The Cold War and the Income Tax: A Protest
Encyclopedia
The Cold War and the Income Tax: A Protest is a book written by Edmund Wilson
Edmund Wilson
Edmund Wilson was an American writer and literary and social critic and noted man of letters.-Early life:Wilson was born in Red Bank, New Jersey. His father, Edmund Wilson, Sr., was a lawyer and served as New Jersey Attorney General. Wilson attended The Hill School, a college preparatory...

 and published in 1963.
Adapted, with permission, from The Picket Line 5 September 2003

Edmund Wilson

Wilson was an American literary critic and author who followed the familiar political arc of being an idealistic communist sympathizer who came to be disillusioned and horrified the more closely he looked at the Soviet
Soviet Union
The Soviet Union , officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics , was a constitutionally socialist state that existed in Eurasia between 1922 and 1991....

 experiment. “By 1940 when he finally published his epic history of socialism, To the Finland Station
To the Finland Station
To the Finland Station: A Study in the Writing and Acting of History is a book by American critic and historian Edmund Wilson. The work presents the history of revolutionary thought and the birth of socialism, from the French Revolution through the collaboration of Marx and Engels to the arrival...

, seven years in the making, he had completely repudiated Russian socialism.”

Stumbling into tax resistance

His tax resistance
Tax resistance
Tax resistance is the refusal to pay tax because of opposition to the government that is imposing the tax or to government policy.Tax resistance is a form of civil disobedience and direct action...

 was strangely half-hearted and muddled, but he devoted a book to it. The way he tells the story, “Between the year 1946 and the year 1955, I did not file any income tax returns.” Not for any ideological or ethical reason, but because “I thought that this obligation could always be attended to later. I had no idea at that time of how heavy our taxation had become or of the severity of the penalties exacted for not filing tax returns.”

Wilson finally sought out “an old friend of mine, an extremely able lawyer,” who told him that he was in danger of heavy fines and jail time and was in his opinion “in such a mess that he thought the best thing I could do was to become a citizen of some other country.” He instructed the lawyer instead to make out the returns for the years he had failed to file, along with a $9,000 down payment on whatever it was that he owed.

Income tax

Subsequent chapters tell of Wilson’s struggles with what was already a labyrinthine and Kafkaesque Internal Revenue Service
Internal Revenue Service
The Internal Revenue Service is the revenue service of the United States federal government. The agency is a bureau of the Department of the Treasury, and is under the immediate direction of the Commissioner of Internal Revenue...

 bureaucracy, which Wilson compares with those in the Soviet Union
Soviet Union
The Soviet Union , officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics , was a constitutionally socialist state that existed in Eurasia between 1922 and 1991....

. The $9,000 he offers is laughably inadequate to pay what he owes, his fines, or even his eventual legal fees.

His troubles lead him to investigate the history of the income tax in the United States, and to write extensively on how the assumptions the IRS makes about how and when people earn income map poorly to the actual way a literary man like Wilson makes a living. He dives into the tax code and discovers that “[t]he question of what ought to be taxed and how much and which deductions ought to be allowed has reached a point of fine-spun complexity that — working in terms of a different set of values — recalls the far-fetched distinctions of medieval theology.”

And here what starts out looking like a literary man’s attempt to squeeze some wry observations out of an unfortunate and naïve encounter with the government at its bureaucratic best starts to turn. Wilson takes a long, hard look at the federal government’s budget and notices that huge hunks of it go to pay for wars past present and future and (this is 1963, remember) the program to put a man on the moon
Project Apollo
The Apollo program was the spaceflight effort carried out by the United States' National Aeronautics and Space Administration , that landed the first humans on Earth's Moon. Conceived during the Presidency of Dwight D. Eisenhower, Apollo began in earnest after President John F...

. After a brief detour to contrast the lunar project with a project he thinks underfunded and more valuable — to publish collected editions of some of America’s finest authors — he dives a little deeper into the military budget.

Cold War

He’s shocked and alarmed at the sums spent to fuel the arms race with the Soviet Union
Nuclear arms race
The nuclear arms race was a competition for supremacy in nuclear warfare between the United States, the Soviet Union, and their respective allies during the Cold War...

, and upset also at how enthusiastically his government pursues chemical, biological and nuclear weapons technology — what now gets lumped under the “Weapons of Mass Destruction
Weapons of mass destruction
A weapon of mass destruction is a weapon that can kill and bring significant harm to a large number of humans and/or cause great damage to man-made structures , natural structures , or the biosphere in general...

” banner. He determines, finally, that:

When the stakes in games become so serious — when everybody’s life is at stake — they ought not to be played at all, and the taxpayers should not support them. But the taxpayers do support them, and that is why we cannot halt these activities.


And later:

I have said that it was difficult to understand, in what we call our free world, how it can come about that a scientist who has been working on CBR [Chemical, Biological and Radiological weapons] but is dubious about the morality of what he is doing should not find it in his power to resign. But how free are we citizens of this free world to resign from the gigantic and demented undertakings to which our government has got us committed?


He makes also an interesting observation about how because of the importance of these problems, and because of the difficult and compelling moral demands they make on us, they have paradoxically disappeared from conversation — a strategy similar to not talking about a family member’s drinking problem in the hopes that this will make it as though it never existed in the first place:

[T]he United States, for all its so much advertized comforts, is today an uncomfortable place. It is idle for our “leaders” and “liberals” to talk about the necessity for Americans to recover their old idealism, to consecrate themselves again to their mission of liberation. Our national mission, if our budget proves anything, has taken on colossal dimensions, but in its interference in foreign countries and its support of oppressive regimes, it has hardly been a liberating mission, and the kind of idealism involved is becoming insane and intolerant in the manner of the John Birch Society
John Birch Society
The John Birch Society is an American political advocacy group that supports anti-communism, limited government, a Constitutional Republic and personal freedom. It has been described as radical right-wing....

. Even those who do not give much conscious thought to what has been taking place are discouraged and blocked in their work or alienated from their normal ambitions by the paralyzing chill of a national effort directed toward a blind dead end which is all the more horrifying and haunting for being totally inconsecutive with their daily lives and inapprehensible to their imaginations. The accomplished, the intelligent, the well-informed go on in their useful professions that require high integrity and intellect, but they suffer more and more from the crowding of an often unavowed constraint which may prevent them from allowing themselves to become too intelligent and well-informed or may drive them to indulge their skills in gratuitous and futile exercises. One notices in the conversation of this professional class certain inhibitions on free expression, a tacit understanding that certain matters had better not be brought into discussion, which sometimes makes one feel in such talk a kind of fundamental frivolity.


Wilson then goes on to tell the stories of a few people who were unable to successfully silence the yelps of their own cognitive dissonance. He starts with the case of Major Claude Eatherly
Claude Eatherly
Claude Robert Eatherly was an officer in the U.S. Army Air Forces during World War II, and the pilot of a weather reconnaissance aircraft Straight Flush that supported the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, Japan, August 6, 1945.-The bombing of Hiroshima:The Straight Flush was one of seven...

, who commanded the bomber group that dropped the atom bombs on Japan, capping 13 months of duty in World War II
World War II
World War II, or the Second World War , was a global conflict lasting from 1939 to 1945, involving most of the world's nations—including all of the great powers—eventually forming two opposing military alliances: the Allies and the Axis...

. Shortly afterwards, he became horrified by what he had done, and hopeless at the possibility of repenting for or earning forgiveness for willfully extinguishing so many lives and causing so much pain. He tried speaking out with pacifist groups, sending parts of his paycheck to Hiroshima
Hiroshima
is the capital of Hiroshima Prefecture, and the largest city in the Chūgoku region of western Honshu, the largest island of Japan. It became best known as the first city in history to be destroyed by a nuclear weapon when the United States Army Air Forces dropped an atomic bomb on it at 8:15 A.M...

, writing letters of apology, and at a couple of points attempted suicide. At one point “he set out to try to discredit the popular myth of the war hero [by] committing petty crimes from which he derived no benefit: he forged a check for a small amount and contributed the money to a fund for the children of Hiroshima. He held up banks and broke into post offices without ever taking anything.” Eatherly was confined to the Veterans’ Administration Hospital in Waco, Texas, from which he wrote:

Whilst in no sense, I hope, either a religious or a political fanatic, I have for some time felt convinced that the crisis in which we are all involved is one calling for a thorough re-examination of our whole scheme of values and of loyalties. In the past it has sometimes been possible for men to “coast along” without posing to themselves too many searching questions about the way they are accustomed to think and to act — but it is reasonably clear that our age is not one of these. On the contrary, I believe that we are rapidly approaching a situation in which we shall be compelled to re-examine our willingness to surrender responsibility for our thoughts and our actions to some social institution such as the political party, trade union, church or State. None of these institutions are adequately equipped to offer infallible advice on moral issues and their claim to offer such advice needs therefore to be challenged.

Go on strike?

“Now, how is one to struggle against this situation?” asks Wilson. “Go on strike and refuse to pay taxes?” And much of the remainder of the book is devoted to people who decided to do just that, like Dr. A.J. Muste, Eroseanna Robinson, Walter Gormly
Walter Gormly
Walter Gormly was an American conscientious objector, tax resister and advocate of small-scale industry....

, and Rev. Maurice McCrackin
Maurice McCrackin
Maurice McCrackin was an American civil rights and peace activist, tax resister and Presbyterian minister. McCrackin started a community church in Cincinnati after gaining notoriety for refusing to pay federal taxes...

, all of whom confronted the IRS directly and bore the brunt of its most vigorous enforcement efforts.

Wilson ends by asking: “And what is the author of this protest to do?”

I am not going to let myself be sent to Leavenworth
United States Penitentiary, Leavenworth
The United States Penitentiary , Leavenworth was the largest maximum security federal prison in the United States from 1903 until 2005. It became a medium security prison in 2005.It is located in Leavenworth, Kansas...

, as Dr. McCrackin was. I have thought of establishing myself in a foreign country as my lawyer friend suggested and as I thought him rather absurd for suggesting. I do feel that I must not violate the agreement I have signed with the government to surrender for three years longer all the income that I take in above a certain taxable amount. My original delinquency was due not to principle but to negligence; but I now grudge every penny of the imposition, and I intend to outmaneuver this agreement, as well as the basic taxes themselves by making as little money as possible and so keeping below taxable levels. I have always thought myself patriotic and have been in the habit in the past of favorably contrasting the United States with Europe and the Soviet Union; but our country has become today a huge blundering power unit controlled more and more by bureaucracies whose rule is making it more and more difficult to carry on the tradition of American individualism; and since I can accept neither this power unit’s aims nor the methods it employs to finance them, I have finally come to feel that this country, whether or not I continue to live in it, is no longer any place for me.


According to Wilson biographer Lewis M. Dabney, Wilson transferred the copyright for the book “to A.J. Muste’s magazine Liberation
Liberation (magazine)
Liberation Magazine was a monthly magazine, of the New Left compared with Dissent , and Studies on the Left.-Early days:"Liberation" was founded, published, and edited by David Dellinger, A. J. Muste from 1956–1975 out of New York. A. J...

.”

Aftermath

Wilson was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom
Presidential Medal of Freedom
The Presidential Medal of Freedom is an award bestowed by the President of the United States and is—along with thecomparable Congressional Gold Medal bestowed by an act of U.S. Congress—the highest civilian award in the United States...

 in the same year that The Cold War and the Income Tax was published. Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. writes that President Kennedy:
…himself added Edmund Wilson’s name to the list in 1963. (Knowing Wilson’s dislike of honors on principle, I called him to see whether he would accept the Medal. He said that he would be greatly pleased to do so, but that the President should know he was writing a pamphlet attacking the income tax and the defense budget. It was not, he said, directed so much against the Kennedy administration, parts of which he much admired, as against governments in general; still the President ought to know about it, and he would understand if we decided not to go ahead with the presentation. When I reported this to Kennedy, he smiled and said that he didn’t think it would make any difference.)


Lewis M. Dabney, in Edmund Wilson: A Life in Literature, adds to this account:
[Wilson] stipulated that the president had to be made aware of his pamphlet and sent the text to Schlesinger, who passed on a summary. When a man named Bacon from the IRS brought in a memorandum opposing the award — parts of it paralleling the ever expanding FBI file on Wilson — Schlesinger and Theodore Sorensen each remembered that Kennedy decisively stated, “This is not an award for good conduct but for literary merit.”


Phyllis Schlafly
Phyllis Schlafly
Phyllis McAlpin Stewart Schlafly is a Constitutional lawyer and an American politically conservative activist and author who founded the Eagle Forum. She is known for her opposition to modern feminism ideas and for her campaign against the proposed Equal Rights Amendment...

 attacked this awarding of the Medal of Freedom to Wilson in her 1964 book A Choice, Not an Echo.

In his book Intellectuals, historian Paul Johnson shows little sympathy for Wilson’s tax troubles:
They had given him a frightening insight into the harshness of the modern state at its most belligerent — the tax-gathering role — but this should have come as no surprise to an imaginative man who had made it his business to study the state in theory and in practice. The person who is in the weakest position to attack the state is he who has largely ignored its potential for evil while strongly backing its expansion on humanitarian grounds and is only stirred to protest when he falls foul of it through his own negligence. That exactly describes Wilson’s position. In his book he tried to evade his own inconsistencies by arguing that most of his income tax went on defence spending induced by Cold War paranoia. But then he had not paid his state income taxes either, and they did not go on defence. Nor did he meet the point that, by the time he settled, a rapidly rising proportion of federal income tax was going on welfare. Was it morally justifiable to evade that too? In short, the book shows Wilson at his worst and makes one grateful that, in general, he ceased being a political intellectual by the time he was forty.


Dabney writes that Wilson’s tax troubles continued for the rest of his life, and beyond:
The fight with the IRS… dragged on into the [Kennedy] administration, the agency never quite ready to compromise.… Elena [Wilson] began appealing to Schlesinger at the White House. Commissioner Mortimer Caplin
Mortimer Caplin
Mortimer Maxwell Caplin is an American lawyer and educator and the founding member of Caplin & Drysdale . Born in New York City, he holds B.S...

was asked to produce a settlement, and the government eventually agreed to $25,000, though continuing to insist on a $30,000 collateral agreement against future earnings. Wilson would die in debt… for the money with which he paid this off, and Elena had to justify all the medical expenses of his last decade to auditors. She would be submitting detailed accounts in the year of her death, seven years after her husband’s.
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