Customer Reviews

The Great Arizona Orphan Abduction

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

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.

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.

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.

Linda Gordon takes a small story out of the old southwest using court records, oral histories, interviews, and hospital records to create a highly readable and provocative work of American history. She recounts the half-legend of the Arizona orphan abduction to reveal what it meant to be human a hundred years ago. It was a time and place of nation-building and evolving standards of citizenship. During that colonizing period, dominated by self appointed "civilizers," racial attitudes allowed a mob to kidnap infants at gunpoint only to have the Supreme Court grant the perpetrators custody. The Euro-Americans did not want Mexican-looking people to gain any whiteness in the form of the foundlings and thereby diminish their status. Today it seems like an outrage akin to Plessy v. Fergusson.

Against a backdrop of the smoldering mountains of oozing slag, Gordon describes how the eastern nuns fought the western WASPY-neighbors-from-hell in an effort place their charges in good catholic homes. This story heightens the contrast of the blurred lines of identity: gender, religion, politics, nationality, class, regional identity, group and subgroup, and most of all, race. These lines, like the borderlands themselves, are never clear and fixed. They shift in and out of focus, but they nevertheless affect the concrete balance of power between labor and capital, men and women, the genteel and the half-breed, the wicked and the good, the white and the non-white other.

Gordon's thesis is that fickle notions of race dictate status, from the Irish Catholic birth mothers to mine workers. Race was a badge of rank for courtroom and lynch mob alike. In an age of imperialism and social Darwinism race determined one's place, trumping class, religion, education and merit. It determined everything from social mobility to one's worthiness to adopt. Those who were blind to the shifting hierarchy of racial identity were destined to lose.

Industrialists manipulated race to undermine worker solidarity in their company town. It trapped the Mexicans in a degrading Catch-22; they were paid less and therefore tainted by imposed poverty. Denied a chance to shower and change clothes, they were condemned as filthy creatures. The unspoken understanding between Anglo laborers and mine owners kept Mexican wages low.

The same quality that makes Gordon's so engaging might drive a doctrinaire historian crazy. With her imagination Gordon fills in the gaps that could not be documented. But I, as a graduate student and a lover of good historical writing, can appreciate her style when she says, "no doubt they (the vigilante town folk) were cleaning their rifles." She can't really know that but it rings true and brings the story to life.

This is one of the best history books I have ever read. Not only does it focus on a little known, little discussed part of history...the selling of orphans, it also sheds light on the cultural factors that allowed this to happen.

I have passed this book on to so many friends that I have had to purchase extra copies to continue to do so.

The author has an easy style that could almost lull you into thinking you are reading a novel. Well, given the facts in this wonderful book, it is one of those books that are often talked about "If someone wrote a book about this no one would believe it."


Thank you Linda Gordon. I hope you have more books like this in progress. I am a real fan.

Gordon divides her book into parts: the "facts" and the narrative. The narrative reads much like a novel (at least partially because Gordon doesn't have a lot of concrete research to draw upon so she can fill in the blanks in an... entertaining manner) while the rest of the book is filled with (often dry) research. It seems as if Gordon is torn between writing an academic work or a popular work and ends up not quite hitting the mark with either. If I hadn't been reading the book for class, I would probably just skim through the book for the story (there's a section of each chapter devoted just to the orphans' story) and then check with the rest of the book is I was very curious about a specific detail.

A big disappointment.Not much about the children and too long on dates and events. Our book club all felt the same way. Somewhat bored. The title fools you, I kept looking for more info on the children. Good for educational use, not for interesting,want more reading. Too drawn out.

I was disappointed in the book. I kept looking for more on the children and all I got was dates and events. The title misleads you. Our book club all felt the same way. Good for educational purposes but short on interesting and "want more" story line, in fact there was no story line. Boring!.