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WORK TITLE: The Last Sheriff in Texas: A True Tale of Violence and the Vote
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE:
CITY: Beeville
STATE: TX
COUNTRY: United States
NATIONALITY: American
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Born in Beeville, TX.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer. Formerly banker and business executive.
WRITINGS
SIDELIGHTS
After a career in banking and business in the Northeast, James. P. McCollom returned to his native Texas. In 1987 he penned The Continental Affair: The Rise and Fall of the Continental Illinois Bank, a book that takes a hard look at his own industry. McCollom tells the story of the rise and fall of Continental Illinois Bank. The bank at first was extremely successful—until 1982, when it was discovered that the bank’s lending arm had put more than a billion dollars into Oklahoma City’s failed Penn Square Bank. A Kirkus Reviews contributor called this an “absorbing, elegaic appreciation of how Continental Illinois … came to be nationalized by the US government; from an insider who knew the institution when—and mourns its passing.”
Three decades after his first book, McCollom released his second book, The Last Sheriff in Texas: A True Tale of Violence and the Vote—another story of rise and fall, this one of Sheriff Vail Ennis. From 1945 until 1952 Ennis controlled law enforcement in the towns of Bee County, Texas. Michelle Newby at Lone Star Literary Life described Ennis’s purview, saying that he was “arrester, jailer, bondsman, probation supervisor, judge, jury, and—this is where things get really hairy—executioner.” Pitted against him is “hometown-boy-made-good” Johnny Barnhart, who has earned a law degree and returned to put it to use in the defense of criminals. McCollom writes: “Sheriff Vail Ennis, the protector of our wives and mothers and sisters and daughters, was under attack by Johnny Barnhart, the Mexican lover, the communist, the protector of deviants.” Barnhart busies himself gathering together the Christian Citizens Group to work to eject Ennis from office in the 1952 election. According to Newby, McCollum “skillfully conveys the personalities of his large cast of fascinating characters” and “conjures a visceral sense of foreboding” about what will happen between the two men.
A Kirkus Reviews contributor recommended the book to “students of Texas history as well as aspiring law enforcement officers, who should read it as an example of how not to conduct themselves.” Writing in Publishers Weekly, a critic was less impressed, saying that McCollom overlooked his “chance for insightful commentary on the intersections of race, power, and politics.” Charles Ealy, in the Dallas News, explained, however, that “Barnhart thought it was important that the campaign shouldn’t be framed as Latinos vs. Ennis, in part because the campaign would need Anglo votes to oust Ennis.” Ealy concluded that The Last Sheriff in Texas is a “riveting story of a time when sheriffs could get away with murder.” In the Texas Observer, Andrew Roush reported: “As a story about violence, policing, elections and society, McCollom’s book is immediate. As a reflection on Texan myth and reality, it is timeless.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Kirkus Reviews, October 1, 1987, review of The Continental Affair: The Rise and Fall of the Continental Illinois Bank; September 15, 2017, review of The Last Sheriff in Texas: A True Tale of Violence and the Vote.
Publishers Weekly, September 11, 2017, review of review of The Last Sheriff in Texas, p. 56.
ONLINE
Dallas News, https://www.dallasnews.com (November 14, 2017), Charles Ealy, review of The Last Sheriff in Texas.
Lone Star Literary Life, http://www.lonestarliterary.com (December 10, 2017), Michelle Newby, review of The Last Sheriff in Texas.
Texas Observer, https://www.texasobserver.org (November 16, 2017), Andrew Roush, review of The Last Sheriff in Texas.
JAMES P. McCOLLOM is the author of The Continental Affair: The Rise and Fall of the Continental Illinois Bank. A native son of Beeville, Texas, he has worked as a banker and business executive in the Northeast before settling back in his hometown.
McCollom, James P.: THE LAST SHERIFF IN TEXAS
Kirkus Reviews. (Sept. 15, 2017):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
McCollom, James P. THE LAST SHERIFF IN TEXAS Counterpoint (Adult Nonfiction) $26.00 11, 14 ISBN: 978-1-61902-996-5
A true-crime story centering on a South Texas lawman who became a law unto himself.Local county sheriffs don't often make the national news unless they've been pardoned by the nation's chief executive for crimes committed in office. An exception was Bee County, Texas, roughly midway between Corpus Christi and San Antonio, where in the late 1940s and early '50s a latter-day Wyatt Earp named Vail Ennis ruled with a gun and attracted plenty of press. In a story whose mood matches John Sayles' melancholic film Lone Star, native son McCollom (The Continental Affair: The Rise and Fall of the Continental Illinois Bank, 1987), after a career as an international banker, comes back to home ground to recount Ennis' career. The author opens on a note that might well have been a closing, when, in November 1947, Ennis shot two grifters dead--after one of them shot him five times. "He turned around to me and said Houston you better get me to a doctor quick," said an eyewitness. "I'm dyin'." Improbably, Ennis did not die, but the lead in his system didn't improve his mood. McCollom contrasts Ennis' old-fashioned law-keeping, as mean as Roy Bean's but without the eccentricity, with the needs of a modernizing Texas, which brought his rule to an end following an electoral uprising by a mostly Hispanic population that had not turned out before, even after suffering the sheriff's racist attentions. Ennis, who had taken care to put notches on his gun for each kill and who engaged in plenty of intimidation to keep those voters away from the polls, said that if the county didn't want him, he didn't want it, adding that "the results of the election convinces [sic] me that people are more interested in politics than in law enforcement." Of interest to students of Texas history as well as aspiring law enforcement officers, who should read it as an example of how not to conduct themselves.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"McCollom, James P.: THE LAST SHERIFF IN TEXAS." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Sept. 2017. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A504217511/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=39384338. Accessed 17 Feb. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A504217511
The Last Sheriff in Texas: A True Tale of Violence and the Vote
Publishers Weekly. 264.37 (Sept. 11, 2017): p56+.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
The Last Sheriff in Texas: A True Tale of Violence and the Vote
James P. McCollom. Counterpoint, $26 (272p)
ISBN 978-1-61902-996-5
A love of local history marks this tale from McCollom (The Continental Affair) about a 1952 sheriff's election, and this love of local history proves to be his book's most redeeming aspect. The account opens with a 1947 shoot-out at a gas station in McCollom's hometown, Beeville, Tex. The eponymous sheriff, Vail Ennis, had already killed five men in his career. That day he killed two more, but not before taking five bullets that nearly killed him. It's a lot of drama, but McCollom never really fits it into a larger narrative. Instead, he moves on to introduce more Beeville residents, focusing on Johnny Barnhart, a young lawyer with an interest in politics. The story meanders through some interesting incidents that took place over several years in the wake of the shooting, most of which focus on Barnhart's burgeoning career. In 1952, Ennis killed a Latino prisoner, exposing longstanding ethnic and racial tensions in Beeville. Barnhart, concerned with such rough justice, formed the Christian Citizens Group to oust Ennis in the next sheriffs election. Throughout, McCollom tosses in references to national and international matters but fails to tie them to Beeville, missing the chance for insightful commentary on the intersections of race, power, and politics. Agent'. Robin Straus, Robin Straus Agency. (Nov.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"The Last Sheriff in Texas: A True Tale of Violence and the Vote." Publishers Weekly, 11 Sept. 2017, p. 56+. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A505634938/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=03e89303. Accessed 17 Feb. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A505634938
12.10.2017
TEXAS HISTORY
James P. McCollom
The Last Sheriff in Texas: A True Tale of Violence and the Vote
Counterpoint
Hardcover, 978-1-6190-2996-5, (also available as an e-book), 272 pgs., $26.00
November 14, 2017
My dad, former deputy sheriff of Mitchell County, Texas, always said everything that happens in the big city happens in small towns, just not as often. The small towns in Bee County, Texas, were presided over by Sheriff Vail Ennis from 1945 until 1952. Ennis was a legend in his time, and his most dramatic exploit is also the beginning of this true story. Shot five times by an ex-con at a Magnolia station in Pettus, a wide spot in the road, on a cold November night in 1947, Ennis managed to empty his gun, reload, and kill both attackers before the ambulance arrived to speed him to a hospital.
The Last Sheriff in Texas: A True Tale of Violence and the Vote by Beeville native son James P. McCollom is told through the actions of two men, Sheriff Ennis and Beeville’s hometown-boy-made-good Johnny Barnhart. In the beginning it’s not clear what Barnhart’s part in the drama will be; we meet him as a yell leader and fraternity boy, then a law student, at the University of Texas at Austin. Barnhart returns to Beeville with his juris doctor, hangs out a shingle, and is promptly elected to the Texas lege, where his principles and idealism get him branded a subversive and smeared as a Commie during McCarthy’s Red Scare. Barnhart returns home to practice criminal-defense law, which is how he discovers Sheriff Ennis’s pervasive power. Ennis is arrester, jailer, bondsman, probation supervisor, judge, jury, and—this is where things get really hairy—executioner. Before Ennis leaves office, he will kill eight men.
Barnhart, reckoning the sheriff and the town complicit in the reign of a homicidal menace, wages a campaign against Ennis in 1952. “Sheriff Vail Ennis, the protector of our wives and mothers and sisters and daughters,” McCollom writes, ”was under attack by Johnny Barnhart, the Mexican lover, the communist, the protector of deviants.” Barnhart finds himself battling “peripheral codes, imprecise but understood, that gave Texas its character, that kept Texas free from Yankee squeamishness.” If Ennis is wrong, then Texas is wrong. Before the election is over, Barnhart will fear for his life.
With a cover that’s half sepia and half the black-and-blue of storm clouds and bruises, the design of The Last Sheriff in Texas echoes McCollom’s style, a hybrid of old-timers sitting on the front porch telling tales and true crime. The book is consistently entertaining and a valuable chapter of South Texas history, the patron system of vote fraud (think box thirteen and LBJ), and the nascent struggle for Mexican American civil rights.
McCollom’s tone occasionally drips with derision, usually with good cause. The narrative is sometimes repetitive, the sequence of events not always easy to follow, but it’s difficult to say whether this is the author’s fault or the result of byzantine South Texas politics. A couple of geography mistakes stand out.
However, McCollom skillfully conveys the personalities of his large cast of fascinating characters. He conjures a visceral sense of foreboding as the election approaches, and evokes the time and place with rich detail and personal experience. In the author’s note, McCollom claims the background of his book as memoir—he knew many of the people he writes about. His grandfather was Bee County sheriff prior to Ennis who “it was said never [fired] his gun.” McCollom has a dog in this hunt.
In the end, against the backdrop of a rapidly modernizing and urbanizing Texas, Sheriff Vail Ennis failed to recognize his time had passed, becoming a walking anachronism. The Last Sheriff in Texas takes place in the middle of the last century and remains sadly relevant today.
When voters took on a killer: 'The Last Sheriff in Texas'
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Lots of words can be used to describe Sheriff Vail Ennis of Bee County, but author James P. McCollum starts off by casting the lawman as tough in The Last Sheriff in Texas.
McCollum begins in 1947, when Ennis is trying to arrest two men at a gas station near Beeville. He handcuffs the two together but doesn't know that one of them is carrying a Smith & Wesson .38. When the sheriff turns his back to make a phone call, one of them pulls the gun, tells the sheriff to halt, then shoots him five times in the belly. Though Ennis is gravely wounded, he manages to draw his six-shooter from his holster, empty it, reload and empty it again.
Ennis survived the firefight. The suspects didn't.
The Last Sheriff in Texas: A True Tale of Violence and the Vote, by James P. McCollom(Counterpoint)
The Last Sheriff in Texas: A True Tale of Violence and the Vote, by James P. McCollom (Counterpoint)
That's the kind of toughness that earned respect in South Texas, where sheriffs were the unquestioned law of their county.
And that was part of the problem. Ennis was the kind of sheriff who also killed Hispanics in questionable circumstances. The most noted were the Rodriguez killings. "In a shootout west of town, Vail had shot down the three Rodriguez brothers — Felix, Domingo and Antonio, all highly respected farmers," McCollom writes. "Some people said it was a shooting, not a shootout. They said the Rodriguez boys hadn't fired a gun."
Much of McCollum's book follows a slowly growing movement among a coalition of Beeville residents, ranchers and Hispanics to oust the sheriff and hold him accountable for the killings.
Besides Ennis, the key player in the book is Johnny Barnhart, a Beeville native who attended the University of Texas, eventually was elected to the Legislature, then returned to his hometown to practice law. He's the one who took out an ad in the Bee-Picayune, the local paper, in 1952, urging residents to join a campaign aimed at eventually ousting the sheriff, with a pointed paragraph stating "that every person, prisoner or otherwise, should receive fair and impartial treatment from our law enforcement officers regardless of race, creed, color or position."
Many years later, Barnhart contacted McCollom to tell his story. McCollom, a Beeville native, had returned to his hometown in 2000 after years of serving as a banker and business executive around the world. As Barnhart knew, McCollom was also a writer, who had published The Continental Affair: The Rise and Fall of the Continental Illinois Bank in 1987. McCollom was also uniquely qualified to write about sheriffs. His grandfather, John Eugene McCollom, was Bee County's sheriff from 1924 to 1932, keeping the peace during Prohibition and the rise of Ku Klux Klan "while — it was said — never firing his gun."
Although McCollom interviewed many other people for this book, the Barnhart narrative predominates, and this focus probably helps propel the action, with two people doing battle.
McCollom also includes the brewing civil rights movement in South Texas, in particular the rise of the GI Forum, led by Hector Garcia. Amid the organizing by Barnhart and others in Beeville, the GI Forum passed a resolution "condemning and reproaching the cowardly, brutal, sadistic, and blood-thirsty treatment of the citizens of Bee County by Sheriff Vail Ennis."
Barnhart thought it was important that the campaign shouldn't be framed as Latinos vs. Ennis, in part because the campaign would need Anglo votes to oust Ennis. And in this regard, Barnhart was probably right. Still, it's hard not to wonder whether McCollom's recounting of the campaign to oust Ennis gives full credit to the GI Forum and other groups.
James P. McCollom, author of The Last Sheriff in Texas: A True Tale of Violence and the Vote. (Jimmie Jackson/Counterpoint)
James P. McCollom, author of The Last Sheriff in Texas: A True Tale of Violence and the Vote. (Jimmie Jackson/Counterpoint)
But that's not really what McCollom is trying to do with The Last Sheriff. He's placing the battle over Ennis in a context much broader than relations between Anglos and Hispanics. He's showing how the story of Ennis and Barnhart foreshadows a changing Texas — the rise of urban areas and the oil industry, as well as the rising mistrust of traditional authority figures.
To that extent, he succeeds, with a riveting story of a time when sheriffs could get away with murder.
Charles Ealy is the former books editor of The Dallas Morning News and the Austin American-Statesman.
The Last Sheriff in Texas
A True Tale of Violence and the Vote
James P. McCollom
(Counterpoint, $26)
Last Sheriff in Texas’ Tells True Story of State’s Deadliest Lawman
James P. McCollom’s "The Last Sheriff in Texas" paints the South Texas town of Beeville as a microcosm of Texas politics and policing — past, present and future.
Vail Ennis; November 1944 - November 1952
Vail Ennis; November 1944 - November 1952 COURTESY OF THE BEE COUNTY SHERIFF'S OFFICE
It begins with a firefight. In a quiet patch of South Texas in 1947, the sheriff has unloaded his six-shooter on a pair of criminals. In the process, he’s taken a handful of rounds to the torso. The town of Beeville gathers outside the hospital, waiting for the news that Vail Ennis has, somehow, survived. The titular sheriff in James P. McCollom’s The Last Sheriff in Texas: A True Tale of Violence and the Vote, Ennis is a kind of hyper-violent, unbound lawman presumed to typify the Old West. But carefully, thoughtfully and with an abundance of energy and charm, McCollom tells of a man who was one of a kind, a folktale come to life, and along with him, all the trouble that accompanies setting a folk hero loose in a small town.
The Last Sheriff is a true story, intensely researched, passionately written and dense with meaning, both for its examination of our history and its tacit meditation on what that means today, when police brutality and accountable democracy are ever-present concerns. It’s a big story full of visceral details and driven by real-world characters. The writing is rich and fulfilling, packed with detail and Easter eggs of Texas history and culture. Sometimes the tone borders on rhapsodic, but it seldom delves into anything patently reverential. McCollom and his subjects have a niggling awareness that things are rarely simple.
Vail Ennis killed seven men during his career, an unmatched record for Texas lawmen. After the gun battle that bracingly opens the book, and a subsequent mention in TIME magazine that brought it into the national consciousness, everything in Beeville begins to unravel just a bit. We see these changes through the eyes of an idealistic young man named John N. Barnhart, a childhood declamation champion and a stand-in, perhaps, for the author, who also grew up in Beeville.
Barnhart was a wide-eyed University of Texas at Austin student, then novice attorney, then freshman state representative, an optimist and liberal-leaning moderate in the McCarthy era. The story sets him adrift in a volatile sea of uniformed Aggies and aging ranchers who are chiefly concerned with law, order and commies. Eventually, Barnhart is forced to make a choice: whether to tolerate the lionized but dangerous Ennis, or to stand against him and face the uncertainty of a new order.
The Last Sheriff in Texas
The Last Sheriff in Texas:
A True Tale of Violence and the Vote
by James P. McCollom
COUNTERPOINT PRESS
$26; 272 pages
Ennis was a violent man who believed he was protecting the weak. In one scene, he beats a man harassing a waitress to a bloody pulp when the harasser resists arrest. A small-eyed, thin-lipped, Stetson-wearing knight guarding his domain with seeming impunity, he runs his mouth nearly as fast as he runs his trademark steed, a green Hudson Hornet, down the dirt roads of his South Texas fiefdom. His driving habit accounted for a manslaughter, his trigger finger for more deaths than can be counted on one hand. And still, Ennis is re-elected, again and again, even as the city fathers cluck their tongues, whisper the word “violence” with sad resignation and fund a series of inept candidates. The perennial coming-to-terms with Ennis, through elections, serves largely as the book’s central plot. Ennis is a figure worth considering today, and McCollom contextualizes him so fully that a reader could scarcely pick up a paper without seeing his shadow.
The prose is emotional and slightly idiosyncratic, sometimes verging on verse, sometimes wrapped in vernacular. McCollom renders every scene in cinematic detail. So much detail, in fact, that many of the book’s establishing shots — florid descriptions of Beeville or Pettus or Austin on a given day — can begin to feel redundant, especially when we’re watching the subjects cycle back to vital but familiar rituals of elections, rodeos and daily banter at the cafe, country club or beer joint.
McCollom renders every scene in cinematic detail. So much detail, in fact, that many of the book’s establishing shots — florid descriptions of Beeville or Pettus or Austin — can begin to feel redundant.
The detail McCollom achieves, however, is far more of a feature than a bug. The reader feels the gnawing tensions that bubble under the surface and eventually explode, particularly as Johnny Barnhart, who is the point-of-view subject, begins to see the fault lines running beneath the town. The Cold War is sinking into the American psyche. The state of Texas, once wild and wooly, is now mostly urban. The cattle trails are empty, and cowboys lope to and from the bar, where they keep telling stories of youthful prowess, of skills that matter little to Camp Ezell, John Barnhart, Russ Wade and the other men with modern jobs. Yet those same city folk cling to the notion that these cowboys are special, that they are what makes the place special.
The world was surely new, “Yet small ranchers patiently waited for things to go back to normal. You could still drive out any county road and little old ranch houses with wooden corrals, a barn, and chicken yard. The road from Beeville through Cadiz to Oakville led past dozens of such places like Roman ruins with the Romans still living in them,” McCollom writes.
McCollom, like the real people he renders on the page, is entrenched in Texana, the folkloric elements that give a Texas twinge to a universal story of ballots and bullets. There is the Alamo and its defenders, and old cowboys in the rodeo parade flying flags of a not-yet-forgotten way of life. There are six-shooters, shootouts, ranchers, oilmen, J. Frank Dobie, LBJ, Texas Rangers, the Aggie War Hymn and a state capitol perfumed with cigar smoke. All of it coalesces into a beautifully rendered portrait of a changing nation.
In some ways, The Last Sheriff reads like a kind of prequel to Billy Lee Brammer’s phenomenal entry to the Texas canon, The Gay Place. In both books, an increasingly urbanized, cosmopolitan Texas struggles with the tension between modernity and tradition. As a story about violence, policing, elections and society, McCollom’s book is immediate. As a reflection on Texan myth and reality, it is timeless. Lonesome Dove it’s not, but in many ways it gives T.R. Fehrenbach, author of Lone Star: A History of Texas and Texans, a run for his money in encapsulating the Texan mindset. McCollom has earned his place in the canon with a tale that’s part true-crime, part sociological nonfiction, and part national epic.
Andrew Roush is a writer in Bastrop, Texas.
by Andrew Roush
Published
Thu, Nov 16, 2017
at 3:08 pm CST
KIRKUS REVIEW
An absorbing, elegaic appreciation of how Continental Illinois, Chicago's largest bank, came to be nationalized by the US government; from an insider who knew the institution when--and mourns its passing. McCollom spent 14 years with the Midwestern colossus, mainly in offshore postings. Although he left in 1980, while Continental was at the top of its multinational game, the author stayed in touch with former colleagues. His account sheds a good deal of new light on the events leading up to the bank's shocking fall from grace. To illustrate, McCollom traces in detail the ways in which a management reorganization adopted in 1977 at the behest of McKinsey & Co. contributed to the loss of upper-echelon control that permitted the 1982 Penn Square debacle. Weakened by this brush with disaster, Continental succumbed to a rumor-spurred run on deposits, which ended only with a megabuck bailout by the FDIC in 1984. McCollom documents how world-class banking's paramilitary bent can produce problems as well as solutions. Few if any major institutions, for example, realized that their corporate clients had become banks themselves during the 1970's. In addition to an unsparing critique of Continental and the helter-skelter international financial system within which it operated, the author has harsh words for journalists who became participants in as well as observers of the 1984 crisis. Whether Continental could have survived, let alone thrived, without confidence-impairing press reports on its solvency remains an open question McCollom does not address. He does, though, evoke the bygone esprit of the bank's officer corps and the intrinsic worth of business traditions that now seem relics of a simpler, slower-paced era with decidedly lower stakes. An affectionate, albeit analytic, memoir that conveys just how much was lost in the federal takeover and ongoing rehabilitation of Continental Illinois.