Taxpayers in Revolt: Tax Resistance During the Great Depression

Regrettably, there has been no significant attempt to preserve the source material of taxpayers’ protest. The comparison with labor history is especially revealing. Newsletters of a myriad of unions, sometimes very obscure, have been preserved with diligence. Secondary literature, manuscript collections, and oral interviews abound for the interested researcher. The labor union official can draw on a rich folklore and tradition that historians have documented, fortified, and expanded.

Taxpayers’ organizations in the 1930s also printed a bumper crop of newsletters. Most, despite listings in the National Union Catalogue, have been lost or thrown out. Interviews with the principals have been almost unheard-of, even though some, like Adam Schantz, are still alive. What struck me as especially telling is that the leading tax protesters of today, in organizations like the National Taxpayers’ Union, know nothing of their precursors in the 1930s. By contrast, one would have to search long to find a major labor union leader who has never heard of Samuel Gompers or the sit-down strikes of the 1930s.

Fortunately, the Chicago tax strike seemed an exception to this generally frustrating absence of sources. As headline news, the strike received extensive (though often biased) coverage in the press. None of the strikers, at least to my knowledge, left behind manuscript collections of any consequence. Two members of ARET, Edwin J. Kuester and Ronald Chinnock, were available for interviews and proved extremely helpful. John M. Pratt’s son, John T. Pratt, gave me much honest and evenhanded insight into his father’s colorful background and character. Ted Diller, a lawyer who worked for the firm that defended ARET, was instructive from the legal angle. The manuscript collection of the Chicago Teachers’ Federation, the strikers’ chief organizational nemesis, included some eye-opening correspondence, broadsides, and verbatim transcriptions of meetings.

To find the occupational backgrounds of individuals listed, I turned to the Chicago City Directory for 1928-29. This posed a problem because of the time lag of three years between the City Directory and the index of litigants. In addition, the commonness of many names hampered a positive identification. Some of the litigants compounded this problem by listing initials rather than their full first names. My research method could be faulted because it imperfectly reflects changes in occupational mobility between 1928-29 and 1932. While this problem must be reckoned with, it should be noted that most, if not all, occupational mobility for this period was downward.