by Josh Levin
The welfare fraud hotline cost $25,135 a year to maintain—$8,549 for labor, $806 for the recorder, and $15,780 for the phone line. By that measure, the toll-free number paid for itself. In May 1976, the head of the Public Aid Department’s bureau of special investigations told the Tribune that the hotline had in fact “been too successful”—that it “generates more cases [than] prosecutors can handle.” The agency’s chief investigator added that “most people call because of jealousy. They feel they are taxed beyond belief, and don’t want their dollars supporting someone who doesn’t need them.” In case Tribune readers felt jealous themselves, the paper printed the hotline’s digits in the last line of its story.
The Department of Public Aid’s embrace of toll-free vigilantism didn’t win universal acclaim. The Chicago Sun-Times wrote that the agency had cast ordinary citizens as “Big Brother’s helper,” then suggested it change its name to the “Ministry of Fear.” After reading that editorial, the Reverend Samuel M. Carter, a minister from the majority-black community of North Lawndale, wrote the department to condemn the hotline as “dangerous and un-American,” likening it to something out of Hitler’s Germany or Mussolini’s Italy. “It seems to me that this is just another punitive practice against people who are poor,” Carter wrote.
There seems to be a middle-class American attitude to haunt, to curse, and to damn people because they are poor, as if being poor is a disgrace, a crime.…
I want you to understand, sir, that I do not condone fraud or cheating on any level of society, but in America we have blessed and glorified the Vanderbilts, the J. P. Morgans, and the Harrimans, who stole and cheated the railroad systems of America blind.…We have had shoebox episodes in Springfield and even more recent misappropriations of state government funds.
George Bliss had wanted to write about Paul Powell, the bribe-soliciting Illinois secretary of state who’d secreted away wads of cash in a shoebox and other receptacles, a haul discovered only upon his death in 1970. Back then, higher-ups at the Tribune had told Bliss to leave Powell alone—the newspaper needed to maintain a good relationship with a powerful if ethically compromised state official. There was no such institutional pressure to protect the reputations of welfare cheaters, a group seen as both amoral and politically useless.
* * *
Linda Taylor’s latest booking photos looked like the head shots of a fallen Hollywood star. The “CHIGO PD” placard that hung around Taylor’s neck obscured the regal, oversized collar of her black full-length fur coat—the same garment she’d worn to her most recent court appearance. She sported a longer wig than she had in 1974, the dark hair covering her ears and curling down to her shoulders. But her cheeks appeared more sunken than they had two years earlier, the look on her face less defiant than downcast.
Taylor had been carrying a handful of documents at the time of her arrest, one of which revealed that she had a new husband. A month before, she’d married Sherman Ray, a twenty-seven-year-old Vietnam veteran. The marriage license, Taylor’s third in less than three years, listed her name as Linda C. B. Wakefield and her age as twenty-nine. The janitor at 7450 South Normal Avenue, Arthur Krueger, told Sherwin that the newlyweds had moved in at the beginning of February. Krueger said he’d known Taylor for a long time—she’d been using the building on South Normal as a drop for welfare checks since the early 1970s. When she’d rented an apartment this time, Krueger said, a mail carrier had brought her “some type of questionnaire from the welfare office.”
On the night of Taylor’s burglary arrest, the victim of her crime came to Sherwin’s division to identify her stolen property. Everleana Brame had been Taylor’s roommate for several months starting in the fall of 1975, after Taylor had gotten locked out by John Parks and left her room at the 50th on the Lake Motel. Brame told the police that the women had agreed to “split certain expenses,” but Taylor had never paid any rent. After what Brame described as “several disagreements,” she’d asked her boarder to leave. On move-out day, Taylor showed up at Brame’s house with two Chicago police officers—she’d told the cops she “feared that she would have trouble obtaining her possessions if the police were not present.” When she left, she pocketed a key to the back door.
A few weeks later, on January 29, 1976, Brame came home and found her can opener and television missing. A set of white china dishes with silver edging was also gone, as was her silverware, a pink radio and record player, a makeup mirror on a flower-adorned pedestal, and a silver wedding band with five small diamonds. Someone had raided her closet, too, swiping a bunch of jackets, a three-piece polka-dot pantsuit, and a black broadtail coat with gray fur trim.
This wasn’t a difficult case for Sherwin to crack. Brame’s neighbors had seen a woman who matched Taylor’s description carry several boxes from the rear entrance of 7719 South Oglesby Avenue, load them into a black Cadillac Eldorado convertible, and drive away. Taylor had done nothing to disguise herself. She’d grabbed Brame’s possessions in the middle of the afternoon.
Less than twelve hours after they’d arrested Taylor, at 1:30 a.m. on February 26, Sherwin and his fellow officers went back to her apartment on South Normal Avenue. This time, they had a search warrant. The detectives found Brame’s makeup mirror and dishes, though the china service was missing one cup. They didn’t recover the polka-dot pantsuit or the broadtail coat. Taylor, it turned out, had an extensive collection of black furs—the one she’d stolen from Everleana Brame’s house wasn’t the same coat she’d draped over herself in her most recent set of mug shots. The police gathered, bagged, and labeled the detritus of Taylor’s unsettled life: motel keys, lottery tickets, attorneys’ business cards, and papers marked with the names Dr. Connie R. Walker, Constance Howard, and Linda Ray. Sherwin also found a Carson Pirie Scott department store credit card that had belonged to Patricia Parks, and he inventoried another document as “deposition of Patricia M. Parks, dated 5/24/1975.” That was the day, three weeks before her death, on which Parks had modified her will from her hospital bed.
Most of the stories written about Taylor’s arrest focused on a single large object. On February 28, the UPI wire service reported that the Chicago police had impounded Linda Taylor’s car. “No carriage for Queen of welfare,” read the headline in the Ottawa Journal. “‘Welfare’ Cadillac seized,” said Pennsylvania’s New Castle News. The New York Times ran its one-paragraph article with the title “‘Welfare Queen’ Loses Her Cadillac Limousine,” misidentifying Taylor’s Eldorado convertible. The Times piece noted that the car had been “used to transport a fur coat, television set, diamond ring and kitchen appliances allegedly stolen from an occupant at a residence where Miss Taylor formerly lived.” It didn’t mention that the police had also seized a pair of children that had been under Taylor’s care.
A grand jury indicted Taylor on two counts of felony theft—one each for the GE color television and the fur coat—and one count of burglary. Taylor had been transported to Cook County’s Women’s Correctional Center after her arrest, and she stayed there after her indictment. The threat she’d made to have Jack Sherwin killed had not gone over well in bond court; a judge set her bail for $50,000, and Taylor wasn’t able to post the $5,000 she needed to get released. Seven weeks later, R. Eugene Pincham filed a motion arguing that the five-figure bond was “exorbitant, prohibitive, punitive, unreasonable, and unconstitutional.” Taylor, he wrote, wasn’t a flight risk—she’d appeared in court for her welfare fraud case “on at least two dozen occasions.”
On April 14, a month and a half after she’d shown up for a hearing in a body-length fur coat, Taylor was escorted to criminal court in a correctional center jumpsuit. Pincham sparred with a team of Cook County state’s attorneys for nearly four hours, interjecting so often that a frustrated prosecutor pleaded with the defense lawyer “to have some respect for the court even if you don’t have any for me.” (Pincham’s response: “I assure you that I have the utmost respect for the court.”) This was less a bond hearing than a refere
ndum on the “welfare queen” label, and the fairness of punishing one particularly flashy woman for the supposed crimes of a whole class of people. It was a debate, in the Tribune’s words, over whether “Linda Taylor is a champion of deception and deceit or the innocent victim of a vendetta by overzealous prosecutors.”
Judge Russell DeBow sided with Pincham, reducing his client’s bail to $7,500. The next morning, Linda Taylor posted $750 in cash and walked out of the Cook County Women’s Correctional Center. That same afternoon, she vacated the rear apartment at 7450 South Normal Avenue and left the court no forwarding address. It had taken her less than a day to violate the terms of her release.
* * *
If Ronald Reagan’s close defeat in New Hampshire could be spun as a kind of victory, his losses in Massachusetts, Vermont, Florida, and Illinois looked like the death throes of a candidacy that had never really stood a chance. Although his advisers claimed to be pleased with Reagan’s string of second-place finishes, they knew that the challenger was running out of time. On March 15, 1976, the campaign’s chartered plane almost didn’t take off due to a lack of funds. Nancy Reagan urged her husband’s press secretary, Lyn Nofziger, to quit chasing the White House while they could all still maintain a bit of dignity.
Reagan’s first few months on the trail hadn’t been a total fiasco. After the New Hampshire primary, he’d found a crowd-riling foreign policy message to pair with his more well-developed domestic agenda. The ex-governor earned loud ovations by condemning the policy of detente with the Soviet Union as a symbol of the “collapse of the American will.” He also adopted an aggressive posture on U.S. sovereignty over the Panama Canal, denouncing President Gerald Ford and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger for their plan to gift an important American asset to a Communist regime.
By March 1976, the Panama Canal had become Reagan’s new Linda Taylor. In a campaign advertisement, he parroted a line inaugurated by Senator Strom Thurmond: “We bought it, we paid for it, and [Panama’s] General Torrijos should be told we’re going to keep it.” As he had with Taylor, Reagan got dinged for peddling a misleading, simplistic story—his old Republican ally Barry Goldwater, for one, said his gloss on the canal situation contained “gross factual errors.” But Reagan had latched on to a deeper truth. “The Panama Canal issue had nothing to do with the canal,” a campaign aide told reporter Jules Witcover. “It said more about the American people’s feelings about where the country was, and what it was powerless to do.” When Reagan topped the polls in North Carolina on March 23, earning his first win of the primary season, a Ford organizer credited the triumph to “Miss Sally Jones sitting at home, watching Ronald Reagan on television and deciding that she didn’t want to give away the Panama Canal.”
Reagan knew that his campaign manager, John Sears, wanted him to stop talking about the woman in Chicago. The Republican contender’s discovery of a rich new vein of crowd-pleasing material made it easier to heed that advice. But despite putting Linda Taylor aside, Reagan continued to benefit from bigotry. Desperate to resuscitate the flagging campaign, Sears had ceded control of the North Carolina operation to Tom Ellis, a close ally of Senator Jesse Helms. In the run-up to the primary, Ellis’s crew had distributed flyers insinuating that Gerald Ford might select a black man, Massachusetts senator Edward Brooke, as his running mate. Reagan reportedly demanded that the flyers be confiscated the moment he learned of their existence. Whether they’d been distributed against his will or not, those leaflets marked him as the candidate of racial grievance.
Earlier in the year, Sears had sought to distance Reagan from George Wallace. Now, in advance of the May 1 Texas primary, staffers produced radio and television ads featuring a Wallace supporter. “As much as I hate to admit it,” the man said, “George Wallace can’t be nominated. Ronald Reagan can. He’s right on the issues.” With the help of the state’s Wallace-loving ex-Democrats, Reagan won Texas by a landslide. When he took the primaries in Georgia, Alabama, and Indiana three days later, the campaign crowed to reporters that Reagan had swiped the delegate lead from the incumbent president.
The new GOP front-runner barnstormed across the country, championing fiscal prudence at home and strength abroad. At a speech at a Baptist college in Chattanooga, Tennessee, on May 21, the crowd cheered when he said, “Welfare is destroying human beings, not saving them,” and again when he suggested that “the answer to saving human beings is to see that able-bodied welfare recipients work at useful community projects in return for their welfare grants.” A few weeks later at Oregon State University, a student shouted a question from the balcony: “What do you propose to do to welfare families in Harlem?” Reagan repeated the question, then quickly pivoted to more familiar territory. “There is no one in Washington, DC, who knows how many people in this country are on welfare. Washington only knows how many people they’re sending checks to,” he said. With his campaign ascendant, Reagan didn’t restrain himself. “And in Chicago,” he continued, “they’re sending checks to a woman who’s been on welfare under eighty names, thirty addresses, and fifteen telephone numbers.” He made no mention of welfare families in Harlem.
From May 25 through the end of primary season in June, Ford and Reagan each topped the ballot in six different states. With the nomination fight showing no signs of wrapping up before the Republican convention, the candidates’ public statements became less important than the words they whispered in private to uncommitted delegates. While the Reagan campaign had built up an impressive grassroots network, Ford bested him by wooing delegates with tantalizing perks: a one-on-one meeting in the Oval Office, a seat alongside Queen Elizabeth II at a state dinner, a perch on an aircraft carrier to watch the bicentennial fireworks in New York Harbor. On August 18, 1976, after three anxious days at Kansas City’s Kemper Arena, Ford won the party’s presidential nomination with 1,187 delegates to Reagan’s 1,070.
The next night, the president invited his worthy opponent onstage to say a few words. In his concession speech, Reagan crowed that “the Republican Party has a platform that is a banner of bold, unmistakable colors with no pale pastel shades.” He urged his fellow members of the GOP to “go forth from here united, determined, that what a great general said a few years ago is true: There is no substitute for victory.” In the crowd, a Reagan organizer reported hearing a Ford partisan exclaim, “Oh my God, we’ve nominated the wrong man.”
* * *
Having lost the battle for the GOP nomination, the sixty-five-year-old Reagan went home to his California ranch, an American Cincinnatus waiting to be called back into service by the nation he loved. With his political career on hiatus, Reagan relaunched the daily radio commentaries he’d set aside during his run for the presidency. Two weeks after he’d been edged out by Gerald Ford in Kansas City, Reagan dropped by a Hollywood studio to record a dozen new spots. After he’d finished up for the day, he celebrated his return to the airwaves by drinking champagne with his friend Jack Webb, Dragnet’s Sergeant Joe Friday.
Radio was Reagan’s medium. He’d been a broadcaster for much of his life—his first job out of college had been at WOC-AM in Davenport, Iowa, in 1932—and he knew how to talk so people listened. Reagan composed his radio addresses himself, filling yellow legal pads with the neat cursive he’d learned as a boy in small-town Illinois. He’d steal time on airplanes and car rides crafting as many as three weeks’ worth of monologues in one go. Writing for the radio brought Reagan tremendous joy. He grinned widely every time he handed his secretary a new stack of yellow paper.
On October 18, 1976, the Republican runner-up read from a script titled “Welfare.” He began, “A news item about welfare foolishness has brought back some campaign memories I’d like to share with you.” Those memories centered on a woman in Chicago with eighty different aliases. Though Reagan didn’t say Linda Taylor’s name, he did refer to her as “the ‘welfare queen,’ as she’s now called”—possibly the first time he’d been recorded saying that phrase.
Reagan’s th
ree-minute monologue was a rhetorical double bank shot, one that targeted the American public aid system and his critics in the media. “Even though the story had been widely carried in the press, campaigns being what they are, I would run into cynics who thought I’d padded the story for political purposes,” he told his radio audience. “Well, thanks to the chief investigative reporter of the Chicago Tribune, I can verify and update my story—and it won’t do anything for the image of welfare workers who tried to hush the story up.”
Ensconced in that Hollywood recording studio, Reagan told the tale of Linda Taylor in far more detail than he ever had before. He described the Chicago detectives who’d uncovered her fraud, the state’s attorney’s office that didn’t want to prosecute it, the newspaper that publicized Taylor’s crimes, and the heroic chair of the Legislative Advisory Committee on Public Aid who’d investigated the whole mess. He then offered this “update” to his original story.
The trail extends through fourteen states. She has used a hundred and twenty-seven names so far, posed as a mother of fourteen children at one time, seven at another, signed up twice with the same case worker in four days, and once while on welfare posed as an open-heart surgeon, complete with office. She has fifty Social Security numbers and fifty addresses in Chicago alone, plus an untold number of telephones. She claims to be the widow—let’s make that plural—of two naval officers who were killed in action. Now the Department of Agriculture is looking into the massive number of food stamps she’s been collecting. She has three new cars, a full-length mink coat, and her take is estimated at one million dollars.
Reagan finished up with one last dig at the bureaucrats who’d allowed Taylor to steal all that money. “I wish this had a happy ending,” he said, “but the public aid office, according to the news story, refuses to cooperate. She’s still collecting welfare checks she can use to build up her defense fund.” With that, the almost-nominee signed off: “This is Ronald Reagan. Thanks for listening.”*
