How you can resist funding the government → the tax resistance movement → birth of the modern American war tax resistance movement → Abraham J. Muste

I went to the library with my friend, the Techno-Pagan Octopus Messiah, who was doing some research on classical mythology. I didn’t have much to do myself except to admire the mild earthquake that hit just across the bay and rattled the books in their stacks, but in browsing I came across The Cold War and the Income Tax: A Protest by Edmund Wilson (). So today: a longish book review.

Wilson was an American literary critic and author who followed the familiar political arc of being an idealistic communist sympathizer who came to be disillusioned and horrified the more closely he looked at the Soviet experiment. “By when he finally published his epic history of socialism, To the Finland Station, seven years in the making, he had completely repudiated Russian socialism.”

His tax resistance was strangely half-hearted and muddled, and it’s strange to me that he devoted a book to it. The way he tells the story, “, I did not file any income tax returns.” Why? Not for any ideological or ethical reason. “I thought that this obligation could always be attended to later. I had no idea at that time of how heavy our taxation had become or of the severity of the penalties exacted for not filing tax returns.”

Wilson finally seeks out “an old friend of mine, an extremely able lawyer,” who told him that he was in danger of heavy fines and jail time and was in his opinion “in such a mess that he thought the best thing I could do was to become a citizen of some other country.” He instructed the lawyer instead to make out the returns for the years he had failed to file, along with a $9,000 down payment on whatever it was that he owed.

Subsequent chapters tell of Wilson’s struggles with what was already a labyrinthine and Kafkaesque IRS bureaucracy, which Wilson compares with those in the Soviet Union. The $9,000 he offers is laughably inadequate to pay what he owes, his fines, or even his eventual legal fees.

His troubles lead him to investigate the history of the income tax in the United States, and to write extensively on how the assumptions the IRS makes about how and when people earn income map poorly to the actual way a literary man like Wilson makes a living. He dives into the tax code and discovers that “[t]he question of what ought to be taxed and how much and which deductions ought to be allowed has reached a point of fine-spun complexity that — working in terms of a different set of values — recalls the far-fetched distinctions of medieval theology.”

And here what starts out looking like a literary man’s attempt to squeeze some wry observations out of an unfortunate and naïve encounter with the government at its bureaucratic best starts to turn. Wilson takes a long, hard look at the federal government’s budget and notices that huge hunks of it go to pay for wars past present and future and (this is , remember) the program to put a man on the moon. After a brief detour to contrast the lunar project with a project he thinks underfunded and more valuable — to publish collected editions of some of America’s finest authors (Wilson’s a literary guy, remember) — he dives a little deeper into the military budget.

He’s shocked and alarmed at the sums spent to fuel the arms race with the Soviet Union, and upset also at how enthusiastically his government pursues chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons technology — what now gets lumped under the “Weapons of Mass Destruction” banner. He determines, finally, that

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. But the taxpayers do support them, and that is why we cannot halt these activities.

And later:

I have said that it was difficult to understand, in what we call our free world, how it can come about that a scientist who has been working on CBR [Chemical, Biological, and Radiological weapons] but is dubious about the morality of what he is doing should not find it in his power to resign. But how free are we citizens of this free world to resign from the gigantic and demented undertakings to which our government has got us committed?

He makes also an interesting observation about how because of the importance of these problems, and because of the difficult and compelling moral demands they make on us, they have paradoxically disappeared from conversation — a strategy similar to not talking about a family member’s drinking problem in the hopes that this will make it as though it never existed in the first place:

[T]he United States, for all its so much advertized comforts, is today an uncomfortable place. It is idle for our “leaders” and “liberals” to talk about the necessity for Americans to recover their old idealism, to consecrate themselves again to their mission of liberation. Our national mission, if our budget proves anything, has taken on colossal dimensions, but in its interference in foreign countries and its support of oppressive regimes, it has hardly been a liberating mission, and the kind of idealism involved is becoming insane and intolerant in the manner of the John Birch Society. Even those who do not give much conscious thought to what has been taking place are discouraged and blocked in their work or alienated from their normal ambitions by the paralyzing chill of a national effort directed toward a blind dead end which is all the more horrifying and haunting for being totally inconsecutive with their daily lives and inapprehensible to their imaginations. The accomplished, the intelligent, the well-informed go on in their useful professions that require high integrity and intellect, but they suffer more and more from the crowding of an often unavowed constraint which may prevent them from allowing themselves to become too intelligent and well-informed or may drive them to indulge their skills in gratuitous and futile exercises. One notices in the conversation of this professional class certain inhibitions on free expression, a tacit understanding that certain matters had better not be brought into discussion, which sometimes makes one feel in such talk a kind of fundamental frivolity.

Wilson then goes on to tell the stories of a few people who were unable to successfully silence the yelps of their own cognitive dissonance. He starts with a case that until now I was unfamiliar with: that of Major Claude Eatherly, who commanded the bomber group that dropped the atom bombs on Japan, capping 13 months of duty in World War Ⅱ. Shortly afterwards, he became horrified by what he had done, and hopeless at the possibility of repenting for or earning forgiveness for willfully extinguishing so many lives and causing so much pain. He tried speaking out with pacifist groups, sending parts of his paycheck to Hiroshima, writing letters of apology, and at a couple of points attempted suicide. At one point “he set out to try to discredit the popular myth of the war hero [by] committing petty crimes from which he derived no benefit: he forged a check for a small amount and contributed the money to a fund for the children of Hiroshima. He held up banks and broke into post offices without ever taking anything.” Eatherly was confined to the Veterans’ Administration Hospital in Waco, Texas, from which he wrote:

Whilst in no sense, I hope, either a religious or a political fanatic, I have for some time felt convinced that the crisis in which we are all involved is one calling for a thorough reexamination of our whole scheme of values and of loyalties. In the past it has sometimes been possible for men to “coast along” without posing to themselves too many searching questions about the way they are accustomed to think and to act — but it is reasonably clear that our age is not one of these. On the contrary, I believe that we are rapidly approaching a situation in which we shall be compelled to reexamine our willingness to surrender responsibility for our thoughts and our actions to some social institution such as the political party, trade union, church or State. None of these institutions are adequately equipped to offer infallible advice on moral issues and their claim to offer such advice needs therefore to be challenged.

“Now, how is one to struggle against this situation?” asks Wilson. “Go on strike and refuse to pay taxes?” And much of the remainder of the book is devoted to people who decided to do just that. He is less interested in the people who are doing it my way (reducing income below the taxable threshold) and more interested in people like Dr. A.J. Muste, Eroseanna Robinson, Walter Gormly, and Rev. Maurice McCrackin all of whom confronted the IRS more directly and bore the brunt of its most vigorous enforcement efforts.

Wilson ends by asking: “And what is the author of this protest to do?”

I am not going to let myself be sent to Leavenworth, as Dr. McCrackin was. I have thought of establishing myself in a foreign country as my lawyer friend suggested and as I thought him rather absurd for suggesting. I do feel that I must not violate the agreement I have signed with the government to surrender for three years longer all the income that I take in above a certain taxable amount. My original delinquency was due not to principle but to negligence; but I now grudge every penny of the imposition, and I intend to outmaneuver this agreement, as well as the basic taxes themselves by making as little money as possible and so keeping below taxable levels. I have always thought myself patriotic and have been in the habit in the past of favorably contrasting the United States with Europe and the Soviet Union; but our country has become today a huge blundering power unit controlled more and more by bureaucracies whose rule is making it more and more difficult to carry on the tradition of American individualism; and since I can accept neither this power unit’s aims nor the methods it employs to finance them, I have finally come to feel that this country, whether or not I continue to live in it, is no longer any place for me.

Wilson was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom that The Cold War and the Income Tax was published, strangely. I haven’t been able to find on-line (and haven’t been back to the library to research) how Wilson’s attempts at income limitation worked out, or indeed whether he stuck with his plan at all after the book was published.

, I dropped the name of Dr. A.J. Muste, who was briefly profiled in Edmund Wilson’s book The Cold War and the Income Tax: A Protest (). Here’s an example of where he is mentioned in the book:

[H]ow is one to struggle against this situation? Go on strike and refuse to pay taxes?… The alternative[s include]… see[ing] to it that your income is never allowed to rise above the taxable level. Dr. A.J. Muste, the secretary emeritus of the Fellowship of Reconciliation, has, in his own case, refused to accept this solution. “Voluntarily keeping one’s income down,” he writes, “does not commend itself to me as a form of tax protest. I do not see how one can in effect recognize that a government may determine one’s standard of living or think that permitting the government to do so constitutes a significant protest against war taxation.”

Needless to say, I disagree. But I don’t think that myself & Dr. Muste are so much in disagreement as we are talking past each other a bit. Muste, I think, sees tax protest as a symbolic and confrontational act of opposition; I see tax refusal as a more practical and non-confrontational act of enlightened self-interest. Of course, if tax protest is supposed to be confrontational, then doing it by the government’s own rules is pointless. If, on the other hand, the goal is simply to stop contributing to the funding of the government, then it may be the best available avenue to that end.

Am I letting the government “determine my standard of living” this way? Well, I guess that’s one way of looking at it. But if the alternatives are letting the government declare me an outlaw and seize my property and person by force, or, on the other hand, letting the government declare a percentage of my income its own that it can spend on reprehensible activities… I’ll prefer to let the government determine my standard of living.

I briefly covered A.J. Muste’s opposition to my tax resistance method. “Voluntarily keeping one’s income down,” he wrote, “does not commend itself to me as a form of tax protest. I do not see how one can in effect recognize that a government may determine one’s standard of living or think that permitting the government to do so constitutes a significant protest against war taxation.”

My response to this was:

Am I letting the government “determine my standard of living” this way? Well, I guess that’s one way of looking at it. But if the alternatives are letting the government declare me an outlaw and seize my property and person by force, or, on the other hand, letting the government declare a percentage of my income its own that it can spend on reprehensible activities… I’ll prefer to let the government determine my standard of living.

Earlier this year, Greg Swann at presenceofmind.net reconstructed Muste’s argument from an egoist / objectivist foundation. He at times seems to be shouting past his critics rather than debating them, but he has put considerable time and effort into trying to persuade libertarians to give up on what he calls “vanity” tax resistance. Echoing Muste, Swann writes: “Deliberately frustrating your own goals in vengeance against the state seems to me to be enslaving yourself in the name of liberty.”

He notes that tax resisters like myself are only going part-way — not paying the income tax, and maybe an excise tax or two, but still “up to [our] neck[s] in the Kleptocratic quicksand. Property taxes, sales taxes, excise taxes, fuel taxes, sin taxes and every precious fee down at the Dee-Emm-Vee — all of them paid, freely, voluntarily, even eagerly. On the other side, ‘free’ water, ‘free’ books, ‘free’ roads, ‘free’ bandwidth — all of them lapped up greedily, avidly, without a second thought.”

If you’re in for a penny, you’re in for a pound. Libertarians choose — freely, explicitly, consciously, repeatedly, happily — to be Good Germans. If they are Scofflaws here or there, this might be a vice. It’s more likely a vanity. But it is not a Rebellion. To implicitly and consistently support Good Germanism when doing so is fruitful, but to explicitly reject the Good German principle when doing so is convenient is specious. If you take the water, you’ll take the war. This is the actual Consent of the Governed. Governments fall when the Good Germans withdraw all of their consent, not just slivers of it. Governments fall when the Good Germans become Rebels. Not before.

(Gandhi, I remember, had the same insight: that you support a government not only by what you give to it, but what you take from it. To the extent that you rely on or are dependent on a government, you help prop it up. He wrote: “there is no State run by Nero or Mussolini which has not good points about it, but we have to reject the whole, once we decide to non-co-operate with the system. ‘There are in our country grand public roads, and palatial educational institutions,’ said I to myself, ‘but they are part of a system which crushes the nation. I should not have anything to do with them. They are like the fabled snake with a brilliant jewel on its head, but which has fangs full of poison.’ So I came to the conclusion that the British rule in India had crushed the spirit of the nation and stunted its growth, and so I decided to deny myself all the privileges, services, courts, titles.”)

Tax resistance is only a “gesture,” Swann writes, and “I think it is vain to suppose that anything will change in response to what amounts to a gesture.” Swann’s own proposed response to our problem, however:

is to stand up for what is right. Ayn Rand said one must never grant evil a moral sanction, and that alone is enough for now. Not arguing, not hectoring, it is sufficient to say… “That may be your belief, but I do not share it.”

A simple declaration that you do not give a moral sanction to your despoilers, as and where it is required. Without anger, without fear, without shame, without guilt, a simple dispassionate statement of your right as an individual to be an individual. To any rejoinder, it is sufficient to say, “I am as entitled to my beliefs as you are to yours.” If your interlocutor persists, your reply is any form of, “I am a free and equal citizen and I am not subject to your oversight.”

To this he adds that “you should work to structure your world as” a world in which “you get what you pay for and you pay for what you get.”

This is all no more than a gesture, too, for now. But it is a conceptual gesture, the communication of vitally important ideas, not a pantomime subject to misapprehension, misrepresentation or simply neglect. Will it effect immediate, dramatic changes? Probably not. Will it change all of the world, eventually? It will, much as the original Hellenic assertion of individuality did.

I haven’t been convinced by Swann’s argument to trade my vain gesture for his conceptual one, but I appreciate his attempts to expand on Muste’s dissent to this tax resistance strategy.

Hill’s tax resistance declaration can be found in the book We Won’t Pay!: A Tax Resistance Reader.

I just noticed this interview with Julia “Butterfly” Hill from in which she discusses her war tax resistance:

Gar Smith: Could you talk a little about your family upbringing and how that brought you to your decision to refuse to pay federal taxes. I understand that your father was a minister.

Julia Butterfly Hill: Yes, my father was a traveling preacher. He and my mother were both raised Catholic and converted to Baptist and later became nondenominational so I was raised in a nondenominational evangelical upbringing. My father always taught from a place of “How does this book known as the Bible apply to who we are today?” He was really about teaching what it means to be a loving, committed, active spiritual person in the world.

That upbringing, I feel, has been very core to who I am because it has really become my foundation. How do I keep a core sense of the sacred as my foundation in everything I do and everything that I say?

GS: A lot of us grew up with that and it’s not just a core feeling that we share as a family value but it’s something we think of as a core set of beliefs that used to apply to this country as a nation. I’d like to hope that we could find our way back to that.

, you stood on the steps of the Federal Building and issued your formal public statement about why you were resisting taxes — joining people like Joan Baez, Noam Chomsky and others. What were the repercussions of that act?

JB: I have to say I “redirect” my taxes rather than “resisting” my taxes. Because I actually take the money that the IRS says goes to them and I give it to the places where our taxes should be going. And in my letter to the IRS I said: “I’m not refusing to pay my taxes. I’m actually paying them but I’m paying them where they belong because you refuse to do so.” They are not directing our money where it should be going, they are being horrific stewards of that money.

If we had an investment with a fund-management system and they were doing a terrible job of investing our funds, we would pull those funds and re-invest them with a management fund that was stewarding our money properly. Yet, for some reason, we don’t do that with our taxes and with the IRS and with our government. So I said, “Well, I’m sorry. You’re not managing these funds appropriately and you’re not balancing them wisely and you’re not investing them properly, so I’m going to have to take this money from you and invest it myself.

GS: This is an argument that supports not just environmentalists and pacifists, but anybody with good business sense should not be investing in this “company.”

JB: That’s right! I majored in business in college and so I’m always looking at where is the wise investment — in time, in energy and monetary resources. What is the smartest investment? And anyone who is a smart businessperson should look at how much is being invested in our government and where that is actually being spent. I don’t think anyone but a select few people will think that the rate of return on that currently is a wise investment.

GS: What local organizations are you giving money to? How does that happen?

JB: I have learned so much in collaboration with War Resisters network. The People’s Life Fund is one of the ways people can give money to help a myriad of causes (as well as help people who suffer negative responses from the government for taking this step of conscience and redirecting their taxes). I’ve directed this money to all the places where our money should be going — after school, arts and cultural programs, community gardens. A huge portion of my funds (not only from my “redirection” but also from funds that I raise speaking at colleges) goes to indigenous peoples in this country. All of the wealth in this country is built on what was stolen from the original peoples and then through slavery. I look to redirecting money back to where our money comes from — from human and planetary resources. So a large portion has gone to support native peoples’ subsistence, sovereignty and spirituality. I’ve redirected money into the Alternatives to Incarceration Program. I believe our prison-industrial complex is clear-cutting our diversity and clear-cutting our youth and our humanity. That’s a big passion of mine.

And, of course, environmental protection. Particularly endangered, old-growth forest issues, wetlands (which are a very threatened area) and some prairie protection as well. The list goes on.

GS: I was at a War Resisters League meeting a couple of weeks ago at the St. Martin de Porres food kitchen in San Francisco and one of the startling statements that cropped up at the meeting was that at least 25 percent of American people don’t pay taxes — legally. And somebody asked: “Does that include corporations?” Well, of course not: the figure is much higher for corporations. It is possible to legally not pay taxes by using available deductions and small-business options. Are you trying to use any of those legal strategies or is this an outright redirection of tax money?

JB: I’m currently not employing the various forms of legal ways of tax [resistance] because, for me, it was important to take the conscious, conscientious, political stand. Not just to work within the system but to say that the system is inherently flawed and highly destructive. It was absolutely crucial that I also take a stand outside that system. It’s a devastated system and, just as we look at a devastated ecosystem and think about how to restore it, the same thing applies with this [tax] system. That’s part of why I’ve chosen to take this very public, political stand…

Taxes are not inherently evil. When we come together as a community and collectively pool our resources, the good we can do is absolutely inspiring. On the other hand, the devastation we can wreak upon the planet and its people is horrific. And currently [the U.S. tax] system is doing that. Because of that, it is absolutely crucial that more and more of us take the political stand and say it’s time to transform the system.

GS: Has your public statement inspired others to consider this as a moral option?

JB: It’s been incredible how many people have come out of the most surprising places saying “I want to know more about this! Is it safe to do? Is it not safe to do?” [There are] organizations like War Resisters and the network of the war tax resistance community I can direct people to. I became well-known for living in a tree for over two years, but that tree-sit — although it was the longest in history — was only able to be that tree-sit because of wonderful history of a movement that built it to a place where we could carry out an action like that.

It’s exactly the same with [the war-tax resistance] movement. For over 30 years, the war-resistance community has been saying “Here’s the plethora, the rainbow, of information. You can sit with that information and find out what most resonates for you and cultivate from that list a way for you to take your next step.” It’s great to have that network to be able to direct people into.

GS: Now for a question about the response from the other side of the spectrum. How has the government responded?

JB: Well, I knew when I took this action that the government was going to do one of two things: they were either going to come down quick and hard or they were going to ignore me. And I felt the same would probably happen within the media. The media pretty much ignored me. The IRS responded very, very quickly.

My lawyer asked me: “What did you do to upset them? They never respond that quickly? What did you do?” And I said, “I think it’s partly because of who I am and partly because of the letter I wrote.” He got back to me and said: “Yes, you’re right. I asked them: you’re right.”

At this point, I’ve gotten through the first round of hearings. They’ve gone well. It’s “in the process.” In this process, anything can happen. There can be compromises that are reached; there can be an endless amount of paperwork that never turns into anything at all (just back-and-forth paperwork and lawyers talking to each other); or there can be a mandate into court.

It’s been a joy for me. Every time I see another newspaper headline about yet more war and devastation happening, there’s such a joy for me — even being caught in the “process” right now, as noxious and time-consuming as that can be. There is such a sense of liberation and joy every time I see one of those headlines and know that I can say: “I am not contributing to that. I’m contributing to a healthy world and a happy planet and a world that works for all.”

A little bit of headache and some legal fees and whatever may come it’s absolutely worth it to me every time I walk down the street and I’m able to say: “I’m contributing to a different headline.”

GS: The great American pacifist A.J. Muste once said: “People are drafted through the Selective Service; money is drafted through the Internal Revenue Service.” So, you’ve “liberated” your money (or, at least it’s standing its own — against the assault of a government that would take it hostage). What are your thoughts about the environmental rationale for refusing taxes and, also, the spiritual nature of it?

JB: I was in [the tree I named] Luna when the war, under the Clinton administration, broke out in Yugoslavia. I was praying on how to help because I felt it so deeply. I’m that kind of person: I feel the interconnection of issues very deeply and very profoundly. I’m not just an “environmentalist.” I’m not just a “joyous vegan.” I’m not just a “war-tax redirector.” I’m not these segments. I’m about the interconnection.

And as I was praying I saw a bulls-eye. At that time [in Yugoslavia], people were running out on bridges with bulls-eyes painted on their shirts because their communities were being targeted by the U.S. and other [NATO] countries. What the people were saying is: “Hey, you’re turning us into targets. This isn’t some war on some evil dictator.”

The answer that came to me is that, in the war of politics, power and profit, all of life becomes a target. And what people need to realize is that [given] where our taxes are currently going, we are actually supporting an unprecedented war on the planet and all of the life on it — the human life, the plant life, the animal life. We are a global community and this war being perpetuated with our money, under our name if we pay taxes under our name, under our watch, for this unprecedented war. It’s happening to the forest. It’s happening to ecosystems across the country. It’s happening around the world.

The devastation of Iraq! That land that is now being devastated by war under the guise of “freedom and liberation” used to be known, in Biblical times, as one of the most decadently rich, life-giving areas in the entire region. And now it’s a desert wasteland because war does not discriminate — it affects everything. And now, with our money, we’re having a war on kids, we’re having a war on education, we’re having a war on elders, we’re having a war on healthcare, we’re having a war on the planet and all of its life-giving systems. We’re having a war on our global family around the world.

Every time that we pay taxes or spend a penny on anything, we’re either voting for that war or we’re voting for peace and healing. And, if we want to stand up and say: “Shame on the Bush administration! Shame on these corporations! Shame! Shame! Shame!” we have to remember, as we point our fingers at the Bush administration, that there’s three fingers pointing back at us.

If we are not holding ourselves accountable, I don’t feel that we actually have the right to say “Shame!” unless we include ourselves in that shame. I would rather include ourselves in a stand — in a real stand for peace, for healing, for justice — where we are actually living it, not just talking about it.

Some other Picket Line entries about Julia “Butterfly” Hill’s tax resistance:

The Progressive, in , carried an article from Milton Mayer about tax resistance:

If You Want Mylai, Buy It

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 , the St. Petersburg Times covered the early days of the modern American war tax resistance in the Peacemakers group:

Group Plans Tax Strike

Pacifists Balk At Helping Pay For U.S. Defense

New York — (AP) — A pacifist Presbyterian minister said 150 members of a peace-seeking group had decided they would not pay any Federal income taxes to be used for financing “war preparations.”

The Rev. A.J. Muste, national secretary of the Peacemaker said yesterday he himself was one of “about 15” members of the organization in the New York City area who have launched the tax resistance movement.

Muste described the Peacemakers as a “non-violent revolutionary pacifist group engaged in a campaign similar to that of the late Mahatma Gandhi in India.” The organization has about 2,000 members, he said.

The 150 persons throughout the country who have joined in the tax resistance movement, Muste said, have either decided “to withhold all their taxes or just that part of them which proportionately would go to war preparations.”

Muste predicted general resistance to war preparedness in the form of refusals to register for draft and the tax resistance movement would increase.

He said the Peacemakers organization is “completely non-political, opposed to totalitarianism in any form, including communism.”

Muste also is national chairman of the Fellowship of Reconciliation which he described as a religious organization numbering some 15,000 and dedicated to peace.

Meanwhile, in Yellow Springs, O., a 75-year-old Quaker widow deducted 32.2 per cent from the first installment of her income tax because she said “war and preparation for war in the atomic era is a crime against humanity.”

Mrs. Caroline Urie failed in a similar protest. She deducted 34.6 per cent of her estimated tax for the year, but, after taxes in her bracket were reduced, she had still paid more than was called for and at the year’s end the government owed her money.

She said yesterday she had made sure the same things wouldn’t happen . She said she would withhold the full amount of military taxes by paying only the first installment of the tax now and giving herself until , to pay the final quarter.

From the New York Times:

41 Pacifists Oppose Tax

Refusal to Pay Whole Income Levy Laid to “War” Spending

An increase of persons refusing to pay full income tax was announced by Peacemakers, a pacifist organization with offices at 2013 Fifth Avenue. The group reported that twenty-five men and sixteen women had declared publicly that they would refuse to pay the entire tax because they were “unwilling to contribute to preparations for war.”

The organization added that some of the forty-one persons would pay no portion of their tax, “since they maintain that the major activity of the Federal Government at this time is war.” A.J. Muste, a Presbyterian minister who is secretary of the organization, was opposed to both World Wars.

I like the “non-Communist demonstrators” bit. From the New York Times (excerpt):

In a faint protest against tax funds going for military spending, ten non-Communist demonstrators picketed the office of the Third Internal Revenue District at 110 East Forty-fifth Street and reported that forty-one persons in the nation were refusing to pay part of their income taxes because of objections to arming.

The anti-war pickets at the Third District, who paraded , called themselves the Tax Refusal Committee of Peacemakers with headquarters at 2013 Fifth Avenue. They distributed leaflets saying that the “real crime in connection with the Bureau of Internal Revenue” is not corruption but collection of money for “preparations for mass murder — for a third world war.”

Among the forty-one Americans listed as refusing to pay part of their taxes as an anti-arms protest were the Rev. A.J. Muste and the Rev. George M. Houser, both officers of the Fellowship of Reconciliation, a pacifist group; James Peck, a restaurant worker, of 552 Riverside Drive, and his wife, and Miss Mary S. McDowell, a retired school teacher, of 555 Ocean Avenue, Brooklyn.

Mr. Hoffman said his district had received “maybe a dozen” letters from taxpayers declaring that they were paying only 45 per cent of their taxes, to cover non-arms parts of the Federal budget. The collector reported that the office would bill them for the rest and attach their property is [sic] necessary.

Some of these names are pretty new to me. George M. Houser I think is still around, and you can find some stuff on line about him and his long career in activism.

Mary S. McDowell was fired from her job as a teacher for the crime of being a pacifist. As the Times put it at the time: “officials feel that a teacher with pacifist views cannot give satisfactory service at present because of the many war-time activities engaging the attention of the children.” She apparently wrote some editorials on the subject of war tax resistance, but I haven’t found them yet. An excerpt from a letter she wrote to the IRS in , the year before she died, reads:

In reply to your notice of that I owe… 246.28… I believe that war is wicked and contrary to our democratic faith… and it is also contrary to our Christian faith which teaches us to overcome evil with good. Moreover, in the atomic age and in an interdependent world, even victorious war could only bring disaster to our own country as well as others. War preparations and threats of atomic war cannot give us security. True patriotism calls for world-wide cooperation for human welfare and immediate steps toward universal disarmament through the United Nations. Accordingly, I still refuse to pay the 70% of the tax which I calculate is the proportion of the tax used for present and future wars. The portion used for civilian welfare I am glad to pay.

Among James Peck’s other adventures in pacifist agitation included a three-year stint in prison as a draft resister during World War Ⅱ, piloting a sailboat into a nuclear weapons testing zone in the Pacific to try to disrupt the tests, engaging in the Freedom Rides and attempts to integrate restaurants in the South, and disrupting an event where President Lyndon Johnson was scheduled to accept the “National Freedom Award” from the U.S.-government funded group Freedom House to give him lip about Vietnam.

From the New York Times:

“Peacemakers” Convene

Group Organized to Fight Draft With “Gandhian Methods”

Chicago,  — The Peacemakers, organized a year ago in Chicago to apply “Gandhian methods” to resist militarism and conscription, opened its first annual conference here .

Attended by 200 delegates from about fifteen states, the first sessions of the meeting were devoted to reports from committees and speeches by four young men who explained their reasons for refusing to register for the draft. A.J. Muste of New York, secretary of the group’s national committee, presided.

In a press conference, the Rev. Ernest Bromley of Wilmington, Ohio, chairman of the organization’s tax refusal committee, said that on forty-three persons from various parts of the country “concertedly refused to pay all or part of their income taxes on the ground that such funds were being devoted to preparation for atomic and biological warfare.”

From the St. Petersburg Times, :

360 Refuse To Pay Tax On Income

New York (UPI) — At least 360 persons, including a Nobel Prize winner, a leading folk-singer, and a controversial Yale professor, have refused to pay all or part of their federal income taxes for in protest to “illegal use” of U.S. forces in such areas as Viet Nam and the Dominican Republic.

A statement issued by the group said some of the protestors will leave their tax money in banks where it can be seized by the Internal Revenue Service. Others, it said, will contribute the money to charities.

The Federal Revenue Code provides for jail sentences of up to one year and fines as high as $10,000 for conviction of willful refusal to pay federal income taxes.

Among the protestors who signed the statement were Prof. Albert Szent-Gyorgyi, nobel prize-winning bio-chemist; folk singer Joan Baez; Prof. Staughton Lynd of Yale, who made an unauthorized trip to Viet Nam last December; veteran pacifist the Rev. A.J. Muste; Helen Merrell Lynd; co-author of “Middletown;[”] poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti; publisher Lyle Stuart; Prof. William Davidon of Haverford College; Prof. Carroll C. Pratt of Rider College; editor Dorothy Day of The Catholic Worker, and Prof. John M. Vickers of the University of Illinois.

A version of the same story in The Milwaukee Journal has some minor wording changes, lists CARE and UNICEF as two of the charities some of the resisters are redirecting their taxes to, notes that “Almost every state in the union is represented in the group,” and adds a couple of paragraphs about Wisconsin resisters:

Dr. Carl M. Kline, a Wausau psychiatrist who formerly practiced in Milwaukee, was one of the signers. He said: “I am just going to refuse to pay a part of it, and I will leave that money in my bank account. I realize you can’t beat this thing, but it is a matter of expressing my feelings. I am a Quaker, and I am against war altogether, but I feel particularly that our action in Vietnam is wrong, and this is my way of protesting. I wish I could do more.”

Another Wisconsin signer was Kenneth Knudson, of Madison. Knudson picketed the Madison internal revenue office in and to protest use of federal funds for military purposes.

That article also adds this detail:

Miss Baez earlier had refused to pay 60% of her federal income tax to protest government expenditures for armament. The internal revenue service collected more than $34,000 from her after attaching a lien to her income and property.

On , The Deseret News published a piece on the American war tax resistance movement:

Why They Won’t Pay

Millions of Americans are sitting up late these nights, agonizing over their financial records, fighting their way through a maze of federal regulations and puzzling over the inconsistencies of their own arithmetical prowess. They’re involved in the nation’s annual orgy of self-revelation: preparation of personal income tax returns.

For many, hours of hard labor will be crowned by the distasteful task of getting out the bankbook, figuring out whether to refinance the car or postpone that midwinter vacation and then writing a check to Uncle Sam for the amount still owed. But for a few, the culmination of the long agony of tax forms will be the pleasure of writing a little note to the tax collector, and sending that instead of a check.

The note will say simply that the author is not paying 10 per cent, or 23 per cent or 67 per cent, or all of his federal income tax as a protest against the Vietnam war. In a few months, after the exchange of some nasty notes, the Internal Revenue Service will almost certainly get its money, with interest — from the offender’s bank account, by seizing his paychecks or perhaps by selling his car. But even though the protester is clearly violating the law, there is almost no chance he will go to jail. Meanwhile, the nontaxpayer will have made his point: that he disagrees with government policy on Vietnam and that he is not voluntarily financing the war.

Estimates of how many protesters are not paying their taxes vary widely. A spokesman for the Internal Revenue Service in Washington said that in , only 583 persons who filed returns did not pay all or part of their taxes as a protest. This was out of a national total of 73,000,000. But other estimates are higher. Maris Cakars, the enthusiastic young Oceanside native who runs the New York-based Tax Resistance Project of the War Resisters League, said that he had on file 1,000 names of persons who said they refused to pay all or part of their federal income tax . Predictably, the government says the number of protesters has leveled off. The protesters say it is climbing.

A larger group has taken to refusing to pay its telephone tax — the 10 per cent federal excise tax added each month to each customer’s phone bill. This tax was continued in largely to pay the costs of Vietnam. According to a spokesman for American Telephone & Telegraph Co., about 5,600 telephone users nationwide refused to pay the tax on their bills in the third quarter of . This has remained constant since late , he said. However, Cakars said he believed the figure was closer to 10,000, while the IRS said there were 18,000 cases in . But the IRS spokesman added that many of these were repeaters — one customer who refused to pay for 12 months would be counted as 12 in that figure.

The most famous offender is folk singer Joan Baez. Since , she has been withholding roughly 60 per cent of her federal taxes, which she says is the portion of federal expenditures used to support past, present and future wars. This is in the form of the present defense budget, veterans’ benefits and interest on the portion of the national debt paid for past wars. The IRS has merely attached a lien on her bank account, and has recovered most of what she owes plus interest and penalties.

Other notables have also expressed interest in such protest. In , when Congress was initially considering levying a 10 per cent surtax which most believed was to support the Vietnamese war, 448 writers and editors signed a newspaper advertisement stating that they would not pay the surtax or any other war-designated increase. About a third also added that they would not pay the 23 per cent of the current taxes that they believed was financing the Vietnam war effort. When action on the surtax was postponed several months — past the filing deadline — the movement fell apart and no one kept any records of how many did not pay. Gerald Walker, an editor of The New York Times Magazine, who organized the protest, recently refused even to talk about the effort.

Willful failure to file a return or to pay taxes owed are both punishable by fines of up to $10,000 and jail terms up to a year. But both the government and those organizing tax resistance say that only a handful of tax protesters have spent any time behind bars since the end of World War Ⅱ. The longest period known was six months by a New London, Conn., man. He served his time not for refusing to pay taxes, but for contempt of court, when he defied a court order to tell where he had his bank account. Nobody is in jail for tax resistance at the present time, according to the IRS. The revenue service has little interest in locking up tax delinquents, a spokesman said recently. “In most cases, we have gotten the money,” he said. “All we want to do is to get the money that’s coming to us. After all, is IRS going to ask the Justice Department to go to a federal grand jury and get a jury trial to put a man in jail for a dollar, when all we have to do is go to his bank account? These people are making a protest, but most of them are doing it openly, so there’s no fraud or evasion. This way, they apparently feel they’ve satisfied their protest feelings, and we end up getting the money anyway — sometimes with added penalties.” Since Vietnam, he said, the most drastic step the IRS has taken was to seize a California man’s car, sell it and deduct the owed taxes. “He ended up buying his car back anyway,” the spokesman said.

The government, the protesters claim, is also anxious to avoid a confrontation that would produce a test case, a martyr and added publicity. “We’re anxious for a confrontation,” said Cakars. “It would help to add one more serious headache for the government while the war goes on.”

One New York lawyer, who has advised protesters on tax evasion and refusal, doubts that the government would dare prosecute protesters on a large scale. “Many people would be delighted to be put in jail for a cause like this who would not like to be put in jail for passing a red light,” he said. “But the government doesn’t want to raise the issue that someone is being put in jail for not paying $14. It’s the same reason they are so slow to prosecute for burning a draft card.” The lawyer added that any massive prosecution would tend to win sympathy for the protesters from many persons who are now neutral or apathetic. “If they become too repressive, it sounds too much like 1984,” the lawyer said.

So far, the protest movement has been limited mainly to longtime pacifists and professionals. Pacifists have been protesting the use of tax money for armaments for years. The movement was popularized after World War Ⅱ by the late A.J. Muste, clergyman-philosopher, who refused to pay his taxes . Cakars’ War Resisters League, which is one of the organizations promoting tax resistance to its mailing list of 10,000, has been in business advocating peace policies since World War Ⅰ.

Since the Vietnam war most of those who have joined the protest are professionals and intellectuals. Many are clustered around college towns, such as Cambridge, Mass., and Berkeley Calif. Professionals are particularly attracted, said Cakars, because they are often self-employed and therefore not subject to employers’ withholding their taxes.

One organizer who has hopes of expanding the protest to the middle class is Ted Webster, a self-employed publisher in Roxbury, Mass. Webster started the Roxbury War Tax Scholarship Fund, into which tax protesters have put $8,000. The money is kept in a savings account, and only Webster keeps records of how much belongs to each protester, thereby preventing the government from seizing the individual’s money. Interest goes to a scholarship for a poor Negro student.

Webster says he is not a pacifist but merely objects to his tax moneys being spent on the “boon-doggle and pork-barrel military-industrial complex.” He counts on the increasing discontent of the great bulk of U.S. taxpayers to add fuel to the protest, as more and more question the need for the present level of military spending. “I’m trying to convey to taxpayers generally that a good deal of their money is generally being wasted,” Webster said. “Americans don’t mind killing people, as long as it doesn’t cost us anything. But now it’s coming home to the middle class, who are being hit hard with taxes and getting a bit uptight about it.”

Reasons for tax resistance vary, but most of those interviewed said they were too old to refuse to be drafted, or felt they had been denied a pro-peace choice among the presidential candidates, or felt that, in accordance with the results of the Nuremberg was crimes trials, they did not want to contribute voluntarily to a government policy which they feel is immoral. E. Russell Stabler, a special associate professor of mathematics at Hofstra University who has not paid the balance due on his income tax , said: “I feel we are bound by a higher law. We cannot abide by the U.S. income tax law and at the same time avoid responsibility for criminal acts committed in our name and by conscription of our own funds.” He said that he willingly told the IRS where his bank account was, and that the money, plus penalties, had been seized each year. But at least his conscience is absolved. “It’s just a different view of patriotism from the standard one,” he said with a chuckle. “We used to offer to pay the money we owed into a special fund earmarked for constructive, peaceful purposes, but the government wasn’t interested.” Did Stabler, who is 62, ever fear being jailed? “I suppose anybody who does this runs a risk of going to jail eventually, but the government has been fairly generous about it,” he said.

Like most college faculty members, Stabler has not been threatened by his employer for his unorthodox views. There is talk among war protesters that others have had their jobs threatened or even lost them, for nonpayment of taxes. But this is difficult to substantiate because employer disapproval of an unorthodox employe can be subtle and may also be attributable to other “quirks” in the employe. Employers do, however, cooperate with the IRS by making protesters’ paychecks available for seizure — in fact they are required to by federal law.

One protester who has so far avoided all government attempts to collect his back taxes is Eric Weinberger, who is a paid worker for the Fifth Avenue Peace Parade Committee. His employer has refused to turn over his paychecks to the IRS although Weinberger has not paid anything for five years. He said he does not own a car or a house and has so little money that he does not even have a bank account that can be seized. He has been threatened with prosecution, he said, but no further action has been taken. He added with a note of resignation, “I suppose they’ll find some way to get it eventually. But they’ll have to take it. I’m a pacifist and I don’t intend to give them my money for the purpose of war.”

I’m a little surprised I hadn’t come across the name Maris Cakars before in my research. He was active with the War Resisters League and with the Committee for Non-Violent Action during the Vietnam War period, and both of those organizations were close to the war tax resistance movement of the time.

Of the other tax resisters mentioned in the article whose names I hadn’t come across before — E[dward?]. Russell Stabler, Gerald Walker, Ted Webster, and Eric Weinberger — I wasn’t able to find out much more. You can find some of Stabler’s work in mathematics on-line. Walker is mentioned in a couple of articles about the Writers & Editors war tax protest, and besides his work for The New York Times Magazine is also known as the author of the novel Cruising which was adapted into the Al Pacino movie of the same name. Ted Webster remains a mystery to me. I found a photo of an Eric Weinberger from serving up food to the homeless in front of the Bush/Quayle campaign headquarters in Boston in a “Food Not Bombs” action — perhaps the same Eric Weinberger, perhaps not.

Andrea Ayvazian has a thoughtful essay on her thirty years of war tax resistance in the Hampshire Gazette. Here’s an excerpt:

Some have called war tax resistance a silent scream — a protest that no one hears or cares about. Some have pointed out that the government receives, in the end, more money than what was originally owed. Some have said it is an insignificant protest carried out by a small self-righteous few who do not prevent war from happening and are not making a difference.

Those are just a few of the objections I have heard over the years and all the criticisms have some merit.

But I continue. I remember the Quaker activist A.J. Muste who, during the Vietnam War, was vigiling alone in a cold November rain in front of the White House protesting the war when a reporter stopped and said, “Mr. Muste, do you really think you can change the world standing out here alone in the rain with a candle?” Mr. Muste quickly replied, “Oh I don’t do this to change the world. I do this so the world won’t change me.”

I am a war tax resister so the world won’t change me. But I have other motivations as well. I believe that when people act on their most deeply held values something in the universe shifts — even if it is imperceptible to the one taking the action. I have not stopped one war in 30 years. And I have probably not prevented one bullet from being produced. But I also have been a cog in the war machine system that just won’t mesh — a tiny cog, a small blip, a middle-aged woman with a form and a letter who says year after year after year: life is precious.

From the New York Times (excerpts):

Dauntless Pacifist

Abraham Johannes Muste

The tax deadline passed , and for the 19th time the Rev. A.J. Muste’s tax return was among the missing.

, the Internal Revenue Service has received from Mr. Muste only a Bible, a copy of Thoreau’s essay “Civil Disobedience” and a three-page typewritten outline of the principles that he feels prevent him from making a contribution to the armaments of the United States.

The Federal Government won a judgment against Mr. Muste in but so far has not tried to collect on it by attaching his small retirement income. This leaves the case in a sort of standoff, which is the way the 81-year-old pacifist would like all disputes to end. [sic!]

Here is an excerpt from Scott H. Bennett’s Radical Pacifism: The War Resisters League and Gandhian Nonviolence in America concerning the origins of the modern American war tax resistance movement:

In a small tax resistance movement emerged when several tax refusers learned about one another and began to correspond. Many of these early tax resisters were WRL members. Abraham Kaufman, the League’s executive secretary, facilitated many of these contacts. At its founding conference in , Peacemakers established a Tax Refusal Committee. League members formed a majority on this committee, which was chaired by Ernest Bromley, a Methodist minister and the nation’s leading proponent of tax resistance.

For the next two decades, Bromley championed tax resistance and publicized examples from three continents to demonstrate its power. American examples included Quaker tax resistance during both the French and Indian War and the American Revolution, the popular tax protests by colonists during the American Revolution, and Henry David Thoreau’s refusal to pay the Massachusetts poll tax to protest the Mexican War. He also cited England’s Wat Tyler (fourteenth century) and John Hampden (seventeenth century). Finally, he invoked Gandhi and the Indian independence movement; both resorted to tax resistance in the struggle against British rule.

For both moral and pragmatic reasons, tax resistance appealed to Peacemakers and to radical pacifists. Most important, it enabled absolutists to express their total commitment against militarism and war. The Peacemakers’ literature underscored this uncompromising position. One publication explained that tax resistance “is not merely a protest. It is an act.” Aware that modern, technological warfare required huge expenditures, tax resisters were seeking to cripple war preparation — and war — through nonpayment of taxes. Other literature asserted that nearly 35 percent of the national budget was earmarked for the military and that 80 percent paid for past, present, and future wars. The “new push-button type warfare,” Bromley declared, would require “more drafted dollars than drafted men.” Tax resisters were hoping to influence American policy by publicly repudiating military preparedness and weapon stockpiling before conflict broke out again. Unlike COs and nonregistration, tax resistance was both age and gender neutral. By enabling men and women of all ages and occupations to participate, tax refusal expanded the sphere of war resistance and promoted solidarity with draft-eligible men.

Ernest and Marion Bromley, whose Wilmington, Ohio, home served as unofficial headquarters of the Tax Refusal Committee, embodied the spirit of tax resistance. “The time has now come,” Ernest exclaimed in his IRS tax statement, “when men ought no longer to depend solely upon their spoken witness against war or preparation for it. They ought to prepare themselves for an outright resistance by a thorough-going dissociation with the war-making system.” In her letter to the tax collector, Marion charged that “this country did not turn to peace at the end of World War Ⅱ, but instead sought to protect and expand an American Empire,” declaring “I want to dissociate myself as completely as possible from these tragic, suicidal and evil policies… and to do all I can to convince my fellow citizens that we must completely renounce the way of war and violence.” The Bromleys believed that radical pacifist individuals and organizations must assume risks for war resistance. Anticipating the New Left, Ernest asserted: “Pacifists believe… that there is a… time and place where they as individuals must simply come to a stop, and ‘clog [the system] with their whole weight.’ Perhaps that time and place have come.”

Four months after its formation, Peacemakers’ Tax Refusal Committee published the statements of active tax resisters. Many of these people were WRL members. These statements illustrate the total commitment and absolutist nature of Peacemakers and of a section of the League. Writing in a different venue, Caroline Urie similarly declared:

In a time of crisis like the present it is our duty as sovereign citizens to defend our country not only with protest but with our lives, if necessary, against military enslavement and the possible annihilation implicit in atomic and bacterial warfare. In the brief time at our disposal, protest is not enough; if we are to assume real responsibility, we must act in a manner simple enough and clear enough to be understood and to arouse public conscience.

As justification for tax resistance, several WRL members pointed to the Nuremberg War Crimes Tribunal, which had established the principle of individual responsibility for wartime actions, even in the face of wartime orders. In his letter to the IRS, Walter Gormley declared that he was “refusing to make any federal income tax payment, because they money would be used mostly for ‘crimes against peace.’ ” “The U.S. is preparing for a shooting war of aggression 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,” he charged. “I must refrain from supporting such a government.” Likewise, Valerie Riggs explained that “if our government… at Nuremberg could hold individuals responsible to stand against crime… I feel thoroughly justified by my own government in not paying this part of my tax.”

Perhaps A.J. Muste best expressed the compelling logic of tax resistance. “World War Ⅲ has already started,” he exclaimed in :

I cannot support a government in these war-measures, which I deem insane, wicked and suicidal. I must withdraw support from such war-measures in every possible way. The two decisive powers of government… are the power to conscript and the power to tax. Pacifists recognize that to be consistent they must refuse to be conscripted for military service or training. I have come… to the conviction that I at least am in conscience bound… to challenge the right of the government to tax me for waging war, and in particular for the production of atomic and bacterial weapons… The need for getting our pacifist teaching off the level of talk and writing and onto the level of action is, I believe, imperative.

Peacemakers was highly critical of pacifist organizations — the WRL included — that collected withholding taxes from their employees. By withholding taxes these pacifist groups were effectively barring tax refusers from working for them, or forcing them to resign. Both the WRL and the FOR paid a lot of attention to this issue. A special committee of the FOR examined the problem for a year before recommending that the FOR withhold taxes, even though most FOR employees had indicated that they wanted to make individual decisions about tax refusal. Staff member Marion Coddington (Bromley) resigned over the policy. The WRL also decided to withhold taxes. In justifying this policy, a member of the League’s executive committee declared: “The life of the organization is at stake.” The Peacemakers’ Tax Refusal Committee, which characterized the WRL and other pacifist groups as “tax collectors for the government,” was scathing in its denunciation. “If pacifist organizations, whose business is to create a warless world, are not ready to risk something for war resistance now,” the committee asked, “when will they be ready?”

Tax resistance took various forms. Total refusers paid not tax. Since most workers could not avoid withholding tax, total refusers were often self-employed. Miriam Keeler and Marion Coddington Bromley resigned from the Labor Department and the FOR staff in order to avoid the withholding taxes. Percentage refusers withheld that portion of taxes corresponding to the percentage the federal government would spend on war preparation and the military (calculations ranged from 35 to 80 percent). Finally, some tax resisters chose to live on an income below the taxable level or to work at several part-time, low-income jobs to preclude employers from withholding taxes. Some tax resisters refused to submit tax returns; others explained their action in letters to local tax collectors and the Bureau of Internal Revenue. Some tax resisters, instead of remitting taxes to the government, contributed the money to WRL and other peace and justice organizations.

As a result of Peacemakers’ activism, tax resistance became a major issue for the WRL. The League sold stickers that tax resisters could attach to their tax forms. “This tax goes chiefly for war purposes, as a pacifist I pay under protest.” In the League passed several resolutions commending those, members or not, who practiced tax resistance. Beginning in , several tax resisters began donating a portion of their unpaid income tax to the League, an act consistent with their willingness to pay taxes for nonmilitary social programs. The League established a special literature fund for these donations to ensure that they did not go to pay staff salaries, which were subject to withholding taxes.

Ammon Hennacy, a WRL member most often associated with the Catholic Worker movement, was a pioneer tax refuser praised by the League. A “Christian anarchist,” he first practiced tax refusal in , when the tax withholding system was implemented. Each year at tax time he prepared a statement and mailed it to the IRS. Hennacy’s tax statement reflected the direct action and civil disobedience impulse that would shake the League over the next half-decade. “We can refuse to put our trust in Princes and Presidents,” he declared. “With Thoreau and Gandhi we can start our own campaign of Civil Disobedience by refusal to buy war bonds… and… pay taxes for war or conscription.” In , Hennacy began expanding his protest; each year, on 6 August, he fasted and picketed the local IRS office for as many days as years had passed since . While picketing, he distributed tax statements and leaflets that repudiated war, advocated anarchism, and declared his tax resistance. When threatened with arrest for disturbing the peace while picketing, he retorted: “I’m disturbing the war.”

In a letter to Hennacy, [Abraham] Kaufman expressed his disagreement with tax resistance. But then he added: “I admire your guts and want you to know that I am with you, for each of us must use the methods he feels to be effective in bringing the world out of its present insanity. Your method may prove most effective in the long run.” Although he did not delude himself that his “One Man Revolution” would change government policy or transform the world, Hennacy insisted on the moral imperative of individual resistance to the militaristic state.

By , radicals had succeeded in raising the issue of the WRL’s payment of withholding taxes, especially for members like Roy Kepler who supported tax refusal. In the WRL endorsed CCCO assistance for tax resisters and authorized a review of the issue. Although they extended moral support to tax refusers and publicized their actions, most League members did not support tax resistance, and the WRL did not officially endorse it. Kaufman, in particular, insisted that it would be “unethical” for a small minority to “coerce” the League into accepting such a policy. With minor revisions, the League accepted its subcommittee’s Withholding Tax Report. Concluding that its survival as an organization took priority over tax refusal, the League decided to continue to withhold income taxes from its employees.

The WRL eventually changed its policy on withholding, and stopped withholding income taxes from the wages of one of its tax-resisting employees, Ralph DiGia, in .

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:

A.J. Muste (Chairman), Gordon Christiansen (Chairman, Executive Committee), Ralph DiGia (Treasurer). Staff: Eric Weinberger (National Secretary), Maris Cakars (Field Secretary), Mark Morris (Director of Publication), Peter Kiger, Gwen Reyes. Executive Committee: Peter Boehmer, Mary Cristiansen, Tom Cornell, William C. Davidon, David Dellinger, Barbara Deming, Erica Enzer, Jim Forest, Neil D. Haworth, Bill Henry, Irene Johnson, Yvonne Klein, Paul Klotzle, Anton Kuerti, Bob Larsen, Bradford Lyttle, David McReynolds, Stewart Meacham, Dorothy Mock, Jim Peck, Harry Purvis, David Reed, Charles Solin, Beverly Sterner, Mary Suzuki, Robert Swann, Charles Walker, Barbara Webster, George Willoughby, Bill Wingell, Wilmer Young. Consultants: Joan Baez, Albert Bigelow, Henry Cadbury, Dorothy Day, Richard B. Gregg, Ammon Hennacy, William R. Huntington, Ray Kinney, Milton Mayer, Mildred Scott Olmstead, Earle Reynolds, Sumner M. Rosen, Bill Sutherland, Ralph Templin, David Wieck

The time has come, and that time was .

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 DeGaulle; 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 use 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.

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.

From the Delaware County Daily Times from Primos, Pennsylvania, on :

Hearing set for Quaker activist Anthony

by Marion Logue
Daily Times Correspondent

Nether Providence – Quaker activist Robert Anthony is nearing the next step in his long battle with the U.S. government over his refusal to pay taxes for armaments and war. A hearing on his case is set for before the Third Circuit Court of Appeals in the U.S. Courthouse, 6th and Market, Philadelphia.

The case dates back to the Vietnam War when Anthony filed tax returns reducing his tax obligation to zero by claiming a “war crimes” deduction. When this deduction was denied by IRS in he appealed to the U.S. Tax Court, and that court’s decision against him resulted in the current case before the U.S. Court of Appeals.

As a conscientious objector, Anthony had refused to pay taxes for the war in Vietnam for several years previously by deducting part of his taxes in filing his returns. But when this money was seized by the government anyway through garnishment of wages, Anthony attempted to maintain his position by denying the IRS all information about his income . As the war drew to a close he filed returns for those years in , but deducted all tax obligations.

The key case used by the IRS concerns pacifist leader A.J. Muste, whose appeal of resulted in a court ruling that income tax payments do not interfere with religious practice by Quakers. This precedent has been used to strike down efforts by Quakers and other war tax objectors to avoid taxes related to arms and wars since that time. But Muste’s case was not carried to the Court of Appeals, where Anthony’s attorneys are arguing for a test of the Constitutional issues and an overthrow of the Muste decision.

The issues include protection of religious freedom; the authority of Congress to declare war (which it did not do in Vietnam); and enforcement of international agreements and the United Nations Charter, to which the U.S. is a party by treaties which have the force of law.

The appeal brief, submitted in for Anthony by the firm of Duane, Morris and Heckscher of Philadelphia, cites 40 court decisions supporting the claim for exemption from military taxes, and cites historic freedom of religious decisions by the Supreme Court. There are 50 pages of legal argument and history of Quaker pacifism, 54 pages of photographs and records of peace action against nuclear weapons and the Vietnam War, 20 pages of Anthony’s tax court brief, and 30 pages of supporting documents.

To authenticate current Quaker requirements for a conscientious objector’s alternative to the payment of war taxes, Anthony circulated a statement containing a pledge to pay the military portion of his income tax to an “alternative peace fund.” Such a peace fund is the goal of legislation presently included in congressional bills which specify a World Peace Tax Fund. The legislation is being promoted by a number of Quaker Yearly Meetings, several other national religious denominations and various peace organizations.

Anthony’s appeal is being backed by the Rights of Conscience Fund of the American Friends Service Committee, the Bequests Committee of Philadelphia Yearly Meeting and the Media Monthly Meeting of Friends.

A letter to the Court of Appeals, from the Media Monthly Meeting, stated: “We believe that any citizen, who on the basis of religion or conscience, is opposed to paying for armaments or war should not be compelled by the tax laws to pay taxes for these purposes. Refusal to participate in any way in killing and warfare is a basic principle of the Quaker Faith… We assert that the free exercise of the Quaker religion entails the avoidance of any participation in war or financial contribution to that part of the national budget used by the military… We urge the Congress to speedily enact legislation to provide an alternative for conscientious objectors to war under the tax laws parallel to the alternatives… provided in the draft law.”

How did that work out for Mr. Anthony? Not favorably:

In a twenty-two sentence decision the Appeals Court ruled that proof of the violation of [Anthony’s] First Amendment right was legally irrelevant to the issue of the payment of the tax and penalties because “the Tax Court correctly determined that the violation alleged by taxpayer would not, if true, constitute defenses to his obligation to pay income tax.”

That quote comes from his subsequent Supreme Court appeal, which that court declined to address.

I’m impressed by the strong language in the Media Monthly Meeting’s letter (“We assert that the free exercise of the Quaker religion entails the avoidance of any participation in war or financial contribution to that part of the national budget used by the military…”). That’s about the strongest statement on war tax resistance I can think of from a Meeting in recent decades. It ranks among the strongest from any period, and stands out in particular contrast to the often vague and lukewarm statements on war tax refusal from Meetings over the last century.

Kennett Love

In , the Washington Monthly carried a story about war tax resisters written by Kennett Love, himself a signer of the “Writers and Editors War Tax Protest” pledge.

Tax Resistance: Hell No — I Won’t Pay

“We believe that the right of conscientious objection to war belongs to all the people, not just to those of draft age,” says a pamphlet now being sent out across the country from a littered, poster-bright office on New York’s Lower East Side. It carries a radical call to the citizenry to come out against the war in Vietnam by refusing to pay taxes that finance the war.

Such tax resistance is now gathering adherents outside traditional pacifist circles. Although it is still far from a major headache to the government, Internal Revenue Service men are being assigned to locate bank accounts of resisters and to seize the sums due — plus six per cent interest. Out of the frustration of the anti-Vietnam-war segment of the population, which is growing rapidly according to the polls; out of dashed hopes raised by peace promises and peace gestures from the Nixon and Johnson Administrations alike; and out of a feeling that orthodox democratic forms of protest — elections and demonstrations — have been ignored, an increasing number of otherwise law-abiding people are following their consciences into what Gandhi called the last stage of civil disobedience by openly refusing to pay part or all of their federal taxes.

The chief targets of the tax-resistance movement are the income tax, particularly the 10 per cent war surtax imposed last year, and the 10 per cent federal excise tax on telephone service. Other federal taxes have been rejected either as too complicated to resist, such as the liquor tax, which is collected at the wholesale level before individual purchase, or as earmarked for such non-war uses as highway construction. One pacifist, imprisoned for draft refusal and therefore lacking income to refuse taxes on, gave up smoking because the cigarette tax brings the government more revenue than any other single consumer-commodity tax.

The telephone tax is the most popular one to resist, partly because it was the first to be specifically linked to the war in Vietnam and partly because the American Telephone and Telegraph Company has proven courteous in its handling of tax resisters. The telephone tax was due to be reduced to three per cent in . In approving the White House request for its extension of the 10 per cent level, Chairman Wilbur Mills (D-Ark.) of the House Ways and Means Committee said: “It is clear that the Vietnam and only the Vietnam operation makes this bill necessary.”

Resistance to the telephone tax began soon afterward. Karl Meyer of Chicago, a former Congressman’s son and a free-lance writer immersed in pacifist causes, conceived the idea and proposed it to Maris Cakars of the War Resisters League in New York. Meyer drafted a pamphlet, “Hang Up On War!,” which has become a staple among the literature distributed by the War Resisters League through the mails and at peace booths. It explains the link between the telephone tax and the war, summarizes moral and legal objections to the war, and provides practical advice for resisters of the tax, including a candid assessment of the possible risks. Of the risks, it points out that under Section 7203 of the Internal Revenue Code, which covers both the telephone and the income tax, one who “willfully fails to pay” could be imprisoned for up to one year and fined up to $10,000. It adds that the experiences of tax resisters over the past several years show that the government is not willing to press criminal charges but, instead, acts to collect the taxes (with interest) directly, when and where it can.

AT&T records indicate that telephone tax resisters were relatively unmoved by President Johnson’s famous “abdication” speech on , but that about a quarter of them resumed payment of their telephone taxes at in the belief that President-elect Nixon would end the war. A table of the telephone company statistics follows, giving the number of telephone tax refusers at the end of each quarter :

QuarterNo. of resisters to telephone tax
1,800
2,300
2,600
3,400
3,400
4,700
5,300
4,700
4,000
4,000

The figure for is not available yet, but the revived intensity of the anti-war movement, manifested in the national student moratorium on and the big demonstrations on , presage an increase.

Measured against the telephone company’s 43,459,000 residence customers, the percentage of tax resisters is minuscule. But in view of the seriousness of the act of tax resistance, the number of resisters is a source of satisfaction and encouragement to the leaders of the movement.

A spokeswoman for the telephone company told me its standing orders are to continue service to tax resisters so long as its own charges are paid. The company notifies the IRS of tax non-payments so it can do its own collecting. If a tax resister informs the local business office of the telephone company that he is deliberately omitting the tax from his payment, the office will not carry the tax charges forward to his next bill. “It would seem logical to assume that we don’t like to be a collecting agency,” she said, “but we do what we’re obliged to do.” She said that telephone tax resisters are located mainly in college communities.

Income tax resisters, although fewer than telephone tax resisters, appear to be a more stubborn breed, unmoved by political gestures and prepared to hold out until the war actually ends. An IRS spokesman in Washington gave me a statistical summary of the growth of such tax resistance. So far as he knew, it first became a public issue when Joan Baez, the singer, refused in to pay 60 per cent of her income tax in an act to dissociate herself from what she called the immoral, impractical, and stupid war in Vietnam. She refused the same proportion in and wrote the IRS: “This country has gone mad. But I will not go mad with it. I will not pay for organized murder. I will not pay for the war in Vietnam.” Joan Baez and a scattered handful of old-line pacifists, a few of whom had been refusing war taxes , were not worth keeping statistics on, so far as the IRS was concerned.

Then, in , a committee under the chairmanship of the Reverend A.J. Muste circulated a tax-refusal pledge among persons on the mailing lists of the Committee for Non-Violent Action and the War Resisters League. They obtained 370 signatures for an advertisement in The Washington Post that stated: “We believe that the ordinary channels of protest have been exhausted…” Joan Baez headed the list of signers. According to an IRS analysis, about one-quarter of the signers had no taxable income, about one-half cooperated with the IRS to the extent of telling the agent who called on them where their money could be seized, and about one-quarter put the IRS to the trouble of ferreting out their bank accounts. The number of actual resisters came to about 275.

the IRS began keeping a count of tax protesters. The number rose to 375. In there were 533 taxpayers who refused part or all of their income taxes and wrote the IRS that they were doing so in protest against the Vietnam war. there were 848 who set themselves against the law on grounds of conscientious objection to the war. The IRS spokesman told me that roughly three-quarters of the income-tax protesters live on the east and west coasts and that the same proportion held for persons refusing to pay the telephone tax.

IRS spokesmen emphasize that the number of refusers is only a tiny fraction of the total number of taxpayers. There were some 71 million returns filed in , about 73 million in , and 75 million in . But again, tax-resistance leaders find significance in the fact that the very idea of tax refusal was unthinkable to nearly all of the resisters until their consciences impelled them to it. Furthermore, although the numbers are small, the rate of increase of tax resisters is far greater than the annual increase in tax returns.

Fear of prosecution and jail is a deterrent to potential tax refusers. Many people fail to recognize the distinction between clandestine tax evasion and open tax refusal. The IRS makes the distinction, however, and has shown no inclination to prosecute persons refusing taxes because of the Vietnam war. An IRS spokesman said earlier this year: “Is IRS going to ask the Justice Department to go to a federal grand jury and get a jury trial to put a man in jail for a dollar, when all we have to do is go to his bank account?” Tax-resistance leaders believe also that the government wishes to avoid the publicity attendant on a prosecution, largely because a test case might produce a martyr and create sympathy for the movement. The few prosecutions in recent years have been for refusal to file returns or disclose information rather than for refusal to pay.

War tax refusal in this country is older than the United States itself. It began in when Mennonites and Quakers refused to pay taxes for the French and Indian wars. They refused again during the American Revolution and the Civil War. The most famous early instance was that of Henry David Thoreau, who spent a night in jail in for refusing taxes in protest against our invasion of Mexico. He explained in his essay on civil disobedience that he could not “without disgrace be associated with it” and added: “If a thousand men were not to pay their tax bills this year, that would not be a bloody and violent measure, as it would to pay them, and enable the State to commit violence and shed innocent blood.”

Gandhi, who was deeply influenced by Thoreau, wrote in that “civil non-payment of taxes is indeed the last stage in non-cooperation. …I know that the withholding of payment of taxes is one of the quickest methods of overthrowing a government.” He went on to say: “I am equally sure that we have not yet evolved that degree of strength and discipline which are necessary… Are the Indian peasantry prepared to remain absolutely non-violent, and see their cattle taken away from them to die of hunger and thirst? …I would urge the greatest caution before embarking upon the dangerous adventure.” But Lord Mountbatten said with relief after India became independent: “If they had started to refuse to pay their taxes, I don’t know what we could have done.”

The idea of modern, organized tax resistance in this country against armaments and war seems to have begun with the Peacemaker Movement, which was formed by 250 pacifists who met in Chicago early in . In , the Peacemaker Movement published the first edition of a mimeographed Handbook on Non-Payment of War Taxes, which contains practical advice and case histories. The handbook has now run to three editions and nearly 10,000 copies. It points out that since the bulk of the federal budget (estimates range from 66 to 80 per cent) goes to pay for past wars, finance the Vietnam war, and prepare for future wars, “it is apparent that the major business of the federal government is war… it is useless to act as if the major business of government is civil functions or peaceful pursuits.”

In , a little more than a year after A.J. Muste’s committee published its tax protest advertisement with 370 signers, Gerald Walker of The New York Times Magazine began to organize a Writers and Editors War Tax Protest, in which all the signatories pledged themselves flatly to refuse the then-proposed 10 per cent war surtax and possibly the 23 per cent of their income taxes allocated to the war effort as well. As was the case with the Reverend Muste’s advertisement, most daily newspapers that Walker approached refused to sell space to him. The New York Times was one that refused and so, this time, was The Washington Post. The New York Post printed Walker’s advertisement in , as did The New York Review of Books and Ramparts. In all, 528 writers and editors signed the pledge. Walker told me recently that about half of them, including himself, failed to carry out the tax-refusal pledge. “Johnson’s ‘abdication’ two weeks before the tax deadline convinced me that we had won,” he said.

I was myself among the other half of the signers who did refuse part of their taxes — 23 per cent in my case, the 10 per cent surtax not having gone into effect. Since my own hesitant involvement in war tax resistance seems typical among the non-pacifists now joining the movement, I will summarize it here as the case history I know best. With my part payment of my income tax, I wrote the IRS as follows:

Enclosed please find my check for $1,862.81, which is 77 per cent of the tax required. The 23 per cent unpaid is a protest against the government’s use of that proportion of its revenue for the war in Vietnam. My conscience revolts against the gross immorality of the war… There are also questions of law. The war violates the supreme law of our land, notably the Constitution (Art. Ⅰ, Sec. 8, clause 11), the United Nations Charter (Art. 51), and the Southeast Asia Treaty (Art. Ⅳ)… Responsible jurists and philosophers soberly accuse our government of crimes against international codes on human rights and the conduct of wars and the specific statutes created ex post facto to punish the Nazis…

The prodigal waste of our national energy and treasure in destroying the land and people of Vietnam is so weakening this nation that other powers may bring us to judgment as we once brought the Nazis to account at Nuremburg… It will then be no defense to plead, like the “good Germans,” that we had to obey our government and cannot be held responsible for what it did. By paying taxes which I know my government is using to kill a small nation I commit a greater and more violent breach of laws than I do by not paying…

I was a Navy pilot in World War Ⅱ. I would not serve in this war. If I could prevent my tax dollars from serving, I would do so. Unfortunately, I have not yet learned of a practical way to keep the government altogether from extracting financial support from me for the war. In the meantime, I balk at 23 per cent in token of my dissociation from the cruel injustice and bloodshed to poor and distant strangers being done under my flag, in my name, with my money.

The IRS reply did not come until after I had refused a similar amount of taxes . It was a form postcard saying: “Dear Taxpayer: Thank you for your letter. We are looking into the matter you brought up and should have the answer to you shortly… Thank you for your cooperation.” The answer, inevitably, was a series of printed forms, progressing from a “notice of tax due” to a “Final Notice Before Seizure.” The IRS had already seized telephone taxes, which I stopped paying in , from three bank accounts, patiently tracking down the bank to which I transferred my account after each seizure. The IRS obtained the unpaid part of my tax, plus six per cent interest, in . At this writing I am awaiting implementation of the Final Notice Before Seizure of the refused portion of my taxes. Banks are required by law to surrender private assets, including the contents of safe deposit boxes, to the IRS upon demand. Most banks surrender the levied amount immediately and the depositor is informed afterward.

This whole business of deliberately defying and harassing the government, even in a moral protest, is a heavy and anxious experience. When I first considered it in I was unaware that some hundreds of other people were already doing it. I was afraid of going to jail, which, among other things, would have prevented my fulfilling a contract to complete a book. I began refusing the telephone tax after obtaining the pamphlet “Hang Up On War!” from a pacifist in Princeton in . The Writers and Editors War Tax Protest, which came to my attention , gave me a sufficient sense of safety in numbers to begin income-tax resistance.

I am still troubled over possible consequences, particularly after the conspiracy convictions in the Dr. Spock trial, and I find it innately distasteful to resist paying my share of the general tax burden. But my revulsion against the war in Vietnam prevails over anxiety and civic reservations. And the Nixon Administration seems as unwilling or as unable as the Johnson Administration to make a significant and credible effort to end the war. In the country voted for Johnson and peace and got an escalation of the war. In , between Nixon and Humphrey, there was no real opportunity to vote for peace. Demonstrations have proven equally futile as a means of affecting war policy, so much so that the President declares that he will not be swayed by them. Under these circumstances, tax resistance, distasteful as it is, seems to more and more people to offer the most effective channel of protest.

I participated in the formation of War Tax Resistance, which is working to transform tax protests from essentially individual acts into an integrated political factor. The leading figure in the organization is Bradford Lyttle, a slim, earnest, no-nonsense pacifist who led a peace march across the United States and Europe to Moscow, urging unilateral disarmament on governments along the way and exhorting citizens toward non-cooperation with military service and war production. Its “Call to War Tax Resistance,” claiming the right of conscientious objection for taxpayers as well as draft-age men, says:

The first goal… is to convince as many people as possible to refuse at least $5 of some tax owed the government. Nearly everyone can do this by refusing their federal telephone tax or part of their income tax. If hundreds of thousands refuse to pay $5, they will establish mass tax refusal. Besides having the burden of collecting the unpaid amounts, the government will be faced with the political fact of massive non-cooperation with its war-making policies.

In a separate but related action, the poet Allen Ginsberg and I have obtained the backing of the National Emergency Civil Liberties Committee for a suit against the government to recover money that has been seized from us in enforcement of tax claims and also to enjoin further seizures. The main ground of our action, as it is now being prepared, is based on the historical equivalency between taxes and service (which is a kind of tax) and the claim that the right of conscientious objection is as inherent to taxpayers as it is to men liable for military service. Conscientious objectors cannot avoid service but they can earmark their service to the exclusion of warlike activity. In the same way, we claim, taxpayers should pay their full share but they should be able to earmark their taxes to the exclusion of war-like applications. In a time when weaponry has achieved the capacity to wipe out civilization, we believe, the people should be accorded a direct voice in deciding whether they shall make war. Since World War Ⅱ the decision has moved ever more into the hands of the executive despite the Constitutional stipulation that it is Congress which should declare war.

Meanwhile, until we are legally able to earmark our taxes for non-warlike applications, we feel conscience-bound to resist paying at least a part of them.

Today I’ll present some of the residue left behind in the news media by the war tax resistance of Marion Frenyear. First, this letter to the editor from the Glens Falls, New York Post-Star:

For the Collector

South Hartford, N.Y.
.

To the Editor of The Post-Star:

When I sent in my income tax return this year with a check for [illegible] of the tax due the federal government I wrote to the Collector [illegible] Internal Revenue as follows:

“I have sent 75 percent of [illegible] tax due to … agencies which [illegible] working for world peace and [illegible] conciliation. I cannot pay this [illegible] of my tax because as a Christian I believe war is wrong. I also believe that modern war is obsolete [illegible] futile, a form of collective insanity [illegible] that we cannot defeat communism by killing communists.

“I believe that if we turn from our present foreign policy and courageously follow Christ, strengthening the United Nation so that [illegible] becomes a limited world government leading in world disarmament, [illegible] using our wealth to help the people who most need help, there [illegible] be a real possibility of peace. [Illegible] present concentration on preparation for war will lead to war if continued.”

Very truly yours,
(Miss) Marion C. Frenyear
Rev. Marion C. Frenyear, Pa[stor?]
South Hartford Congregational Church.

Then, from the same paper, :

Tax Holdout: The Reverend Marion C. Frenyear, pastor of the Congregational Church at South Hartford, New York, says she paid only one-fourth of federal income tax because “taxes should be used to bring peace and disarmament to [the] world.”

The Lady Is Real

Published elsewhere on this page is a letter signed “Wanda Turpen,” referring to a letter published here on over the signature of the Rev. Marion C. Frenyear. The Turpen letter says that the Frenyear letter was written by a fictitious character to “other side-splitting letters” of the same type and purported authorship. It enjoins The Post-Star to “Give us credit for having a little more intelligence, please!”

We have a surprise for Miss Turpen. Miss Frenyear is, and so signed her letter whose authenticity has been questioned, the pastor of the South Hartford Congregational Church. We rather imagine that if Miss Turpen cared to verify the statement she could do so simply by addressing a letter to Miss Frenyear direct rather than by doubting her existence in the press.

Obviously, Miss Turpen cannot imagine anyone so incredibly foolish as to believe so firmly in a religious principle that she would defy the government of the United States in order to stick to it. How far Miss Frenyear and an organization to which she belongs will get is problematical. They have decided not to pay that portion of their income taxes which they figure, on the basis of the national budget, will be devoted to military expenditures.

Concerning Miss Turpen’s P.S. as to the Internal Revenue Collector’s response, he is not called upon to make one yet since Miss Frenyear has compiled with the income tax law by paying, her first installment. But on the New York Times reported that a Rev. Abraham J. Muste of New York City, another member of the protesting organization, wrote his tax collector as follows: “For the third successive year I must refuse to file an income tax return or to pay the federal income tax.” He explained why.

The Post-Star does not endorse Miss Frenyear’s method of going about attaining peace and sternly advises the general public not to try it. We strongly disagree with Miss Turpen, however, as to who is “unenlightened.” It is not Miss Frenyear. She is merely conspicuous.

Next, from the Binghamton [New York] Press:

Pastor Refuses To Pay “War” Tax

South Hartford — (AP) — A woman pastor says she has paid only one-fourth of her income tax because she couldn’t “support a government in participation and preparation for war.”

The Rev. Marion C. Frenyear of the Congregational Church in this Washington County village said she had notified the Bureau of Internal Revenue that she would pay 25 per cent of her tax.

She said she had paid only a quarter of her tax , too.

Bureau officials, however, subsequently obtained a lien against her salary.

The Amsterdam, New York, Evening Recorder of added:

The church paid the lien and deducted the amount from her salary, she said.

“Taxes should be used to bring peace and disarmament to the world,” she said.

A United Press dispatch from :

Minister Refuses Taxes for Arms

New York (UP) — A Presbyterian minister filed his income tax . It consisted of a three-page letter to the collector of internal revenue on his political views, a copy of the gospels and Henry Thoreau’s essay on civil disobedience.

The Rev. A.J. Muste said he would not file a return or pay taxes because he opposes the armament race between the U.S. and Russia.

He refused to file for , too.

He was joined by 58 other pacifists in 14 states who belong to the Tax Refusal Committee of Peacemakers.

Mary Stone McDowell is a rare — perhaps unique — example of someone who took a war tax resistance stand during World War Ⅰ and was also part of the post World War Ⅱ revival of war tax resistance in America.

From the New York Herald (excerpt):

Woman Teacher Is Suspended on Pacifist Charge

Miss Mary S. McDowell, Member of Society of Friends, to Face Trial.

Miss Mary S. McDowell, a teacher of Latin in the Manual Training High School, was suspended from duty without pay as a result of charges of pacifism brought against her several weeks ago by the Board of Superindendents.

The order suspending Miss McDowell, issued by Dr. Gustave Straubenmuller, acting Superintendent of Schools, was approved formally by the Board of Education at its meeting. In the formal notice the cause for suspension is given as “conduct unbecoming a teacher.”

Miss McDowell will be called before a special committee of the School Board to show cause why she should not be dismissed from the service. No date has been set for the trial.

Miss McDowell, who lives with her mother at No. 20 Crooke avenue, Brooklyn, is a member of the Society of Friends and declares that by reason of her faith she conscientiously is opposed to war and all its activities. It is alleged she repeatedly refused to sign loyalty pledges circulated among the teachers and refused to take part in Red Cross work and Liberty Bond sales.

Miss McDowell has been a teacher in the public schools for thirteen years and, in the opinion of Dr. Straubenmuller, is “a very estimable woman and an excellent Latin teacher, with unfortunate views regarding the war.”

(The New York Times, always jealous in defending its own freedom of speech, though it so rarely has anything to say that the government would find any need to censor, editorialized that “it becomes the Friends to retire from and to keep out of positions which in their very nature involved the declaration and teaching of patriotism as it is understood by a majority of human beings so large that its members have a right to consider themselves normal and everybody else abnormal. For these reasons it seems to us that a Friend, at this time, is distinctly out of place as a teacher in a public school — that if well advised such a teacher will resign, and that if not docile to good counsel, he or she, as the case may be, should be dismissed.”)

From the Brooklyn Eagle:

Ex-Boro Teacher Joins 69 in Income Tax Defy

, but 70 pacifists throughout the country, including a former school teacher in Brooklyn, will refuse to pay Uncle Sam who, they say, is spending his money preparing for a war.

The group has grown since when about 40 pacifists, objecting to the “war preparations,” refused to pay either all or a part of their taxes.

Mary McDowall of 555 Ocean Ave., a Quaker who taught Latin at Abraham Lincoln High School until her retirement five years ago, is a member of the group, known as the Tax Refusal Committee of Peacemakers.

“I’m Not Stingy”

Miss McDowall has withheld one-third of her total tax, claiming “at least that proportion is used for war preparation.” The withheld amount, she points out is donated to the American Friends Service Committee (Quakers).

“I don’t want the money I withhold,” she says. “I’m not stingy. I merely won’t help in construction for war.

Miss McDowall’s Quaker principles caused her suspension from the faculty of Manual Training High School in . She was suspended for “disloyalty and insubordination,” having refused to take part in the school’s patriotic aid program of World War Ⅰ.

She was cleared and reinstated in when it was officially admitted that her Board of Education trial had been held “at a time of great public excitement.”

Has Jaile[d] Confrere

The 70 “tax refusers,” in a statement issued at their headquarters, 2013 5th Ave., Manhattan, announced they “hail the courage of Katsuki James Otsuka,” who drew a three-month Federal sentence and a $100 fine in Indianapolis earlier this month for refusing to pay $4.50 in income taxes.

Otsuka also refused to pay the fine, choosing instead an additional sentence.

Among the organization’s Manhattan members is Sander Katz, 25, who served 19 months in jail for refusing to report for induction in World War Ⅱ and who was sentenced to another year and a day for refusing to register under the Draft Act.

Another Brooklyn Eagle article, from, I think, around :

Pacifist Balks at “War” Use of Income Tax

Mary S. McDowell, 74, retired public school teacher of 555 Ocean Ave., wants it known that again this year she is paying only two-thirds of her Federal income tax.

The reason, she advised during a call at the Brooklyn Eagle office, is that she is opposed to war and refuses to finance the manufacture of war materials.

“An estimated third of income tax collections goes for defense,” she said. “So one-third of my tax payment, or what would be a third of it, I am giving to a charity. I did it last year on my own initiative and this year I am withholding one-third as a member of the ‘Peacemakers’.”

From its Manhattan office at 2013 5th Ave. the Peacemakers issued a press release in which it described itself as “a national pacifist movement” and listed “27 men and 19 women in scattered parts of the United States” who are not paying income taxes because they “refuse to finance war preparations.” Miss McDowell is among those listed.

“I am a Quaker,” said Miss McDowell, the only Brooklynite on the Peacemakers’ list. “I have always been opposed to war. Not paying income tax is a practical Way of expressing opposition to war.

“I was opposed to the first World War. I was teaching at Manual Training High School then. Because of my expressed opposition I was fired. It wasn’t until that I was reinstated as a teacher.”

She was at Abraham Lincoln when she retired in .

The Peacemakers’ list of tax rebels includes the names of the Rev. A.J. Muste of 21 Audubon Ave., Manhattan, described as secretary of the organization, and the Rev. Ernest R. Bromley of Wilmington, Ohio, named as chairman of the Tax Refusal Committee.

“One omission from the list,” the release explains, “is the name of Katsuki James Otsuka, an earlham college student of Richmond, Ind. He was released on after serving nearly five months in the Federal Correctional Institution, Ashland, Ky., for his refusal to pay $4.50 income taxes. He was released even though he continued to refuse to pay. His name does not appear because his imprisonment prevented his earning a taxable income for .”

The Eagle covered her protest again in :

Kansas Tax Conchies

Topeka, Kan., (U.P.) — Kansas Internal Revenue officials had two “conscientious objectors” on their hands today when Edith Aldis and the Rev. Gerhard Friesen defied Federal income tax laws on grounds that “too much of the money goes for military armament.” Both have signed a statement issued by the tax refusal committee of Peacemakers, a pacifist movement with headquarters in New York.

Ex-Teacher Here Joins “Tax-Refuser” Movement

A retired Brooklyn Latin teacher was one of 41 “Tax Refusers” across the nation who deducted from their Federal returns — due  — percentages they said would be used for present and future wars.

Mary S. McDowell of 555 Ocean Ave., a Quaker who started teaching in borough schools in and was suspended from the school system for pacifist activities, in a letter to the local internal revenue office said she was sending $237 — 60 percent of her return — to the American Friends Service Committee, a charity, to keep herself from being “involved in war preparations.”

The 76-year-old woman wrote: “All war is contrary to the essential principle of Christianity and to the basic faith of democracy.” She inclosed a pamphlet entitled “A Democratic Program for a Durable Peace” which she recently had published.

, she said, she deducted only 45 percent from her tax return. The increase this year, she explained, was prompted not by inflation but by mounting Government spending for rearmament.

Government Takes Lien

The income tax office , in a move to collect the unpaid balance of her return, placed a lien on the elderly ex-teacher’s pension.

A native of New Jersey, Miss McDowell attended Swarthmore College and taught in Manual Training and Abraham Lincoln High Schools. She retired in .

Her letter, in part, said: “I realize that I cannot entirely free myself from being involved in war preparations; but I believe it is important to bear my testimony in action as far as I can.

“Now that we are so largely devoting our men and our resources to war preparations and taking part in an armament race, it seems clearer than ever that our course may be leading toward world war and inconceivable slaughter and destruction to our own country as well as the world.

“Accordingly, it would seem that not only religious pacifists, but all intelligent true patriots should do everything in their power to halt rearmament and vastly increase constructive activities looking toward worldwide human welfare and durable peace.”

The Eagle covered her protest again in :

Woman, 77, Clings to Tax-Strike Vow

A 77-year-old former Latin teacher has taken a stand in which many of her neighbors would like to join her , although for more personal reasons. Mary McDowell of 555 Ocean Ave. has refused to pay her income tax.

Member of the Tax Refusal Committee of Peacemakers — a group of individuals scattered over the nation who withhold that part of their tax which they believe will be used for armaments — Miss McDowell held back 70 percent.

Each year the tally grows. In , the elderly teacher said, she deducted only 60 percent from her return. it was 45 percent. It is her custom to contribute the deducted amounts to the American Friends Service Committee.

The Quaker lady has been fighting a war against war nearly all her life. She started teaching in Brooklyn in but was suspended from the school system because of her pacifist activities during World War Ⅰ.

Her defiance of the tax collector, Miss McDowell calls “the new patriotism.” The popular idea, she said, holds up the soldier as a model of patriotism but, against this, she matches her own method of “trying to prevent a disaster to one’s country.”

Each year the U.S. Government refuses to be persuaded and places a lien on her teacher’s pension. Each year Miss McDowell tries, in the same way, to express her belief that “war or threats of war cannot bring security.”

The Tax Refusers, she said, “strive not only to avoid assisting in preparations for war, but also to point out constructive courses of action, that will bring durable peace through human welfare, disarmament and solution of world problems.”

Miss McDowell believes the great day of permanent peace “will come like Spring,” suddenly but only as a result of slow preparation and a multitude of just such efforts as her own small token resistance to the tax collector.

, McDowell was at it again, and the Eagle was there:

Anti-War Ex-Teacher Defies Uncle Sam Again on Taxes

Mary McDowell, 78, retired high school teacher of 555 Ocean Ave., figured out her Federal income tax.

It came to $300.

She promptly sent a check for $90 as her tax to the Internal Revenue Bureau.

“I’m paying only 30 percent of my tax,” she said .” I refuse to pay the 70 percent which goes for war purposes.”

She calls her tax defiance “the new patriotism.”

Miss McDowell is a member of the Tax Refusal Committee of Peacemakers — a group of individuals scattered over the nation who each year withhold part of their tax which they believe will go for armaments. she has withheld part of her tax.

Each year the Government refuses to go along with her and it places a lien on her teacher’s pension.

She is a Quaker and has been fighting against war all her life.

“War is contrary to Christian principles and is contrary to democratic ideals,” she contends.

In , the Mary S. McDowell story became the second of the “Profiles in Courage” featured on the short-lived television series of that name. The Friends Journal published a profile of McDowell in .

From the Binghamton Press, :

Pacifist Must Pay U.S. Taxes

by Robert E. Hoyt
Special Press Correspondent

Washington — The U.S. tax court says you have to pay income taxes even if you are a pacifist.

The court has ordered Abraham J. Muste of New York, ordained Presbyterian minister and member of the Society of Friends, or Quakers, to pay up $1,165 in back taxes and $407 in penalties for .

Muste contended that the First Amendment protected his religious beliefs — including opposition to war — and that he therefore was not required to pay taxes that would pay for atomic bombs, armies, and other war-making potential.

The First Amendment says: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof…”

Group Official

From , when he retired, Muste was executive secretary of the Fellowship of Reconciliation, a group opposed to participation in, or preparation for, war.

Muste made no secret of his failure to pay taxes. Prior to he paid, although he had “qualms of conscience.” In he decided that emphasis on such things as hydrogen bombs made it “irrational” for him — against his conscience — to pay money to the government when he estimated that about 60 per cent of all tax funds were being used to prepare for war.

Once his personal decision was made, Muste informed the Internal Revenue Service. He wrote each year, just before filing deadline. In , he wrote in part:

“I am impelled to take this course — by my Christian convictions, by conscience, and by my love of country…

Held Incompatible

“I would… have to reject war as a means, even if the end seemed saner and worthier than that with which the world is today confronted. I am unable to regard participation in war… as compatible with the teaching and spirit of Christ, to whom… I owe an allegiance prior to my allegiance to any… state…

“The budget and energies and policies of the Federal Government are today being rapidly sucked info a total commitment to war preparation. I fear that as the drive toward war gathers momentum, less and less weight attaches to the… protests…

“I consider, therefore, that I am obligated to withdraw… from… the war-making aspects of the state, to make as nearly total a protest as possible…”

Earned $16,543

His earnings over totaled $16,543.

The tax court ruled that there is no contradiction of the First Amendment in Muste’s case.

It quoted from a Supreme Court decision that said, in part: “The power to tax is the one great power upon which the whole national fabric is based… It is not only the power to destroy, but it is also the power to keep alive…”

The court noted, also, that conscientious objectors are exempt from military service because of an act of Congress, not on constitutional grounds.

Rejected by Court

In his brief, Muste also contended that he could not be compelled to pay war-purpose taxes “by virtue of the Nuremberg principles of international law” which, he said, would make him — as an individual — liable for a violation of international law.

The court said “there is no principle of international law which… relieves citizens from their tax obligations… or which imposes upon them individual responsibility for the use made of tax revenue.”

IRS had assessed Muste an additional $652 for alleged fraud. The court held there was no evidence of fraud. The court did allow assessments under revenue code sections covering “willful neglect” of the duty of paying taxes.

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

By the glacier that had crept over war tax resistance in the Society of Friends for almost a century had started to recede, and you can see evidence of this in issues of the Friends Journal from that year.

The issue mentions the legal case against A.J. Muste based on his tax refusal . Excerpt:

At a hearing on , A.J. Muste declared that “on grounds of Christian teaching, conviction, and conscience” he could not help to pay for the development of more nuclear arms or hydrogen bombs.

(A follow-up article noted that “The United States Tax Court ruled in that the First Amendment to the Constitution, which assures religious freedom, does not give the conscientious objector immunity from paying taxes which are to be used in part for war or preparation for war.”)

Muste, however, was a Presbyterian, not a Quaker. It is telling that although there was some latent sympathy for war tax resistance in the Society of Friends at the time, the number of exemplars seemed to still be few. But that would change. Here is an article from the issue:

Several Friends have sent letters to the Collector of Internal Revenue, United States Treasury Department, Washington, D.C., declaring they cannot pay taxes for war purposes. The following letter by Wilmer J. Young of Pendle Hill, Wallingford, Pa., is indicative of the trend and spirit of letters by other Friends, copies of which have been sent to the office of the Friends Journal:

I cannot voluntarily pay taxes which are used to prepare for the destruction of mankind.

For the past twenty-four years I have lived voluntarily on a scale which meant that I was not called upon to pay a tax on income. In , however, due to unusual circumstances, I am eligible for such payment. I am sending today checks to various organizations whose object is to encourage a nonviolent approach to the solution of international problems, which will more than cover the amount of my tax.

Taxes for the ordinary expenses of government, schools, roads, proper police activity, etc., I pay cheerfully and gladly. But modern war has now become so serious a threat to mankind, that I would prefer spending the last years of my life in prison rather than deliberately supporting it.

In the issue, Frances G. Conrow briefly reviewed a seminar on “The Origin, Development, and Significance of Our Quaker Testimonies” that had been led by Clarence E. Pickett, and suggested:

In a world where there is no defense against modern war, there is need as never before for the peace testimony. Is refusal to pay taxes for support of war effort emerging as a new testimony in support both of purity of purpose in simplicity and as a peace witness?

It goes to show how thorough the glacial forgetting of Quaker war tax resistance had been, that in war tax resistance could be described in a Quaker publication as possibly “emerging as a new testimony.” (The same issue has an article titled “The Quaker Peace Testimony, : Some Suggestions for Witness and Rededication” that doesn’t mention taxes at all.)

In the issue, in an article on “The Peace Testimony and the Monthly Meeting” by Lawrence McK. Miller, Jr., he wrote:

Pacifist and nonpacifist Friends are also much closer to each other than they care to admit in terms of their personal involvement indirectly in preparation for war. The tax-refusal cases are making it clear that through our federal taxes we are all contributing to the so-called defense effort. In many other ways most of us are cooperating, if only in our reluctance to protest. It is the pacifist in these instances who particularly must act with a sense of regret for the measure of his involvement and with real humility for the compromising position he is in.

Awareness is growing, but still the emphasis seems to be on sad-eyed, shoulder-shrugging regret, rather than resistance. Tax refusal is largely still seen as something other people do, while Quakers are to just sorrowfully and humbly reflect on their complicity.

On , Robert J. Leach wrote to the magazine about the Geneva (Switzerland) Yearly Meeting and noted that one of the “high points” of the meeting was when an “octogenarian Friend, Elizabeth Blaser, pled with Friends to refuse to pay defense taxes.”

In the same issue where that report appeared, the pseudonymous Quaker history columnist “Now and Then” wrote about the emergence of the Quaker peace testimony in , and concluded by saying:

We may search our hearts to see whether we have allowed this testimony to grow as it should have done in three centuries or even in our own lifetime. Have we kept abreast “the Truth,” as Friends used to call Quakerism? Can we be satisfied with the feebleness of our efforts for peace even ? Are there not too few Friends willing to find for our testimony more radical expression, which, whatever else it may do, will strengthen our own determination not to acquiesce in the trend to war? Between the Fifth Monarchy rising and the cold war of a nuclear age there is a vast difference. Should not our peace testimony become correspondingly more aggressive and more inclusive and more costly? What will we do this anniversary year about civil defense, about biological warfare, about the hidden control by the Pentagon of our minds and property, about taxes that go to war preparation, about the suppression of the truth concerning the risks of nuclear war or even of testing?

The following years would show that many Quakers shared this dissatisfaction with the feeble state of the peace testimony, and that many saw war tax resistance in some form or another to be key to giving that testimony some backbone.

War tax resistance in the Friends Journal in

There was hardly an issue of the Friends Journal in that did not at least mention war tax resistance, and some issues covered the topic in depth.

In the issue was an article by Scott Benarde about the Quaker community of Monteverde in Costa Rica. Excerpts:

In , a year after the sentencing [of Marvin Rockwell for draft resistance], Rockwell and the small Quaker community of Fairhope made national news. In a short article, Time magazine mentioned that “for the first time in history a group of Quakers were planning to leave the U.S. because of their peace-loving convictions.” Seven Quaker families — including Marvin Rockwell and his parents — twenty-five or thirty people in all, had decided to move to the Central American Republic of Costa Rica.

, Marvin Rockwell recounts why he left the U.S. and what has happened to him since settling 5,000 feet up in the steep, rugged mountains of Costa Rica.

“We had a growing dissatisfaction with what we in Fairhope thought was a military build-up, a wartime economy. We wanted to be free of paying taxes in a war economy,” Rockwell says in a soft, yet deliberate, voice. “When the judge sentenced us he said, ‘If you’re not willing to defend your country, you should get out.’ So we began to think seriously of that possibility.”

That issue also brought the news that Quaker Richard Catlett “has been indicted on criminal charges of willful failure to pay income tax for three years” (the indictment was actually for failure to file).

The issue — under the theme “Can the Government Cancel Conscience?” — had many mentions of war tax resistance. The opening article, by Ruth Kilpack, began:

Ten years ago, at the height of the Vietnam War, a Friend spoke directly to my condition at Philadelphia Yearly Meeting when he said, “Many of us support our sons’ conscientious objection to serving in the armed forces. But what about ourselves? Do those of us who are beyond draft age, or not otherwise subject to the draft, conscientiously object to giving our money for war?”

For me, this struck deep, as did the words, “Two things are needed to fight a war: warm bodies and cold cash.” For the first, the full flush of youth is required for combat. For the second, there is no age limit for those who must pay tax funds, over half of which are channeled directly into wars, past, present, and future. Everyone is involved. By the payment of taxes, all are required to support the “national defense,” or whatever the current euphemism is.

Kilpack’s article concerned the legal case of Robert Anthony, who was appealing his tax case on religious freedom grounds.

What Bob Anthony’s case was about that day was an effort to break the longstanding precedent set by the case of A.J. Muste, the great peace activist, who in had challenged the U.S. government in the matter of paying taxes for war. The court had then ruled that the income tax does not interfere with religious practice. Whatever attempts have been made since that time to break that precedent-and there have been many-have been thwarted, federal judges repeatedly refusing to examine the deep issues involved: the issues of rights of conscience and the First Amendment’s protection of religious belief.

As it turned out, according to Anthony, “the court came up with a complete backing of the government’s right to cancel conscience for the sake of the taxing system.”

The same issue reprinted excerpts from a letter that Media Monthly Meeting had sent to the court that was hearing the Anthony case, in which it said:

As a Meeting, we have consistently backed and encouraged [Anthony’s] position on military taxes. We believe that any citizen who on the basis of religion or conscience is opposed to paying for armaments or war should not be compelled by the tax laws to pay taxes for these purposes. Refusal to participate in any way in killing and warfare is a basic principle of the Quaker faith.

…Robert Anthony’s refusal of military taxes constitutes an essential and consistent implementation of Quaker religious principles.… We assert that the free exercise of the Quaker religion entails the avoidance of any participation in war or financial contribution to that part of the national budget used by the military.

In the same issue, Bruce & Ruth Graves wrote of how their war tax resistance had grown out of their conscientious objection to the draft.

[O]ur early married years were largely those of family and professions, years in which we were no longer pressured by government to form external written attestations of belief to satisfy the draft board. After all, we had done that. What else could just we two do to alter this evil? The pacifist ideas could safely rest — or could they? In retrospect, those beliefs that had been yanked forth from us by society, perhaps too early in our lives, needed more time to mature, to become integrated into our very beings.

Perhaps ten years of integration preceded our realization that a different and subtler written attestation of belief was being required of us by our society. This attestation was made not once, but every year and it was an attestation of beliefs we did not believe. It was a lie. It was our income tax return. We signed it every year, and thus gave money, without objection, to buy the tools of war, even though we did not believe in killing. It was subtle because it was money and did not look like death. But when you put them together, it is a contract.

…All of this occurred during a time when militarism increasingly permeated national policy. Here, then, we finally reached a point where the idea of our financing the arms race became unbearable. After all, warfare was becoming more automated, thus relying far more on the expenditure of tax money than on the conscription of lives. In fact, it now appears that conscientious objection itself may be tending toward irrelevance, unless the concept is expanded beyond the confines of the Selective Service system — especially for those over draft age.

At this point we changed our tax returns into something we could in conscience sign and our remittance checks into contracts for the Internal Revenue Service. Each year, the item “Foreign Tax Credit” and about fifty percent of our normal tax “due” was entered. Carrying that credit over to the first page as instructed, we showed each year on our signed returns a credit balance due us from the IRS. To reduce IRS profit from interest and penalty, we still paid tax “owed” as calculated normally, but our check required the IRS to promise to refund the war tax we claimed by their endorsement because of a restrictive clause we placed on the back of the check.

Rather than our refund, the IRS has usually sent a notice for us to sign, correcting our return. We have never signed these, because that means agreeing to the original war tax. Yet the IRS seems to need our agreement to resolve each case legally — that is, unless it should decide to initiate proceedings against us in U.S. Tax Court. That, in fact, happened to us in for tax year .

From here, the Graveses write about their frustrations with the legal system, which seems eager to latch onto superficial technicalities to avoid having to face head-on the issue of whether the government can force people to violate such core tenets of conscience as “thou shalt not kill” via the tax system. They also express the need they feel for a stronger and more sustaining national war tax resistance organization:

At present, the community of war tax resistance appears to us to be a loosely-structured communications network of interpersonal contacts, newsletters, and small organizations perhaps not always widely known. Entrance to this network, we presume, is often gained through need for help by individuals who then grow, gain experience, and are later able to help other newcomers in their various situations. Whether they do help others or just gradually fade out of the network, however, is crucial to the power of the community. If we, ourselves, were to fade out as our own tax problems become less immediate, for example, the experience and knowledge we will have gained (even though far from complete) would be lost to the others. It would seem to be a sad waste to have this process repeated over and again for each member passing through the community.

There are a few organizations emphasizing war tax resistance (e.g., WTR, Peacemakers, etc.), from which a range of handbooks and information is available for individual action. Some may provide counseling: for example, we have recently learned that CCCO is in liaison currently with the Philadelphia Office of War Tax Resistance (WTR), thus affording the wider range of counseling needed by this more recent form of conscientious objection.

They added:

There are other courses of individual action besides variations on how to fill out a tax return. One such course is to reduce one’s income to a level of lower — or no — taxation. For some, this would mean a change in profession, or else a donation of one’s professional services to his or her current employer. If it is not desirable to put that kind of commitment into that particular employer’s pockets, one can give away up to fifty percent of taxable income to tax deductible organizations, thereby reaching three simultaneous objectives: a) continue one’s profession, b) support human interests of choice, and c) decrease war tax payments. Tax liability on interest income can also be reduced by buying tax-exempt bonds or shares in exempt bond funds. Both Individual Retirement Accounts and Deferred Tax Annuities (sometimes available through the employer) enable the postponement of income to retirement years, when, hopefully, the World Peace Tax Fund Act will have become law. This provides a reasonable chance for legally claiming the exemption on a part of current income, the exempted funds then being redirected to the WPTF Trust Fund for uses more closely aligned with human values.

Also in that issue was an update on the Richard Catlett case, in which he was charged with “willfully and knowingly failing to file income tax returns for ” — he in fact hadn’t filed .

The Brandywine Peace Community wrote in with “some fundamental questions of reality and responsibility” for Quaker taxpayers. The community ran an alternative fund “comprised of refused war taxes, personal savings, and group deposits, [that] makes interest-free loans to groups working for social change or providing change-oriented services. Thus, the alternative fund is a small-scale act of beating swords into plowshares and initiating our own peace conversion program.” Also:

In past January–April tax seasons, the Brandywine group and its supporters have been present at local IRS offices, presenting the option of war tax resistance, and posing the question, “H-bombs or Bread?” with peace tax counseling available.

The issue shared the story of John and Louise Runnings, who…

…have withheld payment of their income taxes in order, as they state, “to resolve the conflict between the spirit that dwells within and the violence implicit in surrendering our substance to the building of the war machine.” They have submitted a brief to this effect to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals.

The Runnings feel that since their action makes them answerable to “those Quakers whose light allows them to pay the federal tax,” they must plead their case before the Society of Friends as well as before the Federal Court. In doing so, they stress the fact that they share Friends’ testimonies against war but feel that these testimonies will be muted if they are not supported by actions which speak louder than words. They question how we can “speak truth to power” when so large a part of our income supports that power. They invite Friends to join them “in taking those uncomfortable actions which put us in conflict with the government rather than with the Spirit.”

That issue also brought the update that Robert Anthony’s appeal to the U.S. Third Circuit Court of Appeals had been rejected. It also noted that, according to the Albuquerque Monthly Meeting’s newsletter, the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting and the AFSC were contributing to the legal expenses in the case.

At the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting, according to the Journal, “[a] minute on nonpayment of taxes for military purposes was adopted” — but not one that required much explanation, apparently.

A letter from Austin Wattles appeared in the issue in which he encouraged the Journal to continue to cover war tax resistance, saying that to him, “[t]he movement seems to be growing.” He told of the support he had received from Meetings in his area — specifically the Old Chatham (New York) Monthly Meeting and Worcester (Massachusetts) Meeting. He concluded:

[T]ax resistance can have its penalties. You don’t have money to send your kids to college if you change your profession in a way not to pay withholding tax. I think certainly one reason so few Friends have considered this witness is it can hurt one’s profession so seriously. It’s not only losing the wages, but Friends enjoy doing a good job where they are working and don’t know how else they can live.

I like Quakers very much. I’ve always been an active Friend. But I feel our being part of the world to the degree we are prevents us from following Christ if the price is too high.

Molly Arrison also had a letter in that issue, but she thought war tax resistance “to be a most unrealistic and disrupting idea” because it would lead to a slippery slope of every citizen withholding taxes for whatever items of government spending they disapproved of, leading to “50 million contingencies” that would overwhelm the government’s revenue system. She recommended that Quakers instead “orchestrate consistent barrages of phone calls, letters, and lectures until the general public has more influence than the Pentagon.”

David Scull considered this same argument in a letter in the issue:

We wish not to pay taxes for what we so strongly disapprove of. But there are those who equally strongly feel that government contributions to the United Nations, or government money to pay for abortions, violate their principles. It would not be difficult to compile a long list of purposes objected to; of course we say that our cause is a matter of high principle, but one person’s principle is another’s foible.

Is there some guideline which would make it easier to distinguish between two paramount obligations when they seem to be in conflict, one to support those purposes which our society has determined (no matter how imperfectly) to be for the common good, and the other to obey our consciences? It seems to me that this can best be judged by our willingness to make some tangible sacrifices on behalf of conscience.

Scull went on to say that this made him skeptical of the World Peace Tax Fund plan: “[I]f I understand it correctly, there is no personal sacrifice involved. It is just too easy to say to the government, ‘Please send my money where I want it to go instead of where you want it to go.’ ” He suggested improving the World Peace Tax Fund idea by “add[ing] the principle of personal sacrifice”:

Suppose I say, “Instead of $1000 which you say I owe you, here is $1100 as evidence of my sincerity; now will you allocate it in these ways? That is how much extra I am willing to pay for the privilege of having my money not go to pay for machines of war.”

The inclusion of such a sacrificial element in the WPTF program would make a great deal of difference in my own ability to argue for it, and I think it would make a very convincing argument as we work toward its widespread acceptability.

…When we ask to relieve our consciences because of the way our money is spent, we should be… willing to put a price tag on the privilege.

A letter-to-the-editor in response to Scull’s argument, from Bill Samuel, thought that while the personal-sacrifice angle “has some surface attractiveness…”

Put another way, the proposal amounts to a government tax on conscience, which is quite a different matter from a voluntary personal sacrifice. Not only is it morally questionable for the government “to put a price tag on” conscience, but some legal authorities believe it would constitute unconstitutional discrimination as well.

The World Peace Tax Fund bill would not be a special privilege. Rather, the WPTF bill is a practical means of implementing the rights of conscience guaranteed by the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. Like women, blacks and homosexuals, pacifists should take the position that we need not earn our rights but that they should be respected as a matter of course in a free and pluralistic society.

There is, of course, nothing wrong with the concept of people of conscience making a sacrifice for their deeply held beliefs. Rather than impose a ten percent tax on conscience, concerned Friends might send an amount equal to ten percent of their tax payment to the National Council for a World Peace Tax Fund…

Corporately, Friends can also act to support those working to secure the right of pacifists not to pay for war. One yearly meeting recently agreed to give $1,500 to the NCWPTF and several monthly meetings include the NCWPTF in their budgets. Mennonites and Brethren each give a full time volunteer service worker to the NCWPTF. While Friends do not have the kind of organized volunteer service effort that the other historic peace churches have, meetings can do their part by together contributing enough to support a full-time salaried worker.

Ross Roby also had some words to say about Scull’s argument against the World Peace Tax Fund plan. He first begged for “immediate self-sacrificial labor and giving, on behalf of passage of a WPTF bill” and then wrote:

I would like to remind those who, like David Scull, have “difficulty with the World Peace Tax Fund as presently offered,” that there is nothing sacred and immutable about the present wording. We can be quite certain that, when Congress takes a serious scrutiny of provisions for an alternative fund for C.O.s, much rewriting will be done. The final bill. when passed, may look very different from the WPTF bill as now published.

He suggested that conscientious objectors to military spending should “soft pedal” the arguments amongst themselves over the details of the WPTF plan and instead concentrate on trying to convince the government to enact “a change in the income tax laws that will allow ‘free exercise of religion’ and give us the opportunity to build institutions for nonviolent solutions to international conflict with our present war tax dollars.”

His advice seems to have been followed, and the current campaign for “peace tax fund” legislation seems to have become so unwilling to use critical judgment and so eager to pass legislation of any sort that it has ended up backing a bill that would do nothing to help people with genuine conscientious objection to supporting military spending, nothing to reduce the military budget, and indeed nothing to increase spending on nonviolent conflict resolution — and yet even this bill has gone nowhere in Congress. Such is the cost of “soft pedaling” internal debate.

Exiles in Babylon: This ad is being paid for with money we refused to give the I.R.S. for war… because it seemed more important to let people know about a kingdom of peace and justice, which is not for the utopian future but is available right now, to anyone who wants it more than the false security of death-leagued systems and institutions.…

an ad in the issue of Friends Journal

John J. Runnings confronted Molly Arrison’s argument more head-on in the letters-to-the-editor column of the issue. Excerpt:

Our actions are determined by the degree of urgency we feel. When our house is on fire we may exit by way of an upstairs window rather than by the conventional route via the stairs. Many of us see the arms race as a fire out of control, and we are so adverse to feeding the flames that we are prepared to suffer considerable discomfort rather than do so.

So we break the law and are prepared to suffer the penalty.…

To break the law openly and expose oneself to the wrath of the power structure is to witness to the urgency and depth of one’s convictions.…

The early Quakers started at the places that Molly suggests, in the heart and in the community, but they went further. They broke the law. And they got themselves hanged and imprisoned; and they were heard above the contending clamors of their day. And when the Constitution was written it contained provisions for freedom of religion and freedom of speech.

Modern Quakers continue, as of old, to work from the heart and in the community, but if we are to outshout the Pentagon we will have to use a louder and more urgent voice than we have used heretofore. Perhaps more and more and more of us will have to break the law.

Franklin Zahn also responded to Arrison’s slippery-slope argument: “In practice, the portion of federal income tax for the military is far greater than for any other item. Currently thirty-six percent goes for present costs and another estimated seventeen percent for past wars. Objectors to smaller items would not find withholding worth the bother… [W]ords alone eventually lose all effect if no one ever acts. But if a few other than war objectors choose to refuse, I see no objection to their doing so.”

Sally Primm interviewed Lucy Perkins Carner for the issue. Among other topics, Carner addressed her war tax resistance:

[Q:] “Did you ever consider not paying part of your tax?”

[A:] “Oh yes, for years I’ve taken out of my income tax payment a portion that the Friends Committee on National Legislation says is equal to what the Pentagon gets. Then I write a letter to the income tax people. It’s good propaganda. I send copies to my representatives in Congress and the President.

“I know my failure to pay isn’t going to impoverish the Pentagon, but it’s good propaganda. They go to your bank and get the money. I send them a copy of the letter, too. Some people have refused to give them the information and go to jail as a result, but I’m not heroic. They get it out of my bank every year.

“The bank has a right to charge for that, a service charge. Well, in the last few years, believe it or not, I’ve received a letter from the bank saying they won’t make the charge any more.[”]

[Q:] “Why did they say that?”

[A:] “Well, that just shows you what good propaganda will do. They know why I’m doing it.”

[Q:] “And how long have you done this?”

[A:] “I don’t know; when I became a pacifist, whenever that was [around the end of World War Ⅰ, according to another part of the article —♇]. I don’t even know when the income tax started.”

The issue covered the “New Call to Peacemaking” in which representatives from the three historic “peace churches” (Quakers, Mennonites, and Brethren) got together to try to put some oomph behind their peacebuilding efforts. There was actually less about war tax resistance in this article than in much of the mainstream media coverage of the Call — perhaps because the civil disobedience angle was thought to be more newsworthy or attention-catching. Here is where taxes were mentioned in the Friends Journal coverage:

The Friends Committee on National Legislation points out that all the federal income taxes withheld from your paycheck from January 1 to June 23 go for military purposes. Not until June 24 do you begin to support any other part of the budget.

Especially in recent years — in light of increasing military budgets and the trend toward fewer soldiers and more expensive weapons systems — many conscientious objectors have chosen to witness against war by refusal to pay voluntarily those federal taxes that will be used to fund present, past, and future wars. Some have done this by lowering their income below the taxable level; others who owe taxes have refused to pay the portion that would go for the military.

In the same issue, Robert C. Johansen wrote about the challenge of putting forward a pacifist alternative to mainstream political thinking. In the course of that, he wrote:

Even though their goals are radical in the sense of seeking fundamental system change, political moderates will feel most comfortable using conventional means of education, consciousness-raising, lobbying, campaigning, organizing, and personal witness. Those people who have tried such means and found them weak and insufficiently penetrating politically will search for other actions, such as tax resistance and civil disobedience, that convey a seriousness and urgency more equivalent to the threat of planetary militarization.

Maynard Shelly gave the Mennonite perspective in the wake of the New Call conference, and claimed that “[r]esistance to the payment of war taxes is becoming the witness of choice for a growing number of Mennonites.”

Charles C. Walker wrote in to the issue to suggest a token $1 resistance to the Pennsylvania state income tax as a way of protesting against its anticipated adoption of capital punishment.

The issue noted in its calendar that the Media Pennsylvania Friends Meetinghouse would be hosting a “National Military Tax Resistance Workshop” that would be “[i]ntroducing the program and services of the newly organized Center on Law and Pacifism.”

War tax resistance in the Friends Journal in

Some Quaker war tax resisters of the past and present made appearances in the Friends Journal in .

Another article on George and Lillian Willoughby, in the issue, mentioned how early American Quakers had been sensitive to the issue of war taxes:

In colonial America, tremendous pressure was exerted on Penn and other Quakers to support militias, to provision the British army, to pay taxes for unexplained uses that might well turn out to be military expeditions. Governing a large colony (Pennsylvania) in which Quakers were a minority, and in which the majority wanted protection from Indian attacks, forced further compromises. Only with the advent of John Woolman, who with others sent a letter to the Pennsylvania assembly concerning a royal levy, [a portion of the PDF is illegible at this point] -tion of Christ and Fox. As reported by Peter Brock in his The Quaker Peace Testimony, , it states in part:

And being painfully apprehensive that the large sum granted by the… Assembly for the King’s use is principally intended for purposes inconsistent with our peaceable testimony, we therefore think that as we cannot be concerned in wars and fightings, so neither ought we to contribute thereto by paying the tax directly by the said act, though suffering be the consequence of our refusal.

Despite the influence of John Woolman and Anthony Benezet, Friends remained divided on the question of “rendering unto Caesar” that which “Caesar” claimed.

The Willoughbys, the article said, “have acted on their beliefs — through war tax refusal” and other means.

An obituary notice for Louis E. Jones in that issue noted that among the ways he “championed Friends causes” was by “for many years avoiding paying federal income tax, instead contributing to charitable causes.… He served as Downers Grove Meeting’s treasurer for many years, giving him the opportunity to witness against war taxes in the form of refusing war/excise tax for phone service.”

A retrospective on the life and work of the pacifist activist A.J. Muste in the issue noted:

Throughout , he often faced jail and prosecution for refusing to pay income taxes (he constantly followed the dictates of the Quaker John Woolman, who insisted that “The spirit of truth required of me as an individual to suffer patiently the distress of goods, rather than pay actively”)…

That same issue also noted that the Quaker Council for European Affairs planned to “present a resolution, under Article 9 of the European Convention of Human Rights on Freedom of thought, conscience, and religion, to the Council of Europe” that would enshrine a “right for individual taxpayers to direct a portion of their taxes away from military uses and towards peace-building, international development, and other alternatives to war.” The note mentioned the difficulties with the resolution: “1) the state’s need to maintain a uniform tax system is deemed more important than designing a tax system through which some taxes are diverted for conscientious objection, and 2) in the absence of legislation that allows for the diversion of taxes away from military purposes, the courts have no power to rule in favor of peace tax protestors.”

That issue also noted that the American Friends Service Committee had nominated Ghassan Andoni for the Nobel Peace Prize, and mentioned that “[d]uring the First Intifada, , Andoni was an active participant in Beit Sahour’s tax resistance.”

An obituary for Glenn S. Mallison in the issue noted that “[d]uring the Vietnam War, he refused entry to IRS agents who confronted [his] family’s refusal to pay phone taxes.”

The issue reported that “New York Yearly Meeting approved a statement against paying for war.”:

The following minute was approved at their Spring Business Sessions on : “The Living Spirit works to give joy, peace, and prosperity through love, integrity, and compassionate justice among people. We are united in this Power. We acknowledge that paying for war violates our religious conviction. We will witness to this religious conviction in each of our communities.” This statement reflects Quakers’ steadfast testimony that any participation in war, including payment of taxes for war, is a violation of our faith. By compelling support of war-making through taxation, our government and political leaders have forced many people of faith to subordinate God’s Word to the dictates of the state. The statement seeks to uphold a foundational principle of our nation that freedom to practice our religious faith is a matter of moral imperative, and is not dependent upon the grace of rights or privileges granted by the legislature.

For nearly 350 years, members of the Religious Society of Friends have upheld a testimony of peace and nonviolence that embodies the belief that God’s spirit, present in every person, empowers all of us to resolve disputes without resorting to the machinery of war. Quakers, Mennonites, and people of other faiths came to the New World to escape persecutions in Europe for their religious convictions. The work of these “peace churches” in the United States eventually led to the legal recognition of the right of all persons not to be forced into military service in violation of their conscience. To date, however, the United States government has failed to respect the right of religious conscience, recognized by the First Amendment’s guarantee of free exercise of religion, not to be compelled to support war through the collection of taxes.

The U.S. Congress has before it legislation introduced by Congressman John Lewis of Georgia and supported by 35 Representatives… (the “Religious Freedom Peace Tax Fund Bill”) that would provide conscientious objectors [subject] to military taxation with an option. Individuals who establish a sincere religious objection would have their tax payments directed towards nonviolent and life-affirming means for protecting and promoting national security, consistent with their faith. Until that time, many Quakers and others are being forced to choose between being faithful to their religious convictions and being in compliance with our federal tax laws.

“As a religious body, we cannot in good conscience support war, and we have borne that witness for over 350 years,” said Christopher Sarnmond, general secretary of New York Yearly Meeting. “We are clear that violence only begets more violence, in a neverending cycle of horror that diminishes all humankind. Being required to pay almost half our taxes to support war-making is a violation of our religious convictions, and we will be seeking ways to redress this, individually and corporately.”

In an op-ed in the issue, Stan Becker used his column inches to present the dilemma of Quakers paying for the Iraq War and other such militarism. He asserted that “[V]ery few Friends have been able to conscientiously refuse to pay the military portion of their income tax and succeeded in doing so” because “[t]he Internal Revenue Service simply does what is necessary to get its monies.” The option of “living below the taxable income level,” he insisted, “is nearly impossible as well.”

To the rescue is “the Peace Tax Fund legislation that would allow pacifists to have their taxes used only for nonmilitary purposes.” Meanwhile, he suggested that Friends calculate how much of their time and money is going to pay for war and try to counterbalance this with some peace-minded donations.

Nadine Hoover had an article in the same issue in which she mentioned her frustrations at trying to forward the cause of war tax resistance in the New York Yearly Meeting:

In , a member of Peace Concerns Committee of New York Yearly Meeting approached me outside the auditorium at yearly meeting: “We were talking in committee today about how we are being prepared for something, something historic. We don’t know what it is, but we feel ready! We thought of asking people and your name came up. What do you sense we are being prepared for?”

The answer was laid upon me in that instant. I replied: “Don’t ask the question if you’re not prepared to yield. Our dear Friend Sandra Cronk warned us of the dis-ease that settles in when we think we are ready but, when the Light comes, we refuse to yield. You really do not want to know the answer.”

“Yes, yes! We do. We really do. We’re ready.”

“Okay.” I said, “It’s a corporate conviction against paying for war.”

He paled and said, “Oh, no. That may be a bit too much.”

“Oh, I’m so sorry. You wanted an historic action that would not change your life. Well, let me see…”

He smiled.

That was the end of that conversation…

But…

Seven years after that conversation, New York Yearly Meeting approved a statement of faith testifying to the Power of the Living Spirit and acknowledging that paying for war violates our religious conviction. This statement not only reaffirms our Peace Testimony, but shifts from supporting or encouraging individual acts of conscience to claiming a corporate testimony laid upon all of us. U.S. courts have rejected cases on war tax resistance saying they cannot accommodate individuals, but the courts may not say no so easily to an entire religious body.

Alan Emory, the long-time Washington D.C. correspondent for the Watertown Times, penned a dismissive article about war tax resisters for that paper’s edition.

With its quotes and paraphrases of unnamed “officials” and its furious hand waving, it reads to me as a desperate attempt by the government to throw water on a spreading brush fire by means of a cooperative and sympathetic reporter. (Emory’s parents were both in government, and, as a Washington reporter, Emory was about as antagonistic to politicians as a sportscaster is to athletes.)

Protests for Publicity?

Fewer Americans Using War As Excuse for Dodging Taxes

Washington — Fewer Americans are using the Vietnam war as an excuse for not paying all or part of their income taxes , according to the Internal Revenue service.

And most of them appear to be making the protest for publicity purposes, officials believe.

Instead, the protesters appear to be more active in using the war as a reason for not paying telephone excise taxes.

In both cases, however, the numbers are relatively insignificant.

Out of 70,000,000 income taxpayers, the IRS says only 275 declined to pay up in full because of Vietnam in and only 520 in . So far, the count shows 93.

As for the telephone tax refusals, “about 4,800” out of 50,000,000 users took this line last year, according to Internal Revenue Commissioner Sheldon Cohen.

The American Telephone & Telegraph company put the figure at 700 in and 1,800 during . The figure included 86 residents of Pennsylvania — out of 3,000,000 telephone subscribers — and 25 in New Jersey out of 2,200,000.

IRS officials say the Vietnam protest first showed up as a tax factor in . Individuals ran to newspapers and issued press releases, they said, and filed their returns with a note or letter citing the war protest.

Some groups held protest meetings in front of IRS offices and passed out flyers.

The tax collectors’ problems, however, turned out to be surprisingly small. When, after sending out the normal number of letters to the taxpayer, the IRS sent an agent to his home, he was usually greeted with “We were expecting you,” and the taxpayer then told the agent the bank in which his funds were deposited.

The government either filed a lien or, in some cases, went to the bank with the taxpayer and obtained the money right there.

The IRS found out that many of the protesting taxpayers had not received enough income to require any taxes. Others had enough withheld to cover what they owed. Some had salaries attached.

One taxpayer has consistently shrugged off IRS communications, including those showing he had refunds due.

Cohen says the war protest cases are being handled “under special procedures and we are pursuing them through to collection.”

“If any taxes are due we will collect them down to the last dollar,” he says.

Only 1,500 to 2,000 go to jail for not paying taxes in a single year, though, and very few of them belong in the war protest lists. One official said that 25 per cent of the protest petition signers are “students and hippies.”

When the phone tax problem showed up in , the phone companies agreed to make out lists for the IRS of those who would not pay the tax. Ironically, the paper work involved in making the collection is usually more costly than the money owed.

No jailings have resulted from this situation yet.

The most famous protester on taxes and the war is folk singer Joan Baez, who has been seeking a $36,528 refund on her tax payment of $60,948. Although Miss Baez regularly withholds part of her tax because of Vietnam, the IRS goes right ahead and attaches income, property and bank accounts to pay any tax left unpaid. Last week she said she will withhold her entire tax .

The singer paid $6,000 in penalties and interest for . Government officials consider that a fee for what they call “front-page advertising.” Her taxable income in was $110,000.

The first mass tax protest involving Vietnam came with the publication of a notice signed by 350-odd names, mostly writers and educators, led by Rev. A.J. Muste, a well-known pacifist leader who had not paid any income taxes  — well before Vietnam.

Other signers included pianist Anton Kuerti and former Yale Prof. Staughton Lynd, Merrel Lynd, co-author of “Middletown,” and biochemist Albert Szent-Gyorgi. In , another protest list was printed in newspapers, and this year a third, with 448 sign…

Here, alas, the reproduction of the article available on-line gives out, and if Emory’s article was syndicated elsewhere in full, I haven’t been able to find it in any of the on-line archives (an abbreviated version was picked up by The Milwaukee Journal).

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.”

The latest news from the U.S. war tax resistance movement:

  • Erica Weiland reviews American war tax resister Frances Crowe’s memoir, Finding My Radical Soul. “Now 96 years old, she is still an activist and still getting arrested for civil disobedience.”
  • Ruth Benn reflects on “The Mysterious Ways of the IRS” — the agency seems arbitrary and unpredictable at times in the ways it responds to war tax resisters.
  • The three activists who boldly broke through security at the Oak Ridge nuclear weapons plant in have had their sabotage convictions reversed on appeal and are no longer being imprisoned. One article about their successful appeal concluded: “They are still obligated to pay the government a fine of $52,953 for the break-in at Y-12. But they took vows of poverty decades ago, don’t have bank accounts, and have neither the means nor the intention of paying it.”
  • The War Tax Talk blog has reprinted an op-ed debate that was published in the Sunday Republican of Springfield, Massachusetts back in . It features Juanita Nelson dueling with a U.S. Air Force Reserve Lieutenant-Colonel over the question: “Is it ever right to refuse, on principle, to pay taxes?”

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 Militant: Published in the Interest of the Working People (masthead)

This comes from the issue of The Militant:

Tax Office Blocks Funds of Pacifist Organization

The federal government has attached the bank account of the Committee for Non-Violent Action because two of its employes refuse to pay taxes on the grounds that such money will be used for war preparations. The CNVA, a pacifist organization, supported the two and did not deduct withholding tax money from their pay.

There have been numerous cases of objectors to war preparations refusing to pay income tax, thus inviting federal prosecution. In this case, however, the Internal Revenue Service has apparently taken no action against the two individuals but against the pacifist organization which employed them.

A.J. Muste, CNVA chairman, wrote the tax bureau that his organization would not be an instrument for collecting taxes and that the government would have to do the collecting itself from the individuals involved.

From the issue of The Militant:

Pacifists Refuse To Pay Taxes to Aid U.S. Wars

Cincinnati — Twelve people prominent in the anti-war movement issued a statement on that they would refuse to pay taxes on their income.

They gave as their reason “because so much of the tax paid the federal government goes for killing and torture as in Vietnam, and for the development of even more horrible war methods to use in the future.”

“We issue this statement,” they said, “not only to make known our own intentions, but also to call upon others to consider this manner of stopping their money from going to what they do not want.”

Those who want to sign the statement are asked to send their names to No-Tax-for-War-in-Vietnam Committee, c/o Rev. Maurice McCrackin, 932 Dayton St., Cincinnati, Ohio.

The signers of the statement include: Dave Dellinger, an editor of Liberation; Neil Haworth, national secretary of the Committee for Non-Violent Action; Maurice McCrackin, pastor of the Community Church in Cincinnati; A.J. Muste, dean of the pacifist movement and leader of many action projects; and Harry Purvis, peace spokesman and candidate in the New York area.

While I wasn’t paying attention, someone scanned in many back issues of Friends Bulletin, the journal of the Pacific Yearly Meeting and Pacific Coast Association of Friends. This has allowed me another window onto the state of American war tax resistance, Quaker war tax resistance in particular, in .

Here, for example, from the issue, is an article on an early Peacemakers tax refusal pledge that includes a complete list of signatories, including several I hadn’t heard of before:

Tax Refusal

On there were among those who did not pay their Federal income taxes the following 59 persons who joined together to support a statement distributed by the Tax Refusal Committee of Peacemakers, 2013 Fifth Ave., N.Y., N.Y. Reverend Ernest Bromley is chairman of this subcommittee of Peacemakers: A.J. Muste is secretary of Peacemakers. A part of their statement is: “Feeling that war must inevitably come unless something drastic is done by individuals to show their unwillingness to go along with war-making policies of their governments, we the undersigned state hereby that we are not going to pay our federal income taxes due . For some of us this means that we will not pay that percentage which corresponds to the nation’s outlay for militarism; for others of us it means we will not pay even the first cent for the maintenance of a government whose main business is preparation for annihilation…”

The signers were: Ernest and Marion Bromley, Golay Rd., Gano, Sharonville, Ohio; Lindley and Emma Burton, Low Buildings, Bryn Mawr, Pa.; Horace and Ava Champney, 512 Phillips St., Yellow Springs, O.; Sara Chase, 1525 Sutter St., San Francisco, Calif.; Samuel and Clarissa Cooper, 214 Eastbourne Terr., Moorestown, N.J.; Dorothy DaPonte, Rte. 4, Box 374, Mobile, Ala.; Margaret E. Dungan, Wallingford, Penna.; Arthur Evans, Awbury, Penna.; Rebecca Winsor Evans, Radnor, Penna.; Fyke Farmer, Bellevue Dr., Nashville, Tenn.; Rev. Marion Frenyear, So. Hartford, N.Y.; Henry and Beatrice Dyer, Yellow Springs, O.; Walter Gormly, 412 N. 3rd St., W., Mt. Vernon, Iowa; Konrad Halle, 76 Pinehurst Ave., New York 33, N.Y.

Gerald Haynes, R.R. No. 3, Freeport, Maine; Ammon Hennacy, Rte. 3, Box 227, Phoenix, Ariz.; Rev. George Houser, 21 Audubon Ave., New York 32, N.Y.; Woodbridge O. Johnson, Jr., 106 W. 3rd St., Parkville, Mo.; Sandy Katz 232 W. 29th St., New York 1, N.Y.; Ruth C. LaBarrer, 6 Nutt Ave., Uniontown, Pa.; Sarah B. Leeds, 28 E. Main St., Moorestown, N.J.; Walter and Emily Longstreth, 140 N. 15th St., Philadelphia 2, Pa.; Mary Bacon Mason, 31 Pleasant St., Newton Center, Mass.; Rev. Maurice F. McCrackin, 1111 Dayton St., Cincinnati 14, O.; Mary S. McDowell, 555 Ocean Ave., Brooklyn 26, N.Y.; Rev. A.J. Muste, 21 Audubon Ave., New York 32, N.Y.; Ax Nelson, 501 Benvenue, Los Altos, Calif.; Wallace and Juanita Nelson, Golay Rd., in Gano, Sharonville, O.; Ray and Jean Olds, Yellow Springs, O.; Raymond F. Olds, Monterey, Mass.; Storrs F. Olds, Monterey Rd., Great Barrington, Mass.; Jim Otsuka, Rte. 1, Cloverdale, Mich.; Mrs. Gordon Parker, 1401 Wood Ave., Colorado Springs, Colo.; Mabel G. Parker, 1804 Wood Ave., Colorado Springs, Colo.;

James and Paula Peck, 552 Riverside Dr., New York, N.Y., Miriam Pennypacker, 6420 Drexel Rd., Philadelphia 31, Pa.; Grace Rhoads, Box 90, Moorestown, N.J.; Elizabeth and Edward C.M. Richards, Nur Mahal, R.D. 3, West Chester, Pa.; Francis and Valerie Riggs, 23 Coolidge Hill Rd., Cambridge 38, Mass.; Margaret Schauffler, 100 S. Cedar St., Oberlin, O.; Robert and Marjorie Swann, R. 1, Cloverdale, Mich.; Ralph and Lila Templin, Box 125, Yellow Springs, O.; Caroline F. Urie, 128 S. Walnut St., Yellow Springs, O.; Ellen Winsor, Radnor, Pa.; Abraham and Jean Zwickel, P.O. Box 232, Pismo Beach, Calif.

And here’s an early example of a plea for a “peace tax”-style accommodation for conscientious objectors to military taxation, from the issue:

Tax Petition

On , in Whittier, Calif., there was combined with the annual meeting of the southern California office of the Fellowship of Reconciliation a program sponsored by the Peace Board of California Yearly Meeting. One of the results of the day is the following petition:

To the Congress of the United States of America

We the undersigned citizens of the United States of America believe:

That present tensions between the free enterprise and communist group of nations are the result of reliance upon military force as an instrument of political determination;

That the threat or use of such force can never result in a just or mutually satisfactory resolution of these tensions;

That the labor and material expended in building up military might would have and still might lead to a peaceful and mutually satisfactory solution if used instead indiscriminately to rebuild the homes and industries destroyed in the last war.

We further believe:

That the military way violates the commandment “Thou shalt not kill” and the Golden Rule by which a Christian must live.

That to supply the means to induce of compel another to do that which we cannot do is equally a violation of those Commandments.

Therefore relying on our Constitutional Bill of Rights which our nation is this week honoring, and the Right of Petition thereby guaranteed, we humbly pray your august body that you pass legislation exempting all of like religious belief from income tax to be used in support of military establishment and substitute the use of that portion of our tax which is to our total tax as the amount used for military is to the national total, to that committee of the United Nations seeking a peaceful abatement of these tensions, thus giving the citizens of the United States the opportunity of paying taxes for the support of war or peace according to the dictates of their own conscience.

While I wasn’t paying attention, someone scanned in many back issues of Friends Bulletin, the journal of the Pacific Yearly Meeting and Pacific Coast Association of Friends. This has allowed me another window onto the state of American war tax resistance, Quaker war tax resistance in particular, in .

Here, for example, from the issue, is an article on an early Peacemakers tax refusal pledge that includes a complete list of signatories, including several I hadn’t heard of before:

Tax Refusal

On there were among those who did not pay their Federal income taxes the following 59 persons who joined together to support a statement distributed by the Tax Refusal Committee of Peacemakers, 2013 Fifth Ave., N.Y., N.Y. Reverend Ernest Bromley is chairman of this subcommittee of Peacemakers: A.J. Muste is secretary of Peacemakers. A part of their statement is: “Feeling that war must inevitably come unless something drastic is done by individuals to show their unwillingness to go along with war-making policies of their governments, we the undersigned state hereby that we are not going to pay our federal income taxes due . For some of us this means that we will not pay that percentage which corresponds to the nation’s outlay for militarism; for others of us it means we will not pay even the first cent for the maintenance of a government whose main business is preparation for annihilation…”

The signers were: Ernest and Marion Bromley, Golay Rd., Gano, Sharonville, Ohio; Lindley and Emma Burton, Low Buildings, Bryn Mawr, Pa.; Horace and Ava Champney, 512 Phillips St., Yellow Springs, O.; Sara Chase, 1525 Sutter St., San Francisco, Calif.; Samuel and Clarissa Cooper, 214 Eastbourne Terr., Moorestown, N.J.; Dorothy DaPonte, Rte. 4, Box 374, Mobile, Ala.; Margaret E. Dungan, Wallingford, Penna.; Arthur Evans, Awbury, Penna.; Rebecca Winsor Evans, Radnor, Penna.; Fyke Farmer, Bellevue Dr., Nashville, Tenn.; Rev. Marion Frenyear, So. Hartford, N.Y.; Henry and Beatrice Dyer, Yellow Springs, O.; Walter Gormly, 412 N. 3rd St., W., Mt. Vernon, Iowa; Konrad Halle, 76 Pinehurst Ave., New York 33, N.Y.

Gerald Haynes, R.R. No. 3, Freeport, Maine; Ammon Hennacy, Rte. 3, Box 227, Phoenix, Ariz.; Rev. George Houser, 21 Audubon Ave., New York 32, N.Y.; Woodbridge O. Johnson, Jr., 106 W. 3rd St., Parkville, Mo.; Sandy Katz 232 W. 29th St., New York 1, N.Y.; Ruth C. LaBarrer, 6 Nutt Ave., Uniontown, Pa.; Sarah B. Leeds, 28 E. Main St., Moorestown, N.J.; Walter and Emily Longstreth, 140 N. 15th St., Philadelphia 2, Pa.; Mary Bacon Mason, 31 Pleasant St., Newton Center, Mass.; Rev. Maurice F. McCrackin, 1111 Dayton St., Cincinnati 14, O.; Mary S. McDowell, 555 Ocean Ave., Brooklyn 26, N.Y.; Rev. A.J. Muste, 21 Audubon Ave., New York 32, N.Y.; Ax Nelson, 501 Benvenue, Los Altos, Calif.; Wallace and Juanita Nelson, Golay Rd., in Gano, Sharonville, O.; Ray and Jean Olds, Yellow Springs, O.; Raymond F. Olds, Monterey, Mass.; Storrs F. Olds, Monterey Rd., Great Barrington, Mass.; Jim Otsuka, Rte. 1, Cloverdale, Mich.; Mrs. Gordon Parker, 1401 Wood Ave., Colorado Springs, Colo.; Mabel G. Parker, 1804 Wood Ave., Colorado Springs, Colo.;

James and Paula Peck, 552 Riverside Dr., New York, N.Y., Miriam Pennypacker, 6420 Drexel Rd., Philadelphia 31, Pa.; Grace Rhoads, Box 90, Moorestown, N.J.; Elizabeth and Edward C.M. Richards, Nur Mahal, R.D. 3, West Chester, Pa.; Francis and Valerie Riggs, 23 Coolidge Hill Rd., Cambridge 38, Mass.; Margaret Schauffler, 100 S. Cedar St., Oberlin, O.; Robert and Marjorie Swann, R. 1, Cloverdale, Mich.; Ralph and Lila Templin, Box 125, Yellow Springs, O.; Caroline F. Urie, 128 S. Walnut St., Yellow Springs, O.; Ellen Winsor, Radnor, Pa.; Abraham and Jean Zwickel, P.O. Box 232, Pismo Beach, Calif.

And here’s an early example of a plea for a “peace tax”-style accommodation for conscientious objectors to military taxation, from the issue:

Tax Petition

On , in Whittier, Calif., there was combined with the annual meeting of the southern California office of the Fellowship of Reconciliation a program sponsored by the Peace Board of California Yearly Meeting. One of the results of the day is the following petition:

To the Congress of the United States of America

We the undersigned citizens of the United States of America believe:

That present tensions between the free enterprise and communist group of nations are the result of reliance upon military force as an instrument of political determination;

That the threat or use of such force can never result in a just or mutually satisfactory resolution of these tensions;

That the labor and material expended in building up military might would have and still might lead to a peaceful and mutually satisfactory solution if used instead indiscriminately to rebuild the homes and industries destroyed in the last war.

We further believe:

That the military way violates the commandment “Thou shalt not kill” and the Golden Rule by which a Christian must live.

That to supply the means to induce of compel another to do that which we cannot do is equally a violation of those Commandments.

Therefore relying on our Constitutional Bill of Rights which our nation is this week honoring, and the Right of Petition thereby guaranteed, we humbly pray your august body that you pass legislation exempting all of like religious belief from income tax to be used in support of military establishment and substitute the use of that portion of our tax which is to our total tax as the amount used for military is to the national total, to that committee of the United Nations seeking a peaceful abatement of these tensions, thus giving the citizens of the United States the opportunity of paying taxes for the support of war or peace according to the dictates of their own conscience.

Nat Hentoff, in his book about A.J. Muste — Peace Agitator () — naturally included some comments about his tax refusal. Here is an excerpt:

[In Muste wrote The New York Times, saying in part:] “…[S]ince , I have refused to pay Federal income taxes because I felt I had to find every possible means to divorce myself from any voluntary support of the crowning irrationality and atrocity of atomic and bacterial war… I am by no means eager to go to prison; and I bear no ill will to any Federal officials or any one else. But adolescent and growing youth should not be conscripted for atomic and bacterial war. Young men like [imprisoned Quaker draft registration resister] Larry Gara ought not to be jailed for expressing their deepest religious convictions… Whether at liberty or in prison, where Larry Gara and these young men are, I belong.”

Copies of the letter were also sent to the Attorney General and to the Federal District Attorney in New York. Muste had been considering making an antiwar protest through refusing to pay taxes for some time before . He cited the long American heritage of tax refusals, including Thoreau’s comment in his essay, On the Duty of Civil Disobedience: “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 to pay them, and enable the State to commit violence and shed innocent blood. This is, in fact, the definition of a peaceable revolution, if any such is possible.”

Muste’s decision to act on his beliefs concerning tax refusal was set off by a disagreement within the Fellowship of Reconciliation when Muste’s secretary decided she could not conscientiously pay Federal income tax and asked that the F.O.R. not withhold taxes from her pay. After several months of debate within the organization, which led to a referendum of the membership, the majority declared, as John Nevin Sayre has explained, that “the F.O.R. should not break the law except on an issue, such as the refusal to fight in a war, on which all its members agree. We in the majority felt that a person’s right not to pay taxes was a matter of individual conscience. We would support that individual, but not to the point of refusing to withhold his or her taxes.” Muste was on the losing side.

As an ordained minister, Muste did not have the problem of asking the Fellowship to stop withholding his taxes. Accordingly, in and , he has simply informed Federal authorities that he is not paying taxes or filling out his return. He was not questioned by Internal Revenue agents until , and he was not brought into court until . He was then charged with owing $1,165 in taxes from as well as additional penalties for “non-filing of returns, for fraud, for non-payment, and for substantially underestimating his tax.”

John Nevin Sayre and Norman Thomas appeared as character witnesses for Muste, although Thomas disapproved of Muste’s position. “I don’t think you do any good,” says Thomas, “by disrupting organized society. Besides, I doubt if anyone has such complete control over what he does with his money that he can be sure none of it goes to support government activities of which he disapproves. There are, after all, many hidden taxes in what you buy.”

Muste’s lawyer in his tax refusal campaign has been Harrop A. Freeman, Professor of Law at Cornell Law School. A tax expert, Freeman has also served as attorney for several conscientious objectors. In one of his briefs in the Muste case, Freeman noted: “Taxpayer has no funds. Counsel is not being paid, even for his expenses.”

Among Freeman’s points for his client were that “It is proper to consider the ‘purpose’ of a tax in deciding its Constitutionality… A person who refuses to make returns or pay taxes solely because of his religious conscience, which he deems protected by the First Amendment, does not incur fraud or other penalties… Petitioner is excused from paying taxes used for war by the First Amendment to the Constitution… Petitioner cannot be compelled to file returns or pay taxes for war purposes under the Internal Revenue Code by virtue of the Nuremberg Principles of International Law.” On that last issue, Freeman quotes the Nuremberg Tribunal’s reference to the Atlantic Charter in its statement of fundamental principles of law: “…the very essence of the Charter is that individuals have international duties which transcend the national obligations of obedience imposed by the individual State.”

Muste finally both lost and won his case in the Tax Court. In addition to the tax which the Internal Revenue Service had claimed was due as a result of its examination of F.O.R. payment records, it also pressed its claim that Muste owed further penalties for “fraud” since he had not made out any returns.

As Harrop Freeman explains, “Previous tax refusers had all lost their cases in the District Courts (criminal) and thus there seemed to be a rule that following one’s conscience was wrong or criminal. I felt that by going into the Tax Court, which is not handling criminal cases, we would get better treatment and that if we won the fraud issue, this would indirectly help to show that following conscience was not fraud (and perhaps then not criminal). The Tax Court held that A.J. was not guilty of fraud for following his conscience. He did not owe any penalties. It did hold that the tax itself was due. We decided not to appeal this because the fraud decision was in our favor and we might have lost an appeal.”

The Internal Revenue Service has threatened Muste with collection of that tax once since the Tax Court decision. There are only a couple of ways, however in which Muste’s funds can be attached. He doesn’t have a bank account, nor does he have any property which can be seized. Presumably, the Internal Revenue Service could try to collect the tax out of Social Security or out of a small pension Muste receives. The latter course, some lawyers feel, would be of doubtful validity.

If Muste is ever confronted with the clear choice between paying the tax or going to jail, there is every likelihood that he would choose prison. In a letter to the Collector of Internal Revenue, Muste wrote: “I do not recognize the right of any earthly government to inquire into my income — or that of other citizens — for the purpose of determining how much they or I ‘owe’ for the diabolical purpose of atomic and biological war.”

As usual, there is disagreement on tactics among pacifists who will not pay taxes. Some will not cooperate with Federal authorities at all. They do not come to court voluntarily, and when they are brought there, they stand mute. Muste respects that kind of absolutism, but does not adopt it himself “because in the main I regard certain institutions of so-called democratic societies as useful and necessary, and because I have wanted to make an effort to secure a judicial determination on the specific issue of whether or not conscientious objection to paying war taxes should be recognized by a democratic government.”

Muste also refuses to use the technique of keeping his income down to a point where not taxes are owed. “Keeping one’s income down to a subsistence level may be justified,” Muste observes, “on the grounds of self-discipline or asceticism, though it is not the pattern of life I have chosen or regard as superior to a less ascetic one. Besides, I do not see how one can in effect recognize that a government may determine one’s standard of living or how one can think that permitting government to do so constitutes a significant protest against war taxation.”

Muste’s uncompromising stand on payment of taxes has encouraged several other pacifists throughout the country to take a similar position. “It’s another example,” says one of them, “of how A.J. ‘leads’ the movement, and it also illustrates how he can draw attention to our point of view. When a man as respected as A.J. refuses to pay taxes it’s like Jeremiah walking down the street naked. People stop, look, and listen.”

Norman Thomas, by the way, went on to sign the Writers and Editors War Tax Protest in , so apparently Muste wore down his opposition to the tactic.

This is the tenth in a series of posts about war tax resistance as it was reported in back issues of The Mennonite. Today we finish off the 1950s.

The Mennonite

In general, except for a brief flurry of mostly noncommittal articles in the late 1940s, The Mennonite seemed to steer clear of the topic of war tax resistance thereafter, with a few exceptions.

In the issue, Lloyd L. Ramseyer wrote of “The Sin of Just Being Good” — that is of “people who are content to just be good without concerning themselves very much with the evil about them.” One way this might display itself?

Do we sometimes shift the responsibility to others, saying this is no business of mine? May it be that we sometimes even employ others to do what we think it is wrong for us to do ourselves, and then seem to feel that it is not our affair?… If three-fourths of my tax dollar goes for war, can I have a conscience clear of it?

An article on “Taxes” in the issue gave some very middle-of-the-road advice:

In the classic passage, Matthew 22:17–22, Jesus states that He expected His followers to pay taxes.

“Render therefore to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s.”

Very briefly, we want to say four things:

  1. Christians ought to be honest in filing tax returns…
  2. Christians should not pay too much tax…
  3. Christians ought to take advantage of deductions and through contributions…
  4. Christians ought to study best ways to give as to tax…

There was not even a hint of a suggestion that a Christian ought to be concerned about what use Caesar puts the tax to, or might have to draw a line somewhere and refuse. The “Render Unto Caesar” episode is portrayed as though when Jesus was asked whether Jews ought to pay taxes to Caesar or not, he had simply replied “yes” but in a more wordy way than necessary. (“When they heard this, they marvelled…” perhaps this is just a mistranslation for “they yawned and checked their wristwatches.”)

The issue also had an article on the income tax that uses a different verse to also counsel tax obedience:

The time of year has come again when the citizens of our country will have to pay income tax. The question is sometimes raised, should Christians pay this tax? A large percentage of the income tax money goes for war purposes. A Christian obeying the new commandment of Jesus to love his neighbor as himself cannot possibly be in accord with hatred, strife, and bloodshed resulting from war. What then shall we do about it? Refuse to pay and come in conflict with the laws of our country?

Jesus our Lord has given us a very clear teaching on this subject in Matthew 17:24–27. The collector of the tribute money asked Peter if Jesus paid tribute. Peter answered, “yes.” Jesus preventing Peter from telling him the incident, asks Peter “of whom do the kings of the earth take custom or tribute? of their own children, or of strangers?” Peter said of strangers. Jesus answered, “then are the children free. Notwithstanding, lest we offend them, go to the sea, cast a hook, and take the first fish thou catchest, open his mouth and take out the coin therein and give it to the tribute collector.”

The Roman tribute money was used mostly for military purposes. The Roman Empire was then ruling the major part of the then known world. It required large armies to subdue and occupy these many nations. The money consumed for military purposes was a large sum. Jesus asked Peter to pay for both of them.

Tax was again the subject of an article in the issue, but this time the message is much changed:

Taxes

Daniel Graber
Pastor, Silver Street Church, Goshen, Ind.

Dear Quiet of the Land;

PAX… VOLUNTARY SERVICE… 1‒W… What does it all mean? Yes, it means a positive witness for peace; but in a vision the other night I heard 1000 angels shouting, “Awake! Awake! Ye Quiet of the Land!”

And then the angel Gabriel went on to explain: “Ah, yes, you Mennonites are righteous, peace-loving, law-abiding citizens of your land; but what are you doing at this time so near the death of your Lord? Does not your Christian conscience move you at more points than that of nonresistance to war and your interest in finding a peaceful alternative?

“You who proclaim to the world that you are Christ’s disciples would now also deny thy Lord! Ah, yes, my Lord did boldly say, ‘Render therefore to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s and to God the things that are God’s’; but are you living under the Roman Empire where you have no political freedom? No, you are citizens in a free republic, a land founded with an appreciation for your conscience. Did you not hear the words of John Milton: ‘The passage “render to Caesar what is Caesar’s and to God what is God’s” does not say “Give Caesar thy conscience.”’

“You, the Quiet of the Land, are ordering a huge portion of that which crucifies your Lord when you pay your federal taxes. Did you know, fine Mennonites, that you are ordering H-Bombs which will destroy cities of a million men, women, and children?… Did you know you are ordering massive retaliation which will destroy most of mankind and cause more mass suffering than our world has ever known?… Did you know you are ordering nuclear bomb tests which poison the atmosphere for a hundred generations yet unborn?… Did you know you are ordering the top secret horror weapon, by paying in advance for it, to be delivered any day now?”

As Gabriel finished, the chorus of angels replied from the background; “No! Gabriel, No! Most Mennonites did not order these horrible weapons. They were ordered for them unawares — yet we must admit they did give silent consent. Most of them didn’t realize that Washington sent all of them a bill for these macabre instruments of suicide and moral degradation in the name of democracy.”

That bill for the coming year amounts to $43,300,000,000 for Defense, or 60 per cent of the total estimated expenditures of the national government. Over half of the total budget is raised from individual income taxes, Mennonites included.

In 20 per cent of the budget went to the War and Navy Departments to defray the cost of national security. In this item went down to 14 per cent of the budget. Possibly these figures do not mean very much now, but taken in comparison to the present amount, it is ten times less than the 43 billion dollars now at our doorstep.

At what point, my dear friends, does one cease to add a pinch of incense and begin to engage in idolatrous worship, and thus deny our Lord? The cost of the Federal Government operation in the budget was $55 per person, even then more than what many people gave to the church. The budget will cost about $455 per person. If you wish to put this into the Mennonite picture, here is an up-to-date report.

In Elkhart County, Indiana, where the population is 84,512 ( Census), there are over 8,800 Amish and Mennonites (Mennonite Encyclopedia). Elkhart County will pay $43,642,912 as their share of the cost of federal government spending. It is assumed that Mennonites of Elkhart County will pay at least their share, which amounts to more than 10.4 per cent, or $4,538,862 plus.

If we could believe that even 40 per cent of the budget would be legitimately used for democracy, it means that the Mennonites of Elkhart County alone are putting into preparation for future wars close to three million dollars a year. That amount of money would be sufficient to operate the entire MCC program for more than a year, or to build several new Mennonite Biblical Seminaries, or a number of hospitals, old people’s homes, colleges, high schools, etc.

From the soldiers of the cross we hear these testimonies concerning taxes. John Woolman, who refused payment in : “To refuse active payment at such a time might be construed to be an act of disloyalty, and appeared likely to displease the rulers, not only here but in England; still there was a scruple so fixed on the minds of many Friends that nothing moved it.”

Bishop Andrew Ziegler, a Mennonite, in the Revolutionary War period; “I would as soon go to war as to pay the three pounds and ten shillings.”

A.J. Muste (Secretary Emeritus of the Fellowship of Reconciliation): “The two decisive powers of government with respect to war are the power to conscript and the power to tax. In regard to the second I have come to the conviction that I am at least conscience bound to challenge the right of the government to tax me for waging war, and in particular for the production of atomic and bacterial weapons.”

Ernest and Marion Bromley (Sharonville, Ohio): “We regard it as the prerogative of every individual to refuse to aid this government or any other government either to prepare for or to engage in war. The time has come when men ought no longer to depend solely upon their spoken witness against war. They ought to prepare themselves for outright resistance by a thorough-going dissociation with the war-making system. No testimony for peace can afford to become a timid shadow. No matter what one may say against our armaments, if he is still paying for armaments, it seems to be talking peace and preparing for war.”

“Awake! Awake! Ye Quiet of the Land!” Think before you begin paying Defense dollars. Convert them to Peace and the Church today.

―From The Christian Evangel.
(slightly condensed)

An article on “Christians and Bomb Tests” in the issue touched on war tax resistance briefly:

Christians have responded to the challenge of this issue in various ways. A few have refused to pay the proportion of their tax that is used for military purposes. Some have voluntarily limited their income to the low level that is tax-exempt…

The issue included Don and Eleanor Kaufman’s letter to the IRS:

Can Christians Pay for War?

As Mennonite Christians filed their income tax returns for , more than one was disquieted to realize that tithing Christians were not giving nearly as much to further God’s kingdom as they were paying for military preparation for war! Two Mennonites decided to give voice to this concern in the following letter.

U.S. Treasury Department
Internal Revenue Service
Washington 25, D.C.

Gentlemen:

In filing income tax returns for we believe it is necessary to clarify our concerns. Like others who have been perplexed by the irresponsible use of tax money for military purposes, we are earnestly seeking for a constructive way in which to be honest with what we understand about the issue. Personally, we are unable to acquiesce easily to the present military expenditures of our government which we believe, are irrelevant to the problem they are trying to solve. One cannot change ideologies or correct evil by destroying those in whom these forces reside.

In an effort to reduce our cooperation in a warmaking system to a minimum, we seriously considered refusing payment of that portion used for military expenditures (which we understand is about 73 per cent of federal taxes). Since we object on religious grounds to participation in war and military preparation in any form, we believe, like Milton Mayer, that we are denied the free exercise of our religion (guaranteed by the First Amendment to the Constitution) when forced to pay income taxes used for military purposes.

If money represents a part of a person’s life, as we believe it does, then it logically follows that a Christian will have ambivalent feelings about professing peace and good will while at the same time supporting explicitly destructive forces within a government. As there are provisions for conscientious objection to military service, there should also be provisions for conscientious objection to making H-bombs or paying for the making of them.

Consequently, in the interests of our government and all people, we are looking for some alternative whereby it would be possible to channel that portion of tax money to those causes which contribute to the welfare of people — those legitimate functions which are constructive and not destructive of human value.

We hope that the United States government will accept our offer to pay the equivalent or more of the military tax to some mutually agreeable agency, organization, or institution, like CROP, MCC, Church World Service, or the United Nations (UNESCO, Technical and Economic Assistance Program, etc.), which is committed to a peaceful program for all men. We feel that a voluntary arrangement something like Edith Green’s bill H.R. 12310 is necessary if we are to make possible the conditions of a lasting and abiding peace.

(This was the earliest of the “peace tax fund” legislative proposals. It set up a fund to be used to give aid developing nations, and would have allowed taxpayers to get up to a 2% deduction on their taxes by donating to the fund.)

As Christians, we are not seeking exemption from the payment of taxes, but we are searching for a right to determine how those taxes are used, especially those which we contribute personally. It is clear to us that a Christian has a responsibility to government, significantly because in a democracy he is a real part of the government. Because the Christian knows something of the value and importance of community he will do everything he can to contribute to the stability and welfare of government on all levels.

Yet if this person realizes the destructive character and devastating results of all military preparation, he will consider it his patriotic duty to do what he can to avoid collective disaster. We believe responsible citizenship implies that there is no blanket endorsement for what a government does. Its actions must be tested and if they are found to be outside of the purpose of God they are to be challenged.

We hope you will feel with us the urgent need to recognize the priority which God always deserves in every human decision. We would appreciate your thoughtful response to this crucial issue.

Don and Eleanor Kaufman
Moundridge, Kansas

The issue reported as follows:

War Tax Concern

Akron– Concern for payment of war taxes has been expressed by the General Brotherhood Board of the Church of the Brethren. Board Executive Secretary W. Howard Row writes, “The concern is real and the problems to implement (an alternative to payment of war taxes) are great. However, probably no greater than that of securing an alternative to military service.” In a resolution shared with MCC and similar organizations the General Brotherhood Board states: Because there is a growing interest among Brethren and others in finding a positive alternative to the payment of that portion of federal income taxes that go for war preparations, the General Brotherhood Board voted that explorations be made with the appropriate agencies of government to the end that an acceptable constructive alternative be provided for all those persons who, by reason of religious training and belief, conscientiously object to the payment of that portion of income taxes going for military defense. These explorations might be made in concert with one or the more of the other organizations with which we are associated or if necessary by Brethren alone.”

A similar reaction was recently expressed by two Mennonites. Mr. and Mrs. Don Kaufman (Moundridge, Kan.) who are under appointment as MCC workers in Indonesia [and who] assert in a letter to the U.S. Treasury Department: [quote from above letter omitted]

On the MCC Executive Committee met, and, according to a later article on the meeting, “[r]eferred to Peace Section the invitation from the Church of the Brethren to study whether there might be a positive alternative provided by the U.S. government for persons conscientiously opposed to paying that portion of income taxes going for military defense.”

The Mennonite Central Committee annual report for included a report from this “Peace Section.” They noted that “throughout our constituency… [c]oncern is evident in discussions about possible participation in various protest actions and about the propriety of paying income taxes that are used so largely for war purposes…”

Our next episode will pick up as the tumultuous 1960s begin.

This is the seventh in a series of posts about war tax resistance as it was reported in back issues of Gospel Herald, journal of the (Old) Mennonite Church.

“Gospel Herald” logo, circa 1959

We are now up to the post-World War Ⅱ period and the Cold War is about to ramp up. Harold S. Bender gets us started with “Forward into the Postwar World with our Peace Testimony” (), which gives us some perspective on how wobbly the Mennonite nonresistance doctrine was even in regards to military service:

[O]f all the Mennoite men who were drafted, forty-one per cent entered the army and fifty-nine per cent stood by the faith of the New Testament and the Mennonite Church and went into C.P.S. To be exact, thirty per cent went straight into the army, ten into noncombatant service, and sixty per cent into C.P.S.

In , Ford Berg took a hard line on Romans 13 in “The Christian’s Obligation to the Government”, disputing in particular the idea that Paul’s advice to the Romans was given during a placid period of Nero’s reign and so shouldn’t be taken to apply to all governments at all times. (See yesterday’s Picket Line in which Edward Yoder tried to advance that gambit.)

Similarly, Lois Ann Weaver tried to quiet any Render-Unto-Caesar revisionists in the issue:

When Christ was questioned about the paying of tribute (taxes) He answered, “Render therefore unto Caesar the things which be Caesar’s, and unto God the things which be God’s” (Luke 20:25). We have no record of an unco-operative spirit or a voiced undertone of resentment on Christ’s part concerning the payment of taxes.

But what this tells me is that there were Mennonites out there who were chipping away at the Christians-Always-Pay-Their-Taxes edifice, enough so that the defenders of the orthodoxy felt it necessary to write such rebuttals.

There was a question of whether or not Mennonites should participate in blood drives run by the Red Cross, as the agency was apparently still doing this in a “race”-segregated way (e.g. only giving “white” plasma to “white” recipients) that was offensive to Mennonite teachings on common humanity. Ford Berg, in the issue, compared this to the relative lack of reluctance Mennonites had paying their taxes for war:

[I]f we are so touchy on this thing, perhaps we should recall that our tax money goes largely for war purposes, to which we carelessly respond that we are not responsible after we make our payments. Dare we apply this reasoning to the blood donations also? Both seem inconsistent, and yet…

Berg was also the first writer to introduce the Peacemakers to Gospel Herald readers. Recall that he was the one who took the hard Romans 13 line in . Here, though, in the issue, he just lets the Peacemakers’ war tax resistance action speak for itself:

Forty-eight men and women, including eight Protestant clergymen, in various parts of the nation refused to file Federal income tax returns as a protest against “bomb building” and war, it was announced by the Tax Refusal Committee of Peacemakers, a national pacifist group. “President Truman’s decision to begin the manufacture of the hydrogen bomb makes us even more determined than before to refuse to finance armaments. Building this newest and most terrible weapon is further indication of the extreme depth of moral degradation into which our nation has sunk.”

As with the coverage in The Mennonite around this time, the first mentions of war tax resisters are those from outside the Mennonite community. There is clearly some interest in this sort of witness or direct action, but it takes a while before Mennonites themselves put themselves forward. Here’s another example, from the issue:

Twenty-five Quaker residents of Fair Hope, Alabama, have decided to emigrate to Costa Rica so that they may be free from military demand and from paying “war taxes.” Said their spokesman, “Our economy has become so involved with military effort throughout the world, that a person can hardly make a living here without being a part of that system.” A spokesman for the American Friends Service Committee said this would be the first instance in American history that a group of Quakers had left the country because of their religious pacifist convictions.

On the Mennonite Church, in General Conference, adopted “A Declaration of Christian Faith and Commitment with respect to Peace, War, and Nonresistance.” These were the sections that dealt most directly with taxes:

[W]e cannot apply our labor, money, business, factories, nor resources in any form to war or military ends, either in war finance or war industry, even under compulsion.

[I]n wartime, as well as in peacetime, we shall endeavor to continue to live a quiet and peaceable life in all godliness and honesty; avoid joining in the wartime hysteria of hatred, revenge, and retaliation; and manifest a meek and submissive spirit, being obedient to the laws and regulations of the government in all things, including the usual taxes, except when obedience would cause us to violate the teachings of the Scriptures and our conscience before God.

The issue included an article on “Nonresistance in Eighteenth Century Pennsylvania” by M. Alice Weber that related the story of the war-tax-related Funkite schism in the early American Mennonite community, and also mentioned Quaker refusal to pay war taxes.

The first instance I saw of a Mennonite suggesting that Mennonites should take action to address the problem of their taxes going to the military was in the article “Give Caesar — Give God” by Christian L. Graber in the issue. Excerpt:

A large part of the Federal Taxes are used to support the military budget. If we do not deduct all that the government allows us to deduct, but rather pay a higher tax than we would need to pay, we are to the extent of such overpayment lending our voluntary support to the military program. Good stewardship forces us to face this issue.

But this idea was taken as a reductio ad absurdum by Barney Ovensen, who was defending nonresistance against another Christian who was arguing that Christians should not be pacifistic (“Why It Is Not Right for a Christian to Fight”, ). Excerpt:

McQuilkin says the man who pays taxes is just as guilty of killing as the man who actually joins the army and kills. If this is true, every Christian is guilty — for we all are told to pay taxes to “Caesar.” But where did McQuilkin learn this doctrine? From Christ? Of course not. From the apostles? No. It is an awful thing to use the wisdom of this world in order to make void the “foolishness” of God.

The issue brought news of another example of war tax resistance from outside of the Mennonite community:

For the third year in succession a woman pastor at Great Barrington, Massachusetts, has paid only 25 per cent of her federal income tax, because she is opposed to the large percentage of the national income used for war. In a letter accompanying her tax return this lady says, “I cannot conscientiously pay more of my tax because at least that proportion of our national income is now used for war. I believe it is wrong to kill human beings. I believe that today war only increases the evils we are fighting and it will, if we persist in it, degrade us, destroy our liberties and our spiritual values, and eventually destroy us and our civilization.” In the past two years a lien was placed against this pastor’s salary to collect the unpaid tax. Probably the same method will be used again this year.

The issue briefly quoted A.J. Muste on why he refused to file a tax return, but made no comment.

A series of notices in , , , and noted with alarm what a high percentage “of the taxpayer’s dollar” in the U.S. was devoted to military spending.

The annual sessions of the Virginia Conference, held , passed a resolution that indicates the attitude of unconcern was still dominant:

Resolved, That we gratefully acknowledge the sincere efforts of our government to provide for the welfare of its citizens; that we counsel our people to pay their taxes cheerfully…

An editorial by Paul Erb in the issue, “On Paying Taxes,” seemed to acknowledge that war tax resistance was in the air — not approving of it, but indicating that in any case there was a right and wrong way to go about it.

In our obedience to law, we reserve the right to obey God rather than man, if we are asked to do something contrary to our consciences. But we do not think it is wrong to pay lawfully imposed taxes and customs, even tough some of the money maybe used for purposes which we cannot approve, like military preparations and war.

If anyone has conscientious scruples about paying taxes, he should be honest and aboveboard about it. Certainly a Christian could never justify dishonest tax or import reports. Yet a brother who is in business writes us of his certain knowledge that some Mennonites falsify their reports, and cheat the government out of some thousands of dollars.

“The Christian and the State” by Wilbur J. Miller, found in the issue, reiterated the traditional hard line on Romans 13.

“Mennonites and Bomb Tests” by Ronald & Elaine Rich () matter-of-factly presented war tax resistance as a possible Christian option:

Christians have responded to the challenge of this issue in various ways. A few have refused to pay the proportion of their tax that is used for military purposes. Some have voluntarily limited their income to the low level that is tax exempt.

I assume the following note, found in the issue, again refers to A.J. Muste:

A Presbyterian clergyman in New York has refused for the fourth consecutive year to pay the major part of his income taxes which he says are earmarked for military expenditures. He pays only 20 per cent of his taxes and gives the rest to charities. “The time has come,” he says, “when responsible clergymen must join in a common protest against the government’s present suicidal policy of reliance on military might.”

Ditto with this one, from the issue:

A Presbyterian pacifist minister who refused to pay the part of his federal income tax which he felt would be used for war purposes is now serving a six-month term at Federal Prison camp at Allenburg, Pa.

I’m not sure what if anything was behind the reluctance to mention his name.

A “Sunday School Lesson” (Alta Mae Erb again) in the issue asserted that when Jesus asked his interrogators to show him a coin, and then gave his Render Unto Caesar answer, what he meant by all that was: “With these coins they paid their poll tax. Jesus meant that this tax was among the things of Caesar.”

On , Melvin Gingerich testified before a Senate committee on a military conscription bill. His testimony included the following phrase: “We who have uneasy consciences because of the disproportionate share of our tax money which is going into military expenditures in contrast to that which is going into nonmilitary foreign aid…” This, I thought, was a long way from Romans 13 and its insistence that Christians pay their taxes not grudgingly but “for conscience’ sake,” and shows how that norm was shifting.

Amish Farmers and the Social Security Tax

While this was going on, there was another tax resistance fight in the greater Anabaptist community. The Amish, who placed a high value on mutual aid and on reliance on God and who therefore did not purchase insurance, were resistant to being roped in to the federal government’s Social Security system. Many refused to apply for benefits. Some refused to pay withholding taxes.

The first mention of this I noticed was this, from the issue:

The Federal International Revenue Service [sic] has ordered the seizure of livestock of Amish farmers in certain Ohio counties. These farmers have refused to pay taxes which go for social security, which the Amish are opposed to.

Other mentions of this conflict included:

  •  — the Amish farmers bought their horses back from middlemen who had bought them at a tax auction
  •  — a bill was introduced that would exempt Amish from Social Security
  •  — Amish refuse refund of overplus from auctions of their goods
  •  — Amish petition government for an exemption from the Social Security law
  •  — the Amish reportedly win such an exemption (but this turns out to be exaggerated)
  •  — three work horses are seized from an Amish farmer for back taxes
  •  — letters of protest hit the local papers after an Amish farmer’s horses are seized for taxes
  •  — the IRS announces a crackdown on Amish social security tax resisters
  •  — the IRS announces a moratorium on seizures from Amish Social Security resisters, and a Senator goes on record siding with the Amish on this
  •  — debate on a possible exemption continues in Congress
  •  — a Gospel Herald editorial sympathizes with with Amish resisters
  • and  — more exemption legislation is proposed
  •  — apparently they’re still debating whether or how much to exempt the Amish from Social Security in Congress

This is the eighth in a series of posts about war tax resistance as it was reported in back issues of Gospel Herald, journal of the (Old) Mennonite Church.

“Gospel Herald” logo, circa 1959

Up until now, war tax resistance has either been treated as unscriptural and therefore unthinkable, or as a curious practice that a few particularly conscientious people from other Christian sects were experimenting with. But in something snapped, and the Gospel Herald began to consider it as a possible Mennonite response.

The issue noted that the closely-related Anabaptist cousins, the Church of the Brethren had turned the payment of taxes for military purposes into a problem that Christians needed to solve or work around:

Church of the Brethren leaders will approach government agencies in the interest of finding a “positive alternative” to the payment of taxes for military purposes. The Brotherhood Board voted to make explorations “with the appropriate agencies of government to the end that an acceptable constructive alternative be provided for all those persons who by reason of religious training and belief conscientiously object to the payment of that portion of income taxes going for military defense.” Several members of the Board pointed out that this matter would be much more complicated than arrangements already in effect for alternatives to military service, but the Board felt all possible explorations should be made.

The Mennonite Central Committee put this on the agenda at its Executive Committee meeting :

[The MCC Executive Committee actions included] Referring to Peace Section the invitation from the Church of the Brethren to study whether there might be a positive alternative provided by the U.S. government for persons conscientiously opposed to paying that portion of income taxes going for military defense.

Harold S. Bender did not address this tax problem directly, in his essay “When May Christians Disobey the Government?” This may be meaningful because this was a time when war tax resistance was clearly in the air and because when Bender had been given the opportunity in the 1930s and 1940s, he had said unequivocally that Christians pay their taxes period. Bender did, though, take a very conservative line on civil disobedience in general:

Jesus taught His disciples to “Render therefore unto Caesar the things which are Caesar’s; and unto God the things that are God’s” (Matt. 22:21), thus stating a principle which goes far beyond the question of tax payment which was immediately at issue. The Christian owes allegiance and obedience to two sovereignties, both in good conscience. He must decide in all conscientiousness and earnestness when his allegiance to God requires disobedience to regularly constituted governmental authority and cheerfully take the consequences.

Opinion that a law or a requirement of the state is unwise or undesirable cannot be a ground of disobedience. There may be wide divergence as to whether legislation is good or bad or whether governmental policies are helpful or harmful to the general welfare. The Christian’s overriding obligation is to obey, even while he may seek to persuade or convince the authorities to change the law.

What then are the conditions requiring disobedience? Certainly the Christian must disobey (1) when he is required to perform an act which is clearly forbidden in Scripture or is a dear implication from such a prohibition (military training or service would be a case in point), and (2) when he is forbidden to do what the Scripture or the clear implications of it require.

In other words, the subject matter of an act required by the state must clearly be an evil in itself, which then becomes a sin when performed. We must consider it a sin to disobey the government (in the light of the above-cited N.T. teachings) unless a sinful act is required. The Christian is not at liberty to disobey the government for his own ulterior purposes, no matter how good these purposes may be in themselves… Nonresistant Christians cannot justify disobedience to law merely because they have good ends in view.

In the light of the above, it would appear that the desire to witness to the truth or against an evil cannot be a ground to disobey the requirements of the state which in themselves are not wrong. Nor may the supposed relative effectiveness of several kinds of witness be a ground for employing the type of witness that involves disobedience, rather than a type that is free of such disobedience.

For example, Bender wrote, in the case of conscription, it is not sinful to accept conscription into civilian service, so Christians must accept this if it is demanded. Registration is also not sinful, so Christians must register. If forced into military service, though, the Christian must refuse to obey. Refusal to register is a form of witness against the military, not a proper example of Christian refusal to commit a sinful act, and so it’s not an appropriate occasion for disobedience.

This distinction is worth keeping in mind as we move forward, as some Mennonite war tax resisters will come to defend their resistance as a form of witness against an over-militarized state, while others will defend theirs as a form of conscientious objection against (indirect) military service.

When the Mennonite Central Committee issued its Annual Report, the “Peace Witness” section made note of the growing concern among Mennonites about the propriety of paying for the military by means of taxes:

Emerging throughout our constituency is a growing uneasiness concerning our witness against such problems as discrimination, militarism, and war, in view of the frightful consequences these might have today. Concern is evident in discussions about possible participation in various protest actions and about the propriety of paying income taxes that are used so largely for war purposes, as well as the suggestion that perhaps nonregistration would be a clearer testimony against conscription and militarism.

The MCC Annual Report put it somewhat more strongly:

Serious discussion on the question of whether the nonresistant Christian can in good conscience pay income taxes which go so heavily for war purposes has continued.

Some decided the time had come to press the point. “A Concerned Member” had this to say in the issue:

Would you believe that Mennonites are giving many times more for military purposes than for missions? Sixty per cent of your income tax money each year goes for defense and yet per member we give only about $20 each year for missions.

The brought this news about A.J. Muste’s tax resistance (naming him this time):

A.J. Muste, well-known pacifist leader, has lost a court battle in his refusal to pay income tax because some portion might go toward the nation’s military establishment. United States Tax Court has ruled that Mr. Muste must pay back taxes plus a variety of penalties. The opinion stressed that Congress has specifically provided military service exemption for conscientious objectors, but has taken no similar action in the income tax field.

Andrew R. Shelley was among the first Gospel Herald writers to try to provide a solution for concerned Mennonites. He proposed using legal deductions for charitable donations (which were apparently more generous then than they are today) to reduce or eliminate income tax liability ():

Taxes for Military Spending

By Andrew R. Shelley

Practically all thinking people are disturbed about the arms race in our world. This does not mean there is common agreement as to exactly what should be done about it. In the United States many people of various denominations, and some who do not claim to be Christians, are very much concerned over the proportion of the national budget which goes for military purposes. There have been those who have felt that Christian people should withhold the portion of the tax which goes for military purposes. These people reason that to pay the tax is a violation of conscience.

Our government has been petitioned numbers of times to provide an alternative to paying tax for military purposes. During World War Ⅱ the Canadian government did provide what was called a “Sticker Bond.” This meant that a conscientious objector, if he desired that his money be used for other than war purposes, could request that a sticker be attached to his bond which would indicate that the money was to be used for nonmilitary purposes of government. While this eased the conscience of the conscientious objector, it was purely a bookkeeping matter as far as the government was concerned, because it provided for essential phases of the work of the government.

Recently in various periodicals there have appeared letters and articles regarding the paying of the portion of tax that goes for military purposes. It has appeared to me that one phase of the solution of the problem has been overlooked in almost all of the letters and articles which I have read.

In our desire to find a full solution to the problems involved we should not be unmindful of that which we do have in our power to do. The government of the United States is the most liberal government in the world in regard to giving recognition for giving to charitable purposes. Our government allows a tax deduction of 30 per cent for charitable giving. (The last 10 per cent must be given to certain phases of charity which fall into the category of the general giving of Christian people.)

All of us are aware of the unnatural and unwholesome nature of American living. Yet, most Christian people choose to go along with this way of life which even many non-Christian leaders say is unwholesome. It is possible for Christian people to sharply reduce the amount of tax which they pay for military purposes through the simple and legal expedient of charitable giving. Here, our government gives us the marvelous opportunity to choose that phase of charitable giving to which we desire our money to go.

While it is certainly true that not all Christian families can give 30 per cent of their income to charitable purposes, certainly those in average circumstances can do so. (Those in higher income brackets can go far beyond this.) It is at once evident that we need not go along with some of the extremely wasteful practices of the American public. For every hundred dollars more that the Christian family gives to the work of the church, they can save twenty dollars’ tax and approximately fifteen dollars which would go into the general category of military spending (on the basis of 20 per cent taxation). Consequently, it would seem that those directly concerned with the problem of taxation for military purposes would go the very limit in reducing the amount of money which they give to military purposes through taxation.

For those who are concerned about this matter, I would urge that careful records be kept of every phase of living having to do with taxes. Thus it will be seen that through careful expenditure of the money God has entrusted to us, it is astounding how much we can give to the work of the Lord. Think of the prospects; the positive aspect of our modern America is the privilege of living full lives and yet giving largely to the work of the Lord.

I would like to clearly state that this is not the highest motivation for giving. We give fundamentally not because we want to pay less tax, but primarily because we love the Lord and we want His work to go forward. It is startling and it is wonderful that at this juncture of the history of the world, when the needs are great and the opportunities are beyond description, the Lord has granted us the greatest resources in the history of mankind. We can send forth the Gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ. Certainly without Him there can be no peace. Without the saving grace of salvation which has been brought through the shed blood of Christ, there can be no lasting peace. Among the various things that might be said, we must realize that the primary consideration is the sending forth of the Gospel.

While this approach does not answer the total problem with which we began this letter, it does mean that we are beginning at a point where we have control. And from this point, which takes no more time than any other approach that we might use, we can do what we feel led to do further. But let us begin at this point and I am sure whatever else we do will be observed with greater sympathy than if we do not start at this point of personal involvement.

All of us believe it is right and proper that we should support many phases of our government. Whatever our differences may be on the attitude toward taxation in relation to the military part of our budget, certainly we recognize the need for government. We recognize our responsibilities. Rom. 13. Consequently, we gladly participate in that part of our government’s program which is essential for the welfare of our people.

A civilly disobedient war tax resister from the Church of the Brethren — Charles E. Zunkel — hit the pages of Gospel Herald on :

Charles E. Zunkel of Port Republic, Va., former moderator of the Church of the Brethren, wrote to President Kennedy and to the director of Internal Revenue that he and his wife would no longer pay a major portion of their federal income tax because 75 per cent of it goes for military purposes. He wrote that they would continue filing their income taxes, but would pay only 25 per cent of the amount. The remainder would be given to the church in quarterly payments, in addition to the 15 per cent or more which they already give. He writes that they hope some alternative tax plan may be worked out whereby conscientious objectors may give their tax money to peaceable pursuits just as young men serve in alternative service in lieu of the military service.

Finally, a poem by Rachel Horst, found in the edition, and titled “Render to Caesar” suggested that the Render Unto Caesar quotation was being abused by people who prefer Caesar to Christ:

He spoke the words, Himself, not long ago
While looking at a craven face upon the coin.
We paid our tax with hatred to a hated man
And waved palms for a King of love,
  Whose throng we hoped to join.

We shout the words from raucous throats today
While looking at a regal face upon the cross.
We acclaim the kingship of a loathsome man
As we renounce the Sovereign
  Without a thought of loss.

There was a bit of a gap in coverage of war tax resistance issues for the rest of the year that coincided with John Drescher taking over the editorship from Paul Erb in (I don’t know if there’s any connection). But then things heated up, as a genuine Mennonite declared himself a civilly disobedient war tax resister in . Tune in tomorrow!

Today I’ll share what I found in the archives of American Brethren periodicals from the early 1950s concerning war taxes and war bond purchases.

Church of the Brethren: Gospel Messenger

I found most of the items of interest in the Gospel Messenger again, and for the first time these included specified war tax resisters from within the Church of the Brethren. The edition gave readers this short notice:

Floyd M. Irvin of Eustis, Fla., sent in only that part of his income tax which would not be used by the Federal government for war purposes. The rest of it, he informed them, he was turning over to a useful church program. He believes that if many more people would do this it would have a telling effect upon military expenditures.

This was the first I’d heard of Irvin. There was a follow-up about his resistance in the issue (source):

A series of articles in a Lake County, Fla., local paper call attention to the activities of Floyd M. Irvin of Eustis, Fla., on behalf of world peace. While the articles tell a few facts concerning Bro. Irvin’s life, they give special attention to his advocating nonviolent techniques in place of war, and especially to his refusal to pay the share of income taxes which goes toward supporting the military program. Through Bro. Irvin’s efforts a recent article in the Gospel Messenger was used as the basis for a feature in his local paper.

They don’t come right out and claim Irvin as a member of the Brethren here, but they do call him “Bro.” and make the Gospel Messenger connection. I think this is the first explicitly war tax resisting member of a Brethren church named in a Brethren periodical from the modern war tax resistance era.

Another small note was found in the issue (source):

Again this year various people, who have conscientious feelings against the tremendous amount of our budget which is being spent for war, are withholding from their income tax the percentages which are used definitely for war purposes. The rest of it they are paying.

I assume this refers to the Peacemakers, who were putting out press releases about organized war tax resistance around this time.

The issue included a note about the Monteverde Quaker emigrants (source):

Quaker Group to Leave United States

Twenty-five Quaker residents of Fairhope, Ala., have decided to emigrate to Costa Rica so that they may be free from military demands and from paying “war taxes.” This announcement came from Hubert Mendenhall, the spokesman for the group who range in age from twenty to eighty years. Most of them are farmers.

“Our economy has become so involved with military effort throughout the world,” Mr. Mendenhall said, “that a person can hardly make a living here without being a part of that system.”

A spokesman for the American Friends Service Committee said that this would be the first instance in American history that a group of Quakers had left the country because of their religious pacifist convictions.

A letter to the editor from Mart Sheaffer, in the edition suggested that tax resistance was more Christian than the alternative (source):

Tax Refusal

Why do Christians continue to pay the government that portion of tax which is used to support war, since war is contrary to the teachings of the New Testament?

It seems that it would be more Christlike to refuse to pay that portion of tax and to give the same amount — or more — to some worthy Christian cause such as the program of the Brethren Service Commission or some other Christian denomination’s project.

We could then take a receipt for the amount given and turn the receipt over to the government. If it is permissible to teach the gospel, it also should be permissible to live it and practice it.

the magazine printed a letter in response, disagreeing by giving the old taxes-are-debts argument, and recommending instead prayer rather than civil disobedience (source). Floyd M. Irvin responded in the issue (source):

Taxes and Our Responsibility

I would like to express my disagreement with the brother from Grantsville, Md., who states that “taxes are a debt… when we pay this debt our responsibility ends.”

I would say rather that, as a citizen, I am a partner with other citizens both in managing and in financing the affairs of our government. A citizen of a democracy has a definite responsibility in determining the purpose for which his tax money is used. The denial of this privilege by the English government was one of the chief reasons for the revolt of the American colonists and for the birth of our republic. Now that we have this privilege, it becomes a responsibility.

If the fathers of the American Revolution in their day felt an inner compulsion to refuse to pay taxes for the use of which they had no directing voice, ought not followers of the Prince of Peace in our day feel an urge to refuse to pay taxes which are used to finance the killing of our fellow Christians?

This is a question which needs careful consideration. The following questions may stimulate our thoughts on the matter.

Do we as citizens have a responsibility in regard to the use of our tax money which should direct our actions beyond our choice of representatives? In other words, after we have voted to the best of our ability, are we guiltless if our taxes are used to kill our fellow men?

Does the Scriptural injunction to pay taxes apply without exception, or is the payment of taxes to finance a war that destroys God’s children an exception when we should obey God rather than men?

How can we order our lives and finances so that if we refuse to pay taxes the government will not take more than we withhold? Is it time for Christians to organize a non-violent resistance movement against war?

The edition again covered the Peacemakers (source):

Group Refuses to Pay “War” Taxes

Fifty-nine men and women, including four Protestant clergymen, in various parts of the country have refused to file federal income tax returns because they find it impossible to support the Korean or any other war. This announcement was made by the tax refusal committee of Peacemakers, a national pacifist group, which released a statement by the fifty-nine saying:

“We are particularly concerned at this time about the situation in Korea, where a civil struggle has been provoked and aggravated by two power states to the point where it is already a major war — one which may be the spark that will set the world afire.

“We find it impossible to support policies and activities of this kind with our allegiance or with our money. We must, therefore, refuse to give money for such purposes of conquest and massacre, and must give it instead to causes which build understanding and world community.”

A.J. Muste of the Fellowship of Reconciliation, sent a separate letter to the collector of internal revenue in his district, declaring that this is the third successive year in which he has refused to file a return or pay taxes. He contended that “anyone who contributes to arming the United States today also contributes to arming Russia — which is the last thing I want to do — in the same way that Russians contribute to American armament, for each government mechanically matches the military preparations of the other.”

The issue brought this news (source):

At the auction sale of her husband’s car, Mrs. Arthur H. Emery, Jr., begged those attending the sale not to bid. She said she feared the proceeds might be used for war. The U.S. bureau of internal revenue, which had seized the car, will apply the $145 on the income tax owed by Mr. and Mrs. Emery. They had refused to pay it because they thought it might be used for military purposes.

This letter from Ernest Bromley comes from the issue (source):

Tax Refusal

Many people who have been deeply concerned over the large and growing percentage of federal taxes going to war purposes have been prevented from taking any definite action because all funds paid to the federal government go into a common treasury, whether this money is for war purposes or for constructive purposes to which citizens willingly contribute.

The Tax Refusal Committee of Peacemakers calls attention to the fact that if the increased military appropriations now being voted by Congress under various heads are added together, this will mean a total of around seventy billion dollars for war purposes out of a budget of around ninety billion. The increased appropriations will reflect themselves in a percentage increase in taxes, and this increase will be for purely military purposes and nothing else. We would welcome correspondence from persons who feel a concern over this matter, which should be addressed to Rev. Ernest Bromley, Golay Road in Gano, Sharonville, Ohio.

Another war tax resister from outside of Brethren circles was featured briefly in the issue (source):

Woman Pastor Refuses to Pay “War Taxes”

A woman pastor in South Hartford, N.Y., paid only twenty-five per cent of her federal income tax because she is opposed to the government’s “warlike ventures.” The Rev. Marion C. Frenyear, pastor of the South Hartford Congregational church, said she is a Christian pacifist and “cannot support war in any way,” that in her belief war is against religious principles and taxes should be used to bring peace and disarmament to the world.

For the same reason Miss Frenyear paid only twenty-five per cent of her federal tax bill. Walter R. Sturr, collector of internal revenue at Albany, placed a lien against her salary and indicated the same method would be used this year to collect the unpaid taxes.

The delinquent taxes were paid by the treasury of the church and the amount was deducted from the pastor’s salary.

The Brethren Missionary Herald

The Brethren Missionary Herald seemed to trend conservative. It complained about high government spending and taxes (and saw creeping socialism at every turn), and didn’t hesitate to put the blame for this on the military budget, but this was about as far as it was prepared to go in protest:

The child of God will… pay his taxes…. It is our judgment that the general tenor of the teaching of the Bible allows for protest and even revolt against unjust and exorbitant taxation. Beyond these considerations, however, the Lord’s servant will not try to evade the payment of tribute. []

The Brethren Evangelist

The Brethren Evangelist was also largely sticking to its guns and not entertaining any newfangled tax resistance ideas. But the magazine’s intolerance for legalized alcoholic beverages was intense enough that, in the midst of what was otherwise a standard render-unto-Cæsar article, they let this slip in the issue (source):

“Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s.” What things does Caesar have a right to claim? Taxes? Yes, we should expect to pay taxes for the privilege of living in such a land as ours. We expect protection of life and property; good sanitary living conditions, and the like — and these cost money. But there is, of course, a limit to which the Christian should be forced to go. For instance, to be forced to pay taxes for the upkeep of hospitals for the criminally insane and penitentiaries where are housed the results of crimes brought about by a government-supported liquor program, is going beyond what any government has a moral (even if it has a legal) right to demand. We could go on at great length with many other examples, but space forbids. You think about them.

Interest in war tax resistance in the Church of the Brethren continued to simmer through the mid-1950s, and more war tax resisters emerged into the limelight.

Church of the Brethren: Gospel Messenger

The war tax resistance of Marion Frenyear again made it into the Gospel Messenger in the issue (source):

Woman Pastor Deducts “War” Tax

A woman pastor in Great Barrington, Mass., paid only twenty-five per cent of her federal income tax because she is opposed to the large percentage of the national income used for war. Marion C. Frenyear, now a supply pastor for churches in the Great Barrington area, said she had paid voluntarily only twenty-five per cent of the federal income taxes since . Miss Frenyear explained her partial payment in a letter to the director of internal revenue at Boston. In the past two years a lien was placed against Miss Frenyear’s salary to collect the unpaid taxes and it is expected the same method will be used this year.

James Berkebile, dean of McPherson College (a Brethren institution) wrote an article on “Christians and Citizens” for the edition. In the past, this would have been the occasion for the usual render-unto-Cæsar boilerplate when it came to taxes. This time, though, things were a little more nuanced. Excerpt:

In these days of high taxes many illegal methods of evading payment of income tax have been used. It is just that one make every means provided under law to reduce his income tax to that value determined by legislation, but often there is no reporting of income that cannot be checked on readily. Devious methods are used to avoid one’s well-defined financial obligation to the government. Certainly, we should protest the use of so much of our public money for war purposes. We should compliment and encourage those who strive to divert our tax money to productive enterprises for the good of men. But for our own soul’s sake we must be honest in our reports for taxation purposes while we strive to change the taxation procedure if it is unwise and unfair. We respect those who refuse to pay that portion of their tax going for war purposes in order to make their testimony for a cause because they make clear what they are doing and accept the penalties of the law for their failure to comply. We do not respect those who are dishonest in their reporting. We owe the government, of which we are a part, our honesty and integrity, whether we move through normal channels or whether we move contrary to established legislation. In the latter case we owe our submission voluntarily, willingly and freely to the penalties involved with the hope that our suffering for the cause of the kingdom may result in changes for the better.

In the issue, Donald Royer passed along some early results of his historical study of the beliefs and practices of the Brethren (source):

I am completing a study on the factors in our culture which are related to the changing peace position of the Brethren, and one of the tentative conclusions I have drawn is this. Up to World War Ⅰ the heart of our peace position was conscientious objection to war. Since World War Ⅰ the heart of our peace position has come to be the Brethren Service program of relief and rehabilitation. We have lost the protesting witness almost completely, and have put in its place a positive witness. With this positive witness there has come something we may not have anticipated. According to my study an increasing number of Brethren are saying that in case of another war they would increase their giving to Brethren Service, but that they would also buy war bonds and work in a defense industry if needed. Under our new emphasis it is becoming easier to play both ends against the middle, or to serve both God and Caesar at the same time.

A.J. Muste was quoted in the issue (source):

A.J. Muste, on refusing to file a Federal income tax return: “A stupendous percentage of the Federal budget is devoted to war purposes, an increasing percentage to the manufacture of weapons of mass destruction, and there is no way of separating the income used for war and that used for other purposes.”

A new Brethren war tax resister shared his protest in the letters column of the issue (source):

Obliged to Protest

I am informing the Bureau of Internal Revenue that since the major item on the Federal budget is military expenditure I, therefore, cannot conscientiously pay all of my income tax. Because of religious conviction I could not myself bear arms, nor could I assist in the manufacture of armaments. Neither can I pay a substitute to bear arms for me or invest time or money in any company or corporation which manufactures or supplies armaments. Therefore, I do not feel able to supply voluntarily any part of the money to be used to support a military establishment or to create super-bombers, guided missiles, and nuclear weapons, all of which things clearly contradict God’s will for mankind and cannot help but bring terrible judgments upon their creators.

With five dependents I have not until this year been affluent enough to be liable for this tax. Now, although the amount of money is small, I feel that I can voluntarily pay half, which will more than include that spent for all of the necessary and valuable functions of the federal government. For I have no desire to deny either the government’s existence or its value, except in that its military function has become so pathologically exaggerated.

Also as a member of the Church of the Brethren I feel obliged to make this protest. For it is shameful and demoralizing that the whole weight of the important witness against war and warmaking is being laid on teen-age shoulders while their elders too easily content with a false security conveniently look the other way and refuse to assume their moral and spiritual obligation to their community, their church, and God.

It may be objected that by saying, “Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s,” Jesus thereby obliged his followers to pay every tax for any purpose. The truth is that this saying places the problem squarely upon one’s discrimination of what belongs to Caesar that does not belong to God, and contrariwise. The image and legend which made that particular coin legal tender were certainly Caesar’s and not God’s. Any ultimate claims upon the actual metal would, of course, pose more difficult questions. My situation is not like that, however. What Caesar demands of me is a check, a mere piece of common paper which is not given currency value by Caesar’s image and legend but rather by my own private signature which is a particular and intimate image of my own personal mind and body.

The claim whereby Caesar would use my personal image and signature in order to create weapons of total destruction is not supported by the gospel or by any divine right but rather by the very force and violence which I as a pacifist and a Christian must and do refuse to acknowledge as binding or just in the sight of God.―Fred W. Smith, W. Alexandria, Ohio.

Lottie M. Bollinger wrote a letter supporting Smith’s stand that was published in the issue.

The Pilgrim

Over several issues in and , The Pilgrim reprinted Daniel Musser’s Non-Resistance Asserted: Or the Kingdom of God and the Kingdom of the World Separated. Musser was a Reformed Mennonite, but apparently his point of view was harmonious with that of the Pilgrim editors.

Musser believed that Christians should stay aloof from the government, but should obey it, including in taxation. Christians “are duty bound to be obedient to all their laws and regulations, and to pay all taxes, duties, fines, or whatever rates or levies the government may see fit to impose upon them,” he wrote.

On the other hand, voluntary contributions for war or to raise money to help hire armed forces were out of the question:

Since the commencement of the present war, when the War Department called for fresh levies of troops, and when our State was threatened with invasion, people have collected money to arm and equip militia for local or State service, and also for bounty to induce men to volunteer in the National service. This is not inconsistent for the world, or such as profess that it is the duty of Christians to take up arms in defense of their rights and country. But it is certainly inconsistent for those who profess to be nonresistant to pay or arm others to go and do what they say is wrong to do themselves.

It would be a very gross violation of this principle [of non-resistance] for non-resistants to show their reliance in or dependence on an arm of flesh by joining in with the world to contribute money for bounty to induce men to volunteer, or to arm and equip men to go forth and defend their person and property.

[H]ow can those who profess to be disciples of Jesus Christ, and who say as such that Christ has forbidden them to fight, join in with our opponents and pay men to go and fight for them, or in their stead? It is said, “It is to avoid the draft,” but by what means? By inducing other men to go in our stead! Anyone can see that there is no consistency here. If it is wrong for me to go, it is wrong to pay another to go for me.

And hiring substitutes directly is also forbidden:

We do not recognize those as true non-resistants who profess to have conscientious scruples about bearing arms… as will not go to the battle-field themselves, but will hire substitutes to go and do that for them which, they say, they dare not do themselves.

What about the special tax that conscientious objectors were supposed to pay in lieu of service? Mennonites and Brethren were typically okay with paying that; Quakers were not. Musser’s opinion:

[T]he powers again ordered a draft without exempting any for conscience sake. The request was personal service or money — three hundred dollars. The personal service they could not render. The money belongs to the kingdom of this world, and they had a right to demand it as their own. Paul said that we shall pay tribute and custom to whom it is due, and said we shall do so because of the duties the Government has to discharge. They now ask for our person or the money. The latter is theirs and we make conscience of the duty to pay it, and feel that it would be wrong to refuse to do so.

It is alleged that, when we pay the commutation fee and the war tax, these are used for war purposes, and that the case is parallel with that of paying to induce volunteering, or buying substitutes. The world does not profess to be willing to suffer loss and inconvenience if it can be avoided by personal resistance or defense. When they take such measures, as before alluded to, they act rationally and consistently. The government is founded on this principle and cannot exist without the sword, and, whenever necessity requires it, must use the sword. Paul said that for this purpose we also pay tribute. It is due to the government, and we shall pay to all their dues. The commutation fee and what is called “war tax” are no more a “war tax” than any other tax we pay to keep up the government; and I am no more violating my non-resistant principles, if I pay one, than I do if I pay the other.

I have said before, all the estate or property we own, we hold only by the tolerance and authority of the powers that be. The powers have authority over all property, and have right to demand so much of it as they have need of. This we acknowledge, and have no right to refuse giving it to them, or to ask what use they intend making of it. If I buy property with a ground rent, or lien of any kind on it, that part or amount is not mine any more than if I had not bought the property. I have no right to withhold the payment of that money any more than I have a sum of money that I have borrowed, or other debt that I have contracted. Thus it is with land, and all property. The government originally owned all the land. It sold it to settlers, under its patent; they hold it on condition of paying such rates and levies as the Government may demand. Then, when we pay whatever tax is asked of us, we only give to it its due, as we would pay any other debt due; and for this reason Paul said we shall do it for conscience’ sake. Every honest man makes conscience of withholding anything which is due to another, and so every true Christian makes conscience of returning his property, fairly and faithfully, to the officers of government, and punctually paying what it requires of him, with as little right to ask or inquire what use they design making of it, as they have to ask what use the person proposes to make of the money he has lent to us. There is therefore a very great difference between what we pay voluntarily, or without sanction of law, and what we pay on demand of the powers. If a person comes to me, and solicits a donation to give as a bounty to induce men to volunteer in the army, or to equip men to go and fight, by giving it I testify that I am interested in the cause and desire it to progress — when, at the same time, I do not know that I am not arming men to fight against what God designs to do. But if I owe a man a sum of money as a debt, and he comes and demands it, and tells me he intends it to arm and equip himself to go to war, I have no right to withhold payment. It is his, and he has a right to do with it as he pleases.

I would make no difference between paying a man to go to war, and going myself. I would not consider that I would any more violate the spirit of the Gospel in one case than the other; neither do I consider that I am any more violating the command of the Savior if I serve as a General in the field, or a soldier in the ranks, than I do if I serve as sheriff of the county, or justice of the peace, or cast my vote for member of Congress, Governor, or President of the United States; and would not make one iota more conscience to one than the other. I say more: those who vote for officers in the government, and use its power and authority to protect their rights and property, or appeal to law for justice, and yet refuse to defend the government in the time of need, are neither faithful to the kingdom of Christ or that of this world.

Musser’s book was inspiring to Leo Tolstoy, who quoted from it in his The Kingdom of God Is within You.

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:

  1. There is not even any pretense of preparation to protect the people of Stroud in the event of war.
  2. According to Government spokesmen, there is no known means of protecting the population against nuclear attack.
  3. 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.
  4. 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.
  5. 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:

  1. 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

  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.

  3. 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.

  4. 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

  5. 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.

  6. 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:

  7. 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.

  8. 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.

  9. 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

  1. 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.”

  2. 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…”

  3. 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.)

  4. INSTRUCTIONS — Unagreed Income, Estate, or Gift Tax Cases — U.S. Treasury Department — Internal Revenue Service — Publication No. 5 (Rev. 8-64)

  5. 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.