Some historical and global examples of tax resistance → United States → Vietnam War, ~1965–75 → Irving Hogan

Tax resisters frequently face the criticism of being freeloaders who enjoy the benefits of organized society without cooperating in the taxes necessary to fund them. This rhetorical attack paints the tax resisters as self-interested, anti-social tax evaders.

One way resisters have countered this attack is by staging flamboyant giveaways of their resisted taxes — both to make it clear that the resister does not have only selfish motives for resisting, and to demonstrate that the money is being spent for the benefit of society (and to a greater extent than if the money had been filtered through the government first).

Redirection is also a way of forging or strengthening ties with the recipient groups, and of making them aware of tax resistance as an option.

Today I will briefly describe some of the many examples of tax resisters and tax resistance campaigns that have used this technique, and the many variations they have come up with.

• Julia “Butterfly” Hill in 2003 redirected more than $150,000 of federal taxes that she owed that year, and made a point of saying “I ‘redirect’ my taxes rather than ‘resisting’ my taxes”:

  I actually take the money that the IRS says goes to them and I give it to the places where our taxes should be going. And in my letter to the IRS I said: “I’m not refusing to pay my taxes. I’m actually paying them but I’m paying them where they belong because you refuse to do so.” They are not directing our money where it should be going, they are being horrific stewards of that money.



• NWTRCC organized what it called the “War Tax Boycott” in 2008. It encouraged people to resist as a group, and as part of their resistance, to redirect any refused taxes to one of two groups: one that concentrated on providing health assistance in New Orleans in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, and the other that provides assistance for Iraq War refugees. The campaign kept track of how much money had been redirected over the course of the boycott, and then held a press conference at which oversized checks adding up to about $325,000 were given to spokespeople for these campaigns.
• The People’s Life Fund, associated with the group Northern California War Tax Resistance, accepts redirected taxes from resisters. If the IRS successfully seizes money from the resisters, the resisters can reclaim their donations to the Fund. Otherwise, the money remains there and earns interest and dividends. Every year the group pools these returns on investment and gives them away to local charitable organizations in a granting ceremony. Usually the grants are small — $500 or $1000 — but they give them to a dozen or more groups, which makes their granting ceremonies a good way for local charities to network with each other and for news of war tax resistance to spread in the local activist community. This same model, or one similar to it, is followed by a number of regional redirection funds associated with war tax resistance groups.
• A family in Vermont figured out a way to get extra mileage out of their redirection: “They refused to pay 50% of their tax liability and redirected it to Plan International’s Childreach program. Childreach has a fund drive for a project to help children in Nepal and Ghana, and has received a challenge grant from the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). This means that the $211.69 that the WTR family has redirected will result in a $423.38 matching contribution from the U.S. government!”
• In 2009, several hundred Spanish war tax resisters redirected over €85,000 to the group “La’Onf,” which was organizing and educating about nonviolent conflict resolution techniques in Iraq.
• The Mennonite Central Committee has established a “turning toward peace” fund especially designed for people who want to redirect their tax dollars from the government to more constructive projects — for example, education for children in Afghanistan.
• War tax resisters Paul and Addie Snyder made a point of saying “we believe in paying taxes” as they explained in 1975 that they wouldn’t be paying those taxes to the federal government, but instead would be giving the money directly to rural poverty projects nearby.
• In 1983 several hundred American Quaker war tax resisters paid their tax dollars to a Catholic soup kitchen in Philadelphia.
• The Women’s Tax Resistance League largely suspended its campaign during World War Ⅰ, but one woman, writing as “A Persistent Tax Resister” wrote a letter to the editor of a suffragist paper suggesting that women “should contribute the sum she owes to the Government to a National Fund of her own choosing, and should send her donation as ‘Taxes withheld from the Government by a voteless woman.’ ” Charlotte Despard, for example, “said she had offered to give voluntarily the amount demanded of her by Revenue authorities to any war charity, but her offer had not been accepted.”
• A war tax resistance group in Iowa used the proceeds from their redirection fund to create a scholarship for college students who would be ineligible for government financial aid because of refusal to register for the draft. Another, in Pennsylvania, made an interest-free loan to a defense committee that was supporting a group of draft resisters who were on trial.
• In 1971, 70 war tax resisters went to the phone company offices in Boston to pay their bills minus the federal excise tax. They then collected this refused tax ($142 worth) by passing an army helmet around, and donated it to the United Farm Workers to help them set up a clinic in California. Also that year, the Cornell branch of the National Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam did a similar phone company office protest and collection of redirected phone taxes, donating the money to a local Early Childhood Development program.
• In 1968, war tax resister Irving Hogan stood outside the Federal Building in San Francisco and redirected his federal income tax dollars one at a time — by handing them out to passers by. “I want this money to be used for the delight, not the destruction, of men,” he said. “Here: go buy yourself a beer.”
• John and Pat Schwiebert did something similar: “One year they converted their war tax debt into five-dollar bills, which they gave to individuals waiting in line at the city unemployment office. They included a letter with each donation telling why they were doing this, and they notified media beforehand. Their actions garnered them an interview on NPR, and they received letters and cards from around the world.”
• In 1972 a group of war tax resisters in New York redirected their war taxes as nickels that they handed out to people waiting at the bus stops on lines where fare hikes were being proposed, saying “this is where our tax dollars should be going.”

And here’s something kind of similar that doesn’t fit into any of my other categories, so I’ll toss it in here:

• When the IRS seized back taxes from war tax resister Mary Regan’s retirement account in 1998, she threw a fundraising party to try to raise an equivalent amount of money — not to reimburse her, but to give away to charities like “the Boston Women’s Fund, the American Civil Liberties Union, the American Friends Service Committee, a homeless shelter for youth, and the peace movement in Israel.”

April 15^th has long been the date for war tax resisters to have their “fifteen minutes of fame” in the papers. Here are some examples from years gone by:

1966

IRS Warns Objectors To Pay Taxes

N.Y. Times News Service

Washington — The Internal Revenue Service will, if necessary, seize cash and property owned by opponents of the war in Viet Nam who are recusing to pay their income taxes, Commissioner Sheldon S. Cohen said Thursday.

The service will take this action “in fairness to the many millions of taxpayers who do fulfill their obligations,” he said in a statement in response to an advertisement urging non-payment of taxes in Thursday’s Washington Post.

The government has been upheld in court on all occasions when individuals have refused to pay taxes because of disapproval with the uses to which their money was being put, revenue officials said.

One noted precedent was the case of Milton Mayer, the Quaker author, who in 1956 attempted unsuccessfully to refuse to pay one-half of his income tax, on the ground that the money was being used for purposes that violated his pacifist beliefs. The case was made on constitutional grounds under the First Amendment, which guarantees freedom of religion, but Mayer lost both in the District Court in the Northern District of California and in the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals.

IRS and Justice Department officials could not remember a similar case that has reached the Supreme Court.

A group of Amish farmers in Pennsylvania lost a somewhat similar suit recently in the District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania when they attempted to refuse to pay Social Security taxes. Their property was seized in payment of the tax.

The standard IRS procedure in cases where taxpayers file returns but do not pay the tax that is due is to send a notice as soon as the non-payment is discovered. If the return is filed on or near the April 15 deadline, this could be as long as a month, although it is usually less than that, revenue officials said.

The initial notice gives the [illegible] make his payment or make arrangements with the IRS for a later payment. The latter is permitted to cases of [unusual?] financial hardship.

If there is no response to the 10-day notice, the IRS generally sends a second notice. After another 10 days or so has elapsed, the service then moves to seize the assets of the delinquent. Under law, it may do this without specific authorization from any court.

1968

“War” Tax Resister Gives Joy to Some

San Francisco — (UPI) — Irving Hogan, 44, distributed his unpaid income tax yesterday not to Uncle Sam but to his fellow man.

Hogan stood in a crowd of about 150 startled persons, handing out $1 bills. About 60 of them.

That, he said, was the amount of his unpaid federal income taxes he guessed would be spent on the Vietnam war.

“I want this money to be used for the delight, not the destruction, of men,” the well-dressed philanthropist said.

“Here,” he called to one man, “go buy yourself a beer.”

“And here,” he said to another, thrusting the bill in his hand. “Buy your wife a nosegay.”

The money soon ran out, and the crowd moved to other events of the three ring circus billed as an antitax rally outside the federal building.

Ogling curvy showgirls who paraded in bikinis and barrels was, they agreed, a more enjoyable way to celebrate April 15 than the traditional payment of taxes to the federal government.

The young morsels were protesting taxes. One, Bonnie Parker, said she would not pay the $500 she owes.

“I refuse to pay. I am not even filing. I don’t have it and I don’t know what I would do to get it,” she said, shivering in a brisk wind.

Through it all, the IRS offices did a brisk business on deadline day.

The “Comprehensive Disobedience” movement in Spain has developed international ambitions, and as part of this project it has launched a new media platform — RADI.MS — that aims to spread news about allied projects around the world. The site content is currently translated into English, Castillian (Spanish), and Catalan.

I contributed an article on the American war tax resistance movement for the inauguration of the project:

In mid-April, people across the United States struggle to fill out their federal income tax returns. This shared calamity has created something of an inverted holiday season — with grumbling about paperwork and frustration towards government bureaucracy replacing the “peace on earth, goodwill to men” of the Yuletide.

But at a church in Berkeley, California, this past April, people were handing over their taxes with a smile. They were members of the group Northern California War Tax Resistance, and they were smiling because their checks — averaging more than $1,000 (more than €800) apiece — were not made out to the federal government, but to twenty-seven local groups including the Bay Area Community Land Trust, the Berkeley Food Pantry, the Biketopia Community Workshop, Oakland Sustaining Ourselves Locally, People’s Community Medics, and the Sustainable Economies Law Center.

The money came from a war tax resisters’ “alternative fund” called the “People’s Life Fund” — one of more than a dozen such funds in the United States. The Fund’s annual mid-April “granting ceremony” brought together representatives from each of the recipient groups, who accepted their checks and briefly summarized their work for the benefit of the other attendees.

The People’s Life Fund (like most other such funds) accepts deposits from war tax resisters of the money they are refusing to pay to the government. The fund holds the money in alternative financial institutions like credit unions and socially-responsible investments. If the government manages to seize the resisted taxes from the resister, he or she can reclaim the money from the Fund. Meanwhile, any investment returns from the deposits are distributed to local groups in these annual granting ceremonies.

“Redirection” has a long history in American war tax resistance. American war tax resister Bill Ramsey says it reminds him of Gandhi’s “constructive programme” with which the commander of the Indian resistance movement worked to strengthen grassroots Indian institutions at the same time he was trying to weaken British imperialist ones:

The spinning wheel was the center of Gandhi’s constructive program. Redirection is the war tax resistance movement’s spinning wheel. The “constructive program” is positive action that builds structures, systems, and processes alongside the obstructive program of direct confrontation to or noncooperation with oppression. When we redirect our war taxes, we invest in imaginative and positive projects in our communities and around the world.

At first, redirection was largely practiced by individuals, and in an ad hoc manner. For example, in 1968, war tax resister Irving Hogan stood outside the Federal Building in San Francisco and redirected his federal income tax dollars one at a time by handing them out to passers by. “I want this money to be used for the delight, not the destruction, of men,” he said. “Here: go buy yourself a beer.” But today redirection is frequently coordinated by local or national war tax resistance groups.

Some have used redirection to strengthen the anti-war movement. One group used its alternative fund to create a scholarship for college students who had been barred from government financial aid because they refused to register for the military draft. Another made an interest-free loan to a legal defense group that was supporting a group of military draft resisters who were on trial.

Traditional charity and relief organizations have also been recipients of redirected taxes. In 2008, a national effort called the “War Tax Boycott” redirected $325,000 (approximately €235,000) in federal taxes from the U.S. Treasury to two organizations: a health clinic in New Orleans struggling with the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, and Direct Aid Iraq, which provided medical care to refugees from the American war.

War tax resisters aren’t just redirecting their money. Many American war tax resisters resist by deliberately lowering their income below the level where the federal income tax applies.  They do this by working fewer hours of paid employment and by simplifying their lives so that they can live on less money. Such resisters no longer have an amount of income tax to redirect, but they can redirect their time instead. One low-income resister, Clare Hanrahan, wrote: “I believe that redirection of time and presence provides a personal and potent contribution to the common good, a gift of self that has more dimensions than money alone. I redirect each time I give my time and energy in support of good work within my community.”

In recent years more ties have developed between American war tax resisters and the grassroots or “solidarity economy” — a model that is currently being spearheaded by Spain’s “comprehensive disobedience” (desobediencia integral) movement. National War Tax Resistance Coordinating Committee (NWTRCC) made “economic disobedience” the theme of its last national gathering, and had fruitful exchanges there with the debt resistance group Strike Debt! which has since incorporated a chapter on resisting “tax debt” into its Debt Resisters’ Operations Manual.

When Erica Weiland of NWTRCC delivered the keynote address at a recent “economic disobedience” conference in Eugene, Oregon, she said:

When we heard about this work in Spain, it was clear to us that war tax resistance is economic disobedience, the refusal to cooperate in an economic system that is built on war, militarism, and the perpetuation of human suffering. It was also clear to us that a variety of movements that also practice economic disobedience are allied with us in this struggle. When people refuse to pay debts to ruthless debt collectors, resist foreclosure, set up bartering networks that don’t report bartering as income, set up gift economies that avoid the IRS bartering regulations, organize lending circles for low-income borrowers, counsel high school students on alternatives to military service, squat abandoned houses, organize tent cities for the homeless regardless of bureaucratic and inhumane regulations, and struggle against corrupt landlords and employers, we are engaging in economic disobedience. The economic system we live under is not set up to support us, so we should withdraw our support from the system whenever feasible.

American war tax resisters are withdrawing from the warfare state and the economic model it enforces and are committing themselves with all of their strength and all of their resources to the creation of a more just system in which we can live with dignity. In doing so, they are blazing the trail that leads to this better world we all yearn for.

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David M. Gross, an American tax resister, is the author of 99 Tactics of Successful Tax Resistance Campaigns (2014).

Last month the statute of limitations erased another year of my taxes. For the 2009 tax year, my 1040 form showed that I owed $1,203 in federal taxes. I didn’t pay, of course, and the IRS has been nagging me about that ever since. But now it’s too late for them, as ten years have expired as they failed to collect.

I celebrated by sending a check for $1,203 to our local food bank program.

(Coincidentally, on the same day I sent the check, I got my $1,200 stimulus check from the U.S. Treasury. I’m not sure how to interpret that, cosmically-like, except that it seemed to rhyme like poetry.)

This is an example of the tax resistance tactic of “redirection.” Here is an excerpt from 99 Tactics of Successful Tax Resistance Campaigns that describes this tactic:

Redirect Resisted Taxes to Charity

Governments spend a lot of time and energy—and enlist a host of political scientists and pundits and other such clergy—to try to convince their subjects that paying taxes is not only mandatory, but that it’s honorable, dignified, and even charitable, while failure to pay taxes is underhanded, shady, and selfish.

Governments and other critics of tax resistance are quick to deploy this already-available propaganda lexicon in their counterattacks. They criticize tax resisters as freeloaders who enjoy the benefits of organized society without cooperating in the taxes necessary to fund them—as self-interested, anti-social tax evaders.

One way resisters have countered this attack is by staging giveaways of their resisted taxes. This makes it clear that the resisters do not have merely selfish motives for resisting, and also demonstrates that the money is being spent for the benefit of society (to a greater extent than if the money had been filtered through the government first).

This sort of tax redirection also can forge or strengthen ties between the resisters and the recipients, and can make more people aware of tax resistance as an option.

War tax resisters

This tactic is put to particularly good use by the contemporary war tax resistance movement. Here are some examples:

When Julia “Butterfly” Hill refused to pay more than $150,000 in taxes to the U.S. government in 2003, she made a point of saying “I ‘redirect’ my taxes rather than ‘resisting’ my taxes”:

I actually take the money that the IRS says goes to them and I give it to the places where our taxes should be going. And in my letter to the IRS I said: “I’m not refusing to pay my taxes. I’m actually paying them but I’m paying them where they belong because you refuse to do so.” They are not directing our money where it should be going, they are being horrific stewards of that money.

NWTRCC organized what it called the “War Tax Boycott” in 2008. It encouraged war tax resisters across the country to coordinate by redirecting their refused taxes to either of two groups: one that provided healthcare in New Orleans in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, and one that helped Iraq War refugees. The campaign kept track of how much money had been redirected over the course of the boycott, and then held a press conference to give oversized checks adding up to about $325,000 to spokespeople for these campaigns.

The People’s Life Fund is associated with the group Northern California War Tax Resistance, and holds redirected taxes from resisters. If the IRS successfully seizes money from a resister, that resister can reclaim his or her deposits to the Fund. Otherwise, the money remains there and earns interest and dividends. Every year the group pools these returns on investment and gives them away to local charitable organizations in a granting ceremony. Usually these grants are modest—$500 or $1,000 each—but they give them to a dozen or more groups, which makes their granting ceremonies a good way for local charities to network with each other and helps the word about war tax resistance spread in the local activist community. This same model, or one similar to it, is followed by a number of regional redirection funds associated with war tax resistance groups in the United States.

A war tax resistance group in Iowa used the proceeds from its redirection fund to create a scholarship for college students who had been banned from applying for government financial aid because of their refusal to register for the draft. Another, in Pennsylvania, made an interest-free loan to a legal defense group that was supporting a group of draft resisters who were on trial. These actions helped to forge or sustain ties between the war tax resistance movement and anti-conscription activists and gave war tax resistance a higher profile in the larger anti-war movement.

One family figured out a way to get extra mileage out of their redirection: In 1997 they redirected their refused federal taxes to a charitable program called “Childreach.” That year, the U.S. Agency for International Development, a federal government agency, had promised to match private donations to Childreach two-to-one from its budget, so the family’s $211.69 in redirected taxes had the effect of pulling an additional $423.38 from the U.S. government for a good cause.

In 1968, war tax resister Irving Hogan stood outside the Federal Building in San Francisco and redirected his federal income tax dollars one at a time by handing them out to passers by. “I want this money to be used for the delight, not the destruction, of men,” he said. “Here: go buy yourself a beer.”

John and Pat Schwiebert did something similar: They redirected their taxes by handing out five-dollar bills to people standing in line at the unemployment office. Along with the bills, they handed out letters in which they explained their redirection action. To amplify the public relations impact, they notified the media of their plans ahead of time. “Their actions garnered them an interview on NPR,” according to one report, “and they received letters and cards from around the world.”

In 1972 a group of war tax resisters in New York redirected their war taxes as nickels that they handed out to people waiting at the bus stops on lines where fare hikes were being proposed, saying “this is where our tax dollars should be going.”

Arthur Evans felt that if redirecting your war taxes to charity was a good idea, redirecting twice your war taxes to charity must be twice as good. In 1965 he wrote to the IRS to tell them “I am sending double the amount I am not paying for war to Quaker House at the United Nations for transmission to the United Nations Organization for its technical assistance program.”

In the early 1970s, farmers who were resisting the expansion of a military base onto their land in Larzac, France, found common cause with war tax resisters. Thousands of war tax resisters there redirected their war taxes to help fund the Larzac struggle.

And here’s something kind of similar that doesn’t fit into any of my other categories, so I’ll toss it in here: When the IRS seized back taxes from war tax resister Mary Regan’s retirement account in 1998, she threw a fund-raising party to try to raise an equivalent amount of money—but not in order to reimburse her, but to give away to charities like “the Boston Women’s Fund, the American Civil Liberties Union, the American Friends Service Committee, a homeless shelter for youth, and the peace movement in Israel.”

British women’s suffrage movement

The Women’s Tax Resistance League largely suspended its campaign during World War Ⅰ, but one woman, signing her letter “A Persistent Tax Resister” wrote to the editor of a suffragist paper to suggest that women should redirect their taxes from the government to a privately-run war relief charity “and should send her donation as ‘Taxes withheld from the Government by a voteless woman.’ ” Suffrage activist Charlotte Despard reported that “she had offered to give voluntarily the amount demanded of her by Revenue authorities to any war charity, but her offer had not been accepted.”

Social Security foe

In 1952, Howard Pennington, unwilling to pay an $81 social security tax “for waste by socialistic dreamers,” instead sent that money directly to George Robinett. Robinett was a 72-year-old retiree whose social security had been abruptly cut off for three months, costing him $210, because during one month he had earned 62 cents above the $50 maximum monthly earnings for a social security recipient.