Texas GOP bringing its battle to the Alamo

Long-overdue redesign of state’s most hallowed ground is much too important to be enmeshed in party politics

San Antonio is celebrating its 300th anniversary this year, so it’s altogether fitting that the city and the nonprofit Alamo Endowment and General Land Office released plans last week for a long overdue $450 million renovation and redesign of the Alamo.

A redesign is long overdue. Anyone who’s visited the Alamo in recent years knows that the site is a disgrace. This is supposed to be the most hallowed ground in Texas, a sacred shrine to honor the Texas Revolution and those who heroically died for it.

And yet Alamo Plaza, where much of the original 1836 compound once stood, is surrounded by noisy downtown traffic. Garish tourist dives like Tomb Rider 3D and Ripley’s Haunted Adventure line the west side of the plaza, and political protests and unrelated events are often staged right in front of the chapel, on what should be hallowed ground.

What’s more, in the Alamo’s current state it’s impossible to get a sense of the actual battlefield and the scale of the siege. The footprint of the original mission is undecipherable, and the grounds surrounding the chapel and the long barracks evoke nothing of the sacrifice and valor that makes the place sacred.

Since 1905, the site has been managed by the Daughters of the Republic of Texas. To their credit, when the DRT took over management the chapel was more or less crumbling. At first, the DRT did much to preserve and restore the buildings and persuade the state to purchase adjacent land for a memorial park.

But custodianship of the Alamo has been mired in controversy ever since. In 2010, the Texas Attorney General launched an investigation into the DRT’s management of the Alamo, and a year later the state Legislature transferred custodianship to the Texas General Land Office.

When George P. Bush ran for commissioner of the land office in 2014, he made fixing the Alamo a centerpiece of his campaign. During his first year in office, he began the ambitious process of redesigning and restoring the site to its original dimensions, with the aim of transforming the place into a landmark historical site.

Almost immediately, he was attacked for it — strangely enough, from the right. The conservative grassroots group Empower Texans joined with former Land Commissioner Jerry Patterson in condemning Bush’s plans. Patterson was so irked about it that he and two other Republicans challenged Bush in the recent GOP primary (he earned less than 30 percent of the vote; Bush won the primary with more than 58 percent).

Patterson reserved most of his indignation over plans to move the cenotaph, a 60foot marble and granite column to the Alamo dead erected on the centenary of the battle. Moving the monument for any reason, they said, would minimize it. Patterson and conservative activists even staged a “Save the Alamo Cenotaph” rally at the site last October.

It was a curious issue to rally around. The initial proposal was to move the cenotaph to the location of one of the original funeral pyres, where the Mexican Army stacked the bodies of the Alamo’s defenders after the battle and set fire to them. According to the land office’s proposal, moving the cenotaph would not only honor the dead by serving as a kind of mass tombstone, it would open up the historic core of the Alamo, allowing the entire site to function as a living history museum and square.

Another criticism of the redesign, leveled by Michael Quinn Sullivan of Empower Texans, centered around fears that expanding the site and re-imagining the plaza was merely a pretext for imposing upon the Alamo a “politically correct” spin that would minimize the 1836 battle while highlighting the pre-Alamo history of the site instead.

But the outrage on display over the Alamo redesign is out of proportion with what the land office has proposed. Moving the cenotaph to its own space within the same line of sight as the chapel and opening up the original battlefield — including an excellent plan to preserve and display the original battle wall footings under glass — are improvements to the Alamo that are long overdue.

One suspects the real reason Patterson and Empower Texans have objected to the redesign has little to do with the particulars of the Alamo as such and much to do with intraparty squabbling among Texas Republicans. Put bluntly, conservative groups like Empower Texans think Bush is insufficiently conservative — a RINO like outgoing House Speaker Joe Straus, who has long been a thorn in the side of Sullivan and other conservatives.

But the Alamo is too important to get sucked into the never-ending civil war of Texas Republican politics. The plan put forward last week by the Texas General Land Office is the best chance we have to restore a measure of dignity and solemnity to the Alamo and properly honor those who died to make Texas free.

Davidson is a senior correspondent for “The Federalist.” He lives in Austin.