Tax resistance in the “Peace Churches” →
Quakers →
20th–21st century Quakers →
Beatrice & Cornelis Boeke
In the course of scanning through the ninety or so volumes of The Friend (the Philadelphia journal of that title) available through Google Books, covering about a century, the most telling example of the decline of war tax resistance in the Society of Friends was perhaps the headline the journal chose to give the following article, from its edition:
Testimony-Bearing of the Seventeenth Century Type
The following item appeared in The Friend (London)
of :—
R. Barclay Murdoch writes of a recent visit to Bilthoven, Holland, paid
en route to Germany, and of fellowship there with
Cornelis
and Beatrice Boecke. He says: “Many Friends are aware that Cornelis and
Beatrice Cadbury Boecke have several times been torn away from their family
(five little girls, the eldest but eleven), and imprisoned because of their
unflinching testimony against war, and fearless preaching of the Gospel of
peace and good-will. It may not be so generally known that, last year, the
Dutch Government took away considerably over £200 worth of furniture,
&c,
for the nonpayment of a military tax. Letters just to hand tell of the
likelihood of another distraint for the same tax this year, and further
persecution and prosecution because of the encouragement they are giving to
young men who, for conscience’ sake, are resisting and intend to resist the
operation of the Conscription law. The drawing of lots for the purposes of
this law takes place within the next few weeks, and our Friends earnestly
desire the sympathy and prayers of Friends, that they may be upheld in
bearing the testimony to which they feel called.
“Having felt called upon, in obedience to their Lord and Master, to surrender
all their worldly investments and possessions, they are now entirely
dependent upon their own industry for their subsistence. The principal means
at their disposal for this purpose is photography, and they are producing
some very fine views of the district,
etc.”
Of course, American Friends in didn’t need
to hearken all the way back to the seventeenth century to find exemplars like
this. They could have looked to their own tradition, and examples no more than
a few decades old. But by it seems like a
great forgetting had taken hold, and war tax resistance had come to be seen as
a relic of the past like “thee”s and “thou”s.
Beatrice and Cornelis Boeke
Cornelis Boeke sounds like he was an interesting character.
Next time you watch Charles & Ray Eames’s classic documentary short Powers of Ten, which tries to visualize the universe from the largest to the smallest scales conceivable by human understanding, note at the end of the credits it says “with much gratitude to Kees [Cornelis] Boeke.”
The Eameses were inspired by Boeke’s book Cosmic View which was an earlier attempt at the same sort of project.
According to Wikipedia,
“for a while the Boekes refused to use money and avoid contributing to the
state as they also spend on weapons; they wouldn’t pay postage, tolls, or
taxes and they never used public transport. They were imprisoned several
times, and one of their seven children was born in prison. On one occasion the
Dutch tax authorities auctioned off his estate to collect taxes, and the then
Queen, Wilhelmina, bought his favorite violin out of the auction with her own
money, and gave it back to him on the spot.”
Here’s another note about war tax resistance in Holland in from The Friend:
Demonstrating for the release of Herman Groenendaal
The Struggle for Freedom in Holland
H. Runham Brown, a C.O. who was closely associated with Friends during the war and is a member of the Committee of the No More War International Movement, writes:—
I have spent twenty-four hours in Holland on my way into Germany. On leaving
the train at Utrecht in the early morning of the
1st (ultimo.) I was at once plunged into the
atmosphere of the English
C.O.
Movement of .
The city is placarded with little orange bills demanding the release of a
conscientious objector who is on hunger strike — Herman Groenendaal. There
are forty still in prison; over six hundred have been through prison, while
many homes have been sold to pay the military taxes, which are fifty-one per
cent, of the whole taxes in Holland.
[Bart] De Light, the
President of the International Anti-Militarist Bureau, has been arrested to
prevent his propaganda.
The police came to my bed-room door within five minutes of my arrival at the
hotel; all day we walked about Utrecht with the demand on our hats “Herman
Groenendaal must go free.” A grand placard depicting a Dutch soldier
standing over the prostrate body of Groenendaal, with Christ in the
background asking “Are you doing this in my name?” was being carried through
the streets.
In the evening five hundred people met in the Corn Exchange (in Rotterdam
the night before there were two thousand). We breathed the No-Conscription
atmosphere in the days of the Conscription Acts. Boeke, Giesen. Eckhard and
Harinch demanded Groenendaal’s release, and the liberation of De Light and
the other thirty-nine.
Only once when I said, for I had to speak in English, Giesen translated,
that we were out against a system and not individuals, did the stern row of
police officers unfold their arms, and turn to each other with approval.
The enthusiasm was unbounded. Holland is entering into a big struggle, and
they are looking to the English
C.O.s
to help them. What are we going to do about it?
The No More War Movement and The International Anti-Militarism Bureau were forerunners of War Resisters International.
Beatrice and Cornelis (“Kees”) Boeke were pioneers in the international war resistance movement and also steadfast war tax resisters.
I covered a bit of their story , but aside from what is there I wasn’t much able to satisfy my curiosity about them from on-line sources.
But I’ve just finished reading through Fiona Joseph’s new biography of Beatrice Boeke née Cadbury — Beatrice: The Cadbury Heiress Who Gave Away Her Fortune — which gives a much fuller and more nuanced picture of the Boekes’ quest to live a life in line with their ideals.
The Quaker couple already came from a tradition that promoted service, international missionary work, charity, and pacifism.
In addition, Beatrice had financial independence because of her inheritance of part of the Cadbury chocolates company.
The couple gave away a lot of money to international charity, and also helped to nurture the international peace movement — both War Resisters International and the International Fellowship of Reconciliation had their founding meetings at the Boeke home in Holland (where the couple settled after Kees was expelled from England during World War Ⅰ for preaching pacifism and for his suspicious contacts with pacifists on the other side of enemy lines).
Another major figure in the international peace movement at the time, and a major influence on the Boekes, was Swiss pacifist Pierre Cérésole (see The Picket Line, ).
He was present at the meetings of international war resisters at the Boeke home, and soon afterwards the Boekes began to contemplate war tax resistance, which Cérésole had already been practicing for several years.
Cérésole, like Beatrice Cadbury, had inherited shares of stock.
He, however, refused to accept them, not being willing to live on unearned wealth while trying to maintain solidarity with the working class.
“To live on one’s invested income is as debasing as to own slaves,” he wrote, “in fact it is the same thing.”
He believed that the best thing rich Christians could buy with their money was freedom from possessing it: relinquish it, give it away, and remove the barriers it puts up between them and other people.
This made for a challenge to the Boekes, who were sensitive to charges of hypocrisy while being very public in their idealistic (and increasingly revolutionary Marxist) proclamations.
In the couple were imprisoned for refusing to pay their fines after being arrested for unlicensed street preaching — Beatrice while in the last month of pregnancy.
Later that year Beatrice decided that she would give away her Cadbury shares to the workers at Cadbury.
It was harder than she expected.
Other members of the Cadbury family were opposed to the move and there were legal obstacles (the voting shares she had hoped to give away as a way of giving workers greater control over the company were legally-restricted to Cadbury family members, and the law might allow the Boeke children to successfully challenge such a gift when they came of age).
It was not until that she was able to construct a Boeke Trust that satisfied her wishes to relinquish control of the shares and also seemed to cover the legal bases.
By that time the Boekes had adopted a forthright anarchism.
Kees published a pamphlet entitled “Break with the State” and, following its advice, the couple began resisting taxes.
Here is an excerpt from Joseph’s book about their tax resistance:
During the many conferences in Bilthoven, the couple had been exposed to different forms and methods of political activism, one of which struck them as very valid and effective: tax resistance.
They had long been unhappy at the thought of their taxes being used in part to fund the military, and Kees had already tried the novel, though unsuccessful, approach of sending his tax payment directly to the Queen with the request that it be used for charitable purposes.
Sources told him that the Queen had sent the money on to the Finance Minister, where it had been absorbed into the general tax system.
So this tactic was deemed a failure, and more radical action was needed.
The withholding of tax for reasons of conscience had a long history and was regarded by pacifists as a fair form of non-violent resistance.
Pierre Ceresole had done it, and so would the Boekes.
First, Kees wrote to Queen Wilhelmina again to say that they were willing to pay tax, but would withhold the amount that went to the Defence Tax for military purposes (thought to be 42%).
On hearing no response, Beatrice and Kees decided they would refuse to pay tax altogether.
To begin with, reminders came through the letterbox about their outstanding tax bill.
Then further demands arrived, followed by fines for non-payment, which Kees continued to ignore.
Soon the Boekes’ tax bill, along with the accumulated fines and added interest, came to four hundred pounds.
The authorities ordered a forced sale of their assets: the date was set for .
The morning of the sale was grey and drizzly.
Dark clouds loomed in the sky, threatening storms at any moment.
Beatrice opened the door to a sober-looking tax official with a group of bailiffs standing behind him.
The local policeman accompanied the group to ensure there would be no trouble.
The tax official explained to Beatrice that they were going to take goods from the house up to the value of the sum that they owed, and then auction them off.
The sale had clearly been advertised in Bilthoven because many people came, either to gawp or in the hope of getting a bargain.
Although Het Boschhuis was furnished in a simple manner, the bailiffs found plenty of items to remove.
The children were sent upstairs to Helen’s bedroom and listened, no doubt anxiously, as the house was looted.
Almost every removable item was put under auction: the tables and chairs, all the bed frames (although, with some heart, the bailiffs left the mattresses), cupboards, kitchen crockery, the books.
The curtains were taken down from the windows and sold to the highest bidder.
The rugs and strips of linoleum were ripped up from the floor and sold.
Eveline intervened to stop the bailiffs taking the cupboard with the children’s clothes and the local policeman, Berkhoff, in a surprising show of support towards the family, hid some of their silver.
Everything else was sold in the street for a pittance and the amount raised was still insufficient to clear the debt of four hundred pounds.
Worst of all, for the Boeke children watching in distress from the upstairs window, was the sight of Daddy’s grand piano standing out in the street with no protection from the spattering rain.
Nine-year-old Helen was particularly upset.
Beatrice’s engagement present to Kees, the valuable violin also went under the hammer.
Then the bailiffs started on the Brotherhood House next door, removing the beds and any other furniture they could.
Throughout this episode Beatrice and Kees remained calm.
They had the support of their friends, and God was on their side.
These were only material possessions after all, they reassured themselves.
The vulture-like buyers assumed that the couple would want to buy everything back again.
Kees refused, much to their chagrin, and they were forced to find vans and carts to take it all away.
In a remarkable show of composure and quiet determination, Beatrice and Kees went to a public meeting in Utrecht that evening.
They returned to find their friends, the Fletchers, had made the best of the situation.
Eveline had tidied up Het Boschhuis as best she could, cleaning the stone floors from top to bottom to remove the muddy footprints made as the bailiffs had trooped through the house.
She had improvised some curtains by hanging old blankets and a donated bedspread up at the windows.
Beatrice was almost moved to tears to see Ernest’s makeshift table, made out of a wooden trestle.
An old packing box from the cellar did service as a lamp table.
The children were worn out, and fast asleep upstairs as they huddled together on a shared mattress on the floor.
The events of the day had left the couple frustrated but more determined than ever to carry on their fight.
The Boekes felt that in order for their tax resistance to be consistent, they must also refuse to use state-run monopolies like the postal service and railways, relinquish their passports, stop contributing to retirement accounts, and renounce any claim to the protection of the police, courts, and military.
The following year, Kees stopped handling money, and Beatrice joined him in this a year later.
They had also adopted an “open door” policy at their home — anyone was welcome at any time, no need to knock, and the doors were never locked.
This led to frequent thefts — even of the family’s food (though sympathetic friends would sometime sneak food in the same way) — and eventually to the occupation of the family home by vagrants.
Being unwilling to either kick out their new guests themselves or to apply to the police to do it for them, the family — including seven children — abandoned their home and left to live in tents elsewhere.
The Cadbury family, concerned for the welfare of the Boekes and especially for their children, devoted a lot of time and energy to figuring out ways of providing for the Boekes without appearing to do so.
While the Boekes would have angrily rejected any blatant Cadbury family charity, Joseph notes that “[a]lthough Beatrice had relieved herself of the burden of her inheritance, the Boeke family were now dependent on their friends to help and support them.”
In addition, at the Boeke Trust that Beatrice had established to relinquish any claim on the Cadbury fortune and to give control to the workers to pursue their agendas, the welfare of the Boeke children was in fact a top concern.
“Every meeting” of the Trust, Joseph writes, “started with the same agenda item: ‘Care of the Boeke Family.’ ” The trust voted in to pay the Boekes’ back taxes without their knowledge.
The family had also become increasingly isolated.
Their refusal to use the railways or the postal service, and their relinquishing of their passports, meant that they were no longer as able to participate in the international peace movement — and the occupation of their property by ne’er-d’ye-wells meant that they could no longer host gatherings themselves.
Meanwhile their children were living in squalor, and visits from their family resembled interventions from social workers — for instance, taking the children aside out of view to look them over for signs of malnutrition.
They eventually realized that they had gone too far and that in their attempts to patch up any hints of hypocrisy and inconsistency in their lifestyle, much common sense had slipped through the cracks.
Joseph: “They had wanted to humble themselves before God, to prove that He would provide their daily bread.
All they had actually done was to cause hardship for the children and put the responsibility for their welfare onto the shoulders of other people…”
Finally they gave in.
They accepted some help from the Cadbury family in setting up a modest new home, and they began to compromise with some of their earlier-drawn lines in the sand.
By they were using money again and had reapplied for passports.
Among the steps they had taken over the years was to withdraw their children from school when the government took over private schools and made them tax-funded.
They homeschooled their children, and Kees in particular discovered a talent for teaching and an interest in the reform of education.
What had begun as homeschooling blossomed into a small school that attracted parents enthused by Kees’s methods or theories and also orphaned Jewish refugees from Nazi-occupied countries.
This enabled the Boekes’ to shelter some of these children during the Nazi occupation of Holland (for which the couple were later enshrined in the “Righteous Among the Nations” list of the Holocaust Martyrs’ and Heroes’ Remembrance Authority).
The school they founded was so well-considered that after the war, Dutch Princess Juliana sent her children there (including now-Queen Beatrix).
Fiona Joseph’s story of the Boekes is a fascinating look at a quest for purity and righteousness — both in its pitfalls and its promises — and would be a good and humbling meditation for anyone who has ever considered “going all in” and uncompromisingly living by the standard of their most idealistic hopes.
Quakeress Devotes Income of $1,000,000 Inheritance to Aiding Workers
Her Husband Is in Poverty
Defies Government of Holland Which Seized Her Furniture for Taxes — Declares All Government Is Based Upon Force.
The Hague.
– Both Holland and England are speculating on the Tolstoyian ideas of the Quakeress, Beatrice Cadbury Boeke, head [sic] of the Cadbury Cocoa works, who made over to the workers of Bournemouth village the income of 28,000 of the shares in the cocoa corporation which she inherited from her father, Richard Cadbury.
England is also speculating with profound interest upon Mrs. Boeke’s conflict with the Dutch government, which she has been conducting for several years in the effort to enforce her Tolstoyian belief that all government is based upon force and should not be obeyed.
Mrs. Boeke has devoted the income of her $1,000,000 bequest to help the workers rise above the limitations of organized government, which she denounces as a tyranny and a bar to human progress.
Her husband, Cornelius Boeke, a sturdy Dutchman, believes precisely as she does.
He has no regret at the action of his wife in donating the income of her 28,000 shares in the Cadbury works to enable the workers to work out their destinies on the lines which she has adopted.
She could not give more than the income, for under the terms of her father’s will the fortune of more than $1,000,000 is hers only for life.
Upon her death the property descends to her children.
Workers Don’t Grasp Idea.
The workers of Bournemouth, however, do not quite grasp the ideal of rising above the limitations of organized government which Mrs. Boeke cherishes and for which she has suffered and probably will continue to suffer as long as her conflict with the Dutch government continues.
A deputation of these workers made a trip across the channel to the Netherlands to thank their benefactress for her generosity.
In their testimonial to her they expressed no scintilla of a desire to follow her in the thorny path of conflict with organized government in which she is energetically engaged.
The indications are that the workers whom she has endowed for her lifetime will continue to pay their taxes like honest, industrious English villagers; that they will obey the king and respect the law as their forefathers have done for all past generations.
In her letter to the workers announcing the gift, Mrs. Boeke thanks them “for the many privileges the unearned income resulting from your united work has enabled me to enjoy.”
She enjoins them to administer the shares “for social, industrial, and philanthropic purposes.”
Her renunciation is a step in her struggle to bring about a better state of society.
And her conception of the way in which a better state of society can be brought about is indicated by her long struggle with the Dutch government.
She refuses to recognize the authority of that government when it comes, for instance, to the important governmental function of collecting taxes.
She and her husband do not consider the Dutch government — or any other government, for all governments in their conception are “based upon force” — has a right to levy upon them their legitimate share in the upkeep of the state.
So they decline to pay.
And the Dutch government has twice applied to them the processes designed for the coercion of taxpayers who will not or cannot pay.
Their Home in the Wood.
Their modest home at Boschhuis (the House in the Wood), near Utrecht, has been made furnitureless because of Mrs. Boeke’s opposition to “government based upon force.”
And the end is not yet, because Mrs. Boeke still persistently refuses to pay taxes.
Mrs. Beatrice Boeke was found by a representative of the New York World in her small house, “Boschhuis,” at Bilthoven.
Prepared though the visitor was to meet an unusual personality, he was totally unprepared to find a devout Quakeress whose conscientious scruples have pitted her in an amazing struggle with the state along uncompromising and extreme Tolstoyian lines.
What George Cadbury’s widow said of her husband, that his practical “devotion to the needs of the world was inspired by his interpretation of the will of God,” might equally be said of his niece, now the penniless wife of Cornelius Boeke, who is working as a carpenter at Bilthoven.
But whereas Sir George saw the world as a millionaire and a practical man, his niece and her husband have evolved a code which makes it revolting and impossible for them to obey the laws of the Netherlands.
Once already her furniture has been sold, as she and her husband refused to pay taxes to a state “built upon force.”
A second time an unknown friend saved Mrs. Boeke from a similar calamity by paying her taxes without her consent, and thus prevented the state from taking away her simple furniture once more.
But the state has not ended its struggle with her.
Once more a creditor, the state has declared her and her husband bankrupts.
A solicitor has been appointed for them by a judge.
But the Boekes refuse to have anything to do with him because he too represents a “coercive state.”
The outcome of this unusual duel between one small family and the entire state is still in doubt, but it is attracting wide public attention.
I made note of people and groups that had deliberately exposed themselves to extraordinary taxes, or had flouted the conditions of tax-exemption, in order to be subject to a tax that they could then resist.
That reminded me of the draft resisters during the Vietnam War who deliberately refused to invoke exemptions from the draft for which they were qualified (such as the draft exemption granted to ministers) so that they could resist in solidarity with draft resisters who did not qualify for any such exemptions.
Some of the examples I mentioned are a variety of tactic that has occasionally accompanied tax resistance campaigns: renouncing of government privileges and titles.
Here are some additional examples from this category:
When Gandhi was commander-in-chief of the Indian independence movement, his campaign of non-cooperation included tax resistance and other forms of civil disobedience, but he not only instructed his nonviolent army to resist taxes, wear untaxed domestic cloth, break the British salt monopoly by harvesting salt, and so forth — he also told them to resign their government posts, renounce any government-awarded titles or authority, take their children out of government schools, not ask for protection from the government’s law or courts, and stop voting or running for office.
He explained why:
This is the way of non-co-operation, or peaceful severing of relations.
That is, that we should neither seek help from the Government nor offer it any help.
How can we part company with it?
First we should renounce titles.
For us now to hold titles is a sin.
Next we should give up the courts.
The dispensing of justice should lie in our own hands.
The courts strengthen the roots of the Government.
Lawyers should give up their practice.
If it is possible for them they should, after giving up legal practice, serve the country.
Even if they cannot serve the country the giving up of legal practice would be by itself sufficient service.
They should take up other trades.
Parents should withdraw their children from schools and universities.
Boys who have reached the age of 16 should be treated as friends and advised to withdraw.
They should be told not to continue their studies in these institutions.
They should be told to go to school at institutions where they can remain free.
We should not go for education to a place where the Government’s flag flies.
The Congress has also said that we should not go into the Councils.
The election to the Councils will take place on .
It is the day when we shall be tested.
First we should persuade the candidates to withdraw.
If they do not give in, it will be the duty of voters to remain at home and not to cast their votes.
We should go on pleading with the candidates till the night of .
We should fall at their feet and beseech them not to stand for the Councils.
If they do not come round but persist in going into the Councils it will be your duty to refuse all help and do no work for them.
Again, soldiering is a sin.
You should not get recruited as soldiers, but it is your duty to become soldiers of freedom.
…With great humility I ask you: What have you done?
Have you withdrawn your boys from schools and colleges?
If your boy is grown up have you made him aware of his duty?
Have you given him your blessing in this matter?
If you have not done this, why are you gathered here?
It is the duty of boys to leave schools and to convince their elders.
Have you decided not to vote?
Have you taken the swadeshi vow?
These questions concern everyone.
Government recruitment should stop.
We should take our litigation to our elders and seek justice.
This will put an end to the “prestige” of the Government.
The Government will at the same time realize that its hundred thousand whites can no longer rule over three hundred million people.
So long the Government has carried on its rule over us by making us quarrel among ourselves, by offering us enticements and by giving and taking help.…
The British occupation government responded by asking its Indian employees, who were normally forbidden to engage with political questions, to explicitly oppose Gandhi’s movement.
This instead triggered even more resignations from those who were not active in the independence movement but who felt they could not explicitly oppose it.
During the Bardoli satyagraha, for example, many members of the Bombay Legislative Council resigned in protest, some of the first resigners co-signing a letter in which they wrote that “when a Government forgetful of its own obligations commits grave breaches of law, and ruthlessly attempts to trample under foot such noble and law-abiding people, it is but fair and proper for us, as a protest against the high-handed policy of Government in that taluka [district], to resign our seats on the Bombay Legislative Council, and so we request your Excellency to accept our resignations of the same.”
Many local officials also resigned their posts, which meant a great deal of sacrifice for them and their families.
Gandhi said of them: “More purifying than this suffering imposed by godless and insolent authority is the suffering which the people are imposing upon themselves.”
By resigning, these officials, who were often part of the indigenous elite who had been bought off by the Raj with titles and state-guaranteed privilege, were risking all of that.
Resistance spokesman Sailendra Ghose noted that “the government in some provinces has refused to allow village officers to resign, dismissing those who refuse to carry out their duties and thus depriving their heirs of their hereditary rights as village chiefs.”
Quaker Meetings would frequently not only require that members adhere to their peace testimony by refusing to participate in military service or pay war taxes, but also that those members who had been in the military prior to becoming Quakers renounce their claim to military pensions.
Here is how the New England Yearly Meeting put it in their “rules of discipline” of 1808:
It is our sense and judgment, that it will not be consistent with our testimony against war, for any of our members to receive pensions from government, for military services performed before they became members, though reduced to necessitous circumstances; but that this necessity should be relieved by monthly and quarterly meetings, and thereby preserve our religious testimony against the anti-christian practice of war, and manifest their sympathy for their brethren, by contributing to their comfortable support.
Ghislaine “Ghis” Lanctôt embarked on a project of absolute individual independence from the governments of the world, something she termed “personocratia,” in .
She refused to cooperate with the government in any way, but also took a careful inventory of the benefits and privileges of the citizenship granted her by the government, and was careful to refuse those too.
She started by giving up her state health insurance card, later tossed her driver’s license and stopped paying traffic fines, gave up her claim to a family trust, and eventually let her passport expire.
She made a list of various state privileges that she was turning her back on: social security, professional licensing, insurance, legally protected property, certifications, intellectual property rights, the courts, access to banks, and so forth.
In Beit Sahour, during the first intifada, one of the ways the Israeli military occupation authorities would retaliate against tax resisters was to seize their identity cards, which would make it difficult for them to travel, get medical care, be employed, avoid arbitrary arrest, or “to pursue anything resembling a normal life under occupation.”
But the residents fought back in a creative and daring fashion: Hundreds of them voluntarily turned in their identity cards.
During the French wine-growers tax strike of , the municipal governments of the region resigned en masse.
The Mayor of Narbonne will open the strike.
He and the entire Municipal Council will resign , after having previously dismissed all municipal employes.
Officers of other cities will follow suit in the course of a few days.
Tax strike leader Marcelin Albert claimed that “12,000 cities, towns, boroughs, and villages in the south of France” were left without municipal governments as a result of the resignation.
The quitting of municipal officers is usually attended with much ceremony.
Generally a crape streamer is hoisted at the flagstaff, and the Mayor burns his official sash in public.
Beatrice and Cornelis Boeke
War tax resisters Beatrice and Cornelis Boeke felt that in order for their tax resistance to be consistent, they must also refuse to use state-run monopolies like the postal service and railways, relinquish their passports, stop contributing to retirement accounts, and renounce any claim to the protection of the police, courts, and military.
When the government started providing funding even for private schools, they withdrew and homeschooled their children.
They even stopped handling government-issued currency.
They took this to the point of abandoning their home rather than calling the police when vagrants moved in.
In Tasmania, in , 26 magistrates resigned their offices rather than try to enforce a widely-resisted tax.
Such an expressive demonstration on the part of gentlemen holding the commission of the peace incited the people to stronger resistance; for it appeared to them that a law which could not be conscientiously administered by the retiring justices was unworthy of obedience.
At the upcoming national gathering of NWTRCC at Earlham College in Richmond, Indiana, I’m going to be presenting a summary of the history of war tax resistance in the Society of Friends (Quakers).
Today I’m going to try to coalesce some of the notes I’ve assembled about the “Great Forgetting” period in which the Quaker practice of war tax resistance seemed to all but disappear.
The Great Forgetting ()
In mentions of Quaker war tax resistance nearly vanish from the record.
When, during the Spanish-American & Philippine-American wars at , the U.S. government attached war taxes to rail tickets, to official documents like checks, and to inheritances, some Quakers were troubled by this and made some efforts to avoid the new taxes, but I only find occasional mention of these taxes, and nothing resembling official warnings from meetings or prominent publications that Quakers should not pay them.
A report in the Friends Intelligencer about the (Hicksite) Philadelphia Yearly Meeting noted that “[t]he ninth query called forth regret that Friends had not maintained a stronger and more consistent testimony against war, but had paid the war taxes without protest.”
Things were slightly better, but heading in the same direction, in England.
An newspaper article on how the Society of Friends was changing to conform more and more to the society around it, included the detail that “its dislike to war taxes is [now] so slight that one for the Egyptian war has not been refused by a dozen of its members!”
In 1901, Charles H. Fox had his property seized and sold at auction for his refusal to pay income taxes that had been boosted to pay for war expenses in South Africa and China.
This was considered unusual enough to prompt a number of newspaper articles.
Some of his friends bought the auctioned property and returned it to him, so even in this case, adherence to traditional Quaker practices with regard to war tax resistance was slack.
The London Yearly Meeting during issued a number of formal statements amplifying and reasserting its peace testimony, but none of these mentioned war taxes, and it would take a lot of work to read any encouragement for tax resistance between the lines of any of the statements.
That meeting’s “query” concerning the peace testimony in asked Quakers if they were “faithful in our testimony against bearing arms, and being in any manner concerned in the militia, in privateers, or armed vessels, or dealing in prize goods?”
A century later this language would have seemed archaic, and the advice no longer representative of how modern wars were fought and how citizens would be called on to support them.
But when the meeting revisited and reworded this query, instead of moderninzing the language and adding more relevant specifics, they instead replaced the query with a vague generality:
Are Friends faithful in maintaining our Christian testimony against all war, as inconsistent with the precepts and spirit of the Gospel?
To which it was easy to answer “sure!” because it didn’t seem to ask anything specific.
In an “American Friends’ Peace Conference” was held in Philadelphia at which presentations were made over three days on the subject of peace, anti-war activism, international arbitration, and related topics.
The papers presented at the gathering were later published.
I looked through them to see how the subject of war tax resistance was treated at this gathering and found exactly one mention of war taxes in the entire book, from Haverford College’s president Isaac Sharpless, speaking on the question “To What Extent Are Peace Principles Practicable?”:
It is impossible to avoid giving aid and comfort to wars and warlike tendencies unless one goes to a desert isle and lives by himself.
Even if we do not join the army we pay taxes for its support.
I do not know that any peace man omitted to write checks after the opening of the Spanish War because stamps were necessary to make them legal, and these stamps were expressly a war tax.
That’s why I call this period the Great Forgetting.
It isn’t that war tax resistance was formally rejected, or that it had become too onerous and had to be abandoned, it’s more as though it was lost in a sort of collective amnesia.
(This is especially perplexing in Isaac Sharpless’s case, as he had written a history of the Quaker governance of the Pennsylvania colony, and certainly knew plenty about Quakers who had refused to pay war taxes without retreating to a desert isle to do so.)
By the beginning of the 20th Century, in a variety of debates concerning resistance to “church rates” and the Education Act by nonconformist Christians in the U.K., I begin to see references to Quakers that take for granted that they do not resist war taxes.
Arguments along the lines of: “Just because you are conscientiously opposed to funding the state religion doesn’t mean you can just stop paying a tax.
I mean, look at the Quakers.
Everybody knows how conscientiously opposed to war they are, and they never refuse to pay their war taxes.”
(The forgetting came even earlier to Australia.
An anti-war writer there in advocated war tax resistance this way: “The English Quakers refuse to pay Church rates for conscience sake, and it is time for tax-payers who disapprove of such wars as the Affghan, the Kaffir, the Chinese, and the New Zealand war to make a stand for conscience, and refuse to pay income-tax.”
In other words: Quakers were not an example of war tax resisters, but an example of tithe resisters that war tax resisters could be inspired by when developing their own variety of tax resistance.)
But although Quaker war tax resistance had mostly gone dormant in England and the United States (and evidently, Australia, if indeed it had ever gotten a foothold there), I see occasional signs that it had not entirely died out.
Some Quakers in the far outposts of the Quaker world were keeping the flame lit and reminding Friends elsewhere that there was an alternative to sorrowful resignation in the face of war taxes.
A edition of The Friend noted that the harsh enforcement of military conscription on the European mainland had reduced the ranks of Quakers there, but also said that “One Friend in Norway has been imprisoned five times for refusing to pay the ‘blood-tax.’ ”
In Switzerland, in , pacifist Pierre Cérésole began to refuse to pay his military tax.
He was not yet a Quaker, but would later convert, and would help to reintroduce war tax resistance to the Society of Friends through his influence on Dutch Quakers Beatrice Cadbury and Kees Boeke.
The Boekes began resisting taxes in .
They made waves with their radical and uncompromising testimony against war and against violent coercion of any sort.
In the United States, The Friend of Philadelphia quoted a report from its London namesake on the Boekes, but astonishingly headlined the article “Testimony-Bearing of the Seventeenth Century Type” — seemingly ignorant of all of the Quaker war tax resistance that had happened in the 18th and 19th centuries!
More evidence that an uncanny Forgetting had taken hold.
An English Quaker wrote in that he believed “no Friend, so far as is known, has declined to pay his war taxes, so called.
Even the Friends who during the South African war [probably the Second Boer War, ] permitted the authorities to distrain upon their goods rather than pay the (then) war tax, and the still larger number who refused for years to pay education rates [a conflict about tax money going to sectarian education that peaked around ], have seen their ways to pay the much larger war taxes of today without demur.”
This is the case even though draft boards in the U.K., in order to test the sincerity of people applying for conscientious objector status, would sometimes ask them if they were using any luxury products like tea, coffee, cocoa, matches, tobacco, or movies, all of which had a war tax applied to them.
Quakers who attended these hearings in the support of their own applications for conscientious objector status were thereby getting a long-overdue sermon on the connection between conscientious objection and war taxes, but it seems to have fallen on deaf ears.
When the United States entered World War Ⅰ, it adopted a new war funding method: rather than relying entirely on taxes, it encouraged citizens to invest their money in “Liberty Bonds” — that is, to loan the government the war money at interest.
Pressure to invest in these bonds was enormous — how many bonds you were willing to purchase was seen as a quantitative proxy for the quality of your patriotism — and refusal to purchase bonds was seen as being tantamount to treason.
Although the bond purchases were ostensibly voluntary, vigilante mobs were not above using violent coercion to force sales, or even, at times, to steal property directly from recalcitrant citizens.
I have found dozens of examples of reprisals of various sorts being taken against people who refused to buy Liberty Bonds.
Most of them involve Mennonites, whose Quaker-like pacifism would not permit them to buy war bonds.
(Many American Mennonites were also of German ancestry and had Germanic names, which probably didn’t help them avoid trouble.)
Others involve socialists and other political radicals who saw World War Ⅰ as being an example of workers fighting workers for the sake of capitalists.
Notably absent are Quakers, with one important exception: Mary Stone McDowell.
McDowell was fired from her teaching job in part for her refusal to promote war bonds to her students.
(The New York Times used the occasion to editorialize that Quaker teachers should all resign their positions since their pacifist views clashed with the proper patriotism that ought to be taught in school.)
McDowell would resurface as a war tax resister in the years after World War Ⅱ as part of the new “Peacemakers” movement and so would help begin the thaw in the Great Forgetting that would eventually lead to a renaissance of war tax resistance in the Society of Friends.
Here I should note that there’s a discontinuity in the material I’ve been drawing on for my research.
The ease of search and the ready availability of on-line books and magazines and newspapers and other archival materials through Google Books, Internet Archive, and many other such platforms, has made research like this much easier than in times not long past.
But much material published is not as available due to copyright issues.
For many such documents, it is difficult to even determine who the copyright holder is, and so the creators of the on-line archives have not made this material as available.
So it’s possible that the seeming absence of evidence of Quaker war tax resistance in the period should not be interpreted as evidence of absence.
As far as I could tell from what was published by Brethren periodicals during World War Ⅰ, the ostensible pacifism of the Church of the Brethren became a cowardly retreat in the face of public pressure to join the war bond purchase drives.
Today I examine the archives from the post-war period to look for signs of soul-searching in the wake of this capitulation.
The Annual Report of the General Mission Board, as found in The Missionary Visitor (source) crowed that “the war is over” and even went so far as to say that “Possibly the historian of future years will look back and recount, through numberless proofs, that the war was not fought in vain.” The Board compared its own struggle against Satan with the Allies’ victory in Europe, and said Brethren contribute to each: “[W]hile we have contributed our funds for Liberty bonds, and freed the world from autocracy, we must not cease our vigilance.”
In this vein, the magazine decided to market Brethren fundraising efforts as “God’s Liberty Loan”.
It is staggering to think of the amount of money that has been raised to finance the war, reaching the great sum of twenty-three billion dollars.
It is interesting to wonder how much of this large amount has been subscribed by the Church of the Brethren.
“Interesting” but not pauseworthy.
The author goes on to make an estimate, by assuming that the typical member of the church makes a little more than the average national income and that “it would be expected that we contribute our proportionate share” to the war bond drives.
The earliest issue of The Brethren Evangelist that I found in the archives comes from (41 years into its run).
By then, anyway, it seems that they saw no inconsistency in Brethren and Brethren institutions trafficking in war bonds.
The initial issue of that year noted that “The first Liberty Bond given to Kentucky Mission work was received as a Christmas Gift on Christmas morning,” named the donor, and asked that others follow their example to “send Liberty Bonds to be used to further the Home Mission work of the Brethren church” (source).
A later article compared a mission fund drive with the Liberty Loan, saying “We [emphasis mine] raised billions for Liberty Bonds time and again.
Now we are starting another drive.”
The Business Manager of Ashland College (a Brethren institution) wrote in to encourage donations in the form of Liberty Bonds, writing that “[d]uring the past year more than $20,000 in Liberty Bonds have been assigned to Ashland College in this way” (source).
By this amount had risen to more than $50,000 (source).
The Brethren in Falls City “could see that it was only good business to kill two birds with one stone, so they bought those Liberty Loans and gave them to the college” (source).
An accounting of the endowment of that college, in a later issue, indicated that it held $29,800 in Liberty Bonds and $1,256.62 in War Savings Stamps (source).
A note in a issue tried to explain what happened: “Did we buy Liberty Bonds?
We did.
Not because we were especially in favor of war; not because we were investors.
We gave because the spirit of giving and sacrifice was abounding.” (source)
A fundraiser for a Brethren project being pumped in a edition, on the other hand, said that “Liberty Bonds were bought, in a large measure not as an investment but to save the country’s credit” — so why don’t you donate them to us since you don’t really need the money (source).
By issue, a sanctimonious pacifism had returned, as shown by a reprint of a letter from another magazine in response to National Defense Day (source).
The editorial note before the letter said that “[t]he Christian patriot who has a true vision of world peace and of the only way to its attainment will not remain silent and passive and allow national propaganda for militarism to go on unrebuked.” The letter itself told the story of a Belgian family, some members of which had been killed by poison gas in an American bombardment: “American gas shells, made by American girls, paid for by your grandmother’s liberty bonds [emphasis mine], handled by skilled American artillerymen, blessed by American clergy, valiantly gassed this Belgian maiden.”
But aside from this pointed mention, the subject of the Liberty Loan, Liberty Bonds, War Stamps, and things of that nature was for the most part just quietly dropped in the Brethren Evangelist, and writers went on preaching peace as though nothing had happened.
(But Iremember them that are in bonds.)
Meanwhile, what was going on over at the Gospel Messenger?
A article by I.V. Funderburgh on “Our Response” (to the war).
He described the response of Brethren in part this way: “We pledge to the Red Cross; we subscribe for Liberty Bonds; we buy thrift-stamps; we conserve food, clothing, and fuel. Sacrifice! Yes, we do. ¶ But what of the summons, ‘Serve’? Oh, yes, we have served in responding to our country’s demand for money…”
In the issue, D.E. Cripe confronted the theory of war tax resistance more directly than I had seen done to this point (source):
Though we be strangers and pilgrims, while we are in the flesh, we can not avoid living in an earthly kingdom or nation, and therefore we have duties which can not be evaded.
One of these is paying tribute or taxes.
Even Jesus, through Peter, paid tribute, “lest we should offend them,” and he never asked what use would be made of the money.
Paul says we should pay tribute, not only for wrath but for conscience’s sake.
Very likely this tribute was turned into the treasury to support the Roman army, but Paul did not question this.
After the Christian has paid his tribute, he has done his duty, and he is not responsible for the use that the Government makes of it.
In the issue, J.A. Vancil urged Brethren who had purchased war bonds to “put those Liberty Bonds to work for the cause of Jesus Christ?
It was really the Lord’s money that purchased them, anyway.” (source) “If those Liberty Bonds were turned over to the church, there would be sufficient funds, from the accruing interest, to carry on all departments of the work of the church for the next five years.
Then, at the maturity of these Bonds, there would be a vast available amount.”
The General Mission Board, in a fundraising notice in the issue (source), wrote:
Liberty Bonds
A brother writes and asks: “Can you accept Liberty Bonds in the Conference offering?
Some of our brethren can give considerably more, if you can.” Most surely we can accept Liberty Bonds.
Through them you have helped to free the world from autocracy.
Now let us use them to free the world from the autocracy of sin.
Send them in to us!
We will put them to the Lord’s use.
An interesting note in the issue said that the following query had been sent to the Annual Conference (source):
We, the members of the Empire congregation, ask Annual Meeting of through the District Meeting of Northern California, to restate and define the position of the church upon war in all its phases, including the bearing of arms, drilling, buying war bonds, etc.
If the Annual Meeting took up this invitation, I haven’t yet found record of it.
The issue included an article entitled “In the War on War” by George Fulk.
Fulk wrote that “[t]o a very considerable number of highly patriotic Christian citizens, perhaps no question of ethics more difficult of solution ever presented itself than that of the proper relation which they should personally bear toward service in the World War… With [some] it became a question as to the purchasing of liberty bonds, which meant the furnishing of the sinews of war.”
This at least put buying war bonds back on the agenda as a problem and didn’t try to wave away what buying war bonds meant.
Fulk was back in to tell Brethren that they really must take a stand, because by default they were supporting war (source):
It is a stern fact also that persons are volunteering on both sides, and those who fail to volunteer, are being drafted on the side of war.
Circumstances, speaking in very general terms, are doing the drafting.
That is to say, circumstances have always been such, are now such, and promise indefinitely to be such, as to lead unfailingly to war unless counter-forces are brought to oppose.
If we fail to join the counter-forces, we not only offer circumstances a clear road to war, but we contribute directly, through taxes, and other means, which necessarily conform to the present system of war, as a method of settling disputes.
But in general, war taxes were presented as something to be regretted, not resisted.
The Messenger would sometimes allude to estimates that 93% of federal taxes being raised were going to pay for the expenses of the recent war.
But rather than wonder whether anti-war Brethren ought to pay such a bill, this was usually just a lead in to a sales pitch about how Brethren ought to be just as willing to contribute to the latest church fundraising campaign.
A note in a issue concerned Kees and Beatrice Boeke, the European Quaker pacifists who were pushing the limits of nonviolent action.
The note said that the couple “are likely to have their property seized again this year as last, because they can not, as a matter of conscience, pay their military tax.”
The couple’s “unflinching testimony against war, and their fearless preaching of the Gospel of peace and good will to all men” was described in nothing but flattering terms (source).
A lengthy article by L.R. Holsinger on “The Christian’s Duty to the State”, from the issue, attacked war tax resistance more or less directly, which at least suggests that somewhere off the pages of the Messenger that heresy was alive:
The matter of paying taxes has been considered obligatory ever since government has been a realization.
It was true thousands of years before Christ said, “Render, therefore, unto Caesar the things which are Caesar’s.”… We therefore believe that in order to “Render… to all their dues: tribute to whom tribute is due; custom to whom custom”…, it becomes necessary to pay over our portion of the necessary funds to facilitate the effective and harmonious administration of the government of which we are a part.
There come times, however, that the government engages in activities such as war which their consciences justly raise a question about, but the experiences of the recent war have been of such a nature as to cause many to feel that the awful cost, not only in money, but in morals, happiness, and life, is the penalty for their neglect and indifference both in religious and civic affairs.
We are persuaded that if the amount of money and zealous effort that was expended each month during the war to promote it, had been expended during the ten years previous to the war to propagate the Gospel and promote the cause of the Prince of Peace, the history of the “world war” would never have been written, and the future generation would have “heroes” to admire and to emulate whose influence would not create a false patriotism which will result in a periodic repetition of a similar or worse upheaval but would hasten the day when “Nation will not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more”… The fact that we find ourselves a part of a government that engages temporarily in war may be blamed on us as Christians as well as others, and though we may be justified in absolute refusal to take the life willfully of any individual, we cannot find justification in refusal to pay taxes as long as the government functions as such, not only for the purpose of war which is incidental, but “for the people.”
I’ve left out some references to war savings stamps and liberty bonds listed as donations or as parts of the holdings of Brethren institutions.
I saw very few signs that members of the Church of the Brethren — at least those who were represented in the periodicals of the period — had second thoughts about church-members or institutions trafficking in war bonds during World War Ⅰ.
There were many complaints about the continuing arms race, and many of these highlighted the burden placed on the taxpayer, but this was never presented as something that a conscientious taxpayer could or should confront directly.
