Pollock v. Farmers' Loan & Trust Company, 157 U.S. 429 (1895), affirmed on rehearing, 158 U.S. 601 (1895), was a landmark case of the Supreme Court of the United States.

Chief Justice Melville Fuller's majority opinion in Pollock held that a federal tax on income derived from property was unconstitutional when it was not apportioned among the states according to representation in the House of Representatives.

In one dissent, Associate Justice Henry Billings Brown wrote that the majority opinion "involves nothing less than the surrender of the taxing power to the moneyed class."

The Court's decision in Pollock was unpopular but effectively prevented Congress from implementing another income tax over the next two decades since the apportionment requirements were widely regarded as unworkable.

The ratification of the Sixteenth Amendment essentially overturned the key holding in Pollock, and Congress established a new federal income tax in the Revenue Act of 1913.

The taxation of income reflected the increasing amount of wealth held in stocks and bonds, rather than property, which the federal government had taxed in the past.

[7] President Grover Cleveland and his congressional allies proposed a bill that affected moderate downward revisions in the tariff, especially on raw materials.

[11] The Cleveland administration was ambivalent about the income tax but included it in the proposed bill in large part because of the efforts of Congressmen William Jennings Bryan and Benton McMillin.

Justices John Marshall Harlan, Howell Edmunds Jackson, Edward Douglass White, and Henry Billings Brown dissented from the majority opinion.

Justice White argued: It is, I submit, greatly to be deplored that after more than 100 years of our national existence, after the government has withstood the strain of foreign wars and the dread ordeal of civil strife, and its people have become united and powerful, this court should consider itself compelled to go back to a long repudiated and rejected theory of the constitution, by which the government is deprived of an inherent attribute of its being—a necessary power of taxation.

The following year, the Democratic Party, which had grabbed hold of the Populist movement, included an income tax plank in its election platform.

[20]Nebraska Republican Senator Norris Brown publicly decried the Court's decision in Pollock and proposed a constitutional amendment to remove the requirement that certain income taxes to be apportioned among the states by population.

[21][23][24][25][26] The Revenue Act of 1913, which greatly lowered tariffs and implemented a federal income tax, was enacted shortly after the Sixteenth Amendment was ratified.

[27] Three years after ratification of the Sixteenth Amendment, the United States Supreme Court rendered its decision in the case of Brushaber v. Union Pacific Railroad.

Justice White's decision in Brushaber shows how the Sixteenth Amendment was written to prevent consideration of the direct effects of any income tax laid by Congress.

[30] That effect was reaffirmed in Bowers v. Kerbaugh-Empire Co., 271 U.S. 170 (1926), in which the Supreme Court reviewed Pollock, the Corporation Excise Tax Act of 1909, and the Sixteenth Amendment.