Today, when education and truth are under assault, I recall how kids of my generation grew up thinking American frontiersmen like Davy Crockett and Jim Bowie were not only tough and rugged but also handsome, articulate, and good-hearted men who opened up the west to civilized society. They were American heroes, at least the way Hollywood portrayed them in John Wayne’s 1960’s version of the Alamo, which I watched on television a few nights ago, thanks to Ted Turner’s TCM, Turner Classic Movie station.
In Wayne’s portrayal of the Alamo, Crockett and Bowie died, patriotic defenders, fighting to the last man, cementing the myth, even in the 2004 Disney remake of the Alamo, staring Billy Bob Thorton, dead Mexicans everywhere. Truth or fiction?
Fine, movies are entertainment, playing with the facts, offering audiences invented stories. That’s when education is supposed to step in and teach us the truth, like what really happened at seminal events in our country’s history.
The big screen is powerful, those large beautiful or handsome faces and epic scenes assaulting our senses. Education, on the other hand, is usually quick, a few boring paragraphs in a textbook, not much of a lasting impression, and, even then, governments control the facts. My fifteen-year-old grandson said he never heard of the Alamo, a depressing fact.
Only two people survived the actual fighting at the Alamo, an African American slave, and a woman, who escaped and said they witnessed nothing. They couldn’t confirm a “last stand,” just as no one could confirm a last stand at the battle of the Little Big Horn when George Armstrong Custer led his men into a massacre. Everybody died. Nobody could tell the story. Though, Captain Reno and his troops were in the vicinity, they couldn’t confirm a last stand since they were fighting for their own survival.
The only participants of both battles who lived to tell the story were the opposition, Mexicans at the Alamo and Lakota, Cheyenne, and Arapaho at the Little Big Horn, led by mythic leaders like Crazy Horse, Little Big Man, and Sitting Bull. No American reporters asked to hear their accounts. In the long run, the truth might cause the government and the press too many problems.
Newspaper reporters out of the East, far from the battles, who wanted to sell as many papers as possible, decided to invent their own version of events. Newspaper reporters, of the day, were notorious for turning questionable events into mythic tales.
In his memoir Newspaper Days, noted journalist H.L. Menken said on slow news days in places like Baltimore, Chicago, and New York, reporters met with hoodlums and drunks in local bars, listened to their stories, a lot of bragging. then returned to the newsrooms and created rip-roaring tales of their dramas, just in time for the next day’s dailies. Editors couldn’t confirm the accounts. A good day was if somebody really did get shot.
Famed New York writer Jimmy Breslin said the writer Damon Runyon was the real genius behind iconic times, places, and people, like the Roaring Twenties, Broadway, Babe Ruth, the Copacabana, and sporting events. Reporters made athletics appear legitimate to get “losers and suckers” to put their hard-earned money down on the table, so some swindler could wipe them clean. The Roaring Twenties didn’t “roar” any more than any other time in history, and once Hollywood screenwriters got a hold of the stories, they made sure audiences saw and heard the roar on the big screen.
Breslin, in his biography of Damon Runyon, said Runyon and his hard-boiled writing peers turned lazy, vulgar, poorly spoken, thugs and thieve, who had no idea how to dress properly, into mythic American “Gangsters” and “Mobsters”. Violence and crime sold papers. Reporters joked how they laundered the reputations of the only men more corrupt than gangsters -- politicians, bankers, businessmen, and lawyers, who got the thugs to do their dirty work. Corruption was rife in big-city America, still is except, today, it’s better disguised.
One time, I asked my dad about why young Chicanos of his generation became pachucos. Was it the racism, police abuse, or servicemen attacking Chicanos in downtown L.A.? He said, without hesitation, “The movies. In the 1930s, we all went to the movies every Saturday afternoon, gangster movies. We wanted to be like them.” He said the kids were mimicking gangsters by wearing too-large second-hand suits, greasing back their hair, and talking tough, creating their own slang, just like in the movies. “We looked up to them.”
In so many cases, reporters’ magic pens created the “Everyday Joes,” the places, and events that have come down to us as Americana.
So, as I watched John Wayne’s version of the Alamo, I was just as distracted by Italian American Frankie Avalon’s modern Philly hairstyle as I was with the other inaccuracies in the movie. Historian Timothy Todish wrote, “There is not a single scene in the Alamo which corresponds to an historically verified incident.” Historians James Frank Dobie and Lon Tinkle, “Demanded their names be removed as historical advisors [from the movie].”
According to scholar Phillip Tucker, the story most Americans know about the Alamo is from Richard Penn Smith’s 1836 book, Colonel Crockett’s Exploits and Adventures in Texas, what Tucker calls, “a bogus account,” “complete fiction,” invented quotes portraying Mexicans in the most heinous way.
By the 1830s, America was moving west. Newspapers spread the myth about Manifest Destiny, the belief that the “Almighty” willed America’s right to expropriate any land it wished. The notion was carved into the American mind, along with the racist belief no Indian, Mexican, or foreigner could defeat a white man in battle. So, after the defeats at the Alamo and the Little Big Horn, writers knew readers needed to believe only an “immoral, unscrupulous enemy could win by deceiving Americans into unfair battles.” (My quotation marks.)
The press and some historians scapegoated the level-headed Captain Reno, who refused to send his men into the valley at the Little Big Horn to die along with Custer who ignored his superiors' instructions. History and the press dubbed him a coward. Reno couldn’t save Custer. He and his men had to fight overwhelming forces to save themselves. Years later, Captain Reno’s descendants demanded the Army absolve him of his crime and admit they’d lied—or, at the least—erred in unjustly court-marshaling their infamous relative.
Inside the Alamo, many of the volunteers were inexperienced fighters who got caught sleeping when the Mexicans attacked. Many volunteers were in sick bay, ill from hunger and consuming polluted water. Their gun powder was old, wet, and useless. According to Phillip Tucker, archeological evidence showed the majority of the Alamo’s volunteers died as far away as 500 yards outside the mission walls, where archeologists found their skeleton remains. Hollywood hero Jim Bowie was in sick bay, unable to fight when he was killed. Davy Crockett’s body couldn’t be identified among the decayed remains of so many others.
Realizing the Alamo was a death trap, volunteers began fleeing before the fighting started. The promised reinforcements never arrived. Some suggest they were never called. The volunteers probably retreated in the hopes of fighting another day, except they rushed right into the long lances of Mexicans on horseback, men superbly trained in that antiquated style of combat.
The defenders the Alamo were pawns, a motley sort, many shouldering their personal hunting weapons against an experienced army their leaders knew was larger, far superior, and better armed. The volunteers who came from as far away as Kentucky had no idea what life was like in the Southwest. They weren't accustomed to the food or customs. Politicians and pro-slavery plantation owners exploited them and offered them little support. There was no central command or organized force.
Some defenders didn’t’ even trust each other, pro-slavery advocate William Travis on one side and anti-slavery Davy Crockett and Jim Bowie, who had lived in Mexico and had a Mexican wife and family, on the other. Could it be someone on high wanted a massacre, which would rile up the country and seek revenge?
Travis fought not only to support the government's plans on expansion but to support cotton plantation owners who intended on opening Texas to slavery. Crockett and Bowie fought for Texas independence and land rights for small farmers and ranchers. Yet, Hollywood never mentioned slavery, racism, or religion in its Alamo movies, even though some politicians and business interests promoted the incursion into Texas as Anglo-Celts versus Indians and mestizos, and Protestants versus Catholics, not that Mexico was a paragon of racial and social equality and justice. It wasn't.
As for historical accuracy, the Alamo movies depicted the battle in the daylight, over two days, the defenders rejecting the invaders’ assaults. In fact, the Mexicans attacked in the early morning darkness while the volunteers slept. The blinding, thick smoke clogged the air. The majority of Mexican casualties didn’t come from the defenders’ rifles as reported by the New York writers and Hollywood, but from fratricide, “friendly fire.” The number of Mexican casualties was greatly exaggerated.
The fight lasted 20-to-30 minutes, not much of a defense, and the Mexicans attacked only after Santa Ana had sent the Alamo’s leader numerous warnings, offering them a chance to leave the mission. Perhaps, that’s when the hubris set in--Manifest Destiny, “It's our land for the taking, and no greaser can defeat a white man in battle.”
Mexico, like its patria, Spain, loves to celebrate major events and heroes with monuments, songs, and holidays. The country doesn’t celebrate the Alamo. To the Mexican military, it was not even a battle but a “minor skirmish,” nothing worth celebrating. The old, abandoned mission was a lonely outpost of no consequence and San Antonio a wilderness, and its defenders a rag tag group of slave-traders encroaching on Mexican territory. The battle was barely mentioned in Mexican history books.
If important historical events are fictionalized, what are we to believe, especially now when education is under attack.
