Headlined “Welfare Worker Lays Alleged Forms of Punishment in Memphis Home to Woman Head,” the article read, “Miss Georgia Tann, executive secretary of the Tennessee Children’s Home Society, charged today that negro inmates of the Settlement Industrial Home were punished by being placed on hot stoves and made to stand on hot coals and in hot ashes. . . .
“The social worker’s report . . . alleged that Bessie Simon, superintendent of the institution, was responsible for the alleged tortures and that one little negro’s face was seared with a red hot poker for punishment. She said Bessie Simon was collecting money for orphans and running a boarding school at the same time. . . .”
It was an instance of the pot tarnishing the kettle: Georgia, too, abused children and received boarding money from temporarily incapacitated parents. She was also doing something even Bessie hadn’t done: collecting boarding money from unsuspecting parents whose children she had already sold.
Georgia never publicly acknowledged the contradiction between her words and her behavior; she may not have admitted it to herself. Introspection would have robbed her of the aplomb that served her so well. Shortly after her death a reporter for the Nashville Tennessean described a speech Georgia delivered in 1944 to Memphians critical of her adoption practices.
“Her narrowed eyes gleaming with what appeared to be genuine anger, she brushed fingers through her silvery, short-cropped hair in a characteristic gesture,” and acted as incensed as her audience by “‘the thriving black market in babies. . . .’” But she admitted no part in baby selling, blaming instead “‘Doctors, lawyers and private individuals [who] are arranging adoptions without a license to do so. . . .’”
According to reporter Nellie Kenyon, “Those who heard Miss Tann’s stirring talk applauded her. They left the meeting with her words of warning ringing in their ears.”
Georgia’s propensity for deflection helped her greatly. So did her political clout. She had won Crump’s support quickly upon arriving in Memphis, and constantly reminded citizens she had it, and that she would report the least resistance to her wishes to him. This bought her all the protection she needed. Police officers ignored parents whose children she had stolen; judges ruled against the parents in habeas corpus suits.
Judges also approved her illegal adoptions: one judge approved fourteen in a single day. But the judge most useful to Georgia was Juvenile Court Judge Camille Kelley. While pretending to advise parents struggling with illness, unemployment, or divorce, Judge Kelley secretly severed their parental rights and transferred custody of their children to Georgia. Kelley provided Georgia with a large number of children—20 percent of the more than five thousand children Georgia placed for adoption. A former court worker recalled Georgia perching “like a solitary vulture” in Kelley’s courtroom.
Marie Long witnessed the collusion between Georgia and Camille Kelley in 1935. Fifteen-year-old Marie was living on a farm with three sisters and a brother when their mother, near death from cancer, asked the welfare department to board them until relatives could care for them. A worker drove them to Juvenile Court, where they met Georgia: “She had a tight-lipped, hatchet face,” Marie told me. “She was hateful looking, mean.” They also met Judge Camille Kelley, who seemed the drab-appearing Georgia’s opposite: smiling, perfumed, frilly, wearing silk, pearls, furs, and orchids even in court. She told the children they would be temporarily housed at the nearby St. Peter’s Orphanage.
On the way five-year-old Christine, the youngest, sat on the lap of twelve-year-old Bessie, her second mother. Marie promised the others she would keep them together, no matter what. But when they arrived at the orphanage the court worker accompanying them grabbed Christine and dragged her into a waiting car. “Bessie!” she cried. “Bessie! Bessie! Bessie!”
“I can still hear her screams,” Marie told me. “I begged the nuns at St. Peter’s to tell me what had happened. Finally one said Georgia Tann had flown Christine out of state, to be adopted.”
The help Camille Kelley gave Georgia was extensive enough, and required enough deadening of conscience, to suggest motivation beyond deference to someone protected by Crump. Former investigator Robert Taylor told me that Georgia bribed Judge Kelley and others, including the nurses who falsely told mothers their babies had died.
And many Memphians told me that Georgia had paid off Crump. “Her business contributed to his campaign coffers,” said an elderly pediatrician. “She paid off the city to lay off her,” another long-time Memphis resident said. And it’s true that Crump extorted kickbacks even from churches, and made civil servants give him 15 percent of their pay.
But whether or not a financial arrangement existed between Georgia and Crump, he received more than money from her. She reflected well on Memphis during the years outsiders believed her to be “the foremost leading light” in American adoption. And she was even more solicitous of Crump’s friends than she was of her ordinary clients. His cousin adopted through her, as did U.S. congressman and Memphis mayor Walter Chandler, judges, state representatives, and state senators. An elderly social worker described the speed with which Georgia met the needs of the head of the Memphis delegation to the state legislature, who had been awaiting the birth of a grandchild. When his daughter delivered a stillborn baby he called Georgia, who quickly brought a newborn to the delivery room. The legislator’s daughter, who had been anesthetized for the delivery, never learned of the substitution.
“Miss Tann did for me what God himself couldn’t do,” said one of her board members, who had adopted through her. Grateful clients were particularly inclined to support her. But Georgia received help from people other than Crump and adoptive parents. The aid of Ann Atwood Hollinsworth, her lifelong partner, was crucial.
Eight years younger than Georgia, Ann was twenty-five when they moved to Memphis. She was never officially employed by Georgia, and worked as secretary for the Boy Scouts of America. But she spent her free time typing Georgia’s business correspondence and ferrying adoptive babies across the country. She helped raise Georgia’s adopted daughter, June, and gave Georgia a domestic life. Ann’s “love for Miss Tann seemed sincere,” wrote reporter Nellie Kenyon of the Nashville Tennessean shortly after Georgia’s death. “She registered grief and pain at the death of the woman” she called “Sister.” Ann lived for forty-five years afterward, dying in 1995 at age ninety-six. She seldom talked publicly about Georgia, but in the 1980s told a Memphis reporter that she had been “the most generous woman who ever lived.”
Georgia provided financially for Ann, and may well have loved her: when the two fought and Ann checked into a hotel, Georgia sent her candy and flowers. But theirs was not a relationship of equals; Georgia dominated Ann as she did everyone else.
Georgia was a formidable woman. People saw her as larger than life. “She was a relentless, cold-blooded demon, a female smiling Buddha, a very wicked woman,” I was told by a Memphis pediatrician who’d tried vainly to curb her in the 1940s. “She got bigger and bigger the more power she had. She was pompous, self-important—she was like Hitler, riding around in a big Cadillac driven by a uniformed chauffeur. She terrorized everyone.”
Another of her contemporaries described her as “enormous” and “massive.”
But although Georgia was big-boned and heavyset, she wasn’t gigantic: she was about five feet, five inches tall and weighed about 155 pounds. She looks surprisingly ordinary in photographs: a plain and almost pleasant-seeming woman. She achieved this mundane appearance, an elderly Memphis attorney told me, “only because of her skill in projecting a positive image.”
It was her combative nature, rather than her physical appearance, that intimidated others. She argued frequently about personal and professional issues, and never backed down. In articles written after her death, Tennessee reporters described her as fiery-tempered, pugnacious, “domineering, tyrannical. . . . Her ability to make those to whom she talked see her point was commanding. . . . Her word was law. . . .”
Her manner inspired instant obedience, particularly in children. “Oh, we were scared to death of Georgia,” said a Hickory resident who as a child observed the adult Georgia visiting her mother, Beulah. “When she spoke, we minded. She was just that way.”
She haunted Billy Hale in his dreams. When I spoke to him shortly after he’d viewed the 60 Minutes episode on Georgia Tann, he described how she’d struck him for touching the glass beads of a lamp in the Home.
Georgia must have seemed only marginally less frightening to adults than to children; almost no one criticized her publicly until she was safely dead. Even then, such criticisms were few, and often juxtaposed with laudatory comments. A Memphis pediatrician described the surreal experience of reading the front page of a Memphis newspaper on September 15, 1950, the day of her death. It was three days after the press conference at which the governor had revealed that she wasn’t the “angel of adoption” she’d pretended to be. “It was the strangest front page I’ve ever seen,” the doctor told me. On the left side was an article describing her crimes. “On the right there was a eulogy with tremendous use of Roget’s Thesaurus, praiseworthy words, saying what a wonderful woman she was.”
Her obituaries were fawning, considering the circumstances, but accurate in many respects. “Miss Tann put her heart and soul into her work,” wrote a reporter for the Commercial Appeal. “It was both her business and her hobby. It was not only her public life—it was her private life as well.”
And Georgia was intelligent, directed, focused. Her devotion to work, which would have been noteworthy in anyone, seems particularly remarkable when her physical problems are taken into account. Injuries resulting from a car accident that occurred before she moved to Memphis had caused one of her legs to be shorter than the other, and despite the aid of an orthopedic shoe she walked with a limp. She suffered from arthritis and often used a cane. For the last five years of her life she suffered from cancer, for which she refused surgery, and treated with what Judge Camille Kelley called the “dope”—probably morphine—that enabled her to work.
Georgia seems to have lived in her head, solely by her wits and will, and to have ignored her body. It was a means to accomplishing her mission, and she meant it to project confidence, authority, success, and professionalism. She wore tailored suits or black skirts and print blouses, and black shoes with low Cuban heels. Her nails were manicured, but she used no other cosmetics. She wore one piece of jewelry, a two-carat diamond ring, on the fourth finger of her right hand. Her hair was fine, cropped, parted severely and worn off her face. Her eyes were blue, and projected willpower and resolve.
“Even her friends called her fearless,” wrote reporter Nellie Kenyon shortly after Georgia’s death. “Her determination to rule was as strong as the iron burglar-proof bars on the windows of her home. . . .”
Her fearlessness was best illustrated by the way she coped with three threats on her life, including one from a man who snuck into her bedroom at night. Georgia awoke and scared him away. These incidents “grew out of baby adoption cases,” Nellie Kenyon wrote. “Concerning the last threat she calmly told reporters: ‘I wasn’t afraid.’”
And at least twice, Georgia was hit by parents whose children she’d stolen. She was unperturbed. Such boldness was less often associated with women than men, and Memphians repeatedly described her to me as mannish.
Georgia’s partner, Ann Atwood Hollinsworth, complemented her in looks and temperament. Ann was short, thin, and nondescript in appearance: “I never could recall what she looked like,” said an adoptive mother who saw Ann frequently.
May Hindman, who performed adoption-related work for Georgia for fourteen years, recalled Ann as a snobbish and artistic woman who painted landscapes. Ann had grown up in Meridian, Mississippi, near Georgia’s hometown. Her parents and Georgia’s were good friends.
It’s unclear how well Georgia and Ann knew each other when the much-younger Ann was a child. But by 1920 they were co-workers in Jackson, Mississippi, employed by the Kate McWillie Powers Receiving Home for Children, which was affiliated with the Mississippi Children’s Home Society. Twenty-one-year-old Ann worked as housemother. Georgia, then twenty-nine, was supervisor of the Receiving Home.
Letterhead for the Mississippi, Children’s Home Society lists Georgia as “Miss George Tann.” U.S. Census records placing Georgia at the Powers Home in 1920 list her simply as “George Tann.”
Georgia had previously gone by the female version of the latter part of her given name—Beulah George. Why she chose to be known as “George” while working in Jackson, Mississippi, is unclear. The use of “George” may have been an expression of her sexual orientation. But it seems more likely that she used the name “George Tann” to imitate, or almost to become, the other George Tann, her father.
I don’t know whether Ann called Georgia “George” in Jackson, or whether Ann moved with her to Texas after Georgia was run out of Mississippi for her child-placing methods. But Ann accompanied Georgia when she moved to Memphis in 1924. By then Georgia had a young daughter, June, whom she’d adopted as an infant in 1922. Ann also had a child, a son, Jack, who was born around 1924.
In Memphis, Georgia changed her name again, back to “Georgia Tann.” Ann had by then also changed her name, from “Ann Atwood” to “Ann Atwood Hollinsworth.” A slightly different version of the sur name—“ Hollingsworth”—was common in Ann’s hometown of Meridian, but I found no evidence that Ann was ever married. A Hickory resident described Ann as “one of those poor young women Georgia helped,” a single mother. If this was true, Ann would have been embarrassed by it, and may have adopted her new surname to make herself appear to have been more respectably widowed or divorced.
Whatever the source of Ann’s new name, and however she, Georgia, and the two children came together, they were a family, and Georgia treated Jack as a son. She provided for his and June’s education at Miss Lee’s Private School in Memphis. When he died in an air crash in the early 1940s, Georgia went into seclusion with Ann for several weeks.
Jack was an intelligent young man, and, had he lived, he would probably have assisted Georgia in her business, as did Ann, June, and Georgia’s mother, Beulah. Beulah frequently boarded some of Georgia’s wards at her home in Hickory. After June graduated from the University of Mississippi she sometimes helped Georgia by transporting children to adoptive homes.
Georgia was fortunate in having the support of Crump and her family, especially in the beginning of her career, when she faced even more challenges than the enormous one of creating a market for adopted children. One hurdle was Tennessee’s adoption statute. Passed in 1852, only a year after Massachusetts enacted the first adoption law in the country, the Tennessee statute required childcare institutions to investigate prospective adoptive parents and supervise adoptees in their new homes. To facilitate supervision, adoptive parents were required to be state residents. To ensure that birth parents’ surrenders of their children were voluntary, the statute required that the surrenders be confirmed by the action of a court.
Had Georgia been held to the standards of Tennessee law, she would have been compelled to operate ethically. But she perverted adoption, first by weakening Tennessee law, and then by revolutionizing adoption practices across the United States.
Unlike the authors of the 1852 Tennessee statute, Georgia had no interest in protecting the rights of adoptees or birth parents, only in pleasing her clients—adoptive parents. She didn’t investigate their fitness, allowing virtually anyone who was financially comfortable to adopt a child.
For thirteen years she also, extra-legally, allowed nonresidents to adopt her children. By the 1930s ethical social workers in Tennessee were complaining about this violation of state law. Fortunately for Georgia, Boss Crump controlled the state legislature, and in 1937 a law was passed legalizing adoption by out-of-state residents. She usually ignored the aspect of the new law that required them to travel to Tennessee to finalize the adoptions.
For as
long as possible, Georgia also disregarded the provision of the 1852 statute that required a judge’s verification of birth parents’ surrenders. Ethical social workers criticized this violation too, so in 1941 the law was changed again. The new legislation allowed surrenders to be witnessed by a notary public. Georgia and her workers were notaries, and they routinely claimed to have witnessed willing surrenders of children whose parents had never relinquished them.
Georgia further consolidated her hold over adoption in Tennessee by seizing control of the statewide organization that employed her. She did this by exploiting her relationship with Crump and weaknesses within the Tennessee Children’s Home Society.
The oldest child-placing organization in the state, the Society had branches in Knoxville, Chattanooga, and Jackson, Tennessee, as well as Memphis. It was based in Nashville, in a Victorian mansion that had been converted into the best-equipped, most modern childcare institution in the South. But its officials lacked backbone. The statewide director, Fannie Elrod, allowed herself to be bullied by Georgia, and through the years ignored increasingly frequent complaints about her.
And although the organization had enjoyed a good reputation prior to Georgia’s employment, it was soft at the core: like her, it was violating state law. A provision added to Tennessee’s adoption statute in 1917 required child-placing agencies to be licensed by the state. For some reason, representatives of the Tennessee Children’s Home Society consistently refused to apply for a license, a fact that made every adoption arranged by the organization, and every adoption arranged in Memphis by Georgia Tann, illegal.
The illicit nature of her adoptive arrangements didn’t bother her. She considered herself above the law, free to make her own rules. And the agency’s policy of noncooperation with the state suited her perfectly. Secrecy would be an essential hallmark of her business; she would refuse to divulge information about her adoptive placements to the Tennessee Department of Public Welfare, to Welfare Departments in states in which she placed children, and even to Fannie Elrod, her supposed boss.
The Baby Thief Page 9