How you can resist funding the government →
the tax resistance movement →
birth of the modern American war tax resistance movement →
Jane & Milton Mayer
I found a peek at the birth of the modern American tax resistance movement hidden away in a edition of the MANAS Journal which features the article “No Compromise:”
Among those taking a decisive position are a number of men calling themselves the “Peacemakers,” who met in Chicago last April and pledged themselves (1) to refuse to serve in the armed forces in either peace or war; (2) to refuse to make or transport weapons of war; (3) the refuse to be conscripted or to register; (4) to consider to refuse to pay taxes for war purposes — a position already adopted by some; (5) to spread the idea of peacemaking and to develop non-violent methods of opposing war through various forms of non-cooperation and to advocate unilateral disarmament and economic democracy.
(Reported in the Politics.)
The idea of non-payment of taxes has been put into practice by Ammon Hennacy, a Tolstoyan of Arizona, and by Mrs. Caroline Urie of Yellow Springs, Ohio (see MANAS, March 31), and possibly by others.
Milton Mayer, of the University of Chicago, who writes regularly for the Progressive and has contributed to Harper’s, the Saturday Evening Post and other magazines, has frequently written and spoken of this form of protest against war.
Walter Gormly, of Mt. Vernon, Iowa, finds the payment of taxes for war a violation of the principle established by the International Military Tribune which conducted the Nuremberg Trials.
The Tribune Charter identifies as a crime against peace, the “planning, preparation, initiating or waging of a war of aggression,” and in a letter to the Bureau of Internal Revenue Gormly asserts that the United States is doing just that “by maintaining bases, subservient governments and military forces from Korea to Turkey, by intensive research on methods of mass slaughter and by maintaining a huge military organization.”
As Section Ⅱ, Article B, of the Charter declares that “the fact that the defendant acted pursuant to order of his government or of a superior shall not free him from responsibility,” Mr. Gormly feels obliged, to avoid possible prosecution as a “war criminal,” to refuse to pay a federal income tax, a large part of which goes for preparation for war, and he has so informed the Federal Government.
The story of “Mrs. Caroline Urie of Yellow Springs, Ohio” is given in an earlier edition:
The determination of Mrs. Caroline Urie, social worker and widow of an American naval officer, to pay no taxes for war purposes will probably strike many Americans as an irrational attitude.
On , Mrs. Urie wrote President Truman announcing that she had deducted 34.6 per cent of her tax — the proportion she estimates is earmarked for war.
“If they want to send me to jail,” she said, “that’s all right with me… I’ll never pay any more money for war.”
Democracy, it will be argued, is a rational process.
Nobody likes war, and nobody likes income taxes, but we have to put up with both.
We have a Congress to decide these things, and if everyone could question the decisions of the Congress whenever he pleased, soon there would be no Government, no order, no national defense, no anything.
So Mrs. Urie is irrational.
But what, exactly, is she to do, feeling the way she does?
From where she stands, paying for a war is irrational.
Maybe she has read Morgenstern’s Pearl Harbor.
Maybe she is convinced that democracy means the right to have no part of killing anybody, for any reason, and to take the consequences of this position.
In her case, the consequences might be a jail sentence, although this may be doubted.
Mrs. Urie once worked with Jane Addams at Hull House.
For five years she was director of the School for Immigrant Children.
The Government may feel a little silly trying to put her in jail.
Maybe it should.
A week or so ago a leading news magazine blandly announced that a war with Russia is “in the cards,” not now, but later, when both nations are “ready.”
This was followed by a page of explanation telling why the war would be delayed.
Nobody wants a war, but there it is, and all the man-in-the-street can do is wait around …or so it seems. The news magazine also told what the war would mean — compulsory labor, compulsory financing, compulsory everything.
Compulsory death for millions was not mentioned — that is taken for granted, we suppose.
The news magazine said nothing about stopping the war.
It was just a nice, objective account for the American business man — what to expect, and when.
A visit to a large aircraft factory here on the Pacific Coast adds considerable local color to one’s sense of doom.
One plant, at least, seems to be making no commercial planes at all.
In the plant in question, 10,000 men working two shifts are turning out jet fighters and bombers as fast as they can.
The plant has Government contracts.
It’s all official, according to schedule, and absolutely democratic and rational.
But from Mrs. Urie’s viewpoint, it’s not rational at all.
She objects to buying death for somebody on a cost plus basis.
Thoreau had a similar idea, about a century ago.
Actually, there are two rationales in this problem: there is the rationale of a great nation getting ready for war, and the rationale of a lonely individual getting ready for peace.
So far as Mrs. Urie and her income tax are concerned, the democratic process is 34.6 per cent irrational, and she won’t go along.
This is her way of trying to be a good citizen and a good human being at the same time.
It is beginning to take some imagination.
A edition has a letter to the IRS (and an amusing recollection of a telephone conversation with an IRS agent) by tax resister Richard Groff.
Other issues of the journal include a review of Edmund Wilson’s The Cold War and the Income Tax, and a great deal of discussion of the work and thought of Gandhi and Thoreau.
I plan to spend some time browsing their free archives on-line in the coming days.
This essay is particularly good, I think, both in its rhetoric and in its attitude.
I can’t say that I agree with him when he says that “the point is the smile” — in other words, that what matters is the change in attitude and posture that tax resistance represents, and not the practical withholding of money — but in many ways he seems to articulate what I have felt as I have tried to withhold cooperation from the government and have tried to justify and advocate this to others.
I was a spavined old man of forty-three (this was ten years ago) when I realized that my Government was unlikely ever again to order me to pick up a gun and kill a man who has never offended me and who had been ordered by his Government to pick up a gun and kill me; each of us subject, if he disobeyed the order, to being set upon by his own Government.
The last time my Government ordered me to perpetrate this abomination — for such it may be seen to be, on its very face — was in .
On that occasion I had said No (as who wouldn’t, to such a preposterous demand?) and the Government retired in instant confusion.
I had not expected that it would stand up to me like a man; rather, I had expected it to use its brute force on me.
But I appeared to have taken it by surprise.
Governments taken by surprise hasten to reclassify, supposing by this device they may escape their predicament.
Mine reclassified me.
It reclassified me as “indispensable war worker” because I was beating my gums in the lower depths of the one remaining peaceable division of a university engaged in a great secret war project.
(The university’s motto was, Let Knowledge Grow from More to More, that Human Life May Be Enriched; and by , its knowledge had grown to the point where it was able to enrich human life in Hiroshima.)
When I saw that all a man had to do was say No to send the Government headlong, I lost my fear of it.
I had long since lost my respect for it, as any man necessarily must for any such organization, be it Murder Inc. or Murder United.
But the Government found other men to do its sorry work, and enough of them, I suppose, because it did not come near me again; not even in , when it enacted universal peacetime conscription (which Woodrow Wilson had called “the root evil of Prussianism”).
It sent me a classification card again, and I sent it back with a letter of regret and heard nothing more.
Others may have had another sort of experience with Government, or with Governments more purposeful than mine, but mine convinces me that Government, whatever it means to be, good government or bad, is something of a humbug.
The good things it pretends to do are done by men — by free men, and even by slaves — and the one thing it is specifically designed to do, and always promises to do, it never does, namely, keep the peace.
A humbug and, like all humbugs, a fourflusher.
A few years ago I was invited to Hungary on a religious mission.
My American passport forbade me — quite tyrannically — to go to Hungary.
But my American Constitution forbade the Government to interfere with my religion.
As between the passport and the Constitution, I held with the Constitution and so informed the Government before I went.
The Government waited until I got back and then threatened to take my passport away from me, and thus make me a prisoner of my own country, unless I immediately swore that I would never again disobey its regulations present and future.
Again, all I had to do was say No.
My religion forbade me to swear at all and my Americanism forbade me to agree to obey anybody’s future regulations, and I said so.
The Government ran away at once.
There remained one matter in respect of which I felt that the Government needed a really good licking and would not behave itself until it had one.
That was money.
If men for its abominations were, as it seemed, a dime a dozen, it wanted only to get the dime to get the men.
I might be palsied and arthritic, but I could still hand over the dime and the Government would let me go my windbroken way.
As long as I went on giving it its annual allowance, I could no more expect it to mend its ways than I could a reprobate son.
I had to say No to the dime and see what happened.
The Government was even then — this was — on a shooting spree and I was financing the spree.
It was ordering men to kill other innocent men and burn down their shanties, and I was buying it the men.
I was paying others to do what I would never do myself or, indeed, countenance in others in any other circumstances.
This couldn’t go on.
Such were my reflections when, that same season, in a German town, I saw the ruins of a hospital in which eighty-five people, their eyes bound after surgery, were burned up blind when a bomber missed the railroad station.
I realized that my notion of war as two innocent men ordered to kill one another was a little refined.
War meant killing people in hospitals, including whatever Jews in Germany Hitler had overlooked.
This really couldn’t go on.
I notified the Government that I was cutting it off without a nickel of my dime until it straightened up.
It was spending at least half of its allowance on criminal debauchery and I did not see how I could be a God-fearing American and go on paying its upkeep.
Taxes are inevitable. So is death. But suicide isn’t inevitable.
I intend to die unwillingly and without giving death any help.
The inevitability of any evil is not the point; the point is my subornation of it.
Why should I, on receipt of the Government’s demand for money to kill the innocent, hurry as fast as I can to comply?
My neighbor says that the Government will take the money anyway, by force and violence and other lawful means.
He is right, but what’s that to me?
If a robber ties me up and robs me, I have not become a robber.
If the wicked Russians kill me and my little ones in my (or at least in my little ones’) innocence, I have not become a killer.
I have become a killer only if I kill wicked Russians (or, more likely, their wicked little ones).
My neighbor says that my refusal to pay half the tax begs the question, since the Government will use half of what I do pay to kill the innocent and, in the end, with interest and penalties, get more from me than if I had paid the whole tax with a smile.
Agreed. But the point is unaffected; the point is the smile.
I am told that the Government doesn’t need my piddling nickel to get on with its abominations.
Agreed again. But I need it.
The year I first refused to pay it, the tax came to $33.94.
I could buy myself a champagne supper with $33.94.
Or I could send it to the American Friends Service Committee, which could buy 1,697 dinners with it for hungry children in Orissa Province in India.
One way or another, the Government doesn’t need the $33.94, and I do; and its characterization of the amount, when I went to court for it, as “this small tax” was contumelious.
Of course the Government can get along without my money.
If it gets less from me, or none, it will get more from my neighbor.
Or more from me, then less from him.
It will get the money and buy the guns and give them to the Portuguese to defend democracy against the Russians by killing the innocent in Angola.
Good enough.
I am not the government; I haven’t the power to put a stop to the abomination, but only to put a stop to my being willing to perpetrate it myself.…
If I need not pay my taxes because I am squeamish about the killing of men, then, says my neighbor, the vegetarian need not pay his for inspection of the killing of animals, etc., and, in the end, no one need pay his taxes for anything he doesn’t much fancy, and this is Anarchy.
My neighbor is not alone in saying it.
When the Circuit Court of Appeals was hearing my complaint against the Government, one of the Judges said to my learned counsel, “Is the plaintiff aware that this Court, if it held for him, would itself be laying the axe to the root of all established Government?”
And learned counsel said, “I think he is, Your Honor.”
Is a man who is worth anything at all to be diverted from positive horrors by putative horrors?
I have no primary obligation to save established Government from the axe, but to save myself from the fire.
I will pay for the conveniences of Government, including those conveniences I don’t use.
I will pay for its inconveniences, because prudence dictates that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes.
But why should I pay for its madness — or my neighbor’s, if you will — because the madness is established?
All the more reason for cutting it off at once; all the more.
The Government is anarchical, not I.
It, not I, denies the kingdom of God and throws its anarchical bombs into the midst of the family of man.
I am not first of all a doctor of political philosophy, with no better business than to set terms like Anarchy in order (though I may say that if there were only one other term, and that Slavery, I, like Locke’s judicious Hooker, would know how to order the two).
I am first of all a man; not much of a man, and getting no better; but still a man, born with a set of terms to live by and an instinctive apprehension of their validity.
My neighbor says “Anarchy” as if he were affirming the Eleventh Commandment instead of denying the Second and the Sixth.
He wags his head and says that there is no other way than established Government — or even than this established Government — to manage human affairs.
Who said that human affairs are manageable? — Not I.
Perhaps they aren’t.
They do not seem to be just now, nor for a long time since.
If they aren’t, then a man who may not live until they are must manage his affairs as best he can.
The burden of proving manageability is on the managers or, as they are known in election year, the rascals.
Neither my neighbor nor the rascals can relieve me of my responsibility by thumbing through their index of terms and threatening me with Anarchy.
But all this is by the bye.
I do not mean to argue Pacifism here (another of my neighbor’s terms).
I mean to abide by the Aesculapian oath to do good if possible, but in no case to do harm, whether or not the doctors of medicine (or of political philosophy) abide by it.
And if I can not once in a while try to be righteous without succeeding in being self-righteous, I am sorry that I am offensive and that my neighbor is diverted by the offense.
My neighbor is forever saying that the situation is pretty bad (or at least hopeless) and asking, “But what can one man do?”
He means to answer his own question with, “Nothing.”
I tell him what one man can do, almost nothing, perhaps, but not quite nothing, and do at no more effort than it takes to keep his golf clubs polished.
But when I tell him, he says, “But one man is ineffective.”
I know that one man is ineffective.
I know that Roosevelt, Truman, and Eisenhower were ineffective.
They all hated war — so they said, and I believed and believed them — and they all made war.
I hear that John F. Kennedy, as President, is the prisoner of his position.
And these men are managers, and my neighbor and I are not even managers.
How, then, should one of us be effective?
But one of us can try to do the right thing, all by himself, and, maybe, even be effective.
The United Nations has not been able to disarm the world by one man; I, all by myself, can be more effective than it has been.
“But someone must take the responsibility for Society.”
Is there no other way than public preferment to take responsibility for Society?
If there is none, a man may have to be irresponsible.
Too bad; but not as bad as being responsible for the offenses the men-turned-Government are obliged to commit in Society’s name.
Society, grumbling at the offenses, but assenting to them, has compelled me to choose between a bad course and a worse.
Thoreau imagined a State which would recognize the individual as a higher and independent power.
He may have been whimsical then. He would be much more whimsical now.
Two victorious world wars for democracy have not extended democracy even among the citizens of the victorious nations.
Two victorious world wars for democracy have extended, not the black man’s, but all men’s enslavement to war and its preparation.
The State that Thoreau, so whimsically in his time, so much more so in ours, imagined “would not think it inconsistent with its own repose if a few were to live aloof from it, not meddling with it, nor embraced by it, who fulfilled all the duties of neighbors and fellow-men.”
Some of us who once pitied the Forgotten Man would like ourselves to be forgotten now, but the State insists upon remembering us each and several; not, to be sure, as men, but as cards to be slipped soundlessly into a computer.
But when one of the cards does not slip soundlessly out the other end, the computer may not know, for a moment, what to do, and so, for a moment, do nothing.
The only thing a man — a man, not a card — can do now is obstruct and pray for obstruction.
“Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country.”
Mr. Kennedy spoke these words at his inaugural, I knew that I was at odds with a Society which did not immediately rebel against them.
They are the words of totalitarianism pure; no Jefferson could have spoken them, and no Khrushchev could have spoken them better.
Could a man say what Mr. Kennedy said and also say that the difference between us and them is that they believe that man exists for the State and we believe that the State exists for man?
He couldn’t, but he did. And in doing so, he read me out of society.
This good man, and the good men around him, can neither do good themselves nor allow me to do good if I would.
They are all of them prisoners of their position — prisoners already of the Government which tries to imprison me.
I offered to give the Government all the money it wanted, no matter how much it wanted, if it would use it to help my countrymen.
My country’s children needed schools.
Its old people needed medical care for want of which I (with my own eyes, as my mother would say) had seen them die.
But the Government wouldn’t hear of these needs.
They were all beyond its capacity — the capacity of the Government of the richest nation in history.
So straitened, indeed, is the Government’s capacity to help men, at home or abroad, that it is constrained to notify the children of Orissa Province in India that they either have to make war on “our” side or starve.*
Shall we say “Yes” to a Government, no matter what it asks of us?
If so, men are freer in Prague than they are at home; and this would seem strange unless you hold that ours is a Government that, unlike any Government that ever was before, never asks anything of us.
Our government is certainly better than many in many respects, but in the one respect of mortal wrong, the killing of the innocent, it is identical with all the rest.
There is something to practice’s making perfect.
I may say, “I would say No to Communism,” or, “I would have said No to Nazism.”
But if I cannot say “No” to a Government whose pains are light, what makes me think I would say “No” to a Government whose pains are heavier?
It is excruciatingly easy for me to say “No” to Communism, and I say it.
I would not rather be red than dead; I would rather be neither.
But I would rather be either than have the blood of the innocent on my hands.
Wouldn’t you?
The Russians will have to answer to their Government’s abominations, you and I only to ours.
What our Government requires of you and me, in our dotage, is only that we give it the money to buy the gun and hire the man to carry it.
What say you?
The world may end next week, or next year, and the last flash will light up the darkness in which we stumble now.
We shall be able to see then, in an instant, that the Government, like us, wasn’t itself very good or very bad but only, like us, enchanted, and, in its enchantment, like us in ours, turned everything it touched to iron.
Between now and then we shall none of us change our wonted ways very much or very fast, and we should not expect to.
But then, in the last flash, instead of saying, “What little can I do?” we shall say, “What little could I have done?”
* “It is my belief that in the administration of these (foreign aid) funds we should give great attention and consideration to those nations which have our view of the world crisis.” ―President Kennedy (Newsweek, ).
Every year, the San Francisco Public Library puts on a huge used book sale
fundraiser that’s a pretty fantastic source of obscure books at bargain
prices. This time around I picked up a copy of Milton Mayer’s On Liberty: Man v. The State.
Mayer looks at the historical conflict between government and liberty, and at
the various philosophical, legal, and revolutionary methods people have
devised to resolve it. He concludes that all of these have been incoherent and
self-contradictory. The liberal ideal of a state that operates only within
strict restraints, with the consent of the governed, and with a goal of
maximizing and defending individual liberty is a pipe dream — and its most
famous proponents end up unwittingly reducing our options to tyranny or
anarchy.
He gives a number of examples from the United States in which “inalienable”
rights found themselves alienated without much trouble, and in which the state
discovered reasons why, on one occasion after another, it would have to reach
just a little bit further beyond the carefully enumerated powers of the
Constitution and into the carefully guarded Rights in the Bill of. Here’s a
great example that almost reads like it comes out of today’s headlines:
…Attorney General John Mitchell revealed that the FBI had ignored the
Congressional requirement of a court order to listen in on the conversation
of youth leaders indicted for allegedly inciting riots at the Democratic
National Convention of — and would go
on doing so. “While it may be appropriate,” said Mr. Mitchell, “for
Congress to establish rules limiting the investigative techniques which the
Executive may employ in enforcing the laws the Congress has enacted, a
serious question exists as to the power to restrict the President’s power to
gather information which he deems necessary to the proper exercise of powers
which the Constitution confers on him alone. If the Congress cannot tell the
President whom he should employ to direct the Army, there is a strong basis
to argue that Congress cannot tell the President what means he may employ to
obtain information which he needs to determine the proper deployment of his
forces … The President… has the constitutional power to authorize electronic
surveillance to gather intelligence information concerning domestic
organizations which seek to attack and subvert the Government by unlawful
means.”
The various lines in the sand beyond which an individual, a conscience, and
the home that is their castle may not be invaded by the state — whether in the
rigorous formulations of political philosophers or in the legal scaffoldings
of Supreme Court justices — Mayer shows to be easily wiped away by the next
wave.
Does Mayer have any better ideas? “The problem may be insoluble,” he says
near the beginning of the book, “which is not to say that it is a dead horse
that will bear no beating.” At the end of many pages of beating, though, the
horse doesn’t appear to have moved much, and although he starts by saying
that “to rest on the proposition that the central problem of political life — the problem that is politics — is insoluble is to accept the counsel
of despair” he ends on what seems to me, by this criterion, to be a despairing
note:
The immediate issue is not whether the problem of liberty and authority is
soluble. Nor is it whether we are condemned to go on crying, “Liberty,”
without knowing what we are crying. The immediate issue is whether we have
any ground for asserting the problem’s solubility (or insolubility) without
consciously confronting the problem; the question is whether we are
manipulating it for purposes of propaganda, deceit, and self-deceit.
One of the joys (or exasperations) of reading old books is to see today’s
arguments dressed up in yesterday’s clothes. As with the Mitchell quote above
that would not be surprising to find paraphrased in a position paper by John
Yoo today, there’s an interesting appendix in which Mayer discusses his
argument with young “fellows” of the Center for the Study of Democratic
Institutions (which published the book). This would have been around
. There’s a part of the discussion in which
one of the participants says that perhaps a society composed of small,
independent, diversely-organized communes might be a solution to Mayer’s
dilemma.
Mayer responds: “The difficulty is that your communes would still exist in a
world, a cosmos, made up of governments… Within this cosmos there may be
‘free’ groups, ‘free’ communes, living any way they want — but only so long as
they pay their taxes, go to war, get their vaccinations, go to school, marry
one woman at a time,
etc.”
But his debate partner says it doesn’t have to be that way. We have other
models we can choose from: “in the Moslem world there were various
principalities living very close to each other with vastly different laws…
This was also true of the early European folk societies.”
Mayer shoots back that modern technology — “J. Edgar Hoover and Samuel F.B.
Morse” — has made inevitable the supremacy of big states over small kingdoms
and societies. But his debate partner responds — and I couldn’t help imagining
this on an old-school paper and pencil version of a Boing Boing comment thread
or something of the like:
I think the pluralism I’m talking about is possible because of the
technology. The computers can be used, for example, to help people with
similar interest and life styles get together.
Technotribal utopianism circa . Groovy.
Milton Mayer, whose book On Liberty I reviewed , was a war tax resister.
In his essay The Tribute Money (The Progressive, ), he explained why.
Excerpts:
I cannot see why I should not persist in my folly.
Like every other horror-stricken American I keep asking myself, “What can a man do?
What weight does a man have, besides petition and prayer, that he isn’t using to save his country’s soul and his own?”
The frustration of the horror-stricken American as he sees his country going over the falls without a barrel is more than I can bear just now.
He tries to do constructive work, but all the while he is buying guns.
I have thought as hard as I can think.
I have thought about, for example, anarchy.
Not only am I not an anarchist, but I believe in taxes, in very high taxes, and especially in a very high graduated income tax.
I realize that a man who believes in taxes cannot pick and choose among them and say he will not spend 50 per cent of them on guns just because he doesn’t need guns.
I realize that anarchy is unworkable and that that is why the state came into being.
And I realize, too, that the state cannot be maintained without its authority’s being reposed in its members’ representatives.
I realize all that.
But in this state — and a very good state it is, or was, as states go, or went — I cannot get anybody to represent me.
My senators will not represent me.
My congressman will not represent me.
I am opposed to taxation without representation.
Were I God I would turn Milton into a pillar of salt for how many times he looked back behind him on those patriotic liberal platitudes (“its members’ representatives”) and rose-lit recollections (“a very good state it is, or was”) as he was walking away to dissidence.
Don’t tell me that I am represented by my vote.
I voted against the national policy.
Having done so, I am constrained in conscience to uphold my vote and not betray it.…
If my offense is anarchy — which I dislike — I can’t help it.
If the preservation of society compels me to commit worse evils than anarchy, then the cost of preserving society is too high.
Society is not sacred; I am.…
Would that he would extend the realm of the sacred so as to let other people participate in it, rather than making his conscience king of his own money while advocating “a very high graduated income tax” for others.
My first responsibility is not to preserve the state — that is Hitlerism and Stalinism — but to preserve my soul.
If you tell me that there is no other way to preserve the state than by the implicit totalitarianism of Rousseau’s “general will,” I will reply that it is the state’s misfortune and men must not accept it.
I have surrendered my sovereignty to another Master than the general will — I do not mean to be sanctimonious here — and if the general will does not serve Him it does not serve me or any other man.
In so far as there is any worldly sovereign in the United States, it is not the general will, or the Congress, or the President.
It is I.
I am sovereign here.
I hold the highest office of the land, the office of citizen, with responsibilities to my country heavier, by virtue of my office, than those of any other officer, including the President.
And I do not hold my office by election but by inalienable right.
I cannot abdicate my right, because it is inalienable.
If I try to abdicate it, to the general will, or to my representatives or my ministers, I am guilty of betraying not only democracy but my nature as a man endowed with certain inalienable rights.
I have thought about all this, in the large and in the little.
I have thought about my wife and children and my responsibility to them.
War will not even save them their lives, not even victorious war this time.
And it will lose them their most precious possession, their souls, if they call a man husband and father who has lightly sold his own.
I have thought of the fact that better men than I, much better men, disagree with me.
That grieves me.
But I am not, in this instance, trying to emulate better men.
I have thought about my effectiveness.
A man who “makes trouble for himself,” as the saying is, is thought to reduce his effectiveness, partly because of the diversion of his energies and partly because some few, at least, of his neighbors will call him a crank, a crook, or a traitor.
But I am not very effective anyway, and neither, so far as I can see, is anyone else.
If anything is effective in matters of this sort, it is example.
I go up and down the land denying the decree of Caesar that all able-bodied men between eighteen and twenty-five go into the killing business and urging such men as are moved in conscience to decline to do so.
If a million young men would decline, in conscience, to kill their fellow men, the government would be as helpless as its citizens are now.
Its helplessness then would, I think, be at least as contagious abroad as its violence is now.
Other governments would become helpless, including the Russian, and thus would we be able to save democracy at home and abroad.
Victorious war has failed to do it anywhere.
But how can a million old men who themselves will not decline to hire the killing expect a million young men to do it?
How can I urge others to do what I do not care to do myself? …
Of course the government doesn’t want me for military service.
I am overage, spavined, humpbacked, bald, and blind.
The government doesn’t want me.
Men are a dime a dozen.
What the government wants is my dime to buy a dozen men with.
If I decline to buy men and give them guns, the government will, I suppose, force me to.
I offer to pay all of my taxes for peaceable purposes, the only purposes which history suggests will defend democracy; the government has, I believe, no way, under the general revenue system, to accept my offer.
I like the out-of-doors and I do not want to go to jail.
I could put my property in my wife’s name and bury my money in a hole or a foreign bank account.
But I am not Al Capone.
I am… an honest man.
And I am not mathematically minded; if I did try deceit, I’d be caught.
There is only one other alternative, and that is no alternative either.
That is to earn less than $500 a year and be tax-free.
I’d be paying taxes anyway on what I bought with $500, but that doesn’t bother me, because the issue is not, as long as I am only human, separation from war or any other evil-doing but only as much separation as a being who is only human can achieve within his power.
No, the trouble with earning less than $500 a year is that it doesn’t support a family.
Not a big family like mine.
If I were a subsistence farmer I might get by, but I’m a city boy.
I would be hard put to answer if you asked me whether a man should own property in the first place, for a government to tax.
If I said, “No, he should not,” I should stand self-condemned as a Christian Communist.
It is illegal, under the McCarran Act, to be either a Christian or a Communist, and I don’t want to tangle with both the Internal Revenue Act and the McCarran Act at the same time, especially on the delicate claim to being a Christian.
Still, the Christian Gospels are, it seems to me, passing clear on the point of taxes.
When the apostle says both that “we should obey the magistrates” and that “we should obey God rather than man,” I take it that he means that we should be law-abiding persons unless the law moves us against the Lord.
The problem goes to the very essence of the relationship of God, man, and the state.
It isn’t easy.
It never was.
History, however, is on the side of us angels.
The primitive Christians, who were pacifists, refused to pay taxes for heathen temples.
They were, of course, outlaws anyway.
The early Quakers, who were pacifists, refused to pay tithes to the established church and went to prison.
But the war tax problem seems not to have arisen until , when a considerable number of Quakers refused to pay a tax levied in Pennsylvania for the war against the red Indians.
The Boston (and New York and Baltimore and Charleston) “tea parties” of the 1770’s were, of course, a vivid and violent form of tax refusal endorsed, to this day, by the Daughters of the American Revolution.
Seventy-five years after the Revolution, Henry David Thoreau refused to pay his poll tax because the government was waging both slavery against the Negroes and war against the Mexicans.
Thoreau was put in jail overnight, and the next day Emerson went over to Concord and looked at him through the bars and said, “What in the devil do you think you’re dong, Henry?”
“I,” said Thoreau, “am being free.”
So Emerson paid Thoreau’s poll tax, and Thoreau, deprived of his freedom by being put out of jail, wrote his essay on civil disobedience.
Seventy-five years later, Gandhi read Thoreau’s essay and worked it into a revolution.
It could happen here, but it won’t.
The place was propitious for Gandhi, a slave colony whose starving people had no money or status to lose, just as the time was propitious for Thoreau, a time of confidence and liberality arising from confidence.
Totalitarianism was unthinkable and parliamentary capitalism was not in danger.
The appeal to the rights of man was taken seriously, and McCarthyism, McCarranism, and MacArthurism were all as yet unborn.
I doubt that anybody will be able to bring me more light in this matter than I now have.
The light I need will come to me from within or it won’t come at all.
When George Fox visited William Penn, Penn wanted to know if he should go on wearing his sword.
“Wear it,” said Fox, “as long as thou canst.”
I hasten to say that I feel like Penn, not like Fox.
I know I can’t say that you ought to do what I can’t do or that I’ll do it if you do it.
But I don’t know if I can say that you ought to do what I do or even if I ought to do it.
I am fully aware of the anomaly of refusing to pay 50 per cent of my taxes when 50 percent of the 50 per cent I do pay is used for war.
I am even fuller aware of the converse anomaly of refusing to pay 50 per cent of my taxes when 50 per cent of the 50 per cent I won’t pay would be used for peaceable purposes.
In addition, if the government comes and gets it, and fines me, as I suppose it might, it will collect more for war than it would have in the first place.
Worst of all, I am not a good enough man to be doing this sort of thing.
I am not an early Christian; I am the type that, if Nero threw me naked into the amphitheatre, would work out a way to harass the lions.
But somebody over twenty-five has got to perform the incongruous affirmation of saying, “No,” and saying it regretfully rather than disdainfully.
Why shouldn’t it be I?
I have sailed through life, up to now, as a first-class passenger on a ship that is nearly all steerage.
By comparison with the rest of mankind, I have always had too much money, too many good jobs, too good a reputation, too many friends, and too much fun.
Who, if not I, is full of unearned blessings?
When, if not now, will I start to earn them?
Somebody will take care of me.
Somebody always has.
The only thing I don’t know is who it is that does it.
I know who feeds the young ravens, but I know, too, that the Devil takes care of his own.
The Progressive, in , carried an article from Milton Mayer about tax resistance:
Young men are a dime a dozen.
What the Army wants is a dime to buy a dozen young men with.
Either give them the dime or don’t give them the dime — but stop asking, “What can an old man do?”
April 15 is the date.
April 15 is the date you turn over a quarter of your income to Behemoth, and half to three-quarters of what you turn over goes to the Army to buy a dozen young men to populate (and depopulate) Perforation Paddy.
“I sent them a good boy,” said Private Meadlo’s mother after Mylai, “and they made him a murderer.”
If you want it, buy it.
If you don’t, don’t. But stop asking, “What can an old man do?”
If, like me, you had a good year and made more than $625 in , the Internal Revenue Act requires you to file an income tax return.
If you refuse (rather than evade) the requirement to file, you are still a felon, but you should notify Behemoth and all its minions lest you be hanged for the wrong reason.
(The Act simply punishes “failure to file” and “failure to pay”.)
I shouldn’t refuse to file, myself, but better men than I have taken the position that filing is more than a formality; the best of them, A.J. Muste, always filed an appropriately marked Bible instead of a return.
So, too, as the antics proceed, you will be asked (unless you have a readily attachable pay-check) where you stash your money so that Behemoth’s little boys in blue can go and get it.
Here again I should comply, myself, lest Behemoth get the impression that I am playing a cat-and-mouse (or mouse-and-cat) game.
But this decision, too, like whether or not to file a return, is probably a matter of temperament.
The purpose of taxation is to enable people collectively to buy what they want.
Sometimes when some of them want a little something special and some of them don’t — for instance, throughways financed by tolls — those who want them pay for them and those who don’t want them don’t. But Mylai is financed by the general fund of the Treasury, on the assumption that everybody wants Mylai.
Behemoth has no way of knowing that the assumption is false unless those who don’t want it refuse to buy it.
A vote for Nixon (or Humphrey) or Johnson (or Goldwater) is a vote for Mylai.
(“It was murder.
We were shooting into houses and at people — running or standing, doing nothing.” — Sergeant Charles Hutts.)
The nation-state is not merely fallible; it is, as every Judeo-Christian (or Christeo-Judean) schoolboy knows, unholy because it divides the family of man into we and they.
Only men are, or may be, holy in a world of nation-states, and they dare not perform an unholy act to preserve such an institution.
Still the conscientious tax refuser is a conscientious citizen of the nation-state.
He would gladly pay his taxes for the things all the people in it (including him) want.
In Norway (in this respect the only even halfway civilized country in the world) the conscientious citizen may have his tax payment segregated for the support of the United Nations if he does not want to buy Mylai.
Bucking always for salvation, the conscientious citizen is nevertheless up against some serious objections to his refusal to send a dozen young men to the edge of the ditch in Mylai.
The objections appear to be six in number:
Objection 1: The legal penalty of five years in stir and/or a ten-thousand-dollar fine.
The U.S. Government has not yet pressed for the penalty in any case of tax refusal that I know of — partly, I suppose, because Behemoth does not know what to do about conscience, partly because the use of force, violence, and other lawful means of penalizing conscientious people always increases their number.
(Better pretend they’re not there — up to a point.)
But the number is increasing anyway, and it is not unlikely that it is approaching that point.
When it is confident that it has got its Haynsworth-Carswell Court, Behemoth may feel constrained some one of these days to press for the penalty.
The tax refusal movement, for twenty years amorphous, is now coordinated by War Tax Resistance, whose address, I am reliably informed, is 339 Lafayette Street, New York, N.Y. 10017, and whose telephone number (212‒477‒2970) was discovered in the Manhattan telephone directory by a task force of forty FBI agents led personally by J. Edgar Hoover.
Desperado Bradford Lyttle of WTR reports 181 active refusal centers across the country and estimates 15,000 refusers in .
Answer to Objection 1: There are worse things than losing five years and/or ten thousand dollars, and Mylai is one of them.
Objection 2: The loss of job or reputation.
Ten years ago (even five) many tax refusers lost jobs (or failed to get them) as a consequence of the invariable FBI “inquiry.”
That’s less likely (but only less likely) now.
Loss of reputation, on the other hand, has never appeared to be consequential; I have never known anybody to the left of Orange County, California, who thought that a tax refuser was anything worse than crazy, and even in Orange County they hate taxes.
Answer to Objection 2: There are worse things than losing a job (though that is easier for a light-fingered clown like me to say than it is for an honest workingman).
We proceed now from the nuts-and-bolts to the nitty-gritty, as follows:
Objection 3: Tax refusal is ineffective because “they” get the money anyway (by force, violence, or other lawful means).
Answer to Objection 3: True, true; but, then, so is everything else ineffective (including two victorious world wars to save the world for democracy).
To man, all things are impossible.
If whatever you do is ineffective, you might as well buck for salvation and do what is right.
Objection 4: Tax refusal is illogical: If you refuse to pay half your income tax, half of what you do pay will be used for Mylai, as will more than the other half (since Behemoth, when it seizes the other half by force, violence, and other lawful means will also seize twelve per cent per annum interest on it).
Answer to Objection 4: This is true only if logic is a brance of effectiveness — and even then it is only half true.
Behemoth will lose money on the deal because it will have to spend more to collect it than it gets.
In one instance I know of, where the refuser took his case “on up,” it must have cost $25,000 in salaries and travel expenses of Treasury and FBI dicks, district attorneys, assistant attorneys-general, judges, and court attachés to collect and hold on to $32.27 (and the refuser took his own expenses in the case as a tax deduction).
It is true, none the less, that in the end Behemoth will get all the money it wants for Mylai, by raising this tax rate if necessary.
But there is another, and more significant, logic: the logic of symbolism (not to be confused with symbolic logic).
The only action a man can take against the nation-state is symbolic.
He can not prevent its depredations but only repudiate them persistently in the hope of (a) salvation and (b) the sympathetic infection of his fellow-citizens.
It is not logical symbolically (for instance) to bomb the ROTC building, because people sympathize with the victim of a bombing, and, besides, Behemoth has all the ROTC buildings it wants and is always eager to build new ones and add the building costs to its Gross National Product billboard.
(The Army doesn’t need ROTC buildings or ROTC except as a symbol of militarism; no European army would dare ask a university to disgrace itself by letting its students be marched around the premises.)
What is logical symbolically is for students to sit nonviolently in front of the ROTC building and be hauled violently away.
Tax refusal is logical symbolically.
Objection 5: Tax refusal is a disavowal of representative government.
Answer to Objection 5: It is, if, and only if, by representative government is meant majoritarianism and not representation at all.
If you are an American citizen and you do not want Mylai and won’t buy it, you are not represented.
The Congressmen (including the Senators) who deplore Mylai all buy it, without exception.
The last one who wouldn’t was Representative Jeannette Rankin of Montana, who voted all alone against the second go-around of the War to Make the World Safe for Democracy.
The conscientious citizen who does not want Mylai and will not buy it is driven to self-government by the failure of representative government to represent him.
Objection 6: Tax refusal is anarchy, and anarchy is the worst thing that can befall society.
Answer to Objection 6: Anarchy is not the worst thing that can befall a society; it is the second worst.
The worst is tyranny, and the worst tyranny is self-evidently that which requires the innocent to kill the innocent.
(“I love women.
I love children, too.
I love people.” — Lt. William L. Calley.)
He who does not want and will not buy tyranny must, like George Washington, take his chances on anarchy.
So hopelessly unholy is the nation-state that it drives the conscientious citizen to anarchy and then accuses him of driving it to anarchy when he tries to disengage himself from its tyranny.
In the interesting case of the $32.27 cited above, Attorney Francis Heisler was arguing for the refuser before the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, and one of the judges said to him: “Counsel, is your client aware that if this Court holds in his behalf the Court itself will be laying the axe to the root of all established government?”
“I think he is, your honor,” Attorney Heisler replied.
The objections considered, we proceed to the obstacles.
There is only one that appears to be insuperable: withholding, the worst crime ever committed against liberty by a good man.
When Beardsley Ruml thought up “pay-as-you-go,” everybody cheered except the company bosses who had to do the detestable New Deal’s detestable bookkeeping for it.
(Anybody remember when the Connecticut manufacturer, Vivian Kellems, led the Old Guard attack on Social Security by refusing to make the employe deductions?)
Under withholding, most of the people who don’t want to buy Mylai have already had it bought for them by April 15. They can sue to recover — some have — but nobody has made it to the Supreme Court yet.
Others reduce or eliminate the withholding by claiming excess dependents (the whole population of Vietnam, for instance) in calculating their estimated tax.
Again, I suppose, a matter of temperament, and mine doesn’t happen to run that cat-and-mouse way — though their cause is just, and we have indeed made the whole population of Vietnam our dependents.
A few religious organizations — not the churches, of course — have refused to withhold the tax from the pay of their employes who do not want to buy Mylai.
The most respectable of them is the American Friends Service Committee, with which I confess to being associated.
(Personally leading a task force of eighty FBI agents, J. Edgar Hoover discovered the association by looking in the Philadelphia telephone directory, so there is no point in my denying it.)
But the AFSC has a task force of eighty Philadelphia lawyers, and one of these years a test case will go to Washington.
Meanwhile, however, the conscientious citizen who waits for a test case will go on buying Mylai until the whole of Vietnam is a ditch.
A few years ago a new form of refusal got rolling, available to people trapped by withholding.
This was non-payment of the telephone tax (which goes into the general Treasury), on the ground that Chairman Mills of the House Ways and Means Committee had argued its necessity for continuance of the war against Mylai.
I’m uneasy about the telephone tax refusal myself; again, I suppose, a matter of temperament.
There seem to me to be two visible arguments, and one invisible, against it.
First, I can not bring myself either to do or not to do anything on the bases that what a Congressman says is true.
And second, it seems to me that if you are going to fight City Hall you should go for the jugular.
The income tax is the jugular.
The telephone tax is one of those petty excises, no more significant fiscally, and no more to be singled out, Congressman Mills to the contrary notwithstanding, than the whiskey, movie, or airplane tax.
But the invisible, base-of-the-iceberg, stem-of-the-martini-cherry argument for paying the phone tax is, I’m afraid, one of craven convenience.
If Behemoth were to put me in jail for five years for income tax refusal, I’d refuse to pay my telephone tax instantly.
But living where and how I do, running a little back-bedroom sweatshop out in the country, I can’t make it very well (still worse, very sick) without a telephone.
Discussing telephone tax refusal with some of my anarchist friends, I have discovered that some of them were for it because they didn’t feel quite up to going to the mat on the income tax, and still others because they understood that the telephone company, like Vivian Kellems, was no more enthusiastic about collecting the Mylai tax than they were about paying it and would not jerk the phone out for non-payment of the tax.
This last seemed to me to be a misreading of history.
Unlike Vivian Kellems and the American Friends Service Committee — Right and Left united across the years by the mounting terror of the Middle — the telephone company has no principle except money; and Behemoth’s agent, the Federal Communications Commission, is where the money is.
In the Communist countries like Spain and Greece and, come to think of it, every other country in the world, the post office operates the telephone and telegraph systems, whose profits subsidize the carrying of the mails; in the only truly free country in the free world the money-losing branch of the communications system is communized and the money-making branches are Government-protected private monopolies.
But telephone tax refusal caught on until, according to the calculation of War Tax Resistance, there are now more than 100,000 practitioners of it.
For a couple of years nobody did anything about them.
But reports have begun to filter in of Government agents swarming over refusers and, more ominously, of the jerking of telephones by the company on behalf of its protector, the Government.
As the reports spread it may be anticipated that there will be a falling-away of telephone tax anarchists, as, I suppose, there will be of income tax anarchists when Behemoth decides that they are getting to be too much of a nuisance and starts throwing them into the pokey.
Until that time the only obstacle (not objection) to income tax refusal, other than withholding, is the harassment it entails.
The smart way to live alongside Behemoth is not to attract his attention, and whoever attracts his attention is in for it.
Twenty years ago he was paying his harassers $40 a day.
It must be $80 now, or $100; there is nothing niggardly about Behemoth.
He sends two kinds of harassers around.
The first is a ritualistic cut-out character whom it’s a positive pleasure to be harassed by.
He is the warm handclasp type, around thirty-five and running to pudge from running around in his down-payment Impala.
He wants to have a little talk with you.
“Homyonum’s the name, Mr. Murgatroid, from the Internal Revenue Service.”
(Warm handclasp.)
“Sit down, Homyonum, sit down, and tell me what I can do for you.”
“To be perfectly frank, Mr. Murgatroid, I think that I may be able to do something for you.”
“Well, now, Homyonum, that is nice — I never expected the Internal Revenue Service to do something for me.
Do sit down and have a nice glass tea.”
(He will, and he does.)
“Mr. Murgatroid, we of the Treasury Department are actually your agents.
We are here to help you.”
“How sweet of you, Homyonum.
One lump or two?”
(Two.)
“Mr. Murgatroid, I want you to know that I respect your position, but I think you are ill-advised to refuse to pay your income tax.”
“Homyonum, my boy, your advice is ill.
Milk?
Lemon?”
(Milk.)
“I beg your pardon, Mr. Murgatroid?”
“Not at all, and do let me tell you why your advice is ill.
If my position is, as you say, respectable, then yours is not, since the two positions are contradictory.
Do you follow me?”
“I —.”
“What I am trying to tell you, Homyonum, since you respect my position, is that you are trying to tell me that I ought not to pay my income tax and neither ought you.
You do want to be respectable, don’t you?”
A little more of this standoff, a warm handclasp, and Homyonum is gone wherever such people go nights and is seen no more.
He makes his report, the report spends two or three months going through channels, and then Behemoth hands one of his judges a distraint warrant to sign and sends one of his blue-boys around to attach your unattached property (money in the bank, wages coming in, shoes off your feet) in the amount in which you are delinquent in buying Mylai.
The other kind of harasser is another glass tea entirely.
He is tall, sallow, dour, ulcerated: a certified public accountant who doesn’t know anything about your income tax refusal (he says), but has been sent to audit your return.
“I suppose,” he says, “that your name came up on a spot check.
Of course you have all your records and a receipt for each expenditure — if I may just look at them.”
At the end of two weeks, at $40, $80, or $100 a day, reducing the Gross National Product by that much, he has discovered that you owe Behemoth $1.14 (or Behemoth owes you $1.14; that’s not the point of it at all) and you and your back-bedroom are a shambles.
He turns up the next year, on the dot, to do it all over again, and then you know he is lying about the spot check (and even he beginst to suspect he is).
Meanwhile, he has converted you into a fox.
You spend half your life (at $40, $20, or $10 a day) keeping records of your expenditures.
You spend the other half of your life like the mouse you were not going to play in the cat-and-mouse game, scurrying for loopholes down which you can hurry.
You end up beating your wife, cursing your children, and, of course, kicking the cat.
And that, not the $1.14, is the point of it.
If Behemoth can make your life unbearable, you will buy Mylai.
It is the very devil to be harassed, but what did you expect — a valentine from Mrs. Mitchell?
It’s like (or even as) Give-’Em-Hell-Harry used to say: If you can’t stand the heat, stay out of the kitchen.
You harass them, and they harass you back, and they’ve got the big battalions on their side.
(You know Whom you’ve got on yours.)
And you harass them back and they harass you back.
Who said ineffective? Behemoth has the whole country, the whole world, computerized to take care of everything — everything but one man who says, No, sir, instead of Yes, sir.
It takes one (count ’em, one) man to obstruct the machine by introducing the human element into it.
The grind-organ monkey is suddenly a monkey-wrench.
I put it to you: What more can an old man do?
The machine has not been built yet, and won’t be, that does not come down with the gripes while it digests a human being.
Mind you, I am not advocating income tax refusal; not I. For all I know the advocacy itself constitutes a felony, especially if it creates a clear and present danger that the Army won’t be able to buy a dozen young men with machine guns at the edge of the ditch in Mylai.
Operating on a very low and cautious level, I say unto you only, Give them the dime or don’t give them the dime — but don’t ask, “What can an old man do?”
If you want Mylai, buy it; if you don’t want it, don’t. That’s the free enterprise system, and do you believe in the free enterprise system or are you some kind of a Communist?
Operating on the highest level of all, under a law that even the Supreme Court (Girouard, etc.) admits is higher than the Internal Revenue Act, Jesus Christ was asked by the Pharisees whose the tribute money was, and you know what he said and you know that he said it perceiving their wickedness.
(Matt. 22:18.) If you have to choose between Christ and the Pharisee who, like the Pharisee of old, occupies the highest seat in the Temple, you are in a tight spot.
I’d play it safe myself: Better to do time than eternity.
A biographical note accompanying the article says that “Mr. Mayer began his own tax refusal adventures more than twenty years ago.
(He is the anti-hero of the $32.27 case he cites in this article.)”
On , just a few days after Martin Luther King, Jr., delivered his powerful “Beyond Vietnam” speech, Eric Weinberger, the national secretary of the Committee for Nonviolent Action, wrote to to ask if King would publicly sign on to their war tax resistance campaign:
I don’t know how (or if) King responded to this request.
I have seen no indications that he participated in the war tax resistance of the period.
King had been targeted by politically-motivated tax prosecutions in areas where he had been active.
Because of this he had been under particular pressure to keep to the straight-and-narrow when it came to tax filing, so as not to give his enemies a potentially fruitful avenue of attack.
This may have discouraged him from making war tax resistance part of his protest against U.S. militarism and the Vietnam War.
It is also possible that, since King was killed , he just didn’t have time to put any possibly-intended resistance into practice.
The CNVA letterhead as shown on this letter is a clue as to who was associated with the emerging war tax resistance movement of the time.
Many of these names are familiar to me, but some others are not:
The time has come, and that time was .
350 Balk at Taxes in a War Protest
Ad in Capital Paper Urges Others to Bar Payment
Washington, — Some 350 persons who disapprove of the war in Vietnam
announced that they would not
voluntarily pay their Federal income taxes, due
. They urged others to join them
in this protest.
The Internal Revenue Service immediately made clear that it would take
whatever steps were necessary to collect the taxes.
The group announced its plans
in an advertisement in The Washington Post.
“We will refuse to pay our Federal income taxes voluntarily,” the
advertisement said. “Some of us will leave the money we owe the Government in
our bank accounts, where the Internal Revenue Service may seize it if they
wish. Some will contribute the money to
CARE,
UNICEF or similar organizations. Some of us
will continue to pay that percentage of our taxes which is not used for
military purposes.”
Joan Baez, Lynd, Muste
The first signature on the advertisement was that of Joan Baez, the folk
singer. Others who signed it were Staughton Lynd, the Yale professor who
traveled to North Vietnam in violation
of State Department regulations, and the
Rev. A.J. Muste, the
pacifist leader.
The advertisement contained a coupon soliciting contributions for the protest.
The ad said that further information could be obtained from Mr. Muste at
Room 1003, 5 Beekman Street, New York City.
Those who placed the advertisement — which bore the heading “The Time Has
Come” — said that those who sponsored it “recognize the gravity of this step.
However, we prefer to risk violating the Internal Revenue Code, rather than
to participate, by voluntarily paying our taxes, in the serious crimes
against humanity being committed by our Government.”
The advertisement mentioned not only the war in Vietnam “against hungry,
scantily armed Vietnamese guerrillas and civilians” but also “the spectacle
of the United States invasion of the Dominican Republic,” an event the
sponsors said “will go down in history alongside Russia’s criminal
intervention in Hungary.”
Cohen Is Determined
The determination of Internal Revenue to collect the taxes the Government is
owed was expressed in a formal statement by the Commissioner of Internal
Revenue, Sheldon S. Cohen.
He said Internal Revenue would take “appropriate action” to collect the
taxes “in fairness to the many millions of taxpayers who do fulfill their
obligations.”
The Government has been upheld in court on all occasions when individuals
have refused to pay taxes because of disapproval with the uses to which their
money was being put, revenue officials said.
Ad Prepared Here
The headquarters of the Committee for Nonviolent Action, 5 Beekman Street,
said that it had prepared the
advertisement carried in the Washington newspaper after receiving 350
responses to invitations it had sent out soliciting participation in “an act
of civil disobedience.”
A spokesman for the committee said that Mr. Muste, the chairman, was out of
town and would return in about a week. The spokesman said that although
monetary contributions in response to the advertisement had not yet begun to
come in, the committee was prepared to mail literature explaining its program
to those who responded to the advertisement.
The spokesman said that the tax protest had been intended to represent “a
more radical and meaningful protest against the Vietnam War.”
The committee announced that members would appear at
in front of the Internal
Revenue Service office, 120 Church Street, to distribute leaflets concerning
the tax protest.
It also said that a rally and picketing would be staged from
, in front of the Federal
Building in San Francisco under the sponsorship of the War Resisters League.
The league also has offices at 5 Beekman Street.
With press coverage like this, including even the address to write to for
more information, Muste hardly needed to pay for ad space in the
Times (assuming they would have printed the ad — many
papers rejected ads like this).
Some other names I recognize from the ad are Noam Chomsky, Dorothy Day, Dave
Dellinger, Barbara Deming, Diane di Prima, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Milton Mayer,
David McReynolds, Grace Paley, Eroseanna Robinson, Ira Sandperl, Albert
Szent-Gyorgyi, Ralph Templin, Marion Bromley, Horace Champney, Ralph Dull,
Walter Gormly, Richard Groff, Irwin Hogenauer, Roy Kepler, Ken Knudson,
Bradford Lyttle, Karl Meyer, Ed Rosenthal, Maris Cakars, Gordon Christiansen,
William Davidon, Johan Eliot, Carroll Pratt, Helen Merrell Lynd, E. Russell
Stabler, Lyle Stuart, John M. Vickers, and Eric Weinberger.
The text of the ad (without the signatures and “coupon”) is as follows:
The Time Has Come
The spectacle of the United States — with its jet bombers, helicopters,
fragmentation and napalm bombs and disabling gas — carrying on an endless war
against the hungry, scantily armed Vietnamese guerrillas and civilians…
this spectacle will go down in history alongside the unforgivable
atrocities of Italy in Ethiopia.
The spectacle of the United States invasion of the Dominican Republic — again
pitting our terrifying weaponry mainly against civilians armed with rifles…
this spectacle will go down in history alongside Russia’s criminal
intervention in Hungary.
But the spectacle of the indifference of so many Americans to the crimes
being committed in their names, by their brothers, and with their tax money…
this spectacle reminds us more and more of the indifference of the
majority of the German people to the killing of six million Jews.
The United States government has not reacted constructively to legitimate
criticism, protests and appeals:
by world leaders including the Pope, U Thant and President De Gaulle —
by United States leaders including Senators Morse, Gruening, Church, Fulbright, Robert Kennedy, Eugene McCarthy and Stephen Young —
by hundreds of thousands of citizens including 2,500 clergymen and countless professors who placed protest advertisements in leading newspapers —
by innumerable students, many tens of thousands of whom have taken their protest to Washington on several occasions —
by celebrated individuals such as the Rev. Martin Luther King, Robert Lowell, Arthur Miller and Dr. Benjamin Spock —
and by leading newspapers, including the New York Times.
We believe that the ordinary channels of protest have been exhausted and that
the time has come for Americans of conscience to take more radical action in
the hope of averting nuclear war.
Therefore, the undersigned hereby declare that at least as long as
U.S. Forces are
clearly being used in violation of the
U.S. Constitution,
International Law and the United Nations Charter…
We will refuse to pay our federal income taxes voluntarily
Some of us will leave the money we owe the government in our bank accounts,
where the Internal Revenue Service may seize it if they wish. Others will
contribute the money to CARE,
UNICEF or similar organizations. Some of us
will continue to pay that percentage of our taxes which is not used for
military purposes.
We recognize the gravity of this step. However, we prefer to risk violating
the Internal Revenue Code, rather than to participate, by voluntarily paying
our taxes, in the serious crimes against humanity being committed by our
Government.
Writers and Editors War Tax Protest
Attention: Gerald Walker
145 West 86th Street
Apt. 7D
New York, N.Y. 10024
Fellow Writers and Editors:
Join us in signing the enclosed statement proclaiming our refusal to let our
tax dollars support the war in Vietnam. Tell us in writing that we may list
your name with ours in ads and statements. Send us your check for $10.00 or
more (payable to Writers and Editors War Tax Protest) to pay for advertising
and other expenses. Ask other writers and editors to join. Mail copies of
this letter and the enclosed statement, “We Won’t Pay” (which will comprise
the substance of ads we plan to run), to your own list of colleagues. Extra
copies available at $1.00 per hundred, plus 25¢ for mailing.
How we will go about tax refusal
Should President Johnson’s surcharge be adopted by Congress, we will
refuse payment. We will not add this extra war tax to our current tax
when preparing our return and we will enclose a letter with our return
explaining why.
Many of us will also deduct from our tax the 23% which represents the
amount currently being spent on Vietnam.
Possible consequences
It is a violation (up to one year in prison and/or up to $10,000 in fines) of
Sec. 7203 of the Internal
Revenue Code willfully to refuse to pay federal income taxes. However, of the
421 signers of a similar no-payment ad in ,
not one has been prosecuted and sentenced; of the estimated 1500 additional
protest non-payers, none has been prosecuted since the war began. The
IRS, so
far, has chosen to exercise the power to collect unpaid tax money by placing
a lien on refusers’ income or attaching their bank accounts or other assets,
when these can be traced. In addition, a penalty of 6% interest is charged
annually on the unpaid tax balance, a rate estimated to be less than the
collection expense.
Vietnam drags on. Casualties rise, $28 billion are wasted yearly,
U.S. prestige and
moral fabric rot away. No solution, political or military, is in view. The
President’s prescription is more of the same — 45,000 new men (for a total of
525,000) and a proposed 10% income tax increase specifically for this
undeclared, unconstitutional, unprofitable, and unjust war.
“The needs of this country’s riot-shaken cities are being neglected to pay
the war bill,” The New York Times has
editorialized. It is time for escalation by those who want peace in
order to focus on our critical domestic dilemma. Peace marches have not
worked; nor have pickets, protest ads, teach-ins, or pleas to the President’s
conscience by public figures here and abroad. We are not consoled by reports
of atrocities committed by the other side; we want to stop those committed by
our side. So we must now go beyond mere expressions of dissent to strong,
affirmative, and dramatic action by responsible citizens.
We, the undersigned writers and editors for publications and publishing
houses large and small, have not had to give our lives in Vietnam — that has
fallen on younger Americans. But we have lent our passive support in the form
of our tax dollars. From now on, we are willing to lay our middle-class lives
on the line in pledging:
That none of us voluntarily will pay the proposed 10% income tax
surcharge, or any war-designated tax increase.
That many of us will also refuse to pay that part of our current income
tax (23%) being used to finance the war.
Many of us, too, will give an equivalent sum to humanitarian organizations.
Even so, this was not an easy decision to make. We have been law-abiding,
tax-paying citizens all our lives, and we are now subjecting ourselves to
possible legal penalties of up to one year in prison and/or up to $10,000 in
fines for willful non-payment of taxes. But we believe our taxes should not
be used to support a war that violates not only our own Constitution but the
Charter of the United Nations.
By this act, we aim to awaken the Administration to the fact that a
significant number of responsible citizens are so fundamentally opposed to
this war that they are willing to go to this extreme. And we wish to show
other Vietnam-haunted Americans that there is a simple, swift, effective way
to vote no-confidence in the Administration’s policy. It can be done
individually or in groups. It cannot wait until the 1968 presidential
election. Your ballot is your next tax return, and other ads such as this
placed in every newspaper in the land.
There are not enough prisons to hold the millions in this country who,
according to Gallup and other recent polls, strongly oppose this ugly war.
Time now to end our tacit acceptance of what is being done in Vietnam in our
name.
Much of the text of the above declaration didn’t make it in to the final
advertisement (I’m guessing it was cut down to make room for the many names
of signers, but maybe there was more to it than that). Horowitz himself did
not make the list.
I am enclosing a copy of the statement signed, so far, by 220 writers and
editors who pledge to refuse payment of the proposed 10 per cent income tax
surcharge or any tax increase earmarked for the Vietnam War. At this writing,
seven New York Times writers and editors have signed. We plan to run a
full-page advertisement in the Times in
, giving the quote from
Thoreau, the pledge and the list of names. The placing of the ad will
coincide with Congressional debate on the tax surcharge. By that time we hope
to have 500 persons pledged to refuse payment.
If you would be interested in signing the statement, please fill in the blank
and mail it in as soon as possible. And please tell your writer and editor
friends about it and urge them to do the same. As Thoreau said, “If a
thousand men were not to pay their tax bills this year, that would not be a
violent and bloody measure, as it would be to pay them, and enable the State
to commit violence and shed innocent blood.” During his incarceration for
refusal to pay his war tax, Thoreau was paid a visit by Emerson, who asked,
“What are you doing in here?” To which Thoreau replied, “What are you
doing out there?”
I feel strongly that the collective involvement of writers and editors in the
nation’s politics should not stop with the War Tax Protest. Many of our
colleagues share this view, and are preparing this fall to organize local
chapters of what can become a national writers and journalists association.
An organized and articulate “intelligentsia” can be a political force in
America as it is in France. And it must become a political force if
the increasingly oppressive policies of the present United States government — in Vietnam, in Southern Africa, in Latin America, and here at home — are to
be permanently reversed. Not to organize, not to amplify our voices so that
an ill-informed America may hear alternatives, is to accede, in effect, to
the policies of the present government. For more information, please write me
immediately at 377 Green Street, San Francisco, California 94133.
Included with this letter is a somewhat different version of the proposed ad:
— Henry David Thoreau, Civil Disobedience,
commenting upon American involvement in the Mexican War.
We the undersigned writers and editors, believing that American involvement
in Vietnam is morally wrong, pledge:
None of us voluntarily will pay the proposed 10% income tax surcharge or
any war-designated tax increase.
Many of us will not pay that 23% of our current income tax which is
being used to finance the war in Vietnam.
Following this was a sign-up sheet, asking signers to agree with the statement
“I believe American involvement in the war in Vietnam is morally wrong,” and giving three further options:
“As a writer/editor, I wish to add my name to the Writers and Editors War Tax Protest. I dissociate myself from my government’s actions in Vietnam and I am willing to use my next tax return to vote no-confidence in the present Administration. I enclose a check (payable to Writers and Editors War Tax Protest) for $10.00 or more to help pay for running this statement as a newspaper advertisement and for other expenses.”
“I am in sympathy with what you are doing. Enclosed is my check for $____.”
“I would like more information. Please send me your fact-sheet on tax refusal.”
A number of additional signers had been added to the list by this time:
(Spock was listed out-of-order and in a different typeface in the original.)
In the modern world, many governments have introduced income tax withholding
or “pay as you earn.” In such a scheme, it can be difficult for people to
resist paying income tax, as the tax has already been paid on their behalf by
their employers. In such cases, resisters need their employers to be willing
to go out on a limb and resist alongside them.
Today I’ll give some examples of employers who helped their employees resist
income tax withholding.
Quaker Meetings
Quaker Meetings (congregations and collections of congregations) have sometimes
supported the war tax resistance of their employees by not withholding taxes
from their paychecks.
Philadelphia Yearly Meeting of the Religious Society of Friends (Yearly
Meeting) has discerned and again affirms that conscientious objection to
paying taxes supporting military purposes is an appropriate and traditional
individual expression of the Friends Peace Testimony. As a result, Yearly
Meeting has a religious duty to refrain from taking action that violates an
employee’s expression of conscience in such historic Friends testimonies. …
At the written request of an employee pursuant to this Policy, Yearly Meeting
will withhold from an employee’s gross salary or wages, but refuse to forward
to IRS,
amounts up to but not in excess of the military portion of the federal income
tax otherwise due on that employee’s pay. Yearly Meeting, in notifying
IRS
that it has not remitted a portion of withheld taxes, will disclose and advise
IRS of
its action, as described [below]…
Yearly Meeting will communicate at least annually with an appropriate office
or official of the
IRS to
explain that, pursuant to this Policy and Yearly Meeting’s core religious
principles, it has withheld the full amount of taxes, as indicated by form(s)
W-4, from the salaries of certain employees opposed to the payment of taxes
for military purposes. Yearly Meeting will further explain that, at the
request of each such employee, it has not remitted the portion of the amount
withheld which the employee has conscientiously refused to pay, that it has
identified the amounts not remitted in its records, and that the amounts not
remitted, plus interest, will be paid over to the Treasury of the United
States on behalf of the employees at such time as there is assurance that the
taxes will not be used for military purposes.
The Meeting was taken to court in
for failing to remit $11,224 in taxes
from resisting employees. More recently, the Meeting has been pursuing legal
arguments in support of its employee Priscilla Adams, who has been resisting
war taxes for years with the help of the Meeting. The Meeting was unable to
convince a court to order the
IRS to
respect its conscientious scruples, and the agency ordered to Meeting to
garnishee Adams’s salary. The Meeting has continued to refuse.
The London Yearly Meeting for a while withheld a portion of the
pay-as-you-earn withholding of some of its employees, hoping to make this a
test case that might legalize conscientious objection to military taxation.
The courts rejected their arguments, and an appeal to the European Commission
of Human Rights also failed, and so the Meeting stopped trying to resist
military taxation and now gives war tax resistance only rhetorical support:
Since losing the appeal we have paid in full the income tax collected from
our employees. In recent months we have considered whether we can continue to
do this, but after very careful consideration have decided that for the time
being we must do so. The acceptance of the rule of law is part of our
witness, … for a just and peaceful world cannot come about without this.
However we do wish to make it clear that we object to the way in which the
PAYE [withholding]
system involves us in a process of collecting money, used in part to pay for
military activity and war preparations, which takes away from the individual
taxpayer the right to express their own conscientious objection. This
involvement is incompatible with our work for peace.
American Friends Service Committee
During the Vietnam War, the American Friends Service Committee refused to
withhold taxes from those of its employees who were refusing to pay taxes.
Milton Mayer said, of the Committee’s action:
Under withholding, most of the people who don’t want to buy Mylai have
already had it bought for them by April 15. … A few religious
organizations — not the churches, of course — have refused to withhold the
tax from the pay of their employes who do not want to buy Mylai. The most
respectable of them is the American Friends Service Committee, with which I
confess to being associated. … But the AFSC
has a task force of eighty Philadelphia lawyers, and one of these years a
test case will go to Washington. Meanwhile, however, the conscientious
citizen who waits for a test case will go on buying Mylai until the whole of
Vietnam is a ditch.
The AFSC continues to support tax-resisting employees, and has had mixed luck defending itself in court.
According to the NWTRCC pamphlet on Organizational War Tax Resistance:
Employers or other entities which refuse to withhold from the assets of a war
tax resister on religious grounds actually have a chance of justifying their
actions in court thanks to a case involving
the American Friends Service Committee
(AFSC) and the
IRS. A
federal district court ruled that the
AFSC and
its employees had the First Amendment right not to be required to participate
in the withholding system, since the
IRS has
other methods of satisfying its objectives, such as levies. The decision was
overturned by the Supreme Court, but solely on procedural grounds. This
position is possibly strengthened by the Religious Freedom Restoration Act
(RFRA), passed by Congress in .
The IRS
has more recently tried to send what are called “lock-in letters” to the
AFSC, demanding that they withhold taxes from their resisting employees at
the maximum rate permissible by law.
For a time (and this may still be the case), the AFSC policy was to obey
such withholding laws and orders, but to hold back a percentage of the
withheld taxes from the government, putting that percentage (a percentage they
deemed equal to the percentage of the federal budget spent on the military)
into an escrow account.
According to a Treasury Inspector General
for Tax Administration report, many employers ignore these lock-in letters.
This takes some gumption. The way the law works, if an employer doesn’t comply
with the lock-in letter, the employer can become liable for the taxes
that the employee isn’t paying.
Mennonite General Assembly
In 1989, the Mennonite Church General Assembly adopted a resolution to
“support the Mennonite General Board in establishing a policy that federal
income taxes not be withheld from the wages of any of its employees who make
this request because of conscientious objection to the use of their taxes for
military purposes.”
The General Board, however, balked on establishing such a policy after
determining “there was not enough support… to ask church boards to engage in
civil disobedience.”
Restored Israel of Yahweh
The small Jehovah’s Witnesses spin-off group called the Restored Israel of
Yahweh practices war tax resistance. To help facilitate this, two of them, who
ran a construction business, agreed not to withhold taxes from those of their
employees who were also members of that denomination.
Those two, along with the company’s bookkeeper, were taken to court and
convicted of tax evasion charges, making them, according to one of their
lawyers, “the first pacifist tax resisters to be prosecuted and
jailed — possibly ever — for felony conspiracy to defraud the
U.S. and attempted
tax evasion, the most serious criminal charges in the Internal Revenue Code.”
War Resisters League & War Resisters International
In , Ralph DiGia, who was working for the War
Resisters League, asked them to stop withholding federal taxes from his
paycheck. The League agreed, and some other employees followed DiGia’s lead.
It had taken a lot of work to get the League to adopt a policy of tax refusal.
At first, they had refused, with a member of the League’s executive committee
saying “the life of the organization is at stake.” War tax resisters
responded, saying: “If pacifist organizations, whose business is to create a
warless world, are not ready to risk something for war resistance
now, when will they be ready?” Another group, the Fellowship of
Reconciliation, also refused to challenge the
IRS, and
some of its employees resigned over the issue.
War Resisters’ International, which is based in London, decided in
to hold back a percentage of
its employees’s taxes (equivalent, in its view, to the military percentage
of the British national budget). The organization takes the position that
conscientious objection to military taxation is an unrecognized human right,
but a human right all the same, and they intend to assert it.
Collective Impressions
American war tax resister Ed Guinan for a time ran a print shop called
“Collective Impressions.” “Most of the workers in the collective were rooted
in a Catholic tradition of pacifism,” said Guinan, and so,
the company paid its
employees’ withholding not to the Internal Revenue Service but directly to the
U.S. Arms Control
and Disarmament Agency.
The Agency returned the money, saying it could not accept it under such
circumstances, whereupon Collective Impressions put the money into an escrow
account from which it hoped to eventually be able to pay the money in a way
that wouldn’t violate the pacifist beliefs of its employees, and from where
it was eventually seized by the government.
Straight Lines, Ltd.
Martin Philips, director of the Welsh jewelry business “Straight Lines”
stopped paying the 13.6% pay-as-you-earn withholding to the government for his
employees — sending the money instead to the Overseas Development
Administration as a protest against government military spending.
The government took Straight Lines to court, and eventually seized money from
the company to cover the unpaid taxes.
Vivien Kellems
Soon after income tax withholding was introduced in the United States,
ornery industrialist Vivien Kellems decided she was not interested in being
the tax collector for her employees’ at the Kellems Cable Grip Manufacturing
Company:
The most un-American phrase in our modern vocabulary is “take home pay.” What
do we mean, “take home pay”? When I hire a man to work for me we discuss
three things: the job to be done, the hours he shall work, and the wages he
shall receive. And on Friday when he received that pay envelope, we have both
fulfilled our contract for that week. There is no further obligation on
either side. The money in that envelope belongs to him. He has worked for it
and he has earned it. No one, not even the United States Government, has the
right to touch it. Who dares to lay profane hands upon that money, to rudely
filch from that free man the fruits of his labor, even before the money is in
his own hands. This is a monstrous invasion of the rights of a free people
and an outrageous perversion of the spirit of the Constitution. This is the
miserable system foisted upon the people of our country by New Deal zealots
and arrogant Communists who have wormed themselves into high places in
Washington. This system is deliberately designed to make involuntary tax
collectors of every employer and to impose involuntary tax servitude upon
every employee. We don’t need to go to Russia for slavery, we’ve got it right
here.
Paying taxes is a duty, a responsibility and a privilege of citizenship.
Without taxes we can have no government. However I do not exercise other
duties, responsibilities and privileges of citizenship for my employees. I do
not vote for them, I do not form political opinions for them, I do not select
a church for them, I do not pay real estate taxes for them. They are all free
American citizens, thoroughly capable of performing all of the duties and
responsibilities of citizenship for themselves. And so, from this day, I am
not collecting nor paying their income taxes for them.
To demonstrate that she wasn’t against her employees paying their taxes, but
only opposed to having to do it for them, she organized her employees once per
quarter and allowed them, on company time, to fill out their own tax returns
and to go down to the post office as a group to purchase money orders and file
their own taxes.
The government subjected Kellems to a public smear campaign (which included
intercepting and publicizing her love letters), and to legal action. The
government won the legal battle, fining Kellems $7,600, whereupon she resumed
withholding taxes from her employees’ paychecks.
George Fidenato
George Fidenato is Vivien Kellems reincarnated in today’s Italy.
he has been refusing to withhold
taxes from his six employees’ paychecks. “I do not want to be the tax
collector. I’m not a slave of the state, and wouldn’t want to work for it even
if you paid me!” As of this writing he is still pursuing legal appeals.
Indianapolis Baptist Temple
The Indianapolis Baptist Temple started refusing to pay federal taxes in
, when pastor Gregory Dixon “decided the
church would break all ties with the government and no longer act as its agent
in withholding taxes from its employees,” citing Constitutional freedom of
religion as his mandate for taking his church out from under Uncle Sam’s
thumb. For several years, nothing came of this defiance, but in
, the
IRS
started seeking back taxes, eventually filing liens against the church and
against Dixon. The church fought back in court, but lost a series of appeals,
finally getting turned down by the
U.S. Supreme Court
in , whereupon the government seized
and auctioned off church property and Dixon himself was fined.
“Texas housewives”
, a group of women the
press invariably referred to as the “Texas housewives” refused to withhold and
pay social security taxes on the wages of their household help. The women were
opposed to government-run social security, and to being enlisted as government
tax collectors. They claimed also to be supported in their stand by their
employees.
Money was eventually seized from their bank accounts to cover the taxes. They
also pursued court appeals to try to get the tax declared unconstitutional,
but in they lost their case and began paying
the taxes.
The women’s suffrage movement in the United Kingdom
The National Insurance Act of required all
workers to pay a portion of their paycheck into a fund for government-run
health and unemployment benefits.
Members of the women’s suffrage movement saw this as another tax enacted
without their consent, another example of “taxation without representation,”
and another opportunity to resist.
Some members of suffrage groups were employers, and some suffrage groups had
paid employees. In the Women
Writers’ Suffrage League met to ask whether they “should, as a society, resist
the new insurance tax and refuse to insure their secretary, with her full
consent to their so doing?”
Kate Harvey refused to pay 5 shillings, 10 pence of tax for her gardener — for
which she was sentenced to two months in prison.
The Women’s Freedom League refused to pay the tax on their employees — “we
refuse to acquiesce in any legislation which controls the resources of women
without the consent of women” — but the government seemed unwilling or unable
to do more than threaten the group.
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.
April 15th has long been the date for war tax
resisters to have their “fifteen minutes of fame” in the papers. Here are some
examples from years gone by:
Washington — The Internal Revenue Service will,
if necessary, seize cash and property owned by opponents of the war in Viet
Nam who are recusing to pay their income taxes, Commissioner Sheldon S. Cohen
said .
The service will take this action “in fairness to the many millions of
taxpayers who do fulfill their obligations,” he said in a statement in
response to an advertisement urging non-payment of taxes in
’s Washington Post.
The government has been upheld in court on all occasions when individuals
have refused to pay taxes because of disapproval with the uses to which their
money was being put, revenue officials said.
One noted precedent was the case of Milton Mayer, the Quaker author, who in
attempted unsuccessfully to refuse to pay
one-half of his income tax, on the ground that the money was being used for
purposes that violated his pacifist beliefs. The case was made on
constitutional grounds under the First Amendment, which guarantees freedom of
religion, but Mayer lost both in the District Court in the Northern District
of California and in the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals.
IRS and
Justice Department officials could not remember a similar case that has
reached the Supreme Court.
A group of Amish farmers in Pennsylvania lost a somewhat similar suit
recently in the District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania when
they attempted to refuse to pay Social Security taxes. Their property was
seized in payment of the tax.
The standard
IRS
procedure in cases where taxpayers file returns but do not pay the tax that
is due is to send a notice as soon as the non-payment is discovered. If the
return is filed on or near the April 15 deadline, this could be as long as a
month, although it is usually less than that, revenue officials said.
The initial notice gives the [illegible] make his payment or make arrangements
with the
IRS for
a later payment. The latter is permitted to cases of [unusual?] financial
hardship.
If there is no response to the 10-day notice, the
IRS
generally sends a second notice. After another 10 days or so has elapsed, the
service then moves to seize the assets of the delinquent. Under law, it may
do this without specific authorization from any court.
San Francisco — (UPI) — Irving Hogan, 44, distributed his unpaid income tax yesterday not to Uncle Sam but to his fellow man.
Hogan stood in a crowd of about 150 startled persons, handing out $1 bills.
About 60 of them.
That, he said, was the amount of his unpaid federal income taxes he guessed
would be spent on the Vietnam war.
“I want this money to be used for the delight, not the destruction, of men,”
the well-dressed philanthropist said.
“Here,” he called to one man, “go buy yourself a beer.”
“And here,” he said to another, thrusting the bill in his hand. “Buy your
wife a nosegay.”
The money soon ran out, and the crowd moved to other events of the three ring
circus billed as an antitax rally outside the federal building.
Ogling curvy showgirls who paraded in bikinis and barrels was, they agreed, a
more enjoyable way to celebrate April 15 than the traditional payment of
taxes to the federal government.
The young morsels were protesting taxes. One, Bonnie Parker, said she would
not pay the $500 she owes.
“I refuse to pay. I am not even filing. I don’t have it and I don’t know what
I would do to get it,” she said, shivering in a brisk wind.
Through it all, the
IRS
offices did a brisk business on deadline day.
The first edition of the Friends Journal is dated , and billed itself as “Successor to The Friend () and Friends Intelligencer ().”
The Philadelphia Yearly Meeting, which had been split into an Orthodox and a Hicksite meeting , had reunified .
The new magazine reflected this merger: The Friend had been the organ of the Orthodox meeting, and the Intelligencer that of the Hicksite meeting.
, the magazine shared offices with the “Friends Peace Committee” of the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting, which may have led to some cross-pollination, and increased coverage for peace testimony concerns in the magazine.
War tax resistance in the Friends Journal in
There are few mentions of war tax resistance in the early issues of Friends Journal.
We have reached the last years of the long decline of war tax resistance in the Society of Friends that began around the time of the American Civil War.
In , the American Friends Service Committee put out an influential booklet, Speak Truth to Power: A Quaker Search for an Alternative to Violence, that mentions war tax resistance only once, in reference to its use by Quakers in (this despite the fact that war tax resisters A.J. Muste and Milton Mayer were part of the committee that wrote the booklet).
The first mention I found comes from the issue.
It is a single-sentence sardonic comment on the tax resistance of conservative Utah governor J. Bracken Lee:
“The Governor of Utah should be welcomed to the ranks of conscientious objectors, even though most Friends and other pacifists would not resist paying income tax on the ground that they were conscientiously opposed to economic aid to other countries.”
The issue mentions a lawsuit filed by Milton Mayer “to recover income tax taken from him forcibly in what he claims was a violation of his conscientious objection to war.”
The three-paragraph article is conspicuous for how much effort it seems to go to to avoid referring to Mayer as a Quaker.
Mayer is “a well-known writer,” a “Carmel, Calif., author, formerly a Chicagoan,” “who writes for leading magazines,” and “has been a lecturer for the American Friends Service Committee and at many colleges, universities and churches,” and “has been a member of the faculties of the University of Chicago and Frankfurt (Germany) and is consultant to the Great Books Foundation.”
All that resume material in the brief article, and yet no mention that he is a Quaker convert.
The article says that “his religious principles will not let him buy guns for other men to shoot” but doesn’t call these Quaker principles or refer to the Quaker peace testimony.
So it makes for a curious article: a respectful nod at war tax resistance with a pained effort to distance the Society of Friends from it.
The issue included a “symposium” on “Investments and Our Peace Testimony” which highlighted the difficulty of finding investments “free of the taint of involvement in war preparation.”
Only one of the participants, Samuel J. Bunting, Jr., explicitly mentions taxation as something that triggers the same concern.
Excerpts:
The problem has worried me ever since World War Ⅰ.
At that time, at the risk of losing a position and the chance of becoming permanently barred from my chosen profession (the investment business), I refused to sell or otherwise handle U.S. Liberty Bonds.
My firm respected my conscientious convictions, however, and the ax did not fall.
Since then I have scrutinized the activities of the corporations whose securities I have considered selling to my clients and have rejected many because of their service in military production.
Yet I still think there is no satisfactory solution of the problem for most of us.
We live in a world geared to military activities.
I see no way of escaping it except by the destruction of militarism itself and by adjudicating differences which might lead to war.
Investments are only a small fraction of the over-all problem.
Payment of taxes is another important aspect of the situation.
It is true that to some extent mortgages could be considered, but, of course, income taxes would have to be paid from the interest.…
The issue included an interesting note about the Quaker outpost of Monteverde, Costa Rica, in the form of a letter from one of the inhabitants there.
Excerpts:
You are so surprised that our group consists of so many North Americans.
The reason that most of them have established themselves in Costa Rica is not the climate, nor the possibility of finding work here, but rather an idealistic reason, typical of Quakers.
They were convinced that it was against their conscience to continue living in a country where, indirectly, they had to collaborate in arming the nation for war by means of taxation, and where it is impossible to educate their children according to principles of Quakers.
A few of them spent a year in prison for being conscientious objectors before emigration to Costa Rica.
So finally, a full-throated reference to real live Quakers who have taken action in response to their conscientious objection to paying war taxes.
Perhaps their geographical remove made this feel safer to mention.
Or perhaps the ice that had formed over American Quaker war tax resistance was beginning to crack.
The issue covered the goings-on at the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting earlier that year.
On , according to the article, war tax resistance was discussed:
It will always be unfinished business that Friends’ practice of our testimonies is not consistent with profession.
The discussion centered on the payment of income tax, particularly that portion used for military purposes.
Few present felt it right to refuse to pay, nor yet felt comfortable to pay.
Varied suggestions were presented: Send an accompanying letter expressing one’s feeling about war; live so simply that income is below tax level; make no report, but once a year send a check for nonmilitary purposes; engage in peace walks and other minority demonstrations; follow Jesus’ example of rendering unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s; beware of taking for granted the evils deplored, such as riding on military planes; associate more closely with the Mennonites, who share Friends’ concerns; rise above one’s own shortcomings through personal devotion; work to unite with all Friends Yearly Meetings in refusal to pay taxes.
Nothing can be done unless there is a willingness to suffer unto death.
The next mention comes from the issue, and shows the cracked ice has begun to melt.
Excerpt:
Meetings [on the West Coast] in general have been reconsidering the meaning of the peace witness.
Newer activities have included… street distribution of a leaflet on tax refusal because of the amount going to arms (write Franklin Zahn, 836 South Hamilton Boulevard, Pomona, California, for samples), and a poster walk in front of the federal tax office on income tax day, …
Franklin Zahn’s name will come up frequently during the years of the thaw and resurgence of war tax resistance in the American Society of Friends.
War tax resistance in the Friends Journal in
War tax resistance had largely retreated into the back pages of the Friends Journal by .
Why this should be, I don’t know.
Perhaps the winding down of the cold war made the issue seem less crucial, or perhaps the momentum from the Vietnam War era war tax resistance surge had finally sputtered to a halt, or maybe it was just a feeling that the issue had been discussed to an impasse and readers were fatigued and eager to move on to another topic, or it could be that the “peace tax fund” campaign had convinced people that the dilemma of Quakers paying for war would soon be a thing of the past.
The issue briefly noted the publication of a new NWTRCC practical war tax resistance pamphlet “on how to prevent withholding of tax from wages.”
Frances S. Eliot penned an article for the issue that described a tax day vigil in Ann Arbor, Michigan:
Holy Week at the IRS
During and since the Vietnam War, war tax dissidents in Ann Arbor, Michigan have held vigils on April 15 from 8 p.m. to midnight, with leaflets, posters, and banners, outside the main post office, which stayed open to postmark last-minute income tax returns.
The weather was frequently dark, cold, and sleeting; but through the years, public response became less hostile and more favorable.
We usually got a photo and brief paragraph in the local newspaper.
In , a small circle of us decided to upgrade our customary tax day witness.
We were inspired by the success of the War Resisters League in establishing the right to leaflet within New York City IRS offices; we were encouraged by growth of local peace groups and nonviolent direct actions; and the fact that Easter fell on , presented a symbolic opportunity we couldn’t resist.
The Lessons Learned:
Be persistent.
If a course of action seems right and necessary, expect aggravation and boredom along the way — but hang in there.
Document your communications and actions.
An accurate record is important.
Pay "courtesy calls" on your law enforcement agencies.
Inform them of your goals and plans.
Know that part of their job may be to dissuade you from actions they feel may cause trouble.
Check details of procedures, penalties, and possible legal expenses with a sympathetic lawyer.
When dealing with a bureaucratic system, avoid procedural errors.
Respond to all details, whether they make sense or not.
Don’t assume there is continuity of record keeping by the bureaucracy.
Send copies of whatever you need to refer to: previous correspondence, ordinances, regulations, recapitulation of phone conversations.
Our immediate goals were to provide taxpayers with information about the federal budget and its military portion, and to offer alternatives, all at a time and place that would permit genuine discussion of concerns.
We planned to distribute leaflets advocating the U.S. Peace Tax Fund Bill, which would establish conscientious objection for taxpayers.
We changed the location of our action from the post office, where we’d had official permission and friendly cooperation, to the Ann Arbor IRS office, located in a privately-owned office complex.
We had previously been excluded from this building, grounds, and parking lot by the building management.
We decided to offer information and to talk with taxpayers during business hours of Holy Week, and again on , the actual tax deadline.
Three tasks followed:
First, we needed to pursue the application-for-permit procedure required by the General Services Administration for activities in/on federal property.
Jurisdiction is fuzzy: is GSA, IRS, or the building management in charge?
The ensuing communication with the Detroit GSA and IRS offices unrolled like a script by Lewis Carroll and Franz Kafka.
On the advice of a local ACLU lawyer, I kept detailed records.
Second, we tried to assess the possible risks and penalties of our witness, in case a permit were not granted.
Again, who was in charge — Ann Arbor city police? county sheriffs deputies? federal marshals?
Richard Cleaver, AFSC Peace Education secretary, gave us an evening of training in nonviolent civil disobedience.
Third, we recruited enough people to keep the leafleting going, two or three volunteers at a time, four hours a day, even if there were to be arrests.
(In such case our goals would expand from war-tax resistance to include First Amendment rights.)
, I dumped everything unnecessary from my purse and pockets, and caught the bus out to the IRS office.
I had barely spoken a few words and handed a Peace Tax Fund leaflet to a woman waiting to see an IRS consultant, when an IRS officer came out of an inner office and said we absolutely could not be permitted to distribute leaflets or initiate conversations with taxpayers in the reception area.
I explained that I’d been trying to get the necessary permit, had complied with all GSA requirements, responded to GSA’s objections, filed an amended application, and still had received no definitive response.
The officer, without comment, offered an attractive solution, which he had cleared with the building management:
So long as we did not obstruct or harass persons entering and leaving the IRS office, we could leaflet and converse with them in the corridor immediately outside the office door.
We accepted the offer.
During this busy tax season, a rack of the standard IRS forms had been moved into the corridor for the convenience of taxpayers who only needed to pick up forms.
The corridor area was thus functioning as a temporary extension of the IRS office and was a logical and appropriate place for us to offer additional information on where tax dollars go and what can be done about it.
In whatever way a deal had been made between IRS and the building management, it was a neat example of creative conflict resolution.
All of us were spared six days of possible arrests — which no one wanted — but which we were prepared for.
Holy Week, Easter, and Tax Day came and went.
We had lots of interesting conversations, plus some mutually respectful arguments, with taxpayers.
The Ann Arbor News carried a picture of the leafleting, and a good article on the Peace Tax Fund Bill.
Postscript:
That was then… this is now.
We have taken a few breaths of post-Cold War fresh air, only to be propelled into a hot war in the Middle East.
Opinions are increasingly polarized.
However, on the assumption that the local IRS and its building management will continue their spirit of cooperation, we will proceed with plans for a week-long witness for taxes for peace.
Stay tuned!
Another note in that issue announced an “Alternative Revenue Service organizing kit” put out jointly by NWTRCC, the War Resisters League, and the Conscience and Military Tax Campaign, and designed to facilitate “immediate action to oppose the war machine that survives on our tax money.”
[The] kit provides a 1990 EZ Peace Income Tax Form, action ideas, an explanatory brochure, a camera-ready flyer and ads, background papers, and a resource list.
The EZ Peace Income Tax Form is a take-off on IRS’s 1040EZ form.
The alternative form begins with a section in which the taxpayer figures the amount of his or her taxes that will go toward military spending.
It then offers a choice of areas in which the money might be re-directed, such as education and culture, international conflict resolution, human resources, environment, or justice.
The form provides a space in which to choose an amount to withhold from the IRS, from $1 to the full amount of income taxes.
The forms are to be filled out and mailed to the IRS, with one’s income tax return, to Congressional representatives and senators, to organizers of the campaign, and to friends and neighbors.
A book review in the issue mentioned Milton Mayer’s war tax resistance:
Milton Mayer refused to kill and refused to pay others to do what he would not do himself.
He recognized the futility of withholding his taxes from war expenditures, but argued that “the inevitability of any evil is not the point.
The point is my subornation of it.”
Knowing that the government would ultimately force him to pay war taxes, Mayer defended his integrity:
“If a robber ties me up and robs me, I have not become a robber.”
That issue also announced that a “Peace Taxpayers Newsletter” was being published out of Nellysford, Virginia, covering “subjects of interest to war tax resisters and others concerned with the tax money that supports military efforts.
A recent issue describes how some people in Virginia are redirecting their federal taxes toward their local government to finance a much-needed waste management system.
The newsletter is available for no charge, although the group asks for donations to help cover postage.”
The issue announced a new pamphlet — Peace and Taxes… God and Country — written by Chel Avery for the War Tax Concerns Support Committee of Philadelphia Yearly Meeting.
“[It] has many helpful suggestions for the structure, content, and process of a clearness meeting for individuals considering war tax refusal.
The financial, legal, and emotional ramifications to the individual, the individual’s family, and meeting are discussed and listed for easy reference.”
And that’s about it for , except for some minor asides or references to activities of the war tax resistance movement scattered here and there.
At the upcoming national gathering of NWTRCC at Earlham College in Richmond, Indiana, I’m going to be presenting a summary of the history of war tax resistance in the Society of Friends (Quakers).
Today I’m going to try to coalesce some of the notes I’ve assembled about how the Quaker practice of war tax resistance began to reemerge after the Great Forgetting period.
The Thaw ()
In the Great Forgetting period, Quakers endeavored to overlook that war tax resistance had been an important part of putting the Quaker peace testimony into practice.
But during World War Ⅱ and the opening decade of the Cold War, a largely Christian pacifist war tax resistance movement began to coalesce, which included Quakers, but the most prominent members of which belonged to other denominations.
This movement set the stage for the coming renaissance of war tax resistance in the Society of Friends.
A few of the earliest tax resisters of this period were Quakers.
I’ve already mentioned Mary Stone McDowell, who carried on her resistance from the World War Ⅰ period (the only such example I’m aware of).
There was also Arthur Evans, who was resisting perhaps as early as 1943, making him one of the earliest adopters of war tax resistance in this Thaw period.
But institutionally, the Society of Friends still had little interest in the subject.
In the American Friends Service Committee, a major voice of the practical side of the Quaker peace testimony, put out an influential booklet: Speak Truth to Power: A Quaker Search for an Alternative to Violence.
It mentions war tax resistance only once, and in an 18th century historical overview context, not as an example of a contemporary method of speaking truth to power in search of alternatives to violence.
This is in spite of the fact that the committee that produced the booklet included among its members the war tax resisters A.J. Muste and Milton Mayer.
Instead, the leadership in advocating for war tax resistance and in organizing the fledgling modern war tax resistance movement largely came from outside the Society of Friends.
Some of the more prominent war tax resistance promoters in this important period were Dorothy Day (Catholic) & Ammon Hennacy (often Catholic), A.J. Muste (sometimes-Quaker, but bounced around a lot), Maurice McCrackin (Presbyterian), Ernest Bromley (Methodist, later a Quaker), Ralph DiGia (not religious as far as I could tell), and Milton Mayer (Jewish, later a Quaker).
The work of this emerging group of resisters helped to encourage the remaining Quaker war tax resisters and to remind Quakers that war tax resistance wasn’t only something of the legendary past but was an available testimony to them in the present.
The thaw in the Society of Friends had begun.
One of the first examples of this thaw was a particularly dramatic one.
When four Quaker conscientious objectors in the United States were put on trial for evading the Korean War draft, the judge told them:
“If you are not willing to defend this country, you should leave.”
They took that advice seriously, and began to look for an alternative.
They chose Costa Rica, a country that had abolished its standing army in .
“We wanted to be free of paying taxes in a war economy,” recalls Marvin Rockwell, one of the emigrants.
Seven Quaker families left the U.S. to found the community of Monteverde, Costa Rica, in .
Rockwell later told a Friends Journal reporter:
“I do not feel bad at all paying taxes in Costa Rica.
The largest item in the tax budget is for education.”
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.
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)
