American Expansion
52min. version
narration & dialog
0:30 Narrator
It probably comes as no surprise that the largest airport in the Western world, in terms of land area, is located in the United States of America. For the longest time, the U.S. has had a reputation for being oversized. The Denver Airport alone is larger than many European cities. It has six runways, and three aircraft can take off or land simultaneously. It's more than an airport: it's a symbol of the American love of space.
1:05 PAUL CAMPOS, University of Colorado
The Western part of the United States is so enormous and and there are so few people, relatively speaking, given the amount of land that there is, that there is still deeply in the American psyche this notion that you can always find your own space
to inhabit where you will not be hemmed in by other people. You can always go West you know you can always find the wide open spaces, and I do think it’s one of the reasons that we’re obsessed with the notion of space it's because space represents freedom for us.
2:00 CHALMERS JOHNSON, political scientist
There has always been a tendency in the United States to invoke supernatural forces to justify what we were doing, that the idea that the inhabitants of North America were, that they weren’t there, to not notice the Native Americans or the Mexicans that were being conquered in this westward expansion, was very much part of a deep rooted American racism that also goes into this. So that I think yes there’s no question there’s a long history of expansion -
3:01 Narrator
When you travel by car, it's the straight line that catches your eye. That sense of order and regularity, which pays no heed to physical environments like hills or valleys. ---
The steep streets of San Francisco result from the pure application of this principle: the grid. Before there were automobiles, there were cable cars that transported people up and down the enormous gradients which inevitably arose in this hilly city. ---
This preference for the straight line and the right angle can be traced back to the first decades of the American nation. It was Thomas Jefferson - one of the Founding Fathers - who championed the scheme to survey and define the land West of the original colonies in a rigid and rational pattern. ---
With its panoramic views, Mt.Diablo - the Devil's Mountain - is a popular destination for a day trip. ---
However, it also has historic significance: starting in 1851, large parts of California and Nevada were surveyed from this point. ---
A former County Surveyor in the San Francisco Bay Area explains how the U.S. was measured.
DON MARCOTT, Mt.Diablo Surveyors Historical Society:
This is a township plat. This is the final product that's produced from the field notes that the surveyors made when they were in the field and running the lines and setting monuments. And as you can see up here in the Northwest corner, this is Mt.Diablo. ---
This being the Baseline East. This is the meridian line going South from the Mt.Diablo Initial Point. And then there is section 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, all the way down to section 36. ---
What this map shows is those States that are under the Sectionalized Public Land System and those that are not. Where there's no cross-hatched area, like Texas is not a land survey system, and neither are the Eastern States. Most of these are the original colony areas. In each one of these cross-hatched areas there is an individual baseline. For instance in Oklahoma, this baseline is called the "Indian Meridian". And this is the meridian, and this is the baseline. And that's the initial point.
6:00 Question
Did the Indians have anything like that?
6:07 DON MARCOTT
The Indians didn't consider land as ownership. They used it. They moved frequently. The land - they owned the land because they occupied it and they used it. They didn't describe land like this. They didn't think in terms of ownership. ---
The squares surveyed by the Americans were exactly one mile wide, and a quarter of that - 160 acres - constituted a farm. You could homestead the land by simply going there and starting to farm it. In the 19th century, this was how many Americans whose European ancestors had never owned land before were able to become land owners. --- Now the property and the crops were at stake; and protecting them against roaming herds became an important issue:
7:07 LEE SHANK, Kansas Barbed Wire Museum:
This area was all open range, just wide open country, there wasn’t no fences no roads no nothing, and when the settlers moved in ranchers had already been out there, they would just have big areas that they just run cattle on and it they didn’t own it or nothin, they just run the cattle they just used the land to run their cattle on, and then when the settlers came out, they wanted to farm it, they tried to farm it and them cattle’d run across it and trample crops in the ground and that’s what started the fence. So it took a lot of wire, just mile after mile of it.
7:53 Narrator
In 1874, barbed wire was invented in America. It signified the transition from just using the land to its definite possession. Only in the 20th century, with its wars and concentration camps did barbed wire start to have negative connotations. This museum in Kansas is the only one world-wide that dedicates itself to these historically important artefacts.
8:28 LEE SHANK
They took pride in their fencing. When the put a row of fences in the posts they wanted to get em so they just looked down the line looked like it was one post, so they’d be straight you know. That was the pride of it. They had pride in it when they put their fence up how nice it looked. Always in a straight line. The straighter they'd get it the better.
8:56 PATRICIA LIMERICK, Center of the American West
There’s still that dream: we move from A to B, we come up with this plan, we - I’m sorry I take the obvious example, we will reconstruct Iraq and give it democracy, A to B linear, and repeated episodes, hundreds and hundreds of repeated episodes of having to be surprised and alarmed and caught unprepared because it turned out that it wasn’t a straight line that we couldn’t go on.
9:38 Narrator
Their mission was: to find a way through the wilderness to the Pacific. ---
Thirty men, led by the officers Meriwether Lewis and William Clark, set off. ---
Like all American founding myths, this one, too, is being re-enacted in minute detail these days. The project will take the re-enactors two-and-a-half years to complete; which is how long the original journey took, two hundred years ago. ---
One of the main purposes of Lewis' & Clark's expedition was to gather military intelligence; and amongst those who participate in the re-enactment today there are still some who are soldiers:
10:32 NORMAN BOWERS, Re-enactor
I’m doing it because I love history and I like excitement. In my career I spent many years in the American Special Operations in the United States Army, and I guess I was getting bored, so I needed something - in retirement I was getting bored, I needed something to fill that void.
11:19 Narrator
For Americans, the Fourth of July has become a date of almost mythical importance. On this day in 1776, the U.S. Declaration of Independence was adopted. It's been an occasion for celebration ever since; and Americans are proud of how far the U.S. has come since then. ---
Some, of course, are prouder than others:
11:52 NORMAN BOWERS
I think by and large we do have that courage [of] and tenacity of a [hundred] years ago. Just to do what is being done with our forces today, for example in Iraq. What other country can project forces and can attempt to instill the love of democracy and the actuality of regular government within a country the size of Iraq.
12:22 Narrator
Despite being almost wiped out by the White American, many Native Americans still served in the U.S. military as soldiers. The delicate relationship between the two peoples is being commented on by a direct descendant of one of the expedition leaders:
12:38 PEYTON "BUD" CLARK, Great-great-grandson of William Clark
The Native Americans were recognized by Jefferson as being equal in every respect to
White people, in terms of their potential to find their place in society, that they had the
intelligence, that they had the physical attributes, etc., but they just had not had the opportunity, the opportunity to evolve to the same level that ah the Euro-Americans were at.
So the answer to that in Jefferson’s mind was to teach them, to nurture them until they’re ready to be assimilated into white society.
13:33 Narrator
This entertainer has found his place in both worlds. He is sort of a emissary of Native American culture. As a story-teller, flute player, and dancer, he is well-known throughout the U.S.
14:02 PEYTON "BUD" CLARK
When assimilation was not what the Indians wanted, it was a case of either being willing, either be willing to relocate and move your home lands or they’ll be bloody conflicts and annihilation perhaps. And Clark witnessed that first-hand, I mean he grew up in it. He
grew up watching this western migration this this tidal wave start build and spill over the
Appalachians and work its way down the Ohio Valley, and by the time the expedition was over and William Clark took office in St. Louis, that tidal wave of settlers was building and building and it was thousands and then ten thousands...
15:13 Narrator
About half a million people ended up risking the trip to the West with the covered wagon. ---
The Frontier beckoned, and with it the prospect of a better life ahead. ---
The longest escalator in the State of Nebraska carries you into one of the newest museums commemorating the historic trek. It was built directly over a busy Interstate Highway at a point where many of the emigrant trails came together.
16:07 ROBERT ZUBRIN, President, Mars Society
You know I think most Europeans looking at Americans tend to think of us as optimists,
perhaps even incurable optimists. We tend to like ourselves that way; we see ourselves that way. The frontier means hope, it means that there is another chance, there is another place, there is a place you can go where the rules haven’t been written yet where you have not been defined yet, and the physical frontier of course has been a disappearing reality in American over the past century, but it still persists in the mind of the society.
16:51 Narrator
The hard times and deprivations that the emigrants had to cope with are always stressed by America's pioneer museums and memorials. Today's Americans are proud that their ancestors suceeded in surmounting all these difficulties. After all, according to some estimates, up to ten percent of the emigrants died on the trail: through exhaustion, disease, accident. And only rarely by Indian arrows. ---
From the museum, today's freeway can be observed, where many push the speed limit just a bit. ---
Not only did the covered wagons on the Oregon, California and Mormon Trails pass through here, but also the Overland Stagecoach.
17:59 Announcer, Stagecoach theatrical trailer
The American Stagecoach crossed among [?] the uncharted West, bringing new people to a new country. What fascinating stories there were in the life of the stagecoach, in the lives of its courageous passengers bound for months in danger, and understanding its strange companionships. From the adventure of [?] these American Frontier characters, John Ford has created a truly great motion picture, "Stagecoach", a drama as forceful and as true as "The Informer" and as gripping as "The Hurricane".
18:37 Narrator
The stagecoach travelled day and night and usually covered the distance between St.Louis and San Francisco in 25 days. Sometimes attacked by Indians but more frequently robbed by White people, it became a much more dramatic subject for the movies than the slow-moving wagons. Classic Westerns like this one demonstrated American values: to establish and maintain independence, freedom and prosperity in a hostile environment.
19:20 Narrator
Back to the emigrants, who mostly walked next to their heavy wagons which were commonly pulled by pairs of oxen. After almost two months on the Plains, they finally caught sight of Chimney Rock. Most Easterners had never seen anything like it, and in their diaries almost all the travelers mention this strange-looking peak. ---
It signified that the first third of their trip was behind them; now they only had to get through the Rocky Mountains. What kind of future would await them?
20:06 MATT SALOMON, Scotts Bluff National Monument
This is Mitchell Pass behind me at Scott's Bluff National Monument. This is one of the
narrow points on the trail, where the wagons had to go into single file, up here through Mitchell Pass. And on one side we have Sentinel Rock, and on this side we have Eagle Rock, and this kind of formed a pass. ---
They first started using this pass in about 1851, someone had improved it in 1850, I think it was some soldiers from Ft.Laramie that kind of improved the route through here. And as soon as they saw a wagon had made it through, everyone started to come this way, to save time. ---
This is the first major East-West route across the United States; so this was a very primitive Interstate without the pavement and all the other improvements. But this was the main way through. And today this is still a main way through for airlines that fly abouve us, this is the main East-West corridor; it's the main East-West corridor for our Interstate System, I-80, and we even have small highways that run the same route] paralleling the Oregon Trail.
21:34 Narrator
The desert as a very special American place can be experienced in California's Death Valley, one of the hottest areas on Earth. Americans have developed this region of extremes to such an extent that tourists can now descend on it even in the middle of summer. ---
The Mojave Desert - essentially hostile to human habitation - is nowadays being built up in many places, like here on the outskirts of Las Vegas. --
America has one of the highest homeownership rates in the world.
22:45 MIKE DAVIS
We’re told that Americans need the family home to live out the Jeffersonian ideal,
everyone needs their little ranch. That, I think, is a kind of post hoc imposition of national
ideology. We’re told Americans by nature have to have wide open spaces, a little log cabin even if it’s a tract home, and, you know, a little lawn to themselves. The truth is we haven’t had a lot of alternatives for that. ---
Americans depend on the equity in their homes as a last resort to provide for contingencies of old age, of disaster, to put their kids in college, ah, you know, this is one reason why homeownership is so central to the kind of American ethos.
24:28 Narrator
The American Dream in Las Vegas: here an ambitiously decorated but essentially typical single-family residence which a few years ago was purchased for about 160.000 U.S.Dollars.
24:40 STEPHANIE PRATHER
This is the family room. And this is typically where the family spends most of its time. And this is the primary seating space right next to the cooking and preparation, food preparation space. One of the reasons this is commonly used in the house is that this is where the television is located. And even though I have the formal dining room over there, typically a lot of times I just eat lunch here from [in front of?] the TV. ---
This is a 41-inch television, and by American standards, by many of my friends' standards, it'll be considered small. A lot of people I know have 50-, 60-, even greater than 60-inch televisions. ---
The kitchen is located here; we love ice in America, it's one of our favorite pastimes; we love to have cold beverages, and here I have an icemaker that has an option to make cubes or crushed ice. ---
So I'll make some cubes first. ---
And that's typically a cube. ---
And the, if I change the --- it will make crushed ice. ---
So I can pick one or the other. And then also dispense water. So I can have a nice cool beverage with my choice of cooling agents of ice. ---
This is typically about a standard size refrigerator, but there are many that are much larger than that. Typically, you wouldn't find that many that are smaller. ---
Coming down the hallway here, we have the master bedroom. ---
There is the master bed, --- the bureau, --- and then the reclining/relaxing area of (the) bedroom, --- and then finally the master bathroom, where we have separate shower stall and bathtub. --- And here are the sinks and the master closet, which of course is a walk-in. --- This typically was built for a couple. Because I live here by myself, these are all mine;
and I have to still store other clothes outside. So, regardless of the size of the closet, here in America we always stuff it to the brim, and we always want more storage. ---
Psychologically, anywhere else that I am physically located on the planet, it's a space that's not my own; so I feel like a guest; I feel like it's not my area, and I cannot do anything that I want. This is the one space on the entire planet where it's mine, I can do what I want, when I want, how I want. So I can leave it as clean or as messy; I can have it as hot or as cold; I can paint it or do whatever I want; it's really my own space.
28:14 Narrator
During the last twelve years, the Las Vegas Metropolitan Area, situated in a wide desert valley, has doubled in size, and there are now one-and-a-half million people living here. The economic base of the city is gambling and tourism. There are plenty of jobs, and the cost of living is fairly low. For many who have moved here Las Vegas signifies a new Frontier.
29:21 MIKE DAVIS, Author, "Ecology of Fear"
One of the most troubling things I think about Las Vegas today, has been the kind of denial of the desert. In the first generation of the building of Las Vegas in the Forties and early Fifties, the theme was the Western mining town, the theme was the frontier, the theme was the illusion that the gamblers were actually participating in the wild old days you know of gold or silver strikes. Now the West is erased, is forgotten, I mean you have Venice and New York City and and Paris there, and what I see happening really is a devaluation, a kind of destruction not only in in reality by motorized recreation and by sprawl, but also kind of just destruction, you know, in the cultural sense of what the desert is, which is an immensely fragile and complex ecosystem.
30:22 Narrator
Nine of the world's largest ten hotels are in Las Vegas. The hotel fires of the early Eighties, with almost one hundred deaths, have been completely forgotten. Everything looks fine ... but it's nevertheless a fragile equilibrium, as Patricia Limerick confirms:
30:40 PATRICIA LIMERICK, Direktorin, Institute of the American West
We always are drawn to the idea that every problem has a solution, and we just have a real, almost natural force or hydraulic force pushing us away from tragedy and from a recognition of permanent defeat. Nobody promised Las Vegas eternal life as a city, and there are plenty of examples of areas where human life bustled around and was full of vitality and then for economic reasons and for long term drought reasons, for all kinds of reasons // that slowed down a lot, so - I don’t know how much longer the happy ending thing goes on. I don’t wanna be overstated in my gloom, but you do wonder how long that can go on.
31:55 Narrator
This was a boom town, as well. In 1904, gold was found here. An opera house was built, plus three railroads, 53 saloons, and a large red light district.
32:35 Narrator
Americans have put up memorials not just to the covered wagon, but also to the auto-mobile: here in the middle of nowhere a remake of the famous "Stonehenge" was built. ---
The worship of transportation vehicles continues to this day with America's preference for SUVs, the Sports Utility Vehicles. They are big, heavy, use up a lot of petrol; and Americans are thrilled by them.
33:40 MIKE DAVIS
The SUV is an interesting phenomena because it’s essentially a military vehicle with off-road capacities, which is now the essential household car for suburban families in Southern California and elsewhere in the West, and normally used not for deep penetrations of the wilderness of the desert, but simply to drive to their local Big Box discount store to go shopping. So it’s the obviously the symbol really rather than the capability here that’s important. The big SUVs of today give you a kind of protection, they are the equivalent of a gate or a wall in a psychic sense to the rest of the traffic, and they correspond to the slowing of the commute, to gridlock, to declining mobility. In a way we kind of fortified our little personal space on the freeway, in the same way we've fortified our living space you know in the suburbs from others. They also represent a form, I think, of a very hostile, anti-social, you know, - luxury.
35:12 Narrator
Just like their cars, Americans themselves have also put on weight. Statistically speaking, they are now among the most obese people in the world. ---
SUVs as well as the obese have plenty of enemies. Paul Campos, who wrote a book on the subject, has this to say about it:
36:16 PAUL CAMPOS, Author, "The Obesity Myth"
Oh I think there’s a very striking parallel there. People often comment [that what] that they see fat people as taking up too much space literally. They complain about it sitting in an airplane and sitting next to a fat person, that person is stealing as it were, is impinging upon other's social spaces. And very similar comments are made about SUV’s, except in my view the anxieties about the SUV’s are much more realistic and much more well grounded than the anxieties about weight, but the weight is what people focus on, I think partially because the opinion makers and the elites tend to be thin, and so they can drive their gigantic cars while talking about how terrible it is that all these working class people and poor people are getting fat. ---
We are supersizing everything in this nation, and we do have this ethos of bigger is better and that it’s always better to consume more rather than less, and that I think is the real social and ethical and political problem that goes far beyond weight, and has really very little to do with weight, which in my view is really a trivial issue that people focus on because it’s a kind of convenient metaphor, a safe metaphor especially if you’re a thin upperclass person and have the kind of privileges that allow you to retain a relatively thin body.
37:40 Narrator
Irrespective of weight, everyone is able to use the latest in American mobility, the so-called Segway Human Transporter. It's self-balancing, easy to master, quite expensive, and arguably a completely unnecessary means of transportation. Developed on America's East Coast, it's found enthusiastic followers all over the country and drawn a well-known American stereotype to it: the passionate promoter, who promises adventure and accomodates the entrepreneurial urge of Americans.
38:11 SUSAN RICH, Segway Los Angeles
To me it feels like a magic robot personal horse and that as a kind I always envisioned that
there’d be something that I could take with me and would always stay by my side, and the
Segway that it’s just because it’s all electric and all gyroscoping and self balancing there’s this very fluid organic natural feeling, and yet at the same time you know you’re on the most advanced technology in the world, so you’ve got a very futuristic and earthy feeling at the same time. Very strange but wonderful - very freeing.
38:50 Narrator
Although individual consumers have not taken to the Segway as originally envisioned - the price tag of almost 5000 U.S.Dollars may have something to do with that - small fleets are nevertheless leased or sold to corporations and institutions:
38:56 SUSAN RICH
We have the sheriffs in Metrorail downtown, they can go up and down a train and I asked one yesterday, I said how have this affected you with you know apprehending criminals, and they said nobody expects that we can move this quickly. You know you have a big heavy guy who wouldn’t run at twelve miles per hour but on a Segway he can definitely move, maneuver between people and apprehend anybody who might have purse
snatched or whatever kind of crimes there might be, so I like it for municipality security, that’s my favorite use of it.
39:30 SUSAN RICH
I’m very excited that it happened in the U.S. I’m almost kind of surprised cause it’s usually you know, European countries that would like to be the first in advancements with technology, but that’s why I’m here, that’s why I work at Segway because I’m very proud that something’s coming out the U.S. that’s going to push the whole world into a state of mobility that it didn’t know before.
40:50 Narrator
Lewis & Clark were among the first to actively pursue American expansion. During the 19th century, the U.S. pushed their territory further and further, into the Caribbean and Pacific; and American expansion has not stopped yet, says Chalmers Johnson:
41:06 CHALMERS JOHNSON, Author, "The Sorrows of Empire"
As it stands right now, the Pentagon acknowledges 725 American military bases in a hundred and thirty-two countries, ah they spread all over the world on every continent, even including Antarctica, but from Greenland to Australia, from Japan to Latin America, and I think this is imperialism. It is a kind of determination to show the flag everywhere around
the world regardless of the cost. It has Roman pretensions about it as if we were defending the empire at its borders, not paying attention to the remarkable resentments this builds. No American can truly appreciate how the resentment of these bases, because there aren’t any foreign military bases in the United States, but I guarantee you we’re sitting here in San Diego. If you’d had a division of Turkish troops in downtown San Diego for the last fifty years, I’ll tell you every Saturday night you would have riots in the streets, you would have men my age saying to their sons and grandsons on Saturday morning, "Look, for the honor of our family, for the honor of our country, son I want you to go out tonight and kill a Turk." That’s exactly what the United States faces in many places around the world today.
42:33 Narrator
The Global Positioning System is helpful when you are lost in the desert. Originally, however, the American military had developed the GPS to guide cruise missiles precisely to their target.
42:50 CHALMERS JOHNSON
One of the things that has happened in um in modern military technology of which
we are totally fascinated in this country, is the dependence on the use of satellites for navigational aids, for so-called smart bombs, for ah global positioning systems and things of this sort, that increasingly the military has discovered exponential rise in their dependence on computers, on satellite communications, on the use of space for military reconnaissance and things of this sort, and it has crossed their minds that we are vulnerable.
44:00 CHALMERS JOHNSON
They're absolutely fascinated with the idea that they must assume a dominant position in space, regardless of the attitudes of not just enemies but of our allies. They are unimaginably arrogant on the subject, and then when they’ve seem to have gotten drunk talking with each other, then they start talking about the ultimate the ultimate imperial base: controlling the entire earth from weapons in space aimed back at earth.
45:27 Narrator
Pessimists, and especially their fear of the future, are rare amongst Americans. Much more common are professional optimists like Robert Zubrin, a promoter who is also an intellectual. He is trying to convince mankind to settle on Mars as soon as possible. His followers are not just from the U.S.; however, it's Americans who he thinks best understand his message:
45:55 ROBERT ZUBRIN, Author, "The Case For Mars"
Mars calls with an open book, a history book filled with blank pages that have yet to be written in. And you know great deeds yet undone waiting to be done, waiting to be recorded. That’s what’s out there. It’s a great adventure, and Americans can feel it.
46:20 Narrator
Zubrin is not just a theorist. He's already built two simulated Mars habitats: one in the American desert and the other in the Canadian Arctic. Here, under conditions somewhat similar to those found on Mars, with the addition of polar bears, life on Mars is being rehearsed. One could almost say: by "pre-enactors".
ROBERT ZUBRIN
Here is an intial Mars base.A group of explorers recently landed on Mars, okay. Here is their habitat, single habitat module, and the return vehicle and some exploration vehicles, and scientific equipment. Okay, that's where it begins. But then we go forward in time: this one shows the development of a Mars base. Here is a greenhouse, and plants growing, green things growing, you know; human interaction between a man and a woman looking through the greenhouse window here. ---
And then if we'd have go[ne] further; this is the final painting in the series, and this one I like the most. This shows where all this Martian exploration is supposed to lead, which is human settlements on Mars. Men, woman, children, cities, life, new life in a new world.
47:47 Question
Do you think that in the future there will be real estate offices on Mars?
47:52 ROBERT ZUBRIN
Yes. I think that people'll settle Mars, and the first settlers will acquire large tracts of land, which eventually they will sell. Sure. There'll be universities on Mars, coffeehouses, chess clubs, used book stores, you know, community theater - the works.
48:23 PATRICIA LIMERICK
It does seem like that is a pretty hard-wired dream, and it can be used to promote all kinds of projects that we are going to Mars, we’ll go to Mars because we’re that kind of people, and we settle new frontiers and we expand ah into new territory, and if we run out of territory on the planet well how about Mars, and first you think that’s almost that’s really beyond belief, but then it’s a very American thing.
48:57 CHALMERS JOHNSON
The Americans seem to believe that they can go on forever, that they’re ah they don’t seem to realize how short a lifespan empires actually have. That’s why they like the Roman
comparison, it went on for three hundred years, took a long time for that world of Visigoths to combine against the Roman empire, but in my own lifetime I’ve seen the ah collapse of the Nazi empire, the Thousand Year Reich lasted twelve years; the imperial Japanese empire; the British, French, and Dutch empires; the Soviet empire. It only took a couple of years, 1989 to 1991, for it to go down. It’s nowhere written that the American empire need go on forever, and it is showing massive contradictions today.
49:59 CHALMERS JOHNSON:
I keep thinking that the archeologists of the future will study the United States the way
our archeologists today study Chaco Canyon for the old Indian ruins or Angkor in Cambodia. They will - as they look at these massive freeways, gas stations, parking lots,
endless miles of concrete streets ... that they will try to figure out what actually were these people up to.
52min. version
narration & dialog
0:30 Narrator
It probably comes as no surprise that the largest airport in the Western world, in terms of land area, is located in the United States of America. For the longest time, the U.S. has had a reputation for being oversized. The Denver Airport alone is larger than many European cities. It has six runways, and three aircraft can take off or land simultaneously. It's more than an airport: it's a symbol of the American love of space.
1:05 PAUL CAMPOS, University of Colorado
The Western part of the United States is so enormous and and there are so few people, relatively speaking, given the amount of land that there is, that there is still deeply in the American psyche this notion that you can always find your own space
to inhabit where you will not be hemmed in by other people. You can always go West you know you can always find the wide open spaces, and I do think it’s one of the reasons that we’re obsessed with the notion of space it's because space represents freedom for us.
2:00 CHALMERS JOHNSON, political scientist
There has always been a tendency in the United States to invoke supernatural forces to justify what we were doing, that the idea that the inhabitants of North America were, that they weren’t there, to not notice the Native Americans or the Mexicans that were being conquered in this westward expansion, was very much part of a deep rooted American racism that also goes into this. So that I think yes there’s no question there’s a long history of expansion -
3:01 Narrator
When you travel by car, it's the straight line that catches your eye. That sense of order and regularity, which pays no heed to physical environments like hills or valleys. ---
The steep streets of San Francisco result from the pure application of this principle: the grid. Before there were automobiles, there were cable cars that transported people up and down the enormous gradients which inevitably arose in this hilly city. ---
This preference for the straight line and the right angle can be traced back to the first decades of the American nation. It was Thomas Jefferson - one of the Founding Fathers - who championed the scheme to survey and define the land West of the original colonies in a rigid and rational pattern. ---
With its panoramic views, Mt.Diablo - the Devil's Mountain - is a popular destination for a day trip. ---
However, it also has historic significance: starting in 1851, large parts of California and Nevada were surveyed from this point. ---
A former County Surveyor in the San Francisco Bay Area explains how the U.S. was measured.
DON MARCOTT, Mt.Diablo Surveyors Historical Society:
This is a township plat. This is the final product that's produced from the field notes that the surveyors made when they were in the field and running the lines and setting monuments. And as you can see up here in the Northwest corner, this is Mt.Diablo. ---
This being the Baseline East. This is the meridian line going South from the Mt.Diablo Initial Point. And then there is section 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, all the way down to section 36. ---
What this map shows is those States that are under the Sectionalized Public Land System and those that are not. Where there's no cross-hatched area, like Texas is not a land survey system, and neither are the Eastern States. Most of these are the original colony areas. In each one of these cross-hatched areas there is an individual baseline. For instance in Oklahoma, this baseline is called the "Indian Meridian". And this is the meridian, and this is the baseline. And that's the initial point.
6:00 Question
Did the Indians have anything like that?
6:07 DON MARCOTT
The Indians didn't consider land as ownership. They used it. They moved frequently. The land - they owned the land because they occupied it and they used it. They didn't describe land like this. They didn't think in terms of ownership. ---
The squares surveyed by the Americans were exactly one mile wide, and a quarter of that - 160 acres - constituted a farm. You could homestead the land by simply going there and starting to farm it. In the 19th century, this was how many Americans whose European ancestors had never owned land before were able to become land owners. --- Now the property and the crops were at stake; and protecting them against roaming herds became an important issue:
7:07 LEE SHANK, Kansas Barbed Wire Museum:
This area was all open range, just wide open country, there wasn’t no fences no roads no nothing, and when the settlers moved in ranchers had already been out there, they would just have big areas that they just run cattle on and it they didn’t own it or nothin, they just run the cattle they just used the land to run their cattle on, and then when the settlers came out, they wanted to farm it, they tried to farm it and them cattle’d run across it and trample crops in the ground and that’s what started the fence. So it took a lot of wire, just mile after mile of it.
7:53 Narrator
In 1874, barbed wire was invented in America. It signified the transition from just using the land to its definite possession. Only in the 20th century, with its wars and concentration camps did barbed wire start to have negative connotations. This museum in Kansas is the only one world-wide that dedicates itself to these historically important artefacts.
8:28 LEE SHANK
They took pride in their fencing. When the put a row of fences in the posts they wanted to get em so they just looked down the line looked like it was one post, so they’d be straight you know. That was the pride of it. They had pride in it when they put their fence up how nice it looked. Always in a straight line. The straighter they'd get it the better.
8:56 PATRICIA LIMERICK, Center of the American West
There’s still that dream: we move from A to B, we come up with this plan, we - I’m sorry I take the obvious example, we will reconstruct Iraq and give it democracy, A to B linear, and repeated episodes, hundreds and hundreds of repeated episodes of having to be surprised and alarmed and caught unprepared because it turned out that it wasn’t a straight line that we couldn’t go on.
9:38 Narrator
Their mission was: to find a way through the wilderness to the Pacific. ---
Thirty men, led by the officers Meriwether Lewis and William Clark, set off. ---
Like all American founding myths, this one, too, is being re-enacted in minute detail these days. The project will take the re-enactors two-and-a-half years to complete; which is how long the original journey took, two hundred years ago. ---
One of the main purposes of Lewis' & Clark's expedition was to gather military intelligence; and amongst those who participate in the re-enactment today there are still some who are soldiers:
10:32 NORMAN BOWERS, Re-enactor
I’m doing it because I love history and I like excitement. In my career I spent many years in the American Special Operations in the United States Army, and I guess I was getting bored, so I needed something - in retirement I was getting bored, I needed something to fill that void.
11:19 Narrator
For Americans, the Fourth of July has become a date of almost mythical importance. On this day in 1776, the U.S. Declaration of Independence was adopted. It's been an occasion for celebration ever since; and Americans are proud of how far the U.S. has come since then. ---
Some, of course, are prouder than others:
11:52 NORMAN BOWERS
I think by and large we do have that courage [of] and tenacity of a [hundred] years ago. Just to do what is being done with our forces today, for example in Iraq. What other country can project forces and can attempt to instill the love of democracy and the actuality of regular government within a country the size of Iraq.
12:22 Narrator
Despite being almost wiped out by the White American, many Native Americans still served in the U.S. military as soldiers. The delicate relationship between the two peoples is being commented on by a direct descendant of one of the expedition leaders:
12:38 PEYTON "BUD" CLARK, Great-great-grandson of William Clark
The Native Americans were recognized by Jefferson as being equal in every respect to
White people, in terms of their potential to find their place in society, that they had the
intelligence, that they had the physical attributes, etc., but they just had not had the opportunity, the opportunity to evolve to the same level that ah the Euro-Americans were at.
So the answer to that in Jefferson’s mind was to teach them, to nurture them until they’re ready to be assimilated into white society.
13:33 Narrator
This entertainer has found his place in both worlds. He is sort of a emissary of Native American culture. As a story-teller, flute player, and dancer, he is well-known throughout the U.S.
14:02 PEYTON "BUD" CLARK
When assimilation was not what the Indians wanted, it was a case of either being willing, either be willing to relocate and move your home lands or they’ll be bloody conflicts and annihilation perhaps. And Clark witnessed that first-hand, I mean he grew up in it. He
grew up watching this western migration this this tidal wave start build and spill over the
Appalachians and work its way down the Ohio Valley, and by the time the expedition was over and William Clark took office in St. Louis, that tidal wave of settlers was building and building and it was thousands and then ten thousands...
15:13 Narrator
About half a million people ended up risking the trip to the West with the covered wagon. ---
The Frontier beckoned, and with it the prospect of a better life ahead. ---
The longest escalator in the State of Nebraska carries you into one of the newest museums commemorating the historic trek. It was built directly over a busy Interstate Highway at a point where many of the emigrant trails came together.
16:07 ROBERT ZUBRIN, President, Mars Society
You know I think most Europeans looking at Americans tend to think of us as optimists,
perhaps even incurable optimists. We tend to like ourselves that way; we see ourselves that way. The frontier means hope, it means that there is another chance, there is another place, there is a place you can go where the rules haven’t been written yet where you have not been defined yet, and the physical frontier of course has been a disappearing reality in American over the past century, but it still persists in the mind of the society.
16:51 Narrator
The hard times and deprivations that the emigrants had to cope with are always stressed by America's pioneer museums and memorials. Today's Americans are proud that their ancestors suceeded in surmounting all these difficulties. After all, according to some estimates, up to ten percent of the emigrants died on the trail: through exhaustion, disease, accident. And only rarely by Indian arrows. ---
From the museum, today's freeway can be observed, where many push the speed limit just a bit. ---
Not only did the covered wagons on the Oregon, California and Mormon Trails pass through here, but also the Overland Stagecoach.
17:59 Announcer, Stagecoach theatrical trailer
The American Stagecoach crossed among [?] the uncharted West, bringing new people to a new country. What fascinating stories there were in the life of the stagecoach, in the lives of its courageous passengers bound for months in danger, and understanding its strange companionships. From the adventure of [?] these American Frontier characters, John Ford has created a truly great motion picture, "Stagecoach", a drama as forceful and as true as "The Informer" and as gripping as "The Hurricane".
18:37 Narrator
The stagecoach travelled day and night and usually covered the distance between St.Louis and San Francisco in 25 days. Sometimes attacked by Indians but more frequently robbed by White people, it became a much more dramatic subject for the movies than the slow-moving wagons. Classic Westerns like this one demonstrated American values: to establish and maintain independence, freedom and prosperity in a hostile environment.
19:20 Narrator
Back to the emigrants, who mostly walked next to their heavy wagons which were commonly pulled by pairs of oxen. After almost two months on the Plains, they finally caught sight of Chimney Rock. Most Easterners had never seen anything like it, and in their diaries almost all the travelers mention this strange-looking peak. ---
It signified that the first third of their trip was behind them; now they only had to get through the Rocky Mountains. What kind of future would await them?
20:06 MATT SALOMON, Scotts Bluff National Monument
This is Mitchell Pass behind me at Scott's Bluff National Monument. This is one of the
narrow points on the trail, where the wagons had to go into single file, up here through Mitchell Pass. And on one side we have Sentinel Rock, and on this side we have Eagle Rock, and this kind of formed a pass. ---
They first started using this pass in about 1851, someone had improved it in 1850, I think it was some soldiers from Ft.Laramie that kind of improved the route through here. And as soon as they saw a wagon had made it through, everyone started to come this way, to save time. ---
This is the first major East-West route across the United States; so this was a very primitive Interstate without the pavement and all the other improvements. But this was the main way through. And today this is still a main way through for airlines that fly abouve us, this is the main East-West corridor; it's the main East-West corridor for our Interstate System, I-80, and we even have small highways that run the same route] paralleling the Oregon Trail.
21:34 Narrator
The desert as a very special American place can be experienced in California's Death Valley, one of the hottest areas on Earth. Americans have developed this region of extremes to such an extent that tourists can now descend on it even in the middle of summer. ---
The Mojave Desert - essentially hostile to human habitation - is nowadays being built up in many places, like here on the outskirts of Las Vegas. --
America has one of the highest homeownership rates in the world.
22:45 MIKE DAVIS
We’re told that Americans need the family home to live out the Jeffersonian ideal,
everyone needs their little ranch. That, I think, is a kind of post hoc imposition of national
ideology. We’re told Americans by nature have to have wide open spaces, a little log cabin even if it’s a tract home, and, you know, a little lawn to themselves. The truth is we haven’t had a lot of alternatives for that. ---
Americans depend on the equity in their homes as a last resort to provide for contingencies of old age, of disaster, to put their kids in college, ah, you know, this is one reason why homeownership is so central to the kind of American ethos.
24:28 Narrator
The American Dream in Las Vegas: here an ambitiously decorated but essentially typical single-family residence which a few years ago was purchased for about 160.000 U.S.Dollars.
24:40 STEPHANIE PRATHER
This is the family room. And this is typically where the family spends most of its time. And this is the primary seating space right next to the cooking and preparation, food preparation space. One of the reasons this is commonly used in the house is that this is where the television is located. And even though I have the formal dining room over there, typically a lot of times I just eat lunch here from [in front of?] the TV. ---
This is a 41-inch television, and by American standards, by many of my friends' standards, it'll be considered small. A lot of people I know have 50-, 60-, even greater than 60-inch televisions. ---
The kitchen is located here; we love ice in America, it's one of our favorite pastimes; we love to have cold beverages, and here I have an icemaker that has an option to make cubes or crushed ice. ---
So I'll make some cubes first. ---
And that's typically a cube. ---
And the, if I change the --- it will make crushed ice. ---
So I can pick one or the other. And then also dispense water. So I can have a nice cool beverage with my choice of cooling agents of ice. ---
This is typically about a standard size refrigerator, but there are many that are much larger than that. Typically, you wouldn't find that many that are smaller. ---
Coming down the hallway here, we have the master bedroom. ---
There is the master bed, --- the bureau, --- and then the reclining/relaxing area of (the) bedroom, --- and then finally the master bathroom, where we have separate shower stall and bathtub. --- And here are the sinks and the master closet, which of course is a walk-in. --- This typically was built for a couple. Because I live here by myself, these are all mine;
and I have to still store other clothes outside. So, regardless of the size of the closet, here in America we always stuff it to the brim, and we always want more storage. ---
Psychologically, anywhere else that I am physically located on the planet, it's a space that's not my own; so I feel like a guest; I feel like it's not my area, and I cannot do anything that I want. This is the one space on the entire planet where it's mine, I can do what I want, when I want, how I want. So I can leave it as clean or as messy; I can have it as hot or as cold; I can paint it or do whatever I want; it's really my own space.
28:14 Narrator
During the last twelve years, the Las Vegas Metropolitan Area, situated in a wide desert valley, has doubled in size, and there are now one-and-a-half million people living here. The economic base of the city is gambling and tourism. There are plenty of jobs, and the cost of living is fairly low. For many who have moved here Las Vegas signifies a new Frontier.
29:21 MIKE DAVIS, Author, "Ecology of Fear"
One of the most troubling things I think about Las Vegas today, has been the kind of denial of the desert. In the first generation of the building of Las Vegas in the Forties and early Fifties, the theme was the Western mining town, the theme was the frontier, the theme was the illusion that the gamblers were actually participating in the wild old days you know of gold or silver strikes. Now the West is erased, is forgotten, I mean you have Venice and New York City and and Paris there, and what I see happening really is a devaluation, a kind of destruction not only in in reality by motorized recreation and by sprawl, but also kind of just destruction, you know, in the cultural sense of what the desert is, which is an immensely fragile and complex ecosystem.
30:22 Narrator
Nine of the world's largest ten hotels are in Las Vegas. The hotel fires of the early Eighties, with almost one hundred deaths, have been completely forgotten. Everything looks fine ... but it's nevertheless a fragile equilibrium, as Patricia Limerick confirms:
30:40 PATRICIA LIMERICK, Direktorin, Institute of the American West
We always are drawn to the idea that every problem has a solution, and we just have a real, almost natural force or hydraulic force pushing us away from tragedy and from a recognition of permanent defeat. Nobody promised Las Vegas eternal life as a city, and there are plenty of examples of areas where human life bustled around and was full of vitality and then for economic reasons and for long term drought reasons, for all kinds of reasons // that slowed down a lot, so - I don’t know how much longer the happy ending thing goes on. I don’t wanna be overstated in my gloom, but you do wonder how long that can go on.
31:55 Narrator
This was a boom town, as well. In 1904, gold was found here. An opera house was built, plus three railroads, 53 saloons, and a large red light district.
32:35 Narrator
Americans have put up memorials not just to the covered wagon, but also to the auto-mobile: here in the middle of nowhere a remake of the famous "Stonehenge" was built. ---
The worship of transportation vehicles continues to this day with America's preference for SUVs, the Sports Utility Vehicles. They are big, heavy, use up a lot of petrol; and Americans are thrilled by them.
33:40 MIKE DAVIS
The SUV is an interesting phenomena because it’s essentially a military vehicle with off-road capacities, which is now the essential household car for suburban families in Southern California and elsewhere in the West, and normally used not for deep penetrations of the wilderness of the desert, but simply to drive to their local Big Box discount store to go shopping. So it’s the obviously the symbol really rather than the capability here that’s important. The big SUVs of today give you a kind of protection, they are the equivalent of a gate or a wall in a psychic sense to the rest of the traffic, and they correspond to the slowing of the commute, to gridlock, to declining mobility. In a way we kind of fortified our little personal space on the freeway, in the same way we've fortified our living space you know in the suburbs from others. They also represent a form, I think, of a very hostile, anti-social, you know, - luxury.
35:12 Narrator
Just like their cars, Americans themselves have also put on weight. Statistically speaking, they are now among the most obese people in the world. ---
SUVs as well as the obese have plenty of enemies. Paul Campos, who wrote a book on the subject, has this to say about it:
36:16 PAUL CAMPOS, Author, "The Obesity Myth"
Oh I think there’s a very striking parallel there. People often comment [that what] that they see fat people as taking up too much space literally. They complain about it sitting in an airplane and sitting next to a fat person, that person is stealing as it were, is impinging upon other's social spaces. And very similar comments are made about SUV’s, except in my view the anxieties about the SUV’s are much more realistic and much more well grounded than the anxieties about weight, but the weight is what people focus on, I think partially because the opinion makers and the elites tend to be thin, and so they can drive their gigantic cars while talking about how terrible it is that all these working class people and poor people are getting fat. ---
We are supersizing everything in this nation, and we do have this ethos of bigger is better and that it’s always better to consume more rather than less, and that I think is the real social and ethical and political problem that goes far beyond weight, and has really very little to do with weight, which in my view is really a trivial issue that people focus on because it’s a kind of convenient metaphor, a safe metaphor especially if you’re a thin upperclass person and have the kind of privileges that allow you to retain a relatively thin body.
37:40 Narrator
Irrespective of weight, everyone is able to use the latest in American mobility, the so-called Segway Human Transporter. It's self-balancing, easy to master, quite expensive, and arguably a completely unnecessary means of transportation. Developed on America's East Coast, it's found enthusiastic followers all over the country and drawn a well-known American stereotype to it: the passionate promoter, who promises adventure and accomodates the entrepreneurial urge of Americans.
38:11 SUSAN RICH, Segway Los Angeles
To me it feels like a magic robot personal horse and that as a kind I always envisioned that
there’d be something that I could take with me and would always stay by my side, and the
Segway that it’s just because it’s all electric and all gyroscoping and self balancing there’s this very fluid organic natural feeling, and yet at the same time you know you’re on the most advanced technology in the world, so you’ve got a very futuristic and earthy feeling at the same time. Very strange but wonderful - very freeing.
38:50 Narrator
Although individual consumers have not taken to the Segway as originally envisioned - the price tag of almost 5000 U.S.Dollars may have something to do with that - small fleets are nevertheless leased or sold to corporations and institutions:
38:56 SUSAN RICH
We have the sheriffs in Metrorail downtown, they can go up and down a train and I asked one yesterday, I said how have this affected you with you know apprehending criminals, and they said nobody expects that we can move this quickly. You know you have a big heavy guy who wouldn’t run at twelve miles per hour but on a Segway he can definitely move, maneuver between people and apprehend anybody who might have purse
snatched or whatever kind of crimes there might be, so I like it for municipality security, that’s my favorite use of it.
39:30 SUSAN RICH
I’m very excited that it happened in the U.S. I’m almost kind of surprised cause it’s usually you know, European countries that would like to be the first in advancements with technology, but that’s why I’m here, that’s why I work at Segway because I’m very proud that something’s coming out the U.S. that’s going to push the whole world into a state of mobility that it didn’t know before.
40:50 Narrator
Lewis & Clark were among the first to actively pursue American expansion. During the 19th century, the U.S. pushed their territory further and further, into the Caribbean and Pacific; and American expansion has not stopped yet, says Chalmers Johnson:
41:06 CHALMERS JOHNSON, Author, "The Sorrows of Empire"
As it stands right now, the Pentagon acknowledges 725 American military bases in a hundred and thirty-two countries, ah they spread all over the world on every continent, even including Antarctica, but from Greenland to Australia, from Japan to Latin America, and I think this is imperialism. It is a kind of determination to show the flag everywhere around
the world regardless of the cost. It has Roman pretensions about it as if we were defending the empire at its borders, not paying attention to the remarkable resentments this builds. No American can truly appreciate how the resentment of these bases, because there aren’t any foreign military bases in the United States, but I guarantee you we’re sitting here in San Diego. If you’d had a division of Turkish troops in downtown San Diego for the last fifty years, I’ll tell you every Saturday night you would have riots in the streets, you would have men my age saying to their sons and grandsons on Saturday morning, "Look, for the honor of our family, for the honor of our country, son I want you to go out tonight and kill a Turk." That’s exactly what the United States faces in many places around the world today.
42:33 Narrator
The Global Positioning System is helpful when you are lost in the desert. Originally, however, the American military had developed the GPS to guide cruise missiles precisely to their target.
42:50 CHALMERS JOHNSON
One of the things that has happened in um in modern military technology of which
we are totally fascinated in this country, is the dependence on the use of satellites for navigational aids, for so-called smart bombs, for ah global positioning systems and things of this sort, that increasingly the military has discovered exponential rise in their dependence on computers, on satellite communications, on the use of space for military reconnaissance and things of this sort, and it has crossed their minds that we are vulnerable.
44:00 CHALMERS JOHNSON
They're absolutely fascinated with the idea that they must assume a dominant position in space, regardless of the attitudes of not just enemies but of our allies. They are unimaginably arrogant on the subject, and then when they’ve seem to have gotten drunk talking with each other, then they start talking about the ultimate the ultimate imperial base: controlling the entire earth from weapons in space aimed back at earth.
45:27 Narrator
Pessimists, and especially their fear of the future, are rare amongst Americans. Much more common are professional optimists like Robert Zubrin, a promoter who is also an intellectual. He is trying to convince mankind to settle on Mars as soon as possible. His followers are not just from the U.S.; however, it's Americans who he thinks best understand his message:
45:55 ROBERT ZUBRIN, Author, "The Case For Mars"
Mars calls with an open book, a history book filled with blank pages that have yet to be written in. And you know great deeds yet undone waiting to be done, waiting to be recorded. That’s what’s out there. It’s a great adventure, and Americans can feel it.
46:20 Narrator
Zubrin is not just a theorist. He's already built two simulated Mars habitats: one in the American desert and the other in the Canadian Arctic. Here, under conditions somewhat similar to those found on Mars, with the addition of polar bears, life on Mars is being rehearsed. One could almost say: by "pre-enactors".
ROBERT ZUBRIN
Here is an intial Mars base.A group of explorers recently landed on Mars, okay. Here is their habitat, single habitat module, and the return vehicle and some exploration vehicles, and scientific equipment. Okay, that's where it begins. But then we go forward in time: this one shows the development of a Mars base. Here is a greenhouse, and plants growing, green things growing, you know; human interaction between a man and a woman looking through the greenhouse window here. ---
And then if we'd have go[ne] further; this is the final painting in the series, and this one I like the most. This shows where all this Martian exploration is supposed to lead, which is human settlements on Mars. Men, woman, children, cities, life, new life in a new world.
47:47 Question
Do you think that in the future there will be real estate offices on Mars?
47:52 ROBERT ZUBRIN
Yes. I think that people'll settle Mars, and the first settlers will acquire large tracts of land, which eventually they will sell. Sure. There'll be universities on Mars, coffeehouses, chess clubs, used book stores, you know, community theater - the works.
48:23 PATRICIA LIMERICK
It does seem like that is a pretty hard-wired dream, and it can be used to promote all kinds of projects that we are going to Mars, we’ll go to Mars because we’re that kind of people, and we settle new frontiers and we expand ah into new territory, and if we run out of territory on the planet well how about Mars, and first you think that’s almost that’s really beyond belief, but then it’s a very American thing.
48:57 CHALMERS JOHNSON
The Americans seem to believe that they can go on forever, that they’re ah they don’t seem to realize how short a lifespan empires actually have. That’s why they like the Roman
comparison, it went on for three hundred years, took a long time for that world of Visigoths to combine against the Roman empire, but in my own lifetime I’ve seen the ah collapse of the Nazi empire, the Thousand Year Reich lasted twelve years; the imperial Japanese empire; the British, French, and Dutch empires; the Soviet empire. It only took a couple of years, 1989 to 1991, for it to go down. It’s nowhere written that the American empire need go on forever, and it is showing massive contradictions today.
49:59 CHALMERS JOHNSON:
I keep thinking that the archeologists of the future will study the United States the way
our archeologists today study Chaco Canyon for the old Indian ruins or Angkor in Cambodia. They will - as they look at these massive freeways, gas stations, parking lots,
endless miles of concrete streets ... that they will try to figure out what actually were these people up to.