My name is greg barrios. Im a former book editor of the san Antonio Express news. I worked for many years in los angeles for the Los Angeles Times. Ive written for the new york times, currently, i right for the los angeles review of books, and i am on the board of directors of the National Book critics circle. I am also the author of the book of poetry that deals with la causa. In fact, its called la causa. At this time i would like to introduce miriam. Miriam is the former pulitzer prizewinning editor who spent 25, with the Los Angeles Times. The crusade of cesar chavez, a biography is the First Comprehensive biography of the iconic, charismatic leader. She has also written the union of their dreams, a widely acclaimed and nuanced history of chavezs United Farmworkers Movement. She recently received a humanities endowment of fellowship to support the chavez biography. Please welcome miriam powel. [ applause ] thank you. Hi, miriam. Hi, greg. Thanks. Can you hear me . Im on. I want to ask you something that i feel is really important. What brought you through the writing about cesar chavez. I know a lot of people here in texas know who he is, but then i was very surprised to learn that recently when the mexican filmmaker diego luna was having the premiere of cesar chaff necessary austin at south by southwest he took a walk, a stroll down cesar chavez boulevard, and asked people if they knew who cesar chavez was. Most of them said they felt he was the boxer the mexican boxer Julio Cesar Chavez or they thought he was Julio Cesar Chavez jr. Who was also a boxer. Another answered isnt he the venezuelan leader hugo chavez . And several others thought that he had something to do with the Chicano Movement. It really surprised the filmmaker, and and i want to ask you why did you decide to write a fulllength book after writing, what is it, a long series in the Los Angeles Times about the unions and then your recent book, the union of their dreams . Thanks for asking that question because the answer is it ties very closely to what you just said about diego luna. The fact is that there was no bog ravy a biography, and thats why i wrote it. You are here today because you have heard of cesar chavez and know something about him, but hes virtually unknown these days and when you get outside of california and the southwest people really have no idea who he was. I mean, i was in the salinas valley, recently which as people may know is one of the still is the heart of the agriculture industry and a teacher got up and said her students had no idea who cesar chavez was and its not only in austin. Part of the reason why he has faded from our collective memory and not gotten the attention and the study that he deserves is because there has been, until recently, so little serious scholarship about him. There is theres been a lot of hegiography and repetition of stories that make him into a fairly onedimensional figure and so, you know, a lot of people have known that he was a much more complicated person, but theres been a reluctance to tackle the subject, and i also knew from my earlier work that there was a tremendous amount of material available. He saved everything. He saved documents. He saved hundreds of audiotapes of conversations and meetings and conferences, so i knew that there was this rich trove of material that had not really been fully mined and you know, i think that hes such an important figure in history and should be and that a biography would go would be an important step in restoring him to that position that he deserves. How helpful were earlier works about the union and chavez like John Gregory Dunn and Peter Matheson and i feel there were a couple of others jacques levy. Right. As well. How helpful were those earlier biographies . They were really helpful, all three of those books in different ways. For folks who dont know about them, the first two books that you mentioned, john dunn and Peter Matheson were written at the height of the struggle and in the real glory days of the movement and the boycott. People probably remember still, the boycott, right . So they were both written . 67, 68, 69, that time period and theyre both really wonderful writers. So each of them captured a lot about the spirit of the time. Dunn was muchmo more leary of where the movement was going to end up and more accurate in his predictions and Peter Matheson who i interviewed for my book, as well was much more opportunity mftic at the time about where things were going to end up and was disappointed and jacques levys book. Jacques levy was the official biographer of cesar chavez in the early years. His book was published in 1974. Theres obviously a big gap after that and because he was authorized, he was allowed this incredible access to chavez and chavez and the union knew that they would have the right to review the manuscript beforehand and what levy did was tape everything also and transcribe all his tapes and ultimately had a falling out with chavezs heirs and sold his collection to yale university, so there are again, these hundreds of tapes and he was present at negotiations and at all sorts of inner circle meetings and they were a wonderful resource. He went with chavez on a trip to europe where, among other things, cesar and helen chavez had an audience with the pope and levy was just there, not just in the audience with the pope, but on the flight back, tapes cesar talking about the trip and about what it meant to him to meet the pope. So it was just this wonderful resource for me. Do you repeat any of those stories for us recent readers of chavez . Absolutely. I try to repeat the stories and i try to separate out the facts and the way the stories have gotten embellished over the years, some of them, and in really interesting and important ways. Chavez created to some degree his own mythology and he did that because he was a great organizer and he did it sort of to help with the cause, but in the end 21 years after his death, i think its time to sort of separate out and show the ways in which he created the mythology. I understand that you did not have access to most of the family or, i believe, Dolores Huerta, as well. Right. Can you tell us the reasons that they felt, perhaps, they didnt want to cooperate with another book . So i think i should basically let the families speak for themselveses about their reason, but they did not cooperate. They felt it was transmitted to me through third parties that they felt that only a member of the family should write the story essentially. They have always retained great control over the story. The movie which we may get to later. The movie is the familys movie and they were very involved in the movie so they did not feel that i was the person who should be writing the story, and i knew that going in, and i knew that there would not be cooperation and there was so much material available that i didnt need it. I know they did respond to your first articles that appeared in the l. A. Times and they actually filed some kind of suit with the attorney general. What was the result of that . Well, so the articles in the Los Angeles Times was really about what the uaw had become and that the union was not in the fields anymore and had not been for many, many years so the story is focused mostly on the present and on the problems that farmworkers still suffer from, and the exploitation and the terrible Housing Conditions that go on while the ufw has moved on and done a lot of other sort of entrepreneurship. So in doing those stories i kind of started to look back at the past. That was what i came to the past and ultimately did this book through the present and through writing about farmworkers conditions today. The union did not like the stories. They did not actually sue. They filed a notice saying they were preserving their right to sue the paper for libel, but ultimately never filed a suit and they issued a 100page report alleging also to things that the paper stood by the stories and we never ran any corrections. There is a famous line by john ford and theyre having the john ford panel next door, and its a scene at the end when James Stewart goes to a newspaper reporter or editor and tells him that hes the man who shot hes not the man who shot liberty balance and the newspaper editor wont hear anything about it. He says when the legend becomes fact, print the legend. I think id like to start there by asking you how cesar got started as a labor organizer. And then well have to connect that to the legends and im thinking how were going to do that. Okay. Youve got a plan. His beginning as an organizer is really a fascinating part of the story and the understanding his later years and decisions. He was a farmworker and became part of the migrant stream in 1939 when he was 12 years old and his family lost their farm in yuma, arizona. He was a farmworker. He was in the navy and came out and he worked his way out of the fields and working in a lumberyard. In 1952 when a name named fred ross and no one has heard about fred ross, and thats too bad, too, except for a couple of notable exception. He ran the group called the Community Service organization which was almost exclusively in california and it was the part of the mexicanamerican Civil Rights Movement. In 1952 he came to san jossy and he came to hold house meet wrgs you invite a few people over and talk to them about what are their concerns and what are their needs and try to get people engaged in collective Community Organizing and he meets cesar chavez at a meeting at the chavez house and part of the legend has always been that fred ross then said, wrote in his journal that night, i think i found the guy im looking for, and that you can find that quote in lots of books and lots of scholarly works, even, but in fact, thats made up and i found the actual entry from fred ross journal from that night in which he says something very positive. He says chavez great potential, great energy, something very positive about cesar, but not exactly the quote as the legend has become. So thats how he gets his start. He is 25 years old. Hes really smart and hes stuck in this deadend job and along comes fred ross who says were going to do a Voter Registration drive and he becomes the chair of the Voter Registration drive and by 1954 clearly impresses ross and the founder of the Community Service organization. Yes. And by 1954 cesar is on the payroll of the iaf and ultimately the cso. So he has a tenyear apprenticeship as an organizer working for ross between 1952 and 1962 before he goes off into the part of the story that more people are familiar with when he organizes farmworkers. Lets go back to his name. When i first got a copy of your book i was startled, in a way, because the accent americas in his name were not there and it read cesar chavez, and i wondered and i looked it up and i found that several newspapers do use the accent marks, and i also found in our second brain wikipedia, that the accent marks were there and that his original name was cesario. Would you tell me why he changed the name or whether he actually used the accent marks or not . So his name was cesario and his grandfathers name was cesario and he was named after his grandfather although he never knew him. When he went outside of school his name was changed to cesar and his mother was never happy about this situation and she always called him cesario. She also did not speak english. He spoke spanish at home to his parents so he became cesar when he went to school, and he never used he was always, if you listen to these tapes of which ive listened to hundreds of hours or you talk to people when worked with him at the time, although theres some revisionist history in that, but he was always called cesar, and i actually saw an interview with America Ferreira who plays helen chavez in the movie and she was asked why do you call him cesar in the movie . Helen calls him cesar so that was good enough for me. So he never used the accents and called himself cesar. In recent years theres been a revisionist. You will hear Dolores Huerta refer to him as cesar although she did not back in the day. Was he, at that time that he became organizer with the cso, i think he became disenchanted with the way things were being run. He also was upset with the fact that once the Union Members were put in the in the circuit, they often wanted to talk about money and very little else and not support the work that needed to be done to create the union later on. I think thats a really key point and it goes back to the cs odehs. So here he is an organizer in the cso. He is helping to sort of empower mexican americans who have not been a part of the voting public to some degree and certainly not a political power, and as he works with them and as they move into the middle class, they adopt middleclass values and he is really upset by this, and so in the late 1950s you see him writing in his journal more and more and writing letters to fred ross and saying the way this is going this is just want going in the direction that i want. He really believed that it was important to empower people and for them to not to have a sense of dignity and to not live in poverty and to be comfortable, but not to forget where they came from and to help people who were still living in poverty and to help the cause, and that is a lot of the reason why he leaves the cso and starts out on his own to organize farmworkers, and i think that that really strong feeling that i have empowered these people and now theyre using that power to use goals that i dont support becomes very significant later on when you try to understand some of the decisions that he made and the degree to which he wanted to maintain control because he never wanted to be in that situation again and he talks about that quite a lot. So later on the cso was just a membership organization. Once hes running a labor union, a lot of people support labor unions because they want to make more money and they want better conditions and not everyone joins a labor union because they believe in la causa and they believe in the lives of other people and sacrifice. So he felt very strongly that you needed to educate workers in order to share this philosophy that he had and that was a very became a tough issue. At this time, was there a beginning of the mexicanamerican Civil Rights Movement, Chicano Movement, if you will, and there were other leaders in the mix, was there tijerina and nuevo mexico and Corky Gonzalez in the crusade for justice in denver and there was Jose Angel Gutierrez in crystal city here in texas, and yet chavez never reached out to connect with them. It seemed to be very focused only in california. I think that this goes back to the control issue that he wanted to be the sole person in control. We talk about this later in texas that he undermined efforts by other people to organize in texas because he didnt want to be in that position of sharing power. He also had a very strong commitment to nonviolence and that was not necessarily shared by some of the early leaders of the chick anano movement and ironically, he emerges through the end of his life as the symbol of the Chicano Movement and even though he did not embrace it in his earlier years. Was it the appearance during the fast of Robert Kennedy that catapulted the union and his krused a to a more National Audience . I think absolutely, yes. The fast takes place in march 1968. This is two and a half years into the grape strike and hes begun to become somewhat of a nationally known figure, particularly the march to sacramento in 1966 and certain other events, but the fast is a tremendous organizing opportunity. He fasts for 25 days. S place where he fasts becomes basically a shrine. There are nightly masses and there are people walking on their knees up the path to the 40 acres and it was it attracted obvious a tremendous Media Attention for the first time and Bobby Kennedy coming to break the fast. Its an iconic picture probably the picture that more people have seen than any other. It still gets used a lot today and the kennedy name was enormous at that point in time, and it also comes a week before kennedy announces that hes running for president. It also ties the ufw into their First Political campaign, chavez and the union go out and do door to door campaigning particularly in los angeles and help kennedy win the primary. Theyre there in the Ambassador Hotel when he gets shot. It was important for those political reasons and probably more, i see the fast as a real turning point in the history of the movement, and i always quote the reverend jim drake who was one of chavezs top advisers and he was a prot stance minister and he said in later years that after the fast cesar was too saintly to make mistakes, and i think its an important concept. You know, this was sort of thrust on him, to some degree and he certainly embraced the image of the suffering and the penance and that was part of the marching, as well and believe that when you sacrifice its such a powerful force that it forces other people to want to help you, and i think it did. Was he a very religious man or was it the fact that they appropriated a lot of the religious iconography . I think it was both. I think it was a tactic, certainly. It was a real thing. He grew up in a catholic home and his mother was quite religious in the sense of mexican catholicism which was which has its own cultural resonance for people and so it was important to him, but he also used it tremendously effectively. You have to remember when the strike starts in 1965 the Catholic Church in california is not supporting the farmworkers union. Now we think of the churches being on their side, but the pillars of the the financial pillars of the church were the growers. So they were really loathed to do anything over it, and there were a lot of great files that the archdiocese of fresno kept that show all of the letters that the growers are writing to the bishop saying get these people out of here. Whats going on . And so on, so lacking support from the church and knowing how important, you know, youre trying to convince very poor mexican farmworkers who are scared in speaking out in favor of the union because theyre risking their job, their homes and livelihoods and the embrace of the church and having the support was really important, and he does that so he does this sort of brilliant thing using the banner of the virgin de guadalupe everywhere he goes and particularly in the march and the march to sacramento, people are not necessarily familiar with california, but they walk up the spine of the San Joaquin Valley through all these little farmworker towns and every night there is a rally and the teatro campesino performs and its during lent and its a perigriacion and ultimately the church comes around and the bishops support them, but it took a while. At the same time that this is happening there was a lot of discussion as to the nonviolence that they used in the strikes and the boycotts, et cetera. And you mentioned that there was violence at times among the farmworkers. There was acts of sabotage against the growers. Manuel chavez, a relative of cesar was quite relentless and perhaps im reading too much into this, but i sense the, mobile violence that many volunteers must have felt when they were dismissed from the movement and must have caused a lot of emotional violence. Ruthlessness was not a foreign concept, shall we say, right . And i think that that manifested itself in different ways. One of the reasons why chavez was so effective was his singleminded focus and intensity and i think that got communicated to his followers and people interpreted that in different ways and people who had been part of movements or read about them may identify this. If you believe and you are lead to believe by this leader who is a tremendous force for you that anything goes in the interest of getting this this victory, sometimes people do this in the name of the movement or behalf of the movement that may not have been sanctioned and sometimes people just look the other way. When i talk to growers who lived through this era, one of the things that makes them the most angry and the first thing they always say is this was not a nonviolent movement. And theyre right to a degree. There was a lot of a sort of tacit understanding that violence against property was okay. Violence against people wasnt. If youre a grower and your life is your vineyard and somebody comes and takes a machete and chops down the vines youre pretty angry about that. So there was a degree of violence. During this time i lived in crystal city texas and i was part of the raza unida and we were privileged at that time to have a performance by the teatro campesino and he brought his group of actors and we were very pleased with that and proud of it. Little did we know that chavez had sort of distanced himself from them and that luis had been told that the teatro came second and not first and they were dismissed and in reading your book i discovered this bit of information, and i wondered if you would clarify some of that for us and the relationship that cesar had with people that were all for the union and all for la causa and in a sense were summarily dismissed. Luis valdez was an interesting and important figure in the movement in his early years and for people who might not know his name, he was actually a farmworker born in a labor camp in delano, but whose family moved to san jose and his personal sacrifice made sure that they went to high school and college and he was a migrant farmworker as a kid and goes to san jose state and becomes a promising playwright and was working with a San Francisco mine troupe when the strike starts and part of a radical group in the San Francisco bay area and thats an important part of the story, too, because the things didnt happen in a vacuum and the Civil Rights Movement was very strong and a lot of early support that made the union successful came out of that sort of particularly San Francisco area. So luis valdez has to decide. His play is about to be produced on offbroadway and he has to decide does he go to new york or go back to delano to help the farmworkers. He wants to start a theater for farmworkers and we dont have any money and any actors and sure, go ahead if he wants and he begins the teatro campesino. There is a wonderful website that the university of Santa Barbara has put together that are the actos online and its terrific. He starts this theater where they improvise and do skits and he teaches theater to farmworkers who arent literate and they can perform and are naturals and the theater becomes immensely popular both as entertainment and also for education. So hes teaching basic concepts. Whats a contract . How does this work . Whats the union . And the teatro becomes more and more popular and he is a rival force to cesar chavez, not because he wants to run the labor union, but sort of as a credible voice for farmworkers. He also sort of embodies the more radical element of the movement, not in terms of their politics interfering, but in their independence. So if any of you know or have dealt with people who are politically active, they have strong opinions. There comes a period of time in 1967 when those opinions are not really welcome and chavez, i think, never particularly believed in a democratic organization. He did a good imitation in the earlier years of being a democracy, but it never really was a democracy. So in 1967 are the first purges and luis valdez did a great session with me with the Public Library which was also online and he talks publicly for the first time in that video audio, rashths of being purged. I found all of the records and he told me the story, and then i actually found the written minutes of the meetings and who said what and what the votes were and so on, that helped me to tell that story in a really authentic way from documents. I think its really significant. He never talked about it and no one who were purged in general did not talk about it because that was the ethos that you didnt want to do anything that would hurt the union and luis throughout his life has always supported ufw and continued to do so, but the emotional impact on him of being thrown out and not talking about that, i think, was something that took him a long time to work through, as well. Another thing that strikes me as interesting is the fact that many of the workers at some point were no longer farmworkers that were in the positions of the ruling board, et cetera, and it seemed to go against his original idea that it was it should be made up of farmworkers deciding for themselves and rawling f ruling for themselves and at some point he decided like he did earlier on in the cs days that he didnt want anyone telling him. Is that accurate . Thats really accurate. He even talks on the tapes when he becomes very frustrated with the battles that hes having with some of the board members, he saysy feel like im back exactly where i was with the cso and that was exactly what he did not want. So the lack of farmworker partes pagz and the leadership goes back to that idea that if you give them power they may make decisions that are not the ones that you want and it becomes a struggle between the movement and the union and ultimately leads to the demise of the ufw as a viable labor union. At some point chavez becomes a National Figure partly due to the boycotts of National Boycotts that are hailed all across the country. Would you tell us more about how that really became a symbol of his successes . Sure. Let me go quickly because we want to leave room for questions so ill do a very short boycott story because again, to me, this really shows his brilliance and him at his best and what he did for the great boycott that made it so effective was to send mexicanamerican farmworkers across the country, never been on plane, didnt have any support, and had the name of a few supporters and told them stop the sale of grapes which on its face you think its kind of an insane idea and yet the smart, creative ones were able to tap into communities of support and build networks and ultimately put enough pressure on the supermarket chains so that in 1970 that is what ends the strike and it was contracted. The supermarkets go back to the growers and say we just cant deal with this boycott nonsense anymore. You need to solve your labor problems. So it is a sort of the height of creativity and also ultimately creates the problems that come up later because then the union has these contracts and then they have to figure out how to run them. Okay. I think we have time now for some questions from the audience and perhaps you can bring up issues that we havent addressed so far. Yes . The role of the filipinoamericans, you havent mennoned tha mentioned that. Can you repeat the question . Her question is the role of the filipinos in the strikes. I think they had originally . The filipinos had their own union and it was the awoc and in 1965 the filipinos start the strike. The filipino union walks out on strike and agoes to chavez and they play an Important Role and they merge in 66 and the filipinos felt like secondclass citizens in a mexicancontrolled union. Their leadership is never very happy. Leo who is the most prominent and strongest organizer in delad delano ends up leaving where he felt that chavez could not delegate and would not delegate so the filipinos become marginalized and then chavez, in an effort to sort of do something about it in a very misguided effort, goes in 1977 to the philippines as a guest of Ferdinand Marcos and that becomes a tremendously polarizing event, as well and praises martial law and you know anyway, theres quite a bit about it, and we havent talked about it, but there is an important part of the story about the filipinos. And i believe part of the meetings were held in filipino hall. Absolutely. For the most part, and i believe that the Filipino Community has denounced part of the film because the filipinos were shown in the background and not in the forefront and i believe when the growers finally signed the contract, i think it wasser have vera cruz, and he was sitting next to chavez and was one of the people that signed and yet in the film hes shown in the background. Miriam, you shared with me before the presentation that you had worked as a cultural reporter for the Los Angeles Tim times. The first question is how much did you physically retrace the path of cesar chavez . Did you spend time in bakersfield, los angeles, if you got up to Lake Isabella to talk to his brother and apparently not, the second question is in your Extensive Research is there one nugget you found about Cesar Chavezs life that the public doesnt know but should. Two questions. Yes. Absolutely yes. I climbed out in yuma and the ruins of the house and theyre just crumbled walls of the house where he was a child, his grandfathers estate. I think place is really important when youre writing and there are so many places that still exist that i was able to really so yes, i retraced all of that, and the nugget that i like is that in 1969 he was flat on his back and he was in tremendous pain. Hed been in traction and all sorts of things and he couldnt sit up in bed and theres a picture and there are Cool Pictures in the book that i also found in the archives and one of them you see them flat on his back because there was a bar and finally, the Kennedy Family doctor and dr. Janet trivel who treated kennedy, and she watches him right away that hes crooked and he has this extreme case of asymmetry and shes so relieved because now its a simple solution and you even out your shoe. She also tells him he has a venus demilo foot because his second toe is longer and the reason we know this is because he taped it and the fact to me that here is a man who is flat on his back in tremendous pain and has the presence of mind in terms of preserving history, his own history to turn on a tape recorder and 40 years later im sitting in the library listening to this tape and that was for me, kind of summed up a lot of the remarkableness both about the man and about writing the book. Yes . Did you research the role that said antonio played in the United Farmworkers Movement . To a limited interview. I didnt interview antonio who was the head of the texas farmworkers and theres some information about him in the book, and i do deal in the book with the degree to which in both arizona and texas, independent organizations formed and tried to function as unions and chavez basically sort of undercut them in a lot of ways by making sure that they didnt get funding, so there was a battle over there is a turf battle because he wanted to be the sole voice for farmworkers. The idea was that there was going to be a union and that was the goal and they couldnt run california enough to expand and batted down the efforts that grew up in texas and in arizona. Yeah. The texas farmworkers had a Hunger Strike at the capital in 1978 and they also had a march to washington which i believe youre familiar with, and at the time i remember speaking to antonio, and he said that they wanted to represent all farmworkers both u. S. Citizens and mexican workers and that cesar did not want that. He only wanted u. S. American farmworkers to be represented. And that was a big philosophical difference between the two groups, too. Excuse me. Excuse me. My question has to do with unions, tafthartley act in late 40s really was a very poor act because when you strike an alternative is for managers to come in and to do the job, and im wondering whether that was evident after striking and therefore they strategized to do the boycott or thats . Thats absolutely right. When the farmworkers are excluded Relations Board and because they were excluded from the act they were able to do secondary boycott and something thats perceived by the growers as an advantage turned out to be to the farmworkers benefit to the boycott. Why were they excluded . Thats a complicated story. Yeah. As a nurse, im interested in pesticides and declining health, and these farmworkers, the close proximity they were to the crops that i consider cesar chavez the pioneer in pioneer in organics. And my kids didnt eat grapes. Way before people were talking about organic food, he was doing composting and he did fight against pesticides both out of conviction and as a tactic. I think were done. I would like to ask one more questi question. What is chavezs legacy . Is legacy is not in the fields but a generation of activists who learned from him and have taken that knowledge and gone elsewhere and for the farm workers empowered by his union. That was a tremendous experience and as a hero for latinos throughout the country. And i think all of that is an important legacy. Thank you very much. Prepare to cast off. May we cast off . Youre watching American History tv. Covering history cspan style with event coverage. Eyewitness accounts, archive films, lectures in College Classrooms and visits to museums and historic places. All weekend, every weekend on cspan3. August marked the 75th anniversary of the atomic bombings of hiroshima and nagasaki. Monday at 8 00 p. M. Eastern time we look back with an author. Heres a preview. At that point japanese strength was kind of down to its last drop. But it is true as the caller says, that the japanese were essentially pouring all of their remaining strength, military strength and their civilian population, they were preparing to meet the invasion and to fight us, as she says tooth and nail. You had women and children being organized into militias, being trained how to fight with bamboo spears. Being told to use kitchen knives if necessary. And so i think avoiding an invasion of japan was absolutely critical. And i think it was so critical that if it was true, that really if you could say the choice was bomb two cities with an atomic bomb or launch a bloody invasion, it was one or the other, i think if that was true, i think that using the bombs exactly the way we did, that is hitting cities without a prior explicit warning, i do think you could defend that. The traditional way in which americans have understood the atomic bombings, you know, sets up this forced binary where you have to choose either hit these cities without warning or launch an invasion, and i dont i personally dont think thats right. I think that there were many other options other than just those two. And i think you can make a pretty good case, although as a counterfact, that an invasion would not have been necessary. You know, with or without the atomic bombs. Keep in mind that the invasion of cue shoe, the target date was november 1st. Thats almost three months after the bombing of hiroshima. And so the idea that the bombs were a last resort to an invasion that was just about to happen, thats not quite right. But as i say, i mean, veterans of that war had their own very, very strongly held beliefs about what had happened at the end of the war. And as a historian, as someone who has interviewed lit al raleigh hundreds of world war ii veterans, i have never made it a practice to argue with world war ii veterans about this. I present my views, but i think its important to recognize and to honor the feelings, the strong feelings that veterans have about the subject. Learn more about the atomic bombings and the end of world war ii monday at 8 00 p. M. Eastern, 5 00 p. M. Pacific here on American History tv. Youre watching American History tv. All weekend every weekend on cspan3. To join the conversation, like us on facebook at cspan history. Between 1892 and 1954 about 12 Million Immigrants seeking a new life in america were taken to ellis island for processing, questioning and health screening. Today millions of americans take ferry boats to visit ellis island and the statue of liberty. Up next on american artifacts we visit to learn about the immigrant experience. Good morning. Im a park ranger for the National Park service here at