About Chris Tomlinson
Chris Tomlinson is the business columnist for the Houston Chronicle, focusing on energy, business, and policy.
Until April 2014, he was the supervisory correspondent for The Associated Press in Austin, responsible for state government and political reporting in Texas.
From 2007-2009, he was an international investigative reporter for the AP working in Iraq, Austin, and Washington DC. He served as the AP’s East Africa bureau chief in Nairobi, Kenya from 2004 to 2007 and was responsible for text, photo, and television coverage from14 countries. He was appointed East Africa correspondent in 2000 and before that served two years as an international editor at AP’s headquarters in New York from 1998-2000. He started with the AP in 1995 as the Central Africa correspondent based in Rwanda. Tomlinson covered the 1994 elections that ended Apartheid in South Africa for Asahi Shimbun, a Japanese newspaper.
Shortly after the 9/11 terror attacks, the AP assigned Tomlinson to work from the USS Theodore Roosevelt aircraft carrier and later to cover operations in Afghanistan, including the Battle of Tora Bora. During the invasion of Iraq in 2003, the AP chose Tomlinson as their lead embedded reporter and he has spent two years in Iraq since then. Tomlinson has also reported conflicts in Uganda, Burundi, Congo, Sudan, and Somalia. Before becoming a journalist, he spent seven years in the U.S. Army. He graduated from the University of Texas at Austin in 1992 with special honors in humanities.
He was awarded the Military Reporters and Editors Association award for distinguished reporting and the Associated Press Managing Editors runner-up award for international feature writing for his work in Iraq. He received the New York Association of Black Journalists award for international reporting for his work from Africa. While based in Minneapolis, he won the AP staffer of the year award in 1997. The AP has nominated his international reporting for the Pulitzer Prize twice for Iraq and reporting on the 2004 tsunami from India.
Where to find Chris Tomlinson
Forget the Alamo: The Rise and Fall of an American Myth
Three noted Texan writers combine forces to tell the real story of the Alamo, dispelling the myths, exploring why they had their day for so long, and explaining why the ugly fight about its meaning is now coming to a head.
Every nation needs its creation myth, and since Texas was a nation before it was a state, it’s no surprise that its myths bite deep. There’s no piece of history more important to Texans than the Battle of the Alamo, when Davy Crockett and a band of rebels went down in a blaze of glory fighting for independence from Mexico, losing the battle but setting Texas up to win the war.
However, that version of events, as Forget the Alamo definitively shows, owes more to fantasy than reality. Just as the site of the Alamo was left in ruins for decades, its story was forgotten and twisted over time, with the contributions of Tejanos–Texans of Mexican origin, who fought alongside the Anglo rebels–scrubbed from the record, and the origin of the conflict over Mexico’s push to abolish slavery papered over.
Forget the Alamo provocatively explains the true story of the battle against the backdrop of Texas’s struggle for independence, then shows how the sausage of myth got made in the Jim Crow South of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. As uncomfortable as it may be to hear for some, celebrating the Alamo has long had an echo of celebrating whiteness.
In the past forty-some years, waves of revisionists have come at this topic, and at times have made real progress toward a more nuanced and inclusive story that doesn’t alienate anyone. But we are not living in one of those times; the fight over the Alamo’s meaning has become more pitched than ever in the past few years, even violent, as Texas’s future begins to look more and more different from its past. It’s the perfect time for a wise and generous-spirited book that shines the bright light of the truth into a place that’s gotten awfully dark.
The authors of “Forget the Alamo” — Bryan Burrough, Chris Tomlinson, and Jason Stanford — are friends who concocted their book’s premise during a breakfast gabfest and then managed to pull this jackrabbit 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 misunderstood 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.
“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,” 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,” 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.