Barbara Bisantz Raymond - 29 Apr

I learned of Georgia Tann in 1990 from Alma Sipple, whod met her decades earlier. I was interviewing Alma for a magazine piece. She said she could still see Georgia: a stern-looking woman with close cropped gray hair, round, wireless glasses, and an air of utter authority.

She gained entry to Almas apartment in Memphis, Tennessee, by identifying herself as a social worker and orphanage director concerned about Almas ten-month-old daughter, who had a cold. After examining Irma, Georgia pronounced her seriously ill.

When Alma said she had no money for a doctor, Georgia offered to obtain free treatment by passing Irma off as her ward. She warned Alma not to accompany her daughter to the hospital: If the nurses know youre her mother theyll charge you, she said. Two days later she told Alma that her baby had died.

Alma didnt believe her. But neither frantic visits to Georgias orphanage, from which she was ejected, nor desperate trips to the police station, where she was ignored, nor haunting of hospitals and graveyards revealed the truth: that Georgia had flown Irma to an adoptive home in Ohio.

When I interviewed Alma forty-five years later she had finally found her daughter, but while the reunion had been happy their relationship was fragile. Irma was uncomfortable with the television coverage of the reunion that Alma had sought, and educated enough to intimidate a mother whod only finished sixth grade. What can I get her for Christmas? Alma asked me. Im afraid to insult her with my taste.

A year later Alma had a heart attack and called me from the hospital. She and her daughter were not in touch. Only someone whos lost a child this way can know how horrible it is, Alma said, crying. Theres a hole in me that will never be filled.

I couldnt forget the woman who had ruined Almas life and so many others. Georgia had arranged over five thousand adoptions between 1924 and 1950, many involving children she had kidnapped. She had molested some of the little girls in her care and placed some children with pedophiles.

Georgia had also caused so many child deaths that by the 1930s the official infant mortality rate in Memphis was the highest in the country. And the actual number of Memphis children who died was even larger than the official count, because Georgia failed to report many deaths. She also neglected to bury all of her dead children in the cemetery used by her adoption agency. They simply disappeared, a former Memphian told me.

Still, most of Georgias children survived, and grew up all across the country, many in her favorite markets, Los Angeles and New York. Those adopted by Joan Crawford, June Allyson and Dick Powell, and other celebrities were featured in magazines, and some have had distinguished careers. But most are seemingly ordinary people coping with the extraordinary fact of having been placed with adoptive parents unscreened for anything but wealth.

Some of these adoptive parents loved their new children and treated them well. But other children were made to serve as domestics and farmhands. Some were starved, beaten with hoes and razor strops, hung from hooks, and raped.

There seemed no bottom to the pain Georgia had caused, and I flew to Memphis, consumed by questions. And besides the questions about her and the consequences of her actions there was another one: why hadnt anyone stopped her? She had been expelled from Mississippi before moving to Tennessee. What had made Memphis ripe for her? And what aspects of her era had facilitated her crimes?

Only after situating Georgia within her context would I discover her other dimensionthe one that allowed her to hurt millions more people than those she directly touched. While building her black market business, she had invented modern American adoption.

Its hard to overestimate her influence. When she began her work in Tennessee in the 1920s, adoption as we know it did not exist. Eugenicists had made Americans afraid to adopt, and agencies like the Boston Childrens Aid Society were arranging a scant five adoptions a year. In 1928, however, only four years after Georgias arrival in Memphis, she arranged 206.

She did much more than popularize adoption. She commercialized it, charging adoptive parents large fees and marketing children in nationally syndicated newspaper ads.

Worse, she stole adoptees identities. To cover her kidnapping crimes, and to appease clients threatened by the possibility of their new children someday reuniting with their birth parents, she falsified adoptees birth certificates, sealing their true documents and issuing them false certificates portraying their adoptive parents as their birth parents.

The practice was approved by legislators who believed it would spare adoptees the onus of illegitimacy. All fifty states ultimately falsified adoptees birth certificates.

Georgias legacy has endured into the twenty-first century, and the vast majority of Americas 6 million adoptees are still legally denied knowledge of their roots, even after they become adults. Many cant find their birth parents or learn potentially life-saving information about their family health histories.

But finally, fifty-seven years after Georgias death in 1950, adoptees are escaping her influence. In a dramatic legislative and court victory in 1999, people who had been adopted in Tennessee won access to their original birth certificates and adoption records. Since the passage of the Tennessee open adoption records law, adoptees have won similar legal battles in twelve other states. They wont stop until Georgias legacy is eradicated throughout the nation.

Georgia accomplished all that her victims are fighting to undo through boldness, cunning, and the exploitation of her time and place. I began my research by studying the environment in which she had operated, paying a visit to the site of her orphanage on Poplar Avenue.