by Josh Levin
Although these “citizens’ press conferences” were carefully stage-managed, Reagan couldn’t dodge the press entirely. Reporters demanded answers about a speech he’d made in Chicago the previous September, one in which he’d proposed cutting $90 billion from the federal budget by transferring control of education, housing, welfare, food stamps, Medicare, and Medicaid to the states. While nobody had paid much attention to the idea when it had first been floated, the Ford campaign brought this forgotten scheme to the press’s attention, declaring that Reagan wanted to “throw old people in the snow.”
The insurgent candidate was now on the defensive. “I guess I made a mistake in the speech that I made in Chicago,” Reagan said at a campaign event, declining to address what that mistake had been. Later, he insisted he could pay for the $90 billion transfer by repurposing federal taxes on alcohol and cigarettes. He also said that if a specific state didn’t fill in the gaps after he eliminated the federal safety net, poor people could “move elsewhere.”
Reagan had long been criticized for pushing simplistic proposals. No matter what after-the-fact explanations the ex-governor came up with, this seemed like another plan he hadn’t thought through. But Reagan’s connection with voters didn’t depend on his mastery of policy details. On January 15, he pivoted to a topic that played to his strengths. “No one knows how many people are on welfare,” he told a crowd in the mill town of Hinsdale. “They only know how many checks they send out.” He said there was a woman in Chicago who exemplified the welfare mess. That woman, Reagan said, used eighty names, thirty addresses, and twelve Social Security cards to collect all kinds of public benefits. The former California governor made it clear that the federal government was preventing the country from reaching its true potential. But this unnamed woman in Chicago—she was the enemy, too.
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Linda Taylor’s new address had a heated pool, a cocktail lounge, and a spectacular view of the Lake Michigan shoreline. The 50th on the Lake Motel billed itself as the largest in Chicago, with 301 luxurious rooms that provided guests with “the ultimate in comfort and pleasure.” The motel, which sprang up at the intersection of East Fiftieth Street and South Lake Shore Drive in 1958, quickly became a way station for black celebrities. Muhammad Ali moved to the motel in 1965, after a fire coincidentally destroyed his South Side apartment on the same night as Malcolm X’s murder. He also bunked there in April 1967, in the days before he formally refused to join the U.S. military, and reporters rushed to East Fiftieth and Lake Shore Drive to interview the boxer on June 28, 1971, the day the Supreme Court overturned his draft-dodging conviction.
Taylor was facing a daunting set of legal issues when she arrived at 50th on the Lake in 1975. In September of that year, a Cook County grand jury issued an updated, fifty-four-count indictment in her welfare fraud case—a substantial increase from the twenty-nine counts she’d been hit with the previous November. Prosecutors brought forward more public aid checks Taylor had cashed as Connie Walker and Linda Bennett, bumping her alleged take to $8,865.67. In addition to “theft by deception,” Taylor now stood accused of having “knowingly exerted unauthorized control” over each of the checks she’d pocketed—that is, having stolen money from its rightful owner, the State of Illinois. The new indictment did include one piece of good news for Taylor: She was no longer being charged with bigamy.
As she continued to await trial, the most pressing item on Taylor’s legal calendar was the matter of the estate of Patricia M. Parks. By the late summer, the Cook County state’s attorneys had decided Taylor wouldn’t be charged with murdering Parks. Now a probate court judge would determine whether she’d get the dead woman’s money and house.
In a hearing on September 3, Taylor testified that Parks had been of sound mind and memory when the Trinidadian woman had amended her will less than a month before her death. Taylor told the court that she’d been bereft since Patricia’s ex-husband had locked her out of the house on South Phillips Avenue—that her food and clothing were trapped inside the Parks family’s brick bungalow. Under cross-examination by John Parks’s attorney, Taylor misstated her husband Lamar Jones’s name—she called him Lamont—as well as the year of their marriage, saying it had been in 1975 rather than 1974. Though her welfare fraud prosecution was ongoing, she denied being known as Linda Taylor in any other legal cases. She stated, falsely, that “Taylor is the name the detectives gave me after Mr. Parks had broken into my home.” And while she’d already told the Chicago Defender that Patricia was her sister, Taylor now demurred when asked if they were related by blood: “Your honor, I prefer to not say at this time whether we are or we aren’t.”
The judge, Robert A. Sweeney, insisted that Taylor answer the question. “Well, I’m going to say this,” she responded. “We were allegedly to have the same father.” Taylor said that man was named Lawrence Wakefield, and that he was a resident of Wakefield, England. She added that Patricia Parks wasn’t her sister’s real name—that “Patsy” had been written on her Trinidadian birth certificate.
Sweeney didn’t believe anything Taylor said. On October 24, 1975, he appointed John Parks administrator of his ex-wife’s estate. Taylor wouldn’t get the contents of Patricia Parks’s safety-deposit box at Hyde Park Bank and Trust Co., and she wouldn’t get the house on South Phillips Avenue. That outcome didn’t get written up in the Chicago Tribune or in any other paper. Nor had anybody followed up on the status of the investigation into Patricia Parks’s death. The allegation that Linda Taylor had killed Parks just disappeared.
That didn’t mean reporters had lost interest in Taylor entirely. On October 24, the same day she lost her claim on the Parks’s home, the Tribune, the AP, and the UPI all ran items on a new Taylor-related intrigue. According to George Bliss, the accused welfare cheat had told the police that “two men came in carrying guns, took her cash and rings, and forced her to remove all her clothing in a bathroom.” In an interview with the Defender published the next day, Taylor said that one of the robbers had held a gun to her young son Hosa’s head and threatened to “blow his brains out”; that the other supposed perpetrator, who went by Chucky, had snatched her friend’s two-month-old and flung the baby against the wall; and that the two men had stolen $500 in cash and seven diamond rings worth $17,000. “When I couldn’t get [the rings] off fast enough, ‘Chucky’ grabbed my hand and yanked them off, leaving bruises and scratches on my fingers,” she said to the Defender, which identified her in a photo caption as “Mrs. Linda (Welfare Queen) Taylor.” That photo, which ran on the front page of the newspaper, showed a concerned-looking Taylor with her left arm wrapped around Hosa. Taylor comforted the boy while seated on the hood of a Cadillac, her feet dangling in front of the grille.
While Bliss did note that Taylor had a history of filing fake burglary reports, the Tribune, the Defender, and the wire services never questioned the veracity of this latest purported theft. This was something of a pattern for the Chicago papers, which published a bunch of lurid, one-off stories about Taylor in 1975 and left all of them unresolved. In February, the Tribune’s William Griffin had reported that Taylor had tried and failed to lay claim to the estate of South Side gambling kingpin Lawrence Wakefield—the man she’d told Judge Sweeney was her and Patricia Parks’s father. A month after that, Griffin and Bliss had written a pair of articles indicating that Taylor had been a suspect in the 1964 kidnapping of an infant from a Chicago hospital and suggesting she may have purchased children as part of a welfare fraud scheme. In May 1975, the Chicago Daily News had noted that Taylor was accusing one of her ex-husbands—Willie Walker, the taxi driver—of faking his own death to get out of paying alimony and child support.
Just as the question of whether Taylor murdered Patricia Parks had come and gone, so, too, did all these other allegations. The only other Taylor-connected development that got national play in the latter part of 1975 was her daughter Sandra Brownlee’s indictment. The AP reported that Brownlee had been charged with receiving public aid while her husband “
was earning $10,000 a year as an employee of Western Electric Co.”
For Bliss, Taylor’s theft of welfare checks had served as the defining example of the Public Aid Department’s apathy. This had been a crime aided and abetted by an agency that didn’t know where its money was going and didn’t care to find out. Bliss’s subsequent reporting had done nothing to change his view of the department. In January 1975, he’d written that Governor Dan Walker “was accused of covering up a widespread public aid scandal, while state officials were attacked for refusing to cooperate with an investigation of welfare cheaters, who are costing the state $400 million a year.” In December, Bliss revealed that the Department of Public Aid had ignored rampant Medicaid abuse by Chicago pharmacists. But none of those white-collar professionals got a catchy nickname or became a political symbol. The welfare queen—not the bill-padding, prescription-forging pharmacist—was the villain the press and the public wanted.
In May 1976, Bliss would win yet another Pulitzer Prize, this one for an investigation he’d done with his colleague Chuck Neubauer on malfeasance in the Federal Housing Administration’s mortgage insurance program. Linda Taylor wasn’t Pulitzer material. By 1976, Bliss’s pieces on the larger public aid scandal no longer mentioned Taylor’s name, and his pieces on Taylor didn’t address the larger public aid scandal. She’d become a fascinating triviality, less a symbol of systematic fraud than a case study of the outer limits of human behavior.
Though Bliss typically didn’t talk about his works in progress, Linda Taylor turned him into a newsroom gossip. “Oh my God, I’ve got another one,” he’d tell his fellow reporter Bill Mullen, boasting about his latest tip and laughing at the brazenness of the public aid cheat with all the names. But nothing Bliss published connected Taylor to a bigger story, and he never answered the basic questions he’d raised in his own reporting: Had anyone on the inside helped Taylor fleece the government? How much money had she really stolen?
Bliss didn’t write in shades of gray. He identified villains, and he shamed them. In his initial stories, Taylor stood for an institution that had lost its way. By 1975, she stood alone. In the end, the only person implicated in the Linda Taylor scandal was Taylor herself.
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In New Hampshire, Illinois, North Carolina, and Florida, Ronald Reagan won over conservative voters with an endless stream of stories about the hilarious, alarming ineptitude of the United States government. At a $5-a-plate luncheon in Asheville, North Carolina, on January 27, 1976, he said a judge had ordered a public aid cheat to repay $1,511 “at the rate of fifteen dollars a month, and then ordered the welfare department to increase her grants fifteen dollars a month so she could pay off the debt.” He talked about a family that had its welfare checks forwarded to the Soviet Union, and he said there was a housing project in New York City, Taino Towers, where “you can get an apartment with eleven-foot ceilings, with a twenty-foot balcony, a swimming pool and gymnasium, laundry room and playroom” for just $113.20 per month including utilities.
Reagan also told a convoluted but well-received story about a welfare recipient who stole a country ham, sold that ham to a store, and bought it back with food stamps. He said the “executive editor of a metropolitan newspaper in the East” had been urged by a welfare worker to “purchase food stamps even though he informed them he owned a forty thousand dollar home, a three-acre lot, two late-model motor cars, and has had a salary of four hundred dollars a week.” He claimed there was a “student in California who was getting food stamps by virtue of being in school.” The kicker: “She’s studying to be a witch.” And though he didn’t mention her by name, the Republican presidential candidate also brought up Linda Taylor, again and again. “In Chicago, they found a woman who holds the record,” he said at the luncheon in Asheville, cribbing from the 1974 UPI article that his aide Peter Hannaford had clipped and filed away. “She used eighty names, thirty addresses, fifteen telephone numbers to collect food stamps, Social Security, veterans’ benefits for four nonexistent deceased veteran husbands, as well as welfare.”
The former radio announcer had a way of making the hoariest yarn sound like a fresh outrage. Reagan’s casual, confiding delivery assured his supporters they were the upstanding “us” fighting to save the country from the corrupt, dishonest “them” of Washington bureaucrats and the undeserving poor. “If someone set out to design a welfare program that wouldn’t work, they couldn’t do better than food stamps,” he said in Asheville. “You’ve probably had the same idea when you were standing in the checkout line at the market with your package of hamburger, watching the strapping young fellow in line ahead of you buying T-bone steaks with food stamps.”
The people in Asheville applauded after Reagan’s riff on T-bone steaks, and they laughed when he talked about the food stamp–nabbing witch. But the mood changed when he talked about the woman in Chicago. When he said “her tax-free cash income alone has been running a hundred and fifty thousand dollars a year,” the crowd at the luncheon gasped. This wasn’t funny.
Reagan had built his political career on stories of profligate government spending. In his star-making 1964 speech, “A Time for Choosing,” a televised endorsement of Republican presidential candidate Barry Goldwater, Reagan told the story of a woman who “wanted a divorce to get an eighty-dollar raise”—her husband’s salary didn’t match what she could get from Aid to Families with Dependent Children. When he first ran for governor in 1966, a pair of advisers—behavioral psychologists Kenneth Holden and Stanley Plog—pushed Reagan to make welfare a major focus of his campaign. Reagan, who’d thought it “might be a dangerous subject,” quickly learned that he’d been mistaken. “I am becoming more aware that the man on the street has decided he’s supporting too many families not his own, and he wants something done,” he wrote in a letter eight months before Election Day. Reagan would defeat Democratic incumbent Pat Brown by nearly one million votes.
While welfare was typically understood to be a synonym for cash assistance programs such as AFDC, the term’s vagueness made it a versatile political tool. For middle- and upper-class voters, particularly white ones, welfare didn’t encompass a program like Social Security. Rather, it came to stand for any government benefit they themselves didn’t receive.
Although Reagan tended to center his anti-welfare pitch on fiscal sanity, Goldwater and many others framed their objections to public aid in moral terms. “I don’t like to see my taxes paid for children born out of wedlock,” Goldwater said in 1961. “I’m tired of professional chiselers walking up and down the streets who don’t work and have no intention of working.” Eleven years later, Russell Long, a Louisiana Democrat who spearheaded a Senate Finance Committee investigation on welfare fraud, said “the welfare system, as we know it today, is being manipulated and abused by malingerers, cheats, and outright frauds.”
The loosening of welfare’s strictures in the 1960s and 1970s had made it much easier for needy people to get emergency relief. It had also made it simpler for determined thieves to cheat the system. In 1971, the Washington Post reported that a group of women in Prince George’s County, Maryland, had stolen roughly $40,000 in welfare and food stamps by giving phony addresses and disguising themselves with wigs. When a public aid worker confronted one of the fakers, the woman said she’d been schooled in the art of welfare subterfuge “by a man named Red Willie who drove a brown Cadillac.” Red Willie and his brown Cadillac were never found.
Whether or not Red Willie roamed the earth, public aid fraud did exist. In 1978, the federal Department of Health, Education, and Welfare reported that it lost between $5.5 and $6.5 billion of its $150 billion annual budget to fraud, abuse, and waste. However, just 15 percent of that $5.5 to $6.5 billion—less than 1 percent of HEW’s yearly spending—got siphoned away due to “unlawful, willful misrepresentation (fraud) or excessive services and program violations (abuse).” Further, less than $500 million of the agency’s losses was attributable to the partially federally funded AFDC program.
The vast majority of those debits, around $4 billion, came via Medicaid and other health care initiatives.
While AFDC wasn’t, at least relative to Medicaid, a colossal money pit, it also wasn’t managed all that efficiently. A 1973 HEW survey revealed that 22.8 percent of families on AFDC were overpaid, 8.1 percent were underpaid, and 10.2 percent were entirely ineligible for payment. Some of those ineligible cases could’ve been the handiwork of wig-wearing women with fake addresses. In an earlier report, though, HEW had said that most instances of ineligibility stemmed from “honest mistakes” by people on welfare and local administrators, not out-and-out fraud. The next largest group of ineligible recipients, everyone in the field agreed, was those who’d failed to report outside income—the wages from a job or a family member’s contributions to the household purse. Families on AFDC needed whatever cash they could scrape together to afford food, clothing, and shelter. In 1974, when the federal poverty line for a family of four was $5,038, the basic grant for a four-person AFDC family in Cook County was $288 per month—$3,456 annually. After the state legislature finally pushed through a 10 percent cost-of-living increase, that figure rose to just more than $3,800.
Most Americans didn’t feel sorry for the men, women, and children who received a monthly, taxpayer-funded allowance. A June 1976 survey by the pollster Louis Harris found that 89 percent of respondents believed “the criteria for getting on welfare are not tough enough,” while 85 percent thought “too many people on welfare cheat by getting money they are not entitled to.” In a poll conducted a month earlier, 66 percent of Americans had fully agreed with the notion that “the American way of life is superior to that of any other country.” In the year of the bicentennial, hating welfare cheaters was more American than loving the United States itself.
Americans’ views on the poorest of the poor had shifted dramatically in just a few decades. Michael Harrington’s 1962 book The Other America had awakened politicians and the general public to the deprivations of the white rural poor and had played a key role in inspiring Lyndon Johnson’s 1964 War on Poverty. Over the subsequent ten years, the amount of Americans receiving some form of public aid grew from roughly 2 percent to 6 percent. During that same period, the racial composition of the Aid to Families with Dependent Children caseload had stayed roughly the same, with the proportion of black recipients cresting in the early 1970s at just more than 40 percent. But in the aftermath of riots in the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles, on the West Side of Chicago, and in other inner cities, the image of American poverty had changed. In 1964, just 27 percent of the photographs in newsmagazine stories about poor Americans showed black people. In 1972 and 1973, that number jumped to 70 percent.