"What you're going to see now is the last programme of "America"." "It takes a look at America today, or it did when the programme was made, which was in 1972." "Remember, the aim throughout this series was to show the roots of the present in the past." "That is constant through the final programme." "But some things have changed, gone not quite the way we thought they would." "And when I look back," "I think that I was unduly grim about some aspects of America and maybe not grim enough about others." "For instance, I remarked as if it were a recipe for almost permanent prosperity that America had learnt to live by the credit card, by the mortgage, by the bank loan, by Roosevelt's system of deficit financing." "Today, whole nations live that way and the word deficit carries a far more ominous sound than it did." "On the other hand, the black revolution has achieved less and more than it promised." "Now, you're going to hear the Reverend Jesse Jackson chanting on about total freedom and a separate black political party." "Well, that flaming rhetoric cooled, but into action." "I would never have dreamed that by today, most of the big cities of America would have black mayors." "Los Angeles, Chicago, Detroit, Atlanta, Washington." "Or that there would be black generals in the armed forces or that my bank manager would be a young black woman." "You'll notice too that in 1972 there was a great to-do about the communes, young people who decided not to join or fight the middle class but to leave it." "Well, they've dissolved and the more serious rebels have gone into local government." "Finally, I made the point that in the welfare state too many of us expect a handout, a government subsidy." "Big Daddy will provide." "But I didn't think that so soon we would elect a President in protest against this liberal system that we'd come to take for granted." "So, some points would've been sharpened if I'd been clairvoyant." "Some would've been softened." "But the main conclusion, the little talk at the end about American society today, what it faces, where it's going," "I would not now change a word of it." "About a fifth of America, half the West, is semi-desert." "For centuries, much of it has been at the mercy of the Colorado River, either a trickle that leaves the land parched or a torrent that floods it with silt." "The desert is not infertile." "Spit on the desert, they say out West, and a flower will grow." "On the Arizona-Nevada border is one of the great works of man," "Hoover Dam, which bottles the 1400-mile flow of the river and teaches it to spit accurately and often on one quarter-million acres of dry land." "This reservoir, a man-made lake 110 miles long, holds 5,000 gallons for every man, woman and child in the world." "The dam took 5,000 men 21 months to build." "To get to the bottom of the spillway, you go down what would be a 60-storey skyscraper." "It was built in the Depression, before the age of plastic and lavatory tile." "It used the beautiful strong materials of the old order, aluminium and steel, copper and brass." "They drove tunnels through the canyon bedrock and held the river in them while the spillway was poured." "700 feet high." "Four and a quarter million cubic yards of concrete." "They planted huge icing tubes to hasten its cooling." "If it had been left to nature, it would've taken a century to set." "I remember the exhilaration with which we first saw the pylons striding across the barren land." "To tame the Colorado and make the desert bloom was the stated aim of President Franklin Roosevelt when he dedicated this dam." "It was to create a fruit and vegetable market for America, which it did, and also to produce more electricity to keep Roosevelt's promise of what he called "the more abundant life"." "However, a vast sprouting of power made the desert and much else of America bloom in ways that Roosevelt never had in mind." "If it hadn't been for Hoover Dam, this would still be the small, dusty Western town where I first bedded down in a rooming house with cockroaches the size of turtles." "But it's now Las Vegas, the archetype of the new pleasure cities of America, which offer screaming solicitations to people passing through to stop and stay and enjoy themselves." "Before the sun goes down, it pierces the eyeballs as cruelly as Broadway by daylight." "But when the twilight comes on, it settles into a large shape and a sharp style that is nowhere but America in the 1970s." "A single downtown hotel consumes as much electricity as the houses in a town of 60,000." "It takes this candle power to create the night-time image of Babylon in the desert." "But, mind, it is Everyman's cut-rate Babylon." "Not far from here, there's a roadside lunch counter and over it is a sign which proclaims in three words that the Roman emperor's orgy is now a democratic institution." "It says, "Topless Pizza Lunch"." "In the pleasuredome of Las Vegas, people line up for hours to register into motels and indulge the pleasures that were once reserved at Baden-Baden for Edward VII and King Farouk." "(BURLESQUE MUSIC)" "Anybody else on a hardways now?" "Come on, field bets." "The stakes can be as high or as low as you like." "It's the big time on a low budget, which you must admit exhibits neither the gloom nor the listless trance of casinos for the rich." "But it would be the understatement of the century to say that this was not what Franklin Roosevelt meant by "the more abundant life"." "And yet it was made directly possible by harnessing the power of the Colorado River through the generators at Hoover Dam." "Las Vegas in the 1970s is only one example we'll look at of a revolution in American values, of the starkest historical contrast between the old American dream and the new American reality." "Certainly, this is maybe a civilisation and a decadence away from that New World for which the Pilgrim Fathers, after their first harvest, rose and gave thanks." "Give us the courage our forefathers had on this first Thanksgiving Day 350 years ago." "Since, the original Puritans' conceptions of purity have come a long way." "This group in California is only one of legions of permissive cults with their own views of community, of religion, of therapy." "America was settled by tough, patient people carrying a few rude staples." "Today, food groans and gurgles from coast to coast in variations both succulent and frivolous." "America used to be the land of boundless spaces." "Today, boundless space is available only to the airbound reporter instructing the earthbound midgets." "(RADIO)" "America revelled at the beginning of the century in the latest ingenuity of the glorious industrial revolution." "Today, we have reaped that whirlwind." "America was the magic word and the better life for millions of Europeans penned in ghettos." "Today, the magic has faded but the tenements remain." "(JAZZ SAXOPHONE PLAYS)" "These contrasts are obviously worldwide." "But they always seem more depressing and dramatic here because America didn't inherit a nation, it invented one, and boasted that it would be better than everything that had gone before." "Europeans take delight in saying," ""You see, life over there, for all its well-advertised equality," ""is just as unequal as ours."" "It isn't." "Morally, the Americans know as much as any of us about the seven deadly sins." "And because they expected more, they know more about disillusion." "But materially, what was new about the American experiment was the attempt to deny special privilege, to bring wellbeing to the masses." "30 years ago, presidential candidate Wendell Wilkie said it in a sentence." ""The American economy cannot exist" ""unless Americans regard as necessities what other people look on as luxuries."" "This impulse was at work very early." "Take as a dramatic example the son of George Washington's Judge Advocate General, an upper-crust Bostonian, the very last type you would expect to become the first tycoon and the founding father of anything so democratic as an ice-cream parlour." " (MAN) What you would like?" " I'll have bubblegum ice cream." " Cone?" "Banana split?" " Yeah, cone." "A cone with a scoop of mandarin chocolate sherbet and a scoop of peach chiffon." "Peppermint-fudge ribbon chocolate fudge with nuts and, um, my toppings," "I think I'd like chocolate and marshmallow." "Right." "Then he tries to make basket..." "Basketball!" " (GIGGLING)" " You're a fool." "(CHILDREN LAUGH AND TALK)" "The man who made this possible was a man named Frederick Tudor." "And without his kind," "Americans would not have had iceboxes in their homes a century before Europeans had refrigerators, and ice cream might today be a luxury as exotic as Iranian caviar." "Now, Tudor, mind you, was born in 1784." "His brothers went to Harvard." "He wanted to be up and doing." "He quit school at 13 and became a merchant and an inventor with so many mad ideas which didn't pay off." "A brother said, "I wonder you don't break up the ice on the Boston ponds" ""and ship it to the tropics."" "Well, young Tudor ignored the crack and seized on the brainwave." "He shipped 130 tons of ice to Martinique." "It melted in six weeks." "Insulation was the big problem." "Like Edison with his filament, he tried everything from straw to blankets." "He beat it in the end with sawdust." "Then, to get uniform blocks of ice, he got a friend to design an ice cutter with two parallel runners made of iron with saw teeth and they were pulled across the ponds by horses." "Within 15 years, he'd collared title to the New England ponds, got monopoly rights on building icehouses in Havana and New Orleans and Charleston, and with his own fleet was shipping ice to the West Indies," "to Persia, to India and to Europe." "The foreigners were delighted with the product, but like an Englishman contemplating his first corn on the cob, they wondered what to do with it." "But Tudor knew that the golden rule of merchandising is to create an appetite for something that you didn't even know you wanted." "He undercut his competitors." "He offered bargains in bulk." "In the end, he delivered his ice at a penny a pound." "Frederick Tudor made ice a necessity, even at the end of the Second World War in England." " Hi, how are you?" " Nice to see you." " Nice to see you." " What are you drinking?" "Some Harvey's Bristol Cream will be fine." " Well, hello." "Hi, John, how are you?" " Hi." "(COOKE) No question." "The middle class in America has it better than most." "(FROM OTHER ROOM) Hey, dynamite, how about another drink?" " Oh, this is great." " Oh!" " Thank you." " Marvellous." "The conversion of luxuries into necessities goes on." "Row houses in the suburbs have swimming pools to mimic the status pools of the rich." "But to maintain this, to keep up with the Joneses, the American family has taken over the policy the Roosevelt government adopted - deficit financing." "Without the credit card and the mortgage and the bank loan," "I doubt the affluent society could exist." "Since the last war, the crumbling city centres have been replaced by office buildings and banks and loan and insurance buildings, not by housing." "The central land is too dear for housing, so the old city types have departed for the country and the new suburbs." "After every war, there's a massive movement of population." "After the last one, the men who fought in the Pacific spread the word that in California there were no slums, the valleys were fruitful and the living was easy." "There was a song that celebrated this dream." "# I'm gonna pack my grip and I'm leavin' today" "# 'Cause I'm takin' a trip California way" "# I'm gonna settle down and never more roam" "# And make the San Fernando Valley my home" "# I'll forget my sins" "# I'll be makin' new friends..." "The San Fernando Valley when I first knew it was a relic of New Spain." "Tiled houses and barns, corrals and platoons of eucalyptus trees marching through an horizon of green pastures." "The song was irresistible." "Its invitation has been accepted by one and a half million people." "# I'm gonna settle down and never more roam" "# And make the San Fernando Valley my home" "What made a thousand green valleys into a thousand choking suburbs?" "The automobile - the motor car and the instalment plan, and their showroom, the car lot, with more pennants flying than they had at Agincourt, have stripped the approach into the cities of their identity and regional character." "Where is this?" "It might be Gary, Indiana, Cleveland, Miami, Phoenix." "The glimpse of a eucalyptus tree and a stray palm tells us it is Los Angeles, the city of the angels, where one quarter of the city's land area is monopolised by the motor car and its needs." "Freeways, highways, garages, petrol stations, parking lots, car lots." "The motor car has given Everyman a marvellous mobility." "It's also done something Henry Ford never figured on:" "Covered the cities of the world with a suffocating blanket of anonymity." "Anonymity and foul air." "What to do about it?" "Well, there are always the alert watchdogs of the Congressional committees, which can subpoena practically anybody but the President, and to make even giant corporations apologise." "To the extent that General Motors bears responsibility," "I want to apologise here and now to the members of this subcommittee and Mr Nader." "(COOKE) And to hear the complaints of any citizen with a plausible case." "The Corvair provides a spacious and instructive case study of the subordination of safety considerations to the tyranny of the cost accountants and the lethality of the stylists." "(COOKE) But frequently these committees take down millions of words that are never acted on." "Washington can be a long way from the pollution in your backyard." "So, there is the sturdy figure of the do-it-yourself watchdog." "Ellen Harris, how are you?" "I just came from walking along the beach today down at the point where the Hyperion sewage plant is." "And the Edison power plant." "And the Standard refinery." "There were a couple of tankers." "The stench was overwhelming." "The surf was dark grey to black." "(COOKE) She is Mrs Ellen Harris." "She sits in her bedroom here in Los Angeles, a one-woman telephone terror of the city fathers." "But the stench seemed to be something quite overpowering." "I don't know if that's a question for air-pollution control." "She's fought smog density, airport decibels, sewage disposal, all the things that now disfigure the once-beautiful beaches of California." "But despite these hazards, the young continue to frolic in the oily, stinking foam." "Lately, the cities have been forced to appoint official watchdogs, some of whom are bred in unlikely cradles." "They're about to pick Miss America of 1945." "Miss New York looks like the winner." "Venus Ramey, the winner last year, places her regal robes on the shoulders of Bess Myerson of the Bronx, the first New York gal to become the reigning queen of beauty." "And here she is, crowned Miss America of 1945." "And the only Miss America to become" "New York City's official prosecutor of grocers with a thumb on the scale, the policewoman of the supermarket that separates product from price tag." "If you put them together, then the customer would know which is the best buy." " That's right." " That is the reason." "You know what I mean?" "Like this." "There's the large and then you have the next one." "Then you have the next one." "Then you have the different prices here." "Then she reads it along and sees how much it is per quarter." "(COOKE) These consumer protectors also go after quack medicines, loan sharks, butchers and landlords who gouge the blacks." "Such volunteer vigilantes are in the great American tradition of muck-raking journalists." "However, in the past 20 years, many millions of city dwellers have abandoned the city and its afflictions altogether and gone to new suburbs in open country." "But they too can take on the city's monotonous order and copy its random violence and high-school drugs and assembly-line food." "All of which has led a generation of the idealistic young to reject the city and the suburb and the whole caboodle of values of what they call Middle America." "They've retreated into deeper country to do what the first Puritans did - to build their own house, start a society from the ground up, as here in New Hampshire." "There ain't no more potato bugs." "Oh, there's tons of them." "They kill the insects by hand because they're against pesticides." "They grow food, do their own curing, baking, churning, mending, all the chores of a rural self-sufficient society." "That's what they're after - self-sufficiency with pride." "These are not whimsical or hooligan dropouts." "They're all university graduates, some of them old political protestors, who three years ago decided not to fight the system but to leave it." "But not to scorn its country cousins." "They help the locals cut hay." "They buy their grain in bulk from a cooperative." "They share all the tasks, taking it in turns to mind the children." "And coming all together only at the evening meal." "(CHILD SHOUTS)" "Let's hold hands and be quiet." "(WOMAN) Calm down, little brother." "Time heals all the wounds." "No matter how much one is weeping, the moon always follows the sun." "Eat your bananas and fresh leaves and don't cry any more, because for ever and ever the moon will follow the sun." "We thank thee, Lord, for happy hearts, for rain and sunny weather." "We thank thee, Lord, for this, our food and that we are together." "Amen." " (CHILDREN LAUGH)" " We got granola and fried onions with soy grits." "And the meat dish and the carrot dish." " (CHILDREN LAUGH AND TALK)" " We don't need this top." " OK." " There's rhubarb too." "(COOKE) They've been here three summers." "It remains to see in the next generation how deep is this split with the huge middle class to which, most of the time, most Americans have aspired." "(DRUMS AND FLUTE PLAY)" "Well, communes come in many shapes and styles." "California, especially, has been the spiritual home of imported religions from Yogi to Instant Serenity, and health cults from yoghurt to high-colonic irrigation." "Quite simply, this is a party thrown by a wealthy young man who lives alone in a cliff-top pavilion above Los Angeles." "They have one common obsession." "These exotic goings-on are dedicated solely to the pursuit of vegetarianism, both human and animal." "But this too is nothing new." "The idea of a community of purists, or malcontents in retreat, is almost as old as the republic, which was, after all, founded by malcontents." "(DRUMS AND FLUTE PLAY)" "The classic model of the commune was one created here in Indiana on the banks of the Wabash in 1825 by Robert Owen, a Welshman, a prosperous self-made mill owner, who first reformed his own factories and then headed for America to start an empire of good sense" "here in New Harmony." "He bought the dormitories of a religious colony and brought in intellectuals, educators, scientists, 900 eager disciples." "Owen's principles were majestic:" "Total equality of the sexes, property to be held in common, absolute freedom of action for the individual." "I'm afraid that the leaders had in common that strain not only of arrogance but of asininity that runs through the most earnest idealists." "Children were to have a special place in society." "They were to be the tender, privileged guests." "Too often, they turned out to be just children." "(SHE SOBS)" "Owen called his experiment an empire of good sense, though that was the last thing that seemed to rule." "Equality of labour." "Everybody to do the humblest chores, whether able or not." "Owen offered and started to do the baking and was implored to desist only when general indigestion set in." "Like many another passionate advocate of equal rights, he laid down the rules." "It was too much for most people." "Freedom meant the freedom to be a wealthy hanger-on or a poor incompetent." "The farmers complained that the musicians got equal wages for just fiddling around." "Some man coveted another man's wife." "Some woman had an awful laugh." "These dedicated purists made the maddening discovery that they had more than a taint of human nature." "They found that living with nine people, let alone 900, could be more of a strain than living with a million." "And within five years, the empire of good sense dissolved." "It left behind a band of scholars and the germ of some excellent social reforms and a few sturdy physical relics, including, every spring, a perennial reminder of the first high hopes in the blossom of the golden rain tree," "which was imported from China by Owen's best friend and his partner in the original deal." "But these are minority protests, whether wise or freakish." "The unrepentant majority has other solutions, and if they have money they can create this, an artificial island on an artificial lake, its own schools, churches, golf course, boat dock, fishing, riding stables." "A bucolic retreat for the comfortable, but well aware of the hostile world outside." "In the city fortresses of the well-to-do, closed-circuit television keeps watch in lifts and garages." "In the country, the lake is a kind of moat." "Guests are screened." "The resident can drive out." "But the stranger cannot drive in." "First the suburb was a refuge from the city's noise, its lack of greenery, its density and smog, now from its crime, and more often than the refugees admit, from "them"." "Who are they?" "They are the ever-growing and derelict population of the cities' blacks." "The question of the blacks is one of America's oldest and guiltiest problems." "The fifth President, James Monroe, thought the blacks could have no happy future in the land they'd been sold to." "He gave his blessing and his name to the capital of Liberia, Monrovia, founded in Africa by high-minded whites as a haven for ex-slaves." "It was never a realistic solution." "Black labour was too precious to export." "In the intervening century, Abraham Lincoln spoke for his fellows." ""Neither my own feelings nor those of the mass of whites" ""will admit of making them social and political equals." ""The only preventive of amalgamation is a separation of the races."" "The word separation became a talisman." "In the 1890s, the Supreme Court settled everything once for all by granting the blacks separate but equal rights." "The snag was they were very rarely equal." "60 years later, a black parent in Kansas legally protested against separate schools and the Supreme Court reversed itself and sparked the black revolution of our day." "Integration was the order of the court." "It was to be obeyed with all deliberate speed." "The exulting blacks never guessed that speed could be so deliberate." "So they began a mass protest, at first with laborious marches in the company of white sympathisers." "Southern courts wriggled through the loophole of state constitutions and delayed and evaded." "We all assumed trouble in the South." "That's where the first violence came." "We never guessed at the tenacious resistance of the whites in the Northern cities." "You are ordered to stop and stand where you are." "This march will not continue." "(THEY SING "WE SHALL OVERCOME")" "# 0h, peace in my heart" "# I do believe" "# We shall overcome some day... #" "The word confrontation emerged from the dictionary with a new and frightful meaning..." "In Watts, Detroit," "Newark, Baltimore, Washington." "(GUNFIRE)" "Today on the black campuses, blacks learn professions and businesses that they'll practise in the white world, blacks who want no part of the white world, who want separate states, and blacks who want and feel everything in between." "(LECTURER) Now, in the West, black has been a negative." "That goes all the way to the heart of the Christian experience, literally." "Garvey was one of the promoters of the idea that black is beautiful, that black was a plus rather than a minus." "And that all groups should define themselves by their most common characteristic." "And if in our case that characteristic is colour, then that colour should be a positive point of departure." "(COOKE) For the first time, the black population, the submerged one-ninth, has developed a philosophy and acted on it, and looked up to national leaders." "All the more poignant that some of them turned so soon into martyrs." "There is no such thing as freedom in this country for a black man." "There is no such thing as justice in this country for a black man." "There is no such thing as equality in this country for a black man." "This is a white man's country." "I just wanna do God's will." "And He has allowed me to go up to the mountain and I've looked over." "And I have seen the promised land." "I may not get there with you." "But I want you to know tonight that we, as a people, will get to the promised land." "(CLAPPING)" "So I'm happy tonight, I'm not worried about anything, not fearing any man." "Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord." "In 1972, there was held the first wholly black political convention." "In the name of Nat Turner," "Sojourner Truth," "Mary McLeod Bethune," "Marcus Garvey," "Malcolm X," "Martin King, what time is it?" "When we come together, what time is it?" "When we respect each other, what time is it?" "When we get ourselves confident, what time is it?" "When we form our own political party, what time is it?" "The idea of revolutionary violence goes back in the black experience as one of the underthemes for a long, long time, back to the 1820s." "David Walker." "His appeal to the slaves, where he said simply slavery maintained by violence can only be destroyed through violence." "But I suspect that as a practical recommendation, in terms of operating theory, revolutionary violence is a minor theory, although a major wish." "And I think there's a distinction." "Well, speaking for myself," "I believe that Monroe's solution, shipping Negroes back to Africa to form their own nations, might've been wise in 1820, but it's a century and a half too late." "I don't know what the realistic solution is." "I do know, and there are many disenchanting episodes in American history to prove it, that nothing is more mischievous to good government than splendid rhetoric that doesn't pay off." "Now, look what's being asked." "The rehousing of a population, the chance of free education through college, the strangling of the drug traffic at the roots, and the radical overhauling of the prisons, the jury system, the courts." "Now, this is going to call for prodigies of goodwill but also for a massive subsidy of taxes - white taxes - beyond our experience." "As an historian, I'm not sure an integrated society will work." "As an old reporter, I suspect that the blacks will not get more than Lincoln's mass of whites, who live here in the ratio of 9:1, is willing to give them." "The best hope, I think the only sensible hope, is that the mass of whites have greatly changed since Lincoln's day or will change, so that the blacks, whether inside or outside white society, can become an equal race, separately respected." "It's no accident, I think, that this is the great age of tourism." "It's why the airplane is our Santa Maria, for all of us, white, black, city, suburb, want an out." "The airlines strive to offer Shangri-La at bargain-basement prices." "I have a reservation on Flight 111." " And your last name, please?" " The name is Cooke." "C-O-O-K-E." "Thank you." "When the American colonies were beginning to revolt against British rule, many European philosophers felt that their society too was threatened with tragic failure." "They dreamed of a pure society on some remote island, inhabited exclusively by noble savages." "And a Frenchman went to look for it." "He and his crew went beyond America into the farthest ocean, and we are following them." "For like them and the Spaniards we laughed at 13 hours ago, most of us believe that westward the land is brighter." "(HAUNTING MUSIC)" "In the winter George Washington and his ragged army were fighting at Valley Forge, the first white man stepped on this shore and was greeted by the natives as one of their gods come back to earth." "The tourist literature hopes that you too will feel like Captain Cook." "The famous memento of that Frenchman's heaven on earth, the bougainvillea." "And inevitably the dreamy bonus of beautiful, pliant maidens." "(LAUGHTER)" "This is Hawaii." "And this is Hawaii, the 50th state, already far gone with our troubles." "Traffic, pollution." "Urban sprawl and suburban density and the new fear of one's neighbour." "(HAWAIIAN MUSIC)" "Are these people in the same stew as the rest of us?" "Well, at first glance it seems a happier stew, a more permanent melting pot than we have on the mainland." "Maybe this is the ultimate hope, the next stage in the human family." "For the Polynesians have intermarried with most other strains." "There are around you, it appears, more relaxed blacks." "And here the issue of a Chinese father and an Irish mother, of a Filipino and a Scot, of a white American and a Japanese." "There is a price to pay." "Hawaiians had a strong original culture with its own way of life." "One element that survives is an Hawaiian invention, the mastery of the sea on surfboards." "(HAWAIIAN MUSIC)" "Most other elements of their culture have been dissolved and diluted and bottled for tourists who have invaded the islands in increasing hordes to feel carefree and safe in the playground of the 50th state." "You can't call it a triumph for democracy when Americans feel, as so many do, that the only safe place is at home in a room of one's own like this." "A wise historian usually stops 20 or 30 years before his own time, because like the rest of us, he can't see the wood for the trees." "But I have tried in this programme to say something about American civilisation today, because what is fiercely in dispute between the Communist and non-Communist nations is the quality and staying power of American civilisation." "Every other country scorns American materialism while striving to match it." "Envy has something to do with it." "But there is a true basis for this debate and it is whether America is in its ascendant or its decline." "I myself think I recognise several of the symptoms that Edward Gibbon saw so acutely in the decline of Rome, not from external enemies but from inside the country itself:" "A love of show and luxury, a widening gap between the very rich and the very poor, the exercise of military might in places remote from the centres of power, an obsession with sex, freakishness in the arts masquerading as originality," "and enthusiasm pretending to creativeness." "And a general desire to live off the state, whether it's a junkie on welfare or a government-subsidised airline." "In a word, the idea that Washington, Big Daddy, will provide." "Yet I have tried to show that the original institutions of this country still have great vitality." "Much of the turmoil springs from the energy of people who are trying to apply those institutions to forgotten minorities." "Now, as for our rage to believe that we've found the secret of liberty in general permissiveness from the cradle on," "I recall the saying of a wise Frenchman." ""Liberty is the luxury of self-discipline."" "Historically, those peoples that did not discipline themselves had it thrust on them from outside." "That's why the usual cycle of great nations has been first a powerful tyranny broken by revolt, the introduction of liberty, the abuse of liberty and back to tyranny again." "As I see it, in this country, a land of the most persistent idealism and blandest cynicism, the race is on between its decadence and its vitality." "Now, as for the woes that we share with the world that you can see from your window - the overpopulation, the pollution of the atmosphere, cities and rivers, the destruction of nature," "I find it impossible to believe that a nation which produced such human beings as Jefferson and Eli Whitney," "John Deere, McCormick, Kettering," "Oppenheimer, Edison, Benjamin Franklin, is going to sit back and let the worst happen." "There is now a real possibility that atomic energy can help us to cure incurable diseases and preserve our food indefinitely, and through breeder reactors, which renew more power than they spend, actually clean the cities and the oceans." "That would take us over a watershed that none of us has conceived." "But to get back to this country, and looking back over the 200 years of its life as an independent republic - the oldest surviving republic, by the way - two sentences have kept coming back to me on the road" "and I want to leave you with them." "One of them is from a very distinguished judge." "The other is from a very obscure immigrant." "The first reminds us that a constitution is made to be argued about, not to impose a doctrinaire view of life." "It's a tremendous sentence from Mr Justice Holmes." ""A constitution is made for people of fundamentally differing opinions."" "The other is the remark of an old Italian immigrant, who for many years had a shoeshine box outside Grand Central Station in New York." "And he said something forgotten many times - forgotten, I think, by the Founding Fathers in the ecstasy of their promising everybody life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness." "When this old man was asked what 40 years of life in America had taught him, he said, "There is no free lunch."" "(CAJUN MUSIC)" "(GOSPEL MUSIC)" "(HEBREW PRAYERS)" "(ENGLISH HYMN)"