Giant Country: Essays on Texas

Remembering the Alamo: The Story of the Texas Republic in Popular Culture

Remembering the Alamo: The Story of the Texas Revolution in Popular Culture Republic. I like the sound of the word. It means people can live free, talk free. Go or come, buy or sell, be drunk or sober, however they choose. Some words can give you afeeling that makes your heart warm. Republic is one of those words. John Wayne's Davy Crockett, The Alamo, 1960 n thinking about the Texas Revolution we would do well to heed the advice of English novelist Hemy Fielding, who long ago urged the importance of scrutinizing popular materials in order better to understand a culture. Wrote Fielding: "I must blame you for taking so little notice of our Diversions and Amusements ; tho' these may perhaps be called the best Characteristics of a People. They are, indeed, the truest Mirrors ...." 235 Giant Country 236 The output of popular materials about the Texas Revolution began almost concurrently with the events taking place in San Antonio, Gonzales, and Washington-on-the-Brazos. The first Texas novel to treat these events was Mexico versus Texas (1838), which, with slight changes, was reissued in 1842 under a new title, Ambrosio de Letinez. Mexico versus Texas used historic events such as the massacre at Goliad and the battle at San Jacinto as background for its twin themes of romance and theological debate set against the conflict between progressive Anglo-American civilization and a retrograde Spanish-Mexican civilization. In the dedication to the 1842 edition, the author of Ambrosio de Letinez, presumed to be Anthony Ganilh, elucidates the overriding meaning of the historic epoch under examination: 'The Texians may be considered as leading a crusade in behalf of modern civilization , against the antiquated prejudices and narrow policy of the middle ages, which still govern the Mexican Republic." What Ganilh expresses indirectly, many other novelists named outright as the scourge of Catholicism. As a somewhat disaffected member of the Catholic priesthood, Ganilh offers many criticisms of Catholic abuses in Mexico and Texas, but his criticism is mild compared to that of later novels. In these novels the Texas cause is championed chiefly on religious grounds, and the image of the Republic is that of a new government founded to relieve its citizens of the dark designs of priests and the hierarchical and undemocratic structure of the Catholic Church. Ganilh exempts from calumny those priests who practice charity and endure hardships for the sake of their flock, but in many of the novels the main villain is a priest. In Augusta Evans Wilson's Inez (1855), for example, Father Alphonso Mazzolin craftily converts the Anglo heroine to Catholicism and tries to force the titular heroine, Inez de Garcia, to marry a cousin for whom she has no love. Father Mazzolin, typical of the evil priest type, possesses "cunning, malignity, and fierceness." His counterpart appears in Amelia Barr's Remember the Alamo (1888) as Fray Ignatius, who has a "dark, cruel face" and is "immovably stern." Ignatius spends much of the novel trying to Remembering the Alamo force the Mexican-born wife of the hero to sign over their property to the church. His hatred for Americans is all-consuming: "If these American heretics were only in my power! ... I would cut a throat-just one throat-every day of my life." In the struggle between the forces of light and the forces of dark, the meaning of the Texas victory is the same in novel after novel. Perhaps Remember the Alamo best summarizes the issues: "For the priesthood foresaw that the triumph of the American element meant the triumph of freedom of conscience, and the abolition of their own despotism." Such anti-Catholicism sometimes finds innovative and sinister imagery in these novels. In Remember the Alamo, for example, the Bowie knife receives a kind of ironic religious sanction. A Mexican who is partisan to the Texan cause calls it a "knife of extreme unction-the oil and wafer are all that remains for the men who feel its edge." And in The Lost Gold of Montezumas (1906) Davy Crockett approves of lead ammunition derived from the ornaments of church windows: "Church lead is as good as any other to kill Greasers with." Such rabid hatred is nearly always the handmaiden of racism. Racist themes are developed chiefly by two means: stereotypes and overt statements. Stereotypes are ubiquitous and involve a system of classes based upon purity of blood lines. On...