 How do you measure these giant things that have grown here? How take their stature? How gauge or weigh them? Pace off the shadow that sprawls from the chimney. Add the rolls of steel. Count the rubber tires. No matter. Its hugeness still eludes you that total is more than the sum of its parts. For an ore infinitely more subtle than iron bubbles in these cauldrons, and more chains are broken here than forged. Peer deep into the white hot coals. Bear for a moment the heat upon your face, for you too have an interest here. In these flames are the beginnings of tomorrow. This is the forge for the future. The National Broadcasting Company in cooperation with the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation presents Forge for the Future, the sixth in a series of programs documenting one of the most significant developments of our generation, the rebirth of the American South. To report this 20th century revolution, NBC correspondent Henry Cassidy led a pilgrimage into the South and caught on his tape recorder some of the voices and sounds of this latter day renaissance. This his sixth report tells of the growth of big industry in the South and the changes it has brought. Mr. Cassidy. It's a commonplace that travel is stimulating largely because of the occasional incidents that jolt the newcomer from long established and sometimes cherished ideas. So it was with me. As a New Englander I had assumed the giant factories and mills that dot my northern land had no equal in the South. As I traveled southward I was prepared for cotton and for tobacco for a burning sun and the lazy, time-haunted rivers. These I saw, but there was more, Birmingham, Memphis, Atlanta. I saw Gadsden, Alabama, where the Goodyear plant sprawled over what was once gently rolling farmland. I sat in a control tower above a huge rail yard that, like some giant brain, sent out nerve tendrils to the uttermost parts. I saw a blacksmith's forge grown out of the proportions of some lusty giant and chimneys that mocked the knight and write their message across the clouds. But above all there were voices, voices of the men who built these places, pulled these levers, signal the starting and the stopping of the wheels. There was one voice that, long after I had returned from this place, came back with the insistence of some compelling music or the rhythm of a half-remembered poem. Here are the words spoken offhand, but summing up in one sentence the hours, the days and the weeks I spent observing this latest phenomenon in the development of southern industry. If dividends, whether they be monetary or otherwise, are to be reaped, the men must know the rules of the game beforehand. As they perform well and honestly, we feel that the future will be bright. Of course for a long time the outstanding industry in the south was textiles. We are now rapidly getting away from that. We are rather turning to the more modern industries, the chemical industries, the synthetic fabrics, the newspaper and paper and pulp industries. These are not only industries which use the resources of the south, they are high-wage industries which provides a very much needed outlet for southern labor. This is Professor B. U. Ratchford of Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, a gentleman we visited on several occasions to find the significance of the things we were observing. We asked him to trace the pattern for us to point out the reasons for the sudden growth of industrial activity in a land that for centuries had known only an occasional mill or a lonely chimney above the rows of planted things. As for industry, I would say that, especially in the past ten years, a number of factors have been of tremendous importance, and the first of these perhaps is the fact that the south has abundant labor supply. During the war when labor was very scarce, there were enormous numbers of laborers in the south, either unemployed or only partly employed in agriculture. So when new industries had to be built and when the labor supply was scarce in the northern and midwestern industries, many of them moved to the south to take advantage of this labor. And this is on the whole intelligent labor, untrained, it is true, but capable of being trained fairly rapidly. That has been demonstrated in dozens of cases. And we sought out other chapters of this story. It was in the office of Frank Shaw, industrial relations manager of the Atlanta Chamber of Commerce, that a second chapter was added. All about us, like the notes for some yet to be written book, were the charts and maps that showed the new plants, the latitude and the longitude of a revolution. What are the reasons, Mr. Shaw, we asked for these new things that we have seen? All there are numerous reasons, it would be hard to point to any particular one, but just reviewing a few of them, the federal government itself is committed to a policy of regional equalization in many respects. Perhaps the dominant factor is the growing market in the south. It's the fastest growing consumer market in the country, also the fastest growing market for industrial goods, utilities, transportation equipment and many other things. Even in the older industrial areas, some of the plants are gradually becoming obsolete and to replace that production is logical to put new plants in the parts of the country that are buying your goods that are not producing them at present. Well there then, Mr. Shaw, we find reasons for movement of industry from north to south. It's not so much what you'd call a migration, but it's a regionalization of industry. You don't pick up a plant and just move it, you just branch out down here and operate in both sections of the country. And another voice, C. O. Hodges, President of the Giant American Cast Iron Pipe Company in Birmingham, Alabama. The sounds of industry, of course, are not new to this city. In our reading of the War Between the States, we learn that this place was an arsenal for the proud, ragged men who guarded the hills above Fredericksburg. Weapons forged here were carried across the little stone wall that marked the union lines at Gettysburg, but surely the earlier men could not have fashioned, even from their dreams, the changes that have come. It was Mr. Hodges who first told us of John Joseph Egan and how fitting a name for the hero of an American folk story. Listen to the tale of John Joseph Egan, businessman. For the first 19 years, our company was not unlike the average corporation except possibly that it enjoyed progressive management. In 1921, one of the outstanding founders of our company, John Joseph Egan, acquired all of the common stock and began then to put into practice his ideas and ideals with reference to industrial progress and management. Between the years 1921 and 1924, he created or caused to be created two boards, one representing the employees and the other representing management. The members of the employees board were known as the Board of Operatives, and they were elected by secret ballot in various divisions of the plant. The Board of Management, on the other hand, is what is known ordinarily as the Executive Committee coming out of the Board of Directors. And through these two boards, this great man sought to bring about a better understanding between management and workers. Some of the benefits that have come out of this have been better working conditions and enlargement of our medical service. In 1925 and 1926, the doing away with all cuts over the payroll, which is to say that of all these benefits, such as accident and sickness benefits, employees' pensions, later group insurance, all charges for medical service, these were done away with. And following the World War II, we inaugurated a general profit-sharing plan. These things may sound like paternalism or socialism to the radical, but we have found that John Egan knew what he was doing way back yonder decades ago, because the benefits that have come out of this setup have been the virtual elimination of absenteeism, labor turnover, and a minimum of conflict and misunderstanding as between any of the groups. We believe that we have a plan here which has something to offer to any other industry or company who would be so bold as John Egan was to put it down in black and white, honestly laying down the rules and thereafter abiding by them. One thing we have learned is that 90% of the misunderstandings and the so-called grievances come about through ignorance. This sounds to me like a song of the New South, the sound of heavy industry. We're standing outside the American Cast Iron Pipe Company at Primingham, Alabama, and here is where the raw material is arriving for this plan. And Ken, here, your scrap iron is being picked up by Magnet and perhaps you could describe to us, Ken, what is going on here. We're unloading here various grades of cast scrap iron, pig iron, and cast steel. From these bins, which you see, we will make up the proper analysis for charging into the Cupid O'Furnaces. Kenneth R. Daniel, Chief Engineer for the American Cast Iron Pipe Company, he talks easily and well, this young man, because he knows whereof he speaks. And there are others like him in a dozen other places. Call the list. Hoverstuff, attractors and farm machinery, Goodyear and Firestone for Rubber, Reynolds Aluminum. We're bringing down here a product that will employ people and, in turn, allow new paychecks to come into the southern part of the country. Further, we're right down here in the south, making a product which is used in this territory and also revolutionizing the territory located here. Curtis Hotter, his name is, Assistant Works Manager for the International Harvester Company in Memphis, Tennessee. Go West, today's driver so, and hear this voice, William Binford, Manager of the Hurricane Plant of the Reynolds Aluminum Company in Bauxite, Arkansas. He spoke softly, as is fitting for one intimate with the warm sun-splashed hills of Arkansas, but his words were strong with the strength of one who knows the power that he wields. The building rose about us like some growing thing fresh from the valley floor. What I asked him is the value of this place. Can it be measured in dollars and cents? Approximately fifty million dollars in stall cost, approximately seventy-five million dollars replacement cost. Saline County and Pulaski County, Arkansas contain approximately seventy-five percent of the Bauxite reserves in this country. I would say that ninety-five percent or more are people, are Arkansas people. Many of them were small farmers and, effectively, a cross-section of the people of Arkansas. South to Lake Charles, Louisiana and the Firestone Synthetic Rubber Plant, the accents were a little different, but the words we had heard before. Here's Howard Kane, Plant Superintendent. Our output is over one hundred thousand tons per year. It is fifty percent greater than was originally designed into the plant. It became a recurrent theme, steel or aluminum, rubber or a machine for stacking grain. It was all the same. We have come. We have put down our roots here and there will be others to follow in our paths. Rubber industry in the south has grown considerably the past five or six years. Mr. A.C. Michaels, Plant Manager of the Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company at Gadsden, Alabama, he too has heard the music and his voice is added to the chorus. The new plant at Tuscaloosa started in 46 and Armstrong Rubber at Natch, Mississippi started sometime in 1945. And what do you think is going to be the future of the rubber industry down here? I think the general movement of rubber business will be in the south. The general movement will be to the south. This means changes in many things and many places. Banking and credit now in towns that not so long ago know what it was to buy her goods for goods. A new building needed because the older one is no longer adequate and perhaps most dramatic of all changes in the railroads in the long lines that fan out to the north and west and east. For them the stern challenge, for them a gauntlet flung down from the new factories the new plants. They say we got a customer in Chicago but he wants the stuff fast. Can you handle it? How long does it take to ship a thousand tires to Dallas, a distilling furnace to Beaumont? Can you roll them? Can you put wheels under them? Can you put wheels under what we make? Yes, they can and they do. Listen to the voices of two who have picked up the gauntlet. Calling Mr. Terrell at 37th Street. Hey, Army. You got a message on this CTS outfit, camp cars in Birmingham on Friday the 17th, now on hand-thinly yards, they're supposed to be brought back out here. When is it supposed to be out? Well, it's between now and the end of the week, Army, it's supposed to probably be at the end of this week. He's advised when it is returned to Norwich Yard. Now, I'm looking at my camp car, maybe I can get them on North Birmingham more easily. We're at the Ernest Norwich Yard, the Southern Railway System's new freight classification and forwarding out at Birmingham and Alabama, considered by its system as the most modern railway freight yard in the country and the largest in the South. The Southern Railway System freight trains operate in and out of Birmingham on lines that fan out like spokes from the hub of a wheel going east to Atlanta, north to Chattanooga, south to Mobile Southwest and New Orleans, west to Columbus, Mississippi, Sheffield, Alabama and Memphis, Tennessee. This yard is located about six miles from downtown Birmingham and it extends some four miles around us in a fork between the Alabama Great Southern Main Line to Chattanooga and the Birmingham Division Main Line to Atlanta. Physically, what we see here is a 14-track receiving yard, a 56-track classification yard, two departure yards, a car repair yard with six tracks and a 14-track local yard. Here in the Yard Masters Tower, we're at the top of what I could only describe as a lighthouse overlooking this maze of tracks overseeing everything that moves in this great yard. With me is Carl Schultz, who is Birmingham Division Superintendent of the Southern Railway System. Mr. Schultz, I wonder if you could tell me what is the process that we're seeing here from the top of this tower. The process you now see is that of classifying a train which has been yarded in the receiving yard. As the cars move over the hump, they go into different tracks according to destination. All cars for Atlanta go in a particular track. Cars for Potomac Yards and another. Chattanooga cars and another track. So long. What are some of the new devices that you have here? Well, the scale, which is one of the most modern devices, the little squirt, which all is the journal boxes. As the cars go over the hump, it's the only one of its kind that I know of. How about this rotata, which I suppose actually means a break, doesn't it? Yes, sir. When pressure is applied to the wheels, the retarder slows the car down to desired speeds so they run off into the classification yard and come to a stop at the far end of the yard. Here, of course, you have a brake which can slow down a car which is rolling under its own motion and with nobody aboard. How is the brake applied? The tower over to the left, our retarder operator is located, and he himself controls the speed of the car by exerting certain pressure, electrically, on the wheels. So sitting up there several hundred feet away, he squeezes these rails and that slows down the car. Yes, that's great. And now here's John Tipton, who is superintendent of the Birmingham Terminal of the Southern Railway System and who's in charge of this yard that we're visiting. Mr. Tipton, what are some of the differences between this yard and the old kind of yard? The old yard was strictly flat switching. The men had to go up and down the lead, kick in cars, pull in pins, and shoving tracks, riding the top of cars, setting handbrakes. In this yard, the men do not have to ride the top of cars or set handbrakes. They got behind a train and shoved the hump at a speed of two miles per hour, which permits the cars to go over the hump at four cars per minute. In the building of trains, the men do not use hand signals but to build the trains by communicating with the engineer by walkie talkie. What are the advantages that you get from a yard like this? Speeding up your operation, switching your trains and the moving of your cars on outbound trains. And it's gone away with a lot of the safety hazards that we have had in this terminal in the past. How many men do you have working here? This yard, it takes a total of 175 engine and trainmen to operate the switch engines. And how many do you suppose it would have taken in the old type of yard to do the same amount of work? About 275 men. In other words, here with your new yard and your new devices, you're saving the manpower of 100 men a week. Yes, sir. Well, it's pretty clear, Mr. Tipton, you do everything by machinery here. I wonder if you fellas don't have a long for the old romantic days of railroading. No, sir, we never long for that anymore after working in a yard of this kind. But it was curious how just when we thought we were finding the final reasons for this tremendous renaissance, other voices intruded with quiet words that told us somehow that all the figures, all the statistics in the world could not head up to the final sum. There was more, a subtle something that defied the precisely ruled lines of our charts and maps. It was a worker at the Firestone Plant who started us off on another aspect of our journey. Each man has a job to do. And if he does a job well, well, it makes it easier on each man all the way down. That was part of it. Each man has a job to do. It makes it easier all around. Simple words, these are but powerful if one ponders for a while. When international harvester moved to Memphis, they made it clear that they had a company policy that had worked well in other areas and should work well here. We asked Bob Massey of Harvester to explain it to us. Well, that policy simply is a person's ability to get a job with harvester, retain that job, or be upgraded to higher position, is in no way affected by the country comes from, the church he goes to, or the color of his skin. We're not crusaders. We merely follow this policy as a matter of conscience and moral principle. It hasn't been without its headaches. We have had several work stoppages over a five-year period which were caused by the upgrading of Negro employees. However, they've been of short duration. They've involved only a small percentage of our employees generally, just working out. There are a very wide variety of jobs being held by Negroes in this plant. Our production and maintenance people average well above $2 an hour. We have 2,200 production and maintenance workers and about 600 of them are Negroes. In 1936, the auxiliary board was organized and I was elected as first chairman. Norman S. Randall, a worker at the Asipco plant in Birmingham, he carried on the story. We are voted on by members of our working committees out in the shop, that each man has an opportunity to vote by a secret ballot. We have 12 men serves on this auxiliary board. And what does the board actually do? The board has to do with the waking hours, the waking condition, the wedges that each man make in the shop of our Negro employees. Do you give advice to management? We give advice to management as to what to do with the employment. And how has it worked out? It's the best playing in the world. For an instant, when an employee is getting underpaid as they think, he brings his complaint to the board. Then the board has a living and waking condition committee. We take that to the Board of Management and the Board of Management have never turned us down on any deal, that was right. Could you tell us one case history of the way this has worked? There was James Glover, for an instant, was underpaid for about a year. And the foreman he was waking with didn't know he wasn't getting what the job was paying. Therefore, he took it to the board. And the company was nice enough to go back to correct it from the time he started up until the time the complaint was, which was a space maybe something like four months or eight months. And he got retroactive pay on that. Yes, sir. Well, apart from wedges, Norman, what other fields does the board deal with? In our plant here, each man among the Negro race pays into a part five cents per day. That is 25 cents per week or 50 cents per estimate. That money is distributed by this board to less fortunate agencies over the city of Birmingham. The community chess, the Red Cross, the YMCA, and the Girls Service League, the Federation of Clubs, Daynestry, Slossfield Library, and other agencies similar to that. So here you're doing charitable work for others? Yes, sir. You've had quite a career in this company? 31 years. Well, good luck to you, Norman. Thank you. And the final voice, Lemuel T. Cook, worker at International Harvest Up. He used simple everyday words, but they were strong words and taught a powerful lesson. I represent the union in my department and we have no discrimination policy whatsoever. That's against our constitution. I treat them all this alike. In my department, there's really not but four white guys in it. We don't have any trouble whatsoever. These were the things we saw, the words we heard. As a foreign correspondent, I have traveled, looked on mountains that Hannibal looked upon, marked the dawn coming up gray and cold over the streets of Moscow. But I shall not easily forget these other sites that burst upon me. The stones throw comparatively from my own door. A worker sweat-grimed and weary, proudly showing how metal rolls from a press. A rubber factory, hot and noisy, as though Vulcan himself had taken quarters here. Fires that burn by day and night and do not divide the Sunday from the week. These, I will remember. These and the voices that will not be stilled. We believe that we have a plan here which has something to offer to any other industry or company who would be so bold as John Egan was to put it down in black and white. Honestly, laying down the rules and thereafter, abiding by them. Each man has a job to do. And if he does a job well, it makes it easy on each man all the way down. Our output is over 100,000 tons per year. It is 50% greater than was originally designed into the plan. If dividends, whether they be monetary or otherwise, are to be reaped, the men must know the rules of the game beforehand. As they perform well and honestly, we feel that the future will be bright. This was the revolution I saw, the South with its back turned upon the past. The old debts wiped out. Don't speak to them of ancient things, their business is with the new. Peer deep into the white-hot coals, bear for a moment the heat upon your face for you too have an interest here. In these flames are the beginnings of tomorrow. This is the Forge for the Future. You have been listening to Forge for the Future, the sixth in a series, Heritage Over the Land, describing the rebirth of the American South. This series is written and directed by William Allen Bales. Produced by Miss Lee F. Payton. And brought to you in cooperation with the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. Next week at this same time, the story of the river, the twisting road that leads from Memphis and St. Joe, from Louisville and New Orleans to all the doorways of the world. It is planned that another series will deal with the remarkable growth and changes in other sections of America.