The Texas Rangers and the Mexican Revolution: The Bloodiest Decade, 1910-1920.

The Texas Rangers and the Mexican Revolution: The Bloodiest Decade, 1910-1920. By Charles H. Harris III and Louis R. Sadler. (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, c. 2004. Pp. xiv, 673. $37.50, ISBN 0-8263-3483-0.)

Although the controversial activities of the Texas Rangers during the era of the Mexican Revolution prompted a state congressional investigation in 1919, the subject received relatively little attention (at least from Anglo researchers) during the twentieth century. Recent years, however, have witnessed the appearance of several projects that consider these events, including Benjamin H. Johnson's Revolution in Texas: How a Forgotten Rebellion and Its Bloody Suppression Turned Mexicans into Americans (New Haven, 2003) and Border Bandits, a 2003 documentary by Kirby Warnock. a Texas filmmaker. The Texas Rangers and the Mexican Revolution: The Bloodiest Decade, 1910-1920, by Charles H. Harris III and Louis R. Sadler, is the latest--and certainly the most comprehensive--addition to this growing field, though it is far from the most edifying.

The book examines the role of the Rangers between 1910 and 1920, a decade shaped to a great extent in Texas by the chaos of the Mexican Revolution. While the constabulary performed a host of typical law enforcement duties during the period--from policing labor disputes to keeping order in the state's oil boomtowns--chief among their assignments was the securing of the 1,250-mile Texas-Mexico border, a central Ranger responsibility since the end of the Mexican-American War. This mission took on added importance after 1910 as the Mexican Revolution spilled across the Rio Grande and into the Lone Star State, where refugees sought shelter from the fighting and exiled dissidents cultivated support for key players such as Francisco Madero, Pancho Villa, and Venustiano Carranza, among others. In response to such developments, officials in Austin called on the Rangers to thwart Texas-based efforts to undermine the Mexican government and also to defend the state from invasion by Mexican insurrectionists. It was in fulfillment of this last charge that the Rangers brutally suppressed the irredentist Plan de San Diego uprising of 1915-1916, killing anywhere from three hundred to five thousand Mexicans in the process and earning lasting notoriety for the constabulary.

To be sure, Harris and Sadler's volume has several strengths, most notably its mammoth base of archival research (drawn from repositories in both the United States and Mexico), which justifies historian Alwyn Barfs assessment of the study as "probably the most thoroughly researched book on the Rangers in any period" (quotation on dust jacket). The authors' investigative efforts have turned up numerous intriguing (if obscure) episodes in the history of the force, further developing the images of colorful men whose stories are already familiar to Ranger scholars and buffs. More importantly, their research reveals the extent to which political machinations--especially in the governor's office--directly affected the composition and deployment of the constabulary, sometimes exposing its members to unfair criticism and misuse.

And yet even as the depth of the authors' research constitutes the book's single greatest attribute, the organization of their findings blunts the volume' s possible impact by drowning the reader in a sea of undifferentiated detail. In this sense, the method of Harris and Sadler invites comparisons to Walter Prescott Webb's encyclopedic approach in The Texas Rangers: A Century of Frontier Defense (Austin, 1935). Like its predecessor, The Texas Rangers and the Mexican Revolution presents its audience with a staggering amount of information but offers little in the way of a sustained analytical interpretation by which to separate the substantial from the inconsequential. That determination, it seems, is left to the reader--no small task considering that the text runs to more than five hundred pages, packaged in an oversized format, no less.

Also problematic is the authors' misleading insinuation of their work into the bitter historiographical debate over the Rangers, which has in the past fallen rather neatly into pro and anti camps. As Harris and Sadler insist, their "purpose is neither to justify nor to condemn but rather to paint as accurately as possible a portrait of the Rangers, warts and all" (p. 8). This is an admirable goal, and one they might have achieved had they not succumbed to the tendency of Ranger hagiographers to venerate the machismo of members of the force, as they do, for example, with Anderson Yancey Baker, whom they describe as "a man not to be messed with" (p. 57). Later, they explain that "Baker had his faults--among them that of shooting Hispanics out of hand--, but lack of nerve was not one of them" (p. 279). Numerous wry asides, awkward attempts at humor (sometimes making light of otherwise gruesome episodes), and intemperate dismissals of alternative scholarly viewpoints as mere political correctness consistently undermine their stated objectivity and severely compromise the quality of the book.

In the end, The Texas Rangers and the Mexican Revolution contains some useful resources for other researchers--including a sixty-eight-page appendix listing those men who served as Rangers between 1910 and 1920--but the narrative and analysis (such as it is) are muddled, amorphous, and downright unsettling in parts.

ANDREW GRAYBILL

University of Nebraska, Lincoln