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Wally Nelson
Today, a profile of long-time tax resisters Wally and Juanita Nelson.
“Commitment may be seen as a constant state of fertilization of the heart and mind which fuels the determination to live up to one’s beliefs.
It means keeping a promise to oneself and others.
Sometimes it can be scary.
Nevertheless, one feels a sense of integrity, striving to express in action the soul’s deepest sense of what is right and good.”
That quote comes from Wally Nelson, who died at the age of 93 after more than a half-century of tax resistance and activism.
He spent three and a half years in prison as a conscientious objector during World War Ⅱ, was on the first of the “freedom rides” enforcing desegregation in and was the first national field organizer for the Congress of Racial Equality.
In , he began his lifelong relationship with Juanita, who met him when she was working as a journalist and went to interview him in jail.
Together they started engaging in tax resistance.
“When we became tax resisters in ,” they wrote, “it included not filing, not answering notices to supply information and making sure we had something to refuse.”
One account says:
“In Juanita became the first woman in modern times to be apprehended for war tax refusal.
She made her court appearance in the bathrobe she was wearing when apprehended at her home.”
As for many others, jail was an opportunity for self-searching and reappraisal:
“Why am I going to jail?
Why am I going to jail in a bathrobe?
What does it matter in the scheme of things whether or not you put on your clothes?
Are you not making, at best, a futile gesture, at worst, flinging yourself against something which does not exist?
Is freedom more important than justice?
Of what does freedom of the human spirit consist, that quality on which I place so much stress?”
Juanita was released the same day, and the government never did collect the money they claimed she owed them.
Over time, the Nelsons came to adopt the income-reduction method of tax refusal.
“Living on a reduced income is related to our refusal only as a progression of awareness, that our entire economic life is tied into violence.
It seemed logical that the less we participated, the less we’d be giving to that system.”
Their critique of the economic system went to eccentric extremes — at one point, Juanita convinced the Pioneer Valley War Tax Resisters that interest payments were ethically insupportable.
She then went into the bank that held the organization’s small account “to ask that we not be credited with interest [and to] return the interest we had previously collected.”
The bank, after considerable puzzlement, eventually gave in to the request.
The Nelsons cut their expenses dramatically — building a house with salvaged materials and without electricity or plumbing, and growing the majority of their own food on a half-acre of land.
Eventually they came to live on less than $5,000 per year.
As they aged, they wrote, “we may soon face some difficult decisions…
We have no insurance.
In latter years we’ve had our share of medical problems.
Hospitalizations are covered by aid to the indigent.
We talk with doctors before they take us on.
Mostly they don’t charge; sometimes we agree on something up to twenty percent of the fee.
Our greatest insurance has been the outpouring of support from many, many younger friends (and some older ones).”
Wally Nelson countered complaints about government with stern words about individual responsibility.
After the Tienanmien Square massacre, he told a reporter:
“What happened in China last month was because you had people following orders.
There was damn fools out there doing it.
You got to have somebody take orders to do it.”
He added: “I never accuse presidents of doing anything — we do it.”
“I guess a long time ago I got it out of my head I was going to save the world.
So I act to save Wally and his integrity.
Sometimes it’s a situation that’s dangerous and sometimes not so dangerous.
But I would hope that other people would be inspired to do what they ought to do.”
―Wally Nelson
The Greenfield, Massachusetts Recorder published a profile of Juanita Nelson, who stopped paying federal income tax .
Some excerpts:
Recovering from a stroke… she was relaxing recently in the apartment of a Turners Falls friend with whom she’s been staying, reflecting on the coming Winter Fare and on a recent 22nd annual conference of the Pioneer Valley War Tax Resisters, which she co-founded, and how it’s all part of a whole.
“It’s all connected,” said Nelson, who since moving with her husband, Wally, to Deerfield’s Woolman Hill in , has lived simply and peacefully.
She and her husband, who died in at age 93, stopped paying federal income taxes because of their opposition to war.
It was on assignment [as a reporter with The Cleveland Call and Post] that she met her future husband, who’d been raised in Arkansas, worked in Cincinnati and Chicago and had declared himself a conscientious objector during World War Ⅱ.
She interviewed him at the Cuyahoga County Jail, where he was jailed for about a year after walking out of a Civilian Public Service Camp that felt like “slave labor.”
Nelson, who never thought before about war and had even briefly considered joining the Women’s Army Corps during World War Ⅱ, said, “I was intrigued immediately.
You ask, ‘What would you do if somebody was going to kill you?’
Wally said, ‘I’d try to protect myself by putting my hands over my face.’
In the end, I couldn’t see that my life was worth more than somebody else’s. It just spoke to me.”
Nelson, whose short hair is just turning gray, recalled, “Wally had been in prison.
It didn’t seem to be making any sense whatever to be paying for something you were so much against.”
Living in Philadelphia, where they joined with the fledgling war-tax refusal movement, “We still felt we were so entangled in a system that called for war, we wanted to go further and get more out of the system.”
The couple moved in to a small town in New Mexico, where they made friends with Randy Kehler, a conscientious objector who was moving to Deerfield to teach at an alternative school at Woolman Hill.
He invited them to farm there, and in , the Nelsons arrived to become homesteaders.
Juanita was 15 years younger than Wally, who was 65 at the time.
He recalled staying at Greenfield’s Weldon Hotel years earlier while working as a salesman for the Antioch Book Plate Co.
They moved an old four-room house to the Quaker-owned Deerfield site where they set up a three-quarter-acre garden, “The Bean Patch,” from which they sold vegetables at the Greenfield Farmers Market.
To this day, she laughs as she tells people, “I have running-in water, running-up water and running-out water” in the house — literally carrying buckets from the well, running up the stairs and pouring them into a can that drains to a downstairs sink and eventually an outside barrel.
Particularly since the death of her husband, who cut, split and stacked their wood, Nelson has depended increasingly on friends to bring wood, and occasionally water and vegetables, to supplement the garden that’s also supplied their food.
Nelson makes clear she’s not trying to prove anything to anyone by the simplicity of her life, and is amused by people who ask, “How can you live like that?” and adds, “I don’t appreciate being put up on a pedestal; that’s almost like an excuse.
Until I had the stroke, I could still get my water and things.”
Eveline MacDougall of Greenfield, who first met the Nelsons 23 years ago, called her “the most practical person I’ve ever met, on a day-to-day, minute-to-minute level.
She seems to have a singleness of purpose that’s been very impressive for me.
She lives it, instead of just talking about it.
“First and foremost for her seems to be putting it into action,” MacDougall added, “It’s really grounded.
There’s no enshrining.
Instead of a lifestyle, it’s a life.”
“…mainly I’m concerned about what I do,” [Nelson] said.
“Living simply is almost like an umbrella that can cover everything.
You have to believe in it and feel it.
I’m so far away from what I’d like to be, but just talking about stuff doesn’t do it for me.”
An update on the legal taxable income baseline for and on how much income is exempt from IRS levies, a note about how some banks are charging exorbitant processing fees when they submit to a levy, and some other news about tax policy and enforcement changes.
News about a celebration of the Wally Nelson Centenary to be held in Massachusetts, brief notices of a few books that have been published recently by war tax resisters, some information on the activities of War Resisters International, and another call to order some fundraising message scarves while the weather cooperates.
Information about resources available to people promoting war tax resistance and/or the war tax boycott.
News, including an update about Steev Hise’s tax resistance film project, the new NWTRCC “Speaker’s Bureau”, a request for nominations for people to fill two seats on the NWTRCC administrative committee that will open in , and a call to begin a discussion on whether or not it would be a good idea for NWTRCC to endorse the Religious Freedom Peace Tax Fund Act.
An update from a new war tax resister, John Parrish who, along with his wife Kate, dipped their toes into the tax resistance pool with a token $50 resistance.
They were surprised and alarmed when the IRS shark came for the toes and took the whole leg — assessing a $5,000 “frivolous filing” penalty on John and then another one on Kate!
With the help of the folks at NWTRCC, their Congressman, and “the IRS Legislative Advocates” they managed to get the fines removed.
John tells the story.
Ten years ago, when he received the “Challenge and Change Award” from the Men’s Resource Center of Western Massachusetts, he reflected back on fifty years of tax resistance — which was just one facet of his life of integrity and activism:
He served time in federal prison as a conscientious objector during World War Ⅱ, and has refused to pay federal income taxes since .
“I decided it was ridiculous to pay for what I was in prison protesting.”
Nelson maintains that the U.S. government uses taxpayers’ money to fund “premeditated killing” around the world, as well as “rape, mayhem, and mass destruction.”
“I said no to all those things,” he once said, but typically disavowed lofty motives, focusing instead on the personal choice involved.
“I do not expect to save the world.
I do expect to save Wally Nelson from doing some very stupid things.”
For the past 25 years, Wally and Juanita have lived on Woolman Hill in Deerfield, engaged in subsistence farming and living without electricity, a telephone, or running water.
In they joined with four other area farmers to form Community Supported Agriculture, a farming cooperative in which customers subscribe in advance to buy produce each growing season.
The Nelsons’ simple lifestyle goes hand-in-hand with their tax resistance and other principles.
“It helps us reflect on consumption,” explains Juanita, “and [makes] us feel we want to live more and more simply.
Tax refusal is part of a process.
It can lead you on to do other things.”
“[Resisting war taxes] is the best thing that’s ever happened to me,” says Wally.
“It gave me the freedom to open my mind to anything.
Because once you face this tax question, you know then you’re living on the brink.
If you can develop that skill, you’ve got it made.”
On another occasion, he said: “I guess a long time ago I got it out of my head I was going to save the world.
So I act to save Wally and his integrity.
Sometimes it’s in a situation that’s dangerous and sometimes not so dangerous.
But I would hope that other people would be inspired to do what they ought to do.”
Which reminds me of what Thoreau wrote in his journal 61 years before Nelson’s birth day:
“If you would convince a man that he does wrong, do right.
But do not care to
convince him.
Men will believe what they see.
Let them see.”
— Henry David Thoreau,
The documentary Path of Greatest Resistance is now available on-line.
It was made by Bill Hector Weye and Emily Harding-Morick in .
It focuses on the arrest of Randy Kehler during his war tax resistance, but covers the war tax resistance movement in general, particularly the local war tax resistance scene in Western Massachusetts.
Aside from Kehler, some of the resisters who appear in the documentary are Andrea Ayvazian, Daniel Sicken (who performs the best war tax resistance blues tune I’ve yet heard), Wally Nelson, Brayton & Suzanne Shanley, Henry Lappen, Amy Martyn, and Erik Schickendanz.
Tax resistance history buffs (there must be more of us out there somewhere) will appreciate the shout-outs to the Shays Rebellion, another tax revolt in Western Massachusetts 200 years earlier.
That’s too bad, because it’s a fine book, one of those large-sized volumes full of photos from the archives and such.
It tells the story of the development of nonviolent political action theory and practice in the United States, with brief bios of some of the important figures, and in-depth looks at some of the movements that most exemplified or advanced nonviolent resistance — such as the anti-war movements, the women’s suffrage movement, the civil rights movement, and the labor movement.
Of course I kept a close eye out for any mentions of the tactic of tax resistance so I could report my findings here.
The book has a more complete story of the founding of Peacemakers in than I’d seen elsewhere.
Peacemakers launched the modern American war tax resistance movement, and just about anyone who practiced war tax resistance in America between World War Ⅱ and the Vietnam War was connected with that group.
According to The Power of the People, Peacemakers was founded mostly due to the efforts of Ernest & Marion Bromley and Juanita & Wally Nelson, and it drew about half of its original membership from a leftist anarcho-pacifist group called the Committee for Nonviolent Revolution that had been founded in Chicago a couple of years earlier.
Peacemakers was more Gandhian than it was Marxist and rejected much of the rhetoric of CNVR in favor of small direct action projects.
It was organized as a network of local radical pacifist cells, participants in its local activities being deemed members.
During the following ten years [after it was founded in ], until the formation of the Committee for Nonviolent Action (CNVA), Peacemakers was the most active nonviolent direct action group and the initiator of organized war tax resistance.
A sidebar goes into more detail:
Peacemakers was one of the first organizations to be formed after World War Ⅱ by radical activists inspired by the growing theory and accomplishments of nonviolence throughout the world.
There was a growing conviction among many that the times called for a grass-roots movement, no matter how small in its beginnings, which was committed to a vigorous and unmistakable disassociation from military power.
Although it never became a large organization, Peacemakers did have an important effect on many of the people and organizations which came to make up the modern nonviolent movement.
Peacemakers attempted to build a decentralized and self-disciplined movement which stressed local initiative and group coordination along the lines of the nonviolent revolutionary movement in India.
Emphasis was put on building intentional communities which practiced communal living.
“Groups or cells are the real basis of the movement,” Peacemakers announced, “for this is not an attempt to organize another pacifist membership organization, which one joins by signing a statement or paying a membership fee.”
Instead, Peacemakers emphasized a living program which included resistance to the draft and war taxes, personal transformation, and group participation in work for political and economic democracy.
Uniquely non-organizational, Peacemakers has no national office, paid staff or membership list; decisions are made at yearly Continuation Committee meetings.
The major connecting link between individuals and groups considering themselves Peacemakers is The Peacemaker, published since as a forum for letters, announcements, and accounts of the experiences of radical pacifists.
Peacemakers initiated organized work against war taxes and since a number of its members have been imprisoned for refusing to pay for war.
Peacemakers at the Ohio cell organized a land trust to remove property from the market place and established the Peacemaker Sharing Fund, a mutual aid plan designed to insure aid to dependents of imprisoned Peacemakers and to help finance group projects.
During the Vietnam war, the sharing fund became the main vehicle for donations to meet the needs of war resisters’ families.
When the government seized the land trust home where Peacemakers Marion and Ernest Bromley lived, in , allegedly to collect taxes on the “income” to the sharing fund, Peacemakers exposed the fraud and persuaded the government to withdraw its case.
Peacemakers organized a number of direct action projects in the late Forties and Fifties, including demonstrations in Puerto Rico against U.S. colonialism and a disarmament bicycle trip across Europe by four pacifists which preceded the San Francisco to Moscow Walk by nearly ten years.
Peacemakers also sponsored the “Walk for Survival” in , the first large post-war peace walk in the U.S., and set up Operation Freedom, a fund to aid people in Tennessee and Mississippi who had been deprived of home or job for seeking their civil rights.
Peacemakers lost some of its initial impetus by the mid-Fifties as it encountered the difficulty of maintaining a decentralized and largely anarchist program and at the same time keeping a disciplined and well organized radical group functioning.
Some Peacemakers went on to join or form other nonviolent groups which incorporated the radical view Peacemakers helped to germinate, while others in the organization gave more emphasis to life style and nonviolent principles.
Peacemakers published a “Handbook on the Nonpayment of War Taxes,” and has also offered summer training and orientation programs in nonviolence since , often organized and led by long-time resisters and Peacemakers Wally and Juanita Nelson.
Ashland, Ky., . — (AP) —
Members of a peace group of six charged they were ordered off a highway by state police while demonstrating to welcome Katsuki James Otsuka from prison.
Otsuka, a 28-year-old American-born Japanese [sic], completed 120 days in the Ashland Federal Correctional Institution, near here, for non-payment of war taxes.
Warden R.O. Culver indicated, however, that any release was out of his hands.
He said Otsuka first must appear before United States Commissioner J.C. Yeager here for non-payment of a $100 fine in connection with his sentence.
The peace group, led by the Rev. Ralph Templin of the Wilberforce, O., University faculty, appeared on the state highway near the prison at .
At Frankfort, Police Commissioner Guthrie F. Crowe said three troopers have been assigned to maintain order outside the institution.
The troopers were sent there at the request of Warden Culver, Crowe said.
The state policemen have been instructed to keep the highway clear and to see that no one is injured, Crowe said.
“The police will not interfere with placards, banners or speeches,” he added.
Crowe said the group interfered with the free movement of guards and other institutional employes as they went to work this morning.
Templin and the Rev. Ernest Bromley of Wilmington, O., later attempted to interview prison officials about Otsuka’s release, but were told by a tower guard that none was available at that hour.
Templin said that “four carloads of state police” drove up shortly after and ordered him and the others, all carrying peace placards, off the road and that they broke one of the placards.
The sign read:
“You did right in refusing to pay taxes for A-bombs.”
Templin said he asked what law was being violated by the picketing, but that he got no answer.
No one was available at the Ashland state police detachment for comment.
Other demonstrators included Henry Dyer of Yellow Springs, O., employe of a printing establishment; Lloyd Danzeisen, a railroad postal clerk of Brookville, O., near Dayton, and Mr. and Mrs. Wallace Nelson of Covington, Ky.
Nelson is a construction worker.
Otsuka, native of San Diego, Calif., was sentenced to 90 days and fined $100 on in Indianapolis, Ind., by Federal Judge Robert C. Baltzell for refusing to pay 29 per cent of his income taxes, amounting to $4.50, which he considered to be for war purposes.
He has served an additional 30 days in lieu of the fine, but Culver said he must still appear before the commissioner.
Ralph Templin was a former missionary stationed in India, and an admirer of Gandhi’s techniques.
The British government expelled him because of his support for Gandhi’s movement.
Back in the U.S., Templin noted that Gandhi had eagerly learned from American predecessors like William Lloyd Garrison and Henry David Thoreau, and proposed that Americans should return the favor by learning a thing or two from Gandhi.
To this end, he helped to form the “Harlem Ashram” and its Non-violence Direct Action Committee, which concentrated on non-violent actions to fight racial discrimination.
Dyer was one of the World War Ⅱ conscientious objectors who was further radicalized by / helped radicalize the civilian work camps to which drafted conscientious objectors in the United States were assigned (he was later one of thousands of conscientious objectors the U.S. imprisoned).
Lloyd Danzeisen was one of the “Peacemakers” group.
Wally & Juanita Nelson and Ernest Bromley I’ve covered here before in more or less detail.
S. Brian Willson was interviewed on KQED’s radio show “Forum with Michael Krasny” .
Among the things he discussed were varieties of protest tactics, symbolic tactics versus practical direct action, the need for deep and radical change as opposed to superficial changes that keep dysfunctional structures intact, and his encounters with Juanita & Wally Nelson.
Here’s some of what he had to say about tax resistance:
Willson: I think it would be good if people
simplified their lives and lived below the taxable level. Or even if they
didn’t do that, to become tax refusers and to begin getting rid of their
property — which I did, myself, with the
IRS
over the years…
Krasny: Have you refused to pay taxes?
W: I refused…
K: But you didn’t get prosecuted.
W: No. And I thought I would be
prosecuted.
K: ’cause there are so many in jail who have said…
W: Sixteen years… but I had to get rid of my
property, my bank accounts, and pay all my bills with postal money orders.
But I had to resolve going to jail. I mean I had to resolve that that was a
likely consequence. But I felt free when I made that… It took me three years
to get clarity on that, back in the early eighties. But when I got clear
about it… I’ve had twelve meetings with the
IRS
over the years and I was always very clear with them that their option was to
take me to prison. Because they didn’t have anything to seize, but they
could seize me. And I thought — my lawyer said — pretty sure they’re gonna do
that. But they didn’t.
Later they took a call from “Greg:”
Greg: I would think that if people were to become
tax refuseniks at a larger scale, we’d cut off the supply — the blood supply — to people who are making some of these really poor decisions. My question
is: how would that be coordinated? how would that get started? how would that
become a much larger movement so it wasn’t just maybe a few people who were
left hanging out there with their pants down, so to speak — how to go and
make something that’s a coordinated effort that was much larger in scale and
difficult to stop, and really make a big statement?
W: Well that’s a good question…
K: We’re getting this from a lot of emailers:
‘How do we organize?’ or ‘How do we get more momentum?’
W: There are about 10,000 tax refusers in the
United States, I think, now. There is a national group called the National
War Tax Resistance Coordinating Council [sic] which is
trying to do just exactly what you as the caller have suggested. It’s just
very tough: it’s another leap that people make. I made the leap, myself, and
it took me three years to process the thought of being a tax
refuser, which I felt was the correct position for me personally, and I met
other people who were tax refusers…
I’ve many times mentioned Ammon Hennacy’s tax resistance hereabouts, but have only less-frequently commented on his more-well-known Catholic Worker comrade Dorothy Day’s stance.
The site catholicworker.org now has a search engine with which I have been able to recover some of her writings on the subject, which I’ll excerpt here today.
“Render to Caesar the things which are Caesar’s.” Yes, and we have heard too much of that.
Let E.I. Watkin, founder of the Pax movement in England, author of The Catholic Center, Men and Tendencies, and The Bow in the Clouds, answer as he did in his pamphlet, “The Crime of Conscription.”
Render unto Caesar the things which are Caesar’s. This is a favorite text with the hosts of Christian clerics, Protestant and Catholic, who both in the present and in the past, have abused and still abuse religion to enslave men’s consciences to the unjust bondages of a usurping state.
They omit to notice the context.
Our Lord has just asked for a coin, and having obtained the admission that it bear’s Caesar’s image and superscription, bids his questioners render to Caesar what is his.
This is obviously the coin payable in taxation which bears Caesar’s stamp.
The body and soul of man, however, do not bear Caesar’s image.
Whose image they do bear we are told in Holy Scripture.
It is the image of God.
Obviously, therefore, as we are to render to Caesar what bears his image, namely, money, we are to render to God, not to Caesar, what bears not Caesar’s stamp, but God’s; namely, human beings.
Thus the same text which justifies, indeed, imposes the obligation of paying taxes, denies any right of the state to take a toll of man.
All forced labor, for example, is implicitly declared unlawful.
And still more does the principle here enunciated forbid military conscription.
Whether a war be just or unjust, no government may without grave injustice compel me — bearing as I do the divine image which marks me as God’s bondman, but a freeman in respect to my fellows — to slay and be slain in its quarrel unless I freely consent.
If a government unlawfully outsteps its prerogative and imposes conscription, any one who, from whatever motive, refuses to serve, is whether he intend it or not, fighting for human dignity and freedom, as also is anyone who abets and supports his resistance.
But now in these days it would be desirable to go even further, as did Thoreau, to refuse even the taxes which were to be used to pay for the means to kill our fellow man.
In many cases, however, it is all but impossible to separate the tax from the cost of the commodity needed to maintain life.
We believe that social security legislation, now balled as a great victory for the poor and for the worker, is a great defeat for Christianity.
It is an acceptance of the Idea of force and compulsion.
[The people] pay taxes, and it is the city and the state and the federal government that is robbing them and pilfering them, too, They are taxed for every bite they eat, every shoddy rag they put on.
They are taxed on their jobs, there are deductions for this and that, there are the war bonds, eighteen dollars for a twenty-five dollar war bond, paid on the Installment plan.
And they are not only being taxed, but they are being seduced.
Their virtue is being drained from them.
They are made into war profiteers, they are forced into the position of usurers.
The whole nation, every man woman and child, is forced to become a profiteer — hideous word — in this war.
If you cry aloud for land and home and tools and the good natural life for the poor without which a good supernatural life is impossible, then you are either an escapist and an inhabitant of an ivory tower, or you are a Communist in disguise trying to do away with property.
And you are a communist also if you cry out for peace and against increased armaments — against the making of the hydrogen and atom bombs and the paying of federal taxes for the making of those bombs.
We know, who picketed before the tax offices up on 45th street, because we heard these jibes as we walked to and fro with our signs.
We will have more to write about taxes later.
We believe in paying our local taxes but not federal.
Maybe this is quibbling, but the benefits of hospitals, fire department, street cleaning and health department, etc. make us firm in our decision to always pay our local taxes though we will not pay income tax.
I can scarcely list all the people Ammon [Hennacy] introduced me to, all the friends he has made through his constant protest against war and taxes for war, and his distribution of the Catholic Worker.
But I can give a little glimpse of Ammon’s living quarters, in his little three room bungalow on Lin Orme’s place some five miles out of town [Phoenix, Arizona].
Ammon likes to call our Lord the Celestial Bulldozer to indicate that ones way is smoothed for one, the rough ways made plain and the crooked straight.
He arrived in Phoenix broke, he said, as he came further south out of the dairy region to the farming section of the country where he could work by the day and not by the month and so avoid the withholding tax.
He slept all night on an anarchist’s floor (one of the readers of the CW) and got up at daylight to go to the slave market, as the corner is named in every town in every state, Calif., Texas, Florida, New Mexico and Arizona, where immigrant workers are employed.
Some times there are as many as 200 trucks, sometimes only 25. They go as far as seventy miles away for the day’s work.
Mexican trucks take only Mexicans.
He got on the second truck, owned by the Arena brothers, a corporation which owns land in California, Colorado, and Arizona, and specializes in lettuce, melons, cabbage, celery.
This was , the year the withholding tax began.
At the end of his day’s work he asked if there was a shack on the place where he could sleep, and a fellow worker told him of one down the road and he took his sleeping bag and camped out there for the night.
He stayed there for some months and as it was on land rented by Mr. Orme to the company, he became acquainted with that old gentleman who later invited him to occupy the vacant shack on his own land.
There is one room and two porches, rather than three rooms, really, and before Ammon lived there, twelve Mexicans had camped out there.
I sat on the porch one afternoon with Ammon and drank strong black coffee, brewed on a little kitchen stove, stuffed with mesquite which burned fragrantly while we talked.
How does property fit in, people ask.
It was Eric Gill who said that property is proper to man.
And St. Thomas Aquinas said that a certain amount of goods is necessary to lead a good life.
The recent popes wrote at length about justice rather than charity, that should be sought for the worker.
Unions are still fighting for wages and hours, and it is a futile fight with the price of living going up steadily.
They are fighting for partial gains and every strike means sacrifice to make them, and still the situation in the long run is not bettered.
There may be talk of better standards of living, every worker with his car, and owning his own home, but still this comfort depends on a wage, a boss, on War.
Our whole modern economy is based on preparation for war and that is one of the great modern arguments for poverty.
If the comfort one has gained has resulted in the death of thousands in Korea and other parts of the world, then that comfort will be have to be atoned for. the argument now is that there is no civilian population, that all are involved in the war (misnamed defense) effort.
If you work in a textile mill making cloth, or in a factory making dungarees or blankets, it is still tied up with war.
If one raises food or irrigates to raise food, one may be feeding troops or liberating others to serve as troops.
If you ride a bus you are paying taxes.
Whatever you buy is taxed so you are supporting the state in the war which is “the health of the state.”
The argument may go this way, but we still can choose what seems to us the most honorable occupations, which have to do with human needs.
We can choose the kind of work most necessary to do, and if possible where there is no withholding tax for war.
Ammon Hennacy in working by the day, at hard farm labor, has not paid income tax for years.
One can so cut down one’s standard of living that no income tax is required; families with many children pay no income tax.
One can protest in many ways this contribution to the atom and hydrogen bomb.
If one owns property the government then can take a lien on it.
If one has money in the bank, the government can confiscate it.
So truly such protest as this calls for the most profound poverty and a voluntary doing without property.
How obey the laws of a state when they run counter to man’s conscience?
“Thou shalt not kill,” Divine law states.
“A new precept I give unto you that you love your brother as I have loved you.”
St. Peter disobeyed the law of men and stated that he had to obey God rather than man.
Wars today involve total destruction, obliteration bombing, killing of the innocent, the stockpiling of atom and hydrogen bombs.
When one is drafted for such war, when one registers for the draft for such a war, when one pays income tax, eighty per cent of which goes to support such war, or works where armaments are made, one is participating in this war.
We are all involved in war these days.
War means hatred and fear.
Love casts out fear.
St. Augustine in his City of God says that God never intended man to dominate his fellows.
He was to dominate the beasts of the field, the fowls of the air, what crawled upon the earth, but men were not to dominate each other.
He preferred shepherds to kings.
It was man himself who insisted on having a worldly king though he was warned what would happen to him.
God allowed the prophets to anoint the kings and once men had accepted their kings they were supposed to show them respect, to obey the authority they had set up.
To obey, that is, in all that did not go against their conscience.
St. Peter was ordered by lawful authority not to preach in the name of Jesus, and he said he had to obey God rather than man, and he left prison to go out again to the market place and preach the Gospel.
Over and over again, men had to disobey lawful authority to follow the voice of their conscience.
This obedience to God and disobedience to the State has over and over again happened through history.
It is time again to cry out against our “leaders,” to question whether or not, since it is not for us to say that they are evil men, they are sane men.
It is all very well to say we must go to the source of all strength, to drink at the living fountain of Christ, but can we go from that fount of Love to a factory where nerve gas and incendiary bombs are manufactured?
When we have talked of a general strike it is of such work and of such evil that we are thinking; when we talk of non-payment of taxes it is of the money which is going to Indo-China in the form of these incendiary bombs and the planes to drop them that we are thinking.
It is not thus that we can love God and our brother; it is not in this way that we can love our enemy.
When it is said that we disturb people too much by the words pacifism and anarchism, I can only think that people need to be disturbed, that their consciences need to be aroused, that they do indeed need to look into their work, and study new techniques of love and poverty and suffering for each other.
Of course the remedies are drastic, but then too the evil is a terrible one and we are all involved, we are all guilty, and most certainly we are all going to suffer.
The fact that we have “the faith,” that we go to the sacraments, is not enough.
“Inasmuch as ye have done it unto the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me” with napalm, nerve gas, our hydrogen bomb…
Each one of us must make our decisions as to what he should do, each one must examine his conscience and beg God for strength.
Should one register for the draft?
Should one accept conscientious objector status in the army or out of it, taking advantage of the exceptions allowed, but accepting the fact of the draft?
Should one pay tax which supports this gigantic program?
I realize how difficult this is to decide.
If one is unmarried and strong physically, it is easier to make a decision to do only day labor or work without pay.
But there are many whose mental and physical strength is not equal to this decision and there is a withholding tax taken from even the smallest salary.
Sometimes one can only make a gesture of protest.
It is not for any one to judge his fellow man on how far he can go in resisting participation in preparation for war.
In the very works of mercy which we are performing, we at the Catholic Worker are being aided by those who earn what they do only because they pay income tax for war.
Oh yes, the editors of The Catholic Worker know only too well how far we too are involved in the city of this world.
Perhaps Bob Ludlow, who left us much against our will, felt that he was being more honest in permitting a withholding tax to be taken from his meager wage as hospital attendant that working for nothing for the Catholic Worker.
Who knows the heart of another?
The temptation is always there to go out on one’s own, to walk the lone path of a St. Francis rather than the community way of a St. Benedict.
[Ammon Hennacy] has had to abandon his life at hard labor and to replace that discipline of work he is fasting Fridays; during our recent retreat he fasted, and again in August for nine days he will picket and fast in reparation for Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the cruel weapons of destruction which we have made.
All men are responsible, but Ammon by not paying income tax, and by penance, is doing reparation.
And the other trouble?
It was Federal income taxes and investigations for Ammon Hennacy, Charlie McCormick, Carol Perry and me.
Charlie has had no income for all the years he is with The Catholic Worker, but the rest of us could acknowledge having earned money on which we did not pay taxes, and which we refuse to pay because eighty per cent of the money so gathered goes for wars past and present.
The others were treated with great courtesy, but one of the revenue agents made a coldly insulting remark to me based on my past, which was entirely uncalled for.
But perhaps he was only stupid so I acted as though I did not hear it.
I would like to urge upon the bishops the idea of the non-payment of taxes by Catholic parents for school taxes, when they are sending their children to Catholic schools and so are paying double for their education.
Yes, we must set ourselves with all the force we possess, against war, and the making of instruments of war, and our means are prayer and fasting, and the non-payment of federal income tax which goes for war.
The message of The Catholic Worker is that simple one for all the rank and file, for the masses, that we have free will, we can make our choice, that our personal responsibility which we exercise is what matters.
Ammon [Hennacy], in his non-payment of taxes for war, and his civil disobedience, is bringing that message to countless thousands of people.
When we got home from our little tour of the neighborhood and I had explored the view from the eleventh floor, Ammon came for supper and brought us up to date on his journeyings as well as on the news of our own workers in Chicago.
He had no sooner arrived in town on Saturday when he was called on to picket in front of the courthouse for Roseanna Robinson.
They are keeping up a vigil night and day, people joining for a stint of three hours at a time.
I certainly hope to join them sometime these next few days.
Roseanna is a young colored woman who had refused to pay any income tax 85 per cent of which goes for war, or to file any returns.
She had been given an indeterminate sentence and she is now for two weeks on hunger strike.
I suppose they will forcibly feed her.
The newspapers are paying little head to this, so it is necessary to have the picket line, and Karl Meyer has gotten out a leaflet which is signed by The Catholic Worker, 164 West Oak street and the War Resisters League which takes in all those who are not Catholic who wish to participate but might hesitate if it were only under Catholic leadership.
There is much to be done in these small Indian schools throughout the country [the United States South-West], and a peace army could be at work there right now, without waiting to be drafted.
There would be no pay besides a living, and so no bother about income tax, and so no contributing to war in this way.
I could not help but think of Don Milani’s statement in his defense against the charges made against him of advocating resistance to conscription for war.
He said that even those who cooked for troops contributed to war.
How involved we all are, what with the hidden taxes we pay for war, the high standard of living all of us enjoy, even when we refuse to pay income tax, so much of which goes for war, and when we build prisons for draft refusers.
Every summer for a Peacemakers training program has been held at our Tivoli farm for the last two or three weeks of August.
The old mansion and the Peter Maurin house are filled with guests, and campers come and set up their tents on the lawn facing the river.
The organizer of the Peacemakers’ school is Wally Nelson, who has been in the workhouse in Cincinnati for the past two weeks, fasting.
He and several others were arrested during a vigil for DeCourcy Squire, an 18 yr. old Antioch student who had been hospitalized after fasting since her arrest and subsequent sentence of 9 mo. for participating in a peace demonstration.
(DeCourcy has since been released.)
A psychiatric examination was ordered for Wally when he refused to co-operate with his arrest and trial.
Found by court psychiatrists to be “sane,” he was sentenced for “loitering” to ten days in the workhouse, $25 and costs.
Again refusing to co-operate with legalized injustice, he was dragged from the police van by his legs, an action that caused his wife Juanita to follow him, cradling his head in her hands.
When they arrived at Wally’s cell, Nita bent over to kiss him, was arrested for “disorderly conduct” and fined $25 and costs.
This she refused to pay, and was ordered to the workhouse.
Detailed stories of these arrests are given in the February 10th issue of the Peacemaker, (10208 Sylvan Avenue, (Gano) Cincinnati, Ohio 45241).
I hope that many of our readers will subscribe to the Peacemaker, since news of the conscientious objectors who are in prison and much other war-resistance news can be obtained there.
Peacemakers have led in direct action for many years.
Wally and Juanita have both refused to pay income tax for many years, and it is of them particularly I wish to write, with the most heartfelt sympathy for their suffering and the greatest admiration for their dedication.
It is their vocation to realize and to lead others to realize the horror of the times through which we are passing.
Wally has explained that his fasting during the jail sentences he has undergone was the result not of willful refusal but of a total inability to swallow food while imprisoned.
Simone Weil, the French woman whose brilliant writings on man and the state, work and war, were widely published after her death, suffered during the second world war in the same way.
She was literally unable to swallow enough food to keep her alive, in the face of world starvation.
In the stories of the saints, one reads of such sensitivity, such penances undergone, such fastings endured and they are little understood by the secular world.
I am convinced that this vocation, this calling, to give oneself to one’s brother, in loving communion, in loving understanding of the heinous crimes that are being committed today was at the root of Roger La Porte’s immolation in front of the United Nations .
It is as though such men said, “We will suffer with you, since we have no way of stopping the bombing, the burning, the napalm, the defoliation, the destruction of homes and an entire countryside.
There is no act of ours extreme enough, no protest strong enough, to deal with this horror.”
Wally Nelson was in prison for thirty-three months during World War Two and fasted for a hundred and eight days (with forced feeding by tube) as a protest against racial segregation of prisoners.
He had had time to think out his position while in Civilian Public Service camp, as forced labor camps which were set up for conscientious objectors were called.
These very camps were a concession to pacifists, who had been imprisoned and brutally treated during World War One.
But Wally decided to walk out and did so and was arrested and jailed.
His example and that of other absolutists led to further concessions.
In this present undeclared war in Vietnam, to which ten thousand more men were shipped off yesterday, the conscientious objector position is recognized, and paid employment is offered in home hospitals as “alternative service.”
To accept this is still to submit to the draft, hence the continued protests against war, and the drafting of youth to wage this hideous struggle.
[To Hennacy,] Obedience, of course, was a bad word.
Authority was a bad word.
In vain I pointed out to him that when the retired army major for whom he worked in Arizona told him to do a particular job, he did it, and he did it as he was told to.
He admired the army officer because he knew farming.
And he cooperated with Ammon in paying him by the day and thus evading the federal income tax which the tax man was trying to collect from Ammon.
I visited Art Harvey of South Ackworth, New Hampshire who has a mail order book shop handling a great number of books by and about Gandhi.
Art and Ammon Hennacy served six month terms in Sandstone Prison in Minnesota for trespassing on a missile base some years ago.
He carries on a practical application of Karl Meyer’s tax refusal (see article in this issue) by having teams of workers in orchards where they prune trees, harvest apples and later blueberries and work seven months of the year.
They work and live in a style which frees them from the payment of taxes for war.
Perhaps about a hundred are engaged in this way of life, which results usually in some settling in communities of the moshavim variety, each having some small acreage and a house built by themselves.
Considering the New England climate, no small achievement!
It certainly means an emphasis on the ascetic, on sacrifice.
The other young man who visited Russia was Karl Meyer, who at present is serving his sentence of a two-year term (and thousand dollar fine) at Sandstone Federal Prison, for obstructing the income tax system by refusal to pay taxes for war.
He had made the San Francisco-to-Moscow walk some years before, joining the march at Chicago.
The walk ended at Moscow University, where the students, though not agreeing with the American visitors, demanded that the time of their talks be extended.
He also distributed leaflets in Red Square!
The Catholic Worker has received a letter from the Internal Revenue Service stating that we owe them $296,359 in fines, penalties, and unpaid income tax for .
As the matter stands right now, there might be a legal battle with delays and postponements which may remind us of Dickens’ Bleak House.
Or, since we will not set up a defense committee to campaign for funds, it may terminate swiftly in the confiscation of our property and our bank account (never very large).
Our farm at Tivoli and the First Street house could be put up for sale by government agents and our C.W. family evicted.
One of the most costly protests against war, in terms of long-enduring personal sacrifice, is to refuse to pay federal income taxes which go for war.
The late Ammon Hennacy, one of our editors, was a prime example of this.
He earned his living at agricultural labor, always living on a poverty level so as not to be subject to taxes, though he filed returns.
Another of our editors, Karl Meyer, recently spent ten months in jail for what the I.R.S. called fraudulent claims of exemption for dependents.
He ran the C.W. House of Hospitality in Chicago for many years, working to earn the money to support the house and his wife and children.
Erosanna Robinson, a social worker in Chicago, refused to file returns and was sentenced to a year in prison.
While in prison she fasted and was forcibly fed.
It will be seen that tax refusal is a serious protest.
Wars will cease when we refuse to pay for them (to adapt a slogan of the War Resisters International).
The C.W. has never paid salaries.
Everyone gets board, room, and clothes (tuition, recreation included, as the C.W. is in a way a school of living).
So we do not need to pay federal income taxes.
Of course, there are hidden taxes we all pay.
Nothing is ever clear-cut or well defined.
We protest in any way we can, according to our responsibilities and temperaments.
(I remember Ammon, a most consistent, brave, and responsible person, saying to one young man, “For the love of the Lord, get a job and quit worrying about taxes.
You need to learn how to earn your own living.
That is most important for you.”)
We have to accept with humility the fact that we cannot share the destitution of those around us, and that our protests are incomplete.
Perhaps the most complete protest is to be in jail, to accept jail, never to give bail or defend ourselves.
In the fifties, Ammon, Charles McCormack (our business manager at the C.W.), and I were summoned to the offices of the I.R.S. in New York to answer questions (under oath) as to our finances.
I remember I was asked what happened to the royalties from my books, money from speaking engagements, etc. I could only report that such monies received were deposited in the C.W. account.
As for clothes, we wore what came in; my sister was generous to me — shoes, for instance.
Our refusal to apply for exemption status in our practice of the Works of Mercy is part of our protest against war and the present social “order” which brings on wars today.
In the issue of The Catholic Worker I wrote of the crisis The Catholic Worker found itself in when we received a letter from the Internal Revenue Service stating that we owe them $296,359 in fines and penalties and unpaid income tax for .
This was a very impressive bill, and we wondered what it would be if they started figuring out what they thought we owed them !
The New York Times, in a story signed by Max Seigel, with a four column head and a picture of a few of us at lunch in our headquarters at 36 East First Street, brought our situation to the attention of a vaster group of readers, and followed up the story with an editorial [“Imagination, Please” — excerpt: “Surely the IRS must have genuine frauds to investigate.
Surely there must be some worthwhile work this agency could be doing instead of obstructing acts of corporal mercy for the poor.”].
The New York evening Post also editorialized on our situation.
The National Catholic Reporter and the Commonweal editors also registered their protest and other papers followed suit.
Letters come in daily from our friends, reassuring, comforting, indignant at the government, a few of them indignant at us, that we cause them so much worry.
We certainly are grateful and must apologize that we cannot keep up with the mail and get them all answered.
There is not any real news for them at the moment, nor will be until our edition of The Catholic Worker.
I will have to appear before a Federal Judge on to explain why the CW refuses to pay taxes, or to “structure itself” so as to be exempt from taxes.
We are afraid of that word “structure.”
We refuse to become a “corporation.”
We repeat — we do not intend to “incorporate” the Catholic Worker movement.
We intend to continue our emphasis on personal responsibility, an emphasis which we were taught from the beginning by Peter Maurin who used to quote Emmanuel Mounier’s Personalist Manifesto, and his Personal and Communitarian Revolution, Peter was our teacher, and being a Frenchman, a peasant, he emphasized decentralization, manual labor, voluntary poverty.
Voluntary poverty meant that everyone at the CW worked without salary, and contributions came from them, and from our readers, which kept the work going.
Rumblings first came from the Internal Revenue service after many on the CW staff, together with other peace groups, demonstrated against war in the Fifties and Sixties and were jailed for Civil Disobedience.
Writing about jails and courtrooms resulted in much publicity.
But it was Ammon Hennacy and Karl Meyer who wrote most consistently on Tax Refusal, and its importance.
“Wars will cease when men refuse to pay for them.”
…And while you are at it, write to TAX Talk, published by War Tax Resistance, 339 Lafayette St., N.Y., N.Y. 10012 which contains letters from all over the country from individual tax resisters, telling what is happening to them.
Stimulating and invigorating.
Good make up and good format.
First Rate.
While I write, Arthur J. Lacey comes in to hand me my mail and it contains a notice from one of our two lawyers.
“Please be advised that I have been contacted by the Conference Section of the Internal Revenue Service and we have arranged for the hearing on .”
Good news first!
On we received absolution from the U.S. Government in relation to all our tax troubles.
In the Catholic Worker this year we told of the notice we had received — that we owed the government nearly $300,000 in back income taxes which included penalties for “late filing and negligence.”
The examining officer of the Manhattan District had arrived at these figures through the reports we had obediently made to Albany on our appeals for funds, which we send out once or twice a year.
We accept this compromise with our local state because we are decentralists, personalists, anarchists (in addition to being pacifists).
When we first thought about Federal income taxes, most of which go for war or “defense,” we simplistically considered ourselves exempt because we had no income; no salaries are paid at the Catholic Worker, nor ever have been .
I myself have been questioned because of my writings, and lecture fees which were not really fees but offerings made to the work which covered all expenses of travelling and supported the work besides.
A crowd of people living together as we do, in houses of hospitality, has to give something of an account to each other as to how well we are living up to our profession of voluntary poverty.
We are always bound to have healthy guilt feelings about that, and keep trying to do better.
Certainly a number of us do work on the side to provide what we need for books or rent on cheap apartments in the neighborhood, since our house at 36 East First Street is always so crowded.
But with the growing tax resistance throughout the United States, the government has become concerned.
Telephone calls and official visits made us realize that trouble was impending.
And we have been having it and have reported on it in both the and issues of our paper.
Now we are happy to report the outcome.
In a conference in with William T. Hunter, litigation attorney from the Department of Justice, one of the Assistant Attorney Generals of the United States, we reached a verbal settlement couched in more human and satisfactory terms than the notice we later received.
“They” were willing to recognize our undoubtedly religious convictions in our conflict with the state, and were going to drop any proceedings against us.
They had examined and looked into back issues of the Catholic Worker, and they had noted the support we had from the press (the New York Times news story and the editorials of the Times and the New York Post), and had come to this conclusion that ours was a religious conviction.
They had come to the conclusion also that it was not necessary that the Federal Government seek for any other kind of a “conviction” against us.
The conference took place in a law office in Manhattan, 9:30 of a Monday morning.
John Coster, our lawyer, Mr. Hunter and Ed Forand, Walter Kerell, Patrick Jordan, Ruth Collins and I attended.
There were no hostilities expressed.
As peacemakers we must have love and respect for each individual we come in contact with.
Our struggle is with principalities and powers, not with Church or State.
We cannot ever be too complacent about our own uncompromising positions because we know that in our own way we too make compromises.
(For instance, in having a second-class mailing privilege from the government we accept a subsidy, just as Mr. Eastland does in Mississippi!
[This refers to Senator James Eastland, who was a beneficiary of hundreds of thousands of dollars a year in federal cotton subsidies, overseen by a Senate committee he sat on.])
It was Jesus who said that the worst enemies were those of our own household, and we are all part of this country, citizens of the United States and share in its guilt.
Yes, we would survive, I thought to myself, even if the paper were eventually suppressed and we had to turn to leafleting, as we are doing now each Monday against the I.B.M. Wall-Street offices, trying to reach the consciences of all those participating by their daily work in the hideous and cowardly war we are waging in Vietnam.
I must not forget the beautiful young ghinkgo tree which we purchased from the city last year, and which we planted in honor of Carmen Mathews, herself a great lover of the countryside (and of drama).
She rescued us from a foreclosure when a first mortgage fell due and so has become part of this house on First Street, and of the bits of greenery back and front of it.
The fact that prisoners on Riker’s Island so I have been told, grow these trees which brighten our streets makes that tree especially dear to me.
When I pass it, I make the sign of the cross on its bark, to encourage it to grow fast and strong.
Maybe we can plant another this year in gratitude to God for saving us from the hands of the tax gatherers.
Fr. McNabb, the French Dominican, said that when Jesus left his apostles, “Peter could go back to his nets, but Matthew could not go back to his tax gatherings.”
Letter from the Internal Revenue Service:
From: District Director, Internal Revenue Service, Department of the Treasury, PO Box 3100, Church St. Station, New York, N.Y., 10008
To: The Catholic Worker Movement, 36 East 1st Street, New York, N.Y. 10003
Gentlemen:
After examining your financial records and reviewing your activities for the above years, we find that you are not required to file annual returns for the years shown, and no further action is necessary regarding the proposals in our letter of .
…of our own conflict with the IRS.
We live in what we can only regard as a temporary truce.
We have not applied for or received tax exemption.
The letter we received (and published) from the N.Y. State Offices of the IRS stated:
After examining your financial records and reviewing your activities for the above years (), we find that you are not required to file annual returns for the years shown, and no further action is necessary regarding the proposals in our letter of .
Thank you for your cooperation.
Sincerely yours, District Director Internal Revenue Service
The Washington official representative who met with us conveyed to us the respect they held for our religious principles and assured us that the presented bill for almost $300,000 could be ignored.
The matter would be dropped, it was indicated (but, “for the present” was the qualifying clause in my own mind).
Mr. Nixon’s first statement that he would attack the problem of “permissiveness” was a warning note.
The jailing of newspaper reporters, the Ellsberg trial — in fact, any criticisms of government policies or actions was going to meet with repressive measures.
The tax refusal movement all over the country grows.
The conflict between State and people is coming out into the open here in the United States.
The Totalitarian State is not just Germany (Hitler), Italy (Mussolini) and the USSR (Stalin), but is here and now with the “all encroaching State” as our Catholic bishops once called it, involving China and ourselves, as well as Russia.
We assure our readers that we try to get rid of our gifts as fast as they are given to us.
But the threat still hangs over us of prosecution for not paying income tax.
We are not tax-exempt.
On principle we refuse to pay income tax, because so great a portion goes for wars, preparation for wars (defense, it is termed), and providing other countries with billion of dollars to buy our instruments of war and material and plants to make their own.
There is a sizable movement truly the foundation of the peace movement which is based on tax refusal.
(Contact Robert Calvert, War Tax Resistance, 912 E. 31st St., Kansas City, Mo. 64109.)
Our refusal goes deep.
Our motivation is fundamentally religious.
We are told by Jesus Christ to practice the works of mercy, not the works of war.
And we do not see why it is necessary to ask the government for permission to practice the works of mercy which are the opposite of the works of war.
To ask that permission to obey Christ by applying for exemption, a costly and lengthy process, is against our religious principles.
It is an interference of the state which we must call attention to again and again.
A father who educates a young man or woman other than a blood relative is taxed for his generosity.
A poor family who takes in another poor family (as many of them do in time of unemployment or crisis), cannot count that as tax deductible.
Of course the poor suffer from the withholding tax which is taken from their weekly pay.
To understand their rights, they must plough through booklets and forms put out by the government (which I am sure I could not manage to do) before they are able to collect money at the end of the year which is owing to them due to some change of circumstance.
To get the advice of the Internal Revenue Department means standing in lines, paying excessive fares by bus or subway, with generally little redress of their grievances.
(A cheering note for us, with our very large family, which seems to increase day after day, is that when confronted by the government forces not long ago, Washington representatives from the Department of Justice were willing to concede that we were not making profits out of the poor, that we were motivated by religious principles, and that they would so notify the New York offices of the Internal Revenue Dept. which had handed us a awful bill for taxes due, along with penalties and fines, over a space of four or five years.
The New York office then sent us a brief notice concluding that our income did not obligate us to file returns.)
To talk economics to the rich and Jesus to the anarchists gathered in convention [a conference at New York’s Hunter College] these two days (and have to write this column) is a job.
Besides, I did not “talk Jesus” to the anarchists.
There was no time to answer the one great disagreement which was in their minds — how can you reconcile your Faith in the monolithic, authoritarian Church which seems so far from Jesus who “had no place to lay his head,” and who said “sell what you have and give to the poor,” — with your anarchism?
Because I have been behind bars in police stations, houses of detention, jails and prison farms, whatsoever they are called, eleven times, and have refused to pay Federal income taxes and have never voted, they accept me as an anarchist.
And I in turn, can see Christ in them even though they deny Him, because they are giving themselves to working for a better social order for the wretched of the earth.
Proceeded to the Kansas City, Mo. House of Hospitality and War Tax Resistors’ Center in adjoining buildings and run by Bob and Angela Calvert who are gardening every inch of the land in their front and back yards.
It is much to the edification of the city block families and we hope their imitation.
Spent a Sunday afternoon with Karl Meyer and Jean and their three beautiful children, and all happy in the life of voluntary poverty where he receives an income low enough to be untaxable and so will not anticipate any more jail terms. His work is with the retarded in sheltered workshops.
Some of the best all around accounts of this ferment which is going on, among the young especially, is in The Peacemaker, 1255 Paddock Hills Ave., Cincinnati, Ohio 45229. This small packed newspaper deals extensively and specifically in works for peace, listing all those imprisoned for conscience — refusing conscription; one valiant woman is confined on Terminal Island for refusal to pay taxes (Martha Tranquilli, Terminal Island, San Pedro, Ca. 90731).
All those activities which we Catholics call “works of mercy,” are also performed by many Protestant, Quaker, and other groups in the country.
I remember a young woman who came to help us years ago, who, after her first, early enthusiasm had worn away, used to sigh wearily and say — “What’s it all about?”
I am sure many of our friends and readers also pose, more seriously, the same question.
For instance, what are Ernest and Marion Bromley all about?
Why is this frail, elderly man in jail right now for “disorderly conduct,” that is, for distributing leaflets about the nefarious workings of the Internal Revenue Service and their ways of penalizing people for advocating tax refusal.
Remember, it is the Federal taxes paid by each of us that supply arms that are keeping wars going, I cannot go into the important discussion of Tax Refusal now.
(Subscribe for The Peacemaker, 1225 Paddock Hills Ave., Cincinnati, Ohio 45229 or write to War Tax Resistance, 339 Lafayette St., New York, N.Y. 10012.)
What I want to bring out is how a pebble cast into a pond causes ripples that spread in all directions.
And each one of our thoughts, words and deeds are like that.
Going to jail, as Ernest Bromley has done, short though his stay may be, causes a ripple of conscience among us all.
And of remembrance too.
Did they search him and list every item contained in every pocket?
Did they strip him and search every nook and cranny of his body, as they did the young women arrested during the protests against air raids drills (psychological warfare) in the 50’s?
As they are doing now to Martin Sostre in Dannemora prison even after every visit from friends or lawyers.
What sadistic impulse is it that causes guards to continue these searches?
Ernest Bromley is sharing, in his (we hope) brief jail encounter, the sufferings of the world.
And we hope, like the apostles, he rejoices in having been accounted “worthy to suffer.”
The Peacemaker, every issue, has a list of those imprisoned for conscientious objection to war.
I was happy to see that Martha Tranquilli was due for release .
The Peacemakers discussed, among other subjects like voluntary poverty, life styles, etc., the kind of demonstrations to show our determination not to pay income tax which goes for building up monstrous implements of war.
Wally Nelson and his wife Juanita were there, both of whom are familiar with arrests and jailings.
I got acquainted with them years ago when Koinonia, in Central Georgia, was literally under fire from the small-towners all around them.
Next issue, I will try to write more about federal income tax which is providing the weapons for war — why we pay local taxes and not the federal income tax.
We recognize the seriousness of this and the risks involved for families.
The Bromley case is an example.
Their house was sold from under them in Cincinnati but they have not yet been evicted.
The price paid was excessively above its value.
It looks like the government is trying to make an example of them.
(It was not bought by friends and given back to them — an erroneous rumor; the Bromleys would not have put up with a connived sale which would mean still more money going to the government for war.)
This is a good and historic case, involving as it does, simple, plain and powerless (?) people.
I’d like to call special attention to a story in this issue of the paper — it is Peggy Scherer’s story, on the front page, of the Peacemaker victory [the IRS surrendered in their attempt to seize and sell Ernest and Marion Bromley’s home].
(It is the completed story of the news box which appeared on page three of the last issue.)
It is a story of gentle persistence, the power of Truth — faith in Truth (remembering that Christ is our Truth).
He is the Way, the Truth, the Life.
Chuck Matthei had told me the story of his interviews with the head of the Internal Revenue Service, the almost daily dialogue that went on between them, and the frank and “manly” admission, made finally by the IRS chief, that a mistake had been made, that the Peacemakers had Truth on their side.
I felt a great sense of joy and thanksgiving, a sense of hope too, that our officials in Washington D.C. could be approached in this way — with dignity and perseverance, with courtesy, with the recognition that we are all, each one of us, whether government official or radical (one who gets to the roots of things), children of God.
We do believe that we are all brothers and sisters.
We believe, too, that we can only show our love for God by our love for our brothers and sisters.
So we share our joy with you, our readers, and hope we all have a sense of renewed strength and energy to continue our opposition to all violence, to all wars.
We point out that one way not to have to pay income tax, so much of which goes to the military, into stockpiling, into sales of weapons to other countries, is to seek more ways of living a life of voluntary poverty, to follow our Lord Jesus and his loveable servant St. Francis.
[Speaking of Pentecostal Christian groups on the Mexican border:] I could tell of other works these groups have done, but there is no space here.
I only wish that the cause of peace, the rejection of war and service in the armed forces, and refusal to pay income tax could be part of their way of life.
Jesus told us to love our enemies and St. Francis’ followers made a rejection of feudal service to the war lords of the time part of their religious commitment.
In the Catholic Worker organization itself was targeted by the IRS for failure to pay income tax.
Eventually the IRS backed down in the face of public ridicule and Catholic Worker resistance.
Some of the Catholic Worker articles about this were written by Dorothy Day and I’ve already excerpted them in an earlier Picket Line post focusing on her writings.
The issue published a couple of reader reactions to the kerfluffle:
Dear Dorothy,
Ho, you are on the right track.
I just read your tax exemption article in the issue.
You are absolutely correct.
I don’t know how you will do it.
But you owe to all those you help, not the money represented, but the faith and steadfast purpose for which you stand — the guiding light.
I pray for you.
I hope some way you can make it — somehow.
Love, Dick Mayer 409 West 11th St. Newton, Kansas 67114
Dear Friends at CW,
I just read the 39th Anniversary issue and am tremendously excited by the article: “If the Present Is Different…”
We are in a bit of a “predicament,” between seizure of our car and auction by the IRS.
The IRS has adjourned the open auction and declared an auction for sealed bids; peace people around here are ready to rise to that challenge also.
We are starting a peace action center in this area.
We’d be interested in literature lists of books and pamphlets written by CW people.
We read that the CW has to appear in court to justify its tax refusal and its refusal to ask for exemption — as if mercy had to ask permission!
We are in a three-family intentional communlty of Mennonite background.
War tax resistance is one of our pillars and we’ve not yet found our way out of tbe maze of incorporation into some status that gives us the kind of freedom we seek.
But our existence together, our resistance and service, are dally victories.
So we keep on.
Peace and Joy be with you, David Jansen of the Bridge
A brief article on war tax resistance by Anita Katz appeared in the issue of Mother Jones.
It is mostly the standard boilerplate war tax resistance article, but in a couple of paragraphs it tries to guesstimate the size of the movement.
This photo by Lionel Delevigne of war tax resisters Juanita and Wally Nelson accompanied the article
It was opposition to the Vietnam War that first created widespread national attention for antiwar tax resisters.
The number of antiwar income-tax resisters rose from 275 in 1966 to an estimated 20,000 in , with telephone tax resisters during this peak period estimated at between 200,000 and 500,000.
Though figures have since leveled off — there were an estimated 5,000 income-tax resisters in — many in the movement are hoping that further revelations of the Reagan administration’s mucking about in Central America will fuel a new round of war-tax resistance.
Says David Croteau at the War Resisters League, “The two fundamental needs for the government to conduct war are men to serve in the military and cash for equipment — which comes from taxes.”
From the edition of
In These Times:
Pocketbook Pacifists
Some people use income tax time to send an anti-military message to the
government.
by Marcia Yudkin
“Some people think tax resistance is an extreme thing to do,” muses Steven
Broil, “but you have to be as extreme and active as the people you’re
opposing. Money talks.” An increasing number of people are using April
15th as an opportunity to talk back. According to
a recent General Accounting Office report, tax resistance rose sharply in
, with a 400 percent
increase in the Northeast. Accurate estimates of the number of war tax
resisters are difficult to arrive at. The
IRS has
a category called “illegal protesters,” in which it placed 6,694 individuals
in 1978 and 15,285 in 1980. According to the War Resisters League, those
figures are a gross underestimate. There might be as many as 200,000 people
resisting taxes from any principled position, including at least several
thousand specifically protesting military spending.
IRS
figures would also not include individuals using wholly legal means to resist
war taxes. And both the War Resisters League and the Conscience and Military
Tax Campaign report a groundswell of interest since President Reagan took
office.
Steven Broil, who stocks shelves in a store in Amherst,
Mass., last year found
himself for the first time owing the government money at tax time. He
happened to hear an announcement on the radio of a number to call about war
tax resistance, and after a conference with veteran tax resisters Wally and
Juanita Nelsen [sic] of nearby Deerfield, he decided not to pay the
$255 he owed. He filed and enclosed a statement of his decision of conscience
instead of a check.
Broil might seem an unlikely recruit to the ranks of tax resisters. Both his
parents were officers in the military, and only a long string of coincidences
prevented his own enlistment in the Air Force. Recently, however, he has
developed what he calls “pacifist leanings.”
“I was raised a Roman Catholic,” he explains, “and we weren’t exactly
encouraged to read the Bible for ourselves. But when I began to read the
Bible I found that it’s pretty much black and white in the Gospels not to
kill and to love your enemy. From believing that it’s wrong to kill under any
circumstances, the next logical step is that I shouldn’t participate in
killing in any way. Working so that my taxes go toward killing is
intolerable.”
He has also come to feel strongly about El Salvador. “A lot of people say
they’re against
U.S. aid going to
El Salvador, but they don’t make the connection that money is taken out of
their paycheck every week and sent to El Salvador.”
Comparative risk.
Breaking the law was not an easy thing for Broil to bring himself to do. Last
year, a series of “Dear Taxpayer” letters ended with threats to garnish his
wages or seize bank accounts, although neither happened. This year, his
giving false information on his W-4 withholding form and deciding not to file
a tax return at all make him liable to a year’s imprisonment and a
substantial fine. Although he points out that Wally and Juanita Nelsen have
been resisting for 30 years and Juanita was only jailed once for an hour, he
knows that the government could create difficulties for him.
Erin Freed of the Pioneer Valley War Tax Resisters points out that it usually
costs the government more money to pursue tax resisters than it will collect,
a good reason not to bother. On the other hand, the tax system relies on
voluntary compliance, and the
IRS
must crack down on “avoidance schemes” that appear to be popular. Hence there
is great variance in the government’s response to war tax resisters. One
PVWTR
member had the $600 in his checking account seized without notice during his
second year of war tax resistance, while another member received his first
phone call from the
IRS
nine years after he began to resist. Since court trials of war tax resisters
are expensive and may generate publicity favorable to the cause, they are few
and far between. seven
pacifist refusers were criminally prosecuted, none, and in there were
two criminal convictions.
“In our little world,” Broil says, “if my wife and I lost our savings or if I
lost my job, that would really put a dent in our lives, but if you put
yourself in a village of El Salvador where they can take you out and shoot
you — or put yourself in a European’s place hearing about Haig’s nuclear war
and knowing that the war would be in your backyard — our risks are minimal.”
The roughly $2,000 that he owes the
IRS
has been contributed instead to an alternative fund administered by the
Pioneer Valley War Tax Resisters, a local group of about a dozen longtime
members, “We feel we can do a better job with our money than the government
can,” explains Broil. “We put the money toward life-affirming purposes.” Part
of the money in the fund is reserved for legal fees a member might need, but
most of it is loaned to local groups who don’t have access to mainstream
funding.
Like many tax resisters, Broil keeps no bank accounts. Instead he gives extra
money to friends on interest-free loans. “You can’t have a house or a car in
your name because the
IRS
could seize it,” he says, “and it’s much easier to keep the money away from
the government in the first place if you can be self-employed.”
Alan Eccleston, an architect and builder who also lives in Amherst, is a war
tax resister in the ideal position of being able to withhold the quarterly
payments required of a self-employed person. But he has a very different
philosophy of resistance. He makes partial quarterly payments and doesn’t
much mind that for the last seven years, the
IRS has
usually ended up with his full income tax assessment, plus interest and
penalties on the amount held back. “Some war tax resisters put a maximum of
energy into preventing collection by the
IRS,”
he says. “I put my energy into following my conscience and conveying my
beliefs to others.” A Quaker, Eccleston opposes war in any form. “The only
people who have the opportunity to be conscientious objectors against war in
this country are 17-year-old males,” he points out, referring to draft
registration. “But I believe that the First and Ninth Amendments to the
Constitution protect my right to refuse war taxes.”
So that people like himself can satisfy both their consciences and the law,
he supports the passage of the World Peace Tax Fund bill, first introduced in
the Senate in by Senator Mark Hatfield and
now with 333 co-sponsors in the House of Representatives. The bill would
provide taxpayers with the opportunity to identify themselves on their 1040
form as conscientious objectors to war taxes. The portion of their income tax
that would otherwise go to the military would instead be deposited with the
World Peace Tax Fund and be available only for peaceful purposes.
Eccleston rejects the criticism of some other war tax resisters that after 40
percent or so of their taxes was handed over to the World Peace Tax Fund, the
same percentage of the remainder would still go to the military. “It’s a good
idea because the general fund would receive less money,” he argues, “billions
less if even 4 percent of the population chose to be
COs.
Their $4 billion a year in the World Peace Tax Fund would clearly support
alternatives to war that presently get no funding. It would spread the
ethical decision to more people. Every year every taxpayer would have to
think about whether or not he or she wanted to support the military.”
Another project he supports is the Conscience and Military Tax Campaign,
coordinated by four activists in Bellport,
N.Y. Signers of the
resolution they circulate pledge to withhold at least the military portion of
their income taxes when notified that 100,000 people have signed the
resolution. CMTC also administers an escrow account to hold refused taxes.
Yet Eccleston urges people not to wait for the safety of numbers. The
important thing to him is taking personal responsibility and going on record
against preparations for nuclear war.
Eccleston is accordingly less enthusiastic about the strategy of some war tax
resisters to avoid contributing to the military by reducing their income to a
nontaxable level. “The point is not to be self-sacrificing, but to witness
for peace. The real issue is peace, not tax resistance.”
Occasionally, tax resisters will join forces to form cooperative housing or business relationships that help to facilitate their resistance.
This is most often found among war tax resisters, for whom resistance is an ongoing commitment rather than a protest or rebellion against a particular government or policy.
Today I’ll summarize some examples of this that I have encountered in my research.
The Bijou community of Colorado Springs, Colorado is a living example of nonviolent community resistance in the “belly of the beast” of right-wing military and Christian extremism.
The members of this community live below a taxable income level so that they don’t pay for war.
In addition to ongoing bannering and civil disobedience at some of the 5 major military institutions in the area, the Bijou community runs services for the mentally-ill, homeless, working poor, incarcerated, and the general community including: a soup kitchen, food banks, a land trust, several homes for transitional and homeless folks, a free bicycle clinic, and a musical theater group.
The Agape Community
The Agape Community was founded in by a group of Catholics who wanted to live closer to the ideal of Christian community they found in the Bible.
Among the founders were tax resisters Brayton & Suzanne Shanley and Emmanuel Charles McCarthy.
They formed the community in such a way that it could support itself with members earning less than a taxable income, for example by being able to grow their own food.
The Shanleys have stayed with the two-house community since its founding, and it has had dozens of more transient residents through the years.
The community hosts speakers and workshops on nonviolence and related topics.
The Whiteway Colony
A group of Tolstoyans made a go of creating a colony based on their interpretation of Tolstoy’s Christian anarchism, which included tax resistance, and was eventually the home to forty people.
The land was operated by a committee headed by noted Tolstoyan (and Tolstoy translator) Aylmer Maude, and this committee held the land in trust, while allowing anyone to settle on and work the land, with the understanding that nobody would own any of it except by virtue of being engaged in occupying and working on it.
(The Whiteway community still exists, but has abandoned the more radical communal-ownership principles — today the land is communally owned, but the homes on it are bought and sold as private property.)
Possibility Alliance
The Possibility Alliance farm is a simple-living showcase guided by the following five principles: radical simplicity, service, social activism, inner work, and gratitude.
It hosts free skills-share classes and a group called the Superheroes who dress up like caped crusaders and bike out to do good deeds here and there.
The founders are war tax resisters who resist by maintaining a very low (sub-poverty line) income.
Joanne Sheehan
When the Hartford Courant profiled war tax resisters Anna Aschenbach and Joanne Sheehan, who have been resisting taxes since the Vietnam War, it noted Sheehan’s participation in cooperative projects as being helpful to her resistance:
Along with her partner, who’s also a tax resister, Sheehan raised two kids with a family income of about $24,000. Now that their children are grown, and can no longer be claimed as deductions, each earns less than about $8,000 a year in order to keep from paying taxes.
They’ve lived in collectives and communes much of the time, sharing living expenses with other resisters.
They practice “radical simplicity” by going “back to basics” — doing things like hanging clothes instead of using a dryer, not going to restaurants or buying pre-packaged foods.
“Land League Villages”
During the rent strike that the National Land League organized against English absentee landlords in Ireland, when landlords were successful in evicting tenants who refused to pay rent, the League would try to find them (and sometimes their livestock) a temporary home on the land of someone who was sympathetic with the resisters.
These might grow to hold several families and were sometimes called “Land League Villages.”
Amish Milk Cooperatives
The cooperatives used by Amish communities to process and package milk turned out to be useful also when the Amish began resisting the then-new social security taxes (they believed the social security program would require them to violate principles of their faith, and after many years of resistance, they won a legal exemption from the program).
The government tried to levy the checks that the cooperative wrote to pay those of its milk suppliers who were resisting the tax, but the responsible officials of the cooperative refused to sign the checks.
Peacemakers attempted to build a decentralized and self-disciplined movement which stressed local initiative and group coordination along the lines of the nonviolent revolutionary movement in India.
Emphasis was put on building intentional communities which practiced communal living.
“Groups or cells are the real basis of the movement,” Peacemakers announced, “for this is not an attempt to organize another pacifist membership organization, which one joins by signing a statement or paying a membership fee.”
Instead, Peacemakers emphasized a living program which included resistance to the draft and war taxes, personal transformation, and group participation in work for political and economic democracy.
Peacemakers at the Ohio cell organized a land trust to remove property from the market place…
Juanita and Wally Nelson, founding members of Peacemakers, and war tax resisters Betsy Corner, Randy Kehler, and Bob Bady were among the organizers of the Valley Community Land Trust.
The trust resisted IRS attempts to seize the Corner/Kehler home for back taxes, and helped to get their home returned to them.
Art Harvey’s farm
Dorothy Day visited Art Harvey’s farm in and described it this way:
He carries on a practical application of Karl Meyer’s tax refusal… by having teams of workers in orchards where they prune trees, harvest apples and later blueberries and work seven months of the year.
They work and live in a style which frees them from the payment of taxes for war.
Perhaps about a hundred are engaged in this way of life, which results usually in some settling in communities of the moshavim variety, each having some small acreage and a house built by themselves.
Considering the New England climate, no small achievement!
It certainly means an emphasis on the ascetic, on sacrifice.
Peter Maurin Farm
Peter Maurin Farm
is a Catholic Worker project — a “hospitality house on the land” near Manhattan that also grows food for the urban hospitality houses.
Many of those involved in the project were conscientious objectors, and appreciated being able to be part of a self-supporting project that required its volunteers to earn little or no taxable income and so enabled them to stay under the tax line.
Collective Impressions
War tax resister Ed Guinan created a business to help facilitate the tax resistance of its employees.
One news profile described it this way:
[I]n Washington, D.C., is another group of tax resisters who have formed a nonprofit cooperative print shop and who refuse to send their taxes to the IRS.
Ed Guinan is a priest and the coordinator of the shop, called Collective Impressions.
A year and a half ago Guinan and his colleagues decided to continue paying social security taxes but to send their withholding taxes to the U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency.
“Every quarter, when taxes are due, we send a check to the Arms Control Agency,” Guinan says.
“They return it with a polite note saying that they cannot accept it, and we put it into a tax escrow account which cannot be used for normal business expenses.”
Collective Impressions owes only $500 per quarter to the IRS, but Guinan and his coworkers believe they are making an effective protest against U.S. military spending policies.
Restored Israel of Yahweh
Similarly, members of the small religious group called the Restored Israel of Yahweh formed a small construction business and helped those of its employees who were also members of the group to resist their taxes — eventually facing criminal tax evasion convictions for this.
Here are a handful of artifacts relating to the American war tax resistance
movement circa .
First, some relics that were filed alongside a letter from Herbert Sonthoff to
W. Walter Boyd (though I think this filing may be arbitrary and that the
letters are not related to each other):
At this late date it is pointless to muster the evidence which shows that the
war we are waging in Vietnam is wrong. By now you have decided for yourself
where you stand. In all probability, if you share our feelings about it, you
have expressed your objections both privately and publicly. You have witnessed
the small effect these protests have had on our government.
By ,
every American citizen must decide whether he will make a voluntary
contribution to the continuation of this war. After grave consideration, we
have decided that we can no longer do so, and that we will therefore withhold
all or part of the taxes due. The purpose of this letter is to call your
attention to the fact that a nationwide tax refusal campaign is in progress,
as stated in the accompanying announcement, and to urge you to consider
refusing to contribute voluntarily to this barbaric war.
Signed:
Prof. Warren Ambrose
Mathematics, M.I.T.
Dr. Donnell Boardman
Physician, Acton, Mass.
Mrs. Elizabeth Boardman
Acton, Mass.
Prof. Noam Chomsky
Linguistics, M.I.T.
Miss Barbara Deming
Writer, Wellfleet, Mass.
Prof. John Dolan
Philosophy, Chicago University
Prof. John Ek
Anthropology, Long Island University
Martha Bentley Hall
Musician, Brookline, Mass.
Dr. Thomas C. Hall
Physician, Brookline, Mass.
Rev. Arthur B. Jellis
First Parish in Concord, Unitarian-Universalist, Concord, Mass.
Prof. Donald Kalish
Philosophy, U.C.L.A.
Prof. Louis Kampf
Humanities, M.I.T.
Prof. Staughton Lynd
History, Yale University
Milton Mayer
Writer, Mass.
Prof. Jonathan Mirsky
Chinese Language and Literature, Dartmouth College
Prof. Sidney Morgenbesser
Philosophy, Columbia University
Prof. Wayne A. O’Neill
Graduate School of Education, Harvard University
Prof. Anatol Rapoport
Mental Health Research Institute, University of Michigan
Prof. Franz Schurmann
Center for Chinese Studies, University of Calif., Berkeley
Dr. Albert Szent Gyorgy
Institute for Muscle Research, Woods Hole, Mass.
Harold Tovish
Sculptor, Brookline, Mass.
Prof. Howard Zinn
Government, Boston University
* Institutions listed for informational
purposes only
P.S. The No Tax for
War Committee intends to make public the names of signers, hence if you wish
to add your signature, early return is desirable. Contributions are needed,
and checks should be made payable to the Committee.
The committee will publish the above statement with names of signers at tax
deadline — .
Send signed statements to: NO TAX FOR WAR COMMITTEE,
c/o
Rev. Maurice McCrackin,
932 Dayton St., Cincinnati,
Ohio 45214.
For additional copies of this form, put number you will distribute and name
and address on the following lines:
No. _____ Name ____________________
Address _________________________
Signers So Far
Meldon and Amy Acheson
Michael J. Ames
Alfred F. Andersen
Ross Anderson
Beulah K. Arndt
Joan Baez
Richard Baker
Bruce & Pam Beck
Ruth T. Best
Robert & Margaret Blood
Karel F. Botermans
Marion & Ernest Bromley
Edwin Brooks
A. Dale Brothington
Mrs. Lydia Bruns
Wendal Bull
Mrs. Dorothy Bucknell
John Burslem
Lindley J. Burton
Catharine J. Cadbury
Maris Cakars
Robert and Phyllis Calese
William N. Calloway
Betty Camp
Daryle V. Carter
Jared & Susan Carter
Horace & Beulah Champney
Ken & Peggy Champney
Hank & Henry Chapin
Holly Chenery
Richard A. Chinn
Naom [sic] Chomsky
John & Judy Christian
Gordon & Mary Christiansen
Peter Christiansen
Donald F. Cole
John Augustine Cook
Helen Marr Cook
Jack Coolidge, Jr.
Allen Cooper
Martin J. Corbin
Tom & Monica Cornell
Dorothy J. Cunningham
Jean DaCosta
Ann & William Davidon
Stanley F. Davis
Dorothy Day
Dave Dellinger
Barbara Deming
Robert Dewart
Ruth Dodd
John M. Dolan
Orin Doty
Allen Duberstein
Ralph Dull
Malcolm Dundas
Margaret E. Dungan
Henry Dyer
Susan Eanet
Bob Eaton
Marc Paul Edelman
Johan & Francis Eliot
Jerry Engelbach
George J. Etu, Jr.
Mary C. Eubanks
Arthur Evans
Jonathan Evans
William E. Evans
Pearl Ewald
Franklin Farmer
Bertha Faust
Dianne M. Feeley
Rice A. Felder
Henry A. Felisone
Mildred Fellin
Glenn Fisher
John Forbes
Don & Ann Fortenberry
Marion C. Frenyear
Ruth Gage-Colby
Lawrence H. Geller
Richard Ghelli
Charles Gibadlo
Bruce Glushakow
Walter Gormly
Arthur Goulston
Thomas Grabell
Steven Green
Walter Grengg
Joseph Gribbins
Kenneth Gross
John M. Grzywacz, Jr.
Catherine Guertin
David Hartsough
David Hartsough
Arthur Harvey
Janet Hawksley
James P. Hayes, Jr.
R.F. Helstern
Ammon Hennacy
Norman Henry
Robert Hickey
Dick & Heide Hiler
William Himelhoch
C.J. Hinke
Anthony Hinrichs
William M. Hodsdon
Irwin R. Hogenauer
Florence Howe
Donald & Mary Huck
Philip Isely
Michael Itkin
Charles T. Jackson
Paul Jacobs
Martin & Nancy Jezer
F. Robert Johnson
Woodbridge O. Johnson
Ashton & Marie Jones
Paul Jordan
Paul Keiser
Joel C. Kent
Roy C. Kepler
Paul & Pauline Kermiet
Peter Kiger
Richard King
H.A. Kreinkamp
Arthur & Margaret Landes
Paul Lauter
Peter and Marolyn Leach
Gertrud & George A. Lear, Jr.
Alan and Elin Learnard
Titus Lehman
Richard A. Lema
Florence Levinsohn
Elliot Linzer
David C. Lorenz
Preston B. Luitweiler
Bradford Lyttle
Adriann van L. Maas
Ben & Sue Mann
Paul and Salome Mann
Howard E. Marston, Sr.
Milton and Jane Mayer
Martin & Helen Mayfield
Maurice McCrackin
Lilian McFarland
Maureen & Felix McGowan
Maryann McNaughton
Gelston McNeil
Guy W. Meyer
Karl Meyer
David & Catherine Miller
James Missey
Mark Morris
Janet Murphy
Thomas P. Murray
Rosemary Nagy
Wally & Juanita Nelson
Marilyn Neuhauser
Neal D. Newby, Jr.
Miriam Nicholas
Robert B. Nichols
David Nolan
Raymond S. Olds
Wayne A. O’Neil
Michael O’Quin
Ruth Orcutt
Eleanor Ostroff
Doug Palmer
Malcolm & Margaret Parker
Jim Peck
Michael E. Pettie
John Pettigrew
Lydia H. Philips
Dean W. Plagowski
Jefferson Poland
A.J. Porth
Ralph Powell
Charles F. Purvis
Jean Putnam
Harriet Putterman
Robert Reitz
Ben & Helen Reyes
Elsa G. Richmond
Eroseanna Robinson
Pat Rusk
Joe & Helen Ryan
Paul Salstrom
Ira J. Sandperl
Jerry & Rae Schwartz
Martin Shepard
Richard T. Sherman
Louis Silverstein
T.W. Simer
Ann B. Sims
Jane Beverly Smith
Linda Smith
Thomas W. Smuda
Bob Speck
Elizabeth P. Steiner
Lee D. Stern
Beverly Sterner
Michael Stocker
Charles H. Straut, Jr.
Stephen Suffet
Albert & Joyce Sunderland, Jr.
Mr. & Mrs. Michael R. Sutter
Marjorie & Robert Swann
Oliver & Katherine Tatum
Gary G. Taylor
Harold Tovish
Joe & Cele Tuchinsky
Lloyd & Phyllis Tyler
Samuel R. Tyson
Ingegerd Uppman
Margaret von Selle
Mrs. Evelyn Wallace
Wilbur & Joan Ann Wallis
William & Mary Webb
Barbara Webster
John K. White
Willson Whitman
Denny & Ida Wilcher
Huw Williams
George & Lillian Willoughby
Bob Wilson
Emily T. Wilson
Jim & Raona Wilson
W.W. Wittkamper
Sylvia Woog
Wilmer & Mildred Young
Franklin Zahn
Betty & Louis Zemel
Vicki Jo Zilinkas
Following this was a page explaining how to go about resisting:
For those owing nothing because of the Withholding Tax.
Such persons write a letter to the Internal Revenue Service, to be filed
with the tax return, stating that the writer cannot in good conscience
help support the war in Vietnam, voluntarily. The writer
therefore requests a return of a percentage of the money collected from
his salary.
Note: Of course, the
IRS
will not return the money. However, the writer has refused to pay for the
war voluntarily and has put it in writing. This symbolic action
is not to be belittled since anybody who does this allies himself with
those who will withhold money due the IRS.
For those self-employed or owing money beyond what has been withheld from
salary.
Such persons write a letter to be filed with the tax return, stating that
the writer does not object to the income tax in principle, but will not,
as a matter of conscience, help pay for the war in Vietnam. The writer is
therefore withholding some or all of the tax due.
Note: In all cases, we recommend that copies of these letters be sent to the
President and to your Senators.
Remarks:
The Internal Revenue Service has the legal power to confiscate money due
it. They will get that money, one way or another. However, to obstruct the
IRS
from collecting money due (by not filing a return at all, for example)
seems less important to us than the fact that each is refusing to pay
his tax voluntarily. With this in mind, many of us are placing the
taxes owed in special accounts and we will so inform the
IRS
in our letters.
Willful failure to pay is punishable by a fine of up to $10,000 and up to
a year in jail, together with the costs of prosecution. So far, the
IRS
has prosecuted only those who have obstructed collection (by refusing to
file a return, by refusing to answer a summons,
etc.).
Usually, the
IRS
has collected the tax due plus 6% interest and possibly an added fine of
5% for “negligence”. The fact that the
IRS
has rarely, if at all, prosecuted tax-refusers to the full
extent of the law does not mean they will not do so in the future.
Finally, an article from the edition of The Capitol East Gazette:
Two thousand anti-war leaflets on telephone tax refusal were distributed in Capitol East on , by members of CHOICE, a group of local residents who are withdrawing their support for the Vietnam war.
The leaflet explains that the 10% phone tax was enacted in specifically to raise money for the Vietnam war.
According to CHOICE, the phone company will not remove a person’s telephone if he refuses to pay the tax.
The company asks refusers to state why they are withholding the tax and then turns the matter over to the Internal Revenue Service.
According to CHOICE, there are presently 25 known tax refusers in the Capitol Hill area.
Those desiring CHOICE’s leaflet are asked to call LI 6‒9836.
War tax resistance in the Friends Journal in
There was a great deal about war tax resistance in the Friends Journal in , in part because of the occupation of the Randy Kehler/Betsy Corner home which the IRS was trying to auction off, and in part because of the IRS suit against the Journal to try to force it to pay its editor’s resisted taxes, and in part because of the Peace Tax Fund bill’s first congressional hearing.
A note in the issue pointed out that politicians were playing a name game that had apparently fooled some Quakers into thinking that the telephone excise tax had been transformed into something benign:
The telephone tax continues as a source of money for military expenditure, contrary to recent confusion about its status.
The tax, which was due to expire in , was extended under the Act for Better Child Care.
Those who proposed the act were searching for a way to finance their new program and seized upon the telephone tax as their “new” source of money.
However, the phone tax revenues continue to go into the General Fund, as always, and are not earmarked for the child care programs. More than 50 percent of the General Fund is used for military expenditure.
The National War Tax Resistance Coordinating Committee recommends that conscientious resistance to the telephone tax continue, as it can have a powerful impact if enough people are involved.
an ad for NWTRCC in the issue of Friends Journal
That issue also had a follow-up on the “Alternative Revenue Service” protest:
In , the Alternative Revenue Service reports that individuals redirected $104,740 of their federal income taxes away from the military to areas of human need.
The total includes $12,898 redirected through the ARS, $38,416 redirected by Alternative Funds, and $53,426 that individuals redirected to social action and relief programs. The Alternative Revenue Service campaign is designed to educate taxpayers about how their federal income tax dollars are used.
The service provides the EZ Peace Form, which participants can use in registering their opposition to military spending at the time they file their taxes.
The service reports that 70,000 EZ Peace Forms were distributed nationwide last year.
This year’s form is simplified, with clearer instructions.
The issue brought the news that the Peace Tax Fund promoters had finally managed to get a Congressional Committee hearing for their bill, which was scheduled for .
“The hearing will be informational to determine the need for such legislation, not a preparation for floor action.
The need is assessed from the testimony of both individuals and religious bodies.
The hearing will support the bill by providing a permanent public record, by lending it legitimacy, by possibly attracting more serious consideration from prospective cosponsors, and by providing a record of congressional scrutiny.
The hearing will be brief, not lending itself to extended exchanges.
However, written testimony can be added and will become part of the official record.”
A follow-up in described the latest Peace Tax Fund bill as one that “would amend the Internal Revenue Code to permit qualified conscientious objectors to have part of their federal taxes — that part equal to the military portion of the federal budget — to be paid into a fund for peace-related projects.”
It encouraged readers to submit “written testimony for the official hearing record,” to publicize and perhaps attend the hearing, to contact Congressional representatives and encourage them to attend and to support the bill, and to donate money to the cause.
The issue described how the hearing before the House Subcommittee on Select Revenue Measures went — “the first actual hearing held since a Peace Tax Fund Bill was first introduced in Congress .”
Excerpts:
“If we give the right to a person to withhold their body from a war as a conscientious objector, that person should be able to withhold his money as well.”
So spoke Sen. Mark Hatfield in his lead-off testimony…
…Several hundred spectators from across the country packed the hearing room.
Many attended as concerned individual taxpayers.
Others came as members of religious denominations and peace groups long associated with the Peace Tax Campaign.
Three chartered buses, one from Lancaster, Pa., two others from Philadelphia, swelled the numbers by some 150 supporters.
When the last of them filed in from a late-arriving bus to find all spectator seats occupied, Chairman Charles Rangel stopped the hearings momentarily, inviting standing-room only observers to move forward and to occupy empty seats normally reserved for officials and the press.
Many did so.
Veterans of peace demonstrations, several parents holding small children, young bearded men in simple dress, older couples from the peace churches created a colorful patchwork as they mixed with congressional aides, heads of foundations, and Capitol bureaucrats in business suits.
…Over 2,300 letters in support of the Peace Tax Fund Bill were bound in large volumes and set on a front table to be presented to the committee.
From 50–100 such letters a day continued to arrive as of the time of the hearing.
Following the introductory testimony of Mark Hatfield, lead sponsor of the bill (S.689) in the Senate, there were also presentations by four members of Congress: Andy Jacobs (lead sponsor of the bill in the House), Nancy Pelosi, and John Conyers.…
…[A] panel of religious leaders testified.
One, Thomas Gumbleton, Roman Catholic bishop from Detroit, and past president of Pax Christi, pointed out that two of the first leaders of the church, John and Peter, said that sometimes it is necessary to obey God before obeying the law.
How much better it would be, Gumbleton said, for COs to be able to pay all their taxes, knowing their money would be used for life-affirming purposes.
William Davidson, retired Episcopal bishop of western Kansas, a CO in World War Ⅱ, has actively opposed war .
“Having lived past draft age, I have been saddened and conflicted each year having to pay taxes to support war,” he said.
The Episcopal Peace Fellowship has consistently supported war tax resistance as a religious witness.
John A. Lapp, executive secretary of Mennonite Central Committee, Akron, Pa., spoke on behalf of the three historic peace churches (Mennonites, Quakers, and Church of the Brethren).
The issue of war-related taxes is one of religious freedom, Lapp said.
“Many of us feel the pain of having our religious institutions serve as tax collectors for war.”
During committee questioning, Representative Jacobs asked Rabbi [Phil] Bentley [with the Jewish Peace Fellowship], “Is [passage of this bill] going to give rise to requests for similar legislation from people who don’t want their money going for a golf course?”
…[Friends Journal] editor-manager Vint Deming, associate editor Melissa Elliott, typesetter Susan Jordhamo, and board members Robert Sutton and Sam Legg joined several hundred other citizens in packing the hearing room…
The hearing was informational, to give legislators material to use in future considerations, rather than to schedule the bill for action.
As such, it gave supporters a chance to formally present the case, get testimony in the written record, and show the depth and breadth of people’s interest in the bill.
The pace of this legislative process is frustratingly slow, but, for many of us, the hearing was a heartening experience.
There, we heard people testify in a formal legislative setting to our most deeply held beliefs.
One activist-participant said, “All my life I’ve been on the side that opposes government decisions.
It was a weird experience to see all those peace movement people in the same room with legislators.
I’ve never seen anything like that before, nor ever imagined it.
It gave me a different vision of what might be possible.”
The Peace Tax Fund Bill has come a long way , with many technical refinements, and it has a long way to go in gathering widespread support.
On we witnessed one small step in validation, acknowledgment of our beliefs, and moving the dream closer to reality.
Perhaps one day we will look back, as do those who watched the process of legalizing conscientious objection, and be glad we were involved in making it legal to follow our beliefs with our money-as well as with our bodies.
“This is not a political issue, but a moral issue of conscience,” responded Bentley…
Jacobs, in response, thanked the Rabbi and others of religious conscience who had testified.
“I am a sponsor of this bill,” he said, “but I am not a pacifist.”
He called to mind one of his favorite movies, Friendly Persuasion, and the lines spoken toward the end of the film: “It’s good to know that somebody is holding out for a better way of settling things!”
Terrill Hyde, tax legislative counsel for the Department of the Treasury, presented the Bush Administration position opposing the PTF.
She mentioned “problems of complexity, confusion, and increased administrative burden,” sure to arise if the bill were passed.
There would be no deterrent either, she said, to restrain taxpayers from inappropriately claiming CO status.
If taxpayers were allowed to designate the uses for which their tax dollars were spent, “our entire budgetary process would be undermined.”
There would likely be loss of revenue to needed federal programs.
Others, however, presented differing views.
Several speakers argued that there would likely be substantial increases in revenue as a direct result of the bill.
Many who currently refuse to pay a portion or all of their taxes would gladly pay.
Also, large costs resulting from IRS efforts to collect from tax resisters would be avoided.
Answering the criticism of how the act might increase paperwork and administrative costs, several people testified to the simple nature of the bill and of the tax filing process.
As to IRS claims that the bill raises possible legal questions, a panel of two law specialists responded.
Mark Tushnet, professor of law at Georgetown University, said, “A nation that wants to protect the religious freedom of its citizens can reasonably be expected to enact legislation to enable the freedom to be expressed.”
It seems perfectly appropriate, he concluded, that such legislation be enacted.
“It is needed in addition to the Religious Freedom Act.”
Philadelphia, Pa., attorney and war tax specialist Peter Goldberger agreed.
“Legislation of this kind has a noble history in our country,” and he quoted from a letter from then-President George Washington to Philadelphia Quakers.
The nation’s laws, Washington wrote, must always be “extensively accommodated” in cases of individual conscience.
Alan Eccleston, a Quaker and an organizational development consultant from Hadley, Massachusetts, told about how, in his own tax witness, he has endured penalties, punishments, and the threat of losing his home.
The IRS has a lien on his house right now.
“Conscience must be taken into account.
Spiritual values are real.
They are not to be treated as incidental or expendable to fit the needs of the state.
This is what the First Amendment is all about.”
Ruth Flower, legislative secretary of Friends Committee on National Legislation, emphasized that the Peace Tax Fund Act would not offer an escape to those who do not wish to pay their taxes, because they would have to pay the same amount either way.
It would, however, provide a legal way out of violating one’s religious beliefs in order to comply with the laws of the land.
Her point was born out by Patricia Washburn, who gave perhaps the most moving testimony of the hearing.
She talked about the challenge presented to each of us, and to her personally, in Micah 6:8: “…what does the Lord require of you but to act justly, to love constantly, and to walk humbly with your God?” Walking humbly requires us to acknowledge the seeds of violence in our own hearts, rather than projecting them onto someone else.
“Loving constantly” can be a discouraging and difficult task, especially in today’s climate of distrust and alienation.
“I am not opposed to paying taxes, but I find no alternative form of tax payment… Thus, I see no current alternative to withholding the military portion of my taxes… I pray that my witness is done in love and that it will help to build a bridge across the chasm of violence and fear.”
After the hearing and following the press conference, [Marian] Franz [executive director of the National Campaign for a Peace Tax Fund] gave a brief workshop on lobbying for the bill.
She pointed out that the testimony would now be entered in written record and could be referred to in the future.
She added, “the fact that we got a hearing is absolutely amazing.”
Many other pieces of legislation have not yet been so lucky, and the demand is great.
“If all members of the committee had been present, they all would have been deeply moved, and we would be a lot further down the road.”
Franz encouraged people, when lobbying, to talk in terms of conscience, as defined by Pope John ⅩⅩⅢ, who said, “Deep inside, each one of us finds a law that we did not put there.
It tells us to do this and shun that.”
That is what puts the issue of paying taxes for war in the arena of religious decisions and touches on every individual’s right to follow their faith — whether they are housewives, bureaucrats, lawyers, teachers, or politicians.
That is why it is important to keep trying to open doors and ears and minds.
Marian Franz has a suggestion for how to approach people: “Talk to aides and legislators as though you’re sharing something personally.
You will often find that when you are talking about conscience, people are moved deeply.”
The issue also plugged “Good Use: Songs of Peace, Tax & Conscience” — “a tape of War Tax Resister Songs, featuring Charlie King, Luci Murphy, Geof Morgan, Lifeline, and others.
It was produced by Don Walsh, who donates the royalties.”
The lead editorial (by Vinton Deming) in the issue concerned the ongoing Randy Kehler/Betsy Corner case:
Finding Affinity
Randy Kehler and his wife, Betsy Corner, have been tax resisters .
They have given the tax money instead to a variety of groups doing constructive community work.
the IRS has been trying to sell their house in Colrain, Mass., in an effort to collect $25,896 in back taxes — but it hasn’t been easy.
First of all, there’s been a growing tax resistance movement there in Franklin County.
Bob Bady and Pat Morse, for instance, had their house seized and auctioned in .
(They still live in the house, however, and the buyer hasn’t taken possession.)
Shelburn Falls dentist Tom Wilson had his dental license revoked when he refused to cooperate with IRS.
(He continues his practice, however; even the local sheriff remains one of his regular patients).
So when the word got out that IRS planned to auction Betsy and Randy’s house, supporters in large numbers turned up on the announced day to oppose the sale.
There were lots of signed bids (such as an offer to clean the teeth of an IRS agent, others pledging to do community work or to be peace activists for life) — but no cash buyers came forward.
Not a one.
So, in , IRS upped the ante.
Betsy, Randy, and daughter Lillian, 12, were given an eviction notice.
When Randy decided to stay, he was held in contempt and tossed in the county jail for 6 months.
This didn’t go unnoticed by friends and neighbors, however.
A sign-up sheet got circulated, and volunteers committed themselves to stay in the house around the clock.
There’s been a continuous presence there .
Groups from as far away as Washington, D.C., have signed up to come and help out.
In , members of Mount Toby (Mass.) Meeting formed such an affinity group for a week.
Meanwhile, Randy stays in jail and makes the most of his time there.
He has made friends with many of the prisoners, has organized a chess tournament, and does what he can to interpret his tax witness.
Allan Eccleston, member of Mount Toby Meeting, has been approved as the meeting’s official minister and visits Randy twice a week.
So what’s next?
IRS has scheduled another auction, this time out of the area in Springfield, Mass. — in the hope, it seems, of attracting a buyer for the house, someone who doesn’t know about this whole chain of events.
Randy will not be there to talk about it, but lots of his friends will.
Even if the house is sold, the issue will be far from over.
The house is part of a land trust (Randy and Betsy own the house but not the land on which it stands) — and there’s the likelihood of a continuing nonviolent presence in the house to welcome any potential new buyer.
How might Friends respond?
I asked this question in of Francis Crowe, long-time head of the American Friends Service Committee office in western Massachusetts and a supporter of Randy and Betsy.
She suggests:
Form an affinity group to help sustain the presence in the house.
(To be scheduled, contact Traprock Peace Center…
Funds are also needed to support the action (checks made out to “War Tax Refusers Support Committee”…).
Letters to the editor on the subject of taxes and militarism are always helpful.
More sponsors are needed in Congress for the Peace Tax Fund bill.…
At a rally in support of Betsy and Randy, Juanita Nelson — who, with husband Wally, has been a tax refuser for decades and is known to many Friends — offered these words by Goethe: “Whatever you can do or dream you can, begin it.
Boldness has Genius, Power, and Magic in it.”
Good advice as another tax season is upon us, when many of us seek to find our way on this difficult question of taxes for war.
In a later issue, David Zarembka reported in a letter-to-the-editor about how the occupation / blockade of the Kehler/Corner home was proceeding:
On , federal marshalls arrested seven members of the Flowing River Affinity Group who were occupying the Kehler/Corner home and removed the furniture into storage.
At , the IRS sold the house to the highest bidder in an auction for $5,400. The seven affinity group members were released from jail later in the afternoon.
So was Randy, who had served two months of his sentence.
Do not think, however, that Betsy and Randy have lost their home in an exotic cause!
As soon as the federal marshalls left the house, an affinity group reoccupied it, and other groups, including one from Washington, D.C., of which I am a member, have continued to occupy the house on a 24-hour basis.
Affinity groups, which occupy the home for a week each, have been organizing , but new ones are still being formed…
The “buyers,” a young couple with a two-month-old son, have visited the house several times but have not as yet forced the issue.
They are consulting with their lawyers.
Betsy and Randy have become members of the Colrain Neighbors Affinity Group, which will occupy the home for the week beginning .
They and their twelve-year-old daughter, Lillian, will move back into their home when they can comfortably live there once again.
I would hope that this action would lead Friends to consider how their cooperation with the federal tax collection process — even those who are symbolic tax resisters or those who force the IRS to take their taxes from them — allows the present military system to thrive.
A report in that issue on the Canadian Yearly Meeting that had taken place noted that:
Canadian Yearly Meeting, in its role of employer, was asked to refuse to remit that portion of its employees’ taxes that will be used to support the military.
Concern was expressed by the yearly meeting’s trustees, who would bear the legal results of such actions.
Although the yearly meeting came close to supporting a minute for this action, it agreed to seek clearness with the trustees and monthly meetings and return to this issue next year.
an ad from the issue of Friends Journal
The issue was largely devoted to war tax resistance.
It began with an editorial from Vinton Deming concerning his war tax resistance and the response of his employer, the Journal.
Excerpt:
From the outset, I knew it wasn’t a very practical thing to do.
The government was too powerful, and all the tax laws were against me.
I’d just end up paying much more in the end, so why not choose a better way to work for peace?
A good letter to my congressman, for instance, or a tax vigil at the federal building on Apri1 15.
But this was in .
Our war in Vietnam was just over, but the Cold War continued.
As the Reagan years unfolded, with still larger military expenditures and big cuts in domestic programs, I became even more clear: I must resist as fully as possible the payment of taxes for war.
The Journal board was always supportive of my witness.
It refused twice to honor IRS levies on my wages.
In doing so, Friends openly accepted the possibility of being taken to court one day and fined severely.
The board wrote to IRS: “Our position of noncompliance to the requests of the Internal Revenue Service is not an easy one.
We do not question the laws of the land lightly, but do so under the weight of a genuine religious and moral concern.”
Well, as they say, “What goes ’round comes ’round.”
, Friends Journal was told by the U.S. Justice Department to pay up or we’d be taken to court.…
I am grateful for the steadfastness of the Journal’s board of managers.
, it has been faithful to the Quaker peace testimony.
The road has been an uncertain and confusing one at many points, but Friends have shown courage in continuing.
In my own personal war tax journey, these words by John Stoner have served to guide: “We are war tax resisters because we have discovered some doubt as to what belongs to Caesar and what belongs to God, and have decided to give the benefit of the doubt to God.”
Sam Legg, clerk of the Friends Journal Board of Managers, gave his take on the Deming situation and on why the Journal had decided to throw in the towel and pay the IRS’s demands.
Excerpts:
… Vinton refused to pay any federal taxes.
Each tax year he sent a blank 1040 along with a letter to the president explaining his opposition to war and his unwillingness as a Friend to pay for it.
Since there was no Peace Tax Fund, Vinton reasoned, he would instead contribute the money to worthwhile projects and see that it was used for peaceful purposes.
In , the IRS served a levy on Friends Journal for $22,714.16, Vinton’s taxes for the period, plus interest and penalties.
The IRS asked Friends Journal to withhold part of Vinton’s salary each month, but the Journal Board refused, writing that “We… are in support of Vinton Deming’s conscientious witness.”
In , Friends Journal received a letter from the U.S. Department of Justice reminding us of the levy on Vinton’s salary and asking us to try to “resolve this matter short of litigation.”
That is, to pay the original assessed amount plus interest and a possible 50 percent penalty on the total.
We were given until to respond.
If we were to continue refusing to honor the levy, an immediate court action would follow.
The U.S. Supreme Court decision, Smith vs. Oregon, as Philadelphia Yearly Meeting and the American Friends Service Committee have learned, teaches us that there is no way we could win such a case in court, nor could our assets be protected from seizure.
More troubling, this seizure could make others who are not involved in our decision, undergo unwelcome investigation.
Finally, a court case offers IRS the opportunity to set a legal precedent requiring the payment of the 50 percent penalty (which a sympathetic judge excused in the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting case last year).
We fear that the inevitable negative decision could establish that precedent and thereby restrict other individuals’ or groups’ religious freedom.
And so, most reluctantly, the Friends Journal Board has agreed to negotiate with IRS and to pay the least amount IRS will accept ($31,300) as settlement of this claim.
Our painful recognition of failure is heavy upon us.
We have to accept that our witness in its present form can no longer serve a useful purpose.
We can hope Vinton’s action and our support will have brought the issue of tax refusal to the attention of others, thereby becoming a part of the tradition of citizen pressure that in the long run eliminates or diminishes social evils such as slavery and war.
Our protest is on record.
What we will do now is support the Religious Freedom Restoration Act of … which aims to reestablish the first amendment religious rights lost in the Smith vs. Oregon decision.
We also urge support for the U.S. Peace Tax Fund Bill… which makes the same witness, but provides money to finance peace-enhancing projects.
(Needless to say, if there had been a Peace Tax Fund in , Vinton’s taxes would have been paid gladly, and there would have been no need for an IRS levy.)
We ask all those who share our concerns to join in these legal approaches to the continuing effort to convince ourselves and others of the futility of armed conflict and the necessity of finding other means to resolve human disputes.
The immediate financial challenge to the Journal is a very real one.
In a year in which we already face a substantial budget deficit, the payment of such a large lump sum adds an enormous burden.
Vinton has engaged to repay the Journal through payroll deductions over time.
We have been heartened as well, as word of our tax witness spreads, to receive gifts of support from our readers.
One contributor writes: “I hope everyone at the Friends Journal can be made aware of Friends’ approval of [your] Board action.
To help this happen, I encourage the Journal to go as public with the story as is consistent with respect for Vint’s privacy and the Journal’s limited resources.
I am convinced that other Friends will wish to help financially when so informed.”
For such words, and unexpected gifts, we are most grateful.
Readers wrote in with their feedback about the Journal’s decision, and some of their letters were printed in the issue:
Duane Magill wrote to “applaud” and “sympathize” with the Journal’s stand.
“As a war tax resister myself for the past quarter of a century, I have had some brushes with the IRS myself and know what it is like.
I also appreciate your giving publicity to the subject.
I know that not many Quakers take this position, and giving the matter this extensive coverage just might encourage more to take this stand.”
Yvonne Boeger wrote in on behalf of the Live Oak (Texas) Meeting to say that the meeting had recently “discussed the importance of war tax resistance as a means of witnessing to Friends’ long-standing opposition to all forms of war and violence” and that the Meeting was supportive of the Journal’s (and Deming’s) action.
“We send the enclosed check as a token of our support and solidarity in Friends’ resistance to war.
Thank you for the example you have set for us all.”
Lillian and George Willoughby wrote to express gratitude for the Journal’s “courage in standing in support of Vint Deming.”
They wrote: “Most important is the example of a Quaker religious employer providing support to staff who endeavor to live according to Friends’ teachings.
The Journal has run considerable risk and incurred heavy expenses.
We enclose our check as a demonstration of our support.
We think that many other Friends will want to help carry the financial burden of this witness.”
An editorial note in the letters column expressed “thanks to all those who have sent checks!” and a later editorial note (in the issue) said that they had received “$8,000 from individuals and meetings, $7,000 from a Sufferings Fund of Philadelphia Yearly Meeting,” and almost $4,000 from Deming himself.
Mennonite war tax resister (and, according to his author bio, “itinerant prophet and spiritual retreat leader”) John K. Stoner wrote about the call he got from an IRS employee.
Excerpts:
We talked for about ten minutes, as I explained why Janet and I had said “no” to paying the full amount of our income tax.
The man could not understand why anyone would invite the collection pressures of the IRS upon themselves by withholding some taxes.
But by the time the conversation was over, he was a little closer to understanding that this was, for us, a matter of faith and a question of the practice of our religion.
It was a Mark 13:9 kind of experience of being called before the authorities, “before governors and kings,” because of Jesus, as a testimony to them.
By the sound of Mark 13, Jesus expected this kind of thing to happen regularly to his followers.
Mark 13 is a good text to remember when everybody around you is quoting Romans 13.
The Christian Peacemaker Teams organization is promoting symbolic war tax refusal as a way to make a clear witness in the matter of war taxes.
Taxes for Life is a plan to have taxpayers redirect to education an amount equivalent to 1 penny for every billion dollars in the military budget.
For tax year this is $3.03, which can be mailed to Christian Peacemaker Teams… Listen to your conscience when you pay your taxes.
Write a letter of witness to the IRS, with copies to Congress and your local newspaper.
Redirect some taxes to education through CPT.
If the IRS calls, tell them that it makes you a little bit nervous to break their law and that you do not enjoy being harassed by the collectors of blood money.
Go on to say that you are far more apprehensive, however, about breaking God’s law.
Tell them that you hear God’s warning rising up from the bulldozed mass graves of Iraqi conscripts, fathers and husbands, and the nightmares of their children.
Explain that you are really afraid to harden you heart to the cry of the victims and that you have decided you will not take their blood upon your hands.
When Randy Kehler was thrown in prison on contempt of court charges for refusing to vacate the home that had been seized by the IRS, he prepared a statement that he hoped to read.
The court denied him permission to address it.
The Journal printed the statement he’d hoped to have made, which is a good thing: it would be a shame if such an articulate statement was left to sit unread in a file folder somewhere.
My refusal to give up our home is not an act of contempt or defiance of your court order.
I regard it as an act of conscience and also an act of citizenship.
The two go hand in hand.
The first obligation of responsible citizenship, I believe, is obedience to one’s conscience.
Obedience to one’s government and to its laws is very important, but it must come second.
Otherwise there is no check on immoral actions by governments, which are bound to occur in any society whenever power is abused.
I want to assure you, however, that I am not someone who treats the law lightly.
Even when a particular law seems at first to have no clear purpose or justification, I try to give it — that is, give those who created and approved it — the benefit of the doubt.
In an ideal sense, I see law as the codification of those rules and procedures by which the members or citizens of a community, be it local or global, have agreed to live.
A decent respect for one’s community requires a decent respect for its laws.
At their best, such laws express the conscience of the community, causing conscience and law to coincide.
The international treaties and agreements that my wife, Betsy, and I cited in the legal documents recently submitted to, and rejected by, this court are wonderful examples of the coincidence of law and conscience.
These agreements, each one signed by our government, include the United Nations Charter, which outlaws war and the use of military force as methods of resolving conflicts among nations; the Hague Regulations and Geneva Conventions, which prohibit the use or threatened use of weapons that indiscriminately kill civilians and poison the environment; and the Nuremberg Principles, which forbid individual citizens from participating in or collaborating with clearly defined “crimes against humanity,” “war crimes,” and “crimes against peace,” even when refusal to participate or collaborate means disobeying the laws of one’s government.
These international accords — which, as you know, our Constitution requires us to regard as “the Supreme Law of the Land” — are at least as much affirmation of conscience, rooted in universal moral standards, as they are statements of law.
Betsy and I regret that you chose to deny our request for a trial, which would have allowed us to argue the relevance of these international laws before a jury of our peers.
Even in the absence of such laws, however, I believe that citizens would still have an affirmative obligation to follow their conscience and refuse to engage in or support immoral acts by governments.
It is not true, as is commonly thought, that if large numbers of people put conscience ahead of the law and decided for themselves which acts of government were immoral, civilized society would break down into violence and chaos — that is, greater violence and chaos than there is now.
In fact, the opposite would likely occur.
There would likely be greater compliance with those laws that are fundamentally just and reasonable — in other words, most laws — and there would be greater public pressure to abolish or reform those laws (and policies) that are unjust or unreasonable.
There would be exceptions for the worse, of course.
In the name of conscience, certain individuals would, no doubt, do some terrible things and cause much injury and death, which happens now.
On balance, however, the historical record is clear: from the Spanish Inquisition and the African slave trade, to Stalin’s purges, Hitler’s Holocaust, the genocide of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, and our own devastation of Vietnam and Iraq, far more killing and suffering, has resulted from people following “legal” orders and obeying the law than from people refusing to do so in obedience to conscience.
My own refusal to kill (which led me to spend nearly two years in federal prison rather than cooperate with the Vietnam draft), Betsy’s and my refusal to pay federal taxes used for killing (which caused the IRS to seize our home), and now our refusal to turn over our home in lieu of taxes, are all acts of conscience.
It has not been easy for us to deliberately violate the law in these instances, and in so doing incur the anxiety and disapproval of some of our friends and family, as well as the scorn and censure of many members of the community.
We are painfully aware that even though we do pay our town and state taxes, and even though we have given away to the poor and to the victims of our war-making in other countries every cent that we have withheld from the federal government, nevertheless we are still regarded by some as irresponsible and not contributing our fair share.
These are times, however, when all of us are confronted with difficult choices.
Betsy and I, and many others like us, feel we must choose between knowingly and willingly paying for war and killing, and openly and nonviolently breaking the law with respect to federal taxes.
Our consciences compel us to choose the latter.
For me, the issue is larger than simply the taking of another human life, or even the instance of a particular war in which many lives are lost.
I have increasingly come to see the larger issue as war itself.
Whereas there has always been a moral imperative to end war and refrain from killing, today the imperative is much greater.
Today the logic of peace, the logic of nonviolence, is also the logic of survival.
It is impossible to dis-invent today’s nuclear, chemical, biological, and so-called conventional weapons of mass destruction.
Therefore, we have no alternative but to effectively abolish war.
This is the one essential adaptation the human species must make — and, I firmly believe, can make — if life as we know it is to continue.
War today is the scourge of the planet.
It is tragic enough that war is daily claiming the lives of people, maiming more, leaving orphans and widows, and destroying homes, schools, and hospitals — to say nothing of the irreplaceable treasures of human civilization destroyed in Baghdad last year and in Dubrovnik over the past several months.
What makes war today even more tragic, more horrible, are the incalculable economic, social, and environmental costs that go along with it.
Instead of using our human and material resources to produce food, medicine, housing, schools, and other desperately needed commodities, the world’s nations, led by our own, are annually spending trillions of dollars to purchase more and more weapons of even greater destructive capability.
The hundreds of millions of children, women, and men whose lives are ravaged by poverty, hunger, and homelessness — around the world and here in the States — are as much victims of our addiction to war and militarism as are those who are hit directly by the bullets and bombs.
While the awful gap between the rich minority and the poor majority of the world’s people grows wider and wider, war’s assault on the earth — the earth that sustains us all — becomes more savage and less reversible with each new armed conflict.
The severe and longterm ecological damage to the Persian Gulf region that resulted from only a few weeks of war last year is just the tip of the iceberg.
The cumulative impact of the many smaller, less publicized wars elsewhere around the globe is no less severe and, ultimately, no less threatening to the well-being of people everywhere, including the United States.
Furthermore, here at home, where ecological damage to our own environment is proceeding at a frightening pace, the single largest polluter by far, producing more toxic and radioactive waste than any other single entity, is the U.S. military.
I am not at all suggesting that our country bears sole responsibility for the global state of affairs.
But we bear a good deal of it, and therefore any steps we take to move away from war will have great influence upon other countries around the world.
Even before the collapse of the Soviet Union, we had the most powerful armed forces in the world, the most sophisticated weaponry, and by far the largest number of military bases outside our own borders.
Since World War Ⅱ, we have used our military might to bomb, invade, or otherwise intervene in more countries around the world than any other nation.
We were the first to develop the atomic bomb, and we are the only nation ever to use it.
For years we have led the Soviets in atomic test explosions, and we ani continuing these tests even though Soviet testing has stopped.
In addition, we have long been the world’s largest arms merchant, today supplying 40 percent of the entire overseas arms market.
We have been told that all of this is necessary for our security, but the opposite is true.
This military colossus we have created has greatly undermined our security — by creating more enemies than it destroys, by wasting our precious resources and poisoning our environment, by degrading our democracy with “national security” secrecy, covert actions, and official lying, and by undercutting our highest Judeo-Christian values with the insidious doctrine of “might makes right.”
Betsy’s and my actions that have brought us to court are testament to our belief that there is another way for us to live in the world, and another way for us to resolve our conflicts with our fellow human beings.
It is a way that is rooted in the best of our values: the values of generosity and justice, of human dignity and equality, of compassion and mutual respect.
The seeds of this alternative way — the way of nonviolence that Dr. Martin Luther King tried to teach us — already exist within our society, and within each person.
We have only to honor and nurture those seeds, individually and collectively.
This is a prescription based not on wishful idealism, but on practical necessity.
It is our only real hope for survival.
The transformation required cannot be accomplished without our accepting some measure of personal responsibility for the mess we are in.
It would be futile to expect our government, or any other, to initiate it.
In any event, we cannot afford to wait.
The transformation must begin with us.
Because we profess to be a self-governing people, it is all the more our responsibility.
We can exercise this responsibility by means of the choices each of us is called upon to make.
For example, we can choose to speak out publicly against governmental practices and priorities that we know to be wrong.
Many of us can also choose not to hand over to the federal government some part of our tax money — instead redistribute it to those in need, until such time as those in need become our government’s first priority.
And each of us can choose to continue leading lives based on materialism, consumerism, and environmental exploitation, or we can find ways of living based on simplicity, sharing, and respect for the Earth.
The choices we make as individuals will determine the choices we make as a nation.
This is, no doubt, a dangerous and ominous time to be alive in the world.
Yet it is also a very exciting time to be alive.
People all over the world, despite the opposition of their governments, are taking initiative to bring about momentous and long overdue changes.
These winds of change are sweeping the planet, and they are not likely to stop at our borders.
If the people of Prague and Moscow can overthrow Soviet communism and bring about democracy and human rights; if the people of Soweto and Johannesburg can abolish South African apartheid and establish an egalitarian, multi-racial society; then, I feel sure, it is equally possible for us to dismantle U.S. militarism and replace it with attitudes and institutions of nonviolence.
It is my great hope, my silent prayer, that Betsy’s and my struggle to see that the fruits of our labor are used for nurturing and healing, rather than for killing and war, will somehow contribute to that process.
Following this, Christopher L. King had a piece promoting the Peace Tax Fund.
He described it as the brainchild of David Bassett, who some twenty years before had come up with the idea of allowing taxpayers to perform “alternative service” money the way conscientiously objecting draftees could with their labor.
King wrote that he was surprised to find little awareness of the bill in Quaker circles and described some of the work that he and his comrades were doing for the bill.
Those of us who meet each month and a quiet group of supporters in the surrounding communities believe in our consciences that war and militarism are wrong.
We don’t believe they should be the major tools of our foreign policy.
We sympathize with citizens like Randy Kehler and Betsy Corner of Colrain, Massachusetts, who have chosen to pay no taxes because they are pacifists.
We empathize with those brave souls who choose alternative lifestyles so they can keep their income below taxable levels.
It often means their children must learn to sacrifice at an early age.
It means stepping out of the mainstream culture.
Most of us don’t want to change our lifestyles radically or go to jail for our beliefs.
Some might argue that if we are true to our faith, we have no other choice.
On the other hand, there is a need to resist the fundamental tyranny that requires that we must become rebels if we wish to stand firmly for peace.
King’s article was pretty vague on the mechanics of what the Peace Tax Fund bill would actually accomplish, and it was written as if there were no reason why a conscientious objector to paying to war might not find it a satisfactory solution.
The issue included a brief review of the video Paying for Peace: War Tax Resistance in the United States, which was produced by Carol Coney.
Excerpt:
Among those interviewed are Brian Willson, a war tax resister and Vietnam veteran who in was run over by a train while blocking munitions shipments at the Concord naval weapons plant in California.
Also interviewed is Maurice McCrackin, a minister who was sentenced to jail for war tax resistance in ; Ernest and Marion Bromley, who have lived under the taxable income level to avoid paying taxes for military purposes; and Juanita Nelson, an early civil rights organizer who was the first woman to spend a night in jail for war tax resistance.
The issue included an op-ed from Allan Kohrman suggesting Quakers ought to be more patriotic, perhaps singing “God Bless America” during their Sunday meetings, and in particular should rethink their permissive attitude toward civil disobedience and war tax resistance.
“Many Friends seem to define civil disobedience as breaking any law they feel is morally wrong.
Some will not pay war taxes, testifying that God has called them to resist.
I would argue that paying taxes is a basic responsibility of citizenship, a function of my almost mystical relationship to my country.
God calls me to pay my taxes much as God calls others to resist them.”
That’s what “an almost mystical relationship to my country” will get you, I guess.
Another note in that issue concerned two Quakers in Germany — Christa & Klausmart Voigt — who had been prosecuted for war tax resistance.
“About 40 Friends from all over Germany attended the hearing, which was overseen by five judges.”
Klausmart had “placed his money in an account for a peace tax initiative,” and at press time they were still awaiting the court’s decision.
There was another note about the Tax Resisters’ Penalty Fund in the issue, which described it this way: “When a request for assistance comes in, the committee that oversees the fund takes it under consideration, then notifies people who have agreed to participate of the amount each would need to contribute to cover the tax resister’s penalty and interest debt.
Contributions are not used to cover the tax liability itself.
The fund is administered in cooperation with the North Manchester (Ind.) Fellowship of Reconciliation.”
War tax resistance in the Friends Journal in
In mentions of war tax resistance in the Friends Journal were few and far between.
In the issue, Cliff Marrs (a British Quaker) gave his interpretation of the “Render Unto Caesar…” koan from the Bible, and in particular what guidance it offers to those war tax resisters who take advice from scripture.
His point-of-view:
The idea that Jesus was circumscribing a political realm that was Caesar’s domain, and a sacred realm that belonged to God, is anachronistic.
Jesus, and his Jewish listeners, “regarded God as the Creator, and the whole universe as God’s domain — including politics — and would not have distinguished between the political and the religious.”
The tax in question “functioned as a kind of rent that assumed that all land belonged ultimately to the Roman Empire,” while core Jewish scripture makes it clear that Israel belongs to God.
The fact that Jesus had to ask someone else for a coin to use to illustrate his point may be significant — perhaps he did not carry such a coin because its use of a graven image that represented a member of the Roman ruling class as a divinity was idolatrous, or perhaps he had rejected Roman money and so (by the logic of his epigram) its taxes as well.
Maybe he was suggesting that it’s not sufficient to refuse to pay Roman taxes, but you ought to reject Roman money as well: give it back to Caesar and be done with it.
Would Jesus, who cared for the poor, really promote a regressive poll tax?
Paul’s unmistakable pay-your-taxes command in Romans 13 isn’t necessarily an interpretation of Jesus’s instructions, or even good advice in general, but was just a pragmatic, common-sense instruction to Christians living in Rome.
Since Jesus was ultimately charged with promoting resistance to Roman taxes prior to his execution, this seems to indicate that at least some of his listeners interpreted his message that way.
In short, biblically-oriented tax resisters should not be frightened off by the “Render Unto Caesar…” episode, as its interpretation is not so simple as its vulgar usage may suggest.
An obituary notice for Edith Carlton Browne in the same issue noted that “[s]he and [her husband] Gordon became military tax resisters in , and she continued that witness throughout her life.”
Another obituary, for Lorraine Ketchum Cleveland, said that “[i]n she became a war-tax refuser in a case that eventually went to the Supreme Court (Cleveland, Cadwallader, and the AFSC vs. U.S.A.).
Lorraine continued throughout her life to deduct from her federal taxes that portion that would be used for war, and sent it to a worthy cause.”
The issue mentioned the tax resistance of Robert Purvis, who refused to pay his Pennsylvania state taxes in protest against the state’s denial of equal voting rights to black citizens around , and then refused to pay “that portion of his property tax that went to support the schools” in when his children were refused admission to the whites-only classrooms. Purvis wrote:
I have borne this outrage ever since the innovation upon the usual practice of admitting all the children of the township into the public schools, and at considerable expense, have been obliged to obtain the services of private teachers to instruct my children, while my school tax is greater, with a single exception, than that of any other citizen of the township.
It is true, (and the outrage is made but the more glaring and insulting): I was informed by a pious Quaker director, with sanctifying grace, imparting, doubtless, an unctuous glow to his saintly prejudices, that a school in the village of Mechanicsville was appropriated for “thine.”
The miserable shanty, with all its appurtenances, on the very line of the township, to which this benighted follower of George Fox alluded, is, as you know, the most flimsy and ridiculous sham which any tool of a skin-hating aristocracy have resorted to, to cover or protect his servility.
An article in the issue mentioned in passing that “Quakers withdrew almost as a single body from the Pennsylvania legislature in rather than vote taxes for war.”
An obituary notice for Wally Nelson (not, I believe, a Quaker, but the obituary says he “demonstrated the values and commitment of a Friend; by his loving manner and unwavering integrity, he shaped an ideal for Friends to aspire to”) mentions his war tax resistance activities:
In , he cofounded Peacemakers, a national organization dedicated to active nonviolence as a way of life.
In , he and his wife, Juanita Nelson, began their lifelong practice of refusing to pay taxes used for armaments and killing.… During , the couple was among the founders of the Valley Community Land Trust, Pioneer Valley War Tax Resisters, and the Greenfield Farmers Market.
He was well known as a regular market vendor in downtown Greenfield and as a participant in the annual war tax protest in front of the Greenfield Post Office on tax day.
The issue noted that the Northern Yearly Meeting had “approved a minute expressing support for the Religious Freedom Peace Tax Fund Bill and for those who are conscientiously opposed to war taxes.”
At this point, those Quakers who cannot pay for military and weapons are subject to great sacrifice.
Some have refused employment that would result in a taxable level of income.
Others have exposed themselves to confiscation of their homes and other possessions.
We seek a legal mechanism whereby we may pay taxes and be responsible citizens without funding human death and suffering.
We view adoption of [the Bill] as providing religious freedom to many of our Society currently suffering for their faithfulness to their Quaker beliefs.
Add that all up and we get:
one abstract discussion of whether war tax resistance conflicts with Jesus’s teachings
three mentions of American war tax resisters recently deceased
one mention of a tax resister from
one mention of American Quaker war tax resistance from
one contemporary American Quaker Meeting advocating the latest Peace Tax Fund scheme and alluding to the acts of contemporary Quaker war tax resisters
Which is to say: next to nothing about actual real-life American Quakers doing actual, honest-to-goodness war tax resistance in .
The annual tax season “fifteen minutes of fame” for the American war tax resistance movement has begun:
Vice magazine published a nice feature by Charles Davis titled “Don’t Pay Your Taxes” that spotlights American war tax resisters like David Hartsough, Susan Quinlan, Erica Weiland, and Ruth Benn.
Excerpt:
“They’ve never actually done anything,” Erica Weiland, a 30-year-old activist from Seattle, Washington, told me when I asked her about the consequences of her tax resistance.
Weiland generally tries to avoid owing taxes in the first place, but when she does owe something, she files a return without paying a dime.
And while she’s received a few letters, she’s never responded, nor had a problem.
Freed from the burden of paying for broken fighter jets, she has been able to give money instead to those causes she believes in, which, she said, is “one of the things that’s the most rewarding about being a war-tax resister.”
Weiland learned about tax resistance while working with the group Food Not Bombs, which helps feed the homeless in cities across the United States (at least where its activities are not banned).
She met a war refugee from Sri Lanka who refused to accept anything more than room and board as payment for his labor, not wanting to contribute in any way to the sort of violence he witnessed firsthand — funded, in part, by the U.S. government.
If a poor immigrant could do it, Weiland decided she could too, and she hopes her actions will send a message that Americans are not as powerless as popularly imagined.
“I want to show people that there’s more that we can do to resist war and stop military actions than just marching and sending letters to Congress,” she said.
From the front page of The Sandusky [Ohio] Register
Star-News on :
Widow Defies Government — Mrs. Caroline Urie, 75-year-old Quaker widow, from Yellow Springs, O., deducted 32.3 percent of the first installment of her income tax for a second time because she said “war and preparation for war in the atomic era is a crime against nature.”
8 Ohioans Refuse To Pay Tax For “Financing War”
Columbus,
(UP) — Eight
Ohioans said today they will refuse to pay all or part of their
income tax because the money will be used to
“finance war preparations.”
The eight were among 41 persons in the nation who announced they will not pay
all or part of their income taxes. All are members of Peacemakers, a pacifist
group with headquarters in New York city.
In a prepared statement, the eight Ohioans renounced war and violence and said
they were “acting for peace by refusing to manufacture weapons of war,
refusing to serve in the armed forces, and refusing to finance war
preparations.”
The Rev. Ernest Bromley,
Wilmington, O. was
identified as chairman of the tax refusal committee of peacemakers. His wife,
Marion, also was listed among those who will refuse to pay income taxes.
Other Ohioans listed include Horace Champney, Caroline Urie, and Ralph
Templin, all of Yellow Springs; Max Sandin, Cleveland; Wallace Nelson,
Cincinnati, and Aleck D. Dodd, Toledo.
Mrs. Urie, a 75-year-old widow, attempted last year to deduct 34.6 percent of
her estimated tax for that year. Congress, however, reduced taxes in her
income bracket and her income fell enough below her estimate that at the end
of the year the government owed her money instead.
There had been a flurry of articles about Urie’s tax resistance. I’ve posted
some of these before.
A caption to a wire service photo of Urie published in many papers around
reads: “Mrs. Caroline Foulke Urie,
74-year-old Yellow Springs, Ohio, widow [“of a navy World War Ⅰ officer,” some
versions add], has paid $294.30 of her income
tax, but has refused to pay the remaining 34.6 percent, because it would be
allocated for military purposes. Crippled by arthritis for 14 years, Mrs. Urie
is bedridden most of the time.”
And here’s a United Press dispatch from that adds some more details to the story:
Quaker Refuses to Pay Tax for War Expenditures
Yellow Springs, O., (UP) — The
elderly widow of a career Navy officer refused to pay 34.6 per cent of her
income tax because “I’ll never pay
any more money for war.”
Mrs. Caroline Fouke Urie, 74-year-old Quaker, wrote President Truman and the
Internal Revenue Department that she would pay only 65.4 per cent of her
income tax.
“If they want to send me to jail because I won’t pay, that’s all right with
me,” she said. “I’m perfectly willing to go to jail. I’ll never pay any more
money for war.”
She would donate the other 34.6 per cent, she said, to non-profit agencies
“engaged in practical efforts toward removing some of the causes of war.”
Mrs. Urie said her husband, a Navy medical officer, retired before World War Ⅰ
because of injuries suffered in a target practice blast on a battle ship.
In her letter to Mr. Truman, Mrs. Urie explained that in previous years “I
have affixed to my income tax return, and to the check in payment of the tax,
a typed or printed protest stating that the tax is paid under duress because
most of it goes to military expenditures.
“Now that the atomic bomb has reduced to a final criminal absurdity the whole
war system… I have come to the conclusion that — as a Christian, a Quaker, a
religious and conscientious objector to the whole institution of organized
war — I must henceforth refuse to contribute to it in any way I can avoid.”
She said the atomic bomb has involved the United States in the “shame and
guilt” of having been the first to exploit its criminal possibilities.
“It’s time for people to start thinking,” the modest and retiring widow said.
Once expelled from Italy by the Mussolini government because of anti-fascist
statements, Mrs. Urie was a social worker for the Society of Friends in
England, Denmark, Iceland, Norway, Germany, and Italy.
Her friends said that even though crippled by arthritis, Mrs. Urie keeps
abreast of community and world activity by reading and maintaining a large
volume of correspondence.
From the Pittsburgh [Pennsylvania] Courier:
Refuses to Pay Tax — Tells Pres.
Cincinnati — Citing race bias in military establishments and stating that a large part of income taxes goes for wars, Wallace F. Nelson, a construction worker, went on record this week with forty-one others throughout the country who have declared that they will not pay income tax, according to a statement from the Peacemakers from New York.
Mr. Nelson wrote President Truman setting forth his reasons for refusing to pay income taxes.
Some war tax resistance news that has scrolled by on my screen in recent days:
Erica Weiland, at the War Tax Talk blog, has
uncovered a case of successful war tax resistance from the archives of
NWTRCC’s
newsletter. The anonymous resister in question filed income tax returns,
refused to pay the amount “owed,” and then began to watch those unpaid
amounts disappear behind the statute-of-limitations curtain and beyond the
reach of the
IRS.
The resister made some attempts to make collection more difficult — not
owning big-ticket property, setting up a “gift annuity” and outright giving
money away to make current assets less-collectible, moving accounts from
bank to bank — but in part it seems to be
IRS
negligence or laziness that gets the credit. Good enough for government
work!
Canada’s Globe and Mail published
an obituary for Eldon Comfort,
a World War Ⅱ vet who became an anti-war activist. It quotes from a letter
he sent to the minister of revenue in :
Today, modern technology has introduced weapons of mass destruction. Their
cost is staggering. … So, in a very real sense when I pay my income tax, I
am complicit in the deployment of such armaments.
I am, therefore, claiming conscientious objection to the conscription of
my tax for military purposes. The percentage of the federal budget
designated for
DND
is deemed to be 8.1 per cent, so I have reduced my income tax by that
amount. This portion is being directed to
Conscience Canada’s peace
tax fund.
When the Canadian military operations were restricted to peacekeeping (in
its restricted sense), to search and rescue, and to succour during
national natural disasters, I had no quarrel with paying my taxes in full.
When the priority for the resolution of conflict, once again, becomes a
peaceful and diplomatic enterprise, I shall resume full payment.
Greg Slepak recognizes that by paying his taxes he becomes complicit in
what the government does with his tax money, but he has chosen a different
approach to that of conscientious war tax resisters. Instead of no longer
paying for the government’s misdeeds, he has identified one of the victims
of these misdeeds and
attempted to compensate him in proportion to how much he’d victimized him.
“To such a person, I have a sense of… indebtedness, as though I
owe him something. After thinking on it, I realized there might be some
truth to that.”
I recently became aware that a biography of Maurice McCrackin has been put on-line, including a chapter that covers his introduction war tax resistance and the early days of the Peacemakers group.
His tax resistance began, according to the book, when Wally Nelson noticed the pacifist minister removing toy guns and other war toys from those in a donation pile, and told him: “Do you ever think that next March 15 [then the income tax filing deadline] you’ll be paying for real guns?”
The next chapter covers his imprisonment for refusing to cooperate with an IRS summons.
Another chapter concerns his removal as a minister by officials of his Presbytery who were upset about his war tax resistance.
Matt Hisrich at the Quaker Libertarians blog takes issue with Quaker organizations who frame their opposition to government military spending in terms of reallocating that spending to other government priorities.
Excerpts:
This approach puts forth the false notion that national governments sit
atop vast reserves of wealth that should be spent on nonviolent rather
than violent ends.…
National governments cannot spend new wealth without either issuing new
debt (that will have to be repaid) or extracting it directly from
taxpayers through the implicit or explicit threat of violence. If Quakers
(or anyone else for that matter) want to be known as “Champions of Peace,”
it would be better to strive toward a reduction in the war spending that
seeks to keep funds in the hands of individuals to peacefully pursue their
own ends instead of merely shifting line items in national budgets. The
former focuses on individual and local empowerment, and the latter focuses
on somehow “winning” in the national political game.
Some news of interest to war tax resisters in particular:
C.J. Hinke has a book coming out: Free Radicals: War Resisters in Prison. Here’s an excerpt.
You can also follow the PrisonWarResisters blog which contains a lot of good accounts of mid-twentieth-century conscientious objection in the United States.
The entries touch on war tax resistance from time to time, mostly in passing, but include information about the tax resistance stands of Juanita & Wally Nelson, Ernest & Marion Bromley, Eroseanna Robinson, Karl Meyer, and Art Harvey.
The Spanish anti-militarist group “Tortuga” has created a comic book to explain why and how to refuse to pay war taxes.
War tax resisters have been making the tactic known hither and yon, including at a Fellowship of Reconciliation regional conference, a Fourth-of-July parade, a “People’s Budget” gathering, and the U.S. Social Forum; also, the New England Gathering of War Tax Resisters and Supporters is coming up in .
I haven’t yet visited any archives that hold material from the Peacemakers,
that group that coordinated the early modern American war tax resistance
movement beginning in the . But while I
was following another thread, I found the following article which gave the most
complete membership run-down of the tax refusal committee of Peacemakers that I
have yet seen:
43 Pacifists Won’t Pay U.S. Tax in Arms Protest
Special in The [Philadelphia] Inquirer and New York Herald Tribune
New York, . — Forty-three pacifists throughout the United States
declared that they would refuse to
pay all or a part of their Federal income taxes this year as a protest against
the Nation’s military expenditures.
The group, including a number of Quakers, conscientious objectors, and several
who have refused payment of taxes before, issued a statement through
Peacemakers, [a] national pacifist group with headquarters here, in which they
said:
“Believing that men are accountable for their actions, and that laws requiring
immoral acts should not be obeyed, we have after serious consideration
determined upon a course of civil disobedience with relation to the income tax
laws of the United States.”
Headed by Pastor
Forty-one of the tax refusers acted under a tax refusal committee of
Peacemakers, headed by
Rev. Ernest Bromley, of
Wilmington, O. Their
statement was issued by
Rev. A.J. Muste,
secretary of the organization, and also secretary of the Fellowship of
Reconciliation. Mr. Muste, former director of the Presbyterian Labor Temple,
and one-time president of the defunct Brookwood Labor College at Katonah,
N.Y., has long been
known in the labor movement, and as a pacifist and campaigner against military
conscription.
Two additional persons were listed as tax refusers in a statement issued on
behalf of 11 Philadelphians by Walter C. Longstreth, Philadelphia lawyer. The
other nine were all included in the Peacemakers list.
Some Withhold 36.4 Pct.
Mr. Muste, who said he personally would refuse to pay any income taxes
, as he did
, declared that some of the signers would
follow his course of action; while others will withhold the 36.4 percent
estimated by the Bureau of the Budget as that portion of tax money expended
for military purposes.
Others on the list issued by the Peacemakers were:
Ross Anderson, of Portland
Ore.; B. Bargen, of Newton,
Kas.; Marilyn Blaise, religious
education director, New York City; Marion Bromley, of Wilmington,
O.; Lindley Burton, of Bryn Mawr,
Pa.; Horace Champney, of
Yellow Springs, O.; Miriam Keeler
Cornelius, labor economist, Washington
D.C.; Aleck
D. Dodd, clergyman, of Toledo, O.;
Margaret E. Dungan, of Wallingford,
Pa.; William Bacon Evans,
of Morrestown, N.J.;
Caleb Foote, of Arden, Del.;
Hope Foote, of Arden, Del.;
Marion C. Frenyear, clergyman, of Plainfield,
Mass.; Robert C. Friend,
religious education director, of Schenectady,
N.Y.; Walter Gormly, of
Mt. Vernon,
Ia.; J. William Hawkins, of
Winters, Calif.; Ammon
Hennacy, of Phoenix, Ariz.;
George M. Houser, of New York City; Sander Katz, of New York City; Raymond E.
Kinney, of Los Angeles; Emily Longstreth, of Philadelphia; Walter Longstreth,
of Philadelphia; Mary Bacon Mason, of Newton Center,
Mass.; Milton Mayer, of
Chicago; Mary McDowell, of Brooklyn,
N.Y.; Wallace Nelson, of
Cincinnati; James Peck, of New York City; Paula Beck, of New York City;
Caroline Philips, of Wilmington,
Del.; Lydia Philips, of
Wilmington, Del.; Grace
Rhoads, of Moorestown,
N.J.; Francis B. Riggs,
of Cambridge, Mass.;
Valerie Riggs, of Cambridge,
Mass.; Igal Roodenko, of
Bronx, N.Y.; Max Sandin,
of Cleveland; Laurence Scott, of Kansas City,
Mo.; Ralph Templin, of Yellow
Springs, O.; Louise Thomas, of
Cherry Valley, N.Y.; Mrs.
Caroline Urie, of Yellow Springs,
O.; Beverly White, of Wichita,
Kas..
Many of these names I’ve encountered before, but several were new to me.
There were fewer than 3,000 people living in Yellow Springs, Ohio at the time,
and three of them were among the 43 public war tax resisters in the United
States. I wonder what that was all about.
Some bits and pieces from here and there:
war tax resistance
Jesse Maceo Vega-Frey recalls his time with Juanita & Wally Nelson, and his own ambivalent experiences with war tax resistance, in an article for the Boston Review.
I stumbled on this quote, shared recently by “tandy_jack” on Instagram, from the back of a Joan Baez album:
We paid the taxes that bought the war that hired the men and dropped the fire that burned the huts and killed the people who then were the bodies that Scott counted.
It’s a rotten thing to brainwash someone into doing the dirty part of the killing while we stay at home.
It’s a rotten thing to pretend the war is coming to an end when it’s only taken to the air.
And in if you don’t fight against a rotten thing you become part of it.
What I’m asking you to do is take some risks.
Stop paying war taxes, refuse the armed forces, organize against the air war, support the strikes and boycotts of farmers, workers, and poor people, analyze the flag salute, give up the nation state, share your money, refuse to hate, be willing to work… in short, sisters and brothers, arm up with love and come from the shadows.
virtual cash
exiled American dissident Edward Snowden made waves recently by promoting tax resistance to the incoming Trump regime
National governments are trying to discourage cash, so as to eliminate the sorts of anonymous, untraceable transactions that are difficult to tax.
For example, the government of India recently made a surprise announcement that 500 and 1,000 rupee notes would no longer be legal tender after a certain deadline.
If the IRS does decide to crack down on virtual currencies, it may have to do so with virtual employees, as its real enforcement staff numbers have been dropping year after year:
This article, concerning another TIGTA report, gives a good indication of how strapped the agency is.
Even when shown that there’s money on the table that just needs to be picked up (in this case, high-income people who haven’t filed income tax returns but whom the agency knows about), the IRS complains it doesn’t have enough people to do the picking.
A news dispatch I found in the Lincoln Journal (Nebraska) from :
“Military Portion” of Tax Withheld
Moorestown, N.J. (NANA). William Bacon Evans, firm in his Quaker convictions, has paid his income tax three months ahead of time — deducting from his payment that portion he has estimated would be devoted to military purposes.
Evans has written the federal tax collectors that he does not “feel conscientiously at liberty to contribute toward… the involvement of our country in military programs of occupation and… adoption of peacetime conscription and the manufacture and storage of atomic bombs.”
So he is giving the sum deducted from his income-tax check to “constructive programs of relief and reconstruction.”
“No can do,” say the tax collectors.
Evans (1875–1964) is also listed as one of eleven war tax resisters in the Philadelphia area in a newspaper article, along with Margaret Dungan, Emma & Lindley Burton, Caleb & Hope Foote, Emily & Walter Longstreth, Caroline & Lydia Phillips, and Grace Rhoads.
Here’s another article in which he is mentioned, from the Doylestown, Pennsylvania Intelligencer:
6 Countians Won’t Pay Their Tax
Six residents of Bucks County were among the 51 across the nation who announced in a joint statement today that for conscientious reasons they are refusing to pay part or all of their income taxes for .
The statement, issued by Peacemakers, a pacifist organization based on Gandhian principles of non-violence, said that approximately 85 per cent of the Federal income tax is used for past, present, and future wars.
The non-payers ask:
“Who knows what weapons his taxes will buy?… In full consciousness of our own involvement in a war-centered economy and of our shortcomings in the pacifist way of life, we nevertheless feel constrained to call this matter to the attention of others who may have felt they had no alternative to payment of their taxes”
The six Bucks County people announcing their tax refusal include:
Doylestown Writer
Jean V.N. DaCosta, RD 2, Doylestown, a writer and member of the Episcopal Pacifist Fellowship.
Miss DaCosta declared: “If I were a man and of draft age I would refuse military service: therefore I cannot pay taxes for others to do what I could not do myself.”
Wallace and Juanita Nelson, 970 Wood Road, Southampton.
Nelson, who is a construction worker, and his wife, a speech therapist, are active in race relations work.
They recently stated: “The peaceful world for which we all hope cannot come about in the atmosphere of hostility created by the armaments race highlighted by the production of the hydrogen bomb.
The greatest contribution our country can make toward the elimination of war is the demonstration of brotherhood through action.
We cannot pay our money for war.”
Lee Pagano, New Hope, a craftsman who operates his own shop.
Robert and Marjorie Swann, 2845 Sussex Road.
Trevose [sic] Swann is a designer and builder.
He and his wife have three daughters.
Three other tax refusers in the Philadelphia area are William Bacon Evans of Haverford, and Irene S. Eldridge and Margaret Dungan, both of Wallingford.
All are members of the Society of Friends.
While I wasn’t paying attention, someone scanned in many back issues of Friends Bulletin, the journal of the Pacific Yearly Meeting and Pacific Coast Association of Friends.
This has allowed me another window onto the state of American war tax resistance, Quaker war tax resistance in particular, in .
Here, for example, from the issue, is an article on an early Peacemakers tax refusal pledge that includes a complete list of signatories, including several I hadn’t heard of before:
Tax Refusal
On there were among those who did not pay their Federal income taxes the following 59 persons who joined together to support a statement distributed by the Tax Refusal Committee of Peacemakers, 2013 Fifth Ave., N.Y., N.Y. Reverend Ernest Bromley is chairman of this subcommittee of Peacemakers: A.J. Muste is secretary of Peacemakers.
A part of their statement is: “Feeling that war must inevitably come unless something drastic is done by individuals to show their unwillingness to go along with war-making policies of their governments, we the undersigned state hereby that we are not going to pay our federal income taxes due .
For some of us this means that we will not pay that percentage which corresponds to the nation’s outlay for militarism; for others of us it means we will not pay even the first cent for the maintenance of a government whose main business is preparation for annihilation…”
The signers were: Ernest and Marion Bromley, Golay Rd., Gano, Sharonville, Ohio; Lindley and Emma Burton, Low Buildings, Bryn Mawr, Pa.; Horace and Ava Champney, 512 Phillips St., Yellow Springs, O.; Sara Chase, 1525 Sutter St., San Francisco, Calif.; Samuel and Clarissa Cooper, 214 Eastbourne Terr., Moorestown, N.J.; Dorothy DaPonte, Rte. 4, Box 374, Mobile, Ala.; Margaret E. Dungan, Wallingford, Penna.; Arthur Evans, Awbury, Penna.; Rebecca Winsor Evans, Radnor, Penna.; Fyke Farmer, Bellevue Dr., Nashville, Tenn.; Rev. Marion Frenyear, So. Hartford, N.Y.; Henry and Beatrice Dyer, Yellow Springs, O.; Walter Gormly, 412 N. 3rd St., W., Mt. Vernon, Iowa; Konrad Halle, 76 Pinehurst Ave., New York 33, N.Y.
Gerald Haynes, R.R. No. 3, Freeport, Maine; Ammon Hennacy, Rte. 3, Box 227, Phoenix, Ariz.; Rev. George Houser, 21 Audubon Ave., New York 32, N.Y.; Woodbridge O. Johnson, Jr., 106 W. 3rd St., Parkville, Mo.; Sandy Katz 232 W. 29th St., New York 1, N.Y.; Ruth C. LaBarrer, 6 Nutt Ave., Uniontown, Pa.; Sarah B. Leeds, 28 E. Main St., Moorestown, N.J.; Walter and Emily Longstreth, 140 N. 15th St., Philadelphia 2, Pa.; Mary Bacon Mason, 31 Pleasant St., Newton Center, Mass.; Rev. Maurice F. McCrackin, 1111 Dayton St., Cincinnati 14, O.; Mary S. McDowell, 555 Ocean Ave., Brooklyn 26, N.Y.; Rev. A.J. Muste, 21 Audubon Ave., New York 32, N.Y.; Ax Nelson, 501 Benvenue, Los Altos, Calif.; Wallace and Juanita Nelson, Golay Rd., in Gano, Sharonville, O.; Ray and Jean Olds, Yellow Springs, O.; Raymond F. Olds, Monterey, Mass.; Storrs F. Olds, Monterey Rd., Great Barrington, Mass.; Jim Otsuka, Rte. 1, Cloverdale, Mich.; Mrs. Gordon Parker, 1401 Wood Ave., Colorado Springs, Colo.; Mabel G. Parker, 1804 Wood Ave., Colorado Springs, Colo.;
James and Paula Peck, 552 Riverside Dr., New York, N.Y., Miriam Pennypacker, 6420 Drexel Rd., Philadelphia 31, Pa.; Grace Rhoads, Box 90, Moorestown, N.J.; Elizabeth and Edward C.M. Richards, Nur Mahal, R.D. 3, West Chester, Pa.; Francis and Valerie Riggs, 23 Coolidge Hill Rd., Cambridge 38, Mass.; Margaret Schauffler, 100 S. Cedar St., Oberlin, O.; Robert and Marjorie Swann, R. 1, Cloverdale, Mich.; Ralph and Lila Templin, Box 125, Yellow Springs, O.; Caroline F. Urie, 128 S. Walnut St., Yellow Springs, O.; Ellen Winsor, Radnor, Pa.; Abraham and Jean Zwickel, P.O. Box 232, Pismo Beach, Calif.
And here’s an early example of a plea for a “peace tax”-style accommodation for conscientious objectors to military taxation, from the issue:
Tax Petition
On , in Whittier, Calif., there was combined with the annual meeting of the southern California office of the Fellowship of Reconciliation a program sponsored by the Peace Board of California Yearly Meeting.
One of the results of the day is the following petition:
To the Congress of the United States of America
We the undersigned citizens of the United States of America believe:
That present tensions between the free enterprise and communist group of nations are the result of reliance upon military force as an instrument of political determination;
That the threat or use of such force can never result in a just or mutually satisfactory resolution of these tensions;
That the labor and material expended in building up military might would have and still might lead to a peaceful and mutually satisfactory solution if used instead indiscriminately to rebuild the homes and industries destroyed in the last war.
We further believe:
That the military way violates the commandment “Thou shalt not kill” and the Golden Rule by which a Christian must live.
That to supply the means to induce of compel another to do that which we cannot do is equally a violation of those Commandments.
Therefore relying on our Constitutional Bill of Rights which our nation is this week honoring, and the Right of Petition thereby guaranteed, we humbly pray your august body that you pass legislation exempting all of like religious belief from income tax to be used in support of military establishment and substitute the use of that portion of our tax which is to our total tax as the amount used for military is to the national total, to that committee of the United Nations seeking a peaceful abatement of these tensions, thus giving the citizens of the United States the opportunity of paying taxes for the support of war or peace according to the dictates of their own conscience.
On , Susan B. Anthony, convicted of voting-while-female, was sentenced by Justice Ward Hunt of the Circuit Court of the United States for the Northern District of New York to “pay a fine of one hundred dollars and the costs of the prosecution.”
This is Anthony’s response to the sentence:
May it please your honor, I shall never pay a dollar of your unjust penalty.
All the stock in trade I possess is a $10,000 debt, incurred by publishing my paper — The Revolution — four years ago, the sole object of which was to educate all women to do precisely as I have done, rebel against your man-made, unjust, unconstitutional forms of law, that tax, fine, imprison, and hang women, while they deny them the right of representation in the government; and I shall work on with might and main to pay every dollar of that honest debt, but not a penny shall go to this unjust claim.
And I shall earnestly and persistently continue to urge all women to the practical recognition of the old revolutionary maxim, that “Resistance to tyranny is obedience to God.”
She never did pay the fine or costs of prosecution.
And despite some efforts to find assets to seize, the courts were never able to squeeze anything out of her.
And the following tale comes from Leo Schiff’s Toward a Nonviolence of Daily Living: The Life and Times of Juanita and Wally Nelson (1996):
The Nelsons continued to encounter the Internal Revenue Service in New Mexico.
The IRS tracked them down in Ojo Caliente and tried to collect back taxes on Wally’s income from the Antioch Bookplate Company.
Juanita recalls:
They came to Ojo Caliente, sixty miles north of Santa Fe, and tried to take our vehicles.
One had completely gone kerplunk and was ready to be hauled off to the junkyard, but they didn’t know that, and the other one wasn’t much better.
They came and placed stickers on them saying, “Property of the United States Government,” and then they got a tow truck to try and haul them away.
I sat in front of one and Wally sat in front of the other, and finally the guy went away.
The FBI
was nice enough to take careful notes at a war tax resistance protest that took
place in Washington,
D.C. on
, and write up what they
saw. Seems that the government does sometimes pay attention to protests.
An advertisement in the ,
issue of “Village Voice,” a weekly newspaper concerning activities in
Greenwich Village, and other sections of New York,
N.Y., was captioned “Tax
Resistance Action in Washington,
D.C.” It
stated the Catholic Worker, Resist, Writers and Editors War Tax Protest, and
the War Resisters League would sponsor the activity at
, at the Internal Revenue Service, Washington,
D.C.
(WDC).
This advertisement indicated the peaceful action at the Internal Revenue
Service would be preceded by a public meeting in Judiciary Square, Fourth and
E Streets, N.W.,
WDC,
at
Dr. Arthur Waskow of the
Institute for Policy Studies; Dave Dellinger, Chairman of the National
Mobilization Committee (to End the War in Vietnam); Harold Tovish of the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology; Barbara Deming, an author; and
Professor William C. Davidon of Haverford College would be among the speakers
at this public meeting.
On , a confidential source,
who has furnished reliable information in the past, made available a flyer
published by the Tax Resistance Project, War Resisters League, 5 Beekman
Street, New York, N.Y.,
calling for support of the activity on . This flyer asks participants to bring their completed income tax
return or a statement explaining why they are refusing to file a return. It is
stated that these returns and/or statements, accompanied by an insufficient
amount of money or no money at all, will be turned in to the Internal Revenue
Service
(IRS),
WDC, at
.
A copy of this flyer is attached.
The publication, “Washington ’68” describes the Institute for Policy Studies,
1520 New Hampshire Avenue, N.W.,
WDC,
as an institution created to serve as an independent center of research and
education on public policy problems in
WDC.
The National Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam was formerly known as the Spring Mobilization Committee (SMC).
The SMC
is described in the publication entitled “Communist Origin and Manipulation
of Vietnam Week (),” a
report by the Committee on Un-American Activities, House of Representatives.
On page 53, the report states in part, “Communists are playing dominant roles
in both the Student Mobilization Committee and the Spring Mobilization
Committee.”
A second source, who has furnished reliable information in the past, as of
, identified Arthur Waskow as
a member of the Steering Committee of the Washington Mobilization to End the
War in Vietnam, an outgrowth of the SMC.
A third confidential source, who has furnished reliable information in the
past, reported on , that during
a symposium in New York City on , David Dellinger, editor of Liberation magazine, identified
himself as a pacifist, advocated a communist society, and said, “I am a
communist.” However, he pointed out that he was not a “Soviet-type” communist.
On , Professor William C.
Davidon was a participant in a program on Radio Station
WEAU, Chicago, Illinois, concerning
“Peace Walks.” During this program he admitted being a sponsor of the
Committee to Secure Justice for Morton Sobell (Committee to Free Morton
Sobell) (CFMS).
A characterization of the CFMS is attached.
An article appearing in the issue of the “Cape Cod Standard-Times,” a daily newspaper,
Hyannis, Massachusetts, stated that Barbara Deming returned to the United
States the previous day after spending eleven days in North Vietnam. She
accused the United States of waging a war of terror against a civilian
population.
On , Special Agents of the
Federal Bureau of Investigation observed approximately fifty-five people
gathered in Judiciary Square, WDC.
At approximately ,
Professor William C. Davidon, acting as master of ceremonies, opened the
program by stating that a large number of people are not paying taxes because
their money is being used to kill in Vietnam. He estimated that four thousand
people are not paying the telephone tax.
Professor Davidon then introduces Arthur Waskow as a representative of Resist.
Waskow described Resist as a group encouraging and supplying funds to those
who refuse to kill. Waskow said they were assembled to uphold the law. He said
that the war in Vietnam is illegal, and that the crime is in the White House
and executive offices, not in the streets. He claimed that the President and
the Secretaries of State and Defense are the ones violating the law.
Waskow further stated that the President has helped wreck the dollar with the
war in Vietnam. He urged those present to uphold the economy and the law by
withholding that portion of their income tax that is paying for the “obscene”
war. Waskow also felt it is illegal for
IRS to
collect money to pay for that war.
The next speaker, Harold Tovish, stated the Johnson Administration has
alienated the youth of today with lies and a foul war. He said that the youth
of America wants a life that is worth living, and he was not certain that life
today is worth living. Tovish also said they had gathered in WDC
to show that they cannot tolerate the type of life that has been formed for
Americans today.
At approximately , the majority of the group left Judiciary Square and walked to the
Constitution Avenue entrance of the
IRS
building. About fifteen carried posters reading, “Don’t Pay War Taxes.”
Beginning at about , Barbara Deming
spoke to the gathering. She said she believes in government of, by, and for
the people, and stressed how little tax money is spent for people. She claimed
the United States is saying to the Vietnamese — let us self-determine you or
we will have to destroy you. Deming stated the lives of the Vietnamese do not
belong to the Government, and that she refuses to pay her taxes to deliver
these lives “up to Caesar.”
An individual identified as Wally Nelson stated that in
he affirmed that no human being should be
killed and indicated he has refused to pay taxes since that date. He said that
rational people should not pay for slaughter, and should not allow a portion
of their taxes to be used for that purpose. Nelson stated that any government
that prides itself on killing people owes its people an apology. He indicated
he will continue to refuse to pay taxes.
James Leo Herlihy, a novelist, spoke briefly about the inflated cost of
killing people you do not really hate. He said that at one time it cost
$14,000. to kill a person during a war, but that now that cost has risen to
$234,000.
David Dellinger spoke of refusing to pay taxes to a government that tortures,
kills, and maims people. He stressed the need for door to door contact to ask
people how long they are going to be willing to pay for killing.
Professor Davidon then read what he said was a telegram from three doctors in
Cambridge, Massachusetts, supporting their action against
IRS.
At approximately
, a delegation of seven of the demonstrators was admitted
to the
IRS
Building to meet with
IRS
officials. This delegation said they were prepared to deliver “thirty
envelopes” to
IRS.
Whle waiting outside the entrance one ⸺ ⸺ of Connecticut state an associate
has been harassed by
IRS
since for not paying taxes, and that he,
Hayworth, is now suffering the same harassment. [Probably Neil Haworth―♇]
A ⸺ from the Philadelphia, Pennsylvania area, and ⸺ of Princeton, both spoke
briefly against paying taxes to support the illegal war in Vietnam.
The demonstrators passed out literature of the War Resisters League. One
leaflet captioned, “Resist Vietnam War Taxes,” states that about 67 percent of
taxes collected by the Government go for war and preparations for war, and
that about 23 percent goes for the war in Vietnam. Another captioned, “Hang Up
on War! — Telephone War Tax Refusal Campaign,” urges refusal to pay the ten
percent telephone tax.
The delegation that had been admitted to the
IRS
Building at about
left the building at approximately ,
and the demonstrators dispersed shortly thereafter. There were no arrests or
incidents during this demonstration.
On , Mr. Ray Brennan,
Internal Security Division, Office of the Assistant Commissioner, Inspection,
IRS,
advised that the following were admitted to meet with Deputy Assistant
Commissioner Leon C. Greene and a representative of the
IRS
Baltimore District Office:
David Hartsough
Arthur Waskow
Barbara Deming
William Davidon
Wallace Nelson
Harold Tovich
David Dellinger
A copy of an
IRS news
release dated , concerning
the activity on that date is attached.
The attached flyer announcing the action was a typewritten sheet with a
crudely-drawn headline:
Tax Resistance Action in Washington,
DC
Internal Revenue Service Headquarters, 12th
St. & Constitution
Ave.
Join us in an act of collective tax resistance. Bring your completed tax
return, form 1040, or a statement explaining why you are not filing, and
together we will return forms and statements accompanied by either no
money or an insufficient amount of money. The action at
IRS will
be preceded by a public meeting at Judiciary Square,
4th & E
St.
N.W.,
Dr. Arthur Waskow of the
Institute for Policy Studies and Dave Dellinger, Chairman of the National
Mobilization Committee, will be among the speakers.
We act because for many verbal opposition to the war in Vietnam is no longer
enough. Resistance has become necessary. Our consciences dictate it. The young
men resisting the draft have shown a way and we who are not subject to the
draft must develop creative parallels. Tax resistance is such a parallel act
because it confronts the administration directly and challenges it at a vital
point. It liberates the tax resister by showing him that he does have choices.
Total refusers, partial tax refusers, and telephone tax refusers will all be
there. Join us.
That flyer then listed the sponsors (Catholic Worker, Writers & Editors Tax
Protest, Resist, and War Resisters League) and included a tear-off section that
could be returned to War Resisters League headquarters for people who wanted
more information or transportation options. It encouraged recipients to also
sign this pledge: “I dissociate myself from my government’s actions in Vietnam
and therefore I am not paying all or more portion of my
income taxes. Signed:…”
The IRS
press release, also attached to the FBI
report, was mostly uninteresting. It snidely contrasted the protesters with
“[t]he overwhelming majority of taxpayers [who] carry out this obligation of
citizenship in a conscientious manner” and also suggested that the protesters
were part of a tiny movement, most of whom would ultimately buckle: “In a
relatively few cases,
IRS has
had to enforce collection against tax protestors. Most have paid when asked and
some who failed to pay voluntarily notified the
IRS where
the taxes could be collected from their bank accounts.”
In other news:
One of the tools the
IRS
uses against tax scofflaws like myself is to file a federal tax lien in the
local court system of the scofflaw. This puts creditors and the local legal
system on notice that the
IRS
intends to step in and assert its rights to seize money. This can make it
difficult to get credit, and also makes it easier for the feds to seize
anything awarded by the courts in lawsuits, probate resolution,
etc. However
(and this is where it gets interesting and newsworthy), filing a lien costs
money. And the
IRS
thinks several California counties are charging them too much, and so they
have started to refuse to pay. In response, some counties are refusing to
process the
IRS
liens. Alas, this filing fee, and the standoff between the bureaucracies,
also applies to paperwork to release a previously-filed lien. So
this doesn’t always work in the scofflaw’s favor. Here’s some news
coverage:
War tax resister Larry Bassett was interviewed on the Parallax Views podcast.
Bassett is the subject of the recent documentary film
The Pacifist and is responsible for the largest
known individual act of war tax resistance, in terms of the amount of
dollars resisted at once.
Another Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration report points out
that reduced IRS
resources means collapsing tax enforcement capability.
“As more taxpayers experience little to no consequences for non-filing, the
long-term impacts may include potential erosion of the voluntary compliance
rate.”
The IRS
issued an update to its estimate of the “tax gap” (the difference between how much tax people are supposed to pay and how much they do pay).
The upshot is that they think little has changed: people pay about 84% of
what the agency believes they owe. However, the last time I looked at the
details of one of these “tax gap”
reports, I noticed a lot of hand-waving, guesswork, and extrapolation, and
only a little empirical data collection, so I would recommend taking these
numbers with a grain of salt.
More attacks on traffic ticket issuing radar cameras — in France & Italy; Mexico, Germany, and France; and France again.
Revenue from the cameras is only half of what the government had hoped for
and budgeted for in France this year, and the government has had to divert
some of that money to installing more heavily-fortified cameras.
Money, even in tiny amounts, talks. If money — money from a growing number of tax rebels — refuses to go where the government is trying to put it, then together we can make a difference.
That’s why I’m appealing to other self-employed writers to join me in this tax resistance.
Rogers is part of “The Earth Tax Strike” group, which is holding its withheld taxes in an escrow account which they say they’ll pay when the government meets their demands.
Some tabs that have passed across my browser in recent days:
As part of the Biden administration’s plan to reduce the “tax gap,” they proposed that the government be given more visibility into people’s assets by requiring banks and other financial institutions to report to the IRS the amount of gross inflows and outflows from all accounts holding at least $600.
There was pushback, both from opposition lawmakers and the banking industry.
Now, it appears that this proposal has been dropped from the budget reconciliation package making its way through Congress.
That’s not the final word, but it’s an encouraging sign.
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).
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.
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 .
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.
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.
The Catholic News Archive has a pretty good catalog of issues of the Catholic Worker.
Today I’ll present transcriptions of some of the material on tax resistance from the span.
These include several essays by Ammon Hennacy (these formed the raw material out of which he composed his autobiography, so if you have read that, you’ll see some familiar phrases and stories), as well as other writings by and about conscientious tax resisters, including long works by Ernest Bromley, Eroseanna Robinnson, and Karl Meyer.
The articles fill in some interesting details about the evolution of the American war tax resistance movement during this period.
First, Ammon Hennacy, in the edition:
Picketing
“How are you going to get people to put up the sword?
My son died in Korea.
I know you didn’t kill him.
God bless you,” said an elderly woman as I was picketing the post office in Phoenix, , in response to Truman’s “emergency” declaration.
The woman had seen my big sign which read:
“Put up thy Sword.
He that taketh the Sword
Shall Perish
by the Sword”
Jesus’ words.
On the reverse of this sign was a picture of a pot colored green with a sign on it—Capitalist.
Opposite was a red kettle—Communist.
Underneath was the caption: “The Pot Calls the Kettle Black.” I carried my old tax refusal sign as a sandwich in front.
It read:
75%
of your Income Tax
Goes for War.
I have refused
to pay Income Taxes
for Seven years.
The reverse sign hanging on my back read:
Reject War.
Use Gandhi’s
Weapon of
Non Violent
DIRECT ACTION.
I attended mass at St. Mary’s before picketing and prayed for wisdom during my day which I feared would be more disturbing than my previous marches.
In another church that morning a CW priest said mass for the success of my witness for peace.
I had notified the City Manager and the tax man that I would picket against the war emergency.
Ginny Anderson, whose C.O. husband Rik varityped my leaflet and made the above signs, stood on one corner to hand me extra literature and be my “lookout” for trouble.
Byron Bryant, Catholic anarchist, home on Christmas vacation from his duties as professor of English at a western university, stood on the other corner.
There was an unusual amount of people going and coming.
Ne one advised me to go back to Russia or called me a Communist.
As is usual in picketing most people were afraid to be seen taking a leaflet.
If one person took a leaflet all others in line took it and if the first one refused so did all the others.
Negroes and Mexicans and Indians always took the leaflet and many times a Catholic Worker.
My leaflet read as follows:
What’s All The Shooting About?
It’s about men who put money ahead of God.
It’s about young men on both sides misled into dying and killing each other.
It’s about rationing, inefficiency, dictatorship, inflation, and politicians stealing a little more than usual.
War is what happens when one nation prepares to defend itself against another nation that prepares to defend itself.
World War Ⅰ and World War Ⅱ did not end war nor make the world safe for democracy.
Neither will this one.
There just isn’t any sense to war!
What can we do about it?
If the politicians think one person is important enough to become a soldier, a munition maker, a bond buyer, or an income tax payer, then one person is important enough to
REFUSE to become a soldier,
REFUSE to make munitions,
REFUSE to buy bonds, and to
REFUSE to pay income taxes.
War does not protect you—it will destroy you!
You cannot overcome Communism with bullets.
It can be overcome by each person doing what he knows in his heart to be right.
The way of Jesus, of St. Francis, of Tolstoy, and of Gandhi teaches us to love our enemy, to establish justice, to abolish exploitation, and to rely upon God rather than on politicians and governments.
If you are a Christian, why not follow Christ?
You might as well die for what you believe in as for what you don’t believe in.
If you must fight, fight war itself.
Don’t be a traitor to humanity!
Wars will cease when men refuse to fight.
(No “Johnny come lately" to the peace movement, I served 2½ years in prison for opposing World War I, 8½ months of it in solitary confinement in Atlanta Penitentiary.
And since more than three-fourths of one’s income tax goes for war purposes, I have refused to pay my income tax for more than seven years.
Nor did I register for the draft in either world war.
I am a Christian Anarchist, a follower of Tolstoy, Thoreau, and Gandhi, and invite your serious consideration of their examples.)
“Extra, extra, all anarchists to be shot at sunrise,” shouted the good-natured news man stationed in front of the post office as I passed by.
The one who had led the fight against me in August and later became my friend had left town.
When a later edition told of a bank robbery in Tucson he shouted as I passed: [“Extra, extra, Gandhi robs a bank.” (missing from this article, but included in a later reprint —♇)]
A woman looked at my sign and asked if I did not know that Jesus told Peter to sell his clothes and buy a sword.
I answered: “yes, but when Peter showed him the sword which he had Jesus answered ‘that is enough,’ and when Peter used this sword to cut off the ear of the servant of the high priest Jesus did not say to cut off the other ear but said ‘put up thy sword.
He that taketh the sword shall perish by the sword’.”
As the woman walked on she shouted back: “Jesus called for a sword so he could perform a miracle.
He never said ‘put up thy sword.’
You better read your Bible.”
Somewhat different was a teen age boy who pointed to an ad of the Marines and said that meant more to him than my sign or my leaflet which he had just read.
I told him that if he believed that way—and he was to leave next month—that he should do what he thought was right.
He refused to take a CW although he was a Catholic and went to St. Mary’s.
I hoped that he would return safely and could then confer with the priest as to the possibilities of being a pacifist Catholic.
It was not his fault that he had never heard the pacifist message before.
We parted in a friendly spirit.
One gruff fellow asked, “What have you got there?”
I answered, “It’s either very good or very bad; depends on how you look at it; better read it and see.”
He smiled and went his way reading the leaflet.
A Catholic anarchist woman walked with me for a bit and was going to come after 3 p.m. and take Ginny’s place.
While Byron and I went for lunch the Catholic banker whose bank had been robbed spoke to Ginny.
Although the CW says “Starve the Bankers and Feed the Poor” he reads the paper and has visited me before on the picket line.
Another Catholic anarchist woman came and missed us because of the following incident.
The Cops
We had only brought along 500 leaflets and now at 3 p.m. they were nearly all distributed.
Many had stopped with kind words and no one had openly insulted us.
Two good natured policemen came up in a squad car and said they were having too many complaints about my picketing.
They read my signs and leaflet.
I told them that what I was doing was clearly subversive and that the FBI and the tax man had priority over them in my case and they ought to confer with them.
One cop did so while the other asked me questions.
Meanwhile people crowded around and watched my signs.
I saw my tax man as he came near, and an FBI man.
The police wanted to know what had been done when I had been arrested for picketing before.
I told them that I had been released and had picketed 7 more days without being bothered.
They conferred with headquarters and suggested that Ginny and I accompany them to the police station.
Here we waited about an hour while detectives and police looked over the signs and leaflet and asked questions.
I offered a CW to one police captain but he refused it saying that no Catholic paper could support such unpatriotic actions as mine.
I asked him if he knew Father Dunne and he said he did.
I advised him to call him up and see what he said about myself and the CW.
(Later Fr. Dunne told me that the man had called him.)
Byron had phoned a Catholic attorney, friend of the CW, who spoke to Chief Clair.
The latter told us we could go but I had better not picket for I might cause a riot and then charges of disorderly conduct, loitering, or other charges would be proferred against me.
I told him that I had been able so far to handle individuals and crowds.
He shrugged his shoulders inferring that I would be on my own.
I said that I had been on my own all my life and another half hour (it was now 4:30) was not much to worry about.
Before I left I told him that I would picket again on .
He replied, “That is another day.”
We went back and gave away our few remaining leaflets.
Postal employees looked out of the windows and saw that the police had not stopped us.
(One of the calls had come from an ultra-patriotic postal employee, although another employee to whom I had offered a leaflet early in the morning had refused it and about 2 p.m. had asked for one, and after reading it praised me for my stand.)
Ammon Hennacy, in the edition:
Life at Hard Labor
“I don’t wear a label; I’m for all good causes,” replied the young ex-conscientious objector who, passing through Phoenix, had called the local paper to find my address, and had found me this evening as I was caretaker of Jersey cows at the sale of purebreds at the State Fair grounds.
Many write to me or come to visit me who are drawn by different phases of my philosophy, so to save time I try to find out if their bias is Catholic Worker, I.W.W., pacifist, anarchist, vegetarian, life on the land, or tax refusal.
This slogan of not wearing a label is fine, I told my new friend, for a young person in search of the truth, but at his age of 31 he ought to begin to have ideas that led to some definite belief and action.
I admitted that for the average person of bourgeois tendencies to look at the Republican and Democratic parties and to think that wearing their labels was meaningless was a sign of progress.
Like the housewife in the days when women did the baking at home who put the initials “T.M.” on the top crust of one pie, meaning “Tis Mince”; and the initials “T.M.” on another pie crust, meaning “Taint Mince,” labels surely do not have any meaning.
The thought behind my friend’s no label attitude seemed to be a desire to approach as many people as possible, on the street, in buses, at dances, etc., and to make friends and influence people by not scaring them with such words as pacifist or anarchist, but to rattle half-truths and half criticisms as a build up for “all good causes” and as a monkey wrench toward the status quo.
This is a mass approach; mine has been to get the individual in this mass, if possible, to think.
I remember forty years ago when well meaning friends told me that to use the word “Socialist” was defeating my purpose, and that some word such as “Progressive" that did not have such ill omen should be used.
My reply then was that whatever word was used to designate a belief that word would always have a bad meaning to those who were being denounced.
Today the word Socialist only means collaboration with war and has lost all its class conscious meaning.
Even many timid anarchists whom I know prefer the word “Libertarian” for fear they will be called bomb throwers.
I go on the principle of never being on the defensive, so when I am called a bomb throwing anarchist I tell the accuser that the government is the biggest bomb thrower with its A and H bombs.
I told my young friend that he could always get a crowd to applaud mild criticism of war and for the lowering of taxes and raising of wages, but that this same crowd would really follow the blazing torch of super demagogues who spoke of “the great native intelligence of the common man,” and who never meant to catch the bird but were adept in the case of putting salt on its tail.
I pointed out that spiritual power was the strongest force in the world and that beside it all the two penny political victories did not mean a thing.
Too many of us dissipate our energies by being “for all good causes” and never develop or use this spiritual power.
And then we wonder why we become tired radicals and why warmongers rule the world.
We refuse to use our strongest weapon, but at the ballot box where we are invariably outnumbered a million to one, we choose our weakest weapon.
As I was helping a farmer polish the horns of his cows he said he had heard that I was an educated man and implied wonderment as to my being a day laborer.
I explained my plan of working at day work on farms in order that no withholding tax for war should be taken from my pay.
He wanted to know more about these ideas and for the next hour he heard the words anarchism and pacifism undiluted by “all good causes” and departed with the current CW and my promise to mail him future copies.
In contrast another farmer wanted me to go back to Russia if I didn’t like this country.
The cows for sale were listed in a catalogue with pedigrees and a record of their production of butter fat.
The manager of the sale was discussing with one farmer about certain unregistered and non pedigreed cows which are called “grades,” and many times these cows give more and richer milk than the purebred stock.
But there is no guarantee that a heifer from such a cow will be a good producer; more than likely a throwback of scrub stock.
Culls
In Albuquerque I worked for two men who specialized in extra fancy chickens.
At one place I gathered eggs each hour from a trap nest, and marked the number of the chicken, taken from a leg band, on the egg she had just laid, and also in the record book.
Those who did not produce a great number of eggs were thus culled out. “Why feed the culls?” my boss said.
Each day a dozen or more hens would die of “blow-outs”; which meant that the very efficient egg producing machine had overstepped itself.
The mediocre hens lived longer and did not blow-out.
At a dairy in Albuquerque where I worked, my job was to go to any of the eight corrals and in the mud and manure drive the next string of cows to the barn to be milked.
Nearly every night a calf would be born in this wet and cold discomfort and my job was to carry it to a warm stall after the milking was done.
Very few of these calves, coming from cows that were “grades,” died.
Later I worked for a multi-millionaire who had highly priced purebreds.
My job was to keep a fire in a stove in the barn at night and to feed these calves egg with specially prepared milk.
Yet the death rate among these purebreds made my boss groan.
Tuberculosis and Bangs Disease (premature birth of calves) seems also to be more prevalent among the inbred purebreds.
Super efficient bankers jump out of windows when red ink instead of black ink records their business schemes.
Efficient assembly line workers go berserk and often a supposedly steady bus driver leaves his route and drives right on to Florida to escape his treadmill of efficiency.
At its best our system is efficient only in turning out quantity and at its worst it is trying to bomb us to death.
Very expensive garden tools these days are held together only by the paint on the handle and are of very inferior design and workmanship.
When I was a social worker in Milwaukee in the thirties we were often derided by well to do Republicans for “coddling the culls” when we helped the poor.
And from time to time I have heard radicals who were especially scientific and eugenic minded look upon the ideals of Jesus and Gandhi as perpetuating the life of the unfit and the misfit.
Although I helped in the formation of the CW House of Hospitality in Milwaukee in I will admit that my interest in the CW was limited then to its pacifist and anarchist slant and that I felt this coddling of the bums was not so important.
Since, however, my study of Tolstoy and acquaintance with Peter and Dorothy, and my ten years as an actual laborer, rather than a radical theorist with a good job, I have come to view this whole matter in different light.
The conversation about grades and purebreds that night and my meeting with the young rattle-brain who was “for all good causes” helped me to clarify my ideas along this line.
In this age of the assembly line, of super-markets and super advertising schemes; and of Service Clubs to put a little holy oil of goodness on this theft, the illusion persists that this is a scientific and efficient age.
Yes, we produce, but for what?
If somehow we do have bums, poor housing, ill-health, new diseases, and poverty these can only be attended to by Community Funds, Heart, Cancer, and Give a Dime Campaigns; pensions and social security payments by the state.
Charity Incorporated has no room for Houses of Hospitality where there is no record of aid given or even the name of the recipient.
“They won’t work if you keep on feeding them!
They sell the clothing you give them around the corner for booze!” say the well fed parasites who also neither work nor help the poor except perhaps in a very dim and distant contribution to a fund, much of which goes for overhead.
The idea of these professional do-gooders is to “give coals and treacle” to the poor, as Shaw said, and to keep them out of sight in order that the rich may not be reminded of the filth and degradation which is the foundation of their wealth.
Good social workers are told not to “become emotionally involved” with their clients.
Again, the mechanistic approach.
The CW breaks through all this sham.
Instead of living in fine apartments to which we can repair after witnessing the other side of the tracks, we who accept Lady Poverty have given up worldly goods, insurance, and much of our privacy.
This cull in the breadline; this drunk or prostitute; this maladjusted and perhaps lazy man—all of these may not be improved a bit by our help.
Ours is not a success story; the Way of the Cross was also a failure.
He at least might have led a rebellion against the Roman State instead of dying on the Cross and forgiving His enemies.
Where are we to look for those who are going to bear the Cross today?
It is true that St. Francis, Tolstoy, Malatesta, Kropotkin and Gandhi left their inheritance and choosing voluntary poverty were able to accomplish much.
We also print the word and deliver the lecture to the purebreds.
We make no mistake in thinking that because a man is ragged that he is holy, for if he is avaricious he is as much a slave to money as is the rich man.
(My banker friend Brophy jokingly told me that he would have to write a defense of the rich for the CW.
I told him that he would end up contradicting himself and that the best defense of the rich could be obtained by giving a couple of drinks to a poor man on the street.)
The Old Pioneer [Lin Orme, Jr.] tells of stopping at a stand in the desert recently and being charged 15¢ for a soft drink.
“This is 300% profit for you” he told the proprietor.
“I’m not in business for my health” said this greedy and seedy defender of the capitalist system.
The Old Pioneer also tells of 25¢ being charged for one common needle in the old days when everything coming into Phoenix had to be hauled from Maricopa Wells station beyond South Mountain.
“The freight is what costs” was the alibi of the greedy merchant.
Neither do we consider the product of the purebreds.
Tommy Manville, the dear old DAR ladies, the useless royalty of Europe, and our own inbred Duponts and intellectuals who have nearly without exception prostituted their talents toward the making of bombs.
There is some hope that among the bums we may find a John the Baptist to carry on the work when we have gone, but there is little hope from politicians whose integrity has already been purchased and from the super educated to whom a doctors degree, a deep freeze and a television set mean more than fighting for a lost cause.
How will we then come to a sensible way of life?
Without war work we would have a terrible depression.
Hardly a person but whom will gladly earn this blood money!
Hardly a person but whom will pay taxes for more bombs!
The rich will not give up their riches and the poor will not give up their pensions; (the young will not help the aged; preparing to “keep up with the Jones’.”)
The froth at the top has little right to scorn the scum at the bottom; meanwhile we who do the work of the world support them both.
The Old Pioneer remarked recently that Jefferson’s plan of not having great wealth inherited was the right idea.
This reminds me of the old Russian proverb: “Do not lay up your money for your son, for if he is any good he can make his own money; and if he is not any good he will lose it.”
So in our writing, our picketing, our speaking, our help to the poor in Houses of Hospitality, we must need show our sincerity by our voluntary poverty.
No one would think of bribing us for by our lives we have established the fact that we need nothing.
We need not fritter our time by building up “all good causes,” which accept the tyranny of the state.
When they are ready for it the rich, the bourgeois intellectual, the bum, and even the politician may have an awakening of conscience because of the uncompromising seeds of Christian Anarchism which we are sowing.
To all of these we make our appeal and from all it is not impossible to gain a few adherents for that time “when each shall give according to his ability and receive according to his need.”
For what does all our bookkeeping mean but a denial of this ideal?
Johnny Olson came back from a sojourn in Texas.
In a splurge of affluence he bought five mouse traps and set them around our house.
He caught the whole population which consisted of three mice.
While I as a pacifist vegetarian would not cause the death of Brother Mouse yet as an anarchist I have no right to deny Johnny the right to catch them… The old mules, belonging to a neighbor, which I have used for plowing the garden these five years are now muleburger. They were not killed in time for the new government regulation which allows equine meat in weiners.
My friend Joe Craigmyle, nonregistrant, and one-cylinder vegetarian and anarchist, runs a fruit stand and at times I have helped him pick oranges and grapefruit in groves where he has purchased the crop.
Even in the month of May when the new fruit is on the trees the last year’s crop is still sweet and juicy.
As with apples the fewer fruit on the tree the larger.
There is not generally time to thin out the fruit but many drop off before maturity.
An orange or grapefruit may look fine but if it is light in weight it is pithy and is discarded right there at the tree.
The load is graded as to size when we return to the stand.
Coming home from work the other night in Joe’s truck we were discussing the idea of responsibility and of my reference in a recent CW article to the woman who called on every one else to remove the dead cat from the road.
I remarked that I had seen a dead cat on the lateral that Sunday morning but being in a hurry to catch a bus did not practice my anarchist idea of responsibility in removing it.
However, in the evening upon my return it was still there despite hundreds of cars and dozens of people on the road that day, so I took care of it.
Just then we both saw to the right of us a two-by-four with four spikes sticking up.
I said that this would soon give someone some trouble.
By that time we were a quarter of a mile beyond it.
“I’ll back up and you can throw it in the ditch,” said Joe.
In my mind, then, Joe, who has not been much of a man of action, rose from a one-cylinder to a two-cylinder anarchist.
Molokons
Recently I went to the federal court as a young Molokon who lives a few miles down the lateral had been out on $5,000 bail for refusing to report to the army.
Dozens of other young Molokons in the vicinity had been given CO status.
Whether the draft board lost his CO questionnaire or thought they ought to get hardboiled I do not know.
I had phoned a local lawyer who had handled Craigmyle’s refusal to register case and he promised to come to court but did not do so.
His excuse being that he couldn’t do anything about it.
Judge Ling set as date for a trial and the Molokon will get a lawyer from Los Angeles.
The Old Pioneer tells of in when he went to the court commissioner with about fifteen Molokons who had refused to register.
Two of them worked for him and he arranged for bail.
They asked him if they could sing and pray.
The Old Pioneer doubted if they could but asked the commissioner about it.
“Hell no, this is a court,” was the answer. “You’d better let them sing and pray and not look foolish for they’re going to do it whether you give permission or not,” said the Old Pioneer to the commissioner.
So they sang and prayed.
Now they register and do not sing or pray in court.
, I received a notice I owe $2.15 interest and penalty on my $192 tax bill for and unless paid within ten days my property and wages will be attached.
This is an old run-a-round and I am not worrying.
I ate the first Irish potatoes this year from our garden.
The persimmon tree which the Old Pioneer’s daughter-in-law gave me last winter now bears fruit.
Watermelon, eggplant, tomatoes, squash, peppers and onions are doing fine.
I am irrigating and soon will come irrigating maize.
An excerpt from “Poverty is to Care and Not to Care” by Dorothy Day, from the issue:
Our whole modern economy is based on preparation for war and that is one of the great modern arguments for poverty.
If the comfort one has gained has resulted in the death of thousands in Korea and other parts of the world, then that comfort will be have to be atoned for.
The argument now is that there is no civilian population, that all are involved in the war (misnamed defense) effort.
If you work in a textile mill making cloth, or in a factory making dungarees or blankets, it is still tied up with war.
If one raises food or irrigates to raise food, one may be feeding troops or liberating others to serve as troops.
If you ride a bus you are paying taxes.
Whatever you buy is taxed so you are supporting the state in the war which is “the health of the state.”
The argument may go this way, but we still can choose what seems to us the most honorable occupations, which have to do with human needs.
We can choose the kind of work most necessary to do, and if possible where there is no withholding tax for war.
Ammon Hennacy in working by the day, at hard farm labor, has not paid income tax for years.
One can so cut down one’s standard of living that no income tax is required; families with many children pay no income tax.
One can protest in many ways this contribution to the atom and hydrogen bomb.
If one owns property the government then can take a lien on it.
If one has money in the bank, the government can confiscate it.
So truly such protest as this calls for the most profound poverty and a voluntary doing without property.
All this is by way of saying that poverty is no longer voluntary, no longer a counsel, but something which is laid upon us by necessity.
Ammon Hennacy, in the issue:
Hiroshima Fast
“I got a letter from one of my sons in Korea this morning.
My three other boys will go to jail before they go to another foolish war.
God bless you for your sign about war; that’s just what it is: murder,” said a woman to me as I was on my 8-day picketing and fasting.
She referred to my sign:
DRAW THE LINE AT MURDER
REFUSE TO GO TO WAR.
In contrast a man went by with his wife and said: “Drop dead!”
“Can’t do it, Mister,” I replied.
Rik had done a beautiful job on my leaflet, printed in the CW, on blue paper.
I was nearly out of CW’s containing my tax statement so did not give out any unless people asked for them.
Now for the first time in my fasting I went to Mass and Communion each morning.
I had worked until after dark for several nights in order to finish work that I had planned, and up until .
I had eaten my last full meal and only toast bread until I commenced my fast at .
I had written the following note, enclosing my blue leaflet, to 165 of the clergy in and around Phoenix.
And as usual I had notified the police, the FBI, and the tax man, of my picketing, telling them that what I was doing was clearly subversive, but no worse than it ever was.
“Please pray for the success of my fasting and picketing in this the 10th year of my open refusal to pay income taxes for war, if you can in conscience do so.
My attitude may appear too radical but I feel that something as radical as the Sermon on the Mount is needed in this wicked world.
I too believe in a personal religion but if in matters of social concern I act just as unbelievers act, then I am a fraud.
If you have time stop and say hello to me as I fast and picket in front of the old YMCA.”
I had sent my leaflet air mail to the Mayor of Hiroshima and to Manalil Gandhi in Phoenix, South Africa.
I received but one answer which was from a leading Methodist minister, who did not agree with my ideas but who praised my stand.
I knew beforehand of the approval of the half dozen priests who appreciated the CW.
As usual the Associated Press sent a favorable factual message on the wire about my activities and the local radios reported it each day, one announcer even reading my entire leaflet.
But the local dailies, per their policy, refused to “dignify” themselves by mentioning my name.
I started the fast weighing 142 pounds.
The scales also poured forth a slip with the dubious information that read, “Don’t always follow the line of least resistance.”
I lost 2 pounds and which was exceptionally hot I lost 5 pounds.
I slept that night for 14 hours and awoke refreshed.
One friend who was an usher in a Catholic Church and also a veteran, had always been cordial to the CW, but he felt that the plan of the American Legion to take the profit out of war and make the big shots who make war go to war was a better method than my tax refusal and picketing.
I told him that I was winning my battle against the government each day and while this was only a step forward, his way was no more than conversation about it.
I said that this method stood as much a chance of succeeding as a butcher putting vegetarian signs in his window.
That those who make money and fame out of war would never stop.
It was up to us to refuse to take part in war.
Fasting
Now on I was weak but never a bit hungry.
Several people on park benches nearby told me of a young man who had gone on a 62 day fast.
They said he ate his lunch at the park.
That day I introduced myself to him and found he had suffered from arthritis, stomach ulcers and chronic nightmare.
He went to my friend Dr. Shelton in San Antonio and after 40 days of nothing but water to drink, all of the accumulated toxic poisons had been washed out of his body and he commenced to get stronger.
He was entirely cured at the end of 62 days.
Of the 25,000 people taking fasts there in 30 years only one person had endured a longer fast; that being 68 days.
A priest in Phoenix had taken a 30 day fast there and had been cured.
My friend had lost 57 pounds but had gained it all back again.
I visited with him each noon and envied his vegetarian diet of pears and grapes.
He had been raised a Catholic but believed in no religion at present.
He was interested in my ideas and felt he would never go to war but he did not feel that it was his job to propagandize about it.
Other friends I met told me of a man in Phoenix whom I knew who had been given up by the doctors because of tuberculosis of the kidneys.
He had read in some book that in ancient Egypt those with such trouble had laid in the hot sands.
Egypt was too far away so he came to Arizona and for 6 months literally lived in the sand.
He was entirely cured.
He is a strict vegetarian these past 20 years and in good health.
The Mormon wife of a friend of mine told me of her grandfather who in the old days had several wives.
At the age of 86 he discovered that he had diabetes.
He fasted 68 days at home and cured himself and lived 9 more years in good health.
But Mormons are used to disciplining themselves so his fast was not as difficult for him as it would be for the regular flabby American.
My other sign read: “Thou Shalt Not Kill,”
HIROSHIMA WAS A-BOMBED , JUST 8 YEARS AGO .
As penance I am Fasting IN MEMORIAM.
This was enclosed with a black border.
The six story Veteran’s Bureau was across the street and many men in uniform went by.
One soldier asked me what kind of lies I was peddling.
I told him I was peddling no lies, but the right side of a very important question; that he had better read it and see what it was all about.
He read it as he walked along. Another soldier did the same.
Generally soldiers refuse to take the leaflet or tear it up.
Near quitting time on a young fellow whose appearance marked him as of the nervous intellectual type, and not a rowdy, stopped and asked me if this was my sign that I was carrying.
I told him that it was.
He said that I had better call the police for he was going to take the sign and tear it up and dance on it for no Communist could carry such a sign in his town.
I told him that I was not a Communist; that I was a Catholic and an anarchist.
He replied that he was a Catholic.
I asked him what parish he belonged to and it was mine also.
I inquired if he had been at mass the last Sunday and if he noticed me selling CW’s in front of the church.
He had been to last mass and had not noticed me.
I told him that if he had looked closer he would have noticed a candle burning before the Blessed Mother for the success of my intention in this picketing and fasting.
He didn’t believe it.
I asked his name and he told me but would not give me his address.
I said I did not believe in the police and if he got any pleasure out of tearing signs he could do so.
He took them and tore them off the standard and danced on them there on the sidewalk.
He refused to take a copy of my leaflet or of the CW, muttering “Communist, Communist.”
I advised him to see our parish priest and get straight on the matter of the CW.
He promised to do so.
I then called the priest and told him of what had just happened.
He did not remember the name of my patriotic friend.
I wanted to see the AP man on another matter so went to the newspaper office.
Here I saw my friend with my signs telling a reporter about the Communist he had found.
I recognized the reporter from pictures I had seen of him but I had never met him.
The reporter said that I was not a Communist for they all knew of my picketing activities for years.
The patriotic Catholic said he was a veteran from Korea and repeated that no one could carry such signs in his town.
The reporter said he was a veteran of two wars and he had fought for just such things as the freedom of Hennacy to carry his signs and picket; that if the young man did not like my signs he could do as the pickets in front of the White House in the Rosenberg case did: get other signs and picket the pickets.
The reporter also said that I was standing up for the freedom which was true Americanism, and although he disagreed with my ideas, that the patriotic young man was acting like a Communist or a Fascist in denying me freedom.
He picked up the signs saying, “Here Hennacy take your signs; they are yours, not his.”
The young man said he would take them away from me.
I replied that I was too tired carrying them anyway and would simply give out my leaflets the next day as Rik was away and I had no cardboard to make new signs.
The young man said he would come down next day and tear up any signs that I had.
The reporter told him that he was breaking the law and he was lucky he opposed such a person as Hennacy who would not take him to court.
I left him still arguing with the reporter.
The AP carried this story and it was reported over the radio.
Some of the newspaper men wanted me to prefer charges against my assailant to make a more exciting story.
I refused to do so, explaining my Gandhian principle of non-violent resistance to evil and that as an anarchist I could take no recourse to law under any circumstances.
The next day the young man did not show up.
I phoned my priest and he had not come around to ask about the CW.
To Maryfarm
All during my picketing the employees of the tax office, including the three Catholic tax men whose job it had been to get my tax money, were cordial.
There was not a mean look from anyone in that office.
This was the first time this had happened.
Several friends came and walked around the line with me.
Only about a dozen people tore up my leaflet.
Many stopped and cordially approved of my picketing.
About half a dozen grunted disapproval.
There was not as much traffic as there had been other years at the postoffice.
I had not met the new head of the tax office so as I finished my fast I introduced myself to Col. Wood and expressed my appreciation of the cordial attitude of his coworkers toward my picketing.
He asked me the difference between a Communist and an Anarchist and seemed to understand my explanation.
Ginny and her boys came up and broke the fast with me around as we all drank juices at the juice bar.
I left for New York on the bus.
I had bought more fruit than I could eat but I nibbled at it on the way.
In Prescott, I phoned the former head of the tax bureau in Phoenix and talked to his wife, Mrs. Stuart, Democratic National Committeewoman.
They own the Prescott “Courier.”
She was pleasant as usual and told me that they had a story on my fast that day.
Soon I was with Platt and Barbara Cline in Flagstaff and now I could eat mashed potatoes and other soft food.
Platt made a recording of my experiences.
He had a fine Third Mesa basket which I took to New York for Dorothy.
I spent with Hopi friends in Winslow and by I was visiting with Msgr. Garcia in Albuquerque and my good friend Rev. Soker of St. Paul’s Lutheran Church there.
Reagans had moved to Arkansas and the letter I had sent to Al and Catherine Reser must have gone astray or they had moved, for I couldn’t find them.
By I was in Sante Fe welcomed by Peter and Florence van Dresser.
They had a meeting for me .
I did not have time to go to El Rito to see their Organic House heated by solar heat and with windmill for power.
I will stop there on my way back when I visit my daughter Carmen.
Carmen is with her sister Sharon for a retreat at Mt. Shasta.
I visited the nearby Trappist monastery and spoke to two monks who are CW fans and had lunch with the nursing sisters where I had spoken last year.
As I left I was pleased to see a good factual writeup on the front page of the daily New Mexican.
This paper goes to nearby Los Alamos, so perhaps for the first time those who make the bomb could learn of opposition to it.
A social worker told me that there were more maladjusted children from the homes of Los Alamos workers than from any other strata of people from the state.
The gloom of this blood money thus defiles the next generation.
A few days with my family in Cleveland and I arrived at Maryfarm, with Father Casey.
I understood more this year than last and read some Catholic literature that I should have read long ago.
It is too soon to evaluate the effect of this spiritual retreat upon me.
Just now I am at Dave Dellinger’s at Glen Gardner, N.J., proof-reading my autobiography.
Some excerpts from an Ammon Hennacy article in the edition:
…Wally Nelson came to take me to Sharonville to spend the night with tax-refusers Ernest and Marion Bromley.
We disagree on my frankness to the authorities but we have the same aim.
The afternoon and night was most pleasant as I became acquainted with Fred Schulder, age 79, who had written in the anarchist paper Liberty in before I was born.
He is not religious in the accepted sense, but takes the CW.
His son Horace Champney took me to Brookville to an area meeting of Peacemakers where Ralph Templin, Clay Marks, and others whom I knew held forth in a discussion about tax refusal and the picketing which they would do in Cincinnati .
Some excerpts from an Ammon Hennacy article in the edition:
Max Sandin, old time tax refuser, and one of we seven veterans of jails in World War Ⅰ who also refused to register in World War Ⅱ renewed old time memories with me.
Jim Ward had asked me in Chicago what live meant to me now that I was a Catholic and I had listed the seven things which seemed to me now in the most important, and I talked this over with Father Casey.
Here they are:
(1) Voluntary poverty.
(2) The Sermon on the Mount.
(3) Pacifism, with its absolutist meaning as evidenced in tax refusal.
(4) The Mass.
(5) To Work and not be a parasite.
(6) Anarchism.
(7) Vegetarianism, which includes no tobacco, alcohol or medicine.
This is for myself and not meant for others.
Each has to go at his own speed and in his own way.
We drove to Grasston to see old man Paul Marquardt and found him reading his Bible.
He told us of the time when his children had been sent home from school with a card telling the family to save fat for the war.
Marquardt immediately withdrew the children from the school saying that each morning he prayed “give us this day our daily bread,” and he was not going to save bread or fat or anything for a war.
He told also of the priest in nearby Pine City, who, in instructing his confirmation class said, “Have faith like the Marquardts.”
To have this honor in your home town is indeed an honor.
From the edition:
Individual Income Tax: War’s Chief Supporter.
Of the income of the Federal Government 48% comes from individual income taxes which we pay; 30% comes from corporation taxes; 15% comes from excise taxes; and 7% other sources
By Ernest Bromley
The Administration’s proposed budget, recently announced, asks for a billion dollar increase for “new weapons of unprecedented strategic and tactical importance” in order to give this nation “the greatest military power in its peacetime history.”
Diagrams of the proposed income and expenditures emphasize two things: (1) The chief source of federal revenue is the individual income tax, (2) The chief national expenditure is military (including bomb stockpiling and new terror weapons).
Both things have been true for these eighteen years, but one is always struck anew with each announcement of them.
So minute a portion of the tax money is being spent for any socially acceptable activity that it seems to be only an illusion to consider that one’s Federal taxes go to anything constructive.
(Actually, the only way one can support the better enterprises is to bypass the Internal Revenue Bureau completely and find ways to contribute to these causes directly.)
The war build-up touches the individual much more directly and intimately at the income tax point than it does anywhere else.
Almost two-thirds of every tax dollar goes to build H-Bombs, Guided Missiles, Germ Warfare, Conscript Armies, etc.—thirty-five times as much as for schools, roads, and health combined.
(Can there be any doubt about what the Federal government’s major activity has come to be?)
It is almost unthinkable that more people (especially more pacifists) have not declined to bolster this monstrous drive to destruction; that they have not at this major point stopped the flow of their funds through the book-keeping which takes most of what they pay and channels it into what they abhor; that they have not by-passed the present tax set-up and given their valuable, held-back funds to something worthy of support.
Will we wake up too late?
The first, and major, encumbrance to keeping one’s tax money and using it for something decent is the withholding set-up.
Trying to be a tax refuser in a withholding job is a good deal like being a pacifist in the army.
In each case you have already placed yourself well within the system; and in each case the very first step is to take yourself out of the system.
The real, creative possibilities on these fronts begin to open up only after this step of separation has been taken.
The fact that such separations are difficult to carry out makes them no less imperative.
Because the withholding situation presents problems, is there no advice that can be given to the average working person about the business of non-cooperating with income tax payments?
I would advise: Stop paying income taxes (whether you file a form to this effect or not).
For some people this will, of course, mean that they will have to leave their present jobs and take employment that is not affected by withholding.
Here we sometimes tend to lose sight of the fact that there is probably no type of socially useful work (individual or organizational) being done under the withholding tax set-up which cannot also be done outside it.
And, too, this raises the important question of what social usefulness really is.
Can “socially useful” firms or organizations remain socially useful to any real degree when their one rigid requirement is that the first portion of a worker’s earnings be set aside for war?
Can a “socially useful” person remain socially useful in his job to any real degree when, in order to do with one hand the work of building a better society, he has first to do with the other hand the work of destroying it (like a church constructing a brothel)?
Conscientious workers in such employment may reason after a while, as some have, that the effect of this operation is that they are working in a munitions factory part of the time.
Men go to prison rather than join the armed forces and support conscription.
Should not the people with these principles (especially the people not subject to any draft) face the imperative of sacrificing a little economic security (or convenience), especially when not facing it means continuing to pay substantial sums of money for terrifying weapons and conscript armies?
Ernest Bromley lives in Sharonville, Ohio, with his wife, Marian and family.
He keeps his earnings below the amount where any tax has to be paid.
Around he refused, when a Methodist minister in North Carolina, to purchase an automobile tag (not a license), for his car and did three months in jail.
His wife worked for the Fellowship of Reconciliation, the leading pacifist group in this country, and quit her job rather than pay the withholding tax for war which this and all other peace organizations take from their employees.
He has been head of the tax refusal committee of Peacemakers.
He supplements his income by an apiary in his garden.
I have visited there several times and respect the effort which he and his wife are making to live up to their ideals.
They live a few miles from the Grail farm at Loveland, Ohio.
The Jehovah Witnesses and the Catholic Worker are two groups where all work for their keep and no salaries—and no taxes—are paid.
This basis of voluntary poverty could be approximated by others if they wished to make the necessary adjustment between faith and works and try to live in community.—A.H.
Excerpts from an article by Ammon Hennacy in the issue:
For the first time when the withholding tax began I have not earned enough money to owe the tax man anything.
I only made $310 lecturing and as my Autobiography is not copyrighted and I want no royalties from it, the sales go to pay for the printing and whatever is left over will go to the CW.
There is no status [sic] of limitations on income taxes so I owe for 12 years.
I told the tax man that I would not be foolish enough to tell him where I was going to lecture so he could be there and get the money.
There is practically nothing that I have to buy as all of us here at the CW work for our keep.
However, if I was to purchase anything in a store and give the cashier a $5 bill for a dollar purchase the tax man, if he were present, could garnishee the change from the cashier right then without any legal proceeding.
In this idea of tax refusal there are ways by which pacifists have to act according to their web of circumstances.
Some, like Ernest Bromley, limit their earnings to the amount they are allowed because of dependents and have no tax to pay.
Others like Rev. George Hauser, because of being ordained in the clergy, do not have a withholding tax taken from their pay, but at the end of the year make a statement of their earnings.
Then the amount of tax is taken by garnishee from the pay with added penalties.
There are others who have an income from securities and do not work for wages and who keep their money in a bank where the tax man comes and gets it.
There are millions of people who dislike paying taxes and who may write a letter to the government about it, but they pay.
There are others like Governor Lee of Utah who put a certain amount of the tax due which comes from income other than wages in a bank and dare the tax man to sue to get it.
But the government always will evade a moral issue, so it is likely that the Governor’s money will be taken the same as others who keep money in banks.
I plan to picket the tax man here in New York City for , and then fast and picket in penance for the bomb we dropped at Hiroshima .
The T men have interrogated me and what they want to do about my tax arrears is up to them.
With more H bomb tests scheduled for the spring by politicians and militarists it is increasingly the responsibility of the individual pacifist to think and to act about being a part of this terrible destruction planned by those who will soon be asking for votes because they have “kept us out of war.”
An excerpt from an Ammon Hennacy article in the issue:
The coming atomic tests now scheduled for and the air raid drill for are a challenge to all Christians.
We intend to demonstrate against this “pinch of incense on the altar to Caesar.”
This with our non payment of income taxes for war and a refusal to be a part of the war system is positive evidence that we are trying to understand and practice the Sermon on the Mount.
The argument that the idealist hears from the opportunist is that we are not practical.
I submit that our program of the one-man-revolution is the most practical of all.
Others who believe in bullets and ballots must gain a majority before they can begin to practice their beliefs and thus postpone indefinitely anything but conversation about their views.
We do not need to wait upon others for we have seceded about 90% from this exploitative system and are already practicing our ideals.
An editorial from Dorothy Day reflected on the hydrogen bomb test among other things, and included this note:
Those who can take such stringent courses as tax refusal can give their services rather than be put on payrolls and beg their way to supply their daily needs if they can find agencies willing to work with them on these terms.
Or they can embrace voluntary poverty and manual labor as a life of penance and mortification.
The harvest is great and the laborers are few. No fear of unemployment in this field.
An unsigned book review in the issue included this:
These publications [Thomas Merton’s The Silent Life and Basic Principles of Monastic Spirituality] will be of special interest to novices in the religious life or those contemplating such a move but laymen who read them should keep in mind that while there is much contained in them from which any Christian can benefit still the “techniques” of attaining union with God proper to the monk are not always the same for those “in the world.” Anyone who has lived under the Benedictine rule, and all the monastic orders of the Western world have felt the impact of Benedict’s spirit and legislation, knows the position of the concept of obedience in his thought.
It is just about the most important single element and no one can be a good monk unless he is willing to give up his own will and like Jesus become “obedient unto death,” and the whole monastic observance is organized to serve this end.
But the layman, living as he does most often in a society where “the prince of this world” and his spirit prevail, has the duty to cultivate, rather, the virtue of rebellion in order to be obedient to God.
It is in rebellion too that we can imitate St. Benedict who fled the corrupt Roman society of his day, whose only concern was “to please God alone.”
The monastic life is a judgement on the life of the “world” and in its light the “world” stands condemned.
In this way the monk practices the virtue of rebellion.
For those in the “world” there must be rebellion also if they are not to be counted “of it.” They must rebel against materialism by embracing voluntary poverty and giving all they possess over and above the absolute necessities to those who have not the necessities, they must rebel against war and its causes by conscientious objection and tax refusal, they must combat that selfish middle class individualism and fear of giving of self by embracing community in one form or another.
Rebellion is the first step in any attempt at conforming to Christ; it begins at baptism when the neophyte formally renounces Satan—et omnibus operibus ejus.
More from Ammon Hennacy, in the issue:
Richard Fichter, whose article appears in this issue, had been dismissed from the Methodist ministry in Pennsylvania because of his energetic anti-war and tax refusal stand.
I had never met him but he had bought several of my books and distributed the CW and had attended various picketing demonstrations.
He and his wife have three small children and live on a farm with twenty cows to attend to.
All radicals have to make the decision when to follow Caesar and when to follow Christ.
75,000 followers of Gandhi went to prison and someone besides the British government took care of their families.
Many bourgeois minded pacifists thought it was wrong for a CO to go to CPS camp or prison and leave a family behind.
Richard wrote to many papers about the evils of atomic war and little attention was paid to his views.
So he came to New York City and in the midst of a nation wide broadcast on television he jumped to the stage and shouted his message.
He thought that this would gain attention and the papers would print his views in full.
Instead he was locked up in Bellevue for mental observation.
I visited him there and met his wife and brother and two Methodist ministers who were his friends.
Later his brother and Parents came to visit us at the CW from their home in Ohio.
When the government comes to a pacifist and says you must register for the draft, pay taxes for war, sign a loyalty oath, or when a Congressional Committee wants you to tell on others, then if you do not follow the best you know and refuse absolutely, you are following less than you know and will live to regret your timidity.
But to leave farm and family to try to tell your message to those who do not want to hear it is not wise and does not make a witness with the dignity which no doubt inspired Richard in the lives of Thoreau and Gandhi.
A radical who has faith knows like Thoreau that “one on the side of God is a majority.” And when his neighbors think he is queer and out of step he can reply like Thoreau that he “is listening to a different drummer.” He is not frustrated if all are against him.
He does not need the applause of the multitude for he will be content when “two or three are gathered together.”
Ammon Hennacy, in the issue:
Tax Refusal
Leland Olds of Yellow Springs, Ohio has refused to pay income taxes and as a result his house worth $9,000 has been sold by the government for the less than $200 taxes due.
He can regain the property within a year by paying the tax with interest.
This action, together with the sale of a car belonging to Walter Gormly and of Arthur Emery of Iowa, are the only cases I know of where the government has taken property of tax refusers.
At times they have garnisheed wages and taken money from bank accounts.
They got $5 from a farmer I was working for in Arizona who paid it out of his own pocket rather than take it from my wage, and the tax man also took my picketing sign saying he would sell it to the highest bidder.
I never heard of anyone buying it.
I still owe taxes for 12 years and will picket the tax office here on unless I am in jail on the air raid drill.
Then I would fast in jail.
Karl Meyer, in the issue:
Stepping Up the Agitation
Dear Bob or Dorothy or whoever is holding things down there while we are all out making angry and urgent faces at the giants of the impersonalist order.
I was very encouraged to receive the issue and to read your letter to the California legislature, even as I was preparing to step up the agitation in support [of] Rose Robinson and tax refusal.
On I began to hand out a new leaflet outside the Federal Building which has been the focus of our protest.
After outlining developments in the case.
I wrote, “There are some of us who believe, as she does, that it is wrong to pay taxes for war.
We have refused as she refused, to cooperate with the Internal Revenue Service in the collection of taxes.
And, beyond this, we encourage everyone to do the same.
If she deserves to be in prison we deserve to be there too.
Therefore I ask from the judge, the United States Attorney’s office, the Internal Revenue Service and all taxpayers and supporters of military preparations, a share in the judgment against her.
We have said very simply that your preparations for nuclear war, and therefore your war taxation, are criminal beyond any measure of crime that man has known before.
And you have said that our dissent from the idea and action of military preparedness is criminal.
The question of which is right is urgent for the future of all men.
We have shown a readiness to ratify the truth of our conviction at the risk of imprisonment and hardship.
The integrity of justice asks either that Rose Robinson be released, or that all who share her stand be imprisoned with her.
That is why I ask the officials and the people for a decision in my case consistent with their decision in hers.
How can one person be imprisoned for taking a stand, while others who take the same stand and, what is more, advocate and promote it in the marketplace are left free?
I ask the officials and the people involved to release Rose Robinson, but if they will not do that, I ask them to prosecute me for refusing to cooperate with Internal Revenue Service and for advocating that all people do the same.”
The third person who came out and took this leaflet was Judge Robson.
I had already mailed him a copy with a covering letter in which I said, “…By presenting this nuclear issue as an issue of imprisonment and freedom, we approach by an analogy the core of what it really is: that is, an issue of life and death for all of us…
I hope therefore that you will not regard this leaflet distribution and this request for a share in the judgment against Rose Robinson as something impertinent, but as an attempt to enunciate forcefully the terms of a public discussion of a crucial issue, as well as to bear witness to a very strong conviction that it is wrong to participate in modern war in any way.”
We encouraged Rose by our vigil, visits and letters.
In court she thanked us for that.
I feel responsible to every one man insurrection to make it a two-man insurrection, so that it may become a three-man insurrection and finally a revolution of enough men.
It is at the critical moment when we recognize our responsibility to one another that we realize our responsibility to mankind and to God.
That is what Jesus told us.
We see war coming on, bearing down on us, a visible monument to an immensity of sin.
Our voices have not reflected the horror we have seen.
Our voices have not challenged the supremacy of crime in the actions of men.
We were glad enough if a government preparing for World War Ⅲ, was yet benevolent in this decade until war comes, glad enough if our protest could be free from suffering.
We are still accomplices because we have whispered at the moment when we should have shouted.
We ought to throw up the challenge of Tolstoi and Thoreau, to keep all just men in jail or give up war and slavery.
Here we are making faces at the giants of the impersonalist order, but what we do not forget is that a face turned in urgent desperation to them is a face turned in hope to God.
Our work is primarily a prayer.
Early last week two men were standing on the step of the Federal Building watching me as I passed my leaflets and commenting to each other.
I recognized one of them.
It was deputy U.S. Marshal Wheeler, the man who put the chains on me last summer at Mead, Nebraska.
I stepped up to him and said, “Hello. Mr. Wheeler. Will you take a leaflet?”
“Yes, Karl,” he said, “I’ll take that. I see that you are still here passing them out.”
And so I was, and I realized that the children of this world are too wise to be consistent.
Last summer he put me in chains for standing on a grass covered knoll near a missile base.
Last month they gave Rose Robinson twelve long months and a long day.
Who can say what they will do tomorrow when I walk up the steps and into the building and have a try at handing the leaflet to taxpayers lined up outside the Federal Internal Revenue office.
In Christ, Karl Meyer Chicago Catholic Worker
An announcement in the issue:
Prayer, Fasting, and Tax Refusal
Ammon Hennacy will picket the office of Internal Revenue at Varick and West Houston Streets in New York City and will fast at this time as a penance for our dropping the bomb at Hiroshima, , and for our continued atomic activities.
He has openly refused to pay income taxes during 12 years while working in the fields in the Southwest, or while lecturing, as 83% of the income tax goes for war.
He will picket from 9 to 5 on weekdays.
Readers in New York are invited to keep him company, and anyone sympathetic can help by praying and fasting according to his capacity.
The same issue also included an article from Eroseanna Robinson, borrowed from The Peacemaker:
Rose Robinson Tells of Her Arrest and Prison Experiences
It was , and I got off the city bus in a hurry because I was late for work.
My arms were straining with the packages I’d bought downtown.
They were things for the Play Club mostly, and food.
I hadn’t had any lunch, except a couple of cashews and some fudge nibbled at on the bus.
I was quick-stepping toward Bethlehem Community Center compelled by two nagging realizations.
I was late and I was hungry.
I had a conference with my supervisor set for two o’clock.
It was already ten after.
Well, I’d just have to talk and eat at the same time.
I stopped, late as I was, at the corner store and bought some buttermilk.
Actually, I already had an abundance of food — vegetable soup, swiss cheese sandwich and what not.
But for a change, I had a little extra money and for the rest of that year, certainly, I was going to be earning a little more than usual.
For the first time in my seven years of tax refusal, I wouldn’t have to budget so closely.
Eating was as good a way as any to celebrate.
I was vexed with myself to be so busy.
First the conference.
Then group preparation.
Then the Play Club children’s time.
I’d have to do a lot of phoning after that for the parents meeting that night.
I took the hall steps quickly when I got inside the building and rushed into the front office, I said “Hi” to the secretary.
She had a peculiar look on her face.
My supervisor and the girl workers were also in the office.
I spoke to them but everybody kept looking at me strangely and nobody said anything. “What’s wrong with all of you?” I asked. “I’m not that late.
It’s only 2:15.” Then the secretary said, “Rose, there’s somebody to see you.”
She was nodding across the hall toward the library.
Somebody to see me.
I didn’t want to see anybody with all I had to do.
I wanted to put down my arm-racking bundles and have my conference and eat.
The fact is that I never had that conference and I didn’t eat for 115 days because a short, stocky, authoritative man in a grey uniform came toward me out of the library.
Behind him was a man I knew.
He’d come to my home several times and to Bethlehem Center only a week before.
He was Mr.
D.L.
Turner, deputy collector for the Internal Revenue Service.
The first man said, “Erozee-yanna Robinson?” and I said correctly “Eroseanna,” and he snapped his right hand open sidewise showing his badge. “I have a warrant for your arrest," he said. “Come with me.” For eight months the government, through its agents, had hammered link upon link several visits by the deputy collector, registered letters, a subpoena, a certified court order, telephone calls, throughout, to my home and work, a call to my sister, Adrienne, at her work, a visit to my job — until at last, they had reached the handcuff-end of the chain, putting my wrists into them so tightly that they cut, and lugging my body, in deliberately ungainly fashion, away to jail.
My body was lugged and dragged around many times after that because I refused to walk to jail or trial or any place authorized by the courts.
And throughout the whole of my incarceration, the practices upon which government power pivots came into sharp focus.
One is the coercion of the individual to unquestioningly submit to authority imposed by the government, the other is the deliberate misrepresentation of any individual who might take exception to such authority.
This whole pattern is disguised as the democratic process’ and, in recent years, has frequently been labeled ‘freedom’ and ‘truth’.
Actually, respect for the right of the individual to examine policies of government — which certainly affect us all — is a myth.
And taking exception to policy, as in my own case — even though that exception be a denouncement of violence, waste, psychological intimidation, misrepresentation of truth, and preparation for wholesale destruction — can constitute a felony.
When the individual is willing to be fodder for such an organ, it is partly out of desire for reward but largely to escape punishment.
And submission to such authority is no guarantee of either.
So, when the deputy marshal told me he was there to arrest me, I told him that was his affair and was of no concern to me, and started up the 2nd floor stairs to my office.
I recognized that I was going to be forcibly involved and I was alert to a point of high tension.
But still, I knew I was faced with a choice of being arrested or of arresting myself.
I knew then that my arrest was to be his affair, since he had not the conscience to do otherwise, and later, that or the ten or so others who answered his telephone call for help when I refused to go with him voluntarily.
I wasn’t going to contribute my body for incarceration anymore than I would contribute federal income taxes for militarization.
This would be giving sanction to the government’s inflicting punishment upon the individual.
But just as militarization is evil, so too is the punitive institution.
The government has prepared a glossy brochure about Women’s Federal Prison at Alderson, West Virginia.
They call their penal process ‘rehabilitation’!
This is a calculated misuse of the term. They proceed due south of rehabilitation.
Such downgrading of human beings — infantile treatment of the women, the frequent apathy toward the physical ailments of inmates, the absurd restrictions — is anything but preparation for constructive living.
This was equally true of the Cook County Jail.
This maltreatment of prisoners would be bad enough if done out of ignorance.
But attempts at concealment of the facts by all levels of government personnel, with restraint of information and with lies, reveals the hypocritical state of such authority.
I’ve learned, since my release from Alderson, that a number of lies in regard to me and treatment of me were given to the Press by the wardens of both the County Jail and the prison and by the U.S. marshal.
I will recount some in a later issue, but let me state a few of these now and set the facts in order:
Rose was arrested and taken to the Clerk’s office of the county jail.
I wasn’t taken to any office, but was carried upstairs and dumped on a bed in the incorrigible cell of the “Hole.”
The Hole is usually reserved for narcotics addicts who are breaking the habit.
It was overheated because addicts in that condition are always cold.
They vomited all day and all night and in between they talked in the lewdest profanity.
The Hole is a four part unit — 1 larger room about 9′×12′ and 3 tiny cells, removed from the outer door, about 4′×8′.
The grey speckled floors were stone, the clay colored walls, iron.
The larger section had four iron beds with mattresses and bedding.
A bed in each of the little cells took up half the width.
There’s a seatless toilet in each.
The two outer ones had windows that opened (but that were kept closed because the addicts complained of being cold).
Only one of these boasted a sink.
Two cell doors remained open usually, while the one in which I was put was locked.
In that cell, the window was nearly opaque with dirt and with heavy screening, and iron bars were on the outside.
It could not be opened.
Under it, going full blast always, was a radiator.
The only way I could get relief from the heat, and a breath of cool air, was by lying flat on the floor on my stomach and inhaling of the stream that flowed under the hall door from several feet away.
The iron bed had a wafer-thin mattress on it and was so short that my head and feet stuck out simultaneously beyond its borders.
I was given a clean sheet and a blanket.
To get some sleep at night, I tilted the bed up on one end out of the way and put the mattress on the floor.
I slept fitfully with my head resting on stone, under the toilet.
Whenever a toilet in an adjacent cell was flushed, the substance would back up into the others.
This kept me jumping up throughout the night, reflushing the one over my head.
The radiator boiled away, where my feet were, all night long.
I didn’t wash for 3½ days because I was told I couldn’t use the facilities without begging.
Frequently the matron put food for me on the floor.
Rose proceeded to take off her clothes and to remain thus in the cell.
I was forcibly undressed by two matrons after refusing to give up my own clothes.
Then I was manually searched all over and forced into a striped cotton dress that was ripped in two places.
All my clothes — even shoes — were taken from me.
The next morning I was told repeatedly that I would be left in jail to rot unless I got dressed and walked out to go to court.
I refused.
About an hour later, without explanation, my clothes were given back to me.
Another hour passed, and when I refused to walk out, I was dragged from the cell, up the steps, into a wheelchair and hauled off to court.
When I returned, the nurse had trouble removing my clothes by herself, so she didn’t bother to take any more than my skirt.
I fashioned another by doubling a sheet and wrapping it around my middle.
I refused to put on the striped dress she’d provided.
On the fifth day, after I’d been dragged from my prayers and put in isolation cell of the so-called hospital (a dingy white-painted dormitory), the nurse, who proved to be sympathetic and courteous, offered me a nightgown which I accepted.
I wore this to bed and whenever I washed my own clothes.
Rose took exercises unclad.
Silly. I always wore the above-mentioned.
Rose, therefore, had to jump into bed when the warden and a reporter from the Daily News came to interview her.
She told her story, said the reporter, who “quoted” her in the News.
How reluctant I’ll be to believe anything printed in the daily papers from now on.
No reporter was ever admitted to quarters where I was confined.
And such quotes are out-and-out lies.
Moreover, I neither saw nor talked to the warden until the last day when, under his supervision, I was dragged from the cell and carted to the U.S. hospital.
Rose left the cell to go downstairs and see a boyfriend, but she wouldn’t go to see her parents.
During my incarceration I walked out of the immediate confines 3 times — once at Alderson when I helped carry a sick inmate to the hospital car, once to my release and one other time, at the Cook County Jail.
And I went to talk to Rev. Ernest Bromley, editor of The Peacemaker.
At first I hesitated.
And then I decided that too few people knew my views on tax refusal and the like, so this was to me a fine chance to express these views through the newspaper.
I then resumed my plan to see no one unless they were admitted to the area where I was confined.
My mother was admitted and I welcomed her.
The other inmates were sneaking Rose candy bars during her fast.
The warden, head matron, priest and others had proof.
This’s the first time in my experience that fantasy has become proof.
I ate nothing throughout my whole time in jail and nobody crammed anything down my throat.
After my removal to the U.S. hospital I ate nothing.
I drank no water the first 3½ days of jail, very little — spasmodically — in-between, and none the last 9 days before force-feeding.
I did not wish to crave things that could be withheld from me, because emotional control meant freedom.
Rose enjoyed being fed through a tube in her nose. She didn’t struggle.
At Alderson, I didn’t struggle. I gave voice protest and continued whatever I was doing.
In the beginning at the U.S. hospital in Chicago, I had struggled, nonviolently against four men and two women.
It took them 20 minutes to turn me over and stretch me out and another 20 minutes to get me tied, hand and foot to the bed, in a straitjacket.
I couldn’t do much moving in that state, but they further secured me with a restraining blanket made of bulky canvas.
Then they tightened a rope across my chest.
It was in the mid-eighties in that room and no air was stirring.
I had trouble breathing. I was miserable. But they had an easy time force-feeding me.
By the next morning I was aching all over. One of the doctors came in and asked me how I felt.
I felt terrible, I said. Would I struggle if he let me out? I’d thought about that overnight.
How easy it was for them to force food into me—how uncomfortable it was for me.
Besides this, I was 37 lbs. below normal weight and very weak.
If I could keep them from having power over me, struggle I would.
But I knew I couldn’t keep up even the kind of effort I’d made the night before, and neither did I have the control yet to remain lying in one position for a long period of time.
So, I told the doctor, no. Did I want to be untied? Yes.
So, he walked away and left me like that for several hours more.
I stayed, thus restricted, for nearly 24 hours.
The night before, when they inserted the tube, the other doctor had jammed it into my nose, letting it stop at my throat.
I tried desperately to get my breath but I kept choking.
I could see the doctor’s face, looking like a great wax mask—with expensive eyes—magnified enormously.
He watched me as though I were a specimen under glass.
I gagged three times and he watched me.
“Alright now, breathe,” he said this steadily, “through your mouth”.
Of course I did, and, in one movement, he jammed the tube down to my stomach.
Blood bubbled from my nose and mouth. It continued for hours, after that.
My nose and throat were inflamed and sore for 4 days.
My nose remained sore and ran constantly, and I sneezed again and again throughout 12 days of force-feeding.
The doctor at Anderson was considerate and gentle in this.
He used a smaller tube and put it down by degrees. There was very little irritation.
My nose did run for weeks though, and always when I talked.
I sneezed, because the tube was left there all the time.
I plugged up the nostril with cotton to keep the thing from wriggling.
I slept with it and otherwise lived with it for 76 days and nights.
That made a total of 88 days of force-feeding.
Rose was being well-fed, gaining much weight, and was getting 3000 calories per day.
For nine days at Alderson, I was force-fed 2 pints of water with 5% sugar and 2 pints of a mixture of egg, molasses, sugar, salt, water, evaporated milk and orange juice.
After that the mixture was doubled and the sugar-water eliminated.
When I was removed to solitary confinement, the mixture was cut 25%.
Then it was cut a second time.
I was carried to solitary 25 lbs. underweight.
Taking measurement of myself revealed I hadn’t gained a pound. Limited exercise wore me out.
To keep from losing, frequently I’d spend long hours in bed.
Hospital aides (inmates) told me the mixture contained very little protein and an abnormally high amount of molasses, salt and orange juice.
Long before they told me this I’d started drinking lots of water because I was feeling irritation from the acidity.
I was drinking as much as 15 glasses of water each day.
Sometimes I felt a little feverish and my face would swell.
That was when the prison staff would compliment me on how nice and fat I was getting.
Only when friends came to the prison, asking after my welfare, did the aides tell me the protein had been increased noticeably but that the molasses and salt and orange juice remained high.
Again, before they told me this, I’d already noticed my measurements were increasing normally.
When I was released, I was 10 lbs. underweight.
Rose liked the feeding.
I was forced-fed in a ragged pattern.
The aides and nurses came any time between sun-up and 9:30 at night.
I overcame feelings of weakness usually through prayer, and sometimes, as I said before, by just climbing into bed.
Food was left as an enticement throughout most of my confinement.
An aide who felt sorry for me told the head nurse I wasn’t getting enough nourishment.
“That’s impossible.” said the nurse. After that they left a glassful of the stuff on the dresser.
Often I was spattered with the stuff, whenever the tube came off the syringe.
So, too, were walls, ceiling, floor, draperies bed, bedding — everything in the cell.
And usually it was left where it landed.
I made a practice of going on with whatever I was doing.
At first, the nurses carried or sat me into position for force-feeding.
Sometimes the aides would lurk, pitcher and syringe in hand, waiting for me to halt so that they could pour the stuff down easily.
After I was moved to solitary, the aides were ultimately told to walk away if I didn’t sit down right away, so sometimes my stomach was left empty.
One day I accidentally got a hole in the tube.
The doctor refused to let the aides cut it, and he decided that neither did he have the time to leave the hospital to change it.
I wasn’t fed for 25 hours.
Rose was given considerable freedom of movement.
When this was said, I was in solitary confinement in the maximum security cottage, one of only two with bars on the windows and with locked outer doors.
I remained there for 27 straight days in full confinement.
The last 31 days, the cell door was opened from 8 A.M. to 5 P.M.
And so the lies went and there are more — most skillful — all paid for with federal income tax.
Lies. The Official order of the prison day, and at Alderson, the green grass grew all around.
For the grounds were lovely to look at — lovely its trees, its broad lawns and gay spring flowers, lovely the birds singing outside the cottages where wires crawled through the walls like snakes, so that every word that every inmate spoke day or night was listened to and taken down on a tape recorder.
There weren’t any secrets.
Next time, I’ll tell about the alleged psychiatric and medical examinations at Alderson and about the marshal’s predictions about what the inmates would do to me when they found out I wouldn’t work.
Also, I’ll tell about a time of weakness. One morning, for a moment, I was in a turmoil.
Daily discipline, including prayer exercises, helped me to regain strength.
More from Karl Meyer, in the issue (excerpts):
I have had a small house of hospitality, five rooms where I have lived with nine or ten people who were sick, poor, orphans, old, travelers or needy of other kinds.
I have sought some way to work for the support of my responsibilities to this house and not pay federal income taxes for the support of militarism.
In I quit my job where taxes were withheld and resolved not to pay withholding tax anymore and went to jail for 54 days in solidarity with tax refuser Eroseanna Robinson, who had just been imprisoned here in Chicago.
After my release I began a search for work without taxes.
I experimented with self-employment in odd jobs and in tutoring.
I tried to persuade employers to pay for my work in the form of a direct donation to St. Stephens House, without withholding tax.
I received an opinion from a lawyer that Internal Revenue Service had ruled that this type of arrangement with a charitable organization was legal for hospitals, so I applied at a number of hospitals, but was turned down.
I looked for part time work paid for in cash. Nothing worked, particularly me.
Being under the firm impression that only one’s relatives could be claimed as dependents for the purpose of withholding exemptions, I complained bitterly to my pacifist brethren that, in fact, I had nine dependents but was unable to claim them for non-tax purposes.
Not one of these experts on tax resistance set me straight.
On , after five months of frustration, I checked on the Internal Revenue Service definition of dependents.
This is how it reads:
“To qualify as your dependent… a person (a) must receive more than one-half of his support from you for the year, and (b) must-have less than $600 gross income during the year… and (c) must not be claimed as an exemption by such person[’]s husband or wife, and (and) must be a citizen or resident of the United States… and (e) must (1) have your home as his principal residence and be a member of your household for the entire year, or (2) be related to you…”
I counted four people in my household, in addition to myself, whom I could claim for dependency exemptions.
I discovered that all along I might have been earning $3000 per year without a cent of withholding tax.
I could have kicked myself all the way down Clark St.
We need more small houses of hospitality “to shelter the homeless at a personal sacrifice” instead of delivering them to the City and the State to be supported by taxes, on the street or in the jails.
We believe that housing the unemployed, feeding the hungry, giving drink to the thirsty, clothing the naked, caring for the sick and the aged and, last of all, visiting the prisoners are parts of a total Gospel of Peace.
If we do these things, we can also starve the tax collector, by feeding the poor.
We can build “a new society in the shell of the old,” a City of God, and swing wide its gates to let the King, and his ambassadors, enter in triumph.
Not all of the poor who come to our door come in the embassy of God.
Several nights ago one of the men came with two drop-cloths and a gallon of turpentine “from the job” and asked permission to leave them here and stay the night himself, and I, in all innocence, agreed to this.
The next morning, two painters arrived, with a policeman, demanding the drop-cloths, which had been stolen from them and traced to our house.
I turned over the drop-cloths, but the policeman also demanded that I turn over the thief.
When I declined to do this, he said that he would take me to the station and book me for possession of stolen property.
The painters agreed to sign a complaint against me, because, they said, not only had the cloths been stolen, but also, some paint had been spilt and now they would have to pay for it out of their own pockets.
However, perhaps if I would reimburse them for the spilt paint, they would find it in their hearts to forget about the complaint.
How much paint was lost, asked the policeman? Ten dollars worth.
Now, half a gallon of paint may have been spilt, but how could anyone have spilt ten dollars worth?
Still I had to take their word for it or they would surely have taken me to the station and signed the complaint, so in the end I paid and they went away satisfied with their take, all of which goes to prove the old moral: one good theft deserves another, or no use taking a fall over spilt paint.
After the danger had passed, I found the thief under a bed in the farthest corner of the back room.
He said he was sorry. And I said he sure as hell should be. And after a little of that he left.
I did reap an unexpected reward for my ordeal however, for that morning the most shiftless character in the house, out of an excess of sympathy and generosity, offered to press my trousers for me.
I might also say that some of the “rich” even come to our door as ambassadors of God.
There is one man who comes from time to time and leaves things that we need (clothing, furnishings or household items) inside the door.
He just opens the door, puts them inside and goes away.
For almost two years he has been doing this.
He used to come perhaps once a month, but recently he has taken to coming much more frequently.
For a long time we knew nothing about him because we never saw him come, but several times recently, when the door was locked, he knocked and handed in his gifts when the door was opened and then left very quickly.
I have always respected his anonymity, because I remember from my childhood the story of the shoemaker and the elves: the elves used to come at night and make shoes for the shoemaker, but one night he tried to catch them at their work and they disappeared and never returned again.
(After the story I told above, let me hasten to say that there is always a ticket with the things that this man brings so that I know they are not stolen.)
During the voter registration period, one man from the neighborhood came in and asked, “Is this a registration office?”
And I looked at the crucifix on the wall and the picture of Ammon Hennacy and said, “No, it isn’t.”
The Democratic precinct worker for our building came in to see if we were registered, and she told me that I am going to vote under the name of Geoffrey Thornton, because he is registered but she can’t find him anywhere in the building.
She needs votes but this is one she won’t get.
Three young Catholic workers have said they may join me in the work here soon.
If they do, we will be well staffed to carry out the Green Revolution program I outlined in my last letter.
The next article concerns Laurence Hislam, a war tax resister who is new to me.
It comes from the issue:
Catholic Pacifist Jailed in England Father of Five Refuses Civil Defense Tax
By Robert Steed
My friend Laurie Hislam, who resembles Ammon Hennacy in many ways, was recently sentenced to a term in jail far refusing to pay his Civil Defense rates.
He served two months last year for taking part in the civil disobedience campaigns of the Committee of 100 which protested the British involvement in the nuclear arms race.
I was in court with Laurie in when he first appeared on this charge.
When he put on bis best suit, cranked up his car (a huge, old London taxi), which finally had to be pushed down a hill to get it started, and drove to town where other friends were waiting in court I was expecting fireworks but the magistrate put a damper on the proceedings and said he would allow no speechmaking.
He said a note would be made of the tax refusal, and went on to the next hearing.
Laurie said the court would probably send someone around to the house and want to take away a table or a few chairs and auction them off for the amount owed (the former owner having the privilege of bidding for them too) and debated whether any kind of resistance should be offered and if so what kind.
When I left a few days later nothing had happened and a month after that when we met at the Spode House PAX Conference it was still the same.
And now more than a year later I have heard in a letter from Laurie’s wife, Winifred, that he is serving time for the offense.
Lest I give the impression that Laurie became a radical in middle-age I should also say that he declined to serve in World War Ⅱ and instead of showing up for his physical went off on a tour of England and Scotland selling anarchist literature for Freedom Press.
When he got back to London after a year on the road the police picked him up but the army doctors found something wrong with one of his feet and rejected him.
In the intervening years he has become a Catholic, gotten married and moved to the Cottswolds in the west of England near Gloucester where he and his wife built their house with their own hands and are raising five beautiful daughters.
The whole family is vegetarian.
Here is the text of Laurie’s leaflet explaining his position which was distributed in the Stroud area:
Why I Am In Jail
I have just commenced serving a term of imprisonment imposed by the Stroud (Glos.) Magistrates, and I believe it is important that it should be clearly understood by the members of the community on whose behalf the Magistrates have officially acted, why this has happened.
For the past two years I have refused to pay the portion of the Local Rate (roughly 1 penny in the pound) allocated to “Civil Defense.”
My reasons are as follows:
There is not even any pretense of preparation to protect the people of Stroud in the event of war.
According to Government spokesmen, there is no known means of protecting the population against nuclear attack.
Even if “Civil Defense” could be effective (which I do not believe possible) I would still feel bound to refuse to pay for it, since “Civil Defense” is an essential part of the preparation for a war in which millions of innocent people would be brutally killed or maimed.
I believe that those who support “Civil Defense” have been deceived by the Government into believing that they are helping to save life and assist the injured, whereas in fact by their acceptance of the need for “Civil Defense,” they have given their tacit agreement (in certain circumstances) to the waging of nuclear war and its unimaginably terrible suffering.
Worst of all is the hypocrisy attached to “Western” propaganda, which says, in effect, the Russians are the atheistic barbarians and we are good people trying to protect Christianity and democracy, whereas, in fact we and the U.S.A. are prepared to collaborate with the Russians in the ultimate blasphemy of destroying the whole of creation.
A so-called policy of which this is the logical result can never be justified, and I appeal to everyone who reads this statement to seriously consider his or her position.
Examine your conscience and ask yourself the question: Am I willing to lend my support, either actively or (as the majority, unfortunately do) by my silence, to the preparation for nuclear war?
(Remembering that “Civil Defense" is part of the insidious mental conditioning for war-acceptance.)
If we give our silent agreement to Lord Home’s recent boast of our ability to annihilate all Russia’s cities (even in revenge) we have committed murder in our hearts.
You can no longer remain silent and still hope to retain your integrity.
I may be forcibly silenced for a time, but I ask you to speak out fearlessly against the crime which is being prepared by the world’s leaders.
Above all—speak out for the children and babies of the world who rely upon you for protection.
You cannot give protection by preparing for war — a war in which there can be no defense — only revengeful slaughter on both sides.
Laurence Hislam,
Brownshill,
Stroud, Glos.
This next comes from the issue:
Tax Refusal
Handbook on Nonpayment of War Taxes; published by the Peacemakers’ Movement; 35 cents; 52 pages; available from the Peacemakers (1208 Sylvan Ave., Cincinnati 41, Ohio)
Reviewed by James Forest.
For all those who have ever felt a deeply responsive chord struck upon reading or re-reading the story of 10 just men saving the city, this book on conscientious tax-refusal should be meaningful.
The book is divided into a number of sections: there is a good collection of fairly brief quotations by a wide range of tax-refusers, a chapter on the philosophy and history of this particular form of conscientious objection, considerable material concerning the inherent legalities/illegalities, descriptions of the basic forms of refusal (surprising variety) and, most important, a substantial collection of “personal experience” sketches.
The reader might find it useful to see a tightened version of the major contents:
Philosophy
Nonviolence begins with personal disarmament:
“Lord, make me an instrument of your peace. Where there is hate, let me sow love.”
It is not a partial disarmament. At least that isn’t the goal.
It is a serious and concerted effort to shred the rhinoceros hide which makes us either witting or unwitting enemies to other men.
(I recently had the opportunity to hear a young woman describe the effect her first long term contact and participation in a nonviolent project — in this case the Walk to Cuba — had on her.
She spoke of the sensation of peeling off layer upon layer of dead skin, of feeling the wind for the first time.)
What is it the pacifist says? I refuse to be your enemy.
I refuse to be your enemy so much that I will fight for you, fight with you, fight with love to see justice done — even at personal risk.
The Great Commandment: “Love one another as I have loved you.”
I cannot be free until you are free.
I cannot be comfortable or safe or satisfied until these things are common property.
It is not necessary to quote here statistics offered in the book on where taxes go.
We all know. A good deal of it goes to the arms race in all its continuing facets.
I don’t think it would make much difference if it were only a little.
There is nothing more moral in contributing a nickel to a child’s death than in giving a dollar for the cause.
But the plain fact is that more than half that money goes for that purpose, and we do give it.
Said one woman, Miriam Nicholas, deciding this was one contribution she would be unable to make, “…the government expects me to help pay for weapons that could destroy all life on this earth.”
“This I must not give,” said Wendal Bull, finishing a similar statement.
“You may be imprisoned, but that is sometimes more honorable,” Ross Anderson stated.
“If I can’t stop other people’s killing.” Milton Mayer decided, “I must stop my own.”
What Is the Law?
The legal aspects of tax refusal are complicated and inevitably vary from case to case.
It is, of course, a punishable offense to refuse all or part of one’s taxes.
It is also an offense not to submit the required documentation.
Any noncooperation with the Internal Revenue Service is illegal.
The penalty can be as high as a $10,000 and a year in jail plus the cost of prosecution.
In practice, for reasons which one can easily understand, no such sentence is ever meted out.
In fact few tax-refusers ever find themselves in front of a judge at all.
It is interesting to draw some quick statistics from the 41 cases detailed in the handbook (there is some slight overlapping):
Four lost their jobs (two were Protestant ministers).
Six were jailed, average sentence served being about three months.
(Those jailed, it should be noted, refused any alternatives: put no money in the bank so that it couldn’t be seized, held no volatile property in their own names, etc.)
Nine had property or funds seized.
(The government, when it desires to seize anything, prefers funds; attempts to garnish salaries or draw from cheeking and savings accounts are most common.
As a last resort it may seize property for public auction, such as a house.)
29 received no punishment and had no property or funds seized.
That is not to say there was no intimidation, that the going was easy. It wasn’t.
But the simple truth is, or at least has been, that there are still relatively few tax collectors, district attorneys or judges who wish to play a modern version of Pilate’s role.
We can be glad there remain many (perhaps even a growing number) who do not feel justice is served by stale coercion of conscience.
Forms of Refusal
There are, and this I didn’t realize, several distinct forms of tax-refusal, each with its own sub-variations.
The first and probably most well known is absolute nonpayment.
Absolute Refusal
To practice absolute nonpayment it is necessary either to earn an income too low to be taxable (Citizens and residents, under 65, can figure as nontaxable any income which is below the number of members in the family times $600.
Thus a family of three would be tax exempt if it made less than $1,800 in the course of a year), or, if is is impossible or philosophically repugnant, to earn a taxable income where one is not subjected to withholding tax, such as by having one’s own business or forming one with others of similar concern.
Ammon Hennacy, though he owes $1,300 in back taxes, is for the present in the first group, earning less than a taxable income.
Karl Meyer was in the latter group until he discovered he could count all the members of St. Stephen’s house of hospitality as dependents (as long as they had lived in the hospice from the beginning of the year and received half or more of their subsistence from him).
Persons interested in both tax refusal and running a small house of hospitality might find this an ideal solution.
Partial Refusal
For persons who are having taxes withheld from their incomes there is the opportunity of refusing to pay the balance due, or part of it.
Others, whether they have taxes withheld from their earnings or not, sometimes choose to pay only the percentage which they feel is used for peaceful purposes — 30% to 40%.
UNESCO seems to be one of the frequent recipients of the balance.
A third form of partial refusal includes persons such as Franklin Zahn, who annually withholds a “token ten dollars.”
These believe that the minimum one can do is to refuse a symbolic sum.
“Ten dollars is large enough to be noticed,” Zahn says, “but small enough to avoid excessive penalty.”
The “token ten,” he suggests, could be given to some constructive project and the IRS so notified.
(The book also relates Zahn’s refusal, beginning in , to pay that portion of his telephone bill which was a federal tax, at the time 49¢ monthly.
He explained this action to the telephone company, saying “My refusal to pay this tax is part of a larger rejection of all participation in defense activities.”
Before long his telephone was removed.
His resultant letter of explanation to friends, an apology, is a document worth reading:
“Three times I have refused the monthly telephone war tax of 49¢ (15%) and now [garbled text omitted ―♇] is no more, as of .
I regret much of the inconvenience of this fails on you, and offer my apologies to you and others who thus suffer from my act of conscience.
When irked, please consider:
1. Somewhere in the world there may be one less bullet killing a human being.
2. The $3.74 saved monthly will be used for CARE parcels.
3. If it actually is the narrow choice I feel it to be, you would prefer me to be connected with my highest conscience than with a mere gadget.”)
Conclusion
Finishing the handbook, I am reminded of a brief epigram of James Baldwin contained in The Fire Next Time.
“To act is to be committed, and to be committed is to be in danger.”
How we admire action and commitment!
St. Francis strikes off to the Holy Land with his nonviolent “Army of Love,” an army, as Clement of Alexandria would call it, “which sheds no blood.”
And we applaud this, one of the few moments of sanctity which occurred during all the Crusades, one of the few a Christian can recall with pride.
St. Maximillian refuses to serve in the military and shortly dies under the executioner’s axe.
The Cure d’Area, as a young man, changes his name and flees to the mountains rather than be conscripted.
Before death he recalls this, saying be never felt his conscience burdened by it.
And on and on. Thank God the list is endless. No editorializing is needed on lives like these.
Somehow they change the question. It is no longer Should I be a tax-refuser?
It becomes How can I be anything else?
It is fitting to end this discussion with a quotation the book provides from Milton Mayer:
“The power to stop war is not in my hands, and never will be.
The only power that is in my hands is to stop killing my fellowmen.
A thousand, or two thousand, or fifty thousand people refusing to go on killing via the tax method may save the old way of life; fewer than that were required to save Sodom.
But if a new way of life is the condition of the revolution to which we are called, then we must find it in our hearts, and when we do that we will stop killing our fellowmen and, best of all, stop justifying our doing it.
If I can’t stop other people’s killing, I must still stop my own.”
Another book review from the issue:
The Cold War and the Income Tax
The Cold War and the Income Tax, by Edmond Wilson; Farrar, Straus and Company; 1968; 118 pp.; $2.95.
Reviewed by James Forest.
Edmund Wilson’s most recent book is a small volume which carries the subtitle “A Protest.”
Indeed it is that: a forceful, plain-spoken broadside at the cold war and the related income tax, and though it is not without blemish, it ought to provide at least an awakening for a great many.
What Mr. Wilson has done is to tell a simple, and at times homely, tale that began with carelessness (or more likely unadmitted and ingrained Yankee independence) and concluded with a monumental decision, at least for our timid age: a modified refusal to pay income taxes.
Much of the book is devoted to a detailed account of the original carelessness, fascinating in the sense that a common experience of almost everyone is seen in the sharp relief of Mr. Wilson’s prose — the utterly frustrating encounters with the rule-book bureaucrats, who seem always the same whether it is a hospital clinic or the army or a tax office that houses their working hours, or no matter what their ideology may be.
In Mr. Wilson’s case, his long encounter was precipitated by almost, dedicated indifference to taxes.
Until taxes were no problem to him, as they were automatically withheld by his various employers.
But after that year he began to devote himself to fulltime independent writing, and of course there was no withholding.
Six years went by, no taxes were paid, no returns filed, and though he tells us he occasionally thought about the eventual necessity of paying up, he was unaware of the astounding severity the law applies for even minor neglect.
When at last he spoke to a lawyer friend, saying he might need some assistance in preparing his returns, the lawyer was flabbergasted and immediately urged Mr. Wilson to establish citizenship outside the United States before it was too late.
But even the author of To the Finland Station can be naive, and he couldn’t believe it would be more convenient to change countries than negotiate a debt.
He insisted on settlement, gave the lawyer a check and told him to begin his work.
“You’re a brave man,” his lawyer told him.
The Years That Followed
It would be of little value to outline the years that followed , when the arduous work began.
He must often have wished he had followed his friend’s advice and tucked himself away in a friendlier economy, where if he were paying taxes, at least it wouldn’t be for war.
It took Mr. Wilson five years and two lawyers to settle the case.
At some unspecified point, Mr. Wilson’s instinctual annoyance emerged into a time of probing the meaning of his experience, the inadequacies of the collection system and, most important, the uses the money was being put to.
His discoveries are carefully outlined—translating the noble sounding verbiage of the Administration’s Budget in Brief
(which says in part, “The Federal Government’s final responsibility is to help safeguard the peace and security of the free world.
This is our largest category of expenditures…
Expenditures devoted to national security… space programs… and the continuing cost of past wars amount to 79% of the administrative budget…”),
translating this into the facts of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, of napalm and phosphorus bombs, of disease, warfare.
The latter two are of particular interest, because, (despite protest demonstrations at Ft. Detrick, Md., the U.S. research-development center for chemical and biological weapons) there is little popularisation of these methods of warfare, though it is admitted that napalm bombs are being used in Vietnam — as they have been widely used elsewhere — and there is evidence that disease weapons are also being employed.
For instance, water supplies in South Vietnam have been poisoned in areas where both civilians and Vietcong rebels use the same well, killing some Vletcong, but also many non-combatants who were merely thirsty.
About napalm: It is, Mr. Wilson writes, “a kind of jelly saturated with gasoline, which is ignited by the bursting of the bomb.
Its great advantage is that it sticks to whatever it touches…
Its effect on human beings has been described by a
BBC correspondent in Korea:
‘In front of us a curious figure was standing a little crouched, legs straddled, arms held out from his sides.
He had no eyes, and the whole of his body, nearly all of which was visible through tatters of burned rags, was covered with a hard black crust speckled with yellow pus.
A Korean woman by his side began to speak, and the interpreter said:
“He has to stand, sir, cannot sit or lie.”
He had to stand because he was no longer covered with skin…’ ”
The BBC correspondent goes on to explain, however, that he would rather be killed by napalm than phosphorus or flame throwers.
Toward Inspired Derangement
The material on disease warfare (often termed bacteriological, biological or chemical) is on much the same level, though not so grossly horrifying, as we do not see it translated into eye witness accounts.
Involved is the same degradation of any value system.
For as one military man, Admiral Mahan, puts it, every advance in the use of lethal weapons, beginning with firearms, has been denounced as cruel.
He goes on to point out that shells with asphyxiating gases could produce “decisive results.”
Says Philip Noel-Baker, in his book The Arms Race, “All the leading governments have them now.”
And in the Chief Chemical Officer of the United States Army announced that even “mental derangement might be deliberately inspired” by this form of weaponry.
As Mr. Wilson observes, “Human life since Stalin and the Nazis has been something that few people in the East or West any longer care much about.”
Or as Robert Pickus, Turn Toward Peace executive, observed: “We support policies that would make Genghis Kahn vomit, and yet we turn out for Church every Sunday.”
Of course the question is, what can we do about all this?
To Catholic Worker readers this is no new question, as we have been fighting this a long time.
Mr. Wilson outlines the general steps of tax refusal (see detailed article on this subject in the September 1963 Catholic Worker [Forest’s review, see above]) and describes the course of two more well known refusers, Dr. A.J. Muste of the Committee for Nonviolent Action and Liberation magazine, and the Rev. Maurice McCrackin, active in the civil rights effort and the Peacemaker movement.
He goes on to describe his personal response, which is to keep his income below taxable levels.
(It is a fact, though it is not mentioned in this work, that Mr. Wilson has assigned all royalties of this book to use in the peace movement.)
He has decided not to go to jail, however, and will move to another country before allowing this to occur.
But he is determined to withdraw his support:
“When the stakes in games become so serious — when everybody’s life is at stake — they ought not to be played at all, and the taxpayers should not support them.”
The following article, from the issue, announces the formation of the “War Tax Protest Committee,” a group I hadn’t heard of before.
I’m guessing it was an early, regional form of the group “National War Tax Resistance,” which came together in .
Tax Refusal
The War Tax Protest Committee was formed to bring together West Coast conscientious objectors to income taxes for war and war preparations.
The aim of the committee is to heighten public awareness of uses to which tax monies are put and to suggest alternatives to the submissive payment of such taxes.
A range of activities around the tax deadline is being planned, including an all-day picket of IRS regional headquarters in San Francisco, a press conference, and a public meeting.
Founders of the War Tax Protest Committee include Ammon Hennacy, Roy Kepler, Mark Morris, Britt Peter, Ira Sandperl, Barton Stone, Sam Tyson, and Ida and Denny Wilcher.
The War Tax Protest Committee welcomes all persons involved in war tax protest — from total refusers to those who include a letter of protest with their return.
Creation of this new committee took place at the Committee for Nonviolent Action-West weekend seminar on Conscientious Objection to Income Taxes for War Preparations at Forest Farm in Marin County, .
The new committee, however, will have no organisational tie with CNVA-West, which is furnishing it with office space.
c/o
CNVA-West P.O. Box 5983, San Francisco 1, Calif.
The issue reprinted a letter from Joan Baez announcing her income tax resistance:
Tax Protest
Joan Baez, American folksinger, has refused to pay that 60% of her income tax which goes for military expenditures.
She sent the following letter to the Internal Revenue Service explaining her action:
Dear Friends:
What I have to say is this:
I do not believe in the weapons of war.
Weapons and Wars have murdered, burned, distorted, crippled, and caused endless varieties of pain to men, women, and children for too long.
Our modern weapons can reduce a man to a piece of dust in a split second, can make a woman’s hair fall out or cause her baby to be born a monster.
They can kill the part of a turtle’s brain that tells him where he is going, so instead of trudging to the ocean he trudges confusedly towards the desert, slowly, blinking his poor eyes, until he finally scorches to death and turns into a shell and some bones.
I am not going to volunteer the 60% of my year’s income tax that goes to armaments.
There are two reasons for my action.
One is enough. It is enough to say that no man has the right to take another man’s life.
Now we plan and build weapons that can take thousands of lives in one second, millions of lives in a day, billions in a week.
No one has a right to do that.
It is madness.
It is wrong.
My other reason is that modern war is impractical and stupid.
We spend billions of dollars a year on weapons which scientists, politicians, military men, and even the President all agree must never be used.
That is impractical.
The expression “National Security” has no meaning.
It refers to our Defense System, which I call our Offense System, and which is a farce.
It continues expanding and heaping up, one horrible kill machine upon another, until for some reason or another a button will be pushed and our world, or a good portion of it, will be blown to pieces.
That is not security. That is stupidity.
People are starving to death in some places of the world.
They look to this country with all its wealth and all its power.
They look at our National budget. They are supposed to respect us. They do not respect us.
They despise us. That is impractical and stupid.
Maybe the line should have been drawn when the bow and arrow were invented, maybe at the gun, the cannon, maybe.
Because now it is all wrong, all impractical, and all stupid.
So all I can do is draw my own line now. I am no longer supporting my portion of the arms race.
Sincerely Yours, Joan C. Baez
Karl Meyer was back for the edition:
War Escalates, Tax Refusal Called For
“The future will be different, if we make the present different.” ―Peter Maurin
By Karl Meyer
I have been refusing to pay Federal income tax, or to file tax returns, .
Finally, on , after several visits, an Internal Revenue Service agent sent me returns for the years 1962, 1963 and 1965, which he had prepared and filed without my cooperation or consent, claiming a total of $1,099.12 in back taxes and penalties for those years.
we have shared the greater part of our personal income with people who have no income, through the house of hospitality, and I have claimed an appropriate number of exemptions on the withholding tax slips which one must file with one’s employers in order to hold a job, but I.R.S. did not recognize these exemptions, because I refused to file a return or to substantiate a claim to such exemptions in their conversations with me.
My resistance to Federal taxes is not based on legalities, but on moral opposition to militarism, and I will maintain it in spite of legalities and without taking refuge in them.
I will never pay the tax that is claimed, even if I must become a pilgrim from job to job in order to avoid the attachment of my wages.
(A national list of income-tax refusers is being collected for publication, by the No Tax for War Committee, c/o Rev. Maurice McCrackin. 932 Dayton St., Cincinnati, Ohio 45214.
Last year’s list included the names of Dorothy Day, Martin Corbin and Ammon Hennacy among a list of two hundred.)
But I am not writing about this because I expect a mass addition of Catholic Worker readers to the list of income-tax refusers (it is not that easy to resist so thoroughly the demand of the state).
I mention it as background to a more modest effort that we have also been promoting.
we have been advocating a first step toward denying to the government funds to carry on the war against the Vietnamese people, refusal to pay the 10% excise tax on telephone service.
This tax had been reduced to 3% as of and was scheduled to expire altogether, but it was restored in .
The rationale for our campaign to refuse the tax is based on the words of Congressman Wilbur Mills, chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee and administration floor leader for the legislation which restored the tax, who stated directly at the outset of debate on the measure, “The bill, H.R. 12752, is intended first and foremost to provide additional revenues to help finance the expenditures required to sustain our operation in Vietnam!”
(Congressional Record, .)
Further along he declared, “I believe it is clear that it is the Vietnam, and only the Vietnam, operation, which makes this bill necessary,” and a third time, “I have stated, and I state it again, that it is the extraordinary expenses attributable to our operation in Vietnam that are responsible for the Ways and Means Committee reporting this bill.”
The Chicago Workshop in Nonviolence, Peacemakers, the Committee for Nonviolent Action, The War Resisters League, and other groups supporting the campaign have already collected several hundred names of people who are refusing the tax, but not yet in the numbers for which I had hoped.
It is not that any danger is involved in the act.
In no case has telephone service been terminated, because, under the regulations, the ultimate responsibility for collecting the tax lies with the I.R.S., not with the telephone companies, which are only required to bill for it.
And the I.R.S. so far has done practically nothing to collect from any of the phone-tax refusers.
This is understandable when you realize that the amounts of money are so very small, that it took I.R.S. six years to get around to trying to collect over a thousand dollars from a publicly acknowledged income-tax refuser like myself, and that they have never succeeded in collecting from Ammon Hennacy or numerous other tax refusers.
For the individual, the telephone tax by itself seems an insignificant amount of money, though the Johnson administration is counting on it, together with a 1% automobile excise tax increase, to raise $1.2 billion in , which would pay for about twenty days of killing in Vietnam at current rates of spending.
For the individual, telephone-tax refusal is a small step, but for many it is a significant step, because for the first time they are acknowledging in action that if they had the free choice they would refuse to contribute to the activities of the federal Government, because its military activities outweigh its positive tax-supported programs.
And if they admit that they are involuntary participants in such a great evil, they must face the issue of struggling in the society for the freedom to do what they believe is right, even by going outside of the law.
But in going outside of the law they are taking back for themselves a basic responsibility for the order of society, which they had hitherto reposed in the state and the law.
They are facing the issue of ultimate personal responsibility for society and the needs of others as we have faced it in the houses of hospitality and the Catholic Worker movement.
These are some of the implications of civil disobedience; of recognizing that the majority of citizens organized in the state, have failed man so badly, that we must struggle to build a whole new way of life that will be able to be human.
I remember how often Ammon Hennacy has spoken of the people who were “pacifists between wars,” which he says is like being “vegetarians between meals,” and now it is possible to speak of those who oppose the war but pay their phone tax at “pacifists between telephone calls,” because with each ten-cent telephone call another penny joins the stream of Federal revenue that flows inexorably to Vietnam.
It is true, friends, that with a first small step like phone-tax refusal, we are trying to coax people down the primrose path to the one-man revolution.
The future will be different only if we change our lives.
The act is small, but the meaning is large: this war is not our war, and we are willing to struggle to be on the side of life.
In the edition, Karl Meyer explained in-depth how to stop income tax withholding by claiming excessive dependents and how tax redirection could be used to nourish alternative institutions.
(This would not be good advice to follow today, as the IRS has new punitive tools at its disposal.)
Through Effective Tax Resistance:
A Fund for Mankind
By Karl Meyer
Let us speak of a clearcut solution to two prevailing ethical concerns which are shared by many stable, wage-earning citizens who are in the peace movement today.
On the one hand, we see a perverse system of national priorities which devotes most of our federal tax contributions to militaristic purposes which we abhor.
We want our money to be used positively to fulfill social needs.
On the other hand, we see young men of draft age resisting war and conscription concretely by refusing to participate, and suffering the consequences: imprisonment or exile.
We wish to support them and to align ourselves with them in a real way.
Let me affirm that it would be very practicable for us to get together in our own resistance movement to prevent the conscription of our money by the military and to create a Fund for Mankind to support the things we believe in and provide mutual aid in the difficulties that might come as a consequence of our resistance.
The Vietnam War may draw towards a conclusion in the months to come, yet we have already been warned by spokesmen of the government, if not by the history of the last twenty-five years, not to expect huge amounts of money to be freed for the solution of domestic problems.
There are plenty of military boondoggles waiting in the wings, promising that military expenditures will command the stage for many years to come.
We should either seize our destiny in our own hands or stop crying about our involuntary complicity in the militarization of society.
I promise to show how we can stop paying for militarism and instead pay into an alternative fund and use it according to our own moral and political judgments.
At the outset, we must directly contradict the widespread notion that refusal to pay federal income tax is merely a form of personal witness and a purification of conscience, which because of inherent obstacles cannot emerge as a general action of resistance to the Vietnam War, militarism, and imperialism.
Instead, let us affirm that tax resistance can be the most promising basis for a movement of constructive social action, as well as resistance to the evils of war and the wastefulness of the arms race.
Right away we come to the heart of the issue, because people say, “Our taxes are withheld at the source and paid by our employers without our consent.”
This is the fallacy which must be resolutely laid to rest.
Your consent is given whenever you fill out and sign a new W-4 Employees Withholding Exemption Certificate.
The proper use of this form and of the early income-tax return are the keys to effective tactics of widespread tax resistance.
Let me therefore outline these tactics for Everyman in nine easy steps:
Obtain a new W-4 form from your employer.
On lines 4 and 5 claim as many extra dependents as is necessary to prevent the withholding of any tax (ten or twenty or five hundred thousand or thirty-five million if you wish).
Sign the statement, “I certify that the number of withholding exemptions claimed on this certificate does not exceed the number to which I am entitled.”
(Entitled by whom?
We cannot have a moral revolution as long as we supinely acknowledge that we are entitled to do only what can be drained by the Internal Revenue Code and Regulations.
We must explicitly reject the standards and definitions specified by a blind bureaucracy and instead affirm definitions that spring from our own consciousness of human solidarity.
We must affirm that our obligation to the victims of United States militarism entitles us to claim as many exemptions as may be necessary to prevent the payment of taxes in our name.) Submit the new form to your employer.
He is not responsible under law for the legality or accuracy of our claim, nor is he authorized to alter your claim.
He is advised, but not required by law, to report to the Internal Revenue Service if he believes that your claim exceeds the number of dependents to which you are entitled.1
It is only if you fill out no W-4 form that he may withhold the taxes without your consent.2
Write a letter to the I.R.S. stating that five hundred thousand American soldiers are depending on you to bring them home, or that thirty-five million Vietnamese are depending on you to stop supporting the war, that consequently you cannot accept the narrow definitions of human interdependence specified by I.R.S. regulations, that you therefore affirm your right to claim enough exemptions to forestall the collection of war taxes, and you have recently filed a new W-4 form with your employer in accord with this affirmation.
This will put you on record as an open and principled tax resister, and may provide you with some defense in case of prosecution for making a fraudulent claim, since fraud implies an element of concealment, deception, and bad faith.3
But in writing to them, I would advise you not to name your employer, since this would only facilitate possible attempts by the I.R.S. to harass or intimidate you or your employer.
Taking these first two steps should forestall the withholding of any tax from your wages.
On April 15th (fifteen and a half months after the beginning of your no-tax year) you are required by law to file an income-tax return.
File and complete an honest return, but don’t do it the way they want it.
On line 3B of form 1040 U.S. Individual Income Tax Return, enter the same number of dependents previously claimed on your W-4 form (if thirty-five million, enter that number on line 3B).
Attach a schedule stating the moral grounds of your claim: the universal interdependency of man.
For line 11C, multiply the total number of exemptions claimed by six hundred dollars.
Fill out the rest of the form, showing no tax owed, and send it in.
Wait a few more taxless months while the I.R.S. gets around to figuring out your form, disallowing your numerous exemptions, and sending you a “proposed adjustment” of your income tax liability.
You have another taxless month to request a District Conference to discuss the “proposed adjustment.”4
If agreement is not reached at the District Conference, you may appeal to the Appellate Division of the Regional Commissioner’s Office.4
All steps up to this point can be easily taken without the aid of an attorney and without much cost or inconvenience to yourself.
If agreement cannot be reached with the Appellate Division, a statutory notice of deficiency will be sent to you; you will then have ninety days to appeal to the Tax Court of the United States, but if the I.R.S. believes that assessment and collection of the tax deficiency will be jeopardized by delay, it may proceed to assess and collect the tax in the meantime, pending your appeal to the Tax Court and decision by it, and any further appeals to the United States Court of Appeals and the Supreme Court, if you choose to pursue such appeals.
So a number of time-consuming bureaucratic steps must be gone through before the I.R.S. can make its final assessment of the tax due and begin the process of attempting to collect.
The whole process must be repeated for each taxable year.
I do not see how the I.R.S. can reach the collection stage in less than two years from the date when you first began to frustrate the withholding of taxes.
Even if you chicken out and pay up at that point, you will have cost them more than it was worth and made them wait at least two years to get their money.
But above all, you will have expressed concrete convictions clearly and registered effective short-term resistance against any particular war or Defense Department program that happens to be the primary current target of the resistance movement.
If you want to go beyond this and keep struggling, as I have done, there are further effective steps to prevent the collection of the assessments by wage attachment or seizure of assets:
Take your cash out of banks you have used in the past.
If you have so much money that you have to be afraid of keeping it in the mattress, you should probably start thinking of what that money says about your aspirations towards human brotherhood.
In the meantime, you could distribute it into several banks you have not used before and be careful not to write checks in payment of bills whose payment could easily be traced by the I.R.S. (such as telephone and utility bills).
I have used an account in this way for several years, but I could do without it easily enough.
If you are not strongly tied to your current place of employment, you can switch jobs as soon as the I.R.S. arrives to collect from your wages by levy and take a few simple precautions to make it a little difficult for the I.R.S. to discover your new place of employment.
They are so bogged down and incompetent that it doesn’t take much to throw them off the trail for several years.
I changed jobs in , and they haven’t found out my new job yet, though they have tried through numerous visits, phone calls, notes left under the door, and other perfunctory attempts.
In preparation for the eventual confrontation, you can begin early to have real property which you use, such as houses and automobiles, owned and registered in the names of persons who will not be liable for payment of income taxes.
These and similar steps have worked for me and for a number of other individuals around the country for many, many years.
I have used this method of tax resistance, or variations, of it, for the last ten years.
In that time, I have paid no federal income tax of any significance.
I have devoted the greater part of my total income to sharing with other people through Catholic Worker Houses of Hospitality.
The I.R.S. is many years and hundreds of dollars behind in its attempts to collect from me, and has indeed collected nothing from me so far, though it has prepared returns for the years 1962, 1963, and 1965, and is trying to collect over eleven hundred dollars from me.
Here is the strength of tax resistance.
If you don’t play by their rules, the cost of collecting will in many cases exceed the successful collections.
The process of assessing and collecting taxes in the face of intelligent resistance is an immensely complicated bureaucratic operation, which frequently gets bogged down for incredible periods of time.
The due process of law involved in the arrest and conviction of an induction refuser under Selective Service law is child’s play when compared to the due process involved in the collection of taxes from the intelligent tax refuser.
So we have an effective tool at hand for resisting the demands of war and the arms race, if we will only seize the courage to act.
Positive Side
Now we turn to the constructive side of this action.
If we pool all of the tax money that we did not pay in locally administered funds, we can create a model for a future in which men can regain direct control of their common institutions and effectively deny their consent to governmental programs they believe to be evil.
In each community or region we can set up a common fund.
Each contributor will have one vote, as in a cooperative.
The members will meet from time to time to set priorities and guidelines for administering the fund and to elect a committee to administer it according to their guidelines.
Part of the fund can be held as a reserve, which can be invested in low-interest loans to socially useful projects.
In case of needs these loans can be liquidated in order to compensate members of the fund, up to the amount of their contribution, for personal losses and needs resulting from successful tax collections by the I.R.S.
The reserve funds can also be used to provide legal defense for members who might be prosecuted under the tax laws, and to provide aid for the families of those who might be convicted and imprisoned or suffer other needs as a result of conscientious tax refusal.
Thus through mutual aid the members of the fund will be protected from personal hardships arising from their stand, and together they can develop a most valuable sense of community and solidarity, that could immeasurably strengthen the whole peace movement.
Assuming that successful collections by the I.R.S. would always lag far behind the ongoing contributions to the fund, the greater part of receipts could be disbursed in the form of direct grants for ail kinds of socially useful organizations and projects.
Assuming that the federal-income-tax contributions of most people in the movement probably far exceed their voluntary political, organizational, and charitable contributions, we could expect that the tax alternative funds could become one of the most substantial sources of money for the projects and purposes in which we most strongly believe.
But beyond that we could hope that our experience in mutual aid through these cooperative funds would bear fruit in the development of ashrams and communities for closer economic and social cooperation; for it is when our constructive action and our resistance to evil become for real that we will see the need and value of mutual aid and begin to create cooperative alternatives within the competitive society in which we live.
If we ignore or neglect the great potential of tax resistance joined to constructive action, we must be deaf to history and blind to experience.
Deaf to history.
Do we not know that tax resistance has been one of the greatest sources and strategies of revolutionary movements throughout history?
Has not history shown that taxation is a process requiring the general consent and cooperation of the populace?
Has it not been shown that when numbers of people reject a government by withdrawing their consent from the elaborate bureaucratic process of taxation, that government is in deep trouble?
Did not the French Revolution begin with tax resistance?
Was not the Estates General called into session by the King because he found it impossible to raise sufficient revenue for the operation of his government?
Was not tax resistance the slogan and rallying cry of the American Revolution: “Taxation without representation is tyranny!”?
Does not the Boston Tea Party, an act of resistance to taxation, stand in our historical tradition as a model for the actions of the Baltimore Four, the Catonsville Nine, the Boston Two, the Milwaukee Fourteen, the D.C. Nine, and the Chicago Fifteen?
Did not Thoreau fashion the cornerstone of American resistance theory out of his own experience as a tax resister?
Was not Gandhi’s largest and most significant campaign of civil disobedience, the Salt March, based on the strategy of tax resistance?
Blind to experience.
Can we not see what the I.R.S. knows full well: that even where the public gives general consent to the process of taxation it is always and everywhere a grudging and tentative consent, a resentful and querulous consent, a fragile consent that must always be nursed and safeguarded by positive public relations?
Why has the I.R.S. trodden so lightly in prosecuting principled tax refusers, usually concentrating instead on ineffectual attempts at collection?
Is it not because there exists among the public at large a greater reservoir of grievance, a potential of sympathy for tax resisters, and, what is more, a vast subliminal potential for tax resistance and evasion, that only needs to be aroused by news of widespread tax resistance?
Let us learn from the experience of the draft-resistance movement and the telephone-tax-refusal campaign, a few years ago, many people regarded draft refusal as a personal witness of the solitary conscience.
Today it has taken on the dimensions of a social movement.
It is, however, restricted by the narrow age and sex range of those who are subject to conscription, and even more restricted by the narrowness of the draft as a single focus of action.
In the telephone-tax-refusal campaign we measured the potential dimensions of a tax-resistance movement.
In , we started the campaign for nonpayment of the ten-per-cent federal telephone excise tax, which had just been restored by Congress explicitly to help in meeting the rising costs of the Vietnam War.
The issue of WIN magazine quotes from a Wall Street Journal story reporting that eighteen thousand people refused to pay their telephone tax last year.
This resistance tactic caught on quickly and spread rapidly with little organizational effort, because it was a direct and simple action which any telephone subscriber could easily carry out.
But after flaring up briefly, interest in this tactic gradually subsided, though thousands no doubt continue to refuse to pay the tax.
Enthusiasm for the action could not be maintained, because it was not resistance for real.
It was, rather, the first token of a spirit of resistance, which at the time could find no practical channel for deeper development.
When we can combine real war tax resistance with the tremendous constructive potential of a Fund for Humanity, we will have raised a banner to which all honest and courageous men of conscience can repair.
Note: I want to acknowledge the contributions of Brad Lyttle, Sidney Lens, and several young members of the draft-resistance movement whose names are unknown to me.
Recent discussions with them helped greatly in stimulating and formulating the ideas for the article, which has also been distributed in mimeographed form by the founders of the Chicago Area Alternative Fund (C.A.A.F), 1209 West Farwell, Chicago, Illinois 60626. (Tel: 764-3620).
We have begun. Join us!
Notes and References
Internal Revenue Regulations, Paragraph 31.3401 (e)-1 (b) — “The employer is not required to ascertain whether or not the number of withholding exemptions claimed is greater than the number of withholding exemptions to which the employee is entitled.
If, however, the employer has reason to believe that the number of withholding exemptions claimed by the employee is greater than the number to which such employee is entitled, the district director should be so advised.”
Internal Revenue Regulations, Paragraph 31.3401 (e)-1 (a) — “…If no such certificate is in effect, the number of withholding exemptions claimed shall be considered to be zero…”
Internal Revenue Code, Section 7201. ATTEMPT TO EVADE OR DEFEAT TAX. “Any person who willfully attempts to evade or defeat any tax imposed by this title or the payment thereof shall, in addition to other penalties provided by law, be guilty of felony and, upon conviction thereof, shall be fined not more than $10,000, or imprisoned not more than 5 years, or both, together with the costs of prosecution.”
Internal Revenue Code, Section 7205. FRAUDULENT WITHHOLDING EXEMPTION CERTIFICATE OR FAILURE TO SUPPLY INFORMATION: “Any individual required to supply information to his employer under section 3402 who willfully supplies false or fraudulent information, or who willfully falls to supply information thereunder which would require an increase in the tax to be withheld under section 3402, shall, in lieu of any other penalty provided by law (except the penalty provided by section 6682), upon conviction thereof, be fined not more than $500, or imprisoned not more than one year, or both.” (Section 3402 is the section which provides for withholding of income taxes.)
INSTRUCTIONS — Unagreed Income, Estate, or Gift Tax Cases — U.S. Treasury Department — Internal Revenue Service — Publication No. 5 (Rev. 8-64)
Internal Revenue Code, Section 6861. Jeopardy Assessments of Income, Estate, and Gift Taxes.
Meyer had a followup in the issue:
Clarification On Tax Withholding
By Karl Meyer
December 12, 1969
Dear Mike and Allen:
I was pleased to receive your inquiry about our “Fund for Mankind, Through Effective Tax Resistance” (Catholic Worker, ).
Yours is one of dozens of serious inquiries from all over the country, and the fourth so far from the Minneapolis area alone.
Jim Dunn (19 Sidney Place S.E., Minneapolis, Minnesota) has already started an alternative fund and has reprinted my article as a leaflet.
Dennis Richter (Hope House, 2603 14th Ave. South) has begun by claiming forty million exemptions on his W-4 Withholding Exemption Certificate.
This has tremendous educational value, but we don’t know yet the effective results of this experiment.
One person in Chicago tried this mass approach and it did not work.
He claimed three and a half billion dependents, the entire population of Spaceship Earth.
His employers, on the advice of their tax attorneys, rejected his W-4 form, on the grounds that it was not correctly filled out because it would be impossible under the rules to have that number of legally qualified exemptions — a trenchant argument we must confess.
They also pointed out that their payroll computer program could not handle that number of exemptions.
Two digits, or a maximum of 99, would be all the computer could handle.
This leaves him nowhere, since his only recourse would be to appeal to the Internal Revenue Service or the courts for support of his right to claim three and a half billion, and it is obvious enough that he would get no support from that quarter.
Does my article give the impression that I advocate claiming such great numbers of exemptions as a practical step, or that I myself have used this approach and succeeded?
If it does, that impression should be corrected before it leads us down the blind alley of ineffectual protest.
I myself have always claimed the minimum number of exemptions necessary to prevent the withholding of tax (between six and twelve in my case) and the same modest approach is used by all those I know of who are successfully using the exemption method of tax resistance at present.
The idea of claiming hundreds of thousands, millions or billions of dependents makes for a beautiful protest and a glorious expression of fraternal solidarity.
I introduced this idea in my article, and I certainly hope that a certain number of bold souls like Dennis will experiment with it; but I proposed it with tongue in cheek, and I would be the first to predict that it will not work in very many cases.
Most employers, on their own initiative or on the advice of I.R.S., will probably reject such a W-4, and those that don’t may fire you.
It would be a fine educational protest, but if the idea is protest, that could also be expressed by picketing the personnel office during your lunch hour to ask them to stop withholding taxes.
If the purpose is actually to prevent the withholding of tax, the most practical way to proceed is to claim the minimum number of exemptions necessary to achieve that objective!
This number can be found by dividing your weekly salary by $13.50, or dividing your projected annual salary by $700, or by consulting the tables and rules in Circular E, Employers Tax Guide, available to the public at your local office of I.R.S.
The minimum number of exemptions necessary for most people will be between six and twenty.
If your employer should question the number you claim, you may wish to save him the embarrassment of being implicated in your action by simply stating, “This is the number of exemptions to which I believe I am entitled.”
Since you are the person responsible for the number which you claim, it is not necessarily incumbent on you to offer your employer a more elaborate explanation.
In our group, some people have explained to their employers the entire basis of their claim; others have filed the new W-4 with their employer without further explanation; some have written to I.R.S., or other officials of government, stating the entire basis of their claim; others have taken the action without informing the state directly.
These choices must be made on the basis of personal inclinations and circumstances of employment.
You ask about the chances of prosecution for tax evasion or fraud.
No principled tax refuser has been indicted or prosecuted for violation of tax laws within my memory or knowledge.
A few have been imprisoned briefly for contempt of court for refusing to reveal information about their income and assets.
The I.R.S. has concentrated exclusively on attempts at assessment and collection, rather than prosecution.
With the rapid development of this campaign, I predict that this policy will be changed.
If pressed to do so, I could name a man whom I believe to be a prime candidate for aggressive prosecution.
But it would be impossible for me to predict what pattern of criminal prosecution may emerge as this campaign grows and develops.
I do predict that many people in this movement will eventually be subjects of intensive efforts by I.R.S. to assess and collect income taxes that they have not paid.
Ten years ago I popularized the aphorism: “If you can’t do time, don’t commit crime,” which was taught me by Marshal Raab as he drove me to the penitentiary.
Today I am in a position to coin a new variation of this maxim for our time: “If you can’t stand heat, don’t put your hand in the fire.”
If people want to start out easy and test the temperature before they go all the way they might begin by not paying the ten-percent federal excise tax on telephone service or they might try claiming just one extra withholding tax exemption.
Most important of course is to band together in small local alternative-fund groups for mutual aid and the sharing of experiences.
Over the years I have developed quite a tolerance for heat of all kinds so I was not dismayed on when Agent Roy Suzuki of the I.R.S. telephoned at my place of employment, which he had at long last discovered, and very graciously demanded payment of $46.60 in taxes, penalties, and interest for , a small part of a bill for more than a thousand dollars, going back to that I.R.S. has been unsuccessfully trying to collect for a long time.
After I stated that I would not pay he came over immediately and served my employers with a levy against my wages which they reluctantly honored by deducting $48.60 from wages due to me.
These events inspired the composition of the following ballad, which is currently leading the hit parade of the tax-resistance movement:
Some Enchanted Taxmen
Some enchanted evening
You may meet a stranger,
You may see him come to you
Across the crowded room,
Then pull put his badge
And ask for your wage;
If you don’t go along,
He will not argue long.
He will be a taxman,
He will be insistent,
He will bring a levy
To place against your wage,
And when he is done
He’ll go back to his boss,
And give a report like this:
Suzuki:— Who would believe it,
Who would say it’s so?
I found him at Follett’s,
I collected dough.
His boss:— Oh, Suzuki,
How did you know?
Now that you’ve found him,
Never let him go!
Suzuki:— Forty-six dollars,
All for the war,
I’ll go back again soon,
I will grab some more.
His boss:— Oh, Suzuki,
Try going slow,
Don’t scare him off too fast,
Don’t let him go.
Suzuki:— l have worked so patiently,
I have tried so long,
My, but that man’s
Conscience is strong.
Boss:— Don’t get sentimental,
Remember he’s your foe,
Now that you’ve found him,
Never let him go.
Suzuki:— I’ll go back tomorrow,
Shortly after dawn,
I’ll levy on his wage again;
But he will be gone.
Boss:— Buck up, Suzuki,
Don’t let it get you down,
We have lots of agents,
Snooping round the town.
Suzuki:— They will never nail him,
They’ll never collect,
Why should we waste our time,
Breaking our necks?
Boss:— The war must go on you know
And we must be paid,
The arms race must be financed
And profits be made.
Suzuki:— We will never make it
With guys like that Meyer;
Why not quit and go to work;
Our proceeds would be higher.
Boss:— Roy, that’s not the spirit
Of I.R.S., you know;
Once you have found one.
Never let him go!
A few days later I quit my job, and since then I have been earning part of our livelihood by part-time and irregular labor, while spending most of my time on the important work of developing the tax-resistance campaign.
I have to thank Roy Suzuki for having given me the incentive and the opportunity to do this.
To coordinate a countrywide campaign for tax resistance and to provide literature and counseling we have established a center called War Tax Resistance/Midwest (1339 North Mohawk St., Chicago, Illinois 60610) which is sponsored by the Nonviolent Training and Action Center, the Chicago Area Draft Registers and the Chicago Catholic Worker.
We will have a basic leaflet based on my article in the CW, as well as reprints of the article itself.
For a single copy of each, send us a stamped, self-addressed envelope.
For quantities the price will be a dollar for fifty, or two dollars for a hundred, plus a dollar for each additional hundred in one shipment.
We hope that people will send a few extra dollars to help with the organizing costs and that new tax resisters and alternative funds will earmark a small percentage of their tax savings to contribute to the organizing work.
The issue reported on the death of Ammon Hennacy on .
Ernest Bromley added a tribute, which included this summary of his tax resistance activity:
I, like so many others, knew Ammon by reputation long before I met him in person.
He was one of the pacifist tax refusers during World War Two, at a time when I could count them on the fingers of one hand.
He was in Arizona during those years, working as a day laborer in the fields.
To the few of us who made up the Tax Refusal Committee of Peacemakers, which began in , he is memorable, not only because the number was still very small but mainly because he was simple, direct and dramatic.
He saw that the government got none of his tax at the source (through withholding), he refused the total amount of income tax, he took steps so that the tax man could not garnishee money from his employer, and he went straight to the tax man and to the people with the message that he would not pay for the weapons or the soldiers.
He was basic, cryptic, humorous.
When the tax collector asked him if he thought he could change the world to his point of view, he answered, “Of course not. but I’m damn sure it won’t change me.” Then, referring to his contest with the government, he said, “Every day I win and every day the government loses.”
He once told a tax man, “Peter could return to his nets, but Matthew could not return to his tax collecting.”
It was in World War One, while doing time in Atlanta Penitentiary for opposing the war, that he read the Bible and became a Christian.
He was also turning from socialism to anarchism.
It was not however, until the early 1950’s that he joined a church.
Soon he wrote his first book. The Autobiography of a Catholic Anarchist.
Later he revised this book, calling it in the new form The Book of Ammon.
While in Arizona he wrote a column in the Catholic Worker, entitled “Life at Hard Labor.”
He managed by doing day labor in the fields and irrigation ditches, to contribute financially to the education of his two daughters by his first marriage.
After moving to New York in he became one of the associate editors of the Catholic Worker with Dorothy Day.
In he moved to Salt Lake City and began a "House of Hospitality.”
Borrowing the language of Robert Frost in one of his poems “Build Soil — A Political Pastoral,” Ammon spoke early and often of the “one-man revolution — the only revolution that is coming.”
He felt that the only way to change society is for each to become a radical and responsible person.
He detested dependence on government, state, institutions.
He wished to live as the early Christians did.
He did not join organizations or participate much in conferences or committees.
Most of the actions he took were solitary ones.
After leaving Arizona he travelled several weeks of each year, going to homes of friends.
Innumerable opportunities opened up to him to talk to small groups of people.
Many young idealists got their inspiration from a first contact with Ammon Hennacy.
He was always quick in tongue and caustic in comment.
He could state his views briefly.
Once when asked why he refused to pay Federal taxes, he said “Jesus wouldn’t make atom bombs.
Why should I pay for them?”
And Karl Meyer wrote, in part:
[I]n thirteen years, I spent only a few hours in his company; so I know nothing of him that is not amply recorded in the Book of Ammon and his columns.
The only original thing that I can tell is what he has written in my spirit.
In closing I want to remind you that Ammon wouldn’t pay taxes that go for war.
In his last letter to me () he wrote, “I think your idea of claiming a million dependents is o.k. for a joke between you and the tax man, but to consider it for a group of people is not being a bit realistic.
Hardly half a dozen in this country would have nerve enough to do it for fear of losing their jobs.”
That was the main fault Ammon had: he never had faith that other people would be radicals, would change their lives and live the revolution.
But I remember a pipsqueak boy of twenty once, who didn’t want to lose his job, who wanted to take bail and get a lawyer and a long continuance.
And one summer day that boy went down to Chrystie Street, and that was the day that he met Hennacy.
That’s why I have faith that a lot of people are not going to go on paying taxes for another five years of national murder; and anyone who really wants to stop can send me a couple of stamps for our leaflet entitled “Common Sense for Every Concerned Taxpayer — You Can Stop Paying War Taxes Now,” or send a dollar for fifty copies.
![No Income Tax For War! Now Particularly the U.S. War in Vietnam. Statement: Because so much of the tax paid the federal government goes for poisoning of food crops, blasting of villages, napalming and killing of thousands upon thousands of people, as in Vietnam at the present time, I am not going to pay taxes on 1966 income. Name ___. Address ___. [In order to withdraw support from war, particularly the savage and expanding war in Southeast Asia– Some are refusing to pay their total tax, or some portion. ☐ Some have in advance lowered their income so as to owe none. ☐ (for our information, would you like to check which form of nonpayment you are following?) NOTE: There are laws which (although not usually applied to principled refusers) cover possible fine and jail term for non-payment of a legally-owed amount.]](noIncomeTaxForWar.png)
