Some historical and global examples of tax resistance → United States → Liberty Bonds in World War Ⅰ, 1917–18 → John Schrag

This is the forty-first in a series of posts about war tax resistance as it was reported in back issues of The Mennonite. Today we reach the end of the 1990s.

Peace Tax Fund bill advocate Marian Franz wrote about “The claims of God and Caesar” in the 6 April 1999 edition. She began by highlighting how entwined tax issues are with the stories related in the gospels. She then highlighted the spending priorities of the U.S. government — how much it spends on weapons while crucial needs remain underfunded — and on the related spending priorities of Mennonites:

John Stoner did an analysis that found that for every $9 Mennonites spend on their military taxes they give $5 to charitable causes.

She told of Dan Slabaugh, who in 1975 “was plowing his field, and at one point he knelt on the ground and promised God he would never again let a penny of his earned income go for military use.” Slabaugh wrote his Senator about this, and that Senator, Mark Hatfield, went on to introduce a Peace Tax Fund Bill.

She also told of Claus Felbinger, a 16^th Century Hutterite martyr who had said that “When… the government requires of us what is contrary to our faith and conscience, such as swearing oaths and paying hangman’s dues and taxes for war, then we do not obey its commands.”

And she related (for the first time, I think, in The Mennonite, remarkably) the story of World War Ⅰ-era American Mennonite John Schrag, who was attacked by a mob for refusing to buy war bonds.

She then went on to plug the Peace Tax Fund bill, suggesting it would provide a way for conscientious objectors to pay their taxes and have “the military portion” safely disinfected of its militaristic taint. She also said she found lobbying for the bill to be a useful way of introducing conscientious objection to military taxation to new audiences, such as religious groups outside of the traditional peace churches, and to politicians and bureaucrats.

The same issue included an article about war tax resistance by Steve Ratzlaff. He asserted: “It isn’t possibly to pray for peace and pay for war unless you suffer from delusions or a split personality disorder… Yet 99 percent of Mennonites do that very thing.”

The problem lies in our split personality, in the mental gymnastics we use to excuse ourselves from the reality of our actions. We have separated our actions from our belief by rationalizing that we don’t really have any choice; the government requires us to pay taxes. That is true. But the government required that we serve in the army before the Alternative Service Act was passed in the 1940s. We refused to serve in the armed forces then. Once they accommodated us by granting us conscientious objector status, we gladly gave them our money so they could continue to kill in our names. And they do kill, through aggressive military maneuvers and supporting almost every government in the world through the sale of arms.
We have separated our pocketbooks from our consciences. Money has become the topic that is nobody’s business but our own. As a result, we allow no one to hold us accountable for the way we spend it. That includes our tax money as well. We take the path of least resistance and pay the military portion of our taxes, even though that may violate our conscience.
We Mennonites are sick. We are schizophrenic when it comes to taxes that go for war. And our government is thankful for that. It was a small price to give us the option of alternative service. They really are more concerned that we continue to provide them with the cash needed to pay for their wars and military build-ups.

The unconditional support of the military that our government asks of us is obscene. We have withdrawn support from welfare mothers and aid to dependent children while increasing corporate welfare to the military industry. As a people of peace we cannot continue to pay for such irresponsibility in good conscience. It is time for us to listen seriously to our consciences again and to refuse to pay for such atrocities. We are a conscientious people that have lost our way and fallen ill. It’s time to address our personality disorder and listen once again to Jesus’ call to be peacemakers, not war supporters.

An editorial by J. Lorne Peachey in the same issue tried to sum all of this up, but also to deflect its urgency. He began by quoting 2 Timothy 2:23 — “Have nothing to do with stupid and senseless controversies; you know that they breed quarrels” — and he suggested that the issue of taxpayer complicity was such a controversy.

This prompted several letters which were printed over the next few issues:

John F. Murray wrote to say that he had determined the best course of action was not to reduce your income below the tax line, nor to withhold taxes due from the government, nor to support a Peace Tax Fund bill, but to donate generously to the church in order to take a large tax deduction.
Another letter, from Steve Martin, had other suggestions:

Until the Religious Freedom Peace Tax Fund Bill becomes reality, it would appear that the only ways to ensure that one’s tax dollars not go to military usage is to keep income below taxable levels or refuse to pay all taxes. The government currently will first take taxes for military purposes regardless of whether one pays the military portion or not. Thus by not paying the military portion, it appears one ultimately cuts money available for social programs rather than the military. To stay below taxable levels, one may cut actual income below the taxable level or go beyond Ratzlaff’s suggestion that the military portion of income taxes be given to some organization such as Mennonite Central Committee and give all actual income above the taxable level to charitable purposes. One wonders what our Mennonite agencies could do if the latter practice was followed by the large majority of their constituencies.
Steven J. Olshewsky followed up with a letter in which he pointed out the practical difficulties of using charitable giving as a way of reducing a taxable income to a tax-free income, among other things.
John M. Eby expressed his disappointment that “[t]here apparently has been no new thinking on the subject of war taxes since the last time this was a burning issue.”

Caesar comes at us like a highwayman, willing and able to come in and take whatever Caesar determines to be his share. Due to interest and penalties, those who make a show of resisting will end up rendering more than those who do not resist. This is the first paradox of the war tax issue.
When there is little or no money available, Caesar quickly loses interest. Those who choose to live on the lower fringe of Caesar’s economy are not expected to render. However, if we all choose to live on that fringe, there will be no money to support the National Campaign for a Peace Tax Fund. No money for Mennonite Central Committee. Little or no money for the panoply of camps, boards, schools, publications, etc., that are the visible representations of our attempts to do church. We all recognize, at least in theory, that we cannot serve both God and mammon. But we have yet to figure out how to serve God without at least some mammon. I suppose this is the second paradox of the war tax issue.
Jacob Tice suggested a novel approach:

I would like to register a legal way to avoid paying that I haven’t seen mentioned yet: live and earn your income abroad. U.S. citizens can exclude up to $72,000 (1998) of foreign earned income (they are taxed on worldwide income) as long as they meet the IRS requirements for the foreign country being their “tax home” or for being “bona fide residents” of the foreign country.

After over eight years of living in Panama, my wife, three children, and I have attained permanent residency status… but are also still U.S. citizens. In these eight years of dairy farming in Panama, I have been required to pay U.S. self-employment taxes (Social Security) but have not needed to pay any U.S. income tax. (And with an exclusion of up to $72,000, I do not anticipate needing to pay any.) I’m liable for Panamanian income tax but, as a dairy farmer, have not yet needed to pay any.

This is the forty-third in a series of posts about war tax resistance as it was reported in back issues of The Mennonite. Today we reach 2002.

The 22 January 2002 finally did a good job of telling the story of John Schrag:

Showdown in Burrton, Kansas

Mennonite John Schrag faces a mob during World War Ⅰ

by James C. Juhnke

When World War Ⅰ broke out, Mennonites discovered they were considered enemies by their neighbors and business associates. Their German origins, even if generations removed, their German language and culture, and their pacifism made them suspect. In some communities, patriotic citizen groups harassed “slackers” by throwing yellow paint on houses and meetinghouses, committing arson, tarring and feathering pacifists and threatening death by hanging. In this story, Swiss Volhynian Mennonite John Schrag finds himself in the hands of such a patriotic mob.

The John Schrag espionage case was the dramatic climax to the dilemma of Kansas Mennonites in World War Ⅰ. Schrag was chosen to be the symbol and the bearer of the American community’s mistrust and hatred of German-speaking pacifists in the tense days of 1918.
Schrag was a believer in those simple and durable virtues that made Mennonites highly prized citizens on the Kansas frontier. He was 13 years old when his family emigrated from Volhynia, Russia, to central Kansas in 1874. In his teens, he helped his father build a grain mill on the banks of the Little Arkansas River in Harvey County. From his father he learned the value of hard work, the love of the soil and the wisdom of careful investment.
From the Mennonite faith and tradition Schrag knew that God generously rewards his faithful laboring servants. Schrag’s rise as a prosperous farmer with a large family and extensive landholdings was as natural as the economic and social success of the Mennonite community in the first decades after arrival in the new country.
The Mennonite role as outstanding and valuable citizens received an unforgettable jolt when the United States entered World War Ⅰ in 1917. It suddenly became a requirement of acceptable American citizenship to support the war and to hate Germany. The Mennonites failed on both counts. They could not support the war because their religious faith taught them nonresistance, a doctrine whose practical expression included a claim for exemption from military service. They could not hate Germany because Mennonites themselves were of German background and loved the German language and culture as preserved in their homes, schools and churches.
Their sympathies in the European war had been demonstrated in their collections of money for the German Red Cross. Mennonites could not be acceptable citizens in America during World War Ⅰ unless they gave up their German culture and their doctrine of nonresistance.
The war bond drives became the test of loyal citizenship in the local community. Faced alternatively with persuasion and intimidation by local Loyalty Leagues, many Mennonites reconciled their nonresistance with the purchase of the bonds. After all, reasoned Henry Peter Krehbiel, member of the Western District Committee on Exemptions, a war bond is a kind of tax, and Jesus told us to pay our taxes. But John Schrag was not convinced. Buying bonds was supporting the war, and he would not support the war. That was that.
Five carloads of men: On Nov. 11, 1918, a group of patriotic citizens in Burrton, Kan., decided that the time was ripe for a showdown. “We was out to convert these slackers into patriots,” said one of them later. Five carloads of men drove 11 miles to the Schrag farm to get him to join the Armistice Day festivities in Burrton. Schrag’s boys, sensing trouble, refused to say where their father was, but the Burrton men found him after ransacking the farmstead and forcing their way into the house. Schrag offered neither argument nor resistance.
He went along in the hope that a measure of cooperation would help avoid physical violence.
In Burrton, a crowd quickly gathered as the citizens confronted Schrag with their real reason for bringing him to town. He must buy war bonds now or face the consequences. Schrag offered to contribute $200 to the Red Cross and the Salvation Army, but this was not sufficient.
They demanded that he salute the American flag and carry the flag through town at the head of a parade. But Schrag quietly and firmly refused to cooperate. The flag thrust into his hand fell to the ground. Someone shouted, “He stepped on the flag.” The crowd became an enraged mob.
Yellow paint: They sprinkled and poured yellow paint on their victim, rubbing it into his scalp and beard until he resembled “a big cheese or yellow squash or pumpkin after the autumnal ripening.” They led him to the city jail. Someone ran for a rope to hang him, but Tom Roberts, the head of the local Anti-Horse-Thief Association, courageously stood before the jail door, brandished a gun and said, “If you take this man out of jail, you take him over my dead body.” Temporarily frustrated, the indignant citizens made plans to return that night, force the jail open and hang this so-called traitor.
Meanwhile, Schrag was placed in a chair on a raised platform in the jail, so passersby could view the humiliated man through the window in the jail door. One repentant member of the mob later testified to Schrag’s calmness throughout the ordeal: “If ever a man looked like Christ, he did.”
Schrag was finally rescued from the Burrton crusaders for American democracy by the Harvey County sheriff, who came that evening to take him to the county jail in Newton for cleaning and safe-keeping. Before he was released, Schrag was informed that he was to be tried in court for violation of the Espionage Act. It was against the law to desecrate the flag of the United States.
Local newspaper accounts of the incident failed to defend the rights of the victim. The weekly Burrton Graphic on Nov. 14 saw in the event “a pungent and durable reminder that loyalty is a necessary prerequisite to life in this community. We must all be Americans.” The Hutchinson News article said that “a petition is being circulated to have him [Schrag] deported to Germany, his native land. This country is fast becoming an unhealthy place for ‘slackers’ of any kind.”
The Newton Evening Kansan-Republican suggested that if a federal court would find Schrag guilty, “it would undoubtedly mean the confiscation of his property and his deportation.” On the week of his hearing in Wichita, the editor of the Burrton Graphic published a list: “Some Things Residents of Burrton Should Be Thankful For.” In the list was “that we as a people are more tolerant of others’ foibles.”
Desecration of the flag: The case against Schrag was heard in the Wichita federal courtroom by U.S. Commissioner C. Shearman on Dec. 9. Five Burrton citizens presented 50 typewritten pages of evidence to prove Schrag’s disloyalty and desecration of the flag. For his defense, Schrag retained the services of a Jewish lawyer named Schulz. Commissioner Shearman took the case under advisement and promised that the decision would be made shortly.
The decision, handed down on Dec. 24, was that Schrag was not guilty and should not be bound over for federal trial. But Commissioner Shearman did say that “Schrag could not have gone closer to a violation of the Espionage Act if he had had 100 lawyers at his side to advise him.”
Schrag in fact had not willfully desecrated the flag. Nothing in the Espionage Act required one to salute the flag. Schrag’s words that supposedly slandered the flag had been spoken in German, so none of the monolingual plaintiffs could prove any guilt.
The Newton Evening Kansan-Republican, frustrated by the acquittal of this “bull-headed” man, suggested that the case “should certainly make plain to any thinking person the viciousness that exists in the encouragement of the German language as a means of communication in America… The melting pot cannot exercise its proper functions when such things are allowed.”
The Mennonite newspapers in central Kansas, intimidated into silence, did not come to Schrag’s defense and did not even mention the incident or the hearing as an item of news. After the commissioner’s decision, however, C.E. Krehbiel, editor of Der Herold, wrote an editorial, “Mob Power,” that clearly referred to the Schrag case, although it mentioned no specific names or events. In cases of mob violence, wrote Krehbiel, either the mob or the abused person is guilty. If the court of justice decides that the victim is innocent, the only conclusion is that the mob is guilty. Readers were to make their own applications.
Schrag’s attorney encouraged him to bring charges against his persecutors, but Schrag declined. Such an action would have violated the Mennonite principles of nonresistance.
Nevertheless, in the months after the Schrag affair, the nonresistant German-Mennonites had no scruples against clamping an economic boycott on the town of Burrton. The boycott was not organized systematically, but it was effective in disrupting the trade of Burrton businessmen who were dependent on the commerce of German-Mennonite farmers. The legacy of tension and hatred generated by the event would be remembered for decades to come.
American Melting pot: The experience of the Mennonites in World War Ⅰ hardly had a salutary effect on the processes of the American melting pot. In the years after the war, the Mennonites were driven to a defensive retrenchment, to a renewed awareness of their distinctiveness as Mennonites.
Though the Mennonites gradually abandoned their German language and some German cultural traits, the war experiences forced them to a reconsideration and reaffirmation of the doctrine of nonresistance. As long as Mennonites held to that doctrine, they would be a thorn in the flesh of American nationalists.
The witness of John Schrag and of other Mennonites who refused to compromise their doctrine of nonresistance during wartime can serve as a reminder of the Anabaptist heritage of steadfastness in the face of persecution.

Charles Carney tried to refute seven misconceptions about war tax resistance in the 2 April 2002 issue. These being:

War tax resisters are law-breakers.
Sooner or later, war tax resisters go to jail.
War tax resisters benefit from the services that taxes provide without having to pay their fair share.
War tax resisters break the command of Jesus [Render unto Caesar…].
War tax resisters oppose social and medical services for veterans.
War tax resisters hide their actions from the government.
War tax resisters are one and the same as right-wing groups who refuse taxes because they don’t believe the government has the right to tax people.

Al Albrecht wrote in to suggest a few more:

Refusing to pay these taxes puts the U.S. government in a financial bind.
Refusing to pay these taxes causes the U.S. government great concern.
Refusing to pay these taxes absolves the resister of all moral responsibility for U.S. military action.

An editorial by Everett J. Thomas in the 21 May 2002 edition reflected on the “awkward” relationship Mennonites have with Memorial Day. Excerpt:

While reading The Earth Is The Lord’s… John Ruth’s massive history of Lancaster Conference, I discovered that this same question confronted my ancestors during the Civil War. As their neighbors joined local militias “to preserve the Union,” many Pennsylvania Mennonites were forced to answer questions about their loyalty. In the end, Congress passed a bill that allowed “the conscientious” to pay a commutation fee of $300 and thereby avoid the military draft.
“Mennonites, who preferred to pay anything called a tax rather than participating in their government’s military activities, were more content with this arrangement than were the Quakers, many of whom saw it as a moral compromise,” writes Ruth.
That solution is the pattern that exists to this day. While we do not fight, at least half our federal taxes support a vast military machine that no longer needs our bodies. It needs our money to pay for high-tech weapons and for the training for those who guide those weapons.
This reality leaves us directly supporting our country’s military with our dollars and means that in spite of our convictions and beliefs, in practice Mennonites are not much different from those who loudly support the current military buildup.
This Memorial Day, we can remember and pray for neighbors who publicly mourn the loss of a family member. We can also pray for those who were killed by our country, which for years has used and continues to use our tax dollars to kill in our name.

Don Schrader penned letters to the editor for the 4 June and 10 December editions to describe how his simple-living, non-voting lifestyle meets his goal of tax refusal. Excerpt:

In 2001 I lived well on $3,845 for my total expenses: rent, food, phone, stamps, etc. I have no right to more than I need while others have less than they need. I love to live simply. I write down every penny I spend for everything every day. I always pay cash; I refuse to buy on credit and to pay interest. I enjoy learning new ways to stretch dollars, to live healthily and responsibly on less.
The most radical, nonviolent action that people of conscience can take in this society is to pledge publicly to live simply, to own no car, and to pay no federal income tax for war for the rest of their lives.

In the 2 July 2002 issue, J. Daryl Byler reflected on his family’s tax resistance and on the ambiguous Biblical support for it. He wondered:

What would happen if Christians en masse decided to no longer pay the portion of their taxes that go to war? What if Christians mounted a mass resistance movement as an expression of our loyalty to Jesus Christ and his way of peace? Several years ago PBS aired a series called A Force More Powerful. This documentary tracked six nonviolent social-change movements in the 20^th century, including the U.S. civil rights struggle, the campaign to end apartheid in South Africa and the movement in India to end British rule.
The common thread in these successful nonviolent movements was masses of people choosing not to cooperate with forces of evil and oppression. Oppressive powers depend for survival on the cooperation of the masses. When that cooperation is withdrawn, these structures eventually crumble.

The 10 December 2002 issue shared the story of Linda Shelly:

Ten years ago, when Linda Shelly accepted her first salaried job, she did not want all the money. What she did made her a recipient of a Journey Award, given by Mennonite Mutual Aid to highlight good stewardship.
After working with Mennonite Central Committee in Bolivia and Honduras, Shelly returned to the United States to be MCC’s director of Latin American and Caribbean programs. But her wages were problematic. Shelly did not want her tax dollars to support the U.S. military. She also wanted to share her money, after years of benefiting from the generosity of Latin Americans who had so few resources. So Shelly accepted a lower salary to reduce her lax liability. She also loaned money to friends, then instead of receiving taxable interest income, shared it with people in need, both locally and internationally.