 There are those who can remember well the way it used to be, a small school building precariously built and reluctantly paid for, a few time-eaten books that had long survived the men who wrote them and the generation who read. Windows where the wind entered like a familiar gas, and all presided over by a master more interested in achieving order than in the subtler discipline of the mind, an unbelieving priest to a god who had given his blessings to another people and another land. But the change was coming, obeying laws as immutable as those of Uphold or Pythagoras, and one day the worshipers of learning came and drove the false priests from the temple. The gods are appeased now and smile over the land. Mark these dormitory lights that burn long past the midnight. Listen to the presses pounding out the lines of type, a thousand voices telling a thousand stories of what has been and what yet may be. These things are for us, for it is said that he who no longer learns no longer lives. Enter for a moment into these halls and listen. Here is your lesson for tomorrow. The National Broadcasting Company in collaboration with the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation presents Lesson for Tomorrow, the tenth in a series of programs on the changes that have come recently to the American South. In order to document this remarkable development, the National Broadcasting Company sent Henry Cassidy, distinguished foreign correspondent, to direct a new kind of reporting of the news. The recapitulation, if you will, of the voices of the men and women who are the actors and what we believe to be the most dramatic chapters of our recent history. To this end, Mr. Cassidy traveled across the length and breadth of the South. It soon became apparent that changes in research and education were writing a powerful chapter in this story of the emergence of the new South from the old. Here with a report on the development is Mr. Cassidy. Just as a few vagrant bars of music can sometimes call back memories of a long-forgotten incident, so for me a single voice comes back that seems to tell in capsule form the long months I spent in this gracious land. It's a proud voice, as is fitting, but the South is proud now perhaps as never before. It's the voice of one who knows his strength and throws his challenge to the world. We were late in the coming, so far as the South is concerned, but when we did get into motion with the great activity of our people and the greatest hour of our people to move ahead, we move ahead faster than the nation as a whole. I had not been long upon my journey when it seemed that every signpost pointed toward a single stopping place. It had a somewhat ponderous name, the Southern Research Institute. There I was told I could find the beginnings of the dramatic changes that have come to the techniques of education and research in the South. And not many days had passed before I met Mr. Thomas Martin, chairman of the board of the Alabama Power Company in Birmingham, Alabama. But it was not of power that I had come to speak of him, but of the new awareness in the South of the advantages of developing research and education in this land that for so many years sent its sons to the North to learn the techniques of modern industry and science and philosophy. Mr. Martin is also chairman of the board of trustees of the Southern Research Institute, and it was in that capacity that he came to see us in the recording room we had set up in our hotel. It was here that I heard of the beginnings. Here we were in this vast area we call the South with scarcely 2% of the total research workers of the nation. And about the same percentage of patents year after year had been granted to Southern people. It was found that research workers and hence patents resulting from research were mainly confined to that great industrial area in the North lying principally east of the Mississippi River and north of the Ohio River. The great preponderance of manufactured products came from that area. And there was to our minds a very different relation between research and industry, manufacture and wealth created thereby. And a few of us felt that we ought to try to make a start in this matter of research. So a few men met, decided they would organize this institution. They would attempt to raise capital from industrial and other firms who had men within their own organization who felt as a few of us did feel that it was important to the South looking to the long future that we make some start in providing research facilities for our people. But I wondered what precisely was the effect of the work of this Southern research institute. Could it be measured in dollars and cents? Perhaps not exactly. But it surely could be measured in subtler and somehow more important ways. I remember talking to Dr. Skipper, assistant director of cancer research at the Southern Institute. A few minutes before he had led me through what seemed a labyrinth of test tubes and all the mysterious equipment of a modern medical laboratory. The enemy, the last great enemy of the host that once thundered at our doors was nowhere to be seen but his presence was felt as though we were nearing his abiding place. I asked to whom will go the victory. Mr. Cassie, we have a program in cancer research that is directed toward trying to find useful new drugs which might help to control certain types of cancer in human patients. Before the war, it was considered by many people in the field of science that the control of cancer by means of new drugs was impossible and hence practically nobody worked in this field at all. However, during the war a chemical warfare agent called nitrogen mustard was shown to have some temporary effect in controlling cancer. As a result of this, many scientists became convinced that it was not impossible to develop drugs which would be even more useful than nitrogen mustard. I wonder if you could give us some view of the future of your research. I personally am convinced that given time that useful drugs will be developed that will be of great benefit ideally in permanent control of certain types of cancer. I am permanently convinced that it is a possibility. And there were others. The SASI as we are known in the south is a non-profit, non-political organization founded in 1941 to promote the economic and technological development of the South. This is H. McKinley Conway Jr., Director of the Southern Association of Science and Industry in Atlanta, Georgia. He carried on the story. We worked primarily to promote research and to encourage a systematic approach to the solution of the problems of the region. Just recently we've announced our program which consists of ten points. We urge a continuation of intensive efforts to acquaint people everywhere with the progressive trend in the South and the opportunities that exist here. We urge more extensive exploration of the resources of the South. We advocate further improvement of means for transporting industrial products and raw materials. We're urging greater industrial use of industrial waste. Of course we're interested in constant efforts to improve the entire educational structure. We're very much interested in promoting wider use of existing research facilities. We know that we must further expand our facilities for providing our industries with electric power, natural gas and other services. We think that the South will benefit from a very strong effort to apply atomic energy in southern industry. Another opportunity for the South is in the improvement in advertising, selling and distributing the products manufactured in the region. And finally, as an effort to coordinate the work of the hundreds of groups working to promote southern progress in order to eliminate duplication and to focus attention on neglected fields. What about research? Well, we believe that applied scientific research is the real secret of southern progress. South again down to the campus of the University of Florida at Gainesville. It was here that I met Dr. Darrell S. Mace, chairman of the Florida Center for Clinical Services. Here was a frontline fighter in this new war. Here was the kind of war reporting new to one who had filed more than his share of stories on battles of destruction. Dr. Mace, I ask, how goes this fight? The Florida Center for Clinical Services is a group of clinics that were organized on May 6, 1949. They are designed to assist students of the University and residents of the state in solving their educational, vocational, emotional, personal and social problems through the provision of activities in these six coordinated clinical units that we have. What are your various units, Dr. Mace? A logical clinic, a speech and hearing clinic, a reading laboratory clinic, a medicine family clinic, an adaptive and corrective exercise unit, and then a veterans guidance center. Well, we really have four objectives or four points to our program. First of all is to see that university students have services from these various clinics commensurate with the types of services that they get over medical nature on university campuses. However, we also work with the training department, those training clinical psychologists, speech correctionists and the like, and helping in the training of people that go out into the states and into the southeast to work with clinics, with schools. Here, certain departmental lines have been broken down where these various clinics have been brought together, functioning together. We staff cases weekly working to help every individual to become as productive to himself and to society as he can become. We find that by having specialists in each area working together, different professions develop respect and confidence in other professions and can better serve the needs of people. And what do you think, Dr. Mace, in this field would be the future of it? Well, I think the big future of it is to work, to improve our own professions by this kind of interdisciplinary cooperation, to work more closely with the medical profession. And so ours is an attempt to, with our psychology in other areas, to help people to adjust and to live happier, more useful lives. The effect of all this is broadcast throughout this land. The outposts of poverty and ignorance are being pushed back, almost it would seem while you watched. The sterner aspects of the Old South are as remote now as a wooden plow or a flintlock rifle in my New England Hills. You can measure it in a dozen ways, but it remained for an economist to make it clear to show me the multi-lined graphs and the upward moving lines. Dr. Rex Winslow, professor of economics at the University of North Carolina. Businessmen in the South, through the University, such as this one, are setting up special funds devoted to finding out new ways to produce wealth and new techniques by which management can increase the productivity of labor and the investment of capital. And echoes came from the long-level acres that stretch out toward the horizon. I remember one hot afternoon I paused for a moment to chat with a farmer and I asked a question. This work at the university, had they come to him, had they helped in the ancient problems of farming? The college has done a wonderful work here in breeding up some good grices that will grow and produce comparable to our corn and other crops that we've had here. And the people have found they can put those out with less labor, less management, and get more returns from it. The old saying, it's hard to teach an old-all when you trick still remains. You have to start with young boys and girls and work through them mainly. Of course, we've always got some progressive farmers and the older group that are willing to change over and do a wonderful job. In all the world, there's only one privately owned nuclear reactor that's here at Raleigh, North Carolina and the very center of the campus of North Carolina State College. It's a sort of a look at the future of this building, a low square red brick building 110 feet on each side with a round dome inside it, an octagonal room, and inside that an octagonal concrete thing that looks something like a furnace for creation of atomic energy. With us inside this nuclear reactor building is Dr. Clifford K. Beck, professor of physics at North Carolina State College, initiator and director of this unique instrument. Dr. Beck, could I ask you how did this come about? This project here at North Carolina State College is a peacetime development which grew out of the Manhattan Project which resulted in the atomic bomb. Not very much had been done to develop the peacetime possibilities of nuclear power. It was clear to some that nuclear processes were destined eventually to become important factors in our civilian economy as well as in our military security. Two purposes of such a program here would be to train students in nuclear engineering and to develop a program devoted to peacetime applications of nuclear processes. Now, most of us of course don't know very much about this sort of thing. We don't realize what is actually a nuclear reactor. Could you explain, Dr. Beck, exactly what this is? A nuclear reactor is an accumulation of nuclear fuel put together in such fashion that it releases its energy in a controlled fashion at any desired level of operation. There are two products from a nuclear reactor. One, heat, and secondly, radiation. To what could these two forces be applied? We intend to operate our nuclear reactor at a power level such that it will release heat at an equivalent rate of 10 kilowatts. This nuclear reactor will provide a tremendously large and varied source of nuclear radiation. This radiation in turn may be used for a wide variety of experimental purposes. Well, I would say, Dr. Beck, from the looks of it, that a nuclear reactor is not an inexpensive item for one's budget. How did you handle the finances of it? The college agreed to furnish this much money for the construction of this unit. We obtained approval of the Atomic Energy Commission. Their approval was necessary since they would have to loan us the uranium fuel and it retained title to it throughout the subsequent life of the project. Later, the Burlington Mills Textile Foundation here in North Carolina became interested in this project and gave us enough money for a large laboratory building to house a nuclear reactor. The college added some money to that which was given by the Burlington Mills Foundation and therefore we have a laboratory building which costs itself about $380,000. The nuclear reactor inside of this building probably costs in the neighborhood of $100,000. And there is a new generation of young men now who speak a new language, work with tools whose potentialities for good or evil stagger the imagination. I ask Harold Lamones, what is your stake in this giant thing they have built here? My particular interest is in reactor control, as I'm interested in safety circuits and power level monitoring and power level control and things of this sort. And how would you apply that when you get through college? Well, my feeling is that nuclear energy, even though it is now restricted by government control, in the not too distant future will probably be used a great deal by industry. And I feel that when I get out, I'll probably go to work possibly for some government agency until industry gets a little bigger finger into running their own reactors and then probably go with some private company. Well then Harold, you're looking far and up into the future so that you can see private industry owning a reactor like this first private one here and using it for peacetime purposes. Yes, sir. Power for many other uses, principally power though. You're a very far-sighted young man. Now here's another student. Could I ask your name, please? My name is Edward Hood. There's one thing that worries me about you fellas. When you're pulling around with this nuclear reactor of yours, are you in any danger of coming up with some atomic secrets that you shouldn't have? Well, I don't think so, not here. And eventually, all of us probably will be cleared by the atomic energy commission to work with classified information. I guess there's a remote possibility. I hadn't really given that too much consideration. Well, if you come up with some of them, don't tell them to me. But though I spoke in jest, I knew that beneath the calm words of these young men was the force and the power of a revolution. Or it was not always so. Go back only a few years and young men like these would have had a choice of only two careers, stay on the farm, or if you insist on learning, go north. That past is not too remote. Here is one who remembers. Sadler Love of the American Cotton Manufacturers Institute in Charlotte, North Carolina. A few years ago, we had a boy who was at that time working in a textile mill in South Carolina at night and going to school during the day. And don't ask me how he did that. I suppose there are three eight-hour periods in every 24 hours, and he went to school for eight hours, and he worked for eight hours, and perhaps he slept for eight hours. But at any rate, he graduated from Warford College at Spartanburg. He was selected as a Rhodes Scholar, and he went to England as a Rhodes Scholar. Perhaps 20 years ago, he might not even have gotten to high school. And there are still other ways of measuring this change that has come. This emphasis on training the minds of young men and women, this planning for business, this concern with all the multi-numbered elements that make up the health of the community. Here is Wright Bryan, former editor of The Atlanta Journal. There's one statistic that I think is significant and important. The state of Georgia is spending 51% of its state revenue on education. That includes the colleges and universities and the elementary and high schools. As far as we know, that is the highest percentage of state revenue going to education of any state in the union. But it's hard sometimes to think of these things impersonally. What happens when X number of people have their income raised Y number of dollars in a constant ratio? No, that's not how we would learn of this revolution. Let's have a specific example. Here are the facts, and here the voices. Here is one W.G. Bryant, and his story is an interesting one. Into the making of this champion hometown went several outstanding achievements made in Griffin during that particular year. Some of those were in the fields of, say, for instance, education in which people in Griffin decided and voted to increase their school facilities in Griffin by some $1,900,000 worth of facilities. And it's interesting to note that in these school facilities, the new construction that went on that equaled facilities. And when I say equal, I mean absolutely equal facilities were provided for the colored folks in this town. And making them have modern, up-to-date school buildings of equal rank with the white children. Then in addition to that, we had in the educational field the people of Griffin and surrounding area provided funds by subscription. That is donations to build about a $5,000 stadium. And I understand from some of the judges that this was one item that really impressed them as to why this was a champion hometown and the people would really be willing to lay it on the line to better themselves and their community. And as there are many kinds of people, so there are many kinds of battles. Mrs. Jacqueline Leonard, a former newspaper woman, I'm proud to say, decided that there were some things that just weren't right in the New Orleans school system and she went to work. Children were going to school under unbelievably bad conditions from the standpoint of health, safety. I believe that out of a total of 90-some schools, we had exactly two that would have passed inspection by the state fire and health authorities at that time. That was in 1947-48. We started on the buildings first and we built most of them for the Negroes because that's where the need happened to be. You see, back through the years, it so happens that there has been only a small portion of the funds spent. Well, we just simply faced up to the fact that here was a large segment of the population and had to be educated. I found that it was possible to go to the public and take the issues to the public. And incidentally, one of the first things we did was to open the school board meetings to the press. They had not been open in the past. And we found that by opening them to the press and by inviting the public to attend the meetings and so on, it was much, much easier to get a reversal of some of those votes. We have a public interest in schools here that never existed before and new enthusiasm for public education. How then do we sum up these things that we saw and heard in our journey across the land? It was Dr. John Ivy of the Southern Regional Education Board who, in telling of his work, seemed to get very close to the whole story of research and education in this newborn South. The Southern Regional Education Board is an organization created through an interstate compact approved by the legislatures of 14 Southern states. The purpose is attempt to work out ways and means by which the several states of the South can pool their educational resources so as to provide a higher quality of education among existing institutions rather than carry on the expensive duplication which is rapidly causing major financial crisis throughout American higher education. And how do you go about accomplishing that cooperation? Well, at the present time we have two different types of programs. One, a contract services activity in which states which do not have certain types of facilities by educational service from institutions in those states which carry on particular programs. The second type of program that we have is our graduate activities carried on under memoranda of agreement in which two or more institutions agree to provide services for the entire region. Then here, Dr. Ivy, it sounds to me as though you've got a new confederacy of education in the South. How do you bring about this amalgamation of educational effort? Well, the function of our board is to work out the cooperative arrangements among the institutions to provide the educational services. And then after those arrangements are worked out, the legislatures of the several states make the appropriations of the needed funds which in turn are transferred through our board to the institutions providing services. What has it done to education itself? My first response would be that we are attempting to have and help higher education deal more precisely and effectively with the resource development problems of this great region. The second level of activity means that your qualitative aspects of education are going to be greatly enhanced. The great industrial and governmental laboratories in the past have been unused educationally in the sense that they carry their own research missions independently of higher education, duplicating in many instances the laboratories on the campuses of universities which they would not have to duplicate if they use the facilities which universities had. And conversely, the universities can use the laboratories of industry as training sites. The heads of our institutions of higher learning have shown a remarkable degree of enthusiasm for cooperating with one another on those things which will help them improve the quality and range of education that their institutions are offering. Then, Dr. Ivy, what would you say is the future of education in the South? The South is rapidly improving its graduate research and training facilities. I like to think of this in sort of a mixed metaphor and that is that it gives us an opportunity to nail down our intellectual topsoil as it were by keeping our own best brains here to solve the problems of this region after they've been trained in our institutions. One final voice, L.W. Bishop, Director of Research of the Planning and Development Board of South Carolina. He was speaking of the changes that have come to his part of the South, but as he spoke, his words I knew were just as true of Tennessee and Alabama, of Florida and Georgia. We are looking for jobs. And I'm leading into the point of telling you that percentage-wise we've developed more than any other state in the nation since 1945. Our job is to advance the general welfare of the people of South Carolina. We are looking for jobs for boys and girls. In the past, we've spent our money educating boys in college and high schools and have had to leave South Carolina and go to other places to hunt jobs. Today that no longer is necessary. We can provide jobs for our own people and we're endeavoring to do it. This, then, was the revolution that we saw. This was the change that has come subtly and without sound and fury to this land. Occasionally one sees the remnants of the old like some anachronistic scarecrow still standing guard over fields long since abandoned. But the weight of the present and the future is heavy here and in the words that we heard were not of yesterday but of tomorrow. Cancer research, atomic reactor, energetic battalions of men planning for the day when the South will again assume the equal standing that was hers in the beginning. This was the lesson that we learned. This was our lesson of tomorrow. You have been listening to Lesson 4 Tomorrow, the tenth in a series of programs, Heritage Over the Land, describing the social, economic and industrial revolution that's taking place in the American South. Your field reporter has been Arthur Hepham. This series is written and directed by William Allen Bales, produced by Ms. Lee F. Payton. This is Dick Dudley speaking. It is anticipated that future series will deal with changes in other sections of the country.