Chapter 5
Life at Hard Labor—Refusal to Pay Income Tax
1943 – July, 1947
(Albuquerque and Isleta, New Mexico)
Christmas of 1942 I went to Santa Fe to see my wife and the girls, and although I was not welcome I did get a couple of hours' enjoyment playing games with the girls. I could not get a job there so went to Albuquerque. Here I obtained work on a dairy farm at $70 a month and keep, 12 hours a day work.
I wanted to get my ideas clear on Christian Anarchism so wrote a book of 150,000 words on the subject much of which was quotations from all of the different brands of anarchists of whom I had read. I sent it to several publishers but did not really care if it was printed or not. It is bound and on file with my other writings in the Labadie Collection at the University Library at Ann Arbor, Mich. After eight months I went to work for Albert Simms who had married Ruth Hanna McCormick. I worked in the cow barn, in the greenhouse and taking care of his valuable calves.
A group in New York City had asked me to write something from Tolstoy against war so I read all of the twenty-two volumes of the Scribner edition and took hundreds of pages of notes, listing them on the subjects of Thou Shalt Not Kill, Christian Anarchism; The Simple Life; and Religion. The first was published in a small green covered booklet and distributed free. The others were much longer booklets and have not been published.
During this time I was aware that a withholding tax would be taken from my pay if I worked on any other place than a farm and that at the end of the year I would have to pay taxes or refuse to pay them. My study of Tolstoy and the emphasis of Dorothy Day in the CW that payment of taxes was unChristian, inasmuch as most of the taxes went for war, helped me to make up my mind openly to refuse to pay taxes. I wrote to the leaders of all of the pacifist groups in the country asking their moral support. All of them but one told me I should
61
