Once or twice, or honestly, a thousand times in a writer’s life, we think to ourselves, “Now there’s a book I should have written.”
Such is the case with Forget the Alamo, by Bryan Burrough, Chris Tomlinson, and Jason Stanford. Actually, in this case, I am not so much regretful as puzzled. I mean, I thought most of the explosive conclusions this book offers — that slavery played an outsize role in the Texas Revolution, that Crockett did not die swatting Meskins like flies with his Tennessee long rifle, nor did Bowie perish stacking privados like cordwood with a brace of pistols as he wasted away in his deathbed — did not occur the way John Wayne saw it.
And I thought we all knew Travis was a whoremonger, Bowie a swindler of the highest order, Fannin a fatal ditherer, and Crockett something of a blowhard. And all of them, save Crockett, absolutely balls deep in the hideous business of slave smuggling.
I mean, we all knew that, right?
The authors of Forget the Alamo seem to have thought so. They make no claims as to originality. And weren’t the very words from their title lifted from that unsettling John Sayles movie from way back in the ‘90s?
This is the version of the Alamo I was taught at UH in the 1990s when I was prepping to be a Texas historian, before the siren call of gutter journalism came calling in the form of a job offer from the Houston Press. My professor there was not some young firebrand, but the semi-retired Stanley Siegel, a man who’d been preaching this same fire since shortly after he arrived in Houston from the City of Brotherly Love circa 1949.
Even paleo-conservative historians like Stephen Hardin and Donald Fehrenbach did not proffer the Hero Myth as gospel. Hardin saw the entire revolution as nine parts farce to one part heroism.
Which brings me back to that sense of puzzlement. Why did they bother to write this book? Apparently for a very good reason, because look at the reaction: the “treasonous Texan Trio,” this “Tres Malhombres” have been literally cancelled by our carpetbagger Gov Lite Danny Goeb and our Gov Abbott. They’ve gotten death threats. La enchilada entera.
I thought this was settled. Who knew the old myth still had such power?
Which, well, I guess is to say, yeah, it’s a powerful myth. But don’t blame journalists or historians. As established in this (rather brilliant) Texas Monthly essay, It was the work of a cadre of Mad Men and PR types working in concert for decades, their goal to detach Texas from the wreckage of the rest of the Old South. This gospel was directed inwardly and outwardly — at the Texas Centennial exhibition in Dallas in 1936, our business leaders explicitly paired us with the Golden Sunsets of California rather than the moonlit spider-webs in the magnolias of the past.
Texas and the west — to the future! Farewell, Dixie. And hats off to Bobby Lee and all that, but we’re Texans, and we won our war.
In Santa Anna, there was a positively Darth Vader-like villain, albeit in Santa Anna’s respect, a nemesis who was comically inept when he was not brazenly cruel. And for some reason we furnished him with an excuse for his abject failure at San Jacinto — he’d been narcotized into lassitude by the swiveling hips of la mulata — the Yellow Rose of Texas….See, even our slaves pitched in for the cause!
By such comforting fables Texas did indeed disentangle from Dixie, for the most part. The fact that unlike, say, Alabama, we were swimming in oil did still more toward that end, but hey, who’s counting. It was more that we descended from a rare breed of fighting man, the spiritual descendants of the Spartans of Thermopylae.
Who….were probably, almost certainly, absolutely, also full of shit.
Growing up in the Midwest the Texas myth was foreign and a bit exotic. When I began to become acquainted with American music I quickly discovered the pivotal role that The South and particularly Texas played in its development. Until I moved South at the tail end of the 70s and I was
actually Living here did I begin to understand the depth of the myth. I never learned to sing “Texas, my beautiful Texas” as my Father-in-law as a child had growing up in Fort Worth, or even know what the Lone star meant. What attracted me to Texas was Flaco, Clifton, and all the wacky Czech/Anglo conglomerations that I heard on obscure hillbilly and ethnic recordings. There must be a better way to educate our young citizens that embraces the cultural contributions of ALL of our peoples.