Tax resistance in the United States
American Henry David Thoreau's theory of civil disobedience has proven to be extremely influential, and its influence today is not limited to tax resistance stands and campaigns but to all manner of refusal to obey unjust laws.
[1] The "no taxation without representation" slogan was later brought to bear in the arguments for tax resistance by African-Americans[2]: 115–117 and women,[3] as they did not have the right to vote or serve in the legislature.
[6] It was prompted by Thoreau's refusal to pay a poll tax because of unwillingness to support a government that was enforcing the slavery of Americans and what he felt was an unjust war against Mexico.
[14] The following sections briefly describe some of the more prominent examples of tax resistance in colonial America and the United States: The Society of Friends (Quakers) had a tradition of refusing to pay tithes to the establishment church, and of refusing to pay explicit war taxes, from the early years of the establishment of the sect.
Colonists, fed up with what they viewed as a corrupt and unrepresentative colonial government, stopped paying taxes and ultimately rose in an armed revolt.
This included rampant smuggling and attacks on British customs ships (as in the Gaspee Affair), the refusal to allow British monopoly products to be brought to market (as in the Boston Tea Party and Philadelphia Tea Party), boycotts of British-manufactured goods and the encouragement of local production of replacement goods, and sanctions ranging from social boycott to violent attacks aimed at tax collectors and collaborators.
[18] After the success of the American Revolution, the independent United States government of the former colonies was confronted by its own tax resistance campaigns.
[20] Thus, when United States government put an excise tax on whiskey, this was seen as an imposition by coastal elites at the expense of rural farmers and was widely resented and resisted.
[21] While resistance in the form of refusal to pay the excise tax or to cooperate in the enforcement of excise laws persisted and largely succeeded in some areas,[22] in Western Pennsylvania this resistance erupted into attacks on tax collectors and eventual armed revolt—the Whiskey Rebellion—which was violently suppressed by federal government troops under the command of former revolutionary war commander in chief George Washington.
When members of the Iroquois Confederacy blocked roads in a similar conflict in 1997, law enforcement responded with brutal violence (the state would eventually pay out $2.7 million to victims).
He wrote,[30]I object to the payment of this tax, on the ground that my rights as a citizen, and my feelings as a man and a parent have been grossly outraged in depriving me, in violation of law and justice, of the benefits of the school system which this tax was designed to sustain.After the American Civil War, the United States government established Reconstruction era governments in the states of the former Confederacy that included black and carpetbagger representatives.
The loss of political power by the formerly dominant white supremacists led to resentment, protest, and the formation of paramilitaries and parallel governments.
For example, tax resistance was used as a tactic by South Carolina Democrats in the months leading up to the collapse of the carpetbagger administration of Republican Daniel Chamberlain and his replacement by former Confederate Army officer Wade Hampton III.
Because by the time the bonds had matured they had likely been sold to new owners who did not participate in the original fraud, the court system was not usually very sympathetic to the defrauded taxpayers.
They responded by refusing to pay taxes on "no taxation without representation" grounds, and their battle soon became a cause célèbre among suffrage activists and sympathizers throughout the country (in part thanks to the sisters' knack for publicity).
Nor apparently was there open protest; there is no record of rallies, picket marches, petitions, manifestos, named organizations, political coalitions, or the like.
[45] "Bond slackers" (the popular term at the time for people who did not buy war bonds, or did not buy them in sufficient quantity) could be run out of town,[46] might lose their jobs,[47] have their property stolen[48] or vandalized,[49] might be tarred-and-feathered,[50] otherwise tortured,[51] coated in paint,[52] threatened with murder,[53] or subjected to hours of questioning by hooded interrogators in impromptu star chambers in the hopes of prompting them to say something that would incriminate them under the Espionage Act.
Herbert Lord, Director of Finance for the War Department, considered this "an organized effort to discourage and defeat the loan", and it was attributed to a conspiracy of "pro-German agents".
Mayor Anton Cermak and other politicians desperately tried to break the strike by threatening criminal prosecution, revocation of city services, and the seizure of property.
A failed legal suit, government counter-measures, and infighting took their toll and the movement, having in large part accomplished its goals, declined thereafter.
Some of the figures in this early movement were members of the historic peace churches, such as Mary Stone McDowell, a Quaker who had resisted the Liberty Bond drives during World War I, but many others were not.
Dorothy Day and Ammon Hennacy were from the Catholic Worker movement, Ernest Bromley was a Methodist, Walter Gormly and Maurice McCrackin Presbyterians, Juanita and Wally Nelson non-religious, for example.
"[62] About a dozen women from around Marshall, Texas, organized in 1951 to refuse to submit Social Security taxes on behalf of their domestic help.
This may sound dramatic, but we are fighting to preserve the freedoms our forefathers gave to us.The "Texas Housewives" (as they were invariably called in the newspapers) lost a court case in 1952.
She wrote in a letter to Treasury Secretary John W. Snyder that she felt she already had "adequate insurance" and she urged the government to indict her so that she could be a test case to the Supreme Court.
[74] What kind of "welfare" is it that takes a farmer's horses away at spring plowing time in order to dragoon a whole community into a "benefit" scheme it neither needs nor wants, and which offends its deeply held religious scruples?The struggle would continue for a decade.
Muste circulated a tax refusal pledge meant as an advertisement for The Washington Post that 370 people signed, including the singer Joan Baez, on the grounds "that the ordinary channels of protest have been exhausted.
The protest, which appeared in New York Post, New York Times Book Review and Ramparts was eventually signed by about 528 people including Nelson Algren, James Baldwin, Robert Bly, Noam Chomsky, Robert Creeley, David Dellinger, Philip K. Dick, Robert Duncan, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Leslie Fiedler, Betty Friedan, Allen Ginsberg, Todd Gitlin, Paul Goodman, Edward S. Herman, Paul Krassner, Staughton Lynd, Dwight Macdonald, Jackson Mac Low, Norman Mailer, Peter Matthiessen, Milton Mayer, Ed McClanahan, Henry Miller, Carl Oglesby, Tillie Olsen, Grace Paley, Thomas Pynchon, Adrienne Rich, Kirkpatrick Sale, Ed Sanders, Robert Scheer, Peter Dale Scott, Susan Sontag, Terry Southern, Benjamin Spock, Gloria Steinem, William Styron, Norman Thomas, Hunter S. Thompson, Lew Welch, John Wieners, Kurt Vonnegut and Howard Zinn.
faculty members, including Nobel laureates Salvador E. Luria and George Wald, announced that they would be resisting taxes in protest of the war.
"[88] Take this tax and shove it We ain't paying you crooks no more The good ol' boys stole all our cash And ran out the courthouse door
