The Revolting Mr. Taxpayer

THOUGH ANIMUS TOWARD tax increases was a key reason for the American Revolution, historians have not shown much interest in the topic in other contexts. One reason may be that the history of tax revolts, much like the history of mutual aid or of nonunion workers during strikes, cannot easily be subsumed under the most popular analytical categories, such as economic class. So Linda Upham-Bornstein's "Mr. Taxpayer versus Mr. Tax Spender": Taxpayers' Associations, Pocketbook Politics, and the Law During the Great Depression is a welcome sign.

- DAVID T. BEITO

Upham-Bornstein, a historian at Plymouth State University, begins in the 19th century. The taxpayer leagues of the Gilded Age charged that political corruption had produced (as one group put it) "the reckless expenditure of the people's money." These organizations divided sharply along regional lines. In the Northeast, Gilded Age tax resistance groups were generally nonpartisan and had few apparent ideological axes to grind; in the South, they were vehicles for Democrats who sought to undermine Reconstruction governments that had raised taxes to fund new programs.

Southern taxpayers' organizations gained support from small white landowners who felt burdened by these levies. More than a few of these came from the so-called Scalawag group and might otherwise have voted Republican. These groups' leaders denied that race played a role in their efforts, but Upham-Bornstein does not find this convincing. While this skepticism is more than warranted, it is also true that tax increases on financially struggling white yeoman farmers greatly weakened the potential viability of the GOP as a multiracial coalition.

By the 1890s, the Gilded Age wave of taxpayer revolt had largely subsided in both the North and the South. But the Great Depression brought a rapid revival of resistance, with several thousand organizations springing up almost overnight. Massachusetts alone had more than 150 of them. A key reason was that taxes were now harder for many Americans to pay, thanks to slumping incomes, rising unemployment, and the laggardness of real estate tax assessments to fall as fast as property values. As Upham-Bornstein observes, "The American economy, the incomes of most Americans and the revenues of many American businesses shrank far more precipitously than did local and state government expenditures in the early 1930s, producing crippling taxes for many."