I’m going to begin this story by saying that I’m talking here about a case in America, in the 1920s to 1950s. Obviously adoption is different over there, and a hundred years is a long time ago. But it is a shocking story, and despite thirty years in the profession it isn’t something I’d ever heard of until last month. It is a story of abuse of power, mistreatment of the vulnerable and how corruption spreads. We have to look into the abyss sometimes, and in doing so, the abyss looks back.
On the face of it, Georgia Tann was an extremely impressive woman. In a time when career opportunities and education weren’t easy for women, she got a law degree. Despite having a Judge for a father, she wasn’t able to get a job in law and went instead into one of the few professions open to educated women at the time, social work. She became the head of the Tennessee Children’s Home Society.
Also, at that time, adoption wasn’t really viewed as taking a child into your home to be part of the family and instead rather as having another pair of hands to do housework or manual labour on farms. Georgia was fundamental in changing that, and did a great deal to popularise adoption as being a way of taking children who needed homes and placing them as part of the family. She was one of the early pioneers of describing children and their personalities as a way of promoting families to come forward for them. She placed children with celebrities such as Joan Crawford and the attendant publicity really helped to turn around people’s ideas about adoption. Adoption became fashionable and desirable amongst the wealthy and influential, and that effect rippled outwards. She was described as the woman who invented adoption in America.
(The wrestler Ric Flair was a child who was adopted through the Tennessee Children’s Home)
Under her guidance, the Tennessee Children’s Home flourished. By way of example, in 1920 Boston placed only five children for adoption in a year, but in 1928 the Tennessee Children’s Home placed 206 children.
HOWEVER….
Georgia had a strong conviction that children from low-income families, particularly with single mothers, should be removed from them and placed with families of what she described as ‘the higher type’.
And her methods of securing children to be placed was, well, criminal.
For example, take the case of Alma Sipple. Alma was a single mother and her daughter Irma developed an illness. Georgia attended her home and told her that Irma was very sick and needed to go to hospital. Alma didn’t have insurance and couldn’t pay the medical bills, but Georgia had a solution for that. Alma could sign some paperwork and then Georgia would be able to use her own medical insurance to get Irma’s treatment. Alma agreed. Irma never came back.
Alma visited the hospital and was told by staff that her daughter had died. She asked to see her and was refused. The hospital staff were on the take from the Tennessee Children’s Home (whilst state arranged adoptions cost adoptive parents $7, the service from the TCH was charging their rich and keen clients as much as $5,000 – that’s about $81,000 today) and this was a very well-established technique. Alma was told that her daughter had been buried but nobody was willing to tell her where. She went to the police, who were also receiving bribes, as were the Judges stamping the adoption paperwork, and the police told her that the best she could hope for was to be charged with her intention to defraud the medical bills.
It took Alma until 1989 when watching a documentary to recognise Georgia Tann as the woman who stole her baby, and thankfully as a result, she and Irma were able to reconnect.
Irma was one of many children adopted by deception. Mothers would be told to sign paperwork whilst they were still groggy from anaesthesia post birth, and doctors would lie that they had been awake and fully competent when they signed. Sometimes children would just be snatched from the street.
Under Georgia’s command, the Tennessee Children’s Home was estimated to have stolen 5,000 babies. Nineteen children awaiting placements, or having been returned from placements that broke down, died of neglect and mistreatment at the Children’s Home and were buried at a local cemetary in a single large plot with no headstones.
In 2015 a memorial was put up, reading “In memory of the 19 children who finally rest here unmarked if not unknown, and of all the hundreds who died under the cold, hard hand of the Tennessee Children’s Home Society. Their final resting place unknown. Their final peace a blessing. The hard lesson of their fate changed adoption procedure and law nationwide.”
The exact number of children who died is unknown, but some estimates put the figure as high as 500 children. Many of the survivors talked of abuse and mistreatment by adopters – Georgia Tann had a very firm view that children under 7 would have no memories of their original families and sold that belief to adopters hard. When adopters found that those children were (to us very understandably) confused by their new names and traumatised by loss of families, they found that difficult to cope with and rejection and abuse happened far too often.
In 1950 an investigation began into allegations that the Tennessee Children’s Home was selling children for profit. Georgia died of cancer just three days before charges were filed – prosecutors estimated that she had made around a million dollars from child trafficking – around $16 million in today’s money. By that time, Georgia was the head of the Adopted Children’s Association of America.
That money corrupted and poisoned everything – every person who should have spoken out and stopped what was happening kept silent and took the money.
(I’m very grateful to episodes 116 and 117 of the Heart Starts Pounding podcast, which tells this story in a sensitive, vivid and compelling way, and to the Tennessee Children’s Home Society Collection, which keeps an archive of information to keep this vital story alive)
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