This Day in History: Panic on the Airwaves and Other Surprises

On October thirtieth, nineteen thirty-eight, millions of radio listeners across America believed they were hearing the end of the civilized world, while the twenty-three-year-old kid holding the microphone just thought he was putting on a good Halloween show. Yesterday we sat right here and talked about that first stutter of an internet transmission back on October twenty-ninth, nineteen sixty-nine, when two lonely letters traveled down a copper wire and changed how human beings talk forever. But twenty-four hours earlier on the calendar, long before computer screens or satellite dishes, a wooden Philco console in the living room showed everybody just how easily our wires get crossed.

From where we sit today, we smile because we know the Martians never set foot in Grover's Mill, New Jersey, and we know the newspapers spent the next morning puffing up the panic to make radio look dangerous. But the folks tuning their dials on that chilly Sunday evening did not have the benefit of our rear-view mirror. You see that freight train rumbling through the valley down yonder? When you hear the whistle from two miles off, you know exactly what track it's on, how fast it's rolling, and where it's bound. But back on that October night, listeners were caught completely off-guard by a sound they had never learned to read.

At eight in the evening Eastern time, Orson Welles stepped up to the microphone in Studio Twenty-Three at the Columbia Broadcasting Building in New York City. The broadcast started innocent as a Sunday hymn. An announcer introduced Ramon Raquello and his orchestra, playing a little dance piece called La Cumparsita. Folks were relaxing, tapping their feet by the hearth. Then, without warning, the music cut out. An announcer broke in with an urgent weather bulletin, followed by a report from an imaginary observatory claiming strange blue flares were shooting off the surface of Mars. Now, I know how that sounds. But hang on.

The brilliance of that broadcast was not the monsters. It was the rhythm. Welles had his actors pace the news flashes so they sounded ragged and unprepared, exactly like the real radio bulletins that had been interrupting dance music all summer long with scary updates about Hitler marching into Europe. An actor named Frank Readick stepped to the microphone playing a field reporter named Carl Phillips, standing in a farmer's field in New Jersey, describing a giant metal cylinder unscrewing from the mud. He gasped into the metal can, screamed about heat rays, and then the line went dead. Dead air. In nineteen thirty-eight, five seconds of dead air on network radio meant somebody had died or a transmitter had blown.

Folks panicked because the form felt authentic, even if the content was absolute bunk. The switchboard at the Trenton police department took over two thousand calls within two hours. People wrapped wet towels around their heads to keep out imaginary poison gas. When you look back at the actual police logs and the hospital records, the panic was nowhere near the nationwide stampede the front-page headlines claimed the next day. The newspapers were losing advertising dollars to radio hand over fist, so the print publishers leaped at the chance to brand the airwaves as reckless and unsafe. Welles had to stand before flashbulbs the next morning looking like a contrite schoolboy, swearing on his life he never meant any harm.

He was grinning inside his coat, mind you, because that hour of radio made him the most famous young man on planet Earth. That same calendar square carries the sweat of one of the wildest nights in sports history. On October thirtieth, nineteen seventy-four, in the humid midnight heat of Kinshasa, Zaire, sixty thousand people packed into the Stade du Vingt Mai to watch two men settle a question nobody thought was open. Muhammad Ali was thirty-two years old. The boxing writers and the bookmakers figured he was walking straight into an execution. Across the ring stood George Foreman, twenty-five years old, an undefeated freight train who hit with enough brute force to dent an oak barrel.

Foreman had knocked out Joe Frazier and Ken Norton in two rounds apiece—the only two men who had ever beaten Ali. The bell rang at four o'clock in the morning local time so the closed-circuit television feed could hit prime-time audiences back in the United States. From the opening bell, Ali did what looked to every expert in the arena like outright suicide. Instead of dancing around the ring on those famous dancing feet, he backed straight into the ropes. The ring ropes were slack because the African heat had stretched the hemp, and Ali draped himself over the cables, covering his chin with his red leather gloves.

He let Foreman unload hammer blows into his ribs and shoulders, round after round. Angelo Dundee, Ali's trainer, was shouting from the corner for him to get off the ropes, terrified his fighter was going to leave the stadium on a stretcher. But Ali was playing a game of patience that nobody in the building could see. Every time Foreman swung and hit arms or elbows, he spent a shovel-full of his own fuel. Ali would lean in during the clinches and whisper right in his ear: Is that all you got, George? By the seventh round, Foreman was breathing like a steam locomotive struggling up a switchback grade, his arms heavy as wet laundry.

Then came round eight. Ali slid off the ropes, threw a sharp left jab that snapped Foreman's head back, and followed it with a straight right hand flush to the jaw. Foreman tumbled like a felled hickory tree. Swear on my tackle box, that is the honest truth. The underdog who was supposed to be washed up reclaimed the undisputed heavyweight championship of the world seven years after it was stripped from him. When you examine the film now, the strategy looks obvious, even elegant. But in the middle of round three, with Foreman's leather whistling past Ali's ears, it looked like sheer madness. Go back even further on this date, all the way to October thirtieth, seventeen thirty-five, and you find a little boy being born in a saltbox house in Braintree, Massachusetts, who would spend his entire life standing on principle when the crowd wanted blood.

John Adams came into the world as a farmer's son with a sharp mind and an even sharper tongue. Long before he helped Thomas Jefferson draft the Declaration of Independence, and long before he served as the second President of the United States, Adams took a decision on October thirtieth in his thirty-fifth year that nearly ruined his career. In seventeen seventy, following the Boston Massacre, British soldiers stood accused of murder for shooting into a hostile mob on King Street. The city of Boston wanted those redcoats hanged from the nearest elm tree. Nobody would take their case. John Adams stepped up and agreed to defend Captain Thomas Preston and his men in court.

His cousin Samuel Adams warned him it was political suicide. His legal practice dried up overnight. Rocks came through his parlor windows. Adams did not love the British crown, but he loved the principle of an impartial courtroom more. He stood up before a jury of his angry neighbors and spoke words that echo down to this very porch: Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passions, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence. He won acquittals for six of the soldiers, and the other two were convicted only of manslaughter. If John Adams had blinked, if he had let the mob dictate the verdict to protect his own skin, the legal bedrock of the new republic might have been poured out of sand instead of granite.

You lay those three stories side by side, and you start to see the pivot point. History never travels down a straight stretch of high-iron track; it turns on the narrowest switch points imaginable. Take that radio broadcast in nineteen thirty-eight. If Welles had paused for a regular station identification every ten minutes, the entire illusion evaporates. If the CBS network executives had intervened when the script looked too real during rehearsals the night before, the show would have been forgotten by breakfast. Instead, a young artist pushed the envelope just an inch too far, and exposed how hungry the public was to believe the worst news they could imagine.

Take Kinshasa. If George Foreman had stepped back and refused to punch the ropes, if he had forced Ali into the center of the ring where his older legs would have failed him, Foreman might have ruled heavyweight boxing for another decade. The outcome was not written in the stars; it was decided by a fighter who understood human psychology better than his opponent understood physics. And if young John Adams had taken the easy road in Massachusetts, bowing to the shouting in the town square, the American revolution might have traded one brand of tyranny for another without ever learning how to protect the unpopular voice.

What looks inevitable in our history books was always balanced on a knife's edge while it was actually happening. Now, what does any of this mean for you and me, sitting out here listening to the crickets wake up along the creek bed? It means the things making the most noise around us right this minute are rarely the things that will matter ten years down the road. Every single generation gets spooked by its own version of Martians. We get hold of a new microphone, or a new screen, or an algorithm we don't fully understand yet, and we convince ourselves the sky is caving in. We see loud, overpowering forces in our daily lives—like George Foreman stalking around that ring—and we assume the giant is bound to win simply because he hits hard.

History shows us that the quiet virtues—patience on the ropes, stubborn loyalty to the facts, a steady hand when the crowd loses its head—are the things that actually hold the track in place. We spend so much time worrying about the monsters coming over the hill that we forget we have the power to look at the evidence, take a deep breath, and check the record for ourselves. Well. That is about the size of it for October thirtieth. The creek is running clear, the air has a good bite to it, and the world is still spinning round right on schedule.