Gordon demonstrates the continuing vitality of the issues social historians have brought to the table – class, race, gender, family – in the context of a new commitment to a synthesizing narrative…Gordon's invocations of the many issues that have concerned social historians deeply enhances her examination of a particular time and place in this richly re-imagined history…Gordon has gone to such pains to guard the integrity of her historical subjects and to invest then with genuine depth and individuality.
Paula S. Fassn Historical Review
This is an unusual and interesting work of history, whose chief strength lies in the way it lovingly recreates the spirit of a particular Arizona community and, through its insistence on micro-historical detail, gives the reader a clear sense of how racial assumptions and antagonisms operated within everyday life.
Times Literary Supplement - Paul Giles
Written in the lush prose and plots of a Joseph Conrad novel, Linda Gordon's The Great Arizona Orphan Abduction is [an] extraordinary chronicle...More than an isolated case of frontier vigilantism, the affair swirled into the national headlines, fanning the flames of the caustic debate over religion and race...Peeling off the overlapping intrigues, issues, and players of the incident with the precision of a historical detective, Gordon, a leading social historian on issues of gender and family, goes far beyond the question of blatant racism in a racist epoch to examine the cultural and historical makeup that allowed the affair to happen in the first place...Her meticulously researched and reasoned chronicle is a masterwork of historical analysis that deserves to remain on bookshelves far into the future.
Bloomsbury Review - Jeff Biggers
If Gordon's book did nothing more than redeem from obscurity the story of the Arizona orphans, it would be an extraordinary contribution to social history. But Gordon has gone beyond that scanty written record, mainly from the court proceedings, to explore the motives of the Mexican and Anglo women...Gordon's achievement is that she so effectively and fair-mindedly delved into the site and unearthed this appalling and poignant story.
Boston Globe - Michael Kenney
Linda Gordon has used [the orphan abduction's] events to explore issues of race, gender, class, economics and theories of the family in a beautifully constructed narrative and analysis of a flashpoint in American domestic history...Gordon uses her multiplicity of sources with great skill, all the time reminding us that some participants in the story have left no record of their experiences, particularly the children's birth mothers, the children themselves, and the Mexican families with whom they were to be placed. She contextualises the event superbly, giving us a well-rounded portrait of Clifton-Morenci at the time, as well as taking us through the ideological and emotional processes which moved people to act as they did.
Economics, religion, and racial and sexual politics intersect in this fascinating account of the social upheaval caused when Mexicans in a small Arizona mining town in 1904 adopted 40 abandoned Irish-Catholic children from New York. The children were brought West by Catholic nuns on the little-known orphan trains that transported children of poor families across the country for adoption. Gordon has rendered a well-researched analysis of the social and racial factors that aroused passions enough to send posses to 'rescue' the children and that nearly lead to the lynching of a priest. Gordon puts the incident in the context of turn-of-the-century industrialization and changing racial definitions that reclassified ethnic groups, such as the Irish as whites. Gordon uses news accounts and court transcripts to render a compelling account of the incident and the legal challenges by the Catholic charity group that went all the way to the U. S. Supreme Court and ended in judgement in favor of the white vigilantes, reinforcing racial and religious attitudes of the time.
Gordon's account takes place in six scenes, with historical interludes between them. Her narrative voice is enticing, and her descriptions vivid...This book provides a gripping piece of a puzzled history, not only of American racism, but of the Catholic experience of it.
Linda Gordon has written an astonishing book...This is not just a story about orphan children: it is a story of America at a time of transition, when the railroads were opening up the land and men went west from the cities of the eastern seaboard to seek their fortune. It details religious prejudice, but also compassion.
Catholic Herald - Christina White
It is both fascinating and disturbing to delve into specific events of American history: Cultural biases explode, exploitation simmers, and religious identity is challenged. Linda Gordon's book confronts all these issues...Delving deeper and deeper into the American conscience, Gordon shatters layer upon layer of assumption. She has done her research, and the story she has written breathes life as a dragon breathes fire, burning sometimes accidentally, though oftentimes intentionally. As a challenge to preconceived notions of American history, as a reflection of cultural, religious and economic realities and as a how-to guide for retrieving important historical lessons, The Great Arizona Orphan Abduction is fascinating, repelling and completely engrossing.
The Star-Ledger - Ian Graham
Gordon's extraordinary achievement in this book lies in her narrative strategy as much as in her insights as a social historian: she alternates dramatic short chapters detailing the events in the mining communities of Clifton-Morenci from the first to the fourth of October 1904 with longer, denser ones that reconstruct the conflation of class, gender, racial, religious, and economic interests that initiated the children's journey west from New York City and underlay their distribution by Father Mandin, the local priest.
Women's Review of Books - Gay Wachman
A story of racism, vigilantism, and injustice that retains its grim fascination after nearly a century...The sordid but suspenseful story is told against a background that encompasses the mining industry, labor unions and even a waffling U.S. Supreme Court.
In this remarkable history of an obscure event, Gordon skillfully casts light on myriad important subjects...[She] has done an extraordinary amount of research and has completely contextualized the orphan abduction. One finds learned chapters on the history of the Southwest, the copper mining industry, vigilantism, Mexican women, labor relations, and Catholicism. Especially informative are Gordon's lengthy discussions of historical definitions of whiteness and how the orphan abduction was instrumental in destroying the fluidity of race relations.
[Gordon] uses the plight of the children...to introduce her readers to the racial, social and cultural situation in the Arizona minds and in the country in general.
Wisconsin State Journal - William R. Wineke
Gordon is genuinely curious and deeply thoughtful about the complex ways in which race, class and gender intersect to produce pivotal moments like this one. The book that she has written should be of interest not only to scholars of the American southwest, but to anyone curious about how ideologies make us what we are.
Times Higher Education Supplement - Christina Thompson
In 1904, a group of New York nuns delivered 40 mostly Irish but entirely Catholic orphans to a remote Arizona mining town to be adopted by local Catholics. What happened next is the subject of historian Linda Gordon's compelling new book: For their act of Christian charity, the nuns were rewarded with near-lynching and public vilification of an intensity hard to fathom today. As Gordon makes clear in writing so alive it makes the reader smell sagebrush and white supremacy, the Eastern nuns didn't realize that, in turn-of-the-century Arizona, Catholic also meant Mexican, and Mexican meant inferior.
salon.com - Debra Dickerson
Historian Linda Gordon has unearthed a small, forgotten story, and told it exceptionally well...[The] astonishing story, less than a century old, contains much to ponder. Gordon does a masterful job probing class and race, gender and religion, family and border economics to shed light on conflicts unresolved to this day...She has crafted both an exhilarating yarn and a sober morality tale.
Plain Dealer - Karen R. Long
Economics, religion, and racial and sexual politics intersect in this account of the social upheaval caused when Mexicans in a small Arizona mining town in 1904 adopted 40 abandoned Irish Catholic children from New York. Gordon's compelling account of the incident traces the legal challenges by a Catholic charity group that went all the way to the Supreme Court.
an "Editor's Choice 1999" selection Booklist
In her gripping book, The Great Arizona Orphan Abduction , Linda Gordon has written a model study of the creation and maintenance of race relations that manages to capture both the breathless sensationalism of the era's tabloids and the complexity of social status, shifting racial codes and the multiple uses of sex roles in social action...Gordon divides her story into six scenes, most of them devoted to some portion of the four days when the orphans' arrival engulfed Clifton-Morenci in a near riot followed by a mass kidnapping. Spliced between each scene is the history—long-term and proximate—of the towns' sociocultural landscape. It is an ingenious narrative device that enables her to reconstitute the distinct social structures of the area while rendering a taut journalistic account of the unfolding drama...The magnificence of her achievement [is] her masterly assembly of historical detail and acute sensitivity to the intricacies of human relations as mediated by power, prejudice and the passing of time.
Linda Gordon's The Great Arizona Orphan Abduction is a spellbinding narrative history—the kind of rigorous but engaging work that other academics dream of writing. Gordon here unearths a long forgotten story about abandoned Irish-Catholic children in turn-of-the-century New York who were sent out to Arizona to be adopted by good Catholic families. The hitch was that those families turned out to be dark-skinned Mexicans. What ensued was a custody battle that went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. The astonishing story Gordon has recovered considers vexed intellectual questions about race, class and gender in a dramatic, accessible fashion.
Newsday - Maureen Corrigan
[A] fascinating, almost cinematic book...Gordon has brilliantly retrieved history, in the process providing a vivid, complex addition to the growing scholarship on 'whiteness.'
Lingua Franca Book Review - JoAnn Wypijewski
Gordon demonstrates the continuing vitality of the issues social historians have brought to the table – class, race, gender, family – in the context of a new commitment to a synthesizing narrative…Gordon's invocations of the many issues that have concerned social historians deeply enhances her examination of a particular time and place in this richly re-imagined history…Gordon has gone to such pains to guard the integrity of her historical subjects and to invest then with genuine depth and individuality.
American Historical Review - Paula S. Fass
A story of racism, vigilantism, and injustice that retains its grim fascination after nearly a century...The sordid but suspenseful story is told against a background that encompasses the mining industry, labor unions and even a waffling U.S. Supreme Court.
Economics, religion, and racial and sexual politics intersect in this account of the social upheaval caused when Mexicans in a small Arizona mining town in 1904 adopted 40 abandoned Irish Catholic children from New York. Gordon's compelling account of the incident traces the legal challenges by a Catholic charity group that went all the way to the Supreme Court.
an "Editor's Choice 1999" selection Booklist
[A] fascinating, almost cinematic book...Gordon has brilliantly retrieved history, in the process providing a vivid, complex addition to the growing scholarship on 'whiteness.'
Lingua Franca Book Review - Joann Wypijewski
Gordon demonstrates the continuing vitality of the issues social historians have brought to the table – class, race, gender, family – in the context of a new commitment to a synthesizing narrative…Gordon's invocations of the many issues that have concerned social historians deeply enhances her examination of a particular time and place in this richly re-imagined history…Gordon has gone to such pains to guard the integrity of her historical subjects and to invest then with genuine depth and individuality.
American Historical Review
Linda Gordon…has produced a brilliant foray into social history that explores issues of race, class, gender, law enforcement, and labor relations in the American Southwest at the dawn of the 20th century.
Linda Gordon has written an astonishing book...This is not just a story about orphan children: it is a story of America at a time of transition, when the railroads were opening up the land and men went west from the cities of the eastern seaboard to seek their fortune. It details religious prejudice, but also compassion.
Linda Gordon's The Great Arizona Orphan Abduction is a spellbinding narrative history—the kind of rigorous but engaging work that other academics dream of writing. Gordon here unearths a long forgotten story about abandoned Irish-Catholic children in turn-of-the-century New York who were sent out to Arizona to be adopted by good Catholic families. The hitch was that those families turned out to be dark-skinned Mexicans. What ensued was a custody battle that went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. The astonishing story Gordon has recovered considers vexed intellectual questions about race, class and gender in a dramatic, accessible fashion.
Gordon's account takes place in six scenes, with historical interludes between them. Her narrative voice is enticing, and her descriptions vivid...This book provides a gripping piece of a puzzled history, not only of American racism, but of the Catholic experience of it.
[Gordon] uses the plight of the children...to introduce her readers to the racial, social and cultural situation in the Arizona minds and in the country in general.
Gordon is genuinely curious and deeply thoughtful about the complex ways in which race, class and gender intersect to produce pivotal moments like this one. The book that she has written should be of interest not only to scholars of the American southwest, but to anyone curious about how ideologies make us what we are.
Times Higher Education Supplement
Written in the lush prose and plots of a Joseph Conrad novel, Linda Gordon's The Great Arizona Orphan Abduction is [an] extraordinary chronicle...More than an isolated case of frontier vigilantism, the affair swirled into the national headlines, fanning the flames of the caustic debate over religion and race...Peeling off the overlapping intrigues, issues, and players of the incident with the precision of a historical detective, Gordon, a leading social historian on issues of gender and family, goes far beyond the question of blatant racism in a racist epoch to examine the cultural and historical makeup that allowed the affair to happen in the first place...Her meticulously researched and reasoned chronicle is a masterwork of historical analysis that deserves to remain on bookshelves far into the future.
Economics, religion, and racial and sexual politics intersect in this fascinating account of the social upheaval caused when Mexicans in a small Arizona mining town in 1904 adopted 40 abandoned Irish-Catholic children from New York. The children were brought West by Catholic nuns on the little-known orphan trains that transported children of poor families across the country for adoption. Gordon has rendered a well-researched analysis of the social and racial factors that aroused passions enough to send posses to 'rescue' the children and that nearly lead to the lynching of a priest. Gordon puts the incident in the context of turn-of-the-century industrialization and changing racial definitions that reclassified ethnic groups, such as the Irish as whites. Gordon uses news accounts and court transcripts to render a compelling account of the incident and the legal challenges by the Catholic charity group that went all the way to the U. S. Supreme Court and ended in judgement in favor of the white vigilantes, reinforcing racial and religious attitudes of the time.
In this remarkable history of an obscure event, Gordon skillfully casts light on myriad important subjects...[She] has done an extraordinary amount of research and has completely contextualized the orphan abduction. One finds learned chapters on the history of the Southwest, the copper mining industry, vigilantism, Mexican women, labor relations, and Catholicism. Especially informative are Gordon's lengthy discussions of historical definitions of whiteness and how the orphan abduction was instrumental in destroying the fluidity of race relations.
In 1904, a group of New York nuns delivered 40 mostly Irish but entirely Catholic orphans to a remote Arizona mining town to be adopted by local Catholics. What happened next is the subject of historian Linda Gordon's compelling new book: For their act of Christian charity, the nuns were rewarded with near-lynching and public vilification of an intensity hard to fathom today. As Gordon makes clear in writing so alive it makes the reader smell sagebrush and white supremacy, the Eastern nuns didn't realize that, in turn-of-the-century Arizona, Catholic also meant Mexican, and Mexican meant inferior.
It is both fascinating and disturbing to delve into specific events of American history: Cultural biases explode, exploitation simmers, and religious identity is challenged. Linda Gordon's book confronts all these issues...Delving deeper and deeper into the American conscience, Gordon shatters layer upon layer of assumption. She has done her research, and the story she has written breathes life as a dragon breathes fire, burning sometimes accidentally, though oftentimes intentionally. As a challenge to preconceived notions of American history, as a reflection of cultural, religious and economic realities and as a how-to guide for retrieving important historical lessons, The Great Arizona Orphan Abduction is fascinating, repelling and completely engrossing.
[A] fascinating, almost cinematic book...Gordon has brilliantly retrieved history, in the process providing a vivid, complex addition to the growing scholarship on 'whiteness.'
Lingua Franca Book Review
Historian Linda Gordon has unearthed a small, forgotten story, and told it exceptionally well...[The] astonishing story, less than a century old, contains much to ponder. Gordon does a masterful job probing class and race, gender and religion, family and border economics to shed light on conflicts unresolved to this day...She has crafted both an exhilarating yarn and a sober morality tale.
Linda Gordon has used [the orphan abduction's] events to explore issues of race, gender, class, economics and theories of the family in a beautifully constructed narrative and analysis of a flashpoint in American domestic history...Gordon uses her multiplicity of sources with great skill, all the time reminding us that some participants in the story have left no record of their experiences, particularly the children's birth mothers, the children themselves, and the Mexican families with whom they were to be placed. She contextualises the event superbly, giving us a well-rounded portrait of Clifton-Morenci at the time, as well as taking us through the ideological and emotional processes which moved people to act as they did.
Gordon's extraordinary achievement in this book lies in her narrative strategy as much as in her insights as a social historian: she alternates dramatic short chapters detailing the events in the mining communities of Clifton-Morenci from the first to the fourth of October 1904 with longer, denser ones that reconstruct the conflation of class, gender, racial, religious, and economic interests that initiated the children's journey west from New York City and underlay their distribution by Father Mandin, the local priest.
This is an unusual and interesting work of history, whose chief strength lies in the way it lovingly recreates the spirit of a particular Arizona community and, through its insistence on micro-historical detail, gives the reader a clear sense of how racial assumptions and antagonisms operated within everyday life.
Times Literary Supplement
If Gordon's book did nothing more than redeem from obscurity the story of the Arizona orphans, it would be an extraordinary contribution to social history. But Gordon has gone beyond that scanty written record, mainly from the court proceedings, to explore the motives of the Mexican and Anglo women...Gordon's achievement is that she so effectively and fair-mindedly delved into the site and unearthed this appalling and poignant story.
In her gripping book, The Great Arizona Orphan Abduction , Linda Gordon has written a model study of the creation and maintenance of race relations that manages to capture both the breathless sensationalism of the era's tabloids and the complexity of social status, shifting racial codes and the multiple uses of sex roles in social action...Gordon divides her story into six scenes, most of them devoted to some portion of the four days when the orphans' arrival engulfed Clifton-Morenci in a near riot followed by a mass kidnapping. Spliced between each scene is the history—long-term and proximate—of the towns' sociocultural landscape. It is an ingenious narrative device that enables her to reconstitute the distinct social structures of the area while rendering a taut journalistic account of the unfolding drama...The magnificence of her achievement [is] her masterly assembly of historical detail and acute sensitivity to the intricacies of human relations as mediated by power, prejudice and the passing of time.
New York Times Book Review
In her gripping book, The Great Arizona Orphan Abduction , Linda Gordon has written a model study of the creation and maintenance of race relations that manages to capture both the breathless sensationalism of the era's tabloids and the complexity of social status, shifting racial codes and the multiple uses of sex roles in social action...Gordon divides her story into six scenes, most of them devoted to some portion of the four days when the orphans' arrival engulfed Clifton-Morenci in a near riot followed by a mass kidnapping. Spliced between each scene is the history--long-term and proximate--of the towns' sociocultural landscape. It is an ingenious narrative device that enables her to reconstitute the distinct social structures of the area while rendering a taut journalistic account of the unfolding drama...The magnificence of her achievement [is] her masterly assembly of historical detail and acute sensitivity to the intricacies of human relations as mediated by power, prejudice and the passing of time.
New York Times Book Review - Stephen Lassonde
In 1904, a group of New York nuns delivered 40
mostly Irish but entirely Catholic orphans to a remote Arizona
mining town to be adopted by local Catholics. What happened next
is the subject of historian Linda Gordon's compelling new book: For
their act of Christian charity, the nuns were rewarded with
near-lynching and public vilification of an intensity hard to fathom
today.
As Gordon makes clear in writing so alive that it makes the reader
smell sagebrush and white supremacy, the Eastern nuns didn't
realize that, in turn-of-the-century Arizona, Catholic also meant
Mexican, and Mexican meant inferior. How could a dirty, amoral
Mexican (terms that were among the nicer descriptions of the
would-be foster parents in newspaper accounts and sworn
testimony) raise a white child? To Western whites, the nuns were
depraved white-slavers selling children to drunken-whore savages.
Local whites (nearly all Protestant, and
therefore ineligible to receive the sisters'
charges) rioted and "liberated" the children from
their Mexican foster parents, all of whom had
been carefully vetted by the local (white) priest
in accordance with the Sisters of Charity's
well-established system. Many white Arizonans
concocted stories claiming they'd seen Mexicans
pay a priest on receipt of a child, or claiming that
the sisters promised them children if they'd ante up. As Gordon
plausibly sees it, these manufactured memories helped them to
make sense of why another white would deliver helpless white
children to the clutches of near-animals -- and also legitimized their
"rescue" of the children.
The sisters sued to win back the children, promising that they'd be
placed with Catholic, and -- having learned their lesson -- white
parents. Indeed, the sisters abandoned the Mexicans entirely,
claiming they would have never given the children to them had they
"known." Interestingly, the suits were all civil; no criminal charges
were ever entertained, let alone filed, against the vigilantes,
although they were kidnappers whose treatment of the sisters and
the Mexicans was brutal. When the mob first came for the sisters
to "voluntarily" give up the children, 100 people crowded into their
hotel lobby, with 300 more outside threatening the nuns with tar and
feathers. Many were armed, and several called for a rope.
"In the street a sheriff sat on horseback, with a revolver, like the
other men," one sister later wrote. "Women called us vile names,
and some of them put pistols to our heads. They said there was no
law in that town; that they made their own laws. We were told to
get the children from the Spaniards [meaning the Mexicans, a
difference the sisters could not understand] ... If we did not we
would be killed."
The case eventually reached the U.S. Supreme Court, where,
unsurprisingly, whites' right to protect their racial purity, their
societal supremacy and their right to state-sanctioned violence
remained sacrosanct. The "rescued" children grew up with nice,
white criminals as parents and role models, across the tracks from
their erstwhile Mexican-American parents, none of whom were
allowed to testify, file written statements or even enter the
courtroom. The great orphan abduction -- in which
Mexican-Americans tried to do the right thing and were nearly
massacred for it -- was settled entirely among whites.
For the sisters, who back home had to vie with Protestant charities
for the souls of New York's numerous street urchins, religion was
all that mattered. As she relates the story of the orphans' fate,
Gordon patiently describes the tortured, complex systems of racial
categorization that prevailed in different parts of the country. In
New York, "Irish" was a separate and reviled race not much above
"Negro" or "Slav." The orphans' Irish status, coupled with their
sheer numbers (150 more were abandoned every month) made it
impossible to find enough adoptive homes in the children's
hometown, or even in a nearby state. The activist (and quite
feminist) sisters understood that the abandoned children had their
best chance at a future in the labor-starved hinterlands, where they
were a much-needed resource. The sisters failed to realize,
however, that in a sparsely populated region without many
gradations among what we now think of as "white," "race" meant
very different things.
In Arizona, all social significance hinged on the differences
between "whites" and the inferiors: Mexicans, "Chinamen," blacks
and Indians. Closest to white in appearance and comportment,
Mexicans were at the top of the list but remained (then as now)
non-white. Intermarriage (or more often, intercourse) between
whites and Mexicans was common and largely accepted in the
Southwest, but there were limits -- Mexicans adopting white
children, for instance. Gordon's convincing analysis of the nuns'
mistake and the debacle that followed points up some potent racial
ironies that are still worth savoring today: The Easterners didn't
understand that the same train ride that would bring their Irish
charges parents and homes would also make them white. Of
course, had they been white in New York, there would have been
no need for the arduous journey west. Salon
On Oct. 1, 1904, at
about 6:30 p.m., an impatiently awaited train pulled into the railroad station
in the Arizona mining town of Clifton. On board were the reasons for the large
crowd that had gathered: 40 young children, orphans being ''placed out'' by New
York's Foundling Hospital.
The arrival of these ''orphan trains'' were invariably major events in the
small towns of the West and Midwest, where by 1900 they had become a significant
expression of the prevalent child-welfare principle that children needed a
proper environment in which to thrive.
''Placing out,'' and the arranging of orphan trains to accomplish that
policy, was initially a mission of Protestant child-welfare agencies. But as the
children were mostly Catholic, and the receiving families mainly Protestant, the
policy became one of increasing concern to Catholic leaders. By 1880, the
Sisters of Charity at the Catholic-run Foundling Hospital had organized a rival
system.
But in Clifton that October evening, the very concerns that Catholics had
felt about interreligious placements were transformed into ''Anglo'' concerns
about the interracial placement of mostly Irish orphans with Mexican families.
The result, as social historian Linda Gordon skillfully, and suspensefully,
details in ''The Great Arizona Orphan Abduction,'' was an armed confrontation,
just short of ''a lynch mob,'' she writes. The children who had been placed upon
arrival with Mexican families were rounded up that very evening by a posse and
handed over to Anglo families. Most of the remaining children were taken back to
New York.
The Foundling Hospital attempted unsuccessfully to get the abducted children
back with a habeas corpus petition that ended up before the US Supreme Court. On
a technicality, writes Gordon, the court upheld a decision by the Arizona
Supreme Court, which validated ''the claim of the vigilantes'' and, in effect,
the child-saving policy of the Protestant orphan train movement, by stating that
''the child in question is a white, Caucasian child ... abandoned ... to the
keeping of a Mexican Indian [who is] by reason of his race, mode of living,
habits and education, unfit to have the custody, care and education of the
child.''
If Gordon's book did nothing more than redeem from obscurity the story of the
Arizona orphans, it would be an extraordinary contribution to social history.
But Gordon, a professor of history at the University of Wisconsin and the author
of well-regarded books on working-class women, has gone beyond the scanty
written record, mainly from the court proceedings, to explore the motives of the
Mexican and Anglo women.
The Mexican women, Gordon writes, were doing ''something daring'' in
volunteering to take a child when the request from the Foundling Hospital was
relayed through their local priest. As they took the children home from the
railroad station, Gordon writes, ''they were warmed by righteousness,'' while
''chilled by just the least bit of anxiety.'' They were ''no strangers to race
talk and Anglo chauvinism,'' but sensed that bringing an American child into
their homes ''was a way to become American'' themselves, for ''such a child
might go to school, might learn perfect English, might marry a white man or earn
a white man's wage.''
But against that, writes Gordon, ''the orphans were literally drawing Anglo
women out of their homes and into an adventure in which they felt that they had
an obligation to lead.'' The Anglo women, writes Gordon, were motivated at least
partly by self-interest, being immediately charmed by the sight of the
Irish-American children and wanting one for themselves. But ''in their vigilance
in noting the danger and then acting to protect children at risk, they were
performing a public duty and thus making themselves citizens'' because women
have traditionally ''aspired to and reached citizenship ... through defending
children's welfare.''
Of course, Gordon notes, to accomplish that end in 1904 Arizona, the Anglo
women had to mobilize their husbands, being ''cautious not to overstep a
normative line into the male sphere.''
In a footnote, Gordon credits sociologist Robert Merton for pointing out that
the Arizona orphan story is an example of ''a strategic research site,'' an
event so interesting in itself that it allows the investigation of broader
social issues. But Gordon's achievement is that she so effectively and
fair-mindedly delved into the site and unearthed this appalling and poignant
story.
Boston Globe
In her gripping book ''The Great Arizona Orphan Abduction,'' Linda
Gordon, a historian at the University of Wisconsin, has written a model
study of the creation and maintenance of race relations that manages to
capture both the breathless sensationalism of the era's tabloids and the
complexity of social status, shifting racial codes and the multiple uses of
sex roles in social action. The New York Times
Microhistory at its best. Gordon (History/Univ. of Wisconsin-Madison) has long been a student of working-class and poor women, with a special interest in motherhood (Pitied But Not Entitled , 1994, traces the history of single mothers and welfare). Here she takes on some new challenges—narrative, the history of Spanish-speaking Americans, New Western history. Gordon began with great raw material: a gripping tale that sounds more like the plot of a TV mini-series than the subject of a university press book. In 1904, Catholic nuns in New York sent 40 Irish children on an "orphan train" to a small Arizona mining town, where they would be cared for by Catholic families—Mexican Catholic families. When the children arrived, the Anglo townsfolk were outraged by the idea that 40 white boys and girls were going to be placed with non-white families. Anglo women organized their men into a posse which kidnapped the children from the Mexican families. A trial followed, and the Arizona Territorial Supreme Court found in favor of the Anglos. Gordon, drawing on interviews, newspapers, and the court transcript, recreates the kidnapping and the ensuing courtroom drama in intoxicating detail. Along the way, Gordon cracks open a number of hot issues, from labor relations to women's roles. At the center is her examination of the social construction of race; you won't find a more illuminating or nuanced discussion of the invention of whiteness than Gordon's. "The train ride," Gordon reminds us, "had transformed [the foundlings] from Irish to white." In early twentieth-century New York, Irish kids were no more "white" than Jewish or Italian children. But in Arizona, where the "other" wasdark-skinned and spoke a language even more foreign to "white" ears than an Irish brogue, the children were suddenly as white as George Washington. Gordon has written the rare history book that readers won't be able to put down. (35 halftones, 2 maps, 1 table)
