Title page from Davy Crockett's Almanack (1836), vol. 1, no. 2, illus. with "Crockett's method of wading the Mississippi" (on stilts). Source: Library of Congress

Too Good To Be True?

Myths in American History

03.02.18

On this week’s episode, Brian, Joanne, and Nathan explore some of the stories Americans tell about our past and find the kernels of truth that lie at the heart of a few American legends.

folklore; mythology

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Segments

Bold as Brass

Peter Hanff of UC Berkeley’s Bancroft Library shares the story of a literal piece of Bay Area history — an engraved brass plate purported to have been left near San Francisco Bay by famed explorer Sir Francis Drake in 1579.

Music:

waxing waning by Ketsa
The Wrong Way by Jahzzar

Sir Francis Drake; artifacts; mythology

00:00:00 / 00:00:00

View Transcript

NATHAN: Thanks for downloading this episode of BackStory, which explores myths in American history from the root of the folk legend, John Henry, to Robert E. Lee, the man and the myth. If you liked the show, check out BackStoryRadio.org for more episodes.

Major funding for BackStory is provided by an anonymous donor, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the University of Virginia, the Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation, and the Arthur Vining Davis Foundations.

BRIAN: From Virginia Humanities, this is BackStory.

Welcome to BackStory, the show that explains the history behind today’s headlines. I’m Brian Balogh.

JOANNE: I’m Joanne Freeman.

NATHAN: I’m Nathan Connolly.

BRIAN: We’re going to start today’s show in California in 1936. A young man was walking on a hillside above the San Francisco Bay.

NATHAN: And he stumbled across this piece of metal sticking out of the ground.

BRIAN: This is Peter Hanff, the Deputy Director at UC Berkeley’s Bancroft Library. He says the man who pulled the metal plate out of the dirt didn’t think much of it.

PETER HANFF: He had a hole in the bottom of his car, and the plate with metal seemed about the right size to cover the hole. So it was only later, apparently, that he discovered that it had writing on it.

BRIAN: He took it to a historian at the Bancroft Library named Herbert Bolton. Bolton had been telling his students for years to keep their eyes out for a piece of metal just like this. It was an almost mythic piece of California history.

NATHAN: So what is it? Something from, like, the gold rush?

JOANNE: Yeah, I’m totally stumped and now you have to tell us what it is.

BRIAN: Well, to Bolton, it was proof that Sir Francis Drake, the first Englishman to circumnavigate the globe, had actually landed on the California coast in 1579. Two years before that, the Queen of England had secretly commissioned the British sea captain to attack Spanish colonies in Central and South America. So that’s what he did.

Drake sailed up and down the Pacific coast, plundering Spanish ports and galleons. He noted in his journals that at one point, he put in for repairs somewhere north of Spanish California.

PETER HANFF: He was able to pull into a safe and fit harbor. And he careened the ship there, which I think meant that he put it on its side, so that they could scrape the barnacles, and re-cock the wood, and make the thing seaworthy again. He apparently encountered local natives, and somehow got the impression that they had ceded to him, on behalf of Elizabeth I in England, this area that he called Nova Albion, which we would think of in English as New England.

NATHAN: Just like an Englishman, to get, like, a plot of land after a pit stop. I’m just saying. Go ahead.

BRIAN: Well to note that pit stop, Nathan, before he sailed off again, Drake engraved this English claim to Nova Albion onto a metal plate. And he left it behind.

Herbert Bolton, the Berkeley historian, fervently believe that Drake’s plate was hidden somewhere along the California coast. It was just waiting to be found. So when the man brought this metal plate to Bolton for authentication, the historian was euphoric.

Here was physical proof of Drake’s landing. And it was now in Bolton’s very hands.

NATHAN: This is actually pretty amazing.

JOANNE: It is amazing. It is amazing.

PETER HANFF: I think once he made out the words, he got rather excited. He said, one of the world’s long lost treasures apparently has been found.

BRIAN: Bolton published the news of the plate’s discovery and helped make it a national story. It also got picked up by the British press. Drake’s name had already been stamped across local landmarks in the Bay Area. Now, the plate became part of local history that was taught in California schools.

Hanff says that when he started working at the Bancroft library in the early 1970s, Drake’s plate was one of the university’s treasures. It was also popular with the public.

PETER HANFF: School kids from all over the state, when they came to Berkeley, came in to look at it, together, in groups. And people would trek from all over the world to come and look at Drake’s plate.

BRIAN: There was just one problem. The plate was a fake.

JOANNE: Ooh.

PETER HANFF: All through the years, there were arguments, published and not published, that the plate was a forgery.

BRIAN: So in the 1970s, officials at the Bancroft Library decided to resolve the controversy and have Drake’s plate tested. They discovered that it was machine-made American brass, likely beaten with a hammer, and then thrown in a fire to make it look old.

JOANNE: Why in the world would someone do that?

NATHAN: You hear the fear in the early Americanist voice there, don’t you?

JOANNE: Exactly. Eek! What do you mean fake evidence that looks old?

BRIAN: Well, Hanff says the leading theory is that some members of a local historical society were trying to pull a prank on their pal, Herbert Bolton.

JOANNE: Oh, no.

BRIAN: Remember, Bolton really wanted proof of this local lore. And when he thought he’d found it, he published his findings before his friends had a chance to tell him that it was a joke.

JOANNE: So why did it even matter where Drake landed in the 16th century? Why did certain people want to believe this plate was real?

PETER HANFF: It was something that people had a large amount of passion about. The significance, I think, is that this occurred quite a few years before the arrival of English to the eastern coast, certainly before Jamestown, and then certainly, as well, quite a few years before the pilgrims arrived in Massachusetts.

NATHAN: Yeah, I mean, just think about the way that American history usually gets taught, right? I mean, it usually starts with the English showing up somewhere, either in Jamestown in 1607, Plymouth Rock in 1620. That leaves places like California, Florida, really most of the country, out of that origin story.

JOANNE: Unless there is a famous English sea captain who shows up in California 30 years before Jamestown.

BRIAN: That’s right, Joanne. It’s a way of including California in that early part of our national narrative, and keeping the British at the center of that narrative. As it turns out, Drake’s landing is a part of local lore in lots of places. Communities up and down the Pacific coast, from California all the way up to Alaska, have claimed that Drake actually landed in their hometown. He’s a busy guy.

JOANNE: That’s amazing. And I had no idea that there was, like, a George Washington slept here thing happening on the other part– on the other coast of the country.

BRIAN: Hanff says that even after the plate was found to be a forgery, people continued to embrace it as part of local history.

PETER HANFF: There were definitely individuals, even with the evidence before them, that simply would not accept the new evidence. They were sure this was Sir Francis Drake’s plate.

BRIAN: Strangely enough, more recent evidence suggests Drake did land near San Francisco Bay. But the rush to claim the fake plate as proof shows the power of the stories we tell about our past. The plate was accepted because it reflected a version of history some people wanted to believe.

Died With A Hammer In His Hand

Listener Natanya Pope-Sohel read that folk hero John Henry may have been a real person after all. So, she reached out with some questions. Historian Scott Reynolds Nelson helps answer her questions about John Henry, and the times he lived in.

Music:

John Henry, as sung by Harold B Hazelhurst
John Henry, as played by Jamal Millner

John Henry; folklore; mythology; prison labor

00:00:00 / 00:00:00

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JOANNE: Today on the show, we’re diving into some of the stories we tell ourselves about American history, and teasing out fact from fiction, because let’s face it. There are a lot of stories out there.

NATHAN: We’ll discuss the myths we hear most often from our students. We’ll look at Robert E. Lee, the man, the myth, and legend. And we’ll also investigate whether Davy Crockett actually died defending the Alamo.

JOANNE: Over the last few weeks, we’ve been getting questions from listeners about history they heard about as kids, wanting to know what’s real and what’s myth. Listener Natanya Pope-Sohel in Chicago wondered about someone who looms large in American folklore. He’s inspired countless stories, poems, and especially ballads, for more than a century.

HAROLD B. HAZELHURST: The name of this song is “John Henry.”

JOANNE: This is a recording of a man named Harold B. Hazelhurst. It was made in 1939 by the Works Progress Administration. Hazelhurst had learned the “John Henry” song when he was a teenager working on the Florida railroad.

HAROLD B. HAZELHURST: See, the fellas from different railroads would come and work on this track with us. And each fella, perhaps he’d have a new voice that he’d add to the song.

VOICE: Well, good. Well, now, let’s hear the way you remember it.

HAROLD B. HAZELHURST: (SINGING) When they brought John Henry to this country, they brought him through by land. The people came from far and near, just to see a steel drivin’ man. Just to see a steel drivin’ man.

John Henry told his captain, not a man ain’t nothing but a man. Before I let this hammer outdo me, I’ll die with the handle in my hand. John Henry, I’ll die with the hammer in my hand.

John Henry had a little woman–

JOANNE: That song lays down the legend of John Henry, the steel drivin’ man who raced against a modern steam drill to carve out a railroad tunnel. He won, but then immediately collapsed, and died. It’s a classic story of man versus machine.

BRIAN: I’m just going to admit it right up top. I didn’t know much more about John Henry than what I’d heard in the songs. So after getting in touch with Natanya, we called a historian at the University of Georgia named Scott Reynolds Nelson. He’s an expert in all things John Henry. And it turns out that the real story of John Henry is more disturbing and less uplifting than the myth. We’ll start with Natanya’s first question.

NATANYA POPE-SOHEL: So my first question is, was he an actual person?

SCOTT REYNOLDS NELSON: Yes, he was. He was 5 feet, 1 1/4 inches tall. He was born in–

BRIAN: I thought this guy was a giant.

SCOTT REYNOLDS NELSON: The quarter, I’m sure he insisted on. So he was a very small man, but that’s what you needed to build a tunnel. To make a tunnel in the 1860s and 1870s, you needed a hammer man who is small. The arc of his swing had to be small enough so that he could go deep into that tunnel.

BRIAN: Hey, Natanya, can I squeeze a question in here?

NATANYA POPE-SOHEL: Of course. It’s your show.

BRIAN: So was he, and the guys he were working with, were they actually racing against another team that was using a steam drill?

SCOTT REYNOLDS NELSON: Yes. That would have been around September or October of 1871, according to the construction reports. The steam drills were there. They were being used to try to drill these little holes for the explosives. But there are actual reports at the time, saying that the drillers are drilling alongside the steam drills, and the steam drills are failing.

BRIAN: OK. Let me check in with Natanya. Are you believing this so far, Natanya?

NATANYA POPE-SOHEL: I am. I do find it believable, but I’m wondering, was he in the context of the Ava Duvernay documentary, 13th, about the constitutional loophole that allows for enslavement of prisoners? Was John Henry caught up in one of the first waves of post Civil War mass incarceration of African American men?

SCOTT REYNOLDS NELSON: Yes, he was. What happened– this is very early in 1865. Andrew Johnson is President. He allows the Virginia state to kind of reconstitute itself as a state. And they take all of these minor misdemeanors and turn them into felonies. And what you see is mass incarceration of African American, mostly men. And 3/4 of the men in the Virginia penitentiary in 1864 are white. By 1869, 80% of the men in the Virginia penitentiary are black.

BRIAN: That’s really remarkable.

SCOTT REYNOLDS NELSON: Yeah. You get, basically, a labor force that is a critical labor force that allows Virginia– the Virginia railroads to penetrate the mountains and connect to Western Virginia.

They tried to use miners, black and white miners, to do this work, but they went on strike around 1870. Said there was bad air in the mountain, and that’s when they brought in convicts to finish the work. John Henry and about 100 to 200 other folks were shipped up to do the final stages of this construction work.

BRIAN: Right. What led you to believe that John Henry was actually a real person, Scott?

SCOTT REYNOLDS NELSON: I didn’t think he was a real person. I thought he was– I thought he was a legend. And I was listening to a version of the song that said, looking at a picture of the Virginia penitentiary, and the song says they took John Henry to the White House and buried him in the sand. Every locomotive comes roaring by, says, there lies a steel drivin’ man.

And next to the Virginia penitentiary, buried in layers of sand in 1995, they found 200 bodies. And they were all mostly black men between the ages of 18 and 25.

So using that, I got access to the Virginia penitentiary records. They show John Henry being arrested for a crime that he probably didn’t commit. He’s listed as stealing goods worth $200 from a grocery store. But you look at the inventory of the grocery store, there’s nothing worth $200.

He finally ends up in the Virginia penitentiary in 1868, but he’ll die by 1871, working on the tunnels at the Lewis Tunnel, right at the edge of the border between Virginia and West Virginia on the Chesapeake and Ohio Railroad.

BRIAN: So what is it about this story, Scott, that made it so compelling to become a myth? I mean, what makes for a myth?

SCOTT REYNOLDS NELSON: That’s a good question. I think part of it is that a steam drill in 1871 was a terribly difficult instrument. It was really bulky. It was really slow. The power was transmitted pneumatically. Any two of us– you and I, Brian, could have defeated a steam drill in 1871.

But by 1880, when the song starts to be transmitted, steam drills are so powerful and they work so well, that no human could defeat a steam drill. And so that’s when it becomes– it enters a level of myth.

But what killed most of the prisoners on the worksite was not exactly the steam drill. It was actually the explosives that were creating this rock dust. People inhaled it, little tiny bits of crystalline rock. They cut up your lungs, and basically, your lungs fill up with fluid, and you die. And this is how he and most of the other workers who were doing this construction died, this rock dust from very, very hard rock. People inhale it, and it kills them.

BRIAN: Right. So Natanya, should we let this guy keep going? I mean, he’s convinced me so far. You got any more for him?

NATANYA POPE-SOHEL: I have just one more question.

SCOTT REYNOLDS NELSON: Mm-hm.

NATANYA POPE-SOHEL: So John Henry is considered a hero in American folklore, and I believe that he’s a hero. But we don’t usually consider people in the prison system as heroes. So I’m wondering, is there a bit of revisionist history at play, or is his story part of the natural evolution of folklore that tends to leave out the sticky parts as time passes.

SCOTT REYNOLDS NELSON: Mm. That’s a great question. I think it is. A part of it is this evolution of the sticky parts. I think one of the amazing things about African American art, and literature, and music, is that it can take the most terrible crimes and turn them into the most beautiful literature and music that we have.

And so this is a way– the story of John Henry is really a story about a terrible crime. It’s about men who are buried unremembered, without gravestones, in the Virginia penitentiary, forgotten. And the song is really about saying, here are the men. They’re buried at the White House.

So it’s a story that takes a terrible crime, but over time, as men and women carry the song forward, and convert it, and change it, they turn it into this beautiful song. It goes from a dirge to, really, the beginnings of blues and what we now call rock and roll.

BRIAN: And Natanya, you made the mistake of telling me something about yourself while we were waiting for Scott. You’re in law school?

NATANYA POPE-SOHEL: Yes, I am.

BRIAN: Is that what piqued your interest in this?

NATANYA POPE-SOHEL: Actually, no. I also homeschool my kids, and we got to the unit on folktales. And so I was trying to find something that I thought that they could relate to.

BRIAN: What’s your takeaway? What are you going to– how old are your kids?

NATANYA POPE-SOHEL: My youngest is 9. I guess my takeaway is that history is just interconnected, you know, especially with folktales. It’s not always what we see. There’s always a backstory. There’s always an undercurrent.

You know how you have subjects that you constantly think about, like, throughout time, you know? You come back to them, you think about other things. John Henry has always been that for me. And I feel like a lot of my questions about who he was, and why he was, and why he is such a huge figure in folklore has been answered. And I’m really glad that we had this conversation.

BRIAN: Thanks to our listener, Natanya Pope-Sohel for her questions. Thanks, also, to Scott Reynolds Nelson for helping us answer them. He’s an historian at the University of Georgia, and author of Steel Drivin’ Man: John Henry, the Untold Story of an American Legend.

NATHAN: It’s time to take a short break. When we return, the myths that turned Robert E. Lee from a rebel general into healer of a nation.

‘A Foe Without Hate?’

Brian and historian Gary Gallagher discuss some of the stories told about Confederate General Robert E. Lee — and how Lee came to be venerated by many Americans in both the North and the South after the Civil War.

Music:

Bad Scene by Podington Bear

Confederate monuments; Lost Cause of the Confederacy; Robert E. Lee; mythology

00:00:00 / 00:00:00

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JOANNE: Now we’re going to look at one figure who has certainly been in the news for the last year, Robert E. Lee.

REPORTER 1: Should we be removing Robert E. Lee from public vision?

REPORTER 2: Today, the city of New Orleans will take down a statue of Robert E. Lee.

REPORTER 3: Dozens of Ku Klux Klan members rallying against the removal of a statue of Confederate General Robert E. Lee in Charlottesville, Virginia, yesterday. But the Klan members, outnumbered by–

NATHAN: In July of 2017, the KKK held a rally in Charlottesville. They were protesting the city council’s decision to remove statues of Confederate generals, including Robert E. Lee, from parks in the heart of downtown.

BRIAN: The rally drew thousands to the city, with wildly different opinions on the statues. We asked some people, what does Robert E. Lee mean to you?

WOMAN 1: Hero. You know? I mean, he’s just a hero.

MAN 1: The definition of an American. One of the greatest generals that there ever was.

WOMAN 2: He was a failed general. If you don’t win, you don’t win.

WOMAN 3: I don’t think people quite understand just how racist the man was.

MAN 2: I just hear racism all the time, you know? It was on the wrong side, but that doesn’t make him a horrible person.

MAN 3: I don’t think that Robert E. Lee himself necessarily thought the cause was worth fighting for, but ended up fighting for it because Virginia was his home.

MAN 4: He wasn’t about slavery. He was about– did he own slaves? Yes.

MAN 5: It was never proven that he owned slaves.

MAN 6: Robert E. Lee thought that it would have been a good idea for the Confederacy to outlaw slavery.

GARY GALLAGHER: Those all sound very familiar, Brian. There’s a Groundhog Day tone to this.

BRIAN: This is Gary Gallagher, a historian at the University of Virginia. We asked Gary to help us sort out some of the myths he heard among those voices.

GARY GALLAGHER: Well, I think that the two most prominent myths about Lee are both represented in those comments. The first is that he’s all about Virginia. All you need to know about Robert E. Lee is that he was a Virginian, considered himself a Virginian, and you can explain his life, pretty much entirely, based on his devotion to Virginia.

The second one is that he either didn’t own any slaves at all, or owned very few and wanted to get rid of them as sort of a closet emancipationist. Those are two– I think those are the two most common myths about Lee.

NATHAN: Before we go any further, let’s review what’s called the Lost Cause of the Confederacy. It comes up a lot in our conversations about the Civil War.

Gallagher says white southerners began constructing the narrative of the Lost Cause in the ashes of the war between the states.

GARY GALLAGHER: So they’re trying to figure out how to hold their heads up in the wake of a catastrophic defeat that cost them the thing they most wanted to protect, which was their slaveholding society. How do we explain this to our children and grandchildren? And by the way, we lost almost a third of our military aged white males, killed.

Well, first, we never could have won. So there’s no loss of honor in fighting a fight you never could have won against Yankees who had too much of everything.

Second, it wasn’t about slavery. It was about high constitutional principle. So it was a noble fight in a cause, even though we couldn’t win, it was worth fighting. And look at Robert E. Lee if you want to see what kind of a cause we had. He’s central to the Lost Cause.

JOANNE: As the archetypal southern gentleman, Lee became the noble face of the Lost Cause. Gallagher says that many of the myths swirling around Robert E Lee were constructed by taking tiny truths and distorting them. Remember those voices we heard a moment ago, claiming Lee didn’t support slavery and maybe never even owned slaves at all?

GARY GALLAGHER: Lee did own a few slaves in his life. He inherited some from his mother, but he never owned very many slaves. He never had very much money. His only source of money through most of his life was his salary as an officer in the United States Army, which didn’t make anyone wealthy. But he married into the Custis family, and his father-in-law owned a huge number of slaves. He was one of the largest slaveholders in Virginia.

So although he didn’t own a lot of slaves, he still has to be reckoned a part of the slaveholding elite of the Antebellum South. There’s one statement he made in 1856 where he said, everybody knows slavery is wrong. And I think he meant that in a sort of Jeffersonian sense, that slavery in the long term will probably go. But then he very quickly said, but nobody should do anything to get rid of it. God will get rid of it in his own time.

In other words, he isn’t in a hurry to give black men the vote. He doesn’t think black people are equal to white people, and he’s not the lone ranger in that regard.

NATHAN: And what about the claim that Lee’s true allegiance was to Virginia and not the Confederacy? Again, Gallagher says that’s true, up to a point.

GARY GALLAGHER: I think Lee faced a very difficult decision in leaving the United States Army in 1861. He’d just been promoted to colonel. That had been his entire life’s work. But in the end, and I don’t see any reason not to take him at his word here, he didn’t believe that he could fight against his family and his state.

But once he got into a Confederate uniform, he became an absolutely staunch Confederate nationalist. And if it had ever been a case of Virginia needs A, the Confederacy needs B, he would have said, we’re going to do B because Virginia’s a subset of the Confederacy. And the Confederacy, in the long term, will protect the things we consider most important, including our slaveholding social structure.

BRIAN: So I asked Gallagher. If you can’t separate Robert E. Lee from the Confederacy and slavery, how did he become a national hero?

GARY GALLAGHER: I think initially, the former Confederates who decided to focus on Lee had very good material in Lee because he– they argued they fought against long odds. Lee did fight against long odds. He won famous victories against long odds. He’s a soldier, not a politician, so you can talk about Lee without talking about slavery.

He’s a good loser. The winner set the terms, accept the terms, and go forward. Don’t wallow in the past. He was against, for example, erecting monuments to the Confederacy. He thought that wasn’t productive. So go forward. Accept, and he–

BRIAN: Is that how he ended up with so many monuments?

GARY GALLAGHER: He’s a very monumented fellow. That’s the public Lee.

BRIAN: That public persona was consistently reconciliation.

GARY GALLAGHER: Yes. Yes, it was. It was consistently reconciliationist in a public sense. But after the war, and I should be more specific– after Lee died, he wouldn’t have countenanced this when he was alive, actually, but after he died, they not only– the Lost Cause people began to present him not only as a great soldier, but as kind of a perfect soldier. And they tried to explain away all of his deficiencies as a general, explain away his defeats at Gettysburg and elsewhere, find other people to blame. So he became this kind of a perfect model of the best that the Antebellum southern slaveholding society could produce. Let’s look at Lee.

BRIAN: I get why Lee works for the South, but why does he work for the North as well?

GARY GALLAGHER: Over time, he comes to work for the North because it’s– in that is where the reconciliationist thread becomes more impor– I mean, the point of the war, after all, for the vast majority of the white citizenry of the United States, was to restore the Union.

The restoration of the Union was the most important goal in 1861. It was the most important goal in 1865. Most white Northerners also accepted emancipation in the end as one of the tools that would be necessary to restore the Union. But if the point is to put the Union together, then you try to find ways to see that that restored Union works. And bringing Lee into the tent, so to speak, is one way to do that. And it began pretty early.

A lot of the obituaries in northern newspapers– he died in 1870. A lot of those obituaries were quite favorable in many ways. Frederick Douglass called them nauseating flatteries of Robert E. Lee. He was very upset with how quickly this started.

It gained steam later in the 19th century, and by the early 20th century, he was– he had been elevated to a position where he could be admired. As long as you don’t talk about slavery, and as long you don’t talk about who was right or wrong so much in the war, then you can kind of bring Lee into it. And so he becomes– he’s not only part of the Lost Cause stream of memory. He’s also part of the reconciliationist stream of memory by the early 20th century.

And in fact, the statue in Charlottesville, the equestrian statue of Lee, is a perfect example of that. It went up in 1924, which is one year before Congress passed legislation making Arlington a National Memorial to Robert E. Lee. And putting Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson on a $0.50 piece minted by the United States Mint, not by some vanity Mint, by the United States Mint.

BRIAN: Gary, you’ve mentioned one thing that is left out of the current debates, let’s say, in Charlottesville, over removing the statue of Robert E. Lee. You talked about how Lee was embraced by the North, even put on coins with the US Mint by the 1920s.

GARY GALLAGHER: He’s been on five postage stamps, Brian. He’s been on–

BRIAN: Five postage stamps.

GARY GALLAGHER: –five United St– what I would love to know, and I’ve often said this and no one has ever given me a name, I’d love to know any other principle rebel leader in a major civil war who ended up with a National Memorial to him, and his visage on postage stamps and coins. I would love to know if there’s another example of that.

BRIAN: We will send that out to our listeners. They’re very attentive, so we’ll–

GARY GALLAGHER: Good.

BRIAN: –get some good answers.

GARY GALLAGHER: So it’s– I’ve watched this debate in Charlottesville with interest. To say that that’s just a Lost Cause statue really isn’t right, because it’s part of a much broader reconciliationist movement by the mid-1920s. And this is really important to understand because if we don’t understand the difference between history and memory, we’re not going to understand very much about the past.

BRIAN: So how do we go about correcting myths? How do we do that with Robert E. Lee?

GARY GALLAGHER: I’m not hopeless about whether people can get a better understanding of our past, because I’ve seen many people get it. I’ve had many gratifying notes, and emails, and conversations, not only with students, but also with teachers.

I work with groups of teachers every year, who say that they’re really looking at things in a different way. On the other hand, I’ve had students come up at the end of a semester and say, I loved your class. I just thought it was the greatest thing, but you’re wrong. The Civil War wasn’t about slavery, and my Uncle George knows that, and I do, too.

So I realize that you’re not going to reach everybody. If I can get students to take one thing away from a history course– I want them to take two. I want them to understand the difference between history and memory, and all of this Confederate memorialization stuff is perfect for that.

And the other one is, anyone who wants simple answer– just give me the– what is it? Is it black or is it white? Well, it’s almost never black or white. It’s never simple. It’s never easy. And if we can convey some sense of that to people, so they don’t jump as a result of their impulse to have a nice pat, easy soundbite, 24 hour news station answer for something, then I think we really have accomplished something.

BRIAN: Gary Gallagher is a historian at the University of Virginia, and Director of the now Center for Civil War History.

JOANNE: The statue of Robert E. Lee still stands in Charlottesville’s downtown. Whether it will stay or go will ultimately be decided in court. The question is whether the statue of Lee is a war memorial, or a monument to something besides soldiers who fought the Civil War. Under Virginia law, a war memorial cannot be removed.

A Man May Die, But A Myth Lives On

Brian, Nathan, and Joanne discuss myths that crop up regularly in their classrooms.

Music:

Mr. Trumpet by Ketsa

American dream; education; founders; mythology

00:00:00 / 00:00:00

View Transcript

BRIAN: Nathan, Joanne, we spend a lot of time in the classroom. And I’m sure, as I do, you come up against a lot of myths. We’ve heard these myths built around individuals, Robert E. Lee, but what are the real macro myths? I’m going to put one on the table we could come back to, or not, later.

My students really believe in the story of progress in the United States. History is a never ending series of things getting better. Try to top that.

NATHAN: Well, I see your myth of progress. And it’s compelling. But I want to raise you an even more compelling myth, I think, which gets to an even more fundamental place in our own vocations, which is the myth of information. Education is the key. If you simply give people enough to change their hearts and minds, then all of our social ills will basically go away. Right? And yet, we see time and time again, it’s a lot harder than that.

BRIAN: I’m impressed, Nathan. You win.

JOANNE: Wait, a minute.

NATHAN: Uh-oh. There’s a third player at the table.

JOANNE: I got to get in the game. I got to get in the game.

NATHAN: OK.

JOANNE: OK.

NATHAN: What do you got, Joanne?

JOANNE: I would say, certainly in the classroom, that the biggest myth, and in a sense, this is not going to be surprising, is the idea of the founders. Right? All capital letters. That there is this group of people who came up with brilliant ideas by themselves, and together sort of marched into a room and wrote it down on paper, and ahh, there we had the American experiment.

NATHAN: Right, right.

JOANNE: And that’s, you know, that’s it. That’s America. And when I teach the founding, a lot of what I’m doing is unraveling this sense of inevitability, and unraveling the sense of superhuman capabilities, and unraveling the sense of unity, right?

I actually think thinking about the founders as this unified group of guys who all absolutely agreed does more damage than good, right, which suggests, somehow, that either you’re all supposed to agree, or that somehow disagreement is wrong? So I think– I think the founding is vital for a lot of different reasons for people. And I think, obviously, the way you think about the beginning is going to affect the way you think about the here and now.

NATHAN: Well, that’s the thing about myths though, right? I mean, they’re supposed to both explain and conceal. So if we can explain why the Constitution has had relatively few amendments when compared to other documents, on the world stage, we have to attribute that to the genius of the founders. Right?

JOANNE: The magical f– yes.

NATHAN: The magical document.

JOANNE: Yes.

NATHAN: But at the same time, that narrative conceals all of the debates at that time, and certainly the debates in the subsequent centuries about what it meant to maintain the power of the planter class, maintain the power of white man and the political culture, maintain the geographic boundaries of the country, and the displacement that went along there with it, the wealth of the country. Again, that’s a wealth generated by slavery, to be very clear, right? I mean, all of that has to kind of fall under this shadow of the great architects of the republic.

JOANNE: Right, right.

NATHAN: And I think, yeah, that’s critical.

JOANNE: Any form of exclusion gets excluded from our history with that kind of an outlook.

BRIAN: Well, Nathan, I hear a lot of ideas behind Joanne’s entry into the myth-a-thon. Why aren’t ideas enough?

NATHAN: It has to ring true in your ear for you to believe it. We have, for instance, this notion of Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech, oftentimes played on repeat, as having done such amazing, kind of cognitive work in the American mind, about the evils of segregation, the evils of racism, the right of people to have kind of equal rights. And it is absolutely not the case that that speech changed the way that Americans thought about their country. Right? It took on another decade, at least, for there to be any real breakthroughs in terms of black political representation.

And so it’s important for us to kind of have, as our kind of narrative mythology, that a kind of great speech on the steps of a great monument are all the country kind of needs to turn the page on the worst parts of its history. But it also takes a very clear commitment from tons of people, often faceless people, to make any progress at all.

BRIAN: And I think we all need, in some ways, to believe that we’re moving forward. That we’re part of a collective progress that is going to leave our kids better off than we are. And this notion of history progressing is a very powerful source of that belief.

I urge my students to think about progress for who, or if they’re British, progress for whom. And that immediately gets them thinking, well, yes, certain technological changes, for instance, helped elite white men, but put a lot of lower middle class men out of work, if we’re talking about industrialization–

NATHAN: Sure.

BRIAN: –for instance.

JOANNE: So one of the interesting things about the founders is that some of them lived long enough to realize that they were kind of becoming the founders. They did begin to get letters from Americans, sort of with an awestruck, you know, tell us how it was when X, Y, and Z happened.

And there’s an amazing letter from John Adams in reference to one of these. He’s responding to one of these requests that basically says, tell us what it was like when you wrote the Declaration of Independence. What was it like? And Adams says, OK, let me tell you what it was like. Here’s what it was like.

I sat and I watched everybody go up and sign that document. And you know what I saw? People who didn’t want to sign it, people who were scared of signing it, people who really had to be kind of shoved up there to sign it. He wasn’t showing that from that moment, in a sense of inception, there was no great, wonderful unity. There were people in that room who weren’t all that excited about declaring independence.

NATHAN: Right.

JOANNE: So here’s what unites, I think, all three of our myth moments, here. All three of us have talked about myths that essentially erase work. Right? Erase all of the effort, erase all of the real life aspect of it, in a very concrete kind of a way. So it’s not just a myth because it’s–

BRIAN: And all of the controversies, and battles, and conflicts–

JOANNE: Yes, yes.

BRIAN: –as your example shows, Joanne.

JOANNE: So here’s the thing. I mean, and this is particularly true of the founding. What’s fascinating about it is the struggle of it, and the humanity of it, and the messiness of it, and all of the ways in which wrong decisions were made. That’s so much more interesting than some glossy little shiny myth that has a bunch of perfect people coming up with a perfect little document.

I feel like when I talk about the founding to the public, in essence, that’s what I keep saying over and over again, is the truth is so much more interesting and has so much more to tell us than a myth does.

Coonskin Cap

Producer Nina Earnest looks into a listener’s question about how famous frontiersman Davy Crockett really died — and the myths that surrounded Crockett even when he was alive — with help from historians Andrew Torget, James Crisp, and writer William Groneman.

Music:

The Wild Ones by Jahzzar

Liar by Jahzzar

Aisles by Jahzzar

Isn’t Another Post War Movie by Jahzzar

Become Death by Jahzzar

Alamo; Davy Crockett; folklore; frontier; mythology

00:00:00 / 00:00:00

View Transcript

We’re going to close the show with a historical mystery brought to us by another listener.

MARK MADELEY: My name is Mark Madeley. I am from Houston, Texas.

NATHAN: Madeley asked us about the circumstances surrounding Davy Crockett’s death at the Alamo. Crockett was one of about 200 who defended the San Antonio mission from Mexican leader, Antonio López de Santa Anna, and his army in 1836.

Up against what most considered overwhelming odds, the legendary frontiersman and his fellow soldiers all died in battle. According to state lore, the heroic sacrifice fed the fires of the Texas Revolution, and led to the region’s eventual independence from Mexico.

But Madeley wanted to know about another version of this story, one that claims that Crockett didn’t die on the ramparts, rather, that he was taken prisoner and executed by Santa Anna’s men after the battle. Madeley objected to this version of the story.

MARK MADELEY: I mean, the Alamo is what we’re told to remember, right? Especially as Texans.

I think, for me, with regards to what happened to Crockett or what after to all his men there, to find out that, you know, the story of all these guys dying at the Alamo in battle to not be true. I’m sure it’s disturbing to some people, a little bit to me, that there were guys left over.

And so to imagine that things might not have gone the way we want them to go means letting go of something that’s very important in the way we look at the world.

JOANNE: OK. So what really happened? Did Davy Crockett die defending the Alamo or not? And I guess maybe even more important, why does it matter? We put BackStory producer, Nina Earnest, on the case.

NINA EARNEST: To understand how Davy Crockett died, we first have to know more about how David Crockett lived. Not the Davy from the Walt Disney TV show of the 1950s, you know, the one dressed head to toe in buckskins, toting a rifle, and wearing a coonskin cap. I mean the real David Crockett, the man who launched 1,000 myths.

So was he born on a mountaintop in Tennessee? Did he kill a bear when he was only three? Or I guess he says b’ar, right? Killed me a b’ar.

ANDREW TORGET: Yeah, he said bar. Well, that’s what the song says. (SINGING) Killed him a b’ar when he was only three.

This is historian Andrew Torget.

ANDREW TORGET: I don’t think he was born on a mountaintop, but he definitely was born in the woods on the frontier in a lot of poverty.

NINA EARNEST: After a series of odd jobs from hunter, to gristmill operator, Crockett made a name for himself in local politics.

ANDREW TORGET: But what gave him a national prominence was when he was elected to the United States Congress in 1827. And when he went there, he was a part of this movement toward embracing the every man.

NINA EARNEST: In some ways, Crockett owed his popularity to another so-called hardscrabble man from Tennessee, Andrew Jackson. Both men portrayed themselves as champions of the poor white man, but Torget says that’s where the similarities end.

ANDREW TORGET: The reality was Andrew Jackson was actually quite wealthy and had a lot of great advantages. Crockett truly was the every man. He truly was that poor guy.

Davy Crockett, as he became known, was the true eccentric. He was the true representative of the wildness of the West.

NINA EARNEST: And Crockett played that up. He made sure not to blend in the nation’s capital, and quickly became the talk of the town.

ANDREW TORGET: He would often walk around Washington wearing, you know, his buckskins, and what became kind of a costume for him, this sort of hunting gear that he would wear on the Western frontier. And this was, you know, a sort of shocking sort of thing, but it gave him attention on a public scale that he couldn’t create on his own by any means.

NINA EARNEST: Torget says Crockett knew that his carefully crafted image could also invite ridicule.

ANDREW TORGET: And he had this problem where he wanted to be taken seriously, but he also knew that the caricature of him and who his life was, was part of the power that he couldn’t escape, as well. And he had to try to balance those two things to be taken seriously enough to do things that he was interested in doing, like helping poor folks from his district in Tennessee.

NINA EARNEST: But Crockett wasn’t the only one capitalizing on his popularity. He was irresistible for writers and journalists who published outlandish tales about him. A hit 1831 play called, The Lion of the West, further, well, lionized him. Its main character, Nimrod Wildfire, was clearly modeled on Crockett.

ANDREW TORGET: Because he seemed to be this wonderful character that could be used to represent so much about the American experiment moving westward, about the expanding United States, and about the power of this rugged individual frontiersman, that was becoming a part of how the United States was beginning to think about itself in the 1820s and ’30s as the country really starts expanding westward very rapidly.

NINA EARNEST: Unfortunately, his celebrity didn’t translate into political success. During his three terms in Congress, most of the legislation he supported didn’t pass. He also made a powerful political enemy in President Andrew Jackson, especially when he opposed the removal of Native Americans from the east.

In 1835, Crockett lost his re-election bid. Stung by this defeat, the living legend decided to leave Tennessee behind. The story goes that he told his constituents, you all may go to hell, and I will go to Texas.

ANDREW TORGET: And the question is, why? Why is Crockett going to Texas?

JAMES CRISP: He went to Texas because lots of people were going to Texas to see what kind of new life they could make for themselves.

NINA EARNEST: This is historian, James Crisp.

JAMES CRISP: These were guys looking for a second chance, because all of them had failed in their lives in the United States. And it’s true of Crockett.

NINA EARNEST: Texas, then a part of Mexico, was in a state of political upheaval. Anglo settlers had been streaming into the territory for more than a decade. When Crockett arrived in early 1836, both Anglos and tejanos, native Texans of Mexican descent, were rebelling against the Mexican government. Some kind of clash seemed imminent.

Crockett enlisted in the Texas militia as a private, never mind that he was 49 years old. Torget says he probably hoped to revive his political career, this time, as a Texan.

ANDREW TORGET: And so when Crockett goes to San Antonio, it’s probably to build up support to getting himself elected in whatever this new Texas government is, to do a tour of the area, but it certainly isn’t to get into a fight at the Alamo, because absolutely nobody saw that coming.

NINA EARNEST: On February 23, 1836, Mexican troops, led by Antonio López de Santa Anna, suddenly appeared outside San Antonio.

ANDREW TORGET: Pandemonium just hits the streets of the town. They start ringing the bell of the San Fernando church, everybody starts panicking, and there’s just this general retreat into the Alamo complex, which was on the far western edge of San Antonio at the time, because there was really no other place to go.

JAMES CRISP: The walls didn’t even go all the way around. They had to put sharp sticks into the ground just to have protection all the way around, and it wasn’t all that much protection.

ANDREW TORGET: And so Crockett and his men retreated into the Alamo with all the Texas soldiers and a lot of people in town who were just seeking refuge in someplace to hide while they saw whatever happened next.

NINA EARNEST: What happened next was that the Mexican Army laid siege to the makeshift fortress. By the time the battle ended 13 days later, all of the Alamo’s defenders, including Davy Crockett, had been killed.

ANDREW TORGET: When Crockett was killed at the Alamo, that was big news because Crockett was big news.

NINA EARNEST: But trying to figure out how he died there has never been easy. Crisp says that in the weeks following the siege, the local papers printed two competing narratives.

JAMES CRISP: You’ve got the story of Davy Crockett fighting like a tiger until the very end.

NINA EARNEST: And the other version, saying that Crockett and several others were taken captive and executed by Santa Anna after the battle. This scenario is backed up by a famous memoir–

JAMES CRISP: –written by a Mexican captain, José Enrique de la Peña–

NINA EARNEST: –which describes the scene of Crockett’s execution. De la Peña says that seven prisoners were brought to Santa Anna. One of them, he writes, was the naturalist, David Crockett, well known in North America for his unusual adventures. De La Peña adds that Crockett and the others were stabbed to death by Santa Anna’s men.

But in 1994, writer and New York firefighter, William Groneman, and lifelong Davy Crockett fan, claimed there were inconsistencies in the de la Peña account.

WILLIAM GRONEMAN: It always bothered me that how this Mexican officer, who had never been to the United States, was only in Texas for the first time. Crockett had only been in Texas two months before the Alamo fell. How would he have known, on sight, Davy Crockett?

NINA EARNEST: The more he looked into it, the more Groneman’s doubts grew. For example, he says that de la peña’s memoir wasn’t even discovered until 1955. And he’s convinced it’s a fake, or perhaps a forgery.

WILLIAM GRONEMAN: So I made that fact known back in the early 1990s, and it started a big controversy that’s still going on today.

JAMES CRISP: And one of the reasons it exploded into controversy is because I was asked to review Bill Groneman’s book.

NINA EARNEST: This is historian, James Crisp, again.

JAMES CRISP: And unfortunately, his argument didn’t close. He hadn’t proved his point.

NINA EARNEST: Crisp says de la Peña’s one of three eyewitness accounts to the execution. And he did his own research and concluded that the memoir was authentic. So it’s likely that Crockett did die after the battle. This caused an uproar among Alamo aficionados, including one woman on the streets of San Antonio, who told him–

JAMES CRISP: If I had my bowie knife, I would gut you right now, because hanging is too good for you. And I said, wait a minute. Wait a minute. Have you actually read what I wrote? And she said, no. I’m just a Crockett loyalist.

NINA EARNEST: Since then, Crisp and Groneman have been the key figures in the “how did Davy die” debate. Crisp is pretty sure he was executed. Groneman thinks the answer is unknowable. And there’s only one thing that would change his mind.

WILLIAM GRONEMAN: Somebody inventing a time machine and going back to the battle of the Alamo and actually see what happened. There’s no way to know. You can’t verify any of these things.

NINA EARNEST: In other words, the Crisp and Groneman camps will never see eye to eye. To me, this seems like a historical dispute that obscures a larger point. Can we know how he died? Not with 100% certainty. But whichever side of the debate you fall on, it’s pretty clear that, yes, Davy Crockett did die defending the Alamo. Even if he was executed afterward, he still lost his life fighting a losing battle. The bigger question is, why do we care?

WILLIAM GRONEMAN: I don’t really think it does matter. But it began to matter, like I say, a few years back, when all the spin in the media which was put on that if he was executed, that meant he surrendered. That meant he gave up after encouraging everyone else to fight to the death. And that meant he was a coward.

JAMES CRISP: Because allowing yourself to be taken captive has a lot of wrinkles to it, a lot of layers to it. And when I argued that Crockett had actually been executed, people were calling me up, and some of them were kind of asking legitimate questions, but many of them were saying, as one British guy did, would you say that Crockett was a coward? And I would say, no.

NINA EARNEST: On this point, the two men actually agree.

WILLIAM GRONEMAN: You know, if Crockett had been executed, it doesn’t take away from a whole life of good service to other people.

NINA EARNEST: But that fine difference clearly matters to a lot of people, including the woman who threatened to gut James Crisp with the bowie knife. Andrew Torget says it’s no accident that Crockett resurfaced as a pop culture icon during the Cold War, both in the Walt Disney series and in the John Wayne film, The Alamo.

ANDREW TORGET: One movie is worth 100,000 academic books in terms of how the public thinks about stuff. And so the story about the Alamo today really is that there’s this group of men who believe so strongly in freedom, and liberty, and independence, that they knew they were going to die, but it was more important to stand up for those ideals.

If Crockett, then, is seen to surrender after these new pieces of evidence come out, that seems to take away, somehow, from that idea. It doesn’t have the same kind of punch that people who grew up in the ’50s and ’60s, and even ’70s and ’80s, would have had from the idea of the Crockett story, which is about no surrender, no matter how terrible the odds.

NINA EARNEST: Both in his own time and in his mythic afterlife, Davy Crockett has reflected how Americans want to see themselves.

NATHAN: BackStory producer, Nina Earnest, brought us that story. We also heard from Andrew Torget, a historian at the University of North Texas, and author of Seeds of Empire: Cotton, Slavery, and the Transformation of the Texas Borderlands, 1800-1850. James Crisp is a historian at North Carolina State University, and the author of Sleuthing the Alamo: Davy Crockett’s Last Stand and Other Mysteries of the Texas Revolution. William Groneman is author of Eyewitness to the Alamo.

BRIAN: That’s going to do it for today. But you can keep the conversation going online. Let us know what you thought of the episode, or ask us your questions about American history. You’ll find us at BackStoryRadio.org, or send an email to BackStory@virginia.edu.

We’re also on Facebook, Tumblr, and Twitter, @BackStoryRadio, and if you like the show, feel free to review it in Apple podcasts. Whatever you do, don’t be a stranger.

NATHAN: This episode of BackStory was produced by Andrew Parsons, Bridget McCarthy, Nina Earnest, Emily Ghatak, and Ramona Martinez. Our senior producer is David Stenhouse. Jamal Milner is our technical director. Diana Williams is our digital editor. And Joey Thompson is our researcher.

Additional help came from [INAUDIBLE], Sequoia Carrillo, Emma Greg, [INAUDIBLE], Aran Teeling, [INAUDIBLE], and Gabriel Hunter Chang.

Our theme song was written by Nick Thorburn. Other music in this episode came from [INAUDIBLE], Paddington Bear, and [INAUDIBLE]. And as always, thanks to the Johns Hopkins Studios in Baltimore.

BRIAN: And special thanks this week to Jamal Milner, who played the version of John Henry you heard after our story.

JOANNE: BackStory is produced at Virginia Humanities. Major support is provided by an anonymous donor, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the provost’s office at the University of Virginia, the Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation, and the Arthur Vining Davis Foundations.

ANNOUNCER: Brian Balogh is Professor of History at the University of Virginia. Ed Ayers is Professor of the Humanities and President Emeritus of the University of Richmond. Joanne Freeman is Professor of History and American Studies at Yale University. Nathan Connolly is the Herbert Baxter Adams Associate Professor of History at the Johns Hopkins University.

BackStory was created by Andrew Windham for Virginia Humanities.