Vengeance in a Small Town: The Thorndale Lynching of 1911 (review)

From 1848 to 1928, Americans lynched 597 Mexicans. Historical scholarship on the lynching of Mexicans, however, is scant. Almost a decade after William Carrigan and Clive Webb’s 2003 call for increased scholarly attention to the subject (“The Lynching of Persons of Mexican Origin or Descent in the United States,” Journal of Social History 37: 411–438), little has changed. Carrigan and Webb asserted race was the main factor contributing to violence against Mexicans. In Vengeance in a Small Town, Nielsen argues that in the lynching of Antonio Gómez in Thorndale, Texas, race played an insignificant role. He concludes that white locals, caught between a violent frontier past and an invigorated push by city leaders towards modernity, turned to lynching as a form of “instant, albeit illegal, retribution” (xi) to counterbalance their perception of a weak local justice system.

Nielsen places the Gomez lynching in historical context and explains the history of Thorndale, Milam and Williamson Counties, and central Texas as a violent frontier with both southern and western characteristics. Violence reigned supreme in the region for decades as locals lynched cattle thieves, murdered freedmen and Union supporters during Reconstruction, and supported legally sanctioned violence. The Texas Rangers, Nielsen argues, utilized extreme tactics to maintain Anglo domination over Mexicans and Native Americans. Despite local efforts to modernize the city through improved infrastructure and new technologies such as the telephone, locals could not overcome the legacy of violence. Following the murder of prominent local businessman Charles Zieschang, locals feared Gómez would escape punishment because the murder was not premeditated. Therefore, a small mob took the boy from local authorities and hanged him. The lynching, according to the author, represented a “logical consequence” (xii) resulting from the region’s violent legacy.

Most participants in mob violence went unpunished; however, local and state officials investigated and tried the men responsible for the Gómez lynching. Although the jury acquitted the alleged lynchers, they served several months in jail during the trial. Mexican-Americans acted as the catalyst behind the state’s investigation into the lynching. Prominent pharmacist and San Antonio city council member Francisco A. Chapa played a crucial role and encouraged Texas governor Oscar B. Colquitt to prosecute the ringleaders. Nielsen argues Chapa’s local influence provided Colquitt with the votes necessary to win Bexar County in the Democratic primary. When Chapa demanded Colquitt take action against the mob, the governor acquiesced. Although the jury found none of the men guilty, the ability of a minority to dominate politics locally and also hold sway over a prominent Democratic governor in the early twentieth-century South demonstrates minorities’ ability to successfully challenge Jim Crow.

Nielsen’s thesis is argued effectively, although the author is too quick to discount the role of race. The author argues race played no role in the Gómez lynching because the small number of Mexicans in Milam County removed the need for whites to control them through lynch law. In his argument, the author fails to account for the total number of nonwhites in the county. When combined with the local black population, non-whites comprised 25 percent of the population and the Gómez lynching might have been an object lesson to all non-whites in the county.

Nonetheless, the author skillfully uses a single event to explain larger historical issues. Vengeance in a Small Town examines the deep cultural roots of violence in Texas, the myriad forces opponents of mob violence confronted, and the struggles small-town Texans faced as the forces of modernization transformed their traditional agricultural society. Nielsen’s work provides a template on how to effectively place lynching in its proper historical context.