Some historical and global examples of tax resistance → United States → Vietnam War, ~1965–75 → Writers & Editors War Tax Protest, 1967 → James Baldwin

After the March on the Pentagon — that madcap combination of somber protest and bizarre street theater (the Yippies announced their intention to surround the building and induce it to levitate) — Norman Mailer wrote a book about himself to commemorate the occasion: The Armies of the Night.

In that book is a brief mention of the “Writers and Editors War Tax Protest” that was brewing, in which more than 500 signatories vowed to illegally resist the 10% surtax the federal government was enacting to fund the Vietnam War:

The program for the day was presented in a leaflet which Mailer had brought with him to Washington. In a typical anxiety at his essential lack of orientation to the protean forms of these protests he had put a folder of mailings, leaflets, programs, reprints, and associated letters for money in his attaché case — each morning he whipped through the folder selecting what seemed appropriate for the occasion. Even a protest against the 10 percent increase in income tax had gotten into this — Mailer had to put it aside each morning. Since he had taken the oath not to pay the 10 percent increase in the event it was passed (for the increase had been announced as a surtax to meet the costs of the war in Vietnam) he anticipated with no particular joy that the Department of Internal Revenue would examine his returns in the years ahead with no ordinary tolerance. (In fact he fully expected his financial tidbits to be fried.) Stating this supposition with his own variety of gallows humor had been the most direct pleasure in a letter he had written to James Baldwin, Bruce Jay Friedman, Philip Roth, Joseph Heller, Tennessee Williams, Edward Albee, Jack Richardson, James Jones, Gore Vidal, Arthur Miller, Lillian Hellman, Lillian Ross, Vance Bourjaily, Mary McCarthy, and Jules Feiffer, asking them to join this protest.

Actually, he had hated the thought of signing the protest, he had piped up every variety of the extraordinarily sound argument that his work was the real answer to Vietnam, and these mass demonstrations, sideshows, and bloody income tax protests just took energy and money away from the real thing — getting the work out. But for such an argument to succeed, it was necessary to have work which absorbed all one’s effort, and a sense of happy status with oneself. Mailer had had neither for the last year or two. His work had been good — there were some who thought Why Are We In Vietnam? was the best book he had ever written, but no project had seemed to cost him enough, and he had been suffering more and more in the past few years from the private conviction that he was getting a little soft, a hint curdled, perhaps an almost invisible rim of corruption was growing around the edges. His career, his legend, his idea of himself — were they stale? So he had no real alternative — he was not sufficiently virtuous to eschew the income tax protest, and had signed, and to his surprise had been repaid immediately by the abrupt departure of a measurable quantity of moral congestion, a noticeable lowering of his spiritual flatulence and a reduction in his New York fever, that ferocious inflammation which New York seemed always to encourage: envy, greed, claustrophobia, excitement, bourbon, broads, action, ego, jousts, cruelty and too-rich food in expensive hateful restaurants. Yes, signing the protest had been good for him. (He hoped he remembered in future years when the penalty might have to be paid.) But now, going through his attaché case, he could grin in the mirror, for if he had only known in September that shortly, so shortly, he was going to be an incometaxnik, he could have told Mitch Goodman where to shove his RESISTANCE. (Or was it called RESIST? — even with the pamphlets Mailer could not get the names right, there were so many and they changed so rapidly.) “Yes, Mitch,” he could have said, “I think your RESISTANCE is first rate! first rate! but I’m putting my energy these days into the income tax drive. You have your going-to-jail bag — now I have mine.” Of course, on the other hand, if he had only joined RESIST? RESISTANCE? with a little good grace he could have told the tax protest people.…

This was vast humor perhaps to no one else, but in the middle of his hangover, Mailer was still remotely delighted by the mock dialogue of all this: yessir, boss, we’se gonna get in all the jail bags before day is done.


Truth be told, part of my harsh reaction to the Iraq Moratorium that I posted here on was probably from envy at how their call to vague and lukewarm action has attracted some 2,000 signers, support from dozens of organizations, and endorsements from various celebs, while the War Tax Boycott is still trying to build up a head of steam, without much in the way of organizational or big-name support.

There was a time, though, when influential people were eager to sign on to a war tax boycott.

On , the New York Times reported:

WRITERS PROTEST VIETNAM WAR TAX

133 Will Refuse to Pay if Surcharge Is Approved
By MORRIS KAPLAN

A number of writers and editors have joined in opposing tax payments to support the war in Vietnam by pledging to withhold payment of President Johnson’s proposed 10 per cent income tax surcharge if Congress approves it.

Many of them have also promised to deduct 23 per cent from their tax bills as an estimate of the percentage used to fight the war. A statement in support of this dissent has been signed by 133 writers.

Each dissenter has sent $10 or more to the Writers and Editors War Tax Protest, a group headed by Gerald Waker of Manhattan. Mr. Walker, assistant articles editor of The New York Times Sunday Magazine, said the money would be used for expenses and to pay for a newspaper advertisement planned for .

The proposal for a 10 per cent surcharge on corporate and individual taxes is now before the House Ways and Means Committee and is expected to be reported out next month. The President has said it would relieve a budget deficit of possibly $28-billion.

More Support Sought

Mr. Walker expressed hope that the protest would win the support of from 300 to 500 writers and editors.

Among those who have pledged support are Eric Bentley, drama critic who is Brander Matthew Professor of Dramatic Literature at Columbia University, and Ralph Ginzburg, the New York publisher who is still appealing a Federal Government pornography conviction.

Others include Fred J. Cook, author and magazine writer; Betty Friedan, author of “The Feminine Mystique”; Dwight Macdonald, New Yorker Magazine critic, and Merle Miller, Thomas Pynchon and Harvey Swados, novelists.

A letter accompanying the protest statement points out the possible consequences of willfully refusing to pay Federal income taxes. Violators of the law could receive up to one year in prison and up to $10,000 in fines.

Others Not Prosecuted

Mr. Walker said, however, that of the 421 signers of a similar no-payment ad last year in a Washington newspaper, not one had been prosecuted and sentenced. Of an estimated total of 1,500 additional protest nonpayers, he added, none has been prosecuted since the war in Vietnam began.

The Internal Revenue Service has chosen, so far, to collect unpaid taxes by placing a lien on the incomes of those who refuse to pay, or by attaching their bank accounts or other assets. In addition, a 6 per cent interest penalty is charged each year on the unpaid tax balance.

The group’s appeal for support included a quotation from Henry David Thoreau’s “Civil Disobedience,” written in and protesting American involvement in the Mexican War. The writer said, in part:

When… a whole country is overrun and conquered by a foreign army, and subjected to military law, I think it is not too soon for honest men to rebel and revolutionize.… If a thousand men would not pay their tax bills this year, that would not be a violent and bloody measure, as it would be to pay them, and enable the state to commit violence and shed innocent blood.”

That’s a weird note to end the piece on. The Thoreau quote is strangely ellipsized to make it sound like he thought that somehow the United States had been overrun and conquered by Mexico or something, or that civil disobedience was appropriate only when you’ve been invaded by a foreign army and subjected to military law. Here’s the full quote, which makes its relevance (to the Vietnam War then, to the Iraq War now) more clear:

[W]hen a sixth of the population of a nation which has undertaken to be the refuge of liberty are slaves, and a whole country is unjustly overrun and conquered by a foreign army, and subjected to military law, I think that it is not too soon for honest men to rebel and revolutionize. What makes this duty the more urgent is that fact, that the country so overrun is not our own, but ours is the invading army.

But enough nitpicking. This appeal brought in 133 writers and editors. , the list had swelled to 448 (it would go even higher than the 500 that Gerald Walker originally hoped for), and included such names as Nelson Algren, James Baldwin, Noam Chomsky, Philip K. Dick, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Allen Ginsberg, Paul Goodman, Norman Mailer, Henry Miller, Tillie Olsen, Grace Paley, Robert Scheer, Susan Sontag, Terry Southern, Benjamin Spock, Gloria Steinem, William Styron, Hunter S. Thompson, Kurt Vonnegut, and Howard Zinn.

As far as I can tell, the IRS didn’t take legal action against anyone who signed on to this list (though it probably sent threatening letters or engaged in administrative sanctions like levies and liens).

Nixon won the presidential election in , and among his campaign promises had been to end Johnson’s 10% surtax and somehow salvage “peace with honor” in Vietnam. A couple of years later, the surtax breathed its last. It took a few more years to get U.S. troops out of Vietnam.