The northernmost construction teams encountered special problems with permafrost, which thawed when bulldozers exposed it to sunlight, creating a deadly layer of muddy quicksand under seemingly stable roadbed. This brought the project to a halt for six weeks—time Hoge and his team couldn’t afford to lose.
That’s when Hoge borrowed an idea from America’s past: George Washington had built log roads through the wilderness. Why couldn’t his men?
PERMAFROST
Permafrost is a layer of earth that has been frozen for at least two years. It forms in regions where the annual mean temperature is less than zero degrees. Most of the world’s permafrost has been frozen for several thousand years. It can be up to five thousand feet thick, depending on snow cover, vegetation, nearby bodies of water, and the temperature of the air near the ground.
Engineers became lumberjacks, cutting trees down by hand to create a roadbed paved with logs. The technique, called corduroying, had been used as early as the Roman Empire and as late as the American Civil War. Hoge employed it on a new, epic scale. The wooden road insulated the ground, keeping it frozen; but constructing it was slow. Progress on the road slowed from fourteen miles a day to just one. With the arctic winter approaching fast, Hoge and his crews were running out of time.
At the beginning of October, temperatures dropped sharply. One of the coldest Alaskan winters on record had arrived, with temperatures approaching minus fifty degrees Fahrenheit. It was cold enough to kill a man in minutes. Metal machines froze and cracked. Men cut holes in their sleeping bags to turn them into coats. With only 166 miles left to go, two regiments—one white, one black—struggled to finish the road before conditions worsened from horrific to impossible.
In less than eight months, working through extreme weather with inadequate training and supplies, Hoge’s men laid fourteen hundred miles of rough highway through the wilderness. A year later, civilian contractors followed to upgrade the surface to a true highway. Although it was never used for military traffic, the Alaskan Highway helped unite a nation and connect a continent. Now part of the world’s longest drivable route, stretching three thousand miles from Alaska to Argentina, the Alaskan Highway led to a demand for more roads. Today’s network of roads, built across all terrains, is long enough to travel to the moon and back twenty times.
Corporal Refines Sims Jr. was one of the 10,670 troops the army sent to Alaska in spring of 1942. The Philadelphia native was a member of the Ninety-seventh Engineer Regiment, an African-American unit assigned to build the northern section of the new Alaskan-Canadian highway. Like many members of his unit, he enlisted in the army straight from college, eager to help defend his country. He had no experience with construction, road building—or the arctic climate of northern Alaska.
But Sims would make history for more than helping to build an intercontinental highway.
Lord, it was bitter cold. Your breath would turn to ice inside your blankets at night. If you touched anything metal with your bare hands, you could tear your skin loose. We’d have to keep fires burning underneath our trucks all night, or they wouldn’t move in the morning.
—Sergeant Clifton Monk, Ninety-seventh Engineers
THE ALCAN HIGHWAY
OCTOBER 25, 1942. PRIVATE SIMS IS DRIVING through the forest on a newly constructed stretch of log-lined road. Around him, other members of the Ninety-seventh Regiment are clearing debris. Suddenly, he hears a thundering sound from inside the forest. Trees topple toward him. He frantically slams his bulldozer into reverse. The other men stop and unconsciously take a few steps closer together, preparing to defend themselves from whatever new menace the wilderness is about to throw at them.
Seemingly from nowhere, a second bulldozer breaks through the underbrush, driven by Private Alfred Jalufka, of the Eighteenth Engineers. His face is bloodied with scrapes from the undergrowth. The two ends of the road have met. Sims, a black soldier from Philadelphia, and Jalufka, a white soldier from Texas, jump from their bulldozers, shake hands, and embrace. One of their fellow soldiers takes a photograph of the embrace, and it sweeps across America—a picture that records not only mankind’s triumph over the wilderness, but the possibility of triumphing over our own prejudices.
Within five years, the United States Army will be integrated for the first time.
Integration of the country as a whole will not come so easily. African-Americans fought bravely during World War II in what became known as a campaign for “Double Victory”; they aimed to defeat fascism abroad and defeat racism and segregation on the homefront. Many African-American soldiers returned from duty only to find that inequality and racism persisted. They translated their disappointment into action, and by the middle of the twentieth century, the civil rights movement was in full swing. The seeds of this movement were planted as far back as the nineteenth century, but the struggle to achieve equality and full citizenship rights for African-Americans gained powerful momentum in the 1950s and 1960s.
Corporal Sims (left) and Private Jalufka (right) helped hold the ceremonial ribbon when the Alaskan Highway was dedicated in November, 1942.
a stretch in the Alcan Highway that connects Edmonton with Fairbanks, Alaska, 1942
a man at camp repairing a tire and bulldozers clearing the road
“BLOODY SUNDAY”
MARCH 7, 1965. SELMA, ALABAMA. SIX HUNDRED African-Americans march two by two through the otherwise empty city streets. Their destination is the state capital in Montgomery, fifty-four miles away. Their goal is an end to segregation.
The crowd is quiet and orderly. They don’t sing or clap. No one even talks. The only sound is the scuffle of their feet on the pavement. One of the marchers is fifty-four-year-old home economics teacher Amelia Boynton. For two years now, Boynton has volunteered at the county courthouse as a “voucher,” helping other African-Americans complete their voter registration forms. Despite Boynton’s efforts, in two years the number of African-Americans registered to vote has only increased from 150 to 335. Frustrated by the lack of progress, Boynton is ready to make a bigger, more visible gesture.
The protestors march across the Alabama River over the Edmund Pettus Bridge. When they reach the crest of the bridge, they stop. On the other side of the river, a wall of blue-shirted state troopers stretches across the road, blocking their path. The officers are aided by a posse of khaki-clad county deputies commanded by Sheriff Jim Clark, a racist bully with a history of physical abuse toward civil rights activists. At six foot two and 220 pounds, Clark is an imposing figure, made larger by the menace of the billy club dangling from his belt. White spectators waving Confederate flags stand beside the road, as if gathered to watch a parade.
The marchers freeze.
Troopers and posse pull on their gas masks and take out their nightsticks. A trooper calls through a bullhorn. “This is an illegal march. You have two minutes to turn around.”
No one moves.
The trooper with the bullhorn gives the order. “Charge.”
At first the state troopers hold their clubs at both ends and use them to shove the marchers back. Soon they begin beating the crowd with their nightsticks. Some marchers back away from the police attack. Others try to hold their ground. Tear gas canisters hit the bridge, emitting thick clouds of gas. Eyes and throats burning, the marchers scatter across the bridge. Then the mounted troopers charge.
The troopers are dangerously out of control. The crowd is confused and panicked. People run, screaming. Some fall.
Amelia Boynton freezes in the middle of the crowd, stunned by the sudden violence and confused by the gas and the noise. A trooper hits her on the back of the head. She half turns. He hits her again on the back of the neck. She falls forward under the feet of the crowd. The troopers move on, leaving Boynton for dead. She will remain unconscious for two days.
ACROSS THE AGES, COMMUNICATION breakthroughs, from Gutenberg’s printing press to Marconi’s wireless, have allowed us to communicate more quickly with more people. Every new
technology has allowed changes in society. Reporters in the Crimean War telegraphed stories home about inadequate facilities for treating wounded soldiers, leading to the creation of modern nursing. John and Alice Harris used the new medium photography to expose abuses that were taking place in the Congo to a horrified world. And in 1965, television would broadcast the message of the civil rights movement across the planet.
In 1965, racial segregation still reigned supreme in the American South. The Civil Rights Act of 1964, which outlawed segregation in schools, workplaces, and public facilities, had little effect in towns like Selma, Alabama. Blacks and whites were still segregated in restaurants, buses, and movies theaters. Worse, though the 1964 law dealt with segregation, it did not guarantee the right to vote. Black activists, like female suffragettes before them, knew that people without the vote had no power to make changes.
The Selma march marked a turning point in the American civil rights movement—and for social change worldwide.
Selma, Alabama, was the perfect place to stage a voting rights campaign. More than half of its population of roughly thirty thousand was African-American; 99 percent of its registered voters were white.
The registration process was intentionally difficult. The courthouse only accepted applications two days a month. Black applications were subjected to unfairly administered literacy tests and unreasonable poll taxes. Applications were denied for the smallest errors. Those who tried to register faced intimidation and scare tactics from Sheriff Jim Clark and his deputies. Despite the difficulties, month after month, year after year, people tried to register and were turned down.
Frustrated by their lack of progress, Boynton and other local activists asked for help from Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.
King’s Selma campaign began on January 2, 1965. For weeks, peaceful demonstrators marched to the Selma County courthouse to register, only to be met with violence and arrest at the hands of Sheriff Clark and his men.
Things come to a head on February 25, when twenty-seven-year-old protestor Jimmie Lee Jackson died after being shot twice in the stomach by a state trooper. Preaching the following Sunday, Rev. James Bevel stormed that he would like to take Jackson’s body to Montgomery and lay it on the steps of the state capitol for Governor George Wallace to see.
The idea of a march on Montgomery took hold. At Jackson’s funeral, Dr. King announced that a march from Selma to Montgomery would take place four days later.
Governor Wallace denounced the march as a threat to public safety and ordered the state police to put a stop to it. In Selma, Sheriff Clark called for all white males over the age of twenty-one to be deputized. The march ended less than a mile from where it started, stopped by a violent attack by state troopers and county police.
Amelia Boynton wanted to be heard. She accomplished her goal. News cameraman Laurens Pierce captured the trooper’s attack on her. That night ABC News interrupted the network’s Sunday night movie, Judgment at Nuremberg, to screen fifteen minutes of raw footage of what quickly became known as “Bloody Sunday.” Forty-eight million viewers, including President Lyndon B. Johnson, watched in disbelief and horror as scenes of police violence in Selma replaced those of Nazi violence in Germany.
THE GENEALOGY OF NONVIOLENT NONCOOPERATION
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. made masterful use of the tactic of nonviolent noncooperation, but he didn’t invent it. Here’s how he fits on the nonviolence family tree.
In 1846, American writer Henry David Thoreau refused to pay his poll tax, even though he knew he would be sent to jail. His refusal was an act of civil disobedience intended to demonstrate his disapproval of slavery and America’s war with Mexico. He explained his action in his essay Civil Disobedience, written three years later: “Under a government that imprisons unjustly, the true place for a just man is in prison.”
In 1907, a friend sent Mohandas Gandhi a copy of Thoreau’s Civil Disobedience at the time when Gandhi was formulating his first civil disobedience campaign in South Africa. Gandhi called his technique of nonviolent non-cooperation satyagraha, a Sanskrit term meaning “the force of truth.” Thoreau’s book gave Gandhi an English name for the technique that made sense.
Dr. King gave Gandhi full credit for influencing his ideas about nonviolence, claiming, “From my background I gained my regulating Christian ideals. From Gandhi I learned my operational technique.” While still a young theology student in the early 1950s, King became fascinated by Gandhi. The more he read about Gandhi’s use of passive resistance in his campaign for Indian independence, the more convinced he became that Gandhi’s philosophy of nonviolence was “the only logical approach to the solution of the race problem in the United States.” King applied Gandhi’s tactics for the first time in the Montgomery bus boycott in 1955.
Nelson Mandela also acknowledged Gandhi’s influence on the nonviolent political tactics used by the African National Congress prior to 1962.
Mohandas Gandhi visits textile workers in Lancashire, England
Martin Luther King Jr.
Selma’s “Bloody Sunday” was a turning point in the civil rights movement. Within days, President Johnson introduced the bill that would become the Voting Rights Act, outlawing discriminatory voting practices.
Two weeks later, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. led a second march from Selma to Montgomery, this time sanctioned by a federal judge and protected by federal troops. At the end of the march, King spoke to a crowd of twenty-five thousand from the steps of the state capitol. “We are on the move now, and no wave of racism can stop us!”
THE SELMA MARCH MARKED a turning point in the American civil rights movement—and for social change worldwide. The civil rights movement was not the first popular campaign for individual freedoms. But it was the first such campaign to be exposed to public scrutiny through real-time media coverage. The same dynamic of protest, repression, and public outrage has played out again and again in our time—in South Africa, in Tiananmen Square, and most recently, in the Arab Spring. Individual rights are fragile; free speech and media for the masses help protect them.
CHRISTIAAN BARNARD AND HIS eighteen-member team completed the first successful human heart transplant in 1967: five hours of delicate surgery that built on six decades of research by scientists around the world. Although Louis Washkansky succumbed to pneumonia eighteen days later, his heart beat steadily to the end. Since Barnard’s breakthrough operation, heart transplant surgery has extended more than one hundred thousand lives around the world. Today, more than twenty-five hundred heart transplants are carried out each year in America alone.
Eclipsing anything that had come before, Barnard’s achievement opened the door to new surgical techniques. For the first time, doctors saw the body as a collection of parts that can be interchanged and improved. Doctors can now repair damaged organs, reconstruct mangled bodies, and transplant many different organs, from hearts and livers to skin grafts and corneas. Scientists are working on growing new organs and building artificial ones. They have created artificial skin from spider silk, used pig proteins to regrow human skeletal muscles, and implanted electrodes to stimulate the neural networks in paraplegics.
Dr. Christiaan Barnard, 1967
THE FIRST HUMAN HEART TRANSPLANT
DECEMBER 3, 1967. GROOTE SCHUUR HOSPITAL. Cape Town, South Africa. Louis Washkansky, fifty-three-year-old former athlete and amateur boxer, is wheeled toward the operating theater. He has already suffered three massive heart attacks, and his heart is failing fast. He has waited three weeks for a suitable donor heart, becoming weaker by the day.
Dr. Christiaan Barnard scrubs his arms and hands in preparation for surgery. He is relatively unknown, but he is already a pioneer in cardiac surgery. Barnard has performed heart transplants on more than fifty dogs, but he has never performed the operation on a human being. No one has.
The operation is a massive gamble. The odds that Washkansky will survive the operation are completely unknown
. Without it, he will live only a few weeks.
Washkansky is still awake when Barnard walks into the operating theater. “Where you been? I kept telling them I didn’t want any Mickey Finns until you came to say good-bye.”
“Good-bye?”
“Aren’t you giving me a new heart?”
“Yes.”
“So it’s out with the old and in with the new.”
The team gives Washkansky oxygen. His eyes remain fixed on Barnard. Suddenly he motions that he wants to say something. Barnard leans over so he can hear.
“Did you tell my wife it’s in the bag?”
The surgeon nods and smiles. “I told her.”
Washkansky nods back. He blinks his thanks. Slowly, his eyes close.
The Hubble Space Telescope works on the same principle as the first reflecting telescope, built in the seventeenth century by Sir Isaac Newton.
Today’s medical miracles are poised to go beyond pioneering surgical techniques. Scientists have begun to understand the building blocks of life itself. In 2001, scientists assembled the first complete map of the human genome—the three billion base pairs of DNA that tell our bodies how to be a human. Our new ability to read and manipulate not only our own genetic code but that of disease-causing organisms is allowing medical science to reinvent itself. Researchers are taking the first steps toward fighting disease at the genetic level, with the potential for new solutions to old problems. Some believe that with greater understanding of DNA we will be able to shape the future evolution of our species.
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