There is a new British royal family “tell-all” book out called Battle of the Brothers, which among other things tells us that former royal communications director and now chief aide of Prince William, Jason Knauf, was the source of much of the salacious gossip about Meghan Markle “not understanding” how she was supposed to “act,” was a “bully,” that she was a “sociopath,” and she and Prince Harry were “made” for each other because they were both “damaged goods.” But Knauf was likely not motivate to be a peacemaker, and not only because it is his “job” to put Prince William in the best possible light; we learn that he is Texas-born, and it is entirely possible that he poisoned people’s mind with a Texas racist’s ideas about what to “expect” from “black people.” I am frankly shocked (well, not really) that the royal family would actually hire anyone from a former Confederate slave state who has delusions of racial grandeur, and naturally feels Markle would in “normal” circumstances be his “inferior.”
That is isn’t the only questionable connection between the UK and Texas. British pop singer Phil Collins is such a huge “fan” of the myth of the Alamo that he had collected hundreds of artifacts related to it, so much so that he believed them to possess some “cosmic” energy. The Daily Mail has likened him to be “one drumstick shy of a pair” in this regard. Collins apparently is so deeply committed to the “sanctity” of the “myth” of the Alamo that he donated his collection to a new Alamo museum. One thing that the Motown fan Collins doesn’t seem to understand is that the de facto result of the Texas “revolution” was the legalization and growth of slavery in that state, and indeed what many people seem to forget in all this “lone star” business was that Texas was not just a Confederate slave state, but practiced its own form of Jim Crow and lynching on its Mexican residents long before it came into vogue in other Southern states.
There is a new book just out entitled Forget the Alamo: The Rise and Fall of an American Myth, written by Bryan Burrough, Chris Tomlinson and Jason Stafford that throws more gasoline on the flames of Texas hypocrisy:
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 to the last 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.
Except that very little of that tale is exactly true. On the other side is:
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. Some think the whole thing was an American conspiracy to steal Texas from Mexico. Many don’t believe Crockett went down fighting, as John Wayne famously did in his 1960s movie The Alamo. Almost none of them believe Travis drew that fateful line in the Alamo sand.
Texas school children are required to be taught the “heroic” version of not just the Alamo, but of white Texas in general. The authors don’t hold back on what they believe the evidence actually shows:
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.
The authors note that “Anglos” are still writing the history books, reporting the news, and making the laws in Texas. Minority opinion in Texas are lone voices in the wilderness. “How on earth can Texas still defend naming dozens of schools, roads, and towns after a brazen slave trader and swindler like Jim Bowie?” the authors ask. Even George P. Bush—the son of Jeb Bush and whose mother is Mexican-American—found himself so fiercely attacked by “traditionalists” for just suggesting recognizing the contribution of Tejanos, that he weaseled his way out of what was just a “suggestion.”
American Anglos had been allowed into Texas so long as they became Mexican citizens, learned Spanish and obeyed its laws. For the most part, these “Texians” had no intention of doing any of those things. There was a “clash of cultures,” ethnic hatred, and taxes. But as the authors point out, the true “underlying” theme of the Texas “revolution” was about money, and how one made it, to the objections of the Mexican government. Anglos had established “sprawling cotton fields” in east Texas, and to the Anglos it was under threat; but what was, exactly?
What was it they feared losing? In the pamphlets and newspaper articles that swirled through the revolt, it was always called “property.” The inarguable fact is that there was only one kind of property the Mexican government ever tried to take from its American colonists, and it tried to do so repeatedly. In the ten years before the Alamo, this single disagreement brought Texians and Mexican troops to the brink of warfare multiple times. So, what did the Mexicans want to take? It wasn’t the cotton. Or the land it was grown on. It was the third leg of the Texas economic stool, the “property” in which Texas farmers had invested more money, more working capital, than any other asset: the slaves.
The book goes on to debunk the many myths of the Alamo, citing evidence—much of it from the testimony of Mexican soldiers who were actually there—that Crockett didn’t fight to his last bullet, but was killed trying to surrender, and that when it was clear the battle was lost, many of the defenders took to their heals like jackrabbits, only to be hunted down and killed. Typically ignored is not whether these men supported slavery or not personally, but the fact their actions were de facto to maintain and enlarge the “property” of slavery in the state; as noted before in another post, eventually over 150,000 slaves were still in Texas by the end of the Civil War. Another truth is that the Texas “revolution” came just a decade before the Mexican-American War, which both Abraham Lincoln and Ulysses S. Grant called a shameful war of aggression by a stronger nation against a weaker one. In fact, it is entirely possible that the “revolution” was fomented in Washington D.C. by those seeking to gauge the ability of Mexico to defend its territory north of the Rio Grande.
The authors note that for 50 years, the Alamo was largely ignored and left in decrepit condition; the 50th anniversary of the battle passed virtually unnoticed in 1886, when a San Antonio newspaper called for the observation of “prominent anniversaries of Texas histories.” This led to the creation of the De Zavala Daughters and then The Daughters of the Republic of Texas, the latter whose leader, wealthy socialite Clara Driscoll, wanted to demolish the “Long Barrack” where the fighting took place—not in the church as many believed, where in fact the non-combatants (mainly women) hid. Aldina De Zavala, who was the granddaughter of Lorenzo De Zavala, who was of Mexican descent and a prominent political figure in the founding of the “republic,” initially led the effort to restore the site, but Driscoll wanted much of it torn down and made into a theme park “commemorating” the Alamo.
The battle between the two raged for decades until the Georgia-born Oscar Colquitt became governor in 1911. Colquitt was a typical Southern racist. In response to border violence during the Mexican Revolution, Colquitt was responsible for sending out Texas Rangers to “restore order”—meaning “massacring Mexican and Tejano civilians by the dozens.” The authors note that Colquitt found the story of the Alamo useful, as way “to glorify the victory of Texas over the hated Mexicans. It served the governor’s tough anti-Mexican talk, and he hoped, would subtly excuse the Rangers’ atrocities.”
Although Colquitt failed in court to preserve the Long Barrack in its original form—Driscoll, who wanted that park built on the grounds, succeeded in having much of it torn down, leaving behind a ten-foot high relic of wall that essentially means nothing. Although Colquitt lost that battle, he won the “battle” for its “interpretation,” which has never really changed in the minds of “traditionalists.” Unsurprisingly, as with the various “Daughters of” organizations around the country, the Daughters of the Republic of Texas continue to defend the racist myth to their last breath against all those pesky “revisionists.”
Texas is inching closer demographically to a Democratic voting majority, but you’d never know it because of the radicalization of the Republican right, in which minorities have been rendered virtually invisible. In the 2014 governor’s race, Democrat Wendy Davis received just 38.9 percent of the vote, yet in 2018 Lupe Valdez—seemingly the “weaker” candidate because she is a dark-skinned Latina—won 42.5 percent of the vote. Currently only 41 percent of the state’s population is non-Hispanic white, and Gov. Greg Abbott—who will be running for a third term in 2022—has in a recent press conference declared the state to be under “invasion,” and the “invaders” are coming to your house. In the same press conference, Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick linked immigrants to “future crime.” Both have been attacked for the same rhetoric that inspired the El Paso mass shooting, and it is time for Latino voters to get a grip on reality, especially in a state that led the attempt to kill the Affordable Care Act, and is attempting to take away their right to vote—even for white Republicans who hate them.
A story in Buzzfeed after the election wondered why so many Latinos in Texas voted for Trump despite him calling them an “infestation,” and so many in the Fox News orbit calling them “diseased” and a danger to the “culture.” One Latino voter for Trump ironically pointed out that “We are teachers, we are lawyers, we are doctors, we are everything. We aren’t just the people who are cleaning your house.” That’s all fine and dandy, but what was Trump saying you “really” are? Rapists, violent criminals, drug dealers, etc. And yes, most white Republicans you voted with believe that too. Much of the Latino Republican vote is a bigoted “reaction” to being lumped in with “one of them”; but what they don’t seem to realize that it doesn’t matter if you have a college degree or are a veteran—you are what ignorant people “see.”
There are some recent books that attempt to portray the reality of racial injustice in Texas, such as The Injustice Never Leaves You: Anti-Mexican Violence in Texas and Decade of Betrayal: Mexican Repatriation in the 1930s, the latter which recounted how as many as 600,000 U.S. citizens of Mexican descent were literally rounded-up and “deported” with little more than what they could carry during the Depression—a crime just as heinous as the Japanese internment (and perhaps even worse), but never spoken of, and certainly a canker sore on FDR’s record for not attempting to stop.
The anger aroused by the attempt to tell the truth about Texas is seen on Amazon’s item page for Forget the Alamo; 33 percent of the reviews are those one-star reviews from “unverified” purchasers, meaning people who are just reacting to the book’s descriptions or previews. The only “verified” one-star reviewer had just this to say: “Just as there were no rank and file soldiers on either side fighting to free slaves during the Civil War, there were no Texans fighting to preserve slavery or Mexicans fighting to end it during the Texas Revolution. Both fights were for Independence.” The problem with that argument is the way it can be applied to WWII: the Germans at home didn’t “know” their countrymen were slaughtering 6 million Jews, and millions more in Poland and on the Eastern Front for “Greater Germany.” And on the “other side,” it could also be said that allied soldiers were not fighting to end the Holocaust.
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