Some historical and global examples of tax resistance →
India →
Gandhi’s campaigns →
Bardoli tax strikes
I gave my opinion that violent struggle for political change in the United States was unwise and likely to be counterproductive.
But I also expressed frustration at the ingrained ineffectiveness of today’s nonviolent protests, and tried to imagine what an effective nonviolent resistance might look like.
I’m not a doctrinaire pacifist the way Gandhi was.
I can imagine causes I would kill for as well as those I would die for.
And yet it seems to me that we’re more likely to reach the goal worth aiming for — and I’m speaking here practically and not just idealistically — through nonviolent means.
I recommended yesterday that “[p]eople who are committed to (or who prefer) nonviolence and who regret the rise of the ‘black bloc’ and other violent protesters should ask how Gandhi prevented the Indian National Congress from choosing the tactics of those in India who were advocating armed insurrection.”
“The answer,” I suggested, was that Gandhi “was more hard-core than they were, and he demonstrated results.”
But I decided to take my own advice and take a closer look, since I’m not a scholar of the Indian independence movement.
I picked up some facts of interest, both about the practical appeal of Gandhi’s program to an Indian National Congress with lofty and concrete goals, and about the importance of, yes, tax resistance in that program.
If we step into the Wayback Machine, we’ll see an India that was fighting for its independence against a hypocritically blind and openly imperalist British empire.
Jawaharlal Nehru remembered:
I have always wondered at and admired the astonishing knack of the British people for making their moral standards correspond with their material interests and for seeing virtue in everything that advances their imperial designs.
[SNC 160]
The violent struggle for independence in India, which Nehru initially supported, predates Gandhi’s nonviolent satyagraha techniques.
In fact Gandhi’s first use of these new tactics in India were in response to the British administration’s draconian anti-terrorist laws which had in turn been designed to fend off the violent independence movement (and which sound awfully familiar):
In the Rowlatt Bills were promulgated.
Their intent was to control a few wartime manifestations of terrorism and to prevent their recurrence during the postwar period… They incensed Indians and provided a focal point for resistance.
The bills made trial without jury permissible for political offenses and extended to the provincial authorities the right to intern suspected terrorists without trial.
On the day they were to become law, Gandhi, fresh from a victorious campaign in Champaran… proposed a nationwide hartal.
[SNC 163]
The hartal was something akin to a general strike.
The “victorious campaign in Champaran” was Gandhi’s first Indian satyagraha campaign, conducted when he was a newcomer on the political scene without a lot of “cred.”
He had been acting independently of existing resistance organizations as the founder of his own group called the “Satyagraha Sabha” because, in his words, “all hope of any of the existing institutions adopting a novel weapon like Satyagraha seemed to me to be in vain” [GAA 456]
The Raj responded to Gandhi’s new national campaign and the outrage over the Rowlatt Bills with violent reprisals, which included perpetrating the vicious Amritsar massacre and imprisoning Gandhi for .
Gandhi’s first national campaign of non-cooperation went nowhere.
Yet the Indian National Congress decided against a violent revolutionary movement and chose Gandhi as its commander-in-chief for the coming independence struggle.
One of Gandhi’s first acts in this capacity was to lead “what amounted to both a training exercise and a preliminary skirmish” [SNC 166] in Bardoli:
The farmers and peasants of Bardoli were being asked to pay a 22 percent land tax increase after a particularly bad agricultural year.
[Vallabhbhai] Patel led them in withholding all taxes until the increase was rescinded.
Solidarity was enforced in part through a social boycott of nonresisters.
The movement lasted , and ended with the resisters paying the tax into a government escrow account, pending an investigation of the fairness of the tax.
The investigation found that the tax was not justified, and it was withdrawn.
The Bardoli experiment demonstrated the power of disciplined collective action.
Nonpayment of taxes was an extremely aggressive act and subject to harsh penalties.
[SNC 166–7]
Gandhi and the Indian National Congress took heart at this victory.
Gandhi wrote about the British: “You have great military resources.
Your naval power is matchless.
If we wanted to fight with you on your own ground, we should be unable to do so, but… we cease to play the part of the ruled.
You may, if you like, cut us to pieces.
You may shatter us at the cannon’s mouth.
If you act contrary to our will, we shall not help you; and without our help, we know that you cannot move one step forward.”
[PNVA 84]
The key, according to Gandhi, was in withdrawal of cooperation.
“We recognize… that the most effective way of gaining our freedom is not through violence.
We will therefore prepare ourselves by withdrawing, so far as we can, all voluntary association from the British Government, and will prepare for civil disobedience, including nonpayment of taxes.
We are convinced that if we can but withdraw our voluntary help and stop payment of taxes without doing violence, even under provocation, the end of inhuman rule is assured.”
[PNVA 84]
The goals of the Indian National Congress were lofty.
“This was the first campaign in which immediate and unconditional independence for India emerged as the explicit objective and it mobilized more Indians for direct action in the service of that objective than any other single campaign” [SNC 157].
And the rhetoric was correspondingly confrontational.
Gandhi wrote: “sedition has become the creed of the Congress… Noncooperation, though a religious and strictly moral movement, deliberately aims at the overthrow of the Government, and is therefore legally seditious in terms of the Indian Penal Code” [PNVA 85].
Gandhi felt that “civil disobedience, once begun this time, cannot be stopped and must not be stopped as long as there is a single resister left free or alive.”
This was not a pastime for hobbyists or cowards.
Tens of thousands were arrested.
Hundreds killed.
Protesters had to be willing to be beaten with steel-tipped canes without even raising a hand to ward off the blows.
The first concentrated target of these protests was the Salt Act:
The existence of a government monopoly on salt, resulting from the Salt Act, perfectly exemplified the perceived evils of colonial rule.
Paying the tax on salt (and thereby providing much of the revenue to run the colonial regime) was more a mild irritant than a desperate hardship for most.
But why pay the bill for their own subjugation?
[SNC 172]
Gandhi also tried to extend this campaign to a boycott of foreign liquor and fabric.
Wearing homespun clothing (and thereby damaging the economy of occupation while at the same time encouraging self-reliance) became a symbol of resistance.
The Salt March, the Dharasana salt factory confrontation (one of the climactic scenes you may remember from Gandhi the movie), and “also the entire Salt Satyagraha campaign, were, technically, utter failures” when seen from the point-of-view of the lofty goals — that is, complete independence.
“Yet now we know that this bloody climax made India’s freedom inevitable, because it showed what the Satyagraha volunteers were made of, and what the oppressive system of government that the British had imposed on India was made of” [ITNOW 113]
Perhaps this is an example of the tendency of losers to use clever fantasy redefinitions to turn their losses into victories, a tendency I complained about on The Picket Line .
But it’s true that India did gain its independence, though , and it’s hard to look at the historical record and not conclude that Gandhi’s campaigns made Indian independence inevitable.
And it’s also true that Indians like Jawaharlal Nehru, who was not initially a proponent of nonviolent resistance, came to have respect for the effectiveness of the technique:
We had accepted that method, the Congress had made that method its own, because of a belief in its effectiveness.
Gandhiji had placed it before the country not only as the right method but as the most effective one for our purpose… In spite of its negative name it was a dynamic method, the very opposite of a meek submission to a tyrant’s will.
It was not a coward’s refuge from action, but a brave man’s defiance of evil and national subjection.
[PVNA 87]
Would that we could say the same for the nonviolent resistance movement in the United States today.
A brief Argus article reported on the tax resistance campaign in the Indian independence movement:
Villages Evacuated.
88,000 PERSONS LEAVE.
Refusal to Pay Taxes.
Effect of New Indian Law.
CALCUTTA, .
The agriculturalists of 25 villages in the Bardoli district, the centre of the “no tax” movement in West India, made a dramatic evacuation as a protest against the new unlawful association ordinance.
The district, which has an area of 222 square miles and a population of 82,000 agriculturalists, is, on account of the congress agitation for non-payment of taxes, three years in arrears, the amount involved being £18,800.
When the ordinance was applied the villagers anticipated the measures for the attachment of their property, and when the tax officers arrived they found only deserted villages.
The inhabitants had left, taking everything movable, including the newly harvested rice crop, household goods, and cattle.
It was discovered that the villagers had been secretly removing goods and crops by night across the border into Baroda State territory, where the Baroda villagers harboured and helped them.
From The Canberra Times :
MRS. GANDHI SENT TO GAOL
CALCUTTA, .
Mrs. Kasturbhai Gandhi, wife of the Congress leader (who is himself in gaol), was convicted at Surat under the Criminal Law Amendment Act, and sentenced to six weeks’ simple imprisonment.
It is understood that the Government did not at first intend to arrest her, but their hands were forced when she travelled among the villages in the Bardoli district of Bombay in company with other women leaders, inciting the peasants to refuse to pay their taxes.
And here are a couple of notes from Gandhi’s salt tax resistance campaign.
The first was carried in The Argus in :
The salt tax controversy continues.
The leader of the Democracy party in a manifesto says that it is absurd to speak of the party’s objections to the tax as purely sentimental or political.
A severe blow had been dealt at reforms by certification, and the cumulative effect of such an exercise of executive authority would render the position of the people’s representatives under the reformed constitution wholly illusory.
The president of the Liberal Association has sent a cable message to the Secretary of State for India (Viscount Peel), asking for Parliamentary intervention with the view of allaying the discontent caused by the Viceroy’s certification, stating that it has weakened the Indian Government’s prestige and the position of those who loyally supported the Government in making the reforms a success.
The Bengal extremists, by an overwhelming majority, passed a resolution proposing that non-co-operators should refuse to pay the enhanced salt tax, and requesting the All India Congress to empower the Bengal congress to order mass civil disobedience of the certification.
The second is a United Press dispatch from Bombay dated (excerpts):
A new move in which a woman will lead the followers of Mahatma Gandhi in opposition to the government was announced today in plans for fresh attacks on the Dharsana salt works.
Shortly after martial law had been established at the terrorized city of Sholapur, Mrs. Sarojini Naidu, who succeeded yesterday to the leadership Gandhi was forced by his arrest to abandon, started enlisting volunteers for the salt works raid.
Both Gandhi and his first successor, Abbas Tyabji, were arrested when they prepared to raid the Dharsana works.
Mrs. Naidu’s determination to force the policy of Gandhi to the limit was demonstrated in violations of the salt laws at Shiroda and Belgaum last night and today.
She expected to enlist about 300 volunteers.
There was also danger at Karachi where a hartal was declared in protest against sentencing of Abbas Tyabji, noted jurist, to three months in prison.
All Hindu shops and markets were closed.
Moslems were not affected.
A mass meeting was arranged for tonight after several peaceful parades had been held.
An accompanying article by UP’s Webb Miller included these notes:
Dissatisfaction with the salt tax as a result of agitation inspired by Gandhi — although the salt tax actually amounts to only a small sum per head yearly.
The followers of Gandhi, however, claim it is iniquitous because it hits the poverty stricken comparatively harder than the rich.
Salt is a vital necessity for the poor, who, with big families, must eat as much as the wealthy.
Furthermore, dissatisfaction has existed in certain districts as a result of the land tax, the only levy with which millions are familiar.
The government collects the land tax in accordance with the area in crops.
The rent production tax is often revised in accordance with alterations of the fertility and productiveness of the land.
By a colossal system of accounts, every cultivated field in India’s 500,000 villages is registered and taxed.
Revisions, or absence of revisions, was responsible for the outbreak at Bardoli, where the followers of Gandhi recently said they would not pay the tax unless Gandhi instructed them to do so.
The Indians object to the government’s payment of 30,000,000 to 40,000,000 rupees a year (about $8,500,000 to $11,500,000) in pensions to retired officers.
They also object to the fact European businesses take great sums out of the country instead of investing here.
The claim was made during these conversations that a widespread practice has come into existence, namely, shipping raw materials from India abroad and then buying products manufactured from these raw materials for sale in India.
This, the Indians complain, forces them to pay freight two ways and allows several profits.
The Indian leaders insist they must build their own industries.
One way tax resisters can foil the plans of the tax collectors is to send up the alarm when they’re on the way.
Here are some examples:
In rural Germany between the wars, a tax strike broke out, and when tax collectors came to distrain cattle from the resisters:
they blew the fire horn, and on the road they lit a fire of straw, the age-old sign that help is needed.
Peasants ran from all sides towards the smoke.
“Horning” was a legal term of art describing the process under which tax debtors could be imprisoned for defying the King (because it was normally prohibited at the time to imprison someone merely for being a debtor in default).
During the Edinburgh Annuity Tax resistance, one victim of this process declared “Horning! horning!
— by the powers! if they bring a horning against me, I’ll bring a horning against them.”:
When the King’s messenger-at-arms, as tipstaves are called in Scotland, brought his horning to the Cowgate, the Irishman, previously provided with a tremendous bullock’s horn, blew a blast “so loud and dread,” that it might have brought down the Castle wall; and a faction mustered as quickly as if it had sounded in the suburbs of Kilkenny.
The messenger-at-arms took leave as rapidly as possible, and without making the charge of horning at this time.
Poujadist tax rebels in France in
used this tactic: “Some priests ring church bells to warn of the arrival of the revenuers,” according to a Life magazine article on the movement.
A Montreal Gazette reporter said of Poujade’s Union for the Defence of Shopkeepers and Craftsmen:
The loudspeaker is its symbol and it all started in earnest one bright morning 18 months ago when a loudspeaker mounted on a truck brought awful tidings to the pleasant little town of St. Cere near Toulouse in south-west France.
“Attention,” it blared.
“Attention.
The tax inspector is in town.”
There was a rumbling sound as the steel curtains with which French shops are shuttered at night were rolled down all over St. Cere.
…
The tax inspector rapped on steel curtain after steel curtain, demanding to be let in to see the books.
Nowhere did he get an answer.
When they found that even the bistros were locked, the hapless inspector and his guards gave up their mission and beat a humble retreat from St. Cere.
The triumph of St. Cere lit the fires of rebellion in the hearts of tax-ridden shopkeepers all over France.
Poujade was suddenly a national figure and he lost no time in organizing his Union to spread the message of the loudspeakers and the steel curtains.
More recently, in Greece, when tax official Nikos Maitos took a team of inspectors to the island of Naxos to hunt for tax evaders, “a local radio station broadcast his license plate number to warn residents.”
During the Bardoli satyagraha, tax collectors and other government enforcers were tracked by the resisters, who warned villagers when they were on the way.
Resister Govardhandas Chokhavala said, “We have provided our volunteers with drums and conches, and the moment they sight a Government servant, the drum or the conch gives the alarm.
That is work which is after the heart of these youngsters.”
Some other notes from The Story of Bardoli read:
[E]very village had its volunteers ready with their bugles or drums which Were pressed into aid as soon as they caught sight of the Talati and Patel out on their japti [attachment] depredations
The youngsters on duty announced [the Collector’s] arrival by a hearty beating of their drums. and all the doors were closed.
[T]he other [new legal] notification which was over the signature of the District Superintendent of Police prohibited the beating of drums, playing music, or blowing conches or horns on or near public roads or public places or Government buildings.
Some of them had to post themselves at and keep a strict watch over the various approaches to the village, and no sooner was a japti party sighted or the whank of a car heard, than they were to be on their alert, and the warning of the fact to be given to the village people.
Some of them had always like sleuth hounds to be on the trail of the Government officials.
Their business was to scent their plans and warn the village people against their machinations.
Some boys were arrested, tried, and imprisoned for nothing more than keeping a watchful eye on a government building from across the street.
Tax resisters in Alwar, India in used this system: “The paths are blocked by huge boulders and at intervals along the hills remote from the towns are watchers with giant tom-toms which are heard for five miles, giving warning of the approach of troops or the revenue collectors.”
The horn became the symbol of the Rebeccaite uprising in Wales, because of incidents like this one:
The constables then went towards Talog; but when on their way there they heard the sound of a horn, and immediately between two and three hundred persons assembled together, with their faces blackened, some dressed in women’s caps, and others with their coats turned so as to be completely disguised — armed with scythes, crowbars and all manner of destructive weapons which they could lay their hands on.
After cheering the constables, they defied them to do their duty.
The latter had no alternative but to return to town without executing their warrants.
The women were seen running in all directions to alarm their neighbours; and some hundreds were concealed behind the hedges, intending to appear if their services were required.
The entire district seemed to be aroused, and awaiting the arrival of the constables, who were going to levy on the goods of John Harris of Talog Mill for the amount of the fine and costs imposed upon him by the magistrates.
There could not have been less than two hundred persons assembled to resist the execution of process, and vast numbers were flocking from all quarters, in response to the blowing of a horn, the signal of the Rebeccaites to repair thither.
Various mounted messengers were scouring the country and sounding the trumpet of alarm.
A sign declares a neighborhood a “poll tax free zone” and warns bailiffs away from entering.
During the poll tax rebellion in Thatcher’s Britain, resisters tracked and shadowed bailiffs, and declared certain areas to be bailiff “no-go” zones, with watchouts established to raise the alarm if any approached.
They first modeled this approach on tactics used in South African townships during the anti-apartheid resistance there, and then improvised from there:
Throughout Britain, city-wide bailiff busting groups were formed.
Activists in Edinburgh formed a group called “Scum-busters” which was equipped with CB radios, and squadrons of cars.
Telephone trees were organised; bailiff companies were monitored; their car registration numbers were taken and distributed to activists in all the local areas.
Camden, in London, followed their example in :
We have organised a rota so that we know who and when people are available to do whatever shift.
We have organised a “knock up system” giving people different responsibilities for knocking up each part of the estate when the bailiffs are spotted.
Telephone trees have also been established.
We have approached a couple of mini-cab firms who have agreed to be bailiff spotters.…
Some bits and pieces from here and there:
The 200-person town of Gallifa in Catalonia, Spain, has begun tax resistance as a municipality — by refusing to pay €1,662.62 income tax due on the salaries of the employees at the tax office.
The town government is controlled by the small separatist coalition party “Catalan Solidarity for Independence.”
There have been other rumblings of tax resistance lately in Catalan independence circles, and some people have made a symbolic gesture of trying to pay their federal taxes directly to the Catalan regional government.
A not particularly favorable Spanish-language news article about the Gallifa action gives a good overview of Catalan nationalist tax resistance in recent years (translation mine):
The group from local Barcelona-area government is considering conducting the same action with other taxes, such as the contributions for Social Security.
In , Òmnium Cultural, a radical separatist group that tops the list in terms of subsidies received, launched a new challenge against the present law — more than those it is accustomed to raise — that the federal government grant the Catalan regional government an economic treaty [like the ones that make the Basque region and Navarre more fiscally independent] in the next four years, or it will promote “tax resistance” against the Tax Agency.
This proposal was dismissed by the Catalan government — which considered it “interesting” — and by CiU, while the PSC called it “appealing” but “unrealistic.”
Gallifa is not the only municipality that has initiated an action of this sort.
The Consistory of San Vicente dels Horts (Barcelona) — chaired by the ERC leader Oriol Junqueras — or of Gerona — with Carles Puigdemont (CiU) in charge — also attempted to cheat the national Treasury, but eventually backed down.
I’ve had less luck trying to parse this article (in Italian), but the gist of it seems to be that Italy’s “Northern League” is threatening tax resistance (though it seems I’ve heard similar bluster from them in the past, without much to show for it).
The gist of the grievance is similar to that of Catalonia — that taxes paid by people that live in the region don’t go to provide services there but to prop up economically poorer regions of the country.
Northern League-allied mayors are threatening to kick out the agency that collects federal taxes, and to instead collect and spend these taxes themselves at the local level.
Laura McGonigle said: “I’ve always enjoyed being a public representative and taken the rough with the smooth but tonight was horrendous.
“While everyone is entitled to protest, I felt extremely intimidated and unsafe in our democratically-elected chamber.”
Bill Evans, a pensioner living near Hartlepool, England, is refusing to pay his council tax because the government services it pays for have become so shoddy.
“It has reached the stage where I feel the only thing I can do now is stop paying my council tax,” he says.
“The council is not fulfilling its commitment and I will have my day in court.”
The New York Times profiles American alternative currency martyr Bernard von NotHaus, who is facing serious prison time for minting a set of coins for people who were losing faith in the government’s official legal tender.
I made note of people and groups that had deliberately exposed themselves to extraordinary taxes, or had flouted the conditions of tax-exemption, in order to be subject to a tax that they could then resist.
That reminded me of the draft resisters during the Vietnam War who deliberately refused to invoke exemptions from the draft for which they were qualified (such as the draft exemption granted to ministers) so that they could resist in solidarity with draft resisters who did not qualify for any such exemptions.
Some of the examples I mentioned are a variety of tactic that has occasionally accompanied tax resistance campaigns: renouncing of government privileges and titles.
Here are some additional examples from this category:
When Gandhi was commander-in-chief of the Indian independence movement, his campaign of non-cooperation included tax resistance and other forms of civil disobedience, but he not only instructed his nonviolent army to resist taxes, wear untaxed domestic cloth, break the British salt monopoly by harvesting salt, and so forth — he also told them to resign their government posts, renounce any government-awarded titles or authority, take their children out of government schools, not ask for protection from the government’s law or courts, and stop voting or running for office.
He explained why:
This is the way of non-co-operation, or peaceful severing of relations.
That is, that we should neither seek help from the Government nor offer it any help.
How can we part company with it?
First we should renounce titles.
For us now to hold titles is a sin.
Next we should give up the courts.
The dispensing of justice should lie in our own hands.
The courts strengthen the roots of the Government.
Lawyers should give up their practice.
If it is possible for them they should, after giving up legal practice, serve the country.
Even if they cannot serve the country the giving up of legal practice would be by itself sufficient service.
They should take up other trades.
Parents should withdraw their children from schools and universities.
Boys who have reached the age of 16 should be treated as friends and advised to withdraw.
They should be told not to continue their studies in these institutions.
They should be told to go to school at institutions where they can remain free.
We should not go for education to a place where the Government’s flag flies.
The Congress has also said that we should not go into the Councils.
The election to the Councils will take place on .
It is the day when we shall be tested.
First we should persuade the candidates to withdraw.
If they do not give in, it will be the duty of voters to remain at home and not to cast their votes.
We should go on pleading with the candidates till the night of .
We should fall at their feet and beseech them not to stand for the Councils.
If they do not come round but persist in going into the Councils it will be your duty to refuse all help and do no work for them.
Again, soldiering is a sin.
You should not get recruited as soldiers, but it is your duty to become soldiers of freedom.
…With great humility I ask you: What have you done?
Have you withdrawn your boys from schools and colleges?
If your boy is grown up have you made him aware of his duty?
Have you given him your blessing in this matter?
If you have not done this, why are you gathered here?
It is the duty of boys to leave schools and to convince their elders.
Have you decided not to vote?
Have you taken the swadeshi vow?
These questions concern everyone.
Government recruitment should stop.
We should take our litigation to our elders and seek justice.
This will put an end to the “prestige” of the Government.
The Government will at the same time realize that its hundred thousand whites can no longer rule over three hundred million people.
So long the Government has carried on its rule over us by making us quarrel among ourselves, by offering us enticements and by giving and taking help.…
The British occupation government responded by asking its Indian employees, who were normally forbidden to engage with political questions, to explicitly oppose Gandhi’s movement.
This instead triggered even more resignations from those who were not active in the independence movement but who felt they could not explicitly oppose it.
During the Bardoli satyagraha, for example, many members of the Bombay Legislative Council resigned in protest, some of the first resigners co-signing a letter in which they wrote that “when a Government forgetful of its own obligations commits grave breaches of law, and ruthlessly attempts to trample under foot such noble and law-abiding people, it is but fair and proper for us, as a protest against the high-handed policy of Government in that taluka [district], to resign our seats on the Bombay Legislative Council, and so we request your Excellency to accept our resignations of the same.”
Many local officials also resigned their posts, which meant a great deal of sacrifice for them and their families.
Gandhi said of them: “More purifying than this suffering imposed by godless and insolent authority is the suffering which the people are imposing upon themselves.”
By resigning, these officials, who were often part of the indigenous elite who had been bought off by the Raj with titles and state-guaranteed privilege, were risking all of that.
Resistance spokesman Sailendra Ghose noted that “the government in some provinces has refused to allow village officers to resign, dismissing those who refuse to carry out their duties and thus depriving their heirs of their hereditary rights as village chiefs.”
Quaker Meetings would frequently not only require that members adhere to their peace testimony by refusing to participate in military service or pay war taxes, but also that those members who had been in the military prior to becoming Quakers renounce their claim to military pensions.
Here is how the New England Yearly Meeting put it in their “rules of discipline” of 1808:
It is our sense and judgment, that it will not be consistent with our testimony against war, for any of our members to receive pensions from government, for military services performed before they became members, though reduced to necessitous circumstances; but that this necessity should be relieved by monthly and quarterly meetings, and thereby preserve our religious testimony against the anti-christian practice of war, and manifest their sympathy for their brethren, by contributing to their comfortable support.
Ghislaine “Ghis” Lanctôt embarked on a project of absolute individual independence from the governments of the world, something she termed “personocratia,” in .
She refused to cooperate with the government in any way, but also took a careful inventory of the benefits and privileges of the citizenship granted her by the government, and was careful to refuse those too.
She started by giving up her state health insurance card, later tossed her driver’s license and stopped paying traffic fines, gave up her claim to a family trust, and eventually let her passport expire.
She made a list of various state privileges that she was turning her back on: social security, professional licensing, insurance, legally protected property, certifications, intellectual property rights, the courts, access to banks, and so forth.
In Beit Sahour, during the first intifada, one of the ways the Israeli military occupation authorities would retaliate against tax resisters was to seize their identity cards, which would make it difficult for them to travel, get medical care, be employed, avoid arbitrary arrest, or “to pursue anything resembling a normal life under occupation.”
But the residents fought back in a creative and daring fashion: Hundreds of them voluntarily turned in their identity cards.
During the French wine-growers tax strike of , the municipal governments of the region resigned en masse.
The Mayor of Narbonne will open the strike.
He and the entire Municipal Council will resign , after having previously dismissed all municipal employes.
Officers of other cities will follow suit in the course of a few days.
Tax strike leader Marcelin Albert claimed that “12,000 cities, towns, boroughs, and villages in the south of France” were left without municipal governments as a result of the resignation.
The quitting of municipal officers is usually attended with much ceremony.
Generally a crape streamer is hoisted at the flagstaff, and the Mayor burns his official sash in public.
Beatrice and Cornelis Boeke
War tax resisters Beatrice and Cornelis Boeke felt that in order for their tax resistance to be consistent, they must also refuse to use state-run monopolies like the postal service and railways, relinquish their passports, stop contributing to retirement accounts, and renounce any claim to the protection of the police, courts, and military.
When the government started providing funding even for private schools, they withdrew and homeschooled their children.
They even stopped handling government-issued currency.
They took this to the point of abandoning their home rather than calling the police when vagrants moved in.
In Tasmania, in , 26 magistrates resigned their offices rather than try to enforce a widely-resisted tax.
Such an expressive demonstration on the part of gentlemen holding the commission of the peace incited the people to stronger resistance; for it appeared to them that a law which could not be conscientiously administered by the retiring justices was unworthy of obedience.
Tax resistance movements have often coordinated with labor strikes or business shut-downs as a way of further restricting government resources, demonstrating solidarity, and freeing up the time of resisters to engage in more campaign-oriented activities.
In some cases, these strikes are themselves a form of tax resistance — reducing the income or sales tax base by simply reducing the amount of income earned or sales made.
Here are several examples:
Labor strikes
In Germany, in , “A movement for a general refusal to pay taxes, originating in Württemberg, spread rapidly to other towns, principally Stuttgart, which was without gas, electricity and water for several days.
The strike began in the Daimler motor works in Württemberg, where the workers refused to allow the deduction of the legal tax of ten per cent from their weekly wages…”
A tax strike in aimed at the Hugo Chavez regime in Venezuela was accompanied by a multi-week labor strike that “bled the Chavez’s government’s economic lifeline, costing it millions of dollars a day.”
Prisoner slave laborers in the American state of Georgia went on strike in , refusing to work for the profit of the prison system.
In Savannah, Georgia, in , the city tried to impose a $10 tax on “stevedores and other laborers on the wharves,” which they refused to pay.
The city then locked them out of the wharves.
This, of course, seriously interfered with the shipping interests of the city, and the Council, finding that the laborers were not at all disposed to yield, and that meanwhile the “strike” was damaging the business community to the amount of thousands of dollars, and was driving all the vessels from this to other ports, met and reduced the tax to $3.
This, however, only tended to increase the feelings of the laborers, who had resolved not to pay any tax whatever, deeming it unjust, unconstitutional and oppressive to tax unskilled labor, and they determined that none of their number should work, whether they paid the tax or not.
During the recent Household Tax agitation in Ireland, the Civil and Public Service Union threatened to strike if the government tried to deduct the tax from the paychecks of resisting union members.
Ship stokers in France went on strike when the government tried to tax their incidental benefits like meals as income in .
The standoff kept the largest French trans-Atlantic ship stranded in port until the stokers’ employer agreed to pay the extra tax on their behalf.
In Birmingham, Alabama, in :
The plant of… [a] Paint company at North Birmingham, employing 200 men, closed down because a deputy tax collector served garnishment on five employees for the non-payment of poll tax.
Many of the men quit work causing the plant to shut down.
… The men persist in their refusal because they claim the tax is an unjust one and not constitutional.
The citizens all side with the strikers.
Hartals and business strikes
“Bushel Bob” Williams’ produce stand
When Argentina tried to increase taxes in the midst of a drought in , farmers there went on strike for a week and set up highway roadblocks.
American farmer Bob Williams, disgusted at the U.S. military budget, decided in to henceforth donate all of his produce to charity rather than sell it for taxable income.
For a week in , a strike spread amongst the vendors in Tehran’s bazaar until hardly any were open for business.
They were protesting a new VAT that would have applied to them.
Apparently this was a nonviolent resistance tactic that bazaar merchants used successfully before the Iranian revolution, but this was the first time they’d done it since.
20,000 lawyers in Delhi went on strike in , “paralyzing the lower courts,” when India tried to extend its sales tax to cover legal services.
In in Benares, the British imperial government tried to impose a house tax.
The residents responded with a hartal, or general strike: “the shops were closed, every kind of occupation was abandoned… a solemn engagement was taken by all the inhabitants to carry on no manner of work or business until the tax was repealed.
Everything was at a stand: the dead bodies were cast unceremoniously into the river, because there were none to perform the obsequial rites; and the very thieves refrained from the exercise of their vocation…”
Hartals and strikes, sometimes of specific industries and other times general strikes, were also frequently used in the later Indian independence movement led by Gandhi, sometimes in coordination with tax resistance campaigns such as the salt raids.
During the Bardoli satyagraha, for example, shopkeepers frequently shut down their operations whenever officials came to town, and hartals sometimes broke out spontaneously on other occasions.
Gandhi also led a strike of Indian miners in South Africa in that was directed against a poll tax on Indian immigrants, a strike in which hundreds were arrested, and which eventually drew in strikers from “harbour, corporation, and railway employees, as well as the drivers, cooks, waiters, and messengers.”
That campaign was successful at forcing the government to rescind the tax.
A Parisian cafe owner holds down the fort during a one-day business strike during the Poujadist campaign.
When the tax inspector called at St. Cere during the Poujadist tax strikes:
“The tax inspector rapped on steel curtain after steel curtain, demanding to be let in to see the books.
Nowhere did he get an answer.
When they found that even the bistros were locked, the hapless inspector and his guards gave up their mission and beat a humble retreat…”
During the first intifada in Palestine, the Unified National Command responded to a crackdown on the tax strikers of Beit Sahour by calling “an unprecedented five day in six general strike,” while “[s]torekeepers in the town launched a commercial strike that lasted three months…”
The Israeli practice of seizing equipment, supplies, and goods from businesses that refused to remit taxes also had the effect of putting those businesses into a state of strike whether or not that was their intention.
In , in support of Palestinian doctors who were refusing to pay an Israeli income tax, shopkeepers in Gaza City launched multiple two-day strikes.
In , Greek kiosk owners held a one-day strike to protest an increase in tobacco taxes.
In the Dutch West Indies in , “[m]erchants, as a token of their approval of [a] doctor’s refusal to pay the tax,” (the government was attempting to auction off his goods that day) “closed their places of business during the afternoon.”
In the waning days of the rule of the Gyanendra monarchy in Nepal in , people stopped paying taxes and utility bills, and accompanied this with a general strike.
In , cashew traders in Guinea Bissau went on strike:
“We cashew exporters have decided to boycott the current marketing season to protest the payment of a 50 CFA franc ($0.11) per kilogram export tax,” said the head of the exporter’s association.
In sympathy with the tax protests in Turkey in , there were often business strikes:
…all shops and businesses [in Kastamonu] remained closed during the day…
…merchants [in Erzurum] closed their shops in solidarity… shops were closed again…
Erzurum’s example of closing shops… [was followed] at Hasankale…
In the Ruhr, during the French/Belgian occupation of , businesses shut down rather than pay reparation taxes:
The owners of the German coal mines and foundries in the Ruhr are determined not to pay the 10 per cent. export tax imposed on coal by the French…
The owners will refuse to export an ounce of coal or coke.
They will dump the supplies in the yards, and are prepared for a long seige.
This was accompanied by a large-scale labor strike, which the German government supported by directly financially supporting the individual strikers.
Consumer strikes
In Cairo in , a boatload of cruise ship passengers refused to disembark because of a landing tax they would be forced to pay.
This so upset the tourist-dependent shopkeepers that they rioted and forced the tax officials to waive the tax.
In Melbourne, Australia, in “[b]etween 500 and 600 young men refused to pay the amusement tax at the Stadium last night to witness a boxing match between Edwards and Palmer.
They were patrons of the lower-priced seats.
The manager of the Stadium argued with the spokesmen for the crowd for some time, but neither side would yield, and the result was that the attendance was much smaller than usual.”
In the U.S., school districts often get government funding based on how many students are attending on certain “count days.”
One parent decided to use this as leverage, saying she would keep her children home from school on count days, and thereby deprive the district of money, to protest against poor district policies.
(I’ll cover consumer strikes of government-monopoly products in another episode of this series.)
Another way people can assist and show solidarity with tax resisters is by coming to their assistance if their property is seized.
Here are some examples:
Practical support
The War Tax Resisters Penalty Fund was established in .
It helps war tax resisters who have had penalties and interest added to their tax bills and seized by the IRS by reimbursing them for a large portion of these additional charges.
The more people we could recruit to shoulder the penalties and interest of resisters, the lighter the burden for everyone.
With the modest help we could provide, conscientious resisters were able to keep on keeping on.
The penalty fund had the added benefit of making us all tax resisters, not just those who withheld all or a portion of their income taxes.
The base list of supporters has been as high as 800 people sharing the weight.
In nearly every appeal, at least 200 people respond, usually more.
In all we’ve paid out about $250,000 to help resisters stay in the struggle.
The story of the seizure of the Kehler/Corner home was the subject of the documentary An Act of Conscience.
When the home of war tax resisters Randy Kehler and Betsy Corner was seized for back taxes, supporters came from near and far to maintain a 24-hour occupation of the home:
[David] Dellinger and others have come from as far away as California to the Colrain [Massachusetts] house…
Mr. Kehler and Ms. Corner continued to live in the house until they were arrested by Federal marshals last December.
Since then, friends and supporters of the couple have arrived to occupy the almost empty house in week-long shifts marked by the Thursday “changing of the guard” ceremony.
Because the house was sold in a Government auction in , all who go inside risk arrest for trespassing.…
For Bonney Simons of St. Johnsbury, Vt., sleeping on a bedroll in the house is her first official act of civil disobedience.
At 72 years of age, she said, it is time to “put your body where your mouth is.”
Suffragist tax resister Dora Montefiore barricaded her home and kept the tax collector from seizing her property for several weeks in , in what came to be known as the “Siege of Montefiore.”
She noted:
The tradespeople of the neighbourhood were absolutely loyal to us besieged women, delivering their milk and bread, etc., over the rather high garden wall which divided the small front gardens of Upper Mall from the terraced roadway fronting the river.
The weekly wash arrived in the same way and the postman day by day delivered very encouraging budgets of correspondence, so that practically we suffered very little inconvenience…
A woman sympathiser in the neighbourhood brought during the course of the [first] morning, a pot of home-made marmalade, as the story had got abroad that we had no provisions and had difficulty in obtaining food.
This was never the case as I am a good housekeeper and have always kept a store cupboard, but we accepted with thanks the pot of marmalade because the intentions of the giver were so excellent.
Examples like this also proved to be vivid anecdotes that the press could use when describing the siege and the support from sympathizers.
When the U.S. government seized Amish tax resister Valentine Byler’s horses and their harnesses while he was in the field preparing for spring planting, sympathetic neighbors allowed him to borrow their horses so he could continue his work.
Other sympathizers throughout the country who heard about the case sent Byler money — more than enough to buy a new team.
An auctioneer who was dragooned into helping the government sell some of the livestock of a man who had been resisting taxes meant to pay for sectarian education in , donated the fee he had earned for conducting the auction to the resister.
During the water charge strike in Dublin, “local campaign groups successfully resisted attempts to disconnect water and in the couple of instances where water was cut off, campaigners re-connected it within hours.
The first round was won hands down by the campaign and it was back to the drawing board for the councils.”
Similar monkeywrenching is being practiced today in Greece, where activists promptly reconnect utilities of people who have been disconnected for failure to pay the increased taxes attached to their utility bills.
During the Annuity Tax resistance in Edinburgh, people sympathetic to the resisters would bid on and return furniture and other items that had been seized and sold by the tax collectors.
The Rebecca Rioters, on the other hand, were characteristically more direct in their resistance:
Warrants of distress were issued… and the constables proceeded to execute them…
The constables then went towards Talog; but when on their way there they heard the sound of a horn, and immediately between two and three hundred persons assembled together, with their faces blackened, some dressed in women’s caps, and others with their coats turned so as to be completely disguised — armed with scythes, crowbars and all manner of destructive weapons which they could lay their hands on.
After cheering the constables, they defied them to do their duty.
The latter had no alternative but to return to town without executing their warrants.
The women were seen running in all directions to alarm their neighbours; and some hundreds were concealed behind the hedges, intending to appear if their services were required.
The entire district seemed to be aroused, and awaiting the arrival of the constables, who were going to levy on the goods of John Harris of Talog Mill for the amount of the fine and costs imposed upon him by the magistrates.
There could not have been less than two hundred persons assembled to resist the execution of process, and vast numbers were flocking from all quarters, in response to the blowing of a horn, the signal of the Rebeccaites to repair thither.
Various mounted messengers were scouring the country and sounding the trumpet of alarm.…
At Maesgwenllian near Kidwelly, several bailiffs were put in possession for arrears of rent to the amount of £150, but about , Rebecca and a great number of her followers made their appearance on the premises, and after driving the bailiffs off, took away the whole of the goods distrained on.
As soon as daylight appeared, the bailiffs returned, but found no traces of Rebecca, nor of the goods which had been taken away.
A group in Olive Hill, Kentucky in followed the Rebecca model, to an extent, “in a raid… by a band of between 800 and 900 men, who forced Levi White, Collector of Taxes, to give up a stock of goods which had been seized.
The goods were then taken back to the store of Levi Oppenheimer, where the official had seized them.”
Last year in Oaxaca, the PRI said that the would “defend up to the point of injunctions those citizens who suffer from liens imposed as well as judgments in order to prevent the impounding of vehicles, considering it unconstitutional that the police will impound them to stop the driver and remove the unit if the striker does not pay the corresponding [vehicle] tax.”
The IRS auctioned off a portion of Ralph Shinaberry’s property in after he refused to pay a fine for growing more wheat on his farm than his government-assigned quota.
“I don’t believe the Government can tell me how much I can grow,” he said, explaining his resistance.
The winning bidder, Herbert Jessup, told a reporter:
“I have no intention of taking possession of the property.”
When war tax resister Cosmas Raimondi’s car was seized by the IRS in , a handful of families in his parish offered to permanently loan him their car so he could still get around, and many others loaned him their cars temporarily.
“I’ve not had to ask one person,” he said.
In Beit Sahour, when the Israeli occupation authorities seized furniture and appliances from resisters, relatives and others would loan them spares, or camping furniture to use as replacements.
“In Bedfordshire in community pressure persuaded a minister to return goods seized from a Quaker for non-payment of tithes.”
Moral support
When Dora Montefiore was first formulating her “siege” strategy with fellow-activists Theresa Billington and Annie Kenney, they agreed to organize daily demonstrations outside of her home while she was defending it.
Montefiore remembered:
The feeling in the neighbourhood towards my act of passive resistance was so excellent and the publicity being given by the Press in the evening papers was so valuable that we decided to make the Hammersmith “Fort” for the time being the centre of the W.S.P.U. activities, and daily demonstrations were arranged for and eventually carried out. …
The roadway was… ideal for the holding of a meeting, as no blocking of traffic could take place, and day in, day out the principles for which suffragists were standing we expounded to many who before had never even heard of the words Woman Suffrage.
At the evening demonstrations rows of lamps were hung along the top of the wall and against the house, the members of the W.S.P.U. speaking from the steps of the house, while I spoke from one of the upstairs windows.
…shoals of letters came to me, a few sadly vulgar and revolting, but the majority helpful and encouraging.
Some Lancashire lads who had heard me speaking in the Midlands wrote and said that if I wanted help they would come with their clogs but that was never the sort of support I needed, and though I thanked them, I declined the help as nicely as I could. …
The working women from the East End came, time and again, to demonstrate in front of my barricaded house…
When the IRS seized and auctioned off the home and farm of Art Harvey and Elizabeth Gravalos in , other war tax resisters and supporters were by their sides:
“I might have cried if I were alone,” Gravalos admitted.
But she was far from alone.
About 75 supporters gathered outside the building and spoke of their solidarity with Elizabeth and Arthur.
About 35 supporters turned up for the second auction, this time held at the IRS office in Lewiston, Maine.
Demonstrators read excerpts from letters to IRS officials and to President Clinton urging them to call off the auction.
In , the IRS levied 78-year-old war tax resister Ruth McKay’s social security checks to recoup the taxes she had been refusing to pay over the previous 20 years.
To show their support of her stand, 40 activists from New Hampshire Peace Action joined her for a vigil at the federal courthouse in Concord, New Hampshire.
When war tax resister Maria Smith’s wages were garnisheed by the IRS in , fifty supporters held a special church service in her honor.
“One of the Valod Vanias,” whose land was seized by the government during the Bardoli satyagraha, “who thus lost all his valuable property, celebrated the event by inviting friends and soldiers of Satyagraha to a party.”
On the other hand, some campaigns have taken the position that sacrifices for the cause are their own reward — that martyrdom is a blessing and that it would be foolish for such resisters to seek or accept recompense.
Nathaniel Morgan was speaking with someone curious about the Quaker stand on war and war taxes, and had this to say:
I told him then that I and my father had refused to pay the income tax on account of war, and had refused it on its first coming out, and withstood it 16 years, except when peace was declared, and that our goods were sold by auction to pay it.
This seemed to excite his curiosity, and made a stand to hear further, on the steps above the engine, going down to the river; asking me if we got anything by that, meaning, was anything refunded by the Society for such suffering.
I immediately replied: “Yes, peace of mind, which was worth all.”
When you’re trying to expand the ranks of tax resisters in your campaign, you need good educational tools.
People are often reluctant to resist either because they aren’t sure how to go about it, or because they only have a vague idea of the likely consequences (and so are likely to exaggerate their frightfulness).
When NWTRCC conducted a survey of non-resisting anti-war activists , the most popular answer to the question “Which resources would help you decide to participate [in a tax resistance campaign]?” was: “clear idea of likely consequences” and the two top responses to the question about “the most important reason you have not done war tax resistance” were “fear legal consequences” and “need more information.”
People like to stick with the familiar, and if you ask them to take a jump into the unknown, they will imagine the worst as a way to justify their reticence.
If you can be clear, thorough, and credible in demonstrating how to resist and what the consequences are likely to be, you can eliminate the biggest obstacle to the growth of your campaign.
This is easier said than done, however.
It can be difficult to be clear and thorough if you are going up against a tax agency that is arbitrary or that changes its rules suddenly, and it can take time to establish credibility.
Today I’ll give a few examples of how tax resistance campaigns have dispelled ignorance about tax resistance.
Ethel Ayers Purdie ran what she called the “Women Taxpayer’s Agency” and counseled British women’s suffrage activists both on how to best resist their taxes on no-taxation-without-representation grounds, and on how they could exploit legal quirks to avoid taxes (for instance, archaic laws that made husbands wholly legally liable for their wives’ taxes).
She also published a pamphlet about that particular legal quirk, which concluded:
Many married women, including leading actresses, doctors, titled women, business women, and various others having property, businesses, investments, &c., or being in receipt of salaries, have succeeded in demonstrating their non-taxability, and thereby involved the Revenue in a total loss of the tax illegally charged on them.
Members of the Women’s Tax Resistance League regularly gave lectures on their tactic of choice at suffragist meetings, and thereby recruited new resisters.
The American war tax resistance group NWTRCC publishes a number of specialized how-to pamphlets that cover various techniques of tax resistance (such as refusing to file, filing and refusing to pay, living on a non-taxable income) and strategies for coping with possible consequences (such as government collection efforts).
They also have a nationwide network of people who offer one-on-one counseling sessions for potential resisters or for current resisters who are running into snags.
Local groups in the network periodically run workshops at which people can come to learn about the variety of war tax resistance methods and ask questions of people who have experience with them.
The current tax resistance movement in Spain, which has its roots in the war tax resistance movement there but which has expanded to a broader anti-government pro-autonomy critique, recently published half a million copies of a tabloid that included its call to resist alongside some practical instruction on how to go about resisting both the pay-as-you-earn income tax and the value-added tax.
American constitutionalist, “show-me-the-law”-style tax protest often spreads by means of workshops run by self-styled experts who have discovered or invented new (and increasingly baroque) legal arguments that prove that most people are not legally liable to pay the federal income tax.
Although these arguments don’t typically stand up in court, they are sufficiently credible to the lay audience that they can convince many people to begin resisting.
For example, in , an epidemic of tax protest swept General Motors plants in Flint, Michigan, as thousands of employees there told GM to stop withholding income tax from their salaries after they attended seminars or listened to lectures on tape from the tax protester group “We The People ACT.”
a flier used to educate people about their rights concerning property seizures by bailiffs
Resisters to Thatcher’s Poll Tax gained confidence thanks to the efforts of the Poll Tax Legal Group which, among other things, “produced over 30 accessible legal bulletins on the Poll Tax and a book called To Pay or Not To Pay.”
To combat the threat of property seizure — often the threat itself was enough to intimidate people into stopping their resistance — the movement made efforts to educate the public about the seizure process and about ways to frustrate it:
[T]he first task of Anti-Poll Tax Unions was to inform people about what the bailiffs could and couldn’t do.
In Scotland, people were advised not to tell the sheriffs where they worked, not to tell them which banks they used, and not, under any circumstances, to let them into their houses.
They were also told to inform the local group as soon as the sheriffs threatened anything.
The Anti-Poll Tax Unions advised people to move possessions to local friends’ houses before the date of the poinding and offered to help with the moving.
People were told to leave their cars well away from their homes.
They were informed that a wrongful poinding could be appealed against and, in many cases, this was done successfully.
People were also told how to avoid bailiff action by signing away their possessions to people who lived outside of the area or, preferably, to their children.
There are now young children who technically own all of their parents’ possessions.
Some local law centres went onto the offensive against the bailiffs, providing information to the public, which totally undermined their actions.
One morning in , the bailiffs delivered over 4,000 intimidation notices to people throughout Bristol.
By 7:30 a.m. the law centre had heard about this and contacted all local radio stations.
By 8:00 p.m. the news bulletins which went out every fifteen minutes, reported:
Today bailiffs have delivered notices for payment to over 4,000 people in Bristol.
A spokesperson from the law centre said that they were illegal and should be ignored.
So most people ignored them.
The Bardoli satyagraha depended on regular distribution of news bulletins from campaign headquarters to the scattered villages of the province, to make sure everyone was on the same page about strategy, and to counteract government propaganda and rumor.
These also came to be powerful propaganda tools to affect Indian opinion outside of the resisting region:
A campaign like this could not be carried on without a publicity department.
The peasants could not be asked to subscribe to daily papers or even to the weekly Navajivan, and outside papers could at best give an outside view of the campaign.
A publicity office was therefore opened with Sjt. Jugatram Dave at its head.
With an artist’s pen and with a knowledge of the whole taluka [district] at his fingertips, he took to this work like a duck to water.
The arrangement was to issue a daily news bulletin and publish Sjt. Vallabhbhai’s speeches in pamphlet form and to distribute them free to the agriculturists all over the taluka: For four or five days cyclostyled [mimeograph-like] copies were issued, but arrangement was soon made to get them printed daily at Surat, and a start was made with 5,000 copies.
The arrangement answered most admirably, the villagers waiting anxiously for the patrikas every morning and devouring the contents with avidity.
All the Gujarati and almost all the English dailies of Bombay reproduced them verbatim, and as the movement gathered force, every important town and village in Gujarat began to get copies of the bulletin with the result that over and above ten thousand copies distributed in Bardoli, four thousand copies were subscribed to by places outside.
A tax resistance campaign can increase participation by means of a social boycott practiced against non-resisting by-standers.
Here are some examples of social boycotts of this sort:
Vallabhbhai Patel, commander of the Bardoli tax strike
Social boycott was an important tool of the Bardoli tax refusal campaign during the independence struggle in India.
Mahadev Desai, in The Story of Bardoli, writes:
It is this weapon that exasperated the Government, but they were helpless because social boycott was no offence under the Penal Code.
And the Sardar [Vallabhbhai Patel, who commanded the campaign] poured ridicule on Government for grudging the people the use of this their only weapon.
“What do you do yourselves?
Yours is a close corporation maintained by force of arms and its motive is no nobler than keeping a nation in bondage.
We resort to this weapon simply for the sake of self-defence and self-preservation.”
But he never omitted to emphasize its limitations, the very first being that in no circumstances should a Satyagrahi refuse to minister to the physical needs of the party boycotted.
“Eschew by all means molestation or oppression.
We may not refuse anyone milk, water, foodstuffs, help in case of illness or worse.
We cannot afford to prosecute boycott at the expense of our humanity.”
Among the ways they could boycott landowners who capitulated to the government and paid their property taxes was to refuse to rent their fields or to work as agricultural laborers for them.
During the American revolution, boycotts of British imports were enforced by social boycott.
One resolution of boycotters read in part:
[W]e further promise and engage, that we will not purchase any goods of any persons who, preferring their own interest to that of the public, shall import merchandise from Great Britain, until a general importation takes place; or of any trader who purchases his goods of such importer: and that we will hold no intercourse, or connection, or correspondence, with any person who shall purchase goods of such importer, or retailer; and we will hold him dishonored, an enemy to the liberties of his country, and infamous, who shall break this agreement.
another said:
That whoever shall directly or indirectly countenance this attempt, or in any wise aid or abet in unloading receiving or vending the Tea sent or to be sent out by the East India Company while it remains subject to the payment of a duty here is an Enemy to America — … That a Committee be immediately chosen to wait on those Gentlemen, who it is reported are appointed by the East India Company to receive and sell said Tea, and to request them from a regard to their own characters and the peace and good order of this Town and Province immediately to resign their appointment.
An Ipswich town meeting resolved:
[W]e will not by ourselves or any for or under us directly or indirectly purchase any goods of the persons who have imported or continue to import, or any person or trader who shall purchase any goods of said importer contrary to the agreement of the merchants in Boston and the other trading towns in this government & the neighboring colonies until they make a public retraction or a general importation takes place.
Sicily’s branch of the “Confindustria” industrialists’ union unanimously voted in to expel any member who was caught paying protection money to the mafia, and a few dozen members in fact were expelled from the group under this policy.
Many Quaker “meetings” (congregations) had a policy of “disowning” members who failed to practice war tax resistance.
Sometimes, even failing to report that the government had subjected you to “sufferings” for your resistance could make you suspect, and Quakers would be appointed to visit you and ask how you had managed to avoid government reprisals while maintaining your refusal to pay.
Disowning was something akin to excommunication, and had the effect of removing the benefits of meeting membership from the disobedient Quakers until such time as they repented and made satisfactory amends — which might include reading an acknowledgment of the wrong of their behavior at a future meeting.
Occasionally, as during the American Revolution, disownings like this would lead to schisms and the emergence of rival meetings.
During the Tithe War in Ireland, it was reported that
Immense meetings are held, which form themselves into tribunals, before which persons accused of the crime of tithe-paying are summoned to appear, and give an account of their conduct; and defaulters undergo the punishment of being abandoned at once by every person in their employment.
Country gentlemen and farmers are left without a servant or labourer to perform the most necessary work.
The hay is left to rot on the ground, and the cattle to perish for want of the necessary food, drink, and care; and even on the roads it is common for the horses of the mails and stage-coaches to be changed by the coachmen and passengers, because the unhappy recusant innkeeper has been deserted by every one, even to his hostler.
Such is the terror of this new species of judicial authority, that numbers of highly respectable persons have found it necessary, in order to avert ruinous consequences, to appear before these self-constituted courts, acknowledge their jurisdiction, and promise to give obedience to their decrees!
Another report complained: “The man who in any way upholds the obnoxious system, whatever his previous character or services may have been, is branded as an object of universal execration.”
When resisters at the “New Rush” in South Africa in pledged to refuse to pay further taxes, they also pledged, “that I shall buy from, sell to, or deal with only such men as have also taken this pledge or obligation.”
Women in Pennsylvania who found themselves suddenly taxable in the wake of women’s suffrage were subject to strong social pressure to join in a largely unorganized but widespread tax boycott.
According to one report:
[A] woman, who is reported to have failed to pay her tax, asserted she was laughed at by her friends when she paid her tax in former years, and she would not be laughed at any longer.
Social boycott can also be a potent tactic to use against tax collectors or collaborators with the tax collection process.
Here are some examples:
Adolf Hausrath writes about how social boycott was used to discourage tax collectors in Roman-occupied Judaea:
The people knew how to torment these officials of the Roman customs with the petty cruelty which ordinary people develop with irreconcilable persistency, whenever they believe this persistency to be due to their moral indignation.
In consequence of the theocratic scruples about the duty of paying taxes, the tax-gatherers were declared to be unclean and half Gentile.… among the Jews the words “tax-gatherersand sinners,”“tax-gatherers and Gentiles,”“tax-gatherers and harlots,” “tax-gatherers, murderers and robbers,” and similar insulting combinations, were not only ready on the tongue and familiar, but were accepted as theocratically identical in meaning.
Thrust out from all social intercourse, the tax-gatherers became more and more the pariahs of the Jewish world.
With holy horror did the Pharisee sweep past the lost son of Israel who had sold himself to the Gentile for the vilest purpose, and avoid the places which his sinful breath contaminated.
Their testimony was not accepted by Jewish tribunals.
It was forbidden to sit at table with them or eat of their bread.
But their money-chests especially were the summary of all uncleanness and the chief object of pious horror, since their contents consisted of none but unlawful receipts, and every single coin betokened a breach of some theocratic regulation.
To exchange their money or receive alms from them might easily put a whole house in the condition of being unclean, and necessitate many purifications.
From these relations of the tax-officials to the rest of the population, it can be readily understood that only the refuse of Judaism undertook the office.
The current Greek “won’t pay” movement included a joint statement from several outraged groups that called for a social boycott of legislators who went along with the tax-and-austerity plans: “do not talk to them, do not listen, do not socialize, do not invite, do not serve them, do not put gasoline in their cars…”
A social boycott of tax collectors was practiced in the years before the American revolution.
John Adams wrote:
At Philadelphia, the Heart-and-Hand Fire Company has expelled Mr. Hughes, the stamp man for that colony.
The freemen of Talbot county, in Maryland, have erected a gibbet before the door of the court-house, twenty feet high, and have hanged on it the effigies of a stamp informer in chains, in terrorem till the Stamp Act shall be repealed; and have resolved, unanimously, to hold in utter contempt and abhorrence every stamp officer, and every favorer of the Stamp Act, and to “have no communication with any such person, not even to speak to him, unless to upbraid him with his baseness.”
So triumphant is the spirit of liberty everywhere.
Sam Adams led those opposed to the tea tax to declare “That whoever shall directly or indirectly countenance this attempt [to send and collect duties on East India Company tea to America], or in any wise aid or abet in unloading, receiving, or vending the tea sent or to be sent out by the East India Company while it remains subject to the payment of a duty here is an enemy to America.” and to decide “that a committee be immediately chosen to wait on those gentlemen, who it is reported are appointed by the East India Company to receive and sell said tea, and to request them from a regard to their own characters and the peace and good order of this town and province immediately to resign their appointment.”
During the Whiskey Rebellion, the rebels passed a social boycott resolution that said in part:
…[W]hereas some men may be found amongst us, so far lost to every sense of virtue and feeling for the distresses of this country, as to accept offices for the collection of the duty:
Resolved, therefore, That in future we will consider such persons as unworthy of our friendship; have no intercourse or dealings with them; withdraw from them every assistance, and withhold all the comforts of life which depend upon those duties that as men and fellow citizens we owe to each other; and upon all occasions treat them with that contempt they deserve; and that it be, and it is hereby most earnestly recommended to the people at large to follow the same line of conduct towards them.
Islanders living off the coast of Galway County in Ireland refused to appoint tax collectors from among their number, and “where collectors are available on the mainland owners of boats have refused to facilitate their passage to the islands,” according to a newspaper account.
“On a few occasions the Civic Guards have persuaded the owners to lend their service and their boats, or their boats alone, for the guards to cross.
In such cases the guards have met with anything but a cordial reception.”
During the Dublin water charge strike:
Through contacts in the trade union movement we were able to discover the names of all the water inspectors and imagine their surprise the night before disconnections were due to begin when each of them received a hand-delivered letter appealing to them as trade union members not to cut people’s water off.
They decided not to respond positively to our polite request so the next morning when they left home under the cover of darkness, they each discovered a car-load of activists sitting outside their homes ready to follow them wherever they might go to try to do their dirty work.
One of them didn’t like it so much that after driving around and being followed for an hour he went to the local copshop to complain about being intimidated.
During the Bardoli satyagraha, tax collectors and collaborators were vigorously shunned.
Here are some excerpts from Mahadev Desai’s The Story of Bardoli:
There were meetings in talukas contiguous to Bardoli… calling upon people in their respective parts not to cooperate with the authorities engaged in putting down the Satyagraha… by helping in the attachment of property by engaging as labourers or sending carts on hire…
…the police proceeded to hire a taxi.
The driver, whose car had been engaged by the Satyagrahis, refused to break his engagement and place his bus at the disposal of the Collector.
His licence was demanded, it was not with him, but he showed his brass badge, which he was asked to surrender.
Another taxidriver whose car had been engaged by [campaign commander] Sjt. Vallabhbhai was deprived of his licence too.
Kadod… was trying to go one better than other villages by resolving to cut off supplies of provision, etc. to the attachment officer posted in the village.
Sjt. Vallabhbhai in a long and moving speech expounded the principles of Satyagraha, and told them that their resolution was not in keeping with principles and must be canceled: “In a struggle based essentially on truth and nonviolence we must not do anything in resentment or anger.
It is a sign of weakness.
…do not refuse them the ordinary amenities of life.
They must get whatever they want at market rates.”
It would appear, that three carts were commandeered. for removing the kit and luggage belonging to the Deputy Collector from the Bardoli thana [district] to Valod.
The man to whom the carts belonged came to realise his mistake and went to the thana in company with Sjt. Ravishankar to call back his men.
One of the cartmen, as soon as he saw his master, said, they were not at all willing to go but they were helpless.
Sjt. Ravishankar pleaded with the Mamlatdar that if the men were not willing they should not be forced.
He was ordered to leave the thana which he did; and the cartman leaving the cart followed him.
The other cartmen also ultimately left leaving the carts in the thana compound.
Moderate reformist K.M. Munshi wrote to the government after visiting Bardoli:
Your japti officer has to travel miles before he can get a shave.
Your officer’s car which got stuck would have remained in the mud but for Mr. Vallabhbhai, officially styled “agitator living on Bardoli.”
Garda to whom lands worth thousands have been sold for a nominal amount does not get even a scavenger for his house.
The Collector gets no conveyance on the railway station unless one is given by Mr. Vallabhbhai’s sanction.
The threat of social boycott also played out at other points in the Indian independence struggle, with one account noting for instance that “the native police, fearing social boycott if they pressed their own kinsmen too hard, in some cases sat idly by and watched proceedings,” during the Dharasana salt raid.
When the salt march reached the sea near Danmi, where Gandhi planned to harvest sea salt in violation of the taxed monopoly:
The police and labourers [who had been hired by the government to try to destroy all the natural salt deposits in the area] are boycotted by the villagers in the neighbourhood and have to journey to a village ten miles away to procure food.
During the Edinburgh Annuity Tax resistance, social boycott was practiced against tax enforcers:
Of late months, no auctioneer would venture to the Cross to roup for stipend.
What human being has nerve enough to bear up against the scorn, hatred, and execration of his fellow-creatures, expressed in a cause he himself must feel just?
The cabman who brought the officers, seeing they were engaged in such a disagreeable duty, took his cab away, and they had some difficulty in procuring another…
During the government investigation of the Annuity Tax resistance campaign the following exchange took place:
Q: What was Mr. Whitten’s express reason for declining to act as auctioneer?
A: He was very much inconvenienced on that occasion, and he believed that his general business connection would suffer by undertaking these sales, and that he would lose the support of any customer who was of that party.
During the Fries Rebellion, social pressure made it difficult for the government to recruit collaborators:
[I]n every tavern [Jacob Eyerley] stopped at, the law was the subject of general conversation and denunciation, and great pains were taken to find the friends of government, in order to persuade them not to accept the office of assessor.
In consequence of this feeling there was great difficulty in finding suitable persons for these appointments.
When Thatcher’s poll tax was being introduced, the government tried to recruit convenience stores and newsstands to be tax collection points.
When the resistance got wind of this, they contacted the stores, letting them know they would be boycotted if they allowed themselves to be used in this way.
Several then refused to participate.
A threat of social boycott was used to deter potential buyers of property seized from Steuben County resisters of taxes meant to pay back purchasers of crooked railroad bonds:
The scene was upon the farm of William Atkins, where 200 of the solid yeomanry of the town had assembled to resist the sale… A Mr. Updyke, with broader hint, made these remarks: “I want to tell you folks that Mr. Atkins has paid all of his tax except this railroad tax; and we consider any man who will buy our property to help John Davis and Sam Alley as contemptible sharks.
We shall remember him for years, and will know where he lives.”
The tax collector finally rose and remarked that in view of the situation he would not attempt to proceed with the sale.
During a tax resistance campaign in the German countryside between the world wars:
The carters refused, even with police protection, to carry off the distrained cattle, for they knew that if they did they would never again be able to do business with the peasants.
One day three peasants even appeared in the slaughter yards at Hamburg and announced that unless the distrained cattle disappeared at once from the yard’s stalls the gentlemen in charge of the slaughterhouse could find somewhere else to buy their beasts in the future — they wouldn’t be getting any more from Schleswig-Holstein.
Tax resisters and tax resistance campaigns have at times made use of barricades, blockades, and occupations to keep tax collectors at bay.
Here are some examples:
There were a number of prominent “sieges” in the tax resistance campaign that accompanied the British women’s suffrage movement.
Dora Montefiore barred the arched doorway to her home against the bailiffs in and held out for six weeks before the bailiffs broke through,
…addressing the frequent crowds through the upper windows of the house.
WSPU meetings were held in front of the house daily, and resolutions were taken “that taxation without representation is tyranny.”
After six weeks, the Crown was legally authorized to break down the door in order to seize property in lieu of taxes, a process to which Montefiore submitted, saying, “It was useless to resist force majeure when it came to technical violence on the part of the authorities.”
The “Siege of Montefiore” was a publicity coup for the movement, and served as a useful rallying point for activists.
On the little terrace of the front garden hung during the whole time of the siege a red banner with the letters painted in white: “Women should vote for the laws they obey and the taxes they pay.”
Kate Harvey barricaded her home in and it took seven months for the authorities to crowbar their way in and seize her dining room furniture to auction for back taxes.
The following year they needed battering rams to break her barricade.
The Women’s Freedom League reported, of her first barricade:
Passers-by read the bold declaration that she refuses to be taxed by a Government that refuses her representation because she is a woman.
Her continued resistance has aroused keen interest in the London and Provincial Press, and afforded excellent “copy” for numerous illustrated papers.
and of the second:
An ingenious plan of protection had been devised and carried out, and the King’s officers wrestled with the fortifications for two hours before an entry was effected by means of a battering-ram!
A newspaper article gives more details:
Finally, after a heavy beam was used as a battering ram, the door went in with a crash.
The door, however, led only to a narrow passage, where a still more obstinate door barred the way.
A crowbar, battering ram, and a small jemmy were here brought into use, but even with those it was nearly half an hour before the door, almost splintered, gave way.
Later, the hall was entered, where the tax collector was met by Mrs. Harvey and Mrs. [Charlotte] Despard.
Here was little furniture visible, and it was not until a locksmith had forced the door of the dining room that the bailiff was able to place his levy upon goods.
The amount of the tax, it is understood, is about £15.
When the tax collector and bailiff came to seize goods from Isabella Harrison,
Mrs. Harrison then gave instructions for the tradesmen’s entrance and windows to be locked and bolted, and herself opened the inner front door, closing it behind her and keeping her hand on the handle.
The Tax Collector, who was standing with the bailiff inside the outer front door, asked if he was addressing Mrs. Darent Harrison, and hoped she would allow him to execute his trying task and produced his paper.
Mrs. Harrison asked and was told the names of the local magistrates who had signed the warrant, and explained that her house could only be entered by force.
… The Tax Collector protested that he could not employ force against a woman — that was quite out of the question.
Mrs. Harrison then suggested that if he did not intend to stand there till he or she collapsed he must either employ force or call in the police to do so.
He scoffed at the idea of sending for the police, but finally sent the bailiff to see if he could find any.
But no police were to be found.
The bailiff was next sent to get his dinner, and when he returned he reported “still no police anywhere to be found.”
It was a complete impasse.
They had been facing one another for three hours, and the Tax Collector seemed equally determined to “do his duty” and not to be guilty of even a technical assault on an elderly woman.
It was only after being taunted with cowardice — with fear of the consequences of meeting moral with physical force — that he finally made an effort to get control of the handle of the door, and so with the assistance of the bailiff to force his way in.
On an earlier occasion, Harrison had barricaded herself inside her home.
Supporters brought her food and supplies by means of a basket she lowered from a window by a rope.
There is at least one report of similar barricades in the American women’s suffrage movement.
Lillie Devereaux Blake addressed a New York Women’s Suffrage Society meeting in , and
…narrated several anecdotes of vigorous ladies, who, in the security of their own castles, had defied all the approaches of the tax collector.
One lady, she said, was in the habit of barricading herself in her house whenever the tax collector made his appearance, getting into a top room of the house, and from that coign of vantage, delaying the minion of the Government with potations from her parlors.
[Laughter.]
In this case, Mrs. Blake said it was suspected that the collector had paid the taxes himself, rather than submit to the convincing streams of the lady’s eloquence.
[Laughter.]
The story of the seizure of the Kehler/Corner home was the subject of the documentary An Act of Conscience.
War tax resisters Randy Kehler and Betsy Corner refused to leave their home when it was seized by the U.S. government in , defying a federal court order.
When Kehler is arrested and imprisoned for contempt of court, a dozen affinity groups maintained a round-the-clock occupation of the home through .
During the Dublin water charge strike:
People were told how to block up their stopcocks to make it difficult for their water to be cut off.
Empty bean tins and a little bit of cement were the necessary ingredients.
In a group of French syndicalists and unemployed workers rallied at the home of “two of their comrades who refused to pay the income tax” and successfully deterred the police and bailiffs from appearing.
During the Fries Rebellion, officials tried to arrest Henry Shankwyler, but were foiled by a crowd of fifty supporters, who “went in advance of the officers, and, reaching the house before them,” intimidated the marshal into withdrawing without his prey.
“Some said if he were taken out of his house they would fight as long as they had a drop of blood in their bodies.
… Seeing that nothing further could be accomplished there, the officers took their leave.
As they left the house the people set up a shout and hurrahed for ‘Liberty.’ ”
Irish “Blue Shirts” held a rally in County Cork to protest government property seizures against tax resisters, and “[w]hile the conference was sitting, County Cork farmers felled trees in the roads, cut telephone wires and made other efforts to prevent further seizure of cattle for unpaid annuities.”
At one point “police fired upon a crowd attempting to prevent the forced sale of cattle seized for non-payment of taxes,” killing one.
Una Ridley, an English council tax resister, told a reporter in :
…how the couple had managed to foil efforts by bailiffs to remove property.
“So long as you make yourself secure, close all the downstairs windows and all the upstairs ones too, the bailiffs cannot make an entry,” she said.
In Samoa in , officials tried to arrest Tamasese, the head of the Mau movement, for tax refusal:
…a party of civil police attempted to arrest Tamasese at Apia, but were prevented by crowds of Mau supporters, who obstructed the police and managed to get him away in a car.
On , at Vaimoso village, another attempt was made by a party of civil police at his home.
On that occasion the police were covered by a party of 30 men from the cruisers.
Resistance was again made, and the police and the naval party, to avoid bloodshed, retired. further attempt to make an arrest was made at the home of Tamasese at Vaimoso on .
The party of six military police was stoned by women and others, and it retired.
Barricades were used successfully in the battle against Thatcher’s Poll Tax.
In one early case:
Over 300 people turned up outside [Jeannette McGuin’s] house.
Banners were hung out of the window saying “God Help the Sheriffs.”
The sheriffs didn’t show up and Jeannette McGuin never heard another word from them.
In some others:
[I]n Edinburgh over 300 people filled a central high street to prevent a poinding… 200 activists guarded flats in the Grass Market area… and 150 people guarded 11 flats in Stockbridge and Comely Bank.
In another:
Demonstrators threatened to form a human blockade outside the home at Irvine of Mr Alex Smith, MEP for Scotland South, who has refused to pay a £50 penalty imposed for not registering for the community charge.
However, before the protesters arrived, two sheriff’s officers, who called at Mr Smith’s home, left without trying to force entry after he refused to let them in.
Jackie Moyers of the Mayfield/Newtongrange Anti-Poll Tax Union reported:
The very first poinding which was supposed to have been taking place was in a small village called Pathead…
The back of eight o’clock everybody started coming up, they actually started running a relay service, a shuttle service with cars going to collect people, and I’d say by about half-past nine to ten o’clock we had 110 people standing in the garden.
It was a beautiful day, it was like everybody was sunbathing, having a day out; we stood about there, everybody singing songs, we had the records on, a couple of them had a wee drink, things like that, waiting on the sheriff officers coming…
The sheriff officers turned up, got on the phone and, lo and behold, a police car turned up… So the police came up and asked us if the sheriff officers could get in and I said, “Well, I’m telling you, under no circumstances whatsoever are we allowing any sheriff officers into anybody’s house to carry out a poinding.”
…So the sheriff officers turned around to the police, and says “I want him arrested, because he’s organising this,” and the police says, “well, we can’t do a thing.”
And everyone in the garden, I says to them, well, “They want me arrested.”
They says, “Well, if you’re getting arrested then all of us are getting arrested.”
And by this time, the local coalman had come up the road in his lorry, stopped his lorry and blocked the street.
The two guys at the back jumped off, and the coalman who was driving the lorry, they jumped over the fence and joined us.
The local council workers, who were doing the windows at the time, downed their tools and got in the garden and supported us.
It’s worse than jungle drums, because the local baker heard it, he came around with his baker’s van and started dishing out cakes to us.
The sheriff officers were getting quite panicky by this time.
The police got in their car and left the sheriff officers.
I told them again.
I said, “You’d better get going.
It’s a waste of your time.
We know you’re not going to get in, so there’s nothing else you can do.”
… They tried to get in for five or ten minutes and by this time the crowd were getting quite hostile, and I says, “I think you’d better go to your car while you’ve still got four wheels and you’re still able to walk.”
At Bishops Lydeard, people “divided up into small groups, and blockaded every road into the village.”
Barricades were constructed and every vehicle which tried to enter was stopped and asked its business.
… In the end, the bailiffs didn’t come near the place.
Poll tax resisters also sometimes occupied or blockaded the offices of sheriffs and bailiffs.
During the Edinburgh Annuity Tax resistance, blockades were used to obstruct the movement of constables when they were seeking to arrest resisters, and barricades were used to prevent property seizure.
Here are excerpts from one government investigation of the Annuity Tax disturbances:
…I saw sledge hammers and other instruments there to open the premises and get at the goods, but after labouring for half an hour or more they could not effect an entrance.
Q: Was that because Mr. Dun used some of the metal in which he was a dealer to barricade his premises?
A: Yes; tons of metal were put up against the back door, and it was impossible for them to get in.
Mr. Dunn had barricaded the door of the room where the poinded effects were, so that an entrance could not be had… I found that the room where the poinded goods were was filled up to above the centre of the room with boxes filled with plates of iron of immense weight.
We were told that the poinded goods were lying beneath those, and that we might get at them as we could.
I sent for labourers, and had the whole of those boxes removed into the front shop until I got access, after great trouble, to the sheets of brass, which were the poinded articles.
These were then declared by the sheriff officers to be of a different description, and inferior to what they had previously poinded; they refused to take them; and the only articles they recognised were some coils of copper wire; those they took to the police office, and those were all that were obtained on that occasion.
During the Bardoli satyagraha, farmers famously barricaded their homes with their cattle inside to protect them from seizure.
When the attachment operations began, minute instructions were issued to meet every situation.
In the beginning only those who had received notices were to greet the attachment parties with closed doors.
Then whole villages were turned into blackholes, and people who could not put up with the terrible strain involved were humourously asked to undertake a pilgrimage.
When it was found that in spite of the greatest precautions, the Pathans managed to carry away carts, break into enclosures and unhinge closed doors, the Sardar [resistance commander] said: “Pull your carts to pieces.
Keep the body in one place, wheels in another, and shafts in a third place; make your hedges extra strong with thorns and bushes; and fortify the doors in such a way that they might not be able to open them except by breaking them open with axes.
Exhaust them thoroughly.”
In order to save their beloved cattle 80,000 men, women, children with these cattle have locked themselves up in small and insanitary houses for over three months.
As I passed through villages, silent, empty and deserted with sentinels posted at different ends, I saw women peeping through the barred windows to see whether it was the arrival of the japti [attachment] officer and on being reassured the doors being opened I was taken inside and I saw the darkness, the stench, the filth; and the men, women and children who had herded for months in the same room with their beloved cattle — miserable, lacerated, grown whitish by disease — and as I heard their determination to remain in that condition for months rather than abandon their cattle to the tender mercies of the japti officer I could not help thinking that the imagination which conceived the dire japti methods, the severity which had enforced them and the policy which had sanctioned them were difficult to be found outside the pages of a history of medieval times.
In Alwar, India, in , blockades were used against tax collectors:
Thousands of armed Hindu Moslem [sic] peasants of splendid physique with fighting spirit are concentrating in an area of 22 square miles to repel the State tax gatherers.
The roads by which the lorries have been bringing troops have been made impassable.
The paths are blocked by huge boulders…
“Early one morning in Karl North (Rochester, N.Y.) was alerted by neighbors that the IRS had seized his car and was about to have it towed for $11.29 in unpaid telephone tax.
Without time to grab his car key, Karl rushed out of the house and lay down under the car.
This disconcerted the IRS enough that when they stopped everything to call the police, he ran back into the house, got the key, rushed back out, and drove the car off.”
Landholders in Tasmania launched a tax strike in , and when the police came with distress warrants, “Householders padlocked their gateways, and mastiffs were chained at the approaches.”
The tax resisters at the “New Rush” in South Africa in assembled a force to prevent the jailing of one of their comrades who had refused to pay a fine.
The Hut Tax War in Sierra Leone began when a king named Bai Bureh assembled an armed group which successfully defended him against an expected attempt to arrest him for refusing to pay the Hut Tax — an attempt that a later government investigator labeled “aggression pure and simple on the part of the authorities.”
Other angry kings and people, inspired by Bai Bureh’s successful action, rallied to his side.
In , drivers parked their cars in the middle of the streets in downtown Paris, blocking all traffic for 45 minutes at mid-day to protest a fuel tax.
Property seizures were also used by the British women’s suffrage movement as opportunities to hold protest rallies or for propaganda.
Here are some examples from the news of the time:
“Miss Muller, far from relenting to save her property, publicly advertised the date of the seizure, and invited the women of England to come and witness the disgraceful spectacle of a woman being robbed by the minions of the law because she dared to ask for a voice in the disposition of her taxation.
The invitation was accepted by hundreds of well-dressed but excited and indignant women, who crowded into Cadogan Square and nearly mobbed the bailiffs while they were removing the lares and penates from the Muller residence.
An indignation meeting was afterward held in Miss Muller’s drawing-rooms and many bitter and vehement denunciations of the tyranny and injustice of the law were indulged in.”
“Miss Raleigh naturally made use of the occasion for propaganda purposes, conversing with the tax collector for some time on the subject of Woman Suffrage, and presenting him with Suffrage literature, which he accepted.”
“A very successful protest was made at Finchley on in connection with the seizure of property belonging to Miss [Sarah] Benett, late hon. treasurer of the W.F.L. By courtesy of the auctioneer, Miss Bennet, was allowed to explain her reason for resisting payment of taxes.
A very successful open-air meeting was held afterwards.”
This may seem a little out-there, but I’d like you to consider radical honesty as a tactic with potential to augment a tax resistance campaign.
Radical honesty at its most extreme means abjuring subterfuge — conducting your campaign in the open, in plain sight, without trying to take your opponent by surprise through trickery, and without trying to influence people by “spin” and lopsided propaganda.
But it also means studiously refusing to participate in the dishonesty by which your opponent holds on to power and deceives those who give in to it.
Radical honesty has several potential advantages:
It provides a stark moral contrast between your campaign and whatever institution you are opposing.
In The Story of Bardoli, Mahadev Desai described how this played out in the Bardoli tax strike:
…a regular propaganda of mendacity was resorted to [by the Government].
The Government’s way and the people’s way presented a striking study in contrasts.
On one side there were secrecy, underhand dealings, falsehood, even sharp practice; on the other there were straight and manly speech, and straight action in broad daylight.
This contrast can make your campaign more appealing to potential resisters and to by-standers, and can increase the morale of the resisters in your campaign.
Tyranny thrives on mutual dishonesty, and honesty threatens it.
The way people signal their loyalty to the tyrant is to participate in the lie.
When everybody around you is participating in the lie, it feels like everyone is loyal to the tyrant.
Vaclav Havel wrote of this:
Individuals need not believe all these mystifications, but they must behave as though they did, or they must at least tolerate them in silence, or get along well with those who work with them.
For this reason, however, they must live within a lie.
They need not accept the lie.
It is enough for them to have accepted their life with it and in it.
For by this very fact, individuals confirm the system, fulfill the system, make the system, are the system.
But people may start to refuse:
Living within the lie can constitute the system only if it is universal.
The principle must embrace and permeate everything.
There are no terms whatsoever on which it can co-exist with living within the truth, and therefore everyone who steps out of line denies it in principle and threatens it in its entirety.
Tolstoy went even further, and claimed that radical honesty was itself enough to topple governments:
No feats of heroism are needed to achieve the greatest and most important changes in the existence of humanity; neither the armament of millions of soldiers, nor the construction of new roads and machines, nor the arrangement of exhibitions, nor the organization of workmen’s unions, nor revolutions, not barricades, nor explosions, nor the perfection of aërial navigation; but a change in public opinion.
And to accomplish this change no exertions of the mind are needed, nor the refutation of anything in existence, nor the invention of any extraordinary novelty; it is only needful that we should not succumb to the erroneous, already defunct, public opinion of the past, which governments have induced artificially; it is only needful that each individual should say what he really feels or thinks, or at least that he should not say what he does not think.
And if only a small body of the people were to do so at once, of their own accord, outworn public opinion would fall off us of itself, and a new, living, real opinion would assert itself.
And when public opinion should thus have changed without the slightest effort, the internal condition of men’s lives which so torments them would change likewise of its own accord.
One is ashamed to say how little is needed for all men to be delivered from those calamities which now oppress them; it is only needful not to lie.
Honesty keeps the campaign on the straight-and-narrow.
In a tax resistance campaign, as in any activist campaign, there are frequently temptations to take short-cuts.
Rather than winning a victory after a tough and uncertain struggle, you can declare victory early and hope to capitalize on the morale boost.
Rather than doing something practical that takes a lot of thankless hours, you can do something quick and symbolic that “makes a powerful statement.”
Rather than fighting for goals that are worth achieving, you can choose goals that are more achievable.
Radical honesty gets you in the habit of avoiding temptations like these.
Honesty is itself a good thing worth contributing to.
If you conduct your campaign in a radically honest way, you contribute to a cultural atmosphere of trust and straightforward communication.
In this way, even if you do not succeed in the other goals of your tax resistance campaign, you still may have some residual positive effect.
Honesty means there’s a lot of things you no longer have to worry about.
For instance, you don’t have to keep your stories straight, you don’t have to worry about leaks of information that might cast doubt on your credibility, you don’t have to be so concerned with information security, and you don’t have to worry about spies and informers in your midst who might blab your secrets to the authorities.
This leaves you free to spend your energy and attention playing offense instead of defense.
A tactic that I’ve encountered on many occasions in my research into tax resistance campaigns is that of disrupting government auctions of goods, particularly those of seized from tax resisters.
Here are several examples that show the variety of ways campaigns have accomplished this:
Religious nonconformists in the United Kingdom
Education Act-related resistance
Some disruption of auctions took place during the tax resistance in protest of the provisions of the Education Act that provided taxpayer money for sectarian education .
The Westminster Gazette reported:
There was some feeling displayed at a sale of the goods of Passive Resisters at Colchester yesterday, the Rev. T. Batty, a Baptist minister, and the Rev. Pierrepont Edwards, locally, known as “the fighting parson,” entering into discussion in the auction room, but being stopped by the auctioneer, who said he did his work during the week and he hoped they did theirs on Sundays.
At Long Eaton the goods of twenty-three Passive Resisters were sold amid demonstrations of hostility to the auctioneer.
A boy was arrested for throwing a bag of flour.
The New York Times reported that “Auctioneers frequently decline to sell goods upon which distraints have been levied.” And the San Francisco Chronicle noted:
Difficulty is experienced everywhere in getting auctioneers to sell the property confiscated.
In Leominster, a ram and some ewe lambs, the property of a resistant named Charles Grundy, were seized and put up at auction, as follows: Ram, Joe Chamberlain; ewes, Lady Balfour, Mrs. Bishop, Lady Cecil, Mrs. Canterbury and so on through the list of those who made themselves conspicuous in forcing the bill through Parliament.
The auctioneer was entitled to a fee under the law of 10 shillings and 6 pence, which he promptly turned over to Mr. Grundy, having during the sale expressed the strongest sympathy for the tax-resisters.
Most of the auction sales are converted into political meetings in which the tax and those responsible for it are roundly denounced.
Edinburgh Annuity Tax resistance
Auction disruptions were commonplace in the Annuity Tax resistance campaign in Edinburgh.
By law the distraint auctions (“roupings”) had to be held at the Mercat Cross — the town square, essentially — which made it easy to gather a crowd; or sometimes in the homes of the resisters. Tait’s Edinburgh Magazine reported of one of the Mercat Cross roupings:
If any of our readers know that scene, let them imagine, after the resistance was tolerably well organized, an unfortunate auctioneer arriving at the Cross about noon, with a cart loaded with furniture for sale.
Latterly the passive hubbub rose as if by magic.
Bells sounded, bagpipes brayed, the Fiery Cross passed down the closses, and through the High Street and Cowgate; and men, women, and children, rushed from all points towards the scene of Passive Resistance.
The tax had grinded the faces of the poor, and the poor were, no doubt, the bitterest in indignation.
Irish, Highlanders, Lowlanders, were united by the bond of a common suffering.
Respectable shopkeepers might be seen coming in haste from the Bridges; Irish traders flew from St. Mary’s Wynd; brokers from the Cowgate; all pressing round the miserable auctioneer; yelling, hooting, perhaps cursing, certainly saying anything but what was affectionate or respectful of the clergy.
And here were the black placards tossing above the heads of the angry multitude — ROUPING FOR STIPEND!
This notice was of itself enough to deter any one from purchasing; though we will say it for the good spirit of the people, that both the Scotch and Irish brokers disdained to take bargains of their suffering neighbours’ goods.
Of late months, no auctioneer would venture to the Cross to roup for stipend.
What human being has nerve enough to bear up against the scorn, hatred, and execration of his fellow-creatures, expressed in a cause he himself must feel just?
The people lodged the placards and flags in shops about the Cross, so that not a moment was lost in having their machinery in full operation, and scouts were ever ready to spread the intelligence if any symptoms of a sale were discovered.
Sheriff Clerk Kenmure Maitland appeared before a committee that was investigating the resistance campaign.
He mentioned that “Mr. Whitten, the auctioneer for sheriff’s sales, was so much inconvenienced and intimidated that he refused to take any more of those sales.”
Q: What was Mr. Whitten’s express reason for declining to act as auctioneer?
A: He was very much inconvenienced on that
occasion, and he believed that his general business connection would suffer
by undertaking these sales, and that he would lose the support of any
customer who was of that party.
Q: It was not from any fear of personal violence?
A: That might have had a good deal to do with it.
Q: Was Mr. Whitten the only auctioneer who declined?
A: No. After Mr. Whitten’s refusal I applied to
Mr. Hogg, whose services I should have been glad to have obtained, and he
said he would let me know the next day if he would undertake to act as
auctioneer; he wrote to me the next day saying, that, after consideration
with his friends, he declined to act.
Q: Any other?
A: I do not remember asking any others. The rates
of remuneration for acting as auctioneer at sheriffs’ sales are so low that
men having a better class of business will not act. I had to look about among
not first-class auctioneers, and I found that I would have some difficulty in
getting a man whom I could depend upon, for I had reason to believe that
influence would be used to induce the auctioneer to fail me at the last
moment.
It was difficult for the authorities to get any help at all, either from auctioneers, furniture dealers, or carters.
The government had to purchase (and fortify) their own cart because they were unable to rent one for such use.
Here is an example of an auction of a resister’s goods held at the resister’s
home, as described in the testimony of Thomas Menzies:
A: I saw a large number of the most respectable citizens assembled in the house, and a large number outside awaiting the arrival of the officers who came in a cab, and the indignation was very strong when they got into the house, so much so that a feeling was entertained by some that there was danger to the life of Mr. Whitten, the auctioneer, and that he might be thrown out of the window, because there were such threats, but others soothed down the feeling.
Q: There was no overt act or breach of the peace?
A: No.
The cabman who brought the officers, seeing they were engaged in such a disagreeable duty, took his cab away, and they had some difficulty in procuring another, and they went away round by a back street, rather than go by the direct way.
Q: Did Mr. Whitten, from his experience on that occasion, refuse ever to come to another sale as auctioneer?
A: He refused to act again, he gave up his
position.
He then described a second such auction:
A: The house was densely packed; it was impossible for me to get entrance; the stair was densely packed to the third and second flats; when the policemen came with the officers, they could not force their way up, except with great difficulty.
The consequence was, that nearly the whole of the rail of the upper storey gave way to the great danger both of the officers and the public, and one young man I saw thrown over the heads of the crowd to the great danger of being precipitated three storeys down.
Then the parties came out of the house, with their clothes dishevelled and severely handled; and the officer on that occasion will tell you that he was very severely dealt with indeed, and Mr. Sheriff Gordon was sent for, so much alarm being felt; but by the time the Sheriff arrived things were considerably subdued.
Sheriff Clerk Maitland also described this auction:
I found a considerable crowd outside; and on going up to the premises on the top flat, I found that I could not get entrance to the house; the house was packed with people, who on our approach kept hooting and shouting out, and jeering us; and, as far as I could see, the shutters were shut and the windows draped in black, and all the rooms crowded with people.
I said that it was necessary to carry out the sale, and they told me to come in, if I dare.
On another occasion, as he tells it, the auction seemed to go smoothly at first, but the buyers didn’t get what they hoped for:
At Mr. McLaren’s sale everything was conducted in an orderly way as far as the sale was concerned.
We got in, and only a limited number were allowed to go in; but after the officials and the police had gone, there was a certain amount of disturbance.
Certain goods were knocked down to the poinding creditors, consisting of an old sofa and an old sideboard, and Mr. McLaren said, “Let those things go to the clergy.” Those were the only things which had to be taken away.
There was no vehicle ready to carry them away.
Mr. McLaren said that he would not keep them.
After the police departed, he turned them out in the street, when they were taken possession of by the crowd of idlers, and made a bonfire of.
A summary of the effect of all of this disruption reads:
So strong was the feeling of hostility, that the town council were unable to procure the services of any auctioneer to sell the effects of those who conscientiously objected to pay the clerical portion of the police taxes, and they were consequently forced to make a special arrangement with a sheriff’s officer, by which, to induce him to undertake the disagreeable task, they provided him for two years with an auctioneer’s license from the police funds.
In , it was found necessary to enter into another arrangement with the officer, by which the council had to pay him 12½ percent, on all arrears, including the police, prison, and registration rates, as well as the clerical tax; and he receives this per-centage whether the sums are recovered by himself or paid direct to the police collector, and that over and above all the expenses he recovers from the recusants.
But this is not all; the council were unable to hire a cart or vehicle from any of the citizens, and it was found necessary to purchase a lorry, and to provide all the necessary apparatus and assistance for enforcing payment of the arrears.
All this machinery, which owes its existence entirely to the Clerico-Police Act, involves a wasteful expenditure of city funds, induces a chronic state of irritation in the minds of the citizens, and is felt to be a gross violation of the principles of civil and religious liberty.
The Tithe War
William John Fitzpatrick wrote of the auctions during the Tithe War:
[T]he parson’s first step was to put the cattle up to auction in the presence of a regiment of English soldiery; but it almost invariably happened that either the assembled spectators were afraid to bid, lest they should incur the vengeance of the peasantry, or else they stammered out such a low offer, that, when knocked down, the expenses of the sale would be found to exceed it.
The same observation applies to the crops.
Not one man in a hundred had the hardihood to declare himself the purchaser.
Sometimes the parson, disgusted at the backwardness of bidders, and trying to remove it, would order the cattle twelve or twenty miles away in order to their being a second time put up for auction.
But the locomotive progress of the beasts was always closely tracked, and means were taken to prevent either driver or beast receiving shelter or sustenance throughout the march.
The Sentinel wrote of one auction:
Yesterday being the day on which the sheriff announced that, if no bidders could be obtained for the cattle, he would have the property returned to Mr. Germain, immense crowds were collected from the neighbouring counties — upwards of 20,000 men.
The County Kildare men, amounting to about 7000, entered, led by Jonas Duckett, Esq., in the most regular and orderly manner.
This body was preceded by a band of music, and had several banners on which were “Kilkea and Moone, Independence for ever,” “No Church Tax,” “No Tithe,” “Liberty,” &c. The whole body followed six carts, which were prepared in the English style — each drawn by two horses.
The rear was brought up by several respectable landholders of Kildare.
The barrack-gates were thrown open, and different detachments of infantry took their stations right and left, while the cavalry, after performing sundry evolutions, occupied the passes leading to the place of sale.
The cattle were ordered out, when the sheriff, as on the former day, put them up for sale; but no one could be found to bid for the cattle, upon which he announced his intention of returning them to Mr. Germain.
The news was instantly conveyed, like electricity, throughout the entire meeting, when the huzzas of the people surpassed anything we ever witnessed.
The cattle were instantly liberated and given up to Mr. Germain.
At this period a company of grenadiers arrived, in double-quick time, after travelling from Castlecomer, both officers and men fatigued and covered with dust.
Thus terminated this extraordinary contest between the Church and the people, the latter having obtained, by their steadiness, a complete victory.
The cattle will be given to the poor of the sundry districts.
Similar examples were reported in the foreign press:
Cork. — A most extraordinary scene has been exhibited in this city.
Some cows seized for tithes were brought to a public place for sale, escorted by a squadron of lancers, and followed by thousands of infuriated people.
All the garrison, cavalry and infantry, under the command of Sir George Bingham, were called out.
The cattle were set up at three pounds for each, no bidder; two pounds, no bidder; one pound, no bidder; in short, the auctioneer descended to three shillings for each cow, but no purchaser appeared.
This scene lasted for above an hour, when there being no chance of making sale of the cattle, it was proposed to adjourn the auction; but, as we are informed, the General in command of the military expressed an unwillingness to have the troops subjected to a repetition of the harassing duty thus imposed on them.
After a short delay, it was, at the interference and remonstrance of several gentlemen, both of town and country, agreed upon that the cattle should be given up to the people, subject to certain private arrangements.
We never witnessed such a scene; thousands of country people jumping with exulted feelings at the result, wielding their shillelaghs, and exhibiting all the other symptoms of exuberant joy characteristic of the buoyancy of Irish feeling.
At Carlow a triumphant resistance to the laws, similar to that which occurred
at Cork, has been exhibited in the presence of the authorities and the
military. Some cattle had been seized for tithe, and a public sale announced,
when a large body of men, stated at 50,000, marched to the place appointed,
and, of course, under the influence of such terror, none were found to bid
for the cattle. The sale was adjourned from day to day, for seven days, and
upon each day the same organised bands entered the town, and rendered the
attempt to sell the cattle, in pursuance of the law, abortive. At last the
cattle are given up to the mob, crowned with laurels, and driven home with an
escort of 10,000 men.
In a somewhat later case, a Catholic priest in Blarney by the name of Peyton refused to pay his income tax on the grounds that the law treated him in an inferior way to his Protestant counterparts.
His horse was seized and sold at auction, where “the multitude assembled hissed, hooted, hustled, and otherwise impeded the proceedings.”
There was precedent for this. During the Tithe War period and thereafter, the
authorities had to go to extraordinary lengths to auction off seized goods. As
one account put it:
In Ireland we pay — the whole people of the empire pay — troops who march up from the country to Dublin, fifty or sixty miles, as escorts of the parson-pounded pigs and cattle, which passive resistance prevents from being sold or bought at home; and we also maintain barracks in that country which not only lodge the parsons’ military guards, but afford, of late, convenient resting-places in their journey to the poor people’s cattle, whom the soldiers are driving to sale; and which would otherwise be rescued on the road.
The women’s suffrage movement in the United Kingdom
The tax resisters in the women’s suffrage movement in Britain were particularly adept in disrupting tax auctions and in making them opportunities for propaganda and protest.
Here are several examples, largely as reported in the movement newsletter called The Vote:
“On a sale was held… of
jewellery seized in distraint for income-tax… Members of the
W.F.L.
and Mrs. [Edith] How Martyn
(Hon.
Sec.) assembled to
protest against the proceedings, and the usual policeman kept a dreary
vigil at the open door. The day had been specially chosen by the
authorities, who wished to prevent a demonstration…”
“The sale of Mrs. Cleeves’ dog-cart took place at the Bush Hotel, Sketty,
on afternoon. The
W.F.L.
held their protest meeting outside — much to the discomfort of the
auctioneer, who declared the impossibility of ‘drowning the voice
outside.’ ”
“Notwithstanding the mud and odoriferous atmosphere of the back streets
off Drury-lane, quite a large number of members of the Tax Resisters’
League, the Women’s Freedom League, and the Women’s Social and Political
Union, met outside Bulloch’s Sale Rooms shortly after
to protest against the sale of Miss Bertha Brewster’s goods, which had
been seized because of her refusal to pay her Imperial taxes. Before the
sale took place, Mrs. Gatty, as chairman, explained to at least a hundred
people the reasons of Miss Brewster’s refusal to pay her taxes and the
importance of the constitutional principle that taxation without
representation is tyranny, which this refusal stood for. Miss Leonora
Tyson proposed the resolution protesting against the injustice of this
sale, and it was seconded by Miss F[lorence]. A. Underwood, and supported
by Miss Brackenbury. The resolution was carried with only two
dissentients, and these dissentients were women!”
“The goods seized were sold at the public auction room. Before selling
them the auctioneer allowed Mrs. How Martyn to make a short explanatory
speech, and he himself added that it was an unpleasant duty he had to
perform.”
“A scene which was probably never equalled in the whole of its history
took place at the Oxenham Auction Rooms, Oxford-street, on
. About a fortnight before
the bailiffs had entered Mrs. Despard’s residence in Nine Elms and seized
goods which they valued at £15. Our President, for some years past, as is
well known, has refused to pay her income-tax and inhabited house duty on
the grounds that taxation and representation should go together; and this
is the third time her goods have been seized for distraint. It was not
until the day before — — that Mrs. Despard was informed of the time and place where
her furniture was to be sold. In spite of this short notice — which we
learn on good authority to be illegal — a large crowd composed not only of
our own members but also of women and men from various Suffrage societies
gathered together at the place specified in the notice. ¶ When ‘Lot
325’ was called Mrs. Despard mounted a chair, and said, ‘I rise to
protest, in the strongest, in the most emphatic way of which I am capable,
against these iniquities, which are perpetually being perpetrated in the
name of the law. I should like to say I have served my country in various
capacities, but I am shut out altogether from citizenship. I think special
obloquy has been put upon me in this matter. It was well known that I
should not run away and that I should not take my goods away, but the
authorities sent a man in possession. He remained in the house — a
household of women — at night. I only heard
of this sale, and from a man
who knows that of which he is speaking, I know that this sale is illegal.
I now claim the law — the law that is supposed to be for women as well as
men.’ ”
“[A] most successful protest against taxation without representation was
made by Mrs. Muir, of Broadstairs, whose goods were sold at the Auction
Rooms, 120, High-street, Margate. The protest was conducted by Mrs.
[Emily] Juson Kerr; and Miss Ethel Fennings, of the W.F.L.,
went down to speak. The auctioneer, Mr. Holness, was most courteous, and
not only allowed Mrs. Muir to explain in a few words why she resisted
taxation, but also gave permission to hold meeting in his rooms after the
sale was over.”
“One of the most successful and effective Suffrage demonstrations ever
held in St. Leonards was that arranged jointly by the Women’s Tax
Resistance League and the Hastings and St. Leonards Women’s Suffrage
Propaganda League, on ,
on the occasion of the sale of some family silver which had been seized at
the residence of Mrs. [Isabella] Darent Harrison for non-payment of
Inhabited House Duty. Certainly the most striking feature of this protest
was the fact that members of all societies in Hastings,
St. Leonards, Bexhill and
Winchelsea united in their effort to render the protest representative of
all shades of Suffrage opinion. Flags, banners, pennons and regalia of
many societies were seen in the procession.… The hearty response from the
men to Mrs. [Margaret] Kineton Parkes’s call for ‘three cheers for Mrs.
Darent Harrison’ at the close of the proceedings in the auction room, came
as a surprise to the Suffragists themselves.”
“On , the last item on
the catalogue of Messrs. Whiteley’s weekly sale in Westbourne-grove was
household silver seized in distraint for King’s taxes from Miss Gertrude
Eaton, of Kensington. Miss Eaton is a lady very well known in the musical
world and interested in social reforms, and
hon. secretary of the
Prison Reform Committee. Miss Eaton said a few dignified words of protest
in the auction room, and Mrs. [Anne] Cobden Saunderson explained to the
large crowd of bidders the reason why tax-paying women, believing as they
do that taxation without representation is tyranny, feel that they cannot,
by remaining inactive, any longer subscribe to it. A procession then
formed up and a protest meeting was held…”
“At the offices of the collector of Government taxes, Westborough, on
a silver cream jug and sugar
basin were sold. These were the property of
Dr. Marion McKenzie, who
had refused payment of taxes to support her claim on behalf of women’s
suffrage. A party of suffragettes marched to the collector’s office, which
proved far too small to accommodate them all. Mr. Parnell said he regretted
personally having the duty to perform. He believed that ultimately the
women would get the vote. They had the municipal vote and he maintained
that women who paid rates and taxes should be allowed to vote. (Applause.)
But that was his own personal view. He would have been delighted not to
have had that process, but he had endeavoured to keep the costs down.
Dr. Marion McKenzie thanked
Mr. Parnell for the courtesy shown them. A protest meeting was afterwards
held on St. Nicholas
Cliff.”
“Mrs. [Anne] Cobden-Sanderson, representing the Women’s Tax Resistance
League, was, by courtesy of the auctioneer, allowed to explain the reason
of the protest. Judging by the applause with which her remarks were
received, most of those present were in sympathy.”
“The auctioneer was entirely in sympathy with the protest, and explained
the circumstances under which the sale took place. He courteously allowed
Mrs. [Anne] Cobden Sanderson and Mrs. [Emily] Juson Kerr to put clearly
the women’s point of view; Miss Raleigh made a warm appeal for true
freedom. A procession was formed and an open-air meeting subsequently
held.”
“The auctioneer, who is in sympathy with the suffragists, refused to take
commission.”
“[A] crowd of Suffragists of all shades of opinion assembled at Hawking’s
Sale Rooms, Lisson-grove, Marylebone, to support Dr. Frances Ede and Dr.
Amy Sheppard, whose goods were to be sold by public auction for tax
resistance. By the courtesy of the auctioneer, Mr. Hawking, speeches were
allowed, and Dr. Ede
emphasized her conscientious objection to supporting taxation without
representation; she said that women like herself and her partner felt that
they must make this logical and dignified protest, but as it caused very
considerable inconvenience and sacrifice to professional women, she
trusted that the grave injustice would speedily be remedied. Three cheers
were given for the doctors, and a procession with banners marched to
Marble Arch, where a brief meeting was held in Hyde Park, at which the
usual resolution was passed unanimously.”
“An interesting sequel to the seizure of Mrs. Tollemache’s goods last
week, and the ejection of the bailiff from her residence, Batheaston
Villa, Bath, was the sale held , at the White Hart Hotel. To cover a tax of only £15 and
costs, goods were seized to the value of about £80, and it was at once
decided by the Women’s Tax Resistance League and Mrs. Tollemache’s friends
that such conduct on the part of the authorities must be circumvented and
exposed. The goods were on view the morning of the sale, and as there was
much valuable old china, silver, and furniture, the dealers were early on
the spot, and buzzing like flies around the articles they greatly desired
to possess. The first two pieces put up were, fortunately, quite
inviting; £19 being bid for a chest of drawers worth about
50s. and £3 for an
ordinary leather-top table, the requisite amount was realised, and the
auctioneer was obliged to withdraw the remaining lots much to the disgust
of the assembled dealers. Mrs. [Margaret] Kineton Parkes, in her speech at
the protest meeting, which followed the sale, explained to these irate
gentlemen that women never took such steps unless compelled to do so, and
that if the tax collector had seized a legitimate amount of goods to
satisfy his claim, Mrs. Tollemache would willingly have allowed them to
go.”
“Under the auspices of the Tax Resistance League and the Women’s Freedom
League a protest meeting was held at Great Marlow on
, on the occasion of the sale
of plate and jewellery belonging to Mrs. [Mary] Sargent Florence, the
well-known artist, and to Miss Hayes, daughter of Admiral Hayes. Their
property had been seized for the non-payment of Imperial taxes, and
through the courtesy of the tax-collector every facility was afforded to
the protesters to explain their action.”
“At the sale of a silver salver belonging to
Dr. Winifred Patch, of
Highbury, Steen’s Auction Rooms, Drayton Park, were crowded on
by members of the Women’s Freedom
League, the Women’s Tax Resistance League, and other Suffrage societies.
The auctioneer refused to allow the usual five minutes for explanation
before the sale, but Miss Alison Neilans, of the Women’s Freedom League,
was well supported and cheered when she insisted on making clear the
reasons why Dr. Patch for
several years has refused to pay taxes while deprived of a vote. A
procession was then formed, and marched to Highbury Corner, where a large
open-air meeting was presided over by Mrs. [Marianne] Clarendon Hyde, of
the Women’s Freedom League, and addressed by Mrs. Merrivale Mayer.”
“Practically every day sees a sale and protest somewhere, and the banners
of the Women’s Tax Resistance League, frequently supported by Suffrage
Societies, are becoming familiar in town and country. At the protest
meetings which follow all sales the reason why is explained to large
numbers of people who would not attend a suffrage meeting. Auctioneers are
becoming sympathetic even so far as to speak in support of the women’s
protest against a law which demands their money, but gives them no voice
in the way in which it is spent.”
“The sale was conducted, laughably enough, under the auspices of the
Women’s Freedom League and the Women’s Tax Resistance League; for, on
obtaining entrance to the hall, Miss Anderson and Mrs. Fisher bedecked it
with all the insignia of suffrage protest. The rostrum was spread with our
flag proclaiming the inauguration of Tax Resistance by the W.F.L.;
above the auctioneer’s head hung Mrs. [Charlotte] Despard’s embroidered
silk banner, with its challenge “Dare to be Free”; on every side the
green, white and gold of the
W.F.L.
was accompanied by the brown and black of the Women’s Tax Resistance
League, with its cheery ‘No Vote, no Tax’ injunctions and its John Hampden
maxims; while in the front rows, besides Miss Anderson, the heroine of the
day, Mrs. Snow and Mrs. Fisher, were seen the inspiring figures of our
President and Mrs. [Anne] Cobden Sanderson, vice-president of the
W.T.R.L.”
“…all Women’s Freedom League members who know anything of the way in which
the sister society organises these matters should attend the sale in the
certainty of enjoying a really telling demonstration…”
“From early in the day Mrs. Huntsman and a noble band of sandwich-women
had paraded the town announcing the sale and distributing leaflets. In the
afternoon a contingent of the Tax Resistance League arrived with the John
Hampden banner and the brown and black pennons and flags. These marched
through the town and market square before entering the hall in which the
sale and meeting were to be held, and which was decorated with the flags
and colours of the Women’s Freedom League. Mr. Croome, the King’s officer,
conducted the sale in person, the goods sold being a quantity of table
silver, a silver toilette set, and one or two other articles. The prices
fetched were trifling, Mrs. Harvey desiring that no one should buy the
goods in for her.”
“Miss Andrews asked the auctioneer if she might explain the reason for the
sale of the waggon, and, having received the necessary permission was able
to give an address on tax resistance, and to show how it is one of the
weapons employed by the Freedom League to secure the enfranchisement of
women. Then came the sale — but beforehand the auctioneer said he had not
been aware he was to sell ‘distressed’ goods, and he very much objected to
doing so.… The meeting and the auctioneer together made the assembly chary
of bidding, and the waggon was not sold, which was a great triumph for the
tax-resisters.… Miss Trott and Miss Bobby helped to advertise the meeting
by carrying placards round the crowded market.”
“There was a crowded audience, and the auctioneer opened the proceedings
by declaring himself a convinced Suffragist, which attitude of mind he
attributed largely to a constant contact with women householders in his
capacity as tax collector. After the sale a public meeting was held… At
the close of the meeting many questions were asked, new members joined the
League…”
The authorities tried to auction off Kate Harvey’s goods on-site, at her
home, rather than in a public hall, so that they might avoid
demonstrations of that sort. “On
morning a band of Suffragist
men carried placards through the streets of Bromley, on which was the
device, ‘I personally protest against the sale of a woman’s goods to pay
taxes over which she has no control,’ and long before
, the time fixed for the
sale, from North, South, East and West, people came streaming into the
little town of Bromley, and made their way towards ‘Brackenhill.’
Punctually at the
tax-collector and his deputy mounted the table in the dining-room, and the
former, more in sorrow than in anger, began to explain to the crowd
assembled that this was a genuine sale! Mrs. Harvey at once protested
against the sale taking place. Simply and solely because she was a woman,
although she was a mother, a business woman, and a tax-payer, she had no
voice in saying how the taxes collected from her should be spent. The tax
collector suffered this speech in silence, but he could judge by the
cheers it received that there were many ardent sympathisers with Mrs.
Harvey in her protest. He tried to proceed, but one after another the men
present loudly urged that no one there should bid for the goods. The
tax-collector feebly said this wasn’t a political meeting, but a genuine
sale! ‘One penny for your goods then!’ was the derisive answer. ‘One
penny — one penny!’ was the continued cry from both inside and outside
‘Brackenhill.’ Then men protested that the tax-collector was not a genuine
auctioneer; he had no hammer, no list of goods to be sold was hung up in
the room. There was no catalogue, nothing to show bidders what was to be
sold and what wasn’t. The men also objected to the presence of the
tax-collector’s deputy. ‘Tell him to get down!’ they shouted. ‘The sale
shan’t proceed till he does,’ they yelled. ‘Get down! Get down:’ they
sang. But the tax-collector felt safer by the support of this deputy.
‘He’s afraid of his own clerk,’ they jeered. Again the tax-collector asked
for bids. ‘One penny! One penny!’ was the deafening response. The din
increased every moment and pandemonium reigned supreme. During a temporary
lull the tax-collector said a sideboard had been sold for nine guineas.
Angry cries from angry men greeted this announcement. ‘Illegal sale!’ ‘He
shan’t take it home!’ ‘The whole thing’s illegal!’ ‘You shan’t sell
anything else!’ and The Daily Herald Leaguers,
members of the Men’s Political Union, and of other men’s societies,
proceeded to make more noise than twenty brass bands. Darkness was quickly
settling in; the tax-collector looked helpless, and his deputy smiled
wearily. ‘Talk about a comic opera — it’s better than Gilbert and Sullivan
could manage,’ roared an enthusiast. ‘My word, you look sick, guv’nor!
Give it up, man!’ Then everyone shouted against the other until the
tax-collector said he closed the sale, remarking plaintively that he had
lost £7 over the job! Ironical cheers greeted this news, with ‘Serve you
right for stealing a woman’s goods!’ He turned his back on his tormentors,
and sat down in a chair on the table to think things over. The protesters
sat on the sideboard informing all and sundry that if anyone wanted to
take away the sideboard he should take them with it! With the exit of the
tax-collector, his deputy and the bailiff, things gradually grew quieter,
and later on Mrs. Harvey entertained her supporters to tea at the Bell
Hotel. But the curious thing is, a man paid nine guineas for the sideboard
to the tax-collector. Mrs. Harvey owed him more than £17, and Mrs. Harvey
is still in possession of the sideboard!”
“The assistant auctioneer, to whom it fell to conduct the sale, was most
unfriendly, and refused to allow any speaking during the sale; but Miss
Boyle was able to shout through a window at his back, just over his
shoulder, an announcement that the goods were seized because Miss Cummins
refused to submit to taxation without representation, after which quite a
number of people who were attending the sale came out to listen to the
speeches.”
“The auctioneer was very sympathetic, and allowed Miss [Anna] Munro to
make a short speech before the waggon was sold. He then spoke a few
friendly words for the Woman’s Movement. After the sale a meeting was
held, and Mrs. Tippett and Miss Munro were listened to with evident
interest by a large number of men. The Vote and
other Suffrage literature was sold.”
“A joint demonstration of the Tax Resisters’ League and militant
suffragettes, held here [Hastings]
as a protest against the sale of
the belongings of those who refused to pay taxes, was broken up by a mob.
The women were roughly handled and half smothered with soot. Their banners
were smashed. The police finally succeeded in getting the women into a
blacksmith’s shop, where they held the mob at bay until the arrival of
reinforcements. The women were then escorted to a railway station.”
“The auction sale of the Duchess of Bedford’s silver cup proved, perhaps,
the best advertisement the Women’s Tax Resistance League ever had. It was
made the occasion for widespread propaganda. The newspapers gave columns
of space to the event, while at the big mass meeting, held outside the
auction room…”
“When a member is to be sold up a number of her comrades accompany her to
the auction-room. The auctioneer is usually friendly and stays the
proceedings until some one of the league has mounted the table and
explained to the crowd what it all means. Here are the banners, and the
room full of women carrying them, and it does not take long to impress
upon the mind of the people who have come to attend the sale that here is
a body of women willing to sacrifice their property for the principle for
which John Hampden went to prison — that taxation without representation
is tyranny. … The women remain at these auctions until the property of the
offender is disposed of. The kindly auctioneer puts the property seized
from the suffragists early on his list, or lets them know when it will be
called.”
American war tax resisters
There have been a few celebrated auction sales in the American war tax resistance movement.
Some of them have been met with protests or used as occasions for outreach and propaganda, but others have been more actively interfered with.
When Ernest and Marion Bromley’s home was seized, for example, there were
“months of continuous picketing and leafletting” before the sale. Then:
The day began with a silent vigil initiated by the local Quaker group.
While the bids were being read inside the building, guerrilla theatre took place out on the sidewalk.
At one point the Federal building was auctioned (offers ranging from 25¢ to 2 bottle caps).
Several supporters present at the proceedings inside made brief statements about the unjust nature of the whole ordeal.
Waldo the Clown was also there, face painted sadly, opening envelopes along with the IRS person.
As the official read the bids and the names of the bidders, Waldo searched his envelopes and revealed their contents: a flower, a unicorn, some toilet paper, which he handed to different office people.
Marion Bromley also spoke as the bids were opened, reiterating that the seizure was based on fraudulent assumptions, and that therefore the property could not be rightfully sold.
The protests, odd as they were, eventually paid off, as the IRS had in the interim been caught improperly pursuing political dissidents, and as a result it decided to reverse the sale of the Bromley home and give up on that particular fight.
When Paul and Addie Snyder’s home was auctioned off for back taxes, it was
reported that “many bids of $1 or less were made.”
Making a bid of pennies for farm property being foreclosed for failure to meet mortgages was a common tactic among angry farmers during the Depression.
If their bids succeeded, the property was returned to its owner and the mortgage torn up.
In some such cases, entire farms plus their livestock, equipment and home furnishings sold for as little as $2.
When George Willoughby’s car was seized and sold by the IRS,
Friends, brandishing balloons, party horns, cookies and lemonade, invaded the IRS office in Chester and bought the car back for $900.
The Rebecca rioters
On a couple of occasions the Rebeccaites prevented auctions, though not of goods seized for tax debts but for ordinary debts.
Here are two examples from Henry Tobit Evans’s book on the Rebecca phenomenon:
A distress for rent was levied on the goods of a man named Lloyd… and a bailiff of the name of Rees kept possession of the goods.
Previous to the day of sale, Rebecca and a great number of her daughters paid him a visit, horsewhipped him well, and kept him in safe custody until the furniture was entirely cleared from the house.
When Rees was freed, he found nothing but an empty house, Rebecca and her followers having departed.
Two bailiffs were there in possession of the goods and chattels under execution… Having entered the house by bursting open the door, Rebecca ran upstairs, followed by some of her daughters.
She ordered the bailiffs, who were in bed at the time, to be up and going in five minutes, or to prepare for a good drubbing.
The bailiffs promptly obeyed, but were driven forth by a bodyguard of the rioters, who escorted them some distance, pushing and driving the poor men in front of them.
At last they were allowed to depart to their homes on a sincere promise of not returning.
Reform Act agitation
During the tax resistance that accompanied the drive to pass the Reform Act in the in the United Kingdom, hundreds of people signed pledges in which they declared that “they will not purchase the goods of their townsmen not represented in Parliament which may be seized for the non-payment of taxes, imposed by any House of Commons as at present constituted.”
The True Sun asserted that
The tax-gatherer… might seize for them, but the brokers assured the inhabitants that they would neither seize any goods for such taxes, nor would they purchase goods so seized.
Yesterday afternoon, Mr Philips, a broker, in the Broadway, Westminster, exhibited the following placard at the door of his shop:— “Take notice, that the proprietor of this shop will not distrain for the house and window duties, nor will he purchase any goods that are seized for the said taxes; neither will any of those oppressive taxes be paid for this house in future.” A similar notice was also exhibited at a broker’s shop in York Street, Westminster.
Another newspaper account said:
A sale by auction of goods taken in distress for assessed taxes was announced to take place at Ashton Tavern on , at Birmingham.
From forty to fifty persons attended, including some brokers, but no one could be found except the poor woman from whose husband the goods had been seized, and the auctioneer himself.
A man came when the sale was nearly over, who was perfectly ignorant of the circumstances under which it took place, and bid for one of the last lots; he soon received an intimation, however, from the company that he had better desist, which be accordingly did.
After the sale was over nearly the whole of the persons present surrounded this man, and lectured him severely upon his conduct, and it was only by his solemnly declaring to them that he had bid in perfect ignorance of the nature of the sale that he was suffered to escape without some more substantial proof of their displeasure.
Railroad bond shenanigans
There was an epidemic of fraud in the United States in in which citizens of local jurisdictions were convinced to vote to sell bonds to pay for the Railroad to come to town.
The railroad never arrived, but the citizens then were on the hook to tax themselves to pay off the bonds.
Many said “hell no,” but by then the bonds had been sold to people who were not necessarily involved in the original swindle but had just bought them as investments.
In the course of the tax resistance campaigns associated with these railroad
bond boondoggles, auction disruption was resorted to on some occasions. Here
are some examples:
St. Clair [Missouri]’s taxpayers joined the movement in to repudiate the debts, but the county’s new leaders wanted to repay the investors.
Afraid to try taxing the residents, they decided to raise the interest by staging a huge livestock auction in , the proceeds to pay off the railroad bond interest.
On auction day, however, “no one seemed to want to buy” any animals.
To bondholders the “great shock” of the auction’s failure proved the depth of local resistance to railroad taxes.
Another attempt was made the other day to sell farm property in the town of Greenwood, Steuben county [New York], on account of a tax levied for the town bonding in aid of railroads, and another failure has followed.
The scene was upon the farm of William Atkins, where 200 of the solid yeomanry of the town had assembled to resist the sale… A Mr. Updyke, with broader hint, made these remarks: “I want to tell you folks that Mr. Atkins has paid all of his tax except this railroad tax; and we consider any man who will buy our property to help John Davis and Sam Alley as contemptible sharks.
We shall remember him for years, and will know where he lives.” The tax collector finally rose and remarked that in view of the situation he would not attempt to proceed with the sale.
The White League in Louisiana
In Reconstruction-era Louisiana, white supremacist tax resisters disrupted a tax auction.
There was a mob of fifty or sixty armed men came to prevent the deputy tax-collector effecting a sale, armed with revolvers nearly all.
Mr. Fournet came and threatened the deputy and tax-collector.
The deputy and tax-collector ran into their offices.
I came down and called upon the citizens to clear the court-house, but could not succeed.
I then called upon the military, but they had no orders at that time to give me assistance to carry out the law.
Mr. [Valsin A.?] Fournet came with eight or ten.
When the deputy tax-collector attempted to make a sale Mr. Fournet raised his hand and struck him.
The deputy then shoved him down.
As soon as this was done forty, fifty, or sixty men came with their revolvers in hand.
…very few people attended tax-sales [typically], because the white people were organized to prevent tax-collection, and pledged themselves not to buy any property at tax-sales, and the property was generally bought by the State.
Miscellaneous
The First Boer War broke out in the aftermath of the successfully resisted
auction of a tax resister’s waggon. Paul Kruger wrote of the incident:
The first sign of the approaching storm was the incident that happened at the forced sale of Field Cornet Bezuidenhout’s waggon, on which a distress had been levied.
The British Government had begun to collect taxes and to take proceedings against those who refused to pay them.
Among these was Piet Bezuidenhout, who lived in the Potchefstroom District.
This refusal to pay taxes was one of the methods of passive resistance which were now employed towards the British Government.
Hitherto, many of the burghers had paid their taxes, declaring that they were only yielding to force.
But, when this was explained by the English politicians as though the population were contented and peacefully paying their taxes, some asked for a receipt showing that they were only paying under protest and others refused to pay at all.
The Government then levied a distress on Bezuidenhout’s waggon and sent it to public action at Potchefstroom.
Piet Cronjé, who became so well known in the last war, appeared at the auction with a number of armed Boers, who flung the bailiff from the waggon and drew the waggon itself back in triumph to Bezuidenhout’s farm.
When the U.S.
government seized Valentine Byler’s horse because of the Amish man’s
conscientious objection to paying into the social security system, no
other Amish would bid at the auction.
Between the Wars in Germany, the government had a hard time conducting
auctions of the goods of tax resisters. Ernst von Salomon writes:
Everywhere bailiff’s orders were being disobeyed.… Compulsory sales could not be held: when the young peasants of the riding club appeared at the scene of the auction on their horses and with music, nobody seemed willing to make a bid.
The carters refused, even with police protection, to carry off the distrained cattle, for they knew that if they did they would never again be able to do business with the peasants.
One day three peasants even appeared in the slaughter yards at Hamburg and announced that unless the distrained cattle disappeared at once from the yard’s stalls the gentlemen in charge of the slaughterhouse could find somewhere else to buy their beasts in the future — they wouldn’t be getting any more from Schleswig-Holstein.
Environmental activist Tim DeChristopher disrupted a Bureau of Land
Management auction by making winning bids on everything that he
had no intention of honoring.
During the Poujadist disruptions in France, “They also took to spiking
forced tax sales by refusing to bid until the auctioneer had lowered the
price of whatever was up for sale to a laughably small figure. Thus a tax
delinquent might buy back his own shop for, say 10 cents. At an auction
the other day, a brand-new car went for one franc, or less than one-third
of a cent.”
in roughly the same region
of France:
It was in the south where the wine growers refuse to pay taxes to the government.
A farmer had had half a dozen rabbits sent him by a friend; he refused to pay duty on them, whereupon they control or local customs tried to sell the six “original” rabbits and their offspring at auction.
The inhabitants have now boycotted the auction sales so that the local officials must feed the rabbits till the case is settled by the courts.
In York, Pennsylvania in , a group
“surrounded the crier and forbid any person purchasing when the property
which had been seized was offered for sale. A cow which had been in the
hands of the collector was driven away by the rioters.”
In the Dutch West Indies in “The
household effects of a physician who refused to pay the tax were offered
for sale at auction today by the Government. Although the building in
which the sale was held was crowded, there were no bids and the articles
were not sold.”
In Tasmania, in , “Large quantities of
goods were seized, and lodged in the Commissariat Store [but] Lawless mobs
paraded the streets, tore down fences, and, arming themselves with rails
and batons, smashed windows and doors.… The fence round the Commissariat
Store was torn down…”
During the Bardoli tax strike, “There were meetings in talukas contiguous
to Bardoli, not only in British territory, but also in the Baroda
territory, for expression of sympathy with the Satyagrahis and calling
upon people in their respective parts not to cooperate with the
authorities engaged in putting down the Satyagraha… by bidding for any
forfeited property that may be put to auction by the authorities.”
Some tax resistance campaigns have accompanied their resistance with petitions to the government asking it to change its policies or to rescind the tax.
Here are some examples:
Some 14,000 American Amish petitioned Congress, putting aside that sect’s usual reluctance to participate in political affairs and asking the government to exempt them from the Social Security program, participation in which they felt was anti-Christian.
At the same time, some Amish were actively resisting the tax and suffering from government reprisals.
Congress eventually did carve out an exemption for the Amish and certain other sects.
American Quaker meetings frequently petitioned state legislatures when those bodies were considering laws that would force conscientious objectors to pay a fine or to hire a substitute — neither of which Quakers felt they could conscientiously do.
Here are two examples: from and .
On one occasion, American Quakers successfully petitioned the government to call off unscrupulous tax collectors who were seizing their property to pay such fines, in amounts that far exceeded the amount of the fine, and keeping the surplus (or sometimes the whole amount) for themselves.
In several Quakers wrote to the Pennsylvania Assembly to tell them they would be unwilling to pay a tax that body was contemplating for “purposes inconsistent with the peaceable testimony we profess.”
African-American entrepreneur Paul Cuffee petitioned the Massachusetts legislature in and to complain that he was not permitted to vote, although he was a taxpayer — and he backed this up by refusing to pay.
His petition arrived at a time when the state Constitution was in flux, and may have helped influence its drafters to omit a clause restricting voting to white citizens.
The Benares Hartal in , began with “the people deserting the city in a body, and taking up their station halfway between Benares and Secrole, the residence of the European functionaries, about three miles distant.
A petition was presented to the magistrate, praying him to withdraw the odious impost, and declaring that the petitioners would never return to their homes until their application was complied with.”
Before launching the Bardoli tax strike, representatives from the Indian civil disobedience movement petitioned the government, asking patiently for the concessions they would later demand via satyagraha.
The Rebecca Rioters, with their pseudonymous campaign of midnight toll-gate destruction, had the government nearly begging them to present a list of grievances they could at least pretend to address.
Many groups of Welsh farmers did meet and draft lists of grievances.
A London Times reporter gained the confidence of one Rebeccaite assembly, and set out their grievances in the form of a Times article describing the meeting.
Another group of farmers met to draft a petition of their grievances which they sent to a government representative via a trusted intermediary.
On at least one occasion a group of parishes had petitioned the Turnpike Trust that ran one of the offending toll gates to remove it, before it was destroyed by Rebecca and her daughters.
During the 17th century Croquant tax rebellions in France, the rebels carefully worded petitions to the king that assumed his benevolence and that the tax hikes must have been snuck past his royal highness by deceitful advisors.
In , nonconformists in Massachusetts successfully petitioned the King to free imprisoned resisters to a tax meant for the establishment church there, and to affirm that Quakers should not have to pay taxes to maintain the ministers of another church.
Abby Smith addressed the Glastonbury town council in to explain why she would not be paying her property tax to politicians who took advantage of her voteless state.
A newspaper obtained and publisher her speech, saying that “Abby Smith and her sister as truly stand for the American principle as did the citizens who ripped open the tea chests in Boston Harbor, or the farmers who leveled their muskets at Concord.”
Soon the Smith case became a cause célèbre nationwide.
During the Annuity Tax struggle in Edinburgh, Scotland, “40,000 citizens of Edinburgh petitioned the House of Commons for [the Tax’s] abolition.
The town council, the magistrates of Canongate, the Merchant Company, the Anti-state-church and the Anti-annuity-tax Associations, all exerted themselves with the legislature and the government to procure its repeal…”
The hut tax war in Sierra Leone was preceded by petitions from a variety of groups there asking the government to rescind the tax, and explaining why the tax was felt to be particularly offensive.
In this case, the petitioning may have backfired, as the government stubbornly pushed forward with the tax, but, forewarned of opposition by the petitions, it “came to the conclusion that the exercise of force, peremptory, rapid, and inflexible, was the element to be relied on in making the scheme of taxation a success.”
A tax resistance campaign can benefit its recruiting efforts, engage public sympathy, and constrain the response of the government, by getting a good spin out in the media.
Here are some examples:
The Bardoli tax strike was media savvy, both in terms of national establishment media, and in terms of local, down-to-earth outreach methods:
“A campaign like this could not be carried out without a publicity department,” wrote Mahadev Desai.
“The peasants could not be asked to subscribe to daily papers or even to the weekly Navajivan, and outside papers could at best give an outside view of the campaign.
… The arrangement was to issue a daily news bulletin and publish Sjt. Vallabhbhai’s speeches in pamphlet form and to distribute them free to the agriculturalists all over the taluka.
… The arrangement answered most admirably, the villagers waiting anxiously for the patrikas every morning and devouring the contents with avidity.
All the Gujarati and almost all the English dailies of Bombay reproduced them verbatim, and as the movement gathered force, every important town and village in Gujarat began to get copies of the bulletin with the result that over and above ten thousand copies distributed in Bardoli, four thousand copies were subscribed to by places outside.”
In the course of describing the organizational structure of the nonviolent resistance army, Mahadev Desai noted: “[U]nder these officers were privates ready to march anywhere and everywhere, at any hour of the night and day, and ready to do the lowliest of duties, from carrying a message to drawing water from the well.
… The round of duties of most of them began often as early as 3 A.M., when they started with their orders for the day to the various villages where they would distribute the daily news bulletins issued by the Publicity Bureau.
… All were to go amongst the peasants, acquaint themselves with their needs and difficulties, cheer them up, and explain to them the instructions of the Chief.”
Mahadev Desai continues: “And at the head of them all the Sardar, ever on the move, without haste and without rest, ever vigilant, his iron discipline ever unrelaxed, paying the penalty of his exclusive prerogative — speech-making — often at midnight, and often at three or four places in a day.”
… “The Bardoli victory was not won by a miracle.
It was the inevitable fruit of patient and incessant toil, the inevitable result of the teaching that the Sardar wore himself out to impart day in and day out.
During the first two months he gave three days in the week to Bardoli, but as soon as the Ahmedabad Municipality released him, all his waking hours were given to the people of Bardoli, the day usually beginning at 5 P.M. and ending at 2 A.M., with four or five speeches a day on average.”
The case of Valentine Byler, an Amish man who refused to participate in the American Social Security system for conscientious reasons, was notable for how it played out in the media.
Part of this was due to the clumsy heavy-handedness of the IRS, which seized Byler’s horses out from under him literally as he was working his field.
Asked about this, the IRS Chief of Collections said: “Plowing never occurred to me.
I live in an apartment.”
The frame of thoughtless-urban-bureaucrats vs. godly-heartland-people attached itself to the story, and editorialists across the country who were already skeptical of welfare state policies jumped on it.
“What kind of ‘welfare’ is it,” wrote the New York Herald Tribune, “that takes a farmer’s horses away at spring plowing time in order to dragoon a whole community into a ‘benefit’ scheme it neither needs nor wants, and which offends its deeply held religious scruples?”
Byler got letters of support from around the country.
And Congress eventually felt enough of the pressure that it carved out an exception for the Amish exempting them from the Social Security law.
Abby and Julia Smith, who were taxed excessively by an unscrupulous local government for which they, as women, had no voice in electing, knew how to make their struggle attractive to the news media.
Julia prepared a speech for the town council, which fell on deaf ears — but she then released it to the editor of a nearby newspaper, which reprinted it and compared the sisters’ actions to those American Revolutionaries who fought for the principle of “no taxation without representation.”
An accompanying editorial concluded: “It will not be creditable if Abby Smith and her sister are left to stand alone… to fight the battle of principle unaided.”
Sure enough, they found support — rhetorical and practical — from many quarters.
“[M]uch of the nation’s interest in the Glastonbury case was the work of Abby,” wrote Elizabeth George Speare in recapping the case, “who willingly took pen in hand to keep her public informed.
Though she once reminded a Toledo editor that she could not give quite so much time to answering such distant requests, she seems to have welcomed every opportunity to recount, in her pungent style, a tale which lost nothing in constant retelling.”
The Women’s Tax Resistance League in Britain made sure to have speeches and propaganda ready to deliver at any events — such as tax auctions — that the media might cover.
Such speeches might form the core of an overtaxed reporter’s coverage of such an event.
When Dora Montefiore barricaded her home against the tax collector in , she recalled:
In a bailiff had been put in my house, a levy of my goods had been made, and they had been sold at public auction in Hammersmith.
The result as far as publicity was concerned was half a dozen lines in the corner of some daily newspapers, stating the fact that Mrs. Montefiore’s goods had been distrained and sold for payment of income tax; and there the matter ended.
When talking this over in with Theresa Billington and Annie Kenney, I told them that now we had the organisation of the W.S.P.U. to back me up I would, if it were thought advisable, not only refuse to pay income tax, but would shut and bar my doors and keep out the bailiff, so as to give the demonstration more publicity and thus help to educate public opinion about the fight for the political emancipation of women which was going on.
They agreed that if I would do my share of passive resistance they would hold daily demonstrations outside the house as long as the bailiff was excluded and do all in their power outside to make the sacrifice I was making of value to the cause.…
…From the day of this simple act of closing my door against the bailiff, an extraordinary change came over the publicity department of daily and weekly journalism towards this demonstration of passive resistance on my part…
On the morning following the inauguration of the siege, Annie Kenney and Theresa Billington, with other members of the W.S.P.U., came round to see how we were getting on and to encourage our resistance.
They were still chatting from the pavement outside, while I stood on the steps of No. 32 Upper Mall, when there crept round from all sides men with notebooks and men with cameras, and the publicity stunt began.
These men had been watching furtively the coming and going of postmen and tradesmen.
Now they posted themselves in front, questioning the suffragists outside and asking for news of us inside.
They had come to make a “story” and they did not intend to leave until they had got their “story.”
One of them returned soon with a loaf of bread and asked Annie Kenney to hand it up over the wall to my housekeeper, whilst the army of men with cameras “snapped” the incident.
Some of them wanted to climb over the wall so as to be able to boast in their descriptions that they had been inside what they pleased to call “The Fort”; but the policeman outside (there was a policeman on duty outside during all the six weeks of a siege) warned them that they must not do this so we were relieved, in this respect, from the too close attention of eager pressmen.
But all through the morning notebooks and cameras came and went, and at one time my housekeeper and I counted no less than twenty-two pressmen outside the house.
A woman sympathiser in the neighbourhood brought during the course of the morning, a pot of home-made marmalade, as the story had got abroad that we had no provisions and had difficulty in obtaining food.
This was never the case as I am a good housekeeper and have always kept a store cupboard, but we accepted with thanks the pot of marmalade because the intentions of the giver were so excellent; but this incident was also watched and reported by the Press.
When I read stories from newspaper archives about the tax strike in Beit Sahour during the first intifada, I’m struck with how much more sympathetic the English-language press was toward the Palestinian people at that time.
They are depicted as human beings, with families and aspirations, and their grievances are taken seriously and explored and analyzed and given credence.
The contrast with the coverage in today’s media is stark.
Beit Sahour was a high water mark of sorts.
This can partially be explained by the fact that most of the resisters were Palestinian Christians, and so did not trigger the anti-Muslim bias that shapes much of the English-language reporting from the area — one news account made much of the fact that the Israeli military had seized “Christian crosses carved of olivewood and the statuettes of the Good Shepherd and the Madonna” from one resister.
But the resisters were also very deliberately media savvy: they stuck to nonviolent tactics, which, besides being tactically sensible under the circumstances, also made the draconian Israeli crackdown seem particularly bullying; and they used slogans, like “no taxation without representation” that could not help but fall on sympathetic ears in the English-speaking world.
Another article noted that when the Israeli military lifted its siege of Beit Sahour, “hundreds of residents gathered at a central intersection to celebrate and to escort journalists to homes and shops from which troops had seized goods.”
During the campaign against Margaret Thatcher’s poll tax, the very name “poll tax” was a propaganda coup.
Thatcher had launched the tax under the benign name “community charge,” but the opposition movement used “poll tax” right off the bat, and the name stuck.
That name had resonance with anti-poll tax campaigns of the past, dating back as far as the rebellion of Wat Tyler.
The movement also pitted the government against pensioners, the disabled, student nurses, families with live-in elderly relatives, and other such victims that made for a sympathetic media narrative.
“Stories like this flooded both the national and local media,” writes movement historian Danny Burns.
“One minute the focus was on the nurses, next on the disabled, then on the pensioners.”
The IRS includes a publicity strategy with their enforcement actions, and grades itself with how much publicity it gets when it cracks down on a tax evader, thus “sending the message to taxpayers that violations of the Internal Revenue Code and related financial crimes are being investigated and prosecuted.”
Since the IRS is already doing the work to make sure the press is aware of the action, and of course giving out their own spin, it makes sense for tax resisters to be prepared with their own message.
“Never let a lien, levy, seizure, auction, summons, Order to Show Cause, or indictment pass without taking the opportunity to publicize opposition,” advise the authors of the book War Tax Resistance: A Guide to Withholding Your Support from the Military.
“The IRS is very sensitive to adverse public opinion.
It is probably the most disliked agency of the government.
You may be surprised at the amount of support and sympathy you will get from the general public and media when struggling against the IRS — if you take care to organize properly.”
NWTRCC has some ideas on how to make a bigger media splash, including propaganda leaflets, props & costumes, theatrical protest ideas, penny polls, tax form burnings, bake sales, banners, vigils, and so forth.
Some tax resistance campaigns have had their own anthems or fight songs.
Mahadev Desai, in The Story of Bardoli, mentions such songs on a few occasions:
I paid a visit along with Sjt. Vallabhbhai to one of these [Raniparaj] villages.
… The young women, who had taken the Khadi pledge three years ago in the presence of Gandhiji and shed their trinkets and heavy brass ornaments, were all there in spotlessly white Khadi, brimming over with joy and lustily singing Satyagraha songs.
The mention of the Satyagraha songs reminds me of one or two things that happened during the month.
… Phulchandbhai had already some songs ready, and the atmosphere in the taluka gave him the inspiration for many more.
These friends were posted at Valod, and thanks to their bhajans they were in great demand everywhere.
The plain and homely songs spread the message of Satyagraha in a most effective manner, and men, women, and children had them on their lips.
One cannot speak too highly of the part played in the movement by Phulchandbhai and his songs.
I shall describe one of the scenes.
We visited Nani Phalod, a small village, at about 9 p.m. There was a huge procession of men and women, the former singing Satyagraha songs, and the latter singing a song from an old saint of which the refrain was: “All our sorrows have ended, now that the Master has come.”
There were huge meetings everywhere, attended by hundreds of women, laying heaps of [homespun] yarn before Sjt. Vallabhbhai, as in , and lustily singing bhajans.
The invincible spirit of the people evidenced everywhere was bound to exasperate the officials even more.
The women of Varad… had their own songs, some of them being old songs of the saints and some composed by themselves to suit the fight in which they were engaged, and tacked on to the originals.
One of these songs sung soulfully by them ran:
With full knowledge take up your arms even like a Gnani (seer).
Let Purity and Contentment be your armour and Courage your shield.
The valiant shall rush to the forefront, the laggards will be beaten and will take to their heels.
With full knowledge, therefore, take up the fight like the Gnani.
The path of fight is not strewn with roses.
It is sharp as the edge of the sword, for it is the fight for Truth.
Let us therefore be wide awake like the Gnani.
With full knowledge etc.
The tyrant has run amok and crushed the ryot under his heels.
We slumbered so long, we have now found our Guru and are blessed with knowledge.
With full knowledge etc.
He has taught us to pit righteousness and truth against oppression and injustice.
God is sure to run to the rescue of right and vanquish the wrong.
With full knowledge etc.
Vallabhbhai our leader assures us that ultimately victory is ours.
Let us therefore keep our pledge.
With full knowledge etc.
The boycotts and tax strikes of the American Revolution also had their songs.
When patriots gathered to spin home-spun yarn, the work would be accompanied by “many stirring tunes, anthems, and liberty songs,” such as the following:
Young ladies in town, and those that live round, Let a friend at this season advise you; Since money’s so scarce, and times growing worse, Strange things may soon hap and surprise you.
First, then, throw aside your topknots of pride; Wear none but your own country linen; Of economy boast, let your pride be the most To show clothes of your own make and spinning.
What if homespun they say is not quite so gay As brocades, yet be not in a passion, For when once it is known this is much worn in town, One and all will cry out— ’Tis the fashion!
And, as one, all agree, that you’ll not married be To such as will wear London factory, But at first sight refuse, tell ’em such you will choose As encourage our own manufactory.
No more ribbons wear, nor in rich silks appear; Love your country much better than fine things; Begin without passion, ’twill soon be the fashion To grace your smooth locks with a twine string.
Throw aside your Bohea, and your Green Hyson tea, And all things with a new-fashion duty; Procure a good store of the choice Labrador, For there’ll soon be enough here to suit you.
These do without fear, and to all you’ll appear, Fair, charming, true, lovely and clever; Though the times remain darkish, young men may be sparkish, And love you much stronger than ever.
Then make yourselves easy, for no one will teaze ye, Nor tax you, if chancing to sneer At the sense-ridden tools, who think us all fools; But they’ll find the reverse far and near.
The modern American war tax resistance movement has in recent years managed to collect its own funk anthem (“What If We All Stopped Paying Taxes?” by Sharon Jones and the Dap Kings):
I was talking to a friend of mine Said he don’t want no wars no more They’re building bombs while our schools are falling Tell me what in the hell we’re paying taxes for
What if we all stopped paying taxes? Now, what if we all stopped paying taxes? Stop paying taxes y’all
Now tell me who’s gonna buy their bombs Their tanks, their planes and all their guns Well, tell me who’s gonna pay for their wars If we all get together and cut their funds
Hey, listen people, listen to what I’ve got to say What if we all stopped paying taxes?
folk song (“Don’t Be Afraid of the Neo-Cons” by Norman Blake):
Don’t send your money to Washington To fight a war that’s never done Don’t play their games don’t be their pawns And don’t be afraid of the neo-cons
and rap (“Uncle Sam Goddamn” by Brother Ali):
You don’t give money to the bums On the corner with a sign, bleeding from their gums. Talking about you don’t support a crackhead — What you think happens to the money from yo taxes?
Shit, the government’s an addict With a billion dollar a week kill-brown-people habit And even if you ain’t on the front line When the master yell crunch time you right back at it
You ain’t look at how you hustling backwards And the end of the year add up what they subtracted: 3 outta twelve months your salary Paid for that madness… man that’s sadness
War tax resister Joan Baez was fond of including the Whiskey Rebellion celebration tune “Copper Kettle” in her concerts.
Get you a copper kettle Get you a copper coil Cover with new made corn mash And never more you’ll toil
You just lay there by the juniper While the moon is bright Watch them jugs a-fillin’ In the pale moonlight
Build your fires of hickory Hickory or ash or oak Don’t use no green or rotten wood They’ll catch you by the smoke
My daddy he made whiskey My granddaddy did to We ain’t paid no whiskey tax Since !
When a youth activist group joined war tax resisters at a recent Tax Day demonstration at the Oakland federal building, they brought their lyrical skills along:
People, People, People, can’t you see? They kill around the world with tax money. Stealing from workers how there money’s made, I guess that’s why we’re broke and they’re so paid!
People, People, People, can’t you see? They tax the poor more, the rich stay greedy. No money for health or to educate, I guess that’s why we’re broke and they’re so paid!
On-line, you can see some of the rehearsal video showing how they combined the lyrics with pantomime to drive the point home.
At another American “Tax Day” protest, this one in St. Louis in , war tax resisters at the federal building sang a protest song with lyrics like these:
For the cost of cluster bombs that maim and leave to bleed our kids could have more teachers helping them to read
Tax resisters against the British colonial government in Ghana had a fight song for the occasion:
Cannon they have loaded, but couldn’t fire, Cannon they have loaded, but couldn’t fire. Whitemen dishonestly imposed poll-tax on the blacks. The poll-tax we will never pay, the grandees never deliver up, Go tell the white man to come out!
Luzerne County, Pennsylvania is home to an unusually corrupt government culture (or maybe it’s just that they got caught).
Federal authorities charged 23 county residents with various corruption charges, including three judges and a county commissioner.
But then the county government decided to hike taxes by 10%.
Fred Heller said no.
Why fund a nest of crooks?
He recorded a protest song titled “Take This Tax and Shove It” and started a campaign to get county residents to refuse to pay their taxes, at least until the government stables have had all their manure shoveled out.
Excerpts:
Take this tax and shove it We ain’t paying you crooks no more The good ol’ boys stole all our cash And ran out the courthouse door
Residents in Castine, Maine, upset at their local taxes being siphoned off by state politicians, started a tax resistance campaign and accompanied it by protest songs:
Write me a song of the Revolution, ’cause that’s what it’s gonna be. Write me a song of the Revolution, ’cause that’s what’s in store for me! I can’t sit by and watch this country go right down the drain. I gotta stand firm on the Constitution and stay aboard the freedom train.
When Meo farmers killed a tax collector during a tax strike aimed at the British-backed Maharaja in , they commemorated the occasion with a song:
Rebels in the open the Meos did then rejoice They conferred among themselves and spoke in a single voice Your názim’s dead and ever since we aren’t ruled by any prince To London by now you should’ve fled, and do take along your dead.
