Forget the Alamo: The Rise and Fall of an American Myth

Bryan Burrough, Chris Tomlinson, and Jason Stanford argue that the traditional story of the Battle of the Alamo, long held up as a sacred founding myth of Texas, is built on layers of distortion, racism, and deliberate mythmaking. The book traces the actual history of the 1836 battle, examines how its legend was constructed over nearly two centuries, and chronicles the bitter modern fights over what the Alamo should mean.

The authors begin by establishing the economic foundations of Anglo Texas. The invention of the cotton gin and the rise of British textile factories made cotton enormously profitable, fueling demand for enslaved labor and new land. Sparsely settled Spanish Texas offered vast tracts of prime cotton land. After Moses Austin, a bankrupt Missouri entrepreneur, secured permission to settle American families there, his son Stephen F. Austin took over the colonization effort. Austin's colony in southeast Texas attracted settlers with cheap land; by 1825, one in four residents was enslaved.

Mexico, which had won independence from Spain in 1821, was philosophically opposed to slavery. Austin spent years lobbying to preserve his colonists' right to hold enslaved people, recognizing that without slavery, Americans would refuse to come. A series of Mexican legislative efforts to ban slavery repeatedly panicked the colonists. Austin and his Tejano allies, Texans of Mexican descent such as the prominent San Antonio rancher Erasmo Seguín, devised workarounds including reclassifying enslaved people as indentured servants under fraudulent contracts. The authors argue that this conflict over slavery, not opposition to tyranny, was the true underlying cause of the revolt.

The immediate trigger came in the mid-1830s. Antonio López de Santa Anna, who had risen to the Mexican presidency as a federalist, abolished the Constitution of 1824 and replaced its decentralized system of governance with centrally controlled military departments. The Texians, as the American colonists called themselves, interpreted this as a death knell for their slave-based economy. A small group of bellicose young Southerners known as the War Dogs, including the lawyer William Barret Travis and the land speculator and illegal slave trader Jim Bowie, agitated for revolt. Tejano leaders such as Juan Seguín, Erasmo's 28-year-old son and an ardent federalist, were actually the first Texians to raise arms against Santa Anna, riding to the neighboring state of Coahuila to oppose the troops of General Martín Perfecto de Cos. When Cos later issued arrest warrants for Travis and other agitators, public sentiment shifted sharply toward war.

After Texian volunteers stormed San Antonio in December 1835 and forced Cos to surrender, most went home. Sam Houston, the most famous man in Texas and a former Tennessee governor and Andrew Jackson protégé, argued that San Antonio was indefensible. He sent Bowie to assess the old Spanish mission called the Alamo and, if necessary, destroy it. Instead, Bowie decided to stay and fortify it. Travis arrived with 30 soldiers in early February 1836, triggering a power struggle with Bowie. The two eventually agreed to share command before Bowie fell seriously ill, probably with typhoid, leaving Travis in sole charge. The former Tennessee congressman Davy Crockett, a 49-year-old celebrity whose fame rested more on ghostwritten biographies and a popular stage play than on real accomplishments, arrived on February 8 seeking not combat but a political career in Texas.

Despite repeated warnings from Tejano scouts that Santa Anna's army was approaching, Travis dismissed the intelligence. On February 23, Mexican cavalry appeared in San Antonio, and the roughly 150 defenders were trapped inside a compound nearly a quarter mile around that was never designed as a fort. The authors contend there was no conscious decision to stay and fight; the men had simply lingered too long. During the 13-day siege, Travis penned dramatic letters appealing for help, but no significant reinforcements came. Only 32 men from Gonzales slipped through Mexican lines to join the garrison.

At approximately 5 a.m. on March 6, about 1,800 Mexican soldiers attacked. Travis was among the first killed, shot in the forehead on the north wall. Recent scholarship reveals that perhaps half the defenders fled the compound rather than making a last stand, only to be run down by Mexican cavalry. The diary of Mexican officer José Enrique de la Peña describes seven survivors, including Crockett, being brought before Santa Anna and executed. Between 180 and 250 Texians and Tejanos died, at the cost of an estimated 600 Mexican casualties.

The legend took shape almost immediately. Santa Anna released the Anglo survivor Susanna Dickinson, whose husband had died in the battle, along with Travis's enslaved man Joe, to carry news of the defeat. Houston and his advisers reshaped their accounts, recasting reports of Travis's suicide into a heroic combat death and portraying Crockett as fighting to the end. The first published account, in the Telegraph and Texas Register, built a narrative of supreme heroism and falsely portrayed the defenders' deaths as a strategic sacrifice. The Goliad massacre on March 27, in which nearly 400 Texian prisoners were executed on Santa Anna's orders, further hardened Texian resolve. At San Jacinto on April 21, Houston's force of about 900, including Juan Seguín's Tejano cavalry, surprised Santa Anna's camp and routed his army in 18 minutes. The victory secured Texas's independence.

The second half of the book traces how the myth was constructed and reinforced. Amateur historians in the mid-1800s established what the authors call the Heroic Anglo Narrative, portraying Anglo Texans as democratic warriors while erasing Tejano contributions. In 1873, William Physick Zuber, a Texas veteran and amateur historian, published the story of Travis drawing a line in the sand, purportedly told by an Alamo escapee named Moses Rose. Scholars doubted the tale, but it entered textbooks in 1888. In the early 1900s, Clara Driscoll, a wealthy heiress, prevailed over the preservationist Adina De Zavala in a bitter fight over the Alamo site, demolishing most of the Long Barrack where the fiercest fighting occurred and creating a shrine centered on the church. The University of Texas history department, led for 40 years by Eugene C. Barker, reinforced the myth by rejecting slavery as a cause of the revolt.

In the Cold War era, Disney, John Wayne, and President Lyndon Johnson transformed the Alamo into a national political symbol. Disney's 1954-1955 television miniseries Davy Crockett portrayed the frontiersman as a saintly hero resisting tyranny, a parable about fighting Communism. Wayne's 1960 film The Alamo spread the Heroic Anglo Narrative worldwide. Johnson invoked the Alamo obsessively during the Vietnam War, even falsely claiming his great-great-grandfather had died there.

Revisionism emerged slowly. The earliest challenges came from Mexican-American activists in the 1930s, including League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC) activist José Tomás Canales and schoolteacher Maria Elena Zamora O'Shea, who sought to restore Tejano contributions to the historical record. A California writer named Carey McWilliams published the first significant revisionist work in 1949, North from Mexico. The 1975 publication of de la Peña's diary, with its account of Crockett surrendering, triggered national controversy. Author Jeff Long's 1990 Duel of Eagles, which portrayed the defenders as mercenaries, marked a turning point; Long received death threats.

The final chapters chronicle battles over the Alamo site itself. Whistleblowers exposed the Daughters of the Republic of Texas, who had managed the site for over a century, as neglectful stewards, and the legislature stripped them of control in 2011. When George P. Bush took over the General Land Office in 2015, he launched a $450 million revitalization plan centered on a museum for British rock musician Phil Collins's donated artifact collection. Bush initially embraced revisionism but pivoted under conservative pressure. Armed protesters occupied the Cenotaph, a monument beside the Alamo church. Native American groups demanded recognition of burial sites beneath the plaza, and African-American leaders lobbied to save the old Woolworth Building, site of a 1960 lunch-counter desegregation, from demolition. A 2018 fight over whether schoolchildren should be taught that the defenders were "heroic" drew responses from the governor and multiple state officials. The authors also investigate Collins's collection, arguing that many items attributed to Bowie, Crockett, and Travis are of questionable authenticity, with authentication methods relying on speculation and storytelling.

The book closes in the summer of 2020, as a protester spray-painted the Cenotaph and armed groups formed a cordon around it following the killing of George Floyd. The authors conclude that the Alamo story must evolve to include the perspectives of all Texans and that the whitewashed version of history should be abandoned in favor of a truthful, inclusive account.