The Queen: The Forgotten Life Behind an American Myth

Levin has done an amazing detective job in ferreting out the facts behind a politically-charged urban legend of the 80’s – the anonymous “woman in Chicago who used 127 names to bilk the government out of $150,000 in bogus welfare claims”, and whose existence Ronald Reagan quoted incessantly on his road to the White House.

Linda Taylor, the so-called “welfare queen” did indeed flaunt a wealthy lifestyle, including luxury cars and fur coats, but her convictions for welfare fraud amounted to the use of four aliases to collect slightly under $8,000. Most investigators on the case suspected her of having made many, many more bogus claims, but she was never prosecuted for them.

And that, of itself, is one of the more fascinating and show more frustrating facts about this enigmatic woman who cut a swath of deceit, theft, and probably murder through America’s heartland.

The woman later known as Linda Taylor was born Martha Louise White, in January of 1925, in Tennessee. Though her mother was white, Martha’s father was almost certainly a black man, whom the child never knew. The family presented her as white, partly through pride, and partly because sexual activity between the races was a felony in that place and time. But within the family, Martha always knew she was unloved. In fact her mother, in later years, claimed the racially-ambiguous child had been presented to her as a foundling.

Martha left home fairly early, and racked up arrest records and eight different aliases by the time she was 22. Most of her offenses were based on charges of prostitution and various misdemeanors. When she was 30 years old and already an experienced scam artist, Martha (now using the name Constance Wakefield) attempted to pass herself off as the long-lost child (and therefor legitimate heir) of a Chicago gambler named Lawrence Wakefield, who had died intestate and with no known heirs to grab an estate valued at roughly $7 million. (That was the point at which her mother supported the “foundling” story.) While “Constance” was never successful in getting her bogus story accepted, she apparently began filing for welfare to support herself and her five children, the number of whom was frequently inflated as she double- and triple- and quadruple-dipped into the Family Aid program in Chicago.

Eventually, she moved on from that, collecting a number of new aliases, including primarily “Linda Taylor”. When she filed a false burglary claim (and likely not for the first time), she came to the attention of a Chicago detective, and a series of investigations followed which led to her conviction on the four fraud counts and some jail time.

But her career was far from over. Taylor went on to a number of other lucrative scams, including quite probably baby-brokering and murder for profit.

Levin’s unreeling of the tale jumps around in space and time and is frequently hard to follow. For the reader who is hopelessly lost, he does include a brief biographical timeline at the back of the book.

But Taylor’s story is far more than that of a single woman whose greed led her astray. As the anonymous “welfare queen”, her cautionary tale was used as a springboard to various reframings of family aid programs across the nation, over a time span of decades. Her identification at that time as a black woman reinforced profiling of an entire race as cheaters and parasites. And her many interactions with the courts showed a shocking disarray in American jurisprudence.

How did she get away with so much for so long? Why, when she had a long history of bail-jumping, was she so often released on bond, only to disappear for years and to continue her abuses sometimes scant miles from her former haunts? How could authorities refuse to investigate the barbiturate-poisoning death of a woman she was supposedly providing care for, and later decline to investigate the shooting death of one of her husbands shortly after he had taken out large insurance policies? Why were so many of her welfare claim records lost? How could court after court after court present such sloppy prosecution cases that verdicts were repeatedly overturned?

This was not a criminal mastermind. This was a woman with a second-grade education, a massive amount of street-smarts, the ability to convince far too many people with wildly improbably and self-contradictory tales, absolutely no remorse over the lives she destroyed or the laws she broke, and probably the biggest set of balls ever to come out of Tennessee.

Her story stretches the bounds of probability, but Levin nails it down at every conceivable point, following her life to its sad and pathetic end. Not sure there’s a moral to this one, but it’s a stunning piece of work. show less

If you grew up in the US in the 1970s, you may remember Ronald Reagan’s first run for the presidency in 1976, during which he frequently referred to a “welfare queen” living in Chicago, who gamed the system such that she had numerous houses, cars, fur coats, etc., etc., all the proceeds of fraud on the federal welfare system. Well, “The Queen” is that woman’s story - going by the name Linda Taylor, she actually had some 10 or 12 aliases, not to mention numerous birth dates, parents, children, husbands, living situations and races. In reality, she was born in 1926 in the US South, the product of a white woman and black man (whose sexual union was literally illegal at the time). Because of her mixed race, her family largely show more rejected her, and she grew up all over the southern part of the country, with various family and non-family members and very little (if any) education. Her life of crime began long before the 1970s, when she was identified and prosecuted as a welfare cheat, charges that eventually led to her incarceration for a little over two years; but she may also have been a kidnapper, a bigamist, an “ordinary” thief (of other peoples’ property) and, not least, a murderer. Journalist Josh Levin has waded through thousands of documents, all meticulously laid out in the notes and bibliography sections of this book - indeed, in my Kindle edition I discovered that I still had some 20% of the book left to read when the story was done, that last 20% of the volume being devoted to sources and thank-yous. A really fascinating tale, rather heartbreaking when you think about this woman’s life, utterly impoverished in terms of human contact, love and acceptance - no wonder she felt entitled to take what she wanted, as she’d been deprived of so much. Recommended. show less

This is really middle of the pack. I really wanted to dnf it; the last third took me forever to finish (I read 5 other books in the time it took me to read this one). I have to agree with many of the low ratings that I often felt lost in backstory details. However, I often enjoyed being placed in the history of what was going on, and the character study as well as the political sphere was fascinating. The author did an okay job with sounding unbiased on many political points, but at times his own bias does seem to control the narrative.

She was born Martha Louise White in Arkansas. She became well-known as Linda Taylor, a grifter and a cheat, and the subject of Ronald Reagan’s oft-told story of “the welfare queen” of Chicago. At her death in Florida in 2002, she was called Constance Lloyd. She was a con artist, a kidnapper, perhaps even a murderer.

In The Queen Josh Levin tells the story of Martha / Linda / Constance, and there is a lot of story to tell. Levin first wrote about Linda Taylor in a 2013 article for Slate, the magazine for which he is editor. Six years later came this book. I am sure it took that long just to sift through publicly available information and piece together the life of a woman who changed names, ages, races, husbands, life stories and show more locations so often it boggles the mind.

At the same time, this book is also the story of how politicians, including Reagan, used the specter of "welfare fraud" as a career stepping stone from the 1970s through the 1990s. Levin sets off the true story and scope of Linda Taylor's crimes against the decimation of the welfare safety net that was accomplished through the political drumbeats of "welfare reform" in which a part of her life story became caught up. While Levin draws no overt conclusion in the book, it's clear he comes down on the side of believing that welfare reform has done more harm than good.

I rate this book 3 Stars - I liked this book. If your interests are similar to mine, you might like it too. show less

This is a wild ride of true crime, politics and race in America, a crazy story about an unbelievable con artist and killer who is remembered, when she is at all, only for the most trivial of her misdeeds. Linda Taylor was a thief, a kidnapper and a slow motion serial killer driven by who knows what and for the most part, got away with it all!

Well-researched but the writing really drags.

A bit slow towards the beginning but gets better about halfway through.