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

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 demonic. "They were dirty faces, and wore black shawls over them and they had ragged dresses on," said one woman who led the revolt, when asked what kind of women had received children. Anglo women accused Mexican mothers of sexual immorality and prostitution. Some charged the men were drunks; another claimed "most of the Mexicans are unwashed and infested with vermin."

Gordon deftly demonstrates how racial categories shifted to suit individual and group interests: Orphans who in New York were tarnished by the label "Irish" in Arizona became saintly because they were simply "white."

She follows her drama through Arizona's courts. The trial judge, without testimony from any Mexicans, sanctioned the mob action and awarded the children to the Anglos who stole them. The appellate court affirmed their removal from "degraded half-breed Indians" and approved their placement with "the good women of the place." The U.S. Supreme Court dismissed the case for lack of jurisdiction.

Gordon intersperses this narrative with exhaustive chapters on the role of King Copper and Mexican migration, the abuse of Mexican workers and labor unrest, female authority in home and family, and the development of Western vigilantism, all of which provide an illuminating backdrop to this remarkable tale.

Gordon attempts to connect the Arizona episode with ongoing controversies about the best interests of children. While she raises profound questions, she does not point the way out of a difficult problem.

"The century-old movement against child abuse and neglect has protected many children but also made many poor mothers vulnerable to professional and government decisions--typically without the right of appeal--that their mothering was not adequate," she writes. "Child-saving agencies removed children from parents on the basis of culturally biased standards of child-raising. Even when the agencies committed themselves to not removing children for poverty alone, they could not keep this promise because poverty is never alone; rather, it often comes packaged with depression and anger, poor nutrition and housekeeping, lack of education and medical care, leaving children alone, exposing children to improper influences."

The judges who ruled in the Anglos' favor, continues Gordon, "believed they were upholding the best interests of the children, and they might have pointed out that with Anglo parents the children got better clothes, medical care, education, for example. How would they have confronted, then, the logical conclusion that the poor have weaker claims to their children than the prosperous? Did they believe that equality of opportunity, the premise of the American political system, meant that all children should be raised by those who have the money to provide for them well?"

Gordon's questions go to the heart of a conflict that confounds judges and child welfare workers today. At what point does poverty--when "packaged with" anger and depression, failure to provide adequate nutrition, education, or medical care--become child neglect? Although she comfortably adopts a condemnatory tone, Gordon fails to offer helpful insights into how these enduring questions might be better answered. It is far easier to raise the cultural relativity conundrum than to propose concrete, constructive solutions.

Fortunately, Michael Shapiro has picked up precisely where Gordon trails off. In Solomon's Sword: Two Families and the Children the State Took Away, Shapiro, a journalism professor at Columbia University, tells the story of two families where child neglect ultimately necessitated state action. What form that action should take, and how the amalgam of actors that make up the Child welfare system should handle these emotionally charged situations, is the subject of this illuminating book. Although not as racialized as the Arizona episode, these two modern-day tragedies reveal how similarly rigid beliefs about family, culture, and poverty continue to skew decisions about what is best for children.

Consider the story of the Melton sisters. In February 1994, police stumbled across five women with nineteen children crammed into a two-bedroom apartment on Chicago's West Side. The children were filthy and undressed, sleeping four and five together on two stained, bare mattresses, huddled under dirty clothes and blankets to keep out the cold air that seeped in through a broken window. The apartment's single toilet was clogged with excrement and toilet paper; the bathroom lacked hot water, soap, shampoo, or towels.

"The kitchen sink was piled with dishes caked with spaghetti sauce," Shapiro writes. "The stove was broken and thick with grease. Its door hung open. Cans of lard and some Kool-Aid sat in the pantry. Dripping water stained the bathroom sink black. Cockroaches ran across the floor and in and out of the open boxes of rice and cereal in the pantry. The plaster ceiling was cracked, and the green walls were pocked with holes." The accidental discovery by police ended the children's daily existence in squalor, but it created a troubling dilemma for the state. What to do with the children?

The LaFlammes' story is less gruesome than the Meltons', but equally compelling. It begins with Gina Pellegrino, a high school junior in Milford, Connecticut, who claimed she did not know she was pregnant until she gave birth to a seven-pound baby girl. Nine hours later, Gina Pellegrino disappeared.

At two months, the baby was placed with Cynthia and Jerry LaFlamme, a childless middle class couple that had been waiting to adopt for years. They named the baby Megan Marie. But Pellegrino changed her mind, and four months after giving birth, informed the Department of Social Services that she wanted her baby back. It was the beginning of an agonizing and protracted legal struggle.

For most neglected or abused children, the choices do not inspire hope: Either place them in foster care, where they will likely bounce from one foster home to another for several years, or return them to the parent that has endangered them, with no safety guarantees.

Shapiro presents these options with stark realism. He teases out the details of each of the families' lives, reveals the inadequate efforts of parents and foster parents, and brings in the social workers, lawyers, and judges who seem convinced they can fix the problem. He argues that rigid ideologies led to the wrong outcome for Megan, who was returned to her birth mother, and too drastic an outcome for the Melton children, who were scattered among far-flung relatives, foster parents, and adoptive homes.

What we need, he says, is a more realistic approach. There is no way to "save" a child who has been abused, neglected, or abandoned, he says. The best we can hope to do is to make these children's lives a little bit better.

Decisions about children cannot be made by broad mandates: Each decision requires thorough knowledge of the child and family, individualized and unbiased judgments about each person involved, and a broad range of creative options to choose from.

"The answers for failed children are all about wiggle room," Shapiro writes. "They are answers, not an answer but answers, that begin with the premise of `it depends.' It depends who they are as people and who can best help them grow up without too many lasting hurts and scars. But `it depends' sounds like such a paltry and unsatisfying solution to so sad and sometimes horrific a situation."

He falters when he goes on to propose his own solutions, some of which seem to contradict the argument he has just so convincingly made. But this is a minor problem in an otherwise excellent work. Shapiro cogently demonstrates why child welfare bureaucracies--as inept, inefficient, unwieldy, and overburdened as they may be--should offer multiple, flexible, and innovative options for children and families.

Both books are cautionary tales. They demonstrate the harm caused by unyielding beliefs about children's rightful place.

It is tempting to think that the ongoing tug of war between Miami and Cuba over little Elian Gonzalez is an isolated instance of conviction overtaking compassion. Sadly, these powerful books attest otherwise.

Daphne Eviatar, a graduate student at Columbia Journalism School, is a former staff attorney at Children's Rights, Inc., which represents abused and neglected children in class-action litigation against public child welfare agencies.