I.R.S. Woes and Other News for American Tax Resisters

And now, a bit of domestic tax resistance news:


From the Chicago Daily Tribune of :

Denver Men Resist Tax Collection

Hold a Secret Meeting and Agree to Stand Together

Raising of Assessment Causes Trouble

 — A secret meeting of the principal business-men and merchants was held this evening for the purpose of resisting the payment of taxes for the current year, which are levied on the full market value of the property.

It was decided to send a committee of twenty-five of the heaviest taxpayers to protest, and, in the event of their protest proving futile, sixty of the most prominent men pledged themselves to resist the payment of taxes and to do all in their power to prevent the collection of taxes from others.

Should the threat be carried into execution the county will be left without funds to meet current expenses.

The article gives no indication of what the dispute was about, and I haven’t been successful in digging up more about this threatened tax strike. (I scanned through the minutiae in Jerome C. Smiley’s History of Denver, for example, without finding a mention of it.)

This was a time in Denver history when there was dissatisfaction about the amount of control the state governor had over local spending and official appointments, so that may have had something to do with it. The city was also still reeling from the Panic of .