David Beito, who has written the book on property tax resistance in the U.S. during the Great Depression, profiles one of the movers-and-shakers of that movement — John Morgan Pratt — on History News Network.
Excerpts:
John Morgan Pratt led probably the largest tax strike in the United States since the Era of the American Revolution.
In , Pratt quit his newspaper job to take the helm as executive director of the Association of Real Estate Taxpayers (ARET), an organization of real-estate taxpayers in Chicago and Cook County.… , ARET organized a major tax strike.…
ARET functioned primarily as a cooperative legal service. Each member paid annual dues of $15 to fund lawsuits challenging the constitutionality of real-estate assessments. The radical side of the movement became apparent by when ARET called for taxpayers to withhold real-estate taxes (or “strike”) pending a final ruling by the Illinois Supreme Court, and later the U.S. Supreme Court. Mayor Anton Cermak and other politicians desperately tried to break the strike by threatening criminal prosecution of Pratt and other ARET leaders and revocation of city services.
ARET’s influence peaked in , with a membership approaching 30,000 (largely skilled workers and small-business owners). By this time, it had a budget of over $600,000 and a radio show in Chicago. But it suffered a demoralizing blow in when the U.S. Supreme Court refused to hear a case it had brought. Buffeted by political coercion and legal defeats, and torn by internal factionalism, the strike collapsed in .
