1945.
America stands tall.
Enemies vanquished,
Duty done on the battlefield.
And the greatest riches on earth at its feet:
More than half the world's oil
2/3 of its gold,
And the talents of 140 million people
Ready to build modern America
We are pioneers and trailblazers
We fight for freedom.
We transform our dreams into the truth,
Our struggles will become a nation
Post-war America will be turbulent,
Dynamic and overwhelming.
More change and progress than in the last 400 years put together.
But some things haven't changed.
American courage, vision and determination
Will always shape the nation.
The character of the country and its people
Forged in the past drives the story forward.
The USA has ended World War II as a superpower.
Its economy turbo charged.
Prime to construct the future.
The greatest generation is ready for peace time.
Their ambition knows no limits.
The average American family already earns 15 times more than they do in Europe.
The USA hums with economic potential.
This was the greatest moment of collective innovation
In all of American history.
And this country wasn't giddy.
With the sense of accomplish pride, prospect for the future.
America's future looks bright.
Inventions and innovation have always been the things that bind its people together.
But America's sheer size threatens to pull it apart.
The landmass is 9 million square miles.
And the road system isn't working.
When you saw this vast wilderness in front of you,
And what am I going to do with this?
The older highways, the white shield highways
Would go across the country and when it came to town
It became the main street of every town.
And there is always bottlenecks.
It is almost impossible to get around by car.
Only half of the roads are even plane.
Eisenhower, the new President has seen it for himself.
As a young soldier, he drove across the nation.
It took 62 days.
America has faced this problem before.
How to move people and goods across its great expanse.
Each generation has come up with its own solution.
The rivers were America's first highways.
1811, the paddle steamer is launched,
Taking goods upriver as well as down,
Opening up the Mississippi to more trade.
The Erie Canal is America's next great conveyor belt of commerce.
1825. It links the Eastern sea board to the Great Lakes.
Like the steamboats, it spawns cities along its route.
The canal transforms New York into a boom town
That quadruples in size.
Now it's time to get America's roads working like the canals and rivers before them.
To get the country moving again.
And President Eisenhower makes it his mission to get the job done.
He started looking at the development of this country in the 50s.
And you really saw the vision of what the interstate highway system could do.
And it was amazing. It changed America.
There's a common theme to the greatest innovations in American history,
And that is these were things that helped people or goods or ideas
Travel about more freely.
The interstate highway
Becomes the biggest engineering project in American history.
It costs the nation 129 billion dollars.
2.4 billion Man-hours of hard work.
And just like the railroads a century before,
It's built with manual labor and sheer grit.
America's landscape has been shaped by transportation.
The Transcontinental Railway opened up 1.5 billion acres of land
And 8 new states.
200,000 miles of track.
Churn out of hostile terrain.
Faced with a mountain,
Find an innovative way of blowing it up
Nitroglycerin.
Black powder.
Dynamite.
The Interstates is the largest earth-moving project
In the history of the world.
1.5 million tons of explosives.
42 billion cubic yards of earth removed.
Enough to fill more than 8 million football stadiums...
We can build anything, we damn will, please, we're going to go about it.
And it did change the country.
The Freeways, the Interstate Highway System.
You could connect the cities in a way that no one had seen before,
On a level no one had seen before.
Today there are 46,876 miles of Interstate Highways,
Enough to wrap nearly twice around the world.
And the journey that once took Eisenhower 62 grueling days,
Now it can be done in 4.
Those were the means can take to the roads.
There was nothing that could stop a person from being what they want,
Going where they want, doing what they want.
Freedom to travel where you want.
Freedom not to be stuck to where the trolley rails go.
A freedom and life-style that came with it that really a celebrate
That senses that the car was your ticket to personal freedom.
This is a country that will not accept being shackled,
Perhaps it's because of our geography
And we are able to expand the wheel and move where we wanna to.
Good roads need more cars.
Bigger, faster, better.
1946.
2 million of them are manufactured in America.
And that's just the beginning.
It's the age of the automobile.
When I came to America, the first thing I want to think about,
"How can I get hold a car?"
I didn't have enough money.
So I shared with two friends by a jalopy.
I've crossed the country with that.
I had a love affair with cars from the very beginning
Because this method of movement
That can enable you to see vast, expansive space.
From as soon as they could get their hands on one,
Americans have always liked their cars.
Now the whole country has fallen in love with the automobile.
1955.
Americans are spending 65 billion dollars on car,
Buying 8 million of them every 12 months.
By now, the USA is making 80% of the world's automobiles.
More than 20,000 cars a day roll off the production line across the country.
Four times as many as the Model T at its height.
There was now a car in every drive way, maybe 2 cars in every driveway.
One for mom, one for dad, and maybe one for the oldest child.
We have this ideal of American life as the two parents, two children,
Brand new gleaming American cars
With fins the size of Pennsylvania coming off the rear of it.
Once the Americans got into their cars, there is no going back.
The interstate Highways take them where they've never been before,
Meaning some places gets left behind.
No one really thought about how would fundamentally change these communities,
Because on Route 66, they would always say
"We didn't have to travel, the world came to us."
And overnight when the ribbon cut on the Interstate Highway System
They were bypassing the town.
And many towns died.
You know, they call it "death by interstate."
The interstate bypass the towns,
But they lead somewhere else
To America's next invention-- the suburbs.
America has always used technology
To overcome the challenges of its vast open spaces.
Carving out the environment,
Building houses for its people, shaping its future.
Technology has built America.
Every major development in the history of America
Technology has been the center of it.
1607.
50 million trees.
9 million square miles of wilderness.
60 million bisons.
This is what the first settlers were faced with.
Within a year of arriving at Jamestown,
They had built themselves a fort, a church and 50 houses.
If America needs it, they build it.
If people need housing, they will always find a way.
That is the American dream. To just create a new life for yourself,
Reinvent yourself, get a little patch of land somewhere
Grow some crops and be the master of your own destiny.
America is about to embark on
Its biggest house building project ever.
This greatest generation and what they went thorough
Then they came home and just went back to being civilians.
Houses have been built before. But never on this scale.
13 million over the next decade.
Because at the end of the day I do want to go home.
I want to drink a few beers and I want to watch my football
and I want to have my backyard barbeques
And celebrate the 4th of July.
And the problem to be tackled this time
Is the sheer scale of what's required.
1946.
330 new babies delivered every hour.
That's one baby every 10 seconds.
It's the 'baby boom'. They all need housing.
A million acres are plowed under each year of the 1950s for housing plots.
3,000 acres a day.
It's the birth of suburbia. The next innovation.
Building houses outside the cities to give new families a new life.
Farmland into family homes.
New York loses about 2 million people over that period
And it looks like people are just going to slowly kind of hollow out the inner city.
And they would buy a new, perhaps, saltbox house in Levittown in New York,
Or its equivalent housing development across the country.
All of these icons of sort of the 1950s domestic culture,
Suburban culture, that begins to emerge during these years.
Levitt & Sons are family builders.
They'll give their name to America's most famous post-war housing: "The Levittown."
Here on this Levittown and Sons construction site,
They're building houses as fast as babies are born.
One every 16 minutes.
8:00 AM, trucks unload.
9:30, bathrooms arrive.
11:00, floors are laid.
300 windows a day.
30 baths a day.
These techniques
Are inspired by the Industrial Age.
1840, Lowell Mills Massachusetts,
The manufacture of cotton is transformed by mechanized looms.
1918, Henry Ford's Detroit production line.
The automobile revolution.
Now, in the 1950s, America is mass producing family homes.
Levitt & Sons call it
The "Ford production line of house building"
This is human enterprise, human ingenuity, putting these buildings there,
They were put there by free men and women
Making their own free decisions.
By 1951, Levittown, New York,
Has 17,000 identical new homes.
A second Levittown is built in Philadelphia, a third in New Jersey.
My father grew up very poor during the Depression.
He fought in World War II.
It was a big deal for him to get out of a poor neighborhood.
And buy a 50x100 lot
In Franklin Square, Long Island, where I grew up.
There was a feeling the country now has achieved regained prosperity
After the long decade of the Great Depression
Which had made many people think that prosperity might never return.
A family home for less than $8,000.
That's $71,000 in today's money.
Down to the eve of World War II, down to 1940 or so
Only about 40% of Americans owned their own homes.
By 1960, one short generation later,
60% of Americans owned their own homes.
That's just one way to quantify the spread of affluence and prosperity
And all that came with that
In terms of self-confidence and enthusiasm for the future.
The American home has developed since the Pilgrims,
Into, really, the center of the family.
The family is the most important social unit
In the United States, and it should be.
Through the centuries, the family home has shaped America
And showcased American innovation.
Plantation houses built by stone masons.
Log cabins made from what's available on the land.
Merchants' houses, the backbone for the early cities.
Each time, the technology has transformed how these houses have been built.
And where they've been built.
Overcoming the extreme of America's climate.
1913.
Los Angeles booms when the L.A. aqueduct brings in water.
Without it, the city would have stayed an outpost.
Now it's air conditioning that wins the South.
1902, invented in New York,
1952, $250 million worth of air con units are sold.
Hispanic architecture
Had once kept the Sun Belt States cool.
Now it's air con.
In the 1960s, more people moved to the Southern states
Then moved out after the Civil War.
America's toughest landscapes opened up for housing.
California and Florida became states that were overrun,
With new people moving in and wanting to live in a better life.
Living a better life goes back to the big innovation of the 19th century.
Steel.
1875, Pittsburgh.
Andrew Carnegie has a vision.
Large-scale production
Making steel the greatest building material in the world.
Malleable, versatile, strong, and now affordable.
Used to construct everything from skyscrapers
To refrigerators.
Labor-saving domestic appliances
Freeing people to do more with their time.
1925.
The family wash takes 6 hours.
Soon washing machines will do the job in 45 minutes.
One of the kinds of common themes
That runs throughout the history of America all the way back to the founders
Is this really this obsession with technology and gadgets.
If you look at America's greatness and the standard of living
That was built in 200 plus years, this is America's great story.
The land of plenty has become a land of technology.
And soon, that technology will take America even further.
"That's one small step for man,
One giant leap for mankind."
Massive engineering projects uniting the nation.
Americans working together
To push the boundary of science and technology.
There was a unity of ideas and purpose and that's what brought us together.
It was spirit of exploration like when we went to the moon.
The impetus for the Apollo Space Program
Came from aviation.
Invented by the Wright brothers,
Accelerated into production by two World Wars.
Aerial Combat.
Won in the air
And built by American technology
300,000 aircraft made in the U.S.A.
From 1941 to 1945.
Within a decade, harnessing that technology,
America will lead the world into the jet age.
And from there into space.
1959.
The Boeing 707 flies between New York and Los Angeles.
The journey that once took 4 days by road now takes 6 hours.
Today, over 2 million make that trip every year.
The push to fly faster and further is unstoppable.
Airplanes, rockets, spacecraft.
And people on the moon.
What a magnificent testimony to the progress of humanity.
1961.
President John F. Kennedy tells the world
That America will put a man on the moon.
I still remember when I was a little kid, you know,
John F. Kennedy stand up there and saying,
"We are gonna moon by the end of this decade."
America had been a land of frontiers from the early 17th century.
And the frontiers had moved gradually across North America.
And now it seemed make sense that the frontier
Would expand beyond the boundaries of the Earth.
Space is uncharted territory,
Like the expansion westward.
A grueling five-month journey through the interior.
It hasn't stopped America before.
The pioneering spirit drives people onward.
Americans are impatient.
They want to see new things, new opportunities.
And they challenged millions of people
Into putting this program together. And you know what? They did it.
We just made it.
July of that last year of that decade, we just made it.
400,000 Americans worked directly on "Apollo 11".
Flight controllers, engineers, scientists, seamstresses.
After 8 years, they're ready for the big one.
And the fact that this team of dedicate people,
From astronauts all the way down to, you know, every engineer
How to achieve that goal it's really
One of the truly inspiring stories in American history.
A timeline planned down to the last second.
17,000 people in Florida to handle take-off.
131 people man the mission control room in Houston, Texas.
10
9
Ignition sequence, start.
3,000 tons of metal and three astronauts set off for the moon.
6
5
4
3
2
1
0
All engine running.
Lift off. We have a lift off.
We set our sights on the moon and everybody felt that, yeah,
It sounds impossible
But we're in this business and we're gonna do it.
More power than all the waterfalls in North America combined.
60 feet taller than the Statue of Liberty.
A million gallons of fuel.
Enough to drive a car around the globe 400 times.
All the teamwork and discipline
Still leaves the astronauts to face the unknown alone.
When they approached the Moon
They did a burn to slow the command module down
So they could go into lunar orbit.
If it didn't work, they would have shot past the moon
Into the distant Solar System never to be seen again.
Less than 30 seconds of fuel are left when the landing craft touched down.
And then he said, "Contact light on.
"Tranquility base here.
"The Eagle has landed."
"We copy on the ground."
"That's one small step for man,
One giant leap for mankind."
I thought for a minute
Isn't this is beautiful?, it's magnificent desolation."
The Stars and Stripes first raised in 1776.
Now planted on the moon.
Walk around the moon and look at the world, you know?
A view that nobody else has ever seen.
We believed they could do anything.
We believed NASA's technology was perfect.
It was the genius of the best American science and engineering. And it was.
Often you have to remember what we had come through
Leading up to that summer night in 1969.
We lost a President to assassination.
We lost his brother to assassination.
But for a few minutes, one summer night
We all stood and stared up at the heaven.
That became the first of nine spaceships that went to the Moon,
And 24 Americans reached the moon
And we landed six out of seven times.
And I think for the country as a whole, it remains something a metaphor. You know,
You always have to say,
We did the Apollo project to solve this problem or that problem.
The lunar landing unites America.
It is the nation's greatest scientific achievement.
Technology is powering forward.
But America is held back.
There's a fault line that changed the nation:
Race.
African-Americans have been part of America's story from the beginning.
As foot soldiers and fighting men,
Civilians and citizens.
Doing the dangerous job of whaling in the 19th century.
1619.
The first Africans arrived in Virginia.
Although some will gain their freedom and own land, most were slaves.
Over 200 years, slavery became a key part
Of the American economy, particularly in the South.
By 1861, nearly 4 million slaves.
They helped to fuel a 2 billion dollars cotton boom
That makes the South rich.
The ghosts are very much alive today in people, who have,
If not the actual memory of that,
But a family memory, a memory of what that was like,
And the social memory of what it was like when people were treated as things.
Now in 1963, drawing on the inspiration of their deeper past,
African Americans are about to change everything.
This country once and for all grasps the nettle of the most vexed issue
In all of this country's history, which is race.
We waited 100 years after the Civil War to take that issue up again.
The Civil War was fought in part over the right to own slaves.
And when it was over, African Americans were supposed to be on an equal footing,
But segregation then took hold in the South.
And so you needed that second civil war.
I call it that
Other would not perhaps call it the same thing.
But it was a different kind of civil war.
But it had the same goal as the first Civil War did.
And it was led by different people.
20th century America will see a long struggle for equality.
Race riots in Chicago in 1919 leaves 38 dead.
In the segregated South, separate schools,
Separate buses, separate restaurants.
Twice as many unemployed.
Change begins when 1 million black soldiers
Join up in World War II.
And Blacks demonstrated they could fly planes just like anyone else,
They could sail ships, they could do anything the white soldier could do.
They don't know yet, but these soldiers
Are the beginning of the modern civil rights movement.
Individuals more than willing to fight and die for our country
And for the freedoms that our county represented.
Yet freedom that were not still truly shared by all Americans.
And the first step toward equal rights is taken.
July 1948.
The military is desegregated.
No more whites only regiments.
No more black-only regiments.
Just American shoulder to shoulder.
When I came in, my superior said to me,
"We don't care if you're black, we don't care if you're white.
"We don't want to hear any hard luck stories
"The Only thing we care about is performance."
But outside the military, it is a different story.
Blacks do not have the same status as whites.
The people among us who in many cases, were doing
The dirty work of society
The people who were making hotels ready for us to stay in
And serving us food at restaurants that wouldn't see them as guests.
The Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s
Will use words and actions to convince the world that
The time for freedom has come
That African-Americans are ready to fight for justice.
So people say, "Why are you gonna identify yourself as black "
Because I'm black.
And because everybody else would identify me as black.
And did for the most of my life.
Now, they might not think that same way about my children
But I will not shrink from that
And the single reason why I won't is because of all those who went before me.
To put right the wrongs of slavery.
That's what motivated those who went before.
Come on, you all
Blacks who, despite being enslaved were already fighting for freedom.
Inspirational people like Harriet Tubman.
Come on
A former slave.
From 1849 she was part of an underground network
Bringing some 300 Slaves to freedom.
One of America's first civil rights activists.
It' a story that's not just about black people,
But it's about human beings caring for other people.
And having the courage to do what is right even at peril to yourself.
The voice of the modern civil rights movement
And it's most determined and eloquent leader,
Is Martin Luther King, Jr.
Baptist minister, preacher, and campaigner.
August 1963.
Martin Luther King, Jr. leads 250,000 on the March on Washington.
His marvelous speech that every American knows
At the Lincoln Memorial,
Talking about "I have a dream".
America is telling the world that blacks and whites have come together
To say we are ready to make the next step toward equality,
And a young black preacher talked about a dream
That connected back to the American dream.
What he did was hold a mirror up to the face of all Americans and said,
Hey it's been a couple hundred years
Now let's do what the Declaration of Independence actually said.
"We hold these truth to be self-evident,
"That all men are created equal."
The promise of 1776 back on the agenda.
Now this is a culmination of everybody together saying this,
This is our moment, this is the time for us.
Whites looked inside themselves and said you know what,
Why should black kids go to second-rate schools?
That's not good for the country. That's not good for what we are as people.
That's when the tipping point was reached.
A year after the March on Washington
The Civil Rights Act is passed through Congress.
Voting rights extended.
Racial discrimination outlawed,
Segregation ended.
America's problem with race does not disappear.
But the way is paved,
for an African-American to reach the White House.
To be able to inspire our kids, let them know that
They have such greatness out there
They can be anything they want to be, and we can mean that.
Fighting segregation and discrimination by law
And we're changing hearts and minds.
We're moving out of that and memories tend to fade, but not for me.
I'll never forget
But 1960s America still has a problem.
A growing challenge from beyond the nation's shores.
A rival
That wants to blow the USA out of the water.
July 1945 New Mexico.
The Manhattan Project.
Robert Oppenheimer leads the team that develops the atomic bomb.
The original weapon of mass destruction.
Terrifying in its power.
And America got there first.
Only the Americans in the end had a plausible chance at success
Because they have the enormous resources,
They could invest in this thing on a crash basis
And make it happen.
But someone else wants one too.
America's great rival on the world stage, the Soviet Union.
Now that America has the bomb, they'll stop at nothing to build their own.
Communist's spies even infiltrate the Manhattan Project.
The arms race between the world's superpowers has begun.
You could not possibly have grown up in this country in that era
Without being very actually aware of that great diplomatic standoff
Between the Soviet Union and the United States that we call the Cold War.
After 1949, when the Soviet got the atomic bomb,
This was a foe that could wreck horrible damage
On the United States at the instant's notice.
It was a time unlike anything Americans had lived through before.
It's the Cold War and Americans are on red alert.
We did these duck-and-cover drills routinely at school.
First you duck, then you cover.
The siren would be tested we were instructed how to get under the desk
And cover your head and face
So that the debris from glass blowing in from the windows
When the atomic bomb went off downtown wouldn't hurt us.
Both sides stockpile weapons to defend themselves against possible attack.
From 1940 to 1996,
The USA will spend 5.5 trillion dollars on nuclear weapons.
That's nearly $20,000 for every man, woman and child in America.
It was the arrival really of the specter of real nuclear war.
Hiroshima and Nagasaki were no longer seen as isolated one time incidents.
By the mid-1950s, there were over 40,000 defense contractors
Working for the federal government.
America has always won wars using technology.
In the Revolutionary War, the accuracy of the Kentucky Rifle
Was a key factor in defeating the British.
In the Civil War, the Minie Ball
Could travel 600 yards and shatter bones on impact.
1959.
America's first Intercontinental Ballistic Missile.
It can travel 3,500 miles
And destroy cities.
200 years of American weapons finding their target.
And defeating the enemy.
But this time it's different.
This is a war that no one can win.
If an atomic bomb is used, there's no going back.
Every time the Soviets make a move, American fears the worst.
1960, the U2 incident,
When an US spy plane is shot down over the Soviet Union.
1962, the Cuban Missile Crisis.
The standoff with Moscow over nuclear weapons in America's backyard.
Actual warheads,
The bombs, actual bombs were in Cuba.
They were already there. And the delivery system was coming over.
Suddenly it seems very important to have adequate supplies in every home.
I remember vividly people going to the local supermarkets
And buying up all kinds of canned goods,
And throwing them back in their cars,
And driving up to the Siskiyou Mountains
Or the Trinity Alps or Sierra Nevada Range
To get out of the blast range of any nuclear weapons
That might fall in the bay area.
There are rumors that an attack may come from within,
That Soviet spies are plotting to bring America down.
The Senate sets up hearings to unmask
Communists in the government and media.
And they saw ghosts behind every corner
And enemies on every bookshelf.
So this effort to root out the enemy at home
Became a defining moment.
After World War II when the Cold War emerged there was this feeling
That the country could split apart very easily politically
And there was a desire that that not happen.
So there was this kind of sort of self-imposed conformity.
If Communists are atheists, Americans are religious.
If the Communists are acting collectively,
We are true individualists.
If the Communists want to break down family structures,
We are the tight nuclear family.
Communism.
Armageddon.
These threats to the nation's freedoms
Are just too close for comfort.
The United States has seen off superpowers in the past.
Digging deep to defend what matters.
Maybe the most important values we have
Are our family, faith and...
And the American flag.
But these values, which Americans have defended since the Revolution,
Are about to be challenged in unexpected ways.