This civil rights, that’s the doggondest business I ever heard of.
—CAPTAIN A. Y. ALLEE
Many men could lay claim to being Texas’s toughest Ranger, but Captain A. Y. Allee may have secured the title when he pistol-whipped a highway patrolman who wrote his wife a traffic ticket. Or it could have been the time he pulled his gun on a small-town political boss for, among other sins, being late to court. And there was that afternoon on a public sidewalk when he kicked a district attorney in the shins with his cowboy boots. The DA, Allee explained, had “tried to belittle the Rangers.”
For nearly forty years, Alfred Allee conducted himself as an old-school lawman, without apology. He began his career with the Rangers on horseback and finished it in a Plymouth Fury. Few who met him forgot him: a paunchy cigar-chewing lawman with a voice like a can full of rusty washers. Jowly and beetle-browed, he had a face—in one writer’s description—“like a sunburned potato.”
His men loved him. “There has never been a greater Ranger Commander than Alfred Allee,” wrote Colonel Homer Garrison. “He is dedicated, fearless, honest and sincere.” But those unfortunates on the receiving end of the kicks and pistol blows saw a different man. José Ángel Gutiérrez, who rose to political prominence in the Rio Grande Valley, said the Ranger captain beat him—for no apparent reason beyond adolescent insolence—when Gutiérrez was sixteen years old. “He was always trying to be meaner than a junkyard dog. It was all a show,” Gutiérrez said. “I think he was sick in his head and he was a psychopath.”
Viewed from a more neutral perspective, Allee operated as a traditional Ranger who settled disputes with expedience. “Sometimes we had to get a little rough,” he said of those he arrested, “but they brought it on themselves.” Men like Allee drew sharp lines between good and bad and granted suspected lawbreakers not the first whiff of succor or indulgence.
“He could be meaner than a barrel of rattlesnakes,” Ranger Joaquin Jackson said. Jackson meant it, for the most part, as a compliment. He recalled a standoff with armed prisoners who had seized the county jail in Allee’s hometown of Carrizo Springs. Allee told the inmates he would give them a chance to surrender peacefully. “Captain said, ‘I’ll give you SOBs ’til ten to . . . put them guns down and come out of there,’” Jackson recalled. “And he counted to three and started shooting. I said, ‘Captain,’ I said, ‘that’s not ten.’ He said, ‘Them SOBs can’t count.’”
These tactics and strategies may have played well to certain constituencies in a passing era. But by the mid-1960s even the most insular and intransigent Americans confronted a growing sense that old attitudes, rules, and strictures no longer held. Anyone with a TV tuned to the nightly news could see the fractures. Across the nation, blacks marched for equal rights and students demonstrated against Vietnam. In California’s Central Valley, farmworkers had gone on strike for a living wage.
South Texas, isolated by geography and custom, presented no one’s idea of a revolutionary laboratory. Yet even there the day broke when brown people who picked the white man’s vegetables said they wouldn’t do backbreaking labor for pennies an hour. They had grown weary of primitive living in wooden shacks and of being treated like wretched peasants. So in 1966, and the year after that, the field workers in Starr County, Texas, did something momentous: they called a strike at the peak of the melon season.
To no one’s surprise, the companies who had hired them resisted their resistance. The anxious growers, who stood to lose millions if the crops were not harvested, asked local officials to seek the help of the Texas Rangers.
This vaulted the agency into one of America’s most turbulent—and, to the Rangers, surpassingly strange—decades. With the outside world looking on, they performed their duty as they saw it. Their commander on the scene was Captain Allee, and it soon became clear that while the country had changed, the man himself had not.
Starr County hugs the Mexican border about one hundred miles upriver from the Gulf. Without cultivation it was an arid thicket of cactus and mesquite—a thorn scrubland, in the botanists’ apt phrasing. But a mild winter climate, good soil, and artesian wells made the region ideal for growing fruit and vegetables. And it had one more resource prized by those who owned the crops: an abundance of cheap labor.
In the mid-1960s the county existed as a modern-day feudal empire, with a small group of propertied Anglos and Hispanics holding nearly all economic and political power. It was the poorest county in Texas, as well as one of the poorest in the United States. Average per capita income barely topped $500, and nearly three fourths of families—almost all of them of Mexican origin—subsisted below the federal poverty line.
For them, schools were poor and medical care ranged from inadequate to nonexistent. Farmworkers lived in tin-roofed hovels without electricity or running water, and they picked the crops for as little as fifty cents an hour. “There is nothing but stoop labor and little enough of that,” said the local school superintendent, Rodolfo de la Garza. Children worked the fields alongside their parents. The toilet was the nearest bush and in the punishing heat of a summer afternoon, a cup of clean, cold water could rarely be found. “We would drink from puddles left by the irrigation system, full of frogs and crickets,” one woman remembered of her childhood.
To union organizers such a place seemed full of opportunity. The National Farm Workers Association, led by Cesar Chavez, had organized a 1965 strike against grape growers in California’s Central Valley. It brought international attention to the workers’ cause. In 1966, Chavez sent one of his lieutenants, Eugene Nelson, to Texas, along with others.
The FBI had closely monitored the union’s California operations and noted Nelson’s migration eastward. But the bureau mustered only mild and fairly absurd interest in Texas farmworkers and their confederates. Through a confidential informant, the FBI surveilled an El Paso woman. She was an Avon sales agent—and a Communist, the FBI said—who held meetings in support of the farmworkers at the local Wyatt’s cafeteria. One bureau memo reported that a “sullen looking” man, believed to be a union official, had visited her residence for purposes unknown. A 1966 pro-farmworkers’ rally in San Antonio didn’t excite agents because, as their report said, informants “did not observe any subversives taking part.”
Some residents of South Texas, however, embraced a more expansive definition of subversion. Young, bearded union organizers who appeared in small farm towns made the landed locals more than uneasy. The union reps may have considered themselves advocates for the downtrodden, but to those on the other side of the debate they were unkempt Marxist agitators. As a Starr County grand jury declared, their activities were “contrary to everything that we know in our American way of life.”
The organizers’ initial efforts met with paltry success; a 1966 Starr County strike failed after growers bused replacement workers in from Mexico. But that summer hundreds of farmworkers marched from Rio Grande City to Austin to call attention to “La Causa.” They had been inspired in part by the 1965 Selma-to-Montgomery civil rights marches led by Martin Luther King Jr. The farmworkers’ procession did nothing to improve conditions in the fields, but it did generate news coverage. “The march did not win any contracts or even passage of a $1.25 minimum wage,” a farmworkers’ newsletter said. “But it ended forever the myth that Mexican-Americans were ‘happy, contented, satisfied’ with second-class citizenship and a life of poverty.” Ignored for generations, the plight of the Rio Grande Valley workers now had caught the notice of activists and, perhaps more important, some of the state’s politicians.
Starr County’s growers were watching too. They had seen what happened in California—including a grape boycott that spread across North America—and were not about to allow it on their turf. With another harvest approaching, they asked the local county attorney, Randall Nye, to request the presence of the Rangers. Nye, who happened to be on retainer to one of the biggest growers in the area, did not hesitate.
This was nothing new. The Rangers had waded into many labor actions over the decades, and they invariably declared themselves to be impartial peacekeepers. Yet they were almost always welcomed by management and viewed with suspicion or hostility by labor. In 1883, for instance, several hundred cowboys from three large Texas Panhandle ranches went on strike for higher wages. The ranchers brought the Rangers in to help break it. Five years later, nine Rangers broke up a West Texas coal miners’ strike. The owner of the mine, near the small town of Thurber, supplemented the Rangers’ pay and treated them as his own private police force.
In 1947, Governor Beauford Jester deployed the Rangers to the Gulf Coast during an oil workers’ strike. The workers’ union claimed in a lawsuit that the Rangers—acting as “strike breakers and goons”—harassed and beat picketers. In 1957, a bitter and violent strike lasted for more than forty days at the Lone Star Steel Company in the East Texas town of Daingerfield. At least a dozen Rangers were sent, and again they said they were not taking sides. But Lone Star Steel was secretly picking up the tab for many of the Rangers’ expenses, according to former senior captain Clint Peoples. Lone Star paid “for a goodly number of the meals of the Rangers,” he said, and may have paid for their motel rooms. In exchange, the Rangers were “more or less guarding the plant, Lone Star Steel, against the people that worked there,” Peoples said long after he had left the force. “What you’re doing there, instead of enforcing the law, you are accommodating management.”
The Starr County strike brought an additional component—race. Among the workers, the Rangers’ reputation on the border was forged in the troubles of the early 1900s. Tales of Ranger transgressions against Mexicans and Mexican Americans had been passed down from generation to generation. “Whether it was last year or one hundred years ago, it’s still in the family’s memory,” José Ángel Gutiérrez said. “We feared the Rangers.” They were, in other words, still los Rinches—the Mexican American name for the Rangers, dating from the border wars and connoting oppression and terror.
The Rangers “are the Mexican Americans’ Ku Klux Klan,” said a state senator from San Antonio, Joe Bernal. “All they need is a white hood with ‘Rinches’ written across it.” As one mordant border joke put it, “All Rangers have Mexican blood—on their boots.”
Into this realm, chewing a cigar and packing a .45 automatic on his hip, strode Captain Allee, now sixty-one. He arrived untroubled by history, ambiguity, irony, or nuance. “No one fears the Rangers,” he said, “if they are not violating the law.” As he saw it, he and his company had been directed to Starr County to enforce the statutes on the books, nothing more and nothing less. “I’ve come down here as a law enforcement officer to preserve life and property,” he said. “We’re not damn strike breakers.”
Allee had joined the Rangers in 1931. Like many young men of that time, he did not finish high school. “It is not necessary to have a doctor’s degree,” he once said, “to be a Texas Ranger.” Early in his career, he patrolled the wild and empty Big Bend backcountry on a horse named Quatralgo. “We rode horseback and we had pack mules, by God, chasing some doggone rum runner or smuggler, and we didn’t have any two-way radios,” he said. “Just, by God, our grub and bedroll, and if a fellow ever camped out he enjoyed it and the smell of that old campfire.” The experience—Rangering the old way—never left him. “There are many times,” he said much later, “when I am driving, and a cool breeze rises, that I seem to be back in those old rugged mountains in the Big Bend and I hear Quatralgo’s hoofs on those rocky trails.”
He spent most of his four decades as a Ranger along or near the Rio Grande. Allee considered this his ancestral turf; his forebears had a long and bloody history in South Texas. “My family’s fought for Texas ever since there was a Texas,” he said. Allee’s grandfather was a rancher and deputy sheriff who shot and killed five men. The victims included a bank robber, an unarmed train porter, and a newspaper editor who had written critically of him. The grandfather was convicted in none of these shootings but was himself killed in 1896 when a city marshal stabbed him with a dagger in a Laredo bar. Captain Allee’s father, Alonzo Allee, was a rancher who held a commission as a Special Ranger. He shot and killed three men over property disputes. In 1917 he was killed—shot in the back in a Crystal City drugstore—by the young son of one of the men he had gunned down.
Captain Allee was not so freewheeling with his gun, though he did kill a prisoner who grabbed the Ranger’s weapon and shot him first. One of his favorite methods of punishment was an open-handed blow to the head. In 1948 a picketing oil worker didn’t move aside fast enough for the captain, so he slapped the man. “A mild reprimand,” Allee said. In 1953 a lawyer in Brownwood jokingly accused Allee of lying on the witness stand. Allee met the attorney in the courthouse hallway and slapped him. In 1961 another lawyer, this one in Beeville, disparaged the Rangers in court. Allee took him aside afterward, the lawyer said, and slapped him—twice.
Sometimes the hand doing the slapping held a gun, as when Allee confronted the highway patrolman who had ticketed his wife, Pearl, for not having taillights on a horse trailer. “When they got to talking about the traffic stop, he insinuated that Mrs. Allee was lying,” Joaquin Jackson said of the highway patrolman. “And Captain jumped up and hit him across the head with a pistol.” No one in his right mind accused Allee or his family of bending the truth, Jackson said. “You were gonna get hurt if you did.”
In 1954, George Parr, a corrupt South Texas political boss, scuffled with Allee in a courthouse corridor. Parr had irritated the captain by not showing up on time for a hearing. Allee, with gun in hand, rapped Parr on the side of the head, leaving him with a bloody ear. “I personally don’t like nothing about him,” the captain explained. He was indicted for assault with intent to murder, but the charges were dropped as the case was going to trial.
Allee showed fierce loyalty to the men who worked for him. He defended them against all critics, bought them lunch on the road, and went to the funerals of their loved ones. “I mean he guarded over us men like a setting hen,” Jackson said. In hazardous encounters, Allee walked point. “If there was going to be a firefight or there was gonna be any trouble, he’d be out in front,” Jackson said. “He always said no one is going to kill one of my men without killing me first.” At the Carrizo Springs prisoners’ takeover, for example, Allee led the Rangers’ charge up the stairs, firing a submachine gun as they retook the jail. When the lockup was secured and the inmates in cuffs, he stood on the courthouse lawn and calmly unwrapped a cigar. “Y’all hungry?” he said to the Rangers gathered around him. It was, Jackson said, “as if we’d just walked out of an afternoon cowboy matinee.”
To many Latinos in South Texas, Allee did little to dispel their fear and mistrust of the Rangers. José Ángel Gutiérrez recalled the captain’s confronting—and allegedly shoving—the Hispanic mayor of Crystal City at a rowdy city council meeting. “[Allee] tells him, ‘You goddamn Mexican. Tell these goddamn Mexicans to shut up,’” Gutiérrez said. “Something made Allee hate Mexicans.”
When asked about such matters, Allee expressed bewilderment. “I spoke the Mexican language as much as my own, for I had been reared with Mexican kids,” Allee told one writer. “Right today, I have as many friends among the Mexicans, on both sides of the Rio Grande, as I do my own people.” Friends, perhaps, but not co-workers. There were no Hispanic Rangers in 1967, which perturbed Allee not at all. “I don’t see any Japanese here,” he said. “I don’t see any Chinamen. We can’t hire every doggone breed there is in the United States.”
In May 1967, eight Rangers came to Rio Grande City, seat of Starr County, to handle the melon strike. They set up headquarters at the Ringgold Hotel, a timeworn establishment of frayed carpet, peeling wallpaper, and swayback beds. One contemporary writer described it as a “two-story hostelry before which one can so readily imagine stagecoaches and horses tied.” The Ringgold sat at the center of a sunbaked town that endured as a generally peaceful if flyblown place. With its palm trees and old stucco buildings, the city exuded a subtropical somnolence and an air of decrepitude, and seemed to have drifted through the decades with dust unstirred. Now, however, there were reports of trouble. Growers alleged strikers had engaged in vandalism and harassment. A railroad trestle was burned, and someone put sugar into the gas tanks of farm equipment.
No one was ever charged for those offenses, but the newly arrived Ranger force could employ other laws to arrest the strikers. In Texas, a state that fostered a general loathing of organized labor, it was illegal to engage in “mass picketing.” Picketers were required to be at least fifty feet apart. And state law forbade “secondary picketing,” which involved picketing an affiliated party, such as—in the case of the Starr County strike—the railroad that shipped the crops. Union organizer Nelson was arrested for obstructing a public bridge. He spent the night in the Starr County Jail, a classically fetid border hoosegow. By sunrise, he said, he had killed 212 cockroaches in his cell.
The Rangers had several duties, one of which was to give the harvested inventory an armed escort out of town. “Union pickets followed a train of melons as they left . . . en route to markets,” a Ranger memo noted. “Eight Texas Rangers and armed Missouri Pacific special agents rode the train 75 miles from Rio Grande City to Harlingen.” When not riding the rails, they kept the picketers at bay.
The striking farmworkers primarily sought higher wages, to about $1.25 an hour. They picketed the roads lining the farms and held signs along the railroad tracks. With bullhorns, they exhorted laborers in the field to join them. Along with local law enforcement, the Rangers arrested the marchers, more than one hundred in all. An internal tally by the Rangers showed that most were charged with disturbing the peace or unlawful assembly. Some were cited for “using abusive language,” while others were jailed for “preventing a person from pursuing his lawful occupation.” That meant they had urged workers to strike. Charges against most of those arrested were dropped.
The Rangers had evolved, over the course of a hundred years, from fighting fierce Comanches to pinching humble fruit pickers—a transition not lost on U.S. senator Ralph Yarborough of Texas, a liberal Democrat. “It must be an unsavory duty for the Rangers,” he said, “inheritors of a proud tradition, to be ordered to keep wages low in Texas.” Adding to the unseemliness were accusations that strikers were manhandled or beaten. “Captain Allee and the boys moved in,” said union organizer Gilbert Padilla. “They arrested people indiscriminately, even people who were not in the picket line, and shoved people, and verbally intimidated as many as they could. . . . The Rangers do anything they want.”
Some journalists also complained of Ranger misbehavior. An Associated Press photographer said Allee ordered him to stop snapping photos. “If you take any more pictures,” the captain was reported to have said, “I’ll take your damn camera off of you.” A local television cameraman said one Ranger told him, “If you want that camera busted, just use it again.” The Rangers threatened another photographer with jail if he didn’t stop. “They were pushing people (strikers) around,” a newsman said, “and they didn’t want us around.”
Company D Rangers said they had not mistreated anyone, though it was hardly the first time they had been accused of such. A few years earlier, three men confessed to Rangers under the command of Allee that they had burglarized a succession of South Texas grocery stores. The men sued the Rangers in federal court, alleging the confessions had been coerced. The Rangers had taken them to a ranch, their lawyer said, stripped them, and strung them up by their ankles from a tree. Then, he said, the Rangers beat the men with ropes and used an electric cattle prod on “delicate portions of their bodies” until they confessed.
Allee, who was not named as a defendant, denied the allegations against his company. The suit never went to trial. It was dropped, the suspects’ lawyer said, in exchange for a light sentence on the burglary charges. Of the Rangers accused in that case, two were called in to work the farmworkers’ strike.
Two Ranger actions in Starr County drew the most publicity and sparked the most controversy in the strike of 1967. Both involved Captain Allee.
The first occurred when the Reverend Ed Krueger and his wife, Esther, went to the nearby town of Mission to assist strikers. The Kruegers had come as representatives of the Texas Council of Churches. Allee and several other Rangers were on the scene, Krueger said, and the Ranger captain confronted him. “He said, ‘Krueger, you ain’t a preacher,’” the minister recalled fifty years later. “He said, ‘You’re just a troublemaker. You’re masterminding this whole thing.’” The captain arrested Krueger.
They were standing next to railroad tracks as a Missouri Pacific freight train rumbled by—transporting, fittingly enough, Starr County melons. “Allee grabbed me by the belt and collar and turned me over to another Ranger,” Krueger said. That Ranger, the minister said, held Krueger’s head inches from the passing boxcars. “That was a very unforgettable moment,” Krueger said. “With one step I would have been right on the tracks.” Krueger’s wife tried to photograph the incident. She too was arrested. “One of the Rangers came after me and twisted my arm back and took my camera away,” she said. A Ranger opened the camera, she said, and exposed the film.
Allee said he arrested Krueger because the minister demanded, with “loud and abusive language,” to be detained. Mrs. Krueger was arrested, Allee said, because he thought she was about to hit a Ranger with her camera. Both were charged with unlawful assembly.
The second incident started when a union backer named Magdaleno Dimas went looking for dinner. “Magdaleno had gone rabbit hunting,” said Alejandro “Alex” Moreno, then a college student working with strike organizers. On his return home Dimas passed by a packing shed for a company targeted by strikers. “He apparently raised his rifle and shouted at the people,” Moreno said. Some witnesses said Dimas yelled, “Viva la Huelga.”
Dimas was a tattooed ex-con—he had a dragon on his right arm and a rose on his left—with a long rap sheet that included a murder conviction. “He was an enforcer for the union is what he was,” Joaquin Jackson said. After a farm manager complained about the shouting and gun waving, Allee and another Ranger went to union offices in Rio Grande City. There, according to some witnesses, they leveled shotguns at union organizers. “Y’all have gone too far this time,” Allee told them, and demanded to know the whereabouts of “that son-of-a-bitch Dimas.” No one coughed up Dimas’s location, but Allee and the second Ranger tailed one of his associates to the home of a union member.
Alex Moreno, who was in the house, had gone outside. “As we walked out we saw the Ranger cars out there,” he said. “Captain Allee is standing by the gate, and as I pass by the gate, he grabs me by the neck with one hand. And with his other hand he has a shotgun and pokes it into my ribs.”
Allee and the other Ranger, still carrying shotguns, entered the house. “The place just rocked,” Moreno said. “You knew there was a terrible beating going on inside.” Allee had found Dimas and another union member in a back room, sitting at a table. He ordered them to put their hands on the table. When Dimas did not move fast enough to suit him, the captain hit the man’s head with the butt of his shotgun. Dimas later said he was struck and kicked multiple times by the Rangers. Allee claimed Dimas hurt himself when he tripped over furniture as he was being removed from the house. Dimas was taken to jail. A doctor who examined him there said he had a deep cut on his head and showed signs of a concussion. “He was beaten out of his wits,” the physician said.
It might have been worse. “I could have killed him if I had wanted to,” Allee said. The captain insisted he had arrested and jailed a dangerous man who had threatened violence. “I honestly believe,” Allee said, “that our actions prevented someone from getting killed on this date.” Yet the charges against Dimas made him sound more like someone who interrupted a ladies’ tea. He was cited for shouting in a “manner calculated to disturb the person or persons on the premises.” And he had “rudely displayed a deadly weapon in a manner calculated to disturb.” Both were misdemeanors.
The union accused Allee and his fellow Ranger of being drunk when they arrested Dimas, and of using “Gestapo terror tactics.” That anyone would take Dimas’s side over his mystified Allee. “This damn era we live in now,” he said. “A man who works to violate the law has more civil rights than good people.”
Such matters generated headlines, and in early June 1967, Joe Bernal and two other state senators went to Starr County to investigate. “We found that from the first day of their arrival in Rio Grande City, the Rangers gave every appearance of being on the side of the employers,” they reported. “This has severely tarnished the image of the Texas Rangers.” They and five other state senators, all liberal Democrats, wrote to DPS director Garrison, requesting that he withdraw the Rangers from the strike scene. “I feel that the people of Rio Grande City are living under a police state,” Bernal said.
The U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, a federal agency, also took notice. Its field representative, William B. Oliver III, wrote to Allee and invited him to a meeting in Rio Grande City “to share . . . general information concerning the problems in Starr County.” Within three weeks, the DPS Intelligence Division had assembled a lengthy dossier on Oliver. The tactic was reminiscent of the Rangers’ secret campaign against the NAACP in earlier years. This time, though, the findings were laughably innocuous. The file noted that Oliver subscribed to a socialist magazine and was “the first white pastor to take over an all Negro church in the history of [the] United Church of Christ.” The eight-page document, complete with a mug shot of Oliver, also said that when he had been arrested at an East Texas civil rights protest march, “four prophylactics spilled out of the subject’s pockets.” And the dossier listed traffic citations Oliver had received over the course of ten years.
Unimpeded by any revelations of condoms and speeding tickets, the commission’s state advisory committee held a hearing and concluded that the Rangers, along with local law enforcement, had denied farmworkers their legal rights. Many Hispanics, the committee said, see the Rangers as “a symbol of oppression.” The Rangers had encouraged workers to cross picket lines, the committee found, and their appearance in Starr County “only served to aggravate an already tense situation.”
Despite the rain of criticism, the Rangers felt good about their performance in Starr County. So did the growers. That was because the strike had failed. The Rangers’ presence, a state court injunction against the picketing, and the importation of workers from Mexico kept the harvest on schedule. Starr County’s growers said it was the best melon crop they could recall.
Though the produce had been shipped, the public relations battle raged on. The Rangers called on their friends in the Texas press corps. A story in the Dallas Morning News portrayed Allee as one of the great humanitarians of the Rio Grande Valley. “Those who know him best insist that a heart of pure gold beats beneath the Texas Ranger badge worn by Capt. A. Y. Allee, despite his reputation as a man of steel,” the first sentence said. He was, the story continued, a “former Baptist Sunday school teacher” who lent money to the down-and-out of all races and dispensed “sage advice” to “youngsters who get into trouble.” More than once he was “called upon to arbitrate marital disputes, and his wise counsel is credited with having saved a great many homes.”
Several hundred local residents bought a full-page advertisement in the Carrizo Springs Javelin, headlined as a tribute to Allee and expressing “the high regard we have for him as a man and as a Texas Ranger.” The Missouri Pacific Railroad Company, whose trains the Rangers had escorted, had nothing but praise for Allee and his men. “I feel that we have indeed been fortunate to become your friends,” a railroad district superintendent wrote to the captain. “I would be grateful if you would convey to each of your men our warmest thanks for a job WELL DONE.”
Across Texas, many members of the public—Anglos at least—showed passionate support for the Rangers’ actions in Starr County. “Most of these smart punks down there need their heads rapped a few times to teach them respect for the authority of the Rangers,” a Corpus Christi oilman wrote to Colonel Garrison. A Dallas businessman, D. H. Byrd, wrote that he had moved his farming operations out of South Texas because of the “shameful racketeering practiced by pawns of . . . Teamsters.” Byrd, whose Petroleum Club Building office bathroom featured fourteen-carat-gold fixtures, commended the Rangers and, like many others, blamed outsiders. “When rabble-rousers are allowed to go from state to state stirring up trouble to satisfy their own greed,” he said, “it makes us wonder if we shouldn’t bring back horsewhipping.”
DPS chief Garrison admitted to no problems with the Rangers’ behavior and called any fault-finding unfair and undeserved. As he wrote to a county judge in the Texas Panhandle, “You have no doubt noticed that some of the enemies of the Rangers have been having a field day in the press which is not unusual in these times.”
National publications were not enemies of the Rangers, but they weren’t their lapdogs, either. Newsweek headlined its story “Trouble in the Melon Patch” and ran a photo of “crusty” Allee chewing a cigar. “Texas’ finest stood accused of even pushing little girls around,” the magazine said, “and it had become clear that no matter how splendid their legend, the Rangers suddenly had a bigger-than-life image problem on their hands.” The Wall Street Journal weighed in, calling the strike an “uproar that could threaten [the Rangers’] national reputation as elite lawmen.” The New York Times cited critics who “charge that the elite unit has operated virtually as a private police force to protect the interest of the wealthy landholders and ranchers.” The story was accompanied by a photo of Allee with a scowl and a cigar.
Next came the courts, which delivered the worst public spanking to the Rangers since the Canales hearings of 1919. In 1967 the United Farm Workers Organizing Committee filed a federal civil complaint against Allee, the Rangers, and Starr County officials. Medrano v. Allee was heard by a three-judge panel. The judges took five years to reach a decision, but they found for the union, and they recounted the sins of Allee and the Rangers over many pages. In one instance, the judges said, Allee ordered the arrest of striking farmworkers who were merely resting in the shade. Their offense: they were not reclining fifty feet apart from each other. The judges also determined that Allee’s arrest of Magdaleno Dimas had occurred in a “violent and brutal fashion.” The decision concluded: “The police authorities were openly hostile to the strike and the individual strikers, and used their law enforcement powers to suppress the farm workers’ strike.” The strikers’ constitutional rights, the judges said, were “irreparably injured.” And the court declared unconstitutional five state statutes, including those that banned mass picketing and secondary picketing. In 1974, the U.S. Supreme Court affirmed the lower court’s findings against the Rangers.
It was a tardy and hollow victory for the farmworkers. A few months after the strike, Hurricane Beulah hit South Texas. The Category 3 storm devastated the local agricultural economy. That and other factors caused the influence of the union to fade. Farm laborers saw marginal improvements in the coming years—slightly higher wages and portable toilets in the fields, for example—but Starr County remained one of the poorest counties in the nation.
The political impact of the strike was perhaps more significant, as those who considered themselves the Rangers’ nemeses believed their cause had been invigorated. “Political insurgency was sparked in South Texas,” said Robert Hall, one of the lawyers who filed Medrano v. Allee. The case “proved that even the vaunted Texas Rangers could be restrained by law, thus stripping them of the most effective weapon of any oppressive power: the perception that resistance is hopeless and futile.”
Less than three years after the strike, the Raza Unida Party, promoting Hispanic political influence, was formed in nearby Crystal City. One of its principal founders was José Ángel Gutiérrez, who had been beaten by Allee as a teenager. The party subsequently won a number of local elections in South Texas and helped bring about the rise of the Chicano movement—a combination of cultural celebration and political efforts by young Mexican Americans. Alex Moreno, the college student in whose ribs Allee stuck a shotgun, went on to become a lawyer and a Texas state legislator. The farmworker’s strike, he said, “is considered the first actual event in the Chicano movement.”
The Starr County court case had one more consequence—an official policy change that was, despite its importance, enacted with little fanfare: the Rangers would no longer be the state’s first choice to police labor disputes.
Allee died in 1987 at age eighty-one. The last surviving member of his company, Joaquin Jackson, published an autobiography in 2005. In it, he praised the captain as a courageous leader but acknowledged that in matters such as the melon strike, Allee might have been the wrong man at the wrong time. “Was he a racist? I suppose that he was,” Jackson wrote. “But this is a blanket indictment of his entire generation. He was perhaps the last of a long line of Texans bred to think of Mexico and her people as an enemy of the Lone Star State. . . . He adhered to a code too simplistic to guide us in modern times.”
This was a startling and candid admission for a Ranger, and Jackson may have had second thoughts. Three years later he published a sequel in which he charged that accounts of the Starr County strike had been unfair to him and his colleagues. “The actual events have become shrink-wrapped into a passion play of social stereotypes, of potbellied, bullying Rangers swinging nightsticks and pistol-whipping hapless terrified Hispanic farmworkers,” Jackson wrote. “We performed the role that fate placed us in. . . . I take comfort in believing that we did our job, which was to enforce the law as it was written at the time.”
The Rangers were faulted by the courts, Jackson said, because they saw no use in defending themselves before judges or anyone else. “By the time the testimony was taken and the stories were written,” he wrote, “Captain Allee and the other Ranger principals had become so disgusted by the circus-like quality of the proceedings that they refused to acknowledge a no-win situation, since no one was going to believe them anyway.”
It is not hard, from the perspective of decades, to see Captain Allee as a grand symbol of Ranger anachronism. While the rest of the country was, for better or worse, rocketing into the future, the Rangers under his command were figuratively and literally riding a slow train on bad tracks across the Texas outback. The state itself had changed: more urban, more diverse, less parochial, more sophisticated. Yet Allee and the Rangers remained hidebound, proud, and absolutely sure of themselves. “Captain Allee was a great law enforcement officer,” said Wilson Speir, who succeeded Garrison as head of the DPS. “He believed in Texas and he believed in America.”
The majority in the Texas Legislature seemed untroubled by any fallout from Starr County. In 1969 a new state budget increased the size of the Ranger force from sixty-two to seventy-three. With that, DPS director Speir blasted the agency’s critics. “Widespread recognition from the world at large,” he said, “is almost invariably accompanied by fierce attacks on the part of [a] jealous few to suppress, depreciate or destroy.”
Allee, in the last year of his Ranger career, seemed to back away from his scorched-earth image, if briefly. “Really,” he said, “I’m not quite the bad character some papers have tried to make me seem.” A bit later he reverted to form. “As long as my folks and my friends remember me and respect me,” he said, “I don’t give a damn what the rest of the people think.” Allee departed the Rangers in 1970. He was sixty-five, mandatory retirement age, but looked older. He had survived two heart attacks, a broken neck, and no small amount of public condemnation, yet the fire still burned. “I don’t regret anything I have done,” he said at his farewell party. “I would do the whole thing all over again.”
Some things didn’t change, even in retirement. One year after he left the force, he walked into a Carrizo Springs grocery store to buy a five-gallon jug of water. The clerk, a young Hispanic man, rang up a tab of $1.75. Allee believed the actual price to be $1.35. The sixty-six-year-old former captain—now on the state rolls as a Special Ranger—settled the forty-cent dispute the best way he knew. He slapped the clerk and pulled a gun on him.