On the evening of October 30th, 1938, six million Americans heard the Mercury Theater broadcast of a radio play based upon H.G. Wells' novel, The War of the Worlds. Disguised as a radio news broadcast for heightened realism, the now-famous invasion of earth by Martians was mistaken by 28% of listening Americans for the real thing. And of those one million, seven hundred thousand listeners, most were deeply disturbed, and many thousands across the country fell into a state of acute panic.

Scholarly opinion immediately following the broadcast assigned as the primary reason for the panic widespread worry over the then increasing possibility of war in Europe. As a part of the only adequate social scientific study conducted of the panic, Hadley Cantril polled 250 social scientists concerning what they thought were its causes. The scientists' weighted ranking, from zero to nine, of the ten suggested causes of the panic was as follows:

8.5 -- The recent war scare in Europe

7.5 -- General intellectual immaturity

7.1 -- Prestige of the radio commentators

6.1 -- General emotional immaturity

5.5 -- Science is a mystery

2.9 -- Insecurity from prolonged economic depression

2.5 -- Insecurity from natural causes

1.9 -- Belief that the world will end sometime

1.5 -- Reading of Buck Rogers, etc.

.3 -- Religious beliefs

On first reading Cantril's study, I was surprised that social scientists of the day would so completely ignore the religious dimension of the panic when, to me at least, it seemed so very obvious in the many reports of it that I had read. Today, of course, one might reasonably expect that religion played more of a role in the panic of 1938 than was easily apparent at the time. The scholarly study of religion was not common in the Western academy until the late 1960s, and social scientists of the 1930s, in a particularly positivistic phase of their own discipline, would have had little inclination to consider religious phenomena important for an understanding of fundamental social processes.

Cantril himself observed that while "the social scientists appear to be quite right in stressing the effects of the war scare and the prolonged depression," they "seem to underestimate the importance of religious beliefs." Cantril did not examine the role that religious beliefs might have played in the panic except in the most cursory fashion. But he was well aware that, writing as soon as he was after the panic, he must of necessity leave some questions unanswered. He wrote:

We naturally wonder if the social setting in the United States on October 30, 1938 was particularly conducive to the panicky behavior of people who happened to hear the broadcast. Are the times more out of joint now than they were in the golden 'ninties or in 1925? Were there fewer people able to orient themselves in 1938 than there might have been in other historical periods had a comparable situation arisen? And if conditions were particularly disturbed, did they affect all people equally? These are essentially questions for the historian and sociologist of the future.

I propose to address these questions here, adding angst over secularization as one significant causative factor of the War of the Worlds panic. The 1920s and 1930s were the zenith of secularization; they were decades in which anxiety was especially deep over what many people believed to be a rapid, probably irreversible draining of sacred meanings out of the world and the closing of access to the sacred by the then-dominant scientific positivism. That such angst was a causative factor in a panic over earth's fictional invasion by Martians should not be surprising. Science fiction and fantasy have long constituted one literature with dual balance points, one in science and the other in Faerie. Together, they have constituted a speculative literature of our inner and outer frontiers -- and always it has been impossible to subdue the mythic and spiritual imaginations on our frontiers. From its earliest days, SF has been an aesthetic narrative genre in which metaphysical concerns have been of greatest importance, and in the War of the Worlds panic, anxiety over secularization and loss of access to the sacred expressed itself quite naturally in a science fictional context.

Here, then, is the description of the Martians that begins the War of the Worlds broadcast:

We know now that in the early years of the twentieth century this world was being watched closely by intelligences greater than man's and yet as mortal as his own. We know now that as human beings busied themselves about their various concerns they were scrutinized and studied, perhaps almost as narrowly as a man with a microscope might scrutinize the transient creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water. With infinite complacence people went to and fro over the earth about their little affairs, serene in the assurance of their dominion over this small spinning fragment of solar driftwood which by chance or design man has inherited out of the dark mystery of Time and Space. Yet across an immense ethereal gulf, minds that are to our minds as ours are to the beasts in the jungle, intellects vast, cool and unsympathetic, regarded this earth with envious eyes and slowly and surely drew their plans against us.

We humans are scrutinized and studied as one of our scientists would study the small creatures in a drop of water. The earth is a "small spinning fragment of solar driftwood" -- a perception of it shared no doubt by both the Martians and our own scientists. The Martians are "intellects vast, cool and unsympathetic."

These aliens are not Nazis writ large, as has sometimes been suggested, but scientists, and though a disproportionately large number of those who panicked tuned in late to the broadcast, missing this early description of the Martians, this portrayal of them is made explicit throughout the play. Here is Professor Pierson, "noted astronomer at Princeton University," describing the Martian's death ray:

Of the creatures in the rocket cylinder at Grovers Mill, I can give you no authoritative information -- either as to their nature, their origin, or their purposes here on earth. Of their destructive instrument I might venture some conjectural explanation. For want of a better term, I shall refer to the mysterious weapon as a heat-ray. It's all too evident that these creatures have scientific knowledge far in advance of our own. It is my guess that in some way they are able to generate an intense heat in a chamber of absolute nonconductivity. This intense heat they project in a parallel beam against any object they choose, by means of a polished parabolic mirror of unknown composition...That is my conjecture of the origin of the heat ray.

These dastardly super-scientific invaders must of necessity relegate to pure superstition the religions of earth -- and in the 1930s, the non-religious knew, and the religious feared, that our own scientists had done the very same thing to earth's religions.

Martians, after all, just don't fit into the Judeo-Christian scheme of things -- or do they? Here is the description of the Martians given by "Carl Phillips," a broadcast news reporter said to be on scene at the Grover's Mill landing site:

Ladies and gentlemen, this is the most terrifying thing I have ever witnessed....Wait a minute! Someone's crawling out of the hollow top [of the Martian "rocket cylinder"]. Some one or...something. I can see peering out of that black hole two luminous disks...are they eyes? It might be a face. It might be....

(SHOUT OF AWE FROM THE CROWD)

Good heavens, something's wriggling out of the shadow like a gray snake. Now it's another one, and another. They look like tentacles to me. There, I can see the thing's body. It's large as a bear and it glistens like wet leather. But that face. It...it's indescribable. I can hardly force myself to keep looking at it. The eyes are black and gleam like a serpent. The mouth is V-shaped with saliva dripping from its rimless lips that seem to quiver and pulsate. The monster or whatever it is can hardly move. It seems weighted down by...possibly gravity or something.

These Martians are pretty ungodly looking creatures, to be sure, but the snake symbolism here (the Martian's tentacles wriggle out of the shadows like gray snakes, its eyes gleam like those of a serpent) may strike deeper than the author of the play consciously intended -- it is the snake, after all, that is strongly associated with the Judeo-Christian myth of the Fall, and allied symbolisms include the Tree of Knowledge, Satan as Lucifer, the Lightbearer of the Old Testament, and in all of this the unsettling power of our sciences to enlighten, and the hubris often attendant upon such knowledge.

Still, there can be no doubt that a Martian invasion tended to undermine the steeled religious assumptions of many listeners that October evening. Here, for example, is the account of a college senior's panic flight to rescue his girlfriend, begun upon his hearing the broadcast on his car radio:

"One of the first things I did was to try to phone my girl in Poughkeepsie, but the lines were all busy, so that just confirmed my impression that the thing was true. We started driving back to Poughkeepsie. We had heard that Princeton was wiped out and gas was spreading over New Jersey and fire, so I figured there wasn't anything to do -- we figured our friends and families were all dead. I made the 45 miles in 35 minutes and didn't even realize it. I drove right through Newburgh and never even knew I went through it. I don't know why we weren't killed. My roommate was crying and praying. He was even more excited than I was -- or more noisy about it anyway; I guess I took it out in pushing the accelerator to the floor...I thought I was racing against time. The gas was supposed to be spreading up north. I didn't have any idea what I was fleeing from and that made me all the more afraid. All I could think of was being burned alive or being gassed. And yet I didn't care somehow whether I hit anything with the car or not. I remember thinking distinctly how easy it would be to get shot cleanly in a war. I remember also thinking there wasn't any God. My roommate was really praying and crying all the time. I thought the whole human race was going to be wiped out -- that seemed more important than the fact that we were going to die. It seemed awful that everything that had been worked on for years was going to be lost forever." [Emphasis added]

"I remember thinking there wasn't any God" -- that there wasn't was the implicit logic of the broadcast.

Can we still pray to good effect? Is God our sure and certain support? Where prayer is a part of the play, where God's assistance is called upon, we are to know that prayer will prove futile and that "God's assistance" is mere platitude. In a particularly effective sequence, an "announcer," "speaking from the roof of Broadcast Building, New York City," chronicles the death of that city, observing that "people are holding service below us...in the cathedral." All those praying in the cathedral, the whole of New York, are utterly destroyed by the Martians. Few can think much of the efficacy of prayer after this clear demonstration of its failure. And with human forces most clearly unable to withstand the technology of the Martians, with death and destruction all about, the "Secretary of the Interior" comes on the radio with a windy and pompous official pronouncement to calm the nation's fears:

Citizens of the nation: I shall not try to conceal the gravity of the situation that confronts the country, nor the concern of your government in protecting the lives and property of its people. However, I wish to impress upon you -- private citizens and public officials, all of you -- the urgent need of calm and resourceful action. Fortunately, this formidable enemy is still confined to a comparatively small area, and we may place our faith in the military forces to keep them there. In the meantime placing our faith in God we must continue the performance of our duties each and every one of us, so that we may confront this destructive adversary with a nation united, courageous, and consecrated to the preservation of human supremacy on this earth. I thank you.

As the announcer, just before the "Secretary's" pronouncement, has described the military action that he has been detailing around the country as "the most startling defeats ever suffered by an army in modern times," no one listening on that evening in October, 1938, was likely to have been persuaded by the smug platitudes of the "Secretary." Indeed, they can only have served to confirm the listeners' worst fears: that there is finally no help and no salvation, on earth or in the heavens.

The results of Cantril's own statistical analyses of the panic are not inconsistent with the possibility of religious insecurity as one of several of its precipitating causes. The following percentages, for instance, indicate by region the percentage of those who heard the broadcast as a news report and were then frightened:

New England -- 40 per cent

Middle Atlantic -- 69

East North Central -- 72

West North Central -- 72

South -- 80

Mountain and Pacific -- 71

Cantril observes that the higher percentage of fright among southern listeners may have been the result of the larger proportion of poor and uneducated people in that area. And later in his study, he adduces statistical evidence for this relationship between a lack of education and the tendency of people to panic over the broadcast. But lack of education and lower socioeconomic status were then, as they are now, positively associated with greater religious observance. And over the nation as a whole that October evening in 1938, it is clear that panic was greater in those regions where secularization was just beginning to bite deeply into our culture. There, perhaps, people had the most reason to fear the Martian superscientists.

Cantril discusses at length in his study the ways in which the radio play effectively disoriented its listeners, lessening the critical distance needed to properly evaluate the events portrayed in it. When we are in the grips of such a disorientation, normally submerged fears can surge up in us, as happened in the college senior whose panic flight has been described here. But what was most bothering Americans in the late 1930s? What did they fear? Finally, an historical examination of the broader cultural milieu of both broadcast and panic supports the assumption that angst produced by on-going secularization was relatively more important in causing the panic and worry over war somewhat less important than was assumed at the time.

It seems likely that the disproportionately less well-educated people who did panic were less concerned about impending war than the educated people who studied them. Isolationism was so strong in America and Americans so unanimous in their desire to avoid war, that in those final days of peace, one could sit upon our shores and watch events in the rest of the world, imagining with only a little difficulty that they would pass us by. In 1940, over 85% of the population was strongly opposed to entering the war in Europe. What is more surprising is that in October of 1941, less than two months before the attack upon Pearl Harbor, 83% of the population was still strongly opposed to entering the war. Roosevelt, under pressure from the Republicans in the election campaign of 1940, was forced by popular sentiment to declare:

Let no man or woman thoughtlessly or falsely talk of sending American armies to European fields. I hope the United States will keep out of this war. I believe that it will.

The War of the Worlds broadcast took place before the actual outbreak of war in Europe, and just after the September, 1938, meeting between Chamberlain and Hitler that produced the infamous Munich Accord. If anything, there was a short-lived feeling at the time of the broadcast that the possibility of war in Europe had been significantly lessened. War broke out in March of 1939 with the German invasion of Poland, but that there was a temporary respite from the expectation of immanent war is indicated by Cantril's own constant reference to the "recent war scare in Europe," wording which implies in context that the worst may well be past. Cantril, writing his study just after the broadcast, and thus after the Munich Accord, had completed it in January of 1939, two months before the English declaration of war upon the Germans.

Respite or not, though, most of the American population was sunk in the false security of isolationism and paid little heed to events in Europe. As one man who was featured in a 1940 Path‚ News Poll said: "Let Europe fight their own battles. They mean nothing to us." Or another: "I don't know nothing about the affairs of Europe." And again: "Another war? Not for me! This time America should keep out and I know I will!" As a "man on the street" interview series that preceded motion pictures in the theaters in those days, the "Path‚ News Poll" stands as a good indicator of popular sentiment. Given this unanimity of feeling, most people in October of 1938 seem to have expected that America at least was unlikely to be going to war, and the "recent war scare in Europe" may have played somewhat less of a role in the panic than the sociologists polled by Cantril assumed. With their greater understanding of human history and social process, the sociologists had every reason to be pessimistic, and possibly saw their own fears reflected in the populations they studied.

The Twenties and Thirties were much affected by what was then widely perceived as a final closing of religious possibilities. Could "The Second Coming" or "The Hollow Men" have been written in times other than these? They were times in which the worst were filled with a passionate intensity, and in which the best too often lacked all conviction. And the habit of and need for faith continued on even after religious faith had died in many hearts; Fascism and Russian communism were in part fevered attempts at constructing secular political surrogates for religious meaning systems that very many no longer found persuasive.

In the sciences an antireligious positivism was in the ascendent. Freud was culture hero to the twenties and thirties, a hero who believed religion to be wholly the result of our species' troubled immaturity and who yearned for its quick passing. In the first two decades of this century, Durkheim and Weber reshaped sociology, persuasively predicting the immanent death of religion. If these two scholars, prescient in so many ways, could not see ahead of their own day where religion's future was concerned, could many of that time have been expected to?

As positivism was ascendent in the sciences, science was ascendent in our culture, and the religious certainties of old were in steep decline. The anti-modernist, "fundamentalist" religious resurgence of the turn of the century waned rapidly in influence throughout the 1920s, in part as a result of the highly publicized excesses of certain radio preachers and the treatment in the national media of the Scopes trial specifically, and fundamentalists generally. Finally, fundamentalism was simply not persuasive and science was.

Since mid-century, positivism has died a hard death in our most fundamental sciences, and a reenchantment of the world and an opening of religious possibilities can be charted in many areas of our culture. But the 1920s and 1930s were the depths of secularization, and in few times has so complete a loss of hope in the spirit been possible as it was then. How can this not have affected audience response to the coming of the Martians to America's radio pumpkin patch in late October of 1938?

Works Cited

1. Cantril, Hadley, The Invasion from Mars: A Study in the Psychology of Panic (With the Complete Script of the Orson Welles Broadcast), Princeton UP, Princeton, NJ, 1982.

2. Curtis, Adam, producer, "Bang, Bang! Here Come the British," one segment in the PBS series, "An Ocean Apart," a joint production of BBC-TV, KCET/Los Angeles and WNET/New York, 1988.

3. Cantril, p. 57-60.

4. Radio was an accepted vehicle for important announcements. The 1939

Fortune Poll found 50% supporting radio news as freer from prejudice than

newspapers, and only 17% supporting newspapers over radio news. Cited in

Cantril, p. 69.

. Cantril, p. 209.

. It is suspect, for instance, that social scientists in Cantril's study

listed the intellectual and emotional immaturity of the public second and

fourth respectively as causative factors of the panic. So ready an

assumption of factors that are clearly unquantifiable, much less provable,

could well indicate that the scientists were in part reacting at gut level

against a segment of the public, those who panicked, who were still em-

bedded in a world-view that was antithetical to their own: a religious

world-view. If true, this would be to inappropriately explain away as

mere "immaturity" a possibly significant causative factor of the panic.

. Cantril, p. 210.

. Cantril, p. 153.

. I do not believe that it is now possible to ground empirically this

assertion that secularization (or at least people's perceived lack of

access to the sacred) was at its zenith in the 1920s and 1930s. Too much

time has passed for any retrospective statistical study of those times to

succeed. Any evidence adduced for the claim must remain qualitative and

somewhat impressionistic. The assertion, however, is a not unreasonable

interpolation of the results of the statistical study I have cited in note

10 of this essay. If it can be shown that there has been a progressive

widening of the paths into spirit since mid-century, it not unreasonable

to assume that access to the sacred was in some ways limited before mid-

century.

. Cantril, p. 4-5.

. A CBS survey of audience response to the radio play showed that of

those tuning in from the beginning of the play (n= 269), 20% interpreted

the broadcast as news, and 80% as a play. Of those tuning in after the

beginning (n= 191), 63% interpreted the broadcast as news, and only 37% as

a play. Cantril, p. 78.

. Cantril, p. 20.

. Cantril, p. 16-17.

. Cantril, p. 51-52.

. Cantril, p. 30.

. Cantril, p. 23-24.

. Cantril, p. 59.

. Cited in Curtis, 1988.

. Cited in Curtis, 1988.

. Cited in Curtis, 1988.

. For a tentative empirical grounding of this claim, see my own essay

"The Influence of Speculative Fiction on the Religious Formation of the

Young: A Preliminary Statistical Investigation," Extrapolation, Winter,

1987, Vol. 28, No.4.