 There are many ways to tell a story The most ancient of people's long since vanished still speak to us through their tools of flint and the household shards, which they left behind Others have left us temples and monuments or reveal themselves through their paintings their sculptures their songs or the written word but sounds too are a part of all life and While the sounds of history are gone with the winds that bore them We can reconstruct enough of them from our own experience to tell the story of our forebears through sound From the time of their arrival upon this continent through their trials and tribulations and trials the CBS radio workshop Dedicated to man's imagination The theater of the mind today a Re-evocation through sound of some of the significant themes and development of our country the title sounds of a nation The bells are ringing throughout the land this week Hundreds of bells thousands of bells tens perhaps hundreds of thousands of bells From the clear joyous village bell as pure as virgin landscape to the majestic choirs cast in bronze of the big city of Theatres The little bells are ringing to the proud forlorn little schoolhouse bells Which do double and triple duty on our lonely prairies and in the close held hills and swamps of our south Calling the children to school the grown-up to their meetings and potents and both old and young to their prayers You're too amigo speak out for him over the Sunseer desert Long since gone are the unhappy days when your pioneering mission voice calling man to penance Clashed with the less somber tones of the bells which others brought from their homelands We all now rejoice together. There were no bells in Plymouth, Massachusetts in late October of 1621 11 buildings there comprised a new colony Seven private dwellings each eight feet wide and four built for public use These like the homes constructed of wattle and mud and roofed with bark 50 odd souls still survived of more than a hundred who together had landed there just ten months before There were no bells But there was faith and there was jollity as they called it then when the first Harvard had at last been secured It's a rain but hold off James I was but learning the cause Leave now the calling truth captain standard She felt so some wood for the fire and stay I truly pray to heaven may not rain I know or it might be snow leave now the praying to those who might be more in the habit of it No, James logs go on the fire His cooling in the brook not the red his airing in the shade. Oh, and I on it with all those Well It'll be who's to speak evil of God's children It do perplex me how our Lord who otherwise so ill-favored this land Found fit to bestow upon it such wondrous great and then he evened never knowing mysterious are his ways Is it true that the heathen chief is joining us that table him and that other one for quite hush To quite be an Indian Priscilla, but he is no heathen had to quite not one as the friendship of chief mathasort And his whopper no eggs is not likely. We would be here now idling in We'd be up on the on hill most likely with the others under the thought of this cruel land I but if he the chief brings some of his men as he is wrong to there will not be enough games Up with no fewer than 90 of his selected braves each one places hungry as any pilgrim But as soon as the Indians found out that there was really not enough for the kind of slam bang feast They'd expected they cheerfully offered to help bring in more and So together a pilgrim and Indians set out to the forest the Indians alone brought in four deer Plus no one counted how much other game and the pilgrims contributed their share Not least of all a supply of the potent wines which they had learned from cocked from the abundant native grapes The feast lasted three full days with a half hundred half-starved English pilgrims and 90 odd Indians Stuffing themselves as they had rarely been stuffed before with venison and roast goose roast duck and fricasseed squirrel with black fish and eel Clams and oysters and other shellfish with white bread and cornbread boiled corn and roast corn Wild leeks and onions and watercress mint wild plums dried berries and always the potent wine It was a glorious three days More than 300 Thanksgiving festivals have been celebrated on this continent Which at first seemed so harsh and limitless since that first memorable brawl in Plymouth Each generation since 1621 has of course created its own pattern of living with its own sounds But the basic sounds most expressive of the things for which Americans have given thanks each fall have always returned certain common characteristics Exuberance about life a willingness to face the unknown a fascination with building and creating and a faith in the limitless possibilities of experience A clean sharp bite of a well-honed axe notching the living tissue of forest trees Some as straight and pure as gothic colors They felled them to make masts for the world's swiftest sailing ships or building lumber or paper pulp or just firewood or to clear new land for the planting and The saws the busy saws hand saws band saws two-man saws power saws Cutting an endless supply of boards and planks for more and more homes in more and more towns for more and more Americans and the mallets first wood then iron Riding the stakes which in the course of a few generations made a checkerboard of the new continent a squared-off plaza private domains Then the hammers riding pegs and nails fix the fences fix the shingles fix the barns eating out the yarn rims Eating out rims for the wagon wheels that could travel across the land on roads of clay or sand Pumped with rocks or no roads at all Carrying the ebb and flow of new world humanity Precious produce and that eternal verity the main Oh Tens of millions of us know this sound the blacksmiths shaping the red-hot arc of iron into a horse Conquest of the land and the fencing of it the building of homes and of the furnishings to make them livable The never ceasing cross-country movement of people and of goods all these produced sounds which are part of our heritage And there is yet another sound which our forefathers The pilgrims used the blunder bus inaccurate but loud Then came the flintlock the straight shooting rifle the handy carbine the pistol and the revolver All of them too often misused in needless slaughter most of all of Indians Got about 400 head a guest but look at here boss under what they ain't nobody around can eat that much I'd spring You mean Not all of the gunshots heard on the continent of course were fired in unworthy causes In April 1775 in a small Massachusetts town named Lexington a salvo was fired that was heard around the world The amazement of the world of badly trained highly individualistic band of new world settlers Defeated an organized body of British regular soldiers sent against them to confiscate their stores of powder and shot Once having chosen freedom in preference to security the settlers fought on through a bitter seven-year war the time and souls The summer soldier the sunshine take it will in this crisis shrink from the service of their country But he who now stands Only obtained by the early settlers of our land a one-ton bell in the state house in Philadelphia rang out loud and clear It was rung after that at every important occasion in the development of the new United States But the bell had always been brittle in 1835 it cracked for good Now when the symbolic sound of this broken token of man's will to freedom is wanted It is only struck gently with rubber mallets But the sound of its voice however cracked has attained a worldwide significance Independence achieved the eyes of many descendants of the Plymouth settlers and those who had come after them turned westward To the empty lands beyond the Appalachians which had been ceded to the nation as far as the banks of the Mississippi and Then swept on across the river to the still vaster even emptier regions Which stretched to what seemed like the end of the world the shore of the great Western Let me get my feet on the ground Just pulled in County, Pennsylvania right close by the Virginia line. I'm from Kentucky myself The call me a little bad Dave. Hey, just Josh you like Coming all the way to Oregon. Oh seems like that's what's wearing the most of us that name engines That's what's got my old lady Florence all worked up Independence Missouri in 1846 Those who assembled there came from everywhere and they brought everything their families their belongings their hopes and dreams And when they finally embarked on the Western Trail they carried the mark of destiny upon It was not an easy trip and not all survived it enough of them did however to build an empire By this time the eastern coast of the continent was dotted with cities with cobbled streets and gracious three story houses and other Modern conveniences including slums There were Boston and Philadelphia Charleston and Savannah Baltimore and New Orleans and oh yes, of course, New York Life was gentler there with good manners and parties and a gentleman of course had a carriage It has been a delightful evening You flatter me sir, but so delightfully my carriage is waiting outside. May I might I be permitted to drive you home, sir? I Well, I suppose it would be the cobble streets at times though had to carry more serious burdens than amorous young men and women There were four tragic years when the young union was rent by discord Cities of course were prime targets The bloody fraternal strife was ended at last it sounds never again to be heard in the land one nation Indivisible with liberty and justice for all New sounds by then had joined the national Symphony ever increasing numbers of devoted men of many nations and varied antecedents had long been pushing against the frontiers of human Knowledge and skill and now the age of invention was at hand and our young nation was seizing it as its own Three generations before a Scotsman named James Watt had learned to harness the power of steam to make it work for the benefit of man And The Yankee Eli Whitney was his name had designed a piece of simple machinery Which freed countless thousands in the course of time from the drudgery of cleaning cotton by hand The spinning of the clean cotton and other textile fibers into thread for the weaving had been attended to by an Englishman among others James Hargraves by name I Because doesn't have other men working each on his own produced a baker's dozen of ideas Which in the aggregate made the weaving of the thread into cloth to a mechanized process? Yeah in New England just like I hear it in the old country Which is all them ideas about gin in and spin in and we then them all together That is a steam engine The flood of inexpensive fabrics dazzling to the feminine eye Mr. Robert Fulton having heard of experiments conducted by others had installed a steam engine on a riverboat and hitched it up to side paddle He had turned the waters of the world regardless of winds and currents into fast dependable highways for the transport of goods And a fella called Stevenson over in England is somewhere Started pulling whole wagon trains with one of them steam dinguses a locomotive. He called it He put him on rails first of course. Well, sirie Bob, you couldn't put one like that over on us We had the same kind of things running down to Washington almost before the old Baltimore could get its last horse off on them wooden tracks And then from Albany to Schenectady and back on down to New York and out to Buffalo and Chicago The other way and then still further west until believe it or not in 1869 they drove in a golden spike out there in Utah some place And joined up to an Emory Alliance Time to a closer and closer knit spider web of copper wire began to cover the length and breadth of the continent Symbolic among the many strange sounds which were forming a new pattern Invention an industry in which we still live was one in particular This is the sound of a monument Weighing many tons built to temper and shape the steel which was asserting itself as the world's new master The backbone of national economies the measure of their prestige and the gauge by which even a people's potential to wage war was soon to be judged This sound not only set the tone for the transformation of our nation from a basically Agricultural to an industrial one, but also quickly became a pie pie post melody for work hungry Peace hungry opportunity hungry men and women throughout the world Responded by the millions abandoning their old homes to follow the rainbow trail to the new world and to partake of the new The hands and heads of the newcomers helped to make the nation a giant among the world's giants and also to shape new Syllables for the nation's vocabulary of sounds They took up places amid the awesome rumble of the steel rolling bills They manned believers which controlled the doomsday platter of the sheet steel plans And presses which now she pulled for the bottom of your body's a single brief embrace The bones are a air-driven chisels Newcomers brought with them many skills acquired in their ancient homelands They learned many new ones from the conquerors of the new continent Until the efforts of the two merged in the brotherhood of creative labor Embracing everything from the smallest detail Such as the ingenious testing of the jewel-like steel balls which cut down friction in our machines and transport vehicles From the smallest to the largest Grims might easily have learned to enjoy that last sound Strange as it would have spin to their ears the factory whistle It may tyrannize our lives, but it also brings to us the welcome news It's time to go home you have been listening to the CBS radio workshop and the sounds of a nation Sounds of a nation was written by Henry E. Fritch with music adapted and conducted by Alexander Steinert and Produced and directed in New York by Paul Roberts Louis van Rootman was heard as the narrator others in the cast included Leon Janney Ruth Tobin Ralph Bell Millicent Brower, Herm Dinkin, Raleigh Bester and Joe Helgeson This is Dick Noel inviting you to tune in each Sunday afternoon for the CBS radio workshop Your first opportunity since the Israeli Egyptian war to hear Israel's point of view expressed by her Ambassador Abba Eben in a live question-and-answer session will come to you tonight on face the nation For another timely interview with a key figure in the news Here face the nation on most of these same stations tonight and for suspense which follows immediately over most of these same stations America listens most to the CBS radio network