You Are There: The Alamo

Interestingly enough, both episode 6 (“The Alamo”) and episode 7 (“The Last Days of Pompeii”) were written by Herb Kunich in 1947, but feel extremely different in style and delivery.  Both are well-made and acted, but “The Alamo” is less dynamic and less even-handed in its reporting. 

 

It’s March 6, 1836, and CBS reporters John Daly and Ken Roberts are reporting from the Mexican lines and Washington-on-the-Brazos respectively.  The US is neutral in the conflict between the Republic of Texas and Mexico so, in Daly’s words, “the CBS mobile unit is okay.”  Roberts interviews Mrs Elias Benson, who, with her family walked 250 miles from Independence, Missouri, to Texas.  Her son Philip is among those defending the Alamo.  “Philip is where God put them.”  Roberts tells us that the Texans (or Texians as I believe they called themselves) have “American faces . . . The language is of the Tennessee hills, the Mohawk Valley, the farmlands, the frontiers.”  It’s almost as if this is Edward R. Murrow covering the Blitz in London again, trying to get the CBS listeners to invest and join in the conflict, on the side of the Texians (though in Murrow’s case, it was real, and in this case, they just want us to believe we are there in 1836).   Roberts also interviews Noah Smithwick from Kentucky, who came to Texas for “a chance to own some land.”  He had been a gunners’ mate in the Navy that fought in the War of 1812.  Lured by Moses Austin’s “tolerably good lies,” Smithwick and his friends had tried to “do our best to mind our own business.” Roberts is also there to interview General Sam Huston.  When asked if his army is ready to come to the aid of the garrison at the Alamo, he replies, “When is Texas not ready to fight?”  

John Daly on the Mexican lines then picks up a shortwave signal from the transmitter that was left in the Alamo.  It’s a message from Lt. Col. Travis.  “I shall never surrender!”  Davy Crockett has a long message to his constituency:  “Howdy . . . You must be wondering what an ex-Congressman is doing here. . . . Remember, if someone runs down a neighbor’s race or religion, remind him he’s out of joint with democracy.”  The battle commences shortly after Jackson Beck reports from Louisiana, where US volunteers are clambering aboard barges to relieve the men at the Alamo. 

I wonder why episode 6 doesn’t seize me the way episode 7 does.  It might be because of the propagandistic element—there was no one to side with in Pompeii other than the Pompeiians, and even though the reporting regarding the Nazarenes was sensitive, no one implied that CBS as a US network had any special linkage to the Christian tradition these people represented; as the reporter said, they were a sect that was causing trouble to the Roman Empire.  Though CBS was never explicitly identified as a Roman broadcast unit, the tone was meant to evoke that they were at least tangentially part of the community or nation upon which they were reporting.  CBS in “The Alamo” is clearly representing the US, which, although neutral in the conflict, is obviously sympathizing with the Republic of Texas.  Furthermore, we don’t really get to hear the Mexican point of view.  But this can’t be the only reason “The Alamo” isn’t as successful as “The Last Days of Pompeii”;  “The Surrender of Sitting Bull” never brought us direct interviews with Sitting Bull or any of the Lakota tribesmen, yet the actions of the US Army spoke quite vividly for themselves.