Scholars have shown that the “welfare queen” label is overwhelming used to indicate black women, and that the use of the term leads members of the public to support cuts to welfare. Yet contrary to the pernicious “welfare queen” stereotype, black people have never been a majority of welfare recipients, and welfare fraud is exceedingly uncommon. In fact, the welfare system has always been more likely to illegally deny benefits to those who fit the criteria than benefits-seekers are to commit fraud.
Given how pervasive the trope of the “welfare queen” remains, it’s worth examining its origin in the public shaming of Linda Taylor. Levin’s The Queen: The Forgotten Life Behind an American Myth, is the first full-scale effort to present Taylor’s biography. Levin found that Taylor was indeed a welfare cheat—but also a serial scam artist, a kidnapper, and perhaps even a murderer. She really did drive a Cadillac, use multiple identities, and drape herself in fur coats. But, as all this reveals, she was also about as far from a typical welfare recipient as it is possible to be, a fact that Reagan elided and that Levin takes pains to emphasize.
Levin seeks to contextualize Taylor’s life, in an attempt to make some sense of her often bizarre, sometimes violent, constantly mendacious behavior. The daughter of a white mother and black father, she was born in 1926 in Golddust, Tennessee, where her parentage constituted a crime. Christened Martha Louise White, her impoverished white family excluded her because she could not pass for white, and she was expelled from her first school at the age of six. By fourteen, she’d given birth to her first child. While still a teenager, she fled the Jim Crow South and followed the wartime labor boom to the West Coast. For the rest of her life, she moved continuously, changed her name constantly, and committed a truly astounding number of crimes—from stealing babies from hospitals to possibly hiring a hitman to kill one of her husbands.
In the fall of 1974, the Chicago Tribune ran a story about welfare fraud, citing Taylor as an extreme example. Thousands of newspapers across the country reprinted versions of this story, many focusing on Taylor herself, with some branding her a “welfare queen.” She was indicted for welfare fraud, though for just $7,608 worth of payments; Cook County spent far more securing a conviction than she’d allegedly stolen. Her case led Illinois to aggressively pursue, prosecute, and punish welfare cheats, and, in 1976, it led Reagan—a longtime foe of welfare—to tell a stunned crowd about this “woman from Chicago.”