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The National Pay-Your-Taxes Campaign: Advertising for Political Legitimacy During the Great Depression

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 October 2011

David T. Beito
David T. Beito
Affiliation:
University of Nevada at Las Vegas
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Extract

During the middle years of the Great Depression, urban taxpayers across the land became targets of a massive advertising campaign. This fact alone does not offer the historian much cause for surprise. Advertising, massive or otherwise, always has been common fare for American consumers. What made this particular campaign different from most others was its peculiar agenda: convincing Americans to pay taxes. The central players were the National Pay-Your-Taxes Campaign (NPYTC) and the Citizens' Councils for Constructive Economy (CCCE). Both began in 1933 and embodied the interests of a diverse coalition of good-government reformers, academics, bureaucrats, and investment bankers. Almost all the founding members had one thing in common: They depended heavily on the consumption of tax money.

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Policy History , Volume 2 , Issue 4 , October 1990 , pp. 388 - 402
Copyright
Copyright © The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA. 1990

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References

Notes

1. It is not my purpose here to discuss in depth the tax revolt of the 1930s. For a fuller treatment of the subject, see Beito, David T., Taxpayers in Revolt: Tax Resistance During the the Great Depression (Chapel Hill, 1989)Google Scholar; and Tax Yields, 1940: Tax Collection Statistics for the Various Units of Government with Explanatory Text and Analysis (Philadelphia, 1941), 21, 25.Google Scholar

2. Tax Yields, 21, 25; and President's Conference on Home Building and Home Ownership, Home Finance and Taxation, vol. 2 (Washington, D.C., 1932), 103Google Scholar, 149–50. For tax controversies at the federal level, see Leff, Mark H., The Limits of Symbolic Reform: The New Deal and Taxation, 1933-J939 (Cambridge, 1984).Google Scholar

3. Buttenheim, Harold S., “Are Local Expenditures Excessive?” Municipality 28 (January 1933): 1.Google Scholar

4. Bird, Frederick L., The Trend of Tax Delinquency, 1930–1937: Cities over 50,000 Population (New York, 1938), 5, 22–23.Google Scholar

5. Tax Policy 2 (April 1934): 2, 3; Tax Policy 3 (February 1935): 2–7.

6. New York Times, 11 October 1933, 37; Bond Buyer, 29 April 1933, 5.

7. Bond Buyer, 26 August 1933, 7–8.

8. Bond Buyer, 17 November 1934, 71; New York Times, 10 March 1960, 31.

9. Who Was Who in America, vol. 5 (St. Louis, 1973), 596.

10. Ibid., Stewart, Frank Mann, A Half Century of Municipal Reform: The History of the National Municipal League (Berkeley, 1950), 112–13Google Scholar; Citizens' Councils for Constructive Economy [1933?], 1–2; and Bond Buyer, 26 August 1933, 7. Among the other members of CCCE were Florence Curtis Hanson, secretary-treasurer of the American Federation of Teachers, Frank Bane, director of the American Public Welfare Association, and Flavel Shurtleff, secretary of the National Conference on City Planning. Newspaper release from the CCCE, 27 March 1933, Box 276, League of Women Voters Papers, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

11. Bond Buyer, 26 August 1933, 7; City Manager Yearbook, 1933 (Chicago, 1933), 105.Google Scholar

12. Hays, Samuel P., “Politics of Reform in Municipal Government in the Progressive Era,” Pacific Northwest Quarterly 55 (1964): 157–69Google Scholar; New York Economic Council, Inc., Weekly Legislative Letter, 7 April 1934, 2.

13. “Report of the National Municipal League's Committee on Citizen's Councils for Constructive Economy,” 1 March 1934, League of Women Voters Papers, Box 276; National Advisory Council on Radio in Education et al., Four Years of Network Broadcasting (Chicago, 1936), 1–4Google Scholar; and Barnouw, Erik, A Tower in Babel: A History of Broadcasting in the United States, vol. 1 (New York, 1966), 261–63.Google Scholar

14. National Advisory Council, 66–68.

15. “Listen and Learn About Your Government,” Box 19, Folder 66, 1933, National Broadcasting Company Papers, Wisconsin State Historical Society, Madison; “Report of the National Municipal League's Committee on Citizen's Councils for Constructive Economy”; and Thomas H. Reed to Howard P. Jones, 26 September 1933, July—December, Folder, Thomas H. Reed Papers, Bentley Historical Library, Ann Arbor, Michigan.

16. Kloske, Ralph, “Fiscal Conservatism in New Jersey” 1989, 20 (chapter in forthcoming Ph.D. dissertation, University of Wisconsin, Madison); Bird, The Trend of Tax Delinquency, 21.Google Scholar

17. Kloske, “Fiscal Conservation in New Jersey,” 26.

18. Public Management 15 (January 1933): 29.

19. Kloske, “Fiscal Conservatism in New Jersey,” 27.

20. Bird, The Trend of Tax Delinquency, 21; Kloske, “Fiscal Conservatism in New Jersey,” 27; and Newark Evening News, 15 September 1933, 24.

21. Newark Evening News, 19 September 1933, 8; 30 September 1933; Hillhouse, A. M., Municipal Bonds: A Century of Experience (New York, 1936), 432.Google Scholar

22. Newark Evening News, 30 September 1933; American City 48 (December 1933): 58.

23. Newark Evening News, 16 September 1933, 4; 30 September 1933.

24. Ibid., 19 September 1933; 6 October 1933, 1; Newark Star Eagle, 11 October 1933, 12.

25. Newark Evening News, 30 September 1933; Newark Star Eagle, 12 October 1933, 13.

26. Newark Evening News 5 October 1933, 2; 9 October 1933, 1, 14; and 13 October 1933, 9.

27. American City 48 (December 1933): 58; Newark Evening News, 25 October 1933, 5; 3 October 1933, 6; and Bird, The Trend of Tax Delinquency, 21.

28. Fuller, Denton A. Jr., “Tax Delinquency,” Taxation Magazine, vol. 13, June 1935, 373Google Scholar; and National Municipal Review 23 (May 1934): 285–86.

29. Wisconsin Taxpayer 2 (1 February 1933); Anderson, William, “The Other Side of the Tax Problem,” Illinois Municipal Review 11 (February 1932): 49Google Scholar; and “Secrets of Municipal Credit,” in National Municipal League, The Crisis in Municipal Finance (New York, 1933), 2.Google Scholar

30. Pay-Your-Taxes Campaign, Campaign Handbook (New York, 1935), 10, 16.Google Scholar

31. Ibid., 11, 14.

32. Ibid., 9; Smith, Wade S., “Recent Legislative Indulgences to Delinquent Taxpayers,” Law and Contemporary Problems 3 (June 1936): 371CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 377; and Bush, Chilton Rowlette, “State Centralization: General Property Tax Rate Limitation and Its Relation to Municipal Finance” (Ph.D. diss., University of Wisconsin, Madison, 1935), 11.Google Scholar

33. “Secrets of Municipal Credit,” 11; Municipal Finance News Letter, vol. 2, 1 September 1933, 1.Google Scholar

34. National Municipal Review 23 (April 1934): 234.

35. Woodworth, Leo Day, “Delinquent Taxes,” Tax Digest 12 (December 1934): 423.Google Scholar

36. Chatters, Carl, “Michigan City Overburdened by Assessments,” Tax Digest 8 (August 1930): 273; Herbert D. Simpson, “Tax Delinquency—Economic Aspects,” Illinois Law Review 28 (June 1933): 149.Google Scholar

37. National Municipal Review 22 (July 1933): 307; American City 48 (August 1933): 36.

38. American City 48 (August 1933): 36; William E. Leuchtenburg, “The New Deal and the Analogue of War,” in John Braeman et al., Change and Continuity in Twentieth Century America (New York, 1966), 93–94.

39. Tax Policy 2 (May 1934): 2; American Municipal Association, “Anarchism Through Economania,” Illinois Municipal Review 12 (March 1933): 58.

40. Henry Traxler, “Why Pay Taxes?” Municipality 28 (July-August 1933): 104.

41. American Municipal Association, “Anarchism through Economania,” 58, 59; Fred DeArmond, Merle Thorpe: Champion of the Forgotten Man (Springfield, 1959); and Harold S. Buttenheim, “A Pragmatic Experiment with Taxes,” Survey, vol. 68, 1 December 1932, 639.

42. Stewart, A Half Century of Municipal Reform, 114; and Bird, The Trend of Tax Delinquency, 5.

43. U.S. Congress, Senate, Committee on Banking and Currency, Home Owners' Loan Act, Hearings on S. 1317, 73rd Cong., Senate, 1st sess., 20–21 April 1933, 12; C. Lowell Harriss, History and Policies of the Home Owners' Loan Corporation (New York, 1951), 12, 39; and Federal Home Loan Bank Review 3 (April 1936): 306.

44. Beito, Taxpayers in Revolt, 160–64.

For samples of the still-sparse literature on anti-big government attitudes during the depression, see Otis L. Graham, Jr., The New Deal: The Critical Issues (Boston, 1971);John Braeman, Robert H. Bremner, and David Brody, The New Deal: The State and Local Levels (Columbus, 1975); James T. Patterson, The New Deal and the States: Federalism in Transition (Princeton, 1969); Leo P. Ribuffo, The Old Christian Right: The Protestant Far Right from the Great Depression to the Cold War (Philadelphia, 1983); and Alan Brinkley, Voices of Protest: Huey Long, Father Coughlin, and the Great Depression (New York, 1982).

45. “Retrenching in State and Local Expenditures: A General View,” in Thomas H. Reed, ed., Government in a Depression: Constructive Economy in State and Local Government (Chicago, 1933), 1–2.