Bryan Burrough, Chris Tomlinson, and Jason Stanford, Forget the Alamo: the Rise and Fall of an American Myth
The Alamo is a physical fact: a 300-year-old Spanish mission church near the heart of San Antonio, Texas. But what does that mean? The Alamo’s mythology has shaped how Texas has seen itself since the famous siege, nearly two centuries ago, and mythmakers have coached Americans to see ourselves through the Alamo lens. But new knowledge and controversial facts have forced a recent reevaluation. And that makes some people uncomfortable.
Texas history, including the Alamo, hasn’t always been a respected field; our authors note that historians often go to Texas to bury their careers. Folklore and tall tales often exceed available facts. And Texas, more than probably any other state, actively legislates how history gets taught. This means what actually happened at places like the Alamo and San Jacinto have become creation myths, Just-So Stories that serve a sociopolitical purpose.
Our authors dedicate approximately one-third of their book to uncovering the Alamo’s elusive facts. Yes, they agree, Jim Bowie, William Travis, and Davy Crockett were definitely there. But what were they fighting for? Subsequent folk history has turned the Alamo into a defense of liberty, justice, and democracy. But their contemporary rhetoric shows Texians (White settlers in east Texas) feared Mexico would come for their “property.”
“Property” could only mean two things. Texians treasured land first. The Liverpool textile boom of the 1830s made fertile Texas bottomland valuable, because it nurtured abundant cotton harvests. But Texas land wasn’t scarce, so Mexico City had little motivation to expropriate it. Mexico’s progressive mixed-race government, however, did want to seize the other resource that made cotton farming profitable: White Texians had imported thousands of Black slaves.
Our authors don’t spill copious ink explaining White Texians as slave traders. Once they’ve demonstrated it using Texians’ own words, they’d rather focus on what actually happened: the escalating rhetorical conflict between Texians and the distant Mexican government, as economic need increasingly clashed with social values. Each side projected their fears onto the other. Texians were drifting from Mexico long before troops began massing outside the Alamo.
I was surprised, though, by how quickly our authors moved on from the actual battle. They admit that, owing to longtime historical neglect, verifiable information about the Texas Revolt is pretty scarce. Our authors care more about what happened afterward. Texas began carefully managing Alamo mythology before the gunsmoke cleared; Bowie, Travis, and Crockett had already become martyrs for a democratic parable. The stories quickly outpaced the facts.
Alamo myths have been hotly contested from the beginning. Though Texas associated the Alamo with enlightened democratic values, the stories glossed over non-White allies, including the Tejano and Native American volunteers. (Even our authors briefly mention, then apparently forget, the Cherokee, Comanche, and Wichita nations.) Texas also revered the Alamo abstractly, while permitting the building to decay. Much of the original compound has been lost.
Our authors depict ongoing battles over how Texas should remember what happened in 1836, and to what degree the building deserves preservation. Ardently anti-tax Texans have frequently balked at maintaining or administering the building themselves, delegating responsibilities to clubby networks of San Antonio’s White elite. This has become especially pointed as San Antonio has become a majority non-White city, and Texas overall promises to follow suit.
Governing the Alamo mythology isn’t airy-fairy. The exclusion of Tejanos from Texas’ creation myth, and broad, sweeping stereotypes of Santa Anna’s army, have historically served to fuel anti-Mexican sentiment throughout Texas. Though official state history, including the darkly legendary 7th-Grade Texas History Class, showed signs of liberalizing in the 1990s, but in the early 2000s, conservatives with good PR skills began seizing control of the official narrative.
This battle over official historiography isn’t incidental. It describes in miniature the current battles over how Americans want to memorialize themselves for future generations. The past doesn’t objectively exist. Instead, Texans, and Americans generally, reinforce narratives that reflect values; some of those narratives include monuments, like the Alamo, which have been manipulated for centuries. Whoever controls the past controls the future, as someone once wrote.
Our authors bring the narrative current through summer of 2020, when nationwide protests over monuments and police violence descended into standoffs in Alamo Plaza. Political futures may fall according to how official memory recalls this moldering fortress. Powerful people have proven themselves willing to kill over how the state manages the mythology. But what matters is, the Alamo myth has come unmoored from the old Spanish mission church.
Maybe, our authors assert, it’s time to forget about the Alamo.
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