Forget the Alamo

Forget the Alamo: The True Story of the Myth That Made Texas by Bryan Burrough, Chris Tomlinson and Jason Stanford, 2021

Read this book in a week in early August 2021. 

One of the closing lines of this books states the following... "To learn the real lessons of the Texas Revolt, we need to learn the truth about Bowie, Travis and Crockett. Bowie was a murderer, slaver and con man; Travis was a pompous, racist agitator and syphilitic lech; and Crockett was a self-promoting old fool who was a captive to his own myth."  There were no heroes at the Alamo.

This book was a history of the telling of the history of the Alamo. I wrote an earlier post about Davy Crockett that was significantly influenced by reading this book which showed Crockett to be nothing like the hero of Texas myth. In fact the book is all about the myth of the Alamo and the Texas Revolt which was nothing at all like the actual events. The real story of the Alamo was forgotten and twisted over time. 

I was fascinated by the true story of the Alamo which was so different from the movies and television shows of my childhood that portrayed and completely made of story of heroes defending freedom rather that a bunch of sleazy slavers trying to protect their slave properties from a Mexican liberation army. This is a book of fact based revisionism. Yes, the Mexican army came to the Alamo to free the slaves that were illegally imported into their country by a bunch of illegal immigrants from the American south trying to make money growing cotton with slaves. There was nothing heroic about the Alamo. 

The myth of the Alamo was created in the Jim Crow south to celebrate whiteness. American history tried to make the Mexican general an evil despot rather than the man leading the efforts to rid their country of slavery. It was also used to vilify and to make Mexicans and Native Americans as the non-white others. They still do that in Texas and throughout the south. Growing up in a mixed ethnic neighborhood of Philadelphia I thought I knew what racism was when I saw it but my experience in the Navy with people from the south changed all that. Many of the guys I served with were extreme southern racists. I really disliked the south and especially Texas. I've always considered Texas to be a creepy place filled with hate and some sense of false bravado that looked down on all other Americans and especially non-white people. While stationed at Great Lakes Naval Training Center in 1970 I was in a dorm like barracks for several months with four sailors to a room. My three roommates at the time were all from Texas. I learned a lot about Texas there. Much later I was in Houston for a conference and I couldn't wait to get out of there.

There was another interesting and amusing section of the book about Alamo collectors and specifically the British rock star Phil Collins who over the years was duped out of millions of dollars buying fake and bogus Alamo artifacts based on hearsay and fraud. 

The book spent some time on the recent controversies in the classrooms and in history classes concerning what really happened at the Alamo. Conservatives and especially racists ones are very upset with revisionist historians and teachers who they see as trying to change their history. They are really frightened about the quickly coming time when white people will be a minority in Texas and someone else will control the legislation. They are afraid of a time when school textbooks tell the true story of Texas.

A lot of people, myself included, grew up hearing about the heroics of the Alamo and watching that John Wayne movie and the Disney version of Davy Crockett. We were duped too.