About Taxes: Three Americans Speak

by CATHERINE DRINKER BOWEN

IT is comforting as well as pertinent to remember what some of our forebears ( less confused perhaps than some of our contemporaries) had to say about taxation. Nor does it detract from these statements to note that they were made in limes of great national st ress.

1777

August 19. John Adams in Philadelphia, to his wife Abigail at their farm in Braintree, Massachusetts. Adams was sitting at the Second Continental Congress. The British, under Howe, were advancing on the city, would defeat us at Brandywine and occupy Philadelphia before October: —

We have been several days hammering upon money. We are contriving every way we can to redress the evils we feel and fear from too great a quantity of paper. Taxation as deep as possible is the only radical cure. I hope you will pay every tax that is brought you, if you sell my books or clothes or oxen, or your cows, to pay it.

1862

February 3, near the end of our first year of Civil War. Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes to John Lothrop Motley, the historian, then American Minister to Austria. Dr. Holmes writes from Boston, Massachusetts, about three months after his son, Lieutenant O. W. Holmes, Jr., was shot in the breast at Balls Bluff and barely escaped with his life:

About the taxation schemes, you may find out from the papers. . . . I believe our people are worked up to the paying point, which, I take it, is to the fighting point as boiling heat (212°) to blood heat (98°).

1930

As financial panic mounted, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, at eighty-nine, to his secretary in Washington, who com plained of the income tax:

“Young feller, I like to pay taxes. With them I buy civilization.”