The Baby Thief

by Barbara Bisantz Raymond

  But the Texas couple, who Jim said had been working Betty Jo “like a slave,” overworked him too. He ran away, was caught, and returned to Memphis, where he endured yet one more foster home before enlisting in the Air Force at seventeen. A strong, resilient man, he built himself a good life, and when I spoke with him in 1993 he spoke proudly of his loving, forty-one-year-long marriage, his five children, and his reunion with his sisters.

  But his birth parents had died before he’d found them, and he’d never regain the childhood he’d lost. “I feel angry, frustrated, like I was cheated out of a whole lot of life,” he said.

  Jim and hundreds of other children had also been peddled more crassly than pet stores sell puppies. Georgia’s baby-selling ads were so exploitative that when I first viewed them, I’d been surprised that responsible newspapers had published them.

  Eventually I acquired both an understanding of 1920s Memphis and the place of that city within the larger context of a country quite different from ours today. I read a nationally syndicated news article published in 1929 that, like much of what had originally seemed extraneous research, was curiously related to the Georgia Tann story. The piece dealt in a matter-of- fact manner with an infant ward of a Knoxville, Tennessee, orphanage living not in that or any other children’s institution but in the home economics department of the University of Tennessee, where he served as a “flesh and blood textbook” for students who had changed his name from “Richard House” to “Richard Practice-House.” That this piece amused rather than offended readers helped me understand the reception Georgia’s ads received when they began appearing in Memphis that same year.

  According to an article published in the Press-Scimitar in 1937, inspiration for Georgia’s twelve-year-long ad campaign was, from her standpoint and that of her partner-in-invention, the product of fortuitous coalescence. Georgia, wearing one of her customary dark suits, print blouses, and wide-brimmed hats, was sitting in her fifth-floor office on a December afternoon in 1929 speaking of a professional problem to Memphis friend and reporter, Ada Gilkey. Georgia had appropriated more children than she had been able to place for adoption and was paying to board them in institutions and private residences. Aware that her agency’s state funding would soon be reduced because of budgetary cuts caused by the Depression, she worried about making ends meet.

  Ada had a problem that day, too: a blank space where the idea for a series of heartwarming, Christmas-related stories should be.

  The minds converged, and the idea for the annual Christmas baby giveaway was spawned.

  I call the articles that resulted from this conversation “advertisements,” for that is what they constituted. But the papers that ran the ads received no advertising money, and the reporter who may only have been incredibly naive garnered only bylines and, eventually, embarrassment. Georgia, however, began reaping financial dividends from the advertisements just ten minutes after the first one appeared.

  “Want a real, live Christmas present?” read an article introducing the campaign, published on December 9, 1929.

  “A present guaranteed to add two-fold to the joy of the holidays?

  “Well, here’s your chance, for 25 children, ranging in age from three months to seven years, will be presented to as many lucky families Christmas Eve. . . . The Press-Scimitar is making special arrangements with Miss Georgia Tann, Executive Director of the Memphis branch of the Tennessee Children’s Home Society, to place these babies. . . .”

  A variation of the ad appeared the next day, accompanied by photographs of two of the babies to be given away. “See if you can pick out the boy in this picture. No, you missed! It’s the other one, the curly head on the right, and his playmate on the left is the girl! She is eight months and the little boy is one year old. They have golden hair, blue eyes and good dispositions.

  “Applications should be sent to the Press-Scimitar Adoption Editor. Say whether you want a boy or girl, brunet, blond or red-head.

  “Blonds, by the way, are in the majority.”

  Readers’ reaction was enthusiastic. Within ten minutes of the ad’s publication Georgia and the newspaper’s Adoption Editor received dozens of calls from people requesting one or both of the children.

  And that was simply for those two babies. But Georgia ran different ads, featuring different children, every day that December of 1929 and, during each subsequent year until the early 1940s, every day from the beginning of November until January 1.

  They were captioned:

  “Could YOU Use a Christmas Baby?”

  “Which [of three infant boys] Will You Have for Christmas?”

  “Living Dolls [three baby girls] for YOU.”

  “Are You in the Market for a 14-Month-Old Boy?”

  “Put Your Orders in Early.”

  “Dan, Jimmy, Ray . . . Want One of Them?”

  Georgia’s ads included, of course, many, many other captions—more even than I am aware of, for I found reading them so depressing that I chose not to view all of the pertinent microfilms. I left the Memphis Main Library early, trusting in my ability to gauge the effects of the ads without making myself read every single one.

  Those effects were both immediate and local and, ultimately, much further reaching. The longer I consider them the more blurred becomes the line between them, so skillfully, so seemingly effortlessly did Georgia expand her influence.

  Her earliest ads ran in the Press-Scimitar only. They resulted not only in the adoptions of all twenty-five of the 1929 Christmas babies but, once she’d exhausted her current supply of children, also in compilation of a back list of prospective adoptive clients, a waiting list of sorts. The ads garnered Georgia increased donations and local celebrity. Most significantly, the Christmas baby stories, which quickly became the newspaper’s most popular feature, helped Georgia remove the stigma from adoptable children by bringing them enticingly, intriguingly, adorably into readers’ homes.

  Even Memphians previously unpersuaded by Georgia’s blank slate theory regarding adopted children looked forward to each day’s Christmas ad. Would the picture be of one baby, or several? Would the child be a newborn or a toddler or somewhere in between; would he, or she, be smiling? sleeping? bouncing in a baby swing, teething on a crib rail, cuddling a doll, a toy bear or, for reasons known only to Georgia, a porcelain figurine? Would the child be dressed in lace, or simply a diaper, or, as was Master Paul, advertised on December 14th of that first year, nothing at all? (“Our photographer caught the young gentleman a la nude, but he wasn’t the least bit perturbed. . . . He is seven months old and blond. . . .”) Elderly citizens saved their favorite pictures. Young matrons’ bridge parties were enlivened by spirited but friendly arguments over whether Baby Bonnie was cuter than Master Paul.

  Georgia’s ads made adoption a household word in the region, and adoptable children, their faces illuminating the newspapers that shared table space with readers’ coffee cups and jam pots, began to seem part of their family. Throughout Memphis and such nearby cities as Little Rock, Arkansas, and Jackson, Mississippi, infertile couples’ last particle of resistance crumbled. Adoption applications soon filled half of Georgia’s two-room office suite. By 1935, she had placed children in all forty-eight states, as well as in Mexico, Panama, Canada, and England.

  She had also crafted a technique that survives to this day: the advertisement of children for the purpose of sale.

  Her intention was very different from that of the editors of the Delineator, which from 1907 to 1911 had conducted a Child Rescue Campaign that involved publishing pictures and descriptions of adoptable children. The magazine sought to find homes for children, not to make money by selling babies. Organizations such as AdoptUSKids, a project of the U.S. Children’s Bureau, which seeks adoptive parents for children in foster care, continue to use pictures and profiles of waiting children responsibly today.

  AdoptUSKids’s descriptions of waiting children include significant information regarding their backgrounds, such as whethe
r they’ve spent time in an institution, or will need help coping with physical or psychological problems.

  Georgia, on the other hand, revealed nothing about her children other than their physical appearance and age (and the age she reported was often wrong). She spent no time screening adoptive parents, and placed one infant in an out-of-state adoptive home only one day after the child was advertised.

  Unfortunately there are many unscrupulous brokers around the world today who follow Georgia’s lead. Their methods have changed: they are less likely to advertise in newspapers than on the Internet. But like Georgia, today’s brokers often steal children from their mothers, or coerce the mothers into relinquishing them. They also copy Georgia’s practice of concealing information about children’s backgrounds. And like Georgia, they often become wealthy from their sales.

  It took me a while, and placement of Georgia within the context of other adoption arrangers of her time, to appreciate her commercial brilliance. Not even larger, long-established agencies located in populous areas effected as many adoptions as she did. In 1928 Georgia, who as yet had neither orphanage nor staff, handled 206 adoptions. That same year New York City’s Spence Alumnae Society and the Alice Chapin Nursery, which would later merge to form the Spence Chapin Agency, together arranged only eighty-three. The average annual number of adoptions arranged during the 1920s by the Boston Children’s Aid Society was five.

  It’s difficult to determine how much of Georgia’s greater productivity can be attributed to her marketing techniques, and how much to her criminality. Reputable social workers had a finite number of children to place: those orphaned or relinquished by their parents. Georgia placed for adoption any child she wished.

  I soon discovered that Georgia’s influence was so great that even ethical social workers would, by the 1940s, place for adoption many more children than they should have. Georgia transformed adoption in other ways as well.

  Her ability to make adopted children seem appealing as children, not as potential laborers, attracted clients she called “high type”— wealthy and cultured. The children they desired differed from those sought by clients of Charles Loring Brace. Three times more Orphan Train boys than girls were chosen by Brace’s farmers, who wanted sturdy field hands. The farmers preferred older children to toddlers. Brace didn’t even attempt to place infants.

  Georgia’s clients sought babies, the younger the better. And many were eager to adopt little girls.

  Georgia’s influence upon the frequency of adoption was local at first. But when the Christmas baby series was syndicated in the 1930s, what I can only term the humanizing of adoptable children began to spread. While that humanizing would not be complete during the ads’ run, and while some babies adopted through Georgia Tann and others would long be considered inferior to birth children, adoptable children became regarded as semiacceptable substitutes. The number of Georgia’s adoptive applicants rose throughout the 1930s. This enabled her not only to place more children, but also to gain personal wealth.

  She didn’t openly affix price tags to children, but instead charged fees for transporting them to their new homes. Georgia directed prospective adoptive parents to make the checks out to her, not to the Tennessee Children’s Home Society, and to send them to her private post office box in Memphis. The fees included travel expenses for a worker and the baby to be adopted, and were due in three installments.

  When Georgia received a request for adoption, she quickly determined the prospective clients’ financial status and social standing. If these met her standard, she or a worker usually made a cursory visit to the prospective parents’ home. She charged California residents $168.72 for this visit, and New York City residents $228.81. Adoptive parents in other areas were charged fees somewhere between these figures.

  The next installment of Georgia’s fee was due upon delivery of the child. Georgia enjoyed handing babies to happy, excited couples, and she often made this trip herself. California residents were charged $360; New Yorkers paid $268.81.

  The interval between this trip and the next was longer than that between the first two, which was sometimes as brief as two days. Often a year would elapse between the second and third trips—enough time to justify Georgia’s claims of careful assessment of the children’s adjustment before finalization of the adoption.

  In reality, she made no assessment before having her workers make the final trip, bearing adoption certificates that the new parents signed in preparation for Georgia’s presentation of the paperwork to a Tennessee judge. California residents were charged $202.72, which brought their total bill to $731.44. New Yorkers paid $268.81, for a total of $766.43.

  This was a considerable amount in the 1930s, equivalent to $11,000 in today’s money. And some couples paid Georgia as much as $10,000, equivalent to $140,000 today.

  If these couples had adopted from reputable agencies, they would have paid almost nothing. Some probably didn’t understand this. I don’t know how many realized how Georgia achieved her profit—by charging the same transportation costs several times over. Seldom did she or her workers visit one family or ferry one baby only. Instead, Georgia or a minion would fly to Los Angeles with four infants crowded together in a handheld wicker basket and, often, with toddlers and older children in tow. With the children, she would check into a suite at the Biltmore Hotel. Soon afterward, she would bring them to the lobby and give them to their new parents.

  Issues regarding guilt, not necessarily complicity but tacit, passive concurrence, interest me perhaps more than they should, given my connection to adoption. But often—especially after speaking with Mem phians who insisted to me that Georgia began with good motives, and that none of her clients realized she was operating illegally—I found myself wondering whether the people picking up children in the lobby of the Bilt more Hotel did not notice each other’s presence. Did they not know the cost of air tickets or hotel accommodations and realize that their check, alone, would have covered Georgia’s expenses? And that if the other couples paid as much money as they, Georgia would have a considerable amount left over? (She would in fact make more money from one trip than the couples in the lobby could easily have known, for she would, the next day, make several preliminary and adoption finalization visits, collecting, at each stop, checks covering the full cost of her air and hotel fare.) In at least one case, Georgia received eleven times her actual expenses.

  Some adoptive parents knew that Georgia’s charges were padded, their adopted children told me. But it must have been relatively easy for prospective adoptive parents to overlook this and to justify paying suspiciously large sums of money—especially (and Georgia knew this would happen) after they had seen their baby. Most of her adoptive parents, as unscreened and often poorly prepared as they were, loved their new babies. Would any price have seemed too high?

  I understand this more than I want to. My daughter’s adoption was private. The cost involved was small, just over $2,000, and included several days’ medical expenses for Beth and legal expenses for her mother. I would have paid more. And if I had later learned that some of that cost had gone to something other than legal and medical charges, I, who wanted a baby so badly, would not have cared.

  The ground becomes stickier after this. Even adoptive parents with absolutely no inkling they were fattening Georgia’s wallet must have wondered at the cautionary words that sometimes accompanied her delivery of babies. “Keep your heads down,” she or her aides would tell the adoptive parents. “Lose yourselves.” Georgia told some adoptive parents that the child’s mother was looking for her child. Of course she also told them that she had obtained custody of the child for cause.

  Georgia’s clients apparently believed her, but some must have had doubts. Especially those who lived in Tennessee, where birth parents were desperately trying to persuade judges, the police—anyone—to help them find babies Georgia had stolen. Adoptive parents also must have seen newspaper accounts of habeas corpus suits filed by birth parents.
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  And what would I have done if I’d been a Memphian who’d adopted through Georgia? Would I have tried to learn whether my daughter had been stolen from her parents? And if she had been stolen, would I have returned her? I want to believe I would have, but could I have?

  The opportunity to overcharge for travel expenses soon led Georgia to reverse her early practice of placing most of her children with Memphis couples. By the late 1940s she was sending 90 to 95 percent of them out of state. And the more locales her babies were in, the higher, through word of mouth, grew the number of people seeking to adopt through her. To satisfy the market she’d created, she stole more and more children.

  Georgia’s methods were blatant enough to initially make me marvel that they were tolerated, even by Memphians under Ed Crump. I may have been overestimating Memphians, or underestimating Crump, who robbed citizens who displeased him of their jobs and, often, their homes. It had not been simply Gerald Stratton, the former county court clerk who’d criticized Crump’s support of the poll tax, who had been driven from the city. Pharmacist J. B. Martin, a black man who, refusing to be “voted” by Crump’s Machine, supported Republican Wendell Wilkie for president in 1940, was forced to flee to Chicago. There, like most displaced Memphians I learned of, he prospered, eventually becoming part owner of the Memphis franchise in the Negro Baseball League. His accomplishments, however, like those of the other emigrants, brought him no hometown honor, and when he returned to watch his team play, Crump had him ejected from the ballpark.

  Attorney Ben W. Kohn was beaten and arrested for backing a Crump opponent.

  Another attorney was banished for referring to Crump by the name which, bestowed upon him by out-of-town journalists, was avoided by prudent local citizens: “Boss.”