by Monty Topaz
Imagine what it was like to be a feminist in the 1940s. To live in an age where gender equality was just burgeoning and almost every man looked down on a woman who dared to enter the workforce.
Georgia Tann might have been a feminist at heart, but it was her black heart that propelled her to fame and actually allowed her to surpass many of her male contemporaries in legacy and power.
That’s right – fame, not infamy.
Georgia Tann didn’t become infamous until years later, years after she got away with the perfect crime. We know her today as one of the most prolific child traffickers in modern human history and a woman directly responsible for at least 5,000 kidnapped children.
But what we have forgotten, perhaps rightfully, is that Georgia earned a reputation as a humanitarian before she was a monster.
After one has passed judgment on Georgia Tann’s black heart, which is very easy to do, one has to contemplate her legacy.
She was a woman who helped shape our modern world politically, socially, and administratively.
For a change, rather than just focus on how evil Tann was, let’s discuss where her story began.
With an act of charity.
Young Georgia Tann: A Savvy Woman Ahead of Her Time
Georgia Beulah Tann, named after both her parents, came from humble and almost altruistic beginnings.
The child of a school teacher and an attorney, she watched her mother, Beulah, struggle in a thankless career field dominated by men while watching her father, Chancellor George Tann, preside over a court in Meridian, Mississippi.
George Tann was a strong presence in Georgia’s life. He insisted that his daughter become a concert pianist while dissuading her from pursuing a career in law since women were not taken seriously as litigators or judges.
https://www.newspapers.com/article/the-tennessean-series-1-tann/24013539/
https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/38328338/george-clark-tann
Despite passing the bar exam and showing promise as a would-be lawyer, young Georgia was shooed away from her passion in life by her father and instead re-directed towards social work.
A 1910s Feminist and Iconoclast
According to Barbara Raymond’s book Baby Thief: The Untold Story of Georgia Tann, the Baby Seller Who Corrupted Adoption, Georgia was uninterested in being a typical housewife and mother of the 1910s era.
She wanted to follow in her father’s footsteps and become a lawyer. But having been talked out of it, she decided to pursue social work, one of the few career fields open to women at the time. Tann’s lack of enthusiasm for social work was noted.
According to the Tennessee State Library and Archives, which documented much of Georgia’s misdeeds, she quit her first job in Texas and was later fired by her second employer.
The Mississippi Children’s Home Society found her “questionable child-placing methods grounds for termination.
But she regrouped and later became the Executive Secretary at the Shelby County branch of the Tennessee Children’s Home Society.
This is where it gets interesting because Georgia Tann didn’t make any waves as a social worker but later on as an entrepreneur.
Bisantz Raymond, Barbara (2007). Baby Thief: The Untold Story of Georgia Tann, the Baby Seller Who Corrupted Adoption (1st ed.). New York: Carroll & Graf Publishers. ISBN 978-0-7867-3374-3.
An Emerging Child Trafficking Market
What Georgia discovered was a newly emerging market: children for sale to the rich and or famous elites of the day.
By now, the business-minded Georgia had come up with her USP. It was illegal to sell children, but it was perfectly legal to place children with qualifying families and to charge a fee for adoption services. She found her calling: a facilitator or broker between potential clients and hopeful adoptees.
Legally speaking, adoption rates within Tennessee were set at seven dollars. But there was no law against arranging for private, out-of-state adoptions. She took a state-controlled charity and turned it into a national business model with children as the product.
Her scheme was ingenious in that she knew her key demographic intimately. Almost all of her clients were wealthy couples and willing to pay almost anything to adopt a child.
Georgia could charge upwards of $700 for her premium or even as much as $5,000 for VIP clients. Not a bad profit margin compared to a paltry seven-dollar adoption fee.
She soon took over the Tennessee Children’s Home Society and had placed 3,000 children in new families in just New York and California alone – two of the wealthiest states.
The Washington Post of December 24, 1979, reported that Georgia and her team could charge whatever they wanted for background checks, as well as air travel costs and adoption paperwork.
Clients wrote out checks to her by name, and she kept all of her money in a secret bank account with a false corporation name.
She didn’t pay taxes, and she didn’t even report her full income to the state of Tennessee. In fact, the State of Tennessee was so convinced that Georgia was doing an act of charity and helping neglected children that the government gave Georgia’s agency $61,000 a year to keep the business going.
https://iu.pressbooks.pub/perspectives4/chapter/the-black-market-behind-adoption-in-modern-america/
https://cdm16108.contentdm.oclc.org/digital/api/collection/p13039coll1/id/187/download
https://www.knoxfocus.com/archives/judge-camille-kelley-miss-georgia-tann/
Georgia Tann’s Not-Quite-Criminal Empire
By the 1930s, Georgia Tann’s child trafficking market was exploding – and to the point where she ran out of legitimate “product” – namely abandoned or neglected children from Tennessee.
The only way to grow her market even more so was to create a “baby mill” that could meet the high demand of the industry.
Georgia would have to tap into some of her father’s judicious and domineering nature and embody a face that would strike fear into the hearts of families who had one too many children to support.
This mob boss of social workers began trafficking a higher number of children by coercing poor families to give up their “neglected” sons and daughters.
It was hard to say no to such a well-to-do woman, described by Alma Sipple, one of Georgia’s victimized parents, as “a stern-looking woman with close-cropped grey hair, round wireless glasses, and an air of utter authority.”
It was especially hard to resist Georgia’s wishes when she approached uneducated and cowering families with the long arm of the law.
In the book “Hearings,” published by the United States Congress Senate, it is revealed that Georgia drew upon her legal knowledge to threaten legal action against negligent parents, including single mothers. She preyed upon children of unwed mothers, inmates, and mental patients, who had little to no recourse but to let their children go.
But as the demand for children proved insatiable, she had to go well outside a business frame of mind and embrace the gangster’s approach.
A contemporary of Al Capone, perhaps Georgia Tann fancied herself as a female “Scarface” – someone who had to do whatever was necessary to get paid.
https://www.nchgs.org/html/a_story_of_stolen_babies.html
Bisantz Raymond, Barbara (2007). Baby Thief: The Untold Story of Georgia Tann, the Baby Seller Who Corrupted Adoption (1st ed.). New York: Carroll & Graf Publishers. ISBN 978-0-7867-3374-3.
https://www.listennotes.com/podcasts/the-secret-sits/georgia-tann-wWvHbRDoMyc/
The Horrors of the Tennessee Children’s Home Society
Soon, Georgia was kidnapping children from hospital-bound mothers, suggesting that the newborns needed special medical care, and then subsequently announcing the baby’s death to the parents. She would kidnap children who were being dropped off at nursery schools by parents, continuing the lie that Child Welfare Services were taking neglected children into custody.
Even when family members became temporarily ill or unemployed and had to leave their children in emergency foster care, those children would be taken and given to the orphanage to place in new homes.
Imagine being a parent and hearing that your temporarily displaced child was never officially dropped off at the foster home, and there is no paperwork confirming their arrival.
Children under Tann’s guardianship were not only neglected but, in some cases, physically and sexually abused. Along with malnutrition and sickness, Tann’s non-criminal empire (non-criminal, at least by the books) made Memphis, Tennessee, the worst state in the country for infant mortality rates.
She hired untrained and sometimes drug-addicted nursing staff to look after the children. She ignored not only children complaining of sickness but also doctors who pleaded with her to get dying children basic medical treatment to save their lives. Children starved under her watch, and “difficult” children were completely ignored and left to die.
Even children who were adopted and seemingly free of the horrors of Georgia’s business still faced the nightmare of returning to the Tennessee Children’s Home Society and its mansions.
To this day, the total death count of Tann’s child livestock remains unknown, but 5,000 children were trafficked all over the states, and at least 500 died on record.
https://nypost.com/2017/06/17/this-woman-stole-children-from-the-poor-to-give-to-the-rich/
https://www.knoxfocus.com/archives/judge-camille-kelley-miss-georgia-tann/
How Did Georgia Tann Get Away With It?
That brings us to the obvious question: how did Georgia Tann get away with it for so long? She was a practical mob boss who had a quasi-criminal empire and yet operated in plain sight of law-abiding citizens and governmental authorities.
First, remember that she destroyed paper evidence whenever permissible, particularly any records involving children or their past histories. In some cases, she fictionalized the histories and medical records of her agency’s children.
The only possible way for the truth to sneak out of such a tricky situation would be for the new adoptive parents to notice something was amiss.
But you haven’t met Georgia Tann, have you?
The daughter of a Judge, not only a menacing bluffer and conwoman but also one surprisingly well-connected.
The Tennessee State Library and Archives further reveal that she not only persuaded families into giving her their children voluntarily but also coerced adoptive families into withdrawing any questioning of her methods.
As soon as she received a complaint about incorrect information on an adopted child, Tann would threaten to take the child back. This time, she also brought reinforcements with her, which legitimized her authority.
The Knoxville Focus published a story detailing the cozy relationship between Shelby County Family Court Judge Camille Kelley and Georgia Tann. Judge Kelley sanctioned Georgia Tann’s tactics and threats, going so far as to sever custody of divorced mothers and ordering mothers to surrender their children to Tann’s agency or be held in contempt of court.
Celebrity Clientele and Rich Financers
Georgia played the system well because everyone has a soft spot for charity.
The idea that a foster home could better provide for a neglected child’s care appealed to people who understood just how hard families had it in the 1920s and 1930s when economic depression was setting in.
What was truly diabolical was how poorly Georgia’s “orphans” were treated. Adoptive parents were not vetted according to character but only the means to pay.
While some of Georgia’s clients were celebrities, including Joan Crawford, Dick Powell, and June Allyson, others were fellow outliers of the law who used the children for labor or even outright abused them in some cases.
Author Barbara Raymond wrote in her book on Tann that she was a woman “unable to directly partake in the traditional source of female power, marriage and the bearing of children…but by taking control of other women’s babies, Tann acted out her resentment, and at the same time enjoyed a vicarious sense of maternity.”
Cracks in Georgia Tann’s Empire
By the mid-1940s, Georgia’s non-criminal empire, sanctioned by the state government, was going well.
The only fallback was on a national scale, with the likes of the Child Welfare League of America noticing that Georgia Tann’s agency wasn’t investigating the homes of foster parents homes, nor were they studying the children at all before placement.
The Child Welfare League of America eventually dropped the Tennessee Children’s Home Society from its list of endorsed agencies.
But it wasn’t enough.
Georgia Tann was still being protected by more legal officials with authority, now including former Memphis, Tennessee, Mayor E.H. “Boss” Crump, who still wielded incredible power and influence after his term ended.
Now, with Crump’s protection, who could possibly stand up to Georgia Tann? She was more akin to a gangster than a social worker at this point.
It’s also remarkable to note that whereas Al Capone was a celebrity because of notoriety, Georgia Tann was a widely respected woman, even regarded as a non-radical feminist.
She was highly regarded for his charity work and enjoyed friendships with prominent socialites and politicians.
In Lisa Wingate’s book, Before We Were Yours, the author details how Georgia Tann met Franklin Delano Roosevelt and even forged a friendship with his wife, Eleanor.
This elevated Georgia’s profile, making her an untouchable of sorts. Eleanor Roosevelt even consulted with Georgia on matters of child welfare.
Ironic, all things considered.
https://library.utah.gov/wp-content/uploads/Book-Buzz-Before-We-Were-Yours-Readers-Guide.pdf
How Many People Knew Who Georgia Tann Really Was?
Every conversation about Georgia Tann starts with the question of, “How did Georgia Tann get away with it for so long?”
We covered the celebrity and political alliances she forged, but shouldn’t someone have said something? Were there no whistleblowers in the 30s and 40s?
It should be stressed that while Georgia Tann certainly had allies, not everyone fully comprehended what she was doing at the time.
The vast majority of the public only knew Georgia Tann as “the mother of modern adoption” as she found a way to innovate child adoption opportunities well beyond state borders.
Foster parents had no idea what was happening to the children and were simply grateful for having the chance to adopt a child – especially since many of them were older parents and never qualified in their home state because of age restrictions.
They had to seek national help, and Georgia Tann was their only lifeline to get what they wanted.
While we know she used bribery and extortion with a handful of people who might have wised up to what she was doing, we also know that she gave people every reason not to doubt her.
Author Barbara Bisantz Raymond, who interviewed many of Georgia Tann’s co-workers years after the fact, affirms the illusion of her wholesome character
“I don’t think that he or anybody else saw her as anything but a wonderful social worker, doing so much good. And she had that kind of personality. She was very manipulative.”
Unraveling Georgia Tann’s Secrets
It’s easy to say that the 1940s was a different world and that most people took you at face value. But even today, is it safe to say you know every one of your co-workers’ secrets?
It’s important to note that much of Georgia Tann’s empire was not necessarily illegal at the time.
Black market adoptions, which was how her business started, were not illegal. This was a period in American history where unwed mothers were universally seen as bad parents waiting to happen. It was a time when poor parents hardly had a prayer and had to struggle through the Great Depression, barely able to feed their own families.
The record-keeping system for adopted children was not as advanced in the mid-20th century as it is in modern times.
It was fairly common for the medical and cultural histories of foster children to be lost. Even if adoptive parents were decent human beings, it would be unlikely they would know what condition the child had, whether it was a physical or mental illness.
Georgia was shrewd enough to start a directive that closed all of her agency’s adoption records to the public, which the government approved. All information about an adoptee’s birth parents was kept private at her request, with the supposed intent to spare adoptees the stigma of illegitimacy.
While she did this to protect herself and hide her shocking behavior, legislators only saw what Georgia insisted they see.
https://gwentuinman.com/2020/05/27/delving-deeper-unwed-mothers-and-maternity-home-history/
The Tennessee Government Wakes Up From Georgia Tann’s Spell
The only reason we can conclude why Georgia Tann was ever discovered was because when you traffic over 5,000 children in total, there are bound to be complaints.
On September 11, 1950, Tennessee Governor Gordon Browning decided to launch an investigation into the Tennessee Children’s Home Society after receiving reports of the agency selling children for profit.
It was still technically a crime in Tennessee and the first lead they had to go on.
Memphis Attorney Robert Taylor pursued the case, and within a week, the investigation made headlines nationwide.
Taylor’s case unraveled Georgia’s empire of bribery, extortion, and criminal levels of neglect.
According to Linda Tollett Austin’s book, Babies for Sale: The Tennessee Children’s Home Adoption Scandal, the investigation concluded when Public Welfare Commissioner J. O. McMahan formally accused Georgia Tann and her associates of fraud.
Her organization had made over one million dollars in illegal child trafficking profit.
Georgia Tann’s Timely Death
A case of poetic justice, perhaps. But Tann had the good sense to die – and die of uterine cancer three days before the judicial system caught up with her.
She probably knew, on her death bed, that the investigation had started.
But while representatives from New York and California wanted to take action to restore justice and help displaced children, it was far too late.
It was practically impossible to go back to the beginning and undo the years of injustice that Georgia and her co-workers had perpetrated on clueless families and orphans.
Three days after Georgia Tann died, the state filed charges against Tann’s agency, but it was all but a symbolic gesture by then.
Even Judge Kelley, known for taking bribes to protect Georgia Tann’s methods, was acquitted of bribery charges.
She failed to “aid destitute families” but was not found to not profit from the organization’s doings and so protected by law. She resigned from her post after the investigation started, but by 1955, she also died without any formal charges, having stuck to her name.
The State of Tennessee did manage to sue the Tann’s estate for $500,000, and the Tennessee Children’s Home Society officially closed in 1950, shortly after the investigation started.
Aftermath of the Horrific Tennessee Children’s Home Society
Georgia Tann’s crimes never caught up to her in time. But the story was horrifying enough to change the way Americans approached the adoption process.
One could argue that in the years after Tann’s death, more regulations and more transparency were added to adoption agencies on the state level. No one wanted a Georgia Tann repeat.
The State of Tennessee, however, was admittedly slow to do anything proactive for the victims of the Tennessee Society.
By 1979, the state adopted legislation requiring the state to assist siblings who were trying to find each other. By 1996, further legislation was passed to help adult adoptees locate their birth parents, assuming they gave permission to be discovered.
As a nation, the United States took note of the Georgia Tann case, and many social workers, politicians, and other advocates started promoting ethical adoption practices and drawing attention to problems in the system.
Georgia Tann’s Legacy Is Unfortunately Not Dead
Disturbingly enough, some people still feel that not enough has been done to prevent another Georgia Tann rising.
The Family to Family Support Network states that whenever “ethical agencies can’t counsel women about parenting or adoption because expectant moms come in with a family they found online, Georgia’s dark legacy continues.”
The FTFSN also states that money is an unfortunate motivator even today. When hopeful adoptive families can bribe their way into adoption at the expense of more qualified and educated parents, Georgia Tann’s spirit is definitely still at work.
Many ethical organizations and concerned families want to see more consistent regulations across the United States, which might prevent further agency and private family abuses.
Some of the child victims of the Tennessee Children’s Home Society have recently been tributed. The historic Elmwood Cemetery in Memphis is the burial site of some of Georgia Tann’s victims.
Workers have memorialized the children with a memorial marker and an inscription that reads, “The hard lesson of their fate changed adoption procedure and law nationwide.”
With emotional words like that, and yet so little has been done, it feels as if Georgia Tann’s ruthless opportunistic spirit is still alive and undefeated.
https://www.familytofamilysupport.org/blog/georgia-tann-legacy
https://www.cronememorials.com/crone-monument-to-help-with-memorial
Georgia Tann: Evil Stepmother or Misunderstood Nanny?
It’s hard to be objective about a person like Georgia Tann.
But there are still some who say she wasn’t an evil stepmother stereotype.
Think back to her upbringing. As a child, Georgia grew up with some of the neighborhood children and played with them. She watched her father, George C. Tann, take in children who were neglected or homeless.
George had commented in the past that “I wish I had a doctor, school teacher, and a far-seeing minister to sit as a committee and help me decide what should be done with these children.”
There were so many neglected and impoverished children at the time, and many people probably reflected George’s sentiments. What can we possibly do with all these children?
Georgia herself took an interest in children and would often sneak off to court to hear court cases involving them instead of partying like the rest of her peers.
In one little-known incident, reported on in The Nashville Tennessean of October 22, 1950, Georgia Tann once bucked tradition by stepping out of a vehicle in public and greeting her father in front of his courtroom associates.
Embarrassed, George C. Tann told the others, “Gentleman, this is my daughter.”
It wasn’t just that she dared to speak to such an important man in public. What was dramatic about the scene was that she was carrying a “doorstep baby,” one who had been abandoned by its birth parents.
Perhaps the scariest part of it all was to remember that, at one time, Georgia Tann was an aspiring litigator who felt bad for children and wanted to help bring them a better life.
Later in life, Georgia may have felt that giving these children a home with a rich family (abuse notwithstanding) was their best chance at survival during a very precarious time.
More Powerful Than God, That Georgia Tann
As reported in The Los Angeles Times edition of August 20, 1990, Georgia Tann’s legacy essentially came down to a much broader argument: rich versus poor.
Denny Gladd, the president of Right to Know in Tennessee in the 1990s, states that Georgia’s motivation wasn’t evil, nor was it necessarily purely financial. Knowing that these children were poor and practically hopeless in an unstable world was the death sentence.
“In most cases,” Denny said, “the victims were poor people or unwed mothers. Miss Tann thought that affluence meant good, and I believe that’s how she justified what she was doing. She was taking children who never would have had a chance and placing them in homes where they were going to get good educations and all the material things.”
She was, after all, from a childhood home that associated wealth with love and prominence with success.
“She just thought that she knew better than God,” said Denny Gladd, dismissing Georgia as less a spiritual woman and more of a realist and cynic.
The Tann Family: A Product Of Their Time
Actress Mary Tyler Moore, who played Georgia Tann in Lifetime’s Stolen Babies, commented that Georgia Tann was less evil and more of a “product of her time.”
“If you have a choice between raising a child in a wealthy home with little love or a poor home with a lot of love, there is no question the children would do better in the wealthy home. That was the conventional wisdom.”
It’s also revealing to note that before we knew of Georgia Tann’s legacy, adoption was fairly rare in the United States, with most institutions averaging just several children a year.
But at the height of her conditional charity, Georgia Tann placed thousands of children with adoptive families. She changed the policy, the stigma, the administration, and the very culture of how the United States operated.
She showed others how they could help more “tired, poor, the huddled masses yearning to breathe free.”
Before she became known as a monster, she was a recognized woman, a feminist, and a judge’s ambitious daughter. One who dared to suggest that we could do a lot more for children than we had ever dreamed.
How unfortunate that her legacy of charity was tainted with the corruption of power.
True to her father’s words, if only she had made friends with a doctor, school teacher, or a far-seeing minister who could have helped her make moral decisions that could have saved more children than she harmed.
https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1990-08-20-vw-882-story.html
https://iu.pressbooks.pub/perspectives4/chapter/the-black-market-behind-adoption-in-modern-america/
All images are credited to the Preservation and Special Collections Department, University
Libraries, University of Memphis, and Martha Washington College
L. A. Breaux 