The Baby Thief

by Barbara Bisantz Raymond

  But Georgia was concerned about a fact that negated her position as head of local child placement. Georgia wished to arrange adoptions, but when she arrived in Memphis the local branch of the Tennessee Children’s Home Society only handled foster care. Another Memphis agency, the Children’s Bureau, handled the few adoptions that occurred. Georgia was determined to reverse this situation.

  A social worker employed by the Children’s Bureau during the 1920s described the speed of Georgia’s attack. “She wielded a whip,” the worker told me.

  She added that she and her supervisor, the well-regarded French social worker Elise de la Fontaine, had immediately disliked Georgia. “To people not involved in social work, she probably initially seemed fine,” she said. “But if you stood in her way you saw her real side. She was ruthless.” Cold, haughty, boastful of her political clout, Georgia simply appropriated wards of the Children’s Bureau and arranged for their adoption.

  This worker had been furious at Georgia’s lack of scruples. “She placed with no regard to whether children would be happy in their adoptive homes; it was hit and miss,” she said. Georgia’s only concern was the number of placements. “She was trying to place every child in Memphis. She wanted to get her hands on every child she could.”

  Within a year of her arrival in Memphis in 1924, Georgia had control of virtually every local child available for adoption. The Children’s Bureau was reduced to providing only foster care. Georgia was unstoppable, the former Children’s Bureau worker told me. Georgia’s hold over Tennessee adoptions became so absolute that when this worker and her husband, a prominent Memphis physician, sought to adopt a child in 1940, they had no choice but to adopt one through Georgia Tann.

  Georgia’s dominating personality and political contacts served her well, allowing her to surmount professional obstacles while also confronting personal problems. One difficulty was the condescension with which she was viewed by the wealthy Memphians she cultivated as clients.

  “She was no one you would have wanted to know socially,” an elderly Memphis matron told me.

  “She didn’t even perm her hair,” said another.

  “She was,” said a third, “not attractive in any way.”

  It may be difficult imagining a woman as tough as Georgia being hurt by these opinions, but she probably was. While she’d been an outsider in Hickory because of her career aspirations, she had been admired for her social position. But Memphians disparaged her as “country.” She didn’t dress fashionably, or know how to dress her daughter June, whose expensive outfits were so ill chosen that Memphis matrons pitied the child. “June was frumpy and quite uninteresting, not an interesting child at all,” an elderly Memphis woman told me. Georgia enrolled June in Miss Lee’s Private School and sent her to Ole Miss, where she joined a sorority, but she, too, remained an outsider. “She moved on the fringes of the Southern debutante circle,” Attorney Lewis Donelson told me. “Like her mother, she was always trying to be accepted.”

  Georgia was also distinguished by the unconventional nature of her domestic unit. It’s difficult to discern whether she was considered an outsider because of her sexual orientation, largely because most of her contemporaries referred to her homosexuality only indirectly. “I never knew how to take her; she wore mannish clothing,” or variations of it, they’d say. Then, segueing to talk of her political connections, they’d give the impression of having prudently ignored a lifestyle they might otherwise have condemned. Georgia encouraged this seeming obliviousness by misrepresenting her relationship with Ann, and even with June. Unmarried women weren’t supposed to adopt children in the 1920s, and in some states were legally prohibited from adopting. So Georgia portrayed June as her adoptive sister, who had been adopted by her own parents, George and Beulah. She forced June to address her as “Sissy.”

  June, who understood that Georgia was her adoptive mother, must have been confused by the charade. Almost all adoptees have difficulties regarding identity, and most desire knowledge of their roots. But June’s genetic heritage would remain a mystery. She learned nothing about her parents, who Georgia claimed had died of the flu, or about the circumstances of her adoption, which she assumed had been arranged through the Texas home-finding society for which Georgia had briefly worked. Georgia was vague even about June’s date of birth. She generally claimed that June had been born on June 7, 1921, and June believed that to be her birth date. But in correspondence with her attorney in 1934, Georgia wrote, “. . . I took a baby [June], personally, for adoption” in February of 1921.

  It’s unclear why Georgia at least once misrepresented June’s date of birth, and which date was correct. But it’s patently true that Georgia frequently falsified the birth dates of many children she placed for adoption. In every case of which I learned, she reduced the children’s age. She did this to satisfy clients’ wishes for the youngest possible babies, and to make the children appear bright, even precocious. While Georgia reduced the ages of babies only by weeks or months, she frequently subtracted years from the ages of older children. Many adoptees were shocked, upon reuniting with their birth parents, to discover their true ages.

  As Georgia increasingly augmented her supply of orphans with kidnapped children, she falsified their ages to prevent their birth parents from finding them.

  Georgia also lied about her relationship with Ann Atwood Hollinsworth, portraying her too as an adoptive sister who had been raised by Georgia’s own parents, George and Beulah. That Georgia and Ann were related by adoption was actually one of the few things Georgia said that contained some truth. But Ann hadn’t been adopted by Georgia or anyone else before she moved to Memphis in 1924, and she never became Georgia’s adopted sister. In 1943, however, Georgia adopted Ann as a daughter. Georgia was fifty-two, and Ann was forty four years old.

  The adoption took place on August 2 in Dyer County, a rural area that was the site of many of Georgia’s illegal adoptions involving children. The legal record states that the “petitioner, Georgia Tann, desires to adopt Ann Atwood Hollinsworth. The said Ann Atwood Hollinsworth is a full orphan of the state of Tennessee.

  “Petitioner further states that she has reared and educated the said Ann Atwood Hollinsworth, and desires to make her her legal heir by said adoption. . . . Petitioner prays that the court decree that Ann Atwood Hollinsworth be adopted by her, with the right to inherit and succeed her estates, both real and personal, as if born to her.”

  Even when considered within the context of Georgia’s unorthodox and duplicitous adoption transactions, her adoption of Ann seems strange. Her contention that she had “reared and educated” Ann was of course false. Georgia’s reason for the proceeding was probably exactly what it appeared to be: to ensure Ann’s right of inheritance. It was not uncommon then for women to adopt female companions for this reason. Georgia may also have wished to codify or celebrate her union—in the only way possible—with the woman she loved.

  Georgia’s lies regarding her personal relationships, which prefigured the dishonesty and secrecy with which she would taint the institution of adoption, may have seemed somewhat necessary regarding her relationship with June. Prevarication concerning her involvement with Ann must have seemed even more crucial. And it was more critical during the period after World War I than it would have been before.

  People such as Richard Freiherr von Krafft-Ebing—an Austro German psychiatrist and author of an influential study of what he termed sexual aberrance—began declaring that partners in Boston marriages were not, as had been previously believed, asexual, but homosexual. This idea quickly became part of popular culture. “Intimacy between two girls was watched with keen, distrustful eyes,” wrote Wanda Fraiken Neff in her 1928 novel, We Sing Diana. “Among one’s classmates one looked for the bisexual type, the masculine girl searching for her feminine counterpart.” Romantic friendships and Boston Marriages were now deemed lesbian partnerships, and the women themselves “inverts,” of the “intermediate,” or “third” sex. Lesbians
were said to be hermaphrodites, sexual deviates, genetic anomalies possessing male souls trapped in women’s bodies.

  Earlier in the twentieth century, Georgia could have settled into a domestic relationship with Ann in virtually any city in the country without fear of censure. Arriving in Memphis in 1924, however, she had cause for concern. She was such an example of what sexologists called “the mannish lesbian” that she could have been wearing a label. Krafft Ebing described a supposedly typical case:

  “Even in her earliest childhood she enjoyed playing at soldiers and other boys’ games; she was bold and tom-boyish and tried even to excel her little companions of the other sex. . . . [After puberty] her dreams were of a lascivious nature, only about females, with herself in the role of the man. . . .

  “She was quite conscious of her pathological condition. [She had] masculine features, a deep voice, manly gait, . . . small breasts; she cropped her hair short and made the impression of a man in a woman’s body.”

  According to Krafft-Ebing and other sexologists, “inverts” such as Georgia were not only biologically tainted, but had been corrupted by their experiences in women’s colleges and settlement houses. Georgia had been reticent about her private life before 1918. During her years in Memphis she became even more secretive.

  While Georgia kept secret her private and much of her professional life, she blatantly promoted her business. Faced with the challenge of inspiring wealthy, infertile couples to adopt children previously deemed unworthy, she procured the most beautiful babies she could find and dressed them in elaborate layettes of organdy and lace. Then she placed one infant, or two, in a simulation of twins, in a ribbon-bedecked wicker basket, and visited her targets.

  Most of her earliest clients are dead; I don’t know under what pretense Georgia displayed children to them. It’s likely that her approach to these couples was subtler than it was to political targets like Mildred Stoves.

  Age ninety-one when I spoke with her, Mildred described working in the 1930s for the Memphis Department of Public Welfare. “And one day Miss Tann just stopped in my office with this beautifully-dressed, beautiful baby and said, ‘Miss Stoves, I have a child for you.’”

  What did she do?

  “Well I refused it,” she answered. “Miss Tann did seem surprised. But I was young; I wasn’t married: what did I want with a baby?”

  She admitted that many other social workers, all like her employed by agencies Georgia considered rivals and in most cases also unmarried, had been unable to resist the gift of a rosy, sweetly-powdered babe. Mildred Stoves was perhaps less impulsive than they. She may also have been more prescient. For although these workers doubtlessly received lifetimes of pleasure from their adopted children, they also experienced terror when Georgia blackmailed them. Employed by such organizations as the Department of Public Welfare, the Children’s Bureau, and the Traveler’s Aid Society, these adoptive parents soon realized that Georgia was a criminal. But criticizing her was almost impossible when, as she threatened, it would result in her reclaiming their adopted child. Or in letting “his mother know where he is”—since any adoptive parents who read newspaper accounts of local habeas corpus suits had to have been aware that the children they’d adopted through Georgia might have been stolen.

  Georgia lured people into impossible situations, victimizing, occasionally, even those who profited from her. Among this otherwise-privileged group were physicians, attorneys, judges, and university professors. Such early, strategic placements provided her with names for what Candy Debs, who’d been adopted by a California legislator, described to me as “a hit list, a sales tool.” The list would eventually include Joan Crawford, June Allyson and Dick Powell, Pearl Buck, Lana Turner, and New York governor Herbert Lehman. These prominent adoptive parents made adoption seem fashionable.

  Georgia was not only the first American to make adoption popular, but also the first to attract clients she described as “high type” or “of the better sort.” Unlike the rural couples who had put indentured servants and Orphan Train children to work, her adoptive parents, she boasted, would send their children to college. And most of her clients did provide their adopted children with an education. In placing children with adoptive parents generally willing to treat them as children, not hired help, Georgia was a pioneer. Today’s adoptive parents continue to treat adopted children as part of their families. It is one of Georgia’s few positive legacies.

  An unknowable number of the children Georgia placed in new families had been kidnapped from their old ones—either directly, often literally from their mothers’ arms, or indirectly, by means of illegal court orders. She employed the direct method more often in the 1940s than she had in the 1920s. She had fewer customers in the early years, and a large supply of more easily obtainable product.

  There were more than twenty-eight institutions caring for dependent children in Tennessee in 1929. None of these belonged to Georgia, who wouldn’t have one until Memphian Fred Smith, the founder of the Dixie Greyhound Bus Line, donated the mansion on Poplar Avenue that became her Home in 1943. But from the beginning she treated every orphanage and maternity home in the state as her private preserve. Adoptee Christine Nilan recalled Georgia’s frequent scouting at the Tennessee Children’s Home Society Orphanage in Nashville. “I can still hear her steps down the hallway and see her funny hats. She had big feet and wore black lace-up shoes. She always went upstairs to see the babies. There would be masses of them one day; they’d be gone the next.”

  During her visits, Georgia photographed the babies she was interested in, and then showed their pictures to prospective clients. After the children were placed, Georgia displayed the photographs on the walls of her office.

  A disproportionate number of the children in these pictures were blond and blue-eyed. While Georgia presumably preferred such children because she thought her clients would, she favored that coloring herself. Her own adopted daughter, June, was born with blond hair and blue eyes. And in the 1940s Georgia surprised June, who by then had had two miscarriages, with an adoptive daughter—a blond, blue-eyed baby, too.

  The former Children’s Bureau social worker who had been appalled by Georgia’s adoption methods in the 1920s attributed her success in locating such a specific type of child to her use of spotters. Prominent among them was the superintendent of a Memphis orphanage that housed over one hundred children. She informed Georgia of the arrival of particularly attractive children with an alacrity that convinced the Children’s Bureau social worker I spoke with that the superintendent was being bribed by Georgia. Another social worker told me that the superintendent was dismissed from her job in 1950 because of her relationship with Georgia.

  Juvenile Court Judge Camille Kelley wasted no time in transferring custody of the scouted children to Georgia Tann.

  Judge Camille Kelley also frequently visited a local Catholic orphanage run by the Sisters of the Good Shepherd, noting the names of marketable children with an eye toward seizing them by court order and transferring their custody to Georgia. A former orphanage worker told me, “One of the nuns [who worked at the orphanage during the 1940s] said, ‘We knew something was rotten.’ This nun’s superior would tell her, ‘Judge Kelley is coming,’ and she and the other sisters would scramble around, trying to hide the prettiest children from her.”

  This probably hindered Georgia little, if at all. An effective if terrible marketing technique ensured steady increases in her number of placements.

  One of the adoptees I spoke with was Jim Lambert, who’d been physically and emotionally abused after being adopted through Georgia in the 1930s. In our first phone conversation, he told me that his adoptive parents had chosen him after seeing him advertised in a Memphis newspaper.

  After we hung up, I pulled out a folder I’d labeled “Georgia’s Christmas Baby Ads,” which contained some of the approximately 400 child advertisements she’d run between 1929 and the early 1940s. All were repugnant, and several seemed prurient. One, which r
an on the front page of the Memphis Press-Scimitar in November of 1930 under the caption “Wants Home,” was accompanied by a photograph of a small girl standing with her hand on her hip, wearing a short dress and disconcertingly mature facial expression. A caption described her as “a solemn little trick . . . with big brown eyes. Madge is five years old and ‘awful lonesome.’”

  Another ad, published on December 7, 1935, and headed “Yours for the Asking!” included a close-up of a five-year-old boy holding a large ball.

  “How would YOU like to have this handsome boy play ‘catch’ with you?” the caption read.

  “How would you like his chubby arms to slip around your neck and give you a bearlike hug? His name is George, and he may be yours for the asking.”

  I’d read these ads before speaking with many adoptees, and they’d disturbed me then. It was even more difficult to view them after speaking with people like Jim Lambert, whose advertisement had brought him so much pain.

  Two-year-old Jim and his two sisters, Pat and Betty Jo, were taken from their mother by Georgia Tann in 1932. Pat was placed in foster care; Betty Jo was sent to a Texas adoptive family; and Jim was placed with a Chicago couple.

  The couple soon divorced. Jim stayed with his adoptive father, who married a woman who so resented Jim’s presence that she hung him by his shirt from a hook in the basement for an entire afternoon. At age nine Jim was sent to a Mississippi boarding school; a few years later he was transferred to Gailor Hall, which he described to me as “a kind of Memphis Boys Town.” While there he received a letter from his adoptive father. “He didn’t want me anymore,” Jim said.

  He spent the rest of his childhood in a dizzying number of places— the Porter Home and Leath Orphanage in Memphis; Memphis Juvenile Court, which had jail-like quarters for children; and foster homes. Georgia Tann eventually sent him to the Texas couple who had adopted his sister Betty Jo.