Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-gbm5v Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-26T07:51:55.976Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Raising Revenue and Raising Hell

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 February 2010

Christopher Capozzola
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

It was a time of greenbacks, goldbugs, and grangers; milquetoast mugwumps; single-taxers, socialists, standpatters, and the Sugar Trust. Calls for more taxes filled the air. Populist Mary Lease urged Americans to “raise less corn and more hell,” and even Andrew Carnegie piously endorsed an estate tax “by which the State marks its condemnation of the selfish millionaire's unworthy life.” All that hell-raising pushed an income tax through Congress in 1894, but a year later, the Supreme Court granted relief to Charles Pollock, a ten-share stockholder in the Farmers' Loan and Trust Company, leaving Justice Henry Brown to moan in dissent that “the decision involve[d] nothing less than the surrender of the taxing power to the moneyed class.” The Populist Party demanded that “[t]he power of government—in other words, of the people—should be expanded … to the end that oppression, injustice, and poverty shall eventually cease in the land.” By the summer of 1914, oppression, injustice, and poverty were still around, but the Constitution had a Sixteenth Amendment, and the power to collect corporate excise and personal income taxes rested in the hands of the Treasury Department. But still, with all that hell-raising, I wouldn't wanted to work there.

Type
Forum: Comment
Information
Law and History Review , Volume 28 , Issue 1 , February 2010 , pp. 227 - 234
Copyright
Copyright © the American Society for Legal History, Inc. 2010

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1. Carnegie, Andrew, “The Gospel of Wealth” (1889), in The Gospel of Wealth and Other Timely Essays, ed. Kirkland, Edward C. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1962), 22CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Joseph, Richard J., The Origins of the American Income Tax: The Revenue Act of 1894 and Its Aftermath (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 2004), esp. 105–17Google Scholar; Pollock v. Farmers' Loan and Trust Company, 157 U.S. 429 (1895); Henry Brown, quoted in “Fears the Effect,” New York Times, May 21, 1895, p. 3; “Populist Party Platform,” in Heffner, Richard D., ed., A Documentary History of the United States, 7th ed. (New York: Signet, 2002), 237Google Scholar.

2. Ajay Mehrotra, “Lawyers, Guns, and Public Moneys: The U.S. Treasury, World War I, and the Administration of the Modern Fiscal State,” 173, 174, 193 (in this volume). On the fiscal regimes of U.S. allies, see Cronin, James E., The Politics of State Expansion: War, State and Society in Twentieth-Century Britain (New York: Routledge, 1991), 49–64Google Scholar; Daunton, M. J., “How To Pay for the War: State, Society and Taxation in Britain, 1917–24,” English Historical Review 111 (September 1996): 882–919CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Fisk, Harvey E., French Public Finance in the Great War and To-Day (New York: Bankers Trust Co., 1922), 13–24Google Scholar; Horn, Martin, Britain, France, and the Financing of the First World War (Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2002)Google Scholar; Whiting, R. C., “Taxation and the Working Class, 1915–24,” Historical Journal 33 (4) (1990): 895–916CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

3. Mehrotra, “Lawyers, Guns, and Public Moneys,” 187; Bourne, Randolph S., “The State,” in War and the Intellectuals: Collected Essays, 1915–1919, ed. Resek, Carl (New York: Harper and Row, 1964), 71Google Scholar.

4. Rockoff, Hugh, “Until It's Over, Over There: The US Economy in World War I,” in The Economics of World War I, ed. Broadberry, Stephen and Harrison, Mark (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 310CrossRefGoogle Scholar; William Gibbs McAdoo, quoted in Mehrotra, “Lawyers, Guns, and Public Moneys,” 184.

5. Mehrotra, “Lawyers, Guns, and Public Moneys,” 223; Woodrow Wilson, quoted in Mehrotra, 184; Amos Pinchot, quoted in Mehrotra, 186. On Civil War financing, see Lawson, Melinda, Patriot Fires: Forging a New American Nationalism in the Civil War North (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2002), 40–64Google Scholar.

6. Wall Street Journal, quoted in Mehrotra, “Lawyers, Guns, and Public Moneys,” 211.

7. E. R. A. Seligman, quoted in Mehrotra, “Lawyers, Guns, and Public Moneys,” 211 n100.

8. Mehrotra, “Lawyers, Guns, and Public Moneys,” 197; Daniel Roper, quoted in Mehrotra, 193.

9. United States v. Darmer, 249 F. 989 (1918), at 989; Ferrell, Robert H., Woodrow Wilson and World War I, 1917–1921 (New York: Harper and Row, 1985), 204Google Scholar. See also Gibbs, Christopher C., The Great Silent Majority: Missouri's Resistance to World War I (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1988), 74–92Google Scholar; Keith, Jeanette, Rich Man's War, Poor Man's Fight: Race, Class, and Power in the Rural South during the First World War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004Google Scholar).

10. United States v. Pape, 253 F. 270 (1918), at 271.

11. Ibid., at 272; Mehrotra, “Lawyers, Guns, and Public Moneys,” 200; Capozzola, Christopher, Uncle Sam Wants You: World War I and the Making of the Modern American Citizen (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), esp. 7–17 and 117–43CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

12. “Bonds or Taxes?” New York Times, August 16, 1917, 10.

13. Mehrotra, “Lawyers, Guns, and Public Moneys,” 210; Daniel Roper, quoted in Mehrotra, 192. Corporate leaders—who appear in Mehrotra's account as rather static figures—were equally improvisational and entrepreneurial, seeing in the war an opportunity to consolidate U.S. dominance of the postwar global economy. For one chapter of that story, see Harry N. Scheiber, “World War I as Entrepreneurial Opportunity: Willard Straight and the American International Corporation,” Political Science Quarterly 84 (September 1969): 486–511. On World War II, see Jones, Carolyn C., “Mass-Based Income Taxation: Creating a Taxpaying Culture, 1940–1952,” in Funding the Modern American State, 1941–1995: The Rise and Fall of the Era of Easy Finance, ed. Brownlee, W. Elliot (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 107–147Google Scholar; Sparrow, James T., “‘Buying Our Boys Back’: The Mass Foundations of Fiscal Citizenship in World War II,” Journal of Policy History 20 (2) (2008): 263–86CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

14. Mehrotra, “Lawyers, Guns, and Public Moneys,” 174–75.

15. Ibid., 178, 179, 175, 176–77.

16. Russell Leffingwell, quoted in the Mehrotra, “Lawyers, Guns, and Public Moneys,” 198; ibid., 224. Mehrotra details the rise of a “distinctively legal administrative state,” providing an account less focused on judges and courtrooms than previous histories. Rightly so: The Supreme Court validated nearly every single wartime legislative intervention, from the draft to the functional dismantling of the state militias to the income tax, and, of course, the excess-profits tax as well. See Arver v. United States, 245 U.S. 366 (1918); Cox v. Wood, 247 U.S. 3 (1918); LaBelle Iron Works v. United States, 256 U.S. 277 (1921).

17. Mehrotra, “Lawyers, Guns, and Public Moneys,” 223; United States Senate, Hearings before the Special Committee Investigating the Munitions Industry (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1935), esp. pt. 22, 6183–90; Leonard, Robert James, “The Nye Committee: Legislating against War,” North Dakota History 41 (Fall 1974): 20–28Google Scholar; Olmsted, Kathryn S., Real Enemies: Conspiracy Theories and American Democracy, World War I to 9/11 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 13–43Google Scholar; Wiltz, John Edward, “The Nye Committee Revisited,” The Historian 33 (February 1961): 211–33CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

18. New York Sun, July 28, 1916, quoted in Arnett, Alex Mathews, Claude Kitchin and the Wilson War Policies (Boston: Little, Brown, 1937), 276Google Scholar. On the cost and financing of current wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, see Bank, Steven A., Stark, Kirk J., and Thorndike, Joseph J., War and Taxes (Washington, D.C.: Urban Institute Press, 2008), 145–65Google Scholar; Hormats, Robert D., The Price of Liberty: Paying for America's Wars (New York: Times Books, 2007), 261–76, 280–99Google Scholar; Stiglitz, Joseph E. and Bilmes, Linda J., The Three Trillion Dollar War: The True Cost of the Iraq Conflict (New York: Norton, 2008)Google Scholar.