The Myth of the Welfare Queen: A Pulitzer Prize-Winning Journalist's Portrait of Women on the Line.

As the Welfare Debate Captivated Congress in the summer of 1995, David Zucchino, a reporter for the Philadelphia Inquirer, struck out from the newsroom and immersed himself in the lives of several of the city's most disadvantaged families. His goal was to question the welfare myths that held sway in official Washington, where "few of the senators and congressmen who voted for the welfare bill had ever met a person on welfare." Zucchino is a talented reporter and a graceful writer, and he returned after six months on the street with a lucid, even gripping, account of daily life among the poorest segment of the welfare population. His characters stride across the pages trying to deal with any number of predicaments, including murders, house fires, asthma attacks, rampaging rats, and a stranger-than-fiction Christmas dinner staged by a mobster trying to court community goodwill.

There's just one problem: The characters don't really debunk the "myths" about underclass life, as the author seems to believe. Indeed, with each tragic twist of their unfortunate lives, they seem to ratify the very stereotypes that drive the political debate. With little attachment to work or marriage, they produce an abundance of children they cannot support, often with the indignant expectation of a welfare check. Had the book been available during the congressional debate, Newt Gingrich himself might have stood on the House floor, reading it aloud. When a skilled reporter, drenched in sympathy for the poor, produces such an inadvertently damning document, it's not hard to see why the welfare abolitionists won the epochal debate. If the status quo hadn't become indefensible, it certainly appeared that way.

The book weaves two unrelated stories. The first chronicles the tribulations of 56-year-old Odessa Williams, a longsuffering, large-hearted woman doing her level best to care for an ever-expanding clan that includes eight children, 32 grandchildren, and seven great-grandchildren. Born in Georgia to sharecropper parents, Odessa spent her childhood picking crops and migrated north after marrying a sharecropper herself at the age of 15. The marriage lasted until she was 27, when her husband's beatings grew so bad she finally fled, fearful that she might end up killing him. Since then, her main form of support appears to have been government checks, which she supplements with "trash-picking" -- gleaning discarded clothes and furniture from refuse piles in the suburbs.

On top of the welfare checks she receives for several grandchildren, Odessa also gets two disability payments under the Supplemental Security Income program, one for herself and one for her seven-year-old grandson, who was born addicted to cocaine. That brings her total income in government checks to $16,584 a year, not counting thousands more in food stamps. Her decades of reliance on welfare do not appear to strike her as anything out of the ordinary. "It seemed to her that just about everybody she knew was on the check," Zucchino writes.

Of Odessa's eight children, two seem to have escaped the disorder of the inner city for stable homes and families. The rest run the gamut from being partly to wholly dysfunctional. Darryl is serving a lengthy prison term for burglary and drugs. Brenda is a crack addict with four children, who supports her habit by turning tricks in back alleys. Two other daughters are on and off of welfare (mostly on), and in and out of jobs, training programs, and relationships (mostly out). Her two other sons have eight kids by four women, none of whom they have married.

And circumstances do not appear to be improving with time. Odessa's granddaughter, 19-year-old Iesha, is so neglectful of her three children that she inspires an index entry called, "Iesha, laziness of." Her unwillingness to tear herself from the soaps long enough to feed or clothe her kids exhausts even Odessa's vast reserves of patience. And whenever her children and grandchildren find themselves unable to support their children -- which is often -- they bequeath them to Odessa.

To call Odessa's circumstances dire would be an understatement. She weighs 240 pounds, battles severe asthma, and has a history of nervous breakdowns. She has "neither the time nor energy to wipe down the greasy kitchen walls ... scraps of food fell from the table and remained on the floor for days." Since she owes the gas company $3,250, her home is warmed only on the intermittent occasions when she can afford to buy kerosene. Fortunately, she managed to buy an abandoned row house from the city years ago for $125; otherwise the extended Williams clan might have no refuge at all.

The other narrative centers around the antics of Cheri Honkala, a welfare recipient and welfare organizer who presides over a rag-tag group of protesters known as the Kensington Welfare Rights Union. Honkala appears to be Philadelphia's answer to Mitch Snyder: a foul-mouthed street guerrilla with 54 arrests and a passion for sticking her thumb in the eye of the city's welfare bureaucrats.

She specializes in occupations. First, Honkala raises a tent city of 40 or so homeless people on an abandoned industrial lot. Next she moves it to the lawn outside Independence Hall, where she delights in the tourists'revulsion. Then she breaks into an abandoned Catholic church, and with an assortment of welfare mothers, homeless men, crack addicts, and ex-cons, she turns it into a cross between a day-care center and an asylum. Fights break out. Drugs get dealt. By the end of the saga, her troops have broken into 15 repossessed HUD homes, cutting off the locks and "homesteading" them.

Like Snyder, Honkala's favorite emotion appears to be rage. "When anyone asked her why she had welfare mothers and their children living on a vacant lot in the broiling hot sun, Cheri always shot back: 'Where the fuck do you expect them to live? These people are homeless! Get it?"' And like Snyder -- who abandoned his wife and children, beat his girlfriend, and finally hanged himself -- Honkala has a shady secret.

Toward the end of the book Honkala confesses that she finances her political activity with a lucrative, latenight job: She is a topless dancer. Whether this weakens her stance as a moral leader depends on one's view of topless dancing. But certainly it weakens her claim to a welfare check, since her moonlighting brings her as much as $500 a night, in cash. In other words, this effort to debunk "the myth of the welfare queed" has, at its heart, a rather inconvenient case of welfare fraud.

The author, who treats Honkala as some modernday Martin Luther King, does not dwell too deeply on this. He appears to accept her own explanation, that her work as a stripper is an "economic necessity," the price a committed leader must pay to keep her days free to fight for the rights of the poor. "She lit a cigarette and blew gray smoke into the moist, greasy air of the diner," he writes of the confession scene. "A smile played on her lips. 'And anyway,' she said, 'who says welfare mothers won't find work, huh?"'

So what do these portraits prove? Zucchino says they show that the poor are, well, really poor -- and not living the high life that the phrase "Welfare queen" evokes. "If there were any Cadillac-driving, champagne-sipping, penthouse-living welfare queens in North Philadelphia, I didn't find them," he writes. Given Honkala's unreported cash income, this isn't altogether correct. But the general point is fair enough. The book leaves little doubt that its characters are, for the most part, a dejected and defeated lot, living lives of serious material deprivation. What the author doesn't seem to realize is that this, precisely, was the welfare abolitionists'point.

By the time welfare captured center stage in the mid-1990s, Cadillacs weren't the issue. It was Ronald Reagan who, two decades earlier, had attacked the poor for abusing the programs (with his famous parable in the 1976 campaign of the Chicago welfare cheat). By 1996, the leaders of the Republican Congress had adopted the opposite tack: they attacked the programs for abusing the poor.

"By creating a culture of poverty, we have destroyed the very people we are claiming to help," Gingrich said over and over again. "You can't sustain civilization with 12-year-olds having babies and 15-year-olds selling drugs and 18-year-olds who can't read their diplomas." He didn't argue that the poor had it good. He argued that the poor had it bad, really bad, and that the welfare system was to blame for neither demanding nor encouraging personal responsibility.

One can argue about whether Gingrich and his lieutenants were sincere (some were, some weren't), and whether they were right (that remains to be seen). But there's little in Zucchino's book that wouldn't neatly fit their critique. In choosing such desperately disadvantaged subjects (most welfare recipients, in fact, are not as bedraggled as these), Zucchino is bolstering his opponents' case. Gingrichs line about pregnant 12-year-olds may sound like a bit of tendentious hyperbole -- after all, how many pregnant 12-year-olds are there? But Zucchino actually finds one! Odessa's daughter Elaine, he reports, gave birth to the first of her six children at age 12 (in this case, after being raped), and the child is in juvenile custody by the book's end.

Rape, of course, is a crime, not an act of irresponsibility on Elaine's part. But there are plenty of those, too. After all, she conceives five more children with no particular plan for supporting them. And she almost loses them to the state after a neighbor complains that they are living in utter filth. Odessa organizes a family work-crew to clean the place up before the social worker re-inspects.

The more the details accrue, the more they seem to bolster the welfare critics' view. Whether or not welfare caused the problems the book portrays, it certainly seems to be doing little to alleviate them. Odessa's daughter Joyce had four children by four different men and raised them largely on welfare. But even Joyce finds herself "especially dismayed at the reluctance of her own daughter, Iesha, to take charge of her life and end her passive reliance on welfare." Her boyfriend, a drug addict, is in jail, and "Iesha could barely be trusted to change her babies' diapers regularly." She is snoozing when two of the children she is supposed to be watching burn down the house. Not all the parents in the book are as neglectful as Iesha. But there are enough examples of kids in filthy diapers and kids missing school and kids living with drug addicts in tents, that one wonders what in the world Zucchino has in mind when he writes that the women he met were "skilled primarily at raising children."

Perhaps, as he seems to believe, this is all the product of industrial flight. In his view, there simply aren't any jobs. And even if there were, he writes, "these women were so consumed by the business of securing housing, food, and health care," that working "was not a viable option." (One might turn that around and wonder whether housing, food, and health care are "viable options" without securing a job.)

There is, of course, a serious question about whether there are enough jobs to go around, and enough child care and transportation so that low-income mothers can take them. But one can't help noticing, in this book at least, that no one seems to be looking very hard.

Following these characters around for six months, Zucchino finds himself visiting many welfare offices, attending many protests, and picking many trash piles in the suburbs. But the trip he doesn't make may be more telling: He never finds himself accompanying someone looking for a job.

Odessa regards welfare "as part of God's bounty." Cheri, with a more secular bent, "regarded welfare as an entitlement in the strictest sense of the word." When counseling the members of her poor people's movement, she tells them to make no apologies for their welfare-dependent status. "Until society created conditions where the poor were provided with housing and jobs, she said, they had every right to take the government's money."

It comes as no surprise that most Americans disagreed. By the end of the book, the interesting question isn't, "Why did the welfare bill pass?" but "What took so long?"

To argue that the old system had become indefensible is not to say the new law will make things better. The beauty of "devolution" from the abolitionists' point of view is that it allowed them to attack the status quo, without ever quite saying what a better support system would look like. Maybe the states will figure it out; maybe they won't. President Clinton did try to articulate a solution -- a mutual responsibility pact, with a safety net for those really trying -- but he never truly fought for it. After unleashing a maelstrom with his "end welfare" rhetoric, he more or less dove for cover.

There are certainly reasons to worry about how the Williams clan and their counterparts will fare in a post-entitlement world of time limits and work requirements. But the early returns offer cause for cautious optimism. Case loads are plunging across the country, and tougher welfare programs (not just low unemployment) are clearly part of the reason. in Milwaukee, where the changes are perhaps most dramatic, 10,000 families have left the rolls in the last year alone. That represents a 30 percent decline in the caseload, unprecedented for a major city. Only a tiny percentage -- a few dozen on a given night -- have wound up in the city's shelters. And many of those families are headed by drug-addicted women, some of whom were heading for the streets anyway. Many, many more have gotten jobs. For more families than was commonly supposed, work may be a "viable option" after all.

And for all the talk of welfare "cuts," the case load reductions have left most states awash in cash, at least for now. And there are initial signs that some of the money, at least, is being reinvested in programs to help those harder cases that remain on the rolls with child care, transportation, and wage subsidies.

Of course, much could still go wrong. Not every state has Wisconsin's booming economy. Not every state will reinvest its windfall. No one knows how long those who find the jobs will keep them. ...Or what will happen when people lose jobs, without welfare to fall back on. ...Or what will happen to the more disadvantaged families still on the rolls. ...Or what will happen when the country hits its first recession without the stabilizing effect of an entitlement system in place for the poor. Had the liberals spent less time in denial about the shortcomings of the old system, they might have come up with a better replacement -- one with less work rhetoric and more assurances of the necessary work support.

The Myth or the Welfare Queen showcases the flaws of this late-stage liberalism; awash in good intentions, it defends what cannot be defended. One even wonders whether the book's lone apparent hero, the likable, generous Odessa, has been well-served by a system that allowed nearly three decades of cash support, while asking nothing in return. Her asthma, obesity, and nerves notwithstanding, she can do some things to support herself. In fact, she does: She runs her own little taxi service, for neighbors who need rides to the grocery store. A system of public support that pushed (and helped) her to hold a real job, might have brought her a more productive life, with a greater personal sense of accomplishment. And the same goes all the more for her kids. The old system of poverty relief failed Odessa. Maybe there's still time to devise the more fruitful one she deserves.