1904 - On opening day, 100,000 people pay a nickel for a ride on the New York Subway. It traveled 9 miles through 28 stations. Currently, there are 36 lines and 472 stations.
1919 - Congress passes the Volstead Act, enforcing the 18th Amendment and ushering in the Prohibition era. It would fail to prevent large-scale distribution of alcoholic beverages and would be repealed 14 years later. Organized crime flourished during this time.
1938 - Orson Welles broadcast his famous “The War of the Worlds” across national radio. The fictional but realistic dramatization had thousands of people calling the police believing martians were actually invading New Jersey.
1983 - The U.S. invades the Caribbean country of Granada to protect 1,000 American medical students from the Marxist regime. The regime was overthrown in less than two weeks.
1984 - A 14-month old girl, “Baby Fae”, received a baboon heart transplant to replace her defective heart. She survived a record 20 days. Other similar cases did not survive more than 4 days.
“The War of the Worlds” Broadcast and Pandemonium
When Americans genuinely thought they were being invaded by aliens.
On October 30, 1938, 23-year-old Orson Welles directed 10 actors and a 27-piece orchestra for a fictional news radio broadcast of Martians invading New England. Americans tuned into the primetime broadcast dramatizing H.G. Wells’ science-fiction novel, “The War of the Worlds.” However, most listeners were tuning in late and had missed Welles’ introduction, disclaimer and presentation of the cast members. Instead, they were thrust into the middle of an hour-long drama that left thousands believing that the country was under attack.
For the next hour, fictional reporters detailed an extraterrestrial army of squid-like figures that killed thousands of earthlings with heat rays and black clouds of poison gas as they steamrolled into New York City. Welles and the rest of the cast impersonated astronomers, state militia officials and even the Secretary of the Interior, who sounded like President Franklin D. Roosevelt.
Thousands of listeners besieged police departments and newspapers with phone calls about the event. Even some national guardsmen in New Jersey were calling to ask where they should report for duty. A swarm of police showed up at CBS asking for answers. Welles and the cast snuck out the rear door to bypass the crowd of reporters outside the studio. Welles was aware of the sensation but not the extent. It wasn’t until a few hours later he saw the lighted bulletin at Time Square scrolling, “ORSON WELLES CAUSES PANIC”, did he realize what he had instigated.
Fear and anxiety was already in the air during this time. Many regularly tuned into the radio for updated news on the war in Europe. Welles’ fictional broadcast had a similar vibe to the usual news reports coming in from Europe and led people to believe it was real. However, the panic was not as widespread as newspapers later stated. During this time, newspapers considered radio as its rival. They saw this as a chance to show how harmful radio can be and exaggerated the panic as mass hysteria. It has since been reported that maybe a third of the listeners actually believed the broadcast to be true. It wasn’t a national crisis like newspapers were making it out to be.
Decades later, Orson Welles admitted, “The kind of response was merrily anticipated by us all. The size of it, of course, was flabbergasting.”
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