NONFICTION
Two Books on the Bizarreness of Texas
*
<https://www.facebook.com/dialog/feed?app_id=9869919170&link=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.nytimes.com%2F2021%2F06%2F08%2Fbooks%2Freview%2Fforget-the-alamo-bryan-burrough-chris-tomlinson-jason-stanford-a-single-star-and-bloody-knuckles-bill-minutaglio.html%3Fsmid%3Dfb-share&name=Two%20Books%20on%20the%20Bizarreness%20of%20Texas&redirect_uri=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.facebook.com%2F>
*
<https://api.whatsapp.com/send?text=Two%20Books%20on%20the%20Bizarreness%20of%20Texas%20https%3A%2F%2Fwww.nytimes.com%2F2021%2F06%2F08%2Fbooks%2Freview%2Fforget-the-alamo-bryan-burrough-chris-tomlinson-jason-stanford-a-single-star-and-bloody-knuckles-bill-minutaglio.html%3Fsmid%3Dwa-share>
*
<https://twitter.com/intent/tweet?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.nytimes.com%2F2021%2F06%2F08%2Fbooks%2Freview%2Fforget-the-alamo-bryan-burrough-chris-tomlinson-jason-stanford-a-single-star-and-bloody-knuckles-bill-minutaglio.html%3Fsmid%3Dtw-share&text=Two%20Books%20on%20the%20Bizarreness%20of%20Texas>
*
<mailto:?subject=NYTimes.com%3A%20Two%20Books%20on%20the%20Bizarreness%20of%20Texas&body=From%20The%20New%20York%20Times%3A%0A%0ATwo%20Books%20on%20the%20Bizarreness%20of%20Texas%0A%0A%E2%80%9CForget%20the%20Alamo%2C%E2%80%9D%20by%20Bryan%20Burrough%2C%20Chris%20Tomlinson%20and%20Jason%20Stanford%2C%20and%20%E2%80%9CA%20Single%20Star%20and%20Bloody%20Knuckles%2C%E2%80%9D%20by%20Bill%20Minutaglio%2C%20have%20many%20strange%20stories%20to%20tell%20about%20the%20Lone%20Star%20State.%0A%0Ahttps%3A%2F%2Fwww.nytimes.com%2F2021%2F06%2F08%2Fbooks%2Freview%2Fforget-the-alamo-bryan-burrough-chris-tomlinson-jason-stanford-a-single-star-and-bloody-knuckles-bill-minutaglio.html%3Fsmid%3Dem-share>
*
*
* /4/
A Texas Ranger patrols the Alamo, March 2020.
A Texas Ranger patrols the Alamo, March 2020.Credit...Eric
Gay/Associated Press
ByChristopher Knowlton
* NYT, June 8, 2021
*FORGET THE ALAMO*
*The Rise and Fall of an American Myth*
By Bryan Burrough, Chris Tomlinson and Jason Stanford
*A SINGLE STAR AND BLOODY KNUCKLES*
*A History of Politics and Race in Texas*
By Bill Minutaglio
Sign Up
The columnistMolly Ivins
<https://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/01/washington/01ivins.html>, an acerbic
critic of her native Texas until her death in 2007, once described
politics in the Lone Star State as the “finest form of free
entertainment ever invented.” Here are two new cultural and political
histories that amply prove her point. Both are works of revisionism that
are sure to draw censure from the right for their alleged “correctness,”
and yet both are written with conviction by Texas-loving locals. Both
manage to wring surprising new truths out of old subjects while telling
some tall tales about a very big and very baffling place. One book
recounts the folkloric Battle of the Alamo in 1836, the other the loopy
history of the Texas Statehouse. The topics they cover fit together as
snugly as a pair of soup spoons.
The authors of “Forget the Alamo” —Bryan Burrough
<http://www.bryanburrough.com/>,Chris Tomlinson
<http://christomlinson.net/>andJason Stanford
<https://www.texasmonthly.com/author/jason-stanford/>— are friends who
concocted their book’s premise during a breakfast gabfest and then
managed to pull this jack rabbit out of a Stetson during the pandemic
lockdown. The result requires a tolerance for some lowbrow jocularity,
especially in the opening chapters. At one point they state, “There’s
really no better way to put it: Santa Anna was/pissed/.” Ahem. But the
narrative soon hits its stride, and the story becomes a lively and
absorbing one.
The Alamo, it turns out, is the least understood and most
often/mis/understood of American battlefields. The true history, the
authors note, “remained obscured by a sooty veneer of myth and
folklore.” Much of the fun of the book derives from how deftly it strips
that varnish off and demolishes the prevailing (white) racist
shibboleths — in particular, what the authors call the Heroic Anglo
Narrative of Texas history. That version of the story entirely overlooks
the central role played by the Tejanos, a local people of Spanish
descent who are pictured here much like today’s Kurds, tragically
sandwiched between warring empires. The winning side, the Texians, will
build their economy using slave labor. Why? Because without the use of
human chattel the average cotton or sugar plantation couldn’t possibly
turn a profit. Thus the zealous effort to defend the system well before
and after Juneteenth 1865, when slavery was theoretically pronounced
dead by proclamation at Galveston.
ADVERTISEMENT
Continue reading the main story
<https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/08/books/review/forget-the-alamo-bryan-burrough-chris-tomlinson-jason-stanford-a-single-star-and-bloody-knuckles-bill-minutaglio.html#after-story-ad-1>
“Forget the Alamo” divides neatly in half. The first half recounts the
events leading up to and through the fiasco at the Alamo, and often
reads like a boy’s story of action and adventure, although there is an
absence of heroes in the factual version of the tale. For example, Jim
Bowie, the knife-wielding pioneer of legend, is revealed to be a slave
trader, a swindler and a murderer; William Barret “Buck” Travis is a
racist syphilitic who writes in his diary that he has bedded 56 women;
the coonskin-capped Davy Crockett emerges as a former U.S. congressman
and self-promoter in thrall to his own large ego. Their defense of the
fort is not just foolhardy, it’s weirdly suicidal. “They can no longer
be the holy trinity of Texas, nor can the Alamo be the Shrine of Texas
Liberty,” the authors proclaim with complete justification, drawing
their own Travis-like line in the sand.
The book’s second half is a more discursive examination of the ways
various groups have exploited the myth of the Alamo, weaponizing it as
propaganda, as Sam Houston did when he cried out to his troops to
remember the Alamo, or invoking the myth in defense of white supremacy,
as was the case with “Texas History Movies
<https://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/entries/texas-history-movies>,”
which was in fact a popular racist comic strip that ran in The Dallas
Morning News in the late 1920s; it was later published in book form and
for decades distributed free to all Texas seventh graders. Shockingly
little serious academic study of this touchy subject occurred until the
1980s.
Predictably, Hollywood played a villainous role in spreading the false
narrative of the old fort, notably through John Wayne, who used the
subject to indulge in his own hypermasculine version of nationalism. In
1960 Wayne produced, directed and starred in a nearly three-hour $12
million epic called, fittingly,“The
Alamo,”<https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/1000560-alamo/reviews>in which
he played Davy Crockett. The result was, in Texas parlance, horse pucky
— and a bomb at the box office. The book ends with an amusing account of
the state’s farcical effort to build a $450 million museum to house a
collection of Alamo antiquities compiled by the British pop star Phil
Collins that includes an ammo pouch once used by Crockett to load “Old
Betsy” and a Bowie knife, allegedly bought for $1.5 million. The authors
make a convincing case that the most important items are of dubious, if
not fraudulent, provenance.
In “A Single Star and Bloody Knuckles,”Bill Minutaglio
<http://www.billminutaglio.com/>, a Texas journalist with a saddlebag of
books to his name, takes a decade-by-decade look at Texas politics,
placing particular emphasis on events at the Statehouse and its
succession of unlikely governors, but digressing to include other key
players in the story like Sam Rayburn and Barbara Jordan. He begins with
General Order No. 3, announcing Emancipation in Galveston at the end of
the Civil War, and moves through to the present. Smoothly tackling this
near-herculean research task, he keeps the sweat stains from showing and
writes in prose as cool as a trout stream.
Texas, from its earliest days, championed a form of swashbuckling free
enterprise that minimized the regulatory touch of government. Even
today, the Legislature convenes for only a maximum of 140 days every
other year. Business oversight and federal interference have been
anathema from the outset. In the immediate post-Civil War years,
plantation owners pivoted toward sharecropping and a/patrón/system that
turned freed slaves into impoverished indentured servants with no
ability to vote. Further crimes against humanity appeared later in the
form of the cruel convict-leasing system that was used to build the
roads and railroads across the state’s vast interior. And then big oil
gurgles up into the story: “A maze of miles of pipes, a metallic Oz of
roaring tanks, flares, hoses, storage tanks and train tracks, was
growing on the shallow bays and marshes that a few decades earlier had
been mostly devoid of human presence, except for the crab collectors and
oyster men pushing their flat-bottomed boats past the great blue herons.”
Editors’ Picks
The Little Hedge Fund Taking Down Big Oil
<https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/23/magazine/exxon-mobil-engine-no-1-board.html?action=click&algo=identity&block=editors_picks_recirc&fellback=false&imp_id=440921346&impression_id=95d29000-dd32-11eb-a3d6-474fa6b07906&index=0&pgtype=Article&pool=editors-picks-ls®ion=ccolumn&req_id=590368458&surface=home-featured&variant=0_identity&action=click&module=editorContent&pgtype=Article®ion=CompanionColumn&contentCollection=Trending>
Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter Reflect on 75 Years of Marriage
<https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/04/us/jimmy-rosalynn-carter-anniversary.html?action=click&algo=identity&block=editors_picks_recirc&fellback=false&imp_id=556050362&impression_id=95d2b710-dd32-11eb-a3d6-474fa6b07906&index=1&pgtype=Article&pool=editors-picks-ls®ion=ccolumn&req_id=590368458&surface=home-featured&variant=0_identity&action=click&module=editorContent&pgtype=Article®ion=CompanionColumn&contentCollection=Trending>
Roger Federer’s Gift to Tennis: A Shot That Players Love to Hit
<https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/03/sports/tennis/wimbledon-forehand-slice-squash-shot-federer.html?action=click&algo=identity&block=editors_picks_recirc&fellback=false&imp_id=391258290&impression_id=95d2b711-dd32-11eb-a3d6-474fa6b07906&index=2&pgtype=Article&pool=editors-picks-ls®ion=ccolumn&req_id=590368458&surface=home-featured&variant=0_identity&action=click&module=editorContent&pgtype=Article®ion=CompanionColumn&contentCollection=Trending>
Continue reading the main story
<https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/08/books/review/forget-the-alamo-bryan-burrough-chris-tomlinson-jason-stanford-a-single-star-and-bloody-knuckles-bill-minutaglio.html?action=click&module=editorContent&pgtype=Article®ion=CompanionColumn&contentCollection=Trending#after-pp_edpick>
ADVERTISEMENT
Continue reading the main story
<https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/08/books/review/forget-the-alamo-bryan-burrough-chris-tomlinson-jason-stanford-a-single-star-and-bloody-knuckles-bill-minutaglio.html#after-story-ad-2>
Back at the Statehouse in Austin, Minutaglio debunks a succession of the
deplorables who clearly deserve it. A memorable pair are the
husband-and-wife griftersPa and Ma Ferguson
<https://www.ntcc.edu/sites/default/files/2018-11/Honors%20Essay%20-%20Ma%20and%20Pa%20Ferguson%20by%20Morgan%20Capps.pdf>,
who together serve three terms (1915-17, 1925-27, 1933-35) and dispense
pardons like gumdrops to felons — for a modest stipend, of course. Then
there is “Pass the Biscuits” Pappy O’Daniel, a flour magnate with a
folksy manner who exploits the new technology of radio and a populist
message to propel himself into the governor’s chair in 1939, in much the
way our 45th president used Twitter to troll a path to the White House.
Minutaglio also profiles interesting, if lesser-known, political actors,
especially among the Latino community, admirable figures like the
journalist and educatorJovita Idár
<https://www.womenshistory.org/education-resources/biographies/jovita-idar>and
the organizerEmma Tenayuca
<https://www.nps.gov/people/emma-tenayuca.htm>, who raised political
awareness and encouraged activism in San Antonio, where votes had been
suppressed or elections rigged for generations.
The book might have been better had it ended in the 1970s, before
Minutaglio interjects himself more directly into the narrative. Still,
he is strong on the parabolic career of Gov. Ann Richards and on the
roles that Lee Atwater and Karl Rove played in the miraculous makeovers
of the two George Bushes before their runs for the White House. When
Minutaglio visits various cemeteries around the state to examine the
gravestones of Texas luminaries, he writes movingly of the nearby
“hanging” trees where not many years before, horrific tortures and
lynchings drew large crowds.
The stoking of white nationalism and the promoting of voter suppression
are all-too-familiar tropes in our politics — as American as rancid
apple pie. These two books can’t change those facts, but they may
succeed at altering the way we view them.
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Groups.io Links: You receive all messages sent to this group.
View/Reply Online (#9700): https://groups.io/g/marxmail/message/9700
Mute This Topic: https://groups.io/mt/83989691/21656
-=-=-
POSTING RULES & NOTES
#1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message.
#2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived.
#3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern.
#4 Do not exceed five posts a day.
-=-=-
Group Owner: [email protected]
Unsubscribe: https://groups.io/g/marxmail/leave/8674936/21656/1316126222/xyzzy
[[email protected]]
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
