Karl Meyer Imprisoned for Leafletting at Courthouse

From the Schenectady Gazette:

Tax Foe Sent To Jail Again

,  — A Vermont congressman’s son was sentenced today to his third jail term for distributing leaflets on federal property.

Imposing the 20-day sentence, U.S. District Judge Walter J. Labuy commented to Karl Meyer, 22, “I suppose you’ll do it again when you get out.”

Meyer, son of Representative William H. Meyer, (D. Vt.) replied, “I suppose I will.”

Meyer has served earlier terms of three days and 15 days for passing out the leaflets in the U.S. courthouse which urge a boycott on payment of federal income taxes. Meyer said he feels that the government will use tax money to wage war.

Meyer is still resisting today. The Numinous Nomads recently visited his home at a Catholic Worker urban farm in Nashville, Tennessee and share their impressions of the visit.


The photo below comes from the Niagara Falls Gazette from (the accompanying article comes from ).

Balks at Taxes — Dr. Arthur Evans, 42, Denver medical doctor, has disclosed he is refusing to pay federal income taxes because the government is using tax funds to prepare “heinous weapons of mass destructiveness.”

A friend of mine, 43 year old Arthur Evans, a medical doctor with offices in Denver, Colorado, was sent to jail by Judge Alfred A. Arraj of the Denver district court, for his refusal to pay his part of the income tax (about 50%) which would be used for the annihilation of the human race. He sent it, instead, to the United Nations, to promote peace in the world.

In a statement circulated by him to his friends he says in part: “My lawyer, the judge, and other lawyers, tell me that there is no law, no constitutional provision that provides for the individual to refuse to pay taxes for annihilation. So I go to jail, for I will not, I cannot in conscience be party to financing the means to annihilation. The Jews under Hitler were taxed to buy their crematoriums. The same happens here — but it is not only the Jews who finance their means of destruction — it is almost every income earner in the United States. This is called democratic because we are all taxed alike.”

Letters of approval have been pouring in to Dr. Evans, and since he is only allowed to write very few, his mother in Philadelphia has taken up the task of acknowledging them, sending at the same time a typewritten sheet explaining the affair in detail.

, another man (who is now considered one of America’s greatest) was picked up in Concord, Mass. on the way to his shoemaker, and brought to jail because he had refused to pay his poll tax to a government he thought misguided and evil because it allowed slavery and was also at that time waging a war with Mexico to extend its slaveholding territory. I mean, of course, Henry David Thoreau. Out of that incident came his famous Civil Disobedience, which influenced Gandhi and Nehru; Thoreau’s ideas are very much alive in many parts of the globe today. Strange, how history repeats itself!

Some day, perhaps after another century (if we escape a war of annihilation), Dr. Evans will be spoken of with appreciation and respect. We have a way of crucifying the great while they are with us, and of exalting them after they are gone. At present a medical doctor is doing laundry duty as a “trusty” in the Jefferson County Jail in Golden, Colorado, and he may like to hear from you.

Adele Wehmeyer