Miscellaneous tax resisters →
individual war tax resisters →
Carter
Some weeks back I reached the maximum income I can earn this year while still staying below the income tax line.
So I gracefully ended my contract and am now on an (at least) six-month sabbatical.
I recently got my last payment from my main client this year, and so, although I’d also received a 1099 from the same client last year, the IRS failed to intercept any of my payments this year and seems to be flailing a bit in its attempts to locate assets to seize for my (roughly $14,000) tax delinquency.
I’m spending part of this sabbatical doing additional research in the hopes of putting out an expanded second edition of American Quaker War Tax Resistance.
As I do this research, I sometimes come across examples of tax resistance that are either not American or not Quaker or or not war tax resistance or come after my arbitrary deadline, and so aren’t right for the book.
They fit right in here at The Picket Line, though.
Here’s a good example (despite its haphazard punctuation), from Volume 74, #51 of The Friend ():
Faithful to Principle.
— To the Editor of the [Boston] Post:—
The announcement made in the Post that one Carter had been released from the New Haven Jail where he had been confined for twenty-one months for refusing to pay a military tax of one dollar to the State of Connecticut shows what power there is in passive resistance to defeat a tyrannical measure.
Carter is a man who does not believe in war — at least wars of invasion — so when the good old town of Ansonia Conn. assessed a military tax of one dollar on him he simply said that it was against his principle to pay it and that he would go to jail before he would pay it.
Result twenty-one months in New Haven jail at an expense of two dollars and fifty cents per week to the town that sent him there or say a total cost of two hundred and twenty-seven dollars and fifty cents added to the tax levy of Ansonia as the cost of trying to force a man to pay one dollar for a purpose that he did not believe in.
And like Mark Twain in his controversy with the missionaries the fact that the tax was such a “little one” had no weight with Carter who evidently believes that “all just governments rest on the consent of the governed” and that numbers have nothing to do with principles.
Suppose a million men in the United States had said with Carter that “we will go to jail before we will pay a military tax” is it conceivable that militarism could have secured $200,000,000 to wage an aggressive war.
Speed the day when millions of men will prefer going to jail rather than spend their time in producing wealth to be used in murdering their fellow-men on the field of battle.
Some day the people may become sane enough to remember with feelings of gratitude, the man who was willing to lie in prison for twenty-one months rather than give a single dollar to aid in the business of barbarians.
The letter is signed “T. Small” of Provincetown, Massachusetts.
I haven’t found much else about this Carter fellah.
The New York Times ran a short piece about him that adds these details:
The money raised by the tax is used to support the National Guard of the State… Friends offered to advance the money to Carter, but he stubbornly refused to accept the money and pay the tax.… A citizen of the town connected with one of the large manufacturing concerns which has an office here… had this to say: “No, it was not an expensive luxury for the town.
Some of the slothful voters, hearing of the fate of Carter, have been prompt to pay this poll tax, though they had never before paid a tax of any sort.
Our Collector says that the keeping of Carter in jail as a sort of horrible example has really been a paying investment.
Collection of poll taxes was made easier than ever before.
The town has received much more than the usual proportion of this tax — always a hard one to collect — and some of the neighboring towns are talking of following our example.
Incidentally, too, it has been a good thing for the political committees of the town, as both have had fewer taxes of this sort to pay out of their funds, in order to keep careless and shiftless people who happen to be voters on the list of electors.”
There are many ways to support tax resisters when they are targeted by the police or courts, including:
Another way to help resisters who are tangling with the legal system is to pay their legal fees or their fines.
I covered “mutual insurance” plans, with which tax resistance campaigns spread the cost of fines and other such costs over more resisters than just those explicitly targeted.
Today I’ll cover some examples of more ad hoc, after-the-fact generosity in a similar vein.
Sylvia Hardy
Sylvia Hardy, retired and living in Exeter, was upset that the cost of living increase in her pension was less than 3%, while her council tax was rising at a double-digit percentage each year.
So she decided to stop paying.
A sympathizer paid her bill one year, and in response Hardy wrote to the city council to ask them not to accept any further donations in her name.
Later, she was told that someone had called in by telephone offering to pay her whole bill, and she again refused, saying continued refusal was “the only way to get our voices heard.”
Nonetheless, when she was jailed in , an anonymous sympathizer paid her outstanding taxes, and she was released after spending two days behind bars.
Old Holborn
Nick Hogan, a Bolton pub-owner, defied a new anti-smoking ordinance and openly permitted his patrons to light up.
For this he was fined £3,000, and another £7,000+ in court costs.
He refused to pay and was thrown in jail.
Hogan was set free the following month when a blogger going by the handle of “Old Holborn” dressed up in a Guy Fawkes mask and cape in order to remain anonymous and delivered a suitcase full of cash to prison to pay Hogan’s fine.
The funds had been donated by thousands of people around the world who were sympathetic to Hogan’s fight.
“Carter”
A man named Carter (his other name has, as far as I know, been lost to history) refused to pay a $1 militia tax for conscientious reasons in .
For this, his town put him in jail and vowed to keep him there (at a cost to the town of $2.50 per week) until he paid up.
He was stubborn, and stayed there at least 21 months.
A newspaper article about his case says, “[f]riends offered to advance the money to Carter, but he stubbornly refused to accept the money and pay the tax.”
Zerah C. Whipple
When Zerah C. Whipple was imprisoned for refusing to pay a militia tax, an anonymous donor eventually paid the tax and costs to have him released.
At an unexpected moment an entire stranger called at the prison and desired to know the amount of the tax and costs, which he paid, saying he knew the worth of Z.C. Whipple, and that his family for generations back had never paid the military tax, and he wished to save the State from the disgrace of imprisoning a person guilty of no crime.
The money was paid and the door opened, and his friend took the receipt to his children and said, “Keep this as a reminiscence that in your father paid this bill to release a young man from prison, that he might enjoy the rights of conscience.”
Mary McLeod Cleeves
When women’s suffrage activist Mary McLeod Cleeves was threatened with imprisonment for refusing to pay a carriage license tax, the suffragist newspaper The Vote noted that “Mrs. Cleeves has been beseiged by friends asking to be allowed to pay her fine; but like a true Suffragette, she refused.”
Annuity Tax resisters
Quakers, also a nonconformist sect, were largely in sympathy with the Annuity Tax resisters of Edinburgh, Scotland, but an editorial in one Quaker periodical chided those resisters for being eager to pay up to get their colleagues out of jail, rather than to embrace martyrdom like a good Quaker would:
We are principally induced to advert to this matter, on account of the means by which the liberation of the prisoners was effected — that of a public subscription.
This, we consider to have been most objectionable.
… we see nothing to commend, but every thing to reprobate, in the conduct of Dissenters in this matter.
The movement may bespeak their sympathy for the sufferer, but we contend that it was both injudiciously expressed, and exceedingly ill-timed.
Had the public subscription been deferred till after the prisoners had been liberated, in what we should consider a legitimate manner, and its object of course been different — to testify at once the sympathy of the subscribers, and to compensate for the injury sustained by the prisoners — there would have been no objection to the manifestation.
Did it not occur to the Dissenters of Edinburgh, that it was not from want of pecuniary ability that either of the prisoners allowed himself to be immured in jail?
Or again, what was the difference between these individuals paying the tax themselves, and its being paid for them by public subscription?
If it was wrong in the one case, it must be equally wrong, and a violation of principle, in the other.
It has surprised us, that not one of the Dissenting Journals that we have met with has taken this view of the subject.
In their joyfulness at the liberation of the prisoners, they seem to have lost sight entirely of the sacrifice of principle at which it was obtained.
Lessons from Thoreau, Maurice McCrackin, and Juanita Nelson
You’ll note that in many of the cases I mentioned, the offered money was an unwelcome gift — the resisters were not going to jail for lack of funds, but for principle.
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.”
When the lawyers the court assigned to defend war tax resister Maurice McCrackin — who was refusing to cooperate with the court entirely, and who wanted no legal defense whatsoever — vowed to pursue an appeal of a verdict they thought was unjust, McCracken emphatically said that he was not interested in pursuing an appeal: “I said I wanted to file no appeal, nor did I want steps taken to keep the door open, so an appeal could be perfected later.
I do not recognize any appeal on my behalf… My position is not changed.
This is a moral, not a legal, struggle.”
Juanita Nelson tells a happier story: 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.
