How you can resist funding the government →
the tax resistance movement →
birth of the modern American war tax resistance movement →
Caroline Foulke Urie
I found a peek at the birth of the modern American tax resistance movement hidden away in a edition of the MANAS Journal which features the article “No Compromise:”
Among those taking a decisive position are a number of men calling themselves the “Peacemakers,” who met in Chicago last April and pledged themselves (1) to refuse to serve in the armed forces in either peace or war; (2) to refuse to make or transport weapons of war; (3) the refuse to be conscripted or to register; (4) to consider to refuse to pay taxes for war purposes — a position already adopted by some; (5) to spread the idea of peacemaking and to develop non-violent methods of opposing war through various forms of non-cooperation and to advocate unilateral disarmament and economic democracy.
(Reported in the Politics.)
The idea of non-payment of taxes has been put into practice by Ammon Hennacy, a Tolstoyan of Arizona, and by Mrs. Caroline Urie of Yellow Springs, Ohio (see MANAS, March 31), and possibly by others.
Milton Mayer, of the University of Chicago, who writes regularly for the Progressive and has contributed to Harper’s, the Saturday Evening Post and other magazines, has frequently written and spoken of this form of protest against war.
Walter Gormly, of Mt. Vernon, Iowa, finds the payment of taxes for war a violation of the principle established by the International Military Tribune which conducted the Nuremberg Trials.
The Tribune Charter identifies as a crime against peace, the “planning, preparation, initiating or waging of a war of aggression,” and in a letter to the Bureau of Internal Revenue Gormly asserts that the United States is doing just that “by maintaining bases, subservient governments and military forces from Korea to Turkey, by intensive research on methods of mass slaughter and by maintaining a huge military organization.”
As Section Ⅱ, Article B, of the Charter declares that “the fact that the defendant acted pursuant to order of his government or of a superior shall not free him from responsibility,” Mr. Gormly feels obliged, to avoid possible prosecution as a “war criminal,” to refuse to pay a federal income tax, a large part of which goes for preparation for war, and he has so informed the Federal Government.
The story of “Mrs. Caroline Urie of Yellow Springs, Ohio” is given in an earlier edition:
The determination of Mrs. Caroline Urie, social worker and widow of an American naval officer, to pay no taxes for war purposes will probably strike many Americans as an irrational attitude.
On , Mrs. Urie wrote President Truman announcing that she had deducted 34.6 per cent of her tax — the proportion she estimates is earmarked for war.
“If they want to send me to jail,” she said, “that’s all right with me… I’ll never pay any more money for war.”
Democracy, it will be argued, is a rational process.
Nobody likes war, and nobody likes income taxes, but we have to put up with both.
We have a Congress to decide these things, and if everyone could question the decisions of the Congress whenever he pleased, soon there would be no Government, no order, no national defense, no anything.
So Mrs. Urie is irrational.
But what, exactly, is she to do, feeling the way she does?
From where she stands, paying for a war is irrational.
Maybe she has read Morgenstern’s Pearl Harbor.
Maybe she is convinced that democracy means the right to have no part of killing anybody, for any reason, and to take the consequences of this position.
In her case, the consequences might be a jail sentence, although this may be doubted.
Mrs. Urie once worked with Jane Addams at Hull House.
For five years she was director of the School for Immigrant Children.
The Government may feel a little silly trying to put her in jail.
Maybe it should.
A week or so ago a leading news magazine blandly announced that a war with Russia is “in the cards,” not now, but later, when both nations are “ready.”
This was followed by a page of explanation telling why the war would be delayed.
Nobody wants a war, but there it is, and all the man-in-the-street can do is wait around …or so it seems. The news magazine also told what the war would mean — compulsory labor, compulsory financing, compulsory everything.
Compulsory death for millions was not mentioned — that is taken for granted, we suppose.
The news magazine said nothing about stopping the war.
It was just a nice, objective account for the American business man — what to expect, and when.
A visit to a large aircraft factory here on the Pacific Coast adds considerable local color to one’s sense of doom.
One plant, at least, seems to be making no commercial planes at all.
In the plant in question, 10,000 men working two shifts are turning out jet fighters and bombers as fast as they can.
The plant has Government contracts.
It’s all official, according to schedule, and absolutely democratic and rational.
But from Mrs. Urie’s viewpoint, it’s not rational at all.
She objects to buying death for somebody on a cost plus basis.
Thoreau had a similar idea, about a century ago.
Actually, there are two rationales in this problem: there is the rationale of a great nation getting ready for war, and the rationale of a lonely individual getting ready for peace.
So far as Mrs. Urie and her income tax are concerned, the democratic process is 34.6 per cent irrational, and she won’t go along.
This is her way of trying to be a good citizen and a good human being at the same time.
It is beginning to take some imagination.
A edition has a letter to the IRS (and an amusing recollection of a telephone conversation with an IRS agent) by tax resister Richard Groff.
Other issues of the journal include a review of Edmund Wilson’s The Cold War and the Income Tax, and a great deal of discussion of the work and thought of Gandhi and Thoreau.
I plan to spend some time browsing their free archives on-line in the coming days.
New York — (AP) —
A pacifist Presbyterian minister said
150 members of a peace-seeking
group had decided they would not pay any Federal income taxes to be used for
financing “war preparations.”
The Rev. A.J. Muste,
national secretary of the Peacemaker said yesterday he himself was one of
“about 15” members of the organization in the New York City area who have
launched the tax resistance movement.
Muste described the Peacemakers as a “non-violent revolutionary pacifist
group engaged in a campaign similar to that of the late Mahatma Gandhi in
India.” The organization has about 2,000 members, he said.
The 150 persons throughout the country who have joined in the tax resistance
movement, Muste said, have either decided “to withhold all their taxes or
just that part of them which proportionately would go to war preparations.”
Muste predicted general resistance to war preparedness in the form of
refusals to register for draft and the tax resistance movement would increase.
He said the Peacemakers organization is “completely non-political, opposed to
totalitarianism in any form, including communism.”
Muste also is national chairman of the Fellowship of Reconciliation which he
described as a religious organization numbering some 15,000 and dedicated to
peace.
Meanwhile, in Yellow Springs,
O., a 75-year-old Quaker
widow deducted 32.2 per cent from the first installment of her income tax
because she said “war and preparation for war in the atomic era is a crime
against humanity.”
Mrs. Caroline Urie failed in a similar
protest. She deducted 34.6 per cent of her estimated tax for the year, but,
after taxes in her bracket were reduced, she had still paid more than was
called for and at the year’s end the government owed her money.
She said yesterday she had made sure the same things wouldn’t happen
. She said she would withhold the full
amount of military taxes by paying only the first installment of the tax now
and giving herself until
,
to pay the final quarter.
Caroline Urie was mentioned in an article I excerpted here
. Here is some more information about her resistance.
From the Spokane Daily Chronicle:
Widow Refuses to Pay War Tax
Yellow Springs, Ohio,
.
(AP) —
Mrs. Caroline Urie is a pacifist. So she paid only 65.4 per cent of her
federal income tax
Mrs. Urie, white-haired widow of a career navy officer, figures the rest of
her tax was earmarked for military expenses.
“As a Christian, I must henceforth refuse to contribute in any way to
maintaining the institution of war,” she wrote President Truman and the
internal revenue department.
Mrs. Urie didn’t keep the 34.6 per cent “war tax.” She sent the money to four
pacifist organizations (every one of them non-profit” [sic])
and inclosed her contribution receipts with the tax return.
“If they want to send me to jail because I won’t pay the other 34.6 per cent,
that’s all right with me,” she said. “I’m perfectly willing to go to jail.
I’ll never pay any more money for war.”
Mrs. Urie describes herself as “a Quaker, a pacifist, a social worker and a
white-haired widow — a very aged widow, at that.”
Caroline Urie, reading Satyagraha
Urie was one of the founding members of the Tax Refusal Committee of
Peacemakers in , which launched the modern
American war tax resistance movement.
Her protest fizzled, as
the law changed, reducing the tax rate for her tax bracket, so that even after
reducing her tax payments by 34.6% she ended up overpaying and getting a
refund. But the following year she refined her technique and was at it again:
Widow Defies Government
Yellow Springs, Ohio,
— Mrs. Caroline Urie,
75-year-old widow, deducted 32.3 per cent of the first installment of her
income tax because she said “war and preparation for war in the atomic era is
a crime against nature.” The percentage deducted — the amount she estimated
would go for military purposes — will be donated to three non-profit agencies
working for peace and abolition of war, she said.
Urie died in .
From the
New York Times:
Woman Cuts Her Tax To Avoid Paying for Arms
By The Associated Press.
Yellow Springs, Ohio, — Mrs. Caroline Urie, a 75-year-old Quaker widow, who does not want to help finance military preparedness, reduced the first installment of her income tax accordingly today.
Mrs. Urie, who made the news with a similar protest, deducted 32.3 per cent of the first installment because, she said, “war and preparation for war in the atomic era is a crime against humanity.”
She failed last year in her publicized protest. She deducted 34.6 per cent of her estimated tax for but Congress reduced taxes in her income bracket.
Her income fell enough below her estimate so that at the Government owed her money.
She said she had made sure this would not happen .
She said she would withhold the full amount of “military taxes” by paying only the first installment of the tax now and giving herself until , to pay the final quarter.
Mrs. Urie said she had given the 32.3 per cent, her own estimate, to “three nonprofit agencies working for peace and the abolition of war.”
New York.
(UP) — Millions of Americans
rushed to beat the midnight deadline for filing income taxes
. All of them moaned and a few rugged
individualists flatly refused to pay.
“Conscious [sic] Objectors” Refuse
Across the nation there were isolated cases of “conscientious objectors”, who
refused to file returns.
Three Iowans and three New Yorkers balked at paying taxes because of
President Truman’s decision to develop the hydrogen bomb.
In the nation’s largest city, 16 pickets paraded before the internal revenue
offices during the lunch hour ,
carrying signs which read “Don’t pay your income tax. Refuse to finance World
War Ⅲ.” and “Your taxes pay for the H-bomb.”
In Yellow Springs, Ohio, an aged bed-ridden Quaker widow and six of her
neighbors refused to pay part of their taxes as a protest against use of tax
money for military purposes. The widow withheld 30.25 per cent of her tax,
the amount she estimated would go for national defense.
Minister Refuses to Pay
In Boston, a minister wrote revenue collectors that “as long as the bulk of
federal tax dollars goes to pay for past and future wars, I must refuse to
pay the tax.”
In a small tax resistance movement emerged when several tax refusers learned about one another and began to correspond.
Many of these early tax resisters were WRL members.
Abraham Kaufman, the League’s executive secretary, facilitated many of these contacts.
At its founding conference in , Peacemakers established a Tax Refusal Committee.
League members formed a majority on this committee, which was chaired by Ernest Bromley, a Methodist minister and the nation’s leading proponent of tax resistance.
For the next two decades, Bromley championed tax resistance and publicized examples from three continents to demonstrate its power.
American examples included Quaker tax resistance during both the French and Indian War and the American Revolution, the popular tax protests by colonists during the American Revolution, and Henry David Thoreau’s refusal to pay the Massachusetts poll tax to protest the Mexican War.
He also cited England’s Wat Tyler (fourteenth century) and John Hampden (seventeenth century).
Finally, he invoked Gandhi and the Indian independence movement; both resorted to tax resistance in the struggle against British rule.
For both moral and pragmatic reasons, tax resistance appealed to Peacemakers and to radical pacifists.
Most important, it enabled absolutists to express their total commitment against militarism and war.
The Peacemakers’ literature underscored this uncompromising position.
One publication explained that tax resistance “is not merely a protest.
It is an act.”
Aware that modern, technological warfare required huge expenditures, tax resisters were seeking to cripple war preparation — and war — through nonpayment of taxes.
Other literature asserted that nearly 35 percent of the national budget was earmarked for the military and that 80 percent paid for past, present, and future wars.
The “new push-button type warfare,” Bromley declared, would require “more drafted dollars than drafted men.”
Tax resisters were hoping to influence American policy by publicly repudiating military preparedness and weapon stockpiling before conflict broke out again.
Unlike COs and nonregistration, tax resistance was both age and gender neutral.
By enabling men and women of all ages and occupations to participate, tax refusal expanded the sphere of war resistance and promoted solidarity with draft-eligible men.
Ernest and Marion Bromley, whose Wilmington, Ohio, home served as unofficial headquarters of the Tax Refusal Committee, embodied the spirit of tax resistance.
“The time has now come,” Ernest exclaimed in his IRS tax statement, “when men ought no longer to depend solely upon their spoken witness against war or preparation for it.
They ought to prepare themselves for an outright resistance by a thorough-going dissociation with the war-making system.”
In her letter to the tax collector, Marion charged that “this country did not turn to peace at the end of World War Ⅱ, but instead sought to protect and expand an American Empire,” declaring “I want to dissociate myself as completely as possible from these tragic, suicidal and evil policies… and to do all I can to convince my fellow citizens that we must completely renounce the way of war and violence.”
The Bromleys believed that radical pacifist individuals and organizations must assume risks for war resistance.
Anticipating the New Left, Ernest asserted: “Pacifists believe… that there is a… time and place where they as individuals must simply come to a stop, and ‘clog [the system] with their whole weight.’
Perhaps that time and place have come.”
Four months after its formation, Peacemakers’ Tax Refusal Committee published the statements of active tax resisters.
Many of these people were WRL members.
These statements illustrate the total commitment and absolutist nature of Peacemakers and of a section of the League.
Writing in a different venue, Caroline Urie similarly declared:
In a time of crisis like the present it is our duty as sovereign citizens to defend our country not only with protest but with our lives, if necessary, against military enslavement and the possible annihilation implicit in atomic and bacterial warfare.
In the brief time at our disposal, protest is not enough; if we are to assume real responsibility, we must act in a manner simple enough and clear enough to be understood and to arouse public conscience.
As justification for tax resistance, several WRL members pointed to the Nuremberg War Crimes Tribunal, which had established the principle of individual responsibility for wartime actions, even in the face of wartime orders.
In his letter to the IRS, Walter Gormley declared that he was “refusing to make any federal income tax payment, because they money would be used mostly for ‘crimes against peace.’ ” “The U.S. is preparing for a shooting war of aggression by maintaining bases, subservient governments and military forces from Korea to Turkey, by intensive research on methods of mass slaughter and by maintaining a huge military organization,” he charged.
“I must refrain from supporting such a government.”
Likewise, Valerie Riggs explained that “if our government… at Nuremberg could hold individuals responsible to stand against crime… I feel thoroughly justified by my own government in not paying this part of my tax.”
Perhaps A.J. Muste best expressed the compelling logic of tax resistance.
“World War Ⅲ has already started,” he exclaimed in :
I cannot support a government in these war-measures, which I deem insane, wicked and suicidal.
I must withdraw support from such war-measures in every possible way.
The two decisive powers of government… are the power to conscript and the power to tax.
Pacifists recognize that to be consistent they must refuse to be conscripted for military service or training.
I have come… to the conviction that I at least am in conscience bound… to challenge the right of the government to tax me for waging war, and in particular for the production of atomic and bacterial weapons… The need for getting our pacifist teaching off the level of talk and writing and onto the level of action is, I believe, imperative.
Peacemakers was highly critical of pacifist organizations — the WRL included — that collected withholding taxes from their employees.
By withholding taxes these pacifist groups were effectively barring tax refusers from working for them, or forcing them to resign.
Both the WRL and the FOR paid a lot of attention to this issue.
A special committee of the FOR examined the problem for a year before recommending that the FOR withhold taxes, even though most FOR employees had indicated that they wanted to make individual decisions about tax refusal.
Staff member Marion Coddington (Bromley) resigned over the policy.
The WRL also decided to withhold taxes.
In justifying this policy, a member of the League’s executive committee declared: “The life of the organization is at stake.”
The Peacemakers’ Tax Refusal Committee, which characterized the WRL and other pacifist groups as “tax collectors for the government,” was scathing in its denunciation.
“If pacifist organizations, whose business is to create a warless world, are not ready to risk something for war resistance now,” the committee asked, “when will they be ready?”
Tax resistance took various forms. Total refusers paid not tax.
Since most workers could not avoid withholding tax, total refusers were often self-employed.
Miriam Keeler and Marion Coddington Bromley resigned from the Labor Department and the FOR staff in order to avoid the withholding taxes.
Percentage refusers withheld that portion of taxes corresponding to the percentage the federal government would spend on war preparation and the military (calculations ranged from 35 to 80 percent).
Finally, some tax resisters chose to live on an income below the taxable level or to work at several part-time, low-income jobs to preclude employers from withholding taxes.
Some tax resisters refused to submit tax returns; others explained their action in letters to local tax collectors and the Bureau of Internal Revenue.
Some tax resisters, instead of remitting taxes to the government, contributed the money to WRL and other peace and justice organizations.
As a result of Peacemakers’ activism, tax resistance became a major issue for the WRL.
The League sold stickers that tax resisters could attach to their tax forms. “This tax goes chiefly for war purposes, as a pacifist I pay under protest.”
In the League passed several resolutions commending those, members or not, who practiced tax resistance.
Beginning in , several tax resisters began donating a portion of their unpaid income tax to the League, an act consistent with their willingness to pay taxes for nonmilitary social programs. The League established a special literature fund for these donations to ensure that they did not go to pay staff salaries, which were subject to withholding taxes.
Ammon Hennacy, a WRL member most often associated with the Catholic Worker movement, was a pioneer tax refuser praised by the League.
A “Christian anarchist,” he first practiced tax refusal in , when the tax withholding system was implemented.
Each year at tax time he prepared a statement and mailed it to the IRS.
Hennacy’s tax statement reflected the direct action and civil disobedience impulse that would shake the League over the next half-decade.
“We can refuse to put our trust in Princes and Presidents,” he declared.
“With Thoreau and Gandhi we can start our own campaign of Civil Disobedience by refusal to buy war bonds… and… pay taxes for war or conscription.”
In , Hennacy began expanding his protest; each year, on 6 August, he fasted and picketed the local IRS office for as many days as years had passed since .
While picketing, he distributed tax statements and leaflets that repudiated war, advocated anarchism, and declared his tax resistance.
When threatened with arrest for disturbing the peace while picketing, he retorted: “I’m disturbing the war.”
In a letter to Hennacy, [Abraham] Kaufman expressed his disagreement with tax resistance.
But then he added: “I admire your guts and want you to know that I am with you, for each of us must use the methods he feels to be effective in bringing the world out of its present insanity.
Your method may prove most effective in the long run.”
Although he did not delude himself that his “One Man Revolution” would change government policy or transform the world, Hennacy insisted on the moral imperative of individual resistance to the militaristic state.
By , radicals had succeeded in raising the issue of the WRL’s payment of withholding taxes, especially for members like Roy Kepler who supported tax refusal.
In the WRL endorsed CCCO assistance for tax resisters and authorized a review of the issue.
Although they extended moral support to tax refusers and publicized their actions, most League members did not support tax resistance, and the WRL did not officially endorse it.
Kaufman, in particular, insisted that it would be “unethical” for a small minority to “coerce” the League into accepting such a policy.
With minor revisions, the League accepted its subcommittee’s Withholding Tax Report.
Concluding that its survival as an organization took priority over tax refusal, the League decided to continue to withhold income taxes from its employees.
The WRL eventually changed its policy on withholding, and stopped withholding income taxes from the wages of one of its tax-resisting employees, Ralph DiGia, in .
Navy Officer’s Widow Pays 65.4 Per Cent; Figures Rest Slated For War Purposes
Yellow Spring, Ohio, (AP) —
A white-haired widow of a career naval officer
challenged the government’s right to
tax her for military expenses.
Mrs. Caroline Urie figured that 34.6 per cent of her
tax — due
— was earmarked for war.
So, she explained, she wrote a letter to President Truman and the internal
revenue department advising she would pay only 65.4 [percent] of the tax.
“If they want to send me to jail because I won’t pay the other 34.6 per cent,
that’s all right with me,” she said. “I’m perfectly willing to go to jail.
I’ll never pay any more money for war.”
Mrs. Urie, a Quaker, a Pacifist and a social worker,” [sic]
worked with Jane Adams at Chicago’s famed Hull house and was director of the
school for immigrant children for five years. She wrote Mr. Truman and
internal revenue officials:
“As a Christian, I must henceforth refuse to contribute in any way to
maintaining the institution of war.”
Besides, she added, the atomic bomb has made war a “final criminal absurdity.”
Mrs. Urie doesn’t want people to get the impression she’s dodging that “war
tax.” She mailed 34.6 per cent of her tax to four Pacifist organizations — “every
one of them non-profit” — and sent receipts for her contributions with
the tax return.
Mrs. Urie, who refused to give her age (“just call me a white-haired widow — a
very aged widow at that”), admitted she and her late husband often
disagreed on her military views.
“For years I used to send a note along with my federal income tax return
protesting expenditures for the military,” she explained. “But my husband and
I agreed to tolerate each other’s views on the subject.”
Her husband was a medical officer in the navy “for many, many years.” He was
retired before World war Ⅱ, she said, because of injuries suffered in a
target practice explosion on a battleship.
She had a son-in-law in the army during World war Ⅱ.
“He doesn’t agree with me either,” she laughed.
Mrs. Urie said she has nothing against paying taxes “for any reasonable
constructive purposes — like schools, police protection,” and the like.
“The government won’t lose much in war taxes from me because I have small
independent means — and live in a rented house,” she said. “It’s the
principle that’s important to me. Obediance to governmental authority can not
be unlimited.”
I excerpted some articles about the tax resistance of Utah governor J. Bracken Lee.
I’ve since found a more complete version of one of the articles that includes the following details:
Lee elaborated on his tax-fighting plan in an interview after he announced it at a meeting of the American Institute of Mining and Metallurgical Engineers.
At the meeting, he put it this way:
“I shall put my tax in the bank here in Salt Lake City.
Not a dollar of it will they (the federal government) get until legality of the case is tested in the United States Supreme Court.”
Lee said he is taking his tax action to “awaken the American people.”
“My main thinking,” he said, “is if I can get this before the public I can get some people to thinking about this thing.
I’m interested in having the American people awakened to what’s occurring in this country.”
Lee’s announced plan recalled the cases of two women whose defiance of the federal income tax laws drew considerable attention not many years ago.
One involved Miss Vivien Kellems, a Stonington, Conn., industrialist and critic of government tax policy.
The other concerned Mrs. Caroline Foulke Urie, a Quaker widow from Yellow Springs, Ohio, who objected to government expenditures for war.
Mrs. Urie died at the age of 81.
, Miss Kellems stopped withholding income taxes from employes of her cable grip firm, contending the tax law was unconstitutional and claiming the government couldn’t require her to serve as an unpaid tax collector.
The government paid no heed to her requests to be indicted to provide a test case.
Instead, it levied penalties totaling $7,819 and seized the money from the Kellems company’s bank accounts.
However, Miss Kellems and her brother David sued to recapture the money.
In , a Federal Court Jury in New Haven decided she had not acted “willfully” and returned a verdict entitling Miss Kellems to recover most of the money the government had seized.
Mrs. Urie’s case arose in when she decided to withhold part of her income tax because she believed it would be spent for war purposes.
The amount so withheld she donated to organizations she felt were promoting peace.
The government never sought to prosecute.
When I was going through Ammon Hennacy’s writings as part of the research that led to my “one-man revolution” post , I kept an eye out for mentions of J. Bracken Lee.
Though they were not particularly ideologically compatible, the two were both tax resisters and Hennacy spent a good deal of time in Salt Lake City, Utah, as the organizer of a Catholic Worker house there.
And sure enough there’s a mention or two:
I had received several notices from the health department to close down the Joe Hill House.
An article in the paper said that I was not allowed to sleep more than 10 people on the floor.
I asked the inspector what he would do if I had 11.
He said he would padlock the door.
I told him I would break the padlock and beat him like Brigham Young beat the army, and in mock anger I led him to the door and told him “to get the hell out of here.” I spoke to Commissioner Smart and he asked me to present my appeal to the City Commissioners.
I did so and Smart said I was saving the city money by putting up tramps.
And Mayor Brack Lee said that they would go easy on the regulations for I was doing good work; they didn’t want to put me in jail for disobeying their regulations, and he said facetiously that they would have to make an ordinance allowing me to do just what I was doing.
When I was selling CWs at 43 and Lexington a woman told me of a Sister Mary Catherine, a Carmelite nun, whose folks were polygamists and whose relatives are the Romneys, Apostles in the Church.
I corresponded with her and she read my book and she reads the CW, and I visited her in Salt Lake City.
A Jewish man by the name of Herbert Rona became a convert to the Mormons.
An atheist gave him a CW and he wrote to us saying that he was a pacifist.
He had me speak at his home and ex-Gov. Bracken Lee, LeGrande Richards (one of the 12 Apostles), Professor Bennion, and Judge Anderson, all Mormons, came to a meeting at Rona’s house where I explained my radical ideas.
In , upon motion of non-Mormon Mayor “Brack” Lee, the City Commissioners passed a resolution unanimously favoring the serving of Negroes in all restaurants and public places.
This was taken because a Negro reported that he had been refused service in a restaurant, but this is a recommendation, not a law.
Here’s another note about Utah Governor J. Bracken Lee’s tax resistance.
From the Albany Knickerbocker:
Salt Lake City (AP) —
Utah’s Gov. J. Bracken Lee said he will refuse to pay at least part of his income tax this year.
Republican Lee, now in his third year of his second term as governor, says he’s taking the stand because he thinks “it is unconstitutional for this nation to tax its citizens for the support of foreign nations.”
And for the fourth straight year he refused to proclaim as United Nations Day in Utah.
Instead, he said, he will proclaim as United States Day.
Mr. Lee said he will refuse to pay income tax on personal income over and above his gubernatorial salary, from which the tax already has been withheld so far this year.
“Very likely I might decide I will also attempt to act on this withholding thing,” he told the Associated Press.
“But I’m undecided whether I want to act on that or not.
“I plan to figure out my tax return and send it to the government together with a letter saying I have placed the money aside and will not pay it until the United States Supreme Court orders me to do so.”
Mr. Lee elaborated on his tax-fighting plan in an interview after he announced it at a meeting of the American Institute of Mining and Metallurgical Engineers. At the meeting he put it this way:
“I shall put my tax in the bank here in Salt Lake City.
Not a dollar of it will they (the federal government) get until legality of the case is tested in the United States Supreme Court.”
To Awaken People
Mr. Lee said he is taking his tax action to “awaken the American people.”
“My main thinking,” he said, “its if I can get this before the public I can get some people to thinking about this thing.
I’m interested in having the American people awakened to what’s occurring in this country.”
Mr. Lee’s announced plan recalled the cases of two women whose defiance of the
federal income tax laws drew considerable attention not many years ago.
One involved Miss Vivien Kellems, a Stonington, Conn. industrialist and critic of government tax policy.
The other concerned Mrs. Caroline Foulke Urie, a Quaker widow from Yellow Springs, Ohio, who objected to government expenditures for war.
Mrs. Urie died at the age of 81.
Kellems Case Recalled
Early in , Miss Kellems stopped withholding income taxes from employes of her cable grip firm, contending the tax law was unconstitutional and claiming the government couldn’t require her to serve as an unpaid tax collector.
The government paid no heed to her requests to be indicted to provide a test case.
Instead, it levied penalties totaling $7,819 and seized the money from the Kellems company’s bank accounts.
However Miss Kellems and her brother, David, sued to recapture the money.
In , a federal court jury in New Haven decided she had not acted “willfully” and returned a verdict entitling Miss Kellems to recover most of the money the government had seized.
Mrs. Urie’s case arose in when she decided to withhold part of her income tax because she believed it would be spent for war purposes.
The amount so withheld she donated to organizations she felt were promoting peace.
The government never sought to prosecute.
From the front page of The Sandusky [Ohio] Register
Star-News on :
Widow Defies Government — Mrs. Caroline Urie, 75-year-old Quaker widow, from Yellow Springs, O., deducted 32.3 percent of the first installment of her income tax for a second time because she said “war and preparation for war in the atomic era is a crime against nature.”
8 Ohioans Refuse To Pay Tax For “Financing War”
Columbus,
(UP) — Eight
Ohioans said today they will refuse to pay all or part of their
income tax because the money will be used to
“finance war preparations.”
The eight were among 41 persons in the nation who announced they will not pay
all or part of their income taxes. All are members of Peacemakers, a pacifist
group with headquarters in New York city.
In a prepared statement, the eight Ohioans renounced war and violence and said
they were “acting for peace by refusing to manufacture weapons of war,
refusing to serve in the armed forces, and refusing to finance war
preparations.”
The Rev. Ernest Bromley,
Wilmington, O. was
identified as chairman of the tax refusal committee of peacemakers. His wife,
Marion, also was listed among those who will refuse to pay income taxes.
Other Ohioans listed include Horace Champney, Caroline Urie, and Ralph
Templin, all of Yellow Springs; Max Sandin, Cleveland; Wallace Nelson,
Cincinnati, and Aleck D. Dodd, Toledo.
Mrs. Urie, a 75-year-old widow, attempted last year to deduct 34.6 percent of
her estimated tax for that year. Congress, however, reduced taxes in her
income bracket and her income fell enough below her estimate that at the end
of the year the government owed her money instead.
There had been a flurry of articles about Urie’s tax resistance. I’ve posted
some of these before.
A caption to a wire service photo of Urie published in many papers around
reads: “Mrs. Caroline Foulke Urie,
74-year-old Yellow Springs, Ohio, widow [“of a navy World War Ⅰ officer,” some
versions add], has paid $294.30 of her income
tax, but has refused to pay the remaining 34.6 percent, because it would be
allocated for military purposes. Crippled by arthritis for 14 years, Mrs. Urie
is bedridden most of the time.”
And here’s a United Press dispatch from that adds some more details to the story:
Quaker Refuses to Pay Tax for War Expenditures
Yellow Springs, O., (UP) — The
elderly widow of a career Navy officer refused to pay 34.6 per cent of her
income tax because “I’ll never pay
any more money for war.”
Mrs. Caroline Fouke Urie, 74-year-old Quaker, wrote President Truman and the
Internal Revenue Department that she would pay only 65.4 per cent of her
income tax.
“If they want to send me to jail because I won’t pay, that’s all right with
me,” she said. “I’m perfectly willing to go to jail. I’ll never pay any more
money for war.”
She would donate the other 34.6 per cent, she said, to non-profit agencies
“engaged in practical efforts toward removing some of the causes of war.”
Mrs. Urie said her husband, a Navy medical officer, retired before World War Ⅰ
because of injuries suffered in a target practice blast on a battle ship.
In her letter to Mr. Truman, Mrs. Urie explained that in previous years “I
have affixed to my income tax return, and to the check in payment of the tax,
a typed or printed protest stating that the tax is paid under duress because
most of it goes to military expenditures.
“Now that the atomic bomb has reduced to a final criminal absurdity the whole
war system… I have come to the conclusion that — as a Christian, a Quaker, a
religious and conscientious objector to the whole institution of organized
war — I must henceforth refuse to contribute to it in any way I can avoid.”
She said the atomic bomb has involved the United States in the “shame and
guilt” of having been the first to exploit its criminal possibilities.
“It’s time for people to start thinking,” the modest and retiring widow said.
Once expelled from Italy by the Mussolini government because of anti-fascist
statements, Mrs. Urie was a social worker for the Society of Friends in
England, Denmark, Iceland, Norway, Germany, and Italy.
Her friends said that even though crippled by arthritis, Mrs. Urie keeps
abreast of community and world activity by reading and maintaining a large
volume of correspondence.
I haven’t yet visited any archives that hold material from the Peacemakers,
that group that coordinated the early modern American war tax resistance
movement beginning in the . But while I
was following another thread, I found the following article which gave the most
complete membership run-down of the tax refusal committee of Peacemakers that I
have yet seen:
43 Pacifists Won’t Pay U.S. Tax in Arms Protest
Special in The [Philadelphia] Inquirer and New York Herald Tribune
New York, . — Forty-three pacifists throughout the United States
declared that they would refuse to
pay all or a part of their Federal income taxes this year as a protest against
the Nation’s military expenditures.
The group, including a number of Quakers, conscientious objectors, and several
who have refused payment of taxes before, issued a statement through
Peacemakers, [a] national pacifist group with headquarters here, in which they
said:
“Believing that men are accountable for their actions, and that laws requiring
immoral acts should not be obeyed, we have after serious consideration
determined upon a course of civil disobedience with relation to the income tax
laws of the United States.”
Headed by Pastor
Forty-one of the tax refusers acted under a tax refusal committee of
Peacemakers, headed by
Rev. Ernest Bromley, of
Wilmington, O. Their
statement was issued by
Rev. A.J. Muste,
secretary of the organization, and also secretary of the Fellowship of
Reconciliation. Mr. Muste, former director of the Presbyterian Labor Temple,
and one-time president of the defunct Brookwood Labor College at Katonah,
N.Y., has long been
known in the labor movement, and as a pacifist and campaigner against military
conscription.
Two additional persons were listed as tax refusers in a statement issued on
behalf of 11 Philadelphians by Walter C. Longstreth, Philadelphia lawyer. The
other nine were all included in the Peacemakers list.
Some Withhold 36.4 Pct.
Mr. Muste, who said he personally would refuse to pay any income taxes
, as he did
, declared that some of the signers would
follow his course of action; while others will withhold the 36.4 percent
estimated by the Bureau of the Budget as that portion of tax money expended
for military purposes.
Others on the list issued by the Peacemakers were:
Ross Anderson, of Portland
Ore.; B. Bargen, of Newton,
Kas.; Marilyn Blaise, religious
education director, New York City; Marion Bromley, of Wilmington,
O.; Lindley Burton, of Bryn Mawr,
Pa.; Horace Champney, of
Yellow Springs, O.; Miriam Keeler
Cornelius, labor economist, Washington
D.C.; Aleck
D. Dodd, clergyman, of Toledo, O.;
Margaret E. Dungan, of Wallingford,
Pa.; William Bacon Evans,
of Morrestown, N.J.;
Caleb Foote, of Arden, Del.;
Hope Foote, of Arden, Del.;
Marion C. Frenyear, clergyman, of Plainfield,
Mass.; Robert C. Friend,
religious education director, of Schenectady,
N.Y.; Walter Gormly, of
Mt. Vernon,
Ia.; J. William Hawkins, of
Winters, Calif.; Ammon
Hennacy, of Phoenix, Ariz.;
George M. Houser, of New York City; Sander Katz, of New York City; Raymond E.
Kinney, of Los Angeles; Emily Longstreth, of Philadelphia; Walter Longstreth,
of Philadelphia; Mary Bacon Mason, of Newton Center,
Mass.; Milton Mayer, of
Chicago; Mary McDowell, of Brooklyn,
N.Y.; Wallace Nelson, of
Cincinnati; James Peck, of New York City; Paula Beck, of New York City;
Caroline Philips, of Wilmington,
Del.; Lydia Philips, of
Wilmington, Del.; Grace
Rhoads, of Moorestown,
N.J.; Francis B. Riggs,
of Cambridge, Mass.;
Valerie Riggs, of Cambridge,
Mass.; Igal Roodenko, of
Bronx, N.Y.; Max Sandin,
of Cleveland; Laurence Scott, of Kansas City,
Mo.; Ralph Templin, of Yellow
Springs, O.; Louise Thomas, of
Cherry Valley, N.Y.; Mrs.
Caroline Urie, of Yellow Springs,
O.; Beverly White, of Wichita,
Kas..
Many of these names I’ve encountered before, but several were new to me.
There were fewer than 3,000 people living in Yellow Springs, Ohio at the time,
and three of them were among the 43 public war tax resisters in the United
States. I wonder what that was all about.
An Associated Press dispatch from , as headlined by The Kansas City Times:
a wire service photo from
Pacifist Fouls Up As a Tax Dodger
Washington, . — A 72-year-old pacifist sat down in a Treasury corridor to begin a hunger strike which was quickly interrupted by [a] Secret Service agent.
Max Sandin of Cleveland, O., a sign painter, said he would stay in the hall until he starved to death.
Two agents took Sandin into custody and turned him over to a hospital for mental observation.
A conscientious objector in both wars, Sandin has refused to pay federal income taxes .
The Internal Revenue service has attached his monthly social security check for $116 to meet back tax payments.
He was, according to a later article, “found sound of mind and discharged on his own responsibility.”
the District of Columbia Commission on Mental Health dismissed a petition to commit Sandin to an insane institution.
The commission said the finding that Sandin was of sound mind came after examining Sandin and discussions with relatives, friends, and witnesses.
That was over a week and a half after the Secret Service grabbed him, though.
Another unsympathetic headline topped the United Press coverage in the Sandusky, Ohio Register :
Doesn’t Pay Taxes, But Asks Benefits
Cleveland (UPI) — Max Sandin, 72, was en route to Washington to conduct a hunger strike at the U.S. Treasury Building until his social security payments are restored.
Sandin, a conscientious objector in two wars, has refused to pay federal income taxes because most of the money goes to war purposes, he said.
He was notified that his social security benefits for had been surrendered to the Internal Revenue Service.
The government claims he owes several thousand dollars in income taxes.
“I am 72-years-old and unable to work,” Sandin said.
“Without social security I will starve.”
He said he is going to starve in Washington and “the government can do as it pleases with me.”
He was in the news when he and three other pacifists protested against obstruction of Polaris-carrying submarines at New London, Conn.
He related that he had been sentenced to death as a conscientious objector in but this was later reduced by presidential action to a prison sentence and he served about five months.
“Now, years later, they take a second action which can kill me because I am a pacifist and have worked for a peaceful world without war,” Sandin said.
A Scripps dispatch added these details:
Max hitch-hiked from Cleveland to Washington.
he spent all day parading with fellow Peace Action colleagues before the White House, and arguing with Internal Revenue officials.
Late in the day, IRS spokesmen admitted there was a possible legal loophole through which Max might wriggle, should he choose to do so.
“The Social Security law says no one can attach the payments to individuals, but our law doesn’t except the beneficiaries,” explained Lawrence George, spokesman for the tax-collection service.
“There’s a possible conflict in this case which could be taken to court.”
Max said he wouldn’t fight his battle in court.
“No lawyer in the world could defend me against not paying my income tax,” he said in broken English.
“Besides, I have no money for that.”
a wire service photo from
The government had started seizing not only Sandin’s $116 monthly Social Security check, but also his $31 monthly Painters Union Pension, leaving him with essentially no income.
In , Sandin was sentenced to death after being “found guilty of having refused to obey an order of his superior officer to clean up a pile of refuse in camp.”
He was a conscientious objector, but because of the grounds on which he objected, he was found not qualify for that status officially, and so his refusal to serve was treated as simple insubordination.
While at Camp Funston, Sandin and other objectors were subjected to brutal treatment, which became a minor scandal at the time.
President Wilson commuted Sandin’s sentence to 15 years (though in fact he was released from the Fort Leavenworth disciplinary barracks on ).
The following comes from the Mansfield, Ohio News-Journal:
He Pays, But Indirectly
Fights Against Paying Taxes for War
Cleveland — (INS) –
Max Sandin, 59, of Cleveland, refuses to pay federal income taxes because of his convictions against war.
Nevertheless, he pays them, if only indirectly.
, long before a new cult of pacifists began refusing to pay taxes for “war preparations,” Sandin has not paid a single cent of income taxes of his own volition.
Every year, the pacifist sends the Bureau of Internal Revenue a tax form bearing his name and address and a note saying:
As a conscientious objector, I refuse to pay income taxes — not to help war directly.
Tax collectors continually send him notices, visit him at home and call him into the revenue office for conferences.
Once they attached and took his pay for $145 on a painting job.
The collectors also filed a $2,800 tax lien against him, meaning that if he ever owns property, the government will collect its due.
Meanwhile, interest and penalties add to the bill.
Tax officials in Cleveland, however, would not comment on Sandin’s case or that of any other Clevelander who may be one of about 150 persons throughout the nation belong[ing] to the “Peacemakers,” a pacifist organization.
During the First World War, Sandin was sentenced to be shot because he refused to bear arms. He said his objection was political, rather than religious.
President Wilson, however, commuted the death sentence.
Here’s another piece on his tax resistance, from the Circleville, Ohio Herald, :
Stubborn War Objector Still In Private War With Tax Collector
Cleveland (AP) — The little bald man said he wouldn’t pay his income tax , just as he has refused to pay it when he decided Uncle Sam used tax money to pay for wars.
There was a fleck of white paint under Max Sandin’s ear as he sat in the newspaper office to make his annual declaration.
It was literally an earmark of his trade, house-painting.
In his hand he carried a news release headed: “43 refuse to pay federal income tax,” and it was from the “Tax Refusal Committee of Peacemakers.”
Actually the number now is 42, because Mrs. Caroline F. Urie, a naval officer’s widow, died last week.
Sandin was a personal friend and neighbor in suburban Lyndhurst of Mrs. Urie, who made headlines by withholding 75 per cent of her income tax payment.
She figured that percentage went for military expenditures, so she paid it to charities instead of to the government.
“I won’t pay even 25 per cent,” said Sandin, “because they would take 75 per cent of that and use it for war purposes.”
Sandin’s stand for peace has, of course, got him into his own small private war with the Internal Revenue collectors.
Outnumbered, he has lost a few battles, but his foe is fighting on a long front and is unwilling to spend the time, patience, or money to achieve total victory that would net about $3,000 in tax money.
Also, the opposing high command doesn’t want Sandin as a prisoner, and in the skirmishes the house-painter has certain tactical advantages.
When Sandin works steadily for the same contractor, the Internal Revenue officers latch onto his pay check before he gets it.
When he gets his own painting jobs, the collectors have to wait outside his home, board the bus with him and give notice to the homeowner that Uncle Sam, not Sandin will collect for the paint job.
Peace from this private war with the tax collectors is just around the corner for Sandin, who is 65. He plans to retire and write a book entitled “Political War Objector.”
In it he will tell how he has opposed war since World War Ⅰ, when he was sentenced to die for refusing to bear arms but was saved from a firing squad by President Woodrow Wilson’s last-minute reprieve.
And he will tell how he was jailed in for refusal to register for the draft in World War Ⅱ.
“I oppose war politically, not religiously,” he explained.
“Who am I to say that I’m the only person whose conscience objects to war?”
Sandin’s retirement income won’t be a matter of much concern to the Internal Revenue Department.
It will come mostly from social security.
“I paid those taxes,” he said.
While I wasn’t paying attention, someone scanned in many back issues of Friends Bulletin, the journal of the Pacific Yearly Meeting and Pacific Coast Association of Friends.
This has allowed me another window onto the state of American war tax resistance, Quaker war tax resistance in particular, in .
Here, for example, from the issue, is an article on an early Peacemakers tax refusal pledge that includes a complete list of signatories, including several I hadn’t heard of before:
Tax Refusal
On there were among those who did not pay their Federal income taxes the following 59 persons who joined together to support a statement distributed by the Tax Refusal Committee of Peacemakers, 2013 Fifth Ave., N.Y., N.Y. Reverend Ernest Bromley is chairman of this subcommittee of Peacemakers: A.J. Muste is secretary of Peacemakers.
A part of their statement is: “Feeling that war must inevitably come unless something drastic is done by individuals to show their unwillingness to go along with war-making policies of their governments, we the undersigned state hereby that we are not going to pay our federal income taxes due .
For some of us this means that we will not pay that percentage which corresponds to the nation’s outlay for militarism; for others of us it means we will not pay even the first cent for the maintenance of a government whose main business is preparation for annihilation…”
The signers were: Ernest and Marion Bromley, Golay Rd., Gano, Sharonville, Ohio; Lindley and Emma Burton, Low Buildings, Bryn Mawr, Pa.; Horace and Ava Champney, 512 Phillips St., Yellow Springs, O.; Sara Chase, 1525 Sutter St., San Francisco, Calif.; Samuel and Clarissa Cooper, 214 Eastbourne Terr., Moorestown, N.J.; Dorothy DaPonte, Rte. 4, Box 374, Mobile, Ala.; Margaret E. Dungan, Wallingford, Penna.; Arthur Evans, Awbury, Penna.; Rebecca Winsor Evans, Radnor, Penna.; Fyke Farmer, Bellevue Dr., Nashville, Tenn.; Rev. Marion Frenyear, So. Hartford, N.Y.; Henry and Beatrice Dyer, Yellow Springs, O.; Walter Gormly, 412 N. 3rd St., W., Mt. Vernon, Iowa; Konrad Halle, 76 Pinehurst Ave., New York 33, N.Y.
Gerald Haynes, R.R. No. 3, Freeport, Maine; Ammon Hennacy, Rte. 3, Box 227, Phoenix, Ariz.; Rev. George Houser, 21 Audubon Ave., New York 32, N.Y.; Woodbridge O. Johnson, Jr., 106 W. 3rd St., Parkville, Mo.; Sandy Katz 232 W. 29th St., New York 1, N.Y.; Ruth C. LaBarrer, 6 Nutt Ave., Uniontown, Pa.; Sarah B. Leeds, 28 E. Main St., Moorestown, N.J.; Walter and Emily Longstreth, 140 N. 15th St., Philadelphia 2, Pa.; Mary Bacon Mason, 31 Pleasant St., Newton Center, Mass.; Rev. Maurice F. McCrackin, 1111 Dayton St., Cincinnati 14, O.; Mary S. McDowell, 555 Ocean Ave., Brooklyn 26, N.Y.; Rev. A.J. Muste, 21 Audubon Ave., New York 32, N.Y.; Ax Nelson, 501 Benvenue, Los Altos, Calif.; Wallace and Juanita Nelson, Golay Rd., in Gano, Sharonville, O.; Ray and Jean Olds, Yellow Springs, O.; Raymond F. Olds, Monterey, Mass.; Storrs F. Olds, Monterey Rd., Great Barrington, Mass.; Jim Otsuka, Rte. 1, Cloverdale, Mich.; Mrs. Gordon Parker, 1401 Wood Ave., Colorado Springs, Colo.; Mabel G. Parker, 1804 Wood Ave., Colorado Springs, Colo.;
James and Paula Peck, 552 Riverside Dr., New York, N.Y., Miriam Pennypacker, 6420 Drexel Rd., Philadelphia 31, Pa.; Grace Rhoads, Box 90, Moorestown, N.J.; Elizabeth and Edward C.M. Richards, Nur Mahal, R.D. 3, West Chester, Pa.; Francis and Valerie Riggs, 23 Coolidge Hill Rd., Cambridge 38, Mass.; Margaret Schauffler, 100 S. Cedar St., Oberlin, O.; Robert and Marjorie Swann, R. 1, Cloverdale, Mich.; Ralph and Lila Templin, Box 125, Yellow Springs, O.; Caroline F. Urie, 128 S. Walnut St., Yellow Springs, O.; Ellen Winsor, Radnor, Pa.; Abraham and Jean Zwickel, P.O. Box 232, Pismo Beach, Calif.
And here’s an early example of a plea for a “peace tax”-style accommodation for conscientious objectors to military taxation, from the issue:
Tax Petition
On , in Whittier, Calif., there was combined with the annual meeting of the southern California office of the Fellowship of Reconciliation a program sponsored by the Peace Board of California Yearly Meeting.
One of the results of the day is the following petition:
To the Congress of the United States of America
We the undersigned citizens of the United States of America believe:
That present tensions between the free enterprise and communist group of nations are the result of reliance upon military force as an instrument of political determination;
That the threat or use of such force can never result in a just or mutually satisfactory resolution of these tensions;
That the labor and material expended in building up military might would have and still might lead to a peaceful and mutually satisfactory solution if used instead indiscriminately to rebuild the homes and industries destroyed in the last war.
We further believe:
That the military way violates the commandment “Thou shalt not kill” and the Golden Rule by which a Christian must live.
That to supply the means to induce of compel another to do that which we cannot do is equally a violation of those Commandments.
Therefore relying on our Constitutional Bill of Rights which our nation is this week honoring, and the Right of Petition thereby guaranteed, we humbly pray your august body that you pass legislation exempting all of like religious belief from income tax to be used in support of military establishment and substitute the use of that portion of our tax which is to our total tax as the amount used for military is to the national total, to that committee of the United Nations seeking a peaceful abatement of these tensions, thus giving the citizens of the United States the opportunity of paying taxes for the support of war or peace according to the dictates of their own conscience.
Here are some more tidbits I found in back issues of Friends Bulletin.
Two concerned Friends, Bob Vogel and David Walden, who are members of the staff of the Southern California Branch of the AFSC have sent to all meetings in the Pacific Yearly Meeting the following suggested “advice” for implementing our ancient testimony against all wars in terms of current issues.
Friends are exhorted to adhere faithfully to our ancient testimony against all wars and fightings, and in no way unite with any warlike measure, either offensive or defensive, to the end that we may convincingly demonstrate a more excellent way of settling conflicts — the way of Christian love, goodwill, and service to all men.
A living concern having been expressed that Friends[’] practices be consistent with their professions, Friends are urged (1) not to register for any conscription measure nor accept any alternative service for conscientious objectors under a compulsory conscription law; (2) to avoid engaging in any trade or business profession promotive of war or profiting from war activity; (3) to avoid the purchase of government war bonds or stock certificates in war industries; (4) to refuse to pay taxes for war purposes, paying only that percentage of the tax which supports the civil aspects of government; (5) to educate and counsel their children against the use of military toys and books and the attendance or participation in military drills, organizations, parades, or demonstrations.
Friends are urged to live in that life and power that takes away the occasion for war, to give deep attention to the causes of war and conflict, and to support those efforts of mediation and reconciliation which are consistent with our principles gained through Divine guidance.
The edition gave this transcript of a portion of the trial of James Otsuka over his war tax resistance:
Four Dollars and Fifty Cents
On Judge Robert Baltzell sentenced James Otsuka in Federal Court in Indianapolis to ninety days and a fine of $100. Otsuka, a member of Orange Grove Meeting (Pasadena), had refused to comply with an order given by Baltzell to pay to the government $4.50 in taxes which he owed, this being the amount of his taxes that he had determined from the Statemen’s Year Book and other sources would go to military purposes and which he had given instead to the American Friends Service Committee.
He was represented by Earl Robbins, an attorney from Centerville, Indiana.
An account of the dialogue heard in chambers where James Otsuka was sentenced indicated that Baltzell, who has been very rough with most c.o.’s appearing before him and rude to this defendant, was concerned with the issue.
There follows a part of Carolyn Mallison’s report of the dialogue between Baltzell and Robbins, the attorney, after the defendant had been sentenced and taken away:
Judge:
Do you understand this, Robbins?
Robbins:
I think so, your Honor.
Judge:
I hope not!
You are an American.
I hope you cannot understand such actions.
Robbins:
I do not condone it myself your Honor, but I can understand it.
It reminds me of the refusal of the early colonists to pay the Stamp Tax.
Judge:
You know what happened then.
You wouldn’t want that to happen…
I don’t see how you can represent him.
It is a terrible thing for a young fellow to take all the advantages of living here and then refuse to pay his taxes.
Robbins:
Of course the tax law is different from Selective Service, for instance.
Judge:
In what way?
Robbins:
Selective Service does provide for alternative service for those who are conscientiously opposed to war, whereas the tax law gives no alternative.
Immediately after the U.S. Marshal had departed with Otsuka a group of his friends were invited by Judge Baltzell into his chambers for a consultation on the decision just handed down.
Included in the group were Ernest Bromley (editor of News of Tax Refusal, from which this report is taken, Wilmington, Ohio), Lloyd Danzeison [sic] (Peacemaker, Yellow Springs, Ohio), Carfon Foltz, Mr. & Mrs. Glenn Mallison, Jean Olds, Perry Ostroff, Earl Robbins, Ralph Templin, and Caroline Urie.
Here again the issue was raised as how one changes a bad law with Judge Baltzell indicating that his job was to judge by existing laws and he would continue to do so until the people through Congress created new laws.
This note, from the edition, gives us a peek into the publicity tactics in play at the launch of the Peacemakers movement:
Ernest R. Bromley (General Delivery, Wilmington, Ohio) writes:
“The continuation committee of Peacemakers met in Chicago last week .
Among the things discussed was a plan to get widespread publicity on the tax refusal business just prior to .
At present there are about 35 people ready to announce their stand of refusal (some for this year, but all for next year, 1949 I mean).
I am writing, therefore, to several who have recently expressed considerable interest in the position in order to see if any of them are ready to join us and use our group as a medium for making their announcement, at least making it at that time.”
An article from the edition also gave some useful background on the “peace tax” law idea.
This came in the form of a proposed model bill that was being sent around for review by the Pacific Yearly Meeting to its Monthly Meetings, in the hopes of coming to “a decision on whether not an attempt should be made to enact this concept into law.”
The article says that the proposed bill was formulated in response to a presentation on the subject in by representatives of the Claremont Meeting at the Pacific Yearly Meeting that year.
The proposed legislation called itself the “Civilian Income Tax Act of ” and would have created a walled-off fund, governed by the Secretary of the Treasury, and destined “solely to UNICEF” that would receive federal income taxes from conscientious objectors who were willing to pay an extra 5% surtax for the privilege of not having to pay their taxes into the general fund and pay for military spending.
I also noted several mentions of Quakers discussing the idea of voluntarily taxing themselves a certain portion of their income to send to the United Nations as a way of promoting peace.
This continued long after the United Nations formally ratified the Korean War, so seems a bit blinkered to me, but there was clearly a lot of wishful thinking about the United Nations that had persisted through earlier generations in the peace movement and their daydreams about an international legal order that would subdue the frightful anarchy between nations.
Another early “thaw” example, a rare one from Canada, is found in the edition:
Calgary Friends… have written the Minister of Finance regarding non-payment of the defense portion of income taxes.
The Quarterly Meeting encouraged Friends to take what ever stand seemed right to them on the tax question as their consciences dictate, and asked the Monthly Meetings to consider the concern of Calgary Friends.
A problem has been raised in a letter from Irvin [sic] Hogenauer (310 East 170 St., Seattle 55, Washington), which has for many years troubled Friends and members of other peace-making groups.
It strikes at two basic testimonies of Friends: our conviction that war and preparation for war are contrary to the will of our Father, and our belief in the rightness of a government of the people, by the people, and for the people.
In our observation, this problem has not been solved by any group of our Society to the satisfaction of all.
Perhaps our Yearly Meeting, with its diverse, international background, would be able to add to the thinking of the Society and like-minded persons.
The Bulletin would welcome comments; please keep them brief.
―Editor
“In the Adult Study Group of University Meeting,” writes Irwin Hogenauer, “we are using Jospehine Benton’s pamphlet John Woolman, Most Modern of Ancient Friends.
In my further reading of The Basis of Quaker Political Concern, the speech by Henry J. Cadbury before the tenth anniversary dinner of the Friends Committee on National Legislation, Washington D.C., I came across another quotation from John Woolman: ‘I cannot form a concern, but when a concern comes I endeavor to be obedient.’…
[“]Farther on in the speech, Henry Cadbury quotes Woolman again: ‘To turn all the treasures we possess into channels of universal love becomes the business of our lives.’
Now I interpret the word ‘becomes’ two ways.
First, I suppose, one would say that for Quakers this action of which he speaks ‘will be’ the business of our lives.
But I also read that the right channeling of our treasures ‘is becoming to’ the business our our lives.
And the present tense means now.
“I have been burdened with a concern for many years.
I have not sought it out…
Try as I will, especially at the behest of friends and relatives, I can not throw it off, or dodge it, or whatever one does with a concern…
“Mailings from the F.C.N.L. continually remind me… that defense is the primary fiscal consideration of the United States government.
This means that the dollars we pay in income taxes are being spent largely for the military establishment, security measures, and related endeavours in the defense machinery.
“What has become of our peace testimony if we can allow the government to take our substance and put it to a use contrary to this testimony?…
Who is there who refuses military service who would not also refuse to pay for a bullet, a rifle, an atom or hydrogen bomb?…
“Some say we can not keep from paying it.
There are a number of ways if one would but investigate.
A result may be imprisonment, but what period in history has not seen some Quakers in prisons?…
“It is also contended that so many federal taxes that go for war purposes are on goods and services that we buy daily.
This may be true, but it should not automatically relieve us from thought and action on the tax which is levied directly and often withheld without consent of the earner.
With Henry Thoreau, we can not follow the use made of the dollar after we spend it for groceries, telephone services, gasoline, or a railroad ticket.
But does this relieve us of all responsibility in this area?
In any case we can do something about a tax levied directly on our wage, salary, or other income.”
The Friends peace testimony that Friends cannot support or prepare for war, implies that one can not pay others to prepare for or engage in war.
It is not true that one can’t avoid or refuse to pay federal income taxes.
To keep one’s income below the tax level is the most practical course.
I think — having done so for the last 5 years.
A change in employment may be necessary, but can a Friend properly hold a job that causes him to compromise with his testimonies?
If we follow the Richmond Statement, , “Conscientious objection must be complemented by conscientious projection of God’s spirit into affirmative action,” we will be involved in so much volunteer activity for peace that we won’t have time enough for money-making jobs to have a taxable income.
The important thing is to do all one is able for peace…
John Affolter
4004 13th Ave., South Seattle 8, Washington
(In another letter in the same issue, the writer said that tax resisters could expect to have their bank accounts seized unless “you have no job, raise your own food, and resort to primitive barter… a cumbersome way of moving towards non-participation in the war establishment.”
The writer suggested instead that concerned people “influence our legislators” in some unspecified way.)
New Society Publishers began in to bring out a “Barbara Deming Memorial Series” of books meant to highlight women involved in nonviolent action.
The first book in the series was You Can’t Kill the Spirit by Pam McAllister, which included a chapter on women tax resisters, and another separate section on the Igbo Women’s War, which was also a tax resistance campaign in part.
Here are some excerpts from this book:
Injustice, Death and Taxes: Women Say No!
The world just didn’t make sense to thirty-two-year-old Hubertine Auclert.
On the one hand she was considered a French citizen expected to obey the laws of her country and to pay property taxes.
On the other hand, she was denied the citizen’s right to vote simply because she was a woman.
The male rulers couldn’t have it both ways, Auclert decided.
She began plotting a way to unhinge the system.
On election day in , Auclert and several other tax-paying women of Paris initiated the first stage of the action.
They stomped past a line of startled men and presented themselves for voter registration.
They demanded that they be recognized as full citizens of France with rights as well as responsibilities.
They demanded an end to the injustice of taxation without representation.
The men were amazed: there was nothing wrong with the system’s inconsistencies as far as they were concerned!
The women were turned away.
It was time for stage two.
Taking advantage of the publicity the women had generated, Auclert called for a women’s “tax strike.”
She reasoned that, since men alone had the privilege of governing the people and allotting national budgets, men alone should have the privilege of paying taxes.
“Since I have no right to control the use of my money,” she wrote, “I no longer wish to give it.
I do not wish to be an accomplice, by my acquiescence, in the vast exploitation that the masculine autocracy believes is its right to exercise in regard to women.
I have no rights, therefore I have no obligations.
I do not vote, I do not pay.”
During the tax strike, Auclert was joined by twenty other women — eight widows and the rest, presumably, single women.
When the authorities demanded payment, all but three of the women ended their participation in the strike.
The remaining women continued to appeal the decision.
But when law enforcement officers attempted to seize their furniture, Auclert and the others gave in.
They decided they had done the best they could to call attention to the injustice.
Auclert was not the first woman to organize against the taxation of women without government representation.
Mid-nineteenth-century United States saw a number of women’s rights tax resisters.
In … Lucy Stone decided to publicize the injustice of government taxation of women who, because they were denied the vote, were without representation.
, Henry David Thoreau had spent a night in jail for his refusal to pay the Massachusetts poll tax, an action he had taken in opposition to the U.S. war with Mexico.
Now Lucy Stone decided to use the same tactic to publicly draw attention to women’s oppression as voteless taxpayers.
When she refused to pay her taxes, the government held a public auction and sold a number of her household goods.
Like Lucy Stone, [Lydia Sayer] Hasbrouck’s radicalism led her to become a tax resister, refusing to pay local taxes in protest against the denial of her right to vote.
A tax collector, so the story goes, managed to steal one of Hasbrouck’s Bloomer outfits from her house and advertise it for sale, the proceeds to go toward the taxes she owed.
Abby Kelly Foster had always been an active worker and speaker for women’s rights, but, in , at the age of sixty-three, she was newly inspired.
She had just heard about Julia and Abby Smith, two sisters in neighboring Connecticut, who were refusing to pay the taxes on their farm in order to protest the denial of suffrage to women.
This was just the sort of nonviolent direct action that appealed to Abby.
Her husband, Stephen, agreed.
That year, they refused to pay their taxes on their beloved “Liberty Farm” in order to give voice to the urgency and justice of women’s suffrage.
When they refused again in , the city of Worcester, Massachusetts took action.
The farm was seized and put up for auction to the highest bidder.
Letters of support for the Fosters’ tax resistance poured in from the progressive leaders of the day.
Boston abolitionist Wendell Phillips wrote, “Of course I need not tell either of you at this late day how much I appreciate this last chapter in the lives full of heroic self sacrifice to conviction.”
Lucy Stone and Elizabeth Cady Stanton sent words of encouragement.
William Lloyd Garrison, a pacifist abolitionist, wrote, “I hope there is not a man in your city or county or elsewhere who will meanly seek to make that property available to his own selfish ends.
Let there be no buyer at any price.”
Unfortunately, Osgood Plummer, a politically conservative neighbor, bid $100 for the farm, but he retreated when Stephen Foster chided him.
Later, Plummer wrote a letter to the local newspaper explaining that he had only wanted to teach the Fosters a lesson about obeying the law.
With no other bidders, the deed to Liberty Farm reverted to the city.
For the next few years, Abby and Stephen lived with the fear and uncertainty of losing the farm, but they continued their tax resistance until Stephen’s ill health became an overriding concern.
In , the Fosters ended their protest and paid several thousand dollars to save the farm.
The point had been made.
In , the Women’s Tax Resistance League of London published a little pamphlet entitled Why We Resist Our Taxes… “The government of this country which professes to be a representative one and to rest on the consent of the governed, is Constitutional in its relation to men, Unconstitutional in its relation to women,” wrote Margaret Kineton Parkes, author of the pamphlet.
Parkes did not mean all women, however.
She hastened to reassure the reader that the tax resisters were not in the least radical but only fair-minded, concerned with votes only for women householders, certainly not for all women.
The League, she claimed, was about passively resisting the unconstitutional government ruling England.
Because they had been granted the municipal vote, women tax resisters were more than willing to pay local “rates,” and they promised they’d have equal willingness to pay “imperial taxes” as soon as they were granted the parliamentary vote.
The London tax resisters devised a new way to reach beyond those already enlightened members of the public who attended suffrage meetings.
They began making suffrage speeches at public auctions, a tactic that had unexpectedly good results.
Many people were converted to the suffrage cause once they had the chance to hear the argument from the resisters themselves.
The auctioneers not only permitted the women to make their speeches, but sometimes actively invited the speeches and even addressed the cause in their own words.
One auctioneer who openly supported the tax-resisting suffragists ended his remarks by saying: “If I had to pay rates and taxes and had not a vote, I should consider it a great disgrace on the part of the Government, but I should consider it a far greater disgrace on my part if I did not protest against it.”
Since the granting of suffrage, women’s tax resistance has most often been undertaken to protest a government’s military spending or its involvement in a specific war — such as the U.S. war in Vietnam.
For part of her life, Barbara Deming was a war tax resister.
In her essay “On Revolution and Equilibrium,” she explained the rationale for this form of nonviolent noncooperation.
Words are not enough here.
Gandhi’s term for nonviolent action was “satyagraha” — which can be translated as “clinging to the truth…” And one has to cling with one’s entire weight… One doesn’t just say, “I don’t believe in this war,” but refuses to put on a uniform.
One doesn’t just say “The use of napalm is atrocious,” but refuses to pay for it by refusing to pay one’s taxes.
At , Juanita Nelson threw on the new white terry cloth bathrobe she’d recently ordered from the Sears-Roebuck catalog and answered her door.
Two U.S. marshals informed her that they had an order for her arrest.
What a way to start the day.
Juanita and her husband Wally, who was out of town that day, had not paid withholding taxes nor filed any forms for , so it was, in one sense, no big surprise that the government wanted to see her.
“But even with the best intentions in the world of going to jail,” she later wrote, “I would have been startled to be awakened at 6:30 a.m. to be told that I was under arrest.”
She explained to the bright-eyed government men that she would be glad to tell the judge why she was resisting taxes if he’d care to come see her.
Then she proceeded to explain why she would not willingly walk out of her door to appear in court.
I am not paying taxes because the overwhelming percentage of the budget goes for war purposes.
I do not wish to participate in any phase of the collection of such taxes.
I do not even want to act as if I think that anyone, including the government, has a right to punish me for an act which I consider honorable.
I cannot come with you.
The government men were not moved.
They called for back-up assistance while Juanita considered her situation.
Should she get dressed?
Would getting dressed be a way of cooperating?
Quickly she called a friend on the phone to let others know what was happening to her, and just as quickly she was surrounded by seven annoyed law enforcement officers.
There was a brief exchange about her still being in her bathrobe, and one uncomfortable officer asked her whether or not she believed in God.
She answered in the negative.
(“He did not go on to explain the connection he had evidently been going to establish between God and dressing for arrest,” Juanita later reported.)
Suddenly, a gruff, no-nonsense officer said, “We’ll just take her the way she is, if that’s the way she wants it.”
He slapped some handcuffs on her and lifted her off the floor.
In maneuvering her into the government car, he apparently tried his best to expose the nakedness under her bathrobe while another officer tried to cover her.
As the car carried her into the heart of Philadelphia, she tried to think.
“My thoughts were like buckshot,” she wrote of her experience, “so scattered they didn’t hit anything or, when they did, made little dent.
The robe was a huge question mark placed starkly after some vexing problems. Why am I going to jail?
Why am I going to jail in a bathrobe?”
The only thing she was sure of at that moment was that, until her head cleared, she would refuse to cooperate with her jailers.
When the car stopped, she was yanked from the back seat, carried into the federal court building, dragged up a flight of stairs, and thrown behind bars.
[S]everal friends stopped by to visit her.
(Her phone call had been a good idea.)
The first visitors were two men, tax-refusing pacifists like herself.
They thought it best, for the sake of appearances, to go to court in the proper clothes.
They offered to get some clothes for her, and she agreed — just in case she decided she’d feel more at ease in them.
After the men left, a woman friend stopped by.
“You look like a female Gandhi in that robe!”
she said.
“You look, well, dignified.”
Juanita grinned.
When they finally came for her, Juanita, still refusing to walk, was wheeled into the courtroom in her bathrobe.
The clothes the men had brought were left behind in a brown paper bag.
The judge gave her until to comply with the court order that she turn over her financial records or be subjected to a possible fine of $1000, a year in jail, or both.
Juanita Nelson went home.
came and went.
Many Fridays came and went.
The charges were dropped and she heard nothing more.
Every now and then, the Internal Revenue Service sends her a bill or tries to confiscate a car, but so far the government has met a wall of nonviolent noncooperation.
They should have known when they saw Juanita in her bathrobe: nothing will make her pay for war.
Most people who take any notice of my position are appalled by my lawbreaking and not at all about the reasons for my not paying taxes.
Instead of trying to make me justify my civil disobedience, why do they not question themselves and the government about a course of action which makes billions available for weapons, but cannot provide decent housing and education for a large segment of the population?
Like the ascetics of old, Eroseanna (Rose or Sis) Robinson was singularly unburdened by material possessions.
She had no bank account, owned no real estate, and when the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) tried to seize her personal property, they found that all she had was an ironing board, a clock, a quilt, and some clothes.
Robinson took seriously her membership in Peacemakers (an organization founded in to promote radical, nonviolent direct action).
She had been a war tax resister since the early fifties, filing no statements of income and ignoring the various notices and certified letters sent by the IRS.
In , thirty-five years old, single and black, Robinson was a skilled artist and athlete; creative, too, in finding ways to live in the United States without paying for the U.S. military.
She tried to keep her earnings below the taxable level and for a period managed to spend less than $3 per week for food.
She also arranged to earn a withholding-free income from several different work situations.
Even with the little money she made, Robinson regularly sent sums greater than the taxes she owed to groups that worked for peace and social justice.
On , federal marshals descended on Robinson at a community center in Chicago and demanded she come with them.
When she refused, they carried her bodily out of the center and to the district court where she was seated on a bench before a judge.
She refused to accept the services of a lawyer and asked instead that they lay aside their roles as judge and defendant and speak to each other as two people with genuine concerns.
When the judge agreed, Robinson talked.
“I have not filed income taxes,” she said, “because I know that a large part of the tax will be used for militarization.
Much of the money is spent for atom and hydrogen bombs.
These bombs have a deadly fallout that causes human destruction, as it has been proved.
If I pay income tax, I am participating in that course.
We have a duty to contribute constructively to life, and not destructively.”
After making this statement, she was handcuffed, put in a wheelchair because she refused to walk, and taken to jail.
The next day she was wheeled into court again, where she encountered a different judge.
This judge ridiculed her and her supporters who were standing in a vigil in front of the courthouse.
He accused her of having an attitude of “contumacious criminal contempt.”
He committed her to jail until she would agree to file a tax return and show records of her earnings.
Not only would she not agree to file a tax return, she also would not agree to cooperate in any way with the prison system.
She would not walk.
She would not eat.
She did agree to see one visitor one time — her friend Ernest Bromley, a radical pacifist and member of Peacemakers, who had come to see her in Cook County Jail.
He wrote while she dictated a message for all her supporters on the outside:
I see the military system and jail system as one thing.
I don’t want to give up my own will.
I will not compromise by accepting a lawyer or by recognizing the judge as judge.
I would rather that no one try to make an arrangement with the judge on my behalf.
I ask nothing from the court or the jail.
I do not want to pay for war.
That is my main concern.
Love to everyone.
On , Robinson was again wheeled into court.
It was clear that she would not compromise her principles to spare her own discomfort.
The judge sentenced her to jail for a year and added an extra day for “criminal contempt.”
On , she was moved to the federal prison in Alderson, West Virginia.
There she continued her fast, though prison officials began to force-feed her liquids through a tube inserted into her nose.
She refused to cooperate in any way with her own imprisonment nor did she try to send letters through the system of prison censorship.
Ten members of Peacemakers, including long-time activist Marjorie Swann, set up their tents just beyond the gates at Alderson and issued a press release on .
They explained that they were there to show support for Robinson and that most of them intended to fast just as she was fasting.
They invited anyone who wanted to talk to stop by the gate where they were camping.
The pacifists propped up signs along the stretch of dusty road — “No Tax for War,” “Peace Is the Only Defense,” “Thou Shalt Not Kill,” and “Rose Won’t Pay Income Tax.”
After fasting for , Robinson was suddenly and unconditionally discharged from prison on .
The judge who ordered her release said Robinson had become a burden to the prison medical facilities, adding that he felt she had been punished sufficiently.
He didn’t mention the picketers camped outside.
When Robinson was released from prison late afternoon, the first thing she saw was a huge banner held high by her friends — “Bravo Rose!”
A number of women have become war tax resisters in reaction to a specific war.
Mary Bacon Mason, a Massachusetts music teacher, became a war tax resister in after World War Ⅱ.
She told the government she would be willing to pay double her tax if it could be used only for aid to suffering people anywhere, but would accept prison or worse rather than pay for war.
The only possible defense, she said, is friendship and mutual help.
Of World War Ⅱ she said:
I paid a share in that cost and I am guilty of burning people alive in Germany and Japan.
I ask humanity’s forgiveness.
In , Caroline Urie of Yellow Springs, Ohio, bedridden and elderly, gained national attention and inspired many people to consider war tax resistance when she withheld 34.6 percent of her tax.
She sent an equivalent amount as a donation to four peace organizations and wrote an open letter to President Truman and the IRS
Now that the atomic bomb has reduced to a final criminal absurdity the whole war system, leading quite possibly to the liquidation of human society, and has involved the United States in the shame and guilt of having been the first to exploit its criminal possibilities, I have come to the conclusion that — as a Christian, Quaker, religious and conscientious objector to the whole institution of organized war — I must henceforth refuse to contribute to it in any way I can avoid.
Eighteen years later, and in response to a new war, another woman from Yellow Springs, Ohio, Doris E. Sargent, wrote to the Peacemakers newsletter with a new war tax resistance tactic.
She noted that the government had reintroduced a federal tax attached to telephone bills.
The money was earmarked specifically for U.S. military expenses.
Sargent proposed a radical response — that all those who demanded an end to the fighting in Vietnam ask the phone company to remove their phones in protest.
If everyone who opposed the war were willing to make such an extreme sacrifice, real pressure could be put on the government.
Then Sargent suggested a less extreme idea — that people keep their phones and pay their bills but refuse to pay the federal tax.
Phone tax resisters could send a note with their bills each month, stating that the protest was not directed at the phone company but at the government which was using the phone tax to support war.
The idea caught hold, and phone tax resistance became a popular way to protest the war in Vietnam.
It is still used as a form of war tax resistance.
The war in Vietnam turned many people into war tax resisters.
Pacifist folksinger Joan Baez set an example as a tax resister early in the war years by withholding 60 percent of her income tax.
She was instrumental in persuading countless others to follow her example.
In , she explained:
We talk about democracy and Christianity — and we try out a new fire-bomb.
We talk about peace and we move thousands more men and weapons into Vietnam.
This country has gone mad.
But I will not go mad with it.
I will not pay for organized murder.
I will not pay for the war in Vietnam.
In , life-long Quaker Meg Bowman wrote a letter to the IRS to explain why she had decided once again not to pay her federal income tax.
“Do you carefully maintain our testimony against all preparations for war and against participation in war as inconsistent with the teachings of Christ?”
― Query, Discipline of Pacific Yearly Meeting, Religious Society of Friends (Quakers).
The above quotation is from the book that is intended to give guidance to members for daily living.
The book repeatedly stresses peace and individual responsibility.
It is clear to me that I am not only responsible for my voluntary actions, but also for that which is purchased with my income.
If my income is spent for something immoral or if I allow others to buy guns with money I have earned, this is as wrong and offending to “that of God in every man” as if I had used that gun, or planned that bomb strike.
When I worked a five-day week it seemed to me that one-fifth of my income went to taxes.
This would be equivalent to working one full day each week for the U.S. government.
It seemed I worked as follows:
Monday for food.
I felt responsible to buy wholesome, nourishing items that would provide
health and energy, but not too much meat or other luxuries, the world supply of which is limited.
Tuesday for shelter.
We maintain a comfortable, simply furnished home where we may live in
dignity and share with others.
Wednesday for clothing,
health needs and other essentials and for recreation, all carefully
chosen.
Thursday for support of causes.
I select with care those organizations which seem to be acting in such a
way that responsibility to God and my brother is well served.
Friday for death,
bombs, napalm, for My Lai and overkill.
I am asked to support a
government whose main business is war.
Though the above is oversimplified, the point is clear.
I cannot work four days a week for life and joy and sharing, and one day for death.
I cannot pay federal taxes.
I believe this decision is protected by law as a First Amendment right of freedom of religion.
If I am wrong it is still better to have erred on the side of peace and humanity.
Sincerely, Meg Bowman
“The only thing of which I’m guilty is financially supporting the war in Southeast Asia against my better judgment until ,” said Martha Tranquilli when she was charged with the criminal offense of providing false information on her income tax forms.
At , Tranquilli stood on the steps of the state capitol building in Sacramento, California and addressed the 100 supporters who had gathered.
After a short Unitarian service held on her behalf, the aging white woman with a long gray braid told them in her calm, soft voice that she envisioned the day when scientists and workers would join in refusing to pay war taxes or do war work.
I was very much afraid of going to prison, but I think I have overcome that fear.
I plan to read, write letters, and meditate as much as possible.
I’m going to try my best to make an adventure out of this thing.
One after another, friends and strangers attending the rally came up to embrace Tranquilli and offer words of encouragement.
After some spirited singing, they accompanied her to the federal building where she turned herself in to the federal marshals.
Hers was a media image made to order.
“63-Year-Old Tax-Resisting Grandma Goes to Jail” shouted the headlines, and the war tax resistance movement didn’t mind the national publicity Martha Tranquilli generated.
Tranquilli was opposed to the Vietnam War and all the suffering the war was inflicting on the people of Vietnam, the people of the United States, and on the earth itself.
She had therefore decided to withhold the 61 percent of her income taxes (amounting to approximately $1,100) which she believed would go to pay for the war.
It was in Mound Bayou, Mississipi that Martha was tried and sentenced for tax fraud in .
Like other war tax resisters, Tranquilli withheld her taxes by listing unusual dependents.
Tranquilli listed seven peace organizations as dependents, including War Resisters League, the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, the American Civil Liberties Union, and the American Friends Service Committee.
(Another war tax resister in claimed 3 billion dependents, explaining to the IRS that he felt the population of the earth depended on him and on others to refuse to pay war taxes.
That case went to court and the tax resister was acquitted by a court of appeals of the charge of willfully filing a false and fraudulent W-4 form.)
Tranquilli was found guilty of tax fraud, but the judge was reluctant to send her to jail and indicated he’d give her a suspended sentence if she would only apologize and promise not to do it again.
When Tranquilli refused this offer she was sentenced to nine months in prison and two years probation.
The Mississippi Civil Liberties Union helped her appeal the case and, while the appeal was pending, she moved to California.
Both the Court of Appeals and the U.S. Supreme Court refused to hear her case.
On , after making national headlines and being cheered on by supporters, Tranquilli began her stay at Terminal Island Prison in San Pedro, California.
She quickly got involved in the life of the prison community…
After her release, Tranquilli wrote to a friend: “Be sure to say that I did not suffer in prison.
It was a learning experience.”
Tranquilli continued her tax resistance as well as her work for peace and justice until her death in .
For Mason and Urie it was the Second World War.
For Baez, Bowman, and Tranquilli it was the war in Vietnam.
it is the U.S.-backed war against Nicaragua that motivates many new war tax resisters.
In in Brooklyn, New York, tax resister Donna Mehle wrote an open letter to the IRS which was published in the local newspaper.
She cited a religious basis for her tax resistance, protesting the war against Nicaragua.
The decision to come into conflict with the laws of my country is very difficult, but it is a decision rooted in my Christian faith.
As a Christian, I am called to affirm life and reject violence… My commitment to tax resistance deepened in the past year when I travelled to Nicaragua.
There I saw first hand the effect of my tax dollars ($100 million in Contra Aid ).
I vowed to myself and to the Nicaraguan people I met that I would not be complicit in the U.S. backed Contra war, a war which targets innocent civilians and children.
Mehle informed the IRS that she intended to redirect the money she would have owed in taxes to an alternative fund “which supports life-affirming projects in New York City.”
In , some women in the United States proposed a specifically feminist perspective on war tax resistance.
In New York City, the Women’s Tax Resistance Assistance distributed a brochure which read in part:
We can’t keep working for disarmament, for women’s rights, including an end to lesbian oppression, and for racial equality while paying for a male-dominated government which impoverishes and exploits us now and threatens to eliminate the world’s future.
On , this group performed street theater on the steps of Federal Hall.
Some of the women dressed up as pieces of the federal budget “pie” while others, dressed as waitresses, explained the military menu to passersby and handed out leaflets.
In Canada in , sixty-eight-year-old Edith Adamson made headlines with her tax resistance.
A lifelong pacifist and the coordinator of the Peace Tax Fund Committee of Canada, Adamson was one of approximately sixty Canadians who hoped to prevent the government from using their money to make war.
Not that Adamson and the others wanted to keep the money for their own use: they wanted to redirect their dollars into a peace tax fund.
With the adoption of the new Charter of Rights in the Canadian Constitution, there was a guarantee of freedom of conscience.
“This means,” Adamson explained for news reporters, “that the government should provide a legal alternative to war taxes for those who object to killing on religious or ethical grounds.”
Since , Canadian war tax resisters — who call themselves “Peace Trusters” because they trust in peace, not war — have petitioned their government to develop a peace tax fund which would allow citizens the option of directing their money away from the military budget.
They asked for a simple tax form which would allow taxpayers to check whether they want a portion of their taxes to go for warmaking or peacemaking.
In , Edith Adamson explained her involvement:
In a nuclear war, you wouldn’t have a chance to be a conscientious objector.
And, being an old lady, I wouldn’t be drafted, so it seemed the peace tax fund idea was a sound way to get at the root of the problem.
I not only want to exempt myself from the killing, but I want to try to influence the government to look at this problem — and other people as well to examine their consciences.
A nuclear war would involve everybody and mean total destruction and I couldn’t just hide under my little exemption and stay alive.
This peace tax would be an extension of conscientious objector status for the military.
It’s more appropriate today because war now depends more on money than on personnel; it only took twelve men to drop the bomb over Hiroshima, but it took millions, perhaps billions of taxpayers’ dollars in Canada, Britain, and the United States to develop that bomb.
By there were approximately 440 Peace Trusters in Canada who were withholding a portion of their taxes and putting that money into a peace tax fund.
They had agreed to waive the interest on this money in order to pay the court fees involved in taking on a test case to establish the legality of the peace tax fund.
The claimant Jerilynn Prior, a physician and Quaker originally from the United States where she was also a tax resister, now lives in British Columbia.
In a press release, Prior said that paying for war violates her freedom of conscience and religion.
This deep conviction rises from my commitment to work for peace.
I try to live my life that way — as a mother, a physician, a teacher, a woman, a citizen of this world community.
It would be hypocrisy to voluntarily allow my tax contribution to be used for war or the military or pamphlets about bomb shelters…
Each of us can work for peace in our own life, with our own resources, and in our own way.
This tax appeal is the way I must work for peace.
Nigerian women used song in to ridicule, protest, and pressure a man and, by extension, the system he represented.
In , women streamed into Oloko, Nigeria from throughout Owerri Province.
Word had been sent via the Ibo (Igbo) women’s network that it was time to “sit on” Okugo, the arrogant warrant chief of the Oloko Native Court.
“Sitting on a man” was the figurative expression given a traditional process of punishment during which women gathered in front of a man’s home to sing songs which outlined the women’s grievances or insulted the offender.
The women would dance and sing all day and all night, and sometimes, for the most serious and unrepentant offenders, give added impetus to their words by dismantling the roof of the hut until the man promised to cooperate.
On , the women prepared as their mothers and grandmothers before them had prepared for the traditional settling of grievances: they bound their heads with ferns, smeared their faces with ashes, and put on the short loincloths tradition ordained.
Each woman picked up a sacred stick wreathed with young palm fronds.
These sacred sticks were necessary for invoking the spirit and power of their female ancestors.
Thus attired, they massed on the district office to “sit on” Okugo until he got the message.
Just days before, the women had met in the market to discuss the new taxation rumors.
They remembered that , after promises to the contrary, the British had taken a census and begun collecting taxes from the men.
The women were worried that taxes would soon be imposed upon them as well, especially since a district officer had ordered a new census in which they and their property would be counted.
At the marketplace meeting the women had agreed to spread the alarm and act if any of them were approached for information.
And could anyone doubt their cause for alarm now?
Just Warrant Chief Okugo had approached Nwanyeruwa, a married woman.
He had asked to count her goats and sheep.
She had spat back an insult, “Was your mother counted?”
In anger, Okugo had attacked Nwanyeruwa who had immediately set in motion the women’s network.
Now the women were ready to act.
Nwanyeruwa’s name became the watchword, Nwanyeruwa herself the catalyst.
Carrying their sacred sticks high, thousands of women marched on the district office.
They danced.
They sang songs of ridicule and protest, they chanted, and they demanded Okugo’s cap of office, taking from his head the symbol of his authority over them.
A British officer who witnessed the event claimed that the cap, tossed into the crowd of women, “met the same fate as a fox’s carcass thrown to a pack of hounds.”
After several days of such protest, the women secured written assurances that they were not to be taxed.
They also succeeded in having Okugo arrested, tried, and convicted of physical assault and of unnecessarily worrying the population.
When the news of this victory spread through the women’s networks, thousands of other women throughout the region organized to “sit on” their local warrant chiefs.
The protest spread to Aba, a major trading center along the railway.
The women in Aba, like those in Oloko, dressed in their traditional ferns, ashes, and loincloths and carrying the sacred sticks to invoke the mothers, gathered to dance, sing, and demand the cap of the warrant chief.
During World War Ⅱ the Church of the Brethren held somewhat more firm than they had in War Ⅰ.
At least they largely kept their misgivings about war funding, if they were not very consistent about following through on them.
A new pacifist war tax resistance movement began to gel outside of the traditional peace churches in the late 1940s, and I’ll be looking to see how or whether the Brethren contributed to this.
The Brethren Evangelist continued to look at war bonds mostly as a positive example of giving that ought to be emulated by Brethren in the post-war period through Church-directed giving.
For example, an article on that theme by the Reverend James E. Ault alluded to war bonds in this way: “We have assisted in meeting goals for War Bonds, Victory Bonds, or Community Fund drives until it has become a part of every day experience.
These goals would be of very little value if there were not some greater goal to be reached…” (source).
Things took a very different turn in the Gospel Messenger.
Harper S. Will presented “A Seven-Point Program for Brethren” in the issue.
Will suggested that the arms race and the normalization of military conscription and training meant that Brethren would have to be more active and persistent if they wanted to make progress for a peaceful world.
He asked his readers to “[g]o into your closet, quiet your mind, and seek the guidance of the Eternal Spirit” and gave this as one example: “Henry Thoreau did it in the days of the Civil War, and he ended up in jail because he would not pay his taxes.”
In the issue, Rufus D. Bowman addressed “The Church of the Brethren and the Cultural Crisis”.
According to Bowman, the Church was being overwhelmed by and absorbed into an unchristian culture.
One of the symptoms of this was the half-hearted way Brethren upheld their adherence to non-resistance:
During World War Ⅰ our members purchased war bonds and many of our young men went straight into the army.
During World War Ⅱ it is evident that the majority of our members compromised with the war system.
“Shall We Continue to Call Ourselves a Peace Church?” asked Ruth B. Statler in the issue.
Statler noted that most Brethren draftees in the last war went into the armed services without taking any sort of conscientious objector status, and that “[a] great many of our church members bought war bonds.”
The issue brought readers news of a war tax resister from the just-emerging modern war tax resistance movement (source):
Mrs. Caroline Urie. wife of a navy officer, a Quaker and veteran social worker, has publicly refused to pay the 34.6% of her income tax which, according to government figures, would go to military expenses.
Mrs. Urie wrote President Truman and the U.S. collector of internal revenue that the withheld money would be given to four nonprofit agencies engaged in removing the causes of war.
She is willing to pay taxes “for any reasonable constructive purposes.” As a Christian she said, “I must henceforth refuse to contribute in any way I can avoid toward maintaining the institution of war.”
that was followed up by this note:
This copy of a letter to the Collector of Internal Revenue came to the Messenger desk recently.
Enclosed herewith is my income tax return for .
I wish now to announce to the Collector of Internal Revenue and the Treasury Department that I cannot conscientiously continue to pay federal income taxes when so large a proportion of the funds is being used for purposes of war.
This country did not turn to peace at the end of World War Ⅱ, but instead sought to protect and expand an American Empire.
This mad attempt to dominate the world by force of arms, the threat of atomic war, and offers of economic aid only to future allies will lead to devastation and death.
I want to dissociate myself as completely as possible from these tragic, suicidal and evil policies, and to do all I can to convince my fellow citizens that we must completely renounce the way of war and violence. ―Marion Coddington, New York, N.Y.
There was also a note in the following issue about a woman who had been denied U.S. citizenship after she stated in her application that she would not be willing to “bear arms in defense of the United States [and] that she had refused to buy bonds in the last war because their proceeds were used to finance war.”
The issue noted briefly that “The National Baptist Sunday School and Training Union Congress at Cleveland, Ohio, recently urged churches and religious bodies not to invest in war or savings bonds which may be used in the financing of war.” (source)
The issue reprinted some resolutions passed by a Quaker gathering on the subject of conscientious objection to war (source).
Among these were that “Friends are urged… [t]o avoid engaging in any trade, business, or profession directly contributing to the military system; and the purchase of government war bonds or stock certificates in war industries. [And t]o carefully consider the implication of paying those taxes, a major portion of which goes for military purposes.” The issue also reported that the North Carolina Yearly Meeting of Friends had issued a statement on conscientious objection, which also “urged Quakers ‘to realize that by paying federal taxes we are supporting preparation for war,’ but did not advise that taxes not be paid” (source).
Up to this point, all of this sudden interest in war tax resistance has been focused outside the Church of the Brethren — neither Urie nor Coddington were Brethren, and the statements above are from Quaker and Baptist institutions.
But in the issue is a quote from Rufus D. Bowman, who up to this point has been hinting at war tax resistance without actually endorsing it, in which he finally comes out:
My conviction is that all war is sin and out of harmony with the spirit, life and teachings of Jesus.
It is, therefore, wrong to participate in war.
When war comes, it is difficult in a totalitarian state to keep from helping the war system.
The most Christian position is to remain apart from war as far as possible.
Accepting any service within the army puts a person under military orders and clouds his testimony against war.
Carrying on constructive service projects under church or civilian direction, the giving of a vigorous testimony against war and the payment of war taxes, and giving our lives for a vital peace program represents a consistent Christian position.
The issue continued the new trend of highlighting examples of war tax resisters from other denominations (source):
A Quaker of Moorestown, N.J., William B. Evans, paid his income tax three months ahead of time because he believes in the American government.
But he does not believe in war or in the preparation for it; therefore, he deducted from his payment the amount he estimated would be allotted to military purposes.
In a letter to the internal revenue office he said that he was giving that money to relief and rehabilitation.
Refusal to pay taxes that may be used for military purposes on the ground of conscience is being manifested by small groups of people in the United States, Switzerland, and Norway.
In Switzerland a growing group of women, many of them teachers, and in Norway Quakers are withholding taxes for military purposes, but stating their willingness to pay the same amounts for constructive projects.
The issue carried an update on Caroline Urie’s resistance (source):
Mrs. Caroline Urie, seventy-five year old Quaker widow, of Yellow Springs, Ohio, deducted 32.3 per cent of the first installment of her income tax and will donate the deducted amount to nonprofit agencies working for peace.
She estimated the deducted amount would be used for military purposes and expressed her opposition to this use of the tax money because “war and preparation for war in the atomic area is a crime against humanity.”
The issue reported on the blooming Peacemakers war tax resistance movement (source):
More than forty individuals throughout America, most of them from the peace churches, submitted only a part of their income tax to the government this year.
They sent an accompanying letter saying that they were contributing the rest of the tax to service or peace-making projects.
Their basis of refusal to pay all of it was that a high percentage of income tax revenue goes for war purposes.
The issue brought the news that “[i]n Norway the Quakers have decided to pay a peace tax to the government instead of the government defense tax recently voted by Parliament.
The government has agreed to this arrangement.” (source) No further details were given, though, so it’s difficult to guess what this amounted to practically.
The magazine repeated the news in its issue without adding much in the way of specifics.
There was clearly a hunger for news about war tax resisters, but in all of this there is still no mention of any actual named resister from within the Church of the Brethren itself, except perhaps Rufus Bowman by implication.
The issue included this representation of the debate about war tax resistance in the Church of the Brethren at the time (source):
How Does a Pacifist Act?
One says, “I have to stick my neck out.”
Vigorous efforts to break with a war system are necessary.
What kind of logic is it for a person to say he’s a pacifist and pay income tax — a large share of which goes for war?
If I refuse my income tax payment, I am protesting in the strongest way I know.
Anyone can write letters against a tax.
They mean little to our legislators.
What counts is conviction so strong that persons refuse to pay no matter what the consequences are.
If Gandhi had not been ready to go to jail for what he believed, the Free India Movement would have crumpled before it got well under way.
We cannot build a pacifist movement if leaders in the Church of the Brethren are unwilling to risk jail for what they believe.
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Another says, “I must act with moderation.”
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The extreme and antagonistic position of the tax refusers and nonregistrants seems out of harmony with the Master’s deeds and words:
“Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s.”
“Blessed are the meek for they shall inherit the earth.”
I don’t like it that I am forced through my income tax into supporting war preparations. However, if I refuse payment, the government will collect anyway.
The way to fight this tax is to work for a change in the law.
Meanwhile, over at the Brethren Missionary Herald things remained much in the vein of “you gave money for war, won’t you also give some to us?” For example:
the Brethren Home Missions Council held war bonds according to its financial statement
How much have members of our churches paid out in taxes and in purchase of war bonds during the past five years?
Dare we give the Lord less in the next five years? []
