after the exhibitions opened, 400,000 people visited “Degenerate Art”—a record for Germany at the time. By contrast, 129,000 visited the Great German Art Exhibition in the same period. Over the total run of the two exhibitions, which toured around Germany after their opening in Munich, the gap narrowed to three-to-one in favor of “degenerate art.”
* Nolde was a member of the Nazi party, but that didn’t protect his work from Nazi attacks. More of his paintings were exhibited in the Degenerate Art exhibit than those of any other artist, and more of his paintings were confiscated from public galleries.
**A favorite term of abuse in the insult portfolio of populist politicians.
***An idea that I find hard to wrap my mind around. How could anyone consider Ernst Barlach’s breathtaking memorial to the German soldiers who died in World War I part of a plot against the German people?
