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Book Review
One Ranger:
A Memoir
By H. Joaquin Jackson
and David Marion Wilkinson
Reviewed by Robert
M. Utley
H. Joaquin Jackson
and David Marion Wilkinson. One Ranger: A Memoir (Austin: University
of Texas Press, 2005).
Many
Texans still recall that splendid image of Joaquin Jackson that appeared
on the cover of the Texas Monthly in 1993, the year Jackson turned in
his Texas Ranger badge. Fittingly, it also appears on the dust jacket
of his memoir. It is a full-length portrait that personifies the old-time
Ranger: broad-brimmed hat, neckerchief, leather leggings, spurred boots,
Model ‘94 Winchester .30-30, and a pistol on each hip. What are
in the holsters cannot be seen, but he declares his preference for the
1911 Colt automatic. The celebrated circled-star badge of the Texas
Rangers adorns his chest. He looks like he could have been one of the
Rangers who followed such legends as Bill McDonald and John Hughes at
the end of the nineteenth century. Jackson’s appearance, however,
is entirely appropriate to his time and place: 1966-93 in South and
West Texas.
The Ranger Service
was skillfully erected by the venerated Colonel Homer Garrison, head
of the Department of Public Safety from 1938 until felled by cancer
in 1968. By 1966, the Ranger organization had assumed two overlapping
identities.
Jackson and his
peers policed country roads and contended with bad men resembling those
of the frontier West of McDonald and Hughes. High-speed pursuit cars,
aircraft, and radio communication vastly improved their capabilities,
but they still trailed rustlers and smugglers like their predecessors,
and the rugged land still demanded that they mount on horseback for
many tasks.
By contrast, urbanized
East Texas called for a different man and different methods. Here—far
more than in South and West Texas—homicide, burglary, bank robbery,
kidnapping, rape, assault, and other crimes common to cities preoccupied
the Rangers. When not diverted by strikes, gambling, or other such assignments,
the East Texas contingent regarded their principal mission as solving
major crimes. Sometimes they took to horseback, but mostly they worked
with autos, aircraft, radios, and the superb scientific crime laboratory
in Austin. Only when they wanted to appear conspicuous did they don
the garb that marks Joaquin Jackson.
Little interchange
of personnel occurred between these Eastern and Western Rangers, and
the drama of the battle against major crime has tended to obscure the
role of the Rangers in the western part of the state. Here, one Ranger
helps remedy that focus.
In 1966, Joaquin
Jackson was a member of the select few who beat the stiff competition
for a Ranger appointment. Indeed, he was one of the last three men on
whom Colonel Garrison himself pinned the distinctive Ranger badge. He
drew assignment to Company D, the one western outfit that gained plenty
of publicity in the following decade.
The captain was
Alfred Y. Allee, headquartered in Carrizo Springs. The publicity arose
from the role of Allee’s Rangers in the farm labor strikes in
the lower Rio Grande Valley. As the U.S. Supreme Court ultimately decided,
the Rangers deprived the Mexican-American workers of their constitutional
rights. For almost a decade, the Ranger Service endured bad publicity
and widespread calls for its abolition.
Oddly, Jackson
does not tell us anything about this significant episode in Ranger history.
He does, however, recount in fascinating detail his role in the election
crisis of 1972 in Crystal City, which pitted Mexican cannery workers
against the entrenched Anglo establishment.
Jackson also provides
the best characterization of the controversial Captain Allee I have
seen anywhere. Together with all the other Rangers of Company D, Jackson
venerated Allee, a blocky, tough, cigar-chomping, old-time Ranger who
took the heat for the civil rights abuses of the late 1960s and early
1970s. Jackson explains why the Rangers all worshiped him but also concedes
his flaws. As Jackson observes, Texas changed but Allee didn’t.
Another Ranger adds: Allee just didn’t know how to change.
David Marion Wilkinson
co-authors this book. He is a well-known, first-class writer, nd the
text flows smoothly and readably. Jackson’s blunt, forthright
prose often interjects, but mainly we are reading Wilkinson. That the
text is cast in first-person means that Jackson approved it, so it all
may be taken as his words. For the most part, the chapters are stories
out of Jackson’s career involving interesting characters, drama,
and action that illustrate who this Ranger is and how he matured. They
reveal the unfolding of a fine Garrison-era Ranger, one who tells the
truth as he remembers it and is candid in acknowledging his shortcomings
and failures as well as his successes. I especially appreciate two frank
observations.
First, Jackson
sees himself as part of a generation of Rangers that Colonel Garrison
nurtured as individualists responsible for taking care of their problems
as they saw fit, calling for help only when essential. By contrast,
modern Rangers are computerized and bound by rule books. Nevertheless,
Jackson states that they are good and “every bit as magnificent
in their time as my generation was in ours. They aren’t better
or worse, they’re just different.”
Second (and consistent
with that reflection) Jackson retracts all the critical reasons attributed
to him for quitting in 1993, especially the common complaint about unqualified
women politically foisted on the all-male Ranger Service. In truth,
he confesses—just like Captain Allee—that times had changed
and he hadn’t, and even if he knew how, he didn’t want to.
It was time to leave.
This is a fine
book, a good read, and a needed glimpse of an aspect of twentieth-century
Rangering hitherto neglected.
I have two criticisms.
First, I think Jackson should have told us how he viewed and participated
in the farm workers’ strike of 1966 and its aftermath. Second,
the book has no index, incredible for a press as prestigious as the
University of Texas.
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