Review Essay: Violence and Texas History in 2020

Abstract

Review EssayViolence and Texas History in 2020 Carlos Kevin Blanton (bio) Cult of Glory: The Bold and Brutal History of the Texas Rangers. By Doug J. Swanson. (New York: Viking, 2020. Pp. 466. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, index.) The Conquest of Texas: Ethnic Cleansing in the Promised Land, 1820–1875. By Gary Clayton Anderson. (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2005. Pp. 506. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, index.) The Making of a Lynching Culture: Violence and Vigilantism in Central Texas, 1836–1916. By William D. Carrigan. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2004. Pp. 328. Illustrations, notes, appendices, index.) The Injustice Never Leaves You: Anti-Mexican Violence in Texas. By Monica Muñoz Martinez. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2018. Pp. 387. Illustrations, notes, index.) I spent a part of the long, hot, isolated summer of 2020 reading about violence in Texas history: heart-pounding chases on horseback across dusty plains, frenzied moments of destruction followed by acrid gun smoke, the rising swell of an angry mob bent on administering its own justice regardless of the law, and the memory of violence that lives on to strike terror and pain for generations. The summer of 2020's mass protests against racial violence and police brutality, the deployment of unmarked federal agents to American cities, and the caging of immigrant children ripped away from their parents based on little more than their origins and darker skin all added a timely urgency for my reading. That this angry summer occurred in the context of the worst global pandemic in a century, which at the writing of this essay has resulted in more than 200,000 American dead, contributed to an even greater sense of alarm. These musings on violence in Texas history have been spurred by a new, big history of the Texas Rangers, Doug J. Swanson's, Cult of Glory: The Bold and Brutal History of the Texas Rangers. Cult of Glory is a compelling, thorough history of that most definably Texan of institutions. Given the political atmosphere of the present, it also [End Page 338] has impeccable timing. Swanson rightfully begins by stating the obvious, "No law enforcement agency has been celebrated so much for so long in popular culture" (2), before getting to his de-mythologizing intent (4–5): They were violent instruments of repression. They burned peasant villages and slaughtered innocents. They committed war crimes. Their murders of Mexicans and Mexican Americans made them as feared on the border as the Ku Klux Klan in the Deep South. They hunted runaway slaves for bounty. They violated international law with impunity. They sometimes moved through Texas towns like a rampaging gang of thugs. They conspired to quash the civil rights of black citizens. They busted unions and broke strikes. They enforced racial segregation of public schools. They botched important criminal investigations. They served the interests of the moneyed and powerful while oppressing the poor and disfranchised. They have been the army of Texas's ruling class. And they have consistently lied about it. In a larger sense Swanson's history of the Rangers is also a history of violence in Texas, a topic that historians of recent decades have analyzed in ways that move past traditional narratives. Those traditional narratives uncritically portrayed Anglo lawmen and settlers as rough-hewn heroes while depicting Native Americans, Mexican Americans, and African Americans who suffered at their hands as victims of evil times rather than evil men. The three other books that offer context for Cult of Glory here, Gary Clayton Anderson's The Conquest of Texas: Ethnic Cleansing in the Promised Land, 1820–1875 (University of Oklahoma Press, 2005), William D. Carrigan's The Making of a Lynching Culture: Violence and Vigilantism in Central Texas, 1836–1916 (University of Illinois Press, 2004), and Monica Muñoz Martinez's The Injustice Never Leaves You: Anti-Mexican Violence in Texas (Harvard University Press, 2018), take Swanson's revisionist narrative into deeper questions. What is the role of violence in the origins of Texas? What is the motivation for violence? What happens when past violence is tolerated and romanticized? And finally, what is our duty to the past in remembering violence? But before pursuing these questions, a brief...