From: Edward Agro <eagro@igc.org>
Subject: OPINION: Essay on WTR by Lawrence Rosenwald
Followup-To: alt.activism.d
Originator: daemon@pencil.cs.missouri.edu
Organization: University of Missouri
Date: Sat, 11 Apr 1992 03:41:35 GMT

___________________________________________________________________________
Summary - The following essay is by Lawrence Rosenwald, a member of New 
England War Tax Resistance and the IRS Punks Affinity Group. Rosenwald 
teaches a course in Thoreau at Wellesley College. The essay contrasts 
Thoreau's situation with that of the present-day wartax refuser, and tries 
to answer the question "... why so many people with [similar political 
views] don't find Thoreau attractive or at any rate don't do tax 
resistance, and how this can perhaps be changed."

I think there's a lot of wisdom in this essay, that attempts to mesh a 
description of the theoretical desirablity of wartax refusal with the 
effect the actual practice of it has had on one family.

The essay is freely reprintable; please credit Peacenet and Lawrence 
Rosenwald. [24K, 412 lines, 4,040 words]   --  ed agro <eagro@igc.org>
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                           ON WARTAX RESISTANCE

                           by Lawrence Rosenwald

     Doing tax resistance has for me been connected with thinking about 
Thoreau, whose works I often teach in my classes.  I used not to teach 
"Civil Disobedience," but only Walden;  I admired "Civil Disobedience" very 
much, but couldn't bring myself to teach it.  It is an essay intended as an 
argument;  I knew that if I taught it I would present it as an argument, as 
an argument I found reasonable and compelling, and then, I thought, some 
alert and nervy student would ask, "if you think it's such a good argument 
then why are you paying your taxes?"  And then I'd either mutter something 
about how times have changed, or say I was a coward, and I knew I wouldn't 
like myself in either case.  But when my wife and I began doing tax 
resistance, I began to teach "Civil Disobedience," and in fact teaching it 
- not proselytizing with it, but teaching it on a footing of equality - is 
among the rewards doing tax resistance has brought me.

     So I want to talk about Thoreau, first, and about the ideas his tax 
resistance came from;  and then about myself, as someone who finds 
Thoreau's stance attractive but who knows that, after all, times have 
changed, and that doing tax resistance now is different from doing it then, 
and grimmer;  and generally about why so many people with political views 
similar to mine don't find Thoreau attractive or at any rate don't do tax 
resistance, and how this can perhaps be changed.

                                     I

     Understanding Thoreau's politics means first understanding that 
politics wasn't what he wanted to do.  He was, as he saw himself, trying to 
be an individual in a radical democracy;  he was trying to cultivate 
himself, and he found that difficult.  Lots of other people found it 
difficult also;  the difficulty of being one's own person is one of the 
things Tocqueville, in Democracy in America, has in mind when he complains 
about the tyranny of the majority, and it's what Emerson has in mind when 
in "Self- Reliance" he tells the philanthropist to go away and not bother 
him:  

     your miscellaneous popular charities;  the education at college of  
     fools;  the building of meetinghouses to the vain end to which many 
     now  stand;  alms to sots . . . though I confess with shame I 
     sometimes  succumb and give the dollar, it is a wicked dollar, which 
     by and by I  shall have the manhood to withhold.

     Emerson and Thoreau both know, of course, that what the majority wants 
you to do often sounds noble - working for abolition, contributing to your 
local church or school, fighting for your country.  They know, too, that 
maybe such things are noble.  But they want to figure the matter out for 
themselves;  they want to read, to think, to write, to determine who they 
are - from scratch and with no presuppositions, presuppositions about the 
value of good works and causes included.  So by and large doing politics 
becomes for them a temptation to be resisted, because in politics they see 
the abolition of the individual, and the cultivation of the individual is 
what chiefly matters.

     Emerson does frighteningly well at abstaining from politics;  he keeps 
political concerns from bothering him by not bothering about them.  He 
doesn't go to Brook Farm, and refuses to speak out on slavery:  "I have 
quite other slaves to free than those negroes, to wit, imprisoned spirits, 
imprisoned thoughts, far back in the brain of man."  (He is induced when 
young to write to President Van Buren in protest of the forced migration of 
the Cherokees, but soon repents having done so.)  Thoreau, however, gets 
involved earlier, because he sees what Emerson doesn't see until later - 
until the passage of the Fugitive Slave Law, which obliges citizens of free 
states either to aid slaveholders or to break the law - namely, that in 
certain situations you cannot keep out of politics.  Thoreau doesn't see, 
or doesn't believe, that generally you're part of the problem unless you're 
part of the solution, or that to avoid doing politics is in general to 
leave the status quo in place;  rather he notices specifically, with a kind 
of microscopic genius, that in paying taxes abstinence just isn't a choice, 
because you either pay them and collaborate with the state or refuse to pay 
them and defy the state, but in any case you do politics.

      Between collaboration and defiance he has to choose defiance, has to 
defy the state and refuse taxes, because he judges that the state in 
tolerating slavery is violating his moral code, and he therefore cannot 
collaborate with it.  So he refuses the taxes, gets put in jail, and writes 
the essay that eventually exercises so much influence on modern political 
life.  That influence is the result of his actions.  But again, it is not 
what he was aiming at;  when he himself talks about his actions, his focus 
is on the evil avoided rather than the good accomplished.  The point of his 
refusing his taxes is to avoid collaborating with slavery and imperialism, 
and to return as soon as possible to his real work - not politics but 
huckleberrying, or getting his shoes mended, or writing.  Politics isn't 
what he wants to do, it's what he can't avoid doing, and it results not 
from volition but from necessity.

                                    II

     Too many exhortations to political action give only a scanty account 
of who it is that's doing the exhorting.  So I want to speak concretely 
about my own situation, and about the relation between that situation and 
the political action I've been able to take.  As I said, I find Thoreau's 
stance attractive, and in some ways my temperament is like his; politics 
isn't what I like doing, not at any rate as much as I like doing music, or 
translating, or teaching, or being with friends.  But no one living in the 
United States now can be placed as Thoreau was placed, or think as he 
thought; the state is stronger, the individual is weaker, and the relation 
between the state and the individual resister is murkier and trickier.

     To begin with, Thoreau had a choice about paying taxes.  To him and to 
every other Concord taxpayer came the tax-collector, who did not yet have 
the money and had to ask for it, and who therefore could be obeyed or 
disobeyed.  Many of us don't have that choice;  the government collects the 
taxes before we ever see the money the taxes have been collected from.  I 
wonder sometimes how we let ourselves be deprived of so important a choice, 
and wonder also how we would choose if we could.  So the first thing for me 
to explain is the unusual circumstance of having tax payments to refuse in 
the first place.  My wife, the pianist Cynthia Schwan(1) [see notes at 
end], resumed teaching piano in 1985, the year our twin daughters started 
kindergarten and also the year that she and I began to consider doing tax 
resistance. and not having tax withheld from her income left us owing taxes 
and thus able to refuse paying them - ninety dollars at first, then 
gradually up to about two thousand dollars as Cynthia attracted more 
students.  Each year we would prepare our returns, or have them prepared 
for us by H. R. Block;  then, taking from the War Resisters League an 
assessment of what percent of the federal budget went to the military, we 
would subtract that percent of what we owed from the total, send the 
remainder to the IRS with a note explaining our action, and deposit the 
refused taxes in an alternative fund, where the interest would be used for 
good causes and the principal would remain available to us should the IRS 
put a lien on our property.

     It's an equally unusual circumstance that I can refuse taxes publicly 
without jeopardizing my job.  Thoreau's security in his community was 
partly the security of the spirit, partly that of the familiar eccentric 
whom his neighbors would not turn away;  mine is at least partly the 
security of academic tenure.  We refused our first ninety dollars in April 
of 1986;  by the end of that year I had been granted tenure in the English 
Department at Wellesley College, and most of my public activity as a tax 
resister (presenting talks, writing essays, giving interviews) came after 
that - deliberately after that, since I was afraid to do public tax 
resistance while untenured.  Probably I wouldn't have incurred much of a 
risk; the College administration has since said that it considers my tax 
resistance a legitimate form of political expression - though not so 
legitimate that it refrained from executing a federal levy on my salary.  
An executive, a letter carrier, an aspiring lawyer, indeed anyone who works 
for the government or has a job requiring the persona of a law-abiding or 
patriotic citizen:  all these people would run greater risks than I have 
run, and probably greater risks than I would have felt able to run.

     So someone might ask here, "isn't tax resistance as you describe it, 
then, something that most people aren't in a position to do without running 
much more risk than you have?"   There are two ways of answering that 
question.  One is to say, yes, that's the truth, but not the whole truth.  
There are other ways of refusing taxes.   Some resisters choose to keep 
their income below the taxable level.  Some choose to alter their W-4 form 
so as to have less tax withheld by their employer, though the stated 
financial penalties for resisting taxes in this way are severe, and I don't 
know that I would have had the courage to risk them.  Many resisters, 
myself included, begin trying out tax resistance by refusing to pay the 
federal phone tax (a tax instituted for the benefit of the military), and 
incur little danger except that of the phone company's mistakenly counting 
the refused tax as unpaid phone service.  And by ingenuity and persistence, 
tax resisters have found a good many employers at least as sympathetic as 
the academy.  The other answer, however, goes like this.  Suppose that none 
of what I have just described is the case;  suppose that every employer is 
hostile, suppose that everyone prudently declines to commit W-4 fraud, 
suppose that no one wants to go through the rigmarole of refusing the 
monthly phone tax of thirty-nine or seventy-one cents.  Still there are 
many situated as I am, who are deeply opposed to the policies of the 
federal government, who have taxes to pay, and who would not jeopardize 
their jobs by refusing to pay them;  and though I hope not to speak only to 
such people,  I would gladly accept that limitation if by doing so I could 
better understand how they, who do not have to, work for peace and pay for 
war.

     Like Thoreau, I judge the state to be no just receiver of my taxes on 
the basis both of general beliefs and specific assessments:  an absolute 
belief in the sanctity of human life and a general hatred of weapons of 
mass destruction, plus a lot of sharp, specific, horrified disagreements 
with United States action in, say, Nicaragua, Grenada, Panama, and Iraq.  
As a Jew, I have a deep fear of being a docile citizen, meekly acquiescent 
in state violence, and think often of the Nuremberg principles as warrant 
for my civil disobedience(2);  as a timid pacifist during the war in 
Vietnam, having watched friends act more bravely than I did in resisting 
the war I joined with them in opposing, I feel I owe them (and myself) a 
debt of honor.  But as Thoreau in his essay doesn't argue for his 
condemnation of slavery and of the state's acquiescence in it, probably 
because he thinks most of his readers share in that condemnation, so I 
consider these beliefs and assessments of mine unremarkable.  There's 
little that's uncommon in them, and much that's shared by many of my 
friends and colleagues;  so for me to name them is only to wonder again how 
my friends and colleagues and I proceed from common belief to differing 
conduct. 

     Thoreau resisted once, was put in prison, and then wrote his essay, 
which reflects his righteous satisfaction with that single triumphant 
encounter.  An earlier version of my own essay, published in November 1989, 
had something of Thoreau's tone;  the IRS had not then collected on us, 
only sent numerous threatening letters, and I was cheerfully feeling that 
the IRS was, as tax resisters like to say, ninety per cent bluff.  Since 
then the IRS has instituted an Automatic Collection Service, and we have 
been collected on three times, once by a levy on my salary and twice by 
levies on our bank accounts;  each time the levy took not only the original 
refused tax but also penalties and interest.  Even now the IRS occasionally 
fumbles;  before levying my salary it attempted to levy a bank account I 
had closed out fifteen years previously, and between the first bank levy 
and the second it refunded the levied money with interest.  But this 
clumsy, capricious power frets me more than a more efficient and so more 
predictable bureaucracy might have done;   I have felt dully, heavily 
oppressed by it.  I have not experienced great suffering, any more than I 
have run great risks;  but anyone contemplating doing tax resistance ought 
to know what it feels like to have tax resistance punished.

     We knew, of course, that we might be levied, and as noted had 
deposited the refused taxes in an alternative fund.  There is also a fund 
set up to reimburse the fines and penalties of tax- resisters, though we 
have not as yet applied to it.  One colleague of mine, in response to my 
argument in the college paper that the Wellesley accounting manager and her 
superiors had a choice whether or not to execute the IRS levy on my salary, 
wrote to the paper that 

     it seems rather cowardly on [Mr. Rosenwald's] part to push the onus  
     from his shoulders onto [other persons'], implying that they are the  
     ones who are at fault, not he.  Mr. Rosenwald would be much more 
     appealing in his martyrdom if he went bravely off to prison.  

This hurt, however much I found it mistaken.  But for the most part no 
one denounced us for what we were doing, and lots of people surprised us 
with their support.  So the levies did only small harm to our finances and 
to our public social lives.  But they felt oppressive nonetheless, for 
several reasons.  My own temperament was among them: an odd mixture of 
outlaw and good citizen.  The outlaw refuses the taxes;  the good citizen 
calculates the refused taxes honestly, proclaims to the IRS that the 
refusal has been made, and then, irrationally enough, feels humiliated by 
the consequences of the outlaw's behavior.  (Many tax resisters, I should 
say, are less split in this regard than I am, resist authority more boldly 
and systematically than I do, and also do better than I do at keeping their 
money from the IRS - not filing returns, tailoring their W-4 forms to their 
tax resistance, moving their money from bank to bank or out of banks 
altogether, choosing employers sympathetic to their politics.  "Wait for my 
brother," said the littlest billygoat Gruff;  "he's far bigger and stronger 
than I am.")  I like obeying authority, and fear punishment;  and here was 
disobeyed authority executing punishment, and punishment being carried out 
by acquaintances and neighbors, who politely took the money away and sent 
it to the IRS.  Also, I had looked forward to some encounter, some 
Hollywood confrontation - forthright James Stewart standing up to corrupt 
Claude Rains in Mr. Smith Goes To Washington.  But the dull pressure of the 
levies only blurred the moral passion.  No IRS agent called, or wrote, or 
came to my door;  there was no sneering Controller at Wellesley College, no 
smug and vindictive banker - no enemy, no villain, no interruption in my 
amiable relations with the College staff or the bank treasurer, only the 
bland, awkward, numbing workings of the system as a whole.  Thoreau writes, 
"I meet this American government . . . directly, and face to face, once a 
year, nor more, in the person of its tax- gatherer;  this is the only mode 
in which a man situated as I am necessarily meets it."   Usually when I 
read that sentence I think, "today we meet the government everywhere"; in 
another sense, though, today we meet it nowhere.    

     I have, then, felt the great power of government exercised effectively 
against me.  That power blurred my certainty;  also, obviously, it took 
away the refused taxes, and in fact the IRS has through interest and 
penalties collected more from us than we refused in the first place.  So I 
have had to wonder, as Thoreau did not, what happens when tax resistance 
fails?  What happens when it becomes routine?  Because it is simply not 
true now, if it ever was, that "if one HONEST man . . . ceasing to hold 
slaves [or to pay taxes], were actually to withdraw from this 
copartnership, and be locked up in the county jail therefor, it would be 
the abolition of slavery [or state violence] in America."  Against 
Thoreau's serene evening in the Concord jail, and his certainty that his 
truth would prevail, I have had to set the fretting, unsettling experience 
of resisting repeatedly, being levied repeatedly, and not bringing about 
the millennium.   I have had to ask, in the Quaker phrase, how to keep on 
keeping on.  

                                    III

     Partly I've kept on by taking over Thoreau's habit of scrutinizing 
ordinary behavior, his insistent reminder that we pay too little attention 
to any behavior we categorize as normal.  Much, that is, can be said 
against refusing wartaxes;  but not as much as can be said against paying 
them.  (Making this shift of attention is the goal of Thoreau's apocryphal 
remark when Emerson came to see him in prison:  "Henry, what are you doing 
in there?"  "Waldo, what are you doing out there?")  We were last and most 
heavily levied in the fall of 1990, as the United States government pushed 
towards the Gulf War.  I found this levy especially hurtful because it 
recovered the taxes the IRS had anomalously refunded to us, as if 
withdrawing a spontaneously offered gift; but each day's events turned my 
attention from the hazards of refusing taxes to the visible consequences of 
paying them: not some distant "war machine" but this enterprise, this 
propaganda, these weapons.  To pay wartaxes is to acquiesce in building 
weapons of mass destruction, i.e., in what international law as derived 
from the Nuremberg principles arguably defines as a crime(3);  it is also 
to acquiesce in whatever state violence an administration may manage to 
commit.  It is, simply, a wrong act for any pacifist, any adherent of 
international law, any person fundamentally opposed to American policy;  
and I do not understand what keeps such people from refusing taxes, 
especially since with more resisters the IRS would have a harder time 
collecting, and the charge that tax resistance is ineffective could be 
practically refuted.  Someone might say, "I do not acquiesce, even though I 
pay taxes;  I protest."  I honor such protest, but clearly it is not 
enough, and maybe it isn't even what should come first;  "let them protest 
all they like," said Alexander Haig, "as long as they pay their taxes."

     But though comforting, this shift in perspective is not enough, not 
enough of a response to doubt and the experience of futility; in fact I 
have kept equilibrium, and hope to keep it still, not through any mental 
exercise but through tasks of political activity. I should say that this is 
precisely the opposite of what I expected.  To begin with, I had when 
starting to do tax resistance shunned political activity, and in a sense 
hoped through resisting taxes to avoid it.  Thoreau's words, again: "I meet 
this American government . . . once a year, no more, in the person of its 
tax-gatherer;  this is the only mode in which a man situated as I am 
necessarily meets it."   As I had to learn, however, no one can say that 
now;  we meet the government far more often than Thoreau did, and I found 
that by starting with tax resistance I had unknowingly committed myself to 
a fair amount of doing politics.  (Maybe, in fact, tax resistance is 
unpopular in part precisely because people contemplating it rightly 
calculate that its consequences are likely to occupy a good part of their 
lives.)  So I was wrong in thinking that doing tax resistance could meet 
all my political obligations.  But I was also wrong in my understanding of 
how political obligations functioned.  I had shunned doing politics because 
I thought it would disorient and decenter me.  In fact, however, I have in 
accepting the consequences of tax resistance found them not a threat to 
equilibrium but a source of it,  have found that what makes it possible for 
me to continue doing tax resistance is precisely the tasks that doing tax 
resistance lays upon me.  

     All this has of course taken up a lot of time;  tax resistance for me 
has not turned out to be a way to get back with a clear conscience to 
huckleberrying.  It has meant meetings and actions, conversations and 
letters and essays, talks and interviews.  But in fact these activities 
have not encumbered my life but ordered and simplified it.  For one thing, 
they have seemed necessary, arising like the original act of tax resistance 
from the narrowing of choice to a single action;  and to find necessary 
work is a great blessing.  They have provided a standpoint from which to 
speak about politics from the authority of experience rather than on the 
basis of opinion.  Most importantly: though doing tax resistance revealed 
my anonymous relation to my unhearing government, my merely polite relation 
to some of my institutions, it also helped me find a previously hidden part 
of my real community.  Emerson after dismissing the philanthropist admits, 
"there is a class of persons to whom by all spiritual affinity I am bought 
and sold"; doing tax resistance has helped me in the difficult task of 
finding out who some of these persons are.  To sit on the Grants and Loans 
Committee of New England War Tax Resistance, and to dispense the interest 
on refused taxes to a youth group in Chelsea, a video for cable television 
on United States involvement in Central America, and a people's garden in 
Roxbury is to be reminded of the ideal community, however blurred and 
fragmented, that wartax resistance is done on behalf of, in the hope of 
helping to make it clear and whole.

        Thoreau concludes, "I please myself with imagining a State at last 
which can afford to be just to all men."  I prefer to conclude not in the 
utopian end but in the difficult beginning, here and now, by saying simply 
that tax resistance seems to me a good start.  It has been a good start for 
me;  but I believe it would also be a good start generally, a way for those 
opposed to American weapons and American policies to begin saying no, and 
then to see what happened later.

-------------
Notes:

1. [On WTR by husband and wife] We both believe in doing tax resistance, 
but not on the same grounds.  I have framed this essay from my own 
viewpoint, and am not claiming to speak for her.

2. [For Nuremberg principles as warrant for civil disobedience] See Francis 
Anthony Boyle, Defending Civil Disobedience Under International Law.

3. [Arguments that paying  wartaxes is a crime] The United States has 
signed various treaties and charters incorporating the Nuremburg 
Principles, and thus made them part of "the supreme law of the land."  
Principle VI.a (i) states that "the planning, preparation, or waging of a 
war of aggression or a war in violation of international treaties" is a 
crime against peace.  The military build-up during the Cold War, especially 
the stockpiling of nuclear weapons, constitues just such "planning and 
preparation." Principle VII states that "complicity in the commission of a 
crime against peace . . . is a crime under international law.  I believe 
that for me to pay taxes freely to the United States military budget is 
such a crime.

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The first version of this essay, written after the author had begun 
refusing war taxes, but before the IRS had levied, was published in the 
Nov 1989 *Life & Taxes* (NE WTR, Box 174, MIT Branch, Cambridge MA 02139). 
The current version was completed in the winter of 1991, and a slightly 
different version will be published in *Agni Review* (Jennifer Rose, 
editor, English Dept., Boston University, Boston MA 02215).

Lawrence Rosenwald may be reached at 10 Lovewell Rd, Welleseley MA 02181, 
or via eagro@igc.org

Freely republishable. Please credit Peacenet and Lawrence Rosenwald.
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