Miscellaneous tax resisters → individual war tax resisters → Eleanor Bonney Simons

Tax day has arrived, and with it the various news fluff pieces about lines at the post office. But there are a few bits here and there about tax protests of various sorts, worth reviewing:

George Bush is continuing the long-standing Republican theme of lowering taxes, or wanting to, anyway. More power to him. Wait — can I take that back? Chances are the Repubs will propose a bunch of tax breaks that’ll mostly benefit the people who share their income brackets, then the Demos will respond with some populist, feel-good, middle-class benefits like higher per-child deductibles and the like, then both parties will remember how much fun it is spending other people’s money and cut their proposals in half. With any luck, though, things’ll drop a bit.
Some legislator or other had the bright idea of introducing a bill to move tax day from April 15^th to the first Monday in November so that it’d fall right before election day. Clever. Good luck to you.
Some Libertarian Party chapters protest on tax day by handing out fake million-dollar bills at post offices, explaining that the government spends that much of our money every five seconds.
There’ve been a few news items about the few folks like me who are purposefully reducing our incomes below the tax line, here’s one: Eleanor Bonney Simons, 83, of St. Johnsbury, hasn’t paid federal income taxes or the federal tax portion of her telephone bills in a decade, and said she always makes sure to give away enough money each year that she doesn’t have any tax liability. “I find I can live very well this way,” Simons said. “It makes me feel good to know I’m not supporting the war effort.”
Some people are withholding something on the order of half of their income taxes, and then including a letter with their tax forms saying that they will not willingly pay the portion of their tax that goes to the military. The IRS sometimes goes ahead and pulls the remainder from their bank accounts, but these protesters are satisfied with their symbolic protest and with not paying the taxes voluntarily.
There’s another idea in the form of a bill that gets floated from time to time in the U.S. Congress that would create a sort of “conscientious objector” tax that would be paid into a fund that is only spent on those parts of the federal budget that are non-military in nature. Yeah, right. (link: National Campaign for a Peace Tax Fund.) Of course this, like the symbolic withholding above, doesn’t actually have any bottom-line effect. It’s just an accounting shuffle. In fact, I’d wager that it would have an overall negative effect, because it will encourage even more people to pay taxes by enhancing the illusion that it’s a morally neutral or morally acceptable act.
I’ve seen many news articles about how the IRS has been doing less and less enforcement, with fewer and fewer auditors over the last several years, so that it’s much easier to get away with being a tax cheat. Even the most blatant and wacky phony tax dodges often work simply because the IRS doesn’t have the resources to go after most of ’em. (Last year, the IRS revealed that over the previous two years it had mistakenly paid out thirty million dollars to people who were claiming a “slavery tax credit”.) A lot of these articles have a “but this year things will be tougher” spin, and seem to have been prompted by a preëmptive IRS press release, but the numbers seem to support the suspicion that people who pay their lawful share are either a willingly generous group or are being played for suckers.

“I think people fear the IRS much less,” says [tax analyst Jackie] Perlman. Her suspicion is supported by data.
A 2001 government survey found that 24 percent of taxpayers think it’s OK to cheat on their taxes — up from 13 percent in 1999. And the fiscal consequences are huge: If all Americans had paid their taxes last year, according to IRS estimates, an additional $207 billion would have poured into federal coffers — enough to pay the projected federal deficit for 2003, and have $7 billion to spare…
“I think that people have come to see paying income tax as driving 55 m.p.h: Only a fool would do it,” says Deborah Schenk, a law professor at New York University. “If the attitude spreads, the whole system will collapse.”
Because of a series of recent budget cuts, the IRS’s number of full-time personnel declined by 16 percent between 1992 and 2001. The result: the average taxpayer’s chances of being audited dropped dramatically. Five years ago, the IRS audited 1 of every 78 tax filers. Last year, the fraction shrank to about 1 in 170. That steep decline in audits, experts say, has emboldened brash millions to try to pay less. “It’s not a secret that the IRS is understaffed and it can’t enforce as much as it would like,” says Perlman.

A dispatch from the IRS siege of the Corner/Kehler house from the 9 March 1992 New York Times:

Colrain Journal; Peace Advocates Turn Tax Resistance Into a Ritual

Colrain, Mass., March 5 — Every Thursday morning for 14 weeks, a small group of out-of-towners has trudged down a dirt road in this quiet Berkshire community carrying colorful hand-sewn banners to the doorstep of a small white farmhouse.
Stopping in the front yard, they are greeted by others, who form a circle and join hands to sing songs of defiance and world peace in a ceremony evocative of the 60’s. They have come to protest the size of the nation’s military budget in a house that has become a symbol of tax resistance.
The participants have two things in common: they do not believe in paying Federal taxes to finance the United States military, and, pointing to the end of the cold war and evidence of social unrest in the nation, they believe the time is ripe for a revival of their cause.
“Everybody’s become more restless and disgusted with the major parties in government,” said David Dellinger, who was a defendant in the Chicago Seven trial and who came to Colrain with a group from Vermont. The Chicago Seven were anti-war protesters charged with various offenses related to disruptions at the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago.
“Everywhere people go now, there’s crime in the cities, homelessness, drugs, poverty, unemployment,” said Mr. Dellinger, now 76 years old. “I think people are going to decide we didn’t win the cold war. The Soviet people lost and we lost.”
Mr. Dellinger and others have come from as far away as California to the Colrain house, which was seized by the Internal Revenue Service in 1989 because its owners had not paid $27,000 in Federal taxes and interest. The tax-resister owners, Randy Kehler and Betsy Corner, did pay their local and state taxes.
Mr. Kehler and Ms. Corner continued to live in the house until they were arrested by Federal marshals last December. Since then, friends and supporters of the couple have arrived to occupy the almost empty house in week-long shifts marked by the Thursday “changing of the guard” ceremony.
Because the house was sold in a Government auction in February, all who go inside risk arrest for trespassing. Seven protesters were arrested on the day the house was auctioned but were released after the auction.
For Bonney Simons of St. Johnsbury, Vt., sleeping on a bedroll in the house is her first official act of civil disobedience. At 72 years of age, she said, it is time to “put your body where your mouth is.”
Others, like Purusha Obluda, come to resurrect values of their past. Mr. Obluda met Mr. Kehler in California in 1967 after being jailed for blocking the Oakland induction center.
During his week’s stay at Colrain house, Mr. Obluda, 64, typed a letter to the Government saying he would not pay his income tax this April. “I don’t expect to file for the rest of my life,” he told others before he left to go home to Palo Alto, Calif.
The I.R.S. says it stopped counting tax refusers in the mid-80’s because the numbers were so small.
The sale of the house to Danny Franklin, a 22-year-old part-time police officer from the nearby town of Greenfield, has added a twist to the protest, which seeks among other things more attention for housing needs.
The house sits on land owned by the Valley Community Land Trust, a private trust formed to preserve open space and affordable housing in the area, said John J. Stobierski, Mr. Franklin’s lawyer. Mr. Franklin is waiting for the trust to confirm that he can assume the 99-year lease before moving into the house with his fiancee and 5-month-old child.
From his office in the Traprock Peace Center in nearby Deerfield, Mr. Kehler said that he felt sorry for the young couple who bid on his house but believed that they had made a “mistake.”
“In our view, they have wittingly or unwittingly assisted the Government in collecting taxes from us,” he said.
Mr. Kehler, 47, a self-employed public policy researcher, spent 10 weeks in jail after his arrest in December and was released on the day the house was sold. He and his wife, Ms. Corner, and their 12-year-old daughter are staying at a friend’s home near their former house.
Ms. Corner, a self-employed landscape architect, still returns to tidy up the house she lived in for 13 years. She bristles at those who have written letters in the local paper saying she is setting a bad example for her daughter, Lillian.
“We aren’t paying for bombs and she understands that,” Ms. Corner said. “People can’t get away from the fact that we’re breaking the law. But this country was founded by breaking the law.”

The house siege was the subject of the movies An Act of Conscience and Path of Greatest Resistance, and you can also read more about how it played out in the following Picket Line entries:

Another way people can assist and show solidarity with tax resisters is by coming to their assistance if their property is seized. Here are some examples:

Practical support

The War Tax Resisters Penalty Fund was established in 1982. It helps war tax resisters who have had penalties and interest added to their tax bills and seized by the IRS by reimbursing them for a large portion of these additional charges.

The more people we could recruit to shoulder the penalties and interest of resisters, the lighter the burden for everyone. With the modest help we could provide, conscientious resisters were able to keep on keeping on.
The penalty fund had the added benefit of making us all tax resisters, not just those who withheld all or a portion of their income taxes. The base list of supporters has been as high as 800 people sharing the weight. In nearly every appeal, at least 200 people respond, usually more. In all we’ve paid out about $250,000 to help resisters stay in the struggle.

When the home of war tax resisters Randy Kehler and Betsy Corner was seized for back taxes, supporters came from near and far to maintain a 24-hour occupation of the home:

[David] Dellinger and others have come from as far away as California to the Colrain [Massachusetts] house… Mr. Kehler and Ms. Corner continued to live in the house until they were arrested by Federal marshals last December. Since then, friends and supporters of the couple have arrived to occupy the almost empty house in week-long shifts marked by the Thursday “changing of the guard” ceremony. Because the house was sold in a Government auction in February, all who go inside risk arrest for trespassing.…
For Bonney Simons of St. Johnsbury, Vt., sleeping on a bedroll in the house is her first official act of civil disobedience. At 72 years of age, she said, it is time to “put your body where your mouth is.”
Suffragist tax resister Dora Montefiore barricaded her home and kept the tax collector from seizing her property for several weeks in 1906, in what came to be known as the “Siege of Montefiore.” She noted:

The tradespeople of the neighbourhood were absolutely loyal to us besieged women, delivering their milk and bread, etc., over the rather high garden wall which divided the small front gardens of Upper Mall from the terraced roadway fronting the river. The weekly wash arrived in the same way and the postman day by day delivered very encouraging budgets of correspondence, so that practically we suffered very little inconvenience…

A woman sympathiser in the neighbourhood brought during the course of the [first] morning, a pot of home-made marmalade, as the story had got abroad that we had no provisions and had difficulty in obtaining food. This was never the case as I am a good housekeeper and have always kept a store cupboard, but we accepted with thanks the pot of marmalade because the intentions of the giver were so excellent.

Examples like this also proved to be vivid anecdotes that the press could use when describing the siege and the support from sympathizers.
When the U.S. government seized Amish tax resister Valentine Byler’s horses and their harnesses while he was in the field preparing for spring planting, sympathetic neighbors allowed him to borrow their horses so he could continue his work. Other sympathizers throughout the country who heard about the case sent Byler money — more than enough to buy a new team.
An auctioneer who was dragooned into helping the government sell some of the livestock of a man who had been resisting taxes meant to pay for sectarian education in 1903, donated the fee he had earned for conducting the auction to the resister.
During the water charge strike in Dublin, “local campaign groups successfully resisted attempts to disconnect water and in the couple of instances where water was cut off, campaigners re-connected it within hours. The first round was won hands down by the campaign and it was back to the drawing board for the councils.”
Similar monkeywrenching is being practiced today in Greece, where activists promptly reconnect utilities of people who have been disconnected for failure to pay the increased taxes attached to their utility bills.
During the Annuity Tax resistance in Edinburgh, people sympathetic to the resisters would bid on and return furniture and other items that had been seized and sold by the tax collectors.
The Rebecca Rioters, on the other hand, were characteristically more direct in their resistance:

Warrants of distress were issued… and the constables proceeded to execute them… The constables then went towards Talog; but when on their way there they heard the sound of a horn, and immediately between two and three hundred persons assembled together, with their faces blackened, some dressed in women’s caps, and others with their coats turned so as to be completely disguised — armed with scythes, crowbars and all manner of destructive weapons which they could lay their hands on. After cheering the constables, they defied them to do their duty. The latter had no alternative but to return to town without executing their warrants. The women were seen running in all directions to alarm their neighbours; and some hundreds were concealed behind the hedges, intending to appear if their services were required. The entire district seemed to be aroused, and awaiting the arrival of the constables, who were going to levy on the goods of John Harris of Talog Mill for the amount of the fine and costs imposed upon him by the magistrates. There could not have been less than two hundred persons assembled to resist the execution of process, and vast numbers were flocking from all quarters, in response to the blowing of a horn, the signal of the Rebeccaites to repair thither. Various mounted messengers were scouring the country and sounding the trumpet of alarm.…

At Maesgwenllian near Kidwelly, several bailiffs were put in possession for arrears of rent to the amount of £150, but about one o’clock on the morning of 11^th September, Rebecca and a great number of her followers made their appearance on the premises, and after driving the bailiffs off, took away the whole of the goods distrained on. As soon as daylight appeared, the bailiffs returned, but found no traces of Rebecca, nor of the goods which had been taken away.
A group in Olive Hill, Kentucky in 1906 followed the Rebecca model, to an extent, “in a raid… by a band of between 800 and 900 men, who forced Levi White, Collector of Taxes, to give up a stock of goods which had been seized. The goods were then taken back to the store of Levi Oppenheimer, where the official had seized them.”
Last year in Oaxaca, the PRI said that the would “defend up to the point of injunctions those citizens who suffer from liens imposed as well as judgments in order to prevent the impounding of vehicles, considering it unconstitutional that the police will impound them to stop the driver and remove the unit if the striker does not pay the corresponding [vehicle] tax.”
The IRS auctioned off a portion of Ralph Shinaberry’s property in 1960 after he refused to pay a fine for growing more wheat on his farm than his government-assigned quota. “I don’t believe the Government can tell me how much I can grow,” he said, explaining his resistance. The winning bidder, Herbert Jessup, told a reporter: “I have no intention of taking possession of the property.”
When war tax resister Cosmas Raimondi’s car was seized by the IRS in 1982, a handful of families in his parish offered to permanently loan him their car so he could still get around, and many others loaned him their cars temporarily. “I’ve not had to ask one person,” he said.
In Beit Sahour, when the Israeli occupation authorities seized furniture and appliances from resisters, relatives and others would loan them spares, or camping furniture to use as replacements.
“In Bedfordshire in 1657 community pressure persuaded a minister to return goods seized from a Quaker for non-payment of tithes.”

Moral support

When Dora Montefiore was first formulating her “siege” strategy with fellow-activists Theresa Billington and Annie Kenney, they agreed to organize daily demonstrations outside of her home while she was defending it. Montefiore remembered:

The feeling in the neighbourhood towards my act of passive resistance was so excellent and the publicity being given by the Press in the evening papers was so valuable that we decided to make the Hammersmith “Fort” for the time being the centre of the W.S.P.U. activities, and daily demonstrations were arranged for and eventually carried out. … The roadway was… ideal for the holding of a meeting, as no blocking of traffic could take place, and day in, day out the principles for which suffragists were standing we expounded to many who before had never even heard of the words Woman Suffrage. At the evening demonstrations rows of lamps were hung along the top of the wall and against the house, the members of the W.S.P.U. speaking from the steps of the house, while I spoke from one of the upstairs windows.

…shoals of letters came to me, a few sadly vulgar and revolting, but the majority helpful and encouraging. Some Lancashire lads who had heard me speaking in the Midlands wrote and said that if I wanted help they would come with their clogs but that was never the sort of support I needed, and though I thanked them, I declined the help as nicely as I could. … The working women from the East End came, time and again, to demonstrate in front of my barricaded house…
When the IRS seized and auctioned off the home and farm of Art Harvey and Elizabeth Gravalos in 1996, other war tax resisters and supporters were by their sides:

“I might have cried if I were alone,” Gravalos admitted. But she was far from alone. About 75 supporters gathered outside the building and spoke of their solidarity with Elizabeth and Arthur.

About 35 supporters turned up for the second auction, this time held at the IRS office in Lewiston, Maine. Demonstrators read excerpts from letters to IRS officials and to President Clinton urging them to call off the auction.
In 1997, the IRS levied 78-year-old war tax resister Ruth McKay’s social security checks to recoup the taxes she had been refusing to pay over the previous 20 years. To show their support of her stand, 40 activists from New Hampshire Peace Action joined her for a vigil at the federal courthouse in Concord, New Hampshire.
When war tax resister Maria Smith’s wages were garnisheed by the IRS in 2005, fifty supporters held a special church service in her honor.
“One of the Valod Vanias,” whose land was seized by the government during the Bardoli satyagraha, “who thus lost all his valuable property, celebrated the event by inviting friends and soldiers of Satyagraha to a party.”

On the other hand, some campaigns have taken the position that sacrifices for the cause are their own reward — that martyrdom is a blessing and that it would be foolish for such resisters to seek or accept recompense.

Nathaniel Morgan was speaking with someone curious about the Quaker stand on war and war taxes, and had this to say:

I told him then that I and my father had refused to pay the income tax on account of war, and had refused it on its first coming out, and withstood it 16 years, except when peace was declared, and that our goods were sold by auction to pay it. This seemed to excite his curiosity, and made a stand to hear further, on the steps above the engine, going down to the river; asking me if we got anything by that, meaning, was anything refunded by the Society for such suffering. I immediately replied: “Yes, peace of mind, which was worth all.”