Some historical and global examples of tax resistance → women’s suffrage movements → British women’s suffrage movement

This is a chronological index to the articles in The Vote: The Organ of the Women’s Freedom League that I have reproduced at The Picket Line that concern tax resistance.

Here’s a bit more about The Tax Resistance League’s role in the women’s suffrage movement in Great Britain.

In past hunts I’ve found intriguing hints but few details about the role of tax resistance in the women’s suffrage movement in Great Britain. Here’s a bit more, in an excerpt from The Militant Suffrage Movement: Citizenship and Resistance in Britain, 1860–1930:

The Women’s Tax Resistance League is covered in a chapter of We Won’t Pay!: A Tax Resistance Reader.

Rooting their rejection of the law’s authority in the principle that “government without the consent of the governed is tyranny,” [suffragettes] claimed the right to withhold consent until they received representation in Parliament. Withholding consent provided an especially compelling argument where women could establish that they fulfilled the responsibilities of citizenship but lacked basic political rights. Tax resistance formed an important part of suffragettes’ overall strategy to reject the legal obligations of women who lacked representation, drawing upon an older tradition of tax resistance in England for its authority. WTRL member Mrs. Darent Harrison invoked that history in her assertion of a “sense of intimacy and spiritual kinship which must exist between all who have ever defied the law of the day, in defence of eternal justice, and in obedience to the call of public duty.” The WSPU decided to resist payment of income taxes in November 1907. The WFL urged “no vote — no tax” the following month. Drawing once again on historical precedent, the suffragettes argued that in the seventeenth century, the king illegally levied taxes, whereas voteless women were illegally taxed by Parliament, an even more serious offense, since it occurred at a time of representative government. Militants believed that, by refusing to pay taxes without representation, women would force Parliament to grant votes to women. Tax resistance was frequently presented as part of a larger strategy, as in January 1908 when Charlotte Despard defined WFL tax resistance as part of a larger general strike of women, which would extend to the refusal to bear children, to manage their homes, or to fulfill any of the citizen duties they currently performed.

Tax resistance proved to be the longest-lived form of militancy, and the most difficult to prosecute. More than 220 women, mostly middle-class, participated in tax resistance between 1906 and 1918, some continuing to resist through the First World War, despite a general suspension of militancy. Suffragettes resisted payment of two general categories of tax: the first included property tax, inhabited house duty, and income tax; the second, taxes and licenses on dogs, carriages, motor cars, male servants, armorial bearings, guns, and game. Contemporaries had several theories regarding tax resistance’s appeal. Suffragette speaker and sympathizer Laurence Housman cited the clarity of tax resistance’s logic as a primary reason for its popularity. Suffragettes’ tax resistance also cut across organizational lines. The formation of the Women’s Tax Resistance League in 1909 brought women together from numerous organizations, including not only the WSPU, WFL, and NUWSS but also the London Society for Women’s Suffrage, Conservative and Unionist Women’s Franchise Association, Church League for Women’s Suffrage, Free Church League, Catholic Women’s Suffrage Society, Actresses’ Franchise League, Artists’ Franchise League, and the Women Writers’ Suffrage League.

The Museum of London has in its collection this 95-year-old banner from the Women’s Tax Resistance League:

So what’s a man doing on the banner of a women’s suffrage group? And what’s the “Ship 1627 Money” legend all about?

The story of John Hampden’s tax refusal is told in the book We Won’t Pay!: A Tax Resistance Reader.

[John] Hampden was imprisoned for his opposition to the loan King Charles Ⅰ authorised without parliamentary sanction. He also refused to pay “Ship Money,” a tax for support of the Royal Navy. The attempts to imprison him and others for this offence led to the English Civil War. He provided a role model for the Women’s Tax Resistance League whose slogan was “No Vote, No Tax.” The suffragettes’ campaign to gain the vote for women saw many women imprisoned and force-fed. They finally won the vote in 1928.

More on John Hampden:

• John Hampden — The Patriot
• Britannia Biographies: John Hampden

I’ve made note of the tax resistance campaign of the women’s suffrage movement in Great Britain on a couple of previous occasions:

• 19 September 2004
• 14 December 2004

Here’s another look at the role tax resistance played in Britain’s women’s suffrage movement, in an excerpt from Laura E. Nym Mayhall’s The Militant Suffrage Movement: Citizenship and Resistance in Britain, 1860–1930 (I’ve added some paragraph breaks to ease on-line legibility):

[Dora] Montefiore argued that because women had no representation, they could not make their positions known to members of Parliament; therefore, women lacked representation and had recourse only to passive resistance. She had outlined a variation on this policy to readers of the feminist paper the Woman’s Signal in June 1897, suggesting that should the third reading of the women’s enfranchisement bill then before the House of Commons fail, then those women “who believe in the justice of our demands should form a league, binding ourselves to resist passively the payment of taxes until such taxation be followed by representation.” She implemented this position in her own refusal to pay imperial taxes during the war.

Montefiore was prosecuted for her wartime tax resistance in 1904, and she went on to recommend the tactic in 1906 to a controversial new suffrage organization, the Women’s Social and Political Union, as a means of drawing attention to the campaign for women’s parliamentary enfranchisement.

She implemented the protest again, to spectacular effect, during the “Siege of Montefiore,” at her Hammersmith, London, villa in May and June 1906. The house, surrounded by a wall, could be reached only through an arched doorway, which Montefiore and her maid barred against the bailiffs. For six weeks, Montefiore resisted payment of her taxes, addressing the frequent crowds through the upper windows of the house.

WSPU meetings were held in front of the house daily, and resolutions were taken “that taxation without representation is tyranny.” After six weeks, the Crown was legally authorized to break down the door in order to seize property in lieu of taxes, a process to which Montefiore submitted, saying, “It was useless to resist force majeure when it came to technical violence on the part of the authorities.”

Montefiore made her case in the local Kensington News that her refusal to pay imperial tax was linked to her exclusion from the parliamentary franchise. She was quoted in the paper as saying, “I pay my rates willingly and cheerfully, because I possess my municipal vote. I can vote for the Borough and County Councils, and on the election of Guardians,”

Montefiore’s success at mobilizing interest in the women’s cause, and her clear articulation of her protest as one aimed at remedying her exclusion from the parliamentary franchise, popularized the concept of resisting the government as a new approach to campaigning for women’s suffrage.

For previous mentions of tax resistance in Britain’s women’s suffrage movement, see the Picket Line entries from 19 September 2004, 14 December 2004, and 13 February 2005.

The Independent tells the story of Kate Harvey, a tax resister in Britain’s women’s suffrage movement:

The badge is cast in the form of a shield on which is depicted the entrance to Holloway Prison. On the reverse is a card inscribed in a faint hand: “Given to Mrs K Harvey By Women’s Suffrage After She Had Been In Prison For Tax Resistance.”

Kate Harvey was a remarkable woman, even without the incident which lies at the heart of the commendation. She was, for a start, a professional woman in what was very much the man’s world of late Victorian Britain.… ¶ But she was not just a physiotherapist, she was also deaf.…

…Around 100 women were sent to prison for refusing to pay.

The most notorious of these was Mrs Harvey. After many months of refusing to buy a [tax] stamp for her servant, in 1912 the authorities issued a warrant for the seizure of goods in lieu of payment. She responded by barricading herself into her house. An eight month stand-off passed before bailiffs finally broke in using a crowbar. But a year later she still refused to pay, declaring “I would rather die first”. She set about building better barricades. This time the bailiffs needed battering rams to get in.

…When the First World War broke out the main suffragette organisations called off their campaign. But [Charlotte] Despard and Harvey refused. Most members of the Women’s Freedom League were pacifists and refused, unlike other women’s organisations, to become involved in the British Army’s recruitment campaign.

The Scotsman has a profile of princess Sophia Alexandria Duleep Singh, a British suffragette and tax resister.

It was as a tax resister… that Sophia Duleep Singh, the sole Indian member of the WTRL, made her greatest impression. Taking her stand on the principle that taxation without representation was tyranny, she registered her defiance on several occasions. Refusal to pay taxes and fines levied could lead to goods being impounded by the bailiffs under “distraint” and sold by public auction to recover sums due. In May 1911, at Spelthorne petty sessions, her refusal to pay licences for her five dogs, carriage and manservant led to a fine of £3. In July 1911, against arrears of 6s in rates, she had a seven-stone diamond ring impounded and auctioned at Ashford for £10. The ring was bought by a member of the WTRL and returned to her. In December 1913 she was summoned again to Feltham police court for employing a male servant and keeping two dogs and a carriage without licence. Her refusal to pay a fine of £12 10s resulted in a pearl necklace, comprising 131 pearls, and a gold bangle studded with pearls and diamonds, being seized under distraint and auctioned at Twickenham town hall, both items being bought by members of the WTRL. Such actions were a means of achieving publicity. Her high-profile stand was thus significant, and an important contribution to women’s struggle before the First World War.

The Women’s Tax Resistance League is featured in the book We Won’t Pay!: A Tax Resistance Reader.

Today’s tax resistance history lesson:

“NO VOTE, NO TAX.”
English Authoress Takes This Method of Promoting the Cause.

To the Editor of The New York Times:

Miss Beatrice Harraden, the author of “Ships that Pass in the Night,” has refused to pay her income tax, on the ground that “taxation without representation is tyranny.” After receiving the usual demands for payment, Miss Harraden was finally called on by a bailiff, who seized a clock to be sold to recover the money. The sale took place on April 22, at a public auction room. Many suffragettes were present, and banners with the motto “No Vote, No Tax” were prominently displayed. Miss Harraden made a speech in the auction room, stating her reasons as follows:

“I have refused to pay my income tax (1) because it is obviously unfair that a woman who earns her livelihood by the direct use of her brain should be called upon to pay the tax on her earnings and yet be denied any voice in the choice of representatives to Parliament, whose salaries she helps to pay by the direct use of her brain.

“(2) Because I consider that women should now use every opportunity in their power to protest against a Government which has persistently ignored, deceived, and tricked the constitutional suffragists working quietly for the enfranchisement of women, and has goaded the militant suffragists into crimes and deeds of disorder which would never have been committed but for the coercion of seven years of mismanagement and injustice.

“(3) Because I wish to protest against forcible feeding — now universally pronounced to be torture — and against the new ‘cat and mouse’ bill for dealing with hunger strikers. I protest against it as an emanation from a cruel brain and as an ignoble piece of legislation which is a dishonor to England.”

LILIAN M. HICKS,
Treasurer Women’s Tax Resistance League
London, England, April 28, 1913.

The Women’s Tax Resistance League is featured in the book We Won’t Pay!: A Tax Resistance Reader.

Today’s tax resistance history lesson:

MISS HARRADEN HIT IN EYE.
She Accuses London Police of Standing By While Roughs Assailed Her.
By Marconi Transatlantic Wireless Telegraph to The New York Times.

LONDON, May 3 [1913].— Beatrice Haraden, the novelist, who recently returned from America, has made a serious charge against the London police.

Miss Harraden is a suffragist, and, as recently stated in The New York Times, she allowed her property to be distrained rather than pay the income tax, this being her protest to the Government’s refusal of suffrage.

The sale of Miss Harraden’s property, consisting of silver articles, took place on April 24, when the property of several other women members of the Resistance League was auctioned in the Public Rooms.

According to reports in the English papers the tax resisters present were “booed” by the crowd, but Miss Harraden says that roughs not only jeered but also threw stones and refuse; she herself receiving a missile in the eye, necessitating treatment by a doctor.

Worse than this, according to Miss Harraden, was the fact that the crowd of about 300 persons calmly looked on while the women were attacked by the roughs, and that two constables made no effort to interfere.

“I cannot say that the police organized the attack,” said Miss Harraden, “but certainly they permitted it. I do not care for my own injury, but it is right that people should know of this injustice and brutality. The English press refers to such disorder as an expression of public opinion.”

Referring to the Tax Resistance League, Miss Harraden said:

“The least any woman can do is to refuse to pay taxes, especially the tax on actually earned income. This is certainly the most logical phase of the fight for suffrage. It is a culmination of the Government’s injustice and stupidity to ask that we pay an income tax on income earned by brains, when they are refusing to consider us eligible to vote.

“The league was formed three years ago with the slogan: ‘No vote, no tax.’ It is non-partisan—an association of constitutional and militant suffragists, recruited from various suffrage societies for the purpose of resisting taxes.…”

Another author who has refused to pay taxes is Flora Annie Steele. A silver cup, belonging to the Duchess of Bedford, was auctioned on Thursday under distraint and was bought in by friends. The Duchess was not present at the sale at which resolutions of protest were presented by an American, Dr. Stanton Coit, a member of the men’s branch of the Tax Resistance League, who in a speech referred to his ancestors of Boston participating in the “Boston Tea Party” and asserted that the same belief animated them as suffragists—namely, that taxation without representation was tyranny.

This impelled him now, he said, to refuse to pay his wife’s income tax until she was allowed to vote, notwithstanding that that very day an income tax officer had sent him the last notice to pay within seven days or take the consequences. He asserted that he was anxiously waiting till the seven days elapsed.

At Woman’s World, Anna Milford reviews the tax resistance of the women’s suffrage movement:

Inevitably it was from among those women personally affected that the tax protestors were drawn, and a score of them met in London in 1909 with the single-minded aim of starting “an entirely independent society quite separate from any existing suffrage society with the object of spreading the principles of tax resistance”. Their sole action was to be non-action — through non-payment of taxes.

Recruitment drives were held up and down the country and there was a brisk sale of pamphlets such as The Duty of Tax Resistance by Laurence Houseman and the Married Women’s Taxation by founder member Ethel Ayres Purdie. The rallying cry of the League was a variant on the rebellious American Colonists’ “No Taxation without Representation”. Postcards of a defiant Britannia and the motto “No Vote, No Tax” sold at 7d a dozen and recruiting pamphlets at 8d a dozen.

Scores of demands from the Inland Revenue piled up unpaid in members’ homes, and when these were followed by final demands they too went unpaid. Instead, under the heading and slogan of the League, a pre-printed letter was despatched:

“To [the appropriate tax collectors]. I regret that the heavy sacrifices I feel called upon to make for the cause of Women’s Enfranchisement render it impossible for me to subscribe to the object to which you draw my attention. You will recognise that the delay in passing a Women’s Enfranchisement Measure imposed a heavy tax upon the resources of all warm supporters of the movement. Signed….”

Google is starting to do for newspaper archives what it has been doing for books: putting scanned images on-line and making them text-searchable. Hooray for Google, says I.

Here are a few articles I found while browsing around today:

A couple of pieces regarding a reconstruction-era dispute over the legitimacy of the Louisiana state government (in which tax resistance played a role):

• Affairs in Louisiana: Proclamation of Gov. Kellogg to Delinquent Tax-Payers The New York Times 14 March 1873
• Repudiators in Louisiana The New York Times 16 July 1879

Some pieces from the tax resistance campaign for women’s suffrage:

• [Bernard] Shaw on Women’s Rights: Would Get Another Wife, He Says, If Jailed Like Mr. Wilts The New York Times 27 September 1912
• Take Duchess’s Silver Cup: Distraint Owing to Refusal of Suffragist Peeress to Pay Tax The New York Times 22 April 1913
• A joint demonstration of the Tax Resisters’ League and militant suffragettes… The New York Times 15 May 1913

More on the ostensibly voluntary “liberty bonds” in the United States during World War Ⅰ:

• [Billy] Sunday Attacks ‘Bond Shirkers’: And He Would Shoot “Like Traitors” Those Who “Knock the Buying” The New York Times 9 June 1917
• Will Ask Proved Bond Slackers to Make Statement to People The Evening Independent 27 September 1918
• New Plan to Reveal Slackers St. Petersburg Daily Times 11 October 1918
• Slackers Beware The Union County Journal 7 October 1918

Gandhi’s campaign for Indian independence:

• Hindu Campaign Costing Money The Evening Independent 3 June 1930

Miscellaneous war tax resistance articles:

• Five Members of Faculty Will Withhold War Taxes to Voice Vietnam Dissent The Harvard Crimson 9 April 1970
• Tighter Objector Rule Asked Pittsburgh Post-Gazette 12 November 1970

  The Nixon Administration asked the Supreme Court today to rule out draft exemptions for men who are conscientiously opposed to the Vietnam war but not to all wars.

  …

  Besides, the Administration argued, if selective exemptions are approved people could refuse to pay their taxes on religious grounds or could defy other laws.

• Excise tax resistance fails to go unnoticed The Daily Collegian 6 March 1972 (concerning phone tax resistance)
• Tax resistance is historical means of protesting war Columbia Missourian 7 January 1979
• Lutheran group issues call for tax resistance against arms race St. Petersburg Times 16 January 1982 (also covered in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette)
• Local man won’t pay federal income taxes Columbia Missourian 16 January 1983 (George Mummert)
• Local Quakers support stand of tax resister Columbia Missourian 17 January 1983 (Richard Catlett, David Wixom)
• Tax Resisters Give Money to Hospice Associated Press 15 April 1983
• Protesters resist military taxes Penn State Daily Collegian 16 April 1987
• Nuclear Protester May Lose Home Over Tax Stand The New York Times 16 April 1989
• ‘Alternative Revenue Service’ Unveiled The Seattle Post-Intelligencer 10 February 1991
• War Foes Urge Withholding of Taxes The Seattle Times 20 February 1991
• Taxes for Life The New York Times 18 April 1992
• Victory for war tax resister Green Left Online 29 April 1992 (Robert Burrowes in Australia)
• Tax critics don’t leave lawn despite order Associated Press 30 May 1993 (Kehler/Corner case)
• ‘Conscience’ Doesn’t Take the 1040 EZ Route New York Daily News 15 April 1997 (Kehler/Corner case; review of An Act of Conscience)
• War Tax Resisters Will Turn Themselves in to IRS press release, 7 July 2000
• Don’t Like Military Spending? Give Your Tax Dollars to Someone Else! The Portland Mercury 18 April 2002
• War Resisters: ‘We Won’t Go’ to ‘We Won’t Pay’ The New York Times 3 August 2002

Archbishop Raymond Hunthausen’s war tax resistance:

• Hunthausen Joins Rally at Submarine Base The Seattle Post-Intelligencer 27 October 1986
• Bishops oppose nuclear arms St. Petersburg Times 3 October 1981
• Area Priests Declare Their Support for Hunthausen The Seattle Post-Intelligencer 21 April 1987
• Anti-War Archbishop Who Came Under Fire from the Vatican The Seattle Post-Intelligencer 19 June 1991

Miscellaneous other articles of note:

• Finding Out Who ‘Really’ Spends Your Tax Money St. Petersburg Times 7 April 1971 (a conservative tax revolt group working with war tax resisters & Noam Chomsky)
• Washington [D.C.] Official Urges Tax Refusal to Push Statehood The New York Times 18 February 1990 (“Walter E. Fauntroy, the District of Columbia’s Delegate to Congress, has urged residents here not to pay their Federal taxes until Congress makes Washington the 51^st state.”
• Israelis Yield West Bank Taxation and Health to Palestinians The New York Times 2 December 1994

  [C]ollection will be a formidable challenge after years in which taxes were identified by Palestinians with foreign occupation.

  Tax resistance is strong in the territories. It spread during a seven-year uprising against Israeli rule, when Palestinians working in the tax department resigned. According to Israeli estimates, only 20 percent of Palestinians taxed in the West Bank met their payments in 1993, when tax revenues totalled some $90 million.

  The Palestinian Authority has already run into difficulties collecting taxes in Gaza and Jericho, and it has published appeals in recent weeks urging tax payment as a national duty. Outside of Jericho, it has no police powers in the West Bank, and the legal system there remains under Israeli control.

  “Taxes are the dowry of independence and the key to democracy,” said Atef Alawneh, director general of the Palestinian finance department, at the ceremony today in Ramallah.

  “Nonpayment of taxes under occupation was a national struggle worthy of praise,” he added. “Now it is 180 degrees different. Now delay in paying means a delay in building the Palestinian state.”

  Zuhdi Nashashibi, the finance minister in the Palestinian Authority, said he was confident Palestinians would now “hurry to pay” their taxes.

  Mr. Alawneh argued that collection by Palestinians would be more effective because it would lack the coercion of military occupation, would extend to places the Israelis were unable to reach because of security concerns, and would create new revenue sources. The tax authorities will not use force, he said, but will rely instead on friendly persuasion and public goodwill.

Remember what this sort of thing used to be like? You’d get yourself down to the library, and then you’d look through each volume of the Reader’s Guide to Periodical Literature or whatever, one at a time, hoping that what you were looking for was among the things the editors of that guide felt was worth indexing. Then with luck, some of what you were looking for was available in bound volumes, microfilm, or microfiche on-site (elsewise you could always try for inter-library loan, but that might take a couple of weeks). In the case of the first, you could find it on the shelves or ask the reference librarian, and then thumb through the pages, but in the case of the latter two, you’d have to haul your film over to a reader (one that wasn’t broken or occupied) and then spend five minutes or so just trying to locate the pages you were interested in. Then, if it turned out to be good, you’d have to scribble things down or drop in some coin for a barely-legible photocopy.

I like the future.

Here’s some commentary on an unusual tax resistance case in the battle for women’s suffrage in England — a man was imprisoned when his wife refused to pay her income tax.

THE CASE OF MARK WILKS

(Communicated by Alvin Waggoner, Esq.)

The fact, not generally known, that in England, a man may be imprisoned for his wife’s failure to pay her income tax, should be of interest just now in this country where we are in the act of adopting an income tax amendment to our own Constitution. With a proposed exemption of five thousand dollars we need not remind ourselves that few lawyers are likely to go to jail for failure to pay the tax on their annual incomes, but if the English procedure should be adopted here, who can foresee what may come upon any one of us for a wife’s delinquency in this regard. It behooves us then to consider the case of one Mark Wilks.

Dr. Elizabeth Wilks is an English physician. From her practice and property she has an income sufficient to bring her within the tax on incomes. Dr. Wilks is a suffragette. With others of her sex, she believes that taxation without votes is tyranny, and is an enthusiastic member of the Woman’s Tax Resistance League. As concrete evidence of opposition to a man-made government, when her income tax became due, she refused to pay it. The government decided to make an example of — Mr. Wilks! He was called upon, under the statute, for the tax his wife owed. Whether it was a matter of principle or cash with him does not appear, but he also failed to pay the tax. Whereupon he was taken to jail. A wife, less conscientious and fixed in her opinions, might have wavered, but not Dr. Elizabeth Wilks. She stood on the doorstep and watched the detestable government cart her husband off to jail, feeling, no doubt, that her martyrdom was as sweet as it was peculiar. Other women had gone to jail for the cause; she had sent her husband!

The situation was sufficiently novel to attract a great deal of public attention. It was seized upon by the conservative press as a new subject for ridicule of the present government and its policies. The Wilks case soon assumed an importance equaled only by the Home Rule Campaign.

A great meeting of protest was held under the auspices of the Woman’s Tax Resistance League in London early in October. Sir John Cockburn presided. George Bernard Shaw was the principal speaker, and a newspaper report quotes him as saying:

I knew of cases in my boyhood where women managed to make homes for their children and themselves, and then the husbands sold the furniture, turned the wife and children out, and got drunk. The Married Woman’s Property Act was then carried, under which the husband retained the responsibility of the property, and the wife had the property to herself. As Mrs. Wilks would not pay the tax on her own income Mr. Wilks went to jail. If my wife did that to me, the very moment I came out of prison I would get another wife. It is indefensible.

Mr. Israel Zangwill, the novelist, added to the gaiety of the occasion by suggesting that “marrying an heiress might be the ruin of a man.” Possible American complications, involving some of our best families, do not seem to have been pointed out, however, by any of the speakers.

In the end, after Mr. Wilks had been in jail several weeks, such an uproar was created that the Government receded from its position, and the prisoner was released.

The London Times, commenting editorially on the affair, declared that the Government had blundered in sending Wilks to prison, pointed out that this was “admitted by his release,” and added:

Mr. Wilks’s case is also worth noting because it illustrates the anomalies of the law of husband and wife, most of them very much to the disadvantage of the former. From one extreme the law has gone to another. The husband is liable for the wrongs committed by his wife, though he has no power to prevent her from committing them. She for many kinds of contracts is his agent, and can bind him practically to almost any amount. He may be compelled to find her in funds wherewith to carry on proceedings in the Divorce Court. Liabilities founded upon the identity of husband and wife are continued when, by reason of the Married Woman’s Property Acts, it no longer exists. Of these anomalies we rarely hear, though, as any one conversant with proceedings in Courts of Law is aware, they lead to cases quite as hard as that of Mr. Wilks. Somehow, then, is kept well in the background the fact that, in a Parliament elected by men, laws placing them in a position of inferiority and disadvantage are passed.

As usual the Times extracted the large fact of sober significance from an affair that was in most of its phases a comedy. Barely half a century ago, so far as property rights were concerned, the English law regarded the husband and wife as one person, and the husband as that one. Today she not only has her own property, but he may be imprisoned for her delinquency in paying her taxes. And yet there are those who say that the legal world does not move.

This is from the March, 1913 edition of The Green Bag: An Entertaining Magazine for Lawyers.

This comes from the 13 November 1911 edition of New Zealand’s Evening Post, and concerns tax resistance as practiced by English women’s suffrage activists:

Miss Clemence Housman, sister of Mr. Laurence Housman, has gone to prison as a protest against taxation without representation. The paper Votes for Women thus details the circumstances: Two years ago Miss Clemence Housman took a house, for which she was taxed inhabitated house duty, to the amount of 4s 6d. This, since she was denied all Parliamentary representation, she refused to pay. Then, in spite of their assertion that “taxation without representation is legalised robbery,” the Government, tried, by means of threats and legal proceedings, to extract from Miss Housman the tax for which she is allowed no vote. In July of this year Miss Housman received a letter from tho Board of Inland Revenue, stating that legal proceedings had been taken for the recovery of the inhabited house duty, amounting to 4s 6d, and that unless the tax, plus the costs and out-of-pocket expenses, amounting to £4 18s 6d, were paid steps would be taken for her arrest and imprisonment, but that, as they were unwilling to resort to extreme measures, if Miss Housman would pay the tax and the bare out-of-pocket expenses, amounting to £2 10s, they would waive the matter of costs. These terms, since she refused to countenance taxation without representation at all, Miss Housman refused. The department then sent another letter, a copy of which appeared in last week’s Votes for Women, stating that unless the sum of £2 14s were paid within four days the writ would be lodged with the sheriff at once. To this Miss Housman replied that though she could not conscientiously pay the tax she was ready to conform to the law in other respects, and that on Monday, 14^th August, she would be at her house at Kensington between 12 and 1 o’clock. The department replied that this date would not be convenient, and nothing further was heard of the matter for some time, until Miss Houseman received personal intimation that on 28^th September she would be arrested. The officials, however, did not put in an appearance until the next day, when at 10 o’clock in the morning Miss Housman was arrested and taken to Holloway. The day on which the Government threatened the arrest, a protest meeting was held outside Miss Housman’s residence at Kensington. The speakers included Mrs. Pethick Lawrence, Miss Nina Boyle, Mrs. Kineton Parkes, and Mrs. [Caroline] Fagan, of the Women’s Tax Resistance League. Mr. Laurence Housman, who presided, explained the circumstances. On the Saturday night, a large crowd gathered outside Holloway Prison, and was addressed by Mrs. Cobden Sanderson, a daughter of Richard Cobden. Before they dispersed, they gave three rousing cheers for Miss Housman, which, Votes for Women says, it is hoped reached the lonely prisoner in her cell.

This report comes from the 5 January 1912 Toronto World:

Woman — lovely woman — has devised a new method of harassing the British Liberal Cabinet, which at least on the question of her right to the suffrage is a house divided against itself, and therefore, on the best authority, in a parlous condition. Many members belonging to the two militant societies and many more belonging to organizations that eschew violent methods, have bonded themselves together in a “Women’s Tax Resistance League,” imitating thereby the device employed by the Nonconformist opponents of Mr. Balfour’s famous — or infamous, as it may please — Education Bill. In this new move the ladies are more logical than they have been in some of their schemes to draw public attention to their grievance and to achieve its redress.

Taxation without representation is abhorrent to the free man — why not to the free woman? What men have been constrained to resist as unconstitutional and been therein justified by the verdict of history, cannot be blamed when they are offered the flattery of imitation. Nor are women without appeal to the very recently expressed opinions of noble lords and other indignant resenters of the government’s policies. One of them wrote down words to the effect that if the Unionist party was really in earnest in resisting the unconstitutional and revolutionary methods of the government, why should they not organize a refusal to pay taxes until a referendum be introduced? Sir John Lansdale, M.P., also declared in a speech that “they disregard the authority of our Irish Parliament and would refuse to pay its taxes.”

However, whether mankind is inclined to resent or not this further assertion of the claim to complete equality and adoption of the role of tax resister, this new movement is certain to be generally supported. Among the arguments offered in its favor is that women who are property owners and payers of taxes and therefore count as a force in the community, owe a special duty at the present time to women who do not count. Tax resistance, it is contended, provides in the locality where it is employed, a valuable object lesson in support of the cause which women have at heart. The claim is also made that tax resistance forms a common bond of action for suffragists of all shades of opinion; and it may be added will probably be much more generally effective and certainly far more dignified than struggles with constables and wanton destruction of property.

On this date, 99 years ago, a magazine called The New Age published “A Women’s Suffrage Supplement” in which a number of people were asked to respond to the following questions:

1. What in your opinion is the most powerful argument (a) For, or (b) Against woman’s suffrage?
2. Is there any reasonable prospect of obtaining woman’s suffrage in the present Parliament, and this immediately?
3. Have the militant methods in your opinion failed, or succeeded?
4. What alternative methods would you suggest?

Some of the answers touched on the tax resistance campaign for women’s suffrage, though most of these simply mentioned the power of the “no taxation without representation” argument. Laurence Housman was an exception, and promoted a stronger tax resistance campaign:

The methods which I believe will be effective to this end are not an alternative to, but an extension of, militancy. Tax-resistance should be conducted not merely on passive lines, but so as to insure that the Government secures no penny of profit from the women whom it taxes against their will. This can be done in ways that will involve no unequal struggles with the police, and I believe that in the near future it will be done — that women will “take back” in value all those forced levies and deductions of income tax at the source (the return of which, on demand, has been refused by the authorities) in such a way that, though it will involve no danger to any member of the community, will effectually make taxation without representation unprofitable to the Government that attempts it. To me this seems an absolutely right principle — no act of revenge, but a clear demonstration of a constitutional claim which the public will not fail to understand. And if the women recognise the principle as right, then the cost to the Government of unconstitutional taxation will be an accurate measure of the women’s desire for political enfranchisement.

I recently discovered on Google News Archives a treasure trove of information about tax resistance in the British women’s suffrage movement, in the form of what looks like the complete run of The Vote, the newspaper of the Women’s Freedom League.

I’ve found upwards of 175 different mentions of tax resistance in this archive, and I hope to share them here over the next year, assuming I can keep up the pace. They tell the story of a tax resistance campaign that had many facets, met multiple challenges, used a variety of techniques, and can take at least some of the credit for a successful campaign for women’s suffrage.

Today, a short piece from the 22 April 1932 edition, marking the death of Florence Gardiner Hamilton that contains this note:

I was not present when she took her stand as a Tax Resister from Chestnut Cottage, Wendover, but was told by a countryman that “if ever there was a rebellion in the quiet village of Bucks it was that day”! How reminiscent of those four women who backed John Hampden and resisted the ship money! Their names were writ in letters of ribboned gold tied upon a wreath and placed by their spiritual descendants (Mrs. Hamilton and others) on the great Hampden’s statue in Aylesbury market-place in our day and generation.

For some reason, Google News Archives lists The Vote mistakenly as “The Globe,” so it can be more difficult to find than it should be.

When the battle for women’s suffrage in Great Britain was more-or-less won, one of the movement’s veterans, Margaret Kineton Parkes, wrote a history of the tax resistance campaign that was a central part of the victory.

This book, The Tax Resistance Movement in Great Britain was published around 1919 or 1920 by The Woman Citizen Publishing Company (or the Women’s Freedom League, sources differ). It would be of enormous interest and help to my research in this area, but it’s proving to be very hard to get ahold of. Google Books doesn’t have it. My library doesn’t have it, nor does its Link+ network. I put in an interlibrary loan request, but it was denied in record time “because we were unable to locate any libraries in North America that owns this title.” WorldCat knows the book exists, but doesn’t know of any libraries that carry it.

The Women’s Library at London Metropolitan University has a copy, along with some other interesting-looking pamphlets from the Women’s Tax Resistance League, but I was unable to find their policy on photocopying for far-off researchers, if they have one, and I don’t think I’ll be in London any time soon.

In this day and age when so much has come on-line, it’s especially frustrating to find some piece of data like this tantalizingly out-of-reach. Anyone live near The Women’s Library at London Metropolitan University?

From the 27 June 1919 issue of The Vote:

The Tax Resistance Movement in Great Britain

(from W.F.L. Literature Department, 1s.; post free, 1s. 1d.)

Not long ago, at the final meeting of the Women’s Tax Resistance League, it was decided to present the famous John Hampden Banner (which did such magnificent service at so many women’s protest meetings against the Government’s unconstitutional practice of taxation without representation), to the Women’s Freedom League. We treasure this standard of former days, and now we are the grateful recipients of an edition of “The Tax Resistance Movement in Great Britain,” written by our old friend, Mrs. [Margaret] Kineton Parkes, with an introduction by another of our friends, Mr. Laurence Housman.

This little book is charmingly produced, and on its outside cover appear a figure of Britannia and the colours of the Women’s Tax Resistance League. Every reader of The Vote knows that it was the Women’s Freedom League which first organised tax resistance in the year 1909 as a protest against women’s political disenfranchisement, and all our readers should be in possession of a copy of this book, which gives a history of the movement, tracing it back to 1870, when two sisters, the Misses [Anna Maria & Mary] Priestman, had their dining-room chairs taken to the sale-room, because, being voteless, they objected to taxes being levied upon them. Dr. Octavia Lewin is mentioned as the first woman to resist the payment of licenses. It is refreshing to renew our recollections of the tax resistance protests made by Mrs. [Charlotte] Despard, Mr. [Mark] Wilks (who was imprisoned in Brixton Gaol for a fortnight), Miss [Clemence] Housman (who was kept in Holloway Prison for a week), Mrs. [Isabella] Darent Harrison, Mrs. [Kate] Harvey (who had a term of imprisonment), Miss [Kate] Raliegh, Mrs. [Anne] Cobden Saunderson, Dr. [Winifred] Patch, Miss [Bertha] Brewster, Dr. [Elizabeth] Knight (who was also imprisoned), Mrs. [Mary] Sargent Florence, Miss Gertrude Eaton, and a host of others too numerous to mention, and last, but not least, Miss Evelyn Sharp, who, as Mrs. Parkes says, “has the distinction of being the last tax resister to suffer persecution at the hands of unrepresentative government in the women’s long struggle for citizenship.” The full list of tax-resisters appearing at the end of this pamphlet will be found to be of special interest to all suffragists.

I haven’t yet found a copy of this book on-line or available via interlibrary loan. I might be able to order photocopies of a microfilm version held by a library in Australia, but I’m too cheap and so I’m holding out for a better option. Any ideas?

Another source I’ve had trouble tracking down is Laurence Housman’s The Duty of Tax Resistance, which comes from the same campaign. The Vote printed excerpts from it in their 27 June 1913 issue:

The Duty of Tax Resistance

By Laurence Housman.

Two years ago Members of Parliament determined to place the payment of themselves in front of the enfranchisement of women; and now women of enfranchised spirit are more determined than ever to place their refusal to pay taxes before Members of Parliament. To withdraw so moral an object-lesson in the face of so shabby an act of political opportunism would be not merely a sign of weakness, but a dereliction of duty.

Nothing can be worse for the moral well-being of the State than for unjust conditions to secure to themselves an appearance of agreement and submission which are only due to a Government which makes justice its first duty. It is bad for the State that the Government should be able to collect with ease taxes unconstitutionally levied; it is bad for the men of this country who hold political power, and in whose hands it lies to advance or delay measures of reform, that they should see women yielding an easy consent to taxation so unjustly conditioned. If women do so, they give a certain colour to the contention that they have not yet reached that stage of political education which made our forefathers resist, even to the point of revolt, any system of taxation which was accompanied by a denial of representation. It was inflexible determination on this point which secured for the people of this country their constitutional liberties; and in the furtherance of great causes, history has a way of repeating itself. Our surest stand-by to-day is still that which made the advance of liberty sure in the past.

In this country representative government has superseded all earlier forms of feudal service, or Divine right, or the claim of the few to govern the many; and its great strength lies in the fact that by granting to so large a part of the community a voice in the affairs of government, it secures from people of all sorts and conditions the maximum of consent to the laws and to administration; and, as a consequence, it is enabled to carry on its work of administration in all departments more economically and efficiently than would be possible under a more arbitrary form of Government.

But though it has thus acquired strength, it has, by so basing itself, entirely changed the ground upon which a Government makes its moral claim to obedience. Representative government is a contract which requires for its fulfilment the grant of representation in return for the right to tax. No principle for the claim to obedience can be laid down where a Government, claiming to be representative, is denying a persistent and active demand for representation. People of a certain temperament may regard submission to unjust Government as preferable to revolt, and “peaceful penetration” as the more comfortable policy; but they cannot state it as a principle which will bear examination; they can give it no higher standing than mere opportunism.

It may be said that the general welfare of the State over-rides all private claims. That is true. But under representative government it is impossible to secure the general welfare or a clean bill of health where, to any large body of the community which asks for it, full citizenship is being denied. You cannot produce the instinct for self-government among a community and then deny it expression, without causing blood-poisoning to the body politic. It is against nature for those who are fit for self-government to offer a submission which comes suitably only from the unfit; nor must you expect those who are pressing for freedom to put on the livery of slaves, and accept that ill-fitting and ready-made costume as though it were a thing of their own choice and made to their own order and taste.

Representative Government man, without much hurt to itself, acquiesce in the exclusion from full citizenship of a sleeping, but not of an awakened section of the community. And if it so acts toward the latter, it is the bounden duty of those who are awake to the State’s interests to prevent an unrepresentative Government from treating them, even for one single day, as though they were asleep. They must, in some form or another, force the Government to see that by its denial of this fundamental claim to representation its own moral claim to obedience has disappeared.

That is where the great distinction lies between the unenfranchised condition of certain men in the community who have still not got the vote and the disenfranchised position of women. It is all the vast difference between the conditional and the absolute. To no man is the vote denied; it is open to him under certain conditions which, with a modicum of industry and sobriety, practically every man in this country can fulfil. To woman the vote is denied under all conditions whatsoever. The bar has been raised against her by statute, and by statute and legal decision is still maintained. There is the woman’s direct and logical answer to those who say that, after all, she is only upon the same footing as the man who, without a vote, has still to pay the tax upon his beer and his tobacco. The man is always a potential voter; and it is mainly through his own indifference that he does not qualify; but the woman is by definite laws placed outside the Constitution of those three estates of the realm from which the sanction of Government is derived. If it asks no sanction of her, why should she give it? From what principle in its Constitution does it deduce this right at once to exclude and to compel? We see clearly enough that it derives its right of rule over men from the consent they give it as citizens — a consent on which its legislative existence is made to depend. But just as expressly as the man’s consent is included in our Constitution, the woman’s is excluded.

From that exclusion the State suffers injury every day; and submission to that exclusion perpetuates injury, not to the State alone, but to the minds of the men and of the women who together should form its consenting voice as one whole. This submission is, therefore, an evil; and we need in every town and village of this country some conspicuous sign that among women submission has ceased. What more definite, what more logical sign can be given than for unrepresented women to refuse to pay taxes?

If Women Suffragists are fully awake to their responsibilities for the enforcement of right citizenship, they will not hesitate to bring into disrepute an evil and usurping form of Government which does not make the recognition of woman’s claim its first duty. The Cæsar to whom in this country we owe tribute is representative government. Unrepresentative government is but a forgery on Cæsar’s name. For Suffragists to honour such a Government, so lacking to them in moral sanction, is to do dishonour to themselves; and to offer it any appearance of willing service is to do that which in their hearts they know to be false.

From pamphlet published by The Women’s Tax Resistance League. 1d.

Excerpts from an article in the 17 July 1914 issue of The Vote:

Women’s Freedom League.

Our Position and Policy.

…

In 1908 the Women’s Freedom League initiated the first organised tax resistance campaign by which we tried to prove to the nation that we were the Constitutionalists of the country in upholding a principle of our Constitution that taxation and representation should go together, and that in denying this principle by their refusal to allow representation to the women whom they taxed, the Government were acting unconstitutionally. Ever since that time Tax Resistance has been one of the foremost planks in our platform. Not only does the Women’s Freedom League object to taxation without representation; it is just as strongly opposed to legislation being passed over the heads of women without women’s opinions being represented in the legislature, and has endeavoured to prove that the government of women without their consent is both a difficult and costly matter. The Women’s Freedom League also initiated the Census Protest, urging its members to resist and evade the Census. The result was that thousands of women up and down the country were not enrolled on the nation’s register, nor did they give any information concerning themselves. Before the National Insurance Act was passed the Women’s Freedom League declared its intention of refusing to comply with its regulations, and it has not paid one penny towards the insurance of any of its many employees. This Act not only imposes taxation and legislation on unrepresented women; it adds the further insult of asking women to collect taxes from other women who are unrepresented!

…

From the 19 July 1918 issue of The Vote:

Women’s Tax Resistance League

The principle of the enfranchisement of women having been established by the passing of the Representation of the People Act of 1918, the Committee of the Women’s Tax Resistance League have decided to dissolve.

At the outbreak of war, it was felt by a majority of the members of the League that, at the moment of national crisis, they could not continue their tax resistance, and it was therefore decided to suspend all active propaganda till the end of the war. The Committee, however, to the last moment held a watching brief, and representatives of the League have attended conferences and meetings of the Consultative Committee, before and during the passage of the Bill, and they were prepared to call members together should the need have arisen. Happily all danger is now over, and we may rejoice on the partial victory obtained.

Mrs. [Margaret] Kineton Parkes has written a little book, to which Mr. Laurence Housman has contributed an introduction, giving an account of the work done and the part played by the Women’s Tax Resistance League in the achievement of victory, and it is hoped that this will be published at the end of the war. It is also hoped that a meeting of old members of the League may be arranged when that happier time arrives.

Gertrude Eaton, late Hon. Sec.

From the 11 September 1914 issue of The Vote:

Tax Resistance.

To the Editor of The Vote.

Dear Madam,— It is with great satisfaction that I learned the other day that the Women’s Freedom League, while abandoning active militant action at this time of national crisis, was still maintaining its constitutional action of tax resistance. One of the more subtle evils of a time of war is that the nation may grow to acquiesce quietly in unnecessary encroachments on civil liberty, from fear of embarrassing those in authority on whom the immediate integrity of the nation depends. If, however, civil rights have been unthinkingly relinquished, rehabilitation is increasingly difficult when peace is again restored. Therefore, though we may cheerfully waive our individual rights as citizens, and bow to exigencies of martial law when called upon to do so, yet it is of extreme importance that we should not lose sight of the great constitutional principles on which our liberties are based. Tax resistance is a means of asserting calmly and firmly the existence and ultimate authority of these principles. At such a time as this it is true that our country needs all that her sons and daughters can give, both of money and service, but not now, any more than before war was declared, can we trust an unrepresentative Government to use its revenues in the best interests of the whole nation. I would, therefore, suggest that every tax resister should contribute the sum she owes to the Government to a National Fund of her own choosing, and should send her donation as “Taxes withheld from the Government by a voteless woman.”

A Persistent Tax Resister.

From the 25 November 1911 issue of The Vote:

The Women’s Tax Resistance League and the Reform Bill.

The Executive Committee met to consider the present situation, and the following resolution was passed unanimously:—

That the Committee of the Women’s Tax Resistance League view with the utmost indignation the proposal of the Government to extend the franchise to all men whilst ignoring the claim to citizenship of any woman, and calls upon all tax-paying women to resist the payment of Imperial taxes, as a protest against this further measure of injustice.

It has been decided to hold a John Hampden dinner on the evening of Tuesday, December 12, at the Hotel Cecil.

From the 2 January 1914 issue of The Vote:

Mrs. Gonne Declines a “Doubtful Privilege.”

All Suffragists know the devoted service of Captain Gonne to the cause of justice for women; they will be interested to hear of the plucky fight which Mrs. Gonne is making on behalf of her husband, with regard to his recent tax resistance protest. During his imprisonment, she sent a telegram, giving the facts of the case, to His Majesty the King through his private secretary. A reply informed her that petitions to His Majesty, must be submitted through the Home Secretary. To this, her reply is that she declines “the doubtful privilege” she would rather die first! She asks for a faithful officer, who has nobly borne His Majesty’s Commission, and is “struggling to keep his King’s Honour as untarnished as his own,” the right to present a petition through a military officer approved by His Majesty. She awaits the result. We echo her declaration to the King’s private secretary, that things have come to a pretty pass, when the only use England has for an honest and courageous gentleman is to break his back and fling him into prison. Capt. Gonne’s serious injuries are due to the violence of Liberal stewards in ejecting him from meetings at which he has protested against a Liberal Government’s injustice to women; it is those who are under the sway of Mr. McKenna who discharged him, cripped as he is from Lewes gaol, after a forty-eight hours’ hunger strike, and sent him, in a state of collapse on a two hours’ railway journey involving two changes. Surely the refinement of cruelty and a near approach to tragedy. With Mrs. Gonne we ask of His Majesty: Is the sacrifice of an honoured officer’s life necessary in the denial of justice to women?

Also from the same issue (excerpt):

The Political Outlook.

The passive resistance, or defiance, policy of the League has been successful also in so far as the non-payment of tax and insurance contributions goes. The Government, however, has not taken proceedings against the League in respect of these omissions, and it is strongly doubtful whether it ever will. In so far, therefore, as the final climax is avoided, the policy remains ineffective. Methods of extending and reinforcing this policy must be discussed, and the League must make up its mind to action more drastic and resolute if resistance to the increasing loads of taxation laid on women without their consent is to be rendered sufficiently striking and useful. Insurance inspectors call at Headquarters office, and threatening-looking documents arrive, but the Government plainly avoids the final issue, or is unwilling to give the advertisement of a serious prosecution. If the pace is to be forced, it is from our side that the provocative action must come.

From the 14 January 1911 issue of The Vote (100 years ago today):

Married Women and Tax Resistance.

From a leaflet issued by the Women’s Tax Resistance League, and costing 2d., we take the following extracts:

The position of married women in relation to the direct annual taxes, such as Super Tax, Income Tax, Property Tax, and Inhabited House Duty, is a very simple one, and easily grasped. No married woman is liable for any of these taxes. It is illegal to demand payment from her, to enforce or attempt to enforce payment, or even to ask her to furnish particulars of her property or income. This total exemption of the married woman from taxability arises out of the ancient and now nearly obsolete law of coverture, which holds that a husband and wife are “one,” and the husband is that “one.” Therefore the Income Tax Act, which was passed in 1842, but still holds good, stipulates that no married woman shall be held liable for taxes. Section 45 of that Act reads thus:— “Provided always, that the profits of any married woman living with her husband shall be deemed to be the profits of the husband, and the same shall be charged in the name of the husband, and not in her name, nor of her trustee.”

The above clause has never been repealed, and still governs the case of the Super Tax, the Income Tax, the Property Tax, and the Inhabited House Duty.

The ruling powers delight in asserting and maintaining the “disabilities” of the married woman. They decline to recognise her as a parental unit. They deny her the privilege of being a mayor or a municipal councillor, and insist that even if the single woman is given the Parliamentary vote, the married woman must not be allowed to participate in the privilege. In short, they believe in the law of coverture when it suits themselves. But women are now too wide awake to allow the game of “having it both ways” to be longer played on them. They know better than to continue to submit to a policy which may be summed up as, Heads I win — tails you lose.

Married women in receipt of incomes can testify, from their own experience, as to whether the law in regard to their non-taxability is obeyed, or whether it is openly and flagrantly defied. It appears that large numbers of married women are paying taxes regularly, without making the slightest protest against the illegal procedure of which they are the victims. This is probably due to their ignorance of their legal status (or rather, lack of status) just as many of them are unaware that they are not the legal “parents” of their children.

When pressed on the subject of married women and taxes, the Somerset House and Treasury officials will not, in fact dare not, deny that their methods are illegal. If asked to show their authority for imposing taxes on married women, they cultivate a stony silence. All the chicanery of the “Circumlocution Office” is brought into play, and anyone who likes can repeat the experience of Arthur Clennam in “Little Dorrit,” by writing a few letters, or making a call at Somerset House, where “knowing nothing” has been brought to a fine art. Officialdom finds itself incapable of understanding the simplest question, when the question happens to be one to which it can find no answer, and which is asked by a woman.

Many married women, including leading actresses, doctors, titled women, business women, and various others having property, businesses, investments, &c., or being in receipt of salaries, have succeeded in demonstrating their non-taxability, and thereby involved the Revenue in a total loss of the tax illegally charged on them.

Helena Normanton wrote a series of articles on “Foundations of Freedom” for The Vote. In her column in the 28 January 1916 issue she scored a historical point for the tax resisters of her day (excerpt):

We need not spend time over the origin of the House of Lords. It originated, of course, from the feudal magnates (including bishops), whose advice the King voluntarily demanded. From the time of the Conqueror to that of Henry Ⅱ. it was little more than a convenient tool for the King, but in 1163 we hear of the first case of opposition to the Royal will — Becket successfully resisted the King on a question of taxation. In 1198 there was another episcopal tax-resister — St. Hugh of Lincoln. The Tax Resistance League should feel a thrill of pride in that the two originators of this time-honoured practice were both saints — and highly popular ones, too! Whether the House of Lords would rejoice in the fact that tax-resistance was begun in England by two of its members is not for such as I to say. I wonder.

From the 3 April 1914 issue of The Vote:

Tax Resistance at Ipswich.

On Tuesday, March 31, Dr. [Elizabeth] Knight and Mrs. [Hortense] Lane had a waggon sold for non-payment of taxes, Mrs. [Isabel] Tippett came to speak. The auctioneer was very sympathetic, and allowed Miss [Anna] Munro to make a short speech before the waggon was sold. He then spoke a few friendly words for the Woman’s Movement. After the sale a meeting was held, and Mrs. Tippett and Miss Munro were listened to with evident interest by a large number of men. The Vote and other Suffrage literature was sold.

In the evening a meeting was held on Cornhill. A large audience gathered, and listened for an hour. At the evening, as well as the morning meeting the logic of tax resistance was appreciated. Ipswich may congratulate itself on a good demonstration. We are very grateful to Dr. Knight and Mrs. Lane for giving us this opportunity of declaring our faith in “No Vote No Tax.”

Elizabeth Knight also penned a fundraising request for the same issue, to defray the costs of her defense and imprisonment.

In addition, a report on the Women’s Freedom League annual conference noted that:

A resolution on the militant policy declared that “We continue our policy of resistance to taxes and to the Insurance Act until a measure for Woman Suffrage is on the Statute Book; that Suffragists refuse subscriptions to churches and organised charitable institutions till the vote is granted, with a view to women making their power felt and to show the difference their withdrawal from religious and social work would make…”

Also from the same issue:

Tax Resistance.

Dr. Knight has not yet been consigned to Holloway to serve the sentence inflicted on her for her courageous resistance of Mr. [Lloyd] George’s extortions. In the meantime, the Waggon was once more seized for taxes at Woodbridge, and Mrs. Tippett and Miss Munro took charge of the protest, which was made last Tuesday.

Also from the same issue:

Women’s Tax Resistance League.

Miss Kate Raleigh gave a most interesting lecture on the “Daily Life of a Taxpaper [sic] in Ancient Athens” at Dr. Alice Corthorn’s drawing-room meeting held under the auspices of the Women’s Tax Resistance League, on March 26. Miss Raleigh held her audience spellbound as she showed the man’s day to be full of interests and life, while the woman had nothing beyond her weaving and spinning, even marketing being an excitement denied to her. The chair was taken by Mrs. [Adeline] Cecil Chapman, who concluded her short speech with this advice to her audience: “It’s dogged that does it — you must keep on and worry, worry, worry.” A keen discussion followed, and a hearty vote of thanks was given to Dr. Alice Corthorn and Miss Raleigh.

Woman Scientist’s Protest.

On March 24 scientific instruments and book-cases belonging to Miss Ethel Sargent, Botanist of Girton College and President of the Botanical section of the British Association at the Birmingham Conference — a unique distinction — were sold at Girton as a protest against being taxed for national expenditure while she was denied a vote. The sale attracted wide attention, and Miss Sargent’s dignified speech, maintaining that resistance to taxation without representation was “the only resource for voteless women,” made a deep impression. Her speech was reported at length in the Press.

Forthcoming Sales.

Friday, April 3, Mrs. Bacon and Mrs. Colquhoun will have goods sold for tax-resistance at 3 o’clock, at Messrs. Westgate and Hammond, 81, South-street, Romford. Procession from auction room to open-air protest meeting. Speakers, Mrs. [Margaret] Kineton Parkes and Miss Nina Boyle. Monday, April 6, Drs. [Francis] Ede and [Amy] Sheppard will have goods sold for tax-resistance at 2 o’clock at Messrs. Hawkings, 26, Lisson-grove. Procession from Marble Arch Tube at 1.30 p.m. sharp. Speakers, Mrs. [Anne] Cobden Sanderson, Mrs. Kineton Parkes, and others.

An editorial in the 8 April 1911 issue of The Vote, 100 years ago today, reflected on the census boycott that the Women’s Freedom League had conducted, and included these remarks:

It must not be supposed that, by regarding the protest as successful, we imagine that a Votes for Women Bill will be hurried through Parliament. We know that is not immediately likely, but we also know that we have opened an avenue of protest which, if followed logically and consistently, cannot fail to win us victory within a reasonable time. A criterion which is sometimes used in judging of an individual action is to imagine the action to be repeated by large numbers of people. How oeven have we heard the remark uttered in a reproachful voice, “What if everyone were to do that!” as sufficient condemnation of certain actions. Applying the criterion to this boycott and to tax resistance, we can imagine the tremendous effect produced on the politician if the population was returned as consisting of about twenty-four million males and no females! and if the twenty-five million pounds sterling now paid by women in direct taxation were withdrawn by the policy of passive resistance. Were this to happen, women would be enfranchised this Session. We must aim at rousing in larger and larger numbers of women a sense of their responsibility in this matter, and to a wide application of passive resistance along various lines as opportunity offers.

From the 15 May 1913 Toronto Sunday World:

Showered Soot on Struggling Suffs.

Joint Demonstration With Tax Resisters Not Glittering Success.

Hastings, Eng., May 14. — (Can. Press.) — A joint demonstration of the tax resisters’ league and militant suffragettes, held here today as a protest against the sale of the belongings of those who refuse to pay taxes, was broken up by a mob. The women were roughly handled and half smothered with soot. Their banners were smashed.

The police finally succeeded in getting the women into a blacksmith shop, where they held the mob at bay until the arrival of reinforcements. The women were then escorted to a railway station.

You can read about the response to this incident from within the suffragist ranks in a couple of reports in The Vote:

• 23 May 1913
• 6 June 1913

Tax resistance campaigns can increase their visibility by adopting particular uniforms, badges, ribbons, or other emblems to identify resisters and those working in concert with the campaign. Today I will summarize some examples of this.

Gandhi’s satyagraha in India

An important part of the Indian independence struggle led by Mahatma Gandhi was the wearing of khādī (homespun cloth). This had three purposes:

1. To encourage the development of Indian self-reliance and industry as the economic foundation of Indian independence.
2. To hurt the British government by boycotting and thereby reducing the profits from exports of British fabric to India.
3. To serve as an emblem to identify and express the commitment of Indian patriots.

Gandhi wrote:

[T]he most effective and visible cooperation which all [Indian National] Congressmen and the mute millions can show is by not interfering with the course civil disobedience may take and by themselves spinning and using khādī to the exclusion of all other cloth. If it is allowed that there is a meaning in people wearing primroses on Primrose Day, surely there is much more in a people using a particular kind of cloth and giving a particular type of labour to the cause they hold dear. From their compliance with the khādī test I shall infer that they have shed untouchability, and that they have nothing but brotherly feeling towards all without distinction of race, colour, or creed. Those who will do this are as much Satyagrahis as those who will be singled out for civil disobedience.

Gandhi himself put in many hours at the spinning wheel, and demanded this of his followers as well.

“Gandhi caps” made from khādī became almost a uniform of the resistance. One news dispatch from around the time of the Dharasana salt raid noted:

The correspondent said the growth of the Gandhi movement was shown by the increased number of persons wearing the Gandhi caps. In the cities, he said, a majority of the people wear them; they also are beginning to be worn in villages in Punjab while even in aristocratic Simla one person in six of the population in the bazaars have donned caps, which is the symbol of the nationalist campaign.

Homespun cloth in the American revolution

But Gandhi’s campaign wasn’t the first blow against the British Empire that was struck in part by homespun cloth and conspicuous consumption of locally-manufactured goods. This was also an important part of the American Revolution.

Here is an example reported in a 1770 edition of the Massachusetts Gazette:

On Wednesday evening the honorable speaker and gentlemen of the House of Burgesses gave a ball at the capitol… and it is with the greatest pleasure we inform our readers… [of] the patriotic spirit… [that] was most agreeably manifested in the dress of the ladies on that occasion, who, to the number of near one hundred, appeared in homespun gowns; a lively and striking instance of their acquiescence and concurrence in whatever may be the true and essential interest of their country.

“Spinning bees” at which patriotic Americans worked together to card, spin, weave, and sew, so as to avoid having to import clothing from England, were ways that everybody could demonstrate their revolutionary spirit and participate in the resistance. Resisters also made a point of eschewing imported tea in favor of locally-produced substitutes (such as dried raspberry leaves).

One patriotic poem of the time advised “young ladies”:

Wear none but your own country linen;
Of economy boast, let your pride be the most
To show clothes of your own make and spinning.
What if homespun they say is not quite so gay
As brocades, yet be not in a passion,
For when once it is known this is much worn in town,
One and all will cry out— ’Tis the fashion!
And, as one, all agree, that you’ll not married be
To such as will wear London factory,
But at first sight refuse, tell ’em such you will choose
As encourage our own manufactory.
No more ribbons wear, nor in rich silks appear;
Love your country much better than fine things;
Begin without passion, ’twill soon be the fashion
To grace your smooth locks with a twine string.

Massachusetts patriots vowed in 1768:

…that we will not, at funerals, use any gloves except those made here, or purchase any article of mourning on such occasion, but what shall be absolutely necessary; and we consent to abandon the use, so far as may be, not only of all the articles mentioned in the Boston resolves, but of all foreign teas, which are clearly superfluous, our own fields abounding in herbs more healthful, and which we doubt not, may, by use, be found agreeable…

Rebecca Riots

The Rebecca Riots in Wales in the mid-19^th century were notorious for the distinctive garb donned by the resistance groups who would gather to tear down tollgates.

The leader of the party was usually a man dressed up in women’s clothing and a large bonnet, sometimes wearing a long horse-hair wig or carrying a parasol, who was given the name “Rebecca.” Rebecca’s followers also were men wearing women’s clothes, or at least white blouses over their clothes, and sometimes bonnets or other high-crowned hats, occasionally with fern fronds, feathers, or other decorations on them. They would paint their faces black or yellow, and sometimes drape their horses in white sheets.

In this case, the reasoning behind the costuming was not so much to express public pride than for other purposes. For instance:

• To disguise the participants so that the government would be less able to take reprisals against them.
• To resonate with ancient folk forms of grassroots vigilantism and protest that had a similar character (cross-dressing, face painting, a carnival atmosphere).
• To intimidate toll gate keepers with their strangeness and reputation.
• To create a figurehead for the movement that could be adopted and then set aside by multiple people, so as to make the movement’s leadership harder to target for reprisals.
• To make the resistance more festive and carnivalesque and thereby encourage participation.
• To make it easier to identify fellow-resisters in the confusion of late-night raids on dark country roads.

Badges awarded by the Women’s Tax Resistance League

Women’s suffrage activists in the United Kingdom awarded badges to resisters who had been imprisoned for their resistance. Here is a description of one such badge given to Kate Harvey:

The badge is cast in the form of a shield on which is depicted the entrance to Holloway Prison. On the reverse is a card inscribed in a faint hand: “Given to Mrs K Harvey By Women’s Suffrage After She Had Been In Prison For Tax Resistance.”

These badges were the equivalent of medals for meritorious service. An American woman who visited her counterparts across the waters observed:

It was a queer sensation in those days to look upon sweet and ladylike young women… and to know that they had actually been prisoners. It was not long before they were looked upon as something sacred, as those who had made special sacrifices for the cause, and they wore badges to show that they had been prisoners and in every place were given the post of honor until their numbers mounted up to the hundreds.

Relics of the Glastonbury cows

Abby & Julia Smith refused to pay taxes to a local government that denied women the vote and that took advantage of this by excessively taxing women’s property in order to ease the tax burden on male voters and to redistribute the money to male patronage recipients. In response, the government periodically seized and auctioned off the Smith sisters’ cows (“Votey” and “Taxey”).

Emblems made from hairs of the cows’ tails, woven into the shape of flowers, and tied with ribbons emblazoned with the slogan “Taxation Without Representation,” became popular adornments for supporters of the Smiths’ tax resistance.

“I refuse to fund this war” stickers

In 2007, an American anti-war group held a “Stop Funding the War in Iraq” rally near the offices of a Congressional leader.

A war tax resistance group was there to hand out stickers for people to wear that read “I refuse to fund this war!” I was there and noted:

I figured a few people would take them and wear them without thinking much about it, a few people would refuse to take them without thinking much about it, and the remainder would have to think about whether they should start refusing if they hadn’t already.

As it turned out, just about everyone we offered the stickers to was eager to wear one, though it’s hard to tell which of these will put their money where their mouths are. Hopefully a few, anyway, had that light bulb go on, and then looked around and wondered “have all these other people wearing these stickers started resisting their taxes?”

French cockades and militia uniforms in the Fries Rebellion

The Fries Rebellion in the United States took place about a decade after the enacting of the United States Constitution, and shortly after the successful French Revolution.

The United States government was under the presidency of John Adams, who represented the more authoritarian, aristocratic, pro-English faction; the faction out of power was more populist, democratic, and pro-French.

Tax resisters who participated in the Fries Rebellion sometimes signaled their loyalty (and frightened the Adams government) by wearing French tricolor cockades in their hats to demonstrate their affinity with the democratic revolutionaries across the pond, and/or by wearing their old American revolutionary militia uniforms to show their belief that their current rebellion was more in harmony with the spirit of the American Revolution than were the policies of the federal government.

Masks at the Carnival of Viareggio

The Carnival of Viareggio is today a parade and bacchanal, but it began with a tax protest in which “a number of local citizens, as a sign of protest… decided to put on masks in order to show their refusal of high taxes they were forced to pay.”

Australian miners wear a red ribbon

Australian miners, who in 1854 were resisting a license tax, held a “monster meeting” at which they passed a number of resolutions, including these:

[A]s it is necessary that the diggers should know their friends, every miner agrees to wear as a pledge of good faith, and in support of the cause, a piece of red ribbon on his hat, not to be removed until the license tax is abolished.

That this meeting… desire to publicly express their esteem for the memory of the brave men who have fallen in battle [during “the late out-break”], and that to shew their respect every digger and their friends do wear tomorrow (Sunday) a band of black crape on his hat…

Taking pride in resistance

Many of these are examples of resisters showing pride in their resistance. This can be a way of short-circuiting a traditional government gambit used against tax evaders: to publish their names as a way of calling them out as bankrupts or deadbeats. If the government tries to shame tax resisters as irresponsible tax evaders, but the resisters have already willingly made their resistance public, this government tactic loses its force.

When local council governments in the United Kingdom tried to use this tactic against Poll Tax resisters in the Thatcher years, the newspapers who published the lists of “shame” found themselves on the receiving end of letters to the editor from resisters who were outraged that they had not made the list — insisting that their names be included too!

Here are some similar examples of people taking pride in their resistance or in things incident to resistance:

• When the Women’s Freedom League (a British suffrage group which refused to pay taxes on the salaries of its employees), was threatened with a legal writ by the government, it decided to auction the writ as a fundraiser.
• Greek tax resisters in Penteli (near Athens), who have been refusing to pay the new taxes attached to their utility bills during the recent “won’t pay” movement, hung their urgent “past due” notices from a Christmas tree in the town square as ornaments.
• When somebody asked Quaker Nathaniel Morgan whether he and his father had “got anything” in the course of their war tax resistance (by which he meant, did his Quaker meeting reimburse them for their losses when their goods were distrained and sold), Morgan replied: “Yes, peace of mind, which was worth all.”

Whenever the authorities arrested, prosecuted, imprisoned, or seized property from Quaker war tax resisters, whatever Meeting that Quaker belonged to was sure to make note of it in their book of “Sufferings.” These ordeals “for conscience sake” were marks of honor and proofs of faith and these books were in turn the evidence of martyrdom that sanctified the Meeting.

“Friends were always careful to put their sufferings on record,” wrote Stephen B. Weeks, in Southern Quakers and Slavery. “Whatever else the Quaker might suffer, he could not bear for the shade of oblivion to come over the record of his testimonies.”

It was easier for a Quaker to exhibit fortitude in the face of government reprisal if he or she knew that this would be remembered respectfully.

Monthly Meetings press their cases

It was a common practice for Monthly Meetings to pass their records of sufferings along to be recorded also at the Quarterly Meeting level, and then finally at the Yearly Meeting.

After the American Revolution, some American Monthly Meetings used this to press for more respect for war tax resistance in the Yearly Meeting. Officially, only Quakers whose tax resistance was due to militia exemption taxes and other taxes that were explicitly and exclusively destined for war spending were to have their sufferings recorded. But some Monthly Meetings recorded sufferings for Quakers who were resisting general taxes, the bulk of which went to pay off war debt.

In 1782, David Cooper wrote of the Rhode Island Yearly Meeting:

By a previous rule, such who paid any tax wholly for the support of war should be dealt with as offenders, but Friends were allowed to pay mixed taxes a part whereof was for civil purposes and part for war, nor were sufferings of those who declined to pay these taxes received or recorded. This subject now occasioned much debate, which resulted in a minute directing such sufferings to be recorded as their testimony against war.

In another case around the same time, the monthly meeting in Evesham, New Jersey tried to forward the sufferings of its members who had refused to pay war taxes, but their Quarterly Meeting in Salem balked at recording them and forwarding them further. This led to a great deal of debate in the Quarterly Meeting and kept war tax resistance on the front burner there — and also in the Yearly Meeting, which appointed a committee of 36 Friends who unanimously recommended that these sufferings be accepted and recorded.

NWTRCC’s lists

Ed Hedemann has been maintaining lists of American war tax resisters in the modern era who have had property seized by the IRS or have been taken to court, convicted, or jailed.

Badges awarded by the Women’s Tax Resistance League

As I mentioned earlier this month the British women’s suffrage movement awarded badges to women who had been imprisoned for the cause, which is a different way of making note of and commemorating such things.

Poll Tax resisters in the United Kingdom

When local council governments in the United Kingdom tried to shame tax resisters by publishing their names in the newspapers during the Poll Tax rebellion of the Thatcher era, the newspapers who published the lists of “shame” found themselves on the receiving end of letters to the editor from resisters who were outraged that they had not made the list — and demanding that their names be included too!

The story of the birth of Jesus, as given in the gospels, begins with his pregnant mother and her husband on the move to Bethlehem in order to enroll in the census that Caesar Augustus had launched as part of his plan “that all the world should be taxed.”

A government doesn’t launch a census just because it’s curious, but usually, as with Augustus, as the prelude to a tax. It’s the government’s way of “casing the joint” before the big heist.

And so some tax resistance campaigns have started by resisting a census. Today I’ll review some examples.

Poll Tax resistance in Thatcher’s Britain

Refusal to register was one of the ways people resisted Thatcher’s Poll Tax. And the government’s difficulties in tracking people as they moved from place to place, and from one council’s jurisdiction to another, made enforcement difficult.

Resisters also successfully refused to provide information about their employment that could be used to seize taxes from their paychecks. According to one account:

[T]he councils still had one insurmountable headache. They had to find out where people worked. This was a real nightmare because other than asking the people concerned, they had no real way of getting the information they needed. When a liability order was granted by the court, non-payers were sent a form which requested details of employment. Failure to fill it out carried a fine of £100 and £400 if the non-payer provided false information. But this didn’t act as a deterrent either, because, if people couldn’t pay the Poll Tax itself (and the court costs which were added), then it made little difference if the council added another £100. A survey carried out by the Audit Commission in late 1989 showed that, nationally, only 15% of people who received the form actually sent it back. Like electoral registration, it was widely ignored even though this was a criminal offence.

Household Tax resistance in Ireland today

The Household Tax resistance movement in Ireland is defined by refusal by households to register to pay the tax.

This is not a charge to fund your local community, it is a tax to fund private speculators, bondholders and the bailout. Our incomes and services are being decimated to pay this private debt. Now people have a chance to register their opposition by not registering for this tax. By not registering, we can make this a referendum on the bailouts for the rich and the cuts for us.

When the registration deadline hit at the end of last March, only about half of Irish households had registered. Ruth Coppinger of the Campaign Against Household and Water Taxes declared victory:

This is more than was achieved by Poll Tax non-payment which started off at 15% in the first year, 1989, and which only reached 45% boycott in the year of its abolition.

Episcopalians in Scotland

The official church of Scotland had a habit through the centuries of taxing everyone in Scotland for the support of that church, whether they were members or not. This tended to annoy those who belonged to other churches. And this annoyance became especially loud whenever the “official” church got swapped from one denomination to another.

When the Presbyterians replaced the Episcopalians in the official chair in 1688, one way the Episcopalians resisted was by refusing to pay the tax and refusing to participate in a church-run census. William Maitland, in his History of Edinburgh, fretted over difficulties in estimating the population at this period of time, noting:

[T]he greatest Defect is owing to the Episcopalian Inhabitants, who, being of a different Communion from the established Church, are not subject to the Controul and Examination of its Ministers; wherefore, many of them refuse to give Accounts either of the Names or Numbers of Persons in their Families.

Queensland water tax strike

In Queensland, Australia, in 1926, the government tried to sneak in a tax on farmers who used wells or water pumps to irrigate their lands. The farmers rebelled.

Since the “tax” took the form of a stiff fee accompanying the mandatory registration of such wells or water pumps, it was natural that the tax resistance included mass refusal to register. Local Producers’ Associations across Queensland gathered and voted to refuse registration.

A month after the tax went into effect, facing mass refusal, the government backed down and rescinded the tax… though without eliminating the requirement to register wells and water pumps. Some Associations continued to counsel their members to refuse to register even after the tax resistance victory. A Mr. Roome of the Woodmillar LPA put it this way:

A lot of farmers were under the impression that because of registration fee had been withdrawn, everything in the garden was lovely. But the regulations were still there, and farmers who were under that impression would receive a rude awakening. Only formal registration had to be made, but they would find that if they furnished the particulars asked for they would give the Government an opportunity to later on impose the charges. The danger was still there, whereas if they refused to register the onus was on the Government to get the particulars, and prove that the farmers put down wells or sunk dams, etc. Once they gave the information they were at the mercy of the Government. … The excuse by the Government was that they wanted to get a survey of the water facilities which was absolutely ridiculous. The whole thing was a farce, and an excuse to impose a tax. The only way was to refuse to register, which he hoped would be done by members of all branches, and also refuse to pay the tax.

A motion that the members of the Association refuse to register was passed.

Zakāt resistance in Malaysia

When the Malaysian government assumed control of the traditional Islamic religious tithe called the zakāt, made it mandatory, and fixed its rate based on the acreage and yields of farmers, this also meant that the government had to do a census of agricultural land and monitor the crop yields.

This led to widespread, varied, mostly quiet, but strikingly effective resistance. James C. Scott, who studied the resistance, writes of one technique:

Some cultivators, particularly small-holders and tenants, simply refuse to register their cultivated acreage with the tithe agent.

Resistance to a pre-tax census in Fiji

A poll tax on indentured workers from India was initiated in Fiji in 1924. The Indians had no political representation on the island, were banned from the schools, and could only emigrate on a single ship voyage offered once per year: they were essentially considered disposable migrant labor. The workers thought the tax, which amounted to the pay of 12 days labor, was a sort of bait-and-switch on the contracts that had brought them to Fiji, and vowed to resist. As one account put it:

A start will be made in January to register all those liable to pay the residential tax, and prison will be the fate of him who does not comply with the law. Leading Indians in every district declare that they will willingly go to gaol before they register their names, and a general passive resistance is highly possible, with all its attendant strikes and bitter feeling.

The British women’s suffrage movement

The women’s suffrage movement in the United Kingdom, more so than anywhere else, used tax resistance in its struggle. “No taxation without representation,” was the cry. Suffragists also resisted government attempts to get information from them, both because these attempts were part of the effort to tax them, and because the laws that governed such information-gathering were passed by a male-exclusive government.

In 1910, Winifred Patch wrote:

I have recently received a paper from the Inland Revenue Office headed “Duties on Land Values. Notice to Furnish Information,” asking for the names and addresses of any persons to whom I pay rent or for whom I may collect rents, a penalty not exceeding £50 being incurred if this information is willfully withheld. … As I am denied the rights of citizenship I absolutely decline to facilitate in any way the carrying out of the provisions of Mr. Lloyd George’s Finance Bill, and am returning my paper with this written across it. I am hoping, through the Women’s Tax Resistance League, of which I am a member, to obtain expert information which will enable me to make it impossible for the Government to exact the £50 penalty, and will leave them with no alternative but to imprison me in default. Will other women join me in making this protest? I feel that there must be many like myself who would gladly risk imprisonment for the cause, but who, for various reasons, find it very difficult, if not impossible, to take part in the more active protests which have hitherto brought women into conflict with the law. I cannot help hoping that we have here another vantage ground from which to attack a Government which refuses us justice.

Teresa Billington-Greig took up Patch’s suggestion and rallied the troops:

The famous forms on which the owners and lease-holders of the country have to prepare the necessary statistics for the levying of the new [land] tax have been issued now in practically all parts of England, and they will be issued in Scotland within a few days. Already these forms have been returned unfilled up, and with a curt comment as to the status of the women applied to, by some of our members in England. They will be so returned by many Suffragists across the border. Neither information nor money will be forthcoming in response to the Inland Revene Department’s demands. As far as possible this piece of Government business will be impeded first by the determined refusal of information, and, second, by the withholding of the money claimed in taxes.

Such refusal to yield to tyranny is always desirable. But at the present moment it carries an additional value in that it can be employed to improve the chances of the Conciliation Women’s Suffrage Bill. From now until the fate of the Bill is decided, every woman to whom any Government application for information or for taxes is made should not only refuse to comply because of the unrepresented condition of her sex, but should add a rider to the effect that she will gladly supply information and provide the money claimed if the Women’s Suffrage Bill at present before Parliament becomes law this Session.

Margarete Wynne Nevinson put it this way:

Here I have one of Mr. Lloyd George’s wonderful forms, with its numerous questions, to answer which intelligently I should require, apparently, the training of a lawyer and surveyor, and a fund of universal knowledge which I do not possess. I am asked to answer those questions, but am not considered fit to vote for a member of Parliament. This Form is addressed to me because I have a little freehold property, but it starts off with “Sir.” I am sending it back, pointing our that I must be addressed as “Madam,” and not “Sir,” and that as I have not vote, I do not see what this matter has to do with me. If you think of it, it is rather an insult to all women property holders to be addressed as “Sir,” and not by their proper title of courtesy. The State seems to take for granted that there can be no free women or women freeholders in the country, but that all the land must be owned by men.

The following year, Charlotte Despard announced that this strategy of non-cooperation would be extended to the census proper. One news account said:

The census would cost a great deal of money, said Mrs. Despard, and involve an enormous amount of labor. So far as they were concerned, this census should not be taken.

“We shall prove,” said Mrs. Despard, “whether there is a people, or whether there can be a people without the women. We shall call upon women householders and women lodgers all over the country to refuse absolutely all information when the census takers come round.”

Women, she went on, had been proud to belong to the nation, but they had been denied their citizenship. Was it not logical, therefore, that they should say, “Very well; citizens we are not, and we shall not register ourselves as citizens?” That was logical, as a protest should be, and it would be effective.

Speaking of the preparations for the census, Mrs. Despard asserted that the officials were trying to get cheap labor: little girls from the schools at six and seven shillings a week. Mrs. Despard added that the members were going to obstruct other Government business and make other protests, and they would stop the census boycott only when they had the promise of the Prime Minister that a Woman’s Suffrage Bill would be introduced this session.

In the modern world, many governments have introduced income tax withholding or “pay as you earn.” In such a scheme, it can be difficult for people to resist paying income tax, as the tax has already been paid on their behalf by their employers. In such cases, resisters need their employers to be willing to go out on a limb and resist alongside them.

Today I’ll give some examples of employers who helped their employees resist income tax withholding.

Quaker Meetings

Quaker Meetings (congregations and collections of congregations) have sometimes supported the war tax resistance of their employees by not withholding taxes from their paychecks.

The Philadelphia Yearly Meeting, for instance, has the following policy [excerpts]:

Philadelphia Yearly Meeting of the Religious Society of Friends (Yearly Meeting) has discerned and again affirms that conscientious objection to paying taxes supporting military purposes is an appropriate and traditional individual expression of the Friends Peace Testimony. As a result, Yearly Meeting has a religious duty to refrain from taking action that violates an employee’s expression of conscience in such historic Friends testimonies. …

At the written request of an employee pursuant to this Policy, Yearly Meeting will withhold from an employee’s gross salary or wages, but refuse to forward to IRS, amounts up to but not in excess of the military portion of the federal income tax otherwise due on that employee’s pay. Yearly Meeting, in notifying IRS that it has not remitted a portion of withheld taxes, will disclose and advise IRS of its action, as described [below]…

Yearly Meeting will communicate at least annually with an appropriate office or official of the IRS to explain that, pursuant to this Policy and Yearly Meeting’s core religious principles, it has withheld the full amount of taxes, as indicated by form(s) W-4, from the salaries of certain employees opposed to the payment of taxes for military purposes. Yearly Meeting will further explain that, at the request of each such employee, it has not remitted the portion of the amount withheld which the employee has conscientiously refused to pay, that it has identified the amounts not remitted in its records, and that the amounts not remitted, plus interest, will be paid over to the Treasury of the United States on behalf of the employees at such time as there is assurance that the taxes will not be used for military purposes.

The Meeting was taken to court in 1988 for failing to remit $11,224 in taxes from resisting employees. More recently, the Meeting has been pursuing legal arguments in support of its employee Priscilla Adams, who has been resisting war taxes for years with the help of the Meeting. The Meeting was unable to convince a court to order the IRS to respect its conscientious scruples, and the agency ordered to Meeting to garnishee Adams’s salary. The Meeting has continued to refuse.

The London Yearly Meeting for a while withheld a portion of the pay-as-you-earn withholding of some of its employees, hoping to make this a test case that might legalize conscientious objection to military taxation. The courts rejected their arguments, and an appeal to the European Commission of Human Rights also failed, and so the Meeting stopped trying to resist military taxation and now gives war tax resistance only rhetorical support:

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 [withholding] 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.

American Friends Service Committee

During the Vietnam War, the American Friends Service Committee refused to withhold taxes from those of its employees who were refusing to pay taxes. Milton Mayer said, of the Committee’s action:

Under withholding, most of the people who don’t want to buy Mylai have already had it bought for them by April 15. … A few religious organizations — not the churches, of course — have refused to withhold the tax from the pay of their employes who do not want to buy Mylai. The most respectable of them is the American Friends Service Committee, with which I confess to being associated. … But the AFSC has a task force of eighty Philadelphia lawyers, and one of these years a test case will go to Washington. Meanwhile, however, the conscientious citizen who waits for a test case will go on buying Mylai until the whole of Vietnam is a ditch.

The AFSC continues to support tax-resisting employees, and has had mixed luck defending itself in court. According to the NWTRCC pamphlet on Organizational War Tax Resistance:

Employers or other entities which refuse to withhold from the assets of a war tax resister on religious grounds actually have a chance of justifying their actions in court thanks to a 1973 case involving the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) and the IRS. A federal district court ruled that the AFSC and its employees had the First Amendment right not to be required to participate in the withholding system, since the IRS has other methods of satisfying its objectives, such as levies. The decision was overturned by the Supreme Court, but solely on procedural grounds. This position is possibly strengthened by the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA), passed by Congress in 1993.

The IRS has more recently tried to send what are called “lock-in letters” to the AFSC, demanding that they withhold taxes from their resisting employees at the maximum rate permissible by law.

For a time (and this may still be the case), the AFSC policy was to obey such withholding laws and orders, but to hold back a percentage of the withheld taxes from the government, putting that percentage (a percentage they deemed equal to the percentage of the federal budget spent on the military) into an escrow account.

According to a 2008 Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration report, many employers ignore these lock-in letters. This takes some gumption. The way the law works, if an employer doesn’t comply with the lock-in letter, the employer can become liable for the taxes that the employee isn’t paying.

Mennonite General Assembly

In 1989, the Mennonite Church General Assembly adopted a resolution to “support the Mennonite General Board in establishing a policy that federal income taxes not be withheld from the wages of any of its employees who make this request because of conscientious objection to the use of their taxes for military purposes.”

The General Board, however, balked on establishing such a policy after determining “there was not enough support… to ask church boards to engage in civil disobedience.”

Restored Israel of Yahweh

The small Jehovah’s Witnesses spin-off group called the Restored Israel of Yahweh practices war tax resistance. To help facilitate this, two of them, who ran a construction business, agreed not to withhold taxes from those of their employees who were also members of that denomination.

Those two, along with the company’s bookkeeper, were taken to court and convicted of tax evasion charges, making them, according to one of their lawyers, “the first pacifist tax resisters to be prosecuted and jailed — possibly ever — for felony conspiracy to defraud the U.S. and attempted tax evasion, the most serious criminal charges in the Internal Revenue Code.”

War Resisters League & War Resisters International

In 1956, Ralph DiGia, who was working for the War Resisters League, asked them to stop withholding federal taxes from his paycheck. The League agreed, and some other employees followed DiGia’s lead.

It had taken a lot of work to get the League to adopt a policy of tax refusal. At first, they had refused, with a member of the League’s executive committee saying “the life of the organization is at stake.” War tax resisters responded, saying: “If pacifist organizations, whose business is to create a warless world, are not ready to risk something for war resistance now, when will they be ready?” Another group, the Fellowship of Reconciliation, also refused to challenge the IRS, and some of its employees resigned over the issue.

War Resisters’ International, which is based in London, decided in late 2011 to hold back a percentage of its employees’s taxes (equivalent, in its view, to the military percentage of the British national budget). The organization takes the position that conscientious objection to military taxation is an unrecognized human right, but a human right all the same, and they intend to assert it.

Collective Impressions

American war tax resister Ed Guinan for a time ran a print shop called “Collective Impressions.” “Most of the workers in the collective were rooted in a Catholic tradition of pacifism,” said Guinan, and so, from 1977 to 1980 the company paid its employees’ withholding not to the Internal Revenue Service but directly to the U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency.

The Agency returned the money, saying it could not accept it under such circumstances, whereupon Collective Impressions put the money into an escrow account from which it hoped to eventually be able to pay the money in a way that wouldn’t violate the pacifist beliefs of its employees, and from where it was eventually seized by the government.

Straight Lines, Ltd.

Martin Philips, director of the Welsh jewelry business “Straight Lines” stopped paying the 13.6% pay-as-you-earn withholding to the government for his employees — sending the money instead to the Overseas Development Administration as a protest against government military spending.

The government took Straight Lines to court, and eventually seized money from the company to cover the unpaid taxes.

Vivien Kellems

Soon after income tax withholding was introduced in the United States, ornery industrialist Vivien Kellems decided she was not interested in being the tax collector for her employees’ at the Kellems Cable Grip Manufacturing Company:

The most un-American phrase in our modern vocabulary is “take home pay.” What do we mean, “take home pay”? When I hire a man to work for me we discuss three things: the job to be done, the hours he shall work, and the wages he shall receive. And on Friday when he received that pay envelope, we have both fulfilled our contract for that week. There is no further obligation on either side. The money in that envelope belongs to him. He has worked for it and he has earned it. No one, not even the United States Government, has the right to touch it. Who dares to lay profane hands upon that money, to rudely filch from that free man the fruits of his labor, even before the money is in his own hands. This is a monstrous invasion of the rights of a free people and an outrageous perversion of the spirit of the Constitution. This is the miserable system foisted upon the people of our country by New Deal zealots and arrogant Communists who have wormed themselves into high places in Washington. This system is deliberately designed to make involuntary tax collectors of every employer and to impose involuntary tax servitude upon every employee. We don’t need to go to Russia for slavery, we’ve got it right here.

Paying taxes is a duty, a responsibility and a privilege of citizenship. Without taxes we can have no government. However I do not exercise other duties, responsibilities and privileges of citizenship for my employees. I do not vote for them, I do not form political opinions for them, I do not select a church for them, I do not pay real estate taxes for them. They are all free American citizens, thoroughly capable of performing all of the duties and responsibilities of citizenship for themselves. And so, from this day, I am not collecting nor paying their income taxes for them.

To demonstrate that she wasn’t against her employees paying their taxes, but only opposed to having to do it for them, she organized her employees once per quarter and allowed them, on company time, to fill out their own tax returns and to go down to the post office as a group to purchase money orders and file their own taxes.

The government subjected Kellems to a public smear campaign (which included intercepting and publicizing her love letters), and to legal action. The government won the legal battle, fining Kellems $7,600, whereupon she resumed withholding taxes from her employees’ paychecks.

George Fidenato

George Fidenato is Vivien Kellems reincarnated in today’s Italy. since 2009 he has been refusing to withhold taxes from his six employees’ paychecks. “I do not want to be the tax collector. I’m not a slave of the state, and wouldn’t want to work for it even if you paid me!” As of this writing he is still pursuing legal appeals.

Indianapolis Baptist Temple

The Indianapolis Baptist Temple started refusing to pay federal taxes in 1983, when pastor Gregory Dixon “decided the church would break all ties with the government and no longer act as its agent in withholding taxes from its employees,” citing Constitutional freedom of religion as his mandate for taking his church out from under Uncle Sam’s thumb. For several years, nothing came of this defiance, but in the early 1990s, the IRS started seeking back taxes, eventually filing liens against the church and against Dixon. The church fought back in court, but lost a series of appeals, finally getting turned down by the U.S. Supreme Court in 2001, whereupon the government seized and auctioned off church property and Dixon himself was fined.

“Texas housewives”

In the early 1950s, a group of women the press invariably referred to as the “Texas housewives” refused to withhold and pay social security taxes on the wages of their household help. The women were opposed to government-run social security, and to being enlisted as government tax collectors. They claimed also to be supported in their stand by their employees.

Money was eventually seized from their bank accounts to cover the taxes. They also pursued court appeals to try to get the tax declared unconstitutional, but in 1954 they lost their case and began paying the taxes.

The women’s suffrage movement in the United Kingdom

The National Insurance Act of 1911 required all workers to pay a portion of their paycheck into a fund for government-run health and unemployment benefits.

Members of the women’s suffrage movement saw this as another tax enacted without their consent, another example of “taxation without representation,” and another opportunity to resist.

Some members of suffrage groups were employers, and some suffrage groups had paid employees. In October, 1912 the Women Writers’ Suffrage League met to ask whether they “should, as a society, resist the new insurance tax and refuse to insure their secretary, with her full consent to their so doing?”

Kate Harvey refused to pay 5 shillings, 10 pence of tax for her gardener — for which she was sentenced to two months in prison.

The Women’s Freedom League refused to pay the tax on their employees — “we refuse to acquiesce in any legislation which controls the resources of women without the consent of women” — but the government seemed unwilling or unable to do more than threaten the group.

There are many ways to support tax resisters when they are targeted by the police or courts, including:

1. supporting the families of imprisoned resisters (see The Picket Line for 27 September 2012)
2. accompanying resisters to and from prison and visiting them while inside (see The Picket Line for 28 September 2012)
3. holding rallies outside the courthouse or prison (see The Picket Line for 3 October 2012)
4. attending their trials (see The Picket Line for 4 October 2012)
5. assisting their legal defense (see The Picket Line for 18 September 2012)
6. disrupting the trials or breaking resisters out of prison (see The Picket Line for 6 October 2012)
7. paying their legal fees or their fines for them (see The Picket Line for 8 October 2012)

Today I’ll finish off this series by mentioning some other examples of ways sympathizers, supporters, and organized campaigns have responded to the arrest, trial, or imprisonment of tax resisters.

Mass action in response to arrests

• When elderly pensioner Sylvia Hardy was imprisoned for refusing to continue to pay her ever-rising council tax, supporters started a daily vigil outside Exeter Cathedral to bring attention to her plight. “Judging from the passers-by,” one said, “most people are fully aware of what’s happened to her and we’ve had a lot of sympathy and interest.”
• When Australian miners refused to pay a license tax in 1854, they resolved that if any one of them were arrested: “it should be reported to the [tax resistance] committee by the nearest observer; they would immediately call a monster meeting, and the whole of the people would deliver themselves into custody.”
• In 1921, Australian miners were at it again, this time resisting the income tax. They voted on a resolution that said, in part, that upon “any member being sent to prison for refusing to pay, that all unionists be called on immediately to stop work, and refuse to recommence until such member is released, or the garnished money is refunded.”
• In Beidenfleth, Germany, between the World Wars, farmers were unable to keep up with their tax payments, and decided to strike rather than see themselves further impoverished. When fifty-seven were indicted for interfering with a tax seizure, hundreds of others who either had been involved with that action (or who wished they could have been), demanded to be tried alongside them:

  [A] fever seemed to grip the countryside. From far and wide the peasants poured into Itzehoe, where the case was to be tried, with wild cries of self-accusation. The public prosecutor could not walk down the streets without being at once mobbed by powerful, earnest men begging him to lift the heavy weight of guilt from their shoulders and to restore their inner peace of mind by issuing a writ against them.

Honor prisoners

• While people were desperately trying to get themselves indicted for tax resistance in Beidenfleth, those who succeeded were honored:

  The Beidenfleth Heifer Case developed into a regular popular festival. Maidenly hands strung garlands about the necks of those enviable peasants who had achieved the honour of receiving a writ.

• I’ve mentioned before the badges awarded by the Women’s Tax Resistance League to those who had gone to prison in the course of the campaign, and how those so awarded were given the place of honor at campaign events (see The Picket Line for 13 September 2012). It was also common for the League to throw luncheons or other such events to honor imprisoned resisters upon their release.
• The annuity tax resisters in Edinburgh, Scotland, honored one imprisoned resister with “a piece of plate for his conduct on this occasion.” Another time, they passed the hat for contributions, which, when the money was given to resister Thomas Russell, he said: “We shall give it to the Annuity Tax League, to enable them to carry out their operations in the abolishment of the tax.”
• A plaque on the Cass County, Missouri courthouse building honors the five county judges who were imprisoned for contempt for refusing to order the county to collect taxes to pay off fraudulent railroad bonds over a century ago.

Formal shows of support

• When John Brown Smith, a lone Christian anarchist tax resister who was imprisoned for tax resistance for about a year between 1879 and 1880, a convention of “Liberalists” in Boston passed a resolution in support of Smith’s stand, saying: “That in suffering eight months’ imprisonment in the orthodox Republican hell of Northampton, rather than pay his taxes, John Brown Smith has shown discerning wisdom and invincible courage, which place him high among the world’s benefactors, and disclose a practical way to vanquish sanguinary forces without shedding innocent or vicious blood.”
• One of the Cass County judges who went to jail for refusing to obey a higher court order to impose taxes on the county to pay for fraudulent railroad bonds, was elected to the state legislature by the citizens of the county while he was in prison.
• When war tax resister Zerah C. Whipple was in jail for his stand, the Connecticut State Peace Society passed a series of resolutions in support. For example: “Resolved: That it is a great, previous, and sanctifying privilege of us all, to feel that in his bonds we are bound with him, and to pour our heart’s holiest sympathies into his cup of trial.”
• The Women’s Tax Resistance League and allied organizations would pass resolutions in support of imprisoned resisters, send telegrams of congratulation to resisters who were being jailed for the cause, and hold meetings to especially commemorate and support their stand.

Petition the government for leniency

• When a number of young Quaker men were imprisoned for failure to pay a militia exemption tax in 1778, David Cooper followed them to jail, and met with the officers who were holding them captive. He wrote:

  I had much conversation with them; they appeared very moderate, but were very earnest for me to pay the fine, and not suffer our sons to be committed to prison. I told them they were aware that our religious principles forbade it; the young men were in their possession, and I had no desire to persuade them to deviate from what they believed their duty as officers required; but only wished them to use their power in a manner that would afford peace hereafter. It was a matter of conscience; they ought therefore to be very tender, and not use rigor. If they were committed I saw no end. They could never pay the fines without wounding their own minds, nor could their friends do it for them. They appeared friendly, and the young men being under the Sheriff’s care, he directed them to go home, and meet him at Woodbury at an appointed day. He afterwards sent them word they need give themselves no further trouble till he called for them. So the matter rested.

• The Women’s Tax Resistance League would write letters of inquiry to government officials whenever one of them was imprisoned. For instance, when Kate Harvey was jailed, Charlotte Despard wrote to her representative in Parliament to point out the discrepancy between her cruel sentence and the wrist-slaps given to men for similar offenses. “I cannot believe, sir,” she wrote, “that you will permit this injustice to be done. … Mrs. Harvey is one whose time, service and money are given to the rescue of little destitute children, and to the help of those not so fortunately placed as herself. While such injustices as these are permitted by the authorities, can you wonder that women are in revolt?” League member Marie Lawson started what she called a “snowball” protest — a sort of chain letter that sympathizers were supposed to send to their friends that included a postcard-sized petition they could send to various government figures.
• When American war tax resister Maurice McCracken was imprisoned, supporters sent a telegram to President Eisenbower, asking him to release the prisoner (they got a vague, noncommittal reply).
• Somewhat related to this is that when the American Revolution broke out, one item on the agenda of the revolutionaries from North Carolina was the legal rehabilitation of the tax rebels who had been convicted at the end of the Regulator movement of 1767–71.

Often in tax resistance campaigns, not everybody is able to be a tax resister, for instance because not everybody is responsible for the tax being resisted, or because the point of the resistance is that some of the people being taxed ought not to be (and so only that class of people is resisting).

In such cases it can be useful to inspire those who cannot themselves resist the tax to show solidarity for the movement in other ways, and it can also help to provide or suggest roles that non-resisting sympathizers can play in the campaign.

Today I’ll mention some examples.

• The Rebecca Rioters knew how to make their tollgate destruction popular among people who couldn’t (or even wouldn’t) participate directly. For example:
  • One night, Rebeccaites destroyed the Rhos Gate, the Rhydyfuwch Gate, and the gate on the Llangoedmore road near Cardigan. “The following day (Saturday) was market day in Cardigan, and every one who drove in was exempted from paying the usual toll, except those who came over the coach-road. The people, looking at things from that point of view, were filled with Rebeccaite enthusiasm. On that day nothing was heard at public-houses but proposals of good health and long life to Rebecca.”
  • On another occasion, they pointedly left intact the gates on “the Queen’s high road” but destroyed those on roads that the various parishes were required to maintain. “This rendered Rebecca not unpopular amongst some farmers and others, many of whom paid the fine, rather than be sworn in as special constables.”
• The Rebeccaites also sometimes resorted to threats to induce reluctant people to participate. In one example:

  All male inhabitants being householders of the hundred, were to meet at eleven o’clock on the following Thursday, at the “Plough and Harrow,” Newchurch parish, to march in procession to Carmarthen — to defy the Mayor and magistrates, and to destroy the gate on their return. Rich and poor were to be compelled to attend, and in case of illness a substitute must be found. All owners of horses were to ride. All persons absent without a sufficient excuse or substitute were to have their houses and barns destroyed by fire.

  and in another:

  [I]n order to ensure a full attendance of her followers, the church doors in the neighbourhood of Elvet were covered with notices in the dead of night, signed by “’Becca,” commanding all males above the age of sixteen and under seventy to appear at the “Plough and Harrow” on the morning of the 19^th under pain of having their houses burnt and their lives sacrificed. The time and place of meeting were also published by word of mouth at most of the Dissenting meeting-houses throughout the hundred, and wherever a disinclination was known to exist on the part of any person to join in the procession and to take part in the intended proceedings, he was privately admonished if he wished to protect his property from the firebrand of the midnight incendiary, and to excuse himself from personal injury, that he had better join the procession — “or else.” This species of intimidation had the effect of drawing together immense numbers to the place of rendezvous.

  despite the threats:

  [Their cheers] were lustily responded to by groups of spectators who had by this time completely filled Guildhall Square, so that the Rebeccaites could hardly pass through.

  At one point they explicitly threatened an attorney to make him join them on one of their destructive sprees, “so that if any proceedings were subsequently taken, he as local solicitor might be made a party to them.” They sometimes also forced the toll house operators to take part in the destruction of their own toll houses.
• When Palestinian Jews practiced tax resistance against the British occupation government in the 1930s at least one Jew back in London stopped paying his income tax as well.
• In 1981, in support of Palestinian doctors who were refusing to pay an Israeli income tax, shopkeepers in Gaza City launched multiple two-day strikes.
• Some men who were sympathetic to the tax resistance of the Women’s Tax Resistance League found that they could participate in the campaign by exploiting a legal technicality that made them responsible for paying their wives’ income taxes. If their wives refused to pay, and they were unable to pay and had no property to seize, they might be imprisoned for tax refusal — and some were.
• American revolutionaries who were using boycotts and other means to try to cut off the support of taxed and British-monopoly products found allies back in the home country in the form of manufacturers and exporters who begged Parliament to rescind the taxes so as to bring the boycotts to an end.
• War tax resister Vickie Aldrich recently got some pro bono legal assistance from law students in her battle with the IRS.
• When residents of Beit Sahour launched a tax strike against the Israeli occupation, Israel put the town under seige. Christian groups around the world attempted to bring humanitarian aid to the city, or even to visit (including the heads of the Greek Orthodox and Armenian Orthodox churches), but were turned away by the Israeli military.
• The success of the anti-Poll Tax movement in Thatcher’s Britain relied on mass popular support. The Anti-Poll Tax Unions “had to make people feel wanted and included and give everyone a sense that they had a role,” said movement chronicler Danny Burns. “In order to sustain a long and protracted struggle, it was necessary for as many people as possible to feel responsible for some aspect of the movement, however small. In the fight against the bailiffs and sheriff officers, the kids hanging around the streets passed on the word as soon as they saw a suspicious-looking character. Parents and pensioners who were not out at work organised telephone trees and were ready to be at each others’ houses at short notice.”

Sometimes the decisive turn in a tax resistance campaign has come when the resisters have coalesced into a formal group with the authority to organize and coordinate resistance actions. Today I’ll give some examples of this.

• The Great Confederated Anti-Dray and Land Tax League of South Australia formed in the Spring of 1850 to fight taxes associated with a recently-enacted Road Act, and, once organized, the League was successful in its fight. Organizer Jonathan Norman remarked to a meeting of the League in September: “They had before them an example of what might be achieved by union. In everything they had been victorious; the dray-tax. which from time to time was threatened to be enforced, was ultimately abandoned altogether. The various memorials from the different hundreds, backed by the memorial of the united delegates, had caused the Government to introduce an amended Act, which promised almost everything they desired.”
• When Charles Ⅹ and his ministers threatened to bypass the elected legislature and start taxing and spending on their own initiative in 1829, French liberals declared that since such actions violated the constitution, the people were under no obligation to pay for them with their taxes. Taxed landholders in Brittany formed the “Breton Association” to coordinate their resistance.

  This Association had a two-fold object. They proposed, in the first place, to refuse to pay any illegal tax, and in the second place to raise by contribution a common fund for indemnifying any subscriber, whose property or person might suffer by reason of his refusal.

  The members subscribed each ten francs. In the event of any tax being imposed without the consent of the Chambers, or with the consent of a Chamber of Deputies created by any illegal alteration of the existing law, payment of the tax was to be refused, and the money subscribed was to be employed in defending and indemnifying the persons who should so refuse, and to prosecute all who might be concerned in the imposing, or the levying of such illegal taxes.

  The association enacted a trigger mechanism for an organized tax strike and a process for collecting and distributing a mutual insurance fund. In this way they were able to present a credible threat to the planned royal usurpation — so much so that the newspapers that dared to print the Association’s charter were prosecuted and their editors imprisoned. This only served to fuel the movement: “The associations spread over the greater part of the kingdom; they embraced more than half the Chamber of Deputies, and a very considerable number of peers.”
• The Rebeccaites formed Farmers Unions which met in secret to discuss the same sort of grievances that, in disguise, Rebecca and her sisters would address vigilante-style, and which corresponded with each other in a regional network. One farmer said: “This Union among us is a very excellent thing if all join. When they elect members of Parliament they do just as they please, and we have no voice, but here we have. There is no way of putting things to rights till we get up this Union, and then we can do as we please and think best. If we had had this Union many years ago we should be better off than we are now!”
• The Women’s Tax Resistance League formed in 1909 when about twenty women from existing suffrage groups came together in London “with the single-minded aim of starting ‘an entirely independent society quite separate from any existing suffrage society with the object of spreading the principles of tax resistance.’ ” League organizer Margaret Kineton Parkes explained that it “included Suffragists from every camp, Conservative, Liberal, Socialist, as well as non-party, and was making every effort to get a large number of influential women to refuse to pay taxes” because “[t]he isolated refusal to pay was ineffective and only caused trouble to the refuser; but a large and unexpected number would cause considerable trouble to the Government and would bring the question at issue home to them.”
• Elias Rishmawi was among those who organized tax resistance in Beit Sahour during the first intifada. He remembers how important it was to have formed a network of committees so as to distribute communication and decision-making in anticipation of Israeli military disruption by means of curfews and arrests of the resistance leadership.
• Direct action-oriented pacifists in the United States came together in the late 1940s to form Peacemakers. “[T]his is not an attempt to organize another pacifist membership organization, which one joins by signing a statement or paying a membership fee,” they announced. By 1949 the group had about 2,000 members, about 150 of which were resisting taxes. A second group, War Tax Resistance, promoted the tactic within the anti-Vietnam War activist community. In 1982, the National War Tax Resistance Coordinating Committee formed to help a variety of groups that included war tax resistance as part of their work to coordinate and share resources and expertise.
• During the Great Depression in the United States, taxpayers’ leagues, some of which organized property tax strikes, proliferated in the thousands. Such groups “spring up like mushrooms,” one critic complained, “every time you go out in the morning, you find more of them.” These leagues attacked the taxes on multiple fronts — not only organizing tax strikes but also coordinating legal suits and pressuring political figures.
• A proposed sales tax boycott in Ottawa in 1981 was boosted by the group Human Action to Limit Taxes. “As individuals we are lost,” one resister said. “But as a group we would have some impact.”
• In January, 1830 the Birmingham Political Union of the Middle and Lower Classes formed. It would play a strong role — and would advocate tax resistance — in the battle to pass the Reform Act of 1832. But it also began as a war tax resistance group, asking its members to sign the following oath:

  That in the event of the present ministers so misconducting the affairs of the country as to make it probable we shall be involved in a Continental war [with Belgium], we will consider the propriety of checking so mischievous an event by withholding the means as far as may lay in our power, and will then consider whether or not refusing to pay direct taxes may not be advisable.

• Similarly, the Catalonian “National Union” began life as a committee to direct a tax resistance action in 1899 and grew into the organizing party for an ambitious reform movement: “its demands included the entire reorganization of the vital forces of the nation: fiscal and administrative reform, the amelioration of the judicial system, the introduction of an effective system of compulsory education, the improvement of the provincial governments.”



• In Danny Burns’s book on the Poll Tax Rebellion, he stresses how important it was for the success of the campaign that people formed and ran their own small-scale, neighbor­hood resistance groups, rather than ceding control of the movement to the various established left-wing partisan and labor-union groups who wanted to use the movement to their own ends but were also afraid to identify themselves too closely with the law-breaking resisters.

  Prior to the Anti-Poll Tax campaign, many people’s only experience of politics was a traditional Labour Party or trade union meeting — the sort of meeting where the top table takes up 90% of the discussion; where the only items discussed are those decided by the executive committee; where half the meeting time is spent discussing procedural motions or the order of words in a resolution; where political factions throw rhetoric across the room in angry and unproductive exchanges. Essentially, boring meetings which stretch long into the night. Hundreds of thousands of people have been to these meetings just once and never returned. To engage people in a mass campaign, the Anti-Poll Tax Unions had to challenge this culture of organisation. They had to make people feel wanted and included and give everyone a sense that they had a role.… This immediate form of organisation also meant that people weren’t patronised by those who had political experience. In the local groups, people didn’t need permission to act, they just had to get on the phone to their neighbours and get something going. People stay involved in political campaigns if they can contribute in the way that they feel is most effective. Very often this is not by sitting in boring meetings.

  …most of the successful Anti-Poll Tax Unions operated on a principle of parallel development. Rather than trying to assert majority control or spend hours reaching consensus, people were allowed to get on with what they thought was most important. Everything could be done in the name of the Anti-Poll Tax Union, which existed to coordinate activity against the Poll Tax, not to specify its exact nature.

  However, he also notes:

  …it was sometimes in the places where the Anti-Poll Tax Unions were weakest that resistance was strongest. For example, St. Pauls was almost the only area in Bristol which couldn’t sustain an Anti-Poll Tax group. Local people didn’t feel the need to set up new groups because, as in many inner city areas, they already had strong networks of solidarity, and there was already a high level of general hostility to officials of any sort. … By the end of 1990, three times as many people had turned up to court to contest their cases from St. Pauls than any other area.

• White supremacists in Louisiana met in 1872 to form “The People’s Association to Resist Unconstitutional Taxation” to coordinate their resistance to state and city taxes enacted by the reconstruction government there, and to provide legal support for resisters.
• Property owners of Silver Lake Assembly met in 1908 to decide how to respond to a property tax they felt was being illegally put over on them by a government with no authority to do so. They decided to respond as a group, “and perfected an organization for the purpose,” issuing a resolution saying that they “individually and collectively will resist the payment of the so-called taxes.”

A very frequently-used tactic of tax resistance campaigns is to take public oaths or sign public pledges of resistance. This signals to potential resisters that they will not be alone, and is a show of defiance to the authorities. I’ve collected dozens of examples, which I’ll summarize here:

• When Gandhi launched his first satyagraha-based campaign in South Africa in 1906, a member of the meeting asked everyone present to take a solemn oath of opposition. Gandhi remarked:

  There is no one in this meeting who can be classed as an infant or as wanting in understanding. You are all well advanced in age and have seen the world; many of you are delegates and have discharged responsibilities in a greater or lesser measure. No one present, therefore, can ever hope to excuse himself by saying that he did not know what he was about when he took the oath.

  I know that pledges and vows are, and should be, taken on rare occasions. A man who takes a vow every now and then is sure to stumble. But if I can imagine a crisis in the history of the Indian community of South Africa when it would be in the fitness of things to take pledges, that crisis is surely now. … Resolutions of this nature cannot be passed by a majority vote. Only those who take a pledge can be bound by it. This pledge must not be taken with a view to produce an effect on outsiders. No one should trouble to consider what impression it might have upon the local Government, the Imperial Government, or the Government of India. Every one must only search his own heart, and if the inner voice assures him that he has the requisite strength to carry him through, then only should he pledge himself and then only would his pledge bear fruit.

  His entire speech, which reflects on vows and the responsibility of vow makers, is worth reading in this context.
• In 1935, “98 per cent of the merchants at Stuttgart and… 60 out of 60 merchants at DeWitt,” Arkansas, signed pledges to refuse to collect a new sales tax from their customers or to pay it to the government.
• Also in 1935, in Verdun (then a suburb of Montreal), 164 shopkeepers, including the mayor, signed a pledge to refuse to collect or pay a Montreal city sales tax.
• The following year, merchants in Gadsen, Alabama followed suit: gathering and voting unanimously to refuse to collect or pay a sales tax.
• In Ghana, in 1854, the Akuashongs met and “swore not to… pay any tax, even if the government should fight with them, and to make war with any party breaking the agreement.”
• In 1829 several French newspapers printed the text of a pledge in which French liberals vowed to resist any taxes that the monarchy instituted without going through constitutional channels. The newspapers were themselves prosecuted for this. However, in court, they pointed out that the King himself, before he took the throne, had signed a tax resistance pledge of his own, along with three other members of the nobility, as a protest against republican infringements on their privileges.
• In Castine, Maine, in 1975, the pledge took the form of a vote: the town voted 125 to 65 at a specially-convened town meeting, to refuse to collect a school funding tax in defiance of a superior court order to do so.
• In 1913, some 5,000 businessmen in Belfast vowed to “keep back payment of all taxes which they can control, so long as any attempt to put into operation the provisions of the Home Rule Bill is persevered in.”
• In the Women’s Tax Resistance League, members signed “pledge cards” that indicated which taxes they would be resisting if the government persisted in denying women the vote.
• The Reform Act agitation really hit its stride in 1831 when a huge rally, 150,000 people strong, vowed as a group to stop paying taxes until the Act’s passage. One account of the meeting read:

  He declared before God, that, if all constitutional modes of obtaining the success of the reform measure failed, he should and would, be the first man to refuse the payment of taxes, except by a levy upon his goods [tremendous cheering, which lasted some minutes]. I now call upon all who hear me, and who are prepared to join me in this step, to hold up your hands [an immense forest of hands was immediately elevated, accompanied by vehement cheering]. I now call upon you who are not prepared to adopt this course, to hold up your hands and signify your dissent [not a single hand appearing, loud shouts and cheers were repeated].

• In South Africa’s “New Rush” in 1874, a number of miners signed a pledge reading, in part, “I promise on my honour and in presence of the people that I shall not from this day forward — until released from this obligation by the officers of the League — pay any taxes or impositions whatsoever to the Government, id est, for the support and maintenance of the Government of this territory; and that I shall buy from, sell to, or deal with only such men as have also taken this pledge or obligation; and that I shall to the utmost of my power, with purse and person, protect any and every officer and member of the League against coercion or consequences of what nature soever arising out of the action necessitated by this pledge.
• At least 1,000 taxpayers in Elmira, New York, signed a declaration in 1933 saying that “The undersigned taxpayers… believing the county, city, and school tax rates as levied are too high, hereby refuse to pay until the budget has been thoroughly examined by the committee of the Taxpayers’ league. We also refuse to pay penalties until such revision has been made and a lower tax adopted.”
• 500 taxpayers in Cadillac, Michigan, signed a petition in 1961 in which they vowed to refuse to pay taxes for two years unless the local government cut its budget by 20%.
• In 1715, 36 New Jersey residents signed their name to a petition to the home country in which they declared that they would refuse to pay any further taxes so long as a Roman Catholic was in charge of tax assessment.
• At a “monster meeting” at Castlemaine in Australia in 1854, a group of miners unanimously adopted a resolution to refuse to take out licenses.
• Taxpayers in Zeehan, Tasmania, met in an open-air meeting in 1904 and passed a resolution stating that they “hereby express our solemn determination to passively resist the payment of the unjust income tax imposed by the late Government.”
• A Queensland, Australia stealth tax on rural irrigation improvements, was resisted by the farmers there in 1927, who, organized in groups called “Local Producers’ Associations,” passed motions vowing to resist. For example, the Association in Rockhampton “unanimously decided that all members pledge themselves to offer passive resistance to the operation of the Act by refusing to make the required applications or to furnish any returns, or to make any payments as demanded by the Act. Further, it was decided to invite all other LPAs and kindred bodies to adopt a similar attitude.”
• Earlier this year, about twenty households near Paddock Wood, England, “signed a declaration to withhold [tax] payments” to protest the lack of government action against vagabonds camping in their neighborhood.
• When the Russian Duma-in-exile issued the Vyborg manifesto in 1906, calling on Russians to refuse to pay taxes to the Czarist autocracy, a number of villages responded by voting whether or not to heed the call and then taking the results of the vote as a pledge they were bound to abide by.
• In 1938, 149 members of a Catholic War Veterans post vowed to refuse to pay their real estate taxes unless the government dismissed a Communist Party member from his post as an advisor to the Borough President of Manhattan.
• At a meeting of the Charleston Board of Trade in South Carolina in 1871, the white supremacist group unanimously passed a series of resolutions declaring that they considered debts incurred by the reconstruction government to be illegitimate and that they would resist the payment of taxes meant to pay them off.
• At a mass meeting of white supremacists in Louisiana in 1872, they passed a resolution vowing that “we will pay no more taxes to State or city.”
• Some resisters of Thatcher’s poll tax made their resistance dramatically public by burning their “final reminder notices” at demonstrations.
• This tactic has been prominent in the American war tax resistance movement. For example:
  • In 1951 the American pacifist group Peacemakers released a statement, signed by 59 members, in which “the undersigned state hereby that we are not going to pay our federal taxes.”
  • In 1966, some 370 people signed a public oath saying “We will refuse to pay our federal income taxes voluntarily.”
  • In 1967, more than five hundred writers and editors added their names to a war tax resistance pledge that appeared as a newspaper advertisement. The names included James Baldwin, Noam Chomsky, Philip K. Dick, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Allen Ginsberg, Norman Mailer, Henry Miller, Grace Paley, Susan Sontag, Benjamin Spock, Gloria Steinem, William Styron, Hunter S. Thompson, Thomas Pynchon, Betty Friedan, and Kurt Vonnegut.
  • Also in 1967, a letter was circulated largely among academics, and signed by more than a dozen professors, among others, organized as the “No Tax for War Committee” in which the signatories pledged to “withhold all or part of the taxes due” and urged the recipients to join their public pledge.
  • The ongoing War Tax Boycott has a public sign-on component.

If you can convince an organization to endorse tax resistance, or to recommend it to its members, this can strengthen your campaign and bring in new resisters.

I’ve mentioned before the tactic of creating groups to organize tax resistance. This related tactic involves convincing already-established groups to make tax resistance part of their program.

• Tax resistance in the women’s suffrage movement started with individual women who saw the logic (and the rhetorical power) of the “no taxation without representation” stand. But it was an uphill climb to get suffrage organizations to endorse the tactic. Here are some examples from the U.S.:
  • Both Susan B. Anthony and E. Oakes Smith offered resolutions advocating tax resistance at the Syracuse Women’s Rights Convention in 1852, but the records of the convention do not indicate whether these resolutions were taken up or voted on.
  • In 1913 the newly-formed Congressional Union for Woman Suffrage announced that while it did not plan to organize a tax resistance campaign, it “would have every sympathy with such action.” This came in the wake of a call to tax resistance by Anna Howard Shaw, president of National American Woman Suffrage Association.
  and from the United Kingdom:
  • In 1910, the Women’s Freedom League, which had advocated tax resistance since 1908, was joined by the older Women’s Social and Political Union. “It is to be hoped,” wrote a League member in their newsletter, “that the Women’s Tax Resistance League will succeed in persuading all the other Suffrage Societies to unite on this logical policy of refusing supplies until our grievance is redressed.”
  • In 1913, the Federated Council of Suffrage Societies “unanimously and enthusiastically” endorsed tax resistance and “recommended its adoption as a means of supporting their demands for a Government measure of Woman Suffrage.”
• The classic example of a group adopting tax resistance is that of the Society of Friends, or Quakers. Since the founding of the Society, it had a policy of instructing members to refuse to pay tithes to rival churches, and this soon expanded to teaching Quakers not to pay taxes for “drums, colors, or for other warlike uses” or fines assessed for refusal to participate in the military. These policies would be codified in a book of “discipline,” and Quakers who deviated from them would be subject to a process of correction, or, if they continued to defy the policy, “disowning.” The extent of the policy could change over time, and from meeting to meeting, and there could be heated argument about how strict a standard of tax resistance Quakers should be held to.
• An existing network of Local Producers’ Associations was crucial to the quick mass-adoption of tax resistance by agriculturalists in Queensland, Australia, in 1927 and to the success of their campaign.
• Miners’ lodges in western Australia met and voted to instruct the Coal and Shale Employees’ Federation to launch a tax strike in it and other employees’ unions and to back it up with a general strike if the government took action against resisters, in 1921.
• In 1978, three American “peace” churches — representing Quakers, Brethren, and Mennonites — issued a joint statement that called for war tax resistance among the 350,000 church members there.
• The United Ireland Party — known as the “Blue Shirts” — passed a tax resistance resolution at its annual conference in 1934.
• In 1939, the Landlords Association, a group of Jewish property owners in Palestine, adopted a policy of refusing to pay taxes to the British occupation government in protest against its “White Paper” policy.
• After the passage of the 1902 Education Act which gave taxpayer money to sectarian schools, the Leeds Free Church Council voted 89 to one in favor of promoting tax resistance.
• The New York Automobile Club met in 1933 and decided to advise its members not to pay a new license fee that it considered to be illegal.
• The Moslem League instructed its members to refuse to pay a punitive tax to the United Provinces of British India in 1946.

Very occasionally, I’ve heard of tax resistance or tax resistance-like campaigns who have threatened to withhold certain non-governmental, voluntary payments as well.

For example, the Women’s Freedom League, at the same time its sister society the Women’s Tax Resistance League was refusing to pay taxes so long as women were not permitted to vote for their political representatives, resolved “that Suffragists refuse subscriptions to churches and organised charitable institutions till the vote is granted, with a view to women making their power felt and to show the difference their withdrawal from religious and social work would make.”

And last year, Howard Schultz, the CEO of Starbucks, announced that he and the heads of a hundred other large companies had pledged to withhold campaign contributions from political candidates “until a fair, bipartisan deal is reached that sets our nation on stronger long-term fiscal footing.” As the ongoing “fiscal cliff” foofaraw shows, no such deal was reached. I looked up a handful of the signers of this pledge at OpenSecrets.org to see if they’d held to their vow, and it was not very encouraging. Whole Foods chief Walter Robb, for instance, donated $5,000 to the Democratic National Committee about ten months after signing the pledge. Tim Armstrong of AOL donated $30,000 to the Republican National Committee between May and September of this year, along with additional contributions to a senatorial candidate and to Mitt Romney’s campaign. Mickey Drexler of J Crew donated to several Democratic Party organizations this year. Campaign organizer Howard Schultz himself couldn’t resist the temptation to drop $1,000 into Congresswoman Nita Lowey’s campaign bucket.

However another clever fellow came up with a plan to get money out of politics. Dubbed Repledge, it works like this:

We connect individual contributors who agree to transform their political contributions into charitable donations if a supporter of the opposing political candidate matches the contribution.

This way, people can divert their political contributions to more useful purposes without feeling that they’re thereby empowering even worse politicians than they ones they had been intending to feed.

Pickets and other such public demonstrations commonly accompany tax resistance campaigns. Here are some examples that caught my eye:

• During the Tithe War in Ireland, one parliamentarian noted with some panic a news account of a mock funeral held in Ireland, attended by 100,000 people “who assembled to carry in a procession to the grave two coffins, on which were inscribed ‘Tithes’ and ‘Rent’.”
• The Women’s Tax Resistance League used signs, banners, handbills, chalked-slogans, and sandwich boards to help get their “No Vote — No Tax” message across at their public demonstrations.
• The Benares hartal of 1810–11 was in part a strike, but in part a huge demonstration, the duration and peaceful discipline of which pointed out the determination of the demonstrators.
• When the Rebecca Rioters came to Carmarthen, they came en masse and during the daytime, almost as a parade. They were “preceded by a band of musicians playing popular airs, and men bearing placards with the following enscriptions in large printed letters:” “Justice and lovers of Justice are we all.” “Freedom and better food.” “Free tolls and Freedom.”
• The tax strike in the French wine-growing region in 1907 was preceded by huge demonstrations and parades. Wrote one observer:

  All observers were struck by the extraordinary perfection of the organization. It was not necessary once for the troops or police to interfere with the multitude which was variously estimated was made up of from 400,000 to 600,000 persons. A feature of the parade was the large proportion of women participating. Groups from various cities bore banners with various inscriptions and carried coffins, guillotines, &c.

  Another wrote:

  …all night long trains entered the station every quarter of an hour with crowds, many of whom had been travelling fifteen and twenty hours. Looking worn and dishevelled, they formed in serried battalions, and, headed by bands and trumpets and drums, young and old, men, women, and children, marched to their quarters…

  This morning five huge columns, approaching from various quarters, welded at the Arch Peyrou into one procession nine miles long, and the march through the streets began at 11. Placards threatened, “The day of reckoning is at hand,” “We will take up arms,” “Down with the deputies.” Here were 200 handsome Norbannese women in mourning, there 500 young girls robed in white muslin, with tricolor robes.

• In 1906 in Turkey, mass tax refusal was backed up by mass demonstrations of as many as 20,000 people, demanding the repeal of the taxes.
• In 2003, anti-Chavez protesters launched a tax strike by tearing up their income tax forms in a demonstration in which thousands of demonstrators marched on the tax offices in Caracas.
• Farmers in New Zealand threatened to drive their farm equipment onto the highways to jam the roads in protest against a new greenhouse-gas-targeting “flatulence tax” on livestock in 2003.
• When the authorities tried to impose a tax on dogs in Breslau, Germany, in 1925 5,000 dogs (and their owners) descended on city hall to protest.
• One of Gandhi’s first experiments with satyagraha was a strike in South Africa to protest against a tax on Indian immigrants there. The culmination of that campaign was a massive protest march of striking workers that deliberately violated laws restricting the right of travel of Indians.
• Ammon Hennacy was fond of accompanying his solitary tax resistance with periodic fasts and picketings at IRS headquarters, typically around the time of the anniversary of the Hiroshima bombing. He would hand out to passers-by copies of the Catholic Worker as well as leaflets that described his own particular protest — while also carrying a sign and wearing a sandwich-board that put things more concisely.
• The previously-untaxed caste of Bhats in India responded to being subjected to the income tax in dramatic fashion: “Two thousand men turned out to remonstrate with the Superintendent of Police who appeared on the scene. He remained firm, whereupon they cut themselves with knives, cursed the Assessors, bespattering them with their blood, and declared they would rather die than surrender their birthright. When several were apprehended, their wives began to hack their persons, and so severely that several have since died. Up to the last intelligence the Bhats still gloried in their refusal.”
• American war tax resisters frequently hold rallies, pickets, street theater, and other such actions around “Tax Day” (the date when federal income tax returns are due). This among other things helps make sure that their message is one of those represented in the obligatory tax day news stories. Here is an example:

  The group then left for the federal building, in which the IRS and a number of other offices are located, at which 75 people burned tax forms and blockaded the street for a bit. There were no arrests. In conjunction with the tax form burning, they used a banner with the quote: “Pardon us, friends, for the fracture of good order, for burning paper instead of babies,” sent from prison during the Vietnam War by Daniel Berrigan… They offered their apologies for burning tax forms instead of Colombian villages, Palestinian schools, Iraqi hospitals, Filipinos’ mosques and Afghan homes.

  In another case:

  After a mock President Clinton bragged to onlookers about the many areas in which the U.S. was #1 - military spending, arms sales, violent gun deaths, etc. — he drove home the point with an 8-foot Patriot missile tossed into a group of students, parents, nurses and other ordinary people.

  Mass dying ensued, followed by an appearance by the grim reaper himself. Ostensibly there to collect bodies, he assented to an interview with M.C. Daniel Woodham. Death was the only one at the rally willing to even attempt an explanation of the maniacal logic of a still-bloated U.S. military budget.

  Here are some street theater tips from war tax resister Steve Gulick.
• Some war tax resisters in Wales brought their tax payment to the tax office in a bucket of blood. When the payment was refused, they poured the blood over the steps of the building.
• In 1997 members of the Magdalene House Catholic Worker held a demonstration at the IRS office in which they “laid out a cloth altar with candles, flowers, and health care items to represent life, and tax forms with their blood poured on them to represent death. They held a worship service and talked about why they were there.” This was enough for several of them to get arrested.
• During the rebellion against Thatcher’s poll tax, there were several demonstrations.
  • The Scottish Trade Union Conference organized a number of rallies, including a 30,000-person march in Edinburgh, but then it put its weight behind a strange 11-minute-long general strike at which people all over Scotland were supposed to briefly stop working to engage in some short anti-poll-tax activism. That protest didn’t go anywhere and the Union Conference lost some credibility as a movement organizer.
  • Hundreds of thousands of people turned out to demonstrations in England, with some of these rallies and marches turning into riots (or being attacked by police, depending on whose stories you believe). On such occasions, the riots became the message of the demonstrations, whatever the intentions of the organizers were. This had mixed consequences for the movement.

101 years ago today, dispatches from Britain covered the militant wing of the women’s suffrage movement, which was using arson and terrorist bombings in its campaign. Given this backdrop, the tax resistance movement was billed as the relatively moderate alternative, as these excerpts from the version picked up by the Victoria (British Columbia) Daily Colonist show:

Refusing to Pay Taxes

Tax resistance as a means of protest against the failure of the British Government to grant woman suffrage is spreading throughout the country among women who are reluctant to employ the more violent Parkhurstian [sic] methods. Following the recent “selling up” of household goods belonging to Miss Beatrice Harraden, a distinguished suffragist and author of “Ships That Pass in the Night,” at Kilburn, because she refused to pay her income tax, scarcely a day has passed without reports of similar instances from some section or other. Under the motto “No taxation without representation,” the membership of the Women’s Tax Resistance League is increasing by hundreds weekly.

Public meetings are being held in all the larger cities of the United Kingdom under the league’s auspices, at which women are pledging themselves to pay no form of tribute to the Government “until they shall have obtained a voice in making the laws under which taxes are assessed against them.” Members of the league in large numbers attended tax sales today at Romfort, Islington, and Battersea and paraded the streets afterwards with banners displaying their Boston tea party war cry.

The Woman and her Sphere blog has published an interesting look back at the Women’s Tax Resistance League — including a postcard featuring a picture from a tax auction and protest held one hundred years ago today:

Today I’ll try to catch up on what has been going on with the tax resistance campaign taking place in Hong Kong as part of the “umbrella movement” protests for democratic reforms.

Beijing loyalists had been pushing what they were calling a “universal suffrage” bill, but one which would only allow people to vote for candidates that had been pre-screened by a Beijing-controlled committee. This bill failed to pass the Hong Kong legislature last month, which was seen as a victory for pro-democratic forces.

The tax resistance campaign has posted a series of bulletins on inmediahk.net about the campaign and its historical precedents, including:

1. An introductory article about the campaign, answering these questions:
   1. What is civil disobedience?
   2. Why do you want to launch civil disobedience campaigns in Hong Kong?
   3. Will noncooperation include acts of violence?
   4. What are examples of noncooperation acts?
   5. Do you have specific recommendations for action?
2. Thoreau’s civil disobedience, refusing to pay a tax for the invasion of Mexico
3. Evan Reeves’s tactic of paying taxes with 5,574 small-denomination checks
4. Tax resistance for women’s suffrage in Britain
5. Answering the question: won’t paying taxes in an inconvenient, symbolic fashion just make trouble for innocent civil servants?
6. Raymond Kwong sends in 2,000 checks to pay his taxes (his eventual goal is 9,280)
7. The poll tax resistance campaign in Britain
8. The tax riots led by Ge Cheng in 1601 in Suzhou
9. Did Jesus preclude tax resistance when he said “render unto Caesar?”
10. The tax resistance & redirection of Julia Butterfly Hill
11. After 50 hours of work, Raymond Kwong finishes filling out and sending in 9,280 checks for his taxes

The movement seems to be exploring new tactics. The last time I checked in, the tactics being discussed seemed to mostly be either underpaying tax by a symbolic amount or paying the complete amount of the tax but in a symbolic fashion (by writing a large number of checks each for a value that is a number with symbolic value for the campaign).

Since then, I’ve seen a number of new tactics mentioned:

• Overpaying the taxes by a symbolic amount so that the government cuts a refund check for that amount.
  

  

• Expanding the underpayment or payment-with-many-checks method to other payments to the government besides taxes, such as student loan repayments, rates at government-run housing, and utility bills.
  

  

• Donating money to charity so as to reduce the amount of tax owed.
• Responding to a notice of assessment with an objection (in the 1cm×18cm space provided for objections) to the effect that the unrepresentative, violent Leung Chun-ying regime has no authority to assess taxes.
  

  

Both income and property tax arrears are up by double-digit percentages, according to government figures, but it is difficult to determine to what extent this is a result of the noncooperation movement.

Some recent links from here and there related to tax resistance:

International

• Here’s an interview with Tommaso Cerno, who has recently launched a tax strike for gay rights in Italy. “Only one weapon of resistance remains to us: to evade the state that does not recognize our rights at the only place where it does consider us equal: when we pay taxes.”
• Opposition legislators in the Gilgit-Baltistan Legislative Assembly walked out of the assembly to join an anti-tax business strike.
• Businesses in Accra, Ghana’s capital, also launched a brief shutdown to protest oppressive taxes.
• Gold dealers in India have also shuttered their stores and burnt the finance minister in effigy to protest a new excise tax.
• Joshua Browder, a teenaged computer programmer currently attending Stanford University, has developed a free, on-line tool that guides people in the U.K. through the process of fighting their parking tickets. “Since launching in late 2015, it has successfully appealed $3 million worth of tickets.”
• Periodistas por Encargo reviews the arguments for tax resistance and redirection.
• Tax resistance plays a role in the anti-bullfighting movement in Galicia, to pressure the government not to allocate public funds to events that feature bullfighting.
• Businesses in Huatulco have stopped paying taxes because the government has failed to provide adequate security against violent crime.
• The Suepples public employees union in Venezuela, saying that employee salaries have not kept up with tax hikes, made a declaration of tax resistance. “We aren’t just refusing for the fun of it, we refuse because we’re broke,” said finance secretary Adela Otaiza. The government is using astronomical inflation to ratchet up taxes and ratchet down public employee wages to make up for drops in oil revenues and a poorly overmanaged socialist economy.
• Helen Thornley, at Tax Adviser magazine, looks back at the role tax resistance played in the women’s suffrage fight in Britain.

U.S. Tax News

• Procedurally Taxing takes a closer look at the new law that allows the government to deny or rescind passports of people with large tax debts. (My own debt is getting large enough that it may trigger this within a couple of years, so I’m paying close attention.) This article asks if a bankruptcy that removes or reduces your tax debt is sufficient to also remove the passport restrictions. Read the comments, too.
• The Institute for Justice has scored another victory against IRS civil forfeiture, successfully winning back Ken Quran’s life savings that the agency tried to steal from him.
• A judge has declared the automated traffic tickets given to motorists in Chicago to be legally unenforceable because the city didn’t follow its own rules in issuing the tickets, what the judge called “a violation of the fundamental principles of justice, equity, and good conscience.”
• Cash transactions are harder to tax (or to ban) because they don’t leave as much of a trace. So governments have begun floating ideas to discourage or eliminate cash. The latest salvo was a New York Times editorial encouraging the government to eliminate the $100 bill.
• The identity theft hack of the IRS’s online “Get Transcript” service was much bigger than originally announced.

Some links that have crossed my browser tabs in recent days:

• Arcadi Oliveres was recently in Bilbao to speak at a conference on war tax resistance. He was interviewed for El Salto. Excerpts (translation mine):

  What is war tax resistance? What does it cover?

  In Spain, war tax resistance launched in 1983, following our incorporation into NATO the previous year. At that time it was said that in order to standardize all of the Spanish armed forces into NATO systems, it was necessary to increase spending a lot on the military tech budgets, arms manufacture budgets, etc. We realized that this was barbarous and began to practice tax resistance, following an analogous path with what had already been done with conscientious objection to military service.
  
  There were people who did not want to participate in the preparation for war with their bodies and their effort and who therefore declared themselves to be conscientious objectors. The same thing goes for those who do not want to participate with their money in the financing of war. That means that in your taxes, which is where you you can act, you stop paying the percentage that the Defense Department gets in the federal budget. If military spending is 2% of the budget, and I have to pay 100, I will pay 98 because I want to stop paying this amount to the state. The way to go about it is to choose an NGO or some social action, send those two resisted euros, and tell the Treasury: “I would be willing to pay 100 but as two are going for very bad spending, here are the other 98.”

  Is this treated as an act of civil disobedience?

  Obviously the act is not recognized by law, and if they catch you, which doesn’t always happen, they can demand that amount. For all that, things take their course. Up to now you stopped paying the two euros, they demanded them, and furthermore added a fine or costs and so you end up paying eight. Concerning this there is a judgment of the Catalan Superior Court of Justice in which an objector was told that he should only pay the delinquent tax but not the fine.
  
  With good sense, the judgment held that the Treasury can only impose a fine when the taxpayer has intended to be deceptive. It’s clear that the objector doesn’t have such an intent because from day one he turns up with a receipt from the NGO or group to which he has donated. A single judgment does not create jurisprudence but I realize that it is necessary to keep winning more so that, finally, this is so.

  What other alternatives do citizens have to oppose spending on the military and arms industry?

  There are some that form part of what we would call conscientious objection, and others that would be broader. I think that a basic way of fighting is in education for peace, which is already practiced but less than is needed. From television shows to schools, and especially from families, we have to try not to impose a violent response to conflicts. Certainly, we also have to work politically, with actions for disarmament.
  
  If we look at conscientious objection, until now we have discussed two actions: objection to military service and tax resistance, but there should be others, such as labor objection. Right here in Bilbao, there was the case of a firefighter who refused to work overseeing the exportation of military equipment. A few years ago in Catalonia, two sailors refused to participate in the transport of Spanish soldiers who were going to the Iraq War, and lost their jobs, but these are isolated cases.
  
  There is also another type of objection. Some 15 years ago, there was a conference in Zaragoza in which more than a thousand professors declared ourselves scientific objectors, which is to say, signed a manifesto to say none of our scientific investigations were to be used for military purposes. Or, also, there is financial objection. I refuse to put money in a bank so that it will wind up invested in weapons, starting with the one that invests the most money in that business, BBVA.

• Cincinnati.com looks at the long career in direct action of war tax resister DeCourcy Squire.
• The Greek “Won’t Pay” movement’s guerrilla electricians have reconnected the power at the home of another needy family cut off by the government utility monopoly for inability to pay new surcharges.
• Helen Thornley, at Tax Adviser magazine, looks back at The Women’s Tax Resistance League.
• FiveThirtyEight notes that “Everyone Tries To Dodge The Tax Man, And It Keeps Getting Easier.” Excerpt:

  Three foes in particular are enabling tax dodgers, making their ploys more common and more damaging: reduced support for the IRS, new incentives for people to become cheaters and widening partisan distrust.

Recently-discovered links of interest:

• Helen Thornley’s talk summarizing her research on the Women’s Tax Resistance League is now available to view on-line.
• Another tax day has come and gone, and Ruth Benn of NWTRCC reflects on what motivates her to get up and out on the streets to protest year after year: Why Bother?
• “A suspicious item that shut down an IRS building in Palm Springs turned out to be an energy drink can with a note.”
• “Civil society organizations” in Beni, North Kivu, in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, have responded to the government’s unwillingness or inability to provide security in the area by calling on people to refuse to pay their taxes.
• Rochas Okorocha, governor of Imo, Nigeria, has apparently decided that he can impose a “Community Levy” on people in the state, without bothering to go through the legislature. This is unconstitutional, points out Obi Nwakanma, who calls on Nigerians to “refuse to pay this levy, and be prepared to run anyone out of town who comes to them to collect this levy.”
• Tax evaders in Australia who are detected and fined so rarely end up paying their taxes and fines anyway that — according to Chris Leech in his paper “Detect and Deter or Catch and Release: Are Financial Penalties an Effective Way to Penalise Deliberate Tax Evaders?” — “deliberate tax evaders may be, on average, financially better off for having evaded tax and been caught, than if they had paid their correct amount of tax in the first place.”

Some bits and pieces from here and there:

• The gilets jaunes movement in France continues its series of weekend protests. The focus of the movement drifted over time from opposition to increased motor fuel taxes to regime-change, with every other opposition movement in the land seeming to want to try to hitch their wagon to the cause as well (which made it hard for me to get a good grip on things from this side of the language barrier). Recently, the government began to crack down more severely on the protests: bringing in counter-terrorist military units to supplement law enforcement, and banning protesters and protest regalia from certain urban areas. Now the movement seems to be struggling to maintain its momentum and the government is trying to wait it out.
  • In one of the more picturesque protests of the movement, a group of gilets jaunes bricked up the entrance to the tax authority in Montargis last November. Nine of those protesters were sentenced this month to small fines and suspended sentences.
• Goethe-University Frankfurt is hosting a workshop next year on “Not paying taxes: Tax evasion, tax avoidance and tax resistance in historical perspective”.

  [W]e want to examine the different practices and forms of withholding and avoiding personal and financial duties, fees and taxes over time and among different social, professional and other groups. This includes, on the one hand, open and organized tax resistance on moral, economic and political grounds, challenging the existing legal or political order and claiming more or a different form of tax justice and redistribution, or a modification of how taxes are collected. In these cases, personal or financial duties were often seen as a form of humiliation and a marker of subordinated status. On the other hand, taxes and duties were often not resisted publically but rather avoided or evaded in secret. These terms refer to notions that distinguish between legal practices of lowering the intended burden and thus saving taxes or fees, and maneuvers that were classified as illegal or criminal. Such categorizations, though, depend on changing moral and legal perceptions and/or on class-related negotiating power.

  They are accepting proposals for papers until the end of May.
• Citizen Truth reviews the new documentary about war tax resister Larry Bassett: “The Pacifist” and American war tax resister and holocaust survivor Bernard Offen is also featured in a new documentary: “Love, Light & Courage”.
• Every year, the Tax Foundation announces what it bills as “Tax Freedom Day” — the day when Americans have earned enough money to pay their annual tax bill. This year that day comes on April 16^th. Up to now, we’ve all been working for The Man. The calculation and the Tax Foundation’s publication of it is a reasonable attempt at making the tax bite less anesthetic.
• Here’s yet another article about the staffing crisis at the IRS. This one quotes the new Service Commissioner Charles Rettig as saying “the IRS ‘lost an entire generation’ of employees during a hiring freeze that took place between 2011 and 2018.” Their trained, experienced employees are retiring in droves, with no replacements. And they’re trying to fill crucial Information Technology positions at a time when there’s high demand for talent in that industry from the private sector, which is able to make much more attractive offers.
• One of the strategists behind the Otpor movement that helped to topple the Milosevic regime in 2000 has created The Path of Most Resistance: A Step-by-Step Guide to Planning Nonviolent Campaigns, which has been released as a free PDF by the International Center on Nonviolent Conflict.
• Amancio Plaza examines The Heroic Tax Resistance of the Suffragettes at the LawAndTrends blog (in Spanish).

Some recent links from here and there…

• The journal Taxation features an article by Helen Thornley on the “Impact of the Women’s Tax Resistance League”.
• Some 30-year-anniversary remembrances of the struggle against Thatcher’s poll tax are appearing, including:
  • Today in London riotous history, 1990: local anti-poll tax demo erupts, Brixton (past tense)
  • Police officers from all over the county were called to poll tax protest in Southampton (Daily Echo)
• Erica Leigh reports back from the International Conference on War Tax Resistance and Peace Tax Campaigns last year in Scotland.
• Deborah White of Ukiah, California, has gotten fed up and has decided to stop paying federal income tax. She declared her tax resistance in a letter-to-the-editor of her local paper.
• More recent attacks on traffic ticket radar cameras in France and Belgium.

Some recent tax resistance links of interest:

• There’s a new NWTRCC newsletter out. Content includes:
  • IRS Circumvents “Statute of Limitations” by Ruth Benn. Normally, the IRS has ten years to collect unpaid taxes from you before they have to give up. Also, normally, if you decide to voluntarily pay your taxes, you can also decide for which tax year you are paying them, and by IRS policy, they’ll respect that. Ruth Benn’s tax resistance takes the form of refusing to pay her income tax, but voluntarily paying her self-employment tax. As the ten year statute of limitations approached on one of her unpaid years of income tax, the IRS tried to pull a fast one and used some sleight-of-hand to apply the money Benn was paying for the current year’s self-employment tax to the expiring year’s income tax amount. She is hoping to get the agency to change its mind and to respect its own policy, and promises to keep us up to date on how the red tape tangles.
  • Counseling Notes. Including a reminder that Social Security levies can continue past the ten-year statute of limitations date because the levy is considered “continuous” when it is first applied (not reapplied with each new Social Security check).
  • An announcement of the upcoming NWTRCC national gathering, which will have an international focus, featuring speakers from Money Rebellion (U.K.) and Grup Antimilitarista Tortuga (Spain).
  • News of a new regional war tax resistance group starting in western Massachusetts called Taxes for Peace New England.
• Democrats are keen to force banks to report how much their customers have put into and taken out of their accounts each year. They hope this will bring to the surface some of the money in the underground economy that the government has been frustrated when trying to tax. This proposal has gotten a lot of pushback, and has been an on-again / off-again part of the budget package currently oozing through Congress. The latest guesswork suggests that the Democrats may reactivate the proposal but restrict it to accounts with $10,000 or more in them.
• There’s a nice website that’s been established by the caretakers of The Nelson Homestead — the modest home of war tax resisters Juanita & Wally Nelson in Deerfield, Massachusetts. It has good recaps of the lives and activism of the Nelsons, including photos.
• Helen Thornley’s “No Vote, No Tax! The Women’s Tax Resistance League from 1909 to 1918” is featured in volume 4 of Contemporary Issues in Tax Research.
• Environmental activists hoping to stop a new incinerator in Edmonton, north London, are refusing to pay their council tax.
• The Biafra Nations League, which is trying to establish a break-away nation more representative of the Igbo people, has issued an ultimatum to oil firms in the area, ordering them to stop paying taxes to Cameroon and Nigeria, which currently claim sovereignty over the region.
• Argentina legalized abortion earlier this year. Now a group of Argentine legislators have proposed a law that would permit a sort of conscientious objection to taxpayer-involvement in abortion, of a similar sort to what is proposed in the “Religious Freedom Peace Tax Fund Act” in the U.S.

  …a bill which, if approved, would allow conscientious tax objection to those who are against abortion for moral, ethical, religious, or scientific reasons. In essence, the practice of abortion would draw the necessary resources from a special fund, without using budget items or subsidies from the national treasury. The taxpayer could at this point expressly ask that the money paid in taxes not go to feed this fund, avoiding participating with their own money in the killing of children in the womb.

• The human war on traffic ticket robots continues, with robots taken out of service by human rebels in the U.S., Italy, France, and Germany & France in recent weeks.