“She was a relentless, cold-blooded demon, a female smiling Buddah, a very wicked woman,” I was told by a Memphis pediatrician who’d tried vainly to curb her in the 1940s. “She got bigger and bigger the more power she had. She was pompous, self important- she was like Hitler, riding around in a big Cadillac driven by a uniformed chauffeur. She terrorized everyone.”
I learned of Georgia Tann earlier this year while reading Before We Were Yours and was both fascinated and disgusted by the woman who, in a sick way, founded the modern system of adoption.
During the late 19th century the city of Memphis, once a thriving river town, was struck by a plague of Yellow Fever that decimated the city’s population and the survivor’s resolve. A young grammar school drop out named Edward Crump moved to Memphis for the same reasons people were fleeing because he saw the weakened city as his opportunity for political greatness. By the early 20th century he had primed the city for the woman who would corrupt adoption and ruin the lives of thousands. Tann was born to an upper middle class family and had originally desired to be a lawyer. Unfortunately that was not a option for a woman in the 1910s and, since teaching didn’t appeal to her, Georgia decided to start a career in the new field of social work.
The world would probably be a better place if women could have practiced law in the early 1900s…
Tann began her career as a social worker but quickly began resorting to stealing babies in order to satisfy the demand she was creating for rich families to adopt children. She promoted the idea that adopted children were “blank slates” who could be molded by their savior adoptive parents. She began skirting the law, no longer getting consent from birth parents and bribing city officials- often by given their childless wives a baby! Tann had spotters in various hospitals who would tell women they gave birth to stillborn children and then whisk the infants away to one of Tann’s homes. She would also visit poor families and deem them unfit for children which gave her a steady stream of older children to sell as well. She had annual Christmas newspaper ads for children! She favored blonde hair and blue eyes in children, often shaving off years to make older children more appealing to potential adopters. While several of her victims were sold to rich families who loved them as their own there were many instances where children were sent to abusive families who could afford Tann’s fees.
Raymond does a serviceable job of getting the facts across to the reader but she clumsily tries to add her own experience of adopting her daughter, and her daughter’s eventual search for her birth parents, into the Tann victims’ stories. She also could have done a better job honing her timeline. She bounced around a lot; I prefer my non fiction to be linear.
Overall this is an interesting read about a truly heinous woman that a lot of people are unaware of despite her impact on the modern world. She had the courts wrapped around her finger which lead to sealed adoption records, which are only beginning to be unsealed, and putting the adopted parents’ names on birth certificates. While her methods were corrupt she did influence the way modern adoption is handled, namely that children are brought in as family members not servants. Unfortunately Tann died of cancer before she could answer for her crimes. There are still many people in Memphis who were wary of speaking against her for Raymond’s book.