Some historical and global examples of tax resistance → religious groups and the religious perspective → Catholic churches → Donald W. McIlvane

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.

Here are some excerpts from The Catholic News Archive concerning war tax resistance from 1972:

The National Catholic News Service carried this dispatch on 24 January 1972:

Episcopal Diocese Pays Protesting Priest’s Tax Bill

By NC News Service, Philadelphia (NC) — The Episcopal diocese of Philadelphia has decided to pay $545 in income taxes withheld by one of its priests as a protest against the Vietnam War.

After the Rev. David Gracie, an urban missioner here, had refused for 10 months to pay half of his income tax assessment, the Internal Revenue Service went to his employer asking the Episcopal diocese to turn over $545 of the priest’s salary.

Refusing to do so would have made the diocese liable for possible criminal charges for non-payment of the taxes.

Father Gracie appealed to the Episcopal council “to join in a corporate act of resistance against this barbaric, immoral war.” Paying the bill, he said, “will finish me as a tax resister.”

Voting to pay the tax bill, the council also set up a committee to study the theological implications of conscientious tax resistance and tax exemption.

Tom Cornell reviewed the book Ain’t Gonna Pay for War No More (Robert Calvert, The War Tax Resistance, 1971) in the March 1972 issue of Catholic Worker:

Ain’t Gonna Pay No More

This book represents a tremendous contribution to the movement against war and for a more decent society, in itself and in the War Tax Resistance campaign from which it emerges. Probably the most significant development in The Movement during the past two years has been the growth of organised tax resistance along with its alternate funds. Tax resistance has long been recognised as a pillar of anti-war activity, at least in theory. After long incubation since the beginning of the Cold War in 1948, tax resistance is taking its place in the minds of many pacifist activists alongside such stances as conscientious objection and draft resistance.

Ain’t Gonna Pay is an unusual movement publication. It is pocket size, has a soft cover, is handsomely but modestly produced. The type is legible and generously spaced. It is crammed with useful information in a digestible form, and it is sprightly and wryly humorous. To Bob Calvert is due not only credit for this most useful book, but also for the cohesion and outreach the national tax resistance has attained. A most extraordinary man, you may read more about him in his own disarming paragraphs “About the Author,” in the comments about him by Bradford Lyttle on the back cover, and in David Dellinger’s Preface.

Karl Meyer

Much of the impetus for the tax resistance movement has come from the writings of Karl Meyer. Karl has recently been released from Sandstone federal prison where he served 10 months for one of his experiments with tax resistance. An important new development he has spurred has been the alternate fund. Basic reasoning behind both tax resistance and the fund is well stated by Karl himself in his October–November 1969 CW article. It is well to repeat portions of it:

If we pool all of the tax money that we did not pay in locally administered funds, we can create a model for a future in which men can regain direct control of their common institutions and effectively deny their consent to governmental programs they believe evil.

In each community or region we can set up a common fund. Each contributor will have one vote, as in a cooperative. The members will meet from time to time to set priorities and guidelines for administering it according to their guidelines.

Assuming that the federal income tax contributions of most people in the movement probably exceed their voluntary political, organizational and charitable contributions, we would expect that the tax alternative funds could become one of the most substantial sources of money for the projects and purposes in which we most strongly believe. But beyond that we could hope that our experience in mutual aid through these cooperative funds would bear fruit in the development of ashrams and communities for closer economic and social cooperation, for it is when our constructive action and our resistance to evil become for real that we see the need and value of mutual aid and begin to create cooperative alternatives within the competitive society on which we live.

If we ignore or neglect the great potential of tax resistance joined to constructive action, we must be deaf to history and blind to experience.

Do we not know that tax resistance has been one of the greatest sources and strategies of revolutionary movements throughout history? Has not history shown that taxation is a process requiring the general consent and cooperation of the populace? Has it not been shown that when numbers of people reject a government by withdrawing their consent from the elaborate bureaucratic process of taxation, that government is in deep trouble? Did not the French Revolution begin with tax resistance? Was not tax resistance the slogan and rallying cry of the American Revolution: “Taxation without representation is tyranny I”?… Did not Thoreau fashion the cornerstone of American resistance theory out of his own experiences as a tax resister? Was not Gandhi’s largest and most significant campaign of civil disobedience, the Salt March, based on the strategy of tax resistance?

Can we not see what the IRS knows full well: that even where the public gives general consent to the process of taxation it is always and everywhere a grudging and tentative consent, a resentful and querulous consent, a fragile consent that must always be nursed and safeguarded by positive relations? There exists among the public at large a great reservoir of grievance, a vast subliminal potential for tax resistance and evasion that only needs to be aroused by news of widespread tax resistance.

Let us learn from the experience of the draft resistance movement and the telephone tax refusal campaign. A few years ago, many people regarded draft refusal as a personal witness of the solitary conscience. Today it has taken on the dimension of a social movement. It is, however, restricted by the narrow age and sex range of those who are subject to conscription, and even more restricted by the narrowness of the draft as a single focus of action.

When we combine real war tax resistance with the tremendous constructive potential of a Fund for Humanity, we will have raised a banner to which all honest and courageous men of conscience can repair.

Penalties

People are always anxious to know the penalties for various forms of tax resistance. There is a chapter of questions and answers taken from the column by Payno Warbucks in Tax Talk, organ of the WTR ($2 a year subscription). It is practical and accurate. Stories of individuals who have dealt with IRS’ and the courts’ attempts to make them pay are told succinctly. Long-time readers will recall the stories of Wally and Juanita Nelson, Rev. Maurice McCracken, Walter Gormly and Eroseanna Robinson. Some recent efforts to collect taxes-due through confiscation of property and sale at public auctions are related with hardly suppressed glee. Here is the story of Bob Marcus:

On November 18, 1970, the IRS auctioned the car of Bob Marcus at the National Guard Armory in Boulder, Colorado for $1.25 in phone tax money. People from the Institute/Mountain West, a branch of the Institute for the Study of Nonviolence and Denver War Tax Resistance decided to make good use of the opportunity. They sent out a leaflet to the 3500 people in the Institute’s mailing list, telling them what had happened and asking that they contribute to a fund to buy Bob’s car back at the auction. It was explained that all money bid for the car above the unpaid tax and fees is refunded to the tax (non)payer. The excess money would be put into the war tax resistance alternative fund. The auction was promoted as a “joint IRS/Institute for the Study of Nonviolence fund-raiser for war tax resistance.”

About thirty people showed up at the auction, held in a stiff wind outside the armory. “We passed around cookies in the shape of the resistance omega, tossed balloons of all colors into the air, and held signs which read ‘I ain’t gonna pay for war no more’ and ‘celebrate life — don’t pay war tax.’ ”

Beneath a skull and crossbones “Jolly Roger” kite that went wild in the wind, two revenuers read the IRS ground rules. They told Bob that he could still redeem the car. He stepped foreword and said, “But can I redeem my soul?” The car was sold for $277.00. It took about twenty minutes to complete the transaction because much of the money was in twenty dollar bills.

After the IRS got its blood money, and the Institute expenses had been paid, the war tax resistance alternative fund had netted $203.35. Bob donated the car to the community. He decided that he preferred bicycling to polluting the air.

In addition, all the media covered the story extensively and pretty sympathetically. It can be stated that the IRS bought tens of thousands of dollars worth of publicity for the idea of war tax resistance. “A final benefit is that we showed the people of the community that tax resisters will stick together and help each other out.” How’s that for a bit of nonviolent jujitsu? (pp. 89–90.)

The book ends with a listing of the eighty-nine local War Tax Resistance centers around the country (as of press date last October). There are now almost one hundred more, as well as twenty-three alternate or “Life Funds.” These centers offer tax-resistance counseling, supply current literature, buttons and bumper stickers, coordinate speakers, produce demonstrations, and administer Life Funds. I suggest you buy at least five copies of this book to give to friends who might then help you to organise a war resistance center in your locale. You will get all the help you need from Bob Calvert

The National Catholic Reporter covered Karl Meyer’s war tax resistance in its 10 March 1972 issue:

An act of “political significance”

Resister urges withholding of taxes

By Jerry De Muth

Special to the National Catholic Reporter — Chicago — “Tax resistance is now like draft resistance was in 1967,” Catholic Worker Karl Meyer told 1,000 persons who gathered to greet him on his parole from prison where he had been serving a two-year sentence for falsifying his federal income tax deductions.

“When I tore up my draft card in 1959, it was an act of personal witness,” the 34-year-old Meyer explained. “Today it has become an act of political significance because so many do it.

“In 1966, eight of us refused to pay the telephone excise tax. Now at least 100,000 do not pay that ten per cent tax.” The tax was levied for the expressed purpose of raising funds for the war in Indochina.

Today, Meyer sees the number of income tax resisters as numbering at least 10,000 and perhaps as many as 20,000. And, he hopes that soon this act of personal witness will also become an act of political significance.

In an interview after his talk, Meyer said, “I like concrete results. If you don’t send $500 to Washington, you can spend that $500 as you wish on something positive. That’s concrete, but there’s no other concrete result unless tax resistance becomes organized and grows.

“The first step,” Meyer said, “is nonpayment of the ten per cent telephone tax. Then there is nonpayment of any balance due or nonpayment of $50, $100 or a significant amount of the income tax. If many do this it does have political significance.”

The affair for Meyer included a $5-a-plate dinner, with the proceeds going to the Chicago Peace Council, Peoples Coalition for Peace and Justice and the Catholic Worker movement. Referring to the people who promoted the dinner, he said:

“They should have decided not to send $500 in tax money to Washington and instead sent it to the Peace Council. But instead they send $500 to Washington and send $5 to the Peace Council, and then they wonder why Washington is strong and the Peace Council is weak.”

Meyer was first exposed to pacifism by his mother, who taught him about Gandhi, and his father, William H. Meyer, a former U.S. representative from Vermont who was a conscientious objector during World War Ⅱ. While in the House, the elder Meyer proposed the abolition of both Selective Service and the manufacture of nuclear weapons.

In 1957, young Meyer became involved in active resistance, joined the Catholic Worker and converted to Catholicism. Also a believer in such “educational” acts as peace marches, he has participated in many such actions, including a ten-month, 6,000-mile San Francisco to Moscow march in 1961.

Meyer’s frequent protests against the war have resulted in numerous arrests. In 1966, he was expelled from South Vietnam for antiwar activities and, he says, similar efforts resulted in his being beaten up by delegates to the Lions International convention in Chicago in 1967.

Meyer began his protest against the use of tax money for the military in 1958 by having his income tax underwithheld. In 1960, he progressed to all-out resistance through the influence of a Chicago tax resister, Eroseanna Robinson, an Olympic high jump champion.

So that no income tax would be withheld from her pay, Miss Robinson would change jobs every time her income from a job totaled more than $600. At the end of the year she did not report any of her income. She was arrested and while detained in Cook county jail in Chicago began to fast while Meyer and others picketed outside. Sentenced to a year in prison, she continued to fast. After 108 days the Bureau of Prisons, Meyer said, asked the judge to release her and the judge complied.

“I said to myself then that I was not going to pay taxes any more,” Meyer said. “I began by leafletting the IRS IRS offices.”

At the time Meyer was supporting a House of Hospitality in Chicago and legally claimed as exemptions the persons who were living there. As a result, no taxes were withheld. “But as I phased out the house,” he added, “I no longer legally had a sufficient number of exemptions. But in 1969 I claimed 12 anyway, and in 1970 I claimed 10.”

Meyer was legally entitled to four — for himself; his wife, Jean; a son, William, now eight, and a daughter, Kristin, now four. (They since have had a third child, Eric, now one year old.) It was for those extra exemptions that Meyer received a maximum two-year sentence plus a $1,000 fine last May 21. He was released from the federal prison at Sandstone, Minn. — where Joe Mulligan and Ed Hoffmans of the Chicago 15 are also imprisoned — on Feb. 16 and will remain on parole until May of next year.

Meyer has frequently changed jobs to avoid a lien on his wages. Once, the government got $46.60 before he quit one job. It is the only income tax he has paid in the past 11 years, he says. He has also avoided paying all but $8 of the federal excise tax on phone service.

“My jobs were determined by my radical pattern of life,” he explained. “I was in jail a lot. I was not thinking of building a career, which was good because, as soon as you stop living as the poor live and stop working as the poor work, you stop caring about their needs.”

A simple lifestyle is a very important part of tax resistance for the Meyers. “There are essential principles more important than tax resistance,” Meyer emphasized. “They are the idea of voluntary poverty and simplicity of life which we have done through our House of Hospitality, sharing our income with others.

“The other major principle is the refusal to do harm to others, especially to claim control of our own productivity and not pay for the killing of others. We can claim control of our lives through tax resistance.”

Meyer said there is only one reason why more persons, even if they strongly oppose the war, do not refuse to pay part or all of their income taxes — “They’re afraid.”

“But the first time it’s done, there’s certainly no risk,” he said confidently. Partly for this reason he backs mass tax resistance as a national antiwar action.

“The question,” he said, “is how do you tell people about their own strengths. They mistakenly think that Karl Meyer is stronger then they.”

Meyer, who frequently delves into history with a preference for the writings of Thomas Paine, fondly points out that the American Revolution, the French Revolution and Gandhi’s movement for Indian independence all had their roots in tax resistance.

The step of tax resistance, he feels, is important for those who have unsuccessfully urged their senators to vote against military appropriations. “When the time comes for us to vote against appropriations — and that day comes April 15 — do we vote against appropriations?” he asked. “The courage we ask of our representatives should not be greater than the courage we ask of ourselves.”

As for the Meyers’ future, Meyer said that they will not pay the $2,000 in taxes owed for past years going back to 1962, will not pay the telephone tax and will not pay his $1,000 fine.

“But in order that we may be allowed to remain together and not be separated by imprisonment,” he added, “we will limit our income to an amount that will not be taxable, to about $4,800. It’s easy to live on this. In fact, I think we can live on $4,000 by the simplification of our life. We will then be in a position to share the surplus with others not so fortunate as us.”

Meyer was working at a hospital when he was arrested a year ago and now is employed by “an association,” working with the mentally retarded. “We will continue to do productive work for the good of society,” he vowed. “We will continue to oppose this war and all other wars and all militarism by the testimony of our lives and the witness of our actions.”

From the 30 March 1972 The Catholic Advocate:

Promotes “Tax Resistance” to War

A 27-year-old priest refuses to pay the “war share” of his federal income tax. Rev. Thomas McKenna, assistant pastor at St. Luke’s, St. Paul, Minn., in a letter to more than 100 priests inviting them to discuss possible tax resistance, said: “No matter how we vote, no matter what we say, no matter how many statements, marches and demonstrations we endorse, we still support the war (and the weekly death toll) with a large portion of every dollar we pay in federal income and telephone excise taxes.”

A follow-up on this from the National Catholic Reporter, 7 April 1972:

17 clergy to withhold tax

Special to the National Catholic Reporter — St. Paul, Minn. — Seventeen Twin Cities’ area priests, ministers and seminarians have announced that they will refuse to pay a portion of their federal income tax to protest the Vietnam war. Among the group are five priests of the St. Paul-Minneapolis archdiocese.

“We cannot before God support or finance this unjustifiable killing of fellow human beings whether American or Southeast Asian,” said Father Thomas McKenna, a leader of the group, in a statement read at the federal building here. “Therefore, we feel that we must in conscience refuse to pay that portion of our federal income tax that goes to support this inhuman, ungodly war.”

Father McKenna, an assistant pastor at St. Luke’s Catholic church in St. Paul, said that 25 priests of the archdiocese had indicated to him that they might join in the tax resistance. The 20 who did not join, he said, are still considering other forms of protest, such as withholding the federal telephone tax.

The tax resisters’ statement came at the conclusion of a peaceful demonstration by more than 200 clergy, seminarians and laymen who marched from St. Paul’s Dayton Avenue Presbyterian church to the St. Paul cathedral and then to the federal building. The march was organized by the Ecumenical Witness for Peace.

A skeptical reporter for the Pittsburgh Catholic penned this for its 21 April 1972 edition:

Most pay little attention

Peace marchers get mixed reaction

By William McClinton

A procession of 25 people, even when escorting a black coffin and led by a man with a cross, doesn’t make much of a ripple in the hurrying crowds in downtown Pittsburgh at lunch time.

So it was with the 25 clergy and laity — mostly Catholic — who marched some 10 blocks to the Federal Bldg. last Friday noon to protest the escalation of the Vietnam war and the use of their tax money to finance the war.

Their sidewalk procession drew attention in some less busy areas, but in the main blocks was separated and absorbed by the crowd.

Nevertheless, the war headlines at every newsstand illustrated the relevancy of their concern, and the news media was present, almost as numerous as the marchers.

The 25 were members or friends of the recently opened Thomas Merton Peace and Justice Center, an interfaith but predominately Catholic effort on the South Side.

Larry Kessler, director of the Center, said the cross was to illustrate the religious motivation of the protesters who cannot “in conscience” support “this atrocity we call the Indochina war.”

Asked if the escalation wasn’t the result of North Vietnam’s attack, several responded in essence: “What do you expect? We’ve had plenty of time to get out. We shouldn’t be there in the first place.”

The demonstrators chose the front of the Diocese of Pittsburgh Bldg. to form, unknown to diocesan officials. As they filed through town they passed out handbills signed by 45 persons, including 12 diocesan priests and three nuns, announcing the undersigned were withholding part of their federal tax payment or the 10 per cent phone excise tax to protest the war. The handbills urged others to “conscientiously object” the same way. Many people took the bills and read them impassively.

The procession stopped at Trinity Episcopal Cathedral on Sixth St. for a brief prayer service and again at the Methodist Bldg. on Smithfield at Seventh where the closest thing to an incident occurred.

The ground floor of the building houses a bank branch, and Fr. Donald Fisher had hardly begun paraphrasing a psalm through a portable mike when the building manager rushed out and announced that “You can’t do that here.” It was private property, the manager said tensely and when the demonstrators tried to discuss it, he hurried off to call the police. By the time he returned, however, the demonstration had moved on.

At the Federal Bldg. on Liberty Ave. where several more demonstrators were waiting, the group set the wooden coffin down in the outdoor plaza, and after Kessler read from one of Fr. Daniel Berrigan’s writings, they tossed into the coffin some old phone bills and income tax forms as a symbolic gesture.

Several dozen persons who gathered to watch included four or five young men preparing to enlist at Armed Forces offices inside the building.

“It’s a shame.” said Robert DeRose Jr., 18, from Gallitzin in Cambria County, a sturdy, dark-haired youth who said — looking at his watch — he was to be sworn into the Navy “in 10 minutes.”

“All they’re doing is letting Communism spread around the world,” he said heatedly. “Yet they’ll be the first to scream when Communism comes in.”

There was a humorous moment when five of the priests went inside to pay their self-reduced income tax and — even as any hapless taxpayer — were unwittingly directed by a solicitous Internal Revenue guide to the wrong line.

“I don’t take any money here,” the official told them after they had worked their way up to his desk and Fr. Donald McIlvane had introduced everyone all around and explained their purpose. “You have to give it to the cashier.”

The cashier proved to be an attractive redhead at the other end of the room who listened politely to the priests’ explanations, smiled and said, “Thank you,” as she accepted each payment.

The procession’s religious aura commanded respect — the prayers, the obvious concern for peaceful protest, the appeal to Christian principles, as the marchers see those principles.

But the intensity of the division this war has generated was reflected by the reaction of a stumpy, graying man on one streetcorner. “They’re a bunch of Communists,” he told a companion contemptuously. “They wouldn’t do that in Russia.”

“Not in East Germany either,” his friend replied in a strong foreign accent.

The National Catholic News Service carried this dispatch on 5 June 1972:

Tax Problems Dog Catholic Worker Movement

By NC News Service New York (NC) — “My little case is to explain to the court that performing the corporal works of mercy is indeed charitable even under the standards imposed by our government, and I refuse to apply for tax exemption.”

With those words Dorothy Day, the 74-year-old founder of the Catholic Worker movement, has summarized what she expects to say when she appears July 3 in a federal court in Lewisburg, Pa.

Miss Day will have to explain why the Catholic Worker movement has not paid $296,359 in fines, penalties and back income taxes to the Internal Revenue Service for the past six years.

A confirmed pacifist, Miss Day has opposed the theory of a just war, a theory that has been foremost in her decision not to apply for federal tax exemption.

“Our refusal to apply for exemption status in our practice of the works of mercy is part of our protest against war and the present social ‘order’ which brings on wars today,” she said.

“One of the most costly protests against war in the way of long enduring personal sacrifice is to refuse to pay income taxes for war,” she wrote recently in the Catholic Worker newspaper.

She argues that the Catholic Worker organization has never paid salaries. Its volunteer workers are given room, board, clothing and free instruction in the Catholic Worker movement.

“So we do not need to pay federal income taxes,” she contends.

“I’m sure that many will think me a fool indeed, almost criminally negligent for not taking more care to safeguard, not just the bank account, but the welfare of all the lame, halt, and blind — deserving or undeserving poor — who come to us.”

Miss Day told NC News Service she considers the tax investigations a “harassment by the federal government” because the Catholic Worker movement is against all war.

The Catholic Worker is not incorporated as a religious organization and therefore is not exempt from paying federal income taxes. She said the Catholic Worker does not incorporate because it is a principal of the movement to avoid all ties with the state.

She says the Catholic Worker did not set up a defense committee to campaign for Catholic funds.

“I can only trust that this crisis will pass,” she said. “I am sure that some way will be found either to avert the disaster, or for us to continue to care for our old, sick, helpless, hungry and homeless if it happens,” she said.

The 21 July 1972 National Catholic Reporter reported that the “peace tax fund” idea had captured Catholic attention as well:

Applying papal suggestions

From tax dollars to peace fund

By Phil Haslanger

Special to the National Catholic Reporter, Madison, Wis.— Trying to apply papal suggestions to political realities is not the easiest job in the world. Take, for example, Pope Paul’s suggestion in his encyclical Populorum Progressio that a world fund be established “to be made up of part of the money spent on arms, to relieve the most destitute of this world.”

For Dr. Daniel J. Guilfoil, a 39-year-old philosophy professor at Edgewood college here, that suggestion provided the key to his dream of having part of his tax money be deferred from military expenses to help the poor.

With the introduction of a bill in the U.S. House of Representatives which would enable citizens to avoid paying war taxes on grounds of conscience (N.C.R., April 28), Guilfoil saw his dream moving closer to reality.

Although Guilfoil had worked for about two years to have his congressman, Rep. Robert Kastenmeier (D-Wis.), introduce such a bill, the push which finally got the bill introduced came from a citizens group in Ann Arbor, Mich. under the leadership of Dr. David Bassett, a physician.

Neither Guilfoil nor the Ann Arbor group had any knowledge about each other — a fact Guilfoil interprets as both a weakness in the tactical effort and a sign that the bill embodies an idea whose time has come.

The path Guilfoil followed which led him to work for such legislation was not dissimilar from that followed by other liberal Catholics in the wake of Vatican Ⅱ.

As enthusiasm for the declarations of the council yielded to frustration over the pace of change, Guilfoil, his wife, Barbara (“She’s probably more activist than I am”) and their nine children became a part of Madison’s John ⅩⅩⅢ experimental community.

With the community, they worked on civil rights and open housing legislation and, in Guilfoil’s words, “moved into the peace movement, if you will, as a connected issue.”

Working with the social action committee of Madison Area Community of Churches to establish a draft counseling center, Guilfoil became sensitive to the witness offered by conscientious objectors and he began to think that “the principle of alternative service should be extended to all people,” not just to draftable young men.

At the same time, he was aware of the growing tax resistance movement to protest the war and he was considering the implications of Populorum Progressio.

The various threads were woven together by Guilfoil and other members of John ⅩⅩⅢ into a petition, signatures were gathered and a resolution was adopted by the social action committee of the diocesan priests’ senate urging “legislation to create an alternate fund to administer to the needs of people.”

From there, more signatures were collected and on election night, 1970, Guilfoil talked with Kastenmeier about the possibility of having legislation to that effect introduced. The congressman responded favorably and suggested the petitions and information be sent to his administrative assistant.

Kastenmeier’s office considered the proposal, but decided that the time was not yet ripe for such a bill.

Some time later the idea of just such a bill was stirring in Ann Arbor. By fall the World Peace Tax Fund steering committee had been established. According to Arthur Mack, the committee’s corresponding secretary, a second committee was established in Washington to lobby towards such legislation.

Rep. Ronald Dellums (D-Cal.) liked the idea and put his office to work on rounding up cosponsors. In April of this year, he and the other nine congressmen introduced the “bill and saw it referred to the House Ways and Means committee.

April 19, Guilfoil prodded the faculty of Edgewood college to “go on record as supporting the right of all citizens to the privilege of the status of ‘conscientious objector.’ ” The following day, he convinced the social action commission of Blessed Sacrament parish in Madison to unanimously adopt a resolution asking the parish council to educate the parish “on the theology of alternate service.”

Resolutions written by Guilfoil supporting the passage of the World Peace Tax Fund act the bill pending in the House were adopted by both the Second District caucus of the Democratic party (Madison) and, most significantly of all, by the State Democratic party as a part of its platform.

Guilfoil sees his efforts on the local level as part of the push to draw national attention to the bill. He said he hopes the National Conference of Catholic Bishops will consider supporting the legislation, and he would like to see other national groups support the bill.

As for the realistic chances of getting the bill out of committee and passed into law, Guilfoil admits, “I’m not optimistic. But if you told me two years ago it would even be a bill now. I wouldn’t have believed you.”

He sees lobbying combined with education as the lever to getting the bill moving. “There’s enough sentiment today that taxes are being directed foolishly,” he says. “It’s a matter of getting people aware that straight people can think about these things.”

For Catholic groups, he added, the concepts of the bill “must be tied to the pacifist and just war traditions of the church — the doctrine of the church is surely important.”

As for Guilfoil himself, he is not waiting for the government to pass legislation which will make that papal suggestion a political reality. He has joined with others in the state to form a Wisconsin Peace Fund.

The specifics of the group haven’t been worked out yet, but basically, members will put a part of their tax money into the fund and the group will disperse it to local causes.

What Guilfoil and the people in Ann Arbor hope is that someday that peace fund will be on a national or even international level. The World Peace Tax Fund act has helped sustain that hope.

The 18 August 1972 issue of National Catholic Reporter reported on a national war tax resistance conference and included a sidebar on “How tax resisters resist taxes.” From the opening paragraphs, it appears that a political endorsement was on the agenda, suggesting that the conference was much more mainstream-liberal then than it is now (I doubt such an endorsement would be seriously considered by a NWTRCC conference these days):

War tax resisters

Can’t quite “endorse” McGovern

Jim Castelli, Associate Editor

Kansas City, Mo. — The second National War Tax Resistance Conference, attended by about 40 persons from around the country, gave what amounted to a qualified endorsement to the presidential candidacy of Senator George McGovern.

The tax resisters approved a statement praising McGovern for his promises to end the war, cut military spending, restudy the entire tax system and support a guaranteed annual income.

The statement also said the political climate in the country would substantially improve with McGovern as president and that he would end “repressive” actions by the government.

But the tax resisters also said they saw a negative side to McGovern, saying he “completely believes in maintaining United States power in the world” and that providing more arms for Israel, as McGovern has said he would do, is not the way to end the crisis in the Middle East.

Despite such criticisms, the statement said that most of the participants would probably vote for McGovern. Discussion indicated that those at the conference not voting for McGovern would either vote for Dr. Benjamin Spock, the People’s Party candidate, or not vote at all.

One participant suggested that applying pressure on McGovern from the left would let voters see him as a moderate, and therefore more acceptable. Another noted that because War Tax Resistance has strong anarchistic tendencies, a statement in support of McGovern might induce some anarchists to vote in this election.

The conference was held at St. Mark’s church, an unusual church in that it is staffed by Protestant and Catholic clergy. The participants, for the most part, wore sandals, well-worn jeans and long hair but weren’t all young. They came from both coasts and such cities as Denver, Chicago and Ann Arbor, Mich.

Also coming out of the conference was an agreement to draw up a statement on what the focus of the war tax resistance movement should be when the war ends. It was agreed tax resisters should continue to oppose the domination of the federal budget by the military and the centralization of power in the hands of governmental and corporate structures.

This opposition, the participants said, should include presenting alternatives, such as a nonviolent peace-keeping force and a blueprint for converting to an economy based on peace — for example, an analysis of how to shift the emphasis at Boeing Aircraft to building mass transportation facilities.

The conference expressed opposition to key segments of the World Peace Fund Tax Act, a measure introduced in the U.S. House of Representatives by Congressman Ron Dellums (D-Calif.) and nine other legislators.

The bill would allow taxpayers who qualified for conscientious objector status under Selective Service standards to divert the percentage of their taxes slated for the military to a “world peace tax board,” which would study peaceful alternatives to international conflict.

The major objections to the bill were the screening process to obtain the conscientious objector status and the fact that the alternative funds would still be controlled at the national level, preventing tax money from being used in the community from which it was paid.

No specific action was taken at the conference on the bill, but Robert Calvert, coordinator of War Tax Resistance, said he expects a new national working committee to try to rework the bill in October.

Calvert, in an interview, said the number of Americans withholding taxes because of the war is growing. He estimated that between 100,000 and 200,000 are either refusing to page the 10 per cent federal telephone excise tax, which is used for the war, or refusing to pay all or part of their income tax.

At present, he said, there are 192 war tax resistance centers in the U.S. He added that each regional office of the Internal Revenue Service now has a person or department dealing with taxpayers protesting the war.

“We’d love to get our hands on the IRS list,” he said. “They have many more names of resisters than we have because many people resist on their own without working with a local center.”

The two main purposes of the conference were organizational: the creation of a working committee, and the question of whether or not to move the national office from New York to Kansas City.

The proposal to move the office was approved, partly because of expected lower operating costs, but mostly because War Tax Resistance wants to be closer to “middle America.” The move is expected to be made by the end of the year.

The working committee, now being assembled, will consist of representatives of national regions and the seven state area around Kansas City. The committee is to meet every two months beginning in October.

How tax resisters resist taxes

Special to the National Catholic Reporter, Kansas City, Mo.— How do you resist paying taxes as a protest against the war, and what happens when you do?

Interviews conducted at the second annual National War Tax Resistance Conference and materials put out by the movement provide these answers:

There are a variety of ways to resist taxes: Withholding the federal telephone excise tax, withholding all or part of the federal income tax, not filing a tax return at all, paying taxes under protest and keeping one’s earnings below a taxable level. All have a different set of consequences.

The most common form of resistance is withholding the telephone tax, says Robert Calvert, coordinator of the War Tax Resistance organization. The telephone tax, which helps finance the war, currently is 10 per cent.

To withhold it, resisters simply deduct the tax when they pay their phone bills, explaining that it is a protest against the war, not against the phone company. Members of War Tax Resistance say that telephone companies have told resisters that their service will not be interrupted, and that they regard the protest as a matter between the individual and the government.

They point out, however, that phone companies do provide the Internal Revenue Service with the names of resisters. The experience of resisters is that, after several written demands for payment, IRS can usually secure payment by attaching the resister’s bank account, taking the amount of the unpaid tax, plus up to six per cent interest.

Technically, a person who resists the telephone tax is liable to a year’s imprisonment and a $10,000 fine, but so far the government has been satisfied with collection, resisters say.

In Calvert’s opinion, the government might still decide to arrest telephone tax resisters. But, he adds, it has been the history of movements such as tax resistance that they are strengthened by governmental crackdowns.

Resisting income taxes is more difficult because taxes are withheld from most people’s wages during the year. Thus, resisters who owe money at the end of the year can refuse to pay it or, through the use of such tactics as claiming more dependents than they actually have, file for a refund.

Income tax resistance is viewed more seriously by the government; resisters have been jailed, but penalties are greater for falsification of income tax returns or failure to file than for refusal to pay. (Any tax returns indicating resistance should be accompanied by a letter explaining the nature of the protest.)

So far, however, either because their returns have been accepted by IRS computers, or because appeals proceedings can take years, most resisters have still not had to pay taxes.

Tax resisters advise against keeping withheld tax money, however. The organization instead advises putting the money into alternate funds which may be used to assist tax resisters who are challenged by the government.

The government can seize personal property such as cars and houses for public auction to bring in the owed taxes. (Whatever money is brought in over and above the taxes and auction fees is returned to the resister.)

These auctions have become occasions for peace demonstrations. An auction for a car that had been seized from a Kansas man for tax resistance heard bids of Vietnamese tears, coffins, and napalmed babies. Also, a resister can often arrange to have friends or a resistance center make the actual purchase at the auction.

The use of withholding allowances as a means of tax resistance was devised by John Egnal, a lawyer from Philadelphia representing resister Jack Malinowski. Malinowski was charged with supplying “false information” on his tax status; he had claimed 14 dependents (the number of other people in the Philadelphia tax resistance center), an amount which negated his tax for the year. He was found guilty, but has not as yet been sentenced.

The problem with past methods of tax resistance is that they are all technically illegal because they hinge on a yes or no answer to questions regarding certain parts of the internal revenue code. The use of withholding allowances, however, seems to avoid this situation.

An employee fills out IRS form W-4 to indicate to his employer the number of deductions he will claim for the coming year; form W-4E indicates that no tax liability has been incurred for the year, usually because of income below the taxable level.

People who expect to have a large number of itemized deductions can enter a number of withholding allowances — converted from dollar figures by a chart on the back of the W-4 form — which will reduce tax payments; this way, higher taxes are not paid and then refunded at the end of the year.

Egnal holds that “the withholding allowance claim would be applicable to any tax resister who believed that, as a result of the illegal and immoral conduct of the U.S. government, some or all of the federal taxes claimed could not lawfully be collected.

“If one held such a belief… it would be necessary to improvise some basis for preparing one’s income tax returns, since IRS has not, as yet, seen fit to follow the law of this country, which includes not only the Internal Revenue code, but also numerous principles of international law to which the U.S. has subscribed.”

This improvisation, according to Egnal, would be a “war crimes deduction” for which a withholding allowance could be entered.

Egnal, claims that if the government were to prosecute such a resister, “the only false statement they could point to would be ‘I am entitled to a war crimes deduction because…’ Such a statement reflects a legal conclusion which has never been ruled upon by any court, and which… enjoys the support of many noted scholars.”

Even if the courts eventually rule that such deductions are illegal, Egnal points out that past rulings would not allow prosecution because the fact that the legal question was in doubt erases the possibility of “willfully” breaking the law.

A similar situation exists with form W-4E, which states “Under penalties of perjury, I certify that I incurred no liability for federal income tax for 1971 and that I anticipate that I will incur no liability for federal income tax for 1972.”

A resister could, according to Egnal, use the “war crimes deduction” to justify the claim that he was not liable for any taxes.

(A follow-up brief in the 17 November 1972 issue read: “There was some discussion at the annual conference of War Tax Resistance last summer that if McGovern lost the election, his followers would make a prime target for the tax resistance movement. He lost, and the war is still going on; if it drags on until income tax time, it will be interesting to see if there is an increase in tax resistance.” Another, in the 24 November 1972 issue read: “The war tax resistance movement has found a new home in Mid-America — Kansas City. The organization moved from New York to save money and to be physically closer to ‘middle Americans.’ Nearby Independence, Mo. is the national headquarters of the paramilitary Minutemen, but tax resistance members don’t expect any hassles. One resister joked, ‘Maybe we can learn something from them about grassroots organization.’ The new address will be 912 E. 31^st St., Kansas City, Mo.”)

The same issue included this opinion piece:

War taxes and conscience

“It is the issue of coresponsibility and complicity that will become salient”

By Roderick Hindery

Even if United States military forces in Indochina should be reduced to a residual element or less before or after the November election, the war will remain an issue crucial for the conscience and morale of those who led it and those who were coresponsible. It is particularly the issue of coresponsibility or complicity that will become salient. The fact that the Indochina war was explicitly rejected by millions who simultaneously supported it by taxes and other forms of cooperation may make the judgment of Nuremberg the question of the present era: “that a person acted pursuant to the order of his government or a superior does not relieve him from responsibility under international law, provided a moral choice was in fact possible to him.”

One of the more constructive expressions of an emerging consciousness of coresponsibility for military action is the World Peace Tax Fund Act (N.C.R. July 21). Although the bill may never escape committee in the U.S. House of Representatives, as one attempt to legislate an alternative to economic participation in war for those conscientiously opposed, it is enormously important. The rationale attached to the bill argues that since compulsory significant participation in war against one’s religious conscience is opposed to the original spirit of the First Amendment, the law should allow a realistic alternative such as contributions to qualified peace-related activities — for example, research toward non-military solutions of conflict. The compatibility of alternate contributions with responsible citizenship is defended by reference to Christian tradition, the traditions of the United States, judicial interpretations and legal precedents.

In a survey of some of the bill’s ramifications, the authors assure their readers that tried and proven standards for determining authentic conscientious objector status can also be applied to military tax objectors. As for other possible abuses, it is alleged that the Peace Tax Fund’s passage would not open the floodgates to earmarking tax dollars because opposition to war involves a right of conscience that is uniquely fundamental. In a concluding section entitled “Effectiveness,” the Peace Tax Fund proposal realistically admits that the military budget would not decrease unless Congress were persuaded by the fund’s growth to reduce the priority of military spending. Tax exemption is primarily a means to that end.

In noting that the bill would “force” taxpayers to decide whether they can support military spending, the authors underline the thesis with which we began — the importance of an emerging consciousness about coresponsibility for war through military spending.

The Peace Tax Fund, of course, is not the only path of dissent being explored. An increasing body of tax resisters (192 listed groups in the United States) have experimented with alternatives ranging from individual protests to communal resistance and harassment of the Internal Revenue Service. Taxes are withheld totally or in amounts proportionate to military spending by the government. Equivalent sums are donated to social and charitable causes. However, if the citizen takes steps to insure that military taxes are not confiscated from his salary or property, he is liable to legal sanction.

While refusal to work for taxable wages and emigration are further options, emigration alone may offer the only route toward a “pure non-cooperation.” When economic systems can support war by deficit spending and by the transfer of non-military funds to military budgets, even participation in a future World Peace Tax Fund would not neutralize the fact that living within a military economy is itself a kind of cooperation in war.

The option most commonly followed is to justify support of military spending as a means of buying time and freedom to work toward a less militaristic administration.

None of these options to economic military support necessarily presuppose a totally pacifistic position. In principle they also apply to citizens concerned with the justice of supporting particular wars, revolutions, counterrevolutions, or exorbitantly massive forms of national defense. In each of these instances it is maintained that money becomes power and weaponry which kills against one’s conscience.

What was always true is becoming increasingly obvious. Conscientious objection is a problem not only for draftees but for all taxpayers and their dependents. The fact that the problem is not yet widely recognized is partly grounded in a profound dilemma never resolved in the history of theoretical ethics and only tenuously confronted by national constitutions and international law. The dilemma can be expressed in two questions: 1) Is there not a basic and inalienable human right/duty not to kill against one’s conscience? 2) If this right/duty is inalienable, how can the right/duty of national defense override it?

Within the legal dimension the dilemma is not yet totally resolved. The Russian Constitution, for instance, legislates that the duty of defense supersedes freedom of conscience. The United States Constitution refers to no such priority, only to a religious freedom which implicitly presupposes a prior freedom of conscience in matters so basic as killing. No subsequent legislation has inverted that valuation, and judicial decisions consistently interpret the Constitution in favor of the primacy of conscience (at least in reference to opposition to war in general). This priority of conscience was explicitly confirmed by the principles of Nuremberg, which were approved by the United States and promulgated as international law by the United Nations in 1950. In principle the United States accepts international law as an authority which obliges its own citizens.

In the United States the priority of conscience still needs clearer and more explicit legislation. The unconstitutionality of compulsory war tax may be argued from the perspective of the written Constitution (intentions or actual practice of the framers or citizens who first ratified it) or from the viewpoint of the living constitution (manifested in judicial decisions or people’s referendums). From either or both of these methodological perspectives the priority of conscience may be argued more cogently than it has in the past.

In other words, whatever may be said for or against other freedoms of conscience, the liberty not to kill, when killing is judged immoral, is unique. It is so basic to the freedom of conscience which the Constitution presupposes, that there is need of an explicit amendment or other legislation to guide courts in deciding all cases involved. A bill like the World Peace Tax Fund, while not as irreversible or desirable as a constitutional amendment, is needed to help explicate what is already implicit at the legal level.

Within the ambit of theoretical ethics which operate autonomously outside or within various world religions, the priority of the right not to kill against one’s conscience is in jeopardy due to two as yet unsolved theoretical controversies.

The first controversy is the one engendered by classic utilitarianism’s principle that morality is always determined by whatever serves the greatest happiness of the greatest number of people. As recently as John Rawls’ A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, Mass., Harvard U. Press, 1972; cf. The New York Times Book Review, July 16, 1972), philosophers have joined in continued debate about the adequacy of the greatest happiness principle and have argued the pragmatic need to supplement it by postulating an equal and, in some ways, prior principle of justice: Since certain individual rights of life or liberty are inalienable, their inviolability necessarily, if sometimes invisibly, brings about the greatest happiness. This principle is not acceptable to everyone since it seems verifiable only in the future.

The second controversy has been sharpened by analysis of ethical language. Are rights something people merely feel about and confer or bestow on one another? If rights are dependent on what others think of us or what they contract with us, how can rights be inalienable? Or, if some rights are inalienable, what is the source of human certitude in specifying them, intuition or what?

Ethical thought which is not rooted in heteronomous religious authority continues to founder on these two controversies and lacks the ringing certitude about inalienable rights proclaimed by the United States Declaration of Independence and the Founding Fathers, by the United Nation’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights, or by the international principles of Nuremberg. Consequently, the sources of national and international laws manifest a greater unanimity and authority than do conflicting approaches in theoretical ethics. Whoever does not immediately perceive the self-evidence of the liberty not to kill against one’s conscience will apparently function best when he appeals not to a universal authority in reasoned ethics but to the legal authority and presuppositions of constitutions or international law. As mentioned previously, those who are convinced of conscientious objection’s legality should work for its logical extension into the economic sphere.

Not all wars or military spending appear so clearly immoral to so many people as does the war in Vietnam. There are other issues on which progressives or conservatives may be divided among their own groups, e.g., future support of military operations in the Near East or Latin America, nuclear defense programs powerful enough to destroy the planet many times over, or foreign aid programs thought to be gravely exploitative and imperialistic. The authors of the World Peace Tax Fund Act give assurances that exemption from war taxes would not open the floodgates for citizens who wish to earmark their tax dollars in other programs. On the contrary, this concern may be offset with the judgment that, given a plurality of fundamental human rights, there may be many other crucial moral issues on which citizens should vote with their dollars.

The lasting merit of the growing war tax resistance movement may not be that it helped end the war in Indochina, but that it raised the question of citizens’ coresponsibility to the moral priority it deserves, not only in matters of war and peace, but in every matter of life and death. The issue of citizens’ coresponsible decision-making entails more than the purity and liberty of individual consciences. If free and informed decisions by greater numbers have anything to do with the effectiveness of democracy, the future of democracy itself may be involved.

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Roderick Hindery teaches religious ethics at Temple university in Philadelphia.

Today, some excerpts from The Catholic News Archive concerning tax resistance in 1973. First, from the January 1973 Catholic Worker:

“Peacemaker” Refuses Taxes

By Ernest Bromley et al.

The federal government’s Internal Revenue Service on December 6 began proceedings against Gano Peacemakers, Inc. and against Ernest and Marion Bromley for taxes and penalties amounting to over $30,000, for the years of 1966 through 1971. The address for both is 10206 Sylvan Ave., Cincinnati, Ohio. The locality is on the map as Gano.

As many people are aware, Gano Peacemakers, Inc. is a nonprofit corporation established by the Bromleys and others soon after they went to Gano as a community in 1956. It has held property, but has never operated a program, had any income from work or contributions, or had a treasury. In 1958, the mailing address of the Movement of Peacemakers, together with its organ, The Peacemaker, was brought to Gano, as Ernest Bromley had accepted responsibility for circulation and editing. The Peacemaker files were brought from Yellow Springs, the financial records were brought from the former business address in Cleveland, and the sharing fund from Oberlin. As is well known by all volunteers who have kept the records and everyone close to the Peacemaker Movement, The Peacemaker finances have continued entirely apart from the finances of the people at the house in Gano.

False Information

IRS arrived at this figure through the assertion that the Peacemaker Movement and its organ, The Peacemaker, housed at that address, are synonymous with Gano Peacemakers, Inc., which holds title to the house where the Bromleys live. The erroneous claim, expressed in notations and figures on numerous IRS forms, is that the finances of the Peacemaker Movement are one and the same as the corporation holding title to the property. Figures on these forms claim that all subscriptions to The Peacemaker and contributions to the Movement are income to Gano Peacemakers, Inc. These IRS tables and figures, received at the house in Gano, go so far as to assert that all recipients of checks from The Peacemaker bank account are employees of Gano Peacemakers, Inc., and assessments are listed for FUTA, FICA and payroll income tax which they claim Peacemakers should have withheld from all those receiving checks. People said to be employees are named in the documents; most are the families of imprisoned war objectors who received monthly checks for their period of need. Apparently, IRS took these from copies of canceled checks kept by the Farmers and Citizens Bank, Trotwood, Ohio.

Whether IRS has made this move with the calculated intention of disrupting and diminishing the Peacemaker Movement and The Peacemaker is, of course, not known. It should be stated that the Bromleys and others who refuse taxes for war have consistently refused to give IRS any information—partly because they wanted to make collection as difficult as possible, even though the amount might be very small—and partly because they wanted to offer total noncooperation with the machinery of a racist and murdering government apparatus. Having gathered information which is totally-false as the basis for a claim, IRS should not be permitted to proceed in ignorance of the total misrepresentation they have made with regard to activities at Gano.

If IRS does proceed on the basis it has claimed, no assets called Peacemaker will be immune to its seizure at any time, be it a checking account where subscriptions are deposited or funds contributed for aid to imprisoned war objectors’ families. Anything considered to be the Movement’s can be grabbed. If that should happen, Peacemaker would find other ways to continue to communicate with each other and meet their obligations to families of imprisoned war objectors.

Claim Against the Bromleys

Ernest and Marion Bromley’s nonpayment of taxes for war antedates the founding of Peacemakers. They have for many years made public their stand against paying taxes for war, and have refused to give IRS any information. It is rather ironic that after making the house at Gano available without charge for The Peacemaker editing and circulation work, they are now being accused of receiving income from the operation of the Peacemaker Movement.

What Response to Make?

It is not likely that either individual refusers or any persons acting for Peacemakers will begin to fill out tax forms, open its mailing lists to IRS, show names of contributors and do any of the things people do who are merely looking for a better deal from IRS. Even if such cooperation were acceptable to Peacemakers, it is no guarantee that IRS would accept the explanations. And one thing quite repugnant to Peacemakers is the thought of applying to IRS for a right to continue.

There is the possibility that IRS is proceeding without knowledge of how far-fetched their claims are. Those who know the principles on which Peacemaker finances are handled may wish to write to the IRS accountant who signed the papers. He is Samuel T. Lay, IRS, P.O. Box 476, Cincinnati, OH, 45201.

Such a communication would be for the purpose of informing the IRS that their claims against the Peacemaker Movement are erroneous. It would be particularly helpful if those knowing how the sharing fund operates would inform the IRS that those receiving checks are not employees either of Peacemakers or Gano Peacemakers, Inc.; that they have not performed any services for Peacemakers; and that they may have never had any other connection with Peacemakers than receiving financial aid during a resister’s prison sentence.

There is no true basis for a collection in the material IRS has assembled. It may be that they will acknowledge this fact if they receive information from those who know how incorrect their assumptions are. If letters go to IRS, it would be helpful if copies are sent to The Peacemaker.

Chuck Matthei reports that the Peacemakers’ winter continuation meeting in Indianapolis discussed mounting an educational campaign about tax refusal in the Cincinnati area. They also foresee a non-violent, direct action response to the war-tax machine if an eviction or auction takes place. Chuck stressed that the action would involve a no bail/no fine commitment from participants.

Although the Peacemakers wish to make refusal to support war, not concern to protect property, the issue in their tax case, they are collecting pledges of assistance for the Bromleys, should the need arise.

For more information, or to participate, contact:

The Peacemaker
10208 Sylvan Av.
Cincinnati, Ohio 45241

The National Catholic Reporter reported in its 5 January 1973 issue:

American Telephone and Telegraph reports that 22,000 people refused to pay the telephone excise tax in protest against the Vietnam war in 1972, up from 17,000 last year and 12,000 in 1970. The Internal Revenue Service wants AT&T to disconnect all those phones, but AT&T says tax problems are IRS’ business. Apparently, IRS wants as little to do with 22,000 prosecutions as AT&T wants to do with the $200,000 a month It would cost to disconnect protesters’ phones.

The 2 February issue of that paper, toward the end of a larger article about peace movement retooling toward the tail end of the Vietnam War, noted:

Bob Calvert of War Tax Resistance said his organization will continue to urge tax resistance in protest against the large amount of the federal budget — more than half — which goes into the military.

He said local tax resistance centers are preparing reports describing the amount of federal taxes taken out of each state, the amount returned through revenue sharing, the real needs of the state and the amount of money from the state which goes into the military.

Mike DeGregory penned an argument for war tax resistance for the March 1973 issue of Catholic Worker:

Render to God: The Imperative to Resist

By Mike DeGregory

“There are two things I’ve got to do in this world — die and pay taxes.” This sentiment presents a serious theological problem for the modern world: equating the demands of the nation state with those of God. Given the violence and militarism of our times, the problem becomes a question of idolatry. As such, the payment of taxes must be examined with all its implications.

God and State

Since biblical times there has existed a tension between allegiance to God and allegiance to the state. Periodically, acts of resistance were made as a witness affirming God as the source of life in opposition to the state. Recently this tension has been manifested in this country when hundreds of thousands of Americans, motivated by belief in a higher authority, refused allegiance to the state. Draft resistance to the Vietnam war was widespread, and the war tax resistance movement reached a high point.

Now, however, that the ceasefire accords have been signed and American troops will be withdrawn from Vietnam, many consider war tax refusal an inappropriate anachronism. Such a view is a misunderstanding of the nature of war and tax resistance. Mr. Nixon has repeatedly said, “Peace, peace with honor,” but there is no peace.

The Vietnam war continues with intense fighting. It is the Vietnamese people who suffer. Over 200,000 refugees have been created since the ceasefire began, while American planes daily bomb Cambodia, and frequently bomb Laos.

Outside Indochina, a similar “peace” prevails. America continues to arm other smaller nations for fratricidal wars, most recently in a $2 billion agreement with Iran. And America’s nuclear overkill continues to increase, as does the military budget. This is peace only in an Orwellian sense.

William James has described the true nature of this “peace” in his The Moral Equivalent of War:

“Peace” in military mouths is a synonym for “war expected”… Every up-to-date dictionary should say that “peace” and “war” mean the same thing, now in posse, now in actu. It may even be reasonably said that the intensely sharp competitive preparation for war by the nations is the real war, permanent, unceasing; and that the battles are only a sort of public verification of the mastery gained during the “peace” interval.

No Mere Protest

The existence of perpetual war makes war tax resistance relevant and necessary. Tax resistance is not just another form of protest. It is a refusal to participate in something, namely war. It involves a change of worldviews, a conversion. It demands a commitment to a new way of living. It can be a truly religious response, stemming from moral obligation rather than expediency. In this moral sense, it is for everyone, not just the courageous few. For in modern society, how we use our money and how we relate to money determines what kind of lives we lead and the kind of persons we are.

For many Christians, this decision of how to relate to the issue of taxes is easily answered: pay them, for Christ said, “Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s.”

The spirit of the Gospel is peace and nonviolence. A biblical response to the “Render to Caesar” passage does not mean blind obedience to the state. Rather, it suggests the responsibility to judge the “things” of Caesar in light of the “things” of God. The essential part of the passage is the latter clause: “Render to God the things that are God’s.” Jesus intended no equality between God and Caesar. Therefore, before rendering to Caesar one must judge if the things of Caesar are compatible with the things of God. More specifically, today we must ask: is the payment of an income tax of which more than 50% finances the works of war, compatible with the things of God who desires from us the works of mercy? We are faced with the moral imperative of examining war and our role in it as taxpayers. In conscience we must decide whether to pay or not.

The New C.O.

In the modern process of violence, our technological society increasingly replaces men with machines. The “big business” of modem war relies more and more on citizens’ money than on their bodies. In light of this, it becomes essential that tax resisters be seen as the new conscientious objectors to war, withholding their financial as well as their bodily resources.

In the past, draft resistance has been seen as the refusal to place the pinch of incense on the altar of a false god. Tax resistance deals more fundamentally with this same idolatry. For tax money is the very gold of which the false idols of war are made. War tax resistance is an alternative to this idolatry.

Some will object that war tax resistance, even with its corresponding alternate life funds, is ineffective. This is perhaps correct, but as I see it, irrelevant. Too often actions are undertaken simply for effect. The words of Dietrich Bonhoeffer sum up the effectiveness of war tax resistance: “One asks, what is to come? Another, what is right? And that is the difference between the slave and the free man.”

“When it becomes the ‘sacred duty’ of a man to commit sin, one no longer knows how he should live,” said Reinhold Schneider. “There remains nothing else for him to do but bear individual witness alone. And where such witness is, there is the Kingdom of God.” In this is the effectiveness of war tax resistance.

One of the best (and shortest) rationales for war tax resistance is Peter Maurin’s statement, “The future will be different if we make the present different.” If we continue to pay for war and the instruments of war, will we ever have peace?

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(Ed. Note: For more information about tax resistance, write War Tax Resistance, 912 E. 31^st St., Kansas City, Mo. 64109.)

The National Catholic News Service included this among its dispatches on 18 April 1973:

Five Anti-War Priests Refuse to Pay Part of Income Tax

Pittsburgh (NC)— Five priests of the Pittsburgh diocese have filed income tax returns but deducted 20 percent from their taxes which they contend would go to support a “totally immoral war” in Southeast Asia.

“The bombing in Cambodia going on right now is without any foundation in law — let alone morality,” said Father Jack O’Malley, spokesman for the group.

“The Thieu government in South Vietnam holds five of our brother priests as political prisoners because they have dared to speak out against the immoral actions of their government. It is our taxes which is keeping Thieu in power,” Father O’Malley said.

The five priests waited until the deadline day of April 15 to file their tax returns at the Internal Revenue Service office here at noon.

Father O’Malley said the priests recognize that wrong is also being done by the North Vietnamese government. “But that country is not our ally,” he said.

“It is a privilege and duty to pay taxes,” the priest said. “It is likewise a duty to resist evil in conscience. When that evil is done by one’s own government, the duty is no less.”

During Holy Week the five priests prayed for an end to the bombing in Cambodia and an end to fighting and violence by all parties in Southeast Asia.

The other priests taking part in the tax resistance were: Fathers Mark Glasgow, Patrick Fenton, Warren Metzler and Donald McIlvane.

A letter-to-the-editor in the May 1973 Catholic Worker, signed by “Ammon Hennacy House” (Grand Rapids, Michigan), included this paragraph:

At this writing we have just ended a week-end tax resistance conference with about twenty-five people from around the state. We have been promoting tax and draft resistance as part of our nonviolence workshop group Life Force. With the beginnings of a tax resisters’ fund we are seeking an alternative to the violence and exploitation of banking. Also, we are exploring possibilities of an insurance fund. With four active children, we feel the need to be providing them with assurance of medical care in emergencies.

The National Catholic News Service included this among its dispatches on 23 July 1973:

War Resister Gets Tax Refund

Altamont, N.Y. (NC)— Mark Brockley of St. Lucy’s Parish here received a refund check from the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) for $250.50 for 1972, which was the total amount IRS had withheld from Mark’s wages for the year.

The unusual aspect of Brockley’s case is that he received the refund after claiming his infant niece as a dependent on his 1040 form, knowing that she would not qualify as his dependent under the IRS definition.

Brockley explained in a letter to IRS officials that his niece, who was born the day of the Vietnam cease-fire, “represents all children, whether they be Mexican-American babies born in a migrant farm worker’s tent or Cambodian youths huddled in a village under American attack, who depend on each of us to create a livable world for them to grow up in and inherit.”

An IRS official said that if an audit showed that Brockley had claimed a dependent to which he was not entitled, any tax owed would be subject to normal IRS collection procedures.

Brockley is among a small but growing number of people who resist payment of federal taxes because of conscientious objection to government policies, especially to the large portion of the budget which supports the military.

He is 22 and single and describes himself as having been “gung ho for the war” (in Indo-China) until about his junior year in high school when his feelings began to change. His feelings continued to grow until he was arrested in 1972 for protesting the mining of North Vietnamese harbors.

After a demonstration in support for the Berrigans during their trial for conspiracy, Brockley learned about the war tax resistance. He then took steps to prevent the withholding of taxes from his wages, which is illegal.

“But since the government already had taken over $200 of my money for the year,” he said, “I thought in conscience I should get it back.”

To emphasize that his action was not meant to evade or defraud IRS, Brockley sent the letter explaining his irregular 1040 form. He stated in part, “I intend that the government you represent shall not receive one penny more of my tax money while it continues policies to which I cannot in conscience lend my support.”

Brockley reconciled his duties as a citizen and his tax actions by noting that “people forget that Jesus did not simply answer, yes, when they asked him if you should pay Caesar’s tax. It is well established that when you see a clash between Caesar’s law and the Gospel, the Christian’s allegiance is owed to the Gospel.”

The refunded money, Brockley said, is being donated to the Life Giving Fund. This fund is used to support “groups we consider alternatives to the government’s priorities,” he added. “None of us is interested in tax evasion for personal gain. We’ve given out over $1000 so far.

“Someday maybe I could get some land and be as self-sufficient as possible — so I could keep my income below the taxable level,” he said. “That way I could follow my conscience without having to break the law.”

Mike Cullen, who had come to the United States from Ireland twelve years before, and had founded the Casa Maria Catholic Worker hospitality house in Milwaukee, was deported in September 1973. Press reports (e.g. National Catholic Reporter, 14 September 1973) noted that the judge in the deportation case had “listed the cause of deportation as burning of draft files, interfering with administration of the selective service law, counseling others on conscientious objection, tax resistance, and burning his own draft card.”