John Moses Browning: The Mormon Inventor Whose Firearms Changed the World

00:00:10
Speaker 1: And we continue with our American stories. Before Orson Welles became the critically praised actor and director known for Citizen Kane, cut his teeth in broadcast radio, most Americans didn’t know of the young man from Kenosha, Wisconsin. But that would all change on Halloween in 1938. You’re to tell the story of The War of the Worlds’ first broadcast is A. Brad Schwartz, author of Broadcast Hysteria. Take it away, Brad.

00:00:39
Speaker 2: Ladies. A gentleman, the director of The Mercury Theater,

00:00:41
Speaker 1: And star of these broadcasts.

00:00:43
Speaker 2: Orson Welles. We know now that in the early years of the twentieth century, this world was being watched closely by intelligences greater than…

00:00:52
Speaker 3: Man’s under data plan.

00:01:00
Speaker 2: In the Rocket Hill and the Groves Mill, two thousands feet engine to getting out, no chance to release bombs.

00:01:08
Speaker 4: Only one thing left.

00:01:09
Speaker 5: Not on the planet. Arm Obamba’s an engagement with Enemy drive Bob Machin’s over Jersey.

00:01:15
Speaker 6: Hello, I’m Orson Welles, and I’ve been quoting from another…

00:01:20
Speaker 2: Welles. No relation. H.G.

00:01:23
Speaker 6: Welles, the distinguished novelist, historian, prophet. It was also the great master of science fiction. He wrote The War of the Worlds, on which was based a certain notorious radio broadcast, which is some of you may remember, sent many thousands of our listeners panicking into the streets all over the country.

00:01:48
Speaker 3: Orson Welles. At the time of the war, The War of the Worlds was broadcast. He is pretty well known in New York and in New York theater circles, and he had achieved some prominence as a radio performer. But the radio work that he was doing was a non because you weren’t credited, so he’s not a national figure by any means. Back in those days, the major radio networks, they would give away a lot of airtime without commercial sponsors, essentially as a public service, because the Communications Act says, if you’re going to have a broadcast license, you disturb the public interest, something like The Mercury Theater, where, you know, Orson Welles is going to perform great works of literature and drama and things like that on the air. This is seen as the public service. The first episode is Dracula. They do Treasure Island, they do Trilock Holmes, you know, all these classic books and plays. The radio show is kind of a disaster. It’s not doing well in the ratings because it is sort of highbrow. Who knows how long CBS is going to give them this hour of time? And that’s when the idea comes up, maybe our next show should be an adaptation of The War of the Worlds. Breaks you will. It’s a question, you know, where the idea of to adapt to do this way came from. Welles told different versions of the story at different times, but when he was under oath, talked about having this idea of doing a broadcast that sounded like breaking news because there had been, in September 1938, the famous Munich Diplomatic Crisis where Nazi Germany was claiming part of Czechoslovakia, and there was a real question as to whether this would precipitate another World War.

00:03:26
Speaker 2: No, Prime Minnesota has come back from his third and greatest done, and he said, “We regard…”

00:03:31
Speaker 5: The agreement time last night and the Anglo-German…

00:03:35
Speaker 7: Naval agreement as symbolic of the desire of our two people…

00:03:40
Speaker 5: Never to go to war with one another again.

00:03:43
Speaker 3: They were reporting on this round-the-clock, breaking into programming regularly, and people were getting used to the idea that anything could be interrupted with news of a catastrophe at any time, and Welles sees what great drama this is, that people were gripped by this, and he wanted to capture that, in some sense, a dramatic, fictitious context, not to fool people, but use some of that power to take an old story and make it seem new. But he didn’t have a book in mind. And maybe John Houseman. We don’t really know, but somebody suggests The War of the Worlds by H.G. Welles. Orson Welles says, “Great, fantastic!” It’s the first alien invasion story really in the modern sense that anyone ever did. H.G. Welles wrote it in 1897 and 1898, really as a sort of satire of colonialism, because it’s written at the high point of the British Empire, and he had been reading about what the British were doing in Tasmania to the indigenous inhabitants there and had this idea of a reversal of, maybe, what if a superior civilization lands in the heart of the United Kingdom and starts treating the British the way the British are treating people on the other side of the globe? What would that look like broadcast?

00:04:56
Speaker 6: The Martians were as aggressive and ruthless as any human. They were supposedly as bad as we are at our worst, and also much uglier. They brandished death rays and their slimy tentacles.

00:05:13
Speaker 3: But what seemed really cutting-edge in 1898, by 1938, looked particularly to members of The Mercury Theater as something that was really kind of hokey. Science fiction back in those days was seen as mainly for children. So they turn it over to a writer that they had just hired by the name of Howard Kage. He would go on to co-write the screenplay for Cosa Blanca and a lot of Hollywood to the films. But at this time he’s used to struggling playwright, and Kage gets the book over the weekend.

00:05:50
Speaker 3: He’s going to turn in a script on like Tuesday, and he is not impressed with the novel. He thinks it’s outdated, he thinks it’s really silly. He tries to get them to change the story, and he’s given the instruction to take this story that sat around the turn of the century, modernize it riches of the United States, and do it as a series of news bullets, which he does. I mean, he takes the basic structure of how the Martians land and come out of their spacecraft.

00:06:08
Speaker 6: And it was understood that the Martians were fighting for their own survival. Their planet was growing so cold and inhospitable that they might perish if they remained.

00:06:19
Speaker 3: In the book, they moved toward London, and broadcast. They moved toward New York City, and he has a roadmap of New Jersey because that’s where he had been visiting the week before, and closes his eyes and drops a pencil on the map, and it lands on this little tower called Grover’s Mill, which is a few miles from Princeton. And he goes, “Oh, Princeton! Okay, so I can have my astronomer be a professor at Princeton, and I can land the Martians here, and it’s not far from New York City,” and puts that all together.

00:06:45
Speaker 6: For a while, at least, just toward the end of the radio play, they appeared to be totally invincible.

00:06:52
Speaker 3: And so they have a draft script. They do a rehearsal that they record so Welles can listen to it. They listened to it, I think on maybe a Thursday before the Sunday show, and everybody who heard it talks about how horrible this rehearsal was, that the script just wasn’t working. The performances weren’t there, they didn’t have the sound effects and the music and everything like that. It just wasn’t believable. And that’s the moment when Orson Welles, who again is the radio show, is in trouble, realizes he needs to bring all his talents to bear on the show. But he only comes into it on the day. So it’s the night before Halloween, a Sunday night. A lot of people had the expectation that it was going to be a quiet night. But again, because of the news that had been coming out of Europe, there is a growing and definite sense that some sort of conflict is inevitable. Anybody could have been frightened under the right conditions. And so back in those days when radios had tubes, it had to warm up, so you switch on the dial, and it takes a while for the sound to come in. So if you turn on, write It again, you could easily miss the opening announcements of this show. Instead come in on a weather report or music.

00:08:07
Speaker 4: Ladies and Gentlemen, following on the news given an Our bullet in a moment ago, the Government Meteorological Bureau has requested the large observatories of the country to keep an astronomical watch on any further disturbances occurring on the planet Mars. Due to the unusual nature of this occurrence, we have arranged an interview with a note of astronomer, Professor Pearson, who will give us his views on this event. In a few moments, we will take you to the Princeton Observatory at Princeton, New Jersey. We return you until then to the music of Ramon Rocchello and His Orbits.

00:08:37
Speaker 3: Much of the first part of the show is fictitious musical program. This sort of music that was very common on the airways at that time, and that people wanted to listen to. On Monday night they did chores or did their homework or whatever, being interrupted by these reports. But what’s going on on Mars then in Jersey, and so a lot of people either they turned the radio on or they spun the dial, and that’s what they came into. This introduces a problem.

00:09:02
Speaker 5: Ladies and gentlemen, I should read you a wire. “A fess Appearson from Doctor Gray of the Natural History Museum, New York. Quote: 9:15 PM, Eastern Standard Times. Seismograth registered shock of almost earthquake intensity occurring within a radius of twenty miles of printing. Please investigate. Signed Lloyd Gray, Chief of Astronomical Divisions.” Unquote. Fess A.

00:09:23
Speaker 3: Pearson.

00:09:23
Speaker 5: But this occurrence possibly has something to do with the disturvices observed on the planet Mars.

00:09:29
Speaker 1: And you’ve been listening to A. Brad Schwartz, author of Broadcast Hysteria, telling the story of Orson Welles’s War of the Worlds. And what a stunt Orson Welles performed for ratings! And not just a stunt, but pure and great radio theater. Radio was the mass media. When we come back, more of the story of Orson Welles’s War of the Worlds here on Our American Stories. Can we continue with Our American Stories, and author A. Brad Schwartz telling the story of The War of the Worlds. When we last left off, Welles’ staff had taken a well-known but dated and cheesy sci-fi book about invading aliens, written by another Welles in response to British imperialism, and modernized it to feed into American anxieties about the crisis in Europe. The process took less than a week. Let’s return to the story.

00:10:41
Speaker 3: Back in those days, virtually everything that aired on the major radio network set me. Seeing CBS aired live, George Bergs a grazy. All the reasons for that had to do with the networks’ basically proving that they could do things that smaller stations couldn’t do. But that conditioned people to think that whatever you’re hearing is happening right now. This introduces a problem for news broadcasting. Right? When if the president is giving a speech and you’re not airing it as it’s airing, you can’t play a recording of it according to network policy. So, how do you get around that? You would have an actor in a studio performing an impression of the president, perhaps saying things that the president never actually said. And this was allowable because the performance is live. Even though it’s a fakery, fakery and allegiance to the truth is what they called it. This was an accepted practice. This is something that was actually more popular in some ways than a lot of news. And this is one of Orson Welles’s first radio jobs, actually. So Orson Welles, having had that professional experience, takes a lot of those techniques and the impressions of FDR. Frank Reddick, who plays the radio reporter who is there when the Martians space crap opens up to the Hindenburg broadcast over and over again, and basically does an impression of it. Yeah, I ambic, guys, it’s still, and the spoken of plays out, and they pla rising to the ground, not quite to the boy plans that all the humanited, all the plans so, and the Hindenburg itt bursting into flames, and wore the world that turning into flame when the heat ray goes off. And this is not eletant the intention. But they’re shuffling how dangerous this practice was, that how easy it is to make something that does not real sound real. They were using every trick in the book, and they succeeded too well. We were very impressionable at that age because of…

00:12:38
Speaker 7: Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon, and that really made a big impression on us. One fell in particular, who owned a store, took the money from his cash register and loaded his car up with food and took off for the mountains and left his wife and children at home.

00:12:59
Speaker 8: Here’s A.T.&T. telephone operators from the 1930s, courtesy of the A.T.&T. Archives, describing what happened the night War of the Worlds aired.

00:13:09
Speaker 3: Every light on that board lit.

00:13:12
Speaker 5: Now, that board was, I would say, almost a half-block long.

00:13:16
Speaker 3: People believed it. And I think of the ones who were begging us to get connections to their families, to their husbands before the world came to an end, so they could just tell them they loved them.

00:13:28
Speaker 9: And, and told me that people were jumping out of the windows, and they were going to kill their families before the Martians could get them.

00:13:35
Speaker 8: Some people said, “What were they?”

00:13:36
Speaker 7: “Did I have a chance to see them?”

00:13:38
Speaker 4: “What were they like?”

00:13:40
Speaker 8: A few policemen trickle, then, then a few more, and soon the room was full of policemen, and a massive struggle was going on between the police page-boys and CBS executives who were trying to prevent the cops from busting in and stopping the show.

00:13:53
Speaker 1: It was a show to witness.

00:13:56
Speaker 8: The following hours were a nightmare.

00:13:58
Speaker 1: The building was.

00:13:59
Speaker 8: Suddenly, full of people in dark blue uniforms, hustled out of the studio. We were locked in a small office on another floor. Here we sat in Communicato. Well, network employees were busy collecting, destroying, or locking up all scripts and records of the broadcast.

00:14:14
Speaker 2: This is us and Welles, ladies and gentlemen, out of character to assure you that The War of the Worlds has no further significance. But as the holiday offering, it was intended to be.

00:14:27
Speaker 8: The haggard Welles set alone and despondent. “I’m through,” he lamented, “washed up.” I didn’t bother to reply to this highly inaccurate self-appraisal.

00:14:36
Speaker 2: We annihilated the world before your very ears and utterly destroyed the CBS. You will be relieved, I hope, to learn that we didn’t mean it and that both institutions are still open for business.

00:14:48
Speaker 3: There were several letters that Ersenwall’s received that are written that night.

00:14:53
Speaker 8: “Dear Sirs, I heard your broadcast of Force in Wells Mercury Theater and practically had hysterics. Everybody absolutely wild. They were tearing frantically about in tearing up beds and dressers, and practically crazy. If you know what’s wise, you better not have programs like this in the future.”

00:15:09
Speaker 10: “Which is the Columbia Broadcasting Company, sponsors of War of Worlds? It is outrageous to broadcast such plays as was presented by the Mercury Theaters Sunday Night. Orson Welles, little white-haired old man of Broadway, I would suggest you enter some accredited college or university, or possibly a prep.”

00:15:27
Speaker 8: “School, and acquire a reasonable amount of education. Are you a drug addict, a gut or drunk? Or are you of thanks to you that half a dozen or more nearly passed out or died because of your silly program? You might as well dig a hole and crawl in it. Stay there too, and we mean you.”

00:15:46
Speaker 3: Most of them are written not in response to the broadcast itself. Relatively few people heard the show then. It was only when they opened their newspapers the next day and they saw these headlines: “War drama sends listeners in panic, thinking Marsihan invasion is back.” It was only then that, you know, a lot of people were frightened, not by the Martian invasion, but by the idea that so many Americans could be deceived.

00:16:12
Speaker 8: Finally, the press was a loose on us, rievening for horror. “How many deaths have we heard of?” “Implying that we knew of thousands?” “What did we know of the fatal stampede in a Jersey hall, implying that it was one of many? What traffic deaths?” “The ditches must be chalked full of corpses, the suicides?” “Haven’t you heard about the one on Riverside Drive?”

00:16:34
Speaker 9: John Houseman, you are aware of terror at the time you were giving this role where you were, the terror was going on to automation.

00:16:41
Speaker 2: Oh, no, of course.

00:16:42
Speaker 6: You know.

00:16:43
Speaker 9: We did Dracula, and it seemed to me, during Dracula, I had high hopes that people would react as they do in a movie of that kind, and I don’t know that they did particularly, and so I’ve given up. One doesn’t believe in the radio audience, but you don’t know that, whether they’re listening or not. You have no idea how many people are listening to what they’re thinking.

00:17:01
Speaker 2: I had every hope that the people would be excited as they would be at a melodrama.

00:17:07
Speaker 3: Dramatized news goes out of fashion very quickly after this.

00:17:10
Speaker 5: Do you always think, Mister Wills, that you might have taken unfair advantage of the public and using a method as a convand for authentic news?

00:17:18
Speaker 9: I don’t believe that I have, since it is not a method original with me.

00:17:23
Speaker 10: It is used by many radio programs.

00:17:26
Speaker 3: It’s very important to make clear that even though Welles, many years after the fact, would sort of suggest or claim that…