Is still being done. Todays talk is the eighth this calendar year and we have one more in november when we will hear from charles stuart, Political Science professor at m. I. T. , longtime friend and supporter of this center who will talk about his coauthored book about electing the senate and direct democracy before the 17th amendment. That ought to be a pretty good talk. I have been looking forward to hosting todays guests. Since i first saw her in action at last years policy history conference chairing a panel that included members and that will include a tax historian who is in the audience today. Thank you for attending, carl. And we will hear from carl soon. Molly is an associate professor of history at Washington University and received her ph. D. Degree from the university of michigan. She is the author of the highly regarded tax and spend, the welfare state, tax politics, and the limits of american liberalism. She will also Say Something about her current book project which builds on tax and spend and is titled as a taxpayer and citizen, rights, obligations in modern america. We should have time for q a. Please raise your hand so we can pass the microphone and pick you up on the recording. Thank you for attending. Thank you very much. Thank you very much, richard, for inviting me down here today. Thank you all for taking time out of your busy days to come hear a noontime talk about tax history. Its a heavy lift. I appreciate you all coming down to hear me talk a little bit today. I want to thank, of course, the National Archives and all of the archivists who make it possible for historians to do what we do. So much of the historical job is to look beneath the surface and to use unpublished archives to put together these stories about the past. It was weird coming down here today because i made basically the same trip every day for about two years while i was doing research in the reading room upstairs and so it was kind of surreal to come back, right, not as a 27yearold or 25yearold graduate student, but as an employed professor of history and to sort of make that trip again in a different circumstance. It felt amazing but also a little bit weird. Today i briefly want to sketch out the political history of the federal income tax as well as talk a little bit about my book as well as the ways in which the National Archives help me put together the story that i tell in the book about the relationship between taxes and spending policy. Mostly in the post new deal period, 1936 to 1986. The tax reform law as the scope of the book. I would like to offer thoughts about how and way taxes have moved to the center of american politics and american political thought in the last 40 years. And the role of the taxes and tax politics play both in sustaining the liberal order of the post world war ii period and animating the conservative challenge of that consensus in the last four decades. First a little bit about myself. Where is my clicker. My interest in taxes grew out of my interest in the welfare state. I began my career in graduate school as a mihistorian of the welfare state. I wrote my thesis on mothers pension that provided the basis for aid to dependent children, the First Federal welfare program, inaugurated in 1935 as part of the Social Security act. Even as an undergraduate, it seemed to me that historians welfare insufficiently attentive to these questions of how you pay for this stuff. There wasnt enough attention given to or thought about taxes in talking about the welfare state. After college and before graduate school, i came down to washington, d. C. , and i worked on the hill for two years, first as a staff assistant. And my boss on the house side worked on the ways and Means Committee, so i had some firsthand experience working with the kinds of issues that i would deal with in my own scholarship. I was able to translate some of this experience and i wasnt his number l. A. On ways and means stuff. Basically the stuff he didnt want to deal with was the stuff i got to do. But i did manage to translate some of that experience with legislative process into my graduate work. Over the course of my six years of michigan, three of which i spent here in washington, d. C. , doing research here, i began to understand that i was an historian of the american taxing state, rather than of the american welfare state. The two remain connected and its this connection that i explore in my book. Over that same period, it was gratifying to see that others recognized the importance of tax and tax politics as a field of historical inquiry. Historians have tended to leave taxes alone. We might be afraid of numbers. Weve generally tried to outsource taxes and tax history to the economists, lawyers, and sometimes to political scientists. But in the last ten years, there has been a blossoming of historical interest in tax. Carl henry is one of the leaders in that field. Aja has also done a great deal to bring taxes to the forefront of the study. Tax and spend relies on Archival Research done here at the National Archives as well as in the johnson and reagan president ial libraries and what was then the nixon president ial materials project. I was lucky enough to be here while nixons stuff was still here. Of the records housed in this being, those of the Senate Finance and ways and Means Committee were important. I also looked at the records of the joint committee on taxation as well as the joint economic committee. These records helped in putting together the history of the u. S. Income tax between 1945 and 1968. A period in which taxes did not play a visible role in politics. It helped me put together a portrait of a community of experts who designed and implemented tax and welfare policy in the 2 1 2 decades after world war ii. Congressional sources were important in two chapters of the book that deal specifically with tax and welfare policy in the 1960s. These chapters depend heavily on the sources i found here, particularly staff memorandum prepared for the members of the ways and Means Committee. I became acquainted with two men, the chairman of the lets see Senate Finance committee. Oh, technology. Youre my friend but also my enemy. Richard,down whats wrong here . Senator russell long is chairman of the Senate Finance committee, he was particularly active on welfare issues. He was a known opponent of afdc, the aid to families with dependent children that replaced adc in 1961 as well as wilbur mills. And really the sort of emperor of all tax policy in the 1950s and 1960 period. One of the main claims that i make in the book and i can probably do this old School Without any kind of any kind of tech support. I feel a little naked up here without my powerpoint. Is it down there . There you go. I dont know if any of you remember this, when you were in elementary school, the teachers could never get the video to play. And you were always like channel 3. Its on channel 3. They were the stupidest people in the world. And i just feel when you get to be a teacher, you suddenly lose your ability to use technology. Even if you do it every day. Thank you very much. I hope we dont have this particular issue again. Here is russell long talking to johnson and potentially getting the johnson treatment. And here, of course, is wilbur mills also talking to johnson and probably also getting the famous johnson treatment. One of the main claims i make is why taxes played an Important Role in american politics, it was not until 1970s that they emerged as a Major Political issue. Its often assumed that americans have always hated taxes and that American History can be imagined as a kind of of 200plusyear revolt against taxes. Income taxes is a relatively accepted part of the social compact. Conservative politicians and Interest Groups experimented with tax politics in the years following the Second World War, it was not until the economic collapse of the 1970s that taxes became a political issue, a partisan political issue, powerful enough to transform american politics. Tax policy and tax politics, i show in my group, grew more heated after 1980. Budget deficit required all tax cuts or spending increases be paid for. Today i would like to take a very brief tour through the history of the federal income tax and, again, offers a few thoughts as to how and why taxes and tax talk has now become a central feature of american politics. The United States experimented with a variety of tax systems in its 200plus years. For most of the 18th and 19th century, American Finance depended on tariff revenue. The constitution allowed the federal government to collect taxes to provide for the common defense and general welfare of the United States. At the same time, however, article nine section nine of article 1, limited the National Governments ability to impose direct tax except in proportion to the consensus. It reflected the framers fear of centralized power, equally important, however, as a historian has shown, these checks on the governments taxing power stem directly from the slave states concerned to protect that institution. Slave holders, many of whom held key positions, feared that the they would abolish slavery by making it expensive. As Patrick Henry said in 1788 as virginia was considering whether or not to ratify the constitution, a federal government with the power to tax might someday impose a federal slave tax hefty enough to compel the Southern States to liberate their slaves. Between 1787 and 1862, it depended on tariffs at the National Level and property taxes at the state and local level. The american civil war, however, was too expensive to pay for these kind of duties. The nation imposed the first income tax to pay for the war. This tax eventually affected 10 of northern households and the confederacy did not have a similar tax. This experiment in the 19th century was short lived. In the decade after the war, they allowed the tax to expire. Tariffs dominated National Finance in the two decades after the civil war. By the 1880s, however, a series of Economic Crises weakened support for tariffbased finance and propelled a Popular Movement in favor of the progressive income tax. The progressive income tax was introduced by the peoples or Populous Party, the platform, representatives of which are shown in that picture. And that Populous Party plank concluded a plank endorsing a graduated income tax to restore the government of the public to the hands of the playing people to which class it originated. Democrats coopted parts of the agenda. In 1894, Congress Approved a 2 income tax on incomes over 4,000. This tax survived only one year. In 1895, the Supreme Court found that tax to be unconstitutional in its controversial 54 ruling. Despite the courts rule, progressive income tax remained a popular policy. Party politics followed popular support. And by 1908, the gop and the Democratic Party supported some kind of a National Income tax. The next year in 1909, congress both the house and the Senate Approved a constitutional amendment giving congress the power to lay taxes getting around the prohibition in the constitution. It took effect on february 25th, 1913. The first tax enacted under the 16th amendment was relatively modest imposing a 1 rate on personal and correspondent income. The tax burden did go up in response to world war i. However, the world war i system still only affected about 15 of American Families at its height and it did not survive the war emergency. The treasury secretary agreed throughout the 1920s to roll back most of the wartime changes. Even the Great Depression didnt bring the income tax to the majority of people. Although roosevelt adopted rhetoric to justify income taxes on the wealthy, new deal tax policy relied heavily on both regressive consumption as well as the new payroll taxes as part of the Social Security act of 1935. Taxes on liquor which had the benefit of being on the books but having been in advance because of prohibition became effective again and generated huge amounts of revenue for the federal government. In 1936, liquor taxes raised 1. 5 billion. That same year the income taxed 1. 4 billion. The federal income tax did not move to the center of american politics until the Second World War. Planning for a war tax had begun as early as 1939 but pearl harbor increased pressure for new federal revenues. Instead of excise profits, congress and the administration agreed to keep the personal income tax at the center of American Finance. The new law lowered the personal exception level and transformed the income tax to a class tax which had been paid by a small minority of very wealthy taxpayers to amass tax that affected the working classes. Between 1939 and 1945, the number of individual taxpayers grew from 3. 9 million to 42. 6 million. Over that same period, income Tax Collections grew from 2. 2 billion to 35. 1 billion. The 1942 law transformed millions of americans almost overnight into taxpayers. To sell this new tax system, we have examples of this year, the federal government tied tax paying to wartime patriotism. The campaign to convince americans to pay their taxes to beat the axis, enlisted help from Irving Berlin who wrote the song i paid my income tax today, roy rogers, and even donald duck who starred in two short films produced by the Walt Disney Company for the department of the treasury. This these films the new spirit and first time of 42, donald duck pays his taxes. Theyre interesting. You can find them on youtube easily. They answer a lot of questions that you might have about donald duck. For example, hes an actor. If people didnt know. He doesnt explain why he doesnt wear pants, but it explains what his job is. He does claim huey, dewey and louie as depends. But these films and Public Campaign in general, right, tend to show the virtues of the taxpaying system. Public opinion polls indicate that americans felt that their taxes were fair and that their tax dollars were helpful with the war effort. At this time, unlike after world war i, the wartime tax survived the return to peace. Taxes, of course, were not universally popular. In the late 1940s, the gop did try to use tax politics to recapture congress as well as white house. Party leaders hoped to use tax politics to appeal to the members of the middle class. Those men who quote owned things or aspire to own things and resented having to pay for new deal programs that they felt did not directly benefit them. Despite gop claims that its tax politics reflected the demands of middle class taxpayers, most of the relief came from organized business groups who american publicized quickly after the war to roll back excess profits and corporate taxation. The role of business interest in antitax politics is particularly clear and surprising successful, ultimately failed movement to amend the constitution, to cap the top rate at 25 . Although supporters of the tax limitation amendment claim that theirs was a voluntary grassroots movement, the campaign was paid for by some of the nations largest corporations, including the mellon interests, texas oil, and others. This limitation campaign failed. But it was not but not before it introduced significant changes, i think, into the way that people talked about and thought about taxes. And their relationship to citizenship. It was during this campaign that the business lobby succeeded in redefining american citizens as taxpayers. And we can see this in talking about in the way in which liberal politicians talk about the war on poverty in the 1960s. They talk about this as a campaign to transform tax eaters into taxpayers and thats not a kind of language that you see as much before this period. The leaders of the campaign may have failed in their quest to amend the constitution to limit taxes. But in the process they had, quote, pioneered much of the antitax rhetoric that would come to dominate america. Voters were happy to support tax cuts if you asked them. But they generally didnt demand them. Indeed, for much of the early postwar period, voters seemed to have little interest in tax relief. One of the largest postwar tax cuts was basically an inside the beltway kind of a production. The law stemmed from the Kennedy Administrations concern that the United States economy had underperformed in the 1950s. Kennedy and his advisers, working with a group of tax experts, arranged around mills and the ways and Means Committee hoped to use individual rate cuts to expand kaeps at a rate that shows the world the vigor of a free to do a kennedy accent when i read the word vigor, but i try not to. The Public Measure was lukewarm, at best. The Kennedy Administration had to go out and gin up public support for this across the board tax cut. According to the New York Times, they were eagerly awaiting new money in their pocket. The wall street journal lamented that the tax cut fever they predicted failed to materialize. According to one Kennedy Administration insider the white house had to do more to convince people that something personally helpful was good for the country and even the creation of two groups and the Business Committee for tax reduction and the Citizens Committee for tax reduction and revision did little to convince the public for the need of prompt congressional action on the tax cut proposal. The big question is what changes . What changes particularly between 1964 and 1969 when taxpayers inundated the white house and congress with demands for Tax Deduction that according to one observer rivals one observer against the vietnam war. How did it move to the center of a National Political agenda . How did an issue that once had been the province of a relatively small Insular Group of tax experts become the stuff of national campaign. First, the postwar boom and 1968 inflation was rising and productivity was flagging and wages stagnating and employment was ticking upward and all of this would worsen over the course of the decade and a half and these economic changes and particularly the cost of living sensitized taxpayers to the size of their tax bills. In late 1960s and early 1970s disgruntled taxpayers across the country founded new organizations to protect their rights and their interests. These new grassroots taxpayer groups were clearly inspired by the 1960s and indeed, as ill show in a moment, many of the taxpayer groups were organized by veterans of the civil rights and Welfare Rights Movement of the 1960s. A Congressional Forum had an Important Role to play. For years, tax negotiations had been done in private and ways and means deliberations were brought to the public and they were brut to the floor of the house only under a closed rule which didnt prevent any amendments and the committees control over the tax agenda had augmented the power of tax experts and had shielded tax policy from public opinion. Julians book taxing america does a great job of talking about this period in American History and particularly the ways and Means Committee did in building the american state in a peculiar way in which that american state was built. The Congressional Forum designed to increase transparency, in combination with the very public fall from grace opened the door for increased Public Participation in tax policy and politics. Perhaps most important, however, to the politicization of tax policy was the collapse of the Democratic Coalition after 1968. Hubert hum freeh, hubert humphrey, and after that defeat, activists, strategists and Office Seekers on the left and the right sought out ways to construct a politically viable alternative to what historians call the new deal order. While leading democrats look for ways to reinvent the economy and offer a postsociety agenda they consolidate and build on the recent success with the white working and middle classes of what Richard Nixon called the silent majority. Tax politics held out hope for both the left and the right in this post68 period and as you can see from this chart, taxes became increasingly important to both parties platforms after between 1960 and 1980 going up from six mentions in the republican platform in 1960 to over 144 times the word tax or taxation comes up in 1980. But you can see a general increase in the platforms of both parties over this period. For democrats, liberals and progressives, tax politics offered a way for the party to appeal to the economic interest of the White Working Class without abandoning the partys new social and racial liberalism. Tax politics made in progressive strategists refused to gather the base economic interests of the economic classes by a populist revolt against those people, classes and institutions which possess an illegitimate amount of weight aalth and powe. The state or local revolt against taxes came in early 1969 when officials in the outgoing Johnson Administration published a list of some 200 tax millionaire, they were called who had used loopholes in the tax code to reduce or even to eliminate their federal tax bills. The treasury report helped to mobilize taxpayers already sensitive to the amount of taxes they were paying thanks to the 10 surcharge that had been passed to offset the cost of the word vietnam the year before, frustrated taxpayers flooded congress and the Tax Administration who was in for less than a month when this hit the fan with letters demanding that taxes for the rich be eliminated and taxpayers and burdens be reduced and this campaign was remarkably affected and by 1969 congress had a significant tax reform before the veto threats. This victory provided democratic liberals with an unexpected victory with an otherwise grim political season. A look into the future, democrat strategists hoped they might provide the party to win back the loyalties of the white, working and middle classes. Capitol hill democrats heralded the bill as a triumph for middle american, those men and women trying to work payment for home and for too long had been taking it on the chin. The passage of this 1969 law did not quiet taxpayer anger. To the contrary, the yearlong campaign for tax reform actually enlarged the scope of the grassroots Taxpayers Movement by bringing the attention of newly formed tax organizations to the issue of fairness in the federal tax code. These initial groups had property taxes and after 1969 we see new attention being given to the federal tax code and particularly to the income tax. Tax groups continue to attract new members in the early 1970s. According to groups, by 19,712 million taxpayers had joined local tax organizations. These tax protesters defined easy categorization. Some seemed to embody the popular image of the white back lar and whilash, and popular mi class owners in arkansas, in california, in massachusetts, veterans of the welfare rights and civil rights movements used their organizational expertise to mobilize low income taxpayers and to direct public attention to corporate and wealthy tax avoiders. This agenda became more central to reconstruction in the wake of George Mcgoverns defeat in 1972 and in the following january 1973, former senator fred harris who also lost his job in the election of 1972, an oklahoma liberal announced plans to lead a taxpayer revolt aimed at reforming americas tax laws and getting the ritual welfare. The group called the new populist action planned a national tax action day for april 16, 1973, the filing deadline for federal taxes. The groups public presentation, as you can see here, deliberately avoided most of the eras divisive cultural politics in favor of an economic populism evading against the rich, and this was a fullpage ad taken out in the New York Times featuring a white, middleaged woman named karen miller who worked outside the home want out of feminist conviction, but rather for her familys quote, struggle to pay the bills. Harris was not alone to look to tax fairness to give new life to a progressive majority. In 1973, noted welfare reform leader george wiley founded a new organization known as the movement for Economic Justice. Progressives, wiley insisted must use the tax code as a grassroots organizing tool as well as a means to bring together the silent majority and the poor and minorities around basic Economic Security issues. Inequality in the tax code, wiley suggested, affected people of all interests and backgrounds, a movement that aimed to challenge and remove these inequalities would bring together the elderly, black vietnam veterans, hospital workers, household employees, women, tenants, welfare recipient, day care, chick annos, blacks, Puerto Ricans and white ethnics. They inverted common conservative critiques of welfare to delegitimize subsidies to corporations and the wealthy and that, of course s whats happening here in this flyer distributed by the movement for Economic Justice which i found in the records of the Wisconsin Historical society and theyve got a great collection on social justice movements. This image mobilizes the image of the welfare queen including the fancy car that you would trade clothing as well as a cigarette, but it turns that image against the scion of the dodge family, henrietta dodge. While the organization concentrated on the grassroots, the National Office prepared press releases and flyers as well as other organizational tools that can be used to address local needs. The movement for Economic Justice also focused on helping out local taxpayers or local tax groups to help their constituents directly by setting up these tax clinics and the idea behind these tax clinics was to offer taxpayers real help as a way of getting them interested in and invested in tax reform. The movement for Economic Justice helped set up at least 25 free tax clinics and these tax clinics not only helped people to prepare their income tax returns and also aimed to demonstrate how individuals tax problems were symptomatic of an unjust system and here is a real good example of that axiom of feminist or 70s politics. The personal is political. The group also worked closely with state and local organizations to plan what they called local tax happenings directly against corporations who avoided their taxes and to provide local groups with information about how the injustices in the current tax system about injustices with the current tax system and how to get a free tax clinic started and how to get involved in legislative battles over tax reform. The movement for Economic Justice and other progressive tax organizations including ralph naders Tax Reform Group set up trained mobile teams to put maximum pressure key senators or congressmen. Despite the high hopes and initial successes, however, the efforts to channel and control taxpayer anger proved futile and the continued deterioration of the National Economy made it difficult, if not impossible to progressives to use tax politics to underwrite a new progressive majority to push into higher marginal tax brackets and a process called bracket creep and this transformed earlier calls for tax reform into trident demands for Tax Deduction. As it turned out, tax reform itself was a doubleedged sword. Progressives were eager to pull out the loopholes to benefit taxpayers and corporation, but they were less eager to pull out the loopholes in the code that provided material assistance to members of the silent majority and for Home Ownership and employerprovided health care and business and even in some cases for getting married. These forms of special tax incentives had become a special feature of the 1960s and the tax code had long been done with providing the governor for revenue, it was discouraging certain behaviors through the use of Tax Deductions, credits and rates to stress their functional equivalent to direct expenditures. These provisions in the code were an increasingly important part of the Economic Security system, particularly for members of the middle class, but although many middle and workingclass taxpayers benefitted from these classes. Few saw themselves, and this was not an accident. Policymakers preferred these tax expe expenditures, and you had to get them past the ways and Means Committee. And also because they fit more easily with american policymakers longstanding preference for policies that privileged the market and minimized direct Government Spending and the result of the slight of hand was that beneficiaries of the tax spending were far more likely to see themselves as victims of the tax code than as beneficiaries of the tax and spend liberal state. Policymakers were so successful in building what one political scientist had called the, quote, welfare state that most beneficiaries dont even know that it exists. In the end, it was the right that won the tax revolt responding to the reintroduction of tax politics during the 1972 democratic primary, the gop strategist developed and deployed a persuasive political story that blamed rising tax burdens on wasteful democratic spending programs. By the end of the 1970s, conservatives had successfully had liberal attacks on the tax code and turned them against the National State itself. Here we have a couple of examples from the archives and this might be of interest to you in so far as it is notes from a meeting with president nixon and John Ehrlichman took copious notes on the meetings that were held in the white house and here theyre talking about the vat and essentially taking the vat off the table because they dont want to be seen as advocating any kind of a tax increase. Pat buchanon, not surprisingly, was particularly forward in advocating the politicization of tax politics in the 1970s and particularly in developing a political rhetoric which pitted the interest of taxpayers against those of tax eaters namely welfare recipients who by the end of the 1970s had become a despised and racialized group, right . So the politics of taxation in the early 1970s takes on a racial dynamic that is sort of reinforced in this kind of a discourse. This punitive competition between taxpayers and tax eaters has been in decades and inspired a novelty board game and here is an aside and the serendipity of historical research. I didnt go looking for this game. I did not know that this game existed and the year i was hired another member of my department, a noted pack rat named Jefferson Davis iii gives you a sense of how old he is was retiring and he had generations of students give him things and this was one of the things that one of his students had given him sort of a parting gift in 1980 and he found this game while he was cleaning out his office and he gave it to me. I introduced in 1980, public assistance, why work for a living when you can play the great welfare game, had the frustration of the silent majority into the board game modeled after monopoly the rules were pretty simple. Players moved a set of dice and moved accordingly one of two tracks and the ablebodied rell fair recipients and the able person on the other. Reflecting the games creators belief that the federal government exploited hardworking t taxpayers like themselves and the rules made it impossible for a working person to win and you cant see what all of these squares say, but basically what you would imagine a game like this would say. So on the ablebodied welfare recipients promenade, you can go to a track. You can go to a prostitute and have illegitimate children, and having the have illevel edge mate children square you get money each time you get illegitimate children. The structure of the game existed as a zerosum, between tax payers . Not only did they travel along different paths sxoo they were caused by the bad behavior of welfare recipients and their government enables. Any time a welfare promenade landed on the have an illegitimate child, and they had to pay that player 50 or so out of their own pocket. If youre on the working person line and it is taxed away at 40 so its basically impossible to win if you get stuck on the working persons right here. And here are just some examples of the kinds of things and situations that might come up over the course of your play in the welfare game. A working persons burden. You were up for a highpaying promotion and the action rules require that a disadvantaged minority and homosexual buddhist female. You are a very young grandparent and your youngest illegitimate child now has an inel ij mat child of her own. These are not unlike the things you come across when you play the welfare game. This game wasnt really an outlier, right . It captured a conventional wisdom about the relationship between taxes, welfare and the liberal state. The tax revolt by 1980 had decisively turned to the right, and thats kind of where taxes end and it ends with the reagan revolution. It ends with it ends with Ronald Reagans election in 1980 and talks a little of tax reform in 1986 and not that much and then in the epilog i talk about the stalemate in contemporary politics over the issue of taxation and my next project sort of grows out of parts of tax and spend, questions that came up, but i was unable to answer over the scope of the book and it also comes in part and i owe my experience on the hill, the title of the book owes to my experience on the hill because every time anyone and i was a lowlevel staffer and i answered a lot of letters and i answered a lot of calls and any time anyone called for anything, it didnt matter what it was. They could be a rightwing guy calling for Border Security or they could be groups of progressive nuns wanting us to close the school of the americas and they would always preface their demands as a taxpayer and citizen, i demand that you do x. That was an interesting way of phrasing your claims on the state and of phrasing your relationship to the state, right . So what is it about american politics . What is it about the American Experience that makes that taxpayer identity so salient and is this something that is unique to the United States . Is this something that is unique to the last four decades . Where does this come from and that is the title of my next book which is tentatively titled as a citizen. Toni morrison has recently argued that this kind of taxpayer citizenship is ultimately a cramped one because it requires you essentially to buy in and it acquires you to have some skin in the game if some ways and she was quoted in a recent interview lamenting this traps formation of american citizenship, and im not solely interested in taxpayer citizenship and they want to see how the taxpayer eade entity in the cramped citizenship. How marginalized groups are able to claim their taxpayer identity in order to push open the boundaries of american citizenship. So this book will focus on how various groups including women, africanamerican, property owners, pacifists and antiwar activists and immigrants and immigration activists and the poor and gay men and women have used both their political and legal identities as taxpayers to affect policy changes and to expand or defend existing definitions of citizenship. Although the defense of taxpayers rights is almost always associated in contemporary america with the political right, historically progressives as well as conservatives have been able to mobilize this kind of a language. Like tax and spend, the citizen sees taxes and tax approximately sees as the key to understanding 20th century American History and where my first focus focused largely on the postnew deal period, this new project will include grassroots mobilization as well as National Lawmakers and well look at political as well as legal defenses of taxpayers rights and hopefully will span the entire 20th century. The first piece of this new project ive been working on and currently under review, is on the politics and socalled marriage tax penalty which becomes the big political issue in the 197 on 0s a0s and how ge align in the 1970s and id be happy to answer questions for that in the q and a and i see were coming up on 10 of. I think ill stop there. I want to thank you very much for your attention and if you have any questions, my husband had those made for me for christmas two years ago. Very difficult, apparently, to get knuckle dusters anywhere. As it turns out, theyre illegal so he had to have these, like, you know, mylar ones made in hong kong via etsy. So you can get everything you want on etsy as long as youre willing to wait. Thank you very much for coming out. Id love to take any questions that you now have, and i appreciate your attention. [ applause ] it would be great to know who everybody is so i know who im talking to. Hi. That was a fantastic talk, thank you very much. Oh, thank you. My name is kate and im a historian with the Senate Historical office. Great. I have a couple of questions for you, one is the statistic that you gave about world war ii, the number of taxpayers dramatically increases. Whats the percentage there . You gave a number of 42 million or something taxpayers. Whats the percentage of i dont know, the working american so i think that and these are going to be and carl, you might have better numbers on this, but i want to say that about 60 of americans owed some kind of federal tax in 1945 and about 75 had to file, right . So the connection then between the state becomes all the much closer. So even if you didnt have to pay anything you still have to go through the motions of filling out this form. Okay. So in terms of kind of defining or redefining the relationship between state and citizen, this is a critical moment in that redefinition because here people are literally sort of filling out this form and sending it to the government, right . Seeing themselves as taxpayers for the first time and the argument, i think, that a lot of tax scholars make is that the income tax feels like a tax in ways that consumption taxes dont also feel like it. They increase tax consciousness. Right . So a lot of people, was there a poll taken in 1939 even though a lot of people were paying taxes, right . They didnt think of themselves as taxpayers, but after 1945 they do think of themselves more often as taxpayers. May i ask one more quick one . This image of the welfare queen and i love this lets redefine it and is a person wealthy who is benefiting from these types of breaks. It is interest, too, the gender component why a woman. Why is it always a woman . Right. Is that anything that you unpack in this book or that you plan to look at further . Yeah. It is one of the things i dont deal with gender a lot in the book, but obviously the politics of welfare are a deeply gendered politics and the politics of taxation, too, are gendered although in a different way although the taxpayers have traditionally been a male prerogative, right . And women traditionally assumed to be naturally dependent and what was interesting about the creation of the welfare queen is that she was unnaturally dependent and she wasnt dependent on the right thing. Youre supposed to be dependent on your husband and your father and not supposed to be dependent on the man and the government and so what we have a transformation of the meaning of dependency and that is deeply raced and deeply misogynist and here you have this group that is coming out of a civil rights background is coming out of a sort of a background that is attentive and mobilizing the white women, essentially and its an interesting image. Youre right. Theres a lot there to unpack. I remember you. Welcome back. We have a number of researchers that contact us who tried to and they request documents that will prove that wherever they live in idaho is not part of the United States of america and i think its less that they dont want to pay the tax, but its that they hate the government and are trying to show that they are not subject to the governments authority. Is this something fairly new or has it always been a part of tax protesting . Thats always been part of tax protesting and robert hines book, american taxation and american slavery argues that it comes out of the republic and out of slave holders fears of nonslave holding majority taxing the institution out of existence. What they managed to do is they managed to wrap this agenda to protect slavery up in the language of freedom, but this is something that is sort of honed and perfected in the earliest years of the republic, and if you look at other examples of tax protests they have a great new book called the american tax resistors, american tax resistors or Something Like that that sort of traces tax resistance over the 19th and 20th century. They use the same kind of language. So idaho is not a part of the United States . Good to know. [ laughter ] amanda from the National History center and the historical association. You said that during world war ii with the 1942 income tax went from being a class phenomenon to a mass phenomenon, similarly in world war i, philanthropy went from being more of an elite phenomenon and thats the argument that julia irwin make with their books about world war i era philanthropy and i was curious and a lot of that was wrapped up with the war effort, so i was curious if you have a sense if theres a connection between philanthropy having helped turn ordinary americans into people who were helping to fund sort of intentionally helping to Fund Government priorities. If there is any kind of connection to the philanthropic experience and the tax experience . I do not know. Thats a really good question, but its not something that i have encountered and thought about. Its not something that ive read about in the literature in world war ii and the creation of a mass tax system. I dont think its ever come up in anything that ive read, but thats interesting, and this sort of notion of the kind of pickal citizenship so much of an economic component to it proceed, right . The Second World War and the creation of a mass tax system. No, i dont know anything about it and it is interesting. Brad and i went to grad school together. Hi. David with the committee on taxation. I was wondering whether any of your work to date or any of you working on the new project will have a comparative element, and i work in International Taxation, and i take that one strand of your book is that progressive tax movement sort of died by the 1980s if we come forward to today, and we look in europe, for instance, it seems to be a much more Civil Society movement about taxation, so we read stories here about big u. S. Multinational companies not paying much tax and maybe some people get upset about that, but it doesnt seem to me to be as big a grassroots phenomena as it is in europe and if you look comparatively and historically. In terms of making this argument about this argument about tax paying and citizenship as being uniquely american you need to make those comparisons and i started to do that on the marriage tax penalty just basically using the research of others and comparing the ways in which the United States tax families or taxes very couples as the taxable unit and the ways over which other oecd countries do. I think theres been a turn in International Taxation against family taxation and towards individual taxation in part to encourage women, particularly in high unemployment places not to go back into the workforce and thats different than in the United States, but certainly an International Component would make sense of all of this and is this the way that people think about taxes and is this something peculiarly american or perhaps unique to the post1970 period and post1950 period and im not sure where that comes from. I think we have time for one more question and carl henry had raised his hand and hes just the man to segway into this topic. Carl, independent scholar. Im just wondering, in terms of what happened in the 1960s, another thing might also be that the republicans under eisenhower were told you cannot cut taxes because that will increase the deficit. By the 1980s what is different from the u. S. From any place cells that the americans actually believed that cutting taxes will lead to a balanced budget, but im wondering, its johnson who first really pushed that. Yeah. And kennedy, too, right . The rationale behind the 1963 and 64 tax cut is we need to cut taxes in order to help the economy. They made this explicit argument that cutting taxes move will increase federal revenue. Its not exactly supply side because these are demand side cuts and theyre cuts geared toward the middle of working classes and there is a huge tax cut that comes in 1962 thats the predecessor of this major income tax reduction. Yeah. Theyre using that argument and if you look at the records from 1978 and 1979 when jack kemp is pushing this, the kemp roth which is a 303030 tax cut and supply side tax cut and he calls it basically a continuation of the kennedy tax cut and never calls it the johnson tax cut, because he never wants it to get associated with the tax cut, and he calls it the kennedy tax cut. Im just doing what the other jack did and we are bringing this up into the 1970s, but i think youre right, right . One of the things that happens, too, is that fiscal conservatism comes to mean something very different by the end of the 1970s than it it did in the 1950s and if you look at the debates over the 1964 cut its the republicans saying no, no, no no, you cant do this. We cant cut taxes now and with the collapse of the keynesian, and politicians figured out a way around, not really, but a way around that potential rhetorical obstacle. And i do talk about that in the book. And the book is here. We have a few copies, Dennis Braden who is the book acquisition person in the gift shop was not able to be here today, but he got it directly at a discounted rate and then he made another discount and so this is a highly discounted book, doubly discounted, but extraordinary eyeopening book. You really should read the book. Molly goes into this deeply about the anomaly of how americans say taxes, but they love all of the things taxes give them and they dont quite get that. For all of the reasons, this is a wonderful book. Thank you so much. Thank for coming, guys. [ applause ] weeknights this month were featuring American History tv programs as a preview of whats available every weekend on cspan3. Tonight, a look back at a union prisoner of war camp during the civil war in new york where almost 3,000 confederate p. O. W. S died. Derek maxfield is the auth of of almira. He talks about the conditions of the prisoners and some of the officers in charge and that starts at 8 00 p. M. Eastern. Enjoy American History this week and every weekend on cspan3. Each week American History tvs american artifacts visits museums and historic places. Up next we take you inside the u. S. Capitols house swing where curator Farrah Elliott use artifacts and photographs to trace the history of women in congress. This is the first of a twopart program. The story of women in Congress Begins with janet rankin who is elected to the house in 1916 from