by Josh Levin
Orienting the dispute around Reagan’s personal beliefs was a dodge, a way to avoid talking about the choices politicians make (or allow others to make on their behalf) to try to win elections. In Atwater’s telling, “country club people”—white voters angry that their wealth was getting redistributed to the poor via welfare programs—were essentially a Republican lock. To build a winning coalition in the South, the GOP candidate needed to woo the Wallace types, too. The Neshoba County Fair, the New York Times reported, was an event where white politicians had traditionally gone off on “bitter racist diatribes.” A week before Election Day, Reagan also appeared alongside former Mississippi governor John Bell Williams, an avowed segregationist. And two days before voters cast their ballots, South Carolina senator Strom Thurmond—Atwater’s mentor and the 1948 presidential nominee of the States’ Rights Democratic Party—declared at a Reagan rally, “We want that federal government to keep their filthy hands off the rights of the states.”*** This was less a dog whistle than a full-throated rebel yell, and Reagan did nothing to disavow it.
On November 4, 1980, Reagan cruised to a ten-point win in the popular vote and a 489–49 electoral college landslide. In 1976, Carter had carried every Southern and border state except for Virginia. Four years later, Reagan would win them all save West Virginia and Carter’s home state of Georgia.
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In the opening two minutes of his first inaugural address, Reagan said the nation had been “confronted with an economic affliction of great proportions.” A month later, the fortieth president of the United States told Congress he could cure that affliction by slashing the federal budget. These cuts wouldn’t hurt “those with true need,” Reagan explained, as the programs he planned to scythe were unnecessary, duplicative, wasteful, and racked by fraud. Spending on food stamps would be reduced “by removing from eligibility those who are not in real need or who are abusing the program.” He also promised to “tighten welfare and give more attention to outside sources of income when determining the amount of welfare that an individual is allowed.”
Carter, like Reagan, had stormed into office promising to clean up the welfare system. The Democrat’s Program for Better Jobs and Income—which called for implementing work requirements for able-bodied welfare recipients and giving a standardized cash payment to those who couldn’t work—had been an ambitious proposition, one Congress had no interest in enacting once it became clear it would cost billions of dollars. Carter’s pitch to fix welfare had been premised in part on the notion that the system was “subject to almost inevitable fraud.” He emphasized, though, that this fraud was rare, and he didn’t tell cherry-picked stories about extraordinary thieves.
His successor took a different approach. A few days before Reagan told Congress he’d “tighten welfare,” syndicated columnist David Broder wrote that Democratic congressional leaders had asked the president to get into the nitty-gritty of his cost-saving plan. Reagan had then proceeded to tell “his well-worn campaign anecdotes about the ‘welfare queen’ of Chicago who was on the rolls with 100 different names.” Two weeks later, the UPI’s Helen Thomas reported that Reagan had brought up “his famous ‘welfare queen’” during a meeting with the Congressional Black Caucus.
According to Thomas, most of the black lawmakers in that meeting “left the White House ‘steaming.’” Other members of Congress walked away from policy discussions with Reagan feeling totally perplexed. “[Senate Budget Committee chair] Pete Domenici says we’ve got a $120 billion deficit coming,” Republican senator Bob Packwood told the AP in March 1982, “and the president says, ‘You know, a person yesterday, a young man went into a grocery store with an orange in one hand and a bottle of vodka in the other, and he paid for the orange with food stamps and he took the change and paid for the vodka. That’s what’s wrong.’ And we just shake our heads.”
At a subsequent congressional hearing, an official from Reagan’s Department of Agriculture said it was “unfortunate if the president was misinformed.” By law, the amount of change dispensed in a food stamp transaction was capped at 99 cents, the official said, and “it’s not possible to buy a bottle of vodka with 99 cents.” The fact that this orange-and-vodka maneuver would’ve been illegal didn’t prove definitively that the anecdote was a work of fiction. The White House’s inability to dredge up a source for the incident, though, suggested pretty strongly that it had never happened. “If there is a major fraud for us to focus upon, it is the fraud upon the public of repeating untrue stories,” said House Nutrition Subcommittee chair Fred Richmond, a Democrat. “We don’t need to change the program to counter these myths. We need to silence the storytellers.”****
Reagan’s shallow command of policy matters may have made the likes of Packwood and Richmond shake their heads, but it didn’t stop the president from winning on Capitol Hill. Reagan did lose some battles: A national registry for welfare recipients got scuttled due to privacy concerns; a proposed mandatory work requirement for those on public aid became an optional, state-level pilot program. But Congress ultimately approved $35 billion in cuts for fiscal year 1982, $25 billion of which came from initiatives that affected the poor. An estimated 408,000 of the country’s 3.9 million Aid to Families with Dependent Children households lost their benefits entirely, while roughly one million people lost access to food stamps. Millions more saw their AFDC and food stamp outlays reduced.
At the end of December, the Los Angeles Times published a long front-page story on the human toll of Reagan’s first year in office. “I won’t be able to survive,” said a woman whose $594 monthly take-home pay had made her ineligible for welfare. “I can’t find a cheaper apartment unless I move to a ghetto. We have to eat.” There was also an unemployed steelworker in Indiana who’d lost two-thirds of his jobless benefits—“We’re not having any Christmas this year,” he said—and a destitute couple in Tennessee who no longer received Medicaid benefits for their three young kids. “Under new federal regulations, Tennessee has exercised its option not to provide free health care for needy children,” the Times explained. (One column over on page one, the newspaper ran a parallel article on the big winners of 1981: lumber dealer Robert Spence and petroleum executive Armand Hammer, both of whom profited from the administration’s rewrite of the American tax code.)
Stories of hardship were easy to find given that the United States had fallen into a severe economic downturn. At the tail end of the recession, which lasted from July 1981 to November 1982, the national unemployment rate spiked to a post-1948 high of 10.8 percent, while the poverty rate reached 15 percent. As the economy tanked, Reagan proposed additional massive cuts to AFDC, Medicaid, and the food stamp program, and Congress would give him about 60 percent of what he asked for. In May 1982, the Boston Globe reported on the proliferation of food banks across the United States, and how “people who are embarrassed to be seen in a soup kitchen” had started lining up for emergency rations.
More often than not, the hungry, jobless people showcased in these sorts of features were white. In the early 1970s, as welfare cheats took the blame for rising public aid costs, 70 percent of the photos in newsmagazine items on poverty had featured black people. As benefit levels crashed in the early 1980s, the percentage of nonblack faces in stories about poverty rose to 67 percent. This dramatic shift couldn’t be explained by actual demographic changes: White Americans made up 66 percent of the nation’s poor in 1972 and 1973 and 68 percent in 1982 and 1983. Rather, this type of editorial decision-making reflected the belief that the U.S. government was now harming the “deserving poor.” A Newsweek piece on “The Hard-Luck Christmas of ’82” asserted that the Reagan-era recession had produced “a much better class of poor person, better educated, accustomed to working, with strong family ties.” Just seventeen of the ninety people pictured in that article were black.
When the president’s approval rating plummeted in 1982, he blamed the drop on negative press coverage. Reagan was particularly aggravated by the media’s fi
xation on individual hard-luck cases—what he described as “horror stories about the people that are going to be thrown out in the snow to hunger and die of cold and so forth.” All those dire warnings about starvation, the president thought, didn’t account for the generosity of the American people, who would compensate for potential shortfalls in government funding via “simple acts of neighbor caring for neighbor.” He was also tired of watching himself get criticized on television. “Is it news that some fella out in South Succotash someplace has just been laid off, that he should be interviewed nationwide?” Reagan groused.
The White House wasn’t just mad that tales of woe were crowding out pro-Reagan news. Administration officials also protested that these accounts were misleading and inaccurate. One of Reagan’s press aides, Larry Speakes, said in February 1982 that the administration had discovered that “a lot of stories of people being deprived…don’t hold up.” Another aide, David Gergen, said it was unacceptable for the news media to use one-sided anecdotes but perfectly okay for the president to do the same thing. “He has several responsibilities,” Gergen said of Reagan. “One is to describe reality, and one is to lead.”
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Ronald Reagan never knew the truth about Linda Taylor, and he never cared to know it. The only thing that mattered to him was that she was a specific type of criminal, one whose criminality was politically useful. The State of Illinois, too, had made an example of Taylor for political reasons. In 1967, she was charged with kidnapping and wasn’t prosecuted for it. In 1975, she was suspected of murder and wasn’t questioned about it. In 1977, she was sentenced to three to seven years in prison for stealing public aid money and lying about it to a grand jury.
By the early 1980s, politics no longer governed Taylor’s fate. When Reagan talked about the woman in Chicago with the 127 different names, he was describing a still image. The real Linda Taylor had moved on, and her movements weren’t of interest to journalists, elected officials, or anyone else.
The Illinois Prisoner Review Board faced no scrutiny when it convened to decide Taylor’s fate. In discharging her prison sentence, the state body relied on the facts of her individual case. The members of the parole board decreed that she no longer posed a threat to society, and they said that she’d remain at liberty without violating the law. They were wrong on both counts.
* In 1978, the State of Illinois would effectively abolish parole for all future inmates, moving to a system that eliminated subjectivity from the sentencing process. Despite this change, Taylor—whose initial sentence was handed down in 1977—remained eligible for an early release.
** Columbo denied the allegations of jailhouse pimping, and the claims were never proved.
*** Immediately after Thurmond left the stage, Trent Lott—then a member of the House of Representatives—proclaimed, “You know, if we had elected this man thirty years ago, we wouldn’t be in the mess we are today.” Twenty-two years later, Lott would resign as Senate majority leader after making a very similar comment at Thurmond’s hundredth birthday party.
**** Richmond would resign from the House five months later after pleading guilty to charges of tax evasion and marijuana possession. Packwood would resign from the Senate in 1995 after nineteen women accused him of sexual misconduct.
Chapter 17
Beneficiary
Michael Booker was so terrified he could barely speak. It was late on a summer night in Chicago in August 1983 when Booker woke up Raymond Ray to tell him what he’d seen. Booker was like family to the Rays. He lived a few blocks from them near Grand Crossing Park on the South Side, and he was a frequent visitor to their house on South Langley Avenue. This time, he would’ve preferred to be anywhere else. Booker came through the door, sat down, and said his best friend, Raymond Ray’s son Sherman, was dead. He’d watched the whole thing happen.
Booker explained that Sherman Ray had been defenseless—that he’d been backing away from a confrontation with a much older man. The thirty-four-year-old victim, who hadn’t been holding a weapon, was standing in front of a tree when he’d gotten blasted in the chest with a shotgun at close range. The person who’d shot him—a relative of Sherman’s wife, Linda—claimed it had been a horrible accident. Booker was certain the old man had pulled the trigger on purpose. He was also convinced that Linda had been an accessory to the crime.
Ray’s father told Booker he needed to go to the police. Booker wasn’t so sure. He thought he’d just witnessed a murder, and he didn’t want to be the next to die. Booker told Raymond Ray they were dealing with some evil people. “You don’t know them,” he said.
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Sherman Ray’s parents and siblings had no idea how he’d met Linda Taylor. The first time anyone had seen the two of them together was in 1976, when they’d made a joint appearance at a barbecue. When Ray introduced Taylor as his wife, his relatives were bewildered. Ray had never mentioned her, and he definitely hadn’t said anything about a wedding.
While Ray’s family was a bit suspicious of his new bride, they were happy he’d found someone to share his life with. Ray had seemed haunted ever since coming back from the Vietnam War. He’d joined the Marine Corps in 1968, when he was nineteen. In June of the following year, twenty-nine of the men in his infantry battalion were killed in action in northwest Quang Tri Province while an additional 114 were wounded. That same month, Ray was hospitalized with what he termed “nervousness.” After stretches in military hospitals in Vietnam, Japan, and New York, he’d been honorably discharged on September 11, 1969, three days after his twenty-first birthday.
When he returned to Chicago, Ray told his brothers how scared he’d been in Southeast Asia. Before he’d gone to Vietnam, he’d been easy to get along with and quick to smile. After the war, he was friendly but guarded. He started drinking heavily, downing six-packs of Schlitz most days of the week. His older sister Patricia noticed that he no longer liked to be touched, and that he’d recoil if anyone surprised him.
As far as Ray’s sister knew, he’d never been in a serious relationship before he’d started seeing Linda Taylor. Whoever she was and wherever she’d come from, he seemed to love and trust Linda. The biographical information on their marriage license, though, suggested that his wife hadn’t been totally honest with him. The document, dated January 20, 1976, granted twenty-seven-year-old Sherman F. Ray permission to wed twenty-nine-year-old Linda C. B. Wakefield; in reality, she was forty-nine or fifty. Sherman and Linda got married the next day at 5546 South State Street, the address of a storefront church called the House of Silent Prayer.
In August 1974, Taylor had gotten arrested for stealing public aid checks eight days after marrying Lamar Jones. That legal predicament had killed their budding romance: Taylor had fled to Arizona, taking Jones’s TV set with her, and he’d subsequently helped the police track her down. In January 1976, Taylor burglarized her ex-roommate’s house eight days after marrying Sherman Ray, pilfering, among other things, a fur coat, a wedding band, and a pink radio and record player. A month later, she’d get arrested yet again. But this time, Taylor didn’t run away. Neither did her husband.
Ray stuck with Taylor when she got charged with that burglary, and he stood by her during her welfare fraud trial in March 1977. On the first day of trial testimony, the CBS Evening News showed footage of Ray strolling through the Daley Center alongside Taylor. He was short, stocky, and handsome, with dark brown skin and a thin mustache. While his Afro was a lot trimmer than his wife’s billowing orange hairdo, he didn’t fade into the background. Ray, whom Taylor’s lawyer had once seen sporting crocodile shoes with goldfish in the heels, wore a white Western shirt with a butterfly collar and contrasting gold fabric on the pocket flaps, yoke, and cuffs; a royal blue vest; and a white belt. A few months later, the AP snapped a picture of the duo on the way to Taylor’s sentencing hearing. Taylor, her left hand clutching a handbag and pressed against her husband’s right hip, appeared untroubled by her looming prison hitch. Ray, who wore a herringbone spo
rt coat over a cable-knit turtleneck sweater, seemed just as relaxed. They looked like a great team.
Taylor, too, supported Ray when he was at his lowest. He was admitted to the VA hospital in North Chicago, Illinois, multiple times in the mid-1970s, with forms indicating a recurrence of a “mental condition.” A photo taken during one hospital stay included a small Christmas tree—a marker of a trying holiday season. Taylor, though, appeared to be full of good cheer, sitting by her husband’s bedside with a look of pure devotion on her face.
Although Linda and Sherman seemed like a happy couple, Ray’s parents had concluded very quickly that their daughter-in-law was a dubious character. But it took more than a burglary arrest for Raymond and Maude Ray to cut off contact with their son’s wife. Their breaking point came in the late spring, when Taylor took their granddaughter.
* * *
Sherman Ray’s brother John was just twenty-five years old when he drowned on June 12, 1976, slipping and hitting his head on a boat propeller. Shortly after the accident, Sherman and his wife went to the morgue to identify John’s body, informing the staff that his corpse should be released to the Lena Bryant Funeral Home. It wasn’t the first time Linda Taylor had given the South Side funeral parlor her business. She’d done the same thing a year earlier when her friend Patricia Parks died of a barbiturate overdose.
Raymond Ray was irate when he learned that Taylor had started planning his son’s funeral. By way of explanation, Taylor said that Bryant—a prominent Chicago entrepreneur who also owned a beauty school and served as the scholarship chair of the Miss Black USA pageant—was her mother. It’s not clear if the Rays realized she was lying. Regardless, it was too late to make alternative arrangements, and the burial proceeded the way Taylor wanted it to. Her father-in-law spent the day of the funeral in a rage. He was about to get even angrier.
