Hell Nay, We Won’t Pay!
By JASON ZENGERLE
NYT Magazine
On Monday, April 16, 1990, millions of Americans sent their tax returns to the Internal Revenue Service. Peter Hendrickson sent a bomb. He was 34 years old, and since graduating from high school, he’d cobbled together an unremarkable career that included a stint as a video-arcade manager and other odd jobs. The only realm in which he showed direction — even distinction — was fringe politics. He was a Libertarian Party activist with a flair for the dramatic. On several occasions, he hired a plane to tow a “Ron Paul for President” ba nner over the University of Michigan football stadium during Paul’s otherwise-little-noticed 1988 presidential campaign.
One evening in the spring of ’89, Hendrickson and his girlfriend, Doreen Wright (they met while working on Paul’s campaign), were at a barbecue at her house in suburban Detroit with some fellow members of the Metro Detroit Libertarians. Eventually, the conversation turned to that old Libertarian bugaboo, the income tax. Like many people of his ideological persuasion, Hendrickson was familiar with a book titled “The Great Income Tax Hoax,” written by a former insurance broker named Irwin Schiff, which argued that, among other things, the tax was unconstitutional. In order to “raise the consciousness” about the evil of the income tax, Hendrickson proposed to the Metro Detroit Libertarians an audacious act of protest, something different from passing out fliers and holding up signs — something that, as he later recalled, “could not be kept quiet.” His idea found some takers and, over the course of the next year, Hendrickson, Wright and a married couple, Scott and Karen Scarborough, devised and carried out a plan to build a firebomb and mail it to the I.R.S.
(More here.)
NYT Magazine
On Monday, April 16, 1990, millions of Americans sent their tax returns to the Internal Revenue Service. Peter Hendrickson sent a bomb. He was 34 years old, and since graduating from high school, he’d cobbled together an unremarkable career that included a stint as a video-arcade manager and other odd jobs. The only realm in which he showed direction — even distinction — was fringe politics. He was a Libertarian Party activist with a flair for the dramatic. On several occasions, he hired a plane to tow a “Ron Paul for President” ba nner over the University of Michigan football stadium during Paul’s otherwise-little-noticed 1988 presidential campaign.
One evening in the spring of ’89, Hendrickson and his girlfriend, Doreen Wright (they met while working on Paul’s campaign), were at a barbecue at her house in suburban Detroit with some fellow members of the Metro Detroit Libertarians. Eventually, the conversation turned to that old Libertarian bugaboo, the income tax. Like many people of his ideological persuasion, Hendrickson was familiar with a book titled “The Great Income Tax Hoax,” written by a former insurance broker named Irwin Schiff, which argued that, among other things, the tax was unconstitutional. In order to “raise the consciousness” about the evil of the income tax, Hendrickson proposed to the Metro Detroit Libertarians an audacious act of protest, something different from passing out fliers and holding up signs — something that, as he later recalled, “could not be kept quiet.” His idea found some takers and, over the course of the next year, Hendrickson, Wright and a married couple, Scott and Karen Scarborough, devised and carried out a plan to build a firebomb and mail it to the I.R.S.
(More here.)
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