The Great Tax Wars : Lincoln--Teddy Roosevelt--Wilson How the Income Tax Transformed America

Review
Robert Samuelson The New York Times Book Review [An] engaging reconstruction...of largely forgotten history....Weisman's account is crisply written, highly readable, and informative. The fascinating cast of characters...illuminates the social upheavals and political conflicts of another era.

The Washington Post Weisman lays bare the early history of the progressive income tax in America, and in the process makes present-day fracases over taxation echo a much longer debate over wealth and its proper uses in the American republic.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

A major work of history, The Great Tax Wars is the gripping, epic story of six decades of often violent conflict over wealth, power, and fairness that gave America the income tax. It's the story of a tumultuous period of radical change, from Abraham Lincoln and the Civil War through the progressive era under Theodore Roosevelet and ending with Woodrow Wilson and World War I. During these years of upheaval, America was transformed from an agrarian society into a mighty industrial nation as great fortunes were amassed, militant farmers and workers rebelled against concentrations of vast wealth and power, class war was narrowly averted, and America emerged as a global power.

Award-winning journalist Steven R. Weisman begins his narrative with the Civil War, when Lincoln imposed the nation's first income tax to pay the Union Army and dampen dangerous resentment against bankers, merchants, and factory owners who profited from the war. Repealed by Congress after the war, the tax was reenacted in 1894 to deal with the nation's worst economic collapse until that time. By reducing the government's heavy reliance on tariffs for revenue, the tax benefited farmers in the West and South who were rebelling against the high cost of imports and goods manufactured in the North and East. But a year later, the Supreme Court declared the income tax unconstitutional, plunging the court into one of the worst controversies it has endured and once again pitting region against region and workers and farmers against industrialists. The court's decision also handed populist congressman William Jennings Bryan of Nebraska, who was a champion of the tax, a major issue in his unsuccessful campaign for president in 1896.

The turn of the century brought an outpouring of progressive reforms under President Roosevelt. Toward the end of his term, T.R. proposed an income tax to help break the excessive power of the wealthy and the trusts and banks they controlled, but it took a deal between President William Howard Taft and Congress in 1909, and then ratification of the Sixteenth Amendment to the Constitution, to finally get the tax enacted in 1913. The tax took effect just as Wilson entered the White House and in time to finance America's involvement in World War I.

The Great Tax Wars features an extraordinary cast of characters, including the powerful men who built the nation's industries and the politicians and reformers who battled them -- from J. P. Morgan and Andrew Carnegie to Lincoln, T.R., Wilson, Bryan, and Eugene Debs. From their ferocious battles emerged a more flexible definition of democracy, economic justice, and free enterprise largely framed by a more progressive tax system. Drawing on their words and on newspaper and magazine accounts of the time, Weisman shows how the ever-controversial income tax transformed America and how today's debates about the tax echo those of the past.

FROM THE CRITICS

The New Yorker

Taxes put the touch on us all, but (unlike their brother in inevitability, death) they are generally considered unpromising material for exciting narrative. Thanks to Weisman, a seasoned Times correspondent who now serves on the paper's editorial board, this view requires revision. Weisman uses the income tax as a spotlight to illuminate American political and economic history from Abraham Lincoln's Administration through Woodrow Wilson's, and the result is a riveting story, peopled by extraordinary characters. (William Jennings Bryan, for example: those who know him only as a populist blowhard turned fundamentalist clown will be in for a few surprises here.) As it turns out, the battles over taxes that have dominated American politics since Reagan's Presidency were also waged throughout the latter half of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth -- and in uncannily similar terms.

Publishers Weekly

Must the story of taxes be taxing? Apparently not. Weisman, a New York Times editorial writer, turns the usually leaden story of income taxes, tariffs, wealth redistribution and the politics of finance into an educational and readable tale. He starts, as he must, with the Civil War income tax, and progresses through the Gilded Age and the years of Presidents Theodore Roosevelt, Wilson and Taft to the 16th Amendment of 1913, which gave sanction to income taxes after the Supreme Court had outlawed them. While the story is a serious one, tax battles gave rise to much laughable drivel, which Weisman reports with delicious relish. Sometimes, however, his overattention to detail obscures his focus, such as in his discussion of the economics of the Civil War, and he slights the states, where many innovations in taxes were born. In choosing color over analysis, he misses opportunities to ask important questions, such as why the Confederacy, claiming distinctiveness as well as independence from the North, implemented Northern-style taxes. What Weisman does make clear is that since 1920, the debate over the income tax ("one of the most important progressive achievements in the making of modern America") has never strayed far from the question of tax rates. It's hard to see how we'll ever escape that debate, he says, because it arises from different conceptions of the nation's promise. This is an important, relevant and well-written story, even if, in the end, it may prove not quite satisfactory to serious historians. Agent, Amanda Urban. (Sept. 12) Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.

Library Journal

There is double meaning to the "tax wars" mentioned in the title. First, there are the class wars over the establishment of a graduated tax on incomes; second, there are the military encounters (the Civil War and World War I) responsible for the enactment, and ultimate acceptance, of income tax legislation. Weisman, a veteran New York Times journalist and editorial writer, provides a carefully researched, thoroughly documented history explaining the course of the political debates, Supreme Court decisions, and political party alignments that ultimately resulted in ratification of the 16th Amendment, permitting Congress to "lay and collect taxes on incomes." He begins by providing background on the temporary income tax levied by Lincoln to support the Civil War, then describes the 19th-century battles against maintaining tariffs on popular goods, which were favored by the powerful bankers and industrialists. Finally, Weisman shows how populism, progressivism, and the voracious financial demands of the "War To End All Wars" produced a new federal government revenue structure through Wilson's enactment of the War Revenue Act of 1917. What results is a balanced, highly readable book. Recommended for academic and larger public Libraries.-Jill Ortner, SUNY at Buffalo Lib. Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.

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