The Bridge (1944)

[Music] the Sun is rising over a battlefield over the Atlantic Ocean beyond the horizon lyova battlefields Europe and Asia the Sun moves west toward the two Americas Mountain and Leikin plain it lies a thousand miles further east in New York lies closer to Europe in the Northeast and to the United States in the northwest it is not one place it is a thousand places light strikes the palms of Natal morning begins over a continent [Music] it is not one place it is a thousand places the Sun flashes down muhabba of Rio de Janeiro the continent of South America not mountain and jungle alone but great cities buenas iris the third largest city in the Western Hemisphere [Music] 2,000 miles to the northwest the Sun glints across the mighty Amazon [Music] and in Caracas the soldiers in the new white barracks begin their day I am the Andes in Peru the Sun touches the Inca ruins reminders of a civilization that flourished before the coming of the conquistadors but the new civilization of South America lives and works and trades with the rest of the world turning her back on these symbols of the you largely tropical produced chewing gum and bananas 50% of the trade of this area was with the United States the west coast area mountainous and dry produced cotton cacao and minerals only one quarter of its trade went to the United States the Amazon area of Brazil sold manganese cacao and coffee to the United States but a great deal more coffee and cotton to Europe the temperate area of Argentina Uruguay and Paraguay produced beef wheat corn and wool and sent these products almost entirely to Europe until the second world war began the guns of destroyers and the torpedoes of submarines struck at this triangle of trade until it broke until the broken ends called back on South America to strangle it with the death of trade in the harbor Puerto Cabello lies silent ships German ships burn by their own crews Italian ships covered with seaweed they are experts at destruction but their Europe can no longer trade with South America their ships hold nothing but ashes and month by month the weight of surpluses began to pile up cotton of Peru cotton of Brazil cotton once used on the looms of youth thereafter bail each bale of field of cotton [Music] cotton which South America needs and needs badly but cannot use does not have the machines to use to weave one-tenth of its own cotton the new warehouses filled of the roof with sacks of coffee here are the years of war 1939 40 41 42 43 a billion cups of coffee product of agriculture that grows nothing but a single crop and the immense pampers of Argentina with a climate like our own Midwest grow beef wheat corn but today only the beef is taken England needs it it goes over at any cost the fleet ripens too long in the fields is dumped back into the silence of the granaries 200 million bushels of surplus a year countries which depend for their life on one of two or three crops feed these crops at last only to the rats in the field the corn is stored outdoors there's no more room in the warehouse will its food ever be Kemosabe no one knows it is corn that the United States doesn't need that Europe cannot get cron is dropped to one cent a bushel corn is cheap corn can be bought by the wagon load left on the cob till it grows dry and hard in the Sun the corner of Argentina is being used as fuel for the furnaces of the factories [Music] South America needs this food but cannot get it she likes trains roads trucks to move it and in Europe there is war the blacksmith burns corn on his Forge the surpluses of South America are burning but other fires burn in South America night and day the fires of Industry [Music] the United States is at war the United States needs masses of raw materials to forge into weapons Asia and Africa far away the United States looks to South America under the soil like pools of high-grade oil new weld go down night and day wells to supply new oil to American fighters [Music] the nuwell begins to pump at first there's nothing only the yellow mud that smells of kerosene but in half an hour there's oil rich oil prospected and drilled and pumped out of the virgin jungle of Eastern Venezuela [Music] and in the Chilean desert life once more they are blasting nightshade out of the desert nitrate and iodides bismuth and antimony the ore is blasted and scraped and dumped out of South America from mine three miles high beryllium vanadium tungsten flat cars loaded with tin down from the plateau of Bolivia to the seaports of the United States and in the Cordillera of Chile where the hills of solid copper ore in the largest open mine in the world there's a warning [Music] then silence day and night the copper is blasted out copper is needed for shells and bullets for gun parts and radios the war boom is on [Music] the metals needed by the United Nations copper and LED and manganese reach new levels of intense production sheets bars ingots human or more sheets of mica industrial diamonds and rare metals and raw goods of every kind pouring out of South America moving by planes steamer and truck for the factories of war it is still morning over South America but there is no war born here there is only one Road into this town there is only a market nine out of ten in South America live near towns like this nine out of ten have never seen a mine or no fuel they live by the earth and by the labor of their hands their lives have always been hard [Music] nothing changes here but the faces on the coins [Music] [Music] the people of South America are as fine and capable as any in the world but their beauty is weakened by disease and their children too many of them will die before they can read [Music] in this market the meat is transported be sold in the open without refrigeration there is no ice and no means of making ice in this market the cheapest food is still the food of the Indians potatoes yoga and other starchy roots and being poor this is what most South Americans eat [Music] potatoes try corn kernels of starch to be ground into bread that's what is sold that's what is bought in every South American town this morning the morning passes corn is ground on a stone mortar the midday meal is being prepared mother needs water there is no source of water in the house her oldest daughter takes the can goes half a mile to the town pump [Music] the attempts of which the daughter carries has great advantages it's quite unbreakable and it leaks only a little it is the product of an American oil company but this family has no use for the oil [Music] [Music] the meal is ready it is potatoes squash yucca there's plenty of hot starch but the vitamin content is not very great no green vegetables not a cook nor or no whole grains and no milk [Music] the baby gets sugar and water [Music] in the Father's plate there will be a portion of black meat [Music] so the meal ends and the afternoon begins and work begins again they're making packs saddles for mules for only mules connect this town with the world around [Music] 300 years ago a woman like this was making saddles exactly like this without tools out of straw woven with bare hands [Music] the people of South America and the great majority live not by wheel and gear and kilowatt but by hand and foot and back using bone tools taking weeks and weeks to weave a single garment the productivity of such labour is very low only in the last generation as weaving by hand given way a little to weaving by machine machines that can make a hundred yards while the Weaver makes one machines that can make clothes out of the surplus cotton of South America bright new factories making cloth textiles paper even cement and glass new thousands of industrial workers but they are only thousands the millions of South America still worked in the old way work on the land scratching the earth with slow oxen and a wooden plough [Music] under the fools of horses the grain is threshed the chaff is thrown to the wind with a wooden fork this is the agriculture of a thousand years ago the fields of wheat lie beautiful in the afternoon light but beyond them is erosion increasing like a disease in this country a farmer will say yes there was good land in this valley but it was plowed too often now there is always too much water or too little water and sometimes no seed will take root [Music] the Sun is bright the air is good but the rate of illness is high the chief disease malnutrition everywhere in the world somehow the face of poverty is the same how will this girl grow up into what kind of South America perhaps the answer is here in the continent itself for while the great centers of population are in Argentina in coastal Brazil in central Chile and in the high plateaus of the Andes there are vast agricultural areas still on you Venezuela has many thousands of square miles Colombia Ecuador Olivia the room and Brazil has the region of the Amazon in these unused lands lies the agricultural future of South America but they are not easy to use they are warm flat rich they have abundant water too much water they are covered with stubborn jungle they are sparsely populated in some areas as little as one family per square mile and here once more there are few tools of any kind [Music] around them is the silence of the jungle a land without winter breeding place of plant animal and human diseases hot and moist crawling with life and with the enemies of life with insects that can devour a crop from roots to leaves [Music] how can this land be conquered in this house become a city are there tools to do the job the tools are still in the ground unknown unused the wealth of South America still lies enclosed in stone in Peru and Chile Venezuela Brazil a billion tons of iron ore and all the metals of the world and enough water power to electrify the continent with these resources South America can open the doors of the 20th century [Music] the steel is ready the steel that will go not to Pittsburgh lancaster yokohama but steel to be forged into more machines for south america steel to be delivered into the arms of the future from the United States and from these South American shops will come the machines that will convert the unknown and undeveloped areas into human use convert cotton into clothing rubber into tires steel and the machines to make machines for half of South America is still a wild frontier not enough roads not enough men not enough tools the work has just begun the work of road builders the work of health engineers the work of soil experts the work of planting in the new fields of the Amazon Valley [Music] the seeds of those of robber the young tree has the kind of group that will resist disease but it yields little rubber so the BOD of another variety of tree whose root is weak but whose trunk gives a high yield of rubber latex is grafted onto the healthy root [Music] seven years of care by Indian workmen of afford plantation and out of the Amazonian forest comes the full yield of liquid rubber science can make the jungle straight make it yield not one crop but many oranges as well as industrial rubber pineapples as well as rice into cow and all the known vegetables of the world [Music] when the richness of South American soil bears the full harvest not of one or two crops for export only but all a variety of human food when the farms of South America are planned to feed men not ships then the children of this continent will have something to inherit but none of these things are complete they have just been started and no measures of industrialization or of improvement for agriculture no measures to raise the living standards of the South American people are possible without transportation there are some railways mostly in Argentina but the mileage is small and sometimes key links are broken for months at a time the network of highways is small and roads are often washed away in the rainy season there are steamer routes but mostly to other continents the vastness of the continent is still impenetrable the great rivers of the amazon system sometimes as wide as 200 miles are still used mostly by small craft by native canoes or not used at all [Music] the jungle still remains untamed and unused the western desert dry and dangerous is a storehouse of metals and chemicals one railroad and one highway across the length of its 2,000 miles [Music] roads have been cut and twisted across the cold passes of the mountains but the roads a few the Andes still hold like a wool the second highest in the world [Music] to build any road here is a trick of engineering acrobatics [Music] it is not easy to drive along these cliffs to follow the chasm of these twisted rivers the vehicle must be short the motor powerful the load not too great to travel 10 miles in air distance there may be a hundred miles of curves and grades it is not easy to base an economy on roads like these [Music] because you cannot go fast you cannot go far the corn of Argentina burns and the coffee of Brazil rots while each Valley tries to live alone the things people need are still carried on the backs of mules [Music] the long afternoon of South America is measured out by the hooves of mules by the feet of men too poor to buy shoes the freight of South America still goes in the backs of the man a woman a child [Music] while this woman climbs five centuries pass and above her head there stands a bridge the bridge of air itself the bridge that Springs toward the future no area in the world is self-sufficient and the greatest amount of trade has always been between the most industrialized countries air transport will bring any place in the world within 68 hours of South America [Music] let us watch the future as it begins [Music] what will go up with this enormous plane is it farm tools fertilizer tested seeds it will carry as much in one year as a hundred trucks 10,000 News [Music] is it books charts microscopes for new college or whole tractors moving up to replace the last of the wooden flowers [Music] the plane is ready with its 20 tons of cargo it takes off from Santiago Lima Quito from cities not yet built [Music] workman of Ecuador multiplied this plane a thousand times multiplied at miner of Bolivia it skips the jungle uses the shortcuts of the air the Indian of Brazil will be the neighbor of a woman and child in cold Peru above their heads a motor flies in the softness of the air [Music] it can bring you what you need South American it can lift it over the deadly snow of the volcanoes [Music] here there are no obstacles of mountains swamp or desert here there are no boundaries between country and country the air itself can carry the traffic of all the continents the air is the bridge into the future [Music] you