Davy Crockett Surrendered?! Jim Bowie, a Slave Trader?! Sam Houston, a Coke Addict?!

The story of the Alamo is simple, right? Davy Crockett, Jim Bowie, William Barret Travis, and a bunch of their friends come to Texas to start new lives, suddenly realize they are being oppressed by the Mexican dictator Santa Anna, and rush off to do battle with him at an old Spanish mission in San Antonio. They are outnumbered but fight valiantly and die, to a man, buying Sam Houston enough time to defeat Santa Anna at the Battle of San Jacinto. As almost any Texan will tell you, their sacrifice turned the Alamo into the cradle of Texas liberty.

The problem is that much of what you think you know about the Alamo is wrong. What you just read? That’s the Alamo myth. The actual story, well, it’s a lot more complicated.

These days there are essentially two schools of thought about the Alamo and what it means. A playful way to contrast them is through the stories of the two British rock stars most closely associated with all this. The first would be Phil Collins, who began his career drumming for the band Genesis and, as a solo singer, has sold millions of albums. Collins happens to be the world’s greatest collector of Alamo artifacts. He owns Sam Houston’s Bowie knife, a belt said to have been worn by Travis, and a shot pouch Crockett is said to have turned over to a Mexican soldier before dying. Not to mention Alamo-sourced cannonballs, maps, letters, muskets, powder flasks, bullets, swords, and even human teeth.

Like many aficionados of a certain age, Collins caught the Alamo bug as a boy watching Fess Parker’s Davy Crockett on the small screen and John Wayne’s on the big. He named his Jack Russell terrier Travis. He was once told that in a previous life, he’d been a courier dashing in and out of the old mission in the days before Santa Anna’s soldiers stormed it. Collins wants to believe. He has hundreds of old Alamo photos, many flecked with small balls of white light. He believes these are “orbs,” globs of paranormal energy.

In Texas, though, where he has donated his collection as the core of a grand new museum planned for San Antonio, Collins is a giant among men. He represents the apotheosis of Alamo “traditionalism,” which is to say, he is deeply invested in the sanctity of the shrine and its tales of heroism. He is the ultimate believer—although he’s taken a bit of fire lately. Collins and other collectors have recently been ensnared in a feud with archivists and activists who say that some of their accumulated memorabilia is of suspect origin or is downright bogus.

On the other end of the Alamo spectrum is none other than Ozzy Osbourne. The former Black Sabbath frontman and reality TV star passed into Alamo lore on a Friday afternoon, February 19, 1982. At approximately 2:50 p.m., as San Antonio children were heading home from school, a 33-year-old old man wobbled unsteadily into Alamo Plaza. He was wearing a torn green evening gown and sneakers. In his hand he carried a bottle of Courvoisier.

Osbourne was having a rough day. He and his bandmates, scheduled to perform a set at the San Antonio Convention Center that night, were squabbling. His partner, Sharon, was carping again about his drinking, which typically began when he rose in the morning, as it had on this day. In an effort to confine his drunken idylls to their hotel suite, Sharon had taken to hiding his clothes, hence the gown, which was hers.

Later, Ozzy would be hazy as to where he was heading that day. What he remembered clearly, though, was an overwhelming need to relieve himself. Frustrated by his inability to locate a suitable loo, he decided to do as inebriated rock stars have done since the dawn of time. He sidled up to what appeared to be a little-used section of wall, parted his dress, and proceeded, with a great sigh, to do his business. Suddenly he heard a voice behind him:

“You disgust me.”

Ozzy turned, as one would, and said, “What?”

An older gent in a cowboy hat was staring at him. “You’re a disgrace, d’ya know that?” he said.

Ozzy attempted to explain about the gown.

“It ain’t the dress, you limey faggot piece of dirt,” the man said. “That wall you’re relieving yourself on is the Alamo.”

“The Aalawot?”

That Ozzy Osbourne peed on the Alamo became part of the Texas canon. It has inspired everything from exchanges in mainstream movies (see: the Steve Buscemi character in Airheads) to journalistic investigations (see: “A Brief History of Peeing on the Alamo,” Texas Monthly, 2014) to an art installation in which a life-sized wax statue of Osbourne urinates on a wall once onlookers trigger an adjacent motion sensor. Alas, as with so much about the Alamo, the story is not exactly true. Ozzy didn’t actually pee on the Alamo. He actually peed on the Cenotaph, a 60-foot-high monument beside it, on which the names of all those killed are listed. City fathers banned him from performing in San Antonio for years, until Ozzy apologized and donated $10,000 to charity.

Osbourne represents the flip side of Collins’s traditionalism, what people in Texas call Alamo “revisionism,” an intellectual school that, metaphorically, amounts to peeing on the Alamo legend. Revisionists tend to think the entire Texas Revolt was a bit more about protecting slavery from Mexico’s abolitionist government than it was about opposing Santa Anna’s supposed tyranny. In the oral traditions of the Mexican American community, in fact, mothers and fathers, for decades, have passed down their view that the Alamo was a symbol of Anglo oppression. Indeed, to scores of Tejanos interviewed by the authors, white racism toward the Latino “other” was hard-wired into to Alamo narrative. As San Antonio art historian Ruben Cordova puts it, “Davy Crockett’s [death], it’s sort of like a Chicano version of the Jewish Christ killers. If you’re looking at the Alamo as a kind of state religion, this is the original sin. We killed Davy Crockett.”

Many key components of the Alamo story, in fact, don’t stand the revisionist test. Some revisionists assert that the whole fracas was an American conspiracy to steal Texas from Mexico. Few believe Travis drew his famous and fateful line in the Alamo sand. And many don’t buy the idea that Crockett went down fighting, as John Wayne famously did in his 1960 movie The Alamo, but, instead, contend he surrendered and was then executed—a revelation that came to light in 2005 with the publication of a seemingly authoritative wartime diary by Jose de la Pena, one of Santa Anna’s junior officers.

Make no mistake: this is all very serious business in Texas, where the Alamo has always loomed at the center of the state’s mythos. Its legends comprise the beating heart of Texas exceptionalism, the idea, deeply held among generations of Texans, that the state is special, having existed for a decade as a nation in and of itself. It’s not an overstatement to say the Alamo is the state’s Western Wall, its secular Mecca.

Probably the first significant work of true revisionist scholarship was a book written in 1949 by an Anglo liberal in California named Carey McWilliams. North from Mexico was a sympathetic history of an “invisible people” just beginning to struggle to overcome centuries of Anglo oppression and discrimination. It notes how Mexican Americans at the time called the Texians “‘los diablos Tejanos’: arrogant, overbearing, aggressive, conniving, rude, unreliable, and dishonest.” It portrays the Alamo’s defenders as “filibusters” invading a sovereign Mexico.

North from Mexico was ignored by reviewers, taken out of print, and forgotten. But by the time the third edition was issued, in 1968, the book became a sensation with a new generation of militant Chicano students and thinkers. The union leader Cesar Chavez once said he recommended it to everyone interested in Chicano issues.

North from Mexico became the template for a new school of Mexican American scholars who in the early 1970s set to work producing an array of Latino-centric books and academic papers, many focused on labor and migration issues. What appears to be the first significant work of Alamo revisionism, Olvídate de El Alamo, or Forget about the Alamo, arrived just as this wave was forming, in 1965. Authored by a prolific Mexican-born playwright in Los Angeles, Rafael Trujillo Herrera, it is an idiosyncratic yet passionate jeremiad that prefigures every component of Alamo revisionism. It portrays the Texas Revolt as a conspiracy orchestrated by Andrew Jackson and Sam Houston; Santa Anna’s Texas expedition as a justified response to American aggression; Bowie as a slave trader; and Travis as a fugitive who fled to Texas after committing a murder. Passages surely struck home with members of the Mexican American community. “Should Mexico permit the continuation of a dark legend that also harms the sentiments and friendship of both nations?” Herrera writes. “Does the battle cry ‘Remember The Alamo’ not just become a restless insult and accusation?”

Both North from Mexico and Olvídate were strong influences on a young radical at Cal State Northridge named Rodolfo “Rudy” Acuña, who in 1966 created one of the first university-level courses in Chicano studies. Acuña’s 1972 textbook, Occupied America: The Chicano’s Struggle toward Liberation, is a scorching history of Anglo oppression, portraying Mexican Americans as a conquered and abused people. The book’s first chapter is a philosophical blowtorch aimed squarely at conventional Anglocentric Texas history. Building on the ideas of McWilliams and Trujillo, Acuña paints the Americans who died at the Alamo as nothing more than mercenaries staging an illicit rebellion to seize sovereign Mexican territory.

But what angered Acuña most was the way in which generations of Anglos created myths that, he argued, served only to justify violence, imperialism, and the subjugation of Mexican Americans: “Anglo Americans in Texas were portrayed as freedom-loving settlers forced to rebel against the tyranny of Mexico. The most popular of these myths was that of the Alamo, which, in effect, became a justification to keep Mexicans in their place. According to Anglo Americans, the Alamo was a symbolic confrontation between good and evil; the treacherous Mexicans succeeded in taking the fort only because they outnumbered the patriots and ‘fought dirty.’ This myth, with its ringing plea of ‘Remember the Alamo!’ colored Anglo attitudes toward Mexicans, as it served to stereotype the Mexican eternally as the enemy and the Texas patriots as the stalwarts of freedom and democracy.”

Acuña would remark elsewhere that the Alamo “is probably the single most important source of racism toward Mexicans in this country.” “Its purpose,” he once said, “is to hate Mexicans.”

Revisionists through the early 1980s were enveloped in scorching denunciations—from the political right but also from the left. A case in point was the Chicano director Jesús Treviño’s 1982 Seguín, a public television biopic of Juan Seguín. “I was interested in telling the Chicano side of American history, which both John Wayne and American textbooks have ignored,” Treviño said. “In Wayne’s version, Mexicans are portrayed as either bandidos, dancing señoritas, sleeping drunks, or fiery temptresses.” Meanwhile, on the left, Acuña, who served as an adviser to the film, actually resigned over Seguín’s portrayal, calling him a traitor to Mexican Americans and comparing his alliance with the Texans to that of France’s Vichy government with the Nazis.

Then came the Big Bang of Alamo Revisionism. Published in 1990, Jeff Long’s well-researched Duel of Eagles was a screaming banzai charge against everything John Wayne held dear. The tone was urgent and almost angry, a brash young author shaking his fists at his ignorant elders. In Duel the defenders of the Alamo are “mercenaries,” “pirates,” and “fanatics,” “Manifest Destiny . . . killers with dirt under their fingernails, lice in their hair,” and “the stink of ignorant, trigger-pulling white trash.” Ordinary Texans at the time, the book suggests, raised weekend spending money by prostituting their wives.

Crockett, in Long’s telling, was “an aging, semiliterate squatter of average talent,” “an arrogant mercenary” who surrendered and then begged for his life. Sam Houston he judged a drunken cocaine addict and—wait for it—a budding transvestite fond of wearing corsets and girdles. To Long, Bowie was utterly without merit, a “frontier shadow creature,” a thug fleeing a “lifetime” of “frauds and hoaxes.” Travis, well, Travis he got about right. But then no one likes Travis.

In the wake of Duel’s cannonade came a rush of works that in short order transformed the 1990s into the golden age of Alamo reassessment. Suddenly, it seemed, all anyone wanted to talk about was Texas history. Panels and symposia sprouted like bluebonnets. Suddenly, the Alamo was under ideological siege, triggering such a contentious contretemps that by the beginning of this century, the revisionist take on Alamo history had established itself as a legitimate alternative to the Heroic Anglo Narrative.

The Alamo is more than a Texas symbol, of course. It is an American touchstone as well, an emblem of national resolve, looming during the 1950s as an embodiment of U.S. determination to halt the spread of Communism. During the ’60s, Texas-bred president Lyndon Johnson repeatedly invoked it to generate backing for the war in Vietnam. In time, it was embraced by “patriots” and right-wingers who viewed Santa Anna’s Mexican army as a stand-in for all manner of threats, including immigrants pouring across the Southern border.

And many Texans are fiercely protective of it. Over the years, the state has gone to extraordinary lengths to safeguard the traditionalist legend against revisionist questioning. The State Board of Education actually has standing orders that schoolchildren must be taught a “heroic” version of Alamo history. In 2018, when a teachers’ committee suggested this was a bit much, Governor Greg Abbott spearheaded a wave of online outrage that further outraged revisionists. Alamo “heroism” thus remains literally the law of the land.

The tension between traditionalism and revisionism has never been on more vivid display than it is today, at a moment when Latinos are poised to become a majority of Texas’s citizenry. At a time when the United States is undergoing an unprecedented reassessment of its racial history, the Alamo and its heroes have essentially been given a pass by the state’s largely Anglo writers, politicians, and educators. Given the fact that its defenders were fighting to form what became the single most militant slave nation in history, that men like Bowie and Travis traded slaves, and that the “father of Texas,” Stephen F. Austin, spent years fighting to preserve slavery from the attacks of Mexican abolitionists, one would think the post–George Floyd era might have brought to Texas a long-overdue reevaluation of its history. By and large, that hasn’t happened.

Traditionalists, though, who tend to be older, conservative, and white, aren’t terribly interested in reconsidering the Alamo’s history, or its symbolism, which has fueled an intermittent debate that’s been building in intensity for a good 30 years now. What began as a set of literary and scholarly discussions in the 1990s became a fight over education and textbooks in the 2000s, and has now engulfed the Alamo site itself. Blame Phil Collins, in part: He made the donation of his collection dependent on the building of a “world class museum,” which got the state government thinking of what changes to make, which got traditionalists up in arms. Literally. When state planners started musing about moving that hallowed Cenotaph, groups of angry traditionalists clad in Kevlar vests and armed with assault rifles began staging symbolic occupations of Alamo Plaza.

The presence of weekend soldiers aside, changes at the Alamo itself seem inevitable. The aging shrine has long been a disappointment to visitors—a dim church, a tiny museum, and a walled-in park plopped down in downtown San Antonio, all of it surrounded by the cheesiest possible tourist venues: a wax museum, a Ripley’s Haunted Adventure, that kind of thing. Texans have debated how to spiff it all up for 50 years. Now that it might happen, it can sometimes seem that everyone in the state has an opinion on what to do. It’s not just Anglos and Mexican Americans. Native American groups want land set aside to honor ancestors buried beneath Alamo Plaza during the Spanish era. One set of plans would involve tearing down an old Woolworth’s department store across the street; African Americans are protesting this, explaining that the lunch counter there was one of the first public places in San Antonio where Blacks were allowed to dine with whites. Stuck in the middle is a beleaguered state bureaucrat with a fine political pedigree, George P. Bush, son of Jeb. Just about no one in Texas envies poor George P. these days.

That vast collection of artifacts Phil Collins donated? The ones Bush is proposing to build a $400 million “world class’’ museum at the Alamo to house? Well, a whole lot of items in the collection may be, at best, of questionable provenance. At worst? A lot of them appear to be fakes.

Adapted from FORGET THE ALAMO: The Rise and Fall of an American Myth by Bryan Burrough, Jason Stanford, and Chris Tomlinson. Published by arrangement with Penguin Press, a member of Penguin Random House LLC. Copyright © 2021 by Bryan Burrough, Jason Stanford, and Chris Tomlinson.

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