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Josh hi everyone, this is Josh Levine, one of the editors behind Slow Burn. We here at Slate are hard at work on another season of the show, but in the meantime, I'm here with something I think you'll like. It's my new narrative podcast miniseries, the Queen. The Queen tells the story of Linda Taylor, a woman who is a con artist, a kidnapper, maybe even a murderer. She was also America's original Welfare Queen, the villain Ronald Reagan needed to create a vision of a country being taken advantage of by its poorest citizens. If you like this episode, I encourage you to subscribe to the show in its own feed. All four episodes in this miniseries are out right now, so you can go ahead and binge. Just search for the Queen in your favorite podcast app. Thanks and enjoy the show. Here's episode one of the Queen Six years ago, a friend sent me an article from the 1970s about a woman named Linda Taylor. It said that Taylor had committed welfare fraud to the tune of $154,000 in a single year using 80 different aliases. It also said that she owned a bunch of luxury cars, had filed a fraudulent police report about stolen furs, and had been preparing to open a medical office posing as a doctor. Another article I found said that Linda Taylor, the so called Welfare Queen, could change from black to white to Latin with a mere change of a wig. Before I read those stories, I didn't know that the Welfare Queen stereotype had originated with a real person, a black woman with a fur coat and fancy cars, living a life of luxury thanks to unearned government checks. That vicious caricature had been based on Linda Taylor then used to demonize those who could barely afford a winter coat, let alone a fur. That caricature has persisted decade after decade as aid to the poor has gotten slashed by Republican and Democratic administrations. Taylor briefly became infamous in the 1970s. Newspapers wrote up her outrageous exploits and Ronald Reagan railed against her during his first presidential campaign. But just as quickly as she'd scandalized the nation, Linda Taylor disappeared from view. Though the Welfare Queen archetype endured, nobody ever dug into who Taylor really was and what had become of her. I became obsessed with uncovering everything I could about Taylor. I wanted to know how and why a single outrageous case had been used to villainize a whole class of people. I learned that politicians and journalists had exaggerated the scope of Taylor's welfare fraud. And welfare fraud, it turned out, was the least of her crimes. Linda Taylor was a kidnapper. She was also possibly a murderer. But on the campaign trail and in the press, the focus mostly stayed on her furs and fancy cars. For my book the Queen, I reported at the details of Taylor's life from start to finish. In this podcast miniseries, I'll explain how the Taylor story became a national phenomenon. I'll tell you about the people who wrestled over Taylor's image and and the events that changed her life. Over the course of four episodes, I'll separate the person from the stereotype and tell you what was done to Linda Taylor, what she did to others, and what was done in her name. This is the Queen, a show about the woman behind the welfare queen myth. I'm Josh Levine. Episode one, Coronation. We probably wouldn't know about Linda Taylor if it wasn't for a Chicago Tribune reporter named George Bliss. Bliss was one of the best journalists Chicago had ever seen. By the mid-1970s, he'd spearheaded three Pulitzer Prize winning investigations. Clarence Page, who was then a young reporter at the Tribune, says Bliss was an icon at the newspaper.
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Yeah, he was greatly admired to the point of idolization because he has such a great reputation and he was a real bulldog, which is what the best investigative reporters are. Once they have a hunch, they latch onto it and won't let go until it draws blood.
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Bliss was 56 years old when he started reporting on Linda Taylor. He looked like he'd teleported into the newsroom from an earlier era. Here's Chuck Neubauer, who won a Pulitzer with Bliss in the 1970s.
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He looked the part. I mean, he looked like a police detective in a movie.
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Neubauer says Bliss saw the front page of the Tribune as a personal scoreboard.
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He would joke when I first worked with him that he had the most hat tricks of any Tribune reporter of not being a hockey person. I said, well, what's a hat trick? He says, well, three stories on page one, which, you know, isn't that easy to do. The only time it ever happened in my career was when I did three stories with him.
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Bliss. Front page stories exposed everything from rampant police brutality to a scheme to fix the results of horse races. In the early 1970s, Bliss worked with a team of reporters to uncover massive election fraud in Chicago. At one point, Bliss went door to door with his colleague Bill Mullen, asking voters to confirm that the signatures on their ballot applications had been faked. They found proof at the first house they visited. Here's Mullen.
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He. He hugged me on the sidewalk after we got down from the front steps and he said, we're on our way, kid.
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The Tribune's Vote fraud series won a Pulitzer, and it led to 79 federal indictments. That wasn't an unusual outcome for Bliss. His reporting got people sent to prison all the time.
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So he was feared if he showed up in city hall or the county building or the state office building. I mean, there were tremors went through the whole building that, oh, George Bliss is down at such and such an office. What's he looking at?
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As a reporter, Bliss thought he had a special duty to root out corruption, and he'd seen a lot of it in his long career. In this 1976 oral history interview, you can hear a bit of weariness in his voice.
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Well, you get the question, but what business has a newspaper got investigating government? Well, nine times out of 10, we get into something because nobody else in government would do anything about it. Almost every case, when the people give up on government and they come to us.
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In 1974, Bliss turned his attention to the Illinois Department of Public Aid. That was the department that handled welfare for the state. All year, he wrote stories about incompetence and waste at the department and the failure of bureaucrats to fix it. One day, Bliss got a tip from a friend of his, a Chicago detective. The detective told him about an outlandish new case of welfare fraud, one that government officials had been ignoring. The woman at the center of that case went by a bunch of different names, but the police were calling her Linda Taylor. Bliss first round of stories about the Department of Public Aid hadn't gotten a huge amount of attention. But when he started writing about Linda Taylor, people took notice. Bliss reported that Taylor had received welfare checks and food stamps even though she drove a Cadillac, a Lincoln, and a Chevy station wagon. His story also said that Taylor claimed to own four buildings on the south side of Chicago and that she was planning a Hawaiian vacation. Bliss article got the attention of his colleague, Clarence Page.
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I was excited because it was a.
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Big story, the kind of story that.
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Most any reporter would want to get. You know, I mean, it was not just welfare fraud, it was bizarre fraud.
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Bliss story also made a big impression on a bunch of government officials. After the piece ran in the Tribune, both state and federal agencies launched investigations into Taylor's alleged crimes. Meanwhile, George Bliss kept on digging. On October 12, 1974, two weeks after Linda Taylor's name first appeared in the Tribune, Bliss reported that she had been arrested in Arizona. He wrote that Taylor had used as many as 50 different aliases in Arizona alone and that her alleged take might have run to $300,000 in welfare funds. It was the first of more than 40 articles in the Tribune. They referred to Linda Taylor as the welfare queen George Bliss. Best work revealed how the government betrayed Chicago's most vulnerable people. Bliss documented rampant abuse in the city's juvenile home, helped expose mistreatment perpetrated by private ambulance companies, and posed as a patient to report on abject conditions in nursing homes. All of these stories focused on institutional problems, not individual ones. So why did Bliss glom on to a single case of welfare fraud? For Bliss, the Linda Taylor story had started out as an expose of waste in the welfare system. In one of his first articles on Taylor, he wrote that the Illinois Department of Public Aid is incapable of investigating welfare fraud, no matter how flagrant it may be. But gradually, Bliss's pieces about Taylor began to focus on her and and her alone. Bliss reported that Taylor had posed as a heart surgeon. She'd also pretended to be the daughter of a gambling kingpin to try to win a huge inheritance. And remarkably, Taylor had been accused of several kidnappings, but she hadn't been prosecuted for any of them. That last allegation was very serious, But Bliss didn't appear to take it all that seriously. He saw the Taylor stories as little more than a fun diversion. Here's Bill Mullen.
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Every once in a while, I would be walking by his desk and he'd say, oh, Mullen, this story doesn't end. I just got her on some more stuff. I suppose in his mind, she was the gift that didn't stop giving. He kept getting these juicy stories about her, and of course, the paper was eager to put them into the paper. So he was always happy when he got another one about her.
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George Bliss's stories were a really valuable resource for me when I started my own research on Linda Taylor. The claims Bliss made about Taylor are a big reason why I've spent the last six years obsessing over her life. But I discovered pretty early on that I couldn't rely on Bliss reporting. He passed along the allegation that Taylor had stolen $154,000 in government money in a single year. He also reported that she'd taken $300,000. But documents I found at the Illinois State archives suggest Taylor's take was closer to $40,000 and not in a single year. Bliss did get a lot of stuff right. Linda Taylor had posed as a heart surgeon. She had pretended to be a gambling kingpin's daughter. She had been accused of several kidnappings. But Bliss and other Tribune reporters treated these items as curiosities. They'd get mentioned in passing, then get dropped entirely. Even when Taylor was suspected of homicide in 1975, the newspaper didn't stay on the story. Taylor was accused of killing a woman named Patricia Parks. Parks had been sick and she died of a barbiturate overdose under Taylor's care. Parks relatives told me they believed that Taylor was a murderer. But back in the 1970s, no one from the Tribune interviewed them and Taylor was never charged. After that, murder allegation faded away. Bliss wrote about the next one off Taylor scandal. Her arrest for stealing a television set and a fur coat. George Bliss and his editors were all white men. Linda Taylor self identified as black, and she was written about in racially loaded ways that perpetuated and helped to create some very nasty stereotypes. The Chicago Tribune had very few black reporters. Clarence Page was one of the first. He saw his mission as helping the paper get more black readers and seeing that Chicago's black community was covered better. Page told me that was a huge challenge, that he got resistance from editors when he tried to report on Jesse Jackson and the Black Panthers. That being said, Page doesn't think the paper's focus on Linda Taylor was a sign of institutional bias.
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I've never felt guilty about this story, beginning with us and our reporting. I feel like it was something for public dialogue that needs to be talked about.
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Page says that things went wrong when people misused the information that the Tribune had surfaced.
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I guess at the time, my reaction, I'd say was more, ah, good, get them. Get the welfare sheets off of welfare so the people who deserve it can get it. You know, that was my optimistic view. There are other people who say, good, this just goes to show you that welfare is just going. Just handing money out to thieves and people who are just too lazy to work and blah, blah, blah. The great lesson of this for me is that people will come to their own conclusions based on what their prejudices are.
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Tribune readers and politicians came to their own conclusions right away. One Illinois bureaucrat said the Taylor was without a doubt the biggest welfare cheat of all time. That same official appears to have been Bliss source for the unfounded claim The Taylor stole $154,000 in a single year. That exaggerated figure would become useful for Ronald Reagan, who was looking for material to deploy during his first presidential run. Here he is at a campaign stop in January 1976 in Chicago.
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They found a woman who holds the record. She used 80 names, 30 addresses, 15 telephone numbers to collect food stamps.
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The record that Linda Taylor held, Reagan said, was that she had an annual Tax free income of $150,000. For Reagan, Linda Taylor's thievery made for the perfect anecdote. It was an outrageous, memorable story that showed welfare was a problem that needed to be solved. Reagan's opponents thought the anecdote seemed a little too outrageous. He was known for telling tall tales and he was accused throughout the campaign of blowing the Linda Taylor story way out of proportion. The campaign would end for Reagan in August 1976, when he lost the Republican nomination to President Gerald Ford. But the Linda Taylor story did not end there. In September, Reagan's favorite publication, the conservative magazine Human Events, ran an essay under George Bliss byline. It was headlined the Unbelievable Case of Chicago's Welfare Queen. Reagan turned that essay into a radio commentary that went out to stations nationwide. Bliss new reporting, Reagan said, confirmed that he'd been right about Taylor all along.
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I can verify and update my story. She has used 127 names so far. Posed as a mother of 14 children at one time, seven at another, signed up twice with the same caseworker in four days and once, while on welfare, posed as an open heart surgeon, complete with office. She has three new cars, a full length mink coat, and her take is estimated at a million dollars.
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George Bliss hadn't actually done any new reporting. He'd just written down bigger numbers. There is no support for the claim that Taylor stole a million dollars in welfare money. I also found nothing to back up this assertion, which Bliss wrote and Reagan repeated in a folksy tone of voice.
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I wish this had a happy ending, 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.
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I don't know why Bliss did that freelance piece for Human Events. He certainly wasn't an ideologue. A short while earlier, he'd written a story for the left wing magazine the Nation. Some of his colleagues told me he probably took the assignment just to make a little extra money. I am confident in saying that the editors at Human Events had a specific goal in mind when they commissioned a story on Linda Taylor. They wanted to make Ronald Reagan look like an honest broker. And that's what Bliss article did. George Bliss story has a sad and shocking ending. In 1977, a year after he wrote about Linda Taylor for the last time, Bliss coworkers began to notice some dramatic changes in his behavior. Here's Chuck Neubauer.
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I knew there was a problem. One day we're sitting there and he's spending three hours reading the Saturday Tribune. The Saturday papers were, were worthless. They had nothing in them but used car ads and motorcycle ads. And just that you would spend all this time just kind of staring at the paper led me to think that there was something, that he was having a problem. There were definitely signs that he wouldn't get excited about stories. He was always excited.
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Before Bliss took a seven month leave of absence from the Tribune to receive treatment for bipolar disorder. When he came back to work, he looked emaciated and even more withdrawn. In September 1978, Bill Mullen heard some horrifying news.
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After his wife fell asleep, he shot her in the head. And then he killed himself. And how I found out, I don't remember, but was just shock. Why, why he killed his wife, I don't know. But that was just an unimaginably horrible end.
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Bliss obituaries focused on his Pulitzer Prizes. They didn't linger on the fact that he'd shot his wife, Therese Bliss. The Tribune's editor, Clayton Kirkpatrick, said that George Bliss had been the foremost investigative reporter in the nation. He added that Bliss had been struck down by the terrible burden of mental illness, which ultimately proved too severe. A year after Bliss death, Ronald Reagan announced he was running for president for a second time. In a campaign speech in Texas in May 1980, Reagan said, There's a woman in Chicago who received welfare benefits under 127 different names. I think we can eliminate that kind of thing. That November, Reagan beat Jimmy Carter in a landslide. There you see the new first family of the United States, Governor and Mrs. Reagan. Their four children, Irene, Mike, Patti. By the early 1980s, the welfare queen stereotype was deeply entrenched. But Linda Taylor herself had been almost entirely forgotten, even erased. In 1982, the new republic referred to the celebrated Chicago welfare queen who did not exist. Linda Taylor did exist, and the full story of her life has never been told until now. In upcoming episodes of this podcast, you'll hear from Isaiah Skip Gant, who served as Taylor's defense attorney in the 1970s. One of Gant's jobs was to create a new image for Taylor, one that countered the welfare queen stereotype. But Taylor would not cooperate.
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Trying to get her to look like a school mom was just not gonna work. Couldn't do it, couldn't do it. She was just bent on being flamboyant. There was a part of her. She needed to be able to thumb her nose at society. She needed to be like in their face. There was this need to be defiant.
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You'll also hear about Taylor's declaration made in the 1960s that she was the daughter of one of the richest men in Chicago. That claim kicked off a heated court battle, one that would define Taylor's life in surprising ways.
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I've had tried many, many cases, had strange things happen during trials over my career, but those few days in that cramped courtroom in the Old Courthouse in Chicago, that sticks in my mind. That was really bizarre.
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Finally, you'll hear from a pair of women whose families had life altering run ins with Taylor. The timing and the circumstance were aligned where it was just our time to receive the blessing of her presence.
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She was into witchcraft and she had kidnapped me and they didn't know where I was.
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This episode of the Queen was written by me, Josh Levine and produced by Emma Morgenstern. Editorial direction from Lo and Liu and Gabriel Roth. Merritt Jacob mixed this episode. You can subscribe to the Queen on Apple Podcasts or wherever you're listening right now. It would also be great if you could rate and review the show. It helps other people find it and you can email us@thequeenslate.com this podcast series is a companion to my book, which is called the the Forgotten Life behind an American Myth. You can order it now. It's on sale everywhere on May 21st. Special thanks to June Thomas, Melissa Kaplan, Danielle Hewitt, Willa Paskin, Asha Soluja, Benjamin Frisch, Vicki Gann, TJ Raphael, Lisa Larson Walker, Katie Rayford, Jessica Seidman, Leonard Roberge, Alia, Hannah Habib, Vanessa Mobley, Alyssa Persons, Sabrina Callahan, Pamela Brown and the team at Little, Brown and Hachette Book Group US the audio of Ronald Reagan was provided courtesy of the Ronald Reagan Presidential foundation and Institute. Additional audio provided by NBC Universal Archives. Thanks for listening.
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SA.