Stout Hearts Steady Hands

“Hands” is a film about folks that get up early, get dirty in their work and go to bed dog tired. They are the builders, the growers and the fixers that keep things working and moving. This film was made fifty years ago, but its subjects reflect a tradition deeply engrained in the American character.

In North America, the ethic of hard physical labor had its beginnings in 1607 when some 110 Englishmen debarked from the three tiny ships that had brought them to anchor on a narrow riverbank to face a seemingly impenetrable virgin forest. As soon as settlers from England arrived at Jamestown Virginia, they turned their hands to the task of clearing land and building homes, a fort and the cottage industries that would sustain them.  In 1609, two years into the building of the first permanent British colony in what would become the United States of America, a colonist wrote back to relatives in England, “All one needs for life’s necessities is a stout heart and a steady hand.“

Fifteen generations after the sweat of Jamestown’s builders, that sentiment became the title of a film about working people in the now developed country of over three hundred million inhabitants.  The documentary was directed by Ash Hawken and produced by the U.S. Information Agency for overseas distribution. Originally a part of the Ahora Series, distributed in Spanish for television placement in Latin America, this version of the film was tailored for worldwide use in multiple languages. The posted version is in the English language, narrated by American actor, John Carter.

By the 1970s, technology had eased much of the physical labor required to shape, build, and deliver the infrastructure, products and services required for a growing and affluent society. Mechanical innovation and electric power had become the “muscle” of industry, in many cases replacing the physical drudgery required to crush the elements and lift the building blocks of production.

Had America gone soft? Was modern labor just about pushing buttons and programming machines? Where there still people that began their work at dawn and keep going until the job got done; as did the progeny of the early settlers, that laid down the railroads and dug the canals? Did the “steady hands” of the early stone masons, blacksmiths, coachmen, and cabinet makers have counterparts in modern America? Were “stout hearts” still to be found on the farms, and in the foundries and factories of the USA in the Twentieth Century? 

The participants in this half-hour film answer that question in a dramatic fashion. As Barney, a long-distance trucker hauls the loads of his 16 wheeler for the 3,000 mile east to west run from the Chesapeake Bay to the waters of Puget Sound, he passes by the modern counterparts of the nation’s pioneers. Maybe the high steel workers, miners, cowboys, tow boat hands and fishermen that he passes along the way don’t know much about Jamestown, but  they know what it means to put in a hard day’s work, and they know what it takes to keep America going.

Credits for “Hands” can be accessed here.