"The American Journey"

In the Federal Pavilion, viewers are conducted on a trip through American history in what might be called a drive-along theater.

Designed, built, installed and operated by Cinerama, the exhibit features bus-sized open vehicles which transport visitors around a city bock-square expanse of motion pictures, still photography and three-dimensional effects. Screens move aside, go up and down, even form a tunnel for the buses to drive through.

The 12 moving grandstands each seat 55 persons. A new group of 55 begins the trip every 80 seconds. Each vehicle is fitted with individual earphone equipment for the presentation's soundtrack.

Measuring 18 feet long and 16 feet wide and containing rows of seats each set higher than the last, the vehicles glide along a 1,250-foot track circling the pavilion building at a rate of about one mile per hour.

Jeremy H. Lepard, in charge of the film project described the film exhibit which Cinerama has created a the Federal Pavilion for the U.S. Government. "Audiences actually have to learn a new way of looking at life-through-movies. It is something like walking down a strange street. Our technique produces the real feel or aura of an era."

Viewers are whisked through an environment something like a big, twisting tunnel, only this environment is mostly comprised of some 120 screens of various sizes and shapes. As Lepard describes it, "We've picked little nubs, shots, from other times to create an overall feeling of the American historical heritage. I expect that many people will return time and again to get the full information of our show."

Some 2,000 viewers an hour, 20,000 a day, can be accommodated at the Federal pavilion film show, which is under the supervision of U.S. Commissioner N.K. Winston and the U.S. Department of Commerce. One of the vehicles has seats equipped with a five-channel selector speaker system, so a viewer can elect to hear the narration in either French, German, Spanish, Italian or English.

The narration was written by noted science-fiction author Ray Bradbury and is delivered by John McIntyre of "Wagon Train" TV fame. Over 170 movie and slide projectors are utilized to create the environmental effect of the 13 1/2-minute ride.

"The American Journey," as the show is entitled, begins with the viewer being surrounded by the mysterious ocean, filled with unnamed sea monsters, which our ancestors knew on their way to America. It is followed by depictions of the Indians to be found here, then shots of pioneers, native animals, early inventions, historical events, the trek Westward and the scenic wonders of America. We are brought up-to-date with some startling rocket effects, provided courtesy of NASA and the U.S. Air Force.

Over 100 historical societies provided material for the show, as well as the Library of Congress, the National Archives and the Smithsonian Institute. Cinerama sent camera crews out to many sections of the United States to film various American landscapes.

All this is on the second level of the Federal Pavilion. On the first level, photos along with other graphics depict events in the American past and controversies in the present which have been or are topics of discussion and interest.

The Federal Pavilion also houses a more-or-less conventional 600-seat theater and a 200-seat auditorium, both of which are used for the presentation of films. A significant one is a U.S. Navy cinematic duplication of a submarine's trip under the Arctic ice, a missile firing on the submarine Nautilus and a ride with the Blue Angels flying team.

Source: Industrial Photography, Vol. 13, No. 5, May 1964

Here lies our past. Look at it. Combine your fabled history with the challenge of noon today so as to move with heart and purpose toward a tomorrow of your own choosing.

 

A sea of water.

A sea of grass.

A sea of stars.

 

A wilderness of ocean.

A wilderness of land.

A wilderness of sky.

Remember these. These were. These are. These will be your destiny.

 

First, the wilderness of the sea. In darkness you move upon it. "Don't go!" the fearful cry, "The world is not round! You will fall from the earth! Fierce dragons lie before you!"

 

Here in the brief hour before the continental dawn, before you pathfind the wilderness of grass, look deep at this wilderness of water. Here be menaces of fish to feed your future colonies. Here giant whales. Those flourishes of God, whose wisdom rendered down to oil will light your lamps.

 

Now ten thousand ships whelm in through island straits and stand off hearing a single sound from the New World. Listen. The landfall of morning. The crash of real surf on real land runs old nightmares off.

 

Now name yourself Columbus and found Hispanola. Wade with Balboa along Pacific shores until, with Vespucci, you print your first name, Americus, upon a wild that should have been far Japan or elephant India. But signs itself, at last, plain "America."

 

Soon you stand small in Virginia and Massachusetts and see the forests primeval. God's bounty of trees. The murmuring pine and the hemlock as far as eyes can see. Later, you might apologize but now you seize forth hatchets, handsaws and axes, back-off and give a whack! And God's wilderness falls down.

 

To reveal the Indian Tribes, as far again as the eye can see, the teepees of the Dakotas, the pueblos of the Zuni, the sod huts of the Kansa -- the United Indian Nations.

 

With Indians before and English close behind you prepare for raw excursions and revolts. You send Ben Franklin forth to juggle lightening. And plug to your roof one of old Ben's Lightening Rods in case God judges your revolution amiss. You fire forges and hammer tools and weapons along the colonial shores. Declare your independence. Fight your revolution. Build a war. Build a Constitution and try to live in it.

 

Then set the restless free to pathfind a raw territory to translate its French names into Indian Oklahoma, Minnesota and the far Dakotas, with Lewis and Clark in the lead.

 

While the spunky nation of half-grown boy mechanics and electrical experimenters blow themselves up with steam devices; with Robert Fulton invent excavating machines and "Fulton's Folly" which did not blow up. And even then, with the sea wilderness and the wilderness of land yet unconquered, you begin to dig and build an Er-i-e canal.

 

You churn the Mississippi up and down. Plant cotton. Invent a Cotton Gin. And thus, spin, loom, cut and plant back the wilderness. Invent machine reapers that harvest your grain and send your hunters forth to a terrible blood harvest: fifty-million wild buffalo slaughtered.

 

And seeing the wilderness shot down before him, your John James Audubon goes forth to catch its winged beauties with eye and hand and pen before they fly south forever.

 

The wheels roll off the water onto land. As Herman Melville takes his ink and writing pen to sea and with that pen harpoons him "Moby Dick, The Great American Whale." And the whale is the wilderness put down. The whale is God's sea and the mystery which must be conquered. The whale is death which must be stayed.

 

So the wilderness of ignorance is cleared by science even as the frontier is pushed back. And you stand at Independence, Missouri. The cry from Sutter's Mill is "Gold!" And the wild climate of people spills toward the landfall of California.

 

And coming with it, the "singing wire." The telegraph poles planted like strange electric trees across the west. Bringing the news that not only is America reaping the wilderness grain, but tossing forth win rows of blue and gray. A harvest of brothers; the civil dead. With mini-ball and cannon you suicide. You commit your life away in the North and South.

 

Now mend the war and weld a peace. From here on down to the Cherokee Strip it's new steel mills. The laying of the Atlantic Cable. The first elevated trains skirt the cities.

 

And far out on the prairies, the Indians, dazed by the comings and goings of the wild White Men, see a dragon monster late at night as the railroads meet in wondrous collision at Promontory Point, Utah. Telephones ring and electric lights shine through the gas-lit lamps!

 

And with the far Pacific shore reached, farmed and citified, American boy-man, great child scout, freighted with gravity, riveted to an earth you have now trampled to subservience, turn from the tides of the sea and the tides of Buffalo Grass and look at fresh wallows of sky. You hear the birds at morning, and strong with new blasphemy, dare take wing. And at last those boys who jumped from haylofts become two men at Kitty Hawk.

 

And America rides, skips, jumps, soars into the free wild air of the Twentieth Century. And flies right into and out of another war. Balloons ascend from the great three-ringed circus that is life in the good old U.S.A.

 

Meanwhile you've sent an Admiral to find the North Pole. Dug a canal in Panama. Filled the country with phonographs and movie theaters. You make movies bigger and bigger and bigger! You send a Byrd to the South Pole and appropriately enough he says "Jules Verne leads me." And put one man in a lonely craft across the Atlantic toward Paris and immortality. Set off a rocket and delivered some first Rocket Mail. Fight a second World War and put fifty-thousand planes over Europe. Split the atom.

 

And find yourself now, four-hundred years later, a nation of fifty states. Two hundred million people who have nailed down the wilderness; who've cut the long grass and breathed the warm winds of freedom. You are the people who always want futures; for you don't like the way things are.

 

You didn't like the mountains so your reared them up in skyscrapers. You didn't like time and distance so you turned it inside out with jets. You didn't like pain, disease and death so you put two hundred thousand hospitals across that dark and dangerous territory.

 

Now, at last America stands lit upon the ancient wilds; one huge electric city facing the future. You've been part of three motions of weather: A wind of change that blew across oceans. A weather of need that strewed wild flower human seed to populate the four corners of no where and make it somewhere. And the boy-mechanics who flew the kites and lit July 4th rockets who now, grown men, make ready for the time of your future voyaging.

 

Look far away from the seas of earth, the seas of grass, and the lights in your constellation cities, toward the lights in the sky. The weather of change is eternal. The warm American climate carries its momentum up.

 

Alert, you shape a vast unsleeping seashell ear, which hears tomorrow rolling in across the shoals of time. From Cape Kennedy to California you mix the elements of raw mythology. From chemistries of earth, fused with air, you strike forth fire. But what goes up must often come down. But, as never failed; can never succeed. We will fall but to rise again.

 

To send Telstar, which speaks in tongues, across lake ponds that once were ocean seas. And fly Tiros to tell the weather of man's earth and lift the sons of Herman Melville and Jules Verne to guess the weather of America's soul.

 

But why? Why fly out to the stars with so much yet undone on earth? The answers lie in what we do not know: What is the sun? How does it send its searchlight waves of heat through frigid vacuum paths of blackness? What lies beneath the mountain range and plain of moon crust that beams down on us nightly? Is man the only thinking life within the endless curve of universal space?

 

The cures you find in rocket flight will cure your maladies at home. The weightlessness you give yourself in rockets will lift the weight of sick disease from earthbound people. You go to find. To know. To learn. To build. And move on yet again. Man seeking peace may find it at last in a mutual attack. A last great war. Not against himself but against the hard challenge of space.

 

So, light brother and dark, in a nation and of nation upon nation in the world, give legs-up to each other. Build pyramids of men and fire toward landfalls on the moon and bright new Independence Days. Looking back from space see your birthplace earth. The old wilderness dwindle as the human race reaches for eternity, survival and immortality in the next billion years.

 

Man, God made manifest, goes in search of himself. The great outpour of all nations which crush the Buffalo Grass and reach the end of one frontier, now finds greater challenges in the star wilderness above.

These are Americans, more than a hundred-ninety million of them. A people whose story is one of movement and change. A record of migration that is unique in history.

The Pilgrims came to Massachusetts to practice freedom of worship. Others from England, from the Netherlands, from France and from Spain, founded settlements of their own, hoping to find in the New World opportunities which the Old World had denied them.

The journey was hard. One out of three died on the way. Of those who survived, more than half entered their new country under some form of servitude. Up to seven years of forced labor in exchange for their ocean passage. There were others whose servitude had no end.

Year after year they came. The slave and the free. Educated and ignorant. Radical and conservative. Some with money and some from debtors prisons. All rich with memories. All eager to build anew.

Political independence was the first step. They still had to cross the wide continent to people the empty land and make it their own.

In Europe, as the people grew desperate under the pressures of social and industrial revolution, there seemed to be only one refuge: the New World. Within a hundred years more than forty million human beings crossed the seas to America. They came in waves. First the Irish; four and a quarter million in all. They built our first chain of canals. Railroads. The cities of the Middle West. Between 1830 and 1840, the population of Illinois trebled and Chicago multiplied eight times as westward moving Americans joined the new wave of immigrants from the Old World.

From Western Europe came the English, Scottish and Welsh. Scandinavians. Germans. Austrians and Swiss. Fifteen million of them. Bringing with them their skills, their education and their ways of life. They helped to create something never seen before: an open society so fluent and so dynamic that those who arrived entered at a status equal to those who were already there.

In the thirty years following the Civil War, over a hundred-thousand miles of railroad track were laid, mostly by immigrants. Now the land was open from coast to coast, ready to receive the millions already on their way. Men and women of many races and creeds. Protestant, Catholics and Jews.

From Southern Europe came the Italians: six million. From Central and Eastern Europe: the Poles, Rumanians, Lithuanians, Hungarians, Slovaks, Bohemians: eight million. From the Balkans and the Middle East three million more; Greeks, Macedonians, Croatians, Albanians, Armenians and Syrians came to work in this new land to which a twelve dollar steerage ticket gave them entry.

As workers and consumers they flowed over the continent and each new pair of hands increased our abundance.

By the beginning of the Twentieth Century, immigrants were entering the country at the rate of a million a year. Of these latecomers, many lacked the means to make their way beyond the ports of arrival. Crowded in the cities of the coast, stranded between the past and the future. Bewildered. Exploited. They find it difficult to accept the shifting forms they were expected to follow.

Yet for them too, in time, the promises of America were fulfilled. They watched with wonder as their children grew with the country. Moving forward into free and open society they themselves had helped to create. In times of crisis our doors are still open.Victims of tyranny and oppression the world over find refuge among us.

We are today the most powerful nation on Earth. Yet the challenges we face are more urgent than any we have met in the past. Power alone will not solve them. Power cannot tell us what to value; where to place our trust. Power to share. There is no better place for Americans to find their answers than in the heritage of our own unsettled and adventurous past.

It is for us today to extend the achievements of the immigrants whose descendants we are. To continue their long struggle for dignity and freedom in a world they could only dream of.