July 7, 2021
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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Notes:
There are many good books on the events in Texas in the 1830s, but if anyone is interested, my favorite book on the real story of the Alamo is James E. Crisp, Sleuthing the Alamo (Oxford University Press, 2004).
https://www.texastribune.org/2021/07/01/texas-forget-the-alamo-book-event-canceled/
https://thehill.com/opinion/education/561549-to-understand-the-history-wars-follow-the-paper-trail
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/texas-lt-gov-dan-patrick-suggests-he-other-seniors-willing-n1167341
Thanks HRC for this Letter, one of your best IMHO.
I remember the Alamo. Or perhaps I should say, "I remember the Alamo myth." When I was 5 years old and living in Seattle with my parents and older sister, "Davey Crockett, King of the Wild Frontier" was a big deal. I had a (fake) coonskin cap which I only took off on days when I thought my Mickey Mouse hat (the big ears were fake, too) was more the thing. My cap pistol was real, however. Very cool! We did not have a TV yet, but our next door neighbors did, so we could keep up with all the larger-than-life events of the Fess Parker/Disney serial version of Davey's life that became intertwined with my yard play and, no doubt, helped plant the seeds of my interest in US history and put me on the road to unquestioning acceptance of many American myths that even now are wrapped up in my understanding of patriotism (which I define as "love of country").
Of course, Davey Crockett (my Dad had always called me Davey, too) got most of my attention for only a year, and then we were off to Pittsburgh PA and my heroes became Roberto Clemente and -- of course -- Alan Shepard who went into space for about 10 minutes on my birthday! My father -- a serious Civil War buff with a groaning bookshelf to prove it -- claiming his right to go out on a Saturday afternoon to do manly things with his son, took me, over my pacifist mother's objections, to see "The Horse Soldiers" on the big screen. Then, having seen I was manly enough not to cry or cover my eyes during the battle scenes, about a year later he took me to see "The Alamo" in which the heroic Union cavalry colonel (John Wayne) had been miraculously transformed into my first true love, Davey Crockett! (Eat your heart out, Fess Parker!)
So my "understanding" of Crockett and The Alamo changed face, but the example of Texian/American heroism was confirmed and -- I am ashamed to say -- my knowledge of that event, even after learning about how the US bullied the Mexicans into giving up what is now a major part of our Southwest, had remained largely unchanged until this morning.
Of course it is now no surprise to me that the Alamo was really about maintaining slavery and Manifest Destiny, and I have no doubt that better historians than John Wayne (who also produced "The Alamo) have gotten pretty close to knowing what really happened there, and I am not surprised that the underlying factors are less glorious than our pop-culture patriotism has made them seem. I am even pleased to know that Davey Crockett had the good sense to surrender and hang onto a few more minutes or hours or days of life, hoping, I suppose, to talk his way out of a bad situation rather than be snuffed out like his compatriots. He was reputedly a good talker and perhaps believed that discretion was the better part of valor, and all that.
Enough reminiscing.... My point is that myths, whether they be ancient Greek and Roman myths or the foundational national myths of modern nations are -- by definition -- both true and untrue simultaneously. Even the Alamo was an example of individuals fighting together in defense of something so important to them they were willing to die for it. We're talking immense physical courage in the face of near certain defeat and death. As the Italians say, "These are not peanuts."
So that part of the myth is true.
But history is not -- or at least shouldn't be -- aimed at propagating uplifting myths. Instead, history is the facts as determined by intelligent people doing the heavy lifting of finding out what really happened. It involves digging through rubble and rummaging in attics and re-reading long forgotten letters and journals and camping out in libraries and then trying to piece it all together so that we can understand the facts as they relate to other facts. And the best historians tend to be good writers as well.
So when historians do their job well, and the majority of other historians confirm the truth of one account over an earlier one, the only reasonable thing to do is accept the new version. And if this means discarding a glorious national myth much beloved by people like me with long memories, so be it, the truth is its own reward.
They very idea that Texas politicians would rudely cancel a "book event" at their State History Museum because the book in question is not to their liking and/or offends them is utterly unacceptable. Are we on the verge of a cultural revolution? Will they send people who disagree with their proto-fascist ideology to the gulags? Or are there gas chambers awaiting the "differently patriotic" among us? Thirty-seven years later, does 1984 still loom on our horizon?
Have the good people of the great State of Texas lost their marbles? Are they in the streets yet?
Leaving aside (which of course we cannot) global warming, I can think of no greater danger to our country and the world than politicians like Dan Patrick and Gregg Abbott.
There's honest and dishonest. Honest history is a search for truth, a search that is never complete, and a truth that is never fixed. Dishonest history is the creation of myth to live in the place of truth, for the purpose that truth never be known.
It is very similar to science vs. religion. To me, that is the fundamental conflict of our time.