Read the Book, Bitch

I dug up this review the other day. I wrote it in college and boy, does it stink. I stand by--I think--my dislike of Linda Gordon's truly pedestrian and schizophrenic The Great Arizona Orphan Abduction (yep, there was a moment there in 1999 when history was just that goddamn precious). But this review has big problems, the least of which is that you can't tell what I'm talking about if you haven't read the book. Guess that was before I learned what an "audience" is. The upshot is, if you want to know what's going on, you'll have to read this book (get it from the liberry, not Borders. It ain't worth a dollar.), which is probably how all reviews should be written.

If you want more on the truly unique Clifton-Morenci relationship, there are two pieces of modern history that put the spotlight on this company town vs. worker-village death struggle: Copper Crucible, an account of the 1983 strike that broke the miners' union and showed the future of labor relations under Clinton, who hired Bruce Babbitt, the Governor of Arizona at the time, to be Secretary of the Interior. You might also see Barbara Kingsolver's (I know, I hate her too.) Holding the Line, which looks at the same strike through the eyes of the women involved. Either would be a better read and a better insight into Clifton-Morenci than Linda Gordon's bleeding uterus screed.

REVIEW:

Linda Gordon, The Great Arizona Orphan Abduction (1999)
"Linda Gordon, a noted women’s historian, tackles a rather odd project in The Great Arizona Orphan Abduction. In collecting a large volume of information about the 1904 "kidnapping" of white, Catholic orphans sent from New York City to live with other Catholic (albeit Mexican) families in Arizona mining country, Gordon takes on and attempts to spin out the narrative through the various lenses of race, gender, class, labor, and religious history. Though there is an inherent danger in attempting such a broad project, Gordon is fearless in her execution. That the end product is a bit muddled should not be surprising; and though one may not be able to satisfactorily answer the "so what?" question upon putting the book down, that does not in any way diminish the feat of presentation she achieves.

In a stirring and, in some ways still shockingly relevant opening, Gordon describes the ways in which parenthood in turn-of-the-century America was influenced by class: the more you had, the better. Economic considerations, mostly shaped by the developing rigidity of class lines at the time—which helped drive a significant portion of the population into the underclass—dictated the very conditions of motherhood. The children of the poor, perhaps hustling on the street to raise the family income, could be and were snatched off the street and consigned to orphanages or put up for adoption. The Catholic New York Foundling Hospital was at least sure of where its supply of "orphans" came from: they were dropped off by their parents, who had ostensibly recognized the futility of their own lives and hoped for an improved future for their children. The orphanage workers then placed the children into "good Catholic" homes, getting to which could entail even the seemingly extreme measure of cross-country transportation via railway. These "orphan trains" were a sad symbol of the price of children.

Gordon lightly continues this class thread for the remainder of the book, although, regrettably, it is not her main focus. She shifts gears to include a labor perspective of the mining town(s), Clifton-Morenci, Arizona, to which the New York orphan train was headed. Born out of personal ingenuity and initiative, Clifton-Morenci was by 1904 a booming copper mining community, located at the intersection of three distinct ethnicities: Apache, Mexican, and "Anglo," or "white." Here is where Gordon’s narrative begins to tangle. Throughout her dissection of the corporate dynamics of Clifton-Morenci and her long recounting of the 1903 strike that polarized the town, Gordon can never really separate the race factor from the labor analysis. One begins to wonder, in fact, if the events of the following year (the "abduction" of the white children) really had roots in the strike, or were more closely related to racial attitudes that pre- and postdated it.

But that is not the only problem. Gordon goes on to address notions of gender in the mining community, asserting that it was the white women of the community who objected so strongly to "white" children being placed in "not white" homes that they forced the political machinery of the town to act on their behalf, thus challenging but at the same time reinforcing women’s place in the public and domestic spheres. As the preceding sentence hopefully suggests, there is also a whiteness argument at work here. If I may be permitted to mix and mangle a metaphor: In scattering her interpretation over so many areas of analysis, Gordon has failed to layer her evidence properly into a coherent whole, and instead muddies the whole thing a little more with each new angle. In the final accounting, what is the trumping factor: race, ethnicity, class? It would seem a bit tame to profess that the incident, and hence our understanding of it—even if we buy that history must be seen through a "panoramic" lens—can only be called a confluence of many factors. If there are so many potential answers that none can be picked and explored on its own, then whence any larger (or smaller!) meaning in history?

On a pickier note, there are conceptual problems with Gordon’s account. For one, it seems odd to call 1904 Arizona the "wild west" (x), especially in light of the fact that one of the "stolen" children was sent to a man in Los Angeles. That is no misprint; it appears that Arizona was not even a frontier anymore—as Turner could have told the good people of Clifton-Morenci back in 1893. And yet, it is this "pioneer" mentality that Gordon cites in her rather weak chapter on vigilantism. The notion of whiteness that runs through the story also seems too convenient, and Gordon gets in a little trouble speculating about the role it may have played in the whole affair.
It is this same kind of speculation that rears its ugly, though often unlabeled by the author, head enough to derail the story. Gordon is just too fond of building card houses. With whiteness theory as backup, she feels comfortable telling the reader that the Mexicans wanted white children so they could "lighten up" and improve their status. Which of course leaves some questions: How does one lighten oneself after birth? And, what happened to Catholic duty, so prevalent a theme earlier in the story? And, why would the Mexicans, if they were trying to move up in status, not realize that there was a resistance to this that would come from the white townspeople—the same (acutely self-aware, Gordon’s whiteness evidence claims) townspeople who had just last year prevented Mexicans from getting a pay raise?

On a related note, what are we to make of the assertion that "They (the posse) believed they knew the Mexicans, and conceived of themselves as wanting only the best for the Mexicans, so of course they were sure that they knew what the Mexicans wanted and what was in the Mexicans’ best interests." (156)? Are "we" so sure? Where in the story is the evidence that the whites were much concerned about or even that they infantilized the Mexicans? Maligned them, certainly, even relegated them to lowest-class status, but how did paternalism get mixed in—and what of the paternalism of the Phelps Dodge men who ran the company town of Morenci? Gordon is not making equally insulting speculations about Charles E. Mills, company man and unqualified whitey, and his treatment of his white "children." A final word about evidence and about Mills (and an indication that some of this book is simply an attempt by Gordon to show off how much research she did): Gordon pokes fun at the strikers of 1903 for calling Mills, who had just fled town, a "coward," noting that Mills had served in the Rough Riders and later accepted a commission into WWI. Clearly, he was no coward. Except that it takes no special degree in history to see that being in the army and being the focus of an angry mob are two very different things. When Carnegie had the Pinkertons shoot down the strikers at Homestead while safely ensconced in Scotland, nobody called him merely prudent.

In the final accounting, Linda Gordon has given readers a very readable, highly debatable book, and that is a good thing. There is an interpretation for everyone in here, and enough for others to arouse a little jealousy and hopefully spark a squabble over the boundaries and proprietary rights of scholarship. Gordon is clearly a committed researcher and talented writer, just be careful how momentarily close you allow her to get—that panoramic perspective can become mighty narrow, mighty fast."

Was that penance? Was it sublime? Just crap? All three, in a barf taco is my vote.