"I saw your interesting article about the Alamo scandal. This article sparked memories of the Alamo couples' rackets back in the mid-1970's when I still lived in Nashville, TN, pursuing my master's degree in librarianship. At that time, downtown Nashville had at least one of their clothing stores, and possible a bookstore of theirs. Although I had never set foot in their places partly because I was not interested in high-priced clothing (not on my budget then!) and because I knew enough of their repugnant right wing ideological views (fellow graduate students told me word of mouth about the Alamos), I avoided them like the plague.

The Alamo's grusome legacy that you spelled out today also sparks my interest because, as a former student of 20th Century Tennessee history, their horrible abuse of children resembles an ugly legacy that plagued Memphis from 1925 until 1950 when a Georgia Tann and another woman started up what was supposed to be the nation's first orphanage. While her enterprise did indeed spawn several legitimate orphanages nationwide that really made an honest effort to put their children residents first, heres was anything but. Hers was a "baby-for-sale-racket." The white children she took in she would try to sell to the highest bidder. Many famous movie stars of the forties like June Allyson, Dick Powell, and Joan Crawford, got their adopted children from this pseudo-orphanage. Those children that Tann could not sell for adoption would suffer a horrible fate of child abuse and molestation. Tann and her assistant, along with several of the staff she hired (many of whom had prior records of mistreating children), would starve, rape, and even murder, children with absolute impunity from the authorities until 1950. Her orphanage to those who were unaware of these abuses, had revolutionized society's expectation of white unwed mothers. Before the 1925 creation of her abusive orphanages, society expected white, as well as black, unwed mothers to keep and raise their children with or without (mostly the latter) any public or private assistance. After 1925, society pressured unwed white mothers to give up their children for adoption while continuing to demand that black unwed mothers hold on to their children.

How, you might ask, did this Memphis orphanage get away with such horrible crimes for over a 25 year period? One has to understand the Memphis of that era and the expectations that the nearby Deep South state of Mississippi had for middle-class white women who aspired to economic independence. Georgia Tann had wanted to become an attorney like her father, but since her family considered that work "unsuitable" for women, she decided, upon moving to Memphis, to start up an orphanage that emphasized profit over child welfare.

Memphis prior to the 1878 yellow fever epidemic had been a fairly cosmopolitan city with a fairly strong foreign white ethnic population. The 1878 yellow fever epidemic, however, would change that by killing most of the Irish and forcing the Germans to flee to St. Louis. In their place came rural, mostly illiterate whites and blacks, who became very suseptible to a new hustler class that would run Memphis into the ground, giving it the dubious distinction as the murder capital of the U.S. for a while and cause it to lose its bond rating. Afterwards, a city-boss system similar to Mayor Daily's Chicago machine would come to power, holding both Memphis and Tennessee in a political stranglehold that would last until 1948. Ms. Tann knew who the most powerful persons in Memphis (and, therefore, Tennessee) were and was able to "buy" police protection for her abusive orphanage. When state reformers toppled the Memphis Dixicrat cabal from power, they decided to finally close in on her, but not for her abuse of her children charges. Instead, the reformers only wanted to force her to pay back taxes that the old machine had allowed her to evade for decades. Only her death from natural causes along with the death of her female co-resident, put an end to her orphanage. It would take decades later for the surviving child victims of her orphanage to get any acknowledgement from the state of Tennessee of the crimes that Tann and her cronies commited against these children. This Memphis scandal may have inspired the 1951 television episode, "Babies for Sale," that appeared in the RACKET SQUAD series that aired during the closing months of the Truman Presidency.

Let's hope that the Alamo crimes have been stopped for good now and that their surviving victims will get their day in court."

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"I wish I had justice when I was a child.. Good for him!"

"Good. He can think of what he did in jail for a verrrry long time."

"You are so very dead-on correct. It sickens me to think what these people went through then and the trauma they will continue to experience. 175 years isn't enough time."