The Canales Hearings, the Loyal Rangers in the Era of the Mexican Revolution

                During World War I, but more relevantly, the era of the Mexican Revolution (1910-1920) the state of Texas authorized the expansion of the Texas Rangers by establishing special commissions for what became known as the Loyalty Rangers.  These Rangers were not within the established Rangers chain of command and often were locally hired and paid by agricultural planters, railroad corporations and mining interests to provide security on the US-Mexico border.  Despite state authorization of these Rangers, they were more or less deputized vigilantes engaged in policing Mexican American communities during times of political turbulence.  Generally, despite the increasingly frequent episodes of violence on the frontier, these Loyalty Rangers also offered effective and often violent support in the maintenance of labor relations between the Mexican American laboring class and Anglo American managerial and employing class.  Not unsurprisingly, the laboring class found themselves frequent targets of indiscriminate and extralegal violence by these Rangers.

Ranger Henry Ransom (seated, far left) and Company D

                In 1919 after more than a dozen episodes of ethnic and racially motivated violence by Rangers killed hundreds of Mexican American community members (who often had no ties to any cross border revolutionary activity) the state’s only Mexican American legislator Jose Tomas Canales sponsored a reform bill that would eliminate the practice of governor’s authorizing the use of special Rangers.  Canales proposed reducing and reforming the regular Ranger units, demanded that those hired have law enforcement experience, that the noxious veterans of the Loyal Ranger be barred from serving, and that the governors be restrained from appointing people to Ranger commissions in the form of political patronage in reward for campaign or electoral help (as Governors Ferguson and Hobby both had done).  Canales also proposed that Rangers be capable of posting $1000 bonds for their service, a fairly common expectation for elected county office holders such as sheriffs and JPs.  The intention was to ensure that gentlemen held these positions, or at least that men of modest means would need the financial backing of local elites in their quest for office.  What Canales hoped, of course, was that the governors would stop expanding the Ranger force with special dispensations to reward their friends, and that those politically connected friends would no longer fill the force with prejudiced and often vicious or violent men of small means who were accustomed to using violence against Mexican and Mexican American farm and mine workers.

Canales, 1937

                The Canales bill sparked an enormous outcry by the Rangers in their own defense as well as growing anxiety that the issues which motivated Canales would stain the history of the Rangers and the state.  A series of Canales Hearings on the bill occurred in the later 1910s until ultimately the bill failed to pass the state legislature.  The hearings make some fascinating, if frustrating reading and can be found here but the growing efforts of Refusing to Forget have recently brought attention to issue as historians seeks to illuminate Texas’s experience of both World War I and the Mexican Revolution one hundred years afterward.  As this piece in Slate notes, both the Bullock Museum and local historical commission authorized markers are beginning to talk plainly about the extraordinary use of extralegal violence by vigilantes and militias backed by private extractive companies.

                At the invitation of the Fort Bend County library system I will be talking about the broader history of the Texas Rangers from the colonial founding of the Brazos colonies through the American Civil War and into the modern 20^th century.  This story of the Loyal Rangers in the 1910s is just one of many stories—some heroic, others decidedly not heroic—and I’d love to see you there.  If you aren’t nearby, take time to browse the Refusing to Forget blog, or if you had a chance to visit the Bullock Museum this past Spring and saw the exhibit, tell me what you thought about it.  If you really want some homework, ask your library to call those Canales hearing transcripts in to your local branch and sit down with the microfilm reader…..

Kara Walker, Harper's Pictorial History of the Civil War (Annotated)

Kara Walker has had over three dozen solo shows since 1995 and, so far as I can tell, the last of them to exhibit in Texas was over nine years ago when “My Complement, My Enemy, My Oppressor, My Love” visited the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth.  It seems quite rare that her work is exhibited in the South, much less Texas.

In the spring of 2014 her Marvelous Sugar Baby sculpture in the vacant Domino Sugar Refinery in Brooklyn became the most talked about art installation of the year, and frankly, I have heard nothing about another work of art discussed as much.  An enormous sphinx made with large sugar cube blocks, it exhibited familiar critiques of the black Mammy iconography that Walker observers should recognize from her earlier conceptual work with silhouettes, prints and Jim Crow era found objects.

So far as I know, there has yet to be a major Kara Walker show in Houston.  The Museum of Fine Arts Houston, however, possesses the fifteen print series of lithographs and screenprints produced by Sikkema Jenkins & Co from Walker’s Harper’s Pictorial History of the Civil War (Annotated) 2005-2006.  These prints are absolutely shocking and remarkable to view and, at least for a short period, a small number are on exhibit during this last phase of Statements: African American Art from the Museum’s Collection.  I can only hope that one day the Museum takes the time to display the entire range of their collected lithographs.

In 1866, Harper’s editor Alfred Guernsay released the Pictorial History of the Civil War.  Originally released in two volumes and over 800 pages, this publication featured more than 1000 illustrations culled from the files of Harper’s throughout the war years.  For the last fifty years, inexpensive coffee table versions on cheaper, thinner paper have been a standard on the bargain gift tables of many American bookstores and the volume is about as inescapable as anything which seeks to document the Civil War.  Kara Walker is not the first to point out the ways in which the book and its many reprints have sheared away any references to slavery and emancipation as well as the role of African Americans in the war.  But academics and artists, frequently with lamentable small audiences, continue to knock against the interpretation of a Civil War over slavery that curatorially excises the black experience of the war from the history and visual record. 

With those issues aside, however, I must confess that I- and presumably Kara Walker- found these 19^th century newsprint illustrations of major events and turning points of the War, as well as the banality of routine, boring soldiering, utterly captivating.  The original illustrations are an absolute high point in mid19th century visual arts and illustrations.  Kara Walker’s “annotations” however force us to reconsider these familiar, often iconographic illustrations.

The use of sexualized and stereotyped images of African Americans from Jim Crow era minstrelsy and popular culture is central to Walker’s art as early as her first use of these images in her Gone: An Historical Romance of Civil War as it Occurred Between the Dusky Thighs of a Young Negress and Her Heart (1994).  Now that Gone is installed at MOMA, Walker teaches at Columbia, and the City’s memory of Marvelous Sugar Baby continues to linger she remains the most prominent African American artist of the contemporary moment.

These large scale panoramas, screenprints, and installations are always arresting when viewed for the first time, surprising in their size and vividness.  The reminder of how often African Americans were removed from the central places in our national memory stands in stark juxtaposition with how often they were also portrayed as either fools or objects for sexual gratification in our nation's vulgar entertainments.  Kara Walker's art forces us to acknowledge this reality lest we forget how routinely early 20th century mass culture and popular media established long entrenched racial stereotypes and assumptions. 

If one sees these five Kara Walker prints at the MFAH's Statements exhibit, I would also encourage you to stop for a moment and view the photographs by Gordon Parks from the 1940s for further reminders of the impact of this history on the lives of African Americans in the late Jim Crow era.

Gordon Parks, Children with Doll, Washington DC, 1942

Further links and writing about these prints:

MFAH's page on the current exhibit, Statements.

MFAH's page on their Walker collection.

Pace Prints 2013 site with great gallery shots of the series on exhibit.

Columbia's bio page on Walker.

Gettysburg College's 11pg gallery show book.

Kara Walker, Harper's Pictorial History of the Civil War (Annotated)

Kara Walker has had over three dozen solo shows since 1995 and, so far as I can tell, the last of them to exhibit in Texas was over nine years ago when “My Complement, My Enemy, My Oppressor, My Love” visited the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth.  It seems quite rare that her work is exhibited in the South, much less Texas.

In the spring of 2014 her Marvelous Sugar Baby sculpture in the vacant Domino Sugar Refinery in Brooklyn became the most talked about art installation of the year, and frankly, I have heard nothing about another work of art discussed as much.  An enormous sphinx made with large sugar cube blocks, it exhibited familiar critiques of the black Mammy iconography that Walker observers should recognize from her earlier conceptual work with silhouettes, prints and Jim Crow era found objects.

So far as I know, there has yet to be a major Kara Walker show in Houston.  The Museum of Fine Arts Houston, however, possesses the fifteen print series of lithographs and screenprints produced by Sikkema Jenkins & Co from Walker’s Harper’s Pictorial History of the Civil War (Annotated) 2005-2006.  These prints are absolutely shocking and remarkable to view and, at least for a short period, a small number are on exhibit during this last phase of Statements: African American Art from the Museum’s Collection.  I can only hope that one day the Museum takes the time to display the entire range of their collected lithographs.

In 1866, Harper’s editor Alfred Guernsay released the Pictorial History of the Civil War.  Originally released in two volumes and over 800 pages, this publication featured more than 1000 illustrations culled from the files of Harper’s throughout the war years.  For the last fifty years, inexpensive coffee table versions on cheaper, thinner paper have been a standard on the bargain gift tables of many American bookstores and the volume is about as inescapable as anything which seeks to document the Civil War.  Kara Walker is not the first to point out the ways in which the book and its many reprints have sheared away any references to slavery and emancipation as well as the role of African Americans in the war.  But academics and artists, frequently with lamentable small audiences, continue to knock against the interpretation of a Civil War over slavery that curatorially excises the black experience of the war from the history and visual record. 

With those issues aside, however, I must confess that I- and presumably Kara Walker- found these 19^th century newsprint illustrations of major events and turning points of the War, as well as the banality of routine, boring soldiering, utterly captivating.  The original illustrations are an absolute high point in mid19th century visual arts and illustrations.  Kara Walker’s “annotations” however force us to reconsider these familiar, often iconographic illustrations.

The use of sexualized and stereotyped images of African Americans from Jim Crow era minstrelsy and popular culture is central to Walker’s art as early as her first use of these images in her Gone: An Historical Romance of Civil War as it Occurred Between the Dusky Thighs of a Young Negress and Her Heart (1994).  Now that Gone is installed at MOMA, Walker teaches at Columbia, and the City’s memory of Marvelous Sugar Baby continues to linger she remains the most prominent African American artist of the contemporary moment.

These large scale panoramas, screenprints, and installations are always arresting when viewed for the first time, surprising in their size and vividness.  The reminder of how often African Americans were removed from the central places in our national memory stands in stark juxtaposition with how often they were also portrayed as either fools or objects for sexual gratification in our nation's vulgar entertainments.  Kara Walker's art forces us to acknowledge this reality lest we forget how routinely early 20th century mass culture and popular media established long entrenched racial stereotypes and assumptions. 

If one sees these five Kara Walker prints at the MFAH's Statements exhibit, I would also encourage you to stop for a moment and view the photographs by Gordon Parks from the 1940s for further reminders of the impact of this history on the lives of African Americans in the late Jim Crow era.

Gordon Parks, Children with Doll, Washington DC, 1942

Further links and writing about these prints:

MFAH's page on the current exhibit, Statements.

MFAH's page on their Walker collection.

Pace Prints 2013 site with great gallery shots of the series on exhibit.

Columbia's bio page on Walker.

Gettysburg College's 11pg gallery show book.

Franz Winterhalter

Leonilla, 1843.  On loan to MFAH from the J. Paul Getty Museum.  No reproduction can convey the beauty of this painting.  Inspired by Ingres, this portrait of a Russian princess married into a German aristocratic family is easily the most breathtaking painting in the exhibit.

              

     After the death of her uncle, King William IV, the London born Victoria ascended to the throne in 1837 at the youthful age of 18.  Born of a German mother and eventually married to her German cousin, Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg, Queen Victoria’s life was deeply intertwined with continental royalty even before her coronation.  Victoria and Albert had nine children, each married to another continental aristocrat, and-- as best as I could ascertain from some of the sumptuous Winterhalter exhibit at the Museum of Fine Arts Houston—her nine children had more than forty of their own, and a dozen of them became kings, queens, emperors and empresses of Greece, Norway, Russia, Romania, Wales, Spain, Prussia and other various German kingdoms.  Until August 14, about 45 of his paintings will be on exhibit at the MFAH.

A pair of portraits of Albert and Victoria, 1842.  On loan to the MFAH.

In the 1820s and 1830s, the German born Franz Xaver Winterhalter emerged from the Munich Academy of Arts as a favored court painter for the aristocracy in Baden.  Winterhalter relocated to France by the end of the 1830s and became the favored painter of King Louis-Phiippe, who lost political power during the Revolution of 1848.  In exile in Britain, the deposed French monarch ingratiated himself with his distant cousins, Victoria and Albert while is painter pivoted toward the painting of biblical and classical scenes rather than aristocratic portraits.  With his patron in exile, Winterhalter traveled to Switzerland, Belgium, and eventually England.

Florinda, 1853.  This was given by Victoria to Albert, now on loan to the MFAH from the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

                He picked up where he left off, with an unmatched reputation for portraiture Winterhalter quickly became the primary painter of Victoria’s growing family in the 1850s.  The revolutionary French government did not last, and the restoration of Bourbon monarchy in 1852 quickly followed.  Winterhalter returned to France and served Napoleon III, painting the re-emergence of ostentatious monarchal fashions of the Second Empire. The rule of Napoleon III and Empress Eugenie ended in war with Prussia in 1870; Winterhalter was abroad, and during the war returned not to France but to Germany, dying three years later. 

Young Woman in Profile, 1862.

                For forty years in Germany, France, and England Winterhalter produced some of the most recognizable portraits of the European aristocrats, particularly favored for his ability to capture qualities of light and texture on clothing, hair, and skin which presented aristocrats in an exalted form which they aspired toward, even if they failed to surpass their own indulgent and insular lives, even if their extraordinary wealth gave them the privilege to cultivate artists like Winterhalter who did not hesitate to portray them as unblemished ideals. 

Lydia Schabelsky, 1857.

                I am quite fond of the 1960s era republican demand in England to “liquidate the lot” and jettison all romanticization of the aristocracy, but I confess like many Americans there is still something unshakeably appealing about the concentration of vast surplus wealth directed at the creation of works of beauty.  And many of these portraits are simply beautiful.

                One last beauty,

Susanna, 1866. Frye Art Museum, on loan to MFAH.

If you are in Houston then you are in luck, this is the only US location of the exhibition.  Go see the exhibit before it moves on High Society: Portraits of Franz X. Winterhalter

Reviews:

Molly Glentzer, Houston Chronicle

Randy Tibbits, Houston Press

Catherine Anspon, PaperCity Mag

Old South's Old Testament

I just picked up an old copy of Roark Bradford's Ol' Man Adam an' All His Chillun (1928) and found the chapter illustrations to be delightful.  Bradford grew up in Tennessee and served in World War I, and although his major stories and novels came out in the 1920s and 1930s he is most certainly overshadowed by other Lost Generation writers, especially William Faulkner.  He later served in WWII and taught literature at Tulane.

Bradford's collection makes use of southern black dialect and Jim Crow minstrelsy stereotypes to retell Old Testament fables reset in the Old South; I suppose the black child narrator serves a sort of Scheherazade like conceit, introducing each of the Biblical tales together for his audience.  The collection became the basis of a prize winning, popular drama about the South, Green Pastures (1929) and many of the nostalgic themes would of course appear in Margaret Mitchell's Gone With the Wind (1936).  Green Pastures on stage and television provided a not uncontroversial vehicle for many African-American actors in the 1930s to the 1960s.

The greatest part of the book, however, remain the whimsical illustrations which recast the familar Old Testament into the world of the Plantation South replete with steamboats, top hats, whiskers, and belles.  Enjoy.