August 13th – American Minute – Orson Welles

“New Jersey is being invaded by Martians!” stated actor Orson Welles, reading the script of a 1938 radio drama based on the novel War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells, who died AUGUST 13, 1946.

H.G. Wells was from an impoverished lower middle class family. He failed as a draper and chemist assistant before going into literature.

He wrote the best selling science fiction novels: The Time Machine, 1895; The Island of Doctor Moreau, 1896; The Invisible Man, 1897; The War of the Worlds, 1898; and The First Men in the Moon, 1901, which inspired a boy named Robert Goddard to become the father of modern rocketry.

President Ronald Reagan referred to H.G. Wells in an address at the National Space Club, March 29, 1985:

“Dr. Goddard once wrote a letter to H.G. Wells…

‘There can be no thoughts of finishing, for aiming at the stars…is a problem to occupy generations…there is always the thrill of just beginning.'”

Reagan added:

“Personally, I like space. The higher you go, the smaller the Federal Government looks.”

H.G. Wells described the United States Constitution in his Outlines of History, (NY: MacMillian Co., 1920):

“Its spirit is indubitably Christian.”

In The Pocket History of the World (August, 1941), H.G. Wells wrote:

“Ideas of human solidarity, thanks to Christianity, were far more widely diffused in the newer European world, political power was not so concentrated,

and the man of energy anxious to get rich turned his mind, therefore, very willingly from the ideas of the slave and of gang labour to the idea of mechanical power and the machine.”

In his studies on education, H.G. Wells noted:

“Education is the preparation of the individual for the community, and his religious training is the core of that preparation.”

Admittedly not a follower of any traditional religion, H.G. Wells wrote in Outlines of History, (NY: MacMillian Co., 1920, Vol. 2, p. 13):

“Because Mohammed too founded a great religion, there are those who write of this evidently lustful and rather shifty leader as though he were a man to put beside Jesus of Nazareth or Gautama or Mani.

But it is surely manifest that he was a being of commoner clay; he was vain, egotistical, tyrannous, and a self-deceiver; and it would throw all our history out of proportion if, out of an insincere deference to the possible Moslem reader, we were to present him in any other light.”

In The Secret Places of the Heart, 1922, H.G. Wells reflected:

“Sir Richmond and Miss Grammont went out into the moonlit gloaming…crossed the bridge…and followed the road beside the river towards the old Abbey Church, that Lantern of the West…said Sir Richmond…

‘It’s only through love that God can reach over from one human being to another. All real love is a divine thing.”

William J. Federer is a nationally known speaker, best-selling author, and president of Amerisearch, Inc., a publishing company dedicated to researching America’s noble heritage.

To learn more about the author please visit  William Federer