Michael: Alright Kevin, quick. When I say 'The Alamo,' what's the first image that pops into your head? Kevin: John Wayne, a coonskin cap, and a bunch of heroic guys fighting to the last man for... freedom? Liberty? Something noble, right? Michael: Exactly. The heroic last stand. Now, what if I told you the real story is about slavery, land fraud, and two British rock stars—one who peed on it and one who's its biggest fan? Kevin: Wait, Ozzy Osbourne and Phil Collins? What on earth do they have to do with the Alamo? This sounds wild. Michael: It's the perfect entry point into the book we're talking about today: 'Forget the Alamo: The Rise and Fall of an American Myth' by Bryan Burrough, Chris Tomlinson, and Jason Stanford. And what's so compelling is who wrote it—not just academics, but a top-tier investigative journalist, a political strategist, and a narrative historian. They came at this sacred Texas story from every angle. Kevin: So it's not your dusty old history book. It's more like an investigation. And it's been pretty polarizing, right? I heard it got a lot of heat in Texas. Michael: Oh, massive heat. It was even canceled from an event at the state history museum. Because it argues that the story we all know is a carefully constructed myth, and the real story starts with something much less heroic: cotton and slavery. Kevin: Okay, you have my full attention. Let's start there. How do two British rock stars represent this whole debate? Michael: The authors use them as perfect bookends. On one side, you have Phil Collins, the ultimate traditionalist. He fell in love with the Disney version of Davy Crockett as a kid and became the world's foremost collector of Alamo artifacts. He believes in the heroism, the sacrifice, the whole nine yards. He's the ultimate true believer. Kevin: And on the other side? Michael: You have Ozzy Osbourne. In 1982, in a drunken stupor, he famously urinated on the Cenotaph, the monument to the Alamo defenders. To traditionalists, it was the ultimate act of desecration. To revisionists, it became a legendary, almost punk-rock symbol of challenging a sacred, unquestioned myth. So you have the worshipper and the desecrater. And the book argues the truth lies somewhere in the messy, complicated space between them.

Kevin: That is a fantastic framing. So let's get into that messy space. If the Alamo story isn't primarily about a heroic fight for liberty against a tyrant, what is it about? Michael: It's about money. Specifically, it's about the cotton industry and the institution of slavery that fueled it. The book makes a really stark claim: "Texas as we know it exists only because of slave labor." Kevin: Whoa. That's a heavy statement. Unpack that for me. Michael: In the early 1820s, Mexico, which had just won its independence from Spain, was ideologically liberal. They were against slavery. In fact, they officially abolished it. But they had this huge, empty, and vulnerable territory called Tejas, or Texas. To populate it and create a buffer against Comanche raids and American encroachment, they invited American settlers in. Kevin: And these settlers were mostly from the American South, I'm guessing. Michael: Exactly. They were cotton planters. The invention of the cotton gin had created a massive economic boom, and they saw Texas as the next frontier for cheap land. But their entire economic model was built on the backs of enslaved people. So you have this fundamental, irreconcilable conflict from day one: Anglo settlers pouring into a country to build a slave-based economy, while the country itself has outlawed slavery. Kevin: Hold on. This is Stephen F. Austin? The 'Father of Texas'? And he was basically arguing for slavery in a country that had banned it? Michael: He was the chief lobbyist for it! The book details his years of political maneuvering in Mexico City. He wasn't some fire-breathing ideologue; he was a pragmatic businessman. He knew that without the promise of slave labor, American settlers wouldn't come. His letters are brutally honest. He wrote, "Nothing is wanted but money, and negros are necessary to make it." Kevin: That is incredibly blunt. So how did they get around Mexico's laws? Michael: They created these elaborate legal fictions. When Mexico cracked down, Austin and the colonists came up with a scheme to reclassify enslaved people as "indentured servants for life." They'd sign these sham contracts that made it impossible for them to ever buy their freedom. It was a workaround, a lie to maintain the slave economy. Kevin: So the whole "tyranny" of Santa Anna... where does that fit in? Michael: Santa Anna was definitely a centralist dictator who dissolved the Mexican Congress and cracked down on states' rights. That's true. But for the Anglo colonists, the ultimate "tyranny" was the Mexican government's consistent, years-long effort to enforce its own anti-slavery laws. Every time Mexico tried to limit or abolish slavery, the colonists panicked. They saw it as a direct threat to their livelihood, their entire reason for being in Texas. Kevin: So it's less 'Give me liberty or give me death!' and more 'Don't touch my property'? Michael: Precisely. The book argues that the Texas Revolution was, at its core, a pro-slavery rebellion. The fight for "liberty" was, for many of the Anglo leaders like William Barret Travis and Jim Bowie—both of whom were deeply involved in the slave trade—the liberty to own other human beings. That's the uncomfortable truth that the heroic myth was built to hide.

Kevin: Okay, so if the real story is this messy, complicated, and frankly, ugly, how did it become this clean, heroic tale of sacrifice that everyone from John Wayne to my fifth-grade teacher knows? Michael: That's the second major part of the book—the story of the myth-making machine. The Alamo, as a physical place, was actually neglected for decades after the battle. It was a ruin. The U.S. Army used it as a warehouse. A grocery store was built into the Long Barrack, the site of the bloodiest fighting. Kevin: A grocery store? That's wild. So who started building the myth? Michael: It started with early, heavily biased histories. But the real engine of the myth was popular culture in the 20th century. The book points to a comic strip called Texas History Movies, which was published by The Dallas Morning News and distributed to seventh graders across Texas for decades. It was filled with racist caricatures—Mexicans as "greasers," happy-go-lucky slaves, and heroic, square-jawed Anglos. It was pure propaganda, and it shaped the minds of generations of Texans. Kevin: But that's still local. How did it go global? Michael: Two words: Walt Disney. In 1954, Disney released a TV miniseries called Davy Crockett, King of the Wild Frontier. It was a phenomenon. Fess Parker played Crockett as this gentle, folksy, saintly hero. The show cemented the most famous Alamo myth of all: William Barret Travis drawing a line in the sand with his sword, asking all who would stay and die for liberty to cross it. Kevin: And Crockett is the first to cross, right? Michael: Of course. In reality, there's no credible evidence this ever happened. The story came from a single, third-hand account published decades later. But Disney made it gospel. Suddenly, every kid in America had a coonskin cap and knew the Alamo story—or at least, Disney's version of it. The Alamo became a symbol of ultimate American sacrifice for freedom. Kevin: Wow, so the Alamo we know is basically a product of the 1950s Cold War anxiety? It's not even an old myth, it's a modern one! Michael: It's a thoroughly modern myth! And John Wayne took it to the next level. He spent 15 years trying to make his epic film, The Alamo, which came out in 1960. He was a fierce anti-communist, and he explicitly saw the story as a Cold War parable. Kevin: How so? Michael: For Wayne, the Alamo defenders were the free people of the world, standing up for individual liberty and their belief in God. Santa Anna was a stand-in for the godless, tyrannical forces of communism, like the Soviet Union. The film is filled with long, preachy speeches about freedom and republics. It was Wayne's political statement disguised as a historical epic. Kevin: So it's like 'Rocky IV' but with coonskin caps? Michael: That's a perfect analogy! It's using a historical framework to fight a contemporary political battle. And it worked. Between Disney and Wayne, the Alamo was transformed from a messy, regional conflict over slavery into a universal symbol of American courage and the fight for freedom. It's a masterclass in how history gets laundered into myth.

Michael: And that brings us to today, where this carefully built myth is starting to crack, and the backlash is intense. For over a century, the Heroic Anglo Narrative was the only story told. And for many people, especially Mexican-Americans, that story was a source of pain. Kevin: The book talks about this, right? The "seventh-grade story"? Michael: Yes, and it's one of the most powerful parts of the book. The authors interviewed numerous Tejanos—Texans of Mexican descent—who all described the same traumatic experience in their seventh-grade Texas history class. The teacher would tell the heroic story of the Alamo, and then the Anglo kids on the playground would turn to them and say, "Your people killed Davy Crockett." Kevin: That's just brutal. It weaponizes history against kids. Michael: It completely does. It makes them feel like the "other," like the villain in their own state's founding story. The book quotes Rosie Castro, a famous Latina activist and mother of politicians Julián and Joaquin Castro, who said, "I can truly say that I hate that place and everything it stands for." Because for her, it stood for conquest and racism. Kevin: So when did people start pushing back? When did revisionism begin? Michael: It started bubbling up during the Civil Rights movement in the 60s and 70s, but it really exploded in the 90s. The book calls Jeff Long's 1990 book, Duel of Eagles, the "big bang" of Alamo revisionism. It was the first major work to frontally attack the heroic narrative and focus on the role of slavery. Kevin: And I'm guessing it was not well-received by the traditionalists. Michael: The Houston Chronicle warned that Jeff Long might become "the Salman Rushdie of Texas." The backlash was, and still is, ferocious. When the state board of education tried to remove the word "heroic" from the curriculum describing the defenders, the governor and other top politicians had a meltdown, tweeting about "political correctness" and vowing to protect the Alamo's honor. Kevin: It's that deeply ingrained in the political identity of Texas. Michael: It's the state's creation myth. And the fight is still happening right now. The book ends by discussing the current, multi-hundred-million-dollar plan to "reimagine" the Alamo site. And it's a total mess, a battle between all these competing interests. Kevin: And this is where Phil Collins comes back in? Michael: This is where he comes back in. He donated his massive, multi-million dollar collection of artifacts to the state, but with one condition: they had to build a new museum to house it. This donation is the centerpiece of the whole revitalization plan. Kevin: But I have to ask... are the artifacts even real? Michael: That's the million-dollar question, and the book's final, explosive revelation. Many experts and collectors have raised serious doubts. The provenance on many of the most famous items—like a knife supposedly owned by Jim Bowie or a shot pouch from Davy Crockett—is incredibly shaky. The authentication process was done by a small, insular group, and their methods were... unconventional. We're talking about using solvents to reveal "hidden" inscriptions and relying on gut feelings. Kevin: You're kidding. So they're building a massive, state-funded museum for a myth, using potentially fake artifacts? Michael: It's the perfect metaphor for the entire story, isn't it? A monument to a myth, built on a foundation of questionable relics. It encapsulates the entire problem the book lays out.

Kevin: Wow. This is so much bigger than just one battle in 1836. It feels like the Alamo is a microcosm of the larger American struggle over history and identity. Michael: That's exactly it. The book shows you the whole lifecycle of a national myth. It starts with a complex, morally ambiguous historical event rooted in the economics of slavery. Then, that story gets simplified and sanitized by myth-makers in culture and politics, transforming it into a heroic tale of freedom that serves a specific ideological purpose, whether it's celebrating whiteness during Jim Crow or fighting communism during the Cold War. Kevin: And now we're in the final stage: the reckoning. The painful, necessary process of confronting the myth and trying to recover the more complicated truth. Michael: Exactly. And it's a fight. Because when you challenge a myth like the Alamo, you're not just challenging a story. You're challenging people's identity, their sense of patriotism, their entire worldview. That's why the reaction is so visceral. Kevin: It makes you question all the 'heroic' stories we're told. The book isn't just saying 'Forget the Alamo.' It's asking us what we choose to remember and why. What parts of our own history do we conveniently leave out to make ourselves the heroes of the story? Michael: That's the core question. And it's not just for Texas. Every country, every community, has its own Alamo—a story it tells itself to feel good, to feel righteous. The authors are urging us to look past the myth, to embrace the messy, uncomfortable, and more truthful history. Because only by remembering what really happened can we understand who we really are. Kevin: And that's a battle worth fighting. We'd love to hear what you all think. What's a historical myth you grew up with that you later found out was more complicated? Let us know on our socials. Michael: This is Aibrary, signing off.