Ronald Reagan, the former star of “Bedtime for Bonzo,” was having trouble gaining traction in the presidential race he hoped to upend. It was 1976, and as the new candidate shook hands in diners, gymnasiums and town fairs, he hit upon a crowd-pleaser, a riff that caught the crowd’s attention by playing to its fears — call it a 1970s version of “Build That Wall.”
“In Chicago, they found a woman who holds the record,” Reagan said in his folksy baritone during a luncheon in Asheville, N.C. “She used 80 names, 30 addresses, 15 telephone numbers to collect food stamps, Social Security, veterans’ benefits for four nonexistent deceased veteran husbands, as well as welfare. … Her tax-free cash income alone has been running $150,000 a year.”
On audio recordings from the time, you can hear the audience gasp.
Reagan didn’t use the phrase “welfare queen” — he left that to the headline writers. His euphemism was “the woman in Chicago,” but the message was clear.
“The audience knew what this welfare-swiping villain looked like,” Josh Levin writes in his new book, “The Queen.” “She was a lazy, black con artist, unashamed about cadging the money that honest folks worked so hard to earn.”
A new political trope was born, and the specter of the “welfare queen” has been with us ever since, a cudgel hauled out by right-wing candidates and cable news hosts to demonize the poor and justify limiting public benefits.
But there’s a wrinkle to the story: Reagan’s “woman in Chicago” was a real person, a mother named Linda Taylor, who had indeed been in the headlines for welfare-related “irregularities,” let’s call them. Taylor’s story has long been forgotten, if it was ever widely known, and many have long assumed that the “welfare queen” was an urban myth. With “The Queen,” Levin, the national editor at Slate, attempts to excavate the gritty, smudgy truth beneath the political rhetoric.
I settled in, expecting to read a story that punctured Reagan’s indelible stereotype. Surely, the “woman in Chicago” would turn out to be an honorable, hard worker who had been unfairly maligned and chewed up in the maw of presidential politics.
Nope. Levin’s book is much stranger than that because here’s the thing: Linda Taylor actually was a scam artist who cheated the system quite prolifically and without the slightest compunction. She turns out to have been a scammer of historic proportions, a woman so protean that she had gone by at least eight different names by the time she was 22. She was, apparently, a kidnapper. Levin even suggests that she committed murder.
This presents an interesting conundrum. Reagan’s stereotype was sweeping and offensive, but the woman at the center of it did drive a Cadillac and wear fur coats and take advantage of state programs intended to help the poor. What’s a writer to do? Levin makes no excuses for Taylor and instead rushes in, magnifying glass in hand, to the tornado that was her life.