The South and the Alamo

I was thinking this morning about the (cultural) fate of the Alamo myth in this era of mass Mexican migration spurred by the economy, and I reflected again on Daniel Bell's point about each age constructing the myths that work for it. (I use "myth" here not in the sense of something being untrue, but in the sense of a story that a society tells to explain itself to itself). Bell, again:

Every society seeks to establish a set of meanings through which people can relate themselves to the world. These meanings specify a set of purposes or, like myth and ritual, explain the character of shared experiences, or deal with the transformations of nature through human powers of magic or techne. These meanings are embodied in religion, in culture, and in work.

I thought about the role all the myths of the Old South play in the culture in which I was raised. It's not news that the history of the Confederacy, which was pretty sacred to my grandmother's generation and older, means relatively little to my generation. Key word there: relatively. It's hard for white people my age and younger to have anything like the same cultural and emotional relationship to the Civil War that our parents, grandparents and older relatives did. I find that the only time I really think about the Civil War figures is when somebody wants to sandblast the name of Robert E. Lee off the side of a school. I generally hate changing history to suit the mores of the moment, but it's also true that I resent the implication that I have to be ashamed of everything about my culture.

And yet, I find that I don't care much about the Old South. I grew up in the Deep South, yet we didn't often hear those old tales told growing up. I was raised in the time of the so-called New South, when the Southern overclass made a point of distancing itself from the South's history. And who can blame them? The civil rights era was just ending, and so much of the vicious, racist reaction to it was expressed using the history and symbols of the Old South. Fair or not, Southern regional consciousness was bound up with anti-black hatred. The Southern business class realized that it was in their economic interest to put all that behind us.

And so we did.

I'd like to be proved wrong, but I doubt very much you could walk into a classroom in most Southern towns and get five good sentences out of your average schoolboy about R.E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson or any of the other sacred Confederate personages. My mom can tell you about Jefferson Davis, but I can't, not really. It's not that my generation despises Davis, or Lee, or anybody else. It's that we're largely indifferent to them. And our culture made it so: yes, the New South business mentality that made Atlanta "the city too busy to hate" (but also made it the city that traded its particular identity to be as bland as any Yankee city); but also, I think, the widespread exposure to television, which provided a powerful counternarrative. I say "counternarrative," but what I really mean is not that it challenged Southern particularism directly, but that it replaced it by making Fonzie, Barbarino, Bo & Luke Duke, et alia, the mythic figures in our young imaginations. I'm not joking when I say that Boss Hogg was more real to me than Jefferson Davis. You may call that a tragedy -- and now, at 40, I do -- but there it is. The Southern culture in which I was raised, either by design or benign neglect, didn't pass on those stories to its children -- or did so in a greatly diluted form.

In Bell's terms, you could say that the Old South myth no longer suited Southern society's needs. The white ruling class saw that holding so tightly to those myths were impeding solving the racial problem, which was keeping the South from progressing economically. Economic progress being judged the most important thing, the myths were allowed to die. Aside from economic progress, insofar as clinging to those myths were allowing white people to hold fast to the apartheid system, at least in their minds, they needed to die. The point here is not to argue about the relative goodness or badness of the South; the point is that within living memory Southern white people generally had a real knowledge of and emotional relationship to the gods of the Old South. And now they don't. What larger forces transforming Southern society caused that to happen?

The same forces, I'd wager, that will make something similar happen to the Alamo myth here in Texas. When a myth ceases to have power over the heart of a people, and only exists in their head, it will die. This is true with religion; a religion that is only carried in the head is a religion that is on its way to oblivion in the next generation or two. I have not been in Texas long enough to know how the younger generations feel about the Alamo. I spoke to a 50-year-old friend the other day, a Texas native who is a liberal Democrat, and she was visibly shocked by the thought that any Texan would do anything other than revere the Alamo myth. She honestly couldn't comprehend that anyone would believe Santa Anna the hero of that story. I thought for a second about the difference between her and me -- I honor the Alamo myth in my head, but for her, it is primarily a felt thing.

How many Texans in the coming generations will feel devotion to the heroes of the Alamo (who, fortunately for them, aren't tainted by slavery as Lee, Jackson, Davis and the others are)? Will the needs of business in this rapidly Latinizing state require a renegotiation of that myth -- or will people simply allow it to fade away, because they don't grasp its importance? How important is it, anyway?