Tax resistance in the “Peace Churches” →
Quakers →
20th–21st century Quakers →
Rosa Packard
It’s in the United States — the deadline for filing our personal federal income tax returns.
In a few minutes, I’m going to head across the bay to meet up with Berkeley’s notorious squadron of Code Pink protesters at the Marine Corps recruiting center.
From there, the crew will march to the main Oakland post office to remind the last-minute filers what they’re paying for.
War tax resisters nationwide are having deductions taken from their fifteen minutes of fame , as the news media take advantage of the Tax Day angle to swing the lens their way.
Amy Goodman’s Democracy Now show is broadcasting from Portland, Oregon , and it features war tax resisters Pat & John Schwiebert, Portland locals who have been resisting taxes for .
(You can hear the show on-line — the Schwiebert segment starts at about 12:49.)
LoHud.com out of New York takes a look at war tax resisters there, including Ethan & Rima Vesely-Flad, Chad Murdock, Frederick Dettmer, Rosa Packard, Daniel Taylor Jenkins, and Hugh & Sirkka Barbour.
Tax resistance is the most direct way U.S. citizens can avoid being complicit in this war and other illegal activities and actions by government employees and agencies.
If all of us who have written our Congresspersons or taken to the streets also refuse to financially back the war and other illegal activities and actions of the government, the decision-makers in Washington have a much harder time ignoring our resistance.
War tax resistance in the Friends Journal in
War tax resistance was largely found in infrequent mentions in the back pages of the Friends Journal in .
an ad in the issue of Friends Journal holds out the hope that the end of the dilemma of Quakers paying for war is just a quick law away
The issue noted a new information sheet that had been put together by “National Campaign for a Peace Tax Fund, New Call to Peacemaking, Church of the Brethren, Mennonite Central Committee, and the War Tax Concerns Support Committee of Philadelphia Yearly Meeting” called Stages of Conscientious Objection to Military Taxes that listed “five steps to ending one’s own contribution to the war machine.”
(Here is the edition of the sheet.)
That same issue included a review of a murder mystery, Quaker Testimony by Irene Allen, whose victim was “a young woman being evicted from her home for nonpayment of taxes.”
On , Quaker war tax resister Gordon Browne addressed a letter to the judge hearing his and his wife’s case in which they were encouraging the court to find that the Religious Freedom Restoration Act required the government to make concessions for religiously-motivated conscientious objectors to military taxation.
This letter, and an accompanying article by Browne, did not appear in the Journal until
After years as military tax refusers, during which we experienced the usual seizures of assets by the Internal Revenue Service, Edith Browne and I felt that the passage of the Restoration of Religious Freedom Act might provide us some relief.
Past court decisions had made clear that exemptions from such taxes on the grounds of conscientious objection to participation in war or in preparation for war would be denied.
The new act, however, suggested that we might be exempted from the interest and penalties routinely added to whatever the IRS claimed we owed.
We filed for refunds, therefore, for the interest and penalties for the years , and, when the refunds were denied, brought suit in Federal District Court in Vermont for their recovery.
Though we had filed our case independently of any others, we soon learned that Priscilla Adams in Pennsylvania and Rosa Packard in New York, both, like us, Quakers, had filed similar suits in their areas.
In responding to the three suits, the attorneys for the IRS linked them, responding, for example, to our suit by alleging to the court that we had followed a practice in our tax refusal which was Rosa Packard’s method, not ours.
The government moved for dismissal without a hearing, and our case was dismissed, as Priscilla Adams’ case had been earlier in Tax Court and as Rosa Packard’s was subsequently in District Court.
Feeling that we had not been heard, we have filed an appeal.
A relative novice in legal proceedings, I was struck by the fact that the legitimate requirement of objectivity in dealing with legal matters risks the depersonalization of the search for justice, which is, after all, about human beings, both as individuals and in community.
With our case decided in Vermont (the Appeals Court is in New York), I felt a strong need to write to our Vermont judge as a person.
I did so but have received no response.
For those who might be interested, I offer below what my letter said.
I omit the judge’s name and address, lest some generous Friends be tempted to write to him on our behalf.
I did not write with the purpose of applying political pressure but to try to establish a personal link.
Edith Browne and I are not familiar with legal practices, our present case asking the refund of penalties and interest charged by the Internal Revenue Service being the first case we have ever been involved in.
It is my understanding, however, that having accepted the government’s motion to dismiss our petition, you are no longer involved in the case, and it will not be improper for me to write to you about it.
Naturally, we were disappointed with your decision and are appealing it to another court, in part because we felt the decision distorted what we have done and said and partly because we feel certain that it was the intention of the authors of the First Amendment to the Constitution and of the recent Restoration of Religious Freedom Act to make room in our national community for views such as ours.
That certainty is a source of great pride to us.
We know that there are many places in the world where a claim such as ours not only would have no status but might place the claimants themselves in danger.
We have been in such places for varying lengths of time: in Greece under the fascist colonels; in Turkey when it was under martial law because of terrorist bombings; in Colombia when it was under martial law because of assassinations of members of the judiciary; in South Africa under apartheid, where even to visit our coreligionists in Soweto without government permission made us and our friends liable to arrest.
We are grateful for the individual freedoms we citizens of the United States enjoy.
To us, one of the most important of these is freedom of conscience, provided for in the “exercise” section of the First Amendment.
The founders of our nation knew about its need from painful experience in the religious wars and persecutions that were so often a curse in Europe.
Further, they had seen the effort to import such ills to the New World.
Four members of our own religious denomination, Quakers, were hanged on Boston Common and 14 more were waiting in prison for such treatment when Charles Ⅱ ordered the Puritan authorities to end such executions.
That did not prevent, however, their continuing to exile Quakers and others who held differing religious views from theirs or, in the case of many Quakers, to whip them out of the colony at the tail of a cart, or to bore hot irons through the tongues of those who had tried to preach in public, or to cut off their ears.
All of those things were done to Quakers in the Massachusetts Bay Colony.
That history is not pretty, but it made our forebears sensitive to the rights of conscience.
For more than 30 years, Edith and I, seeking to fulfill both our civic responsibilities and our understanding of God’s will for us, have paid our full tax, sending that part intended for the Department of Defense to life-affirming and life-supporting organizations.
We cannot in conscience pay for war or its preparation.
During that long period, the IRS has seized our assets to pay that part we sent elsewhere and imposed, in addition, interest and penalties.
This has meant that we annualy paid some of our taxes twice, once to life-supporting organizations and again to the IRS when our funds were seized.
We knew no way out of this situation, except to suffer it.
When the Restoration of Religious Freedom Act was passed we thought that, at last, we might be spared those penalties and that interest, which, to us, seemed to be saying, in denial of our finest American traditions of religious freedom, “Every conscience has its price.
How much is yours?”
In your opinion, you suggested, as Patrick Leahy has in correspondence with me when I have sought his help in providing legislative relief, that consideration of matters of conscience in regard to taxes would result in chaos.
We are not aware of chaos resulting from the legislative provisions for conscientious objectors to conscription of their bodies.
Wise legislators seemed to us to provide for conscientious objectors to conscription of their resources through the Restoration of Religious Freedom Act.
And if it is chaos we fear, what chaos is worse than that resulting from war?
I did not write this letter intending to argue our case, though I guess, perhaps, I have.
I really do mean to leave that to the lawyers.
Rather, I wrote to ask who will defend liberty of conscience if individuals like us and the courts do not.
There are always those among us who would impose their religious views on everyone else if they could, just as there are those who would insist that religion provides no legitimate exceptions in consideration of public policy.
It has been the genius of our system to try to provide a balance between those extremes that infringes on the freedoms of no one.
I enclose two [several] pages from the Book of Faith and Practice of New England Yearly Meeting of Friends.
It is the volume that describes the experience of Friends and the practices arising from those experiences to which most Friends subscribe.
I hope you will find them interesting and informative.
I particularly call your attention to the story of William Rotch of Nantucket.
Like him, if we are in error, we are to be pitied, but, also, like him, we can do no other than we are.
A history of the Atlanta, Georgia, Meeting during the Vietnam War that appeared in the issue mentioned that the Meeting had “refused to pay the ten percent war tax imposed on telephone bills.”
That issue also noted that the National Campaign for a Peace Tax Fund was still doggedly gnawing away at the federal bureaucracy, this time meeting “with tax policy officials at the Department of the Treasury” to try to persuade them that the law would be in their interests and that they should override IRS objections to the bill.
In the course of a book review in the same issue, Errol Hess remembered his “struggles with my own complicity in the [Vietnam] war by virtue of paying taxes that supported it; [and] my decision to go into the underground economy, to live cheaply, to refuse to comply with the IRS as I’d refused to comply with my draft board.”
The Baltimore Yearly Meeting met in .
A report in the Journal noted: “Frank and Elizabeth Massey’s testimony against war taxes led to an ‘opportunity’ on the doorstep of the yearly meeting office with an Internal Revenue Service agent, an explanation of its basis in faith.
We continue to struggle with how best to provide practical support to these leadings.”
The issue included this note about questionable tactics by IRS collection agents:
The Internal Revenue Service cashed a photocopy of a check from a Quaker war-tax resister.
Grace Montgomery of Stamford-Greenwich (Conn.) Meeting has tried to resolve this issue for several years.
Montgomery places the military portion of her federal income tax in a Friends escrow account.
The IRS then usually levies her bank account for the amount owed.
But in the IRS cashed a photocopy of Montgomery’s check to the escrow account.
Her bank accepted it even though it was not genuine and was made out to “The Religious Society of Friends.”
(From The Mennonite, )
An obituary notice for Richard M. Johnson in the same issue noted that “Dick found himself philosophically opposed to the idea of paying income and war taxes, and he and [his wife] Cynthia chose to resign their jobs and live out their lives on a nontaxable income as subsistence homesteaders.
They moved to Monroe, Maine, along with three of their four children, where they helped establish a community land trust.”
War tax resistance in the Friends Journal in
The issues of Friends Journal had a few mentions of war tax resistance and an extensive debate about the wisdom of supporting the Religious Freedom Peace Tax Fund act.
The issue mentioned that J.E. McNeil had been named the head of the National Interreligious Service Board for Conscientious Objectors, and that her legal experience had included “cases involving war tax refusers and conscientious objectors to military service.”
The issue included an article about the Monteverde community in Costa Rica, which was founded by American Quakers who fled the United States in part to avoid paying military taxes there.
Excerpts:
Many Friends know about Monteverde, the Quaker community established in Costa Rica in .
“They came here to be free to practice religion in the way they felt was important.”
They wanted no military taxes.
They wanted to send their children to Quaker schools and to bring them up with a good sense of priorities, away from materialism and militarism.
Some came out of a sense of adventure.
Four of them had just spent time in prison for their beliefs.
They wrote: “We hope to discover through Divine Guidance a way of life which would seek the good of each member of the community and live in a way that will naturally lead to peace rather than war.”
[At the trial of four Quaker conscientious objectors to draft registration], the judge said, “If you are not willing to defend this country, you should leave.”
They decided to do just that but had to wait until their jail sentences were over.
One couple in the meeting had visited Costa Rica, and several families had already been thinking of moving there.
Besides being a fairly prosperous and democratic country, and not very crowded, Costa Rica abolished its army in .
Forty-one people from the meeting eventually moved there, including the teacher of the meeting’s private school.
“We were looking for a peaceful place to raise our families without being involved in the military preparedness of the United States,” recalls Marvin Rockwell.
Marvin Rockwell ran the Flor Mar Pension, a simple hostel-like bed-and-breakfast with a pleasant restaurant serving delicious food.
He says he was never disappointed in the hopes he had when he moved to Costa Rica.
“Costa Ricans are a friendly, helpful people.”
He smiles, “And I do not feel bad at all paying taxes in Costa Rica.
The largest item in the tax budget is for education.”
In the same issue, Chuck Hosking (in the course of a larger article on ethical investing), said: “If I hadn’t had to start an IRA to lower my income below the taxable minimum (to avoid financing U.S. militarism), I would have put these retirement savings in the same place we’ve put most of our contingency savings — into no-interest loans to American Friends Service Committee and Right Sharing of World Resources.”
In there was a “Religion & Social Issues Forum” titled “Building a Culture of Peace” at the Pendle Hill Quaker conference center.
Among the speakers at the conference was Gordon Browne, who “told of his experiences as a ‘military tax refuser’ for over thirty years” during “a session on how Friends can make a personal difference today.”
The issue commented on the Rosa Packard legal case:
The U.S. Supreme Court has refused to hear a Quaker appeal of Internal Revenue Service penalties on religious practice.
Rosa Packard, a Greenwich, Conn., Quaker, had challenged the authority of the IRS to penalize her for religiously based non-payment of war-related federal income raxes.
For the last 18 years Packard has filed her income tax return, notifying the IRS by an attached letter that her core religious beliefs prevent her from paying a tax if any part of the money collected from her is used to fund war or preparation for war.
Every year she has placed the full amount of her taxes, as her letter to the IRS states, in trust for the government in an escrow account maintained by Purchase (N.Y.) Quarterly Meeting.
In Packard requested that the federal government waive the discretionary penalties imposed by the IRS for late payment and failure to pay estimated taxes.
Packard appealed the lower court’s dismissal of this request to the Supreme Court.
An obituary notice for Richard R. Catlett in the same issue noted that “Richard was a founding member of Columbia Meeting and an active war rax resister, for which he was imprisoned briefly about 25 years ago.
In his war tax resistance, he was supported by both Illinois Yearly Meeting and Columbia Meeting, which held an open meeting for worship at the prison where he was held.”
The “Peace Tax Fund” debate
The last issue of had included an op-ed by Spencer Coxe in which he cast a skeptical eye on the Peace Tax Fund idea (see ♇ ).
Boiled down, his complaints were these:
The Peace Tax Fund bill would ostensibly allow conscientious objectors to earmark their taxes for non-military government spending, but this will not in fact make any practical difference whatsoever in how Congress spends tax money.
Conscientious objectors could have more practical effect on actual military spending through such mundane political activities as lobbying, demonstrating, attempting to influence elections, and the like; and attempts to get a Peace Tax Fund bill passed distract from this.
The idea behind the Peace Tax Fund concept — that individual taxpayers can override the spending priorities of their elected representatives with their own conscientious imperatives — is corrosive of democracy, which requires people to compromise and accept the decisions of their representatives rather than engaging in a free-for-all.
If it were enacted, the Peace Tax Fund would make conscientious objectors to military taxation legal, and therefore mundane and unworthy of attention.
In contrast to the war tax resister of today, whose sacrifices evoke admiration and controversy and government inconvenience, the Peace Tax Fund payer would just be another citizen checking a box on a form — which would “[channel] a potentially effective resistance movement into a harmless backwater.”
I have less faith in the democratic process and in democracy in general than does Coxe, but his criticisms are sound, and, from my perspective, way overdue.
A sentimental, blinkered, panglossian take on the Peace Tax Fund bill had become part of the Quaker canon, and, disturbingly, had crowded out other discussion of the dilemma of paying for war with your taxes.
But now that the criticisms had finally been aired, how would the scheme’s supporters respond?
Voiciferously, as future letters columns showed:
Edward F. Snyder partially conceded the point.
“The aim [of the Bill] is not to reduce the military budget… The main purpose of the bill is to honor and respect the conscientious objections of those citizens who are opposed to war in any form, including the financing through their tax dollars…” He compared it to draftees who do “alternative service” rather than serving in the military.
“If I thought the primary purpose of the Peace Tax Fund were to reduce the military budget as Spencer Coxe does, I’d be hard pressed to give the proposal the time of day, and for many of the reasons he cites.
There are many more direct and effective ways to challenge military spending and the policies on which it rests.”
But he believes that since this isn’t the purpose, the bill is still worthwhile.
He also thinks that the fact that war is such a clear violation of a bedrock conscientious value, and because it is such a large part of the budget, it holds a unique place, and carving out an exemption for conscientious objectors here will not necessarily open the floodgates for vast numbers of objectors to every little this and that in the budget.
Joe Volk wrote an extensive op-ed in response (which, alas, is partially obscured in the PDF I have).
He said that he had shared Coxe’s letter with the Friends Committee on National Legislation’s Policy Committee (Volk was the FCNL executive secretary) as a way of provoking a discussion as to whether that group ought to change its policy of supporting the Peace Tax Fund bill (they decided to continue supporting it).
Volk shares Snyder’s views that the slippery slope is not so slippery in this case, and that one can support the bill without believing that it would reduce military spending (“On the contrary, another argument for the Peace Tax Fund is that it would not alter Congress’s control of the purse strings” and “Of course, federal funds are fungible.
Thus, whatever the Peace Tax Fund pays for simply frees other funds for the military.”)
Volk asserted that were the Peace Tax Fund passed into law, rather than defanging conscientious objectors, it might free them from their current troubles in tax court to take up more productive struggles.
Besides “the absence of the Peace Tax Fund does not seem to be generating the waves of protest and tension that Spencer Coxe fears we would lose were it enacted.”
He also felt that rather than being corrosive of democracy, it was supportive of that essential element of democratic legitimacy that requires respect for minority opinions.
And besides, Congress is carving out deductions and exemptions and other things all the time — it seems petty to pick out our own concern as the only one that’s corrosive of this manifestly imperfect democracy.
Volk concluded:
My wife, Beth, and I have refused to pay our war taxes voluntarily .
We want to pay our entire tax bill, but we won’t pay for weapons and the salaries of the people who use them.
Having seen so much war and its effects, we could not voluntarily pay that portion of our tax that goes for war.
So, we pay only that portion of our tax bill that does not pay for war.
Every few years the IRS levies our bank account, wages, or savings.
They take the principle, interest, and penalties on what we have refused to pay.
We end up paying more to the government than had we paid the war tax.
Once they took and auctioned our car.
We no longer park it at our residence.
We have never been able to own real estate; it would be confiscated.
In the U.S. owning real estate has been a principal way for poor and middle-class people to accumulate wealth.
Many of our friends could borrow on their land and property to put their children through school.
We have not had that option.
We are not complaining.
We are happy following our conscience on this matter.
We consider that these consequences of our war tax refusal are aspects of the voluntary self-suffering that nonviolent action uses to reveal truth to ourselves and to others.
But we think the government should recognize our conscientious objection to paying war taxes so that we voluntarily can pay our entire tax bill.
Today, we feel that we are being punished for our religious beliefs, a violation of the U.S. Constitution and of our human rights.
Recognition of our claim to conscientious objection will not cut the military budget, will not end war, will not bring the Kingdom of Heaven.
It will allow us to practice our faith without being punished for it.
That’s a fairly radical idea still.
It’s a dangerous thing too, but it can work without leading to anarchy.
Richard N. Reichley thought that Coxe was missing the point — that the Peace Tax Fund was not meant to put a dent in the military complex, but to permit certain taxpayers to follow their consciences.
It might, he suggested, help spread the idea of conscientious objection to military spending: “Once the Peace Tax Fund Bill is passed, every taxpayer will know that it is law.
IRS instructions will include the option to file as a conscientious objector.
Perhaps we will be pleasantly surprised to learn how many Americans do not want to pay for war.”
Silas Weeks shared his frustrating experience with war tax resistance: “Eventually, the IRS invades our bank account and recovers [the] amount, plus interest and penalties.
We end up paying more tax than we would otherwise have to, plus our income is reduced by whatever we have put in the local [alternative] fund.”
He says that while “[i]t is extremely unlikely that the U.S. Congress will ever establish a legal peace tax alternative” it is “an improper judgment of others” to insist, as he says Coxe did, “that effort on behalf of a Peace Tax Fund wastes time and is a balm to individual conscience.”
Bruce Hawkins thought the Peace Tax Fund was not meant as an ultimate goal but as “an organizational and educational tool” for outreach and lobbying, and one that helps keep pacifist ideas on the agendas of legislators.
“Don’t think for a moment that any of us will heave a sigh of relief and cease all political activity if the Peace Tax Fund passes!
We would continue in the same political activity that we are in now, including support of sensible candidates for office.
And we would encourage everyone we know to consider using the fund.
One of our next goals would be to get enough people to use it so that it would make a difference.
It will only be ‘low-key’ if we let it be low-key.”
Ben Tousley thought that while paying into a Peace Tax Fund might indeed have no practical effect on the military budget, the same could be said for many respected acts of “witnessing” — these things aren’t meant to be immediately, directly effective, but to have an eventual “transforming effect on both individuals and the larger society.”
Rosa Covington Packard echoed the idea that the Religious Freedom Peace Tax Fund bill was never meant “to influence the military budget” but instead “to acknowledge the inalienable right of conscientious objection to paying taxes for war and preparations for war and to accommodate it as a matter of religious freedom.”
She also asserted that those who would take advantage of the Peace Tax Fund were not thereby engaging in a risk-free and invisible act:
When the bill passes, the option will be described in the tax forms everyone receives.
Reports of numbers of conscientious objectors and amounts of taxes redirected to nonmilitary purposes will be published in the Congressional Record.
The conscientious objector will affirm a statement of belief and ille it with his or her tax form.
Even if conscientious objectors to paying for war are given legal status and accommodated, they will continue to suffer many forms of discrimination from the public and the military.
Making slavery illegal did not end racial discrimination.
Recognizing and accommodating conscientious objection to paying for war will not end religious discrimination.
Conscientious objectors were among the first to go to the gas chambers under Hitler.
When we study the Holocaust, we mourn the atrocities against Jews, homosexuals, Gypsies — and “others” — our memories of the victims of war rarely even name conscientious objectors.
Risk free indeed!
We who choose a visible legal status may be more vulnerable to hostility.
Finally: “Without visible legal status, without acknowledgment that it is indeed legal to act upon our beliefs, our ‘democracy’ will continue to confuse and seduce each generation into thinking that war is honorable or necessary and that there are no other options.”
Mary Moulton addressed only the idea that the Peace Tax Fund would “ease the conscience of pacifists and [thereby] deflect them from hard work.”
She said: “This prediction certainly would not apply to any of the peace activists I have known over the years.”
Samuel R. Tyson wrote in with his own set of objections:
Conscientious objection laws discriminate in favor of members of historical “peace churches” which has the effect of adding a religious bias to the law.
Such laws also (because they require objectors to convincingly testify to their conscientious beliefs) discriminate against people with less verbal or reasoning capabilities (a class bias).
Such laws also, for the same reason, favor people with a paper trail in the “historically dominant white paper-based culture” which leads to a racial bias.
He concluded: “A Peace Tax Fund will make it easier for the few, without a full explanation in tax forms. Do we really want another federal bureaucracy to sit in judgment on conscience?”
Coxe wrote back, and in a letter that appeared in the issue.
Excerpts:
The letters convince me that I overlooked two considerations, first that passage of the bill would signal a reaffirmation of our country’s respect for religious dissent (though in symbolic fashion), and second, that legislation would relieve the personal distress of pacifists.
I am surprised that no correspondent pointed out that logically my position is an attack on the legal recognition of conscientious refusal of military service.
As a matter of fact, I have come to the conviction (in my old age) that the pacifist movement might be strengthened if the government offered no alternative to military service except prison.
Then the issue raised by the resister would be the government’s claimed power to conscript.
In my view, conscription is the basic evil.
The government’s recognition of religious objection to military service blunts resistance to conscription.
Those who during the Viemam War said “Hell no we won’t go” were on the right track and did more co bring the war to an end than did the COs.
Debate aside, the issue noted that the Radnor, Pennsylvania, Meeting had approved a minute endorsing the Religious Freedom Peace Tax Fund Bill, and considered this a way by which the Meeting “expresses its commitment to our historic Peace Testimony.”
War tax resistance in the Friends Journal in
In , Quaker Meetings were still wrestling with whether to go on the record in support of war tax resistance, and, if so, whether to do so in an explicit, uncompromising way, or one that played it safe and left a lot of wiggle room.
In an op-ed in the issue of the Friends Journal, Nadine Hoover urged Quaker Meetings to take a concrete stand opposing the payment of war taxes:
Should War Tax Resistance be a Corporate Testimony?
At New York Yearly Meeting in , I was given a message: The Spirit calls Friends to claim a corporate testimony against the payment of war taxes and participation in war in any form.
Of course, we have had a testimony against war since George Fox’s declaration to Charles Ⅱ in :
Our principle is, and our practices have always been, to seek peace, and ensue it, and to follow after righteousness and the knowledge of God, seeking the good and welfare, and doing that which tends to the peace of all.
All bloody principles and practices we do utterly deny, with all outward wars, and strife, and fightings with outward weapons, for any end, or under any pretense whatsoever, and this is our testimony to the whole world.
Yet there is what British Friends in Quaker Faith and Practice call “Dilemmas of the Pacifist Stand” (24.21–24.26), which opens with a quote from Isaac Penington, :
I speak not against the magistrates or peoples defending themselves against foreign invasions; or making use of the sword to suppress the violent and evil-doers within our borders — for this the present estate of things may and doth require, and a great blessing will attend the sword where it is borne uprightly to that end and its use will be honourable — but yet there is a better state, which the Lord hath already brought some into, and which nations are to expect and to travel towards.
There is to be a time when “nation shall not lift up sword against nation; neither shall they learn war any more.”
When the power of the Gospel spreads over the whole earth, thus shall it be throughout the earth, and, where the power of the Spirit takes hold of and overcomes any heart at present, thus will it be at present with that heart.
This blessed state, which shall be brought fotth [in society] at large in God’s season, must begin in the particulars [that is, in individuals].
New York Yearly Meeting’s Faith and Practice, under which I currently reside, advises (p. 60–61):
Friends are earnestly cautioned against the taking of arms against any person, since “all outward wars and strife and fighting with outward weapons” are contrary to our Christian testimony.
Friends should beware of supporting preparations for war even indirectly, and should examine in this light such matters as noncombatant military service, cooperation with conscription, employment or investment in war industries, and voluntary payment of war taxes.
When their actions are carefully considered, Friends must be prepared to accept the consequences of their convictions.
Friends are advised to maintain our testimony against war by endeavoring to exert an influence in favor of peaceful principles and the settlement of all differences by peaceful methods.
They should lend support to all that strengthens international friendship and understanding and give active help to movements that substitute cooperation and justice for force and intimidation.
NYYM
corporately advises against taking up arms against another person, yet more vaguely warns to “beware of” voluntary payment of war taxes.
The yearly meeting calls Friends to examine their own actions and “accept the consequences of their convictions” (emphasis is mine).
This is about individual conviction, not the corporate conviction we have against bearing of arms. We are squarely in the Penington tradition of advising Friends to testify against war by “endeavoring to exert an influence in favor of peaceful principles.”
We commit to the conversion of hearts and minds, one at a time, “seeking the good and welfare, and doing that which tends to the peace of all.”
Patience and persistence are employed in our participation with government.
As late as , it even seemed that our experiment would come to fruition.
Larry Apsey of New York Yearly Meeting called out, “the time is at hand.”
The Gandhian, civil rights, and women’s movements made it clear that patience and persistence were about to pay off; we were about to come into this blessed state, not just as a people, but as a nation.
What a far cry we are from that now!
Fruits of the Spirit are a significant test of discernment for Friends, a test that our path has failed.
We cannot put new wine into old wine flasks.
We cannot be in that blessed state and support a military for those who have not yet arrived.
We are called to choose, we are called to choose now, and we are called to choose as a people.
When we get quiet, every Friend I know says that payment of war taxes violates their conscience.
It’s been a long time since we acknowledged a new corporate testimony; this practice has fallen away.
So let us remember.
Friends experience a Living Presence among us and commit to being taught, guided, and shaped by the Living Spirit, placing great reliance on spiritual discernment.
Meeting for business was organized to test the spiritual discernment of its members, affirm or suggest further laboring, and support those suffering for conscience’ sake.
If a Friend’s testimony were affirmed, the question was, “Is this true for them alone, for others as well, or for all of us?”
If it were true for everyone, then it was a corporate testimony.
If we are quiet and ask the question, “Does the payment of war taxes violate my conscience?” and the response is yes for all of us, then, Friends, this is no longer a personal act of conscience but rather a corporate testimony of the meeting.
I am not suggesting we all do any particular thing.
I am asking a question of faith.
What we do about it will only be sought once we are clear on what we believe.
We may pay in protest, become vocal, or resist payment, but whatever we do, we do, not only as an individual, but also as a religious body.
The Spirit is calling us to unite in the Power of the Living Spirit to give life, joy, peace, and prosperity in the world through love, integrity, and compassionate justice among people and to acknowledge that paying for war violates our religious conviction.
It will be a long, hard, humble road, but it is the only road that promises a future for humanity.
Life will go on with or without us.
Let us stand up for our children and grandchildren and say we chose peace.
The response to Hoover’s plea — at least from the record of it we have in the Journal — was muted.
There was a single letter-to-the-editor from William Ashworth (who describes himself as a former war tax refuser) in the issue that began: “Friend Nadine Hoover asks us if war tax resistance should be a corporate testimony among Friends.
The answer is ‘no.’ ” Ashworth argues that because taxes are mixed, and not specific war taxes, there’s no grounds for refusal to pay; furthermore if we did refuse to pay, Congress would probably cut beneficial spending before military spending; and in addition there’s the familiar slippery slope argument wherein other churches might apply the Quaker precedent to refuse to pay for “family planning, education, environmental protection, and a host of other government services that we value.”
A feature on Lillian Willoughby in the issue mentioned her war tax resistance as follows:
By the time of [the] Vietnam [war], Lillian, a lifelong tax resister, had become well acquainted with the Internal Revenue Service; she liked to speak of herself as “educating the IRS.”
In one celebrated incident, after the IRS seized the Willoughbys’ car, the couple raised sufficient funds to redeem it at auction.
Indeed, they raised much more than enough, and so they could claim their car and a refund as well.
Lillian had brought a cake and lemonade to the IRS offices on the day of the auction.
Once their bid had been declared the winner, she staged a party outside the auction room; one or two of the agents shared refreshments with [PDF cuts off here].
When she was summoned to trial, she and another Quaker wrote a letter to the judge advising him that they would not rise at a judge’s entrance, although they meant no disrespect.
The bailiff instructed everyone to remain seated when the court came into session and the judge seemed predisposed to leniency.
When he asked Lillian to account for her actions, she gave what had become her standard statement, that “we [the United States] should not be making war on people, and we [Lillian and like-minded taxpayers] should not have to pay for it.”
The judge levied a $250 fine; she announced that she had no intention of paying it; he gave her 30 days to think it over.
As George put it many years later, “She’s still thinking about it.”
The article ends with Willoughby, at 89, facing trial for a civil disobedience action in protest of the Iraq War and contemplating how she would confront the system: “One thing was certain, she told her family as they sat in daughter Anita’s New York apartment : she would not pay the fine.
None of them seemed surprised.”
A review of Robert Turner Shaping Silence: A Life in Clay in that issue calls it “the story of a conscientious objector, a tax resister, a generous donor of his time, skills, and possessions,” among other things.
An obituary notice for Susumu Ishitani in the same issue noted that “[i]n , Susumu introduced tax refusal into Japan, and was one of six plaintiffs who sued the Japanese government over the issue of military spending.… , he was a member of Citizens Group of Conscientious Military Tax Refusers, sometimes serving as clerk.”
The annual gathering of the Northern Yearly Meeting approved a minute giving its interpretation of the Peace Testimony, which included this statement:
We will continue to stand and work for peace and justice.
We will continue to support those who for conscience’ sake refuse to participate in the military.
We support those who, for conscience’ sake, refuse to pay taxes for war.
We support those who are involved in nonviolent peacemaking.
A minute approved in by the South Berkshire (Massachusetts) Meeting quoted from the New England Yearly Meeting’s “Advice on Peace and Reconciliation,” which said:
Friends are urged to support those who witness to their governments and take personal risks in the cause of peace, who choose not to participate in wars as soldiers nor to contribute to its preparedness with their taxes.
Though the context in which this was quoted did not concern taxes, but merely an expression of “appreciation” for those Canadian Quaker organizations who were helping Americans who had fled to Canada to avoid military service.
A retrospective on the Friends World Committee for Consultation’s Peace Conference the previous year — which had been entitled “Friends Peace Witness in a Time of Crisis” — mentioned “ ‘Conscience and War Tax Witness’ with Rosa Packard” in a long list of “Other workshops.”
The issue included a review of Henry Climbs a Mountain — a children’s story based on Henry David Thoreau’s night in jail for tax refusal.
That issue also included an article about Mary Stone McDowell, who is the only person I know of who was a war tax resister through both World Wars (she was fired from her job as a teacher in part because she would not participate in urging her students to buy “Thrift Stamps” — a sort of junior version of the Liberty Bonds the U.S. government was using to fund its participation in World War Ⅰ).
Unfortunately, the brief paragraph about her war tax resistance is cut off in the PDF in the archives, but it ends “…income taxes each year and, according to Vernon Martin [a conscientious objector McDowell had helped], the IRS dutifully ‘attached part of her pitifully small teacher’s pension, out of which she also gave to charity.’ ”
At the upcoming national gathering of NWTRCC at Earlham College in Richmond, Indiana, I’m going to be presenting a summary of the history of war tax resistance in the Society of Friends (Quakers).
Today I’m going to try to coalesce some of the notes I’ve assembled about the current period of Quaker war tax resistance — what I’m calling “the second forgetting.”
The Second Forgetting ()
After an enthusiasm for war tax resistance that had grown to a near-mania by there was an astonishing and swift drop in interest in the subject.
I can’t with any great confidence say why this might be, but here are some theories:
The collapse of the Soviet Union and the resulting end of the Cold War made people more optimistic about the chances of avoiding nuclear war and ushering in a more peaceful international order.
Even hawkish politicians were crowing about the “peace dividend” that would come from reduced military spending as a result.
War tax resistance may have slackened because peace work in general was seen as less urgent.
The “peace tax fund” idea had gained traction in Quaker circles.
Some Quakers who were concerned about their taxes paying for war may have chosen to refrain from taking action in the hopes that such a law would eventually give them an easy-out, or in the misapprehension that the absence of such a law made the Quaker taxpayer’s dilemma really a problem for the legislature and not for the Quaker.
It may have been simple demographics:
Those Quakers who were so confident in their war tax resistance stand that they were willing to start resisting when very few Friends were, and who as a result were the leaders and pioneers of the war tax resistance Renaissance, were reaching the ends of their lives at this point.
The younger resisters who joined up during the Renaissance may have been less self-sustaining, less confident, and less persuasive — following a trend more than they were following a compelling conscientious leading.
(This was a worry among Friends as far back as , when John Churchman wrote “Such build on a sandy foundation who refuse paying that which is called the provincial or king’s tax, only because some others scruple paying it whom they esteem.”)
In the Friends Journal, feeling it had reached the end of its legal appeals, threw in the towel and paid the IRS levy on the salary of its editor, Vint Deming.
Two German Quakers were prosecuted for war tax resistance, and their court hearing was attended by some forty Quakers.
Meanwhile in the U.S., the “peace tax fund” legislation got its first and only congressional hearing.
Several Quakers attended and a few testified in favor of the bill.
In a stage dramatization based on the IRS seizure of the home of war tax resisters Randy Kehler & Betsy Corner was part of the program at the Friends General Conference Gathering.
The Canada Yearly Meeting, after years of debate, adopted a policy of refusing to withhold taxes from the salary of war tax resisting employees.
In U.S. President Clinton signed the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, which seemed to offer some hope for a new court challenge against the government’s insistence on taxing religious conscientious objectors to pay for military spending.
In Quaker Priscilla Adams began a case using this argument; Quakers Rosa Packard and Edith & Gordon Brown filed similar suits soon after.
These suits didn’t make any headway.
In , Adams filed a final appeal to the Supreme Court, with the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting contributing a friend-of-the-court brief on her behalf, but the Court turned down the case.
By this time, sad to say, a superstitious, blinkered, panglossian take on the “peace tax fund” has become the norm, and on the rare occasions when war taxes are even discussed (for example, in the Friends Journal), it is taken for granted that should Congress pass such a law, American Quakers will finally be freed from having to worry about paying for war (and implied, in the spirit of the “forgetting,” is the sentiment “and until then, well, what can we do?”).
Statements from Quaker meetings about war tax resistance are increasingly endorsing the “peace tax fund” idea not in addition to supporting war tax resistance, but in lieu of it.
As dawns, most of the mentions of war tax resistance in the Friends Journal are found in the obituary column.
War tax resistance is presented as something that noble and honored Friends used to do; only rarely as something they are currently doing.
Nadine Hoover wrote an earnest plea for Quakers to adopt war tax resistance as a corporate testimony in , but it seems to have fallen with a thud and produced little effect or even debate.
In there were still some Quakers trying increasingly desperate legal arguments to try to get the courts to legalize conscientious objection to military taxation.
Dan Jenkins tried a Ninth Amendment argument, which is the constitutional equivalent of a hail mary pass (the court would not only reject the case, but found it so far-fetched that they also upheld a frivolous filing penalty).
That case is notable, though, for the amount of support he got from the New York Yearly Meeting.
They used a clearness committee to help Jenkins work through his stand and his process.
The Purchase Quarterly Meeting provided some financial backing for his legal challenge.
The Yearly Meeting filed an amicus brief in the case.
Alas, this meeting too seems since to have been thoroughly infected by the magical thinking surrounding the “peace tax fund” idea, and the most active Friends there now sound almost as though they think of war tax resistance less as a logical expression of the peace testimony and more as a pressure tactic to use in the hopes of getting Congress to pass such legislation.
Meanwhile, the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting had held out as long as they felt able to in the Priscilla Adams case, finally writing a check to the IRS for the amount it demanded.
(They would continue to resist withholding and levies for years not covered by the exhausted legal suit.)
Martin Kelly, who would become the Friends Journal editor in , wrote bitterly of this in :
We talk big and write pretty epistles, but few individuals engage in witnesses that involve any danger of real sacrifice. …
When the IRS threatened to put liens on Philadelphia Yearly Meeting to force resistant staffers to pay, the general secretary and clerk said all sorts of sympathetic words of anguish (which they probably even meant), then docked the employee’s pay anyway.
There have been times when clear-eyed Christians didn’t mind losing their liberty or property in service to the gospel.
Early Friends called our emulation of Christ’s sacrifice the Lamb’s War, but even seven years of real war in the ancient land of Babylonia itself hasn’t brought back the old fire.
Our meetinghouses sit quaint, with ownership deeds untouched, even as we wring our hands wondering why most remain half-empty on First Day morning.
In the midst of this terrible decline, the Friends Journal devoted a fourth special issue to the problem of war taxes in .
One thing it shows is a divergence of tactics between Quakers in the New York Yearly Meeting (who were concentrating on legal challenges) and those in the Pacific Yearly Meeting, who were trying to spread the practice of war tax resistance by asking Quakers to take baby steps like refusing tiny symbolic amounts of tax or paying “under protest” (but who struggled even to meet these exceptionally modest goals).
In the Pacific Yearly Meeting did announce a policy pledging $100 in matching funds to any monthly meeting in its demesne that reimbursed war tax resisting Quakers for penalties & interest the IRS had been able to seize from them.
The Philadelphia Yearly Meeting reaffirmed its policy of resisting withholding and levies on the salary of its war tax resisting employees.
But when it did so it noted that “very few Friends actively practice war tax resistance.”
, the Meeting would report that it no longer had any war tax resisting employees, and so its policy, while still in effect, had gone into suspended animation.
The Britain Yearly Meeting issued a booklet on The Quaker Peace Testimony in .
It mentions war tax resistance only once, in a list of historical examples of Quaker peace work, but does not allude to it as a current practice that is available to modern Quakers.
It encourages Friends with concerns about paying war taxes to get in contact with Conscience, a non-Quaker group, rather than suggesting that they get guidance from their own meetings or from Quaker traditions.
When British Quakers released the fifth edition of Quaker Faith and Practice in , it included some inspirational quotes from war tax resisting Quakers of yesteryear, and reaffirmed its statement on the subject from :
We are convinced by the Spirit of God to say without any hesitation whatsoever that we must support the right of conscientious objection to paying taxes for war purposes…
We ask Meeting for Sufferings to explore further and with urgency the role our religious society should corporately take in this concern and then to take such action as it sees necessary on our behalf.
But the fact that they reaffirmed this wording betrays that in , despite the “urgency,” the Meeting for Sufferings had not come up with a sufficient corporate response.
So that’s where we are today.
There are still Quaker war tax resisters, certainly, but there is no groundswell of Quaker war tax resistance, and the obituary column is still where you are most likely to find a mention of a Quaker war tax resister in the Friends Journal, which is an ominous sign.
The resurgence of war tax resistance during the Cold War perhaps would be better described as a fad than, as I hopefully did, as a renaissance.
But whether a renaissance or a fad, it represents hope that the current forgetting won’t be forever, but that Quakers may again reclaim their place at the head of the conscientious tax resistance movement.
When they do so, they will be able to draw on the experiences of Quakers from the previous eras in order to sharpen the persuasiveness of their messages and discover the best and most appropriate techniques.
And they will surely be led out of this wilderness by a few self-motivated Friends who kept the faith through the forgetting period.
