( narrator )
1945. America stands tall. Enemies vanquished. Duty done
on the battlefield and the greatest riches on
Earth at its feet. More than half
the world's oil... 2/3 of its gold and the talents of
140 million people... ready to build modern America. We are pioneers
and trailblazers. We fight for freedom. We transform our dreams
into the truth. Our struggles
will become a nation. Captioning presented by<font color="#0000FF">
A&E TELEVISION NETWORKS</font> Postwar America
will be turbulent, dynamic and overwhelming. More change
and more progress than in the last 400 years
put together. But some things
haven't changed. American courage, vision
and determination will always shape the nation. The character of
the country and its people forged in the past drives the story
forward. ( gunshots firing ) The USA has ended
World War II a superpower. Its economy turbocharged... primed to construct
the future. The greatest generation
is ready for peacetime. Their ambition
knows no limits. The average American family already earns 15 times
more than they do in Europe. The USA hums with
economic potential. ( man )
This was the greatest moment
of collective inebriation in all of
American history, and this country was giddy with a sense of
accomplishment, pride, prospects for the future. America's future looks bright. Invention and innovation
have always been the things that bind its people together. But America's sheer size
threatens to pull it apart. The land mass is
9 million square miles... and the road system
isn't working. Then you saw this vast
wilderness in front of you, and what am I gonna do
with this ? ( man )
The older highways, the white-shield highways would go across
the country, and then when
it came to a town, it became the main street
of every town and there was
always bottlenecks. ( thundering ) It's almost impossible
to get around by car. Only half of
the roads are even paved. Eisenhower,
the new president, has seen it for himself. As a young soldier,
he drove across the nation. It took 62 days. America has faced
this problem before. How to move people
and goods across its great expanse ? Each generation has come up
with its own solution. The rivers were
America's first highways. 1811. The paddle steamer
is launched, taking goods
upriver as well as down, opening up the Mississippi
to more trade. The Erie Canal is America's next great conveyor belt
of commerce. 1825. It links the Eastern seaboard
to the Great Lakes. Like the steamboats, it spawns
cities along its route. The canal transforms New York
into a boomtown that quadruples in size. Now it's time to
get America's roads working like the canals
and rivers before them, to get the country moving again. And President Eisenhower
makes it his mission to get the job done. He started looking at
the development of this country in the '50s, and he really
saw the vision of what the Interstate and highway
system could do. And it was amazing. It changed America. ( man )
There's a common theme
to the greatest innovations in American history, and that is, these were things
that helped people or goods or ideas
travel about more freely. The Interstate Highway becomes the biggest engineering
project in American history. It costs the nation
$129 billion. 2.4 billion
man-hours of hard work. And just like the railroads
a century before, it's built with
manual labor and sheer grit. ( whistle blowing ) America's landscape has been
shaped by transportation. The Transcontinental Railway opened up half a billion
acres of land in eight new states. 200,000 miles of track... hewn out
of hostile terrain. Faced with a mountain, find an inventive way
of blowing it up. Nitroglycerine. Black powder. Dynamite. The Interstate is the largest
earthmoving project in the history of the world. 1½ million tons of
explosives. 42 billion
cubic yards of earth removed. Enough to fill more than
8 million football stadiums. We can build anything
we damn well please. We're gonna go about it. And it did
change the country. ( John )
The freeways,
the Interstate Highway System. You could connect the cities in a way that
no one had seen before, on a level no one
had seen before. Today, there are
46,876 miles of Interstate Highways-- enough to wrap nearly
twice around the world. And the journey that once took
Eisenhower 62 grueling days, now it can be done in four. Those with the means
can take to the road. There was nothing that
could stop a person from being
what they wanted, going where they wanted,
doing what they wanted. Freedom to travel
where you want, a freedom not to be stuck
to where the trolley rails go. A freedom and a lifestyle that
came with it that really
celebrated that sense that the car was your ticket
to personal freedom. ( Bill )
This is a country that will not accept being shackled. Perhaps it's because of
our geography and we were able
to expand at will and move wherever
we wanted to. Good roads
need more cars. Bigger, faster, better. 1946. 2 million of them are
manufactured in America. And that's just
the beginning. It's the age of the automobile. ( man )
When I came to America, the first thing
I wanted was-- how can I get hold
of a car ? I didn't have enough money, so I shared with
two friends to buy a jalopy and I crossed the country
with that. I had a love
affair with cars from very beginning, because this method of
movement that can enable you to
see vast, expansive place. From as soon as they could
get their hands on one, Americans have
always liked their cars. Now the whole country
has fallen in love with the automobile. 1955. Americans are spending
$65 billion on cars, buying 8 million
of them every 12 months. By now, the USA is making 80% of the world's
automobiles. More than 20,000 cars a day roll off production lines
across the country. Four times as many as
the Model T at its height. There was now
a car in every driveway, maybe two cars in
every driveway. One for mom
and one for dad and maybe one for
the oldest child. We have this
ideal of American life as the two parents,
two children, brand-new,
gleaming American car with fins the size of
Pennsylvania coming off the rear of it. Once Americans
get into their cars, there is no going back. The Interstate Highways
take them where they've
never been before. Meaning some places
get left behind. ( John )
No one really thought about how
it would fundamentally change these communities, because on Route 66,
they would always say, "We didn't have to travel,
the world came to us." And overnight,
when the ribbon cut on the Interstate Highway
System, they were
bypassing the town... and many towns died. You know, they call it
"death by Interstate." The Interstates bypassed
the towns, but they lead somewhere else, to America's next invention:
the suburbs. ( narrator )
America has always
used technology to overcome the challenges
of its vast open spaces. Carving out the environment, building houses
for its people, shaping its future. Technology
has built America. Every major development in the history
of America, technology has been
the center of it. 1607. 50 million trees. 9 million square miles
of wilderness. 60 million bison. This is what the first
settlers were faced with. Within a year of arriving
at Jamestown, they had built
themselves a fort, a church and 50 houses. If America needs it,
they build it. If people need housing,
they will always find a way. ( woman )
That is the American dream, to just create a new life
for yourself, reinvent yourself, get a little patch of land
somewhere, grow some crops and be the master of
your own destiny. America is about to embark on its biggest house-building
project ever. This greatest generation
and what they went through... and then came home
and just went back to being civilians. Houses have been
built before, but never on this scale. 13 million
over the next decade. 'Cause at the end of the day,
I do want to go home. I want to drink a few beers and I want to
watch my football and I want to have my
backyard barbecues and celebrate
the 4th of July. And the problem
to be tackled this time is the sheer scale of
what's required. 1946. 330 new babies delivered
every hour. That's one baby
every ten seconds. It's the baby boom, and they
all need housing. A million acres are plowed under
each year of the 1950s for housing plots. 3,000 acres a day. It's the birth of suburbia--
the next innovation. Building houses
outside the cities to give new families
a new life. Farmland into family homes. New York loses about
2 million people over that period and it looks like people
are just going to slowly kind of
hollow out the inner city. And they would buy a new
perhaps saltbox house in Levittown in New York, or its equivalent housing
development across the country. All of these icons of sort of
1950s domestic culture, suburban culture, that begin to
emerge during these years. Levitt & Sons
are family builders. They'll give their name
to America's most famous postwar
housing, the Levittown. Here on this Levitt & Sons
construction site they're building houses almost as fast
as babies are born. One every 16 minutes. 8:00 a.m.
trucks unload. 9:30 bathrooms arrive. 11:00 floors are laid. 300 windows a day. 30 baths a day. These techniques... are inspired by
the Industrial Age. 1840, Lowell Mills,
Massachusetts. The manufacturer of cotton is
transformed by mechanized looms. 1918, Henry Ford's Detroit
production line, the automobile revolution. Now, in the 1950s, America is
mass-producing family homes. Levitt & Sons call it "the Ford production line of
house building." This is human enterprise,
human ingenuity, putting these buildings there. They were put there
by free men and women making their own
free decisions. By 1951, Levittown, New York, has 17,000 identical
new homes. A second Levittown
is built in Philadelphia, a third in New Jersey. My father grew up very poor
during the Depression. He fought in World War II. It was a big deal
for him to get out of a poor neighborhood and buy a 50 X 100 lot in
Franklin Square, Long Island, where I grew up. ( H.W. )
There was a feeling that the country now
has achieved-- regained prosperity, after the long decade of
the Great Depression, which had made
many people think the prosperity might
never return. A family home
for less than $8,000. That's $71,000 in today's money. Down to the eve
of World War II, down to 1940 or so, only about 40% of Americans
owned their own homes. By 1960,
one short generation later, 60% of Americans owned
their own homes, and that's just
one way to quantify the spread of affluence
and prosperity and all that came with that in terms of self-confidence
and enthusiasm for the future. The American home has
developed since the Pilgrims into, really, the center
of the family. The family is
the most important social unit in the United States,
and it should be. Through the centuries, the family home
has shaped America and showcased American
innovation. Plantation houses
built by stone masons. Log cabins made from what's
available on the land. Merchants' houses, the backbone
for the early cities. Each time,
technology has transformed how these houses
have been built and where
they've been built. Overcoming the extremes
of America's climate. 1913. Los Angeles booms when the LA Aqueduct
brings in water. Without it, the city
would have stayed an outpost. Now, it's air conditioning
that wins the South. 1902, invented in New York. 1952: $250 million worth of
air-con units are sold. Hispanic architecture had once
kept the Sunbelt states cool. Now it's air con. In the 1960s, more people
move to the southern states than moved out after
the Civil War. America's toughest landscapes
opened up for housing. California and Florida
became states that were overrun
with new people moving in and wanting to live
a better life. Living a better life goes back
to the big innovation of the 19th century. Steel. 1875, Pittsburgh. Andrew Carnegie
has a vision. Large-scale production, making steel the greatest
building material in the world. Malleable,
versatile, strong, and now, affordable. Used to construct everything
from skyscrapers... to refrigerators. Labor-saving
domestic appliances freeing people to do more
with their time. 1925. The family wash
takes six hours. Soon, washing machines will do
the job in 45 minutes. One of the kind of
common themes that runs throughout
the history of America, all the way back to
the founders, is this, really this obsession
with technology and gadgets. ( Sean )
If you look at
America's greatness and a standard of living that
was built in 200-plus years, this is America's great story. The land of plenty has become
a land of technology... and soon, that technology will
take America even further. ( man )<i>
That's one small step for man;</i> <i>one giant leap
for mankind.</i> ( narrator )
Massive engineering projects uniting the nation. Americans working together to push the boundaries of
science and technology. There was a unity of
ideas and purpose, and that's what's
brought us together. It was the spirit
of exploration, like when
we went to the moon. The impetus for
the Apollo space program came from aviation. Invented by
the Wright brothers, accelerated into production
by two World Wars. Aerial combat. Won in the air... and built by
American technology. 300,000 aircraft
made in the USA from 1941 to 1945. Within a decade,
harnessing that technology, America will lead the world
into the Jet Age. And from there, into space. 1959. The Boeing 707 flies between
New York and Los Angeles. The journey that
once took four days by road now takes six hours. Today, over 2 million
make that trip every year. The push to fly faster
and further is unstoppable. ( man )
Airplanes, rockets,
spacecraft. And people on the moon. What a magnificent
testimony to the progress of humanity. 1961. President John F. Kennedy tells the world that America
will put a man on the moon. The story I remember
as a little kid, you know, John F. Kennedy standing up
there and say, "We're gonna go to the moon
by the end of this decade." America had been
a land of frontiers from the early 17th century. And the frontiers had moved
gradually across North America. Now it seemed to make sense that the frontier
would expand beyond the boundaries of
the Earth. Space is unchartered
territory, like the expansion westwards. A grueling five-month journey
through the interior. It hasn't
stopped America before. The pioneering spirit
drives people onward. Americans are impatient. They want to see new things,
new opportunities. ( Bruce )
And they challenged
millions of people into putting this program
together, and you know what ? They did it. We just made it. July of that last year
of that decade, we just made it. 400,000 Americans
work directly on Apollo 11. Flight controllers,
engineers, scientists, seamstresses. After eight years,
they're ready for the big one. And the fact that this team
of dedicated people, from the astronauts
all the way down to, you know, every engineer, to achieve
that goal, it's-- it really is one of the truly
inspiring stories in American history. A time line planned down
to the last second. 17,000 people in
Florida to handle takeoff. 131 people man the Mission Control room
in Houston, Texas. ( man )<i>
10... 9...</i> <i>Ignition sequence start.</i> 3,000 tons of metal
and three astronauts set off for the moon. ( man )<i>
6... 5...</i> <i> 4... 3...</i> <i> 2... 1...</i> <i> 0.</i> <i> All engine running.</i> <i> Liftoff,
we have a liftoff.</i> ( Buzz )
We set our sights on the moon and everybody felt that, yeah, it sounds
impossible but we're--
we're in this business and we're gonna do it. More power than
all the waterfalls in North America combined. 60 feet taller than
the Statue of Liberty. A million gallons of fuel. Enough to drive a car
around the globe 400 times. All the teamwork and discipline still leaves the astronauts
to face the unknown alone. ( James )
When they approached the moon, they did a burn to slow
the command module down so they could
go into lunar orbit. If it didn't work, they would
have shot past the moon into the distant solar system,
never to be seen again. Less than 30 seconds
of fuel are left when the landing
craft touches down. And then he said,
"Contact light on. "Tranquility base here. The Eagle has landed." ( man )<i>
Roger 20, we copy you
on the ground.</i> ( man )<i>
That's one small
step for man;</i> <i>one giant
leap for mankind.</i> ( Buzz )
I thought for a minute, this isn't beautiful, it's magnificent
desolation. The stars and stripes
first raised in 1776 now planted on the moon. ( Bruce )
Walk around the moon and look back at the world,
you know ? A view that
nobody else has ever seen. ( James )
We believed they could
do anything. We believed NASA's technology
was perfect, it was the genius of
the best of American science and engineering,
and it was. You have to remember what
we had come through leading up to that
summer night in 1969. We'd lost a president
to assassination. We lost his brother
to assassination. But for a few minutes
one summer night, we all stood and stared up
at the heavens. That became the first
of nine spaceships that went to the moon, and 24 Americans
reached the moon, and we landed six out of
seven times. ( James )
And I think for
the country as a whole, it remains something of
a metaphor. Y'know, you always
hear people say, "Well, we need
an Apollo project," to solve this problem
or that problem. The lunar landing
unites America. It is the nation's
greatest scientific achievement. Technology is
powering forward. But America is held back. There's a fault line
that shames the nation: race. ( narrator )
African-Americans
have been part of America's story from the beginning... as foot soldiers
and fighting men, civilians and citizens... doing the dangerous job of
whaling in the 19th century. 1619. The first Africans
arrived in Virginia. Although some will gain their
freedom and own land, most were slaves. Over 200 years, slavery
became a key part of the American economy,
particularly in the South. By 1861, nearly
4 million slaves. They help to fuel
a $2 billion cotton boom that makes the South rich. ( woman )
The ghosts are
very much alive today in people who have, if not the actual memory
of that but a family member of what-- a memory of
what that was like, and the social memory of
what it was like when people
were treated as things. Now, in 1963 drawing on the inspiration
of their deeper past, African-Americans are
about to change everything. ( David K. )
This country,
once and for all, grasps the nettle of
the most vexed issue in all of this country's
history, which is race. We waited 100 years after
the Civil War to take that issue up again. The Civil War was fought
in part over the right to own slaves. When it was over,
African-Americans were supposed to be on
an equal footing, but segregation then
took hold in the South. And so you needed
that second civil war. I call it that. Others would not perhaps
call it the same thing, but it was a different
kind of civil war, but it had the same goal
as the first Civil War did and it was led by
different people. ( all shouting ) 20th century America will see a long
struggle for equality. Race riots in Chicago
in 1919 leave 38 dead. In the segregated South,
separate schools, separate buses,
separate restaurants. Twice as many unemployed. Change begins when
1 million black soldiers join up in World War II. And blacks demonstrated
they could fly planes just like anyone else,
they could sail ships, they could do anything
a white soldier could do. They don't know it yet, but these soldiers are
the beginning of the modern Civil Rights Movement. ( David P. )
Individuals are more
than willing to fight and die for our country
and for the freedoms that our country represented, yet freedoms
that were not still truly shared by
all Americans. And the first step towards
equal rights is taken. July 1948. The military
is desegregated. No more whites-only regiments. No more blacks-only
regiments. Just Americans,
shoulder to shoulder. ( Colin )
When I came in,
my superior said to me, "We don't care if you're black,
we don't care if you're white. "We don't want to
hear any hard-luck stories; the only thing we care about
is performance." But outside the military,
it is a different story. Blacks do not have
the same status as whites. ( Brian )
The people among us,
who, in many cases, were doing the dirty
work of society, the people who were making
the hotels ready for us to stay in
and serving us food in restaurants that wouldn't
seat them as guests. ( dogs barking ) The Civil Rights Movement
of the 1960s will use words and actions to convince the world that
the time for freedom has come, that African-Americans are ready
to fight for justice. ( Colin )
So people say, "Why do you even
identify yourself as black ?" Because I'm black. And because everybody else
would identify me as black, and did for most of my life. Now, they might not think that
same way about my children, but I will not shrink from that, and single reason
why it won't is because of all of
those who went before me. To put right the wrongs of
slavery. That's what motivated
those who went before. ( gunshots firing ) ( dogs barking ) Come on, y'all ! Blacks, who despite being
enslaved, were already
fighting for freedom. Inspirational people like
Harriet Tubman. Come on ! A former slave. From 1849, she was part of
an underground network, bringing some
300 slaves to freedom. One of America's first
Civil Rights activists. It's a story that's not
just about black people, but it's about human beings
caring for other people, and having
the courage to do what is right even at peril to yourself. The voice of the modern
Civil Rights Movement and its most determined
and eloquent leader is Martin Luther King, Jr. Baptist minister,
preacher, and campaigner. August 1963. Martin Luther King, Jr.
leads 250,000 in the March on Washington. His marvelous speech
that every American knows, at the Lincoln Memorial, you know, talking about
"I have a dream." ( man )
America is telling the world that blacks and whites have
come together to say we're ready to make the
next step toward equality, and a young, black preacher
talked about a dream that connected back
to the American dream. What he did was hold
a mirror up to the face of all
Americans and said, hey, it's been a couple of
hundred years, now let's do what the Declaration of Independence
actually said. ( "George Washington" )
"We hold these truths
to be self-evident, that all men
are created equal." ( cheering ) The promise of 1776
back on the agenda. Now this is a culmination
of everybody together saying this is what-- this is our moment,
this the time for us. Whites looked inside themselves
and said, you know what ? Why should black kids go
to second-rate schools ? That's not good
for the country, that's not good for
what we are as a people. That's when the tipping point
was reached. A year after
the March on Washington, the Civil Rights Act is passed
through congress. Voting rights extended. Racial discrimination
outlawed. Segregation ended. America's problem with
race does not disappear. But the way is paved for an African-American
to reach the White House. ( man )
To be able to
inspire our kids and let them know that they
have such greatness out there, they can be anything they want
to be, and we can mean that. Fighting segregation
and discrimination by law and we're changing
hearts and minds. We're moving out of that
and memories tend to fade, but not for me. I'll never forget. But 1960s America
still has a problem. A growing challenge from beyond
the nation's shores. A rival... that wants to
blow the USA out of the water. ( narrator )
July 1945, New Mexico. The Manhattan Project. Robert Oppenheimer
leads the team that develops the atomic bomb. The original weapon of
mass destruction. Terrifying in its power. And America
got there first. ( David K. )
Only the Americans,
in the end, had a plausible
chance at success, because they had the enormous
resources they could invest
in this thing on a crash basis
and make it happen. But someone else
wants one, too. America's great rival
on the world stage: the Soviet Union. Now that America has the bomb, they'll stop at nothing
to build their own. Communist spies even infiltrate
the Manhattan Project. The arms race between the
world's superpowers has begun. ( David K. )
You could not possibly have
grown up in this country in that era without being
very acutely aware of that great
diplomatic standoff between the Soviet Union
and the United States that we call the Cold War. ( H.W. )
After 1949, when the Soviets got
the atomic bomb, this was a foe that
could wreak horrible damage on the United States at
an instant's notice. It was-- it was a time unlike anything Americans
had lived through before. It's the Cold War, and Americans
are on red alert. We did these duck-and-cover
drills routinely at school. ( man )<i>
First you duck,</i> <i>and then you cover.</i> ( David K. )
The siren would be tested and we were instructed how to
get under the desk and cover your
head and your face so that the debris from glass
blowing in from the windows when the atomic bomb
went off downtown wouldn't hurt us. Both sides stockpile weapons to defend themselves against
possible attack. From 1940 to 1996, the USA will spend
$5.5 trillion on nuclear weapons. That's nearly $20,000 for every man, woman
and child in America. ( Brian )
It was the arrival really of the specter of real
nuclear war. Hiroshima, Nagasaki were
no longer seen as isolated, one-time incidents. By the mid-1950s, there are over
40,000 defense contractors working for the federal
government. America has always
won wars using technology. In the Revolutionary War the accuracy of
the Kentucky rifle... was a key factor in defeating
the British. ( shouting ) In the Civil War,
the Minié ball could travel 600 yards and shatter bones
on impact. 1959. America's first intercontinental
ballistic missile. It can travel
3,500 miles... and destroy cities. 200 years of American weapons finding their target
and defeating the enemy. But this time it's different. This is a war
that no one can win. If an atomic bomb is used,
there's no going back. Every time
the Soviets make a move, Americans fear the worst. 1960: the U-2 incident, when a US spy plane is
shot down over the Soviet Union. 1962: The Cuban Missile Crisis. The standoff
with Moscow over nuclear weapons
in America's backyard. ( man )
Actual warheads... the bombs, the actual
bombs were in Cuba, were already there, and the delivery systems
was coming over. ( man )<i>
Suddenly it
seems very important</i> <i>to have adequate supplies
in every home.</i> ( David K. )
I remember, vividly, people
going to the local supermarkets and buying up
all kinds of canned goods and throwing them in the back
of their cars and driving up to
the Siskiyou Mountains or the Trinity Alps or
the Sierra Nevada range to get out of the blast range of any nuclear weapons that
might fall in the Bay Area. There are rumors that an
attack may come from within, that Soviet spies are plotting
to bring America down. The senate sets up hearings to unmask communists in
the government and media. ( Brian )
And they saw ghosts
behind every corner and enemies on every
bookshelf. So this effort to
root out the enemy at home became a defining moment. After World War II,
when the Cold War emerged, there was this feeling that the
country could split apart very easily, politically. And there was a desire
that that not happen. So there was this kind of sort of self-imposed
conformity. ( Beverly )
If the Communists
are atheists, Americans are religious. If the Communists
are acting collectively, we are true individuals. If the Communists want to
break down family structures, we are the tight
nuclear family. Communism. Armageddon. These threats to
the nation's freedoms are just too close for comfort. The United States has seen off
superpowers in the past. Digging deep to
defend what matters. Maybe the most important
values we have are family,
faith and... and the American flag. But these values, which Americans have defended
since the Revolution, are about to be
challenged in unexpected ways. Captioning presented by<font color="#0000FF">
A&E TELEVISION NETWORKS</font> Captioned by<font color="#00FFFF">
Soundwriters™</font>
