98 of 107 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A Stunning Look at Southwestern History, December 10, 1999
This review is from: The Great Arizona Orphan Abduction (Hardcover)
Seemingly small incidents can offer large insights into the process of social change. Linda Gordon, perhaps our country's leading historian of women, has taken a largely forgotten episode in which 40 Irish orphans were placed with Mexican families in a remote Arizona mining town and made it a window into some of the most important themes in the history of the 20th century Southwest. In her book we relive the human meaning of migration for thousands of Mexicans and we see the role of race and gender in the creation of a colonial economy in the Southwest. Above all, her book offers a valuable lesson for our time. She shows how an earlier ideology of family values was misused and abused, and harmed the interests of the very children it was supposed to help.
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10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Excellent microhistory, November 24, 2004
Linda Gordon's "The Great Arizona Orphan Abduction" tells one small story in order to examine a far larger one. In 1904 the Catholic sisters in the employ of the New York Foundling Hospital attempted to place several white, Catholic orphans with Mexican families in the mining towns of Clifton-Morenci, Arizona. The white Protestant residents in the towns objected strenuously to the placements, and joined together to steal the children away from the prospective Mexican parents. Appalled by the scenes of mob activity and the threats made on their lives, as well as the idea of Protestants adopting Catholic children, the Foundling Hospital sued in court to retrieve the orphans. The case first went to the Arizona Territorial Supreme Court before moving on to the United States Supreme Court, which ultimately gave permanent custody of the children to the Arizona whites. This story as told by the author--an excellent example of microhistorical research--provides the impetus to pursue a host of larger subjects involving labor issues, gender, class, mob violence, and child welfare. The overarching theme is race relations.
To understand the orphan imbroglio, Gordon contends, one must understand the racial attitudes whites held about Mexicans. In the late nineteenth century, when Anglos were a weak minority trying to establish themselves in the Southwest, Mexicans could more or less stand on an equal footing with many of the white laborers and settlers. What changed? The arrival of more white settlers increased the power of Anglos. Too, the implementation of large-scale industry--here, the consolidation of individual copper mines--as the sole means of employment in the region brought about an unspoken agreement between Anglo laborers and mine owners to keep Mexican wages low. Finally, the consolidation of white political power helped to disenfranchise Hispanic laborers. Underpinning these issues was an unchanging opinion of Mexicans. Whites saw them as dirty, itinerant immigrants whose presence threatened to drive down wages. While itinerancy was a reality in the late nineteenth century, by 1904 much of the Mexican community had settled down. Many of the mineworkers lived in Clifton-Morenci with their families and children, were productive residents, and usually only returned to Mexico for brief visits.
The orphans from New York, therefore, stepped into a complicated racial situation, a situation further exacerbated by Anglo women. They were the ones who first noticed the nuns giving children to Mexican families, and they brought their husbands into the fray in short order by promoting a vigilante solution. Gordon sees this aspect of the orphan incident as a prime example of how women could step beyond their traditional boundaries in order to take part in the public sphere normally closed to them. And this applied to both Mexican and Anglo women, as it was Hispanic women who agreed to adopt the children and Anglo women who fought to take them away. Mexican wives sought to adopt the children because they believed that a white child would make the family whiter, and therefore more acceptable to American society. White wives and mothers wished to remove the orphans from the Mexican homes because they subscribed to the racial attitudes of the time, namely that Hispanic laborers were dirty, indolent, and poor.
Linda Gordon does an excellent job of locating and scouring meager materials for information on this minor event. Her sources--court records, oral histories, interviews, and New York Foundling Hospital records--allow her to piece together most of the details concerning the actual abduction as well as the underlying issues. Her connection of the mining strike of 1903 to a hardening of racial attitudes about Mexicans is extraordinarily well done. Gordon argues that this strike, which started as a joint Anglo-Mexican effort to gain better wages and safer working conditions, allowed the company to break up the protest by painting Hispanic laborers as dangerous radicals with view threatening to white interests. That the exact same situation occurred during a 1983 walkout reveals the tenacity of racial divisions and helps confirm the accuracy of Gordon's assessment. Her perceptive analysis of the orphan trial, in which she claims that the nuns lost the case because they failed to realize that the real issue was race and not religion, is another example of effective speculation backed up by evidence. Not all of the author's conclusions seem well grounded, however. For instance, her discussion of vigilantism and the role it played in the orphan abduction raises a niggling question that begs for further elaboration.
Vigilantism, according to Gordon, occurred throughout the United States in various forms. The most pernicious type, and the one that has garnered the most attention from scholars, is the southern manifestation involving the lynching of blacks. In Clifton-Morenci during the orphan abduction, the author claims that the posse organized to recoup the children, along with the mob that threatened the sisters from the New York Foundling Hospital, constituted a vigilante action even though no one swung for it. While one cannot argue with the book's claim that many of the actions taken by the white citizens of the two towns classified as extralegal maneuvers, at least one incident in the chain of events raises a question. Why did the leaders of the town, the very same men intimately tied to the vigilante action, summon a judge to issue a ruling justifying the abduction? And why were the leaders of this legal coup "lacking confidence that the court system would decide in their favor" on this issue? Even though Judge Little refused to issue adoption papers to the whites, he also refused to assist the sisters. Everything Gordon describes about Arizona's overtly racist economic, political, and legal systems up to this point leads one to believe that court proceedings in the matter would result in an overwhelming victory for the whites, as indeed it ended up being. This is a small point to complain about in what is otherwise a solidly researched study of racism in the early twentieth century.
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10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Excellent examination of the evolution of race in US history, January 10, 2002
Ms. Gordon has told in a compelling, exciting manner the tragic story of how 40 orphans became a pawn, first in New York's reform movement, and then in the southwest labor struggles.
However, her book goes far beyond this simple story, by using it as a springboard for an examination of the evolving concept of "race" in american history, and how the concept of race was used in different ways, at different times--tied to economic, religious and gender issuses which prevailed at diiferent times in different places.
The central "action" in Ms. Gordon's narrative is not, as several reviewers seemed to think, the abduction of the orphans. It is the transformation of the orphans from "Irish"--a despised minority in New York--into "White"--a powerful minority in Arizona, as they took their 2,000 mile train ride to their new adopted homes.
The only reason that I did not rate this book five stars is because Ms. Gordon first does a very good job explaining the paucity of evidence for the actual abduction--poor people tend not to leave historical records. However, she periodically leaps beyond this limited records into wild speculation (which may well be correct, but certainly is not supported by her evidence), all without acknowledging the contradiction.
All in all, well worth the read for anyone who is interested in the role race has played in american history--which ought to be all of us.
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