William Hanson is not your typical biographical subject. Dead for nearly a century now, Hanson was never famous, nor did he ever hold elected office. He was not an underappreciated artist or a forgotten do-gooder. He was a corrupt mid-level bureaucrat—less a mover of history than a man moved by it, ever pursuing his own narrow self-interest, yielding mixed results for himself and significant harm for others. In his most influential roles, he was a captain and inspector of the Texas Rangers in the late 1910s and, in the 1920s, a San Antonio district director of what was then called the U.S. Immigration Service. From these perches, a new book argues, he played a minor but emblematic part in the advent of the “the white supremacist gatekeeper state.”
In keeping with its odd principal character, William Hanson and the Texas-Mexico Border—published in May by UT Press—is not a typical biography. There are no childhood memories or coming-of-age moments. There’s just a roughly decade-long snapshot of a crooked functionary at work in the early-20th-century Texas borderlands, deploying “methods of institutional corruption [that] have been repeated time and again in the same institutions that he represented,” writes the book’s author, John Weber, an associate professor at Virginia’s Old Dominion University who previously penned a history of labor exploitation in South Texas.
“The disgraced former Texas Ranger and long-time smuggler was now in charge of securing the border.”
