Stuff You Should Know - The Awful Crimes of Georgia Tann

Episode Date: April 25, 2024

Georgia Tann was a bad human. We feel safe in saying that because she kidnapped babies from poor families to sell to wealthy ones. Listen in if you can stomach it.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Do you live in Washington DC? Are you sitting around fretting about this upcoming election? Maybe you're even working on one of these campaigns. Well we've got a great stress reliever for you and that's coming out to see us on May 30th at the Warner Theater for Stuff You Should Know Live. Yeah, we guarantee zero political jokes. One hundred percent zero political jokes if you come out and see us. We're gonna be in Medford, Mass on May 29th.

The next night we'll be in D.C. on May 30th. And then the night after that, we'll be at our old friend, the town hall in Manhattan Town, NYC. That's right. So check out tickets. You can go to stuffyoushouldknow.com. You can go to the theater websites themselves.

Avoid those secondary ticket brokers or check out our Linktree, right Josh? Yeah, Linktree slash SYSK live. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio. Hey and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh and there's Chuck and Ben here too. So this is Stuff You Should Know.

Yeah, big trigger warning up front and we may issue even a second one after breaks or something. This is about a human monster. It's a story of a human monster who did awful things to children. So don't listen to it if that is a trigger and don't let your children listen to this. Yes, for sure. Um, so Chuck, I'm always on the lookout for somebody whose grave I'd like to spit on. And I've never found anybody before, before we started researching this.

Yeah, boy, there's no getting around it. If I ever make it out to Hickory, Mississippi, I will definitely go out of my way to spit on Georgia Tan's grave because she deserves it. Yeah, we'll get to her sort of upbringing here in a sec, but just very quickly, Georgia Tan was a woman who worked in social work, and she made a long and wealthy career, got rich by kidnapping babies,

falsifying birth records, stealing kids from generally poor families, uneducated mothers, and selling them to rich people. Yeah. She was hands down the wealthiest social worker to ever live. Yeah. I'm having a hard time already. So Chuck, let's set the scene a little bit because like the idea of adoption is not that old in the United States. For a very long time, if you were orphaned, if your parents abandoned you, whatever led you to this, this position where you were no longer under the

care of a grownup, you were extraordinarily vulnerable. If you were lucky, relatives might take you in, maybe a kindly neighbor. But you were also very much at risk for basically becoming somebody's indentured servant. It was like without without that whole idea of That's what became of orphans. We wouldn't have Dickens today, basically. Yeah for sure There were a lot of you know, we've talked a lot about sort of the movement after industrialization

from more rural farming communities to the city. That increased a lot of kind of the rate of orphans in cities because in a lot of these poor neighborhoods, you had outbreaks of cholera, you had yellow fever. A lot of these urban communities were decimated, killing parents, leaving a lot of children behind, abandoned. One thing that happened during that period was something called the Orphan Train. Starting in 1854 for about 65 years, about 150,000 orphan kids were shipped from the Northwest in cities to rural towns. But again, most of the time it looked more like a slave trade

than like they weren't being adopted as family members. They were being kind of auctioned off at train stations and lineups. Yeah, they were basically adopted as hands. I wanted to say hired hands, but I don't think they were hired. In some cases they didn't even get room and board. Like if you were fostered out, if you made it into a foster home, you very often had to work to repay the family for your care. Yeah.

So this was, this was how it was for a very long time. Um, adoption just, it wasn't, it didn't click with Americans in particular, at least. Because kids that were in that situation were, were viewed as like inferior, morally inferior, potentially genetically inferior. It was a very mean time. So you didn't want those kids. You didn't want to bring them into your family. And it wasn't until I think about the 1930s that the idea of adoption, as

we understand it today, where a couple or a family want to include a child that's not biologically theirs into their family, that's less than a century old, that concept in the United States. Yeah, kind of like adoption as we know it. If you were out of wedlock, it's horrific to think of how we thought of these kids and the women that were in that situation. Just recently I went to Memphis, and that's where this story takes place, where my mom grew up and her family. And so we went there on a trip to kind of show my daughter where Grand-Grand grew up in her high

school and all that stuff. And at one point we were driving through a neighborhood and my mom was like, oh, there's the old house for unwed mothers. And I was like, wait, I've heard that term. What is that? And she was like, if you were pregnant out of wedlock, then there's a very good chance that you like

were sent to live in a house, like kind of removed. Yeah. And you told the neighbors that you, that your daughter went off to, to stay with relatives to help like a sick aunt or something like that. And then she would come back 10 months later and everybody would move along. Like there was nothing, like nothing had happened, but there would be a child out there in the world that was no longer with her. Yeah, so that's the sort of stage

that we've set for when Georgia Tan came into the world. Was born in 1891 in Mississippi, raised in Hickory, Mississippi, was the daughter of Bula in Georgetown. Her father was a very prominent judge. Part of his job as a judge back then because of the way things were was placing kids, finding homes for orphan kids and abandoned kids

and neglected kids. And because like we said, adoption wasn't such a big thing at the time. So that was part of his job, was placing these kids sometimes in foster homes, sometimes with families who, you know, sometimes it was a great situation, but not always, and sometimes just like to the state asylum. And also the idea of like what you think of in like that old timey orphanage

where there's like nuns walking around. Like that was a real thing. Like charities often ran homes for children, orphanages. Um, but it wasn't any place you wanted to be. Although it was, I mean, I suppose it was better than the alternative in a lot of cases, but I think that you were just so vulnerable that that's not something you could say across the board. Like I'm sure there were people, kids who were better off fending for themselves on the street than in some of the homes that they were put in or some of the orphanages that they stayed in. There was just, nobody was looking out for them.

Yeah, for sure. So in 1906, when Georgia was 15 years old, this is kind of how she, I guess, got the idea for all this. She met a couple of orphan kids, a five-year-old and a three-year-old, from her father's court. A 15-year-old talked a wealthy local couple into adopting them. I guess that's when the light bulb went off, where she equated placing families with people who had money, and instead of in a kind-hearted way, giving these kids a home, it was like, I can make some money off of this.

Yeah. That's crazy. That's a crazy thought, but that was basically the germ of this whole thing. It's a crazy instinct, you know? Yeah. But it says a lot about her. I think that was very much her instinct. And I think that's, it says everything you need to know about her. Not only did she have that thought, she ran with it. Yeah. Initially she was going to become an attorney and she passed the Mississippi bar. Um, but either her father forbade her from following that.

Um, and sent her off to, to be schooled and, um, uh, to become a concert pianist. Or it was just socially, you just didn't, a woman couldn't be an attorney. I'm not sure which one was the case. But either way, she didn't end up being an attorney. She also didn't end up being a concert pianist. She ended up becoming a social worker. And her first gig was with Mississippi, I think the state of Mississippi, basically working as a social worker,

visiting homes, and very quickly stealing babies to sell herself, like right out of the gate, she basically started the scam that she would later become famous for. Yeah, there was a woman named Rose Harvey, which some sources say it was like her very first sort of field visit. Others say it was just early on,

but at any rate, she visited Rose Harvey, who was young. I've seen that she was widowed, but I also saw that the father of her kids was forced to sign a false document basically stating that she was an unfit mother. I think it was her father. Oh, it was her father? That's what I got from it, yeah. But it could also be confused that they were, yeah.

Yeah, I saw it was Onyx's father, but either way, I mean, it's no less reprehensible either way, but she found, Georgia Tan found Onyx, who was a two-year-old boy playing at the house, basically walked in and kidnapped this kid. Just walked out, put the baby in her car, got her father the judge after, you know, a member of her family signed that she was an unfit mother and had the boy listed as an unfit child, or I'm sorry, an abandoned child, and that was it. Very sadly, Rose Harvey was even able to muster up the money to hire an attorney, but she was ill. She had diabetes, she was not doing well, she's very ill, and just stood no chance basically against that system. Yeah, and in particular, the father of George Georgia Tan got involved and was like, this is not

happening, like, do not let this case go forward. Like he was a judge in the 19 aughts Mississippi. Like I'm pretty sure he could, he could make that happen. So yeah, like you said, she never had a chance, But either because of that particular case or another similar case, or potentially because Georgia Tann was actually a, she had a lifelong partner, another woman who was a childhood friend and they actually, I guess, fell in love and spent the rest of their lives together. That is also possibly one of the reasons why they got out of Mississippi. But eventually, I think in the early 1920s, they left Mississippi, landed in Texas, and then ultimately ended up in Memphis a short time later. But very bizarrely, in the interim, her partner had gotten pregnant by a man out of wedlock and had a son named George.

So now they had a son. And then Georgia adopted a son named George. So now they had a son and then Georgia adopted a girl named June. So they built a little family. But when you know more about Georgia's view on kids and adoption and how she really viewed it, it's really strange to me that she ever did it herself. Yeah, for sure.

This is another story too that also,, a lot of times things happen in history just because of when they happened. She was definitely fired from her job for doing what she did. Like, she may have left also because of her relationship, but she was fired and it was a time where, like, no one knows. You can just move a state over and start over. And it's not like there's really no way, like if she didn't list them maybe on a resume or whatever, or who knows even how it worked back then, she would not have been able to get work elsewhere,

which is still a problem today. Yes. With that terrible story about the fake doctor who just kept practicing in different states. It was a podcast, I can't remember, Dr. Death, I think. But it's amazing even with technology today that that can still happen, you know? Yeah. And also, one of the things that I found from researching this is that the secrecy that

developed at this time around adoption that's still around today, We did a short stuff on it, I think, right? That still is keeping kids in the system vulnerable to exploitation and predation, and including essentially private sales, rehoming, I think is what they call it. Should we take a break? Let's take a break. All right. We'll take a break. Going to go wash our mouse out with soap and we'll be right back. understand the moment we're living in without knowing where we've been. On every episode

of NPR's Throughline, we take a story from the news and go back in time to where it started, where it really started. To answer one important question, how did we get here? Find NPR's through line on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts. in season two. This podcast explores complex concepts of identity, resilience, erasure, and genocide. Table for two, season two. Think of the show as a deconstructed Oscar party in podcast form. Each episode takes place over the romance of a meal

and feels like you're seated next to a different guest at that dinner. Hear these podcasts and more on your free iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Elliot Coney and this is Family Therapy. My best hopes, I guess, identify the life that I want and work towards it. I've never seen a man take care of my mother the way she needed to be taken care of. I get the impression that you don't feel like you've done everything right as a father. Is that true?

That's true and I'm not offended by that. Thank you for going through those things and thank you for overcoming them. Wow. Thank God for delivering us. Every time I have one of our sessions, our sessions be positive. It just keeps me going.

I feel like my focus is redirected in a different aspect of my life now. So, how'd we do today? We did good. The Black Effect presents Family Therapy. Listen now on the Black Effect Podcast Network, iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. All right. So Georgia Tann makes her way to Tennessee, to the Tennessee Children's Home Society,

was where her next job was. And from 1924 to 1950, a span of 26 years, she sold, kidnapped and sold more than 5,000 kids. And as you said before, she made millions of dollars. From what I saw, she made around a million dollars in her time, which is equivalent to something like 11 million today. And she sold these kids to some really high-profile customers. A lot of them were in New York, a lot of them were in California, and some of them were stars. Like Joan Crawford adopted twins from

her, apparently. Yeah, and this is, if you saw the movie Mommy Dearest, this was not that girl, I believe that was Christina who was also adopted. But these were her later adopted daughters, Cynthia and Kathy. But also Lana Turner, Dick Powell and June Allison, Pearl Buck, the author. Then in a very weird and sad twist, a guy that we worked with, Rick Flair, the

wrestler, was one of these babies. Which is just crazy to think about and obviously has deep emotional trauma, but I think he elected to not sort of find his biological family, right? Yeah, his biological brother reached out to him and he's like, I don't really wanna strike up a relationship here. Oh man. He's like, what are we gonna talk about?

I think is what he said. But yeah, he said that in addition to that, like just the trauma from it is still with him, obviously, because he was stolen from his family. Like these kids were stolen from their families. In some cases, their parents spent the rest of their lives looking for them, but because of the way that these adoptions were carried out,

there was no paper trail that these people could access to find whatever happened to their kids. Yeah, absolutely not. She made sure that happened. She very much was of the mind, like we mentioned earlier, that like some of society viewed these kids as less than. She was 100% down with that line of thinking. She thought that poor single mothers were damaged goods. She called them breeders. She called them cows. She thought they were genetically inferior. She used marketing tactics. She was a fraudster. But all of this like worked. You don't adopt out 5,000 children without working really, really hard to do that

using the most, you know, in her case, the most reprehensible tactics you can imagine. Yeah, let's talk about her tactics real quick, shall we? Because I can't wait any longer. It's just... I just can't, okay? Yeah, well, before we get to the actual tactics of the adoption, we should say this whole time this is going on, she's running a house of horrors in Memphis. She's running an orphanage there, and hundreds of babies are dying under her care.

That's just the background of what's going on while she's adopting these kids out. Right. We said that adoption wasn't really a thing in the United States until about the 1930s, and it started to kind of spread. Here's the big twist about this whole thing. The reason that we have adoption today the way that it is, like the fact that childless couples will go, you know, take a kid into their life and like, you're like, you're my family now. You're our family. She started that. Like you can trace that almost single-handedly back to Georgia Tan, which in a way like kind of complicates her legacy, but really doesn't because the stuff she did was so despicable

that even that can be, you can't even consider that like a mark in her favor. It just, just immediately is overwhelmed by all the horrible stuff she did. Yeah. Doesn't complicated for me at all. That would have changed anyway. And we did not need a human monster to make it happen. That's like saying that, well, we got Volkswagen's because of Hitler. So, you know, Hugo boss.

Yeah, that's a great point. But yeah, no, that's a great point. But yeah, no, she's kind of like the opposite of where like you really like somebody's work, but you find out that they're a terrible person and you have to reconcile that. This is like hating the person and just, you know, there was one piece of her work that was worthwhile or legitimate, but yeah, it doesn't do anything. Yeah. wild or legitimate, but yeah, it doesn't do anything. Yeah, so her, you know, she would adopt kids out of all ages, but what she really concentrated on was babies, because, you know, even today, adopting a baby is much more in demand.

And especially then when adoption was just sort of a new thing, she was sort of selling the idea, like, hey, you get a blank slate here. Like these babies, some of them may be from bad homes, but you've got them right out of the gate and you can mold them into whatever you want. And that's when she wasn't lying about who the parents were because she also did that and would say things like there was a one-night stand basically between a socialite and a doctor, and it was just a big mistake. But you should see their genes, incredible genes.

One of the other things she was very well known for, especially in Tennessee, was that every Christmas she would take out advertising space in the press cemetery, the Memphis newspaper, and it was like a Christmas adoption drive, a baby drive, but it wasn't like open your home to this wonderful child. It was like, so do you want a real live Christmas present? That was like one of the one of the ads. Could you use a Christmas baby? And she would like, they would vow like, this is a drive.

We're gonna adopt off 25 to 30 kids. And I think to the people who were reading this and who saw this every Christmas, they were taking it like it was an adoption drive. They didn't realize, and this is the thing, no one seems to have really realized, at least no one who had any real power to do anything about it, knew what was going on, that she was making this money. Like this wasn't allowed to go on an open site. There was a lot of machinations and groundwork laid to keep this as far out of the public eye as possible, but to let her just do it as flagrantly as possible.

The general person who was aware of her didn't know what she was doing, I should say. No, or like you said, they thought that, you know, they thought she was a hero. Right. They didn't realize she was selling kids openly in the newspaper every Christmas. Yes, after kidnapping hero. Right, they didn't realize she was selling kids openly in the newspaper every Christmas. Yes, after kidnapping them. So financially, and this one is a little hard to parse out, I've seen different things, but what I think I found the reality, which was in the state of Tennessee at the time,

it was supposed to cost $7 for an in-state adoption and about $700 to $750 out of state. And I saw that she was charging more like, I think 80% of her adoptions were New York and California to wealthy families, about $5,000 instead of $700, which is close to 90 grand today. Yes, for sure. Yeah, that was, I think average was about five, like five grand, or was that the height of the whole thing?

Was that as much as you would pay? I'm not sure, I just saw $5,000. So, the whole thing, again, it's really tough to, I'm not gonna hammer on this because it's just so nuts, but through those Christmas drives, through introducing the concept of adoption, it started to spread in Memphis, in Tennessee, in the South, and it actually spread out of the South.

This trend of adoption grew out of the South in the 1930s and 40s, again, because of Georgia Tann, and then it just spread and kept going. But from the outset, she targeted wealthy customers, clients, you can't really call them anything else, in New York and California, like I said. But there doesn't seem to be any evidence whatsoever that any of the adopting parents knew that their kids were anything than what she was presenting them as, which was kids from

good backgrounds, like you said maybe a one-night stand, and the parents had willingly given them up. That's what they thought they were getting. And that the fact that they had to pay through the nose for them just meant that these kids were like that desirable, their genes were that good. And it's ironic to me because you don't think of the South as being much of a trendsetter, but it set the trend of adoption in the United States. It started in the South and just kind of spread from there.

But out of the gate, she targeted adoptive parents, wealthy ones in New York and California. Yeah, for sure. You know, we already talked about the kidnapping. She would, sometimes she would drive around in a limousine in a neighborhood so kids would, could run out to her car that were all excited and take them. She would, and this is,

I'm having a hard time even reading this part, but she would go to new mothers who had just given birth in the hospital and tell them that their infant was dead and steal the baby. Yeah, that was a common trick. Another one was she would present mothers who had just given birth who might still be under the effects of anesthesia or something like that with papers and said just sign these these are like you know standard paperwork for having a baby and they were actually full adoption papers. So even if you could say you stole my baby there were cases where she could point to paperwork that said no you signed your kid away, sorry. Clearly, you're crazy, essentially.

She also had a network of nurses. She was, in some cases, present in the hospital and spoke with some of the mothers, but she also had nurses working for her that would either trick the mothers themselves or would just outright steal babies from nurseries. Yeah, nurses and fake people dressed as nurses. Yeah, I mean, it's literally not her the whole time.

This is a very, very big operation. So, you know, earlier when you said no one, no one empowered to stop it, like no one empowered that wasn't on the dole. Yeah, and in particular, there was one woman, a judge named Camille Kelly, one of two women judges in the South at one woman, a judge named Camille Kelly, one of two women judges in the South at the time, who was a progressive and a juvenile court judge, and she was fully in Georgia Tann's pocket, fully cooperated. There's a writer named Barbara Raymond who wrote probably the most exhaustive account

of this whole horrible chapter of American history. And she estimated that Camille Kelly, Judge Kelly supplied Georgia Tann with about 20% of the kids that she kidnapped. So that would put it at about a thousand kids that Judge Kelly essentially handed over to Georgia Tann to steal and sell. Yeah, and that's like, that's things that Judge Kelly was doing as far as bending the rules, sealing adoption records, signing off on false paperwork, stuff like that, and fraud, to driving around herself. There was supposedly a Catholic orphanage in Memphis where the nuns would like hide

the what they called the prettiest children whenever Judge Kelly pulled up outside. Yeah. Just unbelievable. It is super, super just terrible. I saw an interview with a woman who is now today and has been for a while trying to connect these people to their original biological families

if they wanna see her name is Denny Glad. And she was asked what she would say to Georgia Tan and she said the exact same thing. I, I wanted to say like, like how, how could you do this? Like, what was your mindset that allowed you to do this over and over again? Because as bad as kidnapping got, as bad as the,

just the corruption that was associated with it and it, in stealing and selling babies, some of them were not adoptable. So she had them on her hands. And as just looking at these kids as products, if you had a bad product, why would you sink any more money into keeping that product around

if it wasn't gonna make you any money? And so the kids who stayed at the home with her, they were often malnourished. Sometimes they would starve to death. If they had any medical issues, they would go untreated. They wouldn't get medicine. They were just left to die essentially because they weren't worth the investment as far as Georgia Tann was concerned and her entire job was to help kids like that but kids like

that couldn't be sold so they didn't deserve any of her time or attention or funding. Yeah the and this is a horrific statistic but the death toll at her orphanage is estimated between five and six hundred kids, obviously most of them infants and babies. And this is staggering, but it was so many children died under her care, she may have actually affected the infant mortality rate in Memphis, because in 1932, eight years into her stint there, Memphis had the highest infant mortality rate in the country. I know that's no accident.

So one of the other things too, is she wasn't reporting these deaths. She reported 19 children's death. The other 500 to 600, or the rest of the 500 to 600, were never reported. No one knows where they are. No one knows where they were buried. They're just gone.

And so I think in 2016, Memphis raised a memorial over a mass grave that had been discovered with I think 40 kids or maybe that was the 19, I think. They found a grave with those kids in it. And they erected a memorial to those kids and all the others who were just lost to history and time. Um, and it was just a, it was a terrible place to be, um, but being adopted out wasn't necessarily much better.

You said that the babies were, were advertised as blank slates. Um, not all of the kids that were sold were babies, and she didn't screen the adoptive parents. So there were kids that were extremely vulnerable to the idea, to sexual abuse, and apparently they also endured sexual abuse in the home as well. Yeah, and just the mental damage of being ripped away from your

biological family. Yeah that too. So I say we take a second break and we must muster the will to finish this thing. Yeah. And we'll be back and talk about some of those pretty high-powered Tennessee that were on the dole right after this. You can't fully understand the moment we're living in without knowing where we've been. On every episode of NPR's Throughline, we take a story from the news and go back in time to where it started, where it really started. To answer one important question, how did we get here? Find NPR's Throughline on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Elliott Connie and this is Family Therapy. In my best hopes, I guess, identify the life that I want and work towards it. I never seen a man take care of my mother

the way she needed to be taken care of. I get the impression that you don't feel like you've done everything right as a father. Is that true? That's true, and I'm not offended by that. Thank you for going through those things, and thank you for overcoming them. Oh, thank God for the limits.

Every time I have one of our sessions, our sessions be positive. It just keeps me going. I feel like my focus is redirected in a different aspect of my life now. So, how'd we do today? We did good. The Black Effect presents Family Therapy.

Listen now on the Black Effect Podcast Network, iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. iHeart Podcast update. This week on your free iHeart Radio app. Fodor's Guide to Espionage, I'm going to go to bed. Table for two, season two. Think of the show as a deconstructed Oscar party in podcast form. Each episode takes place over the romance of a meal and feels like you're seated next to a different guest at that dinner. Hear these podcasts and more on your free iHeart radio app or wherever you get your podcasts. Alright, so I want to say, yeah, I guess we've made it through the worst part, but it's not like anything gets much better. We talked about how she was, Georgia Tann was able to get away with this.

She did this from 1924 to 1950, like you said. And you can't do that without the cooperation of essentially the city that you're working in. And lucky for her, the mayor of, of Memphis at the time was a guy named Ed Crump. And if you want to know anything, all you need to know about Ed Crump, you just need to know his nickname, nickname which was boss crump and he was a progressive mayor who really cared about the city and was extraordinarily corrupt himself

Yeah, so there was there was boss crump. I know those this other guy an attorney named Abe Waldauer Who she hired as her personal attorney and he also worked as the attorney for the agency, was also a very influential guy and successful lobbyist. In between Waldauer and Crump, she basically got whatever she wanted. She got records falsified, she got records sealed. If there were laws that didn't jive with what was going on, they had the power to get those laws changed. Trump had a lot of sway at least,

and we'll talk about this in a minute, at least to a certain point on the governor's office. They were all getting kickbacks. Everyone was on the dole, so they would do whatever she wanted. Yeah. So the operation from what I saw, essentially when she would go to Camille Kelly, the judge that was in her pocket, and say hey these are these are things that would make my life a lot easier as far as laws are concerned and

then Judge Kelly would go to the legislature and or Boss Crump, probably both, and say hey here at Family, these are some laws that are really kind of making things unnecessarily difficult and hurting families. Let's get these changed. So they would actually change laws to help Georgia Tann steal and sell babies more efficiently. 06 Yeah, I mean, and this kind of just shows how manipulative she was. There's actual, how manipulative she was, there's actual like letterhead from Judge Kelly written in her handwriting to the attorney Abe Waldauer. So like this was the attorney working for Georgia Tan.

Instead of Georgia Tan going to him, she would manipulate, go around him to the judge to get her to write the suggestion to Abe Waldauer who would then lobby in pressure on her behalf, which was really on Tan's behalf. So as like, I guess kind of alien concept, modern adoption was at the time, Tennessee had a pretty good law on its books

that dated back to 1852, and there were requirements that were sensible and smart. Um, if you wanted to adopt a kid from Tennessee, first of all, you had to be from Tennessee. The adoptive parents had to be from Tennessee. Um, I don't know about that one, but fine. Right, right.

But I'm just saying if you, if you look at what Georgia Tann was doing, this was, that was not in step with that at all. Secondly, if you were, um, a birth mother, a judge needed to certify that you were voluntarily giving your kid up. Yeah. Right. Still the case.

Yeah. Orphanages needed to investigate the adoptive parents. Great idea. And you needed to follow up with the kid and make sure that the child was being treated well in their new adoptive home. These were the 1852 laws. And if you look at what Georgia Tann was doing out in the open, just the stuff people knew

about, none of it checked any of those boxes. Yeah. And she, you know, because of that, she got a lot of these laws changed to suit her racket, which is just unbelievable that this was going on. Yeah, one of them that got me was you didn't need a judge to certify any longer, that the mom was voluntary surrendering, a notary public could do it.

And so Georgia Tann would have one of her employees certify that basically falsify these records. There was another thing that was a really important outcome of all of this, and that is that she lobbied for secrecy and adoption. Her whole premise was that it saved unwed mothers the shame and social stigma of being known as unwed mothers, publicly having files open, available to the public,

showing that they had had a child out of wedlock. And that that was in the family's best favor for these records to be sealed. That's still what people say today that there's like, in states where secrecy is still a thing in adoption, it's to protect the biological parents' rights in case they don't want to be found, right? That aside, all of the- Is that still a thing? Yeah, in some states. I think California still has really strict secrecy laws around adoption.

Oh my God. I thought that was just for old adoption records. No, so- That's like the current thing? No, no, no, I'm sorry. I'm sorry. Starting in about the eighties that opened up adoption became much more open, but it didn't retroactively affect anybody whose adoption took place before the eighties.

Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So, okay. So, but those, those laws are still in the book. So those people are still. They have their records sealed and that includes Georgia Tans kids. But all that aside, that whole quandary and argument about whether that's a legitimate way

to do adoption or not, that had nothing to do with why she wanted to do it. She wanted to do it because once she got those records sealed, and she soon was able to do that as a matter of course after that law was passed, there was no finding the kid any longer. And like you legally could not get your hands on any records that would lead you to your biological kid. They were just gone. Yeah, well, and not more importantly, but more commonly probably, that kid can't find their parents.

Yes. Their biological parents that is. Yeah, and then even if you did, I think, get your hands on the records, she's so frequently monkeyed with the records and falsified them that they might not even lead you to your birth parent to begin with. Yeah. So we would love to tell you that there was an ending to this where Georgia Tann was made responsible for her crimes.

Sadly, that is not the case. I mentioned earlier that Crump eventually had less sway over the governor's office. That was in 1950 when Governor Gordon Browning became governor, started getting these letters from people, talking about Georgia Tann, being blackmailed, keep silent, things like that. So he launched, Browning launched an investigation into the orphanage headed by Robert Taylor, special counsel. But here's the thing is, Georgia Tann had very aggressive uterine cancer,

was dying fast, and Browning held off on making all this public until she died on September 15th, 1950 at the age of 58. Yeah, which is like, it really ticks you off about Browning. Like, why would you extend any modicum of courtesy to Georgia Tann at all? But Browning's general motivation for this wasn't to prosecute her. It was to embarrass boss Crump and to erode some of his political clout. Cause he was so powerful.

He, he could like get governors elected. Like he was a really powerful mayor. He was so powerful, he could like get governors elected. Like he was a really powerful mayor. And so this really helped like embarrass him. And he just became illegitimate in a lot of people's eyes when this came out that this was happening under his watch. And how could he possibly have not known about it? So that was one reason why he held it back

because boss Crump was still gonna be around after Georgia Tanann died. Luckily, in my eyes, a couple of reporters from different newspapers in Memphis got a hold of the story and they broke it before she died. Yeah, I think, I mean, just a couple of days before she died. So I like to think that there was some great shame visited upon her. Who knows? I doubt it.

Because I think she felt justified the whole time. Because her whole deal was, I'm taking these babies out of these houses where these undesirables shouldn't be having kids to begin with. Yeah. And so what if I make some money? I'm going to a lot of trouble. I just looked at Boss Crump for the first time

for some reason. I didn't look it up earlier. Did you see him? He looks more like boss are chrome You would he looks like you would think he would look basically so that investigation that Robert Taylor headed up led to a lawsuit from the state of Tennessee against George's estate George of tanz state and apparently so we said that she was in a lifelong relationship with her partner and Atwood, um, who supposedly was a good person.

Um, she just happened to love a monster, I guess. I don't know. I don't know about, I don't know how to square that one. Her, I can't remember who, who went to, I think her niece or something or surviving niece went to bat for her. It's like, no, she was actually a really good person. At any rate, Anne Atwood, this is a rather ironic twist if you ask me, Georgia Tan adopted Anne Atwood, which was a fairly common technique among gay couples back in the day to ensure that your

partner would receive your estate. So Georgia Tan, the woman who would steal babies and sell them out for adoption, popularized adoption in America, adopted her partner in her old age, a couple of years before she died. Yeah. And that was a lawsuit that you mentioned. It wasn't about the abuse or the kidnapping though. It was about basically the excess funds, like the victims in that case were parents who overpaid in their mind for kids because like I said she was I think

the adoption fee was like $700 she was charging up to five grand. So that was what the civil case was about. She they sued the estate for $500,000, only got a little more than 50 grand in the end. So, you know, there was never any justice for these families, basically. No. And some people have actually found one another. There was a very famous episode of Unsolved Mysteries, or a famous case that came out of Unsolved Mysteries in 1990, where a woman named Alma Sipple was watching Unsolved Mysteries as you did in 1990, I can attest.

And on TV, they flashed a picture of Georgia Tan. They're talking about this case. And Alma Sipple said later that she just came out of her chair and recognized her immediately as the woman who had swindled her out of her chair and recognized her immediately as the woman who had swindled her out of her baby. And from that, from watching that they ended up reuniting, she reunited with her birth daughter named Sandra. And then there's a few other people who've worked to find their, successfully find their biological family. And again, Denny Glad has been really instrumental in trying to sue Tennessee into opening up these records in particular for Georgia Tans victims,

so that they can find their biological families. And her organization is called Tennessee's Right to Know. Joan Crawford's daughters found their biological family. Oh yeah. Yep. Those two girls did. And hey, you made me laugh in that last bit. I got you got one laugh out of me What I said when you said the watch an unsolved mysteries as you do in 1990 I can attest

You got a chuckle. I didn't think I was gonna laugh at all. Okay. Well then this work this episode is finally complete If you want to watch a movie, there's a TV movie from 93 called Stolen Babies, a little on the nose, starring Mary Tyler Moore. She went to Emmy. I'm told it was, or the reviews I read, you know, said she was pretty remarkable in that role. I saw an ad for it. She looked pretty, she did Despicable really well. Sure. Mary Tyler Moore can do that.

She's got, she's got range. And Leah Thompson was the woman who opposed her. I'm not sure if she was the woman who opposed her. I'm not sure if she was based on anybody or not. Oh, 93, oh yeah, I guess that was, that's right in her wheelhouse. And if you're like Stolen Babies, that's a great band name,

well you're a little late to the party because there actually is a band called Stolen Babies. Of course there is. So actor and movie developer Octavia Spencer, who is wonderful, optioned that book that we were talking about. Who was the author again? Barbara Bizance Raymond. And the book she wrote was Baby Thief, colon, the untold story of Georgia Tann, comma,

the baby seller who corrupted adoption. It's a long title. But I was kind of curious because Octavia Spencer, I wasn't surprised, it was just like, I wonder, if she was adopted or has adopted, like if there was just some pull for this story for her personally. And that is not the case,

but she did play an adoption caseworker in a movie a few years ago, that movie which I didn't see, Instant Family with Rose Byrne and Mocky Mock. So maybe just being in that role kind of, I know that she studied and interviewed a lot of adoption caseworkers so that may have just sort of piqued her interest. Yeah, maybe so. Well, if you want to know more about Georgia Tan, and you can stomach it, there's some stuff out there to read on the internet, but you will probably keep running into Barbara Raymond's book, so you might as

well just read that and get it over with. And since I said that, it's time for listener mail. Another Peanuts email. There's gonna be three total, because we got a lot of great emails about the Peanuts episodes. It's a trifecta. But the best one is coming soon. Oh. But this one's pretty good, because it's an actual correction

on something I said, Josh. Hey guys, Peanuts episode was awesome. Grew up with a series of Peanuts, and they were pretty much the only thing I read as a child. I'm so glad you reminded me of so many little details. The only thing you guys said that was wrong and And Lish here didn't call me up, but I remember saying this Was that Sally was the one talking about her naturally curly hair. I totally got that wrong. That was Frida. Oh

Really? Yeah Frida had the red curly hair and she's always going my naturally curly hair because I think she's I think she's kind of Crushing on Charlie Brown Which obviously wouldn't have been Sally so I just got that all wrong. I see I got you Anyway, you guys are great. I hope you do Occasionally do podcasts into your 90s at least Thank you for your research dedication and great sense of humor plus I was born in 1971 so Chuck and I often sync up To your memories. And that is from Lish.

Lish, with the brain meld on Chuck. How's that feel? It feels great. Well, thanks a lot, Lish. That was a great peanuts email. I can't imagine what the third in the trifecta is going to be if it's even better than that, Chuck. I can't imagine.

I think you know, but unless you didn't see it. I don't know if I did or not. I'm gonna have to go sort through them. I'll just say the wall. Oh yeah, yeah, okay. I do know the one. Yeah, you got it. That's a good one.

If you wanna be like Lish and get in touch with us, you can send us an email too. Send it off to stuffpodcastatihartradio.com. Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For. Stuff You Should Know is a production of I Heart Radio. For more podcasts, My Heart Radio, visit the I Heart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. You can't fully understand the moment we're living in without knowing where we've been on every episode of NPR's through line we take a story from the news and go back in time to where it started where it really started

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