ALAMO IMAGES

Changing Perceptions of a Texas Experience

A Humanities Exhibition
Texas Humanities Resource Center
in collaboration with
DeGolyer Library
Southern Methodist University

The exhibition Alamo Images was organized by the DeGolyer Library of Southern Methodist University, Dallas, to celebrate the Texas Sesquicentennial. Through photographic images and words, it explores what the Alamo means to Texans, the role of Mexican-Texans in the Revolution, and reasons why the Alamo story continues to fascinate people of all ages. Featuring more than 175 photographs, the exhibit traces the history of the Alamo as mission, fort, and shrine; the drama of its siege and fall in March 1836; and the recreation of this drama in poems, plays, novels, games, toys, comics, television programs, films, documents, paintings, and monuments.

Alamo Images is designed for use in humanities programs that focus not merely on Texas history but on the mythic power of events that help define a community, state, or nation, and on the ways in which people learn history.

The development and ongoing circulation of this exhibition and accompanying resources are made possible by grants from the Texas Council for the Humanities, state partner of the National Endowment for the Humanities.

ALAMO IMAGES: Changing Perceptions of a Texas Experience

by Susan Prendergast Schoelwer, with Tom W. Gläser

foreword by Clifton H. Jones

with an introduction and annotated bibliography by Paul Andrew Hutton.

Published by Southern Methodist University Press and DeGolyer Library

Dallas, Texas

THE ALAMO: SYMBOL AND MYTH

The role of myth in American history is probably nowhere more effectively illustrated than in the battle of the Alamo. The encounter was violent and dramatic, its participants gallant. Most critically, there were no survivors, at least among its white male defenders, leaving others free to reconstruct a history based more frequently upon conjecture and imagination than upon verifiable evidence.

By looking at a symbolic event like the Alamo in terms of the way it has been portrayed in popular culture, we can learn much about the character of the people who create, nourish, and cherish the image. Thus, if we can understand what the Alamo means to Texans, we can learn much more about their changing values, character, and self-image as a people.

Although the Alamo is an important national symbol, it is far more vital as a creation myth for Texas. Myth is used here in its folkloric form, not as a word meaning falsehood. Although a true myth may indeed bear little resemblance to historical fact, that is irrelevant to its folkloric function. A powerful mythic saga like the Alamo tale is embraced by a people and characterizes them, expressing shared beliefs and cultural symbols. As a creation myth for Texans, the Alamo story helps define them as a people making them distinct from other Americans.

Comparisons of the defense of the Alamo to the ancient Greek stand at Thermopylae began within weeks after the Texas battle, reflecting the new republic’s need to identify the experience as both unique and universal. The Alamo was seen to be distinctly virtuous and distinctly Texan, yet at the same time to embody and clearly express such basic truths about the nature of man that all of humanity could instantly perceive its worth.

Thermopylae was, of course, a battle in Greece where a small band of Spartan warriors sacrificed themselves to momentarily stall the onslaught from the North of Xerxes's Persian hordes in 480 B.C. Although all but one were killed, the battle gave the other Greek city-states time to mobilize their forces and drive the Persians out of Greece, thus insuring the survival of western civilization and the birth of democracy. The Alamo had now matched the ancient struggle and gone it one better. No one, according to the myth, survived the battle of the Alamo. As with the struggle at Thermopylae, the early Texans viewed the battle at the Alamo as a contest of civilizations: freedom vs. tyranny; democracy vs. despotism; Protestantism vs. Catholicism; the New World culture of the United States vs. the Old World culture of Mexico. Anglo-Saxon vs. the mongrelized mixture of Indian and Spanish races and ultimately, the forces of good over evil. A creation myth does not pander to liberal sensibilities. The lines of good and evil are always razor sharp. The story is meant to give a people a strong and unique self-image. It does not cater to the enemy in any way. Thus the myth of the Alamo is often stunningly racist.

THE BATTLE OF THE ALAMO

Whatever its specific components, the battle itself was of questionable military significance. Once Santa Anna decided to assault the old mission, it fell quickly--if at unexpected cost to the Mexican army. Even the most commonly held premise--that the thirteen days Santa Anna delayed before attacking the Alamo provided essential time for Sam Houston to prepare an army--is difficult to prove. However gloriously, the Alamo's defenders lost their battle. Yet in the public mind, their defeat has paradoxically dwarfed Houston's overwhelming victory at San Jacinto, a stunning triumph which not only secured independence for Texas but also effectively opened the Southwest to North American expansion. Historically, San Jacinto is a much more significant battle; yet is has never captured the public's imagination like the battle of the Alamo.

Since historically most forts have fallen not to assault and barrage but to the inexorable constrictions of want, famine, and pestilence, the key question becomes not why Santa Anna delayed his attack but rather why he attacked at all.

While Santa Anna's army was hardly the body of men that such a dynamic officer would hope to lead, it was the best that a country worn out by continual revolt and economic collapse could raise. [The] forces included professional troops, presidial soldiers, militia, impressed convicts, and even a battalion of Mayan Indians from Yucatan. Not only did these Indians not speak Spanish, they had never before left the tropics.

The Texans were indeed amateurs at soldiering, and not only in their unpaid status. Although there were many with militia experience, those with a regular service background were scarce and were frequently ignored. The American public held a long-cherished aversion to professional armies, distrusting the caliber of their men and fearing their abuse of power. . . . To all of this was added a widespread belief in American marksmanship and innate military superiority.

Susanna Dickinson's surviving statements on the battle date from many years afterward and actually reveal very little of her own activities. [Yet] the horror of her experience is almost beyond comprehension--listening helplessly to gunfire and the clash of weapons all around, engulfed in dark and smoke, waiting in silence to be discovered, walking out amidst blood and carnage, riding miles through unsettled territory to Gonzales, tending all the while to the needs of a fifteen-month-old baby.

THE HEROES OF THE ALAMO

The tale of the Alamo has long revolved around the deeds of Jim Bowie, Davy Crockett, and William Barret Travis. The other defenders--some 183 Anglo-Texan and Tejano men, plus several women and children and at least two Negro slaves--remain shadowy in both fact and fiction.

No official muster roll survived the Mexican assault, and the numerous reconstructed lists found in early newspaper accounts, letters, histories, and on the various Alamo monuments have been subject to continuing review. . . . Considering the dearth of reliable biographical information, it is hardly surprising that some of the most well-known and intriguing Alamo defenders are entirely imaginary.

The tale embraces powerful themes of courage, sacrifice, betrayal, and redemption. Its trinity of heroes--Travis, Bowie, and Crockett--have since been deified beyond recognition as mere mortals. This was not necessarily a gradual development. Men at the time immediately saw the mythic potential of the battle. The Telegraph and Texas Register for March 24, 1836, proclaimed as much in an early account of the battle.

Santa Anna viewed the conflict in Texas not as war between nations but as treason, just as George III had viewed the American Revolution. To Santa Anna, the Texan rebels were not internal freedom fighters but outside agitators to be regarded and treated as pirates.

THE ALAMO AS SHRINE

There have always been two Alamos--the Alamo of historical fact and the Alamo of our collective imagination. One was a mission and a fortress, and is now a shrine. The other has become a cultural and political symbol.

The evolution of the Alamo as both a symbol and a historic site, however, has been neither an accidental nor an inevitable process. The Alamo as it exists today is but one vision of its past-- an enshrinement of one brief moment out of a long and complex history. Although this enshrinement began almost as soon as the Alamo's Mexican captors retreated in May 1836, the most decisive events occurred during the quarter century preceding World War I ….

[The "Second Battle of the Alamo"] determined the site's modern appearance, with its church-shrine dominating a tranquil memorial and with few reminders of mortal combat. Although usually viewed as merely a petty organizational feud between the Alamo's caretakers, this controversy in fact reflected the sharply divergent historical perspectives of Anglo-American and Hispanic Texans.

The Alamo remains a place of strong emotions. For true believers, it is the sacred altar of Texas liberties, the holiest of holies …. For the unfortunate pilgrim not steeped in Texan lore, it is frequently a disappointment. … The Alamo image, as popularized by artists, novelists, cartoonists, and moviemakers, is grand and awe-inspiring … .The reality is a curious anachronism, a tiny chapel elbowed by noisy downtown traffic and dwarfed by modern skyscrapers, a Hispanic building dedicated to Anglo- Texan glories.