 The American Trail. The American Trail. Blazed in blood. Defended in blood. Chapter 11. The New South. The pale, dead moon of the Southlands dissolves into the dawn. Morning now. No time to dally. The people have a job to do. Chips to be built. In Norfolk, Virginia, a passenger plane with businessmen taking off from Atlanta. For Texas City, Kansas City, New York City. Great cars out of Kentucky. Loaded with coal, cement, lumber. Raw materials to be smelted down in the blast furnaces of Birmingham. An oil well coming in from a hundred feet below the surface of the Gulf of New Orleans. A new, noisy, big, growling industry in the South. It didn't happen yesterday. But it wasn't always like this. It was quiet. Quiet and still. And a great tiredness stretched across the prostrate and eroded hills and flatlands. Quiet. Quiet and still. 1866. The war between the states is ended now. Quarter of a million Southern boys dead from wounds. The nightmare called defeat. You feel it everywhere. In the dust. In the hot scorching wind. The people stand there petrified. Shock stunned. A man and his wife, their house gone. They stare at all that's left of them. The land. We still got there. The land. Look at it. It lay there, bleeding, ravished, desolate. Like the people. All hope for the future. Dead. We'll never get back, Mr. Grady. Get back? To where we used to be. Get back into the past? The past belongs to the dead. The man is Brady. Henry Grady. 25 years old. Editor of a Southern newspaper. The Atlanta Constitution. Young, vigorous. He stands at the window in his office. The farmer from the land is with him. Ten years since the war ended. You've grown up in that time. But the South is still prostrate. Yes, almost. Yet the land is fabulous in natural resources. We had men to work. We have them. Ables, strong-bodied men. Who've never done a look at work. For them to learn. I don't know. I don't know about that. Slave days are over. We've got to pull ourselves up. Do the job ourselves. The people have found their spokesman. Grady speaks through his newspaper. The South shall rise up from the ashes. The cities tremble with industry. The soils sparkle with abundance. The forests echo to the passing of freight trains. There will be a fascination about her triumph. So the upward climb begins. The people go to work. But hands that have never known toil find the reconstruction hard. You must be dead. Dead nothing. Out there in those fields all day. They were out there all day. But in that hot sun. They worked in the sun. So can I. One thing is sure. The white man himself is finding a item. From the old slave days. He discovers. He can work. Years passing now new voices. The freed men former slaves. They too have their spokesman. Their symbol of the future. The peanut. The lowly common peanut. A truly wondrous thing. Is Carver. Professor George Washington Carver. Stands there in his laboratory in Alabama. The Tuskegee Institute. The professor is accustomed to visitors. He sees them every day. The farmer is one of them. 32% oil. That's the peanut. 32% oil. I want you to taste something. Drink this. Milk? Taste it. Pleasant. Milk from the peanut. Well it's incredible. You can make butter from it. Cheese. Coffee. The peanut is an industry in itself. A new industry for the south. The voice of Carver is heard all through the south. Wherever the Negro owns land. Don't you plant cotton all the time. You hear me? You take good care of your land. It's no good when you grow cotton on it all the time. That ruins it. You grow corn. Dry. Sweet potatoes and peanuts. And plough deep. Plough deep. You hear me? Don't forget to fertilize your land. Dead leaves from the forest. Muck from the swamp. Now don't you forget these things. A few do what he tells them. And their land grows healthy. The century ending now. But in the big cities. Slum. Disease. Poverty. Evil. Smelling alleyways. Rickety houses. In the middle of all this. In Lexington, Kentucky. Rises another voice. Did you take her? I heard your baby was sick. It was a cold little night. Let me take her. There. We must do something for her. We must take her to a doctor. All this dirt. No food. How can she help being sick? Antlin McDowell Breckenridge. Bites for public health. Food. Sanitation. The right of women to vote. Cries out for every type of freedom. She reflects the people. The stirring for better things. A new century dawning at last. At Spindletop, Texas, an oil boom begins. Nowhere in the south the man named Duke has made a fortune in tobacco and built a university. Recovery. Reconstruction. Heal it everywhere. World War I begins. More ships. More oil. More lumber. More everything. The south is headed for the ceiling and there ain't no ceiling in sight. This is it. And then silence again. The quiet. 1929. The whole world. Millions. Jobless. The worst depression in the nation's history. Textiles. But textiles. Who's gotten money to buy a suit and close these days? Ships. Ships. Who wants to build ships and pick up all the ships you want with a couple hundred dollar bills? Who wants to make milk out of peanuts? They're throwing real milk down the sewers. Stunned. Shocked. Too unbelieving to act. The south staggers. Month after month nothing happens except that everything gets a little worse. Then, as if a giant voice deeply embedded in its memory spoke across the south. From the Virginia to the Carolina coast across the Everglades of Florida and the Red Hills of Georgia and the Delta country of the Mississippi the south shall rise up from the ashes. The cities tremble with industry. The soils sparkle with abundance. There will be a fascination about her triumph. Again, the giant stirs and reaches in its pockets in its heart for means to carry it once more into the future. For the coal, iron, oil, gas, the pine, the paper, the cotton and the cotton seed oil and a hundred other products of the soil and suddenly, not overnight but soon, the south is waiting on the crest of national necessity and then 7,000 miles away in the Pacific. We're lying dormant in the Southlands. This is the breakthrough. Feed them, feed those... You talk too much. Feed them, feed them, feed them. Feed those burnt foundry. The iron foundry is the steel mills. The acid, sulfur, phosphate, manganese, top or aluminum legs ain't you man that they got it. Meanwhile, on an island called Guadalcanal a boy from Cersei, Arkansas reads a letter from his hometown. The letter is written on paper made from good Georgia pine. His uniform from cotton grown in Louisiana turned out by a textile mill near Spartanburg. His body hails him with a phrase that started in Atlanta and now is set in a hundred tons around the world. Hey, have a coke? And back home in the south something going on. Top secret. In a little town outside Knoxville, Tennessee Oak Ridge a science research laboratory. You ask one of the scientists what's going on? Call it what you will. The birth of a Frankenstein monster. The destroyer of its own master. Call it a bomb. An atom bomb. An agent of peace bringing about the swift end of a war. Or call this atomic power the means by which men can walk into a summit future of cheap abundance. The new sound. The old, the chimneys by the hundreds billowing smoke on the outskirts of Knoxville, Tennessee. The giant DC6 roaring over the edge of Stone Mountain and then dropping quietly gently into the airport of Atlanta. The eternal beauty and dignity of the columns of Jefferson's Montchella. Ornamental iron. Delicate as lace. On an old house in Charleston. An alligator swimming through a cathedral of moss in a Louisiana byte. And a great river winding, cutting away, restoring the heartland. This, a man stands there stands there on the rich black soil white man negro. He sees the new South even now as a South that is already passing. For the South is not merely a fragment of geography. It is the spirit of men who fell and rose again and where men rise they are always whatever. This has been the 11th chapter in the stories of the American nation brought to you by the ladies' auxiliary to the veterans of Foreign Wars. We take another story to make you proud of this great country of ours as we follow the American Trail.