have tried to suggest, on how well it expresses deeper cultural anxieties. In excerpts Cantril presents from his interviews it is clear what the primary anxiety was in his day. Another year would pass before Britain went to war with Germany, and more than three years before the United States finally joined the Allies in World War II. But by late 1939 Hitler and Mussolini were already well on their way to conquering Europe, and less than two weeks after the “War of the Worlds” broadcast Nazi mobs would destroy Jewish synagogues, homes, and shops in what came to be known as Kristallnacht.
Many Americans were having trouble suppressing their fears of war and at the same time their sense of culpability as their nation declined to intervene while millions of innocent people fell prey to the barbarous Nazi and fascist regimes. For a substantial number of listeners “War of the Worlds” gave expression to those bridled feelings. Some actually rewrote the script in their minds as they listened to the broadcast. In place of martians they substituted human enemies. “I knew it
was some Germans trying to gas us all. When the announcer kept calling them people from Mars I just thought he was ignorant and didn’t know that Hitler had sent them all,” one person recalled in an interview in Cantril’s study. Said another, “I felt it might be the Japanese—they are so crafty.” 6
Such responses were not the norm, of course. Most listeners envisioned the invaders pretty much as Welles and company described them. Yet this didn’t stop some of them from making revealing connections to real dangers. “I worry terribly about the future of the Jews. Nothing else bothers me as much. I thought this might be another attempt to harm them,” one person said. Reported another: “I was looking forward with some pleasure to the destruction of the entire human race and the end of the world. If we have fascist domination of the world, there is no purpose in living anyway.” 7
Flash forward to the 1980s and 1990s and it is not foreign fascists we have to put out of our minds in order to fall asleep at night, even if we do fantasize about hostile forces doing us great harm. (Witness the immediate presumption after the Oklahoma City bombing and the crash of TWA Flight 800 that Middle Eastern terrorists were to blame.) Mostly our fears are domestic, and so are the eerie invaders who populate them—killer kids, men of color, monster moms. The stories told about them are, like “War of the Worlds,” oblique expressions of concern about problems that Americans know to be pernicious but have not taken decisive action to quash—problems such as hunger, dilapidated schools, gun proliferation, and deficient health care for much of the U.S. population.
Will it take an event comparable to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor to convince us that we must join together as a nation and tackle these problems? At the start of the new century it ought to be considerably easier for us to muster our collective will and take decisive action than it was for our own parents and grandparents six decades earlier. This time we do not have to put our own lives or those of our children at risk on battlefields halfway around the globe.
We do have to finance and organize a collective effort, which is never a simple matter, but compared with the wholesale reorientation of the
U.S. economy and government during World War II, the challenge is not overwhelming. Fear mongers have knocked the optimism out of us by stuffing us full of negative presumptions about our fellow citizens and social institutions. But the United States is a wealthy nation. We have the resources to feed, house, educate, insure, and disarm our communities if we resolve to do so.
There should be no mystery about where much of the money and labor can be found—in the culture of fear itself. We waste tens of billions of dollars and person-hours every year on largely mythical hazards like road
Many Americans were having trouble suppressing their fears of war and at the same time their sense of culpability as their nation declined to intervene while millions of innocent people fell prey to the barbarous Nazi and fascist regimes. For a substantial number of listeners “War of the Worlds” gave expression to those bridled feelings. Some actually rewrote the script in their minds as they listened to the broadcast. In place of martians they substituted human enemies. “I knew it
was some Germans trying to gas us all. When the announcer kept calling them people from Mars I just thought he was ignorant and didn’t know that Hitler had sent them all,” one person recalled in an interview in Cantril’s study. Said another, “I felt it might be the Japanese—they are so crafty.” 6
Such responses were not the norm, of course. Most listeners envisioned the invaders pretty much as Welles and company described them. Yet this didn’t stop some of them from making revealing connections to real dangers. “I worry terribly about the future of the Jews. Nothing else bothers me as much. I thought this might be another attempt to harm them,” one person said. Reported another: “I was looking forward with some pleasure to the destruction of the entire human race and the end of the world. If we have fascist domination of the world, there is no purpose in living anyway.” 7
Flash forward to the 1980s and 1990s and it is not foreign fascists we have to put out of our minds in order to fall asleep at night, even if we do fantasize about hostile forces doing us great harm. (Witness the immediate presumption after the Oklahoma City bombing and the crash of TWA Flight 800 that Middle Eastern terrorists were to blame.) Mostly our fears are domestic, and so are the eerie invaders who populate them—killer kids, men of color, monster moms. The stories told about them are, like “War of the Worlds,” oblique expressions of concern about problems that Americans know to be pernicious but have not taken decisive action to quash—problems such as hunger, dilapidated schools, gun proliferation, and deficient health care for much of the U.S. population.
Will it take an event comparable to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor to convince us that we must join together as a nation and tackle these problems? At the start of the new century it ought to be considerably easier for us to muster our collective will and take decisive action than it was for our own parents and grandparents six decades earlier. This time we do not have to put our own lives or those of our children at risk on battlefields halfway around the globe.
We do have to finance and organize a collective effort, which is never a simple matter, but compared with the wholesale reorientation of the
U.S. economy and government during World War II, the challenge is not overwhelming. Fear mongers have knocked the optimism out of us by stuffing us full of negative presumptions about our fellow citizens and social institutions. But the United States is a wealthy nation. We have the resources to feed, house, educate, insure, and disarm our communities if we resolve to do so.
There should be no mystery about where much of the money and labor can be found—in the culture of fear itself. We waste tens of billions of dollars and person-hours every year on largely mythical hazards like road
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