How you can resist funding the government → the tax resistance movement → birth of the modern American war tax resistance movement → Bradford Lyttle

The Progressive, in April, 1971, 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 1970, 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 1970.
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.

A recent outrage-of-the-week was the Obama administration’s attempt to require employers to provide coverage of contraception-related treatment in employer-provided health insurance plans. Some employers, you see, think contraception is immoral, and don’t think the government ought to be able to force them to violate their consciences by providing a benefit to an employee that an employee might use to do something they think is wrong. To which many folks said: “Seriously? Of all the things the government forces us to bloody our hands with, you’re getting bent about this?” For example:
- “Catholic Bishops’ Contraception Coverage Argument Ridiculed By Pacifist Activists” by Zach Carter, HuffPost, quotes war tax resisters Ruth Benn, Karl Meyer, and Bradford Lyttle
- “Pacifists’ ‘Conscience Objections’ to War Taxes Never Get Same Notoriety as Opposition to Funding Birth Control” by David Dayen, FireDogLake, who includes this depressing remark about the collapse of war tax resistance in the Society of Friends: “I went to a Quaker secondary school for a year, and I’m quite sure that many of the believers in the weekly meeting for worship sessions had strong religious objections to their money being used to kill other people, even in self-defense. And yet I don’t remember a single controversy in my lifetime about ‘conscience protections’ for taxpayer funds and their use in war. I don’t even remember any accounting accommodations made for that.”
- “A modest proposal regarding religious liberty” by Mark Gordon, Vox Nova: “The principle being upheld is that as a matter of religious liberty no one ought to be forced to pay for something that violates their conscience. If that is true of government-mandated private insurance policies, and I believe it is, then it is equally true of government-mandated taxes.”
- “Obama’s Big Government Mandates: Why no one should be forced to act against his conscience” by Sheldon Richman, reason.com, who says “Americans have been forced, without their consultation — much less permission — to finance mass murder. It’s called war, invasion, occupation, and special operations. U.S. military missions in Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen, Somalia, and elsewhere have directly or indirectly killed over a million people who never threatened Americans at home. Those missions have ruined the lives of hundreds of thousands more through injury and the destruction of their homes and societies. The president of the United States refuses to take war with Iran off ‘the table’ … War against Iran would constitute mass murder. The U.S. government should be stopped from engaging in such brutality. But short of that, those with a conscientious objection should be free to opt out of financing these crimes.”

Resistance to the “Household Tax” continues in Ireland. For some reason, the government is requiring citizens to actively register themselves prior to paying this tax, which is a convenient point of leverage for the resisters, who are encouraging their neighbors to simply refuse to register. “The Household Tax can be defeated by mass non registration and mass non payment but this does mean organising every street and road in the country. The first step in opposing the tax is to refuse to register yourself but to win you must organise with your neighbors — if we all stand together we will win.” Irish parliament members are among the supporters of the Campaign Against Household and Water Taxes, whose spokeswoman explained: “This is not a charge to fund your local community, it is a tax to fund private speculators, bondholders and the bailout. Our incomes and services are being decimated to pay this private debt. Now people have a chance to register their opposition by not registering for this tax. By not registering, we can make this a referendum on the bailouts for the rich and the cuts for us.”
This is similar to the argument by the “won’t pay” movement in Greece, whose government is nickle-and-diming the citizens by raising rates on utility bills, road tolls, transit fees, and so forth, to try to raise money to pay off international lenders who are openly threatening to abolish representative government in Greece entirely and instead run the country as though it were a bankrupt corporation in receivership. When the government electric power monopoly cut off power to a family of seven with a disabled child because they were unable to pay the hike, members of the “won’t pay” movement reconnected the power themselves in defiance.
The IRS is being swamped by identity theft cases in which fraudsters use someone else’s social security number to file a tax return that qualifies for a big refund, then cash the check before the victim knows about it. The IRS then pursues the victim for having perpetrated tax fraud and tries to force them to pay back a refund they never saw. The agency’s focus on trying to get more people to file their tax returns electronically has made it easier and faster for the identity thieves to process fake returns wholesale. In Tampa, Florida, where the practice had become so widespread that local tax fraud entrepreneurs even taught classes in how to use the technique, the local news reported a few days back on “hundreds of frustrated people [who] were lined [up] at an IRS building…” waiting in long lines for hours only to find that the IRS personnel they talked to were unable to help them.

Yesterday I noted that Bradford Lyttle was quoted in an article comparing conscientious war tax resisters with those agitating against requiring anti-contraception employers to be forced to provide health insurance that covers contraception to their employees.

Lyttle is a veteran of a number of pacifist direct action campaigns, and was an important figure in the Committee for Nonviolent Action, an early war tax resistance-promoting group in the modern war tax resistance movement. Today I’ve done a little digging through the archives to find out what I can. Here is some of what I uncovered.

Lyttle’s college roommate was James Otsuka, also a war tax resister.
In 1954 Lyttle was imprisoned for nine months for refusing to cooperate with the Selective Service (military conscription) Act.
In 1958, he promoted tactics of nonviolent obstruction (things like blockades, sit-ins, and so forth) in pacifist circles, where many activists considered such tactics to be not strictly non-violent in a Gandhian sense, and many others were content to use more subdued educational and lobbying techniques. “Nonviolent obstruction makes real to the construction workers the issue symbolized by the missile base… the truck driver finds himself faced with the choice of running over the man and killing him or stopping and dragging him out of the way… He sees a man sitting in the dust before his truck who is silently saying to him, ‘Kill me before you build this missile base; kill me before you help kill a million innocent people.’ ”
In 1961, Lyttle coordinated a peace march from Quebec City, Canada to the tip of Florida. The march, sponsored by the Committee for Nonviolent Action, was supposed to then continue by small boat to the U.S. military base and future gulag in Guantánamo Bay — but the marchers were stopped just off-shore by the U.S. Coast Guard, in order to prevent them from violating a U.S. ban on travel by its citizens to Cuba. “This is the Caribbean Wall,” Lyttle was quoted as saying at the time. “We have the right to travel. It’s as bad as East Berlin.”
On that march, some of the marchers, including Lyttle, were arrested in Albany, Georgia for “failing to follow an assigned route… disorderly conduct and failure to obey a police officer” — that is, for trying to conduct a racially-integrated peace march through the white shopping district while the local government was trying to quash local anti-segregation activism. They conducted a hunger strike in jail, were released, immediately returned to the forbidden part of town to continue their protest, were jailed again, and finally the authorities relented — labeling their march a “picket” instead of a “parade” and saying that it could therefore go on without permits. This unambiguous (though modest) victory for nonviolent tactics is credited for influencing the adoption of nonviolent tactics in the civil rights movement.
A second leg of the march went from San Francisco to Moscow, but was halted by Soviet authorities “just 100 yards from the Lenin-Stalin tomb in Red Square” where the marchers were not permitted to speak on disarmament and a nuclear test ban, though they held a silent vigil and handed out Russian-language disarmament, conscientious objection, and war tax resistance propaganda. Lyttle told some curious Russians in Red Square: “I went to jail because I refused to serve in the U.S. Army. I have protested against American rockets aimed at your cities and families. There are Soviet rockets aimed at my city and family. Are you protesting that?”
Lyttle briefly addressed 200 students at Moscow University, and when the sponsors of the talk tried to stop it after an hour — only 15 minutes of which had been allotted to Lyttle — the students banged on their desks and demanded more time, eventually winning an extra hour and a half for the group and giving them a standing ovation at the end of their talk in which they encouraged the students to buck their government and support an end to nuclear weapons testing. One student passed a note to the demonstrators that read in English, “Do not take any notice of the official line. We are with you.”
They were unsuccessful in their attempts to demonstrate at the Soviet Defense Ministry, though they had been able to do so at several Western military installations along their path — sometimes courting arrest for doing so, for instance in Key West near the Boca Chica Naval Air Station where they were denied a parade permit and told that they could not carry signs or hand out leaflets, but demonstrated anyway and were arrested.
In 1966, Lyttle was among the Committee for Nonviolent Action protesters who went to Vietnam and tried to hold a vigil in front of the U.S. Embassy in Saigon. The U.S. military promised “counter measures” and the South Vietnamese government organized counter-demonstrators (some of whom were security agents disguised as students) who threatened and threw eggs, light bulbs, garbage, and tomatoes at the pacifists and tore down their signs as they tried to give a press conference. They were arrested before they could reach the embassy and hustled aboard a plane which deported them to Hong Kong. Police also “roughed up several newsmen, seized the cameras of two TV photographers, and briefly detained a third cameraman” while trying to prevent them from covering the abrupt deportation, which helped it make the papers.

A policeman for the South Vietnamese government rips a protest sign from one of the demonstrators. Bradford Lyttle is on the left.

In May 1967, he was arrested during a series of demonstrations at the Pentagon. He was quoted shouting through the bars of the windows of the bus where arrested demonstrators were being held before transport to jail: “Do not work for the Pentagon. Do not work for the government. Do not pay taxes. Join us in the movement against war.”
Though a pacifist himself, his opponents weren’t interested in playing by pacifist rules. He was knocked out by a punch to the face from a shipyard worker while he was leafletting against nuclear-armed subs, and on multiple occasions the offices where he organized nonviolent actions were attacked by right-wing paramilitary thugs or mobs.
Lyttle was the first national coordinator of the group War Tax Resistance (the predecessor to today’s National War Tax Resistance Coordinating Committee).
In 1971, Lyttle was involved in the May Day anti-war protests in Washington, D.C., as a coordinator for the People’s Coalition for Peace and Justice. The federal government conducted a crackdown, arresting thousands, with the stated goal of tying up anti-war organizers in court. Lyttle, for instance, was charged with assaulting a police officer with “a dangerous weapon” (a bullhorn). The case was later dropped, in part, it was alleged, because the government did not want to be forced to reveal the details of its illegal wiretapping of Lyttle and other organizers.
In 1992 Lyttle participated in the protests surrounding the siege of the home of war tax resisters Betsy Corner and Randy Kehler, which had been seized by the IRS.
In 1996, he helped deliver medical supplies to Iraq in violation of U.S. law.
He’s been a regular presidential candidate of the “U.S. Pacifist Party,” which he founded in 1983. In the logo of this party is a peculiar mathematical formula — representing something Lyttle has been promoting for decades now, his theory that a catastrophic nuclear exchange is mathematically certain unless we abandon the strategy of nuclear deterrence / mutually assured destruction, due to the summing up of multiple small but everpresent probabilities of accident, miscalculation, or malice. Such thinking has become more respectable in recent years under the term “black swan theory,” though I haven’t seen much evidence of Lyttle’s particular application catching on.
He was recently sentenced to a year of probation for his part in civil disobedience actions at the Y-12 National Security Complex (a.k.a. the Oak Ridge nuclear weapons plant).

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

Dear Reverend King, ¶ Tax Refusal Campaigns have been conducted since 1948. Some people have traditionally refused to pay their taxes because so large a percentage of them go towards general armaments. But there are many new refusers who are taking this stand because they are deeply concerned about the war in Vietnam. ¶ There were over 600 known tax refusers last year and the number is sure to be larger this year. Perhaps the tax refusal is still at the stage of being a symbolic action and an act of personal witness, but by getting more and more refusers and also by publicizing the action widely, we come closer to the day when tax refusal may become a political act. ¶ We recommend tax refusals as another way of expressing your own commitment towards ending the war. Also because of your position of leadership, your joining the campaign would hasten the day when it becomes a significant political act. ¶ Depending on the money available, we plan to publicize the campaign as much as possible. We would like to use your name, if you adopt the tax refusal position, in that publicity. ¶ Peace and Freedom, Eric Weinberger, National Secretary, C.N.V.A.

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

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

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

A.J. Muste (Chairman), Gordon Christiansen (Chairman, Executive Committee), Ralph DiGia (Treasurer). Staff: Eric Weinberger (National Secretary), Maris Cakars (Field Secretary), Mark Morris (Director of Publication), Peter Kiger, Gwen Reyes. Executive Committee: Peter Boehmer, Mary Cristiansen, Tom Cornell, William C. Davidon, David Dellinger, Barbara Deming, Erica Enzer, Jim Forest, Neil D. Haworth, Bill Henry, Irene Johnson, Yvonne Klein, Paul Klotzle, Anton Kuerti, Bob Larsen, Bradford Lyttle, David McReynolds, Stewart Meacham, Dorothy Mock, Jim Peck, Harry Purvis, David Reed, Charles Solin, Beverly Sterner, Mary Suzuki, Robert Swann, Charles Walker, Barbara Webster, George Willoughby, Bill Wingell, Wilmer Young. Consultants: Joan Baez, Albert Bigelow, Henry Cadbury, Dorothy Day, Richard B. Gregg, Ammon Hennacy, William R. Huntington, Ray Kinney, Milton Mayer, Mildred Scott Olmstead, Earle Reynolds, Sumner M. Rosen, Bill Sutherland, Ralph Templin, David Wieck

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

The time has come. The spectacle of the United States — with its jet bombers, helicopters, fragmentation and napalm bombs, and disabling gas — carrying on an endless war against the hungry, scantily armed Vietnamese guerrillas and civilians… this spectacle will go down in history alongside the unforgivable atrocities of Italy in Ethiopia. The spectacle of the United States invasion of the Dominican Republic — again pitting our terrifying weaponry mainly against civilians armed with rifles… this spectacle will go down in history alongside Russia’s criminal intervention in Hungary. But the spectacle of the indifference of so many Americans to the crimes being committed in their names, by their brothers, and with their tax money… this spectacle reminds us more and more of the indifference of the majority of the German people to the killing of six million Jews. The United States government has not reacted constructively to legitimate criticism, protests, and appeals: by world leaders including the Pope, U Thant, and President DeGaulle; by United States leaders including Senators Morse, Gruening, Church, Fulbright, Robert Kennedy, Eugene McCarthy, and Stephen Young; by hundreds of thousands of citizens including 2,500 clergymen and countless professors who placed protest advertisements in leading newspapers; by innumerable students, many tens of thousands of whom have taken their protest to Washington on several occasions; by celebrated individuals such as the Rev. Martin Luther King, Robert Lowell, Arthur Miller, and Dr. Benjamin Spock; and by leading newspapers, including the New York Times. We believe that the ordinary channels of protest have been exhausted and that the time has come for Americans of conscience to take more radical action in the hope of averting nuclear war. Therefore, the undersigned hereby declare that at least as long as U.S. Forces are clearly being used in violation of the U.S. Constitution, International Law, and the United Nations Charter… We will refuse to pay our federal income taxes voluntarily. Some of use will leave the money we owe the government in our bank accounts, where the Internal Revenue Service may seize it if they wish. Others will contribute the money to CARE, UNICEF, or similar organizations. Some of us will continue to pay that percentage of our taxes which is not used for military purposes. We recognize the gravity of this step. However, we prefer to risk violating the Internal Revenue Code, rather than to participate, by voluntarily paying our taxes, in the serious crimes against humanity being committed by our government.

350 Balk at Taxes in a War Protest

Ad in Capital Paper Urges Others to Bar Payment

Washington, April 14 — Some 350 persons who disapprove of the war in Vietnam announced today that they would not voluntarily pay their Federal income taxes, due tomorrow. They urged others to join them in this protest.
The Internal Revenue Service immediately made clear that it would take whatever steps were necessary to collect the taxes.
The group announced its plans this morning in an advertisement in The Washington Post.
“We will refuse to pay our Federal income taxes voluntarily,” the advertisement said. “Some of us will leave the money we owe the Government in our bank accounts, where the Internal Revenue Service may seize it if they wish. Some will contribute the money to CARE, UNICEF or similar organizations. Some of us will continue to pay that percentage of our taxes which is not used for military purposes.”

Joan Baez, Lynd, Muste

The first signature on the advertisement was that of Joan Baez, the folk singer. Others who signed it were Staughton Lynd, the Yale professor who traveled to North Vietnam last year in violation of State Department regulations, and the Rev. A.J. Muste, the pacifist leader.
The advertisement contained a coupon soliciting contributions for the protest. The ad said that further information could be obtained from Mr. Muste at Room 1003, 5 Beekman Street, New York City.
Those who placed the advertisement — which bore the heading “The Time Has Come” — said that those who sponsored it “recognize the gravity of this step. However, we prefer to risk violating the Internal Revenue Code, rather than to participate, by voluntarily paying our taxes, in the serious crimes against humanity being committed by our Government.”
The advertisement mentioned not only the war in Vietnam “against hungry, scantily armed Vietnamese guerrillas and civilians” but also “the spectacle of the United States invasion of the Dominican Republic,” an event the sponsors said “will go down in history alongside Russia’s criminal intervention in Hungary.”

Cohen Is Determined

The determination of Internal Revenue to collect the taxes the Government is owed was expressed in a formal statement by the Commissioner of Internal Revenue, Sheldon S. Cohen.
He said Internal Revenue would take “appropriate action” to collect the taxes “in fairness to the many millions of taxpayers who do fulfill their obligations.”
The Government has been upheld in court on all occasions when individuals have refused to pay taxes because of disapproval with the uses to which their money was being put, revenue officials said.

Ad Prepared Here

The headquarters of the Committee for Nonviolent Action, 5 Beekman Street, said yesterday that it had prepared the advertisement carried in the Washington newspaper after receiving 350 responses to invitations it had sent out soliciting participation in “an act of civil disobedience.”
A spokesman for the committee said that Mr. Muste, the chairman, was out of town and would return in about a week. The spokesman said that although monetary contributions in response to the advertisement had not yet begun to come in, the committee was prepared to mail literature explaining its program to those who responded to the advertisement.
The spokesman said that the tax protest had been intended to represent “a more radical and meaningful protest against the Vietnam War.”
The committee announced that members would appear at 2:15 P.M. today in front of the Internal Revenue Service office, 120 Church Street, to distribute leaflets concerning the tax protest.
It also said that a rally and picketing would be staged from 11 A.M. to 3:30 P.M., in front of the Federal Building in San Francisco under the sponsorship of the War Resisters League. The league also has offices at 5 Beekman Street.

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

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

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

The Time Has Come

The spectacle of the United States — with its jet bombers, helicopters, fragmentation and napalm bombs and disabling gas — carrying on an endless war against the hungry, scantily armed Vietnamese guerrillas and civilians… this spectacle will go down in history alongside the unforgivable atrocities of Italy in Ethiopia.
The spectacle of the United States invasion of the Dominican Republic — again pitting our terrifying weaponry mainly against civilians armed with rifles… this spectacle will go down in history alongside Russia’s criminal intervention in Hungary.
But the spectacle of the indifference of so many Americans to the crimes being committed in their names, by their brothers, and with their tax money… this spectacle reminds us more and more of the indifference of the majority of the German people to the killing of six million Jews.
The United States government has not reacted constructively to legitimate criticism, protests and appeals:

by world leaders including the Pope, U Thant and President De Gaulle —

by United States leaders including Senators Morse, Gruening, Church, Fulbright, Robert Kennedy, Eugene McCarthy and Stephen Young —

by hundreds of thousands of citizens including 2,500 clergymen and countless professors who placed protest advertisements in leading newspapers —

by innumerable students, many tens of thousands of whom have taken their protest to Washington on several occasions —

by celebrated individuals such as the Rev. Martin Luther King, Robert Lowell, Arthur Miller and Dr. Benjamin Spock —

and by leading newspapers, including the New York Times.

We believe that the ordinary channels of protest have been exhausted and that the time has come for Americans of conscience to take more radical action in the hope of averting nuclear war.
Therefore, the undersigned hereby declare that at least as long as U.S. Forces are clearly being used in violation of the U.S. Constitution, International Law and the United Nations Charter…

We will refuse to pay our federal income taxes voluntarily

Some of us will leave the money we owe the government in our bank accounts, where the Internal Revenue Service may seize it if they wish. Others will contribute the money to CARE, UNICEF or similar organizations. Some of us will continue to pay that percentage of our taxes which is not used for military purposes.
We recognize the gravity of this step. However, we prefer to risk violating the Internal Revenue Code, rather than to participate, by voluntarily paying our taxes, in the serious crimes against humanity being committed by our Government.

A challenge that many successful tax resistance campaigns have confronted has to do with divisions in the movement. Sometimes these are deliberate divide-and-conquer tactics by those who oppose the campaign. Other times, these are just the result of fractures in an unstable coalition, where most of the dividing pressure comes from within the campaign.

It can be important to the success of such a campaign that it maintain and demonstrate solidarity in the face of such challenges. Here are some examples of how a variety of tax resistance campaigns have tried to cope.

German constitutionalists

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

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

Rebeccaites

The Rebeccaite movement in Wales was very successful in its bold campaign of destroying toll booths. But its diffuse, non-hierarchical, anonymous structure made it easy for people to hijack it for their own ends, and it wasn’t long before people and groups calling themselves “Rebecca” began issuing threats and enacting vigilante justice in a variety of causes, or sometimes in what seemed like merely personal grievances.

For example, having come to the help of the farmers by reducing the tolls they were charged when bringing their goods to market, a meeting of Rebeccaites decided they were justified in now demanding that these newly-liberated farmers and merchants lower the prices of their goods. Butter and beer would now be cheaper in Wales, and the Rebeccaites would make it so by force if necessary.

Things like this made the message of the movement confused, made it less sympathetic to potential supporters, and helped the authorities to recruit spies and people willing to testify against the rioters among those who otherwise might have been their allies.

Irish Land League

The Irish, suffering from famine and under the thumb of government-backed English absentee landlords, began a rent strike under the leadership of the Irish Land League.

The English encouraged the Irish to respond to their sad lot by emigrating to America and elsewhere. They would have been happy to depopulate the island and make it England’s livestock grazing pasture, and they were eager to diminish by attrition the political power of the native population. But, as Charles Stewart Parnell put it:

The Land League saw through this design, and defeated it by their advice to the people to resist being compelled to emigrate. It told them to refuse to pay extortionate rents — that is, rents they could not pay and at the same time feed their families; it told them to refuse to leave their homes unless forcibly ejected, so that winter might not find them without a shelter to their heads; and it told them to refuse to rent farms from which other tenants had been evicted.

British women’s suffrage movement

At the time the Women’s Tax Resistance League and allied organizations were trying to win the vote for women, most men couldn’t vote in Britain either. The vote at the time was largely restricted to propertied men, though there were ongoing campaigns for universal male suffrage.

By trying to get women to be treated equally as voters under the law, the women’s movement of the time was, thereby, fighting merely for the voting rights of propertied women, not for women in general.

Dora Montefiore reflected on this, and the divisions it threatened to provoke, when she reviewed her time in the movement in her autobiography, From a Victorian to a Modern:

The members of the I.L.P., of which there was a good branch in Hammersmith, were very helpful, both as speakers and organisers during these meetings, but the Members of the Social Democratic Federation, of which I was a member, were very scornful because they said we should have been asking at that moment for Adult Suffrage and not Votes for Women; but although I have always been a staunch adult suffragist, I felt that at that moment the question of the enfranchisement of women was paramount, as we had to educate the public in our demands and in the reasons for our demands, and as we found that with many people the words “Adult Suffrage” connoted only manhood suffrage, our urgent duty was at that moment to gain Press publicity up and down the country and to popularise the idea of the political enfranchisement of women.

I explained in all my speeches and writings that though it looked as if I were only asking for Suffrage for Women on a property qualification, I was doing this because the mass of non-qualified women could not demonstrate in the same way, and I was to that extent their spokeswoman. … The working women from the East End came, time and again, to demonstrate in front of my barricaded house and understood this point and never swerved in their allegiance to our organisation

Poll Tax rebellion in the U.K.

In Danny Burns’s reminiscences of the Poll Tax Rebellion, he reflects that there were constant tensions in the campaign between the locally-organized grassroots groups that were the real engine of the revolt, and the professional left/labor radical groups and politicians who kept trying to put themselves at the front of the parade.

When a number of people were arrested in a police riot during an anti Poll Tax demonstration at Trafalgar Square, some of the movement leadership distanced themselves from those who had been arrested in the riot — wanting to distinguish nonviolent tax resisters from those charged with resisting arrest or other such charges, and talking about holding “an internal inquiry” to “root out the troublemakers.” But when the defendants organized their own collective defense committee, the leaders of the All-Britain Federation tried to usurp them by launching their own defense fund and soliciting donations (the attempt failed).

Anti-war, anti-tax coalition building in U.S.

There have been some attempts at coalition building between the left and right in the United States, where the folks at the top keep the folks at the bottom facing off against each other that way so their pockets face outwards and are easier to pick. One example of such coalition building in the tax resistance movement was a “tea party” held in 1970 by the right-leaning group called the National Taxpayers Union, at which left-libertarians like Murray Rothbard and Karl Hess, and leftish war tax resisters like Bradford Lyttle spoke. The following year, leftist scholar and war tax resister Noam Chomsky, and conservative publisher Robert Kephart spoke at a National Taxpayers Union event.

The November 1970 issue of the anarcho-libertarian zine The Abolitionist carried an article about a “tea party” in Washington, D.C., sponsored by the National Taxpayers Union. The article is notable for showing how libertarian anti-tax sentiment and anti-war activism were much more closely allied then than now.

Reflections in a Polluted River

by John Brotschol

On the weekend of October 31 and November 1, a number of RLA libertarians including myself went down to Washington, D.C. to attend a “tea party” sponsored by the National Taxpayers Union. The NTU’s brochure cites some impressive statistics to justify the creation of their group: each year Congress and local governments continue to spend 10% more than the previous year, right now, the taxpayer is spending 44% of his working time just earning enough to pay all his taxes and since 1939 state and local taxes have risen 1700% (WOW!). The NTU hopes to mobilize enough support by the creation of local groups and cooperating with already existing tax groups to exert political pressure on politicians from Capitol Hill down to the local township committee to reduce taxation. The conference drew a relatively small crowd of 50 people but it was the best libertarian gathering, I have yet attended. The speakers included Ernie Fitzgerald who was fired from his position in the Defense Department for exposing the two billion dollar cost increase of the C-5A transport plane, Brad Lyttle of the War Tax Resistance, free market economist Murray Rothbard, author Harry Brown whose book “How you can profit from the coming devaluation” is currently on the best seller list, Karl Hess and WKCA radio commentator Jeffrey St. John. The speakers’ main target was the military industrial complex who they blamed as the primary cause for today’s oppressive taxation (over 70 billion dollars is allocated to the Pentagon). Brad Lyttle who gave one of the best addresses stated that his group is not paying telephone taxes (passed by Congress solely to support the Vietnam War) and income taxes in their attempt to put a dent into the war machine. The Executive Director of the NTU, James Davidson said his group will work closely with the War Tax Resistance people.
This conference brought home to me the excellent possibilities tax organizations offer to libertarians fighting both mic and its Vietnam War and the welfare mess. Here’s our chance to sock it to both liberals and conservatives, so let’s get in there and start pitching.

In December, 1969, the Washington Monthly carried a story about war tax resisters written by Kennett Love, himself a signer of the “Writers and Editors War Tax Protest” pledge.

Tax Resistance: Hell No — I Won’t Pay

“We believe that the right of conscientious objection to war belongs to all the people, not just to those of draft age,” says a pamphlet now being sent out across the country from a littered, poster-bright office on New York’s Lower East Side. It carries a radical call to the citizenry to come out against the war in Vietnam by refusing to pay taxes that finance the war.
Such tax resistance is now gathering adherents outside traditional pacifist circles. Although it is still far from a major headache to the government, Internal Revenue Service men are being assigned to locate bank accounts of resisters and to seize the sums due — plus six per cent interest. Out of the frustration of the anti-Vietnam-war segment of the population, which is growing rapidly according to the polls; out of dashed hopes raised by peace promises and peace gestures from the Nixon and Johnson Administrations alike; and out of a feeling that orthodox democratic forms of protest — elections and demonstrations — have been ignored, an increasing number of otherwise law-abiding people are following their consciences into what Gandhi called the last stage of civil disobedience by openly refusing to pay part or all of their federal taxes.
The chief targets of the tax-resistance movement are the income tax, particularly the 10 per cent war surtax imposed last year, and the 10 per cent federal excise tax on telephone service. Other federal taxes have been rejected either as too complicated to resist, such as the liquor tax, which is collected at the wholesale level before individual purchase, or as earmarked for such non-war uses as highway construction. One pacifist, imprisoned for draft refusal and therefore lacking income to refuse taxes on, gave up smoking because the cigarette tax brings the government more revenue than any other single consumer-commodity tax.
The telephone tax is the most popular one to resist, partly because it was the first to be specifically linked to the war in Vietnam and partly because the American Telephone and Telegraph Company has proven courteous in its handling of tax resisters. The telephone tax was due to be reduced to three per cent in the spring of 1966. In approving the White House request for its extension of the 10 per cent level, Chairman Wilbur Mills (D-Ark.) of the House Ways and Means Committee said: “It is clear that the Vietnam and only the Vietnam operation makes this bill necessary.”
Resistance to the telephone tax began soon afterward. Karl Meyer of Chicago, a former Congressman’s son and a free-lance writer immersed in pacifist causes, conceived the idea and proposed it to Maris Cakars of the War Resisters League in New York. Meyer drafted a pamphlet, “Hang Up On War!,” which has become a staple among the literature distributed by the War Resisters League through the mails and at peace booths. It explains the link between the telephone tax and the war, summarizes moral and legal objections to the war, and provides practical advice for resisters of the tax, including a candid assessment of the possible risks. Of the risks, it points out that under Section 7203 of the Internal Revenue Code, which covers both the telephone and the income tax, one who “willfully fails to pay” could be imprisoned for up to one year and fined up to $10,000. It adds that the experiences of tax resisters over the past several years show that the government is not willing to press criminal charges but, instead, acts to collect the taxes (with interest) directly, when and where it can.
AT&T records indicate that telephone tax resisters were relatively unmoved by President Johnson’s famous “abdication” speech on March 31, 1968, but that about a quarter of them resumed payment of their telephone taxes at the end of 1968 in the belief that President-elect Nixon would end the war. A table of the telephone company statistics follows, giving the number of telephone tax refusers at the end of each quarter since 1966:

Quarter No. of resisters to telephone tax

1967 — 1^st 1,800

2^nd 2,300

3^rd 2,600

4^th 3,400

1968 — 1^st 3,400

2^nd 4,700

3^rd 5,300

4^th 4,700

1969 — 1^st 4,000

2^nd 4,000

The figure for the third quarter of this year is not available yet, but the revived intensity of the anti-war movement, manifested in the national student moratorium on October 15 and the big demonstrations on November 15, presage an increase.
Measured against the telephone company’s 43,459,000 residence customers, the percentage of tax resisters is minuscule. But in view of the seriousness of the act of tax resistance, the number of resisters is a source of satisfaction and encouragement to the leaders of the movement.
A spokeswoman for the telephone company told me its standing orders are to continue service to tax resisters so long as its own charges are paid. The company notifies the IRS of tax non-payments so it can do its own collecting. If a tax resister informs the local business office of the telephone company that he is deliberately omitting the tax from his payment, the office will not carry the tax charges forward to his next bill. “It would seem logical to assume that we don’t like to be a collecting agency,” she said, “but we do what we’re obliged to do.” She said that telephone tax resisters are located mainly in college communities.
Income tax resisters, although fewer than telephone tax resisters, appear to be a more stubborn breed, unmoved by political gestures and prepared to hold out until the war actually ends. An IRS spokesman in Washington gave me a statistical summary of the growth of such tax resistance. So far as he knew, it first became a public issue when Joan Baez, the singer, refused in 1964 to pay 60 per cent of her income tax in an act to dissociate herself from what she called the immoral, impractical, and stupid war in Vietnam. She refused the same proportion in 1965 and wrote the IRS: “This country has gone mad. But I will not go mad with it. I will not pay for organized murder. I will not pay for the war in Vietnam.” Joan Baez and a scattered handful of old-line pacifists, a few of whom had been refusing war taxes since 1941, were not worth keeping statistics on, so far as the IRS was concerned.
Then, in April, 1966, a committee under the chairmanship of the Reverend A.J. Muste circulated a tax-refusal pledge among persons on the mailing lists of the Committee for Non-Violent Action and the War Resisters League. They obtained 370 signatures for an advertisement in The Washington Post that stated: “We believe that the ordinary channels of protest have been exhausted…” Joan Baez headed the list of signers. According to an IRS analysis, about one-quarter of the signers had no taxable income, about one-half cooperated with the IRS to the extent of telling the agent who called on them where their money could be seized, and about one-quarter put the IRS to the trouble of ferreting out their bank accounts. The number of actual resisters came to about 275.
The following year the IRS began keeping a count of tax protesters. The number rose to 375. In 1968 there were 533 taxpayers who refused part or all of their income taxes and wrote the IRS that they were doing so in protest against the Vietnam war. This year there were 848 who set themselves against the law on grounds of conscientious objection to the war. The IRS spokesman told me that roughly three-quarters of the income-tax protesters live on the east and west coasts and that the same proportion held for persons refusing to pay the telephone tax.
IRS spokesmen emphasize that the number of refusers is only a tiny fraction of the total number of taxpayers. There were some 71 million returns filed in 1967, about 73 million in 1968, and 75 million in 1969. But again, tax-resistance leaders find significance in the fact that the very idea of tax refusal was unthinkable to nearly all of the resisters until their consciences impelled them to it. Furthermore, although the numbers are small, the rate of increase of tax resisters is far greater than the annual increase in tax returns.
Fear of prosecution and jail is a deterrent to potential tax refusers. Many people fail to recognize the distinction between clandestine tax evasion and open tax refusal. The IRS makes the distinction, however, and has shown no inclination to prosecute persons refusing taxes because of the Vietnam war. An IRS spokesman said earlier this year: “Is IRS going to ask the Justice Department to go to a federal grand jury and get a jury trial to put a man in jail for a dollar, when all we have to do is go to his bank account?” Tax-resistance leaders believe also that the government wishes to avoid the publicity attendant on a prosecution, largely because a test case might produce a martyr and create sympathy for the movement. The few prosecutions in recent years have been for refusal to file returns or disclose information rather than for refusal to pay.
War tax refusal in this country is older than the United States itself. It began in 1755 when Mennonites and Quakers refused to pay taxes for the French and Indian wars. They refused again during the American Revolution and the Civil War. The most famous early instance was that of Henry David Thoreau, who spent a night in jail in 1848 for refusing taxes in protest against our invasion of Mexico. He explained in his essay on civil disobedience that he could not “without disgrace be associated with it” and added: “If a thousand men were not to pay their tax bills this year, that would not be a bloody and violent measure, as it would to pay them, and enable the State to commit violence and shed innocent blood.”
Gandhi, who was deeply influenced by Thoreau, wrote in 1922 that “civil non-payment of taxes is indeed the last stage in non-cooperation. …I know that the withholding of payment of taxes is one of the quickest methods of overthrowing a government.” He went on to say: “I am equally sure that we have not yet evolved that degree of strength and discipline which are necessary… Are the Indian peasantry prepared to remain absolutely non-violent, and see their cattle taken away from them to die of hunger and thirst? …I would urge the greatest caution before embarking upon the dangerous adventure.” But Lord Mountbatten said with relief after India became independent: “If they had started to refuse to pay their taxes, I don’t know what we could have done.”
The idea of modern, organized tax resistance in this country against armaments and war seems to have begun with the Peacemaker Movement, which was formed by 250 pacifists who met in Chicago early in 1948. In February, 1963, the Peacemaker Movement published the first edition of a mimeographed Handbook on Non-Payment of War Taxes, which contains practical advice and case histories. The handbook has now run to three editions and nearly 10,000 copies. It points out that since the bulk of the federal budget (estimates range from 66 to 80 per cent) goes to pay for past wars, finance the Vietnam war, and prepare for future wars, “it is apparent that the major business of the federal government is war… it is useless to act as if the major business of government is civil functions or peaceful pursuits.”
In the summer of 1967, a little more than a year after A.J. Muste’s committee published its tax protest advertisement with 370 signers, Gerald Walker of The New York Times Magazine began to organize a Writers and Editors War Tax Protest, in which all the signatories pledged themselves flatly to refuse the then-proposed 10 per cent war surtax and possibly the 23 per cent of their income taxes allocated to the war effort as well. As was the case with the Reverend Muste’s advertisement, most daily newspapers that Walker approached refused to sell space to him. The New York Times was one that refused and so, this time, was The Washington Post. The New York Post printed Walker’s advertisement in January 1968, as did The New York Review of Books and Ramparts. In all, 528 writers and editors signed the pledge. Walker told me recently that about half of them, including himself, failed to carry out the tax-refusal pledge. “Johnson’s ‘abdication’ two weeks before the tax deadline convinced me that we had won,” he said.
I was myself among the other half of the signers who did refuse part of their taxes — 23 per cent in my case, the 10 per cent surtax not having gone into effect. Since my own hesitant involvement in war tax resistance seems typical among the non-pacifists now joining the movement, I will summarize it here as the case history I know best. With my part payment of my 1967 income tax, I wrote the IRS as follows:
Enclosed please find my check for $1,862.81, which is 77 per cent of the tax required. The 23 per cent unpaid is a protest against the government’s use of that proportion of its revenue for the war in Vietnam. My conscience revolts against the gross immorality of the war… There are also questions of law. The war violates the supreme law of our land, notably the Constitution (Art. Ⅰ, Sec. 8, clause 11), the United Nations Charter (Art. 51), and the Southeast Asia Treaty (Art. Ⅳ)… Responsible jurists and philosophers soberly accuse our government of crimes against international codes on human rights and the conduct of wars and the specific statutes created ex post facto to punish the Nazis…
The prodigal waste of our national energy and treasure in destroying the land and people of Vietnam is so weakening this nation that other powers may bring us to judgment as we once brought the Nazis to account at Nuremburg… It will then be no defense to plead, like the “good Germans,” that we had to obey our government and cannot be held responsible for what it did. By paying taxes which I know my government is using to kill a small nation I commit a greater and more violent breach of laws than I do by not paying…
I was a Navy pilot in World War Ⅱ. I would not serve in this war. If I could prevent my tax dollars from serving, I would do so. Unfortunately, I have not yet learned of a practical way to keep the government altogether from extracting financial support from me for the war. In the meantime, I balk at 23 per cent in token of my dissociation from the cruel injustice and bloodshed to poor and distant strangers being done under my flag, in my name, with my money.
The IRS reply did not come until after I had refused a similar amount of taxes last April. It was a form postcard saying: “Dear Taxpayer: Thank you for your letter. We are looking into the matter you brought up and should have the answer to you shortly… Thank you for your cooperation.” The answer, inevitably, was a series of printed forms, progressing from a “notice of tax due” to a “Final Notice Before Seizure.” The IRS had already seized telephone taxes, which I stopped paying in 1967, from three bank accounts, patiently tracking down the bank to which I transferred my account after each seizure. The IRS obtained the unpaid part of my 1967 tax, plus six per cent interest, in June. At this writing I am awaiting implementation of the Final Notice Before Seizure of the refused portion of my 1968 taxes. Banks are required by law to surrender private assets, including the contents of safe deposit boxes, to the IRS upon demand. Most banks surrender the levied amount immediately and the depositor is informed afterward.
This whole business of deliberately defying and harassing the government, even in a moral protest, is a heavy and anxious experience. When I first considered it in 1966 I was unaware that some hundreds of other people were already doing it. I was afraid of going to jail, which, among other things, would have prevented my fulfilling a contract to complete a book. I began refusing the telephone tax after obtaining the pamphlet “Hang Up On War!” from a pacifist in Princeton in August, 1967. The Writers and Editors War Tax Protest, which came to my attention that fall, gave me a sufficient sense of safety in numbers to begin income-tax resistance.
I am still troubled over possible consequences, particularly after the conspiracy convictions in the Dr. Spock trial, and I find it innately distasteful to resist paying my share of the general tax burden. But my revulsion against the war in Vietnam prevails over anxiety and civic reservations. And the Nixon Administration seems as unwilling or as unable as the Johnson Administration to make a significant and credible effort to end the war. In 1964 the country voted for Johnson and peace and got an escalation of the war. In 1968, between Nixon and Humphrey, there was no real opportunity to vote for peace. Demonstrations have proven equally futile as a means of affecting war policy, so much so that the President declares that he will not be swayed by them. Under these circumstances, tax resistance, distasteful as it is, seems to more and more people to offer the most effective channel of protest.
This summer I participated in the formation of War Tax Resistance, which is working to transform tax protests from essentially individual acts into an integrated political factor. The leading figure in the organization is Bradford Lyttle, a slim, earnest, no-nonsense pacifist who nine years ago led a peace march across the United States and Europe to Moscow, urging unilateral disarmament on governments along the way and exhorting citizens toward non-cooperation with military service and war production. Its “Call to War Tax Resistance,” claiming the right of conscientious objection for taxpayers as well as draft-age men, says:
The first goal… is to convince as many people as possible to refuse at least $5 of some tax owed the government. Nearly everyone can do this by refusing their federal telephone tax or part of their income tax. If hundreds of thousands refuse to pay $5, they will establish mass tax refusal. Besides having the burden of collecting the unpaid amounts, the government will be faced with the political fact of massive non-cooperation with its war-making policies.
In a separate but related action, the poet Allen Ginsberg and I have obtained the backing of the National Emergency Civil Liberties Committee for a suit against the government to recover money that has been seized from us in enforcement of tax claims and also to enjoin further seizures. The main ground of our action, as it is now being prepared, is based on the historical equivalency between taxes and service (which is a kind of tax) and the claim that the right of conscientious objection is as inherent to taxpayers as it is to men liable for military service. Conscientious objectors cannot avoid service but they can earmark their service to the exclusion of warlike activity. In the same way, we claim, taxpayers should pay their full share but they should be able to earmark their taxes to the exclusion of war-like applications. In a time when weaponry has achieved the capacity to wipe out civilization, we believe, the people should be accorded a direct voice in deciding whether they shall make war. Since World War Ⅱ the decision has moved ever more into the hands of the executive despite the Constitutional stipulation that it is Congress which should declare war.
Meanwhile, until we are legally able to earmark our taxes for non-warlike applications, we feel conscience-bound to resist paying at least a part of them.

Quarter	No. of resisters to telephone tax
1967 — 1^st	1,800
2^nd	2,300
3^rd	2,600
4^th	3,400
1968 — 1^st	3,400
2^nd	4,700
3^rd	5,300
4^th	4,700
1969 — 1^st	4,000
2^nd	4,000

Here are a handful of artifacts relating to the American war tax resistance movement circa 1967.

First, some relics that were filed alongside a letter from Herbert Sonthoff to W. Walter Boyd (though I think this filing may be arbitrary and that the letters are not related to each other):

An Open Letter ^*

At this late date it is pointless to muster the evidence which shows that the war we are waging in Vietnam is wrong. By now you have decided for yourself where you stand. In all probability, if you share our feelings about it, you have expressed your objections both privately and publicly. You have witnessed the small effect these protests have had on our government.
By April 15^th, every American citizen must decide whether he will make a voluntary contribution to the continuation of this war. After grave consideration, we have decided that we can no longer do so, and that we will therefore withhold all or part of the taxes due. The purpose of this letter is to call your attention to the fact that a nationwide tax refusal campaign is in progress, as stated in the accompanying announcement, and to urge you to consider refusing to contribute voluntarily to this barbaric war.
Signed:

Prof. Warren Ambrose Mathematics, M.I.T.

Dr. Donnell Boardman Physician, Acton, Mass.

Mrs. Elizabeth Boardman Acton, Mass.

Prof. Noam Chomsky Linguistics, M.I.T.

Miss Barbara Deming Writer, Wellfleet, Mass.

Prof. John Dolan Philosophy, Chicago University

Prof. John Ek Anthropology, Long Island University

Martha Bentley Hall Musician, Brookline, Mass.

Dr. Thomas C. Hall Physician, Brookline, Mass.

Rev. Arthur B. Jellis First Parish in Concord, Unitarian-Universalist, Concord, Mass.

Prof. Donald Kalish Philosophy, U.C.L.A.

Prof. Louis Kampf Humanities, M.I.T.

Prof. Staughton Lynd History, Yale University

Milton Mayer Writer, Mass.

Prof. Jonathan Mirsky Chinese Language and Literature, Dartmouth College

Prof. Sidney Morgenbesser Philosophy, Columbia University

Prof. Wayne A. O’Neill Graduate School of Education, Harvard University

Prof. Anatol Rapoport Mental Health Research Institute, University of Michigan

Prof. Franz Schurmann Center for Chinese Studies, University of Calif., Berkeley

Dr. Albert Szent Gyorgy Institute for Muscle Research, Woods Hole, Mass.

Harold Tovish Sculptor, Brookline, Mass.

Prof. Howard Zinn Government, Boston University

^* Institutions listed for informational purposes only

P.S. The No Tax for War Committee intends to make public the names of signers, hence if you wish to add your signature, early return is desirable. Contributions are needed, and checks should be made payable to the Committee.

The following page, dated 11 March 1967, shows a mock-up of the intended public advertisement showing the signers’ names:

The committee will publish the above statement with names of signers at tax deadline — April 15.
Send signed statements to: NO TAX FOR WAR COMMITTEE, c/o Rev. Maurice McCrackin, 932 Dayton St., Cincinnati, Ohio 45214.
For additional copies of this form, put number you will distribute and name and address on the following lines:
No. _____ Name ____________________
Address _________________________

Signers So Far

Meldon and Amy Acheson

Michael J. Ames

Alfred F. Andersen

Ross Anderson

Beulah K. Arndt

Joan Baez

Richard Baker

Bruce & Pam Beck

Ruth T. Best

Robert & Margaret Blood

Karel F. Botermans

Marion & Ernest Bromley

Edwin Brooks

A. Dale Brothington

Mrs. Lydia Bruns

Wendal Bull

Mrs. Dorothy Bucknell

John Burslem

Lindley J. Burton

Catharine J. Cadbury

Maris Cakars

Robert and Phyllis Calese

William N. Calloway

Betty Camp

Daryle V. Carter

Jared & Susan Carter

Horace & Beulah Champney

Ken & Peggy Champney

Hank & Henry Chapin

Holly Chenery

Richard A. Chinn

Naom [sic] Chomsky

John & Judy Christian

Gordon & Mary Christiansen

Peter Christiansen

Donald F. Cole

John Augustine Cook

Helen Marr Cook

Jack Coolidge, Jr.

Allen Cooper

Martin J. Corbin

Tom & Monica Cornell

Dorothy J. Cunningham

Jean DaCosta

Ann & William Davidon

Stanley F. Davis

Dorothy Day

Dave Dellinger

Barbara Deming

Robert Dewart

Ruth Dodd

John M. Dolan

Orin Doty

Allen Duberstein

Ralph Dull

Malcolm Dundas

Margaret E. Dungan

Henry Dyer

Susan Eanet

Bob Eaton

Marc Paul Edelman

Johan & Francis Eliot

Jerry Engelbach

George J. Etu, Jr.

Mary C. Eubanks

Arthur Evans

Jonathan Evans

William E. Evans

Pearl Ewald

Franklin Farmer

Bertha Faust

Dianne M. Feeley

Rice A. Felder

Henry A. Felisone

Mildred Fellin

Glenn Fisher

John Forbes

Don & Ann Fortenberry

Marion C. Frenyear

Ruth Gage-Colby

Lawrence H. Geller

Richard Ghelli

Charles Gibadlo

Bruce Glushakow

Walter Gormly

Arthur Goulston

Thomas Grabell

Steven Green

Walter Grengg

Joseph Gribbins

Kenneth Gross

John M. Grzywacz, Jr.

Catherine Guertin

David Hartsough

David Hartsough

Arthur Harvey

Janet Hawksley

James P. Hayes, Jr.

R.F. Helstern

Ammon Hennacy

Norman Henry

Robert Hickey

Dick & Heide Hiler

William Himelhoch

C.J. Hinke

Anthony Hinrichs

William M. Hodsdon

Irwin R. Hogenauer

Florence Howe

Donald & Mary Huck

Philip Isely

Michael Itkin

Charles T. Jackson

Paul Jacobs

Martin & Nancy Jezer

F. Robert Johnson

Woodbridge O. Johnson

Ashton & Marie Jones

Paul Jordan

Paul Keiser

Joel C. Kent

Roy C. Kepler

Paul & Pauline Kermiet

Peter Kiger

Richard King

H.A. Kreinkamp

Arthur & Margaret Landes

Paul Lauter

Peter and Marolyn Leach

Gertrud & George A. Lear, Jr.

Alan and Elin Learnard

Titus Lehman

Richard A. Lema

Florence Levinsohn

Elliot Linzer

David C. Lorenz

Preston B. Luitweiler

Bradford Lyttle

Adriann van L. Maas

Ben & Sue Mann

Paul and Salome Mann

Howard E. Marston, Sr.

Milton and Jane Mayer

Martin & Helen Mayfield

Maurice McCrackin

Lilian McFarland

Maureen & Felix McGowan

Maryann McNaughton

Gelston McNeil

Guy W. Meyer

Karl Meyer

David & Catherine Miller

James Missey

Mark Morris

Janet Murphy

Thomas P. Murray

Rosemary Nagy

Wally & Juanita Nelson

Marilyn Neuhauser

Neal D. Newby, Jr.

Miriam Nicholas

Robert B. Nichols

David Nolan

Raymond S. Olds

Wayne A. O’Neil

Michael O’Quin

Ruth Orcutt

Eleanor Ostroff

Doug Palmer

Malcolm & Margaret Parker

Jim Peck

Michael E. Pettie

John Pettigrew

Lydia H. Philips

Dean W. Plagowski

Jefferson Poland

A.J. Porth

Ralph Powell

Charles F. Purvis

Jean Putnam

Harriet Putterman

Robert Reitz

Ben & Helen Reyes

Elsa G. Richmond

Eroseanna Robinson

Pat Rusk

Joe & Helen Ryan

Paul Salstrom

Ira J. Sandperl

Jerry & Rae Schwartz

Martin Shepard

Richard T. Sherman

Louis Silverstein

T.W. Simer

Ann B. Sims

Jane Beverly Smith

Linda Smith

Thomas W. Smuda

Bob Speck

Elizabeth P. Steiner

Lee D. Stern

Beverly Sterner

Michael Stocker

Charles H. Straut, Jr.

Stephen Suffet

Albert & Joyce Sunderland, Jr.

Mr. & Mrs. Michael R. Sutter

Marjorie & Robert Swann

Oliver & Katherine Tatum

Gary G. Taylor

Harold Tovish

Joe & Cele Tuchinsky

Lloyd & Phyllis Tyler

Samuel R. Tyson

Ingegerd Uppman

Margaret von Selle

Mrs. Evelyn Wallace

Wilbur & Joan Ann Wallis

William & Mary Webb

Barbara Webster

John K. White

Willson Whitman

Denny & Ida Wilcher

Huw Williams

George & Lillian Willoughby

Bob Wilson

Emily T. Wilson

Jim & Raona Wilson

W.W. Wittkamper

Sylvia Woog

Wilmer & Mildred Young

Franklin Zahn

Betty & Louis Zemel

Vicki Jo Zilinkas

Following this was a page explaining how to go about resisting:

Some Methods of Nonpayment

For those owing nothing because of the Withholding Tax.

Such persons write a letter to the Internal Revenue Service, to be filed with the tax return, stating that the writer cannot in good conscience help support the war in Vietnam, voluntarily. The writer therefore requests a return of a percentage of the money collected from his salary.

Note: Of course, the IRS will not return the money. However, the writer has refused to pay for the war voluntarily and has put it in writing. This symbolic action is not to be belittled since anybody who does this allies himself with those who will withhold money due the IRS.

For those self-employed or owing money beyond what has been withheld from salary.

Such persons write a letter to be filed with the tax return, stating that the writer does not object to the income tax in principle, but will not, as a matter of conscience, help pay for the war in Vietnam. The writer is therefore withholding some or all of the tax due.

Note: In all cases, we recommend that copies of these letters be sent to the President and to your Senators.

Remarks:

The Internal Revenue Service has the legal power to confiscate money due it. They will get that money, one way or another. However, to obstruct the IRS from collecting money due (by not filing a return at all, for example) seems less important to us than the fact that each is refusing to pay his tax voluntarily. With this in mind, many of us are placing the taxes owed in special accounts and we will so inform the IRS in our letters.

Willful failure to pay is punishable by a fine of up to $10,000 and up to a year in jail, together with the costs of prosecution. So far, the IRS has prosecuted only those who have obstructed collection (by refusing to file a return, by refusing to answer a summons, etc.). Usually, the IRS has collected the tax due plus 6% interest and possibly an added fine of 5% for “negligence”. The fact that the IRS has rarely, if at all, prosecuted tax-refusers to the full extent of the law does not mean they will not do so in the future.

Finally, an article from the December 1967 edition of The Capitol East Gazette:

Tax Refusal Urged by Group

Two thousand anti-war leaflets on telephone tax refusal were distributed in Capitol East on Saturday, Nov. 18, by members of CHOICE, a group of local residents who are withdrawing their support for the Vietnam war.
The leaflet explains that the 10% phone tax was enacted in April 1966 specifically to raise money for the Vietnam war.
According to CHOICE, the phone company will not remove a person’s telephone if he refuses to pay the tax. The company asks refusers to state why they are withholding the tax and then turns the matter over to the Internal Revenue Service.
According to CHOICE, there are presently 25 known tax refusers in the Capitol Hill area.
Those desiring CHOICE’s leaflet are asked to call LI 6‒9836.

Let’s cast ourselves back, shall we, to April, 1970, by which time the American anti-war movement had really hit its stride, and war tax resistance was prominently on the agenda.

From the 5 April 1970 Niagara Falls Gazette:

Day of Reckoning

Tax Revolt: Refusing to Pay for the War

(Newsweek Feature Service)

As the mid-April day of reckoning approaches, most taxpayers are studiously calculating how much to turn over to the Internal Revenue Service. A small but growing group of citizens, however, is just as studiously determining how much they will refuse to pay the tax collector.
In the latest, and perhaps the ultimate, form of antiwar protest, hundreds and possibly thousands of taxpayers are preparing to hold back, or have already held back, anything from a symbolic few dollars to the 10 per cent war-born Federal surtax on their whole income tax for the year.
At the very least, these irate citizens hope their actions will register as formal protests against the Vietnam war. The more optimistic among them envision the war-effort’s being actually affected, should enough people hold back on their taxes.
It all began last summer, with an organization of New Left and pacifist opponents of the war called War Tax Resistance. WTR’s headquarters is a littered office on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. The group also claims 62 resistance centers around the country, a number that has more than doubled since early February. And it plans nationwide demonstrations at IRS offices on April 15.
The group’s “coordinator” is Bradford Lyttle, a seasoned pacifist who led a peace march through the U.S. and Europe to Moscow a decade ago. WTR dispenses the usual paraphernalia of protest buttons, newsletters, and posters.
One poster shows a sprawl of dead children under the pronouncement “Your Tax Dollars at Work.” But mostly the propaganda treads a careful line between evangelic encouragement to defy the tax-coliector and occasional cautions that doing so could land the tax resister in a heap of trouble, perhaps jail.
The tax resisters also point to respectable historical precedents. Quakers and Mennonites refused to pay taxes for the French and Indian War and the Revolutionary War. And Henry David Thoreau is spiritually summoned forth from his night in jail in 1848 for refusing to pay taxes in protest against the U.S. invasion of Mexico.
“If a thousand men were not to pay their tax bills,” Thoreau said, “that would not be a bloody and violent measure, as it would to pay them and enable the State to commit violence and shed innocent blood.”
But tax resistance leaders warn that Thoreau’s imitators cannot be sure of getting off as lightly as he did.
“As we develop a broad movement of tax resistance,” cautions a Chicago-based WTR group, “we must anticipate a certain number of criminal prosecutions, and many merciless attempts to collect from tax resisters. Here is a good rule of thumb for all would-be resisters: if you can’t stand heat, don’t put your hand in the fire.”
Such warnings generally are played down in tax-resistance circles. Instead, there is a tendency to emphasize that the IRS so far has shied away from criminal action in favor of attaching salaries or seizing bank accounts.
There are, of course, other frustrations. WTR guidance on how to go about not paying taxes inevitably confronts the fact that a good many people already have — through payroll withholding taxes, and that getting tax money back is obviously a more difficult matter than not paying up to begin with.
One tax resistor from Minneapolis claims to have at least temporarily beaten the withholding system. He listed 40 million Vietnamese as dependents on his 1040 form; and the IRS, he says, has already sent him a refund.
He hopes this was one more example of the fallibility of computers, but tax resisters expect the human arithmeticians at IRS to be after the refundee soon enough. All the same, stretching the definition of dependents is one of the main tactics tax resisters are proposing.
“We must explicitly reject the standards defined by a blind bureaucracy and affirm instead definitions that spring from our own consciousness of human solidarity,” goes a bit of neo-Orwellianism from the Chicago WTR center.
The resisters are also zeroing in on other Federal taxes, most notably the 10 per cent Federal excise on telephone charges. According to telephone officials, many tax resisters have already begun subtracting the 10 per cent before paying their bills.
The telephone tax resisters evidently feel somewhat encouraged by telephone company policy: to accept the truncated payments, to continue service, and to leave the collection of the 10 per cent tax up to the IRS.
Income tax resisters have been a smaller band in recent years than telephone tax non-payers. But their numbers have been growing of late at a far greater rate.
In 1967, when the IRS first began to keep tabs on tax protesters, some 375 were counted. In 1968, there were 533, and last year, 848.
Resistance leaders feel that even if the amounts of nonpayment are small, symbolic sums, they could have significant impact by snarling the tax-collecting machinery. In a hand-lettered flier, titled, “No money, no war,” poet Allen Ginsberg asserts:
“If money talks, several hundred thousand citizens, refusing payments to our war government will short-circuit the nerve system of our electronic bureaucracy.”
The IRS has already formed a group of agents to go after conscientious non-payers, but an IRS spokesman stolidly denies that the electronics of the tax-collecting machinery can be jammed or ultimately evaded by the resisters. With the folk wisdom of civilization on his side, he says: “You can’t avoid your tax bill.”
To which WTR coordinator Lyttle, portentiously replies: “We’ll find out.”

Next, from the Daily Illini, 9 April 1970:

War protesters plan action…

April 15: Day to withhold taxes

by Steve Melshenker
Daily Illini Staff Writer

The government is a business proposition supported by a faith in its institutions which brings value to the dollar and the collection of dollars through taxes, which supports the government institutions.
Like any other business, the government is not pleased when its customers, the American people, do not pay their bills on time, and upset with some fail to pay at all.
However, there are those who believe the product for which they are paying is not up to company standards. That product is the Vietnam war. And so, these same people believe, if they don’t like the product, why should they pay for it?
Protest rekindled
On April 15 the war tax resistance moves en masse. All across the country protests are scheduled and various resistance groups are urging taxpayers to withhold part of all of their taxes in protest of the Vietnam war.
The war tax resistance groups do not oppose all taxes, just those going toward the war.
Various methods of resistance could be applied toward this purpose.
The method presently stressed by the resistance movement is refusing to pay at least $5 of some tax owed the government.
Or one might just refuse to pay part of his taxes, such as the additional income, the ten per cent surtax, or the telephone tax.
One might refuse to pay the percentage of his tax going toward the war. He could base his refusal on the percentage of the total national budget used for war, on the cost of the Vietnam war, or on other calculations.
Some people pay part of their tax and contribute the rest as a “peace tax” to the United Nations or some relief agency. Generally, these people contribute to organizations engaged in peaceful, constructive work.
But even though the government is not a profit making organization, it does not like to accumulate unpaid bills.
Don Werner, acting group supervisor of the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) explained a six per cent interest and six per cent penalty charge accompany that part of the taxes due to the government and withheld by the taxpayer.
Werner said IRS offers “every opportunity to pay” the tax and the first step toward collection takes the form of letters to the delinquent tax payer. A bill is sent out and if it is not paid within ten days, the task of collection is turned over to a collecting officer.
Extreme measure
The most extreme measure the internal revenue office can take is to levy on all property belonging to the individual. However, certain property items are exempt from this levy, such as tools and books necessary for the person’s trade, business, or profession. A complete list can be found in the internal revenue code.
Beyond all this, IRS can recommend the U.S. Attorney’s office take legal action against the delinquent taxpayer.
Richard Makarski, chief of the tax division for the U.S. Attorney’s office, said the maximum penalty for tax evasion is five years in prison and a $10,000 fine.
Before any penalty is handed out, he said, the case is reviewed by the tax division of the justice department and if felony is involved a grand jury indictment is issued.
Makarski said that cases of this type were rare and “I don’t see the government taking much action against war protesters.”
He said only major cases of evasion were prosecuted.
So the war tax resistance movement is not likely to cause much damage to the war process, but in the words of one member of the Vietnam Moratorium committee, “it will show the government people are willing to do something assertive to protest the war.”
Sylvia Kushner, executive secretary of the Chicago Peace Council said the withholding of the phone tax will cause no damage to the individual and at worst the government will take the tax out of that person’s bank account.
The nationwide protest on April 15 has as its theme, Who pays for the war? Who profits from the war? And in no small way the peace guys are focusing April’s protest on the answers to those questions.

From the 9 April 1970 Harvard Crimson:

Five Members of Faculty Will Withhold War Taxes To Voice Vietnam Dissent

By Scott W. Jacobs

Five Harvard faculty members and nine M.I.T. professors — including two Nobel prize-winners — have announced their intention to withhold portions of their 1970 taxes to protest the Vietnam War.
In identical letters appearing in the Crimson and the M.I.T. Tech this week, the professors said they will refuse to pay portions of the 10 per cent surtax or the telephone tax “as a sign of our personal opposition to the continuing Vietnam War.”
Salvador E. Luria, M.I.T.’s 1969 Nobel laureate, and George Wald, Higgins Professor of Biology and a 1967 Nobel winner, each signed the letters to their colleagues. Other Harvard signers are Harvey Cox, professor of Divinity; Everett I. Mendelsohn, professor of the History of Science; Herbert C. Kelman, Richard Clarke Cabot Professor of Social Ethies; and Mark Ptashne, lecturer in Biochemistry.
The signers asked other faculty members who have also decided to withhold their taxes to join them in a press release on April 15 — the same day that tax resistance rallies are scheduled around the country.
The Boston professors are among the first groups in the country to announce a systematic plan for withholding taxes. Several individuals — most notably Joan Baez — have withheld taxes to protest the war in the past.
In most cases the government has simply appropriated bank accounts or pay checks to get the revenue, although tax resisters are liable to jail sentences.
“Dragging One’s Feet”
“All of us confidently expect the government will collect the tax before this is through,” Wald said yesterday. “We are expressing our disapproval of what our country is doing and making it more expensive to collect these taxes and do it.
“You understand that one is essentially dragging one’s feet.” he added.
“We are clearly engaging in a conscious form of civil disobedience,” Mendelsohn said. “We are judging the war. We are saying it is wrong, and we are consciously cutting ourselves off from the war in the ways that we can.
Cox, who is now on sabbatical from the Divinity School, said the purpose of the action is to involve non-draft-age people in the anti-war movement.
“We’ve been asking young people to take a lot of risks — burning draft cards, resisting the draft, marching. I think it’s time to spread the risk through the whole life cycle,” he said yesterday.
The tax withholding is aimed primarity at the telephone tax and the 10 per cent surtax which were approved as means of financing the rising cost of the war.
Harvard is forced to deduct the surtax on salaries monthly, but taxes on royalties and honorariums must be assessed privately every year by the April 15 tax deadline.

From the 16 April 1970 Cornell Daily Sun:

Call Off the War

To the Editor: The undersigned members and wives of the staff at Cornell University declare their intention to refuse payment of the Federal excise tax on their telephone bills as a gesture of protest against our government’s policy in Vietnam. This tax was specifically retained by Congress as a revenue measure to provide funds for the war.
By our action, we signify our unwillingness to pay for that brutal, immoral war, one which has brought death and destruction to the Vietnamese, their land, and their culture. We refuse to sanction further waste of lives and treasure in defense of a corrupt and totalitarian regime in Saigon. The Vietnamese must be given true self-determination. American troops must be brought home. The War Must Be Stopped.
Andreas and Genia Albrecht, David and Carol Jasnow, Douglas and Marie Archibald, Jack Kiefer, Michael and Judy Balch, Jack and Mary Lewis, Father Daniel Berrigan, S.J., David Marr, David and Eloise Blanpied, Jim and Jean Matlack, Stephen Chase, Chandler and Katrina Morse, John and Sandra Condry, Reeve Parker, Robert Connelly, George and Julie Rinehart, Fred Cooper, Walter and Jane Slatoff, Vincent and Jill De Luca, Michael and Eve Stocker, Douglas Dowd, David Stroud, Daniel and Linda Finlay, Moss and Marilyn Sweedler, Bill and Maggie Goldsmith, Winthrop and Andrea Wetherbee, Neil and Louise Hertz, Tom and Carol Hill.

From the 16 April 1970 Cornell Daily Sun:

Anti-Tax Rallies At IRS Offices Protest Vietnam

By The Associated Press

Opponents of American policy in Vietnam massed in Boston and New York yesterday, while similar protest demonstrations — some objecting to the use of tax dollars to support the war — were staged in cities and towns across the country.
Crowds in Boston Common were estimated at 60,000, in New York’s Bryant Park, 20,000, but generally turnouts were below that of previous moratoriums. Tea was dumped into the Mississippi and Cedar rivers as reenactments of the Revolutionary era’s tax defiance — the Boston Tea Party.
Demonstrators at Internal Revenue Service sites numbered 4,000 in Chicago and in New York City, and ranged down to about 700 in Washington, D.C., 200 in Boston, 150 in White Plains, N.Y., and 16 in Oklahoma City.
Violence flared during demonstrations at the Berkeley campus of the University of California; demonstrators at Pennsylvania State University seized and damaged the administration building, and a brief melee erupted between police and protesters in Detroit.
In Washington, David Dellinger of the Chicago 7 urged a youthful, largely white crowd of 2,000 near the capitol to withhold their taxes as a means of forcing change in the United States.
“I advocate overthrowing the government by force but not by violence,” he told a rally, “and tax refusal is but one of the cutting edges and forces that are available to us.”
Young demonstrators burned two American flags during an earlier rally, drawing murmurs of disapproval from the rest of the crowd.
“We are going to make sure that this is a not so silent spring.” said Sam Brown, national coordinator of the Vietnam Moratorium Committee, one of several groups sponsoring the Boston rally. The crowd on the common was about 40,000 short of the 100,000 who gathered there last October.
In New York City, William Kunstler, a defense lawyer in the Chicago 7 conspiracy trial, told the Bryant Park gathering: “The time has come to resist illegitimate authority by any means necessary.”

On this date in 1996, National Public Radio’s Morning Edition did a story about the IRS seizure of the home of war tax resisters Art Harvey & Elizabeth Gravalos. Here are some excerpts from the transcript:

Charlotte Renner reports on an anti-military protester whose house and land have been seized by the IRS and offered at auction because of his refusal to pay taxes which support the U.S. military.

Bob Edwards (host)

Every year, an estimated 8,000 anti-military protesters refuse to pay their federal taxes. They say they don’t want the government to use their money for defense or military spending. The Internal Revenue Service rarely seizes the property of these politically motivated non-taxpayers, so when the IRS decided to auction off the property of a tax protester in rural Maine, it created quite a stir. From Maine Public Radio, Charlotte Renner reports.

Charlotte Renner (Maine Public Radio)

For almost ten years now, Arthur Harvey has lived with his wife, Elizabeth Gravlos and their two children, along a country road in a sagging wooden house without electricity or indoor plumbing. They pay their state and local taxes, but they refuse to hand over any money to the IRS, which estimates their tax debt at $62,000. Harvey says that figure is probably too high, but he doesn’t keep careful records of the profit he makes selling organic blueberries, and he says he’d rather lose everything than contribute a single penny to the Pentagon.

Arthur Harvey (anti-military tax protester)

To me, the important issue was nuclear weapons, and I felt, as soon I realized what was going on in the ’50s, that the human race very likely would come to a bad end unless we did away with nuclear weapons. So that has been the focus of my feelings about it.

Charlotte Renner

For Harvey’s wife, Elizabeth, the deciding moment came during the Vietnam War. A staunch Catholic, she can still remember the conversation with a college roommate that made her throw her IRS forms in the trash.

Elizabeth Gravlos (anti-military tax protester)

She said, “Well, how can you be against abortion and pay for the war?” — that was the war in Vietnam. So I said I can’t, after a while.

Charlotte Renner

Gravlos and Harvey have known for decades that the IRS might decide to take the house, their two wood lots, and the blueberry barren they depend on for survival. What they didn’t realize was that the seizure of their property by revenue agents would spark a protest in Hartford, Maine, a village where mill workers and farmers struggle to make ends meet.

[excerpt from protest song, “I’m not gonna pay for that killing machine down by the riverside, down by the riverside.”]

Charlotte Renner

On the morning of the auction as the sun dries the dew, about 30 of Harvey’s supporters form a circle in the vacant lot beside the town office which happens to be right across the street from Harvey’s house. About a dozen of the protesters have been invited here by the War Tax Resistance Resource Center, a national organization based in Maine. While the bidders file in and out of the one-room town office, refusing to speak to the small army of reporters clustered at the screen door, Harvey sympathizers take turns speaking into the microphone. Bob Bady says he hasn’t paid federal taxes for 26 years. Bady blasts the federal government for what he calls “bloated” military spending, but avoids blaming IRS staffers for doing their job.

Bob Bady (anti-military tax protester)

I guess what I had to remember is that they’re just little cogs in a big machine, and we’re little pieces of sand in the big machine — we’re irritants. And I take great pride in being an irritant, and on a day like today I need to remember to be proud of being an irritant and not scared of being a little piece of sand.

Charlotte Renner

Bradford Lyttle considers the Harvey clan a shining example of family values.

Bradford Lyttle (anti-military tax protester)

I have followed his life and I find it an expression of high moral principle.

Charlotte Renner

Lyttle has come all the way from Chicago to say his piece, but closer to home, some neighbors are outraged by Harvey’s refusal to pay his taxes. Armand Rowe watches the protest from his sister’s lawn across the street. Rowe spent five years in the Armed Forces and he calls the resistance, “un-American.” He believes that military spending is justified in a dangerous world, and if he had the $21,000 the IRS wants for Harvey’s house, Rowe says he’d gladly write the check.

Armand Rowe (military Supporter)

You know just to say, “Hey, I’ve put a big old POWs flag up there, a United States flag, and a Maine state flag up there,” just out of spite and send that to Harvey wherever he goes a pitch every time I turn around.

Charlotte Renner

Although Rowe doesn’t try to buy Harvey’s property, a few others do. But they don’t stay around to watch IRS agent Diane Santoro open the envelopes. Just before noon, as the protesters begin chanting and beating a drum, Arthur Harvey, Elizabeth Gravlos, and their daughter Emily, file into the town office, followed by more journalists than the spartan building can hold. A Hartford resident snags one of the wood lots for $10,000. The Harvey’s 30-acre blueberry barren goes for about $13,000 to a hunter who reportedly plans to build a lodge on the land. Harvey says he’ll still grow blueberries in other barrens he’s been renting. And a one-acre wood lot will stay in the family.

Diane Santoro, (IRS agent)

For map 07, lot 56 at $727, the successful bidder is Emily Harvey.

Charlotte Renner

Twenty-year-old Emily Harvey takes some consolation in beating out the town selectman for the slice of land she can see from her bedroom.

Emily Harvey (protester’s daughter)

It would have been very difficult for me to know that the selectman owns that lot because it was across the street. The reason that I put my bid in was because my brother asked me to. So it was a joint thing, because he’s only 16 and not able to own property.

Charlotte Renner

But there’s no way to know how much longer Emily and her family will be able to live near their wood lot. The house didn’t attract a single buyer, so the IRS plans to lower the minimum bid and hold another auction in a few weeks. A similar strategy worked a few years ago in Massachusetts when agents sold two other properties seized from anti-war activists, but IRS spokesman Helen Hertzer says she wishes another auction weren’t necessary.

Helen Hertzer (IRS spokesman)

To not be able to sell the properties and reduce the taxpayer’s debt, of course, we’re not meeting our objective or the taxpayer’s objective there.

Charlotte Renner

Hertzer hasn’t given up hope that a lower price will hook bidders next time around, but Arthur Harvey figures they’d be crazy to buy a house built on a foundation that’s caving in. And, while he won’t accept the property as a gift from anyone willing to pay federal taxes, he still hopes that more protests by all his friends and fellow resisters will keep potential buyers at bay. After all, he needs his kitchen — not just to cook the family’s meals, but also to brew up the herb tea he uses to kill weeds choking his blueberries.

War tax resistance in the Friends Journal in 1966

On 2 November 1965, a 31-year-old American Quaker named Norman Morrison went out to the sidewalk in front of U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara’s office in the Pentagon, doused himself in kerosene, and set himself on fire as a protest against the American war on Vietnam.

His suicide stunned the Society of Friends and made more urgent the already percolating questions about the moribund Quaker peace testimony and how much Friends were willing to put on the line for it.

This is reflected by the increased attention given in the pages of Friends Journal in 1966 to the issue of war tax resistance.

In February, 1966, a “Friends’ Conference and Vigil on the War in Vietnam” asked the “Friends Coordinating Committee on Peace… to prepare a bulletin urging Friends to consider how paying taxes and buying war bonds involved them in financing the military.”

A number of Quakers signed a “No Taxes for Vietnam War” tax refusal vow that was organized by Maurice McCracken’s “No War in Vietnam Committee.” These included, according to the 15 March issue of the Journal, “Franklin Zahn, Bob and Marj Swann, Arthur Evans, Bradford Lyttle, Johan W. Eliot, Staughton Lynd, Wilmer Young, George and Lillian Willoughby, and Marion C. Frenyear.”

The lead editorial in that issue was entitled “To Pay or to Protest?” and the author was determined to give no definitive advice on either side of that question. The editorial begins by stating the case for Quaker taxpayer misgivings, then moves on to note that “a few pacifists” have been resisting, and to claim that “this year the number of tax-refusers will be far greater than ever before,” while other taxpayers who share their misgivings are either unwilling to take on the risks of tax resistance or believe that such an action amounts to “dodging the law and leaving someone else to carry a burden which they themselves will not assume.”

The editorialist then quotes from a letter written by a resisting employee “to her employing group” (why so coy about which group?) in which she writes that while she would be happy to “pay twice as much as required by the present law” for the more benign things the government buys, “I cannot bring myself to furnish money to be used in a way that will bring death to fine young American boys and men and also to Vietnamese men, women, and children.” If “the employing group” were to cooperate in her request to stop withholding income tax from her salary, the editorialist wonders, “[w]ill it (or its members) be penalized?”

This is another strange example of the Journal taking an issue that was obviously a direct concern to Quakers and to Quaker Meetings, and trying to abstract it and cast it off into the distance somewhere in order to consider it dispassionately and indecisively.

From here the editorialist compares the Quaker war tax resister of today to the Quaker abolitionist “in the years before the Civil War when some members wanted to give all-out aid to the cause of abolition while others counseled caution, advocating strict adherence to the letter of such laws as those requiring fugitive slaves to be returned to their masters.”

Nowadays we tend to view with shame the historical evidence that all Friends did not work wholeheartedly for the abolition of slavery; will the time come when the Friends who follow after us have a similar feeling about those of their predecessors (including the present writer) who lacked the courage to resist conscription of their dollars to do the killing that they themselves refused to do?

After a quick detour through “There are those who say… there are others who counterargue…” territory, the editorialist recommends that people interested in tax refusal contact the Committee for Nonpayment of War Taxes or the Peacemakers, and gives their addresses.

Finally, there is a brief nod in the direction of war tax resistance being a time-honored Quaker practice. The editorialist mentions that Franklin Zahn has authored a booklet on “Early Friends and War Taxes,” which includes the quote that ends the editorial, from the letter sent by John Woolman & co. to their fellow-Friends in 1755:

Raising sums of money [for] purposes inconsistent with the peaceable testimony we profess… appears to us in its consequences to be destructive of our religious liberties; we apprehend many among us will be under the necessity of suffering, rather than consenting thereto by the payment of a tax for such purposes.

In the 1 May issue, an article about a Quaker movement in which people voluntarily taxed themselves 1% of their income for the support of the United Nations began this way: “All Friends, whether or not they would refuse to take up arms, are caught up in the military machine through payment of Federal income tax.” This seems to indicate that there was still a blind spot that was making it difficult for some Quakers to even see the various alternatives to paying the federal income tax.

A report on the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting in the same issue noted:

After consideration, the Yearly Meeting concurred with the concern of the Friends Peace Committee that fresh attention be given to the effort to devise a formula acceptable to the Internal Revenue Service and to Congress, which would permit persons to withhold that proportion of their income taxes applicable to military purposes and apply it to constructive purposes of government. Because a Monthly Meeting secretary and a youth worker for the Peace Committee have asked their employers to cease withholding income tax from their salaries, the problem is being thrust upon the Yearly Meeting. Friends, whatever their judgments about a particular action, are sympathetic toward those who engage in it for reasons of conscience.

In furtherance of its concern… the Friends Peace Committee received authorization to seek personal conferences with officials of the Internal Revenue Service to acquaint them with the basis and reality of the concern to refuse payment of taxes for military purposes. Perhaps such conversations may increase understanding on the part of the officials and may enable them, while carrying out their duty and enforcing the law, to understand and respect the refusers.

A conference at Pendle Hill “on the search for peace” in April, concerned the “basic question… [of] whether the militaristic society in which we all live could be influenced through techniques of reason or whether religious pacifists, in their deep alienation, should rather seek a more radical strategy of protest.” At one point, according to the coverage in the 15 June issue of the Journal, William Davidon “spoke frankly and clearly on the moral philosophy behind his refusal to pay those taxes which, he felt, would support the war in Vietnam.”

Martin A. Klaver contributed the lead editorial in the 1 June issue — “More on Tax-Refusal” — which is worth reproducing completely here as a good overview of the issue of war tax resistance as it stood at that time:

“Friends Journal,” writes John R. Ewbank, patent attorney and a member of Abington Meeting, Jenkintown, Pa., “might well mention the ‘mildest form of tax-refusal for Milquetoasts’: the refusal to pay the federal tax on telephone usage when billed for it. The telephone company can carry the accumulated unpaid tax until it equals the deposit, and then assess a charge for nominal discontinuance and reconnection, so that the penalties for prolonged persistence are paid to the phone company instead of to the government. How long it is worth while to carry the protest is a matter of individual judgment…”
For nearly a hundred years, John Ewbank adds, Americans have not been faced with a levy so conspicuously labeled “war tax” as this revived tax on telephone usage. According to his letter to the telephone company, “The publicity connected with the telephone tax has been so specifically related to the Vietnam war, and I am conscientiously so opposed to the Vietnam war, that my payment herewith omits the $1.03 federal tax. There are so few opportunities for protest — even feeble, futile protest — that [this] becomes one of the few available gestures.”
For Milquetoasts or not, feeble or not, the gesture is a form of civil disobedience differing more in degree than in kind from refusal to pay the federal income tax — or that part of it that goes for war. It seems a little unfair to make it at the expense of the telephone company, which is thereby put to added trouble and expense, if only in its bookkeeping department, but it is a protest.
This year, it appears, the thin ranks of those refusing to pay income taxes for reasons of conscience were somewhat augmented. An April release from the office of A.J. Muste cites a statement signed by 360 persons, declaring that they would refuse to pay taxes voluntarily as long as United States forces continue to be used “in violation of the U.S. Constitution, international law, and the United Nations Charter.”
The release says that some signers are leaving the money they owe the government in banks, where the Internal Revenue Service can seize it, while others will contribute it to CARE, UNICEF, or similar agencies. It also notes that, according to the Internal Revenue Code, “willful refusal to pay taxes may be punished by jail sentences of up to one year and fines as high as $10,000.”
This is not tax-refusal for Milquetoasts, although in the past fines and jail sentences have been rare indeed. The law is enforced by placing a lien on the tax refuser’s property or attaching his salary. There have been a number of instances where actions instituted against individuals were simply dropped. But if tax-refusal should reach important proportions, the present seemingly casual attitude might change; the IRS might decide that it must do something to show that it is not virtually inviting more and more trouble.
Philadelphia Yearly Meeting was concerned this year with the problem posed by employes of two Quaker groups who have asked their employers not to withhold federal taxes from their salaries. The Yearly Meeting’s Peace Committee is not only seeking a solution to this problem but is also seeking special conferences with Internal Revenue Service officials to acquaint them with the reasons why some Friends refuse to pay their taxes.
During the Yearly Meeting’s discussion it was brought out that Friends Committee on National Legislation for some time has been exploring the possibility of drafting legislation in this area making it possible for Americans who have conscientious objections to having their property used for war to pay equivalent taxes for other uses. A number of congressmen have been receptive to the idea, but so far no formula has been found that promises to attract the necessary support.
Meanwhile most Quakers (like this one) pay their income taxes (including the reimposed telephone tax) without a murmur. But there is a consensus on a fundamental: Friends’ basic belief that in matters of conscience each individual must choose his own course. If that course brings him into conflict with government, he must decide for himself what he must do: obey in silence, obey and at the same time protest, or resort to civil disobedience of one kind or another. Whether any government can grant any of its citizens the “right” to violate any of its laws is open to debate. The citizen can hardly lay claim to such a right, yet when he feels that he has a duty to break the law, when he says, “God helping me, I can do no other,” then we must accord him our respect.

The 15 July issue noted that “two young Quaker workers… have voluntarily taken drastic cuts in salary rather than pay taxes for war in Vietnam.” The two were John L.P. Maynard and Robert W. Eaton, who reduced their incomes to the maximum allowable before federal income tax withholding began — something on the order of $75 per month.

The Conservative branch of the Ohio Yearly Meeting met in August. According to William P. Taber, Jr.’s report on the meeting, “we asked our members to consider supporting tax refusal and the sending of aid to the civilians of all Vietnam.”

On the other hand, at the Westerly (Rhode Island) Monthly Meeting, the message was more mixed: “Many Friends feel that not to pay their taxes is disrespect for the law, breeding anarchy. Yet they deplore the fact that their tax money is being used to prosecute a morally indefensible war in Vietnam.” The best they could come up with was to approve a suggestion that Friends accompany their tax payments with a statement of protest.

The pseudonymous history columnist “Now and Then” took up the issue of war tax resistance in the 1 September issue:

A scruple against paying taxes which directly or indirectly support war has had a long if sporadic history among members of the Society of Friends. It received official support in London in 1679 when decision was made that fine or punishment for such refusal could be reported by the meeting in the annual listing of “sufferings for Truth.” At Philadelphia Yearly Meeting every year lately this concern has been voiced by individuals. In 1966 the Meeting went so far as to authorize some minor action on the subject, including a delegation to visit the Internal Revenue authorities and to explain the tender conscience of the increasing number of Friends who refuse part or all of their Federal income tax.
The most intensive consideration of the matter among the Meeting’s membership appears to have occurred more than two centuries ago. Before 1700 the Pennsylvania Assembly was asked by the mother country to supply men and funds for British military enterprises in the colonies. The Quaker legislators, when they complied, did so uneasily, with the excuses that it was for defense or that the money was voted nominally for the sovereign’s use and that they were not responsible for what use the king (or queen) chose to make of it. They also accepted as a permanent unqualified mandate the words of Jesus, “Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s.” Sometimes Friends distinguished as acceptable mixed taxes and as unacceptable those taxes that were definitely labeled for war.
We are indebted to John Woolman’s Journal (Chapter Ⅴ) for an account of the exercise that arose in Philadelphia Yearly Meeting both in 1755 and in 1757. In the former year a committee was appointed which issued an epistle expressing the feeling that “the large sum granted by the late act of Assembly for the King’s use is principally intended for purposes inconsistent with our peaceable testimony,” and that “as we cannot be concerned in wars and fightings, so neither ought we to contribute thereto by paying the tax directed by the said act, though suffering be the consequence of our refusal.” Woolman speaks of the conference on the subject “as the most weighty that ever I was at.” There was not unanimity in the group. Some who felt easy to pay the tax withdrew, but twenty-one substantial Friends subscribed the epistle; they included John Woolman, John Churchman (who also mentions the matter in his Journal), Anthony Benezet, John Pemberton, and Samuel Fothergill, an English public Friend visiting America.
In the Yearly Meeting of 1757 the matter was opened again, and a committee of about forty Friends were appointed to consider “whether or no it would be best at this time publicly to consider it in the Yearly Meeting.” Visitors from other Yearly Meetings — including John Hunt and Christopher Wilson from England — were asked to join the committee. The decision was negative. There was difference of opinion on the subject, and “for that and several other reasons” the committee unanimously agreed that it was not proper to enter into public discussion of the matter. Meanwhile it recommended that Friends of differing opinions “have their minds covered with fervent charity towards one another.” One wonders why the different result from two years before and what were some of the “other reasons.”
Part of the answer, I think, is to be found in a letter to John Hunt and Christopher Wilson, sent to them by the Meeting for Sufferings in London. This letter is dated 9.ⅶ.1756 and is signed by Benjamin Bourne, clerk. I shall quote it as I have copied it from the manuscript minutes of the Meeting. It falls in date between the two Philadelphia Yearly Meetings described above, at the second of which Hunt and Wilson were present and in a position to transmit the urgent advice of London Friends.
The main purpose of their mission to Pennsylvania, as is well known, was to prevent the home government’s proposed requirement of an oath for members of the Assembly by asking Friends to refuse to run for election. The British Friends asked the government to let them attempt first to bring about the purging of the Assembly of Quakers. In this they succeeded to the extent that most Friends withdrew from the Assembly; thus the threat was averted. Evidently the same pressure was exercised to encourage Friends to pay provincial war taxes to the British crown and particularly not to publicize their scruple against paying them. But neither the minutes of Philadelpha Yearly Meeting for 1757 (under 9 mo. 23) nor its epistles — whether to London Yearly Meeting or to its own members — are so explicit as the letter. After repeating the primary commission to the English delegates to try “to prevail on Friends in Pennsylvania to refuse being chosen into Assembly during the present commotions in America” and “to make them fully sensible of their danger, and how much it concerns them, the Province, and their posterity to act conformably to this request and the expectations of the government,” the letter continues:

And as you will know that very disadvantageous impressions have been made here by the advices given by some Friends against the payment of a tax lately laid by the provincial assembly, it is recommended in a particular manner that you endeavour to remove all occasions of misunderstanding on this account, and to explain and enforce our known principles and practice respecting the payment of taxes for the support of civil government agreeable to the several advices of the Yearly Meeting founded on the precept and example of our Saviour.
May that wisdom which is from above attend you in this weighty undertaking, and render your labours effectual for the purposes intended that you may be the happy instruments of averting the dangers that threaten the liberties and privileges of the people in general and restore and strengthen that union and harmony which ought to subsist in every part of our Christian Society.

Two brief lists were delivered with the above letter: extracts from London Yearly Meeting minutes of 1715, 1732, 1733, 1734, and 1735, in which the payment of dues to the government is inculcated; and titles of Acts of Parliament, seven chapters in four Acts from the reigns of William and Mary and Queen Anne, “wherein it is expressed that the taxes are for carrying on a war.” The final phrase was to leave no doubt that English Friends encouraged no escape on the ground that a Quaker conscience could assume the doubtful or peaceful purpose of the legislation.
The grounds on which the scruple among Friends was silenced in 1757 are clear. Friends had long paid such taxes and wished to obey the laws. If Pennsylvania Friends refused to vote for them as assemblymen or to collect them as tax collectors or to pay them as subjects, the liberties enjoyed in the colony, such as permitting affirmations in place of oaths, would be terminated. The exhortations in the gospels and New Testament epistles in favor of paying Caesar his dues were applicable. The early Quaker examples of civil disobedience in other matters were forgotten, and the relevance of the continuing Quaker testimonies against personal participation in war and against the payment of tithes was not cited. In the latter area Friends were resolutely against payment and suffered ruinous distraints. Evidently dues for the support of “hireling ministers” seemed more obnoxious than taxes for the prosecution of war. If Colonial Friends disagreed with the practice of Friends in England or even with one another they would expose the Society to disharmony.
When Woolman’s Journal was reprinted in England in 1775 the whole section on paying or not paying taxes was omitted, but in America the problem already was taking a different form. Friends and others had opposed taxation without representation when the Stamp Act was passed in 1765. With the outbreak of the Revolution the issue was one of using continental currency or of paying taxes to support war against Great Britain. This, many American Friends (like Job Scott) and Meetings were willing openly to oppose.

The New York Yearly Meeting issued a statement “on the tragic situation in Vietnam,” saying that it represented “a supreme test” to “the spiritual vitality of the Religious Society of Friends.” The statement, reprinted in the 15 September issue of the Journal included this point:

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

The 1 November issue noted that “the newsletters of several Friends’ organizations” are encouraging their readers to “protest your telephone war tax” but also suggests that in some cases the protest was a pretty pathetic one: “Stickers saying ‘The Vietnam War Tax Included in This Bill Is Paid Only Under Protest’ are available from the American Friends Service Committee.”

The following issue included a letter-to-the-editor from Franklin Zahn in which he encouraged a more practical approach: “Each month I pay all of my phone bill but 7 percent, informing the company it is against my conscience to pay the direct war tax. For five months the company added the unpaid balances to each new bill, then wrote it was referring the unpaid total to Internal Revenue Service and wiping my bill clean of debt… How will Internal Revenue handle this? Past experience with unpaid income taxes indicates IRS may ask for payment but make no bank account seizure until the amount totals more than $5, at which time it takes an extra 6 percent (per annum) as fine. Not paying direct war taxes is part of Quaker peace testimony. Don’t pay for a wrong number.”

Franklin Zahn

We’ve encountered Franklin Zahn before. He was listed as the contact person for “a leaflet on tax refusal” in a 1959 issue, and also something described as “the historical material” on the subject — “Early Friends and War Taxes” (perhaps the same leaflet).

Here is some more of his work:

In the 1 June 1969 issue, he responded in a letter-to-the-editor to an article that apparently suggested “that Friends drop their middle-class attitude of changing law and join the less privileged whose only method has been evading law.” Zahn responded:

A basic test for conscience is the categorical imperative: What happens if everybody else did the same? For [draft] evasion, I can see only the tightening up of conscription law. For open resistance, however, the end of conscription.
For myself, personally beyond the applicable age, the corresponding form of resistance is refusal to pay war taxes. If everyone in the world practiced it, the result would be close to total elimination of war.

I recently harbored an AWOL who jumped ship fifteen minutes before it sailed for Vietnam, but a better Quaker witness and confrontation would have been for both of us openly to declare our civil-military disobedience — he, his desertion; I, my aiding and abetting, and face the penalties for our actions. But maybe I should rejoice in that having evaded the law I have lost some middle-classness.
In the 15 April 1972 issue, he suggested that the spirit of the gospels meant that the “Render Unto Caesar” episode should be interpreted anew:

In the matter of war taxes, were Jesus addressing Christian stewards of God’s wealth who were citizens in a free democracy and responsible for its conduct and were be to pick up an American coin with its inscription, “In God We Trust,” his words might very well be:
If the God you trust is Mars, pay your taxes to him.
In the 1 March 1973 issue, he gave “a historical summary” of how Quakers had dealt with the issue of war taxes:

With war taxes as with slavery, John Woolman stands out as the pioneer in getting the Society of Friends to face the issue. His motivation in bringing the concern to Philadelphia Yearly Meeting in 1755 came from the increasing willingness of the Quaker government of the colony of Pennsylvania to vote money for war.
The Quaker Assembly had begun to weaken in its peace testimony in 1709. First it had refused to vote £4000 for an expedition into Canada, forthrightly saying, “It was contrary to their religious principles to hire men to kill one another.” But later they voted £500 “for the Queen” as a token of their respect, with a rider saying, “The money should be put into a safe hand till they were satisfied from England it should not be employed for the use of war.” But in 1711 a similar request resulted in £2000 being voted, with Isaac Norris echoing Fox in explaining: “We did not see it to be inconsistent with our principles to give the Queen money notwithstanding any use she might put it to, that not being our part but hers.”
That same year William Penn reputedly wrote the Queen (I have not found historical verification): “Our civil obedience is only due to Christ, not to confound the things of God with Caesar’s; for no man can be true to Him that’s false to his own conscience, nor can he extort from it a tribute to carry on any war, nor ought true Christians to pay it.” [I also have been unable to find a source for this quote —♇]
Whatever influence the letter may have had, the fact seems to be that none of the £2000 voted “for the Queen’s use” was spent on the military expedition. But the principle of passing the buck for war seems to have been established in the Assembly, which took the view that while Quakers refused to bear arms themselves they did not condemn it in others. In 1737 the Assembly told the Governor it could not vote money for war, but acknowledged that on the other hand it had obligations to aid the government. The crisis, however, came in the French and Indian War in 1755, when individual taxpayers decided they could no longer pass the war buck to the Assembly.
In November of that year John Churchman and other Friends met with Assembly Friends, and about twenty of them said, in part:
“…As the raising sums of money, and putting them into the hands of committees, who may apply them to purposes inconsistent with the peaceable testimony we profess, …appears to us in its consequences, to be destructive of our religious liberties; we apprehend many among us will be under the necessity of suffering, rather than consenting thereto, by the payment of a tax for such purposes; and thus the fundamental part of our constitution may be essentially affected, and that free enjoyment of conscience by degrees be violated;…”
The setting for this ultimatum is of interest: Quaker tax-payers, one-third of the population of the colony, Quaker Assemblymen a majority in a legislature which had non-Quakers like Benjamin Franklin — the most important person in the colony.
The Assembly, when the vote came, said it could not give money for munitions but that, as a “tribute to Caesar,” it was voting £4000 for “bread, beef, pork, flour, wheat, or other grain.” The Governor who had received the request from New England for a grant to buy a different granular material, told the Assembly that their term “other grain” meant gunpowder and so spent the money.
Woolman’s thoughts about war taxes and his journeying to Philadelphia Yearly Meeting that year with his concern are familiar in his Journal. One passage, however, seems pertinent to 1973 as Friends urge a divided Congress to cut off war funds:
“Some of our members who are officers in civil government are… called upon in their respective stations to assist in things relative to the wars… if they see their brethren united in payment of a tax to carry on the said wars, may think their case not much different, and so might quench the tender movings of the Holy Spirit in their minds.”
On December 12, 1755, he; Churchman and others drew up an Epistle to Pennsylvania Friends:
“…The large sum granted… is principally intended for purposes inconsistent with our peaceable testimony; we therefore think that as we cannot be concerned in wars and fightings, so neither ought we to contribute thereto, by paying the tax directed by said act, though suffering be the consequence of our refusal.… Though some part of the money to 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, who have suffered in the present calamities, …we could most cheerfully contribute to those purposes, if they were not so mixed, that we cannot… 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…”
The “tax” committee of Yearly Meeting decided that refusal should be an individual matter, and in 1756 we find Friends like Joshua Evans conscious there was no solid front: “I found it best for me to refuse paying demands on my estate which went to pay the expenses of war, and although my part might appear at best as a drop in the ocean, yet the ocean, I considered, was made of many drops.”
The effect of such witness was not to stop the war but, as Woolman may have felt of even greater importance, to help Quaker legislators to be true to their own “tender movings.” In that year the last of the Quaker Assemblymen had resigned and no more ran for the office — in Franklin’s approving words, “choosing rather to quit their power than their principle.” The 70-year experiment of a Quaker government came to an end over the question of war taxes. By 1757, according to James Pemberton, it was clear the war-makers were extracting their toll: “The tax in this country [is] pretty well collected and many in this city particularly suffered by distraint of their goods and some being near cast into jail.”
Two decades later, when the bigger test of the Revolutionary War came and the “fighting” Free Quakers separated, tax refusal was so well established that some Quakers appear almost to have over-reacted. In The Quakers in the American Colonies, Rufus Jones writes:
“There was plenty for the overseers to do in these early days of the war.… Shutting their hearts against the pleadings of mercy for their brothers and sons who had joined the ‘associators’ or paid war taxes, or placed guns for defence upon their vessels, or paid fines for refusing to collect military taxes, or in any way aided the war on either side, they cleared the Society of all open complicity with it. The offense was reported to one Monthly Meeting, and at the next the testimony of disownment would go out.”
While by today’s permissive standards of the Society such peace witness seems more hysterical than historical, we need to be aware that in this period as in the Civil War, “tax” sometimes meant the substitutionary amount paid in lieu of military service by COs.
In New England the question of paying war taxes to the rebelling colonial governments was the precipitating cause for the split-off of Free Quakers. There, as elsewhere, when the Revolutionary War broke out, Friends generally agreed they should not pay specific war taxes but on “mixed” taxes — the subject of the 1755 Epistle in Pennsylvania — there was no consensus.
Job Scott in New England Yearly Meeting was the most erudite and detailed advocate of not paying mixed taxes. In his essay, subtitled “A truly conscientious scruple with respect to the payment of such taxes as are in part demanded for and applied to the support of war and fighting,” and addressed to “Friendly reader,” he reasoned in 1780:
“Now then, if a collector of taxes comes to me and in Caesar’s name demands a tax of £20 which I am persuaded is so far mixed, part for war and part for other charges, that my conscience forbids my paying it… I am not to blame for not paying it: if Caesar pleaseth to separate them I can gladly pay the one part and refuse the other.… though magistry be a divine ordinance, yet it does not follow that every requisition of the civil magistrate ought to be actively obeyed, anymore than because it is a duty indispensable and incumbent on all mankind to pay all their just debts, that therefore we must pay all demands however unjust.”
Tradition-minded Friends who used the Caesar argument sometimes pointed to George Fox who in 1667, paying a specific war tax for the Dutch war, made a distinction between this and direct military service. But the homeland of Quakerdom by the end of the 18th century had also moved towards tax refusal; in 1796 London Yearly Meeting minuted its censure on “the active compliance of some members with the rate (tax) for raising men for the Navy” and directed local Friends to have such cases under their care. Those who paid war taxes without even waiting for the process of distraint were considered to have acted “inconsistently.”
In the 19^th century less material on taxes was published by Friends. Perhaps there is here a fruitful field awaiting some researcher of yearly and quarterly minutes [indeed there is –♇]. Was there less interest in the problems, or was refusal taken for granted? Did non-Friend Thoreau’s ringing call to refusal in the Mexican-American War preempt the field? Whatever the reasons, as Friends face today’s violence with its automated battlefields and nuclear missiles — where the conscription of human bodies for mass armies may become less important — and conscription of money for sophisticated technology more important — the relevancy of the tax question to a modern, effective peace testimony has reached an all-time high.
In its 1 May 1973 issue, the Journal noted that the IRS had made a half-hearted attempt to seize Zahn’s “1955 Dodge station wagon” for $6.58 in resisted phone tax.

Although contemplating lying in front of the car as a final protest before the towing, Franklin calmly removed his personal effects from the car and showed no agitation at this seizure of his property. At the last minute, however, the IRS men suddenly removed the chains, saying, “We just got new orders — we’re calling off the dogs.” The mood changed from one of tense formality to joviality as the men left. “It was as though,” Franklin says, “they were glad the little bluff had failed.”
A letter-to-the-editor from Zahn appears in the 15 November 1978 issue, in which he responds to “a frequent objection to war tax refusal: that it logically leads to a host of other tax refusal.” He suggests that because military expenses are such an overwhelming part of the federal budget, only war resisters are likely to find tax resistance to be a tempting tactic. And anyway, “if a few other than war objectors choose to refuse, I see no objection to their doing so.”
In the 1 January 1980 issue, Zahn writes in to make a fresh case for war tax refusal:

In refusing personal service, one considers one’s integrity — conscience: Can I be part of a machine geared to agony and death? But often a different criterion is applied to refusal to pay: How effective a protest is it? If the protest-value of tax refusal is the only consideration, Friends may feel the effort is better spent in writing a legislator or phoning the White House. (But I have found that a letter to the government saying I am refusing to pay war taxes is one letter officials never ignore.)
Arguments against the effectiveness of war tax refusal can be self-fulfilling prophecies. Friends may not wish to join a public witness which is so small it attracts little notice — therefore it remains small. Yet it is possible that an announcement of intention to pay no further war taxes would be the most single effective act against the arms race that members of the Society of Friends could take.
But sudden, dramatic decisions for effectiveness are not in the manner of Friends. Perhaps we should forget all about witness and consider tax refusal purely as personal integrity. This basis, after all, is the one for our day-to-day decisions in matters of principle. We refuse to steal, not as some witness in influencing others, but because for us stealing is wrong. We refuse to cheat, not as some protest against dishonesty or against anything else, but because cheating is not the way of the life of the Spirit. Questions of effectiveness become irrelevant.
The corresponding question for taxes could be, explicitly: Should I, a person in whom there is that of God, voluntarily pay all money asked of me for the purpose of injuring and killing millions of other persons in whom there is also that of God?
If trying to hold back some one-third of our federal income tax (which will go next year for current military uses) is too boggling, we can start modestly and refuse payment of only ten dollars — a small pinch of incense not voluntarily laid on Caesar’s altar. It can, to our conscience, be a symbol of our refusal of total submission to the military-industrial complex. But it can also symbolize the positive. It can be given to the Right Sharing of World Resources of Friends World Committee. It is possible a small amount like ten dollars will not even be collected by IRS. Each of us can try such an experiment for one year, and from then proceed as way opens.
Finally, in the March 1997 issue, the Journal announced Zahn’s death (nearly a year after the fact). It called him “a peace activist and worldly ascetic” and said that he practiced “religious asceticism — regular meditation, vegetarianism, celibacy, and voluntary poverty — as both the sustenance for his personal spiritual life and public witness to the power of love and truth in the world.” He was among those conscientious objectors who at first accepted alternative civilian service, and then decided to resist the draft entirely. He also was among those who tried to sail into nuclear weapons test zones to disrupt the tests.

The latest news from the U.S. war tax resistance movement:

Erica Weiland reviews American war tax resister Frances Crowe’s memoir, Finding My Radical Soul. “Now 96 years old, she is still an activist and still getting arrested for civil disobedience.”
Ruth Benn reflects on “The Mysterious Ways of the IRS” — the agency seems arbitrary and unpredictable at times in the ways it responds to war tax resisters.
The three activists who boldly broke through security at the Oak Ridge nuclear weapons plant in 2012 have had their sabotage convictions reversed on appeal and are no longer being imprisoned. One article about their successful appeal concluded: “They are still obligated to pay the government a fine of $52,953 for the break-in at Y-12. But they took vows of poverty decades ago, don’t have bank accounts, and have neither the means nor the intention of paying it.”
The War Tax Talk blog has reprinted an op-ed debate that was published in the Sunday Republican of Springfield, Massachusetts back in 1993. It features Juanita Nelson dueling with a U.S. Air Force Reserve Lieutenant-Colonel over the question: “Is it ever right to refuse, on principle, to pay taxes?”

There’s a new edition of NWTRCC’s newsletter out, with content including:
- reports from this year’s Tax Day actions
- concerns bubbling up in the war tax resistance community, like:
  - what to do about sudden, unexpected financial gains
  - how resisters might get hit with an Estimated Tax Penalty
  - how to avoid the now-epidemic tax debt telephone scams
- book reviews:
- a report on NWTRCC’s recent national gathering in Milwaukee
- Redmoonsong reflects on how tactics of dealing with tax resistance and government benefits may change as one ages

Get Yourself a Peace. Seventy cents of every 1969 tax dollar went to pay for the costs of America’s past wars and the War in Vietnam. You spend $400 yearly on the Vietnam War. Where was your peace, and how can you go about getting it? Tax resistance is what some people have decided to do for peace. They have kept the 10% Federal Tax on telephone bills. All of this tax is allocated to War costs. Customers who have refused to pay, and submitted a written explanation to the telephone company, have not had their service discontinued. Telephone officials simply forward these messages to Internal Revenue. Others have declined to pay the 10% surtax, all of which was levied in 1968 to pay war costs. And a few people have withheld the percentage of their tax that supports the Defense Establishment. These funds, placed in an escrow account, generate income used to promote and support human resource projects. The time has come for you to get a peace. A form of tax resistance could get you a big one. For more detailed information, contact: Boston War Tax Resistance… — from the 14 May 1970 edition of Cycle

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

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

A Call to War Tax Resistance

In 1968, the United States government spend $103 billion to pay for present and past wars and to be prepared in case of future wars. This was 66% of the entire federal budget of $156 billion. One hundred and three billion dollars exceeds the gross national product of all but six nations.
Of this $103,198,100,000, $29 billion was spent on the Vietnam war, to continue a conflict whose brutality, immorality, and illegality have sickened most Americans and the vast majority of the people of the world. Already, this war has brought death to more than 42,000 Americans and more than two million Vietnamese. It is a spur to the arms race and continually threatens world peace.
Almost $20 billion will be invested this fiscal year in making more frightful our nuclear missile and bomber arsenal, weapons already so destructive that they can deliver ten tons of explosive power for every person on the globe.
$330 million will be spent on chemical and biological weapons that are polluting the environment and endangering the people in the United States and other countries without even being used; simply by being improperly stored.
$7.5 billion will go toward research on new and yet more fearful weapons.
$1.2 billion has been authorized for the Anti Ballistic Missile (ABM) system in 1968.
$500 million to $1 billion is the estimated budget of the CIA.
Vast sums will be paid to the corporations and research institutes that design and build the weapons. In fiscal year 1968, the following companies, a handful of the biggest among thousands engaged in war production and research, enjoyed these military contracts:

General Dynamics $2.2 billion

Lockheed Aircraft $1.8 billion

General Electric $1.4 billion

United Aircraft $1.3 billion

McDonnell-Douglas $1.1 billion

AT&T $777 million

The following amounts were spent in fiscal 1968 for projects that seem to have little to do with primary human needs:
For moon and other space exploration $3.4 billion.
For farm subsidies to wealthy landowners $3.1 billion.
In comparison to the enormous expenditures for acts and instruments of military violence, luxury space programs, and subsidies to the wealthy, and at a time when city governments are crying for more funds, the United States government spent these sums on improving the health, education, and general welfare of the people within this country.
Slum rebuilding $1.9 billion.
Other poverty programs $7.2 billion.
Health programs $1.8 billion.
Educational programs and subsidies $3.7 billion.
Direct, nonmilitary foreign aid to underdeveloped countries totaled about $1.6 billion.
The U.S. appropriation to the United Nations was $109 million, about the cost of one Polaris submarine.
In fiscal 1968, the total of all non-military expenditure was approximately 34% of the military expenses.
Throughout the United States, young people by the hundreds of thousands are rebelling in disgust and anger against this squandering of resources on war, and neglect of the day-to-day practical needs of the people. They are not alone in seeing only massive social disruption and probably nuclear war as eventual consequences. They are risking their freedom, careers, and often their lives to protest and resist what they see to be wrong.
In the face of this shameful and alarming situation and in solidarity with the youth resisting it, we, as participants in War Tax Resistance, are resolved to confront our own complicity in war, waste, and callousness. We resolve to end to the extent we can our cooperation in a federal tax program geared to death more than life. The least measure of our resistance will be not to pay voluntarily $5 of federal taxes due.
We are prepared to bear the consequences of our actions, be these criticism and unpopularity, financial penalties, confiscation of our bank accounts and property, and, perhaps, imprisonment. These seem to us small inconveniences beside the agony of those killed or bereft by war, and the numb hopelessness of those crippled by poverty.
We invite all Americans to join us in some form of tax refusal. War tax resistance is not always easy, particularly for those whose taxes are withheld from their wages, but for most there is some variety of tax refusal that they can conscientiously adopt. It may be by not paying part or all of a balance “owed,” or by not paying federal telephone tax. War Tax Resistance has prepared literature and is setting up counseling services designed to help each individual find the best way of tax refusal and resistance for him. A list of Methods of War Tax Resistance follows this statement of purpose.
We also are developing a war tax resistance promotional program that will include advertisements, demonstrations, meetings, a bulletin, and other literature distribution. If you become a war tax resister, we hope you will allow yourself to be publicly identified with the movement and permit your name to be used on tax resistance literature.
War Tax Resistance will do more than concentrate on the weeks just before April 15. We are planning a year round educational and resistance program. If you agree with conscientious tax resistance as a means for opposing war, we hope you will communicate with us now. The included coupon is for your convenience.

Methods of Refusal

Refuse to pay at least $5 of your tax

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

Better yet, refuse to pay all the taxes you can

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

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

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

You can refuse to pay the 10% surtax

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

You can refuse to pay the federal telephone tax

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

To Reduce or Eliminate the Withholding of Your Taxes You Can

Claim additional dependents

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

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

Make your employer an ally

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

Organize an employment agency

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

Also You Can

Demand a refund

There are four ways to do this:

You may request a refund right on the 1040 form and stand a good chance of receiving it. Ask for a tax credit on Part Ⅴ of the form.

You may file form 843 for a refund.

If the above demands are refused, go to the Income Tax Board of Appeals. If the Board turns you down, sue.

You can also sue the government to refund all your taxes on the grounds that the taxes have been used for illegal and immoral purposes.

Protest by letter or in person

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

Maximize the Impact

Talk about your tax refusal with friends, neighbors, co-workers. This sort of direct contact changes many minds. Distribute tax refusal literature.
Inform the newspapers and other mass media in your neighborhood that you are resisting war taxes and why. Start a war tax resistance group in your community.
Organize or join demonstrations at your local IRS office.
Inform yourself thoroughly and become a tax refusal counselor. Let your community know through ads, leaflets, etc. that a counseling service is available.
Keep the War Tax Resistance Clearinghouse informed by writing or phoning about your activities. Communication is the lifeblood of any movement.
We invite war tax resisters to send War Tax Resistance the first $5 or more refused the federal government. This money will be used to publicize and expand the war tax resistance movement.
Until now, the government has not imprisoned anyone for conscientious tax refusal. A few have been given short sentences for refusing to reveal information about their incomes. In general, the IRS has been content to take money from tax refusers’ bank accounts, garnishee part of their wages, or, on rare occasions, seize and auction property.

Sponsors of War Tax Resistance

Winslow Ames

Joan Baez

Norma Becker

James Bristol

Prof. Noam Chomsky

Prof. Frank Collins

Tom Cornell

Prof. William Davidon

Dorothy Day

Dave Dellinger

Barbara Deming

Ralph DiGia

Prof. Douglas Dowd

Prof. Margaret Eberbach

Ruth Gage-Colby

Allen Ginsberg

Bob Haskell

James Leo Herlihy

Faye Knopp

Kennett Love

David McReynolds

Stewart and Charlotte Meacham

Rev. and Mrs. Arthur G. Melville

Karl Meyer

Jack Newfield

Grace Paley

Igal Roodenko

Rev. Finley Schaef

Dr. Benjamin Spock

Marj and Bob Swann

Arthur Waskow

George and Lillian Willoughby

Irma Zigas

Working Committee (in formation)

Norma Becker

Maris Cakars

Frank Collins

John Darr

Jerry Dickinson

Ralph DiGia

Bob Haskell

Neil Haworth

Peter Kiger

Kennett Love

Bradford Lyttle

Mark Morris

Christopher Pollock

Melinda Reed

Kay Van Deurs

Eric Weinberger

War Tax Resistance, 339 Lafayette Street, New York, N.Y. 10012, Phone (212) 228-0450. ☐ I would like to join War Tax Resistance. ☐ I am not ready to join W.T.R., but please place me on your mailing list. ☐ Please send me more information about the following methods of war tax resistance: (blank) ☐ Pleas send me (blank) additional copies of A Call to War Tax Resistance (6 for 25¢; 30 for $1). ☐ I am already resisting war taxes (on a separate sheet please list the taxes you have not paid, since which year, the consequences to date, and any other pertinent information). ☐ You may use my name in publicizing W.T.R. ☐ I am interested in becoming a W.T.R. counselor; please send me more information. Enclosed is $(blank) to support the work of W.T.R. Please send copies of this Call to the attached list of people. Name (blank), Address (blank), Telephone (blank)

Here are some excerpts from The Catholic News Archive concerning tax resistance, from sources other than Catholic Worker, from the 1947–71 span:

First, a typed news dispatch from “M. Massiani,” Paris Correspondent for the National Catholic Welfare Council (U.S.) News Service, dated 4 August 1947:

Priests and People of Vendee, France, Protest Tax on Christian Schools and Refusal of State Aid

Paris, July 28. — A delegation of 20,000 citizens from various parts of the Department of Vendee, one of the most Catholic regions of France, appeared in the town of La Roche-sur-Yon, where a number of priests were on trial for refusing to pay a tax exacted on entertainments and theatrical productions given to aid in supporting the free Christian schools of the Department.
A large group of priests and directors of Christian schools purposely decided to refuse payment of this tax and made public announcement of the decision in order to protest what is regarded by the people of the Vendee as a highly inequitable situation; the state taxing the people to support unneeded public schools, refusing to grant a subsidy to aid in maintaining the Christian schools, and at the same time taxing entertainments held to raise money for support of the Christian schools.
It is pointed out that in Vendee public schools are practically empty. The Christian schools, on the other hand, are educating the vast majority of the children of the region, saving the state more than 200 million francs in school taxes annually. Yet whenever Catholics hold a festival to raise funds for support of their schools, the state intervenes to collect part of the receipts.
It is hoped that in refusing to pay this tax, public attention will be called to the injustice and the need of a state subsidy to help support the Christian schools, such as is granted in other countries, including Belgium and Holland.
Bishop Antoine Cazaux of Lucon, who went to La Roche-sur-Yon to testify in behalf of the defendants, stated that his priests are neither rebels nor evaders, and that the court, in order to judge equitably, should take into consideration the unjust situation that exists with regard to education. Many thousands of people were in the streets outside the courtroom.
Decisions were rendered in only two of the cases, the defendants being acquitted on procedural grounds. The other cases were postponed. The action of the court caused anti-religious groups and newspapers, particularly in Paris, to demand that new suits be instituted and that the law be applied with severity.
In the Diocese of Lucon, two-thirds of the children attend the 461 primary religious schools. In six large districts, 13,757 children out of 15,183 are enrolled at the Christian schools. In two other districts, the number of pupils in the public schools is only three per cent of the total. In 41 settlements in the Department, with a population of 40,000, there are no public schools.

A National Catholic Reporter editorial (signed by editor Robert C. Hoyt) in the 3 January 1967 issue recommended that men refuse military service, concluding that in Vietnam, “we are killing people and destroying a culture without adequate justification, without a rationale that meets the minimum requirements of morality. That imposes obligations on all of us. We believe that anyone who despairs of a political solution has a right and duty to search for more effective ways, including civil disobedience and tax refusal. We have a responsibility to the rest of the world, to history, to God that nobody else can bear.”

In its 4 February 1970 issue, that paper published a lengthy article on the war tax resistance movement:

Protesters turn to taxes to fight against the war

By Gary MacEoin
Special to the National Catholic Reporter, NEW YORK— Protesters against the Vietnam war are turning to the withholding of taxes as a way of fighting against the war.
A national campaign against the payment of taxes used for the war is being organized and its goal is to involve “tens and perhaps hundreds of thousands of people in conscientious tax refusal.”
The campaign is spearheaded by the War Tax Resistance, an organization founded last summer which draws support from a broad spectrum of pacifist groups. Its headquarters is in New York and it has offices in Philadelphia and Chicago.
Resistance spokesmen say they hope to have “at least a phone, an address and a contact person” in each of the principal 50 to 100 cities in the nation by mid-February. Groups organized around such regional centers are to focus their tax resistance efforts on demonstrations on March 2 and April 15.
“We picked the March 2 date more or less arbitrarily,” said Bradford Lyttle, clean-shaven and soft-spoken coordinator of War Tax Resistance. “That’s about the time that thousands of accountants all over the country hang out signs offering to help prepare tax returns. We want to provide an option for those who want not to pay.”
The choice of April 15 is more obvious, he said. “It is both the final day for filing tax returns and the start of the Spring offensive of the demonstrations against the war in Vietnam.”
Lyttle, 42, works out of an office in Lower Manhattan (339 Lafayette Street). It is also the home of the New York GI Coffeehouse, the Jewish Peace Fellowship, the Catholic Peace Fellowship, the War Resisters League, Win magazine (hippie-pacifist), and Liberation magazine (David Dellinger’s voice). Between them, they occupy the two top floors of a three-story cold-water walk-up not far from the Catholic Worker.
Organized resistance to paying war taxes is not new, dating from 1948, Lyttle said. The War Tax Resistance is trying to give the idea broader appeal by modifying the totally pacifist position that its forerunners had adopted.
Lyttle, who himself is a pacifist, said the new approach was developed by a New York teacher, Norma Becker, who recruited a group of sponsors which included Joan Baez, Noam Chomsky, Tom Cornell, Dorothy Day, Dave Dellinger, Allen Ginsberg, Stewart and Charlotte Meacham, Grace Paley and Dr. Benjamin Spock.
“The result,” says Bradford Lyttle, “was a new emphasis. Instead of stressing the total pacifist tradition as the others had done, we decided to concentrate on two more immediate and obvious reasons: the horrors of the war in Vietnam, and the misuse of the taxpayers’ money by the government to the extent that it was neglecting national priorities.
“And instead of calling on sympathizers to pay no taxes whatever, we appealed to them to make a token withholding, if only $5, without of course ceasing to urge those who had the moral courage to go further.”
War Tax Resisters chose as their prime targets the 10 per cent surtax and the 10 per cent federal excise tax on telephone service — two taxes more clearly linked to Vietnam than any others.
Both War Tax Resistance and other organizations distribute literature explaining the various ways — some legal, some doubtful, some illegal — for nonpayment of federal taxes. The first War Tax Resistance leaflet was prepared for the antiwar demonstration in Washington, D.C., last Nov. 15, and 10,000 copies were handed out there.
“The act of war tax resistance creates a confrontation between the government and the conscience of the citizens,” this pamphlet states. “We believe that the right of conscientious objection to war belongs to all people, not just to those of draft age… Do whatever makes sense to your conscience. But do it.”
Among the ways to avoid paying taxes, the first is to earn an income so low as not to be taxable. This means for the single person under 65, an earned income of less than $900 annually. Yet a considerable number of pacifists choose this method.
Another form of protest is to refuse to pay the percentage of the tax that goes for war. More than two-thirds of the federal budget pays for wars, past, present and future. This is the amount some withhold. Others refuse to pay the proportion of the federal budget (23 per cent) directly allocated to Vietnam, while others hold back a token amount.
According to Internal Revenue Service figures, 73 million Americans paid their income taxes in full last year, while 1,025 refused to pay all or part in protest against the Vietnam war. The 1,025 protesters was an increase from 592 the previous year.
IRS counted 10,511 cases of refusal to pay the telephone tax in the first nine months of 1969, down from 14,396 in the same period of 1968. Several factors combine to make the telephone tax the attractive target it has become.
For one thing, the American Telephone and Telegraph Co. has handled the situation with kid gloves. So long as the protester makes it clear to the company with each payment that the amount withheld is the tax portion, it will not cut off a phone. Printed forms are made available by the resistance groups to facilitate this notification. What the telephone company does is simply to report to IRS the fact of nonpayment and the amount.
IRS also is anxious to keep the situation as cool as possible, but it wants at the same time to maintain whatever pressure is necessary to dissuade the hesitant from joining the movement. Back in 1967, the first step was to send the defaulter a “notice of preliminary assessment” which enabled him to demand a hearing. Because of the number of cases involved and the small amount in each, the IRS quickly eliminated this step and moved immediately to Form 17-A or some other “notice of final assessment.” This notice contains a threat to seize property to collect a debt.
Ralph Di Gia of War Resisters League is one who has been through this process several times.
Early in 1969, for example, the IRS computer at Andover, Mass., sent him Form 17 demanding payment of $2.25 owed as telephone tax. Next a New York agent wrote him, then called on him in his New York office. After checking with Di Gia’s landlord and the building superintendent to establish his political views, the agent tried to place a lien on his salary at the War Resisters League, but the League refused to cooperate.
After another confrontation with Di Gia, which merely established that it was “the principle,” not the $2.25, that was at issue on both sides, the agent located Di Gia’s bank account and collected the $2.25 plus 6 per cent interest. Under the IRS code, it can take money from a bank account without a court order in payment of taxes due by the account holder.
Apparently the discovered account was then fed into the computer, because another section of IRS moved quickly to seize the entire balance in payment of income tax. And as of last month, the IRS located a savings account recently opened by Di Gia in another bank and collected yet another telephone tax bill. But Di Gia insists that he doesn’t mind.
“The issue isn’t withholding money from the government,” he says. “They’re going to get it ultimately. But I made a few collection agents think about what their job’s about, and now IRS is going to have to realize that there are people who aren’t afraid to resist. They got the tax, but they had to come and get it, like when the agents had to go to the fields in France for collection.”
Unpaid taxes, whether telephone or income, can result not only in seizure from a bank account but also a lien on salary or the attachment and sale by auction of some property, usually an automobile.
In addition, some banks make a service charge — as high as $10, reportedly each time a lien is placed on an account, and the resisters suspect that IRS is pressuring banks to do this as a deterrent. Such a fee every month would make telephone tax refusal impractical for most people. But actually, the load on the IRS is such that it usually moves against any given individual only at much longer intervals.
Everyone who refuses to pay any taxes he owes is actually exposing himself to heavy penalties, and the resistance literature spells out this danger very openly. Simple “willful failure to pay” is punishable by fine up to $10,000 and a year in jail, plus the cost of prosecution. Similar or greater penalties are available for a variety of related offenses.
Although the offense of counseling or urging others not to pay taxes would seem greater than the simple act of withholding, the law on this point is somewhat ambiguous and apparently has never been tested in the courts.
There are few, if any, cases of conscientious tax refusers being jailed for not paying taxes or filing returns. Most of the small number of cases on record have resulted from related non-cooperation with the courts, such as ignoring a court order to disclose financial records.
In addition, it would appear that prosecutions have been initiated by local collectors who did not first check with headquarters. Current IRS policy on this issue apparently stops short of court action.
The most distinguished American to go to jail for refusal to pay taxes was Henry David Thoreau, the essayist, poet and naturalist. He spent only one night in confinement, because a neighbor paid the tax, but the experience inspired his essay on Civil Disobedience, espousing the doctrine of passive resistance. It deeply influenced Gandhi and has become the bible of the resistance movement. One passage is found to be particularly relevant by today’s resisters:
“When… a whole country is unjustly overrun and conquered by a foreign army, and subjected to military law, I think that it is not too soon for honest men to rebel and revolutionize. What makes this duty the more urgent is the fact that the Country to overrun is not our own, but ours is the invading army.” The reference is to the Mexican War of 1846–48.
About half a dozen have been jailed in the past 20 years. Juanita Nelson was arrested in Philadelphia in 1959, threatened with a year in jail and $1,000 fine if she did not disclose certain financial information, but in fact was held only some hours.
Maurice McCrackin, arrested in Cincinnati in 1958, was given a mental test, imprisoned “indefinitely” on a contempt charge, then sentenced to six months and a $250 fine. James Otsuka got 90 days and a $140 fine in Indianapolis, in 1949. Eroseanna Robinson, sentenced to a year and a day in Chicago in 1960, was released unconditionally after 93 days. Walter Gormley got 7 days in Cedar Rapids in 1960.
And in the first such imprisonment in several years, Neil Haworth of New London, Conn., got 60 days in 1968 for refusal to produce records. He had served six months in 1959 for “committing civil disobedience at a missile site” near Omaha. And in 1962, he was a crew member of Everyman Ⅲ, a boat which sailed to Leningrad to protest the Russian nuclear tests.
Those who have refused to pay federal taxes and have got away with it include the Catholic Worker settlement houses and the settlement house of the New England Committee for Non-Violent Action. “We pay local taxes,” says Dorothy Day of the Catholic Worker, “and we let the IRS people examine our records, but we pay them nothing.” The New England group says that IRS has spent thousands of dollars going through their bills and receipts, without collecting a penny.
War Tax Resistance is now urging citizens “to sue the government to refund all your taxes on the grounds that the taxes have been used for illegal and immoral purposes.” The main value of such suits to date has been the publicity.
Professor Donald Kalish, chairman of the philosophy department at UCLA, filed a suit to recover his telephone tax but it was dismissed by the District Court. He appealed, and the appellate court has agreed to hear his appeal.
The most important case to date is that of Walter C. Pietsch, of Rego Park, N.Y., a 33-year-old administrative employee in a hospital. Last year, he instituted “a class action” for an injunction to enjoin IRS from collecting the 10 per cent surtax and all other taxes used to propagate the war, and also for a declaration that the Vietnam war was unconstitutional. A class action, if successful, would provide the same remedy for all taxpayers.
Pietsch, who served in Korea, “is not against all wars, just this one.” The surtax he withheld was $190.84. “The amount is insignificant,” he said, “It’s the principle I’m fighting for.” After a preliminary hearing in the Brooklyn federal district court on Dec. 19, written arguments were submitted on Jan. 2, and on Jan. 6 the case was dismissed on a motion by the defendants. An appeal was filed immediately.
Although the Vietnam war is the direct issue on which tax resisters are concentrating, many of them insist that the campaign has escalated into something much bigger — the war mentality behind much of United States foreign policy. “Maybe it’s a hang-up,” says Ted Webster, administrator of the Roxbury War Tax Scholarship fund, “but I personally have a great feeling of urgency, it seems the logic behind bombing North Vietnam can be so easily applied to China. The influence of the Pentagon on policy, and the political expediency of yielding to it seems so obvious, I see the need to rapidly escalate resistance, or there will be a greatly expanded war — maybe with China — within one to three years.”

Another National Catholic Reporter article, from the 10 April 1970 issue, asked “In the name of God, how did Milwaukeeans get so radical?” A section of it covered tax resisters:

One area in which a number of community members are discussing is tax resistance. Some say they have claimed as many exemptions as were needed to keep from paying any federal taxes used to finance the war.
[Richard W.] Zipfel, who is defense committee chairman for the Chicago 15, Feit and Father Robert W. Dundon, a Jesuit, have sent a letter to the Wisconsin Telephone Co. stating they are refusing to pay the federal telephone tax on their phone bills because “we can no longer tolerate our nation spending more than $75 billion on the military while our cities die.”
The letter, dated Jan. 7, added that “even if the present war ended, our policies would quickly create another Vietnam.”
Their resistance gesture is significant, they said, because the tax was argued through Congress as a specifically Vietnam war tax. They have reserved a reply from the utility saying their letter was being forwarded to the government.
“I do believe in the legitimacy of the magistrates,” [Michael] Cullen said. “In paying property taxes, I believe in the state.
“I’ll render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s, but when Caesar decides to take what is God’s, or if Caesar decides to look like God or act like God, I won’t render to Caesar.
“You only render to what is legitimate and what is human, and what is for the common good. War destroys humans.”

Milwaukee’s Casa Maria Catholic Worker House still looks to be something like a hotbed of war tax resistance, at least relative to the current national lull. Lincoln Rice of Casa Maria is the current NWTRCC coordinator. I recognize the names of war tax resisters Roberta Thurstin and Don Timmerman among their volunteers as well.

From the Pittsburgh Catholic, 17 April 1970:

Five say they won’t pay taxes

Five local clergymen handed in their income tax forms at the Federal Bldg. downtown on Wednesday with the announcement they were withholding a portion in protest to the Vietnam War.
Joining them in the protest at the Internal Revenue Office there were several dozen local lay members of War Tax Resistance, an organization whose members carried out withholding actions in a number of cities Wednedsay (April 15), the last day for filing income tax returns. It is headquartered locally at 3601 Blvd. of the Allies.
The clergymen issued a statement denouncing the Vietnam war as immoral and stating other means of protest had been futile. “Now we must do more than talk. The time is now that we must act,” they said.
They included three priests active in civil rights causes here: Fr. Donald C. Fisher of St. Francis de Sales, McKees Rocks; Fr. Donald W. McIlvane, St. Richard’s, Hill District; and Fr. John O’Malley of St. Joseph’s, Manchester. Also taking part was Fr. Bernard Survil of St. Hedwig in Smock, Greensburg Diocese.
Protestant clergy included Rev. Oscar L. Arnall, a Lutheran, Rev. Thomas Whitcroft, an Episcopalian, and Rev. William S. Richard, a Presbyterian, signed the statement but weren’t present.
The clergymen announced they were withholding 25 per cent of their income tax, the proportion of the national tax that is estimated goes for the Vietnam war, they said. Some said they would pay the money into local community action programs suffering because of the amounts given to the Vietnam war.
“We are conscious of our obligation to pay taxes, but we are equally conscious of our obligation before God to refuse to cooperate with evil,” the clergymen said.

The National Catholic Reporter, in its 19 March 1971 issue, printed the following letter from Robert Calvert of War Tax Resistance:

Tax resisters suggest: “Stop paying for it”

To The Editors:
Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos… young people by the hundreds of thousands are rebelling in disgust and anger against the squandering of lives and resources in an immoral and illegal war. They are risking their freedom, careers and often their lives to protest and resist what they see to be wrong.
We, as participants in war tax resistance, are resolved to confront our own complicity in war, waste and callousness. We resolve to end to the extent possible our cooperation in a federal tax program geared to death more than life.
For every dollar which the administration expects to spend in fiscal year 1971, 64.8 per cent will go for wars — past, present and future. Of this amount, 48.4 per cent will go for current military expenditures, including Vietnam. (The administration has not revealed the exact costs of the Indochina war.) Another 17 per cent will go to health, education and welfare; 18.2 per cent for other expenditures.
The deadline for paying income taxes is close, April 15. Many who read this letter will owe the federal government money. Don’t pay. War tax resistance is being supported by numerous civil rights, anti-poverty and peace organizations in our call to help end the war by widespread tax refusal. Widespread tax refusal does more than force the government to spend much money to try to collect unpaid taxes. It confronts the government with the political fact of massive non-cooperation with its war-making policies.
We need to dramatize war tax resistance and to expand it from an act of individual conscience to a nationwide demonstration of collective civil disobedience.
On April 2–4, the People’s Coalition for Peace and Justice — which includes such groups as the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the National Welfare Rights organization, the American Friends Service committee and the Fellowship of Resistance — is calling for a nationwide “Tribute in Action to Martin Luther King.” The theme is “Freedom from Hunger, War and Oppression”; the event will be observed by hunger marches, fasts, teachins, demonstrations and religious services.
War tax resisters will relate to these events in a real way. We are asking people to refuse to pay $10 to $50 or more of their federal income taxes, and to publicly turn this money over to a local community group on April 2, 3 or 4. We will thus take our tax money out of the hands of the government and put it into the hands of the people. If we work hard thousands of dollars can be rechanneled to the people. We can not wait for the government to change priorities. We must change them ourselves.
Find out what actions are being planned in your city or region and build a demonstration dramatizing the transfer of funds to useful community programs. A possible action: Rally at the IRS office where people put their tax money into a container of some sort. The money is then carried to the main event and is turned over to the designated local community group.
There also will be actions at Internal Revenue Service offices across the country on April 15. We will publicly submit our 1040 forms to the IRS with all or part of our taxes deducted. This is a simple action and serves as an extension of the April 2–4 observance.
If no action appears to be under way in your community, contact the nearest war tax resistance center or the People’s Coalition office (1029 Vermont avenue, Washington, D.C.). Information about the WTR center nearest you, and about other forms of tax resistance, may be obtained from War Tax Resistance, 339 Lafayette street, New York, N.Y. 10012; telephone (212) 477‒2970.
Thousands are already engaged in these acts of peaceful, conscientious civil disobedience. If you engage in any of the above acts of civil disobedience we strongly urge you to write a letter to the IRS setting forth the reasons for the steps you have taken. Keep a copy.
Although there is a penalty for openly refusing to pay federal taxes (Section 7203 of the Internal Revenue Code — a fine of up to $10,000 and up to a year in jail, plus the costs of prosecutions) no war tax resisters have been prosecuted under this law. The only war tax resisters arrested have been those who have filed “fraudulent” W-4 forms, refused to file any income tax form, refused to present financial statements to the courts when ordered to do so. There have been prosecutions and convictions based on Section 7203 but none for openly refusing to pay for conscientious reasons, as far as we know.
We invite all Americans to join us in some form of war tax refusal. We must now take a stand by refusing to support the governments destructive policies with our bodies, our skills and our money.
Robert Calvert
New York, N.Y.

Editor’s note: The writer is a member of the Working Committee of WTR. Among sponsors of the organization are Dorothy Day, Joan Baez, David Dellinger, Arthur and Cathy Melville, the Rev. Richard J. Neuhaus, Rabbi Michael A. Robinson, Noam Chomsky, Peter Seeger and Theodore Roszak.

An op-ed from Eugene C. Bianchi, in the 28 May 1971 National Catholic Reporter:

“Maybe next year…”

To resist or not to resist

Two TV tableaus recently jarred me into fresh appreciation of how my tax money fosters the insanity of Vietnam.
In one film, helicopter gunships swooped down on a truck convoy; thousands of rounds of computer-directed cannon fire pierced the night. There goes at least one year’s withholding tax, I thought. But the commentator saw this military exercise as a demonstration of admirable killing efficiency. It was so orderly and precise; nothing out of place, except perhaps some Vietnamese flesh and bone.
The second scene showed men carefully loading bombs into B52s. The calm reporter noted how effectively these marvels of American know-how worked. The big bombs tore open huge craters and sent waves of damaging concussion. The antipersonnel bombs spewed thousands of body-ripping nails. As I viewed the distant puffs of smoke, I mused about how many income tax returns it took to accomplish such a feat.
It’s appalling how resigned we are to this insane use of our financial resources. Yet my and your tax money is closely related to the terrible statistic from the Kennedy subcommittee about 325,000 Indochinese, civilian deaths in recent years. Many more are maimed and driven from their homes. When I drop that IRS envelope through the red and blue bomb bay of the mail box, I wonder how many sad faces I’ve put behind the fences of relocation camps, how many children I’ve separated from parents. If Mr. Nixon is a prime candidate for war crimes according to the Nuremberg principles, we have all in some degree had our hands on the tax trigger.
Yet my courage rarely equals my insights. I also tell myself that some tax money goes for good causes. But the spirit of Ammon Hennacy, that holy maverick against war, won’t let me be content with such dodges. The whole Catholic Worker crowd stares up at me from their penny paper. I finally summon up the mouselike courage of refusing to pay the telephone war tax. At least that will cost the government more in time and bother than they’ll eventually get from me.
Maybe next year around income tax time, I’ll be brave enough to risk other concrete gestures. The words of Thoreau won’t go away: “If a thousand men were not to pay their tax bill this year, that would not be a violent and bloody measure as it would be to pay them and enable the State to commit violence and shed innocent blood.”
War tax resistance, though only a small act before the mighty state, could have broad effects if it became more widespread. It has the educational effect of conviction in action. Such tax resistance is illegal; but the war, by an ever-growing consensus, is enormously more illegal and immoral. Even token refusal to pay war taxes confronts the government with a concrete statement about its brutal policies. Tax resistance also awakens conscience to active non-complicity, to a new level of sensibility. For the situation is overwhelmingly clear: Tax money can be as killing as the weaponry it buys.
Since some risk is involved in tax resistance, it is worth reading a brochure or two about it. These can be easily obtained from a number of peace action groups, such as the War Tax Resistance (339 Lafayette St., New York 10012; or War Resisters League-West, 833 Haight St., San Francisco 94117). A Catholic group, Ammon’s Tax Associates (Box 1744, Indianapolis, Ind. 46204) is striving to awaken church institutions to their responsibilities for supporting conscientious tax resisters, as an extension of the church’s respect for conscientious objectors.
Perhaps the American church will end its complicity of silence with the warmakers when enough of us try to stop our own complicity in war taxes.

Prof. Warren Ambrose	Mathematics, M.I.T.
Dr. Donnell Boardman	Physician, Acton, Mass.
Mrs. Elizabeth Boardman	Acton, Mass.
Prof. Noam Chomsky	Linguistics, M.I.T.
Miss Barbara Deming	Writer, Wellfleet, Mass.
Prof. John Dolan	Philosophy, Chicago University
Prof. John Ek	Anthropology, Long Island University
Martha Bentley Hall	Musician, Brookline, Mass.
Dr. Thomas C. Hall	Physician, Brookline, Mass.
Rev. Arthur B. Jellis	First Parish in Concord, Unitarian-Universalist, Concord, Mass.
Prof. Donald Kalish	Philosophy, U.C.L.A.
Prof. Louis Kampf	Humanities, M.I.T.
Prof. Staughton Lynd	History, Yale University
Milton Mayer	Writer, Mass.
Prof. Jonathan Mirsky	Chinese Language and Literature, Dartmouth College
Prof. Sidney Morgenbesser	Philosophy, Columbia University
Prof. Wayne A. O’Neill	Graduate School of Education, Harvard University
Prof. Anatol Rapoport	Mental Health Research Institute, University of Michigan
Prof. Franz Schurmann	Center for Chinese Studies, University of Calif., Berkeley
Dr. Albert Szent Gyorgy	Institute for Muscle Research, Woods Hole, Mass.
Harold Tovish	Sculptor, Brookline, Mass.
Prof. Howard Zinn	Government, Boston University

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

How you can resist funding the government → the tax resistance movement → birth of the modern American war tax resistance movement → Bradford Lyttle

If You Want Mylai, Buy It

350 Balk at Taxes in a War Protest

Ad in Capital Paper Urges Others to Bar Payment

Joan Baez, Lynd, Muste

Cohen Is Determined

Ad Prepared Here

The Time Has Come

We will refuse to pay our federal income taxes voluntarily

German constitutionalists

Rebeccaites

Irish Land League

British women’s suffrage movement

Poll Tax rebellion in the U.K.

Anti-war, anti-tax coalition building in U.S.

Reflections in a Polluted River

An Open Letter *

Signers So Far

Day of Reckoning

War protesters plan action…

Protest rekindled

Extreme measure

“Dragging One’s Feet”

War tax resistance in the Friends Journal in 1966

Franklin Zahn

A Call to War Tax Resistance

Methods of Refusal

To Reduce or Eliminate the Withholding of Your Taxes You Can

Also You Can

Maximize the Impact

Sponsors of War Tax Resistance

Working Committee (in formation)

Priests and People of Vendee, France, Protest Tax on Christian Schools and Refusal of State Aid

Protesters turn to taxes to fight against the war

Five say they won’t pay taxes

Tax resisters suggest: “Stop paying for it”

“Maybe next year…”

To resist or not to resist

An Open Letter ^*