things that make up what your historical society may or may not have -- i just have to make this one comment. is everyone reminded of forbes field, the people sitting in the i go off intooll? a tangent. we grew up in the left-field bleachers and sometimes i would

actually go and sit in the seat. it became apparent to me that when they called me from the bleachers to sit in the seat, it was behind the pole. people, onions, the that all of those things make our historical society important and viable are things that have one or two of. we have several of those. we take our philosophy from howard zinn. if anyone remember dr. howard he has an approach to history where we do not look at it from the perspective of presidents and a powerful industrialists. we look at it from the ordinary

people who get up and work every single day. the theall yourself historical donora society -- we can count on someone going to falling water. they will get off route 70 and come down to cs because they had to see what a smog museum actually is. the story is not only of the 1948 smog but of the industrial community as well. primary resource tells us where we are as far as how we put things together. we help students all over the world. helped the young lady from shanghai. we will get to her. we have the oral interviews and i'm going to recommend that

sometimes you guys take a look at blue sky. we provide the history and interviews and it is about the 1948 smog. all of these collections come from the people who live and care about their community. course all of the other things that go with that. books have been written about the smog incident. the gas comes out of the zinc works and the dangers of florida. this is a copy or rumor of blue sky. they were at our museum to do research. talking about industrial

disasters from all over the world as well as that did nora incident. as well as the donora incident. a quirky place, we are an old chinese restaurant, but we have tremendous archives. this is a film crew from pioneer production in the south side of london. they were here to do something for the weather channel. all sorts of mysteries at the museum. we call ourselves the smog museum. of a clever catchy name you could put out there. benjamin ross was at our museum

as well, they are from washington, d.c.. the polluters look at other industrials from a government perspective in what is now going to be our government policy. done i kathleen -- by kathleen shoop, it developed that character through that. i told bob i was going to do 35 minutes of advertising and 40 minutes of presenting. he is giving me the signal to wrap it up. we help students from everywhere. she is from shanghai china.

she put up a website that is website as well, the historical society.org. she was at the concordia national school in shanghai. this is a photograph standing in front of a mural at the university of pennsylvania. teaching primary sources out of the library of congress, we made a tremendous number of connections in the last 10 years. this is a local young lady. she got to meet peter parker from pioneer production. she was doing a project in 23rd team. -- in 2013. eighth gradeo see

science projects, we have many of that in our museum. i hope it doctoral candidate from stanford university -- we help people from stand -- from san diego, from texas. now it's time to start. i was talking to a lady here and she was asking me where i was going to begin my story. we start back in the ice age. the impetus guy was back then and still today, ice just -- i just started at the ice age. he wrote on paper never do this again.

i was linking it to baseball. we can't understand why that isn't true. i was linking it to baseball and this phenomenon. we all recognize the fowler map. it is historically inaccurate. never paint and outhouse. you would never see any outhouses and a fowler map. what gratis you don't have -- you have a genesis moment with donora. it happens because of this guy, william h donner. was going to see how many people -- you can tell me anything about william h

donner? news bob ross and some of the other folks. william h donner is one of the most underappreciated industrialists of the 20th century. we saw another great opportunity. that is where the market started. he is hanging out with guys like this. his new young bride was nora mcmullen. from aung lady, she was wealthy industrialist family from ireland. marryally did not want to injury. sort of was forced into marrying him.

she finds herself in the early part of the 1900s. his daughters hanging out with these guys. they were at any exclusive place my family would not have been allowed to be in. they decide they are going to start a company from the improvement company. is goingvement company to name this new town. we are going to name it for mr. donner and my new bride donora -- new bride nora, so we are

going to name it nora. donora is very well laid out on the floodplains as you can see. this is the little village of across the river, directly across the river. they are going to play a very important role later on. this is donora at the height. this is 1941. you will notice we have the glass furnaces here. a wire works come zinc works, and plant. vertical integration in action.

need to bring anything in other than the actual war. there is relatively good vegetation across from the glass furnace, across from the open heart. across on the eastern side you can see the little village of webster. it is getting hammered every day by these shelter furnaces. zinc.re producing sometimes blowback. even at this elevation you can that is indeed taking place. there are stylized versions of this as well.

there is visitation -- there is vegetation and grass growing. painting that came in 1950. you have to be careful what you use. nora 1908. we can see a bit of the open hearts in the back. you can also see how shallow the river bank is. as soon as they started to build -- to build the mills they started to pollute. we have untold thousands of negatives.

you see the ethnic and racial diversity. they are standing in front of -- we look at all sorts of things like ethnicity, where the nora -- where the northern europeans are going to be clean shaven in the southern europeans are going to have some type of mustache and beard. we can do all sort of things with this. i could spend hours on this photograph. what has he got planned? pot -- a cinder pot. to make the riverbank less shallow so they wouldn't be flooding. railroad tracks up

there and dumped him to make a 25 foot high banks of the railroad couldn't get flooded. -- bank so the railroad couldn't get flooded. photograph.eat he was the official photographer from the mill and when he passed of glassot thousands plates. the university of pittsburgh has 120. again as you see, the proximity of that high riverbank, it is

right on top of all of that flag. days is a very idyllic time where we have braces on the river. the charleston railroad will never be hot out by the pennsylvania railroad. a wonderful place to play baseball. grace -- great baseball shots. people build their houses. these are tremendous glass plates. all sorts of worker housing. webster, getting back to after 19 08 --s after 1908.

and if you can look and see closely -- down here we have a baseball game being played. these are the mules from the mine. things are going to change really quickly. economically it is not going to be good for the environment. this is the bosses house. there was grasping at this is right across the street. grass. this was right across the street. they had this wonderful aneption that this would be ideal like community.

then they started this. building zinc works. the zinc works that they actually built -- this is a photograph that i like because .t shows two different versions postcards lie and pose cards tell viewed the truth. it looks like it is not too bad it was dirty, it was smoky, and it killed all of the vegetation.

this is your typical scene. we don't see any vegetation here. this is called the built-in type of shelter furnace. we are not going to study this in any great depth. and is labor intensive creates a tremendous amount of pollution. it is hot and a nasty place to work. the workers did not have a lot of safety equipment. each retort needs to beat happed. of thehave ever heard phrase, i am tapped out, it comes from this. tapped outthey were they could finish their day, if

it is open to hours, if it was open eight hours. are 320 retorts per side. reasonistory major for a because that is the limitations of my math. very labor intensive. basically there is a clay covering over the top of this. the furnace will have poured into every one of these retorts liquid zinc or molten zinc. they will pour it into a ladle. they will take that ladle and pour it into a mall. zinc melts and hardens at very low temperatures. it hardens very quickly and melts at a very low temperature. alters hard and you

--e these 85 pound zinc bars once that hardens you have these 85 pound zinc bars. we put weights into our cars. they knew the zinc and acid fumes or something that were toxic and dangerous. poster thatfety was in the wire. they had those posters up to give workers a warning. a lot of workers cannot read english so they would make these photographs. that the zinc was causing a problem.

there was something called the zinc shakes or jitters. there is lightheadedness, there is dizziness, shortness of breath, nausea, headaches, all of those sorts of things. frequentlyed quite so they came up with solutions. this is the mixture and concoction they would put together. milk, ice,mix water, oatmeal, and whiskey. that was to get than to actually drink this because there is value in each of these. value in the milk and oatmeal because those are things that absorb toxins in our body. pace to cooled him down and whiskey is just the added inducement -- ice to cool it

is just theskey added inducement. the recommendation was drink outside in the fresh air. again, it is the concentration of these flouride gasses that are the problem. you can see it in housing and what happened in webster. this is probably five years. you remember our little trickle, slowly but surely it is taken over by what is happening in the zinc works. just seeebster, you stand.sort of webster. shot from

i can't tell you how many boxes of photographs we go through to find a gem like this. we do find lots of gems. kodak photos taken and looking down. are very proud of their community. are very much promoters of our community as well. are at theurnaces southern end of town. the open-heart furnaces are in the middle. as you can see a lot of vegetation. the people live in the shadows of these mills. park, where all sorts of things took place. open hearts is going strong

and the zinc works to the left to there. it is amazing how well a -- they areeen doing some type of a projection. as you can see the smoke rising, they are supposed to do an advertisement here. on october 19 we are going to have our annual cement city walking to her. tour.king i in fight you to go to our website and sign up for the cement city walk in.

back to our story, we have these young ladies from the back of the photograph on eastern sunday 1939. every single day people did things. we have kids playing with a dead tree. they went to the movies. life was your typical town. they had everything you needed. kids ask about shopping or going to the mall or things like that. we went downtown and had everything you needed. a here is a sunny day into nora.

this is the corner of six and mccain. it is just like any other community we are going to look at. this is 1948 when the disaster happened. the disaster is going to begin. this is gilmore cemetery. this predates the nora. there are about 4000 people living a year before that. it was an instant community. in the cemetery are 40 civil war veterans. the zinc work destroys all of the vegetation.

what is interesting about this photograph is this, the palisade. what did you think it was he that's sulfur. rod sulfur. right here across the railroad tracks is one of the main arteries of town, route 80 -- route 37. this is something that has changed. this would never be thought of today. remember the bosses house is going showed you before? the wrong way. here we have the zinc stacks. you can barely make the amount in the smoke.

this was life down in that area of town. this is the superintendence house. grasser that nice green people in the summer were celebrating? this is what it looks like later. it doesn't seem like anyone is addressing the problem because of why. the work, the money, that is bread and butter on the table. people come to us and ask if we have any pictures of the smog. we do but you are not going to like then. listen to what you are asking me. these people cannot see anything. for the most part they don't have cameras. are they going to run and take a

picture of something you can't see? we don't have pictures of the smog. from webster and the zinc works, this is every single day. something is going to happen to change that. this was given to me by a guy from webster. to catch theaiting ball back in 1948. you can see the zinc works. kids are going to be kids. webster gets fed up with what is happening. groups one of the first in american history that is actually looking at fighting industrial pollution.

we had theater roosevelt and the sierra club and all of those environmentalists looking for preservation. this group is the first group that is going to begin to think about fighting industrial pollution. they call themselves the webster society for better living. the buggy is an interesting character. he is driving this in a parade in 1951. his official job was he was an accountant. they feared the western society. one of your employees is advertising for a grassroots group of people that is taking dem to court. this is how seriously they took the society for better living.

you have to build a foundation. we cannot just spark the story at the disaster. he started at the ice age. it into thely made disaster. 29 1938. this is all unbeknownst to anyone. they have note clue what the temperature is. it is when a layer of warm air near the surface and there is no movement. the atmosphere is stagnant. is moving east, west, up everything is dropping straight back down to

the ground. you can read about that in their book. i'm not a scientist i am a historian. i'm not going to get into all of that. tissue andlong constricts long tissue. people who have a problem breathing, that is only going to be exacerbated and made far worse. the people who aren't prone to having some type of respiratory problem, they are also going to be affected. they are going to have the zinc shakes or zinc jitters. we do not feel our smoke and fumes are harmful. that was the superintendent from

donora zinc works, he works with the american steel and wire company. saidure he called down and all of the other places, what are you doing different? why are people dying? he probably comes to the conclusion it cannot be us. he could see the environment and at the same time no one in the past died because of it. now we are going to change gears just slightly. in 1950 a man had a poem published.

he read a life magazine article. you have a disaster were 27 people died in town from this mysterious black cloud of death. you don't get the cover of life magazine. the cover was ingrid bergman in joan of arc. room quartered off that shows what a typical living room in 1948 would look like and then this cover with ingrid bergman on it. i'm going to do a reminder to myself. some years later he got a hold of it, translated it into

english, and many years later after the fact he mailed it to us. it's up on a board and then fast-forward to another group of people. they are looking for something to use in the archives and they think they have settled on something. they put out this video on youtube. the poem is called "song of a small town." at first i thought it was going to be a typical project. they put in what they want to

and what is the least amount of work i continue to get in a? that is kind of what i was this video comes on his last one recently. some ofhim for good, the ok. anyway, this was last. i was absolutely a great by this video. i don't know if they are thursday. that's a shame. we are going to show to show you you willuestions and

have a question and answer period. just if any a moment to escape >> of here and get that up the very darkness we created, the nations watched as we trembled powerless. though we the world, were too late to save our own. the place, donora pennsylvania, home of the killer industrial smog. thousands of articles captured our demise, creating her fixed

scenes we could not forget. , artists, and poets created something. week stood on the same street, consumed by the same darkness. our story preserved in ink and pastel, butg and onethis is a time no remembers, in a town soon to be forgotten. if ever we disappear we will find peace between verses of poems and stories, preserved in museums. there was a town called donora. a town in the midst of a valley in pennsylvania and smoking mills, railroad yards, steel foundries, and the zinc works.

it's habitants, 13,000. there is a town where grass is .ot green 13,000 turned out their lights and they can see before they close their eyes. there is a town where they all sleep, where they think of the we will becoming from .ctober to november, 1948 always be sleeping while the fog descends.

the rail yards, the foundries. on the friday that will be coming our time. for none of the 19 on friday, the restlessness dies their dreams the color of blood. a friday like a slave in a town where the grass is not green. , which is named donora. inhabitants, only 13,000.

>> it is a privilege to be able to tell this story. i am blessed to be a part of the historical society. of the great archives of historical society. we are the caretakers who pass it on to another generation. we will talk about that later. now back to our story in another

form. anything i am doing afterwards .s going to pale in comparison this was taken on the november 2 issue in 1948. donora atribed as noon. this is donora at night. the exaggerations are going to start coming and the legends will rebuild. there were no zinc workers actually affected as far as fatalities during the smog incident. there's something we did a few years ago where he interviewed a lot of guys.

zinc workers for particularly proud of brutal conditions. if you even access a copy of that -- he is basically saying peace guys have been through a lot. suffer through three hours every day and get paid. this is nothing. idea of youo this didn't complain. the hospital for 8000 employees. people are getting hurt at this time. this is the hospital for that. very rarely would they access the hospital. disaster is unfolding most people do not know what is

happening. there are 13 doctors back in town and if you were sick in those days doctors actually made house calls. you call him up on his phone. i think there were 13 or 14 doctors in town at the time. the switchboard is absolutely ablaze now. friday has been a complete disaster. she has some tremendous stories to tell. she is a member of blue sky as well. people said get to your board. people were dying everywhere. even that statement is so

powerful. this isn't just a mystery. he pinpointed early on that it was the gases coming out of the zinc works that was in fact initiating the disaster. there was no such thing as internet. he is basically advising then to get out of town. i know exactly what the problem is. he is going to be confirmed a few years later.

there are many outside institutions that investigate. of course he is going to link it to the fluorine gases. these two guys kind of stand out. bill schempp suggested oxygen to be used. they have a limited amount of oxygen tanks. you can't really get around, , wherelly the lower part the town is on foot and most people live on top of the hills. you can't see much of anything.

we have kids come in and i will say your grandfathers laying on the floor, do you know anything ?bout cpr there is no such thing as 911. these two kinds are going to go around with oxygen tanks door to door and try to relieve the problem. 13,000 people can't breathe. they talk about not being able to see a cross the street, that if you got turned around in some way you didn't know which way you were actually going. east, west, north, south. withe began walking around the masks. it became a dachshund statement -- a fashion statement

in the 1950's. the fashion industry came out with this. does any lady into nora have a hat -- did you have a hat like this? the halloween parade, people talk about the halloween parade. this is where the arguments begin to start. people say you could not see the parade, people say you could see it just fine. not from that parade. this is from another parade. there was the football game that was the big rivalry. the stories come from that. you couldn't see this, you couldn't do that. it was a very close game.

if you can't see anything how do you throw the ball? your argument about what actually happened. the closest thing to a hospital is a middle hospital. the doctors were scrambling and use this as a temporary morgue. this is around 1961. building three years after the disaster. people are thent heroes of this particular incident. reporting that went on afterwards. you heard me mention 27 as

passing away. we see 20 as a number as well. 20 people died. nobody knows how many died directly from the smog. that becomes a point of contention as lawsuits are going to happen. the funeral homes were overwhelmed. we had to run out of caskets. two or three people passing away per week and over the course of the weekend you would have 27. this is from the life magazine article. this is steve stark of it being buried at the cemetery hill. if you look in the background, this is a fall on a tuesday, you can see the works are still going strong.

it is not long enough to effectively change. zinc works are going to resume operations and within a week it is reported all over the reporting with various degrees of accuracy. what is going to happen after the smog? of the important things where we start the investigations, whether it is government, the state government, the national government. people like that. wire takeseel and out messages to their employees.

we are no way at fault in this particular disaster. the still company was going to claim it was an act of god. indeed it was an act of god. in actual occurring weather fun almond on. what was coming out of that temperature come i we have temperature and inversions. people are taking advantage. calls up and says we will give 20 vacations to people from the north to come down. they give the mayor fair.

there was a guy in the zinc works. when he came back to work the guy said, you aren't sick, what is wrong? they were giving away free vacations. -- cooperationn was brutal. the editors of the paper had to send out messages to the communities saying if you should , it isis investigation ok to talk about it. they knew if they said anything bad it may be wrong. this is in the public health of 1949.

this is paul hagerman. i do know the dogs name is spicy. andnterviewed his daughter she remembered his daughter's name. , which i think was cool. the following october the had a memorial. no one from the american steel and wire comes to the memorial. these are the list of victims. there is an the list of victims. this is what has been decided through the court system. there had to be autopsies on everyone. we have many people claiming their relatives died that theend but they were not on

official list because this was the official list that we actually used, the one that had autopsies and said they died of fluorine and fluoride poisoning. everybody has a state marker. this was made by a high school student many years ago. probably 15 or 20, i'm assuming. you can correct me later. the most popular one is the legend of stanley, which has been repeated in numerous books across the world. he was playing in a game at legion field on saturday. his father was ill. he was called home. of course he gets home and supposedly his father has passed

away. legend out that is a that grew out of the smog. it is a much more to maddox to refer the dad to have passed away. they said coffin's were coming out of the hillside and landing on 837. works hade zinc disastero do with that but with simple competition. the imperial company came out with a new way to smell zinc. the magazine came out with this story. he strangled half the town of donora. saidational enquirer

people died from the smog. this good old-fashioned competition works out for business. a more inclusive kind of recycling and regenerating process. we are not going to get into all of that. it is less labor-intensive and less expensive. the zinc is dormant for a couple of years. you can see the hillside is we don'tto come back see farmland and sing -- and things like that. we have great footage of that at the smog museum.

they are actually dropping these great big stacks. of people are gathered on the hillside. this great cloud of dust comes up with all of this smoke and lance on all of these people there standing there with their babies and children it is a number disaster waiting to happen. this is us today. things have changed. it is no longer a mill town. there have been other disasters. donora is probably the most significant one other than the london disaster. we do get action. years before it

is passed. the result of the smog disaster is all of the oversight agencies we have today. ends, -- of other things, people realizing if there is a disaster, are we equipped to handle it? we are much better equipped than we were in the past. fema is something that comes directly from this disaster. the whole environmental movement that comes out of the smog disaster, as well, is another legacy. -- challenges we have today the environment has become a lyrical football. let's own up to that. one side says, nothing is happening. the other side is saying, the sky is basically falling in.

we can never find anything the middle ground. we attached that political stigma onto it, and we don't move forward. anything attached to politics today can't seem to move in any direction. i talked about our affiliations and our resources. that is pretty much all i have for you. i'm little bit over what i thought i was going to be. do we have any questions? the doctors are here to a dress any questions you may have about anyvideo -- to address questions you may have about the video. i will just start from left to right. >> what was the zinc used for? >> zinc was used for a couple of different things. number one, it was used to galvanize.

peopleld ship it, and would galvanize nails, why are, anything they wanted -- wire anything they wanted to waterproof,. it was also used in the bottoms of ships. bar, the rustzinc would attack the zinc before it attacks a metal. that is a chemistry question. i didn't do too well in chemistry. i was a good student, but more think about it, math, biology -- i was a history and english student. >> you mentioned the political football issues we have with getting things done in this area of environmental politician -- environmental issues. who were the politicians at the time, and the companies use their political capital and power to try to influence the politicians to stop any legislation? -- i talkedion is

about the environment being a political football -- who were the politicians at the time, and who might've been a hindrance to any type of investigation or change? written tos were governor jeff, who was the governor of pennsylvania at the time. he really did and on anything. american thing that steel and wire -- the other thing that happened was lesser society a better living had a better arsenal to take to court. faith is the idea of all of these deaths -- they took the idea of all of these deaths, and they said we are going to sue american steel and wire for millions of dollars. they settled on the fourth because the lawyers for american steel and wire convince the lawyers for the webster society for better living that they were

going to lose. they were going to say that this was an act of god. they have been to court before. they had experienced this before. they would always lose on a type of appeal. they couldn't continue the process in court. they didn't have enough money. they ended up settling for $235,000, divided amongst the lawyers. this is an out-of-court settlement. the lawyers and the plaintiffs --there were 130 plaintiffs were interviewed. the only thing we realized out of that was, in 1953, we got a television set. -- sad the said case case. nagasaki --, [indiscernible]

lymphoma and leukemia. were there studies on those around dondora? studies, i'mose not an expert on those. they are out there. they are not as thorough as you probably would want them to be or as i would want them to be. deborah davis, one of the leading epidemiologists in the world, has studied that. if you look at some of her work, she has gathered a lot of that information and footage together. -- put it together. there hasn't been a real conservative, thorough efforts actually examine, in a chronological way, what happened in the 5, 10, 15 -- it is a

thing they tried to ignore for many years. this was a black eye. this was something that was viewed upon as negative, something to be ashamed of. it is only in the last 10 or 15 years that we've been able to unearth and turnover that had the feeling and make it into a point about american history that is more important and valuable than what the people in the early days actually believed it to be. the deaths that occurred, were those young people? were they elderly people? >> most of the deaths were people who were 48 years old or older and had had a history of respiratory problems. the people who were made very

ill, clarence mills from the has a studystitute out, and we have all sorts of studies that you can access the museum as primary sources -- he said, have a temperature inversion lasted for a couple more days, there would've been hundreds if not thousands dead. from that.e it the death is that occurred -- deaths that occurred over the weekend, that is what happened. the weeks following, there were deaths that followed, but the governments started the clock at 12:00 p.m. on friday and stopped it at 6:00 a.m. monday morning. before that or after that, even if it was directly related to the smog incident, you weren't on the official list. washington county, right?

>> right on the river. towns, allut other those other times? how were they impacted? mileanasseh is one will -- denora.nora -- remember, there are thousands of people. it is monday morning when the rain comes in the front moves through that we get back to normal. the surrounding area is really not affected that much by the smog incident. >> [indiscernible] >> i would need one hour for economics. two hours for political. [laughter] economically, people associate the zinc works being shut down

with the smog disaster, when in reality it is good old-fashioned competition. somebody is making the same product cheaper. that is the economic consequence. the political consequences that it was just business as usual. the people get run over because big businesses there. they don't want to have to adapt and put in scrubbers and all of that. the cultural phenomenon is that people were ashamed. they are proud of their town but ashamed of the incident. they want to forget about it as soon as possible. did supervisors ever move away from that area? >> absolutely. i'm sorry i didn't mention that. year, all of the bosses move. they donated the house -- one of the groups that was

very prevalent in the zinc , they broughttry this belgian process over from europe, and we have a huge spanish population. in fact, we have the largest spanish-speaking population in the united states prior to the great depression, bigger than even new york city and los angeles. we have one of the largest ever speaking populations in the -- largest spanish-speaking revelations in the country prior to the depression. >> how many of the people who died worked in the factory and had lung conditions due to working in the factory? >> none of them had actually worked in the zinc works. that is what some of the zinc guys would point out. we were doing these oral interviews. died inthe zinc workers that smog.

he pointed the camera right over my shoulder. is pointing at me. i said, ok, i believe you. >> are there any other major books that focus on the event? >> the dinar smog gets mentioned in just about every book that is written about environmental disasters. volumes no one single to it.ed specifically the two i assured you are the ones we carry in the museum. today, you cane find dozens of books that deal with the incident in some way in one or two chapters or another. we can only handle so many books. we chose the two best books, one scientific and one political.

these are the two that we have and carry. >> to president truman ever make a statement? >> it is interesting. this happens the weekend before the election. the guys that we have , the guys -- gosh, -- am i blinking on the man i am blanking on his name -- steve amster, and you believe author -- i am thinking of the lead author. benjamin ross. thank you. me -- whooss told asked that question? say it again. >> president truman -- >> thank you. i had a brain problem there.

weekend, the following tuesday was the election, and in 1948, it was a foregone conclusion that tom is doing dewey was- thomas going to win the election. surprise, surprise, monday morning -- it is not a surprise until wednesday morning -- on monday morning, the federal government begins to investigate as they thought thomas dewey would investigate. morning, they get. their investigation started with the idea that tom is doing -- t dewey is going to be president. benjamin writes they have to do a 180.

truman was, for all of his thoughts, more of a friend to ewey wasem thomas dwe going to be. america's steel and wire was still going to reign supreme. they were going to be king kong, so does the. -- so to speak. they weren't going to speak softly, but they were going to carry a big stick. mr. truman, as far as i know, never made a statement. . [captioning performed by national captioning institute] [captions copyright national cable satellite corp. 2014] >> to join the conversation, like us on facebook. next on american history tv, virginia tech professor peter wallenstein discusses how

congress attempted to end slavery. is hosted by the u.s. capitol historical society. it is about 45 minutes. >> i am paul finkelman, the visiting professor of law at the lsu law school, the law center. it is my honor to be the director of this symposium. i have been with the u.s. capitol historical society for the past decade. this afternoon, we will begin with a paper by peter wallenstein. peter is a professor of virginia polytechnic institute and state university, known to the rest of the world as virginia tech. he has written a number of books on the history of the south, starting with his first book, "from slaves south to new south: public policy in 19th-century georgia." and he has written a book on the history of interracial marriage,

and has another book out on the famous case of loving versus virginia, which will be out in 2014, called "race, sex, and freedom to marry: loving versus virginia." it is an honor and a privilege to introduce peter to all of you and turn the podium over to him. [applause] >> thank you, paul. and thank you all for coming out today. why are you in here, anyway? i cannot speak for the other speakers, but it is rare for me at least to have the u.s. senate imposed on the structure i am standing before. it is a privilege and an honor, and i am happy to be here. congress came together in

december 1865 for the first time since early march. the war had ended, we were told, and slavery was over too, we were told, but that made for big questions left unanswered. and if we assume, as it is so easy to do, that former slaves must clearly not the citizens, we somehow conflate the turbulent events over the next year or two, or three. and i want to catch the wave early on in that unfolding history. the 15th amendment had been shepherded through congress the previous january, thanks to congressman spielberg. congress had to face its implications. when they met that first week of december, they had reason to think, and rightly so, that word would come real soon than the amendment had actually been ratified. what next?