April 22, 2025 • 14 mins
A historical series that narrates the significant events and figures that shaped the nation's past, offering educational and engaging stories. The episodes highlight the spirit of exploration and perseverance.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:02):
The American Trail, The American Trail blazed in blood, defended
in London, Chapter eleven, The New South.
Speaker 2 (00:33):
The.
Speaker 3 (00:41):
Pale, dead moon of the Southlands dissolves into the dawn.
Speaker 2 (00:47):
Burning.
Speaker 4 (00:48):
Now no time to dolly. The people have a job
to do. Ships to be built in Norfolk, Virginia. A
passenger playing, loads of business men taking off.
Speaker 3 (00:59):
From Atlanta or Texas City, Kansas City, New York City.
Great cars out of Kentucky, loaded with coals, cement, lumbers, raw.
Speaker 4 (01:10):
Materials to be smelted.
Speaker 3 (01:11):
Down in the glass furnaces of Birmingham. An oil well
coming in from one hundred feet below the surface of
the Gulf, or two Orleans.
Speaker 4 (01:22):
The new noisy, big, brawling and dustry.
Speaker 2 (01:25):
So.
Speaker 4 (01:31):
New it didn't happen yesterday. But it wasn't always like this.
Speaker 3 (01:37):
It was quiet, quiet and still, and a great tiredness
stretched across the prostrate and new roded hills and flatlands. Quiet, quiet,
and still. Eighteen hundred six, the War between the States
(02:03):
is and now quarter of a million Southern boys dead
from wounds and disease. The nightmare called defeat. You'll feel
it everywhere, in the dust, in the hot, scorching wind,
the people stand there petrified. Shots done, a man and
(02:25):
his wife, their house gone. They stare at all that's
left them, the land.
Speaker 4 (02:34):
We still got back the land. Look at it.
Speaker 3 (02:40):
It lay there, bleeding, ravished, desolate, like the people, all
hope for the future. Death.
Speaker 4 (02:50):
We'll never get back, mister.
Speaker 1 (02:52):
Grady, Get back to where we used to be, Get
back into the past. The past belongs to the dead.
Speaker 3 (03:03):
The man is Brady, Henry Brady, twenty five years old,
editor of a Southern newspaper, The Atlanta Constitution. Young, vigorous,
he stands at the window in his office.
Speaker 4 (03:18):
The farmer from the land is witted.
Speaker 1 (03:22):
Ten years since the war ended. You've grown up in
that time, But the South is still prostrate, yes, almost.
Speaker 4 (03:29):
Yet the land is fabulous in natural resources. We had
men to work.
Speaker 1 (03:33):
We have them able, strong bodied men who've never done
a liquor work. It's not too late for them to learn.
Speaker 4 (03:39):
I don't know now, I don't know about that. Slave
days are over.
Speaker 1 (03:44):
We've got to pull ourselves up, do the job ourselves.
Speaker 3 (03:51):
The people have found their sportsmen. Brady speaks through his newspaper.
Speaker 1 (03:57):
The South shall rise up from the ashes. The cities
tremble with industry, the soils sparkle with abundance, The forests
echo to the passing.
Speaker 4 (04:09):
Of freight trains.
Speaker 1 (04:12):
There will be a fascination about her triumph.
Speaker 4 (04:16):
All 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. Those seals
all days, they were out there all day, put in
that hot sun. They worked in the sun. Joke and
(04:37):
I one thing is sured.
Speaker 3 (04:42):
The white man himself is finding a freedom from the
all slave days.
Speaker 4 (04:47):
He discovers he can work.
Speaker 3 (04:53):
Years passing now new voices. The freedmen, former slaves, They
too have their spokesmen. Their symbol of the future.
Speaker 2 (05:02):
The peanut, the lowly common peanut, a truly wondrous thing.
Speaker 3 (05:09):
The man is Carver, Professor George Washington. Carver stands there.
Speaker 4 (05:16):
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.
Speaker 2 (05:28):
Thirty two percent oil. That's the peanut, thirty two percent oil.
I want you to taste something.
Speaker 4 (05:36):
Drink this milk.
Speaker 2 (05:37):
Taste it pleasant milk from the peanut.
Speaker 4 (05:43):
Why that's incredible.
Speaker 2 (05:44):
You can make butter from it, cheese, coffee. The peanut
is an industry.
Speaker 4 (05:49):
In itself, a new industry for the salt.
Speaker 3 (05:54):
The voice of Carver is heard all through the South
wherever the Negro owns land.
Speaker 2 (06:01):
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 rye, sweet potatoes, and peanuts,
and plow deep, plow deep, you hear me. Don't forget
(06:22):
the fertilize the lamb, dead leaves from the forest, muck
from the swamp. Now, don't you forget these things?
Speaker 3 (06:32):
If you listen, A few do what he tells them,
and their lamb grows healthy the century ending now. But
in the big cities, slums, diseases commonly, evil smelling alleyways,
rickety houses. In the middle of all this, in Lexington, Kentucky,
(06:56):
rises another voice.
Speaker 4 (06:59):
Didn't you go, cat, I hate your lady's kick than
a poor little knife.
Speaker 3 (07:07):
Let me take her there.
Speaker 4 (07:12):
We must see something for her. Mistake her to a doctor.
Speaker 3 (07:17):
All this did no food?
Speaker 4 (07:20):
How can he help the sick ladlin mcdald.
Speaker 3 (07:25):
Breckinridge fights for public health, full 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, and oil
boom begins elsewhere in the South. A man named Duke
(07:49):
has made a fortunate tobacco and build a university, recovery,
reconstruction field everywhere. World War One begins. Warships, oil, love,
the more, everything, the salad.
Speaker 4 (08:02):
The ceiling, and there ain't no ceiling in sight.
Speaker 2 (08:06):
This is it?
Speaker 3 (08:16):
And then silence again, the quiet, the stillness.
Speaker 4 (08:23):
Nineteen twenty nine, the whole world.
Speaker 3 (08:27):
Seems to have collapsed. Millions jopless, the worst depression in
the nation's history.
Speaker 4 (08:34):
Sex times, but sex times. Who's gotten money to buy
a suit of clothes these days?
Speaker 2 (08:42):
Ships?
Speaker 3 (08:43):
Ships?
Speaker 4 (08:45):
Who wants to bill ship?
Speaker 1 (08:47):
Pick up all the ship you want with a couple
of hundred dollars bills?
Speaker 2 (08:51):
Who wants to make milk out of peanuts? They're throwing
real milk down The sewers.
Speaker 3 (08:58):
Done shot. Too unbelieving to act, the South staggers. Month
after month, nothing happens except that everything gets a little worse.
And then, as if a giant voice deeply embedded in
its memory, smoke across the South, from the Virginia, from
(09:21):
the Carolina Coast, across the Upperglades of Florida, and the
Red Hills of Georgia, and the Delta Country of the Mississippi.
Speaker 4 (09:28):
The South shall rise up from the ashes.
Speaker 1 (09:32):
The cities tremble with industry, the soils sparkle with abundance.
Speaker 4 (09:40):
There will be a fascination about her triumph.
Speaker 3 (09:44):
But then the giant stirs and reaches in its pockets
and its heart or means to carry it once more
into the future.
Speaker 4 (09:52):
For the coal, iron, oil.
Speaker 3 (09:54):
Gas, the pine, the papers, 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.
Speaker 4 (10:10):
And then, seven thousand miles away in the Pacific Pearl Harbor,
heed for all the riches that have been lying dormant
in the southlands. This is the breakthrough. Feed them.
Speaker 1 (10:31):
Feed those furnaces, you talk too much, feed them, feed them,
feed them, feed those burnaces, boundaries, feed them, the iron founderies,
the steel mills.
Speaker 3 (10:40):
Yes, and sulfur, phosphate, manganese, hop or aluminum legs.
Speaker 4 (10:43):
Think you name that, they got it.
Speaker 3 (10:49):
Meanwhile, on an island called Wattle Canal, a boy from Circe,
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.
Speaker 4 (11:07):
Mill near Spartanburg.
Speaker 3 (11:09):
His body hails him with a phrase that started in
Atlanta and now is set in.
Speaker 4 (11:13):
A hundred tons around the world.
Speaker 2 (11:16):
Hey have a coke.
Speaker 4 (11:19):
And back home in the South.
Speaker 3 (11:21):
Something going on top secret in a little town outside Knoxville,
Tennessee oak Ridge, the Science Research Laboratory. You ask one
of the scientists what's going on.
Speaker 1 (11:36):
Call it what you will, the birth of a Frankenstein munster,
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
(12:00):
means by which men can walk into a summlit future
of cheap abundance, The.
Speaker 3 (12:16):
New South, the old South on the side, the chimneys
by the hundreds, billowing smoke on the outskirts of Knoxville, Tennessee,
the giant d C Six roaring over the edge of
Stone Mountain and then dropping quietly gently into the airport
(12:37):
to Atlantic. The eternal beauty and dignity of the columns
of Jefferson's Montchell ornamental irons delicate as lace on an
old house in Charleston.
Speaker 4 (12:51):
An alligator swimming through a cathedral.
Speaker 3 (12:54):
Of moss in a Louisiana by, and a great river
winding cutting away, restoring the heart land.
Speaker 4 (13:07):
This is the South. A man stands there, stands there,
on the rich black soil, white man needle.
Speaker 3 (13:19):
He sees the new South, even now as a South
that has already passed. 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're
always in the future, whatever the future raping.
Speaker 1 (14:07):
This has been the eleventh chapter in the Story of
the American Nation, brought to you by the Ladies Auxiliary
to the veterans of Foreign Wars. Next week, another story
(14:29):
to make you proud of this great country of ours.
As we follow the American trail,
The American Trail, The American Trail blazed in blood, defended
in London, Chapter eleven, The New South.
Speaker 2 (00:33):
The.
Speaker 3 (00:41):
Pale, dead moon of the Southlands dissolves into the dawn.
Speaker 2 (00:47):
Burning.
Speaker 4 (00:48):
Now no time to dolly. The people have a job
to do. Ships to be built in Norfolk, Virginia. A
passenger playing, loads of business men taking off.
Speaker 3 (00:59):
From Atlanta or Texas City, Kansas City, New York City.
Great cars out of Kentucky, loaded with coals, cement, lumbers, raw.
Speaker 4 (01:10):
Materials to be smelted.
Speaker 3 (01:11):
Down in the glass furnaces of Birmingham. An oil well
coming in from one hundred feet below the surface of
the Gulf, or two Orleans.
Speaker 4 (01:22):
The new noisy, big, brawling and dustry.
Speaker 2 (01:25):
So.
Speaker 4 (01:31):
New it didn't happen yesterday. But it wasn't always like this.
Speaker 3 (01:37):
It was quiet, quiet and still, and a great tiredness
stretched across the prostrate and new roded hills and flatlands. Quiet, quiet,
and still. Eighteen hundred six, the War between the States
(02:03):
is and now quarter of a million Southern boys dead
from wounds and disease. The nightmare called defeat. You'll feel
it everywhere, in the dust, in the hot, scorching wind,
the people stand there petrified. Shots done, a man and
(02:25):
his wife, their house gone. They stare at all that's
left them, the land.
Speaker 4 (02:34):
We still got back the land. Look at it.
Speaker 3 (02:40):
It lay there, bleeding, ravished, desolate, like the people, all
hope for the future. Death.
Speaker 4 (02:50):
We'll never get back, mister.
Speaker 1 (02:52):
Grady, Get back to where we used to be, Get
back into the past. The past belongs to the dead.
Speaker 3 (03:03):
The man is Brady, Henry Brady, twenty five years old,
editor of a Southern newspaper, The Atlanta Constitution. Young, vigorous,
he stands at the window in his office.
Speaker 4 (03:18):
The farmer from the land is witted.
Speaker 1 (03:22):
Ten years since the war ended. You've grown up in
that time, But the South is still prostrate, yes, almost.
Speaker 4 (03:29):
Yet the land is fabulous in natural resources. We had
men to work.
Speaker 1 (03:33):
We have them able, strong bodied men who've never done
a liquor work. It's not too late for them to learn.
Speaker 4 (03:39):
I don't know now, I don't know about that. Slave
days are over.
Speaker 1 (03:44):
We've got to pull ourselves up, do the job ourselves.
Speaker 3 (03:51):
The people have found their sportsmen. Brady speaks through his newspaper.
Speaker 1 (03:57):
The South shall rise up from the ashes. The cities
tremble with industry, the soils sparkle with abundance, The forests
echo to the passing.
Speaker 4 (04:09):
Of freight trains.
Speaker 1 (04:12):
There will be a fascination about her triumph.
Speaker 4 (04:16):
All 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. Those seals
all days, they were out there all day, put in
that hot sun. They worked in the sun. Joke and
(04:37):
I one thing is sured.
Speaker 3 (04:42):
The white man himself is finding a freedom from the
all slave days.
Speaker 4 (04:47):
He discovers he can work.
Speaker 3 (04:53):
Years passing now new voices. The freedmen, former slaves, They
too have their spokesmen. Their symbol of the future.
Speaker 2 (05:02):
The peanut, the lowly common peanut, a truly wondrous thing.
Speaker 3 (05:09):
The man is Carver, Professor George Washington. Carver stands there.
Speaker 4 (05:16):
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.
Speaker 2 (05:28):
Thirty two percent oil. That's the peanut, thirty two percent oil.
I want you to taste something.
Speaker 4 (05:36):
Drink this milk.
Speaker 2 (05:37):
Taste it pleasant milk from the peanut.
Speaker 4 (05:43):
Why that's incredible.
Speaker 2 (05:44):
You can make butter from it, cheese, coffee. The peanut
is an industry.
Speaker 4 (05:49):
In itself, a new industry for the salt.
Speaker 3 (05:54):
The voice of Carver is heard all through the South
wherever the Negro owns land.
Speaker 2 (06:01):
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 rye, sweet potatoes, and peanuts,
and plow deep, plow deep, you hear me. Don't forget
(06:22):
the fertilize the lamb, dead leaves from the forest, muck
from the swamp. Now, don't you forget these things?
Speaker 3 (06:32):
If you listen, A few do what he tells them,
and their lamb grows healthy the century ending now. But
in the big cities, slums, diseases commonly, evil smelling alleyways,
rickety houses. In the middle of all this, in Lexington, Kentucky,
(06:56):
rises another voice.
Speaker 4 (06:59):
Didn't you go, cat, I hate your lady's kick than
a poor little knife.
Speaker 3 (07:07):
Let me take her there.
Speaker 4 (07:12):
We must see something for her. Mistake her to a doctor.
Speaker 3 (07:17):
All this did no food?
Speaker 4 (07:20):
How can he help the sick ladlin mcdald.
Speaker 3 (07:25):
Breckinridge fights for public health, full 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, and oil
boom begins elsewhere in the South. A man named Duke
(07:49):
has made a fortunate tobacco and build a university, recovery,
reconstruction field everywhere. World War One begins. Warships, oil, love,
the more, everything, the salad.
Speaker 4 (08:02):
The ceiling, and there ain't no ceiling in sight.
Speaker 2 (08:06):
This is it?
Speaker 3 (08:16):
And then silence again, the quiet, the stillness.
Speaker 4 (08:23):
Nineteen twenty nine, the whole world.
Speaker 3 (08:27):
Seems to have collapsed. Millions jopless, the worst depression in
the nation's history.
Speaker 4 (08:34):
Sex times, but sex times. Who's gotten money to buy
a suit of clothes these days?
Speaker 2 (08:42):
Ships?
Speaker 3 (08:43):
Ships?
Speaker 4 (08:45):
Who wants to bill ship?
Speaker 1 (08:47):
Pick up all the ship you want with a couple
of hundred dollars bills?
Speaker 2 (08:51):
Who wants to make milk out of peanuts? They're throwing
real milk down The sewers.
Speaker 3 (08:58):
Done shot. Too unbelieving to act, the South staggers. Month
after month, nothing happens except that everything gets a little worse.
And then, as if a giant voice deeply embedded in
its memory, smoke across the South, from the Virginia, from
(09:21):
the Carolina Coast, across the Upperglades of Florida, and the
Red Hills of Georgia, and the Delta Country of the Mississippi.
Speaker 4 (09:28):
The South shall rise up from the ashes.
Speaker 1 (09:32):
The cities tremble with industry, the soils sparkle with abundance.
Speaker 4 (09:40):
There will be a fascination about her triumph.
Speaker 3 (09:44):
But then the giant stirs and reaches in its pockets
and its heart or means to carry it once more
into the future.
Speaker 4 (09:52):
For the coal, iron, oil.
Speaker 3 (09:54):
Gas, the pine, the papers, 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.
Speaker 4 (10:10):
And then, seven thousand miles away in the Pacific Pearl Harbor,
heed for all the riches that have been lying dormant
in the southlands. This is the breakthrough. Feed them.
Speaker 1 (10:31):
Feed those furnaces, you talk too much, feed them, feed them,
feed them, feed those burnaces, boundaries, feed them, the iron founderies,
the steel mills.
Speaker 3 (10:40):
Yes, and sulfur, phosphate, manganese, hop or aluminum legs.
Speaker 4 (10:43):
Think you name that, they got it.
Speaker 3 (10:49):
Meanwhile, on an island called Wattle Canal, a boy from Circe,
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.
Speaker 4 (11:07):
Mill near Spartanburg.
Speaker 3 (11:09):
His body hails him with a phrase that started in
Atlanta and now is set in.
Speaker 4 (11:13):
A hundred tons around the world.
Speaker 2 (11:16):
Hey have a coke.
Speaker 4 (11:19):
And back home in the South.
Speaker 3 (11:21):
Something going on top secret in a little town outside Knoxville,
Tennessee oak Ridge, the Science Research Laboratory. You ask one
of the scientists what's going on.
Speaker 1 (11:36):
Call it what you will, the birth of a Frankenstein munster,
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
(12:00):
means by which men can walk into a summlit future
of cheap abundance, The.
Speaker 3 (12:16):
New South, the old South on the side, the chimneys
by the hundreds, billowing smoke on the outskirts of Knoxville, Tennessee,
the giant d C Six roaring over the edge of
Stone Mountain and then dropping quietly gently into the airport
(12:37):
to Atlantic. The eternal beauty and dignity of the columns
of Jefferson's Montchell ornamental irons delicate as lace on an
old house in Charleston.
Speaker 4 (12:51):
An alligator swimming through a cathedral.
Speaker 3 (12:54):
Of moss in a Louisiana by, and a great river
winding cutting away, restoring the heart land.
Speaker 4 (13:07):
This is the South. A man stands there, stands there,
on the rich black soil, white man needle.
Speaker 3 (13:19):
He sees the new South, even now as a South
that has already passed. 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're
always in the future, whatever the future raping.
Speaker 1 (14:07):
This has been the eleventh chapter in the Story of
the American Nation, brought to you by the Ladies Auxiliary
to the veterans of Foreign Wars. Next week, another story
(14:29):
to make you proud of this great country of ours.
As we follow the American trail,
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