Some historical and global examples of tax resistance →
United States →
Vietnam War, ~1965–75 →
No Tax for War Committee protest, 1967 →
Mildred & Wilmer Young
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.
War tax resistance in the Friends Journal in
By the glacier that had crept over war tax resistance in the Society of Friends for almost a century had started to recede, and you can see evidence of this in issues of the Friends Journal from that year.
The issue mentions the legal case against A.J. Muste based on his tax refusal .
Excerpt:
At a hearing on , A.J. Muste declared that “on grounds of Christian teaching, conviction, and conscience” he could not help to pay for the development of more nuclear arms or hydrogen bombs.
(A follow-up article noted that “The United States Tax Court ruled in that the First Amendment to the Constitution, which assures religious freedom, does not give the conscientious objector immunity from paying taxes which are to be used in part for war or preparation for war.”)
Muste, however, was a Presbyterian, not a Quaker.
It is telling that although there was some latent sympathy for war tax resistance in the Society of Friends at the time, the number of exemplars seemed to still be few.
But that would change.
Here is an article from the issue:
Several Friends have sent letters to the Collector of Internal Revenue, United States Treasury Department, Washington, D.C., declaring they cannot pay taxes for war purposes.
The following letter by Wilmer J. Young of Pendle Hill, Wallingford, Pa., is indicative of the trend and spirit of letters by other Friends, copies of which have been sent to the office of the Friends Journal:
I cannot voluntarily pay taxes which are used to prepare for the destruction of mankind.
For the past twenty-four years I have lived voluntarily on a scale which meant that I was not called upon to pay a tax on income.
In , however, due to unusual circumstances, I am eligible for such payment.
I am sending today checks to various organizations whose object is to encourage a nonviolent approach to the solution of international problems, which will more than cover the amount of my tax.
Taxes for the ordinary expenses of government, schools, roads, proper police activity, etc., I pay cheerfully and gladly.
But modern war has now become so serious a threat to mankind, that I would prefer spending the last years of my life in prison rather than deliberately supporting it.
In the issue, Frances G. Conrow briefly reviewed a seminar on “The Origin, Development, and Significance of Our Quaker Testimonies” that had been led by Clarence E. Pickett, and suggested:
In a world where there is no defense against modern war, there is need as never before for the peace testimony.
Is refusal to pay taxes for support of war effort emerging as a new testimony in support both of purity of purpose in simplicity and as a peace witness?
It goes to show how thorough the glacial forgetting of Quaker war tax resistance had been, that in war tax resistance could be described in a Quaker publication as possibly “emerging as a new testimony.”
(The same issue has an article titled “The Quaker Peace Testimony, : Some Suggestions for Witness and Rededication” that doesn’t mention taxes at all.)
In the issue, in an article on “The Peace Testimony and the Monthly Meeting” by Lawrence McK. Miller, Jr., he wrote:
Pacifist and nonpacifist Friends are also much closer to each other than they care to admit in terms of their personal involvement indirectly in preparation for war.
The tax-refusal cases are making it clear that through our federal taxes we are all contributing to the so-called defense effort.
In many other ways most of us are cooperating, if only in our reluctance to protest.
It is the pacifist in these instances who particularly must act with a sense of regret for the measure of his involvement and with real humility for the compromising position he is in.
Awareness is growing, but still the emphasis seems to be on sad-eyed, shoulder-shrugging regret, rather than resistance.
Tax refusal is largely still seen as something other people do, while Quakers are to just sorrowfully and humbly reflect on their complicity.
On , Robert J. Leach wrote to the magazine about the Geneva (Switzerland) Yearly Meeting and noted that one of the “high points” of the meeting was when an “octogenarian Friend, Elizabeth Blaser, pled with Friends to refuse to pay defense taxes.”
In the same issue where that report appeared, the pseudonymous Quaker history columnist “Now and Then” wrote about the emergence of the Quaker peace testimony in , and concluded by saying:
We may search our hearts to see whether we have allowed this testimony to grow as it should have done in three centuries or even in our own lifetime.
Have we kept abreast “the Truth,” as Friends used to call Quakerism?
Can we be satisfied with the feebleness of our efforts for peace even ?
Are there not too few Friends willing to find for our testimony more radical expression, which, whatever else it may do, will strengthen our own determination not to acquiesce in the trend to war?
Between the Fifth Monarchy rising and the cold war of a nuclear age there is a vast difference.
Should not our peace testimony become correspondingly more aggressive and more inclusive and more costly?
What will we do this anniversary year about civil defense, about biological warfare, about the hidden control by the Pentagon of our minds and property, about taxes that go to war preparation, about the suppression of the truth concerning the risks of nuclear war or even of testing?
The following years would show that many Quakers shared this dissatisfaction with the feeble state of the peace testimony, and that many saw war tax resistance in some form or another to be key to giving that testimony some backbone.
War tax resistance in the Friends Journal in
Issues of the Friends Journal from give some additional hints of the reemergence of war tax resistance as a widespread practice in the Society of Friends… and also the first example of the backlash against it.
The lead editorial in the issue concerned “Taxes for War” and covered the war tax resistance of Quakers in England.
The article begins: “Friends in England are under the weight of the same concern that occupies American Friends: what can, or should, we do about taxation for military purposes?”
…short of outright refusal to pay taxes there seems no way out for those objecting to militarism.
The voluntary payments to U.N. funds, such as various Friends groups are making, will undoubtedly contribute to easing the moral burden, yet these sensitive donors would be the last ones to claim that their voluntary self-tax is a satisfactory solution to the problem.
The editorial then describes a quirk of British tax law by which if a taxpayer there “ ‘covenants’ a certain annual amount to a charity for seven years, the Internal Revenue will then, as The Friend (London) reports, pay over to the charitable organization ‘a sum equal to the tax normally payable on the amount of the covenant.’
The ‘charity,’ then, receives not only the contribution but also the tax paid upon it.
On the average a subscriber to a charity will have to pledge one half of his normal tax payment in order to recover that proportion usually allocated to armaments.”
While “far from flawless” and while “this plan exists only in England,” this plan “nevertheless affords some moral relief,” the editorial states.
This is the first in-depth discussion of a practical war tax resistance method in the pages of the Friends Journal, but it is only “practical” to most of its readers in the abstract — as something Friends in the old country might do.
As with the Journal’s earlier coverage of Quaker war tax resisters in Costa Rica, or of war tax resisters Milton Mayer, A.J. Muste, and Maurice McCracken, the magazine still seems most comfortable when talking about war tax resistance as something that other people do and American Quakers admire.
The article can be seen as a hunt for an excuse: “If only we had a law like the British do, we could resist our war taxes… maybe some day we will have one, perhaps we can even advocate for one, but until then there’s nothing we can do.”
Another example of the “there’s nothing we can do” point of view, in the same issue of the Journal, comes in a report on the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting, whose sessions were held :
Our sympathy was aroused for businessmen and taxpayers trapped in the war system and, recognizing our common sense of guilt, we acknowledged the fact that all enterprise is thus enmeshed.
The next paragraph begins “We were encouraged to break out of this trap…” but no mention of resisting war taxes follows.
The issue includes an article about the United Nations that includes this observation about those countries, like the U.S.S.R., that “have refused to contribute to U.N. projects of which they disapprove”:
There is a puzzling similarity between the attitude of these countries toward the U.N. budget and the attitude of those pacifists who refuse to pay income tax because they disapprove of some of the projects of the United States Government.
Note: “those pacifists” and not “those Friends” or “those Quakers.”
Again, there’s deniability about whether Quakers are the sort of people who do this sort of thing.
But here is a letter-to-the-editor, from Wilmer J. Young of Wallingford, Pennsylvania, that shows how war tax resistance was beginning to reawaken in the Society:
The following letter, signed by Clarence Pickett and Henry Cadbury, was sent to about twenty persons:
Dear Friend:
Many Friends have for years felt uneasy about paying that part of their income tax which goes into preparation for war.
A very few have refused to pay; but the majority of Friends have felt this to be an ineffective way to protest, or they have felt for various other reasons that this was not the way for them to bear witness for peace.
At the same time, many of them have been unhappy at not bearing a clear witness in this regard.
The signers of this letter invite thee to attend a meeting of a small group of Friends who feel concern in this matter.
We hope to discuss whether there is some action (perhaps not in violation of any law) which would be a clear indication of our position on war preparation, and might have some meaning both to the participants themselves, on one side, and to the general public, on the other.
Our consideration will of course be looking toward next year, as it is already too late for this.
Most of those invited to this meeting attended it.
There was an earnest and searching discussion for two hours.
However, no consensus appeared and no action was taken.
Some of us who are clear that we cannot pay this tax can but wonder whether it is weak intelligence or misguided conscience that has led us to our decision.
The issue included a report on “The Peace and Social Order Committee of the Young Friends Committee of North America,” which
…concerned that many Friends have lost the meaning of the peace testimony, organized a peace caravan this summer.
The seven Young Friends who joined in this Peace Caravan traveled in the Middle West asking Friends: “What does the Peace Testimony mean?
Is it relevant to our personal lives and our national policies?
If so, what is required of us?”
The article suggested some “Queries” that could be used to delve into questions like these, including this one: “Do we consider Christ’s teachings to love our enemies and do good to those who persecute us when we make decisions about our attitude toward military training and taxation for war?”
The same issue of the Journal contains the first example of backlash against war tax resistance I found in that magazine — a letter to the editor by Harold H. Perry in which he says that tax resisters are “by implication” showing a lack of support for all the good things the government does: not just the usual list of roads, schools, and the like, but even “many and considerable civilian services of the military establishments such as the work of the Corps of Engineers and much of the research that aids civilians, including medical and health benefits.”
He acknowledges that some resisters redirect their taxes to things of less-questionable benefit, but says that “[t]his may be laudable theoretically, but if widely practiced or permitted would lead to endless confusion, imbalance, and injustice.”
He concludes by encouraging Quakers to instead “work through established democratic machinery” to try to get their ideals reflected in government behavior.
A friend of mine, 43 year old Arthur Evans, a medical doctor with offices in Denver, Colorado, was sent to jail by Judge Alfred A. Arraj of the Denver district court, for his refusal to pay his part of the income tax (about 50 pct.) which would be used for the annihilation of the human race.
He sent it, instead, to the United Nations, to promote peace in the world.
In a statement circulated by him to his friends he says in part: “My lawyer, the judge, and other lawyers, tell me that there is no law, no constitutional provision that provides for the individual to refuse to pay taxes for annihilation.
So I go to jail, for I will not, I cannot in conscience be party to financing the means to annihilation.
The Jews under Hitler were taxed to buy their crematoriums. The same happens here — but it is not only the Jews who finance their means of destruction — it is almost every income earner in the United States.
This is called democratic because we are all taxed alike.”
Letters of approval have been pouring in to Dr. Evans, and since he is only allowed to write very few, his mother in Philadelphia has taken up the task of acknowledging them, sending at the same time a typewritten sheet explaining the affair in detail.
A little over a century ago, in , another man (who is now considered one of America’s greatest) was picked up in Concord, Mass. on the way to his shoemaker, and brought to jail because he had refused to pay his poll tax to a government he thought misguided and evil because it allowed slavery and was also at that time waging a war with Mexico to extend its slaveholding territory.
I mean, of course, Henry David Thoreau.
Out of that incident came his famous Civil Disobedience, which influenced Gandhi and Nehru; Thoreau’s ideas are very much alive in many parts of the globe today.
Strange, how history repeats itself!
Some day, perhaps after another century (if we escape a war of annihilation), Dr. Evans will be spoken of with appreciation and respect.
We have a way of crucifying the great while they are with us, and of exalting them after they are gone.
At present a medical doctor is doing laundry duty as a “trusty” in the Jefferson County Jail in Golden, Colorado, and he may like to hear from you.
How would the Friends Journal cover this?
Would it, as in the earlier case of Milton Mayer (see ♇ 5 July 2013), mention it but try to downplay its connection to Quaker practice?
Let’s see.
In the issue is a three-paragraph piece in the “Friends and Their Friends” section on the case:
Arthur Evans, Denver physician and member of the Society of Friends, went to jail on for three months because he has refused to pay part of his federal income taxes and because he would not produce his financial records.
For at least twenty years the doctor has paid to Internal Revenue Service only the proportion of his income tax which corresponds to the percentage of the national budget devoted to non-military purposes.
The part he has not paid to IRS he has devoted to charitable purposes and to agencies working for world peace.
Not until , when he declined to file an income tax return, has he been personally pursued by IRS, which heretofore had subtracted from his bank account amounts he was refusing to pay.
So the magazine is forthrightly recognizing this tax resister as one of its own flock, though its coverage is considerably more subdued than even the example from the mainstream media that I quoted above.
(Incidentally, if the Journal article is accurate and Evans was resisting as early as , this would put his resistance well in advance of that of the Peacemakers of , which I usually think of as the birth of modern American war tax resistance.)
The Evans case got another mention , in the issue, which reprinted excerpts from his letter to the Director of Internal Revenue (and which also explicitly identifies Evans as “a Friend”).
“We doctors have pledged to serve life,” Evans wrote:
I find no way to finance mass murder — be it called war, defense, or security — and be true to this pledge.
I care about life and the dignity of each individual, and desire to serve people everywhere, no matter who they are religiously, nationally, or racially.…
I cannot voluntarily fund that overwhelming part of my nation’s budget that finances acts based on retaliation, based on fear and hatred psychology, based on threats of injury and killing-in short, acts based on returning evil for evil.…
If this results in my going to jail for breaking laws that support injustice, slavery, death, and destruction, then in jail, with Martin Luther King, Henry David Thoreau, Peter, and Paul, I will attempt to serve wherein I can.…
“Thou shalt not kill” and “Thou shalt love thy neighbor [which includes thy enemy] as thyself” are precious laws of life to doctors and to all who would cooperate with the Christ.… Many men still believe… that they can deal with the evil acts of men by destroying the men who do these acts.
Yet I know no one who believes that conflicts… are resolved by mass murder.… The majority have not yet discovered that love is the only power that overcomes evil.…
I will continue to pay that percent of my tax liability that goes for nonmilitary acts of my government and enclose $200 toward same.
I am sending double the amount I am not paying for war to Quaker House at the United Nations for transmission to the United Nations Organization for its technical assistance program.
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
The momentum of war tax resistance continued to build in the pages of the Friends Journal in 1968.
A letter-to-the-editor from Wilmer J. & Mildred B. Young in the issue mentioned the 500-person-strong “writers & editors” tax strike advertisement, and a second one from the “No Tax for War Committee,” and noted that the War Resisters League was “also collecting signatures for this purpose.”
— “Some Friends are participating.
Should not many more do so?”
At the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting’s annual sessions in , “[t]here was talk of establishing a common escrow account into which all tax-refusers could pay, and finally a suggestion that the Yearly Meeting participate in the AFSC suit [see ♇ 15 July 2013]”
A note in the issue concerned a “Quaker pacifist, Neil Haworth,” who was facing prison “for not revealing his assets to the Government and for refusing to pay his income taxes because of his religious scruples against taxes of which seventy per cent go for war purposes.”
David D. & Barbara C. Houghton had a letter-to-the-editor in the same issue in which they explained why they were embarking on war tax resistance: “Letters to our congressmen and public demonstrations of disapproval have not been enough.
We feel compelled by our consciences to perform the symbolic illegal act of withholding that part of the Federal telephone tax reinstated as a result of the war expenses in Vietnam.”
(The following year, they wrote in to say that in anticipation of a proposed federal income tax surcharge for Vietnam War expenses, “[a]s a constructive expression of protest we have increased our contributions to organizations working for man’s welfare so that the added deduction entirely offsets the tax surcharge.”)
The issue had an article about expatriates who had settled in Canada that included this note:
Several young married couples whom we met expressed relief that they had left the United States and that they could now bring up their families in a land where there is less emphasis on violence, where the military is less powerful in national affairs, and where their taxes do not rise so greatly to support military activities — especially war.
an ad from the issue of Friends Journal
Also in , the New England Yearly Meeting’s gathering “adopted a… statement giving approval and support to Friends who in conscience refuse taxes for war and conscription.”
A letter from Geoffrey D. Kaiser in the issue tried to remind Quakers that war tax resistance was not some crazy innovation of the longhair set:
With the institution of new taxes which avowedly are largely for Johnson’s war, many Quakers are asking if they can in good conscience pay them.
Some, on the other hand, are saying that all civil disobedience and refusal to pay taxes is unquakerly.
A statement by the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting on the subject is as follows: “It is the sense of this meeting that a tax levied for the purchase of drums, colours, or for other warlike uses, cannot be paid consistently with our Christian testimony.”
This quotation is from page 98 of the 1825 Philadelphia Yearly Meeting Discipline.
Who now are the conservatives?
The Richmond Declaration
In , in Richmond, Indiana, 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 to draft a “Declaration on the Draft and Conscription.”
Most of the statement concerned the draft, but war tax resistance got a mention.
Excerpts:
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.
We commit ourselves to validate our witness by visible changes in our lives, though they may involve personal jeopardy.
We cannot rest until we achieve a truly corporate witness in the effort to oppose and end conscription.
Let us hold each other in the Light which both reveals our weaknesses and strengthens us to overcome them.
“Nonviolence: Ends and Means”
In the first Friends Journal issue of was a piece about nonviolent direct action by Lawrence Scott, in which he urged Quakers to take civil disobedience more seriously and to examine more closely the means and ends involved.
“Such direct action will include civil disobedience against conscription, war taxes, and armament construction,” he wrote.
But he was concerned about the way people were engaging in civil disobedience.
He hoped people who practiced civil disobedience would do so not in disrespect for government and law, but “in such a manner as to enhance the principle of just and democratic laws and government.”
He also thought that people should adopt a more satyagraha-like version of civil disobedience — in particular, that they should submit to arrest and legal consequences without resisting.
He was concerned that practices like “going limp, or trying to pull away” during arrest, or “noncooperation with normal court and jail procedures” tended “to transform the witness being made against a specific law or immoral practice of government into a witness against the principle of government itself.”
Such tactics “tend to attract and foster anarchists and angry persons who are opposed to all regulations and seek the disruption and overthrow of all government” and this in turn reduces the influence of the movement.
Scott’s anarchist-baiting resulted in a letter-to-the-editor from Jim Giddings, who said that when it comes to keeping means and ends in harmony, it is the people who try to defend both Gandhian nonviolence and coercive government who should be on the defensive:
I assert that “law” (as the term is used today) is based on violent coercion; the means and ends that we who use noncooperation advocate are in harmony.
Our goal is the establishment of a society free from coercive law.
The law, the police, the courts, the prisons, the army — they are all there to enforce privilege.
In the following issue, Samuel R. Tyson defended the tactic of going limp on arrest, saying “I have seen it done with great dignity.”
He then played the generation gap card, saying that Scott’s article seemed to be “another sad instance of younger people’s being turned off by the rigidity of adults.”
![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)
