[News] Glorifying the Fight for Slavery in Texas, Forget the Alamo!

Fri Apr 23 08:59:36 EDT 2004

Glorifying the Fight for Slavery in Texas
   Forget the Alamo!

   By DON SANTINA
   April 8, 2004

   Yet another film version of the story of the Alamo is about to descend on
a movie theatre near you. Due to production delays, we have been watching
trailers and previews for over four months. According to the hoopla, the
defenders of the Alamo fought for "liberty" and "freedom" and--as their
noble commander says in a film clip-- to "show the world what patriots are
made of." A stirring ad run during the Superbowl intoned that, at the Alamo,
"Ordinary men will become heroes."

   The perpetuation of this myth of the Alamo is a dishonest exploitation of
our history. The fact is that the defenders of the Alamo fought for white
supremacy and slavery. This latest Hollywood edition of the Alamo story is
not much different than the last half dozen or so Alamo movies, such as the
1937 Heroes of the Alamo. The most recent Alamo film saga was John Wayne's
lumbering effort in 1960, complete with a ponderous musical score and a cast
of thousands. All of these films inevitably fall into a category known as
White Man Movie Fiction.

   WMMF, as it is more commonly known, does not allow a non-white actor in a
movie unless the character is a servant, a comedian, or a criminal. The
result is that the white man is always the central focus, or hero, of
whatever action or event is being portrayed, regardless of historical fact.
The first western movie, the all- white Great Train Robbery of 1903, set the
tone for this fictional mythology of America's story of the Frontier.

   We know that-in the Old West trail drives--at least one out of every five
cowboys was black. Yet hardly any black characters have been portrayed in
the thousands of western films made during the past 100 years. Have you seen
any black guys on horses with Gene Autry, Roy
   Rogers, John Wayne, Jimmie Stewart, or Gary Cooper? What about television
serials like Gunsmoke and Bonanza? Search for black cowboys in Kevin
Costner's Wyatt Earp and Kurt Russell's Tombstone.

   You get the drift.

   The earliest major promulgator of WMMF was the highly esteemed director
D.W. Griffith, who was a Southerner. Griffith--like Hitler favorite Leni
Rienfenstahl--is excused for his blatant and pervading racism by film
savants because of his technical innovations and artistic contributions to
the film industry.

   No one wants to be reminded that Griffith's epic 1915 film The Birth of a
Nation, which was based on a fictional and inflammatory retelling of the
Reconstruction period, contributed to the massive rebirth of the Ku Klux
Klan in the 1920's. We also want to forget that lynchings increased and
pogroms were carried out against black people throughout the South whenever
Griffith's movie was shown. The white supremacist massacres of black people
in Rosewood, Florida and Tulsa, Oklahoma have been directly linked to local
screenings of Griffith's movie.

   D.W. Griffith also made one of the first-if not the first-fictional movies
of the Alamo story, The Martyrs of the Alamo. The through line for Griffith
here is the White Man As Hero; Non-White Man As Bad Guy. If White Man Dies,
He Dies For a Good Cause; If Non-White Man Dies, Good Riddance. Native
Americans and Mexicans routinely fell into the Good Riddance
classifications.

   Another early Western film maker, William S. Hart, continued this
tradition in his movies. One of the most notorious subtitles in Hart's
silent movie Hell's Hinges describes the villain as "mingling the oily
craftiness of a Mexican with the deadly treachery of a attler, no man's open
enemy and no man's friend." Phew!

   So what was the Alamo standoff really about?
   Well, for starters, let's take a look at one of the most legendary
defenders of the Alamo, Jim Bowie.

   Jim Bowie is widely celebrated in film (both Alan Ladd and Richard Widmark
portrayed him) and television (a two year run in the '50's) as a daring and
resourceful adventurer famed for the development and usage of a long-bladed
knife which became known as the "Bowie knife."

   The facts are that Bowie was much more than a back alley knife fighter.
Shortly after the War of 1812, he and his brother Rezin went into business
as slave traders with the pirate Jean Lafitte. In the 1820's they used their
   profits from the slave trade to become land speculators and eventually
established a sugar plantation with slave labor in Louisiana. Ten years
later they sold that business, and the 82 slaves who worked on it, for
$90,000.

   Bowie took his share of the profits and went to "Texas" to join Stephen F.
Austin's group of Anglo colonists. He then became involved in a scheme to
fraudulently acquire land grants from the Mexican government and ultimately
   garnered thousands of acres of land. As the crisis loomed between the
Anglo colony and the Mexican government, Bowie found himself on the side of
William Travis' "War Party," a group that brooked no conciliation with the
Mexican government and was dedicated to the creation of a "Republic of
Texas."

   The "Republic of Texas" was a natural outgrowth of the Austin colony which
brought slavery onto Mexican soil in 1821. In 1825, twenty five per cent of
the people in Austin's colony were slaves and by 1836 there were 5,000
slaves. James S. Mayfield, a later Secretary of State for the Republic of
Texas, stated that "the true policy and prosperity of this country (Texas)
depend on the maintenance" of slavery. Like all Southern plantation owners,
these Anglo-Texans had a plan for their own prosperity based on the free
labor of slaves.

   However, the problem for the slave-owning crowd was that the fledgling
national government in Mexico City threatened to restrict or abolish slavery
on Mexican land.

   So the Texas colonists organized a convention in March, 1836 to establish
the issues for which they would do battle with the Mexican government. In a
two-week period they adopted a declaration of independence from Mexico,
   declared a republic, and produced a constitution for that republic. All of
this activity occurred during the siege of the Alamo.

   The Alamo defenders fought and died for the constitution of the Republic
of Texas which declared in Sections 6, 9 and 10:

   "All free white persons who emigrate to the
   republic...shall be entitled to all the privileges of citizenship.'

   "All persons of color who were slaves for life previous to their
emigration to Texas, and who are now held in bondage, shall remain in the
like state of servitude... Congress (of Texas) shall pass no laws to
prohibit emigrants from the United State of America from bringing their
slaves into the Republic with them...nor shall Congress have the power to
emancipate slaves; nor shall any slaveholder be allowed to emancipate his or
her slave or slaves...no free person of African descent either in whole or
in part shall be permitted to reside permanently in the Republic without the
consent of Congress."

   "All persons, (African, the descendants of Africans and Indians excepted,)
who were residing in Texas on the day of the Declaration of Independence
shall be
   considered citizens of the Republic and ntitled to all the privileges of
such."

   Contrary to popular mythology and the spurious history of White Man Movie
Fiction, the story of the Alamo is not a story of a fight for freedom. It is
the story of a fight for slavery. It is important for us to look honestly at
our cultural and historical mythologies so that we can learn from them. By
perpetuating the old myths, we create a stagnant and dangerous platform
which prevents our cultural and artistic growth as a society.

   Forget the Alamo as it's portrayed in this movie, but never forget what
really happened.

   Don Santina is a film historian who is the author of the Academy of Motion
Picture Archive's monograph "The History of the Cisco Kid in Film."

   http://counterpunch.org/santina04092004.html

The Freedom Archives
522 Valencia Street
San Francisco, CA 94110
(415) 863-9977
www.freedomarchives.org 
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