Some historical and global examples of tax resistance → United States → Catholic War Vets in Manhattan, 1938

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Governments spend a lot of time and energy, and hire a host of political scientists and other such clergy, to try to convince their subjects that paying taxes is not only mandatory, but that it’s honorable, dignified, and charitable, and that conversely, failure to pay taxes is underhanded, shady, and selfish.

So governments and other critics of tax resisters and tax resistance campaigns are quick to deploy this available propaganda lexicon in their counterattacks. This can have the effect of putting the resisters on the defensive, message-wise. One way some resisters and resistance campaigns have tried to defuse this is through the use of escrow accounts.

The idea here is that instead of paying taxes to the government, the resister or resisters will pay their taxes into a special account that they will relinquish to the government at a future date if the government meets their demands. The message conveyed by this is that “we are willing to pay our share of money for the government’s upkeep — we’re not just keeping the money for ourselves — but we’re not going to do so until the government shapes up.”

Here are some examples of tax resisters and tax resistance campaigns that have used this technique:

• In 1887, Samoan chiefs met and decided to pay their taxes not to the German imperialist government, but to officers who were authorized to hand the money over to the Germans only if “a satisfactory settlement has been arrived at.”
• In 1938, a group of Catholic war veterans in Queens, New York began paying their property taxes into an escrow fund that they said they would refuse to turn over to the local government until it fired a Communist Party member from his post as a government advisor.
• In New Guinea, in 1969, natives in the Mataungan Association, upset at their political control being diluted in a local government that included immigrant representatives, set up its own tax agency and collected $29,000 “which, it says, it is holding in trust until the council reverts to its old native-only status.”
• In 1977 the Friends Meeting at Cambridge established a “Peace Tax Fund” that worked partially as a redirection fund, but which also anticipated that some contributors would want to release the funds to the government if the government provided a way to do so that would not make them complicit in military spending.
• Ed Guinan resisted his small business’s taxes by sending the checks to the U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency. “They return it with a polite note saying that they cannot accept it, and we put it into a tax escrow account which cannot be used for normal business expenses.”
• In 1981, the Nashua Area War-Tax Resistance Support Group decided to keep the withheld taxes of its members in escrow “to be given to the government when policies change and when the money will be used for purposes other than war.” Resisters could reclaim their money from the fund if the IRS seized money from them individually, and meanwhile the interest earned in the account would be given to charitable causes.
• New England War Tax Resistance set up three funds — a mutual insurance “penalty fund,” a “Direct Giving Fund” for resisters who wanted to immediately redirect their taxes, and an escrow fund which would hold on to resisters’ money in case they at some future point decided they wanted to settle with the IRS.
• The Purchase Quarterly Meeting of Quakers set up something called the “Peace Tax Escrow Account” to which resisters could deposit their refused taxes and which the Meeting said it would turn over to the government if the government gave taxpayers a mechanism to pay such taxes without paying for the military functions of government.
• In 1990, District of Columbia politician Walter Fauntroy, upset at the District’s lack of political representation at the federal level, “asked city residents to file federal tax returns but withhold payment of federal taxes and place the money in an escrow account to be established by a group called ‘Taxation Without Representation Committee.’ ”
• The Philadelphia Yearly Meeting of Quakers lost a court battle in which the IRS hoped to force them to withhold taxes from a war tax resisting employee. They began withholding the taxes as ordered, but rather than submitting them to the IRS, they put the withheld money into an escrow account and told the agency they’d have to seize it themselves.
• In 2006, the Chamber of Commerce in Tijuana, Mexico decided to withhold taxes in protest against inadequate security during a crime wave there. The group brought in accounting consultants to help them establish an escrow account, in the hopes that the gesture would discourage the government from classifying the member businesses as tax delinquents.
• In 2010, New York state assemblyman Greg Ball encouraged his constituents not to pay their Metropolitan Commuter Transportation Mobility Tax but to instead deposit the amount due into an escrow account which would not be relinquished until the Metropolitan Transit Authority were audited and reformed.
• In 2010, shopkeepers in San Juan, Argentina, protesting against competition from untaxed and unregulated street vendors, began paying their taxes into a fund that they say they will only relinquish to the government when it begins to crack down on the street vendors.
• In 2011, Markus Zwicklbauer, a 58-year-old tax consultant from Fürstenzell, Germany, began paying his taxes instead into an escrow account which he says he will release to the government if the government can show him to his satisfaction that it will be spent for the benefit of German citizens and not wasted on bailouts of other Eurozone nations.
• A bar owner in Michigan in 2011, struggling in the wake of an indoor smoking ban that discouraged her customers, organized a tax protest of similarly-situated businesses that involved paying taxes into escrow.

From the 11 April 1938 Brooklyn Daily Eagle:

Catholic Vets Refuse Taxes In Gerson Row

Queens Foes Warn They Won’t Pay Until Communist Is Removed

Property owners among the 149 members of Richmond Hill Post, Catholic War Veterans, will refuse to pay their real estate taxey until Simon W. Gerson, a member of the Communist party, is removed from his office as confidential examiner to the Borough President of Manhattan, it was learned today.

This was decided at a meeting Thursday in the post quarters, 115–16 Liberty Ave., Richmond Hill, pending consideration and release by the organization’s executive committee. Similar action is asked of other divisions of the Catholic War Veterans.

Will Deposit Taxes

To forestall foreclosure of their property as a result of the tax strike, members of the post will deposit their taxes in escrow with banks and loan companies holding mortgages on their property. The taxpayers declared they were willing to bear the 7 percent penalty for late payment of the levy.

The resolution adopted follows:

“Be it resolved that in so far as the Mayor of the City of New York and the President of the Borough of Manhattan have seen fit to ignore the protest formerly taken by our organization and countless other organizations and citizens of our city and State against the appointment of Simon W. Gerson as confidential adviser and secretary to the President of the Borough of Manhattan and have seen fit to retain Mr. Gerson as a public servant on the city payroll and Mr. Gerson still continues to act as a public servant of the City of New York although an avowed Communist and as such an open enemy to the Constitution of the United States and the principles upon which our country is founded,

Refuse to Pay Taxes

“We, the members of this post, refuse to be a party to the actions taken by our public officials and pledge ourselves to do everything in our power to bring the career of Mr. Gerson as a public official to a close as speedily as possible by refusing to pay our taxes now due on our property, so that the funds necessary to supply Mr. Gerson with his weekly pay check may not be available to our Mayor and President of the Borough of Manhattan, and

“We further resolve that we will request our friends and neighbors and other available citizens that we come in contact with to pursue the same course of action;

Urge Similar Action

“Be it further resolved that copies of this resolution be forwarded to the county, State and national departments of our organization with the request that they take similar action,

“Be it further resolved also, that copies of this resolution be forwarded to the Mayor of the City of New York and to the President of the Borough of Manhattan.”

William F. McCumiskey is commander of the post.

From the New York Sun on this day in 1938 comes this example of tax strikers using escrow accounts to ward off reprisals and blunt criticism:

Novel Protest Against Gerson

Richmond Hill Veterans Vote a Tax Strike.

Hope to Spread Movement

Will Refuse to Pay Property Levy as Long as Red Holds Office.

One of the most novel of the many protests against the retention of Simon W. Gerson, a communist, on the city’s pay roll has been devised by members of the Richmond Hill War Veterans Post who, it was learned today, have voted to pay no more taxes on their property so long as Mr. Gerson remains on the salary list as confidential investigator to Borough President Isaacs.

Members of the post not only voted to take such action themselves, but to urge their friends and other posts of their organization in the city to join in the campaign. They believe that the legal difficulty involved in non-payment of taxes can be solved by having each “tax striker” put his tax money in the bank in escrow, to be released to the city whenever Mr. Gerson is dismissed.

The protest of the veterans is the more striking because, of the 149 members of the post, 98 per cent are property owners. They reason that if the city cannot collect taxes it cannot continue to pay the salary of the communist they feel should not be receiving pay even indirectly from them.

Veterans’ Resolution.

The resolution which the veterans empowered their executive committee to draw up was made public by William F. McCumiskey, post commander. It follows:

“Be it resolved that insofar as the Mayor of the City of New York and the President of the Borough of Manhattan have seen fit to ignore the protest formally taken by our organization and countless other organizations and citizens of our city and State against the appointment of Simon W. Gerson as confidential adviser and secretary to the Borough of Manhattan and have seen fit to retain Mr. Gerson as a public servant on the city pay roll and Mr. Gerson still continues to act as a public servant of the City of New York, although an avowed communist, and as such an open enemy to the Constitution of the United States and the principles upon which our country is founded.

“We, the members of this post, refuse to be a party to the action taken by our public officials and pledge ourselves to do everything in our power to bring the career of Mr. Gerson as a public official to a close as speedily as possible by refusing to pay our taxes now due on our property, so that the funds necessary to supply Mr. Gerson with his weekly pay check may not be available to our Mayor and President of the Borough of Manhattan, and

“We further resolve that we will request our friends and neighbors and other fellow citizens that we come in contact with to pursue the same course of action.

“We further resolve that copies of this resolution be forwarded to the county, State and national departments of our organization, with the request that they take similar action.

“Be it further resolved, also, that copies of this resolution be forwarded to the Mayor of the city of New York and to the President of the Borough of Manhattan.”

Gerson continued in the post until 1940. He then became the campaign manager of Pete Cacchione, who ran a victorious campaign for New York City Council as a Communist. He joined the U.S. military and served in the infantry in World War Ⅱ. I saw no sign that he joined the Richmond Hill War Veterans Post on his return home. He died in 2004, after a lifetime of service to the Communist Party of the U.S.