A Walk Through the 20th Century With Bill Moyers; America On the Road

<v Speaker 1>In keeping with Chevron's tradition of service throughout the <v Speaker 2>20th century, the people of Chevron bring you this program in support of public television. Right from the start, we crowded around it, fascinated by what it could do. There wasn't much to look at, it wobbled and padded and scattered things in its path. Noisy and insular that threatened everything, that stood motionless and much else besides. And the faithful horse could still beat it on the track, but somehow the order was meant to be ours. And with hardly a backward glance, we let it brush us towards the future into a century old. I'm Bill Moyers. Like so many of you, I can tell much of my personal story in terms of the cars that have owned me as much as I owned them, cars that took me to specially remembered Crossroads in my life. There was the forty six Ford that I bought six hundred dollars to buy when I went off to college in nineteen fifty two. But soon I gave my heart to a big black Buick convertible but used when I bought it. Something was always happening to the starter, especially at midnight in the moonlight part by Lake Dallas. I had to skimp on meals to afford that Buick because to a sophomore some things are just more important than eating among them, wooing and winning the girl you cherish. Then came a nasch with seats that made into a bed a graceless machine that looked rather like a ill product, no cigar or a very sick well when it played out on the road one Thanksgiving. As my wife and I were going home, we bought on the spot a little Tutone Plymouth Coupe with the Nasch as a down payment and the balance of five hundred and fifty dollars in eight payments. Then in Scotland to study and teach, we bought a nineteen thirty four Wolseley with a green body in a stately top magnificent machine that cost only twenty six pounds and had to be promptly sold when we discovered it got only four miles to the gallon. But my favorite of all was the fifty two to two hour Chevy which I bought for two hundred dollars in nineteen sixty. It had high seats and a body like a bulldog, but it sounded like a tractor and looked so unseemly that Lyndon Johnson ordered me not to drive the thing onto the White House grounds. It broke my heart when I sold it. You could go on with tales of your own about your car, because almost all of us have had a special fascination with this machine so passionately, did we invest it with our aspirations once we adopted it from the Europeans? To look at the evolution of the automobile through this century in America is to discover something about ourselves, clues about how a nation and its industry, our people in its dreams, come together and unfold one with the other. Of course, the story of the car in America reminds us that progress is not without its price. Only in fairy tales does the magic chariot never need a tune up or a tank full of gas. But at the beginning it seemed like a fairy tale come true. At the turn of the century, Americans were ready for more than the calendar to change. There were harsh aspects to life in the 19th century that we were eager to leave behind. But at a time when millions of pounds of manure and thousands of gallons of horse urine were left daily on city streets, only the urban trolley marked a path beyond the horse age. The first appearance of the automobile was evidence that our hopes might be rewarded to the city bystander and nineteen hundred, it offered literally a breath of fresh air. Many of the first cars were built and repaired on the horses own turf, the more adaptable blacksmiths learned a new trade. Since our earliest days, skilled artisans had honed the manufacture of carriages into a major industry, and America was now ready for the production and care of the automobile. The pioneers at it were often the sons of bicycle and carriage manufacturers. They started out as small businessmen with big ambitions, obsessed with finding the way to the best machine. People like Henry Leland, a master of precision engineering who brought us Cadillac, and Charles Kettering, who invented the electric self starter or ran some old who opened the first car assembly plant for his Mary and popular Oldsmobile in Detroit in 1931. He was a plain looking wizard and Detroit, an unlikely land of Oz. But it was here. The romance began <v Speaker 1>and.

<v Speaker 2>It took money to be Mary, you could own a horse for one tenth of what it cost to buy a new fangled automobile. Not surprisingly, the car was denounced by some social critics as a mere plaything for the arrogant display of the wealthy, but it went to their head like champagne. It offered adventure and soon was the seat of more intimate of. But we also found ways to make it more practical. Before long, we were testing its endurance and reliability and those of the drivers in the roads as well. It promised, above all, what a nation in a hurry truly craved speed. Naturally, it found a place in our fantasy's, too, from the race to the chase, Hollywood was soon in the act, but a farmer's son had more realistic plans for the automobile. Let the rich and the romantic play as they might. Henry Ford intended his car for the common folk. By the time I'm through, everyone will be able to afford one, he said. And about everyone will have one. In 1988, Ford introduced his Model T, black and boxy, reliable and cheap, 850 dollars at first and down to two hundred and ninety dollars by the mid 20s. Here was the car for the masses. Here was the car to get America moving forward. Did it by standardizing the parts of a uniform design that meant the car could be assembled on a moving belt in a hurry. Routinely, with little wasted time or motion, his assembly line brought about a revolution of production. The 10 Lizy, they call it affectionately or the flivver whatever. One rider described it as nimble as a jackrabbit, tough as a hickory stump and unadorned as a farmer's boot. And like a farmer's boot, it was expected to wade through thick and thin. Although sometimes, especially on bad road, when Lizzie founded the horse could still have the last laugh. That was some year 19 08, Henry Ford brought out the Model T and the flamboyant Billy Durant brought on General Motors, Durant took companies like Oldsmobile and Buick, later added Chevrolet and offered the consumer a choice of style and color in class through GM. He would make a spectacular splash in organizing the industry as Ford was making in production. But Henry Ford had another big idea, why shouldn't the man who made his cars be able to drive away in one, there was a lot of turnover on the assembly lines, the result of monotony and low wages. It was hard to maintain productivity. So in 1914, Ford captured headlines around the world, announcing a pay raise for his workers, the eight hour, five dollar day. In one stroke, Ford doubled manufacturing wages and turned his workers into consumers of their very own product. You have to wonder what Karl Marx would have thought about the mobility of the masses. <v Speaker 1>In an automobile with sweet Molly O'Neill, every Sunday, I fly to the fog

<v Unidentified>and the time we seem to know big thing that we're out for, Mary. <v Speaker 1>Up the Riverside Drive, we just felt like reaching Claremont in time for me. Not a jolly affair in the crowd. I mean, yours truly and only. You just gotta see me and Molly right out in our automobiles. You just gotta see all the accents and sly little kisses. We still you just <v Unidentified>come to our wedding. It's bound to take place pretty soon. <v Speaker 1>In a nice new machine, I will go with my feet on an automobile, honey. <v Speaker 2>In just a few years, the car was changing society. No other invention had so shaken up traditional living patterns in so short a time, moving the old boundaries, taking the city to the country and the country to the city, and giving women access to a much larger world. In step with the suffragette era, the car equipped now with a self starter, helped women in their bid for independence. It took them visiting and shopping and more and more to work outside the home. For all of us, men and women alike, the car made friendships possible over larger distances. It took socialite off the front porch and onto the road. The new crossroads of American life, said Sinclair Lewis, was the filling station there. We found a common place to compare and share our fascination with this machine. As services were delivered faster and more efficiently and the distances between towns more easily bridged, the nation became more unified. With half the population still living in rural areas in 1920, the car helped to break down their isolation for farm families, the weekly trip to town to visit and to sample new ideas became a treat as well as a necessity when a country housewife was asked why her family had a car but not a bathtub, she replied, Bathtub. You can't go to town in a bathtub. Motor vehicles were taking over many of the farmers grubbier tasks, the bigger cousins to the car, the tractor and the truck enabled an emerging economy to be ever more productive. Fewer and fewer farmers could grow more and more food. The automobile industry itself fed the nation's growth. It was as if all roads led to Detroit, auto plants gobbled up large portions of petroleum, steel, rubber and glass and put hundreds of thousands of Americans to work. America's entry into the Great War in 1917 only temporarily slowed car production as the industry contributed thousands of trucks and ambulances to the war effort, as well as some of the earliest warplane. When our soldiers came home from Europe, we were producing some one of the half million cars a year. It was a new era of industrial prosperity, which would have been unthinkable without them. But the appeal of a plane, Tin Lizzie, was beginning to wane beside the colorful model changes being introduced each year by General Motors to counter his rivals, Ford begin to spruce up Lizhi and to give her a more fashionable look. Look, if you will, of a flapper. Well, sort of. She was still pretty dowdy beside GM's beauties and there was a new vamp on the block, a tantalizing creature from Chrysler. In just four years, Chrysler climbed to third place in the sales charts. The Big Three would rule the automaker's roost for decades to come. By 1927, Ford had to admit that the facelift hadn't worked with his son Edsel, he rode the last of 15 million Model Ts off the line, then posed with the first car he'd made. The death of Lizzie marked the end of the first great era of the automobile. The industry's help would now depend on people's willingness every few years to trade in their durable used car for a shiny or new one to make planned obsolescence. A fount of American youth and the roaring 20s became the rolling 20s. As the Great Depression hit, new car sales declined seventy five percent and a quarter of the nation's workforce was out of a job, even the fabulous Billy Durant, the creator of one of the world's largest conglomerates, would soon be ruined. And in his life in poverty and obscurity and poor Herbert Hoover. In 1928, he had promised us two cars in every garage. But soon farmers in North Carolina were hooking their gasless tin lizards to mules and calling them Hoover carts. In 1930, to these farmers helped to elect Franklin Roosevelt in the hope that he would get us moving again. Through all of this, people did everything they could to keep their old cars. There were more automobiles in the US during the Depression. Then telephones or bathtubs in America was on the road searching not for adventure but for work. In many states in the south and southwest, the Dust Bowl had blown away the last chance for tenant farmers to scratch out a living from the soil. So the owners shoved them off the land and with tractors, plowed their homes under the farmers with their families, salvaged what they could and piled into their jalopies for a massive westward migration. What the highway revealed in the 1930s was the desperate heart of an uprooted people.

<v Speaker 1>The.

<v Speaker 2>In John Steinbeck's classic account of their plight, The Grapes of Wrath, the Joe family often fed their old Hudson with gas before feeding themselves. <v Speaker 1>The dispossessed were drawn west from Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas, New Mexico. Families, tribes, dusted out track, brought out a homeless, hungry man driving the roads with his wife beside him and his thin children in the back seat. And the man driving the trucks, the overloaded cars listened apprehensively, listened to the motor, listened to the wheels. The oil isn't getting someplace. Maybe a barren start in the Gulf. It's a barren. What do we do? <v Speaker 2>What do we do with a broken down car and no money, there was nothing to do. Documenting their passage. The photographer Dorothea Lange found one woman literally at the end of a road she had just sold the tires from her car to buy food for herself and her children. There was no place to go. Hers became the face of the depression. But right out there in Southern California, the road ran to Rainbow's End to another world where the pot of gold was a sleek new. Here at the opening of Hollywood Grand Hotel in 1932, some of the most luxurious cars ever made were on display, shimmering in the night, they carried names that were poetic Rhapsody, the flying cloud, the blue streak and the Silver Arrow. Was Hollywood ever more glamorous or extravagant as movie stars posed with their prized possessions, idols in their oasis of splendor <v Unidentified>in the midst of depression? But at least

<v Speaker 2>movies were cheap to see, so we spent our night watching the stars with the car as the mobile from Hollywood sustained our dreams of romance. And action. Set against prohibition and the real life crime of gangsters like Chicago's Al Capone, taking somebody for a ride acquired another meeting. In real life, Henry Ford received a letter from Mr. Clyde Barrow of Bonnie and Clyde, quote, Even if my business hasn't been strictly legal, it don't hurt anyone to tell you what a fine car you got. I've drove Fords exclusively when I could get away with one. A sense of humor helped many hang on for better times and anything weird if it dispel despair from polo matches by car to cars that ran on nothing at all. The Depression inspired some strange contraptions, but not even hard times could make them work. Gasoline sales remain virtually untouched by this passing fancy. There were even more spectacular footholds for willing audience is invited here to share in the fate of this old tin Lizzie. Once the pride of prosperity, now a symbol of the gloom, she was to be destroyed and exorcize like an evil spirit, a ritual scapegoat cast out. I can't think of anything in any other culture that has played so many parts as the automobile in America during the Depression, from home to the transient poor to a means of forgetfulness, to a dream machine of luxury and glamor, the car became a touchstone of survival, a totem with which we remembered the good times it had been and would one day return in their nineteen thirty five study of American life in Muncie, Indiana, called Middletown in transition, Robert and Helen Lind observed that people clung to their cars as they clung to self-respect. It was important to their dignity for families to drive up to the relief offices to stand in line for their weekly food months. Munsie was an auto town in 1935, as were many in America, with almost half the factory workers producing for the auto industry when they could find jobs. So the car helped people to carry on marriages, divorces, new babies, other measurable things, both large and small said the land might be put off during hard times, but not the use of the car. Not if people could help it. They buy two bits worth of gas at a time just to keep going. In less than 30 years, the fate of the auto and the economy had become inseparable. The government in Washington trying to spin this back to prosperity knew this as it sought to provide work for the unemployed. Roosevelt couldn't start the auto plants going again on his own, but the government could and did finance the network in which the cars could move. When prosperity returned in the 20s, government expenditures for new street and highway construction exceeded the capital outlay of any single line of private enterprise. Now, in the thirties, the number of miles of paved roads in the United States doubled. And after years of push and shove, we were finally out of the mud for good. The first high speed toll highway was completed in Connecticut and the first cloverleaf appeared. <v Speaker 1>Thirty five million dollars worth of risk goes into service across the Golden Gate. The longest suspension bridge in the world,

<v Speaker 2>what had been an army of the unemployed built these projects and the mobility they made possible helped to return in time. The vicar of our economy. Halfway into the decade, car sales begin to rise and the factories that supply the auto industry were producing once again. By 1936, the president of General Motors, Alfred P. Sloan, proclaimed the beginning of the year. <v Speaker 1>It has been almost a popular belief that the automobile industry would, as in 1922, again lead the country out of the depression. Now, for the first time, we are hopeful in General Motors that recovery is on the way. The automobile industry calls men, thousands of men back to work jobs and more jobs. Sixty five thousand letters go out from one company. The call comes WPA Road and President Roosevelt. Is that perhaps a permanent relief cut can be made as more men report to factory employment offices and factory gates welcome a growing army of workers. The whole nation's business will be stronger. One million men and women have gone back to work since June 1st. There's a happy home as the assembly line rolls along and America's industries face a great leap forward. <v Speaker 2>But there was grumbling under that happy home. Things have changed since Ford's five dollars day in 1914. Depression, pay cuts and assembly line speedups had auto workers talking militantly since 1930. But industry spies harassed union sympathizers, many of whom were fired. Late in 1936, under the banner of John Lewis as CIO, they were ripe for organizing and in the following year, both GM and Chrysler were hit with Labor's new tactic of a sit down strike. Instead of leaving the factories, the workers bedded down inside them, holding America's wheels hostage. Their women brought them food and marched outside in solidarity. Spreading from Flint, Michigan, auto towns across the country were shutting down and the sit down stirred controversy as far away as Washington, D.C..

<v Speaker 1>Sit down strike is the most abominable and outrageous thing that has happened to America in this generation. Unless this thing is curbed, it threatens to destroy all of the good relationships that have been built up in these many years between labor and capital. <v Speaker 2>At GM, Sit Downers were met with violence as the bosses sent in strikebreakers to flush the workers out with tear gas. But the strikers held on finally, after 44 days, GM shook hands across the bargaining table with the United Automobile Workers of America. Chrysler took just two weeks to do the same with labor and management meeting again represented by John Lewis and Walter Chrysler.

<v Speaker 1>Sit down, strikers evacuate the automobile plant under a truce between the corporation and union leaders. And labor historians say the agreement came shortly after the greatest labor mass meeting in Detroit's history. I'd heard Union Leader Homer Martin speak of Ford Motor Labor. The best thing for you to do that is to get ready to do business. You are organize workers. <v Speaker 2>But Henry wasn't ready, the folk hero of 1914 remained a bitter foe of unions and stubbornly fought to keep them out of his plans. But in 1941, old and outvoted, Ford reluctantly signed with the UAW. Auto workers led now by Walter Ruther were once again Labor's elite, setting the pace and production, wages and consumption

<v Speaker 1>of the auto world keeps in step with national business, recovery and office for nineteen thirty eight and ultra smart and swift product. <v Speaker 2>The crowning of the end of the 30s recovery seemed just around the corner. It was time to pick up the parade and let fancy road and the manufacturers knew how to do it. <v Speaker 1>Automobile before the close of the calendar year. So look at mobile phones. They've employed every device to show you the stuff the cars are made of. This is done with mirrors. This car has Coral Springs for the rear wheels. Absolutely. The latest and for streamlining. How's this? Don't miss the square headlight. Shifting in safety from the steering wheel instead of on the floor of this car, luxury and comfort, they are the keynote today for Doggie. <v Speaker 2>As we know now, looking back on the closing years of the 30s, events in Europe were a dark contrast to those gay upbeat car shows taking place in Detroit. Yet in their own way, those shows were a symbol of things to come along for, hoped for a better way of life. The Second World War would frustrate what had been called an American sacred right to drive his car as far and as fast as he liked. But the end of the war would restore that notion with a vengeance. We emerged in nineteen forty six, the richest and most powerful nation in the world. And more than anything else in the postwar years, the family car would come to represent the American way of life to ourselves, to the arriving immigrants and to the foreigner. Looking from afar. 10 years after the war, our car population had doubled to fifty two million. By nineteen seventy five, it would double again in a boom of consumer goods. Our dominant desire was for the automobile. Any fantasy we could conjure, Detroit could provide and more. The industry had the means and Madison Avenue, the magic to shape our yearning for a machine that spoke to our most extravagant material selves. To understand these pent up appetites, we have to go back a few years to nineteen forty two. That's when the government slammed the door on civilian car production and the assembly lines went silent, awaiting conversion to war production. But not for long. From the autos former domain came rolling guns, airplanes, tanks, jeeps and trucks thousands upon thousands of trucks. By war's end, the auto industry had turned out twenty nine billion dollars worth of weapons and material one fifth of our entire war production. But while the industry stayed fat on war contracts, the tires on the home front were getting thinner and thinner. Rubber rationing, gas stamps, old cars and a speed limit of thirty five miles per hour slowed us down for the duration. The car moved over to make room for the war.

<v Speaker 1>Frienemy 17 pilot says he means 2000 gallons at that rate, it takes two million gallons of gas to send a single thousand bomber raid over enemy territory. Now, where would you rather see that? No gas sign at his station or here. Now, just take a look at this. About 5000 of our cars are going off the road a day, a million and a half a year, and it's going to be a long wait before any new cars are made. What's the answer? The best way to stretch the gas left over for us civilians and to save our cars and tires is by car pooling. It's the only way this great nation on wheels can keep on rolling, rolling, right on to victory.

<v Speaker 2>Victory after six years of depression and war. We were ready to build and splurge. The cars were rolling off the lines again a year after V-J Day and both makers and buyers joined in the bin. From the drawing boards up, the auto industry spun wheels of fantasy dream boats, offering instant gratification for yearnings deferred so long and for some not yet created. Returning veterans and their families found affordable housing in the new suburban development reconstruction race to keep pace with the baby boom. Once the preserve of the affluent middle class suburbia eventually became home to almost half of all Americans. But as the suburbs spread out from the city on a ribbon of pavement, they needed some way to get from home to work and back again. And as the number of suburbanites grew, the auto industry found its steadiest customers. In the growing number of teenagers, it found its most devout groupies, the young could run a little more than imagination, zipping along in the last go cart races and soapbox derbies for the college crowd, the promoters took over completely. In towns large and small across America, a brassy Detroit was showcasing its particular vision of what America could be, even plain folks were encouraged to think big, to step up to a Cadillac or a Lincoln. By now, owning a big car was an essential part of being American and a country fairs promoters could pull in a crowd with display models of what the car was helping to spawn, a measure not only of how far we had come since the Model T, but a signpost of where we would go in the next 20 years. You know, Lotus Land had anything like this living room on wheels whose rewards did not even require you to get out of the seat. You had only to open your window. The more gadgets and gimmicks, the more we eat them up and one just led to the other. There was even a car that popped its top at the head of a draw. And a 55 Firebird that look ready to take off. In a word, bigger was better and more was this heavy on chrome and long tail fins, it took the power of a V8 engine just to carry the weight. Never mind. They kept the showrooms for. Our peripatetic poet rhapsodized about the great American road, the U.S., one writer put it, would sooner have driven a 57 Chevy than ridden in the chariot of the Lord. <v Unidentified>They hey en route again. Now, like my son went down, said goodbye to Boston down the mass turnpike to Route 15 million down to New York City another time. Sure thing about women in New York City on the road again. I can't stand more than just a being the make love to you. Hey, hey, on the road again. How does it make you feel in the. I'm on the road again. I downtown D.C. running all around town, trying to find a little

<v Speaker 1>lady and me when I'm down, nobody hands Azana anybody <v Unidentified>who's trying to grab me. You can't get the ball, Godfried. Big old smile, great, long live the the White House and hey, I'm on the road again. <v Speaker 1>I can't stop

<v Speaker 2>mortgages, but the road is a journey of revelation, drew predictable. How could a modern Huck Finn cope with a world that teamed with gas stations, parking lots, billboards, motels and fast food outlets <v Speaker 1>to bring <v Speaker 2>on the 1960s? We truly were a drive in civilization <v Unidentified>on the road again. <v Speaker 2>And Main Street was a shopping mall, a one stop market, accessible only by car, a parking on a parking place is the new American meeting ground connected by a labyrinth of highways once farmers took the road to town. Now the town was already there at road's edge look alike, towns flowing one into another. So close and yet so far. And so divided the car made it possible for us to get around without getting together. The poor were left in the inner city, made more disagreeable by gridlocked freeways and fumes while the suburbs prospered, never the twain would meet. Out here, a generation grew up on wheels. It was a generation spending hours tuning up those customized machines for the supreme teen ritual cruising. Being 16 in America means being old enough to drive and sports cars like the Thunderbird, the Corvette and the Mustang were designed with the young in mind. This is how you could get a girl or a guy and the best place to get to know them. <v Speaker 1>Hey, I'm with you tonight with Greg. We're breaking for you a up in the.

<v Unidentified>Daddy, daddy, Ray. Mary. <v Speaker 2>But unnoticed by the joyriders, the debris of our car culture was piling up around us, traffic deaths had reached fifty five thousand a year and our road side became convenient dumps for the wreckage left behind. But it was a reality we tended to ignore as we cruised toward fresh novelties. <v Speaker 1>Let us unite in prayer. This is a very special day for you. Oh, God, and for all mankind, for you are permitting man to conquer space and on this very day to find his footsteps on the moon. Bless the three intrepid Americans who are privileged to do this and made the banner of peace to be placed on lunar surface, herald a better day through Jesus Christ, our Lord. Amen.

<v Speaker 2>It is, after all, a love hate affair we carry on with the car. Just consider the young who challenged the gods of the status quo and not the poet. Robert Lowell told them that cars were part of the sickness of the nation and were they not the purified. But not only was the Woodstock Rock Festival in 69 an event on the agrarian calendar, it was also dubbed the biggest parking lot in the world, when half a million of the young flocked to Woodstock to celebrate their disenchantment with materialism. They came in car for the road was still the only way back to. The sentiments are real for sure, the idea of progress as technology's inexorable blessing is beginning to be measured in other ways. <v Speaker 1>We know what we want, what do we want and where we want.

<v Unidentified>When we were have more. <v Speaker 2>Rivals from abroad successfully challenged Detroit's supremacy and complacency, Beirutis shock of all was the higher cost of driving the oil producing nations raise the price of fuel. And many Americans turned from the gas guzzlers we adored in the 50s to foreign sweethearts who got more miles to the gallon. Our auto industry was forced to think small. But whether or not that's enough for the Volkswagen or an old America wheels keep rolling, although not as fast as rush hour, there are 102 million cars on the road today, almost one for every other American, and their number keeps growing. Can you imagine this century without the automobile? We may curse it when it stalls, kick it when it's flat. We may even want to shoot the beast, as one social critic recommended, but live without it. Not likely. Not in this century we have struck a bargain with this thing. It gave us mobility, romance, freedom, status and jobs and required in return only that we come utterly to depend upon it that we did. A journalist can observe the phenomenon of our romance with the car, but for understanding it, well, you wish for the encompassing eye of the anthropologist and the lyrical tongue of the poet. They speak to this capacity of machines to fulfill human longings. Way back in nineteen eighteen, Carl Sandburg wrote one of the first poems on the subject, Portrait of a Motorcar. It's a lean car, a long legged dog of a car, a gray ghost ego car. The feet of it eat the dirt of erode the wings of it, eat the hills, Dani, the driver dreams of it when he sees women in red skirts and red socks in his sleep. It is in Danny's life. And runs in the blood of Eileen Gray Ghost Car. Can you think of another machine we have personalized as this one are so in doubt in our minds with the quirks and qualities of life, we give our cars nicknames, complain about their costly ailments, praise their feel for the road. We say that their engines per their brakes scream and their springs groan. I've wondered at times what women think of this macho side of this long affair. There's a E. cummings sly, wry, bald valentine that compares driving a new car to making love to a virgin. And Carl Shapiro's erotic address, comparing the movement of his Buick to the hips of a girl. I don't know. I thought only the primal mind gave souls and human form to lifeless objects. Maybe that's it, one bar of the road said that when a youth steps on the gas and feels that surge, it's as if wolves howled from extinct caves in the bloodstream. Do we roll towards the future, never quite losing our animal link to the past, or is this just nonsense? And all we feel is the gratitude toward the one piece of the machine age that still leaves us in the driver's seat? I'm Bill Moyers. <v Speaker 1>In an automobile with sweet Molly O'Neill, every Sunday, I fly to the mall

<v Unidentified>and go the. We seem to know this thing that we're for. <v Speaker 1>Up the Riverside Drive, we just felt like reaching Claremont in time for me. Not a jolly affair in the crowd dying in that line. Yours truly. And you need. You start to see me and Molly right <v Unidentified>out in our. You just start to see all the glances and sly little kisses <v Speaker 1>we steal, you just come to our wedding. It's bound to take place pretty soon in a nice new machine. I will go with my queen on an automobile honeymoon. <v Speaker 2>Now, here are some scenes from future edition of a walk through the 20th century. Americans, even as they enjoyed the old pleasures, eagerly embraced the new for the first time in our history, women's bodies came into public view. The Miss America pageant began as a resort promotion at Atlantic City in 1921. Soon, any excuse sufficed for a beauty contest like this chiropractor's perfect back contest under the fluff, a message Victorianism was dead when fuel for all that restless motion was alcohol. Prohibition, begun in 1920, made drinking a crime and did cut average consumption of alcohol by a third. Yet Prohibition also turned millions of ordinary Americans into law breakers.

<v Speaker 3>Some nasty, wicked eyes would peer out and you would say, I am Ruth Gordon and is a big name. <v Speaker 1>I come to the door and it's say, Whoo! Who, in other words, who sent you? And it's say, George or Benny or whoever. Some people made Neidl beer, they call it that food and cakes them injected with ether. Then you had all sorts of home brew that was made. And this is the great big thing. How do you introduce the man who is the acknowledged

<v Speaker 2>father of public relations, who wrote the first public relations book and who got the first public relations class? Who is a counselor to Presidents Edward Bernays, the Public Relations Society of America honors a pioneer. Do you remember what they talked about when Edison and Ford got together for dinner? <v Speaker 3>Mr. Ford cupped his hands this way up to his lip. And in a rather loud voice, because Edison was slightly deaf, said, Tom, what makes you look so good? And Tom and said, my wife gives me Carter's little liver pills and Mr. Ford cupped his hands again and said, Tom, how many of them does she give you? And as I said, she gives me a five day. <v Speaker 2>Life centered around the traditional family, bachelors were thought of as eccentric career girls, an exception, homosexuals, people with an ugly secret who went to college, if you could, and more could than ever got yourself a good job, preferably with a big company and just assumed getting married, settling down. Premarital sex was a no no for nice girls, everything would come in its season. You wanted a car and of course, a home of your own, a place to share with your helpmate, divorce was practically unheard of. You could always get twin beds instead. Tranquilizers came later.

<v Speaker 1>You didn't Jörg <v Speaker 2>or expect French wine for dinner, but you could smoke all you wanted and not even the surgeon general would complain

<v Unidentified>you lied about. <v Speaker 1>This program has been brought to you by the people of Chevron who have been helping to supply <v Speaker 2>America's energy needs throughout the 20th century. <v Speaker 1>Schools, colleges and other educational organizations may obtain video cassettes of a walk through the 20th century with Bill Moyers by calling 800 four to four seven nine six three or by writing PBS video post office box eight 09 to Washington, D.C., two or two for.