Some historical and global examples of tax resistance → United States → Vietnam War, ~1965–75 → Writers & Editors War Tax Protest, 1967 → Kennett Love

Penn State University has shared on-line a letter from Ronald Gross to Irving Horowitz from inviting him to join the writers & editors war tax protest — giving us a behind-the-scenes look at how that protest’s impressive list of names was recruited, and at an early draft of the ad text.

Writers and Editors War Tax Protest
Attention: Gerald Walker
145 West 86th Street
Apt. 7D
New York, N.Y. 10024

Fellow Writers and Editors:

Join us in signing the enclosed statement proclaiming our refusal to let our tax dollars support the war in Vietnam. Tell us in writing that we may list your name with ours in ads and statements. Send us your check for $10.00 or more (payable to Writers and Editors War Tax Protest) to pay for advertising and other expenses. Ask other writers and editors to join. Mail copies of this letter and the enclosed statement, “We Won’t Pay” (which will comprise the substance of ads we plan to run), to your own list of colleagues. Extra copies available at $1.00 per hundred, plus 25¢ for mailing.

How we will go about tax refusal

  1. Should President Johnson’s surcharge be adopted by Congress, we will refuse payment. We will not add this extra war tax to our current tax when preparing our return and we will enclose a letter with our return explaining why.
  2. Many of us will also deduct from our tax the 23% which represents the amount currently being spent on Vietnam.

Possible consequences

It is a violation (up to one year in prison and/or up to $10,000 in fines) of Sec. 7203 of the Internal Revenue Code willfully to refuse to pay federal income taxes. However, of the 421 signers of a similar no-payment ad in , not one has been prosecuted and sentenced; of the estimated 1500 additional protest non-payers, none has been prosecuted since the war began. The IRS, so far, has chosen to exercise the power to collect unpaid tax money by placing a lien on refusers’ income or attaching their bank accounts or other assets, when these can be traced. In addition, a penalty of 6% interest is charged annually on the unpaid tax balance, a rate estimated to be less than the collection expense.

Join us.

Initial Signers of the Enclosed Statement

We Won’t Pay

Vietnam drags on. Casualties rise, $28 billion are wasted yearly, U.S. prestige and moral fabric rot away. No solution, political or military, is in view. The President’s prescription is more of the same — 45,000 new men (for a total of 525,000) and a proposed 10% income tax increase specifically for this undeclared, unconstitutional, unprofitable, and unjust war.

“The needs of this country’s riot-shaken cities are being neglected to pay the war bill,” The New York Times has editorialized. It is time for escalation by those who want peace in order to focus on our critical domestic dilemma. Peace marches have not worked; nor have pickets, protest ads, teach-ins, or pleas to the President’s conscience by public figures here and abroad. We are not consoled by reports of atrocities committed by the other side; we want to stop those committed by our side. So we must now go beyond mere expressions of dissent to strong, affirmative, and dramatic action by responsible citizens.

We, the undersigned writers and editors for publications and publishing houses large and small, have not had to give our lives in Vietnam — that has fallen on younger Americans. But we have lent our passive support in the form of our tax dollars. From now on, we are willing to lay our middle-class lives on the line in pledging:

  1. That none of us voluntarily will pay the proposed 10% income tax surcharge, or any war-designated tax increase.
  2. That many of us will also refuse to pay that part of our current income tax (23%) being used to finance the war.

Many of us, too, will give an equivalent sum to humanitarian organizations. Even so, this was not an easy decision to make. We have been law-abiding, tax-paying citizens all our lives, and we are now subjecting ourselves to possible legal penalties of up to one year in prison and/or up to $10,000 in fines for willful non-payment of taxes. But we believe our taxes should not be used to support a war that violates not only our own Constitution but the Charter of the United Nations.

By this act, we aim to awaken the Administration to the fact that a significant number of responsible citizens are so fundamentally opposed to this war that they are willing to go to this extreme. And we wish to show other Vietnam-haunted Americans that there is a simple, swift, effective way to vote no-confidence in the Administration’s policy. It can be done individually or in groups. It cannot wait until the 1968 presidential election. Your ballot is your next tax return, and other ads such as this placed in every newspaper in the land.

There are not enough prisons to hold the millions in this country who, according to Gallup and other recent polls, strongly oppose this ugly war. Time now to end our tacit acceptance of what is being done in Vietnam in our name.

Writers and Editors War Tax Protest

Additional Signers of the Enclosed Statement

  1. Joseph M. Fox
  2. Isabel W. Fox
  3. Andre Schiffrin
  4. Dianne Harris
  5. Janet Schulman
  6. Anne Reit
  7. Hunter Thompson
  8. Erika Munk
  9. Saul Gottlieb
  10. Kelly Morris
  11. John Speicher
  12. Caroline Trager
  13. Eric Lasher
  14. John Hopper
  15. Merle Miller
  16. Howard Zinn
  17. Charles Lam Markham
  18. Hal Scharlatt
  19. Elizabeth Bartelme
  20. John McDermott
  21. Sally Belfrage
  22. John Simon
  23. Selma Shapiro
  24. Ralph Ginzburg
  25. Elinor Langer
  26. Richard Kostelanetz
  27. Thomas R. Brooks
  28. John J. Simon
  29. Walter Arnold
  30. Richard Marek
  31. Tod Gitlin
  32. Frances Fox Piven
  33. Ned O’Gorman
  34. Berenice Hoffman
  35. Bennett Sims
  36. Carl Morse
  37. Jackson MacLow
  38. Dwight Macdonald
  39. Noam Chomsky
  40. James Leo Herlihy
  41. Paul Jacobs
  42. Iris Lezak MacLow
  43. Aaron Asher
  44. Peter Kemeny
  45. David Segal
  46. Thomas D. Barry
  47. Alan Rinzler
  48. Robert Markel

Much of the text of the above declaration didn’t make it in to the final advertisement (I’m guessing it was cut down to make room for the many names of signers, but maybe there was more to it than that). Horowitz himself did not make the list.

, David Welsh of Ramparts sent Horowitz a follow-up letter:

Dear Mr. Horowitz:

I am enclosing a copy of the statement signed, so far, by 220 writers and editors who pledge to refuse payment of the proposed 10 per cent income tax surcharge or any tax increase earmarked for the Vietnam War. At this writing, seven New York Times writers and editors have signed. We plan to run a full-page advertisement in the Times in , giving the quote from Thoreau, the pledge and the list of names. The placing of the ad will coincide with Congressional debate on the tax surcharge. By that time we hope to have 500 persons pledged to refuse payment.

If you would be interested in signing the statement, please fill in the blank and mail it in as soon as possible. And please tell your writer and editor friends about it and urge them to do the same. As Thoreau said, “If a thousand men were not to pay their tax bills this year, that would not be a violent and bloody measure, as it would be to pay them, and enable the State to commit violence and shed innocent blood.” During his incarceration for refusal to pay his war tax, Thoreau was paid a visit by Emerson, who asked, “What are you doing in here?” To which Thoreau replied, “What are you doing out there?”

I feel strongly that the collective involvement of writers and editors in the nation’s politics should not stop with the War Tax Protest. Many of our colleagues share this view, and are preparing this fall to organize local chapters of what can become a national writers and journalists association. An organized and articulate “intelligentsia” can be a political force in America as it is in France. And it must become a political force if the increasingly oppressive policies of the present United States government — in Vietnam, in Southern Africa, in Latin America, and here at home — are to be permanently reversed. Not to organize, not to amplify our voices so that an ill-informed America may hear alternatives, is to accede, in effect, to the policies of the present government. For more information, please write me immediately at 377 Green Street, San Francisco, California 94133.

Included with this letter is a somewhat different version of the proposed ad:

How does it become a man to behave toward this American government today? I answer that he can­not without disgrace be associated with it. … In other words, when … a whole country is overrun and conquered by a foreign army, and subjected to military law, I think it is not too soon for honest men to rebel and revolutionize. What makes this duty the more urgent is the fact that the country so overrun is not our own, but ours is the invading army… There are thousands who are in opinion opposed … the war … who, esteeming themselves children of Washington and Franklin, sit down with their hands in their pockets, and say that they know not what to do, and do nothing… They hesitate, and they regret, and sometimes they petition; but they do nothing in earnest and with effect. They will wait, well disposed, for others to remedy the evil, that they may no longer have it to regret… What I have to do is to see, at any rate, that I do not lend myself to the wrong which I condemn… If a thousand men were not to pay their tax-bills this year, that would not be a violent and bloody measure, as it would be to pay them, and enable the State to commit violence and shed innocent blood.

— Henry David Thoreau, Civil Disobedience, commenting upon American involvement in the Mexican War.

We the undersigned writers and editors, believing that American involvement in Vietnam is morally wrong, pledge:

  1. None of us voluntarily will pay the proposed 10% income tax surcharge or any war-designated tax increase.
  2. Many of us will not pay that 23% of our current income tax which is being used to finance the war in Vietnam.

Following this was a sign-up sheet, asking signers to agree with the statement “I believe American involvement in the war in Vietnam is morally wrong,” and giving three further options:

  • “As a writer/editor, I wish to add my name to the Writers and Editors War Tax Protest. I dissociate myself from my government’s actions in Vietnam and I am willing to use my next tax return to vote no-confidence in the present Administration. I enclose a check (payable to Writers and Editors War Tax Protest) for $10.00 or more to help pay for running this statement as a newspaper advertisement and for other expenses.”
  • “I am in sympathy with what you are doing. Enclosed is my check for $____.”
  • “I would like more information. Please send me your fact-sheet on tax refusal.”

A number of additional signers had been added to the list by this time:

(Spock was listed out-of-order and in a different typeface in the original.)

Kennett Love

In , the Washington Monthly carried a story about war tax resisters written by Kennett Love, himself a signer of the “Writers and Editors War Tax Protest” pledge.

Tax Resistance: Hell No — I Won’t Pay

“We believe that the right of conscientious objection to war belongs to all the people, not just to those of draft age,” says a pamphlet now being sent out across the country from a littered, poster-bright office on New York’s Lower East Side. It carries a radical call to the citizenry to come out against the war in Vietnam by refusing to pay taxes that finance the war.

Such tax resistance is now gathering adherents outside traditional pacifist circles. Although it is still far from a major headache to the government, Internal Revenue Service men are being assigned to locate bank accounts of resisters and to seize the sums due — plus six per cent interest. Out of the frustration of the anti-Vietnam-war segment of the population, which is growing rapidly according to the polls; out of dashed hopes raised by peace promises and peace gestures from the Nixon and Johnson Administrations alike; and out of a feeling that orthodox democratic forms of protest — elections and demonstrations — have been ignored, an increasing number of otherwise law-abiding people are following their consciences into what Gandhi called the last stage of civil disobedience by openly refusing to pay part or all of their federal taxes.

The chief targets of the tax-resistance movement are the income tax, particularly the 10 per cent war surtax imposed last year, and the 10 per cent federal excise tax on telephone service. Other federal taxes have been rejected either as too complicated to resist, such as the liquor tax, which is collected at the wholesale level before individual purchase, or as earmarked for such non-war uses as highway construction. One pacifist, imprisoned for draft refusal and therefore lacking income to refuse taxes on, gave up smoking because the cigarette tax brings the government more revenue than any other single consumer-commodity tax.

The telephone tax is the most popular one to resist, partly because it was the first to be specifically linked to the war in Vietnam and partly because the American Telephone and Telegraph Company has proven courteous in its handling of tax resisters. The telephone tax was due to be reduced to three per cent in . In approving the White House request for its extension of the 10 per cent level, Chairman Wilbur Mills (D-Ark.) of the House Ways and Means Committee said: “It is clear that the Vietnam and only the Vietnam operation makes this bill necessary.”

Resistance to the telephone tax began soon afterward. Karl Meyer of Chicago, a former Congressman’s son and a free-lance writer immersed in pacifist causes, conceived the idea and proposed it to Maris Cakars of the War Resisters League in New York. Meyer drafted a pamphlet, “Hang Up On War!,” which has become a staple among the literature distributed by the War Resisters League through the mails and at peace booths. It explains the link between the telephone tax and the war, summarizes moral and legal objections to the war, and provides practical advice for resisters of the tax, including a candid assessment of the possible risks. Of the risks, it points out that under Section 7203 of the Internal Revenue Code, which covers both the telephone and the income tax, one who “willfully fails to pay” could be imprisoned for up to one year and fined up to $10,000. It adds that the experiences of tax resisters over the past several years show that the government is not willing to press criminal charges but, instead, acts to collect the taxes (with interest) directly, when and where it can.

AT&T records indicate that telephone tax resisters were relatively unmoved by President Johnson’s famous “abdication” speech on , but that about a quarter of them resumed payment of their telephone taxes at in the belief that President-elect Nixon would end the war. A table of the telephone company statistics follows, giving the number of telephone tax refusers at the end of each quarter :

QuarterNo. of resisters to telephone tax
1,800
2,300
2,600
3,400
3,400
4,700
5,300
4,700
4,000
4,000

The figure for is not available yet, but the revived intensity of the anti-war movement, manifested in the national student moratorium on and the big demonstrations on , presage an increase.

Measured against the telephone company’s 43,459,000 residence customers, the percentage of tax resisters is minuscule. But in view of the seriousness of the act of tax resistance, the number of resisters is a source of satisfaction and encouragement to the leaders of the movement.

A spokeswoman for the telephone company told me its standing orders are to continue service to tax resisters so long as its own charges are paid. The company notifies the IRS of tax non-payments so it can do its own collecting. If a tax resister informs the local business office of the telephone company that he is deliberately omitting the tax from his payment, the office will not carry the tax charges forward to his next bill. “It would seem logical to assume that we don’t like to be a collecting agency,” she said, “but we do what we’re obliged to do.” She said that telephone tax resisters are located mainly in college communities.

Income tax resisters, although fewer than telephone tax resisters, appear to be a more stubborn breed, unmoved by political gestures and prepared to hold out until the war actually ends. An IRS spokesman in Washington gave me a statistical summary of the growth of such tax resistance. So far as he knew, it first became a public issue when Joan Baez, the singer, refused in to pay 60 per cent of her income tax in an act to dissociate herself from what she called the immoral, impractical, and stupid war in Vietnam. She refused the same proportion in and wrote the IRS: “This country has gone mad. But I will not go mad with it. I will not pay for organized murder. I will not pay for the war in Vietnam.” Joan Baez and a scattered handful of old-line pacifists, a few of whom had been refusing war taxes , were not worth keeping statistics on, so far as the IRS was concerned.

Then, in , a committee under the chairmanship of the Reverend A.J. Muste circulated a tax-refusal pledge among persons on the mailing lists of the Committee for Non-Violent Action and the War Resisters League. They obtained 370 signatures for an advertisement in The Washington Post that stated: “We believe that the ordinary channels of protest have been exhausted…” Joan Baez headed the list of signers. According to an IRS analysis, about one-quarter of the signers had no taxable income, about one-half cooperated with the IRS to the extent of telling the agent who called on them where their money could be seized, and about one-quarter put the IRS to the trouble of ferreting out their bank accounts. The number of actual resisters came to about 275.

the IRS began keeping a count of tax protesters. The number rose to 375. In there were 533 taxpayers who refused part or all of their income taxes and wrote the IRS that they were doing so in protest against the Vietnam war. there were 848 who set themselves against the law on grounds of conscientious objection to the war. The IRS spokesman told me that roughly three-quarters of the income-tax protesters live on the east and west coasts and that the same proportion held for persons refusing to pay the telephone tax.

IRS spokesmen emphasize that the number of refusers is only a tiny fraction of the total number of taxpayers. There were some 71 million returns filed in , about 73 million in , and 75 million in . But again, tax-resistance leaders find significance in the fact that the very idea of tax refusal was unthinkable to nearly all of the resisters until their consciences impelled them to it. Furthermore, although the numbers are small, the rate of increase of tax resisters is far greater than the annual increase in tax returns.

Fear of prosecution and jail is a deterrent to potential tax refusers. Many people fail to recognize the distinction between clandestine tax evasion and open tax refusal. The IRS makes the distinction, however, and has shown no inclination to prosecute persons refusing taxes because of the Vietnam war. An IRS spokesman said earlier this year: “Is IRS going to ask the Justice Department to go to a federal grand jury and get a jury trial to put a man in jail for a dollar, when all we have to do is go to his bank account?” Tax-resistance leaders believe also that the government wishes to avoid the publicity attendant on a prosecution, largely because a test case might produce a martyr and create sympathy for the movement. The few prosecutions in recent years have been for refusal to file returns or disclose information rather than for refusal to pay.

War tax refusal in this country is older than the United States itself. It began in when Mennonites and Quakers refused to pay taxes for the French and Indian wars. They refused again during the American Revolution and the Civil War. The most famous early instance was that of Henry David Thoreau, who spent a night in jail in for refusing taxes in protest against our invasion of Mexico. He explained in his essay on civil disobedience that he could not “without disgrace be associated with it” and added: “If a thousand men were not to pay their tax bills this year, that would not be a bloody and violent measure, as it would to pay them, and enable the State to commit violence and shed innocent blood.”

Gandhi, who was deeply influenced by Thoreau, wrote in that “civil non-payment of taxes is indeed the last stage in non-cooperation. …I know that the withholding of payment of taxes is one of the quickest methods of overthrowing a government.” He went on to say: “I am equally sure that we have not yet evolved that degree of strength and discipline which are necessary… Are the Indian peasantry prepared to remain absolutely non-violent, and see their cattle taken away from them to die of hunger and thirst? …I would urge the greatest caution before embarking upon the dangerous adventure.” But Lord Mountbatten said with relief after India became independent: “If they had started to refuse to pay their taxes, I don’t know what we could have done.”

The idea of modern, organized tax resistance in this country against armaments and war seems to have begun with the Peacemaker Movement, which was formed by 250 pacifists who met in Chicago early in . In , the Peacemaker Movement published the first edition of a mimeographed Handbook on Non-Payment of War Taxes, which contains practical advice and case histories. The handbook has now run to three editions and nearly 10,000 copies. It points out that since the bulk of the federal budget (estimates range from 66 to 80 per cent) goes to pay for past wars, finance the Vietnam war, and prepare for future wars, “it is apparent that the major business of the federal government is war… it is useless to act as if the major business of government is civil functions or peaceful pursuits.”

In , a little more than a year after A.J. Muste’s committee published its tax protest advertisement with 370 signers, Gerald Walker of The New York Times Magazine began to organize a Writers and Editors War Tax Protest, in which all the signatories pledged themselves flatly to refuse the then-proposed 10 per cent war surtax and possibly the 23 per cent of their income taxes allocated to the war effort as well. As was the case with the Reverend Muste’s advertisement, most daily newspapers that Walker approached refused to sell space to him. The New York Times was one that refused and so, this time, was The Washington Post. The New York Post printed Walker’s advertisement in , as did The New York Review of Books and Ramparts. In all, 528 writers and editors signed the pledge. Walker told me recently that about half of them, including himself, failed to carry out the tax-refusal pledge. “Johnson’s ‘abdication’ two weeks before the tax deadline convinced me that we had won,” he said.

I was myself among the other half of the signers who did refuse part of their taxes — 23 per cent in my case, the 10 per cent surtax not having gone into effect. Since my own hesitant involvement in war tax resistance seems typical among the non-pacifists now joining the movement, I will summarize it here as the case history I know best. With my part payment of my income tax, I wrote the IRS as follows:

Enclosed please find my check for $1,862.81, which is 77 per cent of the tax required. The 23 per cent unpaid is a protest against the government’s use of that proportion of its revenue for the war in Vietnam. My conscience revolts against the gross immorality of the war… There are also questions of law. The war violates the supreme law of our land, notably the Constitution (Art. Ⅰ, Sec. 8, clause 11), the United Nations Charter (Art. 51), and the Southeast Asia Treaty (Art. Ⅳ)… Responsible jurists and philosophers soberly accuse our government of crimes against international codes on human rights and the conduct of wars and the specific statutes created ex post facto to punish the Nazis…

The prodigal waste of our national energy and treasure in destroying the land and people of Vietnam is so weakening this nation that other powers may bring us to judgment as we once brought the Nazis to account at Nuremburg… It will then be no defense to plead, like the “good Germans,” that we had to obey our government and cannot be held responsible for what it did. By paying taxes which I know my government is using to kill a small nation I commit a greater and more violent breach of laws than I do by not paying…

I was a Navy pilot in World War Ⅱ. I would not serve in this war. If I could prevent my tax dollars from serving, I would do so. Unfortunately, I have not yet learned of a practical way to keep the government altogether from extracting financial support from me for the war. In the meantime, I balk at 23 per cent in token of my dissociation from the cruel injustice and bloodshed to poor and distant strangers being done under my flag, in my name, with my money.

The IRS reply did not come until after I had refused a similar amount of taxes . It was a form postcard saying: “Dear Taxpayer: Thank you for your letter. We are looking into the matter you brought up and should have the answer to you shortly… Thank you for your cooperation.” The answer, inevitably, was a series of printed forms, progressing from a “notice of tax due” to a “Final Notice Before Seizure.” The IRS had already seized telephone taxes, which I stopped paying in , from three bank accounts, patiently tracking down the bank to which I transferred my account after each seizure. The IRS obtained the unpaid part of my tax, plus six per cent interest, in . At this writing I am awaiting implementation of the Final Notice Before Seizure of the refused portion of my taxes. Banks are required by law to surrender private assets, including the contents of safe deposit boxes, to the IRS upon demand. Most banks surrender the levied amount immediately and the depositor is informed afterward.

This whole business of deliberately defying and harassing the government, even in a moral protest, is a heavy and anxious experience. When I first considered it in I was unaware that some hundreds of other people were already doing it. I was afraid of going to jail, which, among other things, would have prevented my fulfilling a contract to complete a book. I began refusing the telephone tax after obtaining the pamphlet “Hang Up On War!” from a pacifist in Princeton in . The Writers and Editors War Tax Protest, which came to my attention , gave me a sufficient sense of safety in numbers to begin income-tax resistance.

I am still troubled over possible consequences, particularly after the conspiracy convictions in the Dr. Spock trial, and I find it innately distasteful to resist paying my share of the general tax burden. But my revulsion against the war in Vietnam prevails over anxiety and civic reservations. And the Nixon Administration seems as unwilling or as unable as the Johnson Administration to make a significant and credible effort to end the war. In the country voted for Johnson and peace and got an escalation of the war. In , between Nixon and Humphrey, there was no real opportunity to vote for peace. Demonstrations have proven equally futile as a means of affecting war policy, so much so that the President declares that he will not be swayed by them. Under these circumstances, tax resistance, distasteful as it is, seems to more and more people to offer the most effective channel of protest.

I participated in the formation of War Tax Resistance, which is working to transform tax protests from essentially individual acts into an integrated political factor. The leading figure in the organization is Bradford Lyttle, a slim, earnest, no-nonsense pacifist who led a peace march across the United States and Europe to Moscow, urging unilateral disarmament on governments along the way and exhorting citizens toward non-cooperation with military service and war production. Its “Call to War Tax Resistance,” claiming the right of conscientious objection for taxpayers as well as draft-age men, says:

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

In a separate but related action, the poet Allen Ginsberg and I have obtained the backing of the National Emergency Civil Liberties Committee for a suit against the government to recover money that has been seized from us in enforcement of tax claims and also to enjoin further seizures. The main ground of our action, as it is now being prepared, is based on the historical equivalency between taxes and service (which is a kind of tax) and the claim that the right of conscientious objection is as inherent to taxpayers as it is to men liable for military service. Conscientious objectors cannot avoid service but they can earmark their service to the exclusion of warlike activity. In the same way, we claim, taxpayers should pay their full share but they should be able to earmark their taxes to the exclusion of war-like applications. In a time when weaponry has achieved the capacity to wipe out civilization, we believe, the people should be accorded a direct voice in deciding whether they shall make war. Since World War Ⅱ the decision has moved ever more into the hands of the executive despite the Constitutional stipulation that it is Congress which should declare war.

Meanwhile, until we are legally able to earmark our taxes for non-warlike applications, we feel conscience-bound to resist paying at least a part of them.

Get Yourself a Peace. Seventy cents of every 1969 tax dollar went to pay for the costs of America’s past wars and the War in Vietnam. You spend $400 yearly on the Vietnam War. Where was your peace, and how can you go about getting it? Tax resistance is what some people have decided to do for peace. They have kept the 10% Federal Tax on telephone bills. All of this tax is allocated to War costs. Customers who have refused to pay, and submitted a written explanation to the telephone company, have not had their service discontinued. Telephone officials simply forward these messages to Internal Revenue. Others have declined to pay the 10% surtax, all of which was levied in 1968 to pay war costs. And a few people have withheld the percentage of their tax that supports the Defense Establishment. These funds, placed in an escrow account, generate income used to promote and support human resource projects. The time has come for you to get a peace. A form of tax resistance could get you a big one. For more detailed information, contact: Boston War Tax Resistance…

from the edition of Cycle

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

If a thousand men were not to pay their tax bill this year, that would not be a violent and bloody measure as it would be to pay them and enable the State to commit violence and shed innocent blood.

Henry David Thoreau

A Call to War Tax Resistance

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

For moon and other space exploration $3.4 billion.

For farm subsidies to wealthy landowners $3.1 billion.

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

Slum rebuilding $1.9 billion.

Other poverty programs $7.2 billion.

Health programs $1.8 billion.

Educational programs and subsidies $3.7 billion.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Methods of Refusal

Refuse to pay at least $5 of your tax
The first goal of War Tax Resistance is to convince as many people as possible to refuse at least $5 of some tax owed the government. Nearly everyone can do this by refusing their federal telephone tax or part of their income tax. If hundreds of thousands refuse to pay $5, they will establish mass tax refusal. Besides having the burden of collecting the unpaid amounts, the government will be faced with the political fact of massive noncooperation with its warmaking policies.
Better yet, refuse to pay all the taxes you can
Even if some of your taxes are withheld, you can refuse to pay the balance and other taxes. These might include: taxes on additional income, the 10% surtax, and the telephone tax.
You can refuse to pay that percentage of your tax that goes for war
Two thirds or more of the federal budget pays for wars past, present, and future. To protest against war, a person can refuse that percentage of his tax. He can base his refusal on the percentage of the total national budget used for war, on the cost of the war in Vietnam, or on other calculations. Some people pay part of their tax and contribute the rest as a peace tax. Some give to the UN, or a relief agency, or some other organization engaged in peaceful, constructive work.
You can refuse to pay the 10% surtax
This surtax was imposed in to help pay for the war in Vietnam. Refusing to pay it is a direct protest against the war.
You can refuse to pay the federal telephone tax
The federal telephone tax was revived in to help pay for the war. Thousands are already not paying it. In all cases known to us but one, the telephone companies have continued service and referred the tax collection to IRS.

To Reduce or Eliminate the Withholding of Your Taxes You Can

Claim additional dependents

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

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

Make your employer an ally
Although the law reads that it is illegal not to withhold taxes from an employee’s wages, your employer may be sympathetic to your protest and be willing to assist — and make a protest of his own — by not withholding from your salary. It is always valuable to raise the question.
Organize an employment agency
Have your agency hire you and then have your present employer hire the agency to supply him with you. Naturally, an agency that you control will not withhold taxes from its employees. Getting organized is complicated, but if you and a few friends get together you can work out the problem. Write us for information.

Also You Can

Demand a refund
There are four ways to do this:
  1. You may request a refund right on the 1040 form and stand a good chance of receiving it. Ask for a tax credit on Part Ⅴ of the form.
  2. You may file form 843 for a refund.
  3. If the above demands are refused, go to the Income Tax Board of Appeals. If the Board turns you down, sue.
  4. You can also sue the government to refund all your taxes on the grounds that the taxes have been used for illegal and immoral purposes.
Protest by letter or in person
Any protest to IRS or other government officials will help express opposition to the war and to militarism. If you are unable to refuse taxes, protest them as vigorously as you can.

Maximize the Impact

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

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

Organize or join demonstrations at your local IRS office.

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

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

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

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

Sponsors of War Tax Resistance

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

Working Committee (in formation)

  • Norma Becker
  • Maris Cakars
  • Frank Collins
  • John Darr
  • Jerry Dickinson
  • Ralph DiGia
  • Bob Haskell
  • Neil Haworth
  • Peter Kiger
  • Kennett Love
  • Bradford Lyttle
  • Mark Morris
  • Christopher Pollock
  • Melinda Reed
  • Kay Van Deurs
  • Eric Weinberger
War Tax Resistance, 339 Lafayette Street, New York, N.Y. 10012, Phone (212) 228-0450. ☐ I would like to join War Tax Resistance. ☐ I am not ready to join W.T.R., but please place me on your mailing list. ☐ Please send me more information about the following methods of war tax resistance: (blank) ☐ Pleas send me (blank) additional copies of A Call to War Tax Resistance (6 for 25¢; 30 for $1). ☐ I am already resisting war taxes (on a separate sheet please list the taxes you have not paid, since which year, the consequences to date, and any other pertinent information). ☐ You may use my name in publicizing W.T.R. ☐ I am interested in becoming a W.T.R. counselor; please send me more information. Enclosed is $(blank) to support the work of W.T.R. Please send copies of this Call to the attached list of people. Name (blank), Address (blank), Telephone (blank)