Some historical and global examples of tax resistance → United States → Vietnam War, ~1965–75 → Addie & Paul Snyder

And, from the 2 April 1975 edition of The Spartanburg Herald:

Couple Refused To Support War

Fremont, Mich. (AP) — Paul Snyder and his wife, Addie, saw their home sold Wednesday for the taxes they refused to pay to support the wars they opposed.

But the property — sold at an Internal Revenue Service bid opening at the Fremont Post Office — went to a friend and the Snyders said they will buy it back.

The purchaser was identified as Carol Blizzard of Holton in adjoining Muskegon County. The high bid was $8,460.

However, the IRS said the Snyders actually owe only $3,023 for taxes they withheld from 1971 through 1973.

IRS officials refused to say how high they set a minimum bid in conducting the sale and that prompted the 41-year-old Mrs. Snyder’s only public outcry. “Oh, that’s not fair!” she shouted.

The Snyders, surrounded by about 100 supporters and newsmen, said afterward that they believe their protest was worthwhile.

“We have not given up. They had to extract it from us,” said Snyder, 42, a veterinarian.

The Snyders withheld the portion of their taxes they believed went to the Defense Department based upon that agency’s share of the national budget. Snyder said the total amounted to about 45 per cent of their taxes.

And he said they will continue their protest and refuse to pay taxes they believe are used for wars. In fact, they have not paid that portion of their 1974 taxes, he said.

Mrs. Snyder said that 1971 Cambodian invasion was responsible for turning a “pair of hard-working Republicans” into war protesters and tax evaders.

“We had tried to ignore the war up to that time,” she said.

Instead, they used the money for alternative purposes — “spent mostly in Newaygo County on rural poverty projects” — because “we believe in paying taxes.”

Another report adds: “An IRS spokesman in Grand Rapids refused to disclose the amount of the losing bids. Other sources, however, said many bids of $1 or less were made. The New York City War Tax Resistance group said “a couple hundred bids of a minimal amount were made.”

This, according to an earlier article in The Argus-Press, was a tactic modeled on foreclosure auction disruption tactics during the Great Depression:

Members of the Newaygo County Citizens for Peace took an ad in today’s editions of the weekly Fremont Times Indicator urging those who oppose wars to bid for the property of Paul Snyder…

Listing a variety of reasons for supporting the Snyders, the peace group’s ad urged county residents, “If you agree with us… please make a bid on their (the Snyder’s) property.”

Making a bid of pennies for farm property being forclosed for failure to meet mortgages was a common tactic among angry farmers during the Depression. If their bids succeeded, the property was returned to its owner and the mortgage torn up.

In some such cases, entire farms plus their livestock, equipment and home furnishings sold for as little as $2.

On this date in 1975, The Milwaukee Journal printed an expanded version of an Associated Press article I drew attention to last year mashed up with the one I reprinted a few days back:

War Tax Protesters Face Loss of Property, Freedom

By the Associated Press

Paul Snyder and his wife, Addie, of Fremont, Mich., saw their home sold last week for the taxes they refused to pay to support the wars they opposed.

But the property — sold at an Internal Revenue Service bid opening at the Fremont Post Office — went to a friend, and the Snyders said they would buy it back.

There are others like the Snyders — who have lost their property or even gone to prison for refusing to pay taxes to support wars. And, like the Snyders, they say they believe their protests were worthwhile and that they’ll continue them.

The Snyders withheld the portion they believed went to the Defense Department based on that agency’s share of the national budget. Snyder, 42, a veterinarian, said the total amounted to about 45% of their taxes.

Mrs. Snyder said the 1970 Cambodian invasion was responsible for turning a “pair of hard working Republicans” into war protesters and tax evaders.

They said they used the money for alternative purposes — mostly in Newaygo County on rural poverty projects — because “we believe in paying taxes.”

The Snyders’ $80,000 home was put up for sale by the IRS for the $3,023 in taxes owed for 1971–’73. The purchaser, with a high bid of $8,460, was Carol Blizzard of Holton, who represented a group of Snyder friends who will sell the home back to the Snyders.

In New York City, another taxpayer, Frank J. Costello, 33, a high school teacher, husband, and expectant father, faces the loss of part of his salary and the eventual possibility of imprisonment for his war tax protest.

On March 12, a federal judge handed down a decision against Costello in a civil action brought by the IRS for nonpayment of $659 in taxes for 1971. The IRS will have the right to confiscate his wages to get the money, the court held. Costello says he will appeal.

Now the government is considering whether to file criminal charges against him for his tax returns of 1972–’74. Costello claimed as many as 10 exemptions so that less money would be withheld from his paycheck for taxes in proportion to the share of the Defense Department in the federal budget.

Costello says he took the extra money and put it into community projects of his own choosing. But the law says falsely inflating exemptions is fraud, and he could wind up in prison.

There are others like Costello and the Snyders.

Martha Tranquilli, 64, was released from a federal prison in California March 3 after serving 7½ months for tax fraud for claiming antiwar organizations as dependents.

Ernest Bromley, 63, has been withholding taxes since the 1940s because of his pacifist views. His two acre farm in Butler County, Ohio, was confiscated last month.

An IRS spokesman said that in 1971, at the height of US involvement in the Vietnam War, 1,740 tax returns were readily identifiable as protest returns for war resistance or other reasons. For fiscal 1974, the number dropped to 667, although the spokesman said many such returns could go undetected.

The full scope of the protest might be more accurately reflected in the number of persons withholding payment of the federal excise tax on their telephone bills, a tax imposed specifically to pay for war costs. There were 56,445 instances in 1971 compared with 50,371 in fiscal 1974, the IRS spokesman said.

Tax resisters frequently face the criticism of being freeloaders who enjoy the benefits of organized society without cooperating in the taxes necessary to fund them. This rhetorical attack paints the tax resisters as self-interested, anti-social tax evaders.

One way resisters have countered this attack is by staging flamboyant giveaways of their resisted taxes — both to make it clear that the resister does not have only selfish motives for resisting, and to demonstrate that the money is being spent for the benefit of society (and to a greater extent than if the money had been filtered through the government first).

Redirection is also a way of forging or strengthening ties with the recipient groups, and of making them aware of tax resistance as an option.

Today I will briefly describe some of the many examples of tax resisters and tax resistance campaigns that have used this technique, and the many variations they have come up with.

• Julia “Butterfly” Hill in 2003 redirected more than $150,000 of federal taxes that she owed that year, and made a point of saying “I ‘redirect’ my taxes rather than ‘resisting’ my taxes”:

  I actually take the money that the IRS says goes to them and I give it to the places where our taxes should be going. And in my letter to the IRS I said: “I’m not refusing to pay my taxes. I’m actually paying them but I’m paying them where they belong because you refuse to do so.” They are not directing our money where it should be going, they are being horrific stewards of that money.



• NWTRCC organized what it called the “War Tax Boycott” in 2008. It encouraged people to resist as a group, and as part of their resistance, to redirect any refused taxes to one of two groups: one that concentrated on providing health assistance in New Orleans in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, and the other that provides assistance for Iraq War refugees. The campaign kept track of how much money had been redirected over the course of the boycott, and then held a press conference at which oversized checks adding up to about $325,000 were given to spokespeople for these campaigns.
• The People’s Life Fund, associated with the group Northern California War Tax Resistance, accepts redirected taxes from resisters. If the IRS successfully seizes money from the resisters, the resisters can reclaim their donations to the Fund. Otherwise, the money remains there and earns interest and dividends. Every year the group pools these returns on investment and gives them away to local charitable organizations in a granting ceremony. Usually the grants are small — $500 or $1000 — but they give them to a dozen or more groups, which makes their granting ceremonies a good way for local charities to network with each other and for news of war tax resistance to spread in the local activist community. This same model, or one similar to it, is followed by a number of regional redirection funds associated with war tax resistance groups.
• A family in Vermont figured out a way to get extra mileage out of their redirection: “They refused to pay 50% of their tax liability and redirected it to Plan International’s Childreach program. Childreach has a fund drive for a project to help children in Nepal and Ghana, and has received a challenge grant from the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). This means that the $211.69 that the WTR family has redirected will result in a $423.38 matching contribution from the U.S. government!”
• In 2009, several hundred Spanish war tax resisters redirected over €85,000 to the group “La’Onf,” which was organizing and educating about nonviolent conflict resolution techniques in Iraq.
• The Mennonite Central Committee has established a “turning toward peace” fund especially designed for people who want to redirect their tax dollars from the government to more constructive projects — for example, education for children in Afghanistan.
• War tax resisters Paul and Addie Snyder made a point of saying “we believe in paying taxes” as they explained in 1975 that they wouldn’t be paying those taxes to the federal government, but instead would be giving the money directly to rural poverty projects nearby.
• In 1983 several hundred American Quaker war tax resisters paid their tax dollars to a Catholic soup kitchen in Philadelphia.
• The Women’s Tax Resistance League largely suspended its campaign during World War Ⅰ, but one woman, writing as “A Persistent Tax Resister” wrote a letter to the editor of a suffragist paper suggesting that women “should contribute the sum she owes to the Government to a National Fund of her own choosing, and should send her donation as ‘Taxes withheld from the Government by a voteless woman.’ ” Charlotte Despard, for example, “said she had offered to give voluntarily the amount demanded of her by Revenue authorities to any war charity, but her offer had not been accepted.”
• A war tax resistance group in Iowa used the proceeds from their redirection fund to create a scholarship for college students who would be ineligible for government financial aid because of refusal to register for the draft. Another, in Pennsylvania, made an interest-free loan to a defense committee that was supporting a group of draft resisters who were on trial.
• In 1971, 70 war tax resisters went to the phone company offices in Boston to pay their bills minus the federal excise tax. They then collected this refused tax ($142 worth) by passing an army helmet around, and donated it to the United Farm Workers to help them set up a clinic in California. Also that year, the Cornell branch of the National Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam did a similar phone company office protest and collection of redirected phone taxes, donating the money to a local Early Childhood Development program.
• In 1968, war tax resister Irving Hogan stood outside the Federal Building in San Francisco and redirected his federal income tax dollars one at a time — by handing them out to passers by. “I want this money to be used for the delight, not the destruction, of men,” he said. “Here: go buy yourself a beer.”
• John and Pat Schwiebert did something similar: “One year they converted their war tax debt into five-dollar bills, which they gave to individuals waiting in line at the city unemployment office. They included a letter with each donation telling why they were doing this, and they notified media beforehand. Their actions garnered them an interview on NPR, and they received letters and cards from around the world.”
• In 1972 a group of war tax resisters in New York redirected their war taxes as nickels that they handed out to people waiting at the bus stops on lines where fare hikes were being proposed, saying “this is where our tax dollars should be going.”

And here’s something kind of similar that doesn’t fit into any of my other categories, so I’ll toss it in here:

• When the IRS seized back taxes from war tax resister Mary Regan’s retirement account in 1998, she threw a fundraising party to try to raise an equivalent amount of money — not to reimburse her, but to give away to charities like “the Boston Women’s Fund, the American Civil Liberties Union, the American Friends Service Committee, a homeless shelter for youth, and the peace movement in Israel.”