 The Columbia Broadcasting System presents Norman Corwin's One World Flight. You're standing in the Mykosky station of the metro under the heart of Moscow, awaiting train signals to workmen in the subway to clear the track. You're strolling along Hallam Street in London, and you're overtaken by a Courtney street peddler selling cut iris, cut cauliflower, Yorkshire blue peas, and brand new potatoes. Holy cuckoo, bless God! In the library of a pleasant house in New Delhi, India, talking with Pandit Nehru about the world and the future, he says, But if we think of freedom for one world, then all this racialism and one race or one nation or one country being fundamentally superior to another, that has to be given up. No doubt, people are not all alike, nations are not alike. Everybody is not the same as clever or as strong as anybody else. You're in a hotel in Manila, sleeping at 6.45 in the morning, and suddenly you're awakened by sounds of the reconstruction of the Philippines going on right outside your window. What you've just listened to, the hammering, Mr. Nehru, the peddler, and the subway train, are fragments among several hundred authentic sounds of foreign places and voices of foreign people to be heard in a new series of CBS broadcasts beginning with this one. Last February, two American organizations, the Wilkie Memorial and the Common Council for American Unity, established an award consisting of a flight around the globe, a flight intended to dramatize and perpetuate Wendell Wilkie's concept of one world. The first winner of the award, chosen on the basis of contributions already made to this ideal, was the CBS playwright and producer Norman Corwin. Last June, Mr. Corwin, with Leigh Bland of CBS and a magnetic wire recorder, set out on a globe-circling trip in the course of which they preserved a hundred hours of the voices and opinions of the people of 16 countries. Tonight and every Tuesday night for the next 12 weeks, Mr. Corwin will bring you the story and record of his one world flight. Footnotes, all made of music, all identified sounds, all foreign voices heard in these broadcasts were actually recorded by Corwin and Bland in various parts of the world. The singers, for example, are Arab women sitting on a rooftop in Cairo on a warm evening last August, celebrating the independence of Egypt, an historic event which occurred that very morning. This is Norman Corwin. These broadcasts have to do with some of the people of the world and with much of the state of the peace, and therefore I believe they have to do with you and me. Today, if war comes anywhere, it will be close to us. No place is far anymore. We are one with others, whether we want to be or not. Tonight, we will stop in no single country, but by way of preview, introduce you to some of the hope and despair that exist side by side in the world today. This aspect I present first before beginning to tell you any progressive story of the flight, because to the observer traveling as I did, it is what strikes you first and asserts itself most often. The war has left in its wake all kinds of attitudes and conditions of mind and spirit, ranging from unshakable confidence to active fear. And it becomes apparent, at least it did to me, that in the drawing together toward the middle of extremes of economic, social, political, and even of certain religious philosophies, lies the safest, if not the only way, to a lasting peace. Within this theme, you will hear tonight moments out of interviews with people high and low, optimists, pessimists, liberals, fascists, communists, stevedores, prime ministers. For example, in the cabinet room at number 10 Downing Street, you sit with the British prime minister, Clement Attlee, at the long beer cabinet table. He pops a pipe and he answers your questions in a friendly, relaxed manner. After all, we're trying to clear up after the Greatest War in history, and you can't expect all the problems of that war. Good many left over from a severe urban light, but I think it's worthwhile paying some attention to the heritage activity which serves agreement. Hopeful enough. But then there's the poor widow, Camilla, in the Italian mountain village of Vannuvio, who lost all her hopes in a single day of war. You stand in a square of a shattered village under the boiling sun. Her neighbors crowd about you. You ask her questions through an interpreter. How big is her family? About a three yard. I live with her spirit. She had three children. Two have died and she has one alive now. Two of them were killed in the bombardment. Now, what about her husband? Her husband was killed in the same bombardment. All of them died together. Two children and a husband. I see, so she has one child left. She lost her father and her husband as well as two children and about ten relatives, close relatives in all. You ask where she lives, what she gets to eat. She says she never eats breakfast. At midday she has a thin soup and in the evening a piece of bread. Can she not afford to eat more or is there not enough food available? It's because she has no money and the situation is so bad that she sort of farms a little boy out to various relatives who can feed him a little better every now and then. What are her hopes for an improvement in this condition? And then the tall finance minister of Denmark, Thorkel Christensen, who's not so sure that we're finished making widows through warfare. You interview him in an anti-room to the house chamber in the parliament building in Copenhagen. He pauses for a long moment before he answers your point blank question about war. Do you feel that there is going to be another war? I'm very much afraid of it. In fact, you are. You think there is a real danger of it? I think there is. And across the world from Copenhagen, at a dockside in the beautiful harbor of Sydney on a clear, sharp day of the Australian spring, a big gray-haired, God-fearing stevedore takes time off from loading the good ship Corinda to point out a path for the nations. I remember the aristocracy of the working class. That's the water-side workers' federation. And now we're looked upon as the aristocracy because we give leads in matters of progress that affect the workers. Now, why did you learn your very good, extemporaneous power of speech? I learned it from intense studies for many years by myself. You were not a university man? No. No. I've only had an ordinary education, but by the power of God through the Holy Spirit, He has put in my heart the words that are acceptable to hearers by trying to live the life. Trying, Mark. You don't say that I've succeeded, but I've made a reasonably successful effort. Do you share with the two gentlemen that I've just interviewed here confidence that we are going to get through the next 25 or 50 years without war? No. No. You will not get through without war unless the world regenerates itself in a sincere line. I would suggest that the great powers assure Russia that they do not want war and also get an assurance from her that she is satisfied to work at her own destiny with the territory she has and her compensation as the result of a terrific sacrifice of this war. And in Russia, the editor of the Moscow News, Mr. Borodin, addresses a dinner given you at the hotel metropole by the Soviet Society for Foreign Cultural Relations. He speaks very slowly, professing the friendship of his country for America, describing what he calls Russia's, quote, tremendously difficult struggle to protect the great interests of a great people, unquote. And then he warns against those who are crying for war. You may have difficulty at first making out the words conflagration and influence and the name of the writer Gorky. Please tell your people that congregations don't start at once. They start from spark. So apparently they have no influence but the conflagration starts and there are people who start the words conflagration as our great Gorky said in order that it be war on for some people. Let me repeat that. Gorky says that there are people in the world who start the conflagration so long as it upwards in a bit of war. They don't care for the interests of humanity so long as it keeps them warm. Those are the war mongers, the war profiteers, those are the reactionaries who created fascism, who brought up fascism and who are still cherishing the hope of some day using fascism in order to kill you and me and every man, woman and child who profess the great ideals of democracy. The phrase one world comes easy. There's nothing hard to remember about it. There was a time when the world meant to the average man a blur of lands and matters outside his life. Long journeys he could never take, languages he would never understand and customs he could never fathom. But twice in our time the world reached into his life and shook him up. That was the least it did. It was a world problem, not a local feud which took your neighbor's boy out of his class, his uniform and killed him. And it could happen again. Tonight, if you think much about it, one world means urgently and above everything else, survival. It has higher meanings, of course, such as the wholesale rewards of total unity, meanings not comfortably smirked at or dismissed like goodwill and the brotherhood of man. But it was within the less idealistic meaning of the phrase, within the immediate and concrete meaning set out on this trip. I went looking for practical testaments of agreement for signs of a uniting world. I found less of these than we would wish for, but I also found plenty of hope. I listened to people's troubles and to nations' troubles, which are often the same thing. I witnessed many a disagreement, sometimes in the form of violence and death. But because I felt all of it belonged in the record, down as well as I could, whenever and wherever I could, what I thought related to the present and the future and to one world. At no time did I attempt to conduct a poll or to make mathematical measurements. In essence, I recorded that which I felt to be significant to us and to these days. Not always were the profoundest things said by presidents and premiers, often in quite unexpected places. Ordinary people, humble people, spoke wisdom, which came through interpretation undamaged. One night, I was dining outdoors at the Giena restaurant in Rome, and I felt a talking with Sonego, a young Italian partisan who'd fought the Nazis in the mountains and killed a dozen of them with his bare hands. He was at first shy about talking because he looked upon me as a foreign correspondent. But at last, he opened up. You'll hear him for a moment and the interpretation as it was pieced together. I would have been rather unwilling to answer the question of a foreign correspondent because I know that Italy has been beaten in this war and that the winning party is the country to whom this foreign correspondent belongs. But once I've heard what the creed of Mr. Corwin is, that is to say, one world, I must say that that is the creed of all my fellow partisans and of myself. That's what we used to say when we were lost in the mountains in heavy snow and rain, but nobody to protect us, but the stars. Every one of us said, why isn't there one world, one flag under which we can all march and be united? That is why we have been fighting and that is why we believe and we sincerely believe that all the world should be very simply unified under one flag because we do not want to keep on fighting for separate flags, for several separate colors, but for one flag and one color throughout the world. And the Greece-stained Polish worker in the power plant on the banks of the Vistula in Shaffard Warsaw. I asked him what he, as a man who worked in the generation of power, thought of the possibilities of atomic energy replacing steam and coal. He answered, Well, it's possible, but in any case, if you're very energetic, it won't be a good world. I think that maybe it's possible, but I don't think that the atomic energy will be the biggest power in the world. What does he think will be the biggest power in the world? I think that the human being was a greater generator than steam or uranium. In the powerhouse, the restaurant, on the farm by the dockyard in chambers of parliament in the ruined village underground in mines and in planes flying above clouds, I found few people anywhere who did not want exactly what you want, to live in peace, to let others live in peace, to prosper, to progress, to think freely, to speak, assemble, worship and travel freely. Very, very few whom I met considered it sentimental and visionary to talk in terms of a unified world in which security and peace can become sensations greater than tension, crisis and war. Some had doubts as to the way of achieving one world or cynicism with respect to their chances of living to see it, but they all want it. They yearn for it. They are willing to work for it. Exceptions, of course, I suppose, they have to be in order to prove rules. The exceptions were mainly selfish or maleducated people of the type incapable of drawing any inference from all that has happened to them in their lives, incapable of learning the simplest lesson out of the costliest and most terrible experience in human history. There was, for example, the dockhand in the same group as the self-styled aristocrat of the workers. Well, I thought Hitler was not a bad sort at all. He felt the Fuhrer had rescued Germany from a great evil. Well, I was in Haerberg in 1923 and the conditions brought about by the Jews in Germany, they faked into Germany when the war was on, when the last war was on, and the conditions brought about by the Jewish occupation in Germany were frightful. And the young Australian accountant on the busy street corner who said he was convinced that fascism was dead and buried. The body, he said, lies molding in the grave and will for a long time. Yet, he had a race theory that was mighty like a fascist. But I consider that the potential danger the world priests lies in the coloured races. I can see in the, in embryos, more or less, I can see in the very backward primitive peoples of the islands the Andean, the parts of Asia that I visited, are potential Japanese. I consider that he, given the same opportunity as the Japanese, as many people would today, they talk about raising his standards of living, educating him, and more or less, raising him to our standard, which is an industrial, highly industrial and mechanical standard, I think that he, that he will possibly become a Frankenstein monster and turn on us and devour us as the Japanese. And the young girl in devastated Manila, who, though she well knew what war can be, still could make this recommendation to America. If I were your people in America, I am going to induce President Truman right now to finish up Russia, because if he does that right now, we have no way about her in the next, in the future. There were long distances and intervals between people who recommended this kind of solution for the world's problems. The last such instance before this one came 10,000 miles earlier, not directly, but within a story told me by an Unruh worker, an American woman in Italy. She told this story of the way she had celebrated VJ Day in Bologna. I was in Bologna on VJ Day when I'd heard the first word that the war with Japan was over. I went into the nearest American hotel because I was very anxious to be around some fellow countrymen at this time, and I introduced myself to two young American tenants who were the Air Corps. One of the boys talked with me and said that his father was a very wealthy man, and his father had always been in favor of wars because he thought it was a good way of reducing the population. But he said he felt sure that his father, after his being in the war, and after his father knew about the horrors of the atom bomb, would change even his mind. Consequently, this boy thought there was a good hope for future permanent peace. Suddenly a man came up, another officer. He walked up, joined us, meant talking about the atom bomb, and said that in his mind, America had already lost the war and had done a very serious thing when it had not used the atom bomb on Russia. One of the young tenants arose, walked quietly over to where the other officer was standing who had made this remark, hit him with all his strength, and said, you have dedicated this day for me. Among people who had experienced war, the sentiments of this officer whose jaw was hit and of the Filipino girl whose city had been hit were rare. Much more representative were the Czech underground fighter Dr. Sebe, and the businessman Edgel in Bathurst, and the son of the founding president of China, Dr. Sun Fou in Nanking. The first of these, Dr. Sebe, was an underground fighter, a lawyer who had been captured by the Nazis, tortured with exceptional cruelty, and sentenced to die. I'd bring you now the voice of Dr. Sebe in his full statement except that the recording is poor, as you can hear from this sentence. This is what would be my message to the United Nations. Dr. Sebe said, quote, this is what would be my humble message to the United Nations. Not to breed the idea that there is a necessity of a war between the Western and Eastern conceptions of life. I know that this is the last hope of fascism. In every part of the world, and especially in Germany, fascists and reactionaries do everything in their power to breed the conception of the inevitability of war. I hate this conception, and I am deeply convinced that it is not true, unquote. My talk with Dr. Sebe was in the lobby of a hotel in Prague. 17,000 miles further along in the trip, in the city of Bathurst, on the edge of the Blue Mountains in New South Wales, the owner of a prosperous canning factory, Mr. Edgel, was in essential agreement with Dr. Sebe. I had a long interview with this industrialist in his noisy plant one morning, and at the end of it, he said this. I think the bogie of communism, and I think a great deal less than it was some years ago, and anyway, we're beginning to realise that communists are ordinary people, much like ourselves, and their views cannot in the long run be so very greatly different to our own. And why shouldn't one be optimistic? What's the good of being pessimistic? I think it's only by optimism that we can create the better world, we can get better living conditions, perhaps shorter hours of work, and perhaps more money to spend and more leisure for sport. Maybe that's the best thing, it was the thing we all want, but whatever it is, we've got to work together and be optimistic of the final results. Another man who thought it important to get together, and in a country which badly needs it, was Dr. Sun Foo, son of the late great Dr. Sun Yat Sen, founder of the Chinese Republic. Dr. Sun, now president of China's legislative yuan, spoke at a diplomatic reception to us in Nanjing. Dr. Sun said he'd been asked by Chinese newspapers and outside to comment on whether he thought that the opposing Guomandang and communist parties were sincere about wanting peace. He told the meeting... I believe, naturally, that the Chinese Guomandang and the Guomandang are really sincere about peace within China. I also believe that the Chinese Communist Party is also sincere about peace for us. There is no man in his senses who would want war and bloodshed. A lawyer who had fought in the underground, a government leader, and a businessman, 17,000 miles apart, but eye to eye on the necessity of getting together. And all along those 17,000 miles and the 20,000 more which lay across our route, the majority of people everywhere had, to greater or lesser degree, hope, optimism, confidence. This, in spite of the fact that many had lost their loved ones and had seen their countrymen die, had been invaded and pillaged, had suffered cold starvation torture. They were hopeful, in spite of the known terrors of the last war, hopeful they would not be made to know the thousand-fold terrors of any next war. There were places in the world where hope was feeble or had been extinguished. And there the concept of one world had the toughest going, among the helpless, the homeless, the underfed, the underpaid, the undereducated, the underprivileged. And it seemed to me that not the least job to be done is to distribute hope or the reason to hope among those elements of great populations who today are hopeless and helpless. If the confidence of a lawyer in Prague and the businessmen in Bathurst could be shared with the Salaheen of Egypt and the Untouchable of India and with the widow of Lanuvio, then perhaps we'd be getting on toward the world of Wendell Wokie's dreams. But in the meantime, as I went around, the widow became to me a symbol of hopelessness. This woman was no food, no home, no prospect. Her husband and two children buried in the ruins of fascism. I heard her voice in many places far from Italy. This voice and the echo of guns only lately filled and the silence of the cemeteries, the begging of arms and the whimper of hungry children. This voice and the mute rubble of wasted towns and cities, these were the sounds of need. Need for the hope and for the reality of a united world. I invite you to be with us next week when we will board a constellation and begin the story of the flight as it started in New York. You have been listening to Norman Corwin, CBS playwright, producer and first winner of the One World War in the first of a series of Columbia broadcasts entitled One World Flight, the authentic story with recordings of his 37,000 mile global trip. This is CBS, the Columbia Broadcasting Station.