Behind the Bastards - Part One: The Woman Who Invented Adoption (By Stealing Thousands of Babies)

Episode Date: April 30, 2019

In Episode 58, Robert is joined by Sofiya Alexandra to discuss George Tann, an abusive child molester who stole five thousand babies from poor parents to sell to the wealthy. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

What would you do if a secret cabal of the most powerful folks in the United States told you, hey, let's start a coup? Back in the 1930s, a Marine named Smedley Butler was all that stood between the U.S. and fascism. I'm Ben Bullitt. I'm Alex French. And I'm Smedley Butler. Join us for this sordid tale of ambition, treason, and what happens when evil tycoons have too much time on their hands. Listen to Let's Start a Coup on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you find your favorite shows. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science, and the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price? Two death sentences in a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated

two days after her first birthday. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. With the Soviet Union collapsing around him, he orbited the earth for 313 days that changed the world. Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What's hanging my overs? I'm Robert Evans, host of Behind the Bastards podcast, where Sophie shakes her head disappointedly at me, but it's accurate. I'm hung over for this episode as well. We talk about bad people, worse people, all history, everything you don't know about them. My guest for this episode is Sophia Alexandra, comedian, host of the Private Parts

Unknown podcast. And anything else I should, I should, I should toss in that. I mean, just genius. Genius. Multi hyphenate. Multi hyphenate. Patent attorney. Yeah. Yeah. I will notarize your documents. Excellent. I love having things notarized. I know. Me too. I love pretending to know that. Well, have you ever heard of a lady named Georgia Tan? No. Have you ever heard of a thing called adoption? No. How do you pronounce that? Oh, dear. I've been saying adoption this whole time. Georgia Tan invented adoption. Oh, yeah. Seems like a great thing, right? How can you invent adoption?

Well, we'll be getting into that a little bit, but it's not always something that people have done, you know? But you're telling me cave people weren't like, oh, I'm going to raise this baby. Yeah, but they didn't like, it wasn't like the process of adoption. Like, yeah. Oh, you're saying like she founded an agency? She founded the, she built the modern structure through which we adopt children. Kind of. It isn't, it isn't. We'll get into a little bit. It used to be a thing that people didn't think was a good idea for some reasons, which we'll discuss. Taking other people's babies. Yeah. Yeah. They didn't like that idea. They thought it was a bad idea, partly because of

eugenics, because like they were like, if you're, if you're, if your mom, you know, was dumb enough to die, then you're going to grow into a stupid person. And I'm like, we don't, we don't want, we don't want smart people raising stupid babies. That's just, that's just bad, bad, bad stuff. Yeah. I mean, everybody was racist in the past and terrible. Just in the past. Just in the past. Thank God we got over that. Yeah, I know. What a beautiful world we live in. What a wonderful place. Now, I do want to note up top that we're not in the habit of giving like trigger warnings and stuff on the show because it's show about the worst people in history. And we talk about like genocide every third episode and like, you kind of know what you're

getting into with the show called Behind the Bastards. But there's going to be a lot of talk about child death and molestation in this one. So heads up, everybody. It's. I'm so glad this is the episode I got invited. Thanks for coming on, Sophia. I was like, my brand should get more edgy. This might be the darkest one we do. I welcome the challenge. She's pretty big. I am the night. Yeah. We are all the night. Yeah. Now, in 1848, Europe was convulsed by a series of violent revolutions, many of which threatened up into the centuries old order and reign in what the elites at least considered to be an era of unspeakable chaos. The United States did not experience this wave of revolutions, of course, but many of our richest assholes watched what was going on

in Europe and got real scared. Like they didn't want that happening here. So I saw Europe doing a lot of revolutions and we're like, we don't want none of that. The socialism thing looks real scary. Let's make sure that doesn't happen. So one of these guys was a dude named Charles Loring Brace. Charles was a Protestant minister and he founded the Children's Aid Society of New York in 1853 and started the first American orphan trains. You heard of the orphan trains? No. Neither had I before I started researching this. It's pretty sounds like an amazing Disneyland ride. It does. It sounds like a Disneyland ride, but it actually reads like a particularly dark Charles Dickens book. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. So the purpose of these trains was to transport abandoned

children from the cities, particularly New York into the and take them into the newly colonized American West. So at the time, Charles wrote, quote, there are thousands upon thousands in New York who have no assignable home and flirt from attic to attic in seller to seller. Moreover, the cultivators of our soil in America are the most solid and intelligent class. So Charles was concerned because most of these orphans were the children of immigrants. He wanted them exposed to what he called the civilizing influences of American life so that they would not grow into socialist revolutionaries. So he saw all these kids hanging out in like New York and stuff and was like, these kids are going to grow up to be like scruffy bearded socialists and they're going to

they're going to overthrow like society. And it was just envisioning like Williamsburg. Yeah, exactly. And he's like, no hipsters here. I don't want let's bust them out to California, the least hip place. It was actually a lot more like Ohio at that point. Like, like, like, we weren't, we weren't that far west with most of our expansion. Yeah, I was just making a joke. Sorry. I thought this was a fun podcast. No, I'm the bastard. You are. You're the main bastard. That is like every bastard is a woman who's just trying to make a joke. I love that listeners couldn't see because this is an audio medium. But as soon as they what? When I said I was the real bastard, Sophie started very enthusiastically pumping her fist.

Like it was the end of Breakfast Club. Yeah. Yeah. I am. I am the monster at the end of the series. The last episode is just going to be about me. It's a pretty great reveal. I mean, you've seen me throwing pens like, you know, how, how, how terrible I can be when the mics are off. Terrible at throwing, sure. Hey, I just threw another pin. You got one pen left. You better. Yeah, but you better wait for the most appropriate moment. There's other throwables. I could throw those dog treats. Oh, no, don't do that. The dog shouldn't suffer. Sophie looks very angry when I talk about her face is one of do not joke about the treats. Do not joke about the dog treats lesson learned. So Charles Brace was concerned because there were a lot of orphans

and he thought they were going to grow up into scruffy bearded socialists. So he wanted to send him out to farms in order to get them civilized from 1854 to 1929, roughly 200,000 children were sent west from New York to the countryside. And on paper, it doesn't seem like it was necessarily a terrible thing, right? You know, you got all these kids, they don't have parents, send them out west, they can live on a nice farm, get that clean farm air, you know, could be could be a good idea. Be separated from the only stuff and people they've ever known. Well, yeah, that part's pretty dark. It actually gets a lot darker. So most Americans part of what made it dark is that most Americans at this point hated the shit out of foreign born

immigrants. And like a lot of these kids were like Italian and German. Thank God we grew out of that. Thank God we grew out of that. Now it's all just white. But at that point, it wasn't. And so like a lot of these parents who would have been from like Anglo stock would look at like a German kid and be like, well, that's not a white kid. Like, so I don't have to treat him like he's like my son or anything. I can just use him as, you know, like a mule, like, like the same thing you'd use like a draft horse for. So a lot of the families were willing to take kids off the orphan train, but they weren't willing to like raise them as their own. It was much more common to treat them as free labor. So the orphan train was not quite child slavery. But it wasn't super far from

child slavery either. And it was basically child slavery. So I'm going to quote from a Chicago Tribune article on the subject, quote, in 1888, the New York juvenile asylum distributed flyers announcing that it was bringing a group of children ranging from seven to 15 years old to Rockford on September 6th. They may be taken at first upon trial for four weeks. And afterwards, if all parties are satisfied under indenture, girls until 18 and boys until 21 years of age. Placed have a vagina like once every thousand times in history. You don't have to be a farm slave as long if you're late. Like sure we'll be raped, but it ends at 18. Oh God. Yeah, you're right. They all got a hundred percent, a hundred percent. Yeah. The past. Well, I mean, you wanted

me to come on in the dark. No, you're 100% right. Darkening it right up. Yeah. Marguerite Thompson was one of those little kids. She later recalled to a to the Tribune, a scene that does seem eerily reminiscent of a slave auction, quote, their skinny muscles being poked and squeezed on the station platforms before they were taken in by families who wanted a little more than farm hands and showed them little affection. So like they would literally train these kids over to like some town in the Midwest and like set up an awk, like like put them up on like a block and like, look at this one's muscles. This kid will push a hoe real good. This kid would be good at farming. Like pick up these kids. They're yours until they're 18 or 21. Like, yeah, it was an indentured

child slave thing. Sure. But black people didn't even get out at 18 or 21. No, it's certainly not that bad. Not nearly that bad. But it happened until 1929, which was kind of shocking to me that like up until like when my grandpa was a kid, they were sending kids west on trains and making them indentured servants until the age of 18. It's gross. Thompson was taken in by a Nebraska family at age six and made to wash dishes by a foster mother who she said never gave her so much as a glass of milk. All she got for me was to work. I never got any love in that home. So it was like an indentured child labor trains. This is how kids were treated in up until the 1920s. It really gives a dark meaning to I choo choo choose you, right? Oh, oh, yeah. I choo choo

choose you to get kicked in the head by a mule trying to trying to till my farmland and buried in the back 10. So sad. Yeah, that probably happened a lot. Probably let little kids buried on a lot of little farms out in the Midwest. And the orphan trains weren't even the worst case scenario for parentless children in New York City. Most abandoned babies were just found dead by the cops. The ones who survived were taken to Bellevue Hospital, where according to Barbara Raymond, quote, they were randomly assigned religions and names. An infant found in an alley would be named Charlie Alley. A girl found under a cherry tree near a hill would become Cherry Hill. Infants whose discovery coincided with a sensational murder trial were named after the victims, witnesses,

or perpetrators. The abandoned children were cared for by prisoners and they were named after perpetrators. Yeah, that is so fucked up just because like there's a famous murder in the newspaper and you find an abandoned kid like you'll be little Charlie Manson little Charlie Manson. So bizarre. It's a weird thing to do. I love that you skipped over that. Like that wasn't the weirdest part of the whole thing. Randomly assigning religions is pretty weird. But isn't everybody Christian at that point or Protestant or whatever the fuck? There's Jewish people too, but like I like just the idea that like you're randomly being like Protestant for you, Catholic for you. Like you look like you'd be. I'm more disturbed by the yeah. I mean yeah. And

also naming a girl Cherry Hill. It's like that's the earliest stripper name, right? Yeah, there's not a lot of not a lot of professions after that. Charlie Alley has a lot of options. Cherry Hill, not that many Charlie Alley is going to grow up to be a card shark and we Charlie Alley. Alley sounds like it could be anything. Honestly, he could be Charlie Alley could be an actor. Charlie Alley. Yeah, I mean, it does. One thing I'm excited for when this drops is all the people on Twitter with last names that are Hill and Alley realizing like what their family came from. Somebody, somebody found your uncle in a ditch. I mean, maybe or they just had that last name. Listener, don't don't step off that ledge. Things are good. I hope that's not. Mr. Hill,

you're fine. Yeah, but Mr. Manson. Yeah, bad news. Yeah. So Children's Asylum is where most of these kids who survived wound up and they were not safe places. The infant mortality rate at Children's Asylum averaged about 50 percent. Oh my God. Oh my God. Half the kids died in the good ones. Oh my God. The bad ones like New York's Randall Island infant mortality rate was 100 percent. What? You're just sending babies off to die. Who is working at this fucking death asylum? A lot of them are prisoners. Oh, so they don't give a shit. No, like a lot of them are like violent criminals and stuff who are like, well, you we got to do something with you. Let's have you take care of babies. What kind of the point of building to people didn't care about babies back

like a lot of it's probably that like so many babies died. Like just because like you don't have a vaccine. You don't have like antibiotics and stuff like so infant mortality is a lot higher. But like, but it's not a hundred percent. No, it's not a hundred percent unless you're at Randall's. Oh my God. How do you tell a kid they're going to Randall Island and them not flip the fuck out because they know everyone just dies there. Well, these are infants. Older kids didn't have a hundred percent mortality rate. But if you're shipping a baby there, they're just not going to make it. Oh man. That's just the baby death island. Oh man. So if you live in Randall's island, there's probably a lot of baby ghosts hanging around there. That's crazy. Yeah, it's

pretty fucked up, right? Now, how do you ship a baby in a crate? I feel like they were just putting them in boxes, catapults maybe. Who's taking care of a shipment of babies? I mean, it doesn't sound like anyone is. I think they're just probably dying on the way there. Yeah, I think a lot of them did die in transport. I think there probably wasn't a lot of feeding going on. I mean, I can't even picture a baby train that would be appropriately suited. No, I can't. Every time it would stop, like the babies would just slide off the seats. There's no way. There's no way this could work. Yeah, that's probably where most of that mortality rate went down. I mean, honestly, I'm imagining one person minding a whole train full of babies

because they don't care about them. And I'm imagining that person being very drunk because it's like 1890. You're on a train full of babies. A hundred percent you'll be drinking. They're not going to stop you. Everyone's shitting themselves and crying. Yeah, I would be drinking too, even if I wasn't going to kill the babies, which I probably would to get some sleep. Yeah. If I was a monster, you joke about that, but that's literally the next thing we're about to talk about. I'm not joking about that. There's a check off short story where there's so, you know, Russian Russia, I'm Russian, so Russians hadn't had surfs, you know, for a really long time, which is just like white people owning white people. Yeah. And then there's a check off short

story about this little girl who's like taking care of a baby. And she's just as exhausted and wants to sleep because she's essentially, you know, a child slave. Yeah. She's like rocking the baby. And in the end, she just wants some sleep. And she like smothers the baby, not on purpose, but because she's so like delirious and fucked up. So yeah, definitely, definitely children got murdered so people could get sleep. And that's what we're about to talk about next. The baby farms. So there were baby farms back then. That's crazy because babies can't breed. No, no, they cannot. Can't milk them. What a terrible farm. It's a terrible idea for a farm. So what was actually going on is that like there would be houses and apartments where,

you know, since there were so many extra babies and it was so terrible to send them to asylums, sometimes the government would pay women to take care of these babies. And so like a woman wind up with like a house full of babies. Now some of the baby farmers received regular stipends from the government and just had it and thus had an incentive to like take care of the infants that the government was handing them. But many of them were given one payment in a single lump sum. So they had no reason to keep the babies alive. So they would take the money and then let the babies starve or just straight up murder the baby and then get more babies so that they could get more money. That's why they were called baby farms. So the babies is what they were processing

essentially for money. This was illegal to kill the babies because you weren't going to get any more money out of them. But it wasn't that illegal. In 1895, one baby farmer was convicted of killing at least 53 babies. Yeah. Those are some serious numbers. That's a lot of babies. You're putting up some stats on the board. Yeah. 53. That's like a basketball score. Dude. Yeah. Messed around and got a triple double. Yeah. You want to guess what her sentence was for 53 baby murders? Nothing. Three to seven years. Okay. Well, I guess I'm glad she got something. I expected them to just be like, yeah, get out of here. Get out of here, you scamp. Yeah. Exactly. Have another couple of babies on the way out. They are just. Take a complimentary baby on the way out. The hallway is nothing but

babies. Grab a couple of them. Oh, boy. This is the America that Belula George Tan was born into on July 18, 1891. What one names kids Belula anymore? Or Bula. Oh, Bula. I keep wanting to say Belula, but it's B-E-U-L-A-H. Bula. Bula. I think Bula, but I don't know. Bula seems right. You know what? All of the versions we've just said. Pretty good names. Pretty good names. But she went by Georgia. She was born in Philadelphia, Mississippi. Real different from the Philadelphia people know. Who knew that there were several Philadelphias? Yeah. People really had a lot of hope for the concept of brotherly love back in the baby killing days. Take the hand of your brother. Take the hand of your sister and then

let's murder somebody. Let's kill some fucking babies. It's the 1890s. George's father was George Clark Tan. He was a local judge. Her mother was also named Bula, Isabelle Tan, and Barbara Raymond, the author of a book called The Baby Thief, visited Hickory, which is the town where Georgia grew up and talked to some of the older folks who'd known her family at the time. She was told, quote, Georgia's mother was the most respected woman in Hickory. Her daddy was a federal court judge. The Tan home was the second one built in town. There were no streets then only passed through the woods. So this is kind of the world that Georgia Tan is grown into. Is this important for the baby murders? Oh yeah. Yeah. The baby murders are important for this because it sets

up sort of how babies were treated at the time. It's good to have the woods if you're a baby killer. Yeah. Yeah. It will turn out to have been handy that she has the woods. So I'm saying you need the woods or a lake or something. You need the woods or a lake. Some place to the quarry. Yeah. Yeah. Quarry would be really good. Very least a crack. A crack. Yeah. Georgia's mother was from a well-off family in Philadelphia. Her father's family had old revolutionary war connections and connections to the Confederacy. Judge Tan was seen as the most educated man in Hickory, which was not a super high bar in the 1890s, but whatever. He was infamously arrogant, domineering, and a womanizer who cheated on his wife and brought daylight as the biggest man in

town. They're like, he loved nooners. He loved afternoon sex. If it's not in daylight, he would not fuck. He would not fuck at night. Couldn't get this guy to fuck with the lifestyle. Let's light this room up. He was famous for at noon having his mistresses come by his judge offices for a nooner. Yeah. Which people were like, I don't know why his wife puts up with it. She was like, but we live in the oldest, second oldest house in town. Yeah. Second oldest house in town, which is a good thing then. Yeah. Yeah. As the biggest man in town, Judge Tan had a number of different jobs in his portfolio. One of them was dealing with all of the orphans in the area. Since this was the 1890s and early 1900s, and the medicine was mostly a mix of whiskey and uncut heroin,

there were quite a few orphans to go around. Since the orphanages were constantly low on space, Judge Tan often found himself sending abandoned children off to workhouses and state insane asylums, which were even worse than the orphanages of the period. Oh my God, insane asylums. There's no room for this baby in the, in the, in the baby house. Let's just send him out for all the crazy people. Jesus, dude. Again, they didn't care that much about little kids at the point. So not a nice man himself, even Judge Tan was kind of pissed off at the injustice of the system. So he wants some of George's earliest memories were her dad being like, sucks that there's nothing to do with these babies, but send them off to the crazy house or a workhouse.

Like, so yeah, she grew up, you know, seeing that social problem as a central issue in her life. She also grew up quite wealthy. Her father wanted to make her into a high society woman. She later recalled quote, I was glued on a piano stool at age five, and I didn't entirely get away from a piano until it was grown. She hated playing the piano, but she was hungry for her father's affection and approval. This was partly for the same reason any child seeks parental approval, but she also had more mercenary ambitions as well. Young George's cheap dream in life was to become a lawyer. Back in the early 1900s, the way you did this was by apprenticing to an active attorney. You know, that's what King Kardashian is doing right now. It is. Didn't she help get someone out of

like, she did or something? Yeah, it seems like. But apparently she had worked for months before I can't. I just read this Vogue article. But they were, but they were saying that actually that's how everybody used to become a lawyer. You apprentice for four years and then actually that's another way you can still do it now. But people choose to do it even though there's another way now because a lot of them feel like that's like a true way to learn the system. That seems like a better way to learn the system. It's like a good idea. Almost any job other than like medicine. I mean, you still do that in medicine after college. You do your residency. Yeah. It seems like that is how almost every career should be done. Agreed. Yeah. Apprentice, stand-up comedian,

getting the other stand-up comedians liquor and yeah, yeah. Gluing their broken dreams back together. Yeah. Taping their drugs to the inside of their thigh during the drive over to the venue. I'm an apprentice comedian. I'm not allowed to joke yet, but two more years. Like no, they're just letting me do setups right now. I can't write any punchlines. They come in with the punchlines. Speaking of apprentice ships, that's not a good way to seag into an ad. Also, seag isn't the right way to say segue. This is a mess. Sophia, help me out here. Do you like products? Let me tell you something. One thing that everybody knows about me is I'm a product head. Product head? How about services? Give me a product. Service head on top of that.

Service head, product head. All of it. If your head is like Sophia's and full of products and services. Nice. Smooth. Here's some other products. During the summer of 2020, some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated the racial justice demonstrations. And you know what? They were right. I'm Trevor Aronson, and I'm hosting a new podcast series, Alphabet Boys. As the FBI sometimes, you've got to grab the little guy to go after the big guy. Each season will take you inside an undercover investigation. In the first season of Alphabet Boys, we're revealing how the FBI spied on protesters in Denver. At the center of this story is a raspy-voiced, cigar-smoking man

who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse was like a lot of guns. He's a shark, and not in the good and bad ass way. He's a nasty shark. He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure, he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Lance Bass, and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC. What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space. And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me about a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space

with no country to bring him down. It's 1991, and that man, Sergei Krekalev, is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on Earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart. And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space, 313 days that changed the world. Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that

it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science. And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences in a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match and when there's no science in CSI. How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus? It's all made up.

Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. We're back. Good products, solid services. Products better than the services in my opinion. But, you know, it's different every time. It's actually, who knows, it might have been another Koch Brothers ad. We've been getting a lot of those randomly. Yeah, what the hell? Who's screening those? Nobody. The ones that I read are screened and like we get to pick them. But like when it's random, it could be anything. You know, we could be, it could be Nordine defense systems, Raytheon ads.

Oh, awkward would it be if there's a baby farm commercial right after this? Kill some babies, get some dollars. More dead babies, more dollars in your pocket. Yeah. I mean, it's nice work if you can get it. It'd be better than a factory. For who? The baby or you? Yeah, you as the as the baby murderer, the professional baby. No. Yeah. As the murderer, it's nice to not have a job rather than the murdering, which is more of a hobby.

It's more of a hobby, kind of a calling. Yeah. More, more of a mission, if you will. That's a real symptom of how like dark life was in the 1890s, that there's some people like in a cramped apartment, smothering babies, like looking at it. Other people go into factories and like, shit, at least I'm not doing that. Silver lining. Silver lining. Okay. So yeah, Georgia's cheap dream was to become a lawyer. She apprenticed with her father. They called it reading law.

And she passed the state bar exam as a young adult, all in the hope that her dad would let her work as a lawyer. But as she later explained to quote, he wouldn't let me practice because it wasn't the usual thing for a woman. And I was the only girl in the family. So he'd let her learn to be a lawyer, but he wouldn't actually let her do it. So instead. But how do you prevent a grown ass woman from doing something? Well, it's like the thread of like losing her fortune or whatever.

I think that was a lot of it. I think a lot of it would have just been like social shame, that like, that wouldn't have gone over well. You know, she's in rural Virginia in 1900. I guess I'm just saying I would have been braver. Some people were. I wouldn't have. Yeah. Most people weren't. Some people were. But yeah.

So instead, Georgia majored in music at Martha Washington College in Abington, Virginia. She graduated in 1913 and wound up teaching school in Columbus, Mississippi. It became clear after a very short span that this was not her strong suit and not the way she wanted to spend her life. Since lawyering was close to her, she gravitated towards the next most interesting career, social work. Now Georgia was a lesbian and a stocky, not traditionally feminine looking woman that could. Well, why did we not start with the fact that she was a lesbian? Well, because that's like the best to me as a queer person.

I wish you had told me that. OK, OK, well, I'm very proud of her. I mean, it's a lawyer, a lesbian. This is very good. Very empowering. Yeah. Yeah. And a murderer, a mass murderer, triple threat, triple threat and an entrepreneur. Oh, shit.

Yeah. I mean, she is like she's a she was a powerful woman in an era where that didn't happen very often. She's definitely like an impressive figure, but also not in the best way. But yeah, so she was she was she was a stocky. She was like a heavy build and such. And so she wasn't like a traditionally feminine looking person, which was a difficult thing to deal with in 1906 in particular. So she did not fit in well with high society. She didn't like doing the parties and galas and wearing the dresses and stuff.

And so charity work when she was like a teenager was kind of she called it her refuge like during her adolescent years and it kept her out of parties and stuff. So like while other girls would be doing like cattillions and stuff like that, you know, the old south sort of thing, she would be working in poor houses, volunteering and stuff was sounds great. And I think was at the start. Like I think she came into this out of a place of wanting to help people. The genesis of George's career came when she was an adolescent and her father

got involved in the case of a single mother who had gotten heavily addicted to the morphine in her cough syrup. At that point, the penalty for drug addiction was to be sent to an insane asylum. Because again, it was 1906. Her children were institutionalized with her. Georgia later recalled to a reporter quote hours later, the mother cried out something about her baby as the effects of the dope began to wear off. Officials at the institution called my father about it.

The whole family had retired, but we got up and drove into the country. And there under a pile of filthy rags in a corner of a shack, we found a pitiful baby, which had evidently been given a little bit of dope. So they find this like a baby that had been abandoned by this woman who was addicted to the morphine in her cough syrup and like pulled it out of the house after like the woman in the asylum like realized that she left her baby behind. So the tans took the baby back to their house and Georgia took care of it for a time. It and the young mother's other kids were eventually sent to an orphanage.

This event seems to have inspired much of Georgia's later career. A few years later when Georgia was 15, her father placed two children in the protection of the Mississippi Children's Home Society. These kids were not orphans though. As Georgia later recalled quote, the father was a man of intelligence, but of a mean disposition that was always getting him into trouble. The mother was from an ordinary poor family.

The children were sweet, attractive and appearance. And Georgia was able to use their attractive appearance to basically market the kids to a wealthy family in town. This rich family adopted both children. This was the first adoption Georgia arranged again when she was 15 years old. Speaking years later to a reporter, she considered it a huge success. The girl now has a degree in music. The boy has finished his law degree and begun his practice.

Each was given an opportunity and made the most of it. So there's some darkness in that story. These kids were not separated from their parents because their parents were abusive or so drugged up that they couldn't take care of them. The dad, you know, was in jail a lot for disorderly conduct and the mother was poor. Well, the dad probably beat them. I mean, yeah, but every I'm going to guess that was like every family and in town at that point.

Sure. Yeah. But like she she didn't like specifically state that he was abusive to the kids. She just thought that they were too poor to have beautiful kids. And so sold the kids to a rich family. I mean, tell me where she's wrong. Well, yeah, that's that that would sort of prove to be her calling in life was finding ways to get poor kids into wealthy families.

And do they just have to be beautiful? Yeah, she liked she liked the blonde kids. Those were the favorite kids to she couldn't sell a red head. Well, I mean, who could? Yeah, exactly right. Ron Howard. Starting at around 1920, Georgia Tann gave up teaching and began exploiting her dad's connections and powers of judge

to start placing children with other families. She worked with the Kate McWillie powers receiving home for children in Jackson, Mississippi. Initially, she did the important work of placing orphaned children with foster homes. But according to the baby thief, quote, she became obsessed with finding adoptive homes for children who had already had homes. She would acquire these children through kidnapping or deceit. And if she saved them from anything, it was poverty. Georgia considered poverty the worst possible condition.

It was her upbringing. She was from a very snobbish family that looked down on people in those shanty houses who got their hands dirty for a living. Andre Bond of Biloxi, Mississippi told me Georgia felt she was taking children from trashy people and elevating the children. Now, that book, The Baby Thief, which is a chilling read, but an excellent piece of journalism, goes into detail about one of Georgia's very first baby abductions, quote. One spring morning, she drove from Model T to a cabin in Jasper County, near her hickory hometown.

A sleep inside was Rose Harvey, who was young, poor, widowed, and pregnant and suffering from diabetes. Who two-year-old son, Onyx, played on the back porch. Georgia lured the sturdy, black-haired, brown-eyed boy into her car. Georgia's father, George C. Tann, signed papers declaring Rose Harvey an unfit mother and young Onyx an abandoned child. Onyx was placed with an adoptive family headed by a man named Rufus Raspberry. Shortly after... I'm sorry, was Rufus Raspberry a fake person someone made up?

Because yes, the answer to that is yes. He sounds like he belongs in like an old, like, fable book from the South. And young Rufus Raspberry? I'm more thinking of like a Charlie and the Chocolate Factory situation. You're an old doll. Yeah, yeah. Rufus Raspberry is the best. That's a good reason I would give him a child today.

You need to have a child stolen for you. Rufus Raspberry Jr., that could be your life. That's amazing. It could have been your life. Shortly afterwards, she stole Onyx's young brother from their mother as well. The mom tried to get her children back in court, but Georgia's dad was the judge. So that did not happen. Oh man.

That's terrible. She's like, well, let's ask the opinion of this neutral judge, daddy. Dad, judge dad? Daddy, what do you think? Do you think I should get to steal these babies? That's so fucked up. But also you said she liked blonde babies. Why'd she steal this dark-haired child?

Well, I mean, you're not going to start with the blonde babies. You work your way up to that. That's just the way it goes. Georgia's methods eventually got her kicked out of Mississippi and then Texas. But she finally found... Oh, thank God. I was like, I don't think anybody cares about this. It's one of those things where if you're getting kicked out of Texas in 1915 for

not treating children properly, it's probably pretty bad. It's Texas, man. Anyway, she finally found her forever home in Memphis, Tennessee, where she became the executive director of the Tennessee Children's Home Society. She got right to work, matching orphaned kids with new parents, but also abducting poor kids to sell to rich parents. It turned out there was a lot of money in selling the right kinds of babies to the right people.

Now, I should note at this point that convincing people to adopt babies at all was something of a coup for Georgia. When I said she basically invented modern American adoption, this is what I'm getting at. In the early 1920s, it was not a thing people did, thanks to the then popular science of eugenics. According to the Adoption History Project, quote, Henry Herbert Goddard, a national authority on feeble-minded children,

insisted that compassion for needy children was short-sighted because adoption was a crime against those yet unborn. The eugenic threat adoption posed, according to Goddard, was directly tied to illegitimacy. Unmarried mothers were likely to be feeble-minded themselves and have feeble-minded children whose adoptions would contaminate the gene pool by reproducing future generations of defectives. Goddard advocated segregating these children and adults in benevolent institutions

where their dangerous sexuality could be contained. Damn. Yeah, dangerous sexuality. That's the name of my next album. That is a good album name. Yeah. That's a really good album name. Should see the cover.

Also a baby farm. It's just nipples. The concerns even common people had about adoption are embodied by this 1928 letter one couple sent to the U.S. Children's Bureau when they were considering an adoption. Quote, we are very anxious to adopt a baby, but would like to get one that we know about its parentage. Are there any homes or orphanages where a person can find out whether there is insanity,

fits, or other hereditary diseases in its ancestors? We would like to have one from Christian parentage. So even people who are open to adopting at this period of time are really concerned about it and it's not something that really happened very often. When Georgia started her business in 1924, the Boston Children's Aid Society, which is one of the largest such organizations in the U.S., arranged roughly five adoptions a year.

In 1928, Georgia Tan arranged 206 adoptions in Memphis alone. According to the baby thief, quote, she developed both her business and the institution of adoption by doing something unprecedented, making homeless children acceptable, even irresistible to childless couples. She complies- Would you cover them in sprinkles?

Irresistible? What does that even mean? Well, she accomplished this by insisting, when most child placement workers apologized for the unworthiness of adoptable babies, that they were neither children of sin nor genetically flawed. They are, she said repeatedly, blank slates.

They are born untainted, and if you adopt them at an early age and surround them with beauty and culture, they will become anything you wish them to be. So it's kind of, she's kind of a mixed bag, because that's a good thing to convince people when they think that like, well no, if a baby's mom is dumb,

the baby's gonna be dumb. But while she's saying that cool shit, she's like literally taking a baby out of the stroller and just like putting it in her. She literally stole a baby with ice cream once, by like luring it into her car with ice cream. Dude, I wasn't too far off when I said irresistible with sprinkles, right?

That's kind of scary how close you are. Yeah, that's insane. Yeah, Georgia's babies also came with a guarantee of satisfaction. Or you could return it within 30 days. Yeah, actually. Oh my God, she not only invented adoption, but she invented the return policy.

Yeah, on a baby. That's insane. Quote, 100% of our children turn out on average, better than 100 children raised in their families of birth. The reason is that ours is a selective process. We select the child and we select the home. Now, Georgia's adoptions were approved by judges, of course.

It was not unheard of for some of these judges to approve more than a dozen per day, as Georgia's business took off. Georgia's favorite judge was Camille Kelly, a juvenile court judge. In the guise of advising parents on how to deal with unemployment or divorce, Kelly would end their parental rights

and transfer custody of their kids over to Georgia. Fully 20% of the children Georgia placed were given to her by Justice Kelly. So parents would come in being like, we just lost our job and we need to get benefits or something like that. And she'd be like, okay, you got to fill out this paperwork.

And then surprise, the paperwork was giving up your rights to your kids. Oh my God, that's like when they have, you know, in sitcoms or something, they have you sign a paper and then they take the top player off and they're like, ha ha. You sign the family farm away or whatever.

But in this case, it was your babies. Yeah. Yeah, they didn't want your farm. She's smart. She's smart. Yeah. Mary Long was one of her victims. When she was 15, she lived on a farm with three sisters, a brother,

and her mother, who was dying of cancer. Their mother asked the state welfare department to take her children temporarily while she waited for her relatives to arrive in town and to take them. Instead, the welfare worker took them to Kelly's juvenile courtroom. Kelly turned the kids over to Georgia Tan.

Mary later recalled meeting Georgia, quote, she had a tight-lipped hatchet face. She was hateful looking, mean. Judge Kelly promised to send them all to an orphanage for safekeeping and she mostly did that. But Georgia Tan wanted Mary's youngest sister, five-year-old Christine.

When they arrived at the orphanage, Mary's young sister was abducted and pulled into Georgia Tan's waiting limousine. Bessie, Bessie, Bessie, Bessie, I can still hear her screams. I begged the nuns at St. Peter's to tell me what had happened. Finally, one said Georgia Tan

had flown Christine out of the state to be adopted. So. Damn. Didn't want the older ones. Just took their young sister and was like, it's the only kid I need. You can stick the rest with the nuns.

Geez. Who gives a fuck? Georgia was only able to. But I gotta say, if you're getting abducted into a limo, kind of best-case scenario adoption. Yeah. Most people, I mean, abduction. Abduction.

Because people mostly just put you in a van. Yeah, it is better than a van. You know, you're getting put in that nice car. I'm just here for the silver lining. It's all about that silver lining. Speaking of silver linings, it's time for another ad break. And the silver linings of these ads

is that none of them will be about babies getting stolen or murdered. Beautiful. Beautiful. Produce. During the summer of 2020, some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated the racial justice demonstrations.

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is a raspy-voiced, cigar-smoking man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse was like a lot of guns. He's a shark. And not in the good and bad ass way. He's a nasty shark. He was just waiting for me to set the date,

the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to heaven. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Lance Bass, and you may know me from a little band

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It's all made up. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. We're back! Georgia was only able to get away with any of her crimes

due to the shocking and total collusion of the local government in Memphis. Some of this was due to bribery of the traditional sort, but much of it was due to Georgia's ability to secure children for their wealthy and powerful people in town. When one member of the Tennessee State

Legislature's grandchild was delivered stillborn, Georgia Tans stole and procured a new infant for his daughter the very same day. The baby was handed over to the legislator's daughter while she was still anesthetized

from giving birth. She never even knew who her original baby had died. Holy fuck. Yeah. Oh, you need a baby today? I can get you a fucking baby. Like, I'll find you a damn baby.

I mean, she also invented that like 30 minutes or less pizza guarantee. Yeah, she kind of invented like Amazon's whole policy of same-day delivery. Holy shit. Prime membership baby delivery. You know Jeff Bezos.

Now that we've said it, our phones have sent him that, and he's like, he's already, he's already... He's like, we've been working on this for months. Way to ruin it. The problem is getting drones that won't fall out of the sky

with a baby in them. We've lost a lot of babies that way. Oh. We have fun. By 1929, Georgia had gotten so good at stealing babies that she just had too damn many of them. More than she could place using her usual methods.

I mean, that's such a classic baby abduction problem. I know. After a while, you're just like, there's too many babies. I got too many. I stole too many damn babies. Yeah.

It's, we've all been there once or twice. Got to put some babies on lay-away. Got to give some away. Put some in one of the baby farms just so you can get rid of the excess. Send them over that island in New York where all the babies die.

Oh. So many options. So many options. She brought up this surplus baby problem to her friend, Atta Gilkey, a reporter with the Memphis Press Cemetery. The holiday season was approaching and Atta needed a bevy

of space-filling, heartwarming Christmas content. The two hit upon the idea of solving both of their issues by using the space to advertise Georgia's babies. One of Georgia's ads was just a picture of several babies under the header, won a real-life Christmas present.

Oh my God. It's like getting a puppy. Yeah. That's exactly how it sounds. I'm going to read you some of the copy from that real-life Christmas present baby ad. I bet you I could write that copy. All right.

What's your guess? Okay. Do you want to have a true Christmas experience? Do you want to experience what Mary experienced when she had Jesus? Well, I have some top-notch, 100% blank slate, beautiful babies that are going to turn out

to be anything you want them to be. Do you want to have the happiest little bundle under your Christmas tree? Come to Georgia's babies. Babies by Georgia. Yeah. That's not super far off. Yeah.

I wasn't trying to be funny. I was just trying to nail it. Yeah. And you nailed it. Yeah. So the ad read, want a real-life Christmas present? Well, here's your chance.

For 25 children, ranging in age from three months to seven years, will be presented it to as many lucky families Christmas Eve. The Press Cemetery is making special arrangements with Miss Georgia Tan to place these babies.

A December 1929 ad featuring a picture of two adorable babies said this. See if you can pick out the boy in the picture. No, you missed. It's the other one. The curly head on the right and his playmate on the left is the girl.

She is eight months and the little boy is one year old. They have golden hair, blue eyes, and good dispositions. Applications should be sent to the Press Cemetery adoption editor. Say whether you want a boy or girl,

brunette, blonde haired, or redhead. Blonds, by the way, are in the majority. Oh my God. So she's gotten better at stealing the blonde babies by that point. 1929.

She's like, I know what the market needs. I know what people want and they want blonde babies. The ads were an instant staggering hit. The newspaper's adoption editor, which is not a thing that ought to exist, received dozens of calls that very day. Georgia ran different ads

with different babies every day that December. She called them Christmas babies. Living dolls and advised readers to put your orders in early. You want to get that baby before Christmas? Yeah.

You don't want to also be the one person who didn't get a baby. Yeah, you don't like it. Your friends are going to make fun of you. Oh, you didn't get the baby for Christmas? Loser. The hot Christmas gift? It's a literal baby.

Yeah. The ads also took on a unsettling air, like even more than the commercializing of babies. There's one ad from November 1930 that described a five-year-old girl this way. A solemn little trick with big brown eyes mages five years old and awful lonesome.

What? Why is she a trick? I don't know. My only hope is that it meant something less like risqué in 1930. Yeah, they're trying to be like, she's ready to fuck. She's five.

Why? Why? I don't know. I don't know. I mean, although we'll be talking about George's love of molesting babies later. Oh, my God. So that might have been a part of it.

It's fucked up. I said this was going to be like... I know. Yeah. A December 1935 ad for a five-year-old boy was titled, Yours for the Asking, and read, How would you like to have this handsome boy play catch with you?

How would you like his chubby arms to slip around your neck and give you a bear-like hug? His name is George, and he may be yours for the asking. Jesus. Yeah. This is 1935. Like, we're not...

It's not that far in the past. Like, they have planes that can go across continents. That's right, before World War II. Yeah. That's crazy. The Christmas ads were so successful that Georgia usually sold out of babies. This provided her with an ever-growing list... Imagine that she's running that ad,

and then on top of it is that big sold-out. Like, stamp that they do. No more babies. I'm going to go drive into the poor part of town and pick some up, but like, you know, you got to give me like four hours to grab the next wave. Fuck, dude.

Yeah. The ads provided her with an ever-growing list of future clients who she could abduct children for and market to directly. The Christmas baby stories were also a wild success from a content standpoint. They became the newspaper's most popular articles and a rampant source of discussion

for the people of Memphis. According to the baby thief, quote, Would the child be dressed in lace or simply a diaper or, as was Master Paul advertised on December 14th of that first year? Nothing at all. Our photographer caught the young gentleman

a la nude, but he wasn't the least bit perturbed. He is seven months old and blonde. Like... Oh my God. Elderly citizens saved their favorite pictures. Young matrons' bridge parties were enlivened by spirited, but friendly arguments over whether

baby Bonnie was cuter than Master Paul. Georgia's ads made adoption a household word in the region, and adoptable children, their faces illuminating the newspapers that shared table space with readers' coffee cups and jam pots, began to seem part of their family.

I really like that the jam pots were mentioned. Yeah. That's, that does. Or do you want to make sure you knew people were having jam at the time? It was big. I mean, it's one of those things. So like, this is again part of like the complexity of it

is because like back before Georgia Tans started her work, it was considered like shameful to consider adopting a kid because like, you don't know where it's going to come from. You're, you know, you're making, you know, you're essentially like letting this lower class person infiltrate a good family. And she ends that stigma by making everybody just kind of baby crazy,

but she's also doing it by turning babies into a commodity. So... Two babies for the price of one. Two babies for one deal. I'm throwing a red head for free. Yeah. Red heads, half off. You know, you take a blonde, get a free red head.

Oh, get some colds cash for a future baby. You don't even have to keep the red heads alive. You can just smother them. I mean, this is the thirties. Eventually other newspapers started running Georgia Tans baby ads too. By 1935, Georgia Tan had placed children with parents in all 48 United States, along with four other countries.

Thanks to the ads and the growing success of Georgia's business, she started to get a little bit famous. This brought more applicants to her, for which she had to find more babies. It also made her rich, and this is probably where we should talk about just how Georgia Tan monetized adoption. So, according to the baby thief, quote, she didn't openly affix price tags to children,

but instead charged fees for transporting them to their new homes. Georgia directed prospective adoptive parents to make their checks out to her, not to the Tennessee Children's Home Society, and to send them to her private post office box in Memphis. These fees included travel expenses for a worker and the baby to be adopted, and were due in three installments.

She charged California residents $168 for the first visit, and New York City residents $228.81. Adoptive parents in other areas were charged fees somewhat between these figures. The next installment of Georgia's fee was due upon delivery of the child. Georgia enjoyed handing babies to happy, excited couples, and she often made this trip herself.

California residents were charged $360. New Yorkers paid $268.81. Now, there were no equality. How did New Yorkers pay more for the first installment, but less for the second? I don't know. It's probably just because she wanted the money. It doesn't make sense.

Yeah, it's... That's the only thing that bothers me about this. The financials. The financials, you were just worried that... The books! Don't add up! Now, there were no qualifications for adopting a child from Georgia TAN. Other than that, you know, you have access to money.

A former children's bureau worker later told Barbara Raymond, quote, She placed with no regard to whether children would be happy in their adoptive homes. It was hidden myths. She was trying to place every child in Memphis. She wanted to get her hands on every child. She could.

But since Georgia TAN didn't actually care about any of these kids, she regularly made parents wait more than a year between the second and third trips. This made it seem to the parents, like Georgia really did carefully scrutinize every placement before approving an adoption. The reality is that this was all done

to justify charging a shitload of money on the third installment. California residents could expect to spend a total of $731.44 for a baby. New Yorkers paid a total of a little over $766. In modern terms, that's roughly $11,000 per baby. So these are a high dollar item. Georgia TAN sometimes sold babies for several times that much.

Ultra-wealthy couples could be expected to pay as much as $10,000 in 1930s dollars, which is roughly $140 grand today. Having a baby be a surrogate, that's about $100 grand. Yeah, that's very expensive. But adoption is not supposed to be that expensive. And at the time, normal adoption agencies did not charge anything

except for fees to cover their basic operating costs. And so she was working through a state agency, but she was getting paid personally herself for delivering the babies. She's a nice racket if you can make it work out. She's a fucking G. Yeah, she's a fucking G. Much of Georgia's profits came from

bilking new couples for her travel expenses. This led to her increasingly selling her babies to out-of-state couples. By the late 40s, more than 90% of her stock was sent out of Tennessee. The more places she sold babies, and the more babies she sold, the more famous she became,

and the more people reached out to her wanting to adopt babies of their own. This led to an increasing series of what Ms. Tan called roundups. Oh, God, that's so dark. Yeah. Roundups. Roundups were conducted by groups of varying sizes

that included her and or one or more of her subordinates. They were accompanied by an ever-changing assortment of Memphians, juvenile court employees, social workers, and deputy sheriffs. Armed with papers signed by Judge Camille Kelly, the groups descended upon the apartments, homes, farms, and even houseboats of poor parents, rounding up their children, looking them over,

and carrying off those Georgia deemed most marketable. The reason most often cited in Judge Kelly's authorization was that their parents were providing a poor home environment. Georgia wasn't required to explain why she often seized only the youngest members of a sibling group, not all. Yeah, that's cool.

Super cool, Georgia. Most of the children she abducted were babies or toddlers. Usually, the cutoff was around age five. When she abducted older children, including teens, it was because of specific requests she received from different clients. As her business grew, Georgia began stealing children

in order to fulfill specific orders. One example of how this worked is the story of a 31-year-old widow and mother of six named Grace Gribble. Now, Grace had a social worker from the Memphis Family Welfare Agency, named Sarah Sims. Sarah visited regularly to check in on Grace and her family,

but Sarah was also working with Georgia Tan. Done, done, done. Done, done, done. And one day, Sarah showed up with one of Tan's other employees, a woman named Helen Rose. Sarah told Grace that she needed to sign six papers that would guarantee her children

free medical care from the state. This was all a ruse, though. The papers were really forfeitures of parental rights. Once they were signed, Helen told Grace, I'll take the three youngest children now. Grace started sobbing while Sarah and Helen took three of her children and stuffed them into the back of one of Georgia Tan's limousines.

As Grace begged them to stop, Helen coldly explained that, we have an order for a boy of this age and type. Grace went to the local juvenile court. But someone ordered your baby. Sorry, someone ordered your baby. I got this order. Like, what do you want me to do? Not fulfill a baby order?

So Grace went to the local juvenile court to try and get her children back. She found Georgia Tan there and asked, where are my babies? To which Georgia replied, they're on their way to a much better life than you could provide them. You should thank me.

For some reason, Grace was not grateful. She continued to beg Georgia Tan to not abduct her children. Georgia advised her, forget them. Now, unlike most of Georgia's victims, Grace was eventually able to find a lawyer. They took her seven months to do this. During this time, her six-year-old

was given to a family in Florida. Her three-year-old was adopted by a doctor in Memphis. But her four-year-old was rejected by the couple who bought him. They sent him back to Memphis on a train with a dollar in his pocket. But they had specifically requested. They had specifically requested him.

I don't know. He probably had a dent or something. You know, you want a fresh baby. He spent seven years in foster homes before being adopted again, this time by alcoholics. Jesus. Yay.

Grace did eventually get a trial. But courts being what they were in 1940, the issue that interested the court wasn't where this woman's children stolen from her. It was, does she have as much money as the new parents of her children? In the end, the judge ruled that the adoptions would be allowed to stand.

Grace would not get her children back. The judge told her, quote, this is one of the sad tragedies of life that even a mother must endure for the best interests of her children. Sorry, the other people have more money. You understand. You're a poor.

You're poor. Think about that. Poor people can't raise babies. You have a poor. You're a poor. You can't have several little pores. Yeah. Gotta give them away.

Gotta give them away. Okay. Georgia Tan was able to get away with so much, in part because she had a tight relationship with the man who was basically the dictator of Memphis at this point, E.H. Boss Crump. According to the New York Post. That is also a fake name. That is a fake.

It goes with, what was it? Russell Raspberry? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Not Russell. Rufus. Rufus Raspberry. Rufus Raspberry. That's the best thing to come out of this story

is that a man named Rufus Raspberry once existed. Yeah. And what is it? Boss Crump? Boss Crump. That sounds like a video game. Boss that you have to beat at the very end. Everything was ridiculous in the thirties. Like, oh man.

Yeah. It's just a silly time. According to the New York Post. Quote. Crump, also a transplanted Mississippian, was the sometime mayor and leader of politics. Oh my God, is that what crumping is named after? Yes. I hope so. He developed a cozy patronage with Tan.

She paid him off and brought the fame of her society to Memphis. He in turn protected her from prying investigations, while city police ignored the complaints of families who'd lost children to Tan and sometimes even helped Tan seize kids. So the cops got in on it. You need help stealing babies, Georgia? Yeah, not a big shocker.

Georgia Tan seemed to see much of what she was doing as a sort of class war. She believed the poor were unworthy parents and that their children were better off dead if they couldn't grow up wealthy. This had the benefit for Georgia of making her look outwardly spotless to the world. Most of the coverage around her focused on either

the adorable pictures of babies in newspapers or her work adopting out babies to the rich and famous. She provided Joan Crawford with her twin daughters. Oh my God. Are you serious? I am serious. She provided babies to Lotta Turner and Pearl Buck and Herbert Lehman, the governor of New York. A number of the children she stole

later grew up to be prominent themselves, including the wrestler Rick Flair. What? Rick Flair was stolen as a baby by Georgia Tan. What? Yeah. Joan Crawford got her kids from Georgia Tan. Yo, we should have led with this.

We buried the lead on this one. You want to know where Joan Crawford's babies came from? Yeah, 100%. They were stolen. From? It's just some poor family. So we don't know where they're really from? No. One of Georgia's legacies that actually persists to this day

is like in most of the country, it started to change. The records of like where the child came from are sealed. And like you, like in a lot of cases, you can't find out what your past is. To your 18 or something. That's, yeah, now you can figure it out at a certain point. It used to be that it was just destroyed and like that you had no access to them.

They were basically sealed in most of the country. And that's something Georgia lobbied for specifically to make it harder for people to figure out where she was stealing babies from and stuff. Yeah, I can't believe that the legacies kind of stayed. That's what I mean when I say she kind of invented the modern way of adoption. And like a lot of, not all of it's bad,

but it all started because like she was just trying to figure out a better way to steal and market babies. That's fucking nuts. It's fucking wild. Yeah. And Georgia Tan's business was even darker than it seems because for Georgia, babies were just products like melons or bottles of beer or cartons of milk.

And with any product, you're going to have some spoilage or breakage to deal with. In the case of Georgia Tan, that spoilage came in the form of a shitload of dead babies. But we're going to talk about all that and so much more when we come back on Thursday. This is a good note to end the episode on. How you feeling about Georgia Tan?

I mean, I first made a patch of her and then I sewed it on my jacket and now I've torn it off. It just feel like my previous love of her was just, you know, not justified. Not justified. It was, you get excited because of the lawyer thing. And then. It was like a lesbian.

Lesbian lawyer. This is amazing. Baby stealer. Oh, this is taking a dark turn. Baby murderer, even darker. Oh, she molested some of the babies. OK, I'm going to head out. I'm out seas.

You want to plug your plugables? Sure. You can find me on Twitter and Instagram at thesophia, T-H-E-S-O-F-I-Y-A and listen to my podcast, Private Parts Unknown. We talk about sex and sexuality and we travel around the world. Pretty cool. That does sound pretty cool.

If you want to find this podcast on Twitter, Instagram, Twinstagram, it's at Bastards Pod is the handle for both. You can find us on the internet at behindthebastards.com, which is where we'll have the sources for this podcast listed. If you want to really get deep down into baby murder, there's more links for you. If you want to be bummed the fuck out. The baby thief is a fine piece of journalism

on a super bummer of a topic. Hooray. We have shirts. You can buy shirts. You can buy beer cozies. You can buy phone cases. You can buy munitions, all branded with behind the bastards. Any babies?

Yes, yeah, we do now sell babies. Are you running a special? Yeah, you know what I am. Tell us what this special is. Two brunettes for the price of a blonde. Oh my God, I'm going to get in on this. Everybody should get on this. Guys, get your baby.

You don't want to be the only person on Easter. Well, I mean, I meant I had to. Put that on your baby. And try to text ahead of time, coz I need to have time to drive down to the poor part of town, duck a couple of kids, you know, it goes. You need a little bit of lead time. You need a little bit of lead time to steal some babies, you know.

I only have so much room in the trunk of the car. I mean, I'll provide the limo. Oh. I'll rent a limo. Nice. So that you can really steal in style. The old fashioned way. The old fashioned way.

Chucking them in the back of the limo and driving off. That sounds great. Well, oh yeah, I have a podcast. It's called It Could Happen Here. It's not as depressing as this, but it's. The title sounds like it probably is. It's pretty depressing. It is pretty depressing.

We don't talk about child molestation though. Well, but it could happen here. I think you are not thinking of like an ice cream party. No. It's like negative things, right? It's not about the possibility of an ice cream party. That's what I'm saying. No one's ever like, it could happen here about something great.

Yeah. They're like, ah, festival. Yeah. That could happen here. No, it's a bummer. That's the episode. I love how committed depression you are. Thank you.

That's all I ever do is sad stuff. That's the end of the episode. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science and the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price? Two death sentences in a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.