Forge for the Future

How do you measure these giant things that have grown here? How tick their stature, how gauge your wather? Pace off the shadow that sprawls from the chimney, add the rolls of steel, count the rubber tires.

No matter, its hugeness still eludes you, the total is more than the sum of its parts. For an ore infinitely more subtle than iron bubbles in these cauldrons, and more chains are broken here than forge.

peer deep into the white hot cold. there for a moment the heaped upon your face. for you too have an interest here. in these flames are the beginnings of tomorrow. this is the forge for the future.

the national broadcasting company in cooperation with the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation presents forage for the future. The sixth in a series of programs documenting one of the most significant developments of our generation, the rebirth of the American South.

To report this 20th century revolution, NBC corresponded Henry Cassidy, lead a pilgrimage into the South, and caught on his tape recorder some of the voices and sounds of this latter-day Renaissance. This, his sixth report, tells of the growth of big industry in the south, and the changes it has brought. Mr. Cassidy?

It's a common place that travel is stimulating largely because of the occasional incidents that jolt the newcomer from long established and sometimes cherished ideas. So it was with me. As a New Englander, I had assumed the giant factories and mills that dot my northern and land had no equal in the south. As I traveled southward, I was prepared for cotton and for

tobacco for a burning sun and the lazy, time-haunted rivers. These I saw, but there was more, Birmingham, Memphis, Atlanta. I saw Gadsden, Alabama, where the Goodyear plants crawled over what was once gently rolling farmland. I sat in a control tower above a huge rail yard that like some giant brains sent out nerve-tendrals to the uttermost parts.