The Valley's climate is moderate and moist. It was originally settled by Native Americans who moved from the nearby foothills and whose habit it was to annually burn the vegetation on the valley floor. This insured an abundance of those plants and animals important to their way of life and culture but created large meadows absent of timber only occasionally punctuated with oak woodlands. The use of fire in cultivation encouraged the growth of tall grasses they called kalapuya. When Europeans arrived they named the people there Kalapuya after the lush waving grass that covered the Valley. By the 1790s, when the first explorers arrived about 13,500 Kalapuya inhabited the Willamette. The newcomers brought with them venereal decease and malaria. These infections combined with the different patterns of farming and new breeds of animals brought by the settlers, hastened the passing of the gentle Kalapuya. By 1890 they had been all but wiped out.

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03-123 Settlement of Oregon National

To get a victory in World War II, the United States sacrificed the lives of nearly a quarter of a million of its sons and daughters, but at the Japanese surrender the war against a huge collection of surplus stuff had just gotten started.

In the summer of 1940 the German war machine was nearly everywhere triumphant when Prime Minister Churchill of Britain began to warn that his country could no longer comply with the U.S. law requiring cash payment for arms purchases. To rectify this problem, President Franklin Roosevelt suggested the idea of Lend-Lease and began sending ancient naval destroyers to the beleaguered and isolated British. This was just a small component of the preparations the administration was making for war. Long before Pearl Harbor, the United States was gearing up for the greatest conflict in its history. In purely economic terms, it was a war that was to consume three times the gross national product of 1940 or in excess of three trillion 1997 dollars as adjusted for inflation.

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21 03 - 178 Surplus Wars 1

To a Europe beset by plague, war and economic depression, the Church offered precious little help.

 A Moment in Time with Dan Roberts.

In the late 1300s Europe was in trouble. The Black Death was the in process of reducing the population by as much as a third. The Hundred Years' War between France and England was tearing up the French countryside and both countries’ economies. To make matters worse, the continent’s one unifying institution was itself in disarray. For seventy years Popes of the Roman Catholic Church lived in Avignon in southern France. Suspicious that the Church was then a pawn of the French king, English and German Catholics increasingly looked elsewhere for spiritual guidance.

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The Conciliar Movement 1

With the Church split into factions, with three popes claiming the obedience of Roman Catholics the leaders of Christian Europe met in the Swiss village of Constance to clean up the mess.

"A Moment in Time" with Dan Roberts.

In 1409 at the Council of Pisa, the leaders of the church met to bring some kind of order out of the chaos that grew from having rival popes one in Rome the other in Avignon in the south of France. They were also trying to come up with way of governing the Church that broadened its leadership base. Many in the church led by Pierre D'Ailly of Bishop of Cambrai in France advocated a change in Church government that would retain the office of Pope but place him under a General Council of Bishops which would be the ultimate authority in the Church. At Pisa the Council deposed the rival popes and appointed one of their own. He soon died and his successor took the name John XXIII. The other popes refused to go, that meant there were three.

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The Conciliar Movement 2

One of the icons of American democracy is the Mayflower Compact, the Pilgrim’s signed commitment in November 1620 to justice and equality in local government. The chance to govern themselves and pursue their religious impulses was a long time coming.

When the tiny square-rigged Mayflower delivered its human cargo of 102 settlers out of their long, difficult Atlantic crossing into what would become the Cape Cod harbor of Provincetown in late 1620, the leaders of the expedition, later called Pilgrims, were nearing the end of a long sojourn.  They were Separatists and represented a tiny radical outgrowth of the English puritan movement, an informal network mostly worshipping within the Church of England. Puritans were vigorous proponents of the doctrines articulated by John Calvin and wished to “purify” and remove all remaining vestiges of Roman Catholicism within the Anglican structure. 


Mayflower Compact I

Cloudy were the political fortunes of India’s longtime Prime Minister Indira Gandhi in the late 1970s. Unfazed, she engineered a vigorous comeback.

Her political intuition, which in the past had seemed infallible, was failing. Power was slipping from her grasp. In June 1975 the High Court of Allabahad (‘a la ba had) found the Prime Minister guilty of irregular and illegal election practices. Economic decline was forcing many Indians further into poverty. When rising public disorder threatened the government, Gandhi resorted to desperation tactics. She declared an emergency, sent political enemies to prison, rescinded constitutional rights, and censored the press with unusual harshness. Confident that her actions had cowed the opposition Gandhi called a snap election. The people rejected her borderline authoritarianism and handed the Prime Minister’s Congress Party a sound thrashing. 

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A Moment In Time

Indira Gandhi II

Born of a political family prominent in the movement for independence, Indira Gandhi became a leader in her own right as Prime Minister of India

The daughter of Jawahalal Nehru, India’s first Prime Minister after independence, after education in Switzerland and Oxford, she returned home, married a lawyer, Feroze Gandhi, then served her widowed father as hostess. By 1955 she had her own seat in the Indian Parliament and four years later became President of the Congress Party, the nation’s strongest political alliance.

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Indira Gandhi I

One hundred and fifty years ago the Republic was facing its greatest crisis. This continuing series examines the American Civil War. It is A House Divided.

While the American Civil War continued from 1861-1865, major combat often shifted from one state or theater to another, came in fits and starts, with idle periods for refitting and rest punctuated by intensive campaigns and major battles. One way of looking at the war is to see it in phases.

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A House Divided 1863 Tide Turns I

One of the most important factors leading to the success of the Normandy invasion in June 1944 was a network of double agents, loyal to Britain, who deceived the Germans about Allied plans.

During World War II, the British Double Cross system, counter espionage operations, worked successfully to mislead the German intelligence organization – the Abwehr. One of the most successful British double agents was Spaniard Juan Pujol Garcia, codenamed Garbo, the ultimate “actor.” 

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Juan Garcia (Garbo) II

In the 1930s, oil companies were struggling to boost the octane of gasoline. Eugène Houdry’s catalytic cracking process made it possible and may have helped win World War II.

When it comes from the ground, crude oil is almost useless, a mixture of thousands of different types of hydrocarbons: asphalt to gasoline to natural gas. Each has a different molecular weight, therefore, crude oil must be refined to pull out the impurities such as sulfur compounds and separate different components such as kerosene, gasoline, fuel oil, and so forth. 

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High Test Gas

In the May 1942 Battle of the Coral Sea, Allied naval forces halted the Japanese southern advance on New Guinea and Australia, but not without severe losses, including that of the Lady Lex.

One of the great disappointments to the Japanese after Pearl Harbor was that the surprise attack failed to catch the aircraft carriers, Enterprise, Lexington, and Saratoga, which were at sea. This failure would return to bite them badly in the Coral Sea six months later, yet in the heady days following the initial success in late 1941 Tokyo decided to expand its ambitions by moving south toward Australia. The most immediate target was Port Moseby in southeastern Papua New Guinea.

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World Battle of Coral Sea 2 National

In the late spring of 1942, two great armadas met off the Midway Islands.

Isoroku Yamamoto opposed the war with America. He had served as Naval Attaché at the Japanese Embassy in Washington and knew first-hand how lethal was the power of the giant American democracy once awakened. However, when the decision to go to war was made he insisted that Japan’s only hope for victory was a surprise attack which would cripple U.S. forces in the Pacific. Pearl Harbor proved him right but he had missed the American aircraft carriers on December 7th, because they were at sea on maneuvers. Yamamoto was back in the Central Pacific in late May 1942 to take out those carriers and to establish an early warning picket line anchored by the two tiny Midway Islands at the tip of the Hawaiian archipelago 1300 miles northeast of Honolulu. 

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Battle of Midway III

Born at the dawn of the twentieth century, master salesman Ray Kroc helped transform the way the world consumed food. 

After brief service as an ambulance driver trainee in World War II, Kroc began his professional life and gradually absorbed the craft of salesmanship. After nearly two decades with cup manufacturer Lily-Tulip, rising to mid-western sales-manager, Kroc became fascinated with the multispindled milkshake maker. He eventually bought the company, Prince Castle, and in the post-World War II business revival the company prospered.

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Ray Kroc And The World Of Fast Food I

Lead:  In the early 1900s a newly powerful Russia was becoming aggressive all along its borders. This pressure hit at British interests especially in the Far East. Britain needed a partner.

The logical partner for Britain would be another European power such as Germany. The combination would have probably proven a potent one and sufficient to cool Russia's assertive tendencies, but no such alliance came about despite serious discussions. Britain then turned its attention to the Far East, the most vulnerable part of the Empire, farthest from home, at the end of the long colonial lifeline. There Japan was also concerned about Russian expansion specifically into Manchuria and Korea. For two years, in a delicate diplomatic dance, Japan and Britain drew closer to one another.

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Anglo Japanese Naval Alliance II

Lead:  Just after 11:00 PM on the second of June, 1919 a bomb exploded in the entrance of the home of United States Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer. The only victim was the bomber himself.

It was no isolated incident. The bomb that shattered windows all over Mitchell's fashionable Washington neighborhood, including those of his neighbor Assistant Navy Secretary, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, was part of campaign of similar attacks in eight other cities that night. In April, letter bombs had been mailed to thirty-six prominent Americans. Most were intercepted but the one mailed to former Georgia Senator Thomas Hardwick made it, blew off the hands of the maid who opened it and severely wounded the Senator's wife.

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Palmer Raids I

Lead:  In June 1919 the house of U.S. Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer was bombed. The bomber tripped and blew himself up along with the front part of the house.

Ironically, for a nation of immigrants the people of the United States go through frequent periods of reaction to immigration. In the wake of the Mitchell bombing, a wave of anti-immigrant fever spread across the country. Coming as it did in the years following the Russian Revolution, much of the press and many citizens believed the bombing and others like it that spring and summer were the work of left-wing radicals and communists, many of whom were Eastern European immigrants.

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Palmer Raids II

Dan Roberts, Professor of History at the University of Richmond discusses history with a 90 second segment about Owen vs Hutchenson.  Sponsored by the National Society of Colonial Dames of America

National Society of Colonial Dames of America

At first reluctant, Emma Lazarus gave in and wrote the words that helped build the symbol of America's welcome.

The money wasn't coming in and Joseph Pulitzer was becoming very frustrated. Publisher of the New York World, a Hungarian immigrant who fought in the Civil War, Pulitzer had taken, as his personal crusade, the task of raising money to build the pedestal on which the colossus was to rest. The arrangement was that France would supply the statue if the United States would build the base. Work in Paris was on schedule but in America, people did not seem to be very concerned.

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Emma Lazarus

Melancholy gripped the Allies in December, 1941. Japanese forces were everywhere victorious in Southeast Asia. It was time to take a stand.

Thailand, Malaya, Wake Island, Hong Kong, Manila, each were attacked by the Japanese and each fell just as quickly. On the 3rd of January, Churchill and Roosevelt formed a joint command with the Dutch and Australians, the purpose of which was to slow down the Japanese assault. The aim was to stop the enemy at the so-called Malay Barrier, an imaginary line stretching from Singapore at the base of the Malayan Peninsula down along the archipelago that is today known as Indonesia to the west coast of New Guinea.

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Battle Of The Java Sea

Owner and Narrator of A Moment in Time with Dan Roberts
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