Welcome to the American Story.

Stories about what it is that makes America beautiful.

Heartbreaking, funny, inspiring, and endlessly interesting.

This is Chris Flannery with the Clermont Institute.

I call this one Sergeant York.

Sergeant York, the highest grossing movie of 1941, opened in American theaters in July

and was still playing after the attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7th. It was a biographical film directed by

Howard Hawks with Gary Cooper starring as the First World War hero

Alvin York. It would receive 11 Oscar nominations and win two, including Cooper's first

Academy Award for Best Actor. The American Film Institute ranks Sergeant York number 57 on the list of the 100 most inspiring films of all time.

Young men went directly from watching the movie in theaters to the enlistment offices

to sign up for the war that had just come to America.

And the hero who inspired them to join the fight was a man of peace.

Alvin Cullen York was born in a real log cabin in rural Tennessee in 1887.

He grew up in a rough, poor,

clanish land, whose dialects, grammar, social customs,

and religion would have been familiar to Davy Crockett

and Andrew Jackson.

Alvin was a hard worker and excellent marksman with the long rifle that hunters in that region

made famous when hunting for your dinner was a common thing.

After his father died, York sort of went hog-wild, as he put it,

drinking, gambling, fighting, and making a general nuisance of himself.

...