Letters show audience panic, hysteria described by media could be earliest American example of “fake news”

The University of Michigan Library has digitized, transcribed and categorized more than 1,300 fan letters sent in response to the 1938 broadcast of Orson Welles’ “War of the Worlds.”

The entire collection of letters, part of the university’s Screen Arts Mavericks & Makers Collection, has been published open access for researchers and fans around the globe. The letters are just one segment of the U-M Welles archive, the largest in the world.

“These letters capture a unique moment in history as experienced by people from throughout the United States and from many walks of life, and now anyone can read them, study them, teach with them, and use them to support research we can only begin to imagine,” said Phil Hallman, curator of the collection and one of the leads on the “War of the Worlds” project.

With the help of a successful Zooniverse campaign, nearly every one of the 1,349 letters was transcribed and tagged by 1,291 volunteers overnight. Generally, a Zooniverse project can take weeks to years to complete, so the speedy nature of the project and the enthusiasm of its participants took the U-M team by surprise.

“I thought it would take a couple of weeks to complete and was planning with my colleague to take turns answering questions and monitoring responses that came through the site,” said Vince Longo, who began working on the project as a U-M graduate student and is now an assistant professor at Western Michigan University.

“But when we checked Zooniverse the next day, everything was transcribed within 24 hours, and we even got complaints that there weren’t enough letters, or enough categories to choose from. It just shows this is one of those energizing stories in the world.”

The massive team effort—spearheaded by Longo and collection curator Phil Hallman, aided by a library production that brought together technical, subject area and crowdsourcing expertise, and featuring a largely anonymous group of volunteer enthusiasts—has yielded a resource with vast potential for discovery.

Archival materials, Hallman says, can inspire students to pursue a new line of inquiry that’s driven by their own interests and curiosity. Like Longo, who says it was “the greatest pleasure and honor” of his life to work with these materials. And A. Brad Schwartz, another U-M alum and author.

“Rarely do you know in the moment that something is changing your life, but I had that sense in this moment,” Schwartz said.

For him, this moment came when Hallman paid his class a visit to discuss what materials were available to them through the Special Collections Research Center, including these boxes of fanmail.

“I vividly remember walking out of the Modern Languages Building thinking ‘there’s a book in there somewhere … but I didn’t know what the book would be,'” Schwartz said.

“I assumed, as I think everybody would knowing the story of how this broadcast supposedly caused a panic, that you would go through the letters and find stories of people fleeing their homes, grabbing their shotgun, collecting their money and belongings … and that is in there, but it is a much, much smaller part of the story than anyone realized.”

Schwartz decided to use these letters as the basis of his honors thesis. Organized by state, he went directly to the Michigan section. The first letter in the bunch was written on U-M Union letterhead writing to praise Welles and thank him for his creative work. It was followed by several more letters of support. It quickly became clear that panic and fear were not the only feelings expressed by “War of the Worlds” audiences.

“There was a much more interesting, more nuanced story here that only this material could tell. What I was on the verge of discovering was what would become the ‘fake news’ phenomenon,” Schwartz said.

“I had discovered that this moment in history, fall of 1938, is probably the first time in American history when you have the nation as a whole wrestling with this question of ‘can democracy survive if this new electronic medium can make lies sound as convincing as truth?'”

Schwartz believes this has become the critical question of the 21st century, and the larger, more global fear that “War of the Worlds” created.

The honors thesis he wrote in 2012 led to a PBS documentary “The American Experience: War of the Worlds” in 2013, after which Hallman says classrooms started contacting him requesting access to the letters. This spurred the idea and prioritization of the digitization project. Schwartz’s documentary also led to the publication of his book in 2015, “Broadcast Hysteria: Orson Welles’s War of the Worlds and the Art of Fake News.”

It’s safe to say the fortuitous use of “fake news” in the book’s title, released one month before Donald Trump announced his candidacy for the 2016 presidential election, may have led to some bonus traffic to the book’s website.

“Most Americans missed the broadcasts, missed the controversy, but everyone saw the headlines in the newspapers the next day,” Schwartz said.

“The reason some portion of the audience believed this was because it played into their preexisting fears and biases. That is how misinformation and fake news work. But media literacy is teachable. You can’t prevent people from falling for everything, but you can give them the skills to protect themselves, and that is one way on an individual level we can get our up-and-coming generations thinking more critically.”

Schwartz explains that although education did not inoculate people from being frightened by the broadcast, more often than not it gave them the right sense to question what was coming through the radio.

At the same time, Longo works to create educational environments, platforms and resources to help teachers and students utilize primary sources and letters in a way that adds more depth to a lesson than simply teaching from a textbook about an event or specific time in history.

Digitizing these valuable resources has cut out several time-consuming barriers to access, making the collection available on-demand for use in classrooms and lesson plans.

“Welles was an innovator who pushed the boundaries of every media he worked in, both technically and in the stories he wanted to tell,” Hallman said. “So I think people will continue to find relevance in both the work itself, and in how people responded to it, for the foreseeable future.”