A History of War Resistance in America

There have been instances of people refusing to pay taxes for war in virtually every American war, but it was not until World War II and the establishment of a permanent, centralized U. One of the earliest known instances of war tax refusal took place in when the relatively peaceable Algonquin Indians opposed taxation by the Dutch to help improve a local Dutch fort.

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Shortly after the Quakers arrived in America there were a number of individual instances of war tax resistance. Most Quakers were opposed to taxes designated specifically for military purposes. Though the official position of the Society of Friends was against any payment of war taxes. Property was seized and auctioned, and many Quakers were jailed for their war tax resistance.

Following the war many Quakers continued to refuse because these taxes were being used to pay the war debt, and therefore were essentially war taxes. The Quakers reacted strongly to this war because of its aggressive nature and the threatened spread of slavery posed by the war. Many, again, refused to pay war taxes. However, the most famous instance of war tax resistance was that of Henry David Thoreau.

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Although not a pacifist he was opposed to slavery, and the imperialist and unjust nature of the war. His refusal to pay the Massachusetts poll tax levied for the war resulted in a night in jail. Until World War II the individual income tax was a minor part of the federal government receipts affecting no more than 3 percent of the population.

However with the introduction of the employee withholding tax in , for the first time a large percentage of the population was subject to the income tax. The unprecedented amount of money being raised and spent for World War II suddenly touched the consciousness of many pacifists, who up until the war were not required to pay taxes.

He was arrested and eventually jailed for 60 days.

Though Bromley and a few other pacifists did not pay income taxes during World War II, but there was no movement of war tax refusal. The Call to the Conference signed by A. Out of this conference grew a new organization, calling itself the Peacemakers.

War resistance in the United States - Wikipedia

Their newsletter was titled Peacemaker. About forty people who attended the conference stated their intention to refuse part or all of their federal income taxes, forming a Tax Refusal Committee. This Committee began almost immediately to publish news bulletins, independent of the Peacemaker. The bulletins were instrumental in engendering concern and giving information on tax refusal.

The Catholic Worke r, The Progressive , Fellowship , and a few other movement newsletters and magazines, would occasionally print sympathetic articles on war tax resistance. Following World War II and up to the start of the Vietnam War only six people were imprisoned for war tax resistance related issues: All had been found in contempt of court for refusing to cooperate in one way or another with the proceedings.

In the Peacemakers published the first handbook on war tax resistance, appropriately titled Handbook on Nonpayment of War Taxes. War tax resistance gained nationwide publicity when Joan Baez announced in her refusal to pay 60 percent of her income taxes because of the war in Vietnam. Then several events in the mid- to lates occurred making this a pivotal period for the war resistance movement, signaling a shift in war tax resistance from a couple hundred to eventually tens of thousands of refusers.

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A committee led by A. A suggestion in to form a mass movement around the refusal to pay the at that time 10 percent telephone tax was given an initial boost by Chicago tax resister Karl Meyer. This was followed by War Resisters League developing a national campaign in the late s to encourage refusal to pay the telephone tax. The writers and editors including Gloria Steinem and Kirkpatrick Sale pledged themselves to refuse the 10 percent war surtax which had just been added to income taxes and possibly the 23 percent of their income tax allocated for the war.

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Most daily newspapers refused to sell space for the ad. Only the New York Post at that time, a liberal newspaper , Ramparts a popular left-wing anti-war magazine , and the New York Review of Books carried it. To see an image of the ad, click on link above. Ken Knudson, in a letter to the Peacemaker , suggested that inflating the W-4 form would stop withholding. Again, Karl Meyer was instrumental in promoting this idea, which was adopted by Peacemakers, Catholic Worker, and War Resisters League, among other organizations in the late s.

Inflating W-4 forms also brought a new wave of indictments and jailings by the government — 16 were indicted for claiming too many dependents; of those, six were actually jailed. The number of known income tax resisters grew from in to an estimated 20, in the early s. The number of telephone tax resisters was estimated to be in the hundreds of thousands.

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The popularity of war tax resistance grew to such an extent that the WRL could no longer handle the volume of requests. Long-time peace activist Bradford Lyttle was the first coordinator. Local WTR chapters blossomed around the country, and by there were such groups.

Radical members of the historic peace churches began to urge their constituencies to refuse war taxes. The bill has been introduced into each Congress since. During the Indochina War, war tax resistance gained its greatest strength ever in the history of the United States, and on a secular basis rather than as a result of the historic peace churches, who played a very minor role this time. At the same time, it places this rhetoric of incompatibility in the context of the long history of French and American controversies going back to the days of the French Revolution.

Rather than oppose France and the United States as incomparable and incompatible regimes of nation building, this book argues that the two countries face similar challenges and mobilize comparable, if not identical, philosophical and political resources when it comes to closing the gap between their republican-democratic principles and national histories of oppression and persecution of individuals and groups on the basis of ethnicity, religion, national origin, and past colonial status.

Jean-Philippe Mathy is associate professor of French, comparative literature, criticism, and interpretive theory at the University of Illinois, Urbana. French Intellectuals and America Mathy synthesizes the history of ideas and the ethnography of intellectual life in an illuminating exploration of themes that divide and unite contemporary French and American thought.

A provocative work for those engaged in these interchanges from various perspectives and disciplines. His book takes a balanced and realistic look at the deeper sources of conflict in this enduring transatlantic partnership.

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French Resistance gets to the heart—and the history—of these vexed Franco-American relations. Mathy lucidly unfolds the urgent necessity to address that which in the politico-epistemological structures and institutions of both North American and French cultures remain unread. A sophisticated study of the ways contemporary French and American people view their own culture and that of the other.

University of Minnesota Press Coming soon. Home Current Catalogs Blog. Search Site only in current section. An original look at the intellectual issues that divide—and unite—these two republics.