Dimensions of Law in the Service of Order : Origins of the Federal Income Tax, 1861-1913

A sophisticated and accessible application of the newest theoretical work in public-policy history and legal studies, this book is a detailed account of how a permanent income tax was enacted into law in the United States. The tax originated as an apology for the aggressive manipulation of other forms of taxation, especially the tariff, during the Civil War. Levied with very low rates on a small proportion of the population and raising little revenue, the early tax was designed to preserve imbalances in the structure of wealth and opportunity, rather than to ameliorate or abolish them, by strengthening the status quo against fundamental attacks by the political left and right. This book shows that the early course of income taxation was more clearly the product of centrist ideological agreement, despite occasional divergences, than of "conservative-liberal" allocative conflict. A sophisticated and accessible application of the newest theoretical work in public-policy history and legal studies, this book is a detailed, and often surprising, account of how a permanent income tax was enacted into law in the United States. Rather than finding the traditional panoply of interest groups, party alignments, and ideologies that one would expect when investigating a tax supposedly aimed at wealth redistribution, Stanley discovers that the tax originated as a symbolic apology for the aggressive manipulation of other forms of taxation, especially the tariff, during the Civil War. Levied with very low rates on a small proportion of the population and raising little revenue, the early tax was actually designed to preserve imbalances in the structure of wealth and opportunity, rather than ameliorate them. Income taxation was not the product of a grassroots movement, an involuted elite conspiracy, or special interest groups. It was, rather, generated by a process called "centrism "--Political officials acting as relatively autonomous trustees on behalf of the most powerful segments of society through the use of multiple dimensions of law. Income taxation originated in the last place one would look for it when using traditional lenses - within the state. Stanley finds that the picture of the polity generated by this episode is antithetical in the extreme to the dominant progressive and pluralist beliefs about the democratic process, and the values expressed by the right and the left. A chilling portrait of law and society, as well as the authoritative source of pre-amendment income tax history, Dimensions of Law in the Service of Order will interest Civil War, Reconstruction, Progressive era, legal, and economic historians; political scientists; and social theorists. This study charts how a permanent income tax was enacted into law in the USA. Although a 3per cent tax on incomes in excess of 800 was enacted in 1861, it was declared unconstitutional in 1881 and remained so for 32 years. The author traces the political and legal history of the tax over half a century