Alamo story evolves in Hollywood's new movie (Kerry social justice vs Bush freedom)

.....For more than a century, popular lore and classroom teachers portrayed the defenders as virtually all Anglo, heroically battling a faceless Mexican army.

Textbooks published 40 years ago presented good guys (the Texan defenders) and bad guys (the Mexican army), says Jim Kracht, associate dean for academic affairs in the College of Education and Human Development at Texas A&M University.

"From Mexico's point of view, people in Texas weren't observing their national laws," he says. "They weren't becoming Catholic, like they had pledged to do. They were trading with the United States, which they had pledged not to do. They were trying to bring slavery into Texas, which was against Mexico's national laws."

After being ignored for decades in both classrooms and popular culture, that more complicated view is spreading, even in the movies.

...........The importance of the Alamo isn't so much about what happened there -- more people died at Goliad, and the ultimate Texan victory came at San Jacinto the following month.

"The idea was that the men at the Alamo had not surrendered and had fought to the end," says Winders, author of Sacrificed at the Alamo: Tragedy and Triumph in the Texas Revolution. "Where there is no disgrace in surrendering, it does not get you the icon status that sacrifice does."

But even under that rubric, the Alamo mythology is always shifting, in some ways the perfect mirror, reflecting whatever the viewer wants to see.

"The Alamo seems to be a universal symbol," says Gilbert Cuthbertson, a political science professor at Rice University. "It's a gateway. If you go in as a (John) Kerry supporter, you are going to see the Alamo as a symbol of social justice and the struggle for civil rights. If you go in as a (George W.) Bush supporter, you're going to see the Alamo as a symbol of freedom and individualism.

"The Alamo has this focusing effect, in which you can see almost any set of political values that you want to, because it reflects universal kinds of struggle."

It was the same with the American Revolution...

I agree with you, but I think there were some small differences. In the colonies, the majority of people were British subjects. There was no place for them to go "home" to except to the same system of government they had in the colonies. Many of the Texians had moved from the southern U.S. to Mexico carrying, as one Mexican officer said, "their constitution in their back pocket." If they thought the government was too repressive, they could have, in fact, returned to a more liberal country.

Many of the defenders in the Alamo were Mexican citizens who, like the patriots of the Revolution, were seeking liberty for themselves. In their case, it was the same with the American Revolution, again with a small difference. They were assisted and in some cases moved forward by agitators from an expansionist U.S. that had visions of "Manifest Destiny" (although the term had not been coined yet). There is some evidence that the U.S. provided support to filibusters whose sole purpose was to agitate for liberty in the Texas area.

This isn't revisionist, unless you feel that considering the truth is revisionist. In those years, North America was a very open land, and governments were vying for possession of it. A stonger government taking land from a weaker government in retribution for a real or imagined affront was the order of the day throughout the world (and anyone who suggests that tribal groups on any particular continent represent models of cooperative living are really just saying that the scale of the land-grab is what makes the difference).

As with the Mexicans at Chapultapec, the defenders of the Alamo fought courageously against impossible odds, and in the face of knowing what their ultimate fate would likely be. Whether you consider them heros or pawns generally comes down to whether you think that the people in the area enjoy greater freedom as part of the U.S., or that they would be better off to still be part of Mexico.

There is some evidence that the U.S. provided support to filibusters whose sole purpose was to agitate for liberty in the Texas area.

The US. The government in Washington. Would this have been the Jackson administration? The Adams administration? The Monroe administration? Tell me more.

On the other hand, if you are speaking of the activities of individual Americans (and private American associations), it would hardly be proper to characterize such activities as having been undertaken by the US, would it?

Given how close Jackson came to being tainted with having participated in Burr's treason/adventure during the Jefferson administration, I would be particularly interested to find any credible report that he was conniving with the Texicans to separate their province from Mexico. Additionally, I've been reading where, in 1830, Texican Col. Milam sought to establish fortifications on the Red River in what is now Arkansas; as well as disputes between Arkansas and Mexico/Texas over people living it what was then Miller County Arkansas (and later became, in part, Bowie and Cass Counties in Texas). I haven't seen a lot of "wink wink nod nod" in the correspondence between Washington and the Arkansas and Texican authorities.

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