Said that is kind of a valid peemack. A valid point. You only have this one example. Literally thats all i could find any spent weeks combing through the records and digging in looking and those with aa little examples that were cited that were written down. Who knows what was really going on. Okay. Good evening. Ii enjoyed the excerpt. One of the things that jumped out at me was the officer who said to paul, some of these guys or whatever, these guys are never going to like you because you are too proud of being black. That really jumped out at me. When you think about the fire department, here with the fire department, one of the things you care about is the brotherhood, about how tight the guys are and how offduty the guys are hanging out. You know, it kind of makes sense. You know, it kind of makes sense. If you are going into a dangerous situation that that could create a bond. What could you say about the brotherhood despite you being a proud member and someone who represents this lawsuit whichlawsuit which is kind of hated onthejob . In terms of brotherhood, i have not felt much brotherhood on this job. Within my specific company i do feel brotherhood. In terms ofin terms of the lawsuit, how people respond, it has been overwhelmingly negative. It is rare that a white firefighter will Say Something to me that is supportive of the fight we raise. Rare to being almost nonexistent. This was done over the objections of not only the mayor but the commissioners, the leaders of the department, department,department, our union, and the rankandfile white firefighters. I am so glad that this book has been written. Exciting and riveting. [applause] this can be used as a blueprint. And it can show what a grassroots effort can accomplish by using the power we have at hand. I cannot imagine a better ending than that one. One more. Paul and mike have been at the spirit of this fight for quite a bit of time. This test was never validated. Not only was it not validated, the amount of money that went out of the city to the suburbs, Rockland County and here and theyre that the city desperately needed was unconscionable. We cant go to Rockland County and become firefighters. We can even go to long island. Those types of things are the reason why we felt as black people that our sons and daughters needed an opportunity to have jobs. Our children should have an opportunity to benefit from the good paying jobs. Its a shame that the powers that be feel it is necessary to stop something that they know is right. [applause] i think going back to the 9 11 comment and making the society look vilified, the firefighters should be outraged that they came on with the test i was not validated. I dont understand why they mad. The city did not do you justice by attest that you took. Most of the tests. It wasnt. Yeah. The one that came from the lawsuit technically came on the right way. We all came on. The test that was validated and went through the proper channels. Even though we are. We approve and it. That is just technically the truth. Their stated goal was that they were advocating for black people to get these jobs. The biggest benefactors of their work is going to be the white firefighters because they by far take the test in the biggest numbers will you look at the people who were the most disenfranchised it was firefighters coming out in larger groups and a small a small percentage of getting on through test they really have no meaning. You know he got a 92. No luck. How many folks, just raise your hand formerly are currently in the fire department, you or your family and been affected in terms of their efforts. A lot of folks. I think maybe a show of hands gives you an idea. Thank you for being here. If we could just have a round of applause. [applause] and a round of applause for a tremendous panelists. Appmack so they will be appear to talk to you, to sign books. The folks are up there obviously. Thank you theyre obviously. Thank you for coming. Have a beautiful night. [inaudible conversations] book tv in primetime continues. Coming up next, the new book broadcast hysteria. It examines the real reaction to the 1938 broadcast. This is one hour. Tonight, we are happy to have a guest, Brad Schwartz come here to discuss his new book, broadcast hysteria. Schwartz attended the university of michigan in ann arbor where he earned his bachelors degree in history and arts and cultures in 2012. He cowrote an episode of the pbs series American Experience on the war of the worlds broadcast. Broadcast hysteria is getting wonderful reviews broadcast hysteria has been called in impeccable account of the finest radio show in history from a fascinating biography of orson welles and a vital lesson about the responsibility of the media. Please welcome brad to the podium. [applause] thank you for that wonderful introduction. Thank you for having me. Its wonderful to be here and especially with all of you for coming. I am blown away by the turnout. I would like to particularly thank someone in the audience who is a Loyal Customer and as you heard, i am from michigan and its well worth the time and the effort to come here as karen has proven. I would not be here without her. So she is going to deserve a round of applause. [applause] this has been a remarkable year for those of us who care about orson welles. Earlier this month, may 6, marks the 100th anniversary of his birth, he was born may 6, 1915, in kenosha, wisconsin. There have been celebrations throughout the United States and around the world and i have had the privilege of attending several. What has come out of all of these discussions and these wonderful celebrations and tributes that people have done so remarkably ahead of his time he was come coming and particularly how he works in multiple media. This is something that we tend to associate with the present day, the idea that you can be in television and you can do things on the internet. But from the very beginning he distinguished himself by having a career in theater and film, radio and television, he did some remarkable things in television. He did everything. And he broke new ground in every field that he tried his hand out. I always knew of orson welles first and foremost as a radio artists. I grew up listening to a lot of oldtime radio shows. My parents would give me these cassettes of shows from the 1930s and 50s to listen to. And i knew of him as a radio star as the voice of the shadow, is the star of the hitchhiker and i would recommend it to everyone. And of course, as the man behind the infamous war of the worlds broadcast analog. [inaudible] and we are very much on the move. There had been a recent diplomatic crisis involving czechoslovakia and americans have gotten used to hearing alarming news bulletins of the sense that we could go to war with the nazis at any moment. And so it was this classic novel that was published in 1898 and it was 40 years old at the time. He restructured it and he took it from its original setting in england and moved it to the east coast and the united state and they have these kinds of announcements that they had gotten used to hearing during the diplomatic crisis. And there are countless books with the subjects and they did so so closely that there was a mass panic. People believe whatever they heard in 1938, this is a new technology. They had come to trust it. So when the radio said that the martians were invading, they mustve been invaded. So they jumped in their cars and they fled to the hills when they wrapped towels around their faces and all these other bizarre behaviors. And it is a remarkable demonstration of the power of the media and the gullibility and that is the story. And then when i was a student at the university of michigan, my junior year, i was studying history and film and one day i was taking a film class and there were fragments discovered of the unpublished doubter fee and the librarian made that discovery. So we both had a remarkable vulnerability there. So that day in the fall 2010 they gave a presentation about all the resources in the Library Resources that they had to offer students. Was this large collection of these personal papers that had only recently come to the university of michigan. And he started describing it and he said that we have this thing that he did in the 40s. Rita hayworth. And we have all of these letters that people wrote about the broadcast that nobody had gone through in 70 years and i later learned that from how this was kept in this garage and that is where it had been until his son eventually became a part of this. And so i knew from my childhood that instantly the lightbulb went off in my mind and i immediately started imagining what kind of stories with him there, and i thought wow, i had what i needed to do and i have this wonderful archival collection in my backyard. One day i went up to the library and started going through them, flipping through the letters, which were arranged by the state. And i pulled out this initiative and i started flipping through them. And we didnt want to be censored, and it is probably eight or 9 00 oclock from someone who had been upset about that. And there was water that had yet to be told and i discovered that just about everything that we think that we know about war of the worlds comes from the same basic sources. You had really been a lot of Research Done because there were not documents or people didnt think there were documents that could be used to do that research. R here i had about 1400 personal stories that allowed me to reconstruct the broadcast in 1938. With another 600 or so letters of the fcc which are now in the National Archives. I was able to reconstruct, talkn about the hysteria that the broadcast brought about and put it in context. Also to talk about the other issues it raised. Raised o the face started diving into the letters, they raised these concerns, these fears about power of the media and what it would do to the american way of government as they understood what it. Had all it struck me that what they were saying had all sorts of relevant to the modern day. You could and so replace radio with the word internet or social media and the point they were making was just as valid now as it wast. Then. So lets get into that. H d as i said orson welles, at the time he was 23 years old isto mainly known in the new yorke area as a theater director. He had done a few innovative and controversial, like an allblace adaptation of mick deathmcbeth. S he had also done a story done in italy and that was a 2000yearold event that seemed like it was ripped from theiswi headline. That was his style at the time and that is what he did with worldviews. These successes lead to give him a radio series beginning in the summer of 1938. The style of the show was that he would select a work of literature to adapt and bring it to fresh life as he did on the stage. There were supposed to be Public Domain type of adventure stories , kind of cheap and fun for the whole family. In those days, because there were no defensive, how to get a sense of how to read the mass audience, they didnt have Ratings Technology as we did today,st they couldnt judge too closely who is listening to what and what the audience wanted to hear. They would oftentimes offer a program and have these things called standing shows which are shows that did not have a sponsor or sell advertising. The network would pay fore program outofpocket. At the time the federal Communications Commission through the communications actte e 1934 required the broadcasters act was a necessity. Mean the Communications Commission ih the 30s interpreted that to mean broadcasters needed to do shows that were assisting educational and popular entertainment that advertises wanted. On one hand, realizing you hadeo advertising tenet time and on the other hand trying to setbasl aside the requirement these on sponsored shows basically gives advertising time to someone like orson welles, or others who were famous at that time and say do whatever what you want at that time. So in the fall of 1938 he had done dracula, treasure island, caesar, all sorts of literaturet he did it in a style that came to be known and the title of the show in this firstperson singular narrative style. Renetc he believed that radio was not you ly the dramatic form but a narrative form. The idea that you are telling the story not putting on a play. Use narrators and storytellers to very openly to draw the audience in. It was revolutionary at the time and inspired other radio seriess after the show went on for 17 weeks, and the fall of 1938 he was growing tired, he wasthin incredibly creative as we all know, he hated to repeat himself. He wanteid to do new things and trying to things. He had an idea to do a show it seem like a crisis was happening , and the Current Events at the time he saw how powerful broadcasts were. He had this idea but didnt have a book to apply it to. That was the point of the show was to adapt literature so he was kind of stuck. He talked it it over with his producer and his associate director on the show, eventually one suggested a novel that welles has not read. N he was directing at the play thn timeout stage play, the stage production fall season. He was busy with that in thei play, it was not turning outwo very well and it was likely going to flop. Everybody knew it, he did have all this time to do his weekly radio series so he turned it over to a writer named howard koch. Howard koch would go on to write casablanca and other classic s films. In all likelihood he was probably the first person in welles company to read the war of the world and he hated it. He thought it was dated and silly, this idea of a martian invasion was not taken very seriously by that sort of adult reading public at the time. Science fiction in in the 1930s was for children, comic strip and buck rogers tales and things like that. Koch wanted a differentwl assignment but they couldnt get welles on the phone because he had been rehearsing a play for 36 hours straight with no sleep, which he did often. D so with no other options koch buckle down and took welles instruction and did the show, this adaptation of the world war set in america in one year in the future 1939. The way the shows typically worked was paul stir stewarts te would director rehearsal of the show and it would be recorded dt for welles to listen to later, he didnt want to read the script. He wanted to see how the sound worked and it would wait up until the last minute and then go on the air with typically a perfect show. He always did his best work atas the edge of collapse. At the end of his career he came right to the edge of his Production Company was going to fail, the government padlocked the theater and wasnt going to the show, his radio broadcast always came down to the wire. Paul stewart record it a rehearsal of howard kochs script for the war of the world and on the thursday before the show welles had a similarious reaction, he thought thought it was boring. He thought it was silly. Re nobody would like it at all. He feared people would turn the dial. From that moment on, on sunday morning rehearsals he started doing all these things to make the show sound more realistic and more frightening. With the only intention, im speculating, of trying to make the show seem credible or seem interesting, not to frighten anyone out of their wits. Welles drew on a kind of fake i news style that was founded several shows both news and entertainment shows in the 1930s. He had worked with a play right that were similar in tone to news broadcasts, he had done a famous show called the march of time which was the most popular news program on the air in the 1930s but it wasnt really a news program. What they did on the march of time was stage these dramatic reenactments of new stories and instead of having a recording of Franklin Delano roosevelt they would hire an actor to pretendes to be facf roosevelt and say things that roosevelt never really said. Of t the impersonations were so good of those shows were well produced that people didnt really oftentimes know that they werent listening to the real roosevelt or the real hitler, or the real newsmaker of the day. Welles appeared on the shows many times and thats when he got his big break into radio. As hes trying to salvage the war of the world he starts h drawing on these things. Wh its a speech in the broadcast where the secretary of war who comes on and gives a speech onal how the combined forces of the government are going to protectl the American People and all that. That had been cut, welles put it back in, he can say it was the president because it would be against Network Policy but he had the actor who had been ons the march at times do this impression of franklin roosevelt. It was a dead on impression. To add to that fake news realistic flavor to the show, with hat the intent of convincing people. He did these things and in various production at the time e no one had put them all together, it goes on the air, eight pm p. M. Eastern timei october 30, 1938. The show was up against popular nbc network which had a manypl ventriloquist act on the radio. So not too many people were listening to or orson welles. I think he had like only form five listeners that night. The show starts off slowly but these musical broadcasts, ta supposedly from a hotel in newer york city. That was interrupted by reports of first gas explosion on mars and then mars takes back land ii new jersey and then martians they think their meteors but martians come out with these tripod fighting machines that roam around the countryside and eventually conquer new york city. So people who heardl the broadcast, it came to it in various ways. Theres a common myth that everybody who is listening to it started spinnina their dials when the musical performance came on and found war of the worlds and thats seat caused the hysteria. Ro thats not what happened. Oftentimes people maybe they had it into cbs and they happen to e come on in the middle of the show, they were looking for a program but it seems by mostthya people were frightened by the broadcasts, they were just looking for some music or something relaxing to listen to on a sunday night. Thats what they thought they had found. We dont really now listen to radio very closely, its treated as background noise, somethingt that is on. Annome so its easy to miss these kind of announcements, these cues that make it very clear in thecr show that things are proceeding more quickly than they would in real life. Famously, the martians take from not mars and conquer the United States within 40 minutes of the show. Which is impossible but if you not listening closely, and often time people listen to the radio and groups in 1938. We have. We have the image of family sitting around the radio listening as a group. Ot if youre listening to these reports and talking and trying to figure out what is going on youre not listening to every word and that this is actually not happening. So some fraction of his audience perhaps as many as a milliont ml although we dont know with any degree of certainty how many believe the broadcasts to be true but some did get caught up in it. Many were momentarily frightenee , realized with the martians made the first appearance for example that something wasnt quite right. Depending on when you tuned inta it was more or less easy to get swept up in. These martians were not really martians but they were germans and there was a Natural Disaster that seems to have been at what frighten most people. That of itself, tuning in late and missing the opening announcements and getting caught up in it, that was typically not sufficient to some people running off into the hills. The the standard story suggest thatt yo people believe whatever they heard on the radio in the 1930s and thats when the martianshapd were coming that means you have to flee. Hats not really what happened. What appears to be the case andt what makes it relevant to the 21st century is that this fake news essentially went viral. It appears to be the first viral media event in history. Typically, i started going through the letters i noticed as particularly high number of hysteria from College Campuses. I i started wondering why that is. I realize from what people described in the letters wasll that it was often one or two people who would tune in late and mistaking it for a real news cast and would rush to tell their friends. If you are living in a dorm or in a dense neighborhood, that dynamic played out in scattered areas all over the country. It wasnt so much the broadcast itself, but this desire as we have as human beings to when we hear news to share, experienceto it with other people. There is a quote from one of the letters that one woman says, i couldnt stand to listen alone. Whenever we hear an alarming or momentous piece of news, we wans to experience it with other people. That is what led so many people down the wrong path. If a relative or friend calls you up and says i just heard this alarming thing on cbs, think its they dontin see the word martian, you areuny much more likely to believe whau youre hearing is true. Because he missed the note opening announcements, the unrealistic feed of whats going on and all you know is someoneee you know and trust is telling you that something horrible is happening in new jersey. On College Campuses in particular, you would get theses pockets of hysteria where there is feedback and suddenly everyone around you believed it. You believe it to any started getting these reports of bizarre behavior that i talked about which in some circumstances appears to have happen to people. People using towels as gas masks but these were isolated, scattered incidents. For the vast majority of americans at night, they had absolutely no idea that anything was going on. Unless you are in the center of it, you missed the whole thing entirely. Ntinue d the press did with the press always has done, and continues to do in the 21st century, which is they jump to conclusions. E oadc many times the people believe the broadcast to be true their first impulse is to pick up thet phone and call an Authority Like newspapers, radio stations, or police to see if this is true. Nowadays winthrop is mark phone and look at google. The closest you could do in 1938 was call up authority to verifyt what youre hearing. When the newspapers of begande getting bombarded with calls saying that people think a meteor landed in new jersey or c the german invasion, they geti the sense and they are at the center of all this hysteria,cted most of it is directed at them that this is a major, momentous event. Theyre getting news and frominh the ap newswire, these calls from frighten people, so they jump to the people that this rate conclusion that this radio show has created a mass panic. Those that were the headlines that were in the newspapers the next day. Ol the stories were all veryetails similar, they were were relying on the same reports, there are very few local details of panic. The stories, as i said most people have not experienced this hysteria firsthand, when they read about it the next day, they were terrified all over again. If hitler is on the march in germany, and they can see what these technologies can do with radio and film, they began to wonder could this happen in the United States. People tend to think separated from the world by a couple of oceans and the ideals that we are exceptional in some sense pi that we cannot be fooled into the same kinds of propaganda ane lies that had hit countries like germany and italy. Reading in the newspapers that s significant portion of the country had apparently fallen prey to the notion that aliens were invading the earth, and they had to flee made many people think maybe we are not as smart and as critical as we would like to think we are. This was a very terrifying notion in 1938. Some people, the vast majorityne of people who wrote letters wrote not in response to the broadcast itself but in response to the story of a nationwide panic. Sen on the one hand to prove they were not as gullible and as the story made them seem and also to defend wells against the prospect of censorship. With this oppose a demonstration of the radios power, the first question on manys minds mind is how do we control, who controls it. E al can a theater director from new york just go on the air and b scare people all over thehe country, are are there laws tobt prevent this . Should thereli be laws to prevet this . Should be the governments responsibility . So many people see and whatha totalitarian countries have done with the media jump to the conclusion that the matter what it would fall in the hands of our own government. So that letter writing was prompted by the fear of censorship to and to defend wells and defend the american commercial system of broandcasting. This had the impact an unintended consequence of pushing america and americane broadcasting further away from the Public Interest model that had to find it in the 13 broadcasting further away from the Public Interest model that had to find it in the 1930s. L i talked earlier about on sponsored sustaining shows whic. Flibn. D the golden age of r3 t someone like orson welles inventing this narrative with the firstperson singular which found its way into the shows and its a great area for experimentation and it was a Discussion Program and all of these were sponsored and kind of produced under this notion that even though broadcasting in the s the notion that even though broadcasting in the United States was a commercialast ju enterprise, and it had duties to the larger public, you had some responsibility to educate andoot inform. Because of war of the worlds and other controversies that occurred at thatsp time, people were suspicious of the fcc and were against the idea of a strong fcc to enforce this requirement. If they could weekend the fcc and these other shows began too disappear. Now that he was of famous it was sponsored by Campbell Soup withh commercials, others disappear and this wonderful culturaladgos moment of diversity in activity, this golden age of radio goes19t away relatively quickly, by the 1940s. Mispced a lot of it is the results of t this misplaced fear and anger o the fcc and of the American People as the story that crosse exaggerated by the war of the worlds. Its always good to associate these things with historical things in the present day, what cane we draw about where we are where were going. There are two great lessons for more of the worlds. First it is a great textbookn example of how viral events happen and how stories can get picked up, exaggerated and ou misdirected by the news media. On onetb hand, similar outbreaks of fear happen on social media all the time. Its important to understand that people were frightened by war of the worlds but the small scale of it to realize that similar things happen even todat on the internet. The larger lesson is understanding how the americans took the evidence of what they saw as mass panic andd about ho misinterpreted it until thew wrong story. There great lessons to beth learned about war of the worldsa about how we react to the mediai and the messages that come to ut the media, but thats not the story they told. In t they told an alarmist, scary story, and that happens even more often and things of the 21st century. Or its evil law or various other crisis, or scary story its alln about fear and not so much about information. And its not good for democracy are really anything. Min if the messages, through us throughhe the media and the mass media presents its a good lesson to have. We have a short video to show that we put together about the book and if i can get it to work here we will play it and i will be happy to take your questions, do we have audio . October 30, 1938 the night be for halloween and approaching world war were far scarier. Shortly after 8 00 p. M. Millions of radio listeners tuned in, announcers reported that martians landed outside and newe jersey, killing everything in theindr paths. New york city was just demolished. The broadcast was not in fact real it was an adaptation of the world and orson welles. Some of you may remember that maybe thousands of our listenero are panicking in the streets all over the country. The next day thousands ofoes listeners had taken the fake news to be true. They are putting i guess maxes and were in a mad rush. O they took the money from the Cash Register and we took off to the mountains with his left his wife and children at home. Were going to the hills to escape the martians, its not ao man. At least thats the story. Everything written about or by this words to sources of information and both are serious. Hologil newspaper articles about the panic ripped and are full of errors and exaggerations that,et in 1940s psychological study set out to explain why people believed itn the broadcast but a raises more questions thanknow v answers. Because these sources are problematic we know very little aboumtia what happened, this isi scholars this approach has its own blind spot. Warp the worldse was a momentous cultural cultural event and while the press may have exaggerated, this incident still has much to teach about the role of mathcads in our lives. Think about the voices of listeners themselves. Understand then ann arbo broadcast is to experience it through the eyes and ears of people who first heard is 75 years ago. As a student of the university of michigan, i learned the special Collections Library had information on orson welles life and career. Rs are e people have put their experiences down on paper. These letters are remarkablyeve detailed. They came from every corner of r the United States and they capture a full range response to the broadcast. Lrs another 600 letters about the broadcast went to the fcc and other agents are preserved at the National Archives in college park maryland. Nearly 2000 pieces of correspondence will help us savl the war of the world better than we have ever seen it. It will allow us to see the effect on the country like never before. First off the letters that provide very little evidence of behavior, that maden war of the worlds in american legend. But many people were deeply frightened by the show. It was the fear of the thatk awakened in me. I was crying so hard my sister woke up and wondered what i was was crying for. A few years ago i am mostto drowned but that compared to nothing what i went through last night. The conventional wisdom on war of the world was people in the 1930s believed whatever they heard on the radio no matter how farfetched. These. These narratives prove that was false. Pf something remarkable and distinctive modern happen. In 21st century First Century terms fake news went viral. He dozens of letters describe coasttocrying to spread word to relatives and neighbors, switchboards lit up coasttocoast, newspapers and radios were trying to figure out if it was fake or real. Someone came out, a rocket is coming to mars we are all going to be killed. Everyone everyone was going home together their loved ones. I called my friends and immediatd they suggested they leave their homes immediately and i was being ridiculed for ml actions. Most thought it was an earthlype invasion, the series that nighti had it power of rumor, that gota lost in a flood of alarming headlines by focusing on the most extreme example of panic and made us a much bigger and more intense than it actually si was. S these stories set up a secondary panic by false fears of the media power. Many wondered whether americans would be easily many played by the missed media, whether democracy can survive in a nation. The American People as a gullible and excitable is that, a smooth tongue to order could soon turn their head. Im not afraid of invasion for mars,. But they never knew. E we are prone to this media hysteria today. The newspapers in 1938, the 20 Century Press were quick tot launch, they grab their attention with headlines but ala too often theynd fail to talk about the story, and keep us on edge without keeping us informed. Understanding the fallouti teaches us to do our news media more critically and to avoid the stakes of our forebears. I barely had time to scratch the surface if you want the whole story check out my new book, orson welles, war of the world. Thanks for watching. [applause]. Need to let the credits play their. Im happy to answer any credits. You questions you may have. I thought were the worlds i thought your coverage of radio and fear of newspaper was more important. D that comment was about the war between newspapers ands rado in the 1930s. It had a lot of similarities which is why you raise the question between old and media new today. In the 1930s, radio broadcastial journalism typically the beginning is credited withl they supporting that