Angry Planet - Lies, Damn Lies, and the Alamo

Episode Date: July 15, 2021

When I was a kid I learned about the Alamo. It’s 1836. Houston said to Travis, fortify the Alamo. Volunteers came from across the continent to fight and die for the dream of a free and independent Texas. Like the Ballad said, One hundred and eighty five holding back five thousand.In the southern part of Texas, near the town of San Antone, like a statue on his pinto rides a cowboy all alone. And he sees the cattle grazing where a century before Santa Anna’s guns were blazing and the cannons used to roar. And his eyes turn sorta misty and his heart begins to glow and he takes his hat off slowly. To the men of the Alamo. To the thirteen days of glory at the siege of Alamo.What a load of bullshit.The Alamo and its effect on Texas, the country, and Phil Collins, is the subject of the new book Forget the Alamo: The Rise and Fall of An American Myth. Two of its three authors are here with me today, Bryan Burrough and Chris Tomlinson. They’re both writers and they’re both from Texas, so you can be sure that what you’re about to hear is the gospel truth.Angry Planet has a substack! Join the Information War to get weekly insights into our angry planet and hear more conversations about a world in conflict.https://angryplanet.substack.com/subscribeYou can listen to Angry Planet on iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play or follow our RSS directly. Our website is angryplanetpod.com. You can reach us on our Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/angryplanetpodcast/; and on Twitter: @angryplanetpod.Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/warcollege. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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And welcome to Angry Planet. I am Matthew Galt. Jason Fields has been exiled from today's episode because he's from New York City and this is a Texans

only episode today. So when I was a kid, I learned about the Alamo. It's 1836. Houston said to Travis fortify it. Volunteers came from across the continent to fight and die for the dream of a free and independent Texas.

The ballad said, 185 holding back 5,000, which is not quite the truth. The history of the Alamo is much more fascinating than the myth that I was led to believe as a kid. And it's also the subject of a wonderful new book called Forget the Alamo, the Rise and Fall of an American Myth. Two of its free authors are here with me today, Brian Burrow and Chris Tomlinson. They're both writers and they're both from Texas, so you can be sure that what you're about to hear is the gospel truth. We're going to talk today about the Alamo, its effects on Texas, the country, and what Phil Collins has to do with all of it.

Gentlemen, thank you so much for joining me today. Thanks for having us. Yeah, good to be here. All right. So for people listening who are not Texans, can you explain? what Texas pride is and what part the Alamo plays in that? Because I really think that's foundational to this story. This is Brian.

I guess I'll lead off. It's not Texas pride, Matthew. It is what's been often called Texas exceptionalism. The idea that we Texans and Texas as a state are somehow just a cut above the Delaware's and the North Dakota's of the world. I've engaged in this myself, I confess, over the years, I will be doing it less forthcoming. The Alamo is at the center of it all. The Alamo is at the center of the Texas creation myth. The thing that Texas has that no other state has, and that is the only state to defeat a foreign country in an international war,

the only state that got its freedom as a 10 years as an independent nation, it is something with which many Texans and a certain kind of Texan especially is deeply invested in. It becomes a part, and I confess it's been a part of mine as a kid, as an adult. You know, in New York, you just have a little spring in your step, knowing you're from Texas. And as someone who's been guilty of it occasionally, I don't mind confessing, but the Alamo is really the heart of it all. I've sometimes said in just, without the Alamo, without this Texas creation, myth, God forbid, we're just another Iowa. What is, I'm curious, did you both come up in Texas public schools? Oh, yeah. Yeah, I'm a fifth generation Texan, and the fact that I know that, I think,

speaks volumes to the pride that we're raised with. Not only was I raised in Texas, on Texas myth in Texas public schools, my grandfather was a big fan. He even tried to convince me as a kid that our ancestors, had died at the Alamo because there's really nothing more important to be in Texas. That's that's aristocracy. Of course, he was, he was less than accurate. My family didn't come until 1849. That's the kind of thing you grow up with. And Texas public schools and in the fourth grade and the seventh grade, just make matters worse rather than clear them up. I actually didn't make it to 1971. And I will never forget, probably in either seventh or eighth grade, another kid, this is in junior high, called me a carpet batter. I'm not sure I even knew what that was,

but that just gives you a sense of that sense of identity that we spoke on. All right. So what is then the myth of the Alamo that we are taught in, I think it's what, seventh grade they block off, and that's all Texas history. in the state. So the Alamo is a central part of that. So what is, can you give me the condensed version of what the story we all think we know is? So a group of Americans who had come to Texas, then a part of Mexico, as colonists, decided that they were done with the dictator Santa Ana, that they were going to fight for their liberty, and that a group of them gathered, at the Alamo. As the Mexican army advanced, the fighters at the Alamo sacrificed themselves,

making a last stand to slow down the advance of Santa Ana's army so that Sam Houston could get organized and ultimately defeat Santa Ana at the Battle of San Jacinto about a month later. That's the myth in a nutshell. So the first chunk of this book goes about, I won't say debunking, Because I feel like that's the wrong word. But like telling the real story of what happened, which is, I think, much more complicated and much more interesting. So what really happened at the Alamo and how is it actually like, what are the parts that we leave out, I guess? We divide the myth really into two camps, those associated with the Texas Revolt, the broader story, and those about the battle and the siege itself. Obviously, the first half of the book that you're asking about is much more the lead up to the battle.

It attempts to address the question of why the American Collis in the Mexican province of Texas were doing this. And basically what we advance, and we should be clear, this is we are building on 30, 40 years of new academic scholarship. These are not original ideas of ours in many cases. In fact, they are widely accepted in colleges where the Alamo in Texas history is being taught these. days. But the principal focus of this is that the Texas revolt is best understood as being about money. The reason that Texans came to, the reason the Americans came to Texas was to make money. The way they did it, the way they, the only reason they came was to farm cotton. And the reason they revolted in the end was that the Mexican government threatened this cotton-based economic model.

The problem, of course, was all about slaves. This was not for the Texans a moral issue. It was purely an economic issue that Mexican abolitionists and every single government that the Mexicans had in the 1820s and 30s was stridently abolitionists. Sought to destroy that economic model by taking away the slaves. And if you go back and you read Stephen F. Austin, the father of Texas, in all the imaginations he went through to try to preserve slavery, to fight for slavery, he makes a. abundantly clear over and over that the only way Texas can possibly survive is slaves. And every time the Mexican government threatened to eliminate the slaves, Texans would bellyache and pick up their suitcases and threaten to leave. And the Mexicans would always say,

okay, six more months, 12 more months. And ultimately, of course, the Mexicans pushed hard enough that the Texans put away their suitcases and took out their gun. So I know the answer to the next question, but I want to ask it anyway. Why did I never hear about any of that when I was growing up? Because I remember the first time I got any kind of, and this is, I think, really sad, the first time I really got any inkling that that was such a huge part of the story was from a King of the Hill episode, which is, I don't know if you all have seen it, but it's a fantastic episode, but it was the first time, yeah, I, it was the first time I saw that I was like, wait a minute, something else is

going on here. And then I actually started reading about. Stephen F. Austin and Sam Houston and started digging into this more and realized just, A, how much of that early history was about the preservation of slavery and B, how disastrously bad Texas was at prosecuting war, which I think is like a whole other side conversation. But anyway. Oh, yeah. Now, there's lots to be said about how the Texans actually fought the revolution. But more directly to your question, because it is like the second act of our book, which is how these myths got made. Frankly, they all started within 72 hours of Sam Houston finding out that the Alamo had fallen. He had failed to send reinforcements at meetings

in Washington on the Brazos. He had scoffed at the idea that the Mexican army was in San Antonio. He thought that Travis was grandstanding. And so when the Alamo fell and all those men died, he had to come up with something. And he came up with the battle. of Thermopylae, the Spartan story of a group of men who sacrificed their lives so others may live in a battle for liberty and for God and country. And that was in Lexian's propaganda rag within 72 hours because Houston knew he had to start spinning this thing if he had any chance of keeping his rag-tag army together. Then you fast forward, 60 years, the University of Texas finally has a history department. And they start teaching history. And the Texas legislature immediately

launches an investigation and determines that, oh, my goodness, there might, there just might be one professor down there who is teaching something that's not approved Southern perspective history. For instance, they're not teaching the lost cause. They might be teaching the Civil War was about slavery. And it just, it compounds, right? After Dallas became the, basically the nominal headquarter for the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s, Texas needed to reinvent itself. So it began saying, oh, we're a Western state. We're not about cotton farming, even though cotton's been the most important thing in our economy

for 100 years. We're actually a Western state. And so we're going to talk about cowboys and killing Native Americans instead of about white plantation owners owning slaves. And so it was a systemic, carefully thought out, planned approach to whitewashing history. And it kind of stood up pretty well until John Wayne's movie, The Alamo, in 1960. Yeah, Matthew, just to build on one thing Chris said, when the legislature started investigating UT's history department in 1897, 1898, this really led to a very direct. intervention in the teaching of Texas history by the Texas legislature, which made absolutely clear

that the standard prescribed heroic version, the Anglo-centric version that didn't mention slavery, that didn't mention the Tejano's, our allies during the battle, during the revolt, none of this was to be taught, and it was not. And this matters because the University of Texas faculty was the dominant Texas history faculty in the state through the first half of the 20th century and even beyond. And its adherence, its students went out and dominated the teaching at every other state university and even high schools. So that really you can make the point, and academics have made this before us, that the teaching of Texas history really did not evolve in Texas between the 1890s and the 1990s. It's really only been about the last 40 or 50 years that Texas academics, many of them

schooled in the tumult of the 1960s, had begun to ask, wait, what about slavery? What about all these other issues? The teaching of Texas history has just been so retarded. Its growth retarded in Texas for so long that things that are happening now, the appearance of our book and the academic books that preceded it, still, they just strike fear into a certain type of Texan. And it's a real shame. Because look, we are just, we're just trying to recapture the alamo of history, the actual alamo, and try to finally discard this fanciful legend that we've lived with and been taught for, what, going on 180 years. Yeah, one of my, one of my favorite quotes as I was reading it that y'all dug up was when they were investigating the history department, they found the South Carolidian, and they were upset.

They were like, Texans first, Southerners second in the hiring process in terms of teachers. Chris, you had mentioned the John Wayne movie from, was it 65? Is that right? 1960. 1960. What was the importance of that movie? I think it really cemented a lot of the myths and frankly outright lies in the minds of baby boomers. Just a few years earlier, Walt Disney had launched really the first television miniseries about Davy Crockett.

And after it was only three parts. And by the end of the second part, every kid in America wanted a coonskin cat and a little plastic rifle that had Betsy ridden across it. John Wayne built on that. And he was a self-professed white nationalist and a clear-cut racist. And he wanted to defeat John F. Kennedy's bid to become president. He wanted to instill a rugged individualism and self-sufficiency in young Americans. And so his film is a parable for the Cold War. It is a very preachy script about the importance of liberty and standing on your own and standing up

against greater odds. And it really had an impact. It really had an impact on an entire generation. It reinforced Disney's message from six years earlier on this extremely large population. The one thing that the Alamo, John Wayne's movie, did not do, was teach anyone any facts about what happened at the battle. And in many ways, that's what we're dealing with today. So I want to, so let's dig in a little bit then to, to, what actually happened? You've got a wonderful, such a fascinating book because it is, it is history, but it's also about this meta history narrative about the wider importance of the myth,

but you do a pretty good job of explaining the battle and how it went down. Can we get into that? Sure. And we can just address the myths head on. Look, the myths have always been that these 180-od Texians showed up there to do battle against Santa Ana and wait, that's the first lie. They didn't. Nobody wanted to fight Santa Ana. And they certainly didn't make a choice to stand there in fight. And by the way, they weren't fighting for their freedom. They were already free men. They had more rights

than anybody else in Mexico, including the rights to own slaves. Nobody else in Mexico had. They weren't being oppressed. The historical record shows absolutely no evidence that these people were being oppressed at all. But back to the question. of the line in the sand that was drawn. That's probably the greatest Alamo myth, and among the easiest to be disproved for those of you who don't know it, it's that the commander William Travis

summoned the men out into the Alamo Plaza where they were surrounded on all sides by Mexican soldiers, drew a line in the sand with a sword and saying, all those who will fight for freedom, cross this and we will do battle. We now know comprehensively that this was a myth created some 50 years later by an amateur historian who lived over in East Texas.

But just even the idea, they didn't choose to be there. The fact is they were just a garrison in San Antonio. Travis and Jim Bowie were warned again and again that Santa Ana was on his way. And in part because these reports were being brought to him by Mexican-American scouts, they didn't trust because they were Mexican-American. They ignored them by and large, or they certainly didn't take them seriously enough to retreat. And so when Santa Ana's cavalry, First Cavalry,

shows up seemingly out of nowhere, they're absolutely stunned. And they are these stories of them literally scrambling into the Alamo itself, grabbing guns, grabbing cattle, everything. In other words, they were utterly not prepared. So if you take this to the next step, which is that these men fought for bravery and for all, They fought to their deaths because that's what people do when they're faced with overwhelming

odds. They have nothing to do but fight for their death. There was no choice to be there and be brave soldiers. Santa Ana made clear they were all going to be killed because they were pirates, illegally stealing sovereign land, and most of them were killed. But even the idea that they fought and died in place, as every Anglo historian has written for 180 years, turns out to me not true. We now know from Mexican accounts that between a third and a half of the defenders actually broke and ran outside the Alamo into open land trying to get away.

Now, let's be clear. Nobody's saying these men were cowards, far from it. It's just that they had no other choice. They were being overrun by overwhelming numbers for, what is it, you know, 4,000 Mexicans to 180 Texans. And by and large, every single one of them was run down and killed by Mexican Lancers. And then, of course, the ultimate justification for the Alamo has always been that these men's heroism bought time for San Houston to put together the army that ultimately six weeks later defeated Santa Ana at San Jacino. We know that Santa Ana had told Mexico City that he planned, I'm forgetting the exact dates here, but planned to take the out, take San Antonio on a certain day. and in the end he ended up being delayed by four days. And those four days were not some critical moments. Houston barely even had an army during those four days.

The criticality, though, the incredibly important thing about the Alamo, and I'll just finish up with this, is that its legend, which as Chris points out, erupted almost immediately, was in fact used to bolster the morale of, the new Texas troops. It really did give them something to fight for. It turned them from a rabble into kind of a desperate small army. And when they, you know, charged across the grasses at San Sino that day six weeks later, they were yelling, remember the Alamo. They were yelling, remember Goliad, the other great massacre. So the Alamo, it mattered, but as a myth, almost from the beginning.

Can you talk about the Goliad real quick? Because I think that's, we just don't ever hear, I don't ever hear that story for obvious reasons. Goliad was the other massacre. It was actually a true massacre. I don't, I mean, I misspoke because I don't like to say that there was a massacre at the Alamo because the Texans at Alamo fought. They only fought for 45 minutes, but they fought back. And they killed Mexican soldiers, young men who were defending their country from invaders. Goliad is a different case, though, because you had James Fannin and his troops, much larger garrison. I forget the exact number of 400. It was more than twice the size of the alma. I was going to say about 400 or so troops, and he gets surrounded and he surrenders. The Mexican general at Goliad did not want to execute them. Heath captured them as foreign troops who had surrendered and was hoping to treat them as you would any other prisoner.

But Santa Ana said no. These guys are pirates. They're invaders. They're not legitimate soldiers. They're pirates. And under international law at the time, that's a pretty accurate description. And the thing is about pirates is you get to execute them on the spot. And so that's what San Anna ordered.

And that's eventually what happened. Fanon and his troops were marched out into an open field and systematically executed without the ability to defend themselves. Fanon was a bit of a mess as a commander. The fact that these Texians had surrendered, I think also hurt their case in terms of history. And also, Goliad didn't have a San Antonio around it. And they didn't have Dina DeZavala and Clara Driscoll, two women who, two generations later, would make the Alamo a personal cause and attract national attention to it.

The other thing Goliad didn't have was the thing that really has made the Alamo resonate with so many people down the years. And that is it didn't have a commander named William Travis writing these incredibly eloquent spin-heavy notes, bemoaning his situation and pleading for reinforcements to fight against these brown-skinned mongrel hordes that he was standing, you know, at the gates of civilization, fighting for freedom. The guy would have made a splendid politician or a splendid PR man. And that's really, I think, as much as anything, what enshrined the Alamo, what made it not just more important to history than Goliad, but more important to history than almost any battle of its size you can find on any battlefield anywhere in the world. None of them quite, you know, the deaths of 200 men, you'd be hard to find an incident like this that is any more famous than the Alamo is.

become. Now, how does this go from Texas story? We've already explained how it goes to, becomes like a national story. How does it become global? And why does Phil Collins get involved? You know, this is a lesson in why you should not allow your children to watch Disney films. It was the Walt Disney TV series, really, that made Davy Crockett a household name. He almost, He was a minor footnote in history before Walt Disney came along and made him famous all around the world. A young Phil Collins watched the Disney program at his home in London and then immediately went in the backyard and drew the facade of the Alamo across his garden wall. His little British toy soldiers suddenly became Texians and Mexicans fighting for liberty. And that went even further, right?

because I think a lot of Western democracies saw the very careful, a carefully crafted metaphor for the Cold War in the Disney piece. And then later the John Wayne piece. And then, of course, we have Lyndon Baines Johnson, our only truly, our first Texas raised president who comes out and just won't stop talking about the Alamo. And he uses the Alamo as justification for sending troops to Vietnam. He goes, no South Vietnamese.

They're like William Barrett Travis at the Alamo. Who's going to help him? I'm not going to let them die. And so he's sending thousands of U.S. troops over there. And it just builds from there. Well, you also got to remember. Johnson had Alamo fever every bit of bad, every bit as bad, apparently is the Tomlinson. Alamo fever referring to the many Texans down through the years who have claimed to have ancestors

who died at the Alamo. LBJ did the exact same thing. Washington reporters caught him at it. You know, he just, all they could say was, I'm just so proud. Though that's really the combination of Disney, John Wayne, and LBJ is really what took the Alamo from a Texas thing to an international thing, to a symbol of pretty much anything you want to be a symbol. All right, Angry Planet listeners, we're going to pause there for a break. We will be right back after this.

All right, Angry Planet listeners, welcome back. We are talking about. The Alamo. All right. Let's zoom out and get to the present moment then. I'm glad I'm talking to y'all now because it's been an interesting couple days. But it's very interesting the environment that I think this book is released into right now. Because we are having these discussions and fights, I'll call them fights all around the country,

about how we're going to teach American history. And so this is this perfect case study for how, new information, well, not even new information, but like factual information will be received and what myths we want to hold on to and which ones we want to keep teaching. What is, what's going on in Texas right now and why is the lieutenant governor pissed at y'all? Well, the New York Times is calling 2021 the year of the history wars. And we've had either the good or the bad luck to come up with a book that has been plot. down right smack in the middle of it. And while the rest of the country may be arguing about the

Revolutionary War or the Civil War in Texas, as often happens, it's about Texas. And what you have in a nutshell is an accepted history, accepted by the populace, if you will, over 150 years. That was authored by White Man in a time that white men dominated Texas politics, media, and academia. And what's happened over the last 50, 60 years is that other people, including people of color, including in this case, Mexican Americans, have gone to college, have done their own research, and come up with different ways of viewing all this. We trace the origins of what some people call Alamo revisionism, in fact, to the oral traditions of the Tijuana community, the Mexican American community in Texas.

And it rose in the 60s, the first controversy. The first controversies over the manner first of Davy Crockett's death arose during the 70s and really got going in the 90s. And the amazing thing about this, Matthew, is that what we're writing here is widely accepted in academia today. This is not some radical crazy thing. This is what research by U.S. and Texas scholars now is generally accepted. We had, Chris and I had to chuckle recently when a Fort Worth columnist went to a UT professor and said, what's the big deal? And the professor basically said, I don't know. There's nothing new here. We'd like to say there is a good deal new in the book, but the general thrust of the importance of

slavery, of some of the things we've talked about that have had to be revised about the battle are widely accepted. This is not crazy stuff that we're writing about and forget the alamo. Well, it's not like it's not based on primary sources, right? Like there's a lot of, sorry, go ahead. Yeah, no, absolutely. It is based on primary sources. And H.W. Brands in the Washington Post, Alan Graybill in the Wall Street Journal, both esteemed Texas history professors were like, ho-hum, yeah, yeah, they got it right. Too bad the politicians won't believe it. And that's where I think we began to get into trouble. Because we have these history wars going on.

our book came out in the middle of it. Conservative Texas groups want their chance to poke at this bear. And that's what the Texas Public Policy Foundation did about three days before we were scheduled to speak at the Bullock Texas State History Museum. We were invited by the museum. We were also invited by the Writers League of Texas to speak. We suggested that we combine those two events, larger crowd, less traction on us. us, both sides agreed. But when TPPF found out, they started tweeting and posting messages to the governor, lieutenant governor, and the Speaker of the House of the Texas legislature calling on them to

cancel our event. They compared our book to the 1619 project done by the New York Times. Bless their heart, I am so flattered by being compared to the 1619 project. However, The lieutenant governor took the bait, called the director of the Bullock Museum, and had her cancel our event. We found out a couple hours before we were scheduled to go on. I went to Twitter. My tweet went viral. And so the lieutenant governor the next day put out his own tweet saying, yeah, I did it. Because I don't want this fact-free book discussed at the Texas State History Museum.

where Brian and I have both spoken before about previous books. It is a public forum. So I think we've got a pretty clear First Amendment violation. A government official cannot discriminate against us based on our viewpoint. But I don't think Lieutenant Governor Patrick cares. I think he sees this as a chance to rally his supporters to point out how he's canceling the left the way Twitter and Facebook canceled Donald Trump. Trump. The most ironic thing, of course, is that Patrick had sent out an email a couple of hours before our event, campaign fundraising, promising his supporters that he would protect the First

Amendment rights of all Texans. And then a couple hours later, he cancels us. We are caught up in those politics. I stand by the 12 pages of bibliography. I stand by the hundreds of end notes, primary sources and secondary sources. They don't have a leg to stand up. but at this point, I think they just see us as an opportunity to make hay while the sun shines. The reaction has just been overwhelming. Every day we think this is going to blow over. And we've got the Washington boats calling us to write op-eds. We've been on MSNBC once.

I'm going on again tonight. I'm going on tonight, Chris went on Monday night. And every day, just people are starting to realize what was done. And Governor Patrick, Lieutenant Governor Patrick has every. right to disagree with us. We don't believe legally he had the right to de-platform our event. We think, I mean, frankly, it's sad that something like this could happen in 21st century America that a public official is just frightened by a new set of ideas and decides people shouldn't have a right to entertain them, to consider them. The fact is that that's not America.

In America, we fight the battle of ideas and the best ideas win, whether it's on the left or the right, and both sides have been guilty about this. You don't just cancel people. You don't prevent them from talking. You let the ideas out there. And if there are lousy ideas, they will go away. They will be defeated. And that appears to be what Patrick can't stand. He is just obviously frightened by the spread of these new ideas, believing they somehow threaten him.

and those who agree with it. Also a carpet beggar. I'll just point out, Dan Patrick, but that's a whole other discussion. It is interesting to me because the reaction is so angry. Is there, how do you get through to, is it even possible to get through to what you broadly call Alamo supremacist? Oh, I don't think so. I think the, I don't think we're going to get through to them.

they have tied their personal identity to this, their sense of self-worth is tied to the alleged heroism of their ancestors. They buy hundreds of books that pile praise on these early Texians for owning slaves and massacring Mexican-Americans and ethnic cleansing the towns. the towns of San Antonio and Victoria, Texas. I don't know how to reach them. The one thing I do want is, you know, I was a war correspondent with the Associated Press for 14 years, and I spent two years in Iraq, and I would really someday like to be able to go to a war zone where Americans are not calling their forward operating base the Alamo and not understanding that the tech seems lost at the alamo and maybe that's not a good thing to name your forward operating base. We, Matthew, I think we're aiming this book really more at what in politics would be called the undecided.

People maybe who have not in time, don't know all this. And we're aiming it to people who are able to court new ideas, who are curious, who want to reclaim the actual alamo rather than the fancable alamo. Alamo. Chris is right. There are some people that will probably never get to. But the fact is this is not some serendipitous thing. There's a reason we should be talking about this. Now, any day now, any year now, the census strongly indicates Mexican Americans are going to be a majority in Texas. Anglos are what? Only 41% now. Given how this narrative has been used to suppress and oppress Mexican Americans in Texas for a long time, we think it's high time that we sort out what actually happened.

It's time that Texans do something that we haven't been very good at over the years. And that's have an actual constructive debate about our history, about what actually happened and what it actually means. And then it should include people other than old white guys. And I say that fully aware that Chris and I are. So, yeah, we can, Chris and I can both get up a little bit on our soapbox here when we think that people basically, look, I think 19 out of 20 of the people who are objecting this book, not only haven't read it, they can't get beyond, they can't get past the title,

forget the Alamo, which was obviously a provocative title. We knew full well it was provocative, and we knew that's the best way to get people to pay attention, to turn their heads and to begin maybe to listen and learn a little. That was our hope. What is the current state of the actual location of the actual Alamo right now. And second part to this question, how do you think this history should be physically memorialized? I think everyone who goes to the Alamo today leaves disappointed. The most common phrase heard on Alamo Plaza is, it's so small. And then you go inside and the daughters the Republic of Texas had turned it into a mausoleum. There are very little displays, mostly just flags with lists of the dead. If you speak, you're shushed. You're supposed to

remain silent when you're in the chapel, which is ironic because at the time of the battle, the chapel was decrepit. All the fighting actually took place in the long barrack next door, which was torn down for silly reasons and is now a minuscule little hall of a museum. So I think everyone is agreed that we need to do something about the Alamo. It hasn't been updated since the 1960s. And that's really what triggered the book, was that everyone's looking around saying, we need to get, we need to do something, but we've got no money. A worker at the general land office came up with the idea of asking Phil Collins if he would donate his collection of artifacts, hundreds and hundreds of artifacts that he collected over the years related to

the Alamo. He agreed the general land office. and used that donation to rally support for a $450 million renovation of the entire plaza. The problem is that there are 300 years of history at the Alamo, not just 13 days. So you have 1,800 Native Americans buried in the street in front of the Alamo with hundreds of cars driving on top of them every day. Needless to say, Native Americans are not happy about that. You have an old Whirlworth's building across the street where African Americans desegregated the lunch counter in the 1960s. That right now is a Ripley's haunted house experience.

And the African Americans would like that to be turned into a civil rights memorial. But then you've got the traditionalists, folks like this militia called Texas Freedom Force, where they come in and say, we only recognize the 13th. days, you change one thing and we've got to fight. And they show up with body armor, assault rifles, Kevlar helmets, ready to go to war. Since this kind of blew up, after the George Floyd murder, people started marching on the Alamo. They started recognizing it as a neo-Confederate monument. They spray painted down with white supremacy across the cenotaph, which is a monuments of the dead in front of the Alamo. And it's a big mess now. The city and the state have

renegotiated their plans. They've scaled it down to $250 million, but they're still not telling us what they're going to teach, what they're going to display, what's going to happen with the graves, or what's going to happen with the civil rights memorial. So everything's up in the air. And the fact that we expose that the fact that Phil doesn't really have all that great a provenance, for some of the items that he's been touting, has only made matters worse. So what do you think the future holds for the Alabo? I would say that because we are at least four or five years

from a museum actually being built at the site, one of two things is going to happen. One is this move to try to rehabilitate Alamo Plath, and turn it into a quality experience, this will die like the last three proposals over the last 30 years and the Alamo is going to stay exactly the way it is. I think the second option is that we're going to have a change of leadership in Texas, and they will eventually build a museum to all 300 years of the Alamo's history that recognizes that this is a very complex story.

It's the story of Texas, and it's one we need to tell honestly. Chris Tomlinson, Brian Burrow. The book is Forget the Alamo, the Rise and Fall of an American Myth. Thank you both so much for coming onto Angry Planet and walking us through this. Thanks for having us. Yeah, it was great. Thanks. That's all for this week, Angry Planet listeners. Angry Planet is me, Matthew Galt, Jason Fields, and Kevin Odell, who's created by myself and Jason Fields.

If you like the show, we have a substack where for $9 a month. You get two bonus episodes. Next one's going to be about Afghan interpreters. You get two bonus episodes and commercial-free versions of the mainline broadcast. Go to angryplanet.substack.com or Angry Planet Pod to sign up. Again, that's $9 for two bonus episodes and commercial-free versions of the main line. We will be back next week with another conversation about conflict on an angry planet. Stay safe until then.