I have miles and miles ahead of me Tales to listen to, time to spin
Up ahead the road is bending Wonder what's around the bend
Want to see what's on the other side Of the mountaintop rainbows in
I can see the road is bending Wonder what's around the bend
Here comes the sun, a new day being born right out of the Atlantic Ocean.
One more day of American history beginning.
These are not just any waves breaking on just any shore.
This is a place of history and mystery, the site of one of the most puzzling episodes
in the whole American story.
I love to walk in these dunes and think about it.
I've been on the road in America for more than 20 years now from sea to shining sea
and always at the places where our history was made I've found myself stopping for a
while to think about what happened there.
If you think about it hard enough some of these places will send little chills down
your spine.
That great room in Philadelphia which gave us a nation, those old missions in California,
there are Spanish ghosts there, but there is other hallowed ground not so well known.
A swamp in Arkansas, a rock in Wyoming with names carved into it, an old meeting house
in Vermont crowded with people, a cattle trail in Texas, a grassy hillside in Montana.
Those are a few of the places I have been and been moved by.
What I'd like to do in this video collection is take you back there with me to those places
and some others that tell us who we are and how we came to be this way.
It is a wonderful journey of many miles, but it has to begin here on the lonely outer banks
which reach out into the Atlantic.
I had this beach to myself one windy, wintry day in 1975.
It was a good day for thinking about beginnings.
We know their names, Christopher Cooper, John Bright, William Waters, Agnes Wood, Margaret
Lawrence, Jane Jones.
We know where they came from, England.
The incredible England of Elizabeth and Shakespeare and Sir Walter Raleigh and Sir Francis Drake.
We know where they landed here on the wild coast of North Carolina.
We know how they lived as Englishmen in English villages and English cottages.
We know everything about the first English colonists to the New World except what happened
to them, how it was that they vanished from this shore without a trace.
They came on a summer's day in 1587 to Roanoke, this green island protected from the sea by
the sand barrier of the outer banks.
They found here a new world indeed, a world of dunes and grass and marshes, of live oak
and gray moss and gray squirrels thick in the thickets, a world of broad sounds and
over the sounds birds on the wing, wood ducks and snow geese and trumpeter swans in numbers
beyond all European imagining.
They had, at least in the beginning, friendly relationships with most of their nearest neighbors
who were accurately and sympathetically portrayed by their artist governor, John White.
They had, moreover, the patronage of one of the great men of the world, Raleigh, the poet,
soldier, scholar, dreamer, and of Queen Elizabeth herself.
It must have seemed that God and nature and Mother England had conspired to give them
good prospects in a rich land.
They made their homes around this earthen fort built the year before by a smaller colony
which had failed and sailed home to England.
This colony meant to stay.
It consciously intended to establish, at this place, a heritage that would make America
forever English.
Under the oaks of Roanoke was born that summer to John White's daughter Eleanor and her husband
Ananias Dare, the first child of English parentage in the New World, a baby girl who was named
Virginia.
And then, against his better judgment, soon after Virginia Dare's birth, John White sailed
back to England for more colonists and more supplies.
He planned to return the following year, but the year was 1588, the year of the Spanish
Armada.
Until Spain had been defeated at sea, Queen Elizabeth would spare not one English ship
nor one English seaman to supply her little colony in America.
So the colonists, waiting for help, stared at that empty horizon for three long years.
When John White returned to them, he found where they had been, only the silent forest.
There was a name carved on a tree, the name Croatoan, nothing else.
Were they lost to Croatoan Indian clubs and arrows, or did they join the Croatoans for
food and protection?
Were they attacked and destroyed by the Spanish?
Or despairing of John White's return, did they try to cross to England in their small
boats and lose their lives at sea?
Only the sea knows.
Their names are so much like our names, Richard Arthur, Thomas Harris, John Burden, Joan Warren,
Rose Payne, Virginia Dare.
They were the first to bring to this continent English names and English speech and English
laws.
We owe so much to them.
Somewhere on this coast, we ought to put up a monument to their fate, if only we knew
where to put it.
Eventually, English settlements did take hold, of course, in little pockets on the Atlantic
coast.
The settlers came, among other things, in the name of religious freedom.
Freedom for themselves, however, not necessarily for others.
That is why an obscure spring in Rhode Island is so important in our history.
Nobody ever comes here anymore, and you can see why.
It's hard to find, lost in the seedy side streets of a big city.
But if you want to see where the raucous give and take of American democracy really was
born, you have to come here.
In the wilderness of 1636, there was a spring on this spot, and a troublemaker named Roger
Williams, kicked out of Puritan, Massachusetts and fleeing for his life, stopped running
here.
He wanted to live in a place where you didn't have to believe what the government told you
to believe.
And when he considered what had brought him to this place, he knew he had a name for it.
Providence.
Then as now, Rhode Island was just a little place, 25 miles across, but the colony put
it right into its first code of laws that within these 25 miles, all men may walk as
their consciences persuade them.
That was Roger Williams' idea, 150 years before the US Constitution got around to saying the
same thing.
Well, it was freely predicted the idea would lead to chaos, and it did.
These old streets were soon filled with every kind of screwball, all arguing with one another.
With the steeple of the church Roger Williams founded behind him, Professor William McLaughlin
of Brown University gave it to a straight.
I should have thought that the other colonies would be proud of Rhode Island for its religious
diversity.
Oh, no, no.
That's happened since the revolution.
At the time, Rhode Island was a scandal and a disgrace.
The ideal in the colonial period was to have a well-ordered, well-regulated community with
uniformity of belief and conformity of practice.
And this place was known as Rogues Island.
It attracted people who couldn't get along in decent society.
All the bad rubbish drained down into Rhode Island.
And since we were at the bottom of New England, that seemed to make sense.
Well, it was called the Licentious Republic.
And in the period called the critical period, the Rhode Islanders were looked upon even
by the other states in the new nation as a rather outrageous example of what happens
when popular democracy goes too far.
Don't tread on me.
It was a South Carolina flag, but it was a Rhode Island sentiment.
We found the flag flying outside the old Turo synagogue.
The Jews started a congregation in Newport in 1658, and it's still here, worshipping
in the oldest synagogue in America.
See, Rhode Island was a mess, but it was a democratic mess, long before the idea of democracy
occurred to anybody else around here.
It sounded good to the Jews.
It sounded good to the Baptists, too.
Today, every town has a First Baptist Church.
This is the First Baptist Church, with a congregation that goes straight back to 1638.
System of conscience is so old in America that we've forgotten where it began.
Every one of us who listens to the cantor on Friday night or sings Faith of Our Fathers
on Sunday morning or kneels with a rosary before a statue of the Virgin Mary or who
never goes to church at all ought to remember that religious liberty, the separation of
church and state, the whole idea of the sovereignty of the people started here.
The early Rhode Islander was disrespectful and disreputable, always fighting about something.
Today, they've put him on a pedestal.
The figure atop the Capitol dome is called the Independent Man.
He can see the whole state from up there, the first to be disrespectful and disreputable
and free.
It took a while, but the idea of liberty gradually caught on in America until finally most people
agreed that liberty was worth fighting for.
I say let us wait.
John Dickinson of Pennsylvania stood on this spot July 1st, 1776 and begged the Continental
Congress to be reasonable.
The time is not yet ripe for proclaiming independence.
Instead of help from foreign powers, it will bring us disaster.
I say we ought to hold back any declaration and remain the masters of our fate and our
fame.
All of Great Britain is armed against us.
The wealth of the empire is poured into her treasury.
We shall weep at our folly.
John Dickinson was not a timid or frightened man.
He was a great old Quaker patriot and he had a good argument.
At the moment he spoke, British grenadiers were sweeping down from Canada, British guns
were bombarding Charleston, and just 90 miles away, an incredible British armada was entering
New York Harbor, 500 ships carrying 32,000 troops, the best army in the world.
That army could march to Philadelphia and take this building and arrest this Congress
any afternoon it chose to do so.
Though John Dickinson pleaded, let us not brave the storm in a paper boat, the delegates
paid him respectful attention.
John Adams and his cousin Sam, hot for independence, impatient with the delay, sat over here listening.
Thomas Jefferson sat back here in the corner.
He had already written the Declaration of Independence.
It spoke his thoughts.
Inside him here, old Benjamin Franklin, also silent, his mind made up.
But every mind was not made up.
Pennsylvania and South Carolina were opposed to independence.
Delaware divided, New York undecided.
All through the spring and into the summer they had sat here and wrangled, their tempers
growing hot with the season.
Young Edward Rutledge of South Carolina, who sat here, had said of John Adams and the new
Englanders, they will bring us ruin.
I dread their low cunning and those leveling principles which men without character and
without fortune possess.
And John Adams had said of Rutledge, Ned, Rutledge is a perfect bobble ink, a swallow,
a sparrow, a peacock, excessively vain, excessively weak.
Now Rutledge and Adams and the rest, listen to John Dickinson speaking gravely from the
heart, declaring our independence at a time like this is like burning down our house before
we have a, and everything he had to say he had said before, he never said it better than
on that July afternoon.
We have been duped and bubbled by the phantom of peace.
What is the real choice before us?
If we postpone the declaration, do we mean to submit?
Do we consent to yield and become a conquered people?
No, we do not.
We shall fight.
We shall fight with whatever means we have, with rusty muskets and broken flints, with
bows and arrows if need be.
Then why put off the declaration?
For myself I can only say this.
I have crossed the Rubicon, all that I have, all that I am, all that I hope for in this
life I stake on our cause.
For me the die is cast.
Sink or swim, live or die, to survive or perish with my country, that is my unalterable resolution.
That night John Dickinson went home, put on his militia uniform and rode away to join
his regiment.
He could not vote for independence, but he could fight the British.
That night Edward Rutledge changed his mind.
South Carolina would not stand in the way of unanimity.
That night Caesar Rodney, a man dying of cancer, rode through the night on horseback in a storm
to Philadelphia to cast the deciding vote for Delaware.
And so when Secretary Charles Thompson called the roll on July 2nd of the twelve colonies
voting, all twelve declared for independence.
It was done.
What remained was the declaring it.
The next morning, July 3rd, an anonymous note was found up here on President Hancock's table.
It said, you have gone too far.
Take care.
A plot is framed for your destruction and all of you shall be destroyed.
It suddenly occurred to them that there might be a lighted powder keg under this floor.
There was an uproar.
There were volunteers to search the cellar.
Then crusty old Joseph Hughes of North Carolina, who sat here, stood up to say, Mr. President,
I am against wasting any time searching cellars.
I would as soon be blown to pieces as proclaimed to the world that I was frightened by a note
without searching any cellars.
The Continental Congress proceeded to a consideration of the Declaration of Independence.
They are immortal words now, but of course they weren't when Charles Thompson read them
for the first time.
When in the course of human events and for two days Jefferson sat back there in the corner
and fumed as they all toyed with his masterpiece.
Did we really have to call the king a tyrant quite so often?
They changed some of the tyrants back to king.
Did we have to bid the British people our everlasting adieu?
They struck that out.
And Jefferson's mightiest passage, his denunciation of slavery, that was struck out too at the
insistence of Georgia and South Carolina.
Jefferson wrote elsewhere, nothing is more certainly written in the Book of Fate than
that these people are to be free.
But finally all the cuts and changes were done and what remained was a document still
noble enough to inspire the tired delegates and bold enough to hang them all.
It was read through one more time to the end.
And for the support of this declaration with a firm reliance on the protection of divine
providence, we mutually pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor.
There was one final vote and President Hancock announced the result with the use of a new
phrase, the Declaration of the United States of America is unanimously agreed to.
There was no cheering, no fireworks, not yet.
The delegates simply walked out into the night of the Fourth of July thinking their own thoughts,
some of them no doubt remembering what John Dickinson had said.
This is like burning down our house before we have another.
Others hearing Tom Paine, the birthday of a new world is at hand.
We have it in our power to begin the world all over again.
John Adams walked to his boarding house to write a letter to a friend.
Well, he said, the river is passed.
The bridge is cut away.
There were great men in those days.
Never from that time to this has so much greatness crowded onto the American stage.
Let us just stop briefly here in the Virginia countryside for me to nominate my choice for
the greatest of them all.
This is what he directed to be written on his tombstone.
This and as he said, not a word more.
Here was buried Thomas Jefferson, author of the Declaration of American Independence, of
the Statute of Virginia for Religious Freedom, and father of the University of Virginia.
Something about his having been president of the United States.
He thought of that as just an honor he had once to be for a time an employee of the people.
He wasn't interested in honors.
He was interested in liberty.
Don't look for him down here in the midst of the family graveyard.
Up on top of this hill in the sunshine, he's still living.
He was the architect of Monticello, but architecture was his pastime.
Liberty was his passion.
Walk around here where he lived and thought, and you can hear him on the subject of liberty.
The God who gave us life gave us liberty at the same time.
I have sworn upon the altar of God eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over
the mind of man.
You almost expect to find him up here cultivating his begonias.
He could raise flowers.
He could, a biographer wrote accurately, calculate an eclipse, survey an estate, tie an artery,
plan an edifice, try a cause, break a horse, dance a minuet, play a violin.
Never mind.
He gave up all those pursuits to pursue liberty.
He wrote, I have such reliance on the good sense of the body of the people that I am
not afraid of their letting things go wrong to any length in any cause.
He believed in us.
Maybe that's why we feel that he is still with us somehow.
Would he be on the side of black people and poor people trying to gain their civil rights
today?
Beyond a doubt.
Would he support women trying to achieve the same rights as men?
We can be sure of it.
Liberty was his work.
On the wall of his study hangs his plan for the University of Virginia to be built down
the hill from Monticello.
If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, he wrote, it expects what never was and never
will be.
He founded the university as an act of liberty.
Thomas Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence as a red-haired young man of
33.
Over the years he changed his mind about many things, but not about liberty.
As a white-haired old man of 83, he cared about nothing else so much.
The 50th anniversary of the 4th of July was coming and was much on Jefferson's mind.
The mayor of Washington sent him an invitation to attend.
On June 24th, 1826, Jefferson sat down here and took his pen in hand to write that he
was too old and weak to accept.
There was nothing old and weak about that letter.
It was a democratic outburst, as clear as a liberty bell.
The mass of mankind, he wrote, has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor the
favored few booted and spurred to ride them legitimately by the grace of God.
It was a youthful letter, full of power.
It might have been the first thing he ever wrote.
As it turned out, it was the last.
He wanted to live until the 4th of July, and he did.
Fifty years to the day after the Declaration of Independence, having said all he had to
say to us, which was enough, Thomas Jefferson died on this bed a free man.
On that same day, a few hours later, away to the north in Massachusetts, John Adams,
so old and weak, also satisfied to have lived until the 4th, also died.
His last words were, Thomas Jefferson still lives.
You were right about that, Mr. Adams.
When he became president, Mr. Jefferson presided over a tall, narrow country, named to Georgia,
Appalachians to the Atlantic.
Suddenly, in his administration, the shape of the country changed.
This is a story about Napoleon and Jefferson and Talleyrand and foreign intrigue in Paris
and an empire changing hands.
And this is the best place to tell the story, a swamp in Arkansas.
By the time we get down to the end of this rickety wooden footbridge into the swamp,
you'll see what I mean.
The year was 1803, this swamp, all of Arkansas.
In fact, the whole central part of what is now the United States was French.
The French called it all Louisiana.
President Thomas Jefferson wanted one tiny part of that vast French empire.
All he wanted for the United States was the city of New Orleans.
Jefferson sent James Monroe as ambassador to Paris to join Ambassador Robert Livingston
there to negotiate with Napoleon's foreign minister, Talleyrand, to buy New Orleans.
They were authorized to pay as much as $7.5 million.
What Monroe and Livingston didn't know was that Napoleon was plotting to declare himself
emperor of France and to go to war with England.
He knew he didn't have the sea power to defend his vast possessions in the New World, and
he knew that, therefore, England would probably just take them in the war to come.
Bonaparte reasoned, why not get rid of all that land in advance?
Why not sell it to the United States?
So, a long way from this swamp, in a Parisian drawing room, Livingston, who'd been getting
nowhere with Talleyrand trying to buy New Orleans, was flabbergasted to hear the foreign
minister say, what if we sold you more than New Orleans?
What would you give for the whole of Louisiana?
By which he meant, the whole of America between the Mississippi and the Rockies.
The very next day, they agreed on a little land sale.
Livingston didn't even know what he was buying.
Lewis and Clark hadn't yet been west to see what was there, but they signed the papers
before Napoleon could change his mind, $12 million for a third of a continent.
The United States was suddenly doubled in size.
This swamp was suddenly American.
Well, if you own something, you have to survey it.
And to survey something, you have to start somewhere.
Because a meridian and baseline crossed in this swamp, this is where they started.
The inscription says, this stone marks the base, established November 10, 1815, from
which the lands of the Louisiana Purchase were surveyed by United States engineers.
If you live today in Arkansas, Missouri, Iowa, Minnesota, your township boundaries, your
section lines, the boundaries of your lot are based on this stone in the middle of a
cypress swamp in Arkansas.
This stone is a symbol of the American urge, the strongest urge in our history, to cross
the rivers and head west.
It's a symbol of the American itch to own a piece of land, to have it and hold it, enough
for a flower garden or enough for a cattle ranch.
The Louisiana Purchase gave us this swamp, gave us all of Arkansas, gave us Louisiana,
Missouri, Iowa, Minnesota, North and South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma, part of
Texas, most of Montana, Wyoming, Colorado, and New Mexico for about two cents an acre.
There were some in the Senate who said it was too much.
But you'll notice that the French, who thought they were getting a good deal at the time,
hardly ever talk about it anymore.
The Louisiana Purchase doubled the size of the country, and there arose in the land a
powerful urge to go west.
It was felt first by the trappers and then by every sort of dreamer and schemer and sodbuster
until it seemed that half the country was on the trail that led to the west.
If you pick your way among the young cottonwoods and old rattlesnake nests along the face of
this cliff in Wyoming, this is what you find.
The names of some people who passed this way before us.
John A. Mathis, June 10th, 1856, born Henry County, Kentucky, December 15th, 1837, a 19-year-old
boy a long way from home.
And in time came Jedidiah Hines from Ohio County, Kentucky, and in time a man named
Preston from Michigan, and in time came thousands, each yielding to the urge to carve his name
on Register Cliff.
Who were all these people so far from home?
Of course, they were the pioneers.
The wagon track that leads here past the cliff was called the Oregon Trail.
Wyoming was a place of passage, a kind of alkali hell to be got through.
You can still read the signs of the getting through all these years later.
The Oregon Trail is a faint path through the sagebrush leading westward toward the mountains.
It is a hard climb over rocks westward.
It is deep ruts through soft stone, a carving of wagon wheels rolling west.
Those wagons were so heavily laden with the hopes and belongings of people who knew they
were never going back again that they left an indelible mark, the sculpture of their
wheels, upon Wyoming.
The trail follows the rivers as far as the rivers go, the North Platte into Wyoming and
then the sweet water, and passes beside a granite outcropping the emigrants called Independence
Rock.
By the time they reached the rock, they had a thousand miles of desert behind them and
a worse thousand miles of mountains ahead of them.
And no true American could resist climbing up here with a hammer and chisel to say, look,
I got this far.
I was here.
If you wanted to get across the Sierra before the blizzards, it used to be said, you'd better
get to Independence Rock by the 4th of July.
You were right on time, Mr. Hughes.
And so were you, John Beck.
You were a few days late, McKee and Moody, but you had come a long way.
You were a 49er, Milo Ayer, bound for the Goldfields, I imagine.
Did you see the war coming, Mr. Hanks?
Is that why you left Illinois?
Did you lose your farm in that war, Mr. Hart?
Is that why you left Georgia?
From 1841 until they finished that railroad in 1869, through the three middle decades
of the 19th century, the wagons rolled through Wyoming along the Oregon Trail.
The sight of a wagon train retracing that path today gives rise to long thoughts about
those people, those failed farmers and dreamy-eyed gold seekers and hopeful young families who
passed here so long ago.
Three hundred thousand of them endured this trail.
But none of them prepared for the heat and hunger and misery of it, for the sake of whatever
they were hoping for in Oregon or California, places they had never been and had no good
idea of.
Wherever they had come from, when they got where they were going, they had one experience
in common, Wyoming.
And Wyoming tells us so little about them.
J.R.
Hornaday, aged 19 years, one month, nine days.
What happened to you, J.R.
Hornaday?
Did you make it across the desert and across the divide?
Did you grow to manhood in some lush valley of California?
Are your great-great-grandchildren happy tonight in Bakersfield or San Jose?
There is nothing around here to tell us.
All you left in Wyoming is your name.
It was not all glory, the settlement of the American West.
There was misery in it and betrayal and disgrace.
And in the country's centennial year in Montana territory, there was tragedy.
This is about a place where the wind blows and the grass grows and a river flows below
a hill.
Nothing is here but the wind and the grass and the river.
But of all places in America, this is the saddest place I know.
The Indians called this river the Greasy Grass.
White men called it the Little Bighorn.
From that gap in the mountains to the east, Brevet Major General George A. Custer's proud
Seventh Cavalry came riding early in the morning of June 25, 1876, riding toward the Little
Bighorn.
Custer sent one battalion under Major Marcus Reno across the river to attack what he thought
might be a small village of hostile Sioux.
His own battalion he galloped behind the ridges to ride down on the village from the rear.
When at last, Custer brought his 231 troops to the top of a hill and looked down toward
the river.
What he saw was an encampment of 15,000 Indians stretching for two and a half miles, the largest
assembly of Indians the Plains had ever known, and a thousand mounted warriors coming straight
for him.
Reno's men, meantime, had been turned, routed, chased across the river, joined by the rest
of the regiment, surrounded, and now were dying, defending a nameless brown hill.
In a low, protected swale in the middle of their narrowing circle, the one surviving
doctor improvised a field hospital and did what he could for the wounded.
The grass covers the place now and grows in the shallow rifle trenches above, which were
dug that day by knives and tin cups and fingernails.
Two friends in age company, Private Charles Windhoff and Private Julian Jones, fought
up here side by side all that day and stayed awake all that night talking, both of them
scared.
Charles Windhoff said the next morning when the firing commenced, I said to Julian, we
better get our coats off.
He didn't move.
I looked at him.
He was shot through the heart.
Charles Windhoff won the Congressional Medal of Honor up here, survived, lived to be 98.
He didn't die until 1950.
And never a day passed in all those years that he didn't think of Julian Jones.
And Custer's men four miles away?
There are stones in the grass that tell the story of Custer's men.
The stones all say the same thing.
U.S. soldier, 7th Cavalry, fell here June 25, 1876.
The warriors of Sitting Bull under the great Chief Gall struck Custer first and divided
his troops.
Two Moon and the Northern Cheyenne struck him next.
And when he tried to gain a hilltop with the last remnants of his command, Crazy Horse
rode over that hill with hundreds of warriors and right through his battalion.
The Indians who were there later agreed on two things, that Custer and his men fought
with exceeding bravery and that after half an hour not one of them was left alive.
The Army came back that winter.
Of course the Army came back and broke the Sioux and the Cheyenne and forced them back
to the starvation of the reservations and in time murdered more old warriors and women
and children on the Pine Ridge Reservation than Custer lost young men in battle here.
That's why this is the saddest place.
For Custer and the 7th Cavalry, courage only led to defeat.
For Crazy Horse and the Sioux, victory only led to wounded knee.
Come here sometime and you'll see.
There is melancholy in the wind and sorrow in the grass and the river weeps.
And now we've come to California, the land of dreams for the gold diggers, the oil riggers,
the okies and their battered trucks, the movie makers and their rolled voices.
From the very beginning there were big dreams in California.
The bell that rang in Philadelphia couldn't be heard out here.
In California they had no way of knowing that across the continent a country was being started.
Besides, they were too busy ringing these bells, starting a country.
This is Mission San Juan Capistrano, founded in 1776.
These old walls and crumbling arches represent a dream that failed, a Spanish dream of an
empire in North America.
The Spanish knew about California during all those years when the English on the opposite
coast of the continent were building cities and making roads and farming the river valleys.
They claimed California, but they saw no value in it.
The Spanish didn't get around to building these missions until the end of their two-and-a-half
centuries of domination of the world, and by then it was too late.
The first of the missions was not yet 40 years old when the Americans swept across the Mississippi
headed west.
The first of the missions was not yet 80 when the Americans took California.
That Philadelphia bell finally rang loudest.
And these buildings, constructed so painfully, so magnificently in a wilderness, quickly
became only relics of a failed colonial past.
But that is all history, dry as dust.
Come into the present.
At Queenly Santa Barbara, the choir at Sunday morning mass still sings Santa Maria Madre
de Dios exactly as that hymn was sung by neophytes when the mission was young.
A boy late for church school still runs across the old stones at Carmel, as boys must have
done 200 years ago.
People still take their lunch at the Mission San Luis Obispo, which is still at the center
of the community.
And even the royal road which the Spanish built to connect the 21 missions is still
in use.
El Camino Real has become, in the modern shorthand, Highway 101.
If you travel the royal road, you can still stop to rest at the missions.
They are best visited in silence.
So I think I'll be silent for a minute and leave you to the gardens and cloisters of
a California that was not to be.
As you visit, give a thought to a great priest, Father Junipero Serra, who came here carrying
only a cross and did all this for God and for Spain.
Think of the effort, the intention, and the broken dream.
Just one more thing.
If you doubt that these first buildings of Spanish California could have led in any way
to the California we know, say some of the missions' names in Spanish.
San Gabriel, San Jose, Santa Clara, Santa Cruz, San Fernando, San Rafael, San Luis Obispo,
Santa Barbara, San Diego, San Francisco.
To the west, a rugged country gave birth to a rugged figure of legend, the straight shooter,
tall in the saddle.
We went looking for him in Texas.
No hero of the American drama ever had a more spectacular stage than this on which to play
his part.
And no stage ever gave us such a bold and enduring hero.
Whenever we think about our past, he is there.
Only those Americans who have never seen him have known him all their lives.
A dusty man of few words, on horseback with chaps and spurs, wearing a Stetson low over
his eyes, the cowboy.
Texas gave us the cowboy.
Chances are, as a matter of historical fact, he was a Mexican or a black man or a disillusioned
toehead kid in the tattered remnants of a Confederate uniform.
In those lost days of the 1860s and 70s, Texas sent him along with the Longhorn herds up
the Chisholm Trail to Abilene, and from there, by story and song, to the whole world.
And so when we wanted to find him again, we came back to Texas, to one of the big ranches
west of the Pecos, one that extends over the mountains and through the canyons for 40 miles
or more, where the spring roundup still takes a month of hard riding.
It is Herbert Coconut's ranch.
It was his father's.
And his grandfather and his great-grandfather, a scout for Sam Houston, were ranchers too.
It will be the ranch of Chris Lacey, Herbert Coconut's grandson, with whom the old man
consults on the future with the knowledge of generations past.
This is where we came to look for the cowboy.
We found him much changed from the legend.
He herds herfords now, not Longhorns, and he leaves his six-gun on the shelf back home.
Much changed and unchanged.
Still the long days in the saddle commencing at dawn with the ranch manager's signal to
move out.
Still the ride into the sun, in the certain knowledge that the ride will not end until
the sun goes down.
Still the elusive steers and heifers unaccustomed to riders on horseback and bawling their unwillingness
to be herded, as they must be twice a year.
Still the hard West Texas wind, still the hot West Texas sun, still the black storm
clouds that force a man to break out his poncho on a day that dawned fair and promising.
All that is unchanged.
Still the bullfight.
Why do they fight?
Is not a ten-mile drive into the wind enough to take the wind out of them?
Still the bullfight that must be broken up.
Still the danger of a sudden movement, an instant of fright that can spook a rounded
up herd and send it bolting for freedom.
Still the stampede that has to be turned by cursing men on galloping horses unless the
whole day's work is to be lost, has to be, and is.
Still the calf that breaks away, so small that he's hardly worth running down for the
promise of 25 cents a pound six months or a year from now, but who must be run down.
Still the skittish calf and still the bucking horse, still the danger of being thrown or
dragged and crippled.
Still the branding.
New calves and yearlings still have to be herded into a high country pen, thrown on
their sides and sat on.
The pen was made of barbed wire and cottonwood limbs and goes back to the turn of the century.
The brand, 06, was young Chris Lacey's great-great-great grandfather's and goes back to before there
was a Texas.
Still the fire and camp at the end of day, all this is the way it has always been.
It is passing strange that such hard and dirty windblown work should have made of this frozen
and bone weary entirely mortal man a legend.
He does not look the part.
We do not like our legends off their horses.
The punishing reality of the cowboy's life always yields in our memory to the shining
dream.
There he is, the embodiment of bold action, straight talk and rough justice.
The self-sufficient man of contained pride.
That is the way we wanted him to be.
And we grew up wanting to be him.
In most places, machines long ago took over from horses.
There came a time when our heroes wore lab coats not chaps and spurs and used calipers
not revolvers.
The industrial revolution came upon us.
He was a farm boy, 13 years old.
He did not know anything about watches, but his friend, Albert Hutchings, had a watch
that would not run.
The farm boy persuaded Albert to let him look inside.
He sat down here at a shelf beneath the window of the farmhouse and with a pair of tweezers
he made from one of his mother's corset stays and a little screwdriver he made from a shingle
nail, he figured out that watch and he fixed it.
When Albert Hutchings' watch started ticking, the world was changed because the farm boy
was not interested in farming anymore.
He was interested in wheels and machines.
America has always had more than her share of boys like Henry Ford and has yet.
Boys who don't care about school or their father's line of work, but who love machinery.
Watches and clocks just happened to be the first machinery Henry could get his hands
on.
Henry Ford worked in a foundry, in a street car plant, in an engine works.
Summertime he took jobs with a steam sawmill gang and a steam threshing crew, wheels.
Wheels that moved, iron on iron.
Gears and valves and rockers and pistons and turning wheels were becoming an American religion
and among the devout communicants was Henry Ford.
And so when the gasoline engine was invented, of course he mastered that too.
And of course he made it run a carriage on the road, always sending his friend Jim Bishop
ahead on a bicycle that summer of 1896 to warn other drivers to hold their horses.
And that is how a new sound was heard in Dearborn, Michigan.
Henry Ford didn't invent the automobile, but he invented this one.
People laughed at it, but when Henry parked it, he found he had to chain it to a tree
or a lamppost to keep those same people from trying it out.
He kept tinkering with the car and started selling it.
He improved it in a major way 19 times over the years.
The 20th time he called it the Model T. He went out and sold 15 million of them.
Of course the Model T changed everything.
It gave us mass production, mass mobility, an industrial elite, the motor car that could
be afforded, the motor car as a right of birth.
It gave us traffic jams and parking lots and paved streets and billboards and air pollution.
It gave us the Sunday drive and the Sunday driver.
It gave us suburbs and supermarkets.
But it is useless to hail or condemn the coming of the automobile.
It is this way.
There were boys in the land who did not care for farming or schooling, who cared only for
wheels and machines.
There was one named Edison in New Jersey and two brothers in Ohio named Wright and one
in Michigan named Ford.
Similar boys have lately returned from the moon and who knows where they may take us
next.
In the Henry Ford Museum at Greenfield Village where we have filmed this story, there are
hundreds of thousands of exhibits and one most visitors overlook.
It is the one that promises the inevitability of the automobile.
It goes back to Henry Ford's youth.
It is Albert Hutchings' watch.
Some Americans, of course, were left out of the progress of the 19th century as they'd
been left out of everything hopeful that had happened in this country from the beginning.
That had to change and the change had to start with the chance at an education.
Most of the beautiful old antebellum mansions of the south like this one in Tuskegee, Alabama
were built by the labor of black slaves.
Then one day slavery ended and then in Tuskegee and the south, it was time for a new kind
of building.
It was freedom that built Tuskegee Institute, the black students themselves who constructed
it brick by brick in order to have a place where they could begin in the 1880s that long
struggle toward a kind of freedom no emancipation proclamation could guarantee.
No more weeping, Booker T. Washington said.
He was born a slave.
By founding Tuskegee, he proclaimed an end to slavery.
Booker T. Washington, ex-slave, came to Alabama from Hampton Institute in Virginia in 1881.
Dan Williams, the archivist of Tuskegee's history, tells how it all started.
It started with the dream of one man, Louis Adams, who was a blacksmith in town, a former
slave who was born in 1842, by the way, who saw the need of some sort of school here to
train black youth in Macon County and out of this dream, he worked with some whites
in the town of Tuskegee Institute in seeking to find someone to found a school and so they
wrote to Hampton Institute to General Armstrong who was over at Hampton Institute at that
time and Armstrong recommended Booker T. Washington who was just a young man in days of 24 and
then that said that that was the only one that he had and so Mr. Adams, the former slave
and Mr. Campbell, the former slave owner, said Booker T. Washington will do.
For a nation currently searching through its past for heroes, Booker T. Washington will
do.
He rode out of here in a cart drawn by a mule to tell black youngsters about the new school
at Tuskegee.
He told them they'd have to build the school themselves.
To this place came intense students and great teachers, like the man who worked in this
lab in an apron made of flower sacks for 47 years, agriculture's gentle revolutionary,
Dr. George Washington Carver.
Tuskegee was and is scientific, industrial, agricultural, and because of its beginnings,
much more.
To a lot of black men and women in America, this place is hallowed ground.
The man who hallowed it isn't easy to sum up, but he once made a statement about his
life that could serve.
Without regard to pay, he said, and with little thought of it, I taught anyone who wanted
to learn anything I could teach him.
Knowledge means a job and a job means freedom.
That's what the civil rights movement says today.
That's what Booker T. Washington said a long time ago.
To be free, that is the impulse that has animated Americans in every generation.
All these places we have visited are waiting for you to visit them, too.
You'll feel prouder of the country afterwards.
We do.
We, by the way, are Isidore Blackman, who makes the pictures.
This is Izzy making a picture of himself, and Larry Gianeschi, who records the sound.
There's one more place we'd like to take you.
This place is the refined essence of freedom.
This one day in Vermont, the town carpenter lays aside his tools.
The town doctor sees no patients.
The shopkeeper closes his shop.
Mothers tell their children they'll have to warm up their own dinner.
This one day, people in Vermont look not to their own welfare, but to that of their town.
It doesn't matter that it's been snowing since four o'clock this morning.
They'll be here.
This is town meeting day.
Every March, for 175 years, the men and women of Strafford, Vermont have trudged up this
hill on the one day which is their holiday for democracy.
They walk past a sign that says, The Old White Meeting House, built in 1799 and consecrated
as a place of public worship for all denominations, with no preference for one above another.
Since 1801, it has also been in continuous use as a town hall.
Here, every citizen may have his say on every question.
One question is, will the town stop paying for outside health services?
The speaker is a farmer, an elected select man, David K. Brown.
And Farmer Brown says yes.
This individual was trying or thinking about committing suicide.
So we called the Orange County Mental Health, this was, I believe, on a Friday night.
They said they'd see him Tuesday afternoon.
And if we had any problems, take him to Hanover and put him in the emergency room.
Now I don't know if we should pay $582.50 for that kind of advice.
They talked about that for half an hour, asking themselves if this money would be well or
poorly spent.
This is not representative democracy.
This is pure democracy, in which every citizen's voice is heard.
We will vote on this before we go to Article 4.
All those in favor, signify by saying aye.
Aye.
All that opposed?
Aye.
I'm going to ask for a standing vote.
All those in favor, stand, please.
It's an old Yankee expression which originated here in the town meeting and has entered the
language of free men.
Stand up and be counted.
And when the judgment is made and announced by James Condict, maker of rail fences and
moderator of this meeting, the town will abide by the judgment.
There are 100 votes cast, 61 in favor, and 39 against.
It then becomes deleted from the town budget.
This is the way the founders of this country imagined it would be, that citizens would
meet in their own communities to decide directly most of the questions affecting their lives
and fortunes.
Vermont's small towns have kept it this way.
Will or will not, Stratford, Vermont, turn off its streetlights to save money?
All those in favor, signify by saying aye.
Paper ballot.
That's my right to, any member's right to, the meeting, to call it a day.
Is that seconded?
Seconded.
Is that seconded?
Prepare and cast your ballots for this amendment.
If any citizen demands a secret ballot, a secret ballot it must be.
Everybody who votes in Vermont has taken an old oath to always vote his conscience without
fear or favor of any person.
This is something old, something essential.
You tear off a little piece of paper and on it you write yes or no.
Stratford voted to keep the streetlights shining.
There is pie baked by the ladies of the PTA.
There are baked beans and brown bread served at town meeting by Celia Lane as long as anybody
can remember.
Then a little more wood is added to the stove and a dozen more questions are debated and
voted on in the long afternoon.
What is really on the menu today is government of the people.
Finally came the most routine of all motions, the motion to adjourn.
All those that ever signify by saying aye, all that oppose, then we don't adjourn and
the nays have it.
It is heady stuff, democracy.
They wanted to go on enjoying it for a while in Stratford today.
When finally they did adjourn and walk out into the snow it was with the feeling of having
preserved something important, something more important than their streetlights, their liberty.
And so we come back to the place of our beginning.
We started with the sun coming up on America.
It's just gone down in the west.
One more day of American history is past.
Of course we have many more stories to tell you, good people for you to meet, beautiful
places to take you to see.
When the sun comes up tomorrow we'll be back on the road.
I hope you'll come along.
All these new words I've been wondering Just when I think I'm near the end
I always see the road is bending And I wonder what's around the bend