Finding a loving home for an orphaned child is gratifying, a calling, unless…
Being a parent is a passion that some couples cannot achieve by conventional methods. Yet they yearn to have a child that they can love, nurture and pass on their beliefs and values to. Back at the turn of the 20th Century, there were no such things as IVF and other scientific methods of infertility treatments.
Although initially frowned upon, adoption was the only alternative method of having a child in the 1920s. From 1924 to 1950, Beulah George “Georgia” Tann, helped many couples realize their dreams with her adoption agency in Memphis, Tennessee. She became a legend in this field although this wasn’t her first choice of career.
Her early life was steered by a domineering father who primarily wanted her to become a concert pianist. Despite attaining a degree in music in 1913, she ideally wanted to become a lawyer like her father used to be.
At first, he supported her fully, helping her to pass the state bar exam. Unfortunately, in the 1900s, it was unseemly for a woman to actually work as a lawyer. So, with very few options available, she chose a path that was acceptable for unmarried women at that time, becoming a social worker.
Working as a social worker lead her first to a starting position in a children’s home in Mississippi, then to a more senior post in the largest children’s society in Memphis, the Tennessee Children’s Home Society. They had branches in Jackson, Knoxville, and Chattanooga and in the next two years, she absorbed all the information she could about the inner workings of the organization. For a reason.
The full potential of the Society was never going to be realized under the current owners, though it was plain for her to see. So, two years after joining the company in 1924, her ambition rising, she resorted to using shady tactics to aggressively take over the organization.
Her hostile takeover was not driven by an urge to improve the standard of living of the children under her care. No, it was driven by greed.
Adopting children was a lucrative business with agencies being able to charge $7 per child placed into adoption in the state of Tennessee. A hefty fee at the time, but Georgia Tann saw more lucrative opportunities further afield.
By targeting couples out of state, in New York and California, who were desperate for a child and nowhere else to turn, she could charge premium prices.
Every three weeks, two of Georgia’s most trusted workers would travel independently to these two states with four to six babies to see prospective parents. These wealthy clients were more than willing to pay $700 for each child, and Georgia Tann was more than willing to fill the hole in their lives, for a price.
She also charged for travel expenses, hotel rooms, background checks on the couples, as well as highly inflated paperwork costs. And on top of all this, the state of Tennessee continued paying $61,000 a year to the Society for looking after these poor orphans.
Between 1940 to 1950 over 3,000 children were placed by Georgia’s team in these two states alone.
The amount of money Georgia Tann was pocketing personally during this period was astronomical. Even so, some would argue that she was doing a good deed, performing a beneficial service of placing orphaned children with loving couples, couples who could not conceive themselves but who had the means to provide a better life for these poor children.
If only that was the case.
Beulah George “Georgia” Tann was a child trafficker.
Her method of finding the children ranged from duping poor families into handing their children over to her care, taking newborns away from inmates at mental institutions and from underaged wards of the state. She even went as far as separating poor unwed mothers from their babies at the time of birth directly from inside hospitals, the nurses paid by Tann informing them that the child had died from complications.
To keep up with demand, she procured a steady supply of children from nurseries up and down the state of Tennessee and Nebraska. Her methods were evil in their simplicity and, with her network of collaborators, worked for years. In the case of nurseries, all it would take was for an unwitting single parent to drop a child off in the morning, assured that their child would be in a safe environment.
When they would return at the end of the day, they would be told that welfare agents had taken the child into care to better protect them. Being poor, they would have no means to complain, no one to turn to.
Their child was simply gone.
As demand continued to rise, she used the reputation of her own society to accept children on a temporary basis only to have them and their records simply vanish into thin air. And, horrifyingly, she even resorted to directly luring poor children into luxury cars with sweet promises, and a grandmotherly smile.
She was ruthless, understanding fully that in those days kids would play on porches, in front gardens, in the streets, unsupervised, and she took full advantage of the disadvantaged.
This network of child abductions thrived for twenty-six long years, partly due to her willing accomplices in child-friendly places, but really more to the complicity of the Memphis Family Court Judge, Camille Kelley.
Judge Kelley’s role was to give the stamp of approval on all the adoption paperwork so everything appeared legal and above board. Some of the children she signed off on, who she declared legally separated from their divorced mothers, were fortunate enough to go to the homes of famous actors and personalities, such as Joan Crawford, while others were placed in homes where they were used as nothing more than cheap labor.
Georgia Tann didn’t care as long as the money kept rolling in.
The whiff of adoption fraud began to circulate around the organization in the late 1940s when, after years of requests from the state of Tennessee, follow-up reports for the children placed into adoption never materialized.
One of the catalysts of her downfall was the death of the local mayor who had been on her payroll for years. Without his protection, the governor, Gordon Browning, became the driving force behind the investigation to bring Tann to justice after it came to his attention that she was selling children for profit.
Further investigation unearthed enough damning information to warrant bringing charges against Georgia Tann and her accomplices. He discovered that over 5,000 stolen children had passed through her evil clutches over the years, and with decades of records destroyed there was no way to trace the children to where they had been placed, or back to their real families.
Damningly, he found that within the orphanage itself over 500 hundred kids had died from mistreatment, neglect, physical abuse, and even murder. Suspicions swirled around the Society but with her long list of friends in high places, she continued to conduct business as usual, suspicions deflected, outright accusations swept aside.
Governor Gordon Browning was determined that she should pay for her crimes. The mounting evidence against Tann was guaranteed to put her behind bars for years.
Before those charges could be brought to bear by his attorney, Robert Taylor, even before news of what she had done could be brought forward in a court of law, Georgia Tann died from cancer.
Her network of accomplices either melted into the background, died before they, too, could be prosecuted, or were not investigated further due to insufficient evidence.
Their good fortune was that Georgia Tann was accustomed to destroying records, not only of the kidnapped children but the co-conspirators in her network. Even Judge Kelly escaped prosecution as there was no paper trail of her accepting any bribes, but the smell of a scandal of this magnitude forced her to retire not long after the investigation began.
And due to a law passed in 1935, whatever records were recorded of child adoptions were sealed to protect the adoptees who were unaware of, or turned a blind eye to, what Tann was doing.
This meant that thousands of children to this very day are living their lives unaware that their past was stolen away from them by a prolific child trafficker, masquerading as a concerned grandmotherly figure who cared about bringing families together, called Georgia Tann.
For her, a child was just a commodity to be traded and sold for profit.