1 Final Transcript 1/21/2008
Opening -- Part Four
Mary Lee Settle
I can only tell you that at my cousin Roger Tompkins’ funeral, we buried him up at Cedar Grove and of course the psalm that was read over his grave was “I Lift Up Mine Eyes Unto the Hills, From Whence Cometh My Strength,” because it’s just in us all. And woe to anyone who tells a West Virginia story around me, except me. I can tell them all.
Main Title: APPALACHIA: A History of Mountains and People
Subtitle : Power and Place -- Part 4
Narrated by Sissy Spacek.
Opening Narration #1
In the region we call Appalachia — running from the bottom of New York down to north Alabama — mountains are as familiar and as peculiar as one's next door neighbor, and every last one of them has a name: Hurricane, Pumpkin Patch, Big Frog, and Possum Knob; Bearwallow, Sharp Top, Rattlesnake, and Missionary Ridge; Old Indian , Cataloochee Divide, and Clingman's Dome; Swannanoa, Looking Glass Rock, and Big Peachtree Bald; Chimney Top, Camel's Hump, Poor Valley Ridge, and Greenbriar Pinnacle. Nicknames inspired by Nature and History — telling something about the mountains and even more about the people who live in them.
Ron Eller
One's identity comes to be shaped by these mountains, by your relationship to it. I know many mountain people feel uncomfortable when we leave the region and we don’t have anything to rest our eyes on. The mountains envelop you in a sense of security.
Buena Winchester
Mountains was here to protect us is what we were taught. God put these mountains here for our protection.
Barbara Kingsolver
I suppose each of us has in our soul, or in our memory, a sense of what's the real place, what's the right place, and for me it's hills, and mountains. And in my childhood it seemed to me that as you went deeper into the mountains, you got farther intothe business of life on earth.
Denise Giardina
I could feel this craving, just the way you would feel a food or something, just a craving for mountains.
Narration # 2 --- Floods and Fire
The Appalachian Mountains are the oldest mountains in the world and their forests are home to more diversity of plant and animal than anywhere else in North America. They're one of the grandest geographical features on the planet. But at the dawning of the 20th century it was not at all certain there would be any mountains or forests worth craving for much longer. The human desire to conquer Nature with ever more powerful technology was the dominant impulse of the time.
And in the mountain regions from Pennsylvania to Alabama, the excesses of rapid industrialization were causing fires, floods, deforestation, and catastrophic erosion. Every living thing, from salamander to black bear to white oak tree to human, was affected. But there was no person, there were no laws available to protect the land, the woods, the wildlife, or the people. The notion of a conservation ethic had barely arisen. And those wielding the new financial and industrial tools with such gusto had no comprehension of the degradation that was occurring.
Archival Documentary Narrator VO --
This was the havoc caused by greed and neglect, and men working unaided against the power of nature: farms, towns, industry smashed. 100's drowned, 1000's made homeless.
E.O. Wilson
For most of our history, we saw this as expansion into a virtually unlimited world. It was only in the late 1800’s that we began to come to our senses and we began to develop a conservation ethic, which said it’s not endless, if we are not careful we will destroy much of what we have needlessly in the way of a healthy natural environment.
Narration #3 -- Pinchot
Fortunately, there were some who took notice and who took action. The first scientific forester in America was Gifford Pinchot, born in 1865, the son of a wealthy Pennsylvania lumber baron. Young Gifford was sent to Europe to study the science of sustainable forestry, and then to apply his new ideas to the cutover woods on the Vanderbilt Estates in North Carolina, where he founded the first school of American forestry in 1895. Deeply religious and well-educated, Pinchot loved tramping in the woods with the local mountaineers. He also admired his new employer, George Vanderbilt, but felt that his mansion was a devastating commentary on the injustice of concentrated wealth.
Gifford Pinchot VO
Biltmore House was 1000 feet long, and as a feudal castle would have been beyond criticism, but among the one room cabins of the Appalachian mountaineers, it did not belong. Nevertheless, here was my chance. The forest was exceptionally rich in kinds of trees, in fact the richest in America, and reproduction was good. I felt this forest could be made to prove what America did not yet understand, that trees could be cut and the forest preserved at one and the same time. I was eager, confident, and happy as a clam at high tide.
Narration #4 --- Pinchot
Gifford Pinchot’s successful experiments in the Vanderbilt forest strengthened his vision in sustainable forestry, and he soon became the first head of the National Forest Service, as well as a close confidant and boxing partner to America’s first and foremost conservation president, Theodore Roosevelt, who came to office in 1901.
E.O. Wilson
I'm very much an admirer of Teddy Roosevelt. He’s certainly the greatest conservation president.
George Constanz
Teddy Roosevelt fell into the utilitarian form of conservation, that is, preserve resources for human uses. That's fine. That's a good starter environmental philosophy.
E.O. Wilson
America at the turn of the century, that is around 1900, was in need of a man like Teddy Roosevelt--a man of strong will, vision, and who was not afraid to take action. // And so being a man of action and a man who did not mince words, he put it like this: “I hate a man who skins the land.” He would single-handedly stop this, at least slow it down. He didn’t want to see America skinned any more.
Narration # 5 -- National Forests
Following the disastrous floods of 1907 the federal government finally began to act. It created national forests throughout Appalachia, and began cautiously buying cutover mountain land in order to contain the damage.
Chris Bolgiano
The first purchases in the National Forest were from the big timber companies, who had raped and pillaged, didn't want to pay property taxes, and were more than happy to get rid of their land. Those were the first purchases the Forest Service made, and the first mission of the Forest Service was to stop the wildfires which were devastating the soil, burning up the young growth,
Robert Zahner
The next thing that happened was that the forest did start to grow back, and they will grow back eventually, but it's not the same forest. When an old-growth forest, an old primeval forest is cut down, you're not only removing the trees, but you're removing the whole ecosystem. You know, the integrity, the stability, and even the beauty of that ecosystem is gone. It would take several hundred years for the trees to reach that size that were cut, number one. And then it takes even longer than that for all of the soil to be built back up again by all the cycling of the nutrients and the leaves coming down, and all of the animals to move back in. It takes several hundred years -- maybe even a thousand years in some cases.
Narration #6 --- Great Smokies
Luckily, there were some mountains that were simply too steep, too isolated, too rugged and too lonely for the railroads and timber companies to penetrate before a new vision had swept through the region --- the vision of a National Park, where wildlife, forests, mountains and rivers alike would be forever protected in their natural state. Or, considered another way, where tourists might be enticed to spend their vacation savings and boost the local economy.
The vision began with a summer trip in 1923 to Yosemite National Park by the Davis family of Knoxville. "These mountains are splendid," Mrs. Davis declared, "but no more lovely than our mountains in Tennessee." Mr. Davis agreed wholeheartedly, and together they organized a Great Smoky Mountains National Park club. back home.
Truly, the land was magnificent, containing most of the highest peaks in the East and more species of trees and other wildlife than in all of Europe. And the park concept sold itself, — but creating a park straddling two states, from land already owned by 18 timber companies and more than 6000 individuals necessitated eleven years of patient, political negotiation.
The problem boiled down to cash --- who's going to pay? The answer: everyone — from Knoxville schoolkids to the states of Tennessee and North Carolina to the Federal treasury, along with a whopping five million dollars donated at the end by philanthropist, John D. Rockefeller. Everyone celebrated, and visitors soon began knocking at the door.
John Muir -- Voice-over
Everybody needs beauty as well as bread, places to play in and pray in where Nature may heal and cheer and give strength to body and soul alike. Thousands of tired, nerve-shaken, over-civilized people are beginning to find out that going to the mountains is going home, that wildness is a necessity, and that mountain parks and reservations are useful not only as fountains for timber and irrigating rivers, but as fountains of life.
Buena Winchester
I think my favorite part of the park is to get back and go up some of these ol' hollers and ridges. And you see old home sites where you see they built their foundation out of rocks, and you can still see where they made their rock steps. And actually in some of the places there's still some of the old timey flowers, that still come up there every year... I just think of the family that lived there and wonder what happened to them. They used to live here--all over the park.
Narration #7 -- the bears
Even more wonderful to many visitors than the ancient mountains and forests was the chance to see wildlife, especially the elusive black bears. And “bear jams” became daily occurences along the park highway, where the most extroverted bears learned they could find an easy meal.
A shy, highly adaptive animal, black bears evolved alongside humankind for more than a million years, and the two species became the most successful omnivores in the forest. For eons Native Americans recognized the bear not only as a food source, but as a kindred spirit with many similarities to humans, and frequantly adopted them as totem animals. Bears were central to initiation rituals and sacred dances. They were thought to be wise and strong and worthy of deep respect, and had skills far beyond those of humans, such as their amazing ability to hibernate through the hungry months of winter. And the fierce protectiveness of mothers for their young cubs.
Bob Zahner
Well, a healthy bear population means a healthy forest because the bear is sort of an omnivorous eater--he eats just about everything. Mostly he eats vegetation--that is fruits, nuts and fruits. They live very very strongly on acorns and earlier on chestnuts, before the chestnuts all died. And all kinds of fruits and berries, but insects, many mnay insects. They will also eat small animals, other small animals--a lot of salamanders and things. So, if a forest has a great diversity of food like that, why then it’s a healthy forest, and bears move in...Automatically, they’ve got all the food he eats or the bear wouldn’t be there, so that makes a healthy forest.
Narration #8 -- the Rennaissance
The 800 square miles of the Great Smoky Mountains were saved from the lumberman’s axe barely in the nick of time. And together with the Shenandoah Park in Virginia and the magnificent Appalachian Trail, they were the centerpiece of an Appalachian Renaissance, a spontaneous movement during the 1920’s in which Appalachians began to assert themselves. The movement took many shapes. A sudden burst of new literary energy emerged, for instance, led by the legendary Thomas Wolfe of North Carolina, whose novel Look, Homeward, Angel has been called the “best first novel ever written in America.” In Tennessee and Virginia, singers such as The Carter Family, Roy Acuff, Riley Puckett and Jimmy Rogers began mining the traditional Appalachian folk treasures, setting off an explosion of creativity that would be known worldwide as Country Music. And in the mountains of Central Appalachia, where the desolate coalfields lay, this movement toward boldness and regional identity took the dangerous form of union organizing. And the most famous labor organizer of all was the Irish-born seamstress, Mary Harris, who was best known as Mother Jones.
Mary Lee Settle
Mother Jones, the miners’ angel, she was called.
My grandmother and my grandfather didn’t see eye to eye about Mother Jones. Mother Jones was coming to Cabin Creek, and Mother Jones had to walk in the creeks. This little old woman had to walk in the creeks because they were the only right of way to some of these mines. And she was an incredible brave mean old lady. //And her job was to go into coal fields that the men were afraid to go into, because several of them had been killed. // She wanted to make a speech to the miners// and my grandfather said, Mother Jones has asked to speak in Cedar Grove, and since all the land I have, except the home farm land, is leased to the coal mines, I have no right to let her speak on coal property and I wouldn’t do it anyway. And my grandmother said, “Mr. Tompkins, did you give me the bull field?” And he said, “Well, yes my dear, you know I gave you the bull field.” She said, “So, it’s legally mine?” He said, “Yes.” She said, “Then Mother Jomes may speak in the bull field.”
And that’s where Mother Jones spoke, and that’s where I had a once-removed experience of Mother Jones speaking, because my grandmother said to my mother, “Don’t you dare go near that place. It’s dangerous.” The miners were armed. Well, my mother wasn’t about to listen to that, // and she slipped under the fence and went to hear Mother Jones speak. // She said she had a voice like a Church of God preacher and she cussed like a section foreman. I’ll never forget that.
Narration # 9 -- a miner in Appalachia
By 1910 there were more than 5000 coal mines, large and small , throughout central Appalachia. Company-owned towns were hastily built and into these rough shacks were packed more than 500,000 men with their families and boarders. For the most part, sanitation was abysmal, health care minimal, schools and churches barely existent, and prices at the company owned store, high. Wages and hours fluctuated wildly, and in sharp contrast to life on the independent mountain farm, miners were powerless to control their own destinies. In the words of the U.S. Coal Commission, living conditions in the coalfields of Appalachia were “among the worst in the country.”
Ron Eller
The coal camps themselves were actually segregated communities, segregated on purpose by the coal operators, who divided their communities into a white community, a immigrant community, usually called a tally town, and a black community. They divided those communities in order to keep the miners apart, to keep them from organizing a union ….
Narration # 10 -- Joining a union
Collective bargaining was a bold new idea for independently-minded mountaineers. And, furthermore, to join the union was to risk death at the hands of the mine police, or else disastrous economic reprisals. Even so, thousands began to take the mine workers oath -- but secretly, often late at night in hidden places. And with a union, the miners felt less alone.
Denise Giardina
The companies did everything they could to resist. The kind of life that people had in the camps was such that they had no freedom--what we think of as First Amendment freedoms didn’t exist in a coal camp, and you didn’t have freedom of speech. If you even mentioned a union, you could be fired. If you were found with a union card on you, you could be fored or killed. You would at least be put out of your house. Your mail was monitored. Your visitors were monitored. You had a local police force that was owned by a company, not run by a town or by the citizens themselves. It was owned by the company.
Narration # 11 ---- battles, wars, victory