Cult of Glory

May 1, 2020
A comprehensive account of the Texas Rangers, perhaps the most storied police force in American history. There's Walker, Texas Ranger, and then there's The Lone Ranger, the latter recounting "a crime-fighting career that spanned almost ninety years." There are Lonesome Dove and many an oater. Celebrated in popular culture very nearly from the beginnings of the organization almost 200 years ago, the Texas Rangers have always been a small outfit with an oversized image. Even today, writes former Dallas Morning News reporter Swanson, now a journalist professor at the University of Pittsburgh, there are only some 160 Rangers on active duty in a state of 29 million people. In the force's early days, most of their work involved fighting the Natives, and the legacy of conflict between the group and non-Anglos is strong. The author points out that it was only in 1969 that an officer of Hispanic descent was admitted, and more than two decades would pass before an African American was allowed into the service. That legacy includes, in recent history, the use of the Rangers to break up a strike of Hispanic farmworkers, a cloud on a reputation already marked by episodes of violence. Still, as Swanson writes--after recounting tales ranging from Ranger incursions into Mexico to the successful hunt for outlaws Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker--the force is slightly more representative of Texas' population today, with about a quarter of its number representing ethnic minorities, and all now recruited from the state's highway patrol. "The perils have dwindled in the modern era--no one is pulling Comanche arrows from their foreheads anymore--but the job still carries risks," Swanson concludes. His narrative is a touch too long and sometimes repetitive but understandably so, given the big story he has to tell, expanding on, updating, and sometimes correcting works by writers such as Walter Prescott Webb and John Boessenecker. Revisionist history done well, if not likely to please Chuck Norris die-hards.

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May 18, 2020
Journalist Swanson (Blood Aces) traces the history of the Texas Rangers from 1823 to the present day in this exhaustive, myth-busting exposé. Originating in a 10-man volunteer squad raised to protect the first American settlers in the Mexican territory of Texas, the Rangers, according to Swanson, “functioned as executioners” whose “job was to seize and hold Texas for the white man.” He documents clashes with Cherokees and Comanches, and claims that early-20th-century Rangers slaughtered innocent Mexicans and Tejanos and enforced school segregation. In the 1980s, Swanson writes, shoddy investigative methods and a hunger to enhance their reputation led the Rangers to accept—and widely promote—convicted killer Henry Lee Lucas’s false confessions to more than 200 murders across America. Though some contemporary Rangers, including Brandon Bess, who helped to crack a 31-year-old East Texas murder case in 2019 and carries a pistol engraved by state prisoners, embody the agency’s traditional image, Swanson points out that others have been tasked with such inconsequential matters as a three-month investigation into a missing mini-fridge. With copious research and a flair for the melodramatic, Swanson reveals that this famed law enforcement agency’s greatest achievement may be in public relations. This boldly revisionist account takes no prisoners. Agent: David Patterson, Stuart Krichevsky Literary Agency.

Starred review from June 1, 2020

The heroic history of the Texas Rangers has, in popular memory at least, gone largely unchallenged. Investigative journalist Swanson (Blood Acres) uncovers the mythmaking that provided three centuries of adventure stories, from dime novels to the 1990s TV series Walker, Texas Ranger. Swanson's detailed account, the bulk of which focuses on the 19th century, unmasks underlying, often racially motivated violence and criminality. From the years of the Republic of Texas through the Mexican-American War, the early Rangers operated as a paramilitary organization with little consequence or oversight. An exemplary story in Swanson's deconstruction is that of Leander McNelly, who massacred dozens of Mexicans over suspected theft of Texan cows. Evidence suggests the mass killing accomplished little but to repatriate wandering cattle. Decades later, Napoleon Augustus Jennings found his fortune transforming McNelly's massacre into a heroic narrative. Swanson is adept at holding readers' interest in a sweeping narrative, all the while allowing a nuanced understanding of these myths. The book loses some momentum in the final chapters in telling 20th-century history; by then the myths were ingrained in public imagination. VERDICT In an era in which some desire a return to a perceived greatness, books like this remind us greatness is often reliant on the selective memory of storytellers.--Bart Everts, Rutgers Univ.-Camden Lib., NJ

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