The Alamo, 1960. John Wayne
wearing the cookskin cap as Davy Crockett.
What he definitely did say was, "History shall be kind to me, for I intend to write it." And he wrote 14 volumes of history, memoirs, and biographies of his father, Lord Randolph Churchill; and of his ancestor, John Churchill, 1st Duke of Marlborough, hero of the War of the Spanish Succession (1701-14).
Hisotry is written by the winners? Not always.
Top 10 Historical Events Where the Losers Wrote the History
Honorable Mention to various Presidential elections:
1824: Andrew Jackson won the popular vote and the Electoral Vote, but didn't get a majority in the EV, so it went to the House of Representatives, where John Quincy Adams beat him, following Henry Clay's withdrawal and urging of his supporters to switch to Adams. Jackson's supporters suggested a "corrupt bargain" had occurred, and Adams governed under a cloud for 4 years. Jackson won the rematch in a landslide.
1876: Samuel Tilden won the popular vote and the Electoral Vote, but didn't get a majority in the EV, so it went to the House of Representatives, where all the EVs that were in dispute, all but 1 in Oregon in Southern States, went to Rutherford B. Hayes. There may have been vote-stealing on both sides -- Republicans supporting Hayes cutting a deal to end Reconstruction in exchange for the White House, Democrats supporting Tilden suppressing the black vote in those States. But it's gone down in history that, while personally not involved, Hayes was the beneficiary of a stolen election.
1896: William McKinley easily won, and began a program of imperialism that would result in the Spanish-American War, the Philippine Campaign, the Boxer Rebellion, his re-election in 1900, and finally, in retaliation, his assassination in 1901. But modern Democrats look at the campaign of the man he beat both times, William Jennings Bryan, as the beginning of the Democratic Party becoming America's liberal party.
1912: Theodore Roosevelt and William Howard Taft, once staunch allies, split the Republican Party, allowing Woodrow Wilson to get 435 Electoral Votes with less than 42 percent of the popular vote. TR got 6 States, Taft only 2. But the boisterousness of TR's campaign -- including getting shot, giving an hour and a half speech, and then going to the hospital -- have engaged historians (professional and amateur alike) ever since.
1928: Herbert Hoover would've beaten Al Smith in a landslide even if Smith had been a Protestant (he was Catholic), pro-Prohibition ("dry" instead of "wet"), from a small town with a Midwestern accent (you could tell he was from N'Yawk), and without the taint of urban politics (he wasn't corrupt, but he was connected with the New York political machine Tammany Hall, which was). This is because Hoover ran on Republican prosperity. Then came the Crash of 1929, and people have said ever since that Smith would have avoided it. Probably not, but he could have made the Depression far easier to bear.
1952: Adlai Stevenson said, "Let's talk sense to the American people." Dwight D. Eisenhower said, "It's time for a change." Millions of simpletons chose between these two, in Eisenhower's favor. Stevenson's acolytes have continued to say he was the better choice. Maybe he would have been a better President, but he was a lousy candidate.
1960: Republicans have spent almost 60 years saying Mayor Richard J. Daley of Chicago stole Illinois' votes for John F. Kennedy. Except even if Richard Nixon had won Illinois, he wouldn't have won either the popular vote or the Electoral Vote. But "Daley stole the election for JFK" has been accepted by so many.
1964: Conservatives have told us for 55 years that Lyndon Johnson's Great Society was immoral, and caused the race riots and made the Vietnam War worse, and that it wouldn't have happened under Barry Goldwater, who won 6 States: His home State of Arizona (barely) and 5 Southern States angry at LBJ's Civil Rights Act. They're wrong, of course, but they've injected it into the public mind that way.
1968: It's not so much the supporters of Hubert Humphrey saying that he should have beaten Richard Nixon as it is the supporters of the assassinated Robert Kennedy and the primary-defeated Gene McCarthy saying their guy should have won.
1976: Republicans say it would have been better if Jimmy Carter lost -- not that Gerald Ford should have won, but that Ronald Reagan should have been nominated ahead of the incumbent Ford. They're fools: Can you imagine Ronald Reagan during the Iran Hostage Crisis? It could have started World War III.
1980: It's not so much the supporters of Jimmy Carter saying that he should have beaten Ronald Reagan -- the popular vote wasn't nearly as bad as the Electoral Vote, but it was nowhere near as close as it was in 1968 -- as it is the supporters of Ted Kennedy saying their guy should have won.
1992: Republicans still say that if Ross Perot hadn't been in the race, the elder George Bush would have won. This is monumentally stupid: Bush was hated. Perhaps not as much as his son would be by 2008, but badly. His reputation recovered somewhat in the last few years of his life, but that's because the son's screwups were from doing the opposite of the things the father did.
2008: Conservatives rewrote this election to say that things weren't so bad, and that the recovery was already in place before Barack Obama was inaugurated, and that he screwed things up, so John McCain should have won. Of course, some of these same people took Donald Trump's side against McCain.
Honorable Mention. Fans of some moved teams: The 1957 Brooklyn Dodgers, the 1983 Baltimore Colts, the 1993 Minnesota North Stars, the 1994 Los Angeles Rams, the 1995 Cleveland Browns, the 2008 Seattle SuperSonics. And the 1981... and 2019?... Oakland Raiders.
Honorable Mention. September 22, 1927: The Long Count Fight. This was far less important than most of other other events on this list. And, in forgetting, in the heat of the moment, the new neutral corner rule for which he, himself, had advocated, Jack Dempsey blew it.
But in incorrectly being seen as being robbed, Dempsey, previously hated for avoiding military service in World War I, gained more goodwill in losing this fight to Gene Tunney, who had taken the Heavyweight Championship of the World away from him in a stunning, if not publicly disputed, decision the year before, than he did in any of his famous quick-knockout victories. Before, his ability was respected, but he was hated as much as he was liked. After, he was loved.
Honorable Mention. April 3, 1978: The Academy Awards. Best Picture went to Annie Hall. Star Wars fans have been calling this an injustice for 41 years.
Now, for the Top 10. These are listed in chronological order:
1. August 20, 490 BC: The Battle of Thermopylae. We all remember "The 300 Spartans," and the courage that they showed. What we seem to forget is that they all died. True, they did manage to delay the Persians long enough for the rest of the Greeks to win the battle. Fat lot of good that did Sparta.
2. April 7, AD 30: The Crucifixion of Jesus. (The date is an estimate, and I'm not the one who made it.) There are historical sources outside of the Bible that prove that Jesus of Nazareth existed. They cannot, however, prove the central tenets of Christian faith: That he rose from the dead to redeem humanity. For all that history tells us, it was over. But the Apostles wrote the story, and turned defeat into victory. Not that any of them lived to see it.
3. Approximately AD 537: The Battle of Camlann. The tale of King Arthur tells of his initial victory, at the Battle of Badon Hill, probably around AD 500, with Bathampton Down in Somerset being the likeliest place if it happened at all; until his death in the Battle of Camlann, 37 years later, possibly at Camelford in Cornwall, in far southwestern England.
But Arthur is held up as the great British hero, the champion of chivalry, who used a combination of Christian faith and magic (which would normally be opposed to each other) to rule over a golden age that came to an end with the affair between his wife, Queen Guinevere, and his best friend and leading knight, Sir Lancelot.
Not that Arthur himself was perfect: Before Guinevere came along, he slept with his half-sister Morgaine, and the result was a son, Mordred, who challenged Arthur, and they led the opposing armies at Camlann, until the two men finally reached each other for personal combat and inflicted fatal blows on each other.
Did Arthur exist? Much like a later British hero, Robin Hood, probably is, he may be an amalgamation of many stories, a "composite character." And one of those men may have led troops at Badon, and another may have at Camlann.
The "loser" at Camlann was, well, everybody. The year 537 also featured the Goths' siege of Rome, and was the 3rd year of a worldwide famine that may have been the result of a volcano that sent lots of ash into the atmosphere, beginning a mini-ice age, thus providing a convenient beginning to "The Dark Ages."
4. June 15, 1389: The Battle of Kosovo. At what is now the city of Pristina, in the capital of the Republic of Kosovo, Prince Lazar led a Serbian force against invading Ottomans, led by Sultan Murad, and much of the Serbian nobility was wiped out. The Ottomans also lost a lot of men. In fact, both commanders were killed.
On the 600th Anniversary, in 1989, President Slobodan Milosevic of Yugoslavia delivered what became known as the Gaimestan Speech at the site. It was full of rhetoric of Serbian nationalism, and led directly to the breakup of the multi-national Yugoslavia and a multi-front civil war that would include the Serbs' genocide of the Ottomans' successors in the region, the Bosnian Muslims.
Honorable Mention: Once the West finally intervened in 1995, the Serbs went from winners to losers, and with NATO's aid, the Bosnians became "losers who wrote the history." Milosevic went from ruling over the entirety of Yugoslavia -- then including Serbia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina (that's one country), Kosovo, Montenegro, Slovenia and what's now named North Macedonia -- to losing Croatia, Slovenia and North Macedonia in 1991; then Bosnia and Herzegovina in 1995; then Kosovo in 1999; then losing power completely in 2000; then, shortly after Milosevic's death in 2006, Serbia lost Montenegro to an independence referendum.
5. July 27, 1689 to April 20, 1746: The Jacobite Rebellion. Maybe King James II of England (and VII of Scotland) wasn't a fit monarch, and deserved to be overthrown. But let's be honest: His son James Stuart, a.k.a. "The Old Pretender," was a lousy commander in the 1715 rebellion; and his son, Charles, a.k.a. "The Young Pretender" and "Bonnie Prince Charlie," was even more inept in leading "The '45."
But 2 more centuries of British Protestant rule over mostly-Catholic Ireland was oppressive enough to make people look for heroes, and such status was conferred upon the Pretenders. So now, James VII is seen as nobler than his usurper, William III; the Old Pretender more so than George I; and Bonnie Prince Charlie more so than George II.
It's worth noting, though, that when the War of the American Revolution was fought, despite many of the Founding Fathers having ancestry from the other "countries" in the United Kingdom (Irish, Scottish, and in the case of Thomas Jefferson and some others Welsh), while the Patriot cause sought out Frenchmen (Lafayette, Rochambeau, both Catholic), Germans (von Steuben), Poles (Pulaski and Kosciuszko, both Catholic), and aid in general from the Dutch and the Spanish (the Protestant former having had a long, finally successful bid for independence from the Catholic latter), they never sought help from the House of Stuart or its supporters in Europe. Maybe that was wise, given the results of 1690, 1715 and 1746.
6. March 6, 1836: The Battle of the Alamo. "Remember the Alamo!" they said. But they don't remember what really happened. What are the 2 things present-day Texans hate the most? Illegal immigrants and other criminals. The Texans at the Alamo were both of those things: What is now the City of San Antonio was then part of Mexico, and they were there without permission; and they were slaveholders, and slavery was already illegal in Mexico.
In other words, at the Alamo, the good guys won. But the Texans yelled, "Remember the Alamo!" at the Battle of San Jacinto on April 21, 1836, won that, and declared independence. Then, when it looked like Mexico was going to take them back, they called their Uncle Sam for help in 1844. Cowards. And then, to thank America for saving their asses, they seceded in 1861, because they decided that having slaves was more important than accepting that all men are created equal.
And then, nearly a century later, John Wayne made a movie about the Alamo, and, of course, any side that The Duke is on must be the heroic one, right?
7. April 12, 1861 to April 9, 1865: The American Civil War. The South became "The Lost Cause." The 1936 novel and 1939 film Gone With the Wind burned the antebellum South's "ladies" and "gentlemen" into the national consciousness. And who doesn't like a rebel?
The Confederacy was based on slavery. It was evil. Its apologists -- in the 1860s, the 1930s, the 1960s, and today -- refuse to accept this.
8. July 17, 1936 to April 1, 1939: The Spanish Civil War. As long as it was going on, the capitalist nations of the world didn't want to help the leftist Spanish Republic. Once World War II was over, and fascism defeated, the West was all, "Oh, poor Spain, noble nation getting bombed to pieces, why didn't anybody help them?"
Of course, with right-winger Francisco Franco in charge, the West could have done something, but didn't, and, 30 years after Hitler shot himself in his bunker, Franco was still alive and ruling. He died later in 1975, but, still.
9. May 26 to June 4, 1940: The Battle of Dunkirk. Backed up against the English Channel as France's defenses proved no match for Nazi Germany's Blitzkrieg ("lightning war"), the British Empire and its foreign volunteers lost 61,000 people killed and wounded, including 3,500 killed during the legendary evacuation.
They also lost 63,000 vehicles, 2,400 field guns (cannons), 6 destroyers, 89 transport ships, and 177 aircraft. The French lost 18,000 men, with another 35,000 captured, and 3 destroyers. In contrast, the Nazis lost 20,000 killed and wounded, 100 tanks, and nearly 400 aircraft -- but more than made up for that with the British and French weaponry they captured.
Somehow, the Royal Navy managed to evacuate 338,000 people (presumably, some of them women, most likely nurses and Army clerks) before the Nazis cut off access to the port. But instead of the humiliating defeat that it was, the British media hailed it as "The Miracle of Dunkirk," and commended the men for the "Dunkirk Spirit."
The battle was commemorated in films titled Dunkirk in 1958, starring John Mills, Richard Attenborough, and Bernard Lee, later to be known as James Bond's boss "M"; and in 2017, starring Kenneth Branagh, Cillian Murphy, Tom Hardy, Fionn Whitehead, Tom Glynn-Carney, and One Direction singer Harry Styles.
10. October 11-22, 1975: The 1975 World Series. Because Boston and Cincinnati are among the leading baseball cities, their one and only World Series matchup thus far has, with some understanding, taken on a historic role. But this Series also came at a time when football seemed to have overtaken baseball as America's favorite sport. (I've previously demonstrated that this wasn't true then, and still isn't true now.) Thus, this Series was a shot in the arm to baseball fans.
So much has been written about this Series, particularly its Game 6 at Fenway Park in Boston, on October 21, 44 years ago tonight. (There was a long rain delay before that game, extending what should have been a Series played over 9 days to 12.) Shortly thereafter, in The New Yorker magazine, Roger Angell wrote, "Game Six... what can we say of it without seeming to diminish it by recapitulation or dull it with detail?"
In his 1989 history of the Boston Red Sox, The Curse of the Bambino, Boston Globe columnist Dan Shaughnessy wrote, "Game Six has taken on a life of its own in the years since it was played, and it gets larger and more thrilling in each retelling. Some distance allows that there may be other contenders for the title of The Greatest Game Ever Played, but by any measure, 1975's Game Six will stand as one of the top ten games in World Series history, and one that came at a time when baseball needed it most."
What's more, both teams needed this Series. The Red Sox had won the Pennant only 8 years earlier, but hadn't won a Series in 57 years. The Cincinnati Reds had lost the Series 3 and 5 years earlier, and hadn't won one in 35 years. Both teams were hungry. Something had to give. And the Reds took a 3-2 lead in the Series, including a controversial play in Game 3 that Sox fans still whine about. (The correct call was made: There was no interference.)
In Game 6, the Red Sox jumped out to a 3-0 lead in the bottom of the 1st inning. That lead held until the top of the 5th, when the Reds tied it. They made it 6-3 in the top of the 8th, but Bernie Carbo tied the game with a home run in the bottom of the 8th. The Sox loaded the bases with nobody out in the bottom of the 9th, but Reds left fielder George Foster, much better known as a power hitter, made a catch and threw Denny Doyle out at the plate as he tried to score the winning run.
It went to extra innings, and Dwight Evans, one of the best-fielding right fielders ever, made a sensational catch of a Joe Morgan drive, and then threw Ken Griffey Sr. out at 1st base to finish a double play.
Finally, leading off the bottom of the 12th, Sox catcher Carlton Fisk hit a home run off Pat Darcy. The NBC cameraman stationed inside the scoreboard at the bottom of the left field wall, the Green Monster, was told to follow the flight of any fly ball that was hit. But a rat ran across the narrow room, and the cameraman stood still as a result, he captured Fisk waving his arms, trying to make the ball stay fair. It did, hitting the foul pole near the top. Red Sox 7, Reds 6.
I've called it "The Fenway Twist," and it may be the most-played TV sports image ever. So much has been made of this home run, to the point where it may have made the difference between Fisk making the Baseball Hall of Fame, and not.
But that home run didn't win the Series. It only forced a Game 7. The Red Sox took a 3-0 lead in the bottom of the 3rd, but the Reds made it 3-2 in the top of the 6th, tied it in the top of the 7th, and won it 4-3 on Morgan's single in the top of the 9th.
Until 2004, people could be forgiven for saying, "Wait a minute: The Red Sox haven't won the World Series since 1918, so they must have lost it in 1975. So why are we making such a big deal out of that Fisk home run?" Because it, along with their 1967 "Impossible Dream" Pennant, it was the Sox' biggest moment of glory since 1918, until 2004.
And yet, the 4 World Series wins -- 2004, 2007, 2013 and 2018 -- have not diminished the impact of that home run, that Game 6, and that entire World Series on the collective memory of baseball fans. Lots of people have said, "There were no losers" or "Everybody won." Cincinnati fans know the truth. So do the fans of the 28 teams not involved (6 of which didn't exist yet).
Red Sox fans act like they won something more important than a single World Series: The hearts and minds of baseball fans in general, just as Brooklyn Dodger fans did when their team desegregated the sport in 1947, and Met fans did in the 1960s when they outdrew the mighty Yankees despite being as bad a team as anyone had ever seen.
And, of course, whenever a team beats the Yankees in a postseason series, they get fans that they wouldn't ordinarily get: The Dodgers in Brooklyn in 1955, and in Los Angeles in 1963 and 1981; The Milwaukee Braves in 1957, the Pittsburgh Pirates in 1960, the St. Louis Cardinals in 1964, the Reds in 1976, the Arizona Diamondbacks in 2001, and the Florida (now Miami) Marlins in 2003; and some teams by beating the Yankees earlier in the postseason, most notably the Kansas City Royals in 1980, the Seattle Mariners in 1995, and the Red Sox in 2004 and 2018.
Speaking of the 2001 World Series: With the psychological blow of 9/11 still recent, and the heroics of the earlier Playoff rounds topped by the dramatic home runs hit in Games 4 and 5, the Yankees, through their YES Network broadcasts, have done their best to make it seem like they won the World Series, or at least won something through losing. But it doesn't work that way. But that Series is still special.
The 1975 World Series is still special. But I wonder how "special" it would have been if, say, the Red Sox had lost the American League Championship Series to the Oakland Athletics, instead of winning it. Or if the Yankees or the Baltimore Orioles, both of whom had their chances, had beaten the Sox out for the AL Eastern Division title in 1975, and then went on to beat the A's in the ALCS and the Reds in the Series.
Would the losers have "written the history" then? Or would the 1975 World Series now be remembered not as the valiant battle by the Red Sox, but as the crowning of the Big Red Machine?
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