UNITED STATES—Bernie regretted that he could not convince his Viennese Uncle to take a ship to New York, and it was a regret that Bernie, perceived as the bloodless, reptilian Svengali, who played the American consumer like a toy piano, carried that regret to the end of his days. How he tried to get Uncle to flee Europe! Instead, Uncle Sigmund shuffled off his mortal coil in London, under the Germans’ blitzkrieg.
New York would’ve been good for his book sales, for sure, and he would’ve reaped celebrity bigtime. Most of all, he regretted that his Uncle Sigmund Freud, whose very name had opened so many professional doors for him in the course of becoming the “Father of Public Relations” and now segueing to the Grandfather of the field he helped invent, he would’ve brought fresh eyes to what author, Graydon Miller, would term ‘la condition américaine’ when he was awarded the Prix Goncourt in France.
And as if to disprove Miller’s ingrained belief that one success takes away from another, and he even went to a hypnotist, to indoctrinate him with the notion that success is endlessly duplicable, and the recording that he listened to night after night before going to sleep, did not produce the desired result. But who’s to say that it did not, by the same token.
Finally, within six months of the Goncourt came the Cervantes, in Spain. The cloud Miller was on, in so many ways he would remain on ever after, and it did not abandon him till the time he had to face that pesky firing squad.
The actual inspiration for Bernie’s psychological warfare was Orson Welles’ Halloween prank. Bernard Lukasey had heard that broadcast, Devil that he was. The panic sowed by Welles made War of the Worlds, the infamous radio version of H.G. Wells’ novel. It’s the narrative widely reprinted in academic textbooks and popular histories and has a grip on the imagination. With actors dramatizing the reaction of frightened audience members reinforces the notion that naïve Americans were terrorized by their radios back in 1938.
Through scrupulously simulated new reports listeners were told of meteor falling new Grover’s Mill, New Jersey, and 1000 people had been killed. Wait, it wasn’t a meteor but a metallic sphere, and little green men came out of a hatch. . . The United States experienced a kind of mass hysteria never seen, flurry of phone calls, switchboards lit up, “How many people have died? Is it safe to go outside?”
By the time Japanese warplanes bombed Pearl Harbor two years later, the reaction was much more subdued.
There’s only one problem, the panic really was like well-behaved children, seen but never heard. The supposed panic was so tiny as to be practically immeasurable on the night of the broadcast. Despite repeated assertions to the contrary in the history books and documentaries, almost nobody was fooled by Welles’ broadcast. Kenneth Miller, Graydon’s dad, and his family were taken in by neighbors.
“Hey, did you hear what’s on the radio?” How did the story of panicked listeners begin? Blame America’s newspapers. Radio had siphoned off advertising revenue from print during the Depression, badly damaging the newspaper industry. And the Washington D.C. paper’s motto, albeit a sobering one, is: Democracy dies in darkness.
So, the papers seized the opportunity presented by Welles’ program to discredit radio as a source of news. The newspaper industry sensationalized the panic to prove to advertisers, and regulators, that radio management was irresponsible and not to be trusted. In an editorial titled “Terror by Radio,” the New York paper reproached “radio officials” for approving the interweaving of “blood-curdling fiction” with news flashes “offered in exactly the manner that real news would have been given.” Warned Editor and Publisher, the newspaper industry’s trade journal, “The nation as a whole continues to face the danger of incomplete, misunderstood news over a medium which has yet to prove… that it is competent to perform the news job.”
To be continued…
