Overthrowing the Queen

Telling Stories of Welfare in America

Tom Mould

• Publisher: Indiana University Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780253048059
• Topic: Politique et relations internationales
• Subtopic: Propagande politique

Examining the popular myths and unseen realities of welfare, this study reveals the political power of folklore and the possibilities of storytelling. In 1976, Ronald Reagan hit the campaign trail with an extraordinary account of a woman committing massive welfare fraud. The story caught fire and a devastating symbol of the misuse government programs was born: the Welfare Queen. Overthrowing the Queen examines these legends of fraud and abuse while bringing to light personal stories of hardship and hope told by cashiers, bus drivers, and business owners; politicians and aid providers; and, most important, aid recipients themselves. Together these stories reveal how the seemingly innocent act of storytelling can create powerful stereotypes that shape public policy. They also showcase redemptive counter-narratives that offer hope for a more accurate and empathetic view of poverty in America today. Overthrowing the Queen tackles perceptions of welfare recipients while proposing new approaches to the study of oral narrative that extend far beyond the study of welfare, poverty, and social justice.

SECTION 1

WELFARE LEGENDS

An American Tradition

ONE

INTRODUCTION

SOME STORIES SNEAK UP ON us; others hit us over the head. This one did both. It was April 2011, and I found myself at a dinner that spanned the white-collar world from the front desk to the corner office. The weather was mild, as it often is in North Carolina in the spring, and we sat outside under a large white tent at tables with starched white tablecloths. The wine and hors d’oeuvres suggested that conversation was meant to be cocktail chatter, but political divisions peeked out from even the most innocuous comments. It was not long before I found myself discussing one of the most contentious issues of the day: health care.

It had been just over a year since US president Barack Obama signed the Affordable Care Act (ACA) into law, and revisions continued to be made. A week earlier, Congress had voted to repeal an unpopular tax requirement tied to the ACA, and Obama agreed to sign it. The mood in Congress and around the country, however, remained divisive. My conversation partner, Janet Haley, was a woman in her sixties who found the ACA abhorrent.¹ After trading views for about fifteen minutes, we stumbled on something we could agree on: that having people use the emergency room as their primary physician was both a bad use of taxpayer money and a bad approach to health. “An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure,” I offered, hoping that a well-worn proverb might continue to help us find common ground. I was wrong.

“Yes, but”—and now I’m quoting directly from the field notes I took as soon as I could excuse myself from the table:

Poor people will still use and abuse the system when they can. I was in the grocery store not too long ago when the woman in front of me tried to buy dog food with her food stamps. She was wearing a fur coat, polished nails, designer handbag. The checkout girl told her she couldn’t do that, and this really made her mad. She huffed and puffed and threw the dog food down and said, “Fine, then he’ll eat steak instead.” She marched back to the meat counter while we’re all standing there, waiting for her. The cashier is looking apologetically at us. And here she comes, sure enough, with two steaks.

Janet followed her story with a litany of beliefs about the poor, the excesses of government programs, and the widespread fraud she believed ran rampant throughout social services programs, ultimately returning to the topic of “Obamacare” to again express her dissatisfaction with the plan.

As I listened, I was struck with how closely her story paralleled a contemporary legend told around the country for at least the past forty years, a story I had heard when I was in high school. The version I remembered was also of a woman trying to buy dog food with food stamps and resorting to buying steaks instead, but I also remembered her climbing into a brand-new Cadillac. These stories described an archetypal figure that has come to symbolize welfare in the United States: the welfare queen.

The welfare system in the United States has always been stigmatized, but not until Ronald Reagan began telling stories of a woman in Chicago with eighty names, thirty addresses, twelve Social Security cards, four nonexistent deceased husbands, and $150,000 in unearned benefits did that system have a name. Not a real name—though the woman in Chicago was based on a real person—but a symbolic one that evoked not just a lack of poverty but also the excessive and unearned wealth of royalty.

As a story, the fraudulent antics of the welfare queen were deeply compelling in the context of current debates about economic justice in a country where the gap in wealth has been growing exponentially. But for Janet, the story was compelling in the context of health care debates specifically and the role of government more generally. Both food stamps and affordable health care were part and parcel of the same system, as were the people who would participate in these programs. The same entitled behavior of the woman in the grocery store was transferrable in her mind to a health care system similarly offered to everyone, deserving or not. For Janet, the story of the welfare queen was not simply a symbol and indictment of the welfare system but of the entire government enterprise.²

Her story caught me by surprise. I had thought stories of “welfare queens” and “welfare Cadillacs” had died out in the years since Reagan, when I had heard them as a child. But when I told my friends and colleagues about my encounter, I was surprised to hear many of them either share their own versions of the welfare queen story—albeit with caveats that such stories were rare—or point me to stories in their email boxes or Facebook pages from coworkers, uncles, high school friends, and neighbors. One friend and colleague told of hearing a woman at a you-pick-’em strawberry patch tell a version of the food-stamps-for-dog-food story only a week earlier. Curious interest soon became professional inquiry. This book is the result.

Initial research supported the conventional wisdom that the welfare queen was a bogey created by Ronald Reagan in 1976 for political ends that just never went away. But six years of fieldwork with bus drivers, grocery store clerks, local business leaders, students, and politicians suggested this specter of the social welfare system in the United States was hardly confined to elite political circles, and fieldwork with aid providers suggested the story was far more complex than the simplistic, one-sided, and stigmatizing narrative the welfare queen offered. But most revealing was the fieldwork with aid recipients who relied on public assistance to meet basic needs. Their stories painted a very different picture of welfare in the United States. Together, stories from all these groups form the backbone of this book, competing narratives that diverge and overlap in often surprising ways.

But exploring these stories is not without its downsides and dangers. The welfare queen as a cultural archetype conjures gendered, racialized images of fraud, corruption, laziness, and immorality. Repeating such stories—even to disrupt, dispel, and ultimately displace them—risks further cementing her image in the social fabric and public discourse for generations to come. This is not a new risk for folklorists, who recognize that while many vernacular traditions emerge from artistic impulses toward beauty, joy, friendship, and celebration, others emerge from darker corners of our beliefs and fears that explore racist, classist, sexist, misogynistic, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic, and jingoistic ideologies.

The question of how to write about the stories of public assistance in the United States without reinforcing the very stereotypes that have caused so much damage was one that kept me up more nights than I can count. At its core, it is the same question that corporations face when trying to decide how to respond to an unfounded rumor or legend about their product or politicians face when deciding whether to ignore baseless rumors or come out swinging, though their concerns may be economic and political as much as ethical and moral.

One solution is to humanize participants by describing the mundane, not just the extraordinary (Fine et al. 2003). The solution is a good one for a purely ethnographic project but less effective for a study focusing on vernacular narrative traditions, where cherry-picking the unusual from the usual is a fundamental narrative process. Another solution is to take a performer- and performance-centered approach to analysis that helps lay bare the personal, social, and cultural histories of the storytellers and the myriad factors that shape those stories. Such an approach humanizes while remaining faithful to the narrative tradition. One answer, however, cannot be to ignore the issue. Sweeping an issue under the rug has rarely been an effective strategy for social reform. The spurious legends and stereotypes about aid recipients have not gone away in the world where this book has yet to be published. Nor is it likely that the publication of this book will either single-handedly provide life support for the welfare queen or eradicate her from social memory and discourse for good. The unchecked legend purported as true deserves the trash can if we provide no lens through which to understand it. But when studied in context alongside the stories of real people living with the aid of public assistance, there is room for new understanding.

Although this book is unapologetic in its goal of attacking inaccurate stereotypes about the poor in this country, and aid recipients in particular, it is not inherently partisan. There are inaccurate stereotypes of the poor coming from both sides of the political aisle and everywhere in between. This book is focused just as much on understanding the stories about welfare shared among a group of businessmen who gather weekly to discuss the events of the day as on the stories of the women and men who feed their families with the help of food stamps and who gather each day in GED prep classes to earn their high school degrees. Yet although these narratives traditions are parallel, they are not equivalent. Some stories are based heavily on hearsay, brief observation, and assumption, while others are based on firsthand encounters, embodied experience, and extensive interaction. Balance, fairness, and justice is achieved not by suggesting all views are equal but by evaluating the evidence offered in support for any given story and constructing meaning accordingly.

HISTORY OF THE PROJECT

In folklore, as in anthropology, the lone fieldworker immersed in a community, observing, interviewing, and participating where appropriate, remains the dominant paradigm for fieldwork. However, as scholars have become more sensitive to the power and politics involved in cultural epistemological work, fieldworkers increasingly are engaging in some form of community-based research that centers on collaboration with communities rather than more one-sided endeavors. The research that provides both the foundation and the data for this study is part of a collaborative project that brought faculty, students, and community partners together in an effort to address the stereotypes and perceptions of public assistance in the United States generally and Alamance County, North Carolina, specifically. The project began after I approached leaders in the community who were working on issues of poverty and economic justice—in both government agencies and nonprofits—with the story I had heard at dinner that night in April. Within a month, we had formed a working group that included directors and staff of programs that serve those in need: the Department of Social Services, the Burlington Housing Authority, Allied Churches (which runs a local food pantry, soup kitchen, and homeless shelter, among other services), the Open Door Clinic (which provides free health coverage for the uninsured), and the United Way. During the next few months, we worked to flesh out the parameters of a project that would examine and ultimately work to dispel the stereotypes and misperceptions surrounding public assistance and the people who receive it. As the director of Elon University’s Program for Ethnographic Research and Community Studies (PERCS), I also brought the project to our PERCS committee as a collaborative research project to engage students through both classroom instruction and independent research.

Over the course of the next year, we established a list of ten outcomes: six to serve community agencies and community members, four geared toward academic audiences. Additionally, we determined a time line, submitted grant applications to fund the project, set the structure and learning goals for the service-learning course, received institutional review board (IRB) approval, and developed fieldwork protocols, including interview questions, field note templates, and processes for how to identify and approach participants. Initial conversations helped us establish the nature of our collaboration together. Rather than the model of full participation in all aspects of the project that is typically assumed in the participatory-action research literature, we followed the more expansive lead of community-based research that embraces a division of labor model.³ Accordingly, I served as the principle investigator for the research and was involved in all aspects of the project; the students served primarily as field-workers; and community partners served as project developers, advisers, facilitators, advocates, and researchers in gathering and providing statistical and policy information.⁴

By 2015 we had completed many of the outcomes we set out with and some that emerged in the course of our work, including a presentation for aid providers (“Improving Programming in Public Housing” for the Burlington Housing Authority), a cheat sheet for local politicians and leaders (“Public Assistance in Alamance County at a Glance”), and documents, presentations, and resources for the general public (a “Top Truths about Welfare” document, “Re-Envisioning Welfare in Alamance County” public forum and panel discussion, Portraits of Hope traveling exhibit, and the Voices of Welfare website, which has served as a repository for some of this work). There were also scholarly presentations and publications, including two journal articles (“The Welfare Legend Tradition in Online and Off-line Contexts” [Mould 2016] and “Collaborative-Based Research in a Service-Learning Course: Reconceiving Research as Service” [Mould 2014]). In the course of sharing our work publicly, we had begun to garner some media coverage. That is when the executive director of Guilford Child Development (GCD), Robin Britt, heard about our project in Alamance County and wanted to set up a similar project in Guilford County. Britt’s focus would be on a new initiative to consolidate programs and provide community members a one-stop-shopping approach to resources such as GED classes, job training, and childcare. A few months later, we were written into a grant with the United Way in GCD’s launch of the Family Success Center.⁵ Over the course of the summer, we worked to clarify the specific research plan: ensuring that the methods were ethical as well as practical; considering the specific organizational structures and goals of GCD; and developing the questions, processes for data collection, and final outcomes. A year later we had completed our research in Greensboro and submitted a 177-page report to GCD a...