The Pushcart War by Jean Merrill

Author:Jean Merrill
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-59017-820-1
Publisher: New York Review Books
Published: 2014-08-20T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER XIX

The Tacks Tax & The British Ultimatum

The Tacks Tax, as all students of American history know, was the most unpopular tax in the history of New York City. It caused revolution in the city schools and almost brought England into the war.

The citizens of New York protested at once that the tax was undemocratic. They said it discriminated unfairly against the users of tacks as opposed to the users of screws, nails, bolts, and pins.

Users of screws, nails, bolts, and pins (and that took in nearly every household in the city) objected as strongly to the Tacks Tax as the tacks users. Their argument was that if the Mayor and the City Council could put a whopping tax on tacks, there was nothing to keep them from putting a whopping tax on screws, nails, bolts, and pins any time they chose.

The pushcart peddlers had no special interest in tacks, as they relied exclusively on pins for the manufacture of their ammunition. However, they supported the protest against the tax as a matter of principle.

Mr. Jerusalem risked arrest by giving away boxes of tacks to his customers, rather than charge the hated tax. He was picked up by the Pea-Tack Squad, but the Police Commissioner refused to jail him on the grounds that the Council ruling put a tax only on tacks that were sold. The Police Commissioner said that if Mr. Jerusalem wanted to go broke giving away tacks, that was his own business.

Teachers were among the hardest hit by the Tacks Tax, and they went on strike in protest. You could not have a bulletin board without tacks, they claimed. And you could not run a New York City classroom without a bulletin board, they said, or things got hopelessly out of hand.

Twelve thousand teachers carrying NO TACKS—NO TEACHERS signs picketed Mayor Cudd’s office. And while they were picketing, the city schools had to be closed.

With the schools closed, children of school age were on the streets from morning to night, and the shooting of trucks increased accordingly. (As many of the children had been making their pea-tacks with pins all along—they couldn’t see that it made any difference—the Tacks Tax did not bother them seriously.)

The strongest objection to the tax naturally came from England, who was at the time the world’s largest producer of tacks. Most of the tacks used in New York City came from England.

England charged that the New York City Tacks Tax was designed to cut England out of the American tack market and was, in fact, a violation of Section 238 of the British-American International Tack Agreement. The British Ambassador protested in the strongest of terms to the President in Washington and suggested that his country might have to intervene directly in the fighting in New York if the Tacks Tax was not at once repealed.

The President acted promptly. He called Mayor Cudd to the White House and warned him that unless the tax law was repealed within twenty-four hours, he would have to send Federal troops to keep order in the city.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.