How you can resist funding the government →
the tax resistance movement →
birth of the modern American war tax resistance movement →
Richard Groff
I found a peek at the birth of the modern American tax resistance movement hidden away in a edition of the MANAS Journal which features the article “No Compromise:”
Among those taking a decisive position are a number of men calling themselves the “Peacemakers,” who met in Chicago last April and pledged themselves (1) to refuse to serve in the armed forces in either peace or war; (2) to refuse to make or transport weapons of war; (3) the refuse to be conscripted or to register; (4) to consider to refuse to pay taxes for war purposes — a position already adopted by some; (5) to spread the idea of peacemaking and to develop non-violent methods of opposing war through various forms of non-cooperation and to advocate unilateral disarmament and economic democracy.
(Reported in the Politics.)
The idea of non-payment of taxes has been put into practice by Ammon Hennacy, a Tolstoyan of Arizona, and by Mrs. Caroline Urie of Yellow Springs, Ohio (see MANAS, March 31), and possibly by others.
Milton Mayer, of the University of Chicago, who writes regularly for the Progressive and has contributed to Harper’s, the Saturday Evening Post and other magazines, has frequently written and spoken of this form of protest against war.
Walter Gormly, of Mt. Vernon, Iowa, finds the payment of taxes for war a violation of the principle established by the International Military Tribune which conducted the Nuremberg Trials.
The Tribune Charter identifies as a crime against peace, the “planning, preparation, initiating or waging of a war of aggression,” and in a letter to the Bureau of Internal Revenue Gormly asserts that the United States is doing just that “by maintaining bases, subservient governments and military forces from Korea to Turkey, by intensive research on methods of mass slaughter and by maintaining a huge military organization.”
As Section Ⅱ, Article B, of the Charter declares that “the fact that the defendant acted pursuant to order of his government or of a superior shall not free him from responsibility,” Mr. Gormly feels obliged, to avoid possible prosecution as a “war criminal,” to refuse to pay a federal income tax, a large part of which goes for preparation for war, and he has so informed the Federal Government.
The story of “Mrs. Caroline Urie of Yellow Springs, Ohio” is given in an earlier edition:
The determination of Mrs. Caroline Urie, social worker and widow of an American naval officer, to pay no taxes for war purposes will probably strike many Americans as an irrational attitude.
On , Mrs. Urie wrote President Truman announcing that she had deducted 34.6 per cent of her tax — the proportion she estimates is earmarked for war.
“If they want to send me to jail,” she said, “that’s all right with me… I’ll never pay any more money for war.”
Democracy, it will be argued, is a rational process.
Nobody likes war, and nobody likes income taxes, but we have to put up with both.
We have a Congress to decide these things, and if everyone could question the decisions of the Congress whenever he pleased, soon there would be no Government, no order, no national defense, no anything.
So Mrs. Urie is irrational.
But what, exactly, is she to do, feeling the way she does?
From where she stands, paying for a war is irrational.
Maybe she has read Morgenstern’s Pearl Harbor.
Maybe she is convinced that democracy means the right to have no part of killing anybody, for any reason, and to take the consequences of this position.
In her case, the consequences might be a jail sentence, although this may be doubted.
Mrs. Urie once worked with Jane Addams at Hull House.
For five years she was director of the School for Immigrant Children.
The Government may feel a little silly trying to put her in jail.
Maybe it should.
A week or so ago a leading news magazine blandly announced that a war with Russia is “in the cards,” not now, but later, when both nations are “ready.”
This was followed by a page of explanation telling why the war would be delayed.
Nobody wants a war, but there it is, and all the man-in-the-street can do is wait around …or so it seems. The news magazine also told what the war would mean — compulsory labor, compulsory financing, compulsory everything.
Compulsory death for millions was not mentioned — that is taken for granted, we suppose.
The news magazine said nothing about stopping the war.
It was just a nice, objective account for the American business man — what to expect, and when.
A visit to a large aircraft factory here on the Pacific Coast adds considerable local color to one’s sense of doom.
One plant, at least, seems to be making no commercial planes at all.
In the plant in question, 10,000 men working two shifts are turning out jet fighters and bombers as fast as they can.
The plant has Government contracts.
It’s all official, according to schedule, and absolutely democratic and rational.
But from Mrs. Urie’s viewpoint, it’s not rational at all.
She objects to buying death for somebody on a cost plus basis.
Thoreau had a similar idea, about a century ago.
Actually, there are two rationales in this problem: there is the rationale of a great nation getting ready for war, and the rationale of a lonely individual getting ready for peace.
So far as Mrs. Urie and her income tax are concerned, the democratic process is 34.6 per cent irrational, and she won’t go along.
This is her way of trying to be a good citizen and a good human being at the same time.
It is beginning to take some imagination.
A edition has a letter to the IRS (and an amusing recollection of a telephone conversation with an IRS agent) by tax resister Richard Groff.
Other issues of the journal include a review of Edmund Wilson’s The Cold War and the Income Tax, and a great deal of discussion of the work and thought of Gandhi and Thoreau.
I plan to spend some time browsing their free archives on-line in the coming days.
I’ve been reading through on-line copies of back issues of the journal MANAS over the past few weeks.
Not all of the articles are to my taste, but the ones that are I’m enjoying very much.
It reads much like a blog — the regular, plaintive and personal expression of a handful of people who feel strongly and want to express themselves to a small audience of the similarly-minded.
One of the things I like about the journal is that it has a sophisticated, secular and urgent concern with ethics and with the intersection of ethics and politics in the nuclear age.
It disappoints me that there isn’t more of this sort of exploration to be found today.
Sophisticated ethical discussion these days seems either to be abstract, academic and nearly impossible to read, or so thoroughly based within a particular religious tradition that it is hard to access from without.
Occasionally I’ll come across something on tax resistance in MANAS. Here’s one example, from (I’ve added some boldface emphasis to bits of especially-sharp rhetoric):
District Director of Internal Revenue
Philadelphia 7, Pa.
Dear Sir:
Enclosed you will find my Federal Income Tax return for , complete except for one detail:
I am refusing on conscientious grounds to pay my tax of $125.00.
You are entitled to an explanation for this refusal.
I do not intend to pay because I believe the use to which the greater part of my tax money would be put is morally wrong.
I refer of course to the preparation for war which is the major activity of the United States Government today.
That a third global war would spell the virtual end of human culture as we know it is a fact often repeated but seldom appreciated.
Those who obediently hand over their taxes to the government may well be financing the extermination of our species.
I decline to be a party to that act.
If one refuses to serve in the armed forces or to build the weapons of war (and I am one such person), how shall he justify his continuing to buy bombs and pay salaries that others may prepare to commit crimes against humanity?
Taxes for war are tithes paid to the devil.
It is not the principle of taxation to which I object.
If there were some practical way to pay that fraction of my tax which is to be used for constructive purposes, I would gladly do so.
But I cannot now see a way to accomplish this.
So I must refuse to pay any tax at all.
When we pause to consider the matter, we see that today our citizens are being presented with a fatal chain of cause and effect: the final link in this chain, a third World War, would be an unparalleled human catastrophe; the middle link is the fact that the most concentrated effort and greatest expenditure of our federal government is toward the preparation for this war; the first link is that the source of more than half these funds is the individual income tax.
What thoughtful person is not inwardly disturbed at contemplating his role in helping to forge this chain?
I for one mean to hold a chisel to that first link.
When two-thirds or more of the taxes demanded of me by the government is to be used to murder or at least to threaten to murder my fellow men on the other half of the globe, meanwhile contaminating with radioactive fallout all the earth and its creatures, it is just about time to draw the line, if indeed one ever intends to draw a line beyond which his honor will not allow him to pass in compromising with evil.
We are indifferent and morally insensible to the horrors that steal upon us by degrees.
Too late we may realize we have become helpless in their grip, as did doubtless many Germans under the Nazis.
Almost everyone is willing to agree that war is no solution to the problems of the world, that they should be met in a more creative way; yet almost no one is willing to act as if he believed this, which after all is the real measure of his belief.
Men have reason to suspect the worth of whatever must be guarded by terror and violence.
Not one fundamental human value need be defended, nor indeed can be defended, by the inflammatory threats and denunciations of our Department of State or the missiles and H-bombs of our Defense (sic) Department.
There is always the danger of mistaking the ugly symptoms for the disease itself, but if the chief enemy of man today is some institution, it is that of war itself, and not any mere form of government.
Man has only one defense against the horror weapons, and that defense is peace.
Not the so-called peace which is really only an interval during which to prepare for the next war, but that state of genuine brotherhood in which the concerns and loyalties of men transcend the arbitrary limitations of national boundaries and political ideologies and instead approach universal welfare as the only legitimate frame of reference when making the value judgments which every day are demanded of each of us.
In all candor I cannot predict that this ideal state of affairs will ever come to pass; but that melancholy fact in no way lessens the obligation we all share to work toward it in whatever way we feel we can.
Similarly, the fact that unjust deeds such as robberies and murders continue to be committed neither makes them just nor is it an acceptable excuse for our participation in them.
Thus I merely propose to extend into a vital area what is commonly regarded as a valid principle.
How strange that a person should feel he must explain to others exactly why he opposes the extinguishing of his species!
Surely it is the task of everyone concerned with ultimate human welfare to resist the forces which impel us toward the appalling crime and folly of collective suicide.
If some charge that this seems a negative approach, I reply that the first step in doing what is right must always be ceasing to do what is wrong.
I therefore stand ready to risk the displeasure of the State and the penalties and inconveniences she may impose upon me rather than willingly assist her in her immoral acts.
RICHARD GROFF Ambler, Pennsylvania
Tax resister Richard Groff, whose letter to the IRS I reprinted in ’s Picket Line, also wrote a four-part essay for MANAS on Thoreau (which was later published as Thoreau and the prophetic tradition).
I’m a sucker for Thoreau, so I dove into this eagerly.
The essay, surprisingly to me considering Groff’s own tax resistance, does not attend much to Thoreau’s civil disobedience specifically, but instead analyzes Thoreau’s relentless self-examination and enthusiastic philosophy of living in an interesting attempt to place it in what Groff describes as a prophetic tradition.
(Links: part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4.)
Some excerpts:
Washington, — Some 350 persons who disapprove of the war in Vietnam
announced that they would not
voluntarily pay their Federal income taxes, due
. They urged others to join them
in this protest.
The Internal Revenue Service immediately made clear that it would take
whatever steps were necessary to collect the taxes.
The group announced its plans
in an advertisement in The Washington Post.
“We will refuse to pay our Federal income taxes voluntarily,” the
advertisement said. “Some of us will leave the money we owe the Government in
our bank accounts, where the Internal Revenue Service may seize it if they
wish. Some will contribute the money to
CARE,
UNICEF or similar organizations. Some of us
will continue to pay that percentage of our taxes which is not used for
military purposes.”
Joan Baez, Lynd, Muste
The first signature on the advertisement was that of Joan Baez, the folk
singer. Others who signed it were Staughton Lynd, the Yale professor who
traveled to North Vietnam in violation
of State Department regulations, and the
Rev. A.J. Muste, the
pacifist leader.
The advertisement contained a coupon soliciting contributions for the protest.
The ad said that further information could be obtained from Mr. Muste at
Room 1003, 5 Beekman Street, New York City.
Those who placed the advertisement — which bore the heading “The Time Has
Come” — said that those who sponsored it “recognize the gravity of this step.
However, we prefer to risk violating the Internal Revenue Code, rather than
to participate, by voluntarily paying our taxes, in the serious crimes
against humanity being committed by our Government.”
The advertisement mentioned not only the war in Vietnam “against hungry,
scantily armed Vietnamese guerrillas and civilians” but also “the spectacle
of the United States invasion of the Dominican Republic,” an event the
sponsors said “will go down in history alongside Russia’s criminal
intervention in Hungary.”
Cohen Is Determined
The determination of Internal Revenue to collect the taxes the Government is
owed was expressed in a formal statement by the Commissioner of Internal
Revenue, Sheldon S. Cohen.
He said Internal Revenue would take “appropriate action” to collect the
taxes “in fairness to the many millions of taxpayers who do fulfill their
obligations.”
The Government has been upheld in court on all occasions when individuals
have refused to pay taxes because of disapproval with the uses to which their
money was being put, revenue officials said.
Ad Prepared Here
The headquarters of the Committee for Nonviolent Action, 5 Beekman Street,
said that it had prepared the
advertisement carried in the Washington newspaper after receiving 350
responses to invitations it had sent out soliciting participation in “an act
of civil disobedience.”
A spokesman for the committee said that Mr. Muste, the chairman, was out of
town and would return in about a week. The spokesman said that although
monetary contributions in response to the advertisement had not yet begun to
come in, the committee was prepared to mail literature explaining its program
to those who responded to the advertisement.
The spokesman said that the tax protest had been intended to represent “a
more radical and meaningful protest against the Vietnam War.”
The committee announced that members would appear at
in front of the Internal
Revenue Service office, 120 Church Street, to distribute leaflets concerning
the tax protest.
It also said that a rally and picketing would be staged from
, in front of the Federal
Building in San Francisco under the sponsorship of the War Resisters League.
The league also has offices at 5 Beekman Street.
With press coverage like this, including even the address to write to for
more information, Muste hardly needed to pay for ad space in the
Times (assuming they would have printed the ad — many
papers rejected ads like this).
Some other names I recognize from the ad are Noam Chomsky, Dorothy Day, Dave
Dellinger, Barbara Deming, Diane di Prima, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Milton Mayer,
David McReynolds, Grace Paley, Eroseanna Robinson, Ira Sandperl, Albert
Szent-Gyorgyi, Ralph Templin, Marion Bromley, Horace Champney, Ralph Dull,
Walter Gormly, Richard Groff, Irwin Hogenauer, Roy Kepler, Ken Knudson,
Bradford Lyttle, Karl Meyer, Ed Rosenthal, Maris Cakars, Gordon Christiansen,
William Davidon, Johan Eliot, Carroll Pratt, Helen Merrell Lynd, E. Russell
Stabler, Lyle Stuart, John M. Vickers, and Eric Weinberger.
The text of the ad (without the signatures and “coupon”) is as follows:
The Time Has Come
The spectacle of the United States — with its jet bombers, helicopters,
fragmentation and napalm bombs and disabling gas — carrying on an endless war
against the hungry, scantily armed Vietnamese guerrillas and civilians…
this spectacle will go down in history alongside the unforgivable
atrocities of Italy in Ethiopia.
The spectacle of the United States invasion of the Dominican Republic — again
pitting our terrifying weaponry mainly against civilians armed with rifles…
this spectacle will go down in history alongside Russia’s criminal
intervention in Hungary.
But the spectacle of the indifference of so many Americans to the crimes
being committed in their names, by their brothers, and with their tax money…
this spectacle reminds us more and more of the indifference of the
majority of the German people to the killing of six million Jews.
The United States government has not reacted constructively to legitimate
criticism, protests and appeals:
by world leaders including the Pope, U Thant and President De Gaulle —
by United States leaders including Senators Morse, Gruening, Church, Fulbright, Robert Kennedy, Eugene McCarthy and Stephen Young —
by hundreds of thousands of citizens including 2,500 clergymen and countless professors who placed protest advertisements in leading newspapers —
by innumerable students, many tens of thousands of whom have taken their protest to Washington on several occasions —
by celebrated individuals such as the Rev. Martin Luther King, Robert Lowell, Arthur Miller and Dr. Benjamin Spock —
and by leading newspapers, including the New York Times.
We believe that the ordinary channels of protest have been exhausted and that
the time has come for Americans of conscience to take more radical action in
the hope of averting nuclear war.
Therefore, the undersigned hereby declare that at least as long as
U.S. Forces are
clearly being used in violation of the
U.S. Constitution,
International Law and the United Nations Charter…
We will refuse to pay our federal income taxes voluntarily
Some of us will leave the money we owe the government in our bank accounts,
where the Internal Revenue Service may seize it if they wish. Others will
contribute the money to CARE,
UNICEF or similar organizations. Some of us
will continue to pay that percentage of our taxes which is not used for
military purposes.
We recognize the gravity of this step. However, we prefer to risk violating
the Internal Revenue Code, rather than to participate, by voluntarily paying
our taxes, in the serious crimes against humanity being committed by our
Government.
