Some historical and global examples of tax resistance →
religious groups and the religious perspective →
Catholic Worker movement
I came across a new web resource yesterday — new to me anyway — The Catholic Worker Movement archives.
In this excerpt from The Catholic Worker, Dorothy Day mentions a visit to what she describes as a sort of low-income tax resisters’ commune:
It isn’t entirely clear from Day’s description whether the ascetic and communal lifestyle was adopted in order to facilitate tax resistance or whether this was just one beneficial side-effect of a practice adopted for other reasons.
Ammon Hennacy was a rare bird — a “One Man Revolution.”
He wrote: “Love without courage and wisdom is sentimentality, as with the ordinary church member.
Courage without love and wisdom is foolhardiness, as with the ordinary soldier.
Wisdom without love and courage is cowardice, as with the ordinary intellectual.
Therefore one who has love, courage and wisdom is one in a million who moves the world, as with Jesus, Buddha and Gandhi.”
Hennacy aspired to be this one-in-a-million.
The challenge Ammon Hennacy makes is not to “the system” or “the government” or to any particular politicians or evildoers, but to those of us who read his words and who haven’t yet turned our backs on evil.
Today I’ll share some of his writings on tax resistance.
Christian Anarchism
Christian Anarchism is based upon the answer of Jesus to the Pharisees when He said that he without sin was to cast the first stone; and upon the Sermon on the Mount which advises the return of good for evil and the turning of the other cheek.
Therefore when we take any part in government by voting for legislative, judicial and executive officials we make these men our arm by which we cast a stone and deny the Sermon on the Mount.
The dictionary definition of a Christian is: one who follows Christ; kind, kindly, Christ-like.
Anarchism is voluntary cooperation for good, with the right of secession.
A Christian Anarchist is therefore one who turns the other cheek; overturns the tables of the money-changers, and who does not need a cop to tell him how to behave.
A Christian Anarchist does not depend upon bullets or ballots to achieve his ideal; he achieves that ideal daily by the One Man Revolution with which he faces a decadent, confused and dying world.
(In [The Book of Ammon] this message is repeated many times.
It is worthwhile repeating and studying.
At the Catholic Worker in New York City in I met a Columbia graduate holding prospects of a fine job; and doing post graduate work.
He praised my anti-tax articles.
In conversation a few minutes later he said, “why everybody pays taxes; they are withheld; you pay taxes; Dorothy [Day] pays taxes.”
He had read my non-taxpaying articles for years and still didn’t know what I was doing.
Likewise in Phoenix an educated woman had read my leaflets and articles for years and did not know that I really paid no taxes.
So, if I repeat myself time after time please remember that I think it is necessary.
I have never paid a federal income tax.)
There are indirect taxes that everyone pays.
As the saying goes I live in this man’s world and if I am going to travel and do propaganda I have to pay tax on the bus.
I do not use tobacco or liquor so pay no taxes.
I buy Indian articles from the Indians rather than from stores and thus need not pay a tax.
To not pay taxes is not my whole message but it is a part of the life of a rebel which I choose to act upon.
For despite all talk you either pay taxes or you don’t.
My First Fast and Picketing
Before the Korean War I had told my tax man, a Catholic who thought the Catholic Worker was a Communist paper, that I was going to picket his office on Aug. 6th — the anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima in 1945.…
According to the Gandhian technique of goodwill and frankness I wrote to the City Manager and to my tax man, telling them of my extended plans; also to the chief of police asking for a permit and telling him if he did not give me one I would picket anyway.…
Rik and Ginny and I had spent hours getting a leaflet out which was headed:
The One Man Revolution
Why do you, a sensible person, now believe that war and the A Bomb are necessary?
Why are poor Oriental peasants who have seldom eaten a square meal in their lives choosing to fight us?
Why does Communism appeal to so many people?
Is it because we have failed as Christians?
Why are we in this mess?
Because you have sought security outside of yourself instead of accepting responsibility.
Because you left matters to the politicians, took their bribes of pensions and subsidies, and their impossible promises of prosperity.
My guilt — For seven years I have refused to pay income taxes for war and bombs.
I am fasting for these five days as a penance for not having awakened more people to the fact that the way of Jesus and Gandhi is not the way of the atom bomb.
This war, like the last two will not bring peace and freedom.
What can you do now?
We made a revolution against England and are not free yet.
The Russians made a revolution against the Czar and now have an even stronger dictatorship.
It is not too late to make a revolution that will mean something — one that will stick: your own one-man revolution.
It is not too late to be a man instead of a pipsqueak, who is blinded by the love of money.
Are you a producer or a parasite?
Why not cease voting for all politicians?
Why not refuse to make munitions or to go to war?
Why pay income taxes for your own destruction?
After Mr. Schumacher, my tax man, came up and handed me a card which read:
Seized for the account of the United States on by virtue of warrant for distraint issued by the collector of internal revenue, district of Arizona.
Deputy Collector.… One poster for picket line.
Actually there were three posters but I handed them over saying that I would get some new ones made and picket .
I continued handing out leaflets and Catholic Workers without my signs until Rik met me at
Rik made new signs that night and marked them “This sign is the personal property of Joseph Craigmyle” but the tax man did not try to take them.
The Arizona Republic had a good picture of myself and signs on the page opposite the editorial page.
The picture showed my large sign which read:
75% Of Your Income Tax Goes for War And the Bomb.
And on the reverse side—
I Have Refused to Pay Income Taxes For the Last Seven Years
In the afternoon the tax man came along and good naturedly said that he had a bid of $5 for my signs from someone who wanted them as a souvenir.
(I did not ask him if he was the bidder) I had given him Catholic Workers before and had shown him Dorothy [Day]’s telegram.
Now he was friendly and asked about my life, my daughters, my ideas, and said that he understood my opposition to the status quo.
Like the tax man before him he was a Catholic.
He felt, as I did, that there was nothing personal.
He had his duty to do.
He had tried to garnishee my wages, and had taken away my signs so he could report some activity on his part.
He said I had a right to peacefully picket and departed in a friendly spirit.
We met several times later as I picketed.
He did not like my reference to himself as a servant of Caesar in a letter I had written to him.
I told him this was perhaps a poetic way of saying it, but I meant it.
How do I get by with it?
I don’t know for sure.
I have picketed thirteen days in the last three years here in Phoenix against war, the draft, and paying taxes for all this.
I have been detained by the police and released four times, and been called to the tax office often.
I was a conscientious objector in both World Wars.
In I refused to register for the draft and resigned from a civil service job in Milwaukee where I had been a social worker for eleven years.
As I do not believe in shooting I have since then worked on farms where no withholding tax is taken from my pay, so I do not buy a gun for others to shoot.
The tax man has tried to garnishee my wages; now I work by the day for different farmers and if necessary am paid in advance in order that no garnishee is effective.
I believe in the idea of voluntary poverty somewhat after the pattern of St. Francis, Thoreau, Tolstoy and Gandhi.
I have no car or anything the tax man can get.
I make a true report of my income but openly refuse to pay a cent of tax.
I am a non-church Christian.
I believe in the Sermon on the Mount, especially because it is more revolutionary than opportunistic Communist tactics.
I do not put my trust in money or bombs, but in God.
I am an Anarchist who believes that all government exists not to help people but to continue in power exploiters, bureaucrats and politicians who keep us on the run with their continual depressions and wars.
If you believe in capitalism and war and think you get your money’s worth in paying taxes that is your business.
My message is to those who are beginning to question the idea that preparing for war brings peace.
It is also to those who believe somewhat as I do but who are afraid to stand up and say so.…
If you are ready for my message here is a starter: REFUSE to become a soldier REFUSE to make munitions REFUSE to buy war bonds REFUSE to pay income taxes STUDY the Sermon on the Mount STUDY Gandhi’s non-violent methods STUDY Jefferson’s idea of life on the land “STUDY war no more.”
“Better to light a candle than curse the darkness.”
A Christian Anarchist does both.
Not Interested
It is and I have sent in my tax report.
I did not work Sundays this year.
I worked for nineteen different farmers and made $1,569. With free rent and often free meals where I work and with simple one dish vegetarian food my actual living cost has been less than $200. I filled out my report accurately, not wishing to have my non-payment of taxes confused by any other issue.
In the space listed “Amount of Tax Due” I wrote “not interested.”
The tax man told me six weeks ago he would have me arrested for continual non-payment of taxes, but would wait until the last minute as he disliked to cause trouble.
I told him that he should do his duty; that there was no hard feelings on my part, for he had always treated me courteously.
Now with Truman calling for universal conscription and the U.S. winking at Dutch imperialism in Indonesia there is less reason than ever for paying an income tax.
If I am arrested I am doing time for a good cause, for, paraphrasing Thoreau, a prison is the only house in a war mad world where a Christian pacifist can abide with honor.
If I am left free I will continue to be a non-tax payer, sell Catholic Workers, and aid my daughters.
I win either way.
What Could a Fellow Do About It?
When I was working a man asked me “Why does a fellow like you, with an education, and who has been all over the country, end up in this out-of-the-way place working for very little on a farm?”
I explained that all people who had good jobs in factories, etc. had a withholding tax for war taken from their pay, and that people who worked on farms had no tax taken from their pay.
I told him that I refused to pay taxes.
He was a returned soldier and said that he did not like war either, but what could a fellow do about it?
I replied that we each did what we really wanted to.
Why Am I Picketing?
Well, why aren’t you?
Do the A-Bomb and the H-Bomb make you sleep any better at night?
Do you trust our politicians to protect us from destruction in an atomic war?
Does it make good sense to foot the bill by paying income taxes?
I am not paying my income tax this year, and I haven’t done so for the last seven years.
I don’t expect to stop World War Ⅲ by my refusal to pay, but I don’t believe in paying for something I don’t believe in — do you?
Do you believe that anyone ever “won” a war?
Or that any good can come from returning evil for evil?
I don’t believe it!
And I don’t believe I need preachers or policemen to make me behave, either.
I do believe in personal responsibility, and that’s why I am picketing.
Why aren’t you?
Why Did You Pay Your Income Tax?
Is it because you think that taxes, like death, are inevitable? I know the decision to pay taxes is a voluntary one, because I have openly refused to pay my tax for the past nine years.
This year alone I owe $192.
Is it because you feel that you are protecting yourself against war with Russia? Certainly there is a definite connection between war and taxes, for from 80% to 90% of your income tax goes to pay for war, past, present and future.
As a conscientious objector to both World Wars I believe that war is destroying us, and has actually created the Russian Communist threat.
The poverty and misery of the Czarist Empire culminated in the First World War (with Russia on the side of the Allies), and brought the Communist state into being.
The world wide destruction, poverty and totalitarianism of the Second World War (with Russia on the side of the Allies) made the Soviet Union a world power and a real threat to our military machine and our capitalist aspirations.
The Marshall Plan and our attempt to arm the non-Communist world has directed the hate and distrust of our allies towards us.
By trusting in our own armed power instead of trusting in God we have created the very conditions which are helping promote Communist Russia: the conditions of insecurity, fear and hate.
The poor of Europe are tired of fighting.
The wealthy classes there have used our money to retain their Asiatic possessions and to fill their own pockets.
The “Voice of America” tells those behind the Iron Curtain to revolt, and boasts of the freedom in capitalist America.
But with our loyalty oaths and with the building of new concentration camps (two of them in Arizona), we are rapidly becoming a Police State like Russia.
Here in Arizona even druggists must now sign loyalty oaths… next it’ll be undertakers and corpses!
This nation was settled by many folks from Europe who sacrificed everything to escape religious despotism and the tyranny of military conscription.
While we have achieved separation of church and state, we are more in danger of a military despotism than ever.
The early Christians refused to be soldiers, and some of them are official saints of the Catholic church for this reason.
When they were thrown to the lions in the Roman arena they died singing.
Truly “the blood of the martyrs was the seed of the church.”
Today most Christians join the Lions Club, or Rotary, sing “for he’s a jolly good fellow,” and die respectably of ulcers.
They bless war, and their churches are built out of the profits of an unjust economic system.
If we continue in this manner, war and income taxes will be the death of us yet.
Do you pay your income tax because you are afraid of the sacrifice that trust in God and opposition to the state may involve? I decided long ago that, while all of us must die, I could choose something worthwhile to live and die for.
You might as well die for what you do believe as for what you don’t believe.
Remember that Johnson said to Boswell, “Courage is the greatest virtue, for without it you cannot practice the other virtues.”
If you want a better world you will not get it by trying to make men out of Congressmen through writing them letters, by voting for any politician since they all believe in war, or by expecting very much of a World Government composed of these same ignoble politicians.
Neither will the mocking of God by saying prayers for peace while making munitions and paying taxes for war be of much avail.
That kind of prayer bounces back!
If you want to think a little further about this, here are the first steps (you will know in your heart what is right for you); Study the Sermon on the Mount, and the lives of such dedicated men as St. Francis, George Fox, Tolstoy and Gandhi.
Try to make whatever you do coincide with Christ’s teachings.
Ask yourself whether returning evil for evil in courts, legislatures, prisons and war is not denying Christ.
If your answer is yes, then stop doing it.
But be honest with yourself.
Don’t alibi by saying you have to do this evil for your family’s sake, or, blasphemously, for Christ’s sake.
Ask yourself whether you are a producer or a parasite.
A third of us lead parasitical lives as salesmen, lawyers, bankers, politicians, policemen or soldiers, or else make a living out of the weaknesses and vices of our fellows.
Most of the clergy give a very counterfeit return for their money.
In a society based on a return of evil for evil, these jobs may be necessary, but they wouldn’t exist in the society envisioned by Jesus where evil is repaid with good.
Do you give your children an example of honesty and Christian conduct?
Aren’t you really coercing your children into un-Christian practices when you boast of your “within the law” business deals, and when you indoctrinate them into giving their first allegiance to the state in such militaristically motivated organizations as the Boy Scouts, and by banning any textbook that doesn’t praise capitalism and war?
If you teach your children to conform at any price, how can you ever expect them to stand upright and self-reliant before men or God?
To sum up: REFUSE to register for the draft or military training! REFUSE to buy war bonds! REFUSE to make munitions for war! And when you get around to it, REFUSE to pay taxes for war!
Here’s another, similar leaflet Hennacy passed out in but that wasn’t included in The Book of Ammon:
What’s All the Shooting About?
It’s about men who put money ahead of God.
It’s about young men on both sides misled into dying and killing each other.
It’s about rationing, inefficiency, dictatorship, inflation, and politicians stealing a little more than usual.
War is what happens when one nation prepares to defend itself against another nation that prepares to defend itself.
World War Ⅰ and World War Ⅱ did not end war nor make the world safe for democracy.
Neither will this one.
There just isn’t any sense to war!
What can we do about it? If the politicians think one person is important enough to become a soldier, a munition maker, a bond buyer, or an income tax payer, then one person is important enough to: REFUSE to become a soldier, REFUSE to make munitions, REFUSE to buy bonds, and REFUSE to pay income taxes.
War does not protect you — it will destroy you!
You cannot overcome communism with bullets.
It can be overcome by each person doing what he knows in his heart to be right.
The way of Jesus, of St. Francis, of Tolstoy, and of Gandhi teaches us to love our enemy, to establish justice, to abolish exploitation, and to rely upon God rather than on politicians and governments.
If you are a Christian why not follow Christ?
You might as well die for what you believe as for what you don’t believe.
If you must fight, fight war itself.
Don’t be a traitor to humanity!
Wars will cease when men refuse to fight!
After the workshop, I browsed the tables a bit.
There was a bit of everything you could ask for in terms of radical literature and punk rock aesthetic clothing, and plenty of amusements of other sorts.
Outside I caught part of a shouting match between two Marxists one of whose factions had collaborated in the repression of the other at some point in some place.
Inside, you could find carefully preserved relics of such infighting going back a hundred years or more.
There was a “bargain bin” dedicated to miscellaneous works of, by, and about Lenin for a buck a pop.
There were old pamphlets with titles like The People Will Quickly Extinguish the Imperialist Running Dogs and Their Lackeys for Making Fun of Our Glorious Tin-Eared Verbiage.
Ammon… will tell you the story of his life at the drop of a hat, because he
feels that so much of it illustrates what he is trying to convey in the way of
ideas. I may be crediting him with a virtue which he does not possess, but it
seems to me that there is a profound humility too, in Ammon’s talk of
himself. Like all prophets, he has a keen sense of the emergency — “now is the
time” and what each man does now is going to have its effect on history. With
Peter Maurin this meant constant repetition and great terseness of expression
in the written word. With Ammon this humility meant, “What I can do, every man
can do, if he will put fear far from him.” Ammon often says that he has the
virtue of courage and knowledge, but lacks love; he knows how critical his
attitude is about others. It is true he judges, but without malice.
The context of Hennacy’s self-criticism here is
his belief that the “one in a million
who moves the world, as with Jesus, Buddha and Gandhi” is someone who combines
equal and generous portions of love, courage, and wisdom. He very much wanted
to be this one-in-a-million.
Hennacy’s first essay in the pamphlet concerns the time he spent in prison
in for speaking out against
U.S. participation
in World War Ⅰ. It includes this delightful anecdote:
The editor of the prison paper, Good Words, asked
me to give him something to print. I told him that was what I got in for,
printing things in papers, and that my ideas were too radical for him. He
insisted so I gave this quote which, believe it or not, appeared in a box
underneath the editorial caption of the Department of Justice on
:
“A prison is the only house in a slave
state where a free man can abide with honor.” Thoreau. This had the o.k.
of the warden and was not sneaked in. The ignorant official thought it
praised prisons.
The second of Hennacy’s essays is “Tax Refusal and Life on the Land,” some
excerpts from which I reproduce below:
Before World War Ⅱ income taxes were not paid by those in the lower brackets
so it was not a problem to think about. I was still too nervous from jail to
work steadily, so to get the jail out of my system my wife and I started from
New York City on (the
anniversary of my entrance into solitary in Atlanta in
) with packs on our backs and $100 in our
pockets. We never asked for rides but took them if offered and went 22,000
miles in every state in the union distributing pacifist propaganda, with
stickers “Stop the Next War Now.” We stopped to work most of the time, but on
my birthday, , we bought 10
acres with $100 down near Waukesha, Wisconsin, built one room in the woods,
and another next year. I helped Carmen get born there June 17, 1927, and
Sharon on Oct. 23, 1929. (The
very day the depression started) I had led in a strike in a dairy where I
worked and lost my job. Friends suggested that I become a social worker in
Milwaukee. I thought this work was too bourgeois, but for me it was either
take relief or hand it out. I told my examiners for the job that I was an
anarchist and would break rules when I thought it best to do so. They needed
male social workers badly it seemed and I got a job with the county of
Milwaukee. I organized a union and was active in pacifist circles.
In a client locked me up in a room and came
after me with a butcher knife because I would not give him something that he
didn’t have coming. After a time I dared him to knife me (I didn’t double
dare him) and I shook hands with him. He put the knife away and we became
friends. My boss was a Catholic and head of the
American Legion in
Wisconsin. He wanted me to take this man to court. I refused for he had been
in jail twice for knifing social workers and had done time for it, and had
not learned anything. My boss thought I should get acquainted “with those
crazy Catholics in New York.” I asked Father Kennedy in the same block,
editor of the Herald-Citizen about the
Catholic Worker and he gave me a copy. Then I
became acquainted with Nina Polcyn and Dave Host and worked with the
CW House formed
there the next year, where my daughters sang Christmas carols, and I took
Muriel Lester, the
English pacifist to bless our
CW house. I met
Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin that same year as they spoke in Milwaukee. I
liked their pacifism and radicalism but not their church. In fact I sold
CW’s every Sunday in front of churches but would not go inside except
to get warm.
When World War Ⅱ came the American Legion wanted to have me fired from my job
because I sold
CW’s
on the street. I had a private hearing for an hour with a court stenographer
taking notes before the Corporation Counsel. I told him that I would not quit my job nor
would I cease selling
CW’s
on the street, and that I would insist on a public hearing. They dropped the
charges that week. However, when the time came for me to register for the
draft on I openly refused
to do so and resigned my job. I thought I would get 5 years but the
government had secretly made a rule that those over 45 would not be
prosecuted. I was 48, and was only in jail a few hours. My wife and daughters
were in the west at that time so I went to Denver and got a job at a dairy.
Selling CW’s
on the street I was imprisoned incommunicado for 4 days for not carrying a
draft card, and I was rearrested a week later for selling
CW’s
at the same place.
On the
withholding tax went into effect. About the only place where a person could
work without paying taxes for war was on a farm. For here the tax was to be
paid at the end of the year. The brackets had been lowered so that even a
dishwasher in a restaurant had to pay about a dollar a day for war. The
New York Times in a recent editorial declared that
83% of the income tax went for past, present or future wars.
I found work on a farm near Albuquerque with a farmer whose wife was a Quaker
and at the end of the year when I refused to pay my tax I was fired but got a
job with another farmer. I also sold
CW’s
on the streets in Albuquerque for 4½ years and the police never bothered me.
I moved to Phoenix in . Here the
tax man was a Quaker and I was at once arrested for picketing the tax office
in . Again in
I picketed the tax office and fasted
for 5 days because it was 5 years since we had dropped the bomb at Hiroshima.
I turned in a report to the tax office, not as my duty or their right, but as
a courtesy to my enemy, the State, saying: “This is my name, this is where I
live, this is what I made. Try and get it.” I had sent all of my money to my
daughters who were taking music at Northwestern University.
Finally in I came to New York City and the
Catholic Worker as my daughters had graduated, and since then I have not
earned enough by speaking to owe any tax. The tax men have been here several
times to investigate my income and have called me into the tax office when I
have been picketing them. I can get 5 years for each of the 12 times that I
have refused to pay my income tax. Young toughs have threatened me at times
as I have picketed in New York City. Now on
I will fast
as it is 14 years since Hiroshima. I
do this as a penance for the sin of our country in continuing atomic testing
and warfare.…
, I received a notice that I
owe $2.15 interest and penalty on my $192 tax bill for
and unless paid within ten days my property
and wages will be attached. This is an old runaround and I am not worrying.
Today I ate the first Irish potatoes from our garden, which is more important
in the life of man than paying taxes. The persimmon tree which the Old
Pioneer’s daughter-in-law gave me last winter now bears premature fruit.
Watermelon, eggplant, tomatoes, squash, peppers and onions are doing fine.
One day when I was soapboxing at Broad and Wall Streets a man asked me what
came first with me: Catholicism or anarchism? I replied that Catholicism came
First and daily Mass and Communion. Second, to live poor as
we did at the CW.
Third, to love your enemy, for as Dorothy quotes some saint: “You
love God as much as you love the person you love the least.” Fourth,
to bring this out in some association with others. Fifth, Don’t be
a parasite, which of course cuts out all Wall Street. Sixth, to be
an anarchist for if one lived a dedicated life and put first things first, to
vote for one millionaire or another whose business was to return evil for evil
in courts, prisons and war, was a poor way of being a Christian.
Seventh, in order to be effective in the spiritual and radical life
I do not smoke, drink, eat meat, or take medicine.
Selling CW’s
at 43rd and Lexington a cop arrested me for selling
papers without a license. I told him that according to the Supreme Court
decision in the forties the Jehovah Witnesses had won the right to sell papers
without a license. He said to tell it to the judge. The magistrate let me out
on my own name for trial in three weeks. I went back next Friday and another
cop said I had to have a license but I talked him out of it. The next Friday
Eileen Fantino and Birtha Tisius stood on one corner and I was on my regular
corner when the first cop arrested me when the girls were not looking. Dorothy
came up to help and finally discovered that I was in jail. They sold
CW’s
all afternoon and Jackson MacLow, an anarchist friend came along and helped
also. They were not arrested. I got 5 days in jail or a $10 fine and as I
never would pay money to the state I did the time on Rikers Island. The
American Civil Liberties Union wanted to use me as an example to provide
freedom for those who always moved on when told to do so. After six months,
although losing the first appeal, the highest court in the state affirmed my
right to sell the
CW
and my book as I was not doing it for profit.
Across the street from St.
Patrick’s Cathedral a policeman told me that I should not sell “that
Communist paper.” I told him it was not a Communist paper, and if it was I
had the right to sell it there, and I showed him a press clipping of the
court decision.
“I don’t care anything about the law. If I don’t want you here I’ll have you
pinched, and you’ll be in jail, you won’t be here. If the judge lets you out
as you say, I’ll arrest you again, and if he frees you, I’ll arrest you
again. I’ll wear you out.”
“What if I wear you out?” I replied.
He shrugged his shoulders and walked away. You have to be ready to die or you
are not ready to live. I was never bothered again on that corner.
In there came the first air raid drill in
New York City. The state law says that if you do not take part you can get a
year in jail and $500 fine. I called up Ralph DeGia of the War Resister’s
League and other pacifists and we told the authorities that we would openly
refuse to take part in their war game and would sit in the City Hall Park.
Television and radio gave our message as we handed out our leaflets. 29 of us
were arrested. Dorothy, being a better basic radical than I, persuaded me to
plead guilty instead of not guilty. We Catholic Workers and some atheistic
anarchists pled guilty and the others carried the case on appeal and it is
still in the courts. We all got suspended sentences. The next year we had our
demonstration in Washington Square and 19 of us got 5 days in jail. Those of
us who pled guilty served them. In there
were only 12 of us in the demonstration in the park across from our house on
Chrystie Street and we got 30 days in jail from a Catholic judge who told us
to read the Bible. Dorothy spoke about the terrible conditions in the woman’s
prison on NightBeat on television, and I spoke twice on the same program
later. So in when 9 of us were arrested
while picketing the Atomic Energy Commission near Columbus Circle during the
air raid drill our sentence was suspended. In
five of us who had been demonstrating
annually were accompanied by 14 others at City Hall Park during the drill and
we got 10 days in jail, after waiting 5 days in jail for our trial. The
newcomers got a suspended sentence. This time when the judge asked me about
“rendering unto Caesar” I answered that Caesar was getting too much and God
was getting very little so I would render unto God by disobeying Caesar as
St. Peter did.
I’ve many times mentioned Ammon Hennacy’s tax resistance hereabouts, but have only less-frequently commented on his more-well-known Catholic Worker comrade Dorothy Day’s stance.
The site catholicworker.org now has a search engine with which I have been able to recover some of her writings on the subject, which I’ll excerpt here today.
“Render to Caesar the things which are Caesar’s.” Yes, and we have heard too much of that.
Let E.I. Watkin, founder of the Pax movement in England, author of The Catholic Center, Men and Tendencies, and The Bow in the Clouds, answer as he did in his pamphlet, “The Crime of Conscription.”
Render unto Caesar the things which are Caesar’s. This is a favorite text with the hosts of Christian clerics, Protestant and Catholic, who both in the present and in the past, have abused and still abuse religion to enslave men’s consciences to the unjust bondages of a usurping state.
They omit to notice the context.
Our Lord has just asked for a coin, and having obtained the admission that it bear’s Caesar’s image and superscription, bids his questioners render to Caesar what is his.
This is obviously the coin payable in taxation which bears Caesar’s stamp.
The body and soul of man, however, do not bear Caesar’s image.
Whose image they do bear we are told in Holy Scripture.
It is the image of God.
Obviously, therefore, as we are to render to Caesar what bears his image, namely, money, we are to render to God, not to Caesar, what bears not Caesar’s stamp, but God’s; namely, human beings.
Thus the same text which justifies, indeed, imposes the obligation of paying taxes, denies any right of the state to take a toll of man.
All forced labor, for example, is implicitly declared unlawful.
And still more does the principle here enunciated forbid military conscription.
Whether a war be just or unjust, no government may without grave injustice compel me — bearing as I do the divine image which marks me as God’s bondman, but a freeman in respect to my fellows — to slay and be slain in its quarrel unless I freely consent.
If a government unlawfully outsteps its prerogative and imposes conscription, any one who, from whatever motive, refuses to serve, is whether he intend it or not, fighting for human dignity and freedom, as also is anyone who abets and supports his resistance.
But now in these days it would be desirable to go even further, as did Thoreau, to refuse even the taxes which were to be used to pay for the means to kill our fellow man.
In many cases, however, it is all but impossible to separate the tax from the cost of the commodity needed to maintain life.
We believe that social security legislation, now balled as a great victory for the poor and for the worker, is a great defeat for Christianity.
It is an acceptance of the Idea of force and compulsion.
[The people] pay taxes, and it is the city and the state and the federal government that is robbing them and pilfering them, too, They are taxed for every bite they eat, every shoddy rag they put on.
They are taxed on their jobs, there are deductions for this and that, there are the war bonds, eighteen dollars for a twenty-five dollar war bond, paid on the Installment plan.
And they are not only being taxed, but they are being seduced.
Their virtue is being drained from them.
They are made into war profiteers, they are forced into the position of usurers.
The whole nation, every man woman and child, is forced to become a profiteer — hideous word — in this war.
If you cry aloud for land and home and tools and the good natural life for the poor without which a good supernatural life is impossible, then you are either an escapist and an inhabitant of an ivory tower, or you are a Communist in disguise trying to do away with property.
And you are a communist also if you cry out for peace and against increased armaments — against the making of the hydrogen and atom bombs and the paying of federal taxes for the making of those bombs.
We know, who picketed before the tax offices up on 45th street, because we heard these jibes as we walked to and fro with our signs.
We will have more to write about taxes later.
We believe in paying our local taxes but not federal.
Maybe this is quibbling, but the benefits of hospitals, fire department, street cleaning and health department, etc. make us firm in our decision to always pay our local taxes though we will not pay income tax.
I can scarcely list all the people Ammon [Hennacy] introduced me to, all the friends he has made through his constant protest against war and taxes for war, and his distribution of the Catholic Worker.
But I can give a little glimpse of Ammon’s living quarters, in his little three room bungalow on Lin Orme’s place some five miles out of town [Phoenix, Arizona].
Ammon likes to call our Lord the Celestial Bulldozer to indicate that ones way is smoothed for one, the rough ways made plain and the crooked straight.
He arrived in Phoenix broke, he said, as he came further south out of the dairy region to the farming section of the country where he could work by the day and not by the month and so avoid the withholding tax.
He slept all night on an anarchist’s floor (one of the readers of the CW) and got up at daylight to go to the slave market, as the corner is named in every town in every state, Calif., Texas, Florida, New Mexico and Arizona, where immigrant workers are employed.
Some times there are as many as 200 trucks, sometimes only 25. They go as far as seventy miles away for the day’s work.
Mexican trucks take only Mexicans.
He got on the second truck, owned by the Arena brothers, a corporation which owns land in California, Colorado, and Arizona, and specializes in lettuce, melons, cabbage, celery.
This was , the year the withholding tax began.
At the end of his day’s work he asked if there was a shack on the place where he could sleep, and a fellow worker told him of one down the road and he took his sleeping bag and camped out there for the night.
He stayed there for some months and as it was on land rented by Mr. Orme to the company, he became acquainted with that old gentleman who later invited him to occupy the vacant shack on his own land.
There is one room and two porches, rather than three rooms, really, and before Ammon lived there, twelve Mexicans had camped out there.
I sat on the porch one afternoon with Ammon and drank strong black coffee, brewed on a little kitchen stove, stuffed with mesquite which burned fragrantly while we talked.
How does property fit in, people ask.
It was Eric Gill who said that property is proper to man.
And St. Thomas Aquinas said that a certain amount of goods is necessary to lead a good life.
The recent popes wrote at length about justice rather than charity, that should be sought for the worker.
Unions are still fighting for wages and hours, and it is a futile fight with the price of living going up steadily.
They are fighting for partial gains and every strike means sacrifice to make them, and still the situation in the long run is not bettered.
There may be talk of better standards of living, every worker with his car, and owning his own home, but still this comfort depends on a wage, a boss, on War.
Our whole modern economy is based on preparation for war and that is one of the great modern arguments for poverty.
If the comfort one has gained has resulted in the death of thousands in Korea and other parts of the world, then that comfort will be have to be atoned for. the argument now is that there is no civilian population, that all are involved in the war (misnamed defense) effort.
If you work in a textile mill making cloth, or in a factory making dungarees or blankets, it is still tied up with war.
If one raises food or irrigates to raise food, one may be feeding troops or liberating others to serve as troops.
If you ride a bus you are paying taxes.
Whatever you buy is taxed so you are supporting the state in the war which is “the health of the state.”
The argument may go this way, but we still can choose what seems to us the most honorable occupations, which have to do with human needs.
We can choose the kind of work most necessary to do, and if possible where there is no withholding tax for war.
Ammon Hennacy in working by the day, at hard farm labor, has not paid income tax for years.
One can so cut down one’s standard of living that no income tax is required; families with many children pay no income tax.
One can protest in many ways this contribution to the atom and hydrogen bomb.
If one owns property the government then can take a lien on it.
If one has money in the bank, the government can confiscate it.
So truly such protest as this calls for the most profound poverty and a voluntary doing without property.
How obey the laws of a state when they run counter to man’s conscience?
“Thou shalt not kill,” Divine law states.
“A new precept I give unto you that you love your brother as I have loved you.”
St. Peter disobeyed the law of men and stated that he had to obey God rather than man.
Wars today involve total destruction, obliteration bombing, killing of the innocent, the stockpiling of atom and hydrogen bombs.
When one is drafted for such war, when one registers for the draft for such a war, when one pays income tax, eighty per cent of which goes to support such war, or works where armaments are made, one is participating in this war.
We are all involved in war these days.
War means hatred and fear.
Love casts out fear.
St. Augustine in his City of God says that God never intended man to dominate his fellows.
He was to dominate the beasts of the field, the fowls of the air, what crawled upon the earth, but men were not to dominate each other.
He preferred shepherds to kings.
It was man himself who insisted on having a worldly king though he was warned what would happen to him.
God allowed the prophets to anoint the kings and once men had accepted their kings they were supposed to show them respect, to obey the authority they had set up.
To obey, that is, in all that did not go against their conscience.
St. Peter was ordered by lawful authority not to preach in the name of Jesus, and he said he had to obey God rather than man, and he left prison to go out again to the market place and preach the Gospel.
Over and over again, men had to disobey lawful authority to follow the voice of their conscience.
This obedience to God and disobedience to the State has over and over again happened through history.
It is time again to cry out against our “leaders,” to question whether or not, since it is not for us to say that they are evil men, they are sane men.
It is all very well to say we must go to the source of all strength, to drink at the living fountain of Christ, but can we go from that fount of Love to a factory where nerve gas and incendiary bombs are manufactured?
When we have talked of a general strike it is of such work and of such evil that we are thinking; when we talk of non-payment of taxes it is of the money which is going to Indo-China in the form of these incendiary bombs and the planes to drop them that we are thinking.
It is not thus that we can love God and our brother; it is not in this way that we can love our enemy.
When it is said that we disturb people too much by the words pacifism and anarchism, I can only think that people need to be disturbed, that their consciences need to be aroused, that they do indeed need to look into their work, and study new techniques of love and poverty and suffering for each other.
Of course the remedies are drastic, but then too the evil is a terrible one and we are all involved, we are all guilty, and most certainly we are all going to suffer.
The fact that we have “the faith,” that we go to the sacraments, is not enough.
“Inasmuch as ye have done it unto the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me” with napalm, nerve gas, our hydrogen bomb…
Each one of us must make our decisions as to what he should do, each one must examine his conscience and beg God for strength.
Should one register for the draft?
Should one accept conscientious objector status in the army or out of it, taking advantage of the exceptions allowed, but accepting the fact of the draft?
Should one pay tax which supports this gigantic program?
I realize how difficult this is to decide.
If one is unmarried and strong physically, it is easier to make a decision to do only day labor or work without pay.
But there are many whose mental and physical strength is not equal to this decision and there is a withholding tax taken from even the smallest salary.
Sometimes one can only make a gesture of protest.
It is not for any one to judge his fellow man on how far he can go in resisting participation in preparation for war.
In the very works of mercy which we are performing, we at the Catholic Worker are being aided by those who earn what they do only because they pay income tax for war.
Oh yes, the editors of The Catholic Worker know only too well how far we too are involved in the city of this world.
Perhaps Bob Ludlow, who left us much against our will, felt that he was being more honest in permitting a withholding tax to be taken from his meager wage as hospital attendant that working for nothing for the Catholic Worker.
Who knows the heart of another?
The temptation is always there to go out on one’s own, to walk the lone path of a St. Francis rather than the community way of a St. Benedict.
[Ammon Hennacy] has had to abandon his life at hard labor and to replace that discipline of work he is fasting Fridays; during our recent retreat he fasted, and again in August for nine days he will picket and fast in reparation for Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the cruel weapons of destruction which we have made.
All men are responsible, but Ammon by not paying income tax, and by penance, is doing reparation.
And the other trouble?
It was Federal income taxes and investigations for Ammon Hennacy, Charlie McCormick, Carol Perry and me.
Charlie has had no income for all the years he is with The Catholic Worker, but the rest of us could acknowledge having earned money on which we did not pay taxes, and which we refuse to pay because eighty per cent of the money so gathered goes for wars past and present.
The others were treated with great courtesy, but one of the revenue agents made a coldly insulting remark to me based on my past, which was entirely uncalled for.
But perhaps he was only stupid so I acted as though I did not hear it.
I would like to urge upon the bishops the idea of the non-payment of taxes by Catholic parents for school taxes, when they are sending their children to Catholic schools and so are paying double for their education.
Yes, we must set ourselves with all the force we possess, against war, and the making of instruments of war, and our means are prayer and fasting, and the non-payment of federal income tax which goes for war.
The message of The Catholic Worker is that simple one for all the rank and file, for the masses, that we have free will, we can make our choice, that our personal responsibility which we exercise is what matters.
Ammon [Hennacy], in his non-payment of taxes for war, and his civil disobedience, is bringing that message to countless thousands of people.
When we got home from our little tour of the neighborhood and I had explored the view from the eleventh floor, Ammon came for supper and brought us up to date on his journeyings as well as on the news of our own workers in Chicago.
He had no sooner arrived in town on Saturday when he was called on to picket in front of the courthouse for Roseanna Robinson.
They are keeping up a vigil night and day, people joining for a stint of three hours at a time.
I certainly hope to join them sometime these next few days.
Roseanna is a young colored woman who had refused to pay any income tax 85 per cent of which goes for war, or to file any returns.
She had been given an indeterminate sentence and she is now for two weeks on hunger strike.
I suppose they will forcibly feed her.
The newspapers are paying little head to this, so it is necessary to have the picket line, and Karl Meyer has gotten out a leaflet which is signed by The Catholic Worker, 164 West Oak street and the War Resisters League which takes in all those who are not Catholic who wish to participate but might hesitate if it were only under Catholic leadership.
There is much to be done in these small Indian schools throughout the country [the United States South-West], and a peace army could be at work there right now, without waiting to be drafted.
There would be no pay besides a living, and so no bother about income tax, and so no contributing to war in this way.
I could not help but think of Don Milani’s statement in his defense against the charges made against him of advocating resistance to conscription for war.
He said that even those who cooked for troops contributed to war.
How involved we all are, what with the hidden taxes we pay for war, the high standard of living all of us enjoy, even when we refuse to pay income tax, so much of which goes for war, and when we build prisons for draft refusers.
Every summer for a Peacemakers training program has been held at our Tivoli farm for the last two or three weeks of August.
The old mansion and the Peter Maurin house are filled with guests, and campers come and set up their tents on the lawn facing the river.
The organizer of the Peacemakers’ school is Wally Nelson, who has been in the workhouse in Cincinnati for the past two weeks, fasting.
He and several others were arrested during a vigil for DeCourcy Squire, an 18 yr. old Antioch student who had been hospitalized after fasting since her arrest and subsequent sentence of 9 mo. for participating in a peace demonstration.
(DeCourcy has since been released.)
A psychiatric examination was ordered for Wally when he refused to co-operate with his arrest and trial.
Found by court psychiatrists to be “sane,” he was sentenced for “loitering” to ten days in the workhouse, $25 and costs.
Again refusing to co-operate with legalized injustice, he was dragged from the police van by his legs, an action that caused his wife Juanita to follow him, cradling his head in her hands.
When they arrived at Wally’s cell, Nita bent over to kiss him, was arrested for “disorderly conduct” and fined $25 and costs.
This she refused to pay, and was ordered to the workhouse.
Detailed stories of these arrests are given in the February 10th issue of the Peacemaker, (10208 Sylvan Avenue, (Gano) Cincinnati, Ohio 45241).
I hope that many of our readers will subscribe to the Peacemaker, since news of the conscientious objectors who are in prison and much other war-resistance news can be obtained there.
Peacemakers have led in direct action for many years.
Wally and Juanita have both refused to pay income tax for many years, and it is of them particularly I wish to write, with the most heartfelt sympathy for their suffering and the greatest admiration for their dedication.
It is their vocation to realize and to lead others to realize the horror of the times through which we are passing.
Wally has explained that his fasting during the jail sentences he has undergone was the result not of willful refusal but of a total inability to swallow food while imprisoned.
Simone Weil, the French woman whose brilliant writings on man and the state, work and war, were widely published after her death, suffered during the second world war in the same way.
She was literally unable to swallow enough food to keep her alive, in the face of world starvation.
In the stories of the saints, one reads of such sensitivity, such penances undergone, such fastings endured and they are little understood by the secular world.
I am convinced that this vocation, this calling, to give oneself to one’s brother, in loving communion, in loving understanding of the heinous crimes that are being committed today was at the root of Roger La Porte’s immolation in front of the United Nations .
It is as though such men said, “We will suffer with you, since we have no way of stopping the bombing, the burning, the napalm, the defoliation, the destruction of homes and an entire countryside.
There is no act of ours extreme enough, no protest strong enough, to deal with this horror.”
Wally Nelson was in prison for thirty-three months during World War Two and fasted for a hundred and eight days (with forced feeding by tube) as a protest against racial segregation of prisoners.
He had had time to think out his position while in Civilian Public Service camp, as forced labor camps which were set up for conscientious objectors were called.
These very camps were a concession to pacifists, who had been imprisoned and brutally treated during World War One.
But Wally decided to walk out and did so and was arrested and jailed.
His example and that of other absolutists led to further concessions.
In this present undeclared war in Vietnam, to which ten thousand more men were shipped off yesterday, the conscientious objector position is recognized, and paid employment is offered in home hospitals as “alternative service.”
To accept this is still to submit to the draft, hence the continued protests against war, and the drafting of youth to wage this hideous struggle.
[To Hennacy,] Obedience, of course, was a bad word.
Authority was a bad word.
In vain I pointed out to him that when the retired army major for whom he worked in Arizona told him to do a particular job, he did it, and he did it as he was told to.
He admired the army officer because he knew farming.
And he cooperated with Ammon in paying him by the day and thus evading the federal income tax which the tax man was trying to collect from Ammon.
I visited Art Harvey of South Ackworth, New Hampshire who has a mail order book shop handling a great number of books by and about Gandhi.
Art and Ammon Hennacy served six month terms in Sandstone Prison in Minnesota for trespassing on a missile base some years ago.
He carries on a practical application of Karl Meyer’s tax refusal (see article in this issue) by having teams of workers in orchards where they prune trees, harvest apples and later blueberries and work seven months of the year.
They work and live in a style which frees them from the payment of taxes for war.
Perhaps about a hundred are engaged in this way of life, which results usually in some settling in communities of the moshavim variety, each having some small acreage and a house built by themselves.
Considering the New England climate, no small achievement!
It certainly means an emphasis on the ascetic, on sacrifice.
The other young man who visited Russia was Karl Meyer, who at present is serving his sentence of a two-year term (and thousand dollar fine) at Sandstone Federal Prison, for obstructing the income tax system by refusal to pay taxes for war.
He had made the San Francisco-to-Moscow walk some years before, joining the march at Chicago.
The walk ended at Moscow University, where the students, though not agreeing with the American visitors, demanded that the time of their talks be extended.
He also distributed leaflets in Red Square!
The Catholic Worker has received a letter from the Internal Revenue Service stating that we owe them $296,359 in fines, penalties, and unpaid income tax for .
As the matter stands right now, there might be a legal battle with delays and postponements which may remind us of Dickens’ Bleak House.
Or, since we will not set up a defense committee to campaign for funds, it may terminate swiftly in the confiscation of our property and our bank account (never very large).
Our farm at Tivoli and the First Street house could be put up for sale by government agents and our C.W. family evicted.
One of the most costly protests against war, in terms of long-enduring personal sacrifice, is to refuse to pay federal income taxes which go for war.
The late Ammon Hennacy, one of our editors, was a prime example of this.
He earned his living at agricultural labor, always living on a poverty level so as not to be subject to taxes, though he filed returns.
Another of our editors, Karl Meyer, recently spent ten months in jail for what the I.R.S. called fraudulent claims of exemption for dependents.
He ran the C.W. House of Hospitality in Chicago for many years, working to earn the money to support the house and his wife and children.
Erosanna Robinson, a social worker in Chicago, refused to file returns and was sentenced to a year in prison.
While in prison she fasted and was forcibly fed.
It will be seen that tax refusal is a serious protest.
Wars will cease when we refuse to pay for them (to adapt a slogan of the War Resisters International).
The C.W. has never paid salaries.
Everyone gets board, room, and clothes (tuition, recreation included, as the C.W. is in a way a school of living).
So we do not need to pay federal income taxes.
Of course, there are hidden taxes we all pay.
Nothing is ever clear-cut or well defined.
We protest in any way we can, according to our responsibilities and temperaments.
(I remember Ammon, a most consistent, brave, and responsible person, saying to one young man, “For the love of the Lord, get a job and quit worrying about taxes.
You need to learn how to earn your own living.
That is most important for you.”)
We have to accept with humility the fact that we cannot share the destitution of those around us, and that our protests are incomplete.
Perhaps the most complete protest is to be in jail, to accept jail, never to give bail or defend ourselves.
In the fifties, Ammon, Charles McCormack (our business manager at the C.W.), and I were summoned to the offices of the I.R.S. in New York to answer questions (under oath) as to our finances.
I remember I was asked what happened to the royalties from my books, money from speaking engagements, etc. I could only report that such monies received were deposited in the C.W. account.
As for clothes, we wore what came in; my sister was generous to me — shoes, for instance.
Our refusal to apply for exemption status in our practice of the Works of Mercy is part of our protest against war and the present social “order” which brings on wars today.
In the issue of The Catholic Worker I wrote of the crisis The Catholic Worker found itself in when we received a letter from the Internal Revenue Service stating that we owe them $296,359 in fines and penalties and unpaid income tax for .
This was a very impressive bill, and we wondered what it would be if they started figuring out what they thought we owed them !
The New York Times, in a story signed by Max Seigel, with a four column head and a picture of a few of us at lunch in our headquarters at 36 East First Street, brought our situation to the attention of a vaster group of readers, and followed up the story with an editorial [“Imagination, Please” — excerpt: “Surely the IRS must have genuine frauds to investigate.
Surely there must be some worthwhile work this agency could be doing instead of obstructing acts of corporal mercy for the poor.”].
The New York evening Post also editorialized on our situation.
The National Catholic Reporter and the Commonweal editors also registered their protest and other papers followed suit.
Letters come in daily from our friends, reassuring, comforting, indignant at the government, a few of them indignant at us, that we cause them so much worry.
We certainly are grateful and must apologize that we cannot keep up with the mail and get them all answered.
There is not any real news for them at the moment, nor will be until our edition of The Catholic Worker.
I will have to appear before a Federal Judge on to explain why the CW refuses to pay taxes, or to “structure itself” so as to be exempt from taxes.
We are afraid of that word “structure.”
We refuse to become a “corporation.”
We repeat — we do not intend to “incorporate” the Catholic Worker movement.
We intend to continue our emphasis on personal responsibility, an emphasis which we were taught from the beginning by Peter Maurin who used to quote Emmanuel Mounier’s Personalist Manifesto, and his Personal and Communitarian Revolution, Peter was our teacher, and being a Frenchman, a peasant, he emphasized decentralization, manual labor, voluntary poverty.
Voluntary poverty meant that everyone at the CW worked without salary, and contributions came from them, and from our readers, which kept the work going.
Rumblings first came from the Internal Revenue service after many on the CW staff, together with other peace groups, demonstrated against war in the Fifties and Sixties and were jailed for Civil Disobedience.
Writing about jails and courtrooms resulted in much publicity.
But it was Ammon Hennacy and Karl Meyer who wrote most consistently on Tax Refusal, and its importance.
“Wars will cease when men refuse to pay for them.”
…And while you are at it, write to TAX Talk, published by War Tax Resistance, 339 Lafayette St., N.Y., N.Y. 10012 which contains letters from all over the country from individual tax resisters, telling what is happening to them.
Stimulating and invigorating.
Good make up and good format.
First Rate.
While I write, Arthur J. Lacey comes in to hand me my mail and it contains a notice from one of our two lawyers.
“Please be advised that I have been contacted by the Conference Section of the Internal Revenue Service and we have arranged for the hearing on .”
Good news first!
On we received absolution from the U.S. Government in relation to all our tax troubles.
In the Catholic Worker this year we told of the notice we had received — that we owed the government nearly $300,000 in back income taxes which included penalties for “late filing and negligence.”
The examining officer of the Manhattan District had arrived at these figures through the reports we had obediently made to Albany on our appeals for funds, which we send out once or twice a year.
We accept this compromise with our local state because we are decentralists, personalists, anarchists (in addition to being pacifists).
When we first thought about Federal income taxes, most of which go for war or “defense,” we simplistically considered ourselves exempt because we had no income; no salaries are paid at the Catholic Worker, nor ever have been .
I myself have been questioned because of my writings, and lecture fees which were not really fees but offerings made to the work which covered all expenses of travelling and supported the work besides.
A crowd of people living together as we do, in houses of hospitality, has to give something of an account to each other as to how well we are living up to our profession of voluntary poverty.
We are always bound to have healthy guilt feelings about that, and keep trying to do better.
Certainly a number of us do work on the side to provide what we need for books or rent on cheap apartments in the neighborhood, since our house at 36 East First Street is always so crowded.
But with the growing tax resistance throughout the United States, the government has become concerned.
Telephone calls and official visits made us realize that trouble was impending.
And we have been having it and have reported on it in both the and issues of our paper.
Now we are happy to report the outcome.
In a conference in with William T. Hunter, litigation attorney from the Department of Justice, one of the Assistant Attorney Generals of the United States, we reached a verbal settlement couched in more human and satisfactory terms than the notice we later received.
“They” were willing to recognize our undoubtedly religious convictions in our conflict with the state, and were going to drop any proceedings against us.
They had examined and looked into back issues of the Catholic Worker, and they had noted the support we had from the press (the New York Times news story and the editorials of the Times and the New York Post), and had come to this conclusion that ours was a religious conviction.
They had come to the conclusion also that it was not necessary that the Federal Government seek for any other kind of a “conviction” against us.
The conference took place in a law office in Manhattan, 9:30 of a Monday morning.
John Coster, our lawyer, Mr. Hunter and Ed Forand, Walter Kerell, Patrick Jordan, Ruth Collins and I attended.
There were no hostilities expressed.
As peacemakers we must have love and respect for each individual we come in contact with.
Our struggle is with principalities and powers, not with Church or State.
We cannot ever be too complacent about our own uncompromising positions because we know that in our own way we too make compromises.
(For instance, in having a second-class mailing privilege from the government we accept a subsidy, just as Mr. Eastland does in Mississippi!
[This refers to Senator James Eastland, who was a beneficiary of hundreds of thousands of dollars a year in federal cotton subsidies, overseen by a Senate committee he sat on.])
It was Jesus who said that the worst enemies were those of our own household, and we are all part of this country, citizens of the United States and share in its guilt.
Yes, we would survive, I thought to myself, even if the paper were eventually suppressed and we had to turn to leafleting, as we are doing now each Monday against the I.B.M. Wall-Street offices, trying to reach the consciences of all those participating by their daily work in the hideous and cowardly war we are waging in Vietnam.
I must not forget the beautiful young ghinkgo tree which we purchased from the city last year, and which we planted in honor of Carmen Mathews, herself a great lover of the countryside (and of drama).
She rescued us from a foreclosure when a first mortgage fell due and so has become part of this house on First Street, and of the bits of greenery back and front of it.
The fact that prisoners on Riker’s Island so I have been told, grow these trees which brighten our streets makes that tree especially dear to me.
When I pass it, I make the sign of the cross on its bark, to encourage it to grow fast and strong.
Maybe we can plant another this year in gratitude to God for saving us from the hands of the tax gatherers.
Fr. McNabb, the French Dominican, said that when Jesus left his apostles, “Peter could go back to his nets, but Matthew could not go back to his tax gatherings.”
Letter from the Internal Revenue Service:
From: District Director, Internal Revenue Service, Department of the Treasury, PO Box 3100, Church St. Station, New York, N.Y., 10008
To: The Catholic Worker Movement, 36 East 1st Street, New York, N.Y. 10003
Gentlemen:
After examining your financial records and reviewing your activities for the above years, we find that you are not required to file annual returns for the years shown, and no further action is necessary regarding the proposals in our letter of .
…of our own conflict with the IRS.
We live in what we can only regard as a temporary truce.
We have not applied for or received tax exemption.
The letter we received (and published) from the N.Y. State Offices of the IRS stated:
After examining your financial records and reviewing your activities for the above years (), we find that you are not required to file annual returns for the years shown, and no further action is necessary regarding the proposals in our letter of .
Thank you for your cooperation.
Sincerely yours, District Director Internal Revenue Service
The Washington official representative who met with us conveyed to us the respect they held for our religious principles and assured us that the presented bill for almost $300,000 could be ignored.
The matter would be dropped, it was indicated (but, “for the present” was the qualifying clause in my own mind).
Mr. Nixon’s first statement that he would attack the problem of “permissiveness” was a warning note.
The jailing of newspaper reporters, the Ellsberg trial — in fact, any criticisms of government policies or actions was going to meet with repressive measures.
The tax refusal movement all over the country grows.
The conflict between State and people is coming out into the open here in the United States.
The Totalitarian State is not just Germany (Hitler), Italy (Mussolini) and the USSR (Stalin), but is here and now with the “all encroaching State” as our Catholic bishops once called it, involving China and ourselves, as well as Russia.
We assure our readers that we try to get rid of our gifts as fast as they are given to us.
But the threat still hangs over us of prosecution for not paying income tax.
We are not tax-exempt.
On principle we refuse to pay income tax, because so great a portion goes for wars, preparation for wars (defense, it is termed), and providing other countries with billion of dollars to buy our instruments of war and material and plants to make their own.
There is a sizable movement truly the foundation of the peace movement which is based on tax refusal.
(Contact Robert Calvert, War Tax Resistance, 912 E. 31st St., Kansas City, Mo. 64109.)
Our refusal goes deep.
Our motivation is fundamentally religious.
We are told by Jesus Christ to practice the works of mercy, not the works of war.
And we do not see why it is necessary to ask the government for permission to practice the works of mercy which are the opposite of the works of war.
To ask that permission to obey Christ by applying for exemption, a costly and lengthy process, is against our religious principles.
It is an interference of the state which we must call attention to again and again.
A father who educates a young man or woman other than a blood relative is taxed for his generosity.
A poor family who takes in another poor family (as many of them do in time of unemployment or crisis), cannot count that as tax deductible.
Of course the poor suffer from the withholding tax which is taken from their weekly pay.
To understand their rights, they must plough through booklets and forms put out by the government (which I am sure I could not manage to do) before they are able to collect money at the end of the year which is owing to them due to some change of circumstance.
To get the advice of the Internal Revenue Department means standing in lines, paying excessive fares by bus or subway, with generally little redress of their grievances.
(A cheering note for us, with our very large family, which seems to increase day after day, is that when confronted by the government forces not long ago, Washington representatives from the Department of Justice were willing to concede that we were not making profits out of the poor, that we were motivated by religious principles, and that they would so notify the New York offices of the Internal Revenue Dept. which had handed us a awful bill for taxes due, along with penalties and fines, over a space of four or five years.
The New York office then sent us a brief notice concluding that our income did not obligate us to file returns.)
To talk economics to the rich and Jesus to the anarchists gathered in convention [a conference at New York’s Hunter College] these two days (and have to write this column) is a job.
Besides, I did not “talk Jesus” to the anarchists.
There was no time to answer the one great disagreement which was in their minds — how can you reconcile your Faith in the monolithic, authoritarian Church which seems so far from Jesus who “had no place to lay his head,” and who said “sell what you have and give to the poor,” — with your anarchism?
Because I have been behind bars in police stations, houses of detention, jails and prison farms, whatsoever they are called, eleven times, and have refused to pay Federal income taxes and have never voted, they accept me as an anarchist.
And I in turn, can see Christ in them even though they deny Him, because they are giving themselves to working for a better social order for the wretched of the earth.
Proceeded to the Kansas City, Mo. House of Hospitality and War Tax Resistors’ Center in adjoining buildings and run by Bob and Angela Calvert who are gardening every inch of the land in their front and back yards.
It is much to the edification of the city block families and we hope their imitation.
Spent a Sunday afternoon with Karl Meyer and Jean and their three beautiful children, and all happy in the life of voluntary poverty where he receives an income low enough to be untaxable and so will not anticipate any more jail terms. His work is with the retarded in sheltered workshops.
Some of the best all around accounts of this ferment which is going on, among the young especially, is in The Peacemaker, 1255 Paddock Hills Ave., Cincinnati, Ohio 45229. This small packed newspaper deals extensively and specifically in works for peace, listing all those imprisoned for conscience — refusing conscription; one valiant woman is confined on Terminal Island for refusal to pay taxes (Martha Tranquilli, Terminal Island, San Pedro, Ca. 90731).
All those activities which we Catholics call “works of mercy,” are also performed by many Protestant, Quaker, and other groups in the country.
I remember a young woman who came to help us years ago, who, after her first, early enthusiasm had worn away, used to sigh wearily and say — “What’s it all about?”
I am sure many of our friends and readers also pose, more seriously, the same question.
For instance, what are Ernest and Marion Bromley all about?
Why is this frail, elderly man in jail right now for “disorderly conduct,” that is, for distributing leaflets about the nefarious workings of the Internal Revenue Service and their ways of penalizing people for advocating tax refusal.
Remember, it is the Federal taxes paid by each of us that supply arms that are keeping wars going, I cannot go into the important discussion of Tax Refusal now.
(Subscribe for The Peacemaker, 1225 Paddock Hills Ave., Cincinnati, Ohio 45229 or write to War Tax Resistance, 339 Lafayette St., New York, N.Y. 10012.)
What I want to bring out is how a pebble cast into a pond causes ripples that spread in all directions.
And each one of our thoughts, words and deeds are like that.
Going to jail, as Ernest Bromley has done, short though his stay may be, causes a ripple of conscience among us all.
And of remembrance too.
Did they search him and list every item contained in every pocket?
Did they strip him and search every nook and cranny of his body, as they did the young women arrested during the protests against air raids drills (psychological warfare) in the 50’s?
As they are doing now to Martin Sostre in Dannemora prison even after every visit from friends or lawyers.
What sadistic impulse is it that causes guards to continue these searches?
Ernest Bromley is sharing, in his (we hope) brief jail encounter, the sufferings of the world.
And we hope, like the apostles, he rejoices in having been accounted “worthy to suffer.”
The Peacemaker, every issue, has a list of those imprisoned for conscientious objection to war.
I was happy to see that Martha Tranquilli was due for release .
The Peacemakers discussed, among other subjects like voluntary poverty, life styles, etc., the kind of demonstrations to show our determination not to pay income tax which goes for building up monstrous implements of war.
Wally Nelson and his wife Juanita were there, both of whom are familiar with arrests and jailings.
I got acquainted with them years ago when Koinonia, in Central Georgia, was literally under fire from the small-towners all around them.
Next issue, I will try to write more about federal income tax which is providing the weapons for war — why we pay local taxes and not the federal income tax.
We recognize the seriousness of this and the risks involved for families.
The Bromley case is an example.
Their house was sold from under them in Cincinnati but they have not yet been evicted.
The price paid was excessively above its value.
It looks like the government is trying to make an example of them.
(It was not bought by friends and given back to them — an erroneous rumor; the Bromleys would not have put up with a connived sale which would mean still more money going to the government for war.)
This is a good and historic case, involving as it does, simple, plain and powerless (?) people.
I’d like to call special attention to a story in this issue of the paper — it is Peggy Scherer’s story, on the front page, of the Peacemaker victory [the IRS surrendered in their attempt to seize and sell Ernest and Marion Bromley’s home].
(It is the completed story of the news box which appeared on page three of the last issue.)
It is a story of gentle persistence, the power of Truth — faith in Truth (remembering that Christ is our Truth).
He is the Way, the Truth, the Life.
Chuck Matthei had told me the story of his interviews with the head of the Internal Revenue Service, the almost daily dialogue that went on between them, and the frank and “manly” admission, made finally by the IRS chief, that a mistake had been made, that the Peacemakers had Truth on their side.
I felt a great sense of joy and thanksgiving, a sense of hope too, that our officials in Washington D.C. could be approached in this way — with dignity and perseverance, with courtesy, with the recognition that we are all, each one of us, whether government official or radical (one who gets to the roots of things), children of God.
We do believe that we are all brothers and sisters.
We believe, too, that we can only show our love for God by our love for our brothers and sisters.
So we share our joy with you, our readers, and hope we all have a sense of renewed strength and energy to continue our opposition to all violence, to all wars.
We point out that one way not to have to pay income tax, so much of which goes to the military, into stockpiling, into sales of weapons to other countries, is to seek more ways of living a life of voluntary poverty, to follow our Lord Jesus and his loveable servant St. Francis.
[Speaking of Pentecostal Christian groups on the Mexican border:] I could tell of other works these groups have done, but there is no space here.
I only wish that the cause of peace, the rejection of war and service in the armed forces, and refusal to pay income tax could be part of their way of life.
Jesus told us to love our enemies and St. Francis’ followers made a rejection of feudal service to the war lords of the time part of their religious commitment.
In the Catholic Worker organization itself was targeted by the IRS for failure to pay income tax.
Eventually the IRS backed down in the face of public ridicule and Catholic Worker resistance.
Some of the Catholic Worker articles about this were written by Dorothy Day and I’ve already excerpted them in an earlier Picket Line post focusing on her writings.
The issue published a couple of reader reactions to the kerfluffle:
Dear Dorothy,
Ho, you are on the right track.
I just read your tax exemption article in the issue.
You are absolutely correct.
I don’t know how you will do it.
But you owe to all those you help, not the money represented, but the faith and steadfast purpose for which you stand — the guiding light.
I pray for you.
I hope some way you can make it — somehow.
Love, Dick Mayer 409 West 11th St. Newton, Kansas 67114
Dear Friends at CW,
I just read the 39th Anniversary issue and am tremendously excited by the article: “If the Present Is Different…”
We are in a bit of a “predicament,” between seizure of our car and auction by the IRS.
The IRS has adjourned the open auction and declared an auction for sealed bids; peace people around here are ready to rise to that challenge also.
We are starting a peace action center in this area.
We’d be interested in literature lists of books and pamphlets written by CW people.
We read that the CW has to appear in court to justify its tax refusal and its refusal to ask for exemption — as if mercy had to ask permission!
We are in a three-family intentional communlty of Mennonite background.
War tax resistance is one of our pillars and we’ve not yet found our way out of tbe maze of incorporation into some status that gives us the kind of freedom we seek.
But our existence together, our resistance and service, are dally victories.
So we keep on.
Peace and Joy be with you, David Jansen of the Bridge
You see the beauty of my proposal is
it needn’t wait on general revolution.
I bid you to the one-man revolution —
The only revolution that is coming.
Today, instead of dredging up something from the archives about historical
tax resistance campaigns and movements, I want to spend some time looking at
individual tax resistance in service of what
Ammon Hennacy called
the “one-man* revolution.”
Whether Hennacy got the name from Frost’s poem, or Frost from him, or whether
each came up with it independently, I don’t know. The idea goes back much
further than either, and in particular is especially pronounced in Thoreau’s
thinking.
This idea is that, contrary to what the organizers of the world are
always telling us, the key to curing society’s ills is not necessarily to
organize at all. You don’t need a majority, or a critical mass, or a
disciplined revolutionary vanguard. Just get your own house in order and
commit yourself to your own personal revolution — that’s the most crucial
and practical thing you can do.
“One-man revolution” is the answer to the question posed by radicals and
reformers who feel overwhelmed by the task ahead. “What can one person do?”
they ask (half-hoping, I suspect, that the answer will be “nothing, so don’t
sweat it”). They think the revolution that will finally put things right is
scheduled for later — when the masses see the light… when a crisis comes… when
we find a charismatic leader… when we unite the factions under one banner…
when… when… when…
The one-man revolutionary says: no, the revolution starts here and now. Your
first task as a revolutionary is to overturn the corrupt, confused, puppet
governor of your own life and to put a more responsible sovereign in its
place.
As to what the policies of this new sovereign ought to be, well, that’s up to
you. I’m not going to cover the details of how Hennacy’s and Thoreau’s one-man
revolutions played out and what specific decisions they made along the way.
Today instead I’m going to look at the reasons they gave for why the one-man
revolution is practical and effective, in answer to the
“What can just one person do?” skeptics.
These reasons can be roughly divided into five categories:
With the one-man revolution, success is in reach. It may not be easy, but
you can win this revolution with your own effort. Furthermore, whether or
not you succeed, the struggle itself is the right thing to do.
You don’t need to wait for a majority. You don’t need to water down your
message to try to win mass appeal or group consensus. You can start
immediately from a firm platform of integrity and honesty. This also makes
you more self-reliant so that you can endure challenges better, which
makes you more effective and far-reaching than those revolutionaries who
always have to check to see if the rest of the pack is still with
them.
Political revolutions that are not also accompanied by individual
revolutions don’t make enduring radical change — they just change the
faces of the clowns running the circus while leaving the corrupt structure
intact.
The world sometimes is changed radically and for the better by
the efforts and example of a single, one-in-a-million character. But the
first step is not to set out to change the world, but to develop that
character.
By fighting the one-man revolution, you are not as alone as you may think
you are: you “leaven the loaf” and cause all society to rise, you attract
other one-man revolutionaries to your side, and you sow the seeds that
inspire others.
You can win the one-man revolution
Ammon Hennacy’s theory of the one-man revolution crystallized, appropriately
enough, while he was being held in solitary confinement. He’d been sentenced
for promoting draft evasion during World War Ⅰ and then thrown in “the hole”
for leading a hunger strike of prisoners to protest awful food. Because he
refused to name names, he was kept there for several months.
Locked up alone in a cell 24/7, unable to communicate with his comrades in the
prison or outside, given the silent treatment by the guard, and overhearing
the day-in day-out torture of the inmate in the adjoining cell — this was not
the most promising situation for a revolutionary.
The only book they allowed him was the Bible (and they even took this away and
replaced it with a smaller-print version for no other reason but to inflict
another petty torment in the dim light of his cell). In the course of reading
and reflecting on what he read — particularly
the Sermon on the
Mount — he decided that the revolution could be fought and won even where
he stood.
To change the world by bullets or ballots was a useless procedure. …the only
revolution worthwhile was the one-man revolution within the heart. Each one
could make this by himself and not need to wait on a majority.
(A few days back I saw a bumper sticker that read “Jesus was a community organizer.”
But if you read the Sermon on the Mount, you won’t see any organizing going on there at all — Jesus is urging people individually to get their lives in order so that their deeds will be like a light shining before others to inspire them.
Do you see any “we must,” “we ought to,” “we should work together to,” or “once there are enough of us” in that sermon?
Jesus isn’t addressing an organization but an assembly.)
You can start now, with full integrity
Lloyd Danzeisen expressed one of the advantages of the one-man revolution in
a letter to Hennacy: “You are lucky and of course very wise to be a ‘one man
revolution,’ for you do not have to discuss your action over and over again
(with committees) but can swing into action.”
The advantage of organizing and working together is superior numbers, and, in
theory anyway, greater force. But there are many disadvantages. It takes a lot
of time and negotiation to get a bunch of people to take action together, and
usually this also involves finding some lowest common denominator of principle
or risk that they can all agree on — which can mean watering down the core of
what you’re fighting for until it seems less like a principle than a petty
grievance.
What such a movement gains in quantity it may lose in quality, and the force
it gains from numbers it may lose from the diffuse, blunted, half-hearted
effort of the individuals that make it up, or from the fact that much of their
energy is expended in the organizing itself rather than the ostensible goals
of the organization.
The advantage of drawing a large crowd of half-hearted followers is rarely
worth the effort.
It is not too hard to sway a crowd of wishy-washy people by appealing to the
half-truths they already believe and being careful not to attack any of the
nonsense they adhere to. But what does this get you? A crowd of wishy-washy
people who are just as vulnerable to falling for the next demagogue who comes
along with patronizing speeches. Instead, Hennacy recommends, we should
“appeal to those about ready to make the next step and… know that these are
very few indeed.… We can live and die and never change
political trends but if we take a notion, we can change our own lives in many
basic respects and thus do that much to change society.”
Thoreau noted with approval that the abolitionist revolutionary
John
Brown had not gathered around him a large party of well-wishers
and collaborators, but instead had been very selective about whom he let in on
his plans:
A one-man revolutionary is more effective and harder to defeat
A one-man revolutionary — a “man of good principles” — is individually more
effective and harder to defeat than that same person would be as part of a
movement. This may seem paradoxical to people who are used to thinking in
terms of “strength in numbers” or “the whole is greater than the sum of its
parts.”
This is for two related reasons:
First, because as a one-man revolutionary you are self-motivated, you do not
get thrown into confusion if the lines of communication down the chain of
command are disrupted, and you don’t lose momentum by looking about to check
if your comrades are still with you or if they have retreated or surrendered.
And second, because this makes it difficult for your opponents to get a
foothold in trying to persuade you with threats or with bribes to give up the
fight.
For example, Hennacy tells of one of his captors trying to trick him:
Detective Wilson said that the young Socialists arrested with me for refusing
to register had all given in and registered. (Later I found out that he had
also told them that I had registered.) [But] I felt that if they gave in,
someone had to stick, and I was that one.
The detective assumed that Hennacy valued his belonging more than his
integrity, and so made a completely ineffective attack. Thoreau similarly
noted that his captors had failed to understand his motives, assuming he
valued his freedom from confinement more than his freedom of action:
People often draw the wrong conclusion from the success of the “divide and
conquer” tactic when used by governments against opposition movements. The
lesson proved by this is not that unless we stay united we are weak,
but that to the extent that our strength depends mainly on our unity we
are vulnerable.
Without the one-man revolution, no other revolution is worth the trouble
The problem with the mass, popular, peasants-with-pitchforks sort of
revolution is that it’s so unreliable. You put everything on the line, shed
buckets of blood, endure betrayals and unfriendly alliances and hard
compromises, and finally (if you’re lucky) cut off the king’s head and take
charge… and then what? As often as not, you end up with something as bad as
before.
Political revolutions, says Hennacy, “only changed masters.” — “We made a
revolution against England and are not free yet. The Russians made a
revolution against the Czar and now have an even stronger dictatorship. It is
not too late to make a revolution that will mean something — one that will
stick: your own one-man revolution.”
Tyranny is not something that only infests the top of the org chart. The
tyrant doesn’t cause tyranny, but is its most obvious symptom.
Tyranny lives as tenaciously in the tyrannized as in the tyrant. This is why
Thoreau was careful to say (emphasis mine):
Not, “when the workers seize power” or “when we get money out of politics” or
anything of that sort, but “when men are prepared for it.” We must prepare
ourselves, one one-man revolution at a time, and when we have, we will get the
government we deserve (self-government, if Thoreau is right and if we ever do
deserve such a thing).
Be careful how you define “success.” You can do everything you set out to do,
but if you haven’t set out to do anything worth doing, you still fail. Even in
mundane things, you’d be wise to keep your eye on a bigger picture. Thoreau
mused in his journal:
Success and failure have superficial and deep components that may contradict
each other. John Brown set out to launch a rebellion that would end American
slavery; the government stood its ground and defended slavery against the
rebellion and had Brown hanged. Who was successful? Who won? A victory for
evil is just a triumphant form of failure.
At the time of the Harpers Ferry raid, Brown was called insane by the pulpit,
popular opinion, and the press (even — especially — the liberal,
abolitionist press). Some gave as evidence for his insanity the most
extraordinarily sane thing about him:
You’d think with the example of Jesus hovering over Western Civilization,
people would be skeptical of traditional notions of success: being captured
and tortured to death by your enemies and having your followers scorned and
scattered throughout a hostile empire doesn’t seem much like a victory. But
Thoreau thought the response to John Brown proved that even after centuries of
Christianity, “[i]f Christ
should appear on earth he would on all hands be denounced as a mistaken,
misguided man, insane & crazed.”
You don’t have to believe that history will eventually smile on you and turn
your seeming defeats and setbacks into obvious victories. You don’t have to
believe the nice-sounding but unlikely sentiment that Hennacy attributed to
Tolstoy: “no sincere effort made in the behalf of Truth is ever lost.” You
just need to remember that the seemingly small victories in an uncompromising
one-man revolution can be more worthwhile (when seen from the perspective of
what is worthwhile, not just what is expedient) than huge triumphs
rotting within from compromise and half-truths.
Slavery in particular was such an unambiguous evil that it was one of
“those cases to which the rule of
expediency does not apply,” Thoreau said. He made this comparison: if the
only way you can save yourself from drowning is to unjustly wrest a plank away
from another drowning man, you must instead do what is just even if it kills
you. If you are “victorious” in wresting away the plank, and thereby save your
own life at the cost of another, you lose.✴
“Hennacy, do you think you can change the world?” said Bert Fireman, a
columnist on the Phoenix Gazette.
“No, but I am damn sure it can’t change me” was my reply.
If you want to change things you have to get 51% of the ballots or
the bullets. If I want to change things I just have to keep on doing
what I am doing — that is: every day the government says “pay taxes for war”;
every day I do not pay taxes for war. So I win and they lose. The One Man
Revolution — you can’t beat it.
Do not let your opponent set the norm. Generally a minority is jeered at
because they are so small. It is quality and not quantity
that is the measure. “One on the side of God is a majority” is the perfect
answer which I have given dozens of times with success.
Sometimes, a single one-man revolutionary really does change the world. Maybe
the world was already ripe for changing, but it still needed a one-man
revolutionary to break from the pack and make the change happen.
We can’t all be Christ, Buddha, Gandhi, or Joan of Arc.
(Steve Allen said that
Ammon Hennacy fulfilled more of the role of a
Lenny Bruce; Hennacy’s
wife suggested Don Quixote.) It is only one-in-a-million who moves the world.
But despite the odds we all should aspire to be this one in a million.
Love without courage and wisdom is sentimentality, as with the ordinary
church member. Courage without love and wisdom is foolhardiness, as with the
ordinary soldier. Wisdom without love and courage is cowardice, as with the
ordinary intellectual. Therefore one who has love, courage, and wisdom is one
in a million who moves the world, as with Jesus, Buddha, and Gandhi.
Even if we fall short of this goal ourselves, by choosing this goal we not
only choose the only goal worth choosing, but we adjust our standards so that
if we are ever lucky enough to meet this one in a million, we will be
more likely to recognize her or him. Most people are incapable of recognizing
or comprehending the hero in real life — they lionize the dead martyred heroes
of past generations, while joining the lynch mobs to martyr the heroes of
their own.
It only takes a little leavening to leaven the loaf
By being virtuous in an out-of-the-ordinary way you encourage people to call
ordinary vices into question and you force the devil’s advocates to show
themselves by coming to the devil’s defense. Thoreau was convinced that one
person was enough to leaven the loaf:
Hennacy said that his “work was not that of an organizer but of a Sower to sow
the seeds.”
We really can’t change the world. We really can’t change other people! The
best we can do is to start a few thinking here and there. The way to do this,
if we are sincere, is to change ourselves!
When they are ready for it [my emphasis again — ♇], the rich, the
bourgeois intellectual, the bum, and even the politician and the clergy may
have an awakening of conscience because of the uncompromising seeds of
Christian Anarchism which we are sowing.
You have a plan to reform the world? As the saying goes: “show me, don’t tell
me.” Thoreau:
So often we hear of a Big Plan that, were it enacted as designed, would solve
the Big Problems. But the problem with the big plans is that they never seem
to get enacted, or if they do, they never seem to work as designed, as the
same problems show up in new guises. Meanwhile the planners waste their time
and energy and don’t change what is changeable. Tolstoy put it this
way:
An alcoholic who spoke with Hennacy had much the same sentiment: “the
AA fixed me
up. You are right in not wanting to change the world by violence; the change
has to come with each person first.”
The present American peace movement, stubbornly paying for the imperial armies
it says it opposes, reminds me of drunks meeting in a tavern at happy hour to
organize a prohibition movement that will solve their alcohol problem.
Your one-man revolution isn’t as lonely as it may seem
Hennacy and Thoreau also had faith that if you begin the one-man revolution,
this will attract like-minded souls to you and you to them, and that you will
find yourself working in concert with comrades you never knew you had:
Hennacy: “In reading Tolstoy I had gained the idea that if a person had the
One Man Revolution in his heart and lived it, he would be led by God toward
those others who felt likewise.… This was to be proven in a most dramatic way,
and was to usher me into the second great influence of my life: that of the
Catholic Worker movement.”
The One-Man Revolution
So what do you have to do to be the exemplar and sow the seeds?
Accept responsibility, and act responsibly.
Build yourself a glass house and start throwing stones.
Accept responsibility, and act responsibly
Most political action amounts to “who can we find to take responsibility for
this problem” — the One Man Revolutionary asks “what can I do to take
responsibility for this problem?”
Not that everything is your responsibility, or that the world is
looking to you personally to solve all of its problems. But you should at
the very least examine your life to see what problems or solutions you are
contributing to with it. Can one person make a difference? You are
already making a difference — what kind of difference are
you making?
In Thoreau’s time, the evils of slavery and of wars of conquest were sustained
by the active allegiance and support of the ordinary people around him, many
of whom nonetheless congratulated themselves for their anti-war, anti-slavery
opinions.
Don’t be fooled into thinking that because the one-man revolution is in your
heart that it can just stay there, locked up inside, without leaking out into
the world around you.
The one-man revolution doesn’t necessarily require living in
opposition to society and the status quo, but it does require holding fast to
justice and virtue. When society and the status quo are opposed to justice and
virtue, as they so often are, this puts them in opposition to you as well.
Build yourself a glass house and start throwing stones
Your friends and even your enemies will come to your aid when you try to hold
yourself to a high standard. All you have to do is to make yourself vulnerable
to charges of hypocrisy. People love to point out hypocritical moralists, in
part because some hypocritical moralists are hilarious, but also in part
because it helps people excuse their own failures to hold themselves to high
standards. If you build yourself a glass house and throw stones from it,
everyone will volunteer to keep you on the straight-and-narrow.
Hennacy:
I have… put myself in a glass house. If so I must needs take whatever stones
come my way. I have the right by my life of integrity to criticize, but I
must also take whatever criticism comes my way in all good humor.
[A] spoiled and arrogant priest wanted to know if I was “holier than thou.” I
told him I hoped by Christ I was, for if I wasn’t I would be in a hell of a
fix. I used this blunt method to deflate his spurious piety.
At times those who do not want to have their inconsistencies pointed out say
in a super-sweet voice to me “judge not, lest ye be judged.” I reply, “O.K.,
judge me, then.”
While both Thoreau and Hennacy strike me as stern with others, and
maybe not always fun to be around (as Hennacy would say: “I love my enemies
but am hell on my friends”), they were anything but joyless. Thoreau’s
vigorous, enthusiastic love of life and the world are legendary, and Hennacy’s
character too was eager, life-affirming, and generous (even in its criticisms).
Utah Phillips came home from the Korean war a drunken brawler, checked in to
Hennacy’s Catholic Worker hospitality house in Salt Lake City, and eight
years later checked out again, sober, a pacifist, and an anarchist. He
remembered Hennacy this way:
He was tough without being hard — tough without that brittle hardness that
some tough men have that would shatter if you struck it too hard. “Love in
Action,” Dorothy Day called him — Dostoyevsky’s words: “Love in action is
harsh and dreadful compared to love in dreams.”‡
Neither Thoreau nor Hennacy had any tolerance for bliss-bunnyishness, but both
were cheerful; both knew how to be dutiful without being dour. Thoreau:
I’ve tried here to put forward the strongest affirmative case for the
practical effectiveness of the one-man revolution, at least as it can be found
in Hennacy’s and Thoreau’s writings.
They make a strong and persuasive argument, I think, but not an airtight one.
I wish more evidence was preserved of them in dialog with incisive critics of
the one-man revolution, to hear how they would respond to the best arguments
against it.
But what keeps the argument for a one-man revolution from persuading people is
not, I think, the strength of the counter-arguments, but just the fact that to
accept the argument is not enough — it demands much more than a “Like,” and
much more than most people think they have to give. To be persuaded is to be
overwhelmed, to take the first step off the path and into uncharted territory,
and only a few of us have the courage to take that step.
* Can we all be mature here and recognize that in Frost’s and Thoreau’s and Hennacy’s time words like “man,” “men,” “he,” “his,” and “him” could either be intended by the author to stand exclusively for males or for people in general depending on the context, which the discerning reader (I think) can still be trusted to understand?
✴ This is an old thought experiment, see for instance Cicero’s De Officiis Ⅲ.23 in which he says much the same.
Thoreau’s “ten honest men” also hearkens back to the Bible, in this
case the story of the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah. When God threatened
to destroy the cities, Abraham asked him if he would still be willing to
destroy them if there were fifty righteous people there who would be
destroyed with the rest. God said in that case, he’d back off. Then Abraham
said, what about 45? how about 40? 30? 20? 10?
He managed to negotiate God down to ten before God got sick of the act and walked away.
Alas, there weren’t even that many righteous people, so God torched the place.
For that matter, Thoreau’s note that in his speech to a mostly-shocked crowd “the seed has not all fallen in stony & shallow ground” also has Biblical roots, as does his “do not let your right hand know what your left hand does” remark.
Even if you’re not a Christian, you almost have to be familiar with the King James Bible just to acquire the vocabulary of metaphors you need to understand the centuries of English-language literature that came after.
By using phrases like these and drawing on the stories they evoked in his
audience, Thoreau is reminding them that his arguments, while challenging,
are rooted in a tradition they can understand and already are familiar with.
As good Christians, they have probably already tried to imagine the Kingdom
of God as being like a little yeast leavening a whole loaf, or whether or not
they are the sort of good ground on which the seeds of good teaching would
land and flourish, or whether if angels came to destroy their town they
would be among the ten righteous people who could argue for them to spare it.
‡ This comes from The Brothers Karamazov, where it is delivered by a saintly monk named Zossima.
He is talking with a woman who is going through a spiritual crisis, and who has
fantasized about going into a religious order and becoming a Mother Theresa
kissing-the-wounds-of-lepers sort. Zossima says that such things are nice
thoughts to have because “some time, unawares, you may do a good deed in
reality,” but they’re just daydreams of saintliness, not the real thing.
If you do not attain happiness, always remember that you are on the right
road, and try not to leave it. Above all, avoid falsehood, every kind of
falsehood, especially falseness to yourself. Watch over your own
deceitfulness and look into it every hour, every minute. Avoid being
scornful, both to others and to yourself. What seems to you bad within you
will grow purer from the very fact of your observing it in yourself. Avoid
fear, too, though fear is only the consequence of every sort of falsehood.
Never be frightened at your own faint-heartedness in attaining love. Don’t be
frightened overmuch even at your evil actions. I am sorry I can say nothing
more consoling to you, for love in action is a harsh and dreadful thing
compared with love in dreams. Love in dreams is greedy for immediate action,
rapidly performed and in the sight of all. Men will even give their lives if
only the ordeal does not last long but is soon over, with all looking on and
applauding as though on the stage. But active love is labour and fortitude,
and for some people too, perhaps, a complete science.
Employers can help tax resisting employees by refusing to withhold taxes from their salaries (see The Picket Line, ) and by refusing to cooperate with salary levies (see The Picket Line, ).
But that’s not all.
Today I’ll mention some other ways that employers have helped (or can help) resisting employees:
Kenya in 2008
During a post-election crisis of legitimacy in Kenya in , Charles Kanjama urged the opposition to embrace a nonviolent resistance strategy, with tax resistance at the forefront.
As part of this, he urged people to adopt both legal and illegal forms of tax avoidance.
Among the legal techniques he advocated was a sort of tax delaying tactic:
Compliant tax avoidance plays within the rules of the current tax statutes to reduce, delay or eliminate tax liability.
For PAYE for example, participating employers and employees can enter into a voluntary contract to convert monthly employment into quarterly or half-yearly employment, thus effectively delaying tax liability for several months.
The Catholic Worker
As Dorothy Day noted,
The C.W. [Catholic Worker] has never paid salaries.
Everyone gets board, room, and clothes (tuition, recreation included, as the C.W. is in a way a school of living).
So we do not need to pay federal income taxes.
The Other Side
Another Christian activist magazine, The Other Side, published .
Staff member Dee Dee Risher said: “We’ve built into our workplace certain small disciplines to remind ourselves that we are on this path of conversion.
Our salaries are structured to allow staff members to do war-tax resistance and are intentionally low to remind us of the struggles of the poor and sharpen our willingness to sacrifice.”
NWTRCC notes
NWTRCC, in its publications, has noted a few cases in which employers have been accommodating when confronted with the unusual needs of war tax resisting employees:
Steve Soucy, [a resister] from Orland, Maine, arranged with his employer to reduce his hours after a levy notice arrived at his workplace.
“I had received a proposed assessment from the IRS for the first years that I’d earned enough to be taxed.
From that notice it was clear they knew my current employer, and so it seemed just a matter of time before they would try to collect directly from my wages.
After some soul searching, I decided to prepare myself to leave that position, or cut back my hours, and I began training for a career change to something which I believe will let me earn money in a way that would be more difficult for the IRS to track.
Up until the notice of attachment I did not tell my employer why I claimed nine exemptions on my W-4, since if they knew, they would be obliged by law to report me.
But once the levy arrived, I was able to be more open about my tax resistance.
I wrote a letter to my boss and my program manager (my supervisor’s boss) explaining that for reasons of conscience, I would no longer be able to continue in my position full time.
I stated my willingness to work up to a certain number of hours per week until they were able to find a replacement, or decide what to do.
I eventually tapered my hours from the maximum allowed before withholding to just a few hours per week, while increasing my employment in my other jobs to cover the loss in income and benefits.
The most rewarding part was talking to my co-workers, who I found quite sympathetic to my reasons for tax resistance.
In a way it was like coming ‘out of the closet,’ and gave them the opportunity to be supportive.”
A counseling session at NWTRCC’s Kansas City gathering got into stories of responding to salary levies and employers.
In a current case, the resister found his employer to be most accommodating and is planning to lower his salary and barter for some benefits that will help keep money from the IRS.
The resister was surprised that his employer was so willing to help — as long as the risks to the business were minimized.
One war tax resister writes: “Rent is always my biggest expense and thus the biggest burden on my practice of war tax resistance.
Usually, I try to arrange housing as a component of one of my jobs.
By doing this, I significantly reduce the amount of cash I need to earn.
I currently work as the caretaker of buildings and grounds at a camp for people with disabilities.
The camp provides me with a residence on the premises so I can keep watch over the facility and so I can be available on short notice for critical maintenance needs.
Although our arrangement is a barter of services in exchange for housing, the value of this particular type of barter is excluded from my income under the Internal Revenue Code…”
Job sharing can be a way of keeping income below taxable levels as well as balancing other parts of life.
Nancy and Gary T. Guthrie, a husband-and-wife parenting team, shared the job of Iowa Peace Network Coordinator.
This allowed them to be involved in both meaningful employment and parenting; it also let them keep their income below taxable levels.
William Hill asks uncomfortable questions
A woman who worked for the gambling bookmaker William Hill asked her employer to stop withholding taxes from her, on the grounds that under international law it would be illegal for her to continue to pay for what she felt to be illegal warfare conducted by the government.
She describes what happened next:
[T]o my amazement, I got a response inviting me to a meeting with the area manager and a chap from Personnel, and we sat down and we discussed the legal implications of paying tax to the U.K. government.
And of course they raised all the normal concerns about the legality of not paying tax, and they showed us a copy of a letter that they had received from the Inland Revenue, so William Hill actually wrote to the Inland Revenue, bringing this matter up, and got a response!
It was the usual whitewash, along the lines of “we are not aware of any law, blah blah,” — however, they also included in that letter that they’d had a series of other inquiries from other people (they didn’t say whether it was just individuals or whether they were other companies).
So the Inland Revenue had already been contacted by other people, already.
So, by the end of the meeting, the area manager of our shops and a chap from Personnel, they both seemed pretty-well convinced of the legality of withholding taxes — of course he had to go to the board of directors: if they’re going to withhold my tax, they’ve got to do it for the whole company, haven’t they, or not at all?
So we’ll see what happens.
Voices in the Wilderness
Corporations can also refuse to pay taxes that they owe as a group.
For example, in the activist group “Voices in the Wilderness” was fined $20,000 for bringing food and medicine into Iraq when that country was under a blockade.
They have refused to pay, saying:
Voices will not pay a penny of this fine.
The economic sanctions regime imposed brutal and lethal punishment on Iraqi people.
The U.S. government would not allow Iraq to rebuild its water treatment system after the U.S. military deliberately destroyed it in .
The U.S. government denied Iraq the ability to purchase blood bags, medical needles, and medicine in adequate supplies — destroying Iraq’s health care system.
We chose to travel to Iraq in order to openly challenge our country’s war against the Iraqi people.
We fully understood that our acts could result in criminal or civil charges.
We acted because when our country’s government is committing a grievous, criminal act, it is incumbent upon each of us to challenge in every nonviolent manner possible the acts of the government.
We choose to continue our noncooperation with the government’s war on the Iraqi people through the simple act of refusing to pay this fine.
To pay the fine would be to collaborate with the U.S. government’s ongoing war against Iraq.
We will not collaborate.
Pickets and other such public demonstrations commonly accompany tax resistance
campaigns. Here are some examples that caught my eye:
During the Tithe War in Ireland, one parliamentarian noted with some panic
a news account of a mock funeral held in Ireland, attended by 100,000
people “who assembled to carry in a procession to the grave two coffins,
on which were inscribed ‘Tithes’ and ‘Rent’.”
The Women’s Tax Resistance League used signs, banners, handbills,
chalked-slogans, and sandwich boards to help get their “No Vote — No Tax”
message across at their public demonstrations.
The Benares hartal of was in
part a strike, but in part a huge demonstration, the duration and peaceful
discipline of which pointed out the determination of the
demonstrators.
When the Rebecca Rioters came to Carmarthen, they came en masse and
during the daytime, almost as a parade. They were “preceded by a band of
musicians playing popular airs, and men bearing placards with the
following enscriptions in large printed letters:” “Justice and lovers of
Justice are we all.” “Freedom and better food.” “Free tolls and
Freedom.”
The tax strike in the French wine-growing region in
was preceded by huge demonstrations and
parades. Wrote one observer:
All observers were struck by the extraordinary perfection of the
organization. It was not necessary once for the troops or police to
interfere with the multitude which was variously estimated was made up
of from 400,000 to 600,000 persons. A feature of the parade was the
large proportion of women participating. Groups from various cities bore
banners with various inscriptions and carried coffins, guillotines,
&c.
Another wrote:
…all night long trains entered the station every quarter of an hour with
crowds, many of whom had been travelling fifteen and twenty hours.
Looking worn and dishevelled, they formed in serried battalions, and,
headed by bands and trumpets and drums, young and old, men, women, and
children, marched to their quarters…
This morning five huge columns, approaching from various quarters,
welded at the Arch Peyrou into one procession nine miles long, and the
march through the streets began at
. Placards threatened, “The
day of reckoning is at hand,” “We will take up arms,” “Down with the
deputies.” Here were 200 handsome Norbannese women in mourning, there
500 young girls robed in white muslin, with tricolor robes.
In in Turkey, mass tax refusal was
backed up by mass demonstrations of as many as 20,000 people, demanding
the repeal of the taxes.
In , anti-Chavez protesters launched a tax
strike by tearing up their income tax forms in a demonstration in which
thousands of demonstrators marched on the tax offices in Caracas.
Farmers in New Zealand threatened to drive their farm equipment onto the
highways to jam the roads in protest against a new greenhouse-gas-targeting
“flatulence tax” on livestock in .
When the authorities tried to impose a tax on dogs in Breslau, Germany,
in 5,000 dogs (and their owners)
descended on city hall to protest.
One of Gandhi’s first experiments with satyagraha was
a strike in South Africa to protest against a tax on Indian immigrants
there. The culmination of that campaign was a massive protest march of
striking workers that deliberately violated laws restricting the right of
travel of Indians.
Ammon Hennacy was fond of accompanying his solitary tax resistance with
periodic fasts and picketings at
IRS
headquarters, typically around the time of the anniversary of the
Hiroshima bombing. He would hand out to passers-by copies of the
Catholic Worker as well as leaflets that
described his own particular protest — while also carrying a sign and
wearing a sandwich-board that put things more concisely.
The previously-untaxed caste of Bhats in India responded to being subjected
to the income tax in dramatic fashion: “Two thousand men turned out to
remonstrate with the Superintendent of Police who appeared on the scene.
He remained firm, whereupon they cut themselves with knives, cursed the
Assessors, bespattering them with their blood, and declared they would
rather die than surrender their birthright. When several were apprehended,
their wives began to hack their persons, and so severely that several have
since died. Up to the last intelligence the Bhats still gloried in their
refusal.”
American war tax resisters frequently hold rallies, pickets, street
theater, and other such actions around “Tax Day” (the date when federal
income tax returns are due). This among other things helps make sure that
their message is one of those represented in the obligatory tax day news
stories. Here is an example:
The group then left for the federal building, in which the
IRS
and a number of other offices are located, at which 75 people burned tax
forms and blockaded the street for a bit. There were no arrests. In
conjunction with the tax form burning, they used a banner with the
quote: “Pardon us, friends, for the fracture of good order, for burning
paper instead of babies,” sent from prison during the Vietnam War by
Daniel Berrigan… They offered their apologies for burning tax forms
instead of Colombian villages, Palestinian schools, Iraqi hospitals,
Filipinos’ mosques and Afghan homes.
In another case:
After a mock President Clinton bragged to onlookers about the many areas
in which the
U.S. was #1 -
military spending, arms sales, violent gun deaths,
etc. — he
drove home the point with an 8-foot Patriot missile tossed into a group
of students, parents, nurses and other ordinary people.
Mass dying ensued, followed by an appearance by the grim reaper himself. Ostensibly there to collect bodies, he assented to an interview with M.C. Daniel Woodham.
Death was the only one at the rally willing to even attempt an explanation of the maniacal logic of a still-bloated U.S. military budget.
Some war tax resisters in Wales brought their tax payment to the tax office in a bucket of blood. When the payment was refused, they poured the blood over the steps of the building.
In members of the Magdalene House Catholic Worker held a demonstration at the IRS office in which they “laid out a cloth altar with candles, flowers, and health care items to represent life, and tax forms with their blood poured on them to represent death.
They held a worship service and talked about why they were there.”
This was enough for several of them to get arrested.
During the rebellion against Thatcher’s poll tax, there were several demonstrations.
The Scottish Trade Union Conference organized a number of rallies,
including a 30,000-person march in Edinburgh, but then it put its weight
behind a strange 11-minute-long general strike at which people all over
Scotland were supposed to briefly stop working to engage in some short
anti-poll-tax activism. That protest didn’t go anywhere and the Union
Conference lost some credibility as a movement organizer.
Hundreds of thousands of people turned out to demonstrations in England,
with some of these rallies and marches turning into riots (or being
attacked by police, depending on whose stories you believe). On such
occasions, the riots became the message of the demonstrations, whatever
the intentions of the organizers were. This had mixed consequences for
the movement.
The Auburn, New York, Citizen published an article about the Catholic Workers’ “Peter Maurin Farm” in its edition.
If you read to the end you’ll see how the project was in part designed to help the war tax resistance of those who participated in it:
Marlboro, N.Y. (AP) — Drive about four miles west of town, turn at the rainbow painted mailbox, and dodge the ruts in the dirt road.
You’ll arrive at the Peter Maurin farm, a community of a dozen or so people, a dog, three cats and about 40 chickens.
It is a peaceful 55-acre parcel with two houses, a garage and a few barns.
A statue of St. Joseph overlooks five acres that are cultivated organically to grow corn, tomatoes, asparagus and other vegetables.
The food goes to soup kitchens in New York City and Newburgh, and to neighbors who need food.
This is a place where the words of Jesus Christ, whose birth we celebrate, are taken seriously.
To feed the poor, clothe the naked.
A place where the four resident children will not receive guns or Rambo dolls, and will play almost all day because TV is unavailable.
It is a farm of the Catholic Worker Movement, an organization founded in the Great Depression by Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin, both deceased.
Maurin, a son of French peasants, and Day, a socialist writer and a Catholic convert, began the movement in with the monthly Catholic Worker, a newspaper which still sells for a penny.
They spoke out about the unsheltered in a wealthy nation, and American spending on technology and weapons.
They urged simple living, not continuous possession of more expensive clothes, cars and homes.
And they established soup kitchens to serve the unemployed of the Bowery, and later “hospitality houses,” which number around 50 today.
Catholic Worker members need not be Roman Catholic.
“At the Worker you can just drop in.
You don’t have to give your life history, you don’t even have to give your name,” said George Lee, who has worked Catholic Worker houses in New York.
“If you want to do a story on the Catholic Worker, why don’t you just print the Sermon On The Mount?”
Carol Campain, 38, asked a reporter.
She was skeptical and said past articles failed to capture the flavor of the farm.
Campain has been with the movement .
She went to Tivoli, where an 86-acre Catholic Worker faxm operated .
Catholic Worker officials said they wanted a site closer to New York and founded the Marlboro farm in .
About 10 people came down from Tivoli, including Campain.
One who remains is George Collins, 71. A spry farm worker, he spends much time alone in the winter to meditate on scripture or lives of the saints.
During World War Ⅱ, Collins served “27 months and 20 days” in a Minnesota prison for refusing to bear arms. As a conscientious objector, he said Christ told disciples to turn the other cheek.
There is also Theodore “Slim” Kidlon, 67, a quiet 50-year movement veteran who is described as “saving nothing, knowing everything.”
And there is Arthur “Arty” Sullivan, 67, an enthusiastic man who walks with a limp from childhood polio.
Sullivan says he heard about the movement in while working for a chemical company in New York.
He wanted to help others and donated time at a Catholic Worker shelter to fold newspapers.
“I was asked to go to Tivoli in for a three-day weekend,” he says, adding he stayed for 14 years to clean house, do laundry and live simply.
“You come to the Worker, you learn how to do for yourself and for other people,” he said.
Dorothy Day, who lectured around the nation, marched with migrant workers and stood alongside conscientious objectors, stayed at Tivoli a few months a year.
Sullivan brought her coffee at 6:30 every morning.
Fervently Roman Catholic, she was straightforward, outgoing and generous.
Sullivan said “She gave her coal away a few times, and she’d have to borrow mine,” he says.
Dozens of people pass through the Peter Maurin farm.
Some stay a few days, others for years.
The Catholic Worker organization contributes money to run the farm, and residents say they also help buy food or whatever is needed.
The Dowdy family — 44-year-old Ralph, 34-year-old Else, and their sons, Jonathon, 8, and Peter, 6 — arrived last summer.
Ralph and Else met in a Christian community in Israel in and married.
Besides farm and house chores, Ralph does carpentry part time.
He says he earns little so that he will be exempt from federal taxes and not have to contribute to military spending.
Wearing patched jeans, he says he and Else want a simple life.
“The elements are human service, reverence for praxis (practice of a skill), reverence for reflection, the dedication of one’s life to the poor and the underclass, and resistance to organized violence,” he said.
Born an only child in Norway, Else says sharing a house means sacrificing privacy, but also brings good company.
She is unsure how long they will stay, but feels drawn to a community with a basis in religious faith.
“I want something more than just church on Sunday,” she says.
The Dowdys do not want to have their own apartment or house, and do not want to make much money.
Ralph says he wonders if his young son, Jonathan, realizes what this means.
“I worry about it, you know, when he grows up, what kind of pressure he’s going to face.
I’m not going to go gung-ho for an upper middle class lifestyle.”
Carol Campain has just come in after chopping firewood for an old woman who lives in the area.
She talks about the movement.
Peter Maurin died in and Dorothy Day in .
They devoted their lives to denouncing materialism and war, and helping the poor.
Campain drives a truck for the Hudson Valley Federation of Food Cooperatives, but only five days a month because she also does not want to pay “federal war taxes.”
She says 66 cents of each federal tax dollar goes to the military.
Christ’s teachings, and his death, are clear lessons of non-violence, she said.
But she admitted that her approach — buying fewer goods, not contributing to military spending, letting go of conventional careers to serve the poor — is too much for most.
“It starts shaking everything that it’s built on,” she says of America.
“It’s too radical.
It’s too radical, but so was He.”
And she points again to the crucifix, depicting the man whose birth we celebrate.
In other news…
The IRS is among the agencies being hit by the budget “sequester” everyone’s been gabbing about.
If Congress doesn’t pass yet another piece of misguided legislation further on down the road (big if, that), the agency will need to lop about $600 million out of its budget.
They’re hoping to make some of these cuts not to their operational budget but to the payouts it makes to people in the form of refundable tax credits and informer payoffs (which at least one commentator thinks the agency has no authority to do).
The Obama administration and the various government agencies and government-funded programs that are facing sequester-related budget cuts are making shameless use of “The Washington Monument Ploy” in which they claim the cuts will necessitate threats to the most popular, picturesque, and sentimental parts of their spending.
The military-industrial complex has been particularly shameful about this ploy, with Obama as its spokesman.
“Already, the threat of these cuts has forced the Navy to delay an aircraft carrier that was supposed to deploy to the Persian Gulf,” he claimed, which would be delightful if it weren’t bullshit.
Turns out, though, that it actually is easier for the Pentagon to make abrupt cuts to mission-critical operations (things the military just happens to do for historical reasons, like fight wars) than to cut corporate welfare political pork projects (the real meat & potatoes).
Elsewise… for what I think is the first time, the gathering is going to be broadcast over them thar interwebs.
You can eavesdrop starting Friday afternoon at http://new.livestream.com/accounts/3800127/nwtrcc.
The IRS continues to get smacked around in the partisan arena, with the Republicans smelling blood and baring their teeth, and the Obama administration having no hesitation in throwing agency bureaucrats overboard to save their sinking ship.
The scandal’s momentum has caused reporters and others to dig deeper, to give credence and airtime to previously-neglected stories, and to instead overhype what in other seasons would be ignored.
An anti-abortion group released a recording of a conversation with an IRS agent in which the agent told them that they couldn’t be a tax-exempt organization if they “use your religious belief to tell other people you don’t have a belief” or “take all kinds of confrontation activities [sic] and also put something on a website and ask people to take action against the abortion clinic” or “go to the front of the abortion clinic and… come for protesting activity, and then go up to the woman and tell the woman they should not do that.”
“When you conduct religious activities,” the agent told the group, “meanwhile you have to respect other people’s beliefs, other people’s religion.
You cannot use any kind of, you know, confrontation way, or to, or against other groups or devalue other groups, other people’s beliefs. OK?”
In a letter to the group in response to their tax-exempt status application (they were applying for 501(c)3 which has stricter guidelines than the 501(c)4 groups that have been the main focus of the recent IRS scandal), the agent had asked the group to “assure:”
that the information you distribute or present to the public are not representing biased and unsupported opinions;
that the information presented or distributed are with sufficiently full and fair exposition of the pertinent facts as to permit an individual or the public to form an independent opinion or conclusion
The letter went on to claim that “Activities that are conducted to expose the racist agenda (as you claimed) of the abortion industry” were an example of activities that are “neither educational nor charitable in nature.”
The agent claimed that:
[A]n organization’s activities may not be considered serving educational purpose, if an organization carries out activities that aims to deny or reduce the rights of another segment of the community; that are designed to influence public opinion in favor of its advocated position; that may have adverse effect on the day to day operation of public health facilities that may be detrimental to the community as a whole; and that show a type of propaganda to defy other’s beliefs or viewpoints on the same matter.
A second letter contained more of the same, telling the group that because their educational material was “condemnatory and opinionated” and made claims with “no data source provided and no explanation given on how the conclusion is made” and included expressions that were “aimed to inflame the hostility to the community health clinic or family planning clinic which hold opposition position or practice on the issues of abortion,” and included “no intelligent discussion of the subject of abortions and no information presented to inform the public concerning alternatives to the present law and practice related to abortions,” that the group might not qualify for tax-exempt status.
(The IRS eventually backed down and granted the group tax-exempt status last month.)
The president of another anti-abortion group told Congressional investigators that an IRS agent had told them “that we needed to send in a letter with the entire board’s signatures stating that under penalty of perjury we would not picket/protest or organize groups to picket/protest outside of Planned Parenthood.
Upon receiving such a letter, she indicated that the IRS would allow our application to go through.”
Such restrictions on the attitudes the group must have or profess towards people with contrary beliefs, what sorts of arguments their outreach material must contain, and what activities it must refrain from engaging in, do not appear to have much support in the law.
But apparently IRS agents have come to believe that it is part of their mandate to police groups that are applying for tax-exempt status in this way.
Here’s an excerpt from the latest draft of my upcoming book on the tactics of successful tax resistance campaigns that speaks to this:
Troubles with Tax-Exempt Status
The legal conditions of tax-exempt, non-profit status in the United States
have proven to be a powerful way for the government to make activist groups
timid. Anti-abortion tax resister Jerry DePyper noted that this was a big
reason why he was making no headway in trying to get the tax resistance
tactic on the agenda of the large anti-abortion groups. He spoke with two
leaders in that movement and reported: “Both… say that no recognized pro-life
leader would want to risk it because of the legal issues with the
IRS,
and they don’t want to lose their tax-exempt status.”
Ruth Benn of NWTRCC
had a similar experience:
I was talking about a potential war tax resistance workshop with a group for
which I have great respect and who are very supportive of war tax
resistance. When I suggested a certain activity as part of the workshop, the
organizer hurriedly said, “Oh, no, we couldn’t sponsor that; we’re 501(c)3
[the section of the legal code that governs tax-exempt non-profits].”
For this and related reasons, some tax resisting groups, like Catholic Worker
and NWTRCC,
have never tried to apply for tax-exempt non-profit status. In 1972 the
IRS
told Catholic Worker that it owed some $300,000 in taxes and penalties
because of this. The tax agency eventually retreated, acknowledging that
Catholic Worker was a de facto non-profit charity, even if
it was never going to fill out the de jure paperwork. This
episode turned out to be a good propaganda opportunity for Catholic Worker.
The New York Times editorialized: “Surely the
IRS
must have genuine frauds to investigate. Surely there must be some worthwhile
work this agency could be doing instead of obstructing acts of corporal mercy
for the poor.” Dorothy Day added:
The New York Evening Post also editorialized on
our situation. The National Catholic Reporter
and the Commonweal editors also registered their
protest and other papers followed suit. Letters come in daily from our
friends, reassuring, comforting, indignant at the government, a few of them
indignant at us, that we cause them so much worry.…
…[T]he CW refuses to pay taxes, or to “structure itself ” so as to be
exempt from taxes. We are afraid of that word “structure.” We refuse to
become a “corporation.”… [W]e do not intend to “incorporate” the Catholic
Worker movement.
Some tax resistance news briefs from the U.S.:
Ruth Benn reports on her visit with war tax resisters in Milwaukee and some of what she found when browsing war tax resistance-related material at the Dorothy Day / Catholic Worker Collection held in the Special Collections of Marquette University.
Cindy Sheehan profiles war tax resister S. Brian Willson on her blog.
You may have heard in the news that you can move to Puerto Rico and thereby avoid U.S. income and capital gains taxes.
Turns out that’s largely true, if you do it right, at least according to Forbes contributing writer Robert W. Wood.
I dug up some additional newspaper mentions of Ammon Hennacy’s work.
This one comes from the Gazette and Daily of York, Pennsylvania:
A-Bomb Is Viewed As ‘One Great Sin’
Ammon Hennacy, associate editor of Catholic Worker, tells Lancaster meeting atomic bomb is ‘the one great sin’ , says he won’t pay taxes to support warlike governments.
The atomic bomb last night was described as “the one great sin” by Ammon Hennacy, associate editor of the Catholic Worker.
Hennacy, an anarchist, pacifist, vegetarian, and Catholic, spoke on “Why As a Christian I Refuse to Pay Taxes” at a meeting at the Evangelical and Reformed seminary in Lancaster sponsored by the Fellowship of Reconciliation.
Hennacy said one has to have been in jail to have been a radical.
He has been in jail many times.
His first experiences in prison were during World War Ⅰ when he refused to register for the draft.
It was there that he was put in solitary confinement (at the time he was a Socialist and atheist) with only the Bible to read.
It was in the Atlanta prison that he became a convinced pacifist.
Later he became a Catholic “out of steady osmosis with Dorothy Day,” managing editor of the Catholic Worker and outspoken pacifist.
Hennacy said he refuses to pay taxes or vote because they are used to support governments which as a whole are warlike.
People who support the government by paying taxes, he said, are guilty of the atomic bomb
Pickets Revenuers
Last week Hennacy picketed the bureau of internal revenue office to protest the payment of taxes.
He said he writes the “tax man” and tells him how much money he has made and how much he owes and that he is not going to pay.
He has not been imprisoned yet for refusal to pay.
Dorothy Day does not pay taxes, either, he said, but she doesn’t even bother sending in a tax form stating her earnings.
Beginning he plans to fast for 11 days as penance for his country’s having dropped the atomic bomb on Japan.
It was that the bombing took place, so he will fast one day for each year since then.
Hennacy was a social worker in Milwaukee for 11 years until .
He quit his job then because he refused to register for the draft and thought he would get a five year prison sentence.
But he had been jailed during World War Ⅰ and was not bothered.
It was near that time that income taxes were first withheld from salaries.
In order that he would have nothing withheld, Hennacy did yard and farm work in the Southwest.
“Tax men,” Hennacy said, have no malice but are just stupid.
He said they stole Daily Worker property and tore things up.
His own paper also pays no taxes and the “tax men” could do the same thing, but “we won’t give them a list of contributors who help us make up the deficit.”
The hierarchy of the Catholic church has not tried to do anything about the radicalism of those associated with the Catholic Worker because they live “in voluntary poverty like Gandhi did,” according to Hennacy.
They have incurred the wrath of the “Cadillac Catholics,” and a monsignor who had petitions signed for McCarthy had Hennacy arrested for selling the Catholic Worker on New York streets, he said.
The Catholic Worker’s circulation now is 65,000, he said.
Before the paper opposed Franco’s government in Spain it was 170,000, he said.
As the ethical background for his beliefs and actions, Hennacy cited the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus’ teachings to “turn the other cheek” and to “love your enemy.”
An Associated Press wire photo from :
Thirsty Picket — Ammon Hennacy, associate editor of the Catholic Worker in New York City, takes a drink of water as he sits on a chair given him by an AEC employe as Hennacy began what he said would be a 12-day fasting-picketing of the Las Vegas AEC offices.
He carries a supply of the newspaper he edits which he hands out to passers, protesting atom bomb testing.
The large sign he displays contains quotations from a speech by Pope Pius Ⅻ.
In the version of Don Dedera’s “Coffee Break” column in the Arizona Republic, was this note:
A few weeks ago Colleague Bud DeWald was hurrying down bustling Lexington Avenue in frantic New York City when he spied Anarchist Ammon Hennacy, Phoenix’s One-Man Revolution, placidly picketing the Internal Revenue Service.
“I refuse to pay income tax,” the Hennacy placard read.
“I have just about conquered New York,” Ammon told Bud.
“Next fall I am going to Salt Lake City and go to work on the Mormons.”
Dedera was back, in the issue, to report that Hennacy wasn’t kidding:
Mormons, Don’t Say We Didn’t Warn You
Phoenix’s One-Man Revolution, flushed with its conquest of America’s largest town, soon will lay siege to Salt Lake City.
Ammon Hennacy means to save the Mormons.
Since the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has never experienced a Hennacy siege, a public warning may be in order.
The struggle should start on even terms.
Opponents are forever granting Hennacy the weapons of surprise and secrecy, by no wish of his own.
For example, the other day when he returned to rest and visit friends in Phoenix, his first act was to contact the Phoenix FBI office and announce:
This is Ammon Hennacy, a subversive.
I am a Christian Anarchist, and I don’t believe in any government at all.
I am against war and the bomb, and I never pay income taxes.
I’m going to give you my address and schedule, in case you want to watch me.
Indeed, the FBI likely has a fat dossier on Hennacy.
He served time for dodging the World War Ⅰ draft.
Although he now damns communism as moral and economic fraud, he was a card-carrying member for years.
It was as a picketer of the Phoenix Internal Revenue office that Hennacy earned the nickname, One-Man Revolution.
He worked on farms which deducted no taxes.
At tax time, he would fill out a form, taking care to change the wording, “U.S. non-Taxpayer.”
Across the bottom he would write:
“This is how much I made last year.
This is how much tax I owe.
Come and get it.”
He said he never had to pay taxes.
Once in New York City a pair of T-men interviewed him and warned, “We have to make our report, and you’ll probably be charged within six months.”
Hennacy said he didn’t hear from them again.
Hennacy also has fasted 40 days in front of the Atomic Energy Commission.
Every April 28 he appears in New York City to disobey the Civil Defense drills.
Usually he is arrested.
“Every year the state makes New York crawl underground for eight minutes,” he said.
“There is no safety in the subways.
A New Yorker can do nothing in an atomic war but pray.”
At 78, Hennacy is rosy and unwrinkled.
His hair is gray, thick and shiny.
But he has mellowed from the day when he would bait a banker for breakfast.
“I shall make my mission into the land of the Mormons because no one has worked with them, and I find them an admirable people.
They are hard-working, responsible — people of integrity.
“My only hope is to out-Mormon the Mormons.
I will open a Joe Hill house, named for the IWW martyr, and feed the bums and maybe put out a newspaper.
“I hear the Mormons work in the fields for their charities.
I’ll work with them.
They fast once a month; I’ll fast every week.
I don’t drink or smoke, but I’ll have to give up coffee and tea.
I’ll go to Mass every day, and as a demonstration, I’ll give 10 per cent of my income to my own church, which I call the Bingo Catholic Church.”
Salt Lake.
Man the walls.
Erne Linford of The Salt Lake Tribune was on the scene when Hennacy arrived (from the issue):
Hennacy’s Coming
Salt Lake City was quietly minding its own business last week when Ammon Hennacy blew into town.
You may have lived such a sheltered life that you don’t know about this one-man revolution, but you likely will soon know him by reputation, if not personally.
Of all the places on the globe, Mr. Hennacy has decided to make Utah his future home.
He is aware that peace officers and some residents will not consider this a blessing.
Ammon, gray-haired and wiry at 65, is a self-proclaimed “Christian Anarchist.”
He doesn’t believe in any government.
He is against war and the bomb.
He never pays income taxes (and claims he gets away with it, Brack [J. Bracken Lee, Utah governor, who had his own tax resistance crusade]).
Though he once carried a Communist Party card, he now damns communism as a fraud.
Hennacy pickets institutions and projects he objects to.
In fact he cut short his Salt Lake visit last week to hurry to New York for his annual refusal to comply with the civil defense bomb shelter regulations there.
He expects to go to jail for refusing to retreat to the subway when the sirens wail.
But having been to jail many times, he considers it a mere nuisance, no deterrent.
In questioning the genial libertarian we deliberately used such terms as “publicity-seeker,” “professional troublemaker,” and “police-baiter,” but Ammon’s clear eyes never flickered.
“I’ve been called most everything,” he explains.
“But at 65 I’ve outgrown being affected by headlines.
I just work for what I believe in — or against what I don’t believe in.
I’ll never stop till I die.”
Hennacy plans to open in Salt Lake City a Joe Hill House, named for the Utah IWW martyr, to feed and bed transients.
He may even put out a paper.
For funds he will do day labor on nearby farms. (He works only on a daily basis, in order to avoid having taxes deducted).
Well, don’t say you weren’t warned about Hennacy’s imminent invasion of Utah.
Hennacy returned to Arizona for a visit later that year, and was interviewed by a reporter for Flagstaff’s Arizona Daily Sun ():
One-Man Revolution
The “one-man revolution,” Ammon Hennacy, 68, visited Flagstaff this week.
He has spent a lifetime espousing the doctrine that the only way the world can be improved is for the individual to improve himself.
Hennacy calls himself a Christian anarchist.
He says he is so far left politically that he makes “the right-wingers of the Republican party look like communists.”
He adds that if people would behave themselves, there would be no necessity for any government.
He has no use for any political group.
He believes, literally, and in every aspect of life, in the Golden Rule.
“The political parties are all going at this thing backwards,” he says.
“You have to start with the individual.”
His aim is to live as closely as he can by the teachings of Christ as exemplified and codified in the Sermon on the Mount.
He believes in turning the other cheek, in going the second mile.
He works at it.
“Possessions are trash,” he says.
“If you want to be really free, don’t own anything.
Things you think you own actually own you.”
Hennacy carries his few belongings in a small suitcase — some articles of clothing, pictures of his two daughters, a Bible and a couple of other religious books, and a memo book.
“If I lost the whole business it wouldn’t hurt me any,” he says.
Hennacy has staunch friends in many unexpected places.
Among these are Frank Brophy of Phoenix, banker and philanthropist, who by no stretch of the imagination could be considered a radical.
Hennacy doesn’t believe in taxes, hence doesn’t pay any.
Years when his income necessitates the filing of a tax return, he files it.
But he never pays the tax bill.
He is cheerfully ready at any time to go to jail for his beliefs, and has done so many times.
Hennacy is a slight, wiry Irishman whose eyes twinkle with humor and love.
He loves everybody including the wardens he has met in what he calls “a professional capacity.”
He has been arrested more than 30 times and served sentences many times.
He served eight months in solitary confinement in Atlanta Federal penitentiary more than 40 years ago.
He had nothing to read but the Bible.
He read it six times.
When he came out, he says, he had not only retained his sanity by reading, but had become a Christian, and he has been working hard at it ever since.
Among his friends are U.S. agents who have tried in vain to make him pay his taxes.
Hennacy is on the way to Salt Lake City where he will work as a farm laborer.
He can always find a job because he doesn’t argue over wage scales or fringe benefits, and works harder than anybody else; but he insists on being paid in cash each day, without deductions for taxes.
His aim is to establish a mission in due time, “without preaching.”
He is a member of the Catholic church.
He says he has no idea of converting the Mormons to his beliefs.
“They are good people, who live the Christian life as they see it,” he says.
“I enjoy being with them.
To them, religion is not something to be saved for Sunday.”
“If the Mormons want my ideas, they’ll get them, but I do not expect to make many converts, in Utah or anywhere else.
Living by the Golden Rule is pretty strong fare for most people.”
He is frequently asked if he expects to change the world.
“No,” he smiles, “and the world isn’t going to change me, either.”
When you look at his stubborn chin and smiling blue eyes, you can believe it.
Hennacy was back at the Atomic Energy Commission headquarters for a picket , as seen in this Associated Press article, as found in the Albuquerque Journal of :
Pickets Protest Nuclear Tests At Nevada Site
Las Vegas, Nev. (AP) — Nuclear explosions at the Nevada test site 65 miles northwest of Las Vegas were protested by two pickets.
Ammon Hennacy, 68, and Mrs. Carol Gorgen, 40, carried signs, which stated:
“Easter Message — Peace Not Scare War.”
“Every Test Kills.”
“Thou Shalt Not Kill.”
The two picketed the Atomic Energy Commission headquarters in what Hennacy said was a one-day stand.
Hennacy, who said his life has been marked by jail terms because of various crusades, said he also has picketed air raid drills, income tax, and capital punishment.
Hennacy said he was a mission operator in Salt Lake City.
Mrs. Gorgen said she was a housewife from San Francisco.
Both said they opposed income tax because it supports “war efforts.”
Here’s one way Hennacy tried to get his message across while in Salt Lake City (from the Salt Lake Tribune):
Lectures Tonight
“Thoreau’s Message for Today,” will be the subject of a lecture by Ammon Hennacy at the Joseph Hill House of Hospitality and St. Joseph’s Refuge, 72 Post Office Pl. (340 South),
The Daily Independent Journal of San Rafael, California, published this note in its issue:
Bruce Sloan of Kentfield informs us he has just had a visit from Ammon Hennacy, a Catholic anarchist, of Salt Lake City.
Asked what that is, Sloan said, he’s a Catholic and he’s an anarchist.
Hennacy runs the Joe Hill House of Hospitality and St. Joseph’s Refuge, where he gives free meals and beds down sober transients.
He was in Marin to look for a Dominican priest and confer with people who are tax refusers.
United Press International sent this dispatch out over its wires in :
Man Pickets To Protest War Tactics
Salt Lake City (UPI) — For one hour each day, , a grey-haired man, looking younger than his 72 years, pickets in front of the U.S. Post Office.
Ammon Hennacy, director of Joe Hill House of Hospitality and St. Joseph’s Refuge, is carrying on his protest against U.S. military intervention in Viet Nam.
A sign he carries clearly announces he is against payment of taxes for war.
Opposing Communism and welfare state capitalism, Hennacy has many friends who stop to say help as he marches each work day from noon to 1 p.m. A few people are antagonistic when they question what he’s doing, while others read his pamphlet and discuss the protest.
he started 20 days of fasting for his personal penance in the 20 years since the United States dropped the atom bomb on Hiroshima.
he has added one day of fasting, taking nothing but water for subsistence.
In the first three days he lost 10 pounds, he said, but anticipates he will lose no more than a pound a day for the next 17 days.
“We have tried the ‘illusion of violence’ long enough,” his pamphlet says, “let us try the power of love.”
The Salt Lake Tribune also covered this protest in its issue:
Protestor Plans Fast Birthday
Ammon Hennacy, director of Joe Hill House of Hospitality, 1131 S. 1st West, will celebrate his 72nd birthday by completing of fasting in protest of “paying taxes for the war in Viet Nam.”
The white-haired pacifist said he will continue his noon-hour picketing in front of the Post Office on Main Street Monday through Friday during a planned 20-day period of fasting .
The 20 days mark one for each year since the World War Ⅱ atom-bombing of Hiroshima.
“I’ve lost 13 pounds this week,” Mr. Hennacy said.
In Hennacy competed for attention with “an acid-rock band” at an Arizona State University anti-war rally.
An Arizona Republic article briefly summarized his contribution:
Ammon Hennacy, 75, of Salt Lake City, who identifies himself as a Christian-pacifist-anarchist, said persons who believe in war should enlist and fight and those who are against war should resist the draft.
Hennacy told the students, “I don’t believe in government any place.
I believe in self-government.”
He also said the students should be more radical so they could become anarchists, too.
Hennacy died .
The Associated Press obituary read:
“One-Man Revolution” Dies Of Heart Ailment in Utah
Salt Lake City (AP) — Ammon Hennacy, an unsinkable individualist who called himself the “one-man revolution” and spent a lifetime protesting war and capital punishment, is dead at 76.
Hennacy died of a heart ailment after suffering a heart attack last week while picketing against the scheduled execution of two murderers.
He cut a uniquely personal path through life, proclaiming principles that sometimes seemed at odds.
Hennacy refused to pay tax, or to accept Social Security benefits.
But almost daily he would trundle through Salt Lake City with a grocery cart, collecting donated food.
The food went back to his Joe Hill House of Hospitality, where transients could find a meal and a bed.
He was a “christian-anarchist-pacifist,” Hennacy said.
He urged revolution; but it was to be peaceful, where a man changed himself before trying to change society.
An anarchist, Hennacy once said, was a person “who doesn’t need a cop to make him behave.”
He was born in Negley, Ohio, in and bounced across the country at a variety of jobs before ending up in Utah.
For many years he picketed and fasted in front of the Salt Lake Post Office each summer to protest the U.S. bombing of Hiroshima.
As each year passed, he added one day to his fast.
His final vigil, in , lasted 24 days.
The Arizona Republic responded to the news in an editorial:
A Gentle Anarchist
A friend sent us a clipping from the New York Times obituary columns the other day.
He wrote on it, “You remember Ammon, the pure in heart anarchist.”
That’s an apt description for Ammon Hennacy, who used to spend his winters in Phoenix.
Unlike most winter visitors, Ammon had no letters of credit or travelers checks, and very little cash.
He would work as an irrigator, back in before the citrus groves were turned into housing developments.
On Sundays he would sell copies of The Catholic Worker while discussing “Christian Anarchy” with the priests and clergymen of the various churches in the Valley.
The pay wasn’t particularly good, but Ammon was sure of one thing — none of it could be withheld by an employer who followed the instructions of the Internal Revenue Service.
However, he wasn’t a tax-evader, in the sense of doing anything fraudulent.
He filed a carefully audited income tax return each year, and then challenged the government to try to collect the amount due.
Ammon usually accompanied his ritualistic filing of the federal income tax return by picketing the Post Office Building, which used to house the IRS.
He obviously wanted to get arrested, but someone at IRS knew better.
So then Ammon would go on hunger strikes, which didn’t impress the carnivorous among us because even on his regular diet he was a vegetarian who wouldn’t even drink carbonated beverages.
He also fasted on the anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima — atomic and nuclear bombs were his own particular devils.
One of his favorite foods, when he allowed himself the luxury of eating, was bread made from a flour that he claimed came from cereals grown by the Hopis 100 years ago.
He insisted the cereal had been preserved in Hopi pots because of the unequaled climatic conditions on the mesas.
Ammon Hennacy was 77 years old when he died in Salt Lake City on , according to the N.Y. Times.
He was running the Joe Hill House of Hospitality for Migrants and Migrant Workers, and was a contributing columnist for The Catholic Worker, edited by Dorothy Day in New York.
He was the author of several books, including “The One Man Revolution in America,” slated for publication in .
During World War Ⅰ he went to prison for pacifist activities, but claimed he was unlike most pacifists because he could see the funny side of things.
He was locked up 30 times for various protest activities, including five times for refusing to participate in civil defense exercises in New York during World War Ⅱ.
At one time or another he was a Socialist, a pacifist, a Quaker, an anarchist, and finally a Roman Catholic.
He protested about nearly everything on the contemporary scene, but unlike most of today’s protesters he didn’t try to avoid punishment for breaking the law.
He’d never dream of burning the records in a draft board, locking up a university dean, or disrupting a court by using profanity on the judge.
Ammon knew Marx and Engels, but his radicalism sprang from the heart of history’s most radical experiment in government — the continuing revolution under which Americans rule themselves.
We don’t know where the “pure in heart anarchist” is today, but we’ll bet he is protesting without venom, and that he is able to find something funny in the lurches that the locomotive of history is making as it goes around one bend after another.
Here’s a Washington Post News Service dispatch about the tax resistance of
Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker movement that I found in a newspaper from
:
The Bowery
Poverty worker bring pressured for back taxes
by Colman McCarthy
New York — Grubby and dingy as ever, the Bowery
is said to be kindlier in the summertime on its used-up and trapped people who
endure some of the country’s severest poverty.
Cold weather can kill the sidewalks in alcoholic daze [sic.]. But
summer nights let them live to another morning. Not that that’s much, but at
least the guillotine of misery does not fall so harshly; hard days are pain
enough without hard weather.
Dorothy Day has worked among the Bowery’s forgotten and lonely most of her 74
years, kicking poverty in the teeth not with safe programs and committees but
by living among the poor and personally dispensing food, clothing, and
shelter; these are the basic gifts in the corporal work of mercy and rescue.
Refuses to pay
, however, promises more strain
for Miss Day, not less. The Internal Revenue Service has sent her a letter
claiming $296,359 in back taxes and penalties. A second
IRS
action involves taxes on a bequest left to her by a deceased spinster; Miss
Day’s Catholic worker group is “political,” said the
IRS, not
charitable, and therefore not exempt from taxes.
The dispute has significance because Dorothy Day has no personal wealth or
money of her own. All that she earns or is given by others goes directly to
the Bowery destitute; her operation,
St. Joseph’s House, 36 East
1st
St. New York is one charity
where there is no handsome rake-off at the top for administrators, per diems,
office rent, speaker bureaus, or other dams that often block the flow of money
to the poor.
There is no question that Miss Day has not been paying her taxes in the last
few years. She has never paid them. The
IRS
allows tax exemptions for charitable organizations, but Miss Day said that
“our refusal to apply for exemption status in our practice of the works of
mercy is part of our protest against war and the present social ‘order’ which
brings on wars today.” To pay taxes, the Catholic worker believes, is to
become a part, directly or indirectly, of the government’s philosophy that
wars and military force can solve human problems.
A pacifist and personalist (be what you want the other person to be), Miss Day
is unlike many in the peace movement, first, because she has opposed all our
wars, and second, because she has never wasted a syllable in denouncing or
moralizing about the politicians or generals who believe in military force.
“The Catholic worker movement,” she says, “believes that tyranny and injustice
must be fought by spiritual weapons, by nonviolence, and by noncooperation. It
is not only that we must follow our conscience in opposing the government in
war. We believe also that the government has no right to legislate as to who
can or who are to perform the works of mercy. Only accredited agencies have
the status of tax-exempt institutions… as personalists, as an unincorporated
group, we will not apply for this ‘privilege.’ ”
The IRS
and Miss Day were to have met in court in
— on the bequest case — but
the trial has been postponed. A number of citizens have been protesting and
arguing her case to the
IRS.
John Cogley, a fellow at the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions,
Santa Barbara, Calif., and
who once worked on the soup line at
St. Joseph’s House, said: “For
50 years, Dorothy Day has served the poor, living in the slums, eating
tasteless food, wearing cast-off clothes, shivering in the winter, sweltering
in the summer.
“Ridiculous”
“There is something ridiculous about the richest government in the world,
after all these years, demanding that Miss Day turn over money given to her to
meet the simplest needs of the nation’s destitute. I am not a tax lawyer but I
have millionaire friends who tell me that they pay no income tax. Like the
wealthy governor of my state, Ronald Reagan, they have managed somehow to
avoid the tax and to do so quite legally. Surely there must be a loop-hole to
cover the case of that rarest of Americans, a person who lives in accordance
with the Sermon on the Mount. If there isn’t, perhaps we should invent one.”
Dorothy Day is not unique in refusing to give money to the government, but her
noncooperation may be singular when it works the other way: refusing money
from the government. In the city of
New York sent her a check for $3,579.29. The sum represented interest on what
the city paid the Catholic worker for property bought by right of eminent
domain for a subway. In a letter beautiful in its clarity, Miss Day said no
thanks and sent the check back.
“We are returning the interest on the money we have recently received because…
we do not believe in the profit system, and so we cannot take profit or
interest on our money. People who take a materialistic view of human service
wish to make a profit but we are trying to do our duty by our service without
wages to our brothers. Please be assured that we are not judging individuals,
but are trying to make a judgment on the system under which we live and with
which we admit that we ourselves compromise daily in many small ways, but
which we try and wish to withdraw from as much as possible.”
Different view
Although the
IRS may
see Miss Day’s work as “political” and not charitable, other officials have a
different view. Her group is registered with the department of social services
of New York state. “Since we sent out an appeal once or twice a year,” said
Miss Day, “we have to file with Albany, pay a small fee, and give an account
of monies received… we always complied with the state regulation because it
was local — regional. We knew such a requirement was to protect the public
from fraudulent appeals, and we felt our lives were open books, our work was
obvious. And of course our pacifism has always been obvious, a great ideal of
nonviolence to be worked toward.”
The other evening, the dining room of the first street house was filled with
the broke and broken of the Bowery. Bread, soup, and stew were being served to
impoverished old men in tatters, to women silent in their pain, and to a few
small children already well aware something is wrong in the world. The poor,
stooped over their plates, had long ago lost interest in the
IRS and
governments. Yet, in a country of great wealth, the
IRS
still cares about them. If the tax officials insist that Miss Day is involved
in politics and thus must pay taxes, then even harder summers and winters are
coming for the forgotten people of the Bowery.
By the time this article hit the press, though, the conflict between the
IRS and
Catholic Worker was pretty much over. On
, an
IRS
district director wrote to the Catholic Worker telling the group that the
agency no longer expected them to file returns or to pay the hundreds of
thousands of dollars the agency had said they owed.
Dorothy Day stared down the
IRS.
Some war tax resistance links that have crossed my browser in recent days:
Almost daily for the past four decades, Jeff Dietrich has been in jail or
feeding upwards of 1,000 people at the Catholic Worker Kitchen at 6th Street
and Gladys Avenue in downtown Los Angeles.
At night, whether in jail or at home at the Catholic Worker hospitality
house in Boyle Heights, Dietrich writes about protests and the poor for the
Catholic Worker Agitator. The monthly newspaper’s
subscription is $1/year and not tax deductible because the Los Angeles
Catholic Worker is not a 501(c)3 non profit.
The IRS
has long since given up threatening to jail Dietrich for failing to pay
taxes. Dietrich never pleads innocent nor asks for mercy during sentencing
after being arrested for civil disobedience.
He knows that he will sleep peacefully in jail and his prosecutor, judge and
jury won’t.
Elaine M. Gibson has joined the ranks of war tax resisters. Gibson withheld 7.8% of her annual income tax and sent it instead to the Conscience Canada Peace Tax Trust Fund. “The organization says it will hold the money in trust and will return it any time it is requested. It uses interest from the Peace Tax Trust Fund for operating expenses.”
Today I’m very excited to announce the release of ebook versions of Ammon Hennacy’s autobiography: both his original The Autobiography of a Catholic Anarchist and his later, revised The Book of Ammon.
Hennacy, in keeping with his anarchist principles, released both books free from copyright protection.
Honoring this decision, these new ebook versions are free of charge and in the public domain.
Months of work have gone into these new editions: polishing up the syntax of Hennacy’s roughly-edited originals, improving the typography, adding metadata and convenient navigation, and so forth.
Thanks in particular to Ken Freeland, who went over the book sentence by sentence, stubbornly fighting against Hennacy’s comma-aversion.
If you’d like a refresher about who this Ammon Hennacy character is, try these Picket Line entries:
I took Hennacy’s autobiography to Mexico with me and read it while camping there, and more than any other book I can remember reading in recent years, it’s changed my attitude and the way I live my life.
I reproduce some contemporary newspaper accounts of Hennacy’s protests and other activities.
The FBI
was nice enough to take careful notes at a war tax resistance protest that took
place in Washington,
D.C. on
, and write up what they
saw. Seems that the government does sometimes pay attention to protests.
An advertisement in the ,
issue of “Village Voice,” a weekly newspaper concerning activities in
Greenwich Village, and other sections of New York,
N.Y., was captioned “Tax
Resistance Action in Washington,
D.C.” It
stated the Catholic Worker, Resist, Writers and Editors War Tax Protest, and
the War Resisters League would sponsor the activity at
, at the Internal Revenue Service, Washington,
D.C.
(WDC).
This advertisement indicated the peaceful action at the Internal Revenue
Service would be preceded by a public meeting in Judiciary Square, Fourth and
E Streets, N.W.,
WDC,
at
Dr. Arthur Waskow of the
Institute for Policy Studies; Dave Dellinger, Chairman of the National
Mobilization Committee (to End the War in Vietnam); Harold Tovish of the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology; Barbara Deming, an author; and
Professor William C. Davidon of Haverford College would be among the speakers
at this public meeting.
On , a confidential source,
who has furnished reliable information in the past, made available a flyer
published by the Tax Resistance Project, War Resisters League, 5 Beekman
Street, New York, N.Y.,
calling for support of the activity on . This flyer asks participants to bring their completed income tax
return or a statement explaining why they are refusing to file a return. It is
stated that these returns and/or statements, accompanied by an insufficient
amount of money or no money at all, will be turned in to the Internal Revenue
Service
(IRS),
WDC, at
.
A copy of this flyer is attached.
The publication, “Washington ’68” describes the Institute for Policy Studies,
1520 New Hampshire Avenue, N.W.,
WDC,
as an institution created to serve as an independent center of research and
education on public policy problems in
WDC.
The National Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam was formerly known as the Spring Mobilization Committee (SMC).
The SMC
is described in the publication entitled “Communist Origin and Manipulation
of Vietnam Week (),” a
report by the Committee on Un-American Activities, House of Representatives.
On page 53, the report states in part, “Communists are playing dominant roles
in both the Student Mobilization Committee and the Spring Mobilization
Committee.”
A second source, who has furnished reliable information in the past, as of
, identified Arthur Waskow as
a member of the Steering Committee of the Washington Mobilization to End the
War in Vietnam, an outgrowth of the SMC.
A third confidential source, who has furnished reliable information in the
past, reported on , that during
a symposium in New York City on , David Dellinger, editor of Liberation magazine, identified
himself as a pacifist, advocated a communist society, and said, “I am a
communist.” However, he pointed out that he was not a “Soviet-type” communist.
On , Professor William C.
Davidon was a participant in a program on Radio Station
WEAU, Chicago, Illinois, concerning
“Peace Walks.” During this program he admitted being a sponsor of the
Committee to Secure Justice for Morton Sobell (Committee to Free Morton
Sobell) (CFMS).
A characterization of the CFMS is attached.
An article appearing in the issue of the “Cape Cod Standard-Times,” a daily newspaper,
Hyannis, Massachusetts, stated that Barbara Deming returned to the United
States the previous day after spending eleven days in North Vietnam. She
accused the United States of waging a war of terror against a civilian
population.
On , Special Agents of the
Federal Bureau of Investigation observed approximately fifty-five people
gathered in Judiciary Square, WDC.
At approximately ,
Professor William C. Davidon, acting as master of ceremonies, opened the
program by stating that a large number of people are not paying taxes because
their money is being used to kill in Vietnam. He estimated that four thousand
people are not paying the telephone tax.
Professor Davidon then introduces Arthur Waskow as a representative of Resist.
Waskow described Resist as a group encouraging and supplying funds to those
who refuse to kill. Waskow said they were assembled to uphold the law. He said
that the war in Vietnam is illegal, and that the crime is in the White House
and executive offices, not in the streets. He claimed that the President and
the Secretaries of State and Defense are the ones violating the law.
Waskow further stated that the President has helped wreck the dollar with the
war in Vietnam. He urged those present to uphold the economy and the law by
withholding that portion of their income tax that is paying for the “obscene”
war. Waskow also felt it is illegal for
IRS to
collect money to pay for that war.
The next speaker, Harold Tovish, stated the Johnson Administration has
alienated the youth of today with lies and a foul war. He said that the youth
of America wants a life that is worth living, and he was not certain that life
today is worth living. Tovish also said they had gathered in WDC
to show that they cannot tolerate the type of life that has been formed for
Americans today.
At approximately , the majority of the group left Judiciary Square and walked to the
Constitution Avenue entrance of the
IRS
building. About fifteen carried posters reading, “Don’t Pay War Taxes.”
Beginning at about , Barbara Deming
spoke to the gathering. She said she believes in government of, by, and for
the people, and stressed how little tax money is spent for people. She claimed
the United States is saying to the Vietnamese — let us self-determine you or
we will have to destroy you. Deming stated the lives of the Vietnamese do not
belong to the Government, and that she refuses to pay her taxes to deliver
these lives “up to Caesar.”
An individual identified as Wally Nelson stated that in
he affirmed that no human being should be
killed and indicated he has refused to pay taxes since that date. He said that
rational people should not pay for slaughter, and should not allow a portion
of their taxes to be used for that purpose. Nelson stated that any government
that prides itself on killing people owes its people an apology. He indicated
he will continue to refuse to pay taxes.
James Leo Herlihy, a novelist, spoke briefly about the inflated cost of
killing people you do not really hate. He said that at one time it cost
$14,000. to kill a person during a war, but that now that cost has risen to
$234,000.
David Dellinger spoke of refusing to pay taxes to a government that tortures,
kills, and maims people. He stressed the need for door to door contact to ask
people how long they are going to be willing to pay for killing.
Professor Davidon then read what he said was a telegram from three doctors in
Cambridge, Massachusetts, supporting their action against
IRS.
At approximately
, a delegation of seven of the demonstrators was admitted
to the
IRS
Building to meet with
IRS
officials. This delegation said they were prepared to deliver “thirty
envelopes” to
IRS.
Whle waiting outside the entrance one ⸺ ⸺ of Connecticut state an associate
has been harassed by
IRS
since for not paying taxes, and that he,
Hayworth, is now suffering the same harassment. [Probably Neil Haworth―♇]
A ⸺ from the Philadelphia, Pennsylvania area, and ⸺ of Princeton, both spoke
briefly against paying taxes to support the illegal war in Vietnam.
The demonstrators passed out literature of the War Resisters League. One
leaflet captioned, “Resist Vietnam War Taxes,” states that about 67 percent of
taxes collected by the Government go for war and preparations for war, and
that about 23 percent goes for the war in Vietnam. Another captioned, “Hang Up
on War! — Telephone War Tax Refusal Campaign,” urges refusal to pay the ten
percent telephone tax.
The delegation that had been admitted to the
IRS
Building at about
left the building at approximately ,
and the demonstrators dispersed shortly thereafter. There were no arrests or
incidents during this demonstration.
On , Mr. Ray Brennan,
Internal Security Division, Office of the Assistant Commissioner, Inspection,
IRS,
advised that the following were admitted to meet with Deputy Assistant
Commissioner Leon C. Greene and a representative of the
IRS
Baltimore District Office:
David Hartsough
Arthur Waskow
Barbara Deming
William Davidon
Wallace Nelson
Harold Tovich
David Dellinger
A copy of an
IRS news
release dated , concerning
the activity on that date is attached.
The attached flyer announcing the action was a typewritten sheet with a
crudely-drawn headline:
Tax Resistance Action in Washington,
DC
Internal Revenue Service Headquarters, 12th
St. & Constitution
Ave.
Join us in an act of collective tax resistance. Bring your completed tax
return, form 1040, or a statement explaining why you are not filing, and
together we will return forms and statements accompanied by either no
money or an insufficient amount of money. The action at
IRS will
be preceded by a public meeting at Judiciary Square,
4th & E
St.
N.W.,
Dr. Arthur Waskow of the
Institute for Policy Studies and Dave Dellinger, Chairman of the National
Mobilization Committee, will be among the speakers.
We act because for many verbal opposition to the war in Vietnam is no longer
enough. Resistance has become necessary. Our consciences dictate it. The young
men resisting the draft have shown a way and we who are not subject to the
draft must develop creative parallels. Tax resistance is such a parallel act
because it confronts the administration directly and challenges it at a vital
point. It liberates the tax resister by showing him that he does have choices.
Total refusers, partial tax refusers, and telephone tax refusers will all be
there. Join us.
That flyer then listed the sponsors (Catholic Worker, Writers & Editors Tax
Protest, Resist, and War Resisters League) and included a tear-off section that
could be returned to War Resisters League headquarters for people who wanted
more information or transportation options. It encouraged recipients to also
sign this pledge: “I dissociate myself from my government’s actions in Vietnam
and therefore I am not paying all or more portion of my
income taxes. Signed:…”
The IRS
press release, also attached to the FBI
report, was mostly uninteresting. It snidely contrasted the protesters with
“[t]he overwhelming majority of taxpayers [who] carry out this obligation of
citizenship in a conscientious manner” and also suggested that the protesters
were part of a tiny movement, most of whom would ultimately buckle: “In a
relatively few cases,
IRS has
had to enforce collection against tax protestors. Most have paid when asked and
some who failed to pay voluntarily notified the
IRS where
the taxes could be collected from their bank accounts.”
The Catholic News Archive has a pretty good catalog of issues of the Catholic Worker.
Today I’ll present transcriptions of some of the material on tax resistance from the span.
These include several essays by Ammon Hennacy (these formed the raw material out of which he composed his autobiography, so if you have read that, you’ll see some familiar phrases and stories), as well as other writings by and about conscientious tax resisters, including long works by Ernest Bromley, Eroseanna Robinnson, and Karl Meyer.
The articles fill in some interesting details about the evolution of the American war tax resistance movement during this period.
First, Ammon Hennacy, in the edition:
Picketing
“How are you going to get people to put up the sword?
My son died in Korea.
I know you didn’t kill him.
God bless you,” said an elderly woman as I was picketing the post office in Phoenix, , in response to Truman’s “emergency” declaration.
The woman had seen my big sign which read:
“Put up thy Sword.
He that taketh the Sword
Shall Perish
by the Sword”
Jesus’ words.
On the reverse of this sign was a picture of a pot colored green with a sign on it—Capitalist.
Opposite was a red kettle—Communist.
Underneath was the caption: “The Pot Calls the Kettle Black.” I carried my old tax refusal sign as a sandwich in front.
It read:
75%
of your Income Tax
Goes for War.
I have refused
to pay Income Taxes
for Seven years.
The reverse sign hanging on my back read:
Reject War.
Use Gandhi’s
Weapon of
Non Violent
DIRECT ACTION.
I attended mass at St. Mary’s before picketing and prayed for wisdom during my day which I feared would be more disturbing than my previous marches.
In another church that morning a CW priest said mass for the success of my witness for peace.
I had notified the City Manager and the tax man that I would picket against the war emergency.
Ginny Anderson, whose C.O. husband Rik varityped my leaflet and made the above signs, stood on one corner to hand me extra literature and be my “lookout” for trouble.
Byron Bryant, Catholic anarchist, home on Christmas vacation from his duties as professor of English at a western university, stood on the other corner.
There was an unusual amount of people going and coming.
Ne one advised me to go back to Russia or called me a Communist.
As is usual in picketing most people were afraid to be seen taking a leaflet.
If one person took a leaflet all others in line took it and if the first one refused so did all the others.
Negroes and Mexicans and Indians always took the leaflet and many times a Catholic Worker.
My leaflet read as follows:
What’s All The Shooting About?
It’s about men who put money ahead of God.
It’s about young men on both sides misled into dying and killing each other.
It’s about rationing, inefficiency, dictatorship, inflation, and politicians stealing a little more than usual.
War is what happens when one nation prepares to defend itself against another nation that prepares to defend itself.
World War Ⅰ and World War Ⅱ did not end war nor make the world safe for democracy.
Neither will this one.
There just isn’t any sense to war!
What can we do about it?
If the politicians think one person is important enough to become a soldier, a munition maker, a bond buyer, or an income tax payer, then one person is important enough to
REFUSE to become a soldier,
REFUSE to make munitions,
REFUSE to buy bonds, and to
REFUSE to pay income taxes.
War does not protect you—it will destroy you!
You cannot overcome Communism with bullets.
It can be overcome by each person doing what he knows in his heart to be right.
The way of Jesus, of St. Francis, of Tolstoy, and of Gandhi teaches us to love our enemy, to establish justice, to abolish exploitation, and to rely upon God rather than on politicians and governments.
If you are a Christian, why not follow Christ?
You might as well die for what you believe in as for what you don’t believe in.
If you must fight, fight war itself.
Don’t be a traitor to humanity!
Wars will cease when men refuse to fight.
(No “Johnny come lately" to the peace movement, I served 2½ years in prison for opposing World War I, 8½ months of it in solitary confinement in Atlanta Penitentiary.
And since more than three-fourths of one’s income tax goes for war purposes, I have refused to pay my income tax for more than seven years.
Nor did I register for the draft in either world war.
I am a Christian Anarchist, a follower of Tolstoy, Thoreau, and Gandhi, and invite your serious consideration of their examples.)
“Extra, extra, all anarchists to be shot at sunrise,” shouted the good-natured news man stationed in front of the post office as I passed by.
The one who had led the fight against me in August and later became my friend had left town.
When a later edition told of a bank robbery in Tucson he shouted as I passed: [“Extra, extra, Gandhi robs a bank.” (missing from this article, but included in a later reprint —♇)]
A woman looked at my sign and asked if I did not know that Jesus told Peter to sell his clothes and buy a sword.
I answered: “yes, but when Peter showed him the sword which he had Jesus answered ‘that is enough,’ and when Peter used this sword to cut off the ear of the servant of the high priest Jesus did not say to cut off the other ear but said ‘put up thy sword.
He that taketh the sword shall perish by the sword’.”
As the woman walked on she shouted back: “Jesus called for a sword so he could perform a miracle.
He never said ‘put up thy sword.’
You better read your Bible.”
Somewhat different was a teen age boy who pointed to an ad of the Marines and said that meant more to him than my sign or my leaflet which he had just read.
I told him that if he believed that way—and he was to leave next month—that he should do what he thought was right.
He refused to take a CW although he was a Catholic and went to St. Mary’s.
I hoped that he would return safely and could then confer with the priest as to the possibilities of being a pacifist Catholic.
It was not his fault that he had never heard the pacifist message before.
We parted in a friendly spirit.
One gruff fellow asked, “What have you got there?”
I answered, “It’s either very good or very bad; depends on how you look at it; better read it and see.”
He smiled and went his way reading the leaflet.
A Catholic anarchist woman walked with me for a bit and was going to come after 3 p.m. and take Ginny’s place.
While Byron and I went for lunch the Catholic banker whose bank had been robbed spoke to Ginny.
Although the CW says “Starve the Bankers and Feed the Poor” he reads the paper and has visited me before on the picket line.
Another Catholic anarchist woman came and missed us because of the following incident.
The Cops
We had only brought along 500 leaflets and now at 3 p.m. they were nearly all distributed.
Many had stopped with kind words and no one had openly insulted us.
Two good natured policemen came up in a squad car and said they were having too many complaints about my picketing.
They read my signs and leaflet.
I told them that what I was doing was clearly subversive and that the FBI and the tax man had priority over them in my case and they ought to confer with them.
One cop did so while the other asked me questions.
Meanwhile people crowded around and watched my signs.
I saw my tax man as he came near, and an FBI man.
The police wanted to know what had been done when I had been arrested for picketing before.
I told them that I had been released and had picketed 7 more days without being bothered.
They conferred with headquarters and suggested that Ginny and I accompany them to the police station.
Here we waited about an hour while detectives and police looked over the signs and leaflet and asked questions.
I offered a CW to one police captain but he refused it saying that no Catholic paper could support such unpatriotic actions as mine.
I asked him if he knew Father Dunne and he said he did.
I advised him to call him up and see what he said about myself and the CW.
(Later Fr. Dunne told me that the man had called him.)
Byron had phoned a Catholic attorney, friend of the CW, who spoke to Chief Clair.
The latter told us we could go but I had better not picket for I might cause a riot and then charges of disorderly conduct, loitering, or other charges would be proferred against me.
I told him that I had been able so far to handle individuals and crowds.
He shrugged his shoulders inferring that I would be on my own.
I said that I had been on my own all my life and another half hour (it was now 4:30) was not much to worry about.
Before I left I told him that I would picket again on .
He replied, “That is another day.”
We went back and gave away our few remaining leaflets.
Postal employees looked out of the windows and saw that the police had not stopped us.
(One of the calls had come from an ultra-patriotic postal employee, although another employee to whom I had offered a leaflet early in the morning had refused it and about 2 p.m. had asked for one, and after reading it praised me for my stand.)
Ammon Hennacy, in the edition:
Life at Hard Labor
“I don’t wear a label; I’m for all good causes,” replied the young ex-conscientious objector who, passing through Phoenix, had called the local paper to find my address, and had found me this evening as I was caretaker of Jersey cows at the sale of purebreds at the State Fair grounds.
Many write to me or come to visit me who are drawn by different phases of my philosophy, so to save time I try to find out if their bias is Catholic Worker, I.W.W., pacifist, anarchist, vegetarian, life on the land, or tax refusal.
This slogan of not wearing a label is fine, I told my new friend, for a young person in search of the truth, but at his age of 31 he ought to begin to have ideas that led to some definite belief and action.
I admitted that for the average person of bourgeois tendencies to look at the Republican and Democratic parties and to think that wearing their labels was meaningless was a sign of progress.
Like the housewife in the days when women did the baking at home who put the initials “T.M.” on the top crust of one pie, meaning “Tis Mince”; and the initials “T.M.” on another pie crust, meaning “Taint Mince,” labels surely do not have any meaning.
The thought behind my friend’s no label attitude seemed to be a desire to approach as many people as possible, on the street, in buses, at dances, etc., and to make friends and influence people by not scaring them with such words as pacifist or anarchist, but to rattle half-truths and half criticisms as a build up for “all good causes” and as a monkey wrench toward the status quo.
This is a mass approach; mine has been to get the individual in this mass, if possible, to think.
I remember forty years ago when well meaning friends told me that to use the word “Socialist” was defeating my purpose, and that some word such as “Progressive" that did not have such ill omen should be used.
My reply then was that whatever word was used to designate a belief that word would always have a bad meaning to those who were being denounced.
Today the word Socialist only means collaboration with war and has lost all its class conscious meaning.
Even many timid anarchists whom I know prefer the word “Libertarian” for fear they will be called bomb throwers.
I go on the principle of never being on the defensive, so when I am called a bomb throwing anarchist I tell the accuser that the government is the biggest bomb thrower with its A and H bombs.
I told my young friend that he could always get a crowd to applaud mild criticism of war and for the lowering of taxes and raising of wages, but that this same crowd would really follow the blazing torch of super demagogues who spoke of “the great native intelligence of the common man,” and who never meant to catch the bird but were adept in the case of putting salt on its tail.
I pointed out that spiritual power was the strongest force in the world and that beside it all the two penny political victories did not mean a thing.
Too many of us dissipate our energies by being “for all good causes” and never develop or use this spiritual power.
And then we wonder why we become tired radicals and why warmongers rule the world.
We refuse to use our strongest weapon, but at the ballot box where we are invariably outnumbered a million to one, we choose our weakest weapon.
As I was helping a farmer polish the horns of his cows he said he had heard that I was an educated man and implied wonderment as to my being a day laborer.
I explained my plan of working at day work on farms in order that no withholding tax for war should be taken from my pay.
He wanted to know more about these ideas and for the next hour he heard the words anarchism and pacifism undiluted by “all good causes” and departed with the current CW and my promise to mail him future copies.
In contrast another farmer wanted me to go back to Russia if I didn’t like this country.
The cows for sale were listed in a catalogue with pedigrees and a record of their production of butter fat.
The manager of the sale was discussing with one farmer about certain unregistered and non pedigreed cows which are called “grades,” and many times these cows give more and richer milk than the purebred stock.
But there is no guarantee that a heifer from such a cow will be a good producer; more than likely a throwback of scrub stock.
Culls
In Albuquerque I worked for two men who specialized in extra fancy chickens.
At one place I gathered eggs each hour from a trap nest, and marked the number of the chicken, taken from a leg band, on the egg she had just laid, and also in the record book.
Those who did not produce a great number of eggs were thus culled out. “Why feed the culls?” my boss said.
Each day a dozen or more hens would die of “blow-outs”; which meant that the very efficient egg producing machine had overstepped itself.
The mediocre hens lived longer and did not blow-out.
At a dairy in Albuquerque where I worked, my job was to go to any of the eight corrals and in the mud and manure drive the next string of cows to the barn to be milked.
Nearly every night a calf would be born in this wet and cold discomfort and my job was to carry it to a warm stall after the milking was done.
Very few of these calves, coming from cows that were “grades,” died.
Later I worked for a multi-millionaire who had highly priced purebreds.
My job was to keep a fire in a stove in the barn at night and to feed these calves egg with specially prepared milk.
Yet the death rate among these purebreds made my boss groan.
Tuberculosis and Bangs Disease (premature birth of calves) seems also to be more prevalent among the inbred purebreds.
Super efficient bankers jump out of windows when red ink instead of black ink records their business schemes.
Efficient assembly line workers go berserk and often a supposedly steady bus driver leaves his route and drives right on to Florida to escape his treadmill of efficiency.
At its best our system is efficient only in turning out quantity and at its worst it is trying to bomb us to death.
Very expensive garden tools these days are held together only by the paint on the handle and are of very inferior design and workmanship.
When I was a social worker in Milwaukee in the thirties we were often derided by well to do Republicans for “coddling the culls” when we helped the poor.
And from time to time I have heard radicals who were especially scientific and eugenic minded look upon the ideals of Jesus and Gandhi as perpetuating the life of the unfit and the misfit.
Although I helped in the formation of the CW House of Hospitality in Milwaukee in I will admit that my interest in the CW was limited then to its pacifist and anarchist slant and that I felt this coddling of the bums was not so important.
Since, however, my study of Tolstoy and acquaintance with Peter and Dorothy, and my ten years as an actual laborer, rather than a radical theorist with a good job, I have come to view this whole matter in different light.
The conversation about grades and purebreds that night and my meeting with the young rattle-brain who was “for all good causes” helped me to clarify my ideas along this line.
In this age of the assembly line, of super-markets and super advertising schemes; and of Service Clubs to put a little holy oil of goodness on this theft, the illusion persists that this is a scientific and efficient age.
Yes, we produce, but for what?
If somehow we do have bums, poor housing, ill-health, new diseases, and poverty these can only be attended to by Community Funds, Heart, Cancer, and Give a Dime Campaigns; pensions and social security payments by the state.
Charity Incorporated has no room for Houses of Hospitality where there is no record of aid given or even the name of the recipient.
“They won’t work if you keep on feeding them!
They sell the clothing you give them around the corner for booze!” say the well fed parasites who also neither work nor help the poor except perhaps in a very dim and distant contribution to a fund, much of which goes for overhead.
The idea of these professional do-gooders is to “give coals and treacle” to the poor, as Shaw said, and to keep them out of sight in order that the rich may not be reminded of the filth and degradation which is the foundation of their wealth.
Good social workers are told not to “become emotionally involved” with their clients.
Again, the mechanistic approach.
The CW breaks through all this sham.
Instead of living in fine apartments to which we can repair after witnessing the other side of the tracks, we who accept Lady Poverty have given up worldly goods, insurance, and much of our privacy.
This cull in the breadline; this drunk or prostitute; this maladjusted and perhaps lazy man—all of these may not be improved a bit by our help.
Ours is not a success story; the Way of the Cross was also a failure.
He at least might have led a rebellion against the Roman State instead of dying on the Cross and forgiving His enemies.
Where are we to look for those who are going to bear the Cross today?
It is true that St. Francis, Tolstoy, Malatesta, Kropotkin and Gandhi left their inheritance and choosing voluntary poverty were able to accomplish much.
We also print the word and deliver the lecture to the purebreds.
We make no mistake in thinking that because a man is ragged that he is holy, for if he is avaricious he is as much a slave to money as is the rich man.
(My banker friend Brophy jokingly told me that he would have to write a defense of the rich for the CW.
I told him that he would end up contradicting himself and that the best defense of the rich could be obtained by giving a couple of drinks to a poor man on the street.)
The Old Pioneer [Lin Orme, Jr.] tells of stopping at a stand in the desert recently and being charged 15¢ for a soft drink.
“This is 300% profit for you” he told the proprietor.
“I’m not in business for my health” said this greedy and seedy defender of the capitalist system.
The Old Pioneer also tells of 25¢ being charged for one common needle in the old days when everything coming into Phoenix had to be hauled from Maricopa Wells station beyond South Mountain.
“The freight is what costs” was the alibi of the greedy merchant.
Neither do we consider the product of the purebreds.
Tommy Manville, the dear old DAR ladies, the useless royalty of Europe, and our own inbred Duponts and intellectuals who have nearly without exception prostituted their talents toward the making of bombs.
There is some hope that among the bums we may find a John the Baptist to carry on the work when we have gone, but there is little hope from politicians whose integrity has already been purchased and from the super educated to whom a doctors degree, a deep freeze and a television set mean more than fighting for a lost cause.
How will we then come to a sensible way of life?
Without war work we would have a terrible depression.
Hardly a person but whom will gladly earn this blood money!
Hardly a person but whom will pay taxes for more bombs!
The rich will not give up their riches and the poor will not give up their pensions; (the young will not help the aged; preparing to “keep up with the Jones’.”)
The froth at the top has little right to scorn the scum at the bottom; meanwhile we who do the work of the world support them both.
The Old Pioneer remarked recently that Jefferson’s plan of not having great wealth inherited was the right idea.
This reminds me of the old Russian proverb: “Do not lay up your money for your son, for if he is any good he can make his own money; and if he is not any good he will lose it.”
So in our writing, our picketing, our speaking, our help to the poor in Houses of Hospitality, we must need show our sincerity by our voluntary poverty.
No one would think of bribing us for by our lives we have established the fact that we need nothing.
We need not fritter our time by building up “all good causes,” which accept the tyranny of the state.
When they are ready for it the rich, the bourgeois intellectual, the bum, and even the politician may have an awakening of conscience because of the uncompromising seeds of Christian Anarchism which we are sowing.
To all of these we make our appeal and from all it is not impossible to gain a few adherents for that time “when each shall give according to his ability and receive according to his need.”
For what does all our bookkeeping mean but a denial of this ideal?
Johnny Olson came back from a sojourn in Texas.
In a splurge of affluence he bought five mouse traps and set them around our house.
He caught the whole population which consisted of three mice.
While I as a pacifist vegetarian would not cause the death of Brother Mouse yet as an anarchist I have no right to deny Johnny the right to catch them… The old mules, belonging to a neighbor, which I have used for plowing the garden these five years are now muleburger. They were not killed in time for the new government regulation which allows equine meat in weiners.
My friend Joe Craigmyle, nonregistrant, and one-cylinder vegetarian and anarchist, runs a fruit stand and at times I have helped him pick oranges and grapefruit in groves where he has purchased the crop.
Even in the month of May when the new fruit is on the trees the last year’s crop is still sweet and juicy.
As with apples the fewer fruit on the tree the larger.
There is not generally time to thin out the fruit but many drop off before maturity.
An orange or grapefruit may look fine but if it is light in weight it is pithy and is discarded right there at the tree.
The load is graded as to size when we return to the stand.
Coming home from work the other night in Joe’s truck we were discussing the idea of responsibility and of my reference in a recent CW article to the woman who called on every one else to remove the dead cat from the road.
I remarked that I had seen a dead cat on the lateral that Sunday morning but being in a hurry to catch a bus did not practice my anarchist idea of responsibility in removing it.
However, in the evening upon my return it was still there despite hundreds of cars and dozens of people on the road that day, so I took care of it.
Just then we both saw to the right of us a two-by-four with four spikes sticking up.
I said that this would soon give someone some trouble.
By that time we were a quarter of a mile beyond it.
“I’ll back up and you can throw it in the ditch,” said Joe.
In my mind, then, Joe, who has not been much of a man of action, rose from a one-cylinder to a two-cylinder anarchist.
Molokons
Recently I went to the federal court as a young Molokon who lives a few miles down the lateral had been out on $5,000 bail for refusing to report to the army.
Dozens of other young Molokons in the vicinity had been given CO status.
Whether the draft board lost his CO questionnaire or thought they ought to get hardboiled I do not know.
I had phoned a local lawyer who had handled Craigmyle’s refusal to register case and he promised to come to court but did not do so.
His excuse being that he couldn’t do anything about it.
Judge Ling set as date for a trial and the Molokon will get a lawyer from Los Angeles.
The Old Pioneer tells of in when he went to the court commissioner with about fifteen Molokons who had refused to register.
Two of them worked for him and he arranged for bail.
They asked him if they could sing and pray.
The Old Pioneer doubted if they could but asked the commissioner about it.
“Hell no, this is a court,” was the answer. “You’d better let them sing and pray and not look foolish for they’re going to do it whether you give permission or not,” said the Old Pioneer to the commissioner.
So they sang and prayed.
Now they register and do not sing or pray in court.
, I received a notice I owe $2.15 interest and penalty on my $192 tax bill for and unless paid within ten days my property and wages will be attached.
This is an old run-a-round and I am not worrying.
I ate the first Irish potatoes this year from our garden.
The persimmon tree which the Old Pioneer’s daughter-in-law gave me last winter now bears fruit.
Watermelon, eggplant, tomatoes, squash, peppers and onions are doing fine.
I am irrigating and soon will come irrigating maize.
An excerpt from “Poverty is to Care and Not to Care” by Dorothy Day, from the issue:
Our whole modern economy is based on preparation for war and that is one of the great modern arguments for poverty.
If the comfort one has gained has resulted in the death of thousands in Korea and other parts of the world, then that comfort will be have to be atoned for.
The argument now is that there is no civilian population, that all are involved in the war (misnamed defense) effort.
If you work in a textile mill making cloth, or in a factory making dungarees or blankets, it is still tied up with war.
If one raises food or irrigates to raise food, one may be feeding troops or liberating others to serve as troops.
If you ride a bus you are paying taxes.
Whatever you buy is taxed so you are supporting the state in the war which is “the health of the state.”
The argument may go this way, but we still can choose what seems to us the most honorable occupations, which have to do with human needs.
We can choose the kind of work most necessary to do, and if possible where there is no withholding tax for war.
Ammon Hennacy in working by the day, at hard farm labor, has not paid income tax for years.
One can so cut down one’s standard of living that no income tax is required; families with many children pay no income tax.
One can protest in many ways this contribution to the atom and hydrogen bomb.
If one owns property the government then can take a lien on it.
If one has money in the bank, the government can confiscate it.
So truly such protest as this calls for the most profound poverty and a voluntary doing without property.
All this is by way of saying that poverty is no longer voluntary, no longer a counsel, but something which is laid upon us by necessity.
Ammon Hennacy, in the issue:
Hiroshima Fast
“I got a letter from one of my sons in Korea this morning.
My three other boys will go to jail before they go to another foolish war.
God bless you for your sign about war; that’s just what it is: murder,” said a woman to me as I was on my 8-day picketing and fasting.
She referred to my sign:
DRAW THE LINE AT MURDER
REFUSE TO GO TO WAR.
In contrast a man went by with his wife and said: “Drop dead!”
“Can’t do it, Mister,” I replied.
Rik had done a beautiful job on my leaflet, printed in the CW, on blue paper.
I was nearly out of CW’s containing my tax statement so did not give out any unless people asked for them.
Now for the first time in my fasting I went to Mass and Communion each morning.
I had worked until after dark for several nights in order to finish work that I had planned, and up until .
I had eaten my last full meal and only toast bread until I commenced my fast at .
I had written the following note, enclosing my blue leaflet, to 165 of the clergy in and around Phoenix.
And as usual I had notified the police, the FBI, and the tax man, of my picketing, telling them that what I was doing was clearly subversive, but no worse than it ever was.
“Please pray for the success of my fasting and picketing in this the 10th year of my open refusal to pay income taxes for war, if you can in conscience do so.
My attitude may appear too radical but I feel that something as radical as the Sermon on the Mount is needed in this wicked world.
I too believe in a personal religion but if in matters of social concern I act just as unbelievers act, then I am a fraud.
If you have time stop and say hello to me as I fast and picket in front of the old YMCA.”
I had sent my leaflet air mail to the Mayor of Hiroshima and to Manalil Gandhi in Phoenix, South Africa.
I received but one answer which was from a leading Methodist minister, who did not agree with my ideas but who praised my stand.
I knew beforehand of the approval of the half dozen priests who appreciated the CW.
As usual the Associated Press sent a favorable factual message on the wire about my activities and the local radios reported it each day, one announcer even reading my entire leaflet.
But the local dailies, per their policy, refused to “dignify” themselves by mentioning my name.
I started the fast weighing 142 pounds.
The scales also poured forth a slip with the dubious information that read, “Don’t always follow the line of least resistance.”
I lost 2 pounds and which was exceptionally hot I lost 5 pounds.
I slept that night for 14 hours and awoke refreshed.
One friend who was an usher in a Catholic Church and also a veteran, had always been cordial to the CW, but he felt that the plan of the American Legion to take the profit out of war and make the big shots who make war go to war was a better method than my tax refusal and picketing.
I told him that I was winning my battle against the government each day and while this was only a step forward, his way was no more than conversation about it.
I said that this method stood as much a chance of succeeding as a butcher putting vegetarian signs in his window.
That those who make money and fame out of war would never stop.
It was up to us to refuse to take part in war.
Fasting
Now on I was weak but never a bit hungry.
Several people on park benches nearby told me of a young man who had gone on a 62 day fast.
They said he ate his lunch at the park.
That day I introduced myself to him and found he had suffered from arthritis, stomach ulcers and chronic nightmare.
He went to my friend Dr. Shelton in San Antonio and after 40 days of nothing but water to drink, all of the accumulated toxic poisons had been washed out of his body and he commenced to get stronger.
He was entirely cured at the end of 62 days.
Of the 25,000 people taking fasts there in 30 years only one person had endured a longer fast; that being 68 days.
A priest in Phoenix had taken a 30 day fast there and had been cured.
My friend had lost 57 pounds but had gained it all back again.
I visited with him each noon and envied his vegetarian diet of pears and grapes.
He had been raised a Catholic but believed in no religion at present.
He was interested in my ideas and felt he would never go to war but he did not feel that it was his job to propagandize about it.
Other friends I met told me of a man in Phoenix whom I knew who had been given up by the doctors because of tuberculosis of the kidneys.
He had read in some book that in ancient Egypt those with such trouble had laid in the hot sands.
Egypt was too far away so he came to Arizona and for 6 months literally lived in the sand.
He was entirely cured.
He is a strict vegetarian these past 20 years and in good health.
The Mormon wife of a friend of mine told me of her grandfather who in the old days had several wives.
At the age of 86 he discovered that he had diabetes.
He fasted 68 days at home and cured himself and lived 9 more years in good health.
But Mormons are used to disciplining themselves so his fast was not as difficult for him as it would be for the regular flabby American.
My other sign read: “Thou Shalt Not Kill,”
HIROSHIMA WAS A-BOMBED , JUST 8 YEARS AGO .
As penance I am Fasting IN MEMORIAM.
This was enclosed with a black border.
The six story Veteran’s Bureau was across the street and many men in uniform went by.
One soldier asked me what kind of lies I was peddling.
I told him I was peddling no lies, but the right side of a very important question; that he had better read it and see what it was all about.
He read it as he walked along. Another soldier did the same.
Generally soldiers refuse to take the leaflet or tear it up.
Near quitting time on a young fellow whose appearance marked him as of the nervous intellectual type, and not a rowdy, stopped and asked me if this was my sign that I was carrying.
I told him that it was.
He said that I had better call the police for he was going to take the sign and tear it up and dance on it for no Communist could carry such a sign in his town.
I told him that I was not a Communist; that I was a Catholic and an anarchist.
He replied that he was a Catholic.
I asked him what parish he belonged to and it was mine also.
I inquired if he had been at mass the last Sunday and if he noticed me selling CW’s in front of the church.
He had been to last mass and had not noticed me.
I told him that if he had looked closer he would have noticed a candle burning before the Blessed Mother for the success of my intention in this picketing and fasting.
He didn’t believe it.
I asked his name and he told me but would not give me his address.
I said I did not believe in the police and if he got any pleasure out of tearing signs he could do so.
He took them and tore them off the standard and danced on them there on the sidewalk.
He refused to take a copy of my leaflet or of the CW, muttering “Communist, Communist.”
I advised him to see our parish priest and get straight on the matter of the CW.
He promised to do so.
I then called the priest and told him of what had just happened.
He did not remember the name of my patriotic friend.
I wanted to see the AP man on another matter so went to the newspaper office.
Here I saw my friend with my signs telling a reporter about the Communist he had found.
I recognized the reporter from pictures I had seen of him but I had never met him.
The reporter said that I was not a Communist for they all knew of my picketing activities for years.
The patriotic Catholic said he was a veteran from Korea and repeated that no one could carry such signs in his town.
The reporter said he was a veteran of two wars and he had fought for just such things as the freedom of Hennacy to carry his signs and picket; that if the young man did not like my signs he could do as the pickets in front of the White House in the Rosenberg case did: get other signs and picket the pickets.
The reporter also said that I was standing up for the freedom which was true Americanism, and although he disagreed with my ideas, that the patriotic young man was acting like a Communist or a Fascist in denying me freedom.
He picked up the signs saying, “Here Hennacy take your signs; they are yours, not his.”
The young man said he would take them away from me.
I replied that I was too tired carrying them anyway and would simply give out my leaflets the next day as Rik was away and I had no cardboard to make new signs.
The young man said he would come down next day and tear up any signs that I had.
The reporter told him that he was breaking the law and he was lucky he opposed such a person as Hennacy who would not take him to court.
I left him still arguing with the reporter.
The AP carried this story and it was reported over the radio.
Some of the newspaper men wanted me to prefer charges against my assailant to make a more exciting story.
I refused to do so, explaining my Gandhian principle of non-violent resistance to evil and that as an anarchist I could take no recourse to law under any circumstances.
The next day the young man did not show up.
I phoned my priest and he had not come around to ask about the CW.
To Maryfarm
All during my picketing the employees of the tax office, including the three Catholic tax men whose job it had been to get my tax money, were cordial.
There was not a mean look from anyone in that office.
This was the first time this had happened.
Several friends came and walked around the line with me.
Only about a dozen people tore up my leaflet.
Many stopped and cordially approved of my picketing.
About half a dozen grunted disapproval.
There was not as much traffic as there had been other years at the postoffice.
I had not met the new head of the tax office so as I finished my fast I introduced myself to Col. Wood and expressed my appreciation of the cordial attitude of his coworkers toward my picketing.
He asked me the difference between a Communist and an Anarchist and seemed to understand my explanation.
Ginny and her boys came up and broke the fast with me around as we all drank juices at the juice bar.
I left for New York on the bus.
I had bought more fruit than I could eat but I nibbled at it on the way.
In Prescott, I phoned the former head of the tax bureau in Phoenix and talked to his wife, Mrs. Stuart, Democratic National Committeewoman.
They own the Prescott “Courier.”
She was pleasant as usual and told me that they had a story on my fast that day.
Soon I was with Platt and Barbara Cline in Flagstaff and now I could eat mashed potatoes and other soft food.
Platt made a recording of my experiences.
He had a fine Third Mesa basket which I took to New York for Dorothy.
I spent with Hopi friends in Winslow and by I was visiting with Msgr. Garcia in Albuquerque and my good friend Rev. Soker of St. Paul’s Lutheran Church there.
Reagans had moved to Arkansas and the letter I had sent to Al and Catherine Reser must have gone astray or they had moved, for I couldn’t find them.
By I was in Sante Fe welcomed by Peter and Florence van Dresser.
They had a meeting for me .
I did not have time to go to El Rito to see their Organic House heated by solar heat and with windmill for power.
I will stop there on my way back when I visit my daughter Carmen.
Carmen is with her sister Sharon for a retreat at Mt. Shasta.
I visited the nearby Trappist monastery and spoke to two monks who are CW fans and had lunch with the nursing sisters where I had spoken last year.
As I left I was pleased to see a good factual writeup on the front page of the daily New Mexican.
This paper goes to nearby Los Alamos, so perhaps for the first time those who make the bomb could learn of opposition to it.
A social worker told me that there were more maladjusted children from the homes of Los Alamos workers than from any other strata of people from the state.
The gloom of this blood money thus defiles the next generation.
A few days with my family in Cleveland and I arrived at Maryfarm, with Father Casey.
I understood more this year than last and read some Catholic literature that I should have read long ago.
It is too soon to evaluate the effect of this spiritual retreat upon me.
Just now I am at Dave Dellinger’s at Glen Gardner, N.J., proof-reading my autobiography.
Some excerpts from an Ammon Hennacy article in the edition:
…Wally Nelson came to take me to Sharonville to spend the night with tax-refusers Ernest and Marion Bromley.
We disagree on my frankness to the authorities but we have the same aim.
The afternoon and night was most pleasant as I became acquainted with Fred Schulder, age 79, who had written in the anarchist paper Liberty in before I was born.
He is not religious in the accepted sense, but takes the CW.
His son Horace Champney took me to Brookville to an area meeting of Peacemakers where Ralph Templin, Clay Marks, and others whom I knew held forth in a discussion about tax refusal and the picketing which they would do in Cincinnati .
Some excerpts from an Ammon Hennacy article in the edition:
Max Sandin, old time tax refuser, and one of we seven veterans of jails in World War Ⅰ who also refused to register in World War Ⅱ renewed old time memories with me.
Jim Ward had asked me in Chicago what live meant to me now that I was a Catholic and I had listed the seven things which seemed to me now in the most important, and I talked this over with Father Casey.
Here they are:
(1) Voluntary poverty.
(2) The Sermon on the Mount.
(3) Pacifism, with its absolutist meaning as evidenced in tax refusal.
(4) The Mass.
(5) To Work and not be a parasite.
(6) Anarchism.
(7) Vegetarianism, which includes no tobacco, alcohol or medicine.
This is for myself and not meant for others.
Each has to go at his own speed and in his own way.
We drove to Grasston to see old man Paul Marquardt and found him reading his Bible.
He told us of the time when his children had been sent home from school with a card telling the family to save fat for the war.
Marquardt immediately withdrew the children from the school saying that each morning he prayed “give us this day our daily bread,” and he was not going to save bread or fat or anything for a war.
He told also of the priest in nearby Pine City, who, in instructing his confirmation class said, “Have faith like the Marquardts.”
To have this honor in your home town is indeed an honor.
From the edition:
Individual Income Tax: War’s Chief Supporter.
Of the income of the Federal Government 48% comes from individual income taxes which we pay; 30% comes from corporation taxes; 15% comes from excise taxes; and 7% other sources
By Ernest Bromley
The Administration’s proposed budget, recently announced, asks for a billion dollar increase for “new weapons of unprecedented strategic and tactical importance” in order to give this nation “the greatest military power in its peacetime history.”
Diagrams of the proposed income and expenditures emphasize two things: (1) The chief source of federal revenue is the individual income tax, (2) The chief national expenditure is military (including bomb stockpiling and new terror weapons).
Both things have been true for these eighteen years, but one is always struck anew with each announcement of them.
So minute a portion of the tax money is being spent for any socially acceptable activity that it seems to be only an illusion to consider that one’s Federal taxes go to anything constructive.
(Actually, the only way one can support the better enterprises is to bypass the Internal Revenue Bureau completely and find ways to contribute to these causes directly.)
The war build-up touches the individual much more directly and intimately at the income tax point than it does anywhere else.
Almost two-thirds of every tax dollar goes to build H-Bombs, Guided Missiles, Germ Warfare, Conscript Armies, etc.—thirty-five times as much as for schools, roads, and health combined.
(Can there be any doubt about what the Federal government’s major activity has come to be?)
It is almost unthinkable that more people (especially more pacifists) have not declined to bolster this monstrous drive to destruction; that they have not at this major point stopped the flow of their funds through the book-keeping which takes most of what they pay and channels it into what they abhor; that they have not by-passed the present tax set-up and given their valuable, held-back funds to something worthy of support.
Will we wake up too late?
The first, and major, encumbrance to keeping one’s tax money and using it for something decent is the withholding set-up.
Trying to be a tax refuser in a withholding job is a good deal like being a pacifist in the army.
In each case you have already placed yourself well within the system; and in each case the very first step is to take yourself out of the system.
The real, creative possibilities on these fronts begin to open up only after this step of separation has been taken.
The fact that such separations are difficult to carry out makes them no less imperative.
Because the withholding situation presents problems, is there no advice that can be given to the average working person about the business of non-cooperating with income tax payments?
I would advise: Stop paying income taxes (whether you file a form to this effect or not).
For some people this will, of course, mean that they will have to leave their present jobs and take employment that is not affected by withholding.
Here we sometimes tend to lose sight of the fact that there is probably no type of socially useful work (individual or organizational) being done under the withholding tax set-up which cannot also be done outside it.
And, too, this raises the important question of what social usefulness really is.
Can “socially useful” firms or organizations remain socially useful to any real degree when their one rigid requirement is that the first portion of a worker’s earnings be set aside for war?
Can a “socially useful” person remain socially useful in his job to any real degree when, in order to do with one hand the work of building a better society, he has first to do with the other hand the work of destroying it (like a church constructing a brothel)?
Conscientious workers in such employment may reason after a while, as some have, that the effect of this operation is that they are working in a munitions factory part of the time.
Men go to prison rather than join the armed forces and support conscription.
Should not the people with these principles (especially the people not subject to any draft) face the imperative of sacrificing a little economic security (or convenience), especially when not facing it means continuing to pay substantial sums of money for terrifying weapons and conscript armies?
Ernest Bromley lives in Sharonville, Ohio, with his wife, Marian and family.
He keeps his earnings below the amount where any tax has to be paid.
Around he refused, when a Methodist minister in North Carolina, to purchase an automobile tag (not a license), for his car and did three months in jail.
His wife worked for the Fellowship of Reconciliation, the leading pacifist group in this country, and quit her job rather than pay the withholding tax for war which this and all other peace organizations take from their employees.
He has been head of the tax refusal committee of Peacemakers.
He supplements his income by an apiary in his garden.
I have visited there several times and respect the effort which he and his wife are making to live up to their ideals.
They live a few miles from the Grail farm at Loveland, Ohio.
The Jehovah Witnesses and the Catholic Worker are two groups where all work for their keep and no salaries—and no taxes—are paid.
This basis of voluntary poverty could be approximated by others if they wished to make the necessary adjustment between faith and works and try to live in community.—A.H.
Excerpts from an article by Ammon Hennacy in the issue:
For the first time when the withholding tax began I have not earned enough money to owe the tax man anything.
I only made $310 lecturing and as my Autobiography is not copyrighted and I want no royalties from it, the sales go to pay for the printing and whatever is left over will go to the CW.
There is no status [sic] of limitations on income taxes so I owe for 12 years.
I told the tax man that I would not be foolish enough to tell him where I was going to lecture so he could be there and get the money.
There is practically nothing that I have to buy as all of us here at the CW work for our keep.
However, if I was to purchase anything in a store and give the cashier a $5 bill for a dollar purchase the tax man, if he were present, could garnishee the change from the cashier right then without any legal proceeding.
In this idea of tax refusal there are ways by which pacifists have to act according to their web of circumstances.
Some, like Ernest Bromley, limit their earnings to the amount they are allowed because of dependents and have no tax to pay.
Others like Rev. George Hauser, because of being ordained in the clergy, do not have a withholding tax taken from their pay, but at the end of the year make a statement of their earnings.
Then the amount of tax is taken by garnishee from the pay with added penalties.
There are others who have an income from securities and do not work for wages and who keep their money in a bank where the tax man comes and gets it.
There are millions of people who dislike paying taxes and who may write a letter to the government about it, but they pay.
There are others like Governor Lee of Utah who put a certain amount of the tax due which comes from income other than wages in a bank and dare the tax man to sue to get it.
But the government always will evade a moral issue, so it is likely that the Governor’s money will be taken the same as others who keep money in banks.
I plan to picket the tax man here in New York City for , and then fast and picket in penance for the bomb we dropped at Hiroshima .
The T men have interrogated me and what they want to do about my tax arrears is up to them.
With more H bomb tests scheduled for the spring by politicians and militarists it is increasingly the responsibility of the individual pacifist to think and to act about being a part of this terrible destruction planned by those who will soon be asking for votes because they have “kept us out of war.”
An excerpt from an Ammon Hennacy article in the issue:
The coming atomic tests now scheduled for and the air raid drill for are a challenge to all Christians.
We intend to demonstrate against this “pinch of incense on the altar to Caesar.”
This with our non payment of income taxes for war and a refusal to be a part of the war system is positive evidence that we are trying to understand and practice the Sermon on the Mount.
The argument that the idealist hears from the opportunist is that we are not practical.
I submit that our program of the one-man-revolution is the most practical of all.
Others who believe in bullets and ballots must gain a majority before they can begin to practice their beliefs and thus postpone indefinitely anything but conversation about their views.
We do not need to wait upon others for we have seceded about 90% from this exploitative system and are already practicing our ideals.
An editorial from Dorothy Day reflected on the hydrogen bomb test among other things, and included this note:
Those who can take such stringent courses as tax refusal can give their services rather than be put on payrolls and beg their way to supply their daily needs if they can find agencies willing to work with them on these terms.
Or they can embrace voluntary poverty and manual labor as a life of penance and mortification.
The harvest is great and the laborers are few. No fear of unemployment in this field.
An unsigned book review in the issue included this:
These publications [Thomas Merton’s The Silent Life and Basic Principles of Monastic Spirituality] will be of special interest to novices in the religious life or those contemplating such a move but laymen who read them should keep in mind that while there is much contained in them from which any Christian can benefit still the “techniques” of attaining union with God proper to the monk are not always the same for those “in the world.” Anyone who has lived under the Benedictine rule, and all the monastic orders of the Western world have felt the impact of Benedict’s spirit and legislation, knows the position of the concept of obedience in his thought.
It is just about the most important single element and no one can be a good monk unless he is willing to give up his own will and like Jesus become “obedient unto death,” and the whole monastic observance is organized to serve this end.
But the layman, living as he does most often in a society where “the prince of this world” and his spirit prevail, has the duty to cultivate, rather, the virtue of rebellion in order to be obedient to God.
It is in rebellion too that we can imitate St. Benedict who fled the corrupt Roman society of his day, whose only concern was “to please God alone.”
The monastic life is a judgement on the life of the “world” and in its light the “world” stands condemned.
In this way the monk practices the virtue of rebellion.
For those in the “world” there must be rebellion also if they are not to be counted “of it.” They must rebel against materialism by embracing voluntary poverty and giving all they possess over and above the absolute necessities to those who have not the necessities, they must rebel against war and its causes by conscientious objection and tax refusal, they must combat that selfish middle class individualism and fear of giving of self by embracing community in one form or another.
Rebellion is the first step in any attempt at conforming to Christ; it begins at baptism when the neophyte formally renounces Satan—et omnibus operibus ejus.
More from Ammon Hennacy, in the issue:
Richard Fichter, whose article appears in this issue, had been dismissed from the Methodist ministry in Pennsylvania because of his energetic anti-war and tax refusal stand.
I had never met him but he had bought several of my books and distributed the CW and had attended various picketing demonstrations.
He and his wife have three small children and live on a farm with twenty cows to attend to.
All radicals have to make the decision when to follow Caesar and when to follow Christ.
75,000 followers of Gandhi went to prison and someone besides the British government took care of their families.
Many bourgeois minded pacifists thought it was wrong for a CO to go to CPS camp or prison and leave a family behind.
Richard wrote to many papers about the evils of atomic war and little attention was paid to his views.
So he came to New York City and in the midst of a nation wide broadcast on television he jumped to the stage and shouted his message.
He thought that this would gain attention and the papers would print his views in full.
Instead he was locked up in Bellevue for mental observation.
I visited him there and met his wife and brother and two Methodist ministers who were his friends.
Later his brother and Parents came to visit us at the CW from their home in Ohio.
When the government comes to a pacifist and says you must register for the draft, pay taxes for war, sign a loyalty oath, or when a Congressional Committee wants you to tell on others, then if you do not follow the best you know and refuse absolutely, you are following less than you know and will live to regret your timidity.
But to leave farm and family to try to tell your message to those who do not want to hear it is not wise and does not make a witness with the dignity which no doubt inspired Richard in the lives of Thoreau and Gandhi.
A radical who has faith knows like Thoreau that “one on the side of God is a majority.” And when his neighbors think he is queer and out of step he can reply like Thoreau that he “is listening to a different drummer.” He is not frustrated if all are against him.
He does not need the applause of the multitude for he will be content when “two or three are gathered together.”
Ammon Hennacy, in the issue:
Tax Refusal
Leland Olds of Yellow Springs, Ohio has refused to pay income taxes and as a result his house worth $9,000 has been sold by the government for the less than $200 taxes due.
He can regain the property within a year by paying the tax with interest.
This action, together with the sale of a car belonging to Walter Gormly and of Arthur Emery of Iowa, are the only cases I know of where the government has taken property of tax refusers.
At times they have garnisheed wages and taken money from bank accounts.
They got $5 from a farmer I was working for in Arizona who paid it out of his own pocket rather than take it from my wage, and the tax man also took my picketing sign saying he would sell it to the highest bidder.
I never heard of anyone buying it.
I still owe taxes for 12 years and will picket the tax office here on unless I am in jail on the air raid drill.
Then I would fast in jail.
Karl Meyer, in the issue:
Stepping Up the Agitation
Dear Bob or Dorothy or whoever is holding things down there while we are all out making angry and urgent faces at the giants of the impersonalist order.
I was very encouraged to receive the issue and to read your letter to the California legislature, even as I was preparing to step up the agitation in support [of] Rose Robinson and tax refusal.
On I began to hand out a new leaflet outside the Federal Building which has been the focus of our protest.
After outlining developments in the case.
I wrote, “There are some of us who believe, as she does, that it is wrong to pay taxes for war.
We have refused as she refused, to cooperate with the Internal Revenue Service in the collection of taxes.
And, beyond this, we encourage everyone to do the same.
If she deserves to be in prison we deserve to be there too.
Therefore I ask from the judge, the United States Attorney’s office, the Internal Revenue Service and all taxpayers and supporters of military preparations, a share in the judgment against her.
We have said very simply that your preparations for nuclear war, and therefore your war taxation, are criminal beyond any measure of crime that man has known before.
And you have said that our dissent from the idea and action of military preparedness is criminal.
The question of which is right is urgent for the future of all men.
We have shown a readiness to ratify the truth of our conviction at the risk of imprisonment and hardship.
The integrity of justice asks either that Rose Robinson be released, or that all who share her stand be imprisoned with her.
That is why I ask the officials and the people for a decision in my case consistent with their decision in hers.
How can one person be imprisoned for taking a stand, while others who take the same stand and, what is more, advocate and promote it in the marketplace are left free?
I ask the officials and the people involved to release Rose Robinson, but if they will not do that, I ask them to prosecute me for refusing to cooperate with Internal Revenue Service and for advocating that all people do the same.”
The third person who came out and took this leaflet was Judge Robson.
I had already mailed him a copy with a covering letter in which I said, “…By presenting this nuclear issue as an issue of imprisonment and freedom, we approach by an analogy the core of what it really is: that is, an issue of life and death for all of us…
I hope therefore that you will not regard this leaflet distribution and this request for a share in the judgment against Rose Robinson as something impertinent, but as an attempt to enunciate forcefully the terms of a public discussion of a crucial issue, as well as to bear witness to a very strong conviction that it is wrong to participate in modern war in any way.”
We encouraged Rose by our vigil, visits and letters.
In court she thanked us for that.
I feel responsible to every one man insurrection to make it a two-man insurrection, so that it may become a three-man insurrection and finally a revolution of enough men.
It is at the critical moment when we recognize our responsibility to one another that we realize our responsibility to mankind and to God.
That is what Jesus told us.
We see war coming on, bearing down on us, a visible monument to an immensity of sin.
Our voices have not reflected the horror we have seen.
Our voices have not challenged the supremacy of crime in the actions of men.
We were glad enough if a government preparing for World War Ⅲ, was yet benevolent in this decade until war comes, glad enough if our protest could be free from suffering.
We are still accomplices because we have whispered at the moment when we should have shouted.
We ought to throw up the challenge of Tolstoi and Thoreau, to keep all just men in jail or give up war and slavery.
Here we are making faces at the giants of the impersonalist order, but what we do not forget is that a face turned in urgent desperation to them is a face turned in hope to God.
Our work is primarily a prayer.
Early last week two men were standing on the step of the Federal Building watching me as I passed my leaflets and commenting to each other.
I recognized one of them.
It was deputy U.S. Marshal Wheeler, the man who put the chains on me last summer at Mead, Nebraska.
I stepped up to him and said, “Hello. Mr. Wheeler. Will you take a leaflet?”
“Yes, Karl,” he said, “I’ll take that. I see that you are still here passing them out.”
And so I was, and I realized that the children of this world are too wise to be consistent.
Last summer he put me in chains for standing on a grass covered knoll near a missile base.
Last month they gave Rose Robinson twelve long months and a long day.
Who can say what they will do tomorrow when I walk up the steps and into the building and have a try at handing the leaflet to taxpayers lined up outside the Federal Internal Revenue office.
In Christ, Karl Meyer Chicago Catholic Worker
An announcement in the issue:
Prayer, Fasting, and Tax Refusal
Ammon Hennacy will picket the office of Internal Revenue at Varick and West Houston Streets in New York City and will fast at this time as a penance for our dropping the bomb at Hiroshima, , and for our continued atomic activities.
He has openly refused to pay income taxes during 12 years while working in the fields in the Southwest, or while lecturing, as 83% of the income tax goes for war.
He will picket from 9 to 5 on weekdays.
Readers in New York are invited to keep him company, and anyone sympathetic can help by praying and fasting according to his capacity.
The same issue also included an article from Eroseanna Robinson, borrowed from The Peacemaker:
Rose Robinson Tells of Her Arrest and Prison Experiences
It was , and I got off the city bus in a hurry because I was late for work.
My arms were straining with the packages I’d bought downtown.
They were things for the Play Club mostly, and food.
I hadn’t had any lunch, except a couple of cashews and some fudge nibbled at on the bus.
I was quick-stepping toward Bethlehem Community Center compelled by two nagging realizations.
I was late and I was hungry.
I had a conference with my supervisor set for two o’clock.
It was already ten after.
Well, I’d just have to talk and eat at the same time.
I stopped, late as I was, at the corner store and bought some buttermilk.
Actually, I already had an abundance of food — vegetable soup, swiss cheese sandwich and what not.
But for a change, I had a little extra money and for the rest of that year, certainly, I was going to be earning a little more than usual.
For the first time in my seven years of tax refusal, I wouldn’t have to budget so closely.
Eating was as good a way as any to celebrate.
I was vexed with myself to be so busy.
First the conference.
Then group preparation.
Then the Play Club children’s time.
I’d have to do a lot of phoning after that for the parents meeting that night.
I took the hall steps quickly when I got inside the building and rushed into the front office, I said “Hi” to the secretary.
She had a peculiar look on her face.
My supervisor and the girl workers were also in the office.
I spoke to them but everybody kept looking at me strangely and nobody said anything. “What’s wrong with all of you?” I asked. “I’m not that late.
It’s only 2:15.” Then the secretary said, “Rose, there’s somebody to see you.”
She was nodding across the hall toward the library.
Somebody to see me.
I didn’t want to see anybody with all I had to do.
I wanted to put down my arm-racking bundles and have my conference and eat.
The fact is that I never had that conference and I didn’t eat for 115 days because a short, stocky, authoritative man in a grey uniform came toward me out of the library.
Behind him was a man I knew.
He’d come to my home several times and to Bethlehem Center only a week before.
He was Mr.
D.L.
Turner, deputy collector for the Internal Revenue Service.
The first man said, “Erozee-yanna Robinson?” and I said correctly “Eroseanna,” and he snapped his right hand open sidewise showing his badge. “I have a warrant for your arrest," he said. “Come with me.” For eight months the government, through its agents, had hammered link upon link several visits by the deputy collector, registered letters, a subpoena, a certified court order, telephone calls, throughout, to my home and work, a call to my sister, Adrienne, at her work, a visit to my job — until at last, they had reached the handcuff-end of the chain, putting my wrists into them so tightly that they cut, and lugging my body, in deliberately ungainly fashion, away to jail.
My body was lugged and dragged around many times after that because I refused to walk to jail or trial or any place authorized by the courts.
And throughout the whole of my incarceration, the practices upon which government power pivots came into sharp focus.
One is the coercion of the individual to unquestioningly submit to authority imposed by the government, the other is the deliberate misrepresentation of any individual who might take exception to such authority.
This whole pattern is disguised as the democratic process’ and, in recent years, has frequently been labeled ‘freedom’ and ‘truth’.
Actually, respect for the right of the individual to examine policies of government — which certainly affect us all — is a myth.
And taking exception to policy, as in my own case — even though that exception be a denouncement of violence, waste, psychological intimidation, misrepresentation of truth, and preparation for wholesale destruction — can constitute a felony.
When the individual is willing to be fodder for such an organ, it is partly out of desire for reward but largely to escape punishment.
And submission to such authority is no guarantee of either.
So, when the deputy marshal told me he was there to arrest me, I told him that was his affair and was of no concern to me, and started up the 2nd floor stairs to my office.
I recognized that I was going to be forcibly involved and I was alert to a point of high tension.
But still, I knew I was faced with a choice of being arrested or of arresting myself.
I knew then that my arrest was to be his affair, since he had not the conscience to do otherwise, and later, that or the ten or so others who answered his telephone call for help when I refused to go with him voluntarily.
I wasn’t going to contribute my body for incarceration anymore than I would contribute federal income taxes for militarization.
This would be giving sanction to the government’s inflicting punishment upon the individual.
But just as militarization is evil, so too is the punitive institution.
The government has prepared a glossy brochure about Women’s Federal Prison at Alderson, West Virginia.
They call their penal process ‘rehabilitation’!
This is a calculated misuse of the term. They proceed due south of rehabilitation.
Such downgrading of human beings — infantile treatment of the women, the frequent apathy toward the physical ailments of inmates, the absurd restrictions — is anything but preparation for constructive living.
This was equally true of the Cook County Jail.
This maltreatment of prisoners would be bad enough if done out of ignorance.
But attempts at concealment of the facts by all levels of government personnel, with restraint of information and with lies, reveals the hypocritical state of such authority.
I’ve learned, since my release from Alderson, that a number of lies in regard to me and treatment of me were given to the Press by the wardens of both the County Jail and the prison and by the U.S. marshal.
I will recount some in a later issue, but let me state a few of these now and set the facts in order:
Rose was arrested and taken to the Clerk’s office of the county jail.
I wasn’t taken to any office, but was carried upstairs and dumped on a bed in the incorrigible cell of the “Hole.”
The Hole is usually reserved for narcotics addicts who are breaking the habit.
It was overheated because addicts in that condition are always cold.
They vomited all day and all night and in between they talked in the lewdest profanity.
The Hole is a four part unit — 1 larger room about 9′×12′ and 3 tiny cells, removed from the outer door, about 4′×8′.
The grey speckled floors were stone, the clay colored walls, iron.
The larger section had four iron beds with mattresses and bedding.
A bed in each of the little cells took up half the width.
There’s a seatless toilet in each.
The two outer ones had windows that opened (but that were kept closed because the addicts complained of being cold).
Only one of these boasted a sink.
Two cell doors remained open usually, while the one in which I was put was locked.
In that cell, the window was nearly opaque with dirt and with heavy screening, and iron bars were on the outside.
It could not be opened.
Under it, going full blast always, was a radiator.
The only way I could get relief from the heat, and a breath of cool air, was by lying flat on the floor on my stomach and inhaling of the stream that flowed under the hall door from several feet away.
The iron bed had a wafer-thin mattress on it and was so short that my head and feet stuck out simultaneously beyond its borders.
I was given a clean sheet and a blanket.
To get some sleep at night, I tilted the bed up on one end out of the way and put the mattress on the floor.
I slept fitfully with my head resting on stone, under the toilet.
Whenever a toilet in an adjacent cell was flushed, the substance would back up into the others.
This kept me jumping up throughout the night, reflushing the one over my head.
The radiator boiled away, where my feet were, all night long.
I didn’t wash for 3½ days because I was told I couldn’t use the facilities without begging.
Frequently the matron put food for me on the floor.
Rose proceeded to take off her clothes and to remain thus in the cell.
I was forcibly undressed by two matrons after refusing to give up my own clothes.
Then I was manually searched all over and forced into a striped cotton dress that was ripped in two places.
All my clothes — even shoes — were taken from me.
The next morning I was told repeatedly that I would be left in jail to rot unless I got dressed and walked out to go to court.
I refused.
About an hour later, without explanation, my clothes were given back to me.
Another hour passed, and when I refused to walk out, I was dragged from the cell, up the steps, into a wheelchair and hauled off to court.
When I returned, the nurse had trouble removing my clothes by herself, so she didn’t bother to take any more than my skirt.
I fashioned another by doubling a sheet and wrapping it around my middle.
I refused to put on the striped dress she’d provided.
On the fifth day, after I’d been dragged from my prayers and put in isolation cell of the so-called hospital (a dingy white-painted dormitory), the nurse, who proved to be sympathetic and courteous, offered me a nightgown which I accepted.
I wore this to bed and whenever I washed my own clothes.
Rose took exercises unclad.
Silly. I always wore the above-mentioned.
Rose, therefore, had to jump into bed when the warden and a reporter from the Daily News came to interview her.
She told her story, said the reporter, who “quoted” her in the News.
How reluctant I’ll be to believe anything printed in the daily papers from now on.
No reporter was ever admitted to quarters where I was confined.
And such quotes are out-and-out lies.
Moreover, I neither saw nor talked to the warden until the last day when, under his supervision, I was dragged from the cell and carted to the U.S. hospital.
Rose left the cell to go downstairs and see a boyfriend, but she wouldn’t go to see her parents.
During my incarceration I walked out of the immediate confines 3 times — once at Alderson when I helped carry a sick inmate to the hospital car, once to my release and one other time, at the Cook County Jail.
And I went to talk to Rev. Ernest Bromley, editor of The Peacemaker.
At first I hesitated.
And then I decided that too few people knew my views on tax refusal and the like, so this was to me a fine chance to express these views through the newspaper.
I then resumed my plan to see no one unless they were admitted to the area where I was confined.
My mother was admitted and I welcomed her.
The other inmates were sneaking Rose candy bars during her fast.
The warden, head matron, priest and others had proof.
This’s the first time in my experience that fantasy has become proof.
I ate nothing throughout my whole time in jail and nobody crammed anything down my throat.
After my removal to the U.S. hospital I ate nothing.
I drank no water the first 3½ days of jail, very little — spasmodically — in-between, and none the last 9 days before force-feeding.
I did not wish to crave things that could be withheld from me, because emotional control meant freedom.
Rose enjoyed being fed through a tube in her nose. She didn’t struggle.
At Alderson, I didn’t struggle. I gave voice protest and continued whatever I was doing.
In the beginning at the U.S. hospital in Chicago, I had struggled, nonviolently against four men and two women.
It took them 20 minutes to turn me over and stretch me out and another 20 minutes to get me tied, hand and foot to the bed, in a straitjacket.
I couldn’t do much moving in that state, but they further secured me with a restraining blanket made of bulky canvas.
Then they tightened a rope across my chest.
It was in the mid-eighties in that room and no air was stirring.
I had trouble breathing. I was miserable. But they had an easy time force-feeding me.
By the next morning I was aching all over. One of the doctors came in and asked me how I felt.
I felt terrible, I said. Would I struggle if he let me out? I’d thought about that overnight.
How easy it was for them to force food into me—how uncomfortable it was for me.
Besides this, I was 37 lbs. below normal weight and very weak.
If I could keep them from having power over me, struggle I would.
But I knew I couldn’t keep up even the kind of effort I’d made the night before, and neither did I have the control yet to remain lying in one position for a long period of time.
So, I told the doctor, no. Did I want to be untied? Yes.
So, he walked away and left me like that for several hours more.
I stayed, thus restricted, for nearly 24 hours.
The night before, when they inserted the tube, the other doctor had jammed it into my nose, letting it stop at my throat.
I tried desperately to get my breath but I kept choking.
I could see the doctor’s face, looking like a great wax mask—with expensive eyes—magnified enormously.
He watched me as though I were a specimen under glass.
I gagged three times and he watched me.
“Alright now, breathe,” he said this steadily, “through your mouth”.
Of course I did, and, in one movement, he jammed the tube down to my stomach.
Blood bubbled from my nose and mouth. It continued for hours, after that.
My nose and throat were inflamed and sore for 4 days.
My nose remained sore and ran constantly, and I sneezed again and again throughout 12 days of force-feeding.
The doctor at Anderson was considerate and gentle in this.
He used a smaller tube and put it down by degrees. There was very little irritation.
My nose did run for weeks though, and always when I talked.
I sneezed, because the tube was left there all the time.
I plugged up the nostril with cotton to keep the thing from wriggling.
I slept with it and otherwise lived with it for 76 days and nights.
That made a total of 88 days of force-feeding.
Rose was being well-fed, gaining much weight, and was getting 3000 calories per day.
For nine days at Alderson, I was force-fed 2 pints of water with 5% sugar and 2 pints of a mixture of egg, molasses, sugar, salt, water, evaporated milk and orange juice.
After that the mixture was doubled and the sugar-water eliminated.
When I was removed to solitary confinement, the mixture was cut 25%.
Then it was cut a second time.
I was carried to solitary 25 lbs. underweight.
Taking measurement of myself revealed I hadn’t gained a pound. Limited exercise wore me out.
To keep from losing, frequently I’d spend long hours in bed.
Hospital aides (inmates) told me the mixture contained very little protein and an abnormally high amount of molasses, salt and orange juice.
Long before they told me this I’d started drinking lots of water because I was feeling irritation from the acidity.
I was drinking as much as 15 glasses of water each day.
Sometimes I felt a little feverish and my face would swell.
That was when the prison staff would compliment me on how nice and fat I was getting.
Only when friends came to the prison, asking after my welfare, did the aides tell me the protein had been increased noticeably but that the molasses and salt and orange juice remained high.
Again, before they told me this, I’d already noticed my measurements were increasing normally.
When I was released, I was 10 lbs. underweight.
Rose liked the feeding.
I was forced-fed in a ragged pattern.
The aides and nurses came any time between sun-up and 9:30 at night.
I overcame feelings of weakness usually through prayer, and sometimes, as I said before, by just climbing into bed.
Food was left as an enticement throughout most of my confinement.
An aide who felt sorry for me told the head nurse I wasn’t getting enough nourishment.
“That’s impossible.” said the nurse. After that they left a glassful of the stuff on the dresser.
Often I was spattered with the stuff, whenever the tube came off the syringe.
So, too, were walls, ceiling, floor, draperies bed, bedding — everything in the cell.
And usually it was left where it landed.
I made a practice of going on with whatever I was doing.
At first, the nurses carried or sat me into position for force-feeding.
Sometimes the aides would lurk, pitcher and syringe in hand, waiting for me to halt so that they could pour the stuff down easily.
After I was moved to solitary, the aides were ultimately told to walk away if I didn’t sit down right away, so sometimes my stomach was left empty.
One day I accidentally got a hole in the tube.
The doctor refused to let the aides cut it, and he decided that neither did he have the time to leave the hospital to change it.
I wasn’t fed for 25 hours.
Rose was given considerable freedom of movement.
When this was said, I was in solitary confinement in the maximum security cottage, one of only two with bars on the windows and with locked outer doors.
I remained there for 27 straight days in full confinement.
The last 31 days, the cell door was opened from 8 A.M. to 5 P.M.
And so the lies went and there are more — most skillful — all paid for with federal income tax.
Lies. The Official order of the prison day, and at Alderson, the green grass grew all around.
For the grounds were lovely to look at — lovely its trees, its broad lawns and gay spring flowers, lovely the birds singing outside the cottages where wires crawled through the walls like snakes, so that every word that every inmate spoke day or night was listened to and taken down on a tape recorder.
There weren’t any secrets.
Next time, I’ll tell about the alleged psychiatric and medical examinations at Alderson and about the marshal’s predictions about what the inmates would do to me when they found out I wouldn’t work.
Also, I’ll tell about a time of weakness. One morning, for a moment, I was in a turmoil.
Daily discipline, including prayer exercises, helped me to regain strength.
More from Karl Meyer, in the issue (excerpts):
I have had a small house of hospitality, five rooms where I have lived with nine or ten people who were sick, poor, orphans, old, travelers or needy of other kinds.
I have sought some way to work for the support of my responsibilities to this house and not pay federal income taxes for the support of militarism.
In I quit my job where taxes were withheld and resolved not to pay withholding tax anymore and went to jail for 54 days in solidarity with tax refuser Eroseanna Robinson, who had just been imprisoned here in Chicago.
After my release I began a search for work without taxes.
I experimented with self-employment in odd jobs and in tutoring.
I tried to persuade employers to pay for my work in the form of a direct donation to St. Stephens House, without withholding tax.
I received an opinion from a lawyer that Internal Revenue Service had ruled that this type of arrangement with a charitable organization was legal for hospitals, so I applied at a number of hospitals, but was turned down.
I looked for part time work paid for in cash. Nothing worked, particularly me.
Being under the firm impression that only one’s relatives could be claimed as dependents for the purpose of withholding exemptions, I complained bitterly to my pacifist brethren that, in fact, I had nine dependents but was unable to claim them for non-tax purposes.
Not one of these experts on tax resistance set me straight.
On , after five months of frustration, I checked on the Internal Revenue Service definition of dependents.
This is how it reads:
“To qualify as your dependent… a person (a) must receive more than one-half of his support from you for the year, and (b) must-have less than $600 gross income during the year… and (c) must not be claimed as an exemption by such person[’]s husband or wife, and (and) must be a citizen or resident of the United States… and (e) must (1) have your home as his principal residence and be a member of your household for the entire year, or (2) be related to you…”
I counted four people in my household, in addition to myself, whom I could claim for dependency exemptions.
I discovered that all along I might have been earning $3000 per year without a cent of withholding tax.
I could have kicked myself all the way down Clark St.
We need more small houses of hospitality “to shelter the homeless at a personal sacrifice” instead of delivering them to the City and the State to be supported by taxes, on the street or in the jails.
We believe that housing the unemployed, feeding the hungry, giving drink to the thirsty, clothing the naked, caring for the sick and the aged and, last of all, visiting the prisoners are parts of a total Gospel of Peace.
If we do these things, we can also starve the tax collector, by feeding the poor.
We can build “a new society in the shell of the old,” a City of God, and swing wide its gates to let the King, and his ambassadors, enter in triumph.
Not all of the poor who come to our door come in the embassy of God.
Several nights ago one of the men came with two drop-cloths and a gallon of turpentine “from the job” and asked permission to leave them here and stay the night himself, and I, in all innocence, agreed to this.
The next morning, two painters arrived, with a policeman, demanding the drop-cloths, which had been stolen from them and traced to our house.
I turned over the drop-cloths, but the policeman also demanded that I turn over the thief.
When I declined to do this, he said that he would take me to the station and book me for possession of stolen property.
The painters agreed to sign a complaint against me, because, they said, not only had the cloths been stolen, but also, some paint had been spilt and now they would have to pay for it out of their own pockets.
However, perhaps if I would reimburse them for the spilt paint, they would find it in their hearts to forget about the complaint.
How much paint was lost, asked the policeman? Ten dollars worth.
Now, half a gallon of paint may have been spilt, but how could anyone have spilt ten dollars worth?
Still I had to take their word for it or they would surely have taken me to the station and signed the complaint, so in the end I paid and they went away satisfied with their take, all of which goes to prove the old moral: one good theft deserves another, or no use taking a fall over spilt paint.
After the danger had passed, I found the thief under a bed in the farthest corner of the back room.
He said he was sorry. And I said he sure as hell should be. And after a little of that he left.
I did reap an unexpected reward for my ordeal however, for that morning the most shiftless character in the house, out of an excess of sympathy and generosity, offered to press my trousers for me.
I might also say that some of the “rich” even come to our door as ambassadors of God.
There is one man who comes from time to time and leaves things that we need (clothing, furnishings or household items) inside the door.
He just opens the door, puts them inside and goes away.
For almost two years he has been doing this.
He used to come perhaps once a month, but recently he has taken to coming much more frequently.
For a long time we knew nothing about him because we never saw him come, but several times recently, when the door was locked, he knocked and handed in his gifts when the door was opened and then left very quickly.
I have always respected his anonymity, because I remember from my childhood the story of the shoemaker and the elves: the elves used to come at night and make shoes for the shoemaker, but one night he tried to catch them at their work and they disappeared and never returned again.
(After the story I told above, let me hasten to say that there is always a ticket with the things that this man brings so that I know they are not stolen.)
During the voter registration period, one man from the neighborhood came in and asked, “Is this a registration office?”
And I looked at the crucifix on the wall and the picture of Ammon Hennacy and said, “No, it isn’t.”
The Democratic precinct worker for our building came in to see if we were registered, and she told me that I am going to vote under the name of Geoffrey Thornton, because he is registered but she can’t find him anywhere in the building.
She needs votes but this is one she won’t get.
Three young Catholic workers have said they may join me in the work here soon.
If they do, we will be well staffed to carry out the Green Revolution program I outlined in my last letter.
The next article concerns Laurence Hislam, a war tax resister who is new to me.
It comes from the issue:
Catholic Pacifist Jailed in England Father of Five Refuses Civil Defense Tax
By Robert Steed
My friend Laurie Hislam, who resembles Ammon Hennacy in many ways, was recently sentenced to a term in jail far refusing to pay his Civil Defense rates.
He served two months last year for taking part in the civil disobedience campaigns of the Committee of 100 which protested the British involvement in the nuclear arms race.
I was in court with Laurie in when he first appeared on this charge.
When he put on bis best suit, cranked up his car (a huge, old London taxi), which finally had to be pushed down a hill to get it started, and drove to town where other friends were waiting in court I was expecting fireworks but the magistrate put a damper on the proceedings and said he would allow no speechmaking.
He said a note would be made of the tax refusal, and went on to the next hearing.
Laurie said the court would probably send someone around to the house and want to take away a table or a few chairs and auction them off for the amount owed (the former owner having the privilege of bidding for them too) and debated whether any kind of resistance should be offered and if so what kind.
When I left a few days later nothing had happened and a month after that when we met at the Spode House PAX Conference it was still the same.
And now more than a year later I have heard in a letter from Laurie’s wife, Winifred, that he is serving time for the offense.
Lest I give the impression that Laurie became a radical in middle-age I should also say that he declined to serve in World War Ⅱ and instead of showing up for his physical went off on a tour of England and Scotland selling anarchist literature for Freedom Press.
When he got back to London after a year on the road the police picked him up but the army doctors found something wrong with one of his feet and rejected him.
In the intervening years he has become a Catholic, gotten married and moved to the Cottswolds in the west of England near Gloucester where he and his wife built their house with their own hands and are raising five beautiful daughters.
The whole family is vegetarian.
Here is the text of Laurie’s leaflet explaining his position which was distributed in the Stroud area:
Why I Am In Jail
I have just commenced serving a term of imprisonment imposed by the Stroud (Glos.) Magistrates, and I believe it is important that it should be clearly understood by the members of the community on whose behalf the Magistrates have officially acted, why this has happened.
For the past two years I have refused to pay the portion of the Local Rate (roughly 1 penny in the pound) allocated to “Civil Defense.”
My reasons are as follows:
There is not even any pretense of preparation to protect the people of Stroud in the event of war.
According to Government spokesmen, there is no known means of protecting the population against nuclear attack.
Even if “Civil Defense” could be effective (which I do not believe possible) I would still feel bound to refuse to pay for it, since “Civil Defense” is an essential part of the preparation for a war in which millions of innocent people would be brutally killed or maimed.
I believe that those who support “Civil Defense” have been deceived by the Government into believing that they are helping to save life and assist the injured, whereas in fact by their acceptance of the need for “Civil Defense,” they have given their tacit agreement (in certain circumstances) to the waging of nuclear war and its unimaginably terrible suffering.
Worst of all is the hypocrisy attached to “Western” propaganda, which says, in effect, the Russians are the atheistic barbarians and we are good people trying to protect Christianity and democracy, whereas, in fact we and the U.S.A. are prepared to collaborate with the Russians in the ultimate blasphemy of destroying the whole of creation.
A so-called policy of which this is the logical result can never be justified, and I appeal to everyone who reads this statement to seriously consider his or her position.
Examine your conscience and ask yourself the question: Am I willing to lend my support, either actively or (as the majority, unfortunately do) by my silence, to the preparation for nuclear war?
(Remembering that “Civil Defense" is part of the insidious mental conditioning for war-acceptance.)
If we give our silent agreement to Lord Home’s recent boast of our ability to annihilate all Russia’s cities (even in revenge) we have committed murder in our hearts.
You can no longer remain silent and still hope to retain your integrity.
I may be forcibly silenced for a time, but I ask you to speak out fearlessly against the crime which is being prepared by the world’s leaders.
Above all—speak out for the children and babies of the world who rely upon you for protection.
You cannot give protection by preparing for war — a war in which there can be no defense — only revengeful slaughter on both sides.
Laurence Hislam,
Brownshill,
Stroud, Glos.
This next comes from the issue:
Tax Refusal
Handbook on Nonpayment of War Taxes; published by the Peacemakers’ Movement; 35 cents; 52 pages; available from the Peacemakers (1208 Sylvan Ave., Cincinnati 41, Ohio)
Reviewed by James Forest.
For all those who have ever felt a deeply responsive chord struck upon reading or re-reading the story of 10 just men saving the city, this book on conscientious tax-refusal should be meaningful.
The book is divided into a number of sections: there is a good collection of fairly brief quotations by a wide range of tax-refusers, a chapter on the philosophy and history of this particular form of conscientious objection, considerable material concerning the inherent legalities/illegalities, descriptions of the basic forms of refusal (surprising variety) and, most important, a substantial collection of “personal experience” sketches.
The reader might find it useful to see a tightened version of the major contents:
Philosophy
Nonviolence begins with personal disarmament:
“Lord, make me an instrument of your peace. Where there is hate, let me sow love.”
It is not a partial disarmament. At least that isn’t the goal.
It is a serious and concerted effort to shred the rhinoceros hide which makes us either witting or unwitting enemies to other men.
(I recently had the opportunity to hear a young woman describe the effect her first long term contact and participation in a nonviolent project — in this case the Walk to Cuba — had on her.
She spoke of the sensation of peeling off layer upon layer of dead skin, of feeling the wind for the first time.)
What is it the pacifist says? I refuse to be your enemy.
I refuse to be your enemy so much that I will fight for you, fight with you, fight with love to see justice done — even at personal risk.
The Great Commandment: “Love one another as I have loved you.”
I cannot be free until you are free.
I cannot be comfortable or safe or satisfied until these things are common property.
It is not necessary to quote here statistics offered in the book on where taxes go.
We all know. A good deal of it goes to the arms race in all its continuing facets.
I don’t think it would make much difference if it were only a little.
There is nothing more moral in contributing a nickel to a child’s death than in giving a dollar for the cause.
But the plain fact is that more than half that money goes for that purpose, and we do give it.
Said one woman, Miriam Nicholas, deciding this was one contribution she would be unable to make, “…the government expects me to help pay for weapons that could destroy all life on this earth.”
“This I must not give,” said Wendal Bull, finishing a similar statement.
“You may be imprisoned, but that is sometimes more honorable,” Ross Anderson stated.
“If I can’t stop other people’s killing.” Milton Mayer decided, “I must stop my own.”
What Is the Law?
The legal aspects of tax refusal are complicated and inevitably vary from case to case.
It is, of course, a punishable offense to refuse all or part of one’s taxes.
It is also an offense not to submit the required documentation.
Any noncooperation with the Internal Revenue Service is illegal.
The penalty can be as high as a $10,000 and a year in jail plus the cost of prosecution.
In practice, for reasons which one can easily understand, no such sentence is ever meted out.
In fact few tax-refusers ever find themselves in front of a judge at all.
It is interesting to draw some quick statistics from the 41 cases detailed in the handbook (there is some slight overlapping):
Four lost their jobs (two were Protestant ministers).
Six were jailed, average sentence served being about three months.
(Those jailed, it should be noted, refused any alternatives: put no money in the bank so that it couldn’t be seized, held no volatile property in their own names, etc.)
Nine had property or funds seized.
(The government, when it desires to seize anything, prefers funds; attempts to garnish salaries or draw from cheeking and savings accounts are most common.
As a last resort it may seize property for public auction, such as a house.)
29 received no punishment and had no property or funds seized.
That is not to say there was no intimidation, that the going was easy. It wasn’t.
But the simple truth is, or at least has been, that there are still relatively few tax collectors, district attorneys or judges who wish to play a modern version of Pilate’s role.
We can be glad there remain many (perhaps even a growing number) who do not feel justice is served by stale coercion of conscience.
Forms of Refusal
There are, and this I didn’t realize, several distinct forms of tax-refusal, each with its own sub-variations.
The first and probably most well known is absolute nonpayment.
Absolute Refusal
To practice absolute nonpayment it is necessary either to earn an income too low to be taxable (Citizens and residents, under 65, can figure as nontaxable any income which is below the number of members in the family times $600.
Thus a family of three would be tax exempt if it made less than $1,800 in the course of a year), or, if is is impossible or philosophically repugnant, to earn a taxable income where one is not subjected to withholding tax, such as by having one’s own business or forming one with others of similar concern.
Ammon Hennacy, though he owes $1,300 in back taxes, is for the present in the first group, earning less than a taxable income.
Karl Meyer was in the latter group until he discovered he could count all the members of St. Stephen’s house of hospitality as dependents (as long as they had lived in the hospice from the beginning of the year and received half or more of their subsistence from him).
Persons interested in both tax refusal and running a small house of hospitality might find this an ideal solution.
Partial Refusal
For persons who are having taxes withheld from their incomes there is the opportunity of refusing to pay the balance due, or part of it.
Others, whether they have taxes withheld from their earnings or not, sometimes choose to pay only the percentage which they feel is used for peaceful purposes — 30% to 40%.
UNESCO seems to be one of the frequent recipients of the balance.
A third form of partial refusal includes persons such as Franklin Zahn, who annually withholds a “token ten dollars.”
These believe that the minimum one can do is to refuse a symbolic sum.
“Ten dollars is large enough to be noticed,” Zahn says, “but small enough to avoid excessive penalty.”
The “token ten,” he suggests, could be given to some constructive project and the IRS so notified.
(The book also relates Zahn’s refusal, beginning in , to pay that portion of his telephone bill which was a federal tax, at the time 49¢ monthly.
He explained this action to the telephone company, saying “My refusal to pay this tax is part of a larger rejection of all participation in defense activities.”
Before long his telephone was removed.
His resultant letter of explanation to friends, an apology, is a document worth reading:
“Three times I have refused the monthly telephone war tax of 49¢ (15%) and now [garbled text omitted ―♇] is no more, as of .
I regret much of the inconvenience of this fails on you, and offer my apologies to you and others who thus suffer from my act of conscience.
When irked, please consider:
1. Somewhere in the world there may be one less bullet killing a human being.
2. The $3.74 saved monthly will be used for CARE parcels.
3. If it actually is the narrow choice I feel it to be, you would prefer me to be connected with my highest conscience than with a mere gadget.”)
Conclusion
Finishing the handbook, I am reminded of a brief epigram of James Baldwin contained in The Fire Next Time.
“To act is to be committed, and to be committed is to be in danger.”
How we admire action and commitment!
St. Francis strikes off to the Holy Land with his nonviolent “Army of Love,” an army, as Clement of Alexandria would call it, “which sheds no blood.”
And we applaud this, one of the few moments of sanctity which occurred during all the Crusades, one of the few a Christian can recall with pride.
St. Maximillian refuses to serve in the military and shortly dies under the executioner’s axe.
The Cure d’Area, as a young man, changes his name and flees to the mountains rather than be conscripted.
Before death he recalls this, saying be never felt his conscience burdened by it.
And on and on. Thank God the list is endless. No editorializing is needed on lives like these.
Somehow they change the question. It is no longer Should I be a tax-refuser?
It becomes How can I be anything else?
It is fitting to end this discussion with a quotation the book provides from Milton Mayer:
“The power to stop war is not in my hands, and never will be.
The only power that is in my hands is to stop killing my fellowmen.
A thousand, or two thousand, or fifty thousand people refusing to go on killing via the tax method may save the old way of life; fewer than that were required to save Sodom.
But if a new way of life is the condition of the revolution to which we are called, then we must find it in our hearts, and when we do that we will stop killing our fellowmen and, best of all, stop justifying our doing it.
If I can’t stop other people’s killing, I must still stop my own.”
Another book review from the issue:
The Cold War and the Income Tax
The Cold War and the Income Tax, by Edmond Wilson; Farrar, Straus and Company; 1968; 118 pp.; $2.95.
Reviewed by James Forest.
Edmund Wilson’s most recent book is a small volume which carries the subtitle “A Protest.”
Indeed it is that: a forceful, plain-spoken broadside at the cold war and the related income tax, and though it is not without blemish, it ought to provide at least an awakening for a great many.
What Mr. Wilson has done is to tell a simple, and at times homely, tale that began with carelessness (or more likely unadmitted and ingrained Yankee independence) and concluded with a monumental decision, at least for our timid age: a modified refusal to pay income taxes.
Much of the book is devoted to a detailed account of the original carelessness, fascinating in the sense that a common experience of almost everyone is seen in the sharp relief of Mr. Wilson’s prose — the utterly frustrating encounters with the rule-book bureaucrats, who seem always the same whether it is a hospital clinic or the army or a tax office that houses their working hours, or no matter what their ideology may be.
In Mr. Wilson’s case, his long encounter was precipitated by almost, dedicated indifference to taxes.
Until taxes were no problem to him, as they were automatically withheld by his various employers.
But after that year he began to devote himself to fulltime independent writing, and of course there was no withholding.
Six years went by, no taxes were paid, no returns filed, and though he tells us he occasionally thought about the eventual necessity of paying up, he was unaware of the astounding severity the law applies for even minor neglect.
When at last he spoke to a lawyer friend, saying he might need some assistance in preparing his returns, the lawyer was flabbergasted and immediately urged Mr. Wilson to establish citizenship outside the United States before it was too late.
But even the author of To the Finland Station can be naive, and he couldn’t believe it would be more convenient to change countries than negotiate a debt.
He insisted on settlement, gave the lawyer a check and told him to begin his work.
“You’re a brave man,” his lawyer told him.
The Years That Followed
It would be of little value to outline the years that followed , when the arduous work began.
He must often have wished he had followed his friend’s advice and tucked himself away in a friendlier economy, where if he were paying taxes, at least it wouldn’t be for war.
It took Mr. Wilson five years and two lawyers to settle the case.
At some unspecified point, Mr. Wilson’s instinctual annoyance emerged into a time of probing the meaning of his experience, the inadequacies of the collection system and, most important, the uses the money was being put to.
His discoveries are carefully outlined—translating the noble sounding verbiage of the Administration’s Budget in Brief
(which says in part, “The Federal Government’s final responsibility is to help safeguard the peace and security of the free world.
This is our largest category of expenditures…
Expenditures devoted to national security… space programs… and the continuing cost of past wars amount to 79% of the administrative budget…”),
translating this into the facts of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, of napalm and phosphorus bombs, of disease, warfare.
The latter two are of particular interest, because, (despite protest demonstrations at Ft. Detrick, Md., the U.S. research-development center for chemical and biological weapons) there is little popularisation of these methods of warfare, though it is admitted that napalm bombs are being used in Vietnam — as they have been widely used elsewhere — and there is evidence that disease weapons are also being employed.
For instance, water supplies in South Vietnam have been poisoned in areas where both civilians and Vietcong rebels use the same well, killing some Vletcong, but also many non-combatants who were merely thirsty.
About napalm: It is, Mr. Wilson writes, “a kind of jelly saturated with gasoline, which is ignited by the bursting of the bomb.
Its great advantage is that it sticks to whatever it touches…
Its effect on human beings has been described by a
BBC correspondent in Korea:
‘In front of us a curious figure was standing a little crouched, legs straddled, arms held out from his sides.
He had no eyes, and the whole of his body, nearly all of which was visible through tatters of burned rags, was covered with a hard black crust speckled with yellow pus.
A Korean woman by his side began to speak, and the interpreter said:
“He has to stand, sir, cannot sit or lie.”
He had to stand because he was no longer covered with skin…’ ”
The BBC correspondent goes on to explain, however, that he would rather be killed by napalm than phosphorus or flame throwers.
Toward Inspired Derangement
The material on disease warfare (often termed bacteriological, biological or chemical) is on much the same level, though not so grossly horrifying, as we do not see it translated into eye witness accounts.
Involved is the same degradation of any value system.
For as one military man, Admiral Mahan, puts it, every advance in the use of lethal weapons, beginning with firearms, has been denounced as cruel.
He goes on to point out that shells with asphyxiating gases could produce “decisive results.”
Says Philip Noel-Baker, in his book The Arms Race, “All the leading governments have them now.”
And in the Chief Chemical Officer of the United States Army announced that even “mental derangement might be deliberately inspired” by this form of weaponry.
As Mr. Wilson observes, “Human life since Stalin and the Nazis has been something that few people in the East or West any longer care much about.”
Or as Robert Pickus, Turn Toward Peace executive, observed: “We support policies that would make Genghis Kahn vomit, and yet we turn out for Church every Sunday.”
Of course the question is, what can we do about all this?
To Catholic Worker readers this is no new question, as we have been fighting this a long time.
Mr. Wilson outlines the general steps of tax refusal (see detailed article on this subject in the September 1963 Catholic Worker [Forest’s review, see above]) and describes the course of two more well known refusers, Dr. A.J. Muste of the Committee for Nonviolent Action and Liberation magazine, and the Rev. Maurice McCrackin, active in the civil rights effort and the Peacemaker movement.
He goes on to describe his personal response, which is to keep his income below taxable levels.
(It is a fact, though it is not mentioned in this work, that Mr. Wilson has assigned all royalties of this book to use in the peace movement.)
He has decided not to go to jail, however, and will move to another country before allowing this to occur.
But he is determined to withdraw his support:
“When the stakes in games become so serious — when everybody’s life is at stake — they ought not to be played at all, and the taxpayers should not support them.”
The following article, from the issue, announces the formation of the “War Tax Protest Committee,” a group I hadn’t heard of before.
I’m guessing it was an early, regional form of the group “National War Tax Resistance,” which came together in .
Tax Refusal
The War Tax Protest Committee was formed to bring together West Coast conscientious objectors to income taxes for war and war preparations.
The aim of the committee is to heighten public awareness of uses to which tax monies are put and to suggest alternatives to the submissive payment of such taxes.
A range of activities around the tax deadline is being planned, including an all-day picket of IRS regional headquarters in San Francisco, a press conference, and a public meeting.
Founders of the War Tax Protest Committee include Ammon Hennacy, Roy Kepler, Mark Morris, Britt Peter, Ira Sandperl, Barton Stone, Sam Tyson, and Ida and Denny Wilcher.
The War Tax Protest Committee welcomes all persons involved in war tax protest — from total refusers to those who include a letter of protest with their return.
Creation of this new committee took place at the Committee for Nonviolent Action-West weekend seminar on Conscientious Objection to Income Taxes for War Preparations at Forest Farm in Marin County, .
The new committee, however, will have no organisational tie with CNVA-West, which is furnishing it with office space.
c/o
CNVA-West P.O. Box 5983, San Francisco 1, Calif.
The issue reprinted a letter from Joan Baez announcing her income tax resistance:
Tax Protest
Joan Baez, American folksinger, has refused to pay that 60% of her income tax which goes for military expenditures.
She sent the following letter to the Internal Revenue Service explaining her action:
Dear Friends:
What I have to say is this:
I do not believe in the weapons of war.
Weapons and Wars have murdered, burned, distorted, crippled, and caused endless varieties of pain to men, women, and children for too long.
Our modern weapons can reduce a man to a piece of dust in a split second, can make a woman’s hair fall out or cause her baby to be born a monster.
They can kill the part of a turtle’s brain that tells him where he is going, so instead of trudging to the ocean he trudges confusedly towards the desert, slowly, blinking his poor eyes, until he finally scorches to death and turns into a shell and some bones.
I am not going to volunteer the 60% of my year’s income tax that goes to armaments.
There are two reasons for my action.
One is enough. It is enough to say that no man has the right to take another man’s life.
Now we plan and build weapons that can take thousands of lives in one second, millions of lives in a day, billions in a week.
No one has a right to do that.
It is madness.
It is wrong.
My other reason is that modern war is impractical and stupid.
We spend billions of dollars a year on weapons which scientists, politicians, military men, and even the President all agree must never be used.
That is impractical.
The expression “National Security” has no meaning.
It refers to our Defense System, which I call our Offense System, and which is a farce.
It continues expanding and heaping up, one horrible kill machine upon another, until for some reason or another a button will be pushed and our world, or a good portion of it, will be blown to pieces.
That is not security. That is stupidity.
People are starving to death in some places of the world.
They look to this country with all its wealth and all its power.
They look at our National budget. They are supposed to respect us. They do not respect us.
They despise us. That is impractical and stupid.
Maybe the line should have been drawn when the bow and arrow were invented, maybe at the gun, the cannon, maybe.
Because now it is all wrong, all impractical, and all stupid.
So all I can do is draw my own line now. I am no longer supporting my portion of the arms race.
Sincerely Yours, Joan C. Baez
Karl Meyer was back for the edition:
War Escalates, Tax Refusal Called For
“The future will be different, if we make the present different.” ―Peter Maurin
By Karl Meyer
I have been refusing to pay Federal income tax, or to file tax returns, .
Finally, on , after several visits, an Internal Revenue Service agent sent me returns for the years 1962, 1963 and 1965, which he had prepared and filed without my cooperation or consent, claiming a total of $1,099.12 in back taxes and penalties for those years.
we have shared the greater part of our personal income with people who have no income, through the house of hospitality, and I have claimed an appropriate number of exemptions on the withholding tax slips which one must file with one’s employers in order to hold a job, but I.R.S. did not recognize these exemptions, because I refused to file a return or to substantiate a claim to such exemptions in their conversations with me.
My resistance to Federal taxes is not based on legalities, but on moral opposition to militarism, and I will maintain it in spite of legalities and without taking refuge in them.
I will never pay the tax that is claimed, even if I must become a pilgrim from job to job in order to avoid the attachment of my wages.
(A national list of income-tax refusers is being collected for publication, by the No Tax for War Committee, c/o Rev. Maurice McCrackin. 932 Dayton St., Cincinnati, Ohio 45214.
Last year’s list included the names of Dorothy Day, Martin Corbin and Ammon Hennacy among a list of two hundred.)
But I am not writing about this because I expect a mass addition of Catholic Worker readers to the list of income-tax refusers (it is not that easy to resist so thoroughly the demand of the state).
I mention it as background to a more modest effort that we have also been promoting.
we have been advocating a first step toward denying to the government funds to carry on the war against the Vietnamese people, refusal to pay the 10% excise tax on telephone service.
This tax had been reduced to 3% as of and was scheduled to expire altogether, but it was restored in .
The rationale for our campaign to refuse the tax is based on the words of Congressman Wilbur Mills, chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee and administration floor leader for the legislation which restored the tax, who stated directly at the outset of debate on the measure, “The bill, H.R. 12752, is intended first and foremost to provide additional revenues to help finance the expenditures required to sustain our operation in Vietnam!”
(Congressional Record, .)
Further along he declared, “I believe it is clear that it is the Vietnam, and only the Vietnam, operation, which makes this bill necessary,” and a third time, “I have stated, and I state it again, that it is the extraordinary expenses attributable to our operation in Vietnam that are responsible for the Ways and Means Committee reporting this bill.”
The Chicago Workshop in Nonviolence, Peacemakers, the Committee for Nonviolent Action, The War Resisters League, and other groups supporting the campaign have already collected several hundred names of people who are refusing the tax, but not yet in the numbers for which I had hoped.
It is not that any danger is involved in the act.
In no case has telephone service been terminated, because, under the regulations, the ultimate responsibility for collecting the tax lies with the I.R.S., not with the telephone companies, which are only required to bill for it.
And the I.R.S. so far has done practically nothing to collect from any of the phone-tax refusers.
This is understandable when you realize that the amounts of money are so very small, that it took I.R.S. six years to get around to trying to collect over a thousand dollars from a publicly acknowledged income-tax refuser like myself, and that they have never succeeded in collecting from Ammon Hennacy or numerous other tax refusers.
For the individual, the telephone tax by itself seems an insignificant amount of money, though the Johnson administration is counting on it, together with a 1% automobile excise tax increase, to raise $1.2 billion in , which would pay for about twenty days of killing in Vietnam at current rates of spending.
For the individual, telephone-tax refusal is a small step, but for many it is a significant step, because for the first time they are acknowledging in action that if they had the free choice they would refuse to contribute to the activities of the federal Government, because its military activities outweigh its positive tax-supported programs.
And if they admit that they are involuntary participants in such a great evil, they must face the issue of struggling in the society for the freedom to do what they believe is right, even by going outside of the law.
But in going outside of the law they are taking back for themselves a basic responsibility for the order of society, which they had hitherto reposed in the state and the law.
They are facing the issue of ultimate personal responsibility for society and the needs of others as we have faced it in the houses of hospitality and the Catholic Worker movement.
These are some of the implications of civil disobedience; of recognizing that the majority of citizens organized in the state, have failed man so badly, that we must struggle to build a whole new way of life that will be able to be human.
I remember how often Ammon Hennacy has spoken of the people who were “pacifists between wars,” which he says is like being “vegetarians between meals,” and now it is possible to speak of those who oppose the war but pay their phone tax at “pacifists between telephone calls,” because with each ten-cent telephone call another penny joins the stream of Federal revenue that flows inexorably to Vietnam.
It is true, friends, that with a first small step like phone-tax refusal, we are trying to coax people down the primrose path to the one-man revolution.
The future will be different only if we change our lives.
The act is small, but the meaning is large: this war is not our war, and we are willing to struggle to be on the side of life.
In the edition, Karl Meyer explained in-depth how to stop income tax withholding by claiming excessive dependents and how tax redirection could be used to nourish alternative institutions.
(This would not be good advice to follow today, as the IRS has new punitive tools at its disposal.)
Through Effective Tax Resistance:
A Fund for Mankind
By Karl Meyer
Let us speak of a clearcut solution to two prevailing ethical concerns which are shared by many stable, wage-earning citizens who are in the peace movement today.
On the one hand, we see a perverse system of national priorities which devotes most of our federal tax contributions to militaristic purposes which we abhor.
We want our money to be used positively to fulfill social needs.
On the other hand, we see young men of draft age resisting war and conscription concretely by refusing to participate, and suffering the consequences: imprisonment or exile.
We wish to support them and to align ourselves with them in a real way.
Let me affirm that it would be very practicable for us to get together in our own resistance movement to prevent the conscription of our money by the military and to create a Fund for Mankind to support the things we believe in and provide mutual aid in the difficulties that might come as a consequence of our resistance.
The Vietnam War may draw towards a conclusion in the months to come, yet we have already been warned by spokesmen of the government, if not by the history of the last twenty-five years, not to expect huge amounts of money to be freed for the solution of domestic problems.
There are plenty of military boondoggles waiting in the wings, promising that military expenditures will command the stage for many years to come.
We should either seize our destiny in our own hands or stop crying about our involuntary complicity in the militarization of society.
I promise to show how we can stop paying for militarism and instead pay into an alternative fund and use it according to our own moral and political judgments.
At the outset, we must directly contradict the widespread notion that refusal to pay federal income tax is merely a form of personal witness and a purification of conscience, which because of inherent obstacles cannot emerge as a general action of resistance to the Vietnam War, militarism, and imperialism.
Instead, let us affirm that tax resistance can be the most promising basis for a movement of constructive social action, as well as resistance to the evils of war and the wastefulness of the arms race.
Right away we come to the heart of the issue, because people say, “Our taxes are withheld at the source and paid by our employers without our consent.”
This is the fallacy which must be resolutely laid to rest.
Your consent is given whenever you fill out and sign a new W-4 Employees Withholding Exemption Certificate.
The proper use of this form and of the early income-tax return are the keys to effective tactics of widespread tax resistance.
Let me therefore outline these tactics for Everyman in nine easy steps:
Obtain a new W-4 form from your employer.
On lines 4 and 5 claim as many extra dependents as is necessary to prevent the withholding of any tax (ten or twenty or five hundred thousand or thirty-five million if you wish).
Sign the statement, “I certify that the number of withholding exemptions claimed on this certificate does not exceed the number to which I am entitled.”
(Entitled by whom?
We cannot have a moral revolution as long as we supinely acknowledge that we are entitled to do only what can be drained by the Internal Revenue Code and Regulations.
We must explicitly reject the standards and definitions specified by a blind bureaucracy and instead affirm definitions that spring from our own consciousness of human solidarity.
We must affirm that our obligation to the victims of United States militarism entitles us to claim as many exemptions as may be necessary to prevent the payment of taxes in our name.) Submit the new form to your employer.
He is not responsible under law for the legality or accuracy of our claim, nor is he authorized to alter your claim.
He is advised, but not required by law, to report to the Internal Revenue Service if he believes that your claim exceeds the number of dependents to which you are entitled.1
It is only if you fill out no W-4 form that he may withhold the taxes without your consent.2
Write a letter to the I.R.S. stating that five hundred thousand American soldiers are depending on you to bring them home, or that thirty-five million Vietnamese are depending on you to stop supporting the war, that consequently you cannot accept the narrow definitions of human interdependence specified by I.R.S. regulations, that you therefore affirm your right to claim enough exemptions to forestall the collection of war taxes, and you have recently filed a new W-4 form with your employer in accord with this affirmation.
This will put you on record as an open and principled tax resister, and may provide you with some defense in case of prosecution for making a fraudulent claim, since fraud implies an element of concealment, deception, and bad faith.3
But in writing to them, I would advise you not to name your employer, since this would only facilitate possible attempts by the I.R.S. to harass or intimidate you or your employer.
Taking these first two steps should forestall the withholding of any tax from your wages.
On April 15th (fifteen and a half months after the beginning of your no-tax year) you are required by law to file an income-tax return.
File and complete an honest return, but don’t do it the way they want it.
On line 3B of form 1040 U.S. Individual Income Tax Return, enter the same number of dependents previously claimed on your W-4 form (if thirty-five million, enter that number on line 3B).
Attach a schedule stating the moral grounds of your claim: the universal interdependency of man.
For line 11C, multiply the total number of exemptions claimed by six hundred dollars.
Fill out the rest of the form, showing no tax owed, and send it in.
Wait a few more taxless months while the I.R.S. gets around to figuring out your form, disallowing your numerous exemptions, and sending you a “proposed adjustment” of your income tax liability.
You have another taxless month to request a District Conference to discuss the “proposed adjustment.”4
If agreement is not reached at the District Conference, you may appeal to the Appellate Division of the Regional Commissioner’s Office.4
All steps up to this point can be easily taken without the aid of an attorney and without much cost or inconvenience to yourself.
If agreement cannot be reached with the Appellate Division, a statutory notice of deficiency will be sent to you; you will then have ninety days to appeal to the Tax Court of the United States, but if the I.R.S. believes that assessment and collection of the tax deficiency will be jeopardized by delay, it may proceed to assess and collect the tax in the meantime, pending your appeal to the Tax Court and decision by it, and any further appeals to the United States Court of Appeals and the Supreme Court, if you choose to pursue such appeals.
So a number of time-consuming bureaucratic steps must be gone through before the I.R.S. can make its final assessment of the tax due and begin the process of attempting to collect.
The whole process must be repeated for each taxable year.
I do not see how the I.R.S. can reach the collection stage in less than two years from the date when you first began to frustrate the withholding of taxes.
Even if you chicken out and pay up at that point, you will have cost them more than it was worth and made them wait at least two years to get their money.
But above all, you will have expressed concrete convictions clearly and registered effective short-term resistance against any particular war or Defense Department program that happens to be the primary current target of the resistance movement.
If you want to go beyond this and keep struggling, as I have done, there are further effective steps to prevent the collection of the assessments by wage attachment or seizure of assets:
Take your cash out of banks you have used in the past.
If you have so much money that you have to be afraid of keeping it in the mattress, you should probably start thinking of what that money says about your aspirations towards human brotherhood.
In the meantime, you could distribute it into several banks you have not used before and be careful not to write checks in payment of bills whose payment could easily be traced by the I.R.S. (such as telephone and utility bills).
I have used an account in this way for several years, but I could do without it easily enough.
If you are not strongly tied to your current place of employment, you can switch jobs as soon as the I.R.S. arrives to collect from your wages by levy and take a few simple precautions to make it a little difficult for the I.R.S. to discover your new place of employment.
They are so bogged down and incompetent that it doesn’t take much to throw them off the trail for several years.
I changed jobs in , and they haven’t found out my new job yet, though they have tried through numerous visits, phone calls, notes left under the door, and other perfunctory attempts.
In preparation for the eventual confrontation, you can begin early to have real property which you use, such as houses and automobiles, owned and registered in the names of persons who will not be liable for payment of income taxes.
These and similar steps have worked for me and for a number of other individuals around the country for many, many years.
I have used this method of tax resistance, or variations, of it, for the last ten years.
In that time, I have paid no federal income tax of any significance.
I have devoted the greater part of my total income to sharing with other people through Catholic Worker Houses of Hospitality.
The I.R.S. is many years and hundreds of dollars behind in its attempts to collect from me, and has indeed collected nothing from me so far, though it has prepared returns for the years 1962, 1963, and 1965, and is trying to collect over eleven hundred dollars from me.
Here is the strength of tax resistance.
If you don’t play by their rules, the cost of collecting will in many cases exceed the successful collections.
The process of assessing and collecting taxes in the face of intelligent resistance is an immensely complicated bureaucratic operation, which frequently gets bogged down for incredible periods of time.
The due process of law involved in the arrest and conviction of an induction refuser under Selective Service law is child’s play when compared to the due process involved in the collection of taxes from the intelligent tax refuser.
So we have an effective tool at hand for resisting the demands of war and the arms race, if we will only seize the courage to act.
Positive Side
Now we turn to the constructive side of this action.
If we pool all of the tax money that we did not pay in locally administered funds, we can create a model for a future in which men can regain direct control of their common institutions and effectively deny their consent to governmental programs they believe to be evil.
In each community or region we can set up a common fund.
Each contributor will have one vote, as in a cooperative.
The members will meet from time to time to set priorities and guidelines for administering the fund and to elect a committee to administer it according to their guidelines.
Part of the fund can be held as a reserve, which can be invested in low-interest loans to socially useful projects.
In case of needs these loans can be liquidated in order to compensate members of the fund, up to the amount of their contribution, for personal losses and needs resulting from successful tax collections by the I.R.S.
The reserve funds can also be used to provide legal defense for members who might be prosecuted under the tax laws, and to provide aid for the families of those who might be convicted and imprisoned or suffer other needs as a result of conscientious tax refusal.
Thus through mutual aid the members of the fund will be protected from personal hardships arising from their stand, and together they can develop a most valuable sense of community and solidarity, that could immeasurably strengthen the whole peace movement.
Assuming that successful collections by the I.R.S. would always lag far behind the ongoing contributions to the fund, the greater part of receipts could be disbursed in the form of direct grants for ail kinds of socially useful organizations and projects.
Assuming that the federal-income-tax contributions of most people in the movement probably far exceed their voluntary political, organizational, and charitable contributions, we could expect that the tax alternative funds could become one of the most substantial sources of money for the projects and purposes in which we most strongly believe.
But beyond that we could hope that our experience in mutual aid through these cooperative funds would bear fruit in the development of ashrams and communities for closer economic and social cooperation; for it is when our constructive action and our resistance to evil become for real that we will see the need and value of mutual aid and begin to create cooperative alternatives within the competitive society in which we live.
If we ignore or neglect the great potential of tax resistance joined to constructive action, we must be deaf to history and blind to experience.
Deaf to history.
Do we not know that tax resistance has been one of the greatest sources and strategies of revolutionary movements throughout history?
Has not history shown that taxation is a process requiring the general consent and cooperation of the populace?
Has it not been shown that when numbers of people reject a government by withdrawing their consent from the elaborate bureaucratic process of taxation, that government is in deep trouble?
Did not the French Revolution begin with tax resistance?
Was not the Estates General called into session by the King because he found it impossible to raise sufficient revenue for the operation of his government?
Was not tax resistance the slogan and rallying cry of the American Revolution: “Taxation without representation is tyranny!”?
Does not the Boston Tea Party, an act of resistance to taxation, stand in our historical tradition as a model for the actions of the Baltimore Four, the Catonsville Nine, the Boston Two, the Milwaukee Fourteen, the D.C. Nine, and the Chicago Fifteen?
Did not Thoreau fashion the cornerstone of American resistance theory out of his own experience as a tax resister?
Was not Gandhi’s largest and most significant campaign of civil disobedience, the Salt March, based on the strategy of tax resistance?
Blind to experience.
Can we not see what the I.R.S. knows full well: that even where the public gives general consent to the process of taxation it is always and everywhere a grudging and tentative consent, a resentful and querulous consent, a fragile consent that must always be nursed and safeguarded by positive public relations?
Why has the I.R.S. trodden so lightly in prosecuting principled tax refusers, usually concentrating instead on ineffectual attempts at collection?
Is it not because there exists among the public at large a greater reservoir of grievance, a potential of sympathy for tax resisters, and, what is more, a vast subliminal potential for tax resistance and evasion, that only needs to be aroused by news of widespread tax resistance?
Let us learn from the experience of the draft-resistance movement and the telephone-tax-refusal campaign, a few years ago, many people regarded draft refusal as a personal witness of the solitary conscience.
Today it has taken on the dimensions of a social movement.
It is, however, restricted by the narrow age and sex range of those who are subject to conscription, and even more restricted by the narrowness of the draft as a single focus of action.
In the telephone-tax-refusal campaign we measured the potential dimensions of a tax-resistance movement.
In , we started the campaign for nonpayment of the ten-per-cent federal telephone excise tax, which had just been restored by Congress explicitly to help in meeting the rising costs of the Vietnam War.
The issue of WIN magazine quotes from a Wall Street Journal story reporting that eighteen thousand people refused to pay their telephone tax last year.
This resistance tactic caught on quickly and spread rapidly with little organizational effort, because it was a direct and simple action which any telephone subscriber could easily carry out.
But after flaring up briefly, interest in this tactic gradually subsided, though thousands no doubt continue to refuse to pay the tax.
Enthusiasm for the action could not be maintained, because it was not resistance for real.
It was, rather, the first token of a spirit of resistance, which at the time could find no practical channel for deeper development.
When we can combine real war tax resistance with the tremendous constructive potential of a Fund for Humanity, we will have raised a banner to which all honest and courageous men of conscience can repair.
Note: I want to acknowledge the contributions of Brad Lyttle, Sidney Lens, and several young members of the draft-resistance movement whose names are unknown to me.
Recent discussions with them helped greatly in stimulating and formulating the ideas for the article, which has also been distributed in mimeographed form by the founders of the Chicago Area Alternative Fund (C.A.A.F), 1209 West Farwell, Chicago, Illinois 60626. (Tel: 764-3620).
We have begun. Join us!
Notes and References
Internal Revenue Regulations, Paragraph 31.3401 (e)-1 (b) — “The employer is not required to ascertain whether or not the number of withholding exemptions claimed is greater than the number of withholding exemptions to which the employee is entitled.
If, however, the employer has reason to believe that the number of withholding exemptions claimed by the employee is greater than the number to which such employee is entitled, the district director should be so advised.”
Internal Revenue Regulations, Paragraph 31.3401 (e)-1 (a) — “…If no such certificate is in effect, the number of withholding exemptions claimed shall be considered to be zero…”
Internal Revenue Code, Section 7201. ATTEMPT TO EVADE OR DEFEAT TAX. “Any person who willfully attempts to evade or defeat any tax imposed by this title or the payment thereof shall, in addition to other penalties provided by law, be guilty of felony and, upon conviction thereof, shall be fined not more than $10,000, or imprisoned not more than 5 years, or both, together with the costs of prosecution.”
Internal Revenue Code, Section 7205. FRAUDULENT WITHHOLDING EXEMPTION CERTIFICATE OR FAILURE TO SUPPLY INFORMATION: “Any individual required to supply information to his employer under section 3402 who willfully supplies false or fraudulent information, or who willfully falls to supply information thereunder which would require an increase in the tax to be withheld under section 3402, shall, in lieu of any other penalty provided by law (except the penalty provided by section 6682), upon conviction thereof, be fined not more than $500, or imprisoned not more than one year, or both.” (Section 3402 is the section which provides for withholding of income taxes.)
INSTRUCTIONS — Unagreed Income, Estate, or Gift Tax Cases — U.S. Treasury Department — Internal Revenue Service — Publication No. 5 (Rev. 8-64)
Internal Revenue Code, Section 6861. Jeopardy Assessments of Income, Estate, and Gift Taxes.
Meyer had a followup in the issue:
Clarification On Tax Withholding
By Karl Meyer
December 12, 1969
Dear Mike and Allen:
I was pleased to receive your inquiry about our “Fund for Mankind, Through Effective Tax Resistance” (Catholic Worker, ).
Yours is one of dozens of serious inquiries from all over the country, and the fourth so far from the Minneapolis area alone.
Jim Dunn (19 Sidney Place S.E., Minneapolis, Minnesota) has already started an alternative fund and has reprinted my article as a leaflet.
Dennis Richter (Hope House, 2603 14th Ave. South) has begun by claiming forty million exemptions on his W-4 Withholding Exemption Certificate.
This has tremendous educational value, but we don’t know yet the effective results of this experiment.
One person in Chicago tried this mass approach and it did not work.
He claimed three and a half billion dependents, the entire population of Spaceship Earth.
His employers, on the advice of their tax attorneys, rejected his W-4 form, on the grounds that it was not correctly filled out because it would be impossible under the rules to have that number of legally qualified exemptions — a trenchant argument we must confess.
They also pointed out that their payroll computer program could not handle that number of exemptions.
Two digits, or a maximum of 99, would be all the computer could handle.
This leaves him nowhere, since his only recourse would be to appeal to the Internal Revenue Service or the courts for support of his right to claim three and a half billion, and it is obvious enough that he would get no support from that quarter.
Does my article give the impression that I advocate claiming such great numbers of exemptions as a practical step, or that I myself have used this approach and succeeded?
If it does, that impression should be corrected before it leads us down the blind alley of ineffectual protest.
I myself have always claimed the minimum number of exemptions necessary to prevent the withholding of tax (between six and twelve in my case) and the same modest approach is used by all those I know of who are successfully using the exemption method of tax resistance at present.
The idea of claiming hundreds of thousands, millions or billions of dependents makes for a beautiful protest and a glorious expression of fraternal solidarity.
I introduced this idea in my article, and I certainly hope that a certain number of bold souls like Dennis will experiment with it; but I proposed it with tongue in cheek, and I would be the first to predict that it will not work in very many cases.
Most employers, on their own initiative or on the advice of I.R.S., will probably reject such a W-4, and those that don’t may fire you.
It would be a fine educational protest, but if the idea is protest, that could also be expressed by picketing the personnel office during your lunch hour to ask them to stop withholding taxes.
If the purpose is actually to prevent the withholding of tax, the most practical way to proceed is to claim the minimum number of exemptions necessary to achieve that objective!
This number can be found by dividing your weekly salary by $13.50, or dividing your projected annual salary by $700, or by consulting the tables and rules in Circular E, Employers Tax Guide, available to the public at your local office of I.R.S.
The minimum number of exemptions necessary for most people will be between six and twenty.
If your employer should question the number you claim, you may wish to save him the embarrassment of being implicated in your action by simply stating, “This is the number of exemptions to which I believe I am entitled.”
Since you are the person responsible for the number which you claim, it is not necessarily incumbent on you to offer your employer a more elaborate explanation.
In our group, some people have explained to their employers the entire basis of their claim; others have filed the new W-4 with their employer without further explanation; some have written to I.R.S., or other officials of government, stating the entire basis of their claim; others have taken the action without informing the state directly.
These choices must be made on the basis of personal inclinations and circumstances of employment.
You ask about the chances of prosecution for tax evasion or fraud.
No principled tax refuser has been indicted or prosecuted for violation of tax laws within my memory or knowledge.
A few have been imprisoned briefly for contempt of court for refusing to reveal information about their income and assets.
The I.R.S. has concentrated exclusively on attempts at assessment and collection, rather than prosecution.
With the rapid development of this campaign, I predict that this policy will be changed.
If pressed to do so, I could name a man whom I believe to be a prime candidate for aggressive prosecution.
But it would be impossible for me to predict what pattern of criminal prosecution may emerge as this campaign grows and develops.
I do predict that many people in this movement will eventually be subjects of intensive efforts by I.R.S. to assess and collect income taxes that they have not paid.
Ten years ago I popularized the aphorism: “If you can’t do time, don’t commit crime,” which was taught me by Marshal Raab as he drove me to the penitentiary.
Today I am in a position to coin a new variation of this maxim for our time: “If you can’t stand heat, don’t put your hand in the fire.”
If people want to start out easy and test the temperature before they go all the way they might begin by not paying the ten-percent federal excise tax on telephone service or they might try claiming just one extra withholding tax exemption.
Most important of course is to band together in small local alternative-fund groups for mutual aid and the sharing of experiences.
Over the years I have developed quite a tolerance for heat of all kinds so I was not dismayed on when Agent Roy Suzuki of the I.R.S. telephoned at my place of employment, which he had at long last discovered, and very graciously demanded payment of $46.60 in taxes, penalties, and interest for , a small part of a bill for more than a thousand dollars, going back to that I.R.S. has been unsuccessfully trying to collect for a long time.
After I stated that I would not pay he came over immediately and served my employers with a levy against my wages which they reluctantly honored by deducting $48.60 from wages due to me.
These events inspired the composition of the following ballad, which is currently leading the hit parade of the tax-resistance movement:
Some Enchanted Taxmen
Some enchanted evening
You may meet a stranger,
You may see him come to you
Across the crowded room,
Then pull put his badge
And ask for your wage;
If you don’t go along,
He will not argue long.
He will be a taxman,
He will be insistent,
He will bring a levy
To place against your wage,
And when he is done
He’ll go back to his boss,
And give a report like this:
Suzuki:— Who would believe it,
Who would say it’s so?
I found him at Follett’s,
I collected dough.
His boss:— Oh, Suzuki,
How did you know?
Now that you’ve found him,
Never let him go!
Suzuki:— Forty-six dollars,
All for the war,
I’ll go back again soon,
I will grab some more.
His boss:— Oh, Suzuki,
Try going slow,
Don’t scare him off too fast,
Don’t let him go.
Suzuki:— l have worked so patiently,
I have tried so long,
My, but that man’s
Conscience is strong.
Boss:— Don’t get sentimental,
Remember he’s your foe,
Now that you’ve found him,
Never let him go.
Suzuki:— I’ll go back tomorrow,
Shortly after dawn,
I’ll levy on his wage again;
But he will be gone.
Boss:— Buck up, Suzuki,
Don’t let it get you down,
We have lots of agents,
Snooping round the town.
Suzuki:— They will never nail him,
They’ll never collect,
Why should we waste our time,
Breaking our necks?
Boss:— The war must go on you know
And we must be paid,
The arms race must be financed
And profits be made.
Suzuki:— We will never make it
With guys like that Meyer;
Why not quit and go to work;
Our proceeds would be higher.
Boss:— Roy, that’s not the spirit
Of I.R.S., you know;
Once you have found one.
Never let him go!
A few days later I quit my job, and since then I have been earning part of our livelihood by part-time and irregular labor, while spending most of my time on the important work of developing the tax-resistance campaign.
I have to thank Roy Suzuki for having given me the incentive and the opportunity to do this.
To coordinate a countrywide campaign for tax resistance and to provide literature and counseling we have established a center called War Tax Resistance/Midwest (1339 North Mohawk St., Chicago, Illinois 60610) which is sponsored by the Nonviolent Training and Action Center, the Chicago Area Draft Registers and the Chicago Catholic Worker.
We will have a basic leaflet based on my article in the CW, as well as reprints of the article itself.
For a single copy of each, send us a stamped, self-addressed envelope.
For quantities the price will be a dollar for fifty, or two dollars for a hundred, plus a dollar for each additional hundred in one shipment.
We hope that people will send a few extra dollars to help with the organizing costs and that new tax resisters and alternative funds will earmark a small percentage of their tax savings to contribute to the organizing work.
The issue reported on the death of Ammon Hennacy on .
Ernest Bromley added a tribute, which included this summary of his tax resistance activity:
I, like so many others, knew Ammon by reputation long before I met him in person.
He was one of the pacifist tax refusers during World War Two, at a time when I could count them on the fingers of one hand.
He was in Arizona during those years, working as a day laborer in the fields.
To the few of us who made up the Tax Refusal Committee of Peacemakers, which began in , he is memorable, not only because the number was still very small but mainly because he was simple, direct and dramatic.
He saw that the government got none of his tax at the source (through withholding), he refused the total amount of income tax, he took steps so that the tax man could not garnishee money from his employer, and he went straight to the tax man and to the people with the message that he would not pay for the weapons or the soldiers.
He was basic, cryptic, humorous.
When the tax collector asked him if he thought he could change the world to his point of view, he answered, “Of course not. but I’m damn sure it won’t change me.” Then, referring to his contest with the government, he said, “Every day I win and every day the government loses.”
He once told a tax man, “Peter could return to his nets, but Matthew could not return to his tax collecting.”
It was in World War One, while doing time in Atlanta Penitentiary for opposing the war, that he read the Bible and became a Christian.
He was also turning from socialism to anarchism.
It was not however, until the early 1950’s that he joined a church.
Soon he wrote his first book. The Autobiography of a Catholic Anarchist.
Later he revised this book, calling it in the new form The Book of Ammon.
While in Arizona he wrote a column in the Catholic Worker, entitled “Life at Hard Labor.”
He managed by doing day labor in the fields and irrigation ditches, to contribute financially to the education of his two daughters by his first marriage.
After moving to New York in he became one of the associate editors of the Catholic Worker with Dorothy Day.
In he moved to Salt Lake City and began a "House of Hospitality.”
Borrowing the language of Robert Frost in one of his poems “Build Soil — A Political Pastoral,” Ammon spoke early and often of the “one-man revolution — the only revolution that is coming.”
He felt that the only way to change society is for each to become a radical and responsible person.
He detested dependence on government, state, institutions.
He wished to live as the early Christians did.
He did not join organizations or participate much in conferences or committees.
Most of the actions he took were solitary ones.
After leaving Arizona he travelled several weeks of each year, going to homes of friends.
Innumerable opportunities opened up to him to talk to small groups of people.
Many young idealists got their inspiration from a first contact with Ammon Hennacy.
He was always quick in tongue and caustic in comment.
He could state his views briefly.
Once when asked why he refused to pay Federal taxes, he said “Jesus wouldn’t make atom bombs.
Why should I pay for them?”
And Karl Meyer wrote, in part:
[I]n thirteen years, I spent only a few hours in his company; so I know nothing of him that is not amply recorded in the Book of Ammon and his columns.
The only original thing that I can tell is what he has written in my spirit.
In closing I want to remind you that Ammon wouldn’t pay taxes that go for war.
In his last letter to me () he wrote, “I think your idea of claiming a million dependents is o.k. for a joke between you and the tax man, but to consider it for a group of people is not being a bit realistic.
Hardly half a dozen in this country would have nerve enough to do it for fear of losing their jobs.”
That was the main fault Ammon had: he never had faith that other people would be radicals, would change their lives and live the revolution.
But I remember a pipsqueak boy of twenty once, who didn’t want to lose his job, who wanted to take bail and get a lawyer and a long continuance.
And one summer day that boy went down to Chrystie Street, and that was the day that he met Hennacy.
That’s why I have faith that a lot of people are not going to go on paying taxes for another five years of national murder; and anyone who really wants to stop can send me a couple of stamps for our leaflet entitled “Common Sense for Every Concerned Taxpayer — You Can Stop Paying War Taxes Now,” or send a dollar for fifty copies.
After the death of Ammon Hennacy in 1970, Karl Meyer took up the torch of promoting war tax resistance in the Catholic Worker.
Meyer’s approach was less exhortational and more practical: he pioneered the method of inflating deductions to prevent income tax withholding and wrote an influential early how-to guide on that method. (An embryonic version of what is now NWTRCC’s Practical War Tax Resistance pamphlet #1: “Controlling Federal Income Tax Withholding”.)
Below are some excerpts from the Catholic Worker from the period, starting with an essay by Karl Meyer from the edition:
New Resistance to War Taxes
By Karl Meyer
“Under penalties of perjury, I certify that I incurred no liability for Federal income tax for and that I anticipate that I will incur no liability for Federal income tax for .”
If you can sign that statement, you can stop the withholding of war taxes from your wages.
The statement is the Employee Certification for Form W-4E Withholding Exemption Certificate, which was first published in by the Internal Revenue Service as an alternative to the standard W-4 form.
If your employer doesn’t have it on hand, get it from the local IRS office.
Signing this statement alone provides complete exemption from prior withholding of Federal Income tax, without enumerating dependents or any other specific basis for the exemption.
Who is eligible to claim this exemption?
I say, “everybody.” It is morally impossible to incur a liability to support evil purposes and actions.
Since at least 70% of Federal taxes is spent for military or war-related purposes, and much of the balance for useless or harmful purposes, it is impossible to incur a liability to pay Federal income tax.
Who is eligible to claim exemption according to IRS?
On the back of the W-4E it says, “You may be entitled to claim exemption from withholding of Federal income tax if you incurred no liability for income tax for and you anticipate that you will incur no liability for income tax for .
For this purpose, you incur tax liability if your joint or separate return shows tax before allowance of any credit for income tax withheld.
If you claim this exemption, your employer will not withhold Federal Income tax for your wages.”
According to this definition, you would technically satisfy the requirements for exemption if you file a return for showing no tax due because of the immorality and illegality of U.S. military expenditures, even if IRS subsequently rejects your reasoning and assesses tax against you.
Likewise, if you file no return at all, your non-existent return can not show any tax due.
Now, it has always been a puzzle to me how a person who believes in conscience that taxes should not be paid could file a return showing taxes as a “balance due.”
That is self-contradictory.
If the tax is acknowledged to be due, it ought to be paid.
If it ought not to be paid, it shouldn’t be shown as “due.”
The IRS calls the income tax a “self-assessed tax.” When you file showing tax due, they are empowered to accept your assessment and proceed to collect immediately.
If you show no tax due, even if they disagree with you, they must first reassess the tax themselves and give you extensive opportunities for legal appeals, before they may proceed to collect on their claim.
Therefore, it is foolish and self-defeating to show tax as due, if you sincerely believe that it ought not to be paid.
There are several ways to assert your claim that no tax is due:
you may claim extra exemptions on line 11, on the ground of obligations to all mankind as brothers and members of one family;
you may claim an adjustment of your income on line 17, based on your principled opposition to militarism;
you may itemize a deduction on line 16 of Schedule A, claiming deduction of your whole taxable income on similar grounds.
Perhaps the soundest approach is to file no return at all. (The main disadvantage of this, besides its being illegal, is that IRS agents sometimes file distorted returns in your name, claiming excessive amounts of tax.) I didn’t file for ten years, but IRS agents have filed seven returns in my name showing more than $2000 in tax and penalties due.
On , I filed a return for in a personal interview with E.P. Trainor, the District Director at the Chicago office of IRS.
On the 1040 Form I filled in my name and address.
Under SOCIAL SECURITY NUMBER, I wrote “Peace;” under OCCUPATION, I wrote “Love;” across the face of the return I wrote in bold letters, “WE WONT PAY—STOP THE WAR—STOP THE DRAFT—STOP MILITARISM,” for FIRST NAMES OF DEPENDENT CHILDREN, I wrote “All Men Are Brothers;” under OTHER DEPENDENTS, I claimed “A Vietnamese child killed at Song My, an American soldier killed In Vietnam;” and I filled in a total of three and a half billion exemptions for the whole population of Earth; under BALANCE DUE, PAY IN FULL WITH RETURN, I put “$0.00;” then I signed with my name and the date.
Mr. Trainor and his henchmen haven’t figured that year out yet, but they can’t say I didn’t file.
Before you follow my advice and my example, I wish to speak a word of caution: Everything here is my interpretation.
Don’t expect the IRS, U.S. Attorneys, Federal Juries, or Courts of Appeal to buy a word of it.
In the and issues of the Catholic Worker, I published landmark articles on how to claim sufficient exemptions on the W-4 Form to prevent the withholding of war taxes.
Many people all over the country tried out these ideas effectively, but several last their jobs for persisting, and three were tried and convicted in Federal courts for claiming illegal exemptions.
If you can’t stand heat, stay out of the kitchen.
If you can’t do time, don’t commit crime.
If you have a concern of conscience about paying war taxes, but feel unready to face the possible consequences of the methods of resistance outlined above, the present tax rate provisions give ample opportunity to stop paying war taxes, without violating any provisions of the tax laws, if you are willing to live in reasonable simplicity and voluntary poverty in the spirit of the Catholic Worker movement.
Under the present law an individual may earn up to $1700 a year without any obligation to file a return or pay Federal income tax.
A married person with three dependent children could earn up to $4300 a year without having any tax withheld or due.
Form W-4E was actually introduced by IRS so that such persons, earning less than the minimum yearly taxable incomes by working for only a few months out of the year, would not have taxes withheld and would not have to apply for refunds months after they earned the money.
You can find the complete tables of tax withholding rates and other information in Circular E, Employer’s Tax Guide, available for the asking at your local IRS office.
I do believe that we should all strive to live in a simpler way.
If we work part time for wages and live on less than taxable incomes, we will have extra time to grow, create and do more things for ourselves, or to offer our work as a gift to people in need of it.
Even if we work full time for taxable wages, but successfully resist collection of the taxes, we should still live simply in order to share our surplus money with others who are in need.
I have done this all my adult life and intend to go on with it.
One hundred and eighty years ago, our brother rebel Tom Paine wrote:
…were an estimation to be made of the charges of Aristocracy to a Nation, it will be found nearly equal to that of supporting the poor.
The Duke of Richmond alone (and there are cases similar to his) takes away as much for himself as would maintain two thousand poor and aged persons.
Is it then any wonder that under such a system of Government, taxes and rates have multiplied to their present extent?
In stating these matters, I speak an open and disengaged language dictated by no passion but that of humanity.
To me who have not only refused offers because I thought them improper, but have declined rewards I might with reputation have accepted, it is no wonder that meanness and imposition appear disgustful.
Independence is my happiness, and I view things as they are, without regard to place or person; my country is the world, and my religion is to do good.
(The Rights of Man, Modern Library edition, page 241)
If we do not live by these principles, how are we different from the warfare state we condemn?
The budget and accounting methods of the Federal administration are confusing.
They have recently been modified to deliberately de-emphasize the role of military expenditures as a proportion of the Federal budget, enabling Nixon to claim that they count for less than 50%.
This has been done by counting all separately raised and earmarked revenues, such as Social Security revenues and payments, as part of one budgetary total.
Then the large Social Security payments can be thrown in the pot and counted at part of domestic expenditures for health and welfare.
Rejecting this ruse, it is possible without detailed analysis to estimate that between 70% and 80% of all Federal income and excise tax revenues is spent for military programs and purposes that are intimately related to the cost of past and present military activities.
Acceding to individual judgment this estimate might include veterans benefits, space research and technology, various “international affairs” programs, certain “Justice Department” activities, a percentage of the general administrative expenditures, and the interest and principal payments on the national debt, incurred primarily as a cost of World War Ⅱ and the Cold War.
Awareness of these facts, plus the explanation of new methods of resistance, contributed to a tremendous growth in the movement of war tax resistance in .
In late a national coordinating center called War Tax Resistance was established in New York.
Its periodical bulletin, Tax Talk, lists 181 local centers of contact people all over the country.
Simple nonpayment of the federal excise tax itemised on telephone bills is the easiest and most common form of principled tax resistance.
War Tax Resistance estimates that more than 100,000 people are now participating in this action. IRS agents expend great effort in collecting very small amounts of this tax, and they are hopelessly behind in their efforts to collect.
I have paid no excise tax on telephone service and IRS has succeeded in collecting only $8.00 so far.
War Tax Resistance has a basic leaflet on phone tax resistance.
War Tax Resistance estimates that 15,000 people participate in some form of income tax nonpayment, as a principled protest against militarism.
We speak of those who consciously and explicitly relate to the war tax resistance movement, because we know that millions of our countrymen, from the highest to the lowliest, participate in tax resistance or evasion, largely because of unarticulated opposition to the basic policies of government.
They will be our allies if their protest can become articulate and organized.
The most promising development in was the significant number of people who began to successfully resist payment of all or most of the income tax amounts that would be claimed under Federal law and regulations.
Until the number of such total tax resisters was small and almost exclusively limited to self-employed persons or others who derived most of their income from sources not subject to withholding tax.
In articles for the Catholic Worker ( and ) I explained how to beat the withholding tax by claiming enough exemptions on the W-4 Form that no tax could be withheld from one’s wages.
Widely reprinted and circulated in leaflet form, these articles offered an effective tax resistance method to almost any wage earner who had the courage to try it and risk the possibility of prosecution or harassment sometime in the future.
In his last letter to me before his death, Ammon Hennacy, a pioneer influence in our war tax resistance movement, glumly predicted that from fear of going to jail, there wouldn’t be more than a handful in the country that would take up my idea.
But Ammon was wrong in this case.
I know that many have taken it up, and they are growing in numbers, because I keep hearing from them, particularly those in the Chicago area.
Thousands of dollars have been held back from the military machine and donated to alternative uses that meet the real needs of people.
This movement will continue to grow from roots that are deep in the American tradition.
The ideas of Thoreau’s Essay on Civil Disobedience, fruit of his brief imprisonment for war tax resistance, are well-known today.
But a century before Thoreau our forefathers made their stand for independence in resistance to unjust taxes.
Both the American Revolution and the French Revolution were organized around the issue of resistance to taxation.
Tom Paine understood this well because he was active in both.
In he published in England a powerful polemical tract on The Rights of Man to stir the people of England to a similar revolt.
His most persistent theme of grievance is the criminal burden of war taxes imposed on the people by power hungry men in government.
He vividly describes the genesis of the French Revolution, including the refusal of the Parliament of Paris, in , to register the edicts of the King and Government seeking to enforce new taxes:
While the Parliament were sitting in debate on this subject, the Ministry ordered a regiment of soldiers to surround the House and form a blockade.
The members sent out for beds and provisions, and lived as in a besieged citadel; and as this had no effect, the commanding officer was ordered to enter the Parliament House and seize them, which he did, and some of the principal members were shut up in different prisons…
But the spirit of the Nation was not to be overcome, and it was so sensible of the strong ground it had taken, that of withholding taxes, that it contented itself with keeping up a sort of quiet resistance, which effectively overthrew all the plans at that time formed against it.
(Rights of Man, Modern Library edition, page 149)
On this strong ground let us also take our stand for a quiet battle, more effective against wrong, more productive for good purposes than any other I can think of.
Yours for a gentle revolution
Karl Meyer
Permission is granted to anyone interested to reproduce this article in whole or in part.
If it is reproduced in part, please indicate editing and deletions.
List of sources for information and communication:
War Tax Resistance
839 Lafayette Street
New York. N.Y. 10012
Phone (212) 477‒2970
Send $1 and ask for
WTR Handbook
Hang Up On War telephone tax refusal leaflet.
reprint of Karl Meyer’s Fund For Mankind article from CW
or send more to help with their crucial work of coordinating the communication and work of the movement.
The Peacemaker
10208 Sylvan Avenue
Cincinnati, Ohio 45241
A valuable periodical for all who are interested in draft resistance, tax resistance, and radical life styles.
Send $4 for a subscription, plus their Handbook on Nonpayment Of War Taxes, which includes many informative case histories.
I further recommend that all tax resisters contribute a substantial percentage of the money not paid to the Peacemakers Sharing Fund at the same address.
The Fund is a valuable channel of mutual aid for war resisters and their families, when they suffer from imprisonment or financial hardship as a result of their stand.
Karl Meyer
1209 West Farwell Street
Chicago, Illinois 60628
Phone (312) 764‒3620
Call me or write to me for personal counseling and encouragement.
If you write, send two six cent stamps for my reply and any leaflets I may send you.
Dorothy Day visited war tax resister Art Harvey and brought back this story ( issue):
I visited Art Harvey of South Ackworth, New Hampshire who has a mall order book shop handling a great number of books by and about Gandhi.
Art and Ammon Hennacy served six-month-terms in Sandstone Prison in Minnesota for trespassing on a missile base some years ago.
He carries on a practical application of Karl Meyer’s tax refusal (see article in this issue) by having teams of workers in orchards where they prune trees, harvest apples and later blueberries and work seven months of the work and live in a style which frees them from the payment of taxes for war.
Perhaps about a hundred are engaged in this way of life, which results usually in some settling in communities of the moshavim variety, each having some small acreage and a house built by themselves Considering the New England climate, no small achievement!
It certainly means an emphasis on the ascetic, on sacrifice.
The Karl Meyer article she mentioned follows:
War Tax Resistance
by Karl Meyer
On , charges were filed in federal district court in Chicago against Bill Himmelbauer, Mike Fowler and myself.
In separate cases, we are accused of falsely claiming exemptions from federal tax, to which we were not legally entitled.
Mike Fowler, a student at the University of Chicago, is charged on two counts of filing false W-4 forms with his employer.
The maximum penalty for each count is one year in jail.
Bill Himmelbauer is charged on one count.
He and Sue Himmelbauer joined with us in late in starting the Chicago Area Alternative Fund for tax resistance money, and then moved to Pittsburgh where they became ringleaders in War Tax Resistance activities.
I am charged on five counts for W-4s executed in .
Through eleven years of “one man revolution” I had successfully resisted payment of almost all federal income taxes claimed from me, mainly by claiming enough exemptions on W-4 Withholding Exemption Certificates that no tax was withheld from my wages.
The tax man did nothing beyond ineffectual attempts to collect.
Then suddenly in the one man revolution exploded into a growing movement of effective war tax resistance by the withholding exemption method.
Suddenly the tax man got worried.
Suddenly he started prosecuting withholding tax resisters around the country: , Jim Shea, Alexandria.
Virginia; , Sally Buckley and Dennis Richter, Minneapolis, Minnesota; , Paul Malinowski, and Donald Callahan, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; , James Smith, Springfield, Missouri; and now, three more in Chicago.
On , IRS Intelligence Agents Sam Miele and Alan Leksander visited me at home.
They confronted me with copies of five W-4 forms for , and two articles from the Catholic Worker for and , “A Fund For Mankind Through Effective Tax Resistance” and “Clarification On Tax Withholding.”
These are the articles which launched the wave of withholding tax resistance action in .
I acknowledged authorship of the five W-4s and the two CW articles.
On , I received a letter from the Chief of the Intelligence Division of IRS:
“The current investigation by the Intelligence Division is nearing completion… consideration is being given to recommending that criminal proceedings be instituted against you…”
I was invited to a hearing with Group Supervisor Ralph A. Weber.
At the hearing I presented a statement of my position and various other relevant literature and documents to Internal Revenue Service.
Statement to Internal Revenue Service, Intelligence Division Hearing:
My name is Karl Meyer.
My immediate family includes my wife Jean and three children, William, 7 years old, Kristin, 3 years old, and Eric, 2 months old.
In South Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos there are many families like ours.
I gladly accept a responsibility toward them, like that which I bear toward my own children.
These other families, these other children are the ones who were machine-gunned in a trench at My Lai, and are being killed in many other ways every day that the war continues In Indo-China.
There are also the soldiers of both sides, Americans and Aslans, who are also the victims of the war, who are dying by the thousands as it continues.
Upwards of 80% of all federal income tax revenues are devoted to purposes intimately related to American wars and military activities, past and present.
In the name of my family, of the families of Indo-China, of the soldiers of both sides and all other victims of International militarism, I claim a complete exemption from all federal taxes that finance military activities.
Yes, I have claimed ten or more exemptions on several W-4 exemption certificates. I have claimed exemption from tax for myself and my family, for several others who have lived in our household and received their primary financial support from me, and for these others, the families of Indo-China, and all the victims of war.
In a peaceful and nonviolent society the job of collecting assessments for social purposes might be a useful occupation.
But the man who collects taxes for the United States government today makes himself a direct accomplice in some of the most horrible crimes of our age.
You have already told me that you are considering compounding these crimes by beginning a criminal prosecution against me.
I and my family have already made some sacrifices in the struggle against war, but they have been as nothing compared to the suffering of our brothers and sisters who are in Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos.
We ask you today to recognize just one basic human right, our right not to participate in acts of war against them.
Even if you refuse to recognize that right, we will still refuse to pay federal taxes that continue the war in Indo-China and the militarization of our society.
This is all that I have to say.
Karl Meyer
After I received the letter from IRS, I went in to talk with my supervisor in the huge hospital bureaucracy in which I was employed.
I expected her to be unsympathetic, and even hostile to me as a source of trouble for her.
After thirty years of working her way toward the top of the bureaucracy, it had seemed to me she lived and breathed the system and its rules, though I respected her even so for the great strength of her character.
But now when I told her directly of my long struggle against the war and of the imminent threat of criminal prosecution, she smiled at me from deep within, and expressed her own strong opposition to the war and her respect and support for me.
“Mr. Meyer” she said, taut with emotion, “I am black.
From all of my experience I know that when you fight the system in this ‘democratic’ country they are going to make you pay for it.”
Then she told me something of her own struggle.
After a long talk she asked me, "Wasn’t there a girl here in Chicago who took that same stand (war tax resistance) several years ago?”
Yes, there certainly was.
Eleven years later, another black woman in Chicago still remembered the courageous witness of Eroseanna Robinson, the very person whose example set my feet on the path of determined tax resistance, back in 1960 — Eroseanna Robinson who refused to pay taxes, who defied the order of Judge Robson to give information about her income in spite of a one year sentence for criminal contempt, who fasted one hundred and eight days and won her own release from federal prison by the strength of her resistance.
Now, on , the charges against Fowler, Himmelbauer and Meyer were announced.
That night we picketed and leafleted at the Main Post Office where special postmen were on duty to receive last minute returns from thousands of more tractable Chicagoans.
We haven’t yet received official notice or summons, but from the records filed in court David Finke has found that the three cases are assigned to three separate Judges for trial.
I am to be summoned for an initial hearing in the court of Judge Joseph Sam Perry.
I plan a simple and direct defense. I plan to represent myself without an attorney.
I will ask for a jury trial at the earliest possible date.
I will not base my defense on legalities.
I will simply seek to convince the jury, judge, prosecutor and everyone else that I have done what is right and in accord with inalienable rights of personal judgment, and that I should not be declared guilty or penalized for my actions.
If I am convicted and sentenced to prison, we have been thinking that Jean will apply for public aid for the financial support of our family.
We feel that if the State insists on tearing from the family its source of support, the State should bear the cost of providing other means.
We prefer to see the resources of the movement devoted to the needs of poor people in this country and abroad who have no other recourse.
This is just one of the reasons why I do not desire a costly legal defense or primary financial support from the movement, though we welcome the personal support of our friends.
The form of encouragement and support that we will value most highly will be if our friends in the movement take our troubles and our resolve as an example, to stop paying war taxes and to devote the greatest possible part of their income to sharing with the victims of international war and of the war of rich against poor.
This is why we of the Chicago Area Alternative Fund have saved nothing for our own protection, but have already given away all of our war tax resistance money to meet the immediate needs of others.
If you want to read the articles that launched the present movement of withholding tax resistance by explaining the method, and incidentally brought upon us our small tribulations, you may send two eight cent stamps to:
War Tax Resistance
339 Lafayette Street
New York, New York 10012
and ask for their reprint, “A Fund For Mankind Through Effective War Tax Resistance.”
To get in touch with us about the trial, write to:
Karl Meyer
1209 West Farwell
Chicago, Illinois 60626
Phone 764‒3620
The issue reported on how the court ruled in Karl Meyer’s case:
Karl Meyer Sentenced to Two Years, $1,000
By David Finke
On in the court of federal district Judge Joseph Sam Perry, Karl Meyer appeared in his own behalf to answer a 5-count “criminal information” charging that he falsely and fraudulently filed W-4 income tax withholding exemption certificates.
Having successfully negotiated with the U.S. Attorney, Karl got the government to drop three of the five counts (which he had said he could prove the accuracy of).
He then entered a plea of “nolo contendere,” which the judge accepted as a finding of “guilty,” on the other two counts.
A two-week presentence investigation was then ordered. while Karl remained free without bond.
, Karl returned to court with about 25 friends, supporters, and fellow tax resisters, and personally accompanied by his 7-year-old son William.
Before imposing sentence, Judge Perry with great decorum and civility said he would hear from both the government and the defendant, whose absolute right to represent himself without attorney would be respected.
Assistant U.S. Attorney Kocoras then launched into a most amazing and accurate summary of Karl’s career of leadership in the movement of War Tax Resistance:
Not only has Karl not filed a tax return , he has encouraged others to join with him in resisting federal taxes!
And he has explained publicly exactly what he is doing and how other people can do the same.
Kocoras read extensively from articles that Karl had written for Catholic Worker, including those memorable (but to Kocoras damning) phrases, “If you can’t do time, don’t commit crime,” and “If you can’t stand the heat, don’t put your hand in the fire.”
The prosecutor hit the issue squarely on the head, then, when he said:
“What is at stake here is the integrity of the income tax law.”
The government is obviously worried about the possibility of widespread, undetected, mass-based tax resistance if Karl’s ideas should catch on and not be deterred.
The prosecutor closed his remarks by observing that federal taxes support all programs of government including the operation of Judge Perry’s court.
Karl was then asked to present his statement to the court, the Judge being very cordial again.
With brevity and simplicity, Karl pointed out that federal taxes (unlike the city and state taxes which he pays) are “overwhelmingly devoted to warfare,” and that during the course of his life between sixty and seventy per cent have gone to pay for military ventures.
In conscience, Karl said, he cannot and must not cooperate with the financing of killing.
As he began to explain how his resistance had always been done openly and publicly, the Judge dramatically changed his tone and manner.
In rapid sequence he interrupted Karl to say that being open is no excuse — “You can openly and publicly rob a bank!” — “this defendant is showing no penitence, this is obviously not a case for probation, and there is no point in wasting anymore time.”
Karl was immediately sentenced to the maximum penalty on both counts (one year, $500), with the sentences to run consecutively, although he might consider making the sentences concurrent if Karl showed a “change of heart.”
The Judge was about to call the next case when an older man, Solomon Goldman, appeared at Karl’s side from the audience, shook his hand, and loudly declared, “Karl Meyer, my grandchildren will thank you.
You are a man of peace.” Judge Perry was astounded; exclaimed to Mr. Goldman “You’re not an attorney!” and ordered him removed from the building.
Then a bit of confusion set in.
The Judge was ordering the marshal also to remove Karl, but the marshal was still involved with Mr. Goldman.
Karl was asking if he could give his briefcase to his friends, was told it could be gotten from the lockup.
Bill Himmelbauer (another convicted W-4 tax resister) was by this time at Karl’s side getting the briefcase, various people were waving two-fingered peace signs to Karl and saying “Goodbye!” as he walked out, and the Judge (whose courtroom was still understaffed) was on his feet shouting “No demonstrations!
There will be no demonstrations in here!
I’ll have you all in jail for contempt.
Clear the courtroom!” as we slowly filed out.
I’ve been informed that Karl will be sent to Sandstone, Minnesota, federal prison, after about two weeks in Cook County Jail in Chicago.
Several friends have seen him already, and report that he’s the same old Karl:
He has put his hand in the fire, and he can stand the heat as well as anyone.
(See Letter Column for Karl’s letter.
The story of his action bears repeating. ―Editor’s comment.)
Karl Meyer’s letter follows:
From Prison
Cook County Jail Chicago, Illinois
Dear Dorothy and C.W. family,
I received a letter from Kathy Bredine telling me of your call, and I was very pleased to receive your message.
Here I am permitted to write and receive mall from anyone, but I will probably be here only a few more days, before “shipment” to a federal “Facility.” There I will have a restricted mailing list; how many names I will not know until I get there; but I have been planning to put you on the list, near the top.
The letters will be for all of you, from A Prisoner.
I hope that you will not be cut from the list for being a single woman and not a relative, even though more than twice my age.
Rules are rules (though I am not sure that that is one of them), and the crime of which I stand convicted is that I claimed a familiar relationship of brotherly responsibility for the very lives of a people not in my own line of genetic descent, at least for several generations, and not even born on the same continent between the St. Lawrence River and the Rio Grande.
I was a little stunned to receive the maximum penalty for that crime, one year on each of two counts, to be served consecutively, plus $1000 in fines, though it is my prudential practice to go into court prepared and expecting to get the maximum.
Nevertheless, I keep forgetting that when these judges see a sheet of convictions as long as mine (however humane the motivations that lie behind it) going back for fourteen years, they can’t seem to see beyond that sheet, and they have a reflexive reaction to go for the maximum.
Of course it is appropriate that I should be the first person to start serving time for claiming exemptions from war taxes on the W-4 Form, since, being a child of Dorothy Day and Ammon Hennacy, it is not my way to conduct guided tours to the jailhouse door and not go in myself.
A number of statements were torn from the context of my writings by the U.S. Attorney to be quoted against me, and he particularly dwelt on that prison aphorism. “If you can’t do the time, don’t commit the crime,” which I have often repeated.
In the light of that reality, I might have done differently myself if I had known the severity of the penalty that would come down on me.
For a person without a family of small children, two years is nothing to speak of; but for people having the care of small children such as my own, William—aged 7, Kristin—aged 4, and Eric—aged 5 months, it is a serious thing for them to be fatherless for such periods of time, I think; that is why we must emphasize that there are practical ways, fully within the range of any ordinary working person, to withdraw financial support from the murder of Vietnamese families without going outside U.S. law and without taking the risks of imprisonment that I hare unfortunately taken.
Now, after a year and a half of widespread experience, we can gauge the response of the federal government to the withholding exemption method of war tax resistance.
Nine people have been prosecuted to date, and a sentencing pattern of one year on each count seems to be emerging.
The withholding exemption method of war tax resistance remains very important and useful for persons who measure the personal risk and decide that it is proper for them to take it.
But, particularly for those of us with families, it will be useful to develop ideas on how we can be true to our deepest convictions about our responsibilities to mankind, without coming into such open confrontation with the laws of the U.S.
Many people have talked with me about working toward conscientious objector provisions under the federal tax laws that would allow war objectors to earmark their social tax assessments for exclusively peaceful purposes.
As to practical effect, such provisions already exist under the tax laws of the U.S.
We need only the generosity and honesty in our ideas to take advantage of them.
For instance, under the present tax laws, a family of five could retain income of $4350 for personal use without having to pay any income tax.
In addition they would be entitled to an itemised deduction from taxable income for up to 50% of their gross income if donated to broad categories of recognized charitable and socially positive purposes.
Thus a family of five could easily have an income of at least $8700, give half of it for peaceful purposes, and legally owe no federal tax on the balance.
This is a general figure that does not take account of many deductions and exemptions that might increase that figure.
Many people feel that it is not possible for a family of five to live decently on $4350 a year in the United States.
Our own family experience, in urban Chicago, one of the higher priced areas of the country, indicates that it is quite reasonable and possible to set a family budget at that level.
The factor which has required us to use a higher income has been our contributions to the support of several other people outside our immediate family, at St. Stephen’s House of Hospitality, whom we could not legally claim as dependents for exemption from taxation.
Over the past three years our personal household has lived on a budget averaging about as follows: rent, including heat—$135 a month; food, clothing and household items—$135; hospitalization insurance—$16; Social Security deductions—$30; public transportation—$23; gas—$3; electricity—$8; phone—$8.
That totals $385 a month, very close to the minimum we are talking about; but we are far from having explored all potentials for less expensive living; our rent is higher than necessary because we live in a desirable location in northern Chicago, one block from the lakefront, and our food budget could be cut somewhat by different and more careful buying methods that we have not taken the time to explore; we could cut our electric bill in half and do without a phone, if necessary.
Yet, I can not describe our life as one of sacrifice or hardship.
Thus I believe that if we are honest about our commitment to a peaceful coexistence with other people and other societies, we must and can learn to live in a way of voluntary simplicity that is compatible with equality among people.
And it isn’t even illegal.
Yours, with a large part of my love.
Karl Meyer — a Prisoner for Peace
P.S. The Bldg. Dept has been after us about the house on Mohawk St., which now stands alone amid vacant lots on all sides where other houses were torn down.
I have found places for two of the three men who remained of our household there; Lemont had to go back to the TB Sanitarium; Roy, who was with us , I have gotten on public aid and found him a decent place in a residential hotel; Richard has been with us but he is able to look after himself.
The building will soon be condemned and torn down.
Frank Marfla, of our Alternative Fund group, will visit the men and look after them while I am in jail.
The National Catholic News Service carried this dispatch on :
Episcopal Diocese Pays Protesting Priest’s Tax Bill
By NC News Service, Philadelphia (NC) —
The Episcopal diocese of Philadelphia has decided to pay $545 in income taxes withheld by one of its priests as a protest against the Vietnam War.
After the Rev. David Gracie, an urban missioner here, had refused for 10 months to pay half of his income tax assessment, the Internal Revenue Service went to his employer asking the Episcopal diocese to turn over $545 of the priest’s salary.
Refusing to do so would have made the diocese liable for possible criminal charges for non-payment of the taxes.
Father Gracie appealed to the Episcopal council “to join in a corporate act of resistance against this barbaric, immoral war.”
Paying the bill, he said, “will finish me as a tax resister.”
Voting to pay the tax bill, the council also set up a committee to study the theological implications of conscientious tax resistance and tax exemption.
Tom Cornell reviewed the book Ain’t Gonna Pay for War No More (Robert Calvert, The War Tax Resistance, ) in the issue of Catholic Worker:
Ain’t Gonna Pay No More
This book represents a tremendous contribution to the movement against war and for a more decent society, in itself and in the War Tax Resistance campaign from which it emerges.
Probably the most significant development in The Movement during the past two years has been the growth of organised tax resistance along with its alternate funds.
Tax resistance has long been recognised as a pillar of anti-war activity, at least in theory.
After long incubation since the beginning of the Cold War in , tax resistance is taking its place in the minds of many pacifist activists alongside such stances as conscientious objection and draft resistance.
Ain’t Gonna Pay is an unusual movement publication.
It is pocket size, has a soft cover, is handsomely but modestly produced.
The type is legible and generously spaced.
It is crammed with useful information in a digestible form, and it is sprightly and wryly humorous.
To Bob Calvert is due not only credit for this most useful book, but also for the cohesion and outreach the national tax resistance has attained.
A most extraordinary man, you may read more about him in his own disarming paragraphs “About the Author,” in the comments about him by Bradford Lyttle on the back cover, and in David Dellinger’s Preface.
Karl Meyer
Much of the impetus for the tax resistance movement has come from the writings of Karl Meyer.
Karl has recently been released from Sandstone federal prison where he served 10 months for one of his experiments with tax resistance.
An important new development he has spurred has been the alternate fund.
Basic reasoning behind both tax resistance and the fund is well stated by Karl himself in his CW article. It is well to repeat portions of it:
If we pool all of the tax money that we did not pay in locally administered funds, we can create a model for a future in which men can regain direct control of their common institutions and effectively deny their consent to governmental programs they believe evil.
In each community or region we can set up a common fund. Each contributor will have one vote, as in a cooperative.
The members will meet from time to time to set priorities and guidelines for administering it according to their guidelines.
Assuming that the federal income tax contributions of most people in the movement probably exceed their voluntary political, organizational and charitable contributions, we would expect that the tax alternative funds could become one of the most substantial sources of money for the projects and purposes in which we most strongly believe.
But beyond that we could hope that our experience in mutual aid through these cooperative funds would bear fruit in the development of ashrams and communities for closer economic and social cooperation, for it is when our constructive action and our resistance to evil become for real that we see the need and value of mutual aid and begin to create cooperative alternatives within the competitive society on which we live.
If we ignore or neglect the great potential of tax resistance joined to constructive action, we must be deaf to history and blind to experience.
Do we not know that tax resistance has been one of the greatest sources and strategies of revolutionary movements throughout history?
Has not history shown that taxation is a process requiring the general consent and cooperation of the populace?
Has it not been shown that when numbers of people reject a government by withdrawing their consent from the elaborate bureaucratic process of taxation, that government is in deep trouble?
Did not the French Revolution begin with tax resistance?
Was not tax resistance the slogan and rallying cry of the American Revolution:
“Taxation without representation is tyranny I”?…
Did not Thoreau fashion the cornerstone of American resistance theory out of his own experiences as a tax resister?
Was not Gandhi’s largest and most significant campaign of civil disobedience, the Salt March, based on the strategy of tax resistance?
Can we not see what the IRS knows full well: that even where the public gives general consent to the process of taxation it is always and everywhere a grudging and tentative consent, a resentful and querulous consent, a fragile consent that must always be nursed and safeguarded by positive relations?
There exists among the public at large a great reservoir of grievance, a vast subliminal potential for tax resistance and evasion that only needs to be aroused by news of widespread tax resistance.
Let us learn from the experience of the draft resistance movement and the telephone tax refusal campaign.
A few years ago, many people regarded draft refusal as a personal witness of the solitary conscience.
Today it has taken on the dimension of a social movement.
It is, however, restricted by the narrow age and sex range of those who are subject to conscription, and even more restricted by the narrowness of the draft as a single focus of action.
When we combine real war tax resistance with the tremendous constructive potential of a Fund for Humanity, we will have raised a banner to which all honest and courageous men of conscience can repair.
Penalties
People are always anxious to know the penalties for various forms of tax resistance.
There is a chapter of questions and answers taken from the column by Payno Warbucks in Tax Talk, organ of the WTR ($2 a year subscription).
It is practical and accurate.
Stories of individuals who have dealt with IRS’ and the courts’ attempts to make them pay are told succinctly.
Long-time readers will recall the stories of Wally and Juanita Nelson, Rev. Maurice McCracken, Walter Gormly and Eroseanna Robinson.
Some recent efforts to collect taxes-due through confiscation of property and sale at public auctions are related with hardly suppressed glee.
Here is the story of Bob Marcus:
On , the IRS auctioned the car of Bob Marcus at the National Guard Armory in Boulder, Colorado for $1.25 in phone tax money.
People from the Institute/Mountain West, a branch of the Institute for the Study of Nonviolence and Denver War Tax Resistance decided to make good use of the opportunity.
They sent out a leaflet to the 3500 people in the Institute’s mailing list, telling them what had happened and asking that they contribute to a fund to buy Bob’s car back at the auction.
It was explained that all money bid for the car above the unpaid tax and fees is refunded to the tax (non)payer.
The excess money would be put into the war tax resistance alternative fund.
The auction was promoted as a “joint IRS/Institute for the Study of Nonviolence fund-raiser for war tax resistance.”
About thirty people showed up at the auction, held in a stiff wind outside the armory.
“We passed around cookies in the shape of the resistance omega, tossed balloons of all colors into the air, and held signs which read ‘I ain’t gonna pay for war no more’ and ‘celebrate life — don’t pay war tax.’ ”
Beneath a skull and crossbones “Jolly Roger” kite that went wild in the wind, two revenuers read the IRS ground rules.
They told Bob that he could still redeem the car.
He stepped foreword and said, “But can I redeem my soul?”
The car was sold for $277.00.
It took about twenty minutes to complete the transaction because much of the money was in twenty dollar bills.
After the IRS got its blood money, and the Institute expenses had been paid, the war tax resistance alternative fund had netted $203.35.
Bob donated the car to the community.
He decided that he preferred bicycling to polluting the air.
In addition, all the media covered the story extensively and pretty sympathetically.
It can be stated that the IRS bought tens of thousands of dollars worth of publicity for the idea of war tax resistance.
“A final benefit is that we showed the people of the community that tax resisters will stick together and help each other out.”
How’s that for a bit of nonviolent jujitsu? (pp. 89–90.)
The book ends with a listing of the eighty-nine local War Tax Resistance centers around the country (as of press date ).
There are now almost one hundred more, as well as twenty-three alternate or “Life Funds.”
These centers offer tax-resistance counseling, supply current literature, buttons and bumper stickers, coordinate speakers, produce demonstrations, and administer Life Funds.
I suggest you buy at least five copies of this book to give to friends who might then help you to organise a war resistance center in your locale.
You will get all the help you need from Bob Calvert
The National Catholic Reporter covered Karl Meyer’s war tax resistance in its issue:
An act of “political significance”
Resister urges withholding of taxes
By Jerry De Muth
Special to the National Catholic Reporter — Chicago —
“Tax resistance is now like draft resistance was in ,” Catholic Worker Karl Meyer told 1,000 persons who gathered to greet him on his parole from prison where he had been serving a two-year sentence for falsifying his federal income tax deductions.
“When I tore up my draft card in , it was an act of personal witness,” the 34-year-old Meyer explained.
“Today it has become an act of political significance because so many do it.
“In , eight of us refused to pay the telephone excise tax.
Now at least 100,000 do not pay that ten per cent tax.”
The tax was levied for the expressed purpose of raising funds for the war in Indochina.
Today, Meyer sees the number of income tax resisters as numbering at least 10,000 and perhaps as many as 20,000.
And, he hopes that soon this act of personal witness will also become an act of political significance.
In an interview after his talk, Meyer said, “I like concrete results.
If you don’t send $500 to Washington, you can spend that $500 as you wish on something positive.
That’s concrete, but there’s no other concrete result unless tax resistance becomes organized and grows.
“The first step,” Meyer said, “is nonpayment of the ten per cent telephone tax.
Then there is nonpayment of any balance due or nonpayment of $50, $100 or a significant amount of the income tax.
If many do this it does have political significance.”
The affair for Meyer included a $5-a-plate dinner, with the proceeds going to the Chicago Peace Council, Peoples Coalition for Peace and Justice and the Catholic Worker movement.
Referring to the people who promoted the dinner, he said:
“They should have decided not to send $500 in tax money to Washington and instead sent it to the Peace Council.
But instead they send $500 to Washington and send $5 to the Peace Council, and then they wonder why Washington is strong and the Peace Council is weak.”
Meyer: Tax resistance is like draft resistance was in 1967
Meyer was first exposed to pacifism by his mother, who taught him about Gandhi, and his father, William H. Meyer, a former U.S. representative from Vermont who was a conscientious objector during World War Ⅱ.
, the elder Meyer proposed the abolition of both Selective Service and the manufacture of nuclear weapons.
In , young Meyer became involved in active resistance, joined the Catholic Worker and converted to Catholicism.
Also a believer in such “educational” acts as peace marches, he has participated in many such actions, including a ten-month, 6,000-mile San Francisco to Moscow march in .
Meyer’s frequent protests against the war have resulted in numerous arrests.
In , he was expelled from South Vietnam for antiwar activities and, he says, similar efforts resulted in his being beaten up by delegates to the Lions International convention in Chicago in .
Meyer began his protest against the use of tax money for the military in by having his income tax underwithheld.
In , he progressed to all-out resistance through the influence of a Chicago tax resister, Eroseanna Robinson, an Olympic high jump champion.
So that no income tax would be withheld from her pay, Miss Robinson would change jobs every time her income from a job totaled more than $600.
At the end of the year she did not report any of her income.
She was arrested and while detained in Cook county jail in Chicago began to fast while Meyer and others picketed outside.
Sentenced to a year in prison, she continued to fast.
After 108 days the Bureau of Prisons, Meyer said, asked the judge to release her and the judge complied.
“I said to myself then that I was not going to pay taxes any more,” Meyer said.
“I began by leafletting the IRS IRS offices.”
At the time Meyer was supporting a House of Hospitality in Chicago and legally claimed as exemptions the persons who were living there.
As a result, no taxes were withheld.
“But as I phased out the house,” he added, “I no longer legally had a sufficient number of exemptions.
But in I claimed 12 anyway, and in I claimed 10.”
Meyer was legally entitled to four — for himself; his wife, Jean; a son, William, now eight, and a daughter, Kristin, now four.
(They since have had a third child, Eric, now one year old.)
It was for those extra exemptions that Meyer received a maximum two-year sentence plus a $1,000 fine last .
He was released from the federal prison at Sandstone, Minn. — where Joe Mulligan and Ed Hoffmans of the Chicago 15 are also imprisoned — on and will remain on parole until .
Meyer has frequently changed jobs to avoid a lien on his wages.
Once, the government got $46.60 before he quit one job.
It is the only income tax he has paid in the past 11 years, he says.
He has also avoided paying all but $8 of the federal excise tax on phone service.
“My jobs were determined by my radical pattern of life,” he explained.
“I was in jail a lot.
I was not thinking of building a career, which was good because, as soon as you stop living as the poor live and stop working as the poor work, you stop caring about their needs.”
A simple lifestyle is a very important part of tax resistance for the Meyers.
“There are essential principles more important than tax resistance,” Meyer emphasized.
“They are the idea of voluntary poverty and simplicity of life which we have done through our House of Hospitality, sharing our income with others.
“The other major principle is the refusal to do harm to others, especially to claim control of our own productivity and not pay for the killing of others.
We can claim control of our lives through tax resistance.”
Meyer said there is only one reason why more persons, even if they strongly oppose the war, do not refuse to pay part or all of their income taxes — “They’re afraid.”
“But the first time it’s done, there’s certainly no risk,” he said confidently.
Partly for this reason he backs mass tax resistance as a national antiwar action.
“The question,” he said, “is how do you tell people about their own strengths.
They mistakenly think that Karl Meyer is stronger then they.”
Meyer, who frequently delves into history with a preference for the writings of Thomas Paine, fondly points out that the American Revolution, the French Revolution and Gandhi’s movement for Indian independence all had their roots in tax resistance.
The step of tax resistance, he feels, is important for those who have unsuccessfully urged their senators to vote against military appropriations.
“When the time comes for us to vote against appropriations — and that day comes April 15 — do we vote against appropriations?” he asked.
“The courage we ask of our representatives should not be greater than the courage we ask of ourselves.”
Meyer: “voluntary poverty and simplicity of life”
As for the Meyers’ future, Meyer said that they will not pay the $2,000 in taxes owed for , will not pay the telephone tax and will not pay his $1,000 fine.
“But in order that we may be allowed to remain together and not be separated by imprisonment,” he added, “we will limit our income to an amount that will not be taxable, to about $4,800.
It’s easy to live on this.
In fact, I think we can live on $4,000 by the simplification of our life.
We will then be in a position to share the surplus with others not so fortunate as us.”
Meyer was working at a hospital when he was arrested a year ago and now is employed by “an association,” working with the mentally retarded.
“We will continue to do productive work for the good of society,” he vowed.
“We will continue to oppose this war and all other wars and all militarism by the testimony of our lives and the witness of our actions.”
From the The Catholic Advocate:
Promotes “Tax Resistance” to War
A 27-year-old priest refuses to pay the “war share” of his federal income tax.
Rev. Thomas McKenna, assistant pastor at St. Luke’s, St. Paul, Minn., in a letter to more than 100 priests inviting them to discuss possible tax resistance, said: “No matter how we vote, no matter what we say, no matter how many statements, marches and demonstrations we endorse, we still support the war (and the weekly death toll) with a large portion of every dollar we pay in federal income and telephone excise taxes.”
A follow-up on this from the National Catholic Reporter, :
17 clergy to withhold tax
Special to the National Catholic Reporter — St. Paul, Minn. —
Seventeen Twin Cities’ area priests, ministers and seminarians have announced that they will refuse to pay a portion of their federal income tax to protest the Vietnam war.
Among the group are five priests of the St. Paul-Minneapolis archdiocese.
“We cannot before God support or finance this unjustifiable killing of fellow human beings whether American or Southeast Asian,” said Father Thomas McKenna, a leader of the group, in a statement read at the federal building here. “Therefore, we feel that we must in conscience refuse to pay that portion of our federal income tax that goes to support this inhuman, ungodly war.”
Father McKenna, an assistant pastor at St. Luke’s Catholic church in St. Paul, said that 25 priests of the archdiocese had indicated to him that they might join in the tax resistance.
The 20 who did not join, he said, are still considering other forms of protest, such as withholding the federal telephone tax.
The tax resisters’ statement came at the conclusion of a peaceful demonstration by more than 200 clergy, seminarians and laymen who marched from St. Paul’s Dayton Avenue Presbyterian church to the St. Paul cathedral and then to the federal building.
The march was organized by the Ecumenical Witness for Peace.
A skeptical reporter for the Pittsburgh Catholic penned this for its edition:
Most pay little attention
Peace marchers get mixed reaction
By William McClinton
A procession of 25 people, even when escorting a black coffin and led by a man with a cross, doesn’t make much of a ripple in the hurrying crowds in downtown Pittsburgh at lunch time.
So it was with the 25 clergy and laity — mostly Catholic — who marched some 10 blocks to the Federal Bldg. to protest the escalation of the Vietnam war and the use of their tax money to finance the war.
Their sidewalk procession drew attention in some less busy areas, but in the main blocks was separated and absorbed by the crowd.
Nevertheless, the war headlines at every newsstand illustrated the relevancy of their concern, and the news media was present, almost as numerous as the marchers.
The 25 were members or friends of the recently opened Thomas Merton Peace and Justice Center, an interfaith but predominately Catholic effort on the South Side.
Larry Kessler, director of the Center, said the cross was to illustrate the religious motivation of the protesters who cannot “in conscience” support “this atrocity we call the Indochina war.”
Asked if the escalation wasn’t the result of North Vietnam’s attack, several responded in essence:
“What do you expect? We’ve had plenty of time to get out. We shouldn’t be there in the first place.”
The demonstrators chose the front of the Diocese of Pittsburgh Bldg. to form, unknown to diocesan officials.
As they filed through town they passed out handbills signed by 45 persons, including 12 diocesan priests and three nuns, announcing the undersigned were withholding part of their federal tax payment or the 10 per cent phone excise tax to protest the war.
The handbills urged others to “conscientiously object” the same way.
Many people took the bills and read them impassively.
The procession stopped at Trinity Episcopal Cathedral on Sixth St. for a brief prayer service and again at the Methodist Bldg. on Smithfield at Seventh where the closest thing to an incident occurred.
The ground floor of the building houses a bank branch, and Fr. Donald Fisher had hardly begun paraphrasing a psalm through a portable mike when the building manager rushed out and announced that “You can’t do that here.”
It was private property, the manager said tensely and when the demonstrators tried to discuss it, he hurried off to call the police.
By the time he returned, however, the demonstration had moved on.
At the Federal Bldg. on Liberty Ave. where several more demonstrators were waiting, the group set the wooden coffin down in the outdoor plaza, and after Kessler read from one of Fr. Daniel Berrigan’s writings, they tossed into the coffin some old phone bills and income tax forms as a symbolic gesture.
Several dozen persons who gathered to watch included four or five young men preparing to enlist at Armed Forces offices inside the building.
“It’s a shame.” said Robert DeRose Jr., 18, from Gallitzin in Cambria County, a sturdy, dark-haired youth who said — looking at his watch — he was to be sworn into the Navy “in 10 minutes.”
“All they’re doing is letting Communism spread around the world,” he said heatedly.
“Yet they’ll be the first to scream when Communism comes in.”
There was a humorous moment when five of the priests went inside to pay their self-reduced income tax and — even as any hapless taxpayer — were unwittingly directed by a solicitous Internal Revenue guide to the wrong line.
“I don’t take any money here,” the official told them after they had worked their way up to his desk and Fr. Donald McIlvane had introduced everyone all around and explained their purpose. “You have to give it to the cashier.”
The cashier proved to be an attractive redhead at the other end of the room who listened politely to the priests’ explanations, smiled and said, “Thank you,” as she accepted each payment.
The procession’s religious aura commanded respect — the prayers, the obvious concern for peaceful protest, the appeal to Christian principles, as the marchers see those principles.
But the intensity of the division this war has generated was reflected by the reaction of a stumpy, graying man on one streetcorner.
“They’re a bunch of Communists,” he told a companion contemptuously.
“They wouldn’t do that in Russia.”
“Not in East Germany either,” his friend replied in a strong foreign accent.
The National Catholic News Service carried this dispatch on :
Tax Problems Dog Catholic Worker Movement
By NC News Service New York (NC) —
“My little case is to explain to the court that performing the corporal works of mercy is indeed charitable even under the standards imposed by our government, and I refuse to apply for tax exemption.”
With those words Dorothy Day, the 74-year-old founder of the Catholic Worker movement, has summarized what she expects to say when she appears in a federal court in Lewisburg, Pa.
Miss Day will have to explain why the Catholic Worker movement has not paid $296,359 in fines, penalties and back income taxes to the Internal Revenue Service for the past six years.
A confirmed pacifist, Miss Day has opposed the theory of a just war, a theory that has been foremost in her decision not to apply for federal tax exemption.
“Our refusal to apply for exemption status in our practice of the works of mercy is part of our protest against war and the present social ‘order’ which brings on wars today,” she said.
“One of the most costly protests against war in the way of long enduring personal sacrifice is to refuse to pay income taxes for war,” she wrote recently in the Catholic Worker newspaper.
She argues that the Catholic Worker organization has never paid salaries.
Its volunteer workers are given room, board, clothing and free instruction in the Catholic Worker movement.
“So we do not need to pay federal income taxes,” she contends.
“I’m sure that many will think me a fool indeed, almost criminally negligent for not taking more care to safeguard, not just the bank account, but the welfare of all the lame, halt, and blind — deserving or undeserving poor — who come to us.”
Miss Day told NC News Service she considers the tax investigations a “harassment by the federal government” because the Catholic Worker movement is against all war.
The Catholic Worker is not incorporated as a religious organization and therefore is not exempt from paying federal income taxes.
She said the Catholic Worker does not incorporate because it is a principal of the movement to avoid all ties with the state.
She says the Catholic Worker did not set up a defense committee to campaign for Catholic funds.
“I can only trust that this crisis will pass,” she said.
“I am sure that some way will be found either to avert the disaster, or for us to continue to care for our old, sick, helpless, hungry and homeless if it happens,” she said.
The National Catholic Reporter reported that the “peace tax fund” idea had captured Catholic attention as well:
Applying papal suggestions
From tax dollars to peace fund
By Phil Haslanger
Special to the National Catholic Reporter, Madison, Wis.—
Trying to apply papal suggestions to political realities is not the easiest job in the world.
Take, for example, Pope Paul’s suggestion in his encyclical Populorum Progressio that a world fund be established “to be made up of part of the money spent on arms, to relieve the most destitute of this world.”
For Dr. Daniel J. Guilfoil, a 39-year-old philosophy professor at Edgewood college here, that suggestion provided the key to his dream of having part of his tax money be deferred from military expenses to help the poor.
With the introduction of a bill in the U.S. House of Representatives which would enable citizens to avoid paying war taxes on grounds of conscience (N.C.R., ), Guilfoil saw his dream moving closer to reality.
Although Guilfoil had worked for about two years to have his congressman, Rep. Robert Kastenmeier (D-Wis.), introduce such a bill, the push which finally got the bill introduced came from a citizens group in Ann Arbor, Mich. under the leadership of Dr. David Bassett, a physician.
Neither Guilfoil nor the Ann Arbor group had any knowledge about each other — a fact Guilfoil interprets as both a weakness in the tactical effort and a sign that the bill embodies an idea whose time has come.
The path Guilfoil followed which led him to work for such legislation was not dissimilar from that followed by other liberal Catholics in the wake of Vatican Ⅱ.
As enthusiasm for the declarations of the council yielded to frustration over the pace of change, Guilfoil, his wife, Barbara (“She’s probably more activist than I am”) and their nine children became a part of Madison’s John ⅩⅩⅢ experimental community.
With the community, they worked on civil rights and open housing legislation and, in Guilfoil’s words, “moved into the peace movement, if you will, as a connected issue.”
Working with the social action committee of Madison Area Community of Churches to establish a draft counseling center, Guilfoil became sensitive to the witness offered by conscientious objectors and he began to think that “the principle of alternative service should be extended to all people,” not just to draftable young men.
At the same time, he was aware of the growing tax resistance movement to protest the war and he was considering the implications of Populorum Progressio.
The various threads were woven together by Guilfoil and other members of John ⅩⅩⅢ into a petition, signatures were gathered and a resolution was adopted by the social action committee of the diocesan priests’ senate urging “legislation to create an alternate fund to administer to the needs of people.”
From there, more signatures were collected and on , Guilfoil talked with Kastenmeier about the possibility of having legislation to that effect introduced.
The congressman responded favorably and suggested the petitions and information be sent to his administrative assistant.
Kastenmeier’s office considered the proposal, but decided that the time was not yet ripe for such a bill.
Some time later the idea of just such a bill was stirring in Ann Arbor.
By fall the World Peace Tax Fund steering committee had been established.
According to Arthur Mack, the committee’s corresponding secretary, a second committee was established in Washington to lobby towards such legislation.
Rep. Ronald Dellums (D-Cal.) liked the idea and put his office to work on rounding up cosponsors.
In , he and the other nine congressmen introduced the “bill and saw it referred to the House Ways and Means committee.
, Guilfoil prodded the faculty of Edgewood college to “go on record as supporting the right of all citizens to the privilege of the status of ‘conscientious objector.’ ”
, he convinced the social action commission of Blessed Sacrament parish in Madison to unanimously adopt a resolution asking the parish council to educate the parish “on the theology of alternate service.”
Resolutions written by Guilfoil supporting the passage of the World Peace Tax Fund act the bill pending in the House were adopted by both the Second District caucus of the Democratic party (Madison) and, most significantly of all, by the State Democratic party as a part of its platform.
Guilfoil sees his efforts on the local level as part of the push to draw national attention to the bill.
He said he hopes the National Conference of Catholic Bishops will consider supporting the legislation, and he would like to see other national groups support the bill.
As for the realistic chances of getting the bill out of committee and passed into law, Guilfoil admits, “I’m not optimistic.
But if you told me two years ago it would even be a bill now. I wouldn’t have believed you.”
He sees lobbying combined with education as the lever to getting the bill moving.
“There’s enough sentiment today that taxes are being directed foolishly,” he says.
“It’s a matter of getting people aware that straight people can think about these things.”
For Catholic groups, he added, the concepts of the bill “must be tied to the pacifist and just war traditions of the church — the doctrine of the church is surely important.”
As for Guilfoil himself, he is not waiting for the government to pass legislation which will make that papal suggestion a political reality.
He has joined with others in the state to form a Wisconsin Peace Fund.
The specifics of the group haven’t been worked out yet, but basically, members will put a part of their tax money into the fund and the group will disperse it to local causes.
What Guilfoil and the people in Ann Arbor hope is that someday that peace fund will be on a national or even international level.
The World Peace Tax Fund act has helped sustain that hope.
The issue of National Catholic Reporter reported on a national war tax resistance conference and included a sidebar on “How tax resisters resist taxes.” From the opening paragraphs, it appears that a political endorsement was on the agenda, suggesting that the conference was much more mainstream-liberal then than it is now (I doubt such an endorsement would be seriously considered by a NWTRCC conference these days):
War tax resisters
Can’t quite “endorse” McGovern
Jim Castelli, Associate Editor
Kansas City, Mo. —
The second National War Tax Resistance Conference, attended by about 40 persons from around the country, gave what amounted to a qualified endorsement to the presidential candidacy of Senator George McGovern.
The tax resisters approved a statement praising McGovern for his promises to end the war, cut military spending, restudy the entire tax system and support a guaranteed annual income.
The statement also said the political climate in the country would substantially improve with McGovern as president and that he would end “repressive” actions by the government.
But the tax resisters also said they saw a negative side to McGovern, saying he “completely believes in maintaining United States power in the world” and that providing more arms for Israel, as McGovern has said he would do, is not the way to end the crisis in the Middle East.
Despite such criticisms, the statement said that most of the participants would probably vote for McGovern.
Discussion indicated that those at the conference not voting for McGovern would either vote for Dr. Benjamin Spock, the People’s Party candidate, or not vote at all.
One participant suggested that applying pressure on McGovern from the left would let voters see him as a moderate, and therefore more acceptable.
Another noted that because War Tax Resistance has strong anarchistic tendencies, a statement in support of McGovern might induce some anarchists to vote in this election.
The conference was held at St. Mark’s church, an unusual church in that it is staffed by Protestant and Catholic clergy.
The participants, for the most part, wore sandals, well-worn jeans and long hair but weren’t all young.
They came from both coasts and such cities as Denver, Chicago and Ann Arbor, Mich.
Also coming out of the conference was an agreement to draw up a statement on what the focus of the war tax resistance movement should be when the war ends.
It was agreed tax resisters should continue to oppose the domination of the federal budget by the military and the centralization of power in the hands of governmental and corporate structures.
This opposition, the participants said, should include presenting alternatives, such as a nonviolent peace-keeping force and a blueprint for converting to an economy based on peace — for example, an analysis of how to shift the emphasis at Boeing Aircraft to building mass transportation facilities.
The conference expressed opposition to key segments of the World Peace Fund Tax Act, a measure introduced in the U.S. House of Representatives by Congressman Ron Dellums (D-Calif.) and nine other legislators.
The bill would allow taxpayers who qualified for conscientious objector status under Selective Service standards to divert the percentage of their taxes slated for the military to a “world peace tax board,” which would study peaceful alternatives to international conflict.
The major objections to the bill were the screening process to obtain the conscientious objector status and the fact that the alternative funds would still be controlled at the national level, preventing tax money from being used in the community from which it was paid.
No specific action was taken at the conference on the bill, but Robert Calvert, coordinator of War Tax Resistance, said he expects a new national working committee to try to rework the bill in .
Calvert, in an interview, said the number of Americans withholding taxes because of the war is growing.
He estimated that between 100,000 and 200,000 are either refusing to page the 10 per cent federal telephone excise tax, which is used for the war, or refusing to pay all or part of their income tax.
At present, he said, there are 192 war tax resistance centers in the U.S.
He added that each regional office of the Internal Revenue Service now has a person or department dealing with taxpayers protesting the war.
“We’d love to get our hands on the IRS list,” he said.
“They have many more names of resisters than we have because many people resist on their own without working with a local center.”
The two main purposes of the conference were organizational: the creation of a working committee, and the question of whether or not to move the national office from New York to Kansas City.
The proposal to move the office was approved, partly because of expected lower operating costs, but mostly because War Tax Resistance wants to be closer to “middle America.”
The move is expected to be made by the end of the year.
The working committee, now being assembled, will consist of representatives of national regions and the seven state area around Kansas City.
The committee is to meet every two months beginning in .
How tax resisters resist taxes
Special to the National Catholic Reporter, Kansas City, Mo.—
How do you resist paying taxes as a protest against the war, and what happens when you do?
Interviews conducted at the second annual National War Tax Resistance Conference and materials put out by the movement provide these answers:
There are a variety of ways to resist taxes:
Withholding the federal telephone excise tax, withholding all or part of the federal income tax, not filing a tax return at all, paying taxes under protest and keeping one’s earnings below a taxable level.
All have a different set of consequences.
The most common form of resistance is withholding the telephone tax, says Robert Calvert, coordinator of the War Tax Resistance organization.
The telephone tax, which helps finance the war, currently is 10 per cent.
To withhold it, resisters simply deduct the tax when they pay their phone bills, explaining that it is a protest against the war, not against the phone company.
Members of War Tax Resistance say that telephone companies have told resisters that their service will not be interrupted, and that they regard the protest as a matter between the individual and the government.
They point out, however, that phone companies do provide the Internal Revenue Service with the names of resisters.
The experience of resisters is that, after several written demands for payment, IRS can usually secure payment by attaching the resister’s bank account, taking the amount of the unpaid tax, plus up to six per cent interest.
Technically, a person who resists the telephone tax is liable to a year’s imprisonment and a $10,000 fine, but so far the government has been satisfied with collection, resisters say.
In Calvert’s opinion, the government might still decide to arrest telephone tax resisters.
But, he adds, it has been the history of movements such as tax resistance that they are strengthened by governmental crackdowns.
Resisting income taxes is more difficult because taxes are withheld from most people’s wages during the year.
Thus, resisters who owe money at the end of the year can refuse to pay it or, through the use of such tactics as claiming more dependents than they actually have, file for a refund.
Income tax resistance is viewed more seriously by the government; resisters have been jailed, but penalties are greater for falsification of income tax returns or failure to file than for refusal to pay.
(Any tax returns indicating resistance should be accompanied by a letter explaining the nature of the protest.)
So far, however, either because their returns have been accepted by IRS computers, or because appeals proceedings can take years, most resisters have still not had to pay taxes.
Tax resisters advise against keeping withheld tax money, however.
The organization instead advises putting the money into alternate funds which may be used to assist tax resisters who are challenged by the government.
The government can seize personal property such as cars and houses for public auction to bring in the owed taxes.
(Whatever money is brought in over and above the taxes and auction fees is returned to the resister.)
These auctions have become occasions for peace demonstrations.
An auction for a car that had been seized from a Kansas man for tax resistance heard bids of Vietnamese tears, coffins, and napalmed babies.
Also, a resister can often arrange to have friends or a resistance center make the actual purchase at the auction.
The use of withholding allowances as a means of tax resistance was devised by John Egnal, a lawyer from Philadelphia representing resister Jack Malinowski.
Malinowski was charged with supplying “false information” on his tax status; he had claimed 14 dependents (the number of other people in the Philadelphia tax resistance center), an amount which negated his tax for the year.
He was found guilty, but has not as yet been sentenced.
The problem with past methods of tax resistance is that they are all technically illegal because they hinge on a yes or no answer to questions regarding certain parts of the internal revenue code.
The use of withholding allowances, however, seems to avoid this situation.
An employee fills out IRS form W-4 to indicate to his employer the number of deductions he will claim for the coming year; form W-4E indicates that no tax liability has been incurred for the year, usually because of income below the taxable level.
People who expect to have a large number of itemized deductions can enter a number of withholding allowances — converted from dollar figures by a chart on the back of the W-4 form — which will reduce tax payments; this way, higher taxes are not paid and then refunded at the end of the year.
Egnal holds that “the withholding allowance claim would be applicable to any tax resister who believed that, as a result of the illegal and immoral conduct of the U.S. government, some or all of the federal taxes claimed could not lawfully be collected.
“If one held such a belief… it would be necessary to improvise some basis for preparing one’s income tax returns, since IRS has not, as yet, seen fit to follow the law of this country, which includes not only the Internal Revenue code, but also numerous principles of international law to which the U.S. has subscribed.”
This improvisation, according to Egnal, would be a “war crimes deduction” for which a withholding allowance could be entered.
Egnal, claims that if the government were to prosecute such a resister, “the only false statement they could point to would be ‘I am entitled to a war crimes deduction because…’
Such a statement reflects a legal conclusion which has never been ruled upon by any court, and which… enjoys the support of many noted scholars.”
Even if the courts eventually rule that such deductions are illegal, Egnal points out that past rulings would not allow prosecution because the fact that the legal question was in doubt erases the possibility of “willfully” breaking the law.
A similar situation exists with form W-4E, which states “Under penalties of perjury, I certify that I incurred no liability for federal income tax for and that I anticipate that I will incur no liability for federal income tax for .”
A resister could, according to Egnal, use the “war crimes deduction” to justify the claim that he was not liable for any taxes.
(A follow-up brief in the issue read: “There was some discussion at the annual conference of War Tax Resistance that if McGovern lost the election, his followers would make a prime target for the tax resistance movement.
He lost, and the war is still going on; if it drags on until income tax time, it will be interesting to see if there is an increase in tax resistance.”
Another, in the issue read: “The war tax resistance movement has found a new home in Mid-America — Kansas City.
The organization moved from New York to save money and to be physically closer to ‘middle Americans.’
Nearby Independence, Mo. is the national headquarters of the paramilitary Minutemen, but tax resistance members don’t expect any hassles.
One resister joked, ‘Maybe we can learn something from them about grassroots organization.’
The new address will be 912 E. 31st St., Kansas City, Mo.”)
The same issue included this opinion piece:
War taxes and conscience
“It is the issue of coresponsibility and complicity that will become salient”
By Roderick Hindery
Even if United States military forces in Indochina should be reduced to a residual element or less before or after the election, the war will remain an issue crucial for the conscience and morale of those who led it and those who were coresponsible.
It is particularly the issue of coresponsibility or complicity that will become salient.
The fact that the Indochina war was explicitly rejected by millions who simultaneously supported it by taxes and other forms of cooperation may make the judgment of Nuremberg the question of the present era:
“that a person acted pursuant to the order of his government or a superior does not relieve him from responsibility under international law, provided a moral choice was in fact possible to him.”
One of the more constructive expressions of an emerging consciousness of coresponsibility for military action is the World Peace Tax Fund Act (N.C.R. ).
Although the bill may never escape committee in the U.S. House of Representatives, as one attempt to legislate an alternative to economic participation in war for those conscientiously opposed, it is enormously important.
The rationale attached to the bill argues that since compulsory significant participation in war against one’s religious conscience is opposed to the original spirit of the First Amendment, the law should allow a realistic alternative such as contributions to qualified peace-related activities — for example, research toward non-military solutions of conflict.
The compatibility of alternate contributions with responsible citizenship is defended by reference to Christian tradition, the traditions of the United States, judicial interpretations and legal precedents.
In a survey of some of the bill’s ramifications, the authors assure their readers that tried and proven standards for determining authentic conscientious objector status can also be applied to military tax objectors.
As for other possible abuses, it is alleged that the Peace Tax Fund’s passage would not open the floodgates to earmarking tax dollars because opposition to war involves a right of conscience that is uniquely fundamental.
In a concluding section entitled “Effectiveness,” the Peace Tax Fund proposal realistically admits that the military budget would not decrease unless Congress were persuaded by the fund’s growth to reduce the priority of military spending.
Tax exemption is primarily a means to that end.
In noting that the bill would “force” taxpayers to decide whether they can support military spending, the authors underline the thesis with which we began — the importance of an emerging consciousness about coresponsibility for war through military spending.
The Peace Tax Fund, of course, is not the only path of dissent being explored.
An increasing body of tax resisters (192 listed groups in the United States) have experimented with alternatives ranging from individual protests to communal resistance and harassment of the Internal Revenue Service.
Taxes are withheld totally or in amounts proportionate to military spending by the government.
Equivalent sums are donated to social and charitable causes.
However, if the citizen takes steps to insure that military taxes are not confiscated from his salary or property, he is liable to legal sanction.
While refusal to work for taxable wages and emigration are further options, emigration alone may offer the only route toward a “pure non-cooperation.”
When economic systems can support war by deficit spending and by the transfer of non-military funds to military budgets, even participation in a future World Peace Tax Fund would not neutralize the fact that living within a military economy is itself a kind of cooperation in war.
The option most commonly followed is to justify support of military spending as a means of buying time and freedom to work toward a less militaristic administration.
None of these options to economic military support necessarily presuppose a totally pacifistic position.
In principle they also apply to citizens concerned with the justice of supporting particular wars, revolutions, counterrevolutions, or exorbitantly massive forms of national defense.
In each of these instances it is maintained that money becomes power and weaponry which kills against one’s conscience.
What was always true is becoming increasingly obvious.
Conscientious objection is a problem not only for draftees but for all taxpayers and their dependents.
The fact that the problem is not yet widely recognized is partly grounded in a profound dilemma never resolved in the history of theoretical ethics and only tenuously confronted by national constitutions and international law.
The dilemma can be expressed in two questions:
1) Is there not a basic and inalienable human right/duty not to kill against one’s conscience?
2) If this right/duty is inalienable, how can the right/duty of national defense override it?
Within the legal dimension the dilemma is not yet totally resolved.
The Russian Constitution, for instance, legislates that the duty of defense supersedes freedom of conscience.
The United States Constitution refers to no such priority, only to a religious freedom which implicitly presupposes a prior freedom of conscience in matters so basic as killing.
No subsequent legislation has inverted that valuation, and judicial decisions consistently interpret the Constitution in favor of the primacy of conscience (at least in reference to opposition to war in general).
This priority of conscience was explicitly confirmed by the principles of Nuremberg, which were approved by the United States and promulgated as international law by the United Nations in .
In principle the United States accepts international law as an authority which obliges its own citizens.
In the United States the priority of conscience still needs clearer and more explicit legislation.
The unconstitutionality of compulsory war tax may be argued from the perspective of the written Constitution (intentions or actual practice of the framers or citizens who first ratified it) or from the viewpoint of the living constitution (manifested in judicial decisions or people’s referendums).
From either or both of these methodological perspectives the priority of conscience may be argued more cogently than it has in the past.
In other words, whatever may be said for or against other freedoms of conscience, the liberty not to kill, when killing is judged immoral, is unique.
It is so basic to the freedom of conscience which the Constitution presupposes, that there is need of an explicit amendment or other legislation to guide courts in deciding all cases involved.
A bill like the World Peace Tax Fund, while not as irreversible or desirable as a constitutional amendment, is needed to help explicate what is already implicit at the legal level.
Within the ambit of theoretical ethics which operate autonomously outside or within various world religions, the priority of the right not to kill against one’s conscience is in jeopardy due to two as yet unsolved theoretical controversies.
The first controversy is the one engendered by classic utilitarianism’s principle that morality is always determined by whatever serves the greatest happiness of the greatest number of people.
As recently as John Rawls’ A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, Mass., Harvard U. Press, ; cf. The New York Times Book Review, ), philosophers have joined in continued debate about the adequacy of the greatest happiness principle and have argued the pragmatic need to supplement it by postulating an equal and, in some ways, prior principle of justice:
Since certain individual rights of life or liberty are inalienable, their inviolability necessarily, if sometimes invisibly, brings about the greatest happiness.
This principle is not acceptable to everyone since it seems verifiable only in the future.
The second controversy has been sharpened by analysis of ethical language.
Are rights something people merely feel about and confer or bestow on one another?
If rights are dependent on what others think of us or what they contract with us, how can rights be inalienable?
Or, if some rights are inalienable, what is the source of human certitude in specifying them, intuition or what?
Ethical thought which is not rooted in heteronomous religious authority continues to founder on these two controversies and lacks the ringing certitude about inalienable rights proclaimed by the United States Declaration of Independence and the Founding Fathers, by the United Nation’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights, or by the international principles of Nuremberg.
Consequently, the sources of national and international laws manifest a greater unanimity and authority than do conflicting approaches in theoretical ethics.
Whoever does not immediately perceive the self-evidence of the liberty not to kill against one’s conscience will apparently function best when he appeals not to a universal authority in reasoned ethics but to the legal authority and presuppositions of constitutions or international law.
As mentioned previously, those who are convinced of conscientious objection’s legality should work for its logical extension into the economic sphere.
Not all wars or military spending appear so clearly immoral to so many people as does the war in Vietnam.
There are other issues on which progressives or conservatives may be divided among their own groups, e.g., future support of military operations in the Near East or Latin America, nuclear defense programs powerful enough to destroy the planet many times over, or foreign aid programs thought to be gravely exploitative and imperialistic.
The authors of the World Peace Tax Fund Act give assurances that exemption from war taxes would not open the floodgates for citizens who wish to earmark their tax dollars in other programs.
On the contrary, this concern may be offset with the judgment that, given a plurality of fundamental human rights, there may be many other crucial moral issues on which citizens should vote with their dollars.
The lasting merit of the growing war tax resistance movement may not be that it helped end the war in Indochina, but that it raised the question of citizens’ coresponsibility to the moral priority it deserves, not only in matters of war and peace, but in every matter of life and death.
The issue of citizens’ coresponsible decision-making entails more than the purity and liberty of individual consciences.
If free and informed decisions by greater numbers have anything to do with the effectiveness of democracy, the future of democracy itself may be involved.
Roderick Hindery teaches religious ethics at Temple university in Philadelphia.
The issue of The Catholic Worker included a new Ernest Bromley essay promoting war tax resistance:
War Tax Resistance
By Ernest Bromley
Although it has been several years since I wrote an open letter to the President of the United States, I wrote one about refusal to finance war or the preparation for war:
Open Letter to Ronald Reagan
I was imprisoned during World War Ⅱ because I refused to pay federal taxes for war.
I had already decided that, so long as I would not take up arms to kill, I should not buy the arms and pay someone else to kill for me.
I began , after the U.S. went to war in Korea, to refuse even to file a tax return since I wished to cancel any remaining tie with the arm that gathers war funds.
Now that the U.S.S.R. and the U.S. are helping each other prepare to blow up the world, I reaffirm publicly my separateness from IRS.
That destruction of the world would be accomplished in the name of providing “national security,” reveals that the policy is ironically insane.
I need to put some distance between myself and that policy.
When governments move mindlessly toward destruction, individuals must move mindfully toward blocking them.
We should remember that it is the individual that furnishes most of the tax dollars, and that it is the military that spends most of them.
A dual obligation falls on the individual therefore to stop payment.
If security or sanity lies in any other direction, it has not yet been shown.
If millions this year were to refuse payment, that would not — to paraphrase Thoreau — be the violent and bloody measure that it would be to pay and enable nuclear powers to end us all.
Ernest Bromley
10208 Sylvan Avenue
Cincinnati OH 45241
In , before any of us knew that such a thing as an atom bomb existed, the United States dropped one on the unaware and innocent populace of a Japanese city.
If we had known that such a weapon existed, we could have predicted with almost total certainty that it would be used, for where in history can we find a weapon that was built but was not used, was produced yet was kept on the shelf as a museum piece?
I am glad I did not participate in financing the atom bomb.
My concentration, however, is on not financing the more grotesque and grisly weapons being planned today; one of them even being called the “ultimate weapon.”
We have indeed become a society of butchers, as Bertrand Russell said a few years ago.
If this ultimate weapon should come, the ultimate danger will come right along with it, the ultimate danger for everyone on the planet.
No way can then exist for getting rid of that danger without first getting rid of that weapon.
During World War Ⅱ, I was aware that the government wanted both “you and your money.”
There has been a change.
The government now wants your money only, for it is your money that constructs those almost self-operating weapons that can destroy everybody and everything.
The government has been making it plainer and plainer that today’s combat soldier is the taxpayer — the person who provides the cash to produce and deploy the push-button hardware and software for mass annihilation.
The world is now spending $1.3 million every minute toward this end at the same time that it robs the already-poor and destitute.
Back at the turn of the century, Leo Tolstoy showed us that individuals shoulder great responsibility for warfare.
If widespread refusal of military taxes could take place, he said, something in government would have to change because government could not put that many people in prison, and, if it could, it would still be without funds for its military operations, and solutions other than military ones would have to be found.
It is the same today except that the urgency is much greater, for the “military operations” of old have now become “extermination programs.”
People who contribute substantially each year to these extermination programs — and there is no way to avoid doing so when giving tax funds to IRS — are, whether they like to think so or not, engaging in “crimes against peace,” something that is forbidden by our moral code, by the Nuremburg Tribunal and by other treaties to which the United States is signatory.
The excuse, “We are only obeying orders of our duly-constituted government,” is, of course, empty and meaningless.
The Nuremburg principles held that preparing to engage in crimes against peace is, in itself, a crime against peace, and that people cannot hide behind orders given by government when they personally commit those crimes against peace.
Those “good Germans” of , who knew they were building death camps, and knew they were building those other means of human extermination, justified their acts on the grounds that they “had to obey the law.”
People who finance the horror weapons of today are in the same category.
Disobeying a statutory law is, of course, illegal but it is not necessarily wrong.
The higher laws often cannot be obeyed without disobeying some of the lower ones.
Clearly a choice has to be made.
Holding back money from what one vitally opposes so that one can give it instead to what one vitally favors is probably as old as civilization itself.
From history we learn that this practice existed in many parts of the world, including England, India, and the United States in the American Colonies.
Probably no resistance has been more effective or more honored.
People in these countries who stopped their money cut off from government a source of revenue that government had come to depend on, and they also made clear, thereby, their open opposition to certain government laws and practices.
Our responsibility extends, of course, beyond government demands into the whole of society, and we should be ready at any time to do what we believe to be right.
We are creatures of the whole earth, not just one strip of it, so, if we aspire to be citizens of something, we should aspire to become citizens of the globe.
Hope for the future is dependent on many more people acting on their consciences, becoming bolder and going further than they have yet gone, for the human conscience has a power all its own.
(For people who are considering some form of tax resistance or who wish to learn more about tax resistance, there are two groups that offer helpful information on methods and consequences of such an act.
These are: National War Tax Resistance Coordinating Committee, P.O. Box 2236, E. Patchogue, NY 11772 (516‒286‒8422), and War Resisters League, 339 Lafayette St., New York, NY 10012 (212‒228‒0450).
Eds. note.)
That paper also included an article about war tax resistance in its issue, in which it promoted a “patron saint of war tax resistance”:
War Tax Resistance
According to figures developed by the War Resisters League, fully 63% of all income taxes collected for the United States Federal budget for will be spent on military outlays.
This includes spending on all current military programs, veterans’ benefits, and payment of interest on the portion of the national debt created by past military spending (estimated to be 80% of the entire national debt).
Given the increasingly aggressive U.S. military policy, particularly in Central America, and the billions of dollars being poured into destabilizing weapons systems such as the MX missile, the cruise missile, and the “star wars” missile defense system, more and more people are beginning to question the morality of their tax dollars being put to use for such potentially destructive purposes.
Many feel they can no longer fund these military programs in good conscience, and so they are participating in war tax resistance, as a way of following their beliefs and attempting to bring about social change.
War tax resistance can take many different forms.
Some people refuse to pay a token amount of their income tax, $5 or $10, as a symbolic protest against militarism.
Others withhold the percentage of their tax that corresponds to the percentage of the Federal budget allotted to the military.
It is important to note that any income tax money paid will go in part to military spending, as it is impossible to earmark money for peaceful purposes only.
For this reason, many people choose not to pay any Federal taxes at all, or keep their income below the taxable limit.
Another form of war tax resistance is refusing to pay the Federal excise tax on telephone services, a tax which has been associated with the funding of the Vietnam War.
Choosing to refuse payment of war taxes, and deciding the best course of action to take, can be a confusing and intimidating process.
Our tax system is complicated, and the Internal Revenue Service can be seen as a rather formidable institution to take on single-handedly.
Fortunately, there are a number of resources available to people considering tax resistance.
The Guide to War Tax Resistance, published by the War Resisters League (339 Lafayette St., New York, NY 10012, $6), is an excellent book, thoroughly covering many topics, including the history of tax resistance in the United States, the various types of tax refusal strategies, and the procedures the IRS might use to attempt to collect refused tax money.
The National War Tax Resistance Coordinating Committee (P.O. Box 2236, East Patchogue, NY 11772, tel. 516‒654‒8227) offers many valuable resources, including listings of regional tax resistance groups and counselors (send a stamped, self-addressed envelope), and a war tax alternative fund information packet ($5).
Alternative funds are an important aspect of tax resistance, as many people, in refusing to pay taxes to the Federal government for military purposes, instead contribute their tax money to groups working directly for peace and human needs.
This is an example of how tax resistance can be used as a positive tool for social change.
Confronting our system of taxation and the war machine is a difficult task, as we are all tied into an economy that is geared toward increasing our military might.
Saint Hugh was born of a good (and pious, of course) family in Burgundy, France, around .
After his mother’s death, when he was eight years old, his father placed him in a house of regular canons to be cared for and educated.
When he was fifteen, he made his religious profession in the same community.
In his nineteenth or twentieth year, he happened to visit the Grande Chartreuse with one of his superiors.
The retirement and silence of the place enkindled in Hugh a desire to embrace the Carthusian life in all its austerity, which he did, over the objections of his former superior and the grim picture described by the Carthusian prior of their life.
Of the next seventeen years of his life at the Grande Chartreuse, there is very little to be said, other than that, like St. Francis and various other saints, he had a certain affinity for animals.
He especially liked squirrels and birds, of whom he was very fond, and over whom he had a considerable power.
Later in life he had a pet swan who was very protective of him.
During this time he also acquired a reputation of great holiness.
Tax Resister
It was this reputation which prompted King Henry Ⅱ of England to send for Hugh to come and take over the government of a charterhouse he was founding at Witham, as part of his penance for the murder of St. Thomas Becket.
It is at this time that Hugh sparks our interest, for he refused to undertake his office until full payment and compensation had been made to those who had been evicted from their land to make way for the charterhouse, a small oversight on the King’s part.
This was not the last time Hugh would remind the King of what was right and just, usually to Henry’s expense, but Hugh’s holiness, strength of character and good humor (he was famous for his disarming puns) won him the respect and confidence of his sovereign.
In , he was elected to be Bishop of Lincoln, a see which had been vacant for eighteen years.
While at the task of straightening out the affairs of his long neglected diocese, he also found time to nurse the sick (particularly lepers), assist the poor, play with children, rebuild his cathedral, and during a period of vicious anti-Semitic violence at the beginning of the Third Crusade, he was found at Stamford, Northhampton and Lincoln, singlehandedly facing angry mobs of Christians, compelling them to spare the children of Israel.
In , King Richard Ⅰ wanted the bishops and barons to subsidize his war with Philip Augustus of France.
St. Hugh refused, maintaining that his see was only obliged to assist in home defense.
This seems to be the first documentation of war tax refusal, and, though it was not an easy time for Hugh and his see (all his goods were confiscated), in the end he was able to stand up to the king, rebuke him, and come out on top of the situation.
The king stood corrected.
On his return home from France, having been on state business for King John, he became ill in London and died on the evening of .
His body was carried to Lincoln, where it was buried in the cathedral amidst what appears to be universal grief.
At his funeral were present: “The primate of England, fourteen bishops, a hundred abbots, an archbishop from Ireland and another from Dalmatia, King William of Scotland, King John of England — and the Lincoln ghetto was there, bewailing the loss of its protector and a ‘true servant of the great God.’ ”
St. Hugh was canonized in .
His feast day is November 16.
He is popularly (in certain circles) thought of as the patron saint of war tax resistance.
The issue of The Catholic Worker summarized the state of the art of war tax resistance at that time:
Resisting War Taxes:
On Telephones
The federal excise tax on telephone service has been associated with war spending throughout its history.
It was first imposed by the War Tax Revenue Act of .
Repealed in , the Act was then reimposed in .
During World War Ⅱ, long distance calls were taxed 25%, local service 15%.
In , the tax was reduced to 10% on all phone service, and then further reduced in to 3%, with elimination planned for .
Before this could happen though, the Vietnam War required that the revenue continue.
With military spending continuing at a high level after the Vietnam War, the tax was still retained, and in raised from 1% to 3%.
Currently, the federal government collects nearly two billion dollars a year through the telephone tax.
The tax is itemized on every phone bill (both for local service, and for all long distance companies).
To refuse this tax, one can simply deduct the amount of the tax, and pay the balance.
One should include a note each month explaining that one is not paying the tax in protest against military spending.
If this is not done, the tax will continue to appear on future bills as balance due.
“Telephone tax resistance" cards to enclose with your bill, explaining the protest, are available from several groups, and simplify the notification procedure.
No telephone company can legally disconnect one’s service for nonpayment of the excise tax.
If it does, it can be fined by the Federal Communications Commission.
A telephone company, once notified, should credit your account to eliminate the unpaid amount of the tax, and notify the IRS of your resistance.
The IRS may then send a routine computer notice asking for tax payment, but this rarely happens, since the amounts are small.
If the IRS takes action to collect the tax, many options are afforded the resister.
A war tax resistance counselor can help explore these options, and their consequences.
For information, contact the National War Tax Resistance Coordinating Committee, P.O. Box 2236, East Patchogue, NY 11772, (516) 654‒8227.
On Income
The primary way the United States pays for its wars and war preparations is by taxing income.
And, as long as there has been federal income tax, there has been resistance.
In , this meant resisting the payment of 63% of the income tax assessed, since that was the percentage of the federal budget devoted to military spending.
Various options are available, with different consequences following from each, for those wishing to resist these war taxes.
If one wishes to file tax forms as usual, one can simply include payment for less than is assessed; a “military credit" can be taken on the 1040 form; or a “military deduction” can be taken on Schedule A for miscellaneous deductions, all leading either to the non-payment of a token amount, or the amount which would go to the military, or all income tax (since any portion of what is paid then goes to the military).
Others may elect to either file a blank 1040 return, or no return at all.
Finally, a number of people close the Catholic Worker throughout the years have decided to resist war taxes by living under the taxable income.
While this is by no means easy these days, it has the benefit of incurring no penalty from the IRS, and of bringing one closer to the poor through the voluntary poverty which Peter Maurin and Dorothy Day long practiced and recommended.
Before attempting any form of federal tax resistance, one should become familiar with the various options available, and their consequences, including the different ways to avoid tax withholdings, which are a major impediment to resistance.
The War Resisters League, 339 Lafayette Street, New York, NY 10012, (212) 228‒0450, has just published a completely revised edition of its Guide to War Tax Resistance, which remains the best resource book available.
It is $8, plus $1 for postage and handling.
The National War Tax Resistance Coordinating Committee, P.O. Box 2236, East Patchogue, NY 11772, (516) 654‒8227, has a variety of resources available, including a selection of booklets and a slide show on tax resistance, and can help make referrals to counselors and lawyers.
An article reflecting on direct action and on the Luddite movement, by Katharine Temple, in the issue of The Catholic Worker included this section on tax resistance:
Then there is tax resistance.
This route may not seem as dramatic as smashing the looms that spell unemployment; still, it does strike, nonviolently, the life-line sustaining the corporate-military mechanism.
(Certainly, the State takes it seriously.
Consider the lengths they go to collect meager amounts from people who openly withhold money to protest military spending.)
Refusing to pay the piper may be the most direct and non-confused way to say “No!” to the forces that enslave.
Ways to Resist
Most of us don’t stop to think how many ways tax resistance can be practiced.
At one end of the spectrum is the public and outright refusal to pay, a stance that limits employment possibilities and risks heavy fines or jail.
At the other end is the decision, equally fraught with hardship, to live below the taxable limit.
In between, lie other, less extreme options, such as a partial withholding, working within a lower tax bracket, avoidance of the telephone tax collected for military debts, exchanges of labor without money transactions, rationing (or even giving up!) highly taxed goods, etc.
Given that more than half the federal government budget goes to military expenses and hardware, every tax avoided through pure means is a moral and political statement of the highest order.
These decisions are not to be taken lightly, for the consequences can bear a heavy price.
Any wise builder, we are told, will “first sit down and count the cost whether he has enough to complete it” (Luke 14:28).
Presumably, it is not the best idea to act only in confused, midnight encounters nor to make costly gestures frivolously.
At the same time, if we dismiss tax refusal out of hand, just as when the Luddites have been dismissed, the concern is not always about violence, nor the cost, but the futility.
Isn’t it all doomed to failure?
The die is cast, so that neither demonstrations nor symbolic action nor direct refusals will make the slightest difference.
This is what stops us from even the smallest actions.
The assessment of failure, though, is always a later one, and we shouldn’t give in to historical determinism.
“Our only criterion of judgment should not be whether a man’s actions are justified in the light of subsequent evolution.” (E.P. Thompson)
Furthermore, as Christians, we must hold to belief in the economy of good, that no good action, no matter how seemingly inconsequential, is lost in God’s plan.
The issue of The Catholic Worker announced a war tax resister’s penalty fund:
Tax Resister’s Penalty Fund: A Little Help from Their Friends
By the time this issue of the paper reaches you, , may have come and gone, and so it may be too late to urge again income tax refusal.
It is not too late, however, to take some other steps.
For example, a project has been set up to provide financial and moral support for war tax resisters and to provide a way for those who are not yet able to take that path to support those who have.
Basically, the Tax Resister’s Penalty Fund (TRPF) seeks to reimburse those who suffer financial loss when the IRS levies penalties and charges (over and above the original tax money demanded) against resisters.
The TRPF is sponsored by the North Manchester Fellowship of Reconciliation, which evaluates each request for assistance and requires documentation showing that the penalty has already been collected by the IRS as a result of one’s refusal to pay military taxes.
The fund was established in and, in , reimbursed nineteen war tax resisters for a total of $8,976.76.
As the number of requests increases, it is important that the number of contributors keeps pace.
You can help by joining, sending a donation of any amount, and also by spreading the word.
War tax resisters are taking a brave stand, and they need a little help from their friends.
For further information, please write to: TRPF, North Manchester Fellowship of Reconciliation, P.O. Box 25, North Manchester, IN 46962.
Today, some excerpts from The Catholic News Archive concerning tax resistance in .
These are all from the pen of Karl Meyer, writing in The Catholic Worker.
First, from the issue:
Who’s Afraid of the IRS? Strategies for Refusal
By Karl Meyer
Out of my twenty-eight years of agitating, scheming and refusing payment of all federal income taxes, I have a fund of delightful IRS confrontation stories.
I would love to share them with you as we go along, but, for this discussion, I would like to set out some serious ideas about the goals and development of our movement.
Why are we war tax refusers?
While we remain a tiny minority, our actions are still important because we make an important statement to organizations and causes that are working for peace and social justice.
Let me illustrate this.
In , Women for Peace organized a huge peace walk in Chicago.
There were at least 10,000 people marching, although it was a cold, windy, miserable day.
We gathered for the typical rally in Grant Park.
We were addressed by Helen Caldicott and Jesse Jackson, among many others, who told us about the dangers of the nuclear age.
Helen Caldicott gave a fine speech until she began to suggest what we should do about all this.
She suggested that it was urgent that we should all drop whatever we were doing for the next few weeks, and devote all our energy to the election of Walter Mondale, in order to forestall a second term for Ronald Reagan.
Jesse Jackson’s solution was not much better.
At the end of the rally, he asked us to all join hands and sing, “We shall overcome.”
As we were singing it occurred to me that out of the 10,000 people gathered there who were devoted to peace, only a handful were tax refusers.
Most of them were still paying their per capita share of the military budget, which was on the order of $1,000 per year per person.
So I calculated that there was $10 million dollars in collected war taxes, swaying back and forth in the wind and the rain, singing, “We shall overcome, someday.”
Is Effectiveness Important?
It is common to say that the money is not important, that it is the act of protest that counts.
It is common to say that we must expect the eventual collection of our refused war taxes.
Is effectiveness important? I say that it is. I want tax refusal that works.
If it does not work for me, I may lose the will to persist in it.
And if it does not work for me, I do not see how I can even think about an effective mass movement.
So, I have tried to advocate methods and tactics that will: maximize the amount of effective tax refusal and the thoroughness of war tax refusal, so that we minimize the collection of taxes by IRS; minimize the level of personal risk; minimize the level of personal harassment by IRS assessment and collection officers; minimize the level of personal anxiety and emotional pressure that is felt by the individual tax refuser.
In the CAWRSG and the Chicago Catholic Worker, many people are using a strategy that effectively prevents the withholding, assessment and collection of any federal income tax, and, at the same time, reduces the level of IRS contacts to nothing, or to practically nothing.
It is a simple strategy.
We prevent the withholding of all federal income tax by claiming extra allowances on the W-4 form.
We file no income tax return and send no direct letters or notices about it to the IRS.
If the IRS sends notices about failure to file, we ignore those notices and make no reply.
Since the war tax refusal effort came back to life as an organized movement in , we have had no assessment, no collection, and no significant IRS harassment against any of the individuals who followed all of the elements of this strategy, and those individuals who have donated thousands of dollars of war tax refusal money to the work for peace and justice.
It works for the individuals who use it.
And yet it does not seem to lead to a steadily or rapidly expanding base of committed war tax refusers.
There is a high rate of attrition among committed war tax refusers, even among those who are using an effective method and have suffered no apparent discouraging consequences from their action.
Attrition
It is quite understandable to me that there would be attrition among people who practice the self-defeating strategies that are advocated by some of the more scrupulous and pious religious and political tendencies in our movement.
If you refuse all or part of your war taxes, and then file a tax return about it, assessing the tax against yourself, telling the IRS exactly how much they can expect to collect, where you work, where you live, and even where you bank, if, in short, you tell them how much to collect and where to collect it, it is understandable that they will soon succeed in collecting.
And, if they quickly collect half again as much as you would otherwise have paid (in fines and penalties) and, meanwhile, threaten your sense of security in your job and in your home, it is pretty easy to understand why many people would give up after two or three years of that and go back to paying taxes.
But what puzzles me is why there is still a high rate of attrition among people who have used a strategy that works, and who have not yet experienced any real threat of enforcement from the IRS.
Here I come to the problem of generalized anxiety that is, to a large extent, irrational.
There are many of us old-timers who feel almost total security about war tax refusal.
There is hardly a grain of fear of the IRS, hardly a grain of fear of the consequences of war tax refusal left in us.
But for many of the newer generation, the generation of who are not yet so rooted in this, a generalized level of anxiety persists.
They believe in the correctness of this witness, and it works for them and for other people that they know.
Yet, they remain anxious about the ultimate consequences for their way of life and other personal goals, particularly career goals and home ownership goals, if the IRS would eventually catch up with them and nail them.
In the struggle to make a living and to hold together our families and personal relationships, there are many times when stress and anxiety may threaten to overwhelm us.
There are times when we feel pressures and stress coming at us from all sides, and we wonder if we will be able to cope.
To survive emotionally, we seek to dump overboard some of the sources of stress in our lives, and the war tax refusal commitment can be one of the first victims of this anxiety-reduction syndrome.
How can we deal with this source of attrition in our movement, which leads sincere people to abandon the leadings of their conscience, and causes them to submit to a permanent wounding or searing of their conscience?
Close-knit affinity groups and support groups are the first key to this answer.
I find that the Catholic Worker community in Chicago provides this continuous source of encouragement and support, that sustains people in that community through intermittent periods of uncertainty or anxiety.
I think that a second key lies in broader educational efforts, such as workshops, and the written media of our movement, which can debunk much of the irrational IRS phobia which exists in our society, a phobia that has been persistently and carefully fostered by the government of the United States, and by the mass media that are subservient to the government.
War tax refusal is a very effective form of personal and social witness.
It is an action that works.
The risks for the individual are very low when compared to the benefits for the cause of peace.
But we need to continue to deal with an IRS phobia that is largely irrational but very prevalent, even among many who have already become involved.
(Excerpts from an address to New England war tax resisters, .
For information on tax refusal, contact the National War Tax Resistance Coordinating Committee, P.O. Box 85810, Seattle, WA 98145, (206) 522‒4377, or the War Resisters League, 339 Lafayette Street, New York, NY 10012 (212) 228‒0450, which publishes the Guide to War Tax Resistance, for $8, plus $1 for postage and handling. Eds. note.)
A year later, in the issue, Meyer walked back some of his optimism about the ease of the non-filing method:
New IRS Ploys May Affect War Tax Resisters
By Karl Meyer
(As tax time draws near once again, we encourage all our readers who are in a position to do so to consider participating in some form of war tax resistance.
Karl Meyer, a long time member of the Catholic Worker family and a long time tax resister, here proposes one method of tax resistance.
Karl’s method, while effective, has been the subject of some discussion over the years — because it involves making false statements to the government and refusing to file income tax returns, many people have found that they cannot back this method.
For those who would seek other ways to resist paying war taxes, several possibilities exist.
One is to live below the minimum taxable income.
Another is to decline to pay taxes, but to inform the IRS of your refusal and your reasons for doing so.
You could also refuse to pay that percentage of your taxes which would be used for defense purposes.
In any case, the money which would otherwise have gone for taxes could be used or donated to peaceful, just, and merciful ends.
Moreover the income tax is not the only war-related tax we pay — one may resist war taxes by not paying the federal telephone tax which goes for defense purposes.
For information on war tax refusal, contact the National War Tax Resistance Coordinating Committee, P.O. Box 85810, Seattle WA 98145, (206) 522‒4377. Or get in touch with the War Resisters League, 339 Lafayette Street, New York, NY 10012, (212) 228‒0450, which publishes the Guide to War Tax Resistance, for $8 plus $1 postage and handling. — Eds. note.)
In that article I explained exactly how to prevent the withholding of war taxes by claiming extra allowances on W-4 Forms.
For the first time we showed how people who were employed for wages or salaries could prevent withholding and practice tax refusal effectively.
This article led to a tremendous growth in resistance to taxes for the war in Vietnam.
Thousands of people have used the W-4 method in .
The Internal Revenue Service never found a cost effective antidote to what we started.
The Catholic Worker for carried excerpts from a speech I had given the year before, explaining the most effective strategy for war tax refusal.
I believe that strategy remains the best, but there are new developments that may decrease its effectiveness in the years to come.
The elements of our strategy are simple:
(1) We prevent withholding of war taxes by claiming extra allowances on the W-4 Form, filed with wage employers.
(2) We prevent assessment of taxes by not filing income tax returns and not sending direct letters or notices to the IRS about it.
(3) If the IRS sends us notices about failure to file, we ignore them and make no reply.
(4) If they call us or visit us, we talk to them about the wrongfulness of the arms race.
For nineteen years there was a large comfortable hole in the enforcement capabilities of IRS.
They did not have an effective program for following up and collecting from hard-core non-filers.
Therefore there were very few assessments or collections against those who followed all of the elements of the strategy above.
We are now entering a more difficult time for this form of tax resistance.
Perhaps the golden age of easy tax resistance is ending.
For several years the frequency of notices about failure to file has increased steadily.
In , the IRS announced a program that may bring better results for tax enforcement.
They now have computer programs that enable them to prepare and mail automated tax assessments, based on W-2 wage reports from employers and 1099 reports from interest and dividend payers.
They say that this will enable them to make rapid assessments against a large percentage of those who have ignored notices to file in the past.
By their own estimates, there are about one million of these hard-core non-filers.
That includes war tax refusers.
We do not know yet how thorough and effective this program may be.
Public IRS estimates of their enforcement capabilities have usually been greatly exaggerated, to scare people into compliance.
The IRS machine was bogged down last year, because the so-called “tax-simplification” of made the tax filing system more complicated than ever before.
Two long term non-filers from the Chicago movement contacted me for counseling in , after receiving automated assessments for past years.
Many others have not been touched yet.
Only time will tell, but it seems likely that IRS assessment capabilities will improve with this program.
IRS will still face the obstacle of trying to collect from determined resisters.
I believe that non-filing will remain a key element in an effective strategy, but it will not work as smoothly as it used to.
People will need to think ahead further about the impact of enforcement on their employment and property ownership goals.
Our alternative funds and support groups should give greater priority to mutual aid payments for resisters who suffer unexpected losses from IRS seizures.
Mutual aid is one way of sharing the unpredictable burdens of sporadic IRS enforcement programs, but resisters with families must also be more cautious in insuring themselves against seizure losses.
Nonfilers who may have experienced no collection hassles for many years, should now consider the wisdom of investing a large part of their redirected taxes into retrievable loans to non-profit community development projects, in order to protect themselves financially against increased possibilities of IRS assessments and collections.
I do not believe in bank savings, because the U.S. Treasury borrows from banks to fund the military deficit.
Tenacious resistance to war taxes is rooted in the radical philosophy and traditions of the Catholic Worker movement.
We learned it from Ammon Hennacy and Dorothy Day.
We have been willing to live in simplicity and to share with others in order to remain faithful to our whole vision of a just society, as students of Matthew, a tax collector who became a “fisher of men.”
As the IRS tightens its nets, we will find ways to remain true to the leadings of conscience: more self-employment, more flexible employment, and more simplicity of life.
For a thorough leaflet on how to prevent withholding of tax from wages, send two stamps and a self-addressed envelope to the National War Tax Resistance Coordinating Committee at the address given above.
Ask for the pamphlet “Practical War Tax Resistance: Controlling Federal Tax Withholding.”
I am always glad to talk to people about war tax refusal.
Call me evenings at (312) 784‒8065.
My address is 1460 Carmen, Chicago, IL 60640.
In the issue of The Catholic Worker, Karl Meyer was back, to discuss the pros and cons of tax return filing:
To File Or Not to File
by Karl Meyer
(The following is excerpted from a longer collection of Karl Meyer’s, Fear of Filing, Fear of Not Filing: Weighing the Risks, Benefits and Consequences for War Tax Refusers.
Since it seems that we no sooner wrap up the old year, than the new one arrives, bringing with it the annual tax statement, what better time to consider the pros and cons of dealing with the IRS?
We hope to further the discussion in the CW, to give readers time to ruminate before . ―Eds. note.)
Apart from practical personal benefits or risks, many people make a decision on the filing question based upon philosophical, ethical, or political perspectives about war tax refusal.
Philosophical arguments for filing returns include the following:
The idea of equitable taxation for social needs is sound in itself; therefore we should cooperate with the underlying taxation system, while openly resisting only the appropriation of taxes for war.
The moral basis of conscientious war tax refusal relies upon open disobedience and acceptance of consequences.
We should resist taxes openly, and not evade them or conceal our income in any way.
The moral and political impact of conscientious tax refusal comes from informing the IRS and our political representatives about our protest and the reasons for it.
If we refuse taxes without informing the IRS , there will be no political impact, because we will not be clearly distinguishable from millions of others who evade taxes for reasons of personal benefit.
The act of political protest is more significant than preventing specific collection of taxes from us.
Arguments for not filing include the following:
Because of the domination of militarism, the U.S. tax system has become so perverse and distorted that it serves no positive social purpose.
If we wish to contribute to the needs of society, we can do that more effectively by taxing ourselves and contributing to the unmet needs that we see, instead of cooperating with the Federal taxation system in any way.
The Federal government and the IRS have become morally illegitimate.
We have no obligation to turn ourselves in to them, or to accept the penalties and harassment that they impose on tax refusers.
The political impact of filing protest returns is negligible.
IRS employees pay no attention to the protest part; because of their vested interests they are among the people least likely to be influenced by our ideas.
We can refuse taxes openly without turning ourselves in to the IRS.
We can have more political and social impact by talking openly about our tax refusal to friends and co-workers who are more likely to be influenced by us.
We can communicate openly with the general public (supposedly the sovereign authority of our republic) by leaflets, public education, and letters to periodicals.
Preventing assessment and collection is more significant than tax protest alone, because when we prevent collection, we are able to use thousands of dollars of uncollected taxes to finance directly political, educational and social causes that meet the true needs of society.
If we countenance assessment and collection, we have fewer resources left to devote to the common good.
Although acts of civil disobedience and conscientious objection take varied forms in our country, few in recent memory have resulted not only in loss of freedom but of hearth and home as well.
It is perhaps the latter event which placed North Americans closest to those who lose homes through eviction, war and other forms of violence.
Randy Kehler and Betsy Corner were arrested in , after the Colrain, Massachusetts home, where they lived with their daughter Lillian, was forcibly seized by the federal government for non-payment of taxes.
Betsy was later released, while Randy remains in jail as we go to press, to serve a six-month sentence for contempt of court.
Their home was put on the auction block in , with the federal government ending up as the only bidder and subsequent “owner” of Randy and Betsy’s place, but it has taken two-and-a-half years of other legal maneuvers before they have finally been removed and charged with contempt, despite strong local support and publicity.
Betsy and Randy lease the land on which their home is situated through the Valley Community Land Trust, a non-profit corporation using land for conservation, garden and agricultural purposes, and for affordable housing.
Like many resisters who pay local and state taxes, Randy and Betsy are in disagreement with federal levies used for nuclear weapons production, military intervention and other acts deemed criminal by international law.
Despite all talk of arms reduction carried out in saw Congress giving its approval to $270 billion dollars for the military budget.
The court ruling in favor of ownership by the United States further stated that the government had the right to padlock the house since it “had proper title to, and was entitled to possession of” the home in which Randy, Betsy and Lillian have lived for the last twelve years.
When asked in their court appearance if they planned to reenter their home, Betsy agreed not to when released, and Randy added, “It is my intention neither to occupy or not occupy my house.
It is my intention to oppose the use of my tax dollars for killing and preparations for war.”
But friends, neighbors and other sympathetic supporters have, since the time of the seizure, occupied the house.
On the following morning, for instance, a group of fourteen resisters, including the indefatigable 84-year-old Wally Nelson, who has been “just saying no” to federal war taxes , removed the government’s padlocks and remained in the house for several days, risking arrest in doing so.
As of this date, these occupations continue.
The eloquent response of Betsy Corner to those who have asked if they were “nervous” about the loss of their home, illumines one method of solidarity for these hard times:
“Sure we are. We’ve lived here for over twenty years, and our twelve-year-old daughter Lillian was born here.
We love this place, and the land, and our neighbors too.
But we have to ask ourselves, is our home more important than the tens of thousands of homes that have been destroyed by our brutal bombing of civilian neighborhoods in Panama and Iraq or by the US-sponsored bombing that’s going on at this very moment in El Salvador?
More important than the hundreds of thousands of homes our country has denied to homeless people here in America?
More important than the millions of homes here and around the world that will be incinerated in a flash or irradiated forever, if we don’t stop building nuclear weapons and generating more and more nuclear waste?”
For further information on Betsy and Randy’s current status and ways of assisting their efforts, please contact:
War Tax Refusers Support Committee (WTR), c/o Traprock Peace Center, Keets Rd., Deerfield, MA 01342, (413) 774‒2710 or (413) 773‒7427.
―Jane Sammon
The same issue had an additional article about war tax resistance:
War And Taxes
The CW listed some boycotts suggested as one route to follow “the little Way" of peace.
Now, as the income-tax-returns season is in full swing, is the time to urge a further boycott — of the Internal Revenue Service.
Once we know about the military pursuits in the Persian Gulf over the past year…, surely we must say “No!" to the government as clearly and as concretely as possible.
Nor can the Persian Gulf War be seen as an isolated incident, a regrettable aberration from national policy.
The very existence, for instance, of a “School of the Americas” in Fort Benning, shows how deep-seated is the pursuit of violence in the practices of the US government.
The fact of the matter is that more than half the money collected by the IRS goes to pay for war or to prepare for war.
According to the old adage, “Death and taxes are inevitable” but, according to our faith, murder is not allowed.
True, our Lord did say, “You will hear of wars and rumors of wars; see that you are not alarmed” (Matthew 24:6 and Mark 13:7);
He did not add though, that we should take an active part to promote them.
And, on the mundane level of financial considerations, modern warfare would be rendered well nigh impossible if nobody would foot the bill.
During the war in Vietnam, someone who promoted tax resistance was once asked what to do about the money to be withheld.
He answered, “Better to flush it down the toilet as waste-paper than to pay for the war.”
In reality, though, practicalities about the dollars and cents demanded for taxes cannot be quite so simply swept aside, nor considered only at the moment of the due date.
Peter Maurin taught a full life of voluntary poverty when he interpreted Jesus’ enigmatic reply about taxes with “The less you have of Caesar’s, the less you have to render unto him.”
Randy Kehler and Betsy Corner are now paying the price, in prison, and through the loss of their home to the IRS.
The War Resisters League has proposed the Alternative Revenue Service as a means to hold and channel monies not handed over to the government.
These are all “hard" suggestions which reveal the iron grip of taxes.
Even if success for the tax resistance movement is not imminent, any withholding of federal income taxes marks a break in the deadly power of the economic system in which we are all complicit.
It is a system whose principal “product” is war, whose motive is profit, whose organizing principle is usury.
Usury (charging interest on a loan to make money from money) is the word Peter Maurin emphasized in his discussions on economics, one we seldom hear anymore.
It is the basis for all our financial institutions, from the International Monetary Fund and the world debt to the Savings and Loan frauds (which have been described as “pure capitalism,” that is, effectively unfettered from constraints of either human labor or natural resources) to the stock market to insurance plans, right down to your local bank account.
But the guarantor of usury is the Federal Reserve System, through our taxes.
Barry Peters’ study on the ban on usury in the Hebrew Scriptures, makes it clear how this practice is violent robbery and oppression.
January 15 is the birthday of Martin Luther King, Jr.
, his memorial was eclipsed by the formal outbreak of hostilities against Iraq.
This year, let us rekindle the light of his life and martyrdom by a dedication to his ways of active nonviolence, by a refusal to render unto Caesar the ways of violence.
Instead, let us find alternative ways to render the fruits of our labor unto God, and to His children, to whom they belong.
―Katharine Temple
An Alternative Revenue Service
The Alternative Revenue Service (ARS) is a project of the War Resisters League (cosponsored by the National War Tax Resistance Coordinating Committee and the Conscience and Military Tax Campaign) designed to educate public opinion about the realities of military spending in the federal budget, and to give people a chance to redirect $1 or more of their money “owed” in federal taxes to an established alternative fund.
Last year, people who wished to practice tax resistance, to put that money towards peaceful purposes, put $12,000 into the ARS.
For further information or advice, please write to Lisa Harper, Alternative Revenue Service, 339 Lafayette Street, New York, NY 10012, or telephone their “hot-line” 1‒800‒955‒7322.
Attention New York City CW Readers!
Are you interested in finding ways to channel the grief and anger felt in the aftermath of the Gulf War, while discovering alternatives to war in general?
New York City War Tax Resistance (WTR) offers support and information meetings the first Monday of each month — , , etc. — at 6:30 pm.
The meetings are held at 339 Lafayette St. (IRT Number 6, Bleeker St. station).
For more information, please contact Sallie Marx at: (212) 929‒4833.
The issue of The Catholic Worker included an article by Karl Meyer about a road-trip taken by him and Kathy Kelly.
Here are some excerpts that touch on tax resistance:
After we went on to Salina, Kansas and Newton, Kansas, where we visited with Mennonite friends in the war tax refusal movement.
Everywhere we stopped we found the peace movement vibrant, active and numerous, contradicting the falsehoods that President Bush and much of the press tell about the demise of our efforts.
In New Mexico
The same energy was evident in Santa Fe and Albuquerque, New Mexico, where we visited friends in the war-tax refusal movement.
Don Schrader in Albuquerque had arranged two television news interviews, two newspaper interviews, eight radio talk show appearances, and a lively public meeting.
We renewed acquaintances that showed us how the web of peace action stretches its stands all over North America and Central America.
Perhaps these were the very fields and ditches where Ammon Hennacy worked when he came to Phoenix in , with only a penny in his pocket.
He worked as a farm laborer in order to avoid the withholding of taxes for war.
, he picketed the IRS to let them know why he refused to pay any taxes for war.
In , he began to fast and picket one day for each year that had elapsed since Hiroshima.
(A few copies of his autobiography, The Book of Ammon, are still available from his widow, Joan Thomas, P.O. Box 25, Phoenix, AZ 85001, for $20.)
I am eager to picket with the Peace House this spring at the IRS office in Phoenix, to remind them of Ammon Hennacy, who made a radical and a tax resister out of me thirty-five years ago:
We have come back to bother you again.
This society, and each one of us personally, must put our income into servicing human needs, not into the works of war.
Only then can we rise from the economic ashes of the arms race, the Vietnam War, and our brutal indifference to the needs of the poor in the years since then.
The issue of The Catholic Worker gave an update on the Randy Kehler / Besty Corner house seizure:
War Tax Refusers Update
Although Randy Kehler, Colrain, Massachusetts war tax resister (CW ), was released from jail after a little more than two months, the occupation of his family’s home by friends and supporters continues.
The federal government seized the house for non-payment, and later arrested Randy and his wife, Betsy Corner (briefly held) for contempt after their refusal to surrender it.
Their home has been auctioned off, and is now owned by someone from a nearby town.
At press time, the new “owner” has yet to move in, while groups sympathetic to the cause of tax resistance are taking turns at occupying the home, despite threats of arrest.
For more information, please call the War Tax Refusers Support Committee at: (413) 774‒2710, or write: c/o Traprock Peace Center, Keets Road, Deerfield, MA 01342.
There were also a handful of brief passing references to tax resistance in other issues of The Catholic Worker in .
The issue of The Catholic Worker summarized the then-current argument for war tax resistance this way:
Resist Taxes! April Is Coming!
The peace dividend — the transfer of military funds to humanitarian purposes after the end of the cold war — was indeed only wishful thinking.
The percentage of the federal budget spent on the military has remained virtually the same since the fall of the Berlin Wall.
Also, a law ensured that any defense cuts would be applied to the deficit.
No weapons systems have been eliminated, and the 24% troop reduction doesn’t mean any change in the strategic power of the US armed forces.
In light of all this, we remind our readers once again: tax resistance is a concrete way to refuse to participate in preparing for war.
Some suggestions — don’t pay all or part of your federal income tax — subtract the federal excise tax from your phone bill — and follow in Ammon Hennacy’s footsteps by fasting and picketing the IRS on April 15.
Tax resistance in any form is not an easy thing, but in the spirit of St. Francis’ Holy Poverty, to earn less than the taxable income level (to have less of Caesar’s, to paraphrase the Gospels) is to resist military spending as well.
That amount is $5,550 for an individual and $10,000 for a couple, and is, admittedly, easier to manage in the context of community.
A similar announcement appeared in that paper , adding the U.S. contribution to global sales of military hardware to the list of complaints, and recommending that readers contact NWTRCC (at a post office box in Monroe, Maine).
The issue of The Catholic Worker gave an update on the Randy Kehler / Betsy Corner house seizure saga:
Colrain Resolution
The War Tax Resister Support Committee (WTRSC) in Colrain, MA celebrated their two year nonviolent campaign in .
The celebration comes after a settlement between the Valley Community Land Trust (VCLT) and the young couple who purchased the seized home of tax resisters Randy Kehler and Betsy Corner at an auction from the IRS.
Negotiations concluded with the VCLT being deeded the house from Danny and Terry Franklin in exchange for an undisclosed sum of money as well as the withdrawal of civil suits between the parties.
The WTRSC celebrates the resolution and more so, the sustained support of individuals who nonviolently refuse to pay for war.
The prolonged action in Colrain (CW and CW ) always had its complexities, perhaps best reflected in the WTRSC’s assessment of the situation:
“There had been hopes that Danny and Terry would have a change of heart and remove themselves from between us and the IRS because of the action, or that the courts would invalidate the transfer of the land-lease, or that they’d affirm Randy and Betsy’s Nuremberg/International Law argument and strike down the IRS seizure altogether, or that the resistance action would carry on in high gear.
Was it our nonviolent action, the legal conflict with the VCLT, the lack of water, a new baby, or all of these things over time that brought the Franklins to the negotiating table with the Land Trust?
We may never know.
That all parties are relieved to be free of that situation and moving forward is clear and, in that sense, there has been a victory for everyone.”
At present the VCLT is in the process of finding a new lessee for the house.
Randy, Betsy, their daughter Lillian and Betsy’s mother are exploring the possibility of building a new, larger home on the Land Trust and rejoining the community.
In nearby Greenfield, a housing project spawned by the Colrain action progresses and contributions of labor, materials and money are welcome.
With approaching, the WTRSC is available to inform you about war tax resistance and the Colrain action.
(WTRSC c/o Traprock Peace Center, Keets Road, Deerfield, MA 01341)
―Brian Harte
Catholic Worker was itself a beneficiary of tax redirection, according to letters in the and issues:
Bronx, NY
Dear folks at the Catholic Worker,
Hello!
Once again I am withholding 32% of my federal tax in an act of war tax resistance.
I wanted to send you (and other peace groups) a contribution instead.
So here it is.
Keep up the good work — and I’ll do my best to visit every so often.
Sincerely, Gail Presbey
Bronx, NY
Dear Folks at the New York Catholic Worker,
I am enclosing a donation to your ongoing worthy cause.
The money I am sending is from my personal war tax resistance funds.
I withheld 37% of my federal income taxes from the IRS, and told them that I was instead sending it to organizations which:
are working on an international level to find nonviolent resolutions to world conflicts; and/or
are providing needed services to the members of our own society who are neglected and shortchanged because of our nation’s over-funding of the military.
Our government still spends billions of dollars on nuclear weapons.
Trident subs are still being built and launched.
House Speaker Newt Gingrich wants to continue funding ballistic missile defense spending.
At the same time, the poor will have their meager, underfunded programs cut even more.
This state of affairs goes against my conscience, and I cannot pay for war.
I am sure that you will put these funds to good use.
In the meantime, I can only hope that my small witness by this act of war tax resistance can, when joined with others, challenge the budget priorities of our government.
The following letter, published in the Catholic Worker, shows that a broader set of concerns than war and militarism were motivating some tax refusers in that milieu:
A Tax Resister’s Letter
Garden City, NJ
To: Internal Revenue Service,
On , I addressed a memo to you acknowledging receipt of your notice and explaining why it is not possible for me to fulfill the time requirements according to the law.
I have written three letters to the Internal Revenue Service explaining why I was not willing to pay taxes.
The first letter would have been around , the second in , and the last one in .
Let me try to explain my position a little more at length.
I recognize the right of a government to impose taxes.
Any system of taxation, however, must be eminently just.
It must distribute the responsibility to support the work of governing according to the ability of people to pay.
Our system of taxation places an undue burden on the poor and the lower middle class.
The economically capable have always been well protected from the imposition of a truly proportionate share of economic responsibility for governing and have been, as well, the objects of special benefits in the distribution of monies and services.
The injustices within the system are sufficient, I believe, to call the system itself unjust, and, for this reason, I have said in a previous letter that I am even unwilling to file or cooperate in any way in the system.
This position is not as clear to me as it seems in this statement, but it is certainly the direction of my thought.
The uses of tax money by the government are quite troublesome, as is the failure to use tax money for quite obligatory purposes.
Another way of saying this is that the actual priorities of government impel me to support policies and programs that I consider immoral, if I pay the taxes required.
Outstanding among these policies is the continuing enormous expenditure to support the planning, development and manufacture of arms for war.
Related to this is the continuing encouragement of the sales of arms to foreign countries through tax credits and other means to facilitate these sales.
I will not participate in this policy or in any program related to it.
If I should subtract from taxes due the proportion that supports the government’s policy on arms, as has been suggested to me, this simply means that the same proportion of whatever I might pay would still go to the support of those policies, since there is no way that I can direct where my money might go.
A significant enough proportion of tax dollars now goes to murder unborn children through abortion.
I simply refuse to participate in this, and the same problem presents itself to me as above.
I cannot subtract a proportion of my tax dollar since the same proportion of whatever I might pay would still go for legalized abortions.
As a whole, our country is not particularly generous to those in need, neither in our own country nor in other countries.
In our own country, there are substantial subsidies for the rich and even for the very rich, but the poor are not given the assistance necessary.
This is true not only of the economically poor but also of the needy in other aspects.
The drug addict, for example, who wants to turn his or her life around has great difficulty finding a program that will help since the government has allotted so little for this type of program.
And the list of similar problems is rather long, I suspect.
Likewise, among the developed countries, our own, the richest, is at the bottom of the list in terms of the proportion of our budget that goes for aid to underdeveloped countries.
Given these two realities, I decided long ago that I would use the money I was not paying in taxes to help the poor in the places where I have worked and in other areas as well.
I am not refusing to pay taxes in order that I might get rich or be better off.
A little investigation will show that I am far from rich.
I cannot tell you what proportion of my income goes to help the poor, I suspect it is at least 40–50%.
I can’t prove that and I have no desire nor interest in proving it.
I do not keep records of this and I could not even conceive of looking for a tax deduction if I were going to participate in the system.
I recognize that my position may be somewhat extreme.
I have been told that I have to take that opinion into serious consideration.
It seems to me, however, that there is no other route for me.
I am not asking the government to bless my position and grant me a pardon of taxes due.
I simply wait for the government to do whatever it feels it has to do in this case.
Andrew P. Connolly
Another IRS property seizure targeting war tax resisters was the subject of a Catholic Worker letter:
We Can Take This Stand…
Canton, Maine
Dear friends,
On , two Internal Revenue Service (IRS) agents came to our home and delivered a notice of seizure of all our real estate.
This includes our home, a small woodlot across the street, our blueberry field of 13 acres, and, finally, another woodlot of 21 acres.
They said it would be offered at a public sale within 30 days.
The IRS figures we owe $62,000 in unpaid taxes and penalties for the years .
But we have not filed tax returns for much longer, Elizabeth not , and Arthur not or so.
Twice, in New Hampshire, IRS agents came to visit, once around and again around .
Probably, they concluded we had nothing much worth taking, and, perhaps, were not subject to much tax anyway.
After we came to Maine, earned a bit more and began paying the state income tax, the IRS must have obtained data from these forms in order to prepare their demands.
Our reason for non-cooperation with the IRS is a reluctance to support war preparation, especially nuclear weapons, and the export of arms and military forces to many places around the world.
A large part of income and social security taxes goes to pay for these things.
It seems necessary that someone stand against them as distinctly as possible, without using violence.
We can take this stand, while continuing our family life, farming, and volunteer work for various causes.
Our kids seem to be thriving.
Elizabeth is active in church and the school board.
Arthur works on organic certification and the coming clear cutting referendum.
Of course, it will be a major jolt to lose our home, after living here for ten years.
We have made progress toward fixing the roof, foundation, chimneys, etc.
Our blueberry field, too, is a pity to lose.
Our property is valued by the town at $64,000.
It will probably bring less than $35,000 at an auction.
Real estate is very depressed in price around here, and very few properties are sold.
If the buyer is willing, we would hope to enter into a long-term lease, so that we could continue as before.
If not, we will have to look for another place to rent.
Obviously, we will not want to own any more real estate.
The blueberry field is likely to be leased to us no matter who owns it.
It needs constant work to remain productive, and no one else wants to do that work.
So far, the neighbors and friends we’ve told have been supportive, offering us places to stay and help with figuring out what is best to do.
Yesterday, we met with some of them, including other Maine war tax resisters, a couple from our church “family," neighbors and representatives from Quaker City, NH, where there is a land trust we could join.
Since most of you could not be at that meeting, we would appreciate your prayers, even if you don’t agree with us, and your ideas and reflections. [RFD, Canton, ME 04221. (207) 388‒2860.]
NWTRCC advertised what it billed as its “2008 War Tax Boycott and Redirection” in the Catholic Worker:
2008 War Tax Boycott and Redirection
Withhold from War! Pay for Peace!
, the National War Tax Resistance Coordinating Committee urges all who oppose this war to register and prepare for an nationwide boycott and redirection of the federal income taxes that fuel the war in Iraq.
For more information, contact:
National War Tax Resistance Coordinating Committee
PO Box 150553, Brooklyn, NY 11214, 1‒800‒269‒7464
There was an article promoting the Boycott in the issue of that paper:
One Way to Support Peace
by Stanley Bohn
Minor nonviolent civil disobedience is what the National War Tax Resistance Coordinating Committee (NWTRCC) is proposing for .
As a symbolic action to defund the war, NWTRCC is urging thousands to withhold part of their income tax, even one dollar, and redirect it to humanitarian needs underfunded because of the war.
Will this action make Congress and the Administration change their funding priorities?
Very unlikely, even if millions took part in this effort.
After all, war fuels our economy, having enemies is useful in getting national unity and political support, and it focuses on the evil of others allowing us to raise our self-esteem.
As Chris Hedges wrote in his War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning, war provides us with purpose and a kind of civil religion.
But, for some Christians the motive for participating in the tax redirection, though starting out as outrage, becomes something else.
The reason for participating, at first, may be a protest against refugee making, the slaughter of persons as collateral damage, torture of prisoners, creating mentally damaged veterans, ballooning war debt, ruined international relations and other disastrous consequences.
But, when one risks taking a stand for one’s Christian convictions, something can happen to us.
We gain an understanding of Jesus’ way of being lumped with criminals when choosing the community-building, caring, enemy-loving life that is at the heart of the universe.
We realize in a more immediate way that Jesus did not live or teach a religion that is guided by what is respectable, safe, stress-free or waits until there is wide consensus.
Jesus calls us to a life that is unpredictable and vulnerable.
Tax redirection is not a criterion of who is a “real Christian.”
Who determines whether this kind of civil disobedience is “Holy Obedience?”
But tax redirection seems like accepting life as a gift, to be what we are here for, and to live what we see in Jesus’ life, death and living again.
When the IRS makes us pay a small percentage more than our lawful tax we can experience what we believe is more important than money and the hold money has on us is reduced.
Living this kind of trust in the Jesus way has the benefit of keeping serious Christians from attempting to be “pure” and withdrawing from life’s realities.
It keeps us engaged in current issues and with those proposing different goals.
Engaged however, in an upsetting sort of way… which is the kind of peace that Christians should expect when choosing an alternative way to attempt to conquer evil.
The risk of taking a stand regardless of consequences brings an unexpected peace.
It is a not a peace that makes us feel protected, free of fears or satisfied with ourselves.
It is a peace that comes from knowing one is on a venture of trusting in the universe-guiding reality we see in Christ.
It is an empowering peace given us when we offer ourselves to the One Who gave us this life, trusting God for the outcome.
It is an empowerment that keeps us open rather than defensive and having to shut out the desperate cries of others.
It is an alternative to consumer-oriented Christianity that brings an unintended transformation, making us vulnerable and powerful at the same time.
There is no telling if or how God might use the tax redirection.
Consequences may occur that we never thought of, including what powers or gifts might be released in ourselves.
We should not expect the government to inform us how many participated in the war tax redirection.
The media may not report it if they knew.
If the amount we withheld and diverted is seen by the IRS as worth taking action against, we will likely receive threatening letters and finally have those funds confiscated along with a penalty.
Yet, significant tax redirection could mean some humanitarian agencies will get more financial support in and starving people will be fed.
Maybe some legislators would hear the dilemma of many taxpayers and join with other co-sponsors of HR 1921, the Freedom of Religion Peace Tax Fund, which would make redirection of taxes by conscientious objectors to war legal.
And maybe a few thousand redirectors will discover we are less bound by the expectations of others and are more free than we thought we could be.
Most important, we may learn that choosing risky ways of living for others, even nonviolent civil disobedience, can bring spiritual healing.
We won’t defund the war but we can be more confident of the power that overcomes our fears and by God’s grace be enabled to be the humans God intended us to be.
In the course of an obituary for Larry Rosebaugh in the Catholic Worker, author Karl Meyer mentioned a detail about his own tax resistance that I hadn’t seen before:
Funded by informal donations to avoid IRS collection of refused war taxes, I was working at the American Friends Service Committee that year with the goals of organizing military draft resistance and war tax refusal and organizing among Catholic laity and clergy to oppose the war in Vietnam.
That would have been around .
The Midwest Catholic Worker Faith and Resistance Retreat was held in Chicago in , with the theme: “The Cost of War: At Home and Abroad.”
A recap of the Retreat in the Catholic Worker mentioned a Federal Building civil disobedience performance:
[After Mass, t]he rest of was committed to nonviolence training and action planning… as we prepared for a nonviolent presence and action at the Federal Building in downtown Chicago.
On , over sixty Catholic Workers arrived at the Federal Building with signs announcing the Works of Mercy and denouncing the works of war.
With guitars and mandolin, we sang songs while folks handed out fruit, donuts, water, juice, coffee, clothes and war tax resistance leaflets to passersby.
Seven people staged a die-in to depict the works of war in front of the Federal Building while twelve people entered inside.
With their hands painted red to show the blood on our hands, five people stood in the windows of the lobby with shirts saying “Stop funding War.”
Others fell to the floor as we prayed around them and encouraged people to turn away from the works of war and begin practicing the Works of Mercy.
Seventeen of us were arrested and cited and released after a couple of hours.
We go to trial in .
An article in the Catholic Worker bemoaned the replacement of elected governments in Michigan cities with state-appointed “emergency managers” which meant that “[o]ver half the African American population of the state of Michigan is under non-elected governments [a]nd three quarters of the black elected officials in Michigan have been replaced by this process.” During an aside after remarking about corporate municipal tax dodgers, he wrote:
Oh, the contradictions of my life.
Here I am a lifelong, conscientious war tax resister bemoaning tax refusers (though neither conscientious nor honorable).
I’ve always paid local taxes, but now I even think, “Taxation without representation?”
That same issue featured an article by Karl Meyer on the modest future prospects he foresaw for the war tax resistance movement:
War Tax Refusal
By Karl Meyer
Is there a future for a significantly expanded scale of explicitly organized war tax refusal in the United States?
I see little prospect for this in the foreseeable future.
I have refused payment of all federal income taxes, for reasons of conscience, for fifty-four years.
I was also very instrumental in developing and writing about strategies and tactics that enabled a broad scale of telephone excise tax refusal and income tax refusal, that peaked , and again .
We tried very hard to stimulate mass war tax refusal , , and .
We did not see a significant surge in war tax refusal .
I think I understand the cultural reasons why our movement did not grow much at .
I believe that war tax refusal actions following World War Ⅱ were mostly driven by the problem of military conscription.
All young men were vulnerable to conscription , when the military draft was discontinued.
All the advocates and leaders of war tax refusal that I met in this period were either conscientious objectors or draft non-cooperators, or people in their families or circles of friends.
Before the escalation of the Vietnam War, these people organized in the relatively tiny network of the Peacemakers movement and the War Resisters League.
When war tax refusal surged and peaked , I believe it was a direct result of families, girlfriends, other friends and general supporters who wanted to take a risk and act in solidarity with young men who resisted the draft, or the thousands who submitted although feeling that the war was very wrong.
Thousands of these were dying in vain, or coming back severely injured in body and soul.
Organized war tax refusal dropped off abruptly after the Vietnam War and the draft ended, but came back again quite quickly only seven years later, as a reaction to President Reagan’s belligerent military spending escalations to confront the so-called “evil empire” Soviet Union, his neo-imperial aggressions in Central America, and the “star wars” missile defense scheme.
The generation of Vietnam War resisters sprang back into action for the few years before the Gorbachev-Reagan détente.
But now, the young men who were last subject to military conscription are at least fifty-six years old, and most of them are old enough to receive Social Security and Medicare benefits.
Meanwhile, an increasing number of other federal programs, benefits and subsidies have been tied to levels of income documented by filing income tax returns.
Those enacted include Medicare, broadened food stamp benefits, housing subsidies, Earned Income Allowance, an array of deductions and credits, federal student grant and loan programs, and, most recently, medical care insurance subsidies under the Affordable Care Act.
Following our vigorous resistance to the restoration of draft registration , the registration law became quite toothless, but eligibility for college loans was tied to draft registration, greatly discouraging young men and their parents from resistance to an act of registration that had minor symbolic significance.
Considering these factors, I foresee that explicit war tax refusal will be the limited province of a modest core of well-informed people of unusually scrupulous conscience, who see it as a moral imperative to refuse personal participation in paying for any war crimes of organized states.
Such was the core of war resisters in peace churches, the WRL, and Peacemakers .
People who participate regularly in a corporately organized wage and salary economy that reports to government will shy away from the potential loss of jobs and benefits associated with open war tax refusal.
We must reach young people in their high school and college years when they are refining their moral attitudes and making career choices for their future lives.
It seems to me from personal observation and experience with young people in their twenties that their main social concerns are with threats to our biological environment, corporate domination of our economies, and the economic burdens on students and workers in finding useful employment with compensation adequate to their financial needs.
Over a hundred young people, mostly recent college graduates, have lived with us for varying periods over at our Catholic Worker affiliated Nashville Greenlands intentional community.
They are not as specifically focused on the threat of wars and massive military expenditures as on factors causing social problems that concern them, unlike young people of my generation a half century ago, who focused on militarism and war as the greatest threats to our future.
So I believe we should integrate nonpayment of military taxes as one action in a broad vision for healthy alternative ways of life within the social and economic structure, in short, the classic anarcho/socialist vision of “a new society within the shell of the old.”
Such a vision includes:
simple living in cooperative communities;
self-employment or small group employment in productive enterprises that do not report income to governments;
alternatively, part time or irregular employment in reported economies;
urban agriculture, farming, and local organic food movements;
social activism, including action against war that can incorporate principled nonpayment of military taxes.
The Catholic Worker movement, with which I have been actively associated for , has thrived and grown among young people over , based on this broad vision of alternative ways of life.
I believe we should present war tax refusal in this kind of context.
We should also emphasize the practical benefits of using all of our productivity for the common good, and refusing to turn over any percentage of it to the military state.
