Ceresole seems to be best-known today as the founder of Service Civil International, which organizes volunteers to do beneficial work around the globe to promote a more peaceful world.
He was a Swiss pacifist conscientious objector and war tax resister through both World Wars, and was frequently jailed for this (Switzerland, though a notoriously “neutral” country, had a program of mandatory military service and military taxes).
He also, much like Ammon Hennacy in the United States, refused to go along with air raid drills and other war preparation measures — Ceresole would be regularly arrested for placing lighted candles in the window of his home when the power was cut for blackout drills.
For Peace and Truth is mostly short excerpts — many are one- or two-sentence aphorisms — from notebooks that he wrote for himself, documenting how he prodded himself along as he struggled to be a better Christian.
The following are some that caught my eye, though as I am a nonbeliever my eyes tended to skip quickly through the ones that deal mostly with God stuff, so this isn’t a representative sample:
You say: How sad to think that the noblest altruism is, after all, merely a refined kind of selfishness.
I say: How good to think that selfishness, when it is purified and stops being stupid, is exactly the same thing as the noblest kind of altruism.
I have been carried this tremendous distance by the efforts of all the working men who, gritting their teeth, have laid rails in the desert, forged the machines, assembled the hulls of steamers; of all the engineers who directed their labour, of all the research workers who unlocked the secrets of physical science.
We owe to this immense army of men this conquest of vast distances, continuing without intermission for weeks, yard by yard, at a speed which would absolutely annihilate any human lungs; this merciless, relentless speed is the quintessence, the concentrated result of the efforts of all these men. Though they are now dead, they are potently alive.
Their effort has triumphed.
I must not have a closed mind even about the doctrine of not killing; it is possible that an occasion might arise when I had to kill.
It doesn’t seem likely; but if, after careful consideration, my conscience told me to kill, I ought to be able to do so.
The only absolute is the eternal: we must listen inwardly to this.
There is no other way.
Our world is characterized by the temporary acceptance of the most stupid and criminal things.
And people say: “It will always be like this!” — which means:
I am a coward and a criminal and I fully expect to remain one indefinitely.
All this deliberately willed morality is horrible.
You have no right to be moral if it is not your joy, your highest form of artistic expression.
Wrestle for the good life exactly as the poet wrestles to create a beautiful verse, in the same spirit, for the love of the thing itself.
I have the right to dissociate myself from the state at war if I also do so when it wishes to defend my property.
The basic falsity of these long-range methods of war.
If everyone was obliged to thrust his bomb or his piece of shrapnel personally into the body of his enemy, he would realize the horror of what he was doing.
At present the horror gets lost in transit.
All that remains is a beautiful scientific problem.
A dedicated life is only healthy and holy if it is sufficiently simple for the “inspired” person to be able himself to provide all the labour involved in supplying his material needs, or its equivalent.
Reduce and simplify your needs to the point where you can easily satisfy them yourself, so that those who live or claim to live for the Spirit do not thereby add to the burdens of other men, taking away from them the possibility and perhaps the very desire to develop their spiritual life also.
What will it benefit the world if, in developing your spiritual life, you add to the material burdens of others by a corresponding amount? and if, in rising yourself towards the Eternal you as it were oblige someone else to descend correspondingly in the opposite direction.
You will simply have created or increased a state of inequality and injustice without increasing the sum total of spiritual living.
The wrong and anti-natural character of the totalitarian State is shown by its drawing its real support from the mass, from mass-thoughts and mass-feelings as perceived by an individual; but this is not life manifesting itself in spontaneity, the action of God through the heart of a man, natural action in the depths of the individual, of the personality.
Mr. G.H. (member of the Salvation Army) writes: “I often ask myself what would happen to my two sons, pilots in the (British) R.A.F., if ever war broke out; but I tell myself that God can preserve them from all mishap, and I place my trust in him.”
Touching confidence in the partiality of God who will exert himself to protect Mr. G.H.’s sons against “mishap” — the self-same kind of mishap it is their (freely chosen) job to do their best to inflict on others.
So then you consider yourself cleverer than the millions who think they are bound in honour to defend their country?
But after all there are even more millions who believe themselves bound to attack it.
That restores the balance.
We make no progress for peace because we lack the courage to do as much as the soldier, however misguidedly, does for his cause.
During World War Ⅰ, Ceresole at first was paying the special tax that the Swiss government demanded from men who were exempt (for whatever reason) from military service.
After a Swiss conscientious objector was imprisoned for his stand (Switzerland at the time had no legal accommodation for conscientious objectors), Ceresole decided to express his solidarity by refusing to go along with this substitute tax for military service.
In a Sunday School class at my church, someone told the story of how wealthy Russian Mennonites long ago avoided serving in the military by hiring replacements.
“What’s the difference?” someone muttered.
Others in the class agreed.
It seemed that in the eyes of God, there would be little difference between serving in the military and paying someone else to serve in the military.
“Then why don’t we talk about our war taxes?” muttered another person in the class.
“Because that would be too relevant,” was the sarcastic reply.
Ceresole worked with others in Switzerland to try to get some legal protection for conscientious objection, without much success.
In addition to trying to get the government to allow objectors to do some sort of alternative civilian service in lieu of military training, they also tried to remedy the problem of the special military tax that exempt men were required to pay.
Their approach was an interesting one, and one that modern “Peace Tax Fund” promoters might consider:
“The petition [suggested] the creation of a special civilian tax for those refusing to pay on conscientious grounds; this was to be one-third greater than the corresponding military tax, and the proceeds were to be exclusively used for the support of the proposed civilian service.”
Myself, I’m of the opinion that paying your taxes into a “Peace Tax Fund” is no better than just sending them to the IRS without such a ribbon on top.
So to me the proposal from the Swiss conscientious objector movement that I’ve just described would be one-third worse.
But if I believed in the logic behind the “Peace Tax Fund,” I think I’d also be inclined to be willing to pay a premium for my conscience’s sake, and I would think that this would make it easier to sell the proposal to the public and to skeptical taxspenders.
Beatrice and Cornelis (“Kees”) Boeke were pioneers in the international war resistance movement and also steadfast war tax resisters.
I covered a bit of their story , but aside from what is there I wasn’t much able to satisfy my curiosity about them from on-line sources.
But I’ve just finished reading through Fiona Joseph’s new biography of Beatrice Boeke née Cadbury — Beatrice: The Cadbury Heiress Who Gave Away Her Fortune — which gives a much fuller and more nuanced picture of the Boekes’ quest to live a life in line with their ideals.
The Quaker couple already came from a tradition that promoted service, international missionary work, charity, and pacifism.
In addition, Beatrice had financial independence because of her inheritance of part of the Cadbury chocolates company.
The couple gave away a lot of money to international charity, and also helped to nurture the international peace movement — both War Resisters International and the International Fellowship of Reconciliation had their founding meetings at the Boeke home in Holland (where the couple settled after Kees was expelled from England during World War Ⅰ for preaching pacifism and for his suspicious contacts with pacifists on the other side of enemy lines).
Another major figure in the international peace movement at the time, and a major influence on the Boekes, was Swiss pacifist Pierre Cérésole (see The Picket Line, ).
He was present at the meetings of international war resisters at the Boeke home, and soon afterwards the Boekes began to contemplate war tax resistance, which Cérésole had already been practicing for several years.
Cérésole, like Beatrice Cadbury, had inherited shares of stock.
He, however, refused to accept them, not being willing to live on unearned wealth while trying to maintain solidarity with the working class.
“To live on one’s invested income is as debasing as to own slaves,” he wrote, “in fact it is the same thing.”
He believed that the best thing rich Christians could buy with their money was freedom from possessing it: relinquish it, give it away, and remove the barriers it puts up between them and other people.
This made for a challenge to the Boekes, who were sensitive to charges of hypocrisy while being very public in their idealistic (and increasingly revolutionary Marxist) proclamations.
In the couple were imprisoned for refusing to pay their fines after being arrested for unlicensed street preaching — Beatrice while in the last month of pregnancy.
Later that year Beatrice decided that she would give away her Cadbury shares to the workers at Cadbury.
It was harder than she expected.
Other members of the Cadbury family were opposed to the move and there were legal obstacles (the voting shares she had hoped to give away as a way of giving workers greater control over the company were legally-restricted to Cadbury family members, and the law might allow the Boeke children to successfully challenge such a gift when they came of age).
It was not until that she was able to construct a Boeke Trust that satisfied her wishes to relinquish control of the shares and also seemed to cover the legal bases.
By that time the Boekes had adopted a forthright anarchism.
Kees published a pamphlet entitled “Break with the State” and, following its advice, the couple began resisting taxes.
Here is an excerpt from Joseph’s book about their tax resistance:
During the many conferences in Bilthoven, the couple had been exposed to different forms and methods of political activism, one of which struck them as very valid and effective: tax resistance.
They had long been unhappy at the thought of their taxes being used in part to fund the military, and Kees had already tried the novel, though unsuccessful, approach of sending his tax payment directly to the Queen with the request that it be used for charitable purposes.
Sources told him that the Queen had sent the money on to the Finance Minister, where it had been absorbed into the general tax system.
So this tactic was deemed a failure, and more radical action was needed.
The withholding of tax for reasons of conscience had a long history and was regarded by pacifists as a fair form of non-violent resistance.
Pierre Ceresole had done it, and so would the Boekes.
First, Kees wrote to Queen Wilhelmina again to say that they were willing to pay tax, but would withhold the amount that went to the Defence Tax for military purposes (thought to be 42%).
On hearing no response, Beatrice and Kees decided they would refuse to pay tax altogether.
To begin with, reminders came through the letterbox about their outstanding tax bill.
Then further demands arrived, followed by fines for non-payment, which Kees continued to ignore.
Soon the Boekes’ tax bill, along with the accumulated fines and added interest, came to four hundred pounds.
The authorities ordered a forced sale of their assets: the date was set for .
The morning of the sale was grey and drizzly.
Dark clouds loomed in the sky, threatening storms at any moment.
Beatrice opened the door to a sober-looking tax official with a group of bailiffs standing behind him.
The local policeman accompanied the group to ensure there would be no trouble.
The tax official explained to Beatrice that they were going to take goods from the house up to the value of the sum that they owed, and then auction them off.
The sale had clearly been advertised in Bilthoven because many people came, either to gawp or in the hope of getting a bargain.
Although Het Boschhuis was furnished in a simple manner, the bailiffs found plenty of items to remove.
The children were sent upstairs to Helen’s bedroom and listened, no doubt anxiously, as the house was looted.
Almost every removable item was put under auction: the tables and chairs, all the bed frames (although, with some heart, the bailiffs left the mattresses), cupboards, kitchen crockery, the books.
The curtains were taken down from the windows and sold to the highest bidder.
The rugs and strips of linoleum were ripped up from the floor and sold.
Eveline intervened to stop the bailiffs taking the cupboard with the children’s clothes and the local policeman, Berkhoff, in a surprising show of support towards the family, hid some of their silver.
Everything else was sold in the street for a pittance and the amount raised was still insufficient to clear the debt of four hundred pounds.
Worst of all, for the Boeke children watching in distress from the upstairs window, was the sight of Daddy’s grand piano standing out in the street with no protection from the spattering rain.
Nine-year-old Helen was particularly upset.
Beatrice’s engagement present to Kees, the valuable violin also went under the hammer.
Then the bailiffs started on the Brotherhood House next door, removing the beds and any other furniture they could.
Throughout this episode Beatrice and Kees remained calm.
They had the support of their friends, and God was on their side.
These were only material possessions after all, they reassured themselves.
The vulture-like buyers assumed that the couple would want to buy everything back again.
Kees refused, much to their chagrin, and they were forced to find vans and carts to take it all away.
In a remarkable show of composure and quiet determination, Beatrice and Kees went to a public meeting in Utrecht that evening.
They returned to find their friends, the Fletchers, had made the best of the situation.
Eveline had tidied up Het Boschhuis as best she could, cleaning the stone floors from top to bottom to remove the muddy footprints made as the bailiffs had trooped through the house.
She had improvised some curtains by hanging old blankets and a donated bedspread up at the windows.
Beatrice was almost moved to tears to see Ernest’s makeshift table, made out of a wooden trestle.
An old packing box from the cellar did service as a lamp table.
The children were worn out, and fast asleep upstairs as they huddled together on a shared mattress on the floor.
The events of the day had left the couple frustrated but more determined than ever to carry on their fight.
The Boekes felt that in order for their tax resistance to be consistent, they must also refuse to use state-run monopolies like the postal service and railways, relinquish their passports, stop contributing to retirement accounts, and renounce any claim to the protection of the police, courts, and military.
The following year, Kees stopped handling money, and Beatrice joined him in this a year later.
They had also adopted an “open door” policy at their home — anyone was welcome at any time, no need to knock, and the doors were never locked.
This led to frequent thefts — even of the family’s food (though sympathetic friends would sometime sneak food in the same way) — and eventually to the occupation of the family home by vagrants.
Being unwilling to either kick out their new guests themselves or to apply to the police to do it for them, the family — including seven children — abandoned their home and left to live in tents elsewhere.
The Cadbury family, concerned for the welfare of the Boekes and especially for their children, devoted a lot of time and energy to figuring out ways of providing for the Boekes without appearing to do so.
While the Boekes would have angrily rejected any blatant Cadbury family charity, Joseph notes that “[a]lthough Beatrice had relieved herself of the burden of her inheritance, the Boeke family were now dependent on their friends to help and support them.”
In addition, at the Boeke Trust that Beatrice had established to relinquish any claim on the Cadbury fortune and to give control to the workers to pursue their agendas, the welfare of the Boeke children was in fact a top concern.
“Every meeting” of the Trust, Joseph writes, “started with the same agenda item: ‘Care of the Boeke Family.’ ” The trust voted in to pay the Boekes’ back taxes without their knowledge.
The family had also become increasingly isolated.
Their refusal to use the railways or the postal service, and their relinquishing of their passports, meant that they were no longer as able to participate in the international peace movement — and the occupation of their property by ne’er-d’ye-wells meant that they could no longer host gatherings themselves.
Meanwhile their children were living in squalor, and visits from their family resembled interventions from social workers — for instance, taking the children aside out of view to look them over for signs of malnutrition.
They eventually realized that they had gone too far and that in their attempts to patch up any hints of hypocrisy and inconsistency in their lifestyle, much common sense had slipped through the cracks.
Joseph: “They had wanted to humble themselves before God, to prove that He would provide their daily bread.
All they had actually done was to cause hardship for the children and put the responsibility for their welfare onto the shoulders of other people…”
Finally they gave in.
They accepted some help from the Cadbury family in setting up a modest new home, and they began to compromise with some of their earlier-drawn lines in the sand.
By they were using money again and had reapplied for passports.
Among the steps they had taken over the years was to withdraw their children from school when the government took over private schools and made them tax-funded.
They homeschooled their children, and Kees in particular discovered a talent for teaching and an interest in the reform of education.
What had begun as homeschooling blossomed into a small school that attracted parents enthused by Kees’s methods or theories and also orphaned Jewish refugees from Nazi-occupied countries.
This enabled the Boekes’ to shelter some of these children during the Nazi occupation of Holland (for which the couple were later enshrined in the “Righteous Among the Nations” list of the Holocaust Martyrs’ and Heroes’ Remembrance Authority).
The school they founded was so well-considered that after the war, Dutch Princess Juliana sent her children there (including now-Queen Beatrix).
Fiona Joseph’s story of the Boekes is a fascinating look at a quest for purity and righteousness — both in its pitfalls and its promises — and would be a good and humbling meditation for anyone who has ever considered “going all in” and uncompromisingly living by the standard of their most idealistic hopes.
At the upcoming national gathering of NWTRCC at Earlham College in Richmond, Indiana, I’m going to be presenting a summary of the history of war tax resistance in the Society of Friends (Quakers).
Today I’m going to try to coalesce some of the notes I’ve assembled about the “Great Forgetting” period in which the Quaker practice of war tax resistance seemed to all but disappear.
The Great Forgetting ()
In mentions of Quaker war tax resistance nearly vanish from the record.
When, during the Spanish-American & Philippine-American wars at , the U.S. government attached war taxes to rail tickets, to official documents like checks, and to inheritances, some Quakers were troubled by this and made some efforts to avoid the new taxes, but I only find occasional mention of these taxes, and nothing resembling official warnings from meetings or prominent publications that Quakers should not pay them.
A report in the Friends Intelligencer about the (Hicksite) Philadelphia Yearly Meeting noted that “[t]he ninth query called forth regret that Friends had not maintained a stronger and more consistent testimony against war, but had paid the war taxes without protest.”
Things were slightly better, but heading in the same direction, in England.
An newspaper article on how the Society of Friends was changing to conform more and more to the society around it, included the detail that “its dislike to war taxes is [now] so slight that one for the Egyptian war has not been refused by a dozen of its members!”
In 1901, Charles H. Fox had his property seized and sold at auction for his refusal to pay income taxes that had been boosted to pay for war expenses in South Africa and China.
This was considered unusual enough to prompt a number of newspaper articles.
Some of his friends bought the auctioned property and returned it to him, so even in this case, adherence to traditional Quaker practices with regard to war tax resistance was slack.
The London Yearly Meeting during issued a number of formal statements amplifying and reasserting its peace testimony, but none of these mentioned war taxes, and it would take a lot of work to read any encouragement for tax resistance between the lines of any of the statements.
That meeting’s “query” concerning the peace testimony in asked Quakers if they were “faithful in our testimony against bearing arms, and being in any manner concerned in the militia, in privateers, or armed vessels, or dealing in prize goods?”
A century later this language would have seemed archaic, and the advice no longer representative of how modern wars were fought and how citizens would be called on to support them.
But when the meeting revisited and reworded this query, instead of moderninzing the language and adding more relevant specifics, they instead replaced the query with a vague generality:
Are Friends faithful in maintaining our Christian testimony against all war, as inconsistent with the precepts and spirit of the Gospel?
To which it was easy to answer “sure!” because it didn’t seem to ask anything specific.
In an “American Friends’ Peace Conference” was held in Philadelphia at which presentations were made over three days on the subject of peace, anti-war activism, international arbitration, and related topics.
The papers presented at the gathering were later published.
I looked through them to see how the subject of war tax resistance was treated at this gathering and found exactly one mention of war taxes in the entire book, from Haverford College’s president Isaac Sharpless, speaking on the question “To What Extent Are Peace Principles Practicable?”:
It is impossible to avoid giving aid and comfort to wars and warlike tendencies unless one goes to a desert isle and lives by himself.
Even if we do not join the army we pay taxes for its support.
I do not know that any peace man omitted to write checks after the opening of the Spanish War because stamps were necessary to make them legal, and these stamps were expressly a war tax.
That’s why I call this period the Great Forgetting.
It isn’t that war tax resistance was formally rejected, or that it had become too onerous and had to be abandoned, it’s more as though it was lost in a sort of collective amnesia.
(This is especially perplexing in Isaac Sharpless’s case, as he had written a history of the Quaker governance of the Pennsylvania colony, and certainly knew plenty about Quakers who had refused to pay war taxes without retreating to a desert isle to do so.)
By the beginning of the 20th Century, in a variety of debates concerning resistance to “church rates” and the Education Act by nonconformist Christians in the U.K., I begin to see references to Quakers that take for granted that they do not resist war taxes.
Arguments along the lines of: “Just because you are conscientiously opposed to funding the state religion doesn’t mean you can just stop paying a tax.
I mean, look at the Quakers.
Everybody knows how conscientiously opposed to war they are, and they never refuse to pay their war taxes.”
(The forgetting came even earlier to Australia.
An anti-war writer there in advocated war tax resistance this way: “The English Quakers refuse to pay Church rates for conscience sake, and it is time for tax-payers who disapprove of such wars as the Affghan, the Kaffir, the Chinese, and the New Zealand war to make a stand for conscience, and refuse to pay income-tax.”
In other words: Quakers were not an example of war tax resisters, but an example of tithe resisters that war tax resisters could be inspired by when developing their own variety of tax resistance.)
But although Quaker war tax resistance had mostly gone dormant in England and the United States (and evidently, Australia, if indeed it had ever gotten a foothold there), I see occasional signs that it had not entirely died out.
Some Quakers in the far outposts of the Quaker world were keeping the flame lit and reminding Friends elsewhere that there was an alternative to sorrowful resignation in the face of war taxes.
A edition of The Friend noted that the harsh enforcement of military conscription on the European mainland had reduced the ranks of Quakers there, but also said that “One Friend in Norway has been imprisoned five times for refusing to pay the ‘blood-tax.’ ”
In Switzerland, in , pacifist Pierre Cérésole began to refuse to pay his military tax.
He was not yet a Quaker, but would later convert, and would help to reintroduce war tax resistance to the Society of Friends through his influence on Dutch Quakers Beatrice Cadbury and Kees Boeke.
The Boekes began resisting taxes in .
They made waves with their radical and uncompromising testimony against war and against violent coercion of any sort.
In the United States, The Friend of Philadelphia quoted a report from its London namesake on the Boekes, but astonishingly headlined the article “Testimony-Bearing of the Seventeenth Century Type” — seemingly ignorant of all of the Quaker war tax resistance that had happened in the 18th and 19th centuries!
More evidence that an uncanny Forgetting had taken hold.
An English Quaker wrote in that he believed “no Friend, so far as is known, has declined to pay his war taxes, so called.
Even the Friends who during the South African war [probably the Second Boer War, ] permitted the authorities to distrain upon their goods rather than pay the (then) war tax, and the still larger number who refused for years to pay education rates [a conflict about tax money going to sectarian education that peaked around ], have seen their ways to pay the much larger war taxes of today without demur.”
This is the case even though draft boards in the U.K., in order to test the sincerity of people applying for conscientious objector status, would sometimes ask them if they were using any luxury products like tea, coffee, cocoa, matches, tobacco, or movies, all of which had a war tax applied to them.
Quakers who attended these hearings in the support of their own applications for conscientious objector status were thereby getting a long-overdue sermon on the connection between conscientious objection and war taxes, but it seems to have fallen on deaf ears.
When the United States entered World War Ⅰ, it adopted a new war funding method: rather than relying entirely on taxes, it encouraged citizens to invest their money in “Liberty Bonds” — that is, to loan the government the war money at interest.
Pressure to invest in these bonds was enormous — how many bonds you were willing to purchase was seen as a quantitative proxy for the quality of your patriotism — and refusal to purchase bonds was seen as being tantamount to treason.
Although the bond purchases were ostensibly voluntary, vigilante mobs were not above using violent coercion to force sales, or even, at times, to steal property directly from recalcitrant citizens.
I have found dozens of examples of reprisals of various sorts being taken against people who refused to buy Liberty Bonds.
Most of them involve Mennonites, whose Quaker-like pacifism would not permit them to buy war bonds.
(Many American Mennonites were also of German ancestry and had Germanic names, which probably didn’t help them avoid trouble.)
Others involve socialists and other political radicals who saw World War Ⅰ as being an example of workers fighting workers for the sake of capitalists.
Notably absent are Quakers, with one important exception: Mary Stone McDowell.
McDowell was fired from her teaching job in part for her refusal to promote war bonds to her students.
(The New York Times used the occasion to editorialize that Quaker teachers should all resign their positions since their pacifist views clashed with the proper patriotism that ought to be taught in school.)
McDowell would resurface as a war tax resister in the years after World War Ⅱ as part of the new “Peacemakers” movement and so would help begin the thaw in the Great Forgetting that would eventually lead to a renaissance of war tax resistance in the Society of Friends.
Here I should note that there’s a discontinuity in the material I’ve been drawing on for my research.
The ease of search and the ready availability of on-line books and magazines and newspapers and other archival materials through Google Books, Internet Archive, and many other such platforms, has made research like this much easier than in times not long past.
But much material published is not as available due to copyright issues.
For many such documents, it is difficult to even determine who the copyright holder is, and so the creators of the on-line archives have not made this material as available.
So it’s possible that the seeming absence of evidence of Quaker war tax resistance in the period should not be interpreted as evidence of absence.
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.”
