Book Review: “Forget the Alamo” by Bryan Burrough, Chris Tomlinson, and Jason Stanford

Forget the Alamo by Bryan Burrough, Chris Tomlinson, and Jason Stanford

As a rule, I don’t think about Texas very much.  Too much crazy.  Too much hostile crazy.

Like most folks my age, I do know the official origin story, The Alamo.  The Disney / John Wayne version.  Davy Crockett and all that.

I’m better educated than most, so I know a bit of the real history, too.  Thousands of illegal immigrants pouring south across the Mexican border…the irony is too delicious to ignore.

Forget the Alamo is a no-holds barred, Texas-style historiography, starting with the actual events of 1835, and then following the story telling, myth making, and culture wars surrounding what was originally a relatively small skirmish.

The Alamo has become a sacred myth, defining the “heroic” origins of Texas.  Or at least, sacred to white Anglo Texans, and, these days, to Republicans.

(It’s a bit odd to worship a catastrophic loss of all hands in a hopeless and pointless fight as “heroic”.  But then I’m from the “Patton (1970)” generation: “No bastard ever won a war by dying for his country. He won it by making the other poor dumb bastard die for his country.”)

How the story of the The Alamo developed is a long and winding tale, tangled in the cultural history of Texas.  Heck, The Alamo myth is the cultural history of Texas.

The historical lead up and battle of the Alamo and its aftermath take up less than the first half of this book.  The bulk of the book is an exploration of how the battle was told at the time, and in the centuries that followed.

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And it’s quite the story. 

The Alamo has been a rallying cry for the Texas revolt, the Republic, the confederate state, for the Lost Cause and Jim Crow, and for American Imperialism and anti Communist crusading. 

For many years, the legacy was quietly but firmly the property (literally) of the Daughters of the Alamo and popular history and story telling.

In the 1950s, Disney’s TV series brought The Alamo into the Cold War culture war against “communism”, with coon skin caps and all that jazz.  And we all know John Wayne’s version from 1960.

(In case you were wondering, we are told that the John Wayne version had insanely accurate sets and props, but little resemblance to the actual people or events.)

The Disney-Wayne version has persisted as a popular tourist attraction, even though the building and site are out of date and seedy.

In the last fifty years others have got into the Alamo game.  Real historians.  Real Mexicans and Mexican Americans.  Real Native Americans.  Interest groups of all kinds. 

Change has been coming on for a long time.

(One of the best lines in the book is, “The Daughters [of the Alamo] were about to make their last stand”. [1], p. 259)

In recent years, over the hill rock star Phil Collins picked up a serious Alamo fixation, spending vast amounts of money on Alamo swag. His wads of cash and faith-based authentication process has enabled him to amass the world’s largest collection of fake Alamo stuff.  (His approach seems to be to buy everything, on the theory that some of it must be real.)

Collins has donated this embarrassing junk heap to the state of Texas, providing they build a new museum to host it. Texas has responded, allocating nearly half a billion dollars of public money for the project.  

The site really could use a lot of improvement, but there are a lot of stake holders, and the project seems to have pleased no one.  And, in the eyes of some you can’t actually change anything at the Alamo, even to make it better. 

This being Texas, the protests have included armed militia, “defending” the Alamo.  Sigh.

The renovation is all tangled up in Texas politics now, which is not a formula for any kind of good sense. 

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This book is not at all worshipful of the Alamo myth,and that is a big problem for true believers.

I gather the book is receiving a withering reception from militant culture warriors.  While I was reading the book, the authors were blocked from speaking at the Texas Historical Society, following the tweeted demands of the Lt. Gov. who is running for Gov. These politically incorrect versions of the Alamo are officially Cancelled in Texas.

Up here in Illinois, I can still read the book and laugh at all this silliness.  (But don’t try to mess with Old Abe, don’t you dare. : – ))

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1. Bryan Burrough, Chris Tomlinson, and Jason Stanford, Forget the Alamo: The Rise and Fall of an American Myth, New York, Penguin Press, 2021.

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