The Baby Thief

by Barbara Bisantz Raymond

  Gastrointestinal illness is, as Dr. Oppenheimer of the U.S. Children’s Bureau had noted, a serious problem in babies, whose bodies are so small that they can dehydrate within hours. A particularly severe epidemic of the disease in Georgia’s Home in 1945 caused the deaths of forty to fifty children in less than four months. This was despite the efforts of pediatrician Clyde Croswell, who volunteered his services to the Home, and who urged her to hospitalize her sick infants and not admit any more children into her orphanage. “She didn’t follow the instructions,” he told a Memphis reporter in 1950.

  After having remonstrated with Georgia, who insisted that only two children had died, Dr. Croswell met with Abe Waldauer and other members of her board of directors. “I offered to show them a list of the infants who had died—a staggering toll,” he said. “They didn’t want to see it.”

  Doctors Croswell and Carter and four other Memphis physicians complained to Probate Court Judge Samuel Bates, whose court had long officiated over Georgia’s adoptions. In May of 1946 Judge Bates wrote a six-page, single-spaced letter to the commissioner of the Tennessee Department of Public Welfare, William Shoaf, detailing the doctors’ complaints. Some concerned the dysentery epidemic that had killed forty to fifty children, Georgia’s failure to properly screen adoptive parents, “the advertisement of particular children for adoption,” and her failure to assess the care children received in their adoptive homes. Among the others reported were

  “Dr. C. E. James, who . . . maintains an office in the Methodist Hospital, . . . stated that of the babies released to the Tennessee Children’s Home Society that were born at the Methodist Hospital, all would leave there in perfect health, but in many instances were returned in one or two months in an emaciated condition and that many of them died as a result of neglect. He recalled an instance where a child was given to prospective adoptive parents, but that it lived only two weeks. . . .”

  “ . . . Dr. Croswell stated that he had advised Miss Tann not to bring the babies out of the hospital before they weighed at least five pounds, but she continued to disregard this advice. On an occasion he told her not to bring any children into the Home because of an infection, but she brought in five and three or four of them died. . . .”

  “Miss Tann, according to Dr. Croswell, had a woman assistant by the name of Flanikan who frequently came on duty in a drunken condition. She gave castor oil in disregard of his instructions. . . . Dr. Croswell secured the services of a registered nurse and tried to put her in charge of the babies, but Miss Tann would not permit this with the result that the nurse left. . . . Dr. Croswell said he couldn’t be party to things going on of that type and continue a good citizen, so he discontinued his connection with the Tennessee Children’s Home Society. . . . ‘The mortality rate that is reported is nothing in comparison to what it actually is.’”

  Judge Bates’s letter amounted to a show-cause order. Unless his charges were proven to be untrue, or Georgia Tann was removed from her position as head of the Memphis branch of the Tennessee Children’s Home Society, he wrote, he would stop approving her adoptions.

  Judge Bates wanted Shoaf to investigate Georgia and shut her down. As the Commissioner of the Tennessee Department of Public Welfare, Shoaf had the power to do so (his successor, J. O. McMahon, would close the Home after her death). Shoaf was, however, a politician, and in 1946 Boss Crump still controlled Tennessee. Shoaf handed the responsibility of investigating Georgia Tann over to Georgia’s attorney, Abe Waldauer, and other members of her board of directors. They read Georgia’s six-page rebuttal, a characteristic mix of deflection, indignation, and lies. (“Dr. James’ statement that in many instances babies released to the Tennessee Children’s Home Society in perfect health are returned in two or three months in an emaciated condition and that many of them died is not true. Some of our babies died (she admitted to two)—but NOT from neglect on the part of the Tennessee Children’s Home Society. This is an infamous attack. . . .”)

  Abe Waldauer and other board members grilled Doctors Croswell and Carter, then issued a report finding the physicians’ charges “groundless,” “irresponsible and valueless,” and “false from beginning to end.”

  The Public Welfare Commissioner to whom Judge Bates had appealed, William Shoaf, did nothing. “Mr. Waldauer told me I had no authority in the matter,” Shoaf said.

  Judge Bates was less intimidated by Georgia and her attorney than Shoaf, and he stopped approving her adoptions. This, however, didn’t faze Georgia. She and Waldauer simply spoke to judges in rural Tennessee counties such as Haywood, Hardeman, and Dyer. These small town judges weren’t even lawyers, but they were politically savvy, and they signed whatever adoption decrees she wished.

  Georgia’s ability to operate freely even after Judge Bates’s complaints was of course attributable to her connection to Boss Crump. But she was also indirectly enabled by the generally held attitude that adoptable children were expendable.

  The author of an article in a 1930 issue of the Saturday Evening Post wrote of the plethora of babies to choose from—“beautiful babies, ugly babies; brilliant babies, dull babies; healthy babies, sick, handicapped babies; babies with blue eyes, brown eyes, black eyes; with golden hair, black hair, curly-locked and straight; babies thin and babies fat; babies three days old, three months or years old, and all the way stations in between; babies with full family histories and babies with no family history; without age, name or birth certificate, unknown waifs tossed into alleyways or dumped into garbage cans.”

  Children in such a market, the article continued, have to sell themselves. Blue eyes were a decided advantage, as was female gender. “Baby girls are more feminine, alluring; they are grand little self-advertisers and they know instinctively how to strut their stuff. . . . They stretch out their dimpled arms; gurgle at some secret baby joke, . . . blow air bubbles from moist cupid’s bow mouths . . . and women and strong men grow mad, become besotted with adoration and want to kidnap them on the spot. . . .”

  The author contended that males with the wrong hair color were at a distinct disadvantage: “If a boy is red-headed, his chance of finding a new mamma and papa is practically zero. Nobody wants him at all.”

  The reporter didn’t name her sources—she appeared to have had two, one of whom was director of a New York State agency; neither was as successful as Georgia in arranging adoptions.

  Much of Georgia’s success depended upon her baby ads, which while enjoyed by Memphians appalled many outsiders. “I moved to Memphis in 1936, and was horrified to see on the front page of the paper a picture of a little baby that was going to be given away,” former Press-Scimitar reporter Alfred Andersson told me. “They didn’t do things like that in Texas.”

  When the Christmas baby ads became syndicated in the 1930s they attracted the disapproval of Charles C. Carstens, executive director of the Child Welfare League of America. Georgia ignored his warnings to stop the ads, which his successor, Howard W. Hopkirk, cited in 1941 as a main cause for the expulsion of Georgia and the statewide Tennessee Children’s Home Society from the League. (Other reasons cited were Georgia’s failure to assess the fitness of adoptive parents and to supervise children in their new homes; Hopkirk was unaware that Georgia was also kidnapping and selling children.) In typical fashion, Georgia and her attorney claimed that she hadn’t been ousted from the League, but had voluntarily withdrawn because “of many of their attitudes with which we were not in agreement.”

  Georgia further commercialized children by making them perform: “Sit on that man’s lap and call him ‘Daddy,’” she told one little girl. She also demeaned children by excessively catering to her clients, giving children to some adults who wanted, not babies to raise, but objects to give away. “I was bought by a couple and given as a gift to my adoptive family,” Wilhelmina Newsome of Memphis told me. “My adoptive mother was depressed over the death of her own mother, and instead of buying her a puppy, her friends gave her me.”

  Georgia also debased c
hildren by using them as bargaining chips, placing them with politicians and social workers whose opposition she hoped to defuse. One of the more blatant instances of such bribery occurred in 1949, when she gave a Tennessee legislator two children to prevent his support of reform adoption legislation.

  Georgia sometimes sent couples two or three children “on trial,” allowing them a year to decide which child they wanted to keep.

  Georgia Tann’s attorney frequently referred to children as products. “It is not often that we have the good luck that we have in your case, namely of having the merchandise in hand and in stock to deliver to you immediately,” Abe Waldauer wrote to one of Georgia’s prospective clients in 1944.

  “This is one business in which we can never tell when we can fill an order,” he wrote to a less fortunate applicant that same year.

  In 1947 Abe informed a prospective client that Georgia’s adoptive parents had “complete custody and control of a child for one year; may submit the child to any physical or mental examination they wish and take any steps they may desire to ascertain they have a healthy and normal child. If it is not, the Tennessee Children’s Home takes it back, without question.”

  And Georgia’s clients frequently did send children back, often because they appeared less intellectually gifted than the adoptive parents had been led to expect. The pain experienced by rejected children meant nothing to Georgia, as did the suffering of those not returned but resented, for falling short. Virginia Simmons said, “I was told my adoptive mother ordered me like out of a Sears, Roebuck catalogue.” When Virginia developed scoliosis her mother was furious. “She said, ‘I spent a lot of money on you, and you’re such a disappointment. If I’d known you were going to develop that crooked back I would never have picked you out.’”

  While Georgia informed her clients of her liberal merchandise return policy, she presented her usual false face to the public. In a letter to the editor published in the Press-Scimitar in 1938 she castigated a White Plains, New York, couple who were considering returning a severely retarded child they had adopted from a New York agency.

  “The law is definite and its view of an adoption is final, . . .” she wrote. “If the child has been carried through to the point of legal adoption, to the adoptive parents he is THEIR CHILD. From that point on, the fact that he is adopted should never enter into consideration of his problems. . . .

  “If the White Plains couple had borne this child,” she continued, “they would have had to cope with his handicap. Whatever their solution would have been, it is the answer to their adopted child’s problem. The finality of adoption must be upheld, or the whole structure of the institution, based as it is upon the concept that ‘the adoptive parents stand in the place of the birth parents,’ is destroyed.”

  Few other than the initiated would have understood the hypocrisy of Georgia’s words.

  But as frequently as her children were returned, Georgia knew that she’d stay in business, that the vast majority of her clients had more scruples than she and, even when disappointed by their adoptive children, would keep them. Perhaps it was this insight into human nature that allowed her to risk customer dissatisfaction by misrepresenting her children in the first place.

  Falsifying their birth records, she portrayed many as the children of debutants (“Twenty years old, five-feet, three inches tall, 120 pounds, blond, blue-eyed, of English ancestry,” was her typical misrepresentation of a birth mother) who had been made pregnant by medical students. The young woman’s mother was usually “a society woman,” her father, “a prominent physician.” Clients’ expectations of their adoptive children having the intelligence to eventually attend Harvard must have seemed justified.

  Georgia was also consistently unreliable in her representation of her babies’ religions. Most of her children were born to Protestant young women. But Abe Waldauer, who was Jewish, had contacts with rabbis across the country, and throughout the 1940s, considerably more than half of her clients were Jewish. They wanted to adopt Jewish babies, so Georgia falsely represented many of her children as Jewish.

  Some orthodox Jewish parents were upset to later learn that their children hadn’t been born Jewish. Social worker Boo Cravens witnessed a worse consequence of Georgia’s lies.

  Sent from Nashville to Memphis in 1950 to help close the Home, Boo received letters from social agencies in every state to which Georgia had sent children, requesting information about their birth parents. Discovering an accurate bit of information among the false ones Georgia had recorded, she communicated it to the New York State Department of Public Welfare.

  Unknown to her, however, New York law prohibited residents from adopting children of a religion different from their own. Discovering that a boy adopted sixteen years earlier by a local Jewish family had been born Protestant, authorities placed him in a foster home.

  Boo didn’t want any more children’s lives disrupted. So when agencies inquired about other babies adopted by Jewish couples, “we just started lying.”

  She and other workers changed the children’s birth names to Jewish sounding surnames, she told me, sounding so kind, so truly concerned, that I tried not to consider how such falsifications, heaped upon Georgia’s, had hopelessly obscured adoptees’ true histories.

  Georgia’s adoptees, of course, cared less about their adopted parents’ religions than their characters. And Georgia placed some children with terrible people. She sold seven-year-old Eugene Calhoun to a farmer so vicious that the child’s initiation into his new home consisted of watching his adoptive mother spend three days dying of food poisoning, all the while vainly begging her husband for help.

  This beginning was portentous: the farmer was just as cruel to Eugene, keeping him ragged, shoeless, in the fields for eighteen hours a day and in an unheated bedroom at night. He beat him with belts and farm tools; he split his spine with a post-hole digger.

  Decades later, Eugene had surgery to remove bone fragments from his spine. But miraculously, he had escaped paralysis, and at age sixteen he escaped the farmer, running away to join the Navy. He later became a printer and a successful, self-taught graphic artist. When I spoke with him in the 1990s he lived in Farmington, Missouri, and was cherishing his relationship with his long-lost mother, brothers, and sister, with whom he’d recently been reunited through search expert Denny Glad after a separation of sixty years.

  Another child, adopted through Georgia Tann by a man who hoped adoption might cure his wife of infertility, was left to suffer the consequence of not being curative—would he be resented if the adoptive mother failed to conceive?—or even being so—would he be treated as inferior to the birth child? I know of this boy only from a letter dated in the 1940s; I don’t know what happened to him. But I did speak with people adopted for similarly inappropriate reasons, such as to replace a dead birth child.

  Although from her earliest years Joy Barner knew she disappointed the people who raised her, she didn’t know she was being measured against a ghost, or even that she’d been adopted. Placed with an Arkansas couple as a baby, she grew up believing she was their birth, and only, child. Then at age seven she opened an old trunk to find a first grade reader inscribed with the name, “Mary Eleanor,” a picture of a beautiful little girl with ringlets, and several tiny, dainty dresses. Joy, whose wardrobe was the antithesis of frilly, asked her adoptive mother incredulously, “Were these mine?”

  “No!” she shouted. “They were your sister’s, and she’s dead. Don’t ever mention her again.”

  “But there were ruffly things, like you put on little girls to make them feel partyish,” Joy told me. “I asked her why I didn’t any have dresses like that. She said, ‘Because you are plain.’”

  That she was not only a less than adequate replacement but an adopted one was implied throughout her childhood, always in ways that caused pain. When she was fourteen her mother took her to a beauty salon for a permanent wave. Joy loved it, but when they returned home, her adoptive father flew in
to a rage. “What are you trying to do?” he asked his wife. “Make a whore out of her like her mother?”

  Lonely, unloved, Joy cherished her school friends, but her adoptive parents seldom let her socialize. At age fifteen she requested permission to attend a picnic with a male classmate, a doubly risky request, for the boy was Jewish and her father anti-Semitic.

  “What’s his nickname? Isn’t it ‘Hymie’?” her father shouted. “He’s a Jew!”

  “No, no he’s not,” begged Joy.

  Picking up a glass of iced tea, he flung the contents in her face. “If I say he’s a Jew, he’s a Jew,” he said.

  When Joy was seventeen she fell in love with another school friend, Jake, who wasn’t Jewish, but her father wouldn’t allow her to see him either. So on Valentine’s Day, 1939, she and Jake drove to Little Rock, Arkansas, were married, and then returned separately to their parents’ homes.

  Joy hoped to keep her secret from her parents, but she confided in a girlfriend. When she returned home from school several days later her father screamed that he would have the marriage annulled.

  “Then I’ll just marry him again.”

  Red-faced, the veins in his neck throbbing, he dragged her to the steel box in which he kept the family’s important papers. “You were a mistake,” he said. “I want you to know I paid $500 for you, and I could have gotten a good hunting dog for a lot less. You come from the lowest scum on earth.”

  Joy began to cry.

  “Don’t bother to cry—that’s what you come from.” He threw her adoption papers at her feet. “Now don’t go looking for your people,” he said. “Don’t open Pandora’s box.”

  Her adoptive mother watched, uncomplaining, as he said this.

  Joy ran away to the home of Jake’s parents, and when he joined the service shortly afterward, moved with him to Florida and then to Augusta, Georgia. Theirs was a wonderful marriage, which when I spoke with her had endured for over sixty years.