Alamo Myths (#33130)
by HNN on April 7, 2004 at 9:11 PM

Newsday (New York)
April 6, 2004 Tuesday
ALL EDITIONS

SECTION: PART II; Pg. B02
HEADLINE: Remember the...myths?;
Sketchy history and Hollywood embellishments make it hard to know the real story of the Alamo. A new movie is the latest to try.
BYLINE: BY JOHN HANC. John Hanc is a regular contributor to Newsday
BODY:
Remember the Alamo? Heck, how could you possibly forget it? The image of that 1836 battle - in which about 200 Texans held off an army of 2,500 Mexican soldiers for 13 days - is practically imprinted on every American's genetic code, not to mention the pages of generations of history texts.
Given the dramatic storyline (brave men fighting to the death against overwhelming odds) and the participation of so many mythic figures (Davy Crockett and Jim Bowie died at the Alamo, and Sam Houston commanded the army that avenged the defeat and secured Texas' independence), it's no surprise that the Alamo has intrigued Hollywood since before there really was a Hollywood. Twelve feature films and at least three made-for-TV movies have been done about the battle itself; the first of which, "The Immortal Alamo," appeared in 1911, only 75 years after the actual battle. In his book, "The Alamo: A Cultural History," historian Frank Thompson notes that when that first film opened, there were people living in San Antonio who actually did remember the Alamo.
The latest version of the story opens Friday and stars Billy Bob Thornton as Crockett and Dennis Quaid as Houston. The director of Touchstone's "The Alamo" is a Texas native, John Lee Hancock. "It's a tough thing, to separate the mythology of the Alamo from the new facts that historians have learned, but I'm trying to embrace them both," says Hancock. "We've made a real effort to show, to the best of our knowledge, what it was really like to be there."
But "there" is hard to pin down when you're talking about the Alamo, a place that exists in the imagination as well as in what is now downtown San Antonio: There's the physical Alamo, or what's left of it. The familiar-looking stone facade with the hump is one of the most instantly recognizable images in America - even if few of its 3 million annual visitors realize what they're looking at is simply one part of what was, in fact, a sprawling complex, and that the hump on the church was added years after the battle. The Alamo is not a museum or a national park - it's a shrine, run by the Daughters of the Republic of Texas, and it's treated as such: Men must remove their hats before entering, and loud noise is not permitted.
Strong symbolism
The other Alamo is a symbol - sometimes crass, often ennobling - that has been appropriated by everyone from the manufacturers of coonskin caps to presidential candidates - and often in unlikely situations.
In 1999, asked by his friend Ben Crenshaw to give a motivational speech to the members of the American team competing in the Ryder Cup of golf, famous Texan George W. Bush gave a stirring rendition of a famous letter written by Alamo commander William Barret Travis. In that letter, Travis called on "the people of Texas and all Americans in the world ... in the name of liberty, patriotism and everything dear to the American character to come to our aid." But he vowed, if help didn't arrive (which it didn't), that he was determined "never to surrender or retreat" and "to die like a soldier who never forgets what is due to his own honor and that of his country." Travis signed the letter, "Victory or death."
Inspired by those words, the '99 Ryder Cup team achieved the former without the latter. Travis and his men were not so fortunate. Still, perhaps better than anything else ever written or produced about the battle, the letter speaks to the values posterity associates with the Alamo: Dedication, duty, bravery.
"Even after you strip away all the embellishments, the battle still stands out as an act of heroism," says Raymond Gardner, president of the San Antonio Living History Association. "It was one of the greatest demonstrations of self-sacrifice in our history."
Diverse defenders
In the past, the Alamo has been simplistically portrayed as a battle of "brown versus white" (but there were Mexicans defending, as well as attacking, the Alamo); or between "right and wrong" (but one of the rights the Alamo defenders were fighting for was the right to bring slaves into Texas). The defenders, in fact, were a study in diversity: young and old, rich and poor, including Europeans from several nations. The new movie purports to tell the "real" story. Briefly stated, that goes like this: The Battle of the Alamo was part of a larger struggle pitting settlers in Texas - then part of Mexico - against the Mexican government, ruled by the dictatorial general Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna. The settlers included both Americans and Mexicans known as Tejanos.
When Santa Anna disbanded the democratic Congress that had been formed in 1824, after Mexico freed itself from centuries of Spanish rule, the "Texians," as the white settlers called themselves, organized their own provisional government. As part of the uprising, they seized the Alamo - a mission originally founded in the 18th century - from Mexican troops. Early in 1836, Santa Anna led an expedition to reclaim that fort, and ultimately to destroy the rebel army, which was led by former Tennessee governor Sam Houston. On Feb. 23, Santa Anna's army arrived and besieged the fort, which was under the command of a 26-year-old lawyer from Alabama, Col. William Barret Travis. Although Houston ordered the Alamo abandoned, Travis opted to stay and fight, joined by others, including two men who already were folk heroes in America, knife-fighter Jim Bowie and David Crockett (the name he preferred). In the predawn darkness of March 6, 1836, Santa Anna's forces attacked the fort and, in a 90- minute battle, wiped out the Texian defenders. But six weeks later, at the Battle of San Jacinto (fought near the city now named after the victor), Sam Houston surprised Santa Anna and routed his army in a battle that secured Texas' independence.
To inspire his troops during the battle, Houston used the rallying cry of "Remember the Alamo" - something Americans have been doing ever since.
As to what really happened in the Alamo during the siege, much remains unknown. Historian Todd Hansen, whose 2003 anthology, "The Alamo Reader," contains almost every original source document on the battle, says most accounts - even those written by participants or observers - are "contradictory, fragmentary or unclear."
Crockett's fate
The most controversial Alamo mystery involves the death of the battle's most famous participant: Crockett, a former U.S. congressman from Tennessee, and a writer and so-called "naturalist," whose exploits on the frontier (many of them clearly fabricated for the sake of entertainment) had already made him a major celebrity in North America. In most film versions of the Alamo, Crockett (played by Fess Parker in the 1955 Walt Disney film "Davy Crockett, King of the Wild Frontier," and by John Wayne in the 1960 movie "The Alamo") goes down fighting. The truth may have been a bit different: In the 1970s, a diary surfaced, supposedly written by one of Santa Anna's officers at the siege, José Enrique de la Pena. In it, de la Pena reported that Crockett and several other Alamo defenders survived the battle and were taken before Santa Anna, who had them executed immediately.
The idea that Crockett survived the fighting, some say, is not revisionist history. "That view of Crockett's death ... that he was captured and executed ... was accepted as doctrine for years after the battle," says Gardner, who portrays Crockett during his organization's annual re-enactment of the battle. He says that later generations - maybe filmmakers looking for a boffo ending - began to tinker with the death scene. "So then you had the death of the hero in action," he says. "Crockett swinging his rifle like a club as he's brought down. But that's not the way it was originally reported."
Others disagree. In fact, the death of Crockett alone has been the subject of two entire books; one, by former Long Islander Bill Groneman, who questions the authenticity of the de la Pena diaries, argues that he died fighting.
That debate over image and reality at the Alamo is nothing new - and is not likely to abate simply because audiences may see Billy Bob Thornton as Crockett on his knees before his Mexican captors, not on his feet swinging his rifle like John Wayne.
"The myth of the Alamo is in an almost constant state of revision," says Thompson. "Everyone remembers the Alamo. But everyone remembers it in different ways."