Taxpayers in Revolt: Tax Resistance During the Great Depression
Notes
Introduction
Shays’s Rebellion, the major internal crisis of the era of the Articles of Confederation, has often been characterized as an agrarian struggle against the payment of private debt. See, for example, Szatmary, Shays’ Rebellion. Challenging this interpretation, Forrest McDonald persuasively argues that the Shaysites were first and foremost tax rebels. Forrest McDonald, “On the Late Disturbances in Massachusetts,” in a volume of bicentennial essays by Forrest McDonald (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, forthcoming).
As Dall W. Forsythe put it: “‘Extraction’ is an ugly but necessary term that neatly summarizes the complex strategies governments adopt to assure themselves adequate flows of” revenues. Once so stated, it seems quite obvious that rulers cannot develop a central state apparatus without some degree of capacity to extract revenues from the subject population.” See Forsythe, Taxation and Political Change, p. 1.
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
The conference also endorsed an income tax and rejected ARET’s call for radically increased personal property tax assessments. ARET criticized these proposals in A Protest Against the Acceptance of the Report.
Jarecki tried a less confrontational approach. He invited representatives from Cermak’s administration, the teachers, the ARET, and the CREB to his chambers on 25 February for an informal conference. Although all parties attended, it broke up in acrimony. Pratt refused to heed Jarecki’s plea to make partial payments, and Hayden N. Belt, the county attorney, attacked the tax strike, arguing that “we cannot have government with obligatory duties and permissive support.” Jarecki observed that “tax crises have been at the bottom of every revolution. A tax crisis is synonymous with oppression and if our situation goes too far, I’m afraid this will happen.” Chicago Evening Post, 25 February 1932, p. 2; and Chicago Tribune, 26 February 1932, p. 4.
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
To CCCE’s founders, constructive economy meant reduction in the unit cost of services through increased operating efficiency. It did not entail elimination or even reduction in the total budget of the service. Carl H. Milam to Belle Sherwin, 5 January 1933, Box 246, Papers of the League of Women Voters.
