Some historical and global examples of tax resistance →
United States →
Vietnam War, ~1965–75 →
Writers & Editors War Tax Protest, 1967 →
Gerald Walker
Truth be told, part of my harsh reaction to the Iraq Moratorium that I posted here on was probably from envy at how their call to vague and lukewarm action has attracted some 2,000 signers, support from dozens of organizations, and endorsements from various celebs, while the War Tax Boycott is still trying to build up a head of steam, without much in the way of organizational or big-name support.
There was a time, though, when influential people were eager to sign on to a war tax boycott.
On , the New York Times reported:
WRITERS PROTEST VIETNAM WAR TAX
133 Will Refuse to Pay if Surcharge Is Approved
By MORRIS KAPLAN
A number of writers and editors have joined in opposing tax payments to support the war in Vietnam by pledging to withhold payment of President Johnson’s proposed 10 per cent income tax surcharge if Congress approves it.
Many of them have also promised to deduct 23 per cent from their tax bills as an estimate of the percentage used to fight the war.
A statement in support of this dissent has been signed by 133 writers.
Each dissenter has sent $10 or more to the Writers and Editors War Tax Protest, a group headed by Gerald Waker of Manhattan. Mr. Walker, assistant articles editor of The New York Times Sunday Magazine, said the money would be used for expenses and to pay for a newspaper advertisement planned for .
The proposal for a 10 per cent surcharge on corporate and individual taxes is now before the House Ways and Means Committee and is expected to be reported out next month.
The President has said it would relieve a budget deficit of possibly $28-billion.
More Support Sought
Mr. Walker expressed hope that the protest would win the support of from 300 to 500 writers and editors.
Among those who have pledged support are Eric Bentley, drama critic who is Brander Matthew Professor of Dramatic Literature at Columbia University, and Ralph Ginzburg, the New York publisher who is still appealing a Federal Government pornography conviction.
Others include Fred J. Cook, author and magazine writer; Betty Friedan, author of “The Feminine Mystique”; Dwight Macdonald, New Yorker Magazine critic, and Merle Miller, Thomas Pynchon and Harvey Swados, novelists.
A letter accompanying the protest statement points out the possible consequences of willfully refusing to pay Federal income taxes.
Violators of the law could receive up to one year in prison and up to $10,000 in fines.
Others Not Prosecuted
Mr. Walker said, however, that of the 421 signers of a similar no-payment ad last year in a Washington newspaper, not one had been prosecuted and sentenced.
Of an estimated total of 1,500 additional protest nonpayers, he added, none has been prosecuted since the war in Vietnam began.
The Internal Revenue Service has chosen, so far, to collect unpaid taxes by placing a lien on the incomes of those who refuse to pay, or by attaching their bank accounts or other assets.
In addition, a 6 per cent interest penalty is charged each year on the unpaid tax balance.
The group’s appeal for support included a quotation from Henry David Thoreau’s “Civil Disobedience,” written in and protesting American involvement in the Mexican War.
The writer said, in part:
That’s a weird note to end the piece on.
The Thoreau quote is strangely ellipsized to make it sound like he thought that somehow the United States had been overrun and conquered by Mexico or something, or that civil disobedience was appropriate only when you’ve been invaded by a foreign army and subjected to military law.
Here’s the full quote, which makes its relevance (to the Vietnam War then, to the Iraq War now) more clear:
But enough nitpicking.
This appeal brought in 133 writers and editors. , the list had swelled to 448 (it would go even higher than the 500 that Gerald Walker originally hoped for), and included such names as Nelson Algren, James Baldwin, Noam Chomsky, Philip K. Dick, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Allen Ginsberg, Paul Goodman, Norman Mailer, Henry Miller, Tillie Olsen, Grace Paley, Robert Scheer, Susan Sontag, Terry Southern, Benjamin Spock, Gloria Steinem, William Styron, Hunter S. Thompson, Kurt Vonnegut, and Howard Zinn.
As far as I can tell, the IRS didn’t take legal action against anyone who signed on to this list (though it probably sent threatening letters or engaged in administrative sanctions like levies and liens).
Nixon won the presidential election in , and among his campaign promises had been to end Johnson’s 10% surtax and somehow salvage “peace with honor” in Vietnam.
A couple of years later, the surtax breathed its last.
It took a few more years to get U.S. troops out of Vietnam.
Millions of Americans are sitting up late these nights, agonizing over their financial records, fighting their way through a maze of federal regulations and puzzling over the inconsistencies of their own arithmetical prowess.
They’re involved in the nation’s annual orgy of self-revelation: preparation of personal income tax returns.
For many, hours of hard labor will be crowned by the distasteful task of getting out the bankbook, figuring out whether to refinance the car or postpone that midwinter vacation and then writing a check to Uncle Sam for the amount still owed.
But for a few, the culmination of the long agony of tax forms will be the pleasure of writing a little note to the tax collector, and sending that instead of a check.
The note will say simply that the author is not paying 10 per cent, or 23 per cent or 67 per cent, or all of his federal income tax as a protest against the Vietnam war.
In a few months, after the exchange of some nasty notes, the Internal Revenue Service will almost certainly get its money, with interest — from the offender’s bank account, by seizing his paychecks or perhaps by selling his car.
But even though the protester is clearly violating the law, there is almost no chance he will go to jail.
Meanwhile, the nontaxpayer will have made his point: that he disagrees with government policy on Vietnam and that he is not voluntarily financing the war.
Estimates of how many protesters are not paying their taxes vary widely.
A spokesman for the Internal Revenue Service in Washington said that in , only 583 persons who filed returns did not pay all or part of their taxes as a protest.
This was out of a national total of 73,000,000. But other estimates are higher.
Maris Cakars, the enthusiastic young Oceanside native who runs the New York-based Tax Resistance Project of the War Resisters League, said that he had on file 1,000 names of persons who said they refused to pay all or part of their federal income tax .
Predictably, the government says the number of protesters has leveled off.
The protesters say it is climbing.
A larger group has taken to refusing to pay its telephone tax — the 10 per cent federal excise tax added each month to each customer’s phone bill.
This tax was continued in largely to pay the costs of Vietnam.
According to a spokesman for American Telephone & Telegraph Co., about 5,600 telephone users nationwide refused to pay the tax on their bills in the third quarter of .
This has remained constant since late , he said.
However, Cakars said he believed the figure was closer to 10,000, while the IRS said there were 18,000 cases in .
But the IRS spokesman added that many of these were repeaters — one customer who refused to pay for 12 months would be counted as 12 in that figure.
The most famous offender is folk singer Joan Baez.
Since , she has been withholding roughly 60 per cent of her federal taxes, which she says is the portion of federal expenditures used to support past, present and future wars.
This is in the form of the present defense budget, veterans’ benefits and interest on the portion of the national debt paid for past wars.
The IRS has merely attached a lien on her bank account, and has recovered most of what she owes plus interest and penalties.
Other notables have also expressed interest in such protest.
In , when Congress was initially considering levying a 10 per cent surtax which most believed was to support the Vietnamese war, 448 writers and editors signed a newspaper advertisement stating that they would not pay the surtax or any other war-designated increase.
About a third also added that they would not pay the 23 per cent of the current taxes that they believed was financing the Vietnam war effort.
When action on the surtax was postponed several months — past the filing deadline — the movement fell apart and no one kept any records of how many did not pay.
Gerald Walker, an editor of The New York Times Magazine, who organized the protest, recently refused even to talk about the effort.
Willful failure to file a return or to pay taxes owed are both punishable by fines of up to $10,000 and jail terms up to a year.
But both the government and those organizing tax resistance say that only a handful of tax protesters have spent any time behind bars since the end of World War Ⅱ.
The longest period known was six months by a New London, Conn., man.
He served his time not for refusing to pay taxes, but for contempt of court, when he defied a court order to tell where he had his bank account.
Nobody is in jail for tax resistance at the present time, according to the IRS.
The revenue service has little interest in locking up tax delinquents, a spokesman said recently.
“In most cases, we have gotten the money,” he said.
“All we want to do is to get the money that’s coming to us.
After all, is IRS going to ask the Justice Department to go to a federal grand jury and get a jury trial to put a man in jail for a dollar, when all we have to do is go to his bank account?
These people are making a protest, but most of them are doing it openly, so there’s no fraud or evasion.
This way, they apparently feel they’ve satisfied their protest feelings, and we end up getting the money anyway — sometimes with added penalties.”
Since Vietnam, he said, the most drastic step the IRS has taken was to seize a California man’s car, sell it and deduct the owed taxes.
“He ended up buying his car back anyway,” the spokesman said.
The government, the protesters claim, is also anxious to avoid a confrontation that would produce a test case, a martyr and added publicity.
“We’re anxious for a confrontation,” said Cakars.
“It would help to add one more serious headache for the government while the war goes on.”
One New York lawyer, who has advised protesters on tax evasion and refusal, doubts that the government would dare prosecute protesters on a large scale.
“Many people would be delighted to be put in jail for a cause like this who would not like to be put in jail for passing a red light,” he said.
“But the government doesn’t want to raise the issue that someone is being put in jail for not paying $14. It’s the same reason they are so slow to prosecute for burning a draft card.”
The lawyer added that any massive prosecution would tend to win sympathy for the protesters from many persons who are now neutral or apathetic.
“If they become too repressive, it sounds too much like 1984,” the lawyer said.
So far, the protest movement has been limited mainly to longtime pacifists and professionals.
Pacifists have been protesting the use of tax money for armaments for years.
The movement was popularized after World War Ⅱ by the late A.J. Muste, clergyman-philosopher, who refused to pay his taxes .
Cakars’ War Resisters League, which is one of the organizations promoting tax resistance to its mailing list of 10,000, has been in business advocating peace policies since World War Ⅰ.
Since the Vietnam war most of those who have joined the protest are professionals and intellectuals.
Many are clustered around college towns, such as Cambridge, Mass., and Berkeley Calif. Professionals are particularly attracted, said Cakars, because they are often self-employed and therefore not subject to employers’ withholding their taxes.
One organizer who has hopes of expanding the protest to the middle class is Ted Webster, a self-employed publisher in Roxbury, Mass. Webster started the Roxbury War Tax Scholarship Fund, into which tax protesters have put $8,000. The money is kept in a savings account, and only Webster keeps records of how much belongs to each protester, thereby preventing the government from seizing the individual’s money.
Interest goes to a scholarship for a poor Negro student.
Webster says he is not a pacifist but merely objects to his tax moneys being spent on the “boon-doggle and pork-barrel military-industrial complex.”
He counts on the increasing discontent of the great bulk of U.S. taxpayers to add fuel to the protest, as more and more question the need for the present level of military spending.
“I’m trying to convey to taxpayers generally that a good deal of their money is generally being wasted,” Webster said.
“Americans don’t mind killing people, as long as it doesn’t cost us anything.
But now it’s coming home to the middle class, who are being hit hard with taxes and getting a bit uptight about it.”
Reasons for tax resistance vary, but most of those interviewed said they were too old to refuse to be drafted, or felt they had been denied a pro-peace choice among the presidential candidates, or felt that, in accordance with the results of the Nuremberg was crimes trials, they did not want to contribute voluntarily to a government policy which they feel is immoral.
E. Russell Stabler, a special associate professor of mathematics at Hofstra University who has not paid the balance due on his income tax , said: “I feel we are bound by a higher law.
We cannot abide by the U.S. income tax law and at the same time avoid responsibility for criminal acts committed in our name and by conscription of our own funds.”
He said that he willingly told the IRS where his bank account was, and that the money, plus penalties, had been seized each year.
But at least his conscience is absolved.
“It’s just a different view of patriotism from the standard one,” he said with a chuckle.
“We used to offer to pay the money we owed into a special fund earmarked for constructive, peaceful purposes, but the government wasn’t interested.”
Did Stabler, who is 62, ever fear being jailed?
“I suppose anybody who does this runs a risk of going to jail eventually, but the government has been fairly generous about it,” he said.
Like most college faculty members, Stabler has not been threatened by his employer for his unorthodox views.
There is talk among war protesters that others have had their jobs threatened or even lost them, for nonpayment of taxes.
But this is difficult to substantiate because employer disapproval of an unorthodox employe can be subtle and may also be attributable to other “quirks” in the employe.
Employers do, however, cooperate with the IRS by making protesters’ paychecks available for seizure — in fact they are required to by federal law.
One protester who has so far avoided all government attempts to collect his back taxes is Eric Weinberger, who is a paid worker for the Fifth Avenue Peace Parade Committee.
His employer has refused to turn over his paychecks to the IRS although Weinberger has not paid anything for five years.
He said he does not own a car or a house and has so little money that he does not even have a bank account that can be seized.
He has been threatened with prosecution, he said, but no further action has been taken.
He added with a note of resignation, “I suppose they’ll find some way to get it eventually.
But they’ll have to take it.
I’m a pacifist and I don’t intend to give them my money for the purpose of war.”
I’m a little surprised I hadn’t come across the name Maris Cakars before in my research.
He was active with the War Resisters League and with the Committee for Non-Violent Action during the Vietnam War period, and both of those organizations were close to the war tax resistance movement of the time.
Of the other tax resisters mentioned in the article whose names I hadn’t come across before — E[dward?].
Russell Stabler, Gerald Walker, Ted Webster, and Eric Weinberger — I wasn’t able to find out much more.
You can find some of Stabler’s work in mathematics on-line.
Walker is mentioned in a couple of articles about the Writers & Editors war tax protest, and besides his work for The New York Times Magazine is also known as the author of the novel Cruising which was adapted into the Al Pacino movie of the same name.
Ted Webster remains a mystery to me.
I found a photo of an Eric Weinberger from serving up food to the homeless in front of the Bush/Quayle campaign headquarters in Boston in a “Food Not Bombs” action — perhaps the same Eric Weinberger, perhaps not.
The public relations people have been calling around trying to get publicity for the latest venture of the Narodniki of the Vietnam protesters.
Someone finally prevailed on someone to publish the story, and it appeared in the New York Times under the headline “Writers Protest — Vietnam War Tax, 133 Will Refuse to Pay if — Surcharge is Approved.” A number of writers, the story explains (the usual ones) have announced bravely that if Congress passes the surtax they will simply refuse to pay it.
And then — on down towards the end of the story: “A letter accompanying the protest statement points out the possible consequences of willfully refusing to pay Federal income taxes.
Violators of the law could receive up to one year in prison an up to $10,000 in fines.”
But hold on: “Mr. (Gerald) Walker (organizer of the protest) said, however, that of the 421 signers of a similar no-payment ad last year in a Washington newspaper, not one had been prosecuted and sentenced.
Of an estimated total of 1,500 additional protest non-payers, he added, none had been prosecuted since the war in Vietnam began.
The Internal Revenue Service has chosen, so far, to collect unpaid taxes by placing a lien on the incomes of those who refuse to pay, or by attaching their bank accounts, or other assets.
In addition, a 6 per cent interest penalty is charged each year on the unpaid tax balance.”
Thus the protesters stand to lose 6 per cent on a savings deposit, so that leaves 1 per cent.
One per cent of your old tax, for an average writer, means say a buck seventy-five, which isn’t bad, is it, for making the hero page of the New York Times?
Writers and Editors War Tax Protest
Attention: Gerald Walker
145 West 86th Street
Apt. 7D
New York, N.Y. 10024
Fellow Writers and Editors:
Join us in signing the enclosed statement proclaiming our refusal to let our
tax dollars support the war in Vietnam. Tell us in writing that we may list
your name with ours in ads and statements. Send us your check for $10.00 or
more (payable to Writers and Editors War Tax Protest) to pay for advertising
and other expenses. Ask other writers and editors to join. Mail copies of
this letter and the enclosed statement, “We Won’t Pay” (which will comprise
the substance of ads we plan to run), to your own list of colleagues. Extra
copies available at $1.00 per hundred, plus 25¢ for mailing.
How we will go about tax refusal
Should President Johnson’s surcharge be adopted by Congress, we will
refuse payment. We will not add this extra war tax to our current tax
when preparing our return and we will enclose a letter with our return
explaining why.
Many of us will also deduct from our tax the 23% which represents the
amount currently being spent on Vietnam.
Possible consequences
It is a violation (up to one year in prison and/or up to $10,000 in fines) of
Sec. 7203 of the Internal
Revenue Code willfully to refuse to pay federal income taxes. However, of the
421 signers of a similar no-payment ad in ,
not one has been prosecuted and sentenced; of the estimated 1500 additional
protest non-payers, none has been prosecuted since the war began. The
IRS, so
far, has chosen to exercise the power to collect unpaid tax money by placing
a lien on refusers’ income or attaching their bank accounts or other assets,
when these can be traced. In addition, a penalty of 6% interest is charged
annually on the unpaid tax balance, a rate estimated to be less than the
collection expense.
Vietnam drags on. Casualties rise, $28 billion are wasted yearly,
U.S. prestige and
moral fabric rot away. No solution, political or military, is in view. The
President’s prescription is more of the same — 45,000 new men (for a total of
525,000) and a proposed 10% income tax increase specifically for this
undeclared, unconstitutional, unprofitable, and unjust war.
“The needs of this country’s riot-shaken cities are being neglected to pay
the war bill,” The New York Times has
editorialized. It is time for escalation by those who want peace in
order to focus on our critical domestic dilemma. Peace marches have not
worked; nor have pickets, protest ads, teach-ins, or pleas to the President’s
conscience by public figures here and abroad. We are not consoled by reports
of atrocities committed by the other side; we want to stop those committed by
our side. So we must now go beyond mere expressions of dissent to strong,
affirmative, and dramatic action by responsible citizens.
We, the undersigned writers and editors for publications and publishing
houses large and small, have not had to give our lives in Vietnam — that has
fallen on younger Americans. But we have lent our passive support in the form
of our tax dollars. From now on, we are willing to lay our middle-class lives
on the line in pledging:
That none of us voluntarily will pay the proposed 10% income tax
surcharge, or any war-designated tax increase.
That many of us will also refuse to pay that part of our current income
tax (23%) being used to finance the war.
Many of us, too, will give an equivalent sum to humanitarian organizations.
Even so, this was not an easy decision to make. We have been law-abiding,
tax-paying citizens all our lives, and we are now subjecting ourselves to
possible legal penalties of up to one year in prison and/or up to $10,000 in
fines for willful non-payment of taxes. But we believe our taxes should not
be used to support a war that violates not only our own Constitution but the
Charter of the United Nations.
By this act, we aim to awaken the Administration to the fact that a
significant number of responsible citizens are so fundamentally opposed to
this war that they are willing to go to this extreme. And we wish to show
other Vietnam-haunted Americans that there is a simple, swift, effective way
to vote no-confidence in the Administration’s policy. It can be done
individually or in groups. It cannot wait until the 1968 presidential
election. Your ballot is your next tax return, and other ads such as this
placed in every newspaper in the land.
There are not enough prisons to hold the millions in this country who,
according to Gallup and other recent polls, strongly oppose this ugly war.
Time now to end our tacit acceptance of what is being done in Vietnam in our
name.
Much of the text of the above declaration didn’t make it in to the final
advertisement (I’m guessing it was cut down to make room for the many names
of signers, but maybe there was more to it than that). Horowitz himself did
not make the list.
I am enclosing a copy of the statement signed, so far, by 220 writers and
editors who pledge to refuse payment of the proposed 10 per cent income tax
surcharge or any tax increase earmarked for the Vietnam War. At this writing,
seven New York Times writers and editors have signed. We plan to run a
full-page advertisement in the Times in
, giving the quote from
Thoreau, the pledge and the list of names. The placing of the ad will
coincide with Congressional debate on the tax surcharge. By that time we hope
to have 500 persons pledged to refuse payment.
If you would be interested in signing the statement, please fill in the blank
and mail it in as soon as possible. And please tell your writer and editor
friends about it and urge them to do the same. As Thoreau said, “If a
thousand men were not to pay their tax bills this year, that would not be a
violent and bloody measure, as it would be to pay them, and enable the State
to commit violence and shed innocent blood.” During his incarceration for
refusal to pay his war tax, Thoreau was paid a visit by Emerson, who asked,
“What are you doing in here?” To which Thoreau replied, “What are you
doing out there?”
I feel strongly that the collective involvement of writers and editors in the
nation’s politics should not stop with the War Tax Protest. Many of our
colleagues share this view, and are preparing this fall to organize local
chapters of what can become a national writers and journalists association.
An organized and articulate “intelligentsia” can be a political force in
America as it is in France. And it must become a political force if
the increasingly oppressive policies of the present United States government — in Vietnam, in Southern Africa, in Latin America, and here at home — are to
be permanently reversed. Not to organize, not to amplify our voices so that
an ill-informed America may hear alternatives, is to accede, in effect, to
the policies of the present government. For more information, please write me
immediately at 377 Green Street, San Francisco, California 94133.
Included with this letter is a somewhat different version of the proposed ad:
— Henry David Thoreau, Civil Disobedience,
commenting upon American involvement in the Mexican War.
We the undersigned writers and editors, believing that American involvement
in Vietnam is morally wrong, pledge:
None of us voluntarily will pay the proposed 10% income tax surcharge or
any war-designated tax increase.
Many of us will not pay that 23% of our current income tax which is
being used to finance the war in Vietnam.
Following this was a sign-up sheet, asking signers to agree with the statement
“I believe American involvement in the war in Vietnam is morally wrong,” and giving three further options:
“As a writer/editor, I wish to add my name to the Writers and Editors War Tax Protest. I dissociate myself from my government’s actions in Vietnam and I am willing to use my next tax return to vote no-confidence in the present Administration. I enclose a check (payable to Writers and Editors War Tax Protest) for $10.00 or more to help pay for running this statement as a newspaper advertisement and for other expenses.”
“I am in sympathy with what you are doing. Enclosed is my check for $____.”
“I would like more information. Please send me your fact-sheet on tax refusal.”
A number of additional signers had been added to the list by this time:
(Spock was listed out-of-order and in a different typeface in the original.)
Kennett Love
In , the Washington Monthly carried a story about war tax resisters written by Kennett Love, himself a signer of the “Writers and Editors War Tax Protest” pledge.
“We believe that the right of conscientious objection to war belongs to all the people, not just to those of draft age,” says a pamphlet now being sent out across the country from a littered, poster-bright office on New York’s Lower East Side.
It carries a radical call to the citizenry to come out against the war in Vietnam by refusing to pay taxes that finance the war.
Such tax resistance is now gathering adherents outside traditional pacifist circles.
Although it is still far from a major headache to the government, Internal Revenue Service men are being assigned to locate bank accounts of resisters and to seize the sums due — plus six per cent interest.
Out of the frustration of the anti-Vietnam-war segment of the population, which is growing rapidly according to the polls; out of dashed hopes raised by peace promises and peace gestures from the Nixon and Johnson Administrations alike; and out of a feeling that orthodox democratic forms of protest — elections and demonstrations — have been ignored, an increasing number of otherwise law-abiding people are following their consciences into what Gandhi called the last stage of civil disobedience by openly refusing to pay part or all of their federal taxes.
The chief targets of the tax-resistance movement are the income tax, particularly the 10 per cent war surtax imposed last year, and the 10 per cent federal excise tax on telephone service.
Other federal taxes have been rejected either as too complicated to resist, such as the liquor tax, which is collected at the wholesale level before individual purchase, or as earmarked for such non-war uses as highway construction.
One pacifist, imprisoned for draft refusal and therefore lacking income to refuse taxes on, gave up smoking because the cigarette tax brings the government more revenue than any other single consumer-commodity tax.
The telephone tax is the most popular one to resist, partly because it was the first to be specifically linked to the war in Vietnam and partly because the American Telephone and Telegraph Company has proven courteous in its handling of tax resisters.
The telephone tax was due to be reduced to three per cent in .
In approving the White House request for its extension of the 10 per cent level, Chairman Wilbur Mills (D-Ark.) of the House Ways and Means Committee said: “It is clear that the Vietnam and only the Vietnam operation makes this bill necessary.”
Resistance to the telephone tax began soon afterward.
Karl Meyer of Chicago, a former Congressman’s son and a free-lance writer immersed in pacifist causes, conceived the idea and proposed it to Maris Cakars of the War Resisters League in New York.
Meyer drafted a pamphlet, “Hang Up On War!,” which has become a staple among the literature distributed by the War Resisters League through the mails and at peace booths.
It explains the link between the telephone tax and the war, summarizes moral and legal objections to the war, and provides practical advice for resisters of the tax, including a candid assessment of the possible risks.
Of the risks, it points out that under Section 7203 of the Internal Revenue Code, which covers both the telephone and the income tax, one who “willfully fails to pay” could be imprisoned for up to one year and fined up to $10,000. It adds that the experiences of tax resisters over the past several years show that the government is not willing to press criminal charges but, instead, acts to collect the taxes (with interest) directly, when and where it can.
AT&T records indicate that telephone tax resisters were relatively unmoved by President Johnson’s famous “abdication” speech on , but that about a quarter of them resumed payment of their telephone taxes at in the belief that President-elect Nixon would end the war.
A table of the telephone company statistics follows, giving the number of telephone tax refusers at the end of each quarter :
Quarter
No. of resisters to telephone tax
1,800
2,300
2,600
3,400
3,400
4,700
5,300
4,700
4,000
4,000
The figure for is not available yet, but the revived intensity of the anti-war movement, manifested in the national student moratorium on and the big demonstrations on , presage an increase.
Measured against the telephone company’s 43,459,000 residence customers, the percentage of tax resisters is minuscule.
But in view of the seriousness of the act of tax resistance, the number of resisters is a source of satisfaction and encouragement to the leaders of the movement.
A spokeswoman for the telephone company told me its standing orders are to continue service to tax resisters so long as its own charges are paid.
The company notifies the IRS of tax non-payments so it can do its own collecting.
If a tax resister informs the local business office of the telephone company that he is deliberately omitting the tax from his payment, the office will not carry the tax charges forward to his next bill.
“It would seem logical to assume that we don’t like to be a collecting agency,” she said, “but we do what we’re obliged to do.”
She said that telephone tax resisters are located mainly in college communities.
Income tax resisters, although fewer than telephone tax resisters, appear to be a more stubborn breed, unmoved by political gestures and prepared to hold out until the war actually ends.
An IRS spokesman in Washington gave me a statistical summary of the growth of such tax resistance.
So far as he knew, it first became a public issue when Joan Baez, the singer, refused in to pay 60 per cent of her income tax in an act to dissociate herself from what she called the immoral, impractical, and stupid war in Vietnam.
She refused the same proportion in and wrote the IRS: “This country has gone mad.
But I will not go mad with it.
I will not pay for organized murder.
I will not pay for the war in Vietnam.”
Joan Baez and a scattered handful of old-line pacifists, a few of whom had been refusing war taxes , were not worth keeping statistics on, so far as the IRS was concerned.
Then, in , a committee under the chairmanship of the Reverend A.J. Muste circulated a tax-refusal pledge among persons on the mailing lists of the Committee for Non-Violent Action and the War Resisters League.
They obtained 370 signatures for an advertisement in The Washington Post that stated: “We believe that the ordinary channels of protest have been exhausted…” Joan Baez headed the list of signers.
According to an IRS analysis, about one-quarter of the signers had no taxable income, about one-half cooperated with the IRS to the extent of telling the agent who called on them where their money could be seized, and about one-quarter put the IRS to the trouble of ferreting out their bank accounts.
The number of actual resisters came to about 275.
the IRS began keeping a count of tax protesters.
The number rose to 375. In there were 533 taxpayers who refused part or all of their income taxes and wrote the IRS that they were doing so in protest against the Vietnam war.
there were 848 who set themselves against the law on grounds of conscientious objection to the war.
The IRS spokesman told me that roughly three-quarters of the income-tax protesters live on the east and west coasts and that the same proportion held for persons refusing to pay the telephone tax.
IRS
spokesmen emphasize that the number of refusers is only a tiny fraction of the total number of taxpayers.
There were some 71 million returns filed in , about 73 million in , and 75 million in .
But again, tax-resistance leaders find significance in the fact that the very idea of tax refusal was unthinkable to nearly all of the resisters until their consciences impelled them to it.
Furthermore, although the numbers are small, the rate of increase of tax resisters is far greater than the annual increase in tax returns.
Fear of prosecution and jail is a deterrent to potential tax refusers.
Many people fail to recognize the distinction between clandestine tax evasion and open tax refusal.
The IRS makes the distinction, however, and has shown no inclination to prosecute persons refusing taxes because of the Vietnam war.
An IRS spokesman said earlier this year: “Is IRS going to ask the Justice Department to go to a federal grand jury and get a jury trial to put a man in jail for a dollar, when all we have to do is go to his bank account?”
Tax-resistance leaders believe also that the government wishes to avoid the publicity attendant on a prosecution, largely because a test case might produce a martyr and create sympathy for the movement.
The few prosecutions in recent years have been for refusal to file returns or disclose information rather than for refusal to pay.
War tax refusal in this country is older than the United States itself.
It began in when Mennonites and Quakers refused to pay taxes for the French and Indian wars.
They refused again during the American Revolution and the Civil War.
The most famous early instance was that of Henry David Thoreau, who spent a night in jail in for refusing taxes in protest against our invasion of Mexico.
He explained in his essay on civil disobedience that he could not “without disgrace be associated with it” and added: “If a thousand men were not to pay their tax bills this year, that would not be a bloody and violent measure, as it would to pay them, and enable the State to commit violence and shed innocent blood.”
Gandhi, who was deeply influenced by Thoreau, wrote in that “civil non-payment of taxes is indeed the last stage in non-cooperation.
…I know that the withholding of payment of taxes is one of the quickest methods of overthrowing a government.”
He went on to say: “I am equally sure that we have not yet evolved that degree of strength and discipline which are necessary… Are the Indian peasantry prepared to remain absolutely non-violent, and see their cattle taken away from them to die of hunger and thirst?
…I would urge the greatest caution before embarking upon the dangerous adventure.”
But Lord Mountbatten said with relief after India became independent: “If they had started to refuse to pay their taxes, I don’t know what we could have done.”
The idea of modern, organized tax resistance in this country against armaments and war seems to have begun with the Peacemaker Movement, which was formed by 250 pacifists who met in Chicago early in .
In , the Peacemaker Movement published the first edition of a mimeographed Handbook on Non-Payment of War Taxes, which contains practical advice and case histories.
The handbook has now run to three editions and nearly 10,000 copies.
It points out that since the bulk of the federal budget (estimates range from 66 to 80 per cent) goes to pay for past wars, finance the Vietnam war, and prepare for future wars, “it is apparent that the major business of the federal government is war… it is useless to act as if the major business of government is civil functions or peaceful pursuits.”
In , a little more than a year after A.J. Muste’s committee published its tax protest advertisement with 370 signers, Gerald Walker of The New York Times Magazine began to organize a Writers and Editors War Tax Protest, in which all the signatories pledged themselves flatly to refuse the then-proposed 10 per cent war surtax and possibly the 23 per cent of their income taxes allocated to the war effort as well.
As was the case with the Reverend Muste’s advertisement, most daily newspapers that Walker approached refused to sell space to him.
The New York Times was one that refused and so, this time, was The Washington Post.
The New York Post printed Walker’s advertisement in , as did The New York Review of Books and Ramparts.
In all, 528 writers and editors signed the pledge.
Walker told me recently that about half of them, including himself, failed to carry out the tax-refusal pledge.
“Johnson’s ‘abdication’ two weeks before the tax deadline convinced me that we had won,” he said.
I was myself among the other half of the signers who did refuse part of their taxes — 23 per cent in my case, the 10 per cent surtax not having gone into effect.
Since my own hesitant involvement in war tax resistance seems typical among the non-pacifists now joining the movement, I will summarize it here as the case history I know best.
With my part payment of my income tax, I wrote the IRS as follows:
Enclosed please find my check for $1,862.81, which is 77 per cent of the tax required.
The 23 per cent unpaid is a protest against the government’s use of that proportion of its revenue for the war in Vietnam.
My conscience revolts against the gross immorality of the war… There are also questions of law.
The war violates the supreme law of our land, notably the Constitution (Art. Ⅰ, Sec. 8, clause 11), the United Nations Charter (Art. 51), and the Southeast Asia Treaty (Art. Ⅳ)… Responsible jurists and philosophers soberly accuse our government of crimes against international codes on human rights and the conduct of wars and the specific statutes created ex post facto to punish the Nazis…
The prodigal waste of our national energy and treasure in destroying the land and people of Vietnam is so weakening this nation that other powers may bring us to judgment as we once brought the Nazis to account at Nuremburg… It will then be no defense to plead, like the “good Germans,” that we had to obey our government and cannot be held responsible for what it did.
By paying taxes which I know my government is using to kill a small nation I commit a greater and more violent breach of laws than I do by not paying…
I was a Navy pilot in World War Ⅱ.
I would not serve in this war.
If I could prevent my tax dollars from serving, I would do so.
Unfortunately, I have not yet learned of a practical way to keep the government altogether from extracting financial support from me for the war.
In the meantime, I balk at 23 per cent in token of my dissociation from the cruel injustice and bloodshed to poor and distant strangers being done under my flag, in my name, with my money.
The IRS reply did not come until after I had refused a similar amount of taxes .
It was a form postcard saying: “Dear Taxpayer: Thank you for your letter.
We are looking into the matter you brought up and should have the answer to you shortly… Thank you for your cooperation.”
The answer, inevitably, was a series of printed forms, progressing from a “notice of tax due” to a “Final Notice Before Seizure.”
The IRS had already seized telephone taxes, which I stopped paying in , from three bank accounts, patiently tracking down the bank to which I transferred my account after each seizure.
The IRS obtained the unpaid part of my tax, plus six per cent interest, in .
At this writing I am awaiting implementation of the Final Notice Before Seizure of the refused portion of my taxes.
Banks are required by law to surrender private assets, including the contents of safe deposit boxes, to the IRS upon demand.
Most banks surrender the levied amount immediately and the depositor is informed afterward.
This whole business of deliberately defying and harassing the government, even in a moral protest, is a heavy and anxious experience.
When I first considered it in I was unaware that some hundreds of other people were already doing it.
I was afraid of going to jail, which, among other things, would have prevented my fulfilling a contract to complete a book.
I began refusing the telephone tax after obtaining the pamphlet “Hang Up On War!” from a pacifist in Princeton in .
The Writers and Editors War Tax Protest, which came to my attention , gave me a sufficient sense of safety in numbers to begin income-tax resistance.
I am still troubled over possible consequences, particularly after the conspiracy convictions in the Dr. Spock trial, and I find it innately distasteful to resist paying my share of the general tax burden.
But my revulsion against the war in Vietnam prevails over anxiety and civic reservations.
And the Nixon Administration seems as unwilling or as unable as the Johnson Administration to make a significant and credible effort to end the war.
In the country voted for Johnson and peace and got an escalation of the war.
In , between Nixon and Humphrey, there was no real opportunity to vote for peace.
Demonstrations have proven equally futile as a means of affecting war policy, so much so that the President declares that he will not be swayed by them.
Under these circumstances, tax resistance, distasteful as it is, seems to more and more people to offer the most effective channel of protest.
I participated in the formation of War Tax Resistance, which is working to transform tax protests from essentially individual acts into an integrated political factor.
The leading figure in the organization is Bradford Lyttle, a slim, earnest, no-nonsense pacifist who led a peace march across the United States and Europe to Moscow, urging unilateral disarmament on governments along the way and exhorting citizens toward non-cooperation with military service and war production.
Its “Call to War Tax Resistance,” claiming the right of conscientious objection for taxpayers as well as draft-age men, says:
The first goal… 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 non-cooperation with its war-making policies.
In a separate but related action, the poet Allen Ginsberg and I have obtained the backing of the National Emergency Civil Liberties Committee for a suit against the government to recover money that has been seized from us in enforcement of tax claims and also to enjoin further seizures.
The main ground of our action, as it is now being prepared, is based on the historical equivalency between taxes and service (which is a kind of tax) and the claim that the right of conscientious objection is as inherent to taxpayers as it is to men liable for military service.
Conscientious objectors cannot avoid service but they can earmark their service to the exclusion of warlike activity.
In the same way, we claim, taxpayers should pay their full share but they should be able to earmark their taxes to the exclusion of war-like applications.
In a time when weaponry has achieved the capacity to wipe out civilization, we believe, the people should be accorded a direct voice in deciding whether they shall make war.
Since World War Ⅱ the decision has moved ever more into the hands of the executive despite the Constitutional stipulation that it is Congress which should declare war.
Meanwhile, until we are legally able to earmark our taxes for non-warlike applications, we feel conscience-bound to resist paying at least a part of them.
While doing some book research today I stumbled on a bunch of documents
concerning the “Writers and Editors War Tax Protest” tax resistance pledge of
. I found the documents at
The Harold Weisberg Archive:
A three-page letter from David Welsh on
Ramparts letterhead dated
“enclosing a copy of
the statement signed, so far, by 220 writers and editors…” and saying
that they hoped to run the ad in the New York
Times (the Times would turn them down).
The letter asks Weisberg to sign on, and includes a couple of Thoreau
quotes. It also says that Welsh sees this as a first step towards
organizing the American “intelligentsia” to be an organized and articulate
political force. The final page lists the signers to that point. Also
included is Weisberg’s response in which he complements the Thoreau
quote, notes that he signed the pledge and sent it in with a donation,
and then goes on for four paragraphs about Kennedy assassination
conspiracy research, which was his specialty.
An undated letter from the Protest to “Fellow Signers” noting that “We
now have over 350 names” and “hope to achieve, or surpass, 500 by
” so they can put
the ad in the Times
“.” The letter notes that the anticipated 10% Vietnam War
tax surcharge has run into snags in Congress, but still expects a
modified version to pass. It also solicits funds, noting that they’re
only about half way to the budget they need to place a full-page
Times ad.
A second page includes the text of a Thoreau quote and of the tax
resistance pledge.
A third page includes a “coupon” that signers can fill out to register
their pledge with the Protest office, and begins the partial list of
signers. The next two pages continue the list, and then the following
page includes “Additional Signers” (including Weisberg).
The last two pages are a “Fact Sheet” explaining the reasoning behind the
protest, the process that resisters can go through to make their
resistance effective, a summary of the possible legal consequences, the
possibility of filing a legal challenge, and the Protest’s willingness to
reach out to other groups interested in taking a similar stand.
Only the first page is interesting. It’s a hand-drawn invitation to a
“Deficit Party” fundraiser “to help pay for our newspaper ad” to be held
on “at Betty Friedan’s
apartment [at] The Dakota”: “Eric Bentley, Betty Friedan, Paul Goodman,
James Leo Herlihy, Larry Josephson, Dwight Macdonald, Gloria Steinem,
[&] Gerald Walker invite you to join them, and all the other signers
of the Writers and Editors War Tax Protest…”
The first page is the last of a three-page list of pledge signers (the
first two pages are missing); the second page is a list of “Additional
Signers” with marginal notes indicating that the number had risen to 309,
and then to 324.
A letter from Lawrence M. Bensky & Gerald Walker of the Protest
to “Fellow Signers” dated . It notes that Congress did not institute the expected 10%
income tax surcharge by tax filing season, and so if people want to
resist, they’ll have to choose the other option, which was to refuse to
pay some portion of their ordinary income tax: “we urge you to do so.
Obviously, the effectiveness of our action hinges on the number of
participants.” It notes that 50 more people have signed the pledge since
the ads appeared “in
Ramparts, The New York
Review of Books of ,
and The New York Post of ”
which brings the total signers up to that desired 500 threshold.
Hundreds of people have written us to request tax-refusal information;
many of these were non-writers and non-editors who were sufficiently
impressed to follow our lead, and these information requests continue to
come in without any sign of tapering off.
The letter notes that contributions have been coming in as well, but
proposes not to spend any more money on advertising, but to keep the funds
in reserve in case the government retaliates against any signer, so as
“to focus publicity on such cases; and where a case offers the
opportunity to press a legal test of the government’s right to ‘draft’
our money for Vietnam, we will contribute to the costs of legal defense.”
The letter then recommends that people look into the newly formed “Tax
Resistance Project of the War Resisters League.”
The next page lists some sympathetic organizations, discusses the
possible government retaliation actions against signers, and includes a
coupon resisters could send to the War Resisters League if they want to
be included in their coordinated tax resistance action.
The next page gives “some facts about tax refusal and its consequences”
including a how-to guide giving several options for how to resist.
The final page announces a protest to be held at the
IRS
headquarters in Washington on :
Join us in an act of collective tax resistance. Bring your completed
tax return, form 1040, or a statement explaining why you’re not filing,
and together we will return forms and statements accompanied by either
no money or an insufficient amount of money. The
action at
IRS
will be preceded by a public meeting nearby.
Dr. Arthur Waskow of the
Institute for Policy Studies and Dave Dellinger, Chairman of the
National Mobilization Committee, will be among the speakers.
We act because for many verbal opposition to the war in Vietnam is no
longer enough. Resistance has become necessary. Our consciences dictate
it. The young men resisting the draft have shown a way and we who are
not subject to the draft must develop creative parallels. Tax
resistance is such a parallel act because it confronts the
administration directly and challenges it at a vital point. It
liberates the tax resister by showing him that he does have choices.
A Washington Post clipping dated
— “Marchers Protest War
Taxes” concerning a protest of about 40 people at the
IRS
Building. Protesters included Barbara Deming, Dave Dellinger, William C.
Davidon, Arthur Waskow. The article includes a photo of Waskow and of
protesters marching with “Don’t Pay War Taxes” signs, but the copy
quality is low.
A letter dated from Eric
Bentley, John Leonard, Peter Spackman, Gloria Steinem, and Gerald Walker
to “Fellow Signers” about “how best to wind up the group’s affairs.” They
plan to donate the group’s remaining funds to the Civil Liberties Legal
Defense Fund, which has made a reciprocal agreement to give legal
assistance to any Protest signers who run into trouble in the coming
year. “The Writers and Editors War Tax Protest was always a temporary
organization, and its limited goals have now been achieved. We remain
pledged as individuals, however, to the moral and financial support of
any of our number who is prosecuted or harassed because of non-payment or
simple membership.”
WEWTP certainly added its bit to the anti-war clamor which produced the current atmosphere and the many swift changes that have taken place in it. We ended up with 528 signers. And if there were that many strongly anti-war people from one small area of American Life, surely the political computers in Washington were capable of extrapolating that figure to the population as a whole. So [President] Johnson got the message. Thanks for lending your voice and your name to ours.
The “current atmosphere” of changes since the start of the Protest
project included the abandonment of the 10% income tax surcharge plan,
the Tet Offensive, the resignation of Secretary of Defense McNamara,
Johnson’s decision not to run for another term, and the opening of peace
negotiations.
A press release from the Protest dated
. At this time, the Protest
had attracted 437 signers, and “at least one-third” of these had pledged
not only to refuse to pay any war surcharge, but also “not to pay the 23
per cent of their current income tax which is being used to finance the
war in Vietnam.”
The protest was announced today at a press conference in New York’s
Algonquin Hotel, traditionally a gathering place for New York’s
literary world. Three writers and three editors spoke for the group:
Eric Bentley, drama critic, professor of Columbia, and author of
several books on the theater; James Leo Herlihy, well-known novelist
and short story writer; and Sally Belfrage, author of “Freedom Summer.”
Publishers included Richard Grossman of Grossman Publishers; Aaron
Asher of Viking Press; and Arthur A. Cohen of Holt, Rinehart &
Winston.
One of the group’s organizers announced that today’s advertisement had
been rejected for publication by seven major newspapers before being
printed by the New York Post. The New York Times, where ten of the
advertisement’s signers are employed, twice rejected it, the second
time after the advertisement had been changed to meet their earlier
objection. Other newspapers which refused to accept the prepaid
full-page advertisement were The Boston Globe, the Washington Post, the
St. Louis Post-Dispatch,
the Christian Science Monitor, the National Observer, and the Chicago
Tribune. A spokesman for the Writers and Editors War Tax Protest
expressed regret that the nation’s press, “which is so quick to condemn
violent demonstrations, actually encourages them by frustrating
conscientious expression of dissent from our actions in Vietnam.”
A newspaper clipping dated
that, in the form of an article about the ad, essentially
reproduces it, including the complete list of signers. It is unclear what
newspaper the clipping is taken from.
“Writers Vow Tax Revolt Over War” — a news clipping from the
Washington Post. It gives the number of
signers as 448, and explains that the Post
refused to print the ad “on the grounds that it was an implicit
exhortation to violate the law.”
A letter from Lawrence M. Bensky & Gerald Walker to “Fellow Signers”
dated . It gives the
number of signers as 450. “Two months have been spent dickering with the
NY Times (where 11
of the signers work), which has just refused an ad revised to meet
earlier Times objections.” (Harding Bancroft of the
Times eventually said: “the advertisement was
turned down by the Times in accordance with our general policy that we do
not accept advertising urging readers to perform an illegal action.”) The
letter notes that some signers have wondered why the Protest continues to
stress the 10% surcharge which by now is looking less politically viable.
Finally, the letter announces the above-mentioned “Deficit Party.”
