The Twilight of the Texas Rangers
(Page 3 of 5)
The changes were especially apparent in South Texas, where a century’s worth of animosity had accumulated. To Mexican Americans, the Rangers were not romantic stalwarts but rather “Los Rinches,” oppressors of the poor and flunkies of wealthy Anglo ranchers. Captain A.Y. Allee, the head of Ranger Company D since 1947, was the focus of their fear and contempt. Allee had been sued and investigated countless times for his conduct in South Texas. He readily owned up to assaulting attorneys, smacking a Mexican labor organizer over the head with a rifle butt, and pistol-whipping George Parr, the Duke of Duval County. During a 1968 U.S. Commission on Civil Rights hearing, Allee said of his Rangers, “We are not instructed in any way [about the use of force]. We use what force we deem necessary to make any kind of arrest.”
When the United Farm Workers organized a strike in Starr County in 1967, Allee and his company waded in with characteristic vigor. The Rangers arrested a minister and his wife who were not carrying pickets, delivered a concussion to an organizer, and informed demonstrators that the Rangers would do whatever it took to break the strike. For both the Rangers and the South Texas residents, nothing about the scenario was unfamiliar except for the response it generated. Allee’s behavior was vilified in the statehouse, in the national media, and by the federal government. Eventually the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that Allee’s Rangers had violated the farm workers’ right to peaceful assembly. Allee remained unrepentant, but the damage to the Rangers’ reputation was considerable. In 1975 Allee’s son, Ranger Alfred Allee, Jr., volunteered to assist in a Presidio case involving a strike organized by CÈsar Chavez. The younger Allee’s superiors adamantly refused. “We saw what mess your dad got us into before,” he was told.
Captain Allee departed in 1970, done in by mandatory retirement. Homer Garrison’s retirement from the DPS in 1968 ended a thirty-year reign, which would be followed by a succession of Ranger commanders. In 1972 Sissy Farenthold ran for governor and made the abolition of the Rangers one of her major campaign issues. The stance was intensely unpopular, and Ranger veterans guffawed when Farenthold lost. But Farenthold was of a newer time, and the Rangers were not impervious to it. No longer could a Texas lawman earn his Ranger badge simply by virtue of a veteran’s blessings; now he had to pass a written test that many old-timers doubtless would have failed. A regulation instituted by DPS director James Adams in the early eighties stipulated that new Rangers would have to be plucked from the Department of Public Safety, rather than from a police or sheriff’s office, as had been the case with so many Rangers in the past. As civil procedures tightened, paperwork demands increased. With Captain Allee’s antics known throughout Texas and Garrison no longer around to take the flak, Ranger captains reined in their men and demanded an account of their comings and goings. “Rangers were notoriously unsupervised,” recalls Sid Merchant. “I’d go a month at a time without seeing my captain. And things worked, because the old captains would back you. My captain, Jim Riddles, had balls as big as two brass bathtubs. Cap Allee was as mean as a snake, but damn it, he stood up for his men. Those fellows left, and the ones who came in after them were all caught up in covering their asses.”
New federal labor regulations that severely restricted overtime took effect in the mid-eighties. While unions across America rejoiced, the Texas Rangers were aghast. A Ranger didn’t punch a clock. How could he, when criminals didn’t? “I remember they forced me to take off twenty straight days because I had worked too many hours,” says Max Womack, an East Texas Ranger from 1969 until 1988. “It was ridiculous, and it brought a hardship on the rural counties that depended on men to work their cases.” Many Rangers went about their business and simply fudged their time sheets. “You’d have to lie,” says Glenn Elliott, “and then if a case you were working on went to trial, they’d get you on the witness stand and shove your time sheet in front of your face and make a fool out of you in front of the jury.”
The Ranger force had always been full of ancient lawmen who had lied about their age to keep their post, but now the rules conspired with their advancing frailties to goad them into retirement. Charlie Miller in Mason, Jim Nance in Sierra Blanca, Homer Melton in Benjamin, Frank Kemp in Paris, Hollis Sillavan in Columbus, Bill Baten in Pampa, Lewis Rigler in Gainesville—these men had served their country outposts for as long as anyone could remember, and the silence of their passing was like a lonely death on the prairie. They would have successors, but they would not be replaced. “Coming up, I knew that old bunch,” says Alfred Allee, Jr., now retired from the Rangers. “They were just different. Had a sense of honor. Knew how to get the job done. That old bunch—they were Rangers all the time.”
“Now, the new bunch, they’re something else again. You might run into them on the street and see them in Bermuda shorts and tennis shoes.”
I SERVED ON THE ORAL interview boards when Tom Almond and Lloyd Johnson were made Rangers,” recalls Lewis Rigler. “Before we did the actual interviewing, a captain would tell me, ‘Now, Lewis, I know this Johnson and he’s good.’ And another captain would tell me, ‘Almond, he’s a hell of a guy.’ So that’s who we’d select. Sure, the fix was in. And I was part of the fix.”
To the Rangers, that was a perfectly legitimate hiring practice. To those outside, looking in, it smacked of old-boy inbreeding. In the wake of the 1967 farm worker strikes, critics began to ask DPS officials why there hadn’t been a Hispanic Ranger in many years. The question seemed to take Rangers aback, and their stock response—that there weren’t any qualified Hispanic officers available—no longer seemed to wash. “I don’t see any Japanese here,” A.Y. Allee snapped at a reporter. “I don’t see any Chinamen. We can’t hire every doggone breed there is in the United States.” But the pressure did not relent, and in 1969 a 31-year-old highway patrolman named Arturo Rodriguez was given a Ranger badge. Rodriguez was a tough investigator, highly thought of by Allee and Joaquin Jackson. Yet those connections, along with Rodriguez’s mere five and a half years of law enforcement experience, only reinforced criticisms about the Rangers’ good-old-boy network. In 1971 a Ranger captain approached DPS narcotics investigator Ray Martinez and said, “Ray, we really need another Mexican American Ranger.” Martinez, who as an Austin police officer in 1966 helped gun down sniper Charles Whitman in the University of Texas Tower, thought the proposition sounded like tokenism and declined. He later changed his mind, and though Martinez served contentedly as a Ranger from 1973 until the end of 1991, he acknowledges that his efforts to be promoted in the Ranger ranks were unsuccessful. “Did I feel like I had an equal opportunity to compete for promotion?” he muses. With a wry smile, Martinez then says, “Let’s just say I would hope that I did.”
In 1986 the Ranger oral interview board turned away a veteran DPS trooper named Michael Scott, despite the eight commendations in his personnel file and the high score he had achieved on the written test. Scott had grown up in Waco a mile from the Texas Ranger Hall of Fame. His childhood dream was to be a Ranger. He was an intelligent, well-built, clean-cut family man. The oral interview seemed to have gone well, and yet he was given a score sufficiently low to deny him a promotion to the Ranger force. In 1987 Scott again scored high on the written test. Again he went before the oral board. Again he received a low score and was denied a Ranger position.
Michael Scott could not help but notice that the Rangers had no blacks on the force and wonder if the fact that he was black had something to do with his treatment. Other black troopers began to wonder the same thing, and in 1987 they approached the NAACP, which filed a federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission complaint on behalf of the troopers in 1988. DPS officials agreed to enter into negotiations, and later that year, two black Rangers were hired. Neither of them was Michael Scott, who had committed the unpardonable sin of airing his frustrations to the media. Nor were the hirees among the group of black troopers who had contacted the NAACP. “Scott was as good or better than any Ranger who got in,” recalls a state official who was part of the negotiations between the DPS and the NAACP. “But that’s the pattern that emerged after 1988. Individuals who refused to go along with the company line have continued to be denied justifiable promotions.”
Never before had the Rangers been the least bit concerned about appearances, but the EEOC complaint changed all that. The traditional Ranger oral interview board, consisting of veteran Rangers who happened to be white, was now seen as an invitation to a job-discrimination lawsuit. By 1992, the new interviewers tended to include one of the two blacks Rangers as well as a 32-year-old Hispanic woman from the DPS narcotics division and a black woman from the DPS safety division—”People who don’t know ‘come here’ from ‘sic’em about the Rangers, to tell you the damn truth,” says Joaquin Jackson.
But the cosmetic reforms were not enough to suit the state legislature. By 1993, the growing power of the Hispanic and Black caucuses had seeped into the Texas House Appropriations Committee. During the 1993 session, new committee members like Mario Gallegos, Pete Gallego, and Karyne Conley took it upom themselves to review the minority-hiring situation at the DPS and the Rangers chief Maurice Cook were called to a conference session, where, according to Gallegos, “We raked them over the coals. The low numbers of minorities just stuck out like a sore thumb. Their promotional test hadn’t been validated since the early seventies. To us, that just typified what was happening over at DPS.”
