by Josh Levin
A few days after that meeting, Reagan attacked “the welfare culture” in his State of the Union address, blaming public aid programs for “the breakdown of the family,” as well as “child abandonment, horrible crimes, and deteriorating schools.” Reagan had talked about the dangers of welfare dependency since he was the governor of California. Charles Murray’s 1984 book, Losing Ground—which contended that government poverty-reduction efforts actually deepened poverty, particularly among black Americans, by discouraging job seeking and eroding personal responsibility—gave those old talking points a new intellectual sheen.
Murray saw himself as a teller of uncomfortable truths. In the proposal for Losing Ground, the conservative social scientist wrote that “a huge number of well-meaning whites fear that they are closet racists, and this book tells them they are not. It’s going to make them feel better about things they already think but do not know how to say.”* The book’s final chapter suggested eliminating the safety net of AFDC, food stamps, and Medicaid for working-age people, a move Murray believed would inspire—or, failing that, force—the needy to get their own houses in order. “When reforms finally do occur,” he wrote, “they will happen not because stingy people have won, but because generous people have stopped kidding themselves.”
Murray was right that the American welfare system was in many ways counterproductive. Any outside income AFDC recipients received got subtracted from their monthly checks, a rule that discouraged on-the-books work. His contention that welfare was a major driver of illegitimacy, though, was refuted by most credible economists and social scientists. Murray also failed to foreground the fact that 60 percent of AFDC families were nonblack, and he glossed over the fact that the program’s already meager benefit levels had been continually decimated by inflation.
For all its faults, Losing Ground succeeded in reframing the public aid debate. The problem that needed solving, Murray and Reagan argued, wasn’t poverty—it was welfare. In 1981, Reagan had said his cuts to social services wouldn’t harm the truly needy. By 1986, when the president’s tax cuts were helping the rich get a whole lot richer, Reagan was suggesting that what the needy really needed was self-determination. Every man, woman, and child on welfare, he said in the State of the Union, deserved “real and lasting emancipation, because the success of welfare should be judged by how many of its recipients become independent of welfare.”
At the tail end of 1986, Reagan’s welfare task force proposed that the federal government declare its own independence from the public aid business by ceding decision-making to the states. The Democratic Congress wasn’t having it, however, and the reform bill Reagan eventually signed—the bipartisan Family Support Act of 1988—did little to change the status quo. It would take a Democratic president to finish what Reagan started.
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Three weeks into his first presidential campaign, Bill Clinton announced his mission to forge “a new covenant, a solemn agreement between the people and their government.” Whereas the Reagan and George H. W. Bush administrations “exalted private gain over public obligations,” Clinton vowed to ensure that “people who work shouldn’t be poor.” The flip side of that imperative, he said in October 1991, was that the poor needed to get to work. To that end, the Arkansas governor promised that his administration was “going to put an end to welfare as we know it.”
Clinton was something of a welfare wonk, having helped put together the Family Support Act as the chair of the National Governors Association. Even so, his pledge to kill off welfare was less an actual policy proposal than a signal that he was a different kind of Democrat, one who didn’t hew to liberal orthodoxy. With AFDC caseloads expanding, Clinton’s message felt increasingly urgent. He wasn’t the only political candidate delivering it.
In Louisiana, where Aid to Families with Dependent Children took up just 2 percent of the state’s annual budget, David Duke pronounced that cheats, chiselers, and parasites were pillaging the treasury. The white supremacist–cum–Republican state legislator suggested that women on welfare be paid to get birth control implants, and he clucked his tongue at an unidentified New Orleans mother with eight children whose “welfare family could cost taxpayers over a million dollars.” Duke used that not-very-coded rhetoric to secure a second-place finish in the 1991 Louisiana governor’s race, winning a majority of the state’s Republicans and 55 percent of the white vote. “Perhaps the messenger was rejected in this state of Louisiana, but the message wasn’t,” he said upon conceding defeat. “The people believe in what I believe.”
Unlike Duke and Reagan, who appealed to anti-welfare prejudices by telling extravagant stories about immoral women, Clinton preached empathy. He explained that mothers felt trapped by welfare, unable to work outside the home because they couldn’t afford child care or risk losing Medicaid coverage. The nuance Clinton spoke with on the campaign trail didn’t matter at the ballot box. “Put an end to welfare as we know it” was the perfect pander to white, welfare-hating voters, a slogan that a Clinton-affiliated pollster described as “pure heroin.” Clinton’s adviser Bruce Reed called the catchphrase a “guiding star.”
The new president didn’t follow that guiding star after beating Bush and Ross Perot in 1992, choosing instead to make health care his top priority. When the White House did finally focus on welfare two years later, polling data revealed the widespread belief that the poor had it way too easy. One survey found that “welfare is considered odious by every demographic subgroup” and showed that a clear majority of respondents thought all recipients ought to work for their checks, that no one should get benefits for more than two years, and that mothers didn’t deserve more financial support if they had additional children while already on the rolls.
In his 1994 State of the Union address, Clinton told the American people what they wanted to hear. “We’ll say to teenagers, ‘If you have a child out of wedlock, we will no longer give you a check to set up a separate household,’” the president declared, failing to acknowledge that unwed teen mothers represented just 2 percent of parents on AFDC. Clinton also said the government would provide welfare recipients with “the support, the job training, the child care you need for up to two years.” After that cutoff date, enrollees were to be given subsidized public sector jobs if they couldn’t find work with private employers.
Clinton argued that this approach would be better for both the government and the poor. He made that case by showcasing an anti–Linda Taylor, a woman who’d demonstrated her virtue by leaving the welfare system behind rather than bleeding it dry. Clinton said that unnamed public aid recipient had once been asked, “What’s the best thing about being off welfare and in a job?” Her reply: “When my boy goes to school and they say, ‘What does your mother do for a living?,’ he can give an answer.” The lesson of this anecdote, the president said, was that “these people want a better system, and we ought to give it to them.”
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Clinton’s welfare plan never came up for a vote. Providing welfare recipients with subsidized jobs would’ve cost a tremendous amount of money, and no one had an appetite for ending welfare by raising federal spending. In November 1994, Republicans gained majorities in both houses of Congress, and the president lost control of his domestic agenda. Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich and the GOP had a different kind of covenant in mind, one in which the government did away with public aid and the needy took care of themselves.
Gingrich, like Charles Murray, argued that dismantling the welfare system would be an act of mercy. “By creating a culture of poverty, we have destroyed the very people we are claiming to help,” he said. Gingrich blamed welfare for every conceivable social ill. On the stump, he’d declare that “you can’t maintain civilization with 12-year-olds having babies and 15-year-olds killing each other and 17-year-olds dying of AIDS.” Gingrich knew exactly how his words would be received. When the New York Times’ poverty reporter Jason DeParle suggested to the congressman that “12-year-olds having babies” w
as a modern spin on Reagan’s welfare queen, Gingrich “responded with the smile of a man well-pleased with his cleverness.” He told DeParle, “Congratulations! You cracked the code!”**
Nearly six hundred witnesses testified in a slew of congressional hearings on welfare in 1995 and 1996. Just seventeen identified themselves as current or past welfare beneficiaries. Among them was Democratic representative Lynn Woolsey, the self-described first former welfare mother to serve in Congress, who credited public assistance with keeping her family afloat after her husband left her and their three children.
Woolsey’s message mostly went unheeded, even by some on the Left who insisted they weren’t trafficking in stereotypes. “This issue is not, as is often portrayed, a caricature about Cadillac welfare queens…living in some big city, collecting a multitude of checks with which to buy a Cadillac and color television, and living the life of leisure,” said Senator Byron Dorgan, a North Dakota Democrat. After disavowing Linda Taylor’s nickname, Dorgan noted that greed and laziness were indeed endemic among the nation’s poor—that “there are able-bodied people who make welfare a way of life and should go to work.” Regardless of whether he used the term welfare queen, Dorgan had captured the essence of what it stood for.
As he campaigned for reelection, Clinton had yet to fulfill his promise to put the welfare system out of its misery, having vetoed a pair of Republican-backed proposals he’d deemed too extreme. If he didn’t agree to something, his advisers feared, he’d risk losing out on a second term.
In the summer of 1996, Congress presented Clinton with the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act, a bill that proposed transforming the safety net in ways that, a little more than a decade earlier, only Charles Murray had dared to imagine. Aid to Families with Dependent Children would be replaced by a program called Temporary Assistance for Needy Families. As that name implied, payments made under the system would be time-limited, with most beneficiaries getting cut off after a maximum of five years. TANF would be paid for with the help of federal matching funds, delivered in the form of block grants to the states. Those grants wouldn’t be indexed to inflation, meaning the pot of money would get smaller every year. When those funds ran out, it wouldn’t matter how destitute you were—the government wouldn’t provide you with any cash to live on.
The legislation passed 256 to 170 in the House and seventy-four to twenty-four in the Senate, with support from Democrats including Joe Biden and John Kerry. A few weeks after that vote, the New Republic ran a photo on its cover of a black woman holding an infant while smoking a cigarette. That image, which ran under the headline “Day of Reckoning,” teased an editorial titled “Sign It.” Against the advice of the liberals on his staff, Clinton did. “Today we are ending welfare as we know it,” the president said in a ceremony at the White House Rose Garden on August 22, 1996. In November, he’d beat his Republican opponent Bob Dole in a landslide.
In his speech in the Rose Garden, Clinton explained that he’d pursued reform out of a desire “to overcome the flaws of the welfare system for the people who are trapped on it.” He was introduced that afternoon by a woman he said had broken free from that trap.
“I am here today to talk about how much getting off assistance and getting a job meant to me and my children,” said Lillie Harden, the anti–Linda Taylor whom Clinton had singled out for praise at the 1994 State of the Union. The Arkansas native told the assembled crowd that she’d spent two years on welfare in the early 1980s, taking home $282 per month. After enrolling in a job training program created by then-governor Clinton, she’d found work as a cook. Harden described Clinton as “the man who started my success” and ensured “my children’s future.” When the president took the stage, he thanked her “for the power of your example.” In his autobiography, Clinton would call Harden’s story “the best argument I’ve ever heard for welfare reform.”
That argument wasn’t as straightforward as it appeared. Two months after the Rose Garden ceremony, the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette published a front-page article revealing that Harden had gotten AFDC and food stamps off and on after graduating from her job training program. The newspaper also reported that Harden had at times failed to tell the local housing authority about her income, likely because an honest accounting would’ve imperiled her rent subsidy.
There was enough fodder in that article for a hard-liner to label Lillie Harden a welfare cheat. Her story, when told in full, could’ve also been used to highlight the importance of the safety net, which allowed Harden to pay her bills when she was in between jobs. But that Arkansas newspaper item wasn’t picked up by the national media. While Reagan’s critics on the Left had been highly motivated to prove he was lying about the woman in Chicago, nobody called Clinton out on the imperfections in his perfect welfare-to-work story. Welfare was complicated. Americans were in the mood for simple answers, even if those answers didn’t happen to be true.
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Johnnie Harbaugh wasn’t sure how his mother had landed in an institution in Tampa. At some point in the mid-1990s, his sister, Sandra, called him to say that Taylor had been sent to a state mental health facility. Although Johnnie was willing to interrupt his Florida vacation to look in on her, he knew better than anyone that Taylor wasn’t to be trusted. One time, when she’d been staying with Johnnie in Chicago, she’d swiped checks from her own grandson, lifting them right out of the kid’s drawer. After that, Johnnie and his wife, Carol, had taken to padlocking their interior doors whenever she was around. She’d stolen from her oldest son Clifford’s family, too, writing a check on their account for $700. She also had a habit of lying to Clifford about her health, telling him she was near death to elicit sympathy and money.
But as soon as Johnnie saw Taylor in Tampa, he knew this wasn’t a con. She was wearing shoes that were way too big for her, and she had bald patches all over the top of her skull. She sounded as bad as she looked—ranting and raving, making up crazy things. She couldn’t even remember her own son. She clearly needed help. Johnnie just wasn’t sure he could be the one to give it to her.
Taylor had been a horrible parent. She’d hit Johnnie and abandoned him, and she’d made him lose faith in himself and other people. Growing up, he’d tried to be as cold as she was, getting in trouble with the law enough times that his rap sheet ran to multiple pages. By 1995, though, it had been more than twenty years since Johnnie had been arrested. The forty-five-year-old drove a big rig, and he’d watch the landscape roll past on long cross-country trips, just as he’d done as his mother’s passenger in the 1950s. She’d made him who he was, and he hated and loved her for it.
In that Tampa institution, Taylor did eventually recognize her son’s face. Once she figured out who he was, she begged Johnnie to take her to Chicago. None of her other children had claimed her. If Johnnie didn’t accept responsibility for his mother, she’d be sent to a Salvation Army shelter for homeless women. Faced with that choice, he did what she would’ve done: He got in his car and drove away.
A couple of hours later, Johnnie pulled over to the side of the road. Years earlier, when he’d been a guest at Taylor’s place in the Florida Panhandle, he’d had the chance to save Mildred Markham. Taylor’s elderly captive had pleaded with him to rescue her, and he’d done nothing. Now he couldn’t stop thinking about his mother, disoriented and locked away, with shoes that didn’t fit and no one to look after her. Johnnie turned to his wife and asked what she would’ve done if Taylor were her mother; Carol said she wouldn’t have left the institution without her. And so he turned the car around.
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At Johnnie and Carol’s apartment in Chicago, Taylor and her caretakers fell into a routine. Each morning, her daughter-in-law would wake Taylor up to give her an insulin injection. She would then go back to bed, where she’d stay all day. On Tuesdays, Sandra would come over to give her mother a bath and shampoo what remained of her hair.
After a few months, Sandra brought Taylor to live with he
r in Hazel Crest, a formerly all-white suburb south of Chicago that by 1990 had become predominantly black. As Taylor’s dementia got worse, she began sneaking out of her daughter’s house at night, wandering the streets with no clothes on. Taylor didn’t know where she was, but she had an idea where she was going. When someone would find her a few doors down from Sandra’s place, she’d explain that she’d been on her way to Hawaii.
Eventually, minding Taylor became too much for Sandra to handle, and she put her mother in a nursing home. Taylor convalesced there in near-total anonymity, her presence in Illinois unknown to the police officers who’d chased after her, the politicians who’d villainized her, and the supposed friends whose lives she’d destroyed.
Johnnie Harbaugh didn’t visit his mother on any regular schedule, but on Thursday, April 18, 2002, he felt compelled to see her. Taylor’s health had declined still further, and she’d been admitted to Ingalls Hospital in Harvey—the same suburban enclave where, twenty-five years earlier, the State of Illinois had opened a special court to handle the flood of welfare fraud prosecutions that had followed Taylor’s high-profile conviction. On the night of Johnnie’s visit, the seventy-six-year-old Taylor was in a huge amount of pain. She told her son she had a spider in her chest, and he watched her beat herself in the sternum, again and again. Johnnie couldn’t bear to be there for more than twenty minutes. On his way out of the building, he just missed seeing his sister, Sandra. Neither of them was in the room when their mother died.
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Linda Taylor was pronounced dead at 7:11 p.m. The cause was acute myocardial infarction—a heart attack.
Taylor’s death certificate, which the funeral director filled out with Sandra’s help, identified her as Constance Loyd. She’d conjured that first name halfway through her life, bestowing it on herself, her daughter, and her pseudo-mother, Mildred Markham. She’d taken the last name from the man who’d killed one of her husbands, a confederate she’d lived with for a decade afterward. Her age was given as sixty-seven, a nine-year understatement. Her father was listed as Lawrence Wakefield, the man she’d seen as her protector and ticket to prosperity, and whose fortune had just eluded her grasp. Her mother was marked down as Edith Elizabeth Jarvis, the woman who’d given birth to Wakefield in 1904. Taylor’s race was recorded as white.
