Caesar Kleberg and the King Ranch by Duane M. Leach (review)

Environmental historians have successfully located the origins of a southern conservation movement and have been equally successful in arguing that the movement mattered to the rest of the nation. Methods for ecological land management, agronomy, and game management were cultivated and implemented in the South, and they influenced a national conservation movement that emerged in the early twentieth century. Some of these innovators and advocates of conservation methods, such as Herbert L. Stoddard, worked for resource-rich landholders who had incentive to preserve wildfowl and, in Stoddard's case, to sustain leisure hunting. This was also the case for Caesar Kleberg, who managed parts of the enormous King Ranch in Texas and was the driving force behind employing conservation methods for land use and hunting on the ranch in the first decades of the twentieth century.

Caesar Kleberg (1873–1946) was a devoted, self-styled conservationist, who upon his death bequeathed a legacy that evolved into the Caesar Kleberg Foundation for Wildlife Conservation, which now supports the Caesar Kleberg Wildlife Research Institute at Texas A&M University–Kingsville. Texas A&M University Press published Duane M. Leach's biography of Caesar Kleberg for the foundation. I mention this because the genesis of the work, coming from both Leach's interest (he served on the foundation's board) and the foundation's interest, matters in the production of historical biography. Although the book offers a detailed account of place and person important to southern conservation, it is not a critical engagement. It celebrates Kleberg's life and work without putting his life and work into much-needed context. Leach, a historian, combed the King Ranch archives as well as those at the Dolph Briscoe Center for American History at the University of Texas at Austin and conducted oral histories to produce this work. Leach does not include recent literature on southern environmental history that could have offered more context to Kleberg's story, at least for a scholarly audience. This is a book for lay readers who are enthusiasts of Texas, ranching, and hunting.

Yet Kleberg's life is of note to southern environmental historians who work in the post–Civil War period. His life began in a small German American settlement in East Texas. He was the grandson of German settlers and the son of a Democratic congressman. Kleberg found indoor life stifling, and by 1900 he worked for his uncle Robert Kleberg in Southeast Texas on the King Ranch, vast acreage built by tycoon Richard King. Kleberg was superintendent of the Norias division of the ranch, which he managed with a conservationist's ethos. In 1912 he put strict hunting limitations into place on the ranch, particularly regarding turkey, deer, and quail. These initiatives went alongside those that supported the big business of ranching. Caesar Kleberg, for example, influenced his uncle Robert Kleberg's decision to crossbreed Brahma and Shorthorn cattle, which became one of the ranch's most notable successes. Kleberg's influence was not confined to the ranch. He also began serving on the Texas Game, Fish, and Oyster Commission in 1929. His influence now lives on in the foundation and the research institute, which have a sweeping suite of conservation initiatives in South Texas.

Historians are to be applauded for directing their work toward a popular audience. But there is also a danger therein: the responsibility becomes doubly great to produce work that demythologizes a complicated past, and I was troubled to see the opposite in places here. For example, statements such as "[r]ising racial tensions further strained the heretofore easy social interchange between whites and blacks" depict Reconstruction in Texas (p. 17). This kind of interpretation is not only retrograde but also misleading to readers, and it surprised me, especially as it has the imprimatur of a university press. Let us, especially as writers for popular audiences, create compelling narratives that still pass muster under...