Tax resistance in the “Peace Churches” →
Quakers →
20th–21st century Quakers →
the American Friends Service Committee
War tax resistance in the Friends Journal in
By , though there was still no consensus in the Society of Friends about whether paying taxes was the right thing to do (and if not, how best to resist it), the issue had become impossible to avoid.
The issues of the Friends Journal published that year reflect this, with most of them including at least a mention of war tax resistance or of the dilemma for Quaker taxpayers.
War tax resistance was again on the agenda of the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting’s annual conference , but the Journal only includes the topic in a list of “special concerns” that were covered on , without giving any details of how the conversation went.
In the opening article in the issue, “Tithing for Peace” by Alan Strain, the author expresses his anguish over how much he has “tithed for war and instruments of war… several dollars each day to create a warfare state in which fear and violence have become ever more accepted and expected.”
However: “I cannot see how to disentangle myself from this madness… I cannot even see a way to end my involuntary tithing for war.”
Rather than resist the war tithe, he has decided to try to match it with a peace tithe: “giving this amount to private or public agencies working to remove the causes of war and to develop the conditions and institutions of peace.”
In that same issue, a note about the Canadian Friends Service Committee’s humanitarian efforts in Vietnam includes a parenthetical remark that some of the $60,000 donated to the cause came from “two U.S. churchmen who sent money normally used to pay income taxes.”
In the issue, the American Friends Service Committee tried to capitalize on the new craze with this ad:
In the Baltimore Yearly Meetings approved a minute “including refusal to pay the surtax for the war if such a tax is imposed.”
An article by Cynthia E. Kerman on “The Rationale of Protest” in the issue made note in passing of the communicative possibilities of war tax resistance: “Tax refusal, for instance, may be a means of speaking to people — not only of purifying our lives.”
In the issue, a letter from Lucy P. Carner picked up where Cynthia E. Kerman left off, asserting that there are “possibilities for witness inherent in tax refusal” that are not immediately obvious to people who are looking for a quick fix “to put a stop to war.”
Excerpts:
Tax refusal enables one to “speak truth to power.”
A letter to the Revenue Service protesting the tax, but paying it, is likely to get less attention than one explaining why one is not paying a portion of the tax.
In the latter case, the Revenue Service has to do something about it.
A representative of the service has to make a telephone call reminding the taxpayer of his delinquency.
Here is another opportunity to witness.
“You mean you do not intend to pay?” said the incredulous voice of the representative.
I explained to him what I had already written to his office.
“Yes, I know that you will eventually get the money from my bank.
That isn’t your fault and you have very courteously fulfilled your duty.
But this is my way of saying that I think the war is wrong.
Only for that reason would I break the law — I’m not accustomed to breaking laws.”
“Yes,” said he, rather helplessly, and hung up.
A few months later a bank official will send a letter saying how much the bank would regret allowing the tax collector to take money from my account and won’t I please pay up and avoid this embarrassment.
Here is another opportunity to write my objection to the war.
Refusal to pay the additional Federal tax on my telephone bill provides similar opportunity to make my voice heard.
Tax refusal, then, is a manner of speaking to government officials, to banks and business concerns.
It is a nonviolent way of reaching the hard-to-reach, for it has nuisance value.
It deserves wide consideration as one way of bearing witness to one’s conscientious objection to war.
The lead editorial in that same issue, by Ruth A. Miner, suggests that instead of resisting war taxes, Quakers should pay an additional tax — “the same amount (or a practicable fraction of it — or even more!)”
— to the United Nations.
This, she suggests, would be in the spirit of Jesus’s suggestion that “whoever compels you to go one mile, go with him two.”
That issue was also the first to feature the ad from “Southern California Business Service” (see ♇ 1 July 2013) that included the message: “A word about tax refusal: Since we limit our income to avoid paying income tax, our rates are low — and — in hiring our help we actively seek out C.O.s and/or tax refusers.”
Phone tax resistance
James B. Osgood, in a letter-to-the-editor in the issue, takes note of the American Friends Service Committee’s “stickers which one can attach to one’s phone bill to make payment of the war tax under protest” (see ♇ 13 July 2013).
This form of protest is better than nothing, but its practical effect is next to nothing.
No real witness is made; no war funds are withheld from the government; no one’s reputation is put on the line.
Those of us who have refused to pay the ten per cent tax hope that others joining us will make a great visible witness and will cause sufficient trouble to the government to give it pause for thought over both collection and prosecution of those who conscientiously refuse.
This, however, will require a real step forward, not a mere licking of a label.
Maris Cakars of the Committee for Nonviolent Action also wrote in, and his letter appeared in the following issue.
He believed that there were “hundreds” of telephone tax resisters who had not notified the Committee of their resistance, and hoped they would speak up so that the campaign could move on to its next phase: “placing advertisement in newspapers and holding press conferences.
For this phase to have maximum impact it is important for us to have as complete a list of tax refusers as possible.”
The issue announced that the Claremont (California) Meeting had decided to resist the telephone tax on its meetinghouse phone.
In the issue was a letter from a representative of 57th Street Meeting in Chicago, in which they noted that two other Meetings had contacted them about actions they had taken in response to their call for phone tax resistance, and said “we would be pleased to act as a clearinghouse on positions taken by Meetings on telephone-tax refusal…”
In the issue, George Lakey wrote an article about why he was joining the crew of the Phoenix to illegally (by U.S. law) bring humanitarian aid to North Vietnam.
He described the escalation of his activism, from letter-writing and congressman-lobbying to his current action.
Along the way, he says, “I stopped paying the telephone tax.”
War tax resistance internationally
The issue noted that Quakers in The Netherlands had formed a “Conscientious Objectors’ Committee Against Paying Taxes for Defense Purposes” which was trying to come up with some sort of government-approved “peace tax”-style plan.
I got a wry smile out of the closing sentence: “In The Netherlands it is not permitted to affix protest stickers on tax forms; instead one must use a written announcement of protest.”
The fourth Friends World Conference was held .
The “Protest and Direct Action group” there “called upon Friends in countries party to the [Vietnam] conflict to ‘go as far as conscience dictates in withholding support from their governments’ war-making machinery,’ first by direct communication with those against whom the protest is made, and then if necessary by public witness and individual action, including the possibility of refusal to pay taxes for war.”
“Corporate Witness and Individual Conscience”
The lead (guest) editorial in the issue was “Corporate Witness and Individual Conscience” by Lindsley H. Noble.
It cautioned Quaker corporate bodies (like Meetings) that were contemplating civil disobedience actions like phone tax resistance.
For one thing, he says, a Quaker group should make sure to have the consent of all of its members before it takes such a drastic step, something he thinks some groups have been careless about.
Secondly, even if every member of the group consents to civil disobedience, the group as a corporation has a different relationship to the state than individuals do.
While individuals and their consciences predate and arguably supersede the state, corporations are creatures of the state and are therefore necessarily subordinate to them.
Quakers incorporate their meetings in part in order to get government privileges associated with legal incorporation.
“In voluntarily putting ourselves under the law to receive these subsidies do we not morally forego corporately the right to refuse to obey other laws not to our liking?”
If Quakers, as a group, find a law so intolerable that they must disobey it as a group, he says, they should first legally detach themselves — “withdraw from our contract with the state and give up our subsidies before setting out on this path.”
This led to months of discussion in the letters-to-the-editor sections of future issues, in particular:
Victor Paschkis thought that Noble’s argument failed on both points.
First, his call for groups to reach consensus before taking a civilly disobedient stand should be understood for what it is — merely a preference for the law-abiding status quo.
After all, “inaction in a given situation may violate the conscience of some members just as action may violate the conscience of others.”
Secondly, a Quaker Meeting, whether or not it has incorporated under the laws of the state, still has a yet higher allegiance to God that must be taken into account.
Also, what’s the point of having Meetings if they do not have “corporate insight” greater than the sum of their parts?
Stephen G. Cary mirrored some of this: “There are times when inaction speaks to the world as clearly as action.
In these situations inaction does not leave us neutral, but committed by default.
Responsibility is not a one-way street, resting only on Friends who wish an action taken.
Those who oppose the action are committing the Meeting, too.
I do not suggest that the proponents’ views should necessarily prevail; I only want it recognized that responsibility to conscience cuts both ways and requires both sides to search their hearts.”
He is also suspect of the idea that corporate entities have no responsibility to disobey unjust laws: “Does the Nuremburg principle have no bearing on the institutions of society?
I prefer to regard the corporation as the creature of those who create and operate it, and the fact that the state charters it does not make the state its ultimate master.”
Marie S. Klooz also defended “corporate witness” as being not exactly “the witness of a corporation” but the collective witness of the corporation’s “component members.”
Such a thing is not only justifiable, but is particularly important to Quakers: “Each member is supposed to test his light by the corporate light.”
And: “If the light requires social action, it is our duty to labor lovingly with those whose light differs, not to refrain from action.”
It is no more necessary for a Meeting to divest itself of its corporate charter to be civilly disobedient, than it is necessary for an individual to first renounce his citizenship.
Pat Foreman found himself uncomfortable with the peace testimony “as interpreted by most Friends” and thinks Quakers like him “sometimes have the feeling that we are being shunned.”
He wants “to remind Friends that Quakerism is a religion and not a prodigious committee.”
Evan Howe thought that dissenters were asking too much if they were asking Quaker Meetings to give up their corporate privileges in order to engage in civilly disobedient actions under the direction of the “sense of the Meeting.”
Such a “surrender of subsidies, as I see it, while apparently a demand of conscience, is rather a surrender of conscience with the ultimate consequence of destroying the society.
I do not believe that dissent gives anyone that right.”
Norman J. Whitney stressed that “Meetings do have a responsibility for corporate witness if the integrity of our testimonies is to be maintained.
It is not enough to shift responsibility to ad hoc committees or special groups among us.”
Roy W. Moger suggested that Noble had hit on a truth when he suggested that legal incorporation was a sort of “trap” that the Religious Society of Friends had fallen into, “thereby placing our conscience in jeopardy.”:
I wonder if the Religious Society of Friends should not begin to unincorporate and remove itself from the trap into which it has fallen, so that Friends can once more seek dependence upon the Holy Spirit, act under guidance of that Spirit as a corporate body, and not have to say, “As a group we dare not take corporate action [and offend the state] because our corporate life depends upon the State, and we are obligated to obey.
The individual can alone take the risk and break the law of the State if he feels the law of the State breaks the law of God.”
Roger S. Lorenz said that because there is a good argument that the Vietnam war is itself illegal, both under international and under domestic law, what it means for a person (or a corporation) to remain within the law under our circumstances is no easy question to answer.
David Hartsough
Over the years, starting in , David Hartsough contributed several pieces to the Friends Journal touching on war tax resistance:
In the issue, he set out a simple, compelling case for war tax resistance — “is it not our responsibility to set the example and refuse to pay our taxes for the weapons and ammunition which inflict this suffering?”
He also suggested that if enough people were to refuse, the government would probably legalize some form of conscientious objection to military taxation.
In the issue, he paraphrased George Fox’s advice to William Penn: “Pay the military portion of thy tax as long as thou canst.”
He suggested that people begin now by resisting the phone tax, and then prepare to resist “the 69.2 percent of our income taxes which go for war” .
In the issue, he told the story of what happened when an IRS agent came to his office to try to collect his unpaid income taxes.
Excerpts:
We talked about the Nürnburg trials, in which the Americans told the Germans that they should obey their consciences rather than their state.
I told him I felt that when we are bombing and burning people and their homes in Vietnam, I cannot condone this action by paying other people to do it.
“I want to make it clear that I have no argument with you on your position about the war,” he said.
“I do not argue that you shouldn’t follow your conscience.
But it is my responsibility to get this money.”
…he gave me a financial statement to fill out.
I refused.
He reminded me: “It’s my job to get this money in any way I can.
I don’t like to do this, but we can take any property you have — your house, your car, or whatever.”
“I have a bicycle downstairs,” I said, “and the suit I’m wearing.”
“No, no, I wouldn’t take your bike or your suit.”
He also expressed concern about the dangers of the poorer neighborhood where I live — a concern beyond his responsibility.
“I guess I’ll have to do what I believe is right,” I said when he was leaving, “and, friend, you will have to do what you believe is right.”
He left without collecting the overdue tax or taking any of my property.
In the issue, he penned another exhortation: “Let us, like Friends through the years, blaze the trail and set the example for others, rather than wait until there are masses of people taking this action.”
He recommended redirecting taxes to the American Friends Service Committee or the Friends Committee on National Legislation, which “will do a much better job of putting our beliefs into action than does the Pentagon.”
David & Jan Hartsough returned to the Journal in with a letter expressing the same basic argument, and giving some details as to how their tax resistance technique had evolved: “Each year we write a check to the Department of Human Services (rather than the IRS) for the 50 percent of our taxes that we do pay.
Along with the check, we send our 1040 form to the IRS and ask them to spend all that money for healing and education, not for killing.
And the other 50 percent (the war portion), we refuse to pay.
Instead, we contribute those funds to organizations helping to feed the hungry, heal the sick, house the homeless, and work for justice and peace in the world.”
War tax resistance and the American Friends Service Committee in the Friends Journal
The American Friends Service Committee, since its founding in , has been one of the most prominent ways modern American Quakers have tried to put their peace testimony into practice.
But it could be a voice of relative hesitance and conservatism when many in the Society of Friends were adopting war tax resistance.
And I mentioned the AFSC’s weirdly toothless response to the extension of the federal excise tax on phone service to help pay for the Vietnam War effort — to make stickers that people could put on their phone bills reading “The Vietnam War Tax Included in This Bill Is Paid Only Under Protest.”
(See ♇ 13 July 2013.)
Finally, I noted that the AFSC had tried to capitalize on the emerging concern among Quakers about war tax payment, war tax resistance, and war tax redirection, with a full page ad that encouraged Quakers to pay a “Peace Tax” — by calculating some percentage of their federal income tax… not in order to resist or redirect it, but in order to determine an appropriately-sized donation to give to the AFSC.
I dunno about you, but to me all of this looks less like an honest effort to grapple with the issue of taxpayer complicity and more like an attempt to ride a trend as a marketing opportunity.
In , the group decided to confront the issue more directly, though they did it in a peculiar way.
ad from the Friends Journal
Two employees of the AFSC — Lorraine Cleveland and Leonard Cadwallader — asked
the Committee to stop withholding war taxes from their salaries. The AFSC
complied with their request, sort of.
The Committee did not withhold the taxes from the employees’ salaries but
instead “withdrew from its general funds enough to cover funds not withheld”
and sent this to the
IRS
instead. Of course, to the
IRS,
none of that accounting really mattered… the money was money, whether it came
from the AFSC payroll budget or its general fund.
But then the AFSC applied for a refund of this amount.
When the
IRS
denied the refund, the
AFSC filed a lawsuit, claiming that:
For employees “to be forced to pay their war taxes without even the symbolic
gesture of refusal and enforced collection by the Government,” according to
the brief, violates the clause of the First Amendment that guarantees the
free exercise of religion.
(These quotes come from an article in the issue of the Friends Journal.)
This all seems like a strangely convoluted path that tangles around the heart
of the matter without really getting there. I suspect that this weird
dance — refusing to withhold war taxes from their salaries, but then paying
these taxes after all out of a different fund, and then immediately applying
for a refund of the amount paid — was deemed necessary by the lawyers as a
means of establishing
legal standing
that would enable them to successfully file their suit.
Also bolstering their argument about standing, the Committee’s legal brief
explained:
American Friends Service Committee is further aggrieved, and threatened with
irreparable economic injury because valuable, esteemed and loyal employees
have threatened to resign from their employment because the operation of the
withholding taxes has interfered with the expression of their religious
conscientious objection to the support of war, and because contributors have
questioned the propriety of their donations to an organization which acts as
a collector of war taxes.
That’s all well and good, but the First Amendment argument… hoo boy… were they
really arguing that the government is obligated to allow religious people
unfettered access to a “symbolic gesture of refusal and enforced collection”?
Is that what war tax resistance and the Quaker peace testimony are
about? Is that what the First Amendment is about?
Civil disobedience is one thing this legal gambit pointedly wasn’t.
The AFSC
apparently felt a strong need to stay within the law wherever possible, perhaps
because of the sensitive and vulnerable nature of some of their activities, or
perhaps because they worried about alienating donors.
A letter-to-the-editor from Bill Samuel in the
edition of the
Journal expressed impatience with this caution.
Excerpts:
I have known several [people] who would not be a part of a Society so
comfortable and content with the evil ways of the larger society. They are
not impressed with our “Quaker” President [Nixon] who grossly violates Quaker
testimonies and has not once worshiped with Washington Friends.
Often, even worse than the meetings in complicity with evil, are the “social
action” agencies, the prime example of which is the AFSC.
My yearly meeting has seen the evil of investing in war, but not the AFSC.
My monthly meeting refuses to pay the war tax on telephone service, but the AFSC even forbids regions
[the AFSC is structured as a collection of semi-autonomous regional offices]
that wish to follow such leadings from doing so.
An excerpt from an AFSC
board meeting transcript, reprinted in the issue of the Journal, is an example of
the temptation for the otherwise very pragmatic, hands-on group to retreat into
abstractions and mumbo-jumbo when the issue of corporate war tax resistance
came up:
When I think of the Spirit I think of something which ought, in the best of
circumstances, to permeate each large and small action which we carry out
throughout all of our lives. Even at those moments such as the present, where
in terms of a particular issue such as taxes, we want to take some action
which is paramount or transcending, we should take the action in the light of
the whole sense of the destiny of the human spirit, which we perceive as
somehow distilled and clarified at one particular historical juncture or
through one particular individual or corporate action. If one thinks of the
Spirit as a kind of unity, as I do, one has a great deal of difficulty in
dealing with the tax question the way we have been doing… It seems to me that
dealing with such questions of beliefs, one at a time and serially, mocks the
Spirit of totality — it seems, rather, that all these things should somehow
be wrapped up together in the Light.
But meanwhile, the AFSC lawsuit
was making its slow progress through the legal system. According to the
issue of the
Journal:
Others [aside from Cleveland and Cadwallader] testifying for AFSC
were Frances Neely, lobbyist for Friends Committee on National Legislation,
from Washington,
D.C.;
Cushing Dolbeare, Philadelphia; Tom (John T.) Flower, San Antonio,
TX; Henry Cadbury,
Philadelphia, and Bronson Clark, executive secretary of AFSC.
The government presented no witnesses and no evidence.
The Judge ruled in favor of the AFSC.
(Before you get too excited, the Supreme Court ruled that all of the AFSC’s attention to standing issues was for naught, as “The Anti-Injunction Act… prohibits suits ‘for the purpose of restraining the assessment or collection of any tax,’ [and so] bars the relief granted…”
That court reversed the ruling that had been in favor of the AFSC.)
The issue of the Journal trumpeted the initial decision. Excerpts:
AFSC Tax Case:
Decision Supports Peace Testimony
In what may become a landmark case, a United States federal judge has found
it unconstitutional for two Quakers and their employer, the American Friends
Service Committee, to be compelled to support war through taxes withheld from
their income.
“We are of the opinion that the withholding method of collection of taxes
does foreclose plaintiffs’ ability to freely exercise that part of their
beliefs requiring them to refuse to participate in war in any form…” the
judge said. “The tax which is withheld is in fact a tax on their incomes
which means that the support of whichever war we happen to be engaged in is
coming out of their pockets. The ‘support of war’ also includes the payment
of taxes in time of ‘peace’ so long as those taxes are used to support the
military’s defense budget generally. Quakers make no distinction between an
offensive or a defensive war. Both are equally objectionable.”
The judge also ruled that the section of the Internal Revenue Code requiring
AFSC
to in effect act as employer-middleman-tax collector for the government was
in this case unconstitutional. Judge Newcomer ordered the government to
refund $574.09 which AFSC
had paid as taxes for the plaintiffs while the case was pending.
“Quakers have for many hundreds of years taken the position that they could
not engage in war or violence of any kind and could not take the life of
another human being,” the judge said in his 18-page opinion. “In more recent
years this view has come to be known as the ‘peace testimony.’ The peace
testimony is not a negative concept but is rather a positive idea requiring
Quakers generally to strive to make war and violence unnecessary…
“When the peace testimony of individual Quakers comes into conflict with a
governmental requirement, the first step usually taken is to petition the
government to change its position. Quakers worked out such a change and
compromise with respect to alternative service during World War Ⅰ and
thereafter. If such a compromise cannot be worked out then the individual
must re-examine his or her conscience to determine if it is possible to live
with the government’s requirement or if not, then to disobey the law so as
not to violate conscience.”
In commenting about the case, Lorraine Cleveland, who has been refusing to
pay war taxes and has been
raising her concern within the Service Committee even longer, said, “There
has never been any doubt in my mind that the Quaker peace testimony was
protected by the First Amendment, and the confirmation of this by the court
strengthens my conviction that it is improper for me to pay war taxes.”
In an earlier statement prepared for the case, Lorraine Cleveland said her
refusal to support war in any form “has contributed to my own integrity — my
sense of wholeness — by bringing my actions into harmony with my deeply held
beliefs and with the guidance of my conscience. It (also) has kept me
sensitive to my own direct responsibility in relation to war in a world in
which ‘everything is connected to everything else.’ ”
“It has been our position,” said Bronson Clark, executive secretary of
AFSC,
“that the First Amendment protects us as an organization because of our
basically religious character, from acting as a tax collector for the
government in this matter of war taxes. We also believe that we should not be
forced to act as the government’s agent in a middleman role that deprives our
employees of the right to confront the government individually on this issue.”
Cleveland also penned an op-ed about the case that I found in the
Palm Beach Post:
When on
Judge Clarence Newcomer of the federal District Court in Philadelphia ruled
in favor of me and one of my former co-workers and the American Friends
Service Committee in our suit against the United States government, it marked
a turning point in an effort my husband and I began .
Judge Newcomer declared unconstitutional the withholding-tax method of
collecting taxes used for military purposes when, by its operation, it
violated my religious beliefs. He also relieved my employer of any legal
burden of taking those taxes out of my paycheck in consideration of my
conscientious objection to paying such taxes.
This ruling has cleared the way for me now to confront the Internal Revenue
Service as an individual without my employer acting as a surrogate tax
collector for the
IRS
The historic significance of Judge Newcomer’s ruling, though this was not a
class action, is that it is the first judicial recognition of conscientious
objection where war taxes are involved.
Many factors entered into my decision to oppose the Internal Revenue Service’s
collection of war taxes from my paycheck. Perhaps the most momentous of those
was in , when our government
dropped atomic bombs on Japan. This seemed to be the most monstrous evil, and
made me feel that some new and more demanding commitment was required of me.
By I had joined the Society of Friends
(Quakers) and was serving with the American Friends Service Committee in
postwar relief work in Europe where I saw firsthand the devastating effects
of war. When it came time to pay our tax, we
sent with our tax return a check payable to the United States Children’s
Bureau in excess of the amount of tax due and requested that this contribution
be accepted in settlement of our tax liability.
I explained to the government that the dropping of the bombs on Japan has led
me to perceive that I could no longer voluntarily pay taxes for military
purposes. I was willing to make an equivalent payment on an ear-marked basis
to any nonmilitary government agencies that could accept such payments.
, I have resisted
paying war taxes and the
IRS has
attached either my bank account or my salary. In
the board of directors of the American
Friends Service Committee, sensitive to the concern of some of its staff
members, agreed to take action together with me and Leonard Cadwallader,
another Quaker employe, to sue the United States to remove the committee as
the withholder of taxes for military purposes. This led to our successful
lawsuit.
It has seemed to me that a government in a free society should be able to
work out an arrangement so that its departments do not violate the First
Amendment of the Constitution while performing their functions.
This might cause the
IRS
some additional inconvenience, but, as Judge Newcomer said in his opinion:
“The additional cost of collection, if any, is a small price to pay when
compared with the possible frustration of the religious practice of bearing
witness to one’s conscience, which practice has sought the aegis of the
First Amendment.”
The tragedy is that so many individuals and organizations are over-whelmed by
the complications of the governmental bureaucracy and see no way to make an
effective protest on matters of conscience.
There was a single dissenting vote in the Supreme Court decision that
overruled this temporary triumph — that of
Justice William
Douglas, whose dissent sounded remarkably (almost incredibly) sympathetic
to the AFSC argument — going
beyond dissenting on the issue of whether the case could be heard under the
Anti-Injunction Act, and agreeing that the Quaker employees should have been
permitted to resist their withheld taxes. Excerpts:
The sole question on the merits is whether the provision of the Internal
Revenue Code… which requires employers to deduct and withhold from wages
federal income taxes, is constitutional as applied to employees, who on
religious grounds object to the withholding taxes on their salaries which
represent that portion of the federal budget allocated to military
expenditures. They invoke the Free Exercise Clause of the First Amendment, as
they are Quakers who are opposed to participation in war in any form and who
claim that this method of collection directly forecloses their ability freely
to express that opposition, i.e., to bear witness to their
religious scruples.
There is no evidence that questions the sincerity of the employees’ religious
beliefs. Nor is there any issue raised as to whether that religious belief
would give the employees a defense against ultimate payment of the tax. The
District Court held that the withholding was unconstitutional as to the
employees… a conclusion with which I agree.
The withholding process forecloses the employees from bearing witness against
the use of these monthly deductions for military purposes. Under the opinion
of this Court, they are deprived of bearing witness to their opposition to
war — these withheld portions of their salaries pay the entire tax and they
therefore have “no alternative legal remedy.”…
Quakers with true religious scruples against participating in war may no more
be barred from protesting the payment of taxes to support war than they can
be forcibly inducted into the Armed Forces and required to carry a gun, and
yet be denied all opportunity to state their religious views against
participation.… The Court misses the entire point of the present controversy.
The employees are barred from protesting these monthly deductions under the
Court’s opinion.… Here the employees challenge the withholding law as
depriving them of their one and only chance of contesting the
constitutionality of the withholding of the tax as applied to them.…
The religious belief which the Government violates here is that the employees
must bear active witness to their objections to their support of war efforts.
Dr. Edwin Bronner, who qualified as an expert on the history of Quakerism,
gave testimony which… stated: “[M]ost Quakers have considered it an integral
part of their faith to bear witness to the beliefs which they hold. It has
always been the prevailing view that simple preaching of one’s beliefs is not
sufficient, and that one’s actions must accord with and give expression to
one’s beliefs. Many of the employees of the AFSC,
including particularly appellees’ Cleveland and Cadwallader, share this
belief, and for these employees, the operation of the withholding tax, which
leaves them no option as to the payment of the taxes which they
conscientiously question, operates as a direct abridgment of the expression
and implementation of deeply cherished religious beliefs.”
If we are faithful to the command of the First Amendment, we would honor that
religious belief. I have not bowed to the view of the majority that “some
compelling state interest” will warrant an infringement of the Free Exercise
Clause.…
…to construe the Act as the Court construes it does not avoid a
constitutional question but directly raises one. The Act, read as literally
as the Court reads it, plainly violates the First Amendment as applied to the
facts of this case, for “no law” prohibiting the free exercise of religion
includes every kind of law, including a law staying the hand of a judge who
enjoins a law for the collection of taxes that trespasses on the First
Amendment.
…when it comes to the First Amendment and the free exercise of
religion, the mandate is that “Congress shall make no law… prohibiting” it.
The Anti-Injunction Act is a “law”; and the Constitution gives no such
preference to tax laws as to permit them to override religious scruples. May
Congress enact a law that prohibits a minister from preaching if his taxes
are in arrears? Or that disallows the making of a protest to a tax assessment
even though the assessment and payment violate one’s religious scruples?
Until today, I would have thought not. The First Amendment, as applied to the
States by the Fourteenth, bars a tax on the conduct of a religious exercise
by a minority even though that religious exercise is obnoxious to the
majority.… Dicta to the effect that an allegation of unconstitutionality is
irrelevant under the Anti-Injunction Act… — which the Court today elevates to
a holding — were based on the premise that there was an alternative remedy to
the unconstitutional actions. Here, as demonstrated, there is no other
remedy. A refund suit is of no value, since the religious scruples which
these taxpayers invoke relate to their inability to protest the payment, not
to the use of the taxes themselves for military purposes.
A retrospective on the life of Henry J. Cadbury, published in the
issue of the
Journal, opened by recounting an episode from
Cadbury’s testimony in this case:
…Marvin Karpatkin, chief attorney for the plaintiffs, had invited to the
witness stand the man who had presided at the first meeting of the
AFSC, on .
Henry Joel Cadbury had always been a man of slight build. Now at the age of
89½, he appeared frail and wizened, his rather rumpled suit hanging on him,
his manner occasionally hesitant, as though a little confused. He wore a
hearing aid, but although it was turned up to full volume it was still
necessary for him to ask a speaker to repeat himself. Those in the courtroom
who did not know him might have wondered what value his testimony could have.
Speaking slowly and clearly, Marvin Karpatkin led Henry Cadbury through a
recitation of his educational background, including his Ph.D.
from Harvard — a teaching career which included 20 years as Hollis Professor
of Divinity at Harvard — his many published books and essays, his role in
translating a new revision of the New Testament, his six honorary degrees.
Henry Cadbury answered each question with careful modesty, but the onlookers
were impressed, and when he acknowledged, in response to further probing,
that he had met with presidents Wilson, Hoover, Roosevelt, Kennedy, and Nixon,
the lawyer for the defense rather plaintively objected to this line of
questioning. The judge, however, appeared interested and denied the motion.
Switching to peace, the lawyer asked Henry Cadbury to describe the Peace
Testimony, and to tell the court what was meant by the term “bearing witness.”
“Bearing witness means, primarily, I suppose, a vocal expression of your
belief in certain ideals, but beyond that in the consistent expression in
your actions of those ideals.”
“Could you say in a nutshell that it means practicing what you preach?” the
lawyer pressed.
Henry Cadbury’s eyes danced and his face lit up with a delightful,
mischievous twinkle. Those who knew him well realized he had something
amusing to say. “Yes, or only preaching what you practice,” he quipped.
Today, while the AFSC continues to decry the enormous amount of money American taxpayers spend on wars past, present, and future, it also continues to stop well short of recommending any direct action by taxpayers (or even, usually, acknowledging that as an option) — instead it engages in projects to “encourage Congress” and “urge our leaders” to do something about it.
At the upcoming national gathering of NWTRCC at Earlham College in Richmond, Indiana, I’m going to be presenting a summary of the history of war tax resistance in the Society of Friends (Quakers).
Today I’m going to try to coalesce some of the notes I’ve assembled about how the Quaker practice of war tax resistance began to reemerge after the Great Forgetting period.
The Thaw ()
In the Great Forgetting period, Quakers endeavored to overlook that war tax resistance had been an important part of putting the Quaker peace testimony into practice.
But during World War Ⅱ and the opening decade of the Cold War, a largely Christian pacifist war tax resistance movement began to coalesce, which included Quakers, but the most prominent members of which belonged to other denominations.
This movement set the stage for the coming renaissance of war tax resistance in the Society of Friends.
A few of the earliest tax resisters of this period were Quakers.
I’ve already mentioned Mary Stone McDowell, who carried on her resistance from the World War Ⅰ period (the only such example I’m aware of).
There was also Arthur Evans, who was resisting perhaps as early as 1943, making him one of the earliest adopters of war tax resistance in this Thaw period.
But institutionally, the Society of Friends still had little interest in the subject.
In the American Friends Service Committee, a major voice of the practical side of the Quaker peace testimony, put out an influential booklet: Speak Truth to Power: A Quaker Search for an Alternative to Violence.
It mentions war tax resistance only once, and in an 18th century historical overview context, not as an example of a contemporary method of speaking truth to power in search of alternatives to violence.
This is in spite of the fact that the committee that produced the booklet included among its members the war tax resisters A.J. Muste and Milton Mayer.
Instead, the leadership in advocating for war tax resistance and in organizing the fledgling modern war tax resistance movement largely came from outside the Society of Friends.
Some of the more prominent war tax resistance promoters in this important period were Dorothy Day (Catholic) & Ammon Hennacy (often Catholic), A.J. Muste (sometimes-Quaker, but bounced around a lot), Maurice McCrackin (Presbyterian), Ernest Bromley (Methodist, later a Quaker), Ralph DiGia (not religious as far as I could tell), and Milton Mayer (Jewish, later a Quaker).
The work of this emerging group of resisters helped to encourage the remaining Quaker war tax resisters and to remind Quakers that war tax resistance wasn’t only something of the legendary past but was an available testimony to them in the present.
The thaw in the Society of Friends had begun.
One of the first examples of this thaw was a particularly dramatic one.
When four Quaker conscientious objectors in the United States were put on trial for evading the Korean War draft, the judge told them:
“If you are not willing to defend this country, you should leave.”
They took that advice seriously, and began to look for an alternative.
They chose Costa Rica, a country that had abolished its standing army in .
“We wanted to be free of paying taxes in a war economy,” recalls Marvin Rockwell, one of the emigrants.
Seven Quaker families left the U.S. to found the community of Monteverde, Costa Rica, in .
Rockwell later told a Friends Journal reporter:
“I do not feel bad at all paying taxes in Costa Rica.
The largest item in the tax budget is for education.”
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 renaissance of Quaker war tax resistance during the Cold War.
Much of what I have assembled here comes from my close look at the archives of the Friends Journal, the only Quaker publication from this period I have reviewed thoroughly, and so whatever editorial biases that publication may have had may also bias my history of this phase.
There is a lot that happens in this short period of time, and in some places my narrative is going to be condensed into a bunch of bullet-point-like summaries of the rapid-fire events to try to keep up with it all.
The Renaissance ()
The modern war tax resistance movement began in the wake of World War Ⅱ in the United States.
There had been isolated war tax resisters here and there in other places in recent years, and there was a quiet war tax resistance tendency hiding under the surface of the Society of Friends, but things did not come out into the open in any organized and growing fashion until then.
Quakers were not in the forefront of this movement, but Quaker war tax resisters took courage from it, and it wasn’t long before they began trying to reestablish the war tax resistance traditions in the Society of Friends.
The earliest mention of this that I have found from this period concerns Franklin Zahn of the Pacific Yearly Meeting, who was distributing a leaflet on war tax resistance as early as .
A report on the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting that year noted that the subject of war taxes had come up and had led to what sounds like a long and earnest discussion:
Few present felt it right to refuse to pay, nor yet felt comfortable to pay.
Varied suggestions were presented: Send an accompanying letter expressing one’s feeling about war; live so simply that income is below tax level; make no report, but once a year send a check for nonmilitary purposes; engage in peace walks and other minority demonstrations; follow Jesus’ example of rendering unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s; beware of taking for granted the evils deplored, such as riding on military planes; associate more closely with the Mennonites, who share Friends’ concerns; rise above one’s own shortcomings through personal devotion; work to unite with all Friends Yearly Meetings in refusal to pay taxes.
Nothing can be done unless there is a willingness to suffer unto death.[!]
The blinders put on during the Great Forgetting period were still evident.
An article in a issue of the Friends Journal described “refusal to pay taxes for support of war effort emerging as a new testimony” [my emphasis].
Another article from the same issue, titled “The Quaker Peace Testimony: Some Suggestions for Witness and Rededication” didn’t mention taxes at all.
By this time some Friends in Switzerland had been refusing to pay war taxes (I would guess, under the tutelage of Pierre Cérésole).
In some Quakers in the Pacific Yearly Meeting began to sketch out the initial drafts of a legislative “peace tax” proposal which they envisioned would be a way for conscientious objectors to pay their taxes into a fund that the government could only spend on non-military items.
The idea that there might be a legislative solution that could make tax-paying no longer an act of complicity with war would bob up throughout this period, until, by the end of it, the temptation of lobbying instead of committing to direct action would contribute to the eventual decline of war tax resistance in the Society of Friends.
also, the Yellow Springs Monthly Meeting issued a statement of support for war tax resisters, the first example of new institutional support for war tax resistance in the Society of Friends that I could find from the 20th century.
In there was a burst of excitement about war tax resistance in the Baltimore Yearly Meeting (yet a survey of 350 adults from that meeting found only two or three who were willing to consider actually becoming resisters; whereas almost half of those surveyed were totally unconcerned about their tax money going to the military).
A group of about twenty Quakers, organized by Clarence Pickett and Henry Cadbury, met at the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting to discuss war tax resistance, but they were unable to come up with a consensus statement.
Quaker war tax resister Arthur Evans was imprisoned for three months for his tax refusal.
In the Friends Journal ended what strikes me as a policy of editorial embarrassment about Quakers and war tax resistance by publishing its first article devoted to the practice, and one that also full-throatedly advocated it.
This started a debate in the letters-to-the-editor column and certainly caused more Quakers to confront the question, directly or indirectly.
By the tide was shifting rapidly.
Before this time, individual Quaker tax resisters are unusual enough to highlight individually as being on the cutting-edge; after this, Quaker war tax resistance becomes commonplace enough that individual resisters are exemplars of a larger trend.
In the New York Yearly Meeting promoted war tax resistance in an official statement, and promised financial assistance for any Quakers in the Meeting who might be forced to change jobs or to suffer other financial hardship for their stand.
The statement in part read:
We call upon Friends to examine their consciences concerning whether they cannot more fully dissociate themselves from the war machine by tax refusal or changing occupations.
That was the most concrete advocacy of war tax resistance by a Quaker institution in years.
Franklin Zahn wrote a booklet on Early Friends and War Taxes to reintroduce Quakers to their own history and to further banish the Great Forgetting.
The support from Quaker institutions and publications at this point is often noncommittal and is usually vague about exactly how to go about war tax resistance, which taxes to resist, and how to deal with government reprisals.
There is nothing like the specific, concrete discipline of earlier Quaker Meetings.
This means that Quaker war tax resisters from this period are largely making it up as they go along, conferring with each other informally and organizing, when they are organizing, in groups like Peacemakers, the War Resisters League, and the Committee for Non-Violent Action — that is to say, with non-Quaker groups.
(There was briefly something called the “Committee for Nonpayment of War Taxes” run out of Quaker war tax resister Margaret G. Bowman’s home in , but I have not found much about it.)
Quakers were using a broad variety of tax resistance tactics.
Arthur Evans and Neil Haworth refused to pay some or all of their income taxes or to cooperate with an IRS summons for their financial records.
Johan Eliot redirected twice the amount of his taxes to the United Nations to promote international federalism as a world peace strategy.
Clarissa & Samuel Cooper lowered their family income below the tax line.
John L.P. Maynard and Robert W. Eaton took pay cuts that reduced their incomes to the maximum allowable before federal income tax withholding was mandatory.
Lyle Snyder stopped withholding by declaring three million dependents on his W-4 forms.
Alfred & Connie Andersen stopped filing income tax returns.
Some Quakers fled to Canada as taxpatriates to join the draft evaders there.
Others deposited their taxes into escrow accounts and invited the IRS to seize the accounts while refusing to pay voluntarily.
Lloyd C. Shank advocated “the ‘sneaky’ way” of tax resistance — what many people would call tax evasion — saying “ ‘cheating’ is only an oppressive government’s name for a good man’s refusal to murder.”
Phone tax resistance was beginning to become widespread, and many Quaker meetings began resisting this tax on their office phones (one meeting was unable to reach consensus on resisting the phone tax and compromised by dropping its phone service entirely).
People too timid to resist, and meetings unable to reach consensus on resisting, might instead write their legislators to urge them to enact some form of legal conscientious objection to military taxation.
The most timid groups, like the American Friends Service Committee, urged people to pay taxes “under protest” or to match their war tax payments with additional payments to the AFSC.
Robert E. Dickinson had perhaps the most creative tactic of the bunch.
He designed and built a set of furniture for his home that was formed of interlocking sheets of plywood such that it could be quickly disassembled and hidden away.
He called this “my tax refusal furniture” and meant it to frustrate IRS attempts to seize furnishings from him for back taxes.
Two Quaker employees of two groups within the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting asked their employers to stop withholding income tax from their paychecks, and that Meeting tried to come up with a good policy to follow in such cases.
The fourth Friends World Conference was held in .
The “Protest and Direct Action group” there “called upon Friends in countries party to the [Vietnam] conflict to ‘go as far as conscience dictates in withholding support from their governments’ war-making machinery,’ first by direct communication with those against whom the protest is made, and then if necessary by public witness and individual action, including the possibility of refusal to pay taxes for war.”
U.S. President Johnson called for a 10% income tax surcharge explicitly to fund the Vietnam War.
This would be the first explicit “war tax” (other than, arguably, the phone tax) since World War Ⅱ, and its announcement prompted renewed interest in war tax resistance inside and outside the Society of Friends.
Quakers were, because of this tax, better-enabled to quote the discipline of early Quakers on refusal to pay explicit war taxes as a way of explaining their own stands.
In 203 delegates from “nineteen Yearly Meetings, eight Quaker colleges, fifteen Friends secondary schools, the American Friends Service Committee National Board and its twelve regional offices, and nine other peace or directly-related organizations” met in Richmond, Indiana, to draft a “Declaration on the Draft and Conscription.”
Part of this declaration mentioned the war tax concern:
We call on Friends everywhere to recognize the oppressive burden of militarism and conscription.
We acknowledge our complicity in these evils in ways sometimes silent and subtle, at times painfully apparent.
We are under obligation as children of God and members of the Religious Society of Friends to break the yoke of that complicity.
We also recognize that the problem of paying war taxes has intensified; this compels us to find realistic ways to refuse to pay these taxes.
After only of thaw, some seventy years of Great Forgetting have been melted away, and the Society of Friends has again reached a consensus that Quakers are compelled to refuse to pay war taxes.
President Johnson’s war surtax went into effect in , adding a 7.5% surtax to the income tax returns for , and 10% for (the tax would be extended at a reduced rate into and then abandoned).
Meetings all across the country were discussing and passing minutes on war tax resistance, though few would advocate it in specific and unreserved ways, most choosing instead to voice expressions of unspecified “approval and loving support” for Quakers who felt compelled to resist.
In , the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting passed a relatively strong minute stating:
Refusal to pay the military portion of taxes is an honorable testimony, fully in keeping with the history and practices of Friends…
We warmly approve of people following their conscience, and openly approve civil disobedience in this matter under Divine compulsion.
We ask all to consider carefully the implications of paying taxes that relate to war-making…
Specifically, we offer encouragement and support to people caught up in the problem of seizure, and of payment against their will.
The New York Yearly Meeting decided to begin resisting corporately by refusing to honor liens on the salaries of tax resisting employees (though it could not reach consensus on a refusal to withhold income tax from such employees), and, , by refusing to pay its own phone tax.
The American Friends Service Committee finally decided to do something concrete about the war tax question, but it was a little odd.
They withheld and paid taxes from a war tax resisting employee and then sued the government for a refund.
The strange structure of their process seems to have been a very deliberate way to structure a legal suit for maximum effectiveness, and it did (briefly) show some success.
A court ruled in , on First Amendment freedom-of-religion grounds, that the government could not force the organization to pay the taxes of an objecting employee — alas, the Supreme Court almost immediately, and overwhelmingly, overturned this.
Also in , Susumu Ishitani, a Japanese Quaker, formed a war tax resistance group in Japan — the first example I am aware of from Asia.
By , the Friends Journal’s coverage of war tax resistance is less occupied with advocacy, debate, and the presentation of individual exemplars, and is more concerned with the practical aspects of how Quakers are going about it.
The editorial stance shifts again, to one of more forthright advocacy.
It is assumed that Quakers want to avoid paying war taxes, and the question is how to do so well.
The ending of the U.S. war on Vietnam did not seem to slow the enthusiasm for war tax resistance.
In the Friends Journal devoted an issue to the subject for the first time.
In Robert Anthony began another attempt to get the courts to legalize conscientious objection to military taxation.
It went nowhere, but notably, in a letter to the court, his monthly meeting wrote:
We assert that the free exercise of the Quaker religion entails the avoidance of any participation in war or financial contribution to that part of the national budget used by the military.
If not exaggerated for effect, this statement would be among the strongest yet articulated by a Quaker institution in this renaissance period — not simply expressing support for war tax resisters, or encouraging Friends to consider resisting, but asserting that to practice the Quaker religion necessarily meant to refuse to pay war taxes.
In , Quakers met with their Brethren and Mennonite counterparts to draft a joint statement that encouraged war tax resistance — the “New Call to Peacemaking.”
The Philadelphia Yearly Meeting asked its ongoing representative meeting to draft some formal guidance for Quaker war tax resisters for how they should go about it, and to set up an alternative fund to hold and redirect resisted taxes.
(New England Yearly Meeting began its own alternative fund for resisted taxes .)
By this time war tax resistance is a core part of any discussion of the Quaker peace testimony, and there are increasing calls for Meetings to resist taxes as an institution.
In the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting approved a minute on war tax resistance that pulled its punches a bit:
Our strength and our security are derived from our belief in the reality of a loving God and the oneness of that of God in all people.
In order to say yes to this belief, we must seriously consider saying no to payment of war taxes.
This “seriously consider” compares poorly to discipline of times past (e.g. “a tax levied for the purchasing of drums, colors, or for other warlike uses, cannot be paid consistently with our Christian testimony” [Ohio Yearly Meeting, 1819]).
It also, some Quakers point out, sometimes pales next to the more direct and certain advice from some meetings that young Quaker men resist the draft.
As more Quakers and Meetings feel the pressure to take a stand on war taxes, the more timid ones are increasingly desperate to find ways to do so without actually having to resist.
Silly ideas, like writing “not for military spending” in the memo field of their tax payment checks, and “peace tax fund” ideas proliferate.
By , Quakers in Canada and Australia are floating their own peace tax fund legislation ideas.
Meanwhile, Quakers in England seem to have gotten the tax resisting bug.
The Friends World Committee for Consultation and London Yearly Meeting stopped withholding income taxes from twenty-five war tax resisting employees in , putting the money in escrow.
(This resistance was short-lived; after losing a legal appeal in , they went back to withholding.)
In war tax resistance, according to Friends Journal reports, was a “major preoccupation” of the London Yearly Meeting, and a “burning concern” at the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting (where “unity could not be achieved”).
Lake Erie Yearly Meeting encouraged its Monthly Meetings “to establish meetings for sufferings to aid war tax resisters.”
Pacific Yearly Meeting started an alternative fund.
Smaller Monthly and Quarterly meetings around the country were beginning to take even stronger stands.
The Minneapolis and Twin Cities Meetings approved a minute that asked “all members of our meetings to practice some form of war tax resistance”!
The Davis (California) meeting passed a similar minute.
Monthly Meetings are assembling “clearness committees” to help each other find responses to the war tax problem that are appropriate to their conscientious “leadings.”
also, the Friends General Conference promoted the idea of Quakers giving interest-free loans to them, a thinly-veiled (not explicitly stated) way of hiding assets from IRS:
…Friends loan money to F.G.C. at no interest, which F.G.C. invests to earn income which is used to support the varied programs of the Conference, such as publications, religious education curricula, and the ongoing nurture program.
These loans provide regular dependable monthly income to the Conference, and reduce the interest income on which the lender must pay federal income taxes, while providing the lender with protection against unforeseen financial reversals.
F.G.C. will repay the principal amount within 30 days after receiving a written request from the lender.
All principal amounts are kept in insured investments.
In the Friends Journal, now edited by a war tax resister, devoted another issue to the subject.
Non-resisting Quakers were now very much on the defensive.
One complained that at the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting , taxpaying Quakers like him “were compared to the Quaker slaveholders of , and not a dissenting voice was raised,” but even he had to acknowledge that war tax resistance was “in the mainstream of Quaker thought, and therefore entitled to support from Quaker bodies.”
The meeting itself though could only agree to issue another minute that would “not urge” Friends to resist, but would “give strong support” to those who did.
In , the Friends World Committee for Consultation held a war tax resistance conference in Washington, D.C., and formed a standing “Friends Committee on War Tax Concerns.”
, they held a conference for Quaker organizations that had war tax resisting employees.
The conference was attended by 35 people, including representatives from 21 such organizations.
They were united by an interest in supporting the war tax resistance of their employees in an open and honest fashion, in a way that included the redirection of the resisted taxes to beneficial causes, and that used the “clearness committee” process.
You definitely get the feeling that momentum is building and Quaker war tax resistance is having a vigorous revival.
Unfortunately, though, it seems to me that this is the high-water mark.
In surprisingly little time the tide will begin to recede.
But there is still some forward progress to be made.
In the London Yearly Meeting declared:
We are convinced by the Spirit of God to say without any hesitation whatsoever that we must support the right of conscientious objection to paying taxes for war purposes…
We ask Meeting for Sufferings to explore further and with urgency the role our religious society should corporately take in this concern and then to take such action as it sees necessary on our behalf.
The Friends United Meeting adopted a policy of not withholding taxes from resisting employees as well.
The Philadelphia Yearly Meeting soon followed suit, and refused to withhold federal taxes from three war tax resisters on the payroll (after a legal battle, they would pay “under duress” ).
The Baltimore Yearly Meeting also adopted such a policy, in .
In another conference for employers of tax resisting employees was held, this one expanded to include Mennonite and Church of the Brethren employers.
The Friends Journal got an IRS levy on the salary of its editor, and it devoted a third issue to the topic of war tax resistance.
Some Quakers begin using the tax resistance tactic in the service of other causes, such as opposition to capital punishment or nuclear power.
In an early sign of the receding of the war tax resistance tide, the Friends World Committee for Consultation retired its “Friends Committee on War Tax Concerns” in favor of a “Committee on Peace Concerns.”
From here, sadly, it’s pretty much all downhill.
In the next and final segment of this series on the history of Quaker war tax resistance, I’ll try to describe and explore the second “forgetting.”
Today, another item of interest I found in a back issue of Friends Bulletin, the journal of the Pacific Yearly Meeting of Quakers.
As I noted a few years back when I was looking through back issues of the Friends Journal, the American Friends Service Committee could be relatively conservative about war tax resistance, despite being so prominent in a lot of Quaker peace activism.
Here’s another data point that shows that there was some heartfelt seeking going on behind the scenes.
The American Friends Service Committee is currently considering some unprecedented action to respond to the terrible challenge of the war in Vietnam.
The National Board and other parts of the Service Committee are now weighing
what sacrificial financial effort they will ask themselves and other Friends
to make as individuals… They feel that they must find the way to say that we
must support young men who refuse war service in Vietnam, deny moral sanction
to U.S. military
intervention in Vietnam and encourage churches and other religious bodies to
do the same, support those who refuse their skills as scientists, engineers,
and administrators to produce instruments of death, encourage citizens and
soldiers to consider whether there are moral grounds for them to resist
policies or disobey orders that would require them to engage in what their
consciences clearly have told them are wrong, assist those who conscientiously
resort to civil disobedience on such things as payment of taxes for war
purposes, and so on.
The group asked me to say to Yearly Meeting that It [sic] is possible
to alter one’s way of life, to live more simply, to recognize that $600 of
every $1,000 of income tax we pay supports war expenditures and $200 of that
supports the war in Vietnam. They wanted me to say that the time has come for
us to look honestly at our own lives in the light of what is happening in
Vietnam.
They wanted me to say that we may want to tithe or tax ourselves for peace and
that if our situations are such that we cannot tithe or tax in money, we may
be free to rearrange our lives so that we can tithe our time for working as
volunteers.
This was followed by two “statements… presented by the Peace Committee and,
after consideration and revision, …approved by the Yearly Meeting” including
the following “Statement on Taxes”:
Many Friends feel a growing conflict between their testimony for peace and the
taxes they pay for war. Friends, individually and together, are encouraged to
examine their own economic involvement in creating conditions and institutions
of both war and peace.
In the Discipline of Pacific Yearly Meeting
(pp. 41, 42) “Friends are urged
to consider carefully the implications of paying those taxes a major portion
of which go for military purposes.” An increasing number of Friends and
like-minded people have been led by conscience to express their protest of
such taxes in such ways as the following:
By a letter of protest included with their tax payment, in which the
religious basis of their objection is explained.
By a letter of tax refusal in which the reasons for refusing to pay all or
part of the tax are set forth.
By a formal request for return of taxes paid under protest, or of taxes
and penalties which have been seized from the resources of tax
refusers.
By bringing suit against the government for recovery of such taxes when
such requests for return are denied. Technical information regarding this
is available from the Peace Committee.
By refusing to file an income tax form and sending a letter of
explanation.
By refusing to pay the 7% telephone tax recently added to monthly
telephone bills to help finance the budget deficit caused by Vietnam, and
sending a letter explaining this action.
By pledging not to buy automobiles and other items on which the increased
excise tax for Vietnam is levied.
By lowering their income below the taxable level and informing the
government that this is a protest against war taxes.
Whether or not Friends are moved to such acts of protest as these, they are
urged to take all possible deductions when filing income tax returns. Such
deductions not only reduce taxes paid for war, but make available additional
money which can be invested in Friends’ work for peace.
Believing that effective protest is grounded in the vision and enthusiasm of
affirmation and positive action, some Meetings are assisting their members in
sending a self-imposed tax of 1% of income each year to the United Nations.
Individual Friends have been moved to contribute each month to the United
Nations and the American Friends Service Committee a voluntary tax for peace
equal to the amount they now pay in taxes used for military purposes.
While it is recognized that such acts of protest or affirmation are ultimately
matters of individual conscience, Friends would encourage concerned
individuals among them in their efforts to act in harmony with the light of
conscience, and would support them in such acts as they are led by the Spirit
to take. To this end meetings are urged to make information about possible
courses of action available to concerned members and to counsel and assist
those members seeking to act on their concerns about payment of war taxes.
Freund gives a brief overview of the history of conscientious tax resistance
that seems to me to understate it, though it’s possible that in
less evidence was easily available.
[I]t was not until the Vietnam War that tax resistance became a significant form of Christian witness against war.
One of the early Vietnam-era tax resisters was William Faw, a minister of the Church of the Brethren, one of the historic peace churches.
Faw had not come to my attention before, but Freund tells his story as follows:
William Faw: “Here I Stand; I Cannot Do Other”
William Faw was born in in Nigeria where his parents were missionaries for the Brethren Church.
His father took a post teaching at Bethany Seminary, and the family moved to Chicago where Bill grew up.
He went to college in Indiana and then attended the seminary until his graduation in .
While at school Faw was compelled to confront the issue of the draft. “Both my
parents were pacifists so I had decided early on that I would either be a
resister or a conscientious objector; I could not accept a student or
ministerial deferment in good conscience,” explains Faw. Despite his religious
background it still required a two-year battle with the draft board to obtain
his CO
status. By the time he received
CO status
he had a family and was never required to perform alternative service.
He received his first assignment in at the Douglas Park Church of the Brethren, a poor, multiracial community on the West Side of Chicago.
It was during this period that Bill Faw became a tax resister.
Faw explains that decision, saying, “I was a self-employed pastor and my wife was not working so we had control over our tax payments.
Since my wife was also a pacifist, we felt that it was necessary to protest the Vietnam War.
The question was, ‘How can we do this together?’ We spoke with several other Brethren who had been refusing taxes and listened to political leaders who opposed the war.
By early we decided to refuse to pay our taxes in full knowledge that it could lead to criminal punishment.”
When the time came to file their income tax
return, the Faws sent the
IRS a
long letter explaining why there was no check enclosed. Other resisters had
engaged in resistance by refusing even to file a return, but Faw believed that
a religious witness should be made in an open and public manner. The Faws’
letter made clear the personal struggle which accompanied their decision:
We refuse to willingly contribute to a “war machine” which is engaged in the very brutal war in Vietnam… In the past we felt that the ambiguities of tax paying outweighed the war-tax issue.
That is, our government’s expenditures for foreign aid, law enforcement, programs in health, education, and welfare, agriculture, urban redevelopment, and poverty fighting are worthy of support… Events have occurred which lead us to reconsider our responsibilities as citizens.
We feel we can be true to our national citizenship only if we oppose a so-called “non-war” that has not been constitutionally declared.
We feel that we can be true to our international citizenship as spelled out at the Nuremberg Trials only if we disassociate ourselves from and actively protest our unjust, illegal, morally deplorable, aggressive offensive against human beings in Vietnam.
But most basically we feel that we can be true to our Christian discipleship
only if we oppose… the seizure of God’s prerogative by the United States in
attempting to become the philosophical, theological, executive, legislative,
judicial, and policing agency for the entire world; only if we oppose the
exploiting of American “racism” by
A-bombing, napalming,
scatterbombing Asians; only if we oppose the mode of “evangelistic effort”
our nation is making in Vietnam to show the Buddhists what being a
“Christian” nation means…
Thus we are led to withhold our income tax and to seek constructive alternative ways of sharing our income… In God’s name, and under his judgment, we pray that we might choose the best path to make our witness.
…As a result, they chose to donate the tax money to the Canadian Friends Service Committee for the relief of war victims.
They were well aware that some of those victims who would be helped by their money were North Vietnamese and Viet Cong; they believed this action to be consistent with Jesus’ command to “love your enemy.”
The Faws refused to pay their income taxes for the next five years, donating
the funds to various international relief agencies. The Internal Revenue
Service sent an agent to attempt to obtain the taxes directly. When this
failed the
IRS
placed a levy on the Faws’ bank account and was able to collect the back
taxes. The Faws were not threatened with criminal penalties.
Freund says the Faws were also resisting their phone tax, but returned to being taxpayers in the wake of the Paris Peace Accords.
However, as of the writing of the book, they were planning to become resisters again by refusing a percentage of their income tax:
The continuing military buildup, especially nuclear weapons, has led us to resume tax resistance… We are being lulled into accepting more and more.
Johnson tried to give us guns and butter, but Reagan’s policy of sacrificing butter for guns represents a barbaric reversal of priorities.
Freund asked about the practical effectiveness of individual tax resistance.
…Faw conceded that it would be far more powerful if institutions were to openly advocate and practice tax resistance. “If one church did it, even a small one like the Brethren, the Mennonites, or the Quakers, it would have a tremendous impact on some of the liberal mainline denominations,” Faw believes.
However, even the New Call To Peacemaking, a grassroots movement within the historic peace churches begun in , of which Faw was the local chairman for two years, has failed to adopt a position of total resistance to war taxes.
This has been a source of frustration for Bill Faw, but he nevertheless believes in the importance of individual witness, “I would still do it even if no one else did.
There comes a point, with Vietnam or the arms race, where you say, ‘I’m not going to participate in that, no matter what the cost.’ It’s kind of like Martin Luther saying, ‘Here I stand; I cannot do other.’ ”
Freund then briefly described “A Simple Methodology” for Christians who were considering war tax resistance, covering the options of 1) paying taxes under protest, 2) voluntary poverty, 3) refusal to pay.
He then tried to discern what sort of guidance might be found in the Bible, considering the difficult “Render unto Caesar” and “the powers that be are ordained of God” sections in particular.
Then he returns to the problem of the lack of institutional support for war tax
resistance among Christian churches:
War Taxes: Where the Churches Are
Bill Faw and tax attorney William Durland express frustration that the churches, as national institutions, have not taken clear positions in support of tax resistance.
Durland, who counsels tax resisters, says, “Some church body will have to declare that it stands by the Gospel and not by the IRS.
This could have a chain reaction effect and lead to a coalition of churches to make it work.”
What holds them back? According to Faw, many Brethren have expressed “concern
for the biblical ambiguities regarding taxes, concern over the maintenance of
a certain respectability, and fear of the consequences.” Durland is somewhat
more cynical, “The Pope speaks out against war and then honors the Italian
Army.”
What is the position of the churches?
The historic peace churches, representing 400,000 members in the United States, have been discussing the issue since .
In , the Church of the Brethren recommended that, “Although the Brethren cannot agree as to whether tax withholding is proper, they can all recognize the propriety of using the means of dissent which the social order itself recognizes… We recommend that all who feel concern be encouraged to express their protests through letters accompanying their tax returns, whether accompanied by payment or not.” Many employees of these churches have not been satisfied with this position and have urged church agencies to refuse to withhold their federal taxes, a violation of the law.
The American Friends Service Committee (AFSC), responded by challenging the constitutionality of withholding as an infringement on the right of religious expression.
In the Supreme Court ruled in AFSC v. U.S. that a lower court ruling in favor of the AFSC was invalid and ordered AFSC to continue to withhold.
The AFSC has complied with that order since.
Pressure from employees of the Mennonite Church to refuse to withhold led to the following resolution adopted in , “We request the General Board to engage in a serious and vigorous search to pursue all legal, legislative, and administrative avenues for achieving a conscientious objector exemption from the legal requirement that the conference withhold income taxes from its employees.”
The New Call to Peacemaking
(NCP), a
more radical caucus within the three peace churches, has gone somewhat
further. In and again in
the
NCP
called upon members of the historic peace churches “to seriously consider
refusal to pay the military portion of their federal taxes, as a response to
Christ’s call to radical discipleship.” However, attempts to go further and
adopt a position which called “paying for war a sin parallel to the sin of
fighting war” was rejected. As one pastor at the meeting said, “We are calling
my congregation into deep water when they haven’t even gotten their toes wet.”
The mainline Protestant denominations have reacted cautiously or ignored the issue.
There is a growing movement within the Unitarian Universalist Association to take a position in favor of tax resistance.
One of the leaders of this effort is Rev. Philip Zwerling of the First Unitarian Church of Los Angeles.
He says, “Nowhere is military madness more manifest than in the nuclear arms race… and on one day of the year — April 15 — we break down and pay for it all… Is it not moral schizophrenia to blithely pick up the tab for the military mania that we speak out against?
It’s time to put our money where our mouth is.” However, for all the strength of this statement, the denomination as a whole has not adopted this position.
At the General Conference of the United
Methodist Church a resolution was adopted calling for support of those “who
conscientiously object to the payment of taxes for military purposes.” Here,
too, the group stopped short of calling on church agencies themselves to
engage in tax resistance.
Although large numbers of Roman Catholics are engaged in various forms of tax resistance, the church has taken no official position.
According to Father Bryan Hehir, Associate Secretary for International Justice and Peace of the U.S. Catholic Conference, “We have no policy on tax resistance… and I have not adopted a position intellectually on it.” Activist and author Father Daniel Berrigan thinks this position is becoming increasingly untenable, “More and more the question of paying federal taxes is going to become a question of conscience.
The government is stealing money and turning it into blood money.
We’re going to be pushed into a corner on whether we can recognize… our Christianity.”
Freund then recapped the example of (Catholic) Archbishop Raymond Hunthausen.
Excerpts:
Addressing the Pacific Northwest Synod of the Lutheran Church in America… Hunthausen surprised his audience by suggesting what form their action might take, “I would like to share a vision of an action which could be taken: simply this — a sizable number of people in the State of Washington, 5,000, 10,000, a half million people refusing to pay 50 percent of their taxes in nonviolent resistance to nuclear murder and suicide… Form 1040 is the place where the Pentagon enters all of our lives, and asks our unthinking cooperation with the idol of nuclear destruction.
I think the teaching of Jesus tells us to render to a nuclear-armed Caesar what that Caesar deserves — tax resistance.”
Reaction in the community was mixed, but leaders of eight other Christian
denominations in Seattle announced their general support for the stand of the
Archbishop… However, they stopped short of endorsing tax resistance, saying
they would “encourage discussion of tax resistance” and offer support to
“those who refuse to pay taxes in protest of the arms race.”
At the time of his speech the Archbishop openly stated that he himself had not yet refused to pay taxes, but that it was troubling his conscience.
Several months later he acted.
In a pastoral letter published in the Seattle archdiocesan newspaper, Hunthausen declared, “After much prayer, thought, and personal struggle, I have decided to withhold 50 percent of my income taxes as a means of protesting our nation’s continuing involvement in the race for nuclear arms supremacy… I am saying by my action that in conscience I cannot support or acquiesce in a nuclear arms buildup which I consider a grave moral evil.”
…However, Pacific Northwest United Methodist Bishop Melvin Talbert said that “while the city’s ecumenical leadership is supportive of Hunthausen, none has indicated that he or she is prepared to follow suit with similar personal acts of tax resistance.”
Freund ends the chapter with a nod to the World Peace Tax Fund Bill idea, taking it at face value and noting that “[c]hurch support is broad.”
“Protest at the offices of COSEP. We call on the business sector to join efforts to organize a tax strike and indefinite general strike. We are not afraid… the struggle is just beginning!”
Irlanda Jerez, leader of the tax strike among merchants in
Nicaragua’s Mercado Oriental, was
seized by masked police officers , held incommunicado, and swiftly given a
three-year sentence on what strike me as trumped-up charges
unrelated to the protests.
Calls for more widespread tax refusal and for a general strike are
growing louder. there
was a protest at the offices of
COSEP
[Supreme Private Business Council], a sort of private sector business union
that represents various industry and chamber of
commerce groups. The group, while nominally opposing
the Ortega/Murillo crackdowns and promoting protests, has been
dragging its heels when it comes to challenging the regime with
stronger action. It is under pressure from citizens who want it to be
bolder.
This is the seventeenth in a series of posts about war tax resistance as it was
reported in back issues of The Mennonite. Today we
enter the 1970s.
The edition noted:
“Tentative plans are being made for a professor from Bethel College… to work
with a seminar group for six to ten weeks in a study program for six hours of
college credit. The topic for study is ‘The Draft, Income Tax, and Defense
Spending.’ ” More details
could be found in the edition.
“The seminar will emphasize a total learning experience through study, action,
and group living.” Tax refusal was one of the topics on the agenda.
A
meandering letter from Theodore Janzen dated and published in the edition complained of dancing in public schools, trashy sex talk
in The Mennonite, and “the Mennonite hippie problem”
on the way to having this to say about war tax resistance:
Sure, I am against war and at the same time I pay my taxes. Contradictions!
You bet! I’m not going to fight the great white father in Washington. If I did
nobody would help, and everybody would laugh and tell me, “You never had it so
good!” That’s what happens when I have a crop failure; nobody helps.
But then read the Bible. Give unto Caesar which is Caesar’s, unto God which is
God’s.
Right now, I am more concerned about the dancing than the war…
The edition included a brief
item about the American Friends Service Committee’s lawsuit asking “for the
return of funds which were paid to the government in lieu of federal income
taxes collected from employees conscientiously opposed to war.” (See
♇ 15 July 2013 for more about this
case.)
The purpose of the
MENNO fund
is to help with the following:
Legal costs because of conscientious civil disobedience (tax refusal,
noncooperation with draft, refusal of induction) related to militarism, civil
rights, and religious freedom.
Aid to dependents and families of persons engaging in conscientious civil
disobedience.
Fines and bail for persons engaging in acts of conscientious civil
disobedience.
Grants or loans for personal items (college debts) to persons engaged in
conscientious civil disobedience.
The edition included a long
essay by Phil Kliewer entitled “Did the cat get Menno’s dove?”
that took Mennonites to task for becoming too blasé in their opposition to
violence and war. Some excerpts:
People tell me that the government recognized us by legislating the
alternative service program and respected us for our good use of it.
That is all very fine, except that the recognition and respect has not gone
much further than this. Were we only looking for recognition and respect?
A few of our people are saying no to violence, and sacrificing family
life, wealth, social relations, or personal freedoms. They have refused to
render unto Caesar what belongs to God, in the form of war tax resistance and
draft resistance.
Just a few of these Mennonites are: Dan Clark, who has just recently turned in
his draft card, and is awaiting court procedures; Dennis Koehn, who is
awaiting jail sentence; John Howard Yoder, whose bank account has been frozen
for tax resistance…
What is creative, radical, nonviolent commitment? Can it work? To answer these
two questions, perhaps we can take a look at recent history.
During Franz Josef
of Austria tried to subordinate Hungary. The people of Hungary refused to
recognize Austria, and boycotted Austrian goods. When the Austrian tax
collectors came around, they were treated very kindly, but given no tax money.
Austrian police confiscated property, but could not persuade the Hungarian
auctioneers to sell it. When they brought in their own auctioneers, no one
would bid, and to bring in bidders was not worth the trouble. The Austrian
government then declared boycotting illegal, but the persistent Hungarians
refused to recognize this and soon the jails were overflowing.
Austria then offered partial government, but the Hungarians insisted on full
claims. After trying a compulsory military service, which was destined to fall
flat, Austria gave up. Throughout, the Hungarians remained nonviolent but
unswayed. Their creative, radical, nonviolent commitment was effective.
In , the Bombay provincial government raised
the tax rate to 60 percent, for the people of Bardoli. Vallabhai Patel led a
tax-resistance movement to nonviolently prevent this economic injustice from
actually taking place. This took a lot of planning. Sixteen camps were put up
in the district, where 250 volunteer leaders printed daily bulletins and
trained the eighty-eight thousand peasants to withstand the punishment they
received. The government tried flattery, bribes, fines, flogging,
imprisonment, confiscation, and other means to persuade the peasants to
comply, but the peasants, with their nonviolent methods, eventually persuaded
the government to comply to their wishes. Again, creative, radical, nonviolent
commitment won out.
Government should be God’s servant for man’s good. Its role is to maintain
order and to preserve life. Christians should appreciate and support the
worthy functions which government performs. They should willingly pay generous
proportions of their incomes for taxes which finance education and other
functions which are for man’s good.
But when government is not God’s servant for man’s good, Christians should
seek to be a correcting force. Christians are not called to submit to every
demand of every state. When Paul instructs the Roman Christians
(Rom. 13:7)
to give “tax to whom tax is due, toll to whom toll, respect to whom respect,
and honor to whom honor,” he is saying that we are to discriminate and give to
each only his due, refusing to give to Caesar what belongs to God.
Mennonites throughout history have refused when a government demanded that
they go to war. Our conscientious objectors today carry on this vital
tradition. But how can we, in clear conscience, pay someone else to do for us
that evil which we refuse to do ourselves?
In earlier days men were the primary tools of war. But now the primary tool of
war is money. Military technology needs only a few men. This is making
conscientious objection to military service less and less meaningful.
Conscientious objection to killing will have to take new and different forms
if it is to retain its vital significance.
James Stauffer, missionary to Vietnam under the Eastern Mennonite Board, wrote
recently in the Mennonite Weekly Review: “The time
has come for the peace churches to request a plan whereby our tax dollars
could be channeled directly to some constructive cause. Campus protests,
street demonstrations, draft card burnings have not been effective in stopping
the war. But choking off the funds that feed the military-industrial complex
could bring results.”
Sixty to 70 percent of our income tax dollar is spent in payment for past and
present wars, or in preparation for future wars. The average Western District
congregation of two hundred persons, in ,
paid $65,000 in war taxes to the Internal Revenue Service. Western District
members paid $4,250,000 to buy guns, napalm, and hand grenades. We pay two and
one-half times more in war taxes than we give to our church and its outreach.
What is the meaning of Christmas bundles given to refugees when we bought the
bombs that destroyed their homes?
Let us ponder the words of our late President Eisenhower, who was not a
pacifist: “Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired
signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed,
those who are cold and not clothed.”
Is paying war taxes responsible Christian stewardship? Ought we not as
brothers of those who are hungry and cold, refuse to give up our resources for
destruction, and give our war tax money to authorities who will use it as
God’s servant for man’s good?
We move that the Western District Conference ask the Peace and Social
Concerns Committee to:
Provide information to local congregations and individuals on the
following ways in which Christians have through word and deed sought to
witness against the destructive functions of government made possible by
war taxes:
Pay the income tax, but include a letter of protest to the Internal
Revenue Service explaining why payment of these taxes makes us violate
the law of love that Christ gave us to follow. The letter can urge the
government to use tax money only for peaceful and constructive purposes
either through the United Sates Government or through the United Nations.
We can send copies of this letter to our Congressmen and our President,
among others.
Refuse to pay that portion of our income tax which goes for war and
contribute the same amount to some constructive service agency, such as
Church World Service or UNICEF
of the United Nations. We will not make obstacle nor withhold any
information which
IRS
might need to collect these taxes.
Refuse to pay the federal telephone tax which was instituted in
to pay for an escalated war in Vietnam.
A brochure is available and titled, “Hang Up On War.”
Reduce or share our incomes so that they will be below the income-tax
level, and, thereby, we will avoid payment of war taxes by legal and
sacrificial means. This method also diminishes the amount of indirect
taxes we pay by a higher level of consumption, and puts us nearer to the
world average standard of living.
Petition appropriate legislatures or in some way seek to create an
alternative peace tax to which conscientious objectors to war (of any age)
could pay the military portion of their income tax. This alternative fund
would be comparable to alternative service and would be used for such
projects as promote world peace by nonmilitary means.
Help Mennonite agencies and employers to investigate alternative
structures of operation so that they will not be required to withhold
income tax from their employees’ pay. John Howard Yoder, president of the
Goshen Biblical Seminary has said: “There is something very questionable
about the willingness with which Mennonite church agencies, by withholding
their employees’ income, serve as arms of the federal government for tax
collection which thereby relieves the individual of any conscious choice
concerning the bulk of his tax money… We would object to the states
collecting taxes to support the church, yet without compunction we let
church agencies collect to support the state (and the military).”
We also ask the Peace and Social Concerns Committee to help employees
whose income tax is already withheld to find appropriate ways of making a
witness against the payment of war taxes.
The above statement was prepared by Ardean L. Goertzen Max Ediger, Howard
Snider, David H. Janzen, Dennis Koehn, Stan Senner; and recommended for
adoption by the Peace and Social Concerns Committee to the Western District
Conference of the General Conference Mennonite Church which adopted it at its
annual meeting at Hillsboro, Kansas, .
Western District takes stand on war taxes
Should Christians pay war taxes?
That’s a hard question. One Mennonite body studied a soft answer to this
question, and made it softer after forty-five minutes of cautious debate.
The Western District Conference meeting in Hillsboro, Kansas, in
, was told that its members “pay two
and one-half times more in war taxes than we give to our church and its
outreach.”
Another question: “What is the meaning of Christmas bundles to refugees when
we bought the bombs that destroyed their homes?”
And Western District members through their war taxes have bought quite a few
bombs, guns, napalm, and grenades. One estimate set the figure at $4,250,000
per year.
“I heartily endorse the idea of protesting taxes,” said Curt Siemens, Buhler,
Kansas, as the topic of nonpayment of war taxes was introduced.
But along with other delegates, he was concerned about the practical
consequences of nonpayment of war taxes since the government could deprive a
family of its livelihood as a penalty. Then, how would the church and the
conference raise the funds to support its missions and schools?
Others saw the demands of Christian obedience as prior to the practical
questions.
“What is the meaning of asking these kinds of practical questions about
raising our budgets and educating our children, yet we make pious speeches
about wanting to be biblical and obedient?” asked Peter Ediger, Arvada,
Colorado. “What is the meaning of seeking first the kingdom of God and all
these things will be added unto you?”
Several persons testified that they had withheld a portion of their taxes as a
protest to war or would do so if given encouragement.
“I can’t see eye to eye with those who don’t want to pay taxes,” said one
delegate. “All I say is, ‘Go ahead. Why don’t you do it?’ ”
“That’s just the point,” replied Wendell Rempel, Newton, Kansas. “What is
going to be our relationship to those who take that step?”
At this point, the Western District Conference waffled.
The resolution presented for adoption said, “We move that the Western District
Conference recognize nonpayment of war taxes as a valid Christian witness” and
thus asked for a program of education and actions based on the assumption that
tax refusal was a “valid Christian witness.”
This was seen by some delegates that “everyone ought to [withhold his war
taxes] as a Christian.”
Said Marvin Zehr, Moundridge, Kansas, “It may give encouragement, but it will
also cast judgment. Even if I do it, I don’t know if I want to cast judgment
on someone else,”
So the conference considered a motion that struck the words “valid Christian
witness” from the resolution’s enabling clause. Delegates voted 93 to 63 to
drop these words. The resolution thus weakened was then quickly passed by a
voice vote.
The resolution thus adopted still calls for a broad program of education and
action. It asks the Western District’s Peace and Social Concerns Committee to
provide information on the ways of tax refusal which have been used by various
individuals. Such methods include the filing of a letter of protest with full
payment of income tax or withholding a portion of income tax and contributing
it to a service agency. Withholding the telephone tax or reducing one’s income
below the taxable level were also methods in which more information was
requested.
The Peace and Social Concerns Committee was further requested to petition
government agencies for an alternative peace tax for conscientious objectors.
And Mennonite agencies and employers may expect to receive counsel about their
role in collecting income taxes.
The resolution quoted John Howard Yoder as saying, “There is something very
questionable about the willingness with which Mennonite church agencies, by
withholding their employees’ income, serve as arms of the federal government
for tax collection which thereby relieves the individual of any conscious
choice concerning the bulk of his tax money.”
The statement saw the tax refusal as a natural extension of the traditional
position of conscientious objection to war.
“Mennonites throughout history have refused when a government demanded that
they go to war,” it said. “Our conscientious objectors today carry on this
vital tradition. But how can we, in clear conscience, pay someone else to do
for us that evil which we refuse to do ourselves?”
James Stauffer, missionary to Vietnam under the Eastern Mennonite Board, was
quoted as saying, “The time has come for peace churches to request a plan
whereby our tax dollars could be channeled directly to some constructive
cause. Campus protests, street demonstrators, draft card burnings have not
been effective in stopping the war. But choking off the funds that feed the
military-industrial complex could bring results.”
The resolution as presented to the Western District Conference was prepared by
six interested individuals: Ardean L. Goertzen, Max Ediger, Howard Snider,
David H. Janzen, Dennis Koehn, and Stan Senner.
The Western District statement adopted on represents the first time that any Mennonite body has taken a public
position on war taxes.
At the annual assembly of the Mennonite Central Committee Peace Section in
another such resolution was tabled,
asking the assembly “to make a declaration to be taken to Vietnam pledging
Mennonite support to end the war through tax refusal, draft resistance, and
other forms of civil disobedience.”
An article
about the assembly framed the debate in a generation-gap way, with younger,
more radical students pushing, and older delegates reluctant to go along. In
any case, “[a]fter the statement was debated with considerable emotion, the
activists changed the document from one representing the Mennonite church as a
group to a statement to be signed by individuals.”
A letter from Wanda (Steven) Schmidt to President Nixon lambasting the Vietnam
War appeared in the edition.
It included these thoughts:
I am against war and will not give you my children. Nor will I pay my federal
income tax as sixty-five cents out of every dollar goes for defense. Nor will
I pay the U.S. tax
on my telephone as it goes entirely for Vietnamese War expenditures.
Kansas City — (INS) –
The Rev. Lawrence Scott of Kansas City withheld one-third of his federal income tax payment to protest government expenditures for military purposes.
Rev. Mr. Scott, director of the Interracial Fellowship House, said he was a member of a tax refusal committee of a national pacificist [sic] organization known as the Peacemakers.
He mailed the internal revenue collector $29.21, two-thirds of his tax due for .
He added that he was sending the remainder of $15.04 to the Fellowship of Reconciliation in New York “for the promotion of peace between nations.”
A Baptist minister, Rev. Mr. Scott said the amount of tax he withheld represented the proportion of the national income “being used for armaments and other expenditures relative to preparation for war.”
Scott is credited as founder of the Committee for Nonviolent Action, which advocated for war tax resistance and other forms of nonviolent direct action in the peace cause.
Although the article above says he was a Baptist minister, I think that he had joined the Society of Friends by .
In he became Peace Education Secretary for the Chicago office of the American Friends Service Committee, but he resigned in with a bang after the organization refused to support his tax refusal stand, publishing his resignation letter in which he criticized “effete middle-class Friends of today” for their cheap words of peace at a time when action was called for.
(As I noted a while back, the AFSC is very timid and conservative, particularly around the war tax resistance issue.)
From the edition of Tempo, a magazine of the National Council of Churches, comes this article by Margaret H. Bacon (who was information director of the AFSC at the time):
Must Pacifists Pay for War?
As the war in Indochina drags wearily on, more and more Americans are seeking ways to protest their unwilling complicity in a struggle which they regard as immoral.
There are more conscientious objectors in relation to draft age Americans than ever before in our history, more draft resisters, more protesters within the army.
And a small but growing band of war weary citizens are turning to another method of protest: refusal to pay that portion of Federal income taxes which supports the war.
“Why should I send my dollars to war when I myself refuse to fight?” the war resister asks.
“How can I prove the sincerity of my protest if I am too old for the draft, or the wrong sex, unless I am willing to take this simple positive step?”
Tax resistance is not new in this country.
First the Quakers and then the Mennonites brought the notion with them when they came as settlers.
In Pennsylvania, Quakers in the government agonized for years over raising war taxes at the request of the British crown, while private citizens often refused to pay either militia fees or war taxes.
Many Friends Meetings kept records of Sufferings which were largely accounts of property seized by the militia from members for non-payment of such taxes.
Other New Englanders seized upon the idea of civil disobedience.
William Lloyd Garrison made non-resistance a part of his abolitionist campaign.
Women suffragettes took up the theme.
In one famous case, Abbey Kelley Foster and her husband, Stephen S. Foster, refused to pay taxes on their farm because Abbey did not have the right to vote.
Modern Tax Resisters
Tax refusal, however, remained the act of a mere handful until after World War Ⅱ, when a few hundred pacifists decided to band together to reinforce each other’s determination not to pay taxes, to urge others to join with them, and to work for conscientious objector status for their tax dollars.
In , the Internal Revenue Service announced that 848 individuals had refused to pay a portion of their taxes on their income.
The figures will undoubtedly be much higher, since a spirited campaign was launched to increase tax resistance as part of the anti-war demonstrations of .
One roadblock in the way of the individual who wants to refuse to pay a portion of this income tax has been the withholding tax.
Many men and women find when April 15 rolls around that they do not owe the Government any money; their tax has already been collected by their employer.
In fact, the Government may owe them a refund.
A few individuals have tried to surmount this problem recently by claiming a large number of mythical dependents — in one case, all the wounded children in Vietnam — and informing IRS of this.
Others have pressed the organization for which they work to stop playing the role of tax collector.
Since Federal law compels organizations to withhold taxes from their employees, most employers have felt unable to comply with this request.
Even churches and service organizations dedicated to peace — even the strictly pacifist groups — have regretfully continued to serve as tax collectors.
Because of the obvious dilemma faced by a pacifist employer in demanding that his pacifist employee pay war taxes, such organizations have been seeking with increasing vigor for a way out of the double bind.
A possible source of relief to this situation appeared on the national scene when the American Friends Service Committee, a well-known Quaker organization, filed a complaint against the U.S. government for the return of AFSC funds which were paid to the government in lieu of Federal income taxes collected from employees conscientiously opposed to war.
The suit, which was entered in the United States District Court of Eastern Pennsylvania, may reach the Supreme Court because of the constitutional issue raised.
The Service Committee had long been under pressure to take this step from employees who were opposed to paying war taxes.
In its complaint to the government it stated that individual employees had threatened to resign and contributors had questioned the propriety of their donations while the AFSC continued to play the tax collector role.
The AFSC was in fact eager to find a way out, but it took several years of committee meetings and conferences with lawyers to formulate the case now before the courts.
The AFSC Claim
During , the AFSC began to honor the requests of several employees that it cease to collect from their salaries that percentage of their Federal income tax which goes for war purposes.
(51.6 percent according to the Friends Committee on National Legislation as of .)
When it came time to make quarterly payments to the IRS for withheld taxes, the AFSC took from its own general funds the sum of $574.09 to make up the deficit.
It is for the recovery of these funds that the claim is made.
Two AFSC employees are also serving as plaintiffs in the case.
They are Lorraine Cleveland, 60, Director of the Family Planning Program of the AFSC, and Leonard Cadwallader, 27, Director of Youth Affairs.
Mrs. Cleveland, who has been with the Quaker organization , has been a tax resister .
Every year she and her husband refused to pay and the Government took the money from their bank account.
Cadwallader, who is married and has a young baby is making his first income tax protest , though he and his wife had previously refused to pay the Federal war tax on their use of the telephone.
In Boston, two additional employees are planning to enter a similar suit, enjoining the AFSC to cease serving as the Government’s tax collector.
It is hoped that between these two suits the constitutional question involved will be brought to public attention.
At issue, the AFSC feels, is the right of the Government to compel an organization founded on conscience to violate the conscience of its employees.
“The Federal withholding tax which compels the AFSC to collect military taxes as hereinbefore defined from those of its employees who are by reason of religious training and belief conscientiously opposed to participation in war in any form, is in direct violation of the religious liberty guaranteed by the First Amendment to the United States Constitution,” the Quaker claim states.
If the AFSC wins its suit, the implications for all religious organizations are immense.
Even if it loses, the issue of conscientious objector status for tax dollars will have been brought more widely into public debate.
In , the colony of Rhode Island in consideration of its Quaker citizens wrote the first exemption for those of “tender conscience” to participation in warfare:
Be it therefore enacted, and hereby it is enacted by his Majesty’s authority, that no person (within this Collony) that is or hereafter shall be persuaded in his conscience that he cannot or ought not to trayne, to learn to fight, nor to war, nor to kill any person or persons, shall at any time be compelled against his judgment and conscience to trayne, arm, or fight, to kill any person or persons by reason of or at the command of any officer of this Collony, civil or military, nor by reason of any by-law here past or formerly enacted, nor shall suffer any punishment, fine, distraint, penalty, nor imprisonment, who cannot in conscience trayne, fight or kill any person, or persons for the aforesaid reasons.
Perhaps in tender conscience in regard to warring tax dollars will win equal recognition.
You can find out more about the AFSC lawsuit, which briefly succeeded but ultimately fizzled, in an earlier Picket Line entry.
