Socialists and Union Men Will Refuse to Pay Special Levy.
Wilmington, Del., . —
Members of the Socialist party in Wilmington and workmen allied with labor unions in this city have joined forces to resist payment of a capitation tax.
A measure making it mandatory for all persons, whether property owners or not, to pay this tax was passed by the last session of the General Assembly.
The opponents of the taxation are so determined in their fight that a number of them reiterated that they would go to prison rather than meet the unwarranted and unnecessary payment.
This determination is the most radical ever decided upon by any body of citizens in Delaware to prove the unpopularity of a law.
The matter came up at a meeting of the Central Labor Union, the parent body of all labor organizations.
Resolutions were in readiness for adoption by the union vigorously protesting against the collection of the tax.
Owing to the warm weather, however, the attendance of delegates was not sufficiently large to make passage of the protest representative.
Action therefore was delayed until .
The Socialist party here, which is growing in strength, today began making preparations for the taking of a referendum vote on the issue, “Shall the tax (capitation) be paid?”
Several days will be required to poll the vote.
The result, however, will be virtually unanimous in the negative, it is believed.
The vote will be taken by means of postal cards.
When they shall have been tabulated a committee of local Socialists will call upon the City Council and make a vigorous protest against the collection of… [illegible] …this shall not be sufficient, it was announced that labor unionists will join forces with the Socialists and they will send a joint delegation to the Council with a similar demand.
Several of the labor unionists and members of the Socialist party declare that they will go to the county workhouse in default of payment rather than meet the “unwarranted taxation.”
Fearing that they will have to jail every union man and Socialist, the city tax collectors were ordered by the men higher up to endeavor to collect the tax, but not to put any one in jail who refuses to meet the payment, although the law gives them the power to use rigorous means to this end.
The Republican and Democratic leaders are keeping out of the Socialist fight.
They have no opinion to express on the subject of the payment or nonpayment of this tax.
The law enforcing the collection, which was promoted by the interests, was enacted in order to increase the revenue in Wilmington without raising the tax rate.
A little digging uncovered some more examples of Socialist agitation against the poll tax.
Here’s one from .
Expert Powder Mixer Will Serve Six Months, He Says, for Principle, if Necessary.
Grafton, Ill., . —
J.J. Keon, a Socialist of this city, is in the city jail, having the time of his life, so he says, because he is forcing the city to spend $125 to punish him for failure to pay a poll tax of $1.50.
Keon is employed at the powder mills here, where he is an expert mixer, earning $4.50 a day.
He says he finds nothing in the state constitution which makes a poll tax legal, so he insists that the city keep him in jail for six months, which is the longest term possible for his “offense.”
He believes that it will not alter his principle and that it may make the city tired of forcing its male population to pay a poll tax.
At first it was arranged that the prisoner should be served with fifty-cent meals, purchased at a wholesale rate of thirty-three cents from a local hotel.
But in order to tempt him to pay his tax the jailer cut the price to twenty cents.
“I’ll be positively fat in six months,” predicted the lanky Socialist, as he stowed away his first twenty-cent meal, consisting of bread and butter, steak and hot coffee.
Three such meals are served him each day.
Then the mayor, attempting to weaken Keon’s contumacy, notified him that he would have to pay for his own meals and defray the expenses of his incarceration.
“That’s unconstitutional!” shouted the prisoner.
“Under the law the municipality is compelled to pay for the food and lodging of prisoners–”
“You’re right,” agreed the mayor, wearily.
“We’re up against it.
But I guess we can put you to work,” he hazarded.
“That’s unconstitutional, too!” said the prisoner, jovially.
“Under the law–”
“Oh, all right, all right,” was the mayor’s weak response, as he mopped his brow.
“Just take it easy, smoke all you please, read when you like, sleep well at night, and don’t let our worries trouble you.”
“Not in the least,” replied Keon with a grin.
“You’re losing $4.50 a day while you are in jail,” pleaded the mayor.
“In six months that will amount to more than $500.”
“Money is nothing to me when compared with a principle,” replied Keon.
“And let’s see what I am costing the city.
Meals, 150 days, at sixty cents a day, $108; night watchman, $5; chicken fence wire, $2; miscellaneous, $10.
Total, $125.
The entire poll taxes for the year are only $325.
Total, blocks of concrete pavement lost to Grafton through my imprisonment–”
“Don’t rub it in,” pleaded the mayor, departing in distress.
Lacking a jail, the city confined Keon in a room at city hall, with the windows hastily sealed with chicken wire.
Ralph Korngold visited Keon in jail.
He noted that “the state committee of the Socialist party has started proceedings against the town authorities [and so] they have been more lenient in allowing Keon books and papers.
The mayor still refuses to allow Keon the services of a barber.”
Korngold used the visit as an opportunity to give a speech outside:
This time I did not ask for permission, but spoke and had one of the largest crowds that ever assembled at a public meeting here.
The sentiment is entirely with Keon and against the poll tax.
I asked the crowd, “Do you want the poll tax?”
And they shouted, “No!”
“Well,” I said, “you have been foolish enough to give the government of your town over into the hands of the business element and they are trying to force the poll tax down your throat to relieve themselves of part of the taxes.”
I happened to find out that the banker owned the mortgage on the mayor’s home and was practically running the mayor, and I used this in my talk.
“All over the United States,” I said, “business men dodge their taxes; but did you ever hear of a business man going to jail for doing so?”
The crowd said, “No!”
“Do you think,” I said, “that the mayor would send the banker to jail if the banker refused to pay any kind of tax?”
The crowd said, “I guess not!”
“Of course, he wouldn’t,” said I.
“If he did the banker would foreclose the mortgage on the mayor’s property.”
There was a laugh at the expense of the mayor.
“You are to pay $1.50 poll tax or work on the road two days,” I continued.
“That means you working-men look to the city administration like 75 cents.
Pretty cheap, isn’t it?
But you can make them look still cheaper.
You can make them look like 30 cents at the next election.”
There was a round of applause which did not bespeak well for the future chances of the present administration.
I compared the Keon case with the case of Henry D. Thoreau, who refused to pay taxes before the civil war, saying that he would not pay toward the support of a slave government.
Henry D. Thoreau was placed in jail and was visited there by his friend, Ralph Waldo Emerson.
Emerson, walking up to the bars, said to Thoreau:
“Why, Henry, what are you doing in jail?”
Thoreau answered:
“Why, Ralph, what are you doing out of jail?”
“And the question is,” I said, “what are you workingmen doing out of jail?
If you had gone to jail with Keon the business interests by this time would have lynched the mayor or would have driven him out of town.”
The following year, after serving his six months, Keon ran for mayor, and was defeated by only 89 votes by the incumbent mayor — who was also the prosecutor who had argued the tax case against Keon (only winning a conviction on the third trial).
When people are arrested, tried, or imprisoned for tax resistance, their comrades have sometimes used this as an occasion to hold rallies or other demonstrations.
This shows support for the people being persecuted, demonstrates determination in the face of government reprisals, and can be a good opportunity for propaganda.
Here are some examples:
When Russell Kanning was convicted for leafletting at the IRS office in Keene, New Hampshire, supporters demonstrated at the jail, holding up “Free Russell Kanning” signs.
Supporters of jailed war tax resister Russell Kanning protest near the IRS office in Keene, New Hampshire
During the Dublin water charge strike, according to one organizer:
“The campaign immediately took a decision that when any individual was summonsed to court, we would turn up and contest every case — and that we would turn up in force. …
And when the first court appearances took place, over 500 people turned up outside Rathfarnham courthouse to support their neighbours.
We marched to the courthouse, had stirring speeches, several songs including ‘You’ll never Walk Alone’ and ‘Bridge Over Troubled Water’ and an amazing sense of our unbeatability.”
Sylvia Hardy, an elderly woman from Exeter, refused to pay her council tax, calling it highway robbery that the tax rates have risen by double-digits per year, while her pension rises at only 1.7% annually.
When she was summonsed to court, she walked alongside banner-waving supporters and was met by a crowd of supporters outside the courthouse.
Another pensioner who refused to pay his council tax bill for similar reasons, David Richardson, was taken to court in .
About fifty supporters demonstrated outside, singing “For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow,” for Richardson.
Brian Wright was the first person imprisoned for failure to pay Margaret Thatcher’s “Poll Tax” — 700 people held a rally outside the prison to show support.
Other prisons holding poll tax resisters were later picketed by protesters.
When J.J. Keon, a Socialist from Grafton, Illinois, was jailed for refusing to pay what he contended was an illegal poll tax in , Socialist Party spokesman Ralph Korngold came to town and gave a speech outside the prison urging people to join Keon in resisting and to ask why no rich tax dodgers were behind bars.
Maurice McCrackin was jailed for war tax resistance in .
While there, war tax resister Richard Fichter picketed the federal prison camp where he was held.
Before that, he’d picketed the courthouse where McCracken was being tried.
When the IRS took war tax resister Ed Hedemann to court in to try to force him to turn over financial documents to the agency, some 25 supporters, waving signs and handing out leaflets, joined him to demonstrate outside the courthouse before the hearing.
Prior to war tax resister Frank Donnelly’s sentencing on tax evasion charges in , dozens of supporters rallied outside the courthouse.
One supporter noted that “[i]n addition to showing up at his sentencing, Donnelly’s friends in Maine threw three ‘Going-Away-To-Jail Parties’ for Donnelly in the days leading up to his prison sentence.
In one party surprise, Donnelly cut into a fresh Maine blueberry pie, and he found a file baked into the pie.”
The women’s suffrage movement in the United Kingdom was particularly noted for its courthouse and jailhouse rallies:
When Clemence Housman was jailed for failure to pay about $1 of tax in — with the authorities telling her that they were authorized to keep her in jail until she paid up, however long that took — the Women’s Tax Resistance League held a protest outside the prison, and “gave three rousing cheers for Miss Housman, which… it is hoped reached the lonely prisoner in her cell.”
The league then organized a procession to the prison gates.
The four mile walk, over muddy streets on a rainy day, ended in a surprising victory, as the government had thrown in the towel and released Housman — without getting a penny from her — after five days.
When a Women’s Suffrage wagon full of activists descended on the courthouse where Janet Legate Bunten was being charged with refusal to take out a license for her dog, the authorities panicked.
“The court was twenty minutes late in taking its seat,” a sympathetic observer noted, “and it was freely rumoured that the reason of the delay was that more police were sent for to be in attendance before the proceedings began!
There certainly was an unusual number present for so insignificant a court.”
The Women’s Tax Resistance League organized “a great gathering” to support Kate Harvey who was charged with ten counts of failing to pay national insurance taxes on her gardener’s salary.
Following the sentence, they shouted “Shame!” to the judge, then held a “poster parade” to the town square and held a mass meeting there.
One tactic that has been used from time to time by tax resisters and tax resistance campaigns is to attempt to make tax enforcement, or government reprisals against tax resisters, costly for the government — for example by clogging the jails or the court system.
If accomplished successfully, this can force the government into a checkmate, where if it fails to take action it loses, but if it takes action it loses.
But by forcing resisters to throw themselves onto the gears of the machine, this tactic can be costly to them as well, and so this tactic can turn into a game of chicken (or a war of attrition).
Here are a handful of examples:
John Brown Smith was a British citizen living in Massachusetts.
Not, as an alien, being entitled to vote, he decided to test the American “no taxation without representation” motto, and stopped paying his $2 poll tax.
In the town threw him in jail.
There he stayed… for almost a year!
The town had to pay about $1.75 a week just to feed him.
The question of martyrdom in this case hinges on the board bill, for which the Town of Belchertown is liable.
Some of the frugal tax-payers of Belchertown object to being assessed for their proportion of Smith’s weekly board bill.
They think that they are the real martyrs, since they maintain in idleness a man who will nto pay a poll-tax, the proceeds of which would scarcely suffice to pay the cost of maintaining him one week in Northampton Jail.
Some nobler spirits, however, express their willingness to pay their share of the cost of Smith’s prison fare until the crack of doom, if Smith should hold out so long, in order that the majesty of the law shall be vindicated.
Smith, on his part, exultingly declares that he is better housed and fed than a majority of the voters of Belchertown who are paying his board.
This aspect of the case detracts somewhat from the heroism of the martyr to the poll-tax.
Nevertheless, as Smith adds that he would rather spend the rest of his days in jail than give up the principle for which he is contending, we may concede that he is a real hero, unaffected by the mercenary considerations of his board bill.
Smith was eventually released when someone came forward to pay his tax and fines (a total of $5.62) for him (leaving the government about $75 behind on the deal).
J.J. Keon refused to pay his poll tax in Grafton, Illinois, in :
J.J. Keon, a Socialist of this city, is in the city jail, having the time of his life, so he says, because he is forcing the city to spend $125 to punish him for failure to pay a poll tax of $1.50… He says he finds nothing in the state constitution which makes a poll tax legal, so he insists that the city keep him in jail for six months, which is the longest term possible for his “offense.”
He believes that it will not alter his principle and that it may make the city tired of forcing its male population to pay a poll tax.
“You’re losing $4.50 a day [Keon’s usual salary] while you are in jail,” pleaded the mayor.
“In six months that will amount to more than $500.”
“Money is nothing to me when compared with a principle,” replied Keon.
“And let’s see what I am costing the city.
Meals, 150 days, at sixty cents a day, $108; night watchman, $5; chicken fence wire, $2; miscellaneous, $10. Total, $125. The entire poll taxes for the year are only $325.…”
You may remember the newspaper articles about Maurice McCrackin I posted , in which he refused to cooperate at his tax resistance trial — to the point even of having to be carried or wheeled into the courtroom.
headline from the Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania Sunday Independent
Resisters to an unpopular wage tax in Pennsylvania in discovered that if they refused to pay the tax entirely, the government could quickly hit them with fines or jail time… but if they paid some minimal fraction of the taxes due, the government couldn’t move against them without doing a complicated assessment first to determine how much extra was owed.
This could be a long and dreary legal procedure for a school district or council, especially if there is more than one such delinquent.
Therefore, many residents are beating the wage tax levy by simply clunking a single coin on the tax collector’s desk.
Clogging the courts was an important tactic of the campaign to resist Thatcher’s Poll Tax.
Danny Burns writes:
Bristol City Council issues summonses to 120,000 people, Leeds summoned 110,000 and the numbers in almost all other big cities were comparable.
In order to get through this number of cases, councils had to hope that defendants wouldn’t turn up.…
The strategy of the Anti-Poll Tax Unions was to make sure that as many people as possible came to court.
In law everyone had a right to have their case heard individually.
The calculation was that even if only a small percentage of people had their cases heard, the courts would be blocked for years.
Initially, neither the councils nor the courts took the judicial procedure seriously because they didn’t expect anyone to turn up… South Tyndale Council summoned 3,500 to appear on two afternoons.
A total of five hours was allocated to hear all these cases — an average of four secons per hearing.
When people heard this they were furious, because it was obvious that both the council and the courts saw the process as rubber stamping exercise.…
The Anti-Poll Tax Unions publicised the strategy to block the courts, with leaflets and posters and articles in the local newspapers.
Mass demonstrations were called for the first day of the hearings, and in some areas the courts were brought to a standstill.
In Warrington on , 1,000 people took over the court and all the cases were postponed.
Similar events took place in Southwark:
1,500 people, mostly women and children, turned up at Southwark court and occupied the building.
It was absolute chaos, the courts couldn’t handle the numbers.
The police were stopping people from coming into their own court cases.
The crowds didn’t move until the court declared all 5,000 cases adjourned.
…People were given ideas about how they might disrupt or delay the court proceedings.
These included simple things, like asking for a glass of water because their throat was dry, demanding to see the identity cards of everyone present in court, to fainting in court or arranging for fire alarms to go off.
People were told to demand their rights to see and read every document which was produced as evidence against them.
They were also given briefings on the basic technical arguments.
…Throughout England and Wales over a thousand people were trained to do court support work and could quote the relevant legislation.
Experience showed that the most effective way of wasting time, for those who were not familiar with the law, was to relate direct experiences of hardship.
People talking in their own language about their own circumstances were much harder for the magistrates to dismiss than legal technicians.
Many people made political speeches which lasted for as long as ten minutes, others outlined their financial circumstances.
They all took up valuable time, and sometimes made a powerful and moving impact on the public gallery.
Using the government’s own defenses against it can be a powerful strategy.
And I’ve even got an example in my archives of when the government managed to foil nonviolent tax resisters by using their own tactics against them.
During the Salt Raids in the Indian independence campaign, a group of policemen blockaded the road in front of an assembly of salt raiders, and then sent another group to cut off their escape route.
Then, rather than attacking the raiders, the police used satyagraha tactics to force a standoff:
“You cannot proceed.” the superintendent informed Mrs. [Sarojini] Naidu.
“We will not go back,” the poetess and leader replied.
“We will stay here.”
“We are going to stay here, too, and offer Satyagraha ourselves as long as you stay,” the superintendent said, ordering his men to stand their ground.
They parleyed for a short time and then Mrs. Naidu ordered a chair brought from a nearby house.
She sat down and wrote letters and talked jovially with her friends.
Her followers squatted on the ground nearby, many of them engaged in spinning cloth.
I found another brief note about American Socialist tax resister J.J. Keon, who kept up a Thoreauvian jail stint in Grafton, Illinois over a poll tax there:
Refuses to Pay Tax and Is Sent to Jail
Grafton, Ill., — Because J.J. Keon, a Socialist leader, refuses to pay a poll tax of $1.50 he began to serve six months in jail.
The City Hall has been converted into a jail by screening the windows with chicken wire, and Keon declares he will serve the full term rather than pay the tax or work it out at 75 cents a day.
He holds such a tax is unconstitutional.
Keon’s meals will be brought from the city’s leading hotel and a special deputy has been sworn in to look after him, making the cost of his keep to the city $3.25 a day.
