The following is from a history of war tax resistance during the years of the Vietnam War by the War Resisters League. The tactic continued after that war ended and peace activists turned to grapple with the global arms race.

Indochina War

War tax resistance gained nationwide publicity when Joan Baez announced in 1964 her refusal to pay 60 percent of her 1963 income taxes because of the war in Vietnam. In 1965 the Peacemakers formed the “No Tax for War in Vietnam Committee,” obtaining signers to the pledge “I am not going to pay taxes on 1964 income.” By 1967 about 500 people had signed the pledge.

Then several events in the mid- to late-1960s 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.

A committee led by A.J. Muste obtained 370 signatures (including Joan Baez, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, David Dellinger, Dorothy Day, Noam Chomsky, Nobel Prize winner Albert Szent-Gyorgyi, publisher Lyle Stuart, and Staughton Lynd) for an ad in The Washington Post, which proclaimed their intention not to pay all or part of their 1965 income taxes.

A suggestion in 1966 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 1960s to encourage refusal to pay the telephone tax.

In 1967, Gerald Walker of The New York Times Magazine began the organizing of Writers and Editors War Tax Protest. The 528 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. 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 1965 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 1960s. 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 275 in 1966 to an estimated 20,000 in the early 1970s. The number of telephone tax resisters was estimated to be in the hundreds of thousands. Many groups were formed around the country including “people’s life funds,” to which people sent their war tax resisted money to fund community programs.

The popularity of war tax resistance grew to such an extent that the WRL could no longer handle the volume of requests. So in 1969 a press conference was held in New York City to announce the founding of the National War Tax Resistance (WTR). Long-time peace activist Bradford Lyttle was the first coordinator. Local WTR chapters blossomed around the country, and by 1972 there were 192 such groups. WTR published a comprehensive handbook on tax resistance, Ain’t Gonna Pay for War No More (edited by Robert Calvert), and put out a monthly newsletter, Tax Talk. Radical members of the historic peace churches began to urge their constituencies to refuse war taxes.

In 1972 Congressman Ronald Dellums (CA) introduced the World Peace Tax Fund Act in Congress, which was designed to create a conscientious objector status for taxpayers. The National Council for a World Peace Tax Fund was formed to promote this legislation (later changed to National Campaign for a Peace Tax Fund). 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. The government did its best to stop this increase in tax resistance, but was hamstrung by telephone tax resisters. There were so many resisters and so little tax owed per person that the IRS lost money every time they made a collection. The cost of bank levies, garnished wages, automobile and property seizures, and even the simplest IRS paperwork was simply too expensive to be worth it.