AMERICAN HARVEST

[Music] [Applause] somewhere with someone on the job everything we have is started somewhere on some fertile acre the plow knifes through soil that abounds in promise and the farmer although he plows alone is not alone his life is tied in with the lives of many others of all of us who depend on him and on his mechanized Labour's and he in turn depends on all of us somewhere on a lonely range the earth trembles under the hooves of cattle on the moon and the man who rides the range alone if he listens with vision can hear in the rumble of the herd the beginnings of the rumble of distant machinery in the factories where others will finish the work he has begun [Music] somewhere someone sets a blast to erupt rich ores of metal from stubborn rock and sets men to work in smelter and in blast furnace in mill and in factory and thereafter people many interdependent people come to fashion the products of human inventiveness from all the bounty of nature wait and to grow the wheat it takes a farmer from New York to Michigan the Nebraska to Oregon and from the Dakotas down through all the great Grain Belt a thousand 10,000 and a hundred thousand wheat farmers grow the finest of wheat raw material for industrial alcohols for fine finishes sugar and to grow sugar the sugar farmer in the bottom lands of Mississippi and the Everglades of Florida on the Delta and in the Evangeline country Rose the sugar cane cane sugar raw material for carbon and lamplight for solvents cotton and the farmer to grow the cotton raw material for fabrics and for lacquers and for plastics in the Carolinas in Georgia Tennessee and Arkansas Alabama throughout the Old South and even in the deep south cotton still is king in Texas too and now in California there's a great snowy harvest cartload by carload and bale upon bale as far as the eye can see cotton for fabrics and wool for fabrics on the slopes of the Sierras a sheep herder he grazes his flock and the high cool air that builds thicker longer finer stronger freezes on milling banks no hair goats roam the plains of Arizona Texas and New Mexico where all the silken fleece is tempered by baking days and toughened by freezing nights fine fleece of the sheep flock and long stapled fleece of the mohair goats for fine upholstery top hides for tough durable leather and it takes top durable men to ride the herds to grow those hides to harvest from the Oxbow to the Laramie all along the Red River and the Rio Grande a thousand ten thousand out flung herds with Sun and with wind with rain and with sand as her tools with heat he with cold nature burnishers and strengthens hide and hair on the open range from Dodge City to the foothills of the western mountains perhaps there are jobs you never thought of as being an important part of the great American economy pattern but every basic task is essential to the necessity and convenience of all in this blessed land of all of us west or south no matter where you go or what you are looking for you'll find somebody working working is a part of the vast and intricate and interlocking network of production that leads the raw material to finished product the turpentine Barrel in Florida and in Georgia is the first link in an endless conveyor belt that winds its way from south or east to west and north from Portland Maine to Portland Oregon in the oil fields of all America there is a man-made tree that grows a deep-rooted tree that is to yield a strange assortment of fruits which will be soap and candles paints and asphalt from its roots thousands of feet in the earth the RL well rake brings forth the harvest of precious SAP that is to become a Polish and a lubricant and a coloring and a fuel in the giant test tubes and apparatus of the refineries the oil crews here are cracked and distilled here are cleaned and purified here are separated and sorted into a hundred basic materials for a thousand interdependent industries and a thousand times a thousand interdependent workers managers and engineers [Music] on the job commanding great tools from deep within the plentiful earth come the metal ores with which America is so richly blessed copper for bearings and copper for batteries copper for radiators and for electrical systems copper from Utah and Montana from Michigan and Wyoming from Colorado and New Mexico from Idaho and Arizona and Nevada and again more of the red gold metal from Washington and Oregon [Applause] [Music] [Applause] this red powdery earth is rust call it iron or call it ferric oxide it is the touchstone that has magically transformed a civilization in the raw red earth of Hibbing on the Mesabi but Clinton and Vermillion ranges Steel has its beginnings the mother of steel is iron there is more than a ton of iron and steel in the car you drive several kinds of iron and more than a hundred kinds of steel and from the rusting earth come the ores that are the beginnings of all that rich harvest of metals born of iron and sired by the coal that is mated with iron to make Steel's of many kinds soft gold hard coal and the coke that comes from coal to bring steel into being to purify and refine the Steel's coal and coal two hardened steel four roller bearings and four starter motor assemblies fine molybdenum toughened steel and precision parts fine vanadium shapen to polish precise mechanical parts crystalline quartz for alloy steels for stainless steel plating bumpers and ornamental trim bright chromium for the tiny filaments in electric light bulbs tungsten for storage batteries or radiator assemblies and for the Babbitt metal in engine bearings pure left and even the more famously precious metal gold any metal can be more precious than gold if it is the one metal needed at the time each metal may depend on one or more of the others for successful use copper and aluminum are precious in themselves and all these ores for all these many metals call for many men to dig them from the earth and bring them forth any natural lack or artificial shortage they stopped the entire economic parade you may be a lumberjack teamed up in Washington or Maine in Mississippi or in Michigan Florida or Georgia or East Texas in the Paul Bunyan country or the Empire of the Pacific Northwest [Music] the trees you fell and the logs you drive make pulp or paper to blue print the dreams that put a hundred thousand men to work on a new model and a new job the way we do it in America takes a lot of different people working together in a lot of different places as all rivulet sand Brooks flow to make the river so all the wondrous products of forests and ranch mine and farm flow together on highways of Steel the many raw materials move contributions of every state in the Union on highways of gravel and concrete roll the basic supplies for the mills of industry and on the high air lanes of the trackless skies live products to the factories for processing [Music] in the textile mills of Pennsylvania Connecticut and the Carolinas sheep wool and mohair are the beginnings of more interrelated jobs for men and for women spun by mechanical spiders into being strands cotton sheep wool and mohair are woven by incredibly precise mechanical fingers into luxury fabrics corn the golden treasure of farmers in Iowa Indiana and Illinois and corn of Kansas Michigan Minnesota Ohio and Nebraska one way of changing corn into leather is on the sub assembly line of the feeding lot but a shorter way is through the magic of chemistry corn is now directly processed into the plastic ingredients of artificial leather with ease rich and glowing colors the chemists improve on nature yard after endless yard of perfect and flawless material bears ingrained and its very structure the colors and designs that will enhance its beauty in the interior trim of the finest motorcars the tire you ride are born in a Mississippi cotton patch in a cane field in Louisiana maybe it started when some of its string synthetic makings were pumped up from the ground in California or boiled up from the earth in Texas and in the factories of Detroit and Akron and Dayton men weave and fashioned the basic materials cotton and rayon sulfur and carbon rubber from trees rubber from oil wells [Music] a gripping springing live thing resilient Lee spry and untiringly useful sand and flame make glass but it takes skilled men to grind and polish glass to optical clarity for safety vision [Music] and seeing to all of it then again seeing that the finished product is perfect for seeing means yet another long chain of interdependent jobs from San v through Factory the processing of fine ores into finer steels for the finest of product brings into play a great range of facilities [Music] the linkage of jobs to be done along the line is always and infinitely expanding from flatstock and sheet metal bar and Grodd and ingot come the basic forms to be forged and pressed to be cut to be ground and then polished into many thousands of interrelated but separate and individual parts in factories located along all the railways and highways of America for the bumpers of your family car steel from Pittsburgh Pennsylvania and steel from Pittsburg California join with the copper from Utah and chromium from Texas for beauty combined with massive protection the handiwork of men in the mill and men in the smelter makes work for the hands of men in the casting and forging plants melted and cast into the cylinder block of the valve and head engine are the gray iron pigs here in gray iron are the tough settings for the boom structure of the finest transportation for all of us on all our roads and boulevards what we harvest what we dig in what we produce roll into the work days and paydays and play days of all of us here flaming and precise is a differential pinion gear it took a miner to get it from the ground and a railroad man to carry it to the docks a crew of merchant seamen cargo the red dust to the blast furnaces it took the chemist in the metallurgist to alloy and template before it could be shaped Engineers designed it using pencils made in Pennsylvania and slide rules from New York to design and build the phenomenal machine tools to make the machines it took men in other plants to build these intricate and wonderful machines themselves took other skillful men in other factories to guide and to use the machines takes more men with hands that are skilled and finally productive behind each such job is the mighty panorama of men at other jobs all of us making a living and making a fine product for others and ourselves and our families for all of us who run machines and for all of us who sell other things to other men who run machines gauges to increase the powers of vision of thousand times to make the sense of touch so delicately that it can weigh a puff of smoke to magnify the inch a million fold ages that are marvels of precision extend the senses of men in the countless comparisons inspections and tests that finalize the perfection of each working part it takes supreme precision to give us the smooth and effortless driving that all of us want but men and women and only men and women have the judgment to tell right from wrong to separate the best from anything less than the best making sure we have done right by all the finest materials America can supply calls for a whole new category of excellence in service vigilance and devotion applied to the ideal of seeing that only the best passes inspection in the factories locally built giving local employment in every great area of the nation each factory with its system of communications and Inter communications is in itself a part and portion of other factories which begin where it ends or end where it starts to fabricate or fashion or finish the fine products of the thousands of suppliers and the thousands of suppliers who supply those suppliers with all the parts of all the components that help to make up the complete automobile today's product of the superbly clipped plants is the life story of 10,000 engineers with hundreds of supporting departments and thousands of supporting suppliers completed by the master hands of a million factory men who inscribe all their ideas in metal the careful and meticulous attention to every detail of quality and perfection has resulted in constantly improved performance efficiency and stamina through the years that is the story told in the rhythm of the wondrously precise machines as they dance to the mastery of the workers [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] each of more than 17,000 parts must fit smoothly accurately rightly with some other part and the men on the assembly lines know that each part will be there when it is needed because someone plans it that way and manage it that way the men on the assembly lines know that each material will be fitting it and each part will fit because someone builds it that way and someone checks it to see that it is that way and so it is that in a finished motorcar 17,000 separate and individual parts are so well designed and so well combined all to give us just the qualities we demand in our finest of transportation the beauty and the comfort and the fine long live performance with fine economy from all the designs and all the plans all the materials from all the processes and all the parts made by all the skills of all the men and all the magic of all the machines move through all the pageant of production in a great orchestration of interdependence one upon another and another into a fine climactic assembly of the finest products of all of us for all of us for all the farms and all the cities and towns of all our land and the men who inspect the final product know that each part must be a perfection certified quality first to last the harvest of America's finest automobiles keeps rolling off the assembly lines year after year every year finer and finer the face of America has been changed a factory is built out in the open country and quickly a great city arises around [Music] [Applause] over broad highways made by and made for the automobile what Americans have produced comes back to serve Americans so it is that we can live in the country work in the city life in America has changed so it is that we can make our living on a farm and have a home in town so it is that we can live where we want to the shopping centers now come out to meet us the ever-expanding involvement of people takes on a new dimension the great new dimension of interrelated use a new individual transportation means new freedom of movement to all of us but a spelling of distance and for country dwellers as for city dwellers a new end far and wide range of life new businesses large and small have developed putting America on wheels it has created more jobs for more people all interdependent on each other and all continue to profit from it in ever new ways in each new generation of youth putting America's children on Wheels has changed our schools it has made possible better education has built for better training for tomorrow and all will profit from it in health and wealth like recreation putting America's workers on wheels now means that there is more work within ready reach more work for men to do and more ways to get to the work and make more money on the money somebody else makes all of us are dependent for the harvest of money weaving in all America the money we make on any job changes hands many times every time it changes hands it benefits all of us the miner and the farmer and the rancher all producing the finest materials the worker and the Machine all using the finest the newest processes to do finally buy those finest materials building the finest and the largest low-cost cars and trucks for everyone to hold anywhere and all anyone including ourselves and so it is that all of us in interdependence live independently on wheels and all this far-reaching interdependence is the great secret of why it is possible to put America's automobile within the reach of so many people and all America all its rockbound Beauty all its pleasant vistas all its historic shrines and all its ways of living all its sports and recreations all its scenic grandeur along all its far-flung highways within the reach of [Music] [Applause] [Music]