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Review

What people today — including Phil Collins — get wrong about the Alamo

By  H.W. Brands

H.W. Brands teaches history at the University of Texas at Austin. His latest book is “The Zealot and the Emancipator: John Brown, Abraham Lincoln, and the Struggle for American Freedom.”

June 25, 2021|Updated June 25, 2021 at 2:59 p.m. EDT

Tolstoy knew that unhappy families are more interesting than happy ones; sportswriters have long observed that the losers’ locker room holds more human drama than the winners’; bards write comedy for the moment but tragedy for the ages. Similar insights have inspired historians of war. A victor wins laurels, but a glorious loser gains immortality. Thermopylae resonates after 25 centuries, Masada after 20. Even those who have nothing else good to say about the Confederacy can admire the doomed bravery of Pickett’s charge. The underlying dynamic is the same in all these. Few can identify with the great victors in life, but everyone can identify with the losers. We all suffer defeat; we all die. And we all hope we can die well.

The battle of the Alamo has captivated students of war and history almost since the March day in 1836 when the old Spanish mission at San Antonio fell to the Mexican army of Antonio López de Santa Anna. The defenders — a collection of American-born residents of Mexican Texas, American volunteers to the cause of the rebels and Mexican residents of Texas, or Tejanos — were killed at the end of a 13-day siege. But their action delayed the advance of Santa Anna against the main body of the Texan army, under Sam Houston. Six weeks later, Houston and the Texans defeated Santa Anna and compelled his agreement to Texas independence.

For those who considered Texas independence a good thing, the Alamo became part of the Texas founding myth, and its defenders were treated as martyrs. Not everyone considered Texas independence a good thing. The government of Mexico ignored the treaty Santa Anna had signed under duress and continued to send armies into Texas for another decade. American opponents of slavery labeled the Texas war for independence an enslavers’ conspiracy. Tejanos, including some who had fought in Houston’s army, started having second thoughts about independence when their erstwhile Anglo allies pushed them aside in the new republic. Enslaved Texans found their yoke weighing more heavily under Texan rule than it had under that of Mexico, which nominally forbade slavery.

And yet, as Bryan Burrough, Chris Tomlinson and Jason Stanford explain, the myth of Alamo martyrdom — what they call the “Heroic Anglo Narrative” — predominated within Texas for generations. The book contains two parts: an account of the events surrounding the battle and a survey of interpretations and attitudes since then. For readers unfamiliar with either half of the story, the book provides a useful introduction.

(Penguin Press)

At numerous points in their account of the siege and battle, the authors challenge the traditional view. In doing so they follow historians who abandoned the traditional view decades ago. They sometimes appear to be beating a horse that, if not dead, was put to pasture awhile back, at least outside the political classes. It’s no news to anyone, for example, that the commanders at the Alamo, William Barret Travis and James Bowie, were scoundrels before the war with Mexico. Even the traditionalists acknowledged that; indeed, it made the redemption of Travis and Bowie at the Alamo all the more praiseworthy.

Less familiar to some will be the post-battle story. The authors frame perceptions of the Alamo in a novel way, employing the contrasting experiences of two British musicians: Phil Collins and Ozzy Osbourne. Collins learned about the Alamo as a boy in the 1950s, from television and the movies, and he fell hard for the Fess Parker/John Wayne representation.

Osbourne knew nothing of the Alamo in 1982, when a music tour took him to San Antonio. “Ozzy was having a rough day,” the authors explain; before the day ended, he had been arrested for urinating on the cenotaph commemorating the Alamo defenders.

The authors don’t pursue the Osbourne angle beyond employing him as a stand-in for the revisionist school of Alamo history, which “metaphorically amounts to peeing on the Alamo legend.” They get more mileage out of Collins, who compiled a collection of memorabilia related to the Alamo. How closely related became a matter of intense interest among Texans after Collins agreed to donate the collection to the state, to be housed in a museum built for the purpose. The museum would cost hundreds of millions of dollars, and the project at once became a political battleground between traditionalists and revisionists. Collins got whipsawed in the debate, the more so when the provenance of many of his artifacts was challenged, as well it might have been, given the lack of documentation for many of the artifacts and the cottage industry that had developed in Alamo fakes and forgeries.

The freshest work in this book deals with the Collins controversy and makes a persuasive case that Collins was taken for a ride. The authors asked the Alamo’s official historian, Bruce Winders, what he thought of Collins. “He had been a rock star, and as you age, that all started to go away,” Winders said. “He was kind of at a loss. He was trying to figure out who he was now. And the Alamo filled that void for him. It was a phase for him. His Alamo phase.” Winders was asked whether the name of one dealer in particular who sold material to Collins set off any alarm bells. “Bells?” said Winders. “All the bells. Yeah, kind of like Notre Dame.” The authors can’t resist quoting the London Daily Mail declaring that Collins’s Alamo obsession showed him to be “one drumstick shy of a pair.”

Winders lost his job amid the scuffling, and Collins threatened to withdraw his collection. Texas elected officials, including George P. Bush, who as land commissioner had charge of the Alamo, moved quickly to reassure him. But in the crossfire of Texas politics, Bush found himself, and his Alamo project, under attack from the Republican right even as lefties denounced the Alamo as a continuing symbol of white supremacy.

Notwithstanding the book’s title, the authors — Texans all three — explain in their conclusion that they don’t really want Texans to forget the Alamo, only the “whitewashed” version. It’s a worthy sentiment, if hardly original. And it does bear repeating, since the politicians aren’t paying any more attention to historians than they ever have.

 

Heather Cox Richardson 

9h  · 

July 7, 2021 (Wednesday)

Last week, the Bullock Texas State History Museum cancelled a book event three and a half hours before it was supposed to start. Written by journalists Bryan Burrough, Chris Tomlinson, and Jason Stanford, the book is titled “Forget the Alamo,” and, according to historian H. W. Brands, who reviewed the book for the Washington Post, it both introduces the story of the Alamo to readers unfamiliar with it and explains how the story has been interpreted since the 1836 battle occurred, using the ways in which British musicians Phil Collins and Ozzy Osbourne interacted with the site as a new lens.

Historians long ago put aside the heroic story of the Alamo, which told of freedom-loving Americans fighting off a Mexican tyrant who was trying to crush a fledgling republic. In the past several decades, so many historians have rewritten this history that Brands notes that the new retelling “sometimes appear[s] to be beating a horse that, if not dead, was put to pasture awhile back.”

Historians have explained how Mexican officials, eager to stabilize their northern borderlands after their own agreements with Apache tribes fell apart, permitted Americans to settle in what is now Texas. Americans moved to the area to grow cotton in the boom years of that era. When Mexico banned slavery in Texas in 1830, Americans rebelled. In October 1835, they joined with Mexican opponents of President Antonio López de Santa Anna’s government and went to war. By December, the Texian Army had pushed Mexican troops out of the Mexican territory of Texas, and the Texians hunkered down in the Alamo Mission near what is now San Antonio. In January, reinforcements, including James Bowie and Davy Crockett, arrived. About 200 Texians were there on February 23, 1836, when 1800 of Santa Anna’s troops laid siege to the Alamo. On March 6, Santa Anna’s troops attacked, killing almost all of the defenders (but not Davy Crockett, who surrendered and was executed later).

This history is well established… but Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick—who in March 2020 suggested that elders should be willing to die from Covid-19 in order to get the economy moving again—was one of apparently a number of Republican leaders who demanded that museum officials cancel the event. Governor Greg Abbott, Patrick and other Republican leaders are board members of the State Preservation Board, which oversees the Bullock Museum. “As a member of the Preservation Board, I told staff to cancel this event as soon as I found out about it,” Patrick tweeted. “[T]his fact-free rewriting of TX history has no place [at the Bullock Museum].”

As of the end of June, nine states have passed so-called “divisive concepts” laws, and 17 more are considering them. These measures try to control how teachers talk about issues of race, sex, ethnicity, religion, color, or national origin, saying that such discussions are divisive. Yet, as historians James Grossman and Jeremy Young of the American Historical Association noted yesterday in The Hill, a survey by the American Historical Association and Fairleigh Dickinson University shows that, “regardless of political identity, age, race, gender or education level,” there is broad consensus that these issues provide essential content to understand our history and that they are appropriate for school history classes.

“We should be clear about what’s happening here,” Young and Grossman say. “This is the legislative equivalent of push-polling—creating division where none exists, raising fears about something that isn’t even happening to score political points.”

They point out that the bills are not coming from people in school districts, but instead follow a template produced by an organization led by Russell Vought, the former director of the Office of Management and Budget under the Trump administration. The organization’s website has a file on it titled: “Model-School-Board-Language-to-Ban-CRT-SD-HCS-edits-1.”

Here’s why this rewriting of our history matters.

Historians study how societies change. In order to do that, we examine sources created at the time—newspapers, teapots, speeches, tweets, photographs, landscapes, and so on-—and judge what we think happened by comparing these primary sources to things other historians have said, on the basis of evidence they have found. We argue a lot. But if we cannot see an ever-widening story, we cannot give an accurate account of how societies change.

An inaccurate picture of what creates change means that people cannot make good decisions about the future. They are at the mercy of those who are creating the stories. Knowledge is indeed power.

So the destruction of accurate history is about more than schools. It’s about self-determination. It’s about having the freedom to make good decisions about your life.

It’s about the very things that democracy is supposed to stand for.

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Forget the Alamo

Opinion: Texas Republicans rush to guard the Alamo from the facts

Opinion by  Jason Stanford

July 5, 2021 at 3:15 p.m. CDT

Jason Stanford is the Austin-based writer of the Substack newsletter the Experiment and the co-author, with Bryan Burrough and Chris Tomlinson, of “Forget the Alamo: The Rise and Fall of an American Myth.”

With more than 300 RSVPs, the event hosted by the Bullock Texas State History Museum in Austin was shaping up to be the highlight of our virtual book tour for “Forget the Alamo: The Rise and Fall of an American Myth.” But about four hours before showtime last Thursday, my co-authors, Bryan Burrough and Chris Tomlinson, and I received an email from our publisher. The Bullock had backed out, citing “increased pressure on social media.” Apparently, the state history museum was no place to discuss state history.

This isn’t how things are supposed to work, even in Texas, but the truth turned out to be even worse. The state history museum wasn’t bowing to social media pressure but to political pressure from the state’s Republican lieutenant governor, Dan Patrick, who claimed credit for the kill the next day.

“As a member of the Preservation Board, I told staff to cancel this event as soon as I found out about it,” tweeted Patrick, adding, “This fact-free rewriting of TX history has no place @BullockMuseum.”

Minor umbrage compels me to defend the book as well as the museum, which currently is hosting a Jim Crow exhibition. As The Post noted in its review of our book, we “challenge the traditional view” of the Alamo saga, one popularized by Disney and John Wayneand cemented by politicians in the Texas school curriculum.

The Heroic Anglo Narrative is that in 1836, about 200 Texians (as White settlers were known, to distinguish them from Tejanos) fought a doomed battle at a Spanish mission in San Antonio against thousands of Mexican troops, buying Gen. Sam Houston enough time to defeat tyranny in the form of Mexican ruler Santa Anna and win freedom for Texas. The myth leaves much out, most notably that Texians opposed Mexican laws that would free the enslaved workers they needed to farm cotton.

Politicians barricading the figurative doors of the Alamo in defense of the myth are nothing new. In 2018, a panel reviewing the state history curriculum suggested not requiring seventh-graders to learn that those who died at the Alamo were “heroic.” Republican state political leaders, including Sen. Ted Cruz and Land Commissioner George P. Bush — the nephew and grandson of presidents and the state officeholder with oversight of the historic site — reacted as if the Alamo were once again besieged.

“Stop political correctness in our schools,” tweeted the state’s Republican governor, Greg Abbott. “Of course Texas schoolchildren should be taught that Alamo defenders were ‘Heroic’!”

In the past few years, the boogeyman for these self-appointed defenders of ersatz history has evolved from a generalized “political correctness” to the New York Times’s 1619 Project and other efforts to center slavery and the role of racism in the American story. More than 20 states have introduced or passed legislation that attempts to prescribe how racial matters can be taught. In Texas last month, Abbott signed into law an act establishing a committee called the 1836 Project (get it?) to “promote patriotic education.”

Texas conservatives continue to appear quite exercised about the possibility of public-school students learning more about slavery and racism. So much so that Abbott has added further discussion about a ban on the teaching of critical race theory to the agenda for an upcoming special legislative session.

This is the political flotsam in which our virtual book event was snagged. A couple of days before the scheduled talk, the head of a right-wing think tank in Austin took to Twitter to attack the Bullock Museum for using public resources to provide a platform for our “trashy non-history book,” taking care to tag the governor, lieutenant governor and house speaker. They sit on the State Preservation Board, which oversees the museum.

On the day of the event, July 1, the think tank posted: “Like the New York Times’s debunked 1619 Project, this is an effort to diminish the great figures of history and place slavery at the center of every story.” As it happens, several of the central figures in the story of the Alamo, including William Barret Travis and Jim Bowie, either enslaved people or had attested to the importance of slavery. A few hours after the think tank’s post, the event was canceled.

I’ll leave it to First Amendment scholars to say whether forbidding a state facility to host a conversation because of the contents of a book constitutes censorship. As a Texan, I’m just embarrassed to be governed by politicians who quaver at the prospect of a single uncomfortable conversation. If Texans were tough enough to fight at the Alamo, they should be tough enough to talk about why.