Tax resistance in the “Peace Churches” →
Quakers →
20th–21st century Quakers →
Franklin Zahn
Here are a handful of artifacts relating to the American war tax resistance
movement circa .
First, some relics that were filed alongside a letter from Herbert Sonthoff to
W. Walter Boyd (though I think this filing may be arbitrary and that the
letters are not related to each other):
At this late date it is pointless to muster the evidence which shows that the
war we are waging in Vietnam is wrong. By now you have decided for yourself
where you stand. In all probability, if you share our feelings about it, you
have expressed your objections both privately and publicly. You have witnessed
the small effect these protests have had on our government.
By ,
every American citizen must decide whether he will make a voluntary
contribution to the continuation of this war. After grave consideration, we
have decided that we can no longer do so, and that we will therefore withhold
all or part of the taxes due. The purpose of this letter is to call your
attention to the fact that a nationwide tax refusal campaign is in progress,
as stated in the accompanying announcement, and to urge you to consider
refusing to contribute voluntarily to this barbaric war.
Signed:
Prof. Warren Ambrose
Mathematics, M.I.T.
Dr. Donnell Boardman
Physician, Acton, Mass.
Mrs. Elizabeth Boardman
Acton, Mass.
Prof. Noam Chomsky
Linguistics, M.I.T.
Miss Barbara Deming
Writer, Wellfleet, Mass.
Prof. John Dolan
Philosophy, Chicago University
Prof. John Ek
Anthropology, Long Island University
Martha Bentley Hall
Musician, Brookline, Mass.
Dr. Thomas C. Hall
Physician, Brookline, Mass.
Rev. Arthur B. Jellis
First Parish in Concord, Unitarian-Universalist, Concord, Mass.
Prof. Donald Kalish
Philosophy, U.C.L.A.
Prof. Louis Kampf
Humanities, M.I.T.
Prof. Staughton Lynd
History, Yale University
Milton Mayer
Writer, Mass.
Prof. Jonathan Mirsky
Chinese Language and Literature, Dartmouth College
Prof. Sidney Morgenbesser
Philosophy, Columbia University
Prof. Wayne A. O’Neill
Graduate School of Education, Harvard University
Prof. Anatol Rapoport
Mental Health Research Institute, University of Michigan
Prof. Franz Schurmann
Center for Chinese Studies, University of Calif., Berkeley
Dr. Albert Szent Gyorgy
Institute for Muscle Research, Woods Hole, Mass.
Harold Tovish
Sculptor, Brookline, Mass.
Prof. Howard Zinn
Government, Boston University
* Institutions listed for informational
purposes only
P.S. The No Tax for
War Committee intends to make public the names of signers, hence if you wish
to add your signature, early return is desirable. Contributions are needed,
and checks should be made payable to the Committee.
The committee will publish the above statement with names of signers at tax
deadline — .
Send signed statements to: NO TAX FOR WAR COMMITTEE,
c/o
Rev. Maurice McCrackin,
932 Dayton St., Cincinnati,
Ohio 45214.
For additional copies of this form, put number you will distribute and name
and address on the following lines:
No. _____ Name ____________________
Address _________________________
Signers So Far
Meldon and Amy Acheson
Michael J. Ames
Alfred F. Andersen
Ross Anderson
Beulah K. Arndt
Joan Baez
Richard Baker
Bruce & Pam Beck
Ruth T. Best
Robert & Margaret Blood
Karel F. Botermans
Marion & Ernest Bromley
Edwin Brooks
A. Dale Brothington
Mrs. Lydia Bruns
Wendal Bull
Mrs. Dorothy Bucknell
John Burslem
Lindley J. Burton
Catharine J. Cadbury
Maris Cakars
Robert and Phyllis Calese
William N. Calloway
Betty Camp
Daryle V. Carter
Jared & Susan Carter
Horace & Beulah Champney
Ken & Peggy Champney
Hank & Henry Chapin
Holly Chenery
Richard A. Chinn
Naom [sic] Chomsky
John & Judy Christian
Gordon & Mary Christiansen
Peter Christiansen
Donald F. Cole
John Augustine Cook
Helen Marr Cook
Jack Coolidge, Jr.
Allen Cooper
Martin J. Corbin
Tom & Monica Cornell
Dorothy J. Cunningham
Jean DaCosta
Ann & William Davidon
Stanley F. Davis
Dorothy Day
Dave Dellinger
Barbara Deming
Robert Dewart
Ruth Dodd
John M. Dolan
Orin Doty
Allen Duberstein
Ralph Dull
Malcolm Dundas
Margaret E. Dungan
Henry Dyer
Susan Eanet
Bob Eaton
Marc Paul Edelman
Johan & Francis Eliot
Jerry Engelbach
George J. Etu, Jr.
Mary C. Eubanks
Arthur Evans
Jonathan Evans
William E. Evans
Pearl Ewald
Franklin Farmer
Bertha Faust
Dianne M. Feeley
Rice A. Felder
Henry A. Felisone
Mildred Fellin
Glenn Fisher
John Forbes
Don & Ann Fortenberry
Marion C. Frenyear
Ruth Gage-Colby
Lawrence H. Geller
Richard Ghelli
Charles Gibadlo
Bruce Glushakow
Walter Gormly
Arthur Goulston
Thomas Grabell
Steven Green
Walter Grengg
Joseph Gribbins
Kenneth Gross
John M. Grzywacz, Jr.
Catherine Guertin
David Hartsough
David Hartsough
Arthur Harvey
Janet Hawksley
James P. Hayes, Jr.
R.F. Helstern
Ammon Hennacy
Norman Henry
Robert Hickey
Dick & Heide Hiler
William Himelhoch
C.J. Hinke
Anthony Hinrichs
William M. Hodsdon
Irwin R. Hogenauer
Florence Howe
Donald & Mary Huck
Philip Isely
Michael Itkin
Charles T. Jackson
Paul Jacobs
Martin & Nancy Jezer
F. Robert Johnson
Woodbridge O. Johnson
Ashton & Marie Jones
Paul Jordan
Paul Keiser
Joel C. Kent
Roy C. Kepler
Paul & Pauline Kermiet
Peter Kiger
Richard King
H.A. Kreinkamp
Arthur & Margaret Landes
Paul Lauter
Peter and Marolyn Leach
Gertrud & George A. Lear, Jr.
Alan and Elin Learnard
Titus Lehman
Richard A. Lema
Florence Levinsohn
Elliot Linzer
David C. Lorenz
Preston B. Luitweiler
Bradford Lyttle
Adriann van L. Maas
Ben & Sue Mann
Paul and Salome Mann
Howard E. Marston, Sr.
Milton and Jane Mayer
Martin & Helen Mayfield
Maurice McCrackin
Lilian McFarland
Maureen & Felix McGowan
Maryann McNaughton
Gelston McNeil
Guy W. Meyer
Karl Meyer
David & Catherine Miller
James Missey
Mark Morris
Janet Murphy
Thomas P. Murray
Rosemary Nagy
Wally & Juanita Nelson
Marilyn Neuhauser
Neal D. Newby, Jr.
Miriam Nicholas
Robert B. Nichols
David Nolan
Raymond S. Olds
Wayne A. O’Neil
Michael O’Quin
Ruth Orcutt
Eleanor Ostroff
Doug Palmer
Malcolm & Margaret Parker
Jim Peck
Michael E. Pettie
John Pettigrew
Lydia H. Philips
Dean W. Plagowski
Jefferson Poland
A.J. Porth
Ralph Powell
Charles F. Purvis
Jean Putnam
Harriet Putterman
Robert Reitz
Ben & Helen Reyes
Elsa G. Richmond
Eroseanna Robinson
Pat Rusk
Joe & Helen Ryan
Paul Salstrom
Ira J. Sandperl
Jerry & Rae Schwartz
Martin Shepard
Richard T. Sherman
Louis Silverstein
T.W. Simer
Ann B. Sims
Jane Beverly Smith
Linda Smith
Thomas W. Smuda
Bob Speck
Elizabeth P. Steiner
Lee D. Stern
Beverly Sterner
Michael Stocker
Charles H. Straut, Jr.
Stephen Suffet
Albert & Joyce Sunderland, Jr.
Mr. & Mrs. Michael R. Sutter
Marjorie & Robert Swann
Oliver & Katherine Tatum
Gary G. Taylor
Harold Tovish
Joe & Cele Tuchinsky
Lloyd & Phyllis Tyler
Samuel R. Tyson
Ingegerd Uppman
Margaret von Selle
Mrs. Evelyn Wallace
Wilbur & Joan Ann Wallis
William & Mary Webb
Barbara Webster
John K. White
Willson Whitman
Denny & Ida Wilcher
Huw Williams
George & Lillian Willoughby
Bob Wilson
Emily T. Wilson
Jim & Raona Wilson
W.W. Wittkamper
Sylvia Woog
Wilmer & Mildred Young
Franklin Zahn
Betty & Louis Zemel
Vicki Jo Zilinkas
Following this was a page explaining how to go about resisting:
For those owing nothing because of the Withholding Tax.
Such persons write a letter to the Internal Revenue Service, to be filed
with the tax return, stating that the writer cannot in good conscience
help support the war in Vietnam, voluntarily. The writer
therefore requests a return of a percentage of the money collected from
his salary.
Note: Of course, the
IRS
will not return the money. However, the writer has refused to pay for the
war voluntarily and has put it in writing. This symbolic action
is not to be belittled since anybody who does this allies himself with
those who will withhold money due the IRS.
For those self-employed or owing money beyond what has been withheld from
salary.
Such persons write a letter to be filed with the tax return, stating that
the writer does not object to the income tax in principle, but will not,
as a matter of conscience, help pay for the war in Vietnam. The writer is
therefore withholding some or all of the tax due.
Note: In all cases, we recommend that copies of these letters be sent to the
President and to your Senators.
Remarks:
The Internal Revenue Service has the legal power to confiscate money due
it. They will get that money, one way or another. However, to obstruct the
IRS
from collecting money due (by not filing a return at all, for example)
seems less important to us than the fact that each is refusing to pay
his tax voluntarily. With this in mind, many of us are placing the
taxes owed in special accounts and we will so inform the
IRS
in our letters.
Willful failure to pay is punishable by a fine of up to $10,000 and up to
a year in jail, together with the costs of prosecution. So far, the
IRS
has prosecuted only those who have obstructed collection (by refusing to
file a return, by refusing to answer a summons,
etc.).
Usually, the
IRS
has collected the tax due plus 6% interest and possibly an added fine of
5% for “negligence”. The fact that the
IRS
has rarely, if at all, prosecuted tax-refusers to the full
extent of the law does not mean they will not do so in the future.
Finally, an article from the edition of The Capitol East Gazette:
Two thousand anti-war leaflets on telephone tax refusal were distributed in Capitol East on , by members of CHOICE, a group of local residents who are withdrawing their support for the Vietnam war.
The leaflet explains that the 10% phone tax was enacted in specifically to raise money for the Vietnam war.
According to CHOICE, the phone company will not remove a person’s telephone if he refuses to pay the tax.
The company asks refusers to state why they are withholding the tax and then turns the matter over to the Internal Revenue Service.
According to CHOICE, there are presently 25 known tax refusers in the Capitol Hill area.
Those desiring CHOICE’s leaflet are asked to call LI 6‒9836.
Here are a couple of newspaper articles that give a glimpse of how American Quakers addressed war tax resistance at the New York Yearly Meeting gathering at Lake George in , where “the tragic situation in Viet Nam” was high on the agenda:
A report published after the meeting called on members of the Society of Friends to exercise their consciences and offered support to those Quakers whose actions resulted in financial or personal loss.
“We call upon Friends to obey the Inner Light even when this means disobeying man’s laws, and to risk whatever penalties may be incurred,” said the report.
“We call upon Friends to examine their consciences concerning whether they cannot more fully dissociate themselves from the war machine by tax refusal or changing occupations.”
“We call upon Friends to urge that young men consider in conscience whether they can submit to a military system that commands to kill and destroy.”
“We call upon Friends Meetings to support acts of compromise [sic] by setting up Committees for Sufferings to keep close touch with deeply exercised Friends and their families who may need spiritual and material care because of their witness.”
So far, there has been no indication that any Friends will not pay their taxes, or refuse the draft or disobey “man’s laws.”
But if any do they will be supported by other Friends.
“I’ve thought about it but I’m not persuaded that this is an effective way.
I admire people if their conscience leads them to take that action,” says John Daniels, clerk of the Albany Society of Friends.
An Associated Press dispatch from , put it this way:
Quakers in the New York area have been encouraged to refuse to pay taxes or hold jobs that contribute to the war effort in Viet Nam.
The Society of Friends office here made public a document or “testimony” approved at an annual meeting at Silver Bay on Lake George, N.Y.
Similar to the Peace Declaration of The Friends in 1660, the message was described as perhaps the “strongest message of the 20th century by a major body within the denomination.”
In the document, Quakers were promised financial help through special committees if they changed jobs or refused to pay taxes in protest against the war.
The new “testimony” warned Quakers that they may be facing a “supreme test” that could lead to persecution such as the sect suffered 300 years ago.
Entitled “Message to Friends on Viet Nam,” the document said members of the society must “stand forth unequivocally and at all costs to proclaim their peace testimony.”
Quakers were urged to express their concern over the war to lawmakers and the world community, and to “examine their consciences concerning whether they cannot more fully dissociate themselves from the war machine by tax refusal or changing occupations.”
The 72 Friends “meetings” or congregations in New York, northern New Jersey, and southern Connecticut were called upon to “support acts of conscience by setting up committees for sufferings…”
I also made note of this Lake George meeting in my entry.
At that time I was unable to find an on-line copy of the “Message to Friends on Viet Nam,” but in renewing my search, I found that someone had uploaded a scan of the Friends Journal.
That article didn’t get me any closer to the text I was hunting for, but it did include some other interesting items, including an article by Franklin Zahn on tax resistance, and another by Thomas Bassett about the New England Yearly Meeting that shows war tax resistance was on the agenda there too:
Tax Refusal, Law, and Order
by Franklin Zahn
In the President asked for a ten per cent surcharge on income taxes that might “continue for so long as the unusual expenditures associated with our efforts in Vietnam require higher revenues.”
In words of Quaker simplicity, he was requesting a war tax.
What ought Friends to do about specific levies for war?
First, of course, they can work to prevent such legislation, using the agency they have set up for such purposes — the Friends Committee on National Legislation — and using the opportunity to tell congressmen again that Friends favor de-escalation rather than the escalation the new taxes are designed to permit.
If the President’s request becomes law, Friends may then pay under protest.
This situation might loosely be compared to that of a young man who joins the Army under protest: voicing his convictions is better than not voicing them, but it’s not a satisfactory solution.
After paying a war tax Friends may then through regular channels claim a refund, and although in the past this has never been granted on the basis of conscience, a number of California taxpayers plan to make a common court case.
Here the analogy might be to the young man who goes to court to get released from the Army — again not a very hopeful approach.
However, the young man is entitled by law to request exemption in the first place; unfortunately for Friends as taxpayers, no such legal choices are available to them.
Years ago Pacific Yearly Meeting suggested legislation embodying conscientious-objector provisions in Federal tax laws, and today some Friends are still considering such proposals, but for the foreseeable future, pacifists will have no legal tax alternatives.
Further, for most Friends there is not even a possible illegal alternative for their tax dollars, for if not paid as ordered, the dollars are frequently levied from bank accounts which unfortunately most Friends in their affluence today have.
It is as though a pacifist refused to bayonet an enemy and several strong men held the weapon in his hands and jabbed it for him.
The choice is not whether to participate in war or not, but whether to do so willingly or to drag one’s feet.
“We refuse to steal not as a protest against burglary — with consideration of how ‘effective’ we may or may not be — but simply because for us stealing is wrong.”
Many see a refusal to pay taxes voluntarily as only a protest.
Now it is true that we can designate any act we engage in as a protest against something.
We can fast and announce that our purpose is to protest the war.
A vigil, a march, a meeting, or a handing out of educational material can be a protest if so designated.
Even the young Friend who refused to carry the bayonet could refuse as a protest.
But we are not necessarily protesting anything when we refuse to do that which for us is wrong.
We refuse to steal not as a protest against burglary — with consideration of how “effective” we may or may not be — but simply because for us stealing is wrong.
Similarly, a Friend may refuse to pay taxes voluntarily, not in protest but because he feels he must not participate in war.
In Southern California’s Quarterly Meeting there are many individuals and three Meetings refusing to pay voluntarily the seven per cent war tax on telephone bills.
I do not know which are consciously doing this as a “protest” and which see it as part of the Friends’ code of conduct or way of life.
When Claremont Meeting, in its public statement, said that in refusing to pay it was following a precedent in Friends’ peace testimony, two newspapers used the term “protest” in their very good coverage and one did not.
All three papers quoted the portion of the statement that said, “Those of us who refuse to pay taxes which go to support war also are willing to accept the legal consequences of this refusal…”
Such willingness, along with complete openness, is an important part of any “civil” or, as one Friend terms it, “courteous” disobedience.
It might also be called “orderly” disobedience, for, contrary to the usual linking together of “law and order,” in these days of riots the two words are not necessarily related.
The war in Vietnam is considered by many Americans to be lawful, but to Vietnamese villagers the aftermath of a bombing raid would hardly appear orderly.
On the contrary, the refusal to pay taxes for such chaos may be unlawful, but when the decision is made openly, arrived at in the usually slow and quiet manner of Friends’ group decisions, and explained in nonevasive language with a willingness to accept penalties, it may be very orderly indeed.
Franklin Zahn, member of Claremont (Calif.) Meeting, free-lance writer, and compiler of the recent leaflet “Early Friends and War Taxes,” first refused the telephone excise tax in , during the Korean War, and had his telephone disconnected.
(In , the Internal Revenue Law was amended, permitting telephone companies to refer unpaid taxes to IRS.)
In he read this paper to Pacific Yearly Meeting’s session on civil disobedience.
New England Yearly Meeting
Reported by Thomas Bassett
Quakerism is uneasy everywhere in the face of long-continuing violence, “distress of nations, and perplexity whether on the shores of Asia or in the Edgware Road.”
Friends’ answers to problems of the Vietnam war and urban riots have ranged from evangelical mission to Quaker action.
Evangelical Friends eschew mere human “manipulation” and expect peace only when Christ reigns in human hearts.
Philadelphia and Baltimore Yearly Meetings, reinforced by AFSC and FCNL staffs in their midst, approved minutes to send medical aid to North Vietnam against the law if it could not be changed.
New England Friends were, as usual, in the middle of this scale.
The clerk opened the first plenary session with William Penn’s words on evangelism: “They were changed men themselves before they went out to change others.”
The last, eight-hour session approved a minute to oppose the President’s war surtax and urged its members to earnest consideration of whether they can conscientiously pay war taxes.
And take a look at this advertisement from the back pages:
The first edition of the Friends Journal is dated , and billed itself as “Successor to The Friend () and Friends Intelligencer ().”
The Philadelphia Yearly Meeting, which had been split into an Orthodox and a Hicksite meeting , had reunified .
The new magazine reflected this merger: The Friend had been the organ of the Orthodox meeting, and the Intelligencer that of the Hicksite meeting.
, the magazine shared offices with the “Friends Peace Committee” of the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting, which may have led to some cross-pollination, and increased coverage for peace testimony concerns in the magazine.
War tax resistance in the Friends Journal in
There are few mentions of war tax resistance in the early issues of Friends Journal.
We have reached the last years of the long decline of war tax resistance in the Society of Friends that began around the time of the American Civil War.
In , the American Friends Service Committee put out an influential booklet, Speak Truth to Power: A Quaker Search for an Alternative to Violence, that mentions war tax resistance only once, in reference to its use by Quakers in (this despite the fact that war tax resisters A.J. Muste and Milton Mayer were part of the committee that wrote the booklet).
The first mention I found comes from the issue.
It is a single-sentence sardonic comment on the tax resistance of conservative Utah governor J. Bracken Lee:
“The Governor of Utah should be welcomed to the ranks of conscientious objectors, even though most Friends and other pacifists would not resist paying income tax on the ground that they were conscientiously opposed to economic aid to other countries.”
The issue mentions a lawsuit filed by Milton Mayer “to recover income tax taken from him forcibly in what he claims was a violation of his conscientious objection to war.”
The three-paragraph article is conspicuous for how much effort it seems to go to to avoid referring to Mayer as a Quaker.
Mayer is “a well-known writer,” a “Carmel, Calif., author, formerly a Chicagoan,” “who writes for leading magazines,” and “has been a lecturer for the American Friends Service Committee and at many colleges, universities and churches,” and “has been a member of the faculties of the University of Chicago and Frankfurt (Germany) and is consultant to the Great Books Foundation.”
All that resume material in the brief article, and yet no mention that he is a Quaker convert.
The article says that “his religious principles will not let him buy guns for other men to shoot” but doesn’t call these Quaker principles or refer to the Quaker peace testimony.
So it makes for a curious article: a respectful nod at war tax resistance with a pained effort to distance the Society of Friends from it.
The issue included a “symposium” on “Investments and Our Peace Testimony” which highlighted the difficulty of finding investments “free of the taint of involvement in war preparation.”
Only one of the participants, Samuel J. Bunting, Jr., explicitly mentions taxation as something that triggers the same concern.
Excerpts:
The problem has worried me ever since World War Ⅰ.
At that time, at the risk of losing a position and the chance of becoming permanently barred from my chosen profession (the investment business), I refused to sell or otherwise handle U.S. Liberty Bonds.
My firm respected my conscientious convictions, however, and the ax did not fall.
Since then I have scrutinized the activities of the corporations whose securities I have considered selling to my clients and have rejected many because of their service in military production.
Yet I still think there is no satisfactory solution of the problem for most of us.
We live in a world geared to military activities.
I see no way of escaping it except by the destruction of militarism itself and by adjudicating differences which might lead to war.
Investments are only a small fraction of the over-all problem.
Payment of taxes is another important aspect of the situation.
It is true that to some extent mortgages could be considered, but, of course, income taxes would have to be paid from the interest.…
The issue included an interesting note about the Quaker outpost of Monteverde, Costa Rica, in the form of a letter from one of the inhabitants there.
Excerpts:
You are so surprised that our group consists of so many North Americans.
The reason that most of them have established themselves in Costa Rica is not the climate, nor the possibility of finding work here, but rather an idealistic reason, typical of Quakers.
They were convinced that it was against their conscience to continue living in a country where, indirectly, they had to collaborate in arming the nation for war by means of taxation, and where it is impossible to educate their children according to principles of Quakers.
A few of them spent a year in prison for being conscientious objectors before emigration to Costa Rica.
So finally, a full-throated reference to real live Quakers who have taken action in response to their conscientious objection to paying war taxes.
Perhaps their geographical remove made this feel safer to mention.
Or perhaps the ice that had formed over American Quaker war tax resistance was beginning to crack.
The issue covered the goings-on at the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting earlier that year.
On , according to the article, war tax resistance was discussed:
It will always be unfinished business that Friends’ practice of our testimonies is not consistent with profession.
The discussion centered on the payment of income tax, particularly that portion used for military purposes.
Few present felt it right to refuse to pay, nor yet felt comfortable to pay.
Varied suggestions were presented: Send an accompanying letter expressing one’s feeling about war; live so simply that income is below tax level; make no report, but once a year send a check for nonmilitary purposes; engage in peace walks and other minority demonstrations; follow Jesus’ example of rendering unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s; beware of taking for granted the evils deplored, such as riding on military planes; associate more closely with the Mennonites, who share Friends’ concerns; rise above one’s own shortcomings through personal devotion; work to unite with all Friends Yearly Meetings in refusal to pay taxes.
Nothing can be done unless there is a willingness to suffer unto death.
The next mention comes from the issue, and shows the cracked ice has begun to melt.
Excerpt:
Meetings [on the West Coast] in general have been reconsidering the meaning of the peace witness.
Newer activities have included… street distribution of a leaflet on tax refusal because of the amount going to arms (write Franklin Zahn, 836 South Hamilton Boulevard, Pomona, California, for samples), and a poster walk in front of the federal tax office on income tax day, …
Franklin Zahn’s name will come up frequently during the years of the thaw and resurgence of war tax resistance in the American Society of Friends.
War tax resistance in the Friends Journal in
a Vietnamese postage stamp featuring Norman Morrison
On , a 31-year-old American Quaker named Norman Morrison went out to the sidewalk in front of U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara’s office in the Pentagon, doused himself in kerosene, and set himself on fire as a protest against the American war on Vietnam.
His suicide stunned the Society of Friends and made more urgent the already percolating questions about the moribund Quaker peace testimony and how much Friends were willing to put on the line for it.
This is reflected by the increased attention given in the pages of Friends Journal in to the issue of war tax resistance.
In , a “Friends’ Conference and Vigil on the War in Vietnam” asked the “Friends Coordinating Committee on Peace… to prepare a bulletin urging Friends to consider how paying taxes and buying war bonds involved them in financing the military.”
A number of Quakers signed a “No Taxes for Vietnam War” tax refusal vow that was organized by Maurice McCracken’s “No War in Vietnam Committee.”
These included, according to the issue of the Journal, “Franklin Zahn, Bob and Marj Swann, Arthur Evans, Bradford Lyttle, Johan W. Eliot, Staughton Lynd, Wilmer Young, George and Lillian Willoughby, and Marion C. Frenyear.”
The lead editorial in that issue was entitled “To Pay or to Protest?” and the author was determined to give no definitive advice on either side of that question.
The editorial begins by stating the case for Quaker taxpayer misgivings, then moves on to note that “a few pacifists” have been resisting, and to claim that “this year the number of tax-refusers will be far greater than ever before,” while other taxpayers who share their misgivings are either unwilling to take on the risks of tax resistance or believe that such an action amounts to “dodging the law and leaving someone else to carry a burden which they themselves will not assume.”
The editorialist then quotes from a letter written by a resisting employee “to her employing group” (why so coy about which group?) in which she writes that while she would be happy to “pay twice as much as required by the present law” for the more benign things the government buys, “I cannot bring myself to furnish money to be used in a way that will bring death to fine young American boys and men and also to Vietnamese men, women, and children.”
If “the employing group” were to cooperate in her request to stop withholding income tax from her salary, the editorialist wonders, “[w]ill it (or its members) be penalized?”
This is another strange example of the Journal taking an issue that was obviously a direct concern to Quakers and to Quaker Meetings, and trying to abstract it and cast it off into the distance somewhere in order to consider it dispassionately and indecisively.
From here the editorialist compares the Quaker war tax resister of today to the Quaker abolitionist “in the years before the Civil War when some members wanted to give all-out aid to the cause of abolition while others counseled caution, advocating strict adherence to the letter of such laws as those requiring fugitive slaves to be returned to their masters.”
Nowadays we tend to view with shame the historical evidence that all Friends did not work wholeheartedly for the abolition of slavery; will the time come when the Friends who follow after us have a similar feeling about those of their predecessors (including the present writer) who lacked the courage to resist conscription of their dollars to do the killing that they themselves refused to do?
After a quick detour through “There are those who say… there are others who counterargue…” territory, the editorialist recommends that people interested in tax refusal contact the Committee for Nonpayment of War Taxes or the Peacemakers, and gives their addresses.
Finally, there is a brief nod in the direction of war tax resistance being a time-honored Quaker practice.
The editorialist mentions that Franklin Zahn has authored a booklet on “Early Friends and War Taxes,” which includes the quote that ends the editorial, from the letter sent by John Woolman & co. to their fellow-Friends in :
Raising sums of money [for] purposes inconsistent with the peaceable testimony we profess… appears to us in its consequences to be destructive of our religious liberties; we apprehend many among us will be under the necessity of suffering, rather than consenting thereto by the payment of a tax for such purposes.
In the issue, an article about a Quaker movement in which people voluntarily taxed themselves 1% of their income for the support of the United Nations began this way: “All Friends, whether or not they would refuse to take up arms, are caught up in the military machine through payment of Federal income tax.”
This seems to indicate that there was still a blind spot that was making it difficult for some Quakers to even see the various alternatives to paying the federal income tax.
A report on the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting in the same issue noted:
After consideration, the Yearly Meeting concurred with the concern of the Friends Peace Committee that fresh attention be given to the effort to devise a formula acceptable to the Internal Revenue Service and to Congress, which would permit persons to withhold that proportion of their income taxes applicable to military purposes and apply it to constructive purposes of government.
Because a Monthly Meeting secretary and a youth worker for the Peace Committee have asked their employers to cease withholding income tax from their salaries, the problem is being thrust upon the Yearly Meeting.
Friends, whatever their judgments about a particular action, are sympathetic toward those who engage in it for reasons of conscience.
In furtherance of its concern… the Friends Peace Committee received authorization to seek personal conferences with officials of the Internal Revenue Service to acquaint them with the basis and reality of the concern to refuse payment of taxes for military purposes.
Perhaps such conversations may increase understanding on the part of the officials and may enable them, while carrying out their duty and enforcing the law, to understand and respect the refusers.
A conference at Pendle Hill “on the search for peace” in , concerned the “basic question… [of] whether the militaristic society in which we all live could be influenced through techniques of reason or whether religious pacifists, in their deep alienation, should rather seek a more radical strategy of protest.”
At one point, according to the coverage in the issue of the Journal, William Davidon “spoke frankly and clearly on the moral philosophy behind his refusal to pay those taxes which, he felt, would support the war in Vietnam.”
Martin A. Klaver contributed the lead editorial in the issue — “More on Tax-Refusal” — which is worth reproducing completely here as a good overview of the issue of war tax resistance as it stood at that time:
“Friends Journal,” writes John R. Ewbank, patent attorney and a member of Abington Meeting, Jenkintown, Pa., “might well mention the ‘mildest form of tax-refusal for Milquetoasts’: the refusal to pay the federal tax on telephone usage when billed for it.
The telephone company can carry the accumulated unpaid tax until it equals the deposit, and then assess a charge for nominal discontinuance and reconnection, so that the penalties for prolonged persistence are paid to the phone company instead of to the government.
How long it is worth while to carry the protest is a matter of individual judgment…”
For nearly a hundred years, John Ewbank adds, Americans have not been faced with a levy so conspicuously labeled “war tax” as this revived tax on telephone usage.
According to his letter to the telephone company, “The publicity connected with the telephone tax has been so specifically related to the Vietnam war, and I am conscientiously so opposed to the Vietnam war, that my payment herewith omits the $1.03 federal tax.
There are so few opportunities for protest — even feeble, futile protest — that [this] becomes one of the few available gestures.”
For Milquetoasts or not, feeble or not, the gesture is a form of civil disobedience differing more in degree than in kind from refusal to pay the federal income tax — or that part of it that goes for war.
It seems a little unfair to make it at the expense of the telephone company, which is thereby put to added trouble and expense, if only in its bookkeeping department, but it is a protest.
This year, it appears, the thin ranks of those refusing to pay income taxes for reasons of conscience were somewhat augmented.
An release from the office of A.J. Muste cites a statement signed by 360 persons, declaring that they would refuse to pay taxes voluntarily as long as United States forces continue to be used “in violation of the U.S. Constitution, international law, and the United Nations Charter.”
The release says that some signers are leaving the money they owe the government in banks, where the Internal Revenue Service can seize it, while others will contribute it to CARE, UNICEF, or similar agencies.
It also notes that, according to the Internal Revenue Code, “willful refusal to pay taxes may be punished by jail sentences of up to one year and fines as high as $10,000.”
This is not tax-refusal for Milquetoasts, although in the past fines and jail sentences have been rare indeed.
The law is enforced by placing a lien on the tax refuser’s property or attaching his salary.
There have been a number of instances where actions instituted against individuals were simply dropped.
But if tax-refusal should reach important proportions, the present seemingly casual attitude might change; the IRS might decide that it must do something to show that it is not virtually inviting more and more trouble.
Philadelphia Yearly Meeting was concerned this year with the problem posed by employes of two Quaker groups who have asked their employers not to withhold federal taxes from their salaries.
The Yearly Meeting’s Peace Committee is not only seeking a solution to this problem but is also seeking special conferences with Internal Revenue Service officials to acquaint them with the reasons why some Friends refuse to pay their taxes.
During the Yearly Meeting’s discussion it was brought out that Friends Committee on National Legislation for some time has been exploring the possibility of drafting legislation in this area making it possible for Americans who have conscientious objections to having their property used for war to pay equivalent taxes for other uses.
A number of congressmen have been receptive to the idea, but so far no formula has been found that promises to attract the necessary support.
Meanwhile most Quakers (like this one) pay their income taxes (including the reimposed telephone tax) without a murmur.
But there is a consensus on a fundamental: Friends’ basic belief that in matters of conscience each individual must choose his own course.
If that course brings him into conflict with government, he must decide for himself what he must do: obey in silence, obey and at the same time protest, or resort to civil disobedience of one kind or another.
Whether any government can grant any of its citizens the “right” to violate any of its laws is open to debate.
The citizen can hardly lay claim to such a right, yet when he feels that he has a duty to break the law, when he says, “God helping me, I can do no other,” then we must accord him our respect.
The issue noted that “two young Quaker workers… have voluntarily taken drastic cuts in salary rather than pay taxes for war in Vietnam.”
The two were John L.P. Maynard and Robert W. Eaton, who reduced their incomes to the maximum allowable before federal income tax withholding began — something on the order of $75 per month.
The Conservative branch of the Ohio Yearly Meeting met in .
According to William P. Taber, Jr.’s report on the meeting, “we asked our members to consider supporting tax refusal and the sending of aid to the civilians of all Vietnam.”
On the other hand, at the Westerly (Rhode Island) Monthly Meeting, the message was more mixed: “Many Friends feel that not to pay their taxes is disrespect for the law, breeding anarchy.
Yet they deplore the fact that their tax money is being used to prosecute a morally indefensible war in Vietnam.”
The best they could come up with was to approve a suggestion that Friends accompany their tax payments with a statement of protest.
The pseudonymous history columnist “Now and Then” took up the issue of war tax resistance in the issue:
A scruple against paying taxes which directly or indirectly support war has had a long if sporadic history among members of the Society of Friends.
It received official support in London in when decision was made that fine or punishment for such refusal could be reported by the meeting in the annual listing of “sufferings for Truth.”
At Philadelphia Yearly Meeting every year lately this concern has been voiced by individuals.
In the Meeting went so far as to authorize some minor action on the subject, including a delegation to visit the Internal Revenue authorities and to explain the tender conscience of the increasing number of Friends who refuse part or all of their Federal income tax.
The most intensive consideration of the matter among the Meeting’s membership appears to have occurred more than two centuries ago.
Before the Pennsylvania Assembly was asked by the mother country to supply men and funds for British military enterprises in the colonies.
The Quaker legislators, when they complied, did so uneasily, with the excuses that it was for defense or that the money was voted nominally for the sovereign’s use and that they were not responsible for what use the king (or queen) chose to make of it.
They also accepted as a permanent unqualified mandate the words of Jesus, “Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s.” Sometimes Friends distinguished as acceptable mixed taxes and as unacceptable those taxes that were definitely labeled for war.
We are indebted to John Woolman’s Journal (Chapter Ⅴ) for an account of the exercise that arose in Philadelphia Yearly Meeting both in and in .
In the former year a committee was appointed which issued an epistle expressing the feeling that “the large sum granted by the late act of Assembly for the King’s use is principally intended for purposes inconsistent with our peaceable testimony,” and that “as we cannot be concerned in wars and fightings, so neither ought we to contribute thereto by paying the tax directed by the said act, though suffering be the consequence of our refusal.”
Woolman speaks of the conference on the subject “as the most weighty that ever I was at.”
There was not unanimity in the group.
Some who felt easy to pay the tax withdrew, but twenty-one substantial Friends subscribed the epistle; they included John Woolman, John Churchman (who also mentions the matter in his Journal), Anthony Benezet, John Pemberton, and Samuel Fothergill, an English public Friend visiting America.
In the Yearly Meeting of the matter was opened again, and a committee of about forty Friends were appointed to consider “whether or no it would be best at this time publicly to consider it in the Yearly Meeting.”
Visitors from other Yearly Meetings — including John Hunt and Christopher Wilson from England — were asked to join the committee.
The decision was negative.
There was difference of opinion on the subject, and “for that and several other reasons” the committee unanimously agreed that it was not proper to enter into public discussion of the matter.
Meanwhile it recommended that Friends of differing opinions “have their minds covered with fervent charity towards one another.”
One wonders why the different result from two years before and what were some of the “other reasons.”
Part of the answer, I think, is to be found in a letter to John Hunt and Christopher Wilson, sent to them by the Meeting for Sufferings in London.
This letter is dated and is signed by Benjamin Bourne, clerk.
I shall quote it as I have copied it from the manuscript minutes of the Meeting.
It falls in date between the two Philadelphia Yearly Meetings described above, at the second of which Hunt and Wilson were present and in a position to transmit the urgent advice of London Friends.
The main purpose of their mission to Pennsylvania, as is well known, was to prevent the home government’s proposed requirement of an oath for members of the Assembly by asking Friends to refuse to run for election.
The British Friends asked the government to let them attempt first to bring about the purging of the Assembly of Quakers.
In this they succeeded to the extent that most Friends withdrew from the Assembly; thus the threat was averted.
Evidently the same pressure was exercised to encourage Friends to pay provincial war taxes to the British crown and particularly not to publicize their scruple against paying them.
But neither the minutes of Philadelpha Yearly Meeting for (under ) nor its epistles — whether to London Yearly Meeting or to its own members — are so explicit as the letter.
After repeating the primary commission to the English delegates to try “to prevail on Friends in Pennsylvania to refuse being chosen into Assembly during the present commotions in America” and “to make them fully sensible of their danger, and how much it concerns them, the Province, and their posterity to act conformably to this request and the expectations of the government,” the letter continues:
And as you will know that very disadvantageous impressions have been made here by the advices given by some Friends against the payment of a tax lately laid by the provincial assembly, it is recommended in a particular manner that you endeavour to remove all occasions of misunderstanding on this account, and to explain and enforce our known principles and practice respecting the payment of taxes for the support of civil government agreeable to the several advices of the Yearly Meeting founded on the precept and example of our Saviour.
May that wisdom which is from above attend you in this weighty undertaking, and render your labours effectual for the purposes intended that you may be the happy instruments of averting the dangers that threaten the liberties and privileges of the people in general and restore and strengthen that union and harmony which ought to subsist in every part of our Christian Society.
Two brief lists were delivered with the above letter: extracts from London Yearly Meeting minutes of , , , , and , in which the payment of dues to the government is inculcated; and titles of Acts of Parliament, seven chapters in four Acts from the reigns of William and Mary and Queen Anne, “wherein it is expressed that the taxes are for carrying on a war.”
The final phrase was to leave no doubt that English Friends encouraged no escape on the ground that a Quaker conscience could assume the doubtful or peaceful purpose of the legislation.
The grounds on which the scruple among Friends was silenced in are clear.
Friends had long paid such taxes and wished to obey the laws.
If Pennsylvania Friends refused to vote for them as assemblymen or to collect them as tax collectors or to pay them as subjects, the liberties enjoyed in the colony, such as permitting affirmations in place of oaths, would be terminated.
The exhortations in the gospels and New Testament epistles in favor of paying Caesar his dues were applicable.
The early Quaker examples of civil disobedience in other matters were forgotten, and the relevance of the continuing Quaker testimonies against personal participation in war and against the payment of tithes was not cited.
In the latter area Friends were resolutely against payment and suffered ruinous distraints.
Evidently dues for the support of “hireling ministers” seemed more obnoxious than taxes for the prosecution of war.
If Colonial Friends disagreed with the practice of Friends in England or even with one another they would expose the Society to disharmony.
When Woolman’s Journal was reprinted in England in the whole section on paying or not paying taxes was omitted, but in America the problem already was taking a different form.
Friends and others had opposed taxation without representation when the Stamp Act was passed in .
With the outbreak of the Revolution the issue was one of using continental currency or of paying taxes to support war against Great Britain.
This, many American Friends (like Job Scott) and Meetings were willing openly to oppose.
The New York Yearly Meeting issued a statement “on the tragic situation in Vietnam,” saying that it represented “a supreme test” to “the spiritual vitality of the Religious Society of Friends.”
The statement, reprinted in the issue of the Journal included this point:
We call upon Friends to examine their conscience concerning whether they cannot more fully dissociate themselves from the war machine either by tax refusal or by changing their occupations.
The issue noted that “the newsletters of several Friends’ organizations” are encouraging their readers to “protest your telephone war tax” but also suggests that in some cases the protest was a pretty pathetic one: “Stickers saying ‘The Vietnam War Tax Included in This Bill Is Paid Only Under Protest’ are available from the American Friends Service Committee.”
The following issue included a letter-to-the-editor from Franklin Zahn in which he encouraged a more practical approach: “Each month I pay all of my phone bill but 7 percent, informing the company it is against my conscience to pay the direct war tax.
For five months the company added the unpaid balances to each new bill, then wrote it was referring the unpaid total to Internal Revenue Service and wiping my bill clean of debt… How will Internal Revenue handle this?
Past experience with unpaid income taxes indicates IRS may ask for payment but make no bank account seizure until the amount totals more than $5, at which time it takes an extra 6 percent (per annum) as fine.
Not paying direct war taxes is part of Quaker peace testimony.
Don’t pay for a wrong number.”
Franklin Zahn
We’ve encountered Franklin Zahn before.
He was listed as the contact person for “a leaflet on tax refusal” in a issue, and also something described as “the historical material” on the subject — “Early Friends and War Taxes” (perhaps the same leaflet).
Here is some more of his work:
In the issue, he responded in a letter-to-the-editor to an article that apparently suggested “that Friends drop their middle-class attitude of changing law and join the less privileged whose only method has been evading law.”
Zahn responded:
A basic test for conscience is the categorical imperative: What happens if everybody else did the same?
For [draft] evasion, I can see only the tightening up of conscription law.
For open resistance, however, the end of conscription.
For myself, personally beyond the applicable age, the corresponding form of resistance is refusal to pay war taxes.
If everyone in the world practiced it, the result would be close to total elimination of war.
I recently harbored an AWOL who jumped ship fifteen minutes before it sailed for Vietnam, but a better Quaker witness and confrontation would have been for both of us openly to declare our civil-military disobedience — he, his desertion; I, my aiding and abetting, and face the penalties for our actions.
But maybe I should rejoice in that having evaded the law I have lost some middle-classness.
In the issue, he suggested that the spirit of the gospels meant that the “Render Unto Caesar” episode should be interpreted anew:
In the matter of war taxes, were Jesus addressing Christian stewards of God’s wealth who were citizens in a free democracy and responsible for its conduct and were be to pick up an American coin with its inscription, “In God We Trust,” his words might very well be:
If the God you trust is Mars, pay your taxes to him.
In the issue, he gave “a historical summary” of how Quakers had dealt with the issue of war taxes:
With war taxes as with slavery, John Woolman stands out as the pioneer in getting the Society of Friends to face the issue.
His motivation in bringing the concern to Philadelphia Yearly Meeting in came from the increasing willingness of the Quaker government of the colony of Pennsylvania to vote money for war.
The Quaker Assembly had begun to weaken in its peace testimony in .
First it had refused to vote £4000 for an expedition into Canada, forthrightly saying, “It was contrary to their religious principles to hire men to kill one another.”
But later they voted £500 “for the Queen” as a token of their respect, with a rider saying, “The money should be put into a safe hand till they were satisfied from England it should not be employed for the use of war.”
But in a similar request resulted in £2000 being voted, with Isaac Norris echoing Fox in explaining: “We did not see it to be inconsistent with our principles to give the Queen money notwithstanding any use she might put it to, that not being our part but hers.”
That same year William Penn reputedly wrote the Queen (I have not found historical verification): “Our civil obedience is only due to Christ, not to confound the things of God with Caesar’s; for no man can be true to Him that’s false to his own conscience, nor can he extort from it a tribute to carry on any war, nor ought true Christians to pay it.”
[I also have been unable to find a source for this quote —♇]
Whatever influence the letter may have had, the fact seems to be that none of the £2000 voted “for the Queen’s use” was spent on the military expedition.
But the principle of passing the buck for war seems to have been established in the Assembly, which took the view that while Quakers refused to bear arms themselves they did not condemn it in others.
In the Assembly told the Governor it could not vote money for war, but acknowledged that on the other hand it had obligations to aid the government.
The crisis, however, came in the French and Indian War in , when individual taxpayers decided they could no longer pass the war buck to the Assembly.
In of that year John Churchman and other Friends met with Assembly Friends, and about twenty of them said, in part:
“…As the raising sums of money, and putting them into the hands of committees, who may apply them to purposes inconsistent with the peaceable testimony we profess, …appears to us in its consequences, to be destructive of our religious liberties; we apprehend many among us will be under the necessity of suffering, rather than consenting thereto, by the payment of a tax for such purposes; and thus the fundamental part of our constitution may be essentially affected, and that free enjoyment of conscience by degrees be violated;…”
The setting for this ultimatum is of interest: Quaker tax-payers, one-third of the population of the colony, Quaker Assemblymen a majority in a legislature which had non-Quakers like Benjamin Franklin — the most important person in the colony.
The Assembly, when the vote came, said it could not give money for munitions but that, as a “tribute to Caesar,” it was voting £4000 for “bread, beef, pork, flour, wheat, or other grain.”
The Governor who had received the request from New England for a grant to buy a different granular material, told the Assembly that their term “other grain” meant gunpowder and so spent the money.
Woolman’s thoughts about war taxes and his journeying to Philadelphia Yearly Meeting that year with his concern are familiar in his Journal.
One passage, however, seems pertinent to as Friends urge a divided Congress to cut off war funds:
“Some of our members who are officers in civil government are… called upon in their respective stations to assist in things relative to the wars… if they see their brethren united in payment of a tax to carry on the said wars, may think their case not much different, and so might quench the tender movings of the Holy Spirit in their minds.”
On , he; Churchman and others drew up an Epistle to Pennsylvania Friends:
“…The large sum granted… is principally intended for purposes inconsistent with our peaceable testimony; we therefore think that as we cannot be concerned in wars and fightings, so neither ought we to contribute thereto, by paying the tax directed by said act, though suffering be the consequence of our refusal.… Though some part of the money to be raised… is said to be for such benevolent purposes as supporting our friendship with our Indian Neighbors and relieving the distresses of our fellow-subjects, who have suffered in the present calamities, …we could most cheerfully contribute to those purposes, if they were not so mixed, that we cannot… show our hearty concurrence therewith without at the same time assenting to… practices which we apprehend contrary to the testimony which the Lord hath given us to bear…”
The “tax” committee of Yearly Meeting decided that refusal should be an individual matter, and in we find Friends like Joshua Evans conscious there was no solid front: “I found it best for me to refuse paying demands on my estate which went to pay the expenses of war, and although my part might appear at best as a drop in the ocean, yet the ocean, I considered, was made of many drops.”
The effect of such witness was not to stop the war but, as Woolman may have felt of even greater importance, to help Quaker legislators to be true to their own “tender movings.”
In that year the last of the Quaker Assemblymen had resigned and no more ran for the office — in Franklin’s approving words, “choosing rather to quit their power than their principle.”
The 70-year experiment of a Quaker government came to an end over the question of war taxes.
By , according to James Pemberton, it was clear the war-makers were extracting their toll: “The tax in this country [is] pretty well collected and many in this city particularly suffered by distraint of their goods and some being near cast into jail.”
Two decades later, when the bigger test of the Revolutionary War came and the “fighting” Free Quakers separated, tax refusal was so well established that some Quakers appear almost to have over-reacted.
In The Quakers in the American Colonies, Rufus Jones writes:
“There was plenty for the overseers to do in these early days of the war.… Shutting their hearts against the pleadings of mercy for their brothers and sons who had joined the ‘associators’ or paid war taxes, or placed guns for defence upon their vessels, or paid fines for refusing to collect military taxes, or in any way aided the war on either side, they cleared the Society of all open complicity with it.
The offense was reported to one Monthly Meeting, and at the next the testimony of disownment would go out.”
While by today’s permissive standards of the Society such peace witness seems more hysterical than historical, we need to be aware that in this period as in the Civil War, “tax” sometimes meant the substitutionary amount paid in lieu of military service by COs.
In New England the question of paying war taxes to the rebelling colonial governments was the precipitating cause for the split-off of Free Quakers.
There, as elsewhere, when the Revolutionary War broke out, Friends generally agreed they should not pay specific war taxes but on “mixed” taxes — the subject of the 1755 Epistle in Pennsylvania — there was no consensus.
Job Scott in New England Yearly Meeting was the most erudite and detailed advocate of not paying mixed taxes.
In his essay, subtitled “A truly conscientious scruple with respect to the payment of such taxes as are in part demanded for and applied to the support of war and fighting,” and addressed to “Friendly reader,” he reasoned in 1780:
“Now then, if a collector of taxes comes to me and in Caesar’s name demands a tax of £20 which I am persuaded is so far mixed, part for war and part for other charges, that my conscience forbids my paying it… I am not to blame for not paying it: if Caesar pleaseth to separate them I can gladly pay the one part and refuse the other.… though magistry be a divine ordinance, yet it does not follow that every requisition of the civil magistrate ought to be actively obeyed, anymore than because it is a duty indispensable and incumbent on all mankind to pay all their just debts, that therefore we must pay all demands however unjust.”
Tradition-minded Friends who used the Caesar argument sometimes pointed to George Fox who in , paying a specific war tax for the Dutch war, made a distinction between this and direct military service.
But the homeland of Quakerdom by had also moved towards tax refusal; in London Yearly Meeting minuted its censure on “the active compliance of some members with the rate (tax) for raising men for the Navy” and directed local Friends to have such cases under their care.
Those who paid war taxes without even waiting for the process of distraint were considered to have acted “inconsistently.”
In less material on taxes was published by Friends.
Perhaps there is here a fruitful field awaiting some researcher of yearly and quarterly minutes [indeed there is –♇].
Was there less interest in the problems, or was refusal taken for granted?
Did non-Friend Thoreau’s ringing call to refusal in the Mexican-American War preempt the field?
Whatever the reasons, as Friends face today’s violence with its automated battlefields and nuclear missiles — where the conscription of human bodies for mass armies may become less important — and conscription of money for sophisticated technology more important — the relevancy of the tax question to a modern, effective peace testimony has reached an all-time high.
In its issue, the Journal noted that the IRS had made a half-hearted attempt to seize Zahn’s “1955 Dodge station wagon” for $6.58 in resisted phone tax.
Although contemplating lying in front of the car as a final protest before the towing, Franklin calmly removed his personal effects from the car and showed no agitation at this seizure of his property.
At the last minute, however, the IRS men suddenly removed the chains, saying, “We just got new orders — we’re calling off the dogs.”
The mood changed from one of tense formality to joviality as the men left.
“It was as though,” Franklin says, “they were glad the little bluff had failed.”
A letter-to-the-editor from Zahn appears in the issue, in which he responds to “a frequent objection to war tax refusal: that it logically leads to a host of other tax refusal.”
He suggests that because military expenses are such an overwhelming part of the federal budget, only war resisters are likely to find tax resistance to be a tempting tactic.
And anyway, “if a few other than war objectors choose to refuse, I see no objection to their doing so.”
In the issue, Zahn writes in to make a fresh case for war tax refusal:
In refusing personal service, one considers one’s integrity — conscience: Can I be part of a machine geared to agony and death?
But often a different criterion is applied to refusal to pay: How effective a protest is it?
If the protest-value of tax refusal is the only consideration, Friends may feel the effort is better spent in writing a legislator or phoning the White House.
(But I have found that a letter to the government saying I am refusing to pay war taxes is one letter officials never ignore.)
Arguments against the effectiveness of war tax refusal can be self-fulfilling prophecies.
Friends may not wish to join a public witness which is so small it attracts little notice — therefore it remains small.
Yet it is possible that an announcement of intention to pay no further war taxes would be the most single effective act against the arms race that members of the Society of Friends could take.
But sudden, dramatic decisions for effectiveness are not in the manner of Friends.
Perhaps we should forget all about witness and consider tax refusal purely as personal integrity.
This basis, after all, is the one for our day-to-day decisions in matters of principle.
We refuse to steal, not as some witness in influencing others, but because for us stealing is wrong.
We refuse to cheat, not as some protest against dishonesty or against anything else, but because cheating is not the way of the life of the Spirit.
Questions of effectiveness become irrelevant.
The corresponding question for taxes could be, explicitly: Should I, a person in whom there is that of God, voluntarily pay all money asked of me for the purpose of injuring and killing millions of other persons in whom there is also that of God?
If trying to hold back some one-third of our federal income tax (which will go next year for current military uses) is too boggling, we can start modestly and refuse payment of only ten dollars — a small pinch of incense not voluntarily laid on Caesar’s altar.
It can, to our conscience, be a symbol of our refusal of total submission to the military-industrial complex.
But it can also symbolize the positive.
It can be given to the Right Sharing of World Resources of Friends World Committee.
It is possible a small amount like ten dollars will not even be collected by IRS.
Each of us can try such an experiment for one year, and from then proceed as way opens.
Finally, in the issue, the Journal announced Zahn’s death (nearly a year after ).
It called him “a peace activist and worldly ascetic” and said that he practiced “religious asceticism — regular meditation, vegetarianism, celibacy, and voluntary poverty — as both the sustenance for his personal spiritual life and public witness to the power of love and truth in the world.”
He was among those conscientious objectors who at first accepted alternative civilian service, and then decided to resist the draft entirely.
He also was among those who tried to sail into nuclear weapons test zones to disrupt the tests.
War tax resistance in the Friends Journal in
There was hardly an issue of the Friends Journal in that did not at least mention war tax resistance, and some issues covered the topic in depth.
In the issue was an article by Scott Benarde about the Quaker community of Monteverde in Costa Rica.
Excerpts:
In , a year after the sentencing [of Marvin Rockwell for draft resistance], Rockwell and the small Quaker community of Fairhope made national news.
In a short article, Time magazine mentioned that “for the first time in history a group of Quakers were planning to leave the U.S. because of their peace-loving convictions.”
Seven Quaker families — including Marvin Rockwell and his parents — twenty-five or thirty people in all, had decided to move to the Central American Republic of Costa Rica.
, Marvin Rockwell recounts why he left the U.S. and what has happened to him since settling 5,000 feet up in the steep, rugged mountains of Costa Rica.
“We had a growing dissatisfaction with what we in Fairhope thought was a military build-up, a wartime economy.
We wanted to be free of paying taxes in a war economy,” Rockwell says in a soft, yet deliberate, voice.
“When the judge sentenced us he said, ‘If you’re not willing to defend your country, you should get out.’
So we began to think seriously of that possibility.”
That issue also brought the news that Quaker Richard Catlett “has been indicted on criminal charges of willful failure to pay income tax for three years” (the indictment was actually for failure to file).
The issue — under the theme “Can the Government Cancel Conscience?”
— had many mentions of war tax resistance.
The opening article, by Ruth Kilpack, began:
Ten years ago, at the height of the Vietnam War, a Friend spoke directly to my condition at Philadelphia Yearly Meeting when he said, “Many of us support our sons’ conscientious objection to serving in the armed forces.
But what about ourselves?
Do those of us who are beyond draft age, or not otherwise subject to the draft, conscientiously object to giving our money for war?”
For me, this struck deep, as did the words, “Two things are needed to fight a war: warm bodies and cold cash.”
For the first, the full flush of youth is required for combat.
For the second, there is no age limit for those who must pay tax funds, over half of which are channeled directly into wars, past, present, and future.
Everyone is involved.
By the payment of taxes, all are required to support the “national defense,” or whatever the current euphemism is.
Kilpack’s article concerned the legal case of Robert Anthony, who was appealing his tax case on religious freedom grounds.
What Bob Anthony’s case was about that day was an effort to break the longstanding precedent set by the case of A.J. Muste, the great peace activist, who in had challenged the U.S. government in the matter of paying taxes for war.
The court had then ruled that the income tax does not interfere with religious practice.
Whatever attempts have been made since that time to break that precedent-and there have been many-have been thwarted, federal judges repeatedly refusing to examine the deep issues involved: the issues of rights of conscience and the First Amendment’s protection of religious belief.
As it turned out, according to Anthony, “the court came up with a complete backing of the government’s right to cancel conscience for the sake of the taxing system.”
The same issue reprinted excerpts from a letter that Media Monthly Meeting had sent to the court that was hearing the Anthony case, in which it said:
As a Meeting, we have consistently backed and encouraged [Anthony’s] position on military taxes.
We believe that any citizen who on the basis of religion or conscience is opposed to paying for armaments or war should not be compelled by the tax laws to pay taxes for these purposes.
Refusal to participate in any way in killing and warfare is a basic principle of the Quaker faith.
…Robert Anthony’s refusal of military taxes constitutes an essential and consistent implementation of Quaker religious principles.… We assert that the free exercise of the Quaker religion entails the avoidance of any participation in war or financial contribution to that part of the national budget used by the military.
In the same issue, Bruce & Ruth Graves wrote of how their war tax resistance had grown out of their conscientious objection to the draft.
[O]ur early married years were largely those of family and professions, years in which we were no longer pressured by government to form external written attestations of belief to satisfy the draft board.
After all, we had done that.
What else could just we two do to alter this evil?
The pacifist ideas could safely rest — or could they?
In retrospect, those beliefs that had been yanked forth from us by society, perhaps too early in our lives, needed more time to mature, to become integrated into our very beings.
Perhaps ten years of integration preceded our realization that a different and subtler written attestation of belief was being required of us by our society.
This attestation was made not once, but every year and it was an attestation of beliefs we did not believe.
It was a lie.
It was our income tax return.
We signed it every year, and thus gave money, without objection, to buy the tools of war, even though we did not believe in killing.
It was subtle because it was money and did not look like death.
But when you put them together, it is a contract.
…All of this occurred during a time when militarism increasingly permeated national policy.
Here, then, we finally reached a point where the idea of our financing the arms race became unbearable.
After all, warfare was becoming more automated, thus relying far more on the expenditure of tax money than on the conscription of lives.
In fact, it now appears that conscientious objection itself may be tending toward irrelevance, unless the concept is expanded beyond the confines of the Selective Service system — especially for those over draft age.
At this point we changed our tax returns into something we could in conscience sign and our remittance checks into contracts for the Internal Revenue Service.
Each year, the item “Foreign Tax Credit” and about fifty percent of our normal tax “due” was entered.
Carrying that credit over to the first page as instructed, we showed each year on our signed returns a credit balance due us from the IRS.
To reduce IRS profit from interest and penalty, we still paid tax “owed” as calculated normally, but our check required the IRS to promise to refund the war tax we claimed by their endorsement because of a restrictive clause we placed on the back of the check.
Rather than our refund, the IRS has usually sent a notice for us to sign, correcting our return.
We have never signed these, because that means agreeing to the original war tax.
Yet the IRS seems to need our agreement to resolve each case legally — that is, unless it should decide to initiate proceedings against us in U.S. Tax Court.
That, in fact, happened to us in for tax year .
From here, the Graveses write about their frustrations with the legal system, which seems eager to latch onto superficial technicalities to avoid having to face head-on the issue of whether the government can force people to violate such core tenets of conscience as “thou shalt not kill” via the tax system.
They also express the need they feel for a stronger and more sustaining national war tax resistance organization:
At present, the community of war tax resistance appears to us to be a loosely-structured communications network of interpersonal contacts, newsletters, and small organizations perhaps not always widely known.
Entrance to this network, we presume, is often gained through need for help by individuals who then grow, gain experience, and are later able to help other newcomers in their various situations.
Whether they do help others or just gradually fade out of the network, however, is crucial to the power of the community.
If we, ourselves, were to fade out as our own tax problems become less immediate, for example, the experience and knowledge we will have gained (even though far from complete) would be lost to the others.
It would seem to be a sad waste to have this process repeated over and again for each member passing through the community.
There are a few organizations emphasizing war tax resistance (e.g., WTR, Peacemakers, etc.), from which a range of handbooks and information is available for individual action.
Some may provide counseling: for example, we have recently learned that CCCO is in liaison currently with the Philadelphia Office of War Tax Resistance (WTR), thus affording the wider range of counseling needed by this more recent form of conscientious objection.
They added:
There are other courses of individual action besides variations on how to fill out a tax return.
One such course is to reduce one’s income to a level of lower — or no — taxation.
For some, this would mean a change in profession, or else a donation of one’s professional services to his or her current employer.
If it is not desirable to put that kind of commitment into that particular employer’s pockets, one can give away up to fifty percent of taxable income to tax deductible organizations, thereby reaching three simultaneous objectives: a) continue one’s profession, b) support human interests of choice, and c) decrease war tax payments.
Tax liability on interest income can also be reduced by buying tax-exempt bonds or shares in exempt bond funds.
Both Individual Retirement Accounts and Deferred Tax Annuities (sometimes available through the employer) enable the postponement of income to retirement years, when, hopefully, the World Peace Tax Fund Act will have become law.
This provides a reasonable chance for legally claiming the exemption on a part of current income, the exempted funds then being redirected to the WPTF Trust Fund for uses more closely aligned with human values.
Also in that issue was an update on the Richard Catlett case, in which he was charged with “willfully and knowingly failing to file income tax returns for ” — he in fact hadn’t filed .
The Brandywine Peace Community wrote in with “some fundamental questions of reality and responsibility” for Quaker taxpayers.
The community ran an alternative fund “comprised of refused war taxes, personal savings, and group deposits, [that] makes interest-free loans to groups working for social change or providing change-oriented services.
Thus, the alternative fund is a small-scale act of beating swords into plowshares and initiating our own peace conversion program.”
Also:
In past January–April tax seasons, the Brandywine group and its supporters have been present at local IRS offices, presenting the option of war tax resistance, and posing the question, “H-bombs or Bread?” with peace tax counseling available.
The issue shared the story of John and Louise Runnings, who…
…have withheld payment of their income taxes in order, as they state, “to resolve the conflict between the spirit that dwells within and the violence implicit in surrendering our substance to the building of the war machine.”
They have submitted a brief to this effect to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals.
The Runnings feel that since their action makes them answerable to “those Quakers whose light allows them to pay the federal tax,” they must plead their case before the Society of Friends as well as before the Federal Court.
In doing so, they stress the fact that they share Friends’ testimonies against war but feel that these testimonies will be muted if they are not supported by actions which speak louder than words.
They question how we can “speak truth to power” when so large a part of our income supports that power.
They invite Friends to join them “in taking those uncomfortable actions which put us in conflict with the government rather than with the Spirit.”
That issue also brought the update that Robert Anthony’s appeal to the U.S. Third Circuit Court of Appeals had been rejected.
It also noted that, according to the Albuquerque Monthly Meeting’s newsletter, the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting and the AFSC were contributing to the legal expenses in the case.
At the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting, according to the Journal, “[a] minute on nonpayment of taxes for military purposes was adopted” — but not one that required much explanation, apparently.
A letter from Austin Wattles appeared in the issue in which he encouraged the Journal to continue to cover war tax resistance, saying that to him, “[t]he movement seems to be growing.”
He told of the support he had received from Meetings in his area — specifically the Old Chatham (New York) Monthly Meeting and Worcester (Massachusetts) Meeting.
He concluded:
[T]ax resistance can have its penalties.
You don’t have money to send your kids to college if you change your profession in a way not to pay withholding tax.
I think certainly one reason so few Friends have considered this witness is it can hurt one’s profession so seriously.
It’s not only losing the wages, but Friends enjoy doing a good job where they are working and don’t know how else they can live.
I like Quakers very much.
I’ve always been an active Friend.
But I feel our being part of the world to the degree we are prevents us from following Christ if the price is too high.
Molly Arrison also had a letter in that issue, but she thought war tax resistance “to be a most unrealistic and disrupting idea” because it would lead to a slippery slope of every citizen withholding taxes for whatever items of government spending they disapproved of, leading to “50 million contingencies” that would overwhelm the government’s revenue system.
She recommended that Quakers instead “orchestrate consistent barrages of phone calls, letters, and lectures until the general public has more influence than the Pentagon.”
David Scull considered this same argument in a letter in the issue:
We wish not to pay taxes for what we so strongly disapprove of.
But there are those who equally strongly feel that government contributions to the United Nations, or government money to pay for abortions, violate their principles.
It would not be difficult to compile a long list of purposes objected to; of course we say that our cause is a matter of high principle, but one person’s principle is another’s foible.
Is there some guideline which would make it easier to distinguish between two paramount obligations when they seem to be in conflict, one to support those purposes which our society has determined (no matter how imperfectly) to be for the common good, and the other to obey our consciences?
It seems to me that this can best be judged by our willingness to make some tangible sacrifices on behalf of conscience.
Scull went on to say that this made him skeptical of the World Peace Tax Fund plan: “[I]f I understand it correctly, there is no personal sacrifice involved.
It is just too easy to say to the government, ‘Please send my money where I want it to go instead of where you want it to go.’ ” He suggested improving the World Peace Tax Fund idea by “add[ing] the principle of personal sacrifice”:
Suppose I say, “Instead of $1000 which you say I owe you, here is $1100 as evidence of my sincerity; now will you allocate it in these ways?
That is how much extra I am willing to pay for the privilege of having my money not go to pay for machines of war.”
The inclusion of such a sacrificial element in the WPTF program would make a great deal of difference in my own ability to argue for it, and I think it would make a very convincing argument as we work toward its widespread acceptability.
…When we ask to relieve our consciences because of the way our money is spent, we should be… willing to put a price tag on the privilege.
A letter-to-the-editor in response to Scull’s argument, from Bill Samuel, thought that while the personal-sacrifice angle “has some surface attractiveness…”
Put another way, the proposal amounts to a government tax on conscience, which is quite a different matter from a voluntary personal sacrifice.
Not only is it morally questionable for the government “to put a price tag on” conscience, but some legal authorities believe it would constitute unconstitutional discrimination as well.
The World Peace Tax Fund bill would not be a special privilege.
Rather, the WPTF bill is a practical means of implementing the rights of conscience guaranteed by the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.
Like women, blacks and homosexuals, pacifists should take the position that we need not earn our rights but that they should be respected as a matter of course in a free and pluralistic society.
There is, of course, nothing wrong with the concept of people of conscience making a sacrifice for their deeply held beliefs.
Rather than impose a ten percent tax on conscience, concerned Friends might send an amount equal to ten percent of their tax payment to the National Council for a World Peace Tax Fund…
Corporately, Friends can also act to support those working to secure the right of pacifists not to pay for war.
One yearly meeting recently agreed to give $1,500 to the NCWPTF and several monthly meetings include the NCWPTF in their budgets.
Mennonites and Brethren each give a full time volunteer service worker to the NCWPTF.
While Friends do not have the kind of organized volunteer service effort that the other historic peace churches have, meetings can do their part by together contributing enough to support a full-time salaried worker.
Ross Roby also had some words to say about Scull’s argument against the World Peace Tax Fund plan.
He first begged for “immediate self-sacrificial labor and giving, on behalf of passage of a WPTF bill” and then wrote:
I would like to remind those who, like David Scull, have “difficulty with the World Peace Tax Fund as presently offered,” that there is nothing sacred and immutable about the present wording.
We can be quite certain that, when Congress takes a serious scrutiny of provisions for an alternative fund for C.O.s, much rewriting will be done.
The final bill. when passed, may look very different from the WPTF bill as now published.
He suggested that conscientious objectors to military spending should “soft pedal” the arguments amongst themselves over the details of the WPTF plan and instead concentrate on trying to convince the government to enact “a change in the income tax laws that will allow ‘free exercise of religion’ and give us the opportunity to build institutions for nonviolent solutions to international conflict with our present war tax dollars.”
His advice seems to have been followed, and the current campaign for “peace tax fund” legislation seems to have become so unwilling to use critical judgment and so eager to pass legislation of any sort that it has ended up backing a bill that would do nothing to help people with genuine conscientious objection to supporting military spending, nothing to reduce the military budget, and indeed nothing to increase spending on nonviolent conflict resolution — and yet even this bill has gone nowhere in Congress.
Such is the cost of “soft pedaling” internal debate.
an ad in the issue of Friends Journal
John J. Runnings confronted Molly Arrison’s argument more head-on in the letters-to-the-editor column of the issue.
Excerpt:
Our actions are determined by the degree of urgency we feel.
When our house is on fire we may exit by way of an upstairs window rather than by the conventional route via the stairs.
Many of us see the arms race as a fire out of control, and we are so adverse to feeding the flames that we are prepared to suffer considerable discomfort rather than do so.
So we break the law and are prepared to suffer the penalty.…
To break the law openly and expose oneself to the wrath of the power structure is to witness to the urgency and depth of one’s convictions.…
The early Quakers started at the places that Molly suggests, in the heart and in the community, but they went further.
They broke the law.
And they got themselves hanged and imprisoned; and they were heard above the contending clamors of their day.
And when the Constitution was written it contained provisions for freedom of religion and freedom of speech.
Modern Quakers continue, as of old, to work from the heart and in the community, but if we are to outshout the Pentagon we will have to use a louder and more urgent voice than we have used heretofore.
Perhaps more and more and more of us will have to break the law.
Franklin Zahn also responded to Arrison’s slippery-slope argument: “In practice, the portion of federal income tax for the military is far greater than for any other item.
Currently thirty-six percent goes for present costs and another estimated seventeen percent for past wars.
Objectors to smaller items would not find withholding worth the bother… [W]ords alone eventually lose all effect if no one ever acts.
But if a few other than war objectors choose to refuse, I see no objection to their doing so.”
Sally Primm interviewed Lucy Perkins Carner for the issue.
Among other topics, Carner addressed her war tax resistance:
[Q:] “Did you ever consider not paying part of your tax?”
[A:] “Oh yes, for years I’ve taken out of my income tax payment a portion that the Friends Committee on National Legislation says is equal to what the Pentagon gets.
Then I write a letter to the income tax people.
It’s good propaganda.
I send copies to my representatives in Congress and the President.
“I know my failure to pay isn’t going to impoverish the Pentagon, but it’s good propaganda.
They go to your bank and get the money.
I send them a copy of the letter, too.
Some people have refused to give them the information and go to jail as a result, but I’m not heroic.
They get it out of my bank every year.
“The bank has a right to charge for that, a service charge.
Well, in the last few years, believe it or not, I’ve received a letter from the bank saying they won’t make the charge any more.[”]
[Q:] “Why did they say that?”
[A:] “Well, that just shows you what good propaganda will do.
They know why I’m doing it.”
[Q:] “And how long have you done this?”
[A:] “I don’t know; when I became a pacifist, whenever that was [around the end of World War Ⅰ, according to another part of the article —♇].
I don’t even know when the income tax started.”
The issue covered the “New Call to Peacemaking” in which representatives from the three historic “peace churches” (Quakers, Mennonites, and Brethren) got together to try to put some oomph behind their peacebuilding efforts.
There was actually less about war tax resistance in this article than in much of the mainstream media coverage of the Call — perhaps because the civil disobedience angle was thought to be more newsworthy or attention-catching.
Here is where taxes were mentioned in the Friends Journal coverage:
The Friends Committee on National Legislation points out that all the federal income taxes withheld from your paycheck from January 1 to June 23 go for military purposes.
Not until June 24 do you begin to support any other part of the budget.
Especially in recent years — in light of increasing military budgets and the trend toward fewer soldiers and more expensive weapons systems — many conscientious objectors have chosen to witness against war by refusal to pay voluntarily those federal taxes that will be used to fund present, past, and future wars.
Some have done this by lowering their income below the taxable level; others who owe taxes have refused to pay the portion that would go for the military.
In the same issue, Robert C. Johansen wrote about the challenge of putting forward a pacifist alternative to mainstream political thinking.
In the course of that, he wrote:
Even though their goals are radical in the sense of seeking fundamental system change, political moderates will feel most comfortable using conventional means of education, consciousness-raising, lobbying, campaigning, organizing, and personal witness.
Those people who have tried such means and found them weak and insufficiently penetrating politically will search for other actions, such as tax resistance and civil disobedience, that convey a seriousness and urgency more equivalent to the threat of planetary militarization.
Maynard Shelly gave the Mennonite perspective in the wake of the New Call conference, and claimed that “[r]esistance to the payment of war taxes is becoming the witness of choice for a growing number of Mennonites.”
Charles C. Walker wrote in to the issue to suggest a token $1 resistance to the Pennsylvania state income tax as a way of protesting against its anticipated adoption of capital punishment.
The issue noted in its calendar that the Media Pennsylvania Friends Meetinghouse would be hosting a “National Military Tax Resistance Workshop” that would be “[i]ntroducing the program and services of the newly organized Center on Law and Pacifism.”
War tax resistance in the Friends Journal in
1984 brought the Friends Journal’s second special issue on war taxes, at a time when even its critics acknowledged war tax resistance as a mainstream practice in the Society of Friends.
In a letter-to-the-editor in a issue of the Journal, Tim Deniger, a supporter of the World Peace Tax Fund legislation, had pointed out some of its flaws, for instance that it “does not address the problem of spending for defense versus social welfare; it is simply a bookkeeping proposition which would ease the consciences of pacifists.”
(See ♇ .)
Bill Strong wrote back, and, in a letter that appeared in the issue, defended the bill against its critics.
Excerpts:
[T]he World Peace Tax Fund Bill…[’]s enactment won’t lessen defense spending; Congress will still need to do that.
What it will do is establish a Peace Trust Fund (like the eminently successful highway trust fund), enabling our society to make a striking (i.e., dollar-worthy) commitment to seeking peace (via, for example, funding a peace academy, U.N. peacekeeping forces, the use of mediation, negotiation, and reconciliation techniques — none of which are currently part of U.S. commitments).
As to alternative service for war tax dollars being but an “accounting illusion” or only easing the consciences of pacifists, the same applies to the now-established alternative service of C.O.s. Although men choose alternative service, our government has never lacked the bodies to pursue any conflict any place, any time; but the C.O.’s personal witness still stands for what it is, a man’s conscientious decision not to be a part of the war system.
If we could have C.O. status for men over 20 and all women, allowing them not to pay for war but to have their tax dollars go toward peacemaking, our society would make a new and totally different kind of statement to this violence-weary world.
There’s a little bit of sleight-of-hand here in comparing people who would pay their taxes into a government-run alternative fund with only those conscientious objectors who would be willing to enter government-run “alternative service” in lieu of combat roles (as opposed to the many conscientious objectors who refused to be conscripted into any service whatsoever).
But it’s also important to note that these earlier versions of the “peace tax” scheme were much more conscientious about segregating the “peace tax” payments so that they would pay for new, additional, nonviolent, peace-seeking measures.
This enabled promoters to make a much stronger case in favor of the bill than today’s poor “Religious Freedom Peace Tax Fund” promoters — who have to somehow defend the idea that “peace tax” payers’ dollars will somehow magically get routed just toward the non-military portions of the government’s usual budget.
the cover of the issue of Friends Jounal
The issue of Friends Journal was dedicated to “Our Taxes and Peace” — the second such issue devoted to the war tax issue that I found in the archives.
Vinton Deming, a war tax resister and now the Editor-Manager of the Journal, introduced the issue.
Excerpts:
[W]hat can we do, many of us are asking, to stop the flow of our tax money to the Pentagon?
It feels as if the Society of Friends has come more under the weight of this concern in the past year.
My yearly meeting (Philadelphia) wrestled with the question of tax resistance a year ago, and monthly meetings have been asked to consider the question further as they prepare for yearly meeting sessions this month.
Within my own monthly meeting I have attended clearness meetings this year for members seeking direction and support on the issue.
And I have seen a marked increase in the number of members taking tentative steps to withhold at least a portion of their taxes.
Reports from abroad include London Yearly Meeting’s minute of support this past summer for its employees who seek to hold back the military portion of their taxes.
Robert F. Tatman proposed a Minute on the subject, confidently presenting a target that was well in front of what any meeting had been prepared to accept thus far.
Excerpts:
[W]e are led to declare for ourselves that all participation in war and preparation for war — in any form — is contrary to the Spirit and teachings of Christ.
By this, we mean that membership in the armed forces of the United States or of any country, whether under arms or as a noncombatant; participation in, including registration under, a system of military conscription; acceptance of the privilege of alternative service as a conscientious objector; payment through taxes, both direct and indirect, for wars past, present, and future; and all other forms of participation in the war system, which now holds the world in such deep oppression, are in direct opposition to the Peace Testimony of the Religious Society of Friends.
Friends are advised to examine themselves, their finances, their possessions, and all of their associations to discover whether they are clear of such participation in war and preparation for war, and if they are not, to seek guidance and support from their monthly meetings in their efforts to attain clearness.
We accept that this search for clearness will inevitably bring us, both individually and corporately, into conflict with the laws of the United States and of other countries, and we pledge our full moral, spiritual, and financial support to any Friend or meeting in need of such support as a result of this minute.
We realize that there are many Friends who will not be in full unity with this minute at present, who will feel it is their duty as U.S. citizens to continue paying the taxes demanded of them by the federal government, and to support and counsel cooperation with military conscription.
We recognize the depth of their convictions but stand in loving disagreement with them, and we pledge them, too, our full moral, spiritual, and financial support as they struggle to reach clearness on this concern laid upon us by the Lord.
We are indeed loyal citizens of the United States, but first we are citizens of the Kingdom of God, and the higher law must always take precedence over the lower.
Kingdon W. Swayne went the opposite direction, feeling that Friends had gotten too carried away with war tax resistance and ought to reconsider.
Excerpts:
Most of the current discussion of “war” taxes within the Society of Friends is based on the implicit assumption that those who don’t pay them are morally superior to those who do.
The charge of the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting to that of is to come up with a “stronger minute” on war tax concerns than the one currently on the books, clearly implying that greater “strength” in this area must be morally superior.
In a discussion several months ago at Representative Meeting in Philadelphia, those who obey the law were compared to the Quaker slaveholders of , and not a dissenting voice was raised.
As a member of the substantial majority of Friends who are dutiful taxpayers, I have felt intuitively that my position has every bit as good a moral claim as the contrary view.
I have sought to examine that intuition in two ways: first, to identify the moral assumptions that underlie it and, second, to identify the moral ambiguities in the tax refuser position that render it unattractive to me on moral grounds.
Swayne argued:
It is important to him to be a vigorous participant in the various “circles of community” that he finds himself in, and only to be a disruptive force in those circles in the most extreme circumstances, when productive participation is no longer possible.
He feels that the national circle in the United States has not reached such a stage, and so it’s better to play by the rules.
Friends overemphasize “the dramatic, large-scale evils associated with the national security system” while remaining indifferent to other man-made sources of suffering, for instance “our transportation system [which] has brought more death and injury to U.S. citizens than all the wars of .”
The national security establishment is just a large-scale version of such thoroughly moral defenses as “police forces and locks on houses” — they are not evil in and of themselves, though they can be used in evil ways or can become aggrandized in an evil way.
But war tax resistance treats them as pure evil.
He then described the varieties of resister: the one who reduces his or her income below the tax line (the “most admirable” variety, according to Swayne), the one who tries “limiting but not eliminating federal income tax liability, and paying the required tax” (Swayne considers himself one of these, saying he “does so from prudential rather than pacifist motives” because “I think I give money away more wisely than does Uncle Sam”), and the one who refuses a symbolic “military” percentage of the federal income tax (this, he calls the “mainstream” variety).
He sees problems with this third variety:
It actually means the government gets more money in the end.
The calculation of the “military” percentage is flawed.
“It requires one to assert unequivocally that one’s own reading of the will of God is superior to that of others, not only with respect to goals but with respect to the tactics needed to achieve those goals.”
By filing legal cases contesting government actions against resisters, these resisters undermine their moral position, becoming not civilly disobedient martyrs but mere plaintiffs.
Such war tax resisters incorrectly deny that their position sets a precedent for tax resisters of all sorts.
Law-breaking reflects poorly on the peace movement in the court of public opinion.
But, he concluded:
As for the tax refusers, I hope other Quaker taxpayers will join me in accepting their position, despite its ambiguities, as being in the mainstream of Quaker thought, and therefore entitled to support from Quaker bodies.
I will support them not out of a sense that theirs is the morally superior position, but only because they are taking a greater risk.
Following that, Franklin Zahn promoted phone tax resistance as “a simple way of continuing Friends’ tradition of witnessing for peace.”
He first wrote about why resistance was important (indeed, he felt, as a regressive tax at a time of reduced social welfare spending and tax cuts for the rich, resisting this particular tax could be justified even without reference to military spending), and then explained the mechanics of how to resist and how the phone company is likely to respond.
No one has ever been jailed for refusing the telephone war tax.
Although the tax is small, its refusal by thousands of Friends could be a significant force for peace.
Gandhi, for instance, made good use of a very small salt tax.
Being “effective,” however, need not be the main motive in refusals.
A draft-aged person refuses induction not primarily to be effective but because it is immoral to support war.
The same motivation can apply for tax refusers.
There was also a brief note in that issue about a new “study document” from the National Council of the Churches of Christ on “The Churches and War Tax Resistance,” but it didn’t give much indication about the content or the context in which it had been produced.
The issue brought the news that a group of “peace tax fund” promoters in Canada had incorporated and were planning to pursue a test case in the courts that they hoped would establish a right to conscientious objection to military taxation under the new Canadian Constitution.
Kingdon Swayne’s challenge to what he identified as the orthodox Quaker position in favor of war tax resistance drew some responses that were printed in the issue.
Roland Smith, “a rather recent tax refuser,” thought Swayne’s criticism was “helpful” but not always correct.
In particular, he didn’t think that it was true that war tax resistance always would mean the government would come out ahead in the end, and he felt that the difficult (Swayne called it “arbitrary”) practice of trying to discern the military portion of your tax bill represented “not a drawback but… an opportunity for the refuser to exercise his or her conscience in deciding which percentage of which budget figure to use.”
More troubling, he thought, was the threat to democracy embodied in the idea that people could conscientiously choose to support some decisions of their elected representatives and not others.
Irving Hollingshead denied that “self-righteousness” was behind war tax resistance.
“The moral point is that war and the preparation for mass killing are wrong, and most Friends feel a moral obligation to oppose it.
Tax resistance is merely one tactic consistent with this moral position.”
Tor J.S. Bejnar looked at Swayne’s three varieties of resister and decided that the second variety, to which Swayne (and until recently, Bejnar) belonged, “barely connects spiritual and earthly matters” and so he has decided to move into the first category, which he termed “deliberate poverty.”
Alan Eccleston was glad to see that Friends were “open[ing] ourselves to the question” rather than evading it.
He felt that framing the issue as being about “moral superiority” was counter-productive and judgmental.
And he also felt that more important than strong Minutes from Meetings about war tax resistance was “the continuous witness of those who, under a concern, constantly hold the question before us through their own loving commitment.”
My personal experience suggests that we feel most anxious when we are in a stage of determined avoidance, when, intuitively, we sense something stirring within us for which we believe we are not ready.
All of our defenses are mobilized and we shut ourselves off from that inner stirring — but at a price!
Scott Crom questioned the consequentialism implicit in Swayne’s critique.
“[S]ometimes we are called upon to act in certain ways, or refrain from acting, regardless of the consequences.
Here one does not judge the morality of a choice by its results or its impact, but by something else.
This approach is the one I prefer, and I believe it has ample precedent, both in the Bible and in Quaker history.
The Ten Commandments and the Sermon on the Mount do not say, ‘Thou shalt accomplish such-and-such,’ but speak directly to actions and to attitudes.”
Ben Norris wrote that “Some Quakers are motivated especially towards striving to keep their own lives pure, simple, or consistent, and this inner spiritual state is the focus.
Others note that it is quite impossible to exist outside of some sort of economic and social system… and therefore, such an action as war tax refusal is part of a vastly complex involvement in responsible citizenship, the right ordering of our economic and social systems. Both motivations may exist in the same person.
But to concentrate on which person’s actions, public or private, are ‘more moral’ than someone else’s usurps a judgment not given to mortals, and trivializes both the spiritual and political motivations of rational change in our lives.”
Karl Meyer wrote in to promote his “cabbage patch” method of tax resistance:
the Internal Revenue Service began using a special $500 penalty against people who make protest claims on income tax returns.
This “frivolous tax return” penalty is a significant and intolerable assault on the inalienable rights of freedom of speech and religion.
It seems to me both a challenge and an opportunity for mass civil disobedience by people of conscience.
The only act needed is to assert the rights of conscience on an income tax form.
As an experiment in showing the way, I have begun to file daily protest returns for each day of .
My net income from my work as a carpenter in will be reported and distributed on 365 tax returns, at an average of about $38 per day.
Each return will be addressed to a different employee or office of IRS.
A copy of the daily return will be sent each day to a different newspaper, magazine, public officeholder, or peace organization.
If the IRS imposes penalties for all of my returns, the total assessment may rise to more than $180,000. I have already received notice of one penalty for $500. Of course I don’t intend to pay or allow collection.
I invite Friends to join with me in resisting war taxes and this penalty on the expression of conscience.
This is a good project for people like me, who feel able to protect their income and assets from seizure by IRS.
Some others, whose assets are more vulnerable to collection, may participate by filing protest statements on tax return forms, in the names of some of the victims of U.S. militarism worldwide.
G.M. Smith trotted out the argument that paying taxes is no more of a moral issue because of how the government will spend the money, than handing your wallet over to a violent mugger is because of how he might spend the loot.
He suggested instead of tax resistance that people donate (in a tax-deductible way) to charity.
“Thus, through contributions one could reduce his or her tax liability legally and at the same time be contributing to good in the world.
It is important, however, not to make one’s contributions in a tax-supported area.
There’s nothing government would like better than to dump the entire burden of social services on the private sector and have all those extra tax dollars for bombs.”
Robert R. Schutz questions Swayne’s casual assumption that because the national security apparatus is something like the local police apparatus writ large (and the police are something like the locks on our doors anthropomorphized and handed pistols) that there’s nothing inherently wrong with a military.
Schutz agrees with the theory but denies Swayne’s conclusion.
Rather: “The use of police power may be even less morally defensible than war because it is deliberate, pre-planned, cold-blooded, and because it is entirely mercenary — we hire other people to do our killing for us.”
A report on the annual Philadelphia Yearly Meeting in the same issue noted that “[m]uch of Saturday was taken up with Friends’ wrestling with war tax concerns.”
The minute which finally resulted said, in part, that “Friends are uneasy in conscience that a substantial portion of their tax dollars goes for military purposes”; that we “are ready to support a wide variety of approaches to war tax witness in accord with individual circumstances and leadings”; that “while Friends do not urge one another to undertake civil disobedience, Friends are ready to give strong support to members led to refuse payment of taxes for military purposes”; and that “most Friends strongly endorse passage of the World Peace Tax Fund legislation.”
The minute concluded, “We realize that we have no single or simple answer to the dilemma of praying for peace and paying for war.
We ask for Divine Guidance as we proceed in struggling with the issue of taxes levied for war-related purposes.”
The issue will be considered again at the sessions.
In the issue was a letter from Donna and Jerome Gorman in which they explained how they had extended tax resistance-like techniques to a State-level battle against capital punishment.
They held back a symbolic 1¢ from their electric bill to protest against the Virginia Electric and Power Company’s complicity with the state’s electrocution method of executing prisoners, and later began to also withhold 1¢ from their phone bills in a similar protest because of a state excise tax on phone service.
They saw this largely as a method of getting the attention of people to whom they could then direct anti-death-penalty outreach.
We refer to this economic and tax resistance as “penny resistance.”
Multiple innovations in economic and tax and other forms of resistance are most urgently needed to impede the various methods of carrying out capital punishment.
We pray and we hope that many others will consider joining in this resistance.
Jeff Hunn promoted the War Tax Resisters Penalty Fund in the issue.
He described it this way:
The Tax Resisters’ Penalty Fund is a sort of “mutual aid fund” for war tax resisters.
Formed in , the Penalty Fund is supported by people who contribute small amounts of money periodically to help war tax resisters pay fines and interest levied by the IRS.
Funds contributed are used to help pay not the resister’s original tax burden but what the IRS terms “statutory additions”: interest, penalties, and fines imposed because of war tax resistance.
When each supporter contributes his or her small amount, the total becomes enough to reimburse the resister for the additional cost of his or her witness.
For example, 200 supporters contributing $2.50 each could cover the aforementioned $500 “frivolous” penalty.
The Tax Resisters’ Penalty Fund has grown from 85 supporters in to 400 supporters .
The larger we grow, the bigger an impact we can make and the smaller each supporter’s contribution will need to be.
Finally, in the issue, Dan Merritt reminded people that phone tax resistance was still a good option, and noted that the Claremont, California, Friends Meeting had been refusing to pay the phone tax since the Vietnam War.
At the upcoming national gathering of NWTRCC at Earlham College in Richmond, Indiana, I’m going to be presenting a summary of the history of war tax resistance in the Society of Friends (Quakers).
Today I’m going to try to coalesce some of the notes I’ve assembled about the renaissance of Quaker war tax resistance during the Cold War.
Much of what I have assembled here comes from my close look at the archives of the Friends Journal, the only Quaker publication from this period I have reviewed thoroughly, and so whatever editorial biases that publication may have had may also bias my history of this phase.
There is a lot that happens in this short period of time, and in some places my narrative is going to be condensed into a bunch of bullet-point-like summaries of the rapid-fire events to try to keep up with it all.
The Renaissance ()
The modern war tax resistance movement began in the wake of World War Ⅱ in the United States.
There had been isolated war tax resisters here and there in other places in recent years, and there was a quiet war tax resistance tendency hiding under the surface of the Society of Friends, but things did not come out into the open in any organized and growing fashion until then.
Quakers were not in the forefront of this movement, but Quaker war tax resisters took courage from it, and it wasn’t long before they began trying to reestablish the war tax resistance traditions in the Society of Friends.
The earliest mention of this that I have found from this period concerns Franklin Zahn of the Pacific Yearly Meeting, who was distributing a leaflet on war tax resistance as early as .
A report on the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting that year noted that the subject of war taxes had come up and had led to what sounds like a long and earnest discussion:
Few present felt it right to refuse to pay, nor yet felt comfortable to pay.
Varied suggestions were presented: Send an accompanying letter expressing one’s feeling about war; live so simply that income is below tax level; make no report, but once a year send a check for nonmilitary purposes; engage in peace walks and other minority demonstrations; follow Jesus’ example of rendering unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s; beware of taking for granted the evils deplored, such as riding on military planes; associate more closely with the Mennonites, who share Friends’ concerns; rise above one’s own shortcomings through personal devotion; work to unite with all Friends Yearly Meetings in refusal to pay taxes.
Nothing can be done unless there is a willingness to suffer unto death.[!]
The blinders put on during the Great Forgetting period were still evident.
An article in a issue of the Friends Journal described “refusal to pay taxes for support of war effort emerging as a new testimony” [my emphasis].
Another article from the same issue, titled “The Quaker Peace Testimony: Some Suggestions for Witness and Rededication” didn’t mention taxes at all.
By this time some Friends in Switzerland had been refusing to pay war taxes (I would guess, under the tutelage of Pierre Cérésole).
In some Quakers in the Pacific Yearly Meeting began to sketch out the initial drafts of a legislative “peace tax” proposal which they envisioned would be a way for conscientious objectors to pay their taxes into a fund that the government could only spend on non-military items.
The idea that there might be a legislative solution that could make tax-paying no longer an act of complicity with war would bob up throughout this period, until, by the end of it, the temptation of lobbying instead of committing to direct action would contribute to the eventual decline of war tax resistance in the Society of Friends.
also, the Yellow Springs Monthly Meeting issued a statement of support for war tax resisters, the first example of new institutional support for war tax resistance in the Society of Friends that I could find from the 20th century.
In there was a burst of excitement about war tax resistance in the Baltimore Yearly Meeting (yet a survey of 350 adults from that meeting found only two or three who were willing to consider actually becoming resisters; whereas almost half of those surveyed were totally unconcerned about their tax money going to the military).
A group of about twenty Quakers, organized by Clarence Pickett and Henry Cadbury, met at the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting to discuss war tax resistance, but they were unable to come up with a consensus statement.
Quaker war tax resister Arthur Evans was imprisoned for three months for his tax refusal.
In the Friends Journal ended what strikes me as a policy of editorial embarrassment about Quakers and war tax resistance by publishing its first article devoted to the practice, and one that also full-throatedly advocated it.
This started a debate in the letters-to-the-editor column and certainly caused more Quakers to confront the question, directly or indirectly.
By the tide was shifting rapidly.
Before this time, individual Quaker tax resisters are unusual enough to highlight individually as being on the cutting-edge; after this, Quaker war tax resistance becomes commonplace enough that individual resisters are exemplars of a larger trend.
In the New York Yearly Meeting promoted war tax resistance in an official statement, and promised financial assistance for any Quakers in the Meeting who might be forced to change jobs or to suffer other financial hardship for their stand.
The statement in part read:
We call upon Friends to examine their consciences concerning whether they cannot more fully dissociate themselves from the war machine by tax refusal or changing occupations.
That was the most concrete advocacy of war tax resistance by a Quaker institution in years.
Franklin Zahn wrote a booklet on Early Friends and War Taxes to reintroduce Quakers to their own history and to further banish the Great Forgetting.
The support from Quaker institutions and publications at this point is often noncommittal and is usually vague about exactly how to go about war tax resistance, which taxes to resist, and how to deal with government reprisals.
There is nothing like the specific, concrete discipline of earlier Quaker Meetings.
This means that Quaker war tax resisters from this period are largely making it up as they go along, conferring with each other informally and organizing, when they are organizing, in groups like Peacemakers, the War Resisters League, and the Committee for Non-Violent Action — that is to say, with non-Quaker groups.
(There was briefly something called the “Committee for Nonpayment of War Taxes” run out of Quaker war tax resister Margaret G. Bowman’s home in , but I have not found much about it.)
Quakers were using a broad variety of tax resistance tactics.
Arthur Evans and Neil Haworth refused to pay some or all of their income taxes or to cooperate with an IRS summons for their financial records.
Johan Eliot redirected twice the amount of his taxes to the United Nations to promote international federalism as a world peace strategy.
Clarissa & Samuel Cooper lowered their family income below the tax line.
John L.P. Maynard and Robert W. Eaton took pay cuts that reduced their incomes to the maximum allowable before federal income tax withholding was mandatory.
Lyle Snyder stopped withholding by declaring three million dependents on his W-4 forms.
Alfred & Connie Andersen stopped filing income tax returns.
Some Quakers fled to Canada as taxpatriates to join the draft evaders there.
Others deposited their taxes into escrow accounts and invited the IRS to seize the accounts while refusing to pay voluntarily.
Lloyd C. Shank advocated “the ‘sneaky’ way” of tax resistance — what many people would call tax evasion — saying “ ‘cheating’ is only an oppressive government’s name for a good man’s refusal to murder.”
Phone tax resistance was beginning to become widespread, and many Quaker meetings began resisting this tax on their office phones (one meeting was unable to reach consensus on resisting the phone tax and compromised by dropping its phone service entirely).
People too timid to resist, and meetings unable to reach consensus on resisting, might instead write their legislators to urge them to enact some form of legal conscientious objection to military taxation.
The most timid groups, like the American Friends Service Committee, urged people to pay taxes “under protest” or to match their war tax payments with additional payments to the AFSC.
Robert E. Dickinson had perhaps the most creative tactic of the bunch.
He designed and built a set of furniture for his home that was formed of interlocking sheets of plywood such that it could be quickly disassembled and hidden away.
He called this “my tax refusal furniture” and meant it to frustrate IRS attempts to seize furnishings from him for back taxes.
Two Quaker employees of two groups within the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting asked their employers to stop withholding income tax from their paychecks, and that Meeting tried to come up with a good policy to follow in such cases.
The fourth Friends World Conference was held in .
The “Protest and Direct Action group” there “called upon Friends in countries party to the [Vietnam] conflict to ‘go as far as conscience dictates in withholding support from their governments’ war-making machinery,’ first by direct communication with those against whom the protest is made, and then if necessary by public witness and individual action, including the possibility of refusal to pay taxes for war.”
U.S. President Johnson called for a 10% income tax surcharge explicitly to fund the Vietnam War.
This would be the first explicit “war tax” (other than, arguably, the phone tax) since World War Ⅱ, and its announcement prompted renewed interest in war tax resistance inside and outside the Society of Friends.
Quakers were, because of this tax, better-enabled to quote the discipline of early Quakers on refusal to pay explicit war taxes as a way of explaining their own stands.
In 203 delegates from “nineteen Yearly Meetings, eight Quaker colleges, fifteen Friends secondary schools, the American Friends Service Committee National Board and its twelve regional offices, and nine other peace or directly-related organizations” met in Richmond, Indiana, to draft a “Declaration on the Draft and Conscription.”
Part of this declaration mentioned the war tax concern:
We call on Friends everywhere to recognize the oppressive burden of militarism and conscription.
We acknowledge our complicity in these evils in ways sometimes silent and subtle, at times painfully apparent.
We are under obligation as children of God and members of the Religious Society of Friends to break the yoke of that complicity.
We also recognize that the problem of paying war taxes has intensified; this compels us to find realistic ways to refuse to pay these taxes.
After only of thaw, some seventy years of Great Forgetting have been melted away, and the Society of Friends has again reached a consensus that Quakers are compelled to refuse to pay war taxes.
President Johnson’s war surtax went into effect in , adding a 7.5% surtax to the income tax returns for , and 10% for (the tax would be extended at a reduced rate into and then abandoned).
Meetings all across the country were discussing and passing minutes on war tax resistance, though few would advocate it in specific and unreserved ways, most choosing instead to voice expressions of unspecified “approval and loving support” for Quakers who felt compelled to resist.
In , the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting passed a relatively strong minute stating:
Refusal to pay the military portion of taxes is an honorable testimony, fully in keeping with the history and practices of Friends…
We warmly approve of people following their conscience, and openly approve civil disobedience in this matter under Divine compulsion.
We ask all to consider carefully the implications of paying taxes that relate to war-making…
Specifically, we offer encouragement and support to people caught up in the problem of seizure, and of payment against their will.
The New York Yearly Meeting decided to begin resisting corporately by refusing to honor liens on the salaries of tax resisting employees (though it could not reach consensus on a refusal to withhold income tax from such employees), and, , by refusing to pay its own phone tax.
The American Friends Service Committee finally decided to do something concrete about the war tax question, but it was a little odd.
They withheld and paid taxes from a war tax resisting employee and then sued the government for a refund.
The strange structure of their process seems to have been a very deliberate way to structure a legal suit for maximum effectiveness, and it did (briefly) show some success.
A court ruled in , on First Amendment freedom-of-religion grounds, that the government could not force the organization to pay the taxes of an objecting employee — alas, the Supreme Court almost immediately, and overwhelmingly, overturned this.
Also in , Susumu Ishitani, a Japanese Quaker, formed a war tax resistance group in Japan — the first example I am aware of from Asia.
By , the Friends Journal’s coverage of war tax resistance is less occupied with advocacy, debate, and the presentation of individual exemplars, and is more concerned with the practical aspects of how Quakers are going about it.
The editorial stance shifts again, to one of more forthright advocacy.
It is assumed that Quakers want to avoid paying war taxes, and the question is how to do so well.
The ending of the U.S. war on Vietnam did not seem to slow the enthusiasm for war tax resistance.
In the Friends Journal devoted an issue to the subject for the first time.
In Robert Anthony began another attempt to get the courts to legalize conscientious objection to military taxation.
It went nowhere, but notably, in a letter to the court, his monthly meeting wrote:
We assert that the free exercise of the Quaker religion entails the avoidance of any participation in war or financial contribution to that part of the national budget used by the military.
If not exaggerated for effect, this statement would be among the strongest yet articulated by a Quaker institution in this renaissance period — not simply expressing support for war tax resisters, or encouraging Friends to consider resisting, but asserting that to practice the Quaker religion necessarily meant to refuse to pay war taxes.
In , Quakers met with their Brethren and Mennonite counterparts to draft a joint statement that encouraged war tax resistance — the “New Call to Peacemaking.”
The Philadelphia Yearly Meeting asked its ongoing representative meeting to draft some formal guidance for Quaker war tax resisters for how they should go about it, and to set up an alternative fund to hold and redirect resisted taxes.
(New England Yearly Meeting began its own alternative fund for resisted taxes .)
By this time war tax resistance is a core part of any discussion of the Quaker peace testimony, and there are increasing calls for Meetings to resist taxes as an institution.
In the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting approved a minute on war tax resistance that pulled its punches a bit:
Our strength and our security are derived from our belief in the reality of a loving God and the oneness of that of God in all people.
In order to say yes to this belief, we must seriously consider saying no to payment of war taxes.
This “seriously consider” compares poorly to discipline of times past (e.g. “a tax levied for the purchasing of drums, colors, or for other warlike uses, cannot be paid consistently with our Christian testimony” [Ohio Yearly Meeting, 1819]).
It also, some Quakers point out, sometimes pales next to the more direct and certain advice from some meetings that young Quaker men resist the draft.
As more Quakers and Meetings feel the pressure to take a stand on war taxes, the more timid ones are increasingly desperate to find ways to do so without actually having to resist.
Silly ideas, like writing “not for military spending” in the memo field of their tax payment checks, and “peace tax fund” ideas proliferate.
By , Quakers in Canada and Australia are floating their own peace tax fund legislation ideas.
Meanwhile, Quakers in England seem to have gotten the tax resisting bug.
The Friends World Committee for Consultation and London Yearly Meeting stopped withholding income taxes from twenty-five war tax resisting employees in , putting the money in escrow.
(This resistance was short-lived; after losing a legal appeal in , they went back to withholding.)
In war tax resistance, according to Friends Journal reports, was a “major preoccupation” of the London Yearly Meeting, and a “burning concern” at the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting (where “unity could not be achieved”).
Lake Erie Yearly Meeting encouraged its Monthly Meetings “to establish meetings for sufferings to aid war tax resisters.”
Pacific Yearly Meeting started an alternative fund.
Smaller Monthly and Quarterly meetings around the country were beginning to take even stronger stands.
The Minneapolis and Twin Cities Meetings approved a minute that asked “all members of our meetings to practice some form of war tax resistance”!
The Davis (California) meeting passed a similar minute.
Monthly Meetings are assembling “clearness committees” to help each other find responses to the war tax problem that are appropriate to their conscientious “leadings.”
also, the Friends General Conference promoted the idea of Quakers giving interest-free loans to them, a thinly-veiled (not explicitly stated) way of hiding assets from IRS:
…Friends loan money to F.G.C. at no interest, which F.G.C. invests to earn income which is used to support the varied programs of the Conference, such as publications, religious education curricula, and the ongoing nurture program.
These loans provide regular dependable monthly income to the Conference, and reduce the interest income on which the lender must pay federal income taxes, while providing the lender with protection against unforeseen financial reversals.
F.G.C. will repay the principal amount within 30 days after receiving a written request from the lender.
All principal amounts are kept in insured investments.
In the Friends Journal, now edited by a war tax resister, devoted another issue to the subject.
Non-resisting Quakers were now very much on the defensive.
One complained that at the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting , taxpaying Quakers like him “were compared to the Quaker slaveholders of , and not a dissenting voice was raised,” but even he had to acknowledge that war tax resistance was “in the mainstream of Quaker thought, and therefore entitled to support from Quaker bodies.”
The meeting itself though could only agree to issue another minute that would “not urge” Friends to resist, but would “give strong support” to those who did.
In , the Friends World Committee for Consultation held a war tax resistance conference in Washington, D.C., and formed a standing “Friends Committee on War Tax Concerns.”
, they held a conference for Quaker organizations that had war tax resisting employees.
The conference was attended by 35 people, including representatives from 21 such organizations.
They were united by an interest in supporting the war tax resistance of their employees in an open and honest fashion, in a way that included the redirection of the resisted taxes to beneficial causes, and that used the “clearness committee” process.
You definitely get the feeling that momentum is building and Quaker war tax resistance is having a vigorous revival.
Unfortunately, though, it seems to me that this is the high-water mark.
In surprisingly little time the tide will begin to recede.
But there is still some forward progress to be made.
In the London Yearly Meeting declared:
We are convinced by the Spirit of God to say without any hesitation whatsoever that we must support the right of conscientious objection to paying taxes for war purposes…
We ask Meeting for Sufferings to explore further and with urgency the role our religious society should corporately take in this concern and then to take such action as it sees necessary on our behalf.
The Friends United Meeting adopted a policy of not withholding taxes from resisting employees as well.
The Philadelphia Yearly Meeting soon followed suit, and refused to withhold federal taxes from three war tax resisters on the payroll (after a legal battle, they would pay “under duress” ).
The Baltimore Yearly Meeting also adopted such a policy, in .
In another conference for employers of tax resisting employees was held, this one expanded to include Mennonite and Church of the Brethren employers.
The Friends Journal got an IRS levy on the salary of its editor, and it devoted a third issue to the topic of war tax resistance.
Some Quakers begin using the tax resistance tactic in the service of other causes, such as opposition to capital punishment or nuclear power.
In an early sign of the receding of the war tax resistance tide, the Friends World Committee for Consultation retired its “Friends Committee on War Tax Concerns” in favor of a “Committee on Peace Concerns.”
From here, sadly, it’s pretty much all downhill.
In the next and final segment of this series on the history of Quaker war tax resistance, I’ll try to describe and explore the second “forgetting.”
Here are a few more items concerning tax resistance that I found in back issues
from of Friends
Bulletin, the journal of the Pacific Yearly Meeting of Quakers.
The issue included an announcement
from the Orange County Monthly Meeting of
the launch of “The Conscience and Military Tax Resolution.”
This sort of thing is frequently proposed in modern war tax resistance circles,
but has yet to show much success. In this incarnation people who “are not ready
to resist now” could sign on to the resolution to “show that you are at least
ready to begin when 100,000 others agree to do so.” Once that target was
reached, signers of the Resolution would begin to refuse to pay at least a
certain percentage of their taxes. The goal of this was to pressure the
government into passing “the World Peace Tax Fund Bill or similar legislation
which would provide a legal alternative for taxpayers morally opposed to war.”
The issue had several items on
war tax resistance, beginning with this statement and commentary:
We express our love for God and all the peoples of this earth. A vital act of
this love is to refuse cooperation with registration for the draft and
payment of our tax money for war. We testify against rendering unto Caesar
that which is God’s. We, the individuals who serve on the Pacific Yearly
Meeting Peace Committee, join with those Friends who refuse to cooperate with
war taxes and registration. As a result of this call, we have chosen to
protest war taxes, some refusing at least a “Token Ten” dollars.
Friend — what canst thou say?
Lonnie Valentine
Betsy Eberhart
Gladis Innerst
Mike Turner
Ellen Lyon
Duane Magill
Franklin Zahn
Ed Flowers
Bonnie Wells
The above statement, written by the Pacific Yearly Meeting Peace Committee and
others came with labor over several minutes on conscription and peace from
monthly meetings as well as Friends General Conference
minute, Philadelphia Yearly
Meeting’s statement, and Sarasota Monthly Meeting’s Statement of Peace. The
intent was a minute of action in which our Peace Testimony would be not just
words but applied to our lives in .
Two suggestions came out of a subsequent threshing session: 1) that the
statement be made available for others to sign and 2) that the Peace Committee
be available to labor with monthly meetings on this statement.
All monthly meetings have previously received Franklin Zahn’s “War Taxes–Minus
a Token Ten” of which develops the
idea and makes suggestions on alternative uses of the token ten dollars. In
essence, withholding $10.00 in objection to the federal government’s use of
our tax money for war is similar to withholding the
U.S. Tax from
telephone bills which was done during the Vietnam War.
I am raising the question within monthly meetings and among Peace Committee
members whether
PYM Peace
Committee should sponsor a weekend conference at Quaker Center. Your
suggestions and/or responses would be appreciated.
Also, I hope that monthly meetings, meanwhile, are taking advantage of Lonnie
Valentine’s availability to provide workshops on War Tax Objection.
In peace and love,
Ellen Lyon, Clerk
PYM Peace
Committee
How can we who are above the draft age support Friends faced with
registration? In Our Peace Testimony it says:
Our witness to the way of peace requires that we refuse military service of
any kind, and challenges us to consider whether we can in any way submit to
that involuntary servitude which is conscription. Friends should work to
abolish state conscription — whether for military or other purposes — and
should refuse personally to cooperate with the draft.
Since many of us do not have this opportunity to refuse to register for the
draft, we must look to those other ways in which we can refuse cooperation
with the draft.
One way is refusing registration of our money for war through the taxation
system. When we willingly submit a tax form, we are supporting registration
for the draft; when we willingly pay taxes of which over half is used for war,
we are supporting registration for the draft. When we do these things, we are
withdrawing support from Friends who are refusing to register for the draft.
Therefore, one unequivocal way we who are above draft age can support Friends
resisting the draft is to resist payment of those taxes which, in part, go for
registration and conscription.
If we recognize our “involvement in militarism through the payment of taxes
used for military purposes” but do not act to end such involvement, then are
we not hypocritical to tell Friends faced with registration to refuse military
service? If draft age Friends take the Peace Testimony to heart and refuse to
cooperate with the draft, then is it not time that we who are no longer of
that age refuse to cooperate with the drafting of our money for war?
Perhaps our Peace Testimony states what we believe too rigidly when it calls
on Friends to refuse cooperation with the draft. Perhaps, however, the
testimony does not state what we believe with regard to the payment of war
taxes strongly enough. If we agree that we should refuse cooperation with the
draft, then it is time we should refuse cooperation with war taxes.
That issue also included this on-point notice from one Quarterly Meeting:
In these times of draft registration and military buildup, many persons may be
led to actions in harmony with the Quaker Peace Testimony. College Park
Quarterly Meeting supports those who feel spiritually led, for reasons of
conscience, to perform such actions, including non-registration for the draft
and war tax refusal.
A letter to the editor from Walter Klein
in that issue suggested that Quakers, instead of resisting war taxes, should
pay twice their normal tax, but pay the extra amount for a non-military
purpose, perhaps one chosen as a group. “It would be legal, it would be a
statement of conscience, wars and armament would continue; but the message
might be loud and clear and perhaps more effective.” He suggested the program
be called “ ‘The Better Use of Government’ Fund or
‘BUG’ Fund
for short.”
Lonnie Valentine reminded Quakers of their historical tradition of war tax
resistance in the issue:
A.J. Muste once remarked that “The two decisive powers of the government
with respect to war are the power to conscript and the power to tax.” Now it
can be claimed that the government’s ability to wage war depends decisively
upon its power to tax. After all, our nuclear age began beneath one airplane,
twelve men, and millions of drafted tax dollars.
As early as American Friends recognized the
connection between taxes and war. In an epistle to Pennsylvania Friends, John
Woolman, John Churchman, and others wrote:
As we cannot be concerned with wars and fighting, so neither ought we to
contribute thereto… though some part of the money be raised… is said to be
for such benevolent purposes, as supporting our friendship with our Indian
neighbors, and relieving the distresses of our fellow-subjects… we could most
cheerfully contribute to those purposes, if they were not so mixed, that we
cannot in the manner proposed, show our hearty concurrence therewith, without
at the same time assenting to… practices, which we apprehend contrary to the
testimony which the Lord hath given us to bear…
Indeed, the Friends’ clear apprehension of the connection of money and war was
reflected in the Constitutional debates (about whether to include a
conscientious objector amendment) with regard to the conscription of men and
money. Roger Sherman of Connecticut remarked that “It is well know that those
who are religiously scrupulous of bearing arms, are equally scrupulous of
getting substitutes or paying an equivalent. Many of them would rather die
then do either one or the other.” How much are we now ready to do for our
scruples about conscription?
If we were all to be subject to the military draft in the next war, we would
not pay a fee to hire someone in our place. However, we seem to have forgotten
that with the payment of taxes we are hiring substitutes. We are paying to
have someone go in our place. In being unable to say “No!” to the payment of
taxes used to register and conscript others, we nullify our ability to say
“No!” in other ways. After all, the government cares little if we leaflet post
offices, learn draft counseling, or even advocate draft resistance as long as
we continue to pay our taxes. Simply put, when we pay our taxes, we enable the
government to conscript.
If other Friends are concerned enough about conscription to contemplate saying
“No!” to the drafting of our tax dollars, please write me at 27122 Cipres,
Mission Viejo, CA
92692 to let me know [sic] about the many ways we can protest and
resist paying war taxes. Also, please feel free to ask those Friendly
questions about justifying suffering for such a witness!
Joshua Evans reflected my feelings long ago when he said: “I found it best for
me to refuse paying demands on my estate which went to paying the expenses of
war, and although my part might appear at best a drop in the ocean, yet the
ocean, I considered, was made of many drops.” Are there other Friends who are
willing to be drops in this ocean?
[Lonnie Valentine has travelled in the ministry among Friends in Pacific
Yearly Meeting this past year under the auspices of the Fund for Concerns to
share with Friends his concerns about paying taxes for war.]
A letter from Harold Waterhouse
in the same issue warned Quakers against making their war tax resistance “an
act so private in nature that sometimes its sole impact falls on some harassed
IRS clerk
[and, a]s an act of witness… is chiefly between us and God.” While such an act
“relieves our conscience… if it reduces our drive for peace to the point that
we fail to act in more effective ways, then war-tax-withholding, on balance, is
counter-productive.”
A letter from David & Janet Hartsough to the
IRS,
reprinted in the issue, explained why
the Hartsoughs were refusing outright to pay $10.40 of their federal taxes
(redirecting that to the Oakland Catholic Worker “to feed the hungry and house
the homeless”), and paying the remaining $747.60 but in the form of a check
made out to the Department of Health and Human Services instead of to the
U.S. Treasury, in
the hopes of thereby keeping the money out of the hands of the Defense
Department.
A letter from Elinor Gene Hoffman to the
IRS,
reprinted in the issue, explained why
she was withholding 33⅓% of her taxes (“approximately the amount we are
spending for future wars and present armaments”), redirecting them “to
organizations I believe are dedicated to peace and to furthering life on this
planet,” and declaring this on her tax return as a “Quaker Peace Witness” tax
credit. She wrote, in part:
Please observe that by withholding only one-third of my taxes, I demonstrate
my willingness to pay for past wars and veterans’ benefits. I believe we
should honor past debts and that veterans of all wars should receive our
cherishing care.…
I take this stand in full recognition of the many benefits we all derive from
our representative form of government and the freedoms it enables me to enjoy.
But I firmly believe nothing good my government has done or will do can endure
if we do not halt our military pollution of the planet.
A reprinted letter from DeAnne Butterfield and John Huyler,
Jr. of Boulder Meeting to
the IRS
explained why they were withholding 39% of their taxes and declaring a
credit in a similar manner to Hoffman’s action explained above. Excerpt:
We hope most fervently that legal options (such as the proposed World
Peace Tax Fund) may be available in the future and would gladly pay into
such a fund. Until then we see war tax refusal as the only avenue which
allows us to follow our religious principles.
We welcome your scrutiny of this return. You will find that we have been
forthright and complete to the best of our ability. Furthermore, we hope
that this commitment on our parts can be a useful catalyst for dialogue.
We will welcome you our your agents into our home in hopes that,
together, in a spirit of mutual concern and respect, we may discover
better ways to bring about an end to all wars.
A note appended to this letter added: “Through the efforts of DeAnne
Butterfield, John Huyler, and others, Boulder Meeting adopted a one-year
trial program of reducing war taxes and diverting them to peaceful uses
through hiring a part-time Peace Secretary who will help stimulate activity
in the Meeting and in the community.” (See
♇ 7 June 2018 for more information
about this.)
A reprinted letter from Gerald Morsello of Eugene Meeting to the
IRS
explained his tax refusal, which involved redirecting “a portion of my
Federal Income Tax” to “the Oregon Urban Rural Credit Union for use by
people most affected by recent Federal domestic budget cuts.” He said he
was doing this although he would prefer “to be able to place the money I
owe the Federal government in a legally recognized alternative, such as the
World Peace Tax Fund.”
An letter from Constance Jolly of the Berkeley Meeting to the
IRS,
excerpted from the newsletter of the National Council for a World Peace Tax
Fund, explained her redirection of 35% of her taxes to “an organization
that works for peaceful reconciliation, for human rights, and for
disarmament.” Excerpt:
I am not one who breaks the law lightly, but for me the law that commands
its citizens to do evil is less binding than the higher law that commands
that “Thou shalt not kill.”
An announcement for an upcoming conference on “A Religious Response to
Growing Militarism” sponsored by College Park Quarterly Meeting said that
it “will be a nurturing and supportive gathering for those Friends and
others who are facing issues related to draft and tax resistance,
[etc.]”
A note read:
The 1981 Tax Resistance issue of Newsletter is
available (40¢ each) from 331 17th
Ave.
E., Seattle
WA 94112. Contents
include information about forms of tax resistance or refusal, possible
penalties, resources for decision-making, a national listing of
counselors, Centers, and Alternative Funds.
Those contents sound like the sort of stuff
NWTRCC
puts out nowadays. But
NWTRCC
wasn’t founded until , so I don’t know
who was putting out such a newsletter in
.
An article concerning statements by Episcopalian and Catholic bishops on
nuclear weapons included this section:
[I]n Archbishop Raymond G.
Hunthausen of Seattle proposed that “a sizable number of people in the
state” undertake a taxpayers revolt to protest the buildup in nuclear
arms. He argued that refusing to pay fifty per cent of income taxes “in
resistance to nuclear murder and suicide” would be “a definite step
toward total disarmament… Our paralyzed political process needs that
catalyst of nonviolent action based on faith. We have to refuse to give
incense — in our day tax dollars — to our nuclear idol.”
Brief summaries of the activities of various meetings included such notices
as these:
“Conscience and Military Tax Campaign [and] Consequences of Tax Refusal”
were among topics on the agenda of University Meeting’s “study
hour.”
“Eugene friends held a threshing session on tax resistance: ‘No consensus
was sought, and the Meeting was clearly divided on this difficult
issue.’ ”
“Conscription of Taxes” was discussed by the Phoenix Meeting in the
context of “discussions growing out of the New Call to Peacemaking
statement.”
The Friends Committee on War Tax Concerns is well on the way to working itself
out of a job. The committee was established early in
to accomplish three tasks: (1) to publish a
guidebook on war tax concerns; (2) to encourage consultation on war tax issues
throughout the Society of Friends; and (3) to develop queries and advices for
Quaker employers.
The proposed guidebook has become a series of pamphlets and a bibliography.
Three of the pamphlets, the ones on Quaker history and recent statements of
Friends, on the Biblical basis for conscientious objection to war taxes, and
on the spiritual and rational bases for war tax concerns, should be in print
by , along with the bibliography.
In mid-continent and mid- there will be
a conference for employers. Invitations will be sent to schools and religious
organizations operated by all the groups participating in the New Call to
Peacemaking. About 100 people are expected to gather and explore the positions
that can be adopted vis à vis the Internal Revenue Service
and the range of possible solutions to problems which may arise.
Two regional conferences, “Money and Conscience” and “Paying for War/Paying
for Peace,” were held in . Both were very
successful. Several more are planned for .
FCWTC
will provide resource material and assistance with program planning for
conferences wherever there are Friends who recognize the importance of war tax
issues and are willing to do the basic planning and arrangements. I hope this
means some of us.
Each of us on the committee represents a different Friends organization. Most
of us refuse to pay some or all of the taxes that pay for war. However, the
committee is concerned with “concerns,” not just resistance. We believe that
all Friends should go as far as they can, but not all are called to go in the
same direction. What aspect of this explosive issue do you most want to learn
more about, discuss with other Friends, make the subject of a conference? If
you can’t give time, can you give money? The basic program of the committee is
to prepare resource materials, distribute them where they are needed, help
people with similar problems and concerns to get in touch with each other and
then to lay the committee down, probably about .
I will try to get to any meeting in Southern California (maybe further) and
hope to get to Intermountain Yearly Meeting in
(Anne Friend, 836
N. Beaudry, № 5, Los
Angeles, CA 90012).
Lon Fendall at the Center for Peace Learning, Newberg,
OR 97132, is willing to
visit some meetings in North Pacific Yearly Meeting, as way opens, and/or to
help plan a conference. Linda Coffin is the staff at FCWTC,
P.O. Box 6441,
Washington,
D.C. 20009.
Any of us would like to hear from you.
If April 15 is getting to you more every year, think about what you can do
about it. And while you’re thinking about it, do something to get others
thinking about it, too.
Today I’ll look at war tax resistance among American Brethren in 1963 by hunting through the archives of Brethren periodicals.
In the issue of the Gospel Messenger, John Forbes introduced the idea of a form of tax resistance as a symbolic protest, rather than as a conscientious imperative (source):
Suggestions for Taxpayers
For the benefit of the readers of the Messenger and all others across the Brotherhood interested in the peace position, I would like to quote three statements and make a suggestion.
“We urge the Brethren Service Commission to continue its efforts to develop an acceptable proposal for an alternative tax arrangement” (Report of GBB to Annual Conference, adopted).
“My feeling has been that the initiative on this has to come from taxpayers around the country rather than from any organized effort here in Washington… that until there is widespread nonpayment of taxes by those opposed to war, there will be no change in government policy” (Edward F. Snyder, Friends Committee on National Legislation, letter to the undersigned ).
“I am as convinced as ever that all those who are opposed to preparations for nuclear extermination and who will owe any federal income tax should refuse some token amount.
I suggest holding back $10, an amount large enough to be noticed but small enough to avoid excessive penalty.
When Internal Revenue took $14.49 from my bank account, the ‘statutary addition’ was only 21 cents.
The year before, when I owed $5.90, it did not bother to collect at all.
“This ‘token ten’ could be given to some constructive project, and IRS so informed in a letter explaining the objection to over half of it being otherwise used for destruction.
Enough pacifists are interested in this, I feel, to make it become a significant force for peace” (Franklin Zahn to editor of the Peacemaker, ).
I think everyone in the Church of the Brethren with a concern for peace should take up this suggestion and apply it when income tax is due in April, if they can.
I am willing to act as coordinator of this project, if one is needed and someone in Elgin doesn’t want the job.
If enough Brethren and others take this action now, we shall surely see action in Congress or in the Treasury Department before long.
In a “Brethren Ministers’ Peace Retreat” was held.
The Church teachings on pacifism and peacemaking were given a thorough going-over.
Dale Aukerman reported on the retreat in the issue (source).
Aukerman had himself come out as a war tax resister (see ♇ 31 May 2020), so he would likely have been attuned to any mention of it, but except for one mention of Civil War-era refusal to hire substitutes for military service (but payment of tax), his article on the Retreat is silent on the issue of taxes.
The issue published a brief dispatch about Quaker war tax resister Arthur Evans (source), but a more in-depth dispatch appeared in the Brethren Evangelist so I’ll save it for that section, below.
The minister of the Unitarian Universalist church in San Anselmo Calif., has declined to pay sixty-one percent of his federal income tax on the grounds that it would go for “carefully planned machinery to kill millions of human beings.”
The Dutch-born pastor, Karel F. Botermans, who was a leader in the Netherlands underground during the Nazi occupation, sent the remaining thirty-nine percent of his tax to the Internal Revenue Service.
In the protest letter he sent to President Kennedy and Secretary of Defense McNamara he asserted the belief that he had international law on his side.
He referred to the Nurnberg trials, “where it was stated by our Allied judges that, in actions of genocide, every person in that society involved in those actions is to be held responsible.”
The pacifist clergyman points out that he would gladly pay the withheld sixty-one percent of his tax if the U.S. pledged to spend the money for other methods of settling international differences.
In the issue, O.E. Gibson raised a series of questions about conscientious objection, suitable for consideration by Brethren.
Several of these concerned war funding, and the others seemed designed to guide the consideration of those (source).
Excerpt:
Is there a difference in principle in supporting one’s government as a soldier and supporting its war plans with money?
Are those persons in the U.S. (some forty or fifty) who are openly refusing to give their money in tax to support the military plans of our government more radical or less realistic than the conscientious objectors who would not submit to the draft in World War Ⅰ?
Allowing that refusal may mean much more than a few months in prison — that it may mean a complete change in one’s way or standard of living as is the case with most of those who are refusing, should we condemn or should we uphold them?
Would history or reason suggest that a law allowing that one might divert his tax money into religious or peace work be passed by our Congress without a comparable amount of suffering as that endured to get our “alternative service” law?
The issue of The Brethren Evangelist printed a wire service article about Quaker war tax resister Arthur Evans:
Colorado Springs, Colo. (EP)—
A Colorado Quaker who long has refused voluntary payment of that portion of his federal taxes earmarked for military spending plans the same course of action .
For 20 years, Dr. Arthur Evans, a Denver physician, has donated the amount of money equal to his tax burden of military spending to a charity and has sent the receipt to the Internal Revenue Service.
Every year the IRS attaches his bank account, collects the amount due and adds a 6 per cent interest charge.
, because the IRS was “using the information I was voluntarily giving for evil purposes,” Dr. Evans did not file any federal return.
To make up for his tax liability, the physician sent the IRS five checks for $200 each — payable to the United Nations, the Peace Corps, and the AID Program.
Dr. Evans contends he is meeting his obligation by contributing to organizations such as the United Nations, which are supported at least in part by the U.S. government.
The IRS, in returning the checks, stated “they have no connection with any tax liability and cannot be accepted by this office.”
The Quaker, who terms military spending as a “Doomsday Machine,” continues to pay his state income taxes because they have no military spending connection.
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.
![No Income Tax For War! Now Particularly the U.S. War in Vietnam. Statement: Because so much of the tax paid the federal government goes for poisoning of food crops, blasting of villages, napalming and killing of thousands upon thousands of people, as in Vietnam at the present time, I am not going to pay taxes on 1966 income. Name ___. Address ___. [In order to withdraw support from war, particularly the savage and expanding war in Southeast Asia– Some are refusing to pay their total tax, or some portion. ☐ Some have in advance lowered their income so as to owe none. ☐ (for our information, would you like to check which form of nonpayment you are following?) NOTE: There are laws which (although not usually applied to principled refusers) cover possible fine and jail term for non-payment of a legally-owed amount.]](noIncomeTaxForWar.png)
