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.
Hanson was a middling member of a cohort of Anglo entrepreneurs who acquired land and oil rights in Mexico during the 34-year Porfiriato, the long dictatorship beginning in the late 19th century of Porfirio Diaz, who was friendly to foreign capital. In the early years of the Mexican Revolution of 1910, Weber writes that Hanson operated a spy ring to aid Diaz. In 1914, Hanson found himself expelled from the country under threat of execution for counterrevolutionary activities. This severed his access to land in northern Mexico that he had variously managed, owned, or coveted.
Resettled in Texas, Hanson threw himself into sundry smuggling efforts to assist anti-revolution forces in Mexico and attempt to retake his assets stranded south of the Rio Grande. He also became an informant for the Bureau of Investigation (now the FBI). Through a San Antonio political power broker and fellow meddler in Mexican affairs, Hanson was appointed to the Texas Rangers in 1917 under Governor William Hobby.