The Baby Thief

by Barbara Bisantz Raymond

  Surprisingly often, the husbands were duped. But in 1926 Mrs. Nat Bass of Brooklyn, New York, felt compelled to confess her deception to her husband, and the district attorney, when the baby farmer from whom she had purchased an infant was investigated for fatally starving and beating twenty-two children. Fearful the farmer would reveal her name, Mrs. Bass admitted to faking both a pregnancy and a minor traffic accident, which, she had claimed, necessitated she be treated at the baby farmer’s “clinic.” When her husband arrived, she lay in bed with a newborn baby boy.

  Mrs. Bass’s belief that her husband would accept only a birth child, not an adopted baby, seems to have been accurate, for although authorities were willing to allow her to keep eight-month-old Nat Jr., her husband rejected him. “I don’t want the child,” he said. “I won’t keep it in my home. I did love it, because I believed it to be my own son. . . . You’ll have to take the child away.”

  The baby became a public charge, which meant he could be sent to Randalls Island. “The poor little thing,” understated the prosecutor, “got a very bad break in life.”

  Reading this, I could almost literally see the split, see the thousands of children languishing in orphanages and on baby farms; the thousands of infertile adults who desperately wanted a child, but, because of a belief in eugenics, were afraid to adopt one. Between them was the void I had sensed when reading the books on adoptive history, which noted that the number of adoptions had increased threefold between 1934 and 1944, but never mentioned why this had happened or that, in one Southern city, the number of adoptive placements had spiked decades before that. As I researched the history of the care of homeless children, the void had grown progressively less empty. In it, summoned as if by some perverse part of my subconscious, was the woman forced to seek the prestige, money, and power she would never achieve in law in the unlikely venue of social work, led by a sense of opportunism and specific psychological urges to the subcategory of adoption.

  She developed both her business and the institution of adoption by doing something unprecedented: making homeless children acceptable, even irresistible, to childless couples. She accomplished this by insisting, when most child placement workers apologized for the unworthiness of adoptable babies, that they were neither children of sin nor genetically flawed. They are, she said repeatedly, blank slates. They are born untainted, and if you adopt them at an early age and surround them with beauty and culture, they will become anything you wish them to be.

  Georgia didn’t actually believe the children were blank slates, but she made her sales pitch with conviction, evincing the bravado that would later allow her to decry black market adoptions while arranging them herself.

  But she didn’t rely on her ability to persuade. Even as she proclaimed, “Rearing and environment mean much more than inheritance,” she falsified children’s records, transforming them from the offspring of parents she considered poor white trash to the children of debutantes and medical students. She portrayed her children as more genetically perfect beings than most adoptive parents could have borne themselves. And Georgia virtually guaranteed the success of her placements. “One hundred of our children turn out, on average, much better than 100 children [raised in their families of birth],” she said. “The reason is that ours is a selective process. We select the child, and we select the home.”

  People other than Georgia learned how to exploit the previously underground market for adoptable children, and baby farmers began selling children for as much as $100.

  Nationally, adoption remained rare in the 1920s. The Orphan Trains traveled west until the early 1930s. But by 1935 Georgia had waiting lists with the names of couples from across the United States, Canada, and South America.

  I sat hunched in the library reading room recoiling from my discovery that Georgia Tann had invented modern American adoption. I was almost afraid to learn what her proximity to the institution said about it, or her.

  Adoption, a respected institution that has brought millions of people joy, reflected more flatteringly than I wanted it to on Georgia, softening her edges, making haze of her essence. I was accustomed to thinking of her solely as having hurt children, demeaned them, sold, even killed them. I was accustomed to focusing on those she stole, who lost parents, siblings, histories; whose mothers lost not only babies but their babies’ babies—grandchildren—and on and on: unimaginable, immeasurable, unquantifiable griefs. But an unknowable percentage of the more than five thousand children Georgia sold had in fact lost their parents to death, relinquishment, or abandonment, and, without her intervention, might well have died on baby farms.

  This, for so many Memphians and, that February day, even for me, was the sticking point: she did help some children. She helped them, admittedly, for ignoble motives. And even when she helped them she did it accidentally, since by requiring only that adoptive parents pay her fee and failing to investigate their characters, she never knew whether she was putting babies into cold or abusive situations.

  Some of her children, however, ended up with wonderful adoptive parents. Did the fact that she occasionally, uncaringly, inadvertently, helped children exonerate her, even in part? I knew it didn’t, but that day I felt it did. I felt a chink in my defenses through which Georgia could wound me.

  I was vulnerable, too, on the other side of the Georgia Tann:adoption equation. This side, I sensed, was even more tainted by proximity to her than she was shown to advantage by it. The reason was more than intellectual aversion to seeing a respected institution sullied. I am a person who often feels guilty for things not remotely my fault. Conversely, I sometimes feel more than accountably grateful to people like Thomas Edison for inventing the lightbulb. I am a person who would feel that adoptive parents are indebted to the person who popularized the institution from which they have profited. And I didn’t want to owe Georgia Tann anything—least of all, my adopted child.

  I have two children: Beth, who when I sat in the Cleveland library that day was sixteen, and Tim, who was fifteen. They are wonderful, loving children, the kind of people who, if I met them as strangers, I would want as friends.

  When they were very young, I had tried to forget which was the adopted one. I did this not for a noble motive, but out of cowardice. Being a mother is hard, I knew from having watched my own, and being a child more difficult than many adults like to recall. And I sensed that the fact of adoption might make parenting more complicated, and growing up more difficult for the adopted child.

  I didn’t want to worry about this so I shoved it under, nervously, and between the nervousness and the burying I hurt Beth.

  How easily, I see in retrospect, I justified ignoring her adoptive status. “I don’t want to raise an ‘adopted child,’ just a child,” I thought blithely when she was an infant.

  Pretending that the fact of her adoption had no effect on Beth or me predisposed me to believe it had no relevance to my work, even as I wrote the Good Housekeeping article and began researching my book. My interest in the subject of Georgia Tann was professional only, I had assured myself, even as part of me realized that my reaction to her was informed by my status as an adoptive parent.

  Regarding my research, I had attempted an impossible balance, getting close enough to relate the story with some empathy while staying far enough away to avoid intersection with it, and especially its protagonist— a futile gesture, as she could have told me.

  Now my personal life and research had collided, forcing me to accept who I was. Throughout my research, I had identified with Georgia’s victimized birth parents rather than with her wealthy clients. But I too was an adoptive parent, profiting from the institution she popularized, profiting from another woman’s misery—the loss of her child.

  It was frightening to be so unmasked. And I had more than my own feelings to worry about. Having acknowledged Georgia’s connection to my family, I understood I would have to mention it in my book. How would that affect Beth? I pictured her: smart, strong, popular, but with th
e vulnerability that even the most self-confident adoptees possess. Beth considered adoption a private matter, too private, I’d always felt, though I realized that believing she might become more comfortable with her adoptive status by talking about it for my book might be the ultimate justification.

  I didn’t know how to broach the possibility with her.

  Feeling trapped inside my head, I shifted my gaze from the knothole on the table before me to the tables beyond mine, and further to the decorative scrollwork and chandeliers I loved. I took ten minutes to get a drink of water, relishing every second spent, every step taken down curving stone stairways hollowed by other people’s footsteps. Sitting back down, I retreated gratefully into research, deciding to begin exploring Georgia’s effect on adoption by considering the validity of her sales pitch: adoptable children are blank slates.

  Several adoptees had told me how this statement had hurt them. It wasn’t simply that they, like all children, entered the world with genes preordaining them to certain intelligences, personalities, appearances, and talents, but that many, adopted past infancy and occasionally at ages as advanced as sixteen, arrived in their new homes after having been immersed in a specific culture and, more significantly, traumatized by separation from their birth families.

  Not even the youngest of them was “blank.” Georgia, however, sent six- and seven-year-olds with no musical ability to couples who, because of her falsification of their records, expected them to become concert pianists. She sent children of limited intelligence to college professors intent upon sending them to Yale.

  “Can you imagine those children trying to adjust to homes like that?” Denny Glad had asked me. “Can you imagine the frustration of those adoptive parents?”

  Of course I couldn’t, any more than I could ever know exactly how many children had been rejected and returned to Georgia, or had been placed in detention homes, or had run away.

  I had talked to adoptees dealt these fates. And I’d read an article in the February 1933 issue of American Mercury magazine in which one wrote eloquently of her frustration. “The danger that threatens an adopted child is not his uncertain heredity, his obscure background, or doubtful legitimacy, but the fact that his adoptive parents take him ready-made and then expect him to grow and evolve according to specifications which they set down as definitely as they select his sex or the color of his hair. When in any way he disappoints them, the trouble begins.”

  I wondered if Georgia’s blank slate assertion still hurt adopted children. While it seemed unlikely that contemporary adoptive parents would believe her claim, most people hope their children will share their interests. It’s unfair to expect this of either adopted or biologically related children. But those raised by parents whose genes they share are more likely to resemble them in interests and talents. Adopted children have, of course, no genetic coding from their adoptive parents. I recall the surprise with which I watched Beth develop, and am grateful she was so determined to do it her own way. But if she’d been less assertive, would I have tried harder to mold her?

  “When I adopted my own two children, the agency worker told me my nurturing would affect them nine times more than their heredity,” a child psychiatrist I spoke with for this project told me. Knowledgeable as she was herself, she tried to believe the worker, until her children taught her the truth.

  It was her clients that Georgia sought to serve; it is (and this is a half-step forward) the needs of children and adoptive parents that adoption workers consider today. Birth parents remain the most neglected members of the adoption triad; perhaps I shouldn’t be surprised that it took me until the following day, Friday, of that February week to begin realizing how much Georgia had hurt them.

  Their babies were, she said, born innocent—blank slates. By virtue of either their single or poor status, their parents, however, were tainted. According to Georgia and the theories of reformers, children raised by these tainted parents would quickly be tainted too. Single mothers, who before their children became marketable would have been forced to raise them, were suddenly considered incompetent to keep them. This message was clearly conveyed by Georgia and her lawyer, Abe Waldauer. Writing to Georgia in 1937 about a mother who had sued to regain the baby Georgia had stolen, he boasted that his cross-examination had reduced the young woman to mincemeat. Her “own counsel has indicated,” he wrote, “that I have convinced her of her own unworthiness.”

  The predictable corollary to this was that white, wealthy, infertile, married couples felt entitled to the children others bore out of wedlock. It was as if single mothers bore children solely to fill childless couples’ needs.

  Illegitimacy, which had formerly been considered a nuisance, began to seem a societal blessing—when the children so born were white. Not until decades after Georgia’s death would large numbers of white couples seek to adopt children of other races. But, aided by promotional techniques, the most effective of which exploited the children’s appearance, Georgia’s version of adoption—the placement of white children with white parents—grew popular.

  Throughout the 1930s and ’40s, as Georgia’s influence extended outside Tennessee, the separation of babies from white, single mothers quickly became institutionalized. There were seventeen hundred separations of babies from young single women in Minnesota in 1949; in 1925, when these babies had widely been seen as undesirable, there had been only two hundred. And while the later partings were, outside Memphis, usually accomplished by methods less coercive than stealing, single mothers faced extreme pressure. One, whose social worker refused her any choice, communicated her frustrations in a letter to President Truman in August of 1950.

  “With tears in my eyes and sorrow in my heart I am trying to defend the rights and privileges which every citizen in the United States is supposed to enjoy under our Constitution. . . . [J]ust because I had a baby under such circumstances, the welfare agency has no right to condemn me and demand my child be placed.”

  Exactly ten years and three months earlier, a young single mother had poured out her own anguish regarding the seizure of her child by Georgia Tann. A letter written by Mary Owens to a social worker she futilely hoped would help her recover her child reads, “Please help me to git my baby back. I am so heart broken about the way it has bin taken frome me until I am about to have a nervous break down. . . . After all it is our own darling baby and I would gladly lay down my life just to see her one time. . . . Miss Tann said she would all ways let me hear about her but it is just like asking about the dead. . . . Please help us as it is even hard to try to live. . . .”

  Her babies died like flies.

  —Investigator Robert Taylor

  Part Two

  Georgia’s Crimes

  9.

  Georgia’s Methods

  Once I acknowledged my family’s connection to Georgia and adoption, I found Mary Owens’s letter almost too painful and personally resonant to read. Beth’s birth mother had certainly felt sadness like Mary’s. Mary’s daughter must have cried, as Beth did, for the mother she had lost.

  My husband Bob and I had seen Beth’s mother in her hospital room two days after she had given birth. It was an unusual meeting for the time, required by the judge who was to give Beth’s adoption legal standing.

  I would later be grateful for the meeting, but I approached it with fear. My lawyer had called it “the confrontation,” and if Beth hadn’t been in the intensive care nursery it would have involved her, Bob, me, Beth’s mother, and Beth’s grandmother, who would have transferred Beth from her mother’s arms to mine.

  But the meeting was less emotional than I had anticipated, for only the adults were present. And though, as our attorneys had cautioned, no names were exchanged and scarcely a word was spoken, I was later able to open the door a little, to say, “Your mother wore jeans and a white shirt. She was pretty; she seemed nice.” I was so nervous I blanked out her face, but her hair was brown and her eyes were blue-green.

  Beth’s eyes are the
same striking color. She was a lovely baby. Georgia would have quickly sold her.

  The energy that enabled Georgia to sell babies with alacrity when others couldn’t give them away impressed Memphians from the first day of her arrival. Besides working long hours in her cramped downtown office in the Goodwyn Institute, site of the local branch of the Tennessee Children’s Home Society, she visited merchants door-to-door, soliciting donations and espousing the benefits of adoption. It benefited not only children, she emphasized, but taxpayers, who would be spared the cost of maintaining orphanages. She mentioned the tax aspect often, and in the 1930s claimed to have saved Memphians $218,000 by arranging two thousand adoptions.

  I don’t know when Georgia revealed her ultimate goal, which had nothing to do with tax money: heading a national child-placing monopoly with branches in every state. But in a speech made in 1949 in her branch office in Los Angeles she said, “I want to hear from every family in the United States which would like to adopt a child, and from everyone who knows of a child who should be made available for adoption.”

  Not even she could achieve such control. By 1949 she was, despite her denial of it, close to death: the Los Angeles branch would be her only satellite location. But she had realized her childhood desire for money and fame, having become the most prolific and best-known adoption arranger in the country. She was also the country’s most respected arranger, due to her ability to deceive people who didn’t know her well. Georgia delivered speeches in Washington, New York, and other major cities, and was lauded by a national magazine as “the foremost leading light in adoption laws.” Eleanor Roosevelt sought her counsel regarding child welfare; President Truman invited her to his inauguration; Pearl Buck asked her to collaborate on a book about adoption.

  Georgia garnered national notice early; on September 19, 1929, five years after her arrival in Memphis, she was mentioned in a New York Times article regarding the director of an orphanage for black children.