The woman who believed the end justified any means may have considered the means warranted even when they killed a child. She seemed undisturbed by the deaths of scores of children in her care. A child who died as a result of her social engineering would, at least, not have to grow up poor. And there were always more children to rescue.
Of course, Georgia’s career provided her with benefits other than the satisfaction of making poor children middle class. She became wealthy, and influential, because of her own accomplishments and reflected glory. “She liked being on a first-name basis with the prominent people who adopted her children—movie stars, directors, politicians,” former investigator Robert Taylor told me. She wasn’t above exaggerating her connections to prominent people, Taylor added. Near the end of her life she hung autographed photographs of clients Joan Crawford and June Allyson in her hospital room. The autographs were forged—signed, at Georgia’s direction, by her employees. She also instructed her workers to send her get-well cards, and to sign the actresses’ and President Truman’s names to the cards.
And around 1906, fifteen-year-old Georgia Tann may have had an intimation of the rewards she’d reap from her future profession when she accomplished what her father had considered impossible: the adoptive placement of the young brother and sister she’d found in his courtroom. Eight years later, having graduated from college, rejected teaching, and having been forbidden to practice law, Georgia chose social work as her profession.
It was a profession that offered opportunity. The photographs of New York City street children taken by Jacob Riis had led to an outpouring of private, volunteer activities, which resulted in the establishment of Humane Societies, Juvenile Courts, and institutions for orphans. Over 460 orphanages were established in the United States between 1890 and 1910. When Georgia graduated from college in 1913, Mississippi had three professional, religiously affiliated orphanages. An orphanage operated by the Fraternal Order of Masons was located in Meridian; Georgia had volunteered her services there during summer vacations. In 1912 the first state orphanage, the Mississippi Children’s Home-Finding Society, was also established in Meridian. Georgia obtained employment with this organization, and after its headquarters was relocated to Jackson in 1916 took a position there as field agent.
One of her duties was the placement of orphans in foster homes. Adoption was so uncommon then that even the most altruistic social workers believed the only way to spare homeless children incarceration in spartan institutions was to place them in “work” homes in which they earned their keep by performing menial chores.
Georgia would prove far more resourceful than other social workers in arranging adoptions. She also reaped very different benefits from social work.
Ethical workers found satisfaction in helping others. Georgia considered social work a vehicle through which to achieve power, adulation, wealth, and prestige—goals that would seem unattainable to even the most ambitious social workers today, who would be constrained by agency policy. But the field’s lack of regulation in the early twentieth century left children vulnerable, particularly in Mississippi.
Children adopted elsewhere were generally their adoptive parents’ heirs. Mississippi residents, however, were allowed to adopt with the condition that the children wouldn’t inherit from them, a condition deplored by the state’s ethical social workers, who realized these children would be treated as servants. Georgia’s supervisors at the Mississippi Children’s Home-Finding Society had begun providing financial aid to the relatives of orphans, so that children could remain with their families of birth.
Georgia, who lacked her colleagues’ scruples, considered adoptive placement a business. In another departure from previous adoption practices, she considered her clients to be the prospective adoptive parents who would make her wealthy, rather than the babies she placed. She was equally unconcerned with the rights of birth parents. In 1992 I spoke with a woman whose grandmother, Rose Harvey, may have been one of the first mothers Georgia harmed.
Rose encountered Georgia in 1922—approximately sixteen years after Georgia’s first adoptive placement. By then she had apparently stepped over the line; she wasn’t simply finding adoptive homes for orphans, but for children she’d kidnapped. One spring morning she drove her Model T to a cabin in Jasper County, near her Hickory hometown. Asleep inside was Rose Harvey, who was young, poor, widowed, and pregnant, and suffering from diabetes. Her two-year-old son Onyx played on the back porch. Georgia lured the sturdy black-haired, brown eyed boy into her car.
Georgia’s father, George C. Tann, signed papers declaring Rose Harvey an unfit mother and young Onyx an abandoned child. Onyx was placed with an adoptive family headed by a man named Rufus Rasberry. Shortly afterward Onyx’s three-year-old brother was also taken from his mother and placed with Rufus’s brother, Clyde.
Heart-stricken and incensed, Rose sued to regain her children, unsuccessfully; George may have intervened. But Georgia’s child-placing practices may have angered some local residents. She was run out of town shortly after placing Rose’s little boys for adoption—I have been unable to learn if this case or some other, unknown one was the cause. Her father had friends in Memphis. After working briefly for a Texas orphanage, she got a job with the Memphis branch of the Tennessee Children’s Home Society, and moved there in July of 1924.
7.
Georgia’s Memphis
The city to which Georgia moved perfectly matched her needs. She wasn’t subtle. Blunt, assured of her right to do anything she wished, she made little effort to hide her crimes. Citizens of the Memphis that existed before the yellow fever plague of 1878 would have run her out of town. But by 1924 Edward Hull Crump had rendered Mem phians spineless, afraid to criticize him and his friends.
Crump began this change shortly after his successful mayoral campaign in 1909, during which he promised to purge Memphis of prostitutes and gangsters. He didn’t rid the city of them, however; he managed them, charging them $50 weekly fines and allowing them to stay in business. Crump knew that attaining his goal of ruling Memphis would require citizen support. He courted everyone, providing black residents with parks and athletic fields, poor white citizens with free milk, and young professionals with political positions.
But he did more than appeal to every person; he indulged every part of every person, who had impulses both noble and base. The base, he believed, were stronger, although few citizens would admit it. He didn’t pierce their denial. By fining the owners of gambling parlors and bordellos he feigned giving conservative Memphians what they claimed they wanted—control over crime—while allowing them to indulge in whatever vice they wished.
Memphians understood that they were no longer supposed to perceive their entire city, the good and the bad, but only what Crump wanted them to see. The broken campaign promise they first ignored must have seemed unimportant. The fact that Crump was making money from crime was harder to rationalize.
Not—and Memphians I spoke with insisted that this made it bearable—that he took the money home. His cut of vice profits—money extorted from Dutch Mary, the madam; Joe Bernadino of the Bernadino Syndicate; and Jim Mulcahy, owner of the Memphis Cotton Club, money collected into little black bags on Wednesday afternoons by city workers whose efforts were coordinated by Crump lieutenant Frank “Roxie” Rice, whose tobacco juice perpetually ran down his shirt—provided a governmental slush fund. The fund, which financed elections and city improvements, was augmented by contributions from city workers.
Workers had to contribute, or lose their jobs. And beating Crump at the polls would have been difficult. He banned voting machines, requiring that Memphians hand their ballots to people loyal to him. Within hours he knew how every citizen had voted. And any city worker who had voted wrong was soon unemployed.
Memphians told themselves not to mind. Memphis was improved. Crump paved the city’s streets, and reduced taxes to the lowest rate in history.
And while previous mayors had ignored details of
city government, Crump toured Memphis by day and even by night, noting every broken lamppost and quickly having it repaired. He made Memphis pretty, organizing society women into highly competitive beautification committees.
For the first time since the plague, citizens traveling outside the city could identify themselves as Memphians without embarrassment.
And those who cooperated with Crump found their lives so easy. When a young attorney named Gerald Stratton asked for his support in the 1930s, Crump smiled and said, “I’ll catapult you into public office.” Instantly Stratton became a state legislator. Two years later he was state senator, and two years after that he was elected to the lucrative post of county court clerk.
Then Gerald asserted himself in 1942. After increasingly frustrating years of obeisance, he criticized Crump’s support of the poll tax. Stunned and furious, Crump demanded he resign from office. Gerald refused, and was harassed by threatening phone calls and police surveillance. Most upsetting to him and his wife, Roswell, however, was the shunning.
No one spoke to Gerald at work or on the street. Roswell was blackballed from the Junior League; the local chapter of the Red Cross wouldn’t let her donate blood. They were treated like lepers. Then one Sunday morning a man in a black sedan tried, or pretended to try—in Memphis it was hard to know the difference—to run them over. At forty two years of age, Gerald suffered a heart attack.
He and Roswell left Memphis, spending the next twenty-six years in Boston, Massachusetts. Then they moved back to Tennessee, settling in Nashville, where I visited Roz in 1992. She told me she was proud of her late husband for speaking his conscience. She said he was one of very few Memphians to do it. “Of course we did end up poor—Gerald left behind his law practice. But he took courses at Harvard and practiced law in Massachusetts; I got a job in a hotel. We opened up and got in touch with the whole bigger world.”
The Crump Machine that hurt the Strattons would greatly aid Georgia Tann. The Machine’s base was the city’s municipal workers, who during political campaigns were required to march in parades, attend nightly rallies, and canvass neighborhoods. To them were added young attorneys who rode crowded streetcars, making impassioned speeches for Crump.
Above the base was the Machine’s middle tier, made up of henchmen like bagman Frank “Roxie” Rice. For thirty years, he served as campaign manager, slush fund coordinator, and director of the Memphis bloc of state delegates, who served at Crump’s whim and voted however he wished.
Victims spoken of in whispers, like the union organizer whose body was said to have been found facedown in the Mississippi, and the criminals who were escorted to the state line for beatings and never seen again in Tennessee or any other state, were believed to have been dealt with by the brawny Roxie. His office in a remote courthouse corridor was inaccessible to anyone outside Crump’s inner circle. He was said to live on cigarettes, whiskey, and Coke.
When Georgia met Crump in 1924, he was fifty and seemed the most assured man on the planet. He had easily survived the only threat to his leadership: legislation passed by conservative citizens in 1916 that ousted him from the office of mayor. He resigned instead, named his successor, and had himself elected county trustee, a lucrative post. Then he tightened his grip on the city. From his post as trustee, and later his private business office, Crump pulled the strings that animated the politicians who pretended to govern. No one was nominated for any office without his approval. No one with his approval lost a city election or, eventually, a statewide contest: by 1940 he would mastermind 102 political contests without defeat.
In 1922 he tested his power, not declaring for a mayoral candidate until the night before the election. Then he whispered five words: “Rowlett Paine is our man.” Phones jangled; Crump’s Boys told the bootleggers, the bootleggers told the waitresses, the waitresses told the customers, and when the votes were counted Crump’s power was confirmed.
With elections this farcical his Boys scarcely needed to campaign. But Crump’s hold over Memphis was more psychological than physical, and he understood the importance of letting citizens pretend they had a choice. So even during the many years when his candidates ran unopposed Crump acted as if they might lose, raising money, printing posters, burning bonfires at midnight rallies.
Crump also capitalized on Tennessee’s poll tax—a tax on voting which was intended to disenfranchise the state’s many black citizens. He paid their poll taxes and bussed them to the polls, where they voted for his candidates. White Memphians pretended not to notice. Obliviousness seemed particularly essential after the gubernatorial election of 1928.
Crump longed to determine the outcome. In an unsuccessful effort—his last such until 1948, when his statewide hold was broken— he voted more black citizens than ever before. Local reporters attempting to photograph this were beaten by the police, then jailed for “threatened breach of the peace”—an offense (or the potential of one) for which they could not post bail.
Memphians allowed themselves to notice enough of this to note that they should never notice anything again. Decades before 1984 was a flicker in Orwell’s brain, Memphians learned to see without seeing, to act as if they were asleep even when they were awake. Scarred by their beatings and time in jail, some reporters left the city—Turner Catledge went to Manhattan, where he became managing editor of the New York Times. Of those who remained in Memphis, however, many slept, too.
So did the judicial system. Members of the Memphis Bar Association had averted their eyes since 1915, after observing Crump fire a sheriff who refused to tamper with a jury. Rather than risk political suicide, they backed any candidate he picked. Everyone knew whom to support, a Memphis judge recalled decades later. “It always was a Crump man.” Except when it was a woman.
8.
The Little Wanderers
Boss Crump was so helpful to Georgia that I initially considered her manipulation of him to have been her greatest coup. Instead I discovered her primary achievement to have been something I hadn’t considered necessary: the creation of an adoptive market. When Georgia began her child-placing career, almost no one adopted children.
I was more surprised by this fact than I should have been: I’d written several articles about adoption. My pieces, however, had concerned the institution as it existed in the 1990s, when the demand for healthy white American infants exceeded the supply. I had assumed that the number of adoptions in the first third of the twentieth century had been proportionately consistent with the number arranged during the final third, when the U.S. population included 6 million adoptees.
I had been naive or, if I’d had an intimation of the truth, afraid to face it. My analysis of Georgia’s physical setting had been performed at little emotional cost. Placing her within the context of the history of the care of homeless children would, I feared, be more difficult. It would in fact bring me uncomfortably close to Georgia, and cause me to question how heinous she was. Sitting in the Cleveland Public Library one dark February day, I read facts so appalling they made her crimes seem almost benign.
It was an unwelcome thought, not only because I was more comfortable considering the outcome of her actions to have been absolutely pernicious, but because of what it implied about the suffering endured through the years by the most vulnerable among us. Over the next week I realized that more than defensiveness had impelled an elderly Hickory woman to say, “We thought Georgia was doing a wonderful thing” for the children. I recalled a Memphian’s boast that she hadn’t given her children to garbage men. Poised at a road I didn’t want to travel, I nervously considered to whom she had, directly or indirectly, provided babies.
The lives of unwanted children, always bleak, were revealed to have evolved from an even more lamentable state as I researched further back in history, to a point when babies were routinely murdered at birth by their parents. Infanticide was practiced and condoned in ancient Greece, endorsed by Aristotle and Plato.
Some sickly, disabled, or female infants were
suffocated, drowned, or dashed against rocks. More often unwanted children were “exposed,” abandoned in marketplaces or on hillsides. Most died of starvation; others were forced into slavery or maimed for exhibition.
Infanticide gradually became less acceptable: by the Middle Ages Europeans who killed their children were subject to death by decapitation, impalement, or torture with glowing tongs. Some infanticidal women were burned as witches; others were enclosed in sacks full of vipers and drowned in “sacking ponds,” like the Säcklache in Zittau, Germany.
But poverty was so pervasive and contraceptive methods so ineffective that the killing of children continued. According to Rachel Zinober Forman, author of Let Us Now Praise Obscure Women, a study of single mothers in the United States and Britain, infanticide was the most common crime in Western Europe between the Middle Ages and the eighteenth century.
Along with this practice, however, evolved more compassionate means of treating orphaned or unwanted children. An orphan asylum was built in what is now Trier, Germany, in the sixth century. The first orphanage in our country was established by Ursuline nuns in 1727.
But such institutions were rare. People were reluctant to support homeless children financially, and in Europe and the United States even young single parents were legally obligated to raise their babies. Bastardy Acts, including legislation passed in 1741 in North Carolina, which included what became the state of Tennessee, authorized imprisonment for any parent failing to support a child born outside marriage. Several states passed laws forbidding separation of infants younger than six months from their mothers. Matrons of maternity homes forced residents to breastfeed their babies, so the mothers would bond with them and keep them.
The Baby Thief Page 6