Tax Protester History in The United States - Origin of American Tax Protesters

Origin of American Tax Protesters

People have protested taxation at various times in the history of the United States, sometimes violently.

In the colonial era, Americans insisted on their rights as Englishmen to have their own legislature raise all taxes. Tax loads were very light. Beginning in 1765 the British Parliament asserted its supreme authority to lay taxes, and a series of American protests began that led directly to the American Revolution. The first wave of protests attacked the Stamp Act of 1765, and marked the first time Americans from each of the 13 colonies met together and planned a common front against illegal taxes. The Boston Tea Party threw British tea into Boston Harbor because it contained a hidden tax Americans refused to pay. The British responded by trying to crush traditional liberties in Massachusetts, leading to war in 1775.

In 1794, settlers in western Pennsylvania responded to a federal tax on liquor with the Whiskey Rebellion. President George Washington led an army to crush the rebellion—the rebels dispersed and federal supremacy in taxation was assured. The Fries Rebellion saw German Americans in Pennsylvania protest new federal taxes on houses in 1798. It also failed, but when the low-tax Democratic Republican Party came to power in 1801, it repealed the whiskey and land taxes. Anger at the Tariff of 1828 led South Carolina to reject the federal law, until President Andrew Jackson threatened to send in the army to enforce it. The tariff was lowered, again and again, as Southern insistence until 1861. In the Civil War, with Republicans in control, the tariff was raised to produce needed revenue; after the war it was kept high to encourage industrialization, and became a major issue with conservative Bourbon Democrats such as President Grover Cleveland opposing, and Republicans led by William McKinley promoting tariffs as the route to national wealth. In each of these cases, some opponents of the tax in question contended that it was not merely bad, but exceeded the authority of the body that enacted it.

The Civil War saw the enactment of the first federal income tax; it was temporary. A federal income tax in 1894 was declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court. To remedy that defect conservatives (led by Senator Nelson Aldrich) wrote and the nation passed the 16th Amendment in 1909. The goal was to shift away from tariffs to a more widely based tax, which proved essential in financing World War I.

The Great Depression made tax delinquency widespread during the presidency of Franklin D. Roosevelt, when income taxes increased dramatically to pay for New Deal programs and U.S. involvement in World War II.