by Josh Levin
Although Piper had won the Linda Taylor case, he knew that it hadn’t been a perfect prosecution. In pursuing Taylor’s successor—a woman touted as “the new welfare queen” by both the state’s attorney’s office and the Tribune—he looked to fix the mistakes he’d made the first time out. Illinois officials had believed Taylor had a tax-free cash income of $150,000 a year, but she’d been convicted of thieving a tiny fraction of that amount; the charges against Otis, by contrast, reflected the full scope of her alleged actions. For Piper, it had also been vexing to watch Taylor keep getting released on bail; this go-round, he made sure Otis stayed locked up on a $200,000 bond. And while it took more than three years for Taylor to go from arrest to incarceration, Otis traveled the same path in just eight months. In January 1979, Piper reached a plea deal with Otis’s lawyer, and the new welfare queen was sentenced to four years in state prison. Like her forebear, she’d serve that time at Dwight Correctional Center.
Otis, too, had a successor, a purveyor of frozen treats the Tribune called the “Ice Cream Welfare Queen.” That woman, Joyce Williams, reportedly collected almost $11,500 in public aid even as she lived in a luxury apartment building on South Lake Shore Drive and “drove a $23,000 imported automobile.” She was held on $100,000 bond in August 1978 after supposedly fleeing to Mississippi and opening another ice cream parlor. Piper also prosecuted Chicago’s next “new welfare queen,” Hope Beaty, who was denied bail in 1980 after being charged “with illegally collecting $150,682 in checks, $49,858 in food stamps, and $8,844 in medical payments.”
The bail rulings in these high-profile fraud cases—the six-figure bonds given to Otis and Williams, and Beaty getting held without any bond at all—signaled that the Cook County courts were in the grip of a kind of anti–welfare queen hysteria. The Tribune, stenographer of the state’s attorneys’ press releases, didn’t criticize this or any other practice undertaken by Piper’s welfare fraud unit. It would be unfair, though, to say the newspaper lacked compassion for Chicago’s poor. In its annual drives for the city’s Neediest Families Christmas Fund, the Tribune urged its readers to give money to the city’s most pitiable welfare recipients: Gloria Diaz, a diabetic mother with three small daughters; John Larkin, an elderly man with an artificial leg and paralyzed arm; and Margueritte Gillian, who took care of foster children until being felled by illness, “has not received her last two [public aid] checks in the mail,” and “has no family to help her through these hard times.”
In the enormous chasm between Linda Taylor and Margueritte Gillian were untold numbers of people who neglected to report outside income that might render them ineligible for government assistance. All of them were cheaters by the letter of the law, and the Tribune rarely if ever defended them. In 1980, the magazine Chicago Lawyer published an in-depth feature about one of these supposedly hardened criminals, a black woman named Dorothy Holder who collected $4,730.95 in public aid while working for the Illinois Department of Children and Family Services.
Holder, who’d dropped out of high school to help support her family, had to stop working temporarily at age thirty-six due to a prolonged hospitalization. She’d then earned a bachelor’s degree, began to pursue a master’s, and got a job with the state, failing to get off the public aid rolls immediately upon finding full-time work. Holder learned that she’d been indicted when a friend told her that her name was in the newspaper—she was the eleventh of twenty-seven Chicagoans on a list of those accused of “bilking the welfare system.” For the state’s attorney’s office and the Tribune, these directories of alleged wrongdoers—each person charged was identified by name, age, address, and place of employment—served the dual purpose of publicly shaming supposed welfare thieves and alerting the cheater-hating masses that the city was overrun by leeches.
Holder admitted she’d made a mistake—“I don’t want to sound like ‘Miss Goody Two-Shoes,’ because that’s not the case,” she told Chicago Lawyer—but pleaded to be seen as someone who was trying to do the right thing. “I wanted to work it out so that once I got off public aid I would never have to go that route again,” she said. “They kept saying in court that I was a well-educated woman, but they failed to realize how I had to fight to be well educated. I was trying to survive. I was not doing it to buy cars and fancy clothes.”
Judge Thomas J. Maloney didn’t listen to anything Holder said. He rejected her request that she be allowed to repay the money she’d taken, and he ignored testimony from her boss and co-workers that she was a woman of high character. On December 7, 1979, Maloney ordered Holder to prison for one to five years for what he termed a “clever, conniving, callous rip-off of the taxpayers’ money,” arguing that if she was “retained on the state payroll, Holder could, and probably would, steal again.” Years later, the judge who lectured Dorothy Holder on morality would spend twelve years behind bars after being convicted of fixing multiple murder trials in exchange for cash.
Holder’s prosecution in some ways marked the end of a feverish era in Illinois, one that started when the Tribune branded Linda Taylor the welfare queen in October 1974. In the final days of 1978, Democratic state senator Richard Newhouse succeeded in ousting Republican Don Moore as the chair of the Legislative Advisory Committee on Public Aid. The following year, the body that had led the charge to prosecute Taylor disbanded its internal police force, effectively ending its run as a publicity-seeking pursuer of individual offenders. At around the same time, Piper began to get fewer referrals from the Illinois Department of Public Aid and the Illinois Department of Law Enforcement, a consequence of arcane changes in those agencies’ internal review processes. Finally, in November 1980, Cook County’s Republican state’s attorney Bernard Carey would lose his reelection bid to Democratic mayoral scion (and future twenty-two-year mayor of Chicago) Richard M. Daley. Although Daley would occasionally ballyhoo his office’s welfare fraud prosecutions, he’d dismantle the unit Piper built.
Piper, who’d moved to the state’s attorney’s financial crimes section just before Carey’s ouster, believed he’d done important and valuable work. Between 1977 and 1980, his division would indict 631 people accused of stealing a collective $7.3 million in public aid. In his first meeting with Daley, though, the prosecutor was criticized by the new boss for bringing welfare fraud charges against Chicago Police Department crossing guards. Piper thought those were good cases—if the guards had stolen government funds, he didn’t understand why they should get special treatment. But Daley had other priorities.
The relative slowdown of Illinois’s hyperactive fraud-fighting regime didn’t reflect a shift in the mood of the state’s concerned citizens. Call volume to the Department of Public Aid’s twenty-four-hour welfare fraud hotline stayed steady throughout the late 1970s, hovering at just above ten thousand reports per year. The nation as a whole likewise remained suspicious of those receiving public benefits. Between 1976 and 1980, a consistent 57 to 60 percent of survey respondents said the nation spent too much on welfare—the highest figures on record until the mid-1990s.
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On June 14, 1978, six weeks after the Tribune dubbed Arlene Otis the new welfare queen, the Los Angeles Times reported that a thirty-three-year-old woman from Ladera Heights, California, had been “accused of pulling off the biggest welfare fraud in the nation’s history.” Barbara Williams, who was charged with scamming the state out of $239,857 in welfare checks, allegedly padded her public aid applications with thirty-four, forty-seven, or “more than seventy” phony children, depending on which media item you believed. The judge who sentenced the black, Cadillac-driving, oversized sunglasses–wearing mother of four to eight years in prison said she was “on a par with somebody who steals from the poor box of a church.” The Times’ enormous page one, above-the-fold headlines told Williams’s story in a shorthand that was easy for any reader to understand. “Welfare Queen Surrenders.” “Welfare Queen Sent to Prison.”
Two years later, another Californian would get touted as the perpe
trator of a “possible record swindle.” When police swarmed Dorothy Woods’s Pasadena mansion in December 1980, they found a Cadillac with a license plate frame reading “My other car is a Rolls.” Her Rolls-Royce was indeed parked nearby. Woods, who was black, would get an eight-year prison sentence for stealing $377,000 in welfare payments using thirteen names and claiming forty-nine dependent children. Before getting convicted in California, she’d gone to prison in Illinois for credit card fraud. The state’s attorney who’d prosecuted her was Jim Piper. Woods had been released from Dwight Correctional Center in June 1973, a bit less than five years before Linda Taylor showed up at the front gate.
Newspapers touted Woods’s ascent to the top of the all-time welfare fraud tote board as if she’d just won a literal crown. “No other known ‘welfare queen’ has done so well,” the Tribune wrote, while other newspapers speculated that she’d “unseat” or “dethrone” Barbara Williams. In a 1980 interview with the black newspaper the Los Angeles Sentinel, Maxine Waters—then a member of the California State Assembly—argued that these shocking tales of greed emboldened the enemies of social welfare. “I think every year or so we get a spectacular case of fraud and far too often those who would like to deny any welfare systems to the poor point to these cases in an effort to indict all welfare recipients—black, in particular,” Waters said.
It wasn’t a coincidence that these spectacular cases were concentrated in California and Illinois. Under Governor Ronald Reagan, the Golden State had invested heavily in fraud detection and prosecution; when Illinois got serious about fighting fraud upon the discovery of Linda Taylor in 1974, state senator Don Moore imported a Reagan official to show his public aid cops the ropes. The knowledge transfer went both ways. California launched its own anonymous welfare fraud hotlines after Illinois pioneered the practice, and both Williams and Woods got found out thanks to unidentified phone tipsters. “She does have a Rolls-Royce,” said a caller to the Los Angeles Department of Public Social Services, describing one of Woods’s vehicles. “She has a Fleetwood. She has a Mercedes. Uh…she owns a house worth approximately $250,000.”
For those Americans inclined to believe that high-living good-for-nothings lurked in every grocery store and car dealership, the welfare queens of past and present were less spectacular outliers than representative case studies. “When I read in the newspapers or hear on television about sensational welfare cheaters such as Dorothy Woods, the ‘welfare queen,’ I wonder how many small cheaters there are still undiscovered,” a Tribune reader named M. Freeman wondered in a March 1981 letter to the editor, going on to suggest “that many of the jobless could be trained and gainfully employed in checking on welfare recipients.” The woman who proposed building this spy force lived in the village of Grayslake, a northern suburb of Chicago that, per the 1980 Census, had a population of 5,196 white people and one black person.
M. Freeman wasn’t a lonely crank. Her views were shared by the letter writer in Minnesota who called that state “the promised land for welfare chiselers, cheats, and the parasites who live off the working people”; the editorialist in Arizona who predicted a “revolt” if the government didn’t start “tracking welfare recipients with the same tenacity as it does taxpayers”; and the Kentucky official who said the poor were using food stamps to buy “everything from guns to drugs to Cadillacs.” This not-so-silent majority had a very powerful ally in Washington, DC. “No one in the United States knows how many people are on welfare. They only know how many checks they’re sending out,” President Ronald Reagan said at a breakfast for newspaper and television news editors on February 19, 1981. “And then we turn up a woman in Chicago that’s getting checks under a hundred and twenty-seven different names. And just recently in Pasadena, California, living in a lovely big home there, a woman was brought in and charged with collecting three hundred thousand dollars in a welfare scheme.”
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Coming up short in his bid for the presidency in 1976 didn’t change Ronald Reagan. In his twice-weekly syndicated newspaper columns, daily radio commentaries, and scores of paid corporate talks, the ex-governor maintained that the world was a very simple place. Individual freedom and limited government were good; socialism and high taxes were bad.
Sometimes Reagan would cite new facts that supported his preexisting views, as when he quoted a prosecutor’s explanation for how liars, cheaters, and con artists get on the welfare rolls: “It’s easy. They just lie.” More often, he rehashed his favorite material. In 1977, a writer staking out a Republican get-together at Disney World reported “stumbling through the palm trees in pitch darkness…in search of a conference luau.” Suddenly, he heard Reagan’s “soft, resonant, familiar voice.” The presidential also-ran was “making the same old tired speech,” one in which he marveled at the existence of “a woman on welfare in Chicago who had 127 different identification cards.”
For Reagan, these sorts of gigs were a warm-up for his return to the electoral stage. He talked about the woman in Chicago and her 127 names in New Hampshire in February 1980, and he mentioned her in Springfield, Pennsylvania, in April. “There’s a woman in Chicago [who] received welfare benefit[s] under 127 different names,” Reagan said in advance of May’s Texas primary when asked how he’d trim the federal budget. “I think we can eliminate that kind of thing.”
As they’d done in 1976, journalists pounced on the candidate’s misstatements. Reagan said “there was virtually no growth at all” in California’s budget when he was governor; the Los Angeles Times said the state’s budget had grown 122 percent. Reagan said John F. Kennedy had cut taxes by 30 percent; Time said it was 19 percent. Reagan said it “costs [the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare] $3 in overhead to deliver $1 to a needy person in this country”; the New York Times said the department “insists that it costs only 12 cents.”
This gotcha game didn’t hurt Reagan in the Republican primary against George H. W. Bush, and it didn’t hurt him in the general election against Jimmy Carter. For Reagan and his supporters, it was less important that the statistics he rattled off were true than that they felt true, and that he projected certainty in an uncertain time. In November 1979, with the country shaken by runaway inflation and a gasoline shortage and a perilous hostage situation in Iran, Carter spoke of a “crisis of confidence…that strikes at the very heart and soul and spirit of our national will.” In a televised address a year later, on the eve of the 1980 election, his Republican opponent declared that he’d seen something altogether different. “I find no national malaise,” Reagan said. “I find nothing wrong with the American people.” Reagan told tens of millions of voters what they wanted to hear. The nation’s problems, he assured the people in attendance at his rallies and those tuning in at home, were someone else’s fault.
The main obstacles to American prosperity, Reagan made clear, were Jimmy Carter’s feckless presidency and the enormous bureaucracy that did Carter’s bidding. That bureaucracy, Reagan had explained to an audience of fifteen thousand at Mississippi’s Neshoba County Fair in August 1980, had consigned the poor to a life of dependency. Welfare recipients were “so economically trapped that there’s no way they can get away,” he said. “And they’re trapped because that bureaucracy needs them as a clientele to preserve the jobs of the bureaucrats themselves.” Thirty seconds later, after stopping twice for applause, Reagan told the nearly all-white crowd, “I believe in states’ rights,” adding that he would “restore to the states and local communities those functions that properly belong there.”
Reagan, as was his custom, presented an argument he’d made countless times before, one about how Americans should do “as much as they can for themselves at the community level and at the private level.” When he expressed support for “states’ rights,” though, he used a phrase he wasn’t in the habit of deploying on the campaign trail, and he did so just a few miles from where activists James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner had been murdered during 1964’s Freedom Summer. B
oth before and after the killing of those three men, who’d been investigating the burning of a black church, political authorities in the state had invoked states’ rights as a kind of threat—a warning that integrationists and the federal government give the state leave to handle its own affairs or face potentially deadly consequences. Carter, in a speech at Atlanta’s Ebenezer Baptist Church, where Martin Luther King Jr. had served as co-pastor until his assassination in 1968, lamented “the rebirth of code words like ‘states’ rights’ in a speech in Mississippi,” saying that “hatred has no place in this country.”
In a then-anonymous 1981 interview with a political scientist, Reagan campaign operative Lee Atwater acknowledged that “states’ rights” and “forced busing” (a Reagan hobbyhorse in 1976) were coded phrases, “abstract” appeals that obviated the use of nasty slurs. As Atwater explained, abstracting racism allowed Reagan and other candidates to appeal to racists—blue-collar “George Wallace–style voters,” i.e., the “guy who is most threatened by the black”—without being explicitly racist themselves. (Atwater referred to this as “doing away with the racial problem.”) Voters got the message. In 1976, 40 percent of respondents to the American National Election Studies survey thought the Republican Party would “not make any special effort to help minorities because they should help themselves.” Four years later, with Reagan as the GOP’s presidential nominee, that number had shot up to 66 percent.
Reagan did make some efforts to court black voters. Two days after the Neshoba County Fair, he told the convention of the National Urban League that “to too many people, ‘conservative’ has come to mean ‘anti-poor, anti-black, and anti-disadvantaged,’” urging the crowd “to look beyond labels.” A month later, when Carter went after Reagan for using “code words,” the Republican called it a “shameful” political ploy. Carter then backpedaled, saying he didn’t think Reagan was “a racist in any degree.”
