by Josh Levin
Even before the 1970s, black Americans had taken much of the blame for the country’s “welfare mess.” In 1961, the city manager of Newburgh, New York, lamented that an influx of nonwhite residents had hastened the departure of “more constructive or productive citizens.” Newburgh instituted a welfare reform plan that, among other things, required public aid recipients to report to the local police station on a weekly basis. Though the Newburgh plan was deemed illegal by the New York courts, it won broad popular and political acclaim. When Barry Goldwater said he didn’t like to see his taxes go to children born out of wedlock, he was speaking out in favor of the Newburgh plan.
In his influential 1965 report The Negro Family: The Case for National Action, assistant secretary of labor Daniel Patrick Moynihan framed public aid as an explicitly racial issue. Aid to Dependent Children had been “established in 1935 principally to care for widows and orphans,” Moynihan wrote, but “the steady expansion of this welfare program, as of public assistance programs in general, can be taken as a measure of the steady disintegration of the Negro family structure over the past generation in the United States.”
Although he never used the phrase “welfare queen” on the campaign trail and he never mentioned Linda Taylor’s race, Reagan would’ve had to have been incredibly naive not to anticipate how the “woman in Chicago” would be perceived. He prefaced the Taylor story by saying that “no one in Washington…knows how many people in America are drawing welfare. They only know how many checks they’re sending out.” But the crowd in Asheville wasn’t gasping at the government’s inability to balance a checkbook. The audience knew what this welfare-swiping villain looked like. She was a lazy, black con artist, unashamed about cadging the money that honest folks worked so hard to earn.
Reagan had opposed the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act, saying the latter was “humiliating to the South.” He also failed to condemn Alabama governor George Wallace, Jimmy Carter’s rival for the Democratic nomination, who’d risen to prominence thanks to the rallying cry “Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, and segregation forever.” And on the trail in New Hampshire in January 1976, Reagan declared, “I would do everything in my power as president to eliminate and make unlawful the forced busing of school children for the purpose of integration.” Yet Reagan’s campaign aides bridled at the suggestion that he was prejudiced. Reagan, for his part, described himself as racially enlightened. In one of his first speeches after announcing his presidential candidacy, he’d said that in his youth, Americans hadn’t understood “that we had a racial problem. It wasn’t even recognized. But our generation, and I take great pride in this, were the ones who first of all recognized and then began doing something about it.” As a young man, Reagan had invited two black football teammates to stay with him in his home when they’d been refused admission to a hotel. One of those teammates, who maintained a lifelong friendship with Reagan, later said the politician’s claim that nobody knew about racism in the 1920s and 1930s was “the dumbest thing a grown person could say.”
Reagan’s racial consciousness, or lack thereof, became a matter of public concern during the 1976 presidential campaign. On February 5, the New York Times reported that he’d altered his typical script at a rally in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, describing a “strapping young buck”—not the usual “strapping young fellow”—buying T-bone steaks with food stamps. “In states like New Hampshire where there is scant black population, he has never used the expression ‘young buck,’ which, to whites in the South, generally denotes a large black man,” the Times story said. Reagan’s Florida state chair, a Panama City Chevrolet dealer, denied that racism played any role in the governor’s campaign. In the same interview, the Chevy seller said that in “Florida we are wasting our time to get black people registered. There’s no way we can out-promise the Democrats.” He added that black people “would rather be promised a ham and get a loaf of bread than [be] promised two loaves and get it. It’s just the way they think.”
No matter whether he had zero or several dozen racist bones in his body, Reagan benefited from racism adjacencies. The words he used and the behaviors he didn’t denounce gave the most prejudiced members of the American electorate a reason to believe he was on their side. This was a difficult needle to thread. According to the campaign’s internal polling, voters in the 1976 primaries saw Reagan and George “Segregation Forever” Wallace as ideological twins. As a consequence of that polling, Reagan’s campaign manager, John Sears, told his boss he needed to tone down his rhetoric. Per Sears’s instructions, Reagan modified the grocery store line, changing “young buck” back to “young fellow.” But there was one story the Republican candidate wasn’t yet willing to revise. On February 13, Reagan told a crowd at a Holiday Inn outside Kankakee, Illinois, that it was time to “give back to the people of this country the right to run their own country and determine their own destiny.” He told a few jokes, he mocked the Democrats’ “wild spending ideas,” and he talked about a woman in Chicago, a welfare cheat with an income of $150,000 a year.
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In Ronald Reagan’s stump speech, Linda Taylor had eighty names. Taylor’s lawyer thought even 10 percent of that total was too many. Not even the most fair-minded juror, R. Eugene Pincham argued, would be capable of giving such an alias-happy defendant a fair trial. The Honorable Mark Jones agreed. On January 23, 1976, the Cook County judge decreed that prosecutors could identify their quarry by just four names: Linda Taylor, Connie Walker, Linda Bennett, and Sandra Brownlee.
Pincham had filed all manner of motions and petitions since signing on as Taylor’s attorney in the fall of 1974. That December, he’d managed to get the case transferred to a different courtroom by asserting that five different judges were prejudiced against his client. He’d failed a year later in his bid to dismiss each of the counts against Taylor; Jones hadn’t bought Pincham’s claim that “the Defendant does not know Jack Sherwin, has never talked to Jack Sherwin, and Jack Sherwin has never talked to the Defendant.” His motion to secure Taylor a separate trial for each welfare check she’d been accused of stealing had also been shot down. The state’s attorney, Jim Piper, had called that idea “so staggering in its wastefulness and lack of efficiency and impracticality that the concept boggles the mind.”
Though his gambits didn’t always work, R. Eugene Pincham had a gift for persuasion. When the eminent black lawyer argued a case, young defense attorneys crowded into the gallery to hear his booming baritone, a voice the Tribune said “bore the rhythm and intensity of a country preacher delivering a sermon.” The fifty-year-old Pincham was a brilliant, incisive cross-examiner, and his summations sometimes inspired onlookers to burst into applause. In his closing arguments, he’d explain to jurors that as a young boy he had a habit of swiping sugar from his mother’s supply to sweeten his glass of milk. He never got away with it, though, because she inevitably found the granules he’d spilled on the floor. Those tiny sugar crystals, he’d tell the ladies and gentlemen of the jury, were the perfect analogue for all the reasonable doubts the prosecution had failed to clean up.
Growing up in Limestone County, Alabama, Pincham had picked cotton before and after school and from dawn to dusk each Saturday. In 1931, when he was five years old, nine black teenagers had been accused of raping two white women on a freight train bound for Memphis, Tennessee. The nine “Scottsboro Boys” were pulled off the train in Paint Rock, Alabama, less than forty miles from Pincham’s home in Athens, and nearly lynched by a wrathful mob. Two weeks later, eight of the nine defendants had been sentenced to death.
The Scottsboro case didn’t end there—the Supreme Court ordered the defendants retried twice, first due to ineffective counsel and later because black men had been systematically excluded from the jury pool.* Though there was no evidence to support their conviction, seven of the Scottsboro Boys ultimately spent time behind bars; none were executed. The horrific treatment of those nine young men inspired Pincham to become a lawyer.
The Scottsboro trials also filled him with terror. When Pincham was in high school, his mother demanded that he leave Alabama because she feared he might be lynched—a white girl had made eyes at him at the grocery store, and the Pincham family’s cook had overheard her father saying he wanted to do something about his daughter’s crush. Pincham eventually landed in Tennessee, where he attended the historically black colleges LeMoyne and Tennessee State, then went to Chicago in 1948 to attend law school at Northwestern University. The only black student in his class, he shined shoes and waited tables at the Palmer House hotel to pay his tuition.**
Pincham, who moved into private practice in 1951, stepped away from his firm briefly during the Freedom Summer of 1964; he was working as a lawyer in Mississippi when civil rights workers James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner were abducted and murdered. Back in Chicago, the civil and criminal litigator developed a knack for winning unwinnable cases. In 1969, he was part of a team that defended six black men accused of arson during the previous year’s West Side riots; an all-white jury acquitted all six. Two years later, he defended seven members of the Black P Stone Nation gang who stood trial for murdering a white Chicago detective in a back-alley ambush. Pincham told the jury that the men had been framed, citing Matthew 25:40 in his closing argument: “If ye have done it unto the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me.” All seven defendants were found not guilty.
Jesse Jackson, among others, saw Pincham as a leader who could help bring black Chicagoans where they needed to go. In 1971, Jackson demanded the resignation of Edward Hanrahan—the state’s attorney who’d presided over the raid in which police killed Black Panthers Fred Hampton and Mark Clark—and named Pincham as an ideal candidate to replace him. Instead, Hanrahan lost his reelection bid to Republican Bernard Carey. A little more than a year after his victory at the polls, Carey created the special prosecutions division that was pursuing the case against Pincham’s client Linda Taylor.
Pincham worked out of an office in Chatham, a middle-class community that had transformed from 1 percent to 98 percent black between 1950 and 1970. His firm rented space on East Eighty-Seventh Street right off the bustling commercial thoroughfare of South Cottage Grove Avenue, in a building filled with other black-owned businesses—a life insurance firm, a dental office, a beauty shop. The waiting room of Evins, Pincham, Fowlkes, and Cooper overflowed with men and women desperate to see a lawyer. They’d crowd into the reception area until 1 a.m. some nights, hoping Mr. Pincham might spare a moment to listen to their pleas. He got referrals from his fraternity, Kappa Alpha Psi; from his fellow congregants at Trinity United Church; and from people he knew in the neighborhood. The other lawyers at Pincham’s firm didn’t always know where his clients came from. Pincham’s junior associate Isaiah “Skip” Gant thought Linda Taylor had some sort of connection to Edward “Flukie” Cain, the proprietor of Flukie’s Restaurant and Lounge on Cottage Grove. Gant had no doubt that Taylor was a con artist. But if Pincham had taught him anything, it was that every client deserved the strongest possible defense.
In addition to pulling every conceivable legal lever, Pincham sought to change Taylor’s public image. The Tribune’s welfare queen was, in her attorney’s view, a woman of the people—an inner-city martyr who’d done what she needed to do to keep her head bobbing above the poverty line. “When you cut through everything, she’s being accused of taking money not entitled to her,” Pincham told the Tribune on January 27, 1976. “It would be a pretty sorry situation if the state tried to prosecute and send to jail everybody from the South Side that took welfare money they didn’t have coming. There’d just be nowhere to put them.”
Although Pincham didn’t shy away from taking on high-profile clients, he saw himself as a champion of the underclass. In a 1973 interview with the National Black Law Journal, he said that the “people who need me are the victims of unjust accusation, poor folks, and ignorant folks, not the rich nor the famous.” Was Linda Taylor a poor, ignorant victim or a rich and famous criminal? It depended on what stories you read, and whose stories you believed.
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Ronald Reagan built his campaign for the presidency anecdote by anecdote. He brought out his favorites more than once each day, regaling each new crowd with wit and wisdom gleaned from friends, staffers, and magazines. For many Americans struggling to find work and pay their bills, Reagan’s florid stories of government incompetence felt deeply, viscerally true. They weren’t.
On February 4, 1976, the Washington Star’s John J. Fialka published a front-page report gleaned from his observations of eighteen of Reagan’s citizens’ press conferences. The candidate’s talking points, he found, rarely stood up to scrutiny. Reagan inflated his own record, claiming he’d cut 400,000 rather than 230,000 welfare recipients from the rolls in California. He said that the U.S. taxed its businesses more aggressively than any other nation; in fact, Canada, France, West Germany, and Ireland all had higher corporate tax rates. He reported that “three-fourths of all the Christmas tree decorations in the U.S. are made in Japan.” The president of the National Ornament and Electric Light Christmas Association told Fialka that the correct figure was more like 10 percent, with another 50 percent originating in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Korea.
Reagan’s description of New York’s Taino Towers—the public housing complex with a swimming pool and $113.20-per-month apartments with eleven-foot ceilings—had made it sound great to be poor. The swimming pool, it turned out, was open to anyone who lived in East Harlem, and those apartments with eleven-foot ceilings would cost a family between $300 and $450 a month.
And then there was the Chicago welfare cheat with eighty names and an annual tax-free income of $150,000. Reagan “referred to her at nearly every stop” on his New Hampshire road show, Fialka reported, and “people’s jaws dropped in Dublin and Jeffrey and Peterborough and Salem and in all the other little towns where he appeared.” But just like every other anecdote in Reagan’s arsenal, Fialka wrote, this one “doesn’t quite check out.” The Washington Star reporter had learned that Taylor stood accused of “using not 80 aliases but four. The amount the state is charging that she received from her alleged fraud is not $150,000 but $8,000.” Though various Illinois officials believed she’d stolen more than that, Cook County prosecutor Jim Piper told Fialka, “You have to go with what you can prove.”
Fialka’s piece, a professor at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism said, was such “an excellent example of reportorial journalism” that it was slated for inclusion in a textbook. Journalists would absorb the story’s lessons long before that textbook was printed. At a press conference in Daytona Beach, Florida, on February 7, a reporter accused the candidate of hypocrisy for citing “unverified reports” about a single welfare recipient while refusing to condemn Richard Nixon for his well-substantiated role in Watergate.
In recent weeks, you’ve been going up and down the coast telling people about a woman in Chicago who allegedly bilked the welfare agency there out of a hundred and fifty thousand dollars using eighty names and thirty addresses and fifteen phone numbers.
Yet your own briefing material indicates that this woman has never been found guilty of anything, and in fact has been only charged with one count of fraud relating to using four names to defraud them of seven thousand dollars. Do the rules change depending on who you’re attacking?
Reagan had come prepared. Upon hearing “never been found guilty of anything,” he pursed his lips, shook his head from side to side, unfolded a single sheet of white paper, and pulled a pair of reading glasses from his breast pocket. “Maybe I’ve been careless at times and not said ‘reported,’” Reagan began. A second later, he retracted that mea culpa: “Usually I have said this was reported.” (In reality, Reagan almost never used words like reported or alleged—betraying uncertainty wasn’t his style.) “Now, it was widely reported in all the newspapers at the time,” he continued, “and you know I believe everything that you fellows prin
t in the newspaper, except when you’re writing about me.” He then glanced down at his sheet of paper and started to read aloud.
Late November 1974. Her name is Linda Taylor. The Illinois Legislative Advisory Committee on Public Assistance investigated. Came up with eighty-two charges of welfare fraud, perjury, and bigamy. Among other things they discovered one hundred aliases and fifty false addresses.
Reagan looked up from the podium and raised his eyebrows. “I’ve only been saying eighty and thirty,” he said, complimenting himself on his self-restraint. Back to the sheet of paper.
The point I was making is summarized in a wire-service story quoting Joel Edelman, executive director of the Illinois committee. He said, “When the entire story is told, I believe this will prove to be the most massive welfare fraud that has ever been perpetrated in the fifty states.”
Reagan didn’t mention Linda Taylor’s name at campaign rallies—her identity had never been important. Now it was. So long as the woman in Chicago was a real person, he seemed to think, he had nothing to apologize for.