Solomon's Sword: Two Families and the Children the State Took Away.

• Author: Eviatar, Daphne

Solomon's Sword: Two Families and the Children the State Took Away By Michael Shapiro Times Books. 320 pages. $25.00.

The outcry over the fate of six-year-old Elian Gonzalez, the Cuban boy rescued from the waters off the coast of Florida last November, reminds us how quickly ideology can engulf reason in decisions about the best interests of children. The hundreds of anti-Castro demonstrators that have clamored to keep the boy in Miami to "save" him from a life with his father and grandparents in Cuba are reminders of earlier attempts to "save" children from homes considered abusive on the basis of bigotry.

In The Great Arizona Orphan Abduction, Linda Gordon, a history professor at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, provides a nuanced account of one such drama.

On October 1, 1904, three nuns, four nurses, and forty Irish orphans from New York City arrived in a remote Arizona mining town. The children were carted to this dusty industrial camp for placement in respectable Catholic homes, previously identified by the local priest. It just so happened that these were the homes of Mexicans.

Clifton-Morenci, Arizona, was the site of a massive copper mining operation and a magnet for Mexican immigrants. While local Anglos were largely Protestant, the Mexicans were mostly Catholic, meeting the primary requirement of the New York Foundling Hospital, the Catholic-run agency that brought orphans and abandoned children west on "orphan trains."

That October evening, the orphans were brought to the Clifton church, where sixteen children were distributed to foster mothers. A similar process took place the next morning in neighboring Morenci.

Whether the nuns were concerned that the women receiving the children were Mexican is not clear, but the Anglo Arizona women were incensed. They believed that the placement of so many fair, blond, primly dressed children with "dark" Mexicans was tantamount to child abuse.

Goaded by their wives and an angry crowd of hundreds threatening a lynching, a group of armed men terrorized the local priest and visiting nuns into retrieving the children from the Mexican homes in Morenci. A similar mob gathered in neighboring Clifton--armed with buckets of tar and feathers, rope and gasoline--and incited a posse to kidnap the orphans who had been placed with Mexican families there.

"Race was inextricable from the Anglo women's convictions about what was good for children," writes Gordon. They characterized the Mexicans as...