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

Most of the examples in today’s Picket Line can be found in greater detail in the book We Won’t Pay!: A Tax Resistance Reader.

A while back, I started looking for examples of ways tax resisters have organized mutual aid pacts to help diffuse the effects of government retaliation. In the course of doing the research, though, I started collecting examples instead of a larger variety of collective projects resisters and their sympathizers have used in support of tax resistance.

Here are some of the examples I found:

1. Tax resister “insurance”

   For instance, the Breton Association in 19^th century France, which organized to “form a common stock or fund… to indemnify the subscribers for any expense they may be put to by their refusal to pay any illegal contributions imposed upon the public.”

   Another example was the Association of Real Estate Taxpayers in 1930s Chicago, which formed a cooperative legal fund to fight an offensive legal battle against the tax.

   American war tax resisters today can use the War Tax Resisters Penalty Fund to defray penalties and interest seized by the IRS. The fund is raised as-needed by asking subscribers to contribute an equal amount.

   The oath of the Regulator tax resistance movement in the North Carolina colony bound its signers to “bear an equal share in paying and making up [the] loss” if “any of our company be put to expense or under any confinement.”

2. Communes, collectives, and co-housing projects.

   Some tax resisters have formed mutual support communities. Whiteway Colony was founded to try to live up to Tolstoyan ideals. The members of the Bijou and Agape communities live below a taxable income so as to avoid paying taxes.

3. Supporting resisters as an employer

   Some members of the Restored Israel of Yahweh ran a construction business and agreed not to withhold federal taxes from the wages of those employees who were fellow-members and who were resisting taxes.

   Vivien Kellems refused to withhold taxes from her employees’ wages, saying: “They are all free American citizens, thoroughly capable of performing all of the duties and responsibilities of citizenship for themselves. And so, from this day, I am not collecting nor paying their income taxes for them.”

   Charles Kanjama recently urged Kenyans to begin a tax resistance campaign, and said that to foil pay-as-you-earn withholding, “participating employers and employees can enter into a voluntary contract to convert monthly employment into quarterly or half-yearly employment, thus effectively delaying tax liability for several months.”

4. Disrupting auctions of seized property

   Earlier this year I recounted a dramatic and successful example of the American group “Peacemakers” blocking the sale of Ernest & Marion Bromley’s seized home.

   British nonconformists and women’s suffrage activists a century ago also used this tactic. Auctions became rallies, with speeches and banners and crowds that could number in the thousands. Supporters would pack the auction house and refuse to leave their seats. On some occasions, violence broke out. In some cases, auctioneers refused to handle goods that had been seized for tax refusal.

   Simply boycotting the auctions and refusing to buy seized goods is one way communities offer support. It was part of the Quaker “Discipline” to refuse to buy seized goods. When Valentine Byler’s horse was seized for non-payment of the social security tax, “no Amish came to bid on the horses and, due to a lack of bidders, they went for a good price, with the harnesses ‘thrown in’ by the auctioneer.”

5. Pay cash so as not to leave a paper trail

   Jessica Ramer and a Claire Files contributor brought this idea up. If you pay in cash whenever you can, you give the recipient the opportunity to decide whether or not to declare the income.

   Cash tips are easy to under-report. I asked about that recently and was told that most people pay with credit card/debit card and that the government now uses a percentage method for tips. They look at the charged meals, look at the number of total meals served, and then look at the charged tips to figure out how much cash tips you received.

   (100 meals served. 50 paid with card, tipping 15%. the government calculates 15% from 100 meals even if cash tips are only 10%)

   You can help out by tipping more when paying with cash or better yet, when you pay with card, put 1% tip on it and put the rest out as cash. I even leave a note for the server saying “this is your money, don’t tell your boss, or the government. share it with the buss boy if that is the policy.” This will help lower the average tip figures, but still give the nice server what they have earned.

6. Use barter to avoid taxable/seizable transactions

   Karl Hess found people willing to barter with him as he was dodging IRS seizures:

   The other day I welded up a fish-smoking rack for a family in Washington, D.C. It will earn me a year’s supply of smoked fish. At about the same time, I helped a friend dig a foundation. He’ll help me lay the concrete blocks for a workshop. Part of my pay for a lecture at a New England college was the use of the school’s welding shop, to make some metal sculptures. Three such sculptures have paid my attorney’s fees in maintaining the tax resistance which is the reason barter has become such an integral part of my life.

7. Manufacture and sell goods as alternatives to taxed products

   Before the American Revolution, colonists who opposed Britain’s economic control boycotted British products and began to produce homespun cloth, alternatives to tea, and so forth. Gandhi’s independence campaign in India made the wearing and production of homespun cloth central to the opposition, and the Salt March was focused on the illegal production of untaxed, non-foreign-monopoly salt.

   An example today is home-brewed beer (which beats the excise tax on alcoholic beverages).

8. Buycotts and boycotts that favor resisting businesses

   One report from World War Ⅰ-era America noted that this was a technique used by those who opposed the “Liberty Bonds”:

   Efforts to prevent banks from handling the bonds have centered chiefly in Wisconsin, Minnesota, North Dakota, South Dakota, Montana, Missouri and Oklahoma. The President of a Wisconsin bank has advised the Treasury that his depositors, mostly Germans, or of German parentage, have withdrawn many thousands of dollars from his bank because he aided the First Liberty Loan.

   These depositors, he added, had taken their accounts to two rival banks on the understanding that those banks would not aid the second Liberty Loan. The two banks, he reported, were not aiding the loan in any way.

   Many banks have felt the pressure of German influence in this propaganda, reports indicate. So pronounced was the movement that the States of Minnesota, North and South Dakota, and Montana recently decided that they would withdraw State funds from any bank which did not support the loan.

9. Social boycotts / shunning / noncooperation with tax collectors
   • Adolf Hausrath writes of Roman-occupied Judaea,

     The people knew how to torment these officials of the Roman customs with the petty cruelty which ordinary people develop with irreconcilable persistency, whenever they believe this persistency to be due to their moral indignation. In consequence of the theocratic scruples about the duty of paying taxes, the tax-gatherers were declared to be unclean and half Gentile.… among the Jews the words “tax-gatherers and sinners,” “tax-gatherers and Gentiles,” “tax-gatherers and harlots,” “tax-gatherers, murderers and robbers,” and similar insulting combinations, were not only ready on the tongue and familiar, but were accepted as theocratically identical in meaning. Thrust out from all social intercourse, the tax-gatherers became more and more the pariahs of the Jewish world. With holy horror did the Pharisee sweep past the lost son of Israel who had sold himself to the Gentile for the vilest purpose, and avoid the places which his sinful breath contaminated. Their testimony was not accepted by Jewish tribunals. It was forbidden to sit at table with them or eat of their bread. But their money-chests especially were the summary of all uncleanness and the chief object of pious horror, since their contents consisted of none but unlawful receipts, and every single coin betokened a breach of some theocratic regulation. To exchange their money or receive alms from them might easily put a whole house in the condition of being unclean, and necessitate many purifications. From these relations of the tax-officials to the rest of the population, it can be readily understood that only the refuse of Judaism undertook the office.

   • A social boycott of tax collectors was practiced in the years before the American revolution. John Adams wrote:

     At Philadelphia, the Heart-and-Hand Fire Company has expelled Mr. Hughes, the stamp man for that colony. The freemen of Talbot county, in Maryland, have erected a gibbet before the door of the court-house, twenty feet high, and have hanged on it the effigies of a stamp informer in chains, in terrorem till the Stamp Act shall be repealed; and have resolved, unanimously, to hold in utter contempt and abhorrence every stamp officer, and every favorer of the Stamp Act, and to “have no communication with any such person, not even to speak to him, unless to upbraid him with his baseness.” So triumphant is the spirit of liberty everywhere.

   • Harassment of tax collectors was a signature action of the Whiskey Rebellion. An early published resolution of the rebels read in part:

     [W]hereas some men may be found amongst us, so far lost to every sense of virtue and feeling for the distresses of this country, as to accept offices for the collection of the duty:

     Resolved, therefore, That in future we will consider such persons as unworthy of our friendship; have no intercourse or dealings with them; withdraw from them every assistance, and withhold all the comforts of life which depend upon those duties that as men and fellow citizens we owe to each other; and upon all occasions treat them with that contempt they deserve; and that it be, and it is hereby most earnestly recommended to the people at large to follow the same line of conduct towards them.

10. Violently resist tax collectors, disrupt trials/auctions, intimidate collaborators

    Tax collectors were tarred-and-feathered in America, both before and after the revolution — the violent expulsion of tax collectors was a frequent technique of the Whiskey rebels. Tax collectors have been the targets of violent reprisal at many times and in many places. Because of this, governments have often had to pay high salaries — or, frequently, percentages of the take — to convince collectors to take on the job, which only increases the resentment of those being collected from.

    During the French Revolution and its aftermath, customs houses were burned by mobs, tax rolls were destroyed, excise collectors were made to renounce their jobs and then were run out of town — or in some cases killed.

    The first Boer War was triggered when an armed group of Boers seized a wagon that was being auctioned after it was distrained for resisted taxes.

    The Whiskey rebels threatened to destroy the stills of those distillers who complied in paying the excise tax.

11. Boycotts / social boycotts of non-resisters

    If a tax resisting movement is large enough, it may be able to dissuade people from paying taxes through boycotts or social boycotts of people who are tax compliant. In Massachusetts, a group enforced a boycott of taxed British imports by declaring that

    …we further promise and engage, that we will not purchase any goods of any persons who, preferring their own interest to that of the public, shall import merchandise from Great Britain, until a general importation takes place; or of any trader who purchases his goods of such importer: and that we will hold no intercourse, or connection, or correspondence, with any person who shall purchase goods of such importer, or retailer; and we will hold him dishonored, an enemy to the liberties of his country, and infamous, who shall break this agreement.

12. Maintain solidarity in the face of divide-and-conquer tactics

    In mid-19^th century Germany, the government attempted to break a tax resistance movement by offering to moderate its enforcement efforts against people who could show that they had limited means. Karl Marx, who was promoting the resistance at the time, saw this as a divide-and-conquer tactic:

    The intention of the Ministry is only too clear. It wants to divide the democrats; it wants to make the peasants and workers count themselves as non-payers owing to lack of means to pay, in order to split them from those not paying out of regard for legality, and thereby deprive the latter of the support of the former. But this plan will fail; the people realizes that it is responsible for solidarity in the refusal to pay taxes, just as previously it was responsible for solidarity in payment of them.

13. Keep a record of the “sufferings” of resisters

    The Quakers responded to persecution by keeping careful records of individuals who had suffered thereby. In the archives of Quaker meetings, you can find lists of people who had resisted militia taxes or tithes for establishment church ministers, and what property was distrained by which tax collector.

14. Sign petitions and public advertisements, engage in public protests

    When the American Amish were trying to resist compulsory enrollment in the social security system, 14,000 of them signed a petition to Congress.

    During the Vietnam War, public advertisements were taken out by tax resisters. In early 1968, for instance, 448 writers and editors put a full-page ad in the New York Post declaring their intention to refuse to pay taxes for the Vietnam War. The signatories included James Baldwin, Noam Chomsky, Philip K. Dick, Betty Friedan, Allen Ginsberg, Paul Goodman, Paul Krassner, Norman Mailer, Henry Miller, Tillie Olsen, Grace Paley, Thomas Pynchon, Susan Sontag, Benjamin Spock, Gloria Steinem, Norman Thomas, Hunter S. Thompson, Kurt Vonnegut, and Howard Zinn.

    This year’s 2008 War Tax Boycott, Don’t Buy Bush’s War, and Pledge for Peace campaigns also have a public-signing component.

    Protests, rallies, pickets, and the like have been a part of many large-scale tax resistance campaigns.

15. Hold resisters’ property as an informal trustee

    Some resisters who are vulnerable to property seizure find sympathetic friends who are willing to hold the resisters’ property in their names as a way of foiling seizure. Some war tax resister alternative funds function partially as “warehouse banks” that hold deposits of war tax resisters.

    When a frustrated tax collector seized Ammon Hennacy’s protest signs as he was picketing the IRS office — claiming that he planned to auction them off to pay Hennacy’s tax debt — a friend of Hennacy helped him make new signs, each one marked “this sign is the personal property of Joseph Craigmyle.”

16. Keep in contact with resisters and express support

    After the press reported that Valentine Byler’s horse had been seized by the IRS as he was plowing his field, he got letters of support from all across the country.

17. Form groups for mutual support & coordinated decision-making

    Here there are too many examples to list.

18. Give financial aid to evicted rent strikers

    When the Irish Land League launched its rent strike, it claimed that “The funds will be poured out unstintedly to all who may endure eviction in the course of the struggle. Our exiled brothers in America may be relied on to contribute, if necessary, as many millions in money as they have thousands, to starve out the landlords and bring the English tenantry to its knees.”

19. Comfort and aid imprisoned resisters

    The trick to supporting imprisoned tax resisters is to respect their real needs and desires. When “someone interfered,” as Thoreau put it, and paid his taxes in order to spring him from his night in jail, they thought wrongly that they were doing Thoreau a favor, “for they thought that my chief desire was to stand the other side of that stone wall.”

    Juanita Nelson tells of the support she received in jail, where she had been taken in her bathrobe from her home. Her supporters took the time to learn how to support her in a way that was appropriate to her resistance:

    Two fellow pacifists, one of them also a tax refuser, had been permitted to come to me, since I would not go to them. I asked them what was uppermost in my mind, what they’d do about getting properly dressed? They said that this was something I would have to settle for myself. I sensed that they thought it the better part of wisdom and modesty for me to be dressed for my appearance in court. They were more concerned about the public relations aspect of getting across the witness than I was. They were also genuinely concerned, I knew, about making their actions truly nonviolent, cognizant of the other person’s feelings, attitudes and readiness. I was shaken enough to concede that I would like to have my clothes at hand, in case I decided I would feel more at ease in them. The older visitor, a dignified man with white hair, agreed to go for the clothes in a taxicab.

    They left, and on their heels came another visitor. She had been told that in permitting her to come up, the officials were treating me with more courtesy than I was according them. It was her assessment that the chief deputy was hopeful that someone would be able to hammer some sense into me and was willing to make concessions in that hope. But he had misjudged the reliance he might place in her — she was not as critical as the men. She did not know what she would do, but she thought she might wish to have the strength and the audacity to carry through in the vein in which I had started.

    And she said. “You know, you look like a female Gandhi in that robe. You look, well, dignified.”

    That was my first encouragement. Everyone else had tended to make me feel like a fool of the first water, had confirmed fears I already had on that score. My respect and admiration for Gandhi, though not uncritical, was deep. And if I in any way resembled him in appearance I was prepared to try to emulate a more becoming state of mind. I reminded myself, too, that I had on considerably more than the loincloth in which Gandhi was able to greet kings and statesmen with ease. I need not be unduly perturbed about wearing a robe into the presence of his honor.

20. Support the families of imprisoned resisters

    When Gandhi was preparing the groundwork for a tax refusal campaign in India, he noted that the Indian National Congress “should undertake to feed the wives and families of those who may be imprisoned.”

21. Study the law, give legal support

    When Elizabeth Cady Stanton was contemplating a tax resistance campaign for women’s suffrage in the United States, she noted, “One thing is certain, this course will necessarily involve a good deal of litigation, and we shall need lawyers of our own sex whose intellects, sharpened by their interests, shall be quick to discover the loopholes of retreat.”

22. Combine redirected taxes for dramatic charity giveaways

    Larry Rosenwald wrote, of this technique, “To sit on the Grants and Loans Committee of New England War Tax Resistance, and to dispense the interest on refused taxes to a youth group in Chelsea, a video for cable television on United States involvement in Central America, and a people’s garden in Roxbury is to be reminded of the ideal community, however blurred and fragmented, that war tax resistance is done on behalf of, in the hope of helping to make it clear and whole.”

Can you think of any I’ve missed?

From the 1 April 1971 edition of The Village Voice:

War Tax Resistance

by Mary Breasted

A number of spring harbingers in Manhattan are much more reliable than the weather on Groundhog Day (which was sunny this year, by the way). We have stickball players and nodding junkies out in droves to tell us the fair season is coming. We have some big gathering or other in Central Park, and, like as not, a report in the social columns that Jackie O. was recently seen taking the air on horseback. And now, just as seasonal, we have the re-awakening of the Peace Movement.

It began last week with a news conference in Washington Square Methodist Church that was as passionless as it was repetitive. The news release announcing the event had said: “Leading Intellectuals to Explain Why they Refuse to Pay War Taxes.” And there they all were, seated at a long row of tables Thursday morning, squinting into TV lights, Paul Goodman, Grace Paley, David McReynolds, Dwight MacDonald, familiar faces offering familiar moral aphorisms about mankind’s higher laws superseding the laws of the nations. And although they were as outspokenly critical of the war as ever they had been in demonstrations and news conferences past, they seemed muted even as they redeclared themselves, as if this time they felt secretly defeated right at the start.

Seven “leading intellectuals” in all, they contributed a total of $325 to an account called the People’s Life Fund or to various beneficiaries of the fund (the Welfare Rights Organization, the Women’s Bail Fund, the United Farmworkers Organizing Committee and Operation Move-In). The purpose of the conference, aside from giving them a public forum for personal testimonials, was to launch an intensified campaign for the War Tax Resistance in these last two weeks before we all file our returns.

Robert Calvert, the national director of War Tax Resistance, tried to put some zing into the subdued conference by stressing the inconvenience his group would cause the Internal Revenue Service. “It usually takes the government six months to a year to move and get the money,” he said, adding happily, “I’ve been resisting my telephone tax for a year. The government has not got a penny from me.”

But Paul Goodman, the most openly cynical of the group, countered that hopeful note by observing, “It would be unrealistic for us to think that this is an economic burden on the government.” But he said he did hope the action would have some influence upon the opinions of legislators.

When the conference was over, Goodman walked off saying cheerily, “Well, it’s nice to give money to the Women’s Bail Fund. I always like to see people get out of jail.”

Founded in December 1969, the War Tax Resistance now has more than 170 tax resistance centers in various parts of the country. And in Manhattan, where they’ve been picketing the IRS office, they’ve attracted one clandestine ally, a young man who works for IRS but who opposes the war. Although he won’t give his name, he did tell me he planned to help the War Tax Resistance people figure out other ways to keep the government from collecting taxes.

If you’re interested in war protest through tax withholding, Calvert’s group suggests that you deduct between $10 and $50 from your federal taxes this year and send the difference to the People’s Life Fund, War Tax Resistance, 339 Lafayette Street, New York 10012 (telephone 477‒2970 or 777‒5560). The government will eventually collect the money you withhold and charge you a penalty fee for your action, but according to the IRS employee who is counseling War Tax Resistance, “the expense to collect the tax that is not being paid is far greater than the additional penalty imposed for the delinquent action.” That’s why the Tax Resistance people suggest you withhold such a small sum.

The money will go to the beneficiaries of the People’s Life Fund on April 5, when the People’s Coalition for Peace and Justice will lead a demonstration to Wall Street to protest both the war and unemployment.

From the 2 April 1970 edition of The Village Voice:

On 17 August 1971, Nat Hentoff’s column in The Village Voice carried a story of a post office employee and union organizer who was interrogated at length by postal inspectors in the wake of a strike threat. Excerpts:

“…one of the gentlemen pulled a file out of his briefcase. It looked like it contained about 200 or 300 pages. They went through it. Nat, I was shocked! There didn’t seem to be one thing — personal, private, or otherwise — that they didn’t know.

“The file went back 13 years when I led a strike at the … Country Club at the age of 14! … They spoke about my personal life. My wife recently had a miscarriage. They inferred that I was responsible because she was so worried and upset due to my political and union involvement.

“This was the only time I got mad. I told them, and I quote, ‘Why don’t you shut the fuck up?’

“They spoke about my sister, who is retarded, and asked who would take care of her if I proceed with my actions. At this point I should interject that at certain intervals I would answer a question with things like, ‘That’s a nice tie you’ve got on.’ ‘I think it’s going to rain.’ All irrelevant comments which really infuriated them.

“They spoke about private things which they could only have known by tapping my phone. They talked about my in-laws, my neighbors, the fact that I moved from … County because I couldn’t arouse the migrant workers enough. I did inter-act with migrant workers there. Their facts were very accurate.

“They also spoke about my political activism. I am involved with and support in varying degrees: ACLU (they said it was Communist), Black Panther Party, Young Lords Party, Inmates Liberation Party … the Committee for a Fair Trial (Berrigans), People’s Coalition, Clergy and Laymen Concerned, War Tax Resistance.

“I have been very involved with War Tax Resistance. I have not paid any excise phone tax for two years. In January 1971, I filed a new W-4, claiming 17 dependents. In letters to the Commissioner of Internal Revenue, President Nixon, and our two Senators, I explained that I could no longer abide by their narrow interpretation of what constitutes a dependent and that because I was so concerned with the senseless slaughter of Asians and Americans in Southeast Asia; economic repression of Blacks, Puerto Ricans, Chicanos, and Indians here; and the complete absence of humanism in the distribution of our tax dollars, I was claiming 17 of these people and would use the money to support them and groups which seek to liberate them.

“The men who had identified themselves as postal inspectors spoke on the subject for about 40 minutes, indicating … I was the only federal employee in the country who has filed what they called a fraudulent W-4 form. They said they would be correcting that situation shortly.”

What happened between the time when Peacemakers was leading the war tax resistance charge and 1982, when the National War Tax Resistance Coordinating Committee was founded? There was another group, simply called “National War Tax Resistance,” that took the reins during the Vietnam War.

Here are some more excerpts from Robert Cooney’s and Helen Michalowski’s The Power of the People: Active Nonviolence in the United States about this transition period:

1965 was, as the CNVA Bulletin declared, “The Year of Vietnam.” Picketing and sit-downs across the country marked the announcement of the first US bombing of North Vietnam on February 7. These continued throughout the month and much effort was expended gathering signatures for a new appeal, the Declaration of Conscience, circulated by radical pacifist groups, urging civil disobedience. The Peacemakers group in Cincinnati organized a “No Tax for War in Vietnam Committee” calling for tax resistance. In December 1969 a separate group — War Tax Resistance, coordinated by Bob Calvert — was established and at the time included some 200 local tax resistance centers across the country.

From the 4 March 1965 newsletter of the Syracuse Peace Council

Nonpayment of war taxes, practiced by Quakers and others, disappeared as a pacifist testimony soon after the Civil War and Thoreau’s famous stand against the U.S. foray in Mexico. It first reappeared in World War Ⅱ when a few widely scattered individuals refused to pay federal taxes on the grounds that there was no way to prevent a significant part of their money from being used for military purposes. One resister, Ernest Bromley, was prosecuted and imprisoned for his refusal. Many others began to inform the Internal Revenue Service that payment violated their principles.

The enactment during World War Ⅱ of a measure which required employers to withhold taxes from their employees caused particular difficulties for pacifists and led to the formation of Peacemakers in 1948. A Peacemaker committee promoted tax refusal and provided research, literature, action suggestions, and publicity for those in the tax resistance movement. Although many hundreds of people were refusing to pay income taxes during the 15 years following 1948, the government prosecuted and imprisoned only six: James Otsuka of Indiana, Maurice McCrackin of Ohio, Eroseanna Robinson of Illinois, Walter Gormly of Iowa, Arthur Evans of Colorado, and Neil Haworth of Connecticut. These imprisonments and the seizure of a few cars and houses by the IRS, served to highlight the tax refusal testimony and establish it as a major nonviolent principle and tactic.

Tax resistance, like other forms of opposition to the military, increased dramatically during the Vietnam War. In 1966 the federal government levied an additional tax on every private telephone, and in a rare moment of candor, admitted that the money would help subsidize the war in Indochina. Peacemakers, the War Resisters League, and other nonviolent groups urged refusal of this tax and in the following years countless thousands heeded their call. Under the leadership of Bob and Angie Calvert, War Tax Resistance was formed in 1969 as a separate organization to investigate all aspects and ramifications of conscientious tax refusal. During the war there were over 200 local war tax resistance centers, as well as a number of “alternative life funds” which rechanneled refused tax money back into the local community for constructive purposes. Many of these continued after the end of the war.

The tactic of claiming enough dependents so that no income tax would be withheld became more widespread as the Vietnam war continued. Often the tax refuser would make clear the moral grounds for the protest by listing, for example, “all the Vietnamese” as dependents. Refusing to pay for war by claiming excessive exemptions brought particularly strong response from the government. A number of people were prosecuted and imprisoned: Jim Shea, Karl Meyer, William Himmelbauer, Mark Riley, Ellis Rece, Carole Nelson, John Leininger, and Martha Tranquilli (a 64-year-old grandmother and nurse). The tax resistance movement continued after the war and grew to include both pacifists and non-pacifists who could no longer in conscience support the military priorities of the government.

From the 4 March 1965 newsletter of the Syracuse Peace Council

As more and more tax money was directed toward the [Reagan era] military buildup, many activists revived interest in war tax resistance. Protests were organized each year, and individual resisters tried a variety of means to deny the government money for war. In April 1981, demonstrations were held in Dallas, Atlanta, San Francisco, Los Angeles and other cities and 24 people were arrested at IRS offices in New York City. The following year, the National War Tax Resistance Coordinating Committee was formed by the Center on Law and Pacifism, Conscience and Military Tax Campaign, WRL, Peacemakers and eighty local groups. Nineteen eighty-three featured the largest show of war tax resistance actions in ten years, including Ralph Dull, an Ohio farmer and tax resister since 1951, who drove a truckload of grain to the IRS office as payment for his taxes. The IRS instituted a “frivolous returns” penalty to discourage the filing of returns with any but the requested information, and some resisters began an insurance fund, pooling their resources to pay fines and interest charges levied against fellow tax resisters.

From the Spokane Daily Chronicle on this day in 1968:

Washington (AP) — The Internal Revenue Service has ordered its tax collection offices to attach the paychecks of persons who refuse to pay the 10 per cent federal tax on their telephone bills as a protest against the Vietnam war.

A survey of large telephone companies indicated that about 3,000 persons have adopted this technique. The phone companies do not cut off service to the protesters but simply notify the IRS offices that the tax is unpaid.

An IRS spokesman said that the amounts are small — usually less than a dollar on each phone bill — but that collection must be made. The Washington office therefore has directed district and local collectors to attach the pay or file liens.

From the 19 April 1966 Sarasota Journal:

Viet Critics May Be Slapped In Pocketbook

Washington (AP) — The Internal Revenue Service threatens to attach salaries or bank accounts of critics of U.S. policy in Viet Nam who refuse to pay their income taxes.

The IRS did not say when it would act, adding it would wait until all facts in each case can be checked. A spokesman says criminal prosecution also is a possibility in such cases.

The IRS made its warning after a Washington newspaper advertisement carried the names of about 350 persons, saying “we will refuse to pay our federal income taxes voluntarily.”

No mention was made by the IRS of a protestor’s failure to file an income tax return. This failure carries penalties of its own — 5 per cent monthly of what is owed, up to a maximum of 25 per cent.

The law also provides a penalty of one year in jail and a $10,000 fine for failing to pay the tax. But the IRS indicated it would rather obtain the taxes owed rather than subject a citizen to criminal prosecution.

Here’s an interesting case of government spin in the war tax resistance game. The peak of modern American war tax resistance came around 1969–72 when large numbers of people were resisting, including prominent and well-known people, and were being very public about their resistance. The government paid close attention to the tax resistance movement in those days and took steps to counter it. This article looks as though it was one of those attempts.

The data behind the article are these: the IRS said that it had tallied up 1,740 people who had formally told the agency in 1971 that they would be resisting taxes as a war protest. Of those, by May of 1972 the agency had initiated its delinquent account process against 631, indicating that they actually hadn’t paid some of their taxes and the gears of the agency’s slow-grinding machine had started to move.

That could mean that the remaining 1,109 chickened out at the last minute. But it could also mean a number of other things:

• Maybe some of that 1,109 refused to file a return at all as their form of protest.
• Maybe some lowered their income below the tax line as their form of protest.
• Maybe some used techniques such as claiming the population of Indochina as dependents that had the effect of lowering the tax due and the IRS just hadn’t gotten around to inspecting their returns closely enough yet.
• Maybe in some cases the IRS just hadn’t gotten around to registering the delinquencies yet because it was only a month after tax returns were due.

And of course the “few thousand Americans” the article speaks of only includes those people who managed to get on the IRS list in the first place. Most war tax resisters didn’t bother to write the IRS to let them know about their plans.

But the headline and lede spin for the article only contemplate the chickening-out angle and only count those war tax resisters whom the IRS counted (from the 25 May 1972 Tri City Herald):

Most war protesters fail to carry out tax threats

Washington (AP) — In publicly declaring her refusal to pay income taxes that support the Vietnam war, Sen. Philip A. Hart’s wife joins a few thousand other Americans, most of whom failed to carry out their threats.

Most of those who challenged the Internal Revenue Service lost their cases.

Figures for 1971 income-tax returns showed that 1,740 Americans indicated to the IRS they would not pay any taxes because of the war.

But a spokesman said tax-delinquent accounts have been set up in only 631 of these cases, meaning that the IRS is taking formal action to collect for nonpayment.

In previous years, the number of Americans who have protested to the IRS has grown. Last year, there were 1,648 who told the IRS they didn’t intend to pay taxes, but the agency was forced to collect in 698 cases.

In 1969, 1,401 protested, but only 368 drew formal action by IRS. In 1968, there were 592 who protested and 140 tax-delinquent accounts.

“The numbers are tiny when you consider there were an average of 75 million returns over those years,” the spokesman said.

Today’s figures only take into account those, such as Mrs. Hart, who have formally protested to the IRS. The spokesman acknowledged that those who use more-subtle means to escape paying taxes in protest might not be detected if they didn’t let the service know.

Folk singer Joan Baez announced in 1968 she didn’t intend to pay that part of her income taxes related to the military budget. But the government collected from her bank accounts through court action.

A common form of protest is refusal to pay the federal telephone excise tax, but no figures were immediately available on these. It is said to be small in relation to the number of telephone customers.

Mrs. Hart wrote the IRS May 10 that she was refusing to include a check for $6,200 with her quarterly tax estimate.

According to an IRS spokesman, if an estimated tax payment is not paid, a six-per-cent penalty applies. But the IRS waits until the return for the year is filed to assess penalties or take action.

Mrs. Hart said she put the money into a special bank account instead of paying it to the IRS

A wire report on this date in 1966 showed that Quakers in New York had rediscovered war tax resistance:

New York, Aug. 15 (AP)— Quakers in the New York area were encouraged today to refuse to pay taxes or hold jobs that contribute to the war effort in Viet Nam.

The Society of Friends office here made public a document or “testimony” approved at an annual meeting last month at Silver Bay on Lake George, N.Y..

The message was described as perhaps the “strongest message of the 20^th Century by a major body within the denomination.”

In the document, Quakers were promised financial help through special committees if they changed jobs or refused to pay taxes in protest against the war.

Entitled “Message to Friends on Viet Nam,” the document said members of the society must “stand forth unequivocally and at all costs to proclaim their peace testimony.”

The 72 Friends “meetings” or congregations in New York, Northern New Jersey and Southern Connecticut were called upon to “support acts of conscience by setting up committees for sufferings…”

Such committees, the statement said, should “keep close touch with deeply exercised Friends and their families who may need spiritual and material care because of their witness.”

I haven’t had any luck finding the text of this “Message to Friends on Viet Nam” on-line. Hugh Barbour’s Quaker Crosscurrents: Three Hundred Years of Friends in the New York Yearly Meetings mentions it briefly, and also notes that:

Conscription was a major concern of the 1969 sessions as well, and the yearly meeting approved a “Letter to Friends Troubled by Conscription” for distribution to the monthly meetings. They also agreed that the yearly meeting should refuse to honor liens on the wages of employees made for collecting taxes that were not being paid for reasons of conscience. In the 1971 sessions Friends were urged to protest against taxation for war by refusing to pay the federal telephone tax, and the yearly meeting agreed to publicize its own refusal to pay this tax “imposed for the specific purpose of procuring funds for the support of the military action in Vietnam.”

That “Letter to Friends” is another document that seems to have missed the Internet bus.

The New York Yearly Meeting is still working on conscientious objection to paying for war, though the meeting’s last “minute” on the subject, in 2006 is vague and noncommittal:

The Living Spirit works in the world to give life, joy, peace and prosperity through love, integrity and compassionate justice among people. We are united in this Power. We acknowledge that paying for war violates our religious conviction. We will seek ways to witness to this religious conviction in each of our communities.

A brief article on war tax resistance by Anita Katz appeared in the April 1987 issue of Mother Jones. It is mostly the standard boilerplate war tax resistance article, but in a couple of paragraphs it tries to guesstimate the size of the movement.

This photo by Lionel Delevigne of war tax resisters Juanita and Wally Nelson accompanied the article

It was opposition to the Vietnam War that first created widespread national attention for antiwar tax resisters. The number of antiwar income-tax resisters rose from 275 in 1966 to an estimated 20,000 in the early 1970s, with telephone tax resisters during this peak period estimated at between 200,000 and 500,000.

Though figures have since leveled off — there were an estimated 5,000 income-tax resisters in 1986 — many in the movement are hoping that further revelations of the Reagan administration’s mucking about in Central America will fuel a new round of war-tax resistance. Says David Croteau at the War Resisters League, “The two fundamental needs for the government to conduct war are men to serve in the military and cash for equipment — which comes from taxes.”

On this date in 1967, just a few days after Martin Luther King, Jr., delivered his powerful “Beyond Vietnam” speech, Eric Weinberger, the national secretary of the Committee for Nonviolent Action, wrote to to ask if King would publicly sign on to their war tax resistance campaign:

I don’t know how (or if) King responded to this request. I have seen no indications that he participated in the war tax resistance of the period.

King had been targeted by politically-motivated tax prosecutions in areas where he had been active. Because of this he had been under particular pressure to keep to the straight-and-narrow when it came to tax filing, so as not to give his enemies a potentially fruitful avenue of attack. This may have discouraged him from making war tax resistance part of his protest against U.S. militarism and the Vietnam War. It is also possible that, since King was killed a little less than a year after this letter was written, he just didn’t have time to put any possibly-intended resistance into practice.

The CNVA letterhead as shown on this letter is a clue as to who was associated with the emerging war tax resistance movement of the time. Many of these names are familiar to me, but some others are not:

The time has come, and that time was 14 April 1966.

350 Balk at Taxes in a War Protest

Ad in Capital Paper Urges Others to Bar Payment

Washington, April 14 — Some 350 persons who disapprove of the war in Vietnam announced today that they would not voluntarily pay their Federal income taxes, due tomorrow. They urged others to join them in this protest.

The Internal Revenue Service immediately made clear that it would take whatever steps were necessary to collect the taxes.

The group announced its plans this morning in an advertisement in The Washington Post.

“We will refuse to pay our Federal income taxes voluntarily,” the advertisement said. “Some of us will leave the money we owe the Government in our bank accounts, where the Internal Revenue Service may seize it if they wish. Some will contribute the money to CARE, UNICEF or similar organizations. Some of us will continue to pay that percentage of our taxes which is not used for military purposes.”

Joan Baez, Lynd, Muste

The first signature on the advertisement was that of Joan Baez, the folk singer. Others who signed it were Staughton Lynd, the Yale professor who traveled to North Vietnam last year in violation of State Department regulations, and the Rev. A.J. Muste, the pacifist leader.

The advertisement contained a coupon soliciting contributions for the protest. The ad said that further information could be obtained from Mr. Muste at Room 1003, 5 Beekman Street, New York City.

Those who placed the advertisement — which bore the heading “The Time Has Come” — said that those who sponsored it “recognize the gravity of this step. However, we prefer to risk violating the Internal Revenue Code, rather than to participate, by voluntarily paying our taxes, in the serious crimes against humanity being committed by our Government.”

The advertisement mentioned not only the war in Vietnam “against hungry, scantily armed Vietnamese guerrillas and civilians” but also “the spectacle of the United States invasion of the Dominican Republic,” an event the sponsors said “will go down in history alongside Russia’s criminal intervention in Hungary.”

Cohen Is Determined

The determination of Internal Revenue to collect the taxes the Government is owed was expressed in a formal statement by the Commissioner of Internal Revenue, Sheldon S. Cohen.

He said Internal Revenue would take “appropriate action” to collect the taxes “in fairness to the many millions of taxpayers who do fulfill their obligations.”

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

Ad Prepared Here

The headquarters of the Committee for Nonviolent Action, 5 Beekman Street, said yesterday that it had prepared the advertisement carried in the Washington newspaper after receiving 350 responses to invitations it had sent out soliciting participation in “an act of civil disobedience.”

A spokesman for the committee said that Mr. Muste, the chairman, was out of town and would return in about a week. The spokesman said that although monetary contributions in response to the advertisement had not yet begun to come in, the committee was prepared to mail literature explaining its program to those who responded to the advertisement.

The spokesman said that the tax protest had been intended to represent “a more radical and meaningful protest against the Vietnam War.”

The committee announced that members would appear at 2:15 P.M. today in front of the Internal Revenue Service office, 120 Church Street, to distribute leaflets concerning the tax protest.

It also said that a rally and picketing would be staged from 11 A.M. to 3:30 P.M., in front of the Federal Building in San Francisco under the sponsorship of the War Resisters League. The league also has offices at 5 Beekman Street.

With press coverage like this, including even the address to write to for more information, Muste hardly needed to pay for ad space in the Times (assuming they would have printed the ad — many papers rejected ads like this).

Some other names I recognize from the ad are Noam Chomsky, Dorothy Day, Dave Dellinger, Barbara Deming, Diane di Prima, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Milton Mayer, David McReynolds, Grace Paley, Eroseanna Robinson, Ira Sandperl, Albert Szent-Gyorgyi, Ralph Templin, Marion Bromley, Horace Champney, Ralph Dull, Walter Gormly, Richard Groff, Irwin Hogenauer, Roy Kepler, Ken Knudson, Bradford Lyttle, Karl Meyer, Ed Rosenthal, Maris Cakars, Gordon Christiansen, William Davidon, Johan Eliot, Carroll Pratt, Helen Merrell Lynd, E. Russell Stabler, Lyle Stuart, John M. Vickers, and Eric Weinberger.

The text of the ad (without the signatures and “coupon”) is as follows:

The Time Has Come

The spectacle of the United States — with its jet bombers, helicopters, fragmentation and napalm bombs and disabling gas — carrying on an endless war against the hungry, scantily armed Vietnamese guerrillas and civilians… this spectacle will go down in history alongside the unforgivable atrocities of Italy in Ethiopia.

The spectacle of the United States invasion of the Dominican Republic — again pitting our terrifying weaponry mainly against civilians armed with rifles… this spectacle will go down in history alongside Russia’s criminal intervention in Hungary.

But the spectacle of the indifference of so many Americans to the crimes being committed in their names, by their brothers, and with their tax money… this spectacle reminds us more and more of the indifference of the majority of the German people to the killing of six million Jews.

The United States government has not reacted constructively to legitimate criticism, protests and appeals:

• by world leaders including the Pope, U Thant and President De Gaulle —
• by United States leaders including Senators Morse, Gruening, Church, Fulbright, Robert Kennedy, Eugene McCarthy and Stephen Young —
• by hundreds of thousands of citizens including 2,500 clergymen and countless professors who placed protest advertisements in leading newspapers —
• by innumerable students, many tens of thousands of whom have taken their protest to Washington on several occasions —
• by celebrated individuals such as the Rev. Martin Luther King, Robert Lowell, Arthur Miller and Dr. Benjamin Spock —
• and by leading newspapers, including the New York Times.

We believe that the ordinary channels of protest have been exhausted and that the time has come for Americans of conscience to take more radical action in the hope of averting nuclear war.

Therefore, the undersigned hereby declare that at least as long as U.S. Forces are clearly being used in violation of the U.S. Constitution, International Law and the United Nations Charter…

We will refuse to pay our federal income taxes voluntarily

Some of us will leave the money we owe the government in our bank accounts, where the Internal Revenue Service may seize it if they wish. Others will contribute the money to CARE, UNICEF or similar organizations. Some of us will continue to pay that percentage of our taxes which is not used for military purposes.

We recognize the gravity of this step. However, we prefer to risk violating the Internal Revenue Code, rather than to participate, by voluntarily paying our taxes, in the serious crimes against humanity being committed by our Government.

Some bits and pieces from here and there:

• The Greek “Don’t Pay” movement has organized as a political party that is competing in the May 6^th elections. The video they have created to support their campaign, shown below, is a great collection of shots of the direct action campaign:

• Curious as to how the 1% lower or eliminate their income tax liabilities? Bloomberg Businessweek has a good overview of some of the strategies they use.
• Welcome, Maia Duerr, to war tax resistance.
• From the archives, here’s a photo that appeared (without an accompanying article) in the Yonkers, New York Herald Statesman in 1971:

Alan Emory, the long-time Washington D.C. correspondent for the Watertown Times, penned a dismissive article about war tax resisters for that paper’s 19 April 1968 edition.

With its quotes and paraphrases of unnamed “officials” and its furious hand waving, it reads to me as a desperate attempt by the government to throw water on a spreading brush fire by means of a cooperative and sympathetic reporter. (Emory’s parents were both in government, and, as a Washington reporter, Emory was about as antagonistic to politicians as a sportscaster is to athletes.)

Protests for Publicity?

Fewer Americans Using War As Excuse for Dodging Taxes

Washington — Fewer Americans are using the Vietnam war as an excuse for not paying all or part of their income taxes this year, according to the Internal Revenue service.

And most of them appear to be making the protest for publicity purposes, officials believe.

Instead, the protesters appear to be more active in using the war as a reason for not paying telephone excise taxes.

In both cases, however, the numbers are relatively insignificant.

Out of 70,000,000 income taxpayers, the IRS says only 275 declined to pay up in full because of Vietnam in 1965 and only 520 in 1966. So far, the 1967 count shows 93.

As for the telephone tax refusals, “about 4,800” out of 50,000,000 users took this line last year, according to Internal Revenue Commissioner Sheldon Cohen.

The American Telephone & Telegraph company put the figure at 700 in the final three months of 1966 and 1,800 during the first three months last year. The early 1967 figure included 86 residents of Pennsylvania — out of 3,000,000 telephone subscribers — and 25 in New Jersey out of 2,200,000.

IRS officials say the Vietnam protest first showed up as a tax factor in 1965. Individuals ran to newspapers and issued press releases, they said, and filed their returns with a note or letter citing the war protest.

Some groups held protest meetings in front of IRS offices and passed out flyers.

The tax collectors’ problems, however, turned out to be surprisingly small. When, after sending out the normal number of letters to the taxpayer, the IRS sent an agent to his home, he was usually greeted with “We were expecting you,” and the taxpayer then told the agent the bank in which his funds were deposited.

The government either filed a lien or, in some cases, went to the bank with the taxpayer and obtained the money right there.

The IRS found out that many of the protesting taxpayers had not received enough income to require any taxes. Others had enough withheld to cover what they owed. Some had salaries attached.

One taxpayer has consistently shrugged off IRS communications, including those showing he had refunds due.

Cohen says the war protest cases are being handled “under special procedures and we are pursuing them through to collection.”

“If any taxes are due we will collect them down to the last dollar,” he says.

Only 1,500 to 2,000 go to jail for not paying taxes in a single year, though, and very few of them belong in the war protest lists. One official said that 25 per cent of the protest petition signers are “students and hippies.”

When the phone tax problem showed up in August, 1967, the phone companies agreed to make out lists for the IRS of those who would not pay the tax. Ironically, the paper work involved in making the collection is usually more costly than the money owed.

No jailings have resulted from this situation yet.

The most famous protester on taxes and the war is folk singer Joan Baez, who has been seeking a $36,528 refund on her 1965 tax payment of $60,948. Although Miss Baez regularly withholds part of her tax because of Vietnam, the IRS goes right ahead and attaches income, property and bank accounts to pay any tax left unpaid. Last week she said she will withhold her entire tax this year.

The singer paid $6,000 in penalties and interest for 1963 and 1964. Government officials consider that a fee for what they call “front-page advertising.” Her taxable income in 1964 was $110,000.

The first mass tax protest involving Vietnam came with the publication of a notice signed by 350-odd names, mostly writers and educators, led by Rev. A.J. Muste, a well-known pacifist leader who had not paid any income taxes since 1948 — well before Vietnam.

Other signers included pianist Anton Kuerti and former Yale Prof. Staughton Lynd, Merrel Lynd, co-author of “Middletown,” and biochemist Albert Szent-Gyorgi. In April, 1967, another protest list was printed in newspapers, and this year a third, with 448 sign…

Here, alas, the reproduction of the article available on-line gives out, and if Emory’s article was syndicated elsewhere in full, I haven’t been able to find it in any of the on-line archives (an abbreviated version was picked up by The Milwaukee Journal).

The Panama City, Florida News-Herald published the following editorial forty-five years ago today:

Income Tax Payment Refusals Increasing

What with objections to the war in Vietnam, there appear to be some increase in the number of persons refusing to pay all or part of their federal income taxes.

Refusal to pay income taxes has been going on for a long time. Some individuals object to the idea of the income tax as theft of one’s earnings. Others object to the things the politicians are doing with their money.

Then there are individuals like Austin T. Flett of Chicago. Flett for 12 consecutive years has filed a blank income tax return as a protest. He demands he be taken before a jury and tried so he can show that through “interlocking subversion” certain persons in government have violated the Constitution by favoring privileged groups. He contends such groups as cooperatives, labor unions, and religious organizations “unlawfully escape, each year, the payment of a great many billions of dollars in federal income taxes.”

A former insurance man, he has contended that the taxes he previously was forced to pay in effect subsidized certain mutual-type, tax-exempt competitors.

Most of the people like Flett have been shrugged off by the bulk of people as “odd,” although some have expressed a grudging admiration for the man who has virtually dared the Internal Revenue Service to take him to court.

Now, however, the Wall Street Journal reports, a group called the War Tax Resistance has opened offices in New York, Chicago, and Philadelphia and plans to open other offices to coordinate a campaign to spur mass refusal to pay at least $5 of some federal tax. The main targets are the income tax and the 10 per cent excise tax on telephone service. The objective is to compel withdrawal of U.S. troops from Vietnam.

The Journal says there have been 1,025 persons who refused to pay all or part of their tax because of the war in the first nine months of 1969, compared with 592 for all of 1968. The total number of persons refusing to pay the telephone tax in 1969 had been running at about the same rate as in the previous year.

We recently heard of some people in California who were refusing to pay their state income taxes because of what has been happening on the campuses of the University of California and the state colleges. The number apparently has not been great.

We are less concerned with what people do with their tax money, pay it or hold it, than why they do so. We think a person who refuses to pay tax on reasonable showing that the revenue is converted to immoral use, including fraud and initiated force, stands on just grounds. On the other hand, a person who like a communist believes in initiating force against others has no principle to stand on; he simply refuses to pay because he hopes for some expedient gain. So the same action can come from different causes. What is important, we think, is for more people to understand that taxation of its very essence is the taking of property against the consent of the owner, and institutionalized form of theft. When this one idea prevails, the governmental authorities will not have so much power to perform immoral acts.

The Biblical command to render tribute to whom tribute is due and to render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s cannot be construed so far as to command knowing participation in immoral government acts. After all, not everything that Caesar claims is Caesar’s; neither are you under any obligation to render tribute to whom tribute is not due.

Austin Flett died in 1971, still defiant. He claimed to have spent some $200,000 fighting the IRS, but didn’t turn over any tax or fill in his tax returns for the last 13 years of his life.

Here’s another good example of the tactic of tax redirection, as found in the 24 February 1973 Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania New Courier:

Protest cash put to work

Chicago — More than $350 in federal telephone excise taxes withheld by a group of antiwar tax resisters will provide a set of eye-surgery instruments and two portable oxygen life-support systems for a Hanoi hospital demolished in last December’s bombing.

The much-needed equipment will be sent by a new organization called Medical Aid for Indochina, which received the donation from War Tax Resistance.

Ironically, in a completely independent action, MAI also received a $50 donation from a dozen employes of Illinois Bell telephone to send another portable oxygen system to Bach Mai hospital.

Mark Sherman, coordinator of War Tax Resistance, said his group will focus on utilizing the withheld federal telephone tax for supplying medical aid to North Vietnam.

The 10 per cent excise tax, which was to expire in 1969, was extended specifically to pay the rising costs of the Vietnam war and has been for several years the target of groups seeking to use economic power to end the war.

Supporters of WTR say nonpayment incurs virtually no risk of prosecution by the Internal Revenue Service and little effort is made to collect the withheld amount.

Sherman urged the general public to withhold the next three months telephone taxes for the campaign to rebuild Bach Mai. Funds can be sent to Telephone Tax Relief Fund, Hyde Park Federal Savings, 5250 S. Lake Park, Chicago, or to Medical Aid for Indochina, 109 N. Dearborn, Chicago.

MAI was established in Chicago earlier this month by a group of civic, religious and political leaders including U.S. Rep. Ralph Metcalfe, State Rep. Robert E. Mann, former Congressman Abner J. Mikva, Ald. Dick Simpson, former Illinois Lieut. Gov. Paul Simon and several state and county health officials.

It is part of a nationwide effort to rebuild Bach Mai hospital and provide a wide range of medical supplies and equipment to North Vietnam and liberation forces in South Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia.

Some new links of interest to war tax resisters in particular:

• The next national gathering of the National War Tax Resistance Coordinating Committee will be held from 13–15 May 2016 in Lansdowne, Pennsylvania (near Philadelphia). Check this page for details.
• Anne Barron shares her experiences in organizing a recent war tax resistance teach-in in San Diego.
• I’ve put together a page on Pioneers of the Modern American War Tax Resistance Movement at the NWTRCC site. It gives brief biographies of those resisters who were part of the organized war tax resistance movement that emerged in the late 1940s.
• War Resisters’ International highlighted the bright yellow attack by war tax resisters in Bilbao on the Juan de Garay military barracks.
• Fifth Estate carries Erica Weiland’s article on how war tax resistance featured in the movement to end the U.S. war on Vietnam.

I also recently discovered some war tax resistance items on Issuu — an on-line magazine publishing platform:

• “Mennonites say no to war taxes” — the cover story from an issue of The Mennonite from 2014.
• “Turning Toward Peace program redirects war taxes” (page 40) — a war tax redirection program sponsored by the Mennonite Central Committee, as described in The Mennonite of April 2015.
• The Broken Rifle #62 — an issue of the War Resisters’ International newsletter devoted to war tax resistance, from 2004.
• “What if They Gave a War and Nobody Paid?” — an article by David Hartsough in the April 2013 Street Spirit.
• Clearly from My Heart — devoted to the life and ideas of Albuquerque war tax resister Don Schrader.

The 14 May 1970 edition of Cycle, a student paper from Fitchburg (Massachusetts) State College, gives us a good peek into the rhetoric and tactics of the war tax resistance movement at that time:

If a thousand men were not to pay their tax bill this year, that would not be a violent and bloody measure as it would be to pay them and enable the State to commit violence and shed innocent blood.

Henry David Thoreau

A Call to War Tax Resistance

In 1968, the United States government spend $103 billion to pay for present and past wars and to be prepared in case of future wars. This was 66% of the entire federal budget of $156 billion. One hundred and three billion dollars exceeds the gross national product of all but six nations.

Of this $103,198,100,000, $29 billion was spent on the Vietnam war, to continue a conflict whose brutality, immorality, and illegality have sickened most Americans and the vast majority of the people of the world. Already, this war has brought death to more than 42,000 Americans and more than two million Vietnamese. It is a spur to the arms race and continually threatens world peace.

Almost $20 billion will be invested this fiscal year in making more frightful our nuclear missile and bomber arsenal, weapons already so destructive that they can deliver ten tons of explosive power for every person on the globe.

$330 million will be spent on chemical and biological weapons that are polluting the environment and endangering the people in the United States and other countries without even being used; simply by being improperly stored.

$7.5 billion will go toward research on new and yet more fearful weapons.

$1.2 billion has been authorized for the Anti Ballistic Missile (ABM) system in 1968.

$500 million to $1 billion is the estimated budget of the CIA.

Vast sums will be paid to the corporations and research institutes that design and build the weapons. In fiscal year 1968, the following companies, a handful of the biggest among thousands engaged in war production and research, enjoyed these military contracts:

General Dynamics	$2.2 billion
Lockheed Aircraft	$1.8 billion
General Electric	$1.4 billion
United Aircraft	$1.3 billion
McDonnell-Douglas	$1.1 billion
AT&T	$777 million

The following amounts were spent in fiscal 1968 for projects that seem to have little to do with primary human needs:

For moon and other space exploration $3.4 billion.

For farm subsidies to wealthy landowners $3.1 billion.

In comparison to the enormous expenditures for acts and instruments of military violence, luxury space programs, and subsidies to the wealthy, and at a time when city governments are crying for more funds, the United States government spent these sums on improving the health, education, and general welfare of the people within this country.

Slum rebuilding $1.9 billion.

Other poverty programs $7.2 billion.

Health programs $1.8 billion.

Educational programs and subsidies $3.7 billion.

Direct, nonmilitary foreign aid to underdeveloped countries totaled about $1.6 billion.

The U.S. appropriation to the United Nations was $109 million, about the cost of one Polaris submarine.

In fiscal 1968, the total of all non-military expenditure was approximately 34% of the military expenses.

Throughout the United States, young people by the hundreds of thousands are rebelling in disgust and anger against this squandering of resources on war, and neglect of the day-to-day practical needs of the people. They are not alone in seeing only massive social disruption and probably nuclear war as eventual consequences. They are risking their freedom, careers, and often their lives to protest and resist what they see to be wrong.

In the face of this shameful and alarming situation and in solidarity with the youth resisting it, we, as participants in War Tax Resistance, are resolved to confront our own complicity in war, waste, and callousness. We resolve to end to the extent we can our cooperation in a federal tax program geared to death more than life. The least measure of our resistance will be not to pay voluntarily $5 of federal taxes due.

We are prepared to bear the consequences of our actions, be these criticism and unpopularity, financial penalties, confiscation of our bank accounts and property, and, perhaps, imprisonment. These seem to us small inconveniences beside the agony of those killed or bereft by war, and the numb hopelessness of those crippled by poverty.

We invite all Americans to join us in some form of tax refusal. War tax resistance is not always easy, particularly for those whose taxes are withheld from their wages, but for most there is some variety of tax refusal that they can conscientiously adopt. It may be by not paying part or all of a balance “owed,” or by not paying federal telephone tax. War Tax Resistance has prepared literature and is setting up counseling services designed to help each individual find the best way of tax refusal and resistance for him. A list of Methods of War Tax Resistance follows this statement of purpose.

We also are developing a war tax resistance promotional program that will include advertisements, demonstrations, meetings, a bulletin, and other literature distribution. If you become a war tax resister, we hope you will allow yourself to be publicly identified with the movement and permit your name to be used on tax resistance literature.

War Tax Resistance will do more than concentrate on the weeks just before April 15. We are planning a year round educational and resistance program. If you agree with conscientious tax resistance as a means for opposing war, we hope you will communicate with us now. The included coupon is for your convenience.

Methods of Refusal

Refuse to pay at least $5 of your tax

The first goal of War Tax Resistance is to convince as many people as possible to refuse at least $5 of some tax owed the government. Nearly everyone can do this by refusing their federal telephone tax or part of their income tax. If hundreds of thousands refuse to pay $5, they will establish mass tax refusal. Besides having the burden of collecting the unpaid amounts, the government will be faced with the political fact of massive noncooperation with its warmaking policies.

Better yet, refuse to pay all the taxes you can

Even if some of your taxes are withheld, you can refuse to pay the balance and other taxes. These might include: taxes on additional income, the 10% surtax, and the telephone tax.

You can refuse to pay that percentage of your tax that goes for war

Two thirds or more of the federal budget pays for wars past, present, and future. To protest against war, a person can refuse that percentage of his tax. He can base his refusal on the percentage of the total national budget used for war, on the cost of the war in Vietnam, or on other calculations. Some people pay part of their tax and contribute the rest as a peace tax. Some give to the UN, or a relief agency, or some other organization engaged in peaceful, constructive work.

You can refuse to pay the 10% surtax

This surtax was imposed in 1968 to help pay for the war in Vietnam. Refusing to pay it is a direct protest against the war.

You can refuse to pay the federal telephone tax

The federal telephone tax was revived in 1966 to help pay for the war. Thousands are already not paying it. In all cases known to us but one, the telephone companies have continued service and referred the tax collection to IRS.

To Reduce or Eliminate the Withholding of Your Taxes You Can

Claim additional dependents

If you claim a sufficient number of dependents on your W-4 form you can reduce the amount of taxes withheld from your salary to zero. The law reads that a dependent has to live in your household and be supported by you. The fact is that many people, particularly draft age young men and the Vietnamese, depend on you. So long as you declare at the end of the year that by the government’s standards you owe so much and are refusing to pay it, the moral point is made

The law reads that it is illegal — fraudulent — to state on a tax form that someone claimed as a dependent falls within that category, as defined by the IRS, when he does not. But no fraud appears to be involved if the people claimed as dependents are identified as being outside the IRS categories. The issue has not been tested in the courts.

Make your employer an ally

Although the law reads that it is illegal not to withhold taxes from an employee’s wages, your employer may be sympathetic to your protest and be willing to assist — and make a protest of his own — by not withholding from your salary. It is always valuable to raise the question.

Organize an employment agency

Have your agency hire you and then have your present employer hire the agency to supply him with you. Naturally, an agency that you control will not withhold taxes from its employees. Getting organized is complicated, but if you and a few friends get together you can work out the problem. Write us for information.

Also You Can

Demand a refund

There are four ways to do this:

1. You may request a refund right on the 1040 form and stand a good chance of receiving it. Ask for a tax credit on Part Ⅴ of the form.
2. You may file form 843 for a refund.
3. If the above demands are refused, go to the Income Tax Board of Appeals. If the Board turns you down, sue.
4. You can also sue the government to refund all your taxes on the grounds that the taxes have been used for illegal and immoral purposes.

Protest by letter or in person

Any protest to IRS or other government officials will help express opposition to the war and to militarism. If you are unable to refuse taxes, protest them as vigorously as you can.

Maximize the Impact

Talk about your tax refusal with friends, neighbors, co-workers. This sort of direct contact changes many minds. Distribute tax refusal literature.

Inform the newspapers and other mass media in your neighborhood that you are resisting war taxes and why. Start a war tax resistance group in your community.

Organize or join demonstrations at your local IRS office.

Inform yourself thoroughly and become a tax refusal counselor. Let your community know through ads, leaflets, etc. that a counseling service is available.

Keep the War Tax Resistance Clearinghouse informed by writing or phoning about your activities. Communication is the lifeblood of any movement.

We invite war tax resisters to send War Tax Resistance the first $5 or more refused the federal government. This money will be used to publicize and expand the war tax resistance movement.

Until now, the government has not imprisoned anyone for conscientious tax refusal. A few have been given short sentences for refusing to reveal information about their incomes. In general, the IRS has been content to take money from tax refusers’ bank accounts, garnishee part of their wages, or, on rare occasions, seize and auction property.

Sponsors of War Tax Resistance

• Winslow Ames
• Joan Baez
• Norma Becker
• James Bristol
• Prof. Noam Chomsky
• Prof. Frank Collins
• Tom Cornell
• Prof. William Davidon
• Dorothy Day
• Dave Dellinger
• Barbara Deming
• Ralph DiGia
• Prof. Douglas Dowd
• Prof. Margaret Eberbach
• Ruth Gage-Colby
• Allen Ginsberg
• Bob Haskell
• James Leo Herlihy
• Faye Knopp
• Kennett Love
• David McReynolds
• Stewart and Charlotte Meacham
• Rev. and Mrs. Arthur G. Melville
• Karl Meyer
• Jack Newfield
• Grace Paley
• Igal Roodenko
• Rev. Finley Schaef
• Dr. Benjamin Spock
• Marj and Bob Swann
• Arthur Waskow
• George and Lillian Willoughby
• Irma Zigas

Working Committee (in formation)

• Norma Becker
• Maris Cakars
• Frank Collins
• John Darr
• Jerry Dickinson
• Ralph DiGia
• Bob Haskell
• Neil Haworth
• Peter Kiger
• Kennett Love
• Bradford Lyttle
• Mark Morris
• Christopher Pollock
• Melinda Reed
• Kay Van Deurs
• Eric Weinberger