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Josh Levin has been writing for Slate since 2003 and has co-hosted their podcast Hang Up and Listen for a decade now. (I appeared on the show way back in 2013.) His first book, The Queen, has nothing whatsoever to do with sports, however; it is an engrossing profile and history of Linda Taylor, the woman tabbed by Chicago newspapers and made infamous by Ronald Reagan as a “welfare queen,” whose fraudulent activities were widely embellished by the media and conservative politicians … and who also probably committed other, far worse crimes during her long life of malfeasance.
Linda Taylor was a welfare cheat, and got caught multiple times doing so, although attempts to prosecute her weren’t always successful, and authorities didn’t always follow through even when she was caught because the laws didn’t adequately address this type of public assistance fraud. She used different identities to apply more than once for aid, and used the names of children who weren’t hers, or didn’t exist at all, to ask for more. It’s possible that she was among the most financially successful people exploiting the public aid system in the 1970s, and that that alone would have been enough to make her story newsworthy.
Levin does way more than tell the story of Taylor’s misdeeds around welfare, however. For one thing, he gives readers a detailed biography of Taylor, from birth to death, giving much-needed balance to her story. He explains the roles that uncertain parentage and mixed-race status in a time when that could leave someone ostracized from white and black circles had in shaping her life, while also using interviews and public records to show that Taylor was more than just a con artist, with credible accusations of kidnapping and even murder following in her wake. One of the more interesting threads in Taylor’s biography is her false claim that she was the daughter of a man in Chicago who died and left behind a maybe-illegal fortune, leading to a trial that hinged as much on her own history of lying as anything else.
That alone would make for a pretty good, if short, book, but Levin adds a second and more substantial layer to Taylor’s story by explaining how she became the front-page welfare queen whose thimblerigging became fodder for politicians and activist journalists in Illinois and, eventually, across the country. Levin details much of the life of George Bliss, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist for the Chicago Tribune, whom Levin credits with putting Taylor in the spotlight and helping create the image of her as both an extensive welfare cheat and a symbol of wrongdoing around the public aid system, both by recipients and by people working within the government. That was then picked up by members of the Illinois state legislature, who at one point managed to create their own extrajudicial investigative team to go after welfare frauds, and subsequently by Ronald Reagan in his 1976 presidential campaign.
Reagan, who had left office as California’s governor after two terms in 1974, was a primary challenger to Gerald Ford, who of course was the first unelected official to ascend to the Presidency and was seen as vulnerable for that reason and his tie to the disgraced President Nixon. Reagan began using the story of the “Chicago woman” who used dozens of aliases and the names of hundreds of children to collect hundreds of thousands of dollars in undeserved welfare checks. He was referring to Taylor, but overstated the extent of her crimes and her takings, and continued to embellish the story as the campaign continued – even over objections of some of his own campaign staffers. Levin spins this into a larger point about Reagan’s penchant for dissembling, misrepresenting, or outright lying – and the lack of accountability even from the media covering his campaign at the time – and while Levin never draws the direct parallel to our current President or the contemporary environment of “alternative facts,” I found it impossible to read The Queen without thinking that even Trump’s original campaign was a direct descendant of Reagan’s. Trump is just more blatant about his lies, and perhaps more unrepentant about it, but he was hardly the first – especially when it comes to demonizing people of color.
And that’s the other significant theme of Levin’s book: This is very much a story about race. Taylor’s precise ethnicity is unclear, and she passed for white, black, Latina, and Filipina at different points in her life, but at a time when the “one-drop rule” still existed through the American south, she was generally seen as black. That made her the ideal target for politicians courting white voters angry over the stagnant American economy of the post-oil crisis 1970s and the societal changes that resulted from the civil rights movement. Race-baiting is hardly new in American politics, but Taylor’s race and the breadth of her actual or presumed crimes made her the perfect talking point for candidates looking to appeal to the “economically anxious” non-Latinx white voters who, in 1976, constituted 89% of the U.S. electorate. As I write this, we’re dealing with the current President accusing Democrats pursuing an impeachment inquiry of a “lynching,” invoking a term used almost exclusively to refer to the murders of black men across the American south between the civil war and 1981, when Michael Donald was lynched in Alabama by multiple members of the Ku Klux Klan. Levin makes the case that this sort of coded language is hardly new, and was widely used by a candidate who would go on to serve two terms as President, winning re-election by a historic landslide in 1984.
There’s quite a bit more detail in The Queen, including side threads on the officers who first brought Taylor to some measure of justice (and led to her infamy), Taylor’s daughter and her role in some of the ongoing scams, and comments from people whose lives were affected, almost all adversely, by Taylor’s involvement. The possible murder committed by Taylor for a modest financial gain is an appalling enough story, although Levin can only go so far with that subplot because Taylor was never even arrested for that crime, and the same goes for the accusations that she kidnapped children and either sold them or used their identities to gain more public aid while neglecting the kids. There’s a lot of misery in The Queen, some of it belonging to Taylor herself, but it’s also very much a story of the modern United States – of race and class divides, of lying and self-serving politicians, and of a media culture that still is learning the importance of holding people accountable for their words.
Next up: Just about done with the second book in Paul Theroux’s Riding the Rails trilogy.