Romain D. Huret. American Tax Resisters.

Abstract

Elsie de Wolfe, by many accounts the founder of the profession of interior design, became rich through her efforts in the early twentieth century. When her wealth brought her into the crosshairs of the new income tax law of 1913, she bristled: how could women be taxed when they did not have the right to vote? How could this be anything other than taxation without representation? The story of how the women's suffrage movement became entangled with the tax resistance movement is only one of the surprises of the history of American tax resistance, brought to light in Romain D. Huret's American Tax Resisters as well as other recent scholarship that has appeared on this topic. De Wolfe lost her case, but the men and women who have resisted the encroachment of income tax form an interesting cast of characters, a set of history's losers who suddenly at the end of the twentieth century began to win.