How you can resist funding the government → the tax resistance movement → birth of the modern American war tax resistance movement → Ralph DiGia

Ralph DiGia died last Friday at age 93. He was among the direct-action pacifists who forged the American anti-war movement in the last half of the twentieth century.

Imprisoned as a conscientious objector during World War Ⅱ (he didn’t qualify for conscientious objector status because he couldn’t provide a religious reason for his objection, which was at that time a requirement), he helped to organize strikes in Danbury Federal Prison that led to that institution being the first federal prison to desegregate its dining facility. (He tells the story of his prison time in this interview.)

DiGia was a war tax resister, and led the War Resisters League to take a war tax resistance stance as an institution (a first, so far as I’m aware):

In 1956, Ralph DiGia asked the board of the War Resisters League (WRL) not to withhold federal taxes from his paychecks. WRL agreed, and other WRL employees followed Ralph’s lead in asking WRL not to withhold from their paychecks. For a long time, the IRS ignored the situation, but in 1974 they froze WRL’s bank account and seized the entire account balance of $2,537.43, about a thousand dollars less than they said was owed for resisted employee tax dollars. A few years later, the IRS placed a levy on DiGia’s salary. Because of WRL’s policy of not honoring IRS levies, the IRS sued WRL in U.S. District Court in 1978 for amounts that WRL willfully refused to pay under the levy. In its December 1979 ruling, the court did not challenge the sincerity of WRL’s professed opposition to war. The court ruled in favor of the government, however, because WRL had no constitutional right to refuse taxes based on religious or conscientious objection. In 1981, WRL refused to cooperate with a request by the government to list its assets as an aid to collection of the judgment in the lawsuits. Two years later the U.S. Department of Justice seized $1,228.23 from WRL’s bank account. WRL resists the federal phone tax, and though the IRS continues from time to time to send levies for other employees, they have not been enforced, and there has been little interaction between the IRS and WRL in recent years.

If you search about on-line, you’ll find obits and remembrances that are being published as news spreads. This one, from David McReynolds, is a good example.

Ruth Benn, NWTRCC’s coordinator, eulogizes Ralph DiGia at the War Resisters League site. Excerpts:

Way back in 1956 Ralph asked the board of WRL not to withhold income tax from his pay. He had joined the staff the year before and thus became the first war tax resister on the WRL staff, the first to press the organization to take a stand against cooperating with the IRS. It wasn’t until 1981, after various collection efforts and a court case, that the IRS took money from WRL’s bank account for four years of Ralph’s many years of refusal to pay war taxes.

WRL has promoted tax day actions for years and handing out pie charts at the IRS office in Manhattan was an occasion Ralph rarely missed. He loved leafleting and would be there whether the action was large or small. In recent years he couldn’t stand up the whole time, but he’d sit on a big cement planter at the edge of the sidewalk near the IRS offering out the pie chart to anyone who would take it. In recent years he looked forward to going even more because one of the IRS employees made a special effort to come out and greet Ralph’s arrival each year. They’d have a good chat before returning to their respective posts.

This morning was the first of two workshops I’m helping to put on at the Bay Area Anarchist Bookfair with Northern California War Tax Resistance.

After the workshop, I browsed the tables a bit. There was a bit of everything you could ask for in terms of radical literature and punk rock aesthetic clothing, and plenty of amusements of other sorts. Outside I caught part of a shouting match between two Marxists one of whose factions had collaborated in the repression of the other at some point in some place. Inside, you could find carefully preserved relics of such infighting going back a hundred years or more. There was a “bargain bin” dedicated to miscellaneous works of, by, and about Lenin for a buck a pop. There were old pamphlets with titles like The People Will Quickly Extinguish the Imperialist Running Dogs and Their Lackeys for Making Fun of Our Glorious Tin-Eared Verbiage.

At one of these tables I found a 1959 Catholic Worker pamphlet called Two Agitators: Peter Maurin — Ammon Hennacy. Here’s Dorothy Day’s description of Ammon Hennacy from the Introduction:

Ammon… will tell you the story of his life at the drop of a hat, because he feels that so much of it illustrates what he is trying to convey in the way of ideas. I may be crediting him with a virtue which he does not possess, but it seems to me that there is a profound humility too, in Ammon’s talk of himself. Like all prophets, he has a keen sense of the emergency — “now is the time” and what each man does now is going to have its effect on history. With Peter Maurin this meant constant repetition and great terseness of expression in the written word. With Ammon this humility meant, “What I can do, every man can do, if he will put fear far from him.” Ammon often says that he has the virtue of courage and knowledge, but lacks love; he knows how critical his attitude is about others. It is true he judges, but without malice.

The context of Hennacy’s self-criticism here is his belief that the “one in a million who moves the world, as with Jesus, Buddha and Gandhi” is someone who combines equal and generous portions of love, courage, and wisdom. He very much wanted to be this one-in-a-million.

Hennacy’s first essay in the pamphlet concerns the time he spent in prison in 1917 for speaking out against U.S. participation in World War Ⅰ. It includes this delightful anecdote:

The editor of the prison paper, Good Words, asked me to give him something to print. I told him that was what I got in for, printing things in papers, and that my ideas were too radical for him. He insisted so I gave this quote which, believe it or not, appeared in a box underneath the editorial caption of the Department of Justice on April 1, 1918: “A prison is the only house in a slave state where a free man can abide with honor.” Thoreau. This had the o.k. of the warden and was not sneaked in. The ignorant official thought it praised prisons.

The second of Hennacy’s essays is “Tax Refusal and Life on the Land,” some excerpts from which I reproduce below:

Before World War Ⅱ income taxes were not paid by those in the lower brackets so it was not a problem to think about. I was still too nervous from jail to work steadily, so to get the jail out of my system my wife and I started from New York City on June 21, 1921 (the anniversary of my entrance into solitary in Atlanta in 1918) with packs on our backs and $100 in our pockets. We never asked for rides but took them if offered and went 22,000 miles in every state in the union distributing pacifist propaganda, with stickers “Stop the Next War Now.” We stopped to work most of the time, but on my birthday, July 24, 1925, we bought 10 acres with $100 down near Waukesha, Wisconsin, built one room in the woods, and another next year. I helped Carmen get born there June 17, 1927, and Sharon on Oct. 23, 1929. (The very day the depression started) I had led in a strike in a dairy where I worked and lost my job. Friends suggested that I become a social worker in Milwaukee. I thought this work was too bourgeois, but for me it was either take relief or hand it out. I told my examiners for the job that I was an anarchist and would break rules when I thought it best to do so. They needed male social workers badly it seemed and I got a job with the county of Milwaukee. I organized a union and was active in pacifist circles.

In 1938 a client locked me up in a room and came after me with a butcher knife because I would not give him something that he didn’t have coming. After a time I dared him to knife me (I didn’t double dare him) and I shook hands with him. He put the knife away and we became friends. My boss was a Catholic and head of the American Legion in Wisconsin. He wanted me to take this man to court. I refused for he had been in jail twice for knifing social workers and had done time for it, and had not learned anything. My boss thought I should get acquainted “with those crazy Catholics in New York.” I asked Father Kennedy in the same block, editor of the Herald-Citizen about the Catholic Worker and he gave me a copy. Then I became acquainted with Nina Polcyn and Dave Host and worked with the CW House formed there the next year, where my daughters sang Christmas carols, and I took Muriel Lester, the English pacifist to bless our CW house. I met Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin that same year as they spoke in Milwaukee. I liked their pacifism and radicalism but not their church. In fact I sold CW’s every Sunday in front of churches but would not go inside except to get warm.

When World War Ⅱ came the American Legion wanted to have me fired from my job because I sold CW’s on the street. I had a private hearing for an hour with a court stenographer taking notes before the Corporation Counsel. I told him that I would not quit my job nor would I cease selling CW’s on the street, and that I would insist on a public hearing. They dropped the charges that week. However, when the time came for me to register for the draft on April 27, 1942 I openly refused to do so and resigned my job. I thought I would get 5 years but the government had secretly made a rule that those over 45 would not be prosecuted. I was 48, and was only in jail a few hours. My wife and daughters were in the west at that time so I went to Denver and got a job at a dairy. Selling CW’s on the street I was imprisoned incommunicado for 4 days for not carrying a draft card, and I was rearrested a week later for selling CW’s at the same place.

On Jan. 1, 1943 the withholding tax went into effect. About the only place where a person could work without paying taxes for war was on a farm. For here the tax was to be paid at the end of the year. The brackets had been lowered so that even a dishwasher in a restaurant had to pay about a dollar a day for war. The New York Times in a recent editorial declared that 83% of the income tax went for past, present or future wars.

I found work on a farm near Albuquerque with a farmer whose wife was a Quaker and at the end of the year when I refused to pay my tax I was fired but got a job with another farmer. I also sold CW’s on the streets in Albuquerque for 4½ years and the police never bothered me.

I moved to Phoenix in July of 1948. Here the tax man was a Quaker and I was at once arrested for picketing the tax office in 1949. Again in 1950 on August 6^th I picketed the tax office and fasted for 5 days because it was 5 years since we had dropped the bomb at Hiroshima. I turned in a report to the tax office, not as my duty or their right, but as a courtesy to my enemy, the State, saying: “This is my name, this is where I live, this is what I made. Try and get it.” I had sent all of my money to my daughters who were taking music at Northwestern University.

Finally in 1953 I came to New York City and the Catholic Worker as my daughters had graduated, and since then I have not earned enough by speaking to owe any tax. The tax men have been here several times to investigate my income and have called me into the tax office when I have been picketing them. I can get 5 years for each of the 12 times that I have refused to pay my income tax. Young toughs have threatened me at times as I have picketed in New York City. Now on August 6, 1959 I will fast 14 days until the 20^th as it is 14 years since Hiroshima. I do this as a penance for the sin of our country in continuing atomic testing and warfare.…

Today, May 15, I received a notice that I owe $2.15 interest and penalty on my $192 tax bill for 1951 and unless paid within ten days my property and wages will be attached. This is an old runaround and I am not worrying. Today I ate the first Irish potatoes from our garden, which is more important in the life of man than paying taxes. The persimmon tree which the Old Pioneer’s daughter-in-law gave me last winter now bears premature fruit. Watermelon, eggplant, tomatoes, squash, peppers and onions are doing fine.

One day when I was soapboxing at Broad and Wall Streets a man asked me what came first with me: Catholicism or anarchism? I replied that Catholicism came First and daily Mass and Communion. Second, to live poor as we did at the CW. Third, to love your enemy, for as Dorothy quotes some saint: “You love God as much as you love the person you love the least.” Fourth, to bring this out in some association with others. Fifth, Don’t be a parasite, which of course cuts out all Wall Street. Sixth, to be an anarchist for if one lived a dedicated life and put first things first, to vote for one millionaire or another whose business was to return evil for evil in courts, prisons and war, was a poor way of being a Christian. Seventh, in order to be effective in the spiritual and radical life I do not smoke, drink, eat meat, or take medicine.

Selling CW’s at 43^rd and Lexington a cop arrested me for selling papers without a license. I told him that according to the Supreme Court decision in the forties the Jehovah Witnesses had won the right to sell papers without a license. He said to tell it to the judge. The magistrate let me out on my own name for trial in three weeks. I went back next Friday and another cop said I had to have a license but I talked him out of it. The next Friday Eileen Fantino and Birtha Tisius stood on one corner and I was on my regular corner when the first cop arrested me when the girls were not looking. Dorothy came up to help and finally discovered that I was in jail. They sold CW’s all afternoon and Jackson MacLow, an anarchist friend came along and helped also. They were not arrested. I got 5 days in jail or a $10 fine and as I never would pay money to the state I did the time on Rikers Island. The American Civil Liberties Union wanted to use me as an example to provide freedom for those who always moved on when told to do so. After six months, although losing the first appeal, the highest court in the state affirmed my right to sell the CW and my book as I was not doing it for profit.

Across the street from St. Patrick’s Cathedral a policeman told me that I should not sell “that Communist paper.” I told him it was not a Communist paper, and if it was I had the right to sell it there, and I showed him a press clipping of the court decision.

“I don’t care anything about the law. If I don’t want you here I’ll have you pinched, and you’ll be in jail, you won’t be here. If the judge lets you out as you say, I’ll arrest you again, and if he frees you, I’ll arrest you again. I’ll wear you out.”

“What if I wear you out?” I replied.

He shrugged his shoulders and walked away. You have to be ready to die or you are not ready to live. I was never bothered again on that corner.

In 1955 there came the first air raid drill in New York City. The state law says that if you do not take part you can get a year in jail and $500 fine. I called up Ralph DeGia of the War Resister’s League and other pacifists and we told the authorities that we would openly refuse to take part in their war game and would sit in the City Hall Park. Television and radio gave our message as we handed out our leaflets. 29 of us were arrested. Dorothy, being a better basic radical than I, persuaded me to plead guilty instead of not guilty. We Catholic Workers and some atheistic anarchists pled guilty and the others carried the case on appeal and it is still in the courts. We all got suspended sentences. The next year we had our demonstration in Washington Square and 19 of us got 5 days in jail. Those of us who pled guilty served them. In 1957 there were only 12 of us in the demonstration in the park across from our house on Chrystie Street and we got 30 days in jail from a Catholic judge who told us to read the Bible. Dorothy spoke about the terrible conditions in the woman’s prison on NightBeat on television, and I spoke twice on the same program later. So in 1958 when 9 of us were arrested while picketing the Atomic Energy Commission near Columbus Circle during the air raid drill our sentence was suspended. In 1959 five of us who had been demonstrating annually were accompanied by 14 others at City Hall Park during the drill and we got 10 days in jail, after waiting 5 days in jail for our trial. The newcomers got a suspended sentence. This time when the judge asked me about “rendering unto Caesar” I answered that Caesar was getting too much and God was getting very little so I would render unto God by disobeying Caesar as St. Peter did.

Here is an excerpt from Scott H. Bennett’s Radical Pacifism: The War Resisters League and Gandhian Nonviolence in America concerning the origins of the modern American war tax resistance movement:

In 1948 a small tax resistance movement emerged when several tax refusers learned about one another and began to correspond. Many of these early tax resisters were WRL members. Abraham Kaufman, the League’s executive secretary, facilitated many of these contacts. At its founding conference in 1948, Peacemakers established a Tax Refusal Committee. League members formed a majority on this committee, which was chaired by Ernest Bromley, a Methodist minister and the nation’s leading proponent of tax resistance.

For the next two decades, Bromley championed tax resistance and publicized examples from three continents to demonstrate its power. American examples included Quaker tax resistance during both the French and Indian War and the American Revolution, the popular tax protests by colonists during the American Revolution, and Henry David Thoreau’s refusal to pay the Massachusetts poll tax to protest the Mexican War. He also cited England’s Wat Tyler (fourteenth century) and John Hampden (seventeenth century). Finally, he invoked Gandhi and the Indian independence movement; both resorted to tax resistance in the struggle against British rule.

For both moral and pragmatic reasons, tax resistance appealed to Peacemakers and to radical pacifists. Most important, it enabled absolutists to express their total commitment against militarism and war. The Peacemakers’ literature underscored this uncompromising position. One publication explained that tax resistance “is not merely a protest. It is an act.” Aware that modern, technological warfare required huge expenditures, tax resisters were seeking to cripple war preparation — and war — through nonpayment of taxes. Other literature asserted that nearly 35 percent of the national budget was earmarked for the military and that 80 percent paid for past, present, and future wars. The “new push-button type warfare,” Bromley declared, would require “more drafted dollars than drafted men.” Tax resisters were hoping to influence American policy by publicly repudiating military preparedness and weapon stockpiling before conflict broke out again. Unlike COs and nonregistration, tax resistance was both age and gender neutral. By enabling men and women of all ages and occupations to participate, tax refusal expanded the sphere of war resistance and promoted solidarity with draft-eligible men.

Ernest and Marion Bromley, whose Wilmington, Ohio, home served as unofficial headquarters of the Tax Refusal Committee, embodied the spirit of tax resistance. “The time has now come,” Ernest exclaimed in his 1948 IRS tax statement, “when men ought no longer to depend solely upon their spoken witness against war or preparation for it. They ought to prepare themselves for an outright resistance by a thorough-going dissociation with the war-making system.” In her March 1948 letter to the tax collector, Marion charged that “this country did not turn to peace at the end of World War Ⅱ, but instead sought to protect and expand an American Empire,” declaring “I want to dissociate myself as completely as possible from these tragic, suicidal and evil policies… and to do all I can to convince my fellow citizens that we must completely renounce the way of war and violence.” The Bromleys believed that radical pacifist individuals and organizations must assume risks for war resistance. Anticipating the New Left, Ernest asserted: “Pacifists believe… that there is a… time and place where they as individuals must simply come to a stop, and ‘clog [the system] with their whole weight.’ Perhaps that time and place have come.”

Four months after its formation, Peacemakers’ Tax Refusal Committee published the statements of active tax resisters. Many of these people were WRL members. These statements illustrate the total commitment and absolutist nature of Peacemakers and of a section of the League. Writing in a different venue, Caroline Urie similarly declared:

In a time of crisis like the present it is our duty as sovereign citizens to defend our country not only with protest but with our lives, if necessary, against military enslavement and the possible annihilation implicit in atomic and bacterial warfare. In the brief time at our disposal, protest is not enough; if we are to assume real responsibility, we must act in a manner simple enough and clear enough to be understood and to arouse public conscience.

As justification for tax resistance, several WRL members pointed to the Nuremberg War Crimes Tribunal, which had established the principle of individual responsibility for wartime actions, even in the face of wartime orders. In his 1948 letter to the IRS, Walter Gormley declared that he was “refusing to make any federal income tax payment, because they money would be used mostly for ‘crimes against peace.’ ” “The U.S. is preparing for a shooting war of aggression by maintaining bases, subservient governments and military forces from Korea to Turkey, by intensive research on methods of mass slaughter and by maintaining a huge military organization,” he charged. “I must refrain from supporting such a government.” Likewise, Valerie Riggs explained that “if our government… at Nuremberg could hold individuals responsible to stand against crime… I feel thoroughly justified by my own government in not paying this part of my tax.”

Perhaps A.J. Muste best expressed the compelling logic of tax resistance. “World War Ⅲ has already started,” he exclaimed in May 1948:

I cannot support a government in these war-measures, which I deem insane, wicked and suicidal. I must withdraw support from such war-measures in every possible way. The two decisive powers of government… are the power to conscript and the power to tax. Pacifists recognize that to be consistent they must refuse to be conscripted for military service or training. I have come… to the conviction that I at least am in conscience bound… to challenge the right of the government to tax me for waging war, and in particular for the production of atomic and bacterial weapons… The need for getting our pacifist teaching off the level of talk and writing and onto the level of action is, I believe, imperative.

Peacemakers was highly critical of pacifist organizations — the WRL included — that collected withholding taxes from their employees. By withholding taxes these pacifist groups were effectively barring tax refusers from working for them, or forcing them to resign. Both the WRL and the FOR paid a lot of attention to this issue. A special committee of the FOR examined the problem for a year before recommending that the FOR withhold taxes, even though most FOR employees had indicated that they wanted to make individual decisions about tax refusal. Staff member Marion Coddington (Bromley) resigned over the policy. The WRL also decided to withhold taxes. In justifying this policy, a member of the League’s executive committee declared: “The life of the organization is at stake.” The Peacemakers’ Tax Refusal Committee, which characterized the WRL and other pacifist groups as “tax collectors for the government,” was scathing in its denunciation. “If pacifist organizations, whose business is to create a warless world, are not ready to risk something for war resistance now,” the committee asked, “when will they be ready?”

Tax resistance took various forms. Total refusers paid not tax. Since most workers could not avoid withholding tax, total refusers were often self-employed. Miriam Keeler and Marion Coddington Bromley resigned from the Labor Department and the FOR staff in order to avoid the withholding taxes. Percentage refusers withheld that portion of taxes corresponding to the percentage the federal government would spend on war preparation and the military (calculations ranged from 35 to 80 percent). Finally, some tax resisters chose to live on an income below the taxable level or to work at several part-time, low-income jobs to preclude employers from withholding taxes. Some tax resisters refused to submit tax returns; others explained their action in letters to local tax collectors and the Bureau of Internal Revenue. Some tax resisters, instead of remitting taxes to the government, contributed the money to WRL and other peace and justice organizations.

As a result of Peacemakers’ activism, tax resistance became a major issue for the WRL. The League sold stickers that tax resisters could attach to their tax forms. “This tax goes chiefly for war purposes, as a pacifist I pay under protest.” In the spring of 1948 the League passed several resolutions commending those, members or not, who practiced tax resistance. Beginning in 1948, several tax resisters began donating a portion of their unpaid income tax to the League, an act consistent with their willingness to pay taxes for nonmilitary social programs. The League established a special literature fund for these donations to ensure that they did not go to pay staff salaries, which were subject to withholding taxes.

Ammon Hennacy, a WRL member most often associated with the Catholic Worker movement, was a pioneer tax refuser praised by the League. A “Christian anarchist,” he first practiced tax refusal in 1943, when the tax withholding system was implemented. Each year at tax time he prepared a statement and mailed it to the IRS. Hennacy’s 1945 tax statement reflected the direct action and civil disobedience impulse that would shake the League over the next half-decade. “We can refuse to put our trust in Princes and Presidents,” he declared. “With Thoreau and Gandhi we can start our own campaign of Civil Disobedience by refusal to buy war bonds… and… pay taxes for war or conscription.” In 1950, Hennacy began expanding his protest; each year, on 6 August, he fasted and picketed the local IRS office for as many days as years had passed since Hiroshima. While picketing, he distributed tax statements and leaflets that repudiated war, advocated anarchism, and declared his tax resistance. When threatened with arrest for disturbing the peace while picketing, he retorted: “I’m disturbing the war.”

In a letter to Hennacy, [Abraham] Kaufman expressed his disagreement with tax resistance. But then he added: “I admire your guts and want you to know that I am with you, for each of us must use the methods he feels to be effective in bringing the world out of its present insanity. Your method may prove most effective in the long run.” Although he did not delude himself that his “One Man Revolution” would change government policy or transform the world, Hennacy insisted on the moral imperative of individual resistance to the militaristic state.

By mid-1949, radicals had succeeded in raising the issue of the WRL’s payment of withholding taxes, especially for members like Roy Kepler who supported tax refusal. In October the WRL endorsed CCCO assistance for tax resisters and authorized a review of the issue. Although they extended moral support to tax refusers and publicized their actions, most League members did not support tax resistance, and the WRL did not officially endorse it. Kaufman, in particular, insisted that it would be “unethical” for a small minority to “coerce” the League into accepting such a policy. With minor revisions, the League accepted its subcommittee’s Withholding Tax Report. Concluding that its survival as an organization took priority over tax refusal, the League decided to continue to withhold income taxes from its employees.

The WRL eventually changed its policy on withholding, and stopped withholding income taxes from the wages of one of its tax-resisting employees, Ralph DiGia, in 1956.

On this date in 1967, just a few days after Martin Luther King, Jr., delivered his powerful “Beyond Vietnam” speech, Eric Weinberger, the national secretary of the Committee for Nonviolent Action, wrote to to ask if King would publicly sign on to their war tax resistance campaign:

I don’t know how (or if) King responded to this request. I have seen no indications that he participated in the war tax resistance of the period.

King had been targeted by politically-motivated tax prosecutions in areas where he had been active. Because of this he had been under particular pressure to keep to the straight-and-narrow when it came to tax filing, so as not to give his enemies a potentially fruitful avenue of attack. This may have discouraged him from making war tax resistance part of his protest against U.S. militarism and the Vietnam War. It is also possible that, since King was killed a little less than a year after this letter was written, he just didn’t have time to put any possibly-intended resistance into practice.

The CNVA letterhead as shown on this letter is a clue as to who was associated with the emerging war tax resistance movement of the time. Many of these names are familiar to me, but some others are not:

In the modern world, many governments have introduced income tax withholding or “pay as you earn.” In such a scheme, it can be difficult for people to resist paying income tax, as the tax has already been paid on their behalf by their employers. In such cases, resisters need their employers to be willing to go out on a limb and resist alongside them.

Today I’ll give some examples of employers who helped their employees resist income tax withholding.

Quaker Meetings

Quaker Meetings (congregations and collections of congregations) have sometimes supported the war tax resistance of their employees by not withholding taxes from their paychecks.

The Philadelphia Yearly Meeting, for instance, has the following policy [excerpts]:

Philadelphia Yearly Meeting of the Religious Society of Friends (Yearly Meeting) has discerned and again affirms that conscientious objection to paying taxes supporting military purposes is an appropriate and traditional individual expression of the Friends Peace Testimony. As a result, Yearly Meeting has a religious duty to refrain from taking action that violates an employee’s expression of conscience in such historic Friends testimonies. …

At the written request of an employee pursuant to this Policy, Yearly Meeting will withhold from an employee’s gross salary or wages, but refuse to forward to IRS, amounts up to but not in excess of the military portion of the federal income tax otherwise due on that employee’s pay. Yearly Meeting, in notifying IRS that it has not remitted a portion of withheld taxes, will disclose and advise IRS of its action, as described [below]…

Yearly Meeting will communicate at least annually with an appropriate office or official of the IRS to explain that, pursuant to this Policy and Yearly Meeting’s core religious principles, it has withheld the full amount of taxes, as indicated by form(s) W-4, from the salaries of certain employees opposed to the payment of taxes for military purposes. Yearly Meeting will further explain that, at the request of each such employee, it has not remitted the portion of the amount withheld which the employee has conscientiously refused to pay, that it has identified the amounts not remitted in its records, and that the amounts not remitted, plus interest, will be paid over to the Treasury of the United States on behalf of the employees at such time as there is assurance that the taxes will not be used for military purposes.

The Meeting was taken to court in 1988 for failing to remit $11,224 in taxes from resisting employees. More recently, the Meeting has been pursuing legal arguments in support of its employee Priscilla Adams, who has been resisting war taxes for years with the help of the Meeting. The Meeting was unable to convince a court to order the IRS to respect its conscientious scruples, and the agency ordered to Meeting to garnishee Adams’s salary. The Meeting has continued to refuse.

The London Yearly Meeting for a while withheld a portion of the pay-as-you-earn withholding of some of its employees, hoping to make this a test case that might legalize conscientious objection to military taxation. The courts rejected their arguments, and an appeal to the European Commission of Human Rights also failed, and so the Meeting stopped trying to resist military taxation and now gives war tax resistance only rhetorical support:

Since losing the appeal we have paid in full the income tax collected from our employees. In recent months we have considered whether we can continue to do this, but after very careful consideration have decided that for the time being we must do so. The acceptance of the rule of law is part of our witness, … for a just and peaceful world cannot come about without this. However we do wish to make it clear that we object to the way in which the PAYE [withholding] system involves us in a process of collecting money, used in part to pay for military activity and war preparations, which takes away from the individual taxpayer the right to express their own conscientious objection. This involvement is incompatible with our work for peace.

American Friends Service Committee

During the Vietnam War, the American Friends Service Committee refused to withhold taxes from those of its employees who were refusing to pay taxes. Milton Mayer said, of the Committee’s action:

Under withholding, most of the people who don’t want to buy Mylai have already had it bought for them by April 15. … A few religious organizations — not the churches, of course — have refused to withhold the tax from the pay of their employes who do not want to buy Mylai. The most respectable of them is the American Friends Service Committee, with which I confess to being associated. … But the AFSC has a task force of eighty Philadelphia lawyers, and one of these years a test case will go to Washington. Meanwhile, however, the conscientious citizen who waits for a test case will go on buying Mylai until the whole of Vietnam is a ditch.

The AFSC continues to support tax-resisting employees, and has had mixed luck defending itself in court. According to the NWTRCC pamphlet on Organizational War Tax Resistance:

Employers or other entities which refuse to withhold from the assets of a war tax resister on religious grounds actually have a chance of justifying their actions in court thanks to a 1973 case involving the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) and the IRS. A federal district court ruled that the AFSC and its employees had the First Amendment right not to be required to participate in the withholding system, since the IRS has other methods of satisfying its objectives, such as levies. The decision was overturned by the Supreme Court, but solely on procedural grounds. This position is possibly strengthened by the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA), passed by Congress in 1993.

The IRS has more recently tried to send what are called “lock-in letters” to the AFSC, demanding that they withhold taxes from their resisting employees at the maximum rate permissible by law.

For a time (and this may still be the case), the AFSC policy was to obey such withholding laws and orders, but to hold back a percentage of the withheld taxes from the government, putting that percentage (a percentage they deemed equal to the percentage of the federal budget spent on the military) into an escrow account.

According to a 2008 Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration report, many employers ignore these lock-in letters. This takes some gumption. The way the law works, if an employer doesn’t comply with the lock-in letter, the employer can become liable for the taxes that the employee isn’t paying.

Mennonite General Assembly

In 1989, the Mennonite Church General Assembly adopted a resolution to “support the Mennonite General Board in establishing a policy that federal income taxes not be withheld from the wages of any of its employees who make this request because of conscientious objection to the use of their taxes for military purposes.”

The General Board, however, balked on establishing such a policy after determining “there was not enough support… to ask church boards to engage in civil disobedience.”

Restored Israel of Yahweh

The small Jehovah’s Witnesses spin-off group called the Restored Israel of Yahweh practices war tax resistance. To help facilitate this, two of them, who ran a construction business, agreed not to withhold taxes from those of their employees who were also members of that denomination.

Those two, along with the company’s bookkeeper, were taken to court and convicted of tax evasion charges, making them, according to one of their lawyers, “the first pacifist tax resisters to be prosecuted and jailed — possibly ever — for felony conspiracy to defraud the U.S. and attempted tax evasion, the most serious criminal charges in the Internal Revenue Code.”

War Resisters League & War Resisters International

In 1956, Ralph DiGia, who was working for the War Resisters League, asked them to stop withholding federal taxes from his paycheck. The League agreed, and some other employees followed DiGia’s lead.

It had taken a lot of work to get the League to adopt a policy of tax refusal. At first, they had refused, with a member of the League’s executive committee saying “the life of the organization is at stake.” War tax resisters responded, saying: “If pacifist organizations, whose business is to create a warless world, are not ready to risk something for war resistance now, when will they be ready?” Another group, the Fellowship of Reconciliation, also refused to challenge the IRS, and some of its employees resigned over the issue.

War Resisters’ International, which is based in London, decided in late 2011 to hold back a percentage of its employees’s taxes (equivalent, in its view, to the military percentage of the British national budget). The organization takes the position that conscientious objection to military taxation is an unrecognized human right, but a human right all the same, and they intend to assert it.

Collective Impressions

American war tax resister Ed Guinan for a time ran a print shop called “Collective Impressions.” “Most of the workers in the collective were rooted in a Catholic tradition of pacifism,” said Guinan, and so, from 1977 to 1980 the company paid its employees’ withholding not to the Internal Revenue Service but directly to the U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency.

The Agency returned the money, saying it could not accept it under such circumstances, whereupon Collective Impressions put the money into an escrow account from which it hoped to eventually be able to pay the money in a way that wouldn’t violate the pacifist beliefs of its employees, and from where it was eventually seized by the government.

Straight Lines, Ltd.

Martin Philips, director of the Welsh jewelry business “Straight Lines” stopped paying the 13.6% pay-as-you-earn withholding to the government for his employees — sending the money instead to the Overseas Development Administration as a protest against government military spending.

The government took Straight Lines to court, and eventually seized money from the company to cover the unpaid taxes.

Vivien Kellems

Soon after income tax withholding was introduced in the United States, ornery industrialist Vivien Kellems decided she was not interested in being the tax collector for her employees’ at the Kellems Cable Grip Manufacturing Company:

The most un-American phrase in our modern vocabulary is “take home pay.” What do we mean, “take home pay”? When I hire a man to work for me we discuss three things: the job to be done, the hours he shall work, and the wages he shall receive. And on Friday when he received that pay envelope, we have both fulfilled our contract for that week. There is no further obligation on either side. The money in that envelope belongs to him. He has worked for it and he has earned it. No one, not even the United States Government, has the right to touch it. Who dares to lay profane hands upon that money, to rudely filch from that free man the fruits of his labor, even before the money is in his own hands. This is a monstrous invasion of the rights of a free people and an outrageous perversion of the spirit of the Constitution. This is the miserable system foisted upon the people of our country by New Deal zealots and arrogant Communists who have wormed themselves into high places in Washington. This system is deliberately designed to make involuntary tax collectors of every employer and to impose involuntary tax servitude upon every employee. We don’t need to go to Russia for slavery, we’ve got it right here.

Paying taxes is a duty, a responsibility and a privilege of citizenship. Without taxes we can have no government. However I do not exercise other duties, responsibilities and privileges of citizenship for my employees. I do not vote for them, I do not form political opinions for them, I do not select a church for them, I do not pay real estate taxes for them. They are all free American citizens, thoroughly capable of performing all of the duties and responsibilities of citizenship for themselves. And so, from this day, I am not collecting nor paying their income taxes for them.

To demonstrate that she wasn’t against her employees paying their taxes, but only opposed to having to do it for them, she organized her employees once per quarter and allowed them, on company time, to fill out their own tax returns and to go down to the post office as a group to purchase money orders and file their own taxes.

The government subjected Kellems to a public smear campaign (which included intercepting and publicizing her love letters), and to legal action. The government won the legal battle, fining Kellems $7,600, whereupon she resumed withholding taxes from her employees’ paychecks.

George Fidenato

George Fidenato is Vivien Kellems reincarnated in today’s Italy. since 2009 he has been refusing to withhold taxes from his six employees’ paychecks. “I do not want to be the tax collector. I’m not a slave of the state, and wouldn’t want to work for it even if you paid me!” As of this writing he is still pursuing legal appeals.

Indianapolis Baptist Temple

The Indianapolis Baptist Temple started refusing to pay federal taxes in 1983, when pastor Gregory Dixon “decided the church would break all ties with the government and no longer act as its agent in withholding taxes from its employees,” citing Constitutional freedom of religion as his mandate for taking his church out from under Uncle Sam’s thumb. For several years, nothing came of this defiance, but in the early 1990s, the IRS started seeking back taxes, eventually filing liens against the church and against Dixon. The church fought back in court, but lost a series of appeals, finally getting turned down by the U.S. Supreme Court in 2001, whereupon the government seized and auctioned off church property and Dixon himself was fined.

“Texas housewives”

In the early 1950s, a group of women the press invariably referred to as the “Texas housewives” refused to withhold and pay social security taxes on the wages of their household help. The women were opposed to government-run social security, and to being enlisted as government tax collectors. They claimed also to be supported in their stand by their employees.

Money was eventually seized from their bank accounts to cover the taxes. They also pursued court appeals to try to get the tax declared unconstitutional, but in 1954 they lost their case and began paying the taxes.

The women’s suffrage movement in the United Kingdom

The National Insurance Act of 1911 required all workers to pay a portion of their paycheck into a fund for government-run health and unemployment benefits.

Members of the women’s suffrage movement saw this as another tax enacted without their consent, another example of “taxation without representation,” and another opportunity to resist.

Some members of suffrage groups were employers, and some suffrage groups had paid employees. In October, 1912 the Women Writers’ Suffrage League met to ask whether they “should, as a society, resist the new insurance tax and refuse to insure their secretary, with her full consent to their so doing?”

Kate Harvey refused to pay 5 shillings, 10 pence of tax for her gardener — for which she was sentenced to two months in prison.

The Women’s Freedom League refused to pay the tax on their employees — “we refuse to acquiesce in any legislation which controls the resources of women without the consent of women” — but the government seemed unwilling or unable to do more than threaten the group.

Wednesday’s Picket Line was all about Mary McDowell, but it also briefly mentioned three people involved in the early years of the modern American war tax resistance movement whom I hadn’t heard of before: Sander Katz, Edith Aldis, and Gerhard Friesen.

You’d think a name like “Sander Katz” would make for easy Googling, but in fact there is a “Sandor Katz” who is well-known today for, for instance, his fine do-it-yourself guide Wild Fermentation. Google tends to want to assume you’re just misspelling his name if you try to hunt for “Sander Katz.”

Katz is listed as the editor of a collection of Freud’s essays “on war, sex, and neurosis” with an introduction by Paul Goodman. He is also listed as one of two editors of Complex: The Magazine of Psychoanalysis and Society (and he’d occasionally contribute articles as well, for example: “Comparative Sexual Behavior: Is orgasm for the human female normal?”). He was also on the editorial committee of a magazine called Alternative that published between 1948 and 1951 and was associated with the “Non-Profit Association of Libertarians” and the “Committee for Non-Violent Revolution.” Other members of that committee included war tax resisters David Dellinger, Ralph DiGia, and Roy Kepler.

In 1948, the syndicated columnist Robert Ruark spent several column inches denigrating Katz, who had just been sentenced to a one-year prison term for refusing to register for the military draft (and then Ruark put out another column’s worth when Katz was released eight months later). “I know something about this particular rugged individualist,” Ruark wrote, “who served 19 months in jail during the last war for refusal to report for induction. His name is Sander Katz, and he is one of the long-hairs who stroll the [Greenwich] Village streets, lost in reverie and a turtle-neck sweater.” Katz was imprisoned because he said he opposed the draft on “social, political, and philosophical grounds” and the law at that time only recognized conscientious objection for religious reasons.

The previous year, Katz, along with several dozen others, burned his draft card during a “Break With Conscription Committee” demonstration in New York City. The previous September, Katz was arrested, along with several others, for picketing at a draft registration center.

I found a few more newspaper articles about Edith Aldis, all based on the same template. The Long Island Star-Journal of 18 March 1952 for instance, which also mentions Gerhard Friesen:

2 Pacifists Refuse To Pay Taxes

Topeka, Kan. (UP) — Kansas Internal Revenue officials had two “conscientious objectors” on their hands today when Miss Edith Aldis and the Rev. Gerhard Friesen defied federal income tax laws on grounds that “too much of the money goes for military armament.”

Both have signed a statement issued by the Tax Refusal Committee of Peacemakers, a pacifist movement with headquarters in New York.

Miss Aldis said she paid 10 per cent of her taxes, the amount estimated for use for non-military spending. Friesen said he would pay only direct taxes on the “principal of the thing,” because other levies are “a part of the plan to destroy our country.”

I found a few more things about Friesen as well. I even saw one mention of his war tax resistance (too brief to quote, alas) that said that he had begun resisting in 1943!

The Mennonite profiled Martha Graber in February 2011. Graber is Friesen’s daughter.

Her father, she said, “was ahead of his time” in advocating war tax resistance and speaking out at Mennonite conferences against profiteering from the war economy. “His conscience would not let him support the military.”

She said her father would have approved the 1983 action by the General Conference Mennonite Church to honor employee Cornelia Lehn’s request to not have her income taxes withheld from her paychecks.

The Friesens practiced war tax resistance by living simply, giving generously, and usually not earning enough to owe taxes.

Although as a youth she was embarrassed by her father’s outspokenness to audiences unreceptive to his message, Martha embraced her parents’ convictions about Christian discipleship and peacemaking and taught them to her children. She files tax returns but usually has a zero taxable income due to living simply and giving 50 percent of her income to charity. She has also advocated for the Religious Freedom Peace Tax Fund legislation.

Cornelia Lehn sounds interesting as well: “Lehn sponsored a group of Vietnamese immigrants who attended Bethel College Mennonite Church in North Newton… and was an avid supporter of nonpayment of war taxes,” according to one source. Here are some more articles that mention her war tax resistance:

From the 3 August 1983 edition of The Youngstown Daily Vindicator:

Mennonites Vote Refusal To Withhold U.S. Taxes

Bethlehem, Pa. (AP) — In an action primarily protesting U.S. military policies, the General Conference Mennonites has became [sic.] the first mainstream Christian church to refuse to withhold federal taxes from employees’ paychecks.

Delegates to the church’s international convention Tuesday voted 1,128 to 457 to authorize church officials to violate federal law by refusing to withhold federal taxes.

A denomination spokesman said the church has tried for four years to secure legislative, administrative, and judicial approval for its employees to refuse to pay their taxes as a protest against the use of the money for military hardware.

A group of Quakers — the American Friends Service Committee — also has refused to withhold taxes, according to Margaret Bacon, a spokeswoman for the Philadelphia-based group. The AFSC provides world-wide relief and works for social change.

But Dean M. Kelley, director for religious and civil liberty of the National Council of Churches, said none of the council’s 31 member denominations had previously refused to forward employees’ taxes to the federal government.

The 66,000-member General Conference Mennonite Church and the 93,000-member Mennonite Church are holding their international meetings this week at Lehigh University. The conferences are the first time the two churches have ever met together.

Larry Cornies, news director for the General Conference Mennonites, said the church has been considering the issue of tax withholdings for five years.

The catalyst came in 1978, when Cornelia Lehn, then director of children’s education for the church, asked the church to not withhold taxes from her paycheck, Cornies said. She has since retired to British Colombia.

Since 1978, the church has decided a U.S. Supreme Court test case would be unsuccessful and a tax withholding bill could not get through Congress, he said.

Cornies said a bill to let taxpayers earmark their taxes for a World Peace Tax Fund, to be used only for peaceful purposes, “doesn’t look like it’s got much of a chance.”

The National Council’s Kelley said the only denominations considering refusal to let taxes be withheld are the “peace churches” — the Mennonites, the Church of the Brethren, and the Quakers.

“Most of the mainline denominations are not pacifist,” he said.

The Mennonites decided not to approach the Supreme Court after the justices ruled against an Amish employer from New Wilmington, Pa., who had refused to withhold Social Security taxes from Amish employees.

“Then it gratuitously added something to the effect that ‘if we let this take place, people would be able to insist that they were entitled to withhold paying of taxes on expenditures they object to, such as war and armaments,’ ” Kelley said.

The 5 August 1983 (Lexington, North Carolina) Dispatch carried this shorter and slightly different version of the report:

Mennonites’ Vote Protests Funding Military Activity

Bethlehem, Pa. (AP) — To protest funding of U.S. military activity, the General Conference Mennonites have voted to refuse to withhold federal taxes from employees’ paychecks.

Dean M. Kelley, director for religious and civil liberty of the National Council of Churches, said Tuesday the 66,000-member General Conference Mennonites are the only denomination belonging to the council ever to have taken such action.

A Quaker group, the American Friends Service Committee, also refuses to withhold employees’ federal taxes.

A spokesman for the pacifist General Conference Mennonites said the church has tried for four years to secure legislative, administrative, and judicial approval for its employees to refuse to pay their taxes as a protest against use of the money for military hardware.

Delegates to the church’s international convention Tuesday voted 1,128 to 457 to authorize church officials to violate federal law by stopping the withholding of federal taxes.

Larry Cornies, news director for the General Conference Mennonites, said the church began considering the issue in 1978, when Cornelia Lehn, then director of children’s education for the church, asked that taxes not be withheld from her paycheck. Ms. Lehn has since retired to Canada.

A third version of the article, from the 20 August 1983 Gainesville Sun adds this paragraph:

Gene Harris, spokesman for the Internal Revenue Service in Philadelphia, said of the Mennonite’s vote: “It’s a violation of the law. If they actually do that, they could be prosecuted in court. It’s happened before and the IRS has won the case. But they would have to be audited first.”

According to the Toledo Blade, it was 1977, not 1978, when the Conference began mulling over war tax resistance. Here is an article from their 3 August 1977 edition:

Serious Study Urged On War Resistance

Mennonite Conference Considers Tax Action

From The Blade Correspondent

Bluffton, O. — The General Conference Mennonite Church, holding its 41^st triennial conference here, passed a resolution Tuesday night calling for “serious study of civil disobedience and war tax resistance during the next 18 months.” The vote was 1,178½ yes to 453½ no.

The conference Monday rejected a proposed amendment to the resolution that would have allowed the denomination as an employer to refuse to withhold the so-called “war portion” of an employee’s income tax, if the employee requested it, during the 18-month study period.

The denomination employs about 50 persons at its Newton, Kan., headquarters, Lois Barrett, spokesman, said.

The resolution was drafted because one employee at the headquarters, Cornelia Lehn, had requested since 1975 that the war-tax portion of her taxes not be withheld from her salary, making it possible for her to “follow her conscience in this matter.”

The “war portion” refers to the percentage used by the Government for military purposes, according to the resolution.

At the upcoming national gathering of NWTRCC at Earlham College in Richmond, Indiana, I’m going to be presenting a summary of the history of war tax resistance in the Society of Friends (Quakers).

Today I’m going to try to coalesce some of the notes I’ve assembled about how the Quaker practice of war tax resistance began to reemerge after the Great Forgetting period.

The Thaw (1943–1959)

In the Great Forgetting period, Quakers endeavored to overlook that war tax resistance had been an important part of putting the Quaker peace testimony into practice.

But during World War Ⅱ and the opening decade of the Cold War, a largely Christian pacifist war tax resistance movement began to coalesce, which included Quakers, but the most prominent members of which belonged to other denominations. This movement set the stage for the coming renaissance of war tax resistance in the Society of Friends.

A few of the earliest tax resisters of this period were Quakers. I’ve already mentioned Mary Stone McDowell, who carried on her resistance from the World War Ⅰ period (the only such example I’m aware of). There was also Arthur Evans, who was resisting perhaps as early as 1943, making him one of the earliest adopters of war tax resistance in this Thaw period.

But institutionally, the Society of Friends still had little interest in the subject. In 1955 the American Friends Service Committee, a major voice of the practical side of the Quaker peace testimony, put out an influential booklet: Speak Truth to Power: A Quaker Search for an Alternative to Violence. It mentions war tax resistance only once, and in an 18^th century historical overview context, not as an example of a contemporary method of speaking truth to power in search of alternatives to violence. This is in spite of the fact that the committee that produced the booklet included among its members the war tax resisters A.J. Muste and Milton Mayer.

Instead, the leadership in advocating for war tax resistance and in organizing the fledgling modern war tax resistance movement largely came from outside the Society of Friends. Some of the more prominent war tax resistance promoters in this important period were Dorothy Day (Catholic) & Ammon Hennacy (often Catholic), A.J. Muste (sometimes-Quaker, but bounced around a lot), Maurice McCrackin (Presbyterian), Ernest Bromley (Methodist, later a Quaker), Ralph DiGia (not religious as far as I could tell), and Milton Mayer (Jewish, later a Quaker).

The work of this emerging group of resisters helped to encourage the remaining Quaker war tax resisters and to remind Quakers that war tax resistance wasn’t only something of the legendary past but was an available testimony to them in the present. The thaw in the Society of Friends had begun.

One of the first examples of this thaw was a particularly dramatic one. When four Quaker conscientious objectors in the United States were put on trial for evading the Korean War draft, the judge told them: “If you are not willing to defend this country, you should leave.” They took that advice seriously, and began to look for an alternative. They chose Costa Rica, a country that had abolished its standing army in 1948. “We wanted to be free of paying taxes in a war economy,” recalls Marvin Rockwell, one of the emigrants. Seven Quaker families left the U.S. to found the community of Monteverde, Costa Rica, in 1959. Rockwell later told a Friends Journal reporter: “I do not feel bad at all paying taxes in Costa Rica. The largest item in the tax budget is for education.”

The 14 May 1970 edition of Cycle, a student paper from Fitchburg (Massachusetts) State College, gives us a good peek into the rhetoric and tactics of the war tax resistance movement at that time:

If a thousand men were not to pay their tax bill 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.

Henry David Thoreau

A Call to War Tax Resistance

In 1968, the United States government spend $103 billion to pay for present and past wars and to be prepared in case of future wars. This was 66% of the entire federal budget of $156 billion. One hundred and three billion dollars exceeds the gross national product of all but six nations.

Of this $103,198,100,000, $29 billion was spent on the Vietnam war, to continue a conflict whose brutality, immorality, and illegality have sickened most Americans and the vast majority of the people of the world. Already, this war has brought death to more than 42,000 Americans and more than two million Vietnamese. It is a spur to the arms race and continually threatens world peace.

Almost $20 billion will be invested this fiscal year in making more frightful our nuclear missile and bomber arsenal, weapons already so destructive that they can deliver ten tons of explosive power for every person on the globe.

$330 million will be spent on chemical and biological weapons that are polluting the environment and endangering the people in the United States and other countries without even being used; simply by being improperly stored.

$7.5 billion will go toward research on new and yet more fearful weapons.

$1.2 billion has been authorized for the Anti Ballistic Missile (ABM) system in 1968.

$500 million to $1 billion is the estimated budget of the CIA.

Vast sums will be paid to the corporations and research institutes that design and build the weapons. In fiscal year 1968, the following companies, a handful of the biggest among thousands engaged in war production and research, enjoyed these military contracts:

General Dynamics	$2.2 billion
Lockheed Aircraft	$1.8 billion
General Electric	$1.4 billion
United Aircraft	$1.3 billion
McDonnell-Douglas	$1.1 billion
AT&T	$777 million

The following amounts were spent in fiscal 1968 for projects that seem to have little to do with primary human needs:

For moon and other space exploration $3.4 billion.

For farm subsidies to wealthy landowners $3.1 billion.

In comparison to the enormous expenditures for acts and instruments of military violence, luxury space programs, and subsidies to the wealthy, and at a time when city governments are crying for more funds, the United States government spent these sums on improving the health, education, and general welfare of the people within this country.

Slum rebuilding $1.9 billion.

Other poverty programs $7.2 billion.

Health programs $1.8 billion.

Educational programs and subsidies $3.7 billion.

Direct, nonmilitary foreign aid to underdeveloped countries totaled about $1.6 billion.

The U.S. appropriation to the United Nations was $109 million, about the cost of one Polaris submarine.

In fiscal 1968, the total of all non-military expenditure was approximately 34% of the military expenses.

Throughout the United States, young people by the hundreds of thousands are rebelling in disgust and anger against this squandering of resources on war, and neglect of the day-to-day practical needs of the people. They are not alone in seeing only massive social disruption and probably nuclear war as eventual consequences. They are risking their freedom, careers, and often their lives to protest and resist what they see to be wrong.

In the face of this shameful and alarming situation and in solidarity with the youth resisting it, we, as participants in War Tax Resistance, are resolved to confront our own complicity in war, waste, and callousness. We resolve to end to the extent we can our cooperation in a federal tax program geared to death more than life. The least measure of our resistance will be not to pay voluntarily $5 of federal taxes due.

We are prepared to bear the consequences of our actions, be these criticism and unpopularity, financial penalties, confiscation of our bank accounts and property, and, perhaps, imprisonment. These seem to us small inconveniences beside the agony of those killed or bereft by war, and the numb hopelessness of those crippled by poverty.

We invite all Americans to join us in some form of tax refusal. War tax resistance is not always easy, particularly for those whose taxes are withheld from their wages, but for most there is some variety of tax refusal that they can conscientiously adopt. It may be by not paying part or all of a balance “owed,” or by not paying federal telephone tax. War Tax Resistance has prepared literature and is setting up counseling services designed to help each individual find the best way of tax refusal and resistance for him. A list of Methods of War Tax Resistance follows this statement of purpose.

We also are developing a war tax resistance promotional program that will include advertisements, demonstrations, meetings, a bulletin, and other literature distribution. If you become a war tax resister, we hope you will allow yourself to be publicly identified with the movement and permit your name to be used on tax resistance literature.

War Tax Resistance will do more than concentrate on the weeks just before April 15. We are planning a year round educational and resistance program. If you agree with conscientious tax resistance as a means for opposing war, we hope you will communicate with us now. The included coupon is for your convenience.

Methods of Refusal

Refuse to pay at least $5 of your tax

The first goal of War Tax Resistance is to convince as many people as possible to refuse at least $5 of some tax owed the government. Nearly everyone can do this by refusing their federal telephone tax or part of their income tax. If hundreds of thousands refuse to pay $5, they will establish mass tax refusal. Besides having the burden of collecting the unpaid amounts, the government will be faced with the political fact of massive noncooperation with its warmaking policies.

Better yet, refuse to pay all the taxes you can

Even if some of your taxes are withheld, you can refuse to pay the balance and other taxes. These might include: taxes on additional income, the 10% surtax, and the telephone tax.

You can refuse to pay that percentage of your tax that goes for war

Two thirds or more of the federal budget pays for wars past, present, and future. To protest against war, a person can refuse that percentage of his tax. He can base his refusal on the percentage of the total national budget used for war, on the cost of the war in Vietnam, or on other calculations. Some people pay part of their tax and contribute the rest as a peace tax. Some give to the UN, or a relief agency, or some other organization engaged in peaceful, constructive work.

You can refuse to pay the 10% surtax

This surtax was imposed in 1968 to help pay for the war in Vietnam. Refusing to pay it is a direct protest against the war.

You can refuse to pay the federal telephone tax

The federal telephone tax was revived in 1966 to help pay for the war. Thousands are already not paying it. In all cases known to us but one, the telephone companies have continued service and referred the tax collection to IRS.

To Reduce or Eliminate the Withholding of Your Taxes You Can

Claim additional dependents

If you claim a sufficient number of dependents on your W-4 form you can reduce the amount of taxes withheld from your salary to zero. The law reads that a dependent has to live in your household and be supported by you. The fact is that many people, particularly draft age young men and the Vietnamese, depend on you. So long as you declare at the end of the year that by the government’s standards you owe so much and are refusing to pay it, the moral point is made

The law reads that it is illegal — fraudulent — to state on a tax form that someone claimed as a dependent falls within that category, as defined by the IRS, when he does not. But no fraud appears to be involved if the people claimed as dependents are identified as being outside the IRS categories. The issue has not been tested in the courts.

Make your employer an ally

Although the law reads that it is illegal not to withhold taxes from an employee’s wages, your employer may be sympathetic to your protest and be willing to assist — and make a protest of his own — by not withholding from your salary. It is always valuable to raise the question.

Organize an employment agency

Have your agency hire you and then have your present employer hire the agency to supply him with you. Naturally, an agency that you control will not withhold taxes from its employees. Getting organized is complicated, but if you and a few friends get together you can work out the problem. Write us for information.

Also You Can

Demand a refund

There are four ways to do this:

1. You may request a refund right on the 1040 form and stand a good chance of receiving it. Ask for a tax credit on Part Ⅴ of the form.
2. You may file form 843 for a refund.
3. If the above demands are refused, go to the Income Tax Board of Appeals. If the Board turns you down, sue.
4. You can also sue the government to refund all your taxes on the grounds that the taxes have been used for illegal and immoral purposes.

Protest by letter or in person

Any protest to IRS or other government officials will help express opposition to the war and to militarism. If you are unable to refuse taxes, protest them as vigorously as you can.

Maximize the Impact

Talk about your tax refusal with friends, neighbors, co-workers. This sort of direct contact changes many minds. Distribute tax refusal literature.

Inform the newspapers and other mass media in your neighborhood that you are resisting war taxes and why. Start a war tax resistance group in your community.

Organize or join demonstrations at your local IRS office.

Inform yourself thoroughly and become a tax refusal counselor. Let your community know through ads, leaflets, etc. that a counseling service is available.

Keep the War Tax Resistance Clearinghouse informed by writing or phoning about your activities. Communication is the lifeblood of any movement.

We invite war tax resisters to send War Tax Resistance the first $5 or more refused the federal government. This money will be used to publicize and expand the war tax resistance movement.

Until now, the government has not imprisoned anyone for conscientious tax refusal. A few have been given short sentences for refusing to reveal information about their incomes. In general, the IRS has been content to take money from tax refusers’ bank accounts, garnishee part of their wages, or, on rare occasions, seize and auction property.

Sponsors of War Tax Resistance

• Winslow Ames
• Joan Baez
• Norma Becker
• James Bristol
• Prof. Noam Chomsky
• Prof. Frank Collins
• Tom Cornell
• Prof. William Davidon
• Dorothy Day
• Dave Dellinger
• Barbara Deming
• Ralph DiGia
• Prof. Douglas Dowd
• Prof. Margaret Eberbach
• Ruth Gage-Colby
• Allen Ginsberg
• Bob Haskell
• James Leo Herlihy
• Faye Knopp
• Kennett Love
• David McReynolds
• Stewart and Charlotte Meacham
• Rev. and Mrs. Arthur G. Melville
• Karl Meyer
• Jack Newfield
• Grace Paley
• Igal Roodenko
• Rev. Finley Schaef
• Dr. Benjamin Spock
• Marj and Bob Swann
• Arthur Waskow
• George and Lillian Willoughby
• Irma Zigas

Working Committee (in formation)

• Norma Becker
• Maris Cakars
• Frank Collins
• John Darr
• Jerry Dickinson
• Ralph DiGia
• Bob Haskell
• Neil Haworth
• Peter Kiger
• Kennett Love
• Bradford Lyttle
• Mark Morris
• Christopher Pollock
• Melinda Reed
• Kay Van Deurs
• Eric Weinberger

Here are some excerpts from The Catholic News Archive concerning tax resistance, from sources other than Catholic Worker, from the 1947–71 span:

First, a typed news dispatch from “M. Massiani,” Paris Correspondent for the National Catholic Welfare Council (U.S.) News Service, dated 4 August 1947:

Priests and People of Vendee, France, Protest Tax on Christian Schools and Refusal of State Aid

Paris, July 28. — A delegation of 20,000 citizens from various parts of the Department of Vendee, one of the most Catholic regions of France, appeared in the town of La Roche-sur-Yon, where a number of priests were on trial for refusing to pay a tax exacted on entertainments and theatrical productions given to aid in supporting the free Christian schools of the Department.

A large group of priests and directors of Christian schools purposely decided to refuse payment of this tax and made public announcement of the decision in order to protest what is regarded by the people of the Vendee as a highly inequitable situation; the state taxing the people to support unneeded public schools, refusing to grant a subsidy to aid in maintaining the Christian schools, and at the same time taxing entertainments held to raise money for support of the Christian schools.

It is pointed out that in Vendee public schools are practically empty. The Christian schools, on the other hand, are educating the vast majority of the children of the region, saving the state more than 200 million francs in school taxes annually. Yet whenever Catholics hold a festival to raise funds for support of their schools, the state intervenes to collect part of the receipts.

It is hoped that in refusing to pay this tax, public attention will be called to the injustice and the need of a state subsidy to help support the Christian schools, such as is granted in other countries, including Belgium and Holland.

Bishop Antoine Cazaux of Lucon, who went to La Roche-sur-Yon to testify in behalf of the defendants, stated that his priests are neither rebels nor evaders, and that the court, in order to judge equitably, should take into consideration the unjust situation that exists with regard to education. Many thousands of people were in the streets outside the courtroom.

Decisions were rendered in only two of the cases, the defendants being acquitted on procedural grounds. The other cases were postponed. The action of the court caused anti-religious groups and newspapers, particularly in Paris, to demand that new suits be instituted and that the law be applied with severity.

In the Diocese of Lucon, two-thirds of the children attend the 461 primary religious schools. In six large districts, 13,757 children out of 15,183 are enrolled at the Christian schools. In two other districts, the number of pupils in the public schools is only three per cent of the total. In 41 settlements in the Department, with a population of 40,000, there are no public schools.

A National Catholic Reporter editorial (signed by editor Robert C. Hoyt) in the 3 January 1967 issue recommended that men refuse military service, concluding that in Vietnam, “we are killing people and destroying a culture without adequate justification, without a rationale that meets the minimum requirements of morality. That imposes obligations on all of us. We believe that anyone who despairs of a political solution has a right and duty to search for more effective ways, including civil disobedience and tax refusal. We have a responsibility to the rest of the world, to history, to God that nobody else can bear.”

In its 4 February 1970 issue, that paper published a lengthy article on the war tax resistance movement:

Protesters turn to taxes to fight against the war

By Gary MacEoin

Special to the National Catholic Reporter, NEW YORK— Protesters against the Vietnam war are turning to the withholding of taxes as a way of fighting against the war.

A national campaign against the payment of taxes used for the war is being organized and its goal is to involve “tens and perhaps hundreds of thousands of people in conscientious tax refusal.”

The campaign is spearheaded by the War Tax Resistance, an organization founded last summer which draws support from a broad spectrum of pacifist groups. Its headquarters is in New York and it has offices in Philadelphia and Chicago.

Resistance spokesmen say they hope to have “at least a phone, an address and a contact person” in each of the principal 50 to 100 cities in the nation by mid-February. Groups organized around such regional centers are to focus their tax resistance efforts on demonstrations on March 2 and April 15.

“We picked the March 2 date more or less arbitrarily,” said Bradford Lyttle, clean-shaven and soft-spoken coordinator of War Tax Resistance. “That’s about the time that thousands of accountants all over the country hang out signs offering to help prepare tax returns. We want to provide an option for those who want not to pay.”

The choice of April 15 is more obvious, he said. “It is both the final day for filing tax returns and the start of the Spring offensive of the demonstrations against the war in Vietnam.”

Lyttle, 42, works out of an office in Lower Manhattan (339 Lafayette Street). It is also the home of the New York GI Coffeehouse, the Jewish Peace Fellowship, the Catholic Peace Fellowship, the War Resisters League, Win magazine (hippie-pacifist), and Liberation magazine (David Dellinger’s voice). Between them, they occupy the two top floors of a three-story cold-water walk-up not far from the Catholic Worker.

Organized resistance to paying war taxes is not new, dating from 1948, Lyttle said. The War Tax Resistance is trying to give the idea broader appeal by modifying the totally pacifist position that its forerunners had adopted.

Lyttle, who himself is a pacifist, said the new approach was developed by a New York teacher, Norma Becker, who recruited a group of sponsors which included Joan Baez, Noam Chomsky, Tom Cornell, Dorothy Day, Dave Dellinger, Allen Ginsberg, Stewart and Charlotte Meacham, Grace Paley and Dr. Benjamin Spock.

“The result,” says Bradford Lyttle, “was a new emphasis. Instead of stressing the total pacifist tradition as the others had done, we decided to concentrate on two more immediate and obvious reasons: the horrors of the war in Vietnam, and the misuse of the taxpayers’ money by the government to the extent that it was neglecting national priorities.

“And instead of calling on sympathizers to pay no taxes whatever, we appealed to them to make a token withholding, if only $5, without of course ceasing to urge those who had the moral courage to go further.”

War Tax Resisters chose as their prime targets the 10 per cent surtax and the 10 per cent federal excise tax on telephone service — two taxes more clearly linked to Vietnam than any others.

Both War Tax Resistance and other organizations distribute literature explaining the various ways — some legal, some doubtful, some illegal — for nonpayment of federal taxes. The first War Tax Resistance leaflet was prepared for the antiwar demonstration in Washington, D.C., last Nov. 15, and 10,000 copies were handed out there.

“The act of war tax resistance creates a confrontation between the government and the conscience of the citizens,” this pamphlet states. “We believe that the right of conscientious objection to war belongs to all people, not just to those of draft age… Do whatever makes sense to your conscience. But do it.”

Among the ways to avoid paying taxes, the first is to earn an income so low as not to be taxable. This means for the single person under 65, an earned income of less than $900 annually. Yet a considerable number of pacifists choose this method.

Another form of protest is to refuse to pay the percentage of the tax that goes for war. More than two-thirds of the federal budget pays for wars, past, present and future. This is the amount some withhold. Others refuse to pay the proportion of the federal budget (23 per cent) directly allocated to Vietnam, while others hold back a token amount.

According to Internal Revenue Service figures, 73 million Americans paid their income taxes in full last year, while 1,025 refused to pay all or part in protest against the Vietnam war. The 1,025 protesters was an increase from 592 the previous year.

IRS counted 10,511 cases of refusal to pay the telephone tax in the first nine months of 1969, down from 14,396 in the same period of 1968. Several factors combine to make the telephone tax the attractive target it has become.

For one thing, the American Telephone and Telegraph Co. has handled the situation with kid gloves. So long as the protester makes it clear to the company with each payment that the amount withheld is the tax portion, it will not cut off a phone. Printed forms are made available by the resistance groups to facilitate this notification. What the telephone company does is simply to report to IRS the fact of nonpayment and the amount.

IRS also is anxious to keep the situation as cool as possible, but it wants at the same time to maintain whatever pressure is necessary to dissuade the hesitant from joining the movement. Back in 1967, the first step was to send the defaulter a “notice of preliminary assessment” which enabled him to demand a hearing. Because of the number of cases involved and the small amount in each, the IRS quickly eliminated this step and moved immediately to Form 17-A or some other “notice of final assessment.” This notice contains a threat to seize property to collect a debt.

Ralph Di Gia of War Resisters League is one who has been through this process several times.

Early in 1969, for example, the IRS computer at Andover, Mass., sent him Form 17 demanding payment of $2.25 owed as telephone tax. Next a New York agent wrote him, then called on him in his New York office. After checking with Di Gia’s landlord and the building superintendent to establish his political views, the agent tried to place a lien on his salary at the War Resisters League, but the League refused to cooperate.

After another confrontation with Di Gia, which merely established that it was “the principle,” not the $2.25, that was at issue on both sides, the agent located Di Gia’s bank account and collected the $2.25 plus 6 per cent interest. Under the IRS code, it can take money from a bank account without a court order in payment of taxes due by the account holder.

Apparently the discovered account was then fed into the computer, because another section of IRS moved quickly to seize the entire balance in payment of income tax. And as of last month, the IRS located a savings account recently opened by Di Gia in another bank and collected yet another telephone tax bill. But Di Gia insists that he doesn’t mind.

“The issue isn’t withholding money from the government,” he says. “They’re going to get it ultimately. But I made a few collection agents think about what their job’s about, and now IRS is going to have to realize that there are people who aren’t afraid to resist. They got the tax, but they had to come and get it, like when the agents had to go to the fields in France for collection.”

Unpaid taxes, whether telephone or income, can result not only in seizure from a bank account but also a lien on salary or the attachment and sale by auction of some property, usually an automobile.

In addition, some banks make a service charge — as high as $10, reportedly each time a lien is placed on an account, and the resisters suspect that IRS is pressuring banks to do this as a deterrent. Such a fee every month would make telephone tax refusal impractical for most people. But actually, the load on the IRS is such that it usually moves against any given individual only at much longer intervals.

Everyone who refuses to pay any taxes he owes is actually exposing himself to heavy penalties, and the resistance literature spells out this danger very openly. Simple “willful failure to pay” is punishable by fine up to $10,000 and a year in jail, plus the cost of prosecution. Similar or greater penalties are available for a variety of related offenses.

Although the offense of counseling or urging others not to pay taxes would seem greater than the simple act of withholding, the law on this point is somewhat ambiguous and apparently has never been tested in the courts.

There are few, if any, cases of conscientious tax refusers being jailed for not paying taxes or filing returns. Most of the small number of cases on record have resulted from related non-cooperation with the courts, such as ignoring a court order to disclose financial records.

In addition, it would appear that prosecutions have been initiated by local collectors who did not first check with headquarters. Current IRS policy on this issue apparently stops short of court action.

The most distinguished American to go to jail for refusal to pay taxes was Henry David Thoreau, the essayist, poet and naturalist. He spent only one night in confinement, because a neighbor paid the tax, but the experience inspired his essay on Civil Disobedience, espousing the doctrine of passive resistance. It deeply influenced Gandhi and has become the bible of the resistance movement. One passage is found to be particularly relevant by today’s resisters:

“When… 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 the fact that the Country to overrun is not our own, but ours is the invading army.” The reference is to the Mexican War of 1846–48.

About half a dozen have been jailed in the past 20 years. Juanita Nelson was arrested in Philadelphia in 1959, threatened with a year in jail and $1,000 fine if she did not disclose certain financial information, but in fact was held only some hours.

Maurice McCrackin, arrested in Cincinnati in 1958, was given a mental test, imprisoned “indefinitely” on a contempt charge, then sentenced to six months and a $250 fine. James Otsuka got 90 days and a $140 fine in Indianapolis, in 1949. Eroseanna Robinson, sentenced to a year and a day in Chicago in 1960, was released unconditionally after 93 days. Walter Gormley got 7 days in Cedar Rapids in 1960.

And in the first such imprisonment in several years, Neil Haworth of New London, Conn., got 60 days in 1968 for refusal to produce records. He had served six months in 1959 for “committing civil disobedience at a missile site” near Omaha. And in 1962, he was a crew member of Everyman Ⅲ, a boat which sailed to Leningrad to protest the Russian nuclear tests.

Those who have refused to pay federal taxes and have got away with it include the Catholic Worker settlement houses and the settlement house of the New England Committee for Non-Violent Action. “We pay local taxes,” says Dorothy Day of the Catholic Worker, “and we let the IRS people examine our records, but we pay them nothing.” The New England group says that IRS has spent thousands of dollars going through their bills and receipts, without collecting a penny.

War Tax Resistance is now urging citizens “to sue the government to refund all your taxes on the grounds that the taxes have been used for illegal and immoral purposes.” The main value of such suits to date has been the publicity.

Professor Donald Kalish, chairman of the philosophy department at UCLA, filed a suit to recover his telephone tax but it was dismissed by the District Court. He appealed, and the appellate court has agreed to hear his appeal.

The most important case to date is that of Walter C. Pietsch, of Rego Park, N.Y., a 33-year-old administrative employee in a hospital. Last year, he instituted “a class action” for an injunction to enjoin IRS from collecting the 10 per cent surtax and all other taxes used to propagate the war, and also for a declaration that the Vietnam war was unconstitutional. A class action, if successful, would provide the same remedy for all taxpayers.

Pietsch, who served in Korea, “is not against all wars, just this one.” The surtax he withheld was $190.84. “The amount is insignificant,” he said, “It’s the principle I’m fighting for.” After a preliminary hearing in the Brooklyn federal district court on Dec. 19, written arguments were submitted on Jan. 2, and on Jan. 6 the case was dismissed on a motion by the defendants. An appeal was filed immediately.

Although the Vietnam war is the direct issue on which tax resisters are concentrating, many of them insist that the campaign has escalated into something much bigger — the war mentality behind much of United States foreign policy. “Maybe it’s a hang-up,” says Ted Webster, administrator of the Roxbury War Tax Scholarship fund, “but I personally have a great feeling of urgency, it seems the logic behind bombing North Vietnam can be so easily applied to China. The influence of the Pentagon on policy, and the political expediency of yielding to it seems so obvious, I see the need to rapidly escalate resistance, or there will be a greatly expanded war — maybe with China — within one to three years.”

Another National Catholic Reporter article, from the 10 April 1970 issue, asked “In the name of God, how did Milwaukeeans get so radical?” A section of it covered tax resisters:

One area in which a number of community members are discussing is tax resistance. Some say they have claimed as many exemptions as were needed to keep from paying any federal taxes used to finance the war.

[Richard W.] Zipfel, who is defense committee chairman for the Chicago 15, Feit and Father Robert W. Dundon, a Jesuit, have sent a letter to the Wisconsin Telephone Co. stating they are refusing to pay the federal telephone tax on their phone bills because “we can no longer tolerate our nation spending more than $75 billion on the military while our cities die.”

The letter, dated Jan. 7, added that “even if the present war ended, our policies would quickly create another Vietnam.”

Their resistance gesture is significant, they said, because the tax was argued through Congress as a specifically Vietnam war tax. They have reserved a reply from the utility saying their letter was being forwarded to the government.

“I do believe in the legitimacy of the magistrates,” [Michael] Cullen said. “In paying property taxes, I believe in the state.

“I’ll render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s, but when Caesar decides to take what is God’s, or if Caesar decides to look like God or act like God, I won’t render to Caesar.

“You only render to what is legitimate and what is human, and what is for the common good. War destroys humans.”

Milwaukee’s Casa Maria Catholic Worker House still looks to be something like a hotbed of war tax resistance, at least relative to the current national lull. Lincoln Rice of Casa Maria is the current NWTRCC coordinator. I recognize the names of war tax resisters Roberta Thurstin and Don Timmerman among their volunteers as well.

From the Pittsburgh Catholic, 17 April 1970:

Five say they won’t pay taxes

Five local clergymen handed in their income tax forms at the Federal Bldg. downtown on Wednesday with the announcement they were withholding a portion in protest to the Vietnam War.

Joining them in the protest at the Internal Revenue Office there were several dozen local lay members of War Tax Resistance, an organization whose members carried out withholding actions in a number of cities Wednedsay (April 15), the last day for filing income tax returns. It is headquartered locally at 3601 Blvd. of the Allies.

The clergymen issued a statement denouncing the Vietnam war as immoral and stating other means of protest had been futile. “Now we must do more than talk. The time is now that we must act,” they said.

They included three priests active in civil rights causes here: Fr. Donald C. Fisher of St. Francis de Sales, McKees Rocks; Fr. Donald W. McIlvane, St. Richard’s, Hill District; and Fr. John O’Malley of St. Joseph’s, Manchester. Also taking part was Fr. Bernard Survil of St. Hedwig in Smock, Greensburg Diocese.

Protestant clergy included Rev. Oscar L. Arnall, a Lutheran, Rev. Thomas Whitcroft, an Episcopalian, and Rev. William S. Richard, a Presbyterian, signed the statement but weren’t present.

The clergymen announced they were withholding 25 per cent of their income tax, the proportion of the national tax that is estimated goes for the Vietnam war, they said. Some said they would pay the money into local community action programs suffering because of the amounts given to the Vietnam war.

“We are conscious of our obligation to pay taxes, but we are equally conscious of our obligation before God to refuse to cooperate with evil,” the clergymen said.

The National Catholic Reporter, in its 19 March 1971 issue, printed the following letter from Robert Calvert of War Tax Resistance:

Tax resisters suggest: “Stop paying for it”

To The Editors:

Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos… young people by the hundreds of thousands are rebelling in disgust and anger against the squandering of lives and resources in an immoral and illegal war. They are risking their freedom, careers and often their lives to protest and resist what they see to be wrong.

We, as participants in war tax resistance, are resolved to confront our own complicity in war, waste and callousness. We resolve to end to the extent possible our cooperation in a federal tax program geared to death more than life.

For every dollar which the administration expects to spend in fiscal year 1971, 64.8 per cent will go for wars — past, present and future. Of this amount, 48.4 per cent will go for current military expenditures, including Vietnam. (The administration has not revealed the exact costs of the Indochina war.) Another 17 per cent will go to health, education and welfare; 18.2 per cent for other expenditures.

The deadline for paying income taxes is close, April 15. Many who read this letter will owe the federal government money. Don’t pay. War tax resistance is being supported by numerous civil rights, anti-poverty and peace organizations in our call to help end the war by widespread tax refusal. Widespread tax refusal does more than force the government to spend much money to try to collect unpaid taxes. It confronts the government with the political fact of massive non-cooperation with its war-making policies.

We need to dramatize war tax resistance and to expand it from an act of individual conscience to a nationwide demonstration of collective civil disobedience.

On April 2–4, the People’s Coalition for Peace and Justice — which includes such groups as the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the National Welfare Rights organization, the American Friends Service committee and the Fellowship of Resistance — is calling for a nationwide “Tribute in Action to Martin Luther King.” The theme is “Freedom from Hunger, War and Oppression”; the event will be observed by hunger marches, fasts, teachins, demonstrations and religious services.

War tax resisters will relate to these events in a real way. We are asking people to refuse to pay $10 to $50 or more of their federal income taxes, and to publicly turn this money over to a local community group on April 2, 3 or 4. We will thus take our tax money out of the hands of the government and put it into the hands of the people. If we work hard thousands of dollars can be rechanneled to the people. We can not wait for the government to change priorities. We must change them ourselves.

Find out what actions are being planned in your city or region and build a demonstration dramatizing the transfer of funds to useful community programs. A possible action: Rally at the IRS office where people put their tax money into a container of some sort. The money is then carried to the main event and is turned over to the designated local community group.

There also will be actions at Internal Revenue Service offices across the country on April 15. We will publicly submit our 1040 forms to the IRS with all or part of our taxes deducted. This is a simple action and serves as an extension of the April 2–4 observance.

If no action appears to be under way in your community, contact the nearest war tax resistance center or the People’s Coalition office (1029 Vermont avenue, Washington, D.C.). Information about the WTR center nearest you, and about other forms of tax resistance, may be obtained from War Tax Resistance, 339 Lafayette street, New York, N.Y. 10012; telephone (212) 477‒2970.

Thousands are already engaged in these acts of peaceful, conscientious civil disobedience. If you engage in any of the above acts of civil disobedience we strongly urge you to write a letter to the IRS setting forth the reasons for the steps you have taken. Keep a copy.

Although there is a penalty for openly refusing to pay federal taxes (Section 7203 of the Internal Revenue Code — a fine of up to $10,000 and up to a year in jail, plus the costs of prosecutions) no war tax resisters have been prosecuted under this law. The only war tax resisters arrested have been those who have filed “fraudulent” W-4 forms, refused to file any income tax form, refused to present financial statements to the courts when ordered to do so. There have been prosecutions and convictions based on Section 7203 but none for openly refusing to pay for conscientious reasons, as far as we know.

We invite all Americans to join us in some form of war tax refusal. We must now take a stand by refusing to support the governments destructive policies with our bodies, our skills and our money.

Robert Calvert
New York, N.Y.

Editor’s note: The writer is a member of the Working Committee of WTR. Among sponsors of the organization are Dorothy Day, Joan Baez, David Dellinger, Arthur and Cathy Melville, the Rev. Richard J. Neuhaus, Rabbi Michael A. Robinson, Noam Chomsky, Peter Seeger and Theodore Roszak.

An op-ed from Eugene C. Bianchi, in the 28 May 1971 National Catholic Reporter:

“Maybe next year…”

To resist or not to resist

Two TV tableaus recently jarred me into fresh appreciation of how my tax money fosters the insanity of Vietnam.

In one film, helicopter gunships swooped down on a truck convoy; thousands of rounds of computer-directed cannon fire pierced the night. There goes at least one year’s withholding tax, I thought. But the commentator saw this military exercise as a demonstration of admirable killing efficiency. It was so orderly and precise; nothing out of place, except perhaps some Vietnamese flesh and bone.

The second scene showed men carefully loading bombs into B52s. The calm reporter noted how effectively these marvels of American know-how worked. The big bombs tore open huge craters and sent waves of damaging concussion. The antipersonnel bombs spewed thousands of body-ripping nails. As I viewed the distant puffs of smoke, I mused about how many income tax returns it took to accomplish such a feat.

It’s appalling how resigned we are to this insane use of our financial resources. Yet my and your tax money is closely related to the terrible statistic from the Kennedy subcommittee about 325,000 Indochinese, civilian deaths in recent years. Many more are maimed and driven from their homes. When I drop that IRS envelope through the red and blue bomb bay of the mail box, I wonder how many sad faces I’ve put behind the fences of relocation camps, how many children I’ve separated from parents. If Mr. Nixon is a prime candidate for war crimes according to the Nuremberg principles, we have all in some degree had our hands on the tax trigger.

Yet my courage rarely equals my insights. I also tell myself that some tax money goes for good causes. But the spirit of Ammon Hennacy, that holy maverick against war, won’t let me be content with such dodges. The whole Catholic Worker crowd stares up at me from their penny paper. I finally summon up the mouselike courage of refusing to pay the telephone war tax. At least that will cost the government more in time and bother than they’ll eventually get from me.

Maybe next year around income tax time, I’ll be brave enough to risk other concrete gestures. The words of Thoreau won’t go away: “If a thousand men were not to pay their tax bill 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.”

War tax resistance, though only a small act before the mighty state, could have broad effects if it became more widespread. It has the educational effect of conviction in action. Such tax resistance is illegal; but the war, by an ever-growing consensus, is enormously more illegal and immoral. Even token refusal to pay war taxes confronts the government with a concrete statement about its brutal policies. Tax resistance also awakens conscience to active non-complicity, to a new level of sensibility. For the situation is overwhelmingly clear: Tax money can be as killing as the weaponry it buys.

Since some risk is involved in tax resistance, it is worth reading a brochure or two about it. These can be easily obtained from a number of peace action groups, such as the War Tax Resistance (339 Lafayette St., New York 10012; or War Resisters League-West, 833 Haight St., San Francisco 94117). A Catholic group, Ammon’s Tax Associates (Box 1744, Indianapolis, Ind. 46204) is striving to awaken church institutions to their responsibilities for supporting conscientious tax resisters, as an extension of the church’s respect for conscientious objectors.

Perhaps the American church will end its complicity of silence with the warmakers when enough of us try to stop our own complicity in war taxes.