Tax resistance in the “Peace Churches” → Quakers → 20th–21st century Quakers

From reading my blog lately, you might think that American Quaker war tax resistance stopped 125 years ago. But, of course, it’s still going on today. A couple of reports from the recent New England Yearly Meeting of Friends make note of how Meetings like this continue to struggle with the issue:

  • At Teeksa Photography, Skip Schiel mourned at what he saw to be a half-hearted interest in such issues:

    [L]ike a person with an ailing stomach or chronic arthritis, not life threatening, simply annoying, distracting, worrisome, who then dilutes focus on issues in the wider world, NEYM turns inward, year after year. Our stated theme was “War, God Help Us!” and some like Ernestine Buscemi in the keynote and Peter Crysdale in the bible half hours attempted to refer to it. Despite their attempts, little attention was directed to societal issues such as the war in Iraq, the threat of war with Iran, torture, erosion of civil liberties, environmental desecration, racism, to name a few of the pressing problems of our day. We (I say we inaccurately — I attended only one hour of one business session, not boycotting, just displeased and choosing to devote myself to other matters during that period) passed several minutes about the Iraq war and torture, but I’ve heard these were relatively weak, mostly for internal communication (other meetings and Quaker bodies), lacking substantial discussion, let alone controversy and debate which might stir the pot more, and without action components. Lo and horrors should we ever call for tax resistance or surrounding the Pentagon or joining the equivalent of the Poor Peoples’ Campaign — or freeing one’s slaves.

    And on a more encouraging note, he quotes from the opening prayer of outgoing presiding clerk Christopher McCandless:

    “God, help us: Help us to be Your people, a people of peace in a world awash in the imagery and realities of war. Forgive us our complicity, by our corporate silence and the taxes we render unto America, in our nation’s headlong prosecution of military responses to the violence in the world.…”

  • Will T. at Growing Together in the Light mentions tax resister Paul Hood’s talk at the meeting:

    Paul Hood gave a lengthy testimony of his experiences as a marine in the Pacific in World War Ⅱ and how he was eventually led to being a tax resister. Although he hasn’t paid Federal income taxes since the Vietnam War, he found to his surprise that he was eligible to a tax rebate check this year. After giving it some thought he filed a tax return and has now decided to give his rebate check to the Yearly Meeting.

Google is starting to do for newspaper archives what it has been doing for books: putting scanned images on-line and making them text-searchable. Hooray for Google, says I.

Here are a few articles I found while browsing around today:

A couple of pieces regarding a reconstruction-era dispute over the legitimacy of the Louisiana state government (in which tax resistance played a role):

Some pieces from the tax resistance campaign for women’s suffrage:

More on the ostensibly voluntary “liberty bonds” in the United States during World War Ⅰ:

Gandhi’s campaign for Indian independence:

Miscellaneous war tax resistance articles:

Archbishop Raymond Hunthausen’s war tax resistance:

Miscellaneous other articles of note:

  • Finding Out Who ‘Really’ Spends Your Tax Money St. Petersburg Times (a conservative tax revolt group working with war tax resisters & Noam Chomsky)
  • Washington [D.C.] Official Urges Tax Refusal to Push Statehood The New York Times (“Walter E. Fauntroy, the District of Columbia’s Delegate to Congress, has urged residents here not to pay their Federal taxes until Congress makes Washington the 51st state.”
  • Israelis Yield West Bank Taxation and Health to Palestinians The New York Times

    [C]ollection will be a formidable challenge after years in which taxes were identified by Palestinians with foreign occupation.

    Tax resistance is strong in the territories. It spread during a seven-year uprising against Israeli rule, when Palestinians working in the tax department resigned. According to Israeli estimates, only 20 percent of Palestinians taxed in the West Bank met their payments in 1993, when tax revenues totalled some $90 million.

    The Palestinian Authority has already run into difficulties collecting taxes in Gaza and Jericho, and it has published appeals in recent weeks urging tax payment as a national duty. Outside of Jericho, it has no police powers in the West Bank, and the legal system there remains under Israeli control.

    “Taxes are the dowry of independence and the key to democracy,” said Atef Alawneh, director general of the Palestinian finance department, at the ceremony today in Ramallah.

    “Nonpayment of taxes under occupation was a national struggle worthy of praise,” he added. “Now it is 180 degrees different. Now delay in paying means a delay in building the Palestinian state.”

    Zuhdi Nashashibi, the finance minister in the Palestinian Authority, said he was confident Palestinians would now “hurry to pay” their taxes.

    Mr. Alawneh argued that collection by Palestinians would be more effective because it would lack the coercion of military occupation, would extend to places the Israelis were unable to reach because of security concerns, and would create new revenue sources. The tax authorities will not use force, he said, but will rely instead on friendly persuasion and public goodwill.

Remember what this sort of thing used to be like? You’d get yourself down to the library, and then you’d look through each volume of the Reader’s Guide to Periodical Literature or whatever, one at a time, hoping that what you were looking for was among the things the editors of that guide felt was worth indexing. Then with luck, some of what you were looking for was available in bound volumes, microfilm, or microfiche on-site (elsewise you could always try for inter-library loan, but that might take a couple of weeks). In the case of the first, you could find it on the shelves or ask the reference librarian, and then thumb through the pages, but in the case of the latter two, you’d have to haul your film over to a reader (one that wasn’t broken or occupied) and then spend five minutes or so just trying to locate the pages you were interested in. Then, if it turned out to be good, you’d have to scribble things down or drop in some coin for a barely-legible photocopy.

I like the future.

Cherice at Quaker Oats Live discusses her feelings about war tax resistance. The issue came up at a recent Friends meeting, and she seems to have gone from curious to gung-ho in a hurry:

My solution: Quakers, Mennonites, Brethren, and whomever else wants to participate refuses to pay war taxes for a few years, and we suffer the consequences. I think we should campaign for a war-tax-free in all Quaker meetings and Mennonite/Brethren/etc. communities. What are they going to do — throw us all in jail? Maybe. But they can’t do that forever. No one wants to pay their taxes for a bunch of Quakers and other pacifists to sit in jail for not paying taxes. It doesn’t make sense.

So are we willing to actually suffer a little bit to be consistent about our peace stance? Are we willing to make a bit of a sacrifice to ensure that our money isn’t paying to kill people?

Anyone with me on a war-tax-free ?

Martin Kelly at The Quaker Ranter reacts to Cherice’s recent post at Quaker Oats Live about war tax resistance. Excerpts:

What if our witness was directed not at the federal government but at our fellow Christians? We could follow Quaker founder George Fox’s example and climb the tallest tree we could find (real or metaphorical) and begin preaching the good news that war goes against the teachings of Jesus. As always, we would be respectful and charitable but we could reclaim the strong and clear voices of those who have traveled before us. If we felt the need for backup? Well, I understand there are twenty-seven or so books to the New Testament sympathetic to our cause. And I have every reason to believe that the Inward Christ is still humming our tune and burning bushes for all who have eyes to see and ears to listen. Just as John Woolman ministered with his co-religionists about the sin of slavery, maybe our job is to minister to our co-religionists about war.

But who are these co-religionist neighbors of ours? Twenty years of peace organizing and Friends organizing makes me doubt we could find any large group of “historic peace church” members to join us. We talk big and write pretty epistles, but few individuals engage in witnesses that involve any danger of real sacrifice. The way most of our established bodies couldn’t figure out how to respond to a modern day prophetic Christian witness in Tom Fox’s kidnapping is the norm. When the IRS threatened to put liens on Philadelphia Yearly Meeting to force resistant staffers to pay, the general secretary and clerk said all sorts of sympathetic words of anguish (which they probably even meant), then docked the employee’s pay anyway. There have been times when clear-eyed Christians didn’t mind loosing their liberty or property in service to the gospel. Early Friends called our emulation of Christ’s sacrifice the Lamb’s War, but even seven years of real war in the ancient land of Babylonia itself hasn’t brought back the old fire. Our meetinghouses sit quaint, with ownership deeds untouched, even as we wring our hands wondering why most remain half-empty on First Day morning.

The Progressive, in , carried an article from Milton Mayer about tax resistance:

If You Want Mylai, Buy It

Young men are a dime a dozen. What the Army wants is a dime to buy a dozen young men with.

Either give them the dime or don’t give them the dime — but stop asking, “What can an old man do?”

April 15 is the date. April 15 is the date you turn over a quarter of your income to Behemoth, and half to three-quarters of what you turn over goes to the Army to buy a dozen young men to populate (and depopulate) Perforation Paddy. “I sent them a good boy,” said Private Meadlo’s mother after Mylai, “and they made him a murderer.”

If you want it, buy it. If you don’t, don’t. But stop asking, “What can an old man do?”

If, like me, you had a good year and made more than $625 in , the Internal Revenue Act requires you to file an income tax return. If you refuse (rather than evade) the requirement to file, you are still a felon, but you should notify Behemoth and all its minions lest you be hanged for the wrong reason. (The Act simply punishes “failure to file” and “failure to pay”.) I shouldn’t refuse to file, myself, but better men than I have taken the position that filing is more than a formality; the best of them, A.J. Muste, always filed an appropriately marked Bible instead of a return.

So, too, as the antics proceed, you will be asked (unless you have a readily attachable pay-check) where you stash your money so that Behemoth’s little boys in blue can go and get it. Here again I should comply, myself, lest Behemoth get the impression that I am playing a cat-and-mouse (or mouse-and-cat) game. But this decision, too, like whether or not to file a return, is probably a matter of temperament.

The purpose of taxation is to enable people collectively to buy what they want. Sometimes when some of them want a little something special and some of them don’t — for instance, throughways financed by tolls — those who want them pay for them and those who don’t want them don’t. But Mylai is financed by the general fund of the Treasury, on the assumption that everybody wants Mylai. Behemoth has no way of knowing that the assumption is false unless those who don’t want it refuse to buy it. A vote for Nixon (or Humphrey) or Johnson (or Goldwater) is a vote for Mylai. (“It was murder. We were shooting into houses and at people — running or standing, doing nothing.” — Sergeant Charles Hutts.)

The nation-state is not merely fallible; it is, as every Judeo-Christian (or Christeo-Judean) schoolboy knows, unholy because it divides the family of man into we and they. Only men are, or may be, holy in a world of nation-states, and they dare not perform an unholy act to preserve such an institution. Still the conscientious tax refuser is a conscientious citizen of the nation-state. He would gladly pay his taxes for the things all the people in it (including him) want. In Norway (in this respect the only even halfway civilized country in the world) the conscientious citizen may have his tax payment segregated for the support of the United Nations if he does not want to buy Mylai.

Bucking always for salvation, the conscientious citizen is nevertheless up against some serious objections to his refusal to send a dozen young men to the edge of the ditch in Mylai. The objections appear to be six in number:

Objection 1: The legal penalty of five years in stir and/or a ten-thousand-dollar fine. The U.S. Government has not yet pressed for the penalty in any case of tax refusal that I know of — partly, I suppose, because Behemoth does not know what to do about conscience, partly because the use of force, violence, and other lawful means of penalizing conscientious people always increases their number. (Better pretend they’re not there — up to a point.)

But the number is increasing anyway, and it is not unlikely that it is approaching that point. When it is confident that it has got its Haynsworth-Carswell Court, Behemoth may feel constrained some one of these days to press for the penalty. The tax refusal movement, for twenty years amorphous, is now coordinated by War Tax Resistance, whose address, I am reliably informed, is 339 Lafayette Street, New York, N.Y. 10017, and whose telephone number (212‒477‒2970) was discovered in the Manhattan telephone directory by a task force of forty FBI agents led personally by J. Edgar Hoover. Desperado Bradford Lyttle of WTR reports 181 active refusal centers across the country and estimates 15,000 refusers in .

Answer to Objection 1: There are worse things than losing five years and/or ten thousand dollars, and Mylai is one of them.

Objection 2: The loss of job or reputation. Ten years ago (even five) many tax refusers lost jobs (or failed to get them) as a consequence of the invariable FBI “inquiry.” That’s less likely (but only less likely) now. Loss of reputation, on the other hand, has never appeared to be consequential; I have never known anybody to the left of Orange County, California, who thought that a tax refuser was anything worse than crazy, and even in Orange County they hate taxes.

Answer to Objection 2: There are worse things than losing a job (though that is easier for a light-fingered clown like me to say than it is for an honest workingman).

We proceed now from the nuts-and-bolts to the nitty-gritty, as follows:

Objection 3: Tax refusal is ineffective because “they” get the money anyway (by force, violence, or other lawful means).

Answer to Objection 3: True, true; but, then, so is everything else ineffective (including two victorious world wars to save the world for democracy). To man, all things are impossible. If whatever you do is ineffective, you might as well buck for salvation and do what is right.

Objection 4: Tax refusal is illogical: If you refuse to pay half your income tax, half of what you do pay will be used for Mylai, as will more than the other half (since Behemoth, when it seizes the other half by force, violence, and other lawful means will also seize twelve per cent per annum interest on it).

Answer to Objection 4: This is true only if logic is a brance of effectiveness — and even then it is only half true. Behemoth will lose money on the deal because it will have to spend more to collect it than it gets. In one instance I know of, where the refuser took his case “on up,” it must have cost $25,000 in salaries and travel expenses of Treasury and FBI dicks, district attorneys, assistant attorneys-general, judges, and court attachés to collect and hold on to $32.27 (and the refuser took his own expenses in the case as a tax deduction). It is true, none the less, that in the end Behemoth will get all the money it wants for Mylai, by raising this tax rate if necessary.

But there is another, and more significant, logic: the logic of symbolism (not to be confused with symbolic logic). The only action a man can take against the nation-state is symbolic. He can not prevent its depredations but only repudiate them persistently in the hope of (a) salvation and (b) the sympathetic infection of his fellow-citizens. It is not logical symbolically (for instance) to bomb the ROTC building, because people sympathize with the victim of a bombing, and, besides, Behemoth has all the ROTC buildings it wants and is always eager to build new ones and add the building costs to its Gross National Product billboard. (The Army doesn’t need ROTC buildings or ROTC except as a symbol of militarism; no European army would dare ask a university to disgrace itself by letting its students be marched around the premises.) What is logical symbolically is for students to sit nonviolently in front of the ROTC building and be hauled violently away. Tax refusal is logical symbolically.

Objection 5: Tax refusal is a disavowal of representative government.

Answer to Objection 5: It is, if, and only if, by representative government is meant majoritarianism and not representation at all. If you are an American citizen and you do not want Mylai and won’t buy it, you are not represented. The Congressmen (including the Senators) who deplore Mylai all buy it, without exception. The last one who wouldn’t was Representative Jeannette Rankin of Montana, who voted all alone against the second go-around of the War to Make the World Safe for Democracy. The conscientious citizen who does not want Mylai and will not buy it is driven to self-government by the failure of representative government to represent him.

Objection 6: Tax refusal is anarchy, and anarchy is the worst thing that can befall society.

Answer to Objection 6: Anarchy is not the worst thing that can befall a society; it is the second worst. The worst is tyranny, and the worst tyranny is self-evidently that which requires the innocent to kill the innocent. (“I love women. I love children, too. I love people.” — Lt. William L. Calley.) He who does not want and will not buy tyranny must, like George Washington, take his chances on anarchy.

So hopelessly unholy is the nation-state that it drives the conscientious citizen to anarchy and then accuses him of driving it to anarchy when he tries to disengage himself from its tyranny. In the interesting case of the $32.27 cited above, Attorney Francis Heisler was arguing for the refuser before the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, and one of the judges said to him: “Counsel, is your client aware that if this Court holds in his behalf the Court itself will be laying the axe to the root of all established government?” “I think he is, your honor,” Attorney Heisler replied.

The objections considered, we proceed to the obstacles. There is only one that appears to be insuperable: withholding, the worst crime ever committed against liberty by a good man. When Beardsley Ruml thought up “pay-as-you-go,” everybody cheered except the company bosses who had to do the detestable New Deal’s detestable bookkeeping for it. (Anybody remember when the Connecticut manufacturer, Vivian Kellems, led the Old Guard attack on Social Security by refusing to make the employe deductions?) Under withholding, most of the people who don’t want to buy Mylai have already had it bought for them by April 15. They can sue to recover — some have — but nobody has made it to the Supreme Court yet. Others reduce or eliminate the withholding by claiming excess dependents (the whole population of Vietnam, for instance) in calculating their estimated tax. Again, I suppose, a matter of temperament, and mine doesn’t happen to run that cat-and-mouse way — though their cause is just, and we have indeed made the whole population of Vietnam our dependents.

A few religious organizations — not the churches, of course — have refused to withhold the tax from the pay of their employes who do not want to buy Mylai. The most respectable of them is the American Friends Service Committee, with which I confess to being associated. (Personally leading a task force of eighty FBI agents, J. Edgar Hoover discovered the association by looking in the Philadelphia telephone directory, so there is no point in my denying it.) But the AFSC has a task force of eighty Philadelphia lawyers, and one of these years a test case will go to Washington. Meanwhile, however, the conscientious citizen who waits for a test case will go on buying Mylai until the whole of Vietnam is a ditch.

A few years ago a new form of refusal got rolling, available to people trapped by withholding. This was non-payment of the telephone tax (which goes into the general Treasury), on the ground that Chairman Mills of the House Ways and Means Committee had argued its necessity for continuance of the war against Mylai. I’m uneasy about the telephone tax refusal myself; again, I suppose, a matter of temperament. There seem to me to be two visible arguments, and one invisible, against it.

First, I can not bring myself either to do or not to do anything on the bases that what a Congressman says is true. And second, it seems to me that if you are going to fight City Hall you should go for the jugular. The income tax is the jugular. The telephone tax is one of those petty excises, no more significant fiscally, and no more to be singled out, Congressman Mills to the contrary notwithstanding, than the whiskey, movie, or airplane tax.

But the invisible, base-of-the-iceberg, stem-of-the-martini-cherry argument for paying the phone tax is, I’m afraid, one of craven convenience. If Behemoth were to put me in jail for five years for income tax refusal, I’d refuse to pay my telephone tax instantly. But living where and how I do, running a little back-bedroom sweatshop out in the country, I can’t make it very well (still worse, very sick) without a telephone. Discussing telephone tax refusal with some of my anarchist friends, I have discovered that some of them were for it because they didn’t feel quite up to going to the mat on the income tax, and still others because they understood that the telephone company, like Vivian Kellems, was no more enthusiastic about collecting the Mylai tax than they were about paying it and would not jerk the phone out for non-payment of the tax.

This last seemed to me to be a misreading of history. Unlike Vivian Kellems and the American Friends Service Committee — Right and Left united across the years by the mounting terror of the Middle — the telephone company has no principle except money; and Behemoth’s agent, the Federal Communications Commission, is where the money is. In the Communist countries like Spain and Greece and, come to think of it, every other country in the world, the post office operates the telephone and telegraph systems, whose profits subsidize the carrying of the mails; in the only truly free country in the free world the money-losing branch of the communications system is communized and the money-making branches are Government-protected private monopolies.

But telephone tax refusal caught on until, according to the calculation of War Tax Resistance, there are now more than 100,000 practitioners of it. For a couple of years nobody did anything about them. But reports have begun to filter in of Government agents swarming over refusers and, more ominously, of the jerking of telephones by the company on behalf of its protector, the Government. As the reports spread it may be anticipated that there will be a falling-away of telephone tax anarchists, as, I suppose, there will be of income tax anarchists when Behemoth decides that they are getting to be too much of a nuisance and starts throwing them into the pokey.

Until that time the only obstacle (not objection) to income tax refusal, other than withholding, is the harassment it entails. The smart way to live alongside Behemoth is not to attract his attention, and whoever attracts his attention is in for it. Twenty years ago he was paying his harassers $40 a day. It must be $80 now, or $100; there is nothing niggardly about Behemoth.

He sends two kinds of harassers around. The first is a ritualistic cut-out character whom it’s a positive pleasure to be harassed by. He is the warm handclasp type, around thirty-five and running to pudge from running around in his down-payment Impala. He wants to have a little talk with you.

“Homyonum’s the name, Mr. Murgatroid, from the Internal Revenue Service.”

(Warm handclasp.)

“Sit down, Homyonum, sit down, and tell me what I can do for you.”

“To be perfectly frank, Mr. Murgatroid, I think that I may be able to do something for you.”

“Well, now, Homyonum, that is nice — I never expected the Internal Revenue Service to do something for me. Do sit down and have a nice glass tea.”

(He will, and he does.)

“Mr. Murgatroid, we of the Treasury Department are actually your agents. We are here to help you.”

“How sweet of you, Homyonum. One lump or two?” (Two.)

“Mr. Murgatroid, I want you to know that I respect your position, but I think you are ill-advised to refuse to pay your income tax.”

“Homyonum, my boy, your advice is ill. Milk? Lemon?” (Milk.)

“I beg your pardon, Mr. Murgatroid?”

“Not at all, and do let me tell you why your advice is ill. If my position is, as you say, respectable, then yours is not, since the two positions are contradictory. Do you follow me?”

“I —.”

“What I am trying to tell you, Homyonum, since you respect my position, is that you are trying to tell me that I ought not to pay my income tax and neither ought you. You do want to be respectable, don’t you?”

A little more of this standoff, a warm handclasp, and Homyonum is gone wherever such people go nights and is seen no more. He makes his report, the report spends two or three months going through channels, and then Behemoth hands one of his judges a distraint warrant to sign and sends one of his blue-boys around to attach your unattached property (money in the bank, wages coming in, shoes off your feet) in the amount in which you are delinquent in buying Mylai.

The other kind of harasser is another glass tea entirely. He is tall, sallow, dour, ulcerated: a certified public accountant who doesn’t know anything about your income tax refusal (he says), but has been sent to audit your return. “I suppose,” he says, “that your name came up on a spot check. Of course you have all your records and a receipt for each expenditure — if I may just look at them.” At the end of two weeks, at $40, $80, or $100 a day, reducing the Gross National Product by that much, he has discovered that you owe Behemoth $1.14 (or Behemoth owes you $1.14; that’s not the point of it at all) and you and your back-bedroom are a shambles.

He turns up the next year, on the dot, to do it all over again, and then you know he is lying about the spot check (and even he beginst to suspect he is). Meanwhile, he has converted you into a fox. You spend half your life (at $40, $20, or $10 a day) keeping records of your expenditures. You spend the other half of your life like the mouse you were not going to play in the cat-and-mouse game, scurrying for loopholes down which you can hurry. You end up beating your wife, cursing your children, and, of course, kicking the cat. And that, not the $1.14, is the point of it. If Behemoth can make your life unbearable, you will buy Mylai.

It is the very devil to be harassed, but what did you expect — a valentine from Mrs. Mitchell? It’s like (or even as) Give-’Em-Hell-Harry used to say: If you can’t stand the heat, stay out of the kitchen. You harass them, and they harass you back, and they’ve got the big battalions on their side. (You know Whom you’ve got on yours.)

And you harass them back and they harass you back. Who said ineffective? Behemoth has the whole country, the whole world, computerized to take care of everything — everything but one man who says, No, sir, instead of Yes, sir. It takes one (count ’em, one) man to obstruct the machine by introducing the human element into it. The grind-organ monkey is suddenly a monkey-wrench. I put it to you: What more can an old man do? The machine has not been built yet, and won’t be, that does not come down with the gripes while it digests a human being.

Mind you, I am not advocating income tax refusal; not I. For all I know the advocacy itself constitutes a felony, especially if it creates a clear and present danger that the Army won’t be able to buy a dozen young men with machine guns at the edge of the ditch in Mylai. Operating on a very low and cautious level, I say unto you only, Give them the dime or don’t give them the dime — but don’t ask, “What can an old man do?” If you want Mylai, buy it; if you don’t want it, don’t. That’s the free enterprise system, and do you believe in the free enterprise system or are you some kind of a Communist?

Operating on the highest level of all, under a law that even the Supreme Court (Girouard, etc.) admits is higher than the Internal Revenue Act, Jesus Christ was asked by the Pharisees whose the tribute money was, and you know what he said and you know that he said it perceiving their wickedness. (Matt. 22:18.) If you have to choose between Christ and the Pharisee who, like the Pharisee of old, occupies the highest seat in the Temple, you are in a tight spot. I’d play it safe myself: Better to do time than eternity.

A biographical note accompanying the article says that “Mr. Mayer began his own tax refusal adventures more than twenty years ago. (He is the anti-hero of the $32.27 case he cites in this article.)”

Some bits and pieces from here and there:

  • Marlene at Pick My Brain reviews “Death & Taxes,” the new war tax resistance video from NWTRCC: “I listened intently to the 28 voices who spoke with clarity and passion about their call to action and I was definitely inspired to do something, even a token action to resist using my taxes to fund war and militaristic action. … I heartily recommend using this 30 minute DVD in small groups, Sunday School classes, peace and justice retreats, etc. It is fast paced, very positive and upbeat with lively music.”
  • RantWoman, at RantWoman and the Religious Society of Friends, reflects on the neglected tradition of Quaker war tax resistance and what it might take to revitalize it in modern Meetings.
  • South Carolina is requiring all organizations that “directly or indirectly advocate, advise, teach or practice the duty or necessity of controlling, seizing, or overthrowing the government of the United States, the state of South Carolina, or any political division thereof,” to register their activities with the South Carolina Secretary of State and pay a five-dollar filing fee. A member of the Alliance of the Libertarian Left decided to register: “When belligerence and inhumanity prevail, the peaceful and the humane must find honor in being categorized as the enemies of the prevailing order. Please keep me updated as to the status of our registration. I look forward to hearing back from you as to our official recognition as enemies of your state and its government. … PS. I am told that there is a processing fee in the amount of $5.00 for the registration of a subversive organization. Our organization is in fact so dastardly that we have refused to remit the fee.”
  • Paying taxes is not a civic virtue, according to a Google Translation of an op-ed by Thomas Schmid in a recent issue of Welt Online, which namechecks Thoreau on the way to criticizing governments who rely on data stolen from banks in tax havens to crack down on tax evaders.
  • Wendy McElroy has an interesting note about the philosopher William Wollaston who investigated the sensible idea that our actions are a more reliable indicator of our beliefs than are our utterances.
  • “Where are 1% of American adults?” asks Shakesville. In prison, is the answer. Along with some other revolting statistics about America’s lockdown culture that you’ve probably heard before was this interesting claim: “It is illegal to bring into the United States any goods produced by forced labor or by prisoners, yet American prisoners make 100% of the military helmets, ammunition belts, bulletproof vests, ID tags as well some other items used by the US military. Although a prisoner is not technically forced to work, solitary confinement is the punishment for refusal. They also make 93% of domestically produced paints, 36% of home appliances and 21% of office furniture.”

From the Lodi News-Sentinel:

Quakers will not pay taxes

Philadelphia (UPI) — Philadelphia Quakers say it is not unreasonable for them to follow their beliefs and refuse to withhold federal taxes from employees who are conscientious objectors to war taxes, the head of the local church said .

Samuel Caldwell, general secretary of the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting of the Religious Society of Friends, said that was their central argument when they appeared in federal court to answer an Internal Revenue Service suit.

The suit, filed in , is seeking payment of $11,224 in taxes from the employees, plus $5,614 in penalty from the Quakers.

From the Afro American:

Tax resisters give money to agency

Philadelphia — Several hundred tax resisters, who have refused to pay their taxes as a protest against government military spending, turned over their tax money to a Roman Catholic agency which runs a soup kitchen for the poor at a ceremony in Philadelphia .

The event at St. John’s Hospice, 13th and Race Sts, is part of a war tax resisters’ witness and rally which started at noon at City Hall West, Philadelphia.

The funds were received by Brother Stanley O’Neil. The hospice is run by the Brothers of the Good Shepherd.

Following the presentation at the Hospice rally participants met with Senators Arlen Specter and John Heinz at their offices in the Federal Building, 6th and Arch Sts, Philadelphia, to petition for the transfer of military taxes to peaceful purposes.

The rally is being organized by the War Tax Concerns Committee of the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting of the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers).

Bill Strong, of the committee staff, said a growing number of Quakers and other Philadelphians are refusing to pay their taxes through a variety of methods including: non-payment of the military portion (34 percent of income taxes goes for current military spending), non-payment of the three per cent “military tax” levied on phone bills, adaptation to a simpler life style below the taxable level, and general protest activities.

Speakers at the rally included Peggy Hasbrouck, of the Brandywine Peace Community; Robin Harper, of Pendle Hill, a tax refuser for the past 19 years; Lillian Willoughby, a founder of the Movement for a New Society, a social change agency based in Philadelphia; Joe Volk, peace education secretary of the American Friends Service Committee and Father Paul Washington, Episcopal Church of the Advocate, Philadelphia. The program will include music by several high school choral groups.

For a while, it seems, Bill Strong was the Philadelphia go-to guy for quotes about Quaker War Tax Resistance. Here’s another article, from that confusedly refers to war tax resistance as a modern invention among Quakers rather than an old tradition being rediscovered after nearly a century of near-dormancy:

Quakers consider withholding taxes to protest arms

Philadelphia — For three centuries, Quakers have refused to go to war. Now, an increasing number of them are considering whether they also should refuse to help pay the country’s military bills.

Tax resistance — withholding all or part of tax payments as a protest against military spending — will be the central topic of discussion among Quakers gathered at the Friends Meeting House here for the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting.

The program for the yearly meeting, which began and concludes , lists tax resistance as a “burning concern” for Quakers to consider.

A grass-roots interest in tax resistance has developed among Quakers in the 100 monthly meetings — local Quaker congregations — in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Delaware and Maryland that make up the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting, according to William Strong of the yearly meeting’s War Tax Concerns Committee.

The issue was one of three main topics of concern suggested by the monthly meetings for this year’s agenda, said Betty Balderston of the yearly meeting’s Committee on Aging.

Some Quakers “never have seen their own financial involvement” in war, even though they might have worked for peace, said Strong, a former bank trust officer.

Historically, the burden of opposing war has fallen on young Quaker men who refuse to fight, Strong said. Tax resistance spreads the responsibility to other Quakers.

And here’s an Associated Press dispatch from :

Quaker-Led Tax Protest Gets Boost from Other Faiths

Philadelphia, (AP) — Quakers are taking the lead in a growing movement that subjects members to a painful dilemma — obeying the law or following their pacifist beliefs by refusing to pay taxes that go to the military.

When most Americans meet the Internal Revenue Service deadline Friday for filing income tax returns, up to 10,000 forms from Quakers will contain adjustments for withholding the “war tax,” said Bill Strong, a member of the Religious Society of Friends’ War Tax Committee.

“I used to think three years ago that this was an off-the-wall, peculiar obsession of a handful of particular Quakers,” said Strong, who has chosen to keep his income below the taxable level for three years.

“But we’re convinced now that this is moving to the center. You’re getting people who are thinking about it for the very first time. That’s exciting,” Strong said.

Other churches are beginning to join the movement, Strong said, adding he’s particularly heartened by support from Roman Catholics.

“We’re 100,000; they’re 50 million. When our concern starts bouncing back as their concern, don’t you think we feel good?”

Some members of the two faiths were preparing to join in protest , when several hundred protesters planned to turn over their tax money to the Catholic hospice Brothers of the Good Shepherd during a Quaker witness and afternoon rally at City Hall.

The protest was among 70 planned across the country, with thousands of Quakers participating, said Strong, 53, who is on leave from his job as a trust officer at a bank to advise tax resisters.

Quakers, who abhor killing and live by the creed of “God in every man,” helped lead the struggle to free American slaves in the early 19th century. Some were imprisoned for refusing to fight in World War Ⅰ; others persuaded Congress in to establish a conscientious objector provision to the draft laws.

The Quakers’ tax resistance has taken many forms.

Some have refused to pay a 3 percent excise tax on their telephone bills, which Strong claims raises $2 billion a year for the military.

Others refuse to pay 36 percent of their income taxes, claiming 28 percent goes to the military and 8 percent represents interest on the Social Security trust fund which they say goes to the military.

And some have also withheld an additional 17 percent of their taxes that they say covers the cost of past wars, including veterans payments and war-related interest on the national debt, Strong said.

“For others, withholding 53 percent isn’t enough because they know that no matter what taxes you put in, they go to the military. And they refuse all taxes, turning in a blank 1040. That’s a criminal offense,” Strong said.

A Quaker in Seattle, Irwin Hogenauer, 70, says he hasn’t paid taxes since .

“I’ve lived a life of principle and I’ll continue to stand by it,” he said.

Hogenauer was the subject of my Picket Line entry. A different version of the above article continues as follows:

Hogenauer, who is now retired, managed for most of his working life to keep his income below the taxable level.

“People who are conscientious objectors often mold their lifestyles so they don’t have any taxes to pay,” said Helen Provost-Kees, an IRS spokeswoman in Seattle.

Single people who earn $5,400 or less a year or couples who earn under $7,400 owe no taxes, she said.

Still, the decision to break the tax law is difficult for many.

“It troubles us to find ourselves in conflict with what we judge to be a fair obligation to pay the taxes,” said Joe Volk, secretary of the American Friends Service Committee’s Peace Education branch and a tax resister since .

Robin Harper is still an active tax resister. Lilian Willoughby remained a dedicated activist into her 90s, and died in . Joe Volk is now the executive secretary of the Friends Committee on National Legislation. Paul Washington died in after a long career of shaking things up in Philadelphia.

When I was doing research for American Quaker War Tax Resistance, I deliberately chose to limit the timespan I was researching to the pre- period because I didn’t want to deal with the fuss of trying to track down the copyright of obscure works published after that time.

But what I discovered was that evidence of Quaker war tax resistance petered out almost entirely during the twenty years after the end of the American Civil War.

The tradition of war tax resistance, which had been so strong at one point that Quakers risked being disowned by their meetings if they were caught paying war taxes and refused to sincerely repent, died out so thoroughly that when Quaker conscientious objectors rediscovered war tax resistance in the latter half of the 20th Century, many seemed to think that it was a new innovation to the Quaker Peace Testimony.

It remains a mystery why the tradition died out. Here’s another data point, though, from the Reading Eagle (excerpt):

A Friend [H.M. Wallis] in Reading, Berkshire, Eng., writes to the Public Ledger, Philadelphia, to explain the attitude of the members of his sect in England, as follows:

“The real feeling of the Society of Friends in England may be gauged from the fact, which is not disputed, that no Friend, so far as is known, has declined to pay his war taxes, so called. Even the Friends who during the South African war permitted the authorities to distrain upon their goods rather than pay the (then) war tax, and the still larger number who refused for years to pay education rates, have seen their ways to pay the much larger war taxes of today without demur.”

In , the Associated Press covered the case of war tax resister Priscilla Adams:

I.R.S. Sues Quaker Group

Philadelphia, — Priscilla Adams says she does not mind paying taxes — she just does not want her money going to the military.

Because of that, Ms. Adams, a Quaker organizer, finds herself in a court battle with the Internal Revenue Service.

Ms. Adams, 50, has refused to pay at least some of her federal taxes for many years and owes the government more than $42,000 in back taxes, interest and fines. She says she would rather her money went to further peaceful causes.

“They can do things like the checkoff for the presidential election campaign; they could easily do an accommodation for a peace-tax fund,” Ms. Adams said Wednesday from her house in Willingboro, N.J.

The I.R.S. stepped up the pressure in the dispute on when it sued her employer, the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting of the Religious Society of Friends, for refusing to garnishee her wages. The government wants to impose a 50 percent penalty, more than $21,000, against the society, a regional Quaker organization.

“That would be a hefty price for what we believe is right,” said Gretchen Castle, a leader with the group. “I think that there are other ways the government can do it that are more friendly, more supportive of our faith.”

The government is seeking taxes and penalties ; after that period the Quakers began to withhold taxes from Ms. Adams’s paychecks — she earns about $32,000 a year — and put them in an escrow account to which the I.R.S. has access. The Quakers say they do not want to help the tax agency collect the back taxes and penalties by garnisheeing additional wages.

Nationally, about 8,000 Americans withhold some or all of their federal income taxes because of their political beliefs, often because they oppose military spending, according to the National War Tax Resistance Coordinating Committee.

Ms. Adams is the only employee of the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting who does not pay income taxes, Ms. Castle said, although a few take other actions, like refusing to pay federal telephone taxes that go to the military.

Ms. Adams sued the government on religious freedom grounds in 1996, asking the I.R.S. to set up a fund for conscientious objectors and to excuse her tax fines and penalties because her beliefs provided “reasonable cause” for nonpayment.

The Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit rejected her arguments, and the Supreme Court declined to hear the case.

Peter Goldberger, a lawyer who represented Ms. Adams and now represents her employer, said Quaker leaders hoped to formulate a response to the lawsuit at their meeting.

Ms. Adams, who is married and has two children, said she might quit her job if the Quakers lose the case, rather than see most of her income go to the I.R.S.’s general fund.

For now, she lends the amount in dispute to charitable causes she supports. She says she will not demand repayment unless the tax agency comes after her.

More Than a Paycheck reported last year that the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting decided to continue refusing to garnish Adams’s wages according to the Meeting’s explicit policy on such matters.

I think I’m a little late to this party, but it only now showed up on my radar. Conscience Studio is a Quaker-oriented group that focuses on living life conscientiously. They have a service program centered on development and human rights issues in Indonesia, and a strong war tax resistance focus.

Among the war tax resistance-related pages on their site are:

A Declaration of Conscience
A declaration you can sign to complain that, against our deeply-felt values, “we are all ultimately compelled to pay taxes used for military purposes, and that we have a continuing liability to do so in the future. We have thus been obliged, and are being obliged, in direct violation of our consciences, to be complicit in the funding and waging of war.”
Signators of Declaration of Conscience
Nadine Hoover’s signing statement.
Writing a Statement of Conscience
Some recommendations for how to format your statement of conscientious objection and what points to cover.
Testimonies
Notes from Margaret Fell, Karen Reixach, Jens Braun, Kristin Buchholz, Peg McIntire, the New York Yearly Meeting, and others.
Frequently Asked Questions
Of which there is one, apparently: “Can I still write a statement of conscience while in the midst of the internal debate [over how far I’m willing to go]?”
Articles
Includes reports on war tax resistance from Nadine Hoover, Dan Jenkins, Karen Reixach, and Tom Rothschild.

Signing a Declaration of Conscience About Paying for War

Here’s an AP dispatch that I found in the Free Lance-Star of Fredericksburg, Virginia:

Protestant groups eye war-tax resistance

New York (AP) — Three Protestant denominations opposed to war are considering a new kind of tax resistance — refusal to pay taxes that go for arms and equipment for war.

Following a year-long series of joint regional conferences under the banner of a “New Call to Peacemaking,” the three historic “peace” churches have set a national conference about it in Greenlake, Wis.

The meeting is to consider regional proposals for some form of tax protest against spending for armaments and munitions of war.

The denominations, whose hallmark for centuries has been conscientious objection to participation in violence and war, are all relatively small. But they’ve had an influential impact on Christianity at large and on American thought.

They are the Society of Friends, involving about 100,000 Quakers; the Church of the Brethren, a Midwest-based denomination with about 180,000 members, and the Menonites, totaling about 130,000

Although many of them have protested war in the past by refusing to accept military service, the nature of modern war has turned “from manpower to money for technology and automated weapons,” the churches said.

In a joint statement, they said members of the movement now are “poised for stronger action.”

“The time has come for all Christians and people of all faiths to renounce war on religious and moral grounds,” the new cooperative coalition of peace churches said in its new call.

Regional meetings at 26 locations have been held in the last year about the issue, with more than 1,500 persons taking part, citing war and violence as “denials of the life and teachings of Jesus Christ.”

At one of the conferences at Old Chatham, N.Y., , it raised this question: “Are we going to pray for peace, and pay for war?” Another in Wichita, Kan., declared that 50 percent of funds collected from income taxes are used for military-related purposes and for manufacture of destructive weapons. The meeting encouraged “individuals who feel called to resist the payment of the military portion of their federal taxes.”

A meeting in North Manchester, Ind., proposed making use of the current tax revolt highlighted by California’s Proposition 13 and the distress at the national debt and inflation to further the peace cause.

The Indiana meeting suggested “legislative approaches that attract” the concerns of millions. The meeting urged an annual 5 percent decrease in military spending until it is cut 25 percent.

“The supposition that arms provide security is an illusion,” say the planners of the October conference in their letter of invitation.

“We call for a world based on peaceful order rather than the ‘balance of terror’ fueled by nuclear arsenals and the spreading arms sales.”

The “New Call to Peacemaking” isn’t so new anymore — but it’s still active, as is its sister project Every Church a Peace Church.

As I alluded to , a group of Quakers from the Pacific Yearly Meeting is trying to reinvigorate the tradition of Quaker war tax resistance.

Some of them are resisting their taxes in some way, and a couple of them are trying to get the government to recognize their conscientious objection to military taxation by means of legal challenges.

But most of what they seem to be asking their fellow Quakers to do in this campaign is to “Pay Under Protest” — in which they would pay their taxes just as usual, but would then write their Congressional representatives to complain about the injustice of it all.

Their literature plays up this “Pay Under Protest” campaign as being “a campaign for war tax resisters” and a way to “take a stand against war taxes” as though writing a letter to your congressperson were actually a form of tax resistance.

I think the organizers see this as a way for potential resisters to dip their toes in the war tax resistance pool, and at least to get thinking about how they might confront their taxpayer complicity. By enabling people safely and easily to get just a little forward momentum in this area, perhaps the campaign will cause them eventually to adopt some genuine war tax resistance tactics.

I’m worried that such an approach might backfire, and make it seem as though since the organizers are demanding only a small, insignificant, useless gesture, they must not be motivated by a very urgent concern.

Telling a Quaker that when she pays her taxes she’s buying war and that she should therefore start paying under protest is like telling a smoker that you’re concerned that he is in danger of cancer, heart disease, and emphysema and so you think he should start smoking under protest. (How concerned are you really?)

The campaigners have convinced the Palo Alto Meeting to approve the following minute on war taxes:

As a faith community, we believe that war violates our shared religious conviction that we should love our enemies and acknowledge and nourish that of God in every life.

We declare as a corporate body our objection to paying war waxes.  We express our conviction in acts of individual witness ranging from letters of protest to government officials to acts of civil disobedience.

Nice that it merits mention, but pretty weak sauce. Compare that vague expression of disapproval with the unambiguous declaration of conduct that the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting put out back in the day (this version comes from the Rules of Discipline of ; I’m not sure when it was originally adopted):

It is the judgment of this meeting that a tax levied for the purchasing of drums, colors, or for other warlike uses, cannot be paid consistently with our Christian testimony.

If you would like to assist in the effort to reinvigorate war tax resistance in the Pacific Yearly Meeting, or if you are a Pacific Yearly Meeting Quaker who practices some form of war tax resistance or protest and you would like to add your name to their list, contact Elizabeth Boardman, one of the campaign organizers.

The new issue of More Than a Paycheck, NWTRCC’s newsletter, is on-line. Among the news you’ll find there:

  • Talking Taxes and Taking Action Against Military Spending — how activists are using “penny polls” to start a conversation about government spending priorities
  • Counseling Notes — how tax resisters can avoid getting preyed upon by “settle with the IRS for pennies on the dollar” companies; more “frivolous filing” overreach from the IRS; and increased use of IRS enforcement tactics isn’t leading to increased tax revenue
  • Many Thanks — to the generous donors who keep NWTRCC in business
  • Criminal Cases and Fear — Karl Meyer writes from the standpoint of decades of experience with war tax resistance about what factors increase the likelihood of criminal prosecution for war tax resistance. Larry Dansinger and Ruth Benn add two cents apiece.
  • War Tax Resisters in History — Ed Hedemann reviews some of his research into the U.S. government’s use of property seizures and criminal cases as tools against war tax resisters in the post-World War Ⅱ era
  • War Tax Resistance Ideas & Actions — Evan Reeves tries a new way of paying-as-a-protest; a look at the Quaker “Movement of Conscience” project; a review of Muriel T. Stackley’s War is a God that Demands Human Sacrifice; honoring peacemakers Martha Graber and Fern Goering; upcoming events at which NWTRCC will have a presence; and a look at the new $10.40 For Peace project, another attempt to ease peace activists into war tax resistance.
  • Resources — notes on the Death & Taxes DVD, the new “Thoreau and His Heirs: The History and the Legacy of Thoreau’s Civil Disobedience” study kit, and the NWTRCC fundraising scarves
  • NWTRCC News — a note on the upcoming national conference in Boston next month
  • a Profile of war tax resister Heather Snow

I shared an Associated Press dispatch from about a then-upcoming meeting of Quakers, Brethren, and Mennonites who were planning to coordinate war tax resistance. Today, an article reporting on how the conference went, from the Milwaukee Sentinel:

Sects Urge Tax Protest for Peace

Green Lake, Wis. — A national meeting of “historic peace churches” — Quakers, Mennonites and Brethren — agreed to support those who refuse to pay “the military portion” of their federal taxes.

The possibly illegal “war tax resistance” position is a giant step for many in the churches from the passive refusal to bear arms and turning the other cheek.

Statements such as “we are praying for peace but paying for war” prodded the more than 300 delegates at a New Call to Peacemaking conference to back what advocates called an economic moral equivalent to military conscientious objection.

The lengthy statement also urged total disarmament after arms reduction, formation of a peace church delegation to President Carter, establishment of a world peace tax fund and simpler lifestyles.

It is not binding on the 350,000 members of the churches in the US or the nearly one million members worldwide.

The four day conference at the American Baptist Assembly here followed 26 regional meetings with participation by more than 1,500 Quakers, Mennonites and Brethren.

The joint meetings in themselves were a new ecumenical venture in breaking stereotypes. It was the first time in recent years representatives of the churches had met in such a conference.

The national conference challenged congregations and church agencies to consider refusing to pay the military portion of their federal taxes, generally thought to be about half, as a response to Christ’s call to radical discipleship.

It also asked them to “uphold war tax resistors with spiritual, emotional, legal and material support,” and to consider requests of employees who ask that their taxes not be withheld.

As I mentioned last month, the “New Call to Peacemaking” isn’t so new anymore — but it’s still active, as is its sister project Every Church a Peace Church. I think the new $10.40 for Peace campaign may also spring from these roots.

I’ve been hoping to get to the bottom of the mystery of how American Quaker war tax resistance went into a tailspin at some point after the American Civil War. I still don’t have an answer, but here’s another clue, and one that shows that at least as late as some Quakers were still very concerned about not paying war taxes. This comes from the Friends’ Intelligencer for :

A Friend who recently called at the office of the West Grove (Pa.) Independent said to the editor that he tries to avoid sending a check in payment of a bill, as this requires a stamp (war tax), holding the belief that he becomes a party to the iniquity of war by using the stamp.

This stamp tax was one of a number of war taxes instituted to pay for the Spanish-American War. Quakers also got caught by some of these other war taxes, particularly the estate tax, which some embarrassed Meetings found themselves reporting when Friends died and left their estates to the Meeting.

The new issue of More Than a Paycheck, the newsletter of the National War Tax Resistance Coordinating Committee, is on-line. Among the contents:

The Friends Intelligencer devoted some space to covering the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting.

The ninth query called forth regret that Friends had not maintained a stronger and more consistent testimony against war, but had paid the war taxes without protest. Lydia H. Price said that if Friends had been more faithful a few years ago these recent wars might have been prevented.

This was the time of the U.S. war in the Philippines. It was also, alas, a time when American Quaker war tax resistance was on the wane.

The 8 August 1981 Nashua Telegraph carried an article by Associated Press “Religion Writer” George W. Cornell. Some excerpts:

A-bomb anniversary brings peaceful fight

New York (AP) — In a time of military buildup, the “peace” people are marching, praying, fasting and signing petitions. Several denominations have made “peacemaking” a current priority. And some church leaders, including a bold bishop, have advised refusing to pay the portion of taxes that goes for arms.

The Reverend Hunthausen: “After much prayer, thought”

[A]dvocacy of withholding so-called “war taxes” — the share of federal income taxes that go for military equipment — came not just from traditional “peace” denominations, but from a Roman Catholic archbishop.

Archbishop Raymond G. Hunthausen of Seattle, in a speech that has since evoked wide and varying reactions, suggested Christians refuse to pay the half of their federal income taxes going for armament.

“We have to refuse to give our incense — in our day, tax dollars — to the nuclear idol,” he said. “I think the teaching of Jesus tells us to render to a nuclear-arms Caesar what Caesar deserves — tax resistance.

“Some would call what I am urging ‘civil disobedience.’ I prefer to see it as obedience to God.”

Similar suggestions have come from some other Christians, most solidly from leaders of three relatively small, but historic “peace” denominations — The Church of the Brethren, the Friends and Mennonites.

A joint meeting of them under the banner of “New Call to Peacemaking” said paying for war is wrong and asked members to “consider refusal to pay the military portion of their federal taxes, as a response to Christ’s call to radical discipleship.”

In separate denominational actions, the Church of the Brethren has supported “open, massive withholding of war taxes” and the Mennonites general conference is fighting in court against being required to withhold taxes partly used for military purposes from employes’ income.

The New York-based War Resisters League estimates 2,000 to 10,000 Americans annually hold back part of their taxes, some eventually being forced to pay but continuing to repeat the protest.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The edition of The Friend reprinted a paragraph from the Episcopal Reporter. Excerpts:

The Society of Friends has practically passed from Europe, as conscription makes their presence there next to impossible. In Holland, where they were once so numerous, they can no longer live, and only a few are left in France, Germany, Denmark, and Norway. In other European countries they have been called upon to endure many and grievous persecutions because of their refusal to serve in the army, but, as was expected, they have remained true to their principles. In Scandinavia, they are well treated and never persecuted, though in Norway they have often suffered severely. One Friend in Norway has been imprisoned five times for refusing to pay the “blood-tax.”

The following was reproduced without further editorial comment in the Friends’ Intelligencer, and is more good evidence of the decay of Quaker war tax resistance around the turn of the century:

The following report of Concord [Pennsylvania] Quarterly Meeting on , is taken from the West Chester Local News:

In reply to the suggestion made by one of the speakers as to whether Friends could consistently pay income tax, Charles Paxson said that there was a time when refusal to pay taxes to be used for purposes of war was the only way in which Quakers could bear testimony against this evil. Today there are many and more efficient ways. Friends are loyal to the government, even though there may be some points in which they differ from its present policy. Taxes are not all used for war purposes, and the refusal to pay them would gain nothing in point of principle and would do harm by being misunderstood and misinterpreted.…

I’m curious as to what Paxson meant by these “more efficient ways” of bearing testimony against war that had in his view made war tax resistance obsolete.

Some bits and pieces from here and there.

On , William Edgerton addressed a conference at Spiceland (Indiana) Quarterly Meeting (of Quakers), and touched on the decline of war tax resistance in the Society of Friends. Excerpts:

One definition of militarism is “a warlike or military spirit.” That spirit persecuted our church fathers because they refused to bear arms, and consistently declined to use them even in self-defence. By their patience and fortitude under suffering, they fairly earned the reputation we have inherited of being as a body opponents of all war. Within the memory of living men this spirit imposed fines on Friends or whoever refused to muster, i.e., take lessons in the art of manslaughter, and further distrained property if the fines were not paid.

Those regarded then as consistent Friends refused to pay, and suffered the loss. The principle was held so firmly that not a few were disowned (before my recollection), as I am informed, for paying their fines.

Later, those who paid their fines were not disciplined, and so by degrees and by temporizing the clearness of the testimony was lost.

When the Civil War came on, Southern Friends much more generally adhered to their peace principles and suffered personal abuse than did those under the Washington government. Its lenient Secretary of War, after conference with representative Friends, consented that conscientious persons might take places in hospital service instead of using guns. Some, perhaps, availed themselves of this questionable commutation, but observation, confirmed by reports of recruiting officers, warrants the belief that the large yearly meetings of the middle West furnished as many soldiers in proportion to their membership as other denominations, or even the general citizenship. For generations Friends had been known as opposed on principle to both war and slavery, and thus it came about that the Quakerly hatred of slavery and the inherited hatred of war were set over against each other. For Friends to appear to be neutral in this death struggle between slavery and the government would look like a betrayal of the sacred cause of freedom. To profess sympathy with the purpose of government, and yet refuse the support able-bodied Friends could give in military service, would seem to the authorities and our unconvinced members, too, as inconsistent, if not insincere.

Under this utmost possible strain — apparent conflict between two righteous commandments — our practical testimony against war broke down. Whether this consideration palliates the course of those who engaged in fighting or not, when the church never disowned a soldier as such, nor demanded that he condemn his conduct, nothing can avert the conclusion that the standard erected by our fathers has been let down.

Indeed, are not many active members regularly drawing pensions as soldiers? I am credibly informed that some recorded ministers do that very thing.

The fact that this growing militarism has invaded the church and practically silenced the pulpit is the saddest features of this crisis. While the salt holds its savor there is hope. When that is lost it is sure to be trodden under foot of men.

E.H. Crosby, in the “Episcopal Recorder,” as quoted in The American Friend, , announced this startling conclusion: “I am driven reluctantly to this conclusion, which I only express here under a grave sense of duty, and that is that the churches are the chief strongholds in Christendom of the spirit of warfare.”

If truth warrants a picture so dark as this, or near it, is there not a fearful responsibility resting on our church which in its youth saw in the sight of God this vital truth and proclaimed it in the face of hostile churchmen? Dare we allow that banner to trail in the dust? The statement in our Discipline is complete as far as profession can go. But is the book of Discipline a sufficient candlestick? Will our light thus reach the public, and especially the officers chosen to direct the government and decide between war and peace?

I know of no rule as to how frequently our principles should be publicly restated. Once in a generation would surely be too seldom. I believe that by next yearly meeting time we ought to ask the attention of government, and the public as well, while we reiterate our doctrine on the peace question, and fortify it as well as we may with reason and Scripture.

The argument can easily be made strong enough to command respect, but will fail of effective influence, I fear, because of our well-known shortcomings in practical consistency. If truth backs the taunt, “Physician, heal thyself,” who can but quail? When we are convinced of sin, either as churches or individuals, the best course is to confess, repent and amend the life — better acknowledge the truth though it humbles us in the dust. We have not consistently maintained our testimony against war; and it is simply impossible to reverse the movement of our body and recover the environment and temper of our Society one hundred years ago. Then, a member who should go to war would no more be quietly retained in Society than a horse thief. Indeed, mankilling was regarded as worse than stealing. Even dealing in prize goods was forbidden.

Since we cannot go backward to the place where we left the true course, what can we do? Go forward. Though preaching unsupported by practice is shorn of half its force, still truth has power in and of itself regardless of who proclaims it, and will win its way. Notwithstanding their failures, Friends have still a commission from heaven which they dare not disregard — to portray before all men the horrors and sinfulness of war and the joys and beauty of peace, and especially to appeal to fellow Christians.

In conclusion, let us glance at the present condition of the world relative to war and peace. The agreement of the Hague Conference to establish a Court of Nations has culminated lately in the appointment of the fifty-second member of this truly Supreme (earthly) Court. Other nations will yet appoint, but by proclamation of Secretary Hay it is now organized and ready for business. Any nation at variance with another has now the chance to avoid war without dishonor and yet obtain justice. This is a great advance on old sanguinary methods, I gladly admit, though I cannot see such a rosy dawn of the triumph day for peace as some do. The nations have come very far toward our light. Never must we suffer it to become darkness. And yet, when we cannot forget that nearly ever since the adjournment of the Peace Conference England and America have been in bloody conflict with foreigners, most of whom they superciliously call “child people,” it is enough to make the heart sink and almost despair. Add to this the fact that while our government is demanding by shot and shell the unconditional submission of the Filipinos, a Presidential election occurs and the same party and policy receives a sweeping endorsement by re-election, not only without protest from the Christian Church, but by the help of the votes of its membership, and the cloud assumes almost inky blackness.

The silver lining to this cloud is visible only from this standpoint: neither nation dared defy humanity’s aversion to war simply as war; i.e., for conquest or revenge. They paid some deference to the Christian public sentiment of the nations of the world.

If the real motive was greed of gain or thirst for dominion the rulers felt obliged to conceal it under a cloak of “justice to the Uitlanders and protection to the natives” in South Africa; and in the West Indies, better still, a plea of “compassion for the poor Cubans, whose sufferings under the yoke of Spanish cruelty we could not bear to witness.”

May the day soon arrive when even such devices as these cannot avail to save the horrid head of war from its death blow.

I think now, more than a century on, this experiment in “going forward” can safely be judged a failure. Edgerton’s description of the hypocritical figleaf of humanitarian intervention applies just as aptly to the militaristic imperialism of today, and Christianity is by-and-large just as willing to go along with it or applaud the uniforms it poses in.

I entertained some similar thoughts to Edgerton’s when I looked at the deceptions and distortions that American hawks were twisting themselves into in order to justify their wars and thought to myself, well, at least they feel like they have to dress up their bloodlust in fancy clothes to get people to go along with it… there must be some silver lining there. Today, though, I have a harder time discerning any shine. I think it may have just been wishful thinking.

From the Catholic Herald for

Quakers: no tax for war

So strong are the Quakers objections to any part of their taxes being used for military purposes, they are bringing the matter up as a major subject at their Yearly Meeting plenary session on .

The Quakers are committed to “upholding their historic peace testimony”, and a “Peace Committee of Quaker Peace and Service” has been set up to examine the issue. In the last few years growing numbers of individual Quakers have been appearing in county and higher courts for seeking to divert the proportion of their tax to nonmilitary purposes.

Eleanor Barden (a member of the Peace Committee) in “The Friend”, on May 8, identifies the issues. “Is war tax resistance the modern equivalent of conscientious objection in World Wars One and Two?” she asks, because the nature of warfare has changed so drastically in the last few decades.

At Friend’s House, a group of staff were instrumental in arranging for the Society of Friends, their employers, to withhold a proportion of their PAYE in order to test the law. The case was dismissed by the House of Lords.

Here is what the London Yearly Meeting came up with in with regards to war tax resistance:

We are trustees of a long tradition which has sought to bring our religious convictions into the world “and so excite our endeavours to mend it”. We are trying to live in the virtue of that life and power that takes away the occasion of all wars.

Fundamentally, taxation for war purposes is not a political or a fiscal issue. We are convinced by the Spirit of God to say without any hesitation whatsoever that we must support the right of conscientious objection to paying taxes for war purposes. We realise that we live in a world where it is impossible to see clearly the final consequences of the actions we might initiate from this Meeting. Nevertheless we are impelled by our vision of a peaceful and loving society.

We ask Meeting for Sufferings to explore further and with urgency the role our religious society should corporately take in this concern and then to take such action as it sees necessary on our behalf. We know that this is only one further step in our witness to the Truth, to which we are continually summoned. We go forward in God’s strength.

Here is some of the background: the Meeting had started not withholding taxes from the paychecks of employees who had conscientious objections to paying. The London Yearly Meeting was taken to court over this, and lost an appeal in 1985, whereupon it resumed withholding the taxes (while pursuing the case in the European Commission of Human Rights, which also turned them down).

So the language “we must support the right of conscientious objection to paying taxes for war purposes” by this time meant more of a statement of opinion than a statement of intention. The Meeting itself by this time was not resisting but was paying such taxes, while promoting the point of view that people ought to have the “right” not to.

Here is how the Meeting explained its position in 1991:

The Religious Society of Friends has, since its beginnings in the seventeenth century, borne witness against war and armed conflict as contrary to the spirit and teachings of Christ. We have sought to build institutions and relationships which make for peace and to resist military activity. The horrific nature of modern armaments makes our witness particularly urgent. The Gulf War involved the substantial use of expensive modern weapons and technology, demonstrating that today it is the conscription of our money rather than our bodies which makes war possible.

For many years members of the Religious Society of Friends have been exercised about how we might be true to our historic peace testimony while still obeying the laws of our country. You will know that we have appealed through the courts and ultimately to the European Commission of Human Rights for recognition of the right of conscientious objection to paying taxes for military purposes…

Since losing the appeal we have paid in full the income tax collected from our employees. In recent months we have considered whether we can continue to do this, but after very careful consideration have decided that for the time being we must do so. The acceptance of the rule of law is part of our witness, … for a just and peaceful world cannot come about without this. However we do wish to make it clear that we object to the way in which the PAYE [withholding] system involves us in a process of collecting money, used in part to pay for military activity and war preparations, which takes away from the individual taxpayer the right to express their own conscientious objection. This involvement is incompatible with our work for peace.

Some bits and pieces from here and there:

I dug up some information about the New York Yearly Meeting of Friends rediscovering and promoting tax resistance. I’ve since found a newspaper article that gives a few more details about this (from the Kingston, New York Daily Freeman, ):

Quakers List Guidelines For Viet Nam War Action

Thousands of American Quakers could suffer persecution and imprisonment reminiscent of their early struggles 300 years ago in England and America if they take to heart the guidelines they drew up at their annual sessions recently at Silver Bay.

In what may well be the strongest message of by a major body within the denomination, Quakers were urged “unequivocally and at all costs” to hold to their Peace Testimony first formulated in a “Declaration from the harmless an innocent people of God called Quakers” to King Charles Ⅱ of England. In quaint language, the statement proclaimed: “We utterly deny all outward wars and strife, and fightings with outward weapons, for any end, or under any pretense whatever; this is our testimony to the whole world… The Spirit of Christ, which leads us to all truth will never move us to fight and war against any man with any outward weapons, neither for the Kingdom of Christ nor for the Kingdoms of this world… therefore we cannot learn war any more.”

The implications of this testimony for members of the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers), in a country engaged in a war in Southeast Asia in were not left in doubt by the recent message. Friends were urged to “examine their consciences concerning whether they cannot more fully disassociate themselves from the war machine by tax refusal or by changing occupations,” or whether young men “can submit to a military system that commands them to kill and destroy.”

Civil Disobedience Advocated

Friends are counselled to “risk whatever penalties might be incurred” in obeying the Inner Light (Holy Spirit) “even when this means disobeying man’s laws.[”] Material and spiritual help for individuals and their families imprisoned or otherwise afflicted because of “acts of conscience” is to be administered by establishing again the “Committee for Sufferings” which Quakers developed during their early years of persecution.

The religious body proved its intentions to go beyond written words and not to let the risks of conscientious acts challenging government laws fall upon individuals alone. As a corporate body it authorized violation of the Federal Export Control Act under which officers of the Society of Friends could receive five years imprisonment or fines up to $20,000.

In asking for its “Peace in Viet Nam” Committee to send in the name of the New York Yearly Meeting of the Religious Society of Friends, parcels of medical supplies to the Red Cross society in South Viet Nam, North Viet Nam, and the National Liberation Front, the Quaker organization said that the law it is breaking violates its religious concern to extend humanitarian relief to all who suffer in war, regardless of their geographical or racial identity or their political or national allegiances.

It was pointed out that the steps taken by the 402 delegates and members in attendance at Silver Bay are all the more remarkable because decisions are based on “concensus” [sic] meaning complete or nearly complete unity. Quakers do not favor actions which force a minority to accept the will of a majority, and will postpone action on any matter where a division of opinion is apparent. One Quaker explained their united action this way:

“The shadow of Viet Nam’s tragedy hung like a dark cloud over the week long meetings at Silver Bay. A common sense of divine urgency and of historic moment was felt as the weight of this concern was expressed again and again. We knew that we must speak with our lives.”

The New York Yearly Meeting of the Religious Society of Friends includes 6,765 Quakers from 72 local meetings in New York State, Northern New Jersey, and Southern Connecticut.

People will be less reluctant to take risks in a tax resistance campaign if they know other people are willing to share those risks. One way of providing this sort of reassurance is for resisters to join together in a mutual insurance plan, so that if the government takes legal action against a resister, or retaliates against them in some other way, they won’t have to bear these consequences alone.

Today I’ll review some examples of how a variety of tax resistance campaigns have created mutual insurance plans to protect resisters.

War Tax Resisters Penalty Fund

The War Tax Resisters Penalty Fund reimburses American war tax resisters who have penalties & interest seized by the IRS. The fund is operated by a team of resisters and sympathizers, and has hundreds of subscribers:

In a core group of 83 people across the country decided we could easily share $463.14 in penalties and interest incurred by a few military tax resisters who appealed to the war tax resistance community for help. The more people we could recruit to shoulder the penalties and interest of resisters, the lighter the burden for everyone. With the modest help we could provide, conscientious resisters were able to keep on keeping on.

The penalty fund had the added benefit of making us all tax resisters, not just those who withheld all or a portion of their income taxes. The base list of supporters has been as high as 800 people sharing the weight. In nearly every appeal, at least 200 people respond, usually more. In all we’ve paid out about $250,000 to help resisters stay in the struggle.

Resisters who have had money seized by the IRS send the fund documentation showing how much of the seizure was the result of interest and penalties, and then the fund sends out an appeal to its members to help reimburse the cost:

We divide the total amount for all resisters by the number of active names on the membership list to arrive at a “share.” We then send out an appeal to both actives and inactive members. Each contributor pays all of a share or whatever amount she can afford. Some pay more than a share. If we collect 75 percent of the total we ask for, each resister gets 75 percent of the amount they requested. We cannot promise that we will collect the total amount requested; usually, however, we can reimburse between 50% and 80% of each appeal.

I have personal experience with this mutual insurance plan. In the IRS seized some bank accounts of mine to recover taxes I had refused to pay. This included $813 in interest and penalties. I applied to the War Tax Resisters Penalty Fund, which sent me a check for $649 from the amount the subscribers to the fund pledged.

Irish Land League

When the National Land League launched a rent strike targeting English absentee landlords in Ireland in , it made sure resisters knew it would have their backs if the landlords tried to evict them. The leaders of the League issued a rent strike manifesto from Kilmainham Jail that declared:

If you only act together in the spirit to which within the last two years you have countless times pledged your vows, they can no more evict a whole nation than they can imprison them.

The funds of the National Land League will be poured out unstintingly for the support of all who may endure eviction in the course of the struggle. Our exiled brothers in America may be relied upon to contribute if necessary as many millions of money as they have contributed thousands to starve out landlordism and bring English tyranny to its knees.

One of the ways this played out was for evicted tenants to be temporarily put up, along with their livestock if any, on the property of unevicted tenants and sympathetic landowners, in what came to be called “Land League Villages.” Each family was given a small monthly allowance from the Land League.

Dublin Water Charge Strike

In , the resistance campaign against the water charge in Dublin initiated a mutual insurance fund. One of the campaign leaders recalls:

Obviously the council/government tactic was to try to individualise their intimidation. By summonsing individuals to court maybe they could bypass the mass participation that the protests against disconnections had seen. The campaign immediately took a decision that when any individual was summonsed to court, we would turn up and contest every case — and that we would turn up in force. It was at this time that we made a decision which would prove crucial to the success of the campaign. We decided to initiate a membership of the campaign at £2 per household. This money would go into a warchest to pay legal fees so that no individual would be left facing a legal bill. The idea that the individuals being taken to court were representing all of us was paramount. Within weeks 2,500 households had paid the £2 membership fee, and within 12 months there were over 10,000 paid-up households making the campaign without doubt the biggest to have existed in decades.

Breton Association

When Charles Ⅹ of France attempted to bypass the legislature and enact his own taxes in , French liberals in the Breton Association organized tax resistance and created a fund to defray the costs of any tax resisters who were prosecuted. By the terms of the Association’s manifesto:

We declare… [t]o subscribe individually for ten francs… This subscription will form a common stock or fund for all Brittany, destined to indemnify the subscribers for any expense they may be put to by their refusal to pay any illegal contributions imposed upon the public…

And this is how the fund was to be administered:

[Elected procurators are to] receive the subscriptions, to afford indemnities conformably to the [section quoted above], at the request of any subscriber prosecuted for the payment of illegal contributions; to sue in his name… for justice against the exactors by all possible means allowed by law…

War of the Regulation

The Regulator movement, a tax resistance rebellion in pre-American Revolution North Carolina, had an oath that members took that committed each of them to come to the aid of any others who might be arrested or whose property was being seized for nonpayment:

I will, with the aid of other sufficient help, go and take, if in my power, from said officer, and return to the party from whom taken; and in case any one concerned should be imprisoned, or under arrest, or otherwise confined, or if his estate, or any part thereof, by reason or means of joining this company of Regulators, for refusing to comply with the extortionate demands of unlawful tax gatherers, that I will immediately exert my best endeavors to raise as many of said subscribers as will be force sufficient, and, if in my power, I will set the said person at liberty…

The oath also created a mutual insurance pledge:

I do further promise and swear that if, in case this, our scheme, should be broken or otherwise fail, and should any of our company be put to expense or under any confinement, that I will bear an equal share in paying and making up said loss to the sufferer.

Reformed Israel of Yahweh

Members of the small Christian group called the Reformed Israel of Yahweh were, like its founder, conscientious objectors to military taxation. When some of the members of the group were convicted on tax evasion charges, the Reformed Israel of Yahweh organization paid their fines.

Pacific Yearly Meeting

A committee of the collection of American Quaker congregations known as the Pacific Yearly Meeting administers something it calls “the Fund for Concerns:”

Its purpose is to assist members and attenders of Monthly Meetings to follow individual leadings arising from peace, social order, or spiritual concerns. … Up to $100 per fiscal year per person will be available to help with the interest and penalty expenses of war tax resisters who are members or regular attenders of a Monthly Meeting. The Monthly Meeting must indicate approval and provide matching funds.

New York Yearly Meeting

During the Vietnam War, the New York Yearly Meeting advocated war tax resistance and “promised financial help through special committees if [Quaker resisters] changed jobs or refused to pay taxes in protest against the war.”

Papuan Courier

In 1919, Papua, which had been a territory occupied and run by the German Empire until World War Ⅰ when Australia took over, began to agitate against taxation without representation, and many people refused to pay.

The Papuan Courier, which was sympathetic to the tax resisters,

…as evidence of its bona fides on the question, has decided, to form a fund for the defence of any resident who may by victimised, persecuted, or prosecuted for failure to pay the tax, and to that end we open the list with a contribution of Five Guineas.

Tithe War

In , Irish Catholics rebelled against paying government-mandated tithes to the Anglican church. In this case, the Catholic church itself provided some insurance to the resisters. The Anglican archbishop Richard Whately complained:

Every possible legal evasion has been resorted to to prevent the incumbent from obtaining his due. A parish purse has been raised to meet law expenses for this purpose, and the result has been that in most instances nothing whatever, in others a very small proportion of the arrears, has been recovered. … [One Anglican clergyman] instituted a tithe-suit which was decided in his favour; but, instead of receiving the amount, he was met by an appeal to the High Court of Delegates, and is informed that a continued resistance to the utmost extremity of the law is to be supported by a parish purse.

Addio-Pizzo Movement

In , a number of individuals and businesses opposed to paying mafia protection money began to use a number of techniques to interrupt the payments and to support those resisters whom the mafia was threatening with reprisals. The mayor of Palermo, Diego Cammarata, pledged €50,000 to assist merchants who had been victims of extortion.

Peacemakers

The group “Peacemakers,” which launched the modern American war tax resistance movement , had a mutual insurance component from the beginning:

Peacemakers at the Ohio cell… established the Peacemaker Sharing Fund, a mutual aid plan designed to insure aid to dependents of imprisoned Peacemakers and to help finance group projects. During the Vietnam war, the sharing fund became the main vehicle for donations to meet the needs of war resisters’ families.

Penalty Sharing Community

The Iowa Peace Network maintains a mailing list of persons who have made a commitment to the Penalty Sharing Community to share in the penalties assessed to individuals and families who have chosen to resist war taxes or have participated in civil disobedience or non-violent direct action. When a request for assistance is received, a mailing is sent out which explains the resister’s situation and the amount of money needed. For example, if the resister was assessed a $300.00 penalty, each of the persons in the Community would pay an equal portion of the $300.00. Thus if there were 200 people in the Community, each would pay $1.50. The Iowa Peace Network will also add into the amount requested its costs for printing and mailing. Such costs have proven to be minimal.

Pioneer Valley War Tax Resisters

Members of the Pioneer Valley War Tax Resisters redirected their federal taxes into an “alternative fund” that served partially as an escrow account, and partially as a way of redirecting some of the money to charitable organizations. Part of the fund was reserved to help defray any legal costs incurred by members in the course of their resistance.

“New Rush” Resisters

White miners at the “New Rush” in Kimberly, South Africa, voted in to form “a Defence League and Protection Association… not to assail the Government, but to protect individuals if assailed unrighteously by the Government.” The pledge of the association said in part:

I shall to the utmost of my power, with purse and person, protect any and every officer and member of the League against coercion or consequences of what nature soever arising out of the action necessitated by this pledge.

The pledge had a clause that made it binding when it would be signed by 400 men, whereupon:

The Government will be defied if they dare to touch a single claim for non-payment of license. The diamond buyers will refuse to pay further license and will be defended from harm.

Ruhrkampf

When the Ruhr region of Germany began resisting reparation payments to the victorious nations of World War Ⅰ, France and Belgium occupied the region to take the payments by force. Germans responded with a campaign of mass nonviolent resistance, including tax resistance, and were backed up by their own government.

One of the ways the German government supported the campaign was by paying the strikers itself, to the tune of 715 million marks. It did this in part by printing off more currency, which helped fuel the hyperinflation of (itself a sort of resistance strategy that made it difficult or impractical to account for reparations payments).

Louisiana Anti-Reconstructionists

During the “Reconstruction” period after the American Civil War, white supremacists in Louisiana refused their allegiance to a federally-backed, mixed-race state government, and demonstrated this through tax resistance.

Several attorneys issued a statement offering to “engage themselves, without compensation, and as a matter of public service, to defend professionally all [tax resisters].” A mass-meeting issued a tax resistance pledge, and resolved:

That a committee of five be appointed to draw up a plan by which the citizens may co-operate, to employ counsel and mutually assist each other in their refusal to pay taxes.

Satyagraha in South Africa

Gopal Krishna Gokhale, an officer in the Indian National Congress fighting for the independence of India, pledged £2,000 a month to support Indian satyagrahis in South Africa who were engaged in tax resistance and other tactics under Gandhi’s direction.

In the modern world, many governments have introduced income tax withholding or “pay as you earn.” In such a scheme, it can be difficult for people to resist paying income tax, as the tax has already been paid on their behalf by their employers. In such cases, resisters need their employers to be willing to go out on a limb and resist alongside them.

Today I’ll give some examples of employers who helped their employees resist income tax withholding.

Quaker Meetings

Quaker Meetings (congregations and collections of congregations) have sometimes supported the war tax resistance of their employees by not withholding taxes from their paychecks.

The Philadelphia Yearly Meeting, for instance, has the following policy [excerpts]:

Philadelphia Yearly Meeting of the Religious Society of Friends (Yearly Meeting) has discerned and again affirms that conscientious objection to paying taxes supporting military purposes is an appropriate and traditional individual expression of the Friends Peace Testimony. As a result, Yearly Meeting has a religious duty to refrain from taking action that violates an employee’s expression of conscience in such historic Friends testimonies. …

At the written request of an employee pursuant to this Policy, Yearly Meeting will withhold from an employee’s gross salary or wages, but refuse to forward to IRS, amounts up to but not in excess of the military portion of the federal income tax otherwise due on that employee’s pay. Yearly Meeting, in notifying IRS that it has not remitted a portion of withheld taxes, will disclose and advise IRS of its action, as described [below]…

Yearly Meeting will communicate at least annually with an appropriate office or official of the IRS to explain that, pursuant to this Policy and Yearly Meeting’s core religious principles, it has withheld the full amount of taxes, as indicated by form(s) W-4, from the salaries of certain employees opposed to the payment of taxes for military purposes. Yearly Meeting will further explain that, at the request of each such employee, it has not remitted the portion of the amount withheld which the employee has conscientiously refused to pay, that it has identified the amounts not remitted in its records, and that the amounts not remitted, plus interest, will be paid over to the Treasury of the United States on behalf of the employees at such time as there is assurance that the taxes will not be used for military purposes.

The Meeting was taken to court in for failing to remit $11,224 in taxes from resisting employees. More recently, the Meeting has been pursuing legal arguments in support of its employee Priscilla Adams, who has been resisting war taxes for years with the help of the Meeting. The Meeting was unable to convince a court to order the IRS to respect its conscientious scruples, and the agency ordered to Meeting to garnishee Adams’s salary. The Meeting has continued to refuse.

The London Yearly Meeting for a while withheld a portion of the pay-as-you-earn withholding of some of its employees, hoping to make this a test case that might legalize conscientious objection to military taxation. The courts rejected their arguments, and an appeal to the European Commission of Human Rights also failed, and so the Meeting stopped trying to resist military taxation and now gives war tax resistance only rhetorical support:

Since losing the appeal we have paid in full the income tax collected from our employees. In recent months we have considered whether we can continue to do this, but after very careful consideration have decided that for the time being we must do so. The acceptance of the rule of law is part of our witness, … for a just and peaceful world cannot come about without this. However we do wish to make it clear that we object to the way in which the PAYE [withholding] system involves us in a process of collecting money, used in part to pay for military activity and war preparations, which takes away from the individual taxpayer the right to express their own conscientious objection. This involvement is incompatible with our work for peace.

American Friends Service Committee

During the Vietnam War, the American Friends Service Committee refused to withhold taxes from those of its employees who were refusing to pay taxes. Milton Mayer said, of the Committee’s action:

Under withholding, most of the people who don’t want to buy Mylai have already had it bought for them by April 15. … A few religious organizations — not the churches, of course — have refused to withhold the tax from the pay of their employes who do not want to buy Mylai. The most respectable of them is the American Friends Service Committee, with which I confess to being associated. … But the AFSC has a task force of eighty Philadelphia lawyers, and one of these years a test case will go to Washington. Meanwhile, however, the conscientious citizen who waits for a test case will go on buying Mylai until the whole of Vietnam is a ditch.

The AFSC continues to support tax-resisting employees, and has had mixed luck defending itself in court. According to the NWTRCC pamphlet on Organizational War Tax Resistance:

Employers or other entities which refuse to withhold from the assets of a war tax resister on religious grounds actually have a chance of justifying their actions in court thanks to a case involving the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) and the IRS. A federal district court ruled that the AFSC and its employees had the First Amendment right not to be required to participate in the withholding system, since the IRS has other methods of satisfying its objectives, such as levies. The decision was overturned by the Supreme Court, but solely on procedural grounds. This position is possibly strengthened by the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA), passed by Congress in .

The IRS has more recently tried to send what are called “lock-in letters” to the AFSC, demanding that they withhold taxes from their resisting employees at the maximum rate permissible by law.

For a time (and this may still be the case), the AFSC policy was to obey such withholding laws and orders, but to hold back a percentage of the withheld taxes from the government, putting that percentage (a percentage they deemed equal to the percentage of the federal budget spent on the military) into an escrow account.

According to a Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration report, many employers ignore these lock-in letters. This takes some gumption. The way the law works, if an employer doesn’t comply with the lock-in letter, the employer can become liable for the taxes that the employee isn’t paying.

Mennonite General Assembly

In 1989, the Mennonite Church General Assembly adopted a resolution to “support the Mennonite General Board in establishing a policy that federal income taxes not be withheld from the wages of any of its employees who make this request because of conscientious objection to the use of their taxes for military purposes.”

The General Board, however, balked on establishing such a policy after determining “there was not enough support… to ask church boards to engage in civil disobedience.”

Restored Israel of Yahweh

The small Jehovah’s Witnesses spin-off group called the Restored Israel of Yahweh practices war tax resistance. To help facilitate this, two of them, who ran a construction business, agreed not to withhold taxes from those of their employees who were also members of that denomination.

Those two, along with the company’s bookkeeper, were taken to court and convicted of tax evasion charges, making them, according to one of their lawyers, “the first pacifist tax resisters to be prosecuted and jailed — possibly ever — for felony conspiracy to defraud the U.S. and attempted tax evasion, the most serious criminal charges in the Internal Revenue Code.”

War Resisters League & War Resisters International

In , Ralph DiGia, who was working for the War Resisters League, asked them to stop withholding federal taxes from his paycheck. The League agreed, and some other employees followed DiGia’s lead.

It had taken a lot of work to get the League to adopt a policy of tax refusal. At first, they had refused, with a member of the League’s executive committee saying “the life of the organization is at stake.” War tax resisters responded, saying: “If pacifist organizations, whose business is to create a warless world, are not ready to risk something for war resistance now, when will they be ready?” Another group, the Fellowship of Reconciliation, also refused to challenge the IRS, and some of its employees resigned over the issue.

War Resisters’ International, which is based in London, decided in to hold back a percentage of its employees’s taxes (equivalent, in its view, to the military percentage of the British national budget). The organization takes the position that conscientious objection to military taxation is an unrecognized human right, but a human right all the same, and they intend to assert it.

Collective Impressions

American war tax resister Ed Guinan for a time ran a print shop called “Collective Impressions.” “Most of the workers in the collective were rooted in a Catholic tradition of pacifism,” said Guinan, and so, the company paid its employees’ withholding not to the Internal Revenue Service but directly to the U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency.

The Agency returned the money, saying it could not accept it under such circumstances, whereupon Collective Impressions put the money into an escrow account from which it hoped to eventually be able to pay the money in a way that wouldn’t violate the pacifist beliefs of its employees, and from where it was eventually seized by the government.

Straight Lines, Ltd.

Martin Philips, director of the Welsh jewelry business “Straight Lines” stopped paying the 13.6% pay-as-you-earn withholding to the government for his employees — sending the money instead to the Overseas Development Administration as a protest against government military spending.

The government took Straight Lines to court, and eventually seized money from the company to cover the unpaid taxes.

Vivien Kellems

Soon after income tax withholding was introduced in the United States, ornery industrialist Vivien Kellems decided she was not interested in being the tax collector for her employees’ at the Kellems Cable Grip Manufacturing Company:

The most un-American phrase in our modern vocabulary is “take home pay.” What do we mean, “take home pay”? When I hire a man to work for me we discuss three things: the job to be done, the hours he shall work, and the wages he shall receive. And on Friday when he received that pay envelope, we have both fulfilled our contract for that week. There is no further obligation on either side. The money in that envelope belongs to him. He has worked for it and he has earned it. No one, not even the United States Government, has the right to touch it. Who dares to lay profane hands upon that money, to rudely filch from that free man the fruits of his labor, even before the money is in his own hands. This is a monstrous invasion of the rights of a free people and an outrageous perversion of the spirit of the Constitution. This is the miserable system foisted upon the people of our country by New Deal zealots and arrogant Communists who have wormed themselves into high places in Washington. This system is deliberately designed to make involuntary tax collectors of every employer and to impose involuntary tax servitude upon every employee. We don’t need to go to Russia for slavery, we’ve got it right here.

Paying taxes is a duty, a responsibility and a privilege of citizenship. Without taxes we can have no government. However I do not exercise other duties, responsibilities and privileges of citizenship for my employees. I do not vote for them, I do not form political opinions for them, I do not select a church for them, I do not pay real estate taxes for them. They are all free American citizens, thoroughly capable of performing all of the duties and responsibilities of citizenship for themselves. And so, from this day, I am not collecting nor paying their income taxes for them.

To demonstrate that she wasn’t against her employees paying their taxes, but only opposed to having to do it for them, she organized her employees once per quarter and allowed them, on company time, to fill out their own tax returns and to go down to the post office as a group to purchase money orders and file their own taxes.

The government subjected Kellems to a public smear campaign (which included intercepting and publicizing her love letters), and to legal action. The government won the legal battle, fining Kellems $7,600, whereupon she resumed withholding taxes from her employees’ paychecks.

George Fidenato

George Fidenato is Vivien Kellems reincarnated in today’s Italy. he has been refusing to withhold taxes from his six employees’ paychecks. “I do not want to be the tax collector. I’m not a slave of the state, and wouldn’t want to work for it even if you paid me!” As of this writing he is still pursuing legal appeals.

Indianapolis Baptist Temple

The Indianapolis Baptist Temple started refusing to pay federal taxes in , when pastor Gregory Dixon “decided the church would break all ties with the government and no longer act as its agent in withholding taxes from its employees,” citing Constitutional freedom of religion as his mandate for taking his church out from under Uncle Sam’s thumb. For several years, nothing came of this defiance, but in , the IRS started seeking back taxes, eventually filing liens against the church and against Dixon. The church fought back in court, but lost a series of appeals, finally getting turned down by the U.S. Supreme Court in , whereupon the government seized and auctioned off church property and Dixon himself was fined.

“Texas housewives”

, a group of women the press invariably referred to as the “Texas housewives” refused to withhold and pay social security taxes on the wages of their household help. The women were opposed to government-run social security, and to being enlisted as government tax collectors. They claimed also to be supported in their stand by their employees.

Money was eventually seized from their bank accounts to cover the taxes. They also pursued court appeals to try to get the tax declared unconstitutional, but in they lost their case and began paying the taxes.

The women’s suffrage movement in the United Kingdom

The National Insurance Act of required all workers to pay a portion of their paycheck into a fund for government-run health and unemployment benefits.

Members of the women’s suffrage movement saw this as another tax enacted without their consent, another example of “taxation without representation,” and another opportunity to resist.

Some members of suffrage groups were employers, and some suffrage groups had paid employees. In the Women Writers’ Suffrage League met to ask whether they “should, as a society, resist the new insurance tax and refuse to insure their secretary, with her full consent to their so doing?”

Kate Harvey refused to pay 5 shillings, 10 pence of tax for her gardener — for which she was sentenced to two months in prison.

The Women’s Freedom League refused to pay the tax on their employees — “we refuse to acquiesce in any legislation which controls the resources of women without the consent of women” — but the government seemed unwilling or unable to do more than threaten the group.

In addition to refusing to withhold taxes from the salaries of tax resisting employees (see The Picket Line for ), employers can also express their solidarity for such resisters by refusing to comply with salary levies. Here are some examples:

  • The War Resisters League has a policy of not honoring IRS levies against their employees’ salaries. According to NWTRCC’s guide to organizational war tax resistance, “though the IRS continues from time to time to send levies for other employees, they have not been enforced, and there has been little interaction between the IRS and WRL in recent years.”
  • Also according to NWTRCC’s guide, the National Campaign for a Peace Tax Fund and the Friends Committee on National Legislation have either resisted levies or established policies to resist levies should they occur.
  • The “Fifth Avenue Peace Parade Committee,” which helped fuel the anti-Vietnam War movement, refused to turn over to the IRS the paychecks of Eric Weinberger, a war tax resisting employee.
  • The Philadelphia Yearly Meeting (of Quakers) has a strong and well-thought-through policy on how to respond to IRS levies of the salaries of resisting employees. Excerpt:

    If the conscientious, war-tax-resisting employee requests, in the event that IRS serves a levy on Yearly Meeting against the salary, wages or other employee property alleged to be in the Meeting’s possession, Yearly Meeting will follow the practice approved on and decline to submit to the levy. In refusing, the Meeting will set forth its belief that military tax resistance is an appropriate individual expression of the Friends Peace Testimony and that Yearly Meeting is led, consistent with its most fundamental beliefs, to resist government efforts to coerce an employee against their conscience in such historic Friends’ testimonies.

  • The New York Yearly Meeting (of Quakers) in approved a statement in which they agreed that the meeting would refuse to honor salary levies directed at employees who were refusing taxes for conscientious reasons.
  • The Baltimore Yearly Meeting of Friends has a similar policy, and responded to one levy by telling the IRS: “The levy would require the Yearly Meeting to act against our employees’ testimony and witness. The Yearly Meeting is not ready to take that step.”
  • The Quaker magazine Friends Journal had a policy against paying such levies, and initially refused to pay $31,343 in taxes, penalties, and interest, from the salary of its editor, Vinton Deming. The magazine eventually gave in when it became clear they could not win a legal challenge to the levy.
  • The Christian activist group Sojourners has a policy of refusing to comply with government levies of the salaries of its employees who are war tax resisters. Sojourners managing director Joe Roos says, “To date we have been threatened with levies, with the confiscation of our property, with arrest and prison terms and, most recently, with the money we refused to turn over being taken out of my personal account since the IRS views me as a ‘responsible person.’ Despite all these threats, the only action they have taken is to levy our corporate account, taking the amount they say is still due plus interest, plus penalty.”
  • When some American Mennonite farmers resisted the Social Security / Medicare tax, the IRS tried to seize the money owed to them by the Amish-run milk cooperatives they worked through. According to Brad Igou, who documented such resistance for the Amish Country News, most cooperative officials refused to comply.
  • When the IRS ordered the First & Summerfield United Methodist Church in New Haven, Connecticut, to turn over the salary of their war tax resisting minister, Carl Lundborg, in , the congregation voted unanimously to refuse.
  • The IRS tried also to get war tax resisting Catholic pastor Cosmas Raimondi’s parish to turn over his salary to them in , but the parish council refused, saying that “[a]lthough we personally do not feel called to war tax resistance for ourselves, we do support the right of Father Raimondi to make that decision according to the dictates of his own conscience before God.”

Tax resisters frequently face the criticism of being freeloaders who enjoy the benefits of organized society without cooperating in the taxes necessary to fund them. This rhetorical attack paints the tax resisters as self-interested, anti-social tax evaders.

One way resisters have countered this attack is by staging flamboyant giveaways of their resisted taxes — both to make it clear that the resister does not have only selfish motives for resisting, and to demonstrate that the money is being spent for the benefit of society (and to a greater extent than if the money had been filtered through the government first).

Redirection is also a way of forging or strengthening ties with the recipient groups, and of making them aware of tax resistance as an option.

Today I will briefly describe some of the many examples of tax resisters and tax resistance campaigns that have used this technique, and the many variations they have come up with.

  • Julia “Butterfly” Hill in redirected more than $150,000 of federal taxes that she owed that year, and made a point of saying “I ‘redirect’ my taxes rather than ‘resisting’ my taxes”:

    I actually take the money that the IRS says goes to them and I give it to the places where our taxes should be going. And in my letter to the IRS I said: “I’m not refusing to pay my taxes. I’m actually paying them but I’m paying them where they belong because you refuse to do so.” They are not directing our money where it should be going, they are being horrific stewards of that money.

    • Antor Odu Ndep, executive director of Common Ground Health Clinic, accepts redirected taxes

    Antor Odu Ndep, executive director of Common Ground Health Clinic, accepts redirected taxes during a War Tax Boycott granting ceremony.

  • NWTRCC organized what it called the “War Tax Boycott” in . It encouraged people to resist as a group, and as part of their resistance, to redirect any refused taxes to one of two groups: one that concentrated on providing health assistance in New Orleans in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, and the other that provides assistance for Iraq War refugees. The campaign kept track of how much money had been redirected over the course of the boycott, and then held a press conference at which oversized checks adding up to about $325,000 were given to spokespeople for these campaigns.
  • The People’s Life Fund, associated with the group Northern California War Tax Resistance, accepts redirected taxes from resisters. If the IRS successfully seizes money from the resisters, the resisters can reclaim their donations to the Fund. Otherwise, the money remains there and earns interest and dividends. Every year the group pools these returns on investment and gives them away to local charitable organizations in a granting ceremony. Usually the grants are small — $500 or $1000 — but they give them to a dozen or more groups, which makes their granting ceremonies a good way for local charities to network with each other and for news of war tax resistance to spread in the local activist community. This same model, or one similar to it, is followed by a number of regional redirection funds associated with war tax resistance groups.
  • A family in Vermont figured out a way to get extra mileage out of their redirection: “They refused to pay 50% of their tax liability and redirected it to Plan International’s Childreach program. Childreach has a fund drive for a project to help children in Nepal and Ghana, and has received a challenge grant from the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). This means that the $211.69 that the WTR family has redirected will result in a $423.38 matching contribution from the U.S. government!”
  • In , several hundred Spanish war tax resisters redirected over €85,000 to the group “La’Onf,” which was organizing and educating about nonviolent conflict resolution techniques in Iraq.
  • The Mennonite Central Committee has established a “turning toward peace” fund especially designed for people who want to redirect their tax dollars from the government to more constructive projects — for example, education for children in Afghanistan.
  • War tax resisters Paul and Addie Snyder made a point of saying “we believe in paying taxes” as they explained in that they wouldn’t be paying those taxes to the federal government, but instead would be giving the money directly to rural poverty projects nearby.
  • In several hundred American Quaker war tax resisters paid their tax dollars to a Catholic soup kitchen in Philadelphia.
  • The Women’s Tax Resistance League largely suspended its campaign during World War Ⅰ, but one woman, writing as “A Persistent Tax Resister” wrote a letter to the editor of a suffragist paper suggesting that women “should contribute the sum she owes to the Government to a National Fund of her own choosing, and should send her donation as ‘Taxes withheld from the Government by a voteless woman.’ ” Charlotte Despard, for example, “said she had offered to give voluntarily the amount demanded of her by Revenue authorities to any war charity, but her offer had not been accepted.”
  • A war tax resistance group in Iowa used the proceeds from their redirection fund to create a scholarship for college students who would be ineligible for government financial aid because of refusal to register for the draft. Another, in Pennsylvania, made an interest-free loan to a defense committee that was supporting a group of draft resisters who were on trial.
  • In , 70 war tax resisters went to the phone company offices in Boston to pay their bills minus the federal excise tax. They then collected this refused tax ($142 worth) by passing an army helmet around, and donated it to the United Farm Workers to help them set up a clinic in California. Also , the Cornell branch of the National Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam did a similar phone company office protest and collection of redirected phone taxes, donating the money to a local Early Childhood Development program.
  • In , war tax resister Irving Hogan stood outside the Federal Building in San Francisco and redirected his federal income tax dollars one at a time — by handing them out to passers by. “I want this money to be used for the delight, not the destruction, of men,” he said. “Here: go buy yourself a beer.”
  • John and Pat Schwiebert did something similar: “One year they converted their war tax debt into five-dollar bills, which they gave to individuals waiting in line at the city unemployment office. They included a letter with each donation telling why they were doing this, and they notified media beforehand. Their actions garnered them an interview on NPR, and they received letters and cards from around the world.”
  • In a group of war tax resisters in New York redirected their war taxes as nickels that they handed out to people waiting at the bus stops on lines where fare hikes were being proposed, saying “this is where our tax dollars should be going.”

And here’s something kind of similar that doesn’t fit into any of my other categories, so I’ll toss it in here:

  • When the IRS seized back taxes from war tax resister Mary Regan’s retirement account in , she threw a fundraising party to try to raise an equivalent amount of money — not to reimburse her, but to give away to charities like “the Boston Women’s Fund, the American Civil Liberties Union, the American Friends Service Committee, a homeless shelter for youth, and the peace movement in Israel.”

From the Delaware County Daily Times from Primos, Pennsylvania, on :

Hearing set for Quaker activist Anthony

by Marion Logue
Daily Times Correspondent

Nether Providence – Quaker activist Robert Anthony is nearing the next step in his long battle with the U.S. government over his refusal to pay taxes for armaments and war. A hearing on his case is set for before the Third Circuit Court of Appeals in the U.S. Courthouse, 6th and Market, Philadelphia.

The case dates back to the Vietnam War when Anthony filed tax returns reducing his tax obligation to zero by claiming a “war crimes” deduction. When this deduction was denied by IRS in he appealed to the U.S. Tax Court, and that court’s decision against him resulted in the current case before the U.S. Court of Appeals.

As a conscientious objector, Anthony had refused to pay taxes for the war in Vietnam for several years previously by deducting part of his taxes in filing his returns. But when this money was seized by the government anyway through garnishment of wages, Anthony attempted to maintain his position by denying the IRS all information about his income . As the war drew to a close he filed returns for those years in , but deducted all tax obligations.

The key case used by the IRS concerns pacifist leader A.J. Muste, whose appeal of resulted in a court ruling that income tax payments do not interfere with religious practice by Quakers. This precedent has been used to strike down efforts by Quakers and other war tax objectors to avoid taxes related to arms and wars since that time. But Muste’s case was not carried to the Court of Appeals, where Anthony’s attorneys are arguing for a test of the Constitutional issues and an overthrow of the Muste decision.

The issues include protection of religious freedom; the authority of Congress to declare war (which it did not do in Vietnam); and enforcement of international agreements and the United Nations Charter, to which the U.S. is a party by treaties which have the force of law.

The appeal brief, submitted in for Anthony by the firm of Duane, Morris and Heckscher of Philadelphia, cites 40 court decisions supporting the claim for exemption from military taxes, and cites historic freedom of religious decisions by the Supreme Court. There are 50 pages of legal argument and history of Quaker pacifism, 54 pages of photographs and records of peace action against nuclear weapons and the Vietnam War, 20 pages of Anthony’s tax court brief, and 30 pages of supporting documents.

To authenticate current Quaker requirements for a conscientious objector’s alternative to the payment of war taxes, Anthony circulated a statement containing a pledge to pay the military portion of his income tax to an “alternative peace fund.” Such a peace fund is the goal of legislation presently included in congressional bills which specify a World Peace Tax Fund. The legislation is being promoted by a number of Quaker Yearly Meetings, several other national religious denominations and various peace organizations.

Anthony’s appeal is being backed by the Rights of Conscience Fund of the American Friends Service Committee, the Bequests Committee of Philadelphia Yearly Meeting and the Media Monthly Meeting of Friends.

A letter to the Court of Appeals, from the Media Monthly Meeting, stated: “We believe that any citizen, who on the basis of religion or conscience, is opposed to paying for armaments or war should not be compelled by the tax laws to pay taxes for these purposes. Refusal to participate in any way in killing and warfare is a basic principle of the Quaker Faith… We assert that the free exercise of the Quaker religion entails the avoidance of any participation in war or financial contribution to that part of the national budget used by the military… We urge the Congress to speedily enact legislation to provide an alternative for conscientious objectors to war under the tax laws parallel to the alternatives… provided in the draft law.”

How did that work out for Mr. Anthony? Not favorably:

In a twenty-two sentence decision the Appeals Court ruled that proof of the violation of [Anthony’s] First Amendment right was legally irrelevant to the issue of the payment of the tax and penalties because “the Tax Court correctly determined that the violation alleged by taxpayer would not, if true, constitute defenses to his obligation to pay income tax.”

That quote comes from his subsequent Supreme Court appeal, which that court declined to address.

I’m impressed by the strong language in the Media Monthly Meeting’s letter (“We assert that the free exercise of the Quaker religion entails the avoidance of any participation in war or financial contribution to that part of the national budget used by the military…”). That’s about the strongest statement on war tax resistance I can think of from a Meeting in recent decades. It ranks among the strongest from any period, and stands out in particular contrast to the often vague and lukewarm statements on war tax refusal from Meetings over the last century.

Governments spend a lot of time and energy, and hire a host of political scientists and other such clergy, to try to convince their subjects that paying taxes is not only mandatory, but that it’s honorable, dignified, and charitable, and that conversely, failure to pay taxes is underhanded, shady, and selfish.

So governments and other critics of tax resisters and tax resistance campaigns are quick to deploy this available propaganda lexicon in their counterattacks. This can have the effect of putting the resisters on the defensive, message-wise. One way some resisters and resistance campaigns have tried to defuse this is through the use of escrow accounts.

The idea here is that instead of paying taxes to the government, the resister or resisters will pay their taxes into a special account that they will relinquish to the government at a future date if the government meets their demands. The message conveyed by this is that “we are willing to pay our share of money for the government’s upkeep — we’re not just keeping the money for ourselves — but we’re not going to do so until the government shapes up.”

Here are some examples of tax resisters and tax resistance campaigns that have used this technique:

  • In , Samoan chiefs met and decided to pay their taxes not to the German imperialist government, but to officers who were authorized to hand the money over to the Germans only if “a satisfactory settlement has been arrived at.”
  • In , a group of Catholic war veterans in Queens, New York began paying their property taxes into an escrow fund that they said they would refuse to turn over to the local government until it fired a Communist Party member from his post as a government advisor.
  • In New Guinea, in , natives in the Mataungan Association, upset at their political control being diluted in a local government that included immigrant representatives, set up its own tax agency and collected $29,000 “which, it says, it is holding in trust until the council reverts to its old native-only status.”
  • In the Friends Meeting at Cambridge established a “Peace Tax Fund” that worked partially as a redirection fund, but which also anticipated that some contributors would want to release the funds to the government if the government provided a way to do so that would not make them complicit in military spending.
  • Ed Guinan resisted his small business’s taxes by sending the checks to the U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency. “They return it with a polite note saying that they cannot accept it, and we put it into a tax escrow account which cannot be used for normal business expenses.”
  • In , the Nashua Area War-Tax Resistance Support Group decided to keep the withheld taxes of its members in escrow “to be given to the government when policies change and when the money will be used for purposes other than war.” Resisters could reclaim their money from the fund if the IRS seized money from them individually, and meanwhile the interest earned in the account would be given to charitable causes.
  • New England War Tax Resistance set up three funds — a mutual insurance “penalty fund,” a “Direct Giving Fund” for resisters who wanted to immediately redirect their taxes, and an escrow fund which would hold on to resisters’ money in case they at some future point decided they wanted to settle with the IRS.
  • The Purchase Quarterly Meeting of Quakers set up something called the “Peace Tax Escrow Account” to which resisters could deposit their refused taxes and which the Meeting said it would turn over to the government if the government gave taxpayers a mechanism to pay such taxes without paying for the military functions of government.
  • In , District of Columbia politician Walter Fauntroy, upset at the District’s lack of political representation at the federal level, “asked city residents to file federal tax returns but withhold payment of federal taxes and place the money in an escrow account to be established by a group called ‘Taxation Without Representation Committee.’ ”
  • The Philadelphia Yearly Meeting of Quakers lost a court battle in which the IRS hoped to force them to withhold taxes from a war tax resisting employee. They began withholding the taxes as ordered, but rather than submitting them to the IRS, they put the withheld money into an escrow account and told the agency they’d have to seize it themselves.
  • In , the Chamber of Commerce in Tijuana, Mexico decided to withhold taxes in protest against inadequate security during a crime wave there. The group brought in accounting consultants to help them establish an escrow account, in the hopes that the gesture would discourage the government from classifying the member businesses as tax delinquents.
  • In , New York state assemblyman Greg Ball encouraged his constituents not to pay their Metropolitan Commuter Transportation Mobility Tax but to instead deposit the amount due into an escrow account which would not be relinquished until the Metropolitan Transit Authority were audited and reformed.
  • In , shopkeepers in San Juan, Argentina, protesting against competition from untaxed and unregulated street vendors, began paying their taxes into a fund that they say they will only relinquish to the government when it begins to crack down on the street vendors.
  • In , Markus Zwicklbauer, a 58-year-old tax consultant from Fürstenzell, Germany, began paying his taxes instead into an escrow account which he says he will release to the government if the government can show him to his satisfaction that it will be spent for the benefit of German citizens and not wasted on bailouts of other Eurozone nations.
  • A bar owner in Michigan in , struggling in the wake of an indoor smoking ban that discouraged her customers, organized a tax protest of similarly-situated businesses that involved paying taxes into escrow.

Mary Stone McDowell is a rare — perhaps unique — example of someone who took a war tax resistance stand during World War Ⅰ and was also part of the post World War Ⅱ revival of war tax resistance in America.

From the New York Herald (excerpt):

Woman Teacher Is Suspended on Pacifist Charge

Miss Mary S. McDowell, Member of Society of Friends, to Face Trial.

Miss Mary S. McDowell, a teacher of Latin in the Manual Training High School, was suspended from duty without pay as a result of charges of pacifism brought against her several weeks ago by the Board of Superindendents.

The order suspending Miss McDowell, issued by Dr. Gustave Straubenmuller, acting Superintendent of Schools, was approved formally by the Board of Education at its meeting. In the formal notice the cause for suspension is given as “conduct unbecoming a teacher.”

Miss McDowell will be called before a special committee of the School Board to show cause why she should not be dismissed from the service. No date has been set for the trial.

Miss McDowell, who lives with her mother at No. 20 Crooke avenue, Brooklyn, is a member of the Society of Friends and declares that by reason of her faith she conscientiously is opposed to war and all its activities. It is alleged she repeatedly refused to sign loyalty pledges circulated among the teachers and refused to take part in Red Cross work and Liberty Bond sales.

Miss McDowell has been a teacher in the public schools for thirteen years and, in the opinion of Dr. Straubenmuller, is “a very estimable woman and an excellent Latin teacher, with unfortunate views regarding the war.”

(The New York Times, always jealous in defending its own freedom of speech, though it so rarely has anything to say that the government would find any need to censor, editorialized that “it becomes the Friends to retire from and to keep out of positions which in their very nature involved the declaration and teaching of patriotism as it is understood by a majority of human beings so large that its members have a right to consider themselves normal and everybody else abnormal. For these reasons it seems to us that a Friend, at this time, is distinctly out of place as a teacher in a public school — that if well advised such a teacher will resign, and that if not docile to good counsel, he or she, as the case may be, should be dismissed.”)

From the Brooklyn Eagle:

Ex-Boro Teacher Joins 69 in Income Tax Defy

, but 70 pacifists throughout the country, including a former school teacher in Brooklyn, will refuse to pay Uncle Sam who, they say, is spending his money preparing for a war.

The group has grown since when about 40 pacifists, objecting to the “war preparations,” refused to pay either all or a part of their taxes.

Mary McDowall of 555 Ocean Ave., a Quaker who taught Latin at Abraham Lincoln High School until her retirement five years ago, is a member of the group, known as the Tax Refusal Committee of Peacemakers.

“I’m Not Stingy”

Miss McDowall has withheld one-third of her total tax, claiming “at least that proportion is used for war preparation.” The withheld amount, she points out is donated to the American Friends Service Committee (Quakers).

“I don’t want the money I withhold,” she says. “I’m not stingy. I merely won’t help in construction for war.

Miss McDowall’s Quaker principles caused her suspension from the faculty of Manual Training High School in . She was suspended for “disloyalty and insubordination,” having refused to take part in the school’s patriotic aid program of World War Ⅰ.

She was cleared and reinstated in when it was officially admitted that her Board of Education trial had been held “at a time of great public excitement.”

Has Jaile[d] Confrere

The 70 “tax refusers,” in a statement issued at their headquarters, 2013 5th Ave., Manhattan, announced they “hail the courage of Katsuki James Otsuka,” who drew a three-month Federal sentence and a $100 fine in Indianapolis earlier this month for refusing to pay $4.50 in income taxes.

Otsuka also refused to pay the fine, choosing instead an additional sentence.

Among the organization’s Manhattan members is Sander Katz, 25, who served 19 months in jail for refusing to report for induction in World War Ⅱ and who was sentenced to another year and a day for refusing to register under the Draft Act.

Another Brooklyn Eagle article, from, I think, around :

Pacifist Balks at “War” Use of Income Tax

Mary S. McDowell, 74, retired public school teacher of 555 Ocean Ave., wants it known that again this year she is paying only two-thirds of her Federal income tax.

The reason, she advised during a call at the Brooklyn Eagle office, is that she is opposed to war and refuses to finance the manufacture of war materials.

“An estimated third of income tax collections goes for defense,” she said. “So one-third of my tax payment, or what would be a third of it, I am giving to a charity. I did it last year on my own initiative and this year I am withholding one-third as a member of the ‘Peacemakers’.”

From its Manhattan office at 2013 5th Ave. the Peacemakers issued a press release in which it described itself as “a national pacifist movement” and listed “27 men and 19 women in scattered parts of the United States” who are not paying income taxes because they “refuse to finance war preparations.” Miss McDowell is among those listed.

“I am a Quaker,” said Miss McDowell, the only Brooklynite on the Peacemakers’ list. “I have always been opposed to war. Not paying income tax is a practical Way of expressing opposition to war.

“I was opposed to the first World War. I was teaching at Manual Training High School then. Because of my expressed opposition I was fired. It wasn’t until that I was reinstated as a teacher.”

She was at Abraham Lincoln when she retired in .

The Peacemakers’ list of tax rebels includes the names of the Rev. A.J. Muste of 21 Audubon Ave., Manhattan, described as secretary of the organization, and the Rev. Ernest R. Bromley of Wilmington, Ohio, named as chairman of the Tax Refusal Committee.

“One omission from the list,” the release explains, “is the name of Katsuki James Otsuka, an earlham college student of Richmond, Ind. He was released on after serving nearly five months in the Federal Correctional Institution, Ashland, Ky., for his refusal to pay $4.50 income taxes. He was released even though he continued to refuse to pay. His name does not appear because his imprisonment prevented his earning a taxable income for .”

The Eagle covered her protest again in :

Kansas Tax Conchies

Topeka, Kan., (U.P.) — Kansas Internal Revenue officials had two “conscientious objectors” on their hands today when Edith Aldis and the Rev. Gerhard Friesen defied Federal income tax laws on grounds that “too much of the money goes for military armament.” Both have signed a statement issued by the tax refusal committee of Peacemakers, a pacifist movement with headquarters in New York.

Ex-Teacher Here Joins “Tax-Refuser” Movement

A retired Brooklyn Latin teacher was one of 41 “Tax Refusers” across the nation who deducted from their Federal returns — due  — percentages they said would be used for present and future wars.

Mary S. McDowell of 555 Ocean Ave., a Quaker who started teaching in borough schools in and was suspended from the school system for pacifist activities, in a letter to the local internal revenue office said she was sending $237 — 60 percent of her return — to the American Friends Service Committee, a charity, to keep herself from being “involved in war preparations.”

The 76-year-old woman wrote: “All war is contrary to the essential principle of Christianity and to the basic faith of democracy.” She inclosed a pamphlet entitled “A Democratic Program for a Durable Peace” which she recently had published.

, she said, she deducted only 45 percent from her tax return. The increase this year, she explained, was prompted not by inflation but by mounting Government spending for rearmament.

Government Takes Lien

The income tax office , in a move to collect the unpaid balance of her return, placed a lien on the elderly ex-teacher’s pension.

A native of New Jersey, Miss McDowell attended Swarthmore College and taught in Manual Training and Abraham Lincoln High Schools. She retired in .

Her letter, in part, said: “I realize that I cannot entirely free myself from being involved in war preparations; but I believe it is important to bear my testimony in action as far as I can.

“Now that we are so largely devoting our men and our resources to war preparations and taking part in an armament race, it seems clearer than ever that our course may be leading toward world war and inconceivable slaughter and destruction to our own country as well as the world.

“Accordingly, it would seem that not only religious pacifists, but all intelligent true patriots should do everything in their power to halt rearmament and vastly increase constructive activities looking toward worldwide human welfare and durable peace.”

The Eagle covered her protest again in :

Woman, 77, Clings to Tax-Strike Vow

A 77-year-old former Latin teacher has taken a stand in which many of her neighbors would like to join her , although for more personal reasons. Mary McDowell of 555 Ocean Ave. has refused to pay her income tax.

Member of the Tax Refusal Committee of Peacemakers — a group of individuals scattered over the nation who withhold that part of their tax which they believe will be used for armaments — Miss McDowell held back 70 percent.

Each year the tally grows. In , the elderly teacher said, she deducted only 60 percent from her return. it was 45 percent. It is her custom to contribute the deducted amounts to the American Friends Service Committee.

The Quaker lady has been fighting a war against war nearly all her life. She started teaching in Brooklyn in but was suspended from the school system because of her pacifist activities during World War Ⅰ.

Her defiance of the tax collector, Miss McDowell calls “the new patriotism.” The popular idea, she said, holds up the soldier as a model of patriotism but, against this, she matches her own method of “trying to prevent a disaster to one’s country.”

Each year the U.S. Government refuses to be persuaded and places a lien on her teacher’s pension. Each year Miss McDowell tries, in the same way, to express her belief that “war or threats of war cannot bring security.”

The Tax Refusers, she said, “strive not only to avoid assisting in preparations for war, but also to point out constructive courses of action, that will bring durable peace through human welfare, disarmament and solution of world problems.”

Miss McDowell believes the great day of permanent peace “will come like Spring,” suddenly but only as a result of slow preparation and a multitude of just such efforts as her own small token resistance to the tax collector.

, McDowell was at it again, and the Eagle was there:

Anti-War Ex-Teacher Defies Uncle Sam Again on Taxes

Mary McDowell, 78, retired high school teacher of 555 Ocean Ave., figured out her Federal income tax.

It came to $300.

She promptly sent a check for $90 as her tax to the Internal Revenue Bureau.

“I’m paying only 30 percent of my tax,” she said .” I refuse to pay the 70 percent which goes for war purposes.”

She calls her tax defiance “the new patriotism.”

Miss McDowell is a member of the Tax Refusal Committee of Peacemakers — a group of individuals scattered over the nation who each year withhold part of their tax which they believe will go for armaments. she has withheld part of her tax.

Each year the Government refuses to go along with her and it places a lien on her teacher’s pension.

She is a Quaker and has been fighting against war all her life.

“War is contrary to Christian principles and is contrary to democratic ideals,” she contends.

In , the Mary S. McDowell story became the second of the “Profiles in Courage” featured on the short-lived television series of that name. The Friends Journal published a profile of McDowell in .

Here are a couple of newspaper articles that give a glimpse of how American Quakers addressed war tax resistance at the New York Yearly Meeting gathering at Lake George in , where “the tragic situation in Viet Nam” was high on the agenda:

The first excerpt comes from an article by Dee Wedemeyer from the Knickerbocker News:

A report published after the meeting called on members of the Society of Friends to exercise their consciences and offered support to those Quakers whose actions resulted in financial or personal loss.

“We call upon Friends to obey the Inner Light even when this means disobeying man’s laws, and to risk whatever penalties may be incurred,” said the report.

“We call upon Friends to examine their consciences concerning whether they cannot more fully dissociate themselves from the war machine by tax refusal or changing occupations.”

“We call upon Friends to urge that young men consider in conscience whether they can submit to a military system that commands to kill and destroy.”

“We call upon Friends Meetings to support acts of compromise [sic] by setting up Committees for Sufferings to keep close touch with deeply exercised Friends and their families who may need spiritual and material care because of their witness.”

So far, there has been no indication that any Friends will not pay their taxes, or refuse the draft or disobey “man’s laws.” But if any do they will be supported by other Friends.

“I’ve thought about it but I’m not persuaded that this is an effective way. I admire people if their conscience leads them to take that action,” says John Daniels, clerk of the Albany Society of Friends.

An Associated Press dispatch from , put it this way:

Quakers in the New York area have been encouraged to refuse to pay taxes or hold jobs that contribute to the war effort in Viet Nam. The Society of Friends office here made public a document or “testimony” approved at an annual meeting at Silver Bay on Lake George, N.Y.

Similar to the Peace Declaration of The Friends in 1660, the message was described as perhaps the “strongest message of the 20th century by a major body within the denomination.”

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

The new “testimony” warned Quakers that they may be facing a “supreme test” that could lead to persecution such as the sect suffered 300 years ago.

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

Quakers were urged to express their concern over the war to lawmakers and the world community, and to “examine their consciences concerning whether they cannot more fully dissociate themselves from the war machine by tax refusal or changing occupations.”

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

I also made note of this Lake George meeting in my entry. At that time I was unable to find an on-line copy of the “Message to Friends on Viet Nam,” but in renewing my search, I found that someone had uploaded a scan of the Friends Journal. That article didn’t get me any closer to the text I was hunting for, but it did include some other interesting items, including an article by Franklin Zahn on tax resistance, and another by Thomas Bassett about the New England Yearly Meeting that shows war tax resistance was on the agenda there too:

Tax Refusal, Law, and Order

by Franklin Zahn

In the President asked for a ten per cent surcharge on income taxes that might “continue for so long as the unusual expenditures associated with our efforts in Vietnam require higher revenues.” In words of Quaker simplicity, he was requesting a war tax. What ought Friends to do about specific levies for war?

First, of course, they can work to prevent such legislation, using the agency they have set up for such purposes — the Friends Committee on National Legislation — and using the opportunity to tell congressmen again that Friends favor de-escalation rather than the escalation the new taxes are designed to permit.

If the President’s request becomes law, Friends may then pay under protest. This situation might loosely be compared to that of a young man who joins the Army under protest: voicing his convictions is better than not voicing them, but it’s not a satisfactory solution. After paying a war tax Friends may then through regular channels claim a refund, and although in the past this has never been granted on the basis of conscience, a number of California taxpayers plan to make a common court case. Here the analogy might be to the young man who goes to court to get released from the Army — again not a very hopeful approach. However, the young man is entitled by law to request exemption in the first place; unfortunately for Friends as taxpayers, no such legal choices are available to them. Years ago Pacific Yearly Meeting suggested legislation embodying conscientious-objector provisions in Federal tax laws, and today some Friends are still considering such proposals, but for the foreseeable future, pacifists will have no legal tax alternatives.

Further, for most Friends there is not even a possible illegal alternative for their tax dollars, for if not paid as ordered, the dollars are frequently levied from bank accounts which unfortunately most Friends in their affluence today have. It is as though a pacifist refused to bayonet an enemy and several strong men held the weapon in his hands and jabbed it for him. The choice is not whether to participate in war or not, but whether to do so willingly or to drag one’s feet.

“We refuse to steal not as a protest against burglary — with consideration of how ‘effective’ we may or may not be — but simply because for us stealing is wrong.”

Many see a refusal to pay taxes voluntarily as only a protest. Now it is true that we can designate any act we engage in as a protest against something. We can fast and announce that our purpose is to protest the war. A vigil, a march, a meeting, or a handing out of educational material can be a protest if so designated. Even the young Friend who refused to carry the bayonet could refuse as a protest. But we are not necessarily protesting anything when we refuse to do that which for us is wrong. We refuse to steal not as a protest against burglary — with consideration of how “effective” we may or may not be — but simply because for us stealing is wrong. Similarly, a Friend may refuse to pay taxes voluntarily, not in protest but because he feels he must not participate in war.

In Southern California’s Quarterly Meeting there are many individuals and three Meetings refusing to pay voluntarily the seven per cent war tax on telephone bills. I do not know which are consciously doing this as a “protest” and which see it as part of the Friends’ code of conduct or way of life. When Claremont Meeting, in its public statement, said that in refusing to pay it was following a precedent in Friends’ peace testimony, two newspapers used the term “protest” in their very good coverage and one did not. All three papers quoted the portion of the statement that said, “Those of us who refuse to pay taxes which go to support war also are willing to accept the legal consequences of this refusal…”

Such willingness, along with complete openness, is an important part of any “civil” or, as one Friend terms it, “courteous” disobedience. It might also be called “orderly” disobedience, for, contrary to the usual linking together of “law and order,” in these days of riots the two words are not necessarily related. The war in Vietnam is considered by many Americans to be lawful, but to Vietnamese villagers the aftermath of a bombing raid would hardly appear orderly. On the contrary, the refusal to pay taxes for such chaos may be unlawful, but when the decision is made openly, arrived at in the usually slow and quiet manner of Friends’ group decisions, and explained in nonevasive language with a willingness to accept penalties, it may be very orderly indeed.

Franklin Zahn, member of Claremont (Calif.) Meeting, free-lance writer, and compiler of the recent leaflet “Early Friends and War Taxes,” first refused the telephone excise tax in , during the Korean War, and had his telephone disconnected. (In , the Internal Revenue Law was amended, permitting telephone companies to refer unpaid taxes to IRS.) In he read this paper to Pacific Yearly Meeting’s session on civil disobedience.

New England Yearly Meeting

Reported by Thomas Bassett

Quakerism is uneasy everywhere in the face of long-continuing violence, “distress of nations, and perplexity whether on the shores of Asia or in the Edgware Road.” Friends’ answers to problems of the Vietnam war and urban riots have ranged from evangelical mission to Quaker action. Evangelical Friends eschew mere human “manipulation” and expect peace only when Christ reigns in human hearts. Philadelphia and Baltimore Yearly Meetings, reinforced by AFSC and FCNL staffs in their midst, approved minutes to send medical aid to North Vietnam against the law if it could not be changed.

New England Friends were, as usual, in the middle of this scale. The clerk opened the first plenary session with William Penn’s words on evangelism: “They were changed men themselves before they went out to change others.” The last, eight-hour session approved a minute to oppose the President’s war surtax and urged its members to earnest consideration of whether they can conscientiously pay war taxes.

And take a look at this advertisement from the back pages:

A word about tax refusal: Since we limit our income to avoid paying income tax, our rates are low, and, in hiring our help we actively seek out C.O.s and/or tax refusers.

As I have noted before, the practice of war tax resistance in the Society of Friends has gone through waves. In some periods it has been fervently adhered to, advocated, and practiced; in others, it has been largely reduced to lip service and its remaining practitioners have stayed in the shadows.

In the United States, Quaker war tax resistance seems to have been strongest between the French & Indian War and the American Civil War, and then again during the Cold War, while it suffered from lulls between the Civil War and the end of World War Ⅱ and again in recent decades.

I am less familiar with the arc of war tax resistance in the Society of Friends in other countries, but here’s a data point. The Yearly Meeting of the Religious Society of Friends in Britain has recently released the fifth edition of its Quaker Faith and Practice book. Here’s what it has to say about taxes.

First, in Chapter 20, in a chapter devoted to “Living faithfully today” and a section on “Honesty and integrity: Conducting business” is given this general advice:

From its earliest days our Society has laid great stress on honesty and the payment in full of debts justly incurred.… [For example] When we have received goods or services, we shall be punctual in making payment of the price agreed on, and we shall not attempt to evade our proper obligations to the community by way of taxation.

Chapter 24 — “Our peace testimony” — handles the more specific case of war taxes, by means of quotes from a number of Quaker thinkers, while noting:

As a Society we have been faithful throughout in maintaining a corporate witness against all war and violence. However, in our personal lives we have continually to wrestle with the difficulty of finding ways to reconcile our faith with practical ways of living it out in the world. It is not surprising, therefore, that we have not always all reached the same conclusions when dealing with the daunting complexities and moral dilemmas of society and its government.

These are some of the quotes from this chapter that touch on war tax resistance:

One day in Tokyo Local Court, I had an opportunity to make a statement to witness why I felt it necessary to resist tax-payment for military expenditures, saying, “With military power we cannot protect our life nor keep our human dignity. Even if I should be killed, my way of living or dying to show my sympathy and forgiveness to my opponents, to point to the love of God shown by Jesus Christ on the cross and by his resurrection, will have a better chance to invite others to turn to walk rightly so that we humankind may live together peacefully.”

Susumu Ishitani,

Yet there was in the deeps of my mind a scruple which I never could get over… I all along believed that there were some upright-hearted men who paid such taxes, but could not see that their example was a sufficient reason for me to do so, while I believed that the spirit of Truth required of me as an individual to suffer patiently the distress of goods rather than pay actively.

John Woolman,

The action of withholding the military proportion of our taxes arose for us from our corporately held testimony that “the Spirit of Christ, which leads us into all truth, will never move us to fight and war against any man with outward weapons, neither for the kingdom of Christ, nor for the kingdoms of this world”. This testimony may at times lead to resisting the demands of the state, when a higher law (i.e. God’s inner law) makes its first claim on us. We also need to be conscious that, if we offend against accepted law, we may have to take the consequences of our action.

Arthur and Ursula Windsor,

The Religious Society of Friends has, since its beginnings in the seventeenth century, borne witness against war and armed conflict as contrary to the spirit and teachings of Christ. We have sought to build institutions and relationships which make for peace and to resist military activity. The horrific nature of modern armaments makes our witness particularly urgent. The Gulf War involved the substantial use of expensive modern weapons and technology, demonstrating that today it is the conscription of our money rather than our bodies which makes war possible.

For many years members of the Religious Society of Friends have been exercised about how we might be true to our historic peace testimony while still obeying the laws of our country. You will know that we have appealed through the courts and ultimately to the European Commission of Human Rights for recognition of the right of conscientious objection to paying taxes for military purposes…

Since losing the appeal we have paid in full the income tax collected from our employees. In recent months we have considered whether we can continue to do this, but after very careful consideration have decided that for the time being we must do so. The acceptance of the rule of law is part of our witness, … for a just and peaceful world cannot come about without this. However we do wish to make it clear that we object to the way in which the PAYE system involves us in a process of collecting money, used in part to pay for military activity and war preparations, which takes away from the individual taxpayer the right to express their own conscientious objection. This involvement is incompatible with our work for peace.

London Yearly Meeting (letter to Inland Revenue),

On my last appearance in court [for withholding war tax], having already sent in my defence on grounds of conscience, backed by the Genocide Act, Geneva Convention, etc., I felt I wanted to make a more general statement about the fact that we have not used the United Nations as we should to settle disputes, or given sufficient support to it and its … agencies. So I wrote a statement, gave copies to my faithful supporting Friends and other pacifists and handed a copy to the Judge, asking if I might read it. He listened attentively to what I read, as his comments afterwards showed, though of course his verdict was the usual refusal. It seems important to me to get the understanding of judges so that they will give serious consideration to our point of view and might eventually influence a change in the law, though they always say that is not their business.

Joan Hewitt,

Finally, in Chapter 29 — “Leadings” — is the following section:

We are trustees of a long tradition which has sought to bring our religious convictions into the world “and so excite our endeavours to mend it”. We are trying to live in the virtue of that life and power that takes away the occasion of all wars.

Fundamentally, taxation for war purposes is not a political or a fiscal issue. We are convinced by the Spirit of God to say without any hesitation whatsoever that we must support the right of conscientious objection to paying taxes for war purposes. We realise that we live in a world where it is impossible to see clearly the final consequences of the actions we might initiate from this Meeting. Nevertheless we are impelled by our vision of a peaceful and loving society.

We ask Meeting for Sufferings to explore further and with urgency the role our religious society should corporately take in this concern and then to take such action as it sees necessary on our behalf. We know that this is only one further step in our witness to the Truth, to which we are continually summoned. We go forward in God’s strength.

London Yearly Meeting,

The latest Friends Journal has a more in-depth review of 99 Tactics of Successful Tax Resistance Campaigns than the brief mention in their pages . The reviewer is Tom Head, a professor of economics at George Fox University. Excerpts:

David Gross has put together a helpful compendium of tax resistance tactics. It is a work that I found stimulating and rewarding to read.

From here he digresses into a discussion about the tension he feels between being a conscientious objector to much of what the federal government does in its budget, and yet feeling supportive of a strong public sector in the abstract and seeing the federal budget as an imperfect incarnation of this.

And so as I read Gross’s book, I find myself in this tension: I do like to pay taxes. A free, virtuous, and flourishing society depends upon a measure of cooperative public activity, and we should support that. And yet I do not like to pay taxes that actually undermine a free and just society, those that fuel the destruction of civilization. Sorting out which is which is an important dialogue. This book only indirectly treats that larger moral question, but what it does do very well is catalog methods for removing the support of injustice and destruction. How and when to use these tactics will depend very much on our deeper individual and collective discernment, but I found that even this catalog of action stimulates and informs the larger search for truth.

Gross speaks to all forms of tax resistance. He studies tax resistance around the world and throughout history. His primary topics are war and militarism, but he also addresses tax resistance focused on other concerns — persecution of the women’s suffrage movement, racism, colonialism, and other forms of oppression and intimidation. There is considerable attention given to Quakers, but we read also about the Amish, the Mennonites, and other religious groups. Inspiration and insight come from examining Roman-occupied Judaea, Gandhian nonviolence and the Indian independence movement, women’s suffrage movements in Great Britain and the United States, historical labor movements, poll tax resistance, the American Revolution and the Whiskey Rebellion, as well as the actions of contemporary war tax resisters.

…for less than $20 in print or less than $10 in electronic form, the book is a bargain for anyone wanting to do serious work on putting faith into practice in the area of tax resistance. This work and an earlier volume by Gross — American Quaker War Tax Resistance (Second Edition) — are both useful additions to the meetinghouse library.

A letter to the editor written on to the Brooklyn Daily Eagle by a R.W. Burtis contains an interesting aside that, assuming it’s accurate, is news to me.

The letter concerns the role of religion in the presidential election. The Democrat, Al Smith, was a Catholic, and this was a political liability that would contribute to him losing the election. But the letter-writer asked why Herbert Hoover’s religion was not a subject for debate. After all, Hoover was a Quaker:

We should be much safer as a nation if Governor Smith were made President than if Mr. Hoover were, as Mr. Hoover’s religion forbids its members to take part in war. If the enemy were to attack us while Mr. Hoover was President he would be powerless to help us. George Fox, the founder of the Quaker sect, forbade his followers to engage in war or to support any government waging war. If Mr. Hoover followed the teachings of his religion he would be barred from acting as head of the army and navy. The Quaker religion enjoins and commands pacifism on its communicants. All war, even defensive, it holds wrong.

This exaggerates a bit, at least when it comes to Hoover, who did not seem to be a pacifist (though his presidential term is rather lacking in invasions, imperialist land-grabs, and fevered armaments production, by U.S. presidential standards).

But here’s what caught my eye: in the course of describing the long and consistent history of Quaker pacifism, Burtis writes:

During the late World War they evaded the draft as conscientious objectors, and thousands of them, prompted by religious scruples, refused to ride on railway trains because there was a war tax. Their determination to neither fight nor pay was one of the problems with which the Government had to deal.

I’ve hunted around a bit and have not yet found anything to corroborate this claim.

Excerpts from the Swarthmore Phoenix give us a peek at how the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting was addressing war tax resistance at that time:

Tax Refusals, Reparations Draw Quakers to Philadelphia Meeting

The Religious Society of Friends will hold a special Yearly Meeting Session at the Arch Street Meeting House . The Philadelphia assembly, usually scheduled for March, is taking place in October because of the significance and immediacy of the agenda.

The morning session, convening at 10 a.m. will concern the “drafting of money” for war purposes. The Friends believe that tax refusals [sic] is plausible and important manner of dealing with militarism. A great many people support youth in its refusal to fight on battlefields it did not create. A great many people should be ready to withhold money. The Friends believe that “the functions related to war have become the main pre-occupation of our government” while “social needs are given lower priority.” The Friends hope to gather support in their objection to the use of their tax dollars for military purposes.

Quotes from the report by the committee planning the special session, arguments against tax refusal are as follows:

  • Refusal to pay taxes would be anarchy.
  • The government will collect the taxes, plus interest, and thus get more money.
  • The government will not be hurt by such a form of protest.
  • The war will get first claim on all money, and thus make less for social causes.
  • The tax refuser denies money for worthy civilian activities.
  • Anything less than total tax refusal is insignificant.

It was noted that although these arguments are valid, they are far overshadowed by moral reasons for refusal to pay war taxes.

At the upcoming national gathering of NWTRCC at Earlham College in Richmond, Indiana, I’m going to be presenting a summary of the history of war tax resistance in the Society of Friends (Quakers).

Preparing for this talk has been daunting. It’s a huge topic, spanning centuries and continents, and there are gaps and biases both in the historical record itself, and in my personal knowledge about it.

I’m also not a Quaker, and so am in the awkward and somewhat suspect position of trying to explain Quaker history to Quakers (I expect many of the attendees will be Quakers, particularly as Earlham College is a Quaker institution) as an outsider. Indeed I’m not Christian or even religious, so when I read a Quaker testifying that the holy spirit or “the light” or something of that nature is compelling him or her to take a certain course of action, I just have to sort of take it “on faith” that they know what they’re talking about.

So I’m going to ask you to indulge me as I think “out loud” on The Picket Line while I’m trying to organize my notes.

Most of the material I’m working with while assembling this history comes from two sources: the huge stash of documents I assembled into the collection American Quaker War Tax Resistance, and the archives of the Friends Journal. Both of these sources are biased towards reports of American Friends and Meetings, leaving out much of what may have been happening elsewhere. They also leave time gaps. The first stops at ; the second covers . I’ve tried to supplement this with material from other sources when I could find it.

There seem to me to be some distinct “periods” of Quaker war tax resistance:


The beginnings (~)
War tax resistance has been part of Quaker practice almost from the very beginning. George Fox paid his war taxes and counseled Quakers to do so, but Robert Barclay’s Apology published in reports that Quakers “have suffered much… because we neither could ourselves bear arms, nor send others in our place, nor give our money for the buying of drums, standards, and other military attire.”

The Pennsylvania experiment ()
Quakers ran the colonial legislature in Pennsylvania, founded by Quaker William Penn. This allowed them to put their pacifist principles to the test, which they did to some extent. But most commentators on the period portray the legislature as refusing to enact requested war funding measures mostly as a negotiating gambit, and that they eventually would cough up the war money in thinly-veiled ways. This led several individual Quakers to pledge to refuse to pay taxes to the Quaker government, which in turn led the London Yearly Meeting to come out against such war tax resistance. Eventually this tension became too great, and Quakers gave up government control in Pennsylvania.

The American revolution & aftermath ()
The conscientious Quaker dissidents in America proved influential and their ideas spread, even, eventually, to London, where the meeting found itself coping with a new, home-grown challenge to war tax paying. American Quakers suffered much during the American Revolution for their refusal to give material support to the rebel army, and some dissident Quakers broke off from their meetings because of this. A purifying and intensifying tendency began to rock the Society of Friends, in the aftermath of the war, which tended to strengthen the testimony against paying war taxes, but ended by splitting the Society.

The U.S. Civil War period ()
American Quakers identify with the abolitionist cause, which eventually becomes a war aim of the Union side in the Civil War. The society largely maintains its peace testimony and refusal to pay war taxes through the war, at least on an official level, but there is a slackening in how it is practiced and enforced, and in the aftermath of the war both are shadows of their former selves.

The great forgetting ()
War tax resisters are few and fairly quiet for decades. When war tax resistance is mentioned, it is as a relic of a former time like “thees” and “thous”. To the extent that it still remains on the record as a part of Quaker discipline, it is ignored as something belonging to another time. By and large, Quakers pay even explicit war taxes without complaint.

The thaw ()
A war tax resistance movement begins to coalesce in the United States, but it’s notable how few of its prominent members are Quakers. Eventually, though, this begins to embolden the remaining American Quaker war tax resisters and to rekindle interest in the Society of Friends.

The renaissance ()
The cold war nuclear arms race and the Vietnam War cause a resurgence of war tax resistance in the Society of Friends around the world, from Japan to Norway. By , pretty much all American Quakers must have confronted the issue of war taxes and made a decision about what to do about it. Some Meetings began resisting taxes as a group. War tax resistance becomes a central part of the Quaker peace testimony, and American Quakers who are not resisting in some fashion are on the defensive about it.

The second forgetting ()
The end of the cold war took some of the urgency out of the war tax issue for some Quakers, and those who still felt a concern about war taxes often looked for magical ways to make the issue go away without having to resort to actual tax resistance — such as “peace tax fund” legislation or increasingly desperate and fruitless legal appeals. Remnants of the renaissance period war tax resistance stands still exist, but have little vitality or momentum. Most mentions of war tax resistance in the Friends Journal are seen in the obituaries column.

In some of these periods, to be a Quaker was necessarily to be a war tax resister, as just about every household was subject to some sort of explicit war tax or militia exemption tax and the discipline of Quaker meetings required Friends to refuse to pay such taxes or to risk being disowned. In other periods, such explicit war taxes had vanished, and the government paid for war through less explicit, less transparent, more general-purpose taxes. In those periods, Quaker war tax resistance was more a subject for individual decision and debate and there was a less clear-cut orthodox opinion on how Friends should behave.

The special commission trying the Rebeccaite cases continued on , starting by considering the cases against David Jones and John Hugh, who were captured during a Rebeccaite attack on a toll booth. They chose to plead guilty, probably as the evidence against them was pretty near identical to what the same jury had been convinced by a couple of days earlier in the trial of John Hughes, who had been captured alongside them.

A report of the pleas and sentencing appears in the Monmouthshire Merlin.

The court sentenced Jones and Hugh to be exiled to a penal colony in Australia for seven years. Hughes, however, got sterner treatment:

He appeared to be one in a station of society far above the rest — one not likely to be misled by others, and upon evidence proved to be a leader, if not the leader of this lawless multitude.

He got 20 years of penal colony exile. The court then moved on to other cases. The charges against David Lewis were dropped. Lewis Davies was charged with destroying a turnpike-gate, and pled guilty, but was not yet sentenced.

Morgan and Esther Morgan pled guilty to assisting in the assault on the man sent to take Henry Morgan prisoner, but the prosecutor, “[c]onsidering their advanced age and other circumstances connected with the case,” declined to pursue the felony charge. Margaret, Rees, and John Morgan also pled guilty, Margaret to the assault itself, and the others similarly with abetting. The prosecutor again declined to pursue the felony charges, “and observed that, having ascertained the circumstances under which this aggravated assault had taken place, he did believe they were under a mistake with respect to the right to resist. Under these circumstances he was not disposed to press for a severe punishment in this case…” Margaret was sentenced to six months in prison, and Rees & John to twelve months each.

The Rebeccaites were “bad cops” that allowed peace-loving, law-abiding, innocent Welsh farmers to play “good cop” and use the implicit threat of Rebecca to get more attention for their grievances. Here is an example (from the Monmouthshire Merlin):

High Rate of Turnpike Tolls at Nash, &c.

To the Editor of the Monmouthshire Merlin

Sir, — I am sorry no abler pens than mine have undertaken to draw the attention of our neighbourhood to the monstrous high rate of tolls, as well as the unequal system of collecting them. For instance, from Nash or Goldcliff we only travel one mile on the turnpike road, and have to pay 9d a horse, while in many districts it is only 3d or 4d, and where, too, materials are much more expensive.

Again, the toll to Caerleon from Newport, I understand, is 17d or 18d for one horse. Surely, the tolls might be arranged so that a person might pay in proportion to the distance he has to travel, for under the present system he might go thirty or fourty miles for the same money he is obliged to pay for one — As we small farmers find great difficulty in scraping our rents together for our landlords, I hope and trust the proper authorities will look after these local burdens, as they were advised to do by Lord Granville Somerset at the last Quarter Sessions, in order to prevent tumults and outrages like those which are disgracing South Wales, for we ar really very desirous that Rebecca and her children should never come among us to create an anti-toll rebellion — we would rather have our grievances redressed after a lawful fashion.

Should you think these few remarks deserve a corner in your intelligent paper, till some abler advocate may come forward you will greatly oblige,

Several Poor Little Farmers.

PS. Would not our monthly agricultural meeting do a good service to us, by taking the matter into consideration, with a view to assist.

Nash,

At the upcoming national gathering of NWTRCC at Earlham College in Richmond, Indiana, I’m going to be presenting a summary of the history of war tax resistance in the Society of Friends (Quakers).

Today I’m going to try to coalesce some of the notes I’ve assembled about how the Quaker practice of war tax resistance began to reemerge after the Great Forgetting period.


The Thaw ()

In the Great Forgetting period, Quakers endeavored to overlook that war tax resistance had been an important part of putting the Quaker peace testimony into practice.

But during World War Ⅱ and the opening decade of the Cold War, a largely Christian pacifist war tax resistance movement began to coalesce, which included Quakers, but the most prominent members of which belonged to other denominations. This movement set the stage for the coming renaissance of war tax resistance in the Society of Friends.

A few of the earliest tax resisters of this period were Quakers. I’ve already mentioned Mary Stone McDowell, who carried on her resistance from the World War Ⅰ period (the only such example I’m aware of). There was also Arthur Evans, who was resisting perhaps as early as 1943, making him one of the earliest adopters of war tax resistance in this Thaw period.

But institutionally, the Society of Friends still had little interest in the subject. In the American Friends Service Committee, a major voice of the practical side of the Quaker peace testimony, put out an influential booklet: Speak Truth to Power: A Quaker Search for an Alternative to Violence. It mentions war tax resistance only once, and in an 18th century historical overview context, not as an example of a contemporary method of speaking truth to power in search of alternatives to violence. This is in spite of the fact that the committee that produced the booklet included among its members the war tax resisters A.J. Muste and Milton Mayer.

Instead, the leadership in advocating for war tax resistance and in organizing the fledgling modern war tax resistance movement largely came from outside the Society of Friends. Some of the more prominent war tax resistance promoters in this important period were Dorothy Day (Catholic) & Ammon Hennacy (often Catholic), A.J. Muste (sometimes-Quaker, but bounced around a lot), Maurice McCrackin (Presbyterian), Ernest Bromley (Methodist, later a Quaker), Ralph DiGia (not religious as far as I could tell), and Milton Mayer (Jewish, later a Quaker).

The work of this emerging group of resisters helped to encourage the remaining Quaker war tax resisters and to remind Quakers that war tax resistance wasn’t only something of the legendary past but was an available testimony to them in the present. The thaw in the Society of Friends had begun.

One of the first examples of this thaw was a particularly dramatic one. When four Quaker conscientious objectors in the United States were put on trial for evading the Korean War draft, the judge told them: “If you are not willing to defend this country, you should leave.” They took that advice seriously, and began to look for an alternative. They chose Costa Rica, a country that had abolished its standing army in . “We wanted to be free of paying taxes in a war economy,” recalls Marvin Rockwell, one of the emigrants. Seven Quaker families left the U.S. to found the community of Monteverde, Costa Rica, in . Rockwell later told a Friends Journal reporter: “I do not feel bad at all paying taxes in Costa Rica. The largest item in the tax budget is for education.”

At the upcoming national gathering of NWTRCC at Earlham College in Richmond, Indiana, I’m going to be presenting a summary of the history of war tax resistance in the Society of Friends (Quakers).

Today I’m going to try to coalesce some of the notes I’ve assembled about the renaissance of Quaker war tax resistance during the Cold War. Much of what I have assembled here comes from my close look at the archives of the Friends Journal, the only Quaker publication from this period I have reviewed thoroughly, and so whatever editorial biases that publication may have had may also bias my history of this phase.

There is a lot that happens in this short period of time, and in some places my narrative is going to be condensed into a bunch of bullet-point-like summaries of the rapid-fire events to try to keep up with it all.


The Renaissance ()

The modern war tax resistance movement began in the wake of World War Ⅱ in the United States. There had been isolated war tax resisters here and there in other places in recent years, and there was a quiet war tax resistance tendency hiding under the surface of the Society of Friends, but things did not come out into the open in any organized and growing fashion until then.

Quakers were not in the forefront of this movement, but Quaker war tax resisters took courage from it, and it wasn’t long before they began trying to reestablish the war tax resistance traditions in the Society of Friends. The earliest mention of this that I have found from this period concerns Franklin Zahn of the Pacific Yearly Meeting, who was distributing a leaflet on war tax resistance as early as .

A report on the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting that year noted that the subject of war taxes had come up and had led to what sounds like a long and earnest discussion:

Few present felt it right to refuse to pay, nor yet felt comfortable to pay. Varied suggestions were presented: Send an accompanying letter expressing one’s feeling about war; live so simply that income is below tax level; make no report, but once a year send a check for nonmilitary purposes; engage in peace walks and other minority demonstrations; follow Jesus’ example of rendering unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s; beware of taking for granted the evils deplored, such as riding on military planes; associate more closely with the Mennonites, who share Friends’ concerns; rise above one’s own shortcomings through personal devotion; work to unite with all Friends Yearly Meetings in refusal to pay taxes. Nothing can be done unless there is a willingness to suffer unto death.[!]

The blinders put on during the Great Forgetting period were still evident. An article in a issue of the Friends Journal described “refusal to pay taxes for support of war effort emerging as a new testimony” [my emphasis]. Another article from the same issue, titled “The Quaker Peace Testimony: Some Suggestions for Witness and Rededication” didn’t mention taxes at all.

By this time some Friends in Switzerland had been refusing to pay war taxes (I would guess, under the tutelage of Pierre Cérésole).

In some Quakers in the Pacific Yearly Meeting began to sketch out the initial drafts of a legislative “peace tax” proposal which they envisioned would be a way for conscientious objectors to pay their taxes into a fund that the government could only spend on non-military items. The idea that there might be a legislative solution that could make tax-paying no longer an act of complicity with war would bob up throughout this period, until, by the end of it, the temptation of lobbying instead of committing to direct action would contribute to the eventual decline of war tax resistance in the Society of Friends.

also, the Yellow Springs Monthly Meeting issued a statement of support for war tax resisters, the first example of new institutional support for war tax resistance in the Society of Friends that I could find from the 20th century.

In there was a burst of excitement about war tax resistance in the Baltimore Yearly Meeting (yet a survey of 350 adults from that meeting found only two or three who were willing to consider actually becoming resisters; whereas almost half of those surveyed were totally unconcerned about their tax money going to the military).

A group of about twenty Quakers, organized by Clarence Pickett and Henry Cadbury, met at the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting to discuss war tax resistance, but they were unable to come up with a consensus statement. Quaker war tax resister Arthur Evans was imprisoned for three months for his tax refusal.

In the Friends Journal ended what strikes me as a policy of editorial embarrassment about Quakers and war tax resistance by publishing its first article devoted to the practice, and one that also full-throatedly advocated it. This started a debate in the letters-to-the-editor column and certainly caused more Quakers to confront the question, directly or indirectly.

By the tide was shifting rapidly. Before this time, individual Quaker tax resisters are unusual enough to highlight individually as being on the cutting-edge; after this, Quaker war tax resistance becomes commonplace enough that individual resisters are exemplars of a larger trend. In the New York Yearly Meeting promoted war tax resistance in an official statement, and promised financial assistance for any Quakers in the Meeting who might be forced to change jobs or to suffer other financial hardship for their stand. The statement in part read:

We call upon Friends to examine their consciences concerning whether they cannot more fully dissociate themselves from the war machine by tax refusal or changing occupations.

That was the most concrete advocacy of war tax resistance by a Quaker institution in years.

Franklin Zahn wrote a booklet on Early Friends and War Taxes to reintroduce Quakers to their own history and to further banish the Great Forgetting.

The support from Quaker institutions and publications at this point is often noncommittal and is usually vague about exactly how to go about war tax resistance, which taxes to resist, and how to deal with government reprisals. There is nothing like the specific, concrete discipline of earlier Quaker Meetings. This means that Quaker war tax resisters from this period are largely making it up as they go along, conferring with each other informally and organizing, when they are organizing, in groups like Peacemakers, the War Resisters League, and the Committee for Non-Violent Action — that is to say, with non-Quaker groups. (There was briefly something called the “Committee for Nonpayment of War Taxes” run out of Quaker war tax resister Margaret G. Bowman’s home in , but I have not found much about it.)

Quakers were using a broad variety of tax resistance tactics. Arthur Evans and Neil Haworth refused to pay some or all of their income taxes or to cooperate with an IRS summons for their financial records. Johan Eliot redirected twice the amount of his taxes to the United Nations to promote international federalism as a world peace strategy. Clarissa & Samuel Cooper lowered their family income below the tax line. John L.P. Maynard and Robert W. Eaton took pay cuts that reduced their incomes to the maximum allowable before federal income tax withholding was mandatory. Lyle Snyder stopped withholding by declaring three million dependents on his W-4 forms. Alfred & Connie Andersen stopped filing income tax returns. Some Quakers fled to Canada as taxpatriates to join the draft evaders there. Others deposited their taxes into escrow accounts and invited the IRS to seize the accounts while refusing to pay voluntarily. Lloyd C. Shank advocated “the ‘sneaky’ way” of tax resistance — what many people would call tax evasion — saying “ ‘cheating’ is only an oppressive government’s name for a good man’s refusal to murder.” Phone tax resistance was beginning to become widespread, and many Quaker meetings began resisting this tax on their office phones (one meeting was unable to reach consensus on resisting the phone tax and compromised by dropping its phone service entirely). People too timid to resist, and meetings unable to reach consensus on resisting, might instead write their legislators to urge them to enact some form of legal conscientious objection to military taxation. The most timid groups, like the American Friends Service Committee, urged people to pay taxes “under protest” or to match their war tax payments with additional payments to the AFSC.

Robert E. Dickinson had perhaps the most creative tactic of the bunch. He designed and built a set of furniture for his home that was formed of interlocking sheets of plywood such that it could be quickly disassembled and hidden away. He called this “my tax refusal furniture” and meant it to frustrate IRS attempts to seize furnishings from him for back taxes.

Two Quaker employees of two groups within the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting asked their employers to stop withholding income tax from their paychecks, and that Meeting tried to come up with a good policy to follow in such cases.

The fourth Friends World Conference was held in . The “Protest and Direct Action group” there “called upon Friends in countries party to the [Vietnam] conflict to ‘go as far as conscience dictates in withholding support from their governments’ war-making machinery,’ first by direct communication with those against whom the protest is made, and then if necessary by public witness and individual action, including the possibility of refusal to pay taxes for war.”

U.S. President Johnson called for a 10% income tax surcharge explicitly to fund the Vietnam War. This would be the first explicit “war tax” (other than, arguably, the phone tax) since World War Ⅱ, and its announcement prompted renewed interest in war tax resistance inside and outside the Society of Friends. Quakers were, because of this tax, better-enabled to quote the discipline of early Quakers on refusal to pay explicit war taxes as a way of explaining their own stands.

In 203 delegates from “nineteen Yearly Meetings, eight Quaker colleges, fifteen Friends secondary schools, the American Friends Service Committee National Board and its twelve regional offices, and nine other peace or directly-related organizations” met in Richmond, Indiana, to draft a “Declaration on the Draft and Conscription.” Part of this declaration mentioned the war tax concern:

We call on Friends everywhere to recognize the oppressive burden of militarism and conscription. We acknowledge our complicity in these evils in ways sometimes silent and subtle, at times painfully apparent. We are under obligation as children of God and members of the Religious Society of Friends to break the yoke of that complicity.

We also recognize that the problem of paying war taxes has intensified; this compels us to find realistic ways to refuse to pay these taxes.

After only of thaw, some seventy years of Great Forgetting have been melted away, and the Society of Friends has again reached a consensus that Quakers are compelled to refuse to pay war taxes.

President Johnson’s war surtax went into effect in , adding a 7.5% surtax to the income tax returns for , and 10% for (the tax would be extended at a reduced rate into and then abandoned).

Meetings all across the country were discussing and passing minutes on war tax resistance, though few would advocate it in specific and unreserved ways, most choosing instead to voice expressions of unspecified “approval and loving support” for Quakers who felt compelled to resist. In , the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting passed a relatively strong minute stating:

Refusal to pay the military portion of taxes is an honorable testimony, fully in keeping with the history and practices of Friends… We warmly approve of people following their conscience, and openly approve civil disobedience in this matter under Divine compulsion. We ask all to consider carefully the implications of paying taxes that relate to war-making… Specifically, we offer encouragement and support to people caught up in the problem of seizure, and of payment against their will.

The New York Yearly Meeting decided to begin resisting corporately by refusing to honor liens on the salaries of tax resisting employees (though it could not reach consensus on a refusal to withhold income tax from such employees), and, , by refusing to pay its own phone tax.

The American Friends Service Committee finally decided to do something concrete about the war tax question, but it was a little odd. They withheld and paid taxes from a war tax resisting employee and then sued the government for a refund. The strange structure of their process seems to have been a very deliberate way to structure a legal suit for maximum effectiveness, and it did (briefly) show some success. A court ruled in , on First Amendment freedom-of-religion grounds, that the government could not force the organization to pay the taxes of an objecting employee — alas, the Supreme Court almost immediately, and overwhelmingly, overturned this.

Also in , Susumu Ishitani, a Japanese Quaker, formed a war tax resistance group in Japan — the first example I am aware of from Asia.

By , the Friends Journal’s coverage of war tax resistance is less occupied with advocacy, debate, and the presentation of individual exemplars, and is more concerned with the practical aspects of how Quakers are going about it. The editorial stance shifts again, to one of more forthright advocacy. It is assumed that Quakers want to avoid paying war taxes, and the question is how to do so well.

The ending of the U.S. war on Vietnam did not seem to slow the enthusiasm for war tax resistance. In the Friends Journal devoted an issue to the subject for the first time. In Robert Anthony began another attempt to get the courts to legalize conscientious objection to military taxation. It went nowhere, but notably, in a letter to the court, his monthly meeting wrote:

We assert that the free exercise of the Quaker religion entails the avoidance of any participation in war or financial contribution to that part of the national budget used by the military.

If not exaggerated for effect, this statement would be among the strongest yet articulated by a Quaker institution in this renaissance period — not simply expressing support for war tax resisters, or encouraging Friends to consider resisting, but asserting that to practice the Quaker religion necessarily meant to refuse to pay war taxes.

In , Quakers met with their Brethren and Mennonite counterparts to draft a joint statement that encouraged war tax resistance — the “New Call to Peacemaking.” The Philadelphia Yearly Meeting asked its ongoing representative meeting to draft some formal guidance for Quaker war tax resisters for how they should go about it, and to set up an alternative fund to hold and redirect resisted taxes. (New England Yearly Meeting began its own alternative fund for resisted taxes .)

By this time war tax resistance is a core part of any discussion of the Quaker peace testimony, and there are increasing calls for Meetings to resist taxes as an institution.

In the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting approved a minute on war tax resistance that pulled its punches a bit:

Our strength and our security are derived from our belief in the reality of a loving God and the oneness of that of God in all people. In order to say yes to this belief, we must seriously consider saying no to payment of war taxes.

This “seriously consider” compares poorly to discipline of times past (e.g. “a tax levied for the purchasing of drums, colors, or for other warlike uses, cannot be paid consistently with our Christian testimony” [Ohio Yearly Meeting, 1819]). It also, some Quakers point out, sometimes pales next to the more direct and certain advice from some meetings that young Quaker men resist the draft.

As more Quakers and Meetings feel the pressure to take a stand on war taxes, the more timid ones are increasingly desperate to find ways to do so without actually having to resist. Silly ideas, like writing “not for military spending” in the memo field of their tax payment checks, and “peace tax fund” ideas proliferate. By , Quakers in Canada and Australia are floating their own peace tax fund legislation ideas.

Meanwhile, Quakers in England seem to have gotten the tax resisting bug. The Friends World Committee for Consultation and London Yearly Meeting stopped withholding income taxes from twenty-five war tax resisting employees in , putting the money in escrow. (This resistance was short-lived; after losing a legal appeal in , they went back to withholding.)

In war tax resistance, according to Friends Journal reports, was a “major preoccupation” of the London Yearly Meeting, and a “burning concern” at the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting (where “unity could not be achieved”). Lake Erie Yearly Meeting encouraged its Monthly Meetings “to establish meetings for sufferings to aid war tax resisters.” Pacific Yearly Meeting started an alternative fund.

Smaller Monthly and Quarterly meetings around the country were beginning to take even stronger stands. The Minneapolis and Twin Cities Meetings approved a minute that asked “all members of our meetings to practice some form of war tax resistance”! The Davis (California) meeting passed a similar minute. Monthly Meetings are assembling “clearness committees” to help each other find responses to the war tax problem that are appropriate to their conscientious “leadings.”

also, the Friends General Conference promoted the idea of Quakers giving interest-free loans to them, a thinly-veiled (not explicitly stated) way of hiding assets from IRS:

…Friends loan money to F.G.C. at no interest, which F.G.C. invests to earn income which is used to support the varied programs of the Conference, such as publications, religious education curricula, and the ongoing nurture program. These loans provide regular dependable monthly income to the Conference, and reduce the interest income on which the lender must pay federal income taxes, while providing the lender with protection against unforeseen financial reversals. F.G.C. will repay the principal amount within 30 days after receiving a written request from the lender. All principal amounts are kept in insured investments.

In the Friends Journal, now edited by a war tax resister, devoted another issue to the subject. Non-resisting Quakers were now very much on the defensive. One complained that at the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting , taxpaying Quakers like him “were compared to the Quaker slaveholders of , and not a dissenting voice was raised,” but even he had to acknowledge that war tax resistance was “in the mainstream of Quaker thought, and therefore entitled to support from Quaker bodies.”

The meeting itself though could only agree to issue another minute that would “not urge” Friends to resist, but would “give strong support” to those who did.

In , the Friends World Committee for Consultation held a war tax resistance conference in Washington, D.C., and formed a standing “Friends Committee on War Tax Concerns.” , they held a conference for Quaker organizations that had war tax resisting employees. The conference was attended by 35 people, including representatives from 21 such organizations. They were united by an interest in supporting the war tax resistance of their employees in an open and honest fashion, in a way that included the redirection of the resisted taxes to beneficial causes, and that used the “clearness committee” process.

You definitely get the feeling that momentum is building and Quaker war tax resistance is having a vigorous revival. Unfortunately, though, it seems to me that this is the high-water mark. In surprisingly little time the tide will begin to recede. But there is still some forward progress to be made.

In the London Yearly Meeting declared:

We are convinced by the Spirit of God to say without any hesitation whatsoever that we must support the right of conscientious objection to paying taxes for war purposes… We ask Meeting for Sufferings to explore further and with urgency the role our religious society should corporately take in this concern and then to take such action as it sees necessary on our behalf.

The Friends United Meeting adopted a policy of not withholding taxes from resisting employees as well. The Philadelphia Yearly Meeting soon followed suit, and refused to withhold federal taxes from three war tax resisters on the payroll (after a legal battle, they would pay “under duress” ). The Baltimore Yearly Meeting also adopted such a policy, in .

In another conference for employers of tax resisting employees was held, this one expanded to include Mennonite and Church of the Brethren employers. The Friends Journal got an IRS levy on the salary of its editor, and it devoted a third issue to the topic of war tax resistance. Some Quakers begin using the tax resistance tactic in the service of other causes, such as opposition to capital punishment or nuclear power.

In an early sign of the receding of the war tax resistance tide, the Friends World Committee for Consultation retired its “Friends Committee on War Tax Concerns” in favor of a “Committee on Peace Concerns.” From here, sadly, it’s pretty much all downhill. In the next and final segment of this series on the history of Quaker war tax resistance, I’ll try to describe and explore the second “forgetting.”

At the upcoming national gathering of NWTRCC at Earlham College in Richmond, Indiana, I’m going to be presenting a summary of the history of war tax resistance in the Society of Friends (Quakers).

Today I’m going to try to coalesce some of the notes I’ve assembled about the current period of Quaker war tax resistance — what I’m calling “the second forgetting.”


The Second Forgetting ()

After an enthusiasm for war tax resistance that had grown to a near-mania by there was an astonishing and swift drop in interest in the subject. I can’t with any great confidence say why this might be, but here are some theories:

  1. The collapse of the Soviet Union and the resulting end of the Cold War made people more optimistic about the chances of avoiding nuclear war and ushering in a more peaceful international order. Even hawkish politicians were crowing about the “peace dividend” that would come from reduced military spending as a result. War tax resistance may have slackened because peace work in general was seen as less urgent.
  2. The “peace tax fund” idea had gained traction in Quaker circles. Some Quakers who were concerned about their taxes paying for war may have chosen to refrain from taking action in the hopes that such a law would eventually give them an easy-out, or in the misapprehension that the absence of such a law made the Quaker taxpayer’s dilemma really a problem for the legislature and not for the Quaker.
  3. It may have been simple demographics: Those Quakers who were so confident in their war tax resistance stand that they were willing to start resisting when very few Friends were, and who as a result were the leaders and pioneers of the war tax resistance Renaissance, were reaching the ends of their lives at this point. The younger resisters who joined up during the Renaissance may have been less self-sustaining, less confident, and less persuasive — following a trend more than they were following a compelling conscientious leading. (This was a worry among Friends as far back as , when John Churchman wrote “Such build on a sandy foundation who refuse paying that which is called the provincial or king’s tax, only because some others scruple paying it whom they esteem.”)

In the Friends Journal, feeling it had reached the end of its legal appeals, threw in the towel and paid the IRS levy on the salary of its editor, Vint Deming.

Two German Quakers were prosecuted for war tax resistance, and their court hearing was attended by some forty Quakers. Meanwhile in the U.S., the “peace tax fund” legislation got its first and only congressional hearing. Several Quakers attended and a few testified in favor of the bill.

In a stage dramatization based on the IRS seizure of the home of war tax resisters Randy Kehler & Betsy Corner was part of the program at the Friends General Conference Gathering. The Canada Yearly Meeting, after years of debate, adopted a policy of refusing to withhold taxes from the salary of war tax resisting employees.

In U.S. President Clinton signed the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, which seemed to offer some hope for a new court challenge against the government’s insistence on taxing religious conscientious objectors to pay for military spending. In Quaker Priscilla Adams began a case using this argument; Quakers Rosa Packard and Edith & Gordon Brown filed similar suits soon after. These suits didn’t make any headway. In , Adams filed a final appeal to the Supreme Court, with the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting contributing a friend-of-the-court brief on her behalf, but the Court turned down the case.

By this time, sad to say, a superstitious, blinkered, panglossian take on the “peace tax fund” has become the norm, and on the rare occasions when war taxes are even discussed (for example, in the Friends Journal), it is taken for granted that should Congress pass such a law, American Quakers will finally be freed from having to worry about paying for war (and implied, in the spirit of the “forgetting,” is the sentiment “and until then, well, what can we do?”). Statements from Quaker meetings about war tax resistance are increasingly endorsing the “peace tax fund” idea not in addition to supporting war tax resistance, but in lieu of it.

As dawns, most of the mentions of war tax resistance in the Friends Journal are found in the obituary column. War tax resistance is presented as something that noble and honored Friends used to do; only rarely as something they are currently doing.

Nadine Hoover wrote an earnest plea for Quakers to adopt war tax resistance as a corporate testimony in , but it seems to have fallen with a thud and produced little effect or even debate.

In there were still some Quakers trying increasingly desperate legal arguments to try to get the courts to legalize conscientious objection to military taxation. Dan Jenkins tried a Ninth Amendment argument, which is the constitutional equivalent of a hail mary pass (the court would not only reject the case, but found it so far-fetched that they also upheld a frivolous filing penalty).

That case is notable, though, for the amount of support he got from the New York Yearly Meeting. They used a clearness committee to help Jenkins work through his stand and his process. The Purchase Quarterly Meeting provided some financial backing for his legal challenge. The Yearly Meeting filed an amicus brief in the case. Alas, this meeting too seems since to have been thoroughly infected by the magical thinking surrounding the “peace tax fund” idea, and the most active Friends there now sound almost as though they think of war tax resistance less as a logical expression of the peace testimony and more as a pressure tactic to use in the hopes of getting Congress to pass such legislation.

Meanwhile, the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting had held out as long as they felt able to in the Priscilla Adams case, finally writing a check to the IRS for the amount it demanded. (They would continue to resist withholding and levies for years not covered by the exhausted legal suit.) Martin Kelly, who would become the Friends Journal editor in , wrote bitterly of this in :

We talk big and write pretty epistles, but few individuals engage in witnesses that involve any danger of real sacrifice. … When the IRS threatened to put liens on Philadelphia Yearly Meeting to force resistant staffers to pay, the general secretary and clerk said all sorts of sympathetic words of anguish (which they probably even meant), then docked the employee’s pay anyway. There have been times when clear-eyed Christians didn’t mind losing their liberty or property in service to the gospel. Early Friends called our emulation of Christ’s sacrifice the Lamb’s War, but even seven years of real war in the ancient land of Babylonia itself hasn’t brought back the old fire. Our meetinghouses sit quaint, with ownership deeds untouched, even as we wring our hands wondering why most remain half-empty on First Day morning.

In the midst of this terrible decline, the Friends Journal devoted a fourth special issue to the problem of war taxes in . One thing it shows is a divergence of tactics between Quakers in the New York Yearly Meeting (who were concentrating on legal challenges) and those in the Pacific Yearly Meeting, who were trying to spread the practice of war tax resistance by asking Quakers to take baby steps like refusing tiny symbolic amounts of tax or paying “under protest” (but who struggled even to meet these exceptionally modest goals). In the Pacific Yearly Meeting did announce a policy pledging $100 in matching funds to any monthly meeting in its demesne that reimbursed war tax resisting Quakers for penalties & interest the IRS had been able to seize from them.

The Philadelphia Yearly Meeting reaffirmed its policy of resisting withholding and levies on the salary of its war tax resisting employees. But when it did so it noted that “very few Friends actively practice war tax resistance.” , the Meeting would report that it no longer had any war tax resisting employees, and so its policy, while still in effect, had gone into suspended animation.

The Britain Yearly Meeting issued a booklet on The Quaker Peace Testimony in . It mentions war tax resistance only once, in a list of historical examples of Quaker peace work, but does not allude to it as a current practice that is available to modern Quakers. It encourages Friends with concerns about paying war taxes to get in contact with Conscience, a non-Quaker group, rather than suggesting that they get guidance from their own meetings or from Quaker traditions.

When British Quakers released the fifth edition of Quaker Faith and Practice in , it included some inspirational quotes from war tax resisting Quakers of yesteryear, and reaffirmed its statement on the subject from :

We are convinced by the Spirit of God to say without any hesitation whatsoever that we must support the right of conscientious objection to paying taxes for war purposes… We ask Meeting for Sufferings to explore further and with urgency the role our religious society should corporately take in this concern and then to take such action as it sees necessary on our behalf.

But the fact that they reaffirmed this wording betrays that in , despite the “urgency,” the Meeting for Sufferings had not come up with a sufficient corporate response.

So that’s where we are today. There are still Quaker war tax resisters, certainly, but there is no groundswell of Quaker war tax resistance, and the obituary column is still where you are most likely to find a mention of a Quaker war tax resister in the Friends Journal, which is an ominous sign. The resurgence of war tax resistance during the Cold War perhaps would be better described as a fad than, as I hopefully did, as a renaissance.

But whether a renaissance or a fad, it represents hope that the current forgetting won’t be forever, but that Quakers may again reclaim their place at the head of the conscientious tax resistance movement. When they do so, they will be able to draw on the experiences of Quakers from the previous eras in order to sharpen the persuasiveness of their messages and discover the best and most appropriate techniques. And they will surely be led out of this wilderness by a few self-motivated Friends who kept the faith through the forgetting period.

Lonnie Valentine

Lonnie Valentine speaks on Quakers and the War Tax Concern: Unfinished Business?

Last night was the opening night of the NWTRCC national gathering at the Earlham School of Religion in Richmond, Indiana.

Earlham is a Quaker educational institution, and so there is more than usual interest in the history and current practice of war tax resistance in the Society of Friends at this gathering.

But we have war tax resisters here from a variety of backgrounds, and from all over the country… and even as far away as Kipkarren River, Kenya. They include relatively new resisters, and some legendary veterans of the movement.

The evening began with Lonnie Valentine (the Trueblood Professor of Christian Thought and Professor of Peace & Justice at Earlham), speaking on the topic of “Quakers and the War Tax Concern: Unfinished Business?”

He believes that peace-minded Quakers need to become more “militantly nonviolent” if they want to recapture the way in which their movement was once a real threat to the status quo. Radical societal change can only come about if the powers that be are undermined on multiple levels — economically, militarily, politically, and ideologically. Early Quaker tithe and tax resistance was conducted in that fashion, but now (when such things are practiced at all) they tend to be much less confrontational and much narrower in scope.

Ari Rosenberg

Ari Rosenberg introduces members of the local community to the NWTRCC gathering

He recapped the struggle the Society of Friends had when trying to determine the limits of war tax resistance, and how the eventual compromise (to resist explicit war taxes, but not taxes “in the mixture”) proved unsatisfying and unstable, and was challenged by John Woolman and others.

Valentine told the story of Quaker William Rotch of Rhode Island, who, after receiving some bayonets as part of a payment of a debt due him during the Revolutionary War, threw them overboard rather than risk having them requisitioned by the military. Valentine then challenged the audience to consider whether property destruction of a similar sort might be a worthy addition to their war tax resistance tactics.

What if, he asked, instead of only having a war tax resisters’ penalty fund to reimburse resisters who had penalties and interest seized by the IRS, we also had a more assertive response, in which we destroyed federal government property equal in value to any seizures it made?

Valentine believes that Quakers, not only because of the important role they have played in American war tax resistance, but also because of the ways they have also dropped the ball in that movement, have a special responsibility to lead now. He was a little less certain about how to make this happen… suggesting that maybe a campaign to try to get a lot of Quakers to resist a small, symbolic amount might be a good start.

Joanna Swanger

Joanna Swanger, Director of Earlham College’s Peace and Global Studies Program, addresses Strategizing for Social Change in 21th Century America

Valentine’s talk will be the basis for an exhibit being prepared for display at Wilmington College (Ohio) entitled: “What If They Gave a War and Nobody Paid? War Tax Resistance Among American Friends” that is due to open .

After dinner, Joanna Swanger, Director of Earlham College’s Peace and Global Studies Program, gave the opening convocation on the subject of Strategizing for Social Change in 21th Century America.

Swanger’s talk concentrated on the theory of peace action. She believes that the principles of non-violent action as studied by Gene Sharp and others are not necessarily applicable to our place and time. This is in part because she believes that the U.S. government does not respond to nonviolent pressure in the way expected by this school of nonviolence theory, and also in part because the internet and corporate control of media have changed the rules of visual communication in society.

What should we do instead? Well, I’m not too sure what she recommends. It all sounded pretty abstract to me and I tuned out after a while.

is the first full day of the conference, full of workshops and then a keynote address by Peter Goldberger on the ramifications of the Supreme Court’s Hobby Lobby decision for American war tax resisters.

The following newspaper article (found in the Amarillo [Texas] Globe-Times) concerns a tax resistance statement issued by the New York Yearly Meeting of the Society of Friends (Quakers):

Quakers Urged Not To Pay Taxes

New York (AP) — Quakers in the New York area have been encouraged to refuse to pay taxes or hold jobs that contribute to the war effort in Viet Nam.

The Society of Friends office here made public a “message to Friends on Viet Nam,” a document approved at an annual meeting at Lake George, N.Y.

The document promised financial aid through special committees if Quakers changed jobs or refused to pay taxes in protest against the war.

The regional group also approved a letter to President Johnson urging him to “bring hope to the world by breaking the vicious circle” in Viet Nam and to use “every imaginative and creative method to immediately end the war.”

“We are confident that if you take such positive steps, you will have the overwhelming thanks of mankind,” the letter said.

In addition, the 72 Friends “meetings,” or congregations in New York, North New Jersey, and southern Connecticut were called upon to “support acts of conscience by setting up committees for sufferings.”

In Washington, the Internal Revenue Service said it has the power to attach bank accounts or place liens against property to the extent of unpaid taxes owed by a citizen.

A spokesman said in some cases persons who refuse to pay their taxes for one reason or another place money in an account for IRS to seize.

An employe can’t stop his employer from withholding taxes from his pay check, IRS said.

John Clifford, leader of the Passive Resistance movement

Continuing from where I left off , here are a few more examples of the newspaper coverage of the tax resistance campaign against provisions of the Education Act, a long-term, widespread campaign with mass participation that proved very influential to other tax resistance campaigns that followed.

First, some excerpts from the Western Times:

Passive Resistance.

An Enthusiastic Meeting at Stratton.

A large and enthusiastic meeting to hear an address on this subject by the Rev. S.B. Lane, of Brighton, was held the Lecture Hall, Stratton, . The audience consisted chiefly of men who came from the district round, Mr. J.P. Baker presided and he was supported on the platform by the Rev. S.B. Lane, Rev. J. Seldon (Kilkhampton), Rev. E. Craddock (Holsworthy), Rev. F. Rabey (Bude), and Mr. Williams (Schoolmaster Kilkhampton). After a hymn and prayer by the Rev. J. Seldon, the Chairman said they had met to welcome Mr. Lane and to give passive resistance to the wretched Education Act which he said was bad from the crown of its head to the sole of its foot. It was an unfair Bill, it imposed tests, and the country would not rest until it was wiped out of the land. He hoped the audience had come with an open mind and he trusted some would be convinced. He (the Chairman) was prepared to go to prison, if need be, rather than pay the rate.

The Rev. S.B. Lane said they wanted no bitter feelings against anyone, what they wanted was religious equality. Some of them were passive resisters. He was glad to see some Churchmen present, he wanted deal with the question fairly. He (the Speaker) formed one of the deputation to Mr. Balfour when Dr. Fairbairn said to Mr. Balfour that they would not submit. He would not have agreed to the compromise On questions being invited, an Elector enquired if he refused to pay the rate, whether he should lose his vote. The Chairman thought there was no fear of losing the vote. It depended upon the overseer whether he would take part of the rate or not.

Mr. Williams (Wesleyan Schoolmaster, Kilkhampton) said in England and Wales he would debarred from 16,000 schools. In Cornwall, 162 schools, and within six miles seven schools were closed against him. Why? Because went to chapel. “Is that right?” he asked, and added. “I shan’t pay!”

The Rev. E. Craddock moved “That this meeting strongly denounces the Act and earnestly seeks its early repeal, and sympathises with those who refuse pay the sectarian rate on conscientious grounds.” This was carried with no dissentients. Hearty votes of thanks were passed to Mr. Lane and the Chairman. Invitation was given to join the Passive Resistance League, names to be given in to Mr. Williams.

The first reports of reprisals begin to come in: from the Aberdeen Journal:

Objectors to the Education Act

Distress Warrants Granted.

Two Baptist ministers, a coal merchant, and a Dissenting schoolmaster, were summoned at Stroud (Gloucester) Police Court for not paying their rates. They pleaded that they conscientiously objected to pay the full rate because part was devoted to the maintenance of sectarian schools. The chairman advised the defendants to pay under protest. The bench could only carry out the law. Distress warrants were issued.

An article by the Rev. A. Gray in the Burnley Express included a tribute to John Hampden, and this note about how the campaign was proceeding in Wales:

Wales is leading the van in this great fight against the Education Bill of . The “rock of offence” in their eyes, as well as in ours, is the teaching of denominationalism at the public expense. At Cardiff, on , a Welsh National Convention was held, “which was remarkable for the determined spirit manifested thereat.” As is well known most of the Welsh County Councils have determined to administer the Act in “the spirit and along the lines of the motto, ‘no rate aid without public control.’ ” Mr. Lloyd-George made a great speech at the evening meeting, in which he counselled ratepayers to adopt Passive Resistance in “those areas where the county councils are determined to administer the Act in the interests of denominationalism.” “In these infected areas where the councils had betrayed the people, let the people withhold the rate from them.”

The Sheffield Daily Telegraph had an anonymous letter opposing the passive resisters that included a comment about Quaker war tax resistance that caught my eye:

Formerly our Quakers rebelled in like manner against war taxation. They had far better grounds, for war not absolutely defensive is no actual or imaginary injustice; it is confessedly unchristian. But Quakers are more sensible in these days. Their opinions are known, and they pay their war tax with that reservation.

That paper also covered additional cases of passive resisters being taken to court. “Considerable interest was evinced in the cases, as the two defendants were well known, being the Rev. T. Collins, resident Primitive Methodist Minister for the Patrington Circuit, and the other Miss Lilla Talbot, daughter of the late Mr. E. Talbot, Methodist minister.” Distress warrants were granted against each.

At Alnwick on , George William Thompson and the Revs. John Oman, John Otty, and Ernest Oliver, Nonconformist ministers, were summoned for refusing to pay the Education Rate. — Mr. Joel, barrister, who prosecuted, said some people sought the martyrdom, which might be the object of those proceedings. — Mr. Thompson said he had no desire to be a mock martyr, but those proceedings were the only remedy the law allowed him of expressing disapproval of the rate. — The other defendants objected to pay the portion of the rate devoted to education purposes, on the ground that it inflicted gross injustice on Nonconformists. — The magistrates made an order on all the defendants to pay the rate demanded.

The News and General Advertiser brought this news:

Berwick Passive Resistance League.

This League met in the Baptist Church on , the Rev. R[obert] Leggat presiding. The Chairman explained that the meeting had been called for the purpose of taking into consideration what measures should be adopted when the demand notes were issued by the overseers, which would take place within the next few days. He was given to understand that the overseers had already discussed whether they had to instruct their collector to take the rates less the Education rate, or whether they should insist on having the full pound of flesh. The discussion, he understood, had been a very animated one, and lasted for over an hour, practically degenerating into a wrangle between Church and Dissent. It had been ultimately agreed by 4 to 2 to refuse anything except the whole rate. The Churchwardens had voted solidly for this motion which meant of course that they would put the Nonconformists to as much expense and trouble as possible. On the other side of the river the demand notes had already been issued, and some persons had paid the full rate in ignorance of the fact that the Education rate was included in the Borough rate. It would be well that they should understand that this new rate was not specified on the demand note, but was included under the heading of the Borough rate. Mr George Martin said that as the Council had the appointment of overseers it would be for the community to see at the next election whether churchwardens as such should be appointed overseers. The Rev. Lamb Harvey said that the Education rate was 4d. in the £ rental, and the rate for sectarian schools would therefore be about 1d. in the £ so they should recommend to members of the League that they should tender payment of all with the exception of the 1d. in the £ rental for sectarian schools. It was also agreed to issue a further manifesto making plain the position of the League, and the reasons which had led them to adopt this attitude.

The manifesto followed that article. It lays out their complaints about being forced to pay for sectarian schools and says “we earnestly invite all lovers of religious liberty and even-handed justice to join us in refusing to pay this rate.”

The Hull Daily Mail covered a meeting presided over by parliamentarian Robert W. Perks, in which he slammed the Education Act and had this to say about the passive resistance campaign:

He deprecated the idea that people should always submit to Parliamentary enactments, that a law abound the property and conscience of the people. That was not English, it was not in accordance with British history. He believed the Education Rate was an unjust and an immoral tax, and he did not believe it would be defended upon any righteous ground. When the bailiffs came to his house they would have to worm it from him by distraining upon his goods (applause).

The Burnley Express and Advertiser of covered a meeting of the Burnley and District Passive Resistance League which was attended by about 400 people. The meeting entertained the following resolution:

That this meeting protests against the so-called Education Act, , because it is unconstitutional in character, and seriously violates the principles of religious liberty, and hereby pledges itself to make every effort for its early repeal, and meanwhile gladly recognises the patriotic action of those who are prepared to resist the payment of that portion of the rate which may be levied for dogmatic teaching in rate-aided schools.

A G.W. King moved the resolution and added: “There was one weapon left with which they could deal out some heavy blows against the Act, and that was the weapon of passive resistance.”

The Rev. T. Seaton Davies seconded the resolution. He spoke of what he called the marvellous growth of the passive resistance movement, and said the passive resisters were becoming a force which would have to be reckoned with. On the whole he thought they had gained rather than lost in popularity by the sneers of their enemies and the criticisms of their friends.

“Alderman White, M.P.” spoke next, and in part, “replied to the charge made against the passive resisters that they were revolutionists and anarchists, and remarked that it did not matter whether the education rate was 1d. or £100, he would resist it.”

What he felt as the most serious part of that business was this, that the Protestantism of the nation was very largely at stake in that matter, for none of them knew what the insidious influence of High Church was, how it was burrowing underground in many ways. Therefore, he said that one means in his judgment of keeping that thing alive was to resist paying the rate, as it was necessary for the maintenance of their Free Church principles, and for their Protestantism, to do so, and many of them felt they could not do less, whatever the consequences were. They alone could do it. It was the Free Churches which must do it. It was not a single combat, but a war. In entering upon that position they were entering upon a long struggle which could end only in the disestablishment of the Church — (applause) — which was the sole cause of putting the educational clock back. Being on the right in that matter, they were bound, in the long run, to gain the victory. (Applause)

Below this was an accompanying article:

“Resistance” at Padiham

On the executive of the Free Church Council met at Mount Zion Baptist school, the Rev. D. Muxworthy presiding, and it was decided to form a Passive Resistance League for the town, and a public meeting will follow, probably next week. We are informed that a deputation has waited upon the accountant and assistant overseer (Mr. R.T. Whitehead), with reference to the deduction of that portion of the poor rate which is put down for education purposes — 3d. in the £, and the president of the Free Church Council states that the answer was that resisters could pay the rate with this reservation, and that the law would have to recover this separately.

On , the Rev. G.W. Bloomfield, pastor of the Mount Zion Baptist Chapel, preached on passive resistance, and gave the following reasons for refusing to pay the education rate, having already refused… [the usual grievances follow]

An editorial in the Coventry Herald decrying the passive resistance movement, put the danger in these terms:

Not only is resistance to the law being made or contemplated, but, in some cases at least, the particular methods taken to encourage it constitute an additional defiance of the law, amounting to legal conspiracy. There may be nothing illegal in passive resistance, in itself considered; legal authorities have been cited to that effect. In such cases the law executes itself; those who refuse their money have to part with their goods; they pay in the end. A peaceful acquiescence in this solution of a legal liability exemplifies the theory of passive resistance. In a by-gone generation Quakers took this attitude in regard to war taxes; but they did not seek to emphasize their action by public demonstrations, or to make it spread beyond their own borders. What is called passive resistance to the Education Act is, for the most part, of another character; it is organised, and, practically, missionary.

The author quotes from a letter by James Guinness Rogers that appeared in the London Times, in which that nonconformist minister and disestablishment activist warned that “Passive resistance may be regarded… either as a piece of political strategy, or as an act of supreme loyalty to conscience, and the two cannot be confounded without serious misunderstanding as to the issue at stake.”

The editorial adds this note about the “missionary” strategy of the resistance movement:

We have in Coventry a Passive Resistance League for the city and district. A week ago, the number of members was stated at 150, and it is believed to be increasing. There was recently a public meeting in Queen’s Road Chapel, at which a manifesto, setting forth the case against the Act, was approved. This manifesto, addressed “To the People of Coventry,” is about to be distributed from house to house; eighteen thousand copies have been printed. Attached are two forms; one is for those who desire to be added to the list of passive resisters; the second is for persons “who unable to decline” to pay the education rate (compounders and others presumably) desire to show their sympathy with those who refuse it and their willingness to contribute to an indemnity fund. Sympathisers with the manifesto are invited to fill either of the forms, and to send the same to one of twenty-five gentlemen whose names are given; the twenty-five include nine Nonconformist ministers. This is “passive resistance” up-to-date.

Next, from the Gloucester Citizen:

Passive Resistance.

The Mayor of Wisbech declares that he will suffer distraint of goods rather than pay the education rate.

It is thought that the distrained goods of some “passive resisters” at Matlock Bath will be taken to some distant town and sold.

Mr. Lloyd-George, M.P., speaking at Stratford on , extolled the passive resistance movement, and incidentally expressed the opinion that Mr. Chamberlain had started his new idea of taxing the people’s food for the purpose of withdrawing public attention from the iniquitous Education Act.

On , Prime Minister Balfour released a lengthy letter to the press in which he attacked the arguments against the Education Act and in particular the Passive Resistance campaign against it. This suggests that the government had begun to become alarmed.

The gauntlet was taken up by the reverend A.S. Hollinshead, who devoted his sermon to “Christ and Cæsar” — insisting that this time Caesar had gone too far and it was the duty of Free Churchmen to refuse.

On a meeting in Cheltenham of “large attendance, including a number of ladies in the gallery” discussed the question: “Shall we resist?” A report was given in ’s Cheltenham Chronicle. Balfour’s letter was derided, but also held up as a sign that the movement was making headway in becoming a genuine thorn in the side of the powers that be.

The Rev. Walker Blott, during whose speech a collection was taken on behalf of expenses, explained the basis on which the Cheltenham and District Passive Resistance Union had been formed. The refusal of the Cheltenham overseers to make a simple concession that they might easily have made showed that they would have no consideration in the battle; but they did not yet know how far persecution would be carried. They wished to collect funds sufficient to enable them to support the poorest townsmen in the struggle, and also to distribute literature (cheers).

The reverend Hirst Hollowell included the following in his remarks:

Here the speaker referred to the action of several Christian ladies in Suffolk who had boldly entered the precincts of a police-court and stated before the magistrates their reasons for refusing to pay this rate. … Not only were people refusing to pay this rate all over the country, but were going before the magistrates, and that very day the Government had commenced business on behalf of the Churches of Rome and England. At Worksworth, in Derbyshire, the auctioneer had commenced to flourish his hammer, for there they were taking the lead in this historical refusal to pay the rate. Nine o’clock was the time secretly fixed for the first sale by public auction of a passive resister’s goods and chattels; but men heard of it, and drove 14 miles to the nearest telegraph station, messages being dispatched in all directions. One reached Dr. Clifford, who left London by the newspaper train at 5.15 in order to be present (loud cheers). Six hundred men faced the auctioneer, and not a public bid was given (loud cheers); but someone privately bought the articles seized and restored them to their owners. Then a huge crowd surrounded Dr. Clifford, who spoke to them for over an hour in the rain (loud cheers). He believed they were on the eve of one of the greatest triumphs for liberty England had ever seen: and he trusted that in the preceding battle and sacrifices the harassed and brilliant town of Cheltenham would take a foremost and glorious place (loud cheers).

The meeting continued:

The Chairman then put the resolution– “That this meeting approves of the formation of a Passive Resistance Union for Cheltenham, and resolves to give it hearty support.” — The meeting rose to support it, and on those against it being also asked to stand up, Mr. Alf. Mann and Mr. Bradfield proved to be the only dissentients.

The Rev. J. Foster, in moving a vote of thanks to the speakers, expressed the hope that they should have 500 or even 1,000 pledged passive resisters (applause). … He warned people to ask before paying their rates if anyone had already paid the sectarian proportion for them, and to make a further deduction if necessary.

The Rev. J. Lewitt seconded, saying that he had never paid an ecclesiastical rate in his life, and that by God’s help he never would do so (applause).

The motion was heartily carried, and the meeting closed with a vote of thanks to the chairman.

And that takes us through …

Some tabs that have slid through my browser in recent days:

Miscellany:

  • The U.S. Department of Defense budget is notoriously sloppy. This is by design, as it allows for a lot of kickbacks and graft and such, and is the most popular place for politicians to put their pork projects. An independent audit recently conducted by “a Michigan State University economist [Mark Skidmore], working with graduate students and a former government official,” concentrating on the budgets for , found trillions of dollars of Pentagon spending that was never authorized by law. The Defense Department has announced that for the first time ever (!) the agency will conduct an audit of its finances.
  • According to a new study by Marius Frunza, the underground economy in the European Union succeeds in resisting €132 billion in Value-Added Tax each year, about 14% of the total amount of that tax the Union collects. Compare this to the “tax gap” in the U.S., which is estimated to be about 16%. This suggests to me that if the U.S. were ever to drop its income and payroll tax in favor of a VAT (as so-called “Fair Tax” promoters advocate), this might not have much effect on the over-all tax gap.
  • Reason magazine looks at a new biography of H.D. Thoreau.
  • The Greek “Won’t Pay” movement is still at its Archibald Tuttle-like ways: this time surreptitiously reestablishing a family’s utilities over the Christmas holidays after they had been cut off by the government utility monopoly for failure to pay tax-inflated charges.
  • Quaker Peace & Social Witness is a project of Britan Yearly Meeting. They have a new project called “Take Action on Militarism.” War tax resistance is nowhere mentioned as one of the actions you might consider taking, however, so chalk this up as another example of the decay of the practice of war tax resistance among Quakers since the end of the Cold War.
  • Some Spanish war tax resisters engaged in a collective redirection of their resisted taxes — donating that money to Stop Mare Mortum, which advocates for refugees.

New Tax Law Follies:

  • Kimberly Amadeo, at the balance, has written up a good summary of the various aspects of the new U.S. federal tax law. Some of it is still sketchy (she documents parts of the bill that were dropped before the bill was passed, for instance), so read it with caution, but it’s more thorough than most summaries I’ve seen.
  • Ruth Benn at NWTRCC looks at how the provisions of the new law may affect war tax resisters in particular.
  • Parts of the new law reduce the ability of people to deduct state taxes on their federal tax returns. This has the effect of raising federal taxes on people in higher-tax states — these are typically states like California and New York with high property values and affluent cities… also, not coincidentally, states that tend to vote Democrat. Those states are now considering ways to fight back by rejiggering their own tax systems in such a way that they can bring in as much revenue while preserving their citizens’ federal deductions. This may end up making the new tax law even more damaging to the fiscal health of the federal government than had been originally anticipated.

From the Salamanca Press:

Quaker vows to withhold taxes despite Supreme Court decision

Philadelphia (AP) — A Quaker who refuses to pay part of her taxes in protest of the government’s military activities is standing fast despite a Supreme Court rejection of her appeal.

“I’m deeply saddened that they aren’t going to hear the case, but they needed to look at other ways that I could pay taxes without contributing to war efforts,” Priscilla Adams said after ’s court’s action.

“I will continue to refuse to pay until the government stops using my money for the purpose of killing people,” she said.

The nation’s highest court turned away appeals by Ms. Adams and two other members of the Religious Society of Friends who said the Internal Revenue Service violates their religious freedom by charging fees and interest for delays in paying the portion of their federal tax that funds the military.

Ms. Adams, of Burlington, N.J., owes the federal government thousands of dollars in back taxes and interest. She withheld a portion of federal income taxes paid for five years in the 1980s and ’90s and was assessed late fees and interest.

Gordon and Edith Browne, Quakers who own homes in New Hampshire and Vermont, also refused to pay a portion of their taxes. The Brownes sued the IRS in federal court in Vermont; Ms. Adams sued in U.S. Tax Court. Both lawsuits unsuccessfully sought refunds for the fees and interest the Quakers were forced to pay.

Their appeals did not contest having to pay 100 percent of their tax bill when the IRS forces their hand. Instead, the Quakers cited a “religious hardship” and argued they should be able to pay the back taxes without any penalties or interest.

The justices let stand rulings that had gone against the Quakers, allowing the IRS to impose late fees and interest in addition to back taxes.

Ms. Adams said she will not pay the taxes, even if her beliefs land her in prison.

“They could create a peaceful tax pool that would collect taxes that would only go to non-war activities, but they chose to not listen to reason,” she said.

Her resolve is not uncommon, according to Quakers and members of the War Resisters League, a New York-based pacifist group. They say the rulings against Ms. Adams and the Brownes will do little to deter those who do not pay.

“If people hadn’t refused to respond to the draft, there wouldn’t be conscientious objection statutes like there are now,” said Ruth Benn, the league’s director. “Someone has to have the courage to stand up for what they believe in. Until that happens, there won’t be any opportunity for change.”

Peggy Morscheck, director of the Quaker Information Center in Philadelphia, said only a “very small” percentage of the nation’s 92,000 Quakers withhold portions of their taxes.

“There are many, many ways to act on the peace testimony, and a lot of folks do not feel they can bear witness to that testimony through war-tax resistance,” Morscheck said.

Here’s a video of Lonnie Valentine’s presentation on Quaker war tax resistance at the Quaker History Roundtable held at the Earlham School of Religion:

While I wasn’t paying attention, someone scanned in many back issues of Friends Bulletin, the journal of the Pacific Yearly Meeting and Pacific Coast Association of Friends. This has allowed me another window onto the state of American war tax resistance, Quaker war tax resistance in particular, in .

Here, for example, from the issue, is an article on an early Peacemakers tax refusal pledge that includes a complete list of signatories, including several I hadn’t heard of before:

Tax Refusal

On there were among those who did not pay their Federal income taxes the following 59 persons who joined together to support a statement distributed by the Tax Refusal Committee of Peacemakers, 2013 Fifth Ave., N.Y., N.Y. Reverend Ernest Bromley is chairman of this subcommittee of Peacemakers: A.J. Muste is secretary of Peacemakers. A part of their statement is: “Feeling that war must inevitably come unless something drastic is done by individuals to show their unwillingness to go along with war-making policies of their governments, we the undersigned state hereby that we are not going to pay our federal income taxes due . For some of us this means that we will not pay that percentage which corresponds to the nation’s outlay for militarism; for others of us it means we will not pay even the first cent for the maintenance of a government whose main business is preparation for annihilation…”

The signers were: Ernest and Marion Bromley, Golay Rd., Gano, Sharonville, Ohio; Lindley and Emma Burton, Low Buildings, Bryn Mawr, Pa.; Horace and Ava Champney, 512 Phillips St., Yellow Springs, O.; Sara Chase, 1525 Sutter St., San Francisco, Calif.; Samuel and Clarissa Cooper, 214 Eastbourne Terr., Moorestown, N.J.; Dorothy DaPonte, Rte. 4, Box 374, Mobile, Ala.; Margaret E. Dungan, Wallingford, Penna.; Arthur Evans, Awbury, Penna.; Rebecca Winsor Evans, Radnor, Penna.; Fyke Farmer, Bellevue Dr., Nashville, Tenn.; Rev. Marion Frenyear, So. Hartford, N.Y.; Henry and Beatrice Dyer, Yellow Springs, O.; Walter Gormly, 412 N. 3rd St., W., Mt. Vernon, Iowa; Konrad Halle, 76 Pinehurst Ave., New York 33, N.Y.

Gerald Haynes, R.R. No. 3, Freeport, Maine; Ammon Hennacy, Rte. 3, Box 227, Phoenix, Ariz.; Rev. George Houser, 21 Audubon Ave., New York 32, N.Y.; Woodbridge O. Johnson, Jr., 106 W. 3rd St., Parkville, Mo.; Sandy Katz 232 W. 29th St., New York 1, N.Y.; Ruth C. LaBarrer, 6 Nutt Ave., Uniontown, Pa.; Sarah B. Leeds, 28 E. Main St., Moorestown, N.J.; Walter and Emily Longstreth, 140 N. 15th St., Philadelphia 2, Pa.; Mary Bacon Mason, 31 Pleasant St., Newton Center, Mass.; Rev. Maurice F. McCrackin, 1111 Dayton St., Cincinnati 14, O.; Mary S. McDowell, 555 Ocean Ave., Brooklyn 26, N.Y.; Rev. A.J. Muste, 21 Audubon Ave., New York 32, N.Y.; Ax Nelson, 501 Benvenue, Los Altos, Calif.; Wallace and Juanita Nelson, Golay Rd., in Gano, Sharonville, O.; Ray and Jean Olds, Yellow Springs, O.; Raymond F. Olds, Monterey, Mass.; Storrs F. Olds, Monterey Rd., Great Barrington, Mass.; Jim Otsuka, Rte. 1, Cloverdale, Mich.; Mrs. Gordon Parker, 1401 Wood Ave., Colorado Springs, Colo.; Mabel G. Parker, 1804 Wood Ave., Colorado Springs, Colo.;

James and Paula Peck, 552 Riverside Dr., New York, N.Y., Miriam Pennypacker, 6420 Drexel Rd., Philadelphia 31, Pa.; Grace Rhoads, Box 90, Moorestown, N.J.; Elizabeth and Edward C.M. Richards, Nur Mahal, R.D. 3, West Chester, Pa.; Francis and Valerie Riggs, 23 Coolidge Hill Rd., Cambridge 38, Mass.; Margaret Schauffler, 100 S. Cedar St., Oberlin, O.; Robert and Marjorie Swann, R. 1, Cloverdale, Mich.; Ralph and Lila Templin, Box 125, Yellow Springs, O.; Caroline F. Urie, 128 S. Walnut St., Yellow Springs, O.; Ellen Winsor, Radnor, Pa.; Abraham and Jean Zwickel, P.O. Box 232, Pismo Beach, Calif.

And here’s an early example of a plea for a “peace tax”-style accommodation for conscientious objectors to military taxation, from the issue:

Tax Petition

On , in Whittier, Calif., there was combined with the annual meeting of the southern California office of the Fellowship of Reconciliation a program sponsored by the Peace Board of California Yearly Meeting. One of the results of the day is the following petition:

To the Congress of the United States of America

We the undersigned citizens of the United States of America believe:

That present tensions between the free enterprise and communist group of nations are the result of reliance upon military force as an instrument of political determination;

That the threat or use of such force can never result in a just or mutually satisfactory resolution of these tensions;

That the labor and material expended in building up military might would have and still might lead to a peaceful and mutually satisfactory solution if used instead indiscriminately to rebuild the homes and industries destroyed in the last war.

We further believe:

That the military way violates the commandment “Thou shalt not kill” and the Golden Rule by which a Christian must live.

That to supply the means to induce of compel another to do that which we cannot do is equally a violation of those Commandments.

Therefore relying on our Constitutional Bill of Rights which our nation is this week honoring, and the Right of Petition thereby guaranteed, we humbly pray your august body that you pass legislation exempting all of like religious belief from income tax to be used in support of military establishment and substitute the use of that portion of our tax which is to our total tax as the amount used for military is to the national total, to that committee of the United Nations seeking a peaceful abatement of these tensions, thus giving the citizens of the United States the opportunity of paying taxes for the support of war or peace according to the dictates of their own conscience.

Here are some more tidbits I found in back issues of Friends Bulletin.

This one, from the issue, is an early example of the thaw in the long-forgotten Quaker war tax resistance tradition that began after World War Ⅱ:

Peace Testimony

Two concerned Friends, Bob Vogel and David Walden, who are members of the staff of the Southern California Branch of the AFSC have sent to all meetings in the Pacific Yearly Meeting the following suggested “advice” for implementing our ancient testimony against all wars in terms of current issues.

Friends are exhorted to adhere faithfully to our ancient testimony against all wars and fightings, and in no way unite with any warlike measure, either offensive or defensive, to the end that we may convincingly demonstrate a more excellent way of settling conflicts — the way of Christian love, goodwill, and service to all men.

A living concern having been expressed that Friends[’] practices be consistent with their professions, Friends are urged (1) not to register for any conscription measure nor accept any alternative service for conscientious objectors under a compulsory conscription law; (2) to avoid engaging in any trade or business profession promotive of war or profiting from war activity; (3) to avoid the purchase of government war bonds or stock certificates in war industries; (4) to refuse to pay taxes for war purposes, paying only that percentage of the tax which supports the civil aspects of government; (5) to educate and counsel their children against the use of military toys and books and the attendance or participation in military drills, organizations, parades, or demonstrations.

Friends are urged to live in that life and power that takes away the occasion for war, to give deep attention to the causes of war and conflict, and to support those efforts of mediation and reconciliation which are consistent with our principles gained through Divine guidance.

The edition gave this transcript of a portion of the trial of James Otsuka over his war tax resistance:

Four Dollars and Fifty Cents

On Judge Robert Baltzell sentenced James Otsuka in Federal Court in Indianapolis to ninety days and a fine of $100. Otsuka, a member of Orange Grove Meeting (Pasadena), had refused to comply with an order given by Baltzell to pay to the government $4.50 in taxes which he owed, this being the amount of his taxes that he had determined from the Statemen’s Year Book and other sources would go to military purposes and which he had given instead to the American Friends Service Committee. He was represented by Earl Robbins, an attorney from Centerville, Indiana. An account of the dialogue heard in chambers where James Otsuka was sentenced indicated that Baltzell, who has been very rough with most c.o.’s appearing before him and rude to this defendant, was concerned with the issue. There follows a part of Carolyn Mallison’s report of the dialogue between Baltzell and Robbins, the attorney, after the defendant had been sentenced and taken away:

Judge:
Do you understand this, Robbins?
Robbins:
I think so, your Honor.
Judge:
I hope not! You are an American. I hope you cannot understand such actions.
Robbins:
I do not condone it myself your Honor, but I can understand it. It reminds me of the refusal of the early colonists to pay the Stamp Tax.
Judge:
You know what happened then. You wouldn’t want that to happen… I don’t see how you can represent him. It is a terrible thing for a young fellow to take all the advantages of living here and then refuse to pay his taxes.
Robbins:
Of course the tax law is different from Selective Service, for instance.
Judge:
In what way?
Robbins:
Selective Service does provide for alternative service for those who are conscientiously opposed to war, whereas the tax law gives no alternative.

Immediately after the U.S. Marshal had departed with Otsuka a group of his friends were invited by Judge Baltzell into his chambers for a consultation on the decision just handed down. Included in the group were Ernest Bromley (editor of News of Tax Refusal, from which this report is taken, Wilmington, Ohio), Lloyd Danzeison [sic] (Peacemaker, Yellow Springs, Ohio), Carfon Foltz, Mr. & Mrs. Glenn Mallison, Jean Olds, Perry Ostroff, Earl Robbins, Ralph Templin, and Caroline Urie. Here again the issue was raised as how one changes a bad law with Judge Baltzell indicating that his job was to judge by existing laws and he would continue to do so until the people through Congress created new laws.

This note, from the edition, gives us a peek into the publicity tactics in play at the launch of the Peacemakers movement:

Ernest R. Bromley (General Delivery, Wilmington, Ohio) writes: “The continuation committee of Peacemakers met in Chicago last week . Among the things discussed was a plan to get widespread publicity on the tax refusal business just prior to . At present there are about 35 people ready to announce their stand of refusal (some for this year, but all for next year, 1949 I mean). I am writing, therefore, to several who have recently expressed considerable interest in the position in order to see if any of them are ready to join us and use our group as a medium for making their announcement, at least making it at that time.”

An article from the edition also gave some useful background on the “peace tax” law idea. This came in the form of a proposed model bill that was being sent around for review by the Pacific Yearly Meeting to its Monthly Meetings, in the hopes of coming to “a decision on whether not an attempt should be made to enact this concept into law.” The article says that the proposed bill was formulated in response to a presentation on the subject in by representatives of the Claremont Meeting at the Pacific Yearly Meeting that year.

The proposed legislation called itself the “Civilian Income Tax Act of ” and would have created a walled-off fund, governed by the Secretary of the Treasury, and destined “solely to UNICEF” that would receive federal income taxes from conscientious objectors who were willing to pay an extra 5% surtax for the privilege of not having to pay their taxes into the general fund and pay for military spending.

I also noted several mentions of Quakers discussing the idea of voluntarily taxing themselves a certain portion of their income to send to the United Nations as a way of promoting peace. This continued long after the United Nations formally ratified the Korean War, so seems a bit blinkered to me, but there was clearly a lot of wishful thinking about the United Nations that had persisted through earlier generations in the peace movement and their daydreams about an international legal order that would subdue the frightful anarchy between nations.

Another early “thaw” example, a rare one from Canada, is found in the edition:

Calgary Friends… have written the Minister of Finance regarding non-payment of the defense portion of income taxes.

The Quarterly Meeting encouraged Friends to take what ever stand seemed right to them on the tax question as their consciences dictate, and asked the Monthly Meetings to consider the concern of Calgary Friends.

The issue had this eloquent statement from Irwin Hogenauer:

Non-Payment of Taxes

A problem has been raised in a letter from Irvin [sic] Hogenauer (310 East 170 St., Seattle 55, Washington), which has for many years troubled Friends and members of other peace-making groups. It strikes at two basic testimonies of Friends: our conviction that war and preparation for war are contrary to the will of our Father, and our belief in the rightness of a government of the people, by the people, and for the people. In our observation, this problem has not been solved by any group of our Society to the satisfaction of all. Perhaps our Yearly Meeting, with its diverse, international background, would be able to add to the thinking of the Society and like-minded persons. The Bulletin would welcome comments; please keep them brief.

―Editor

“In the Adult Study Group of University Meeting,” writes Irwin Hogenauer, “we are using Jospehine Benton’s pamphlet John Woolman, Most Modern of Ancient Friends. In my further reading of The Basis of Quaker Political Concern, the speech by Henry J. Cadbury before the tenth anniversary dinner of the Friends Committee on National Legislation, Washington D.C., I came across another quotation from John Woolman: ‘I cannot form a concern, but when a concern comes I endeavor to be obedient.’…

[“]Farther on in the speech, Henry Cadbury quotes Woolman again: ‘To turn all the treasures we possess into channels of universal love becomes the business of our lives.’ Now I interpret the word ‘becomes’ two ways. First, I suppose, one would say that for Quakers this action of which he speaks ‘will be’ the business of our lives. But I also read that the right channeling of our treasures ‘is becoming to’ the business our our lives. And the present tense means now.

“I have been burdened with a concern for many years. I have not sought it out… Try as I will, especially at the behest of friends and relatives, I can not throw it off, or dodge it, or whatever one does with a concern…

“Mailings from the F.C.N.L. continually remind me… that defense is the primary fiscal consideration of the United States government. This means that the dollars we pay in income taxes are being spent largely for the military establishment, security measures, and related endeavours in the defense machinery.

“What has become of our peace testimony if we can allow the government to take our substance and put it to a use contrary to this testimony?… Who is there who refuses military service who would not also refuse to pay for a bullet, a rifle, an atom or hydrogen bomb?…

“Some say we can not keep from paying it. There are a number of ways if one would but investigate. A result may be imprisonment, but what period in history has not seen some Quakers in prisons?…

“It is also contended that so many federal taxes that go for war purposes are on goods and services that we buy daily. This may be true, but it should not automatically relieve us from thought and action on the tax which is levied directly and often withheld without consent of the earner. With Henry Thoreau, we can not follow the use made of the dollar after we spend it for groceries, telephone services, gasoline, or a railroad ticket. But does this relieve us of all responsibility in this area? In any case we can do something about a tax levied directly on our wage, salary, or other income.”

A letter to the editor took up the call:

More on Taxes

To the Editor:

The Friends peace testimony that Friends cannot support or prepare for war, implies that one can not pay others to prepare for or engage in war. It is not true that one can’t avoid or refuse to pay federal income taxes. To keep one’s income below the tax level is the most practical course. I think — having done so for the last 5 years. A change in employment may be necessary, but can a Friend properly hold a job that causes him to compromise with his testimonies?

If we follow the Richmond Statement, , “Conscientious objection must be complemented by conscientious projection of God’s spirit into affirmative action,” we will be involved in so much volunteer activity for peace that we won’t have time enough for money-making jobs to have a taxable income. The important thing is to do all one is able for peace…

John Affolter
4004 13th Ave., South
Seattle 8, Washington

(In another letter in the same issue, the writer said that tax resisters could expect to have their bank accounts seized unless “you have no job, raise your own food, and resort to primitive barter… a cumbersome way of moving towards non-participation in the war establishment.” The writer suggested instead that concerned people “influence our legislators” in some unspecified way.)

Today, another item of interest I found in a back issue of Friends Bulletin, the journal of the Pacific Yearly Meeting of Quakers.

As I noted a few years back when I was looking through back issues of the Friends Journal, the American Friends Service Committee could be relatively conservative about war tax resistance, despite being so prominent in a lot of Quaker peace activism. Here’s another data point that shows that there was some heartfelt seeking going on behind the scenes.

The issue of the Friends Bulletin relates what happened when John Sullivan of the American Friends Service Committee addressed Yearly Meeting. Excerpt:

The American Friends Service Committee is currently considering some unprecedented action to respond to the terrible challenge of the war in Vietnam.

The National Board and other parts of the Service Committee are now weighing what sacrificial financial effort they will ask themselves and other Friends to make as individuals… They feel that they must find the way to say that we must support young men who refuse war service in Vietnam, deny moral sanction to U.S. military intervention in Vietnam and encourage churches and other religious bodies to do the same, support those who refuse their skills as scientists, engineers, and administrators to produce instruments of death, encourage citizens and soldiers to consider whether there are moral grounds for them to resist policies or disobey orders that would require them to engage in what their consciences clearly have told them are wrong, assist those who conscientiously resort to civil disobedience on such things as payment of taxes for war purposes, and so on.

The group asked me to say to Yearly Meeting that It [sic] is possible to alter one’s way of life, to live more simply, to recognize that $600 of every $1,000 of income tax we pay supports war expenditures and $200 of that supports the war in Vietnam. They wanted me to say that the time has come for us to look honestly at our own lives in the light of what is happening in Vietnam.

They wanted me to say that we may want to tithe or tax ourselves for peace and that if our situations are such that we cannot tithe or tax in money, we may be free to rearrange our lives so that we can tithe our time for working as volunteers.

This was followed by two “statements… presented by the Peace Committee and, after consideration and revision, …approved by the Yearly Meeting” including the following “Statement on Taxes”:

Many Friends feel a growing conflict between their testimony for peace and the taxes they pay for war. Friends, individually and together, are encouraged to examine their own economic involvement in creating conditions and institutions of both war and peace.

In the Discipline of Pacific Yearly Meeting (pp. 41, 42) “Friends are urged to consider carefully the implications of paying those taxes a major portion of which go for military purposes.” An increasing number of Friends and like-minded people have been led by conscience to express their protest of such taxes in such ways as the following:

  1. By a letter of protest included with their tax payment, in which the religious basis of their objection is explained.
  2. By a letter of tax refusal in which the reasons for refusing to pay all or part of the tax are set forth.
  3. By a formal request for return of taxes paid under protest, or of taxes and penalties which have been seized from the resources of tax refusers.
  4. By bringing suit against the government for recovery of such taxes when such requests for return are denied. Technical information regarding this is available from the Peace Committee.
  5. By refusing to file an income tax form and sending a letter of explanation.
  6. By refusing to pay the 7% telephone tax recently added to monthly telephone bills to help finance the budget deficit caused by Vietnam, and sending a letter explaining this action.
  7. By pledging not to buy automobiles and other items on which the increased excise tax for Vietnam is levied.
  8. By lowering their income below the taxable level and informing the government that this is a protest against war taxes.

Whether or not Friends are moved to such acts of protest as these, they are urged to take all possible deductions when filing income tax returns. Such deductions not only reduce taxes paid for war, but make available additional money which can be invested in Friends’ work for peace.

Believing that effective protest is grounded in the vision and enthusiasm of affirmation and positive action, some Meetings are assisting their members in sending a self-imposed tax of 1% of income each year to the United Nations. Individual Friends have been moved to contribute each month to the United Nations and the American Friends Service Committee a voluntary tax for peace equal to the amount they now pay in taxes used for military purposes.

While it is recognized that such acts of protest or affirmation are ultimately matters of individual conscience, Friends would encourage concerned individuals among them in their efforts to act in harmony with the light of conscience, and would support them in such acts as they are led by the Spirit to take. To this end meetings are urged to make information about possible courses of action available to concerned members and to counsel and assist those members seeking to act on their concerns about payment of war taxes.

Here are a few more items concerning tax resistance that I found in back issues of Friends Bulletin, the journal of the Pacific Yearly Meeting of Quakers. First, a brief note from the issue about a group who were supplementing their tax resistance with a lawsuit:

“Inter-Pleader” Suit

Phil Drath explained that this suit has been filed by a group of people who are refusing to pay the 10 per cent telephone tax on the Vietnam War. The courts are being asked to decide if it is legal to make citizens pay taxes in support of an illegal war. The litigants are asking for permission to pay the amount (which is now being held by a bank) to the American Friends Service Committee to wage peace. Phil Drath will be glad to furnish information to anyone interested.

Next, from the issue:

Comments

“I’m convinced,” comments Virginia O’Rourke of Berkeley Meeting, “the best way to undertake witness against the illegal use of our tax monies by the government (over 70 per cent of every tax dollar is used for war preparation) is to make oneself invulnerable to IRS collection tactics by radically altering one’s life style. This I have attempted to do personally and as much as possible. An individual can easily adjust and adapt. But with the responsibility of teen-age children, I feel trapped in the white, middle-class ‘bag.’ I hope in a year to have the last of my children graduated from high school and on his own. Then I hope to devote my full time and energy in joining others who are attempting to build alternate life styles for a new society.”

O’Rourke had been an active war tax resister for some time already, and at one point petitioned the Tax Court to recognize that her war tax resistance was valid on Constitutional grounds: to find a First Amendment right to conscientious objection to military taxation, and to find that the government was prosecuting an illegal war and so it was a citizen’s right (or duty) not to fund it, among other things. (The Tax Court did not deign to address her arguments but agreed that the IRS had grounds to assess an income tax on her for the years in which she refused to file.)

The issue included a letter on “Taxes and Giving” from Samuel R. Tyson (Delta Meeting), urging Quakers to be more conscious and conscientious about taxpaying (excerpts):

Each year we are faced with the inescapable task of whether to file an income tax form or not. The President has certainly given the world a demonstration about paying taxes and about the merit of giving, an attitude which is not wholly admirable. [President Nixon was a few months away from resigning in the face of the Watergate and other scandals, including allegations of tax evasion.] Each year it becomes more imperative to ask ourselves why we comply with the tax laws. What is reflected from our computations for Form 1040?

Third– we have the expectation of gain from giving. What happens to the income left after the withholding of taxes for governmental violence? Do you give (donate) as much as you pay by federal fiat? Are the gifts dependent upon tax deductibility? Do you give as much where there is no tax advantage? Do you give directly to people with no strings attached?

Fourth– Taxes are used to kill people. Is the federal state more concerned with life giving or death dealing? Because your resources can be levied, does it matter whether your voluntarily pay your taxes to the state? Does rendering unto Caesar relieve the individual from personal responsibility for the uses of tax money? There are jobs with withholding and self-employment; does it make any difference how long we hold onto our income?

Fifth– peace comes with giving all. Will peace come by continuing acceptance of taxes for killing? Is it more likely to come when we begin the process of being liberated from self and becoming less dependent upon governmental functions? Is there need to resist taxes? For torturing of prisoners, for the wars over the world, for the building of 1984 information storage banks, for supplying our present energy “needs” by nuclear reactors with their explosive radioactive potential which may be at the expense of our children’s children, and for the establishment in California of a violence center to change the behavior of violent individuals: chemically, surgically, or by behavior modification?

What are we giving our lives for? It is always our choice. Don’t blame the administration which gives us exactly that for which we pay.

The Monterey Peninsula Friends Meeting contributed a parable and an exhortation to the issue that ends with one of the strongest corporate declarations of war tax resistance that I have found from 20th Century Quaker meetings:

On Paying War Taxes: Considerations

“Temptation”*

The devil took the Quakers to a very high mountain
the mountain of academic-socio-economic success
and showed them all the kingdoms of the world,
and the glory of them;
and he said to the Quakers

all this I will give you…

  • financial security
  • acceptance in your society
  • many opportunities for doing good
  • tax exemption for your worship centers and your service programs
  • many other benefits too numerous to mention

if you will fall down and worship me…

  • bless the armies which protect your privileges
  • pay taxes without question for my armies around the world
    (a few words of dissent to support your moral image is OK as long as you refrain from any form of civil disobedience)

And the Quakers said (multiple choice — check one):

  1. we want to keep our service program going, so…
  2. we’re uneasy with your terms, but we like the benefits…
  3. would you serve as one of our Trustees? We need more practical minds like yours…
  4. as children of God and members of the Religious Society of Friends we are under obligation to free ourselves from this complicity.

Historical References

  • . William Penn informed the queen that his conscience would not allow “a tribute to carry on any war, nor ought true Christians to pay it.”

(I still have not been able to track down a source of this quote in the writings of William Penn. The earliest mention of it I’m aware of is in William Rakestraw’s pamphlet from around , “Tribute to Cæsar”.)

  • . Monterey Peninsula Friends Meeting, “It is not enough to recognize an evil and our participation in it. We recognize that the Light not only tells us what to do, but also what not to do. Thus, the words of Margaret Fell speak to us: ‘Now Friends, deal plainly with yourselves, and let the Eternal Light search you… for this will deal plainly with you; it will rip you up, and lay you open…’

    [Minute:] We, Monterey Peninsula Friends Meeting, urge Friends as individuals to stop paying war taxes; likewise, we urge Friends to corporately adopt the position favoring the nonpayment of war taxes.”

* Adapted from Peter J. Ediger’s “Temptation” by Walter and Sali Damon-Ruth, Monterey Peninsula Meeting [which in turn is a riff off of the temptation of Jesus described in Matthew 4:8–11]

A letter-to-the-editor from John Fitz of Berkeley Meeting in the edition was skeptical about the proposed “World Peace Tax Fund Act” legislation that had captured the hearts of many people who were conscientiously troubled by paying war taxes and were hoping some democratic accommodation would make the problem go away.

“I am not able to support the push to obtain passage of the [Act]…” Fitz wrote, “in spite of the fact that I am a long-time advocate of tax refusal and have myself often been a refuser. I believe that Friends should ignore the movement to obtain passage of this Act… and should refuse to avail themselves of its provisions if it ever passes.” The Act, he felt, would keep the war tax system intact while enabling some people to feel aloof from it: a “salve” he called it. He compared it to conscientious objection to the draft, which reinforces the legitimacy of military conscription by exempting its potentially most potent foes. “The only Quakerly way of facing the draft is to refuse to let that system dictate our lives, and accept the costs of such refusal” he wrote, and similarly “the only Quakerly way to face the seizure of our tax moneys for the military is to refuse to pay it at all.”

The same issue also contained these notes:

The annual issue of war-tax payments becomes a deep concern for many Friends. John and Louise Runnings of University Meeting invite other Friends to join with them in protest. They are preparing a brief for the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, which is hearing their case against the IRS. John Fitz, Berkeley Meeting, urges Friends either to refuse payments or, at the least, to write a letter of protest when filing returns; he makes a cogent case for tax-refusal. Albuquerque Meeting reports on correspondence with Robert Anthony of Pennsylvania, whose article in Friends Journal started them moving toward tax refusal. He had claimed a War Claims [sic — “war crimes” I think is correct] tax reduction, which was denied by the courts but is on appeal; if the appeal goes to the Supreme Court that body faces the dilemma of denying First Amendment rights or penalizing an individual for following religious convictions.

The issue added these notes:

Orange County includes in its newsletter a statement by Lonnie Valentine, clerk of Peace and Social Concerns Committee, “Why I Refuse to Pay Taxes for Military Spending.” She [sic] writes, in part: “The payment of taxes for military spending is only one of many ways I participate in the killing I would not do… (It) is the tightest bond to the death of others that I feel I can change… If I do not pay, the armies still exist, but I have removed my helping hand… I do not refuse to pay in hopes of peace, I am at peace and therefore refuse to pay… War tax refusal is for me a beginning, not an end.”

Here are a few more items concerning tax resistance that I found in back issues from of Friends Bulletin, the journal of the Pacific Yearly Meeting of Quakers.

The issue included an announcement from the Orange County Monthly Meeting of the launch of “The Conscience and Military Tax Resolution.” This sort of thing is frequently proposed in modern war tax resistance circles, but has yet to show much success. In this incarnation people who “are not ready to resist now” could sign on to the resolution to “show that you are at least ready to begin when 100,000 others agree to do so.” Once that target was reached, signers of the Resolution would begin to refuse to pay at least a certain percentage of their taxes. The goal of this was to pressure the government into passing “the World Peace Tax Fund Bill or similar legislation which would provide a legal alternative for taxpayers morally opposed to war.”

The issue had several items on war tax resistance, beginning with this statement and commentary:

A Refusal to Cooperate with War

We express our love for God and all the peoples of this earth. A vital act of this love is to refuse cooperation with registration for the draft and payment of our tax money for war. We testify against rendering unto Caesar that which is God’s. We, the individuals who serve on the Pacific Yearly Meeting Peace Committee, join with those Friends who refuse to cooperate with war taxes and registration. As a result of this call, we have chosen to protest war taxes, some refusing at least a “Token Ten” dollars.

Friend — what canst thou say?

Lonnie Valentine
Betsy Eberhart
Gladis Innerst
Mike Turner
Ellen Lyon
Duane Magill
Franklin Zahn
Ed Flowers
Bonnie Wells

The above statement, written by the Pacific Yearly Meeting Peace Committee and others came with labor over several minutes on conscription and peace from monthly meetings as well as Friends General Conference minute, Philadelphia Yearly Meeting’s statement, and Sarasota Monthly Meeting’s Statement of Peace. The intent was a minute of action in which our Peace Testimony would be not just words but applied to our lives in .

Two suggestions came out of a subsequent threshing session: 1) that the statement be made available for others to sign and 2) that the Peace Committee be available to labor with monthly meetings on this statement.

All monthly meetings have previously received Franklin Zahn’s “War Taxes–Minus a Token Ten” of which develops the idea and makes suggestions on alternative uses of the token ten dollars. In essence, withholding $10.00 in objection to the federal government’s use of our tax money for war is similar to withholding the U.S. Tax from telephone bills which was done during the Vietnam War.

I am raising the question within monthly meetings and among Peace Committee members whether PYM Peace Committee should sponsor a weekend conference at Quaker Center. Your suggestions and/or responses would be appreciated.

Also, I hope that monthly meetings, meanwhile, are taking advantage of Lonnie Valentine’s availability to provide workshops on War Tax Objection.

In peace and love,
Ellen Lyon, Clerk
PYM Peace Committee

Lonnie Valentine also penned a separate article on “War Tax Objection” for that issue:

How can we who are above the draft age support Friends faced with registration? In Our Peace Testimony it says:

Our witness to the way of peace requires that we refuse military service of any kind, and challenges us to consider whether we can in any way submit to that involuntary servitude which is conscription. Friends should work to abolish state conscription — whether for military or other purposes — and should refuse personally to cooperate with the draft.

Since many of us do not have this opportunity to refuse to register for the draft, we must look to those other ways in which we can refuse cooperation with the draft.

One way is refusing registration of our money for war through the taxation system. When we willingly submit a tax form, we are supporting registration for the draft; when we willingly pay taxes of which over half is used for war, we are supporting registration for the draft. When we do these things, we are withdrawing support from Friends who are refusing to register for the draft. Therefore, one unequivocal way we who are above draft age can support Friends resisting the draft is to resist payment of those taxes which, in part, go for registration and conscription.

If we recognize our “involvement in militarism through the payment of taxes used for military purposes” but do not act to end such involvement, then are we not hypocritical to tell Friends faced with registration to refuse military service? If draft age Friends take the Peace Testimony to heart and refuse to cooperate with the draft, then is it not time that we who are no longer of that age refuse to cooperate with the drafting of our money for war?

Perhaps our Peace Testimony states what we believe too rigidly when it calls on Friends to refuse cooperation with the draft. Perhaps, however, the testimony does not state what we believe with regard to the payment of war taxes strongly enough. If we agree that we should refuse cooperation with the draft, then it is time we should refuse cooperation with war taxes.

That issue also included this on-point notice from one Quarterly Meeting:

College Park Quarterly Meeting Minute of Support for Non-Registrants and War Tax Refusers

In these times of draft registration and military buildup, many persons may be led to actions in harmony with the Quaker Peace Testimony. College Park Quarterly Meeting supports those who feel spiritually led, for reasons of conscience, to perform such actions, including non-registration for the draft and war tax refusal.

A letter to the editor from Walter Klein in that issue suggested that Quakers, instead of resisting war taxes, should pay twice their normal tax, but pay the extra amount for a non-military purpose, perhaps one chosen as a group. “It would be legal, it would be a statement of conscience, wars and armament would continue; but the message might be loud and clear and perhaps more effective.” He suggested the program be called “ ‘The Better Use of Government’ Fund or ‘BUG’ Fund for short.”

Lonnie Valentine reminded Quakers of their historical tradition of war tax resistance in the issue:

Saying “NO!” to Taxation for Draft Registration

by Lonnie Valentine, Orange County Meeting

A.J. Muste once remarked that “The two decisive powers of the government with respect to war are the power to conscript and the power to tax.” Now it can be claimed that the government’s ability to wage war depends decisively upon its power to tax. After all, our nuclear age began beneath one airplane, twelve men, and millions of drafted tax dollars.

As early as American Friends recognized the connection between taxes and war. In an epistle to Pennsylvania Friends, John Woolman, John Churchman, and others wrote:

As we cannot be concerned with wars and fighting, so neither ought we to contribute thereto… though some part of the money be raised… is said to be for such benevolent purposes, as supporting our friendship with our Indian neighbors, and relieving the distresses of our fellow-subjects… we could most cheerfully contribute to those purposes, if they were not so mixed, that we cannot in the manner proposed, show our hearty concurrence therewith, without at the same time assenting to… practices, which we apprehend contrary to the testimony which the Lord hath given us to bear…

Indeed, the Friends’ clear apprehension of the connection of money and war was reflected in the Constitutional debates (about whether to include a conscientious objector amendment) with regard to the conscription of men and money. Roger Sherman of Connecticut remarked that “It is well know that those who are religiously scrupulous of bearing arms, are equally scrupulous of getting substitutes or paying an equivalent. Many of them would rather die then do either one or the other.” How much are we now ready to do for our scruples about conscription?

If we were all to be subject to the military draft in the next war, we would not pay a fee to hire someone in our place. However, we seem to have forgotten that with the payment of taxes we are hiring substitutes. We are paying to have someone go in our place. In being unable to say “No!” to the payment of taxes used to register and conscript others, we nullify our ability to say “No!” in other ways. After all, the government cares little if we leaflet post offices, learn draft counseling, or even advocate draft resistance as long as we continue to pay our taxes. Simply put, when we pay our taxes, we enable the government to conscript.

If other Friends are concerned enough about conscription to contemplate saying “No!” to the drafting of our tax dollars, please write me at 27122 Cipres, Mission Viejo, CA 92692 to let me know [sic] about the many ways we can protest and resist paying war taxes. Also, please feel free to ask those Friendly questions about justifying suffering for such a witness!

Joshua Evans reflected my feelings long ago when he said: “I found it best for me to refuse paying demands on my estate which went to paying the expenses of war, and although my part might appear at best a drop in the ocean, yet the ocean, I considered, was made of many drops.” Are there other Friends who are willing to be drops in this ocean?

[Lonnie Valentine has travelled in the ministry among Friends in Pacific Yearly Meeting this past year under the auspices of the Fund for Concerns to share with Friends his concerns about paying taxes for war.]

A letter from Harold Waterhouse in the same issue warned Quakers against making their war tax resistance “an act so private in nature that sometimes its sole impact falls on some harassed IRS clerk [and, a]s an act of witness… is chiefly between us and God.” While such an act “relieves our conscience… if it reduces our drive for peace to the point that we fail to act in more effective ways, then war-tax-withholding, on balance, is counter-productive.”

A letter from David & Janet Hartsough to the IRS, reprinted in the issue, explained why the Hartsoughs were refusing outright to pay $10.40 of their federal taxes (redirecting that to the Oakland Catholic Worker “to feed the hungry and house the homeless”), and paying the remaining $747.60 but in the form of a check made out to the Department of Health and Human Services instead of to the U.S. Treasury, in the hopes of thereby keeping the money out of the hands of the Defense Department.

A letter from Elinor Gene Hoffman to the IRS, reprinted in the issue, explained why she was withholding 33⅓% of her taxes (“approximately the amount we are spending for future wars and present armaments”), redirecting them “to organizations I believe are dedicated to peace and to furthering life on this planet,” and declaring this on her tax return as a “Quaker Peace Witness” tax credit. She wrote, in part:

Please observe that by withholding only one-third of my taxes, I demonstrate my willingness to pay for past wars and veterans’ benefits. I believe we should honor past debts and that veterans of all wars should receive our cherishing care.…

I take this stand in full recognition of the many benefits we all derive from our representative form of government and the freedoms it enables me to enjoy. But I firmly believe nothing good my government has done or will do can endure if we do not halt our military pollution of the planet.

The issue included a special section on “Conscientious War Tax Refusal”:

  • A reprinted letter from DeAnne Butterfield and John Huyler, Jr. of Boulder Meeting to the IRS explained why they were withholding 39% of their taxes and declaring a credit in a similar manner to Hoffman’s action explained above. Excerpt:

    We hope most fervently that legal options (such as the proposed World Peace Tax Fund) may be available in the future and would gladly pay into such a fund. Until then we see war tax refusal as the only avenue which allows us to follow our religious principles.

    We welcome your scrutiny of this return. You will find that we have been forthright and complete to the best of our ability. Furthermore, we hope that this commitment on our parts can be a useful catalyst for dialogue. We will welcome you our your agents into our home in hopes that, together, in a spirit of mutual concern and respect, we may discover better ways to bring about an end to all wars.

    A note appended to this letter added: “Through the efforts of DeAnne Butterfield, John Huyler, and others, Boulder Meeting adopted a one-year trial program of reducing war taxes and diverting them to peaceful uses through hiring a part-time Peace Secretary who will help stimulate activity in the Meeting and in the community.” (See ♇ 7 June 2018 for more information about this.)
  • A reprinted letter from Gerald Morsello of Eugene Meeting to the IRS explained his tax refusal, which involved redirecting “a portion of my Federal Income Tax” to “the Oregon Urban Rural Credit Union for use by people most affected by recent Federal domestic budget cuts.” He said he was doing this although he would prefer “to be able to place the money I owe the Federal government in a legally recognized alternative, such as the World Peace Tax Fund.”
  • An letter from Constance Jolly of the Berkeley Meeting to the IRS, excerpted from the newsletter of the National Council for a World Peace Tax Fund, explained her redirection of 35% of her taxes to “an organization that works for peaceful reconciliation, for human rights, and for disarmament.” Excerpt:

    I am not one who breaks the law lightly, but for me the law that commands its citizens to do evil is less binding than the higher law that commands that “Thou shalt not kill.”

  • An announcement for an upcoming conference on “A Religious Response to Growing Militarism” sponsored by College Park Quarterly Meeting said that it “will be a nurturing and supportive gathering for those Friends and others who are facing issues related to draft and tax resistance, [etc.]”
  • A note read:

    The 1981 Tax Resistance issue of Newsletter is available (40¢ each) from 331 17th Ave. E., Seattle WA 94112. Contents include information about forms of tax resistance or refusal, possible penalties, resources for decision-making, a national listing of counselors, Centers, and Alternative Funds.

    Those contents sound like the sort of stuff NWTRCC puts out nowadays. But NWTRCC wasn’t founded until , so I don’t know who was putting out such a newsletter in .
  • An article concerning statements by Episcopalian and Catholic bishops on nuclear weapons included this section:

    [I]n Archbishop Raymond G. Hunthausen of Seattle proposed that “a sizable number of people in the state” undertake a taxpayers revolt to protest the buildup in nuclear arms. He argued that refusing to pay fifty per cent of income taxes “in resistance to nuclear murder and suicide” would be “a definite step toward total disarmament… Our paralyzed political process needs that catalyst of nonviolent action based on faith. We have to refuse to give incense — in our day tax dollars — to our nuclear idol.”

  • Brief summaries of the activities of various meetings included such notices as these:
    • “Conscience and Military Tax Campaign [and] Consequences of Tax Refusal” were among topics on the agenda of University Meeting’s “study hour.”
    • “Eugene friends held a threshing session on tax resistance: ‘No consensus was sought, and the Meeting was clearly divided on this difficult issue.’ ”
    • “Conscription of Taxes” was discussed by the Phoenix Meeting in the context of “discussions growing out of the New Call to Peacemaking statement.”

Finally, the issue included a report from Anne Friend of the Santa Monica Meeting on The Friends Committee on War Tax Concerns:

The Friends Committee on War Tax Concerns is well on the way to working itself out of a job. The committee was established early in to accomplish three tasks: (1) to publish a guidebook on war tax concerns; (2) to encourage consultation on war tax issues throughout the Society of Friends; and (3) to develop queries and advices for Quaker employers.

The proposed guidebook has become a series of pamphlets and a bibliography. Three of the pamphlets, the ones on Quaker history and recent statements of Friends, on the Biblical basis for conscientious objection to war taxes, and on the spiritual and rational bases for war tax concerns, should be in print by , along with the bibliography.

In mid-continent and mid- there will be a conference for employers. Invitations will be sent to schools and religious organizations operated by all the groups participating in the New Call to Peacemaking. About 100 people are expected to gather and explore the positions that can be adopted vis à vis the Internal Revenue Service and the range of possible solutions to problems which may arise.

Two regional conferences, “Money and Conscience” and “Paying for War/Paying for Peace,” were held in . Both were very successful. Several more are planned for . FCWTC will provide resource material and assistance with program planning for conferences wherever there are Friends who recognize the importance of war tax issues and are willing to do the basic planning and arrangements. I hope this means some of us.

Each of us on the committee represents a different Friends organization. Most of us refuse to pay some or all of the taxes that pay for war. However, the committee is concerned with “concerns,” not just resistance. We believe that all Friends should go as far as they can, but not all are called to go in the same direction. What aspect of this explosive issue do you most want to learn more about, discuss with other Friends, make the subject of a conference? If you can’t give time, can you give money? The basic program of the committee is to prepare resource materials, distribute them where they are needed, help people with similar problems and concerns to get in touch with each other and then to lay the committee down, probably about .

I will try to get to any meeting in Southern California (maybe further) and hope to get to Intermountain Yearly Meeting in (Anne Friend, 836 N. Beaudry, № 5, Los Angeles, CA 90012). Lon Fendall at the Center for Peace Learning, Newberg, OR 97132, is willing to visit some meetings in North Pacific Yearly Meeting, as way opens, and/or to help plan a conference. Linda Coffin is the staff at FCWTC, P.O. Box 6441, Washington, D.C. 20009. Any of us would like to hear from you.

If April 15 is getting to you more every year, think about what you can do about it. And while you’re thinking about it, do something to get others thinking about it, too.

This is the thirty-first in a series of posts about war tax resistance as it was reported in back issues of The Mennonite. Today we reach 1984.

The Mennonite

The magazine helpfully summed up the current state of war tax resistance, particularly among American Christians, in its edition:

Military taxes: a continuing agenda in

“Were you able in 1983 to find the resources to support religious, charitable and peace efforts equal to the taxes you were required to pay for the military establishment?” The Friends Committee on National Legislation uses this question to encourage people to examine the consistency of their peace witness while filling out income tax forms.

In current military expenditures consumed 33 percent of federal appropriations, or 46 percent if the cost of past wars (interest on the national debt and veterans programs) is included, reports Delton Franz of Mennonite Central Committee Peace Section Washington Office.

During each Monthly Meeting (similar to an individual congregation) in the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting (similar to a conference body) was asked to examine this question: Is the voluntary payment of war taxes consistent with the Quaker peace testimony? When the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting convenes its annual session in , this question will be on the agenda.

Concern about “war taxes” is reaching beyond the traditional peace churches. The United Church of Christ and the United Methodist Church have adopted statements of support for members who conscientiously oppose payment of taxes for military purposes. The United Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A. has initiated a churchwide study on war tax resistance.

While the religious community in the United States has moved toward greater support for conscientious objection to paying taxes for military purposes, the Internal Revenue Service has beefed up its efforts to penalize tax “protests” of all kinds. An estimated 4,700 taxpayers were fined $500 each during for expressing their religious, moral or political views on their income tax forms. Congress enacted this automatic $500 fine as a provision of the Tax Equity and Fiscal Responsibility Act of . The Internal Revenue Service began enforcing the penalty soon after its passage by Congress.

At least 30 people, including those of Mennonite, Quaker, Catholic and other religious backgrounds, are challenging the constitutionality of this regulation in court. Lawyers believe that the penalty violates freedom of speech and that the expression of religious convictions on income tax forms is not “frivolous.” Courts are expected to issue summary judgments (decision made by a judge only, no jury) in a number of cases in the coming year.

Internal Revenue Service officials invited Mennonite representatives to meet with them in to discuss the application of the penalty for “frivolous” returns. IRS officials told U.S. Peace Section staff that the penalty is a processing penalty, designed to protect the efficiency of processing millions of tax returns. People who have filled their tax forms out correctly and have simply not paid the full amount of taxes owed are not subject to this penalty. However, taking a “war tax” credit or deduction or writing other comments on the tax form itself can result in a penalty.

The IRS officials agreed that the World Peace Tax Fund bill would be a solution if it were enacted. Abatement of the penalties already imposed is highly unlikely, but senators who helped formulate the legislation remain concerned about its application against Mennonites and Quakers in particular.

The Fellowship of Reconciliation group in North Manchester, Ind., has organized a Tax Resister’s Penalty Fund to ease the financial burden on conscientious tax resisters. People can submit a request for financial assistance to cover interest and penalty charges resulting from not paying military tax.

If the request is approved, an appeal letter is sent to all people who have expressed interest in contributing to the fund. In this way, the cost of a $500 penalty could be distributed among 200 people if each paid only $2.50. In , 250 people were on the Tax Resister’s Penalty Fund mailing list.

In MCC U.S. Peace Section approved guidelines for a “War Tax Witness Relief Fund.” This fund was established to provide financial assistance to people within the MCC constituency who face hardship from court cases resulting from a war tax witness.

People in financial straits because they contributed the military portion of their taxes to a charitable organization and then had to face an IRS levy, property seizure, or garnishment of wages would also be eligible for assistance.

To date, no money has been budgeted for the U.S. Peace Section War Tax Witness Relief Fund and the existence of the fund has not been publicized. U.S. Peace Section, however, will consider aiding those who are unable to acquire assistance from their congregation or conference.

U.S. Peace Section continues to accept contributions of redirected telephone and federal income tax money to its “Taxes for Peace” fund. Donations to this fund have supported special projects and the ongoing work of U.S. Peace Section.

War tax resistance had apparently also reached the Netherlands:

“The payment of taxes in the service of our common life is a necessary and a good thing. It is therefore unusual and inappropriate to refuse tax payment,” begins a declaration printed in several national daily newspapers in the Netherlands on and signed by 69 Amsterdam area ministers, including at least seven Mennonites. The statement, pointing out the Dutch government’s agreement to place nuclear weapons in the Netherlands, goes on to say, “In this critical phase we consider tax objection as a necessary means of protest. We wish tax monies no longer to be misused to continue along this dead-end road.”

The edition brought readers up to date on the story of John Dyck, a Canadian war tax resister whose story had been introduced :

He pays for war tax resistance

Like the rest of us, John R. Dyck of Rosthern, Sask., files his tax return.

But unlike most of us, he sends Revenue Canada a check for only 90 percent of his unpaid taxes. And he includes a letter informing the Canadian government that, for reasons of conscience, a check for the balance has been sent to the Peace Tax Fund in Victoria, B.C. The second check represents the estimated portion of Canadian taxes designated for the military.

This is in that John and Paula Dyck quietly insisted on not having their taxes spent on bombs and guns. They believe that Christian non-resistance means more than simply refusing to fight in a war. It also means not paying others to arm and fight for you.

A small but growing number of Canadians are sending a portion of their taxes to be held in trust by the Peace Tax Fund. They are hoping that the Canadian government will recognize their conscientious objection to military taxes and provide an alternative.

As a retired pensioner, Dyck must calculate the taxes he owes and forward that amount with his income tax return. Every year he checks with Ernie Regehr at Project Ploughshares (a peace research group) on the exact percentage of Canada’s budget that goes to the Department of National Defense. Last year it was 10.5 percent. He subtracts the military percentage and encloses a letter informing Revenue Canada of his actions, his reasons and the number of his account at the Rosthern Credit Union.

“I tell them, ‘If you want it, take it.’ But I won’t send it myself.”

Consequences. Last year Dyck found out the hard way what happens when the government wants to collect unpaid taxes. He says he was prepared to accept the consequences of his actions, but not for the ruthless, impersonal way Revenue Canada operates.

One day the Credit Union manager showed him an official letter that had arrived that morning garnisheeing his account. His personal notice of the action did not arrive until a week later. And even though the credit union account held sufficient funds, a second bank account in Saskatoon was also garnisheed. Then, without notice, his two pension checks stopped coming.

The government ended up with $360 more than was due and Dyck has not heard from them since. Presumably his “credit” at Revenue Canada will be used to cover the taxes he won’t pay for .

When Dyck visited the Revenue Canada office in Saskatoon to ask why he had not received a notice about the diversion of his pension checks, he was treated rudely. “The man used some pretty rough language. He gave me the impression that he would walk over anyone to get the money.”

Although he can recall the money in the Peace Tax Fund trust account if he wishes, he would prefer to have that money used in a hoped-for court challenge, based on the new Canadian Charter of Rights. “On principle, I don’t mind paying twice,” he says.

The Conscience Canada organization, an outgrowth of the Peace Tax Fund Committee, expects such a challenge to cost at least $50,000.

Dyck himself is not inclined to get involved in a court case. He has had trouble finding a lawyer who is sympathetic. Besides, “the court route should be taken by some organization that has enough money and can do it right.”

What is Caesar due? John R. Dyck is not a man to get up on a soapbox and trumpet his cause. But the word gets around. There are Mennonites in his hometown who don’t agree with him and others who ignore him.

His pastor chooses his words carefully when talking about the subject. “I don’t suppose he has a great deal of support in the church; people feel we should obey the government.”

Dyck is now 70 years old. When asked why he has taken such a stand when others rest in quiet retirement, he begins to talk about a lifetime spent in church-related service, of the example of his parents, about the books he has read and the years spent overseas with Mennonite Central Committee in Paraguay, India, Korea and Jordan, where he observed the effect of Western militarism. “They all left their mark on me.” He is committed to a vigorous, active faith based on a personal experience of God’s salvation and presence.

John doesn’t mind if people disagree with his stand. “I don’t have any corner on the truth. I know what it is for me at this moment. A person should stay true to one’s convictions.”

About his critics he adds, “People say, ‘What do you think you’re doing?’ I know that. I have no illusions that anyone in Ottawa is listening — at the moment. It has to start small, and I want to support this movement.”

But aren’t we supposed to give to Caesar what is Caesar’s?

“Sure. But does Caesar deserve all he asks for?”

A letter to Revenue Canada from Annie Janzen of Victoria, B.C., indicated that she was joining John Dyck in his protest. “I object on conscientious grounds to my taxes being used for war purposes… I have sent 12.2 percent (of income tax owed to Revenue Canada) of the net federal tax payable to Conscience Canada.”

The following brief note appeared in the edition:

Raymond Hunthausen

“Form 1040 is the place where the Pentagon enters all our lives and asks un­think­ing co­op­er­a­tion with the idol of nu­cle­ar de­struc­tion. I think the teach­ing of Jesus tells us to rend­er to a nu­cle­ar-armed Caesar what that Caesar de­serves: tax re­sis­tance.” These are the words of Seat­tle Arch­bishop Ray­mond Hunt­hausen (right), who two years ago de­ci­ded to with­hold half of his fed­er­al in­come tax and there­by helped launch a re­li­gious “war tax” re­sis­tance move­ment that is grow­ing rapidly. According to the Internal Revenue Service, war tax resistance has increased nearly fivefold in the last three years. War tax resistance groups say that actual numbers are higher, that IRS tabulations miss many people, including those who simply don’t file or who don’t specify reasons for underpaying.

An article on the Church of the Brethren Annual Conference noted that it had “appointed a committee to study and recommend how Brethren should respond to the dilemma of paying for war through taxes.” And another note said that the Lutheran Peace Fellowship “issued a strong call to tax resistance by American Christians. LPF calls its action ‘a witness of faith against the false lordship of nuclear weapons and other instruments of mass destruction.’ ”

The edition gave an update on the Mennonite General Conference’s decision to stop withholding taxes from the paychecks of some war tax resisting employees. There wasn’t much new to report, except that the number of such employees had dropped from seven to five (“with some changes in personnel”).

In the edition, Donald E. Martin wrote about “sponsoring” children from war-torn areas, and noted that doing so “helped to cut down the amount of money we spent on ourselves and the amount of taxes we paid toward paying for war.”

There were also several passing mentions of war tax resistance here and there that I didn’t think were worth excerpting here.

This is the thirteenth in a series of posts about war tax resistance as it was reported in back issues of Gospel Herald, journal of the (Old) Mennonite Church.

“Gospel Herald” logo, circa 1967

began with a backlash against the talk of war tax resistance that had been spreading in Mennonite circles.

Titus Martin started it off in the issue:

Some brethren are advocating that we withhold part of our taxes to the “powers that be” as a testimony against the war in Vietnam. With due respect to those that hold this view I want to give my reasons as to why I pay my taxes. Also, what appears to me a questionable testimony of those who do not.

The standard Render-unto-Caesar / coin-in-the-fish’s-mouth / Romans 13 stuff followed. Martin concluded:

I know of no New Testament precedent or teaching that we should disobey God’s direct command (here pay taxes) as a witness to “the powers that be” against their evil deeds. This is why I feel I should pay my taxes.

Withholding taxes as a testimony against the Vietnam war may lead some to believe that we think some wars are all right. For the Christian all wars are wrong. Also, to be consistent, I may have to withhold some other taxes, even local, where I feel the money is not spent right. God has established church and state and their respective duties are far different. Daniel Kauffman in Bible Doctrine says, “Both church and state are better off if each remains in his own sphere.” As God’s children we should live as strangers and pilgrims on the earth.

The Bible says. “Blessed is that nation whose God is the Lord.” I think the church shares much blame for the state our nation is in. If we would have been more faithful in reconciling men to God, that it could be truly said we are a Ghristian nation things would be different. Consistent living and giving the gospel in word and deed to ungodly men is still the best remedy for the ills of the world. I do not think as a church we should link arms with the unbeliever to do this as is done in peace marches etc. If we are faithful in this task which Christ has committed to the church, there will be little time left to try and help direct the “powers that be.” We owe them our prayers, and also our obedience where we need not break God’s higher law to do so.

Allen H. Erb, in a letter to the editor seconded Miriam R. Stoltzfus’s suggestion of lowering income as a way to legally avoid income tax, but questioned the assumptions behind the arguments for war tax resistance:

The plan of withholding taxes is generally presented as a way to give a testimony to the state against excessive war taxes. The plan usually implies that general taxes are to be paid. It is not denied that these latter taxes provide funds for military expenditures.

The logical argument for withholding taxes seems to present the following syllogistic reasoning:

Major Premise.
Taxes should be paid to the state if military expenditures are normal.
Minor Premise.
Current war taxes are above normal.
Conclusion.
Therefore an adjustment should be made by the individual person as to the amount of tax to be paid by withholding this estimated excess.

If payment for excessive military expenditures by the state is wrong why is it right to pay the normal military tax of a variable limited amount? In other areas of conduct do we argue that right or wrong is dependent on the quantity of the act? Is it right to steal a penny but wrong to steal a dollar? Is paying a small tax for military purposes right and a large tax wrong? Is the error in the size of the tax? Does the Bible build an ethic on paying taxes for militarism on the basis of the size of the tax?

Is this not one of those areas where God says in 1 Cor. 5:9, 10, “Not to company with fornicators: yet not altogether… for then must ye needs go out of the world.” Is it not true that in the area of taxes it is impossible to clearly identify the evil and the good and separate them? Is not the expenditure of taxes the function of the state and not the church?

Is not this difficult dilemma of the Christian in involvement in taxes to be solved only by a position of distinct separation of church and state? The church’s main function is to build the kingdom of Christ, the state to regulate society. “My kingdom is not of this world: if my kingdom were of this world, then would my servants fight” (Jn. 18:36).

But fortuitously under our present U.S. legal statutes we do have the blessed privilege of diverting a large amount of our assessed taxes to the treasury of the church. This converts our supposed tax dollars into the program of spreading the gospel of peace and goodwill. We are allowed as much as a 50 percent deduction for gifts to nonprofit causes. What a rich opportunity we have to do good! If the church would accept this challenge of giving the potential military tax as contributions to the program of the church our payment to the military would be canceled and the kingdom of Christ advanced. How the crying deficits of our church programs would be silenced!!

A letter to the editor from David L. Martin put the objection this way:

In Matthew 17:27, Jesus told Peter to go catch that fish and pay our taxes and there were no questions to be asked like, “Caesar, what are you going to spend this for?”

(It seems a common interpretation at the time was that the coin in the fish’s mouth was for a Roman tax; I’d always assumed it was for the temple tax.)

Lloy A. Knis tried to clear up “What Is a Nonresistant Christian?” in the issue. The Nonresistant Christian is among other things, he wrote, not a tax resister:

Jesus did not oppose the paying of taxes to Caesar. We hear today men talking about our tax dollars. They are not ours. They are the government’s. We pay what is the government’s and what they do with it is not our responsibility. The church and the state are still different entities even though we Americans live in a democracy.

Elmer Borntrager tried to find the middle-ground in this commentary:

As I see it we have missed an important point in the discussion on “Render therefore unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s” (Mt. 22:21). In practice I support the position that we should pay all our taxes without asking many questions. I do, however, want to be open to those who have a conscience against doing so or have actually withheld certain taxes or portions. The Amish brethren seemingly have made a point in withholding payments on Social Security taxes. Possibly we need to be more positive in our witness to the government in the use of our tax money for war and/or other immoral purposes.

What I am concerned about now is that we have failed to emphasize the last part of Jesus’ statement in the Scripture referred to, “and unto God the things that are God’s.” We who profess citizenship in heaven and loyalty above all loyalties to God should at least be as careful to give God what belongs to Him as we are to give the state its dues. And as we profess to “seek first the kingdom of God” it seems we should give Him as much as we do the state. Also as loyal servants of an almighty, all-knowing God and King we ought to question less the use to which He puts our funds than we do that which goes to the state.

Now it seems that as a church in all of these areas we have failed in our obedience to the last part of Christ’s words in this passage. It is evident that we have not been as careful to give to God and the church as we have to give to the state. To the state we give 10, 12, 15, and 20 percent to our income. To the church 2, 3, 5, and even occasionally 10 percent and more (an average of about 5 percent). Also it is evident that we often question more the use of funds in the church than we do the use of our tax money by the state. (We give to certain causes in the church and will not give to others, but give unreservedly to the state. How inconsistent can we get?)

My hope and prayer is that the church will take seriously the words of Christ, “Render therefore unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s; and unto God the things that are God’s,” with a renewed emphasis on giving to God. What would happen in the church treasuries and to the cause of Christ if we were as faithful in giving to our heavenly King as we are in giving to our earthly king? Should we not be more faithful?

Roosevelt Leatherman wrote, in a commentary that people with a concern about their taxes paying for war ought to be at least as worried about their investments. (He presented his argument so carelessly, though, that I wonder whether to interpret it as an intended reductio ad absurdum.)

A note in the issue again shone the spotlight on war tax resisters outside of Mennonite circles:

The Mt. Toby Monthly Meeting of Friends (Quakers), covering western Massachusetts, is waiting to see what the federal government will do in response to the refusal of members to pay the telephone tax they say supports the Vietnam war.

The Quakers have been withholding payment of the tax because they consider it an “infringement of religious liberty.”

An inquiry was sent to the Internal Revenue Service asking about legal penalties and routes of appeal.

“They never answered our letter,” said Laura Robinson of North Amhurst, presiding clerk of the meeting. Nevertheless, she said, “the only reply we got was a final notice informing us that they will take the money from our checking account.”

Members of the Mt. Toby Meeting take the Quaker peace testimony, first stated by George Fox in , seriously. Fox, the Quaker founder, said, “We utterly deny all outward wars and strife… for any end, or under any pretense whatever; and this is our testimony to the whole world…”

Finally, Mennonite war tax resisters got their voices back. Roy S. Koch wrote, in “Are Mennonites Anemic?” ():

Several years ago the Mennonites in Elkhart County alone paid three million dollars in government taxes toward war in one calendar year. By now the annual take will be much higher. What would happen if these Mennonites would become radical enough to withhold the 60 percent of the tax that goes for war purposes? Or better still, if they would give so radically to Christian causes (up to 50 percent of our taxable income) that there would be little or nothing left with which to support war taxes? The thought is staggering.

The issue reported on a “Peacemaker Seminar” at which “Ways to Avoid Payment of Taxes for War Purposes” was on the agenda. And a report on the Mennonite Graduate Fellowship conference noted that “Ted Koontz, Harvard Divinity School… presented an analysis of reasons for war tax refusal for use in dialogue with those who believe the war in Indochina is unjust but pay war taxes.”

This is the twenty-ninth in a series of posts about war tax resistance as it was reported in back issues of Gospel Herald, journal of the (Old) Mennonite Church.

“Gospel Herald” logo, circa 1988

In the Mennonite Church danced right up to the brink of committing to corporate war tax resistance, as other church bodies around them considered their own similar actions.

The traditionalists were increasingly restive, though. For example, in the issue, a letter to the editor from Robert L. Beiler took the traditional Romans 13 line and then went on to pointedly ask why war tax resisting Mennonites don’t seem to make any noise about taxpayer-funded abortions — and anyway the United States is a great country and we should be happy to pay taxes here.

The issue reported on how another Christian group was dealing with war tax resisters in the fold:

Quaker denomination supports staff war-tax witness

The General Board of Friends United Meeting — a Quaker denomination based in Richmond, Ind. — has adopted a policy of not withholding the federal taxes of employees who are conscientious objectors to paying taxes used for military purposes. This means the denomination is willing to violate Internal Revenue Service tax regulations in order to support the conscience of its employees.

The policy requires employees who desire to participate in the witness of military tax refusal to first participate in a “clearness process” with their local congregation. They are encouraged to compute the military percentage of their income tax, using the figures of the Friends Committee on National Legislation, and voluntarily deposit that sum in a special denominational account held for that purpose. The remainder would be submitted to the IRS.

In taking this action. Friends United Meeting is pursuing a long Quaker tradition of recognizing all outward warfare to be inconsistent with the gospel of Jesus Christ. It joins one other denomination in taking this action — the General Conference Mennonite Church. Friends United Meeting is also seeking legislative remedy through the U.S. Peace Tax Fund bill in Congress. This legislation would permit tax payers morally opposed to war to have the military part of their taxes allocated to peacemaking.

Julie Garber, arms crossed, faces John Stoner

Leaders of two peace organization talk about military taxes — Julie Garber of Fellowship of Reconciliation and John Stoner of Mennnonite Central Committee U.S. Peace Section.

Representatives of several “traditional peace church” denominations met to try to swap ideas about how to cope with the war tax resistance issue (Paul Schrag reporting):

Historic peace churches tackle thorny issue of tax withholding

Praying for peace while paying for war is a contradiction that historic peace churches must oppose by speaking out and taking action, representatives of those churches agreed at a consultation in Richmond, Ind. For some people, war tax resistance — refusing to pay the portion of one’s taxes that goes to the military — is a moral imperative. Their consciences will not allow them to help pay for machine guns and nuclear bombs.

The question of how church organizations can help their employees follow their consciences — and how to deal with the risks involved for both employees and employers — were the issues that nearly 40 Mennonites, Brethren, and Quakers struggled with at the meeting.

The church leaders, agency representatives, and lawyers affirmed their support for individual military tax resisters and for efforts to seek a legislative solution by working toward passage of the Peace Tax Fund Bill in the U.S. Congress.

They agreed to organize a peace church leadership group to go to Washington sometime in the future to support the peace tax bill and to express concerns about tax withholding. They also agreed to help each other by filing friend-of-the-court briefs if tax resisters are prosecuted and by sharing the cost of tax resistance penalties, if necessary.

“You may think the world will little note nor long remember what has happened here,” said Marian Franz, a Mennonite who is executive director of the National Campaign for a Peace Tax Fund. “But I regard it as a historic meeting.”

People from churches that have policies of breaking the law by not withholding the federal taxes of employees who oppose paying military taxes shared their experiences with people from churches considering adopting such a policy. The General Conference Mennonite Church and two Quaker groups are in the first category. The Mennonite Church is in the second.

Mennonite Church leaders, including Executive Secretary James Lapp and Moderator-Elect George Brunk Ⅲ, came to the meeting to explore church policy options on military tax withholding. The General Assembly of the Mennonite Church asked the General Board to develop a recommendation on the issue for consideration at the next General Assembly in .

“This roots us in a larger movement,” Lapp said of the meeting. “It gives us ideas and handles about how other people have addressed it. We don’t have to start from ground zero.” General Board plans to formulate questions about tax withholding for congregations to discuss. It will prepare its recommendation based on congregations’ responses.

The meeting, held at Quaker Hill Conference Center, took place in an atmosphere of excitement generated by a gathering of people from different traditions who share a vision. In the long and lively discussions, participants challenged each other and their churches to recommit themselves to active peacemaking and prophetic witnessing on the war tax issue.

Robert Hull, peace/justice secretary for the General Conference Mennonite Church, said it was frustrating that many members of historic peace churches are not willing to witness against financial participation in preparing for war although they are opposed to physical participation in war.

When a church or organization decides to honor employees’ requests not to withhold their federal income tax, it assumes serious risks. Any “responsible person” who willfully fails to withhold an employee’s taxes theoretically could be punished with a prison sentence and a $250,000 fine. An organization could be fined $500,000.

But such penalties have never been imposed on legitimate religious organizations, nor are they likely to be, said two lawyers at the meeting. The usual Internal Revenue Service response to war tax resistance is to take the amount of tax owed, plus a 5 percent penalty and interest, from the employee’s bank account.

IRS has not taken even this action against the four GC employees who are not having their taxes withheld. They pay the nonmilitary portion of their taxes themselves and deposit the 53 percent that would have gone to the military in a designated account. IRS has not touched that account since it was established after GC delegates approved the policy in . All GC personnel who could be subject to penalties have agreed to accept the risk.

The Friends World Committee for Consultation, which has had a nonwithholding policy , has had tax money seized, plus interest and penalties, from its resisters’ bank accounts. The Friends United Meeting adopted a nonwithholding policy . The Philadelphia Yearly Meeting of Friends will decide in whether it should have such a policy. Charles Boyer of the Church of the Brethren said he would use the input from the meeting to work toward helping his denomination develop a policy on tax resistance.

Participants made suggestions for improvements on a draft of “A Manual on Military Tax Withholding for Religious Employers” written by Hull, Linda Coffin of the Friends Committee on War Tax Concerns, and lawyers Peter Goldberger and J.E. McNeil. The manual is expected to be available .

The consultation was sponsored by the Friends Committee on War Tax Concerns and New Call to Peacemaking. The latter is a cooperative peace organization of the historic peace churches. New Call to Peacemaking plans to sponsor a military tax withholding meeting for a wider range of church groups sometime in the future.

Whether or not military tax resistance “works,” participants agreed that people’s moral imperative to follow their consciences must be respected. “No conscientious objector ever stopped a conflict,” said William Strong, a Quaker representative. “But they had to explain what they did, and the vision was kept alive, and those ripples — you don’t know where they stop.

The Mennonite Church was playing catch up with their cousins the General Conference Mennonite Church when it came to deciding how to react to employees who were conscientious objectors to military taxation, but now it was their turn to begin the process. From the issue:

General Board considers issue of church agency tax withholding

As the result of a General Assembly mandate , Mennonite Church General Board has initiated a plan to consider church agency tax withholding. The General Assembly action calls for General Board to bring to the assembly a proposal for how the church should respond to questions of conscientious objection to the payment of military taxes and the institutional withholding of the military portion of employees’ income taxes.

Steps in the consideration process, as approved at the board’s meeting, began in with participation in the interdenominational Employers Tax Withholding Consultation in Richmond, Ind. Then a working document, clarifying the issues and enumerating possible responses, will be prepared for General Board study.

Board members will devote a day to the issue prior to their regular meeting. The discernment process will continue as revised copies of the working document are available for conference and congregational study .

A summary of conference responses will be included in the General Board docket in , when the board will develop a recommendation to be presented for General Assembly action in .

The issue noted that the “first major public event” of the Peace and Justice Center at Stirling Ave. Mennonite Church in Kitchener, Ont. “was a… seminar to explore alternatives to paying taxes for military purposes.”

In a letter to the editor in the issue, Jurgen Brauer wrote that after reading Tolstoy he came to feel that “it is high time that the issue of tax withholding (or redirecting) becomes the major issue of the church.”

The “Taxes for Peace” fund gave its annual update in the issue. They’d decided to donate all of the taxes redirected through the fund to the National Campaign for a Peace Tax Fund , and announced that they’d redirected about $4,000 to “the Lancaster County, Pa., Peacework Alternatives project.”

A note in the issue:

Poster on war tax resistance from Mennonite Central Committee. The words on the poster are by John Stoner: “We are war tax resisters because we have discovered some doubt as to what belongs to Caesar and what belongs to God, and have decided to give the benefit of the doubt to God.” It is available from MCC at…

The General Board of the Mennonite Church met in :

Chris Longenecker, standing at a podium, addresses a group seated at desks

Chris Longenecker tells General Board how she decided to ask her employer — Eastern Mennonite Board of Missions — to stop withholding the military portion of her taxes from her wages. Eastern Board, like other Mennnonite Church institutions, is waiting for guidance on this issue from General Board before it honors a request like this.

Jim Lapp gesticulates while Ed Metzler stands nearby holding a folder of papers

Ed Metzler (left) and Jim Lapp lead the General Board discussion on war taxes.

General Board takes step in non-withholding of war taxes

In a decision that will lead to breaking the law if approved by the General Assembly , the General Board of the Mennonite Church has recommended that war taxes not be withheld from the paychecks of denominational employees who request that. The 32-member board passed the recommendation unanimously, with a few abstentions.

The action, which came during the board’s meeting in Kitchener, Ont., was a long-awaited response to several people at church agencies and schools who, because of conscience, do not want to pay the portion of their taxes — about 50 percent in the United States — that goes to the military. It was also a response to an impatient General Assembly that instructed General Board to take a stand on the issue.

“This has been an area we have been reluctant to move in,” said General Board executive secretary Jim Lapp in introducing the matter. Ed Metzler, the denomination’s peace and social concerns secretary, said the main reasons for taking the non-withholding action are to allow individual expressions of conscience and to witness against militarism. “But is this the best way to witness against militarism?” asked Tim Burkholder of Northwest Conference. Other board members wondered if the church corporately should break the law to satisfy the consciences of a few individuals.

The board members, meeting at Pioneer Park Christian Fellowship, gathered a day earlier than usual to take up the war tax matter. Metzler arranged for a variety of speakers to address the subject, including two persons who have requested non-withholding — Chris Longenecker of Eastern Mennonite Board of Missions and Carman Albrecht of Mennonite Central Committee Ontario.

John Stoner, executive secretary of Mennonite Central Committee U.S. Peace Section, delivered a ringing “call for courage” based on the book of Revelation. “It is unthinkable that John the Revelator would not see, in our time and place, the war tax demands of Western democratic militaristic capitalism as a challenge to our faithfulness to the witness of Jesus,” he said.

Bob Hull, peace/justice secretary for the General Conference Mennonite Church, explained the lengthy process that led to his denomination’s decision to honor requests for non-withholding. It included a four-year effort to explore all legal channels — legislative, judicial, administrative — for avoiding the payment of war taxes. Finally, at their convention in Bethlehem, Pa., 72 percent of the GC delegates voted to defy the law — the first denomination to do so. (Several Quaker groups have since done the same.) To date, the U.S. Internal Revenue Service has not moved against the GC Church.

In the discussion that followed, several people argued that consistent conscientious objection to war should include a refusal to fight as well as to pay for fighting. Others wondered why the Mennonite Church — and other denominations — agreed so easily to a law in the U.S. (and earlier in Canada) that required them to withhold taxes from employees’ wages, thus putting the church in the role of tax collector for the government.

For a while it looked like the board members might postpone action on the issue or pass the buck to the 22 conferences of the Mennonite Church. But Moderator Ralph Lebold reminded them of their instructions from General Assembly, and Dean Swartzendruber of Iowa-Nebraska Conference urged the board to “decide here today.”

In the end, the decision was made after much deliberation and considerable rewriting of the proposed action. In addition to honoring requests for non-withholding, it includes support for the Peace Tax Fund bill in the U.S. Congress that would provide conscientious objection to war taxes and a call for “serious attention” to the question of the church as tax collector.

The recommendation will now go to the conferences for review. , General Board will take the responses from the conferences and shape a final recommendation for submission to the General Assembly. The board members agreed that the recommendation will be introduced in person to the leaders of each conference by a denominational staff person.

Gospel Herald kept readers up on the news of other denominations struggling with the same issue ():

Quakers agree to aid workers who refuse to pay “military” taxes

Philadelphia-area Quakers took a historic step recently to aid employees who were opposed to paying taxes for war purposes. The Philadelphia Yearly Meeting of the Religious Society of Friends, in its 308th annual session, agreed to withhold but not forward to the U.S. Internal Revenue Service the estimated military portion of its employees’ federal income taxes. This money will be set aside in a special fund and paid to IRS with interest when there is assurance the money will not go for military spending.

Currently the organization has 42 employees, of which an average of seven are tax resisters at any time. The decision to establish the set-aside fund for war tax resisters augments the decision to refuse cooperation with IRS levies on salaries of war tax resisters employed by the Yearly Meeting. The policies could make the group liable for sizable fines and penalties for breaking federal law. The Yearly Meeting also could incur liability for employees’ unpaid taxes.

And some Mennonite congregations were taking stands on their own (, Cindy Hines Kurfman reporting):

Indiana congregation supports its members who don’t pay “war taxes”

War-tax resistance is an important subject at Lafayette (Ind.) Mennonite Fellowship — important enough that members commit themselves to “support for those who, for reason of conscience, resist ‘war tax’ payment.”

To Ken Nagele, who began refusing to pay a portion of his taxes in , war-tax resistance originally meant not paying “the percentage associated with nuclear weapons.” He now refuses to pay for “all current and past military spending,” but still pays the portion that benefits veterans in the belief that he is “helping those scarred by killing.”

Nagele uses a Friends Committee on National Legislation document each year to determine how much he will withhold. This year the figure is 53.1 percent. The refused portion will be deposited in the Near Eastside Community Federal Credit Union of Indianapolis. This community-development credit union makes loans to low-income persons and small businesses in an economically depressed portion of the city.

Another member, Mary Ann Zoeller, is refusing to pay war taxes for the first time. “As a Christian, I knew I could not, in good conscience, support the killing of others,” she says. “Yet the existing tax laws require me to do just this, by asking me to pay taxes that finance military services. Following Christ’s teachings of love of his persecutors, even to the loss of life, I have been led to question my support of our military.” Zoeller sends the war-tax portion to Amnesty International, a human rights organization.

Alternative methods of war-tax resistance are also demonstrated by several families in the Lafayette congregation. One family, whose income is below the taxable level, has written a letter to their tax commissioner since which explains their belief that paying for war is a sin. Another couple keeps their payment to a minimum by following the example of their parents; live simply and give a large percentage of income to the church.

Another example ():

A Virginia congregation has decided to officially support its members who refuse to pay the military portion of their taxes. Community Mennonite Church in Harrisonburg, Va., has 20 members who illegally withhold some of their tax money as an act of conscientious objection to war taxes or are seriously considering it. “The congregation’s decision grew out of the desire and concern of a few of us that our action be more than the isolated action of individual conscience,” said Orval Gingrich, one of the 20. The congregation is encouraging all its members to include letters of protest with their income tax returns and has notified Internal Revenue Service that it fully supports its members who don’t pay war taxes.

By it was time for another backlash letter to the editor. Titus Martin hit the predictable Romans 13 notes and warned readers against relying on their consciences when conscience and scripture disagree. As a compromise he suggested that readers use charitable deductions rather than civil disobedience to lower their taxes.

Even the Presbyterians were getting in on the tax resistance act, according to this news brief:

The document describes obedience to civil authority as normative for Christians but asks the denomination to set up a special fund to support Presbyterians who suffer financial losses because of a stance of resistance. The paper argues that withholding taxes to protest U.S. military policy is proper under certain circumstances. Such activists are entitled to emotional support from the church, the paper says.

The IRS went on the offensive against the Philadelphia Yearly meeting, which may have been frightening news for a Mennonite Church which was contemplating taking a similar stand ():

Employees’ tax protest prompts IRS lawsuit against Quakers

The Internal Revenue Service has filed two suits against a Quaker group in Pennsylvania because the organization has refused to attach the wages of two employees who have withheld part of their income taxes as a conscientious protest against military spending. The lawsuits against the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting of the Religious Society of Friends seek $17,000 in connection with federal taxes that were not paid by William Grassie and David Falls. IRS said it takes such action against the employer of anyone who fails to pay taxes on the ground that salaries are property that can be levied by the government in such cases.

Finally, a note in the issue read:

A new resource is available on the war-tax issue for Mennonite Church conferences — and others — that are currently considering whether church institutions should be instructed to not withhold taxes from the wages of employees who express conscientious objection to the military portion of their taxes. Conferences are to submit their counsel to General Board in preparation for a proposal to General Assembly at Normal . The resource is a just-published book called Fear God and Honor the Emperor: A Manual on Military Tax Withholding for Religious Employers. Each purchaser of the book will be on a mailing list to receive future updates on the subject. The book is available at a special price of $11 from Mennonite Board of Congregational Ministries…