Reagan used her, the country hated her. Decades later, the Welfare Queen of Chicago refuses to go away
CHICAGO - Between the fall of 1974 and the presidential election of 1980, this newspaper, the Chicago Tribune, used the phrase "welfare queen" in more than 80 different stories. Sometimes it was bold and large, in a headline; sometimes it was tucked into copy. Sometimes it was "welfare queen" in quotes; sometimes just Welfare Queen, without any colloquial smirk - as if it were a formal title in Chicago. Which, in a way, for several years, it was.
There was the Welfare Queen/ice cream vendor who reportedly stole $11,000 in public assistance funds; and the Welfare Queen convicted of stealing just $1,013. There was the University of Illinois at Chicago criminal justice student sentenced to four years in state prison in 1979 for defrauding Illinois of $118,000 in public assistance. But Chicago's most notorious Welfare Queen was indisputably a Golddust, Tenn., grifter, possible baby trafficker, possible kidnapper and possible murderer named Linda Taylor. Her name was rarely printed without adjectives and snark attached. As in "Linda Taylor, the notorious Chicago welfare queen."
According to old reports, she hated those nicknames.
But she didn't have a choice.
She fit an image.
She did drive a Cadillac, she did wear furs. She floated around Chicago, maintaining multiple addresses, and by 1974, according to authorities, she fraudulently gathered at least $150,000 in food stamps and Social Security payments, not to mention plenty of welfare assistance and the veterans benefits of men she had never married. (The amount was likely much less.) There was
