The Great Arizona Orphan Abduction is a bizarre, turn-of-the-century kidnapping story.
In a mining town on the Mexico-Arizona border in 1904 an angry mob of housewives and a few of their husbands threatened to tar and feather three nuns and a priest who brought 40 Irish Catholic orphans to meet their new adoptive parents. The parents were upstanding, solid, middle class citizens; they were also Mexican immigrants.
The townspeople couldn’t abide so many blonde, white children being handed over to dark-skinned Mexicans. At gunpoint the mob took the children and re-distributed them among the Anglo townswomen.
The kidnapping was upheld by the US Supreme Court which concluded Mexicans should not have “the custody, care and education” of white children.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)
Guests:
Linda Gordon