Tax Resistance—An American Tradition

By Robert Riversong

Though I believe that political secession from the New American Empire is vital to the long-term sustainability of Vermont culture and is achievable in time, I would like to suggest a powerful interim strategy of individual economic secession.

Tyranny cannot be sustained without the cooperation of its victims. The lifeblood of empire is money, and the most effective method of nonviolent non-cooperation is to withhold from Caesar the means to fund his armies of oppression.

I'm suggesting tax resistance as a method of severing our personal connection to the umbilical cord of power. Tax resistance, and war-tax resistance in particular, is as much an essential part of the history of American democracy as is pamphleteering and soapbox sloganeering.

Let me share a brief history of income tax in the United States. From 1791 to 1802, our government relied on internal taxes on spirits, sugar, tobacco, and slaves—what are known as “sin taxes”—in order to fund itself. In 1812, to help fund the war with Britain, the nation's first sales tax was instituted on gold, silverware, jewelry, and watches—a luxury tax.

Then, in 1817, Congress eliminated all internal taxes and relied instead on tariffs on imported goods. It wasn't until 1862, to fund another war, that Congress enacted the nation's first income tax. Ten years later, the legislature eliminated the unpopular income tax and again taxed tobacco and spirits.

The income tax was revived in 1894, but declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in 1895 because it was not evenly apportioned among the states. In response, the 16th Amendment to the Constitution was passed in 1913 to make the income tax permanent. Until 1943, when the withholding tax on wages was introduced, only a very small percentage of the population was taxed. The withholding tax “democratized” the income tax and added 60 million people to the tax roles to pay for what was to be the beginning of the military-industrial complex.

Tax resistance began well before the birth of the nation. In 1637, the Algonquin Indians refused to pay the Dutch a tax for the renovation of a fort to house the very military that oppressed the native peoples. And the colonists learned a valuable lesson from this. “No taxation without representation” became a rallying cry as the colonists protested the 1765 Stamp Tax intended to pay for the quartering of British troops in the colonies. Thomas Jefferson declared that “The rights of conscience we could not submit [to the state]. We are answerable for them to our God.” This was considered the most inalienable right of natural people.

In the early history of the American nation, however, it was primarily the Anabaptist churches such as the Mennonites, the Brethren, and the Quakers that openly refused monetary subservience to the state. Early Quakers refused to pay taxes for the American Revolution or to pay for the war debt, and they resisted complicity in the Mexican war because of its aggressive nature and the likely spread of slavery that would result.

And it was the Mexican war which inspired the father of American tax resistance, Henry David Thoreau, to intone, “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.” From the night he spent in jail came Thoreau's “On the Duty of Civil Disobedience,” a treatise that proved to have great impact on the following century, as it informed the work of Mohandas Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr.

World War II created the opening for American economic and military hegemony, and also opened the door to the nation's first secular tax resistance movement. In 1941, the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom and the American Friends Service Committee protested the 10 percent Defense Tax surcharge on the income tax. And it was in 1942 that Earnest Bromley was jailed for 60 days for refusing to pay a $7.09 tax stamp for his car. Thirty-three years later, the home of Earnest and Marion Bromley was seized and auctioned by the IRS, inciting the first nationwide campaign around war-tax resistance. Eight months later, under constant pressure from people of conscience, the IRS finally relented and reversed the lien and sale. Contrary to popular myth, the IRS is not omnipotent.

In the meantime, Rev. Maurice McCracken, Wally Nelson, and others formed the Peacemakers in 1948, the nation's first secular organization devoted to war-tax resistance as an avenue for “more disciplined and revolutionary pacifist activity.” The 40 who began the movement grew, by 1967, to 500 as the Vietnam War deepened.

The powers and principalities began to fight back, albeit meekly. In 1959, Wally Nelson's life-partner Juanita became the first woman in modern times to be arrested for war-tax resistance, and in 1963 Rev. McCracken was defrocked by the Presbyterian Church for his refusal to pay, saying, “To give financial support to war while at the same time preaching against it is, to me, no longer a tenable position.”

The counterculture was introduced to tax resistance in 1964, when Joan Baez refused to pay 60 percent of her income tax, the amount that went to fund the military. Though the tax-resistance movement was gaining momentum, between World War II and the Vietnam War only six people were imprisoned for war-tax resistance, all for contempt of court.

In the 1960s A. J. Muste, another early Peacemaker, convinced 370 prominent Americans—including Lawrence Ferlinghetti, David Dellinger, Dorothy Day, Noam Chomsky, Albert Svent-Gyorgyi, and Staughton Lynd—to proclaim their intention to refuse to pay all or part of their 1965 income taxes. Karl Meyers, a Chicago activist, suggested refusing to pay the 10 percent phone tax, dedicated to funding the Indochina war, and the War Resisters League initiated the first national campaign of tax resistance.

As part of the 1967 Writers and Editors War Tax Protest, 528 wordsmiths stated their refusal to pay for war. From a seed of just a few hundred resisters in 1966, the conscientious tax resistance movement expanded to include 20,000 by the 1970s, and hundreds of thousands were refusing to pay their telephone tax. In 1969, the National War Tax Resistance was organized. By 1972 there were 192 local chapters throughout the country. By the 1970s, Peoples Life Funds—alternative funds in which to deposit withheld taxes—sprang up in a number of cities. Some are still alive today.

The first constructive response of government to this growing and unstoppable movement was the introduction, by Congressman Ron Dellums in 1967, of the World Peace Tax Fund Act, which would allow a conscientious objection to war taxes and a diversion of the funds to peaceful purposes. This bill has been introduced in every Congressional session since then but has never passed.
1978 saw a resurgence of the historic peace churches in their “New Call to Peacemaking,” and the election of Ronald Reagan led to a tripling of the number of tax resisters by 1981. It was also that year that Archbishop Raymond Hunthausen of Seattle urged citizens to refuse to pay 50 percent of their income taxes to protest spending on nuclear weapons.

In 1982, a “National Action Conference” called by the War Resisters League and the Center for Law and Pacifism led to the formation of the National War Tax Resistance Coordinating Committee, which became the hub of the resistance movement. In response, the IRS began to issue $500 fines for the filing of "frivolous" tax returns, and in the next few years seized about a half dozen cars and homes from tax resisters.

In 1989, in an act of stupendous naiveté, the IRS seized and attempted to auction the Community Land Trust home of Randy Kehler and Betsy Corner. Randy was one of the few of draft age during the Vietnam War who took his draft refusal conviction to the Supreme Court. He ended up spending time in a federal penitentiary, but not before influencing Daniel Ellsberg to engage in a similar act of conscience and copy and release the Pentagon Papers.
Randy had also founded the influential Traprock Peace Center in Deerfield, Massachusetts, and initiated the nuclear freeze campaign. Though he was an easy target since he filed his 1040 each year and informed the IRS which peace groups were receiving his withheld tax money, Randy was well known and highly respected by many in the peace movement. The ill-considered IRS action—which brought them only $5,400—sparked the longest protest action in American history. For a year and a half, thousands from all over the world came to rural Colrain, Massachusetts, to occupy his leasehold, and an excellent documentary film, An Act of Conscience, was made. The consequence was extensive free publicity for the always underfunded war-tax resistance movement, and a resurgence in interest and action. I helped organize and then led a “constructive program” that grew out of this protest: Building Our Swords Into Plowshares used 300 volunteers to design and build a super-insulated duplex, which was later turned over to Habitat for Humanity.
Operation Desert Storm, Bush Sr.'s invasion of Iraq, led to a flood of inquiries to tax-resistance groups by people saying they'd had enough. The IRS admits that 8,000 to 10,000 people today are conscientiously resisting all or part of their income taxes.

The scion of the Bush family dynasty, George W., is now engaged in the most blatant and indefensible expansion of the American Empire into the Middle East and Central Asia, where most of the world's remaining fossil fuel reserves lie. We suffer under a government that has completely lost its moral compass and seems determined to bring about the Armageddon that it believes is coming. Now is the time for all American patriots to say “No more,” and Vermont can lead the way, as it has at so many important junctures of our collective history.

The military, as Eisenhower so presciently warned, is the engine of empire. And our taxes are the fuel that feeds that empire. It is time to begin to starve the beast. Tax resistance is not without potential consequences, but they are rarely suffered and the consequences of continued complicity are far greater.

I suggest we use our withheld federal income taxes to fund the Second Vermont Republic and its movement toward a return of local sovereignty, ecological integrity, collective sustainability, personal freedom, and individual dignity. Conscience is the most basic of rights, and non-cooperation with injustice is the most powerful of weapons in the arsenal of nonviolent social change.

In 1982, Secretary of State Alexander Haig laughed, “Let them march all they want to, as long as they continue to pay their taxes.” How much longer will we continue to protest governmental injustice while paying for our own servitude? If you work for peace, stop paying for war. It doesn't need to wait until we become a sovereign republic again. Each of us is free to exercise our conscience and withhold complicity in what we cannot condone. Do it now.