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Writers & Editors War Tax Protest, 1967
Truth be told, part of my harsh reaction to the Iraq Moratorium that I posted here on was probably from envy at how their call to vague and lukewarm action has attracted some 2,000 signers, support from dozens of organizations, and endorsements from various celebs, while the War Tax Boycott is still trying to build up a head of steam, without much in the way of organizational or big-name support.
There was a time, though, when influential people were eager to sign on to a war tax boycott.
On , the New York Times reported:
WRITERS PROTEST VIETNAM WAR TAX
133 Will Refuse to Pay if Surcharge Is Approved
By MORRIS KAPLAN
A number of writers and editors have joined in opposing tax payments to support the war in Vietnam by pledging to withhold payment of President Johnson’s proposed 10 per cent income tax surcharge if Congress approves it.
Many of them have also promised to deduct 23 per cent from their tax bills as an estimate of the percentage used to fight the war.
A statement in support of this dissent has been signed by 133 writers.
Each dissenter has sent $10 or more to the Writers and Editors War Tax Protest, a group headed by Gerald Waker of Manhattan. Mr. Walker, assistant articles editor of The New York Times Sunday Magazine, said the money would be used for expenses and to pay for a newspaper advertisement planned for .
The proposal for a 10 per cent surcharge on corporate and individual taxes is now before the House Ways and Means Committee and is expected to be reported out next month.
The President has said it would relieve a budget deficit of possibly $28-billion.
More Support Sought
Mr. Walker expressed hope that the protest would win the support of from 300 to 500 writers and editors.
Among those who have pledged support are Eric Bentley, drama critic who is Brander Matthew Professor of Dramatic Literature at Columbia University, and Ralph Ginzburg, the New York publisher who is still appealing a Federal Government pornography conviction.
Others include Fred J. Cook, author and magazine writer; Betty Friedan, author of “The Feminine Mystique”; Dwight Macdonald, New Yorker Magazine critic, and Merle Miller, Thomas Pynchon and Harvey Swados, novelists.
A letter accompanying the protest statement points out the possible consequences of willfully refusing to pay Federal income taxes.
Violators of the law could receive up to one year in prison and up to $10,000 in fines.
Others Not Prosecuted
Mr. Walker said, however, that of the 421 signers of a similar no-payment ad last year in a Washington newspaper, not one had been prosecuted and sentenced.
Of an estimated total of 1,500 additional protest nonpayers, he added, none has been prosecuted since the war in Vietnam began.
The Internal Revenue Service has chosen, so far, to collect unpaid taxes by placing a lien on the incomes of those who refuse to pay, or by attaching their bank accounts or other assets.
In addition, a 6 per cent interest penalty is charged each year on the unpaid tax balance.
The group’s appeal for support included a quotation from Henry David Thoreau’s “Civil Disobedience,” written in and protesting American involvement in the Mexican War.
The writer said, in part:
That’s a weird note to end the piece on.
The Thoreau quote is strangely ellipsized to make it sound like he thought that somehow the United States had been overrun and conquered by Mexico or something, or that civil disobedience was appropriate only when you’ve been invaded by a foreign army and subjected to military law.
Here’s the full quote, which makes its relevance (to the Vietnam War then, to the Iraq War now) more clear:
But enough nitpicking.
This appeal brought in 133 writers and editors. , the list had swelled to 448 (it would go even higher than the 500 that Gerald Walker originally hoped for), and included such names as Nelson Algren, James Baldwin, Noam Chomsky, Philip K. Dick, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Allen Ginsberg, Paul Goodman, Norman Mailer, Henry Miller, Tillie Olsen, Grace Paley, Robert Scheer, Susan Sontag, Terry Southern, Benjamin Spock, Gloria Steinem, William Styron, Hunter S. Thompson, Kurt Vonnegut, and Howard Zinn.
As far as I can tell, the IRS didn’t take legal action against anyone who signed on to this list (though it probably sent threatening letters or engaged in administrative sanctions like levies and liens).
Nixon won the presidential election in , and among his campaign promises had been to end Johnson’s 10% surtax and somehow salvage “peace with honor” in Vietnam.
A couple of years later, the surtax breathed its last.
It took a few more years to get U.S. troops out of Vietnam.
After the March on the Pentagon — that madcap combination of somber protest and bizarre street theater (the Yippies announced their intention to surround the building and induce it to levitate) — Norman Mailer wrote a book about himself to commemorate the occasion: The Armies of the Night.
In that book is a brief mention of the “Writers and Editors War Tax Protest” that was brewing, in which more than 500 signatories vowed to illegally resist the 10% surtax the federal government was enacting to fund the Vietnam War:
The program for the day was presented in a leaflet which Mailer had brought with him to Washington.
In a typical anxiety at his essential lack of orientation to the protean forms of these protests he had put a folder of mailings, leaflets, programs, reprints, and associated letters for money in his attaché case — each morning he whipped through the folder selecting what seemed appropriate for the occasion.
Even a protest against the 10 percent increase in income tax had gotten into this — Mailer had to put it aside each morning.
Since he had taken the oath not to pay the 10 percent increase in the event it was passed (for the increase had been announced as a surtax to meet the costs of the war in Vietnam) he anticipated with no particular joy that the Department of Internal Revenue would examine his returns in the years ahead with no ordinary tolerance.
(In fact he fully expected his financial tidbits to be fried.)
Stating this supposition with his own variety of gallows humor had been the most direct pleasure in a letter he had written to James Baldwin, Bruce Jay Friedman, Philip Roth, Joseph Heller, Tennessee Williams, Edward Albee, Jack Richardson, James Jones, Gore Vidal, Arthur Miller, Lillian Hellman, Lillian Ross, Vance Bourjaily, Mary McCarthy, and Jules Feiffer, asking them to join this protest.
Actually, he had hated the thought of signing the protest, he had piped up every variety of the extraordinarily sound argument that his work was the real answer to Vietnam, and these mass demonstrations, sideshows, and bloody income tax protests just took energy and money away from the real thing — getting the work out.
But for such an argument to succeed, it was necessary to have work which absorbed all one’s effort, and a sense of happy status with oneself.
Mailer had had neither for the last year or two.
His work had been good — there were some who thought Why Are We In Vietnam? was the best book he had ever written, but no project had seemed to cost him enough, and he had been suffering more and more in the past few years from the private conviction that he was getting a little soft, a hint curdled, perhaps an almost invisible rim of corruption was growing around the edges.
His career, his legend, his idea of himself — were they stale?
So he had no real alternative — he was not sufficiently virtuous to eschew the income tax protest, and had signed, and to his surprise had been repaid immediately by the abrupt departure of a measurable quantity of moral congestion, a noticeable lowering of his spiritual flatulence and a reduction in his New York fever, that ferocious inflammation which New York seemed always to encourage: envy, greed, claustrophobia, excitement, bourbon, broads, action, ego, jousts, cruelty and too-rich food in expensive hateful restaurants.
Yes, signing the protest had been good for him.
(He hoped he remembered in future years when the penalty might have to be paid.)
But now, going through his attaché case, he could grin in the mirror, for if he had only known in September that shortly, so shortly, he was going to be an incometaxnik, he could have told Mitch Goodman where to shove his RESISTANCE.
(Or was it called RESIST?
— even with the pamphlets Mailer could not get the names right, there were so many and they changed so rapidly.)
“Yes, Mitch,” he could have said, “I think your RESISTANCE is first rate! first rate! but I’m putting my energy these days into the income tax drive.
You have your going-to-jail bag — now I have mine.”
Of course, on the other hand, if he had only joined RESIST?
RESISTANCE? with a little good grace he could have told the tax protest people.…
This was vast humor perhaps to no one else, but in the middle of his hangover, Mailer was still remotely delighted by the mock dialogue of all this: yessir, boss, we’se gonna get in all the jail bags before day is done.
The public relations people have been calling around trying to get publicity for the latest venture of the Narodniki of the Vietnam protesters.
Someone finally prevailed on someone to publish the story, and it appeared in the New York Times under the headline “Writers Protest — Vietnam War Tax, 133 Will Refuse to Pay if — Surcharge is Approved.” A number of writers, the story explains (the usual ones) have announced bravely that if Congress passes the surtax they will simply refuse to pay it.
And then — on down towards the end of the story: “A letter accompanying the protest statement points out the possible consequences of willfully refusing to pay Federal income taxes.
Violators of the law could receive up to one year in prison an up to $10,000 in fines.”
But hold on: “Mr. (Gerald) Walker (organizer of the protest) said, however, that of the 421 signers of a similar no-payment ad last year in a Washington newspaper, not one had been prosecuted and sentenced.
Of an estimated total of 1,500 additional protest non-payers, he added, none had been prosecuted since the war in Vietnam began.
The Internal Revenue Service has chosen, so far, to collect unpaid taxes by placing a lien on the incomes of those who refuse to pay, or by attaching their bank accounts, or other assets.
In addition, a 6 per cent interest penalty is charged each year on the unpaid tax balance.”
Thus the protesters stand to lose 6 per cent on a savings deposit, so that leaves 1 per cent.
One per cent of your old tax, for an average writer, means say a buck seventy-five, which isn’t bad, is it, for making the hero page of the New York Times?
Writers and Editors War Tax Protest
Attention: Gerald Walker
145 West 86th Street
Apt. 7D
New York, N.Y. 10024
Fellow Writers and Editors:
Join us in signing the enclosed statement proclaiming our refusal to let our
tax dollars support the war in Vietnam. Tell us in writing that we may list
your name with ours in ads and statements. Send us your check for $10.00 or
more (payable to Writers and Editors War Tax Protest) to pay for advertising
and other expenses. Ask other writers and editors to join. Mail copies of
this letter and the enclosed statement, “We Won’t Pay” (which will comprise
the substance of ads we plan to run), to your own list of colleagues. Extra
copies available at $1.00 per hundred, plus 25¢ for mailing.
How we will go about tax refusal
Should President Johnson’s surcharge be adopted by Congress, we will
refuse payment. We will not add this extra war tax to our current tax
when preparing our return and we will enclose a letter with our return
explaining why.
Many of us will also deduct from our tax the 23% which represents the
amount currently being spent on Vietnam.
Possible consequences
It is a violation (up to one year in prison and/or up to $10,000 in fines) of
Sec. 7203 of the Internal
Revenue Code willfully to refuse to pay federal income taxes. However, of the
421 signers of a similar no-payment ad in ,
not one has been prosecuted and sentenced; of the estimated 1500 additional
protest non-payers, none has been prosecuted since the war began. The
IRS, so
far, has chosen to exercise the power to collect unpaid tax money by placing
a lien on refusers’ income or attaching their bank accounts or other assets,
when these can be traced. In addition, a penalty of 6% interest is charged
annually on the unpaid tax balance, a rate estimated to be less than the
collection expense.
Vietnam drags on. Casualties rise, $28 billion are wasted yearly,
U.S. prestige and
moral fabric rot away. No solution, political or military, is in view. The
President’s prescription is more of the same — 45,000 new men (for a total of
525,000) and a proposed 10% income tax increase specifically for this
undeclared, unconstitutional, unprofitable, and unjust war.
“The needs of this country’s riot-shaken cities are being neglected to pay
the war bill,” The New York Times has
editorialized. It is time for escalation by those who want peace in
order to focus on our critical domestic dilemma. Peace marches have not
worked; nor have pickets, protest ads, teach-ins, or pleas to the President’s
conscience by public figures here and abroad. We are not consoled by reports
of atrocities committed by the other side; we want to stop those committed by
our side. So we must now go beyond mere expressions of dissent to strong,
affirmative, and dramatic action by responsible citizens.
We, the undersigned writers and editors for publications and publishing
houses large and small, have not had to give our lives in Vietnam — that has
fallen on younger Americans. But we have lent our passive support in the form
of our tax dollars. From now on, we are willing to lay our middle-class lives
on the line in pledging:
That none of us voluntarily will pay the proposed 10% income tax
surcharge, or any war-designated tax increase.
That many of us will also refuse to pay that part of our current income
tax (23%) being used to finance the war.
Many of us, too, will give an equivalent sum to humanitarian organizations.
Even so, this was not an easy decision to make. We have been law-abiding,
tax-paying citizens all our lives, and we are now subjecting ourselves to
possible legal penalties of up to one year in prison and/or up to $10,000 in
fines for willful non-payment of taxes. But we believe our taxes should not
be used to support a war that violates not only our own Constitution but the
Charter of the United Nations.
By this act, we aim to awaken the Administration to the fact that a
significant number of responsible citizens are so fundamentally opposed to
this war that they are willing to go to this extreme. And we wish to show
other Vietnam-haunted Americans that there is a simple, swift, effective way
to vote no-confidence in the Administration’s policy. It can be done
individually or in groups. It cannot wait until the 1968 presidential
election. Your ballot is your next tax return, and other ads such as this
placed in every newspaper in the land.
There are not enough prisons to hold the millions in this country who,
according to Gallup and other recent polls, strongly oppose this ugly war.
Time now to end our tacit acceptance of what is being done in Vietnam in our
name.
Much of the text of the above declaration didn’t make it in to the final
advertisement (I’m guessing it was cut down to make room for the many names
of signers, but maybe there was more to it than that). Horowitz himself did
not make the list.
I am enclosing a copy of the statement signed, so far, by 220 writers and
editors who pledge to refuse payment of the proposed 10 per cent income tax
surcharge or any tax increase earmarked for the Vietnam War. At this writing,
seven New York Times writers and editors have signed. We plan to run a
full-page advertisement in the Times in
, giving the quote from
Thoreau, the pledge and the list of names. The placing of the ad will
coincide with Congressional debate on the tax surcharge. By that time we hope
to have 500 persons pledged to refuse payment.
If you would be interested in signing the statement, please fill in the blank
and mail it in as soon as possible. And please tell your writer and editor
friends about it and urge them to do the same. As Thoreau said, “If a
thousand men were not to pay their tax bills this year, that would not be a
violent and bloody measure, as it would be to pay them, and enable the State
to commit violence and shed innocent blood.” During his incarceration for
refusal to pay his war tax, Thoreau was paid a visit by Emerson, who asked,
“What are you doing in here?” To which Thoreau replied, “What are you
doing out there?”
I feel strongly that the collective involvement of writers and editors in the
nation’s politics should not stop with the War Tax Protest. Many of our
colleagues share this view, and are preparing this fall to organize local
chapters of what can become a national writers and journalists association.
An organized and articulate “intelligentsia” can be a political force in
America as it is in France. And it must become a political force if
the increasingly oppressive policies of the present United States government — in Vietnam, in Southern Africa, in Latin America, and here at home — are to
be permanently reversed. Not to organize, not to amplify our voices so that
an ill-informed America may hear alternatives, is to accede, in effect, to
the policies of the present government. For more information, please write me
immediately at 377 Green Street, San Francisco, California 94133.
Included with this letter is a somewhat different version of the proposed ad:
— Henry David Thoreau, Civil Disobedience,
commenting upon American involvement in the Mexican War.
We the undersigned writers and editors, believing that American involvement
in Vietnam is morally wrong, pledge:
None of us voluntarily will pay the proposed 10% income tax surcharge or
any war-designated tax increase.
Many of us will not pay that 23% of our current income tax which is
being used to finance the war in Vietnam.
Following this was a sign-up sheet, asking signers to agree with the statement
“I believe American involvement in the war in Vietnam is morally wrong,” and giving three further options:
“As a writer/editor, I wish to add my name to the Writers and Editors War Tax Protest. I dissociate myself from my government’s actions in Vietnam and I am willing to use my next tax return to vote no-confidence in the present Administration. I enclose a check (payable to Writers and Editors War Tax Protest) for $10.00 or more to help pay for running this statement as a newspaper advertisement and for other expenses.”
“I am in sympathy with what you are doing. Enclosed is my check for $____.”
“I would like more information. Please send me your fact-sheet on tax refusal.”
A number of additional signers had been added to the list by this time:
(Spock was listed out-of-order and in a different typeface in the original.)
While doing some book research today I stumbled on a bunch of documents
concerning the “Writers and Editors War Tax Protest” tax resistance pledge of
. I found the documents at
The Harold Weisberg Archive:
A three-page letter from David Welsh on
Ramparts letterhead dated
“enclosing a copy of
the statement signed, so far, by 220 writers and editors…” and saying
that they hoped to run the ad in the New York
Times (the Times would turn them down).
The letter asks Weisberg to sign on, and includes a couple of Thoreau
quotes. It also says that Welsh sees this as a first step towards
organizing the American “intelligentsia” to be an organized and articulate
political force. The final page lists the signers to that point. Also
included is Weisberg’s response in which he complements the Thoreau
quote, notes that he signed the pledge and sent it in with a donation,
and then goes on for four paragraphs about Kennedy assassination
conspiracy research, which was his specialty.
An undated letter from the Protest to “Fellow Signers” noting that “We
now have over 350 names” and “hope to achieve, or surpass, 500 by
” so they can put
the ad in the Times
“.” The letter notes that the anticipated 10% Vietnam War
tax surcharge has run into snags in Congress, but still expects a
modified version to pass. It also solicits funds, noting that they’re
only about half way to the budget they need to place a full-page
Times ad.
A second page includes the text of a Thoreau quote and of the tax
resistance pledge.
A third page includes a “coupon” that signers can fill out to register
their pledge with the Protest office, and begins the partial list of
signers. The next two pages continue the list, and then the following
page includes “Additional Signers” (including Weisberg).
The last two pages are a “Fact Sheet” explaining the reasoning behind the
protest, the process that resisters can go through to make their
resistance effective, a summary of the possible legal consequences, the
possibility of filing a legal challenge, and the Protest’s willingness to
reach out to other groups interested in taking a similar stand.
Only the first page is interesting. It’s a hand-drawn invitation to a
“Deficit Party” fundraiser “to help pay for our newspaper ad” to be held
on “at Betty Friedan’s
apartment [at] The Dakota”: “Eric Bentley, Betty Friedan, Paul Goodman,
James Leo Herlihy, Larry Josephson, Dwight Macdonald, Gloria Steinem,
[&] Gerald Walker invite you to join them, and all the other signers
of the Writers and Editors War Tax Protest…”
The first page is the last of a three-page list of pledge signers (the
first two pages are missing); the second page is a list of “Additional
Signers” with marginal notes indicating that the number had risen to 309,
and then to 324.
A letter from Lawrence M. Bensky & Gerald Walker of the Protest
to “Fellow Signers” dated . It notes that Congress did not institute the expected 10%
income tax surcharge by tax filing season, and so if people want to
resist, they’ll have to choose the other option, which was to refuse to
pay some portion of their ordinary income tax: “we urge you to do so.
Obviously, the effectiveness of our action hinges on the number of
participants.” It notes that 50 more people have signed the pledge since
the ads appeared “in
Ramparts, The New York
Review of Books of ,
and The New York Post of ”
which brings the total signers up to that desired 500 threshold.
Hundreds of people have written us to request tax-refusal information;
many of these were non-writers and non-editors who were sufficiently
impressed to follow our lead, and these information requests continue to
come in without any sign of tapering off.
The letter notes that contributions have been coming in as well, but
proposes not to spend any more money on advertising, but to keep the funds
in reserve in case the government retaliates against any signer, so as
“to focus publicity on such cases; and where a case offers the
opportunity to press a legal test of the government’s right to ‘draft’
our money for Vietnam, we will contribute to the costs of legal defense.”
The letter then recommends that people look into the newly formed “Tax
Resistance Project of the War Resisters League.”
The next page lists some sympathetic organizations, discusses the
possible government retaliation actions against signers, and includes a
coupon resisters could send to the War Resisters League if they want to
be included in their coordinated tax resistance action.
The next page gives “some facts about tax refusal and its consequences”
including a how-to guide giving several options for how to resist.
The final page announces a protest to be held at the
IRS
headquarters in Washington on :
Join us in an act of collective tax resistance. Bring your completed
tax return, form 1040, or a statement explaining why you’re not filing,
and together we will return forms and statements accompanied by either
no money or an insufficient amount of money. The
action at
IRS
will be preceded by a public meeting nearby.
Dr. Arthur Waskow of the
Institute for Policy Studies and Dave Dellinger, Chairman of the
National Mobilization Committee, will be among the speakers.
We act because for many verbal opposition to the war in Vietnam is no
longer enough. Resistance has become necessary. Our consciences dictate
it. The young men resisting the draft have shown a way and we who are
not subject to the draft must develop creative parallels. Tax
resistance is such a parallel act because it confronts the
administration directly and challenges it at a vital point. It
liberates the tax resister by showing him that he does have choices.
A Washington Post clipping dated
— “Marchers Protest War
Taxes” concerning a protest of about 40 people at the
IRS
Building. Protesters included Barbara Deming, Dave Dellinger, William C.
Davidon, Arthur Waskow. The article includes a photo of Waskow and of
protesters marching with “Don’t Pay War Taxes” signs, but the copy
quality is low.
A letter dated from Eric
Bentley, John Leonard, Peter Spackman, Gloria Steinem, and Gerald Walker
to “Fellow Signers” about “how best to wind up the group’s affairs.” They
plan to donate the group’s remaining funds to the Civil Liberties Legal
Defense Fund, which has made a reciprocal agreement to give legal
assistance to any Protest signers who run into trouble in the coming
year. “The Writers and Editors War Tax Protest was always a temporary
organization, and its limited goals have now been achieved. We remain
pledged as individuals, however, to the moral and financial support of
any of our number who is prosecuted or harassed because of non-payment or
simple membership.”
WEWTP certainly added its bit to the anti-war clamor which produced the current atmosphere and the many swift changes that have taken place in it. We ended up with 528 signers. And if there were that many strongly anti-war people from one small area of American Life, surely the political computers in Washington were capable of extrapolating that figure to the population as a whole. So [President] Johnson got the message. Thanks for lending your voice and your name to ours.
The “current atmosphere” of changes since the start of the Protest
project included the abandonment of the 10% income tax surcharge plan,
the Tet Offensive, the resignation of Secretary of Defense McNamara,
Johnson’s decision not to run for another term, and the opening of peace
negotiations.
A press release from the Protest dated
. At this time, the Protest
had attracted 437 signers, and “at least one-third” of these had pledged
not only to refuse to pay any war surcharge, but also “not to pay the 23
per cent of their current income tax which is being used to finance the
war in Vietnam.”
The protest was announced today at a press conference in New York’s
Algonquin Hotel, traditionally a gathering place for New York’s
literary world. Three writers and three editors spoke for the group:
Eric Bentley, drama critic, professor of Columbia, and author of
several books on the theater; James Leo Herlihy, well-known novelist
and short story writer; and Sally Belfrage, author of “Freedom Summer.”
Publishers included Richard Grossman of Grossman Publishers; Aaron
Asher of Viking Press; and Arthur A. Cohen of Holt, Rinehart &
Winston.
One of the group’s organizers announced that today’s advertisement had
been rejected for publication by seven major newspapers before being
printed by the New York Post. The New York Times, where ten of the
advertisement’s signers are employed, twice rejected it, the second
time after the advertisement had been changed to meet their earlier
objection. Other newspapers which refused to accept the prepaid
full-page advertisement were The Boston Globe, the Washington Post, the
St. Louis Post-Dispatch,
the Christian Science Monitor, the National Observer, and the Chicago
Tribune. A spokesman for the Writers and Editors War Tax Protest
expressed regret that the nation’s press, “which is so quick to condemn
violent demonstrations, actually encourages them by frustrating
conscientious expression of dissent from our actions in Vietnam.”
A newspaper clipping dated
that, in the form of an article about the ad, essentially
reproduces it, including the complete list of signers. It is unclear what
newspaper the clipping is taken from.
“Writers Vow Tax Revolt Over War” — a news clipping from the
Washington Post. It gives the number of
signers as 448, and explains that the Post
refused to print the ad “on the grounds that it was an implicit
exhortation to violate the law.”
A letter from Lawrence M. Bensky & Gerald Walker to “Fellow Signers”
dated . It gives the
number of signers as 450. “Two months have been spent dickering with the
NY Times (where 11
of the signers work), which has just refused an ad revised to meet
earlier Times objections.” (Harding Bancroft of the
Times eventually said: “the advertisement was
turned down by the Times in accordance with our general policy that we do
not accept advertising urging readers to perform an illegal action.”) The
letter notes that some signers have wondered why the Protest continues to
stress the 10% surcharge which by now is looking less politically viable.
Finally, the letter announces the above-mentioned “Deficit Party.”
War tax resistance in the Friends Journal in
The momentum of war tax resistance continued to build in the pages of the Friends Journal in 1968.
A letter-to-the-editor from Wilmer J. & Mildred B. Young in the issue mentioned the 500-person-strong “writers & editors” tax strike advertisement, and a second one from the “No Tax for War Committee,” and noted that the War Resisters League was “also collecting signatures for this purpose.”
— “Some Friends are participating.
Should not many more do so?”
At the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting’s annual sessions in , “[t]here was talk of establishing a common escrow account into which all tax-refusers could pay, and finally a suggestion that the Yearly Meeting participate in the AFSC suit [see ♇ 15 July 2013]”
A note in the issue concerned a “Quaker pacifist, Neil Haworth,” who was facing prison “for not revealing his assets to the Government and for refusing to pay his income taxes because of his religious scruples against taxes of which seventy per cent go for war purposes.”
David D. & Barbara C. Houghton had a letter-to-the-editor in the same issue in which they explained why they were embarking on war tax resistance: “Letters to our congressmen and public demonstrations of disapproval have not been enough.
We feel compelled by our consciences to perform the symbolic illegal act of withholding that part of the Federal telephone tax reinstated as a result of the war expenses in Vietnam.”
(The following year, they wrote in to say that in anticipation of a proposed federal income tax surcharge for Vietnam War expenses, “[a]s a constructive expression of protest we have increased our contributions to organizations working for man’s welfare so that the added deduction entirely offsets the tax surcharge.”)
The issue had an article about expatriates who had settled in Canada that included this note:
Several young married couples whom we met expressed relief that they had left the United States and that they could now bring up their families in a land where there is less emphasis on violence, where the military is less powerful in national affairs, and where their taxes do not rise so greatly to support military activities — especially war.
an ad from the issue of Friends Journal
Also in , the New England Yearly Meeting’s gathering “adopted a… statement giving approval and support to Friends who in conscience refuse taxes for war and conscription.”
A letter from Geoffrey D. Kaiser in the issue tried to remind Quakers that war tax resistance was not some crazy innovation of the longhair set:
With the institution of new taxes which avowedly are largely for Johnson’s war, many Quakers are asking if they can in good conscience pay them.
Some, on the other hand, are saying that all civil disobedience and refusal to pay taxes is unquakerly.
A statement by the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting on the subject is as follows: “It is the sense of this meeting that a tax levied for the purchase of drums, colours, or for other warlike uses, cannot be paid consistently with our Christian testimony.”
This quotation is from page 98 of the 1825 Philadelphia Yearly Meeting Discipline.
Who now are the conservatives?
The Richmond Declaration
In , in Richmond, Indiana, 203 delegates from “nineteen Yearly Meetings, eight Quaker colleges, fifteen Friends secondary schools, the American Friends Service Committee National Board and its twelve regional offices, and nine other peace or directly-related organizations” met to draft a “Declaration on the Draft and Conscription.”
Most of the statement concerned the draft, but war tax resistance got a mention.
Excerpts:
We call on Friends everywhere to recognize the oppressive burden of militarism and conscription.
We acknowledge our complicity in these evils in ways sometimes silent and subtle, at times painfully apparent.
We are under obligation as children of God and members of the Religious Society of Friends to break the yoke of that complicity.
We also recognize that the problem of paying war taxes has intensified; this compels us to find realistic ways to refuse to pay these taxes.
We commit ourselves to validate our witness by visible changes in our lives, though they may involve personal jeopardy.
We cannot rest until we achieve a truly corporate witness in the effort to oppose and end conscription.
Let us hold each other in the Light which both reveals our weaknesses and strengthens us to overcome them.
“Nonviolence: Ends and Means”
In the first Friends Journal issue of was a piece about nonviolent direct action by Lawrence Scott, in which he urged Quakers to take civil disobedience more seriously and to examine more closely the means and ends involved.
“Such direct action will include civil disobedience against conscription, war taxes, and armament construction,” he wrote.
But he was concerned about the way people were engaging in civil disobedience.
He hoped people who practiced civil disobedience would do so not in disrespect for government and law, but “in such a manner as to enhance the principle of just and democratic laws and government.”
He also thought that people should adopt a more satyagraha-like version of civil disobedience — in particular, that they should submit to arrest and legal consequences without resisting.
He was concerned that practices like “going limp, or trying to pull away” during arrest, or “noncooperation with normal court and jail procedures” tended “to transform the witness being made against a specific law or immoral practice of government into a witness against the principle of government itself.”
Such tactics “tend to attract and foster anarchists and angry persons who are opposed to all regulations and seek the disruption and overthrow of all government” and this in turn reduces the influence of the movement.
Scott’s anarchist-baiting resulted in a letter-to-the-editor from Jim Giddings, who said that when it comes to keeping means and ends in harmony, it is the people who try to defend both Gandhian nonviolence and coercive government who should be on the defensive:
I assert that “law” (as the term is used today) is based on violent coercion; the means and ends that we who use noncooperation advocate are in harmony.
Our goal is the establishment of a society free from coercive law.
The law, the police, the courts, the prisons, the army — they are all there to enforce privilege.
In the following issue, Samuel R. Tyson defended the tactic of going limp on arrest, saying “I have seen it done with great dignity.”
He then played the generation gap card, saying that Scott’s article seemed to be “another sad instance of younger people’s being turned off by the rigidity of adults.”
On , the
FBI
SAC from New York sent a memo to the director of the
FBI
(J. Edgar Hoover), attaching “per the Bureau’s request” a copy of the “Writers and Editors War Tax Protest” advertisement as it appeared in the New York Post on .
The director had evidently heard about the ad from an article about it that appeared in the New York Times .
The letter notes:
The “New York Times” refused to print this advertisement according to their edition, since it was against Times policy to run the ad because of the “Exhortation to take action in violations of federal tax laws.”
[sic]
That memorandum, and all of the bureaucratic hieroglyphics it accumulated as it did the rounds, can be found at the Internet Archive.
