Northwest USA

[Music] On June 16th, 1937, a strange plane rose out of the Arctic Circle and landed on the banks of an American river. The river was the Columbia; the place, the northwest corner of America. It was a fine, exciting [Music] day. That plane came from Moscow, and these men were neighbors who dropped in from the sky—brave men in civilian clothes who said it was easy, natural to fly from the other side of the world—Moscow to the Columbia River nonstop.

Why didn't the Russians stop at Boston first, at New York or Chicago? Because they came this way, far north of all these cities. They flew along a circle across the white and frozen top of the world. Which is the shorter, a curved line or a straight line? A straight line, but only if the world is flat. For a flat world, this old-fashioned map is perfect. But the world is round, so let's change to a round map. M. Now we see the Earth as if from a plane flying very high. Now the straight line becomes curved, and the circle—the way the Russians came—is seen to be straight and short. So the Northwest becomes a kind of a crossroads of the air and a place of importance to the whole world. It holds great trade routes together: the Northwest to East Asia, the Northwest to Latin America, the Northwest to Europe, the Northwest to Australia.

Here's a new kind of world—air thronged, air encircled, with no barriers but storms, with no boundaries but the direction of the wind. The Northwest will be a center of this world. Let's see what it looks like: the face of its mountains, its rapids, lakes, and rivers; the shape of its cities and the shape of the states that were formed inside of it: Washington—the name of America's hero and first president—the two states in the tongue of the Indian: Oregon, Idaho; three states, 400,000 square miles. North, a frontier without a bayonet: Canada and British Columbia; and west, an ocean. Here the west wind moves, and the heavy Pacific moves and lifts against the granite of the Northwest. The noise of the ocean and the silence of this mountain are the same today as they were when the first man looked at this continent. The air is still bright and clear, ice-cold and exciting. It's a young country, and the people who live here feel it. They enjoy the snow, the swiftness of the mountain; they enjoy the summer of the inland [Music] [Applause] lakes, the run of water sounds in their memory, and the great sound of the Columbian [Music] River.

The Indians who fish here have treaty rights in these rivers. The forests behind them still hide the wolf, the mountain lion, and the bear. The salmon still climb 12,200 miles up from the sea to spawn in fresh water, but now they climb ladders made by man, who counts and tabulates them. Salmon are a treasure of the Northwest, as the river itself is a treasure. It is bridged now; it serves man, and it runs through his cities. There are mountains behind the cities; the suburbs are the green forests. The wind over the streets, fresh and salt, blows in from the [Music] Pacific.

From here, the Northwest trades with half the world: from Alaska, furs, gold, and raw materials; from California, oil, oranges, and wine; caros of sugar from Honolulu; from Ceylon, tea, hemp, and mahogany logs; from Russia, rare metals for hardening steel; to Russia, food and [Music] machines. The ports are young and growing fast. In two generations, the cities have doubled, trebled in size. One-third of the Northwest lives in these new cities. The whole world interests these people; they are curious, noisy, energetic. They have the look of the skilled man; they're at home among machines. Electricity is their friend, and yet they still breathe the frontier wind, and the wind still smells of the sea, of the cool mountain, and of the evergreens on the mountain. [Music] On the slopes of the Cascade Range, the Northwest citizen is a lumberjack. [Music] Out of the dark of the forest, he cuts trees as high as skyscrapers and rolls them down the mountain to be made into homes and furniture and books to be read. [Music] On the banks of the snow-melted rivers, he works as a fisherman. Out of cold streams, out of the fertile sea, he draws tuna and halibut, candlefish and steelhead trout and taiye salmon, and sends them to the cannery workers who cook and seal them with steam. Inland, the Northwest citizen drives his sheep toward the railheads, and further east, on the open ranges, he grazes herds of Angus, Shorthorn, and Hereford. He grows wheat on farms too big for anything but machines. [Music] He cuts his Indian corn in the cold October [Music] [Applause] sunlight. He cultivates the earth for sugar beets, cabbages, and melons. He's a fruit farmer, growing apples on cool uplands—apples with Indian names called Wachi, Skookum, and Yakar. He is a miner, searching beneath the earth for salt and coal, limestone and granite, and loading magnesium and aluminum ore for the smelters of Bonners Ferry and Spokane. For three generations, the people of the Northwest have drawn resources from the rock, the earth, and the water. [Music] [Applause]

But this is the Northwest, too: the interior desert—wind and dust and greasewood, dry miles of sagebrush. People plowed this land and put in seeds; almost no rain. They got one crop and then nothing. [Music] The land was dry; it was lava poured out of volcanoes long ago—lava, fine and dark, but without water. Give this ground water, and it grows rich overnight. Irrigation is the answer. It was tried, and it worked on a small scale, but it wasn't enough. The problem was too big; it was nearly as big as the Northwest itself. The land is divided by the Cascade Mountains, as high as 12,000 feet. The rain comes in from the sea; it pours down 90 to 130 inches a year. But the wet Pacific winds are blocked by the mountains, so on this side, the rainfall is as little as 5 inches a year—good land without water. But cutting the dry land in half is the full Columbia River. The Northwest people began to do some thinking. Here's a town of a freighter rainfall—72 inches. In this town there were two friends: a newspaper editor and a lawyer—Rufus Woods and William Clapp. Billy Clapp had an idea. There was the Grand Coulee, the dry bed once used by the Columbia, now just an empty chasm. Use it, he told Woods, to store water from the Columbia; push back the river with a dam and get water power at the same time. His friend said, "Billy, you've got it—2 million horsepower of electricity. Think of it—citizens' power and water at the same time." A big idea, but too big for one county or one state; it needed the nation behind it. Convincing the nation was the first big job. For years, Billy Clapp and Rufus Woods and their friends fought to make the dream come true. Then one day, Woods put on his hat and looked [Music] up. Yes, they were really trying to do it. They were blasting apart the lava and stubborn granite, and when the dust settled, you could see the men go back up the face of the cliff—little men working with the big Northwest, trying, trying to remake a river so it would move their way. But the river itself was so big that the engineers had to design and build a dam almost twice the size of anything ever before attempted. [Music] To block this river from its deep bed to its highest flood, they had to pour in so much concrete and steel that the dam became the largest structure built by man in all his history. And it took them seven [Music] years. But one day it was there. The idea was real; the dream had become copper and [Music] concrete. A man walked to the edge of the water, and there it was—the Grand Coulee [Music] Dam.

A big job, so big that it would change the lives of Americans who would never hear the sound of the Columbia. Here was water to irrigate more than a million acres and power to spark the industry of four [Music] states. The power was ready; the power was moving out—power to light cities, power to drive electric locomotives through mountains and over simmering rapids, and power to reach down and turn a girl's sewing machine in a lonely town. But the water—there was no chance to use the water yet; irrigation had to [Music] wait. Germany and Japan struck at the world. The Coulee, built for uses of peace, became a weapon in the hands of the Northwest people; it became one of the greatest weapons of the United Nations. The power of the Coulee went flashing down the great new lines to mill and furnace and shipyard. The Columbia River was being used to roll, to harden, and to forge. Power out of Northwest water, aluminum out of Northwest rock, and out of the heart of America itself, they poured towards the Northwest a stream of human energy to fill up her factories and make use of her power and metals: a mother from the South, a textile worker from Boston, two neighbors from a town in the Midwest, a businessman who closed his store, a sculptor who came because the world needed something stronger than stone. In great, clean shops, they made surgical instruments like these to cut the can of fascism out of the [Music] world. And Columbia power poured into another kind of factory—a factory outdoors that made ships like automobiles on the assembly line. They call them Liberty ships—"A good name," said the workers on this job, because they made these ships to carry the flour, the woolen sweaters, and the ammunition of Liberty. [Music]

The people of the Northwest were doing a job, but inside themselves, they knew it was more than a job. They were clearing away into the future, and they kept this purpose clear in the smallest things they did. If you look beside the shipyard, you'll see another building, open to the light and air. It's a nursery where children can eat and play games and take a nap after lunch, and it's big enough for anyone's children. It's a safe place to leave a child, knowing he will be fed and occupied and interested while their parents build ships next door. Their children will be busy all day long with their own tremendously important affairs. [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] Here is the greatest treasure of any civilization. This is a famous planner of cities, or a poet, or a lumberjack. This boy wants to be an architect someday, like his father. [Music] Someday they'll hear how a war nearly destroyed the world and how people had to spill their blood to learn to work together, to enjoy their planet. What's here today? A child's dream. Yes, that and something more. There's a community here in the Northwest, a way of living together for a common goal, and there's love here and the fullness of life, and there's work—hard work, planning and doing day and night, so that these ships can go to the water someday without fear. So the children will look up, up in the sky, at planes without bombs or guns, flying every hour to Moscow over the North Pole, flying to Iraq and London and Paris, and drawing the straight circles on the geography of the air. And there will be ships that carry nothing but wonderful [Music] fruit. Come on, child of the Northwest, there's work to do.