When I was at Newbegun Creek a Friend was there who labored for his living, having no negroes, and who had been a minister many years.
He came to me the next day, and as we rode together, he signified that he wanted to talk with me concerning a difficulty he had been under, which he related nearly as follows: That as monies had of late years been raised by a tax to carry on the wars, he had a scruple in his mind in regard to paying it, and chose rather to suffer distraint of his goods, but as he was the only person who refused it in those parts, and knew not that any one else was in the like circumstances, he signified that it had been a heavy trial to him, especially as some of his brethren had been uneasy with his conduct in that case.
He added that from a sympathy he felt with me yesterday in meeting, he found freedom thus to open the matter in the way of querying concerning Friends in our parts.
I told him the state of Friends amongst us as well as I was able, and also that I had for some time been under the like scruple.
I believe him to be one who was concerned to walk uprightly before the Lord, and esteemed it my duty to preserve this note concerning him, Samuel Newby.
A few years past, money being made current in our province for carrying on wars, and to be called in again by taxes laid on the inhabitants, my mind was often affected with the thoughts of paying such taxes; and I believe it right for me to preserve a memorandum concerning it.
I was told that Friends in England frequently paid taxes, when the money was applied to such purposes.
I had conversation with several noted Friends on the subject, who all favored the payment of such taxes; some of them I preferred before myself, and this made me easier for a time; yet there was in the depth of my mind a scruple which I never could get over, and at certain times I was greatly distressed on that account.
I believed that there were some upright-hearted men who paid such taxes, yet could not see that their example was a sufficient reason for me to do so while I believe that the spirit of truth required of me, as an individual, to suffer patiently the distress of goods rather than pay actively.
To refuse the active payment of a tax which our Society generally paid was exceedingly disagreeable, but to do a thing contrary to my conscience appeared yet more dreadful.
When this exercise came upon me, I knew of none under the like difficulty, and in my distress I besought the Lord to enable me to give up all, that so I might follow him wheresoever he was pleased to lead me.
Under this exercise I went to our Yearly Meeting at Philadelphia in , at which a committee was appointed of some from each Quarterly Meeting to correspond with the meeting for sufferings in London, and another to visit our Monthly and Quarterly Meetings.
After their appointment, before the last adjournment of the meeting, it was agreed that these two committees should meet together in Friends’ school-house in the city, to consider some things in which the cause of truth was concerned.
They accordingly had a weighty conference in the fear of the Lord, at which time I perceived there were many Friends under a scruple like that before mentioned.*
As scrupling to pay a tax on account of the application hath seldom been heard of heretofore, even amongst men of integrity who have steadily borne their testimony against outward wars in their time, I may therefore note some things which have occurred to my mind, as I have been inwardly exercised on that account.
From the steady opposition which faithful Friends in early times made to wrong things then approved, they were hated and persecuted by men living in the spirit of this world, and, suffering with firmness, they were made a blessing to the church, and the work prospered.
It equally concerns men in every age to take heed to their own spirits, and in comparing their situation with ours, to me it appears that there was less danger of their being infected with the spirit of this world, in paying such taxes, than is the case with us now.
They had little or no share in civil government, and many of them declared that they were, through the power of God, separated from the spirit in which wars were, and being afflicted by the rulers on account of their testimony, there was less likelihood of their uniting in spirit with them in things inconsistent with the purity of truth.
We, from the first settlement of this land, have known little or no troubles of that sort.
The profession of our predecessors was for a time accounted reproachful, but at length their uprightness being understood by the rulers, and their innocent sufferings moving them, our way of worship was tolerated and many of our members in these colonies became active in civil government.
Being thus tried with favor and prosperity, this world appeared inviting; our minds have been turned to the improvement of our country, to merchandise and the sciences, amongst which are many things useful, if followed in pure wisdom; but in our present condition I believe it will not be denied that a carnal mind is gaining upon us.
Some of our members who are officers in civil government are, in one case or other, called upon in their respective stations to assist in things relative to the wars; but, being in doubt whether to act or crave to be excused from their office, if they see their brethren united in the payment of a tax to carry on the said wars, may think their case not much different, and so might quench the tender movings of the Holy Spirit in their minds.
Thus, by small degrees, we might approach so near to fighting that the distinction would be little else than the name of a peaceable people.
It requires great self-denial and resignation of ourselves to God to attain that state wherein we can freely cease from fighting when wrongfully invaded, if, by our fighting, there were a probability of overcoming the invaders.
Whoever rightly attains to it does in some degree feel that spirit in which our Redeemer gave his life for us, and through Divine goodness many of our predecessors, and many now living, have learned this blessed lesson.
But many others, having their religion chiefly by education, and not being enough acquainted with that cross which crucifies to the world, do manifest a temper distinguishable from that of an entire trust in God.
In calmly considering these things, it hath not appeared strange to me that an exercise has now fallen upon some, which, as to the outward means, is different from what was known to many of those who went before us.
Some time after the Yearly Meeting, the said committees met at Philadelphia, and, by adjournments, continued sitting several days.
The calamities of war were now increasing; the frontier inhabitants of Pennsylvania were frequently surprised, some were slain, and many taken captive by the Indians.
And while these committees sat, the corpse of one so slain was brought in a wagon and taken through the streets of the city in his bloody garments, to alarm the people and rouse them to war.
Friends thus met were not all of one mind in relation to the tax, which, to those who scrupled it, made the way more difficult.
To refuse an active payment at such a time might be construed into an act of disloyalty, and appeared likely to displease the rulers, not only here but in England.
Still there was a scruple so fixed on the minds of many Friends that nothing moved it.
It was a conference the most weighty that ever I was at, and the hearts of many were bowed in reverence before the Most High.
Some Friends of the said committees who appeared easy to pay the tax, after several adjournments, withdrew; others of them continued till the last.
At length an epistle of tender love and caution to Friends in Pennsylvania was drawn up, and being read several times and corrected, was signed by such as were free to sign it, and afterward sent to the Monthly and Quarterly Meetings.
The American Quaker John Woolman was a pioneer of conscientious tax resistance, and he has left a record of how he wrestled with his conscience over whether or not to pay taxes for the French and Indian War.
“To refuse the active payment of a Tax which our Society generally paid, was exceeding disagreeable; but to do a thing contrary to my Conscience appeared yet more dreadfull,” he wrote, but “I knew of none under the like difficulty, and in my distress I besought the Lord to enable me to give up all, that so I might follow him wheresoever he was pleased to lead me.”
Although opposition to active participation in war was a part of Quaker practice, this had not yet extended to war tax resistance.
Part of the reason behind this, ironically, was that until recently, the Quakers had tended to be actively oppressed by the governments under which they lived.
For this reason Quakers who had taxes stolen from them were unlikely to feel in any way complicit with a government that was so clearly against them.
When governments like those in the American colonies began to practice tolerance toward the Society of Friends, and when Quakers began to take positions in colonial governments, they suddenly had to confront the possibility that they were in danger of becoming too entangled in the actions of the state.
When Woolman brought up his “scruple” about tax-paying at the Yearly Meeting in Philadelphia, he soon “perceived there were many Friends under [the same] Scruple.”
Here’s how he tells it:
A few years past, money being made current in our province for carrying on wars, and to be sunk by Taxes laid on the inhabitants, my mind was often affected with the thoughts of paying such Taxes, and I believe it right for me to preserve a memorandum concerning it.
I was told that Friends in England frequently paid Taxes when the money was applied to such purposes.
I had [conference] with several Noted Friends on the subject, who all favored the payment of such taxes, Some of whom I preferred before myself, and this made me easer for a time; yet there was in the deeps of my mind, a scruple which I never could get over; and, at certain times I was greatly distressed on that account.
I all along believed that there were some upright-hearted men who paid such taxes, but could not see that their Example was a Sufficient Reason for me to do so, while I believed that the Spirit of Truth required of me as an individual to suffer patiently the distress of goods, rather than pay actively.
As Scrupling to pay a tax on account of the application* hath seldom been heard of heretofore, even amongst men of Integrity, who have Steadily born their testimony against outward wars in their time, I may here note some things which have opened on my mind, as I have been inwardly Exercised on that account.
From the Steady oposition which Faithfull Friends in early times made to wrong things then approved of, they were hated and persecuted by men living in the Spirit of this world, & Suffering with firmness, they were made a Blessing to the Church, & the work prospered.
It equally concerns men in every age to take heed to their own Spirit: & in comparing their Situation with ours, it looks to me there was less danger of their being infected with the Spirit of this world in paying their taxes, than there is of us now.
They had little or no Share in Civil Government, neither Legislative nor Executive & many of them declared they were through the power of God separated from the Spirit in which wars were, and being Afflicted by the Rulers on account of their Testimony, there was less likelyhood of uniting in Spirit with them in things inconsistent with the purity of Truth.
We, from the first settlement of this Land have known little or no troubles of that sort.
The profession, which for a time was accounted reproachfull, at length the uprightness of our predecessors being understood by the Rulers, & their Innocent Sufferings moving them, our way of Worship was tolerated, and many of our members in these colonies became active in Civil Government.
Being thus tryed with favour and prosperity, this world hath appeared inviteing; our minds have been turned to the Improvement of our Country, to Merchandize and Sciences, amongst which are many things usefull, being followed in pure wisdom, but in our present condition that a Carnal mind is gaining upon us I believe will not be denied.
Some of our members who are Officers in Civil Government are in one case or other called upon in their respective Stations to Assist in things relative to the wars, Such being in doubt whether to act or crave to be excused from their Office, Seeing their Brethren united in the payment of a Tax to carry on the said wars, might think their case [nearly like theirs, &] so quench the tender movings of the Holy Spirit in their minds, and thus by small degrees there might be an approach toward that of Fighting, till we came so near it, as that the distinction would be little else but the name of a peaceable people.
It requires great self-denial and Resignation of ourselves to God to attain that state wherein we can freely cease from fighting when wrongfully Invaded, if by our Fighting there were a probability of overcoming the invaders.
Whoever rightly attains to it, does in some degree feel that Spirit in which our Redeemer gave his life for us, and, through Divine goodness many of our predecessors, and many now living, have learned this blessed lesson, but many others having their Religion chiefly by Education, & not being enough acquainted with that Cross which Crucifies to the world, do manifest a Temper distinguishable from that of an Entire trust in God.
In calmly considering these things it hath not appeared strange to me, that an exercise hath now fallen upon some, which as to the outward means of it is different from what was known to many of those who went before us.
Some time after the Yearly Meeting, the said committees met at Philadelphia, and, by adjournments, continued sitting several days.
The calamities of war were now increasing; the frontier inhabitants of Pennsylvania were frequently surprised; some were slain, and many taken captive by the Indians; and while these committees sat, the corpse of one so slain was brought in a wagon, and taken through the streets of the city in his bloody garments, to alarm the people and rouse them to war.
Friends thus met were not all of one mind in relation to the tax, which, to those who scrupled it, made the way more difficult.
To refuse an active payment at such a time might be construed into an act of disloyalty, and appeared likely to displease the rulers, not only here but in England; still there was a scruple so fixed on the minds of many Friends that nothing moved it.
It was a conference the most weighty that ever I was at, and the hearts of many were bowed in reverence before the Most High.
Some Friends of the said committees who appeared easy to pay the tax, after several adjournments, withdrew; others of them continued till the last.
At length an epistle of tender love and caution to Friends in Pennsylvania was drawn up, and being read several times and corrected, was signed by such as were free to sign it, and afterward sent to the Monthly and Quarterly Meetings.
* Christians refused to pay taxes to support Heathen Temples. See Cave’s Primitive Christianity, part ⅲ, page 327.
[Note by Woolman. Ed.]
Some of this entry is taken from The Journal and Essays of John Woolman, edited by Amelia Mott Gummere (the bracketed material is Gummere’s) as found in a collection of writings on nonviolent action edited by Staughton Lynd.
To this I added material found in The Harvard Classics: The Journal of John Woolman.
The two versions of Woolman’s journal differ in some ways, and I’m not exactly sure how to explain the discrepancy.
The Harvard Classics edition has some material in different places and it modernizes the capitalization, spelling and punctuation.
Both versions change the text somewhat to change archaicisms — for instance “conference” in the first paragraph (or “conversation” in the Harvard version) was probably “intercourse” in the original and has been changed to discourage snickering — though the Harvard version does not indicate these changes in any way while Gummere has the decency to bracket them off.
I can’t discern the motives behind some of the other changes.
In short, this is the best I could do with the material I have, but as I don’t have access to the originals, I can’t be sure this grafted version is entirely accurate in essence.
Update: I’ve found another version of Woolman’s journal, published in , that differs from both of the versions I used to compile this entry.
I’ve put the version of Woolman’s journal entry on-line as a separate page.
I’ve lately set out to share some of the research I’ve done into tax resistance movements and enthusiasts by collecting some of what has been written about them into a “Tax Resistance Reader” that I’ll publish through a print-on-demand vanity press (a publishing option that’s become increasingly attractive and affordable recently).
I’m going to include a mix of contemporary documents and later analyses.
So far, I’ve been delighted at how willing writers and rights-holders have been to give permission for me to reprint their works in a collection like this.
Pretty much everybody I’ve asked has said “yes.”
Nobody’s said “no” yet, but a few people haven’t responded or have proven difficult to track down.
As I assemble the collection, I’ll post some of those documents that are in the public domain here as well.
For instance, here is an excerpt from John Woolman’s journals that I hadn’t seen before (it isn’t included in many editions) — the peculiar spelling and capitalization is from the original:
One evening a Friend came to our Lodgings who was a Justice of the Peace, and in a friendly way introduced the Subject of Refusing to pay taxes to Support wars and perceiving that I was one who Scrupled the payment, Said that he had wanted an Opportunity with some in that Circumstance, whereupon we had some Conversation in a Brotherly way on Some texts of Scripture relating thereto, in the Conclusion of which he said that According to Our way of proceeding it would follow that whenever the Administration of Government was ill, we must Suffer destraint of goods rather than pay actively toward Supporting it.
To which I replied Men put in publick Stations are intended for good purposes, Some to make good laws, others to take care that those laws are not broken.
Now if these men thus set apart do not answer the design of their Institution, our freely contributing to Support them in that Capacity when we certainly know that they are wrong, is to Strengthen them in a wrong way & tends to make them forget that it is so, But when from a Clear understanding of the case we are Really uneasie with the application of money, and in the Spirit of meekness suffer distress to be made on our goods rather than pay actively, this joyned with an upright Uniform life may tend to put men a thinking about their own publick Conduct.
He said he would propose a Medium.
That is, where men in Authority do not act agreeable to the mind of those who Constituted them he thought the people should Rather Remonstrate than refuse a Volentary payment of moneys so demanded, and added, Civil Government is an agreement of free men, by which they Oblige themselves to Abide by Certain Laws as a Standard, and to refuse to Obey in that Case is of the like nature as to refuse to do any particular act which we had Covenanted to do.
I replied, that in making Covenants, it was agreeable to Honesty and uprightness to take care that we do not foreclose ourselves from adhering Strictly to true Virtue in all Occurrences relating thereto.
But if I should unwarily promise to Obey the orders of a Certain man, or number of men, without any proviso, and he, or they Comand me to assist in doing some great Wickedness, I may then Se my error in making Such promise and an active Obedience in that case would be Ading one evil to another: That though by such promise I should be lyable to punishment for disobedience, yet to Suffer rather than Act to me appears most Virtuous.
The whole of our Conversation was in Calmness & good Will.
And here it may be noted that in Pensylvania, where there are many friends under that Scruple, a petition was presented to the Assembly by a large number of friends, asking that no Law might be passed to Enjoyn the payment of money for such Uses, which they as a peacable people could not pay for Conscience Sake.
More excerpts from John Woolman’s journals can be found on The Picket Line at this page.
Woolman and some of his fellow-Friends who shared a “Scruple” concerning war taxes sent a letter on the subject to Friends meetings in Pennsylvania.
On , I reprinted it here.
Here is how Woolman describes the ensuing controversy:
Copies of this Epistle were sent amongst Friends in the several parts of the Province of Pennsylvania, and as Some in the Society who were easie to pay the Tax Spake… openly against it, and as some of those who were concerned in the Conference… believed themselves rightly exercised in putting forward the Epistle, They in the next Yearly meeting Exprest a willingness to have their conduct in that case Enquired into, But friends in the Yearly Meeting did not… enter into the Consideration of it.
When the Tax was gathered many paid it Actively and Others Scrupled the payment, and in Many places [the Collectors & Constables being friends] distress was made on their goods… by their fellow members.
This deficulty was Considerable and at the Yearly Meeting at Philad the matter was opened and a Committee of about… forty Friends were appointed Some from each Quarter to consider the case, and report their Judgment on this point whither or no it would be best at this time publickly to Consider it in the Yearly meeting.
At this meeting were our Friends William Reckett, John Hunt, and Christopher Willson from English, Benjamin Ferris from the Province of New York, and Thomas Nicholson from North Carolina, who at the request of the Yearly Meeting all sat with us,—
we met and Seting some hours adjourned until the next morning: It was a time of deep Exercise to many minds, and after some hours spent at our Second meeting the following report was drawn & Sign’d by a fr’d in behalf of y’ Committee
Agreeable to the appointment of the Yearly meeting we have met & had several weighty & deliberate conferrences on the Subject commited to us and as we find there are diversity of Sentiments we are for that & Several other reasons Unanimously of the Judgment that it is not proper to enter into a publick discussion of the matter & we are one in Judgment that it is highly necessary for the yearly meeting to recomend that Friends every where endeavour earnestly to have their minds covered with fervent Charity towards one another which report was entered on the minutes & Copies sent in the Extracts to the Quarterly & monthly Meetings.
Now that We Won’t Pay!: A Tax Resistance Reader is complete and I’ve finished patting myself on the back for a job well done, I’ve started to work on a spin-off project: a reader that concentrates on war tax resistance by American Quakers .
I planned to take the existing sections of this material from We Won’t Pay! and add a little more context and a handful of additional works.
But the more I researched, the more I found, and so this is turning out to be a bigger project than I’d anticipated.
I’ll share some of what I find here on The Picket Line as I uncover it.
Today, some excerpts from Isaac Sharpless’s book about the Pennsylvania colony: A Quaker Experiment in Government.
There was a difficult balancing act in Pennsylvania, where Quakers for the first time held political power and were able to try to turn their ethical principles into guidelines for social organization.
The English government, under which the colony was founded, was sporadically tolerant of and persecutory towards the Quakers — and so the colony felt the need to mollify the mother country and assure it of their loyalty and harmlessness.
From time to time, the demands of the crown would conflict with Quaker principles.
In , a requisition was made on Pennsylvania for eighty men with officers for the defense of New York.
The Council advised calling together the Assembly, but not until harvest was over.
The Assembly united with the Council in refusing the bald request, reminding the Governor of Fletcher’s promise that the last appropriation should not “be dipped in blood,” but should be used “to feed the hungry and clothe the naked” Indians, and suggested the such of it as had not been used as promised should go towards the present emergency.
The Council finally offered two bills, one to make an appropriation, and one to demand a return to Penn’s Frame of Government, which was held in abeyance since his return to power.
As the Governor had to take both or neither he dissolved the Assembly.
he was willing to make the required concession, and urged that the money was needed in New York “for food and raiment to be given to those nations of Indians that have lately suffered extremely by the French, which is a fair opportunity for you, that for conscience cannot contribute to war, to raise money for that occasion, be it under the color of support of government or relief of those Indians or what else you may call it.”
The Assembly made the necessary vote and the Constitution of was obtained in payment.
The next time the pacific principles of the Assembly were tried was in , when the English Government asked for £350 for the purpose of erecting forts on the frontiers of New York on the plea that they were for the general defense.
Penn, who was then in the Province, faithfully observed his promise “to transmit,” but declined to give any advice to the Assembly.
The members were evidently greatly agitated, and repeatedly asked copies of his speech, which was in fact only the King’s letter.
After some fencing two reports appeared.
One, from the Pennsylvania delegates, urged their poverty, owing to taxes and quit-rents, also the lack of contributions of other colonies, but added plainly, “We desire the Proprietor would candidly represent our conditions to the King, and assure him of our readiness (according to our abilities) to acquiesce with and answer his commands so far as our religious persuasions shall permit, as becomes loyal and faithful subjects so to do.”
The other answer came from the Delaware portion of the Assembly, excusing themselves because they had no forts of their own.
When the Assembly met, a month later, Penn again referred to the King’s letter, but nothing was done, and the matter was not pressed.
Governor Evans made several attempts to establish a militia, but the Assembly refused any sanction, and the voluntary organizations were failures.
Lewis Morris, a colonial official in New Jersey and New York, noted that Quakers outside of Pennsylvania at this time, who were being subjected to military taxes, were refusing to pay and having their property seized by tax collectors — “generally above ten times the value, which, when they came to expose to sale, nobody would buy, so that there is or lately was a house at Burlington, filled with demonstrations of the obstinacy of the Quakers, there was boots, hats, shoes, clothes, dishes, plows, knives, earthenware, with many other things and these distresses amount, as is said, to above 1,000£ a year, almost enough to defray the charges of the government without any other way.”
Sharpless again:
The military question came up in in a more serious form.
An order came from the Queen to the various colonies to furnish quotas of men at their own expense towards an army to invade Canada.
New York was to supply 800, Connecticut 350, Jersey 200, and Pennsylvania 150. In transmitting the order Governor Gookin, who evidently anticipated difficulty, suggested that the total charge would be about £4,000. He says, “Perhaps it may seem difficult to raise such a number of men in a country where most of the inhabitants are of such principles as will not allow them the use of arms; but if you will raise the sum for the support of government, I don’t doubt getting the number of men desired whose principles will allow the use of arms.”
This was too manifest an evasion for the Assembly to adopt.
Its first answer was to send in a bill of grievances.
The opportunity was too good to be lost, and David Lloyd, then Speaker, made the most of it.
In the meantime the Quaker members of the Council met some of their co-religionists of the Assembly “and there debated their opinions freely and unanimously to those of the House, that notwithstanding their profession and principles would not by any means allow them to bear arms, yet it was their duty to support the government of their sovereign, the Queen, and to contribute out of their estates according to the exigencies of her public affairs, and therefore they might and ought to present the Queen with a proper sum of money.”
The Assembly the next day sent an address to the Governor which said, “Though we cannot for conscience’ sake comply with the furnishing a supply for such a defense as thou proposest, yet in point of gratitude of the Queen for her great and many favors to us we have resolved to raise a present of £500 which we humbly hope she will be pleased to accept, etc., etc.”
To this the Governor replied that he would not sign the bill.
If the Assembly would not hire men to fight, there was no scruple which would prevent a more liberal subscription to the Queen’s needs.
The Assembly was immovable, and asked to be allowed to adjourn, as harvest time was approaching.
The Governor refused consent, when the House abruptly terminated the whole matter.
Resolved, N.C.D., That this House cannot agree to the Governor’s proposal, directly or indirectly, for the expedition to Canada, for the reasons formerly given.
Resolved, N.C.D., That the House do continue their resolution of raising £500 as a present for the Queen, and do intend to prepare a bill for that purpose at their next meeting on , and not before.
The House then adjourned without waiting for the Governor’s consent.
The Governor sadly admitted that nothing could be done with such an Assembly, and gave a rather facetious but truthful account in a letter to London, two months later.
“The Queen having honored me with her commands that this Province should furnish out 150 men for its expedition against Canada, I called an Assembly and demanded £4,000; they being all Quakers, after much delay resolved, N.C, that it was contrary to their religious principles to hire men to kill one another.
I told some of them the Queen did not hire men to kill one another, but to destroy her enemies.
One of them answered the Assembly understood English.
After I had tried all ways to bring them to reason they again resolved, N.C, that they could not directly or indirectly raise money for an expedition to Canada, but they had voted the Queen £500 as a token of their respect, etc., and that the money should be put into a safe hand till they were satisfied from England it should not be employed for the use of war.
I told them the Queen did not want such a sum, but being a pious and good woman perhaps she might give it to the clergy sent hither for the propagation of the Gospel; one of them answered that was worse than the other, on which arose a debate in the Assembly whether they should give money or not, since it might be employed for the use of war, or against their future establishment, and after much wise debate it was carried in the affirmative by one voice only.
Their number is 26 [Eight from each county and two from Philadelphia].
They are entirely governed by their speaker, one David Lloyd.”
The service performed by “one David Lloyd” to the integrity of the Quaker testimony against war is strikingly revealed in this letter.
The Assembly, more emphatically than the official records show, took effective measures to maintain their position with perfect consistency.
The issue came up again :
In a… request was made by the government, and in response £2,000 was voted for the Queen’s use.
This money never aided any military expedition, but was appropriated by a succeeding Governor to his own use, and the fact was used as an argument in against similar grants.
“We did not see it,” Isaac Norris says, in , “to be inconsistent with our principles to give the Queen money notwithstanding any use she might put it to, that not being our part but hers.”
This dodge of granting money “for the Queen’s use” when military requisitions were requested, as a way of avoiding making direct military expenditures, became a habit, but its dodgy nature was pretty clear.
This would come back to bite Quakers later, when they would be reminded how flexible their principles could be.
[B]eginning with , the gradual alienation of the Indian tribes made a disturbed frontier ready to be dangerous at the first outbreak of war, and new conditions prevailed.
Hitherto the relation of the Friends to these inevitable military solicitations had been largely that of passivity.
They would not interfere with the movements of those who desired to form military companies.
If the Governor chose to engage in the arming and drilling of voluntary militia, he had his commission from the Proprietors, and they from the Charter of Charles Ⅱ.
It was no matter for the Assembly.
The meeting organizations would endeavor to keep all Quakers from any participation in these un-Friendly proceedings, and the Quaker Assemblymen had their own consciences to answer to, as well as their ecclesiastical authorities, if they violated pacific principles.
When it came to voting money in lieu of personal service, the legislators had a difficult road to follow.
If the government needed aid, it was their duty, in common with the other colonies, to supply it.
Even though the need was the direct result of war, as nearly all national taxes are, they were ready to assume their share of the burden.
Caesar must have his dues as well as God, and a call for money, except when coupled directly with a proposition to use it for military attack or defense, was generally responded to, after its potency as an agent in procuring a little more liberty was exhausted.
They would not vote money for an expedition to Canada or to erect forts, but they would for “the King’s use,” using all possible securities to have it appropriated to something else than war expenses.
The responsibility of expenditure rested on the King.
There were legitimate expenses of government, and if these were so inextricably mingled with warlike outlay that the Assembly could not separate them, they would still support the Government.
It is easy to accuse them of inconsistency in the proceedings which follow.
It was a most unpleasant alternative thrust before honest men.
The responsibility of government was upon them as the honorable recipients of the popular votes.
Great principles, the greatest of all in their minds being freedom of conscience, were at stake.
Each call for troops or supplies they fondly hoped would be the last.
Their predecessors’ actions had secured the blessings of peace and liberty to Pennsylvania for sixty years, and if they were unreasonably stringent, their English enemies held over their heads the threat to drive them from power by the imposition of an oath.
Then the persecutions of themselves and their friends, which their forefathers had left England to avoid, might be meted out to them, and the Holy Experiment brought to an end.
Nor is it necessary to assume that their motives were entirely unselfish.
They had ruled the Province well, and were proficients in government.
Their leaders doubtless loved the power and influence they legitimately possessed, and they did not care to give it away unnecessarily.
They tried to find a middle ground between shutting their eyes to all questions of defense on the one side, and direct participation in war on the other.
This they sought by a refusal for themselves and their friends to do any service personally, and a further refusal to vote money except in a general way for the use of the government.
If any one comes to the conclusion that during the latter part of the period of sixteen years now under consideration the evasion was rather a bald one, it is exactly the conclusion the Quakers themselves came to, and they resigned their places as a consequence.
The iniquities of others over whom they had no control brought about a condition where Quaker principles would not work, and they refused to modify them in the vain attempt.
For a time rather weakly halting, when the crucial nature of the question became clear, and either place or principle had to be sacrificed, their decision was in favor of the sanctity of principles.
Entwined in the debates over military requisitions were power struggles and political battles between the Governor and the Assembly, between England and its colonies, and between poorer rural Pennsylvanians on the western frontier (who were more threatened both by hostile Indians and by taxes) and wealthier urban Quakers in the east (who held political power).
A voluntary company was… organized and supplied by private subscriptions.
This took away from their masters a number of indentured servants, whose time was thus lost, and in voting £3,000 for the King’s use the Assembly made it a condition that such servants such be discharged from the militia and no more enlisted.
The Governor refused to accept it, and in wrath wrote a letter to the Board of Trade not intended for home reading, berating the Quakers for disobedience, stating how they had neglected following his advice to withdraw themselves from the Assembly, but had rather increased their majority there.
He advised that they be refused permission to sit there in the future.
A copy of this letter was secured by the Assembly’s agent in England, and great was their indignation.
The disturbances culminated in an election riot in Philadelphia in in which both sides used force, the Quaker party having the best of it and electing Isaac Norris.
They re-elected their ticket, with the aid of the Germans, and controlled the Assembly by an overwhelming majority.
To show their loyalty they voted a considerable sum for the King’s use, but refused Governor Thomas any salary till he had given up his pretentious show of power and signed a number of bills to which he had objected.
After this he worked very harmoniously with them till .
the Governor asked them to aid New England in an attack on Cape Breton.
They told him they had no interest in the matter.
He called them together again in harvest time to ask them to join in an expedition against Louisburg.
A week later came word that Louisburg had surrendered, and the request was transferred to a call for aid in garrisoning the place, and in supplying provisions and powder.
The Assembly replied that the “peaceable principles professed by divers members of the present Assembly do not permit them to join in raising of men or providing arms and ammunition, yet we have ever held it our duty to render tribute to Cæsar.”
They therefore appropriated £4,000 for “bread, beef, pork, flour, wheat or other grain.”
The Governor was advised not to accept the grant, as provisions were not needed.
He replied that the “other grain” meant gunpowder, and so expended a large portion of the money, There is probably no evidence that the Assembly sanctioned this construction, though they never so far as appears made any protest.
Again in aid was asked of the Assembly towards an expedition against Canada.
After forcing the Governor to yield the point as to how the money should be raised, they appropriated £5,000 “for the King’s use.”
This “or other grain” anecdote comes from Benjamin Franklin’s autobiography, which makes much of the flexible principles of Quaker politicians.
There seems to have been quite a folklore of Quaker hypocrisy at the time, frequently showing Quakers relying on the letter-of-the-law of their principles or the spirit-of-the-law depending on which would be most materially advantageous.
Again and again did successive Governors call for military appropriations.
As often did the Quaker Assembly express a willingness to comply provided the money was obtained by loans to be repaid in a term of years rather than by a tax.
The governors said their instructions prevented their sanction to this proceeding, and except when the necessity was urgent refused to permit the bill to be enacted into a law.
The Assembly frequently reminded the Governor that they were unable to vote any money for warlike purposes, and personally would contribute nothing in the way of service, but that they were loyal subjects of the King and acknowledged their obligations to aid in his government.
Had they granted regular aid, war or no war, their position would have been greatly strengthened, but being given “for the King’s use” in direct response to a call for military assistance, knowing perfectly how the money was to be expended, they cannot be excused from the charge of a certain amount of shiftiness.
The effect, however, was to save their fellow-members in the Province from compulsory military service, and from direct war taxes.
They thus shielded the consciences of sensitive Friends, preserved their charter from Court attack, broke down the worst evils of proprietary pretensions, and secured large additions of liberty.
Whether or not the partial sacrifice of principle, if so it was, was too high a price for these advantages, was differently decided in those days, and will be today.
An unbending course would but have hastened the inevitable crisis.
That they paid these taxes unwillingly and were generally recognized as true to their principles is evidenced by many statements of their opponents.
In the Council writes to the Governors of New York and Massachusetts asking for cannon for the voluntary military companies then forming through Benjamin Franklin’s influence, and says, “As our Assembly consists for the most part of Quakers principled against defense the inhabitants despair of their doing anything for our protection.”
Again later Thomas Penn writes on the same subject: “I observe the Assembly broke up without giving any assistance, which is what you must have expected.”
This belief that the Quakers in the Assembly would not do anything for the armed defense of the Province was general both in England and America.
Then came the French-and-Indian War:
In the Governor, at the instance of the Proprietors, who anticipated the French and Indian troubles on the western frontier, endeavored to induce the Assembly to pass a bill for compulsory military service for those not conscientious about bearing arms. He evidently did not expect much.
“As I am well acquainted with their religious scruples I never expected they would appropriate money for the purpose of war or warlike preparation, but thought they might have been brought to make a handsome grant for the King’s use, and have left the disposition of it to me, as they have done on other occasions of like nature,” he wrote to Governor Dinwiddie of Virginia.
“But,” he added, “I can see nothing to prevent this very fine Province, owing to the absurdity of its constitution and the principles of the governing part of its inhabitants, from being an easy prey to the attempts of the common enemy.”
This was after the Assembly had voted £10,000, but coupled the grant with conditions the Governor would not accept.
While they were debating the question Braddock came into the country as commander of the combined forces in an expedition against Fort DuQuesne.
Pressure came down strong and heavy on the Quaker Assembly.
Their own frontier was invaded.
Their own Indians, as a result of the wicked and foolish policy of their executive, were in league with the invaders.
All classes were excited.
To aid the great expedition which at one stroke was to break the French power and close the troubles was felt to be a duty.
Franklin diligently fanned the warlike spirit, procuring wagons for the transfer of army stores, and was extremely valuable to the expedition at some cost to himself.
The Governor wrote to Braddock telling him they had a Province of 300,000 people, provisions enough to supply an army of 100,000, and exports enough to keep 500 vessels employed.
They had no taxes, a revenue of £7,000 a year and £15,000 in bank, yet would neither establish a militia nor vote men money or provisions, notwithstanding he had earnestly labored with the Assembly, and he was ashamed of them.
He does not explain that they had repeatedly offered sums of money, but that he would not accept the conditions.
As Braddock himself admitted, Pennsylvania had supported him quite as liberally as Virginia.
This was partly done by private enterprise and partly by appropriations of the Assembly, to reward friendly Indians, to open a road to Ohio, and to provision the troops.
Braddock was defeated.
The Indians were let loose on the frontiers.
Daily accounts of harrowing scenes came up to the Council and Assembly.
Settlers moved into the towns and many districts were depopulated.
Strong were the expressions of wrath against the Quakers, who were held responsible for the defenseless state of the Province.
[“The people exclaim against the Quakers, and some are scarce restrained from burning the houses of those few who are in this town (Reading).”
— Letter of Edmund Biddle]
This was hardly a just charge, even from the standpoint of those who favored military defense, for the Assembly had signified its willingness to vote £50,000, an unprecedented amount, to be provided by “a tax on all the real and personal estates within the Province,” which the Governor refused to accept.
While the matter was in abeyance the time for the new election of Assemblymen came around, and both parties, except the stricter Quakers, who were becoming alarmed, put forth their greatest exertions.
The old Assembly was sustained, the Friends, with those closely associated with them, having twenty-six out of the thirty-six members.
The new House went on with the work of the old.
They adopted a militia law for those “willing and desirous” of joining companies for the defense of the Province.
This is prefaced by the usual declaration: “Whereas this Province was settled (and a majority of the Assembly have ever since been) of the people called Quakers, who though they do not as the world is now circumstanced condemn the use of arms in others, yet are principled against bearing arms themselves,” explaining also that they are representatives of the Province and not of a denomination, they proceed to lay down rules for the organization of the volunteers.
After the Proprietors had given their £5,000 the Assembly also voted £55,000 for the relief of friendly Indians and distressed frontiersmen, “and other purposes,” without any disguise to the fact that much of it was intended for military defense, though it was not so stated in the bill.
Before this was done, while they were still insisting on taxing the Penn estates, in answer to the charge that they were neglectful of public interests, secure in the confidence of their constituents just most liberally given, they say: “In fine we have the most sensible concern for the poor distressed inhabitants of the frontiers.
We have taken every step in our power, consistent with the just rights of the freemen of Pennsylvania, for their relief, and we have reason to believe that in the midst of their distresses they themselves do not wish to go further.
Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.”
Their position definitely was, We will vote money liberally for defensive purposes, but we will take care to secure our rights as freemen, and we will not require any one to give personal service against his conscience.
The money was largely spent in erecting and garrisoning a chain of forts extending along the Kittatinny hills from the Delaware River to the Maryland frontier.
“Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.”
— Benjamin Franklin
So now I know the context of that frequently-quoted maxim!
Interesting!
Now we’re in the midst of the time when the tension between Quaker principles and political compromises was reaching the breaking point.
John Woolman’s journal reflects that individual Quakers were beginning to adopt war tax resistance against the taxes of the Quaker legislature.
The Friends Quarterly Meeting at Philadelphia tried to hold things together:
[I]t is remarkable that for sixteen years successively, more than half of which was a time of war, a set of men conscientiously principled against warlike measures have been chosen by those, of whom the majority were not in that particular of the same principle; and this we apprehend may be chiefly attributed to the repeated testimonies we have constantly given of our sincere and ready disposition to provide for the exigencies of the Government, and to demonstrate our gratitude for the favors we enjoy under it by cheerfully contributing towards the support of it according to our circumstances in such manner as we can do with peace and satisfaction of mind.
That this has been the constant practice of our assemblies, the records of their proceedings will evidently show.
We consider that in the present situation of public affairs, the exigencies being great, the supplies must be proportioned thereto; and we only desire that as we cannot be concerned in preparations for war, we may be permitted to serve the government by raising money and contributing towards the Public Exegencies by such methods and in such manner as past experience has assured us are least burdensome to the industrious poor, and most consistent with our religious and civil rights and liberties, and which our present Proprietaries, when one of them was personally present, consented to and approved, and to which no reasonable or just objection has ever since been made.
And a number of Quakers petitioned the Assembly, saying that they would be unable to willingly pay the proposed war taxes.
Sharpless again:
In twenty Friends, including Anthony Morris, Israel and John Pemberton, Anthony Benezet, John Churchman, and others, representing the most influential and “weighty” members of the Yearly Meeting, addressed the Assembly.
They say they are very willing to contribute taxes to cultivate friendship with Indians, to relieve distress, or other benevolent purposes, but to expect them to be taxed for funds which are placed in the hands of committees to be expended for war, is inconsistent with their peaceable testimony, and an infringement of their religious liberties.
Many Friends will have to refuse to pay such a tax and suffer distraint of goods, [this afterwards happened in numerous cases] and thus “that free enjoyment of liberty of conscience for the sake of which our forefathers left their native country and settled this then a wilderness by degrees be violated.”
“We sincerely assure you we have no temporal motives for thus addressing you, and could we have preserved peace in our own minds and with each other we should have declined it, being unwilling to give you any unnecessary trouble and deeply sensible of your difficulty in discharging the trust committed to you irreproachably in these perilous times, which hath engaged our fervent desires that the immediate instruction of supreme wisdom may influence your minds, and that being preserved in a steady attention thereto you may be enabled to secure peace and tranquility to yourselves and those you represent by pursuing measures consistent with our peaceable principles, and then we trust we may continue humbly to confide in the protection of that Almighty Power whose providence has hitherto been as walls and bulwarks round about us.”
As the Assembly was composed, this was an earnest plea from the responsible Friends to their fellow religionists to stand uncompromisingly by their principles.
It was not very kindly received.
The reply indicated that the signers had no right to speak for others than themselves, that they had not duly considered the customs of the past, particularly the grant of £2,000 in , and the address “is therefore an unadvised and indiscreet application to the House at this time.”
Four members of the Assembly dissent from this reply.
On the other hand we have a strong petition sent to the King, signed by numerous influential men in Philadelphia, stating that the Province was entirely bare to the attack of enemies, “not a single armed man, nor, at the public expense, a single fortification to shelter the unhappy inhabitants.”
… “We have no hopes of seeing the grievances redressed here while a great majority of men whose avowed principles are against bearing arms find means continually to thrust themselves into the Assembly of this Province.”
They ask the interposition of royal authority to insist on proper defense being provided.
The attorneys for the petitioners before the Board of Trade made the most sweeping and unfounded charges, full of errors of fact and unconcealed animus, and ending with the recommendation “that the King be advised to recommend it to his Parliament that no Quaker be permitted to sit in any Assembly in Pennsylvania or any part of America,” and that this result should be produced by the imposition of an oath.
In the minds of the Friends the crisis was reached when the Governor and Council (William Logan, son of James Logan, only dissenting) in declared war against the Delaware Indians, the old allies and friends of William Penn, but now in league with the French and killing and plundering on the frontiers.
They were quite sure that peaceful and just measures would detach the Indians from their alliance, and that war was unnecessary.
The lines were becoming more closely drawn, and the middle ground was narrowing, so that it was impossible to stand upon it.
Either the principle of the iniquity of war must be maintained in its entirety, or war must be vigorously upheld and prosecuted.
Some Friends with Franklin took the latter position, but the great majority closed up their ranks around the principle of peace in its integrity.
In six of the old members of the house, James Pemberton, Joshua Morris, William Callender, William Peters, Peter Worral and Francis Parvin, resigned their seats, giving as their reason, “As many of our constituents seem of opinion that the present situation of public affairs calls upon us for services in a military way, which from a conviction of judgment after mature deliberation we cannot comply with, we conclude it most conducive to the peace of our minds, and the reputation of our religious profession to persist in our resolution of resigning our seats, which we now accordingly do, and request these our reasons may be entered on the minutes of the house.”
In several other Friends declined re-election, and after the next House assembled four others, Mahlon Kirkbride, William Hoyl, Peter Dicks and Nathaniel Pennock, also resigned.
“Understanding that the ministry have requested the Quakers, who from the first settlement of the Colony have been the majority of the Assemblies of this Province, to suffer their seats during the difficult situation of the affairs of the Colonies to be filled by members of other denominations in such manner as to perform without any scruples all such laws as may be necessary to be enacted for the defense of the Province in whatever manner they may judge best suited to the circumstances of it; and notwithstanding we think this has been pretty fully complied with at the last election, yet at the request of our friends, being willing to take off all possible objection, we who have (without any solicitation on our part) been returned as representatives in this Assembly, request we may be excused, and suffered to withdraw ourselves and vacate our seats in such manner as may be attended with the least trouble and most satisfactory to this honorable House.”
The places of all these Friends were filled by members of other religious denominations, and Quaker control over and responsibility for the Pennsylvania Assembly closed with and was never resumed.
It was that a number of Quakers composed an “epistle of tender love and caution” to their fellow-Friends recommending war tax resistance.
Sharpless again:
was one of difference and perplexity among Philadelphia Friends.
On the one side were the men of spiritual power, whose voices exercised the prevailing influence in the meetings for business.
On the other were the disciples of Logan, who being manifestly out of sympathy with well-established Quaker views, urged the necessity of vigorous defense, caught the surrounding warlike spirit, and with personal service and money aided Franklin and the militia.
Between the two stood the “Quaker governing class,” who controlled the Assembly, who, while admitting and commending the peaceable doctrines of Friends, considered their own duty accomplished when they kept aloof from personal participation and supplied the means by which others carried on the war.
This third section was the product of long experience in political activity.
To these men and their predecessors was owing the successful administration for decades of the best governed colony in America.
They were slow to admit any weakness in their position, but it was becoming increasingly evident that it was untenable.
There was actual war, and they were, while not personally responsible for it, indeed while opposing vigorously the policy which had produced it, now a component part of the government which was carrying it on.
Would they join their brethren in staunch adherence to peace principles, and thus give up their places in the state as John Bright did afterwards when Alexandria was bombarded?
Would they join Franklin, their associate in resisting proprietary power, and throw aside their allegiance to the principles of William Penn, whom they professed greatly to honor?
The question was answered differently by different ones as the winter and spring passed away.
Pressure was strong on both sides.
The Governor writing to London says: “The Quaker preachers and others of great weight were employed to show in their public sermons, and by going from house to house through the Province, the sin of taking up arms, and to persuade the people to be easy and adhere to their principles and privileges.”
This was an enemy’s view of a conservative reaction which was going on within the Society, which was tired of compromises, was willing to suffer, and could not longer support the doubtful expediency of voting measures for others to carry out, of which they could not themselves approve.
We have seen how in the early winter the Assembly rebuked what they considered the impertinence of the protest of a number of important members of the Meeting against a war tax.
The Meeting mildly emphasized the same difference in their London epistle of :
The scene of our affairs is in many respects changed since we wrote to you, and our late peaceful land involved in the desolations and calamities of war.
Had all under our profession faithfully discharged their duty and maintained our peaceable testimony inviolate we have abundant sense to believe that divine counsel would have been afforded in a time of so great difficulty; by attending to which, great part of the present calamities might have been obviated.
But it has been manifest that human contrivances and policy have been too much depended on, and such measures pursued as have ministered cause of real sorrow to the faithful; so that we think it necessary that the same distinction may be made among you as is and ought to be here between the Acts and Resolutions of the Assembly of this Province, though the majority of them are our Brethren in profession, and our acts as a religious Society.
We have nevertheless cause to admire and acknowledge the gracious condescension of infinite goodness towards us, by which a large number is preserved in a steady dependence on the dispensations of divine Providence; and we trust the faith and confidence of such will be supported through every difficulty which may be permitted to attend them, and their sincerity appear by freely resigning or parting with those temporal advantages and privileges we have heretofore enjoyed, if they cannot be preserved without violation of that testimony on the faithful maintaining of which our true peace and unity depends.
The Friends who refused to pay the tax thought it peculiarly hard that they were forced to suffer heavy losses through the action of their fellow-members of the Assembly.
These Assemblymen and their friends pointed out on the other hand that these taxes had been paid in the past, and that it was ultra-conscientiousness which prevented the willing support of the government in this hour of peril.
The question was a difficult one.
Quakers had hitherto refused a direct war tax and paid everything else, even when war expenditures were mingled with others.
The stricter Friends considered that this tax, though disguised, was of the objectionable sort, while others did not so place it.
The difference accentuated itself by condemnatory criticisms, and in the Yearly Meeting appointed a committee of thirty, who reported that it was a matter for individual consciences to determine, and not for the Meeting’s decision.
“We are unanimously of the judgment that it is not proper to enter into a public discussion of the matter; and we are one in judgment that it is highly necessary for the Yearly Meeting to recommend that Friends everywhere endeavor to have their minds covered with frequent charity towards one another.”
The Meeting unanimously adopted this report.
This appeal seems to have been successful, and we hear no more of the difference.
John Fothergill wrote of a lack of faith in the practicality of pacifist government at the time:
That the majority of the present Assembly were of our Profession who from their known principles could not contribute to the defense of the Country now grievously harassed by the Indians under French Influence in a manner that most people here and even many in Pennsylvania thought necessary it seemed but common justice in our Friends to decline accepting a trust which under the present Circumstances they could not discharge, and therefore advised that we should use our utmost endeavors to prevail upon them neither to offer themselves as candidates nor to accept of seats in the Assembly during the present commotions in America.
For should any disaster befall the Province and our Friends continue to fill the Assembly, it would redound to the prejudice of the Society in general, and be the means perhaps of subverting a constitution under which the province had so happily flourished.
And James Pemberton wrote:
Our situation is indeed such as affords cause of melancholy reflection that the first commencement of persecution in this Province should arise from our brethren in profession, and that such darkness should prevail as that they should be instruments of oppressing tender consciences which hath been the case.
The tax in this country being pretty generally collected and many in this city particularly suffered by distraint of their goods and some being near cast into jail.
The House has been sitting most of the time since the election, and have as yet done little business; they have had under their consideration a militia law, which hath been long in the hands of a committee, and is likely to take up a great deal more of their time; also a bill for raising £100,000 by a land tax of the same kind as yours in England; if these pass it is likely Friends will be subjected to great inconvenience.
As the former now stands, as I am told, the great patriot Franklin, who hath the principal direction of forming the bills, has discovered very little regard to tender consciences, which perhaps may partly arise from the observations he must have made since he has been in that House of the inconsistent conduct of many of our Friends.
That it seems to me he has almost persuaded himself there are few if any that are in earnest relating to their religious principles, and that he seems exceedingly studious of propagating a martial spirit all he can.
Later, he wrote: “The number of us who could not be free to pay the tax is small compared with those who not only comply with it but censure those who do not.”
Once the pacifist Quakers were out of the Assembly, they could try to apply their principles outside of the existing formal political structure.
Sharpless:
The French were busy in the north, and could not do more to aid the Pennsylvania Indians than furnish them with supplies.
Hence it seemed possible to detach the Delawares and Shawnese from the hostile alliance.
For this purpose the “Friendly Association” was formed.
This was composed of Quakers, now out of the government, but anxious to terminate the unfortunate warfare.
They refused to pay war taxes, but pledged themselves to contribute in the interests of peace “more than the heaviest taxes of a war can be expected to require.”
While this Association was objected to by the State authorities as an unofficial and to some extent an impertinent body, and charged with political motives, it succeeded in a remarkable way in bringing together the Indians and the Government in a succession of treaties, which finally resulted in the termination of the war and the payment to the Indians of an amount which satisfied them for the land taken by the Walking Purchase and other dubious processes.
Representatives of the Association, either by invitation of the Indians or of the Governor, were invariably present, and their largesses to the Indians much smoothed the way to pacific relations.
In addition to extra-governmental activism of this sort, there was a tendency to react in repulsion to the compromises of politics by retreating from public life:
There was growing up in the Society a belief, which was vastly strengthened by the military experiences of , that public life was unfavorable to the quiet Divine communion which called for inwardness, not outwardness, and which was the basic principle of Quakerism.… [T]he Yearly Meeting was strenuously engaged for several years after in pressing on its members the desirability of abstaining from civic business.
This was done under the plea that, as matters were, it was impossible to hold most official positions without administering oaths or voting war taxes.
The former violated Quaker principles directly, and the latter enjoined on their brethren a service against which their consciences rebelled.
In the interests, therefore, of liberty of conscience, the meetings urged on the members not to allow themselves to be candidates for judicial or legislative positions, and in time were largely successful.
In a report came in to the Yearly Meeting from a large and influential committee advising against furnishing wagons for the transport of military stores, and warning against allowing “the examples and injunctions of some members of our Society who are employed in offices and stations in civil government” [The distinction between the ecclesiastical and political Quakers is further indicated in the following: “Thou knows that we could not in every case vindicate our Assembly who had so greatly deviated from our known principles and the testimony of our forefathers.”
— Israel Pemberton to Samuel Fothergill, .] to influence anyone against a steady support of the truth.
They also recommend that the Yearly Meeting should “advise and caution against any Friends accepting of or continuing in offices or stations whereby they are subjected to the necessity of enjoining or enforcing the compliance of their brethren or others with any act which they may conscientiously scruple to perform.”
In any case, Quakers would never again regain political power to the extent that it would present these same sort of controversies and opportunities for compromise.
, I related John Churchman’s story behind the “epistle” that, as much as anything, launched the American war tax resistance movement.
John Woolman, in his Journal, gives a postscript that shows that war tax resistance was a hard sell even among Quakers:
Copies of this epistle were sent amongst Friends in the several parts of the province of Pennsylvania, and as some in the society who were easy to pay the tax spake… openly against it, and as some of those who were concerned in the conference… believed themselves rightly exercised in putting forward the epistle, they in the next Yearly Meeting expressed a willingness to have their conduct in that case enquired into, but Friends in the Yearly Meeting did not… enter into the consideration of it.
When the tax was gathered many paid it actively and others scrupled the payment, and in many places [the collectors & constables being friends] distress was made on their goods… by their fellow members.
This difficulty was considerable and at the Yearly Meeting at Philadelphia the matter was opened and a committee of about… forty Friends were appointed some from each quarter to consider the case, and report their judgment on this point whither or no it would be best at this time publicly to consider it in the Yearly Meeting.
At this meeting were our Friends William Reckett, John Hunt, and Christopher Willson from English, Benjamin Ferris from the province of New York, and Thomas Nicholson from North Carolina, who at the request of the Yearly Meeting all sat with us,—
We met and setting some hours adjourned until the next morning: It was a time of deep exercise to many minds, and after some hours spent at our second meeting the following report was drawn & signed by a friend in behalf of the committee:
Agreeable to the appointment of the Yearly Meeting we have met & had several weighty & deliberate conferences on the subject committed to us and as we find there are diversity of sentiments we are for that & several other reasons unanimously of the judgment that it is not proper to enter into a public discussion of the matter & we are one in judgment that it is highly necessary for the Yearly Meeting to recommend that Friends everywhere endeavour earnestly to have their minds covered with fervent charity towards one another, which report was entered on the minutes & copies sent in the extracts to the quarterly & monthly meetings.
In John Woolman’s journal is another episode that touches on war tax resistance, this one from .
In it, Woolman gives a strong answer to the criticism of tax resistance that sees it as a violation of a social contract:
One evening a Friend came to our lodgings who was a justice of the peace, and in a friendly way introduced the subject of refusing to pay taxes to support wars and perceiving that I was one who scrupled the payment, said that he had wanted an opportunity with some in that circumstance, whereupon we had some conversation in a brotherly way on some texts of scripture relating thereto, in the conclusion of which he said that according to our way of proceeding it would follow that whenever the administration of government was ill, we must suffer distraint of goods rather than pay actively toward supporting it.
To which I replied men put in public stations are intended for good purposes, some to make good laws, others to take care that those laws are not broken.
Now if these men thus set apart do not answer the design of their institution, our freely contributing to support them in that capacity when we certainly know that they are wrong, is to strengthen them in a wrong way & tends to make them forget that it is so, but when from a clear understanding of the case we are really uneasy with the application of money, and in the spirit of meekness suffer distress to be made on our goods rather than pay actively, this joined with an upright uniform life may tend to put men a thinking about their own public conduct.
He said he would propose a medium.
That is, where men in authority do not act agreeable to the mind of those who constituted them he thought the people should rather remonstrate than refuse a voluntary payment of moneys so demanded, and added, civil government is an agreement of free men, by which they oblige themselves to abide by certain laws as a standard, and to refuse to obey in that case is of the like nature as to refuse to do any particular act which we had covenanted to do.
I replied, that in making covenants, it was agreeable to honesty and uprightness to take care that we do not foreclose ourselves from adhering strictly to true virtue in all occurrences relating thereto.
But if I should unwarily promise to obey the orders of a certain man, or number of men, without any proviso, and he, or they command me to assist in doing some great wickedness, I may then see my error in making such promise and an active obedience in that case would be adding one evil to another: That though by such promise I should be liable to punishment for disobedience, yet to suffer rather than act to me appears most virtuous.
The whole of our conversation was in calmness & good will.
And here it may be noted that in Pennsylvania, where there are many friends under that scruple, a petition was presented to the Assembly by a large number of friends, asking that no law might be passed to enjoin the payment of money for such uses, which they as a peaceable people could not pay for conscience sake.
Another Woolman piece that has been influential to war tax resisters, particularly the low income / simple living variety, is a chapter from his “A Plea for the Poor.”
It doesn’t touch on tax resistance directly, but culminates in this exhortation: “Oh! that we who declare against wars, and Acknowledge our trust to be in God only, may walk in the Light, and therein examine our Foundation & motives in holding great Estates: May we look upon our Treasures, and the furniture of our Houses, and the Garments in which we array ourselves, and try whether the seeds of war have any nourishment in these our possessions, or not.”
The way of Carrying on Wars, common in the world, is so far distinguishable from the purity of Christ’s Religion, that many scruple to join in them.
Those who are so redeemed from the Love of the World, as to possess nothing in a Selfish Spirit, their “Life is hid with Christ in God,” and these he preserves in resignedness, even in times of Commotion.
As they possess nothing but what pertains to His family, anxious thoughts about wealth or dominion hath little or nothing in them to work upon, and they learn contentment in being disposed of according to His Will, who being Omnipotent, and always mindful of his Children, causes all things to work for their good.
But where that spirit works which loves Riches; works & in its working gathers wealth, and cleaves to customs which have their Root in self pleasing.
This Spirit thus separating from Universal Love, seeks help from that power which stands in the Separation, and whatever name it has, it still desires to defend the Treasures thus gotten.
This is like a Chain, where the end of one link encloses the end of another.
The rising up of a desire to obtain wealth is the beginning.
This desire being cherished moves to action, and riches thus gotten pleace self and while self hath a life in them it desires to have them defended.
Wealth is attended with Power, by which Bargains and proceedings contrary to Universal Righteousness are Supported, and here Oppression, carried on with worldly policy & order, clothes itself with the name of Justice, and becomes like a seed of Discord in the soil: and as this spirit which wanders from the pure Habitation prevails, so the seed of War Swells & Sprouts and grows & becomes Strong, till much fruit are ripened.
Thus comes the Harvest spoken of by the prophet, which “is a Heap, in the Day of Grief & of desperate Sorrow.”
Oh! that we who declare against wars, and Acknowledge our trust to be in God only, may walk in the Light, and therein examine our Foundation & motives in holding great Estates: May we look upon our Treasures, and the furniture of our Houses, and the Garments in which we array ourselves, and try whether the seeds of war have any nourishment in these our possessions, or not.
Holding Treasures in the Self pleasing Spirit is a Strong plant, the fruit whereof ripens fast.
A day of outward Distress is coming, and Divine Love calls to prepare for it.
Hearken then, O ye Children who have known the Light, and come forth!
Leave every thing which our Lord Jesus Christ does not own.
Think not his pattern too plain or too coarse for you.
Think not a Small portion in this life too little: but let us live in His Spirit, & walk as he walked, and he will preserve us in the greatest Troubles.
A correspondent for a London newspaper sent in a report on happenings in Pennsylvania on :
I can send you nothing but the continued news of scalping and internal confusions, arising from Quaker-government.
I shall not therefore increase this packet by enclosing our late newspapers, since the substance of them is in short as follows, viz., that within past, several families in various parts of the province have been barbarously murdered.
In Northampton county, on , one Sifluff and one of his sons was killed and scalped, and the other son killed but not scalped, the tomahawk being found sticking in his head.
In Cumberland county at the same time, the house of one widow Cox was burnt, her two sons and the Craigs murdered and destroyed.
It would be endless to descend to particulars.
The enemy are lurking in every part of the country, and every week, (almost every day) brings us the catastrophe of some unsuspecting family; and we are no nearer our purpose of defence than at first.
The money granted is of little or no use, for want of an equal and just military law.
The Quakers, to save themselves, have given something like a law to bind the willing, but forgot that nobody would be willing to bear the burden of defence, unless it was borne equally.
Hence nothing can be done among the people but by force of money; and even then they make their own terms with their leaders; and no wonder, since our laws are made to encourage licentiousness, by a vile levelling faction, who, in order to keep themselves loose, have loosened the whole government.
Nor is this the worst: they are doing all in their power to raise a rebellion in levying the tax, persuading every Quaker to refuse paying it.
As a proof of this, I send you a circular letter, signed by their preachers, and sent to the meetings in the province.
It is a piece of mere enthusiastic jargon, but sufficiently shows our unhappy situation, and their wicked designs.
Among the subscribers, you will see the name of [Samuel] Fothergill, your London enthusiast: I wish you would keep such men at home; for we are too much distracted by men of that kidney among ourselves.
I hope some notice will at last be taken of such pests of society, who have undone this poor (though late flourishing) province.
The anonymous correspondent attached to this complaint the “Epistle of Tender Love and Kindness” sent by John Woolman and others to their fellow Friends.
This shows what the Quaker pacifists were up against.
Rather than give up their principles, they eventually abandoned their seats in the colonial Assembly — this allowed the Assembly to give in to popular demand and organize a military defense, but without the assistance of Quaker legislators.
Boardman says that the agency is violating the First Amendment right to freedom of religion, and to the later Congressional bolstering of that right by the Religious Freedom Restoration Act of 1993, by labeling her war tax resistance “frivolous” and failing to provide a taxpaying method that accommodates her sincere religious beliefs forbidding her to pay for war (Boardman is a Quaker).
At a luncheon held to mark the filing of her Claim, actor Jeffrey Viguie, playing the part of 18th Century Quaker John Woolman, addressed the attendees, and read from the “Epistle of Tender Love and Caution” in which Woolman and others promoted war tax resistance to the Society of Friends in 1755.
When trying to bring new tax resisters into a movement, there are lots of hopeful short-cuts, but sometimes there is no substitute for addressing potential resisters individually: whether that be through letters, petitions, or face-to-face meetings.
When the United States approved a billion-dollar military aid package to the government of Colombia in , the president of the Mennonite Church of Colombia, Peter Stucky, and Ricardo Esquivia, the director of that church’s Justapaz organization and the coordinator of the Evangelical Council of Colombia’s Human Rights and Peace Commission, wrote a letter to their sister churches in the U.S..
In that letter, they explained the disastrous consequences of fueling the civil war and the military wing of the war on drugs there, explained how the church there was trying to respond more productively to the crisis, and called on churches in the U.S. to do their part:
In reality, the government of the United States, using the tax-payers money, is supporting the Colombian government in what we consider to be a negative form.
This means that the message arriving from the North to the Colombian people becomes a message of death and destruction.
For that reason we are calling the churches in the North to redeem their taxes, on one hand by demanding that the U.S. government invests this money in life-producing projects, and on the other hand by redirecting part of their taxes toward a different project in your community or the world that promotes abundant and dignified life, as our Lord Jesus Christ has commanded us.
The American Mennonite Central Committee responded by urging taxpayers to redirect their taxes from the U.S. government to the Mennonite-run “Taxes for Peace” fund, which in turn would be dedicated that year to peace-building efforts in Colombia.
This sort of advocacy can be dangerous, as this next example will show.
In , R.W. Benner, a Mennonite minister, got worried reports from members of his congregation who were being told in no uncertain terms that they would buy so-called “Liberty Bonds” to support the U.S. war effort, or they would answer for their refusal.
Benner wrote to his bishop, L.J. Heatwole, who responded with a letter in which he reiterated the position of the church that Mennonite brethren “Do not aid or abet war in any form… [and] Contribute nothing to a fund that is used to run the war machine.”
He noted:
In a number of places where brethren have refused to contribute to the different war funds, outlandish threats have been made and in a few cases have been put into execution — such as, tar and feathering, painting houses yellow, decorating autos and buildings with flags to test them out on their principles of nonresistance.
But he urged his fellow-Mennonites to keep the faith and to embrace this sort of martyrdom like good Christians.
Benner conveyed this message to his flock.
For this, both of them were charged under the Espionage Act and convicted.
(To give you some idea of the railroading involved, Heatwole did not learn that a guilty plea had been entered on his behalf by his court-appointed attorney until after he appeared for the trial!)
Letters, or “epistles,” from war tax resisting Quakers to their fellow-Friends were an important way of spreading and maintaining the practice in the Society.
American war tax resistance can be said to have begun on , when John Woolman, Anthony Benezet, and several other Quakers addressed a letter in which they explained to other Friends why
as we cannot be concerned in wars and fightings, so neither ought we to contribute thereto by paying the tax directed by the [recent] Act, though suffering be the consequence of our refusal, which we hope to be enabled to bear with patience.
David Cooper reflected on how thoughtful letters like these helped him maintain his war tax resistance in times of doubt:
I read with singular satisfaction the piece which you lent me respecting taxes, as it was very strengthening to my mind, which before was somewhat encompassed with weakness on this account.… I have since felt much weakness, and had come to no solid conclusion of mind, until I read your little manuscript, which caused my heart to rejoice, under a feeling sense that it is the truth which leads those who walk and abide in it to hold forth this testimony unto the world.
And oh, says my soul, that I may yield faithful obedience to its monitions, let what will be the consequence.
Yearly Meetings would sometimes send letters to Quarterly or Monthly Meetings to reiterate the Quaker position on war tax resistance and give instructions as to how it should be enforced.
For instance, this is from an letter from the North Carolina Yearly Meeting:
…all our members should stand firm, and be faithful in bearing their testimony against war and military operations; taxes and fines appertaining thereunto, either directly or indirectly; or any way conniving or compromising with the specious and plausible offers of the legislature, by the tax proposed in the late act, to screen us from muster fines or military services.
And in order that all our members may be clearly informed on this subject, and be fully prepared to meet the trial likely to come upon us by this law, we have thought it best to send it down in this epistle.
An organizer of the Dublin water charge strike recalls:
…months of work had been done in local areas convincing people of the primacy of [non-payment].
This was done through local public meetings, door-to-door leaflets and even knocking on doors and talking to people… The building of the campaign in this way was crucial.
Local campaign groups were built and then came together and federated, rather than a central committee being formed first and then coming along to organise people.
…it became clear that while people might not have come out to the meeting, they had kept the information about the campaign and the campaign contact numbers had their place on a lot of fridge doors.
American women’s suffrage activist Anna Howard Shaw wrote a letter to women in the movement in , urging them to refuse to fill out income tax returns.
“In this manner we can show our loyalty to those who struggled to make this a free republic and who laid down their lives in defense of the equal rights of all free citizens to a voice in their own Government.
… Let our protest be universal, and let every believer in justice unite in this mode of passive resistance and steadfastly refuse to assist the Government in its unjust and tyrannical violation of its fundamental principle that ‘taxation and representation are one and inseparable,’ and thus prove ourselves worthy descendants of noble ancestors, who counted no price too dear to pay in defense of liberty and equality and justice.”
She told a reporter: “Since my letter was sent all over the country, I have received letters of encouragement and support from all directions,” and she soon thereafter won support for her stand from the Congressional Union for Woman Suffrage.
Only some of the women’s suffrage activists in Britain were responsible for paying taxes, so although tax resistance was an important part of the campaign there, it was a part not everybody could participate in.
The movement made a special effort to find women who had taxes they could resist.
For example, at one meeting in , Margaret Kineton Parkes “asked anyone present who knew women who paid taxes to send in their names, that they might be approached by her society.”
In , Marie Lawson launched what she called a “snowball” protest: a sort of chain letter in which she sent out letters that advocated tax resistance (and protested on behalf of an imprisoned resister) and that asked the recipients to join her and to in turn send the same letter “to at least three friends.”
Public burnings of poll tax notices were good excuses for people to join in festive resistance activities.
The campaign to resist Thatcher’s Poll Tax used some creative outreach techniques (quotes from Danny Burns’s history of the movement):
“The Aberdeen Anti-Poll Tax group was formed when people from the radical bookshop came together with a community arts group:
“…The local community arts group had a theatre group called “Wise Up” and they got a show together about the Poll Tax.
They took this show around the estates with information for people about registration and how to fight it, to encourage them to set up local groups and support networks.
The plays were performed in local community centres.
Attendance for the plays varied from about 10 to 40 or more.
The meetings which followed were encouraging because people gave their names as contacts or asked people to set up future meetings.”
“In my local group… the union was built up through a door-to-door campaign.
A group of five or six people (mostly friends) formed the core.
They advertised a public meeting on the Poll Tax and about 50 people turned up.
Out of these some joined the organising group.
This small group then mass-produced a window poster which said ‘No Poll Tax Here.’
The poster was dropped through the letter-boxes of 2000 households and the group waited to see who put them up.
Posters appeared in about 100 windows.
Activists then went round and spoke to these people individually, inviting them to attend the next organising meeting; about fifteen did — enough to form the core of a group.”
“[Our] network was strengthened by a door-to-door survey of over 500 households.
The survey was not intended to be scientifically accurate.
Its purpose was to give the APTU a fairly accurate picture of what was happening on the ground, and, perhaps more significantly, it was a pretext for engaging people in conversation about the Poll Tax, informing them of the non-payment campaign and encouraging them to join their local APTU.… Over a third of the people canvassed became paid up members of the union.
By the end of the exercise Easton had over 300 members and street reps for almost every street.
The canvass was not left there.
The key to its success was the second visit.
The group compiled all the statistics on a street by street basis and many of the reps then went back, door-to-door, and told people the results of the survey in their street and the neighbouring streets.
A newsletter was delivered to everyone telling them what the overall results were for Easton.
This meant that people knew how few of their neighbours were going to pay and it gave them confidence not to pay themselves.
They had spoken to the canvassers personally, so they knew that the survey was genuine.”
“An independent television company approached the Easton group in order to work with us on a film about the Poll Tax.
The film was never shown, but the way the community was engaged in the process of making it is instructive.
The film producers wanted a shot of all the doors in the street, opening one by one as the occupants came out of their houses with banners and signs.
Charles, the local street rep, went round to people’s houses every evening for a week and explained to them what was wanted.
Out of 30 houses in the street (a cul-de-sac) 28 agreed to participate.
The street is multi-racial with a fairly wide class mix.
It was inspiring to see white working class men standing shoulder to shoulder with Asian women and their kids, holding the same banners and engrossed in conversation.
Some of them had never spoken to each other before.
The film was made, but more importantly, as [a] result of making it, virtually every one of those households joined the Union, and most still had posters in their windows a year later.
People were brought into the campaign, not through a leaflet or a canvasser, but through an interesting activity.
They didn’t have to go to the campaign, it came to them.”
War tax resistance in the Friends Journal in
a Vietnamese postage stamp featuring Norman Morrison
On , a 31-year-old American Quaker named Norman Morrison went out to the sidewalk in front of U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara’s office in the Pentagon, doused himself in kerosene, and set himself on fire as a protest against the American war on Vietnam.
His suicide stunned the Society of Friends and made more urgent the already percolating questions about the moribund Quaker peace testimony and how much Friends were willing to put on the line for it.
This is reflected by the increased attention given in the pages of Friends Journal in to the issue of war tax resistance.
In , a “Friends’ Conference and Vigil on the War in Vietnam” asked the “Friends Coordinating Committee on Peace… to prepare a bulletin urging Friends to consider how paying taxes and buying war bonds involved them in financing the military.”
A number of Quakers signed a “No Taxes for Vietnam War” tax refusal vow that was organized by Maurice McCracken’s “No War in Vietnam Committee.”
These included, according to the issue of the Journal, “Franklin Zahn, Bob and Marj Swann, Arthur Evans, Bradford Lyttle, Johan W. Eliot, Staughton Lynd, Wilmer Young, George and Lillian Willoughby, and Marion C. Frenyear.”
The lead editorial in that issue was entitled “To Pay or to Protest?” and the author was determined to give no definitive advice on either side of that question.
The editorial begins by stating the case for Quaker taxpayer misgivings, then moves on to note that “a few pacifists” have been resisting, and to claim that “this year the number of tax-refusers will be far greater than ever before,” while other taxpayers who share their misgivings are either unwilling to take on the risks of tax resistance or believe that such an action amounts to “dodging the law and leaving someone else to carry a burden which they themselves will not assume.”
The editorialist then quotes from a letter written by a resisting employee “to her employing group” (why so coy about which group?) in which she writes that while she would be happy to “pay twice as much as required by the present law” for the more benign things the government buys, “I cannot bring myself to furnish money to be used in a way that will bring death to fine young American boys and men and also to Vietnamese men, women, and children.”
If “the employing group” were to cooperate in her request to stop withholding income tax from her salary, the editorialist wonders, “[w]ill it (or its members) be penalized?”
This is another strange example of the Journal taking an issue that was obviously a direct concern to Quakers and to Quaker Meetings, and trying to abstract it and cast it off into the distance somewhere in order to consider it dispassionately and indecisively.
From here the editorialist compares the Quaker war tax resister of today to the Quaker abolitionist “in the years before the Civil War when some members wanted to give all-out aid to the cause of abolition while others counseled caution, advocating strict adherence to the letter of such laws as those requiring fugitive slaves to be returned to their masters.”
Nowadays we tend to view with shame the historical evidence that all Friends did not work wholeheartedly for the abolition of slavery; will the time come when the Friends who follow after us have a similar feeling about those of their predecessors (including the present writer) who lacked the courage to resist conscription of their dollars to do the killing that they themselves refused to do?
After a quick detour through “There are those who say… there are others who counterargue…” territory, the editorialist recommends that people interested in tax refusal contact the Committee for Nonpayment of War Taxes or the Peacemakers, and gives their addresses.
Finally, there is a brief nod in the direction of war tax resistance being a time-honored Quaker practice.
The editorialist mentions that Franklin Zahn has authored a booklet on “Early Friends and War Taxes,” which includes the quote that ends the editorial, from the letter sent by John Woolman & co. to their fellow-Friends in :
Raising sums of money [for] purposes inconsistent with the peaceable testimony we profess… appears to us in its consequences to be destructive of our religious liberties; we apprehend many among us will be under the necessity of suffering, rather than consenting thereto by the payment of a tax for such purposes.
In the issue, an article about a Quaker movement in which people voluntarily taxed themselves 1% of their income for the support of the United Nations began this way: “All Friends, whether or not they would refuse to take up arms, are caught up in the military machine through payment of Federal income tax.”
This seems to indicate that there was still a blind spot that was making it difficult for some Quakers to even see the various alternatives to paying the federal income tax.
A report on the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting in the same issue noted:
After consideration, the Yearly Meeting concurred with the concern of the Friends Peace Committee that fresh attention be given to the effort to devise a formula acceptable to the Internal Revenue Service and to Congress, which would permit persons to withhold that proportion of their income taxes applicable to military purposes and apply it to constructive purposes of government.
Because a Monthly Meeting secretary and a youth worker for the Peace Committee have asked their employers to cease withholding income tax from their salaries, the problem is being thrust upon the Yearly Meeting.
Friends, whatever their judgments about a particular action, are sympathetic toward those who engage in it for reasons of conscience.
In furtherance of its concern… the Friends Peace Committee received authorization to seek personal conferences with officials of the Internal Revenue Service to acquaint them with the basis and reality of the concern to refuse payment of taxes for military purposes.
Perhaps such conversations may increase understanding on the part of the officials and may enable them, while carrying out their duty and enforcing the law, to understand and respect the refusers.
A conference at Pendle Hill “on the search for peace” in , concerned the “basic question… [of] whether the militaristic society in which we all live could be influenced through techniques of reason or whether religious pacifists, in their deep alienation, should rather seek a more radical strategy of protest.”
At one point, according to the coverage in the issue of the Journal, William Davidon “spoke frankly and clearly on the moral philosophy behind his refusal to pay those taxes which, he felt, would support the war in Vietnam.”
Martin A. Klaver contributed the lead editorial in the issue — “More on Tax-Refusal” — which is worth reproducing completely here as a good overview of the issue of war tax resistance as it stood at that time:
“Friends Journal,” writes John R. Ewbank, patent attorney and a member of Abington Meeting, Jenkintown, Pa., “might well mention the ‘mildest form of tax-refusal for Milquetoasts’: the refusal to pay the federal tax on telephone usage when billed for it.
The telephone company can carry the accumulated unpaid tax until it equals the deposit, and then assess a charge for nominal discontinuance and reconnection, so that the penalties for prolonged persistence are paid to the phone company instead of to the government.
How long it is worth while to carry the protest is a matter of individual judgment…”
For nearly a hundred years, John Ewbank adds, Americans have not been faced with a levy so conspicuously labeled “war tax” as this revived tax on telephone usage.
According to his letter to the telephone company, “The publicity connected with the telephone tax has been so specifically related to the Vietnam war, and I am conscientiously so opposed to the Vietnam war, that my payment herewith omits the $1.03 federal tax.
There are so few opportunities for protest — even feeble, futile protest — that [this] becomes one of the few available gestures.”
For Milquetoasts or not, feeble or not, the gesture is a form of civil disobedience differing more in degree than in kind from refusal to pay the federal income tax — or that part of it that goes for war.
It seems a little unfair to make it at the expense of the telephone company, which is thereby put to added trouble and expense, if only in its bookkeeping department, but it is a protest.
This year, it appears, the thin ranks of those refusing to pay income taxes for reasons of conscience were somewhat augmented.
An release from the office of A.J. Muste cites a statement signed by 360 persons, declaring that they would refuse to pay taxes voluntarily as long as United States forces continue to be used “in violation of the U.S. Constitution, international law, and the United Nations Charter.”
The release says that some signers are leaving the money they owe the government in banks, where the Internal Revenue Service can seize it, while others will contribute it to CARE, UNICEF, or similar agencies.
It also notes that, according to the Internal Revenue Code, “willful refusal to pay taxes may be punished by jail sentences of up to one year and fines as high as $10,000.”
This is not tax-refusal for Milquetoasts, although in the past fines and jail sentences have been rare indeed.
The law is enforced by placing a lien on the tax refuser’s property or attaching his salary.
There have been a number of instances where actions instituted against individuals were simply dropped.
But if tax-refusal should reach important proportions, the present seemingly casual attitude might change; the IRS might decide that it must do something to show that it is not virtually inviting more and more trouble.
Philadelphia Yearly Meeting was concerned this year with the problem posed by employes of two Quaker groups who have asked their employers not to withhold federal taxes from their salaries.
The Yearly Meeting’s Peace Committee is not only seeking a solution to this problem but is also seeking special conferences with Internal Revenue Service officials to acquaint them with the reasons why some Friends refuse to pay their taxes.
During the Yearly Meeting’s discussion it was brought out that Friends Committee on National Legislation for some time has been exploring the possibility of drafting legislation in this area making it possible for Americans who have conscientious objections to having their property used for war to pay equivalent taxes for other uses.
A number of congressmen have been receptive to the idea, but so far no formula has been found that promises to attract the necessary support.
Meanwhile most Quakers (like this one) pay their income taxes (including the reimposed telephone tax) without a murmur.
But there is a consensus on a fundamental: Friends’ basic belief that in matters of conscience each individual must choose his own course.
If that course brings him into conflict with government, he must decide for himself what he must do: obey in silence, obey and at the same time protest, or resort to civil disobedience of one kind or another.
Whether any government can grant any of its citizens the “right” to violate any of its laws is open to debate.
The citizen can hardly lay claim to such a right, yet when he feels that he has a duty to break the law, when he says, “God helping me, I can do no other,” then we must accord him our respect.
The issue noted that “two young Quaker workers… have voluntarily taken drastic cuts in salary rather than pay taxes for war in Vietnam.”
The two were John L.P. Maynard and Robert W. Eaton, who reduced their incomes to the maximum allowable before federal income tax withholding began — something on the order of $75 per month.
The Conservative branch of the Ohio Yearly Meeting met in .
According to William P. Taber, Jr.’s report on the meeting, “we asked our members to consider supporting tax refusal and the sending of aid to the civilians of all Vietnam.”
On the other hand, at the Westerly (Rhode Island) Monthly Meeting, the message was more mixed: “Many Friends feel that not to pay their taxes is disrespect for the law, breeding anarchy.
Yet they deplore the fact that their tax money is being used to prosecute a morally indefensible war in Vietnam.”
The best they could come up with was to approve a suggestion that Friends accompany their tax payments with a statement of protest.
The pseudonymous history columnist “Now and Then” took up the issue of war tax resistance in the issue:
A scruple against paying taxes which directly or indirectly support war has had a long if sporadic history among members of the Society of Friends.
It received official support in London in when decision was made that fine or punishment for such refusal could be reported by the meeting in the annual listing of “sufferings for Truth.”
At Philadelphia Yearly Meeting every year lately this concern has been voiced by individuals.
In the Meeting went so far as to authorize some minor action on the subject, including a delegation to visit the Internal Revenue authorities and to explain the tender conscience of the increasing number of Friends who refuse part or all of their Federal income tax.
The most intensive consideration of the matter among the Meeting’s membership appears to have occurred more than two centuries ago.
Before the Pennsylvania Assembly was asked by the mother country to supply men and funds for British military enterprises in the colonies.
The Quaker legislators, when they complied, did so uneasily, with the excuses that it was for defense or that the money was voted nominally for the sovereign’s use and that they were not responsible for what use the king (or queen) chose to make of it.
They also accepted as a permanent unqualified mandate the words of Jesus, “Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s.” Sometimes Friends distinguished as acceptable mixed taxes and as unacceptable those taxes that were definitely labeled for war.
We are indebted to John Woolman’s Journal (Chapter Ⅴ) for an account of the exercise that arose in Philadelphia Yearly Meeting both in and in .
In the former year a committee was appointed which issued an epistle expressing the feeling that “the large sum granted by the late act of Assembly for the King’s use is principally intended for purposes inconsistent with our peaceable testimony,” and that “as we cannot be concerned in wars and fightings, so neither ought we to contribute thereto by paying the tax directed by the said act, though suffering be the consequence of our refusal.”
Woolman speaks of the conference on the subject “as the most weighty that ever I was at.”
There was not unanimity in the group.
Some who felt easy to pay the tax withdrew, but twenty-one substantial Friends subscribed the epistle; they included John Woolman, John Churchman (who also mentions the matter in his Journal), Anthony Benezet, John Pemberton, and Samuel Fothergill, an English public Friend visiting America.
In the Yearly Meeting of the matter was opened again, and a committee of about forty Friends were appointed to consider “whether or no it would be best at this time publicly to consider it in the Yearly Meeting.”
Visitors from other Yearly Meetings — including John Hunt and Christopher Wilson from England — were asked to join the committee.
The decision was negative.
There was difference of opinion on the subject, and “for that and several other reasons” the committee unanimously agreed that it was not proper to enter into public discussion of the matter.
Meanwhile it recommended that Friends of differing opinions “have their minds covered with fervent charity towards one another.”
One wonders why the different result from two years before and what were some of the “other reasons.”
Part of the answer, I think, is to be found in a letter to John Hunt and Christopher Wilson, sent to them by the Meeting for Sufferings in London.
This letter is dated and is signed by Benjamin Bourne, clerk.
I shall quote it as I have copied it from the manuscript minutes of the Meeting.
It falls in date between the two Philadelphia Yearly Meetings described above, at the second of which Hunt and Wilson were present and in a position to transmit the urgent advice of London Friends.
The main purpose of their mission to Pennsylvania, as is well known, was to prevent the home government’s proposed requirement of an oath for members of the Assembly by asking Friends to refuse to run for election.
The British Friends asked the government to let them attempt first to bring about the purging of the Assembly of Quakers.
In this they succeeded to the extent that most Friends withdrew from the Assembly; thus the threat was averted.
Evidently the same pressure was exercised to encourage Friends to pay provincial war taxes to the British crown and particularly not to publicize their scruple against paying them.
But neither the minutes of Philadelpha Yearly Meeting for (under ) nor its epistles — whether to London Yearly Meeting or to its own members — are so explicit as the letter.
After repeating the primary commission to the English delegates to try “to prevail on Friends in Pennsylvania to refuse being chosen into Assembly during the present commotions in America” and “to make them fully sensible of their danger, and how much it concerns them, the Province, and their posterity to act conformably to this request and the expectations of the government,” the letter continues:
And as you will know that very disadvantageous impressions have been made here by the advices given by some Friends against the payment of a tax lately laid by the provincial assembly, it is recommended in a particular manner that you endeavour to remove all occasions of misunderstanding on this account, and to explain and enforce our known principles and practice respecting the payment of taxes for the support of civil government agreeable to the several advices of the Yearly Meeting founded on the precept and example of our Saviour.
May that wisdom which is from above attend you in this weighty undertaking, and render your labours effectual for the purposes intended that you may be the happy instruments of averting the dangers that threaten the liberties and privileges of the people in general and restore and strengthen that union and harmony which ought to subsist in every part of our Christian Society.
Two brief lists were delivered with the above letter: extracts from London Yearly Meeting minutes of , , , , and , in which the payment of dues to the government is inculcated; and titles of Acts of Parliament, seven chapters in four Acts from the reigns of William and Mary and Queen Anne, “wherein it is expressed that the taxes are for carrying on a war.”
The final phrase was to leave no doubt that English Friends encouraged no escape on the ground that a Quaker conscience could assume the doubtful or peaceful purpose of the legislation.
The grounds on which the scruple among Friends was silenced in are clear.
Friends had long paid such taxes and wished to obey the laws.
If Pennsylvania Friends refused to vote for them as assemblymen or to collect them as tax collectors or to pay them as subjects, the liberties enjoyed in the colony, such as permitting affirmations in place of oaths, would be terminated.
The exhortations in the gospels and New Testament epistles in favor of paying Caesar his dues were applicable.
The early Quaker examples of civil disobedience in other matters were forgotten, and the relevance of the continuing Quaker testimonies against personal participation in war and against the payment of tithes was not cited.
In the latter area Friends were resolutely against payment and suffered ruinous distraints.
Evidently dues for the support of “hireling ministers” seemed more obnoxious than taxes for the prosecution of war.
If Colonial Friends disagreed with the practice of Friends in England or even with one another they would expose the Society to disharmony.
When Woolman’s Journal was reprinted in England in the whole section on paying or not paying taxes was omitted, but in America the problem already was taking a different form.
Friends and others had opposed taxation without representation when the Stamp Act was passed in .
With the outbreak of the Revolution the issue was one of using continental currency or of paying taxes to support war against Great Britain.
This, many American Friends (like Job Scott) and Meetings were willing openly to oppose.
The New York Yearly Meeting issued a statement “on the tragic situation in Vietnam,” saying that it represented “a supreme test” to “the spiritual vitality of the Religious Society of Friends.”
The statement, reprinted in the issue of the Journal included this point:
We call upon Friends to examine their conscience concerning whether they cannot more fully dissociate themselves from the war machine either by tax refusal or by changing their occupations.
The issue noted that “the newsletters of several Friends’ organizations” are encouraging their readers to “protest your telephone war tax” but also suggests that in some cases the protest was a pretty pathetic one: “Stickers saying ‘The Vietnam War Tax Included in This Bill Is Paid Only Under Protest’ are available from the American Friends Service Committee.”
The following issue included a letter-to-the-editor from Franklin Zahn in which he encouraged a more practical approach: “Each month I pay all of my phone bill but 7 percent, informing the company it is against my conscience to pay the direct war tax.
For five months the company added the unpaid balances to each new bill, then wrote it was referring the unpaid total to Internal Revenue Service and wiping my bill clean of debt… How will Internal Revenue handle this?
Past experience with unpaid income taxes indicates IRS may ask for payment but make no bank account seizure until the amount totals more than $5, at which time it takes an extra 6 percent (per annum) as fine.
Not paying direct war taxes is part of Quaker peace testimony.
Don’t pay for a wrong number.”
Franklin Zahn
We’ve encountered Franklin Zahn before.
He was listed as the contact person for “a leaflet on tax refusal” in a issue, and also something described as “the historical material” on the subject — “Early Friends and War Taxes” (perhaps the same leaflet).
Here is some more of his work:
In the issue, he responded in a letter-to-the-editor to an article that apparently suggested “that Friends drop their middle-class attitude of changing law and join the less privileged whose only method has been evading law.”
Zahn responded:
A basic test for conscience is the categorical imperative: What happens if everybody else did the same?
For [draft] evasion, I can see only the tightening up of conscription law.
For open resistance, however, the end of conscription.
For myself, personally beyond the applicable age, the corresponding form of resistance is refusal to pay war taxes.
If everyone in the world practiced it, the result would be close to total elimination of war.
I recently harbored an AWOL who jumped ship fifteen minutes before it sailed for Vietnam, but a better Quaker witness and confrontation would have been for both of us openly to declare our civil-military disobedience — he, his desertion; I, my aiding and abetting, and face the penalties for our actions.
But maybe I should rejoice in that having evaded the law I have lost some middle-classness.
In the issue, he suggested that the spirit of the gospels meant that the “Render Unto Caesar” episode should be interpreted anew:
In the matter of war taxes, were Jesus addressing Christian stewards of God’s wealth who were citizens in a free democracy and responsible for its conduct and were be to pick up an American coin with its inscription, “In God We Trust,” his words might very well be:
If the God you trust is Mars, pay your taxes to him.
In the issue, he gave “a historical summary” of how Quakers had dealt with the issue of war taxes:
With war taxes as with slavery, John Woolman stands out as the pioneer in getting the Society of Friends to face the issue.
His motivation in bringing the concern to Philadelphia Yearly Meeting in came from the increasing willingness of the Quaker government of the colony of Pennsylvania to vote money for war.
The Quaker Assembly had begun to weaken in its peace testimony in .
First it had refused to vote £4000 for an expedition into Canada, forthrightly saying, “It was contrary to their religious principles to hire men to kill one another.”
But later they voted £500 “for the Queen” as a token of their respect, with a rider saying, “The money should be put into a safe hand till they were satisfied from England it should not be employed for the use of war.”
But in a similar request resulted in £2000 being voted, with Isaac Norris echoing Fox in explaining: “We did not see it to be inconsistent with our principles to give the Queen money notwithstanding any use she might put it to, that not being our part but hers.”
That same year William Penn reputedly wrote the Queen (I have not found historical verification): “Our civil obedience is only due to Christ, not to confound the things of God with Caesar’s; for no man can be true to Him that’s false to his own conscience, nor can he extort from it a tribute to carry on any war, nor ought true Christians to pay it.”
[I also have been unable to find a source for this quote —♇]
Whatever influence the letter may have had, the fact seems to be that none of the £2000 voted “for the Queen’s use” was spent on the military expedition.
But the principle of passing the buck for war seems to have been established in the Assembly, which took the view that while Quakers refused to bear arms themselves they did not condemn it in others.
In the Assembly told the Governor it could not vote money for war, but acknowledged that on the other hand it had obligations to aid the government.
The crisis, however, came in the French and Indian War in , when individual taxpayers decided they could no longer pass the war buck to the Assembly.
In of that year John Churchman and other Friends met with Assembly Friends, and about twenty of them said, in part:
“…As the raising sums of money, and putting them into the hands of committees, who may apply them to purposes inconsistent with the peaceable testimony we profess, …appears to us in its consequences, to be destructive of our religious liberties; we apprehend many among us will be under the necessity of suffering, rather than consenting thereto, by the payment of a tax for such purposes; and thus the fundamental part of our constitution may be essentially affected, and that free enjoyment of conscience by degrees be violated;…”
The setting for this ultimatum is of interest: Quaker tax-payers, one-third of the population of the colony, Quaker Assemblymen a majority in a legislature which had non-Quakers like Benjamin Franklin — the most important person in the colony.
The Assembly, when the vote came, said it could not give money for munitions but that, as a “tribute to Caesar,” it was voting £4000 for “bread, beef, pork, flour, wheat, or other grain.”
The Governor who had received the request from New England for a grant to buy a different granular material, told the Assembly that their term “other grain” meant gunpowder and so spent the money.
Woolman’s thoughts about war taxes and his journeying to Philadelphia Yearly Meeting that year with his concern are familiar in his Journal.
One passage, however, seems pertinent to as Friends urge a divided Congress to cut off war funds:
“Some of our members who are officers in civil government are… called upon in their respective stations to assist in things relative to the wars… if they see their brethren united in payment of a tax to carry on the said wars, may think their case not much different, and so might quench the tender movings of the Holy Spirit in their minds.”
On , he; Churchman and others drew up an Epistle to Pennsylvania Friends:
“…The large sum granted… is principally intended for purposes inconsistent with our peaceable testimony; we therefore think that as we cannot be concerned in wars and fightings, so neither ought we to contribute thereto, by paying the tax directed by said act, though suffering be the consequence of our refusal.… Though some part of the money to be raised… is said to be for such benevolent purposes as supporting our friendship with our Indian Neighbors and relieving the distresses of our fellow-subjects, who have suffered in the present calamities, …we could most cheerfully contribute to those purposes, if they were not so mixed, that we cannot… show our hearty concurrence therewith without at the same time assenting to… practices which we apprehend contrary to the testimony which the Lord hath given us to bear…”
The “tax” committee of Yearly Meeting decided that refusal should be an individual matter, and in we find Friends like Joshua Evans conscious there was no solid front: “I found it best for me to refuse paying demands on my estate which went to pay the expenses of war, and although my part might appear at best as a drop in the ocean, yet the ocean, I considered, was made of many drops.”
The effect of such witness was not to stop the war but, as Woolman may have felt of even greater importance, to help Quaker legislators to be true to their own “tender movings.”
In that year the last of the Quaker Assemblymen had resigned and no more ran for the office — in Franklin’s approving words, “choosing rather to quit their power than their principle.”
The 70-year experiment of a Quaker government came to an end over the question of war taxes.
By , according to James Pemberton, it was clear the war-makers were extracting their toll: “The tax in this country [is] pretty well collected and many in this city particularly suffered by distraint of their goods and some being near cast into jail.”
Two decades later, when the bigger test of the Revolutionary War came and the “fighting” Free Quakers separated, tax refusal was so well established that some Quakers appear almost to have over-reacted.
In The Quakers in the American Colonies, Rufus Jones writes:
“There was plenty for the overseers to do in these early days of the war.… Shutting their hearts against the pleadings of mercy for their brothers and sons who had joined the ‘associators’ or paid war taxes, or placed guns for defence upon their vessels, or paid fines for refusing to collect military taxes, or in any way aided the war on either side, they cleared the Society of all open complicity with it.
The offense was reported to one Monthly Meeting, and at the next the testimony of disownment would go out.”
While by today’s permissive standards of the Society such peace witness seems more hysterical than historical, we need to be aware that in this period as in the Civil War, “tax” sometimes meant the substitutionary amount paid in lieu of military service by COs.
In New England the question of paying war taxes to the rebelling colonial governments was the precipitating cause for the split-off of Free Quakers.
There, as elsewhere, when the Revolutionary War broke out, Friends generally agreed they should not pay specific war taxes but on “mixed” taxes — the subject of the 1755 Epistle in Pennsylvania — there was no consensus.
Job Scott in New England Yearly Meeting was the most erudite and detailed advocate of not paying mixed taxes.
In his essay, subtitled “A truly conscientious scruple with respect to the payment of such taxes as are in part demanded for and applied to the support of war and fighting,” and addressed to “Friendly reader,” he reasoned in 1780:
“Now then, if a collector of taxes comes to me and in Caesar’s name demands a tax of £20 which I am persuaded is so far mixed, part for war and part for other charges, that my conscience forbids my paying it… I am not to blame for not paying it: if Caesar pleaseth to separate them I can gladly pay the one part and refuse the other.… though magistry be a divine ordinance, yet it does not follow that every requisition of the civil magistrate ought to be actively obeyed, anymore than because it is a duty indispensable and incumbent on all mankind to pay all their just debts, that therefore we must pay all demands however unjust.”
Tradition-minded Friends who used the Caesar argument sometimes pointed to George Fox who in , paying a specific war tax for the Dutch war, made a distinction between this and direct military service.
But the homeland of Quakerdom by had also moved towards tax refusal; in London Yearly Meeting minuted its censure on “the active compliance of some members with the rate (tax) for raising men for the Navy” and directed local Friends to have such cases under their care.
Those who paid war taxes without even waiting for the process of distraint were considered to have acted “inconsistently.”
In less material on taxes was published by Friends.
Perhaps there is here a fruitful field awaiting some researcher of yearly and quarterly minutes [indeed there is –♇].
Was there less interest in the problems, or was refusal taken for granted?
Did non-Friend Thoreau’s ringing call to refusal in the Mexican-American War preempt the field?
Whatever the reasons, as Friends face today’s violence with its automated battlefields and nuclear missiles — where the conscription of human bodies for mass armies may become less important — and conscription of money for sophisticated technology more important — the relevancy of the tax question to a modern, effective peace testimony has reached an all-time high.
In its issue, the Journal noted that the IRS had made a half-hearted attempt to seize Zahn’s “1955 Dodge station wagon” for $6.58 in resisted phone tax.
Although contemplating lying in front of the car as a final protest before the towing, Franklin calmly removed his personal effects from the car and showed no agitation at this seizure of his property.
At the last minute, however, the IRS men suddenly removed the chains, saying, “We just got new orders — we’re calling off the dogs.”
The mood changed from one of tense formality to joviality as the men left.
“It was as though,” Franklin says, “they were glad the little bluff had failed.”
A letter-to-the-editor from Zahn appears in the issue, in which he responds to “a frequent objection to war tax refusal: that it logically leads to a host of other tax refusal.”
He suggests that because military expenses are such an overwhelming part of the federal budget, only war resisters are likely to find tax resistance to be a tempting tactic.
And anyway, “if a few other than war objectors choose to refuse, I see no objection to their doing so.”
In the issue, Zahn writes in to make a fresh case for war tax refusal:
In refusing personal service, one considers one’s integrity — conscience: Can I be part of a machine geared to agony and death?
But often a different criterion is applied to refusal to pay: How effective a protest is it?
If the protest-value of tax refusal is the only consideration, Friends may feel the effort is better spent in writing a legislator or phoning the White House.
(But I have found that a letter to the government saying I am refusing to pay war taxes is one letter officials never ignore.)
Arguments against the effectiveness of war tax refusal can be self-fulfilling prophecies.
Friends may not wish to join a public witness which is so small it attracts little notice — therefore it remains small.
Yet it is possible that an announcement of intention to pay no further war taxes would be the most single effective act against the arms race that members of the Society of Friends could take.
But sudden, dramatic decisions for effectiveness are not in the manner of Friends.
Perhaps we should forget all about witness and consider tax refusal purely as personal integrity.
This basis, after all, is the one for our day-to-day decisions in matters of principle.
We refuse to steal, not as some witness in influencing others, but because for us stealing is wrong.
We refuse to cheat, not as some protest against dishonesty or against anything else, but because cheating is not the way of the life of the Spirit.
Questions of effectiveness become irrelevant.
The corresponding question for taxes could be, explicitly: Should I, a person in whom there is that of God, voluntarily pay all money asked of me for the purpose of injuring and killing millions of other persons in whom there is also that of God?
If trying to hold back some one-third of our federal income tax (which will go next year for current military uses) is too boggling, we can start modestly and refuse payment of only ten dollars — a small pinch of incense not voluntarily laid on Caesar’s altar.
It can, to our conscience, be a symbol of our refusal of total submission to the military-industrial complex.
But it can also symbolize the positive.
It can be given to the Right Sharing of World Resources of Friends World Committee.
It is possible a small amount like ten dollars will not even be collected by IRS.
Each of us can try such an experiment for one year, and from then proceed as way opens.
Finally, in the issue, the Journal announced Zahn’s death (nearly a year after ).
It called him “a peace activist and worldly ascetic” and said that he practiced “religious asceticism — regular meditation, vegetarianism, celibacy, and voluntary poverty — as both the sustenance for his personal spiritual life and public witness to the power of love and truth in the world.”
He was among those conscientious objectors who at first accepted alternative civilian service, and then decided to resist the draft entirely.
He also was among those who tried to sail into nuclear weapons test zones to disrupt the tests.
War tax resistance in the Friends Journal in
War tax resistance was a frequent topic in the issues of Friends Journal in , though there was still no consensus about how to go about it, and there was a lot of hesitance among Quaker institutions about how strongly to endorse it.
The issue was another special issue devoted to the peace testimony, which might as well have been a special issue on war tax resistance for how frequently it was mentioned.
Clearly by this time, there was no talking about peace work without talking about war tax resistance.
an illustration by Duncan Harp, from the issue of Friends Journal
Editor Ruth Kilpack opened the issue.
She noted:
I see the billions of dollars (including taxes from my own earnings) being poured into the “defense” budget.
I hear of vastly increased crime and see the wanton waste everywhere, much of it the direct legacy of our last war; I remember the lives still festering in military hospitals, the suffering from the wounds of war both here and across the world.
But now, there is a handful of people who are beginning to take a new view of war and war-making, realizing that it takes place not only when the bombing and shelling begin, but in the will of the people who make — or allow — it to happen.
War-making must be paid for.
As it is said elsewhere in this issue, “we pray for peace, but we pay for war.”
When we once understand that, great change will come about.
And especially, as war becomes more and more impersonal, with computerized strategic commands and weapons, more people are increasingly going to ask, “Who is waging this war?
Are we ourselves responsible, since we pay for it?”
(As the old saying goes, “Your checkbook shows where your heart is.”)
Take Richard Catlett, for example, a Friend who — as I write at this very moment in — is beginning his jail sentence of two months at the Kansas City Municipal Rehabilitation Institute (for first offenders) in Kansas City, Missouri.
That will be followed by three years of probation.
Richard Catlett has been an antiwar activist , refusing to file his income tax return .
In , his health food store was closed for non-payment of taxes (it is now under his wife’s ownership), and now, at sixty-nine years of age, Richard Catlett is treated as a criminal.
Clearly, he is being held up as an example of what can happen to a trouble-maker who dares to go against the tax law.… Richard Catlett’s age gives added emphasis to the warning to those no longer young and foolhardy.
(Besides, the pockets of those in his age bracket are usually better filled, and not to be overlooked by IRS.)
Catlett’s case was covered in more depth later on in the same issue by means of lengthy quotes from a Colombia Missourian article (see “Local war protester leaves for jail term” in ♇ 5 January 2013) and the following section from a Wall Street Journal article:
Tax Report
A protester got loads of publicity that drew criminal charges for nonfiling.
The IRS selects tax protesters for criminal prosecution based on the amount of publicity they get.
Usually protesters who don’t seek the spotlight are pursued by civil actions; criminal is reserved for the publicity hound.
Richard Ralston Catlett is a notorious war and tax protester.
The sixty-eight-year-old Columbia, Missouri, health food store owner argued that criminal charges of failing to file returns should be dropped because the IRS was guilty of “selective prosecution.”
The government is barred from selecting people to prosecute on grounds of race, religion or the exercise of free speech, or other “impermissible grounds.”
Catlett claimed that basing a criminal prosecution on publicity isn’t permitted.
But an appeals court disagreed.
His exercise of free speech wasn’t involved here, the court noted.
The IRS seeks criminal prosecution against publicized protesters to promote compliance with tax laws, the court observed.
“The government is entitled to select those cases for prosecution which it believes will promote compliance,” the court declared.
For some decades now we have been hearing the Church call on governments to take steps toward disarmament.
And it would be difficult to think of a thing more urgent or more appropriate for churches to say to governments.
It is hardly necessary here to give another recitation of the monstrous and unconscionable dimensions of the world arms race, culminating in the ever-growing stockpiles of nuclear weapons and the refinement of systems to deliver their carnage.
The Church has done part of its duty when it has said that this is wrong.
But the time has come to say that the good words of the Church have not been, and are not, enough.
The risks, the disciplines, the sacrifices, and the steps in good faith which the Church has asked of governments in the task of disarmament must now be asked of the Church in the obligation of war tax resistance.
It is, at the root, a simple question of integrity.
We are praying for peace and paying for war.
Setting euphemisms aside, the billions of dollars conscripted by governments for military spending are war taxes, and Christians are paying these taxes.
Our bluff has been called.
In all candor it must be suggested that the storm of objection which arises in the Church at this idea borrows its thunder and lightning from the premiers, the presidents, the ambassadors, and the generals who make their arguments against disarmament.
War tax resistance will be called irresponsible, anarchist, unrealistic, suicidal, masochistic, naive, futile, negative and crazy.
But when the dust has settled, it will stand as the deceptively simple and painfully obvious Christian response to the world arms race.
A score or a hundred other good responses may be added to it.
We in the Church may rightly be called upon to do more than this, but we should not be expected to do less.
Let the Church take upon itself the risks of war tax resistance. For church councils to take the position that the arms race is wrong for governments and not to commit themselves and call upon their members to cease and desist from paying for the arms race is patently inconsistent.
This is probably a fundamental reason why the Church’s pleas for disarmament have met with so little positive response.
Not even governments can have high regard for people who say one thing and do another.
If governments today are confronted with the question whether they will continue the arms race, churches are confronted with the question whether they will continue to pay for it.
As specialists in the matter of stewardship of the Earth’s resources they have contributed precious little to the most urgent stewardship issue of the twentieth century if they go on paying for the arms race.
How much longer can the.
Church continue quoting to the government its carefully researched figures on military expenditures and social needs and then, apparently without embarrassment, go on serving up the dollars that fund the berserk priorities?
The arms race would fall flat on its face tomorrow if all of the Christians who lament it would stop paying for it.
It is not, of course, simple to stop paying for the arms race as a citizen of the United States, or anywhere else for that matter.
If you refuse to pay the portion of your income tax attributable to military spending, the government levies your bank account or wages and extracts the money that way.
If your income tax is withheld by your employer, you must devise some means to reduce that withholding, such as claiming a war tax deduction or extra dependents.
If, as an employer, you do not withhold an employee’s war taxes, you will find yourself in court, as has recently happened to the Central Committee for Conscientious Objectors.
All of these actions are at some point punishable by fines or imprisonment, and none — in the final analysis — actually prevents the government from getting the money.
Nevertheless, it must be said that the Church has not tried tax resistance and found it ineffective; it has rather found it difficult and left it untried.
The Church has considered the risk too great.
Individuals fear social pressure, business losses, and government reprisals.
Congregations, synods, and church agencies equivocate over their role in collecting war taxes.
There is the risk of an undesirable response — contributions may drop off, tax-exempt status may be lost, officers may go to jail.
To oppose the vast power of the state by a deliberate act of civil disobedience is not a decision to be made lightly (an unnecessary observation, since there are no signs that Christians or the Church in the United States are about to do this lightly).
It would be inaccurate to give the impression that Christians, individually, and the Church, corporately, in the U.S. have done nothing about war tax resistance.
There have been notable, even heroic, exceptions to the general manifest lethargy.
The war tax resistance case of an individual Quaker was recently appealed on First Amendment grounds to the U.S. Supreme Court, but the court refused to consider it.
A North American conference of the Mennonite Church is grappling with the question of its role in withholding war taxes from the wages of employees.
Among Brethren, Friends and Mennonites — sometimes called the Historic Peace Churches — there is a rising tide of concern about war taxes.
The Catholic Worker Movement and other prophetic voices in various denominations have long advocated war tax resistance, but they have truly been voices crying in the wilderness.
For all our concern about the arms race, we in the churches have done very little to resist paying for it.
That has seemed too risky.
But then, of course, disarmament also involves risks.
Could there be a moral equivalent of disarmament that did not involve risk?
In this matter of the world arms race, it is not a question of who can guarantee the desired result, but of who will take the risk for peace.
Let the Church take upon itself the discipline of war tax resistance.
Discipline is not a popular word today, but it should be amenable to rehabilitation at least among Christians, who call themselves disciples of Jesus.
How quickly does the search for a way turn into the search for an easy way!
And how readily do we lay upon others those tasks which require a discipline we are not prepared to accept ourselves!
War tax resistance will involve the discipline of interpreting the Scripture and listening to the Spirit.
In a day when the Bible is most noteworthy for the extent to which it is ignored in the Church, it is an anomaly to see the pious rush to Scripture and the joining of ranks behind Romans 13, when the question of tax resistance is raised.
In a day when the authority of the Church is disobeyed everywhere with impunity, it is a curiosity to see Christians zealous for the authority of the state.
In a day when giving to the Church is the last consideration in family budgeting, and impulse rules over law, it is a shock to observe the fanaticism with which Christians insist that Caesar must be given every cent he wants.
As the Church has grown in its discernment of what the Bible teaches about slavery and the role of women, so it must grow in its discernment of what the Bible teaches about the place and authority of governments and the payment of taxes.
War tax resistance means accepting the discipline of submission to the Lordship of Jesus Christ in the nitty-gritty of history.
Call it civil disobedience if you wish, but recognize that in reality it is divine obedience.
It is a matter of yielding to a higher sovereignty.
Those who speak for a global world order to promote justice in today’s world invite nations to yield some of their sovereignty to the higher interests of the whole, and those persons know the obstinacy of nations toward that idea.
It may be that the greatest service the Church can do the world today is to raise a clear sign to nation-states that they are not sovereign.
War tax resistance might just be a cloud the size of a person’s hand announcing to the nations that the reign of God is coming near.
It is clear that Christians will not rise to this challenge without accepting difficult and largely unfamiliar disciplines.
But then, of course, disarmament also involves disciplines.
The idea that one nation can take initiatives to limit its war-making capacities is shocking.
To do so would represent a radical break with conventional wisdom.
How is it possible to do that without first convincing all the nations that it is a good idea?
Let the Church take upon itself the sacrifices of war tax resistance.
It is never altogether clear to me whether Christians who oppose war tax resistance find it too easy a course of action, or too difficult.
It is said that refusing to send the tax to IRS and allowing it to be collected by a bank levy is too easy — a convenient way of deceiving oneself into thinking that one has done something about the arms race.
And it is said that to refuse to pay the tax is too difficult.
It is to disobey the government and thereby to bring down upon one’s head the whole wrath of the state, society, family, business associates, and probably God as well.
Moreover, the same person will say both things.
Which does he or she believe?
In most cases, I think, the second.
The sacrifices involved in war tax resistance are fairly obvious.
They may be as small as accepting the scorn which is heaped upon one for using the term “war tax” when the government doesn’t identify any tax as a war tax, or as great as serving time in prison.
It may be the sacrifice of income or another method of removing oneself from income tax liability.
It can be said with some certainty that the sacrifices will increase as the number of war tax resisters increases, because the government will make reprisals against those who challenge its rush to Armageddon.
Yet, there is the possibility that the government will get the message and change its spending priorities or provide a legislative alternative for war tax objectors, or both.
In any case, for the foreseeable future, war tax resistance will be an action that is taken at some cost to the individual or the Church institution, with no assured compensation except the knowledge that it is the right thing to do.
But then, of course, disarmament also involves sacrifices.
The temporary loss of jobs, the fear of weakened defenses, and the scorn of the mighty are not easy hurdles to cross.
A moral equivalent will have to involve some sacrifices.
Let the Church take upon itself the action of war tax resistance.
The call of Christ is a call to action.
It is plain enough that the world cannot afford $400 billion per year for military expenditures, even if this were somehow morally defensible.
It is plain enough that the dollars which Christians give to the arms race are not available to do Christ’s work of peace and justice.
In these circumstances the first step in a positive direction is to withhold money from the military.
If we say that we must wait for this until everybody and (and particularly the government) thinks it is a good idea, then we shall wait forever.
Having withheld the money, the Church must apply it to the works of peace.
What this means is not altogether obvious at present, but there is reason to believe that a faithful Church can serve as steward for these resources as wisely as generals and presidents.
The dynamic interaction between individual Christians and the Church in its local and ecumenical forms will help to guide the use of resources withheld from the arms race.
This is a call to individual Christians and the Church corporately to make war tax resistance the fundamental expression of their condemnation of the world arms race.
Neither the individual nor the corporate body dare hide any longer behind the inaction of the other.
The stakes are too high and the choice is too clear for that, though we can have no illusions that this call will be readily embraced nor easily implemented by the Church.
But then, of course, we do not think that disarmament will be an easy step for governments to take either.
The Church has an obligation to act upon what it advocates, to deliver a moral equivalent of the disarmament it proposes.
If effectiveness is the criterion, it is certainly not obvious that talking about the macro accomplishes more than acting upon the micro.
A single action taken is worth more than a hundred merely discussed.
(When it comes to heating your home in winter, you will get more help from one friend who saws up a log than from a whole school of mathematicians who calculate the BTUs in a forest.)
To talk about a worthy goal is no more laudable than to take the first step toward it, and might be less so.
Michael Miller wrote an article for the same issue that noted that the National Guard is a U.S. military combat function that is largely paid for out of state budgets, not the federal budget.
He concluded:
I am now more fully aware how the military affects our daily lives and activities.
I also realize that not only is the objection to payment of war taxes a federal issue, but it is also a very real state issue.
State budgets contain rather large amounts in this respect.
As Friends, we must be constantly aware of the issues involved with our tax dollars.
The military has a great influence over our lives and our tax dollars, whether or not we recognize it.
We have a responsibility to make ourselves aware of the issues and how they influence our lives.
Alan Eccleston contributed an article on war tax resistance as a method of testifying for peace — aligning ones life with ones values.
This, he felt, could be done in a variety of ways:
We do not have to be prepared for jail to be a war tax resister.
We do not have to be ready, at this moment, to subject ourselves to harassment by the Internal Revenue Service.
We do, however, have to be truthful on our tax returns.
We do have to be clear about our belief in the peace testimony and our desire to align our lives with this belief.
And that is all!
If you are clear about that, you can withhold some amount of your tax.
It can be a token amount, if that is where you are, say five dollars or fifty dollars.
Or it can be the same percent of your tax as the military portion of the current budget, currently thirty-six percent excluding past debt and veterans benefits.
(An easy way to do this is to insert the amount under “Credits” as a “Quaker Peace Witness,” line forty-six.
Alternately, some people declare an extra deduction, but this is more complicated, since the deduction must be substantially larger than the amount you desire to withhold.)
It may bother you that three times or even ten times what you have chosen to withhold is going to be spent for war preparations.
But far better to take this small step than to turn away from the witness. Write your congresspersons and tell them of your concern.
Urge them to pass the World Peace Tax Fund which would acknowledge your constitutional right to practice your religious beliefs without harassment and penalty.
Alternatively, if the government owes you money fill out the (very short) Form #843 “Request for Refund,” asking that they refund the amount you wish for peace witness.
One can also anticipate the withholding problem by filling out a W-4 Form at your place of employment declaring (truthfully) an allowance for expected deductions that includes the amount of your peace witness.
Then what?
You can expect a series of computer notices stating that you calculated your tax incorrectly and you owe the amount shown on the notice.
This may also include an addition of seven percent annual interest on the amount owed.
(Currently IRS seems not to be adding on penalty charges but that is a possibility.)
You have a choice: you can ignore the notice; you can write or call IRS and discuss it; or you can pay the tax.
Sooner or later you will receive a printout that says “Final Notice.”
If you again fail to pay the amount owed, you will probably receive a call from someone at IRS who will try to convince you that the whole process has gone far enough and that your purpose is better served by paying the government.
IRS wants to collect.
That is their job; when they have done it, they are through with you.
They cannot, by law, be harsh or punitive.
There is no debtors’ prison in this country.
If you declare the intent of your witness on your tax form and by letter to Congress, you cannot be convicted of fraud; therefore, you are not risking criminal penalties.
In other words, the tax resister controls the process.
One can witness to peace so long as it can be done lovingly and, if it is to be a meaningful witness of peace, that is the only way it can be done.
However, if one’s family obligations or other matters are too pressing, or if one’s spiritual resources are being unduly strained, it is time to lay down this particular witness.
One can carry on the witness and still bring the process to a conclusion by letting the payment be taken from a bank account or peace escrow fund.
Another round of letters to Congress and the president will testify to your continuing concern even after the pressure of collection has been relieved.
In your witness, no matter how small the amount withheld or how short the duration, you will gain strength and courage and insight.
This brings new resources to your next witness.
It gives you knowledge and resources to share with others, which in turn helps their witness.
In sharing, you both are strengthened.
Thus, a personal witness becomes a “community of witness,” and the “community of witness” gains strength, courage, and insight in its mutual sharing.
This witness and this sharing of Christian love becomes its own witness to the testimony of peace — the testimony of love for God, for ourselves, for humankind.
(A letter from Dorothy Ann Ware in a later issue credited the Eccleston article for spurring her to “make a token Quaker Peace Witness by withholding a very small portion of my income tax.
So Step One has been taken…”)
The same issue reprinted a Minute from the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting which encouraged Quakers “to give prayerful consideration… to the option of refusal of taxes for military purposes.”
Furthermore:
We reaffirm the Minute of the yearly meeting which states in part that “…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.”
We request the Representative Meeting to arrange for the guidance of meetings and their members on the form of military tax resistance suitable for individuals in accordance with that degree of risk appropriate to individual circumstances, for advice on consequences, and for consideration of legal and support facilities that may be organized.
We also request Representative Meeting to provide for an Alternate Fund for sufferings, set up under the yearly meeting to receive tax payments refused, for those tax refusers who may wish to utilize this fund.
We recommend cooperation with the Historic Peace Churches and other religious groups in further consideration of non-payment on religious grounds of military taxes.
Following that, John E. Runnings wrote of his and his wife Louise’s war tax resistance, and decried the injustice of a “society that requires that Quakers, who renounce war and recognize no enemies, must pay as large a contribution to the support of the war machine as those who fully accept the malicious nature of other nationals and who are so frightened of their ill intent that no amount of extermination equipment is enough to assure security.”
The social reforms that we credit to George Fox’s influence did not come about by his waiting on the Spirit but rather by his responding to the Spirit.
If just one man could accomplish so much by responding to the Spirit, what would happen if several thousand modern Quakers were to respond to their spiritually-inspired revulsion to assisting in the building of the war machine?
If Quakers could be induced to discard their excuses for their financial support of the arms race and to withhold their Federal taxes, who knows how many thousands of like-minded people might be encouraged to follow suit?
And who knows but what this might bring a halt to the mad race to oblivion?
There was a brief update about Robert Anthony’s case.
Anthony hoped to use his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination (presumably in response to a government request for financial records or something of the sort).
The judge in the case asked if the government would grant Anthony immunity from prosecution for anything he disclosed, which would have cut off the Fifth Amendment avenue of resistance, but the government wasn’t prepared to do that, and that’s where the matter stood.
The issue included a notice that the Center on Law and Pacifism had “recently published a military tax refusal guide for radical religious pacifists entitled ‘People Pay for Peace’ ” but also noted that “the Center states that it is in ‘urgent and immediate need of operating funds.’ ”
A later issue gave some more information about the Center:
The Center was started after a former Washington constitutional lawyer and theologian, Bill Durland, met a handful of conscientious objectors who were appealing to the U.S. courts for their constitutional rights to deny income tax payments for the military.…
That was in .
The Center is now producing regular newsletters and has published a handbook on military tax refusal.
It has organized war-tax workshops for pacifists representing constituencies in the Northeast, South and Midwest.
One of its projects was the “People Pay for Peace” scheme, under which it was suggested that each individual deduct $2.40 from his/her income tax return to “spend for peace”: that sum being the per capita equivalent of the $193,000,000,000 which will be consumed in for war preparation in the United States.
This was a protest action against the fifty-three percent of the U.S. budget allocated to military purposes.
The Center on Law and Pacifism is a “do-it-yourself cooperative” which relies on both volunteer professional assistance and individual contributions.
Hmmm… my calculation for 53% of the federal budget in 1979 is more like $214,618,730,000… and per-capita (by U.S. population, anyway) that would be $953.63 per person.
If you use the $193 billion value, that’s still $857.57 per person.
Even if you use world population, you still get $44.08–$49.02 each.
Somebody’s confused… maybe it’s me.
Wendal Bull penned a letter-to-the-editor in the same issue about his experience as a war tax resister twenty years before.
Excerpt:
In I received a lump sum payment of an overdue debt.
This increased my income, which I normally keep below the taxable level, to a point quite some above that level.
I distributed the unexpected income to various anti-war organizations.
I anticipated pressure from IRS officers, so in the autumn, long before the tax would be due, I disposed of all my attachable properties.
This action, under the circumstances, I believe to be unlawful.
But it seemed to me a mere technicality, far outweighed by the sin of paying for war, or the sin of permitting collection of the tax for that purpose.
After disposing of all attachable properties, I wrote to IRS telling them I had taxable income in that year but chose not to calculate the amount of it because I had no intention of paying it.
In the same letter I explained my reasons for conscientious non-cooperation with Uncle Sam’s preparations for war in the name of “defense.”
My letter appeared in full or in generous excerpts in at least three daily papers and several other publications and I mailed copies to friends who might be interested.
I am not a publicity hound nor a notorious war resister.
The publicity did seem to effect a fairly prompt visit from the Revenue Boys.
They paid me three or four visits.
On one occasion two men came; one talked, the other may have had a concealed tape recorder, or was merely to witness and confirm the conversation.
After quizzing me for an hour or more they left courteously, whereupon I said I was sorry to be a bother to them.
At that the talker said, “You’re no trouble at all.
I brought a warrant for your arrest, but I’m not going to serve it.
It’s the guys who hire lawyers to fight us that give us trouble.”
If they had caught me in a lie, or giving inconsistent answers to their probing questions, I suspect the summons would have been served.
I was fully prepared to go to court and to be declared guilty of contempt for not producing records to show the sources of my income.
I had told the men I was in contempt of the entire war machine and all officers of the legal machinery who aimed to penalize citizens for non-cooperation with war preparations.
Later came two visits from a man who attempted to assess my income for that year, and the law required him to try to get my signature to his assessment.
I considered that a ridiculous waste of taxpayer’s money.
The man agreed with a smile.
Still later, there came several bills, one at a time, for the amount of the official assessment, plus interest, plus delinquency fee, plus warnings that the bill should be paid.
These I ignored, of course.
The head men knew I would not pay; and they knew they had not any intention of trying to force collection.
I have no idea who decided to quit sending me more bills.
I think the claim is still valid since the statute of limitations does not apply to federal taxes.
It is inconvenient to have no checking account, to own no real estate, to drive an old jalopy not worth attaching, and so on.
Some of us choose this alternative rather than to let the money be collected by distraint.
In the same issue, Keith Tingle shared his letter to the IRS, which he sent along with his tax return and a payment that was 33% short.
He stressed that he didn’t mind paying taxes — “a small price for the tremendous privilege of living in the United States with its heritage of freedom, equal protection, and toleration” — but that “I do not wish my labor and my money to finance either war or military preparedness.”
Stephen M. Gulick also wrote in.
“Because the military and the corporations need our money more than our bodies, war tax resistance becomes important — in all its forms from outright and total resistance to living on an income below the taxable level,” he wrote.
“Fundamentally, war tax resistance must lead us to look not only at warmaking and the preparation for war, but also at the economic, social, and political practices that, with the help of our money, nurture the roots of war.”
Colin Bell attended the Southern Appalachian Yearly Meeting:
“I think,” Colin said, “that as a Society we are standing at another moment like that, when our forebears took an absolutely unequivocal stance” and we don’t know what to do.
Are we looking for something easy, he wondered, suggesting that it probably should be tax resistance.
Accepting the title Historic Peace Church, he declared, makes it sound like a worthy option, rather than it being at the entire heart and core of Christendom.
A letter to the editor of the Peacemaker magazine from John Schuchardt is quoted in the issue:
I have recently received threatening letters from a terrorist group which asks that I contribute money for construction of dangerous weapons.
This group makes certain claims which in the past led me to send thousands of dollars to pay for its militaristic programs. The group claimed: 1) It was concerned with peace and freedom; 2) It would provide protection for me and my family; 3) It was my duty to make these payments; and 4) I was free from personal responsibility for how this money was spent in individual cases.
Last year, for the first time, I realized that these claims were fraudulent and I refused to make further payments…
That issue also noted that the Albany, New York, Meeting “joined the growing number of meetings which are calling on their members to ‘seriously consider’ war tax resistance…” That Meeting was also considering establishing its own alternative fund, and was hoping Congress would pass the World Peace Tax Fund bill.
This “seriously consider” language, along with the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting’s earlier-mentioned call for Quakers “to give prayerful consideration” to war tax resistance, is a far cry from the sort of bold leadership John K. Stoner was calling for.
But then again, Quaker Meetings were no longer the sorts of institutions to bandy about Books of Discipline and threaten “disorderly walkers” with disownment, or even to give them “tender dealing and advice in order to their convincement.”
Meetings had in general become much more humble about what sort of direction they should provide and what sort of obedience they could expect.
It is hard to imagine a Meeting from this period adopting a commandment along the lines of the Ohio Yearly Meeting’s discipline — “a tax levied for the purchasing of drums, colors, or for other warlike uses, cannot be paid consistently with our Christian testimony.”
The issue included a review of Donald Kaufman’s The Tax Dilemma: Praying For Peace, Paying for War, a book that defends war tax resistance from a Christian and Biblical perspective.
“What is the individual’s responsibility in the face of biblical teachings and the history of tax resistance since the early Christian centuries?
Some biblical passages have been used to justify the payment of any and all taxes.
But Kaufman warns us to consider these passages in their historical context and in the light of the primary New Testament message: love for God, oneself, one’s neighbor, and one’s enemy.”
That issue also included an obituary notice for Ashton Bryan Jones that noted “[h]is courage in the face of the harsh treatment that he endured in the struggle for social justice and against war taxes…”
The issue reported on the New England Yearly Meeting, which held a workshop on war tax resistance, and also agreed to establish a “New England Yearly Meeting Peace Tax Fund.”
Recognizing that each of us must find our own way in this matter, the new fund is seen not as a general call to Friends to resist paying war taxes but specifically to help and to hold in the Light those Friends who are moved to do so.
The fund will be administered by the Committee on Sufferings, which came into being last year to support Friends who are devoting a major portion of their time and energies to work for peace.
New Call to Peacemaking
The “New Call to Peacemaking” brought together representatives of the Mennonites, Brethren, and Quakers in , and to try to strengthen their respective churches’ anti-war stands.
It continued to ripple through the pages of the Journal in .
Barbara Reynolds covered the Green Lake conference that drafted the New Call statement in the issue.
Among her observations:
In my own small group, I saw social action Friends struggling with Biblical language and coming to accept many scriptural passages as valid expressions of their own convictions.
And I saw a respected Mennonite, a longtime exponent of total Biblical nonresistance, courageously re-examining his position and corning out strongly in favor of a group statement encouraging non-payment of war taxes.
Elaine J. Crauder gave another report on the project in the issue.
Excerpts:
Quakers, Mennonites and Brethren are known as the Historic Peace Churches.
How do they witness against evil and do good?
Where does God fit into their witnessing?
Are they responding to the urgency of the present-day world situation, or are they truly “historic” peace churches, with no relevance to today’s complex world?
The New Call to Peacemaking (NCP) developed out of exactly these concerns: Where is the relevance and what is the source of our witnessing?
The answers were clear.
To seek God’s truth and to witness, in a loving way, by doing good (through peace education, cooperation in personal and professional relationships, living simply and investing only in clearly life-enhancing endeavors) and by resisting evil (working for disarmament and peace conversion, resisting war taxes and military conscription).
Crauder says she first started thinking about her support of war through her taxes in :
The 1040 Income Tax form didn’t have a space for war tax resisters.
Either I would have to lie about having dependents, or my taxes would be withheld. l didn’t feel that I had a choice.
It did not occur to me to claim a dependent and then support that person with the funds that thus wouldn’t go for war.
So, I did what was easiest — nothing — and paid my war taxes.
In , she says:
I started to think about my taxes again.
Maybe I could lie on my form.
It was definitely not right to work for peace and pay for the war machine.
I even went to one meeting of the war tax concerns committee.
But there were enough meetings that I had to go to, so I managed not to find the time to struggle with my war taxes.
Words of John Woolman seemed to fit my condition:
They had little or no share in civil government, and many of them declared they were through the power of God separated from the spirit in which wars were; and being afflicted by the rulers on account of their testimony, there was less likelihood of uniting in spirit with them in things inconsistent with the purity of Truth.
Woolman was referring to the early Quakers when he said it was less likely that they would be influenced by the civil government in questions of the truth.
It seemed to me that in Woolman’s time it was also easier to be clear about the truth — we are so much more dependent and tied to the government than they were.
Perhaps it is always easier to have a clear witness in hindsight.
I think Crauder has it a little backwards here.
Woolman was speaking of early Friends in England, who were being actively repressed by the government and banned from much of any exercise of political power, and contrasting them to the Quakers in Woolman’s own time and place (colonial Pennsylvania), where Quakers held political power, and were by far the dominant party in the colonial Assembly.
In Woolman’s time the government and the Society of Friends were as tightly linked as they ever have been.
Historical notes
In the issue, Walter Ludwig shared an interesting anecdote about Susan B. Anthony’s father, Daniel Anthony:
During the Mexican War he made the quasi tax-resisting gesture of tossing his purse on the table when the collector appeared, remarking, “I shall not voluntarily pay these taxes; if thee wants to rifle my pocketbook thee can do so.”
I hunted around for a source for this anecdote, and found one in Ida Husted Harper’s The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony (1898), where she put it this way:
In early life he had steadfastly refused to pay the United States taxes because he would not give tribute to a government which believed in war.
When the collector came he would lay down his purse, saying, “I shall not voluntarily pay these taxes; if thee wants to rifle my pocket-book, thee can do so.”
But he lived to do all in his power to support the Union in its struggle for the abolition of slavery and, although too old to go to the front himself, his two sons enlisted at the very beginning of the war.
John Woolman was invoked in the issue as someone who “took as clear a stand on payment of taxes for military ends as he did on slavery.”
He was quoted as saying:
I all along believed that there were some upright-hearted men who paid such taxes but could not see that their example was a sufficient reason for me to do so, while I believed that the spirit of Truth required of me as an individual to suffer patiently the distress of goods rather than pay actively.
Bruce & Ruth Graves
The issue brought an update on the case of Bruce and Ruth Graves, who were pursuing a Supreme Court appeal in the hopes of legally validating their approach of claiming a “war tax credit” on their federal income tax returns.
They were trying to get people to write letters to the Supreme Court justices, in the hopes that they would find influential the opinions of laymen on such points as these:
1) petitioners right to First Amendment free exercise of religion and freedom of expression, 2) paramount interests of government not endangered by refusal of petitioners to pay tax, 3) petitioners should be able to re-channel war taxes into peace taxes (via World Peace Tax Fund Act, etc.), 4) IRS regulations should not take precedence over Constitutional rights of individuals, 5) threat of nuclear war must be stopped by exercise of Constitutional rights, 6) other pertinent points at the option of correspondent.
There was a further note on that case in the issue — largely a plea for support, without any otherwise significant news.
Included with this was a message from the Graveses with this plea: “How can Friends maintain the secular impact of the peace testimony expressed through conscientious objection when technology has replaced the soldier’s body with a war machine?
Does it not follow that technology then shifts the emphasis of conscientious objection toward reduction of armaments by resisting payment of war taxes?”
The issue brought the news that the Supreme Court had turned down the Graveses’ appeal.
“[W]hen asked whether the frustrations of losing the long court battle had ‘generated any thoughts of quitting,’ Ruth Graves replied, ‘Never.
If I were going to let myself be stopped by seemingly hopeless causes, I’d just die right now.”
World Peace Tax Fund
A note in the issue reported that some people who had “sent in cards or letters expressing support for the [World Peace Tax Fund] bill” had reported that they had “been subjected to IRS audits and other harassment.”
A letter from Judith F. Monroe in the issue expressed some concern about the World Peace Tax Fund plan.
Excerpts:
I fear the World Peace Tax could become a device to appease the consciences of those of us who are not willing to face the consequences of civil disobedience.…
…One important purpose of the tax is to shake the complacent into a realization of the madness of our current armaments race.
I don’t believe the casual matter of checking a block on a tax form will ever cause extensive introspection on the part of most people.
How will peace tax funds be handled?
Will such a tax require more complex tax laws, IRS investigators, and tax accountants?
How can we believe in the government’s ability to use such funds constructively?
I can envision the Department of Defense receiving peace grants.
After all, they’re the boys who fight for peace.
This may be an exaggeration.
The point is I do not feel we can trust any large bureaucracy with the task of peacemaking.
If the majority or at least a sizable minority do not opt for the peace tax, all that will happen is a larger percentage of their taxes will go to armaments to compensate for the monies diverted by the few who chose a peace tax.
Under such circumstances, the peace tax would accomplish little.
Evidence of some critical appraisal of the “peace tax” idea is also found in a note in the issue, which summarizes an address by Stanley Keeble to the June General Meeting in Glasgow, Scotland:
If this were permitted, would not government simply raise military estimates to compensate for expected shortfall?
Would not people not conscientiously opposed to military “defense,” take advantage of such legislation?
Would the procedure be destructive of democracy and majority rule?
Should not individuals rather reduce their earnings to a non-taxable level, or would that deprive useful projects of legitimate funds?
Other such questions were raised, relating to possible effects on national “defense” policy.
For his part, however, Stanley Keeble felt that it was important to “bring a peace decision right to the level of the individual,” and added that of fifteen replies so far received from monthly meetings on the subject of a Peace Tax Fund, only one was completely negative, two uncertain, and “the rest endorsed the proposal whilst acknowledging certain difficulties.”
There were occasional reports on the bill’s status in Congress scattered through the issues of the Journal.
One, in the issue, said:
Endorsed by the national bodies of the Unitarian-Universalist Association, the United Methodist Church, the United Church of Christ, the Roman Catholic Church, the Church of the Brethren, the Mennonites, and the Religious Society of Friends, this bill provides the legal alternative for taxpayers morally opposed to war that the military portion of their taxes would go into the WPTF to be used for a national peace academy, retraining of workers displaced from military production, disarmament efforts, international exchanges and other peace-related purposes; alternatively for non-military government programs.
That issue also quoted the newsletter of the Canadian Friends Service Committee on the legislation, saying: “Thousands of letters and postcards were sent to members and many meetings held across the country as well as slide-tape shows, television and radio programs. Newspaper coverage was also good.
The U.S. government is beginning to act in response.”
War tax resistance in the Friends Journal in
There was plenty about war tax resistance in the Friends Journal in , but it seemed to involve tax resisting Mennonites as least as often as tax resisting Quakers.
The issue announced that the Center on Law and Pacifism was organizing a critical mass style tax resistance action:
The Center… has prepared and has available a “Conscience and Military Tax Resolution,” which may be signed by any conscientious objector to military taxes, witnessed (not necessarily notarized), returned to the Center.
When officially notified by the Center that there are 100,000 such resolutions on file, the signer may carry out his or her resolve to withhold the military portion of the federal income tax.
Alternatively, he or she may deposit the withheld taxes in an escrow account for the World Peace Tax Fund, pending passage by Congress of the WPTF Bill, deposit them in an alternative fund or donate them to some other peace purpose.
The issue was all about anti-war work, and it opened with an article on the history of Quaker war tax resistance by editor Ruth Kilpack.
Excerpts:
[W]e should not suppose that this is a new concern among Friends and members of other Peace Churches, who, by the very nature of our faith, have a conscience tender to such questionings.
For Friends, the searching extends back to the seventeenth century, when Robert Barclay, the English Quaker apologist, wrote in :
We have suffered much in qur country because we neither ourselves could bear arms, nor send others in our place, nor give our money for the buying of drums, standards, and other military attire.
This was the so-called “Trophy Money,” that could be distinguished as such.
But common or “mixed” taxes could not so readily be dealt with, since most Quakers believed it was their duty to pay taxes, and the part allocated to the military could not be separated out from the whole.
Today, like those earlier Quakers, we find ourselves in the same dilemma.
Law-abiding citizens, we continue to find ourselves troubled by the demand that we pay taxes for purposes we cannot in conscience condone.
We cannot pretend that we accept war as a legitimate function of the civil government which we support, and, just as some of our members have refused to serve in the armed services, many are beginning to question the contribution of our money for purposes we eschew for moral, humane, and religious reasons.
Quakers struggled with all these same questionings in the mid-eighteenth century and the period prior to the American Revolution.
One of the most articulate on the subject of war taxes was Samuel Allinson, a young Friend from Burlington, New Jersey, who in wrote “Reasons against war, and paying taxes for its support.”
The Samuel Allinson essay “Reasons against war, and paying taxes for its support” can be found in the book American Quaker War Tax Resistance.
Thus, in words written , he deals with the question of “a remnant who desire to be clear of a business so dark and destructive, that we should avoid the furtherance of it in any and every form.”
He describes it as a “stumbling block to others, [which] ought carefully to be avoided,” and sees such avoidance as advancing the Kingdom of the Messiah, that “his will be done on earth as it is done on heaven; a state possible, I presume, or he would not have taught us to pray for it.”
Further, says Samuel Allinson,
We have never entered into any contract expressed or implied for the paym[en]t of Taxes for War, nor the performance of any thing contrary to our Relig[ious] duties, and therefore cannot be looked upon as disaffected or Rebellious to any Gov[ernment] for these refusals, if this be our Testimony under all, which many believe it will hereafter be.
And finally, Samuel Allinson points out that even though earlier Friends paid their taxes (including that going to the military), that is no good reason for our continuing to do so.
It is not to be wondered at, or an argument drawn against a reformation in the refusal of Taxes for War at this Day, that our Brethren formerly paid them; knowledge is progressive, every reform[atio]n had its beginning, even the disciples were for some time ignorant of many religious Truths, tho’ they had the Company and precepts of our Savior…
Friends, we find ourselves in the very position of the Friends being addressed by Samuel Allinson two centuries ago.
For myself, I cannot think it is by sheer accident that I have stumbled upon his words now.
Neither is it by accident that a growing “remnant” of Friends are awakening to the ambivalence we feel in what we profess and what we practice regarding our involvement in the awesome “stumbling block” of nuclear warfare in our own age.
Friends in the past responded to the threats of the age in which they lived according to the light they had.
We of our generation have been given even greater light, and we must respond accordingly.
Given our heritage, if we don’t respond, who will?
In the meantime, I ask you to think on these things and, to paraphrase George Fox’s advice to William Penn, “Pay thy tax as long as thou canst.”
In the issue, Keith Tingle told readers that they should know “how easy it is to do” war tax resistance… at least in his experience:
My own experience in military tax resistance has been rewarding thus far.
By claiming a tax credit for conscientious objection to war on my income tax form, I was refunded $260 from my taxes.
Now that the IRS has discovered its mistake, I am resisting through federal tax court the recollection of this money.
My appearance in tax court has been reported favorably in three local newspapers, providing an opportunity to publicize the Quaker peace testimony, the history of war tax resistance, the economic impact of military spending, the pacifist position on the military draft, the concept of the World Peace Tax Fund, and the legal assistance offered by the Center on Law and Pacifism.
This has been accomplished with a total expense of about $30 and about thirty hours of time.
I have enjoyed the dedicated support of the Committee on War Tax Concerns of Friends Peace Committee and the legal guidance of lawyer Bill Durland at the Center on Law and Pacifism…
The issue noted that conscientious objection to military taxation was on the agenda at the Kent General Meeting in Canterbury, England — though from the sound of it, this was mostly in a theoretical way: presenting the argument that such a thing was a logical and practical counterpart of conscientious objection to military service.
That issue also reported on the case of Cornelia Lehn, an employee of the General Conference Mennonite Church who was trying to convince her employer to stop withholding federal income tax from her salary:
There was a “neither yes nor no” vote on this request by the 500 delegates present.
Those who favored a strong tax resistance program did not Nor did those who wanted members to unquestioningly pay taxes as a Christian duty.
There was a feeling, however, that neither side really lost.
Thirty percent of the delegates were ready for the conference to take action in “some sort of civil disobedience and tax resistance” and it was hoped the number will grow.
I’m struck by this last phrase — “it was hoped the number will grow” — which makes a pretty clear editorial statement of sympathy for those who favored corporate resistance by the Conference and antipathy for “those who wanted members to unquestioningly pay taxes as a Christian duty.”
At this time, few if any Quaker Meetings or organizations were willing to go out on that limb, in spite of strong urgings from Quaker war tax resisters that they do so.
But I don’t remember the Journal betraying an editorial bias when it reported on this debate in Quaker institutions.
One case in point is a report on the New England Yearly Meeting in which the lukewarm statement is made that “We approved a minute asking New England Friends to give prayerful consideration to non-payment of war taxes.”
The New York Yearly Meeting went so far as to “discuss” a “minute on Refusal of Taxes for Military Purposes” and to note that it “was to be commended for consideration by all monthly meetings and individuals.”
The issue had a followup in which the General Conference of the Mennonite Church was proposing launching a lawsuit in which it would seek a judicial ruling to legalize conscientious objection to military taxation, while at the same time it would increase its efforts to pass the “World Peace Tax Fund” legislation.
Maurice McCracken had a piece of autobiography in the issue.
Naturally, it touched on his tax resistance:
I had decided that I would never register again for the draft nor would I consent to being conscripted by the government in any other capacity.
In contradiction to this position, each year on April 15 I was letting the government conscript my money.
Thus I was voluntarily helping the government do what I vigorously declared was wrong.…
Realizing this inconsistency, I decided that in good conscience I could no longer make full payment of my federal taxes.
At the same time, I did not want to stop supporting civilian services supported by the government.
So, in my tax returns I continued to pay the small percentage allocated for civilian use.
The amount that I formerly had given for war purposes I hoped now to give to such causes as the American Friends Service Committee and to support other works of mercy and reconciliation which help remove the roots of violence and war.
As time went on I realized, however, that this was not accomplishing what had been my hope; for year after year the IRS ordered my bank to release money from my account to pay the money I had held back.
I then closed my bank account, and at this point it came to me with complete clarity that by so much as filing tax returns I was giving the IRS assistance in the violation of my own conscience, because the very information I was giving on my tax forms was being used in finally making the collection.
There is something else that those who withhold a portion of their tax on conscientious grounds should realize.
The IRS does not practice line budgeting.
All that it collects goes where the government wants it to go, which in ever-increasing proportion goes to finance wars, past, present and future.
I have not filed any tax returns, nor have I paid any federal income tax.
On , on charges growing out of my refusal to pay this tax, I was given a six-month sentence, which I spent at Allenwood, Pennsylvania, which is run by the Lewisburg penitentiary.
Some two years my release from Allenwood, in , the Presbytery of Cincinnati, on charges quite unrelated to the real issues, suspended me as a minister.
In , this action was upheld by the General Assembly, the highest court of the denomination.
In the presbytery declared my ordination to the ministry no longer valid, making a highly questionable presumption that they could cancel out whatever spiritual grace the Holy Spirit had bestowed on me when I was ordained at a meeting of Chicago Presbytery back in .
For nearly eighteen years our congregation has been a member of the National Council of Community Churches.
I have been accepted as a minister in full standing, and whatever validity my ordination had back in , is, for them, still valid.
A note in the issue recognized 86-year-old Pearl Ewald’s persistent activism: “Pearl Ewald continued her activities for peace, civil rights and war tax resistance, despite a recurring heart condition.
She has been arrested and jailed more than once for stubbornly refusing to discontinue her witness.
On one occasion, although desperately in need of medical attention, she refused to be admitted to a hospital, because it was a segregated institution.”
That same issue mentioned the case of Mennonite war tax resister Bruce Chrisman, “who was convicted of failure to file an income tax return in , was sentenced to one year in Mennonite Voluntary Service,” to which I can only think: “Please don’t throw me in the briar patch, Your Honor!”
“I’m amazed,” said Chrisman.
“I feel very good about the sentence.
The alternative service is probably the first sentence of its kind for a tax case.
I think it reflects the testimony in the trial and its influence on the judge.”
Chrisman could have been sentenced to one year in prison and a $10,000 fine.
A letter from Mildred Thierman in the same issue challenged Friends:
Could we now unite this year in sending a flood of personal declarations to President Carter and our government, saying that we can no longer, in conscience, allow part of our taxes to be used for the purchase of annihilating weapons?
Can we back this up by joining together in significant numbers to withhold whatever portion of our income tax fits our circumstances, in order to make our protest noticed?
A review of Conscience in Crisis: Mennonites and Other Peace Churches in America, , Interpretation and Documents in the issue, summarized its version of the history of Quaker war tax resistance this way:
Testimony against participation in the military and refusal to pay Trophy Money — the English tax to raise money for military regalia (arms were, by law, furnished by the individual soldiers) — were traditional Friends’ observances by the beginning of the period covered by Conscience in Crisis.…
…Friends and other Peace Church members were, by and large, loyal subjects.
They paid taxes “for the King’s use” — including the royal decision to make war.
Friends began to question payment of taxes more broadly.
The essential issue, according to the authors, was that “the individual is responsible for the actions of his government in a free society.”
Israel Pemberton, John Pemberton, John Churchman, John Woolman, and nineteen other Friends petitioned the Assembly on the issue of taxes in :
…Yet as the raising Sums of Money, and putting them into the Hands of Committees, who may apply them to Purposes inconsistent with the peaceable Testimony we profess, and have borne to the World, appears to us in its Consequences to be destructive of our religious Liberties, we apprehend many among us will be under the Necessity of suffering rather than consenting thereto by the Payment of a Tax for such Purposes…
By the time of the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting sessions, Friends decided not to discuss the issue of “mixed” taxes because of a significant lack of consensus.
Yet, Friends were increasingly beginning to question less direct forms of support for war not traditionally inconsistent with the peace testimony.
an illustration from the issue of Friends Journal
In the issue, Alan Eccleston wrote of his calling as a peacemaker, and how that manifested for him.
Excerpts:
For me personally, the witness to peace has led to war tax resistance.
Over the past six years of this witness I have been — and still am — strengthened by others who are not, themselves, war tax resisters.
The witness of war tax resistance is one that raises fear.
We have been conditioned to fear the Internal Revenue Service as something nearly equivalent to a ruthless secret police, in its imagined power to terrorize.
Most of us, unwilling to admit, even to ourselves, that fear alone would block us from a spiritual witness, find other reasons for willingly paying to produce weapons that can annihilate all humankind.
Based on my own experience, I would say fear imagined is greater in most people than fear actually experienced, and that this is by a factor of ten, at least — maybe 100. Fortunately, borrowing from each other’s experience and knowing others will be there to help us, we can find the courage to move ahead.
Then comes the surprise.
With dread and foreboding we make our stand.
Then, gradually, we become aware that a great weight has been lifted from us.
That nagging, cumbersome burden of blocking from consciousness our own complicity with this evil has fallen away.
We are lighter, more open, more truthful.
We are free, at last, to speak truth to power.
When this affirmation is truly clear in our lives, it will be seen and felt by the president and by Congress.
As in , when C.O. status was incorporated in the Selective Service Act, the tax laws will then be amended to create C.O. status for taxpayers and a “World Peace Tax Fund.”
That legislation, approved by the world’s leading arms supplier, will move the world one step closer to peace.
That portion of our population (approximately four percent during the Vietnam War) which is pacifist would then contribute to peace, not war, and these contributions would total in excess of $2.3 billion every single year — year after year.
For the first time in history, peace programs would have a significant budget.
The funds could be used to support: a National Academy of Peace and Conflict Resolution; research to develop and evaluate non-military, nonviolent solutions to international conflict; disarmament; retaining workers displaced by conversion from military production; international exchanges for peaceful purposes; improvement of international health, education and welfare; and education of the public about the above activities.
The Friends General Conference in drafted “A Statement of Conscience by Quakers Concerned” and collected signatures.
The statement said, in part:
We advocate conscientious refusal to register for the draft and wish young men of draft age throughout the United States to know that if, after thoughtfully considering the reasons and consequences, they refuse to register, we will give them practical and moral support in every way we can, even though our willingness to do so may result in our prosecution, fines and possible imprisonment for disobeying a man-made law that leads us in the direction of war.
Mary Bye wrote in response that although she signed the statement, it felt to her to be something “like a hollow gesture.”
[M]aybe we [adults] should make sure about the beam in our adult eyes before we concentrate on the motes in those bright young eyes of the nineteen- and twenty-year-olds.
“[W]hat would be our reaction to young Quakers pointing out that since it takes money as well as men to fight a war, they encourage Friends beyond draft age to refuse war taxes?
Finally, the issue presented the case of Ruth Larson Hatcher.
Excerpt:
Not wishing to contribute tax money for war-making purposes, she managed for years to have an income just sufficient for survival but not large enough to require payment of taxes.
Then in a friend persuaded her to accept the management and bookkeeping of a children’s art center.
Conscientious and religious beliefs caused her to oppose acceptance of insurance benefits under Social Security, as well as the payment of taxes for war.
Her claims for exemption under various sections of the Internal Revenue code of as well as under the First and Fifth Amendments were routinely rejected, until a Supreme Court judge approved her use of Form No. 4361. It seems that this form (and another previously ignored by the authorities) had been used by an Amish sect to avoid the taxes (and payments) of the social security system.
Although the Court of Appeals handed down the opinion that exemptions were enacted to accommodate individuals commanded by their conscience or their religion to oppose acceptance of insurance benefits, it refused to accept that this was the exact status of petitioner Ruth Hatcher.
It’s a little unclear what took place here, but it sounds like this is saying that the courts left an opening for people who were not members of sects that qualified for an exemption from the social security system but who held similar beliefs to gain the same exemption.
Interesting if true.
I was able to find the appeals court decision that ruled against Hatcher, and the earlier Tax Court decision to the same effect, and the District Court decision that affirmed the Tax Court decision.
I was not able to find any record of Supreme Court action on the case, but I did find some other cases that cited the Appeals Court decision as precedent, which seems to suggest that the Supreme Court didn’t overturn it (as the above excerpt implies).
War tax resistance in the Friends Journal in
War tax resistance remained very much on the agenda at the Friends Journal at the beginning of the Reagan era of aggressive military build-up in .
A letter from Jenny Duskey in the issue read, in part:
I belong to a community of disciples called Publishers of Truth.
Our testimony is that Christ’s disciples can have no part in war or preparation for war, and that this means not joining the military or being drawn into legally designated “alternatives” to conscription even when the law demands, as well as not paying taxes destined for military use when we can refuse them.
“Publishers of Truth” (see also the advertisement pictured in ♇ ) was centered around Larry and Lisa Kuenning, who came to prophesy an emerging paradise on Earth, centered on Farmington, Maine.
I’m tempted to do some further research in this direction, but am afraid of getting lost in some interesting by-ways.
Lisa Kuenning was a collaborator with Timothy Leary, and for a time an important figure in the psychedelic renaissance.
Last I checked, the Kuennings were running Quaker Heritage Press, which specializes in reprints of old Quaker books.
The issue had an in-depth article by Richard K. MacMaster on Christian Obedience in [American] Revolutionary Times, that included a discussion of Quaker responses to war taxes and militia exemption taxes.
Excerpts:
The Pennsylvania Assembly voted on to recommend to conscientious objectors “that they cheerfully assist in proportion to their abilities, such persons as cannot spend both time and substance in the service of their country without great injury to themselves and families.”
This would be a subsidy to poorer Associators, men who could not supply themselves with a musket and bayonet and needed help from their neighbors.
It was a far cry from the kind of nonpolitical relief work that the sects had in mind.
The Continental Congress did not help matters when it decreed in that members of the Peace Churches should “contribute liberally in this time of universal calamity, to the relief of their distressed brethren.”
Were these distressed brethren the poor of Boston or poor families in their own neighborhood or George Washington’s makeshift army camped on the hills overlooking Boston harbor?
The Peace Churches took the Congressional resolve as a last-minute reprieve and insisted that their contributions were for the poor, even though the money would be turned over to the County Committee.
“For we gave it in good faith for the needy,” a Lancaster County Brethren pastor explained, “and the man to whom we gave it gave us a receipt stating that the money would be used for that purpose.”
The Lancaster County experience was repeated in other Pennsylvania counties and in other colonies where Quakers, Brethren, and Mennonites were numerous.
Most communities tried voluntary contributions, but in Frederick County, Maryland, and Berks County, Pennsylvania, the committees levied fines on men of military age who did not drill with the Associators.
The nonresistant sects had fallen into a trap.
No matter how they labeled them, the authorities understood their voluntary contributions as donations to the war chest.
And if contributions failed to come voluntarily, they were already preparing for compulsory payment of money as an equivalent to military service.
Time was running out on the Peace Churches by .
Soon after the elections, military associators began petitioning the Pennsylvania Assembly that
some decisive Plan should be fallen upon to oblige every Inhabitant of the Province either with his Person or Property to contribute towards the general Cause, and that it should not be left, as at present, to the Inclinations of those professing tender Conscience, but that the Proportion they shall contribute, may be certainly fixed and determined.
These petitions asked much more than an increased tax assessment on the conscientious objectors.
The petitions explicitly stated that every member of the community had an obligation to make some contribution to the common cause; the additional tax would be a concession to those who could not meet that obligation on the field of battle.
The Peace Churches rightly put their case on the high ground of religious freedom.
Quakers expressed their “Concern on the Endeavours used to induce you to enter into Measures so manifestly repugnant to the Laws and Charter of this Province, and which, if enforced, must subvert that most essential of all Privileges, Liberty of Conscience.”
They asked the Assembly not to infringe the solemn assurance given them in Penn’s Charter, “that we shall not be obliged ‘to do or suffer any Act or Thing contrary to our religious Persuasion.’ ”
The revolutionary government rose to the challenge.
All sixty-six members of the Philadelphia Committee proceeded in a body to the Assembly chamber to present their response to the Quaker address to the Speaker of the House.
The same day, the Assembly heard petitions from the Officers of the Military Association of the City and Liberties of Philadelphia and from a Committee of Privates.
They first narrowly construed the grant of religious freedom in the Charter and threw out of court the sectarian contention that religion was more than a Sunday worship service.
We cannot alter the Opinion we have ever held with Regard to those parts of the Charier quoted by the Addressors, that they relate only to an Exemption from any Acts of Uniformity in Worship, and from paying towards the Support of other religious Establishments, than those to which the Inhabitants of this Province respectively belong.
The representation from the Committee of Privates went still further.
They insisted that “Those who believe the Scriptures must acknowledge that Civil Government is of divine Institution, and the Support of it enjoined to Christians.”
Quakers ought not to question what governments did, according to this Committee of Privates, but simply obey; God had ordained the powers and thereby gave sanction to every action of the state.
The lines were thus clearly drawn between the sectarian view of supremacy of conscience and the secular view of the primacy of the state.
The Mennonites and Church of the Brethren simply set down the limits of what they could do in good conscience.
Their petition made little difference to the course of events.
The day after the Mennonite and Brethren statement was read the Pennsylvania Assembly voted to require everyone of military age who would not drill with the Associators “to contribute an Equivalent to the time spent by the Associators in acquiring the military Discipline.”
Later in , the Assembly imposed a tax of two pounds and ten shillings on non-Associators, which would be remitted for those who joined a military unit.
Under new pressure from the Associators they raised the tax to three pounds and ten shillings in .
The Pennsylvania Constitutional Convention incorporated the principle of taxing conscientious objectors as an equivalent to military service in the Declaration of Rights they adopted.
It made explicit what most Patriots already believed:
That every Member of Society hath a right to be protected in the Enjoyment of Life, Liberty and property and therefore is bound to Contribute his proportion towards the Expence of that protection and yield his personal Service when necessary or an equivalent… Nor can any Man who is conscientiously scrupulous of bearing Arms be justly compelled thereto if he will pay such equivalent.
Participation in warfare was a universal obligation, in their view, falling equally on every citizen; those who could not fight must pay others to fight in their place.…
The Assembly and the Convention clearly intended to make the Peace Churches pay for war and imposed the tax as an avowed equivalent to military service.… Religious pacifists carried the whole burden of the tax.
But a tax imposed on conscientious objectors as an equivalent to joining the army and intended for the military budget definitely infringed on the religious liberty guaranteed by William Penn’s Charter.
The war tax issue thus arose in a context of freedom of conscience curtailed for those whose Christian faith forbade their “giving, or doing, or assisting in any Thing by which Men’s Lives are destroyed or hurt.”
Maryland and North Carolina followed Pennsylvania’s example in levying a special tax on conscientious objectors; the North Carolina law made payment the grounds for exemption from actual service with the army.
Virginia and several other states required conscientious objectors to hire substitutes to take their place whenever their company of militia was drafted for combat duty.
Special tax assessments for military purposes passed every state legislature as the war dragged on.
And the rapidly depreciating Continental and state paper money that fueled a run-away inflation was itself a war tax.
Wherever Quakers, Mennonites, or Brethren lived, the problem of paying for war soon caught up with them
Could a valid distinction be made between military service and war taxes?
The Reverend John Carmichael, Scottish Presbyterian pastor in Chester County, Pennsylvania, had little sympathy with the nonresistant sects who refused to pay war taxes, but he saw no distinction between fighting and paying the cost of war.
In Rom 13, from the beginning, to the 7th verse, we are instructed at large the duty we owe to civil government, but if it was unlawful and anti-Christian, or anti-scriptural to support war, it would be unlawful to pay taxes; if it is unlawful to go to war, it is unlawful to pay another to do it, or to go do it.
Some Brethren, Mennonites, and Quakers agreed that no real distinction could be made and consequently refused to pay taxes levied for military purposes.
In his sermon, Carmichael spoke of Mennonites “who for the reasons already mentioned will not pay their taxes, and yet let others come and take their money, where they can find it, and be sure they will leave it where they can find it handily.”
They would not resist the tax collector in any way; but they could not cooperate in wrongdoing by voluntarily paying war taxes.
The law took this practice into account and permitted collectors to seize the property of those would not pay their own taxes.
Quakers officially discouraged payment of war taxes and militia fines.
Many Friends went to jail for their refusal and still a larger number allowed the authorities to take horses, cattle, furniture, farm implements and tools to pay their taxes.
They refused to accept any money from the sale of their goods over and above the tax and fine.
In the Shenandoah Valley and in other Quaker communities, their neighbors found rare bargains when the sheriff sold a Quaker farmer’s property for taxes and purposely kept the bidding low.
Virginia Yearly Meeting protested to the authorities about the sale of slaves, freed by their Quaker masters in defiance of the law, who were taken up and sold to pay their former masters’ war taxes.
Refusal to pay taxes for military purposes had a close parallel in Quaker refusal to pay taxes to support an established Church; they accepted the right of civil government to appropriate money for either purpose, but denied that civil government could coerce their consciences, even at the cost of jail sentences.
This was a minority position among English and American Friends, even after John Woolman prodded their conscience on war taxes.
Woolman’s influence can be seen in a circular letter issued by Philadelphia Yearly Meeting in , when Braddock’s defeat left Pennsylvania exposed to French and Indian raids and the Assembly ordered new taxes for mounting a fresh campaign.
The tax was a general one, including military appropriations with all the other functions of civil governments, but Friends agreed “as we cannot be concerned in wars and fightings, so neither ought we to contribute thereto by paying the tax directed by the said act, though suffering be the consequence of our refusal.”
The issue in was much clearer: the taxes were levied entirely for military purposes and intended as an equivalent to military service.
With the passage of years, Friends had the meaning of nonresistance in much sharper focus and a much greater number accepted the challenge of faithful discipleship.
Mennonites also responded to the challenge by refusing to pay war taxes.
When the Pennsylvania Assembly passed an act in to require a tax of three pounds and ten shillings from everyone of military age who refused to turn out with the militia, Mennonite opinion was divided.
Christian Funk, bishop in the Franconia congregation, allowed payment of the tax and tried to convince his brother ministers.
But refusal to pay war taxes had taken deep roots in the Mennonite tradition by .
The mere rumor that Funk permitted payment of the tax was enough to bring complaints against him at the time of preparation for the Lord’s Supper in and to lead to his ouster from the ministry.
All of the preachers and a great many other Mennonites in eastern Pennsylvania opposed payment of the tax.
Andrew Ziegler, bishop in the Skippack congregation, spoke for them, when he declared: “I would as soon go into the war, as to pay the three pounds ten shillings if I were not concerned for my life.”
Zeigler and others could see little difference between fighting and paying for war.
In the face of a long-standing tradition of paying taxes without questioning the purpose of the tax, men of faith testified from their own conscience that for them there could be no distinction between refusing to fight and refusing to pay for war.
These Mennonites, Brethren, and Quakers willingly accepted the penalty for their conscientious objection to war taxes in imprisonment and loss of property far in excess of the tax.
Their action reminded their brethren of the need for careful discrimination in rendering to Caesar the things that are really Caesar’s. They refused to let a majority vote in the legislature be their conscience and rejected the easy way of confusing Caesar’s will with the will of God.
In the same issue, Bill Durland of the Center on Law and Pacifism reviewed the attempts to get a sympathetic court hearing in the United States for the argument that conscientious objection to military taxation is a Constitutionally-protected right of citizens.
He described the founding of the Center in by himself, Robert Anthony, Bruce & Ruth Graves, Barbara & Howard Lull, Peter Herby, and Richard McSorley, and then described the various avenues of appeal the group was pursuing in the U.S. Supreme Court.
Anthony put his legal argument this way: to be compelled to pay war taxes “would force [him] to accept a creed, and practice a form of worship foreign to his convictions, and to establish as the only normative religious belief and practice, that adhered to by most Christian denominations, i.e., that it is both a Christian and an American duty to fight in just wars and pay for them.”
The Supreme Court wasn’t interested.
The Center tried again with the Graves’ case, asserting that the First Amendment’s assertion that “Congress shall make no law… prohibiting the free exercise [of religion]” means that the governmental interest in having an efficient and uncomplicated tax system is trumped by the citizen’s right to a religious practice that forbids funding war.
Again, the Supreme Court turned up its nose.
The Center then made an attempt with the Lulls & Peter Herby as petitioners.
As the First Amendment arguments had failed to make any headway, this time they made a Hail Mary pass with a Ninth Amendment argument.
“This amendment recognizes that there are certain fundamental, inalienable rights not enumerated in the Constitution which the people possess that are preexisting to any constitution, are inherent in the individual, and are not subject to divestment either partially or completely by the state.
These rights have also been called ‘natural’ and are those held by an individual in a state of absolute liberty.
In contracting to enter into a state of society, the people collectively, and the person individually, only divest themselves of those natural rights which they expressly relinquish by enumeration.”
Nice try, but the Supreme Court yet again denied cert.
The article notes that in addition to First Amendment-based arguments, “each of the three cases raised at the Federal Court level a compelling legal position based on International Law and, in particular, the Nuremberg Principles.”
(Not compelling enough, apparently.)
An article in the same issue, by William Strong, profiles war tax resister Bruce Chrisman.
Excerpts:
[H]e cannot pay that portion of his federal taxes that he knows will be used for preparations for war.
For that, he is serving a criminal sentence that includes one year of humanitarian service without pay, three years of probation, a fine of $2,400 for court costs, and the payment of all back taxes due.
He deems this result a moral victory, however — the sentence could have been up to one year in prison and a $10,000 fine.
Over the years Philadelphia Yearly Meeting’s minutes have reflected the repeated return of the war tax concern.
In a striking, sensitive minute was approved.
The unity reached at that time calls upon “all Friends to continue to search themselves deeply on their responsibility to separate themselves from preparations for war.”
Where does that searching lead?
“We encourage dialogue between conscientious war tax refusers and other concerned people struggling with the issue of paying war taxes.
We seek to build a community of deeply committed persons.”
Friends offer their real support — spiritual, moral, legal, and material — to that growing community, and close the minute by reaffirming:
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.
Philadelphia Yearly Meeting’s “War Tax Concerns Support Committee” works to carry out that minute.
Its mandate is broad, from war tax refusal and resistance, questing for administrative (IRS) and judicial relief, to a spectrum of wholly positive approaches.
The committee seeks “legislative relief” in pursuing the World Peace Tax Fund law that proposes alternative service for war taxes, for conscientious objectors to monetary conscription.
In the war tax concerns section of our Peace Testimony, as in most fields of Quaker endeavor, certain Friends are ’way out front.
They have been going down a committed road for years.
George and Lillian Willoughby, Bob Anthony, Lorraine Cleveland, and Robin Harper in Philadelphia Yearly Meeting come to mind.
“Not to worry” — most of us are beginners, and we don’t need to catch up.
What stride do we take this year — or this quarter — in the Light? We tackle the big issues by taking the next step, getting a bit more involved.
Saying “no” to that small, lingering, now two percent Vietnam War telephone tax, which does indeed produce a billion dollars in direct war taxes, is one such step.
Adjusting our withholding so that we take more control of our tax payments, with more options, is another.
Or do we match what the government requires of us in war taxes with comparable contributions to peace organizations?
Everyone ultimately decides his own next step, but often it comes out of shared, caring discussion with other Friends, “wrestling as I am, with the harder questions of our faith and practice.”
That issue also had a few short notes that mentioned war tax resistance:
“In Japan, COMIT (Conscientious Objection to Military Tax) is planning to sue the government for breach of constitution by taxing for war.”
“In Switzerland, 300 people belonging to the group ‘Pour une Politique de Paix Active’ refused to pay their military tax or some part of the duty levied for national defense.”
“[N]ine members of the Pacific Yearly Meeting Peace Committee testified ‘against rendering unto Caesar that which is God’s’ by declaring their solidarity with those Friends who refuse to cooperate with war taxes and draft registration.
Some seventeen others present at the yearly meeting also signed the statement.”
“A statement from Orange County Meeting asks: ‘If we recognize our involvement in militarism through the payment of taxes used for military purposes but do not act to end such involvement, then are we not hypocritical to tell Friends faced with registration to refuse military service?’ ”
The issue included a mention that the Australian Yearly Meeting was pursuing its own Peace Tax Fund plan “as a method of allowing taxpayers to direct a proportion of their tax to peace purposes instead of military spending.”
The issue noted that a “Historic Peace Church Task Force on Taxes is preparing a packet of study materials to provide information on the biblical basis of war taxes and the World Peace Tax Fund… together with suggestions for personal and political action.”
Maurice McCracken wrote in to the issue to chide anti-war activists for their timidity.
Excerpts:
Indeed it is a feeble gesture to do what we do not believe in; even though we protest doing it.
The only valid protest is resistance and complete noncooperation with what we believe to be wrong.
[A] law… threatens anyone who advises a young man not to register for the draft with the same penalty as the non-registrant — a possible prison sentence of five years and a possible fine of $5,000. In the draft registration resistance movement I find that considerable time is spent on how to counsel young men about registration so it will not appear that we are actually advising them not to register.
Why this hesitancy and timidity?
I not only advise young men of draft age not to register.
I urge them not to register.
This military juggernaut which threatens to destroy all human life and all animal and plant life on the planet must be stopped.
It must be resisted at the point of not filing a federal income tax return and of not registering for the draft.
A thief-says, “Your money or your life.”
The Pentagon says, “Your money and your life!”
I refuse to give either one!
Won’t you join me?
In the issue, E. Raymond Wilson tried to envision a “Quaker Peace Program” that would be adequate to the challenges of .
He advocated working toward a more powerful U.N., drastic disarmament, global economic/social development with an emphasis on underdeveloped areas, and active reconciliation of global adversaries.
Much of this work would involve lobbying and other pleading with powerful people whose inclinations are largely in the opposite direction; but there was also a nod toward conscientious objection:
an ad in the issue of Friends Journal
Friends should seriously consider the recommendations of the Second New Call to Peacemaking Conference that individuals should withhold all or part of their income tax going to military and war appropriations, now estimated at more than forty-eight percent of the budget controlled by Congress.
War tax resistance came up at the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting in .
War tax resister John Beer wrote down some questions that people had about resisting, and in a Friends Journal issue , Bill Strong (of the Meeting’s “War Tax Concerns Support Committee”) answered them.
The questions were:
“If we refuse $100 of our federal war taxes and give it to some organization working for peace, what steps will the IRS take?”
“What options do we have in dealing with the IRS actions?”
“Is the initial letter we send with our tax return, stating the reasons for our tax refusal, important in terms of the subsequent legal proceedings?”
“Should we get help from a lawyer or tax refusal group in composing the letter?”
“What kind of advice can you provide which will allow us to profit from the experience of those who are already refusing to pay war taxes?”
“What happens to persons who refuse war taxes year after year?”
Some excerpts from the answers give a window into how war tax resistance was practiced by Quakers and by Meetings:
Both at Celo (NC) Meeting and at Central Philadelphia Meeting members asked others to share their examination or audit with IRS agents.
The first was in the refusers’ home, the latter in a federal office building.…
One Friend has been refusing for 23 years.
His witness continues and collection is still in the future, so much of the obligations of the early years have lapsed.
Another Friend, whose refusal goes back even further, has had the funds due taken at irregular intervals from her checking account.
A report in the issue noted that the Lake Erie Yearly Meeting in had “considered a minute on war tax concerns” based on queries from the New Call to Peacemaking Conference:
“If we believe that fighting war is wrong, does it not follow that paying for war is wrong?
If we urge resistance to the draft, should we not also resist the conscription of our material resources?”
The minute concluded: “We reassert the historic peace witness of the Society of Friends.
We commit ourselves to wrestle with the contradictions between our testimony and our government’s tax regulations.
To continue quiet payment for war preparations is to the conditions for war.”
Each meeting was urged to appoint a representative to the World Peace Tax Fund.
Finally, the issue brought a meditation on “the peaceable kingdom” by Susan Furry.
She believed that the Kingdom of God, the peaceable commonwealth, was “at hand” as Jesus said it was, and that it was the duty of Christians to “begin to live there.”
She reflected on how she came to include war tax resistance in her vision of how to carry this out:
an ad in the issue of Friends Journal
…I felt that I had to begin to look into the question of war tax resistance.
This led to a long period of study and self-examination.
To me, becoming a war tax resister meant making a final commitment to pacifism, and I didn’t do it lightly.
It took a lot of prayer and thought and the help and support of many people in my meeting to bring me to a point of clearness, where I know, solidly and comfortably, that this action is right for me.
Since then I have found myself being led not only to resist war taxes for myself but also to speak about it to others and to offer counsel and support to those who are considering this action.
I have helped prepare a packet called “Quakers and War Taxes” which is on sale at my meeting and have been involved in setting up the New England Friends Peace Tax Fund, an escrow fund for tax resisters under the care of my yearly meeting: I’ve been given a lot of encouragement to continue and to grow in my tax resistance activities through the support of others in my meeting, many of whom are not tax resisters themselves but friends who recognize that it is the right thing for me to do.
I’ve found that obedience to the divine leading I have felt in this matter has brought me closer to God, has given me new courage, and has opened me to further leadings.
In practical terms, war tax resistance seems to be a futile, irrational, and perhaps risky undertaking.
I think by now I’ve probably heard all the possible arguments against it.
The only answer I can really give is, “This is something I must do, to be faithful to my conscience and my understanding of God’s will.”
For it is part of the foolishness of God, which is wiser than human wisdom, as Paul tells us in First Corinthians.
It requires me to acknowledge my dependence on God’s guidance and strength.
I don’t know where my action will lead in practical terms, but I trust God to make use of it; I don’t know what the consequences will be for me personally, but I trust God to help me to face them.
In one way or another, perhaps, peacemaking may bring all of us to that place of acknowledging our dependence on God.
For me it has come through tax resistance.
For another it may come through the old dilemma about Hitler or through an experience of physical violence on the street.
In any case one comes to a place where one has to say, “I don’t know what will happen, but I place my trust in the God of love and accept the consequences.”
In coming to rely on God more, I have begun to learn that God really is dependable.
I have felt God working through the beautiful support I have received from many individuals and from my meeting.
I’ve been to tax court twice and was sustained by a powerful sense of God’s presence.
I’ve faced the certainty of financial loss and found that it doesn’t trouble me as much as I feared it would.
However, I still worry about the future; I haven’t reached the point where I can really leave it all in God’s hands.
Sometimes I even wonder about going to jail.
Right now the government isn’t prosecuting many war tax resisters, but it is always a possibility.
My actions are not very unusual; there are over forty war tax resisters in my meeting alone and many more in New England.
I know many people who have sacrificed more and taken greater risks for peace than I have.
But I have learned that when you follow God one step down the road, God usually asks you to take another step.
Who knows what God may ask of me in the future?
I have friends who have gone to jail for conscience’ sake, and I wonder if I could face that if it came to me.
My action in refusing to voluntarily pay taxes for war is largely symbolic — like the early Christians who refused to put a pinch of incense on Caesar’s altar.
Is it worth the risk to make a symbolic gesture?
Such questions take me back to the Christian roots of my faith.
I know that my way of thinking about these things and the language I use do not work for everybody, but these are the symbols which make sense to me, so I must use them.
War tax resistance in the Friends Journal in
Is the dilemma facing pacifist Quakers who are asked to pay a war tax best resolved by conscientious objection and civil disobedience, or by lawsuits and lobbying?
Both approaches could be found in the pages of the Friends Journal in .
On , the Supreme Court ruled, unanimously, in U.S. v. Lee, that an Amish person who conscientiously objected to the social security system did not thereby have a First Amendment right to opt out of it.
The tax system could not function if denominations were allowed to challenge it because tax payments were spent in a manner that violates their religious belief.
Because the broad public interest in maintaining a sound tax system is of such a high order, religious belief in conflict with the payment of taxes affords no basis for resisting the tax.
As a reductio ad absurdum on the losing legal argument, the court noted that if Lee were allowed to assert the right to opt out of social security on conscientious grounds, it would open the door to other similar challenges:
If, for example, a religious adherent believes war is a sin, and if a certain percentage of the federal budget can be identified as devoted to war-related activities, such individuals would have a similarly valid claim to be exempt from paying that percentage of the income tax.
A note in the issue of the Friends Journal noted that this had also slammed the door on the various First Amendment arguments for conscientious objection to war taxes that people had been pursuing:
In the light of a negative judgment rendered by the U.S. Supreme Court against an Amish employer on , the judicial action committee of the General Conference Mennonite Church has recommended to its General Board that a planned suit against the IRS on the issue of tax withholding “be put on indefinite hold.”
Having been turned away by the judicial branch, they decided to double-down on the legislative:
Rather than take a negatively-shrouded course of action at this time, the General Conference committee urged the General Board to make more money available “to promote the World Peace Tax Fund.”
an ad from the issue of Friends Journal
The issue reviewed two books on war tax resistance: Affirm Life: Pay for Peace from the Historic Peace Church Task Force on Taxes, and People Pay for Peace by William Durland.
The first of these opened with this challenging statement:
A wedge of contradiction is opening a wide fissure in our peace testimony.
While nearly all of us declare ourselves to be conscientiously opposed to war and preparations for war, and while many work tirelessly for its elimination, the overwhelming number of us continue voluntarily to pay for what we openly abhor.
The book, according to the review, covered the “biblical and historical basis for military tax refusal” and presented “a systematic exposition of the proposal for a World Peace Tax Fund.”
It also “gives large place to the significance and importance of achieving religious clarity and motivation.”
However, “[i]t does not… adequately address the mechanics of military tax refusal.”
That gap was filled by the second of the books, of which the reviewer said: “Most useful, I think, is the section entitled, ‘How to Refuse to Pay the Military Tax.’ ”
The same issue had an obituary for Lois Mae Handsaker which noted: “Before there were any peace marches in , she was apprehended during the picketing of the local post office to protest the use of income taxes for war.”
The issue announced that the Iowa Peace Network would be collecting money withheld from taxes by war tax resisters and using it to buy grain which it would submit to an IRS office in lieu of tactics to “symbolize opposition to taxes for the Pentagon and emphasize the need for funding human services.”
The article noted: “In the event that the IRS refuses to accept the grain, it will be donated to local meal programs for the needy.”
Alas, the notice followed-up that news with the silly idea of protesting against war taxes by writing “not for military spending” in the memo field of the check you write to the IRS.
“If enough people take this step, a class action suit against the IRS may be filed” — by some sort of magic, one supposes.
At Canada’s Parliament passed a “Constitution Act” which made it yet more independent of the British government.
The act enshrined “freedom of conscience and religion” as a fundamental freedom.
The Canadian Peace Tax Fund Committee said it was going to “test” this “by assuming that [our legislators] mean we can divert our defense taxes from killing to peaceful uses, on conscientious grounds.”
The notice of this, in the issue, didn’t give any details as to how this “test” would take place, but pretty quickly shifted to “hopes” that the legislature would enact a Peace Tax Fund in the spirit of the new Constitution Act, so lobbying may have been all the testing they planned to do.
ad from the issue of Friends Journal
Similarly vague was the report from the meeting of Carolina Conservative Friends, which decided on “asking ourselves and other American Friends to make some sort of statement against the use of tax money for military purposes, through coordinated activity in filing our returns .”
A report on the Lake Erie Yearly Meeting also vaguely mentioned “continued explorations within monthly meetings about war-tax resistance.”
Another report on the New York Yearly Meeting said that “[s]ome Friends planned to take further individual action supporting nonregistration and tax refusal.”
This consistent vagueness makes me suspect that there was some embarrassment and certainly no consensus about war tax resistance in these meetings.
Trudy Knowles brought things more in the brass tacks direction in the “Memoirs of a War Resister,” an article that concentrated mostly on the plight of Vietnam War veterans in the United States, that she shared in the issue.
Her resistance included tax resistance:
I do not pay the federal excise tax on my phone bill which is earmarked for the military.
I refuse to pay the 50 percent of my income tax that goes to preparing this country for war.
I put this money instead into an escrow account to be held until the government establishes a means by which this money can be used for the peaceful resolution of national and international conflicts — or until they take it by force.
There was a thoughtful overview of the “Holy Experiment” of William Penn’s founding of a colony run on Quaker principles in Pennsylvania by Margaret H. Bacon in the issue.
Toward the conclusion, it discussed war tax resistance as a possible way of advancing the experiment:
Through [John] Woolman we come to the most pressing unfinished business of our Holy Experiment: freeing ourselves from complicity in war.
Penn and his colonists hoped to govern without weapons, placing their hopes on “seeing what love can do,” as well as on the establishment sometime in the future of the instruments of arbitration, Penn’s Congress of Nations.
Neither the personal practice of nonviolence nor the best efforts of the United Nations have yet worked to rid the world of the threat of war, and now time is running out.
Earlier Friends were at least able to separate themselves from complicity in preparations for war by refusing to pay militia taxes as well as refusing to serve in the militia.
Today the principle of conscientious objection for the bodies of our young men (and perhaps young women) is well established with us, having been pioneered by a handful during the Civil War, a few hundred during World War Ⅰ, and some thousands in World War Ⅱ.
The idea of demanding conscientious objector status for our tax dollars is in its infancy.
In the past years, a few courageous souls have refused to pay the government that portion of their federal income taxes that supports war.
Today more and more monthly meetings and yearly meetings are beginning to wrestle with the problem.
Is it time for the Society of Friends as a whole to get behind this move?
Surely if we did it, and the Mennonites did it, and the Brethren did it, we could make a change in the law.
Is there not some simple, single forward step that we could make together in ?
Some Friends find this issue complicated, because the graduated income tax supports many good things, and Friends who designate their taxes solely for peace purposes are just making it necessary for others to pay solely for war.
The same arguments can be raised against conscientious objection to military service.
But is there not a deep and inward side to tax refusal?
Do some Friends feel, as Woolman felt, that they cannot pay these taxes and still keep in touch with the living and life-giving Holy Spirit?
Let us be tender before we argue with our tax refusers, for they may be pointing our way to new light.
The issue brought the news that “25 members of the Friends House staff in London” had embarked on war tax resistance.
The Meeting for Sufferings of London Yearly Meeting agreed to put 34% of the taxes withheld from the objectors into an escrow account, “the intention being to release it to Inland Revenue after assurances that it would be used for non-military purposes.”
An obituary notice of Roberta Dickinson in the same issue noted that “[s]he supported the peace testimony through organized war tax resistance.”
At the meeting of the Friends World Committee for Consultation, that group decided to refuse to submit withheld taxes to the government from its war tax resisting employees (according to a Journal report ).
Walter Ludwig reflected on contemporary and historical Quaker war tax resistance in an article he wrote for the issue.
Excerpts:
The writings from George Fox, John Woolman, Joshua Evans, Timothy Davis,
Moses Brown, and Samuel Allinson that are mentioned in Ludwig’s essay can be found in the book American Quaker War Tax Resistance.
Members of our meeting [Rahway and Plainfield (New Jersey) Monthly Meeting] several years ago began as individuals to withhold a percentage of their income tax in protest of its use for war.
No devastating consequences have resulted.
Courteous, almost sympathetic Internal Revenue Service agents have visited one member, telling her a red tab has been affixed to her folder in the file.
She hopes the IRS will soon run out of red tabs.
I have withheld the military third, sending it the first year to the American Friends Service Committee and since then to the Quaker Peace Tax Fund, custody of Albany (N.Y.) Monthly Meeting.
The first response from the IRS came just .
They want the “underpaid tax,” $939.58 in penalty and interest.
My refusal to support mass murder will likely be ignored, as have been my explanatory notes of “conscientious deduction” sent quarterly during the past three years
In my letters of refusal I have mentioned membership in the Religious Society of Friends.
Do I thereby leave with the IRS the impression that of course Quakers do not pay military taxes, as they once refused to pay tithes to a state church they could not in conscience support?
But has refusal to pay taxes for war been within the main stream of Quakerly testimony and practice?
May war-tax-resisting Friends today take aid and comfort from a tradition of military tax refusal?
George Fox was clear on the matter.
A restored portrait of Fox presents him as a man of property from a well-to-do family with enough investments to give him private means.
He paid his taxes.
If we pay we can plead with Caesar and plead with them who hath our custom and hath our tribute.
Refuse to pay and they will say: “How can we defend you against foreign enemies and protect everyone and their estates and keep down thieves and murders?”
And again:
To bear and carry weapons to fight with… the man of peace cannot act… but have paid their tribute [taxes] which they may still do for peace’s sake… In so doing Friends may better claim their liberty.
Sara Fell kept the Fox family account book after George married her mother, Margaret.
Her accounts disclose that the family paid the poll tax to carry on England’s war against the Dutch in .
When England fought the French, the entry reads: “ by M paid to the Poll Money by father and mother 1 pound 2 shilling.”
Robert Barclay, foremost Quaker theologian, wrote in :
We have suffered much in our country because neither ourselves would bear arms nor send others in our place, nor give our money for the buying of drums, standards, and other military attire.
Such “trophy money,” as these direct taxes were called, many early Friends refused to pay.
Most, however, paid the general or “mixed” taxes even in time of war.
Their willingness may be found in the advice of the gathering at Balby encouraging “all who are indebted to the world endeavor to discharge the same.”
As Fox put it in , “Keep out of debt; owe to no man anything but love… Pay to Caesar, as to your fellows, what is due.”
[H]omespun-clad John Woolman was given a cool reception by elegant London Friends.
They were securely of the propertied class with enterprises in heavy industry and were largely in control of the Atlantic trade.
They would not give their persons to the business of war-making, but did they make nice distinctions in how the empire used their tax money in extending colonial rule?
Philadelphia Friends, like London’s, were well placed in government and trade.
“The richest,” wrote a visiting London doctor, “talk only about selling of flour and the low price it bore.”
Using George Fox as authority, some Quakers tried to persuade others to pay a tax levied for an armed expedition against Canada in .
When war with the French and Indians finally came in , John Churchman, Anthony Benezet, John Woolman, and other Friends refused to pay war taxes that were mixed with taxes for civil uses.
In extenuation of Fox and early war-tax-paying Quakers in England Woolman said:
To me it appears that there was less danger of their being infected with the spirit of the world than is the case with us now.
[They] had had little share in civil government… our minds have been turned to the improvement of our country, to merchandise and the sciences… and a carnal mind is gaining among us.
When ten Quaker members of the Pennsylvania Assembly resigned rather than vote for the War Supply Bill of , the remaining “secular” Friends voted the war taxes and penalties for nonpayment.
The abdicating legislators and their supporters in the Society then began close cooperation with Mennonites, Dunkers, and other pacifist groups that carried on through the Revolution.
When military officers appeared in Mount Holly to draft for the French and Indian War, Woolman noted in his Journal, “In this time of commotion some of our young men left these parts and tarried abroad till it was over” (a prelude to Vietnam).
Woolman in had recorded his uneasiness about paying war taxes:
A few years past, money having been made current in our province for carrying on wars… by taxes laid on the inhabitants, my mind was often affected with the thought of paying such taxes… To refuse the active payment of a tax which our Society generally paid was exceedingly disagreeable but to do a thing contrary to my conscience appeared yet more dreadful.
Joshua Evans in wrote:
I found it best for me to refuse paying taxes on my estate which went to pay the expenses of war, and although my part might appear at best as a drop in the ocean, yet the ocean, I considered, was made up of many drops.
Committees appointed by Philadelphia Yearly Meeting agreed on an “epistle of tender love and caution to Friends in Pennsylvania” signed by those who felt free to do so and forwarded to monthly and quarterly meetings.
It was in keeping with William Penn’s earlier statement, made when he refused to send money to England for war against Canada:
No man can be true to God and be false to his own conscience, nor can he extort from it a tribute to carry on any war, much less offensive, nor ought true Christians pay for it.
I’ve tried many times to track down a source for this Penn quote, with no success.
The war was in full swing when queries sent annually by London Yearly Meeting to English Friends were adopted in by yearly meetings in Virginia, Maryland, Philadelphia, New York, and New England.
They asked:
Do you bear a testimony against bearing arms and paying trophy money or being in any manner concerned in privateers letters of mark, or dealing in prize goods as such?
Friends were expected not to pay voluntarily to hire a substitute for military service or voluntarily pay any tax solely and directly for military purposes.
Every other tax, even mixed taxes that would be used in part for the military budget, Friends were expected in conscience to pay.
The Revolution shifted the locus of tax-raising authority for Americans from London to state and federal governments.
Whereupon Timothy Davis in circulated his tract titled, “Advice of a Quaker to Pay Tax to American Revolution.”
War taxes, especially mixed ones, should be paid, wrote Davis, and he quoted a weighty Friend, Thomas Story, who had declared, “If the officer demand tax from me and tell me ’tis to maintain war, I’ll pay it.”
Sandwich (Mass.) Monthly Meeting took a dim view of the Davis publication and disowned its author.
Quaker books of discipline of the time counseled disowning members who paid war taxes.
During the Revolution Moses Brown reminded Friends:
Our ancient testimonies were and remain to be supportable of paying tribute and customs for the support of civil and yet refuse to pay trophy money and other expenses solely for war.
He suggested Friends might ask, with the war over, for a separation of taxes into their several budget purposes.
“If it should be refused we might be united in refusing even those the greater part of which may be for civil uses.”
The clearest Quaker statement on war taxes during the Revolution came from the pen of Samuel Allinson, a young Friend of Burlington, New Jersey.
In Allinson circulated manuscript copies of his “Reasons against War and paying taxes for its Support.”
War is not a defensible function of civil government, reasoned Allinson, and each generation must apply biblical truths to the issues of its own time.
Peace committees of monthly meetings might well spend a session with Friend Allinson’s cogent thinking.
Quaker support of withholders of war taxes was recorded in a minute approved by Philadelphia Yearly Meeting in , reaffirmed in , and used as model for a minute approved by New York Yearly Meeting.
It reads, in part:
Refusal to pay the military portion of taxes is in keeping with an honorable testimony, fully in keeping with the history and practice of Friends… We warmly approve of people following their consciences 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 same issue noted that a minute passed at the gathering of the New England Yearly Meeting “supported efforts to establish a World Peace Tax Fund and current forms of war tax refusal.”
Also in that issue was an announcement about the formation of a war tax resisters’ penalty fund:
The Tax Resister’s Penalty Fund is a network designed to distribute the burden of penalties or interest levied against military tax resisters.
For example, 200 people would share a $500 penalty at $2.50 each.
For information contact TRPF, Box 25, North Manchester, IN 46962.
The fund was still in operation at that address until fairly recently.
It has not formally disbanded, though it appears to no longer be operating effectively.
War tax resistance in the Friends Journal in
After noting several years of dwindling coverage of war tax resistance in the Friends Journal, it was a pleasant surprise to see that the magazine devoted its issue to the topic.
Robert Dockhorn wrote the opening editorial.
Excerpt:
Historically, many Friends have refused to participate in armed forces, and occasionally Friends, in an organized way, have refused to pay taxes to finance military activity.
But mostly, especially in recent years, only a few individuals, acting on the basis of individual conscience, have refused to pay taxes that are “mixed” — i.e. where one cannot determine which monies are funding which functions of government.
These individual Friends have sometimes received endorsement from their meetings, and on occasion, meetings (including yearly meetings) have gone so far as to encourage individual Friends generally to think seriously about tax resistance.
In this issue of Friends Journal, we offer several
articles that address this subject. At the center of them is a moral dilemma:
how can those of us who are clear that our government is pursuing an immoral,
militarist course live with our consciences in the knowledge that we are
funding this activity? What is required of us? What are our
real choices? What is our most effective response? And, at
another level: are we required only to be faithful to our
consciences, and to leave the consequences in God’s hands?
For — my wife, Roma, and I refused to pay the military portion of our federal income tax, as calculated by Friends Committee on National Legislation.
We donated the refused amounts to various causes that we felt were appropriate.
During these years I was employed by Philadelphia Yearly Meeting.
Eventually, the IRS came to my employer and sought to levy my wages for the owed amounts.
Much searching resulted, and the yearly meeting, while declining to turn over the funds, placed them in a separate account and did not hide them.
Eventually, they were attached.
And in , Roma and I prayerfully considered our course, sensed that we were no longer led to this resistance, and settled with the IRS, paying a substantial amount of interest and penalties.
We followed a leading, and the leading changed for us.
In the entire process, we were supported and nurtured by my monthly and yearly meeting (I am a Friend, Roma is not) — but it was our leading, supported by meetings, not the meetings’ leading.
And that is part of the question in these articles. It is not just about what
individuals can do, and should do. It is also about what all
Friends can and should do — together. How are Friends led today?
The first war tax resistance article in the issue came from Nadine Hoover, who told the story of Dan Jenkins’s attempt to get the courts to recognize conscientious objection to military taxation as a right of individual conscience that American citizens had before the enactment of the U.S. Constitution and that they had deliberately not relinquished by means of that document (see ♇ ).
The courts weren’t buying it, and in fact found the argument so far-fetched
that they upheld a $5,000 fine against Jenkins for using legally-frivolous
arguments. Hoover thought the arguments were good enough to be worth
repeating in the Journal, however.
She noted that “nearly three dozen Quakers and other supporters” joined Jenkins when he was arguing his appeal, and she argued:
To pay war taxes or to purchase from or invest in corporate structures that profit on war or use military might in order to secure wealth, in violation of our religious conviction, plants a dis-ease among us.
Friends’ witness is letting our lives speak — not that we will be protected but that we are willing to make ourselves vulnerable — knowing our faith will sustain us, set us free, and give us joy.
I have experienced this joy when I live in accord with my conscience and faith, regardless of the apparent, temporal consequences.
She invited “Friends who will stand before the courts and proclaim our faith… [or] write their statements of conscience and share them with others… [or] make the commitment to represent and/or support any Friend who is called to this witness” to write a war tax resistance committee of the New York Yearly meeting.
She hoped that if enough Quakers began to resist, they might make a change in the country the way the women’s suffrage movement did.
The change Hoover was hoping this would bring about was that the government
would legally acknowledge conscientious objection to military spending by
passing the Religious Freedom Peace Tax Fund bill, or something along those
lines:
Quakers, Mennonites, Shakers, and others have maintained this testimony throughout U.S. history.
Still many people today, of a wide variety of faiths, do not pay taxes for military purposes because this action violates their essential religious beliefs and moral convictions of conscience.
Passage of this bill by Congress would facilitate the payment of all taxes owed by these principled people.
Perish the thought.
Hoover shared a minute from the New York Yearly Meeting, dated
:
The Living Spirit works in the world to give life, joy, peace and prosperity through love, integrity and compassionate justice among people.
We are united in this Power.
We acknowledge that paying for war violates our religious conviction.
We will seek ways to witness to this religious conviction in each of our communities.
Then she listed off some possible “ways to witness”:
encourage your congregation to write and deliver a statement of
conscientious objection to paying for war
write a statement of conscience to include with your tax return and to
send to various other people
redirect some or all of your taxes “to an escrow account to be held in
trust for the
U.S.
government”
file more lawsuits using Jenkins’s 9th
Amendment argument
live on a below-the-tax-line income
divest from “corporations that profit from war” and invest and spend more
responsibly
“Pursue local ordinances that deny corporations recognition as persons,
and that deny recognition of corporate charters as contracts”
It was a long, rambling, repetitive, sometimes vague and random-seeming (what did corporate charters have to do with any of this?) argument.
It represents one weird extreme of the Peace Tax Fund idea, which had come to be seen by some supporters as an end in itself, rather than a means to a more important end.
Why do we resist paying war taxes?
Because that might help us get the Religious Freedom Peace Tax Fund bill passed!
The following article, edited by Karen A. Reixach, tried to account for how
enthusiasm for conscientious objection to military taxation had taken hold in
the New York Yearly Meeting in recent years. It began by identifying a
“movement of conscience” in much the same way that voluntaryists describe
ideal noncoercive politics, with a quote from
Jim
Corbett:
Nonviolent civil initiative by covenant communities is… the way human beings preserve and develop society based on consent, in which the rule of law, as distinguished from the rule of commanders, is necessarily grounded… Civil initiative must be societal rather than organizational, nonviolent rather than injurious, truthful rather than deceitful, catholic rather than sectarian, dialogical rather than dogmatic, substantive rather than symbolic, volunteer-based rather than professionalized, and based on community powers rather than government powers.
The article hoped to describe how when individuals articulate and share their conscientious yearnings, by means of a “statement of conscience,” they can find like-minded souls to form a “movement of conscience” that can work together to “act on our collective beliefs of conscience,” using the recent activity in the New York Yearly Meeting as an example.
She described some of the minutes and reports from the Meeting that had touched
on peace and justice issues in recent years, and on the Meeting’s support for
Dan Jenkins in his court cases. Then:
In the yearly meeting’s Committee on Conscientious Objection to Paying for War sponsored a series of conferences in support of this growing movement of conscience.
The first conference was held at Purchase Meeting the weekend following the oral argument of Jenkins in the Second Circuit in .
The court hearing and the conference were attended by about 35 Friends and others from the metropolitan area and the northeast region.
Out of that conference arose two strands of action: exploring the possibility of group legal action, and expanding the movement of conscience [PDF illegible] step of writing a statement of conscience.
The second conference, in at
Rochester Meeting, featured a public forum on the failure of violence that
included Robert Holmes, professor of Philosophy at University of Rochester;
Derek Brett, of Conscience and Peace Tax International; and Frederick
Dettmer, the attorney representing Daniel Jenkins. During the following day
and a half, Friends continued to consider action steps individually and in
concert with others.
The third conference was held at Flushing Meeting in … It focused on international venues for raising freedom of conscience issues as they apply to paying taxes for war.
A fourth conference , is being planned; and as momentum builds, we envision more every few months, inviting ever-widening circles of participants.
I don’t see many details there about what, if any “action steps” the conferees decided on.
Jens Braun is quoted in the article as suggesting some possible next steps:
to develop a better theoretical understanding of pacifism and the failure
of violence, so as to share this vision more convincingly
to “explore, develop, and improve the many ways Friends can work towards
not paying for war” —
get the Religious Freedom Peace Tax Fund bill passed
try new court challenges along the lines of Dan Jenkins’s
develop and use workshops and other outreach material
to join with counterparts in other countries, for instance at international
conferences
The Yearly Meeting then issued this Minute:
To Conscientious Objectors to Paying for War Everywhere,
New York Yearly Meeting of the Religious Society of Friends invites you to
join us in acknowledging that paying for war violates our conviction in the
Power of the Living Spirit to give life, joy, peace and prosperity through
love, integrity and compassionate justice among people.
We call on all conscientious objectors to paying for war to state in writing 1) your belief against paying for war and the preparations for war, 2) major influences in forming your belief, 3) how it is demonstrated by the way you live, and 4) a request that our government recognize and accommodate our convictions.
We ask anyone who prepares such a statement to send it to
NYYM
Committee on Conscientious Objection to Paying for War… We ask Friends to
send your statement to your monthly, quarterly and yearly meetings to record
in the minutes having received your testimony.
The thing that unnerves me is that it’s possible to read the whole article without seeing a single reference to one of these newly enthused New York Yearly Meetingers actually refusing to pay their taxes (except for Jenkins himself, who put his taxes in escrow with a promise to pay them into a government “Peace Tax Fund” once one was established).
There’s lots of talk about writing statements of conscience and holding gatherings and planning legal strategies and contacting legislators and all that, but where is the actual not-paying-for-war part?
Of “the many ways Friends can work towards not paying for war,” you’d think some of them might involve not paying for war.
Hopefully this just went without saying, but I worry.
A sidebar from David R. Bassett and Karen Reixach concerned the status of the
Religious Freedom Peace Tax Fund bill, and where one could look on-line to
find information about it. Another, by John Little Randall, described his
work with the National Campaign for a Peace Tax Fund and with Conscience and
Peace Tax International.
The following article, by Jens and Spee Braun, wrote about war tax resistance as part of (and contributing to) a larger project of living a life of integrity, and how not-straightforward it all is.
It’s a good overview of what a typical modern American war tax resister is in for:
Are you frustrated thar the war goes on and on?
Has your conscience brought up with you the subject of not paying for war?
Be careful; your conscience can make you do things (albeit for a good cause) that can turn your life upside down!
You don’t really want to think of refusing to pay part of your taxes to the
government, do you? For starters, no matter how you calculate the percentage
to refuse, there will always be some frustrating other formula that makes
just as much sense. You can use the FCNL percentage of the budget
going towards war, but the War Resisters League has another calculation and
number. You can refuse to pay a token amount, or you can simply not pay the
estimated 50 percent or so of the tax burden that goes to war-making, past
war debts, the Department of Energy’s nuclear weapons work, and all that
spying we do. How to decide?
And then, to top it off, you have to figure what to do with the money not going to the government!
Give it to charity?
Put it in an escrow account?
Use it for peaceful and life-affirming purposes at home or overseas?
Of course this problem can be avoided by living under the taxable-income level — if you don’t mind life without all the great stuff we have nowadays.
After you make these decisions of how to go about not paying for war, have
fun telling your employer that you don’t want any funds withheld from your
paycheck and not to send any money directly to the government for you!
If you get really serious, you can take the government to court, try to change the laws, or try to change the lawmakers.
So many options!
And that is not all. Deciding to be a conscientious objector to paying for
war and setting up the mechanisms by which you put action into your
intentions is the easy part. Once you do that, you know your conscience will
have taken a few strides into your being. And with that foothold (not to
mention the knowledge and understanding you have been given for having taken
those steps), your conscience will begin to demand all manner of other
deviations from a normal daily way of living!
Here is where life gets really dicey.
The problem is integrity.
As your conscience integrates one part of your life with your belief structure (and who says they need to be integrated — people have believed one thing and done another for as long as there have been people!), the process can turn into a domino effect with all sorts of other areas likewise wanting to be integrated.
It becomes a terrible sacrifice.
And don’t believe those who say it is actually liberating! It is like putting
your house in order: once you start organizing the mess, you keep finding
other things to clean up that you didn’t even know were out of place. Take
finances. It turns out that we could all pay less in taxes,
i.e., buy fewer bombs, if we took all the deductions coming to
us. What? Well, for example, if you keep track of all that travel to Quaker
committee meetings and write down the mileage in a little book to document
the expenditure, it may be deductible.
Businesses deduct driving and lunches (and even golf games), but Quakers seldom do.
That is so because we Quakers generally are not hagglers; we want to pay our full share of taxes to support our government as it builds roads, keeps up national parks, and pays politicians’ salaries.
We just don’t like that uncomfortable part that goes to war.
In the house-in-order analogy we want to share our cake, but not have part of it be eaten by our neighbor the landmine manufacturer.
You might think about something as useful and simple as your credit cards.
Who really wants to question those little pieces of plastic that make renting
cars or buying great books over the Internet so easy? Even (especially) if
you pay off your bill in full every month, there can’t be anything wrong, you
think, in using a system that would collapse if everyone were responsible,
saved their money before making purchases, paid off debts promptly, and
weren’t willing to pay usurious interest charges. In particular, don’t think
about how, if you do pay off your bill each month, the credit company
tolerates your borrowing money free of charge only because others don’t pay
up and you might not in the future. See? If you get started, who knows what
trouble you will make for yourself Now you have to think about going inside
to pay cash and talking to the gas station attendant rather than swiping the
plastic card out at the pump!
Can we retain integrity in our relationship to money?
Forget it!
You know very well that money is not important enough to spend precious time keeping track of, even if some folks call it a representation of our life force.
Better to spend time on that street corner protesting the lousy war.
And heaven forbid the government would audit our finances, since we have been occupied with the real spiritual tasks of speaking truth to power in public places.
They say money talks, but not like we can!
We’ve been told that early Friends opened their financial books to their
meeting communities. We can’t do that anymore — it’s hard enough to talk
about sex, but to talk about our money? Who can trust others that far — well,
except if the others are insurance companies, brokerage firms, or retirement
planners? We sure can’t trust our spiritual community to have the power and
scale of resources to support us in need or relieve the fears of what would
happen to us without money!
Yes, money is scary, so don’t bother pondering the irony of why fear of getting out from under its control ends up being even scarier then being part of a war-based society where you can believe whatever you want, as long as you pay up.
It’s not worth it — and besides, a messy house is so much more comfortable!
The next article was by Elizabeth Boardman.
She laid out the problem this way:
Among Friends, there is not much debate about whether war taxes are problematic.
Depending upon the federal budget for the year and how you count the line items, about half of our income tax dollars will be used for the outrageous costs of war.
Thousands of our personally earned dollars will be used to enrich the military-industrial complex, to make killers of young men and women,. and to cause death and destruction in the world.
Letting our own money be used this way is not consistent with good stewardship, with right sharing, with Quaker testimonies, or with Christian teachings.
The question of whether and how we can resist is much more complex. Standing
up to Goliath is possible only for the most confident David.
She mentioned a different set of anxieties than the Brauns had covered in their piece: worries that tax resistance or protest might trigger an audit (and then worries that such an audit might uncover math mistakes, or worse, “convenient” errors)… worries that the accountant who helps her with her tax forms will disapprove of her stand and maybe drop her as a client… difficulty reconciling willingly racking up IRS penalties & interest with her otherwise frugal and practical economic practices… difficulty finding the time to research and plan her tax resistance strategy… reluctance to break the law (or to be known as a law-breaker).
In the face of things like this, Boardman recommends that prospective war tax
resisters start small: maybe with phone tax resistance, or some sort of
symbolic protest like withholding $10.40 from your taxes or supporting the
Peace Tax Fund.
She also recommended that people who resist quietly, by slipping below the taxable income line, start making some noise about what they’re doing — otherwise “we accomplish nothing but a sense of personal righteousness.”
Following this were an excerpt from John Woolman’s journals
(see Excerpts from the Journal of John
Woolman) and from the letter Woolman and twenty other Quakers sent
to their fellow-Friends in to explain why
they could not pay taxes being raised for war expenses
(see ♇ ).
The next article in the set was by Steve Leeds.
He described becoming a war tax resister in and then drifting away in discouragement after the IRS garnished his salary for the taxes, penalties, and interest.
Then:
Fifteen years later, through renewed spiritual commitment and membership in a Friends meeting, I was led to take action with other Quakers on war tax resistance.
It began among a few of us, and that’s all it takes.
, my meeting began cohosting
war tax resistance gatherings with Northern California War Tax Resistance. We
urged Friends in our meeting to engage in symbolic war tax
resistance — refusing federal phone taxes, paying under protest, withholding
symbolic amounts, or living below the tax line — and letting our legislators
know about it. We found that a number of households in the meeting partook in
some form of war tax resistance, symbolic or otherwise.
Philosophically, it’s a slam dunk.
No more war.
Not with my dollars.
Logistically, though, it’s easy to become fixated on the mechanics and legal
aspects of war tax resistance. There’s a lot to learn and consider. My
journey, through discernment, prayer, and the support of others, led me to
focus on complex social and financial issues. Mostly, I have been confronting
my fear of the
IRS and
the insecurity of not knowing where this will lead.
For I have held back $1,040 from the IRS (symbolic of the IRS 1040 form).
Living with multiple feelings — fear, joy, and liberation — makes life whole.
My faith as a Quaker, striving to be nonviolent and to oppose all wars, has led me down this path.
I am sustained by the knowledge that many Quakers throughout history have resisted paying taxes for war.
When I think that we as a faith community need to do more, I know that the we starts with me.
So!
Quite a bit of material and many perspectives there — and a great deal of contrast in approaches between the pursuit of legal accommodation from the New York Quakers and the cautious but deliberate war tax resistance of the California Quakers (Boardman and Leeds were both from the San Francisco Meeting).
It had been years since the Journal devoted that much attention to the topic, and they haven’t done so since.
The series of articles prompted a lot of discussion in the
letters-to-the-editor column of subsequent issues — some of it quite hostile
to war tax resistance.
Dennis P. Roberts noted that the Bible is full of stories of war, and that
it “establishes beyond any doubt that the performance of an army in the
field is directly correlative to the quality of the faith and spirit of
the society or nation that put it there” and that because “the heart,
faith, honor, and spirit of a nation” is best represented by “the fighting
soldier, the fighting sailor, the fighting marine, the fighting airman,”
he finds that “this nonpayment of war taxes can indeed be carried to
frivolous extremes.”
Lucinda Antrim thought that war tax resistance “contradicts the Testimony
of Community… We are, here in the
U.S., members
of the community of the United States.… I find myself agreeing, somewhat
to my surprise, with the judge’s imposition of a ‘frivolous” fine on Dan
Jenkins.” (Naomi Paz Greenberg responded that she could not understand how
this vague and unarticulated “Testimony of Community somehow nullifies our
historic Peace Testimony”.)
Perry Treadwell responded that he did not recognize the
U.S. government
as his “community.” “Thirty-six years ago I was led to refuse to pay war
taxes… I currently send the small amount that I calculate this warrior
nation wants to agencies that support the families of wounded military
personnel. I have followed Thoreau’s warning:
‘What I have to do is to see, at any
rate, that I do not lend myself to the wrong which I condemn.’”
David Zarembka wrote in to correct “the impression that the
IRS
is as omniscient as God, all seeing, all knowing, never making a mistake
in getting the last farthing out of the helpless tax resister. Nothing
could be further from the truth.” He recounted some
IRS
blunders in his own case, and said, “I have always made sure that the cost
of the
IRS
getting funds from me exceeded any penalties and interest that they might
charge. In my 37 years of war tax resistance I am certain that I (and all
the other active war tax resisters I know as a group) have withheld much
more funds for government war-making and given them to peace organizations
than the
IRS
has ever collected, including penalties and interest. I don’t think that
this excuse should be used by Quakers as a group as a cop-out for refusing
to pay for our wars. In fact, if all Quakers in the United States were war
tax resisters, the
IRS
couldn’t even cope with our collective resistance.”
George Levinger, who said he’d been a phone tax resister in the Vietnam
War era, had soured on war tax resistance, considering it ultimately
counterproductive largely because the government succeeded in seizing the
taxes from him with penalties and interest. He suggested channeling the
resources you might otherwise use in war tax resistance “to contribute to
various sorts of peace-promoting organizations” instead.
Ruth Hyde Paine wrote in to promote the “penny poll” idea.
Gary Shuler wrote in to sing jingo bells: “As a retired military man, I
take exception to anyone who wants to use the privileges of this country
and not help to foot the cost. Many of my forefathers and yours died for
this freedom and you don’t want to pay taxes to keep it? Move! Cuba is
nice!” (Isn’t it cute that in someone
was still using the idea of tyranny in Cuba as a contrast to the
U.S. rather
than an example of it?)
For Pamela Haines, the challenge presented by war taxes seemed largely to
be a challenge to come up with good excuses not to resist them. Excerpts:
I don’t think the problem is just lack of courage, at least I hope not!
Part of the difficulty, I believe, is the extent to which we are embedded and enmeshed in a deeply violent world.
It’s not just the portion of my tax dollars that goes to deadly warfare.
It’s my computer, the disposal of which poisons poor people in Africa and Asia.
It’s my everyday purchases from invisible corporations that destroy lives and habitats far from mine.
It’s my energy consumption that threatens the very viability of future generations.
If war tax resistance seems too hard for most of us, what do we do if
that’s just the tip of the iceberg? Some Friends are not deterred by the
seemingly impossible and set out to disentangle themselves from the
whole mess — living below taxable level, with only the bare necessity of
purchases and a minimal carbon footprint. This may be a true calling for
some, and certainly a courageous one, but I know it’s not mine. To me
the focused goal of living a life free from complicity with
institutional violence would involve participating in another sin, that
of separation from my neighbors.
Is it better not to do a right thing, if by doing a right thing you would
be being inconsistent in not doing all possible right things?
In the issue, Jamie K. Donaldson explained why she gave up on trying to change the United States and left it rather than continue to be part of its war machine.
She’d contemplated tax resistance at one point, but decided it wasn’t for her.
Here’s how she describes that decision:
I was haunted by the quote attributed to former Secretary of State Alexander Haig: “Let them march all they want as long as they pay their taxes.” Suddenly the television shots of millions of people in the streets protesting the start of war lost their inspiration for me, and I wallowed in our powerlessness to prevent it.
Haig’s cynical remark exemplified my inner struggle as well as a wrenching
and age-old moral dilemma for all Friends. Some bear it as a cross, enabling
them to continue the Lamb’s War on behalf of love, truth, and justice. Could
I, too? Alas, the contradiction of working for peace while paying for war, of
being complicit by mere participation in the
U.S. “system,”
became untenable and intolerable. I explored war tax resistance, but rejected
it because I hold the assets of my incapacitated mother and could not allow
the government to garnish money for her care to recuperate my taxes withheld.
An obituary notice for Stephanie Kennedy in the issue mentioned her work on war tax resistance.
An obituary notice for Charles Richard Johnson in the issue called him “a dedicated war tax resister.”
an ad from the Friends Journal in
pitches the Monteverde community in Costa
Rica, which was founded by American Quaker taxpatriates, as an ethical
investing opportunity and also a potentially attractive tax-break junket
Here are some items of note that have come to my attention in recent weeks:
I wondered if this might happen: One of the weirder aspects of Obamacare is that the individual health insurance mandate is to be enforced by adding a penalty to the income tax of any individual who fails to get health insurance — but for public relations reasons the IRS is forbidden to use its usual methods of liens, levies, seizures, and the like to chase down this penalty if the taxpayer refuses to pay it.
So now, Obamacare foes are starting to whisper about this cheap-and-easy civil disobedience opportunity.
Though “whisper” isn’t really the right word when you’re talking about Rush Limbaugh.
Are Cryptocurrencies [like Bitcoin] “Super” Tax Havens? asks Omri Y. Marian of the University of Florida.
Marian concludes: “Significantly, cryptocurrencies possess all the traditional characteristics that tax havens do; Earnings are not subject to taxation, and taxpayers’ anonymity is maintained.… Thus, cryptocurrencies have the potential of defeating the recent successes of governments in battling offshore tax evasion.… while governments have paid some attention to this issue, they have so far failed to identify the acuteness of the potential problem.”
Among the things the so-called government “shutdown” brought us was a halt in almost all IRS levies and liens for the duration.
The agency had plenty on its plate before the shutdown, and now it’s already behind in regearing for tax season.
France enacted a populist measure to throw a 75% marginal tax on incomes above €1 million.
Professional soccer teams, whose players may earn large annual incomes but usually over a short viable career, have decided to protest by going on temporary strike, effectively eliminating a round of matches this year — the first time teams have done anything of this sort .
As I have noted before, the practice of war tax resistance in the Society of Friends has gone through waves.
In some periods it has been fervently adhered to, advocated, and practiced; in others, it has been largely reduced to lip service and its remaining practitioners have stayed in the shadows.
In the United States, Quaker war tax resistance seems to have been strongest between the French & Indian War and the American Civil War, and then again during the Cold War, while it suffered from lulls between the Civil War and the end of World War Ⅱ and again in recent decades.
I am less familiar with the arc of war tax resistance in the Society of Friends in other countries, but here’s a data point.
The Yearly Meeting of the Religious Society of Friends in Britain has recently released the fifth edition of its Quaker Faith and Practice book.
Here’s what it has to say about taxes.
First, in Chapter 20, in a chapter devoted to “Living faithfully today” and a section on “Honesty and integrity: Conducting business” is given this general advice:
From its earliest days our Society has laid great stress on honesty and the payment in full of debts justly incurred.… [For example] When we have received goods or services, we shall be punctual in making payment of the price agreed on, and we shall not attempt to evade our proper obligations to the community by way of taxation.
Chapter 24 — “Our peace testimony” — handles the more specific case of war taxes, by means of quotes from a number of Quaker thinkers, while noting:
As a Society we have been faithful throughout in maintaining a corporate witness against all war and violence.
However, in our personal lives we have continually to wrestle with the difficulty of finding ways to reconcile our faith with practical ways of living it out in the world.
It is not surprising, therefore, that we have not always all reached the same conclusions when dealing with the daunting complexities and moral dilemmas of society and its government.
These are some of the quotes from this chapter that touch on war tax resistance:
One day in Tokyo Local Court, I had an opportunity to make a statement to witness why I felt it necessary to resist tax-payment for military expenditures, saying, “With military power we cannot protect our life nor keep our human dignity.
Even if I should be killed, my way of living or dying to show my sympathy and forgiveness to my opponents, to point to the love of God shown by Jesus Christ on the cross and by his resurrection, will have a better chance to invite others to turn to walk rightly so that we humankind may live together peacefully.”
Susumu Ishitani,
Yet there was in the deeps of my mind a scruple which I never could get over… I all along believed that there were some upright-hearted men who paid such taxes, but could not see that their example was a sufficient reason for me to do so, while I believed that the spirit of Truth required of me as an individual to suffer patiently the distress of goods rather than pay actively.
John Woolman,
The action of withholding the military proportion of our taxes arose for us from our corporately held testimony that “the Spirit of Christ, which leads us into all truth, will never move us to fight and war against any man with outward weapons, neither for the kingdom of Christ, nor for the kingdoms of this world”.
This testimony may at times lead to resisting the demands of the state, when a higher law (i.e. God’s inner law) makes its first claim on us.
We also need to be conscious that, if we offend against accepted law, we may have to take the consequences of our action.
Arthur and Ursula Windsor,
The Religious Society of Friends has, since its beginnings in the seventeenth century, borne witness against war and armed conflict as contrary to the spirit and teachings of Christ.
We have sought to build institutions and relationships which make for peace and to resist military activity.
The horrific nature of modern armaments makes our witness particularly urgent.
The Gulf War involved the substantial use of expensive modern weapons and technology, demonstrating that today it is the conscription of our money rather than our bodies which makes war possible.
For many years members of the Religious Society of Friends have been exercised about how we might be true to our historic peace testimony while still obeying the laws of our country.
You will know that we have appealed through the courts and ultimately to the European Commission of Human Rights for recognition of the right of conscientious objection to paying taxes for military purposes…
Since losing the appeal we have paid in full the income tax collected from our employees.
In recent months we have considered whether we can continue to do this, but after very careful consideration have decided that for the time being we must do so.
The acceptance of the rule of law is part of our witness, … for a just and peaceful world cannot come about without this.
However we do wish to make it clear that we object to the way in which the PAYE system involves us in a process of collecting money, used in part to pay for military activity and war preparations, which takes away from the individual taxpayer the right to express their own conscientious objection.
This involvement is incompatible with our work for peace.
London Yearly Meeting (letter to Inland Revenue),
On my last appearance in court [for withholding war tax], having already sent in my defence on grounds of conscience, backed by the Genocide Act, Geneva Convention, etc., I felt I wanted to make a more general statement about the fact that we have not used the United Nations as we should to settle disputes, or given sufficient support to it and its … agencies.
So I wrote a statement, gave copies to my faithful supporting Friends and other pacifists and handed a copy to the Judge, asking if I might read it.
He listened attentively to what I read, as his comments afterwards showed, though of course his verdict was the usual refusal.
It seems important to me to get the understanding of judges so that they will give serious consideration to our point of view and might eventually influence a change in the law, though they always say that is not their business.
Joan Hewitt,
Finally, in Chapter 29 — “Leadings” — is the following section:
We are trustees of a long tradition which has sought to bring our religious convictions into the world “and so excite our endeavours to mend it”.
We are trying to live in the virtue of that life and power that takes away the occasion of all wars.
Fundamentally, taxation for war purposes is not a political or a fiscal issue.
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 realise that we live in a world where it is impossible to see clearly the final consequences of the actions we might initiate from this Meeting.
Nevertheless we are impelled by our vision of a peaceful and loving society.
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.
We know that this is only one further step in our witness to the Truth, to which we are continually summoned.
We go forward in God’s strength.
London Yearly Meeting,
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 second, and possibly most important, period of Quaker war tax resistance — between the establishment of the Quaker colony in Pennsylvania and the relinquishment of political control there by Quakers during the French and Indian War.
The Pennsylvania experiment ()
The advance of war tax resistance among English Quakers had ground to a halt.
Quakers in England still would not pay certain explicit war taxes like “trophy money,” nor pay for substitutes to serve in their places in the military, nor buy goods stolen at sea from enemy nations by government-sanctioned pirates, but attempts failed to extend this testimony to other taxes that were clearly designed to pay for war.
For example, Elizabeth Redford tried to convince Quakers to refuse a new tax in on the grounds that it was obviously meant to fund the Seven Years War (the act that enacted the tax was entitled “For granting to his majesty certain rates and duties upon marriages, births, and burials, and upon bachelors and widowers, for the term of five years, for carrying on the war against France with vigour”).
Her meeting brought her up on charges of violating the discipline and declared that whatever the purpose of the tax, it was being raised by the crown for expenses of its choosing and Quakers should not inquire further into what those expenses were but should pay the tax without question.
Several years later, during the War of the Spanish Succession, this got thrown back in Quaker faces.
William Ray, in a letter to Quaker Samuel Bownas, argued that Quakers should stop resisting tithes because they had stopped resisting war taxes: “though the title of the act of parliament did plainly show that the tax was for carrying on a war against France with vigour” he wrote, “since the war against France began your Friends have given the same active obedience to the laws for payment of taxes as their fellow subjects have done.”
Bownas did not deny this, but instead he tried to argue that tithes were different.
Meanwhile, Quaker William Penn was granted a royal charter for a large North American colony, to which many Quakers emigrated and established a colonial government that would be run, to some extent, on Quaker pacifist principles.
I say “to some extent” because it was still a royal colony, under the military protection of the crown, and with an explicit colonial mandate to engage in military battles against enemies of the home country.
The Quaker Assembly of the colony was also subservient in many ways to the crown-appointed governors and to the British government itself.
Occasionally during wartime, that government would appeal to the Pennsylvania Assembly to raise some funds to help out the war effort — to help defend Pennsylvania against pirates, Frenchmen, hostile Indians, and the like.
The Assembly would sometimes respond to such requests with noble-sounding statements of Quaker principle, like this one by Assembly Speaker David Lloyd in : “the raising money to hire men to fight or kill one another is matter of conscience to us and against our religious principles.”
But most commentators on the period, even those who are sympathetic to the Quaker pacifist position, tend to read these statements cynically.
The Assembly used these requests for money as opportunities to try to wrest more control from the governor and from London.
These statements of conscience seemed often not to be principles so much as gambits in the negotiation process.
The Assembly would usually, in the end, grant the requested money, or some amount anyway, but would thinly veil its nature by eliminating any wording about the money being intended for the military and instead would simply decree that it was intended as a gift to the crown from its grateful subjects, “for the Queen’s [or King’s] use.”
This was such a transparent dodge that it became hard for anyone to take seriously the part of the Quaker peace testimony represented in Lloyd’s quote.
On one occasion, according to colonial legislator Benjamin Franklin, the Assembly refused to vote war money, but instead granted funds “for the purchasing of bread, flour, wheat, or other grain” knowing that the governor would interpret “other grain” to include gunpowder.
The Assembly were able to get away with this, in a colony full of ostensibly conscientious Quakers, because the orthodox point of view about war tax resistance in the Society held that only explicit war taxes were to be resisted, while generic taxes that only happened to be for war were to be paid willingly.
So long as the government kept the name of the tax neutral and didn’t detail how it would be spent, a Quaker could pay it without having to worry about it.
But some Quakers were unable to remain blind to the Assembly’s sleight-of-hand.
In , the Rhode Island Quarterly Meeting sent emissaries to some of its rebellious Monthly Meetings who were beginning to refuse to pay state taxes on these grounds.
In , William Rakestraw published a pamphlet in which he agreed that “we ought not to ask Cæsar what he does with his dues or tribute, but pay it freely,” but added: “if he tells me it is for no other use but war and destruction, I’ll beg his pardon and say ‘my Master forbids it.’ ” He argued that the latest “for the Queen’s use” grant, in spite of its generic name, should fool nobody: it was meant to fund war, and no Quaker should pay a tax for it.
Thomas Story, who visited the colony from England, defended the orthodox position, and had traveled Pennsylvania encouraging Quakers to pay their war taxes.
During the French & Indian War, Pennsylvania was invaded from the west.
The westernmost European settlers in Pennsylvania were largely non-Quaker, and were impatient for a military defense — they felt that the Quaker pacifists in Philadelphia were using them as a shield.
The Pennsylvania Assembly eventually gave in to their demands.
It organized a volunteer militia and appropriated money for fortifications.
This time it did not use the “for the King’s use” dodge by giving the money to the crown and letting it allocate the funds to war expenses, but instead the Assembly appointed its own commissioners to spend the money, and so became responsible itself for the war spending.
(The legislation itself still tried to put a happy face on things, saying the grant was “for supplying our friendly Indians, holding of treaties, relieving the distressed settlers who have been driven from their lands, and other purposes for the King’s service,” but it was that last clause — “other purposes” — that hid where most of the spending would actually happen: largely building and supplying military forts.)
This compromise pleased few.
Back in London there were calls to ban Quakers from colonial government entirely for their refusal to support the military defense of the colonies.
London Quakers were urging pacifist Quakers to resign from the Pennsylvania Assembly as a way of forestalling complete disenfranchisement.
At the same time, a set of American Quakers felt that this was the last straw and if Quaker legislators were going to abandon their pacifist principles and enact a war spending bill, it would be up to Quaker taxpayers to refuse and resist.
Several of them, including Anthony Benezet, sent a letter to the Assembly announcing that “as the raising sums of money, and putting them into the hands of committees who may apply them to purposes inconsistent with the peaceable testimony we profess and have borne to the world, appears to us in its consequences to be destructive of our religious liberties; we apprehend many among us will be under the necessity of suffering rather than consenting thereto by the payment of a tax for such purposes.”
That petition was not viewed sympathetically by the Assembly.
They reminded everyone that nobody had had any problem paying those “for the Queen’s use” taxes in the past, and that this new tax was really not very different, even though the fig leaf had been removed.
Meanwhile, the anti-Quakers in London got word of the petition which further inflamed them and gave them ammunition in their fight to get Quakers disenfranchised.
The London Yearly Meeting was furious about the petition and it sent two emissaries to the colonies with orders to “explain and enforce our known principles and practice respecting the payment of taxes for the support of civil government.”
The Philadelphia Yearly Meeting held a conference in to try to come up with some guidance for Friends on whether or not to pay the new war taxes.
They were unable to reach consensus.
A group of them, including Benezet & John Woolman, sent a letter to quarterly and monthly meetings that set out the reasons why they were choosing to resist.
The Assembly’s attempt to hide its war tax as a “mixed” tax with beneficial spending in the mix did not impress them.
They wrote:
[T]hough some part of the money to be raised by the said Act is said to be for such benevolent purposes as supporting our friendship with our Indian neighbors and relieving the distresses of our fellow subjects who have suffered in the present calamities, for whom our hearts are deeply pained; and we affectionately and with bowels of tenderness sympathize with them therein; and we could most cheerfully contribute to those purposes if they were not so mixed that we cannot in the manner proposed show our hearty concurrence therewith without at the same time assenting to, or allowing ourselves in, practices which we apprehend contrary to the testimony which the Lord has given us to bear for his name and Truth’s sake.
This is one answer to the dilemma many Quakers find themselves in today.
The U.S. government is in a constant state of war and threatens the whole world with its vast nuclear arsenal and its drone assassins.
But it pays for this out of the same budget and with the same taxes as it pays for everything else it buys — including today’s equivalents of “such benevolent purposes as supporting our friendship with our Indian neighbors and relieving the distresses of our fellow subjects who have suffered in the present calamities” — so what is a good Quaker to do?
Benezet, Woolman, and the rest took the position that mixing good spending and bad doesn’t erase the stain from the bad, but stains the good.
The capitulation by the Quakers in the Pennsylvania Assembly was not a compromise that satisfied either the militant Pennsylvanians, the anti-Quaker antagonists in London, or the prominent pacifists in the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting.
In , under pressure from all sides, most Quaker legislators resigned from the Assembly, and the experiment in Quaker government in Pennsylvania came to an end.
Meanwhile, what had become of those London Quaker enforcers who had come across the pond to knock some sense into the war tax resisting faction?
Something unexpected happened: they met with representatives from both the taxpaying and tax-resisting factions, held a two-day meeting on the subject, and ended up agreeing to disagree.
The London representatives, rather than chastizing the resisters, instead recommended that Quakers “endeavor earnestly to have their minds covered with fervent charity towards one another” on the subject without taking a position one way or the other.
That’s not what the London Yearly Meeting had in mind.
But the logic of the war tax resisters’ position, and the sincerity with which they presented it, had an infectious tendency.
Not long after the emissaries returned home, the London Yearly Meeting had been expected to issue a strong condemnation of the resisters who had signed the letter urging Quakers to consider refusing to pay the war tax.
Instead, the topic was dropped from the agenda entirely.
Why?
Because the more Quakers in England heard about the war tax resistance in Pennsylvania, the more sympathetic they became.
The Yearly Meeting authorities decided it was better not to discuss the matter at all rather than risk facing the sort of enthusiasm for war tax resistance that had rocked the Philadelphia meeting.
At the upcoming national gathering of NWTRCC at Earlham College in Richmond, Indiana, I’m going to be presenting a summary of the history of war tax resistance in the Society of Friends (Quakers).
Today I’m going to try to coalesce some of the notes I’ve assembled about how the Quaker practice of war tax resistance evolved, particularly in America, during the period of time surrounding and including the American Revolution.
The American Revolution and Aftermath ()
When Quakers resisted tithes, militia exemption taxes, explicit war taxes, and things of that nature, the government would usually respond by seizing the resister’s property and selling it at auction in order to recover the tax.
(In the earliest years of the Society of Friends, many such resisters were imprisoned, but this practice later became uncommon.)
Quaker meetings developed a protocol that good Quakers were supposed to follow when such property seizures took place.
They were not supposed to cooperate in any way, but neither were they supposed to resist.
They were not supposed to suggest which property the tax collector might seize, and they certainly were not supposed to leave the amount of the tax lying out on the table in plain view (some Quakers evidently tried this way of getting out of resisting).
Instead, when the collector came and said he was going to seize property for unpaid taxes, the Quaker was supposed to step aside and say something along the lines of “do as you think you must,” perhaps explaining the reason for his refusal to pay, but not otherwise interfering.
If the collector seized property worth more than the amount of tax, and was able to auction it off for more than the amount owed, the collector (if honest) might try to return the surplus to the resister.
A Quaker was not supposed to accept such money, it having been tainted by the process.
(However, if the collector seized too many items, and only auctioned off some of them, the Quaker could accept the return of the additional items themselves.)
This part of the protocol made Quakers especially vulnerable to particularly unscrupulous tax collectors.
Such a collector could seize the most valuable thing he could get his hands on, sell it, apply some of the proceeds to the tax, and then pocket the rest.
Many other collectors were also accused of selling property at cut-rate prices to themselves, to their friends, or in exchange for kick-backs.
The result of all of this meant that tax resisting Quakers were often setting themselves up for considerable financial losses.
These “sufferings” were part of the glory of being a Quaker, and, as such, were well worth the price to some Friends, but to others they were just an unwelcome financial hardship.
Meetings had to be diligent to keep wavering Friends from trying to sneak out from under the requirements to refuse to pay certain taxes, to refuse the return of surplus money, and to not cooperate with the tax collector as a way of trying to ameliorate the burden of the seizure process.
If a Friend failed in any of these ways, someone at their meeting might “produce a testification” against them.
The meeting would then investigate the charges and would send out a delegation to talk to the wayward Quaker and try to bring them back into compliance.
This often would include the Quaker standing up at a future meeting to read an acknowledgment of their error and promise never to do it again.
If the Quaker refused to get with the program, the meeting could “disown” them — basically kick them out of the meeting.
Simply not reporting any “sufferings” to the meeting for failure to pay war tax might be enough to start this process.
(“We notice thou hastn’t had any property seized this year for failure to pay the bounty tax, Friend Johnson.
Care to tell us how thou hast been so lucky?”)
American Quakers during the American Revolution were, in many places, pillaged ruthlessly by the authorities by this process of property seizure.
Several things contributed to this:
The Society of Friends was not united.
Dissident Quakers promoted paying taxes to the rebel government, and some “Free Quakers” even abandoned the peace testimony entirely to enlist in the rebel army.
This made it even harder for resisting Quakers to appeal to Quaker beliefs and practices as an explanation for their stand.
Quakers had wavered in their war tax resistance stand in the recent past, for instance when the Quaker-led Pennsylvania Assembly voted to tax the colony to pay for fortifications during the French & Indian War.
This was deployed as a precedent to argue that Quakers only have scruples against war tax paying at convenient times or depending on their sympathy with the particular war or government.
The Quaker peace testimony was often publicly expressed with an eye to being reassuring to the authorities.
So often it would include phrasing like this:
[T]he setting up and putting down kings and governments is God’s peculiar prerogative; for causes best known to himself: And that it is not our business to have any hand or contrivance therein; nor to be busy bodies above our station, much less to plot and contrive the ruin, or overturn of any of them, but to pray for the king, and safety of our nation, and good of all men, that we may live a quiet and peaceable life, in all godliness and honesty, under the government which God is pleased to set over us.
For this reason, some Quakers felt that to adhere to this testimony they could not cooperate in any way with the rebel government, as to do so would be to contribute “to plot and contrive” against the king (others disagreed, feeling that the rebel government had become the one “which God is pleased to set over us”).
Such absolutist resisters were easy targets for patriotic anger.
Both armies were authorized to take any property they needed during the course of their campaigns.
They were usually supposed to pay for what they took, but Quakers, being under an obligation not to supply goods to belligerents, could not accept money in such cases.
This made their farms and stores particularly tempting targets for thrifty officers.
Quakers who would neither serve in the military, pay war taxes, nor take oaths of allegiance to the rebel government (Quakers generally would not take oaths of any kind) were suspected of using their conscientious scruples as a cover for loyalist sympathies.
Speaking of oaths, Quakers could be fined for refusing to take an oath of allegiance to the new American government.
They were forbidden by Quaker discipline from paying such fines.
So this became another opportunity for plunder and to me it looks like this was used deliberately as a revenue-raiser or as a way of punishing Quakers for their lack of enthusiasm for the rebel cause.
An additional complication for Quakers at this time was the fuzziness over what counted as a “war tax.”
For example, one of the ways the Continental Congress funded its military campaign was to issue its own paper currency and make the acceptance of this currency as legal tender mandatory.
This was certainly easier than trying to raise the money through an explicit tax, but it amounted to just as much of an imposition: as the Congress issued more and more currency to finance the war, the value of the currency plummeted, taking resources away from people who were forced to use it.
Some Quakers refused to handle the continentals, and some were imprisoned and others were threatened with execution.
In other cases, such refusers were declared outlaws and boycotts were enforced against them — in one example “it was publicly proclaimed that there was no protection for him [John Cowgill], that all persons were forewarned at their peril to have no dealings with him.
Even the miller was threatened with the destruction of his mill if he ground for his family, and the school-master forbid receiving his children at school.”
The official stand of the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting was neutral on the currency question, and asked Friends to come to their own decisions and not to chastise one-another about it.
The Virginia Yearly Meeting, on the other hand, formally forbade Friends from using continentals.
The official Philadelphia Yearly Meeting position on war taxes, as put forth in , was much as it had long been: “It is the judgment of this meeting that a tax levied for the purchasing of drums, colors, or for other warlike uses, cannot be paid consistently with our Christian testimony.”
Timothy Davis published a tract in laying out the case for why American Quakers should pay most of the taxes being demanded by the rebel congressional government.
He was disowned by his Monthly Meeting, both for the content of the tract and for publishing it without the Meeting’s approval.
He left and took a few other Quakers with him to found a rival Meeting.
This conflict was still dividing the Society a decade later, when the Revolution was over and American Quakers had pretty much all adjusted to the new government God was pleased to have set over them.
The tract was well argued.
Those Quakers who were trying to strengthen and broaden the practice of war tax resistance beyond what the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting was willing to advocate tried to come up with an authoritative and thoroughly scripturally-backed response.
Benjamin Mason, Anthony Benezet, Moses Brown, and Samuel Allinson all pursued efforts in this direction.
I’ve seen some drafts of their work and their correspondence, and Allinson’s draft, at least, seems to have been widely-distributed in manuscript form, but as far as I know, no official version ended up being published.
Benezet believed that because the stronger position they were advocating would demand more from Quakers than before, and would subject them to more persecution than before, it would make the Society of Friends stronger and less-corrupted by worldly riches:
[It] will not be like a passing storm but an abiding trial, which, as it will come heavier upon those who are most loaded & encumbered with the clay of this world, will have I trust a blessed effect to every one who will willingly receive it to keep us low & humble.
Part of what may have restrained them from publishing was caution about introducing new doctrinal innovations at a time when the Society of Friends was already beginning to show signs of fracturing on party lines.
Part also may be that the Meetings that would have to authorize the publication of such a pamphlet were probably hoping to quiet such debate rather than stir up a new hornet’s nest.
But there was also the emerging trouble of an ultra-radical war tax resistance position that was beginning to develop.
Moses Brown wrote to Anthony Benezet about this concern, saying:
[S]ome Friends refuse all taxes, even those for civil uses as well as those clear for war and others that are mixed, and thereby dropping our testimony of supporting civil government by readily contributing thereto, [and] it has been a fear whether this variety of conduct won’t mar rather than promote the work… I understand some Friends have fallen in with or been overpowered by the common argument that civil government is upheld by the sword, and therefore they decline paying to its support, which appears to me a great weakness…
Around this time, you start to see meetings supplementing their discipline about not paying explicit war taxes (“for drums, colors, and military attire”) with advice that Friends not criticize one another over their positions on whether or not to pay “mixed” taxes.
Apparently the arguments in Meetings had become troublesome and did not seem to be near a resolution.
The way Quaker Meetings recorded “sufferings” went something like this: When a Quaker was subjected to persecution of some sort for taking a conscientious stand required by Quaker discipline, that Quaker would report this to his or her Monthly Meeting.
That Meeting would periodically forward on a list of such reports to its Quarterly Meeting, which in turn would compile these into a report that it would submit to the Yearly Meeting.
At each stage, a Meeting might decide that some particular report wasn’t worth recording for some reason.
During this period, for instance, some Monthly Meetings were recording the sufferings of Quakers who were persecuted for resisting mixed taxes, as well as for explicit war taxes.
Some Quarterly Meetings dropped these reports from their submissions to the Yearly Meetings.
This could lead to debate in the Meetings, which would bring the issue of war tax resistance back on to the front burner.
The Rhode Island Yearly Meeting, for instance, decided to begin accepting such reports in .
The Salem Yearly Meeting debated the issue and eventually followed suit.
The war tax question didn’t end with the end of the fighting.
The war still needed to be paid for, and the continental currency that funded it needed to be redeemed, and the government used a variety of taxes to do this.
Among these were a new set of import duties instituted in to pay war debts.
A few Quakers took note of this and decided they could not pay.
For example, Joshua Evans stopped using imported goods.
Isaac Martin, who ran a drug store, stopped stocking and selling imported products.
The new government was also working on a unified militia law, which, though it enabled Quakers to be exempt from service, required any such conscientious objectors to pay a fine in lieu of service.
A representative of the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting addressed Congress, telling them that Quakers would feel obligated to refuse to pay such a fine and to suffer the consequences.
Many Quakers did refuse to pay and were fined (and, as usual, the tax collectors took far more from them in property than the amount of the fines).
In one area, a law was passed exempting members of the volunteer fire department from militia service without necessity of paying a fine, and this led many Quakers to sign up.
Meanwhile, what was happening in England?
Quakers there were much more restrained than their American counterparts on the war tax question.
When they reprinted John Woolman’s Journal in , they omitted the parts where he talked about his war tax resistance.
There were some exceptions to this relative conservatism.
John Payne, for example, boarded up a third of the windows of his home to avoid a property tax, put his coach up on blocks to avoid a vehicle tax, and rode miles out of his way to avoid toll gates, all to avoid paying for the war to suppress the American rebellion.
He also wrote a tract chastising the Society of Friends for investing in government bonds, on the same grounds.
In the years before his death he gave away his property to members of his family so that he would not be liable for any estate tax.
The War of 1812 was largely funded, on the American side, by debt spending, and so explicit war taxes did not become such an acute issue, though the issue of “mixed” taxes again became a heated topic.
The military would again requisition supplies from Quakers, which Quakers felt obligated to refuse to voluntarily give them or to accept money for.
And Quakers were frequently fined (and then plundered for their refusal to pay) when they would not join the militia.
Influential Quaker Elias Hicks reported in (before the Hicksite/Orthodox split) that he had addressed his Meeting’s “meeting for discipline” to ask “whether while we were actively paying taxes to civil government, for the purpose of promoting war or warlike purposes in any degree, we were not balking our testimony in that respect and pulling down with one hand what we are pretending to build with the other.”
He compared this to abolitionist Quakers who nonetheless supported slavery by buying slave-produced goods.
In , several young Quaker men were imprisoned in Baltimore for their refusal to pay militia exemption fines.
The state court would not interfere, as they were imprisoned under a federal regulation at the pleasure of the military, and the judge recommended that they instead apply to President Madison for help.
They did, and the president said that he wouldn’t do anything about it, as the law was clear on the point.
But as the Quaker delegation was leaving the president’s makeshift office (the White House had been put to the torch by the British the year before), the president’s wife, Dolley Madison, called them aside and asked to speak with them.
She had been raised a Quaker.
When she heard what had happened, and what the president’s response had been, she told them “I am determined that the President shall never close his eyes in sleep until these children are liberated from confinement.”
It took the delegation two days to return to Baltimore, and when they got there they learned that the Quaker conscientious objectors had been released on the President’s orders.
I end this period, somewhat artificially, at .
This doesn’t represent a firm boundary in the evolution of the practice of war tax resistance in the Society of Friends, but it does mark a significant milestone in the Society itself.
By that year, the society had fractured into irreconcilable Orthodox and Hicksite factions that would each form their own structures of Meetings and would evolve separately in parallel for decades.
This was caused in part by a passion for strengthened religious purity among American protestant Christians that peaked in .
This striving probably both contributed to a strengthening of war tax resistance (among other traditional Quaker practices) and distracted from it by making other issues more central.
Some links of interest:
Frida Berrigan writes: Why tax resistance under Trump needs its antiwar edge. A nice article that’s not all that well-described by its headline, describing current American anti-Trump tax resistance and how it fits in to the long-standing war tax resistance tradition.
Manoj Viswanathan Presents Tax Compliance In A Decentralizing Economy — Viswanathan says the current tax authorities depend on centralized intermediaries (banks, employers, brokers) to report financial transactions to the government. But blockchain-related technologies like Bitcoin may displace banks and brokers, and gig-economy innovations may reduce the use of employers.
A coalition of grassroots anarchist / anti-authoritarian groups in Greece sabotaged more than 200 public transit fare-enforcement machines. The Greek government has been frustrated in its attempts to raise money through straightforward taxation, and has increasingly been relying on increases in fares, highway tolls, and utility bills. 40% of Greeks are unable (or unwilling) to pay their utility bills. Some have taken to using devices that interfere with the electricity meters; others have been assisted by Den Plirono activists who reconnect the power to residences that have been cut off for failure to pay the electric bill.
Two concerned Friends, Bob Vogel and David Walden, who are members of the staff of the Southern California Branch of the AFSC have sent to all meetings in the Pacific Yearly Meeting the following suggested “advice” for implementing our ancient testimony against all wars in terms of current issues.
Friends are exhorted to adhere faithfully to our ancient testimony against all wars and fightings, and in no way unite with any warlike measure, either offensive or defensive, to the end that we may convincingly demonstrate a more excellent way of settling conflicts — the way of Christian love, goodwill, and service to all men.
A living concern having been expressed that Friends[’] practices be consistent with their professions, Friends are urged (1) not to register for any conscription measure nor accept any alternative service for conscientious objectors under a compulsory conscription law; (2) to avoid engaging in any trade or business profession promotive of war or profiting from war activity; (3) to avoid the purchase of government war bonds or stock certificates in war industries; (4) to refuse to pay taxes for war purposes, paying only that percentage of the tax which supports the civil aspects of government; (5) to educate and counsel their children against the use of military toys and books and the attendance or participation in military drills, organizations, parades, or demonstrations.
Friends are urged to live in that life and power that takes away the occasion for war, to give deep attention to the causes of war and conflict, and to support those efforts of mediation and reconciliation which are consistent with our principles gained through Divine guidance.
The edition gave this transcript of a portion of the trial of James Otsuka over his war tax resistance:
Four Dollars and Fifty Cents
On Judge Robert Baltzell sentenced James Otsuka in Federal Court in Indianapolis to ninety days and a fine of $100. Otsuka, a member of Orange Grove Meeting (Pasadena), had refused to comply with an order given by Baltzell to pay to the government $4.50 in taxes which he owed, this being the amount of his taxes that he had determined from the Statemen’s Year Book and other sources would go to military purposes and which he had given instead to the American Friends Service Committee.
He was represented by Earl Robbins, an attorney from Centerville, Indiana.
An account of the dialogue heard in chambers where James Otsuka was sentenced indicated that Baltzell, who has been very rough with most c.o.’s appearing before him and rude to this defendant, was concerned with the issue.
There follows a part of Carolyn Mallison’s report of the dialogue between Baltzell and Robbins, the attorney, after the defendant had been sentenced and taken away:
Judge:
Do you understand this, Robbins?
Robbins:
I think so, your Honor.
Judge:
I hope not!
You are an American.
I hope you cannot understand such actions.
Robbins:
I do not condone it myself your Honor, but I can understand it.
It reminds me of the refusal of the early colonists to pay the Stamp Tax.
Judge:
You know what happened then.
You wouldn’t want that to happen…
I don’t see how you can represent him.
It is a terrible thing for a young fellow to take all the advantages of living here and then refuse to pay his taxes.
Robbins:
Of course the tax law is different from Selective Service, for instance.
Judge:
In what way?
Robbins:
Selective Service does provide for alternative service for those who are conscientiously opposed to war, whereas the tax law gives no alternative.
Immediately after the U.S. Marshal had departed with Otsuka a group of his friends were invited by Judge Baltzell into his chambers for a consultation on the decision just handed down.
Included in the group were Ernest Bromley (editor of News of Tax Refusal, from which this report is taken, Wilmington, Ohio), Lloyd Danzeison [sic] (Peacemaker, Yellow Springs, Ohio), Carfon Foltz, Mr. & Mrs. Glenn Mallison, Jean Olds, Perry Ostroff, Earl Robbins, Ralph Templin, and Caroline Urie.
Here again the issue was raised as how one changes a bad law with Judge Baltzell indicating that his job was to judge by existing laws and he would continue to do so until the people through Congress created new laws.
This note, from the edition, gives us a peek into the publicity tactics in play at the launch of the Peacemakers movement:
Ernest R. Bromley (General Delivery, Wilmington, Ohio) writes:
“The continuation committee of Peacemakers met in Chicago last week .
Among the things discussed was a plan to get widespread publicity on the tax refusal business just prior to .
At present there are about 35 people ready to announce their stand of refusal (some for this year, but all for next year, 1949 I mean).
I am writing, therefore, to several who have recently expressed considerable interest in the position in order to see if any of them are ready to join us and use our group as a medium for making their announcement, at least making it at that time.”
An article from the edition also gave some useful background on the “peace tax” law idea.
This came in the form of a proposed model bill that was being sent around for review by the Pacific Yearly Meeting to its Monthly Meetings, in the hopes of coming to “a decision on whether not an attempt should be made to enact this concept into law.”
The article says that the proposed bill was formulated in response to a presentation on the subject in by representatives of the Claremont Meeting at the Pacific Yearly Meeting that year.
The proposed legislation called itself the “Civilian Income Tax Act of ” and would have created a walled-off fund, governed by the Secretary of the Treasury, and destined “solely to UNICEF” that would receive federal income taxes from conscientious objectors who were willing to pay an extra 5% surtax for the privilege of not having to pay their taxes into the general fund and pay for military spending.
I also noted several mentions of Quakers discussing the idea of voluntarily taxing themselves a certain portion of their income to send to the United Nations as a way of promoting peace.
This continued long after the United Nations formally ratified the Korean War, so seems a bit blinkered to me, but there was clearly a lot of wishful thinking about the United Nations that had persisted through earlier generations in the peace movement and their daydreams about an international legal order that would subdue the frightful anarchy between nations.
Another early “thaw” example, a rare one from Canada, is found in the edition:
Calgary Friends… have written the Minister of Finance regarding non-payment of the defense portion of income taxes.
The Quarterly Meeting encouraged Friends to take what ever stand seemed right to them on the tax question as their consciences dictate, and asked the Monthly Meetings to consider the concern of Calgary Friends.
A problem has been raised in a letter from Irvin [sic] Hogenauer (310 East 170 St., Seattle 55, Washington), which has for many years troubled Friends and members of other peace-making groups.
It strikes at two basic testimonies of Friends: our conviction that war and preparation for war are contrary to the will of our Father, and our belief in the rightness of a government of the people, by the people, and for the people.
In our observation, this problem has not been solved by any group of our Society to the satisfaction of all.
Perhaps our Yearly Meeting, with its diverse, international background, would be able to add to the thinking of the Society and like-minded persons.
The Bulletin would welcome comments; please keep them brief.
―Editor
“In the Adult Study Group of University Meeting,” writes Irwin Hogenauer, “we are using Jospehine Benton’s pamphlet John Woolman, Most Modern of Ancient Friends.
In my further reading of The Basis of Quaker Political Concern, the speech by Henry J. Cadbury before the tenth anniversary dinner of the Friends Committee on National Legislation, Washington D.C., I came across another quotation from John Woolman: ‘I cannot form a concern, but when a concern comes I endeavor to be obedient.’…
[“]Farther on in the speech, Henry Cadbury quotes Woolman again: ‘To turn all the treasures we possess into channels of universal love becomes the business of our lives.’
Now I interpret the word ‘becomes’ two ways.
First, I suppose, one would say that for Quakers this action of which he speaks ‘will be’ the business of our lives.
But I also read that the right channeling of our treasures ‘is becoming to’ the business our our lives.
And the present tense means now.
“I have been burdened with a concern for many years.
I have not sought it out…
Try as I will, especially at the behest of friends and relatives, I can not throw it off, or dodge it, or whatever one does with a concern…
“Mailings from the F.C.N.L. continually remind me… that defense is the primary fiscal consideration of the United States government.
This means that the dollars we pay in income taxes are being spent largely for the military establishment, security measures, and related endeavours in the defense machinery.
“What has become of our peace testimony if we can allow the government to take our substance and put it to a use contrary to this testimony?…
Who is there who refuses military service who would not also refuse to pay for a bullet, a rifle, an atom or hydrogen bomb?…
“Some say we can not keep from paying it.
There are a number of ways if one would but investigate.
A result may be imprisonment, but what period in history has not seen some Quakers in prisons?…
“It is also contended that so many federal taxes that go for war purposes are on goods and services that we buy daily.
This may be true, but it should not automatically relieve us from thought and action on the tax which is levied directly and often withheld without consent of the earner.
With Henry Thoreau, we can not follow the use made of the dollar after we spend it for groceries, telephone services, gasoline, or a railroad ticket.
But does this relieve us of all responsibility in this area?
In any case we can do something about a tax levied directly on our wage, salary, or other income.”
The Friends peace testimony that Friends cannot support or prepare for war, implies that one can not pay others to prepare for or engage in war.
It is not true that one can’t avoid or refuse to pay federal income taxes.
To keep one’s income below the tax level is the most practical course.
I think — having done so for the last 5 years.
A change in employment may be necessary, but can a Friend properly hold a job that causes him to compromise with his testimonies?
If we follow the Richmond Statement, , “Conscientious objection must be complemented by conscientious projection of God’s spirit into affirmative action,” we will be involved in so much volunteer activity for peace that we won’t have time enough for money-making jobs to have a taxable income.
The important thing is to do all one is able for peace…
John Affolter
4004 13th Ave., South Seattle 8, Washington
(In another letter in the same issue, the writer said that tax resisters could expect to have their bank accounts seized unless “you have no job, raise your own food, and resort to primitive barter… a cumbersome way of moving towards non-participation in the war establishment.”
The writer suggested instead that concerned people “influence our legislators” in some unspecified way.)
Here are a few more items concerning tax resistance that I found in back issues
from of Friends
Bulletin, the journal of the Pacific Yearly Meeting of Quakers.
The issue included an announcement
from the Orange County Monthly Meeting of
the launch of “The Conscience and Military Tax Resolution.”
This sort of thing is frequently proposed in modern war tax resistance circles,
but has yet to show much success. In this incarnation people who “are not ready
to resist now” could sign on to the resolution to “show that you are at least
ready to begin when 100,000 others agree to do so.” Once that target was
reached, signers of the Resolution would begin to refuse to pay at least a
certain percentage of their taxes. The goal of this was to pressure the
government into passing “the World Peace Tax Fund Bill or similar legislation
which would provide a legal alternative for taxpayers morally opposed to war.”
The issue had several items on
war tax resistance, beginning with this statement and commentary:
We express our love for God and all the peoples of this earth. A vital act of
this love is to refuse cooperation with registration for the draft and
payment of our tax money for war. We testify against rendering unto Caesar
that which is God’s. We, the individuals who serve on the Pacific Yearly
Meeting Peace Committee, join with those Friends who refuse to cooperate with
war taxes and registration. As a result of this call, we have chosen to
protest war taxes, some refusing at least a “Token Ten” dollars.
Friend — what canst thou say?
Lonnie Valentine
Betsy Eberhart
Gladis Innerst
Mike Turner
Ellen Lyon
Duane Magill
Franklin Zahn
Ed Flowers
Bonnie Wells
The above statement, written by the Pacific Yearly Meeting Peace Committee and
others came with labor over several minutes on conscription and peace from
monthly meetings as well as Friends General Conference
minute, Philadelphia Yearly
Meeting’s statement, and Sarasota Monthly Meeting’s Statement of Peace. The
intent was a minute of action in which our Peace Testimony would be not just
words but applied to our lives in .
Two suggestions came out of a subsequent threshing session: 1) that the
statement be made available for others to sign and 2) that the Peace Committee
be available to labor with monthly meetings on this statement.
All monthly meetings have previously received Franklin Zahn’s “War Taxes–Minus
a Token Ten” of which develops the
idea and makes suggestions on alternative uses of the token ten dollars. In
essence, withholding $10.00 in objection to the federal government’s use of
our tax money for war is similar to withholding the
U.S. Tax from
telephone bills which was done during the Vietnam War.
I am raising the question within monthly meetings and among Peace Committee
members whether
PYM Peace
Committee should sponsor a weekend conference at Quaker Center. Your
suggestions and/or responses would be appreciated.
Also, I hope that monthly meetings, meanwhile, are taking advantage of Lonnie
Valentine’s availability to provide workshops on War Tax Objection.
In peace and love,
Ellen Lyon, Clerk
PYM Peace
Committee
How can we who are above the draft age support Friends faced with
registration? In Our Peace Testimony it says:
Our witness to the way of peace requires that we refuse military service of
any kind, and challenges us to consider whether we can in any way submit to
that involuntary servitude which is conscription. Friends should work to
abolish state conscription — whether for military or other purposes — and
should refuse personally to cooperate with the draft.
Since many of us do not have this opportunity to refuse to register for the
draft, we must look to those other ways in which we can refuse cooperation
with the draft.
One way is refusing registration of our money for war through the taxation
system. When we willingly submit a tax form, we are supporting registration
for the draft; when we willingly pay taxes of which over half is used for war,
we are supporting registration for the draft. When we do these things, we are
withdrawing support from Friends who are refusing to register for the draft.
Therefore, one unequivocal way we who are above draft age can support Friends
resisting the draft is to resist payment of those taxes which, in part, go for
registration and conscription.
If we recognize our “involvement in militarism through the payment of taxes
used for military purposes” but do not act to end such involvement, then are
we not hypocritical to tell Friends faced with registration to refuse military
service? If draft age Friends take the Peace Testimony to heart and refuse to
cooperate with the draft, then is it not time that we who are no longer of
that age refuse to cooperate with the drafting of our money for war?
Perhaps our Peace Testimony states what we believe too rigidly when it calls
on Friends to refuse cooperation with the draft. Perhaps, however, the
testimony does not state what we believe with regard to the payment of war
taxes strongly enough. If we agree that we should refuse cooperation with the
draft, then it is time we should refuse cooperation with war taxes.
That issue also included this on-point notice from one Quarterly Meeting:
In these times of draft registration and military buildup, many persons may be
led to actions in harmony with the Quaker Peace Testimony. College Park
Quarterly Meeting supports those who feel spiritually led, for reasons of
conscience, to perform such actions, including non-registration for the draft
and war tax refusal.
A letter to the editor from Walter Klein
in that issue suggested that Quakers, instead of resisting war taxes, should
pay twice their normal tax, but pay the extra amount for a non-military
purpose, perhaps one chosen as a group. “It would be legal, it would be a
statement of conscience, wars and armament would continue; but the message
might be loud and clear and perhaps more effective.” He suggested the program
be called “ ‘The Better Use of Government’ Fund or
‘BUG’ Fund
for short.”
Lonnie Valentine reminded Quakers of their historical tradition of war tax
resistance in the issue:
A.J. Muste once remarked that “The two decisive powers of the government
with respect to war are the power to conscript and the power to tax.” Now it
can be claimed that the government’s ability to wage war depends decisively
upon its power to tax. After all, our nuclear age began beneath one airplane,
twelve men, and millions of drafted tax dollars.
As early as American Friends recognized the
connection between taxes and war. In an epistle to Pennsylvania Friends, John
Woolman, John Churchman, and others wrote:
As we cannot be concerned with wars and fighting, so neither ought we to
contribute thereto… though some part of the money be raised… is said to be
for such benevolent purposes, as supporting our friendship with our Indian
neighbors, and relieving the distresses of our fellow-subjects… we could most
cheerfully contribute to those purposes, if they were not so mixed, that we
cannot in the manner proposed, show our hearty concurrence therewith, without
at the same time assenting to… practices, which we apprehend contrary to the
testimony which the Lord hath given us to bear…
Indeed, the Friends’ clear apprehension of the connection of money and war was
reflected in the Constitutional debates (about whether to include a
conscientious objector amendment) with regard to the conscription of men and
money. Roger Sherman of Connecticut remarked that “It is well know that those
who are religiously scrupulous of bearing arms, are equally scrupulous of
getting substitutes or paying an equivalent. Many of them would rather die
then do either one or the other.” How much are we now ready to do for our
scruples about conscription?
If we were all to be subject to the military draft in the next war, we would
not pay a fee to hire someone in our place. However, we seem to have forgotten
that with the payment of taxes we are hiring substitutes. We are paying to
have someone go in our place. In being unable to say “No!” to the payment of
taxes used to register and conscript others, we nullify our ability to say
“No!” in other ways. After all, the government cares little if we leaflet post
offices, learn draft counseling, or even advocate draft resistance as long as
we continue to pay our taxes. Simply put, when we pay our taxes, we enable the
government to conscript.
If other Friends are concerned enough about conscription to contemplate saying
“No!” to the drafting of our tax dollars, please write me at 27122 Cipres,
Mission Viejo, CA
92692 to let me know [sic] about the many ways we can protest and
resist paying war taxes. Also, please feel free to ask those Friendly
questions about justifying suffering for such a witness!
Joshua Evans reflected my feelings long ago when he said: “I found it best for
me to refuse paying demands on my estate which went to paying the expenses of
war, and although my part might appear at best a drop in the ocean, yet the
ocean, I considered, was made of many drops.” Are there other Friends who are
willing to be drops in this ocean?
[Lonnie Valentine has travelled in the ministry among Friends in Pacific
Yearly Meeting this past year under the auspices of the Fund for Concerns to
share with Friends his concerns about paying taxes for war.]
A letter from Harold Waterhouse
in the same issue warned Quakers against making their war tax resistance “an
act so private in nature that sometimes its sole impact falls on some harassed
IRS clerk
[and, a]s an act of witness… is chiefly between us and God.” While such an act
“relieves our conscience… if it reduces our drive for peace to the point that
we fail to act in more effective ways, then war-tax-withholding, on balance, is
counter-productive.”
A letter from David & Janet Hartsough to the
IRS,
reprinted in the issue, explained why
the Hartsoughs were refusing outright to pay $10.40 of their federal taxes
(redirecting that to the Oakland Catholic Worker “to feed the hungry and house
the homeless”), and paying the remaining $747.60 but in the form of a check
made out to the Department of Health and Human Services instead of to the
U.S. Treasury, in
the hopes of thereby keeping the money out of the hands of the Defense
Department.
A letter from Elinor Gene Hoffman to the
IRS,
reprinted in the issue, explained why
she was withholding 33⅓% of her taxes (“approximately the amount we are
spending for future wars and present armaments”), redirecting them “to
organizations I believe are dedicated to peace and to furthering life on this
planet,” and declaring this on her tax return as a “Quaker Peace Witness” tax
credit. She wrote, in part:
Please observe that by withholding only one-third of my taxes, I demonstrate
my willingness to pay for past wars and veterans’ benefits. I believe we
should honor past debts and that veterans of all wars should receive our
cherishing care.…
I take this stand in full recognition of the many benefits we all derive from
our representative form of government and the freedoms it enables me to enjoy.
But I firmly believe nothing good my government has done or will do can endure
if we do not halt our military pollution of the planet.
A reprinted letter from DeAnne Butterfield and John Huyler,
Jr. of Boulder Meeting to
the IRS
explained why they were withholding 39% of their taxes and declaring a
credit in a similar manner to Hoffman’s action explained above. Excerpt:
We hope most fervently that legal options (such as the proposed World
Peace Tax Fund) may be available in the future and would gladly pay into
such a fund. Until then we see war tax refusal as the only avenue which
allows us to follow our religious principles.
We welcome your scrutiny of this return. You will find that we have been
forthright and complete to the best of our ability. Furthermore, we hope
that this commitment on our parts can be a useful catalyst for dialogue.
We will welcome you our your agents into our home in hopes that,
together, in a spirit of mutual concern and respect, we may discover
better ways to bring about an end to all wars.
A note appended to this letter added: “Through the efforts of DeAnne
Butterfield, John Huyler, and others, Boulder Meeting adopted a one-year
trial program of reducing war taxes and diverting them to peaceful uses
through hiring a part-time Peace Secretary who will help stimulate activity
in the Meeting and in the community.” (See
♇ 7 June 2018 for more information
about this.)
A reprinted letter from Gerald Morsello of Eugene Meeting to the
IRS
explained his tax refusal, which involved redirecting “a portion of my
Federal Income Tax” to “the Oregon Urban Rural Credit Union for use by
people most affected by recent Federal domestic budget cuts.” He said he
was doing this although he would prefer “to be able to place the money I
owe the Federal government in a legally recognized alternative, such as the
World Peace Tax Fund.”
An letter from Constance Jolly of the Berkeley Meeting to the
IRS,
excerpted from the newsletter of the National Council for a World Peace Tax
Fund, explained her redirection of 35% of her taxes to “an organization
that works for peaceful reconciliation, for human rights, and for
disarmament.” Excerpt:
I am not one who breaks the law lightly, but for me the law that commands
its citizens to do evil is less binding than the higher law that commands
that “Thou shalt not kill.”
An announcement for an upcoming conference on “A Religious Response to
Growing Militarism” sponsored by College Park Quarterly Meeting said that
it “will be a nurturing and supportive gathering for those Friends and
others who are facing issues related to draft and tax resistance,
[etc.]”
A note read:
The 1981 Tax Resistance issue of Newsletter is
available (40¢ each) from 331 17th
Ave.
E., Seattle
WA 94112. Contents
include information about forms of tax resistance or refusal, possible
penalties, resources for decision-making, a national listing of
counselors, Centers, and Alternative Funds.
Those contents sound like the sort of stuff
NWTRCC
puts out nowadays. But
NWTRCC
wasn’t founded until , so I don’t know
who was putting out such a newsletter in
.
An article concerning statements by Episcopalian and Catholic bishops on
nuclear weapons included this section:
[I]n Archbishop Raymond G.
Hunthausen of Seattle proposed that “a sizable number of people in the
state” undertake a taxpayers revolt to protest the buildup in nuclear
arms. He argued that refusing to pay fifty per cent of income taxes “in
resistance to nuclear murder and suicide” would be “a definite step
toward total disarmament… Our paralyzed political process needs that
catalyst of nonviolent action based on faith. We have to refuse to give
incense — in our day tax dollars — to our nuclear idol.”
Brief summaries of the activities of various meetings included such notices
as these:
“Conscience and Military Tax Campaign [and] Consequences of Tax Refusal”
were among topics on the agenda of University Meeting’s “study
hour.”
“Eugene friends held a threshing session on tax resistance: ‘No consensus
was sought, and the Meeting was clearly divided on this difficult
issue.’ ”
“Conscription of Taxes” was discussed by the Phoenix Meeting in the
context of “discussions growing out of the New Call to Peacemaking
statement.”
The Friends Committee on War Tax Concerns is well on the way to working itself
out of a job. The committee was established early in
to accomplish three tasks: (1) to publish a
guidebook on war tax concerns; (2) to encourage consultation on war tax issues
throughout the Society of Friends; and (3) to develop queries and advices for
Quaker employers.
The proposed guidebook has become a series of pamphlets and a bibliography.
Three of the pamphlets, the ones on Quaker history and recent statements of
Friends, on the Biblical basis for conscientious objection to war taxes, and
on the spiritual and rational bases for war tax concerns, should be in print
by , along with the bibliography.
In mid-continent and mid- there will be
a conference for employers. Invitations will be sent to schools and religious
organizations operated by all the groups participating in the New Call to
Peacemaking. About 100 people are expected to gather and explore the positions
that can be adopted vis à vis the Internal Revenue Service
and the range of possible solutions to problems which may arise.
Two regional conferences, “Money and Conscience” and “Paying for War/Paying
for Peace,” were held in . Both were very
successful. Several more are planned for .
FCWTC
will provide resource material and assistance with program planning for
conferences wherever there are Friends who recognize the importance of war tax
issues and are willing to do the basic planning and arrangements. I hope this
means some of us.
Each of us on the committee represents a different Friends organization. Most
of us refuse to pay some or all of the taxes that pay for war. However, the
committee is concerned with “concerns,” not just resistance. We believe that
all Friends should go as far as they can, but not all are called to go in the
same direction. What aspect of this explosive issue do you most want to learn
more about, discuss with other Friends, make the subject of a conference? If
you can’t give time, can you give money? The basic program of the committee is
to prepare resource materials, distribute them where they are needed, help
people with similar problems and concerns to get in touch with each other and
then to lay the committee down, probably about .
I will try to get to any meeting in Southern California (maybe further) and
hope to get to Intermountain Yearly Meeting in
(Anne Friend, 836
N. Beaudry, № 5, Los
Angeles, CA 90012).
Lon Fendall at the Center for Peace Learning, Newberg,
OR 97132, is willing to
visit some meetings in North Pacific Yearly Meeting, as way opens, and/or to
help plan a conference. Linda Coffin is the staff at FCWTC,
P.O. Box 6441,
Washington,
D.C. 20009.
Any of us would like to hear from you.
If April 15 is getting to you more every year, think about what you can do
about it. And while you’re thinking about it, do something to get others
thinking about it, too.
This is the tenth in a series of posts about war tax resistance as it was
reported in back issues of The Mennonite. Today we
finish off the 1950s.
In general, except for a brief flurry of mostly noncommittal articles in the
late 1940s, The Mennonite seemed to steer clear of
the topic of war tax resistance thereafter, with a few exceptions.
In the issue, Lloyd L.
Ramseyer wrote of
“The
Sin of Just Being Good” — that is of “people who are content to just be
good without concerning themselves very much with the evil about them.” One way
this might display itself?
Do we sometimes shift the responsibility to others, saying this is no business
of mine? May it be that we sometimes even employ others to do what we think it
is wrong for us to do ourselves, and then seem to feel that it is not our
affair?… If three-fourths of my tax dollar goes for war, can I have a
conscience clear of it?
An article on “Taxes” in the issue gave some very middle-of-the-road advice:
In the classic passage, Matthew 22:17–22,
Jesus states that He expected His followers to pay taxes.
“Render therefore to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the
things that are God’s.”
Very briefly, we want to say four things:
Christians ought to be honest in filing tax returns…
Christians should not pay too much tax…
Christians ought to take advantage of deductions and through contributions…
Christians ought to study best ways to give as to tax…
There was not even a hint of a suggestion that a Christian ought to be
concerned about what use Caesar puts the tax to, or might have to draw a line
somewhere and refuse. The “Render Unto Caesar” episode is portrayed as though
when Jesus was asked whether Jews ought to pay taxes to Caesar or not, he had
simply replied “yes” but in a more wordy way than necessary.
(“When they heard this, they marvelled…”
perhaps this is just a mistranslation for “they yawned and checked their
wristwatches.”)
The time of year has come again when the citizens of our country will have to
pay income tax. The question is sometimes raised, should Christians pay this
tax? A large percentage of the income tax money goes for war purposes. A
Christian obeying the new commandment of Jesus to love his neighbor as himself
cannot possibly be in accord with hatred, strife, and bloodshed resulting from
war. What then shall we do about it? Refuse to pay and come in conflict with
the laws of our country?
Jesus our Lord has given us a very clear teaching on this subject in
Matthew 17:24–27.
The collector of the tribute money asked Peter if Jesus paid tribute. Peter
answered, “yes.” Jesus preventing Peter from telling him the incident, asks
Peter “of whom do the kings of the earth take custom or tribute? of their own
children, or of strangers?” Peter said of strangers. Jesus answered, “then are
the children free. Notwithstanding, lest we offend them, go to the sea, cast a
hook, and take the first fish thou catchest, open his mouth and take out the
coin therein and give it to the tribute collector.”
The Roman tribute money was used mostly for military purposes. The Roman
Empire was then ruling the major part of the then known world. It required
large armies to subdue and occupy these many nations. The money consumed for
military purposes was a large sum. Jesus asked Peter to pay for both of them.
Tax was again the subject of an article in the issue, but this time the message is much changed:
Daniel Graber Pastor, Silver Street Church, Goshen, Ind.
Dear Quiet of the Land;
PAX… VOLUNTARY SERVICE… 1‒W… What does it all mean? Yes, it means a positive
witness for peace; but in a vision the other night I heard 1000 angels
shouting, “Awake! Awake! Ye Quiet of the Land!”
And then the angel Gabriel went on to explain: “Ah, yes, you Mennonites are
righteous, peace-loving, law-abiding citizens of your land; but what are you
doing at this time so near the death of your Lord? Does not your Christian
conscience move you at more points than that of nonresistance to war and your
interest in finding a peaceful alternative?
“You who proclaim to the world that you are Christ’s disciples would now also
deny thy Lord! Ah, yes, my Lord did boldly say, ‘Render therefore to Caesar
the things that are Caesar’s and to God the things that are God’s’; but are
you living under the Roman Empire where you have no political freedom? No, you
are citizens in a free republic, a land founded with an appreciation for your
conscience. Did you not hear the words of John Milton: ‘The passage “render to
Caesar what is Caesar’s and to God what is God’s” does not say “Give Caesar
thy conscience.”’
“You, the Quiet of the Land, are ordering a huge portion of that which
crucifies your Lord when you pay your federal taxes. Did you
know, fine Mennonites, that you are ordering
H-Bombs which will
destroy cities of a million men, women, and children?… Did you
know you are ordering massive retaliation which will destroy most of
mankind and cause more mass suffering than our world has ever known?…
Did you know you are ordering nuclear bomb tests which poison
the atmosphere for a hundred generations yet unborn?… Did you
know you are ordering the top secret horror weapon, by paying in
advance for it, to be delivered any day now?”
As Gabriel finished, the chorus of angels replied from the background; “No!
Gabriel, No! Most Mennonites did not order these horrible weapons. They were
ordered for them unawares — yet we must admit they did give silent
consent. Most of them didn’t realize that Washington sent all of them a
bill for these macabre instruments of suicide and moral degradation in the
name of democracy.”
That bill for the coming year amounts to $43,300,000,000 for Defense, or 60
per cent of the total estimated expenditures of the national government. Over
half of the total budget is raised from individual income taxes, Mennonites
included.
In 20 per cent of the budget went to the War
and Navy Departments to defray the cost of national security. In
this item went down to 14 per cent of the
budget. Possibly these figures do not mean very much now, but taken in
comparison to the present amount, it is ten times less than the 43 billion
dollars now at our doorstep.
At what point, my dear friends, does one cease to add a pinch of incense and
begin to engage in idolatrous worship, and thus deny our Lord? The cost of the
Federal Government operation in the budget
was $55 per person, even then more than what many people gave to the church.
The budget will cost about $455 per person.
If you wish to put this into the Mennonite picture, here is an up-to-date
report.
In Elkhart County, Indiana, where the population is 84,512
( Census), there are over 8,800 Amish and
Mennonites (Mennonite Encyclopedia). Elkhart County will pay
$43,642,912 as their share of the cost of federal government spending. It is
assumed that Mennonites of Elkhart County will pay at least their share, which
amounts to more than 10.4 per cent, or $4,538,862 plus.
If we could believe that even 40 per cent of the budget would be legitimately
used for democracy, it means that the Mennonites of Elkhart County alone are
putting into preparation for future wars close to three million
dollars a year. That amount of money would be sufficient to operate the
entire
MCC
program for more than a year, or to build several new Mennonite Biblical
Seminaries, or a number of hospitals, old people’s homes, colleges, high
schools, etc.
From the soldiers of the cross we hear these testimonies concerning taxes.
John Woolman, who refused payment in : “To
refuse active payment at such a time might be construed to be an act of
disloyalty, and appeared likely to displease the rulers, not only here but in
England; still there was a scruple so fixed on the minds of many Friends that
nothing moved it.”
Bishop Andrew Ziegler, a Mennonite, in the Revolutionary War period; “I would
as soon go to war as to pay the three pounds and ten shillings.”
A.J. Muste (Secretary Emeritus of the Fellowship of Reconciliation): “The two
decisive powers of government with respect to war are the power to conscript
and the power to tax. In regard to the second I have come to the conviction
that I am at least conscience bound to challenge the right of the government
to tax me for waging war, and in particular for the production of atomic and
bacterial weapons.”
Ernest and Marion Bromley (Sharonville, Ohio): “We regard it as the
prerogative of every individual to refuse to aid this government or any other
government either to prepare for or to engage in war. The time has come when
men ought no longer to depend solely upon their spoken witness against war.
They ought to prepare themselves for outright resistance by a thorough-going
dissociation with the war-making system. No testimony for peace can afford to
become a timid shadow. No matter what one may say against our armaments, if he
is still paying for armaments, it seems to be talking peace and preparing for
war.”
“Awake! Awake! Ye Quiet of the Land!” Think before you begin
paying Defense dollars. Convert them to
Peace and the Church today.
Christians have responded to the challenge of this issue in various ways. A
few have refused to pay the proportion of their tax that is used for military
purposes. Some have voluntarily limited their income to the low level that is
tax-exempt…
The issue included Don and
Eleanor Kaufman’s letter to the
IRS:
As Mennonite Christians filed their income tax returns for
, more than one was disquieted to
realize that tithing Christians were not giving nearly as much to further
God’s kingdom as they were paying for military preparation for war! Two
Mennonites decided to give voice to this concern in the following letter.
U.S. Treasury
Department Internal Revenue Service Washington 25,
D.C.
Gentlemen:
In filing income tax returns for we believe
it is necessary to clarify our concerns. Like others who have been perplexed
by the irresponsible use of tax money for military purposes, we are earnestly
seeking for a constructive way in which to be honest with what we understand
about the issue. Personally, we are unable to acquiesce easily to the present
military expenditures of our government which we believe, are irrelevant to
the problem they are trying to solve. One cannot change ideologies or correct
evil by destroying those in whom these forces reside.
In an effort to reduce our cooperation in a warmaking system to a minimum, we
seriously considered refusing payment of that portion used for military
expenditures (which we understand is about 73 per cent of federal taxes).
Since we object on religious grounds to participation in war and military
preparation in any form, we believe, like Milton Mayer, that we are denied the
free exercise of our religion (guaranteed by the First Amendment to the
Constitution) when forced to pay income taxes used for military purposes.
If money represents a part of a person’s life, as we believe it does, then it
logically follows that a Christian will have ambivalent feelings about
professing peace and good will while at the same time supporting explicitly
destructive forces within a government. As there are provisions for
conscientious objection to military service, there should also be provisions
for conscientious objection to making
H-bombs or paying for
the making of them.
Consequently, in the interests of our government and all people, we are
looking for some alternative whereby it would be possible to channel that
portion of tax money to those causes which contribute to the welfare of
people — those legitimate functions which are constructive and not destructive
of human value.
We hope that the United States government will accept our offer to pay the
equivalent or more of the military tax to some mutually agreeable agency,
organization, or institution, like
CROP,
MCC,
Church World Service, or the United Nations (UNESCO,
Technical and Economic Assistance Program,
etc.), which is
committed to a peaceful program for all men. We feel that a voluntary
arrangement something like Edith Green’s bill
H.R. 12310 is
necessary if we are to make possible the conditions of a lasting and abiding
peace.
(This was the earliest of the “peace tax fund” legislative proposals. It set up
a fund to be used to give aid developing nations, and would have allowed
taxpayers to get up to a 2% deduction on their taxes by donating to the fund.)
As Christians, we are not seeking exemption from the payment of taxes, but we
are searching for a right to determine how those taxes are used, especially
those which we contribute personally. It is clear to us that a Christian has a
responsibility to government, significantly because in a democracy he is a
real part of the government. Because the Christian knows something of the
value and importance of community he will do everything he can to contribute
to the stability and welfare of government on all levels.
Yet if this person realizes the destructive character and devastating results
of all military preparation, he will consider it his patriotic duty to do what
he can to avoid collective disaster. We believe responsible citizenship
implies that there is no blanket endorsement for what a government does. Its
actions must be tested and if they are found to be outside of the purpose of
God they are to be challenged.
We hope you will feel with us the urgent need to recognize the priority which
God always deserves in every human decision. We would appreciate your
thoughtful response to this crucial issue.
Akron– Concern for payment of war taxes has been
expressed by the General Brotherhood Board of the Church of the Brethren.
Board Executive Secretary W. Howard Row writes, “The concern is real and the
problems to implement (an alternative to payment of war taxes) are great.
However, probably no greater than that of securing an alternative to military
service.” In a resolution shared with
MCC
and similar organizations the General Brotherhood Board states: Because there
is a growing interest among Brethren and others in finding a positive
alternative to the payment of that portion of federal income taxes that go for
war preparations, the General Brotherhood Board voted that explorations be
made with the appropriate agencies of government to the end that an acceptable
constructive alternative be provided for all those persons who, by reason of
religious training and belief, conscientiously object to the payment of that
portion of income taxes going for military defense. These explorations might
be made in concert with one or the more of the other organizations with which
we are associated or if necessary by Brethren alone.”
A similar reaction was recently expressed by two Mennonites. Mr. and Mrs. Don
Kaufman (Moundridge, Kan.) who
are under appointment as
MCC
workers in Indonesia [and who] assert in a letter to the
U.S. Treasury
Department: [quote from above letter omitted]
On the
MCC
Executive Committee met, and, according to
a
later article on the meeting, “[r]eferred to Peace Section the invitation
from the Church of the Brethren to study whether there might be a positive
alternative provided by the
U.S. government for
persons conscientiously opposed to paying that portion of income taxes going
for military defense.”
The
Mennonite Central Committee annual report for
included a report from this “Peace
Section.” They noted that “throughout our constituency… [c]oncern is evident in
discussions about possible participation in various protest actions and about
the propriety of paying income taxes that are used so largely for war
purposes…”
Our next episode will pick up as the tumultuous 1960s begin.
Some tabs that have passed through my browser in recent days:
Two limericks I wrote, inspired by current events, were selected for the Center for a Stateless Society’s poetry feature.
Ruth Benn, at NWTRCC’s blog, takes aim at the “All or Nothing Syndrome” in which some people give up on doing war tax resistance at all because they don’t feel capable of going all-in and resisting everything.
Peace activists in Ireland who broke into Shannon Airport to decommission U.S. military aircraft stationed there have been found not guilty by a jury, who apparently agreed with the defense argument that they were lawfully justified in their actions.
