The Baby Thief

by Barbara Bisantz Raymond

  The Baby Thief

  The Baby Thief

  The Untold Story of Georgia Tann, the Baby Seller Who Corrupted Adoption

  Barbara Bisantz Raymond

  THE BABY THIEF

  The Untold Story of Georgia Tann, the Baby Seller Who Corrupted Adoption

  Carroll & Graf Publishers

  An Imprint of Avalon Publishing Group, Inc.

  245 West 17th Street, 11th Floor

  New York, NY 10011

  Copyright © 2007 by Barbara Bisantz Raymond

  First Carroll & Graf edition 2007

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in whole or in part without written permission from the publisher, except by reviewers who may quote brief excerpts in connection with a review in a newspaper, magazine, or electronic publication; nor may any part of this book be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or other, without written permission from the publisher.

  ISBN-13: 978-0-78671-944-0

  ISBN-10: 0-7867-1944-3

  eBook ISBN: 9780786733743

  9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Interior design by Sue Canavan

  Printed in the United States of America

  Distributed by Publishers Group West

  It’s hard to understand, without being immersed

  in the poisonous air of then.

  —Doris Lessing, Under My Skin, Vol. 1

  Prologue

  I learned of Georgia Tann in 1990 from Alma Sipple, who’d met her decades earlier. I was interviewing Alma for a magazine piece. She said she could still see Georgia: a stern-looking woman with close cropped gray hair, round, wireless glasses, and an air of utter authority.

  She gained entry to Alma’s apartment in Memphis, Tennessee, by identifying herself as a social worker and orphanage director concerned about Alma’s ten-month-old daughter, who had a cold. After examining Irma, Georgia pronounced her seriously ill.

  When Alma said she had no money for a doctor, Georgia offered to obtain free treatment by passing Irma off as her ward. She warned Alma not to accompany her daughter to the hospital: “If the nurses know you’re her mother they’ll charge you,” she said. Two days later she told Alma that her baby had died.

  Alma didn’t believe her. But neither frantic visits to Georgia’s orphanage, from which she was ejected, nor desperate trips to the police station, where she was ignored, nor haunting of hospitals and graveyards revealed the truth: that Georgia had flown Irma to an adoptive home in Ohio.

  When I interviewed Alma forty-five years later she had finally found her daughter, but while the reunion had been happy their relationship was fragile. Irma was uncomfortable with the television coverage of the reunion that Alma had sought, and educated enough to intimidate a mother who’d only finished sixth grade. “What can I get her for Christmas?” Alma asked me. “I’m afraid to insult her with my taste.”

  A year later Alma had a heart attack and called me from the hospital. She and her daughter were not in touch. “Only someone who’s lost a child this way can know how horrible it is,” Alma said, crying. “There’s a hole in me that will never be filled.”

  I couldn’t forget the woman who had ruined Alma’s life and so many others. Georgia had arranged over five thousand adoptions between 1924 and 1950, many involving children she had kidnapped. She had molested some of the little girls in her care and placed some children with pedophiles.

  Georgia had also caused so many child deaths that by the 1930s the official infant mortality rate in Memphis was the highest in the country. And the actual number of Memphis children who died was even larger than the official count, because Georgia failed to report many deaths. She also neglected to bury all of her dead children in the cemetery used by her adoption agency. “They simply disappeared,” a former Memphian told me.

  Still, most of Georgia’s children survived, and grew up all across the country, many in her favorite markets, Los Angeles and New York. Those adopted by Joan Crawford, June Allyson and Dick Powell, and other celebrities were featured in magazines, and some have had distinguished careers. But most are seemingly ordinary people coping with the extraordinary fact of having been placed with adoptive parents unscreened for anything but wealth.

  Some of these adoptive parents loved their new children and treated them well. But other children were made to serve as domestics and farmhands. Some were starved, beaten with hoes and razor strops, hung from hooks, and raped.

  There seemed no bottom to the pain Georgia had caused, and I flew to Memphis, consumed by questions. And besides the questions about her and the consequences of her actions there was another one: why hadn’t anyone stopped her? She had been expelled from Mississippi before moving to Tennessee. What had made Memphis ripe for her? And what aspects of her era had facilitated her crimes?

  Only after situating Georgia within her context would I discover her other dimension—the one that allowed her to hurt millions more people than those she directly touched. While building her black market business, she had invented modern American adoption.

  It’s hard to overestimate her influence. When she began her work in Tennessee in the 1920s, adoption as we know it did not exist. Eugenicists had made Americans afraid to adopt, and agencies like the Boston Children’s Aid Society were arranging a scant five adoptions a year. In 1928, however, only four years after Georgia’s arrival in Memphis, she arranged 206.

  She did much more than popularize adoption. She commercialized it, charging adoptive parents large fees and marketing children in nationally syndicated newspaper ads.

  Worse, she stole adoptees’ identities. To cover her kidnapping crimes, and to appease clients threatened by the possibility of their new children someday reuniting with their birth parents, she falsified adoptees’ birth certificates, sealing their true documents and issuing them false certificates portraying their adoptive parents as their birth parents.

  The practice was approved by legislators who believed it would spare adoptees the onus of illegitimacy. All fifty states ultimately falsified adoptees’ birth certificates.

  Georgia’s legacy has endured into the twenty-first century, and the vast majority of America’s 6 million adoptees are still legally denied knowledge of their roots, even after they become adults. Many can’t find their birth parents or learn potentially life-saving information about their family health histories.

  But finally, fifty-seven years after Georgia’s death in 1950, adoptees are escaping her influence. In a dramatic legislative and court victory in 1999, people who had been adopted in Tennessee won access to their original birth certificates and adoption records. Since the passage of the Tennessee open adoption records law, adoptees have won similar legal battles in twelve other states. They won’t stop until Georgia’s legacy is eradicated throughout the nation.

  Georgia accomplished all that her victims are fighting to undo through boldness, cunning, and the exploitation of her time and place. I began my research by studying the environment in which she had operated, paying a visit to the site of her orphanage on Poplar Avenue.

  Part One

  Georgia’s World

  1.

  Georgia’s Home

  The Memphis I visited was very different from Georgia’s. Her orphanage or Home, the local branch of the Tennessee Children’s Home Society, was long gone, replaced by a rectangular structure housing the offices of the Baptist Brotherhood. Surrounding it were similarly modern and graceless buildings: a Taco Bell, Radio Shack and Payless Shoe Store, Mega-Mart and King’s Den Hair Salon. There was little evidence of the beautiful shade trees that gave Poplar Avenue its name. But nearby side streets contained lovely old homes wit
h deep lots and gardens so lush they hushed the buzz of traffic. Ivy scaled trees whose trunks were taller than the homes: pin oaks, pecans, sweet gums, snow flowers, yellow pines, dogwoods, sycamores and, arching over all, elms that had escaped the disease that killed most others in the world. The air smelled of honeysuckle and pine.

  This was the world in which Georgia lived. Her brick and stucco residence was on Stonewall Court, two blocks from the Home. It still stands, and when I visited was owned by an attorney and his wife who had been kind to adoptees who’d visited, seeking some link to their past.

  Georgia’s orphanage at 1556 Poplar Avenue had been more imposing: three stories high, with a tile roof, columns, and spacious grounds sloping upward from the street.

  Inside, polished wood floors led to a filing room, a personnel office, a private conference room for adoptive applicants, and Georgia’s office. The floor also shone in the formal reception room, which had two fireplaces and drapes of pale rose and blue. A small table bore a lamp with glass beads whose facets sparkled in the sun slanting through a window flanking a fireplace. Dahlias grew in urns on the wide front porch.

  The rooms upstairs were more plainly appointed, but they were clean and orderly, sterile in appearance if not in fact. Georgia considered appearances important. So her three nurseries were painted pink and equipped with white metal cribs decorated with pictures of teddy bears and sleeping babies. Her aides wore starched white uniforms and crisp nurse’s caps. But, as one of her former employees told me, the women weren’t nurses; the head caretaker tended infants while drunk. And the outfits worn by babies when viewed by prospective adoptive parents were strategically selected. Georgia reserved the most beautiful clothing for “the bad apples,” the plainest children, who were hardest to sell.

  In the backyard of the Home were swings, a sandbox, and a tall, white picket fence. Two of Georgia’s workers lived in an apartment over the garage; a cook and a gardener lived in the basement of the main building. All employees except the gardener and a chauffeur were female; a former resident described the Home as “a kingdom run by women.” Neighbors, whose sleep was disturbed by the cries of babies being smuggled into waiting limousines, called the orphanage a house of mystery.

  Mysterious as the Home seemed to some, however, Memphis insiders had easy access. During Georgia’s Christmas parties, matrons led their children upstairs. “I picked you out in this very room,” they told them. While some of Georgia’s clients abused their adopted children, many loved them, and gratefully donated their own services, polishing silver and hand-stitching tiny nightshirts. When she was angered by proposed adoption reform legislation, they flooded Nashville with polite, stern telegrams.

  It is difficult to admit involvement with a criminal, and few adoptive parents admitted to knowledge of the source of many of Georgia’s children. Many professed unawareness of the desperate, futile habeas corpus suits that were reported in the local press, and of her Home’s expulsion from the Child Welfare League of America.

  But when the Tennessee governor finally acknowledged Georgia’s crimes in 1950, prompting mail from birth parents that was sometimes literally tear-stained, adoptive parents must have searched their souls. They could not, however, bring themselves to investigate whether their children had been stolen, and return them if they had been. Neither could Tennessee politicians. They left her stolen children exactly where they were.

  2.

  Georgia’s Disappearance

  One reason that Georgia’s children remained separated from their birth parents was that returning them would have been an admission of crimes committed not only by her, but by countless prominent Tennesseans. In a successful scheme to ensure her invulnerability she had transformed potential adversaries into accomplices. These included politicians, legislators, judges, attorneys, doctors, nurses, and social workers who scouted child victims, wrongfully terminated birth parents’ rights, and falsely informed mothers that their babies had been stillborn. Deputy sheriffs tore screaming toddlers from their mothers’ arms.

  This collaboration allowed her to operate with impunity for twenty six years. It wasn’t until she was three days from death from cancer that a Tennessee official alluded to her crimes. And this reference was prompted largely by knowledge of the imminent publication of an article written by the first reporter brave enough to call her a baby seller in print.

  At a press conference held before dawn on September 12, 1950, Governor Gordon Browning sidestepped every important issue, speaking not of grieving parents or dead babies, but money. Georgia had, he said, illegally made $1 million while employed by the Tennessee Children’s Home Society, which received funding from the state. She had not shared her profit with the agency. “I have asked the welfare department to proceed with whatever course it can take to recover this money for the Tennessee Children’s Home Society,” Browning said.

  Browning had actually planned to shut down Georgia’s business— but apparently only after death had rendered her unable to name her politically important colleagues. One week earlier he had appointed a young attorney named Robert Taylor as investigator. But it was a token position; Browning refused to allow the idealistic Taylor to question Georgia or her helpers. Taylor was also prevented from viewing the court records of a judge who had procured children for Georgia.

  Even worse, Georgia’s business and private papers, which Taylor had also been prohibited from viewing, were stolen by her attorney. Taylor protested the theft, but officials allowed the lawyer to keep them for two months, and, of course, to destroy whatever he wished.

  In 1951 the frustrated Taylor proposed a bill that would have given him control over the investigation. Georgia’s helpers caused it to die in committee. A proposed federal investigation of the Home was quashed.

  The sole result of the state’s only lawsuit against Georgia’s Home was the “recovery” of money she should never have made.

  Georgia Tann had won. And Tennesseans had helped her. The facts are depressing, and shortly after beginning my research I became depressed too. It was a hot day, one I’d spent reviewing records regarding the state’s case against Georgia’s estate, reading nothing of importance. Then, from a faded sheet retrieved from a courthouse basement, I gleaned the names of eighteen of Georgia’s last twenty-two wards, and their ages at her death.

  Fourteen were babies, from four days to six months of age. There was also an eight-year-old boy named Jimmy Nickens, as well as the three Irwin sisters: nine-year-old Patricia, eleven-year-old Wanda, and thirteen-year-old Geneva.

  These children must have been strong, for Georgia had been neglectful and abusive, keeping the babies lying almost unattended in the Home’s suffocating heat, and drugging them with alcohol and sedatives to keep them quiet. One tiny, premature infant had gone untreated for a heart defect.

  Her older children, who lived in boarding homes, had fared no better. Georgia had refused to allow the three Irwin sisters, whose mother had died of tuberculosis, to be tested for the disease. They and Georgia’s other school-age wards were virtual prisoners, kept indoors, denied schooling, and, in many cases, hidden from their frantic parents.

  The closing of Georgia’s Home on December 15, 1950, gave these and other parents their first hope of a hearing, and they demanded their children’s return. They received nothing, not even confirmation that their children remained alive. Only two of Georgia’s last wards, who had been rejected by their adoptive families, were returned to their birth parents.

  And few but the parents themselves protested this treatment. Local news articles focused upon the logistics of Georgia’s amassing of $1 million. The national press scarcely covered the story. And I found no article, published anywhere, that suggested that Georgia’s stolen children should be returned. The general consensus seems to have been that they were lucky to have been delivered into wealth, and that they were emotionally attached to their new parents. But at the time of Georgia’s unmasking, some children had been in their adoptive homes
for less than a week. And her last wards hadn’t even been adopted.

  With no help from the local or greater environment, parents wishing to recover their children needed considerable cunning, or luck. Twenty three year old Josie Stateler distracted an aide at the Home on Poplar Avenue, stole back her fourteen-month-old daughter, and moved to Massachusetts. And the father of eight-year-old Jimmy Nickens, who was languishing in a Memphis boarding home after having been rejected by his California adoptive parents, sent several desperate letters to Robert Taylor. Taylor helped ensure Jimmy’s return to his family. But other parents, even those who went to court to recover their children, never got them back.

  Custody of Georgia’s last wards was consigned to the Tennessee Department of Public Welfare, which evinced little enthusiasm for the assignment. “The children will be studied, and those found acceptable will be placed for adoption,” said Vallie Miller, supervisor of adoptions. “We will not accept responsibility for the others.”

  But state workers disposed of every child. They hospitalized the infant with the defective heart, and placed several other children they deemed similarly unadoptable in state or private institutions. An “imbecilic” adolescent girl was sent to a state asylum. A one-year-old with cerebral palsy who had been rejected by her adoptive parents was also slated for institutionalization. Vallie Miller placed her instead in foster care. But a report written by Miller also indicated the difficulty faced by children who were both homeless and considered imperfect, providing a glimpse of the atmosphere Georgia had exploited to such vicious effect.

  Miller referred to two other infants who if not “over-placed” might be adoptable, “although earlier one child appeared to be subnormal, and the other has required special observation because of a history of epilepsy in his maternal background. . . .”