Cult of Glory: The Bold and Brutal History of the Texas Rangers Hardcover – June 9, 2020

This book resides on my top book shelf.It tells the real history of the original Texas Rangers, which is nothing like the 60 odd Hollywood movies or popular myths, many still promoted at the Texas Rangers Museum in Waco, Texas.In the early years of Texas history, this men were about the only law that the state government could send anywhere. Poorly paid, unsupervised, and basically untrained, they were almost as bad as the outlaws they were supposed to pursue. The did as much damage as good, running off indigenous people, hunting slaves, support slavery, supporting the Confederacy (1865) and harassing Mexicans all along south Texas on both sides of the boarder.Swanson covers the career highlights of a dozen Rangers from 1821 for the next 100 years, from before Texas became a Republic (1936) and then a state (1845).This isn't the Texas history they put in your high school textbooks.

The author did a great job doing his research and writes in a very fluent and understanding manner. That's about all I can say that is good about the book. This is one of the most unbalanced and biased book that I have ever read.The author, from the beginning, is on a social justice rant and along the way decided to bash the image of the Texas Rangers. I am all for social justice, but the book is about the Texas Rangers. Time and again the author goes into great detail explaining how a certain social injustice--unrelated to the Texas Rangers-- was perpetrated by American society against Blacks, Native Americans, or Mexican Americans. Then, he ties the Texas Rangers into an event that they were called upon to deal with on the heels of the injustice and paints them more often than not as nonchalant, racist, thugs. He obviously is focused much more on what the Rangers did wrong than what they have done right since the early 1800's.Make no mistake about it, the Texas Rangers did indeed do some horrible acts in their history--and they were wrong for doing what they did. However, selected bad acts should not define them. There is ample evidence that most police agencies in the US, the military, and even famous literary giants have committed egregious acts that they are not proud of. And, given the time and motivation to deal with their respective histories, someone can trash them as well. This doesn't make the wrongs that were committed by anyone right, but the blatant and imbalanced focus on the seedy can tarnish the good.The author takes the same position that modern day media does every time a police officer does something wrong--they create the impression that all cops are bad and dismiss all of the thousands of times each day the police get terrible things handled as they need to be. It is shameful to discredit such a storied part of our history as the Texas Rangers by focusing so heavily on their mistakes and wrongs. I have little doubt that there are literally thousands of events that the Rangers have done right that would look markedly different in the eyes of another author.

This is a fantastic book that regarding the history of the Texas Rangers and their turbulent history. The people calling this book 'woke' or whatever internet word is the flavor of the day are the folks who want to only think about things in terms of what they learned in their high school history classes. A simple sanitized black and white/good and evil version of history that is never the case. The Rangers have always been problematic even up until today. They've done truly good things. They've done truly bad things. IMO at times they would rather an innocent person go to jail that to show their own fallibility. Don't believe me? Read up on the Greg Kelley case. If you like a 'warts and all' approach to history - check this book out. If you like your history simple, sanitized and wrapped up in myth - maybe stick to reading your 8th grade history textbook.

There have been plenty of paeans to the Texas Rangers, a unique and select band of lawmen whose exploits have been featured in film, song, and fiction.Doug J. Swanson’s Cult of Glory acts as a bracing tonic, showing us not just the Rangers’ mistakes, but the crimes committed by their more corrupt members. Where the legends stand and claim one man fended off ten, or a hundred, he’s happy to show that nothing of the sort happened.That’s just the thing, though. Swanson is a bit too happy to act as an eviscerating iconoclast. You can almost see him gleefully rubbing his hands together as he prepares to take those swaggering lawmen down a peg or two. He’s content to spend a page or two describing encounters in which the courage and tenacity of the lawmen was proven beyond a doubt, and to dwell, like a schoolmarm, on the inexpiable sins of our age, like racism, for ten times as many pages.I like a “warts and all,” picture of any group of men, who, at the end of the day, are fallible, and subject to corruption. But there’s too much “warts” and not enough “all,” here.The book doesn’t start out giving that impression, however. It begins auspiciously, taking the reader through the history of the brutal conflicts between Anglos, Tejanos, Mexicans, and American Indians, each battling for domination of the plainlands. It’s all cruel, brutal, sometimes outright genocidal war to the knife, to the last man, woman, and yes, child.But the ugly, blood-soaked history is related in a kind of evenhanded manner that occasionally reaches the level of the poetic. The larger-than-life characters—the psychos, desperadoes, upstanding men who live by a code—all come across as larger than life, Cormac McCarthy-esque grotesques who sought out the savagery of the wild because it mirrored their own inner turmoil.But it tends to fall apart, however, as the battle for the frontier in the eighteenth century, and then the closing down of the same, finally leads to a hokey, anti-climactic denouement in the modern era. The rotten lawmen of course deserved to be called out, but the brave deserved better than Swanson merited them. With copious photos.

Not the history of the rangers I was expecting well researched and interesting

Thanks