Before we get to this week's episode, I wanted to let you know that this podcast mini-series is a companion to my new book The Queen, the forgotten life behind an American myth. The Washington Post calls it a gripping investigation that reads like a detective story. The Queen is available wherever you buy books, and now onto the show. Previously on The Queen, the Chicago Tribune was the first paper to report on Linda Taylor, whom the newspaper called The Welfare Queen. I was excited because it was a big story. The kind of story that most any reporter would want to get. I mean, it was not just welfare fraud. It was bizarre fraud. Taylor's story was picked up by Ronald Reagan,

who used it to advocate for shrinking the welfare system.

She has three new cars, a full-length mint coat,

and her take is estimated at a million dollars.

Reagan exaggerated how much Linda Taylor stole,

but that didn't matter very much.

The Wellfare Queen stereotype took hold,

while Taylor herself was quickly forgotten. As far as I know, Linda Taylor talked on camera just one time. It's February 1976 and Taylor is hurrying to her car after a court hearing. She's wearing a black fur coat and a sun-shaped rhinestone brooch. A member of the press shouts some questions. Well, compared to some of you white people, I think I'd done pretty damn good to be black. I don't know what was going through Taylor's head in that moment. It's very striking, though, that she flips a question about her performance in court, into a statement about the color of her skin. She's unapologetic about who she is, and she frames her story as one of triumph over a racist society. Beyond that, Taylor mostly declined to speak for herself. After her welfare fraud trial, she vanished from the news entirely. It took me about a year of making phone calls and sifting through core records to find out that she had died in 2002. Taylor never gave a full accounting of what she'd done or why she'd done it. That meant she was defined by other people.

In the mid-1970s, there were competing visions

of who Linda Taylor was and what she represented.

On one side was Ronald Reagan, who portrayed her as a brazen

thief and a symbol of a rotten public aid system.

On the other were Taylor's lawyers, who argued

that the rhetoric around her was dangerous,

that it was an invitation to criminalize poor black people. Linda Taylor's trial came down to what seemed like a simple question. Was she a menace or was she a scapegoat? The answer would dictate whether Taylor went free. It would also help determine the future of aid to the poor and of the millions of people who received it.

This is the Queen, a show about the woman behind the welfare queen myth.

I'm Josh Levine.

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