JOURNAL ASSIGNMENTS Read the assigned pages. As you finish each reading, make a journal entry. Your journal may contain artwork, poetry, short stories, newspaper editorials, letters, speeches, audio or video tapes,

anything you wish. Most of you will use a diary format that is, writing down your personal reactions to what you read. The point is to show me that you have read the assignments and thought about the significance of what you have read. You MUST include: --How the document relates to lectures --The significance of the document --Your reaction to what you read --A quote from the document-include the most significant quote from the document and WHY you think it is significant If your journal is in the standard diary format, it should be about EIGHT double- spaced, typed pages long, in standard (not oversized) typeface and with ONE- inch margins. If you are using some other format, or a mixture, use your judgment concerning length/amount. See me if you have questions. **** IMPORTANT**** DO NOT MERELY SUMMARIZE WHAT YOU HAVE READ!!!!! SUMMARIES WILL EARN YOU NO BETTER THAN A "C." Late journals, unless arrangements have been made with me, will cost you points. Other issues to think about as you read: --If you had been alive at this time, what would have been your reaction? Would your opinion be different if these events occurred today? Why? --What surprised/shocked/upset you the most? Why? --Is this source important to historians? Why or why not? --Are there other sources that should have been included in the assignment? Why? --What is the writer's agenda (goal)? Do you think he/she was successful? --Who would have agreed with this writer? Why? --Who would have disagreed with this writer? Why? --What impact, if any, did this event (letter, law, etc...) have? --How might the events have turned out differently? --How have your impressions and views changed?/n es he st 1. N e Eyewitness to America • 451 funny coming into the hotel and the very deferential clerk not know- ing that I was not only thousands, nay tens of thousands in debt, but had less than forty cents cash in the world and probably a deficit in the bank. I gallantly gave Scotty [his daughter] my last ten when I left her and of course the Flynns, etc., had no idea and wondered why I didn't just "jump into a taxi" (four dollars and tip) and run over for dinner. Enough of this bankrupt's comedy-I suppose it has been enacted all over the U.S. in the last four years, plenty of times. . . . The final irony was when a drunk man in the shop where I bought my can of ale said in a voice obviously intended for me, "These city dudes from the East come down here with their millions. Why don't they support us?" THE WAR OF THE WORLDS October 30, 1938 New York City JOHN HOUSEMAN housands of listeners who tuned in late to The War of the Worlds, a adaptation H. invasion believed the fictional news reports were real. Panics began in several cities at the same time. Houseman, a co-founder with Orson Welles and others of the Mercury The- ater, tells how the troupe created the accidental spectacle. Wells himself was absent for most of the work because he was preparing a stage play. Five days before the show, [scriptwriter] Howard Koch tele- phoned. He was in deep distress. After three days of slaving on H. G. Wells's scientific fantasy he was ready to give up. Under no circum- stances, he declared, could it be made interesting or in any way cred- ible to modern American ears. Koch was not given to habitual alarmism. To confirm his fears, Annie, our secretary, came to the phone. She was an acid and emphatic girl from Smith Collage with Eyewitness to America fine blond hair, who smelled of fading spring flowers. "You can't do it!" she whined. "Those old Martians are just a lot of nonsense. It's all too silly! We're going to make fools of ourselves! Absolute fools!" 452. For some reason which I do not clearly remember our only possi- ble alternative for that week was a dreary one-Lorna Doone. Unable to reach Welles, I called Koch back. I was severe. I taxed him with defeatism. I gave him false comfort. I promised to come up and help. When I finally got there around two the next morning things were better. He was beginning to have fun laying waste the State of New Jersey. Annie had stopped grinding her teeth. We worked all night and through the next day. Wednesday at sunset the script was finished. Thursday, as usual, Paul Stewart rehearsed the show, then made a record. We listened to it rather gloomily, long after midnight in Orson's room at the St. Regis, sitting on the floor because all the chairs were covered with coils of unrolled and unedited film. We agreed it was a dull show. We all felt its only chance of coming off lay in emphasizing its newscast style—its simultaneous, eyewitness quality. All night we sat up, spicing the script with circumstantial allusions and authentic detail. Friday afternoon it went over to CBS to be passed by the Network censor. Certain name alterations were requested. Under protest and with a deep sense of grievance we changed the Hotel Biltmore to a nonexistent Park Plaza, Trans-America to Inter- continent, the Columbia Broadcasting Building to Broadcasting Build- ing. Then the script went over to mimeograph and we went to bed. We had done our best and, after all, a show is just a show. Around six we left the studio. Orson, phoning from the theater a few minutes later to find out how things were going, was told by one of the CBS sound men, who had stayed behind to pack up his equip- ment, that it was not one of our better shows. Confidentially, the man opined, it just didn't come off. On Sunday, October 30, at 8:00 P.M., E.S.T., in a studio littered with coffee cartons and sandwich paper, Orson swallowed a second container of pineapple juice, put on his earphones, raised his long white fingers and threw the cue for the Mercury theme-the Tchaikovsky Piano Concerto In B Flat Minor # 1. . . . con vie ond rep ou ha ter th te St W Eyewitness to America 453 Orson stretched both these numbers to what seemed to us, in the control room, an almost unbearable length. We objected. The inter- view in the Princeton Observatory-the clockwork ticking monot- onously overhead, the woolly-minded professor mumbling vague replies to the reporters' uninformed questions—this, too, he dragged out to a point of tedium. Over our protests, lines were restored that had been cut at earlier rehearsals. We cried there would not be a lis- tener left. Welles stretched them out even longer. He was right. His sense of tempo, that night, was infallible. When the flashed news of the cylinder's landing finally came—almost fif- teen minutes after the beginning of a fairly dull show- he was able suddenly to spiral his action to a speed as wild and reckless as its base was solid. The appearance of the Martians; their first treacherous act; the death of Carl Phillips; the arrival of the militia; the battle of the Watchung Hills; the destruction of New Jersey-all these were tele- scoped into a space of twelve minutes without ever stretching the lis- tener's emotional credulity. The broadcast, by then, had its own reality, the reality of emotionally felt time and space. The Crossley census taken about a week before the broadcast had given us 3.6 per cent of the listening audience to Edgar Bergen's 34.7 per cent. What the Crossley Institute (that hireling of advertising agencies) deliberately ignored, was the healthy American habit of dial-twisting. Edgar Bergen in the person of Charlie McCarthy tem- porarily left the air about 8:12 P.M., E.S.T., yielding place to a new and not very popular singer. At that point, and during the following minutes, a large number of listeners started twisting their dials. . . . By this time [in the radio play] the mysterious meteorite had fallen at Grovers Mill in New Jersey, the Martians had begun to show their foul leathery heads above the ground, and the New Jersey State Police were racing to the spot. . . . In [the real] New York, hundreds of people on Riverside Drive left their homes ready for flight. Bus terminals were crowded. A woman calling up the Dixie Bus Terminal for information said impatiently, "Hurry up please, the world is coming to an end and I have a lot to do."... In Rhode Island officials of the electric light company received a score of calls urging them to turn off all lights so the city would be 454 • Eyewitness to America safe from the enemy. In Minneapolis a woman ran into church screaming, "New York destroyed this is the end of the world. You might as well go home to die. I just heard it on the radio." The second part of the show was extremely well written and most sensitively played but nobody heard it. After a stirring musical finale, Welles, in his own person, delivered a charming informal little speech about Halloween, which it happened to be. I remember, during the playing of the final theme, the phone start- ing to ring in the control room and a shrill voice through the receiver announcing itself as belonging to the mayor of some Midwestern city, one of the big ones. He is screaming for Welles. Choking with fury, he reports mobs in the streets of his city, women and children hud- dled in the churches, violence and looting. If, as he now learns, the whole thing is nothing but a crummy joke—then he, personally, is coming up to New York to punch the author of it on the nose! Orson hangs up quickly. For we are off the air now and the studio door bursts open. The following hours are a nightmare. The building is suddenly full of people and dark blue uniforms. We are hurried out of the studio, downstairs, into a back office. Here we sit incommuni- cado while network employees are busily collecting, destroying, or locking up all scripts and records of the broadcast. Then the press is let loose upon us, ravening for horror. How many deaths have we heard of? (Implying they know of thousands.) What do we know of the fatal stampede in a Jersey hall? (Implying it is one of many.) What traffic deaths? (The ditches must be choked with corpses.) The sui- cides? (Haven't you heard about the one on Riverside Drive?) It is all quite vague in my memory and quite terrible. Hours later, instead of arresting us, they let us out a back way. We were on the front page for two days. Having had to bow to radio as a news source during the Munich crisis, the press was now only too eager to expose the perilous irresponsibilities of the new medium. Orson was their whipping boy. They quizzed and badgered him. Con- demnatory editorials were delivered by our press-clipping bureau in bushel baskets. There was talk, for a while, of criminal action. Then gradually, after about two weeks, the excitement subsided. By then it had been discovered that the casualties were not as numer- ous had thr and sel 1 ch Du st Eyewitness to America 455 ous or as serious as had at first been supposed. One young woman had fallen and broken her arm running downstairs. Of the suits that were brought against us-amounting to over three quarters of a million dollars for damages, injuries, miscarriages and distresses of various kinds-none was substantiated or legally proved. We did settle one claim, however, against the advice of our lawyers. It was the particularly affecting case of a man in Massachu- setts, who wrote: “I thought the best thing to do was to go away. So I took three dol- lars twenty-five cents out of my savings and bought a ticket. After I had gone sixty miles I knew it was a play. Now I don't have money left for the shoes I was saving up for. Will you please have somed send me a pair of black shoes size 9B!" We did. "Frankly, my dear . . ." A MOVIE EXECUTIVE PLEADS FOR A FEW FAMOUS LAST WORDS October 29, 1939 Hollywood, California DAVID O. SELZNICK avid O. Selznick was the fiery independent film producer who had staked career on the Wind. Will Hays directed the Hays Office, which maintained the “moral- ity" of motion pictures. Dear Mr. Hays- As you probably know, the punch line of Gone With the Wind, the one bit of dialogue which forever establishes the future relationship between Scarlett and Rhett, is, “Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn."/n