San Antonio Express-News (Sunday)
Separating Alamo facts from tall tales.
Old stories die hard, but authors do their best to bust the myth
You have to appreciate the cheeky title of a new book that thrashes the myth surrounding a brief but significant 1836 battle fought at an old Spanish mission in San Antonio.
“Forget the Alamo,” by Bryan Burrough, Chris Tomlinson and Jason Stanford, debunks what the authors call the Heroic Anglo Narrative that has co-opted this moment in Texas history for nearly two centuries. In muscular prose that’s heavy on deadpan understatement (“Santa Anna was pissed”), the book aims to separate the truths from the tall tales and tell the real story for a more discerning and diverse 21st-century audience.
It takes some cajones to throw a book at the Alamo myth, especially if you have a Texas address. Burrough is the author of six books, including “Barbarians at the Gate.” Tomlinson, a columnist for the Houston Chronicle and San Antonio Express-News, is the author of “Tomlinson Hill,” the story of his family’s slave-owning history in Texas. Stanford, a writer and former communications director for Austin Mayor Steve Adler, publishes a weekly newsletter called “The Experiment.”
“Forget the Alamo” is grounded in the argument that the Texians living in Mexican Texas who defended the Alamo were fighting to preserve slavery. In that era, Texas drew settlers from all over looking to make money, which often meant planting and selling cotton, a task utterly dependent on slave labor.
Mexicans, newly freed from Spanish oppression since winning their War of Independence in 1821, wanted to abolish slavery.
How much do we know about the actual battle? Not much. The historical record is spotty, the authors note.
We know that the Alamo was tough to defend, a sprawling compound the size of a city block. We know that the Texians and Tejanos — Texans of Mexican origin who fought alongside the Anglo rebels — were wildly outnumbered by the Mexican army. And we know that the three pillars of Alamo legend, the Alamo trinity, were not quite the rugged heroes depicted in books, films and television shows.
William Travis was a “preening politician,” Jim Bowie a “con artist” with superior knife skills and a gift for gab and Davy Crockett a “washed-up politico,” the authors assert. Travis died almost instantly once the fighting started, and Bowie was killed in his sickbed. However Crockett went down — fighting to the death or surrendering before being executed — the authors conclude that his body was among those burned on a funeral pyre after the battle.
A main objective of “Forget the Alamo” is “to highlight the often overlooked contributions of MexicanAmericans
during Texas’s early years.” The best examples of this are Juan Seguín, one of the rebels’ “most efficient commanders,” and Adina De Zavala, granddaughter of Lorenzo de Zavala, a Mexican politician who supported American immigration and helped write the Texas Constitution.
Seguín fought in battles leading up to the Alamo, left the Alamo as a messenger and led cavalry at the Battle of San Jacinto, where Gen. Sam Houston shouted “Remember the Alamo!” and defeated Gen. Antonio López de Santa Anna’s Mexican army to liberate Texas. Elected to the Texas Senate after independence, Seguín clashed with incoming Anglos, many of them Southern racists. When he was accused of conspiring with Santa Anna after a Mexican raid, he fled, ending up in a Mexican prison. Although Seguín eventually made his way back to Texas, his ousting spoke to a broader cultural shift in San Antonio. “In the wake of the Mexican raids, Anglos appropriated much of the town from the Tejano families who had lived there a century or more,” the authors write. “It was the turning point in what amounted to a kind of ethnic cleansing.”
Adina De Zavala was motivated by her grandfather’s memory to restore the Alamo and the other San Antonio missions and promote a more accurate version of Texas history. At first, she partnered with Clara Driscoll, a wealthy, white Texan whose grandfathers had fought at San Jacinto. They led a fundraising campaign on behalf of the Daughters of the Republic of Texas to purchase the Long Barrack, where most of the Alamo’s fighting took place. The building had been sold to a grocer and then to a mercantile firm. The women succeeded in securing the state’s purchase of the Long Barrack, but Driscoll was determined to tear it down to create a park, while De Zavala wanted to preserve it. They fought over the issue for nearly a decade, and Driscoll ultimately won, when the upper walls of the Long Barrack were demolished in 1913.
The greatest surprise of “Forget the Alamo” is its clear-eyed explication of the ways politicians, educators, writers, filmmakers and TV executives used the Alamo to serve whatever message they were promoting.
Sam Houston used the Alamo as a rallying cry and cautionary tale to inspire his troops at San Jacinto.
Walt Disney, who was angry at left-leaning labor unions and understood that animated films were losing audiences to live-action movies, threw his energy behind a weekly TV show, “Davy Crockett: Indian Fighter,” first airing in 1954. Starring Fess Parker as a “saintly stoic” Crockett, the series promoted patriotism amid Cold War propaganda, the Mexicans aligned with Russian and Chinese communists.
John Wayne hoped that his 1960
release of “The Alamo,” a three-hour homage to the Heroic Anglo Narrative that tanked at the box office, would help sink the career of a dangerous liberal named John F. Kennedy.
Wayne was successful, the authors argue, in turning the Alamo “into a national political symbol, a romantic bulwark against shifting political winds.” He was decidedly less successful in destroying Kennedy’s political future.
Let’s pause for a moment to acknowledge that when it comes to our own lives — our personal histories — everyone is guilty of some degree of spin. We tell and retell our favorite stories, embellishing and omitting details to serve the audience before us. But when it’s a matter of historical record, and when the lies and halftruths void the contributions of one population in order to elevate and celebrate another, culture itself is under attack. As “Forget the Alamo” shows, Texas history is too complicated to be cast in white and nonwhite terms.
The problem is that not everyone is interested in complex truths. A dumbed-down, us-versus-them scenario is so much easier for some parts of the population to consume. If we’ve learned anything from recent politics and the scourge of fake news, it’s that people are moved by how a story, true or not, makes them feel — about themselves and their country. Veracity is beside the point, as if truth resides in the way a story settles in one’s gut.
The Alamo is the single most important source of racism toward Mexicans in this country, according to ethnic studies pioneer and American historian Rudy Acuña. And, as “Forget the Alamo” argues, the rise of Alamo revisionism comes, in part, from Texas Latinos who were brought up as American patriots but felt separated from their white friends when the Alamo was taught in school, where the battle was portrayed as Texans versus Mexicans.
Today, the Texas General Land Office runs the Alamo. The Daughters of the Republic of Texas operated it for more than a century until Texas Land Commissioner George P. Bush ( Jeb’s son) finally gave them the boot. He determined they weren’t up to the revitalization project he is steering to turn the Alamo and its surrounding plaza into a world-class historical site, the centerpiece of which is a fourstory museum built around musician Phil Collins’ Alamo collection.
Collins is the world’s greatest collector of Alamo artifacts. But Burrough, Tomlinson and Stanford interviewed prominent antiquities dealers, collectors and archaeologists, one of whom said Collins’ collection contains “more questionable pieces, with more than questionable provenance,” than any other. The documents Collins has acquired — from Bowie’s 1830 application for Mexican citizenship to letters signed by Crockett — seem authentic, but the artifacts attributed to the Alamo trinity, including Bowie’s knife, are another story.
Collins donated his collection to
San Antonio in 2014 with the stipulation that a museum be completed to house it by 2024. Time will tell if the General Land Office is able to complete a museum within the next few years. In the meantime, the authors note, George P. Bush has walked back earlier plans for a revisionist Alamo and started to emphasize the Historic Anglo Narrative to curry favor with voters. Bush announced this week he will run for Texas attorney general.
That pretty much brings us up to the present day. Burrough, Tomlinson and Stanford believe that young Texans, many of them people of color, don’t think it’s a great idea to spend $450 million of taxpayer and donor money on “a monument to so-called Anglo heroes who fought for the perpetuation of slavery and the villainization of Mexicans.”
They conclude: “We must recognize that the Battle of the Alamo was as much about slavery as the Civil War was about slavery. But we should preserve the Alamo exactly as we do the other Spanish missions that make San Antonio a World Heritage Site.”
Readers may well conclude that reclaiming the Alamo in all its complexity is a long-game proposition.
Old stories die hard. What you cannot forget while reading this lively, entertaining and well-researched book is that there will always be another Alamo book, and another, and another after that. Myths take centuries to build and even longer to tear down. Let’s hope readers remember “Forget the Alamo.”