Triumph and Tragedy in Mudville (20 page)

As a second example, I could never understand why such abominable and silly doggerel as “Casey at the Bat” ever became the canonical poem of both American baseball and the normalcy of failure in general. That is, until I
heard
the poem in an ancient film of a vaudeville performer (as the Victor disc in this exhibition illustrates). Then I understood. The poem was written to be declaimed, not to be read silently. Declamation of poetry in the nineteenth century represented a standard social recreation in American life, a fixture of nearly every party, and the doggerel succeeds marvelously in this intended aural context.

Finally, if we need any more proof for the vitality of baseball, and the power of
genius loci
, just stare in reverence at the centerpiece of this exhibition: a pile of dirt from Ebbets Field, home of the Brooklyn Dodgers (and the greatest ballpark I ever knew—an admission, remember, that comes from a Yankee fan!). I mean, folks, it’s just a pile of dirt. And dirt is dirt. Yeah, and nails are nails. But a nail from the true cross and dirt from Ebbets Field—need I say more? We cannot dedicate, we cannot consecrate, we cannot hallow such ground. Robbie did, and Campy, and Duke, and PeeWee, and also the Preacher—and what poor power do we have to add or detract? So of course I don’t care if I ever get back, because I’m there already, and there’s no other place to go. Truly we are all in this particular game together; and if we play our collective cards right (after all, my family’s going on four generations and still counting), we may ward off strike three for the evolutionary equivalent of forever.

Brooklyn’s Ebbetts Field in 1956.
Credit: Bettmann/Corbis

C
harlie Croker, former football hero of Georgia Tech and recently bankrupted builder of the new Atlanta—a world of schlock and soulless office towers, now largely unoccupied and hemorrhaging money—seeks inspiration, as his world disintegrates, from the one item of culture that stirs his limited inner self: a painting, originally done to illustrate a children’s book (“the only book Charlie could remember his father and mother ever possessing”) by N. C. Wyeth of “Jim Bowie rising up from his deathbed to fight the Mexicans at the Alamo.” On “one of the happiest days of his entire life,” Charlie spent $190,000 at a Sotheby’s auction to buy this archetypal scene for a man of action. He then mounted his treasure in the ultimate shrine for successful men of our age—above the ornate desk on his private jet.

From
I Have Landed
by Stephen Jay Gould, copyright © 2002 by Turbo, Inc. Used by permission of Harmony Books, a division of Random House, Inc.

Tom Wolfe describes how his prototype for redneck moguls (in his novel
A Man in Full
) draws strength from his inspirational painting:

Nations need heroes, and Jim Bowie did die in action at the Alamo, along with Davy Crockett and about 180 fighters for Texian independence (using the “i” then included in the name), under the command of William B. Travis, an articulate twenty-six-year-old lawyer with a lust for martyrdom combined with a fearlessness that should not be disparaged, whatever one may think of his judgment. In fact, I have no desire to question Bowie’s legitimate status as a hero at the Alamo at all. But I do wish to explicate his virtues by debunking the legend portrayed in Charlie Croker’s painting, and by suggesting that our admiration should flow for quite different reasons that have never been hidden, but that the legend leads us to disregard.

The debunking of canonical legends ranks as a favorite intellectual sport for all the usual and ever-so-human reasons of one-upmanship, aggressivity within a community that denies itself the old-fashioned expression of genuine fisticuffs, and the simple pleasure of getting details right. But such debunking also serves a vital scholarly purpose at the highest level of identifying and correcting some of the most serious pitfalls in human reasoning. I make this somewhat grandiose claim for the following reason:

The vertebrate brain works primarily as a device tuned to the recognition of patterns. When evolution grafted consciousness in human form upon this organ in a single species, the old inherent search for patterns developed into a propensity for organizing these patterns as stories, and then for explaining the surrounding world in terms of the narratives expressed in these tales. For universal reasons that probably transcend the cultural particulars of individual groups, humans tend to construct their stories along a limited number of themes and pathways, favored because they grant both useful sense and satisfying meaning to the confusion (and often to the tragedy) of life in our complex surrounding world.

Stories, in other words, only “go” in a limited number of strongly preferred ways, with the two deepest requirements invoking, first, a theme of directionality (linked events proceeding in an ordered sequence for definable reasons, and not as an aimless wandering—back, forth, and sideways—to nowhere); and second, a sense of motivation, or definite reasons propelling the sequence (whether we judge the outcomes good or bad). These motivations will be rooted directly in human purposes for stories involving our own species. But tales about nonconscious creatures or inanimate objects must also provide a surrogate for valor (or dishonorable intent for dystopian tales)—as in the virtue of evolutionary principles that dictate the increasing general complexity of life, or the lamentable inexorability of thermodynamics in guaranteeing the eventual burnout and explosion of the sun. In summary, and at the risk of oversimplification, we like to explain pattern in terms of directionality, and causation in terms of valor. The two central and essential components of any narrative—pattern and cause—therefore fall under the biasing rubric of our mental preferences.

I will refer to the small set of primal tales based upon these deep requirements as “canonical stories.” Our strong propensity for expressing all histories, be they human, organic, or cosmic, in terms of canonical stories would not entail such enormous problems for science—but might be viewed, instead, as simply humorous in exposing the foibles of
Homo sapiens
—if two properties of mind and matter didn’t promote a potentially harmless idiosyncrasy into a pervasive bias actively derailing our hopes for understanding events that unfold in time. (The explanation of temporal sequences defines the primary task of a large subset among our scientific disciplines—the so-called historical sciences of geology, anthropology, evolutionary biology, cosmology, and many others. Thus, if the lure of “canonical stories” blights our general understanding of historical sequences, much of what we call “science” labors under a mighty impediment.)

As for matter, many patterns and sequences in our complex world owe their apparent order to the luck of the draw within random systems. We flip five heads in a row once every thirty-two sequences on average. Stars clump into patterns in the sky because they are distributed effectively at random (within contraints imposed by the general shape of our Milky Way galaxy) with respect to the earth’s position in space. An absolutely even spacing of stars, yielding no perceivable clumps at all, would require some fairly fancy, and obviously nonexistent, rules of deterministic order. Thus, if our minds obey an almost irresistible urge to detect patterns, and then to explain these patterns in the causal terms of a few canonical stories, our quest to understand the sources (often random) of order will be stymied.

As for mind, even when we can attribute a pattern to conventional nonrandom reasons, we often fail to apprehend both the richness and the nature of these causes because the lure of canonical stories leads us to entertain only a small subset among legitimate hypotheses for explaining the recorded events. Even worse, since we cannot observe everything in the blooming and buzzing confusion of the world’s surrounding richness, the organizing power of canonical stories leads us to ignore important facts readily within our potential sight, and to twist or misread the information that we do manage to record. In other words, and to summarize my principal theme in a phrase, canonical stories predictably “drive” facts into definite and distorted pathways that validate the outlines and necessary components of these archetypal tales. We therefore fail to note important items in plain sight, while we misread other facts by forcing them into preset mental channels, even when we retain a buried memory of actual events.

This essay illustrates how canonical stories have predictably relegated crucial information to misconstruction or invisibility in two great folk tales of American history: Bowie’s letter and Buckner’s legs, as oddly (if euphoniously) combined in my title. I will then extend the general message to argue that the allure of canonical stories acts as the greatest impediment to better understanding throughout the realm of historical science—one of the largest and most important domains of human intellectual activity.

The Alamo of San Antonio, Texas, was not designed as a fortress, but as a mission built by eighteenth-century Spaniards. Today, the Alamo houses exhibits and artifacts, most recalling the death of all Texian defenders in General Santa Anna’s assault, with a tenfold advantage in troops and after nearly two weeks of siege, on March 6, 1836. This defeat and martyrdom electrified the Texian cause, which triumphed less than two months later when Sam Houston’s men captured Santa Anna at the Battle of San Jacinto on April 21, and then forced the Mexican general to barter Texas for his life, his liberty, and the return of his opium bottle.

The Alamo’s exhibits, established and maintained by the Daughters of the Republic of Texas, and therefore no doubt more partisan than the usual (and, to my mind, generally admirable) fare that the National Park Service provides in such venues, tells the traditional tale, as I shall do here. (Mexican sources, no doubt, purvey a different but equally traditional account from another perspective.) I shall focus on the relationship of Bowie and Travis, for my skepticism about the canonical story focuses on a fascinating letter, written by Bowie and prominently displayed in the Alamo, but strangely disregarded to the point of invisibility in the official presentation.

In December 1835, San Antonio had been captured by Texian forces in fierce fighting with Mexican troops under General Cos. On January 17, 1836, Sam Houston ordered Jim Bowie and some thirty men to enter San Antonio, destroy the Alamo, and withdraw the Texian forces to more defendable ground. But Bowie, after surveying the situation, disagreed for both strategic and symbolic reasons, and decided to fortify the Alamo instead. The arrival, on February 3, of thirty additional men under the command of William B. Travis strengthened Bowie’s decision.

But tension inevitably developed between two such different leaders, the forty-year-old, hard-drinking, fearlessly independent, but eminently practical and experienced Bowie, and the twenty-six-year-old troubled and vainglorious Travis, who had left wife and fortune in Alabama to seek fame and adventure on the Texian frontier. (Mexico had encouraged settlement of the Texian wilderness by all who would work the land and swear allegiance to the liberal constitution of 1824, but the growing Anglo majority had risen in revolt, spurred by the usual contradictory motives of lust for control and love of freedom, as expressed in anger at Santa Anna’s gradual abrogation of constitutional guarantees.)

Bowie commanded the volunteers, while Travis led the “official” army troops. A vote among the volunteers overwhelmingly favored Bowie’s continued leadership, so the two men agreed upon an uneasy sharing of authority, with all orders to be signed by both. This arrangement became irrelevant, and Travis assumed full command, when Bowie fell ill with clearly terminal pneumonia and a slew of other ailments just after the siege began on February 23. In fact, Charlie Croker’s painting notwithstanding, Bowie may have been comatose, or even already dead, when Mexican forces broke through on March 6. He may have made his legendary last “stand” (in supine position), propped up in his bed with pistols in hand, but he could not have mounted more than a symbolic final defense, and his legendary knife could not have reached past the Mexican bayonets in any case.

The canonical story of valor at the Alamo features two incidents, both centered upon Travis, with one admitted as legendary by all serious historians, and the other based upon a stirring letter, committed to memory by nearly all Texas schoolchildren ever since. As for the legend, when Travis realized that no reinforcements would arrive, and that all his men would surely die if they defended the Alamo by force of arms (for Santa Anna had clearly stated his terms of no mercy or sparing of life without unconditional surrender), he called a meeting, drew a line in the sand, and then invited all willing defenders of the Alamo to cross the line to his side, while permitting cowards and doubters to scale the wall and make their inglorious exit (as one man did). In this stirring legend, Jim Bowie, now too weak to stand, asks his men to carry his bed across the line.

Well, Travis may have made a speech at the relevant time, but no witness and survivor (several women and one slave) ever reported the story. (The tale apparently originated about forty years later, supposedly told by the single man who had accepted Travis’s option to escape.)

As for the familiar letter, few can read Travis’s missive with a dry eye, while even the most skeptical of Alamo historians heaps honor upon this document of February 24, carried by a courier (who broke through the Mexican lines) to potential reinforcements, but addressed to “The People of Texas and All Americans in the World.” (For example, Ben H. Proctor describes Travis as “egotistical, proud, vain, with strong feelings about his own destiny, about glory and personal mission…trouble in every sense of the word,” but judges this missive as “one of the truly remarkable letters of history, treasured by lovers of liberty everywhere.” See Proctor’s pamphlet,
The Battle of the Alamo
[Texas State Historical Association, 1986].)